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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Welcome everyone to the very first live Infinite Loops on Twitter spaces.
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And I am delighted to have as my first live guest, Tim Urban, who most know from his wait but why website, which has over 600,000 subscribers.
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Congratulations and welcome, Tim. Tim Urban: Thank you.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: So my first question is about the book that you're finishing.
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Now I know that you don't yet have a title and you're playing with when you're going to release it.
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But if you could start out just by kind of getting us through, why did you decide that this should become a book and then what's the topic and how much does it deviate from the story of us that's on wait but why? Tim Urban: Yeah.
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So the story of us that's on Wait But Why is kind of a framework for...
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well, the original reason I started writing a story of us was I was writing about all of these futuristic awesome tech advances that were happening and just thinking a lot about the potential utopia we could be heading towards.
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We're always thinking, what's it going to be like in 2050 or whatever.
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And it started to kind of eat away at me that I thought that none of that mattered, we didn't...
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because there's something else was going on, which was something our society was kind of devolving in some important way.
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And that, the only reason we would end up with a good future is if we build it together.
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Tim Urban: And if kind of we're devolving, it's kind of, it doesn't matter how many good ideas we have, we might be headed somewhere really bad.
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I thought for a while that we had a, with the amount of power that a human species is gaining, I've called it the human colossus before, this idea of the collective knowledge and power of our species grows at an exponential rate even if each individual human is just limited in what we can do.
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This species itself is getting incredibly powerful.
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And it's so powerful that we could, at some point, probably, not too far away, solve all the major problems that we see today.
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But also powerful enough that we could really do something bad.
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If you look at the kind of the trend in the 20th century was in almost every metric, the most prosperous century.
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Really worldwide, it was about as good as it had gotten for humans in so many ways.
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Tim Urban: And just immense thriving.
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But it also saw the worst wars, the worst genocide, it started the huge, huge, scary problem like climate change.
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And so it kind of seems like the goods were getting better, but the bads were getting worse.
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And so I brought up the goods and what could the 21st century goods be like? How good could this get?
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How many problems could we solve?
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And then I can kind of think about the bads could be so bad that it might make everything else moot.
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The stakes are getting higher and higher here.
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And so, as I wrote about all this other stuff, I'm thinking, I got to, right now, it looks like our society's kind of losing control of something important.
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Tim Urban: And I couldn't really put my finger on exactly what it was.
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It looked like maybe political polarization or just kind of loss of trust in our institution.
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One that's something big like that, but that's kind of what got me started.
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I said, "Let me pause from all of that future stuff and think about what's going on right now.
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And this is this really as scary kind of a trend because I think it is. What is that trend?
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And then if we understand what it is, maybe at least we could have some kind of idea of how, what each of us can do to try to help push this in the right direction."
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Tim Urban: So that was kind of the beginning, which then I started turning to a series on the blog and after thinking about it for a ton of time, multiple years, I ended up kind of settling on a framework that I thought, that could function as a lens that
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we could use to look through and use, as a set of terms we could use in our conversations to help us have better conversations, more accurate conversations about society that will allow us kind of see going on a little bit better. Tim Urban:
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Tim Urban: And maybe, I think a lot of people I think they're pushing things in the right direction and might actually be doing the opposite and help us build some clarity about what we actually need to do to make things better.
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And maybe hopefully encourage people to have the courage, to kind of actually push things in that direction.
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So I started writing and then as I wrote, I realized the framework is great, but I really want to apply it.
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I don't want to just give people this framework and have most people thinking that it's a great framework to assess their political enemies, as opposed to thinking this really applies to most of us.
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And so I wanted to start applying it to real world things, stuff going on in the US right now.
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Tim Urban: And so that started to...
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as I got into that, I realized how much I had to say.
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And that coupled with the fact that the series online was, it was too long to be an online series anymore.
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And I just said, "Okay, look, this is really important thing.
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I want to now take what I learned, read back what I got from the series and redo this in a better way and make it much more complete and then make that a book."
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So that's how that's gone and we're finally getting towards the end here.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's very cool, and ambitious project.
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One of the things that I completely agree with you about is that the challenges and the opportunities both are exponentially increasing.
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And I think it's wise of you to not only look at all this cool stuff that we're going to be able to do, but also to kind of contemplate what Nick Bostrom says is the great filter.
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He writes a very actually dreary paper, addressing the Fermi Paradox about, if the universe is teaming with life, where is everybody?
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And in his paper, the great filter, he basically outlines that maybe there is a great filter that various societies reach and they get wiped up.
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So I think that that's not a happy thought, and obviously I'm betting on the other side of this, but I think it's something that we really do have to talk about in the open, because one of the things that I think you do so well is you invent terms or use terms rather that are immediately accessible to somebody reading it and you avoid academic jargon, like the Overton window, you don't talk about the Trione model of the brain.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: You'd rather talk about the monkey brain and the primitive brain and the higher brain.
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So tell me, how do you set out, how do you frame the conversation going in?
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Do you start with, "Hey, we could have some really cool shit if we're managed to bypass all of this, the problems that we have," or do you go right into, "This is really important. And here's why." Tim Urban: Yeah.
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I mean, I started off by trying, the same way I started off this conversation.
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But trying to paint a picture of kind of humanity in a boat going down a river, and there's a fork up ahead.
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And on one side is a future that we would consider utopia.
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Just like people in the 1600s would, if they came today, they would consider this a complete utopia, coming from the world they lived in and the expectations they had.
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And on the other side of the fork is a really, probably very terrible dystopia, something worse than anything that people in the 20th century went through couldn't imagine.
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Maybe enough to be a great filter for humanity.
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And the problem is we're not really wired to imagine, to believe the potential for a world that is so different than the one we grew up in and where our parents and grandparents grew up in.
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Tim Urban: If it's not in front of our face, we have a hard time truly believing it.
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Even I have to continue to remind myself that I really do what I'm saying here, because it's so easy to just think, "Okay. Yeah."
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But both the utopia in our lifetimes and a horrible dystopia just seem kind of like, "Well, that's just, obviously not what's really going to happen.
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It's just going to be normal."
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And if you just step back and look at what exponential growth can mean and look at how quickly things can change and fall apart, or advance in incredible ways, you really should believe that.
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So I try to just first get people kind of in the mindset of, because both of these things are motivating.
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Tim Urban: The dystopia is something we should be really, really scared of, really scared of a future where we look back to today is the best of the good old days, when, "Oh my God, things were still good.
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Things were still good back then."
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And just be pining to go back into the past to these days when things were still good and what we had, we couldn't appreciate what we had.
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And so I want people to be scared of that world.
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And then I also want people to think about the utopia, a utopia where we can conquer all of these major problems.
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We can conquer climate change and poverty, and we can conquer disease.
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And even potentially mortality.
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I mean each of these things I've had conversations with people that they talk about the kind of things that are being developed and the possibilities and all of those things seem possible to the point where we get to a world where we look back to today, and it would seem like this hellish nightmare that we used to live in.
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Tim Urban: So if people get their minds there, that's a good starting place because now they're kind of with me that, "Okay, the stakes are high.
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We need to get to that good side of that fork."
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And the reason I think it's a fork, because it doesn't seem like we're really in the middle.
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You have 10 times the technological power that we do now, it's what we might have in 30, 40 years.
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We're not going to have an equal world.
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Either it's going to be way better or as I said way, way worse.
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So I want people to get in their heads like, "Okay, yes, we need to get to the right, the good side of that fork. And how do we do that?
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And how do I row in the right direction with my efforts?"
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Tim Urban: And once people are there with me now, they're bought into like, "Okay, at least let's try to think about this."
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So then I kind of get into what I think is a framework that we can use, if we're able to look and maybe see kind of the forces out there in society that are pushing us in one direction and the forces that are pushing us in the other direction.
