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

A radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country, has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the US which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack medical journals and universities and the aclu, you know, all the activist organizations and nonprofits and many tech companies. And the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years and they all rely on trust, public trust and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning. And what I see this thing is as a parasite on that whose goal is and I'm not saying, by the way, each individual in this is I don't think they're bad people. I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust.

The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, his second time in the podcast. He's the author and illustrator of the amazing blog called Wait, but why? And is the author of a new book coming out tomorrow called what's Our Problem? A Self Help Book for Societies. We talk a lot about this book in this podcast, but you really do need to get it and experience it for yourself. It is a fearless, insightful, hilarious and I think important book in this divisive time that we live in. The Kindle version, the audiobook and the web version should be all available on date of publication. I should also mention that my face might be a bit more beat up than usual. I got hit in the chin pretty good since I've been getting back into training Jiu Jitsu, a sport I love very much after recovering from an injury. So if you see marks on my face during these intros or conversations, you know that my life is in a pretty good place. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Tim Urban. You wrote an incredible book called what's Our Problem? A self help book for Societies. In the beginning you present this view of human history as a thousand page book where each page is 250 years and it's a brilliant visualization because almost nothing happens for most of it. So what blows your mind most about that visualization when you just sit back and think about it?

It's a boring book. So 950 pages, 95% of the book Hunter Gatherer is kind of doing their thing. I'm sure there's, you know, there's some. There's obviously some major cognitive and advancements along the way in language. And I'm sure, you know, the bow and arrow comes around at some point. You know, so. So tiny things. But it's like, okay, now we 400 pages till the next thing. But then you get to page 950 and things start moving.

Recorded history starts at 976.

Right? Right.

It's basically the bottom row is when anything interesting happens, there's a bunch of agriculture for a while before we know anything about it. And then recorded history starts.

Yes. 25 pages of actual, like, recorded history. So when we think of prehistoric, we're talking about pages one through nine, 75 of the book. And then history is page, you know, 976 to 1000. If you were reading the book, it would be like, epilogue A.D. you know, the last little 10 pages of the book. And we think of A.D. is super long, right. 2,000 years. The Roman Empire, 2,000 years ago. Like, that's so long.

Yeah.

Human history has been going on for over 2,000 centuries. Like, that is. It's just. It's hard to wrap your head around. And this is. I mean, even that's just the end of a very long road. Like, you know, the hundred thousand years before that. It's not like, you know, it's not like that was that different. So it's just there's been people like us that have emotions like us, that have physical sensations like us for. For so, so long. And who. Who are they all and what was their life like? And it's, you know, I think we have no idea what it was like to be them. The thing that's craziest about the people of the far past is not just that they had different lives, they had different fears, they had different dangers and different responsibilities. And they lived in tribes and everything, but they didn't know anything. Like, we just take it for granted that we're born on top of this tower of knowledge. And from the very beginning, we. We know that the Earth is a ball floating in space. And we know that we're going to die one day. And we know that, you know, we evolved from animals and all those were all like, credible, you know, epiphanies quite recently. And the people, a long time ago, they just had no idea what was going on. And like, I'm kind of jealous because I feel like it. I mean, it might have been scary to not know what's Going on. But it also, I feel like would be you'd have a sense of awe and wonder all the time and you don't know what's going to happen next. And once you learn, you're kind of like, oh, that's like a little grim.

But they probably had the same capacity for consciousness, to experience the world, to wander about the world, maybe to construct narratives about the world and myths and so on. They just had less grounded systematic facts to play with. They still probably felt the narratives, the myths they constructed as intensely as we do.

Oh yeah, they also fell in love. They also had friends and they had falling outs with friends.

Didn't shower much though.

No, they did not smell nice.

Maybe they did. Maybe beauty's in the eye of the beholden. Yeah, maybe it's all like, relative.

How many people in history have experienced a hot shower? Like, almost none. That's like, when were hot showers invented? A hundred years ago. Like, less. So like, George Washington never had a hot shower. It's just kind of weird. Like he took cold showers all the time. Or like. And again, we just take this for granted. But that's like an unbelievable life experience. To have a controlled little booth where it rains hot water on your head and then you get out and it's not everywhere. It's like contained. That was like, you know, a lot of people probably lived and died with never experiencing hot water. Maybe they had a way to heat water over a fire, but like, then it's. I don't know, it's just like there's so many things about our lives now that are completely just total anomaly.

It makes you wonder, like, what is the thing they would notice the most? I mean, the sewage system, like, it doesn't smell in cities.

Incredible.

What does the sewer system do? I mean, it gets rid of waste efficiently, such that we don't have to confront it both with our, with any of our senses. And that probably wasn't there. I mean, what else? Plus all the medical stuff associated with sewers.

Yeah. I mean, how about the disease?

Yeah.

How about the cockroaches and the rats and the, and the disease and the plagues and you know, and then when they got. So they caught more diseases, but then when they caught the disease, they also didn't have treatment for it. So they often would die or they would just be in a huge amount of pain. They also didn't know what the disease was. They didn't know about microbes. That was this new thing, the idea that these tiny little animals that are causing these diseases so what did they think? You know, in the. The bubonic plague, you know, in the Black Death, the 1300s, people thought that it was an act of God because, you know, God's angry at us because why would, you know, why would you not think that if you didn't know what it was? And so the crazy thing is that these were the same primates. So I do know something about them. I know in some sense what it's like to be them, because I am a human as well, and to know that this particular primate, that I know what it's like to be experienced such different things and like, this isn't our life is not the life that this primate has experienced almost ever. So it's just a bit strange.

I don't know. I have a sense that we would get acclimated very quickly. Like if. If we threw ourselves back a few thousand years ago, it would be very uncomfortable at first, but the whole hot shower thing, you'll get used to it after a year. You would not even, like, miss it. There's a was, there's a few. Trying to remember which book that talks about hiking that Appalachian Trail, but you kind of miss those hot showers. But I have a sense, like after a few months, after a few years.

Well, you use. Your scale recalibrates. Yeah, Yeah. I was saying the other day to a friend that whatever you're used to, you start to think that, oh, that the people that have more than me are more fortunate. Like, it just sounds incredible. I would. I would be so happy. But you know, that's not true because you experience what would happen is you would. You would. You would get these new things or you would. You would get these new opportunities, and then you would get used to it, and then you would. This. The hedonic treadmill, you'd come back to where you are. And likewise, though, because you think, oh, my God, what if I had to, you know, have this kind of job that I never would want, or I had this kind of marriage that I never would want? You know, what if you did, you would adjust and you get used to it, and you might not be that much less happy than you are now. So on the other side of the. You being okay going back, you know, we would survive if we had to go back. You know, we'd have to learn some skills and. But we would buck up. And, you know, people have gone to war before that were in the, you know, shopkeepers a year before that. They were in the trenches the next year. But on the other hand, if you brought them here. You know, I always think it would be so fun to just bring, forget the hunter gatherers, bring a 1700s person here and tour them around, take them on an airplane, show them your phone and all the things it can do. Show them the Internet, show them the grocery store. Imagine taking them to a Whole Foods. Likewise, I think they would be completely awestruck and on their knees crying tears of joy. And then they'd get used to it and they'd be complaining about like they don't. You don't have this oranges in stock is like, you know, and that's.

The grocery store is a tough one to get used to. Like, when I, when I first came to this country, the abundance of bananas was the thing that struck me the most. Or like fruits in general, but food in general, but bananas somehow struck me the most that you could just eat them as much as you want. That took a long time for me. Probably took several years to really get acclimated to that.

Why didn't you have bananas?

The number of banana. Fresh bananas, that, that wasn't available. Bread, yes. Bananas, no.

Yeah. It's like we don't even know what to have. Like, we don't even know the proper levels of gratitude.

Yeah.

You know, walking around the grocery store, I don't know. To be like, the bread's nice, but the bananas are like, we're so lucky. I don't know. I'm like, oh, I could have been the other way. I have no idea.

Well, it's interesting then, where we point our gratitude in the west, in the United States probably, do we point it away from materialist possessions towards. Or do we just aspire that. To do that towards other human beings that we love? Because in the east and the Soviet Union growing up poor, it's having food is the gratitude. Having transportation is gratitude. Having warmth and shelter is gratitude. And now. But see, within that, the deep gratitude is for other human beings. It's the penguins huddling together for warmth in the cold.

I think it's a person. By person basis, I mean, I'm sure. Yes, of course in the west we will on average feel gratitude towards different things or maybe a different level of gratitude. Maybe we feel less gratitude than some, than countries that, you know. Obviously I think the easiest, the person that's most likely to feel gratitude is going to be someone who's on whose. Whose life happens to be one where they just move up, up, up throughout their life. A lot of people in the greatest generation, people who were born in the 20s or whatever. And a lot of the boomers, too. This story is the greatest generation grew up dirt poor and they often ended up middle class. And the boomers, some of them started off middle class and many of them ended up quite wealthy. And I feel like that life trajectory is naturally going to foster gratitude, right? Because you're not going to take for granted these things because you didn't have them. You know, I didn't go out of the country really in my childhood very much, you know, like, you know, we traveled, but it was to Virginia to see my grandparents or Wisconsin to see other relatives or, you know, maybe Florida if we're going out to the beach. And then I started going out of the country like crazy in my 20s because I really, you know, became my favorite thing. And I feel like, because I. If I had grown up always doing that, it would have been another thing. I'm like, yeah, that's just something I do. But I still, every time I go to a new country, I'm like, oh my God, this is so cool. I'm in another country. This thing I've only seen on the map. I'm like, I'm there now. And so I feel like a lot of times it's a product of what you didn't have and then you suddenly had. But I still think it's case by case in that there's like a meter in everyone's head that I think.

At.

A 10, you're experiencing just immense gratitude, which is a euphoric feeling. It's a great feeling and it makes you happy. It's to savor what you have, to look down at the mountain of stuff you have that you're standing on, to look down that and say, oh my God, I'm so lucky and I'm so grateful for this and this and this. And obviously that's a happy exercise. Now when you move the meter down to six or seven, maybe you think that sometimes, but you're not always thinking that because you're sometimes looking up at this cloud of things that you don't have and the things that they have but you don't, or things you wished you had or you thought you were going to have or whatever. And that's the opposite direction to look, right? And that's the. Either that's envy, that's yearning, or often it's. If you think about your past, it's grievance, right? And so then you go into a one and you have someone who feels like a complete victim. They are just a victim of the society of Their siblings and their parents and their loved ones. Um, and they are. They're wallowing in everything that's happened wrong to me, everything I should have that I don't. Everything that has gone wrong for me. And so that's a very unhealthy, mentally unhealthy place to be. Um, anyone can go there. You know, there's an endless list of stuff you can. You can be aggrieved about, and an endless list of stuff you can have gratitude for. And so it's. It's. In some ways, it's a choice, and it's a habit, and maybe it's part of how we were raised or our natural demeanor, but it's such a good example. You are really good at this, by the way. Your Twitter is like, go on. Well, like. Like you're. You, You. You. You are constantly just saying, man, I'm lucky. Or like, I'm. I'm so grateful for this. And that's. It's. It's a good thing to do because you're reminding yourself, but you're also reminding other people to think that way. And it's like, we are lucky, you know, And. And so, anyway, I think that scale can go from 1 to 10, and I think it's hard to be a 10. I think you'd be very happy if you could be, but I think trying to be above a five and looking down at the things you have more often than you are looking up at the things you don't, or being resentful about the things that people have wronged you.

Well, the interesting thing, I think, was an open question, but I suspect that you can control that knob for the individual. You yourself can choose the stoic philosophy. You could choose where you are as a matter of habit, like you said, but you can also probably control that in a scale of a family, of a tribe, of a nation, of a society. I mean, you can describe a lot of the things that happens in Nazi Germany and different other parts of history through a sort of societal envy and resentment that builds up. Maybe certain narratives pick up, and then they infiltrate your mind, and then now your knob goes to. From the gratitude for everything, it goes to resentment and envy and all Germany.

Between the two world wars, you know, like. Like you said, the Soviet kind of mentality. So, yeah, and then when you're soaking in a culture, so there's. There's kind of two factors, right? It's, It's. It's what's going on in your own head, and then what's surrounding you. And what's surrounding you kind of has concentric circles. There's your immediate group of people, because that group of people, if they're a certain way, if they feel a lot of gratitude and they talk about it a lot, that kind of insulates you from the broader culture because, you know, the people are going to have the most impact on you, are the ones closest. And. But often all the concentric circles are saying the same thing. The people around you are feeling the same way that the broader community, which is feeling the same way as the broader country. And I think this is why I think American patriotism, nationalism can be tribal, can be very not a good thing. Patriotism, I think, is a great thing, because really, what is patriotism? If you love your country, you should love your fellow countrymen. You know, that's a Reagan quote. It's like patriotism is like, I think, a feeling of, like, unity and. But it also comes along with an implicit kind of concept of gratitude because it's like, we are so lucky to live in. You know, people, you know, think it's chauvinist to say we live in the best country in the world. Right. And, you know, yes, when Americans say that, no one likes it. Right. But actually, it's not a bad thing to think. It's a nice thing to think. It thinks. It's a way of saying, I'm so grateful for all the great things this country gives to me and this country has done. And. And I think, you know, if you heard the Philip, you know, a Filipino person say, you know what? The Philippines is the best country in the world, no one in America would say, that's chauvinist. They'd say, awesome, right? Because when it's coming from someone, you know, who's not American, it sounds totally fine. But I think. I think, you know, national pride is actually good now. Again, that can quickly translate into xenophobia and nationalism. And so, you know, you have to make sure it doesn't go off that cliff.

But, yeah, there's good ways to formulate that. Like, you talk about, we'll talk about, like, high rung progressivism, high rung conservatism. Those are two different ways of. Of embodying patriotism. So you could talk about maybe loving the tradition that this country stands for, or you could talk about loving the people the. That ultimately push progress. And those are, from an intellectual perspective, a good way to represent patriotism. We got to zoom out because this. This graphic is epic. Okay. A lot of images in your book are just epic on Their own. It's brilliantly done. But this one has famous people for each of the cards. Like the best of.

Yeah.

For you, by the way.

Good for them to be the person. Yeah, that, that. It's not that I could have chosen lots of people for each card, but I think most people would agree, you know, that's a pretty fair choice for each, each page and good for them to be. You know, you crushed it if you can be the person for your whole 250 year page. So.

Well, I noticed he put Gandhi, didn't put Hitler. I mean, there's a lot of people going to argue with you about that particular last page.

True. Yes, you're right. I could have, I could have put in. I actually, I was thinking about Darwin there too.

Darwin.

Yeah, exactly. You really could have put anyone.

You think about putting yourself for a second.

Yeah, I should have. I should have. That would have been awesome. I'm sure that would have endeared the readers to me from. Right. From the beginning of the first page of the book.

