Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Problem With Everything" with Tim Urban

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"The Problem With Everything" with Tim Urban · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the space space, the dangerous ideas, what will become of us all
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  as people, as a society, as a culture? Are we on the right track? It's hard to know,
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  but there are certain things that we're doing as a people, as people's, which are probably not
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  conducive to the long-term survivability of our species. Are we really getting our heads
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  and our arms around the challenges that we face? Or are we squabbling and bickering and becoming
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  tribal and silly? You know the answer to that question, you can feel it deep down in your bones,
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  you know that something's a little bit off, you know that something's a little bit of rye,
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  that's why you listen to sane people like me. Another sane person is Tim Urban, who has been on
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  the show once before, and if you haven't listened to that, it's one of my favorite episodes still
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  of this podcast, mind expanding, brain exploding, cosmic level, shit. So when he hit me up and said,
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  hey, zeps, hey, zepity, hey, zeparuni, hey, zeph, he didn't call me any of those things and I
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  encourage you not to either. He said, I've got a book coming out, it's called What's Our Problem,
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  a self-help book for societies. I inhaled the book, I adored it, I thought this is fantastic,
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  I want to talk to him without any further ado, to noodle on the greatest questions that civilization
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  faces, how to reconcile the woke with the right and resurrect a spirit of liberalism that is
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  convincing and appealing to all I give you, you want to know me too much.
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  I have been buried in trying to finish a book and now I have finished the book so that is a nice
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  development. That's better than the alternative of throwing your arms up in the air and going,
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  fuck this thing, I'm never going to get this done, I don't care anyway. Yeah, you're not my money,
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  you don't control me, you're not my daddy. Exactly. Well, it's great. I'm so happy that the book is
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  also the same style as the blog. I wasn't sure if you were going to try to put on a wonky hat and
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  pontificate a little bit more, but I like the fact that they're cartoons. But what I'm
• 2:19
  I guess I'm most interested in what made you want to come out as a white supremacist after all
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  these years. Well, I was you know, I just it was always in me and I just eventually couldn't hold
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  it anymore. You know, like the you know what hasn't happened enough, white straight males haven't
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  been talking enough and I'm going to write a book about why we have to think straight. That's
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  right. I kid you. That's right. I kid you. But nonetheless, there will be some people who'll take
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  it that way. Correct. For sure. Does that bother you? And and and it's like and it well, it's
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  it's I mean, if you think about what that means, if you feel that pressure, so of course I felt the
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  pressure, you know, you know, right about any other topic, write this topic. And with all the
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  shit I'm going to get, but then I'm thinking about well, who who's giving me shit? It's not my
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  like readers, not my main readers who love when I, you know, go nuanced and talk about whatever,
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  you know, they're it's not they're they have no problem. So it's other people or it's a very small
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  minority of my readers and it's just a certain group of people who it's not just the disagree because
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  a lot of people will disagree with points. It's a specifically, it's a specific very small subset
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  of the people who disagree who want to pressure people who disagree with them to be silent and
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  they're going to make it so unpleasant for people just to disagree with them that they make
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  the decision not to. And so when I felt that pressure, I realized like that's what's happening is
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  there's a small group of bullies that are that that you know, that that I'm feeling the pressure of
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  the of and I don't I'm like, you know, that's not a reason to drive my writing decisions.
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  No, and yet it does drive so much. I mean, it's amazing how many people I know who are in the same
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  position as you and I find ourselves who behind who behind closed doors when you get brunch with
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  them say, Oh, I wish I could write something about this. I wish I could say something about this.
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  But you know, it's it's just too hard. I know the mob is going to come for me.
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  And I think what you're saying is exactly right, which is a bit similar to what Peter Singer,
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  the philosopher said when I was at an event with him recently, which became an episode of this
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  podcast, which if people haven't heard, they should go back and listen to that because he's
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  fascinating. And he was like, it's pretty simple. It like, are you responding when I was asking him
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  about getting shit cancel culture wise? He's like, are you responding to my arguments?
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  Or are you just saying that the existence of my arguments means that I should be
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  deplatformed without actually making a urgent case against my arguments? He's like, that's the
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  difference. He's like, I welcome all pushback against everything, but make an argument.
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  Don't just say that I shouldn't have the right to even talk about it. It's it's it's it's that
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  and it's also it's the difference between someone who says those are terrible arguments and here's
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  why, right? Or even those are terrible arguments so I won't read this or I won't pay attention or
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  I'll unfollow you. Those are there's nothing wrong with either of those. In fact, the first one is
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  great. You know, like that's what makes a society smart as people saying that these are bad arguments
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  and here's why, right? That's that's how we get smarter. It's it's specifically someone who says
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  those are bad arguments. So you're a bad person who needs to be punished. And so it's the attacking
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  specifically of the person, not the argument. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the people that we should not
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  be letting drive anything. Yeah. And then of course, they all come back and say, well, what if the
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  argument was we should burn all the Jews? You know, what should you do about Nazis? Shouldn't you be
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  critical of Nazis? And then I would concede that, yes, once you've addressed the argument, when
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  you've addressed using argument, why we shouldn't burn all the Jews, then you're allowed to be
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  mean to Nazis. But until then, maybe just to be arguments. Yeah. So what is your right? So
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  for people who haven't seen the book and who may not even be familiar with you, except for your
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  wonderful work on this very show, what is your argument? Well, it's my the way I see a liberal
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  society is it's kind of like a machine that, you know, it's very complex and relies on a bunch,
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  you know, very, very complicated system of laws and rules, but also relies on a very nuanced
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  system of norms and behavior and values that are kind of commonly shared, liberal values,
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  liberal lowercase L liberal like, you know, but you know, the core concepts of individual rights
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  and free speech and free markets and equal opportunity and open discourse and the marketplace of
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  ideas, all of that stuff that I think most Americans, if you pulled them would say, yeah, like
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  regardless of my politics, I'm a lowercase liberal. So it's this kind of this machine that's a
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  combo of rules and norms, the rules upheld by the government, the norms upheld by the citizens
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  and it's and it's in one hand very robust if they last a long time, they respond, they're resilient
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  in the face of challenge. On the other hand, you know, they're not airtight, they can be broken,
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  you can and they can be a liberal society, that machine can be, if a group is, you know,
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  if they set out to damage the system, like they can, and that's why the system has kind of an
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  immune system, like an organism, and the immune system, as I was just saying, is made up of people
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  who share these values, these liberal values, who will stand up for them in the face of the threat.
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  And so that's part of why they were a bus because, you know, in another country,
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  an illiberal group of people could have maybe a bunch of guns and machetes or whatever it is,
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  and they can make it, you know, they can really take over the country with that because people
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  are so scared. You can't use the guns and the machetes here, and so you have to use kind of soft
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  bullying, social bullying, and so usually, you know, the system can handle it, but the reason
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  I wrote this book is that I feel like over the last few years, especially, you know, I started
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  this in 2016 when I started to really feel it, the system is starting to break down, the immune
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  system is not doing its job, and that's why I think it explains a bunch of current political
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  stories that span the political spectrum, and I think what they all have in common is that
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  the kind of the liberal, you know, mechanics are not standing strong right now, and
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  and illiberal groups are taking advantage. And so that was the initial point, as I said,
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  what's our problem? Why is this happening now? What's exactly happening? Is it really as bad as
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  I think it is? How do we get out of it? And that was, that's what got me writing.
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  How did you make sure that the rabbit hole, that rabbit hole of thought doesn't open up and
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  swallow you up and turn you into James Lindsay, and all of a sudden, there are conspiracy theories
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  everywhere with a global elite that is, that is our puppet masters coordinating a pandemic
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  and undermining Western values.
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  I don't know, I don't know what it is, but in this case, that that wasn't something that I
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  don't think that's not exactly the point. There's not the nub of your concern.
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  Well, the truth is everyone who is kind of fallen too far down conspiracy theory land,
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  they don't believe they are. So maybe I am, and I'm totally on self-aware, but I don't think I am.
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  I think, I think, if anything, like this, this process has made me feel, because I think,
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  you know, so what is it when, when someone is so sure? Because it's not that, look,
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  conspiracy, sometimes there are conspiracies. So some conspiracy theories are correct,
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  or based in some semblance of truth, right? So it's not that conspiracy theories are
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  necessarily bad. It's that people who believe them too readily and too often, and that's not good.
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  And that says to me, there's a lack of humility, because if you have some semblance of humility,
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  you're going to say, I don't know a lot. And I think the kind of profile you're talking about
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  as someone who says, doesn't say, I don't know very often, they say, oh, I know, oh, I know what's
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  happening. And you all, you all don't know, but this is, and that's just not, I don't know, it's not
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  my personality, but also writing this book has really, if anything, made me feel more humble
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  about what I know. And the only thing that I feel really strongly about, like it turns
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  of actual policy, you know, I have some viewpoints. In other ones, I would say, I'm not sure what I
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  think, but this book isn't about, you know, specific policies or something. It's much more about
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  things like broad things, like I think free speech is not just important, but I think it is a
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  critical function like oxygen to a human, to a healthy liberal democracy. That I feel very
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  strong. And what I love about it, as always, you go back so far to first principles. I mean,
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  the thing is, like, there are a lot of people bringing their hands about the fate of liberalism
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  and the fate of Western democracy. And can we end the fate of civility? And are we all going to
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  be nice? Now, we're going to get along. And free speech is important. It's a core belief and
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  liberal values and the enlightenment and everything. And I can see when people talk about that, that
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  people's eyes glaze over a little bit. And there's a little cartoon version of themselves standing
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  on their shoulder going, well, yeah, that's all very well. Those ideals also served to entrench
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  a fairly unjust system for a long time. And they were also used by people who were in
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  total hypocrites who might have been in favor of slavery or even Jim Crow or who might have been
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  quite sanguine about the genocide of First Nations people or about the fact that women were
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  completely not represented in the hallways of power. So that's fine. But we also need some
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  kind of an equity reckoning as well to make things better today. And instead of saying, well,
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  yes, but don't go too far, which is what most people respond with. You actually go right back to
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  first principles and go, okay, what makes a good argument a good argument? How would we know if we
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  were on the right track or the wrong track? What has worked like if human history were a 1000
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  page book, which is like one of your favorite one of my favorite thought experiments of yours?
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  So why don't we do that? Just remind people of the 1000 page book analogy. And then I want to get
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  today. Sure. So yeah, I mean, I like to zoom out. I think zooming out to start a book to start a
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  blog post to start any thought process is good, right? It's like to me, it's that, you know, the reason
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  that we can see, you know, we have at least some idea of what happened in history is because we have
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  hindsight. And to me, it's a little like, you know, imagine you're on a beach and you're trying to
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  figure out the shape of the coastline or you want to big, you know, someone just plops you on a beach,
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  you have no idea where you are. Are you on an island? Is it a huge island? Are you on a continent?
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  It's hard to know what's going on. And how could you figure it out? Well, if you somehow had a
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  helicopter and you can go up, up, up, up, up. Oh, okay. Now I can see more. And you go up even
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  higher. Okay. Now I can see the whole story, right? And so when we look at history, we have a
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  little bit of that hindsight. It's like we're kind of up in a helicopter looking at the situation.
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  But when you're in the present, you don't have that. You are just looking around trying to figure
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  out what the hell is going on. And I think that it's hard for people to it's hard to know in your own
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  time, what the big story is in 100 years and people look back on the 2020s and the 2010s.
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  It's going to look like something. There'll be a clearer story about what was really going on. But
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  but that, you know, that's fine for them. But we need to figure it out now because we're actually
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  driving the story that those people are not. They're looking at what happened. We can actually
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  do something about it. But we also have the least good view of it. So I like to zoom out and the
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  way I did it with the beginning of this book, as I said, all right, let's just like zoom out
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  on human history for a second, just to just just to orient ourselves to what the hell is going on.