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And we can see when we're acting, are we being part of which of those two forces.
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And when our friends are acting and so we look at celebrities doing things, and we look at new policies and which way are all these pushing, are they pushing us towards this side of the fork or that.
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And so that's kind of the basis of this framework I built, which is based on kind of a vertical axis that...
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I oversimplify the brain into kind of, there's this primitive mindset we can be in, and then there's this higher mind.
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Tim Urban: And I kind of arranged those, that higher minds at the top of this ladder and the primitive mind at the bottom of the ladder.
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And so when you're towards the top of the ladder, it means that your higher mind is kind of doing more of the actual thinking, is kind of in control of your morals and the way you think about others and the way you think about yourself.
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And your primitive mind is there, but it's kind of, it's not running the show.
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And then when you're in a different mindset, you might be kind of in the hands of your primitive mind, which affects all of those things.
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And now you're kind of towards the bottom of the ladder.
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So you can kind of have high rung thinking and low rung thinking, and you can kind of have high rung morals and low rung morals and high rung mindset, low rung mindset.
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Tim Urban: And so I hammer these terms in a lot and try to bring people into this so now they can start looking at things with this vertical lens, because we have so many horizontal spectrums that we think about.
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We have the left right and center, political axis for example, that's a one dimensional horizontal axis.
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And there's so much turmoil over this, so much conflict based on this axis.
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And the tribes are arranged on these different parts of this axis.
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And to me, it's really missing the point, it's missing the point, it's way too oversimplified.
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If you bring the vertical axis in, now you have a square, say, now you can kind of have the upper right.
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And the upper left politically and the lower right, and the lower left and even the upper center and the lower center.
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Tim Urban: And you realize that a lot of times when people on the left, they hate the right, what they hate is the lower right and vice versa.
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And there's an upper right, that is incredibly good and productive for society and necessary.
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And people on the right seem to forget often that there's an upper left that is unbelievably important.
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We need high rung progressivism.
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And so once you start thinking with this vertical axis, I think our conversations become a lot clearer.
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And I think things become less tribal because you realize it's not the bane of all problems is the right or the left. That doesn't make sense.
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It collates the bottom rungs, which span the axis.
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So that reduces tribalism because it's just going to, I don't know, I just think it's a lot more accurate.
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Tim Urban: And I think we're just missing these...
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people use the term like moderate or centrist when they're trying to talk about what I think of as high rung thinking, nuanced, productive kind of positive some compromise, but it's not moderate or centrist, or at least centrist is a horizontal term.
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And it's a misnomer for this concept. It really is.
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It's high rung is what people are, I think, trying to say.
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And I can get it a lot more into... there's a lot of...
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when you get to thinking, high rung thinking is when people just searching for truth.
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And so when you're looking for truth, you actually like getting proven wrong.
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Tim Urban: Someone tells you, "You're wrong," you have fun because either you think no I'm not, and this is going to be a fun way to show how great my ideas are or you do get, or maybe you actually get proven wrong, "Okay. Wow.
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I just got a little smarter.
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My ideas just got a little better."
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But you're not taking it personally.
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And you seek out dissent and you're trying to get more nuanced as you go and you're not attached to any conclusion, because that doesn't make sense when you're thinking with your higher mind.
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But when your primitive mind is doing your thinking, which happens to all of us, we have a whole different relationship with our beliefs.
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Our beliefs become sacred, they become part of our identity and they become our body itself.
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So when someone's in insulting us, it actually feels like violent.
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Tim Urban: Our fight or flight mechanisms start up and we'll do anything to kind of...
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confirmation bias will kick in to protect our sacred beliefs, to protect us.
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And we will never, you'll never change your mind when you're in that zone, you don't get any smarter and you're impossible to argue with.
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And you often hate people who disagree with you.
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You think they're awful people and you don't want to be friends with them. And this is a very...
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this is a completely different way of relationship with ideas.
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I think this is low rung thinking.
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Again, we all do both of these at different times, but it helps if we can be aware of these terms, it can help us I think of. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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You add dimensionality, which is so important because the other way, as you point out, it's just flatland and what happens for people who just think about it that way, they sort of feel they need to make a selection. You know what I mean?
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And so what you're doing, I think, and I love, is you are expanding the menu because the menu is not right, left or center.
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My buddy, Chris Williamson says, "If somebody can get and guess all of your political opinions by just hearing one of them, you are essentially a dogmatic zombie," because you should be, at least if you're thinking about it, especially in the dimensionality that you say, and I was very, very happy to hear you say, the upper left is very needed.
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That kind of push to progressive beliefs is very needed, but the upper right is needed too, for kind of the other aspects that people in a hurry tend to not take into mind.
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Tim Urban: Yeah, you need to pass them the breaks.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, exactly right.
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And so I guess the worry for me though, is, we're doing a series ultimately for the podcast called the Great Reshuffle and I think we're in it right now.
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I think we'll be in it for a while.
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Lots of really good stuff, for example, time, space and geography have effectively collapsed.
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Vatsal, who's my colleague at Infinite Loops and he is on here tonight.
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He's in India, Jamie's on, Jamie can be in Washington.
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Geography no longer matters.
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And so the ability to find other people who have interests that are the same as yours has expanded dramatically.
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Unfortunately that also can be taken over by the primitive mind as you call it.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you can just put yourself in an echo chamber, right? You can get...
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and one of the downsides of the great reshuffle is that it is a chaotic time.
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We are moving to a digital universe from a physical one.
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We are, like I said, collapsing space time and geography, which opens a lot of opportunities, but a lot of problems.
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And one of the things that I've found by studying just human operating system, I'm stealing that from my friend, Brian O'Nelli is that many times in a really chaotic environment, people just want to simplify everything.
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And the way a lot of folks go about simplifying everything is to kind of find their "tribe".
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So we've seen a increase, fairly dramatic increase of tribalism, of ingroup versus outgroup.
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There are volumes and volumes and volumes written about how, if you want to be very devious and you're an Adolf Hitler, or you are a charismatic despot, there's manuals on how to do this.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the challenge is, they hook right into kind of our base code.
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And I don't see that changing dramatically.
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So I guess my question for you is, do you agree that we've got to overcome a pretty big part of our own evolution, right, because I was reviewing some of your stuff, you had a great quote, which is this thing that you call the primitive mind still it's optimized for 50,000 BC and man it did a great job in 50,000 BC.
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It kept us safe, it made us [inaudible] , and I often quip that everyone that's alive today, we are all the descendants of the people that ran away when the bush was wrestling. Right?
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And so within our very DNA, we have a real fear of novel dangers and we overreact to them, etc.
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How do you get people and I'm assuming that you're addressing this in your book, what's your strategy for getting people to take a deep breath and put that aside?
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Tim Urban: Well, I mean, humans kind of just left to their own devices will, primitive minds will very often kind of will take over. If you have a...
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you plop a 100 people into an island together and they're alone.
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And even if a bunch of people are thinking high minded, it takes one person starts threatening certain groups and making a group an ingroup and saying, these people are slaves, and now we're going to [inaudible].
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And it takes one or two people who are really primitive mind centered, and they are spouting that out.
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It just wakes up everyone's primitive mind and everyone, a lot of people get scared and then they want to join a group and they want their group to be stronger than others.
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Tim Urban: And before you know, the whole group of a 100 people is in full primitive mind, they war with each other, they're dehumanizing the other group and they, and...
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so I think that one thing a society can do is when things are stable, and they've been stable for a while, we can develop etiquette and things that seem like formalities, but actually something like etiquette is a way of society imposing rules, broad collective rules on the collective primitive minds of the society.
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So, for example, obviously, the primitive minds of men would do very rude things to women in many cases.
