America Needs a Self-Help Book. Tim Urban's Got One.
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Tim Urban is the only cartoonist who has elicited an existential crisis in me. It's not because he's some great illustrator. Tim's drawings are comically simple. They're of stick figures, or if he's feeling fancy, maybe he'll do a chart. What makes them so affecting is the way he's able to capture and distill the most complex and profound questions we face. Questions like, what does it mean to be a human being?

What is the purpose of our lives? Are we spending our finite time on Earth wisely? And do we even grasp how short that time is? By capturing the length of our days in, say, the amount of times we have left to swim in the ocean, or the books we have left to read, or the dumplings we have left to eat, assuming we live to the age of 90, Tim takes an abstract subject like time and makes it tangible.

In one of my favorite blog posts of his, Tim breaks down the amount of time, realistically, that we have left to spend with our parents. Did you know that by the age of 18, you've already used up like 95% of your parent time? It's something that stuck with me. So Tim's done this sort of thing for years on his singular and must-read blog, Wait But Why, which is full of everything from posts on AI to aliens to the Fermi Paradox to marriage.

But a few years ago, like six years ago, like many of us, Tim was troubled by what he was seeing going on in the world around him. He noticed that while technology was progressing in unbelievable ways, people were going to the moon on private rocket ships, computers were the size of Starbucks coffee cups, and foraging was a thing of the past. Yet we were seemingly more unhappy than ever before. We were petty. We were turning against each other.

And the very things that have allowed for this kind of progress, things like democracy and liberalism and humanism, those were under siege. Why, Tim wondered, was everything such a mess? When did things get so tribal? And why do humans do this stuff to each other? His new book, called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies, is an answer to those questions and more.

Tim looks back at hundreds of thousands of years of history. Trust me, it works. He condenses. And he argues that we are living through more change more rapidly than at any time ever. And the stakes of that are almost too high to comprehend. But what he argues is that the danger we face in the end is not global warming. It's not an asteroid racing toward Earth. It's not an impending alien invasion. It's ourselves.

And Tim argues that we got ourselves into this mess, but he's pretty sure we can also get ourselves out of it. Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Tim Urban, welcome to Honestly. Thank you for having me. So you just published this book called What's Our Problem? A self-help book for societies. And you've been working on this book for more than seven years, I think. Is that right? About six and a half. Okay. So you're sort of a famous procrastinator, which we're going to get to later in this conversation. But that is not my sense of why this book, which is made up at least half of cartoons, took so long to get into the world. Right.

What was so hard about getting this book out into the public? Well, if you're trying to assess what's going on in a society and why things are the way they are, there are so many other topics that feed into that. So it was an overwhelming amount of material to try to kind of put together and synthesize. But also, on top of that, I just had all

of this resistance to it, saying anything besides politics. And then other people would feed into that. They'd say, are you crazy? Don't write about that. You know, you don't have any haters right now. Why would you go and write about politics? You know, just write about anything else. And that to me was interesting. I said, well, what's good? This is like, I'm supposed to, you know, I write about whatever I want, right? I write if something's important in society. I wrote when AI first became a big topic in 2015, I wrote a huge thing about it.

You know, whatever I'm thinking about, I write about. So this one topic, which is so important, it's how we all are living together. It's how the fate of our society. There's this incredible incentive to stay away from it. What is going on there? And that got me thinking this is part of the story. The fear I have of talking about it, that that's there's a much bigger topic here.

You recently wrote in your wonderful blog, Wait But Why, about this six-and-a-half-year journey. And you said this about starting the book in 2016. Something seemed off about the society around me, like there had been a subtle foreboding shift in the balance between reason and madness. It felt like we were losing our grip on something important.

Let's talk a little bit about that shift. What were you starting to witness in 2016 that made you feel like the balance between reason and madness was tipping into madness? And to what did you attribute the shift? So...

Think about middle school and how people act in middle school. You know, there's, there's popular kids and then there's, there's unpopular kids and there's kind of like the most popular person is often kind of a mean person. Everyone's a little bit scared of, and then there's, there's, you know, real in group and there's out group and people are cruel. Right. And, and, um,

I started noticing that the grownups were acting like this. You know, we all have that middle school persona in us somewhere, whether we were the person who was the bully or the person who was the sidekick of the bully, sucking up to the bully or the person who was the target of the bully. Or, you know, if we were especially grown up at that age, maybe we were the person who stood up to the bully, you know, but either way, that person's still in us.

And something was bringing it out. And the shift I noticed was not just that more people were acting this way, but that people that would normally criticize this kind of behavior, that would criticize cruelty or overt tribalism or gross stereotyping of giant groups of people, or just kind of old school bigotry, the people that would normally stand up and criticize that were all doing it only in private.

And, you know, it seemed like the power shifted where the people acting kind of in that unadmirable way had some kind of power that everyone was scared of.

And it felt like something crazy new story would be happening that any reasonable person watching it would say, well, that's ridiculous. And, but no one's saying it out loud, right? We're all either saying it in private or in some cases you find even in private, a private dinner party, you see that people are even, that no one knows who's thinking what at that dinner party. And everyone's kind of virtue signaling to each other at the dinner party. And so it didn't feel like it was always like that. It felt like this was happening more than it used to. I mean,

Meanwhile, right as I'm thinking about this, Donald Trump is ascending in power. And this is as the primary was going on. And he has a total disregard for truth.

and a disregard for a lot of the kind of norms that most other politicians had had to follow. And he was rising up, right? And so there seemed to be things happening across the political spectrum, across society, that, again, felt kind of foreboding. Like we were losing our grip on the kind of things that keep a liberal society kind of healthy and strong.

To me, it seems like everyone has what I think of as their, I guess it's like a play on woke, like their waking up moments where they realize something's a little off here. Like, right, for me, it was the Tom Cotton op-ed and my boss, James Bennett, being like struggle session and fired and then ultimately leaving the New York Times and sort of

looking at the capturing of the institutions. For other people, it was the Trump years. For other people, it was the COVID lockdowns. For others, it was the moment where, you know, Kenosha was burning, but CNN had the chyron saying, you know, fiery, but mostly peaceful protests. You know, did you have a kind of like aha moment that, or was it just kind of a series of

Yeah. So when you talk about these aha moments, I think the way they work is you don't just see one example of something for the first time and suddenly your whole worldview shifts. It's more that there's we have these priors, right? You have a prior worldview, but somewhere in your subconscious, you've been noticing things that conflict with that prior.

And maybe it's in your subconscious or maybe your conscious notices it and disregards it. And you keep noticing things and saying, well, that's a freak incident. And then the aha moment, I think, comes at the end of a bunch of these. It's that moment when you realize that, you know what, I might have to question that prior.

And suddenly all those other examples that you had been pushing away or that you're only your subconscious have been noticed, they all come into your consciousness and you realize, wait a second, this is a whole pattern. I've been wrong about this whole thing. And now it's like all these other things fall into place in your head. And so you

For me, the closest I can come to that exact moment was Greg Lukianoff, who's the head of FIRE, took this video. He happened to be walking through Yale campus of Nicholas Christakis getting essentially struggle sessioned out in the quad by a bunch of students over an email his wife had written, which was suggesting that the school had gone too far in telling students what they should and shouldn't wear for Halloween.

