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0:31

I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly.

0:33

Tim

0:36

Urban is the only cartoonist who

0:38

has elicited an existential crisis

0:40

in me. It's not because he's some great

0:42

illustrator. Tim's drawings are comically

0:45

simple. They're of stick figures. Or if he's feeling

0:47

fancy, maybe he'll do a chart.

0:49

What makes them so affecting is the way

0:52

he's able to capture and distill the

0:54

most complex and profound questions

0:57

we face.

0:58

Questions like, what does it

1:00

mean to be a human being? What

1:03

is the purpose of our lives?

1:05

Are we spending our finite time on earth wisely?

1:07

And do we even grasp how short

1:09

that time is?

1:11

By capturing the length of our days in, say,

1:13

the amount of times we have left to swim in the ocean,

1:16

or the books we have left to read, or the dumplings

1:18

we have left to eat, assuming we live to the age

1:20

of 90, Tim takes an abstract

1:23

subject like time and makes

1:25

it tangible.

1:27

In one of my favorite blog posts of his, Tim breaks

1:29

down the amount of time, realistically, that we have left to spend with our parents.

1:35

Did you know that by the age of 18, you've

1:37

already used up like 95% of your parent time? It's

1:41

something

1:41

that stuck with me. So

1:45

Tim's done this sort of thing for years on his singular

1:47

and must-read blog, Wait But

1:49

Why, which is full of everything

1:51

from posts on AI to aliens to the Fermi

1:53

paradox to marriage.

1:56

But a few years ago, like six years ago,

1:59

like many

1:59

of us, Tim was troubled

2:02

by what he was seeing going on in the

2:04

world around him. He noticed

2:06

that while technology was progressing

2:09

in unbelievable ways, people were going

2:11

to the moon on private rocket ships, computers

2:13

were the size of Starbucks coffee cups, and foraging

2:16

was a thing of the past. Yet

2:19

we were seemingly more unhappy

2:21

than ever before. We were petty. We

2:24

were turning against each other. And

2:26

the very things that have allowed for this kind

2:28

of progress, things like democracy

2:31

and liberalism and humanism, those

2:34

were under siege. Why,

2:36

Tim wondered, was everything such

2:39

a mess? When did things

2:41

get so tribal? And why

2:43

do humans do this stuff to each other? His

2:46

new book, called What's Our Problem,

2:49

a self-help book for societies, is

2:51

an answer to those questions and more. Tim

2:54

looks back at hundreds of thousands

2:57

of years of history. Trust me, it works. He

2:59

condenses.

2:59

And he argues that we are living through more

3:02

change, more rapidly, than

3:04

at any time ever. And

3:06

the stakes of that are almost too

3:09

high to comprehend.

3:11

But what he argues is that the danger

3:13

we face in the end is not global warming,

3:16

it's not an asteroid racing toward Earth,

3:18

it's not an impending alien invasion. It's

3:22

ourselves. And Tim argues

3:24

that we got ourselves into this mess,

3:27

but he's pretty sure we can

3:29

also get ourselves out of it.

3:36

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5:44

Tim Urban, welcome to Honestly. Thank

5:46

you for having me. You just published this

5:49

book called What's Our Problem? A self-help

5:51

book for societies. You've been working on this

5:53

book for more than seven years I think. Is

5:55

that right?

5:56

About six and a half. Okay. You're

5:59

sort of a famous procrastinator. I am.

5:59

which we're going to get to later in this conversation.

6:02

But that is not my sense of why

6:05

this book, which has made up at least half

6:07

of cartoons, took so long to get

6:09

into the world.

6:11

What was so hard about getting

6:13

this book out into the public?

6:15

Well, if you're trying to assess

6:18

what's going on in a society and

6:20

why things are the way they are, there are

6:22

so many other

6:25

topics that feed into that. So it

6:27

was an overwhelming amount of material

6:30

to try to kind of put together and synthesize,

6:32

but also on top of that, I

6:34

just had all of this

6:37

resistance to it, saying anything besides politics.

6:40

And then other people would feed into that. They'd

6:42

say, are you crazy? Don't write about

6:44

that. You don't have any haters right now.

6:46

Why would you go and write about politics? Just write about anything

6:48

else. And that to me was interesting. I said,

6:50

well, what's good? This is like, I'm supposed to, I write

6:52

about whatever I want, right? I write it if something's important

6:55

in society. I wrote when AI first became a

6:57

big topic in 2015. I wrote a huge thing about

6:59

it. You know, whatever I'm thinking about, I write

7:01

about. So this one topic, which is so important,

7:03

it's how we all are living together. It's how

7:06

the fate of our society.

7:09

There's this incredible

7:12

incentive to stay away from it. What

7:15

is going on there? And that got

7:17

me thinking, this is part of the story, the

7:19

fear I have of talking about it. That's, there's

7:22

a much bigger topic here.

7:24

You recently wrote in your wonderful blog, Wait

7:26

But Why, about this six and

7:28

a half year journey. And you said this about

7:30

starting the book in 2016. Something

7:33

seemed off about the society around

7:35

me, like there had been a subtle foreboding shift

7:38

in the balance between reason and madness.

7:40

It felt like we were losing our grip on something

7:43

important. Let's talk a little bit

7:45

about that shift. What were you starting to witness

7:47

in 2016 that

7:50

made you feel like the balance

7:52

between reason and madness was tipping into madness?

7:54

And to what did you attribute

7:56

the shift? So

7:58

think about me. middle school

8:00

and how people act in middle school. You

8:03

know, there's popular kids and then

8:05

there's unpopular kids and there's kind of like the

8:08

most popular person is often kind of a mean

8:10

person that everyone's a little bit scared of and then there's

8:13

real in-group and there's out-group and

8:15

people are cruel, right? And I

8:18

started noticing that the grownups

8:21

were acting like this.

8:23

We all have that middle school persona

8:25

in us somewhere, whether we were the person who was

8:28

the bully or the person who was the sidekick

8:30

of the bully, sucking up to the bully or the person who

8:32

was the target of the bully or, you know,

8:35

if we were especially

8:36

grown up at that age, maybe we were the

8:38

person who stood up to the bully, you know, but either

8:40

way, that person's still in us and

8:43

something was bringing it out. And the

8:46

shift I noticed was not just that more people were acting

8:48

this way, but that people that

8:50

would normally criticize this kind of behavior,

8:52

that would criticize cruelty or

8:55

overt tribalism or, you know, gross

8:58

stereotyping of giant groups of people, you

9:00

know, or just kind of old school bigotry.

9:03

The people that would normally stand up and criticize that

9:05

were all doing it only in private. And

9:08

you know, it seemed like the power shifted where

9:10

the people acting kind of in that

9:12

unadmissible way

9:14

had some kind of power that everyone was scared of.

9:17

And it felt like something crazy news story would be happening

9:19

that any reasonable person watching it would say, well,

9:22

that's ridiculous. But no one's saying

9:24

it out loud, right? We're all either saying it in private

9:26

or in some cases you find even in private

9:29

a private dinner party, you see that

9:31

people are even the no one knows who's thinking what

9:33

at that dinner party and everyone's kind of virtue

9:36

signaling to each other at the dinner party. And so

9:38

it didn't feel like it was always like that. It felt

9:40

like this was happening more than it used

9:42

to. Meanwhile, as I'm right as I'm

9:45

thinking about this, you know, Donald Trump is ascending

9:47

in power and he's this is, you know, as the primary

9:50

was going on. And he has a total disregard

9:52

for

9:52

truth and a disregard

9:54

for a lot of the kind of norms that most

9:57

other politicians had had to follow. And he was

9:59

rising up.

9:59

And so there should be things

10:02

happening across the political spectrum, across society

10:04

that, again, felt kind of foreboding. We

10:07

were losing our grip on the

10:09

kind of things that keep a liberal society

10:12

kind of healthy and strong.

10:13

To me, it seems like everyone

10:16

has what I think of as

10:18

their, I guess it's like a play on woke,

10:20

like their waking up moment where they realize

10:23

something's a little off here. Like right for me,

10:25

it was the Tom Cotton op-ed

10:28

and my boss James Bennett being like struggle session

10:30

and fired and then ultimately leaving the New York Times

10:33

and sort of looking at the capturing

10:35

of the institutions. For other people, it was the

10:37

Trump years. For other people, it was the

10:39

COVID lockdowns. For others, it was the moment

10:42

where Kenosha was burning,

10:44

but CNN had the chyron saying,

10:46

you know, fiery but mostly peaceful protests.

10:49

Did you have a kind of like aha

10:52

moment that,

10:53

or was it just kind of a series of

10:55

dinner parties like the

10:57

ones you just alluded to? Yeah. So

11:00

when you talk about these aha moments, I think the

11:02

way they work is

11:03

you don't just see one example of something

11:06

for the first time and suddenly your whole worldview

11:08

shifts. It's more that there's,

11:10

we have these priors, right? You have a prior worldview,

11:13

but somewhere in your subconscious, you've

11:16

been noticing

11:18

things that conflict with that prior and

11:20

maybe it's in your subconscious or maybe your conscious notices

11:22

it and disregards it and you keep noticing things and

11:24

saying, well, that's a freak incident noticing. And

11:27

then the aha moment, I think comes at the

11:29

end of a bunch of these. It's that moment

11:31

when

11:32

you realize that, you know what? I might have

11:35

to question that prior

11:37

and suddenly all those other examples

11:39

that you had been pushing away or that you're only your

11:41

subconscious has been noticed, they all come into

11:43

your consciousness and you realize, wait a second. This

11:46

is a whole pattern. I've been wrong about

11:48

this whole thing. And now

11:50

it's like all these other things fall into place

11:52

in your head. And so

11:54

for me, the

11:56

closest I can come to that exact moment was

11:59

Greg Luciano. took a, you know, who's the head

12:01

of fire, took this video. He happened

12:03

to be walking through Yale campus of Nicholas

12:06

Christakis getting essentially

12:08

struggle sessioned out in the quad

12:10

by a bunch of students over an email

12:13

his wife had written, which was suggesting

12:16

that the school had gone

12:18

too far in telling

12:20

students

12:21

what they should and shouldn't wear for Halloween. And

12:24

she in very gentle wording basically said, I don't

12:26

think it's our job to tell students what they should or shouldn't

12:28

wear. And maybe even if a student

12:30

wears something that's kind of offensive, maybe that's something

12:32

that college students should be able to do. And

12:35

if they and if other students don't like it, maybe the students

12:37

should talk to them and not the administrator, whatever.