A little bit of a messianic complex going on. But yeah. So the list of people, just so you know. So these are 250 year chunks, the last one being from 1770 to 2020. And so it goes. Gandhi, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Muhammad, Constantine, Jesus, Cleopatra, Aristotle. That's so interesting to think about this very recent human history.

That's 11 pages. So it would be 2750, almost 3000 years.

Just that there's these figures that stand out and that define the course of human history.

It's like the crazy, the craziest thing to me is that like Buddha was a dude. He was a guy with like arms and legs and fingernails that he maybe bit and like he liked certain foods and maybe he got like, you know, he had like digestive issues sometimes and like he got cuts and they stung and like he was a guy and he had hopes and dreams and he probably had a big ego for a while before he. I guess Buddha totally overcame that one. But like. And it's like, who knows, you know, you know what the myth, the mythical figure of Buddha. Who knows how similar he was. But the fact, same with Jesus. Like this was a guy. Like to me he's a primate.

Yeah.

What impact.

He was a cell first and then a baby.

Yeah, he was a fetus at some point.

A dumb baby trying to learn how to walk.

Yeah. Like having a tantrum.

Yeah.

Because he's frustrated because he's in the terrible twos. Jesus was in the terrible Twos.

Buddha never had a tantrum. Let's be honest.

The myth, the mother was like, this baby's great. Like, wow.

Figure something out.

It just means hearing, learning about Genghis Khan. It's incredible to me because it's just like this was some Mongolian, you know, herder guy who was taken as a slave and he was like dirt poor, you know, catching rats as a young teen with, you know, to feed him and his mom and his, I think, his brother. And it's just like the odds on. When he was born, he was just one of, you know, probably tens of thousands of random teen boys living in mongolia in the 1200s. The odds of that person, any one of them being a household name today that we're talking about, it's just crazy. Like, what had to happen and for that guy to. For that poor, dirt poor herder to take over the world, I don't know. So history just like continually blows my mind, like, you know, and he's the.

Reason you and I are related, probably.

Yeah. No, I mean, we're. It's. It's also. That's the other thing is that some of these dudes, by becoming king, by being. Having a better army at the right time, you know, William the Conqueror, whatever has. Is in the right place at the right time with the right army, you know, and there's a weakness at the right moment and he comes over and he exploits it and ends up probably having, you know, I don't know, thousand children. And those children are high up people who might be. Have a ton of the species is different now because of him. Like, if that. Forget England's different or, you know, European borders look different. Like, we are like we look different. And because of a small handful of people, you know, when I sometimes I think I'm like, oh, you know, this part of the world I can recognize someone's Greek, you know, someone's Persian, someone's wherever because, you know, they kind of have certain facial features. And I'm like, it may have happened. I mean, obviously it's that. That's a population, but it may be that, like someone 600 years ago that looked like that really spread their seed and that's why the ethnicity looks kind of like that now. So anyway.

Yeah, yeah. Do you think individuals like that can turn the direction of history or is that an illusion, that narrative we tell ourselves?

Well, it's both. I mean, so I said, William the Conqueror, right, Or Hitler. Right. It's not that Hitler was born and destined to be great at all. Right. I Think in a lot of cases he's some frustrated artist with a temper who's turning over the table in his studio and hitting his wife and being kind of a dick and a total nobody, right? I think almost all the times you could have put Hitler baby on earth. He's a rando, right? You know, and maybe he's a, you know, maybe sometimes he becomes a, you know, some kind of, you know, uses this speaking ability because that ability was going to be there either way. But maybe he uses it for something else. But. But that said, I don't also, I think you. But it's not that World War II is going to happen either way, right? So it's both. It's that, like these circumstances were one way and this person came along at the right time and those two made a match made in, in this case, hell.

But it makes you wonder, yes, it's a match in hell, but are there other people that could have taken his place or do these people that stand out, they're the rare spark of that genius, whether it take us towards evil, towards good, whether those figures singularly define the trajectory of humanity. You know, what defines the trajectory of humanity in the 21st century, for example, might be the influence of AI, might be the influence of nuclear war. Negative or positive? Not in the case of nuclear war, but the bioengineering, nanotech, virology, what else is there? Maybe the structure of governments and so on, maybe the structure of universities. I don't know. There could be singular figures that stand up and lead the way for human.

There will be.

But I wonder if the society is the thing that manifests that that person or that person really does have a huge impact.

I think it's probably a spectrum where there are some cases when a circumstance was such that something like what happened was gonna happen if you pluck that person from the earth. I don't know whether the Mongols is a good example or not, but maybe it could be that if you plucked Genghis Khan as a baby, there was because of the specific way Chinese civilization was at that time and the specific, you know, climate, you know, that was. That was causing a certain kind of pressure in the Mongols. And the way they. They still had their great archers and they had their horses and they had a lot of the same advantages. So maybe it was like it was waiting to happen, right? It was going to happen either way and may not have happened to the extent or whatever. So maybe. Or you could go the full other direction and say, actually this was probably not going to happen. And, you know, I think World War II is an example. I kind of think World War II really was kind of the work of. Of course, it relied on all these other circumstances. You had to have the resentment in Germany. You have to have the Great Depression. But, like, I think if you take Hitler out, I'm pretty sure World War I, World War II, doesn't happen.

Well, then it seems, like, easier to answer these questions when you look at history, even recent history. But let's look at. Now, let's look at. I'm sure we'll talk about social media. So who are the key players in social media? Mark Zuckerberg. What's the name of the MySpace guy? Tom.

Tom. It's just Tom. Yeah.

There's a meme going around where, like, MySpace is, like, the perfect social media because no algorithmic involvement. Everybody's happy and positive.

Also, Tom did it right at the time, we were like, oh, man, Tom only made like a few million dollars. Oof. Sucks to not be Zuck. Tom might be living a nice life right now where he doesn't have this nightmare that these other people have.

Yeah. And he's always smiling his profile picture. And so there's like, Larry Page. So with Google, that's kind of intermingled into that whole thing, into the development of the Internet. Jack Dorsey, now Elon. Who else? I mean, there's people. People playing with the evolution of social media. And to me, that seems to be connected to the development of AI, and it seems like those singular figures will define the direction of AI development and social media development. With social media seeming to have such a huge impact on our collective intelligence.

It does feel in one way like individuals have an especially big impact right now in that a small number of people are pulling some big levers. And, you know, there can be a little meeting of three people at Facebook, and they come out, and they come in. They come out of that meeting and make a decision that totally changes the world. Right. On the other hand, you see a lot of. A lot of conformity. You see a lot of, you know, they all pulled the plug on Trump the same day. Right. So that suggests that there's some bigger force that is also kind of driving them, in which case it's less about the individuals. I think this is what is leadership to me. Leadership is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural forces are not already taking things. A lot of times people seem like a leader because they're just kind of hopping on the cultural wave, and they happen to be the person who Gets to the top of it now, it seems like they're. But actually the wave was already going. Real leadership is when. Is when someone actually changes the wave, changes the shape of the wave. Like, I think Elon with, you know, Space X and with Tesla, like, genuinely, like, shaped a wave. You know, maybe you could say that EVs were actually, like, they were going to happen anyway. But it's. There's no. It's not much evidence about at least happening when it did. You know, if we end up on Mars, you know, you can. You can say that Elon was a genuine, like, leader there. And so there are examples now, like, Zuckerberg definitely has done a lot of leadership along the way. He's also potentially kind of like caught in a. A storm that is happening. And, you know, he's one of the figures in it. So I don't know.

And it's possible that he is a big shaper. If the metaverse becomes a reality, if in 30 years we're all living in a virtual world, to many people, that seems ridiculous now that. That was a poor investment.

He talked about getting, you know, 10, you know, I think it was something like a billion people with a VR headset in their pocket in. By you know, I think 10 years from now, back in 2015. So we're. We're behind that. But when I. He was talking about that, and honestly, I. This is something I've been wrong about because I went to like, one of the Facebook conferences and tried out all the new Oculus stuff, and I was like, you know, pretty early, talking to some of the, you know, major players there because I was going to write a big post about it that then got swallowed by this book. But. But I would have been wrong in the post because in. What I would have said was that this thing is, you know, when I tried it, I was like, this is, you know, some of them suck, some of them make you nauseous, and they're just not that you're, you know, the headsets were big and, you know, but I was like, the times when this is good, it is. I have this feeling I haven't had. It reminds me of the feeling I had when I first was five and I went to a friend's house and he had Nintendo and he gave me the controller. And I was looking at the screen and I pressed a button and Mario jumped. And I said. I said, I can make something on the screen move. And the same feeling I had the first time someone showed me how to send an email. It was like, really early. And he's like, you can send this. And I was like, he goes, I can press enter on my computer. And something happens on your computer. Those were obviously, you know, when you have that feeling, it often means you're witnessing a paradigm shift. And I thought, this is one of those things. And I still kind of think it is, but it's kind of weird that it hasn't, you know, like, where's the VR revolution?

Like, yeah, I'm surprised because I'm. I'm with you. My first and still instinct is this feels like it changes everything. VR feels like it changes everything, but it's not changing anything.

Like, a dumb part of my brain is genuinely convinced that it's real. And then the smart part knows it's not. But that's why the dumb part was like, we're not walking off that cliff. The smart part's like, you're on your rug. It's fine. The dumb part of my brain's like, I'm not walking off the cliff. So it's like. It's crazy.

I feel like it's waiting for, like, that revolutionary person who comes in and says, I'm gonna create a headset.

Like, honestly, Steve Jobs iPhone of Honestly.

A little bit of a Carmack type guy, which is why it was really interesting for him to be involved with Facebook, is basically, how do we create a simple dumb thing that's a hundred bucks but actually creates that experience? And then there's going to be some viral killer app on it, and that's going to be the gateway into a thing that's going to change everything. I mean, I don't know what exactly was the thing that changed everything with a personal computer? Is that understood? Why that maybe graphics. What was the use case? I mean, exactly.

Wasn't. Wasn't the 84 Macintosh, like, a moment when it was like, this is actually something that normal people can and want to use?

Because it was less than $5,000, I think.

And I just think it had some, like, Steve Jobs user friendliness already to it that other ones hadn't had. I think Windows 95 was a really big deal. I remember, like. Cause I'm old enough to remember the Ms. Dos when I was kind of remembered the command. And then suddenly this concept of like a window you drag something into or you double click an icon, which now seems, like, so obvious to us, was, like, revolutionary because it made it intuitive. So, you know, I don't know.

Yeah, Windows 95 was good.

It was crazy. Yeah.

I forget what the big leaps was because I was Windows 2000. It sucked. And then Windows XP was good.

I moved to Mac around 2004, so I stopped.

You sold your soul to the devil, I see. Well, us, the people still use Windows and Android. The device and the operating system of the people. Not you elitist folk with your books and your. What else and success. Okay, you write more technology means better good times, but it also means bad or bad times. And the scary thing is, if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn't matter how great the good times become. If the bad gets to a certain level of bad, it's all over for us. Can you elaborate on this? Why. Why is there. Why does the bad have that property that if it's all exponentially getting more powerful, then the bad is going to win in the end? Was. Am I misinterpreting that?

No. So the first thing is I noticed a trend which was like, the centuries, the good is getting better every century. Like, the 20th century was the best century yet in terms of prosperity, in terms of GDP per capita, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of poverty and disease, every metric that matters. The 20th century was incredible. It also had the biggest wars in history, the biggest genocide in history, the biggest existential threat yet with nuclear weapons. Right. You know, the Depression was probably as big an economic. So it's this interesting thing where the stakes are getting higher in both directions. And so the question is, like, if you get enough good, does that protect you against the bad? Right. The dream, and I do think this is possible too, is the good gets so good. Have you ever read the Culture series, the Ian Banks books?

Not yet, but I get criticized on a daily basis by some of the mutual folks we know for not having done so. And I feel like a lesser man for it. Yes, I need to change.

So that's how I got onto it. And I read six of the 10 books, and they're great, but the thing I love about them is, like, it just paints one of these futuristic societies where the good has. Has gotten so good that the bad is no longer even an issue. Like, basically. And the way that this, this works is the AI, you know, the AIs are benevolent and they control everything. And so, like, there's one random anecdote where they're like, you know, what happens if you murder someone in. Because you still, you know, there's still people with rage and jealousy or whatever. So. So someone murders someone, first of all, that person's backed up. So it's like they have to get A new body. And it's, it's annoying, but it's like it's not death. And secondly, that person, what are they going to do? Put him in jail? No, no, no. They're just going to send a slap drone around, which is this little, like tiny, you know, random drone that just will float around next to them forever and by the way, kind of be their servant. Like, it's kind of fun to have a slap drone, but just making sure that they never do anything. And it's like I was like, oh man, it could just be. Everyone could be so safe and everything could be so like, you know, you want a house, you know, the AIs will build your house. There's endless space, there's endless resources. So I do think that that could be part of our future. That's part of what excites me is like there is. Look, today would seem like a utopia to Thomas Jefferson, right? Thomas Jefferson's world would seem like a utopia to a caveman. There is a future. And by the way, these are happening faster, these jumps, right? So, so the thing that would seem like a utopia to us, we could experience in our own lifetimes, right? Like it's. Especially if, you know, life extension combines with exponential progress. I want to get there. And I think in that part of what makes it utopia is you don't have to be as scared of the worst bad guy in the world trying to do the worst damage, because we have protection. But that said, I'm not sure how that happens. Like, it's, it's, that's, it's either easier said than done. Nick Bostrom uses the example of if nuclear weapons could be manufactured by microwaving sand, for example, we probably would be in the Stone Age right now because 0.001% of people would love to destroy all of humanity, right? Some 16 year old with huge mental health problems who right now goes and shoots up a school would say, oh, even better, I'm going to blow up a city. And now suddenly there's copycats, right? And so that's like, as our technology grows, it's going to be easier for the worst bad guys to do tremendous damage. And it's easier to destroy than to build. So it takes a tiny, tiny number of these people with enough power to do bad. So that to me, I'm like, the stakes are going up because what we have to lose is this incredible utopia. But also like, dystopia is real. It happens. The Romans ended up in a dystopia. They probably earlier Thought that was never possible. Like we should not get cocky. And so to me that that trend is the exponential tech is a double edged sword. It's so exciting. I'm happy to be alive now overall because I'm an optimist and I find it exciting, but it's really scary and we, and the dumbest thing we can do is not be scared. Dumbest thing we can do is get cocky and, and think, well, my life is always the last couple generations, everything's been fine. Stop that.

What's your gut? What percentage of trajectories take us towards the as you put unimaginably good future versus unimaginably bad future? Is it like, are you as an optimist?