And she, in very gentle wording, basically said, I don't think it's our job to tell students what they should or shouldn't wear. And maybe even if a student wears something that's kind of offensive, maybe that's something that college students should be able to do. And if other students don't like it, maybe the students should talk to them and not the administrator, whatever. Meanwhile, that turns into now her husband, Nicholas Krosakis, being screamed at. And this happened to be captured by Greg, put on YouTube. So it went viral. A lot of people saw it. But it was watching that video.

I was noticing what kids were saying, which was stuff like, you know, this is supposed to be a safe space, saying that he's disgusting, that, you know, that word disgusting, you know, basically, you know, subhuman.

And snapping. And what I mean by that is, you know, they were when one kid would say something, all the other kids would snap in unison. And I know if I were there and I'm one of those students, whether I agree or not, it's going to be hard to, you know, not snap or at least just stay silent. Because that's scary when everyone is, you know, kind of, you know, that snapping is saying, you know, the group is behind you. We are behind you. We are one right against this man.

And so it was looking at that and saying that Yale is so safe. And the idea that this woman's email, it makes things unsafe. That is just so counter to everything that I think and the way I think a college campus should be. So now I'm thinking, though, but the prior I had for a long time was kind of

Blue, good, red, bad, right, in the U.S. Just in general, not that blue is perfect, but like the people on the blue side were the ones who were pushing the country forward in a good direction. The people on the red side were the people holding it back. You know, I grew up in a progressive suburb and went to progressive college and lived in L.A. and then lived in New York. So, you know, I was surrounded by this. And I was an independent thinker in a lot of areas. But, you know, these priors, especially with something like politics, can be very strong. You know, everyone around you thinks this thing is—

It can make us otherwise independent thinker pretty beholden to this other framework.

And I remember looking at that and thinking, like, if this is what blue is today, then, like, something is incredibly wrong. And I don't think that, you know, it just kind of, it's that moment when your head explodes a little because the house of cards that was my prior, that was based basically on a kind of on tribalism, on a feeling that I'm part of the good team. And that whole thing just kind of shattered over the next couple months. And I was reading and I was thinking and I was thinking.

reflecting on everything and looking back at my own emails like a year earlier, two years earlier. And man, I was like, wow, I was really closed-minded about this stuff. So then I said, okay, this is something I have to write about.

You describe your book, which I love, as a self-help book for societies. And I want to get into the self-help portion in just a minute, but first I want to talk about how we got to the place where we need help. You start the book in this wonderful way by giving a brief history of humanity, which you call The Story of Us.

And you say this, you say, if we wrote the story of us out in a thousand pages, here's what it would look like. From page one to page 950, there's basically not much going on.

And then on page 976 of recorded history, it begins-ish, as you put it. And Christianity isn't even born until page 993. So basically, the first 95% of the book of human history is so, so unbelievably slow and boring. And the last 5%...

Yeah.

So one of the things that separates humans from other animals is language and the ability for people to take what's in their brain and put it, you know, very detailed way into other people's brains. And then people can pass the idea on through language to their children. And so if I learn something about the world, I can tell my whole tribe who then can tell their descendants and the tribe now knows that. And it's like this kind of collective knowledge, like a

like a tower of knowledge in the middle of that tribe that kind of grows and builds and builds.

And then, right around page 975, you start having writing. And so now, someone can take an idea and put it on a tablet or later a book and send it into the minds of millions of people. And it can last for centuries. And it can last in the exact wording it was meant to be transmitted in. So you have instead of a tribe of 150 people's collective knowledge, you now have 10,000 or 50,000. And so that knowledge tower becomes a skyscraper.

And so things start happening very quickly. You start being able to do things that no individual human or no small tribe could ever do, like build giant temples and understand that the world is round and start to come up with governing structures that are based on trial and error of hundreds of years of governing structures before that. And so things start to advance much faster.

But the craziest thing is this has an exponential kind of effect because a more advanced species with a bigger knowledge tower makes progress faster than a less advanced species. So not only do things keep building, but they build faster and faster and faster. And eventually this comes to a point where things are soaring ahead and you're making more progress in a century than you did in all of human history before that when it comes to tech and knowledge building.

The reason I like the 1,000-page book thing is it allows you to look at the last page alone, just page 1,000. So now we're not talking about the last 5% of the book. We're talking about the last 0.1% of the book. And that goes from like 1770s to today, right? 250 years per page.

And it is a total anomaly compared to all the pages before it. And it's, again, I don't think it just happened on its own. It's what eventually happens if you keep this pattern going of exponential growth, exponential growth, which is awesome, right? I mean, we have an amazing quality of life. Modern tech is great. And none of us, I don't think, want to go back to the 1600s.

It's also really scary. It's also really scary because when things start racing forward ahead, you can get very reckless and you have a lot of godlike power from all of this tech. And so that's kind of, to me, it's exciting and it's scary.

The other thing that's anomalous about that page from, call it the mid-1700s till now, isn't just all of the unbelievable leaps ahead in terms of technology. It's also the advent of liberal democracy, you know, as being completely ahistorical and miraculous. How do you understand sort of the rise of liberal democracy in the story of us? Because to me, that is the background to this entire book, is frankly your understanding

and gratitude for a system that I think you feel is really under siege in ways that many people aren't appreciating. A liberal democracy is a totally artificial invention.

And it's not that, you know, the Enlightenment thinkers of the 16 and 1700s, it's not that they invented this from scratch, but this is kind of the best crack yet. And they finally, you know, came up with a way to do it in a way that could last for centuries. It was robust. So it's this kind of, it seems obvious to us because I think of it as a house.

It's a house that is built, right? It has the support beams of the liberal democracy and the structure and the roof. All of this is an invention, right? It's not the law of nature. We made the house. And so we now are growing up within the house. And so did our parents. And so did our grandparents. And so it's been a lot of generations in a place like America, at least for a lot of people, since someone has been outside this house. My wife, she's Persian. Her parents immigrated here.

In 1979, or, you know, they left Iran then, like a lot of Iranians, and they do not take the house for granted. They think the liberal house is unbelievable, right? And you talk to someone who's coming from a communist country or coming from a dictatorship, and, you know, you will hear a love for this house because they're saying, oh, my God, look around. This house is incredible. And we're saying, huh, it is, I guess. I don't know. It's the house. It's just the house. That's where we all live.

And that's all fine until the house is under threat. And then this cockiness about the house will always be here, of course. We have to get rid of that and say, well, hold on. Why is the house under threat? What does that mean? And how do we preserve it?

I think one of the paradoxes of the last page of the book that we're on is that on the one hand, we're enjoying more abundance, more progress, more genuine historical privilege than any group ever has before, ever. And yet that exponential progress, as you describe it, is also the source of

of a lot of chaos, a lot of misery, and a lot of our uncertainty. And you really lay these out in a powerful way in the book. So I want to kind of go through them.