12:40

Meanwhile, that turns into now her husband,

12:42

Nicholas Christakis, being screamed

12:45

at and this happened to be captured by Greg, put

12:47

on YouTube, so it went viral, a lot of people saw

12:49

it. But it was watching that video,

12:52

it

12:52

was noticing what kids were saying, which was stuff like,

12:55

you know, this is supposed to be a safe space, saying

12:58

that he's disgusting, that, you know, that

13:00

word disgusting, you know, they've been basically

13:03

subhuman

13:04

and snapping. And

13:06

what I mean by that is, you know, that they were

13:08

when one kid would say something, all the other kids would

13:11

snap in unison. And I know if I were

13:13

there and I'm one of those students, whether I agree or not,

13:15

it's going to be hard to, you know, not snap or

13:17

at least just

13:18

stay silent. Because that's scary

13:20

when everyone is, you know, kind of, you know,

13:23

that snapping is saying, you know, the group is behind

13:25

you. We are behind you. We are one, right, against

13:28

this man. And so it was

13:30

looking at that and saying that Yale is so safe. And

13:32

the idea that this woman's

13:35

email, it makes things

13:37

unsafe. That is just so counter

13:40

to everything that I think and

13:43

the way I think a college campus should be. So now

13:45

I'm thinking, though, but the prior I had

13:47

for a long time was kind of blue,

13:49

good, red, bad, right, in the U.S.

13:52

Just in general, not blue is perfect, but like

13:55

the people on the blue side were the ones who were pushing the

13:57

country forward in a good direction,

13:59

it back. You know, I grew up in a progressive suburb and

14:02

went to progressive college and lived

14:04

in LA and then lived in New York. So, you know, I was surrounded by

14:06

this. And I was an independent thinker in a

14:08

lot of areas, but, you know, these priors, especially with

14:10

something like politics, can be very strong. You know,

14:12

everyone around you thinks this thing, it can make

14:15

us otherwise independent thinker pretty beholden

14:17

to this other framework. And

14:20

I remember looking at that and thinking like, if this

14:22

is what blue is today, then like, something is incredibly

14:25

wrong. And I don't think that, you know, it just kind of,

14:27

it's that moment when your head explodes

14:29

a little,

14:29

because the house of cards that was my

14:32

prior, that was based basically on a

14:35

kind of on tribalism on a feeling that

14:37

I'm part of the good team. And that whole thing

14:39

just kind of shattered over the next couple months.

14:41

And I was reading and I was thinking and I was reflecting

14:44

on everything and looking back at my own emails,

14:46

like, like a year earlier, two years earlier,

14:49

and man, I was like, wow, I was really close

14:51

minded about this stuff. So then I

14:53

said, okay, this is something I have to I have to

14:55

write about.

14:56

You describe your book, which I love as

14:58

a self-help book for societies. And

15:01

I want to get into the self-help portion in just

15:03

a minute. But first I want to talk about how we

15:05

got to the place where we need help. You

15:08

start this book in this wonderful

15:10

way by giving a brief history

15:12

of humanity, which you call the story of us.

15:15

And you say this, you say, if we wrote the story

15:17

of us out in a thousand pages, here's

15:19

what it would look like. From page one

15:21

to page 950, there's basically not

15:24

much going on. And

15:26

then on page 976 of recorded history, it begins ish,

15:29

as you put it. And Christianity

15:34

isn't even born until page 993. So basically, the

15:36

first 95% of the book of human history

15:41

is so, so unbelievably slow

15:44

and boring. And the last 5% is a page

15:46

turner. Why

15:47

is that? What

15:50

is the spark that creates

15:53

the propulsive change that

15:55

we see in those last

15:57

few pages? So

16:00

one of the things that separates humans from other animals

16:03

is language and the

16:05

ability for people to take what's

16:07

in their brain and put it in

16:09

a very detailed way into other people's brains and

16:12

then people can pass the idea on

16:14

through language to their children. And

16:17

so if I learn something about the world, I

16:19

can tell my whole tribe who then can tell

16:21

their descendants and the tribe now

16:24

knows that. And it's like this kind

16:26

of collective knowledge, like a tower of

16:28

knowledge in the middle of that tribe that

16:30

kind of grows and builds and builds. And

16:33

then right around page 975, you start having writing. And

16:38

so now someone can take an idea and

16:40

put it on a tablet or later a book and

16:43

send it into the minds of millions of people. And

16:45

it can last for centuries and it can last in the

16:47

exact wording it was meant to be transmitted

16:49

in. So you have instead of a tribe

16:51

of 150 people's collective knowledge, you now

16:54

have 10,000 or 50,000. And

16:57

so that knowledge tower becomes a skyscraper.

16:59

And so things start happening very

17:02

quickly. You start being able to do things that

17:04

no individual human or no small tribe could

17:06

ever do, like build giant temples and

17:08

understand that the world is round and

17:11

start to come up with governing structures

17:13

that are based on trial and error of hundreds

17:15

of years of governing structures before that. And

17:17

so things start to advance much faster.

17:20

But the craziest thing is this has an exponential

17:23

kind of effect because a more advanced species with

17:25

the bigger knowledge tower makes progress faster

17:28

than a less advanced species. So not

17:30

only do things keep building, but they build faster

17:33

and faster and faster. And

17:35

eventually this comes to a point where things are soaring

17:38

ahead and you're

17:39

making more progress in a century than you did

17:41

in all of human history before that when

17:43

it comes to tech and knowledge building. The

17:45

reason I like the thousand page book thing

17:47

is it allows you to look at the last page alone,

17:50

just page 1000. So now we're not talking

17:52

about the last 5% of the book. We're talking about the last 0.1%

17:55

of the book. And

17:57

that goes from like 1770s to today.

17:59

right, 250 years per page. And

18:03

it is a total anomaly

18:05

compared to all the pages before it. And

18:08

it's again, I don't think it just happened on its own. It's

18:10

what eventually happens if you keep this pattern

18:12

going of exponential growth, exponential

18:14

growth, which is awesome, right? I mean, we have an amazing

18:17

quality of life. Modern tech is great. And

18:19

none of us, I don't think, want to go back to the

18:21

1600s. It's also

18:23

really scary. It's also really scary because

18:26

when things start racing forward ahead, you can

18:28

get very reckless and you

18:29

have a lot of godlike power from all of this tech.

18:32

And so that's kind of, to me, it's exciting

18:34

and it's scary. The other thing that's

18:37

anomalous about that page from call

18:39

it the mid 1700s till now, isn't

18:42

just all of the unbelievable leaps ahead

18:44

in terms of technology. It's also the advent of

18:46

liberal democracy, as being

18:48

completely ahistorical and

18:51

miraculous.

18:52

How do you understand sort of the rise

18:55

of liberal democracy in the story

18:57

of us? Because to me, that is the

18:59

background to this entire book is frankly

19:02

your

19:03

love and gratitude for a system

19:05

that I think you feel is really

19:08

under siege in ways that many

19:10

people aren't appreciating.

19:11

A liberal democracy is

19:14

a totally artificial invention.

19:17

And it's not that, you know, the

19:19

enlightenment thinkers of the 16 and 1700s,

19:22

it's not that they invented this from scratch, but

19:25

this is kind of the best crack yet. And they finally

19:28

came up with a way to do it in a way that could last

19:30

for centuries. It was robust. So

19:33

it's this kind of, it seems obvious to us because

19:35

I think of it as a house. It's a house

19:38

that is built, right? The support beams

19:40

of the liberal democracy and the structure

19:42

and the roof, all of this is an

19:44

invention. It's not the law of

19:46

nature. We made the house. And

19:49

so we now are growing up within

19:51

the house and so did our parents and so did our

19:53

grandparents. And so it's been a lot

19:55

of generations in the place like America,

19:58

at least for a lot of people.

19:59

since someone has been outside this house. My

20:02

wife, she's Persian, her parents immigrated

20:05

here in 1979, or they left Iran

20:07

then, like a lot of Iranians,

20:10

and

20:11

they do not take the house for granted. They

20:13

think the liberal house is unbelievable,

20:16

right? And talk to someone who's coming from a communist country

20:18

or coming from a dictatorship, and you

20:20

will hear a love for this house because they're saying,

20:22

oh my God, look around, this house is incredible. And

20:24

we're saying, huh, it is, I guess, I don't know. It's

20:27

the house, it's just the house. That's where we all live.

20:29

That's all fine until

20:32

the house is under threat. And then

20:35

this cockiness about the house will always

20:37

be here, of course. We have to get rid of

20:39

that and say, well, hold on. Why is

20:41

the house under threat? What does that mean, and

20:43

how do we preserve it?

20:44

I think one of the paradoxes of the last

20:47

page of the book that we're on is that

20:49

on the one hand, we're enjoying more

20:51

abundance, more progress, more

20:54

genuine historical privilege than

20:57

any group ever has before, ever. And

20:59

yet that

21:01

exponential progress, as you describe it,

21:04

is also the source of

21:06

a lot of chaos, a lot of misery,

21:09

and a lot of our uncertainty. And you really

21:11

lay these out in a powerful way in the book.

21:13

So I wanna kind of go through them.

21:16

One of the things that you

21:18

write about in the book is this distinction between

21:20

what you call the primitive mind and what you

21:22

call the higher mind, right? And the thing

21:25

that sets human beings apart from other animals

21:27

is this higher mind because the higher mind

21:29

is rational. It feels complex emotions

21:32

like empathy and ego. It makes long-term

21:34

goals for the future.

