Sam Harris speaks with Tim Urban about his new book, “What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies.” They discuss Tim’s unusual career, the finitude of life, existential risk, exponential technological change, political tribalism, the corruption of the media, how one thinks vs what one thinks, trust in institutions, the firing of James Bennet at the New York Times, digital mobs, the mechanics of cancellation, Alex Jones, election integrity, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Today I'm speaking with Tim Urban.
Tim is a writer and illustrator and co-founder of Wait But Why, which is a fascinating blog.
It has over 600,000 subscribers and has covered a wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence to social anxiety to humans becoming a multi-planetary species.
Tim also had a TED Talk.
Which I believe was the first TED video to reach over 10 million views in its first year, and it now ranks in the top 10 of most-watched TED Talks.
And in this conversation, Tim and I cover his new book, which is What's Our Problem?
A Self-Help Book for Societies.
We discuss Tim's unusual career, the finitude of life, existential risk,
Exponential technological change, political tribalism, the corruption of the media, how we think versus what we think, the breakdown of trust in institutions, the firing of James Bennett at the New York Times, the role of social media in creating digital mobs, the mechanics of cancellation, election integrity, and other topics.
And I bring you Tim Urban.
I am here with Tim Urban.
Tim, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
So, you are an extraordinarily interesting person.
I don't know if you think of yourself that way, but for those who just have the evidence of your blog and your new book, you really have a unique voice.
I will have introduced you properly in my housekeeping, but how do you describe what you do and how you do it and the kinds of topics you focus on?
Yeah, I would say I'm kind of, um, I, you know, we're all in really interesting conversations at different times and we're all sometimes go on really interesting internet rabbit hole spirals and learn something fascinating or we get addicted to some new topic.
And we all also are always observing things and we have, you know, everyone has kind of, without maybe even consciously realizing it, you know, little pet theories on the world, on what makes a marriage work, on why people procrastinate, on why, you know, what government should be like and whatever.
And so what I do is I just take all those things and when I, when something's particularly interesting, you know, an observation, Or something I learned or some conversation I had, I'll take on the challenge to try to package that.
So what's, you know, if that rabbit hole was seven hours of reading and learning, okay, how can I package it in a way where someone can read something in 20 minutes and basically get the most important stuff there?
And so it's, yeah, so then I'll create like a package.
Usually it's a blog post.
In this case, more recently, a much longer book.
Yeah, and then I just take, you know, pride and kind of it fits well with a kind of my perfectionist sensibilities to like be able to sit there in the incubator and work on it and work on it and work on it and then finally when it's ready to ship it out into the world.
What did you think you were going to do when you were in college?
Did you have a clear sense of where you were hoping to go?
I was, it's hard to really remember.
I was pretty sure, I knew I didn't want a normal job.
I just didn't like school, I didn't like having to be somewhere at a certain time, and I didn't like homework and whatever.
And so I thought, you know, something creative, something in music, something in writing was always very interesting to me, you know, maybe something in business.
And I was doing all of those things in my 20s for a while, kind of all of them not that well, because I was doing everything, you know, trying to do too many things.
It's hard to, you know, you pick something, and it's scary because you're kind of unpicking the other things.
And so it took me till I was like, you know, 31 to basically pick something to go full time with.
And I had been blogging on the side for about seven years at that point, just very casual.
But I, you know, it added up.
I wrote 300 little blog posts on that site, which kind of helped me, I think, get confidence in like a certain writer voice and realize that this could be fun because writing to me was always The worst thing ever, because I associate it with school and papers.
And so blogging, you know, as a side activity, I was like, I don't know, this is a totally different kind of thing.
And yeah, 31 decided, you know, full time with one of the things.
Full-time with the blog WaitButWhy?
Yeah, so the WaitButWhy hadn't started yet.
I actually was business partners with my friend Andrew, and we're running this business, and then I'm on the side doing this musical with my friend Ryan, and then I'm solo blogging.
And I just remember talking to Andrew in the summer of 2012 and being like, I'm going crazy here.
I need to pick something full-time.
Yeah, so, you know, we just decided, you know, why don't I go off and go full-time with blogging and see what happens.
And I didn't know what that meant, you know, was I going to start a media site and hire a bunch of writers?
I mean, this was a different time on the internet, 2012, 2013.
There were lots of listicles, you know, BuzzFeed had just blown up.
I felt like there was a shortage of just like really good, fun, interesting articles and so the idea was start that and I can start it as the only employee writing and maybe we'll hire people.
Ended up turning into just, you know, the blog caught on really quickly and which was awesome.
You know, it's like I don't know whether I would have stuck with it for that long if it hadn't.
But once it did catch on, I was like, all right, okay, this is my thing.
I'm gonna like go full, full steam into this and just got, you know, I had endless energy for that.
It was like such a fun, exciting new thing to be able to just put all my energy into.
Yeah, so Wait But Why was new.
It was December of 2012.
I went to Easter Island alone for a month because I was procrastinating on this new idea, and I wasn't actually starting it.
I said, okay, I'm going to go to Easter Island for 30 days, and I'm going to come back with a blog name, a blog design.
I'm going to have set it up on WordPress.
I'm going to have written the first five posts.
So that's what I did.
That was kind of the birth of Wait But Why.
Well, it's hard to capture what is so strikingly unique about it.
I just recommend people seek it out online in addition to getting the new book we're going to talk about.
But I mean, one thing that jumps out is that you have a remarkable talent for visually representing information, and in particular, in a way that Makes it emotionally arresting.
The thing that is truly burned into my brain from one of your blog posts is the poster you made of the 90-year lifespan doled out in weeks, where each line is a year.
So each line has got 52 squares on it, or circles.