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  So what we, you know, we think it's maybe between 200 and 300,000 years old, depending on exactly
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  what you're, you know, calling the borderline. So I said, okay, just say 250,000 years. And let's
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  make, you know, 1000 pages each one with 250 years on it. If you wrote human history in a thousand
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  page book. And it was pretty amazing when you look at it like that because first of all,
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  it's almost all, you know, small tribes of hunter-gatherers. That's who we were for almost all of human
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  history. And then you get to around 10,000 years ago, you start to have early agriculture and cities
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  and, you know, recorded history only starts on page like 975 out of 1000. And so almost everything
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  we think of as modern civilization developed in the last five percent of this book, five,
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  you know, three to five percent of this book. And the crazier thing to me is comparing the very last
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  page. So page 1000. So according to this, we're at the very end of page 1000 right now about to
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  embark on to the page 1000. And if you think of it that way and you compare page 1000 to all the
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  pages before, you understand that, you know, it seems like it's naive to think we live in such a
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  special time. Oh, everyone thinks that about their time. But no, we actually do because
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  page 1000 was the first page. This goes back to maybe 1770, right? 1773 is 250 years ago. So
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  all of US history and all modern democracies, they all existed only on page 1000, modern transportation,
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  modern communication, anything like that. All electricity, the power was always out until page 1000.
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  Everything that we define as our modern world is extremely new. Like, and the reason it all,
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  it's all so much has happened on this page is that technology grows exponentially. And at some
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  point, you kind of hit a tipping point where things start going really, really fast. So even in our
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  lifetimes, like, we witnessed the birth of the internet, the birth of mobile phones and social
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  media and AI, like, and so many of crazy world changing things, like just paradigm shifts,
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  all right? Is a paradigm shift starting every year in a whole different part of the tech world?
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  So this was my one thought I had, right? So tech is growing exponentially. Then the next that I
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  had was that's not necessarily good or bad because more tech creates accountless goods, right?
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  Life quality of life and medicine and prosperity and GDP per capita and life expectancy.
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  And all of these things just go up exponentially in the last century. On the other hand,
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  more technology brought us the biggest world wars of all time, brought us the biggest existential
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  threat of all time in the 20th century with nuclear weapons and climate change and AI and all of this.
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  And so the good is getting better, but the bad is getting scarier. So if you could sum that up,
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  I'm saying the stakes either way are getting higher. So because of tech, the stakes are getting
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  higher. Now, couple that with what I was seeing around my society, which is that I was seeing wisdom
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  seems to be going down. We are acting, we're acting illiberal in a way that has not served other
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  people in the past. We are, you know, public shamings are back in fashion. Like politicians are
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  getting more clownish. Like truth is on the decline media is not what it used to be, right? Media
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  used to be much more trustworthy. Trust in general in our institutions is at all time low right now
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  or not all time, but at least in the last 50 years. So this is awful. I'm not sure that I'm not
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  sure the media is more trustworthy was more trustworthy. Media used to be more trusted. I think that
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  the institutions, the reputable institutions of media are probably just as worthy of being trusted
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  as they were in more or more as they were in the 1950s say when they had a more covert handshake
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  with people in position. I agree with that. Okay. So, so you can, but I will agree with you on one
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  point, which is that national public. I think radio, broadcast incorporation, Australian broadcast
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  incorporation and maybe the times and even, you know, the reporting of the Wall Street Journal,
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  if not the top ed page and so on. But yeah, so let's let's let's take the lack of trust as being
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  at least as great a liability as the lack of trustworthiness than we agree.
• 18:32
  Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think the lack of trust is a big deal. I think like the media,
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  you could say, you know, I think people pined for the, the, you know, the Cronkite days, the
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  Brocott days. And I think that, you know, that's at least in the US. These were these giant,
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  you know, national broadcasting stations, right? And I think sure they definitely had some,
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  you know, who knows what, you know, what their deep down motives were and whether they were
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  always telling the truth. But they had some semblance of neutrality and some semblance of professional
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  as them. And they had 26, 30 minutes a day to tell the news. So they focused on big news.
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  And today you have these 24 hour news networks that no longer cater to the whole country,
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  they cater to, they cater to very specifically to one political tribe. Yeah. I'm not
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  including that. I'm not including. Well, there's a lot of people today are getting their media
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  from MSNBC, from Fox News, from CNN, from Breitbart, from The Huffington Post, from Twitter. And
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  those, you just, I think you're more likely to see a non fact check, not professional journalism
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  job in these headlines you're seeing than you used to. So I think it's a little, it's a combo of
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  what you're saying. Yeah. No, I guess I'm just saying that like the Economist still exists. And,
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  you know, the Lone River book still exists and the New York River book still exists and the
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  New York is still exists. But what percentage of people are getting their news from one of those
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  really kind of professional things. It's just the percentages gone down. Yeah. So many people
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  are getting their news from, from very biased kind of tribal sources. So yeah. So it's, yeah,
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  it's not, I don't disagree with you and all of friends there. But I think it's, it's so,
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  there's so many institutions that are A, not what they used to be. But like you said, B, even
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  the institutions that are pretty good still are less trusted. And just probably the even bigger.
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  The other thing that I'll throw into the point about how quickly things are changing and how
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  critical it is that we have our wits about us at this particular point in time is I've mentioned
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  this before. I don't remember if I mentioned it when we were chatting or on another podcast. But
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  when my grandmother died, I went back from, she was, it was the eve of her 100th birthday. She was
• 20:33
  in New Zealand. I was, I'd been planning to, to come for her 100th birthday. She died on, no,
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  actually I wasn't going to come. That was the point I sent a card instead. And then I,
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  I beat the card because I was there for her funeral instead of her birthday card arriving
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  before me. So I flew from New York to Auckland, attended her funeral, came back via Greece where a
• 20:55
  friend of mine was living in Athens and spent a weekend there. And I'm wandering around the
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  Agora, the birthplace of democracy and like standing on the Northwest slopes of this hill where
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  humans came for the first time ever with the radical idea of actually sorting things out by
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  talking to each other about them and trying to figure out communally what to do instead of just
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  obeying what the, you know, the cosmically-divined emperor was telling them to do. And I'm like, wow,
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  the age of this thing, the ancientness of Western democracy and Western civilization. And then I was
• 21:34
  like, hang on, it's 40 times 100 years. It's 4,000 years. It's 14 nanas, it's 14 nanas lifespans.
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  So my Nana backed her back, her lifespan. You only have to have to go back 40 to get to the very
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  first example of Western democracy and Western, you know, I suppose, liberal thought. It's only
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  20 nanas to get back to Jesus. It's only a couple of nanas to get back to the Enlightenment.
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  And it's only one Nana to get back to the Gallipoli campaign. And then the invention of nuclear
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  weapons, the evolution of flight, the entire space race, that's a one person's lifespan. And when
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  you give the analogy at the beginning of this book, Tim, we're talking about the 1,000 page book,
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  where each page is 250 years. I mean, it's very funny because you have like a little cartoon of a
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  dude who's, who's reading the transition between page, say 760 and 761. And the dude's saying,
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  oh, wow, that tree is 14 feet taller. Or between pages 992 and 993, the person's going,
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  wow, the Romans really went for it. What great buildings? AD is way cooler than BC. And then
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  page 998 to 999, you get gravity, galaxies, human rights, the Western hemisphere, like all of that.
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  And then everything that my grandmother ever experienced is on the final third of the final page.
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  And that's basically the dawn of people living lives that would be truly recognizable to us,
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  in other words, the post-war period. So those are the stakes. That is the pace. That is the, you know,
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  the legacy that we need to take on from our forebears and move forward with is a terrifyingly
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  rapidly changing legacy. And we have to be as well equipped as we possibly can be to deal with the
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  threats and opportunities that it throws up. So I'm glad that we've now, that's just my contribution
• 23:45
  to you all laying the lie of the land. Now take us through maybe the easiest way to go through
• 23:51
  the sort of steps that you take in the book and talk about the ladder and liberal games and the
• 23:56
  downward spiral. Yeah, so I created a, because I was thinking that, you know, I think part of the
• 24:05
  problem is I think our conversations about this, both my personal ones and ones that see on TV
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  and in podcasts and whatever on Twitter, they're really constrained. I think like, you know, when I
• 24:16
  look at politics or really any other line of argumentation, I, it's, people are so focused on
• 24:23
  what you think, you know, here's what I think, here's what you think, who's right, who's wrong.
• 24:27
  That all to me is a horizontal axis situation. So we have left-right center in politics, right? That's
• 24:33
  a horizontal, one-dimensional axis. And in general, you could lay out the range of what you think
• 24:39
  on a spectrum on most issues, even if it's oversimplifying a bit. It's of what you think axis, right?
• 24:46
  So I was like, how about we create a how you think axis? And we put it next to it. So we have a
• 24:50
  square now, a vertical axis. And I call that the ladder. And what I started to think is, you know,
• 24:58
  what makes, what are the different ways people think? And it came down to me. There's kind of two
• 25:05
  parts of our brain. And, you know, I'm not saying this as a neuroscientist. I'm saying this as a
• 25:09
  human who understands his own thinking, you know, what it's like to be in my own brain. And I know,
• 25:13
  and to me, so I procrastinate a lot because there's two parts of my brain. There's one part,
• 25:22
  the kind of rational part that says, we should work now. It's 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. Obviously,
• 25:28
  this is a great time to work. And then there's another part that self defeats that says, no, we're
• 25:33
  not going to work now because it's not because it's bad. It's not trying to hurt me. It's confused.
• 25:38
  It is what I, you know, it's what I would call the primitive mind. And this primitive mind
• 25:43
  is an ancient part of our brain that doesn't, that has not been updated since, you know,
• 25:50
  civilization sprung upon us really quickly. And our brains have not adjusted. So this primitive
• 25:55
  mind is this piece of software that is that thinks we live in 50,000 BC. And it doesn't want to
• 26:01
  work hard on a book because there were no books in 50,000 BC. You weren't working on a project
• 26:06
  that was going to come out a year from now. You were trying to fulfill your immediate needs.
• 26:10
  And so that's what it's really good at. And so procrastination, I think, is a battle between
• 26:15
  this ancient software and that doesn't understand the concept of long-term work and wants to
• 26:20
  conserve energy. And the rational part that sees what's going on and realizes you need to get to work.
• 26:25
  The same thing goes for when we eat unhealthy. I use the example of skittles. Like,
• 26:30
  why do we ever eat skittles? They're awful for you. There's nothing good about them for
• 26:34
  nutrition wise. It's funny that you use the example of skittles because I just wolfed down a bag
• 26:38
  of skittles last night. I mean, they're so good. But what it, it's the primitive brain in your
• 26:44
  head. They're primitive mind. Things that skittles because it hasn't been updated. If you
• 26:48
  find anything with the texture and the chewiness and the flavor of skittles back in 50,000 BC,
• 26:55
  you want to eat it because that is some delicious calorie dense food that you might not get calories
• 27:00
  for two weeks. It's an incredible bearing. Imagine coming across a skittle tree. You'd be like,
• 27:04
  this is the best tree. I mean, this is obviously the... You would have been very popular. That's
• 27:07
  right. I would have been thinking lots of whores. Bloody wars. Bloody battles fought over that tree.
• 27:12
  Exactly. I would have been there like a lot of people on the roof just selling skittles out of
• 27:16
  my bag next to hoarding the tree for all. But Karen, right. And then you'd give all the ancient
• 27:22
  people diabetes. But we end up with diabetes now because we have this brain that is not really
• 27:29
  understand what's going on and it tries to do the right thing by eating the foods that you want,
• 27:34
  conserving energy, whatever. Now, I took this concept of this kind of the higher mind that can see
• 27:40
  what's going on and wants to do what makes sense. And the primitive mind, which is a piece of
• 27:45
  software that doesn't understand the world you're in and is trying to survive in 50,000 BC even
• 27:50
  though you live today. I took that paradigm and I said, how do we apply it to thinking, to our ideas?