One of the things that you write about in the book is this distinction between what you call the primitive mind and what you call the higher mind, right? And the thing that sets human beings apart from other animals is this higher mind because the higher mind is rational. It feels complex emotions like empathy and ego. It makes long-term goals for the future. It's able to look beyond itself.

And yet, like all other animals, we also have another mind inside of us. And that is what you call the primitive mind or what a lot of people call our lizard brains. And that's the part of our brains that hunts for prey, that protects our kin, that privileges people that look like us or animals that look like us above others. And as you explain it in the book, the higher mind's goal is to get to the truth. But the primitive mind has a very different goal. It's confirmation of its existing beliefs.

So in an era in which, Tim, there's just so much abundance, there's objectively so much freedom, you know, and the structures that support the higher mind are all around us, why is it that the primitive mind feels so often like it's taking over? When did the higher minds become less powerful than the primitive ones?

Yeah, I mean, the primitive mind is kind of our survival brain. And it was programmed for a world living in a small tribe. But what's cool about humans, like you said, is that the primitive mind in our brain, that's kind of the pre-programmed software. And that will never, not just does it start off thinking it's in 30,000 BC, it will never understand that it's not there.

Meanwhile, the higher mind is this cool part of us that can override, can see what's happening, see that our instincts don't make sense here in one area or another and actually override them.

I use the example of candy. When we binge on candy and then we regret it or any kind of unhealthy food, it makes no sense, right? We're mad at ourselves later. And this is the thousandth time this has happened. And what's happening is that the primitive mind is programmed for a world where calories are hard to come by. And if you don't eat this dense, chewy fruit that you just came by, of course, it's candy, right now, you might not find calories for two weeks. Binge, right? Which made sense then.

It doesn't make sense today. And so our higher minds can actually get in there and override this. That's why we don't always eat unhealthy food when we can. Some people can be really good at developing healthy eating habits and other ones, not so much because it's this kind of tug of war in our heads between this one voice that wants to do what it's programmed for and the other voice that says, wait a second, wait a second. In the world we live in, what we're programmed for makes no sense here.

So it's a general concept, but you can apply it to lots of things. You can apply it to how we think, right? So you can say that it makes sense in today's world to try to find the truth. We don't want to be delusional. And, you know, we want to play with ideas and change our mind and get wiser as we grow older. That makes sense. But the other part of our brain, the pre-programmed software is for, you know, is made for a world where the tribe has their beliefs, their sacred beliefs. And people who

couldn't challenge those sacred beliefs and were too independent thinking and said, this doesn't actually make sense. Where's our evidence? They didn't fare very well, right? And so it is our nature to identify with our sacred beliefs. They're part of us. They're part of who we are. And they're part of our group. The people like us, we believe these things.

And the last thing you'd ever want to do is change your mind about that. So you will go through all this effort to confirm the sacred beliefs and you'll spend time with people talking about how great the sacred beliefs are and how bad the people are who disagree with it. And that's the survival brain mode we're in when we're doing that. Or we can override that and we can say, you know what? I know I have the urge to confirm my beliefs right now, but that's unwise. And that's, that's, I need to overcome that and actually get better at changing my mind.

That's this kind of initial seed of a framework that then I take into politics. And I'll just talk about

The higher mind's way of doing politics and the primitive mind's way of doing politics. And I think that that's a framework we can add into our existing discussions. What is the higher mind's way of doing politics and what is the primitive mind's way of doing politics? I use a ladder because it's a spectrum, right? It's not just one mind is doing the thinking and the other is not. It's not as simple as that. Sometimes it's a mix, right? Sometimes you're conflicted between two things. You know, you're doing honest research, but you find a little confirmation bias there.

there. You know, so maybe you're in the middle or whatever it is. So the ladder is kind of a spectrum. And on that, you know, when you're up in the high rungs, maybe you have some conflict, but the higher mind is running the show. And down in the low rungs, the primitive mind is running the show. And then in groups,

The primitive minds in the group will kind of band together and that whole group will be politically low rung together. And it's very hard to get out of that once you're in it. And likewise, a whole group can kind of work hard to stave off those instincts and actually stay up on the high rungs together. So we just talked about ideas. That's one way you can think about this ladder. You know, at the top, in high rung politics,

People care about truth. They're open to debate. They're open to changing their minds. And when they're right about something, they will argue it fully. But they're open to being challenged and they don't identify with the ideas. If they're wrong about something, they don't have this fight or flight instinct. They will admit they're wrong and they'll move on.

principles are consistent. Again, because this is what makes sense. So if you believe that government overreach is bad, then you care about that when both parties are in office. If you believe that discrimination based on skin color is bad, you care about that regardless of the skin color being discriminated against.

And then finally, with tactics in politics, you want to change things, right? You want to make things happen. You do it via persuasion in a liberal democracy. So there's a focus on truth. There's consistency with principles. And you try to get your way by persuading others and building a mind changing movement. And these all go together. When someone's doing when a group is doing one of those things, they tend to be doing all three.

Now, low-rung politics, which I think is born of our survival brains instincts, and when it gets, you know, bands together with others, they do politics the old school way, just pure tribalism. So there's the good people and there's the bad people with the good ideas and the bad ideas.

completely not open to changing their mind. There's tons of confirmation bias. They don't give the other side a fair hearing. They're really not usually open to an honest debate. That's in the ideas realm. And then again, with principles, there's total flip-flopping on principles based on whether it helps the tribe or not. So there's total lack of consistency. We've seen a million of examples of this. And then tactics, you know, again, the old school

way to get what you want is not persuasion. That's the way in this weird house of liberal democracy that we do it. The way we're programmed to do it is coercion. We will try to force our way and force people to do things with blackmail and fear and violence sometimes. And so when I look around at low-rung politics, again, people who are doing one of those things tend to be doing all three. And I think this is just kind of like a vertical axis. We can add to the left-center-right

horizontal political axis rather than saying, are you, you know, left wing, right wing, far right, far left? Are you centrist? Well, how about like making it a square and being like, are you high rung or low rung? Yeah. And you can now, now you can be far left and high rung, or you can be centrist and low rung or far right and in the middle somewhere. And I think it's, it's useful.

Why in our culture right now do we so... I wouldn't even say reward the low-rung politicians, but I think people are actually addicted to them. I think people really enjoy watching the AOCs, watching the Marjorie Taylor Greene's. Obviously, those people are very different. I don't mean to compare them, but...

What is going on in our current culture where the low-rung people seem to be the ones that get all of the attention, all of the rewards, and no one really seems to care very much about the high-rung principled ones? They're like the also-rans. Yeah, people do care. What happened is the media landscape has totally shifted, and we're in a world now where people

24-hour news networks exist. They didn't used to exist. It used to be a half hour of news at night on three networks that broadcast to the whole country. Now you've got 24-hour news networks going all day to one political tribe. And these networks realized you could make, I think Fox News probably pioneered this and other ones have caught on, this idea that you can make a lot more money if you kind of say what you're doing is news and what you're really doing is kind of political entertainment. Right.