I can't remember what you actually graphically represented there.
But You can just see, you know, you literally can put your finger on the week that is currently elapsing in your life, whatever your age, presumably you're younger than 90, and then you see where you are in relation to, you know, what is in actuarial terms for virtually anyone a very generous, you know, lifespan that you really can't safely assume you're going to enjoy, or certainly enjoy in good health.
So it's such a strong way of getting across the knowledge and the wisdom that everyone knows in the abstract, but you manage to make it concrete.
And I mean, there are many other examples of this kind of thing.
The other one that jumps to mind, which it wasn't so much a visual representation, although perhaps you did actually draw it too.
But you at one point did the math and calculated that Forgive me if I get the actual numbers wrong here, but it's something like, you know, 97% of your time with your parents is over by the time you're 18 or something.
Viewed from the side of being the child, it lands one way, but viewed from the side of being a parent, it's quite an arresting realization that As much as you may visit after you first leave home over the course of even a very long life, it just doesn't add up to that much time compared to the time of living in the same house together year after year until 18 or so.
Yeah, you like, you have, you know, I spent, like most people, 300 plus days, 350 probably, plus days with my parents a year from the age of, you know, being birthed to 18, you know.
And then, yeah, I just started doing the math.
I mean, if you live in, some people live in the same city as their parents, and they see their parents a lot, multiple days a week.
Okay, that's great.
And that's a different story.
But I think a lot of us, you know, we see our parents 10, 20 days a year, something like that.
And if you think about, you know, again, if you're lucky when you graduate college, you know, you have, I don't know, three, four or five decades left of time when you and your parents are both around.
And if you add up that 10 to 20 days a year, I mean, you realize it's like around a year total of actual days.
And so, you know, it's like you graduate high school and you're 18, and it's like, oh, you actually, you know, you feel like, you know, you're in year 18 of, you know, 60 of parent-kid time.
And it's actually, no, you're in year 18 of 19.
And you can, and the reason that, I mean, I find that it's incredibly sad, but it's also true.
And so it's like, we don't want to avoid sad thoughts and then make worse decisions because of it.
And so one of the things that you can, the reason I like this one is because It's like, if you get sad now about it, you can do something about it.
You can double that time by doubling the amount of days you visit your parents.
And also, you can improve the time you do hang out with them by realizing, like, this is not, this is not, like, this endless thing.
This, you know, this is actually finite and precious.
And when you start treating it like that, then you make better decisions and you're less sad later than you would be.
Yeah, so your new book is very much in the spirit of your blog.
I mean, in addition to just visually representing things well, you have a very funny cartooning style, which is one of the pleasures that will be familiar to anyone who has looked at your blog.
But the new book is What's Our Problem?
A Self-Help Book for Societies.
And again, it's very much in the spirit of wait, but why?
But Jay, I can't remember how you got tangled up in this project.
Maybe my memory is tangled with respect to what you were working on.
But I remember at one point you put the blog on hold to work on a book or to work on some very long blog posts.
And this book was taking a very long time.
This book took you six years to write?
Give me the story of this painful birth of this book.
Yeah, you know well, because I feel like every time I've seen you, I just come back and I say, you know... You're complaining about something.
Yeah, right.
And I actually partially blame you for this, because one of the very first, I try, I always think back, you know, what, because I didn't like write, I don't want to write about politics.
I actually, you know, Dave Roberts at Vox wrote an article about, you know, praising Wait But Why and saying that, you know, my articles on SpaceX and Tesla were these meaty, great articles.
So he, you know, he's very nice, but then he basically turned it into One point of criticism, which is that I, like so many, you know, tech bro type people who like to think about tech and whatever, Silicon Valley types, they don't, they're not, they have this attitude that like, that politics is so annoying and they just want to check out.
And that's actually kind of a lame cop out and, you know, people like Tim should actually dig it.
And I remember reading that and thinking, no thanks.
Like I just, why would I want to write about something where you're going to have it read so uncharitably and you're going to be, it's going to be straw manned.
And it's also just kind of a, you know, it's kind of a, I don't know.
It's not the kind of concrete topic I like to get into.
It's hazy.
It's changing every year.
So I wasn't even really into this topic.
And then I remember watching the legendary clip now of you on Bill Maher with Ben Affleck.
And I remember it was one of these first moments when I had a, it was, it was a kind of like broke my head a little because I was like, okay, you know, I had always been, you know, true blue.
Like a lot of people who grew up in a progressive suburb and who go to a progressive college and then live in LA like I did and then move to New York like I did.
And like a lot of people in 2012, 2013, 2014, there were a lot of people who were just, you know, very clearly the blue team is the good team, and that's obvious.
And maybe there's faults there, and maybe not everything the red team does bad, but basically it's just clearly blue good, red bad.
And watching that clip, I was like, I very, very much want to be like Sam Harris in this clip, not like Ben Affleck.
Not even because of the specific topic, but because there was this kind of independent, fearless, reasoned opinion.
And then there was this like, you know, knee-jerk dogmatic response of someone who wasn't even listening and was, and I, it was kind of a, it was like one of those moments when you subconsciously absorb probably a lot of that happening and then there's one final straw that kind of makes it all crash down into your, you know, bubble up into your actual consciousness.
And so, you know, it was like kind of a bunch of these things had been subtly
Bothering me and I think that was one of these moments and you know another one was the next year when there was this fiasco at Yale about Halloween costumes and you know Greg Lukianoff takes this video of Nick Christakis getting abused in the in the you know the quad by a bunch of students and and again I was like okay this is that you know it just once there's that crack in some kind of very basic conviction like blue good red bad and there's just some like crack that like then it's it can quickly start to fester and it can like
And so for me, that was one element here.
