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join colossus dot com. Hello,

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and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy,

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2:08

Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and

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founding partner of Positive SUM and

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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