It's really hard to know. I mean all I, you know, one of the things we can do is look at history and on one hand there's a lot of stories. I actually listening to a great podcast right now called the Fall of Civilizations and it's literally every episode is like, you know, a little like two hour deep dive into some civilization. Some are really famous like the Roman Empire. Some are more obscure like the, the, the Norse and Greenland. But, but it's, each one is so interesting. But what's, it's. I mean there's a lot of civilizations that had their peak. There's always the peak right when they're thriving and they're at their maximum size and, and, and they have their waterways and they have their. It's civilized and it's representative and it's fair and whatever. Not, not always, but it's, it's. The peak is a great, you know, if I could go back in time, you know, it's not that you don't, you know, the farther you go back, the worse it gets. No, no, no. You want to go back to a civilization during. I would go to the Roman Empire in the year 100. Sounds great, right? You don't want to go to the Roman Empire in the year 400.

We might be in the peak right now here.

Whatever. Honestly, I, I think about like the 80s, you know, the 70s. The 80s.

Oh, here we go. The music.

No, no.

So much better.

No, the 80s culture is so annoying. It's just like I'm, when I read, when I listen to these things, I'm thinking, you know, the 80s and 90s, America, the 90s was popular. People forget that now. Like Clinton was a superstar around the world. Michael Jordan was exported internationally. Then basketball was everywhere. Suddenly you had like music, the sports, whatever. It was a little probably like the 50s, you know, you're coming out of the World War and the Depression before it, it was like this kind of like everyone was in a good mood kind of time. You know, it's like a finish a big project and it's Saturday. It was like, I feel like the 50s was kind of like everyone was having it, you know, the 20s, I feel like everyone was in a good mood randomly then. The 30s, everyone was in a bad mood. But the 90s, I think we'll look back on it as a time when everyone was in a good mood and it was like, you know, again, of course at the time it doesn't feel that way necessarily. But I look at that, I'm like maybe that was kind of America's peak and like, no, maybe not. But like it hasn't been popular since really worldwide. It's, it's gone in and out depending on the country, but like hasn't reached that level of like America's awesome around the world and the political, you know, situation's gotten, you know, really ugly. And you know, maybe it's social media, maybe, who knows? But I wonder if it'll ever be as simple as, and, and positive as it was then. Like maybe we are in the, in the, you know, it feels a little like maybe we're in the beginning of the downfall or not. Because, because these things don't just. It's not a perfect smooth hill. It goes up and down, up and down. So maybe we're.

There's another big upcoming and it's unclear whether public opinion, which is kind of what you're talking to, is correlated strongly with influence. Because you could say that even though America's been on a decline in terms of public opinion, the exporting of technology that America has still, with all the talk of China, has still been leading the way in terms of AI, in terms of social media, in terms of just basically any software related product like chips. Yeah, chips. So hardware and software. I mean America leads the way. You could argue that Google and Microsoft and Facebook are no longer American companies, they're international companies, but they really are still at the, you know, headquartered in Silicon Valley, broadly speaking. So. And Tesla of course. And just all of its, all the technological innovation still seems to be happening in the, in the United States, although culturally and politically it, this is not, it's not good. Well, maybe that could shift at any moment when all the technological development can actually be, create some positive impact in the world that can shift it with the right leadership and so on, with the right messaging.

Yeah, I Think I don't feel confident at all about whether. No, no, I don't mean that. I don't mean. I don't feel confident, in my opinion, that we may be on the downswing or that we may be. I truly don't know. It's like, I think the people, these are really big macro stories that are really hard to see when you're inside of them. It's like, it's like being on a, on a beach and running around, you know, a few miles this way and trying to suss out the shape of the coastline. Like, it's just really hard to see the big picture. You know, you get caught up in the micro stories, the little tiny ups and downs that are part of some bigger trend and, and also giant paradigm shifts happen quickly nowadays. The Internet, you know, came out of nowhere and suddenly was like, you know, changed everything. So there could be a change everything on the way. It seems like there's a few candidates for it and like, but, but I mean, it feels like the stakes are just high, high, higher than it even was for the Romans, higher than it was for. Because that we, we're more powerful as a species. We have godlike powers with technology that other civilizations at their peak didn't have.

And so I wonder if those high stakes and powers will feel laughable to people that live. Humans, aliens, cyborgs, whatever lives 100 years from now that maybe are a little like this feeling of political and technological turmoil is nothing compared to.

Well, that's the big question. So right now, you know, the 1890s was like a super politically contentious decade in the U.S. it was like immense tribalism and the newspapers were all like lying and telling. You know, there was a lot of like, what we would associate with today's media, the worst of it. And it was over gold or silver being this. I don't know, it was very. It's something that I don't understand. But the point is it was a little bit of a blip, right? It happened. It must have felt like the end of days at the time. And then now most people don't even know about that versus, you know, again, the Roman Empire actually collapsed. And so the question is just like, is, yeah. Will in 50 years will this be like. Or like McCarthyism? Oh, they had like, oh, that was like a crazy few years in America and then it was fine. Or is this the beginning of something really big and that. And that's about.

Well, I wonder if we can predict what the big thing is at the beginning. It feels like we're not. We're just here along for the ride. And at the local level and at every level, I try to do our best.

Well, how do we do our best? What's the. That's the one thing I know for sure, is that we need to have our wits about us and do our best. And the way that we can do that, you know, we have to be as wise as possible. Right. To proceed forward. And, and wisdom is an emergent property of discourse.

So you're a proponent of wisdom versus stupidity because you can make a. I can steel man the case for stupidity.

Do it.

I probably can't, but there, there's some. I think wisdom and you talk about this can come with a false confidence, arrogance. I mean, you talk about this in the book. That's too easy.

That's not wisdom. Then if you're being arrogant, you're being unwise.

Unwise.

Yeah. You know, I think, I think wisdom is doing what people 100 years from now, with the hindsight that we don't have, would do if they could come back in time and they knew everything. It's like, how do we figure out how to have hindsight when we actually are not?

What if stupidity is the thing that people from 100 years from now will see as wise? I mean, the idiot by Dostoevsky being naive and trusting everybody. Maybe.

Well, then you get lucky. Then, then, then you, you know, then maybe you get to a good, a good future by stumbling upon it. But ideally you can get there. I think a lot of America, the great things about it are a product of the wisdom of previous Americans. The Constitution was a pretty wise system to set up.

There's not much stupid stumbling around. Well, there is. I mean, with Dostoevsky's the Idiot, Prince Myshkin and Brothers Karmazov, there's Alyosha Karamazov. You err on the side of love and almost like a naive trust in other human beings and that turns out to be, at least in my perspective, in the long term for the success of the species is actually wisdom.

It's a compass.

But we don't know it's a compass.

When you're in the fog. In the fog, it's a compass.

Yeah, Love is a compass.

Okay, but. But here's the thing. So I think we should have. A compass is nice. But you know what else is nice is a fucking flashlight in the fog. That can help. You can't see that far, but you can see. Oh, you can see four feet ahead instead of one foot. And that to Me is discourse that is open, vigorous discussion in a culture that fosters that is how the species, how the American citizens as a unit can be as wise as possible, can maybe see four feet ahead instead of one foot ahead.

That said, Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog that fades with the first light of reality. So I don't know how that works out, but I feel like there's intermixing of metaphors that works okay. You also write that quote, as the authors of the Story of Us, which is this thousand page book. We have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It's all in our hands. This scares me, but it's also what gives me hope. If we can all get just a little wiser together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points towards an unimaginably good future. Do you think we can possibly define what a good future looks like? I mean, this is the problem that we ran into with communism of thinking of a utopia, of having a deep confidence about what a utopian world looks like.

Well, it's a deep confidence. That was a deep confidence about the instrumental way to get there. It was that, you know, I think a lot of us can agree that if everyone had everything they needed and we didn't have disease or poverty and people could live as long as they wanted to and choose when to die and there was no existential, major existential threat because we control. I think almost everyone can agree that would be great, that communism is a potent. That that was. They, they said this is the way to get there. And that is, that's a different question. So the unimaginably good future I'm picturing, I think a lot of people would picture and I think most people would agree now, not everyone. There's a lot of people out there who would say humans are the scourge on the earth and we should de. Growth or something. But I think a lot of people would agree that just again, take Thomas Jefferson, bring him here. He would see it as a utopia for obvious reasons. The medicine, the food, the transportation, just how, the quality of life and the safety and all of that. So extrapolate that forward for us. Now we were Thomas Jefferson, you know, what's the equivalent? That's what I'm talking about. And the big question is I actually don't, I don't try to say here's the way to get there. Here's the actual specific way to get there. I try to say how do we have A flashlight so that we can together figure it out. Like, how do we give ourselves the best chance of figuring out way to get there? And I think part of the problem with. With communists and people is ideologues is that they're. They're way too overconfident that they know the way to get there. And it's. It becomes a religion to them, this solution. And then you're not. You can't update once you have a solution as a religion.

And so I felt a little violated when you said communist and stared deeply into my soul. In this book, you've developed a framework for how to fix everything. It's called the Ladder. Can you explain it?

Okay. It's not a framework for how to fix everything.

I would say that I'll explain it to Tim Urban at some point how this humor thing works. Yeah, it's a framework of how to think about collaboration between humans such that we could fix things.

I think it's a compass. It's like a ruler that we can. Once we look at it together and see what it is, we can all say, oh, we want to go to that side of the ruler, not this side. And so it gives us a direction to go.

And so what are the parts of the Ladder?

So I have these two characters, this orange guy, this primitive mind is. This is our software. That is the software that was in a 50,000 BC person's head that was specifically optimized to help that person survive in that world. And not even. Not just. Not really survive, but help them pass their genes on in that world. And civilization happened quickly, and brains changed slowly. And so that unchanged dude is still running the show in our head. And I use the example of, like, Skittles. Like, why do we eat Skittles? It's trash. It's obviously bad for you. And it's because the primitive mind in the world that it was programmed for, there was no Skittles any. It was just fruit. And, you know, and if there was a dense, chewy, sweet fruit like that, it meant you just found, like a calorie gold mine. Energy, energy. Take it, take it. Eat as much as you can. Gorge on it. Hopefully you get a little fat. That would be the dream. And now we're so good with energy for a while, we don't have to stress about it anymore. So today Mars Inc. Is clever and says, let's not sell things to people's higher minds. Who's the other character? Let's sell to people's primitive minds. Primitive minds are dumb. And let's trick them into thinking this is this, this, this thing you should eat, and then they'll eat it. Now Mars Inc. Is a huge company.

Actually, just to linger real quick. So you said primitive mind and higher mind. So those are the two things that make up this bigger mind that. That is the modern human being.

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's not perfect. Obviously there's a lot of crossover. There's people who will yell at me for saying there's two minds. And you know that. But to me it's still a useful framework where you have this software that has making decisions based on a world that you're not in anymore. And then you've got this other character. I call it the higher mind. And it's the part of you that knows that skills are not good and can override the instinct. And the reason you don't always eat skittles is because the higher mind says, no, no, no, we're not doing that because that's bad. And I know that right now you can apply that to a lot of things. The higher mind is the one that knows I shouldn't procrastinate. The primitive mind is the one that wants to conserve energy and not do anything icky and, you know, can't see the future. So he procrastinates the. You know, you can apply this. No, I, in this book apply it to. To how we form our beliefs is one of the ways. And then eventually to politics and political movements. But like, if you think about, well, what's the equivalent of the skittles tug of war in your head for how do you form your beliefs? And it's that the primitive mind in the world that it was optimized for, it wanted to feel conviction about its beliefs. It wanted to be sure that it was. Wanted to feel conviction and it wanted to agree with the people around them. It didn't want to stand out. It wanted to fervently agree with the tribe about the tribe's sacred beliefs. Right. And so there's a big part of us that wants to do that that doesn't like changing our mind. It feels like it's part of our. The primitive mind identifies with beliefs, feels like it's a threat, a physical threat to you, to your primitive mind, when you change your mind or when someone disagrees with you in a smart way. So there's that huge force in us which is confirmation bias. That's where that comes from. It's this desire to keep believing what we believe and this desire to also fit in with our beliefs to believe what the people around us believe. And that can be fun. In some ways, we all like the same sports team, and we're all super into it, and we're all going to be biased about that call together. I mean, it's not always bad, but it's not a very smart way to be. And you're actually. You're working kind of for those ideas. Those ideas are like your boss. And you're working so hard to keep believing those. Those ideas are. You know, a really good paper comes in that you read that conflicts with those ideas. And you will do all this work to say that paper is bullshit because you're a faithful employee of those ideas. Now, the higher mind, to me, the same party that can override the Skittles, can override this, and can and can search for something that makes a lot more sense, which is truth. Because what rational being wouldn't want to know the truth? Who wants to be delusional? And so there's this tug of war because the higher mind doesn't identify with ideas. Why would you. It's an experiment you're doing, and it's a mental model. And if someone can come over and say you're wrong, you'd say, where? Where? Show me, show me. And if they point out something that is wrong, you say, oh, thanks. Oh, good, I just got a little smarter. Right? You're not going to identify with the thing. Go, yeah, kick it. See if you can break it. If you can break it. It's not that good, right? So there's both of these in our heads, and there's this tug of war between them. And sometimes, you know, if you're telling me about something with AI, I'm probably going to think with my higher mind because I'm not identified with it. But if you go and you criticize the ideas in this book, or you criticize my religious beliefs, or you criticize, I might have a harder time. Because the primitive mind says, no, no, no, those are our special ideas. So, yeah, so that's one way to use this ladder is like, it's a spectrum. You know, at the top, the higher mind is doing all the thinking. And then as you go down, it becomes more of a tug of war. And at the bottom, the primitive mind is in total control.

And this is distinct, as you show, from the spectrum of ideas. So this is how you think versus what you think. And those are distinct. Those are different dimensions.

We need. We need a vertical axis. We have all these horizontal axes. Left, right, center. Or you Know this opinion all the way to this opinion. But it's like what's much more important than where you stand is how you got there. Right. And how you think. So this helps if I can say this person's kind of on the left or on the right, but they're up high. I think, I think. In other words, I think they got there using evidence and reason and they were willing to change their mind. Now that means a lot to me, what they have to say. If I think they're just a tribal person and I can predict all their beliefs from hearing one because it's so obvious what political beliefs. That person's views are irrelevant to me because they're not real. They didn't come from information. They came from a tribe's kind of, you know, sacred ten commandments.

I really like the comic you have in here, but with the boxer. This is the best boxer in the world. Wow, cool. Who has he beaten? No one. He's never fought anyone. Then how do you know he's the best boxer in the world? I can just tell. I mean, this connects with me and I think with a lot of people just because in martial arts it's especially kind of true. There's this, this whole legend about different martial artists and that kind of reconstruct like action figures. Like, you know, thinking that Steven Seagal is the best fighter in the world or Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is actually backed up. He has done really well in competition. But still, the ultimate test for particularly for martial arts is what we now know as mixed martial arts, UFC and so on. And that's the actual scientific testing grounds.