There was just like this interesting fact that I felt like things were more complicated than I thought they were and things were changing.
And that became much more of an interesting blog post than writing about like, here's what I think about these 10 political issues.
And then there was a whole other thing going on, which is that I write about stuff like AI and brain-machine interfaces and genetic engineering and all these amazing technologies that are coming in the future and things that give us immense power as a species, for better or worse, because technology is a double-edged sword.
Going into this future where tech is exploding, to me, that doesn't say that that's not a good or a bad thing.
It just says the stakes are getting higher and higher and higher.
The good is going to be even better in the next century than it ever has been before, and the bad could be even worse.
And with that in one side of my mind, then on the other side, I'm looking at society, and it's like the time when the stakes are getting high, you want us to be our most grown-up, wise selves.
And I looked out and I see a society That seems to be going in the complete opposite direction.
It just seems to be growing.
You know, if society is an organism, that organism is like, you know, it's like Benjamin Button.
It's like it's getting younger and less wise.
And all those ominous quotes about forgetting history.
I mean, it's like this seems to be what we're doing.
It felt like suddenly like the all these other topics that I write about it's like they were secondary to this topic because it's like if I can't like get excited about the future right now if I think we're gonna blow it and we're not gonna even be able to get to a good future or we're gonna you know we have such an opportunity for what would seem like a utopia to people living today to actually get to a world like that and it felt like we were we were we were like you know We're not doing the things we need to do to get there, going in the wrong direction.
So it's like a combo of those things.
And as a blogger, again back to the first topic, as a blogger I realize I'm like, I write about anything, right?
I wrote about religion, you know, once and my dad was like, you're gonna, this is the end of Waypoint Y, you know, you can't write about religion.
And I said, I don't think that's true.
And I had the right instinct in that, you know, nothing bad happened.
And I've written about a lot of things that I thought that people would say not to write about, and I just felt very unafraid.
But with this topic, I felt like this is going to be a nightmare, and I felt this incredible external pressure to not write it, and that was not coming from You know, the people who I thought of as the political bad guys, the right, because they had no power over me.
I was really scared of kind of the political left.
So again, this is what's going on there?
Like what?
These are supposed to be my people.
So what's going on?
So it's kind of those things got me beginning thinking I'm writing a blog post about this.
I'm going to write a blog post about about this concept that we're going in the wrong direction and that this doesn't seem to be like a simple, you know, right wing is bad problem.
It seems like it's a bigger, deeper problem going on.
And what often happens is I'll think I'm writing a 3,000-word blog post, and I'll write a 7,000-word blog post.
Or I'll think I'm writing an 8, and I'll write a 30.
This has happened a few times.
In this case, it just became a caricature of myself.
It just kept growing, and it got bigger and bigger, and everything seemed relevant to it.
Everything I would read about, every current event story needed to come in, and this topic just kind of subsumed me.
Yeah, and you not only have to write about these things, you have to draw hundreds of illustrations.
So, you know, it's... For someone who's not a very natural artist, so I'm doing my other hand is constantly on the command Z, where I'm just, you know, try to draw the head circle, undo, head circle, undo.
I'll do it 40 times until it looks right.
But you have made a virtue of your limitations as an artist.
Your style is comedic based on how basic it is, and it works perfectly.
So let's start more or less where you start in the book, because I notice whenever I speak as though this moment in history was uniquely important compared to previous moments in history, my own bullshit detector begins to go off.
But then I noticed that I override it because I mean I do think just you know generically it seems ridiculous for any present generation to think that it really is occupies some sort of privileged and you know uniquely perilous moment in the career of the species where like You know, everything that is, you know, turned up to 11 with respect to their daily concerns really is as important as it seems.
It just seems like the perpetual vanity of the present to think that, and yet I can't quite convince myself that that's true in the current environment, the way technology is showing on a, you know, practically an hourly basis now, that it has exponential implications for us.
So perhaps, you know, we can just get a sort of sanity check on this point.
It just seems that, and, you know, many of the things you've listed contribute to this picture for me.
I mean, when you talk about technologies like genetic engineering or AI, and you stack those on top of these longstanding concerns around things like nuclear proliferation or the ongoing threat of nuclear war, inadvertent or otherwise,
it just seems like the prospect of our ruining things is always it just seems like the prospect of our ruining things is always increasing and it's getting easier and easier for one person or a small number of people deranged by mental illness or some terrible ideology to ruin everything for millions and
What we have just lived through with COVID and the prospect that this could have been a lab leak, whether or not it was, in some sense is immaterial.
It just reminds us of the fact that we are virtually on the cusp of democratizing the type of technology that would allow one person or ten to consciously decide to release some heinous pathogen on all of humanity.
And we were never there before, so perhaps you can just reflect on how you view this moment in history and when you hold it up against all previous moments, for the last 200 years or so this hasn't been true, but when you go back Many thousands, as you point out at the beginning of your book.
Human history was just a theater of utter boredom, right?
I mean, basically nothing changed for generation after generation.
And now we've hit some kind of asymptote with respect to cultural and technological change.
I don't know.
Am I just getting paranoid?
No, I mean, there's a couple things going on.
So there is the tendency to think that your time is the end of days, your time is this is the chosen time, you know, whatever.
I mean, I'm sure that people throughout history have always felt that way.
And I see a lot of that in the way that I think is kind of classic bullshit today.
You know, just the media narratives and the people on Twitter talking about You know, just catastrophizing and not having any perspective.
So there's a lack of perspective that makes, can make you feel more special than you are.
About, you know, they make your time feel more special.
There's also, but if you zoom out on even, if you actually do zoom out and get that perspective, I think you ironically, in this case, do land in the same place.
Not necessarily for the same reasons.
