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join colossus dot com. Hello,
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and
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in this podcast.
2:40
I'm excited to share this conversation with Tim
2:42
Urban. Tim is in my opinion one
2:44
of the best and most engaging writers of our
2:46
era. He's tackled many of the most interesting
2:48
topics in the world from AI to procrastination.
2:51
I interviewed him in two thousand seventeen in
2:53
an episode that we called Grand Theft
2:55
Life, and it remains one of my favorite
2:57
episodes ever. In a six years since
3:00
that episode, he hasn't published almost
3:02
anything. That's because he's been writing the
3:04
book we discussed in this
3:05
episode. The book is called, What's our
3:07
problem? In which Tim investigates the big
3:09
issues facing society. The
3:11
reason I love Tim's writing so much is its density
3:13
of ideas and ridiculously clear explanations.
3:16
A rare combo that makes reading a joy.
3:19
I hope you enjoyed this great round too with Tim
3:21
Urban, and go by and enjoy his
3:23
great new book. It's
3:26
so weird that the last time we did this
3:28
was pretty soon into what became
3:31
a seven year exploration for
3:33
you of a topic we'll talk a lot about today.
3:35
And we're gonna bounce all over the place. But
3:37
first, tell me what it's been like
3:40
to spend seven years thinking
3:42
about a single problem.
3:45
Last time we talked, we talked about twenty
3:47
five different things and it was like a pasting
3:49
menu of ideas. And then you've
3:51
devoted God knows how much time, energy,
3:53
attention to it. Effectively single topic
3:55
for seven years ever since. And that original
3:58
episode we did as one of our all time most popular
4:00
ones. What's that been like? I have to start
4:02
there.
4:03
Well, it
4:03
hasn't been pleasant because I'm
4:06
a procrastinating writer and I didn't
4:08
know this. Until I learned the lesson the hard
4:10
way over the last six, seven years was
4:13
that when I'm writing like a short post, the fact that
4:15
it's coming out in a few days, there's
4:17
this adrenaline that I have.
4:20
It feels high stakes. There's a smart
4:22
part of your mind and then the dumb part of your mind.
4:24
Think about when you do VR you
4:26
don't wanna step off a cliff even though you
4:28
know you're just on a rug in a room somewhere. The
4:30
smart part of brain knows that it's not a cliff, but
4:32
the dumb part thinks it's a cliff. What I realized
4:35
is that the smart part of my brain is
4:37
always aware that if I'm writing a book,
4:39
the stakes are just as high. It has,
4:42
if anything, a bigger audience, but the dumb
4:44
part of my brain cannot see the future.
4:46
That's the thing about it. It doesn't have any
4:48
kind of understanding that this
4:51
is high stakes. So can't get excited, so it
4:53
just wants to procrastinate. So anyway, a
4:55
book is a real nightmare for procrastinator along
4:57
with, like, I think, any really long term project. But
5:00
the one thing that I'll say
5:02
about it is it's a single topic, but
5:06
it's also like a hundred topics.
5:09
So I wasn't intellectually bored
5:11
because usually I like to do blog posts because I
5:13
don't like to dive that deep on any single
5:15
topic. I like spread it around. And actually,
5:18
this book is really like a collection of the hundred
5:20
concepts, all relating to
5:22
in the general category of how we
5:24
think how we think as individuals or as
5:26
groups, tribalism works and
5:28
our political history and modern politics.
5:31
So I still had the enjoyment
5:33
of constantly reading all different
5:35
kinds of things. I have written about like a hundred
5:38
topics in the last seven years. They're just all
5:40
part of this one single
5:41
arc. How have you come to articulate
5:44
the big question that you're
5:46
trying to answer in the book? It's interestingly
5:49
titled as a self help book for society,
5:51
which I actually think is having read it now. It's like a
5:53
completely perfect way to think about it. But how do you
5:55
articulate if the book is answering a question?
5:57
What is the
5:58
question? One of the things I did lot
6:00
of before was I would write about future
6:03
tech, the world that we might be living in
6:05
down the road. Trying to figure out what
6:07
the giant paradigm shifts are that are happening and
6:09
what that means for the future. It's
6:11
part of the reason that's exciting is because we live in this
6:13
time or exponential growth is
6:16
really happening right in front of us.
6:18
One year, there's the whole new paradigm shift
6:20
happening in this area. Maybe it's in genetic
6:22
engineering or something like that. In the next year, AI
6:25
is back in the headlines because some crazy
6:27
things that's happening currently. But AI
6:30
but I had this nagging feeling as I wrote about
6:32
these things.
6:32
didn't have it even twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen
6:35
when wait for I started. I really started
6:37
to have it twenty fifteen and
6:39
then twenty sixteen, which was that
6:41
if we're moving and we're getting more god like
6:43
power every year as a species because
6:45
technology is giving us this crazy power,
6:48
it could lead to such an awesome future, but the thing
6:50
is technology is double edged sword. I think of
6:52
the twentieth century as probably
6:54
the most prosperous and awesome century
6:56
by so many metrics ever. And
6:59
also had the biggest wars, the biggest genocide,
7:01
the biggest existential threats with
7:03
nuclear weapons and stuff like that. And
7:05
so I'm thinking the good times of
7:07
the twenty first century can be so incredible
7:10
because of all this tech, but that also means the bad times
7:12
could be unprecedentedly awful. Think
7:14
about that. Okay. So the stakes are going up. And
7:16
so we need to have our wits about us. Let's be
7:18
as why is this possible. I saw it was the
7:20
exact opposite. It felt like our society was developing.
7:23
Public shaming is back in fashion. Truths
7:26
is in an all time low. No one trusts
7:28
any of the institutions suddenly, and
7:30
political tribalism is suddenly like
7:32
and it's worse than decades. What's our
7:34
problem? Why are we doing this now? This
7:36
is such bad timing? It's not that the people
7:38
are individually stupid. It's
7:40
that there's something going on that's making
7:43
us, what I would say, decline in wisdom,
7:45
decline in, like, idle health, at
7:48
a time when our power as a
7:50
species is just skyrocketing. And so
7:52
that was the premise I kind of said, what's
7:54
our problem? But then the second thing also popped
7:56
into my head. Which was I'm
7:59
scared to write about this. I'm scared to write about anything.
8:01
I'll write about religion. I'll write about
8:04
life extension and artificial wounds
8:06
I'm a vlogger on my own platform, but I was like,
8:08
I don't wanna talk about any of this stuff publicly,
8:11
then I kind of said, okay. That might
8:13
be part of the problem. That's interesting. I
8:15
said, what's going on there? Who do I feel
8:17
this pressure from? To not
8:19
say the wrong thing about this one topic?
8:22
Why is it so scary, and maybe this
8:24
is part of the problems. It was those two things.
8:26
It was this is bad. What's happening? We need to figure
8:28
out why we're doing this and let me explore for that.
8:30
And then also, like, Why is it so
8:32
hard to talk about
8:33
this? That was the question. Can we
8:35
zoom in on a shared experience that we had? We
8:37
were at a dinner together with
8:39
a bunch of amazing, very
8:41
smart, very talented people. And
8:44
you created an incendiary conversation
8:48
And I think we're I think attacked
8:50
maybe isn't too strong or but most
8:52
of the room maybe except for me. And I'm
8:54
just curious to have you tell that story
8:56
And why that experience
8:59
was maybe indicative of this problem that
9:01
you're exploring in the book?
9:03
If you saw a video of that
9:05
convo, but it was no sound. So
9:07
you just saw facial expressions. It
9:09
would look like guys said something really incendiary.
9:12
Got this reaction. People were kind of looking
9:14
at each other shaking their heads and are
9:16
you serious right now? It was that kind of tongue.
9:18
Really, is if I said something pretty
9:20
incendiary. What I actually said was
9:23
something along the lines of, I
9:25
used to be, in this mindset,
9:27
blue good, red bat. The left is
9:29
the good is always right about stuff. They are on the
9:31
right side of all these things and the right is the problem
9:34
and they're bad. And I don't really feel that
9:36
way anymore. Like, I don't feel triumphally aligned
9:39
with the left anymore. And once I
9:41
stopped feeling that way I realized it was kind
9:43
of like a prison, an intellectual prison.
9:45
And once I shed that and I just said, you know, these
9:48
aren't my people. Neither of these are my
9:50
people. I'm just independent human. I
9:52
started seeing that the left,
9:54
especially right now, is doing
9:56
a bunch of bad things too. And that this mind
9:59
said of, left must be good, right
10:01
must be bad is holding us back from being able to, like,
10:03
figure out what's going on and solve hard problems.
10:05
That was basically what I said. People
10:07
who thought that was in saying, how could you say
10:10
the left has any kind of whatever? I think
10:12
that's how I remember. That is
10:14
at a table like that a very
10:16
controversial and it's almost, you know,
10:19
heresy, not at every
10:20
table, but at that particular table, that
10:22
went over very badly. If we abstract
10:24
it away from politics, think
10:26
one of the early things you discussed in book that
10:28
is so interesting is this concept
10:31
of the latter. Of the different
10:33
ways that humans approach
10:35
problems. You could overlay
10:37
left to right spectrums not vertical
10:40
spectrums, like politics onto the
10:42
ladder too. But as a device,
10:44
I'd love you to explain this concept. My
10:46
sense is something you developed in
10:48
the face of conversations like this one.
10:50
We need to cut at this with a knife that goes a
10:52
different direction. I really liked what
10:55
you came up
10:55
with. Can you explain that concept of
10:57
the ladder? We have a lot of these
10:59
one dimensional axes, left,
11:02
right, center politics. That's a horizontal
11:05
one dimensional axis. Also just
11:07
have if you lay out, you know, the spectrum of opinion
11:09
on a certain topic, whether it's political
11:12
or not. We would lay it out on on a horizontal
11:14
axis, there's one extreme, there's the other extreme, and
11:16
then there's the more in the middle or
11:18
nuanced partial opinions in the
11:20
middle. And all of those,
11:22
to me, they're fine. We need those. Those are useful,
11:25
but they're what you think axes.
11:27
Their axes that where you are on
11:29
that depicts where you stand
11:32
on the issue, what you think about it, what
11:34
your beliefs are about it, and that and
11:36
that's fine. But It tells you nothing
11:38
about how you got there. So the
11:40
vertical axis, the ladder, is
11:43
it's a way to bring how you think
11:45
axis into the
11:48
story and just turn the political axis, for
11:50
example, into a square. So now you have
11:52
a height component too. And at
11:55
its simplest, it's just, I call it a ladder,
11:57
and you have there's a few different things in the middle. But
11:59
basically, there's the high runns and the low
12:01
runns. And it's a place to our
12:03
psyche can be when we're on the high rungs,
12:06
we would care about things that seem
12:08
like the obvious to care about the truth.
12:11
What we believe we would want it to
12:13
mirror reality we'd want to believe
12:15
things that are true. I don't think anyone would consciously
12:17
want to be delusional. You behave in
12:19
a way that
12:22
makes sense if that's your motivation.
12:25
So if if what you care about is truth,
12:27
if that's the prime motivation, then
12:30
First of all, you're not identifying with
12:32
your views because your views could
12:34
be wrong or whatever. And all you're trying to do
12:36
is the end goal of figuring out what's right and wrong.
12:38
You treat your ideas like, I think of it as
12:40
like a little machine that you built, your conclusions.
12:43
And the machine is not precious. If
12:46
someone wants to tell you you're wrong, all
12:48
they're doing is saying that little machine you've got
12:50
is not reflective of the truth. Let me show
12:52
you why. And so they try to kick the machine
12:54
and that they can break it this shows that
12:56
the machine wasn't what you thought it was. You're down
12:58
to have criticism of your ideas and,
13:00
of course, you're willing to change your mind. If you're trying to
13:02
find out what's true, you're on a hiking trail
13:04
and you're trying to get back to where you were and you're lost
13:06
and someone can say, hey, you're going the wrong way. It's here.
13:08
You're not gonna be offended. You're gonna say
13:10
thank you. You're not gonna say, well, that's not what I
13:13
thought. I'm not gonna believe you. You're gonna say,
13:15
oh, good. That's new information. Of course, you're gonna
13:17
change your mind. If your mind's up on the high rise
13:19
and all of us are there sometimes, just
13:21
thinking that way, trying to figure out what's true. Of
13:23
course, that comes along with a lot of humility because
13:25
often when you're being honest with yourself, you don't
13:27
know. You don't know the truth. So if someone says, what's your
13:29
opinion on policy. And you're up there.
13:32
You very well might say, I don't know. haven't looked
13:34
into that. I don't have good answer to that
13:36
right now because Why would you have to pretend
13:38
to be? That makes no sense. Now, when you're
13:40
on the high and you actually do have
13:42
conviction, it means something. Now, you go
13:44
down to the low runs of the ladder and the
13:47
motivation switches. The lower rung of
13:49
the ladder, we are in a different
13:51
psychological place. I think thinking with a different
13:53
part of our brain, that sees
13:55
our beliefs as a core part of who we
13:57
are and a core part of our identity.