It's a meritocracy.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's within certain rules and you can criticize those rules. Like this doesn't actually represent the broader combat that you would think of when you're thinking about martial arts. But reality is you're actually testing things. And that's when you realize that Aikido and some of these kind of woo woo martial arts in their certain implementations don't work in the way you think they would in the context of fighting. I think this is one of the places where everyone can agree, which is why it's a really nice comic. Because then you start to talk about, map this onto ideas that people take personally. It starts becoming a lot more difficult to, to basically highlight that we're thinking with, not with our higher mind, but with our primitive mind.

Yeah, I mean, if, if, if I'm thinking with my higher mind. And now here is. You can use different things for an idea, as a metaphor. So here the metaphor is a boxer.

Yeah.

For an, for one of your conclusions, one of your beliefs. And if I'm, if I'm, if I'm, if all I care about is truth, in other words, for the. That means all I care about is having a good boxer, I would say go, yeah, try see if this person's good.

Go.

I would, in other words, I would get into arguments, which is throwing my boxer out there to fight against other ones. And if I think my argument's good, by the way, I love boxing. If I, if I think my guy is, is amazing, you know, Mike Tyson, I'm thinking, oh, yeah, bring it on. Who wants to come see? I bet no one can beat my boxer. I love a good debate. Right. In that case, now, what would you think about my boxer if not only was I telling you he was great, but he's never boxed anyone? But then you said, okay, well, your idea came over to try to punch him, and I screamed and I said, what are you doing? That's violence, and you're an awful person, and I don't want to be friends with you anymore because you would think this boxer obviously sucks, or at least I think it sucks deep down, because why would I be so anti anyone? Note boxing allowed, you know, people. So I, I, I think if you're in, so this, I call this a ladder. Right. If you're in low rung land, you know, whether it's a culture or whatever, a debate, an argument, when someone says, no, that's totally wrong, what you're saying about that, and here's why. Or you're actually being totally biased. It sounds like a fight. People are going to say, oh, wow, we got in like a fight. It was really awkward. Like, are we still friends with that person? Because that's not a culture of boxing. It's a culture where you don't touch each other's ideas. That's, that's insensitive versus in a, you know, a high rung culture. It's sport. That's. I mean, look, every one of your podcasts, you're, you're, whether you're agreeing or disagreeing, the tone is the same. It's not like, oh, this got awkward. It's like the tone is identical because you're just playing intellectually either way, because it's a good high wrong space.

At his best. At his best. But people do take stuff personally, and then that's actually one of the skills of conversation. Just as a fan of podcast, is when you sense that people take a thing personally. You have to like, there's sort of methodologies and little paths you can take to like calm things down, like go around the. Don't, don't take it as a violation.

Of like you're trying to suss out which of their ideas are. Are sacred to them.

Yeah.

And which ones are. Bring it on.

And sometimes it's actually, I mean, that's the skill of it. I suppose that sometimes it's a certain wardings in the way you challenge those ideas are important. You can, you can challenge them indirectly and then together walk together in that way. Because there, what I've learned is people are used to their ideas being attacked in a certain way in a certain tribal way. And if you just avoid those. Like for example, if you have political discussions and just never mention left or right or Republican and Democrat, none of that. Just talk about different ideas and avoid certain kind of triggering words. You can actually talk about ideas versus falling into this path that's well established through battles that people have previously fought.

When you say triggering, I mean, who's getting triggered? The primitive mind. So what you're trying to do, what you're saying in this language is how do you have conversations with other people's higher minds? Almost like whispering.

Yeah.

Without waking up the primitive mind. Primitive mind is they're sleeping. Right. And as soon as you say. As soon as you say something, the left primitive mind gets up and says, what? What are you saying about the left? And now, now everything goes off the rails.

What do you make of conspiracy theories under this framework of the latter?

So here's the thing about conspiracy theories is that once in a while they're true. Right. Because sometimes there's a natural conspiracy. Actually humans are pretty good at real conspiracies, secret things. And then, you know, I just watched the Madoff document, great new Netflix stock, by the way. And so the question is, how do you create a system that is good at. You put the conspiracy theory in and it either goes, eh, or it says, this is interesting. Let's keep exploring it. Like how do you put. How do you do something that it can. How do you assess? And so again, I think the Hieron culture is really good at it because a real conspiracy. What's going to happen is you put it. It's like a little machine you put in the middle of the table and everyone starts firing darts at it or bow and arrow or whatever, and everyone starts kicking it and trying to. And almost all conspiracy theories, they quickly crumble. Right. Because they actually, you Know, you know, Trump's election won. I actually dug in and I looked at like every claim that he or his team made and I was like, all of these, none of these hold up the scrutiny. None of them. I was open minded, but none of them did. So that was one that as soon as it's open to scrutiny, it crumbles. The only way that conspiracy can stick around in a, in a community is if it is a culture where that's being treated as a sacred idea that no one should kick or throw a dart at, because if you throw a dart, it's gonna break. So it's being, it's. And so what you want is a culture where no idea is sacred, anything can get thrown at. And so I think that then what you'll find is that 9, 4 out of 100 conspiracy theories come in and they fall down. The other, maybe four of the others come in and there's something there, but it's not as extreme as people say. And then maybe one is a huge deal and it's actually a real conspiracy.

Well, isn't there a lot of gray area and there's a lot of mystery. Isn't that where the conspiracy theories seep in? So it's great to hear that you've really looked into the Trump election fraud claims, but aren't they resting on a lot of kind of gray area, like fog basically saying that there is dark forces in the shadows that are actually controlling everything. I mean, the same thing with maybe you can. There's like safer conspiracy theories, more, less controversial. Like, have we landed on the moon? Right. Did the United States ever land on the moon? There's, you know, you like the reason those conspiracy theories work is you could construct there's incentives and motivation for faking the moon landing. There's a lot of, there's a, there's very little data supporting the moon landing. Like that's very public and kind of looks fake space kind of.

And that would be a big story if it turned, turned out to be fake.

That's the, that's, that would be the argument against it. Like, are people really as a collective going to hold on to a story that big? Yeah, so that. But, but there's a lot that. The reason they work is there's mystery.

Yeah. It's a great documentary called behind the Curve about flat Earthers. And one of the things that you learn about flat Earthers is they believe all the conspiracies, not just the flat earth. They are convinced the moon landing is fake. They're convinced 911 was an American con job. They're convinced, you know, that name a conspiracy and they believe it. And so it's so interesting is that I think of it as a, as a skepticism spectrum.

Yeah.

So on one side you. It's like a filter in your head. Filter in your, in the beliefs section of your brain. On one end of the spectrum, you are gullible, perfectly gullible. You believe anything someone says. Right. On the other side, you're paranoid. You think everyone's lying to you. Right. Everything's. Everything is false. Nothing that anyone says is true. Right. So obviously those aren't good places to be. Now the healthy place, I think that the. So I think the healthy place is to be somewhere in the middle. But also you can learn to trust certain sources and then you don't have to do as much, apply as much skepticism to them. And so here's what, like when you start having a bias, just so you have a political bias, when your side says something, you will find yourself moving towards the gullible side of the spectrum. You read an article written that's. That supports your views, you move to the gullible side of the spectrum and you just believe it. And you don't have any. Where's that skepticism that you normally have? Right. And then you move, and then you. Soon, soon as it's the other person talking, the other team talking, you move to the skeptical, the closer to the, to the denial, paranoid side. Now flat Earthers are the extreme. They are either at 10 or 1. So it's like, it's so interesting because they're the people who are saying, ah, no, I won't believe you. I'm not gullible. No, everyone else is gullible about the moon landing. I won't. And then yet when there's this evidence like, oh, because you can't see Seattle, you can't see the buildings over that horizon. And you should, which isn't true. You should be. If it were, if the Earth around you wouldn't be able to see them. Therefore. So suddenly they become the most gullible person here. Any theory about the Earth flat, they believe it. It goes right into their beliefs. So they're actually jumping back and forth between refusal to believe anything and believe anything. And so they're the extreme example. But I think when it comes to conspiracy theories, the people that get themselves into trouble are the ones who, they become really gullible when they hear a conspiracy theory that kind of fits with their worldview. And they likewise, when there's something that's kind of obviously true and it's not a big lie. They will actually, they'll think it is. They just tighten up their kind of skepticism filter. And so yeah, so I think the healthy places to be is where you are not because you also don't want to be the person who says every conspiracy. You hear the word conspiracy theory and it sounds like a synonym for like quack job, crazy theory. Right. So, yeah, so I, I, I think, yeah, I think it's be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and to learn to fine tune it, which is.

A tricky place to operate because you kind of have to, every time you hear a new conspiracy theory, you should approach it with an open mind. And you know, and also if you don't have enough time to investigate, which most people don't kind of still have a humility not to make a conclusive statement that that's nonsense.

There's a lot of social pressure actually to immediately laugh off any conspiracy theory if it's done by the bad guys. Right. You will quickly get mocked and laughed at and not taken seriously if you give any credence. You know, back the lab leak was, it was a good one where it's like turned out that that was at least very credible if not true. And that was a perfect example of one where when it first came out, not only so Bret Weinstein talked about it and then I in a totally different conversation said something complimentary about him on a totally different subject. And people were saying, Tim, you might have gone a little off the deep end. You're quoting someone who is like a lab leak person. So I was getting my reputation dinged for complimenting on a different topic. Someone whose reputation was totally sullied because they questioned an orthodoxy. Right. So it's, you see, so what, what does that make me want to do? Distance myself from Brett Weinstein. That's the, at least they see incentive. That's a. And what does that make other people want to do? Don't become the next Brett Weinstein. Don't say it out loud because you don't want to become someone that no one wants to compliment anymore. Right. You can see the social pressure and that's, and of course when there is a conspiracy, that social pressure is its.

Best friend because then they see the people from outside are seeing that social pressure enact like Tim Urban becoming more and more and more extreme to the other side. And so they're going to take the more and more and more extreme. I mean this, what, what do you see that the pandemic did that Covid did to our civilization in that regard, in the forces, why was it so divisive? Do you understand that?

Yeah. So Covid, you know, I thought might be the ultimate example of the topic that will unite us all is the alien tech.

Yeah.

Although honestly, I don't even have that much faith. Then I think there'd be like, some people are super, like, you know, pro alien and some people are anti alien.

But anyway, I was actually sergeant to interrupt because I was talking to a few astronomers and they're the first folks that made me kind of sad in that if we discover life on Mars, for example, that there's going to be potentially a division over that too, where half the people will not believe that's real.

Well, because we live in a current society where the political divide has subsumed everything. And that's not always like that. It goes into stages like that. We're in a really bad one where it's actually in the book, I call it like a vortex, almost like a whirlpool that. That pulls everything into it. And so normally you'd say, okay, immigration naturally gonna be contentious. That's always political. Right. But like, Covid seemed like, oh, that's one of those that will unite us all. Let's fight this not human virus thing. Like, obvious. There's no. No one's sensitive. No one's, like, getting hurt when we insult the virus. Like, let's all be. We have this threat, this common threat that's a threat to every one of every nationality and in every country, every ethnicity. And it didn't do that at all. The whirlpool was too powerful. So it pulled Covid in and suddenly masks. If you're on the left, you like them. If you're on the right, you hate them. And suddenly lockdowns. If you're on the left, you like them, and on the right, you hate them. And vaccines. This is. People forget this. When Trump first started talking about the vaccine, Biden, Harris, Cuomo, they're all saying, I'm not taking that vaccine. Not from this CDC because it was.

Too rushed or something like that, but.

Because I'm not trusting anything that Trump says. Trump wants me to take it. I'm not taking it. I'm not taking it from this cdc. So this was Trump. This Trump was almost out of office. But at the time, if Trump had been, it would have been. I'm pretty sure it would have stayed right. Likes vaccines. The left doesn't like vaccines. Instead, the President switched and all those people are suddenly saying. They were actually specifically saying that if you, you know, that, that, that, like, if. If you're saying the CDC is not trustworthy, that's misinformation, which is exactly what they were saying about the other cdc. And they were saying it because they genuinely didn't trust Trump, which is fair. But now, and other people don't trust the Biden cdc, suddenly it's this kind of misinformation that needs to be censored. So it was a sad moment because it was a couple months at the very. Even a week or so at the. I mean, a month or so at the very beginning, when it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were kind of like, oh, I feel like they're kind of irrelevant right now. And then very quickly, the whirlpool sucked it in. And in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these. A lot of the trust in a lot of these institutions for the long run.

But there's also an individual psychological impact. It's like a vicious negative feedback cycle where they were deeply affected on an emotional level and people just were not their best selves.

That's definitely true. Yeah. I mean, talk about the primitive mind. I mean, one thing that we've been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens. And it's emotional, right? It brings out. There's really interesting studies where, like, if they studied the phenomenon of disgust, which is one of these, like, smiling is universal. You don't have to ever translate a smile. Right. Certain, you know, throwing your hands up when you're. When your sports team wins is universal because it's part of our coding. And so is disgust to kind of make this, like, you know, face where you wrinkle up your nose and you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag. That's to expel, expel, whatever is.

Because it's.

It's the reaction when something is potentially a pathogen that might harm us. Right. Feces, vomit, whatever. But they did this interesting study where people who. Who in two groups, the control group, was shown images of. And I might be getting two studies mixed up, but they were showing images of, like, car crashes and, like, disturbing but not disgusting. And the other one was showing, like, you know, like, you know, rotting things and just things that were disgusting. And then they were asked about immigration. These were Canadians. And the group that was. Had the disgust feeling going, pulsing through their body was way more likely to prefer, like, immigrants from white countries. And the group that was. Had been shown car accidents. They still prefer the groups from white countries, but much less so. And so what does that mean? It's because the disgust impulse makes us scared of, you know, sexual practices that are foreign, of ethnicities that are not look, that don't look like us of it stokes xenophobia. So it's ugly, it's really ugly stuff. This is of course also how, you know, the Nazi propaganda with cockroaches and. Or it was Rwandan was cockroaches. You know, know the Nazis was rats and you know, it's, it's specifically, it's a dehumanizing emotion. So anyway, we were, we were, we were, we were talking about COVID But I think it does, it taps deep into like the human psyche and it, and it's, I don't think it brings out our. I think, like you said, I think it brings out an ugly side in us.

You describe an idea lab as being opposite of echo chambers. So we know what echo chambers are. And you said like just basically no good term for the opposite of an echo chamber. So what's an idea lab?