21:36

It's able to look beyond itself. And

21:39

yet, like all other animals, we

21:41

also have another mind inside

21:43

of us. And that is what you call the primitive mind

21:45

or what a lot of people call our lizard brains. And

21:48

that's the part of our brains that

21:50

hunts for prey, that protects our

21:52

kin, that privileges people that

21:54

look like us or animals that look like us above

21:56

others. And as you explained it in the book,

21:58

the higher mind's goal.

21:59

is to get to the truth, but

22:02

the primitive mind has a very different goal. It's

22:04

confirmation of its existing beliefs. So

22:07

in an era in which, Tim, there's just so

22:09

much abundance, there's objectively

22:11

so much freedom, you know, and the structures

22:14

that support the higher mind

22:16

are all around us. Why is it

22:18

that the primitive mind feels so

22:21

often like it's taking over? When

22:23

did the higher minds become less powerful

22:25

than the primitive ones?

22:27

Yeah, I mean, the primitive

22:29

mind is kind of our survival brain, and

22:31

it was programmed for a world

22:34

living in a small tribe. But what's cool

22:36

about humans, like you said, is that the

22:38

primitive mind in our brain, that's kind of the preprogrammed

22:40

software, and that will never, not

22:43

just does it start off thinking it's

22:45

in 30,000 B.C., it will never understand

22:47

that it's not there. Meanwhile, the higher

22:49

mind is this cool part of us that can

22:51

override, can see what's happening, see

22:53

that our instincts don't make sense here, it's in

22:56

one area or another, and

22:57

actually override them. I use the example

22:59

of candy. When we

23:01

binge on candy, and then we regret it, or any kind of unhealthy

23:03

food, it makes no sense, right? We're

23:05

mad at ourselves later, and this is the thousandth time this

23:07

has happened. And what's happening is

23:09

that the primitive mind is programmed for

23:11

a world where calories are hard to come by, and

23:14

if you don't eat this dense, chewy

23:16

fruit that you just came by, of course it's candy, right now, you might not find

23:18

calories for two weeks, binge,

23:21

right, which makes sense then. It

23:24

doesn't make sense today. And so our higher minds

23:26

can actually get in there and override this. That's

23:28

why we don't always eat unhealthy food, and

23:30

some people can be really good at developing healthy eating

23:32

habits, and other ones not so much, because

23:35

it's this kind of tug of war in our heads between

23:37

this one voice that wants to do what

23:39

it's programmed for, and the other voice that says, wait a second,

23:41

wait a second, and the world we live in,

23:43

what we're programmed for, makes no sense here. So

23:46

it's a general concept, but you can apply it to lots of

23:48

things. You can apply it to how we think, right? So

23:51

you can say that it makes sense in today's world to

23:53

try to find the truth. We don't want to be delusional, and,

23:56

you know, we want to

23:57

play with ideas and change our mind and get wiser.

23:59

as we grow older, that makes sense. But

24:02

the other part of our brain, the pre-programmed

24:04

software, is made for

24:06

a world where the tribe has their beliefs,

24:08

their sacred beliefs. And people

24:10

who can challenge those sacred

24:13

beliefs and were too independent

24:15

thinking and said, this doesn't actually make sense,

24:17

where's our evidence? They didn't fare very well.

24:20

And so it is our nature to identify

24:23

with

24:24

our sacred beliefs. They're part of

24:26

us, they're part of who we are, and they're part of our

24:28

group. The people like us, we believe these

24:31

things. And the last thing you'd ever want

24:33

to do is change your mind about that. So you

24:35

go through all this effort to confirm the sacred beliefs, and

24:37

you'll spend time with people talking about how great

24:39

the sacred beliefs are and how bad the people are who disagree

24:42

with it. And that's the survival brain

24:44

mode we're in when we're doing that. Or we

24:46

can override that. And we can say, you know what? I

24:48

know I have the urge to confirm my

24:50

beliefs right now, but that's unwise, and I

24:52

need to overcome that and actually

24:54

get better at changing my mind.

24:57

That's this kind of initial seed of a framework

24:59

that then I take into politics. And I'll just talk

25:02

about the higher mind's way

25:04

of doing politics and

25:06

the primitive mind's way of doing politics. And

25:08

I think that that's a framework we can add into our

25:10

existing discussions.

25:12

What is the higher mind's way of doing politics

25:14

and what is the primitive mind's way of doing politics?

25:16

I use a ladder because it's a spectrum, right?

25:18

It's not just one mind is doing the thinking, the other

25:20

is not. It's not as simple as that. Sometimes

25:23

it's a mix, right? Sometimes you're conflicted between

25:25

two things. You're doing honest research,

25:28

but you find a little confirmation bias there. So

25:30

maybe you're in the middle or whatever it is. So

25:32

the ladder is kind of a spectrum. And when you're

25:35

up in the high rungs, maybe you have some conflict,

25:37

but the higher mind is running the show. And

25:39

down in the low rungs, the primitive mind is running the show.

25:41

And then in groups, the primitive

25:43

minds in the group will kind of band together, and

25:46

the

25:46

whole group will be politically low rung together.

25:49

And it's very hard to get out of that once you're in it. And

25:51

likewise, a whole group can kind of work hard to stave

25:54

off those instincts and actually stay up on the high rungs

25:56

together. So we just talked about ideas.

25:58

That's one way you can think about this.

25:59

at the top, in

26:02

high rung politics, people care about

26:04

truth. They're open to debate, they're open to changing

26:06

their minds. And when they're right about something, they will argue

26:08

it fully. But they're open to being challenged

26:10

and they don't identify with the ideas. If they're wrong about

26:12

something, they don't have this fight or flight instinct.

26:15

They will admit they're wrong and they'll move on. But

26:18

principles are consistent, again, because this is what makes sense.

26:20

So if you believe that government overreach

26:23

is bad, then you care about that when both

26:25

parties are in office. If you believe

26:27

that discrimination based

26:29

on skin color is bad, you care about that regardless

26:32

of the skin color being discriminated against. And

26:34

then finally with tactics, in politics

26:36

you want to change things, right? You want to make things happen.

26:39

You do it via persuasion in a liberal democracy.

26:42

So there's a focus on truth, there's consistency

26:44

with principles, and you try to get your

26:46

way by persuading others

26:49

and building a mind changing movement. And these

26:51

all go together. When a group is doing

26:53

one of those things, they tend to be doing all three.

26:55

Now, low rung politics, which

26:57

I think is born of our survival

26:59

brain's instincts, and when it gets, you know, bands

27:01

together with others, they do politics the

27:04

old school way, just pure tribalism.

27:06

So there's the good people and there's the bad people

27:08

with the good ideas and the bad ideas, completely

27:11

not open to changing their mind. There's tons of

27:13

confirmation bias. They don't give the other

27:15

side a fair hearing. They're really not usually open to

27:17

an honest debate. That's in the ideas realm.

27:19

And then again, with principles, there's total flip-flopping

27:22

on principles based on whether it helps the

27:24

tribe or not. So there's total lack of

27:26

consistency. We've seen a million

27:29

examples of this. And then tactics, you know, again,

27:31

the old school way to get what you want

27:33

is not persuasion. That's the way in this weird

27:36

house of liberal democracy that we do it. The

27:38

way we're programmed to do it is coercion. We will

27:40

try to force our way and force

27:42

people to do things with blackmail and fear and

27:45

violence sometimes. And so when

27:47

I look around at low rung politics, again,

27:50

people who are doing one of those things tend to be doing all

27:52

three. And I think this is just kind of like a vertical

27:54

axis. We can add to the left, center,

27:56

right, horizontal political axis

27:58

rather than saying, are you, you know,

27:59

Left wing, right wing, far right, far left, are

28:02

you centrist? Well, how about making it a square

28:04

and being like... Are you high rung or low rung?

28:06

Yeah. And now you can be far

28:08

left and high rung, or you can be centrist and low

28:11

rung, or far right and in the middle somewhere.

28:13

And I think it's useful.

28:15

Why in our culture right now do

28:17

we so... I wouldn't even say reward

28:19

the low rung politicians, but I think people are actually

28:22

addicted to them. Like, I think people

28:24

really enjoy watching the

28:26

AOCs, watching the Marjorie Taylor Greens. Obviously,

28:29

those people are very different. I don't mean to compare

28:31

them, but what is going on in our

28:34

current culture where the low

28:36

rung people seem to be the ones that get

28:38

all of the attention, all of the rewards,

28:41

and no one really seems to care very much

28:44

about the high rung principled

28:45

ones? They're like the also-rans. Yeah.

28:48

People do care. What happened

28:50

is the media

28:52

landscape has totally shifted. And we're

28:54

in a world now where 24-hour

28:57

news networks, they

28:59

didn't used to exist, used to be a half hour of news

29:01

at night on three networks that broadcast to

29:03

the whole country. Now you've got 24-hour

29:06

news networks going all day to one

29:08

political tribe. And these

29:10

networks realize you could make... I think Fox

29:12

News probably pioneered this and

29:15

other ones have caught on. This idea that

29:18

you can make a lot more money if you kind

29:20

of say what you're doing is news and what you're really

29:22

doing is kind of political entertainment. And

29:25

I use the example of

29:27

like reality show. Reality

29:30

show is interesting all the time, even

29:32

though the actual reality is not that interesting,

29:34

because the editors cut

29:36

in a constant string of conflict with bombastic

29:39

characters

29:39

and it's fun, right? It's our

29:42

primitive minds get addicted to that thing. The same way we

29:44

get addicted to junk food, this

29:46

is political junk food. And

29:48

so these stations realized that

29:50

the same thing that Mars Inc. realized

29:52

about selling candy, you could make a ton

29:54

of money by selling junk food. And so

29:57

these news networks are really entertainment

29:59

networks that sell... to kind of our primitive

30:01

minds, they sell political junk food to our primitive

30:04

minds. And unfortunately, unlike Candy, this

30:06

has major implications,

30:08

which is that the politicians who get cast

30:11

on the show, you see AOC is one of 400 something

30:14

people in the house, their bills passed every

30:16

week that never get talked about, right? There's all these other, but

30:19

AOC is one of the characters on the show. She's

30:22

been cast on the reality show, and so

30:24

is Marjorie Taylor Greene, right? And Trump is one of

30:26

the major characters on the show. And so

30:28

they're going to be on all the time.