13:59
And it sees our beliefs as something sacred.
14:02
Beliefs like political beliefs or religious beliefs
14:04
or how we raise our children or our beliefs
14:06
in nutrition. These are the kind of things that
14:09
really trigger low wrong thinking. And
14:11
low rung thinking is it's not really thinking.
14:13
What it is is it's a strong effort to try
14:15
to continue to believe what you
14:17
currently believe. Your goal is
14:19
confirmation of your existing beliefs. Deep
14:21
down, and truth actually comes in
14:23
second, and it's often in conflict with that. And when
14:26
it's in conflict, truth loses. Likewise,
14:28
you behave in a way that makes
14:31
sense if that's your goal. So
14:33
you like to spend time with other people who already
14:35
agree. You don't want to hear your views down because
14:38
it feels painful. It feels like they're hurting,
14:40
instead of someone kicking your idea, your little
14:42
machine on the ground, like you are when you're in the high
14:44
rounds, it feels like someone's kicking
14:46
you, your body because you feel
14:48
like the idea is part of you. And so you'll do all this
14:50
stuff to protect your ideas. The way you would protect
14:52
your body, which is you spend time with other people
14:54
who agree. If you read an article with someone
14:56
who disagrees you're doing all of this hard work to
14:58
convince yourself that it has no merits.
15:01
You probably won't read it at all. But if you did, you'd be
15:03
saying, oh, well, this you'll do some ad hominem thing. Well,
15:05
this person doesn't know because they're not even at whatever.
15:08
And what's interesting to me is that both of
15:10
these ways of thinking are intimately tied
15:12
to the social setting around us. So
15:14
if a bunch of people who like high running
15:16
thinking can get together, they could actually
15:18
form an intellectual culture,
15:20
a group that I call an idea lab. An
15:23
idea lab is an intellectual culture
15:26
that itself values
15:28
true. So it's basically collaborative, HighRung
15:31
think and an idea lab arguing
15:33
is cool. Saying, I don't know. It's cool.
15:36
Makes you seem smart. Expressing conviction
15:39
more conviction than your knowledge warrants is
15:41
not cool. It makes you seem you lose credibility. And
15:44
changing your mind is cool. And disagreeing no
15:46
one takes it personally. And that grouped
15:48
together Not only can they make each
15:50
other smarter just by pointing out each
15:52
other's flaws, and one person discovers an
15:54
epiphany, and everyone can adapt it, but
15:56
you're also helping each other stay
15:58
up on the high rocks because it's a natural
16:01
tendency to kinda drift down. But if the group
16:03
is gonna call you on that and call you on confirmation
16:05
by is or if you're always hearing opposing
16:08
views, it makes it very hard to kinda
16:11
slip into low rung thinking
16:13
mode. So it's also kind of like a support group.
16:15
Helps people stay on it. Low rung
16:17
group. We have word for that. It's an echo chamber.
16:19
And this is an intellectual culture that's a collaborative
16:22
low rung thinking. A group where
16:24
there is a certain set of sacred ideas that
16:26
the whole group is basically bound together
16:28
with. This is who we are, people
16:30
who believe these things. Identity is
16:33
like the keyword I keep picking up here. Yes.
16:35
The identity of the group is tied to
16:37
the fact that we believe these things. These
16:39
are our politics or whatever. This is our religion.
16:42
Those people over there who think were wrong,
16:45
they're not just wrong. They're bad people.
16:47
They're the other people. They're people that aren't like
16:49
us. They're bad people. There are enemies.
16:51
This is a very natural
16:53
thing for us. Fifty thousand years ago when we
16:55
were evolving, this is probably how tribes great
16:58
way for tribes to be united and to hate
17:00
the other tribes is to have this thinking, but we can
17:02
still we can drift into it today. So
17:04
this access in general, once I started
17:06
thinking about it and just brought that into my thinking.
17:08
I started kind of seeing it, so not
17:10
to make myself the hero of the dinner table
17:12
story, But if I'm going to
17:14
use this language to talk about what happened there,
17:16
because I think that that was a group when it came to politics.
17:19
This was New York City group of intellectuals and
17:21
it was very much like a left ink
17:23
echo chamber where one of the
17:25
things that was very clear from
17:27
that culture was that obviously all of
17:29
us agree on
17:31
politics. Obviously, we are
17:34
right and good, and the people
17:37
who disagree with us are bad. People,
17:40
bad people, they're wrong, they're stupid, they're
17:42
dangerous, and they're the problem. And what
17:44
I did by saying, actually, I don't really
17:46
think the left is necessarily morally heat.
17:48
Superior to the riot or anything. I don't know it can go
17:50
either way. That was heresy because
17:53
part of an echo chamber culture is pressuring
17:55
everyone in the group. You get a huge negative
17:57
reaction if you do something that can cause
17:59
doubt in the
18:00
narratives. I'm sure they would not tell the story
18:02
that some guy was being an asshole. I'm sure If you
18:04
think about what happens in the lower rungs,
18:07
I like how you said earlier, technology is like a double
18:09
edged sword. One way to think about it could be
18:11
like, it's a magnifier. Like, it magnifies
18:14
all sorts of things in human nature.
18:16
It magnifies in equities. It magnifies
18:19
progress. It magnifies beliefs. Identities,
18:22
all these things because we're ever more connected.
18:24
There's less friction between us all than
18:26
there used to be. In that context, talk
18:29
about this idea of Gollum or Gollum. I don't know
18:31
how you pronounce it. When you wrote about it through the lines
18:33
of Gengus Khan for some reasons that have,
18:35
like, really clicked with me as a valuable
18:37
way to understand this mechanism,
18:39
and I'm sure we'll spend more time talking about GOLM.
18:42
So what is that term? Why do you invoke
18:44
it in your explanation?
18:45
So I talked about thinking, low running
18:47
thinking, and then high running group thinking and low running group
18:50
thinking. And where this led me
18:52
thinking about those things, I started thinking, I
18:54
was looking everywhere. You know, is this an ideal lab? Is this an echo
18:56
chamber? Is my relationship in an ideal lab? Is
18:58
my relationship in an echo chamber? Is classroom?
19:00
One way or the other? Is this forum online?
19:03
And one of things I started noticing was
19:05
that I think those two intellectual environments
19:09
have emergent properties. I talked about
19:11
they affect individuals. They encourage people
19:13
to think like the group is thinking.
19:15
That's how the effect on the individuals
19:17
within. But actually, if you kind of zoom out,
19:20
the group itself has emergent properties.
19:22
So the idea lab, a culture where
19:24
people are disagreeing, where disagreement
19:27
is cool. We talk about the concept
19:29
of emergent. An individual ant is
19:31
stupid, but the ant colony
19:33
is smart. has all these brilliant
19:36
things that can do that no individual ant could.
19:38
Same thing goes for the neuron in your brain
19:40
is stupid. A neuron just fires. Right?
19:42
But a hundred billion neurons in your brain
19:45
is this thinking machine. And I think you
19:47
can scale that up. I think that one brain
19:49
is limited. Human brains are impressive, but
19:51
they're not that impressive. And
19:54
if you look at the incredible achievements, in
19:56
human history. The buildings around
19:58
you, you look at the scientific knowledge
20:00
that we've built up. You look at the incredible
20:03
inventions that we've done. And no
20:06
one person could ever have done
20:08
that. Doesn't matter how smart they are. Doesn't
20:10
matter if they lived forever and had all the resources
20:12
they're not smart enough to figure it out.
20:14
But individual brains
20:17
via language and writing
20:20
can connect together into
20:22
a super brain. The reason idea lab
20:24
culture is awesome. What it encourages is there's
20:26
no idea that sacred. It encourages people
20:29
to just be honest and open about what they're thinking
20:31
to let whatever's happening in their brain come
20:33
out of their skull and to the room.
20:35
And now when everyone's doing that, just say there's
20:37
six people. Those six people have six
20:39
brains in the room, and they're all thinking
20:41
different things. And there's mechanisms
20:44
where to figure out what's most true from
20:46
those brains and to figure out what the mistakes are
20:48
being made. And so those six people can be smarter.
20:50
It's emergence because it's smarter than the sum of
20:52
their parts. They can form this kind of super brain.
20:54
I call that a Genie. Came up with a name for
20:56
it. This being is formed and it's a
20:58
super intelligent being called a Genie. Now,
21:01
the entire modern scientific
21:03
establishment is made on specific
21:05
rules to foster this. Someone puts out
21:07
an hypothesis and
21:09
all the other science institutions
21:12
instinctively try to criticize it and show
21:14
why it's wrong. And they usually do.
21:16
And one that's not wrong, when no one can
21:18
show why it's wrong, it becomes an accepted theory.
21:20
This is mass scale genie making,
21:22
and this is why we know about quantum mechanics
21:24
and relativity and all of these things. And that's
21:26
one of the most amazing things about humans that we
21:28
can do that. Other animals really do that because they don't have the
21:30
language capabilities we have. Now what happens
21:33
on the lower runs when an echo chamber
21:35
is acting a certain way, they're actually
21:37
doing they probably don't realize they're doing. They're
21:39
acting like ants in colony in a certain way.
21:41
And think there's an emergent property of an
21:43
echo chamber too, and I call it emollum.
21:46
Kind of a big dumb lumbering monster.
21:49
And to me, the gollum, it has
21:51
a superpower too, but it's not intelligence. It's
21:54
strength and scariness. If the
21:56
Genie gains its power via
21:58
disagreement, that's how it becomes
22:00
smart. The Golan becomes powerful and
22:02
scary via the opposite, which is conformity.
22:05
But everyone agrees on the same thing
22:08
and we're good and they're bad.
22:10
Environment is very normal to be us versus
22:12
their mindset and to dehumanize.
22:15
The other side. For obvious reasons,
22:17
this is something our species does.
22:19
We do this. We have the capability of turning into
22:21
a really worried about world war two. I'm
22:23
see a bunch of individual bad people. I see a bunch
22:25
of people who really got sucked into
22:27
Golar mode together and created
22:29
this terrifying goal that almost took over
22:31
the world. Golan is kind of the emergent
22:33
property of echo chamber culture,
22:36
of low running thinking. And part of
22:38
what I look around when I look around society,
22:40
I see that lots of
22:42
reasons we could discuss, GOLMs
22:44
seem to be on the rise. They are always here.
22:46
A liberal democracy is a place where echo
22:48
chambers are free to be echo chambers. Volumes
22:51
are free to do their thing and
22:53
so you have to live and let live. Right? You can't
22:55
start terrorizing the rest of society. And
22:58
there's kind of an immune system in liberal
23:00
democracy to protect against that, to protect
23:03
against Golar I'm taking over the country because the Ghosn
23:05
is like a force of nature that doesn't have
23:07
a natural like, oh, we've gone far enough switch.
23:09
It'll just keep trying to acquire strength
23:11
and power and forcing its ways
23:13
upon others until it stops. Is why
23:15
the liberal democracies, they have
23:17
an immune system against that. And
23:20
that's part of what the answer to this, what's our
23:22
problem that I started to realize is,
23:24
I think the problem isn't GOLMs themselves.
23:26
It's that the immune system against them doesn't seem
23:28
to be working very well. So GOLMs are running rampant.
23:31
They're tramping through our institutions
23:34
and our conversations,
23:35
and it is causing mass
23:37
scale damage. I'm gonna come back
23:39
to why that seems to be happening
23:42
in just a moment. But to really nail
23:44
home the point, I'd love to hear about
23:46
the favorite genies and gollins that you
23:48
discovered through history. Like, the genghis
23:50
common was so visceral for me because I
23:52
can just remember the line about these units
23:54
of ten soldiers. If one deserted, the
23:56
remaining nine were killed. Talk about conformity.
23:59
They literally structured units in,
24:01
like, a fractal way that had
24:03
these norms and punishments and everything. And then
24:06
you guys basically took over the world with this golem.
24:08
So tell us a couple of the genie
24:10
and golem's of a couple different styles that
24:12
you've encountered through history just to make
24:14
sure, like, those two concepts that are so powerful
24:17
are in people's minds. Yeah. So
24:19
the Mongols is the Michael Jordan of Gollums
24:23
because The best goal impossible is
24:25
one where everyone is
24:28
on the same page and there
24:31
is a way to enforce the
24:33
strictest, obedience, and conformity.
24:36
The Mongols, it's funny because there's
24:38
this pope, this guy think
24:40
he was a minister named Giovanni,
24:43
and the pope came to him and
24:45
he this guy was sixty five. So he was retired
24:47
I mean, back then, the twelve hundred. That's old. Sixty
24:49
five was the new eighty back then. And the
24:51
pope came to him and was like, can
24:54
you go way, way east
24:56
and find out what the deals with these scary barbarians
24:58
that we're all hearing about and it's scary.