Yeah, well, first of all, both of these, we think of an echo chamber as like a group maybe or even a place. But it's a culture, it's an intellectual culture. And this goes along with the high rung. So high rung and low rung thinking is individual. That's what I was talking about. What's going on in your head. But this is very connected to the social scene around us. And so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together. Basically it's collab. So an echo chamber to me is a collaborative low rung thinking. It is, it's a culture where the cool, it's based around a sacred set of ideas. And it's the coolest thing you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great the sacred ideas are and how bad and evil and stupid and wrong the people are who have the other views and this. And it's quite boring, you know, it's quite boring, you know, it's very hard to learn. And changing your mind is not cool in an echo chamber culture makes you seem wishy washy. It makes you seem like, you know, like you're waffling and you're flip flopping or whatever. Showing conviction about the sacred ideas in echo chamber culture is awesome if you're just like, you know, obviously this makes you seem smart while being, you know, humble makes you seem dumb. So now flip all of those things on their heads and you have an. You have the opposite, which is idealab culture, which is collaborative high rung thinking. It's collaborative truth finding. But it's also just. It's just a totally different vibe. It's. It's a place where arguing is a fun thing. It's not. No one's getting offended and criticizing. Like, the thing everyone believes is actually makes you seem, like, interesting. Like, oh, really? Like, why, why do you think we're all wrong? And, um, expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you. It doesn't make you seem smart. It makes you seem stupid if you don't really know what you're talking about, but you're acting like you do.

I really like this diagram of where on the X axis is agreement. On the Y axis is decency. That's in an ideal lab, in an echo chamber. There's only one axis. It's asshole to non asshole, right? This is a really important thing to understand about the difference between. You call it decency here about assholishness and disagreement.

So my college friends, we love to argue, right? And no one thought anyone was an asshole for. It was just for sport. Sometimes we'd realize we're not even disagreeing on something and that would be disappointing and be like, oh, I think we agree. And it was kind of like sad. It was like, oh, well, there goes the fun. And one of the members of this group has this. She brought her new boyfriend to one of our hangouts and there was like a heated, heated, heated debate, you know, just, just, just one of our typical things. And afterwards, you know, the next day, he said, like, is everything okay? And she was like, what do you mean? And he said like, after, you know, the fight. And she was like, what fight? And he was like, you know, the fight last night. And she was like. And she had to. Then she was like, you mean like the arguing? And she. And he was like, yeah. And she. And so that's someone who is not used to idealab culture. Coming into it and seeing it is like, that was like, this is like, are they still friends, right? And idealab is nice for the people in them because you're it. Individuals thrive. You don't want to just conform. It makes you seem boring in an idea. But you want to be yourself. You want to challenge things. You want to have a unique brain. So that's great. And you also have people criticizing your ideas, which makes you smarter. It doesn't always feel good, but you become more correct and smarter. An echo chamber is the opposite, where it's not good for the People in it, your learning skills atrophy and I think it's boring. But the thing is, they also have emergent properties. So the emergent property of an idealab is like super intelligence. Just you and me alone, just the two of us. If we're working together on something, but we're being really grown up about it, we're disagreeing, we're not, you know, no one's sensitive about anything. We're going to each find flaws in the other one's arguments that you wouldn't have found on your own. And we're going to have double the epiphanies, right? So it's almost like the two of us together is like as smart as 1.45. It's like 50% smarter than either of us alone, right? So you have this 1.5 intelligent kind of joint being. Now we've made now bring the third person and fourth person in, right? You see, it starts to scale up. This is why science institutions can discover relativity and quantum mechanics and these things that no individual human, you know, was going to come up with without a ton of collaboration because it's this giant ideal app. So it has an emergent property of super intelligence. An echo chamber is the opposite, where it has the emergent property of stupidity. I mean, it has the emergent property of a bunch of people all, you know, paying fealty to this set of sacred ideas. And so you lose this magical thing about language and humans, which is collaborative intelligence, you lose it, it disappears.

But there is that axis of decency which is really interesting because you kind of painted this picture of you and your friends arguing really harshly, but underlying that is a basic camaraderie, respect. There's all kinds of mechanisms we humans have constructed to communicate mutual respect or maybe communicate that you're here for the idea lab version of this.

Totally. You don't take it, you don't get personal. Right? You're not getting personal. You're not, you're not taking things personally. People are respected in an idea lab and ideas are disrespected.

And there's a ways to signal that. So like for with friends, you've already done the signaling, you've already established a relationship. The interesting thing is online, I think you have to do some of that work. To me, sort of steel manning the other side or no, having empathy and hearing out, being able to basically repeat the argument the other person is making before you and showing like respect to that argument. I could see how you could think that before you make a counter argument. There's just a bunch of ways to communicate that you're here not to do kind of, what is it? Low rung, you know, shit talking, mockery, derision. But are actually here with ultimately to discover the truth in the space of ideas and the tension of those ideas. And I think it's, I think that's a skill that we're all learning as a civilization of how to do that kind of communication effectively. Because I think disagreement, as I'm learning on the Internet, it's actually a really tricky skill, like high effort, high decency, disagreement. Like I listened to, there's a really good debate podcast, Intelligence Squared, and like, they, they can go pretty hard in the paint.

Classic idea lab. It's.

Exactly. But like, how do we map that to social media when people like, will say, we'll say. Well, like Lex or anybody. You're not. You hate disagreement. You, you want to sense their disagreement. No, I love Intelligence Squared type of disagreement. That's fun.

You want to reduce assholes.

And for me, personally, I don't want to reduce assholery. I kind of like assholery. It's fun in many ways. But the problem is when the asshole shows up to the party, they make it less fun for the party that's there for the idea lab. And the other people, especially the quiet voices at the back of the room, they leave. And so all you're left is with assholes.

Well, political Twitter, to me, is one of those parties. It's a big party where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet thinkers away.

Yeah.

And, and so, so if you think about this graph again, what the place like Twitter, a great way to get followers is to be an asshole with a certain, you know, pumping a certain ideology. You'll get a huge amount of followers. And for those followers and the followers, you're going to get the people who let you know, not the people who, like you, are probably going to be people who are really thinking with their primitive mind because they're seeing you're. You're being, you're being an asshole. But because you agree with them, they love you and they think. They don't see any problem with how you're being.

Yeah, they don't see the asshole. This is a fascinating thing because look.

Because look at the thing on the right. Agreement and decency are the same. So if you're in that mindset, the bigger the asshole, the better. If you're agreeing with me, you're my man. I love what you're saying. Yes. Show them right. And the Algorithm helps those people. Does those people do great on the algorithm?

There's a fascinating dynamic that happens because I have. I've currently hired somebody that looks at my social media and they block people because the assholes will roll in. They're not actually there to have an interesting disagreement, which I love. They're there to do kind of mockery. And then when they get blocked, they then celebrate that to their echo chamber, like, look at this, I got him. Or whatever.

Or they'll say some annoying thing like, oh, so it's. So he talks about he likes. You know, if I, If I'd done this, they'll say, he, oh, he says he likes Idea Labs, but he actually wants to create an echo chamber. But I'm like, nope, you're an asshole. I'm not, I'm not. I just. Look at the other 50 people and this thread that disagreed with me. Yeah, respectfully, they're not blocked.

Yep, exactly.

Or they'll say some annoying thing like, oh, so it's. So he talks about he likes. You know, if I have. I'd done this. They'll say, he, oh, he says he likes Idea Labs, but he actually wants to create an echo chamber. I'm like, nope, you're an asshole. I'm not. I'm not. Look at the other 50 people and this thread that disagreed with me. Respectfully, they're not blocked.

Yep, exactly.

You know, and so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because, again, they only see the thing on the right and they're not understanding that there's two axes or that I see it as two axes. And so you seem petty in that moment, but it's like, no, no, no, you're. This is very specific what I'm doing. You're actually killing the conversation.

I. In generally, I give all those folks a pass and just send them love telepathically. But yes, like, it's. Getting rid of assholes in the conversation is the way you allow for the disagreement.

You do a lot of, like, when I think when, like, primitive mindedness comes at you, at least on Twitter, I don't know what you're feeling internally in that moment, but you do a lot of, like, I'm going to meet that with my higher mind. And you come out and you'll be like. And you'll be like, thanks for all the criticism. I love you. And that's. That, that, that. That's actually a. An amazing response because it just. It. What it does is that it, It. It unriles up that person's primitive mind and actually wakes up their higher mind who says, oh, okay, you know, this guy's not so bad. And suddenly like civility comes back.

So it's a very powerful, hopefully long term. But the thing is, they do seem to drive away high quality disagreement because it takes so much effort to disagree in a high quality way.

I've noticed this on my blog. One of the things I pride myself on is my comment section is awesome. Everyone's being respectful. No one's afraid to disagree with me and say, tear my post apart, but in a totally respectful way where the underlying thing is, I'm here because I like this guy and his writing and people disagree with each other and they get in these long. And it's interesting and I read it and I'm learning. And then I, you know, a couple posts, especially the ones I've got written about politics, it's not like it seems like any other comment section. People are being nasty to me, they're being nasty to each other. And then I looked down one of them and I realized, like, almost all of this is the work of like three people. Yeah, that's who you need to block. Those people need to be blocked. You're not being thin skinned, you're not being petty doing it. You're actually protecting an idea lab. Because what really aggressive people like that do is they'll turn it into their own echo chamber. Because now everyone is scared to kind of disagree with them. It's unpleasant. And so people who will chime in are the people who agree with them and suddenly like they've taken over the space.

And I kind of believe that those people on a different day could actually do high effort disagreement. It's just that they're in a, in a, in a certain kind of mood. And a lot of us, just like you said, with a primitive mind, could get into that mood. And I believe it's actually the job of the technology, the platform to incentivize those folks to be like, are you sure this is the best you can do? If you really want to talk shit about this idea, do better. And then we need to create incentives where you get likes for high effort disagreement. Because currently you get likes for something that's slightly funny and is a little bit like mockery. Like, yeah, basically signals to some kind of echo chamber that this person is a horrible person, is a hypocrite, is evil, whatever that feels like, it's solvable with technology because I think in our private lives, none of us want that.

I wonder if it's making me think that I want to like. Because a much easier way for me to do it just for my. My world would be to say something like, you know, here's this axis, this high. This is. This is part of what I. Part of what I like about the latter is it's a language that we can use. It's like, specifically, what we're talking about is high rung disagreement good, low rung disagreement bad. Right? And so it gives us, like, a language for that. And so what I would say is I would, you know, my, you know, I would have my, you know, readers, you know, understand this axis. And then I would specifically say something like, please do the do the do. Wait, but why a favor and upvote, regardless of what they're saying horizontally, right? Regardless of what their actual view is. Upvote, high rung ness. They could be tearing me apart. They can be saying, great. They can be praising me, whatever. Upvote high. Running this and down vote low wrongness. And if enough people are doing that, suddenly there's all this incentive to try to say, no, I need to calm my emotion down here and not be personal because I'm gonna get voted into oblivion by these people.

I think a lot of people would be very good at that. And not only would they be good at that, they would want that. That task of saying, I know I completely disagree with this person, but this was a high effort. High rung disagreement.

It gets everyone thinking about that other axis too. You're not just looking at, where do you stand horizontally? You're saying, well, how did you get there? And how are you, you know, are you treating ideas like machines? Or are you treating them like little babies?

And there should be some kind of labeling on personal attacks versus idea disagreement. Sometimes people, like, throw in both a little bit, right? And it's like, all right, no, there should be a disincentive at personal attacks versus idea attacks.

Well, you can also. One metric is a respectful disagreement. If I see. Just say someone else's Twitter, and I see, you know, you put out a thought, and I see someone say, you know, you know, someone say, you know, I don't see it that way. Here's. Here's where I think you went wrong. And they're just explaining. I'm thinking that if Lex reads that, he's gonna be interested. He's gonna. He's gonna wanna post more stuff, right? Because he's gonna like that. If I see someone being like, wow, this really shows the kind of person that you become, or shows Up. I'm thinking that person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less. It's making him. And so what's that doing? What that person's actually doing is they're putting is. They're actually. They're chilling discussion because they're making it unpleasant to. They're making it scary to say what you think. And the first person isn't at all. The first person is making you want to say more stuff. So. And those are both disagree. Those are people who both disagree with you.

Exactly. Exactly. I want to. Great disagreements with friends in meatspace is like you're. They disagree with you. They could be even yelling at you. Honestly. They could even have some shit talk where it's like personal attacks. It is still feels good because you.

Know them well and you know that. That shit talk because yeah, friends shit talk all the time. Playing us, playing a sport or a game. And again, it's. It's because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun. We're having fun. And obviously I love you. Like exactly. You know, and that's. That's important online. It's a lot harder.

Yeah. That obviously I love you. That underlies a lot of human interaction.

Right.

Seems to be easily lost online. I've seen some people on Twitter and elsewhere just behave their worst.

Yeah.

And it's like, I know that's not who you are. Totally. Like, why are you.

I actually, you know, I know is this human. I know someone personally who is one of the best people.

Yeah.

I'm just. I love this guy. Like one of the best, like fun, funny, like nicest dudes. And he. If you would. If you looked at his Twitter only you would think he's a culture warrior, an awful culture warrior and you know, you know, biased and just stoking anger and, and, and it comes out of a good place. And I'm not going to give any other info about, you know, specific but.

Like I think you're describing a lot of people.

It comes out of a good place because he is about what you know, it comes out. But it's just. I can't square the two. It's so. And that's it. You have to. Once you know someone like that, you can realize, okay, apply that to everyone because a lot of these people are lovely people. And it just bring even just, you know, back in the before social media, you ever had a friend who like was just like they had this like dickishness on text or email that they didn't have in person. You're like, wow, like email you is like kind of a dick. And it's like it just. Certain people have a different Persona behind the screen.

It has, for me personally, has become a bit of a meme that Lex blocks with love. But there is a degree to that where this is. I don't see people on social media as representing who they really are. I really do have love for them. I really do think positive thoughts of them throughout the entirety of the experience. I see this as some weird side effect of online communication. And so it's like to me, blocking is not some kind of a derisive act towards that individual.

It's just like saying, well, a lot of times what's happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion that dehumanizes others. So that doesn't mean they're a bad person. We all can do it, but they're dehumanizing you or whoever they're. They're being nasty to because they, in a way they would never do in person because in a person they're reminded that's a person. Remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I'm doing VR, like, won't step off the cliff, but the smart part of my brain knows I'm just on the rug. That dumb part of our brain is really dumb in a lot of ways. It's the part of your brain where you can set the clock five minutes fast to help you not be late. The smart part of your brain knows that you did that, but the dumb part will fall for it, right? That same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screen, behind that handle is a human that has feelings. And that doesn't mean they're a bad person for forgetting that, because it's possible.

Well, this really interesting idea, and I wonder if it's true that you write, is that both primitive mindedness and high mindedness tend to be contagious. I hope you're right that it's possible to make both contagious because our, our sort of popular intuition is only one of them. The primitive mindedness is contagious as exhibited by social media.

To compliment you again, don't you think that your, your Twitter to me is like, I was just looking down and I mean it is a. It's just high mindedness. It's just high mindedness. Down, down, down, down, down. It's, it's, it's gratitude, it's optimism, it's love, it's forgiveness. It's all these things that are the opposite of grievance. And victimhood and resentment and pessimism. Right. And there's I think, a reason that a lot of people follow you because it is contagious. It makes other people feel those feelings.