And you, you know, I use the example of like reality show. A reality show is interesting all the time, even though the actual reality is not that interesting because it's

The editors cut in a constant string of conflict with bombastic characters, and it's fun, right? Our primitive minds get addicted to that thing the same way we get addicted to junk food. This is, you know, political junk food. And so these stations realized that, you know, the same thing that Mars Inc. realized about selling candy, you could make a ton of money by selling junk food.

And so these news networks are really entertainment networks that sell to kind of our primitive minds. They sell political junk food to our primitive minds. And unfortunately, unlike candy, this has major implications, which is that the politicians who get cast on the show, you see AOC is one of 400 something people in the house. There are bills passed every week that never get talked about, right? There's all these other, but

but AOC is one of the characters on the show. She's on, she's been cast on the reality show and so is Marjorie Taylor green, right? And Trump is one of the, you know, major characters in the show. And so they're going to be on all the time. And the, the, and, and so also of course it incentivizes, uh,

politicians to say, well, getting on the show is a huge career break. I need to be bombastic. And so that's going to have a lot of effects on people. Otherwise, normal people are going to get addicted to this reality show and they're going to be kind of sucked into kind of hardcore political tribalism. In addition to the sort of distinction you make between primitive mind and higher mind, which I loved, and the idea of sort of high-rung political thinkers and actors and low-rung ones, you also...

make a distinction between two different intellectual cultures, one that you call idea labs and the other that you call echo chambers. I would love if you could give me an example of an idea lab and an example of an echo chamber. Yeah. So every group of friends has a culture that includes how they do birthdays, how they do texting.

How they do emojis, how they talk behind each other's backs, what's acceptable, what's distasteful, right? Every group, no matter what you're in, you're full of rules about how we do things, your social rules.

And an idea lab to me is a group that has a high-rung intellectual culture where how we do things here is truth comes first. Truth matters. And disagreement is great. Respectful disagreement. You know, people are to be respected. Ideas are not. Where it's not cool to identify with your ideas and get super offended if someone disagrees with your idea. Right?

where people call each other out on bias and on logical fallacies. And we're, you know, unearned conviction. Someone who's acting like they're sure and they turn out to be wrong a bunch of times. That person is not cool in the idea lab culture. They quickly lose respect. People don't take them very seriously. And so primitive minds in the group act up. Someone will, again, get really offended, but everyone keeps them in check.

And kind of the Idea Lab's immune system kicks in and says, wow, you're upset about that. Like, you know, and they get made fun of for that. And then they don't want to do that again next time. And that keeps the whole group kind of up on the high rungs. And it keeps every individual, because all of us are subject to this kind of internal tug of war. It keeps every individual, their mind up in the high rungs. You can't really get away with slipping down too far or the Idea Lab will call you out. And so sometimes you can have a couple, a married couple has an intellectual culture

If one person knows that you just never disagree with my husband on politics or it's going to be a nightmare, that husband is imposing the other kind of culture on the marriage. And this can happen in groups. One person in the group can, if they have enough cultural power in the group, can kind of say no one is allowed to disagree about X. Right. And so you quickly can slip into the other culture, the echo chamber culture. Yeah.

And groups do it together. When one person starts doing it, sometimes everyone's just scared of them. But often the whole group starts doing it together without even realizing they're doing it. And that's when the primitive minds have taken over. And if you think the primitive mind's goal in your head, in an individual's head, is to confirm the beliefs, your sacred beliefs, well, the group has their sacred beliefs and the primitive minds band together to protect those beliefs. So they're very hostile to someone who says, I think we might be wrong or I think the other side is not so bad or is right about this thing. People will...

Call them a bad, you know, they'll basically be relegated to the out group. They'll get a really negative reaction because they violated something sacred. You know, in an idea lab, no idea is sacred, but in an echo chamber, there's very sacred ideas and it's like going into a church and slandering Christ. You don't do that in a church.

And so I don't think this is, you know, some people do this and other people do that. I think we all can think of different groups at different times of the year. And you find, oh my, we're being really echo chambery about this right now. Oh, it's one of those things where we're all getting a little too much pleasure about all agreeing that

And all we constantly are just all on the same side. And we're always just talking shit about the people who disagree. And you know, it's bad when you realize that it's something you see something's being a little distasteful or going a little too far. And you have this incentive not to say it because it's going to kill the vibe. It's going to people are going to be kind of like, you know, roll their eyes at you. And maybe they'll talk shit about you now behind your back.

That means that the group has slipped down the rungs of the ladder into echo chamber land. And that's fine, by the way. In a liberal democracy, you're welcome to be part of echo chambers or idea labs as long as you live and let live.

When you don't live and let live, that's when there's a problem. Tim, is there an example from your life of being in an atmosphere that was really idea labs-y or like a moment over the course of the past few decades that you feel like, aha, that was like a high watermark of America celebrating the idea labs culture? Because-

I don't think anyone listening to this would disagree that we're in a culture overall right now in which it feels like echo chambers are the thing that are actively being cultivated. Maybe another way of asking this is, when did the idea lab go out of fashion and are there any pockets of it, whether it's a friend group or an institution or whatever, that you feel like are trying to revive it? I think a ton of people, individuals, want to revive it. And there are pockets. Intelligence Squared is a great...

It's a two-on-two Oxford-style debate. And it's a classic idea lab. Everyone's respectful. It's two people taking one side, two people taking another side. And it's basically like, you know, you have two attorneys in that courtroom. And the audience and anyone listening can play juror and listen to them clash and learn a little more along the way. And, you know, you hear really... Everyone's really smart. You hear really compelling ideas from both sides. It's fascinating intellectually. And...

The way echo chambers get formed is when it becomes the kind of social norm to say that one side of this particular debate is not welcome here because, and it's almost, it's never saying because we're an echo chamber, no one admits that. It's almost always because those ideas are dangerous. Those ideas are harmful. Or it's because we're moral and that's immoral. Yes. The idea that the other side of this debate is actively only bad people would hold it

And actually, it's dangerous to even have it in the room. And the key is that you live and let live, right? So echo chamber, you want to go form that with your group of friends, or you want to start an institution and they're openly dedicated to a religion or to a certain set of ideas. Great, you're welcome in the US to go form your echo chamber, just leave everyone else alone.

And when you have that, if you scale that up, what you have is a lot of idea lab pockets and a lot of echo chamber pockets. But that inherently makes the whole country a big idea lab because each echo chamber is going to argue their one position. Idea labs are all over the place. They're going to change their mind, but they're still going to be arguing different positions. And you have this big mix of ideas. It's the federalism of echo chambers makes a national ideas lab. I got you. Exactly. Exactly.