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And that is something that society makes very clear rules about that you, a, there's laws.
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You could go to jail if you assault someone.
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You also will be hated by people in society.
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Tim Urban: And there's so many, there's social penalties, there's legal penalties for a man's primitive mind doing what it wants to a stranger on the street.
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Society imposes so many rules to protect women and keep the primitive minds in check. Same with crime, right? Same with violence.
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Obviously there still is crime, violence, rape.
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These things exist, but they exist way, way less in the US today than they probably did in other much less civilized places in time and space.
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And so we end up with kind of... or racial slurs, right?
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These things, once society starts deciding that these things are bad, they become extremely taboo.
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A taboo is a way of society's way of saying, "Hey, this isn't how we do things here."
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Tim Urban: This is a set of norms, basically written by society's collected higher minds come into existence to police society's collected primitive minds over time.
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And over time, actually, that can be this powerful force that can keep primitive minds in check.
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Now you talked about chaos and when a chaotic period happens, when things rapidly change, a lot of the old rules don't apply or there's new situations there are no rules for yet.
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And what you see often is primitive minds kind of take advantage.
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They jump on the opportunity, there's kind of a vacuum of ethics, and there's a vacuum of...
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it's a confusion about what's even right or wrong.
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So an example is social media with all of this etiquette for how you behave in person with someone and generally being incredibly rude, it's not going to go over well, you're going to get socially penalized.
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You're going to feel bad yourself because you've been taught that it's bad to be that way.
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And you're just not going to do that, but now we have Twitter.
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It's almost like the wild west with social etiquette.
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Tim Urban: All the rules went out the window and it's a time of, shaming right now is somehow thought of as a good thing by a lot of people and public shaming of someone who your group is deemed to be bad is suddenly like...
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Instead of being something that people would say, "What are you doing?
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Why are you behaving so awful?
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I don't want to be friends with you anymore. You shame people." No, people say... You get rewarded for it.
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So that to me is a confused moment in society.
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When things that we all know are bad in this new format, we all have forgotten the thing, the wisdom that we have collected as a society.
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We're all being really primitive about it.
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And so what I see on Twitter, when I see this just really awful behavior and shaming and nasty comments and stuff that I believe that almost none of the people doing them would say this, "Would you really act that way in person?"
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Tim Urban: What I see is I see primitive minds have gone wild on a place like Twitter.
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And again, when I said about a hundred people on an island, I don't think that everyone on Twitter is just a low rung monster.
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I think that it takes a few.
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And sometimes I think it can be bots. It's a great way to...
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Sometimes a couple, nasty people can turn...
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I've seen this in my own blog.
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My comments sections they're like...
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I'm so proud of how high-minded they are.
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People disagree all the time.
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They disagree with me or with each other, but they do it respectfully and they disagree with the ideas.
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There's no personal attacks until a couple...
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What I sometimes see is some comments sections go south.
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And I think, "What the hell.
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This isn't how it normally is.
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Everyone's being so nasty."
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Tim Urban: And then I look carefully and I realize there's like three people, two people who started acting that way.
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And then it just the whole...
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So it's almost like we're animals.
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It's when someone's primitive mind start coming out to play, it almost spreads pheromones to us, and it wakes up all of our primitive minds.
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Just going on Twitter for a while will make you feel small and petty and angry and tribal, really quickly.
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So, we're all prone to this.
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And so it spreads like epidemic.
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But the bigger point here is that chaos, I think, opens the door to things like this.
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Twitter is just one example.
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Look at the change from broadcast media to narrowcast media.
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Tim Urban: So from the ABC, NBC, CBS broadcast, this is the whole country where...
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They're in a race to see...
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They're in a competition to see who can see the most legitimate, most accurate today, and most non-partisan to this narrowcast media world, where that's a different game now.
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And you see all of this media is racing to the right and left to see who's the most partisan, to see who's your accuracy goes out the window, and it's just a whole different incentive structure.
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Tim Urban: And what you...
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And to me, I don't think it's going to last that long in that regard because people are eventually...
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You're going to start to say, "Wait a second."
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Eventually, something like New York times or one of the...
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will start to just really lose its reputation and that become the butt of jokes that eventually, other things will pop up and replace it or it'll have to change for...
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Tim Urban: But there's a big lag time.
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There's a big period where these things are still trusted and where...
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But the actual underlying core tenants of these institutions has slid down to the low rungs.
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So I think chaos is an invitation to that.
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It makes it much harder for that.
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I think of it as the country's high rung immune system.
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We're just that etiquette I was talking about.
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It's like a set of norms that protects us from ourselves, from our own primitive minds.
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When things rapidly changed, the high rung immune system is weakened, and it's an opportunity.
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And the problem today is that I don't think rapid change is going away.
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I think the point is things are rapidly changing and it's just going to get more rapid as tech changes more quickly.
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Tim Urban: And so, that's what worries me is that...
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I worry that this is just the beginning of an era where primitive minds are taking over institutions and norms that they were never able to before.
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And so I think, really, we have to be aware of this concept in the first place so we can see it where it's happening and see it for what it is and catch ourselves doing it.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I totally agree.
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We went from a world where basically, you had three networks that were broadcast.
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You had to show up at the time the news was on or you miss it.
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We had two newspapers that meant anything.
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We had the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.
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And literally creating and sustaining a narrative that the country bought into was pretty easy, honestly.
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If you read about the Hollywood moguls, they had a very strong hand in it too.
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It was like, "No, that's not going to work because that isn't the way America is."
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That's a debatable point, but back then the moguls and the studio bosses and the people who ran the networks and the editors and owners of the Times and the Journal, if they decided that it was going to be this way, well, then it was this way.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: And a lot of reasonable things sprang from that.
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These higher rules that you've mentioned.
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But a lot of really shitty things sprung from that too.
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Institutionalized racism in the South, where people couldn't vote, anti-gay, anti-lesbian type of things.
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And let's say you're a gay person in Sippi.
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I mean, not to pick on Mississippi, but a lot of the Southern states were very kind of in the Bible belt, you were out of luck and you had to physically move to either New York or San Francisco, or maybe a couple other cities.
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That's changed tremendously. Right?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: My wife and I were chatting about this the other day and with all of the naysayers. So I'm 61. I was born in 1960.
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And I would submit that the United States has changed more and mostly for the better in the 61 years that I've been alive than maybe any other country in history.
32:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: In 1971, a woman couldn't get a credit card without her husband's permission.
32:06
I mean, how ridiculous is that?
32:06
And, if a woman wanted to keep her own name after getting married, she had to go to court to keep her own name.
32:13
I know because my sister did it.
32:13
And we have come a very long way.
32:21
Are there lots of other things left to be done? Of course, there are.
32:21
But I tend to come back to Twitter for a minute.
32:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Maybe I'm Pollyannishian and Panglossian, but I think that Twitter, yes, right now, is still more noise than signal.
32:39
But I see it as having the potential to emerge as the world's first continuously updated global intelligence network.
32:49
A hive mind that is greater than the minds of any single individual.
32:55
Even if you put a committee of the most brilliant people together, the hive mind, if this happens, can do better.
33:01
The Human Colossus, as you call it.
33:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, Vatsal who's on my team.
33:08
He doesn't agree with me.
33:12
He thinks that the noise will essentially smother the signal.
33:12
And you can jump in Vatsal if I'm misrepresenting your opinion.
33:20
And that, kind of Gresham's Law.
33:20
And to be honest, he's got the base rates on his side, honestly.
33:28
Vatsal Kaushik: But also, another point that how Twitter basically censors a lot of the opinions which does not align with its political agendas.
33:39
And that's just not the right way to build a global intelligence network.
33:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I completely agree as your know.