25:00
Do you have a honey? Like, had no choice and he had
25:03
to go two thousand miles and he actually
25:05
got there and somehow got all this information
25:07
and they didn't kill him or anything. And then he came
25:10
back and he reported on what
25:12
was going on. And what he learned about
25:14
how it worked, so they had this decimal
25:16
system, this groups of ten where there was like
25:18
a ten man unit. And
25:21
if one member deserted,
25:24
then the whole group of ten were killed.
25:26
If one or two went into battle and
25:28
the other ones didn't follow, all the ones who
25:30
didn't follow or killed, but it gets more intense
25:32
than that. Because every group of ten was
25:34
part of a hundred man unit.
25:37
So there's ten groups of ten in
25:39
a hundred pod. Now
25:41
if one of the groups of ten together,
25:43
I'll say, you know what, let's all deserve together. The
25:45
other ninety in the pod
25:47
are to put to death. Really
25:50
intense. So what does that do? It
25:52
creates this situation where everyone
25:54
is enforcing the conformity upon everyone
25:56
else. You have to enforce it. If
25:58
you see a group acting out, you have to take
26:00
matters in your own hands. The leaders don't have to
26:02
do all this enforcement because the people are gonna do
26:05
themselves out of fear. But if you think about
26:07
the golem as an organism, think
26:09
about it as a big organism. Its life, blood
26:12
is obedience and conformity.
26:14
So what is the opposite of obedience
26:17
conformity is kind of descent and
26:19
doubt and going
26:22
against the party line.
26:24
If you're thinking of it like an organism, that's
26:26
cancer. That's cancer. When a group
26:29
desserts, that's a little cancer and a other who
26:31
start to get that idea and follow answer is metastasizing
26:33
and the golem very quickly will
26:35
shatter. It'll lose all of its strengths and
26:38
there goes the whole mission. So
26:40
what do you do? They did chemo. They
26:42
went in there, they did surgery, they cut out the cancer.
26:45
The fact that two men deserted from this ten man
26:47
unit tells me that ten man unit has cancer
26:49
problem. Get rid of it. Cut it out. So then
26:51
the second thing you learn about the GOLMs is how they
26:53
treated others, which is just they'd go ahead
26:55
and they'd say to a new place, they'd
26:58
conquer, and they'd get there and say join us, and
27:00
nothing bad will happen to you. You have to obey
27:03
and you have to be part of the Golan, basically. Or
27:05
we will flatten you. And they would. They would pass
27:07
absolutely slaughter every man woman in child. any resistance
27:10
was put up, they would leave for a few days, knowing
27:12
that some people probably were hiding and then come back
27:14
and then go and kill anyone who was mean, they were
27:17
ruthless. So there's this internal
27:19
ruthlessness to their own
27:22
people to keep them in conformity, and
27:24
then there's this external ruthlessness We are
27:26
conquering you. You can join or you can be destroyed.
27:29
Now, in a society, obviously,
27:31
no one is murdering people in a goal.
27:33
That's or not usually. That's not how it works. But
27:36
you see the same kind of thing. You see
27:38
this idea in a political
27:40
column, which is internal ruthlessness,
27:44
internal pressure, if you're part of this
27:46
and you go against the party's mind, you're gonna
27:48
be in big trouble, big social trouble, you're gonna
27:50
be ostracized, you're gonna be fired. Whatever
27:52
it is. You're gonna be smeared. You're all these
27:55
really strong social penalties, which have a
27:57
lot of effect on humans. It might not be quite
27:59
as powerful as the physical penalties, but
28:01
it goes a long way for really social species.
28:03
So they have this internal, but then they also have
28:05
the external thing. There's no playing nice with
28:08
others. It's you're with us or against us. And
28:10
that's the kind of trademark of the low run movement
28:12
is you're with us or against us. And when you're with
28:14
us, you better have your fifth
28:16
salutes up in unison marching
28:18
in the exact pace. That we're all marching.
28:21
And that's golden behavior. Again,
28:23
it scales up to something really amazing,
28:25
which is raw power. Scariness.
28:27
It turns a group of humans into a big scary monster.
28:30
What it doesn't do is it doesn't scale
28:32
up to anything smart. No wisdom there,
28:34
to enforce some destruction. You wanna do
28:37
a coup against a king. If you can get up
28:39
digging of Gollum, you can probably pull it off. If you wanna conquer
28:41
a neighboring country, you don't want a bunch of dissenters
28:43
in the army. You want everyone marching
28:45
in unison with the sacred flag being
28:48
held up and what do they do to deserters
28:50
in the army? They put them deaf or they put them in
28:52
jail. For the same exact reasons, because
28:54
they're trying to make Ebola. Because Ebola is what
28:56
we need to conquer that country, deserters
28:58
are cancer. The other people can get those
29:00
ideas, treason versus Patriotism.
29:03
Patriotism is you're doing the right thing, treason,
29:05
is you're gonna get death or jail because you're a cancer
29:07
in the GOLM. We have an amazing society
29:09
around us Partially because we
29:11
live in a place, modern liberal democracies
29:13
did something amazing, which is they didn't stop
29:15
GOLMs. They're still very present,
29:18
but they found a way to control them
29:20
so that genius could actually thrive.
29:22
And so you have these institutions academia,
29:25
and you've got science, and you've got during
29:27
a modern day journalism. Again, a lot of these things
29:29
have gone a little off the rails in the last ten
29:31
years, but in general, those things are magical
29:34
inventions. That can thrive because
29:36
there's clear rules that protect Genie making.
29:38
And so now you have all this incredible advancement,
29:41
which is part of why we have this exponential technology
29:43
going on.
29:44
What are your favorite examples of
29:47
long duration genies? Through history,
29:49
what do you think are the genies? Think of, like, the
29:51
founding fathers is this group of people that
29:53
maybe could be described in that way. But what
29:55
do you think or Manhattan project or something even though
29:57
the outcome there is something very destructive?
29:59
What do you think are the canonical examples
30:02
of a high functioning genie through history?
30:05
There's been these little pockets throughout history
30:07
where knowledge could really
30:10
accumulate ancient Greece. There
30:12
was debate, the socratic method.
30:14
It was all about gender behavior. It
30:16
was about disagreement. Disagreement was awesome.
30:18
What do you have? You had this explosion of
30:21
philosophy and art and
30:24
knowledge. Again, humans are incredible
30:26
when they're doing that. And what
30:28
often happens though is because a civilization
30:31
like that there's always golem's around, external
30:33
and also internal trying to take
30:35
over and impose a new kind of rule.
30:37
And so you have to have a strong military that you
30:39
can either handle it. And at some point, that evolves,
30:42
you get conquered by a neighboring thing. What often happens
30:44
is the books are just burned and destroyed
30:47
and back into, I have a term for
30:49
the power games, then power games
30:51
is basically the laws of
30:53
nature. Use the example of a bunny and
30:55
a bear. If a bear is trying to eat a bunny
30:57
and I don't know if that happens in the world, but that's what
30:59
I decided. There's
31:01
no rules. There's no, like, well, the bear is allowed to
31:03
eat the bunny today because he'd earn this or the
31:06
bunny deserves No. No. It's literally, can the
31:08
bunny run fast enough? And if the answer
31:10
is yes, then the bunny has more power than the bear
31:12
in this situation. So the bunny wins. If the
31:14
bunny can't run fast enough, it gets brutally
31:16
eaten by the bear. It's not fair.
31:18
It's not right. It doesn't matter the rule of power.
31:21
And the rule is everyone can do what they want if they
31:23
have the power to do so. But this extends
31:25
to humans. Right? So thousand people on a
31:27
desert island, but you're often gonna have as a bully,
31:29
starts bullying you in your little area and takes your
31:31
stuff. And what are you gonna do? You're gonna appeal to maybe a
31:33
group of people together, can band together and say no
31:36
bullying. Okay? And often what happens
31:38
is you end up with the biggest bully of all,
31:40
finding getting a kind of a little group of people
31:42
that no one can physically beat,
31:44
and now they're the dictator. And this is that tiny
31:46
version of a totalitarianistic dictatorship, which
31:48
is just the power games on a mass scale. It's saying
31:51
the dictator is making all these rules. It's not
31:53
fair at all, but they have the power
31:55
to do so. What are you gonna do? We have the army.
31:57
Everyone's dealing with that. So anyway, so ancient
31:59
Greece was a place where I'm not an expert on
32:02
it, but clearly there was something going
32:04
on there that allowed for this very
32:06
nuanced concept of disagreement and
32:09
they were big into writing so they captured it
32:11
and different generations could collaborate. Now
32:13
the Romans come along and the
32:15
Romans, if they wanted, you could have burnt all the ancient
32:18
Greek stuff. One emperor could have said, I
32:20
don't like ancient Greece. I think it's evil and bad, that
32:22
would be the end. We would never probably have heard of Aristotle
32:24
and Socrates. And today if
32:26
the Romans hadn't happened to like ancient
32:28
Greece a lot and they loved it and they preserved it
32:30
and they amplified it. But then it was kind
32:32
of within the walls of the Byzantine Empire for
32:35
a long time. One of the things that actually
32:37
stoked the renaissance a thousand years
32:39
after the end of the Roman Empire was
32:41
the Falcom Stendenople and all of these
32:44
Eastern Roman Empire scholars
32:47
and academics today flooded west
32:49
and one of things that launched the Renaissance.
32:51
So now you have this amazing thing which
32:53
is these people. What are the insights
32:55
of ancient Greece? What does it come from? It
32:58
comes from little aha moments
33:00
in individual brains. Back in
33:02
whatever it was, three hundred BC. Little
33:04
insight. In one person's brain, they put it out
33:06
there, and that's one of a thousand insights that month.
33:08
In the group of scholars there, but
33:11
that one is the best of them. So it really makes the
33:13
rounds. And it ends up being something everyone talks
33:15
about, and then other people develop that site, and then
33:17
gets written about. And then the next generation
33:19
enhances it. And so now suddenly,
33:21
the renaissance is happening. Those insights sixteen
33:24
hundred years later, seventeen hundred years later
33:26
are suddenly flourishing again. And now
33:28
there's new collaboration, now it's being melded
33:30
with modern fourteen hundred sensibilities,
33:33
whatever. And so now, it then informs the
33:35
more modern tradition. Right? You look at the renaissance
33:37
to today. A lot of these ideas developed. So
33:40
when a country like the US starts. I mean,
33:42
it is based on enlightenment thinkers. The
33:44
enlightenment thinkers, they knew their history. And
33:46
really, it's this giant two
33:48
thousand year collaboration that spans
33:50
through time and space, but it's fragile.
33:53
This one happened to make it. It didn't get destroyed
33:55
by a gollum along the way. And and then it just appeared
33:57
for a thousand years, then it comes back. There's
33:59
this persistence to knowledge
34:02
that can kind of flow through, but it often gets
34:04
washed religions and dictators have
34:06
often burned the books, punished the scholars,
34:09
and there's this kind of repression of Genie's
34:11
by Goems throughout history. So
34:13
sure it's an exact interview question, but that's only what
34:15
I think about is this two thousand year epic story
34:17
that's going on. And what's cool about modern
34:19
day modern day liberal democracies is
34:22
they are the best crack yet at wide
34:24
mass scale genie making what the Greeks couldn't
34:26
do is they couldn't collaborate
34:28
with people in South America. But today,
34:31
you literally have people from
34:33
every corner of the world playing by the same
34:35
scientific method rules, the saying this kind
34:37
of a global scientific way of doing
34:40
things. And you don't
34:42
speak the same language. You put out the results
34:44
in a paper. It can be tacked and criticized or
34:46
built upon by anyone in the world, and the
34:48
results are amazing. But it's fragile. There's always
34:50
the other impulse, which is to shut down,
34:52
to sent disagreement and enforced
34:54
conformity, which is the exact opposite.
34:57
What do you think is so
34:59
key in the ingredients of the modern
35:01
liberal democracies that created the immune
35:03
conditions to allow,
35:05
but ultimately correct for large
35:07
scale GOLMs. Like, I think about McCarthyism or
35:10
something than the realm of politics,
35:12
which I think probably is like a classic
35:14
example of a big scary golem that
35:17
was doing all sorts of harm, but the system like
35:19
on a long enough time horizon corrected
35:22
it. Now we look back on it as this evil awful
35:24
guy and aberration. My
35:26
next question is going to be what is going on now.
35:29
That seems to maybe be a violation of this. But
35:31
what about the system settings of modern
35:33
global democracies? Do you think allow the
35:35
flourishing of genies and the sort of course correcting
35:38
when gollames do
35:39
emerge. What's interesting is that just that
35:41
you have a desert island, you have total anarchy,
35:44
inherently the power games will prevail.