The visual I use and just kind of that I think is a way to emphasize this point and I think in a way that's pretty undeniable is that if humanity and just say we go you know some people say it's 200,000 years or 300,000 it's a hazy line.
Let's say 250,000 years and so let's make a thousand page book with each page is 250 years.
Like you said, the first 950 pages of the 1,000-page book, almost nothing happens.
It's just hunter-gatherers and there's some migrations and maybe there's some technology developments every, you know, 100 pages with a better arrowhead and, you know, things like this.
But almost nothing happens.
And then the last 50 pages, all of civilization is in the last 50 pages, which of course also just reminds you that we are primates programmed for the first 950 pages.
Our brains have not had time to adjust yet to the last, you know, civilization happening in basically the epilogue of the book.
It's kind of like epilogue civilization is kind of the last chapter.
And AD, you know, is page 992.
So, but the crazier thing about it is, if you compare the very last page, so page 1000, which goes from like the early 1770s to today, to all the pages before it, it's just an anomaly in every way it can possibly be.
I mean, every single part of our current crazy modern world, electricity, all the ways we, you know, have transportation, the incredible communication abilities we have, you know, space travel, air travel, you know, car travel.
I mean, and then, you know, the fossil fuels era, modern liberal democracies.
Every single thing I just said is entirely a page 1,000 phenomenon.
And so, there's no way you can zoom out on that and say, well, you know, everyone always thinks that about their time.
It's just, if you're an alien reading this book, you are riveted suddenly.
On page 1,000, you're saying, oh, okay, shit's going down.
What's going to happen now to this species?
We're about to find out.
This is the climax.
So, I don't think it is Naive to say that we're in some kind of, you know, the climax of the story, or at least one of the climaxes of the story.
And then I think even within page 1000, I think things are moving really quickly now.
The environmental changes that have happened to, you know, like the U.S.
You have, you know, you have tribal media from the broadcast era, you know, turning into kind of the narrowcast tribal era, and you have Social media just drops into the world.
And that's a massive environmental change.
And you've got AI right now is advancing so quickly.
And it's just, I just, you know, we're not, our society, it can be very strong.
But when things start moving too quickly, I think you can, the society can lose its grip.
And when that's a, that should scare everyone.
I mean, we're like, You know, when you grow up in this artificial environment, like a modern liberal democracy, you think this is just the way things are.
But it's not.
This is an artificial, very new artificial invention that gives us all an incredible life that people before us never got to have.
And that artificial invention is not, you know, there's not a totalitarian dictator that's enforcing it.
It is a set of laws and rules that are basically only as good as the people who are willing to uphold them.
And then there's a bunch of norms and customs.
And there's a common shared set of values.
And that's the other half of the puzzle.
And if either of those goes away, then the thing stops working.
And so when things are moving really quickly, it can get chaotic.
People start thinking desperate times call for desperate measures, and desperate measures is often, you know, a euphemism for breaking those norms that have held things together for a long time.
And so, yeah, I think people should be very concerned.
I think there's also a reason for optimism and hope, but I think that anyone who's cocky, who's kind of snickering at anyone who's feeling this way and saying, you know, it's Oh, things have always, you know, people have always thought, you know, it'll be fine.
The U.S.
is robust.
And it's like, well, you know, this is a lot of unprecedented things happening.
Yeah, it's interesting to consider those points of no return or apparent no return where things changed based on the introduction of new technology or a new business model, a new set of incentives that locked everything in.
And I was just reflecting the other day, I was talking to my oldest daughter about the deep past, the 1990s or so.
I realized, I thought about this at the time, but I hadn't thought about it for many years, that the birth of CNN and the introduction of the 24-hour news channel, that was a very significant change where suddenly they had to fill the air, right?
And they were incentivized to basically just train the eye of the media on on each new catastrophe or pseudo-catastrophe, and we just began advertising to ourselves the worst of what could be found on planet Earth in any given 24-hour cycle, or we would expand the significance of anything, just drawing it out, extracting as many possible hours from it
And it just became this, you know, whether it was the O.J.
trial or anything else, it just, there was this turn toward, and the necessity of it all, of knowing everything as it happened, right?
It is so anachronistic to think of the possibility of having a weekly news magazine where you would wait a week, like a news week or time, where you would wait a week to find out what had happened in world events.
Anyway, that seemed like a crucial pre-internet change.
And then the internet, with its ad-based business model, basically locked in a certain kind of incentives.
And now we're living, in many respects, with the implications of a machine we've built that is just designed to game people's attention based on outrage and partisan division.
And it's just...
Apart from the fact that so many people see this and want to resist, the incentives are just so strong for clickbait of a very specific type.
And you know, the social media layer here is perhaps the worst offender.
I'd love to get your take on how you view media and social media at this moment and the prospects of our course correcting.
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that, um, one of my COVID activities turned out to be watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta.
And I didn't plan on that.
This is my, you know, my wife goes in phases.
This is your confession.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not something I'm proud of.
It's, um, my wife goes in phases and she, you know, she's, she's had, you know, she has the true crime phase and she'll have other phases.
Um, she, so she also had a Real Housewives phase and I thought it was this inane background thing.
You know, at some point I'm sitting there and I just find myself looking over and I start to, and then, you know, three episodes later, I'm like, wait, wait, wait, sorry, what happened with Phaedra's, you know, new company?
And so now I'm watching it.
And it got me thinking because, so reality is boring.
It's mostly boring, but a reality show, is always interesting, right?
It's entertainment.
How do you turn boring reality into interesting entertainment is you edit out all the boring stuff and you hype up the conflict in the drama.
And it's just an endless string of conflict in drama, which gets at our ancient, our very ancient brains.