33:46
And that's one of the downsides of...
33:46
I wrote a long essay in the early '80s when I was in my early 20s, just going on and on about how great technology was going to be because it was going to break up the power centers and the institutions that people with a little bit sovereign individually in my outlook.
34:07
And then, unfortunately, you see social networks deciding that they are going to be the final judge and jury and executioner.
34:15
And I agree with you Vatsal, that if that continues, then maybe, it's we're going to have to do without, right, or some other thing.
34:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I do think though, that Tim's point is a good one.
34:32
With all the exponential change, maybe if Twitter keeps blocking people for their opinions, which Twitter use as wrong or wrong think, there might be room for another social network that actually takes up this policy of, "Let's put a bunch of people together and think about things." Right?
35:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And Tim, I think, one of the things that you say that I really liked a lot is when you're talking about the higher mind, it's something that I try to do.
35:07
And it's hard, honestly.
35:07
I hadn't trained myself to do it, but instead of saying, "I believe," or "This is the hill I'll die on."
35:13
I present my ideas more as hypothesis and thesis because it works.
35:21
It's a trick of the mind, but an emotion immediately gets tied to you and your...
35:29
Or sorry, something you say, "I believe, and nothing will change my mind."
35:35
Well, that's something usually, people with very, very profound beliefs have them and that leap of faith because there's not a lot of empirical evidence to support what they're believing.
35:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Now, there is another beliefs.
35:48
I just don't like the word because it attaches to emotions.
35:48
And when you say, "Thesis."
35:48
Well, okay, that's a model.
35:53
Models are meant to be challenged.
35:53
In fact, it's encouraged.
35:53
And so, again with reframing, which is something I think, Tim you do really, really well.
36:04
If you can reframe it that you're not being attacked.
36:04
Somebody is differing with an opinion or a thesis that you have.
36:09
And listen, if they point out something that's really wrong, they've helped you.
36:15
They haven't hurt you in any way.
36:15
Tim, thoughts on approaching it that way. Tim Urban: Yeah.
36:23
I think that when you're thinking on the high rungs, yeah, you see your idea as a hypothesis, and you're really big on hypotheses, and you like testing them.
36:38
But to get to a bigger point you were making earlier.
36:49
You talked about the progressive advances that have happened, and they've been tremendous. Obviously, it's...
36:56
Like you said, "Go back to the '50s and the country is a worst place.
37:04
Basically, everyone that isn't a straight white man.
37:04
It's a much worse place to be."
37:11
And I think that that's part of this...
37:11
The story is that there's two progressive stories going on.
37:21
There is the incredible advances that have happened that I think are the work of high-rung progressives, the upper left.
37:25
The tireless, continually, courageous, upper left.
37:34
Tim Urban: And their job, basically, is to eventually convince the upper right.
37:38
And when the upper right comes around then the lower right, which is often never convincible on those topics has no choice. They get outnumbered.
37:46
I think, right now, you'd probably find a lot of lower right people in the country that are hugely against gay marriage still.
37:50
But they're not very loud anymore.
37:54
You don't hear them much anymore.
37:54
Because they've gotten outnumbered because the upper right has come around.
38:00
And you see this in statistics.
38:00
I mean, the real thing that has changed for gay people in the US.
38:05
The reason things have gotten better is that the conservatives have changed their mind. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure.
38:12
Tim Urban: As progressives, we're on these side of things at least for the last 10, 15 years. And it's really...
38:19
So, this is how I think of it now.
38:19
When progressivism is doing its thing well, it makes its case, it uses persuasion and uses free speech vigorously through art, through books, through speeches, through protests.
38:34
And eventually, it wins people over.
38:34
It creates a mind-changing movement that wins people over and then laws change, their policies change, a lot has changed, and norms change.
38:44
And so, I think there's so many great examples of this.
38:52
Tim Urban: Now, the problem is when the upper left, when the high-rung progressives are making huge progress, it's exhilarating, and it just...
39:00
And what happens is, the lower left, which also likes those movements, and they're happy when they succeed, they're not...
39:05
But the lower left is the very tribal version of the left.
39:05
The version of the left that is much more about crusading against bad guys, and then actual concrete solutions to real complex problems.
39:19
Tim Urban: And the problem is a lot of times, especially after a bunch of progress is made, progressive movements, go from what I think of is kind of the hammer phase to the sandpaper phase.
39:33
So the hammer phases is breaking down big walls and changing the huge misconceptions and laws.
39:39
But then, there's still a lot of work to do. Right?
39:39
For example, gay marriage passes. Right? That's great. That's a hammer thing.
39:43
It have to be huge, big changes.
39:47
But now, you still look at...
39:47
Look at professional sports.
39:47
How many people, how many men in professional sports are openly gay? Very few, right? So, we're not there yet.
40:00
There's a lot of work to do in this regard.
40:00
Tim Urban: And of course, you could say the same thing about...
40:04
Look at the Civil Rights Act and all of this stuff.
40:07
These are hammer activism.
40:07
But now, there's all kinds of much more subtle things going on that still created an impediment for Black people in the US.
40:12
So, there's so many examples of where you really need sandpaper activism to get into really nuanced things, really subtle misconceptions, and subtle biases, and all these little things.
40:24
And so, what I find a lot of the time is that the upper left understands that you have a hammer and you have a sandpaper and you move on there.
40:37
Tim Urban: The lower left only has a hammer.
40:37
They don't understand the concept of the sandpaper. And that's not what...
40:41
They are righteous, good, Disney protagonists on a mission against the evil and the villains.
40:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You're right.
40:47
Tim Urban: And if there's and if it's...
40:48
And so, sometimes it makes sense to have a sandpaper phase where you need nuance and you need debate.
40:52
And sometimes in the sandpaper phase conservatives make a good point, and you need to go back and forth with them.
40:55
And the conservative pushback actually is a really important filter for changes at that point, just put the brakes on a little bit so that it doesn't over-correct, and that you actually get to an even better place.
41:04
And so, something like Twitter is amazing for high-rung progressivism.
41:10
It's one of the things that...
41:14
For sure, social media was a big part of, for example, passing gay marriage, without a doubt.
41:18
Tim Urban: It's also a great tool for the lower left.
41:20
And while something like gay marriage is going on, a big, exhilarating, hammer activism movement, it's hard to see the difference between the upper left and the upper right.
41:29
I'm sorry, the upper and lower left.
41:29
It's hard to see the difference.
41:29
Yeah, they're both seem like they're on the same crusade.
41:33
But then, things turn to a more nuanced phase, and suddenly there's a big difference.
41:37
The lower left is still looking for...
41:37
They are looking for enemies.
41:42
They are looking for who's the next...
41:42
You'll be able to take down evil and they...
41:47
And I think that Twitter and something like that actually enables the lower left to be a lot more powerful than I think they normally would be.
41:53
Tim Urban: So a side by side with these really good developments, you also have really bad groups getting a lot of power and so much power that they can undermine a ton of progress that the upper left has made.
42:08
And so, I think that's part of their bigger story, which is that when you have more progress, you have chaotic changes and exponential increases in connection and technology and power, in that regard.
42:19
You end up with both the better goods and the worst bad.
42:19
And so, yeah, I'm scared about the negatives here, a lot.
42:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Along those lines, one of the things that...
42:31
I try to not be a zealot about anything, but I guess I'm a zealot about free speech.
42:38
I think that the genius of our founders to put the Bill of Rights into place.
42:46
Again, America, at least to what I have done in the history, I've studied the first country that was founded on an idea. Right?
42:54
The other countries were, the Sun King got picked by God himself or the tribal leader or whatever.
43:00
America, Age of Reason, Age of Enlightenment, founded on an idea and a series of ideas.