• 27:55
  And I realized that I think the same thing is going on. I think that the way the primitive mind
• 27:59
  wants to form beliefs is wants to form the same... First of all, the same beliefs as the people
• 28:05
  around you. So they want to fit in and believe what the tribe believes. It wants to confirm those
• 28:12
  beliefs. It wants to feel conviction and express conviction about how right we are. And it wants to
• 28:16
  attach your identity to it. Those beliefs are part of who you are. And the people who don't believe
• 28:23
  what you believe, they're not just wrong. They're bad people. They're those kind of people. And
• 28:27
  we're these kind of people who believe these things. And of course, if you think that way, that
• 28:32
  that brings everyone to change its mind because then your whole identity shatters and your
• 28:38
  whole tribal connection. And now your self-esteem is tied to being the good person who believes the
• 28:43
  good things. So you identify with them that they become sacred beliefs to you. They become
• 28:47
  just to who you are. And I just want to make an analogy. Let me just make another analogy
• 28:51
  there to skittles as well. There is... There's something compelling and juicy and delicious and
• 28:58
  caloric about an idea that makes you feel like you're on the right side of history. And like,
• 29:03
  you're not only correct, but good. You know what I mean? It's all very well for me to hold an
• 29:09
  idea in my head like, I don't know, Saturn is larger than Neptune. But that doesn't make me feel
• 29:18
  good. For me to feel good, I need an idea that has more moral codiency than that. And so an idea
• 29:24
  about something that's something that's political, something that's cultural, something that's
• 29:28
  tribal, something that involves discrimination against other people or a threat to my way of life,
• 29:33
  something that involves all that is good and pure versus things that are sinful and impure,
• 29:41
  or something that involves appeals to egalitarianism and to decency and to fairness over hierarchy and
• 29:48
  evil, like all of those things, like there's just a juiciness, there's a skittlesiness to many of the
• 29:55
  many of the ideas that make us feel like. The reason is because those things you mentioned,
• 30:02
  those were all related to life and death a long, long time ago. Well, Saturn was not. And there's
• 30:09
  actually an interesting study that you know, they use an MRI and people on people and when they have
• 30:15
  their non-political beliefs challenged, the kind of rational parts of their brain light up. And
• 30:20
  when they have their political beliefs challenged, whole different parts of their brain, the kind of
• 30:23
  parts that I deal with identity and internal focus light up because it's a different part of our
• 30:28
  brain to process as it. And those beliefs, of course, are way less likely to change. People get
• 30:33
  angry and defensive and emotional when those beliefs are challenged. And of course, when we did
• 30:39
  believe that like the god of Neptune really did have have agency in the cosmos, then we probably
• 30:45
  were really offended when people said nasty things about Neptune. Yeah, I mean, if we thought it had
• 30:51
  to do with the afterlife or it had to do with some powerful being that had power over us in our
• 30:56
  well-being, then yeah, I'm sure he did. Okay, cool. It's whatever has to do with survival. So we've
• 31:01
  got all these ideas. So one part of your brain is trying to identify with the ideas and not change
• 31:06
  your mind. The same exact part of your brain that wants to eat those skittles. Now the other part
• 31:11
  of your brain, the one that says, let's not binge on skittles because that's a bad decision.
• 31:16
  That same part of your brain thinks totally differently. That part of your brain does what makes
• 31:20
  sense, just like it doesn't make sense, it makes sense to not eat too many skittles. It also makes
• 31:24
  sense to form your beliefs based on evidence and to be humble because you know from experience how
• 31:31
  often people are wrong and how complex it is, things are and how hard it is to gain knowledge.
• 31:37
  And of course you're willing to change your mind when you're thinking rationally because
• 31:41
  what is changing your mind? You have a mental model in your brain, like a little machine you've built
• 31:46
  and you want that machine to be accurate. You want it to be true. That's how it's going to serve you
• 31:50
  and others if you know have the truth. And if someone comes along and says you're wrong about this,
• 31:55
  that higher mind in your head is not going to be offended or angry or defensive. It's going to say,
• 32:02
  oh, you think my machine's broken? Well, I don't think so. Show me why. Look, kick it, kick it,
• 32:06
  try to break it. And if that person can successfully break your machine and say, you know what, see,
• 32:10
  I pointed out a fatal flaw, you wouldn't say you're an asshole. You'd say, thank you. Wow,
• 32:15
  amazing. I just got a little smarter because of you. I just updated. I just got a software
• 32:21
  updated in my head and my brain's a little better off forever. Tim, do you know Dawkins either of
• 32:26
  these Dawkins familiar anecdote about this where he says, in fact, if people are listening to this,
• 32:32
  then I am just about to do a Dawkins event in Brisbane. So if you're in Brisbane and there
• 32:36
  are still tickets left, then next week I'm doing Dawkins live in Brisbane. But his anecdote about
• 32:42
  this is this, and you may tell me if I'm mangling it, but the scientist who had spent his entire
• 32:48
  life trying to defend this particular quirk of, I think, evolutionary theory and a younger scientist
• 32:54
  was giving a big presentation to a packed-out lecture hall that was going to demolish this old
• 32:59
  guy's ideas. And he gave the presentation and the old guy who was in the lecture hall got up
• 33:05
  and walked down to the front and everyone sort of held their breath as if there was going to be
• 33:09
  a big showdown. And the old guy shook his hand ferociously and said, thank you for proving me
• 33:15
  wrong, I've been wrong all of these years. And for Dawkins, that's the ultimate example of what
• 33:21
  science is versus superstition or faith or tribal beliefs. And that's the avatar towards which we
• 33:28
  should all aspire. Right, because a real scientist, think about this, if you're a perfect scientist,
• 33:35
  and that guy sounds pretty close, what are you doing with science? Science is a method of discovering
• 33:41
  the truth and it's collaborative over generations and over space and time. And so
• 33:47
  they're on the same team looking for the same truth, right? And so if someone disproves your thing,
• 33:52
  you say, oh, okay, I added my hypothesis, you shown it was wrong, okay, we all just went a little
• 33:56
  bit, we just took a step forward together. But of course, what so many scientists do is they get stuck
• 34:04
  in there, they become attached to their hypothesis. They're theory because their ego gets involved,
• 34:10
  their primitive mind gets involved. And so their higher mind might be saying, great,
• 34:13
  let's find the truth, but their primitive mind is saying that theory is part of me. And that
• 34:19
  theory being true is part of my self-esteem and part of my reputation. And so they will defend
• 34:25
  it. And then what does that do? It makes them a much worse scientist. It makes them a much worse
• 34:28
  thinker. And of course, that's, it's not just scientists. You can apply this thing to all of us,
• 34:34
  right? We all have times when we are thinking with our higher minds and we're much more humble,
• 34:40
  we're willing to change our mind, we're not emotional or attached to about our ideas. And that,
• 34:44
  that makes us a hyper, you know, hyper-efficient learning machine, right? And if you just,
• 34:48
  if you can get in that habit, you become one of those people that knows so much. But we also
• 34:53
  struggle. It's like a tug of war. So often we will find ourselves just not just fully identifying
• 35:02
  with our ideas, but doing it with others. So our friends and us, we all agree. We all say around
• 35:06
  talking about how right we are and how right those other dump, how wrong those other dumb people,
• 35:11
  bad people are. And when we're doing that, we've gotten caught into kind of our primitive minds
• 35:15
  have banded together into kind of an ancient tribal ritual. And all of us have stopped learning.
• 35:20
  And we're giving away the amazing human ability to learn. We're giving that away. And in favor of
• 35:26
  kind of, you know, pounding a bag of skittles, intellectual skittles by talking about how smart
• 35:31
  and righteous and good we are. And, and so that's a tug of war in all of our heads. And some of us
• 35:37
  are better at being on the high rungs of the, so the latter to me is when you're on the top of the
• 35:42
  ladder, when you're, when your higher mind is just running, you're the show in your head, which
• 35:46
  happens to all of us sometimes. You're in a really good thinking zone. You're the top rung of the
• 35:50
  ladder. Now as the primitive mind starts to enter the, the, the equation, you start to go to drift
• 35:56
  down to those middle rungs when you're in the tug of war and you can feel the influence of both.
• 36:00
  And then a lot of times our primitive mind just totally takes over and we are completely consumed
• 36:05
  with, you know, tribalism, intellectual tribalism, you know, we are, we are totally identified with
• 36:10
  our ideas. We, there's nothing that could change our mind. Deep down, we, we know if you ask us
• 36:15
  that there's not actually anything that can make us say, I think I'm wrong about this. Okay,
• 36:18
  now we're at the bottom of the ladder or in the low rungs of the ladder. And so this, these two
• 36:22
  terms that thinking, you know, high rung thinking and low rung thinking, that's this vertical
• 36:27
  axis that I think we need. And so when someone says, Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm a center left person or
• 36:32
  I'm on the far right. Okay, that's a horizontal statement. Great. But that doesn't tell me how you
• 36:38
  got there. If, if that person is a high wrong thinker and they're on the far right, I'm thinking,
• 36:43
  okay, so this person has done a lot of thinking. They've been willing to change their mind. They
• 36:46
  probably changed their mind a lot of times. And after a lot of evidence, they've come to believe that
• 36:51
  that that staunch conservatism is the way to go. I'm, regardless of whether I agree, I wouldn't
• 36:56
  listen to that person. That's interesting. Okay, so let's talk same if they're on the far left
• 36:59
  or in the center or wherever. If that same person, I can tell that they're just there because this is
• 37:04
  who they are. They are a red Republican or they are a centrist, such as the right and left. It can
• 37:09
  be a centrist. And that's just part of their identity is being that thing. I don't care what they
• 37:13
  have to say because it's not real information. By the way, I can tell them every single position.
• 37:18
  They name an issue. I can tell you that person's position. It's like a computer. Yeah, it's a
• 37:22
  computer spitting out some pre-ordained conceits. And I think it's really worth remembering
• 37:30
  in the wake of how terrible conversations have been over the past few years, particularly around
• 37:36
  the pandemic and social justice, that the key here is why we believe the things we believe.
• 37:44
  Like, why? How did you arrive at the belief? I did a solo podcast, like a soapbox, I call it,
• 37:52
  what I got wrong about COVID. And it was, you know, the amount of hate that I got back from the,
• 38:01
  you know, the, I suppose, COVID can, you know, I don't want to call them conspiracy theorists.
• 38:05
  From people who think that the reaction, the global reaction to COVID was completely
• 38:10
  manufactured or even invented or concocted or that the whole thing was a conspiracy.
• 38:15
  The, the point that I had been making was I've become renowned among certain circles in the wake
• 38:23
  of having been on Joe Rogan's show in, in January of 2022 and gotten into an argument with him
• 38:28
  about myocarditis as a result of vaccines as being like the person who thinks there's no side
• 38:34
  effects from vaccines, which is not true at all. I just followed the data on that. My point
• 38:40
  has always been that in 2021, as Delta and Omicron were exploding and hospitals
• 38:47
  were still struggling to deal with it, it was not correct at the time to be more concerned
• 38:54
  about heart inflammation from our mRNA vaccines than you were about the spread of the disease.
• 39:00
  We didn't know enough back then. We knew enough to know that they were broadly safe.
• 39:05
  And the correct kind of epistemological position at the time was to cautiously be in favor
• 39:12
  of vaccinating as many people as quickly as possible in 2021. Now in 2023, my position can
• 39:20
  afford to be more nuanced. There's a lot more data. I would encourage males under the age of 50,
• 39:25
  not to get mRNA vaccines, but to opt for AstraZeneca or NovaVax if they can, although they should still get.
• 39:30
  So anyway, I'm not going to go down that whole rabbit hole, but the point that I was trying to
• 39:34
  make in what I got wrong about COVID was a stopped clock is right twice a day. If you've been
• 39:40
  banging on about mRNA vaccines and the damage that they can do to young male hearts now,
• 39:48
  that may be all well and good and you may be absolutely correct about your data. But you weren't
• 39:54
  right to be banging on about that 18 months ago because it matters why you believe what you believe
• 39:59
  and how you got there. And the only reason why you were banging on about it in the middle of 2021
• 40:03
  is because your tribe was banging on about it. And it gave you a sense of identity to be
• 40:08
  located in the pandemic in relation to the pandemic, the way that you wanted to be related. It was
• 40:13
  not a rational position. You might like, it's entirely possible to be right for the wrong reasons,
• 40:19
  what I'm saying. Totally agree, because what you're saying is if two people say today that what you
• 40:28
  just said about mRNA vaccines and the risks, one of them might be way up in the high rungs saying it
• 40:36
  and another one being the low rungs and that is all the difference in the world. In fact, that's
• 40:40
  what we should be focusing on. Like in general, we should, each of our goal should be to just
• 40:48
  climb this ladder in our heads as much as possible. But secondly, when you see someone,
• 40:53
  when you talk to someone who disagrees with you, but they're doing it from kind of a high-rung
• 40:58
  perspective, that person is way more an ally of yours in the long run in the quest for knowledge
• 41:05
  and whatever. Then someone who happens to agree with you, who's doing it in the tribe.