Love that, you know?
Gossip is one of the earliest ways for humans to bond and form bonds together in a tribe.
In-group, out-group bashing and all of this.
It's tickling a very ancient thing in us.
To me, it's not that different than junk food.
If you give me a candy bar, One part of my brain is like, this is not good for you.
This doesn't make sense to eat for any reason.
Let's be sparing with it.
Maybe a little treat, but not... But the dumb part of my brain wants to devour it and eat another one and keep going.
Because, again, this first 950 pages of the book, It was always a good idea to eat a really dense sweet thing if you could get your hands on it, because calories are hard to come by, and you don't know when you're gonna come across any kind of calories again, so just binge.
So we kind of misfire, and now we want to eat the candy bar.
And I think this is the same thing that makes us really like watching The Real Housewives.
So this got me thinking about our media, and politics is extremely boring.
You know, I asked my grandmother, when you were, you know, 20, Because all the 20-year-olds today, you know, they're super political, right?
And I said, you know, were you super into like the Hoover, you know, FDR election?
And she said, no, we thought politics was boring.
And I thought, you know, it's so weird today that kids don't think that because politics is so boring.
And again, it started to hit me that politics, like reality, is boring.
And just like you can turn reality interesting by editing it into a kind of a fictional narrative of endless conflict and drama, you can do the same exact thing with politics.
So you have now the real politicians of Washington, D.C., which is basically this trashy reality show that huge portions of America are addicted to.
And there are good guys and bad guys.
There are heroes and villains.
There's always there's there's main characters.
You know, you know, these again, this 20 year old or a lot of 50 year olds who say they're super into politics, they're passionate about it.
Actually, what they, you know, ask them to name the Congress people in their state.
They probably can't.
How about their state representatives?
How about any bills that have been passed in the last month?
They're not actually interested in politics.
They're addicted to a trashy reality show called The Real Politicians of Washington, and it's the same kind of, it's political junk food.
So, it's again, it's like the candy bar.
It's Mars Inc.
makes a ton of money selling to our primitive minds, and CNN and MSNBC and Fox News also make a ton of money selling junk food to our primitive minds, and it both preys on and enhances this rising phenomenon of political tribalism, political bigotry.
So it's, you know, what you said about how, you know, yeah, 24 hours, you had to fill it with something.
But I think that if you watched, if you looked at how this evolved, they started to, you know, realize the fact, these brands, that they were entertainment channels.
And they had a bunch of people hooked on this show.
And so they need main characters.
You know, I talked to a congressman named Derek Kilmer recently, who's super nuanced and measured and is not bombastic, and no one's heard of him.
Right?
But you've heard of, you know, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOC, and because these are the main characters, they've been cast on the show.
Derek Kilmer is not cast on the show.
And so that's a massive environmental shift, which is going to have massive effects on our psyche, on our behavior, and how people act.
Yeah, well, let's talk about the structures of thought here.
And I mean, this really cuts against both extremes of the political spectrum.
And this is the kind of the lens through which you criticize political extremism and ideological capture in your book.
And so one of these structures you introduced is the concept of the ladder versus the idea spectrum.
This is distinguishing, you know, how one thinks from what one thinks.
Perhaps you can introduce that here.
Right, so we, you know, our conversations and then in turn our thoughts are going to be constrained by kind of the language we have.
When you have a word for something, then it becomes a concept in people's minds and then we can discuss it and then develop new nuanced ideas around that word.
But if you don't have the word in the first place, you often just don't even think about it.
And I think our political discussions are massively constrained by this super simplistic one-dimensional horizontal axis that goes from the far left to the moderate left, the center, the moderate right, the far right, whatever.
And I hear people saying stuff like, you know, at least people that I think feel the way I do, they say things like, you know, we need more, you know, we need more centrists.
And then you have a lot of people who hate centrists, right?
And that a lot of people, and it seems like it's this battle between the people who like the center and the people who want the far ends.
And to me, that's just, That's a very, like, un-nuanced conversation.
Because, first of all, I know lots of centrists that are pretty dogmatic about their centrism and they're not actually thinking that hard and they're kind of knee-jerk taking a centrist position on things.
And I also know people who are, I would, you know, consider pretty far right or pretty radical left who are extremely thoughtful and like to argue and might change their minds.
So, there's something wrong with this.
So, I basically said, let's just make it a square.
Let's build a vertical axis here.
And I call it the ladder.
And now we can have like the upper left and the upper right and the lower center and the upper center and it just it just gives us the second dimension where at the bottom you know on the low rungs of the ladder when it comes to it you can apply this ladder to how you think in general you know at the top you're concerned with truth and we're independent you're independent thinking and you're looking for truth and you don't identify with your ideas and you're fine to change your mind
And you like to argue because when all you're concerned about is truth and you're not identifying with your ideas, I consider argument like, it's like you're throwing your idea into the boxing ring.
Let someone else box against it and see how it does.
If you're proud of your idea and you think it's good, you'd love to have someone go at it.
Let's see.
I think I have a champion heavyweight boxer here.
Let's see what you got.
And if you don't think you have a good idea, it's like, cool, kick my idea.
Let some parts break off.
Show me where it's weak.
I can get smarter.
I can get better.
So that's this one kind of general way of thinking.
And when you go down the rungs, I think this same part of your brain that I've been referencing, that I call the primitive mind, this kind of unconscious software in our brain that thinks it's living in 50,000 BC, that likes to eat candy bars, and that is addicted to reality TV, that part of the brain gets involved.
And that part of the brain does not care about truth.
It identifies with its ideas, the ones that it holds sacred, and that means that it becomes like preserving your body to preserve those ideas.
That part of your brain can get very confused.