I don't know, there's been, I've been recently, over the past few months, attack quite a lot. And it's fascinating to watch because it's over things that I think I probably have done stupid things, but I'm being attacked for things that are totally not worthy of attack. I got attacked for a book list.

I saw that, by the way. I thought, I thought it was great.

But you can always kind of find ways to, you know, I guess the assumption is this person surely is a fraud or some other explanation. He sure has dead bodies in the basement he's hiding or something like this. And then I'm going to construct a narrative around that and mock and attack that. I don't know how that works, but there is, there does. And I think you write this in the book. There seems to be a gravity pulling people towards the primitive mind when it.

Comes to anything political. Right. Religious. Certain things sure are bottom heavy, you know, for our psyche. They have a magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder. And why, why does politics pull our psyches down on the ladder? Because for the tens of thousand years that we were evolving, you know, during human history, it was life or death. Politics was life or death. And so um, there's actually an amazing study where it's like they challenged like 20 different beliefs of a person and different parts of the person's brain and they had an MRI going. Different parts of the person's brain lit up when non political beliefs were challenged versus political beliefs were challenged when political beliefs were challenged. When non political beliefs were challenged. The like, the rational, like the prefrontal cortex type areas were lit up when the political beliefs were challenged. And then I'm getting over my head here, but it's like the, the parts of your brain, the default mode network, the parts of your brain associated with like inter introspection and like your own identity lit up and they were much more likely to change their mind on all the beliefs, the non political beliefs. When that default mode network part of your brain lit up, you were, you were gonna, if anything get more firm in those beliefs when you, when you had them challenged. So politics is one of those topics that just, it literally, literally lights up different part of our brain. It's. And again I think we come back to primitive mind, higher mind here. It's like it, it it gets our higher. This is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed to care a ton about. And so there. It's going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and. And looking for truth because we have all this gravity towards.

Well, it's weird because politics, like. What is politics like to talk about? It's a bunch of different issues and each individual issue. If we really talk about tax policy.

Like, why are we being emotional about this?

I don't think we're actually that. I mean, we're. Yeah, we're emotional about something else.

Yeah, I think what we're emotional about is this. My side, the side I've identified with, is in power and making the decisions, and your side is out of power. And if your side's in power, that's really scary for me because that goes back to, you know, the idea of who is making. Who's. Who's pulling the strings in this tribe. Right. Who's in. Who's the chief? Is it your family's patriarch or is it mine? You know, we might not have food if we don't win this, you know, kind of whatever, you know, chief election. So I think that it's not about the tax policy or anything like that. And then, Then. And then it gets tied to this, like, broader. I think a lot of our tribalism has really coalesced around this. We don't have that much religious tribalism in the US Right now. They know the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other. We don't have that really. Right. And honestly, you say people like to, you know, say we have racial tribalism and everything, but white, you know, a white, even a kind of a racist white conservative guy, I think takes the black conservative over the woke white person any day of the week right now.

So that's the strongest.

It tells me that source of division, way stronger tribalism right now. I think that that white racist guy, you know, loves the black conservative guy compared to the white woke guy. Right. There's no. So. So to me, again, not that racial tribalism isn't a thing. Of course, it's always a thing. But like, political tribalism is the number one right now.

So race is almost a topic for the political division versus the actual element of the tribe.

It's a political football. It's. Yeah.

So there, there's. I mean, this is dark because. So this is a book about human civilization. This is a book about human nature, but it's also a book of politics about politics. It is just the way you list it out in the book, it's kind of dark how we just fall into these left and right checklists. So if you're on the left, it's maintain Roe v. Wade, universal healthcare, good mainstream media, fine. Guns kill people. US Is a racist country, protect immigrants, tax cause, bad climate change, awful. Raise minimum wage. And on the right is the flip of that reverse Roe v. Wade, universal healthcare, bad mainstream media, bad people, kill people, not guns kill people. US was a racist country, protect borders, tax cuts, good climate change, overblown, don't raise minimum wage. I mean, it has. You almost don't have to think about any of this. Well, it's like literally.

So when you say it's a book about politics, it's interesting because it's a book about the vertical axis, right? It's specifically not a book about the horizontal axis. And that I'm not talk. I don't actually talk about any of these issues. I don't put out an opinion on them. Those are all horizontal. Right. But when you. So rather than, you know, having, you know, another book about those issues about right versus left, I wanted to do a book about this other axis. And so on this axis. The reason I had this checklist is that this is a low part of the low rung politics world, right? Low rung politics is a checklist. And that checklist evolves, right? Like Russia suddenly is like popular with the right as opposed to, you know, it used to be, you know, in the 60s, the left was the one defending Stalin. Like, so they'll switch. It doesn't even matter. The substance doesn't matter. It's that this is the approved checklist of the Capital P party. And this is what everyone believes. That's a low rung thing. The high rungs. This is not what it's like, high rung politics. You, you tell me your one view on this. I have no idea what you think about anything else, right? And you're gonna say, I don't know about a lot of stuff because inherently you're not gonna have that strong an opinion because you don't have that much. These are complex things. So there's a lot of. I don't know. And people are all over the place. You know, you're talking to someone who has been subsumed with low rung politics. When, if they tell you their opinion on any one of these issues, you know, you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one. And if, and if in three years it becomes fashionable to, to have this new view, they're going to have it. That's, you're not thinking. That's echo, that's echo chamber culture.

And I've been using kind of a shorthand of centrist to describe this kind of a high wrong thinking. But people tend to, I mean, it seems to be difficult to be a centrist or whatever, a high rung thinker. It's like people want to label you as a person who's too cowardly to take stance.

Yeah.

Somehow as opposed to asking, saying I don't know as a first statement.

Well, the problem with centrist is that would mean that in each of these tax cuts bad, tax cuts good. It means that you are saying, I am in that I think we should have some tax cuts, but not that many. You might not think that you might actually come, do some research and say, actually I think tax cuts are really important. That doesn't mean, oh, I'm not a centrist anymore. I guess I'm a far, you know. No, no, no. That's why we need the second axis. So what you're trying to be, when you say centrist is hierarch, which means you might be all over the place horizontally. You might agree with the far left on this thing, the far right on this thing. You might agree with the centrists on this thing. But, but calling yourself a centrist actually like is putting yourself in a prison on the horizontal axis. And, and it's saying that, you know, I, I, whatever the, on the, on the different topics, I'm right in between the two. Policy wise, that's not where you are. So yeah, that's what we're badly missing. This other axis.

Yeah, I mean, I still do think it's like for me, I am a centrist when you project it down to the horizontal. But the point is you're missing so much data by not considering the vertical because on average, maybe it falls somewhere in the middle. But in reality there's just a lot of nuance issue to issue that involves just thinking and uncertainty and changing given the context of the current geopolitics and economics. And just always considering, always questioning, always evolving your views, all of that, not.

Just, not just about like, oh, I think we should be in the center on this. But another way to be in the center is if there's some phenomenon happening, you know, there's a terrorist attack, you know, and one side wants to say this has nothing to do with Islam. And the other one, the other side wants to say this is radical Islam. Right. What's in between those is saying this is complicated and Nuanced and we have to learn more. And it probably has something to do with Islam and something to do with the economic circumstances and something to do with, you know, geopolitics. So in, in, in a case like that, you actually do get really unnuanced when you go to the extremes and all of that nuance, which is where all the truth usually is, is going to be in the middle. So.

Yeah, but there is a truth to the fact that if you take that nuance on those issues, like war in Ukraine, Covid, you're going to be attacked by both sides.

Yes. People who have, who are really strongly on one side or the other, hate centrist people. I've gotten this myself and, you know, the, this, the, the slur that I've had thrown at me is I'm an enlightened centrist in a very mocking way. So what are they actually saying? What does enlightened centrist mean? It means someone who is, you know, Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt gets accused of is, you know, that they're highfalutin, you know, intellectual world and they don't actually have any. They don't actually take a side, they don't actually get their hands dirty and they can be superior to both sides without actually taking a stand. Right. So I see the argument and I disagree with it because I firmly believe that the hardcore tribes, they think they're taking a stand and they're out in the streets and they're pushing for something. I think what they're doing is they're just driving the whole country downwards. And I think they're, they're hurting all the causes they care about. And so it's not that. It's not that, you know, it's not that we need everyone to be sitting there, you know, refusing to take a side, it's that you can be far left and far right, but be upper left and upper right.

If we talk about the. You use the word liberal a lot in the book to mean something that we don't in modern political discourse mean. So it's this higher philosophical view and then you use the words progressive to mean the left and conservative to mean the right. Can you describe the concept of liberal games and our games?

So the power games is what I call basically just the laws of nature. When laws of nature are the laws of the land. That's the power game. So animals watch any David Attenborough special, and when the little lizard is running away from the bigger animal or whatever, I use an example of a bunny and a Bear. I don't even know if bears eat bunnies. They probably don't, but pretend bears eat bunnies. So it's like in the power games, the bear is chasing the bunny. There's no fairness. There's no okay, well, what's right, what's legal? No, no, no. If the bear is fast enough, it can eat the bunny. If the bunny can get away, it can say living. And so that's it. That's the only rule. Now humans have spent a lot of time in essentially that environment. So when you have a totalitarian dictatorship. And so what's the rule of the power games? It's, everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so. It's just a game of power. So if the bunny gets away, the bunny actually has more power than the bear in that situation. Right. And likewise the totalitarian dictatorship, there's no rules. A dictator can do whatever they want. They can, they can, they can torture, they can flatten a rebellion with a lot of murder because they have the power to do so what are you going to do? Right, and that's kind of the state of nature. That's our natural way. You know, when you look at, watch a mafia movie, you know, there's. We do a lot of. We have it in us. We all have, we all can snap into power games mode when it becomes all about, you know, just, just actual raw power. Now the liberal games is, is, you know, something that civilizations for thousands of years have been working on. It's not invented by America or modern times, but America's kind of, was like the latest crack at it yet, which is this idea instead of everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so. It's. Everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Now that's really complicated. How do you define harm? And, and the idea is that everyone has their. A list of rights which are protected by the government and then they have their inalienable rights and they're, they're protected. You know, those are protected again by, you know, from, from an invasion by other people. And so you have this kind of fragile balance. And so the idea with the liberal games is you, that there are laws, but it's not totalitarian. They will build very clear, strict laws kind of around the edges of what you can and can't do. And then everything else, freedom. So unlike a totalitarian dictatorship, actually it's very loose. There's a lot of things can happen and it's kind of up to the people. But there are still laws that protect the very basic inalienable rights and stuff like that. So it's this much looser thing. Now the vulnerability there is that. So the benefits of it are obvious, right? Freedom is great. It seems like it's the most fair. That equality of opportunity seemed like the most fair thing. And equality before the law, due process and all of this stuff. So it seems fair to the founders of the US and other Enlightenment thinkers. And it also is a great way to manifest productivity. You have, you have Adam Smith saying it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their own, from their own self interest. So you have, you can harness kind of selfishness for progress. But it has a vulnerability which is that because the laws, it's like the totalitarian laws, they don't have an excess of laws for no reason. They want to control everything. And the U.S. you know, in the U.S. we say they're not going to do that. And so the second, it's almost two puzzle pieces. You have the laws and then you've got a liberal culture. Liberal laws have to be married to liberal culture, kind of a defense of liberal spirit in order to truly have the liberal games going on. And so that's vulnerable because free speech, you can have the First Amendment, that's the laws part. But if, if you're in a culture where anyone who, you know, speaks out against orthodoxy is going to be shunned from the community, well, you're lacking the second piece of the puzzle there. You're lacking liberal culture. And so therefore you might as well not even have the First Amendment. And there's a lot of examples like that where the culture has to do its part for the true liberal games to be enjoyed. So it's just much more complicated and much more nuanced than the power games. It's kind of a set of basic laws that then are coupled with a basic spirit to create this very awesome human environment that's also very vulnerable.

So what do you mean? The culture has to play along. So for something like a freedom of speech to work, there has to be a basic, what decency. That if all people are perfectly good, then perfect freedom without any restrictions is great. It's where the human nature starts getting a little iffy. We start being cruel to each other. We start being greedy and desiring of harm. And also the narcissist and sociopaths and psychopaths in society, all of that. That's when you start to have to inject some limitations on that freedom.

Yeah, I mean, if, if so what the government basically says is we're going to let everyone be mostly free, but no one, no one is going to be free to physically harm other people or to steal their property. Right. And so we're also, we're all agreeing to sacrifice that, you know, that, that 20% of our freedom. And then in return, all of us in theory can be 80% free. And that's kind of the, the bargain. But now that's a lot of freedom to leave people with. And a lot of people choose. It's like you're so free in the US you're actually free to be unfree if you choose. That's kind of what an echo chamber is to me. It's, you know, you can choose to kind of be friends with people who essentially make it, make it so uncomfortable to speak your mind that it's no actual effective difference for you than if you lived in a country. If you can't criticize Christianity in a certain community, that you have a First Amendment. So you're not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing Christianity. But if you, but, but if you have this, if the social penalties are so extreme that it's just never worth it, you might as well be in a country that imprisons people for criticizing Christianity. And so that same thing goes for wokeness. Right. This is what people get, you know, cancel culture and stuff. So when the reason these things are bad is because they're actually, they're depriving Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by, you know, imposing a social culture that is very power games esque. It's basically a power games culture comes in and you might as well be in the power games now. And so liberal, if you live in a liberal democracy, it's, it's you. There will be always be challenges to a liberal culture. Lowercase link liberal. There'll always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who are much more interested in playing the power games. And there has to be kind of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says, that's not how we do things here in America. Actually. We don't excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs or not. You know, we don't disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs. And if it doesn't stand up for itself, it's, it's like the immune system of the country failing and power games rushes in.

So before chapter four in your book and the chapters that will surely result in you being burned at the stake, you write, quote, we'll start our Pitchfork tour in this chapter by taking a brief trip through the history of the Republican Party. Then in the following chapters, we'll take a Tim's career tanking deep dive into America's social justice movement as you start its. Talk about. Okay, so let's go. What's the history of the Republican Party?

I'm looking at this through my vertical ladder. I'm saying, what is this, this familiar story of the Republicans from the 60s to today? What does it look like through the vertical lens? Right? Does it look different? And, and, and is there, is there an interesting story here that's been kind of hidden because we're always looking at the horizontal. Now, the horizontal story, you'll hear people talk about it and it's, they'll say something like, the Republicans have moved farther and farther to the right. And, and to me, that, that's not really true. Like, it. Was Trump more right wing than Reagan? I don't think so. I think he's left actual policy.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's. So we're using this again. It's just like you're calling yourself centrist when it's not exactly what you mean, even though it also is.

Yeah.