• 41:09
  Yeah, I mean, you could teach Coco the gorilla to say the right, the true things about mRNA vaccines.
• 41:16
  It wouldn't mean that Coco has a great understanding or is good at reason.
• 41:21
  Exactly. And again, a good litmus test is, you know, if this is the kind of person where when
• 41:27
  they tell you they're for Americans, if an American tells me their view on abortion, and I know
• 41:34
  that I could immediately tell you their position without knowing anything else about them on guns,
• 41:41
  on climate change, on immigration, on tax policy, who they voted for in the last election,
• 41:47
  that to me is not a thinker. There's no thinking happening. You know, maybe out of a 100 high-rung
• 41:52
  thinkers, you will have one that happens to have come down the entire checklist in one way.
• 41:57
  Very unusual. It's unlikely. These issues are really, and by the way, they probably won't be so
• 42:02
  nuanced as just to have a clear, yes, higher taxes. No, yes. I mean, if anyone also
• 42:08
  have 100 things to say about it, if anyone needs proof of that Tim, just look at how quickly the
• 42:12
  mob can turn. Look at what the Republican Party's attitude towards Medicare and Social Security
• 42:19
  or international relations has done in less than six years. They've gone from being, you know,
• 42:25
  interventionist hawks to being largely isolationist. They've gone from being Russia's haters to
• 42:31
  Russia lovers. They've gone from being, we need to cut Social Security and Medicare to get the
• 42:36
  budget in check to being, we're never going to touch these things. And what, all, all at exactly
• 42:41
  the same time, and I could make similar arguments of, you know, of group think on the left, I don't
• 42:45
  mean to just say that it's a Republican phenomenon, but in the United States, that's more market
• 42:49
  there. And all at the same time, everyone has independently concluded that all of these positions
• 42:55
  were wrong and that they should actually modify them. Of course not. It's a herd stampede.
• 43:01
  Correct. I mean, also, I mean, you could say, yeah, during the Obama years, all you heard
• 43:07
  was from the left was, I mean, from the right was that the deficit, the deficit, the debt, right?
• 43:12
  Right. And then Trump comes in office in silence, radio silence on that as it continues to balloon.
• 43:20
  You know, I don't know, five, seven years ago, most people on the left in the US, mostly,
• 43:25
  you know, pretty, pretty fervent, you know, tribal leftists in the US would have said, you know,
• 43:31
  colorblindness is great, right? Judger person by the character, not their skin color, right?
• 43:39
  And today, that entire group has shifted and said, the worst thing you can be as colorblind.
• 43:42
  And it's not that they all independently thought about it and came around. It was that
• 43:46
  they're down on the low rungs. The checklist has been, you know, has switched and changed,
• 43:54
  and all the people just kind of without thinking go along with it. And then suddenly,
• 43:58
  you know, we'll try to, you know, look hugely criticized scabingly anyone who has the view they
• 44:03
  had six years ago. Yeah. So, you know, and usually, by the way, these people, whether it's the left
• 44:08
  or right or center, these people that are that are getting their viewpoints from a checklist that
• 44:12
  are unwilling to change their mind, that are doing their thinking with their primitive mind.
• 44:15
  And again, I don't mean to be looking down upon them because I've been there. When people are down there,
• 44:19
  when people are down there, these are also people who are usually very bad at debating. You know,
• 44:28
  they have more conviction than anyone. These are the people who, it's funny because on the high
• 44:32
  rungs, they have a lot more actual knowledge and they can hold their own in a debate usually.
• 44:36
  But they'll often say, I don't know. But on the low rungs, they say, oh, I know, and not only do I
• 44:40
  know, but I know that anyone who disagrees with this is an awful person. Meanwhile, if you try to
• 44:43
  have an actual debate with them, a substantive one, they'll resort, they'll either avoid it,
• 44:47
  or resort to add hominem attacks and things like that because they don't actually have very
• 44:53
  much knowledge. So they had this unearned conviction, this tremendous amount of unearned
• 44:57
  conviction. And that's because the primitive mind is just wired that way to fervently believe
• 45:02
  stuff that it has no good reason to believe this. It's not very smart. And sometimes there are
• 45:09
  some issues that are so thorny and so resistant to simplification that the people on the
• 45:16
  lower rungs, as you said, I mean, avoidance. I'm glad you said that because it's not just,
• 45:20
  you know, people will often say the modern environment, the modern cultural climate and social
• 45:25
  media make everybody more hostile and make us more extreme. And that's true to some degree.
• 45:30
  The algorithms are extremeification machines. But they also tangle some of us up into such a
• 45:38
  pickle that we just have to avoid entire topics now. Like we really are not engaging on the
• 45:45
  challenge between equity and equality that you just pointed to. Are we going to treat people
• 45:51
  without regarding their skin color and ethnicity as being salient? Should that still be an
• 45:56
  aspiration? It's very hard to find people to talk sensibly about that. It's also hard to find
• 46:01
  people to talk sensibly about the fact that again, six or seven years ago, it would have been
• 46:07
  a foundational principle of being on the left that there's something fundamental to the experience
• 46:13
  of being a woman in having grown up as a girl in a sexist world. And that the norm of allowing
• 46:23
  women to have women's only spaces and to define themselves, however they collectively want to,
• 46:29
  is an utmost principle of the left. Now you throw in the question of, well, what is the
• 46:35
  category of woman and do people who were born biologically male but who feel female inside
• 46:43
  get to dictate the trajectory of that cohort? Well, we want to be really nice to trans people
• 46:49
  because we don't want to be bigots and that is such a scramble and it's so difficult to un-pick
• 46:54
  that rather than actually do the legwork of trying to nod it out and go, okay, well, what are the
• 46:59
  big values that we really care about? Like human agency and autonomy and compassion and how can we
• 47:04
  reconcile those values with the facts on the ground? It's much easier to just say, uh, maybe we're
• 47:10
  not going to touch that. So that you either don't touch it or you're a firebrand.
• 47:15
  Well, but it's also, it's each of these issues, right? They're incredibly complicated. They
• 47:21
  need that, you know, we get wise together if we can talk about stuff, if we can argue, if we can
• 47:26
  be, if we can be unafraid to be wrong or even play devil's advocate and argue with something
• 47:29
  we know is wrong because it's interesting and seeing what happens. There's so much nuance here.
• 47:34
  And if you think about what does it say when a person or a group is not just, uh, you know,
• 47:44
  instead of disagreeing, they actually try to shut down conversation. They try to make a taboo
• 47:48
  to even talk about it. It tells me that it's like if someone feels confident that they have the truth,
• 47:56
  they love an argument. They love to talk about it. They bring it on, you know, I, I, and so it tells me
• 48:01
  that it's usually, again, it correlates with people who are very bad at arguing. It's something
• 48:06
  and they don't actually, they don't really know how to argue for their own beliefs. And so it's,
• 48:10
  it's, um, it's like if, if you put your, you know, if, if the way you can test ideas is to throw
• 48:15
  them in the boxing ring with other ideas, there's, there's, you know, there's people who will try to
• 48:22
  box your ideas, which is great. And then those people who try to ban boxing, right, ban boxing and
• 48:26
  try to make it uncomfortable, the fact that it's not a, it doesn't just happen by itself. When you're
• 48:31
  saying these issues are really hard to talk about, that doesn't happen by itself. It happens because
• 48:35
  some people in the society are making it really scary to talk about that by trying to punish people
• 48:40
  who talk about them without, unless they, unless they say the exact viewpoint that is approved.
• 48:45
  Right. Uh, and so with that, it doesn't serve trans people or women. It doesn't serve people of color.
• 48:51
  It doesn't serve, um, you know, any of the people that supposedly are being protected here,
• 48:56
  it's not helpful to make topics, a discussion about these nuanced issues that affect them taboo.
• 49:02
  All it does is it just makes people dig their heels into these unnew ones, one-dimensional narratives
• 49:08
  that actually if you look at plenty of statistics, these narratives don't help,
• 49:12
  yeah, don't help the people that they're trying to help. You've got a nice little cartoon in the book,
• 49:16
  with a person standing in front of a big boxer saying, this is the best boxer in the world.
• 49:22
  And another person says, wow, cool. Uh, how, who, who has he beaten? And the other person says,
• 49:28
  no one, he's never thought anyone. And the other person says, then how do you know he's the best
• 49:32
  boxer in the world? And the other person says, I can just tell. And that's basically what we're
• 49:37
  doing to our beloved beliefs. We don't actually have to subject them to the rigorous scrutiny of
• 49:42
  getting in the ring. Uh, because to do so would be to, to undignify them and to dignify our opponents
• 49:49
  with, with time. Uh, and, and, you know, our beliefs are too good and too noble, uh, to be put
• 49:55
  under that kind of weathering criticism. And as a result, we quarantine them and they atrophy,
• 50:00
  and as the old saying goes, if you don't really know why you believe what you believe, then you don't
• 50:05
  know, uh, sorry, you know, if you, if you're, you're not allowed allowing your belief to be
• 50:09
  critiqued by opponents. And if you're not practicing criticizing your opponents beliefs,
• 50:13
  then you don't really know why you believe what you believe either. And by the way, lots of young
• 50:18
  people in the US at least, and I think probably in Australia and England and other places,
• 50:22
  they're being taught at places like universities and in, in high schools and middle schools. They're
• 50:26
  being taught by teachers and by others that like this concept that argument is violence, that
• 50:32
  dissent is violence, that disagreement is rude and is harmful and dangerous and disagree. And
• 50:38
  what they're basically being taught by grownups is that boxing is bad, but, you know,
• 50:42
  metaphorical intellectual boxing is bad. And so what they're doing is they're creating these people,
• 50:47
  these, these, they're, they're, they're training little kids to be bad thinkers to, you know,
• 50:52
  it's like you should be training them on the opposite, like teaching them how to argue and how to
• 50:55
  defend their ideas and how to, you know, evaluate evidence and, you know, um, and that's how you,
• 51:00
  you create robust, you know, truth finding grownups. And how do you respond? So the, I'm just trying to
• 51:07
  always keep, you know, on my shoulder, the ear of the reasonable woke person here. So the response
• 51:14
  that I can feel welling up in the woke part of me is it's all very well for like these privileged
• 51:20
  white dudes to get in the ring and to love wrestling with each other and to love the boxing match
• 51:25
  and the jousting and the verbal sparring. And you know who has to deal with the detritus that
• 51:30
  flies off them every time they punch each other? It's like the same groups of people who get
• 51:35
  shot on all the time. It's women of color, especially trans women of color. It's like even though
• 51:40
  we might roll our eyes every time we're like, oh, but what about the, you know, what about the poor,
• 51:44
  you know, disenfranchised, disenfranchised, disadvantaged people? The reality is that there are
• 51:49
  communities that just have to constantly cop a whole lot of shit. And so I guess the instinct of
• 51:54
  the person who wants the trigger warning in the university classroom or who wants to say that words
• 51:59
  of violence is the instinct of a person who says like, can we just, can we just stop having to hear
• 52:09
  the institutions of power and bigotry constantly like force themselves upon us and ask us to
• 52:16
  defend why they shouldn't be continued to allow, to be allowed to pillage and terrorize everybody.