And by the way, you've done one of the studies that I like to reference here, where the default mode network of your brain, this part of your brain that is associated with internal reflection and identity, actually lights up and fMRIs when certain political beliefs are challenged, as opposed to when non-sacred topics are challenged.
I think it's one of the most... Yeah, you're referencing a paper I did with Jonas Kaplan, and we compared political beliefs to just ordinary beliefs that wouldn't invoke a person's self-identity, presumably beliefs about what city they happen to be in, or just basic facts.
Yeah, we also found that when you challenge people's political beliefs, you're getting more amygdala and insular activation, which you would expect.
And yeah, that kind of activation was correlated with a resistance to belief change.
Because what we did in these experiments, we presented people with evidence against their beliefs, whatever they are, and basically there were increments of trying to argue them out of any specific belief, whether You know, one was like, you know, secondhand smoke causes cancer.
And in this case, we created spurious evidence that argued them out of that widely held belief.
So yeah, I mean, on some level, not a surprise, but it's interesting to see the brain report that.
And it's just so interesting that literally a different part of your brain, and a very old part of your brain, right, that kind of limbic system, That is not really part of your consciousness.
Gets involved.
Actually gets involved when it comes to, and I'm sure this would go for a sacred, you know, a very religious person's religious beliefs, and I'm sure it would go for, for some people it's about their nutrition opinions, or their way about they raise their kids.
You see a whole different kind of part of their mind takes over.
So basically, when I'm talking about that high rung thinking, where again, this is the ideal thinking, right?
And it's hard to do.
Where you just, you're not attached to your ideas, you just care about truth.
You love to argue, or you're okay to argue, and you like hearing people that disagree with you and all of that.
As soon as this primitive mind enters the scene, that becomes much harder to do.
It affects your motivation.
So your motivation at the top is just truth.
Why wouldn't it be?
That's just rational.
I just want to, I don't want to be wrong.
I don't want to be delusional, but when this other part of your brain enters, it starts to root for certain ideas to be correct.
It starts to feel an existential crisis when introduced to strong evidence against a sacred belief.
It must protect the belief like you protect your body.
And so for a while, in the middle of this ladder, we're conflicted.
You know, we are going for the truth and we do care about the scientific method, but we're really rooting for one idea and we have a lot of confirmation bias.
You know, just kind of this invisible hand of this primitive mind that's pushing your investigation towards confirming, towards ending at the right conclusion.
And so we'll do things like, you know, we'll instead of being skeptical of things that seem untrustworthy or things that seem inaccurate, we'll start to become skeptical of things that disagree with us.
And we'll become gullible towards things that seem to confirm our beliefs, even if that evidence doesn't seem particularly accurate.
And so we're conflicted there.
And you have both minds kind of almost fighting for the process, the thought process.
And then when you get to the bottom, you're in one of those zones where this belief is so sacred to you that you're really doing your thinking.
You're not doing much thinking at all.
You're in the business at that moment of belief preservation.
And so you become this brick wall to argue with and there's nothing that can change your mind about it.
And so that's like the way you can use this axis for thinking.
You also can use it for, I think this goes along, I think people who are, when you are at the bottom in your thinking, I think you're also likely to be at the bottom in a whole other area, which is you're going to be morally hypocritical.
You're going to get into this kind of Tribal zone where there's good people with the good ideas and the bad people with the bad ideas.
And you're going to have different moral standards for your people and their people.
While at the top of the ladder, you're not going to think that way, right?
You're going to be very consistent.
You're going to stay true to your principles no matter who's the subject.
And likewise, I think you can have a third way that this ladder can apply, which is at the top, if you're a movement and that movement is kind of a high-rung movement, they're going to try to get what they want via persuasion.
Again, they care about the truth, they believe they have the truth on their side, and they're going to try to Play by the kind of in the US they would try to play by the liberal rules and use persuasion But as you go down this ladder you find that that again They're not really in the business of truth, even though they think they are which means they're not really good at debating or arguing They're not morally consistent.
They're very easy to pick apart and debate.
So instead of persuasion, which they're not very good at they'll use coercion So I started to realize that, like, both individuals and groups, I saw, you know, you hit—they're doing all three of these things usually together.
So they're doing low-rung thinking, they're full of confirmation bias, and no way, no way they would ever say, okay, you know what?
Good point.
I think I said something wrong about this.
They're also totally morally hypocritical, and they're all about coercion and authoritarianism to get what they want.
And so I call, you know, if you combine those, that's low-rung politics versus high-rung politics.
And so, again, I think that at the top of the ladder, it spans the horizontal spectrum.
I think you're going to have radical leftists all the way to hardline conservatives who, you know, again, maybe not as many because being really hardline in something is often going to correlate with being kind of down on the low rungs, but not always.
Again, there's some of the, you know, really Okay, good point.
and nuanced Marxists and far-right conservatives.
I have friends that are both of these things, and they're great to talk to, and they're fun to talk to, and they're fun to argue with.
And they actually will say, okay, good point, you know, I need to think about that again.
But if you go down to the low rungs, again, it spans the political spectrum, and now you have a totally different game being played.
And these are the people, of course, who the Fox News MSNBC reality show appeals to, because it's going to confirm the worldview down there, which is that there's good guys and there's bad guys on good team and the bad team with the good ideas and the bad ideas.
At the top, maybe your opponents are wrong.
But as you move down, they become, you know, impossibly stupid.
And at the very bottom, they're evil.
These are the bad, evil people.
And they're the only reason that this country isn't, you know, this utopia is because of the bad, evil people.
And that's not how grownups think in other areas.
And that got me back to your study here because it's like, this is, it's very, it's a, I call it political Disney world at the bottom because it's like these simple narratives of good versus evil.