And that's in general the idea with a liberal democracy is that, you know, you can have this low rung stuff going on everywhere just as long, but it has to be contained. It can't go and start messing with other people and infringing upon others. So you have this grand idea lab. And what I think the trajectory has been is that echo chambers have begun forcefully kind of, again, using coercion to not just police their own members, which is okay coercion. Again, it's not admirable, but there's nothing wrong with it from a liberal sense, but

They've been using coercion to forcefully expand, which I compare to like the difference between a benign tumor and a malignant tumor. You know, it's it's the first way is benign. It's going to police its own people. It's going to it's going to say no one can disagree with me, you know, or you're not my friend. OK, I can choose to be your friend or not.

It's this other mentality that's saying, actually, no one outside, even outside of our friends, is allowed to have these ideas. And not only, you know, are those, is that mentality increasing, but it's been succeeding. I call that idea supremacy, which is a distinct difference from kind of zealotry or just, you know, no one can change my mind. Idea supremacy says no one else, even, you know, whether I know you or not, is allowed to express these ideas. It's trying to kind of play, you know, cultural dictator.

And so you've had echo chambers expanding across the land and kind of forceful, coercive expansion and kind of holding pockets that used to be idea labs now hostage and saying the new rules here are the rules of our echo chamber. After the break, Tim Urban explains why what happened to our universities matters. Stay with us. ♪

The ultimate idea lab is supposed to be the university, right? The university is supposed to exist for a singular goal. Maybe they're a secondary, but the key goal is the pursuit of truth, right? And I think one of the ways that is most illustrative to the point you're making in the book is to look at what has happened to universities. And you dedicate almost an entire chapter in your book to the problem of universities today. And I think that's a really important point.

and the way that they've sort of been transformed from idea labs into either echo chambers or idea supremacist chambers. You'll tell me the difference. And you do this with this amazing illustration that you call the social justice horse. And it's sort of similar to the idea of the Trojan horse, right? Except you have this social justice horse which you draw with this little very cute rainbow mane and tail. And the social justice horse says something

Very, very lovely, progressive-sounding things. Like the horse will say, an inclusive environment. And yet the actual horse

that they're smuggling in under the idea of an inclusive environment is disagree with us and we'll smear you, for example. Or the social justice horse will say something like diversity statements. But really the thing being brought in under this rhetoric is, as you put it, McCarthyist political litmus test and loyalty oaths, right? And this sort of theory of the social justice horse or the mechanics of the social justice horse is happening all

All over the country, not just in elite schools, but in schools coast to coast, everywhere in between. And we've gotten to a point in which something like 52% of college students, according to one recent survey, say they always or often refrain from expressing views on political and social issues in classrooms because of concern for how it will be perceived, for concern to their reputation, for concern to their grades. How did we get here? How was this...

Social justice horse? So unbelievably effective. So one of the first things I wanted to do when I was getting into this very spicy topic of social justice is I said, we need two terms here because there's two completely different things that are called social justice here.

The first is what I would call liberal social justice, liberal meaning classic liberal. And so we talked about the liberal house, right? This idea of liberal, you know, this house we live in that has liberal rules and liberal norms and liberal laws and liberal social justice. Its goal is to make the house more perfect. It says liberalism is great. The constitution is awesome, but we don't always succeed in keeping its promises. There are flaws in the house, right?

This awesome house has some, you know, some people or policies or norms have made it weaker and have made it, actually, some people in this house are being treated unfairly in a way they're not supposed to be treated in the liberal house. This was, of course, what Martin Luther King, you know, in his I Have a Dream speech, he talked about a promissory note and how the U.S. has defaulted on its check policy.

to black Americans, right? So that's him saying this house is great, but black Americans are not being treated the way this house is supposed to treat them. Let's fix the house. That's the goal. Let's make it the best house it can be. And so not only does it have liberal goals, right, which is you want more liberalism, but it has, it uses liberal means, right? The civil rights movement was all about free assembly and free speech and, you know, protest and all of these tools of liberalism. They're tools that the house gives you to fix the house.

And, you know, this idea of colorblindness is a very liberal idea. Individualism, right? It's not about the color of your skin. It's about who you are as a person. This idea that your character is another way of valuing individuals. Each individual is a sacred thing, period. It doesn't matter what else you know about them.

And so that's liberal social justice. This is the movement behind gay marriage in 2012. This is the movement behind women's suffrage back in the 1910s. So it's a great tradition in the U.S., and it's something that most Americans, you know, for sure progressive, but even a lot of conservatives are very proud of this movement. Now, what's the other thing? There's another thing called social justice right now, which is what I call social justice fundamentalism, otherwise known as wokeness.

And it's important because wokeness itself sounds derogatory. It sounds like it's, you know, it has a lot of cultural baggage there. So I try to just use a different term to describe what it actually is, which I call social justice fundamentalism or SJF. And this movement is self-proclaimed outside the house with a wrecking ball. The house is evil because the house was built by flawed people. And it's rotten to its core. Its foundation is built to uphold justice.

the power of the powerful, in this case, white supremacy or the patriarchy, and that liberalism itself is an invention of those ideas in order that has the, whether it was intended or not, it has the property of being exploitative and of enhancing inequality and of entrenching the power of the powerful and holding down the oppressed.

And so that's a fundamental disagreement. Liberal social justice and social justice fundamentalism have opposite, not different, but opposite goals. One wants to make the house better and one wants to break the house down. They use words like liberate, liberate from this whole system. It's very revolutionary, much more revolutionary than liberal social justice. Liberal social justice wants to overhaul norms and policies and laws. Social justice fundamentalism wants to overhaul the whole house, just level it and build something new.

And that's okay. That's the thing is what liberalism is awesome because in a liberal democracy, it actually has room for even critique of itself. Sure, bring it in. Bring it in. You hate liberalism. Bring it into the discussion. You're allowed to be here. Go make your arguments. Do whatever you want. Try to persuade people. Maybe we're all missing something. Sure, go for it. What's not okay is illiberal tactics.

And that kind of goes together because if you think the House is bad, well, you also think that the same tools that were used by the Civil Rights Movement, those liberal tools like free speech and all those things, that those things are bad too. Black feminist Audre Lorde says you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. So there's a lot in that statement. It's the idea that, A, this is the master's house. It doesn't belong to all of us. It is a house for slave masters.

And therefore, the tools themselves are rotten, just as rotten as the House itself. And so they will be hostile to all kinds of liberal things. Free speech. So free speech is actually dangerous, right? It's allowing the platforming of dangerous ideas. Not the First Amendment necessarily, but the culture of free speech is bad. The U.S. and the West, they're bad. The group is what matters much more than the individual.

And that's why they will talk about, you know, they will make broad generalizations about white people and black people. They treat these groups as monoliths. There's a common enemy kind of tone to it instead of the much more classic liberal common humanity tone. Equality of opportunity is a liberal staple. But social justice fundamentalism believes that because groups are the same, there's no such thing as equality of opportunity that doesn't lead to equality of outcome.

And so they actually are for equality of outcome. That is very anti-liberal because it's, you know, you can't have freedom with equality of outcome, enforced equality of outcome. So there's a lot of these examples. But again, it's it is like you mentioned with the social justice horse. It's tricky. Right. It's a little bit they don't quite go out and say this. They'll say they'll say we want to save space.