43:07
And free speech being the first of those.
43:07
I think that for the high mind to even work...
43:14
What we're really talking about is the scientific method, really.
43:20
And the [Nullius in Verba], take no one's word for it.
43:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, if you don't study history, you don't understand that before the enlightenment and before scientists were free, and didn't fear being burned at the stake by the either church or civil authorities, there was no real net progress. And that's not good. Right?
43:46
If you have to falsify what you think because you're fearful of being, to the primitive mind, thrown out of the tribe. I don't know.
43:53
I mean, we'll have to come up with ways to overcome that.
43:58
And hopefully, your book is going to be our user's manual.
44:03
Because we're all walking around with these quantum computers in our head with no owner's manual, and that can be problematic.
44:07
I did promise people questions.
44:15
So we've been gabbing here for almost an hour. Jamie, you want to...
44:20
Jamie Catherwood: Yeah, I actually have one question for Tim before I opened it up because I have the power to do that.
44:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Look, the power is mine.
44:29
Jamie Catherwood: I'm just curious if in recent, like in your book and the topics you're talking about in this evolution and progress in society, if you've ever read up on Whiggish history or Whig history? Tim Urban: No. Jamie Catherwood: Okay.
44:42
Tim Urban: It sounds like...
44:43
Jamie Catherwood: It might be... Jamie Catherwood: Sorry. Tim Urban: ... the Whig party. Jamie Catherwood: Yes.
44:45
So it's this idea that- Jim O'Shaughnessy: The classic theory.
44:47
Jamie Catherwood: There's a view of history where it's like this inexorable march of progress throughout history, and that we...
44:52
But the problem with it is that historians can look back and judge what movements in society were by modern standards.
44:59
So we looked back at what people did in earlier centuries with our modern societal views and ignore the fact that in a hundred years, historians will look back at what we did, and think that some of the stuff that we think today is good is actually awful.
45:17
And it just, if you had read up on that, I was going to be curious to hear your thoughts.
45:23
But we'll just open up the floor.
45:26
But I think you should be open to it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
45:28
I would simply reframe that question, Jamie, as, people need to be able to put things into context. Right?
45:32
And I think that people who are not able to do that, miss a lot of that.
45:39
I think that's your point, Jamie.
45:39
And that it's very dangerous to judge somebody who lived 300 years ago through our mores and customs of today.
45:54
Because A, we don't understand their society at all.
45:54
We don't understand the game rules that they were playing under.
46:00
And if you do it that way, somebody who 300 years ago would have been considered a lunatic liberal would be considered an evil person today. Right?
46:07
So context is very important, would be the only thing that I would add.
46:14
But Jamie, go ahead and pick someone to ask a question to Tim.
46:20
Jamie Catherwood: All right.
46:22
Tom has been requesting for a while. So I'm going to add him. Tom, can you hear us? Or can you speak...
46:30
Tom: Can you guys hear me?
46:31
Jamie Catherwood: There you go. Tom: Oh, magic.
46:31
Tim just wanted to say, I'm following your work for years.
46:31
You've been a huge inspiration to me.
46:35
But one thing I've always thought reading it and listening to this conversation is sort of that much nationalism is this thing that's held up is what's going to get us out of this.
46:44
That if we just know more and more, and control the system more and more and more, we'll eventually be able to force our way out of this catastrophe.
46:50
But Jim and I are huge into Daoism.
46:55
And that says the [inaudible] which is if you get less directly rational and learn to take cues from the system and connect to this weird inevitable transcendent, the solutions will start to present themselves in harmony with the system.
47:08
And that, it's completely the opposite of the conversation we're having.
47:13
Because rationalism is amazing at diagnosing the problems.
47:18
But whenever we hope and whenever we come up with solutions, they just disappear.
47:18
So I don't know whether that's a thought that had occurred to you.
47:22
Tim Urban: Well, so yeah, I don't think that...
47:26
I'm going to advise everyone in the book to...
47:26
who reads the book, for example, to just try to be rational.
47:34
Think with your rational brain.
47:34
We all just were [inaudible].
47:39
I agree that that seems naive and not quite understanding the challenges of human society or human nature.
47:44
Because, obviously, all of us had a rational side, and we all make bad decisions, and we're all self-defeating, and we all...
47:50
Even though we have a rational thinker in there, each one of us can barely go a day without violating what that rational side knows we should do because human nature has a lot more to it.
48:03
Tim Urban: So I think that, I don't know whether this is agreeing with your point or not, because I'm not quite sure I understand your point, but you can let me know in a second.
48:12
But I think, to me, it's that what we can do is a pre...
48:18
This is your capitalism, well it doesn't require people to be rational.
48:29
It says that people can be rational or they can be irrationally emotional, or they can be whatever.
48:38
It doesn't really matter.
48:38
Because as long as you have generally subtly pushing self-interest, the system will work. Okay.
48:42
I mean, obviously, a lot of people have a lot of problems with capitalism.
48:47
But that's the basic idea.
48:47
Is that it's a system that expects full rationality.
48:51
And I think that that's the way that we should be thinking.
48:58
Tim Urban: When you think about the incentives right now for major media brands.
49:00
It's almost that if I see...
49:00
If it seems like the New York Times is being more one-sided or if CNN is becoming more whatever, more propaganda less news, whatever you want to say.
49:16
That's because they are being rational.
49:21
And the incentives have gone...
49:21
They're pushing them in the wrong way.
49:21
So I think a lot of times it's rational thoughts in a bad system that drives things into a bad place.
49:35
And I think that what we should be thinking about is incentive systems and what are the kinds of either rules or new kinds of industries that can be born that can take shitty humanness and drive it into good and shitty humanness will be driven in a good direction in- PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:54:04] Tim Urban: It will be driven in a good direction in that system.
49:58
So, I think a lot of what's gone wrong, as I said, is that the rapid changes have created incentives where self-interest of companies and of people.
50:10
I was going on other examples on Twitter right now.
50:10
If you want a self-interested person, if they want clout, probably the best way to do it is to be super tribal and super natty, and shame a certain groups political enemies, and then you're bugged by that group and that's not great.
50:26
Right now we get so much online shaming going on because it's rewarded.
50:26
So again, it's rational, if you want to be popular on social media and get a lot of followers, it's rational to behave really badly, really nasty.
50:36
I guess that's what I would say is it's not the meaning of rationality.
50:43
It's that we do need our systems to be... yeah, sorry. So does that make sense? Tom: Yeah, totally.
51:00
And I don't want to monopolize any of the floor here, but the only question I'll ask is you've spent a long time thinking about this. What is the solution?
51:07
If you were Jim's king for a day, what would that be? Okay.
51:13
Tim Urban: Well I wish I could say I had a single solution.
51:16
The truth is I'm one person.
51:16
I don't think any, person's that smart.
51:30
So this goes back to Jim's point for a second.
51:30
So the reason I think free speech is so so so important.
51:33
Obviously there's a few reasons.
51:33
I mean, one, if you don't have it, and I'm a zealot about free speech too, because as soon as you say, "Well, we're done with free speech, but we don't want hate speech."
51:42
Now suddenly all that means is whoever's in the most cultural power or political power gets to shut up their enemies by calling their enemies hate speech.
51:53
Tim Urban: That's what always happens.
51:55
In Pakistan, a prisoner executed an atheist blogger, saying it was because he was promoting hate speech, right? So this is it.
52:05
Any kind of exceptions to free speech will always turn into the powerful abusing it to silence their enemies.
52:14
So first thing, but the second reason is that a single human is like, I compare it to a neuron in the brain.
52:19
A neuron in the brain is not very smart on its own, but together with all the other neurons communicating, it forms the super system that is brilliant.
52:28
And I think that we are very similar.