• 52:23
  Like it's exhausting is something you hear. You know, it's exhausting to constantly have to
• 52:27
  explain why equity and justice are good ideas. So your boxing ring is fantastic, but can we also
• 52:35
  create spaces in which people can just sit and be with each other? Okay, well, so here's what I
• 52:44
  would say because I understand that. I mean, I see where it's coming from and I've heard it before
• 52:50
  in person. And here's what I would say to that. The first thing is that it's not true that it's
• 52:56
  a bunch of white men being silenced. There's a lot of women and people of color who don't agree
• 53:02
  with the kind of woke orthodoxy who feel just as silenced. A friend of mine, Coleman Hughes,
• 53:09
  he's a, you know, this great writer, you know, he's a black guy and he talked about being in class
• 53:13
  and having the white professor say something like every black person, you know, is a, you know,
• 53:18
  continual victim of racism and he said, you know, in his head he's thinking, I don't feel that way
• 53:22
  that doesn't match up with my lived experience, but he said, and he, you know, this is in an article
• 53:28
  he where he said, but saying that out loud would have been tantamount to social suicide. Yeah,
• 53:33
  and that's, that's a black guy being silenced by a bunch of white people and a white professor
• 53:37
  and pressuring them to, in fact, so as someone, as someone who has quite a lot to do with the
• 53:42
  LGBTQIA plus community, I'll also just throw in that on this toxic issue of trans where I'm constantly
• 53:48
  caricatured by both sides as being in opposition to them and in opposition to the trans community.
• 53:55
  Most of my trans friends want nothing to do with the fashionable orthodoxies on this. And most
• 54:01
  of my black friends don't want anything to, like have the least woke people, they roll their eyes at it.
• 54:06
  So it does strike me as being, well, yeah, that's right white university. Look at demographics.
• 54:11
  Yeah, it is, it is remarkable how, you know, overwhelmingly white and well off and college
• 54:23
  educated a lot of the most vocal woke people are, right? So it's a myth that it's a bunch of,
• 54:30
  you know, white men being silenced conservative white men. It really is, that's just not true.
• 54:34
  It's a lot of, it's a people of all demographics being silenced. And the people doing the
• 54:42
  silencing are also of all demographics and most, and more often than not, they are white and
• 54:47
  quite privileged themselves. That's the very, that's, so that's the first thing. The second thing
• 54:51
  that I think is more important is that there is this, and you mentioned this a little bit earlier
• 54:56
  when you talked about, you know, free speech has been, you know, the tool of a country that also
• 55:01
  did really bad things and whatever. To me, this is major, major misstep. It's throwing the baby out
• 55:07
  with the bathwater. And so first of all, like people like to argue, you're not, your free speech
• 55:12
  isn't being taken away, right? The first amendment still holds. The government is not arresting you,
• 55:15
  and that's true. But like I said, with the liberal democracy, there's two things that hold it together.
• 55:20
  There's the rules and there's, you know, the laws and there's the norms. So freeze to, to actually
• 55:25
  have free speech and, and have it work the way it should, which is a vibrant discourse, right?
• 55:29
  That makes it makes us smarter over time. You need two things. You need the first amendment,
• 55:33
  but you also need a culture of free speech. So when you have a group of people that are punishing
• 55:38
  people for saying the wrong thing, that you might as well be taking away the first amendment,
• 55:41
  because you are going to chill free speech. So the reason I think this is bad is that if you look at,
• 55:47
  I think, look at history, look at American history, every single successful social justice movement,
• 55:54
  from women's suffrage to the 60s civil rights movement to the gay marriage movement,
• 56:01
  every single one of them not only used, but completely relied on free speech. Free speech was
• 56:08
  the engine of those movements. Free speech, think about it. Free speech is the, the, the majority
• 56:14
  has their vote. They're wealthy have their money. They elite have their connections. The powerless,
• 56:19
  they have none of those things. The one thing they have is they have free speech. They can create a
• 56:22
  mind-changing movement. If they're on the side of justice and they're on the side of truth,
• 56:28
  which the civil rights movement was and the gay rights movement was, if you have actual good
• 56:35
  on your side, free speech is your best friend and you will over time change minds and change the
• 56:41
  world and change the way things are. Let me just add to that too. This often comes up when we're
• 56:48
  talking about religious freedom questions. In Australia, like in the States, there are questions
• 56:54
  about when religious freedom bumps up against gay rights. There's been an ongoing thing here. People
• 57:02
  will be familiar with the gay wedding cake example, the anti-gay baker scenario in the United States.
• 57:09
  In Australia, the similar thing is there are sports leagues that have pride rounds where every
• 57:17
  player is supposed to wear a rainbow jersey. Now, we have a lot of players in football, in Australian
• 57:23
  football here, not soccer, but, you know, oval-shek ball, mostly, who are from Pacific Island
• 57:29
  nations, who are quite Christian and who object to homosexuality. How much should we, as a society,
• 57:37
  accommodate the homophobic views of sports players in refusing to participate in pride rounds?
• 57:45
  My attitude is always as much as we humanly can in the sense of being as generous as possible to
• 57:51
  people's deeply held beliefs. Most of my colleagues think that this is untenable and those people
• 57:58
  are guilty of hate speech and they should be effectively silenced or coerced into pretending to
• 58:05
  support gay rights. And my position is always similar to yours, Tim, here, which is what kind of
• 58:11
  a scenario do you think you're setting up if the rule moving forward is that what the majority
• 58:16
  thinks is what needs to be enforced upon everybody who descends. By definition, the majority is
• 58:25
  generally writing roughshod over the rights of the minority. How do you think that we managed to
• 58:31
  get gay rights in the first place? It was in the face of majority opposition. The majority didn't
• 58:38
  want it. Like, if you want to support minorities, then it seems a very peculiar way to go about
• 58:43
  doing that to say, because the majority currently agrees with my particular vision of which minorities
• 58:51
  need to be supported and which don't, I think the majority should have the right to enforce its
• 58:57
  ethics on everybody else and prevent minorities from speaking out because those minorities and
• 59:02
  other ones that we regard as being bigoted slash deviant slash wrong slash evil. Well, guess what?
• 59:08
  A generation ago, they thought gay people rule those things. Well, there's an arrogance to it. It's
• 59:13
  this idea that that, you know, people of totally perfectly good people of the past have been
• 59:18
  dramatically wrong. So for example, what perfect example is in 1958 in the US,
• 59:24
  4% of the country approved of interracial marriage. 4, 96% said it's immoral and it's wrong.
• 59:32
  Today, 94% of people approve interracial marriage. So it's not that 96% of the country were bad people
• 59:40
  back then. I guarantee if you go back and talk to many of those 96%, you're going to see lovely
• 59:44
  people who are no less good than you. They just didn't have as much knowledge. They were wrong
• 59:49
  about something. And what it entails, if you want to shut down free speech and you want to say
• 59:56
  that people who disagree with me should be silenced, what you're saying is that for the first time,
• 1:00:02
  we've reached a time when good people know the truth and that's it. They'll be, you know,
• 1:00:06
  we have it now. We got it. And that's just makes no sense. So there's actually like a lack of
• 1:00:11
  humility, I think, there. And that doesn't mean that you can't have a moral stance and try to
• 1:00:15
  push for it, but you should try to push for it by convincing people by being persuasive. You
• 1:00:20
  don't push for it by shutting down the discussion because look anytime in the past and you're going
• 1:00:26
  to find discussions where that we would see is completely primitive today. And there's nothing,
• 1:00:32
  there's no reason that we're not in the same situation. Right. So that's the latter. We've
• 1:00:38
  gotten through one chapter so far of your seven chapter tone. What do you think is the most
• 1:00:43
  important thing to progress to? We can probably maybe the downward spiral or red column.
• 1:00:51
  Yeah. I mean, when I talk about a downward spiral, I mean, this is to me what has been
• 1:00:56
  happening in Western countries. Again, I focus on the US because I know the most about it. But
• 1:01:02
  I think I do think Australia and England and certain other places have Canada have been
• 1:01:10
  mirroring a lot of the same trends. The downward spiral is a way of reminding myself and others
• 1:01:16
  that is I don't think there's really bad people in this story. I think that there's been an
• 1:01:20
  environmental change. A shift over the last 30, 40, 50 years that has that is changing behavior.
• 1:01:27
  I think that the humans like any other animal, you know, we react to our environment. And so
• 1:01:34
  I think that really we talked a little about the media landscape changing. So you go from
• 1:01:38
  kind of broadcast national media to tribal, you know, narrow cast media. That's a giant seismic
• 1:01:44
  shift. You have the birth of social media. You have a bunch of, you know, political changes in the US.
• 1:01:51
  You start to have the Congress being up for grabs every two years. That's a big change that
• 1:01:58
  makes it harder to compromise. So in the book, I get into a lot of reasons. But one of the things in
• 1:02:04
  the US that's happened is that we haven't had a very scary national enemy for a long time. And
• 1:02:12
  that is a source of unity in the US, even if it's not a pretty thing, nationalism. It is a source
• 1:02:16
  of unity. And also the parties used to be much more mixed up ideologically, but they really kind
• 1:02:21
  of coalesced into very distinct ideological parties. And that also has an effect because it lights
• 1:02:27
  up that primitive mind and a lot of American sense. It turns things into a national kind of tribal
• 1:02:31
  war. And I think the political tribalism in the US and political bigotry is the number one kind
• 1:02:38
  of tribalism and bigotry at the moment. And, you know, an example I could use is, and of course,
• 1:02:43
  there'll be exceptions, but I think if you take 10 conservative white guys and they're maybe even
• 1:02:49
  a little racist, right? And you have each of them, you know, you say you can, you know, who do you
• 1:02:56
  prefer this conservative black guy or this woke white guy? I, from my experience at least, just talking
• 1:03:03
  to hundreds of people in the last few years, is that 10 out of 10 of those guys or 9 out of 10
• 1:03:09
  and they're going to say, oh, I'll take that conservative black any day. Oh, he's not
• 1:03:12
  not the not the white right because because political tribalism is the much more intense kind of
• 1:03:18
  tribal, you know, it's the Trump's racial tribalism, it Trump's national tribalism, right? So I think
• 1:03:23
  that, I think that people have to, you know, I think that we haven't really adjusted to that.
• 1:03:27
  We still think that, you know, the race and, and you know, xenophobia are the main things. And
• 1:03:31
  of course, they still exist. But there's this elephant in the room, which is that we've fallen
• 1:03:36
  into a complete craze of political bigotry and political tribalism. And that's real. And it's
• 1:03:41
  tearing the country apart. And so when I say it's a downward spiral, I picture a whirlpool,
• 1:03:45
  which is, you know, the media has changed, which affects how people think. But then the people
• 1:03:49
  demand certain things from the media. The people will come more politically partisan and they,
• 1:03:54
  they, they, they are going to reward the media that does it. So they affect each other. And then
• 1:03:58
  the politicians are going to get elected by people who are, who become more tribal. But then those
• 1:04:02
  politicians themselves are going to be spewing out more tribal things in their campaigns. And so
• 1:04:07
  there are, these things are all in a downward spiral together, kind of swirling together
• 1:04:11
  down a vortex. And you know, the data, you know, the data, Tim, about how they've, the, the polling
• 1:04:17
  on when you ask progressive Americans, their feelings about, well, like, you know, staunchly
• 1:04:24
  democratic Americans, their feelings about if their child brought home or married a conservative
• 1:04:31
  Republican, their distaste for that exceeds people's reported white people's reported distaste
• 1:04:38
  for bringing home a black partner in like the fifties when they compare it. So we are more racist
• 1:04:46
  now towards our, our political opponents than we ever were in the dark old days towards other
• 1:04:54
  racial tribes, which is kind of shocking when you think about it. And it's genuine bigotry. It's
• 1:04:57
  genuine, you know, it's, what is bigotry? It's giant, you know, it's making these broad negative
• 1:05:01
  stereotypes. It's dehumanizing people. It's not caring about, you know, their suffering and or
• 1:05:09
  cheering for it. It's insulting them. It's, it's, it's, it's mocking them. You know, it's, that,
• 1:05:14
  it's just classic bigotry, but we don't see it as bigotry because it's, you know, because
• 1:05:20
  we just, it seems like it's fine. And of course, but of course, no one wants to think of
• 1:05:24
  themselves as a bigot. So you never feels like bigotry when you're doing it. So I'm sure
• 1:05:28
  the immense amount of racial bigotry that was, you know, that you'd find in the southern,
• 1:05:33
  you know, US in the fifties, for example, I bet those people didn't feel like bigots, right?