But really what they're saying is a space that doesn't have free speech in it, you know, and where our ideas are treated as sacred. And they'll use things like the harm principle in saying that, well, this thing is harmful, so therefore it must be stopped. So back to universities. Back to universities. What's happened is this, you know, SJF was a, you know, in the 60s, liberal social justice was the major thing at universities, right? You have Berkeley, you have free speech protests, right? And we want more liberalism.

But there was also developing in the corners of universities this concept of SJF, this neo-Marxist kind of take on social justice. And what's happened much more recently is as universities have gone from kind of pluralistic with some conservatives, more progressive, but some conservatives, it's transitioned to be almost entirely progressive. And the numbers are stark, you know, the ratio of professors is

left to right has gone from like four to one to, you know, in some departments, 17 to one, 40 to one, sometimes 100 to one. And so when an environment is kind of purple, it has good defenses against extreme components, both from red and blue. But when an environment becomes bright blue and things get really kind of tribal, it becomes weak. It develops a soft spot to kind of illiberalism of its own color.

So social justice fundamentalism has taken advantage of this transition to political purity at a university and has been able to rise up and actually institute its own values. And so, like you said, the university is supposed to be the ultimate ideal lab, right? Veritas is written on the gate above the university.

And for Veritas to happen, you have to have not just ideas put out, but people who will challenge those ideas, right? Or else there's no way for a group of people to find truth together if no one's allowed to disagree. But as SJF has risen up, it has created new rules. And it's basically said, we live in a small echo chamber that now actually is going to be the rules of the entire campus.

And ideas that disagree with SJF in particular, with our tenants, are going to lead to firings or to ostracism or to investigation of students. And that completely...

topples the whole point of a university on its head. For the skeptical listener who's like, I don't want to say SJF, but maybe sympathetic to some of its aims, or who just believes that what happens at universities doesn't much matter, how has the triumph of the social justice horse in what is meant to be the ultimate ideas lab, what has been the impact of that on the broader culture in this country? Well, it matters in two ways.

universities educate young people who then go and become our future leaders, right? And are running the country 20, 30 years later. And what universities are supposed to teach college students is how to think.

is how to think, how to debate, how to find the truth, how to be tougher, more robust thinkers, and teach them a wide variety of lenses, political lenses and other kinds of lenses that they can then, you know, take into their heads and use. It's kind of training for your brain. So you go to college, you come out a better thinker forever, which of course would serve our society. But it also teaches kind of general liberal values, right?

It teaches students that disagreement is okay. And it's supposed to teach students that enforcing an echo chamber on an idea lab institution is not a good thing. So when an ideology like SJF, which is kind of illiberal to its core,

takes over, instead of teaching students a wide variety of lenses, it teaches them one lens. So that's the difference between teaching them how to think and arming them with a lot of tools and teaching them what to think. Teaching them there is one correct worldview with one correct set of politics in it.

And if you try to bring a speaker to campus that disagrees with it, we will, you know, disinvite the speaker or shot them down. If you try to teach us that wide variety of views in a class, that professor is going to be reported. And so students are soaking in instead of this thing, this idea lab culture that makes them better thinkers and more humble about what they know. It teaches students to be zealots and to be intellectual bullies. It teaches them that the way to be a good person is

who tries to fight against harm, you need to punish anyone who shares harmful ideas, which happen to be, of course, the ideas that conflict with SJF. So it's kind of doing the exact opposite of what I think.

We want colleges teaching young people to do it, you know, about both how, you know, about what they're teaching them and also how they're teaching them to be as thinkers and how they're teaching them to treat others. So that's going to affect all of us. Those students then go enter companies and start wreaking havoc there with this idea of someone said something harmful and they need to be fired for it. We'll start a petition and use our power to try to get this person fired.

And eventually those people are our leaders and they're making policies. So that, of course, affects everybody. The other thing that universities do is they're supposed to be our primary truth-finding centers. Universities are the center of academic research and science. That happens at universities. And what a society knows is basically what universities produce for knowledge.

And when an ideology that does not believe in Veritas culture takes over, it starts to affect what can and cannot be researched. And it starts to maybe lower the standards for academic work that is

It confirms SJF and it starts to retract papers or not publish them in the first place or maybe even fire the professor for having the nerve to write it for ideas that conflict with its ideology. And so that also harms everyone because there's already a strain in this country that doesn't believe the science, right? And that's no matter what, and that's not good. But this gives so much credence to those ideas.

That whole idea. And so it's really bad for knowledge production and it's bad for education of our future leaders. And often what happens at universities ends up happening everywhere else a little bit later. You know, universities start, social media started at universities with Facebook and it soon was everywhere. There's a lot of cultural fads. And so when you see something happening at universities, people should take it seriously because it very well might appear across society five, 10 years later, which of course in this case it has.

Tim, there are a lot of huge, I would say almost existential themes to your work. But one of the biggest themes that runs through everything you write is the question of time. And I think you do such an incredible job of making readers aware of a thing that feels perhaps more abstract than almost anything. And you just do an incredible job of concretizing it, making it real for us.

One of the things that you have talked about personally is that you're an epic waster of time, or at least you used to be. In 2016, you gave this TED Talk that I think now has something like 50 million views, which grants it a spot on the most popular TED Talks of all time, right next to Brene Brown and Bill Gates. And it's called Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator. And

And it's all about how the procrastinator's mind works, which as you describe it, contains a rational decision maker and an instant gratification monkey. And the instant gratification monkey takes over in the mind of procrastinators and throws the rational decision maker part of the mind out by the wayside.

But then toward the end of the talk, you say that you had an epiphany, which is that actually we're all procrastinators. Why are human beings such skilled procrastinators? Well, I think this relates to what we were just talking about. I think that we're procrastinators for the same reason we eat unhealthy food and fall into tribal politics, which is that

The primate we are, the world we were programmed to be in, didn't really have long-term projects that often. You had to get food, you had to survive, you had to mate, and you had to sometimes fight. And so you conserved energy most of the time and you expended it when you had to.

And now we live in this world. We've been kidnapped off of our, you know, out of our home forest and we are dropped into an advanced civilization where the way to be, to have a gratifying, successful career is to

to think really long-term and to work hard on stuff today that you might not see the fruit of for months or years. It's to resist the marshmallow in the test. Yeah, exactly. We have to work really hard to override our sense of instant gratification because in the world we were supposed to be in, you really didn't need to override it very often.

And so I think procrastination is a problem a lot of us have. But I think there's kind of two kinds of procrastination. There's the first kind, which is the one that we usually talk about when people say 20% of people are chronic procrastinators, is we talk about deadlines and people who get behind on deadlines or they're late to a meeting.

They're unable to do the work until they absolutely panic. Basically, there's this resistance in them that will resist and resist and resist until this panic gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And eventually, the panic threshold crosses the resistance threshold, and they will freak out and cram for the test or, you know, whatever, do their work. And that often leads to, you know, obviously stress, and it's not healthy, and often you don't do your best work, and it's a miserable way to live.