52:34
Tim Urban: You think about the kinds of things we've invented.
52:36
No human, on their own, could invent anything, right?
52:36
We were very, very basic things only, but together through the generations, this massive billion person collaboration, you end up with this advanced society, this [civilization inaudible], but this incredible technology.
52:49
And so free speech, to me, is basically saying to the brain, "Neurons, you all can think what you want.
52:55
You can communicate together and everyone can speak what's in their mind."
52:59
And so it connects all the brains in the society together, like neurons, and creates a super brain.
53:04
Tim Urban: Now, when you have one group that has enough power, is that sometimes the government has enough power to shut down free speech. The U.
53:10
S doesn't really have that problem. U.
53:10
S has a different problem because to have free speech you need two things.
53:15
You need the government, you need the legal situation, which is the first amendment for us.
53:20
And you need the cultural situation, which is that culture that values free speech.
53:25
When you have a cultural group with enough cultural power to basically ban free speech culturally, by punishing people, culturally, for it, you shut down, you absolutely stopped the conversation.
53:37
The society gets very dumb.
53:37
The big brain and the society can't think anymore.
53:41
Tim Urban: So you ask about what the solution is.
53:45
To me, the only way we're going to figure out a solution is if we can debate the shit out of it, we can talk about it.
53:49
We can write op-eds on it and then op-eds disagreeing with those op-eds on it, and books and then books disagreeing with those books, and then public debates and then blog posts and comments in the blog posts.
54:03
I don't know if we can solve it, but I know that's our best shot if we can all talk about it, because now we have the super brain thinking about it.
54:08
And the super brain, I do think, can come up with a solution.
54:12
The individual brains absolutely can not, we are not smart enough.
54:16
Tim Urban: The point is we can learn how to fly to Mars together, right, but alone, we might be able to create a spear in the woods or a baby in the woods with no other knowledge.
54:24
So the collective brain that can fly to Mars, maybe it can also solve this other problem.
54:28
We can do amazing things collectively.
54:28
One of the major things I'm pushing in my book is basically to have everyone be obsessed with free speech and to have it be taboo to have behavior language that intimidates people out of free speech or shuts down or punishes free speech.
54:47
Tim Urban: When free speech turns into clarity and clarity into, I think, better behavior and better solutions and better systems.
54:58
So yeah, I think that that's a huge one right now and I think that it's in peril.
55:06
I mean, there was just a really scary poll I saw today, which is like, I forget the exact numbers, but the number of students...
55:11
I can actually pull this up for one second here. Here it is.
55:19
66% of all students support speaker shutdowns, up four percentage points from last year.
55:24
23% even support using violence to stop the speaker, up five percentage points from last year.
55:29
So this is a disastrous trend.
55:29
And this is, by the way, students are being taught this by professors, by teachers that this is something that they're being taught that speech can be violence and that you have to protect the students from violence so we have to keep bad ideas off campus.
55:45
Tim Urban: Besides the fact that this assumes, that to assume that certain ideas are not worth hearing and not allowed, no one in the campus should be allowed to hear it, is assuming that you have all the answers and that you know everything already which, of course, people don't.
55:56
So there's an arrogance to it.
55:56
But then there's also this authoritarian where it's, if you want to be on a really good thinker, you go to the speeches that you disagree with, right?
56:04
Cause not, you're going to get smarter and learn something, or you'll understand your opponents better.
56:08
If you want to be a bad thinker, you don't go to this.
56:12
Anything that disagrees with you, you just want to hear things that agree with you, and that's fine.
56:15
I don't think you're a great thinker, but you are live and let live in the U. S.
56:15
You want to go be a zealot, go be a zealot, don't go to the speech.
56:18
Tim Urban: What's not okay, and what everyone should immediately say, "No, this is not okay" is when a shutdown says, "Not only am I not going to go to that talk, no one on this campus is allowed to go hear that speaker.
56:29
No one is allowed to hear that speaker."
56:29
That is what I think of as idea supremacy.
56:34
It's bullying, it's authoritarianism.
56:34
And it is a complete shutdown of free speech.
56:34
That campus is getting dumber.
56:41
The students on it are getting dumber and the students who pay to go have their minds enriched are not allowed to because of a group of bullies.
56:44
So to me, I think that kind of trend is what should make us all raise our eyebrows because that is the antithesis of us finding the solution to our problems.
56:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Me too. Jamie, how about Justin?
56:56
I see him [crosstalk] on the line there.
57:02
Justin: Hey, [crosstalk] appreciate this conversation.
57:04
Thank you for hosting this, Jim, and, and thank you Tim, for being here.
57:04
I just want to connect one thing, Jim, you think about, and Tim, I think you think about a lot, and this has been a conversation that has sort of traversed levels of abstraction, which is I think something that Tim excels at, and there's societal level things and individual level things and the connection between the two and in particular, the connection between progressivism and conservatism and how the health of the U.
57:35
S in particular is dependent on this two party, sort of controversial competing, philosophical points of view and how those are connected.
57:39
I brought up a quote this evening, and this won't last forever I promise, from a controversial figure himself, Woodrow Wilson.
57:52
I went to Princeton so I studied under that sort of point of view cause he was a long time ago, president of that university.
58:05
Justin: And he said there is nothing so conservative of life as growth.
58:09
Well, when that stops decay sets in and the end comes a pace.
58:09
Progress is life for the body politic as for the body natural.
58:15
To stand still is to court death.
58:15
And I think that's a very interesting thing and sort of unites what Tim has been saying here tonight, and Jim, I think you've attested to this.
58:29
It's all about this healthy competition between these two points of view and so, actually, I'm going to go in a weird unexpected direction with this, and that is on the one hand you need this progress and this conservatism, but what I want to ask Tim about in particular and Jim, I know you have lots of wonderful thoughts about this cause I have summarized your stuff, is documenting your own thoughts.
58:56
Justin: So the relationship between the collective and the individual, and so keeping a handwritten journal consistently recording your decisions and beliefs over time, writing about what you're worried about and frustrated about.
59:08
And so I guess what I'm trying to understand and uncover from you, Tim, from you, Jim, is just this relationship between this individual and the collective and how that relates to the progressive and conservative movements in our country.
59:24
Does that make any sense?
59:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah it does, to me.
59:27
If you don't mind, Tim, I'm just going to jump in because it's something that I really do get up on my soap box about.
59:38
I think keeping a journal, a handwritten journal, for reasons that would take me too long to explain here, but it's probably one of the best things that you can do because of several things.
59:49
Number one, it teaches you that our memories are unreliable narrators.
59:58
Our brain, I don't understand the science part of it, hopefully neuroscientists will figure this out but, seems to update our in quotes memories to make them consistent with what we think now.
1:00:03
And I have been called a liar in my own handwriting too many times to not understand that what we think that we believe, that what we remember vividly, we don't.
1:00:20
And if you keep the journal and go back, you'll see that that is in fact, the case.
1:00:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Innumerable examples.
1:00:31
The one that I won't get into right now, but was I kind of thought I had with the 20th anniversary of 9-11, I kind of thought I had a viewpoint about it.
1:00:40
And then I went and I found a letter that I wrote my kids on the day and my beliefs were, the ones that I thought I had now, I really didn't have. I was a lot more angry.
1:00:56
I was a lot more sort of, you know, how are we going to ever let this continue and how can we stop this?
1:01:03
And so it led me to understand that in certain circumstances, the group reacts differently than the individual.
1:01:18
And there's the great quote I say, it's a knockoff of Nietzsche, but that madness is very rare in the individual, but it's common in groups.
1:01:25
I was just reading in a book this afternoon about all of the Japanese people who, when the Americans got to Okinawa, literally committed mass suicide, because it so was at odds with their fervently-held beliefs that they were chosen by God and their emperor was chosen by God and here came the barbarians.