So again, this, I was like, okay, look, this vertical lens helps with other things. Let's, let's apply it to the Republicans. And here, here's what I saw is I looked at the 60s and I saw an interesting story, which I don't think, not everyone's familiar with what happened in the early 60s, but in 1960, the Republican Party was very, it was a plurality. You had progressives, like genuine Rockefeller, pretty progressive people all the way to. Then you had the moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey. And then you go all the way to the farther right. You had Goldwater and what you might call, I call them the fundamentalists. And so it's this interesting plurality, right? Something we don't have today. And what happened was the Goldwater contingent, which was the underdog. They were small, right? Eisenhower was the president, had just been the president. And it seemed like the moderates were. He said, you have to be close to the center of the chess. That's how you maintain power. These people were very far from the center of the chessboard. But they ended up basically have like a hostile takeover. They conquered their own party and they did it by breaking all of the kind of unwritten rules and norms. So they did things like, they first started with, like, the College Republicans, which was like this feeder group that turned in, you know, a lot of the politicians started there and they, they went to the election and they wouldn't let the, the current president, the incumbent speak. And they were throwing chairs and they were fist fights. And eventually people gave up and they just sat there and they sat in the chair talking for, you know, their candidate until everyone eventually left and then they declared victory. So basically they came in, there was a certain set of rules, agreed upon rules, and they came in playing the power games, saying, well, actually, if we do this, you won't have the power. You know, we have the power to take it if we just break all the rules, right? And so they did and they won. And that became this hugely influential thing which then they, then they conquered California through again, these, these people were taken aback. These, you know, these, these, these proper Republican candidates were appalled by the kind of like, you know, the insults that were being hurled at them and the intimidation and the bullying. And eventually they ended up in the national convention, which was called, like, the right wing Woodstock. It was like, you know, the Republican national convention in 64 was just, again, there was jeering, and they wouldn't let their moderates or their progressives even speak. And there was racism. You know, Jackie Robinson was there, and he was a proud Republican, and he said that, like he feels like he was a Jew in Hitler's Germany with the way that blacks were being treated there. And it was nasty. But what did they do? They had fiery plurality, enough to win, and they won. They ended up getting crushed in the general election and they kind of faded away. But to me, I was like, what? That was an interesting story. I see it as. I have this character in the book called the Golem, which is a big, kind of a big, dumb, powerful monster that's the emergent property of a political echo chamber. It's like this big giant. It's stupid, but it's powerful and scary. And to me, I was like a golem rose up, conquered the party for a second, knocked it on its ass, and then faded away. And to me, when I look at the Trump revolution, and not just TRUMP the last 20 years, I see that same lower right, that lower right monster kind of making another charge for it, but this time succeeding and really taking over the party for a long period of time, I see the same story, which is the power games are being played in a situation when it had always been the government relies on all these unwritten rules and norms to function. But for example, you have in 2016, Merrick Garland gets nominated by Obama. And the unwritten norm says that when the President nominates a justice, then you pass them through unless there's some egregious thing. That's what has happened. But they said, actually this is the last year of his presidency and the people should choose. I don't think we should set a new precedent where the president can't nominate. People nominate a Supreme Court justice in the last year, so they pass it through and it ends up being Gorsuch. And so they lose that seat. Now three years later, it's Trump's last year and it's another election year and Ginsburg dies. And what did they say? They say, oh, let's keep our precedent. They said, no, oh, actually we changed our mind. We're gonna nominate Amy Barrett. So to me, that is classic power games, right? There's no actual rule. And what you're doing is they did technically have the power to block the nomination then. And then they technically had the power to put someone and they, and they're pretending there's some principle to it, but they're just extra. They're going for the short term edge at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run. And then what do the Democrats have to do in that situation, because both parties have been doing this, is they either can lose now all the time or they start playing the power games too. And now you have a prisoner's dilemma where it's like both are end up doing this thing because and they. And everyone ends up worse off the debt ceiling. All these power plays that are being made where these, these holding the country hostage, this is power games. And to me, that's what Goldwater was doing in the 60s, but it was a healthier time in a way because there was this plurality within the parties, reduced some of the national tribalism and that there wasn't as much of an appeal to that. But today it's just like do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies. And so I'm seeing a rise in power games. And I talk about the Republicans because they did a lot of these things first, they have been a little bit more egregious, but both parties have been doing it over the last 20, 30 years.

Can you place blame, or maybe there's a different term for it at the subsystems of this. So is it the media, is it the politicians, like in the Senate, in Congress, is it Trump? So the leadership, is it. Or maybe it's us Human beings, maybe social media versus mainstream media. Is there a sense of where. What is the cause and what is the symptom?

It's very complex. So Eric Klein is a great book, why We're Polarized, where he talks about a lot of this and there's some of these are. It's really no one's fault. First of all, the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned. And what happens when you take human nature, which is a constant, and you put it into an environment, Behavior comes out. The environment's the independent variable. When that changes, the dependent variable, the behavior changes with it. Right. And so the environment has changed in a lot of ways. So one major one is it used to, for a long time, actually, first it was the Republicans and then the Democrats just had a stranglehold on Senate, on Congress. There was no, it was not even competitive. The Democrats for 40 years had the majority. And so therefore it actually isn't a decent environment to compromise in because now we can both, you know, what you want is Congresspeople thinking about their home district and, you know, voting yes on a national policy because we're going to get a good deal on it back at home. That's actually healthy, as opposed to voting in lockstep together, because this is what the Red Party is doing regardless of what's good for my home district. You know, an example is Obamacare. You know, there were certain Republican districts that would have actually officially been benefited by Obamacare, but every Republican voted against it. So, and part of the reason is because there's no longer this obvious majority. Every few years it switches. It's a 50, 50 thing. And that's, you know, partially because it's become. So we've been so subsumed with this one national divide of left versus right that, that, that, that the people are not people are whoever. You know, they're voting for the same party for president all the way down the ticket now. And so you have this just kind of 50, 50 color war, and that's awful for compromise. So there's like 10 of these things, you know, that have redistricting. But also it is social media. It is, you know, I call it hypercharged tribalism. We've, you know, in the 60s you had kind of distributed tribalism. You had some people that are worked up about the ussr, right? They're national. That's what they care about. Us versus foreign. You have some people that were saying left versus right like they had today, and then other people that were saying that they were fighting within the party. But today you don't have that. It's, it's. You have ideological realignment. So you kind of got rid of a lot of the, in party fighting. And then there's. Hasn't been that big of a form foreign threat, nothing like the USSR for a long time. So you kind of lost that. And what's left is just this left versus right thing. And so that's kind of this hypercharged whirlpool that subsumes everything. And so, yeah, it's, I mean, people point to Newt Gingrich, you know, and people like, there's certain characters that enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing. But I think this is a much bigger kind of environmental shift.

Well, that's going back to our questions about the role of individuals in human history. So one of the many interesting questions here is about Trump. Is he a symptom or a cause? Because he seems to be from the public narrative, such a significant catalyst for some of the things we're seeing.

This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right? Like, is it the person or is the times? I think he's a perfect example of it's a both situation. I don't think that, I don't think if you pluck Trump out of the situation, I don't think a Trump was inevitable. But I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue. And if you hadn't been, Trump would have had no chance. And so what. And why were we vulnerable to a demagogue is because you have these. Mommy. And I think specifically on the right, if you actually look at the stats, it's pretty bad. Like the people who. Because it's not just who voted for Trump. A lot of people just vote for the red, right? What's interesting is who voted for Obama against Romney and then voted for Trump. These are not racists, right? These are not hardcore Republicans. They voted for Obama. And where did the switch come from? Places that had economic despair, where bridges were not working well, that's a signifier where paint's chipping in the schools, these little things like this. So I think that you had a lot of these kind of rural towns. You have true despair. And then you also have the number one indicator of voting for Trump was distrust in media. And the media has become much less trustworthy, you know, and so you have all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue. And a demagogue is someone who takes advantage, right? There's someone who comes in and says, I can pull all the right strings and pull and push all the right emotional buttons right now and get myself power by taking advantage of the circumstances. And that is what Trump totally did, you know, and so you have all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue. And a demagogue is someone who takes advantage. Right. There's someone who comes in and says, I can pull all the right strings and push all the right emotional buttons right now and get myself power by taking advantage of the circumstances. And that is what Trump totally dead.

It makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who's a charismatic leader to capitalize on cultural resentment when, when there's economic hardship to channel that.

So John Haidt wrote a great article about like the tr. We basically, we like truth is at an all time low right now. Like it's. The media is not penalized for lying. Yeah, right. Msnbc, Fox News, these are not.

Makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who's a charismatic leader to, to capitalize on cultural resentment when, when there's economic hardship to channel that.

So John Haidt wrote a great article about like the truth. We basically, we like truth is at an all time low right now. Like it's. The media is not penalized for lying. Yeah, right. Msnbc, Fox News, these are not penalized for being inaccurate. They're penalized if they stray from the orthodoxy on social media. It's not the truest tweets that go viral. Right. And so Trump understood that better than anyone, right? He, he, he took advantage of it. He, he was living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past and he saw that and he just lied. He every penalized for being inaccurate. They're penalized if they stray from the orthodoxy on social media. It's not the truest tweets that go viral. Right. And so Trump understood that better than anyone. Right? He took advantage of it. He was living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past and he saw that and he just lied everything he said. You know, it doesn't. The truth was not relevant at all. Right. It's just truly, it's not relevant to him when what he's talking about, he doesn't care and he knew that. Neither do a subset of the country.

I was thinking about this just reading articles by journalists, especially when you're not a famous journalist in yourself, but you're more like a New York Times journalist. So the big famous thing is the.

Thing he said, you know, it doesn't. The truth was not relevant at all. Right. It's just truly it's not relevant to him when what he's talking about. He doesn't care and he knew that. Neither do a subset of the country.

I was thinking about this just reading articles by journalists, especially when you're not a, a famous journalist in yourself, but you're more like a New York Times journalist. So the big famous thing is the institution. You're a part of that like you can just lie.

Yeah.

Because you're not going to get punished for it. You're going to be rewarded for the popularity of an article. So if you write 10 articles, it's. There's a huge incentive to just make stuff up.

You got to get clicks to get clicks.

That's first and foremost. And like culturally people will attack that article to say it's not like one half the country will attack that article for saying is dishonest. But they'll kind of forget the. You will not have a reputational hit.

Right.

There won't be a memory like this person made up a lot of stuff in the past. No. They'll take one article at a time and they'll attach the reputation hits will be to New York Times, the institution you're a part of that they're like you can just lie.

Yeah.

Because you're not going to get punished for it. You're going to be rewarded for of the popularity of an article. So if you write 10 articles, it's, there's a huge incentive to just make stuff up.

You got to get clicks to get clicks.

That's first and foremost. And like culturally people will attack that article to say it's not like one half the country. So for the individual journalists there's a huge incentive to make stuff up.

Totally. It's, it's. And it's scary because it's almost. You can't survive if you're just an old school honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and does it with nuance. Like you can be. Is you can be a big time substacker or big time podcaster. A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor and they have huge audiences. But if you're working at a big company right now, it's, I mean especially, I mean I like, I think that many of the big media brands are very much controlled by the left and but I will say that the ones that are controlled by the right are even more egregious. Not just in terms of accuracy, but.

She will attack that article for saying it's dishonest. But they'll kind of forget the. You will not have a reputational hit.

Right.

There won't be a memory like this person made up a lot of stuff in the past. No, they'll take one article at a.

Time also in terms of, you know, the New York Times for all of.

Its criticisms and they'll attach the reputation hits will be to New York Times, the institution.

Yeah, they have a handful of they every day here and there they put out a pretty, you know, an article that strays from the handle Barry Weiss wrote there for a long time. And then you've got they wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus stuff, you know, recently. And they have, you know, they have a couple very, you know, left progressive friendly conservatives, but they have conservatives that are writing the op eds, Fox News. You know, you're not seeing thoughtful Breitbart, you're not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there.

So for the individual journalist, there's a huge incentive to make stuff up.

Totally. It's, it's, it's. And it's scary because it's almost. You can't survive if you're just an old school honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and right.

There's some degree to which the New York Times, I think still incentivizes and.

Values the vertical and does it with nuance. Like what you can be is you can be a big time substacker or big time podcaster. A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor and they have huge audiences. But if you're working the high effort.

So you're allowed to have a conservative opinion if you do a really damn good job.

Yeah.

Like if it's a very thorough in.

Depth and if you kind of pander to the progressive senses in all the right ways. You know, I always joke that, you know, Ted, they always have a couple, you know, token in a big company right now. It's, I mean especially, I mean I like I covered this but they get on stage and they're basically like so totally. You're all, you know, the progressivisms are. That's right. About all of this. But maybe, maybe you know, libertarianism isn't all about, you know, it's this. So there is an element. But you know what? It's. I think that many of the big media brands are very much controlled by the left and but I will say that the ones that are controlled by the right are even more egregious not just in terms of accuracy, but something it's better than being a total tribal. I think you can. You can see the New York Times tug of war, the internal tug of war. You can see it because then they also have these awful instances, you know, where, like, you know, the firing of James Bennett, which is also in terms of, you know, the New York Times, for all of its criticisms, it's a whole other story. But, like, they have you. Yeah, you can see it going both ways. But in the 60s, what did you have? You had ABC, NBC, CBS, you know, the 70s, you know, you had these three news channels, and they weren't always right. And they definitely sometimes spun a narrative together, maybe about the Vietnam or whatever, but they. If one of them was just lying, they'd be embarrassed for it. They would be penalized, they'd be dinged, and they'd be known as. This is. They have a handful of. Here and there. They put out a pretty, you know, an article that strays from the Barry Weiss wrote there for a long. The trash one. And that would be terrible for their ratings because they weren't just catering to half the country. They're catering. They all are catering to the whole country. So both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality, they had to time. And then you've got. They wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus stuff, you know, recently. Um, and they have, you know, they have a couple, you know, try to stay somewhere in the reasonable range, and that's just gone.

One of the things I'm really curious about is I think your book is incredible. I'm very curious to see how it's written about by the press, because I could see click. I could myself write with the help of ChatGPT, of course, clickbait articles in either direction.

Yeah. It's easy to imagine your whole book.

Is beautifully written for clickbait articles.

Yeah.

If any journalists out there need help, I can.

Well, very, you know, left progressive, friendly conservatives, but they have.

Yeah, I can write the most atrocious criticisms.

Yeah. Conservatives that are writing the op eds, Fox News, you know, you're not seeing thoughtful Breitbart. You're not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there. Right.

There's some degree to which the New York Times, I think, still incentivizes and values the vertical.

I'm ready. I'm braced.

Yeah. So speaking of which, you write about social justice, you write about two kinds of social justice. Liberal social justice and sjf. Social justice fundamentalism. What are those?

Yeah. So, like, the term wokeness is so loaded with baggage, it's kind of like mocking and derogatory. And I was trying not to do that in this book.