But the reason I said there was an epiphany that, you know, I think that we're all procrastinators is that there's a whole other much sneakier kind of procrastination. And it happens in all the situations when there's something important that there has no deadline at all around it. So that's a lot of stuff at work. Of course, it's like, you know, we're trying to improve on our skills and to actually, you know, rethink the company culture or whatever. There's a lot of examples at work of stuff that you would call kind of important, but not urgent, no deadline.

But there's a ton of stuff outside of work. There's no deadline on seeing your family enough. And how many people regret not spending more time with their parents before they passed away or not spending more time with their kids before they left for college or whatever it is? That is such a common regret. You know, our brain is a tool and it's not often that smart. And one of the ways that our brain is not that smart is that we have this kind of delusion in our heads that

time is unlimited, that there's endless weeks ahead. And that's not true. And time is quite finite. If there is a friend that you really love, but you see them, I don't know, once every two years because they live in a different city. Every couple of years you catch up and you have an amazing four-hour drink and dinner and it was such a good time. And then that's it. You see them two years later.

Okay, well, just say you're 30 and you, you know, you may be, if you're lucky, both of you lived into your 80s. That's 50 years. If you're seeing them every two years, it's this crazy moment when you realize that I'm seeing them 25 more times ever. We have 25 of these dinners left. What?

That doesn't, the math doesn't add up. And so I think that when it comes to a lot of really important things, when there's no deadline, the combo of that and this delusion that we have unlimited time and unlimited rounds of something makes us very complacent in a way that we shouldn't be. So you have two things you can do with that information. Going back to that friend example, one is really savor that time with your friend. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's a sad but true fact that you're going to see them 25 more times if you're lucky.

And really enjoy it and appreciate what you're seeing here. You have 20, this is number two out of 25. Next one's number three out of 25. Or you can increase that number 25 by prioritizing that friend more. And maybe you're going to go and try to see that friend twice a year. Okay, you just expanded that number from 25 to 100. So there's a lot of things you can do with time when you look it in the face. And when you look it in the face, it's often different than what you think it looks like.

You have this blog post that I got kind of obsessed with called The Tail End. And you just, it puts in perspective visually how little time the average person has for

to do the things they love or spend time with the people they love. You know, from how many dumplings you have left to eat, you have like a whole graph of little baby dumplings, to the amount of oceans you're likely to jump in before you die. And I think the most affecting part of it is about your parents. And you say, it turns out that when I graduated high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I'm now enjoying the last 5% of that time we're in the tail end. In other words...

You basically get 18 years with your parents, and then the whole rest of your life is the additional year in terms of actual time you spend with them. And I wonder in doing all of these exercises that, if I'm honest, have a huge impact on me when I read them, and then I kind of am lulled back into the sleep that most of us go through life in when it comes to something personal.

that seems infinite like time. Has doing these exercises actually changed the way that you function in the world? Has it changed the way that you prioritize time with your family, time with your wife, time with your daughter? Has it transformed the way that you live out your day-to-day? Yes, but not as much as it should. So I've been arguing on the side of more family vacations and

And I used to think, oh, we're all going to be in this house for a week. And I'll make it for the last four days. But I have a lot going on. And I stopped doing that. If there's a thing going on, I'm not missing an hour of it.

And then the other side of it, when I am with people I love, I do sometimes find myself thinking this is precious. This is precious. There actually aren't, there's a very finite number of these moments. And so, yes, it does have an effect on me. But I'm like you too, where I then go and it's so easy to just fall back into our happy human haze of thinking time is endless. And by the way, another delusion that goes along with this was

which is this delusion that things are just, I'm the way that I am, things are the way they are, this is how much I see people, this is the city I live in, that's just what it is. And that's actually not true at all. You have a lot of agency over where to take your life and you can make big changes if it's important. And so yes, I can say all this, do I do it enough? No, but because it's in my head,

I do feel like I can be on a path getting 10% better about this every year. You know, like I will say like my grandmother is very old, right? And I, she's, you know, 98. And I'll, you know, I will try to make sure I spend, you know, I probably will, I probably spend double the time with her that I would have before I wrote this post. So I do think it has an effect, but I think if you're really looking it in the face, you

People should be doing things like moving to the city that their parents or friends live in, even though they don't like that. I mean, that's intense, but like that is kind of what's called for here. But I don't do that. And a lot of people don't do that.

How has the advent of this piece of glass that I'm holding in my hand made this challenge even more difficult, the challenge of procrastination and avoiding what's truly important in our lives? Yeah, I mean, the phone slash the computer, internet, all of that to me goes together. Because for me, it's, you know, if I'm trying to write, I'm writing on the same exact device that I'm using.

that I procrastinate on. I mean, the world, I could go into a prison cell for 100 years and never run out of shit to do on the internet.

you're tempting the instant gratification monkey much, much more. If you're someone who struggles with unhealthy eating, well, a great way to do that is to not have any unhealthy food in the house. But the internet basically is like filling all of our houses just out there in front of us is just junk food everywhere. The willpower required is a lot greater. So yeah, that's a big one. Did people used to procrastinate on the typewriter? Will human beings always find a way to procrastinate? I do wonder how people in the 1700s

procrastinate on. And it must have been something, they had books, so it must have been something, but it was definitely less tempting. But I think there's writers for centuries who have said stuff like, I love having written, but I hate the process of writing. I mean, actually, the word procrastination is

is a Latin word. It means to put off till tomorrow. So we're talking about the Roman Empire. This was a problem. And by the way, there's another word called perendination, I think. And to be a perendinator is actually to put things off till tomorrow.

the day after tomorrow. So procrastination is to put things off until tomorrow. So they have a nuanced understanding of someone who's a disaster or like a super disaster in this regard. So yeah, like I'm sure Julius Caesar was a procrastinator. I just don't know what he exactly did when he was procrastinating. All right. Let's talk a little bit about technology and happiness and the way that technology is either making us happier or more miserable.

You once tweeted this 300-year-old quote by Montesquieu that says this, if you only wish to be happy, this could easily be accomplished, but we wish to be happier than other people. And this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

And I think everyone would agree that social media has made it impossible not to compare ourselves to others, right? It's what we do all of the time, every single time we're looking at Instagram. They're happier on their vacation. They're skinnier than I am. They have the better clothes, right? How has social media put the human urge to compete and compare that Montesquieu talked about 300 years ago on steroids? And is there any way to resist it?

I have a term I call like image crafting, which is I think what people do on social media. They image craft, right? They're going to present a person that is not them, but is who they want people to think they are. Which people, again, people have always done. But social media, it's much, yeah, it's like you said, it's on steroids. A, people don't broadcast their failures and they don't broadcast their shitty vacations.

So you're already seeing this distorted lens. One of the crazy things about humans is that how we feel about our own life is almost entirely derived from comparison. So it used to be if your car isn't as nice as your neighbor's car, you feel poor. But now comparison is in our face. Instead of seeing our neighbor and our couple of coworkers and our friends and how they're doing,

We see everyone and we see the most, so instead of seeing, you know, there's someone who's the most successful person from your high school, right? Who you knew in high school. Normally you might hear through the grapevine about them. Oh, you hear they're doing great, whatever, whatever. You forget about it. You know, you don't hear about them again for 10 years. Now that person's in your face because everyone's talking about them online and they're there and everyone's forwarding their things. And so it's kind of a nightmare of comparison now. And then you combine that with the fact that everyone's presenting the best version of their life.