Why are a bunch of grownups down there?
What are we doing?
Like, and if you go to other areas of thought, you don't see grownups acting this way, acting super tribal, acting like they're in middle school.
And, and then when I look at something like your study, I see, well, because literally politics is one of those topics that completely It fills our mind with this primitive fog, and this other part of our brain takes over, and that part of our brain is not going to be very grown up, and we're not going to be our best selves there.
And the environmental change we talked about with these 24-hour news networks, it completely stokes that.
It's like a magnet that's pulling the country downwards on this ladder.
Yeah, I think that the titles you've put on the rungs of this ladder are also instructive.
So the top is thinking like a scientist, then one rung down is thinking like a sports fan, then thinking like an attorney, and then thinking like a zealot, which is the bottom of the ladder.
And there's another structure you introduced here, the concept of an idea lab versus an echo chamber.
Maybe you can flesh that out.
So basically, it's the same concept applied to groups.
So what I just talked about is individuals, right?
So when I say scientist, I don't mean career scientists.
A lot of career scientists are very attached to their ideas and very unwilling to change their mind or very, you know, politically tribal or whatever.
I mean thinking, you know, the way Carl Sagan says that science is a way of thinking more than like a Any kind of body of knowledge.
It's a way of thinking.
So you're thinking like a scientist.
And then I call it sports fan.
People get confused why sports fan is higher than attorney.
But when I say sports fan, I use that because I'm thinking that sports fans, you know, they care about the integrity of the game, even though they're rooting for their team to win.
So, you know, nothing could have convinced me basically that Tom Brady, you know, because I'm a Patriots fan, that Tom Brady My confirmation bias was so, like, just hilariously in the picture there.
And I'm seeking out articles that confirm that, and I'm already scoffing at a headline that doesn't before I even open the article.
And yet, if someone said to me, okay, but here, look, if you press this button, we're going to have a corrupt ref rig the next game in favor of the Patriots.
I would definitely not press that.
I don't think any sports, or very few sports fans would.
So there's this kind of, you have a respect for the process deep down that is bigger than anything, but you get very lost in this confirmation bias.
And so there's a lot of confirmation bias there, but the other side has the edge.
The attorney, the reason I use that is, as the third rung out of four, So it's still a conflict, right?
The second and third rungs is when both of these minds are kind of competing.
The attorney rung is when you've got the where the primitive mind has the edge.
And so now the difference between the sports fan is, you know, the sports fan might say that, you know, always see the call going there on their side.
But when they see the replay and it's undeniable, they say, OK, I was wrong.
The attorneys, their job is to stay on the side of their client and to continue to, you know, you don't have an attorney who switches their side because the prosecutor made a good point.
So in a real courtroom, you've got two attorneys, and so each attorney knows that they're one side of a truth-finding machine, and that their job is to represent one side as well as possible, because they know the other attorneys, they're doing the same, and the clash of the two allows the jury to see the truth.
So this isn't even a criticism of real-world attorneys who are doing this on purpose because it's part of a bigger system.
When you're thinking like an attorney, you only have one side in your head.
And so you're just building a case that's going to lead right to where you want to.
And you're going to never change your mind.
You'll seem like you have all this evidence and all these ways of thinking, but you won't change your mind.
And then at the very bottom rung, you're a zealot.
And what I mean by that is just that there's nothing, forget arguing.
You don't even think, you think anyone who would argue this is an awful person.
It's so obvious that you're correct, like the sky is blue.
Why would you need to argue that the sky is blue?
And so you're just completely, you know, in a delusional zone down there.
And, of course, conviction, ironically, you know, because the people at the top here end up with way more knowledge, but the people at the bottom have the most conviction.
They have pure conviction.
They're 100% sure they're correct.
So anyway, then I said, okay, but this is about individuals.
Why do we act this way?
Again, just asking why would we ever be down on these low rungs?
It makes no sense.
And a big part of it is that we are social creatures.
And tribes a long time ago, you know, our well-being and our survival totally depended on being kind of successfully integrated with a larger group.
And so what I find is that you can kind of boil group intellectual culture down into two piles, and one is kind of playing by high-rung thinking rules, and the other is playing by the low-rung thinking rules.
So we know the term echo chamber.
But I said, what's the opposite of an echo chamber?
It's an idea lab, right?
It's an idea lab where the culture of the group is to not treat ideas as sacred and that every idea can be completely obliterated but people should be respected.
So people don't, they don't take it personally when someone disagrees with their idea and they also don't throw ad hominem attacks.
Or if they do, the group calls them out on it, because that's not cool here.
And likewise, I said, you know, conviction is, you know, there's an appropriate level of humility for a high-wrong thinker.
Well, in the group where that's the culture in an idea lab, humility is cool.
Like, it's cool to say, I don't know.
And it's not cool to express unearned conviction.
You look like an idiot.
And arguing is great.
You know, arguing is fun in an idea lab.
And so what happens is that that's kind of this culture that is like a magnet pulling everyone in it.
Upwards on the ladder.
It is actually, it's good for us.
It makes us more robust, tougher thinkers and it helps us stay up on the high rungs as individuals.
And it has the emergent property of kind of group intelligence.
Our brains can link together like a larger, like neurons in a larger brain because we're all saying what we think and we're, you know, searching out for falsehoods together and we're updating.
The whole group can update.
Now when you go down to the echo chamber, which is the other kind of group culture, that is basically when a bunch of people, the primitive minds in a bunch of people's heads, team up together to collaboratively protect a certain set of sacred ideas.
The way that an individual low-rung thinker would do that in their own head, now a group's working on it together.
And so they'll do that by imposing strict social penalties on anyone who expresses doubt in the sacred ideas, or even worse, expresses compelling dissent.