30:29

And so of course,

30:32

it incentivizes politicians

30:34

to say, well, getting on the show is a huge career

30:36

break. I need to be bombastic. And

30:38

so that's going to have a lot of effects on

30:40

people. Otherwise, normal people are

30:43

going to get addicted to this reality show, and they're

30:45

going to be kind of sucked into kind of

30:47

hardcore political tribalism.

30:49

In addition to the sort of distinction you make between

30:51

primitive mind and higher mind, which I

30:53

loved, and the idea of sort

30:55

of high-rung political thinkers and

30:58

actors and low-rung ones, you also

31:01

make a distinction between two different

31:03

intellectual cultures, one that you

31:05

call idea labs and the other

31:07

that you call echo chambers. I would

31:09

love if you could give me an example of

31:12

an idea lab and an example of an echo

31:14

chamber.

31:15

Yeah.

31:17

So every group of friends has a culture that

31:19

includes how they do birthdays, how

31:22

they do texting, how they do

31:24

emojis, how they talk behind each other's

31:26

backs, what's acceptable, what's distasteful. Every

31:28

group, no matter what you're in, you're full of rules

31:31

about how we do things, your social rules. And

31:34

an idea lab to me is a group that has a high-rung

31:36

intellectual culture, where how we do

31:38

things here is

31:41

truth comes first. Truth matters. And

31:43

disagreement is great. Respectful

31:46

disagreement. People are to be respected.

31:48

Ideas are not. It's not cool to identify

31:51

with your ideas and get super offended if someone

31:53

disagrees with your idea, where

31:55

people call each other out on bias and on

31:57

logical fallacies.

31:59

You know, unearned conviction, someone who's acting

32:02

like they're sure and they turn out to be wrong a bunch

32:04

of times. That person is not cool in

32:06

the idea lab culture. They quickly lose

32:08

respect. People don't take them very seriously.

32:11

And so primitive minds in the group act up,

32:14

someone will again get really offended, but everyone keeps

32:16

them in check. And kind of the idea

32:18

labs immune system kicks in and says, wow,

32:21

you're upset about that, like, you know, and they get made

32:23

fun of for that, and then they don't want to do

32:25

that again next time. And that keeps the whole

32:27

group kind of up on the high rungs, and it keeps every individual,

32:29

because all of us are subject to this kind of internal

32:32

tug of war, it keeps every individual, their

32:34

mind up in the high rungs. You can't really get away with

32:36

slipping down too far, or the idea lab will call

32:38

you out. And so sometimes you can have a couple,

32:41

a married couple has an intellectual culture.

32:44

If one person knows that you just never

32:46

disagree with my husband on politics,

32:49

or it's gonna be a nightmare, that husband is imposing

32:51

the other kind of culture on the marriage. And

32:54

this can happen in groups. One person in the group

32:56

can, if they have enough cultural power

32:58

in the group, can kind of say,

32:59

no one is allowed to... Disagree

33:02

about acts. Right. And so you quickly

33:04

can slip into the other culture, the echo chamber culture. And

33:07

groups do it together. When one person starts doing it, sometimes

33:10

everyone's just scared of them, but often the whole group starts doing

33:12

it together without even realizing they're doing it. And that's when

33:14

the primitive minds have taken over. And if you think

33:16

the primitive minds go in your head, in an

33:18

individual's head, is to confirm

33:20

the beliefs, your sacred beliefs, well, the group has

33:23

their sacred beliefs, and the primitive

33:25

minds band together to protect those

33:27

beliefs. So they're very hostile

33:29

to someone who says, I think we might be wrong, or I think the

33:32

other side is not so bad, or is right about

33:34

this thing. People will

33:36

call them a bad, you know, they'll basically be relegated

33:38

to the out group. They'll get a really negative

33:40

reaction, because they violated

33:42

something sacred. You know, in an ideal lab, no idea

33:44

is sacred, but in an echo chamber, there's very sacred

33:46

ideas, and it's like going into a church and you're

33:49

slandering Christ. You don't do that in a church.

33:51

And so I don't think this is, you know, some people

33:54

do this and other people do that. I think we all can

33:56

think of different groups at different times of

33:58

the year. And you find

33:59

Oh my, we're being really echo chambery about

34:02

this right now. Oh, it's one of those things where we're

34:04

all getting a little too much pleasure about all

34:06

agreeing and all, we

34:08

constantly are just all on the same side and we're always

34:10

just talking shit about the people who disagree. And

34:13

you know it's bad when you realize that it's something, you

34:15

see something's being a little distasteful or going a little

34:17

too far and you have this incentive not

34:19

to say it because it's gonna kill the vibe. It's

34:21

gonna, people are gonna be kind of like, you know, roll their eyes

34:23

at you and maybe they'll talk shit about you now behind

34:25

your back. That means that the group has

34:28

slipped down down the rungs of the ladder

34:29

into echo chamber land. And that's

34:32

fine, by the way, in a liberal democracy, you're welcome

34:35

to be part of echo chambers or idea labs as

34:37

long as you live and let live. When

34:39

you don't live and let live, that's when there's a problem.

34:41

Tim, is there an example from your life of

34:44

being in an atmosphere that was really

34:46

idea labsy or like a moment

34:49

over the course of the past few decades that you feel like, aha,

34:52

that was like a high watermark of America

34:55

celebrating the idea labs culture

34:57

because I don't think anyone listening to this

34:59

would disagree that we're in a culture

35:02

overall right now in which it feels

35:04

like echo chambers are the thing that are actively

35:07

being cultivated. Maybe another way of asking

35:09

this is, when did the idea lab go out of

35:11

fashion and are there any

35:13

pockets of it, you know, whether

35:16

it's a friend group or an institution or whatever

35:18

that you feel like are trying to revive it? I

35:21

think a ton of people, individuals want

35:23

to revive it. And there are pockets, Intelligence

35:26

Squared is a great

35:28

podcast. It's a two on two Oxford

35:30

style debate. And it's a classic idea

35:32

lab. Everyone's respectful. It's

35:35

two people taking one side, two people taking another

35:37

side. And it's basically

35:39

like, you know, you have two attorneys in that courtroom

35:42

and the audience and anyone listening can play juror

35:45

and listen to them clash and learn a little more

35:47

along the way. And you know, you hear really,

35:49

but everyone's really smart. You hear really compelling ideas

35:52

from both sides. It's fascinating intellectually.

35:55

And the way echo chambers

35:58

get formed is when it becomes kind

36:00

of social norm to say that one

36:02

side of this particular debate is

36:04

not welcome here because, and it's almost, it's never

36:07

the same because we're an echo chamber, no one admits that.

36:10

It's almost always because

36:11

those ideas are dangerous. Those

36:13

ideas are harmful. Or it's because we're

36:16

moral and that's immoral. Yes. The

36:18

idea that the other side of this debate

36:21

is actively, only bad

36:23

people would hold it. And actually

36:25

it's dangerous to even have

36:28

it in the room. And

36:31

the key is that you live and let live, right? So echo

36:33

chamber, you want to go form that with your group of friends or

36:35

you want to start an institution and they're openly dedicated

36:38

to a religion or to a certain set of

36:40

ideas. Great. You're welcome

36:42

in the US to go form your echo chamber. Just leave

36:44

everyone else alone.

36:45

And when you have that, if you scale that

36:47

up, what you have is a lot of idea lab

36:50

pockets and a lot of echo chamber pockets, but

36:52

that inherently makes the whole country a big idea

36:55

lab because each echo chamber is going to argue their

36:57

one position. Idea labs are all over the place.

36:59

They're going to change their mind, but they're still going to be arguing different

37:02

positions and you have this big mix

37:04

of ideas.

37:05

It's the federalism of echo chambers

37:07

makes a national ideas lab. I got

37:09

you. Exactly. And that's

37:12

in general, the idea with liberal democracy is that

37:14

you can have this low rung stuff going on

37:16

everywhere, just as long, but it has to be contained.

37:18

It can't go and start messing with other people

37:21

and infringing upon others. So you

37:23

have this grand idea lab. And what I think

37:25

the trajectory has been is that

37:28

echo chambers have begun forcefully,

37:30

kind of again, using coercion to

37:33

not

37:33

just police their own members, which is

37:35

okay coercion. Again, it's not admirable, but

37:37

there's nothing wrong with it from a liberal sense.

37:40

They've been using coercion to forcefully

37:43

expand, which I compared to like the

37:45

difference between a benign tumor and a malignant

37:48

tumor. The first

37:50

way is benign. It's going to police its own people.

37:52

It's going to, it's going to say, no one can disagree with me.

37:54

You know, or you're not my friend. Okay.

37:56

I can choose to be your friend or not. It's

37:59

this other mentality.

37:59

that's saying actually no one outside,

38:02

even outside of our friends, is allowed to have these ideas.

38:05

And not only is that mentality increasing, but

38:08

it's been succeeding. I call that idea

38:11

supremacy, which is a distinct

38:13

difference from kind of the zealotry or just no

38:15

one can change my mind. Idea supremacy says no

38:17

one else, whether I know you

38:20

or not, is allowed to express these ideas. It's

38:22

trying to kind of play a cultural

38:24

dictator. And so you've had

38:26

these echo chambers expanding across

38:28

the land and kind of

38:30

forceful, coercive expansion and

38:33

kind of holding pockets that used to be

38:35

idea labs, now hostage and

38:37

saying the new rules here are the rules of our

38:39

echo chamber.

38:43

After the break, Tim

38:46

Urban explains why what happened

38:48

to our universities matters. Stay

38:50

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41:12

honestly.

41:15

The ultimate idea lab is supposed

41:17

to be the university, right? The university is

41:19

supposed to exist for a singular

41:21

goal. Maybe they're a secondary, but the key

41:24

goal is the pursuit of truth, right?