35:46
You can have a lot of people that are
35:48
saying, hey, let's do things right. Let's have
35:51
laws and rules and then let's make things
35:54
fair. But if ten
35:56
of the strongest dudes get together and say, you know what,
35:58
we're gonna do things our way. And we get all the women and we
36:00
get all the resources and win and screw your rules.
36:02
Yeah. Doesn't matter what everyone else
36:04
wants. Because the power games have prevailed and
36:06
they have the power, they're gonna kill you if you disagree.
36:09
So anarchy often will turn into
36:11
a totalitarian dictatorship, which is the exact opposite.
36:13
Everyone has a hundred percent freedom to do whatever
36:15
they want, there's no rules. So everyone has free to
36:17
do whatever they want, which is the power games,
36:20
very quickly what that turns into is a few
36:22
people with of power with a ton of freedom
36:24
who could do whatever they want and everyone else with
36:26
very little freedom. So that's the
36:28
pattern. Through history, most humans have
36:30
not had very much freedom because there was
36:32
no overarching laws protecting freedom.
36:34
So what the liberal democracy is, and
36:36
I call it the liberal games as kind of
36:39
asset of the power games or is this an alternative
36:41
to the power games? The Liberal games
36:43
basically says we're gonna have
36:46
a nuanced amount of rules. Just enough
36:48
rules to prevent
36:51
the power games from taking over, but
36:53
not so many rules that we become the power games
36:56
you can have quality of opportunity is
36:58
a nuanced rule. Quality
37:00
of opportunity is very specific. It says we want
37:02
everyone to have an equal opportunity. Course,
37:04
people will argue forever about how well we're doing that.
37:06
If that's the liberal democracy rule,
37:08
so everyone has the opportunity to vie for whatever
37:11
they want. You don't have the opportunity to get what
37:13
you ever want. That's what they said pursuit of happiness.
37:15
It's not that everyone's entitled to happiness.
37:17
They're entitled to the pursuit. Everyone's entitled
37:19
to vie for political power,
37:22
but you gotta win an election to get it. Everyone's
37:24
allowed to vie for economic
37:26
wealth, but you gotta go and improve your value.
37:28
But the free market has some rules that protect
37:31
it from just being a total mafia
37:33
situation. Everyone can buy for power, but
37:35
there's very strict election rules. Everyone can buy
37:37
for influence. That's free speech, but
37:40
you have to win over people's attention and convince
37:42
people you have to win over via persuasion. So
37:44
it's this kind of thing that tries to set up fair game
37:47
rules and dense stay out of it. If the
37:49
power game's rule is everyone can do what they want
37:51
if they have the power to do so, the liberal
37:53
games rule is everyone can do what they want
37:55
as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Basically,
37:58
this harm principle where you're really
38:00
free in the US. But you can't mess
38:02
with people's inalienable rights, life liberty,
38:05
And so it's the
38:07
specific thing that's supposed to create the
38:09
fairest situation, you know, maximize freedom
38:11
and and equal opportunity
38:13
and stuff while also creating this amazing
38:16
ability to harness human selfishness into
38:18
productivity. Free speech can harness
38:20
human brains into widespread changing
38:23
of the mind of the society over time.
38:25
And that's this awesome thing. It's vulnerable.
38:28
So the immune system is made up of two things.
38:30
You need the liberal laws. You need the basic laws,
38:32
preventing physical force basically from
38:34
being used. Because once this physical force is used now,
38:36
the scariest people are in charge or in the power
38:38
games again. So you need those laws that prevent
38:41
physical force. But because
38:43
liberal democracy inherently doesn't have
38:45
that many rules, laws can alone
38:48
provide the full immune system. There's
38:50
a two piece puzzle here and laws are only one.
38:52
The second piece of the puzzle is liberal
38:54
norms. So I think if it liberal
38:56
laws are the bricks in the wall, the norms are
38:58
the mortar that kinda glues it all together. And if
39:00
the norms go away, you
39:02
can knock over the wall pretty easily, or
39:05
you can get through the cracks, you can heat, and it's not
39:07
actually an airtight wall anymore. And
39:09
so the immune system to me Specifically,
39:12
the virus it's trying to predict against
39:14
is the complete
39:17
takeover of the country by the
39:19
power games. I think if you think of an echo chamber,
39:21
political echo chamber or religious echo chamber whatever
39:23
is kind of a little benign tumor
39:25
in a larger Genie brain, larger
39:28
free society, and that's fine. We're okay
39:30
with that. You can go into your church,
39:32
into your classroom, and if
39:34
you wanna set up an institution that has
39:37
acreage set of rules and no one's allowed to disagree
39:39
on this private property you are allowed to. If you wanna
39:41
say my friend group is gonna all think this way and I won't
39:43
be friends with them and they don't. That totally fine. Live and
39:45
let live. You wanna format co chambers You wanna
39:47
form little gollums you're allowed to.
39:49
There's just a hard principle. The gollums can't mess with
39:51
other people's life and liberty. And
39:54
the laws can prevent the physical force, but what the laws
39:56
can't do is prevent social pressure.
39:59
And they can't prevent social
40:01
bullying. And so McCarthyism what
40:03
it was was it wasn't necessarily you
40:05
could say that loyalty oaths were not illegal
40:08
known till later. And so, yeah, some of the laws
40:10
weren't doing their job, but mostly What
40:12
it was is it was a complete
40:14
breakdown of the second
40:16
puzzle piece of the system of liberal norms
40:19
that is in place to
40:21
protect broader atmosphere from being
40:23
subsumed by the power game. So I think
40:26
of a culture as kind of a group of people saying, this is
40:28
how we do things here. And in
40:30
the early fifties, people
40:33
were being smeared as communists who
40:35
were political enemies and then getting fired
40:37
for it. There were loyalty also in applying to
40:39
jobs. And really, that's not really the government's
40:42
job to do something about that. Nearly as
40:44
much as it's the culture's job to say, That's
40:46
not American. That's not how we do things in
40:48
America. We don't fire people based on what they
40:50
believe. We don't ruin someone's
40:52
life with a smear because they're
40:55
a political enemy. And the culture kind of
40:57
got scared, and so it shrunk away. And it
40:59
got really scared and allowed this
41:01
gollum to form and start tramping through society
41:03
at will. And that was a breakdown
41:05
of the immune system. But usually in the
41:07
US, it's not the laws. It's the other puzzle
41:09
piece. It's that people all get scared
41:11
at the same time and stop standing up
41:14
for. What they know is
41:16
right. What they know is the liberal way, the
41:18
living let live way. They stop standing
41:20
up for them. Can we take a little detour
41:22
into the world of media? I'm interested
41:24
in the history of it and obviously the
41:26
present state of it where social media
41:29
is like an obvious piece
41:31
of this technology stack or a layer
41:33
of this discussion that is
41:35
the way that stuff gets disseminated ideas
41:38
echo chambers. Like, it's a tool that can be
41:40
used to create trees or columns. What
41:42
has changed about the nature of media from,
41:44
like, the Walter Cronkite days
41:46
when it all seems so sensible and
41:48
looking back on it, it seems very like truth
41:51
seeking and, I don't know, balanced,
41:53
rooted in truth in what's actually going
41:55
on. Versus rooted in identity
41:58
and echo chamber type stuff. So
42:00
talk about the technology of media and
42:02
how much of a role it has played in
42:05
where we sit
42:06
today. We take human nature
42:08
which is a constant and you put it into
42:11
three different environments, you're gonna get
42:13
three different kinds of behavior. And
42:16
the environment for long time,
42:18
the media environment was incentivizing
42:21
at least some semblance of truth seeking
42:23
as the core. If ABC, CBS,
42:25
and NBC are all presenting the news and one of them
42:28
is more biased and more wrong than the
42:30
others, it's gonna get a real bad reputation very
42:32
quickly and people it's gonna get crush their ratings.
42:34
They had to be careful not to express
42:37
too much political bias hopefully any because
42:39
if they did, they lose half the country
42:41
or whatever. They lose a huge chunk of the country.
42:43
These were national brands and they cater
42:45
to everybody. That environment start
42:48
change, starting with the advent of cable
42:50
television, and cable TV exploded in
42:52
the eighties. And there
42:54
was actually something called the fairness doctrine. For
42:56
a long time, which was a rule that if you're broadcasting
42:59
to a certain size, you had
43:01
to present those sides of an issue. Couldn't just
43:03
focus on one. And that actually might
43:05
have been like a nice policy, but it grounds that it
43:07
probably violated the first amendment, which it probably
43:10
did. It was repealed in the eighty
43:12
seven. Basically, at that point,
43:14
all of these new stuff starts happening. Rush
43:16
Limbaugh and other conservative radio
43:19
just explode onto the scene, illustrated
43:21
that there is a totally new
43:24
way to do this, which is you
43:26
don't have to be neutral and cater
43:29
to everyone. Instead, go
43:31
the opposite of neutral, go totally one-sided.
43:34
Don't worry about truth so much. Instead
43:37
of trying to kind of get it close to the
43:39
truth and stay neutral, confirm
43:42
the beliefs of one
43:44
particular group. We talked early about high
43:46
run thinking and low run thinking. Right? If the old model,
43:48
they were incentivized to be reasonably HighRung. To
43:50
try to get it right and to
43:52
stay down biased. Rush
43:54
limbaugh pioneered a
43:56
new thing, which was low rung media, which
43:59
is media that is specifically trying
44:01
to confirm certain set of sacred beliefs
44:03
instead of trying to find the truth. So, Russ Limbaugh
44:05
just said, the right way or the far right
44:07
is correct about everything. And these other
44:09
people are bad and there's very one-sided.
44:11
So then, what happens in, you know, nineteen
44:13
ninety, Fox News and MSNBC are
44:16
born basically adopting this model. A
44:18
decade ago, the judge report and
44:20
Breit Bart it quickly becomes
44:22
the best way to make money by
44:25
picking aside and going well
44:27
wrong with it rather than trying to stay
44:29
high rung and get to everyone because there's a
44:31
lot of low rung mentality in
44:34
a country when it comes to politics. Politics
44:36
brings out a low rung side. So if you can get
44:38
in there and just be super political.
44:40
You be super low run. You'll actually do really
44:42
well. You'll cater to it. It's a little bit like they were trying
44:44
to sell nutritious food to the smart part
44:47
of people's brains when I would call the higher mind.
44:49
And then they realized, oh, we could sell skittles to
44:51
the dumb part of the brain, to the primitive mind.
44:53
I started selling political junk food. And
44:55
so I think as recline talks
44:57
about how people were still really curious about the
44:59
election. So they still had a ton of
45:02
time to talk about the election and people were
45:04
hungry for it, but because they had to stay neutral,
45:06
they would fill the time with who's gonna win.
45:08
Who's gonna win? What's the latest developments? Like, almost
45:10
like is the hurricane gonna come like weather? They're almost
45:12
meteorologists trying to predict the future.
45:14
Here's the latest developments who's gonna win.
45:16
And that has transformed in the world of
45:18
modern we might call sort of broadcast
45:21
media, narrow cast media, that's narrow
45:23
casting to a certain segment. In the narrow cast
45:25
media that went from who's going to win
45:27
to who ought to win. I remember seeing
45:29
Ted Copel actually in college two
45:31
thousand four or something like that. He came and spoke
45:33
and the interviewer said, So is your
45:36
famously secretive? Who do you vote for? And he just
45:38
kind of smiled and everyone laughed because obviously he
45:40
wasn't gonna say it. That would have been incredibly unprofessional.
45:43
You did not know which way these people voted.
45:45
That was important. Of course, today, it's
45:47
unbelievably obvious where every single
45:49
news anchor votes. Because they're telling you
45:51
who should win, their partisan, they act like that. And
45:53
so all that professionalism went
45:56
away because the business model changed.
45:58
Which is an important lesson. It's like sometimes
46:00
you think the ways things are and the systems we
46:02
have, they have it because it's we're right and it's good. But sometimes
46:04
it's actually because it's a being incentivized
46:07
socially. And when that goes away, there's not
46:09
really that much holding it in place often.
46:11
So there's other factors. It was a thirty minutes
46:13
of news every night. Back then and now you got
46:15
twenty four hour cable, this is just
46:18
a news network. NBC had news
46:20
in this little slot. MSNBC has
46:22
news all the time. So you gotta fill that
46:24
time and so you suddenly you can fill it endlessly.
46:26
There's an endless hunger for
46:29
low rung, really partisan, tribal
46:32
footage. And I think if it is political
46:35
reality TV. Reality is
46:37
boring most of the time, but reality
46:39
TV is always interesting. They're editing it.
46:41
They're making it look more negative than it is. There's
46:43
always negativity and fighting and it's interesting
46:45
because it's juicy and it's gossip. Well,
46:48
politics is boring. There's fifty committees
46:50
that pass bills every week. When you
46:52
talk to someone who's super political, ask
46:54
them about those bills, they probably named one of them.