And conviction down there is super cool, as long as it's conviction on the right side.
It's talking about how, you know, if you're in one of these environments, and we all have been there, you'll notice that one of the main activities is just talking about how right and good we are, and how wrong and bad the people who disagree with us are.
That'll just take up a whole dinner.
A whole three-hour dinner will just be that.
And that's a bunch of people basically in a ritual together doing this ancient thing where they are, their entire, you know, the entire, all the friendship here is based on we are all the good people who have this good idea.
And so all of this social behavior happens.
There's so much social incentive now not to be independent thinking, but to conform.
And arguing, you know, in an idea lab, arguing is thought of as fun.
It's a way to play.
It's a way to get smarter.
Down in an echo chamber, arguing is a fight.
If you disagree with someone, you're an asshole, right?
Being an asshole and disagreeing are two separate axes in the idea lab.
You can be an asshole who agrees with me, or an asshole who disagrees, or a good person who agrees, or a good person who disagrees.
Down below, you're either a good person who agrees or you're an asshole who disagrees.
Again, I'm saying, why do we do this?
It's so much worse to be in an echo chamber.
It's less fun.
It's less interesting.
We all end up less intelligent.
It's like pheromones.
Once you're around that environment, there is this urge to agree and to conform.
It becomes kind of this primitive instinct kicks in.
Kept us alive in the tribes a long time ago, it becomes you kind of want to please the group.
And I've felt this before, and I have to catch myself and say, I'm not proud of how I'm being right now.
And I think it's partially because if the emergent property of the idea lab is really strong intelligence, the emergent property of the echo chamber is, if you really scale it up, is just power.
It's just a big scary giant.
I call it a golem.
It's like a big...
We're in kind of like golem mode when we're acting like this.
We're in this mode where we're doing this thing that is a very important ancient survival thing that makes no sense in 2023.
country, I mean, or back in the old days that can just be the meaner, badder tribe, the one that survives and kills the other.
And so we're actually, we're in kind of like golem mode when we're acting like this.
We're in this mode where, you know, we're doing this thing that is a very important ancient survival thing that makes no sense in 2023.
Why are we wasting our time doing this in 2023?
Yeah.
Well, all of this is very interesting and quite consequential.
I think it gets confusing.
Let's just take the schema as given.
I really like it and needless to say, I try to think like a scientist and live in an ideal lab as much as I can.
But it's interesting to see what happens and How you're perceived when endeavoring to think like a scientist and maintain the norms of an ideal lab, you have to react to the products and misbehavior of zealots and attorneys and sports fans.
It's not obvious how to do that.
There's a few things here that are, I think, confusing to almost everyone.
One is, when you're thinking like a scientist in an idea lab, there's this perpetual tension between accepting authority and scientific consensus and being skeptical of authority and consensus at every step along the way.
You know, it's often said that in science we don't respect scientific authority, but that's not quite true.
I mean, as a labor-saving and time-saving and opportunity-cost-sparing device, we accept scientific authority all the time, but at the slightest sign of error, we become alert to the brute fact that the truth of any proposition It doesn't even slightly depend on the authority or the reputation or the career accolades of the person making that proposition, right?
So, everyone knows that the most celebrated scientist of his or her age can be wrong in their very next utterance.
And so, you know, when your bullshit detector goes off, it goes off in the presence of anyone as a scientist.
But short of that, it's only reasonable to assume that the best chemists know more about chemistry than anyone else most of the time, and so it is with every other scientific discipline.
So we do revert to asking our authorities what they think And then we're continually trying to push into areas where no one is an authority, right?
And then when anomalies are found, we try to clean up the mess as we go.
But we're living in an environment now where there's a, and this is largely what I would say Trump and COVID did to our collective minds over the last few years, Well, something like what I've referred to as a new religion of contrarianism, right, where the difference between expertise and just pure amateurish speculation has been, to a large degree, nullified.
And the institutions that used to safeguard our most reliable streams of Information and knowledge gathering and knowledge dissemination are now derided almost universally.
Virtually no one respects the media, really, or not without severe caveats.
And that disrespect has now spread to, you know, any governmental organization that would give us information about more or less anything of consequence.
It's spread to science, you know, both universities and academic journals.
There's just been a raising of the establishment on both the left and the right, probably, you know, to a greater degree on the right.
And it's introduced this expectation that basically all claims to knowledge are on all fours with all others.
Everything has to be entertained with the same open-mindedness or doubt.
There are no standards anymore.
Just to speak personally, the kinds of things that people want me to debate on this podcast you know, I view as fairly incredible, you know, the range of things that people think should be given the most patient hearing at this point.
And of course, whenever you find evidence of a real conspiracy theory or, you know, a real moment of deception on the part of a major institution, it seems to justify this very picture of the nullification of all distinctions, rightly.
Like, okay, here we got this risible editorial published by, you know, the most esteemed scientific journal, you know, something like Science or Nature, where they just go all in on woke, identitarian nonsense, and that is just the smoking gun of the decade, right?
Like, okay, now scientists can't be believed about anything, you know?
I'm wondering how you are just approaching this, what seems to me to be a kind of epistemological and social emergency, where the tools to manufacture misinformation and public doubt have never been more available, and they're getting stronger by the hour.
Again, we're having this conversation a couple of weeks after the unveiling of ChatGPT, and no sooner did that happen, we now have GPT-4.
This is, while it may one day help us detect and correct misinformation, in the meantime, it's going to proliferate it to an extraordinary degree.
How do you think we should personally and collectively try to navigate this moment?
Well, I mean, I think that this is, this is so that the, it's the erosion is of trust, right?
Is, is, I mean, what is trust?
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