41:26

And I think

41:27

one of the ways that

41:29

is most illustrative to the point you're making

41:31

in the book is to look at what has happened

41:33

to universities. And you dedicate almost

41:35

an entire chapter in your book to the problem

41:38

of universities today, and

41:40

the way that they've sort of been transformed from

41:42

idea labs into either echo

41:45

chambers or idea supremacist

41:47

chambers. You'll tell me the difference. And

41:49

you do this with this amazing illustration

41:52

that you call the social justice horse. And

41:54

it's sort of similar to the idea of the Trojan

41:56

horse, right? Except you have this social justice

41:58

horse which you draw

41:59

with this little... very cute rainbow mane

42:01

and tail. And the

42:04

social justice horse says

42:06

very, very lovely progressive

42:08

sounding things. Like the horse will say an inclusive

42:11

environment.

42:13

And yet the actual

42:15

idea that they're smuggling in under the

42:17

idea of an inclusive environment is

42:20

disagree with us and we'll smear you, for

42:22

example. Or the social justice

42:25

horse will say something like diversity

42:27

statements, but really the thing being

42:30

brought in

42:31

under this rhetoric is, as

42:33

you put it, McCarthyist political litmus test

42:36

and loyalty oaths, right? And this sort

42:38

of theory of the social justice

42:41

horse or the mechanics of the social justice horse

42:44

is happening

42:45

all over the country, not just in elite schools,

42:48

but in schools coast to coast, everywhere in

42:50

between. And we've gotten to

42:52

a point in

42:53

which something like 52% of college

42:55

students, according

42:57

to one recent survey say, they always

43:00

or often refrain from expressing

43:02

views on political and social issues in classrooms

43:05

because of concern for how

43:07

it will be perceived, for concern to the reputation,

43:09

for the concern to their grades. How

43:12

did we get here? How was this

43:15

social justice horse so

43:18

unbelievably effective? So

43:21

one of the first things I wanted to do when I was getting into

43:23

this very spicy topic of social justice

43:26

is I

43:27

said, we need two terms here because

43:29

there's two completely different

43:31

things that are called social justice. The

43:33

first is what I would call liberal

43:36

social justice, liberal meaning classic liberal.

43:38

And so we talked about the liberal house, right?

43:40

This idea of liberal, this

43:43

house we live in that has liberal rules and liberal

43:45

norms and liberal laws and liberal

43:47

social justice,

43:49

its goal is to make

43:51

the house more perfect. It says liberalism

43:54

is great. The constitution

43:56

is awesome,

43:56

but we don't always succeed in keeping.

43:59

its promises. There are flaws

44:02

in the house. This awesome house

44:05

has some, you know, some people

44:07

or policies or norms have, have

44:09

made it weaker and have made it actually

44:12

some people in this house are being treated

44:15

unfairly in a way they're not supposed to be treated

44:17

in the liberal house. This

44:19

was of course what Martin Luther King, you know, in his I

44:22

have a dream speech, he talked about a promissory

44:24

note and how the US has

44:26

defaulted on its check to

44:28

black Americans, right? So that's him saying this house

44:31

is great, but black Americans are

44:33

not being treated the way this house is supposed to treat them.

44:35

Let's fix the house. That's the goal. Let's

44:37

make it the best house it can be. And

44:40

so not only does it have liberal goals,

44:42

right, which is he wants more liberalism, but it has,

44:44

it uses liberal means, right? The

44:46

civil rights movement was all about free

44:49

assembly and free speech and,

44:51

you know, protest and all of these tools

44:53

of liberalism, they're tools that the house gives you

44:56

to fix the house. And you know,

44:58

this idea of colorblindness is a very liberal

45:00

idea, the individualism, right? It's not

45:02

about the color of your skin. It's about who

45:04

you are as a person. This idea of your

45:06

character is, is another way of valuing

45:09

individuals.

45:09

Each individual is a sacred thing, period.

45:11

It doesn't matter what else is, you know, about them. And

45:16

so that's liberal social justice. This is, this is the

45:18

movement behind gay marriage in 2012. This

45:20

is the movement behind women's suffrage

45:22

back in the 1910s. So

45:25

it's a great tradition in the US and it's something that most

45:27

Americans, you know, for sure progressive, but even

45:29

a lot of conservatives are very proud of this movement.

45:32

Now, what's the other thing? There's another

45:34

thing called social justice right now, which

45:37

is what I call social justice fundamentalism, otherwise

45:39

known as wokeness. And it's

45:41

important because wokeness itself sounds derogatory.

45:43

It sounds like it's, you know, it has a lot of cultural

45:46

baggage there. So I try to just

45:48

use a different term to describe what it actually is, which I

45:50

call social justice fundamentalism or SJF.

45:53

And this movement is self-proclaimed

45:56

outside the house with a wrecking ball. The

45:59

house is because the house

46:01

was built by flawed people. And it's rotten

46:03

to its core. Its foundation

46:05

is built to uphold the power

46:08

of the powerful, in

46:10

this case, you know, white supremacy or the patriarchy.

46:13

And that liberalism itself is an

46:15

invention of those ideas

46:17

in order that

46:19

has the, whether it was intended or not,

46:22

it has the property of being exploitative

46:25

and of enhancing inequality

46:28

and of entrenching the power of the powerful

46:31

and holding down the oppressed. And

46:33

so that's a fundamental disagreement. Liberal social

46:36

justice and social justice fundamentalism have

46:38

opposite, not different, but opposite goals. One

46:40

wants to make the house better and one wants to

46:43

break the house down. They use words like

46:45

liberate, liberate from this whole

46:47

system. It's very revolutionary,

46:49

much more revolutionary than liberal social justice.

46:51

Liberal social justice wants to overhaul norms

46:54

and policies and laws. Social

46:56

justice fundamentalism wants to overhaul the whole

46:58

house, just level it and build

47:00

something new. And that's

47:03

okay. That's the thing is what liberalism is

47:05

awesome because in a liberal democracy, it actually

47:07

has room for even critique of itself. Sure, bring

47:09

it in, bring it in. You hate liberalism, bring it into

47:11

the discussion. You're allowed to be here. Go

47:14

make your arguments, do whatever you want. Try to persuade people.

47:16

Maybe we're all missing something. Sure, go for

47:18

it. What's not okay is

47:20

illiberal tactics. And

47:22

that's kind of goes together. Because if you think the house is bad,

47:24

well, you also think that the same tools that

47:26

were used by the civil rights movement, those liberal tools

47:29

like free speech and all those things, that

47:31

those things are bad too. Black

47:33

feminist, Audre Lorde says, you can't dismantle

47:36

the master's house with the master's tools.

47:38

So there's a lot in that statement. It's the idea that A,

47:40

this is the master's house. It doesn't belong to all of

47:42

us. It is a house for slave masters.

47:45

And therefore the tools themselves are rotten, just

47:48

as rotten as the house itself. And so

47:50

they will be hostile to all kinds

47:52

of liberal things,

47:54

free speech. So free speech

47:57

is actually dangerous, right? It's allowing to...

47:59

the platforming of dangerous ideas.

48:02

Not the First Amendment necessarily, but the culture of free speech

48:05

is bad. The US and the West, they're

48:07

bad. The group is what matters, much

48:09

more than the individual. And that's

48:11

why they will talk about, they

48:14

will make broad generalizations about white

48:16

people and black people. They treat these groups as monoliths.

48:19

There's a common enemy kind of tone to it instead of

48:21

the much more classic liberal common humanity

48:24

tone. Equality of opportunity is

48:26

a liberal staple. But social

48:29

justice fundamentalism believes

48:29

that

48:31

because groups are the same, there's no such thing

48:33

as equality of opportunity that doesn't lead to equality

48:35

of outcome. And so they actually

48:38

are for equality of outcome. That is

48:40

very anti-liberal, because you

48:42

can't have freedom with equality of outcome, enforced

48:45

equality of outcome. So there's a lot of these examples,

48:47

but again, it is like you mentioned with the social

48:49

justice horse, it's tricky, right? It's

48:53

a little bit, they don't quite go

48:55

out and say this. They'll say, we wanna

48:58

save space. But really

49:00

what they're saying is a space that

49:02

doesn't have free speech in it. Where

49:05

our ideas are treated as sacred. And

49:07

they'll use things like the harm principle and saying

49:09

that, well, this thing is harmful, so therefore it must

49:11

be stopped. So back to universities.

49:14

That's, back to universities. What's happened

49:16

is this, social, SJF was

49:18

a, in the 60s, liberal social

49:20

justice was the major thing at universities, right?

49:22

You have Berkeley, you have free speech protests,

49:25

right? And we want more liberalism. But there

49:27

was also developing, in the corners of universities,

49:30

this concept of SJF, this neo-Marxist

49:32

kind of take on social justice. And

49:35

what's happened much more recently is, as

49:38

universities have gone from kind of pluralistic

49:41

with some conservatives,

49:43

more progressive, but some conservatives, it's

49:45

transitioned to be almost entirely

49:48

progressive. And the numbers are stark. The

49:50

ratio of professors

49:53

left to right has gone from like four to one to,

49:55

in some departments, 17 to one, 40 to one,

49:57

sometimes 100 to one.

49:59

And so when an environment

50:02

is kind of purple, it has good

50:04

defenses against extreme

50:06

components, both from red and blue. But

50:08

when an environment becomes bright blue and

50:10

things get really kind of tribal, it

50:13

becomes weak. It develops

50:15

a soft spot to kind of illiberalism

50:17

of its own color. So social

50:20

justice fundamentalism has taken advantage

50:22

of this transition to political

50:25

purity at a university and

50:27

has been able to

50:29

rise up and actually institute

50:32

its own values. And so like

50:34

you said, the university is supposed

50:37

to be the ultimate idea lab, right? Veritas

50:39

is written on the gate above the university. And

50:42

for Veritas to happen, you have to have not

50:45

just ideas put out, but people who will challenge

50:47

those ideas. Or else there

50:49

is no way for a group of people to

50:52

find truth together if no one's allowed to disagree.