46:57
Talk to someone who's going crazy about the presidential
46:59
election and asked them to name the congresspeople in
47:02
your state. I mean, the state senators
47:04
in your state. They can't. Because they're not actually
47:06
into politics as politics is boring.
47:08
What they're into, is there a trashy reality
47:11
show. The real politicians of Washington, D.
47:13
C. They're they're addicted to political
47:15
reality TV. And that's what, again, it's
47:17
it's started to be that rather than try to be
47:19
news, forget news. Let's make a reality,
47:21
Shell, make a lot more money. So what else
47:23
is going on now? Like, there's a pyramid
47:26
the book is full of these just incredible names
47:28
and visuals and characters. Everyone has to
47:30
read the whole thing. We're scratching that surface here today.
47:32
But I remember this one pyramid talking
47:34
about where the argument lies at what level
47:37
of pyramid and at the top is this idea
47:39
of norms and institutions and
47:41
policies and laws. You
47:44
described it as the mortar between the bricks.
47:46
And it seems like institutions is a key one
47:48
here that seem to have been potentially
47:51
invaded by some
47:53
sort of virus today, where conformity
47:56
to a set of beliefs
47:59
has stymied the ability
48:01
of genius to sort of do their thing.
48:03
In addition to media and this echo chamber
48:06
path that media as thing has been on.
48:09
What else is going on that
48:11
has you worried about academia or
48:13
academic institutions or other key modern
48:16
institutions that are supposed to serve as
48:18
part of
48:18
the, like, immune system that maybe had been
48:21
not playing that role in the last ten years as
48:23
you said. If you wanna see if an institution
48:25
is healthy, ask what is its telos?
48:28
That's the philosophical term for his end.
48:30
The telos of a knife is to cut things.
48:32
So what is the telos of a
48:34
college? You look at college models
48:36
and a ton of them, a huge percentage of them
48:38
have the word truth. And Thomas
48:40
Jefferson founded UVA by saying something
48:43
like here we are unafraid to search
48:45
for truth wherever it may lead Harvard
48:47
Veritas. Their actual logo
48:49
is the word truth. In case
48:51
of academia, has two
48:53
different arenas. There is education,
48:56
so there's trying to teach, I would
48:58
say, not teach kids the truth,
49:00
but teach kids how to become good truth finders,
49:03
to teach young people, how
49:05
to be high wrong thinkers, how to be skeptical,
49:08
and the right level of skeptic how to think
49:10
like a scientist, how to be
49:12
humble about what they know and how to discover information
49:14
and how to think clearly. This is what an
49:16
ideal college occasion wise, it teaches
49:19
young people to be truth finders, to be high rung
49:21
thinkers. And the second arena is in
49:23
research, acknowledges produced in universities.
49:25
There are knowledge production mechanisms. They're
49:27
the knowledge factories. There's these systems
49:30
in place that try to keep the compass
49:32
pointed towards truth. There's peer review and
49:35
there's a whole set of rules and
49:37
methods that universities use to
49:39
keep their knowledge that they're finding
49:41
accurate and useful. So
49:44
that's the telos. If you go into
49:46
a church, you'd see the cross everywhere because
49:48
the telos of the church is to serve Christ, whatever
49:50
it might be. Healthy, non
49:52
corrupt institution. What
49:54
they do matches what they say they do. Right? They
49:56
say that they're dedicated towards truth and they behave
49:58
that way. Corruption to me. You think of corruption,
50:01
you think of political corruption with money, but that's just really
50:03
to me, corruption is when you say
50:05
this is our sacred value. And
50:07
some other motive has corrupted it. And now you're
50:09
secretly doing this thing. This
50:12
has actually become, like, if you think of values in
50:14
a stack, the one at the top is the most sacred
50:16
some other value has come up and become the
50:18
deep down, the sacred value. And you know which value
50:20
is more sacred, value is often but against
50:23
each other. And which one wins out.
50:25
And so if the sacred value is getting beaten
50:27
by some other value, that means their corruption
50:29
has happened. The institution has cropped. Unless they go
50:31
and announce, we've changed. We now value
50:33
this. That's fine. No problem there.
50:35
They're publicly changing who they are. They actually
50:38
a lot of other colleges used to serve Christ their number
50:40
one thing. They were divinity schools and they changed to be
50:42
Veritas schools. Great. And announce
50:44
it and be honest about it and everything's good.
50:47
So what happened at colleges
50:50
in the last, you know, for a few decades,
50:52
but it's really accelerated, is
50:55
that one ideology and
50:57
people call it wholeness and, you know, has a ton of
50:59
baggage that term. I call it SJS, social justice
51:01
fundamentalism. And I call it that
51:03
a, because I don't want it to have the I don't want it
51:05
to be a mocking term. It is an ideology. And
51:07
I want to distinguish it from what I would call liberal
51:10
social justice. So liberal social justice
51:12
is the very proud tradition of the US. It
51:14
is the kind of social justice that says,
51:16
the civil rights moved in the sixties. It says, liberalism
51:19
is good. We need more of it. Liberalism
51:21
is good and the constitution is great
51:23
and we're violating it. There were promises
51:26
made by the founders, by this
51:28
country, by that flag, And those promises
51:30
are being broken. Martin Luther King would
51:32
talk about the promissory note. The black Americans
51:35
have gotten a bad check, and so
51:37
they would use able to vote billions to break specifically
51:39
the laws that were not liberal. The laws that
51:41
were violating constitution two expose them.
51:44
There's a great tradition of that in the country. One thing
51:46
the US has definitely not been perfect. It's been a lot
51:48
of different kinds of oppression and unfairness. But
51:50
one thing it's really good at is it
51:52
can be the overcome. Those things can be fixed.
51:55
The glitches in the thing can be repaired
51:57
over time. And it takes a long time and it's ongoing.
51:59
That's the tradition of liberal social justice.
52:01
It wants to use the tools of liberalism like
52:04
free speech, and free protests and free assembly
52:06
to fix liberalism. Social justice
52:08
fundamentalism is actually completely
52:11
different. It's actually in the office in that it's
52:13
rooted in Marxism. Its fundamental
52:16
thing is that liberalism is
52:18
bad. Free markets will always
52:21
exploit and lead to oppression. Free
52:23
speech is a tool of the powerful.
52:25
Free speech should be shut down when
52:27
it's dangerous. Someone's saying something dangerous,
52:30
they should be canceled for it, they should be punished
52:32
for it. It's actually anti liberal. I'm
52:34
saying things that believe Most of the scholars
52:36
of this would nod their head and say, yes, we do think
52:38
liberalism is bad.
52:41
We think that it is an invention of the west
52:43
and it's kind of a tool of oppression. So
52:45
it's much more revolutionary. It's much more
52:47
radical if you define radical with how
52:49
deep do you want to go in overhaul? A
52:52
liberal progress might wanna go and overhaul
52:54
a bunch of the norms and laws, but
52:57
the more radical person wants to go and actually
52:59
change the whole concept. Tar up the constitution,
53:01
build something new. And that's what they
53:03
want. And so there's nothing wrong with that. One
53:05
of the cool things about liberalism is it's nimble.
53:08
It's big. Bring it on. Bring all
53:10
the ideas in here. Have it out,
53:12
but live and let live. Don't shut down
53:14
discussion. Bring it all in. So social
53:16
justice fundamentalism. University has
53:18
always been very left wing. But
53:20
traditionally in the sixties, the protests were about
53:22
we want more free speech. They were actually liberal social
53:25
justice protests. They were protests for racial
53:27
quality and gender equality and things like this which
53:29
are all part of liberal social justice. Social
53:32
justice fundamentalism started developing in the corners
53:34
of these universities as more obscure
53:36
neo Marxist take on social justice,
53:39
which was, again, not just a more
53:41
extreme, liberal social justice, the
53:43
polar opposite of it, and that it wants to uproot
53:45
the very thing liberal social justice is trying
53:47
to preserve liberalism. So that's
53:49
fun. You're gonna have a really radical corner of every
53:51
university, and I think it's great. Sometimes the radicals
53:54
point out something we're all missing. We want the radicals
53:56
around. Just like we want the far conservatives around.
53:59
I want all of those people in the room because they're all
54:01
have a different lens. And once in a while,
54:03
there is something fundamentally flawed and the radicals
54:05
are the ones who are gonna see it because their lens is
54:07
looking at why this whole thing could be
54:09
messed up. But at some point they stopped
54:11
playing nicely with others. In universities,
54:14
they started to basically transformed
54:17
into something that was more like a goal.
54:20
Where it saw a descent to its own
54:22
ideology as violence, as
54:24
a form of racism or whatever. And
54:27
it also started to forcefully
54:29
expand where it would try to
54:31
shut down the scent of it even
54:33
outside of its own circles elsewhere. It
54:36
would start to create internal conformity and
54:38
try to forcefully expand. Now this is inevitable.
54:40
And every university is gonna have it, and this is when the immune
54:43
system has to kick in and say we don't do
54:45
things like the so an example would be one
54:47
of the things that has skyrocketed recently
54:49
is disinvitations. So speaker
54:51
gets invited. Maybe he's conservative speaker.
54:53
Often, actually, I looked at the database. Most
54:55
of the speakers are more like liberal progressives. They're
54:58
people like me who probably voted
55:00
for Obama and are criticizing social
55:02
justice fundamentalism, or maybe
55:04
just talking about one of the things that violates
55:06
one of its sacred beliefs, like talking out, please
55:09
perform in a way that doesn't fit with what social justice
55:11
fundamentalism says that it should be. What
55:13
does the liberal do? Even liberal who hates
55:15
the idea. People say there's four ways to handle. A
55:17
speaker you hate saying things you hate coming
55:19
to campus. One way is go
55:21
to the talk and say, I'm gonna
55:24
listen. This is what the high run person does.
55:26
It says, I'm gonna throw my idea
55:28
out there and let this idea bash it.
55:30
Maybe I'll learn something. Maybe I won't.
55:32
I'm just interested, whatever. There's another
55:34
way which is, I'm not going to that talk.
55:37
A low runner might say, I don't want to hear
55:39
and not to gusting set of ideas. Why would I listen
55:41
to something like that? It's blast for me.
55:43
Okay? All so fine. Both of those are
55:45
totally fine because you're living in that living. You don't have to go
55:47
to the talk. Now a third way is what
55:49
I would call social bully, which is not only
55:51
am I not gonna go to the talk, but I'm going to actually
55:54
not be friends of anyone who does. I'm
55:56
not being friends with anyone who goes to the talk. That's
55:58
what I call social bully, which means you're gonna use
56:00
your social power to try to prevent
56:02
others from going. Even that's okay.
56:04
Because other students can just say, well, I'm not gonna
56:06
be friends with you then. That's a choice. You're
56:08
letting them voluntarily opt out
56:10
of your friendship and go to the talk or they
56:13
can say, that's a choice of free choice. All
56:15
three of those are okay, I don't have much respect for the
56:17
social bully. I think they need to grow up a little
56:19
bit, but they're not harming other people.
56:21
The fourth kind of person is the one
56:23
that's not okay. And I call this the idea a supremacist.
56:26
The idea is if the social bully says,
56:29
if you go to the talk, you can't be my friend,
56:31
the idea of a premises says no one
56:33
is allowed to go to the talk whether you're my friend
56:35
or not. And so they do something different
56:38
than the first three. They try to shut down
56:40
the talk. They say, I wanna prevent it from happening in
56:42
the first place. And they will petition the school to get it
56:44
to go away. If they doesn't, they'll go and they'll shut
56:46
down the speaker. That's big thing. There's a shutdown.
56:48
They'll go to the talk. And just get up there and shout
56:50
until they cancel the event. They're
56:52
not banning the speaker. The
56:54
speaker will go speak somewhere else. What they're banning
56:56
is all of their fellow students who paid money
56:59
To be able to hear a wide variety of views,
57:01
they're banning them from hearing the
57:03
talk. Now, this is the antithesis of
57:06
Veritas. Genie's are made
57:08
of disagreement. If you wanna
57:10
have a truth finding institution, it has
57:12
to be that all the brains are really seeing what they're thinking and
57:14
everyone's disagreeing and it's a big mishmash of
57:16
ideas. And what the idea
57:18
as a premise this says is, I live in
57:20
a little echo chamber and I'm now going
57:23
to try to turn to force the whole
57:25
campus to be play by
57:27
my echo chamber's rules, which is the opposite
57:29
of Veritas. And what's happened is
57:31
they've succeeded in a lot of times. The
57:33
immune system of the college, instead of the president
57:35
saying, absolutely not. We will not cancel this
57:37
talk. I don't care if it's a Nazi. This is not how
57:39
we do things here. This is a free marketplace
57:42
of ideas. If you don't like the talk, set
57:44
up your own talk. To refute it, write an
57:46
article about how awful and wrong those
57:48
speakers' ideas are. Great. This is what a
57:50
Veritas campus does. So no, we will
57:52
not cancel the talk. Instead, university
57:54
presidents and leadership have been saying,
57:57
we're canceling the talk, not just canceling
57:59
it, affirming the reasoning of
58:01
SJF. By saying something like,
58:04
we apologize. We need to do better.