1:01:53
So I think it's critical to do so.
1:02:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And then I'll just jump in and throw it to you, Tim, but the notion of Daoism, which is sort of actionist activity, the easiest way to think about that is "Don't swim against the stream, swim with it."
1:02:21
And you got to think and write and do a lot of that stuff to figure out which way the stream is going.
1:02:26
But somebody, I can't remember who the questioner was, but it kind of made a Daoist statement.
1:02:32
And so Tom, if you're still on, I don't think that the two are irreconcilable.
1:02:40
I think for various situations, a Daoist attitude is going to get you much further in almost every aspect of life, but I'm also a quant, right?
1:02:47
So those two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Tim? Tim Urban: Yeah.
1:02:57
I mean, I've done a lot of thinking about progressivism and conservatism and I do think of the concept of what I think of as progressivism is not a group of people, but it's...
1:03:08
most of us are progressive about some things and conservative about some things.
1:03:18
My sister is a hardcore progressive, right? Politically.
1:03:22
And she thinks she's a progressive in general, but she's unbelievably conservative about so many things without realizing it.
1:03:29
I talk about something like, "Maybe one day there will be artificial wombs and women won't be getting pregnant anymore."
1:03:40
And she's immediately saying "What? No, that's awful.
1:03:40
I would, I would never get-" right?
1:03:40
That's a conservative, and progressive thinker thinks, oh yeah, cool.
1:03:43
That could be a change for the better, let's experiment, let's try it.
1:03:50
And she, she just has a knee-jerk reaction to resist against that change and think change is bad.
1:03:55
Tim Urban: So I think a lot of us are really a little bit of both.
1:03:56
And even within one issue, the one thing we can be progressive in one year of our life and then structurally more conservative.
1:04:01
And so when I think of progressivism, I do think of it as kind of a collective thing, or conservatism.
1:04:09
It's the collective progressive instincts across the country form kind of the nations high rank progressive force.
1:04:17
And that is it at a constant kind of conflict with the nation's collective conservative impulse on that same issue.
1:04:26
And so this is a little departure from that component, just to talk for a second about progressivism and conservatism, the thing that I've come to realize is, it's not just that we need both.
1:04:38
We want the whole horizontal spectrum, the high-rung component of it, which is the people who are open to plurality.
1:04:50
Tim Urban: They like the concept of having different views.
1:04:51
They understand that the beta's good.
1:04:51
They understand that [inaudible] might be wrong.
1:04:51
They know their place, that they're a part of a larger system, right?
1:04:55
So once we get to that crowd, as opposed to the crowd, I think that we actually want the entire spectrum.
1:05:01
If you start at the far, far right, you have the impulse to not just resist change, but to go back to the way things used to be.
1:05:18
So to undo change that has happened.
1:05:18
For change to really happen it has to win over a bunch of conservatives.
1:05:30
It's often going to be good change, but sometimes it's not.
1:05:30
So I think often the really hardcore conservatives are going to be wrong and on the wrong side of history.
1:05:39
But once in a while, they're right.
1:05:39
And we need them because sometimes bad changes happen and they do need to be undone and so we need that force.
1:05:45
Tim Urban: Then you might say moving to the left, you've got the conservatives that don't want to go back to the way things are, but they just want to halt change.
1:05:52
And again, you want that.
1:05:52
You want a resistance against any change that can happen because that resistance is a filter and it allows the really good change to overpower it with enough persuasion to get through, but the bad change actually, it's going to help prevent it from happening.
1:06:09
Tim Urban: And then you might have the conservatives like the one you described, the kind of the Wilson idea. Of these people.
1:06:11
Teddy Roosevelt and Disraeli, a lot of these people are progressive conservatives. They're concerned.
1:06:19
They do want to make change, but want to make change that upholds conservative principles.
1:06:22
So they want to make change cautiously in a way that makes sure that it doesn't mess with any of the deep principles that really matter.
1:06:33
Then you've got that the moderate progressives who want to make change, also cautiously, but they're a little bit more aggressive.
1:06:37
And eventually what happens is then as you move to the left, you have people that want to make more radical change.
1:06:41
And when radical, to me, what it means is you, a moderate progressive wants to keep most of the institutions and underlying kind of core ideas the way they are, and they want to change little things.
1:06:55
They want to tweak policies, hey want to try experiments, refer new programs or whatever.
1:06:58
Tim Urban: But as you get further to the left, you start to have progressives that want to actually really fundamentally change [inaudible] and then as you go further and further left, you have to eventually have the radical progressives that are getting to Marxist area where they want to change the entire liberalism of it.
1:07:14
They want to, basically, take out the foundation of the house and put a new one in.
1:07:20
They think the entire house is rotten down to the bottom.
1:07:24
Tim Urban: Now, I think just like the hardcore conservatives, that the hardcore progressives are mostly going to be wrong.
1:07:26
If society is generally going well, probably it doesn't make sense to totally replace the foundation.
1:07:35
But once in a while, there's something about the foundation that needs to change.
1:07:35
And those are the people that are going to originally seemed crazy and eventually convince people and eventually changed the country in a really good way.
1:07:42
But they have to go through a ton of filters.
1:07:46
The rest of the horizontal spectrum is a huge filter for them.
1:07:46
So this is a long way of saying, I just thought it was an interesting time to point out the the way I've started to think about it, which is I value every one of these groups, we need all of them.
1:07:56
And with the cool thing about liberalism is it makes space for all of these.
1:08:00
You can start a far left online publication, start writing things, and you're going to get ignored by most people, but you might, you might start a movement that could change the world. Tim Urban: Good.
1:08:17
We want all of these in the conversation.
1:08:17
It makes the big brain the smartest possible to have all of these groups in the conversation.
1:08:20
And I think right now, when we get to the lower parts of the spectrum, that the tribal areas, you don't have this idea at all, that these are all good.
1:08:32
You think that the people on the other side of the spectrum from you, or in different parts of it, are just pure bad, and only if they would disappear then the country that could be better.
1:08:40
I don't really believe that.
1:08:40
So I know I didn't fully get to your question exactly cause I just thought I kind of had more to say about the spectrum parts.
1:08:49
Jamie Catherwood: And so we're going to go to wannabe. That's your...
1:08:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh no, no. This is no, no, no. Jamie Catherwood: Jamie?
1:08:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: This is Johnny Nelson. Johnny Nelson: Yeah. Hey Jim...
1:09:00
Johnny Nelson: Thanks for getting me out of my text only shell again, Jim.
1:09:06
For Tim, okay, so you used human beings as social neurons analogy.
1:09:11
And I use that a lot too. And I think it's great.
1:09:11
Using the same analogy though, a lot of what we have on modern mediums socially or not, hints that.
1:09:15
But I think the core problem is which is something like it's the connectivity stupid.
1:09:21
Like every neuron is simultaneously communicating with every other neuron in a brain.
1:09:26
That feedback loop is called a seizure.
1:09:31
Johnny Nelson: So I personally believe that free speech is something worth strongly defending for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
1:09:33
We can't adapt without it. We need that ensemble.
1:09:38
But I tend to think the current emphasis on the free speech side ignores what's generating the problem.
1:09:44
We actually have to attend to the architectural problem because if the bad feedback loop exists, they actually end up constricting what conversations occur more than the free speech restrictions. It's just less obvious.
1:09:57
Johnny Nelson: So do you have any thoughts on the architectural problem?
1:10:00
How do we preserve any communication without inducing these seizures?
1:10:00
And what are your architectural prescriptions?
1:10:06
Or do you just care more about the cultural hacking side? And thank you.
1:10:10
Tim Urban: I think there's just a very broad concept where if you have a free speech, it's not necessarily every neuron communicates with every other neuron. It's that someone can.