• 1:05:38
  They have a lot of reasoning why, oh, this is okay. No, we're not being bad people. Of course,
• 1:05:42
  no one thinks of themselves as bad people. So today we see, you know, racial bigots as bad people,
• 1:05:46
  almost everyone sees it, you know, and that goes for the right and the left. But we don't,
• 1:05:52
  we don't see when someone's saying that, you know, those, those, you know, that, that does more
• 1:05:56
  on right wingers or those, you know, lib tards, you know, we don't see it as bigotry, but it is. It's
• 1:06:01
  ugly. And it's, and it's, it's, it's causing a huge amount of problems. Tim, you know what? You're
• 1:06:06
  just making, I always feel so intellectually simulated when I talk to you. I love you because the,
• 1:06:10
  I'm, I'm, I'm now just thinking about Jonathan Heitz's work on our different values, right? And
• 1:06:16
  the values that conservatives versus liberals hold. And one of the things that is a foundational
• 1:06:22
  motivation of value, according to height, the social psychologist is our sense of purity. Like,
• 1:06:29
  this is especially true amongst religious people and conservatives that, and this fuels xenophobic
• 1:06:36
  arguments. It fuels nationalist arguments. It, it fuels honor arguments, purity, maintaining the
• 1:06:43
  purity of the, of the tribe. And much racism and xenophobia in the past has been justified on
• 1:06:50
  that basis, right? We don't want, we don't want, you know, black people are sullying our good
• 1:06:56
  upstanding community with their ways. They're going to make us impure. Now,
• 1:07:02
  transpose that motivation onto the modern left, for example. There is a lot of tapping into that
• 1:07:10
  instinct in what Trump is doing to us and what hate is doing to us and what the
• 1:07:17
  craziness of the rising American right is doing to us is sullying and impureifying our noble
• 1:07:28
  American smaller liberal tradition. Or go to go to go to college and, you know, what do they,
• 1:07:35
  what's been happening there? Conservative speaker comes to campus and many hundreds of examples of
• 1:07:42
  this. They either, there's a huge protest, enough beforehand that they invent as cancelled.
• 1:07:49
  And by the way, it's actually, I'm wrong to say conservative because at least half of the people
• 1:07:54
  who have been disinvited have been progressive is making the kind of points I'm making, kind of
• 1:07:58
  basic liberal, arguing for basic liberal things, which conflicts, you know, conflicts with
• 1:08:03
  woke orthodoxy. They either get the speaker disinvited or they will shout down the speaker in
• 1:08:12
  so that no one can hear them until the events cancelled. Professors have been fired for misstepping.
• 1:08:18
  There's a lot of universities to hire even science professors. Now make them fill out a
• 1:08:23
  diversity statement, you know, quote diversity statement, which is actually basically a political
• 1:08:28
  litmus test to say, are you a proven social justice activist or else you can't be hired as a chemist
• 1:08:32
  professor? What is that? That is the same thing. It is saying that this is a pure space and that if
• 1:08:38
  these other ideas, they come in, they make it dangerous, they make it toxic, right? Talks,
• 1:08:43
  that's a good disease, right? How do you get what you do? You want things to be pure, not toxic.
• 1:08:47
  It's amazing. This is exactly for professors. It's once you see it, it's so hard to
• 1:08:52
  unsee and I'm just seeing it like I see, like I look at Richard Spencer saying that Islam coming
• 1:08:57
  into America is going to make America toxic. It's going to, it's going to solid, you know,
• 1:09:01
  the great American traditions. It is. It's a purity test. It's like we have to protect ourselves
• 1:09:05
  from the dirty outside, you know, unwanted. It's an ugly tribal instinct. It's an ugly part
• 1:09:12
  of humans to do this and it doesn't matter if it's on the left or the right. It's ugly and when
• 1:09:16
  we see it happening, by the way, I've never voted for a Republican. So when I criticize, I mean,
• 1:09:20
  it's like, I'm not saying this out of a tribal kind of like, it's, I took me a while to kind of
• 1:09:27
  accept the fact that the people I thought of as my people were doing a lot of the ugly thing.
• 1:09:31
  So now Tim, just to give voice again to my little inner work critic, right? There's,
• 1:09:37
  I'm reminded of, there was like a critique of Karl Popper or maybe a, was it a popperian idea
• 1:09:43
  that was going around a couple of years ago, which was this conceit that was, it went viral
• 1:09:49
  onto it for a while, that it's naive to try to believe in unlimited free speech because the
• 1:09:55
  people who are going to, who are most going to manipulate that are people who want to put an end
• 1:09:58
  to free speech. So you're, if your tolerance extends so far into tolerating intolerant people,
• 1:10:06
  you're just going to end up getting steamrolled by fascists because they're not going to give a
• 1:10:09
  shit about your tolerance and your free free speech and they're going to shut it down for everybody.
• 1:10:14
  So this idea of, oh, you know, the left, the woke left is being tribal in a way just like Richard
• 1:10:20
  Spencer is at which I just was guilty of saying, can't they retort to that be, well, hang on a
• 1:10:25
  second. At some point, you have to draw a boundary around what is acceptable. And we're just going
• 1:10:29
  to be like, you know, anti Nazis are just so limited, they're just like Nazis because they're
• 1:10:35
  really excluding Nazis from being part of the conversation. Like how do you delineate the boundaries
• 1:10:40
  of what he isn't is not kosher without erecting some kind of a fence, a pure defense?
• 1:10:48
  So I'm really happy you brought this up because I actually talk about this in the book and I
• 1:10:53
  think it's one of the most important, this is the kind of thing that when we are not having
• 1:10:58
  conversations, we can get really confused about. So Popper's paradox, very famous and it's often
• 1:11:07
  paraphrased as in order to maintain a tolerance society, we must be intolerant of intolerance.
• 1:11:15
  Right. Now the problem with that is tolerance and intolerance are not good or bad on their own.
• 1:11:24
  Right. If you're tolerant of, you know, a cult where men marry eight-year-old girls, that's bad.
• 1:11:31
  You'd rather be intolerant. Right. It's good to be intolerant. Right. If you're if you're if you're
• 1:11:35
  tolerant of people who look different than you or different practice different rituals than you,
• 1:11:40
  that's good. We like that tolerance, right. So then being intolerant. So so the question is always
• 1:11:44
  you can't just say intolerance. It's the intolerance of what. Now if you don't specify that inevitably,
• 1:11:51
  everyone thinks that everyone who's whether they're being a bigot or not thinks I'm being
• 1:11:56
  intolerant of intolerance, if you go to the dictators in other countries, when they jail
• 1:12:02
  dissidents, they jail people for saying the wrong thing or if the wrong religion, they never say
• 1:12:06
  we're jailing dissidents. They say we're being intolerant of intolerance. We're jailing, you know,
• 1:12:11
  they basically use poppers argument. And so so it's twisted constantly to mean we're being intolerant
• 1:12:19
  of intolerance. And what they mean by that, and often in this case is in, you know, they'll see
• 1:12:25
  right-wing arguments as intolerant. Right. And so they're those are intolerant people. They'll say,
• 1:12:32
  people who disagree with me, that's intolerance. We have to be intolerant. Now,
• 1:12:37
  poppers paradox is longer than that. And what he actually says, and I have it here, he said,
• 1:12:42
  he says he doesn't imply that we should suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies.
• 1:12:47
  As long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion,
• 1:12:51
  suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary,
• 1:12:55
  even by force for it may turn out that they're not prepared to meet us on the level of rational
• 1:13:00
  argument, but begin by denouncing all argument. They may forbid their followers to listen to rational
• 1:13:05
  argument because it's deceptive and teach them to answer arguments by use of, by use of their
• 1:13:10
  pistols or pistols. Sorry, they're pistols or pistols. But this is so important. It's so
• 1:13:18
  important because he specifically is saying that the that we shouldn't be intolerant of intolerant
• 1:13:24
  philosophies. We should be intolerant of people who are trying to shut down all argument. Right.
• 1:13:28
  That is what his part. And that's so, and so, and so, in other words, we should be intolerant of
• 1:13:33
  the people who are tweeting about poppers paradox. Yes, correct. It's, it's, it's so, so I did,
• 1:13:39
  I have a comic and, and I, I show that, you know, someone says something, right? And then another
• 1:13:44
  person says, those are intolerant ideas. Popper said we have to be intolerant of intolerance. Stop
• 1:13:49
  him from talking. And I circle the stop him from talking. And I say, that's what popper actually
• 1:13:54
  said. We had intolerant ideas to stop him from talking. So, so anyway, it's, it's, it's,
• 1:13:58
  it's frustrating because in the Twitter sphere, you know, you don't get, you can't, I just
• 1:14:02
  explain that for three minutes and write a quote, like, you have the time for that. So people,
• 1:14:06
  you know, that's why you end up with, you know, something like cancel culture, which is a direct
• 1:14:10
  violation of poppers paradox being, being argued as, again, people say that the people who defend
• 1:14:18
  a cancellation, they say we're just being intolerant of intolerance. Actually, you're doing the exact
• 1:14:22
  thing that popper said we should, or it's just consequences. It's just, it's just facing
• 1:14:26
  consequences. But again, I come back to singers, singers point of like the consequence of saying
• 1:14:31
  something stupid or wrong or malevolent should be that another person says something that corrects
• 1:14:37
  you. And yes, they can slap you down in so doing. And people can feel free to, to choose not to
• 1:14:43
  associate with you. But once you start coordinating public mob campaigns to have you stripped of your
• 1:14:51
  livelihood or, you know, excluded from society because you touched a subject or because you said
• 1:14:58
  or did something and you're, and your critics are not actually addressing the thing that you said,
• 1:15:02
  they're simply saying, primer face the fact that you said it is reasons for more of exclusion.
• 1:15:07
  That's the, that's the, well, the puts terms to it. We could say, can your criticism culture
• 1:15:12
  attack ideas? That enriches discussion. It's good. It helps lift up the best ideas.
• 1:15:17
  Cancel culture punishes people for saying the things. So cancel culture shuts down discussion.
• 1:15:23
  It protects, it protects the ideas and it protects the ideas of the culturally powerful.
• 1:15:30
  You know, criticism is a staple of liberalism. Cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism.
• 1:15:35
  So they're actually opposite things. But if we don't, if we can't define our terms,
• 1:15:39
  then it just seems like, oh, someone who is criticizing cancel culture, well now they're doing
• 1:15:43
  the cancel. And you know, you can see how very quickly, you can just get confused here. But these
• 1:15:48
  are, these are distinct and opposite things, criticism and cancel. I saw someone denying that,
• 1:15:52
  that cancel culture existed on social media because Louis CK just played medicine square garden.