58:06
We need to learn more. This should never have happened in
58:08
the first place. The speaker never should have been invited. It makes
58:10
this campus an unsafe place
58:12
all these euphemisms for we
58:15
are basically going to seed
58:18
the culture, seed the telos. The
58:20
Veritas Telos of this, to
58:22
this group who has a totally
58:24
different motive, which is to turn
58:26
the campus into a church for one
58:28
set of ideas, social justice
58:31
fundamentalism. They're trying to change the
58:33
rules where now instead of a free marketplace and
58:35
open marketplace of ideas, instead
58:37
it's that If you say ideas that we agree
58:39
with, great. You probably get promoted. And if
58:41
you don't, you're gonna get fired. If you're a speaker,
58:43
you're gonna get shut down. So that's completely
58:46
flipping it on its head, but the websites the
58:48
university works, I still say, this is a place
58:50
where ideas can flow and it's a play intellectual
58:53
variety and it's a lie. Because that's what happens
58:55
because they've actually allowed a corruption. This
58:57
classic corruption. This is just
58:59
the expression on campus. The
59:01
two areas I talked about, it's really invaded though.
59:04
So education, I mean, if professors are
59:06
teaching something that offends SJF
59:09
sensibilities, a student can report them that professor
59:11
can be fired. There are dozens of stories.
59:14
Every year of professors who
59:16
offend this particular ideology.
59:18
It's never professors who offend any other ideology
59:21
being punished, fired, investigated, students
59:23
being punished, fired, investigated, or
59:26
kicked out. And so, of course, instead of teaching
59:28
students to be high ranked thinkers, It's doing
59:30
the opposite of teaching students that this is the one
59:32
truth. And you already know it. You don't
59:34
have to learn how to find it. This is true. And anyone
59:36
who says something else, they're a bad person. The opposite
59:39
is teaching students how to be Zealous. On
59:41
the research side, this is really
59:43
scary because you really want your research
59:45
your journals and stuff be doing things
59:47
the rigorous way. But what you've seen
59:49
is some corruption here too. You've seen papers
59:52
that go through double peer review,
59:54
that end up in the journal, but they actually say
59:56
something that conflicts with, you know, an SJF
59:58
tenant. Maybe they're criticizing affirmative
1:00:00
action policies, whatever it is.
1:00:03
And The reaction is huge, and
1:00:05
that's this moment of truth. Does the university
1:00:07
stand up for its values and say,
1:00:09
we publish all different kinds of the journal stand
1:00:11
up for this is an idea lab. Does
1:00:13
it do that and therefore uphold its
1:00:15
own telos and uphold its own immune system
1:00:18
against this virus? Or does it say, the
1:00:20
opposite, which is we are so sorry, we need to do
1:00:22
better at retracting the article and we reaffirm
1:00:24
our commitment to social justice or whatever.
1:00:26
And that's what this happened. And when that happens, that
1:00:28
is the immune system failing and the virus comes
1:00:30
in and takes over takes over the host. And
1:00:33
likewise, you see papers that are published that
1:00:35
shouldn't not be published they don't match
1:00:37
the rigor that is supposed to be there, but they
1:00:39
do confirm SJF.
1:00:42
And so they're published with a much easier
1:00:44
track than they should. Don't wanna go ahead and say
1:00:46
all papers right now are suddenly from corrupt
1:00:49
journals. Most journals are fine. But
1:00:51
this has happened a lot, and it's happening a
1:00:53
lot increasingly. So this is one example of an
1:00:55
institution academia that is supposed
1:00:58
to be a classic example of liberalism in
1:01:00
a liberal country. supposed to be the class liberal
1:01:02
place and it has its immune system
1:01:04
out of a cowardice of leadership and a fear of
1:01:06
social media and other things has
1:01:08
faltered The virus has rushed
1:01:11
in and hijacked the
1:01:13
host, and now the university becomes,
1:01:15
at its worst, goes from an instrument of
1:01:17
truth to an instrument of this
1:01:20
ideology of this movement. It becomes a tool
1:01:22
of the movement. Yeah. Not to go over the
1:01:24
top and say, this is every university has been high.
1:01:26
The point is, this is happening more
1:01:28
and more often to a greater and greater
1:01:30
degree. Very recently, we should pay attention.
1:01:33
If you live in the liberal democracy, that should
1:01:35
raise huge red flags regardless of what you believe,
1:01:37
by the way. Be equally concerning
1:01:39
no matter what the ideology was. The
1:01:41
point is that no ideology should have the power
1:01:44
to go into a classically liberal institution
1:01:46
and completely corrupt it. And
1:01:48
that says something is wrong. Something's
1:01:50
up right now. As I was reading
1:01:53
and thinking about your ideas, one of the things
1:01:55
that really stood out was this in my mind,
1:01:57
it's like this giant growing pile of
1:01:59
unsaid things. And I think
1:02:01
a lot about incentives and
1:02:03
let's just take someone like me, for example,
1:02:06
that has a public footprint that I
1:02:08
try very hard to say nothing particularly
1:02:11
inflammatory in either direction because
1:02:13
there's like a horrible asymmetry for me.
1:02:15
But if I say something that's directionally
1:02:18
one way or the other, nothing really great happens.
1:02:20
Whereas if I say something that's explicitly
1:02:22
offensive to whomever, it
1:02:25
could lead to a horrible outcome the
1:02:27
left hand outcome for me. And that's how I think
1:02:29
about it is just what's the system of incentives?
1:02:31
My incentive is to ask
1:02:33
questions, well, and host
1:02:35
a lot of interesting people on this show
1:02:37
in the context of my media activities and
1:02:40
not create a tax surface for
1:02:44
people that come after me. And what that
1:02:46
happens is, like, I have opinions and ideas, and I wanna
1:02:48
be part of an idea factory too. But
1:02:50
my incentives are basically to say nothing.
1:02:52
There are things that I think or
1:02:54
I'm curious about that I don't say anything about
1:02:56
because of
1:02:59
this, like, incentive system that sort of, like, sprung
1:03:01
up around me. So now there's this, like,
1:03:03
growing pile for me and for society, let's
1:03:05
say, of unsaid things. There's, like,
1:03:07
what I say in public and there's what I believe
1:03:09
in private, and it seems like the gap between those
1:03:11
two things for society is
1:03:13
widening. Is that fair estimation of
1:03:15
the
1:03:16
problem? What would you say about that problem?
1:03:18
About that pile of unsaid ideas or unsaid
1:03:21
things? And what can we do about it?
1:03:23
I think the unsaid things is like an iceberg
1:03:25
because people hear about this invited
1:03:27
speaker, for example, or the canceled journalists,
1:03:30
because they said something wrong, or the tech employer, or
1:03:32
whatever. It seems like all those stories
1:03:34
happen here and there, but it's not that big a problem. But
1:03:36
first of all, you're hearing about the big ones that make
1:03:38
the news. There's all kinds of million little stories
1:03:40
about someone small company who's been run
1:03:42
out because they offended the wrong person or whatever.
1:03:45
And so there's a lot of those stories, but much
1:03:47
it's an iceberg because that's what's above the water.
1:03:50
Under the water are all
1:03:52
the self censorship that happens. The
1:03:54
king doesn't need to execute that many people
1:03:56
to have everyone shut up, to have it instituted policy
1:03:58
of censorship. The king executes five people
1:04:01
and hangs them in the public square for saying
1:04:03
something that goes against the king's doctrine and suddenly
1:04:05
everyone else shuts up. What I see when I
1:04:07
see cancel culture or something like that is I
1:04:09
see a few executions in the public
1:04:12
square and people hanging there for everyone to see.
1:04:14
And what that does is it creates an
1:04:16
atmosphere of fear. In an atmosphere of
1:04:18
fear, it's suddenly not a safe place.
1:04:20
Liberal democracy is supposed to be a safe
1:04:22
place to speak your mind and to argue
1:04:24
and be wrong and they'll pay to be wrong and
1:04:27
to disagree and and whatever. And
1:04:29
even if you say something offensive, you should get social
1:04:31
penalty. You know, people should be mad at you for a little bit and give you
1:04:33
a talking to or tell you that they hurt their feelings or
1:04:35
whatever. Instead, if you say something that's
1:04:37
forget widely offensive, just something that is
1:04:39
offensive to one small powerful
1:04:41
political group. It's not that they'll come talk to
1:04:44
you and say you heard their film. No. No. You will have your
1:04:46
life ruined. An example I can give
1:04:48
with you is if you become someone that
1:04:50
becomes that a powerful political
1:04:52
group of one kind or another, some mob
1:04:54
decides is bad. Not
1:04:56
only will they say,
1:04:58
okay, Patrick is bat. He's an
1:05:00
awful person. He's a fascist.
1:05:03
He's a comie. He's a racist. Whatever
1:05:06
it is. Now,
1:05:08
not only does this hurt you as a
1:05:10
person, but if I go on
1:05:12
your podcast, I'm gonna have to be
1:05:14
little brave to do that because I'm gonna get so shit. People
1:05:16
are gonna say, oh, don't guy's book. You went on Patrick?
1:05:18
You went on Patrick O'Shaughnessy thing. You you know
1:05:20
who that guy is? No. No. You don't wanna go on
1:05:22
someone who's been talking with these people. If that
1:05:25
gets enough attention, if you're bad enough,
1:05:27
that transfers to me, that
1:05:29
smear on you, transfers to me,
1:05:31
and now it can go further. Right now, once people
1:05:33
start saying, no, no, no, Tim Urban's bad. You know, he goes, he was
1:05:35
people like, Patrick, you don't wanna talk to him. Suddenly,
1:05:38
people don't wanna share my book publicly. I
1:05:40
don't wanna I just wanna deal with it. Even if
1:05:42
they just don't wanna deal with It's a symmetry
1:05:44
thing. Yeah. It's just not worth it. Even if
1:05:46
nothing got that would happen, let's I don't wanna go put that
1:05:48
guy's book on Twitter and have a bunch of people tell me I shouldn't
1:05:50
be sharing that. And very quickly,
1:05:53
you see how this spider web extends outward.
1:05:55
That's not something that happens in normal liberal
1:05:58
democracy, in a normal time. That's
1:06:00
the kind of thing that happens when
1:06:02
the immune system's down, when the balance is
1:06:04
tipped towards the Gollum. So the McCarthyism, the
1:06:06
red scare was a perfect example of a time
1:06:08
when there was kind of a low rung flare up.
1:06:11
It was a flare up where the music store failed
1:06:13
and it was fear and perfect storm of
1:06:15
fear and all of this stuff where this
1:06:17
thing could take advantage and start tramping
1:06:19
through society. And I think we're in another one of
1:06:22
those now and you're feeling that. And that's I
1:06:24
bet people in the early fifties were saying thing
1:06:26
you're saying is saying, I feel this pressure to not
1:06:28
speak my mind in a way
1:06:30
that I did five years ago. This comes on
1:06:32
quickly. And especially in the era of social
1:06:35
media and stuff that comes on really quickly. And
1:06:37
so if you think about what you're actually saying
1:06:39
is you self censor a lot. That's
1:06:41
a loss. First, that's a loss for your listeners.
1:06:44
The thing is you're not self censoring because all of
1:06:46
your listeners are gonna be offended. Probably
1:06:49
less than one percent ended up
1:06:51
in a total shit storm. Probably less than
1:06:53
one percent of your less yours when they actually heard it
1:06:55
would have thought anything of it. The one percent that
1:06:57
didn't think shouldn't have said that, they think
1:06:59
people say stuff on white sometimes and they keep listening.
1:07:01
We're talking about the tiniest group of people
1:07:03
that actually think he needs to be punished
1:07:06
for that, but that group has an out
1:07:08
size amount of power right now and you can feel that
1:07:10
pressure. That's part of what I felt when I started this book.
1:07:12
I said, I'm scared to write about this. That's interesting
1:07:14
in itself. So if you think about the books,
1:07:16
there's been a bunch of books that have been taken off
1:07:18
of Amazon, taken out of Target because the
1:07:20
mob gets angry on Twitter about it and then there's
1:07:22
a proof of apology. For every one
1:07:24
of those books, there's a lot more that sit on that publisher's
1:07:26
desk. There's a lot more even bigger part
1:07:29
of the iceberg of ideas in someone's head and they no,
1:07:31
I'm just not worth it in this environment. It just never gets
1:07:33
written in the first place. And eventually, people
1:07:35
stop thinking about it. That's what scary is
1:07:37
when the social censorship works, it works
1:07:39
and that people stop talking without
1:07:42
communicating, you can't form that smarter
1:07:44
brain that's working on these problems. It kinda
1:07:46
goes quiet publicly and then people stop thinking
1:07:48
about it or they think about it in these tiny groups and we
1:07:50
lose this mass intelligence capability
1:07:52
we have and the ability to think
1:07:54
together. What's to be done? It
1:07:56
is a self help book for society after all.