1:10:19
A New York Times editor can publish an op-ed of any kind.
1:10:24
And put that out there to 10 million neurons.
1:10:24
And then those brains can read it and get in smaller conversations about it.
1:10:34
And if the big platforms are able to say what, to keep a broad range of ideas floating on them.
1:10:40
And then in smaller groups, it's more likely to be a culture where people can say what they're thinking.
1:10:49
You end up with just a better flowing system, as opposed to a system where a certain cultural notion that words or violence gets spread.
1:11:03
Tim Urban: So now the big platforms start to be very careful about what's on them and in individual groups and in classrooms.
1:11:11
And in companies, people start to be very careful.
1:11:11
And you can have an epidemic of echo chamber nest can spread throughout a country.
1:11:16
So I think there's just a broad concept there.
1:11:20
Tim Urban: But I agree with you that, there's also a specific architecture.
1:11:22
One area that we have very specific architecture is in science.
1:11:27
If you look at the scientific journals, it's a very controlled marketplace of ideas.
1:11:35
Because someone can put out a hypothesis, it has to go through peer review.
1:11:35
Then it makes it in to a journal as a theory.
1:11:40
And then it gets replicated in order to really start to have some traction.
1:11:47
Tim Urban: So for an idea in science, it's like a mountain.
1:11:47
And to get up to the top of the mountain where it becomes accepted, consensus science, it has to go through so many official hoops.
1:11:54
Rigorous, gauntlet of hoops that have a very specific criteria and structure to it.
1:12:00
And I think this is great.
1:12:07
This is the best, most efficient marketplace, is one with very specific rules.
1:12:12
Tim Urban: Now, even here, I have problems at the moment.
1:12:15
In that you have papers that come to a conclusion that offends a powerful group are being retracted right now.
1:12:22
So pure papers that have made it to the top of the mountain or high up of the mountain are being pulled down, not because they've proven wrong, but because they offend a political group.
1:12:31
Or you have papers now that are making it to the mountain, that normally would not.
1:12:36
But because they confirm a certain political view, they're making it up higher the mountain.
1:12:42
Tim Urban: So I see problems with our free speech architecture, both in the broad kind of just broad societal marketplace of ideas.
1:12:45
And I cited that thing about students on campuses, this notion that speech that I disagree with actually should not be allowed is spreading.
1:12:59
It's a spreading in groups, small groups.
1:12:59
It's spreading in schools, universities, it's spreading in media.
1:13:04
Tim Urban: And then I think it's also, when you look at the more official architecture like science journals, I think we also have a problem there.
1:13:14
I think in all of these cases, the people who know how important the free speech is, are not standing up for it in the face of a very strong set of challenges to it. Johnny Nelson: Cool. Thanks for your answer.
1:13:30
Jamie Catherwood: I think that's all the questions we had. Jim, if you wanted to...
1:13:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay, I can't believe that we have come close to the end of our two hours.
1:13:40
I worried the two hours might be a little too long.
1:13:46
But it went by so quickly. Tim, thanks to you.
1:13:46
I guess maybe the final thing I'll ask you is, I don't think that there is a single solution to the problems that we're discussing.
1:13:56
How do we nudge that boat of humanity down the right path in this river as opposed to the wrong one?
1:14:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, I guess I'd ask you, for everyone that's here, is there anything that everyone that's here who agrees essentially with the thesis that you're advocating, that they can start doing or change that would make more people, it becomes cumulative?
1:14:47
And then we've been talking about if a few more people do these few things, maybe you get more and more movement.
1:14:54
Do you have any things that you'd suggest that they could start doing and that they would actually do that would help move this in the right direction?
1:15:09
Tim Urban: I think speaking out, saying what you really think, criticizing someone you think is behaving badly.
1:15:16
I think this as on a spectrum.
1:15:23
At a one, you're keeping completely to yourself staying as safe as possible.
1:15:28
And then at 10, you never hold anything back, whether it's to your boss, to your friend, to your social media followers, whatever.
1:15:33
Tim Urban: And I think that it takes more courage to go higher up on that scale.
1:15:39
And I think that for everyone, there is some point on that scale that doesn't make sense to go to.
1:15:47
So if you were a CEO of a company, it doesn't make sense to be really super vocal probably about everything because you could easily end up, or if you're an employee, you're super vocal, you could get fired.
1:16:02
And that could be awful for your livelihood.
1:16:02
And in a marriage where the unfortunate is that, you're going to end up getting in huge fights if you say this criticism or voice this view. Or Whatever it is.
1:16:12
Tim Urban: I don't think everyone should always go up to a 10 on that scale.
1:16:13
But I think we are overly cautious.
1:16:22
I think there's a bigger gap.
1:16:22
And most of us realize between where we are on that scale and where we could be still pretty much without any major consequences.
1:16:26
In other words, I think most of us could be braver than we are being.
1:16:32
And so my guess is that the people listening to this convo, that the majority of them have a pretty good sense of what means to row in the right direction.
1:16:48
A pretty good sense of if there's some massive online shaming thing that that is bad, that that's not good for society.
1:16:53
Tim Urban: I think most people probably think that students arise in students thinking it's okay to use violence to prevent people from hearing a certain speaker on campus. That's not a good trend.
1:17:04
I think most of us agree.
1:17:04
So I think that the problem isn't that we don't know what is right and wrong.
1:17:11
I think it's a crisis of courage right now.
1:17:11
Tim Urban: And I think that what people can do is again not being stupid, I don't think people should go get fired from their job or ruin their marriage to be saying what they think to that level.
1:17:24
I think that you should go figure out where that line really is, where you can go up to without having any major consequences. And try to go up there.
1:17:27
Try to be a little bit more vocal.
1:17:32
Try to speak out with your friends more or at work more.
1:17:37
Tim Urban: Or if you have a company and you have employees and the culture's drifting direction, have the courage to stand up and say, "That's not how we do things here."
1:17:45
Even if some people are going to quit.
1:17:45
And maybe there's a little bit of a shit show for a while.
1:17:51
A lot of times you're still standing at the end of it.
1:17:55
And you made the world a little bit of a better place, I think.
1:17:55
So I think that just try to maximize the courage you can put forth without totally harming your own life.
1:18:01
And I think if you think about it, most of us probably aren't being as courageous as we could be.
1:18:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Hey, that's good advice.
1:18:14
And I would like to applaud anyone who actually does have the courage to do it.
1:18:17
Because those things actually take courage.
1:18:22
And I realize that in some of the talks that I've had with guests on Infinite Loops, [inaudible] comes to mind.
1:18:29
Talking about, what you're doing, Tim? Writing this book.
1:18:29
It takes a lot of courage to put those ideas out there.
1:18:35
And you should be applauded for that.
1:18:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So we have reached the end of our time together.
1:18:42
I want to thank everyone for coming to our first live Infinite Loops. This was a lot of fun.
1:18:47
It was great to be able to take questions.
1:18:52
We're going to see if we can release this as a bonus episode after our fantastic producer makes it as clean as it can.
1:19:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And Tim, best of luck on the book.
1:19:05
I'd love to have you on Infinite Loops to talk about the book once it's released.
1:19:10
And you're doing great work. Keep it up. Tim Urban: Okay.
1:19:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And thank you, Paul.
1:19:16
Thanks for coming everyone else.
1:19:18
And thank you so much, Tim, for giving us so much of your time.
1:19:22
Jamie Catherwood: Thanks, Tim. Great thoughts. Tim Urban: Okay, Jim.
1:19:24
Johnny Nelson: Thanks, Jim. Thank you everyone.
1:19:26
Jamie Catherwood: Thanks everyone. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. Bye-bye everyone.