50:56

But as SJF has risen up, it

50:58

has created new rules and

51:00

has basically said, we live in a small echo chamber

51:03

that now actually is going to be the rules of the

51:05

entire campus. And

51:08

ideas that disagree with SJF in

51:10

particular, with our tenants, are

51:12

going to lead to firings or

51:15

to ostracism or to the investigation

51:17

of students. And that completely topples the whole

51:19

point

51:23

of a university on its head.

51:24

For the skeptical listener who's like,

51:27

I don't want to say SJF, but maybe sympathetic

51:30

to some of its aims, or who just

51:32

believes that what happens at universities

51:35

doesn't much matter, how has the

51:37

triumph of the social justice horse

51:40

in what is meant to be the ultimate ideas

51:42

lab, what has been the impact of that on the

51:44

broader culture in this country?

51:45

Well, it matters in two ways.

51:49

Universities educate young people

51:52

who then go and become our future leaders

51:55

and are running the country 20, 30 years later.

51:58

And what

52:00

universities are supposed to teach college

52:03

students is how to think, is

52:05

how to think, how to debate, how

52:07

to find the truth, how to be tougher more robust thinkers

52:10

and teach them a wide variety of lenses,

52:12

political lenses and other kinds

52:14

of lenses that they can then you know take into their

52:16

heads and use. It's kind of training for your brain

52:19

so you go you go to college you come out a better

52:21

thinker forever which of course would serve our society.

52:24

But it also teaches kind of general

52:27

liberal values.

52:29

It teaches students that disagreement is okay

52:31

and it's supposed to teach students that

52:34

enforcing an echo chamber on a

52:36

on an ideal lab institution is

52:38

not a good thing. So when an

52:40

ideology like SJF which is you know

52:43

kind of illiberal to its core takes

52:46

over it instead of teaching students

52:48

a wide variety of lenses it teaches

52:50

them one lens. So that's the difference between teaching them how

52:52

to think and arming them with a lot of tools and teaching

52:54

them what to think teaching them there is one

52:57

correct a worldview with

52:59

one correct you

53:01

know set of politics in it. And

53:04

if

53:04

you try to bring a speaker to campus that disagrees

53:06

with it we will you know disinvite the

53:09

speaker or shot them down. If

53:11

you try to teach us that wide

53:13

variety of views in a class that professor is

53:15

going to be reported. And so students

53:17

are soaking in instead of this thing

53:19

this ideal lab culture that makes them better

53:22

thinkers and more humble about what

53:24

they know it teaches students to be zealots

53:26

and to be intellectual bullies it teaches them that the

53:28

way to be a good person who

53:31

tries to fight against harm

53:32

you need to

53:34

punish anyone who shares harmful

53:37

ideas which happen to be of course the ideas that

53:39

conflict with SJF. So

53:41

it's kind of doing the exact opposite of what I

53:44

think

53:45

we want colleges teaching young people to do it's

53:47

and you know about both how you know

53:49

about what they're teaching them and also how they're teaching

53:51

them to be as thinkers and how they're teaching them to treat

53:53

others. So that's going to affect all of us then

53:55

those those students then go enter companies

53:57

and start wreaking havoc there with

53:59

this idea of someone

54:02

said something harmful and they need to be fired for it, we'll

54:04

start a petition and use our power

54:06

to try to get this person fired.

54:08

And eventually those people are our leaders and

54:10

they're making policies. So that of course affects

54:12

everybody. The other thing that universities do

54:14

is they're supposed to be our primary truth finding centers.

54:17

Universities are the center of

54:20

academic research and science that

54:22

happens at universities. And

54:25

what a society knows is basically

54:28

what universities produce for knowledge. And

54:32

when an ideology that does

54:34

not believe in Veritas

54:36

culture takes over, it starts

54:38

to affect what can and cannot be researched.

54:41

And it starts to maybe lower the standards

54:44

for

54:45

academic work that

54:46

confirms SJF and it starts

54:49

to retract papers

54:51

or not publish them in the first place or

54:53

maybe even fire the professor for having the nerve to write

54:56

it for ideas that conflict with its

54:58

ideology. And so that also harms

55:00

everyone because there's already a strain in this

55:02

country that doesn't believe the science, right?

55:04

And that's no matter what and that's not good. But

55:07

this

55:08

gives so much credence to those,

55:10

that whole idea. And so it's really

55:12

bad for knowledge production and it's bad for education

55:14

of our future leaders. And often

55:17

what happens at universities ends

55:19

up happening everywhere else a little bit later. Universities

55:22

social media started at universities with Facebook and

55:24

it soon was everywhere. There's a lot of cultural

55:27

fads. And so when you see something happening

55:29

at universities, people should take it seriously because it

55:31

very well might appear across society

55:34

five, 10 years later, which of course in this case it

55:36

has.

55:37

Tim, there are a lot of huge,

55:39

I would say almost existential themes to your work.

55:42

But one of the biggest themes that runs through

55:44

everything you write

55:45

is the question of time. And

55:48

I think you do such an incredible job of

55:50

making readers aware

55:53

of a thing that feels

55:55

perhaps more abstract than almost anything.

55:57

And you just do an incredible job of conquering.

55:59

advertising it, making it real for us.

56:02

One of the things that

56:04

you have talked about personally is that you're

56:07

an epic waster of time, or at least you used

56:09

to be. In 2016, you

56:11

gave this TED talk that I think now has something like 50

56:14

million views, which grants it a spot on the

56:16

most popular TED talks of all time, right

56:18

next to Brene Brown and Bill Gates. And

56:20

it's called Inside the Mind of a Master

56:22

Procrastinator. And it's all about how

56:25

the procrastinator's mind works, which

56:27

as you describe it, contains a rational

56:30

decision maker and an instant

56:32

gratification

56:32

monkey. And the instant

56:34

gratification monkey takes over

56:36

in the mind of procrastinators and

56:38

throws the rational decision maker part

56:41

of the mind out by the wayside.

56:43

But then toward the end of the talk, you

56:45

say that you had an epiphany, which

56:48

is that actually we're all procrastinators.

56:51

Why are human beings such skilled

56:53

procrastinators?

56:55

Well,

56:56

I think this relates to what we were just talking about.

56:58

I think that we're procrastinators for the

57:00

same reason we eat

57:03

unhealthy food and fall into tribal

57:05

politics, which is that the

57:08

primate we are, the world we were programmed

57:11

to be in didn't really have

57:13

long term projects that often. You

57:15

had to get food, you had to survive, you had

57:17

to mate, and you had

57:20

to sometimes fight. And so you conserved energy

57:22

most of the time and you expended it when you

57:24

had to. Now

57:27

we live in this world, we've been kidnapped out

57:30

of our home forest and we

57:32

are dropped into an advanced civilization where the

57:34

way to have a gratifying

57:36

successful career is to

57:39

think really long term and to work hard on stuff

57:42

today that you might not see the fruit of for months

57:44

or years. It's

57:45

to resist the marshmallow in the test. Yeah,

57:47

exactly. We have to work really hard to override

57:50

our sense of instant gratification because in the

57:53

world we were supposed to be in, you really didn't need to override

57:55

it very often. And

57:58

so I think procrastination is...

57:59

is a problem a lot of us have.

58:02

But I think there's kind of two kinds of

58:04

procrastination. There's the first

58:06

kind, which is the one that we usually talk about when people say, 20% of

58:09

people are chronic procrastinators, is we talk

58:11

about deadlines. And people who get

58:13

behind on deadlines or they're late to a meeting, they're

58:16

unable to do the work until

58:19

they absolutely panic. Basically, there's

58:22

this resistance in them that will

58:24

resist and resist and resist until this panic

58:27

gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And eventually, the

58:29

panic threshold crosses the

58:31

resistance threshold. And they will freak out

58:33

and cram for the test or whatever. Do

58:36

their work. And that often leads to, obviously, stress.

58:38

And it's not healthy. And often, you don't do your best work.

58:40

And it's a miserable way to live. But the

58:42

reason I said there was an epiphany that I think

58:44

that we're all procrastinators is that there's

58:47

a whole other much sneakier kind of procrastination.

58:49

And it happens in all the situations

58:51

when there's something important that has no deadline

58:53

at all around it. So

58:56

that's a lot of stuff at work, of course. We're

58:59

trying to improve on our skills

59:02

and to actually rethink

59:04

the company culture or whatever. There's a lot of examples

59:06

at work of stuff that you would call kind of important,

59:09

but not urgent. No deadline. But

59:12

there's a ton of stuff outside of work. There's

59:15

no deadline on seeing your family enough. And

59:17

how many people regret not spending more

59:19

time with their parents before they passed

59:21

away or not spending more time with their kids before

59:23

they left for college or whatever it is. That

59:25

is such a common regret.

59:29

Our brain is a tool. And it's not often that smart.

59:32

And one of the ways that your brain is not that smart is that

59:35

we have this kind of delusion in our heads that

59:38

time is unlimited,

59:39

that there's endless weeks ahead. And that's

59:41

not true. And time is

59:43

quite finite. If there is a friend

59:45

that you really love, but you see them,

59:48

I don't know, once every two years, because

59:50

they live in a different city. Every couple of years, you catch

59:52

up and you have an amazing four-hour drink and

59:54

dinner. And it was

59:56

such a good time. And then that's it. You see them two years

59:58

later. Okay. Well, just say

1:00:01

you're 30 and you, you know,

1:00:03

you may be, if you're lucky, both of you lived into

1:00:05

your 80s. That's 50 years. If

1:00:08

you're seeing them every two years,

1:00:10

it's this crazy moment when you realize that I'm seeing

1:00:12

them 25 more times ever. We

1:00:15

have 25 of these dinners left. What?

1:00:17

That doesn't, the math doesn't add up. And so

1:00:20

I think that when it comes to a lot

1:00:22

of really important things, when there's no deadline,

1:00:25

the combo of that and the, this delusion

1:00:27

that we have unlimited time and unlimited, you

1:00:29

know, rounds of something, makes

1:00:31

us very complacent in a way that we

1:00:34

shouldn't be. So you have two things you can do with that information.

1:00:36

Going back to that friend example, one is really

1:00:39

savor that time with your friend. Maybe that's true.