• 1:15:57
  Therefore he hasn't been canceled. They also said that about Joe Rogan. They say that, you know,
• 1:16:03
  Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are on these huge platforms saying their things and obviously
• 1:16:07
  doesn't exist. But what I would say to that is, that sounds to me like someone saying,
• 1:16:11
  oh, Obama was president. Obviously racism isn't a thing. Oh,
• 1:16:14
  right. Caitlin Jenner was on the cover of Vogue magazine. Obviously transgender people don't
• 1:16:18
  face any problems anymore. Right. Just because big-time people on big stages can can can survive
• 1:16:25
  and does not mean there's not a giant problem. Also, just be, I mean those giant people have to carve
• 1:16:31
  out their own stick. I mean, not in the case of Rogan. He has a relationship with a big company
• 1:16:37
  Spotify, but it's a big new tech company. He's not being published in the New York Times and
• 1:16:41
  probably wouldn't be even if he wanted to be. And you know, the fact that Louis CK
• 1:16:46
  like still has hands and legs and like a head and is capable of going on to the internet
• 1:16:53
  and selling tickets to and that medicine square garden will rent out its space to him does not
• 1:16:58
  mean that there haven't been consequences for him in the fact that none of his shows are on any
• 1:17:03
  major streaming platforms anymore and you can't get his can't see his movie anywhere and you
• 1:17:07
  can't get any of his stuff through any mechanism other than his own hootspa and and now's like
• 1:17:14
  what would constitute cancel culture you'd have to behead him and cut his hands off and then he
• 1:17:18
  wouldn't be able to go and play play the garden anymore. Okay. Exactly and it's it's just it seems
• 1:17:26
  like there's this willful denial like that there's a problem and is it as opposed to just
• 1:17:32
  taking a look at it and being like this isn't how like it's scary. It shouldn't be a liberal
• 1:17:36
  democracy shouldn't be of such a scary place and the thing that that bothers me is that part of
• 1:17:42
  the reason I've always felt progressive is and the thing the reason it resonates with so many young
• 1:17:47
  people a lot of young people come out of really strict rigid households and they love to go to
• 1:17:51
  college and join and become progressive where it because progressive is supposed to be a safe space
• 1:17:56
  to be yourself to be different to be weird to mess up and and it's supposed to you know to
• 1:18:02
  encourage difference and stuff and and and instead what you know what what what at least you know
• 1:18:08
  what what people would criticize you know the woke movement of doing is being the opposite of that
• 1:18:13
  of of of severe penalties for infraction and for enforcing conformity and for making being
• 1:18:20
  weird being weird kind of intellectually to be bad dangerous and so to me it is it's complete
• 1:18:26
  perversion of progressivism it's it's it's the same exact kind of thing that people try to escape
• 1:18:30
  from rigid conservative you know households to escape right I mean it's it's what people make fun
• 1:18:35
  of conservatives for and and so I think that if you feel like if you if someone agrees with me about
• 1:18:41
  what I just said about you know a safe space to be wrong is good and they still feel like
• 1:18:46
  tribally aligned with the left I think it's worth examining that and saying the left doesn't
• 1:18:51
  deserve my loyalty just because they're the left they have to earn that like anything else by being
• 1:18:57
  upholding the values that I care about yeah and if they're not upholding those values I'm not
• 1:19:00
  going to go with them I'm staying here where my values are and they can come back to me or not
• 1:19:04
  well that's right but also I would encourage you not to give up the mantle of the left to them
• 1:19:09
  don't let the don't let people who are who are illiberal and unjust and have no interest in
• 1:19:14
  in equality fairness free argumentation freedom of thought to to take up a word like the the left
• 1:19:22
  I mean they're not they can go and make and also don't go swing 180 and sometimes people go 180
• 1:19:27
  and they become tribal on the right you know or vice versa that's right that's sort of what I was
• 1:19:31
  joking don't do that either James Lindsay yeah and and the like you just said something
• 1:19:38
  interesting which is it's scary the left is getting scary the thing is it's only scary if you're
• 1:19:47
  not a conformist if you're a conformist there's comfort in tribalism there's comfort in not having
• 1:19:55
  to think things through too closely there's comfort in not having to do the intellectual leg
• 1:20:02
  work of trying to figure out why you believe what you believe but knowing that you're on the right
• 1:20:06
  side of history through your inherited kind of beliefs through Osmos through the osmosis of the
• 1:20:13
  correct tribe how do you I mean are you confident that the scaryness of wearing this tug of war right
• 1:20:22
  that there are the people like you and me who want nothing more than to tease out disagreement
• 1:20:30
  figure out what is true get our hands dirty in conversation think as abstractly as possible
• 1:20:37
  question everything and for for people like that the modern moment is extremely scary
• 1:20:44
  but for the people who are the witch hunters it's nice so who has the balance of power and at
• 1:20:52
  what point do you know does does the tyranny of the witch hunt becomes so widespread that there
• 1:20:57
  are enough people who are scared that they push back and how do they do so collectively without
• 1:21:01
  being picked off one by one well I think one of the things I think most of the people who are you know
• 1:21:11
  in the mob we could say or who who are really enforcing this scaryness I talk to a lot of them I
• 1:21:17
  had multiple of people like that read my book and give me feedback and shockingly because remember
• 1:21:28
  if you're if you're thinking those people are all awful you're being a big it right shockingly
• 1:21:31
  when you actually talk to them people get to know them most of these are good people most of these
• 1:21:35
  people are they got into this because they're empathetic they want to help they want to do social
• 1:21:40
  justice right they they they want to do the right thing and I think that a lot of them have kind
• 1:21:47
  of been suckered into what is not what they think it is and you know you talked about forget
• 1:21:53
  forget the fact that I I would say that it's not good for the social justice causes I don't think
• 1:21:56
  it's good for black people I don't think it's good for women or trans people like we talked about
• 1:22:00
  a little bit but forget that I don't think it's good for the people the witch hunters themselves you
• 1:22:05
  mentioned some of these things people have these deep needs for for meaning for purpose for
• 1:22:11
  identity for community for for the feeling of righteousness for self esteem right and what a
• 1:22:16
  movement like this and a million other movements and cults and religions but they often do is it's
• 1:22:22
  like a it's like a get rich quick quick scheme right it's it's it's a snake oil they it's it promises
• 1:22:28
  you all those things in one one stop shop you're going to come here and suddenly you have your
• 1:22:32
  community you know who you are you know what your opinions are you have strong opinions you can
• 1:22:36
  sound smart you have your community you have meaning you have purpose you know why you get up in
• 1:22:39
  the morning you're good right and it's not true it's not what it doesn't of course those things
• 1:22:44
  are much harder to find in life you don't just get those things with the get with a weight loss pill
• 1:22:48
  right and so I think it leaves a lot of these people first of all stuck in fret in kind of
• 1:22:54
  social situations when they're scared to act up they there's a lot of they they probably feel
• 1:22:58
  the most pressure of all I know that from talking to a bunch of them but also you just end up
• 1:23:03
  feeling empty in the end because you know you it is not all those things it can't be and so I
• 1:23:09
  think that part of it is trying to without attacking people who are doing this to try to
• 1:23:15
  call them in you know you know it's you know it's what the best you know movements in the world are
• 1:23:20
  that the the common humanity movements they're the effective ones polymory in the civil rights
• 1:23:25
  activists said when my my opponents draw a circle to exclude me I'll draw a bigger circle to
• 1:23:30
  include them and you know so that's what I think I think don't I think it's better to try to
• 1:23:39
  communicate some of these ideas that you know you're not you're not a bad person you're trying to
• 1:23:44
  do the right thing here's why I think it's misguided and here's why I also think that you know
• 1:23:50
  is this good for you it's not what you think it is and and I think that can go a long way of course
• 1:23:55
  other people might say that's naive and you just have to get angry and have to show force and
• 1:23:58
  strength against strength and I think that's true too I think that people in companies CEOs that
• 1:24:03
  are being bullied by their you know their their employees or Twitter mob or whatever I think they
• 1:24:07
  should very strongly say not apologize not pander not fire the person that they deep down don't
• 1:24:13
  think doesn't think she should be fired but the mob does they should say no that's not how we do
• 1:24:18
  things here and that we need more of that and some people have shown that but not that many
• 1:24:22
  Tim do you have enough time to uh to go for a little bit longer do you have a hard out
• 1:24:28
  uh no I have time great I want to talk about the cycle of good times and bad times because
• 1:24:33
  towards the end you you sort of try to re invoke the stakes of uh of the book by saying that
• 1:24:39
  societies tend to have good times and then they go stupid and the stupidity causes them to enter
• 1:24:46
  periods of bad times and then those bad times through necessity require that they get their
• 1:24:52
  shit together and become wise and that wisdom then uh pulls them out of the whole and gets them
• 1:24:59
  back into a into a good time you're worried that we can't really afford the luxury of entering
• 1:25:05
  bad times in the 21st century yeah I think this is what I talked about you know earlier on with
• 1:25:15
  the liberal democracy is this this pretty like magical artificial invention you know we're living
• 1:25:20
  inside of these these human constructs that protect us from other humans protect us from um
• 1:25:30
  from violence and and you know mob rule and warlords and all the bad things that can happen in
• 1:25:37
  human societies um and and that that didn't happen by accident that's not just the way things are
• 1:25:45
  that's something that we made through tons of trial and error and it can only it it's it needs to
• 1:25:51
  be upheld not just by the laws but by the norms and by people defending it and I think that that
• 1:25:58
  you know it was built in the first place modern liberal democracies by people who understood
• 1:26:03
  how bad it can be and how bad tyranny is and they didn't do a perfect job and these democracies
• 1:26:08
  have not been perfect there's been a lot of oppression and unfairness of course but they've been
• 1:26:13
  a better than the alternative and at least so far you know and um and so I think that wise they
• 1:26:20
  these were built by wise people in a lot of ways they're you know not just by wise people but by
• 1:26:24
  accumulated wisdom going all the way back to the agor like you talked about um and that you know
• 1:26:31
  after you know the fifties I think after world war two you know in some ways you had you had
• 1:26:36
  people who appreciated you know what they had and and I think that that starts to fade when you
• 1:26:41
  don't have a threat and times are good for too long and you were born in a time when everything
• 1:26:45
  was stable and by the way your parents also were only born in a time when everything was stable
• 1:26:49
  you know the boomers haven't experienced that much real fear of you know they had some fear of
• 1:26:54
  the Soviet Union maybe or you know things like that but but but really they they felt pretty secure
• 1:26:59
  and things have been good I mean things are good for too long you start to get cocky you start to
• 1:27:03
  take the thing you have for granted and it can't survive that it actually can't survive we need to
• 1:27:08
  be a little bit more scared of losing what we have um and so it creates this merry-go-round where
• 1:27:13
  wise people create good times because they they they're they're so aware of how bad it can be
• 1:27:18
  and they they they're not cocky about it but then good times can create foolish complacent
• 1:27:23
  cocky people and those people can can can can let things drift to very bad times and because we're
• 1:27:30
  in such a high tech time we talked about page 1000 well page 1000 one the good times can be even
• 1:27:36
  better and the bad times can be even scarier like existentially really scary we don't want to
• 1:27:41
  mess with bad times in a world where we have so much power and so much tech so how do we yeah
• 1:27:47
  how do we how do you do that because and we haven't really talked about social media but the
• 1:27:51
  elephant in the room my great fear is that as long as our conversations and our attention and
• 1:27:57
  our capacity to follow the thread of important ideas is mediated by algorithms whose sole goal
• 1:28:06
  is to keep us addicted to notifications and to sharing and engaging as much as possible
• 1:28:12
  that that metric makes it very hard to skip over and to to migrate straight from being foolish
• 1:28:19
  clowns to being wise people how do we do it okay but you know like
• 1:28:27
  even what you just said if you said that eight years ago people would have raised an eyebrow what
• 1:28:32
  like social media is bad right you know maybe maybe not eight maybe 12 years ago people would say
• 1:28:36
  social media is where you go to post about your post your pictures from your vacation and you know
• 1:28:40
  it brings people together yeah it's it's it's it's great it's just this like silly fun thing we
• 1:28:46
  do right so today the fact that you would say that and almost everyone listening would probably
• 1:28:51
  shake you know nod their head and say yeah these things are bad the algorithms are bad you know we all
• 1:28:56
  saw or a lot of us saw the social dilemma that you know that Tristan Harris movie and um
• 1:29:01
  um you know the so right there that's progress that's the first step you know that you're really
• 1:29:07
  in trouble when you don't realize something bad can even happen right right we are much more