1:07:58
Usually, there's some clever acronym or something
1:08:01
in a self help book. What acronym do you have
1:08:03
for us? What can people listening
1:08:05
that this resonates with think about
1:08:07
do
1:08:07
differently, mention others, whatever.
1:08:10
If I ask the question, what's our problem? Well, the answer
1:08:12
isn't that there's an ask for it coming towards earth.
1:08:14
The answer isn't that
1:08:17
the laws are creating
1:08:19
censorship or pressing people or
1:08:21
whatever. The real problem is is cultural.
1:08:23
I focused on social justice fundamentalism because
1:08:26
we're talking about academia, the whole Trump
1:08:28
phenomena of totally violating
1:08:30
the telos of conservatism in a hundred different
1:08:32
ways. Of totally violating the
1:08:35
most sacred thing that the
1:08:37
outgoing president ever says is Zoom.
1:08:39
What Reagan said in hailory, seven g loss,
1:08:41
which is that the thing that makes America magical
1:08:43
is what you're watching right now, the peaceful transition
1:08:45
of power. So he also violated
1:08:48
the stuff that should not be it is something's up.
1:08:50
Why are we so vulnerable to a demagogue at
1:08:52
this moment? Why are we so vulnerable to a mob?
1:08:54
There's always people that wanna be demigods and mobs
1:08:56
that wanna form. Why are they doing so well
1:08:58
right now? So anyway, the problem
1:09:01
isn't. I don't believe one of these hard
1:09:03
laws of nature or anything like that. The problem is
1:09:05
the soft cudgel that's happening,
1:09:07
the soft power of a
1:09:09
mob, that's a brittle power.
1:09:12
It's actually a house of cards. And
1:09:14
completely praise on fear
1:09:16
and self sensorship or even worse, by the way, even
1:09:18
worse than self censorship, much worse, is
1:09:20
saying things you don't believe. A lot of people
1:09:22
are out there right now saying things that
1:09:24
are popular with the mob because they wanna
1:09:26
be popular, because they want status, because it feels
1:09:28
good to say things and get approved. You have
1:09:30
a one big element of courage and
1:09:32
that you don't do that. You don't pander, but
1:09:35
you also sell sensor. So I didn't think
1:09:37
it's a little bit of a house of cards. It relies on
1:09:39
widespread fever. It's fear and
1:09:41
some kind of delusion, some kind of confusion.
1:09:43
So one of the things that social justice
1:09:45
fundamentalism elazon is confusion about
1:09:48
it versus liberal social justice. Its
1:09:50
goal is to convince people that anyone
1:09:53
who disagrees with things it wants to do
1:09:55
are today's version of the people who
1:09:57
disagreed with people who wanted to stopped
1:09:59
school segregation in the sixties and in
1:10:02
the fifties. It's trying to convince people
1:10:04
that, oh, that template we all have
1:10:06
in our heads that liberal social justice is
1:10:08
good. The civil rights people were obviously the good
1:10:10
guys. The southern racists were obviously
1:10:12
the bad guys. The people who didn't want women's
1:10:14
suffrage were obviously the bad guys. Well,
1:10:17
today, people who disagree with us,
1:10:19
that's them. And it's not true. So there's
1:10:21
confusion. The difference between cancel a culture,
1:10:23
which shuts down conversation, Chill's
1:10:25
discussion and criticism culture,
1:10:28
which is something that makes genies. It's great.
1:10:30
It makes people smarter. It's there's
1:10:32
a very important difference. Criticism punishes
1:10:35
the idea. It's the idea. Cancel
1:10:37
culture tries to hit the person for saying the idea.
1:10:39
Opposite. But we have a lot of confusion
1:10:41
right now. So try to criticize cancel
1:10:43
culture. They say, oh, no, you're doing the canceling. Right? It's
1:10:46
wrong. That's part of why I wanted to do a whole book because
1:10:48
I was just like, I need to say this thoroughly. Because
1:10:50
in conversation, the words we have,
1:10:53
they're not nuanced enough a lot of the time and there's
1:10:55
such room for confusion. So I
1:10:57
think we have a problem of fear and confusion,
1:10:59
and I think those two beget each other.
1:11:01
It's spiral we've been on. Now the reverse
1:11:03
of that spiral is the opposite of each
1:11:05
of those things, courage and awareness. Awareness
1:11:08
encourage to get each other when someone has courage
1:11:11
to speak out. And I use
1:11:13
the example of toby lefka at Shopify
1:11:15
basically just stood up to the mob and was
1:11:17
like, hey, look, it's not what we do here and
1:11:20
didn't say they were wrong or right. Just said that not
1:11:22
running the show
1:11:23
here. Yeah.
1:11:23
It hurts you. hurts you. And this is what we
1:11:25
do. And that's the end of he showed strength.
1:11:27
They kinda left him alone. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's
1:11:29
been going through hell. I don't realize, Unlike
1:11:32
gangis, they can't come and lynch you. They
1:11:34
don't actually have hard power. They have soft power.
1:11:36
So the epiphany that someone like Total
1:11:38
Beam, hopefully, lots of others have is think
1:11:40
the emperor has no clothes here. think I can speak
1:11:42
out and what are they really gonna do? They're gonna try to throw
1:11:45
a Twitter thing, but I can just show strength in the
1:11:47
face of that. Most people actually respect that. Most
1:11:49
people agree with Toby there even though they're not saying
1:11:51
it. And now suddenly, they're gonna go elsewhere.
1:11:53
They don't wanna go to someone who is showing strength. They
1:11:55
wanna go to the college president or the CEO
1:11:57
who says, I'm so sorry we made a huge mistake.
1:12:00
We're firing the person who you don't like,
1:12:02
and we reaffirm our commitment to that's who's
1:12:04
in trouble. They're acting like
1:12:06
the mob has weapons, physical weapons. That's how
1:12:08
they're acting, but they don't. So I think
1:12:10
that courage is you don't need that much courage.
1:12:12
It's not like the Iranian women. That are
1:12:14
burning their jobs. That is real courage because
1:12:16
you might get executed or imprisoned. This
1:12:19
is minorly courage here. You don't even need
1:12:21
that much. And the and the mob can't stand up to
1:12:23
any form of courage, really. So when one
1:12:25
person stands up, it is scary because the
1:12:27
mob can come after you. No one stands up for you.
1:12:29
But once that starts to go get hit, it point,
1:12:32
I believe. And meanwhile, if people are speaking up,
1:12:34
then all these people in their heads who are thinking,
1:12:36
I kind of think this movement is bad even though
1:12:38
they say, oh my god, I'm not alone. I'm not alone.
1:12:40
Wait a second. And now the discussion starts again.
1:12:42
And when the discussion's starting, we can start to suss
1:12:44
out the differences between criticism and canceling,
1:12:46
and we can talk about telosys and
1:12:48
good corruption. Of institutions. And I think very
1:12:50
quickly, awareness can just spiral upwards.
1:12:53
And a lot of this confusion can melt away because of the
1:12:55
discussions going on again, it makes it less
1:12:57
scary to speak up. So awareness begets
1:12:59
courage, which begets more awareness. It's not that satisfying
1:13:01
an answer. It's not like need to change this one policy
1:13:04
or this one system, but I'd really think it's
1:13:06
that some people will genuinely lose
1:13:08
their job for speaking out. I'm not talking
1:13:10
to them. I'm talking to the vast majority of
1:13:12
people who the sky won't actually fall
1:13:14
if they start being authentic. They
1:13:16
owe it to themselves to represent themselves
1:13:19
in the world. Why are you hiding yourself away because
1:13:21
you're scared of these people? These aren't wise
1:13:23
people. They're trying to punish you for
1:13:26
saying what you think. Fuck those people.
1:13:28
A little bit of that. They're bullying you. And
1:13:32
It's working. And it's like, fuck boys.
1:13:34
It's easy to say. It's hard to do. The
1:13:36
hundred people that are right now scared to do this.
1:13:38
Eight of them will have a real serious consequence.
1:13:41
A friend of mine is a teacher in school and he has to say he has
1:13:43
to whisper, whisper in middle
1:13:45
school. They have this policy they just instituted
1:13:47
where for any new teacher who's applying,
1:13:50
they have to basically show that they're a proven
1:13:52
social justice activist of the SJF
1:13:54
variety. If they haven't shown that long history
1:13:56
of that, they can't even get hired to be a teacher in that
1:13:58
school. A very big leftist
1:14:01
and he thinks that's wrong. You shouldn't have a political
1:14:03
litmus test for hiring teachers. He
1:14:05
said, if I said that out loud in a staff
1:14:07
meeting, I would be out of a job.
1:14:10
I have two kids and
1:14:12
I can't afford to lose the health insurance. can't
1:14:14
afford. He shouldn't be courageous.
1:14:16
I don't want him to be courageous. He's
1:14:18
one of the eight people that truly
1:14:21
will have a very big consequence. I'm talking
1:14:23
to everyone else. And by the way,
1:14:25
about necessarily going public. You don't have to say it
1:14:27
in a staff meeting necessarily, but start saying it
1:14:29
around your friend. Start just representing yourself
1:14:32
accurately more often because you're probably not
1:14:34
a terrible person. You've probably been made
1:14:36
to think that these things are offensive or bad
1:14:38
and probably they're not because most people
1:14:40
are humans and humans are
1:14:43
not usually awful people I
1:14:45
find. I like how in the beginning you
1:14:47
said you felt some fear writing
1:14:49
this book. And I wonder if you think
1:14:51
that really reflecting on what
1:14:53
you're most afraid to say is in
1:14:55
fact the North Star of the direction that you
1:14:57
should run as you think about courage and
1:14:59
awareness. You wrote a chapter on gender,
1:15:02
for example, which to me feels like,
1:15:04
oh, god, I'm just not gonna talk about that
1:15:06
because anything to say in this
1:15:08
case. But it just seems like a terrifying
1:15:11
lose lose proposition right now, the
1:15:13
white hot center of an off limits
1:15:15
topic or something. Do you think that's right?
1:15:18
I'm just using that as an example that seems
1:15:20
visceral to
1:15:20
me. That the direction to run
1:15:22
is the direction that you're most afraid to run.
1:15:25
Depends what your goals are, but if you think about what
1:15:27
being afraid comes from, it comes from the
1:15:29
amount you're being bullied to not say that. Yeah.
1:15:32
So there are tiers of what's
1:15:34
okay to say right now. Opinion a
1:15:36
is popular with everyone. Not gonna get
1:15:38
any pushback. Opinion b is
1:15:40
fine. A little controversial, but fine. Opinion
1:15:43
c, you're now gonna get a lot of people who
1:15:45
hate you for it. Opinion d is gonna
1:15:47
end your career. It's gonna end total disaster.
1:15:49
What that tells me is that there
1:15:51
is some kind of group.
1:15:53
It might be a small political group or maybe it's the
1:15:55
majority of society in some cases, and
1:15:58
they have a rule. They're instituting echo
1:16:00
chamber culture around opinions
1:16:02
c and especially d, where they're saying
1:16:05
that opinions c is blast for me
1:16:07
and opinion d is unforgivable evil.
1:16:10
To just question, if I went and started saying
1:16:12
racial slurs, that would
1:16:14
be a punished by society. But
1:16:17
I would reflect on that and say, well, that's for
1:16:19
a good reason. Because racial slurs
1:16:21
are a really low rung
1:16:23
nasty tribal hurtful
1:16:26
thing to say. That's not one to
1:16:29
run towards. I think that is blasphemy
1:16:31
for a good reason. I think that
1:16:33
if you wanna talk about affirmative action policies
1:16:35
or even just have a nuanced discussion about
1:16:37
it. And blast me to even bring that up.
1:16:39
Well, that's a bad one. Because that
1:16:42
is something that affects everyone. It's
1:16:44
really important. It deals with important things
1:16:46
like fairness. And I'm not even
1:16:48
sure what I think, by the way, about them. I think it's really complicated.
1:16:51
I think there's a ton of pros and cons and historical
1:16:53
factors and all of this. The fact is
1:16:55
the discussion itself is taboo. Literally
1:16:58
anything other than saying more of it the better
1:17:00
is taboo right now. That is not good.