1:00:41

Maybe that's a sad but true fact that you're going to see them 25 more times

1:00:44

if you're lucky and

1:00:46

really enjoy it and appreciate what you're seeing here.

1:00:48

You have 20, this is, this is number two out of 25.

1:00:50

Next one is number three out of 25.

1:00:53

Or you can increase that

1:00:55

number 25 by prioritizing

1:00:57

that friend more. And maybe you're going to go and

1:00:59

try to see that friend twice a year. Okay. You

1:01:01

just expanded that number from 25 to a hundred. So

1:01:04

there is a lot of things you can do with time when you look

1:01:06

it in the face. And when you look it in the face,

1:01:08

it's often different than what you think it looks

1:01:10

like.

1:01:11

You have this blog post that I

1:01:13

got kind of obsessed with called the tail end.

1:01:16

And you just, it puts in perspective

1:01:18

visually how little time the average

1:01:21

person has to do the things

1:01:23

they love or spend time with the people

1:01:25

they love, you know, from how many dumplings

1:01:27

you have left to eat. You have like a whole graph of little

1:01:30

baby dumplings to the amount of oceans

1:01:32

you're likely to jump in before you die. And

1:01:34

I think the most affecting part of it is

1:01:37

about your parents. And you say, it turns

1:01:39

out that when I graduated high school, I had already

1:01:41

used up 93% of my

1:01:44

in-person parent time.

1:01:46

I'm now enjoying the last 5% of that

1:01:48

time we're in the tail end. In

1:01:50

other words,

1:01:52

you basically get 18 years with your

1:01:54

parents and then the whole rest of your life

1:01:56

is the additional year in terms of actual

1:01:59

time you spend with them.

1:01:59

with them. And I wonder in doing

1:02:02

all of these exercises that, if

1:02:04

I'm honest, have a huge impact on

1:02:06

me when I read them, and then I kind of am

1:02:08

lulled back into the sleep that most of us go

1:02:10

through life in when it comes to something that

1:02:13

seems infinite like time. Has

1:02:15

doing these exercises actually

1:02:18

changed the way that you function in the

1:02:20

world? Has it changed the way that you

1:02:22

prioritize time with your family,

1:02:24

time with your wife, time with your daughter? Has

1:02:27

it transformed the way that you live

1:02:29

out

1:02:29

your day to day? Yes,

1:02:32

but not as much as it should.

1:02:34

So I've been arguing

1:02:37

on the side of more family vacations. And

1:02:40

I used to think, oh, we're all going to be in this

1:02:42

house for a week. And I'll make it for the last four

1:02:44

days, but I have a lot going on. And

1:02:47

I stopped doing that. If there's a thing going on, I'm not

1:02:49

missing an hour of it. And

1:02:51

then the other side of it, when I am with people I love, I

1:02:54

do sometimes find myself thinking, this is

1:02:57

precious. This is precious. There

1:02:59

actually aren't a, there's a very finite number of these moments.

1:03:01

And so yes, it does have an effect on me,

1:03:04

but

1:03:04

I'm like you too, where I

1:03:06

then go and I, it's so easy to just

1:03:08

fall back into our happy human haze of

1:03:11

thinking time is endless. And

1:03:13

by the way, another delusion that goes

1:03:15

along with this, which is

1:03:17

this delusion that things are just, I'm

1:03:19

the way that I am. Things are the way they

1:03:21

are. This is how much I see people. This is the city I

1:03:23

live in. That's just what it is. And

1:03:26

that's actually not true at all. You have a lot

1:03:28

of agency over where to take your life and you can

1:03:30

make big changes if it's important. And

1:03:33

so yes, I can say all

1:03:34

this. Do I do it enough?

1:03:36

No. But because it's in my head, I do

1:03:39

feel like I can be on a path getting 10% better

1:03:41

about this every year. You know,

1:03:43

like I will say like my grandmother is

1:03:45

very old, right? And I, she's,

1:03:48

you know, 98 and, and

1:03:51

I'll, you know, I will try to

1:03:53

make sure I spend, you

1:03:55

know, I probably will, I probably spend double the time with her that

1:03:57

I, that I would have before I wrote this, this

1:03:59

post.

1:03:59

So I do think it has an effect, but I

1:04:02

think if you're really looking it in the face, people

1:04:04

should be doing things like moving to the city

1:04:07

that their parents or friends live in, even

1:04:09

though they don't like that. That's intense,

1:04:11

but that is kind of what's called for here,

1:04:13

but I don't do that and a lot of people don't do that.

1:04:16

How has the advent of

1:04:18

this piece of glass that I'm holding in my hand

1:04:21

made this challenge even more difficult,

1:04:23

the challenge of procrastination and avoiding

1:04:26

what's truly important in our lives?

1:04:27

Yeah, I mean the phone slash

1:04:30

the computer internet, all

1:04:32

of that to me goes together, because for me it's, if

1:04:34

I'm trying to write, I'm writing on the same

1:04:37

exact device that

1:04:39

I procrastinate on. I mean the world,

1:04:42

I could go into a prison cell for 100

1:04:44

years and never run out of shit

1:04:46

to do on the internet. You're tempting

1:04:49

the instant gratification monkey much, much more.

1:04:52

If you're someone who struggles with unhealthy eating, well a great

1:04:54

way to do that is to not have any unhealthy food in the house,

1:04:56

but the internet

1:04:57

basically is like filling all of our houses just

1:04:59

out there in front of us, is just junk food

1:05:01

everywhere. It's gonna, now the willpower

1:05:03

required is a lot greater. So yeah, that's

1:05:06

a big one.

1:05:07

Did people used to procrastinate on the typewriter?

1:05:10

Like will human beings always find

1:05:12

a way to procrastinate? I do wonder

1:05:13

how like people in the 1700s procrastinate on.

1:05:19

And it must have been something, they had books, so

1:05:21

it must have been something, but it was definitely

1:05:23

less tempting. But I think there's writers

1:05:26

who for

1:05:27

centuries who have said stuff like, I

1:05:29

love having written, but I hate the process

1:05:31

of writing. I mean, actually the

1:05:34

word procrastination

1:05:36

is a Latin word. It

1:05:38

means to put off till tomorrow. So

1:05:41

we're talking about the Roman Empire, this was

1:05:43

a problem. And by the way, there's another word

1:05:45

called perendination I think.

1:05:47

And to be a perendinator

1:05:50

is actually to put things off till the

1:05:53

day after tomorrow. So procrastination

1:05:55

is to put things off till tomorrow, perendinators to put things off till,

1:05:57

so they have a nuanced understanding of someone who's

1:05:59

a.

1:05:59

disaster or like a super disaster in

1:06:02

this regard. So yeah, like I'm sure Julius Caesar

1:06:04

was a procrastinator. I just don't know what

1:06:06

he exactly did when he was procrastinating. All

1:06:08

right. Let's talk a little bit about technology

1:06:11

and happiness and the way that technology

1:06:14

is either making us happier or more miserable.

1:06:17

You once tweeted this 300 year old quote

1:06:19

by Montesquieu that says this, if

1:06:21

you only wish to be happy, this could easily be

1:06:23

accomplished, but we wish to be happier

1:06:25

than other people. And this is always difficult

1:06:28

for we believe others to be happier than

1:06:30

they are.

1:06:31

And I think everyone would agree that social

1:06:34

media has made it impossible not

1:06:36

to compare ourselves to others,

1:06:39

right? It's what we do all of the time, every single time

1:06:41

we're looking at Instagram, they're happier on their vacation.

1:06:43

They're skinnier than I am. They have the better clothes,

1:06:46

right? How is social media put

1:06:48

the human urge to compete and compare

1:06:51

that Montesquieu talked about 300

1:06:52

years ago on steroids? And

1:06:55

is there any way to resist it?

1:06:57

I have a term I call like image crafting, which

1:06:59

is I think what people do on social

1:07:02

media, they image craft, right? They're going

1:07:04

to present a

1:07:06

person that

1:07:07

is not them,

1:07:09

but is who they want people to think they are,

1:07:11

which people, again, people have always done. But

1:07:14

social media, it's much,

1:07:16

yeah, it's like you said, it's on steroids.

1:07:19

A, people don't broadcast their failures

1:07:22

and they don't broadcast their shitty vacations.

1:07:24

So you're already seeing this distorted lens. One

1:07:27

of the crazy things about humans is that how

1:07:29

we feel about our own life is almost

1:07:31

entirely derived from

1:07:34

comparison. So it

1:07:36

used to be, if your car isn't as nice

1:07:38

as your neighbor's car, you feel poor.

1:07:40

But now

1:07:43

comparison is in our face. Instead of seeing our

1:07:45

neighbor and our couple of coworkers and our friends

1:07:47

and how they're doing,

1:07:48

we see everyone

1:07:51

and we see the most six. So instead of

1:07:53

seeing, you know, there's someone who's the most successful

1:07:55

person from your high school, right? Who you knew

1:07:57

in high school. Normally you might hear through

1:07:59

the great.

1:07:59

fine about them. Oh, you hear they're doing great,

1:08:02

whatever, whatever, you forget about it. You know, you

1:08:04

don't hear about them again for 10 years. Now that

1:08:06

person's in your face because everyone's talking about them online

1:08:08

and they're there and everyone's forwarding their things. And

1:08:11

so it's kind of a nightmare of comparison

1:08:13

now. And then you combine that with the fact that everyone's

1:08:16

presenting the best version of their life. And

1:08:19

you really have a recipe for

1:08:21

misery and you know, inequality is

1:08:24

always a problem, but inequality is really rubbed

1:08:26

in your face with social media.

1:08:29

There's this term coined by the sociologist

1:08:32

Ray Oldenburg called the third space, which

1:08:34

is exactly what it sounds like, right? It's a place outside

1:08:36

of home or work for adults or for

1:08:38

kids that cultivates a sense of community.

1:08:41

Starbucks wanted to pride itself on being

1:08:43

the third place. And for some people it's still a

1:08:45

bar, maybe a coffee shop or a community library

1:08:48

or a park or a playground, but it's meant to

1:08:50

be sort of like this common leveler where

1:08:52

everyone's welcome regardless of

1:08:55

social class, race, gender, et cetera.