• 1:29:12
  and things are changing and so the way i would say it is like i think that it's not just so
• 1:29:17
  obvious that we're just heading off the foolish cliff i think that there is wisdom here and it
• 1:29:21
  and it is in a battle with kind of foolishness and to me the big metric that is going to help the
• 1:29:26
  the kind of why the wisdom went out is discourse you know we we are no individual humans that's smart
• 1:29:32
  but when we're communicating and talking and disagreeing with each other and proving each other
• 1:29:36
  theories right and wrong that's when we can have some collective wisdom and we need it right
• 1:29:41
  now which is why that's why might i keep coming back to stuff like free speech it's not that i
• 1:29:45
  think you know something like wokeness in particular is like the worst thing ever i think it's a
• 1:29:50
  symptom i think it's a it's a symptom of a time that a movement could do such damage to
• 1:29:55
  free discourse right and it's the same thing i it's not that trump is the devil it's that we're
• 1:30:00
  in a time when we're vulnerable to demagogues that's what that's what the trump phenomenon tells me
• 1:30:04
  and so to me because we want to be wise right and discourse is the way to be wise we have to push
• 1:30:11
  back no matter what your beliefs no matter where you are horizontally on the what you think axis
• 1:30:15
  you've got to push back against people that are making it scary to to be wrong scary to put out ideas
• 1:30:20
  into disagree that's like the number one thing it's like we have to be able to just
• 1:30:24
  freely talk and and so when someone is you know something like cancel culture it's not a joke it's
• 1:30:30
  real and it's it has it's scary because it makes our society dumber at a time when we really
• 1:30:35
  can't afford to become kind of dumb the antidote or one antidote that you leave people with at the
• 1:30:42
  end of the book is is courage basically is becoming aware of this but i think we've done a good
• 1:30:49
  job of identifying this problem and you've done a great job of articulating the sense that people
• 1:30:55
  might have if it's just an ineffable kind of vague sense that something is broken about the way
• 1:31:00
  that we're conversing with each other at the moment the courage you break courage into three sort
• 1:31:05
  of challenges the the challenge to stop saying stuff that you don't believe the challenge to start
• 1:31:11
  saying what you really think in private with people you know well and the challenge to then go
• 1:31:18
  public it sounds a bit like a coming out yeah i mean i think in a lot of ways in a lot of ways it's
• 1:31:28
  i mean what what why is coming out so hard because there is an orthodoxy that you're coming out
• 1:31:37
  will violate and the people who hold that orthodoxy are going to have a strong negative reaction and
• 1:31:42
  maybe cut ties with you and maybe worse this is not different in that regard it's not that it's
• 1:31:49
  as hard being you know having holding it's not that it's as hard holding opposing political views
• 1:31:58
  to the orthodoxy as it is being gay right it's not that it's the same but it's the same concept
• 1:32:03
  which is that it's not easy humans can become pretty scary and we all care a lot about what other
• 1:32:08
  people think were wired to i mean i as a gay person i will allow you to make the analogy and i
• 1:32:13
  would actually go further and say that in in progress in large cities in large generally progressive
• 1:32:18
  cities in the western world in 2023 it's easier to come out as gay than it is to come out as the
• 1:32:24
  opposite political tribe or to question the orthodoxies of the political tribe that you're around
• 1:32:30
  yeah because political bigotry and political tribalism has become the number one kind so that's
• 1:32:35
  the scariest kind to defy any given point in history go back and whatever the main kind of tribalism
• 1:32:40
  is you know go back to the to the fifties and try to talk about how maybe the Soviet Union is okay
• 1:32:45
  you're you're out of a job right because national tribalism was the big thing then so this is what
• 1:32:50
  this is our thing now is this kind of conservative versus progressive tribalism and
• 1:32:58
  and so i think that that's what requires a lot of courage but here's the cool thing about it is
• 1:33:02
  that you know the Iranian women throwing their hijabs in the fire that is just a total different
• 1:33:09
  level of courage right you know defying the Maoists in the sixties you know there's you know
• 1:33:15
  the whatever it is you can you know name any try to defy the Nazis defy the fascists in Italy when
• 1:33:21
  they're in power that's different because they will kill you right they will put you in jail so the
• 1:33:27
  the interesting thing today is we have a lot of the same fear of of saying what we think because
• 1:33:33
  we're wired to care almost as much about being ostracized and people criticizing us as we are
• 1:33:40
  about physical danger but it's not actually nearly as dangerous and so there's a soft power
• 1:33:45
  that is that is kind of the scary thing here not a hard power that's a big difference
• 1:33:49
  yeah and so i think a lot of people have to realize that if they started just saying what they
• 1:33:53
  believe the sky is not going to fall on their head like probably nothing will happen and actually
• 1:33:57
  there's a good chance that a lot of other people have been secretly thinking those things too
• 1:34:01
  and the people will have a ton of respect for them for saying out loud what everyone's thinking and
• 1:34:05
  so it's good to remember that like the fear we feel is often the primitive our primitive mind which
• 1:34:10
  remember doesn't know that we're not in a little tribe in fifty thousand BC where being hated can
• 1:34:15
  be death it doesn't know that and that actually that's a lot of what's doing the thinking here and
• 1:34:19
  it's not very it's not actually doesn't map on to reality and that courage you don't need as
• 1:34:24
  much courage as you think you do to start representing who you really are publicly you're probably not
• 1:34:30
  a terrible person if you start saying what you really think you're probably going to find a lot of
• 1:34:35
  other also good people who say you know what i kind of agree with that now some people are going
• 1:34:40
  to get fired from their jobs you know i have a friend who is a teacher who said if he even says
• 1:34:44
  anything about some of the kind of woke policies that he thinks are really bad at the school that are
• 1:34:48
  being enacted which he thinks are bad for you know just the kids and everything he says if he
• 1:34:52
  mentions that he's out of a job who loses health insurance he has two kids he can't afford it
• 1:34:56
  i'm not talking about him i'm not asking him to be courageous i'm talking about everyone else
• 1:35:00
  and most of us will be fine you know if we start speaking up even just with our friends so but yeah
• 1:35:05
  the very first thing is stop saying things you don't believe because so much of the problem here
• 1:35:09
  is people parroting what's popular and saying what you know saying the things that that are popular
• 1:35:14
  that that are going to get a lot of likes or retweets or that are going to get people to think you're
• 1:35:18
  a good person and they don't really believe it and that's that's part of the problem that's what
• 1:35:22
  makes it seem like an actual minority view is the majority of you yeah i mean part of the problem
• 1:35:28
  is there there are actual penalties to not saying what like to refraining it's becoming a thought
• 1:35:33
  policing it's becoming quite Stalinist in the sense that as you say you might be going for an
• 1:35:37
  academic position and you'll be required to sign a document about your commitment to a specific
• 1:35:44
  set of diversity equity and inclusion policies that go way beyond just saying that you believe
• 1:35:49
  that all people you know should be free from discrimination and violence. That's my current
• 1:35:52
  theism yeah similarly in Australia now it's it's necessary at every public event and every
• 1:35:59
  meeting and every zoom meeting and every conference and everywhere to do an acknowledgement of
• 1:36:04
  country which means like a land acknowledgement of first nations people and you know there's a
• 1:36:11
  general sense of or like you know putting pronouns in a person's in your email signature these
• 1:36:16
  are little gestures that most people regard as being like why wouldn't why would you be so mean
• 1:36:23
  and ordinary as to object but there's just something inside me that just feels like there's a there's
• 1:36:32
  something unhealthy about jumping on bandwagon's even if the bandwagon is a good one there's
• 1:36:38
  something unhealthy about unthinkingly joining what you know some of the people who are doing it
• 1:36:46
  might regard as being a fad at best and objectionable at worst or deranged yeah I think it doesn't
• 1:36:55
  matter what it's like you said I think it's it's actually becomes I think if you're a good liberal
• 1:36:59
  lowercase liberal right you stand it for liberal values I think it doesn't it becomes irrelevant
• 1:37:04
  what is being forced hmm I think if if you know there's a story after you know the George Floyd
• 1:37:09
  riots there was a woman who said that her boss said to her you're not posting about this on your
• 1:37:15
  social media and that's a problem on your personal social media right I think that it doesn't matter
• 1:37:21
  what the boss is saying to her it could be saying post about how great America is post about how
• 1:37:27
  you know bad cop shootings are post about how great Christianity is it doesn't matter what it is
• 1:37:32
  the answer should be not because it's illiberal it is a it doesn't matter what the loyalty
• 1:37:37
  political loyalty authors it doesn't matter if it's exactly down the middle with my politics
• 1:37:41
  you know again I I feel strongly about kind of classic liberalism if I'm at the university
• 1:37:46
  and they're saying we don't want Marxists here we're going to make sure we don't get any we're going
• 1:37:50
  to we're going to do a test and if they're not a strong liberal like us then they're not
• 1:37:55
  I would protest that just as much as anything else because it's not about what it is this is
• 1:37:58
  it was wrong it's illiberal so yeah I mean it's like it's also like the wearing like the requiring
• 1:38:04
  football players to wear a rainbow jersey in order to play in the game I mean that it's max
• 1:38:09
  of the same kind of thing I understand the instinct that like let's all the liberal the smaller
• 1:38:15
  liberal thing to do is to demonstrate to LGBTQIA plus youth that were on their side and that were
• 1:38:20
  not bigoted but in order to do that you're requiring another person to become an instrument in your
• 1:38:27
  social goal and they don't want to be an instrument in your social goal they disagree with that
• 1:38:32
  particular social goal they're not going out and beating young gay people they just want to be able
• 1:38:36
  to not have to proactively support the rainbow ideology they're Christians and by the way they
• 1:38:43
  they might agree with your social goal and choose to not express it in this context that's right
• 1:38:47
  it's not your business what what you know and and it's this coercion it's this it's this very and
• 1:38:52
  that's that's just very illiberalist this with us are against us kind of tone of of of of
• 1:38:58
  really um marbish movements and sometimes sometimes I mean sometimes all it is is
• 1:39:05
  fatuous and absurd like I I live in one of the most progressive neighborhoods in uh in Australia
• 1:39:12
  in the inner west of Sydney uh which is sort of you know think a bushwick or like Williamsburg it's
• 1:39:18
  you know the hipster hipster areas and when I got back here from the the states a few years ago
• 1:39:24
  I saw that on all of the street signs the local council has put up a sign underneath the street name
• 1:39:31
  that says say no to racism or racism not welcome here now these are highly multi-ethnic
• 1:39:39
  neighborhoods with an extremely progressive and anti-racist population the only racism that exists
• 1:39:45
  here is the racism of white liberals dripping with sanctumany about how anti-racist they are
• 1:39:51
  the idea that it's necessary to put taxpayer money into congratulating ourselves for stamping out
• 1:39:56
  racism in the least redneck part of the entire country is like that's almost like a kind of forced
• 1:40:03
  speech like I don't want to what do we just kind of like putting uh cross it's probably kind of like
• 1:40:09
  putting the across up in a in a Christian right exactly theocracy yeah you know that's right
• 1:40:16
  that's right and yeah and the bigger thing is that you know that if any city council member had said
• 1:40:20
  I actually don't think that's what we should be doing they would have been in big trouble that's
• 1:40:24
  partially why it happens I mean everyone's scared to push back Tim my own friend I was walking
• 1:40:29
  along the street and I pointed to it I was like scoffed and rolled my eyes and she was like what
• 1:40:34
  was it the sign she was like what do you mean aren't you don't you oppose racism
• 1:40:41
  it's like of course I oppose racism why do we need a sign but yeah so there's so first comes the
• 1:40:48
  awakening then comes the coming out I guess Tim I want to ask you first yeah I want to ask you first
• 1:40:54
  date questions which is a way that I always just pepper the guest with some rorschach questions to
• 1:41:00
  get the first thing that comes into their mind and allow the listener to understand them a little
• 1:41:06
  better what is the best meal that you've ever had um probably um I had Chinese what's my favorite
• 1:41:17
  cuisine Chinese food than I had the best I've ever had was in Hong Kong and this like little
• 1:41:23
  side of the road thing and I just remember being like this is the best that food could ever be
• 1:41:27
  okay so actual Chinese actual Cantonese food not Americans no no it was pretty it was pretty
• 1:41:34
  similar to the American eyes that's all I like actually prefer but it was just so incredibly good
• 1:41:38
  okay so the Kung Pao Chicken and the like oh my god yeah yeah okay well that's it uh what what
• 1:41:46
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• 1:41:51
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• 1:41:56
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• 1:42:01
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• 1:42:06
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• 1:42:12
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• 1:42:17
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