And you really have a recipe for misery. And, you know, inequality is always a problem, but inequality is really rubbed in your face with social media. Yes.

There's this term coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called the third space, which is exactly what it sounds like, right? It's a place outside of home or work for adults or for kids that cultivates a sense of community. Starbucks wanted to pride itself on being the third place. And for some people, it's still a bar, maybe a coffee shop or a community library or a park or a playground. But it's meant to be sort of like this common leveler where everyone's welcome regardless of social class, race, gender, etc.,

But in our world today, I would argue that the internet is that third space, right? And you can use it to get lost in an app or TikTok or Twitter or a game. And in certain ways, it's incredible. It attracts those looking for a community. You know, if you're living in a rural place, you can connect to people all over the world that have a like-minded view to you.

But it can also be this extremely destructive thing in ways that I don't even need to go into because everyone knows what I'm talking about. Alienation, isolation, radicalization, all of those things. How do we use this tool for the good? How do we use this tool in a way that cultivates our higher rung values?

values, our higher mind? How do we protect ourselves from slipping to the lower rungs, from giving in to our primitive mind, especially as technology is continuing to advance? Who knows what's going to be here six months from now because of AI? Well, people who want to lose weight, it's very logical to keep only healthy food in the house, right? Surround yourself by healthy food and you'll probably eat more of it.

And you can do the same thing on the internet. You can actually try to avoid junk food, internet junk food, and surround yourself with influences that'll make you better. Think about Twitter. Twitter, you know, people rag on it as this, you know, hellscape, and it is.

But not for everyone. Just for us? Well, yeah, certainly. But if you're going to tweet about politics, you're going to invite the hellscape into your world. But the point is, you know, a lot of people, they log on and they see a bunch of interesting people talking about science and history and making, you know, comedians making funny jokes and then some of their friends. And it's not a hellscape at all. It's awesome, right?

One thing I did for this book is because I wanted to not end up in an echo chamber of people who felt the way I did is I tried to follow on different social media platforms

a wide range of people. If someone who was getting a lot of attention and I just tested what they thought, instant follow. I want to see what they're saying. And then also if someone who I thought was a good thinker and they disagree with me, even more so, instant follow. So you can surround yourself by a wide variety of views if you want to get the full picture and not let yourself fall too much in an echo chamber. And we talked about idea lab culture. You can choose to go to the sites and

And listen to the podcast and follow people that you believe kind of have a high-rung approach, which means they might be anywhere on the political axis or any other axis, but they approach things like a grown-up, not identifying with their ideas, not attacking people who disagree with them, but attacking their ideas.

So you can curate your own internet world pretty well, I think, to the same way. Again, it's just like food. You're going to sometimes go out or order, you know, delivery. You're going to get some really, you're going to still end up going into this, you know, someone's going to send you a tweet. You're going to end up scrolling down the comment section and getting angry and all that. But you can do a lot. You can go a long way. Now, on a macro scale, how do we do better? You know, how do we not?

Because, you know, collectively we can be very smart and wise. And we can also be the lowest common denominator can win out. And we can be the worst of our human nature can come out collectively.

But what we can do is if we build enough awareness about this concept and people already, there's a lot more people talking about how social media is bad, right? That's new people. You know, you said you said that, you know, it's you didn't even need to even list the things you said. It was just obvious why the Internet can be bad. That's pretty new, actually, this idea that that these algorithms make us miserable. And so right there, you're going to start having some pressure.

You're going to start having some kind of shaming of the people who own the platforms if their algorithms are geared towards engagement, which of course usually it means geared towards amplifying anger and bombastic people. And I think we could get to a world where that's very, you know, no one would ever join a platform that still has an algorithm like that. We all know that that's not so. And in that world, everyone's suddenly incentivized to make their algorithms better and more pleasant. I think we could get there where there's kind of a mass shift where

where it becomes the, it looks like the Wild West back when the algorithms were just going for engagement. And now, of course, we don't do that anymore. And it wouldn't be that hard for algorithms to find ways to drive different behavior, to reward different kinds of behavior. Just turning back to your book and the story of us that we started this conversation with, and where we are on your 1,000-page historical timeline of humanity,

You say that the disasters on page 1,000 of The History of Us are exponential compared to the disasters on page 999. Why is that? Technology is a double-edged sword. I mean, look at the 20th century. It had record numbers in terms of GDP per capita and the eradication of disease and the fewest people ever in extreme poverty.

and just general prosperity. But it also saw the two biggest wars in history. It saw the two biggest genocides in history. And it saw the advent of the biggest existential risk weapon in history, the nuclear weapon. So the same century that was the best ever was also the scariest ever, and in some ways the worst ever in certain areas. So what does that mean about the next century, right? What does that mean about everything, if tech is continuing to explode?

It means that we could solve everything, just advancements in AI alone. I mean, we could solve all disease. We could solve world hunger and eradicate poverty. We could solve climate change. We could solve aging even. People could die when they want to. This is all realistic. This really could happen. But the existential risk, now there's not just one, there's many. And they go together. They feed on each other.

So you can look at that and you can sum that up and say the stakes are higher than ever. If we can kind of move forward wisely, we can live in what would seem like a utopia to people today. And if we don't, then, you know, if you live in this advanced society, the fall might be the worst ever. So the point is people should be scared. We shouldn't be cocky. And the reason I like the liberal house and I talk about it a lot

is that I think that gives us our best chance to proceed wisely. I think liberalism is the tool and the system that can get us to a really good future. And I think the destruction of liberalism is the ultimate existential threat because I think it enhances all the other existential threats. And so, yeah, I don't want us to get cocky about what we have and the stability we have because we really need it going forward and it should never take it for granted. You have a baby daughter.

What is the biggest piece of advice you could give someone, maybe like her, when she understands words, about the world and the world she's being born into as we move on to that thousandth and one page? I would try to teach her independent reasoning. Conventional wisdom from 10, 30, 50 years ago is often not accurate anymore. It's not wise anymore. Conventional wisdom does not stay wise for long.

And it's always going to lag behind. And so I would encourage her to trust her independent reasoning. And when it conflicts with conventional wisdom about how the world is, about where it's going, about who the harmful people and the productive people are, to continually trust

observe and reflect. And when her, what she comes up with there disagrees with conventional wisdom to trust it and to continually stay humble so that she can continue to change her mind. Because if you live in 50,000 BC, the world is the way it is. Your great-grandparent lived the same life you did. Conventional wisdom is the same as it always has been and it's wise. When the world is rapidly changing, you have to be nimble as a thinker and continue to adjust. So I would want her to do that. Tim Urban.

Thanks for coming on today. Thank you, Barry. Thank you.

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