1:08:57

But in our world today, I would

1:08:59

argue that the internet is

1:09:01

that third space,

1:09:03

right? And you can use it

1:09:05

to get lost in an app or Tik

1:09:07

TOK or Twitter or a game. And

1:09:10

in certain ways it's incredible. It attracts

1:09:12

those looking for a community. You know,

1:09:14

if you're living in a rural place, you can connect

1:09:16

to people all over the world that have a like-minded

1:09:19

view to you,

1:09:21

but it can also be this extremely destructive

1:09:23

thing in ways that I don't even need to go into because

1:09:25

everyone knows what I'm talking about, alienation,

1:09:28

isolation, radicalization, all of those

1:09:30

things. How do we

1:09:32

use this tool for the good? How

1:09:35

do we use this tool in a way that

1:09:37

cultivates our higher rung

1:09:40

values, our higher

1:09:42

mind? How do we protect

1:09:45

ourselves from slipping to the lower rungs,

1:09:48

from giving in to our primitive mind,

1:09:50

especially as technology is

1:09:53

continuing to advance? Who knows what's going

1:09:55

to be here six months from now because of AI?

1:09:57

People

1:10:00

who want to lose weight,

1:10:01

it's very logical to

1:10:04

keep only healthy food in the house. Surround

1:10:06

yourself by healthy food and you'll probably eat more of it.

1:10:08

You can do the same thing on the internet.

1:10:11

You can actually try to avoid junk food,

1:10:13

internet junk food, and surround yourself

1:10:16

with influences that'll make you better. Think

1:10:18

about Twitter. Twitter, people rag

1:10:20

on it as this hellscape, and it is, but

1:10:23

not for everyone. Just for us? Well,

1:10:26

yeah, certainly. But if

1:10:28

you're going to tweet about politics, you're going to invite

1:10:30

the hellscape into your world. But the point

1:10:33

is, a lot of people, they log on and they see a

1:10:35

bunch of interesting people talking about science and

1:10:37

history and making funny, comedians, making funny

1:10:39

jokes, and then some of their friends. And it's not a hellscape

1:10:41

at all. It's awesome, right? One thing I

1:10:43

did for this book is, because

1:10:45

I wanted to not end up in an echo chamber, people

1:10:48

who felt the way I did, is I tried to follow

1:10:51

on different social media platforms a

1:10:53

wide range of people. If someone

1:10:56

who was getting a lot of attention and I tested

1:10:58

what they thought, instant follow. I

1:11:00

want to see what they're saying. And then also, if someone

1:11:02

who I thought was a good thinker and they disagree with me, even

1:11:05

more so, instant follow. So you can

1:11:07

surround yourself by a wide variety

1:11:09

of views if you want to get the full picture and

1:11:11

not let yourself fall too much in an echo chamber. And

1:11:14

we talked about idea lab culture. You can choose

1:11:16

to go to the sites and listen

1:11:19

to the podcast and follow people that

1:11:21

you believe have a high-rung approach,

1:11:23

which means they might be anywhere on the political

1:11:26

axis or any other axis, but

1:11:28

they approach things like a grown-up,

1:11:31

not identifying with their ideas, not

1:11:33

attacking people who disagree with them,

1:11:35

but attacking their ideas. So you can

1:11:37

curate your own internet world pretty well,

1:11:40

I think, the same way. Again,

1:11:43

it's just like food. You're going to sometimes go

1:11:45

out or deliver. You're

1:11:49

going to still end up going into this. Someone's going

1:11:51

to send you a tweet. You're going to end up scrolling down the comment section

1:11:53

and getting angry and all that. But

1:11:55

you can go a long way. Now, at a macro scale,

1:11:57

how do we do better? Because

1:12:00

collectively, we can be very smart and wise.

1:12:03

And we can also be the lowest common denominator

1:12:05

can win out. And we can be the worst of our human

1:12:08

nature can come out collectively. But

1:12:10

what we can do is if we build enough awareness about this

1:12:12

concept, and people already, there's a lot more people

1:12:14

talking about how social media is bad, right? That's new.

1:12:17

People, you said that you

1:12:20

didn't even need to even list the things. You

1:12:22

said it was just obvious why the internet can be bad.

1:12:24

That's pretty new, actually. This

1:12:27

idea that these algorithms make us miserable.

1:12:29

And so right there, you're going to start having some

1:12:31

pressure. You're going to start having some

1:12:34

kind of shaming of the people who own the platforms

1:12:36

if their algorithms are geared towards engagement,

1:12:39

which of course, usually, it means geared towards

1:12:41

amplifying anger and bombastic

1:12:44

people. And I think we could get to

1:12:46

a world where that's very, no one

1:12:48

would ever join a platform that still

1:12:51

has an algorithm like that. We all know that that's

1:12:53

not so. And in that world, everyone's

1:12:55

suddenly incentivized to make their algorithms

1:12:58

better and more pleasant. I think we could get there, where there's kind

1:13:00

of a mass shift where it becomes the,

1:13:02

it looks like the Wild West back when the algorithms were

1:13:04

just going for engagement. And now, of course, we don't do that

1:13:06

anymore. And it wouldn't be

1:13:08

that hard for algorithms to find ways

1:13:11

to drive different behavior,

1:13:13

to reward different kinds of behavior.

1:13:15

Just turning back to your book and the story

1:13:17

of us that we started this conversation with, and

1:13:20

where we are on your 1,000 page historical

1:13:23

timeline of humanity, you

1:13:25

say that the disasters on page 1,000

1:13:28

of the history of us are exponential

1:13:32

compared to the disasters on page 999.

1:13:35

Why is that? Technology's

1:13:38

a double-edged sword. I mean, look at the 20th

1:13:40

century. It had record

1:13:42

numbers in terms of GDP per capita

1:13:44

and the eradication of disease and

1:13:47

the fewest people ever in extreme poverty

1:13:51

and just general prosperity. But it also saw

1:13:53

the two biggest wars in history. It

1:13:55

saw the two biggest genocides in history.

1:13:58

And it saw the advent of...

1:13:59

of the biggest existential risk

1:14:02

weapon in history, the nuclear weapon. So

1:14:06

the same century that was the

1:14:08

best ever was also the scariest

1:14:10

ever, and in some ways the worst ever in certain

1:14:12

areas. So what does that mean

1:14:14

about the next century, right? What does that mean about

1:14:17

everything, if tech is continuing to explode?

1:14:20

It means that we could solve

1:14:22

everything, just advancements in AI

1:14:24

alone. I mean, we could solve all

1:14:27

disease, we could solve world hunger

1:14:29

and eradicate poverty, we

1:14:31

could solve climate change, we could solve

1:14:34

aging even, people could die

1:14:36

when they want to. This is all

1:14:37

realistic, this really could happen. But

1:14:39

the existential risk, now there's not just one,

1:14:42

there is many, and they go together,

1:14:44

they feed on each other. So

1:14:46

you can look at that and you could sum that up and say the

1:14:48

stakes are higher than ever. If

1:14:51

we can kind of move forward wisely, we

1:14:53

can live in what would seem like a utopia to

1:14:55

people today. And

1:14:58

if

1:14:59

we don't, then if you live in this

1:15:01

advanced society, the fall might be

1:15:04

the worst ever. So the point is people should be scared,

1:15:06

we shouldn't be cocky. And the reason

1:15:08

I like the liberal house, and I talk about it a lot,

1:15:11

is that I think that gives us our best

1:15:13

chance to proceed wisely. I think liberalism

1:15:16

is the tool and the system that

1:15:19

can get us to a really good future.

1:15:22

And I think the destruction of liberalism is

1:15:25

the ultimate existential threat because I think

1:15:27

it enhances all the other existential

1:15:29

threats. And so yeah, I don't want us to get

1:15:31

cocky about what we have and the stability

1:15:33

we have because we really need it going

1:15:36

forward and she'd never take it for granted.

1:15:39

You have a baby daughter. What

1:15:41

is the biggest piece of advice you

1:15:44

could give someone, maybe like

1:15:46

her, when she understands words, about

1:15:49

the world and the world she's being

1:15:51

born into as we move on to that

1:15:53

thousandth and one page?

1:15:55

I would try

1:15:58

to teach her. independent

1:16:01

reasoning. Conventional wisdom from 10, 30,

1:16:04

50 years ago is often not accurate anymore. It's

1:16:07

not wise anymore. Conventional wisdom does

1:16:09

not stay wise for long, and

1:16:11

it's always going to lag behind.

1:16:13

And so I

1:16:14

would encourage her to trust her

1:16:16

independent reasoning, and when

1:16:18

it conflicts with conventional wisdom about

1:16:21

how the world is, about where it's going, about,

1:16:23

you know, who the, you know, who the harmful

1:16:25

people and the productive

1:16:27

people are, to continually

1:16:30

observe and reflect. And when her,

1:16:33

what she comes up with there disagrees with conventional

1:16:35

wisdom, to trust it

1:16:36

and to continually stay

1:16:38

humble so that she can continue to change her

1:16:41

mind. Because if you live in 50,000 BC,

1:16:43

the world is the way it is. Your great grandparent

1:16:45

lived the same life you did. Conventional wisdom is the

1:16:48

same as it always has been, and it's wise. When

1:16:50

the world is rapidly changing, you have

1:16:52

to be nimble as a thinker and continue to adjust. So

1:16:54

I would want her to do that.

1:16:58

Tim Urban, thanks for coming on

1:17:00

today. Thank you, Barry.

1:17:10

Thanks for listening. If you like this conversation,

1:17:12

if it moved you in some way, or if

1:17:15

Tim said something you appreciated or disagreed

1:17:17

with or were provoked by, it's all

1:17:19

good. Share this conversation

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and use it to have a discussion of your own. And

1:17:26

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do that. Go to thefp.com,

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1:17:34

and become a subscriber today. We'll see

1:17:36

you next time. Transcribed

1:17:50

by https://otter.ai