If it's the goal, the high effort. So you're allowed to have a conservative opinion if you do a really damn good job. Like, if it's a very thorough in.

Depth and if you kind of pander to the progressive senses and all the right terms loaded with baggage, you're already kind of, from the first minute, you're already behind. So to me, also, when people say wokeness has bad ways, I always joke that Ted, they always have a couple tokens. Social justice is bad. They're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the proudest tradition in the US Is liberal social justice. And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning with lowercase L. It is, it is intertwined with liberalism. So Martin Luther King, classic example, his I have a Dream speech, he says stuff like, this country, you know, is, you know, has, has made a promise to. But they get on stage and they're basically like, so totally. You're all, you know, the progressivisms are. It's right about all of this. But maybe, maybe, you know, libertarianism isn't all about, you know, it's this. So there is an element. But you know what? It's, it's something. It's better than being a total tribal thing. I think you can, you can see the New York Times tug of all of its citizens, and it has broken that promise to its black citizens, right? In other words, liberalism, the Constitution, the core ideals, those are great. We are not living up to them. We're failing on some of them. So the internal tug of war, you can see it, because then they also have these awful instances, you know, or like, you know, the firing of James Bennett, which is a civil disobedience. The goal of it wasn't to, to hurt liberalism. It was to specifically break the laws that were already violating liberal. That were the laws that were a violation of liberalism. To expose that this is illiberal, that the Constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the bus. And so it was, it was kind of a. It was really patriotic. You know, the civil rights movement, it was saying, this is a beautiful, you know, we have a, we have a. Liberalism is this beautiful thing. And we. Whole other story. But like, they have, yeah, you can see it going both ways. But in the 60s, what did you have? You had ABC, NBC, CBS, you know, the 70s, you know, you had these three news channels, and they weren't always right. And they Definitely sometimes spun a narrative together, maybe about the Vietnam or whatever, but you need to do better at it. So I call it liberal social justice. And it used the tools of liberalism to try to. They. If one of them was just lying, they'd be embarrassed for it, they would be penalized, they'd be dinged, and they'd be known as. This is to try to improve the flaws and that were going on. So free speech, you know, Mario Savio in the 60s was the. You know, he's a leftist. And what were the leftists doing in the 60s on Berkeley campus? You know, they were saying, we need more free speech because that's what social justice, liberal social justice, was fighting for. But you can also go back to the 20s, women's suffrage, I mean, you know, emancipation. The thing that America obviously has, all of its. These are all ugly things that it had to get out of, but it got out of them, you know, one by one, and it's still getting out of them. That's what's cool about America. And liberal social justice basically is the practice of saying, where are we not being perfect liberals? And now let's fix that.

So that's the idea of liberalism that permeates the history of the United States. But then there's interplay. You have so many good images in this book, but one of them is highlighting the interplay of different ideas over the past, let's say, 100 years. So liberalism is on one side, there's that thread, there's Marx, the trash one.

And that would be terrible for their ratings because they weren't just catering to half the country. They're catering. They all are catering to the whole country. So both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality, they had to, you know, try to stay somewhere in the reasonable range, and that's just gone.

One of the things I'm really curious about is I think your book is incredible. I'm very curious to see how it's written about ism on the other. And then there's postmodernism. How do those interplay together?

So it's interesting because Marxism is. And all of its various, you know, descendants, obviously there's a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren't, you know, the same thing as what Karl Marx preached. But what do they all have in common? They think liberalism is bad, right? They actually think that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people in the civil rights and other movements, they think the opposite. He thinks liberalism is good. We need to preserve it. They said liberalism is the problem. These other problems with racism and inequality that we're seeing, those are inevitable results of liberalism. Liberalism is a rigged game. And it's just the power games in disguise. There is no liberal games. It's just the power games in disguise. And there's the upper people that oppress the lower people and they convince the lower people there's all about false consciousness. They convince the lower people that everything is fair. And now the lower people vote against their own interests and they. And they work to preserve the system that's oppressing them. And what are we by the press?

Because I could see. Click. I could myself write with the help of ChatGPT, of course, clickbait articles in either direction.

Yeah. It's easy to imagine.

Your whole book is beautifully written for clickbait articles.

Yeah.

If any journalists out there need help, I can, I can help.

Yeah.

I can write the most atrocious criticisms.

Yeah, I need to do. We need to. Actually, there's much more revolutionary. We need to overthrow liberalism. Right. So people think is. Oh, you know, like what we call wokeness is just, you know, a normal social justice activist activism, but it's like more extreme. Right. It's this. No, no, it's the polar opposite. Polar opposite. And so now that's the Marxist thread. Now, postmodernism is kind of, you know, this term that is super controversial. And I don't think anyone calls themselves a postmodernist. So take all of this with a grain of salt in terms of the term, but what's the definition of radical? The definition of radical to me is how deep you want change to happen at. So a liberal progressive and a conservative progressive will disagree about policies. The liberal progressive wants to change a lot of policies. Change, change, change. Right. And the conservative wants to keep things the way they are. But they're both conservative when it comes to liberalism. Beneath it, the liberal kind of foundation of the country. They both wanted. They both are. I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm. I'm ready. Embraced.

Yeah. So speaking of which, you write about social justice, you write about two kinds of social justice. Liberal social justice and sjf. Social justice fundamentalism. What are those?

Yeah. So like the term wokeness has become conservatives about that. The Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper and actually overthrow that foundation. Now, what's below liberalism is kind of the core tenets of modernity. This idea of reason and the notion that there is an objective truth and science as the scientific method. Right. These things are actually beneath. And even the Marxist, if you look at the Frankfurt score, you know, these post Marxist thinkers and Marx himself, they were not anti science. They believed in that bottom, bottom foundation. They actually wanted to preserve modernity, but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on top of it. The postmodernist is even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom level and overthrow it. They think science itself is a tool of oppression. They think it's so loaded with baggage, it's kind of like mocking and derogatory. And that's. I was trying not to do that in this book. If it's terms loaded with baggage, you're already kind of, from the first minute, you're already behind. So to me also, when people say wokeness is bad, social justice is bad, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the tool where oppression kind of flows through. They think that the white Western world has invented these concepts. Like they claim that there's an objective truth and that there's reason in science. And they think all of that is just one meta narrative. And it goes a long way to serve the interests of the powerful.

So in the sense that it's almost caricatured, but that is to the core, their belief that math could be racist, for example. Oh yeah, absolutely not the education of math, but literally mathematics notion in math.

That there's a right answer and a wrong answer that they believe is a meta narrative narrative that serves white supremacy. Or the postmodernist might have said it serves just the powerful or the wealthy. So what social justice fundamentalism is, is you take the Marxist thread that has been going on in lots of countries, and whoever the upper and lower is, that's what they all have in common. But the upper and lower, you know, for Marx was the ruling class and the oppressed class. It was economic. And then, you know, the proudest tradition in the US is liberal social justice. And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning with lowercase l. It is intertwined with liberalism. So Martin Luther King, classic example, his I have a dream speech, he says stuff like, this country, you know, has made a promise, but you come here and the economic class doesn't, you know, doesn't resonate as much here as it did maybe in some of those other places. But what does resonate here in the 60s and 70s is race and gender and these kind of social justice disagreements. And so what social justice fundamentalism is, it's basically this tried and true framework of this Marxist framework, kind of with a new skin on it, which is American social justice. And then made even more radical with the infusion of postmodernism, where, you know, not just is liberalism bad, but actually the sign, you know, that like you said, math can be raised all of its citizens and it has broken that promise to its black citizens. Right? In other words, liberalism, the Constitution, the core ideals, those are great. We are not living up to them. We're failing on some of them. So it's this kind of like philosophical Frankenstein, this like stitched together of these and has civil disobedience. The goal of it wasn't to hurt liberalism, it was to specifically break the laws that were already. And so again, it's called, you know, they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice. They say social justice, right? You know, racial equality. But it has nothing to do with liberal social justice. It is directly opposed to liberal social justice.

It's fascinating the evolution of ideas if we ignore the harm done by it. It's fascinating how humans get together and evolve these ideas. So as you show, Marxism is the idea that society is a zero sum. I mean, I guess zero sum is a really important thing here. Zero sum struggle between the ruling class and the working class, with power being exerted through politics and economics. Then you add critical theory, Marxism 2.0 on top of that, and you add to politics and economics, you add culture and institutions. And then on top of that, for postmodernism, you add science. You have morality, basically anything else you.

Can think of to stitch together. Frankenstein. And if you notice, violating that were the laws that were a violation of liberalism. To expose that this is illiberal, that the Constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the bus. And so it was kind of a. It was really patriotic, you know, the civil rights movement, it was saying, this is a beautiful, you know, we have a. We have a. Liberalism is this beautiful thing, which is not necessarily bad, but in this case, I think it's actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti science. And you know, and it's violating the postmodernism because what postmodernists were, they were radical skeptics. Not just of. They were radical skeptics not just of the way things were, but of their own beliefs. And social justice fundamentalism is suddenly, is not at all self critics, critical. It says that we have the answers, which is the opposite of what post modernists would ever say to say, no, you just have another meta narrative. So, and it's also violating, of course, the tradition of like liberal social justice in A million ways because it's, it's anti liberal. And so this Frankenstein comes together. Meanwhile, liberal social justice doesn't have a Frankenstein. It's very clear, it's very, it's a crisp ideology that says we need we. They're trying to make we, trying to get to a more perfect union. You need to do better at it. So I call it liberal social justice. And it used the tools of liberalism to, to try to try to improve the flaws and that we're in. They're trying to keep the promises made going on. So free speech, you know, Mario Savio in the 60s was, you know, he's a leftist. And what were the leftists doing in the 60s on Berkeley campus? You know, they were saying we in the Constitution and that's what it's trying to do. And so it's much simpler in a lot of ways.

So you write that my big problem with social justice fundamentalism isn't the ideology itself. It's what its scholars and activists started to do sometimes around 2013 when they began to wield a cudgel that's not supposed to have any place in the country like the U.S. so it's the actions, not the ideas.

Well, I'm clear, I don't like the ideology. I think it's a low rung ideology. I think it's morally inconsistent based on, you know, it's flip flops on, on its morals, depending on the group. I think it's echo chambery. I think it's, I think it's full of inaccuracies and kind of can't stand up to debate. So I think it's a low. But, but there's a ton of low rung ideologies I don't like. I don't like a lot of religious doctrines, I don't like a lot of political doctrines. Right. The US is a place inherently that is a mishmash of a ton of ideologies. And I'm not going to like 2/3 of them at any given time. So my problem, the reason I'm writing about this is not because I'm like by the need more free speech, because that's what social justice, liberal social justice was fighting for. But you can also go back to the 20s, women's suffrage, I mean, you know, emancipation, the thing that America obviously has, all of its, these are all ugly things that it had to get out of, but it got out of them, you know, one by one and it's still getting out of them. That's what's cool about America. And liberal social justice basically is the practice of this ideology is not something I like. That's not interesting. The reason that it must be written about right now, this particular ideology, is because it's not playing nicely with others. If you want to be a hardcore evangelical Christian, the US says live and let live. Not only are you allowed to have an echo chamber of some kind, it's actively protected here. Live and let live. They can do what they want. You do what you want. Now if the evangelical Christians started saying, by the way, anyone who says anything that conflicts with evangelical Christianity is going to be severely socially punished and they have the cultural power to do so, which they don't in this case. They might like to, but they don't have the power. But they're able to get anyone fired who they want and they're able to actually change the curriculum in all these schools and to suddenly not conflict with no more evolution in the textbooks because they don't want it. Now I would write a book about why, about evangelical Christianity because that's what every liberal, regardless of what you think of the actual horrors saying, where are we not being perfect liberals? And now let's fix that.

So that's the idea of liberalism that permeates the history of the United States. But then there's interplay. You haven't so many good images in this book, but one of them is highlighting the interplay of different ideas over the past, let's say 100 years, Zonto.

Beliefs, doesn't matter what they believe, when, when they start violating live and let live and shutting down other area, other segments of society. And in kind of, it's almost like a, you know, not to, you know, it's not the best analogy, but like, it's like a, an echo chamber is like a benign tumor. And what you, what you have to watch out for is a tumor that starts to metastasize, starts to forcefully spread and damage the tissue around it. And that's what this particular ideology has been doing.

Do you worry about it, you know, as an existential threat to, to liberalism in, in the west, in the United States? Is it a problem or is it the biggest problem that's threatening all of human civilization?

It's. I, I would never, I would not say it's the biggest problem. It might be. I wouldn't. If someone, if it turns out in 50 years, someone says actually it was, I wouldn't be shocked. But I also, I would, I wouldn't bet on that because there's a lot of problems.

I'm A little. Sorry to interrupt. It is popular to say that kind of thing though, and it's less popular to say the same thing about AI or nuclear weapons, which worries me that I'm more worried about nuclear weapons even still than I am about wokeism.

So I've gotten, I've had probably a thousand arguments about this. That's one nice thing about spending six years procrastinating on getting a book done is you end up test, battle, testing your ideas a million times. So I've heard this one a lot, right. Which is there's kind of three groups of former Obama voters. One is super woke now, another one is super anti woke now. And the third is what you just said, which is sure, wokeness is over the top, right? They're not, you're not woke. But I think that the anti woke people are totally lost their mind and it's just not that big a deal. Right.

So liberalism is on one side, there's that thread, there's Marxism on the other, and then there's postmodernism. How do those interplay together?

So it's interesting because Marxism is and all of its various descendants, obviously there's a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren't, you know, the same thing as what Karl Marx preached. But what do they all have in common? They think liberalism is. Here's why I disagree with that. Because it's not, it's not bad. Right. They actually think that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people in the civil rights and other movements wokeness itself, it's that a radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the US which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack medical journals and universities and you know, the aclu, you know, saying all the, you know, activist organizations and nonprofits and certain tech companies. Yeah. And many. And many tech companies. And what. So it's not that I think this thing is so bad. It's a little like we said with Trump. It's that what I'm. What's what? The reason Trump scares me is not because Trump, they think the opposite. They, they think, he thinks, you know, liberalism's good, we need to preserve it. They say it's so bad, it's that because it shows that it's, it reveals that we were vulnerable to a demagogue candidate. Liberalism is the problem. These other problems with racism and inequality that we're seeing those are inevitable results of liberalism. Liberalism is a rigged game. And it's just the power games in disguise. There is no liberal games. It's just the power games in disguise. And there's the upper people that oppress the lower people. And they convince. And what Wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently, and until something changes, will continue to be vulnerable to. A bully movement and a forcefully expansionist movement that wants to actually destroy the workings their liberal gears and tear them apart. And so here's the way I view a liberal democracy is it's a bunch of these institutions that were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years, and they all rely on trust, public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal people. It's all about false consciousness. They convince the lower.