1:17:02
That's one where I'm gonna say, who are the people
1:17:05
that are making that blast for me
1:17:07
topic? When I know that most Americans like
1:17:10
open discussion. And it's usually a small
1:17:12
group of people that have a lot of power. And I say, no,
1:17:14
screw those people. I think it depends. And I don't think
1:17:16
everyone has to go and start saying controversial
1:17:19
things. I just think it's when you feel yourself
1:17:21
with the urge to and you feel yourself too
1:17:23
scared to know what's happening, which is
1:17:25
that you're being bullied by a bully. That's
1:17:27
it. You're being bullied by a bully
1:17:30
and that should make us angry because
1:17:32
who's okay with that? Get out of here. It's
1:17:34
my one life and you're not letting me express
1:17:36
myself in my one life, in my
1:17:38
society, then I'm allowed to express
1:17:41
myself in. And because a defense
1:17:43
your things in your echo chamber, instead of just
1:17:45
hiding in your echo chamber where you belong and
1:17:47
being friends with people that agree with you, you're
1:17:50
actually trying to enforce your echo chamber on
1:17:52
everyone else. And every
1:17:55
liberal person, little, l, liberal, should
1:17:57
be offended by that no matter what
1:17:59
the actual beliefs are. Even if they agree with
1:18:01
you. If you see someone who agrees with you, who's doing
1:18:03
that to other people, you should stop them because
1:18:05
it's not about what they believe. It's about
1:18:08
their being ideas, supremacists, they're
1:18:10
actually violating live and let
1:18:12
live, the sacred thing in a liberal democracy.
1:18:14
I think the ideas of courage and awareness
1:18:17
are like a great aspirational bow
1:18:19
to put on what you've written. Like I said,
1:18:21
we barely scratched the surface of
1:18:23
all the cool frameworks and ideas the book
1:18:25
feels in many ways like a toolkit, like a
1:18:27
mental toolkit for attacking
1:18:30
different ideas, different plans,
1:18:32
different trends, etcetera. It's such
1:18:35
a rich collection. I highly encourage everyone to
1:18:37
go check it out. I can't close though our conversation
1:18:39
without asking you about AI because
1:18:42
we were texting beforehand saying, we gotta make sure
1:18:44
this whole conversation doesn't devolve into
1:18:46
us talking about AI. You wrote extensively
1:18:49
about this before it was a thing.
1:18:51
You were probably the most in-depth
1:18:54
explorer of these ideas for the
1:18:56
mass public. What has it been like
1:18:58
to watch the last six to eight
1:19:00
months of the explosion of some
1:19:02
of these tools? And I'm sure you've
1:19:04
thought about it how these tools fit into
1:19:07
everything else that we just talked about because
1:19:09
you're already seeing the original one had a
1:19:11
political bias when you put it through like
1:19:13
a test or something and and they've corrected
1:19:15
that and that's way more centric. The tuning
1:19:17
Talking about power, these things are
1:19:20
so powerful and getting more powerful.
1:19:22
The tuning matters What's been your reaction
1:19:24
to all of this given that you used to study it in such
1:19:27
detail? First, I'm happy is not my responsibility.
1:19:29
I don't know why I would not want to be in charge.
1:19:31
The closest thing we've had to it in
1:19:34
recent years is when these social media
1:19:36
networks blew up. Mark
1:19:38
Zuckerberg, who never asked
1:19:41
for his role, he never thought
1:19:43
he was getting into what he was getting into.
1:19:45
And Jack Dorsey, and they ended
1:19:48
up realizing that they're pulling political strings.
1:19:50
And they're changing
1:19:53
people's brains and
1:19:55
they're creating mass
1:19:57
depression and teen girls is
1:20:00
scary. Basically, opening
1:20:02
a bottle and, like, this power wears out and
1:20:04
starts having all these unintended consequences.
1:20:07
And I feel that and again, I never criticized
1:20:09
those people running it because I'm just like, they have
1:20:11
the hardest job in the world. And imagine. Yeah.
1:20:13
Just imagine them tossing and turning at night thinking
1:20:15
about how much responsibility, how much damage they've
1:20:17
inadvertently caused. I don't blame them.
1:20:19
So I see this as similar where
1:20:21
it's the people running it. We don't even begin
1:20:24
to know the unintended consequences yet.
1:20:26
This is nineteen ninety three discussing
1:20:28
this new Internet thing. And
1:20:30
imagine in ninety three predicting Uber
1:20:32
from that. Imagine in ninety three
1:20:35
predicting Twitter. People were just talking
1:20:37
about cool thing you could send in message, you could
1:20:39
send mail electronically. So
1:20:41
when I see this, I don't see GPT
1:20:43
three, you know. I don't see, like, oh, it's that's what this
1:20:45
is. It's a chatbot. I see a new
1:20:48
paradigm, a new s curve,
1:20:50
just starting to heat up, and a
1:20:52
new source of Godlike power for humanity.
1:20:54
And I have no idea how
1:20:56
it's going to evolve. I'm not sure if we
1:20:59
have what it takes to make it evolve in a way
1:21:01
that we all look back thank God for this thing. It was
1:21:03
such a good thing. I don't know if I feel optimistic
1:21:05
or pessimistic. What I know is that I
1:21:07
know it's directionally correct. What I
1:21:09
mean is the most basic thing that's directionally
1:21:11
correct to not to bring it back to all of this, but
1:21:14
is that we need to be as wise as we
1:21:16
possibly can as a society about new
1:21:18
crazy technology that's coming out all the time.
1:21:21
And the way we do that is by open
1:21:23
discussion. Right now, it's not controversial, really.
1:21:25
To talk about GPT three and GPT four what's
1:21:28
it gonna bring and what should it be? What shouldn't it be?
1:21:30
All it takes, it becomes a big enough topic
1:21:33
that one of the presidential candidates starts saying this
1:21:35
and the other one starts saying this and before you know it,
1:21:37
the one side has this view on it and the other
1:21:39
side has this view on it like masks. The
1:21:41
left liked the masks, the right didn't like the masks.
1:21:44
As soon as that happens, all wisdom
1:21:46
goes out the window. The macro society, brain,
1:21:49
becomes stupid, goes dark. And we
1:21:51
have these two unknowns positions,
1:21:54
and it becomes taboo to even suggest
1:21:56
new things. That's the worst thing we can do. We
1:21:58
need to have our wits about us, and the way we do that is
1:22:00
buy. So you can't let this political whirlpool
1:22:02
that has sucked everything in, including COVID, which should
1:22:04
have been uniting thing. Russia, Ukraine. Everything
1:22:06
gets sucked into this red versus blue
1:22:09
color war in the US. We cannot
1:22:11
let this thing happen. And so when you see someone
1:22:13
doing that punishing opinion, punishing
1:22:15
a certain viewpoint and making it taboo to have
1:22:17
that viewpoint about AI that has to
1:22:19
be shut down immediately. So as far as what's
1:22:21
gonna happen, man, I don't know. I hope people enjoyed
1:22:24
my articles because I don't know how much longer anyone's
1:22:26
gonna need to read any human writer. Easy
1:22:28
to be scared. It's also so easy to be excited. I mean,
1:22:31
think about the industrial revolution. Or
1:22:33
the Internet, and all of the best good that came
1:22:35
from it as well. All of the jobs, all of the productivity,
1:22:37
all of the quality of life improvements
1:22:40
that happened from it that's gonna happen too. And I'm
1:22:42
so excited to see, like, what kind
1:22:44
of amazing upward trajectories
1:22:46
we end up on because of
1:22:47
it. I just hope that the upward ones are bigger, more
1:22:49
powerful. You just made me think of one
1:22:51
final question, which is the role of leadership.
1:22:54
One of the things about the Gollins through history
1:22:57
is at the top of them directing
1:22:59
their activity, there often is this
1:23:01
very small or even singular person,
1:23:04
literally single person. Or a small group
1:23:06
of people or counsel or something. And
1:23:08
did it on the other side that there's great defenders
1:23:10
of liberal democratic ideas and
1:23:12
so on. Anything as you're
1:23:15
writing the book on the role of leadership
1:23:17
and all of this, because we've talked about the natural
1:23:19
tendencies, the emergent properties of
1:23:21
human brains, in a good and a bad
1:23:23
way in duties and columns. But
1:23:25
what about the role of actual individual leaders?
1:23:28
How much does it matter versus someone
1:23:30
just ends up being at the head of one of these things.
1:23:32
And the mob sort of determines the leader
1:23:34
versus the other way around. Any closing
1:23:37
thoughts on the role of leadership?
1:23:38
It's the most important topic right now
1:23:40
is leadership, I think, because what
1:23:42
is leadership? I mean, it's easy to lead when you're
1:23:44
saying something popular. That's easy to
1:23:47
lead when you're
1:23:49
basically copying the reasoning that's
1:23:51
already accepted. So if you're the
1:23:53
head of company and you're just doing what that company has always
1:23:55
done and you're doing what the other companies are doing
1:23:57
and you're saying the right social, political things
1:23:59
that are popular. You're not being a leader
1:24:01
at all. You're being the lead follower. You're being the most
1:24:03
vocal follower. And I think that it's not that
1:24:05
all moments require the same level of leadership.
1:24:08
Sometimes, maybe leadership is x
1:24:10
important, and then there's a time when
1:24:12
I think things are going off the rails if the immune
1:24:14
system seems to be breaking down. That's when
1:24:16
leadership becomes ten x important. And
1:24:19
specifically because the immune system fails
1:24:21
when leaders again, I use Toby
1:24:23
as an example. You could also talk
1:24:25
about a much a small I have a friend who at a
1:24:27
smaller company stood up to the forces that were trying
1:24:30
to corrupt the company and hasn't had
1:24:32
a problem since. There are some
1:24:34
great examples of people
1:24:36
throughout society who have kept
1:24:38
their integrity in a tough time to keep their integrity.
1:24:41
And I think the true colors are shown in a
1:24:43
time like this. You see who really has integrity.
1:24:46
I do think that we should be looking at that and
1:24:48
assessing that and demanding that
1:24:50
the leaders that we have the year
1:24:52
of encouraging them at least to
1:24:54
lead and to lead even though it's
1:24:56
hard. And that doesn't just go for CEOs
1:24:58
of companies. It goes for people
1:25:00
with public platforms of all kinds.
1:25:02
It goes for smaller leaders.
1:25:05
Teachers in classroom, professors. It goes
1:25:07
for people sitting at a dinner table
1:25:09
with their friends. I mean, the leadership on the mob
1:25:11
side. The truth is, don't think there's that
1:25:13
many bad people in this story. I don't think it's
1:25:15
something where it's like the evil people are trying to
1:25:17
take over. If you actually look at any individual
1:25:19
person who's participating in mob activity, First
1:25:22
of all, often, this person they
1:25:24
got into this because of their empathy. They wanna be an
1:25:26
activist. They wanna make things better. And they've been
1:25:28
convinced that this is the way to do so. And think
1:25:30
they're wrong in that, but they're good people
1:25:32
trying to do good a lot of the time. Then
1:25:34
other times, there's people that know they're doing something that's
1:25:36
not so good. They're being bullied. They're being opportunists.
1:25:39
And even that, that's human. I don't think there's evil
1:25:41
people here. The environment has changed,
1:25:44
virus has sprung loose, multiple kinds of
1:25:46
viruses have sprung loose. And
1:25:48
I think leadership when I think about, I think a much more
1:25:50
on the side of people who need to stand up to
1:25:52
stuff versus bad leaders. Trump
1:25:54
is maybe an example of someone who is
1:25:57
taking advantage of the
1:25:59
times. That's what he's really doing is he's
1:26:01
taking advantage of the times and really doing
1:26:03
really good job at it and
1:26:05
leading as a demagogue. Demigahu's
1:26:08
being an opportunist. So, yeah, I think there are
1:26:10
some I don't think the answer is those people are
1:26:12
bad. I think the answer is we have all the tools
1:26:14
we need right here. To restore this immune system
1:26:16
and get things back on track like we did in the fifties
1:26:18
with McCarthyism. Like you said, it trailed away.
1:26:21
We have the tools. You just have to start
1:26:24
being more annoyed about being bullied
1:26:26
and standing up for the things that we know
1:26:28
are right. Because by the way, it doesn't always end like McCarthyism.
1:26:30
There's a lot of great civilizations that
1:26:32
have genuinely just crumbled over time
1:26:35
and we could be one of those too, you don't know. So we
1:26:37
shouldn't get cocky. Look at some history and then
1:26:39
you won't feel very cocky about the strength
1:26:41
of a liberal democracy, you'll feel like so grateful
1:26:44
that you're in one and you will wanna work
1:26:46
hard to keep it afloat because
1:26:48
the
1:26:48
alternative, the power games, is not
1:26:50
good for anyone. Well, Tim, it's just such
1:26:52
a fun conversation. Funny little, like, inside
1:26:54
factoid is our first conversation was
1:26:56
actually the very first time on the podcast that we did
1:26:58
cover art. Your face was the very first
1:27:00
cartoon that we ever made, which is kind of fun
1:27:02
to think back on
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