Pirate Wires - How to Save the World w/ Tim Urban

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

PIRATE WIRES EP#19 🏴‍☠️ - This week on the pod, Tim Urban jumps on with Solana to discuss his new book, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies. Topics include mental frameworks for thinking clearly about politics, staying cool when issues become heated, the gollums of the Trump right and the social justice left, and soberly navigating Israel and Palestine in a moment of mass hysteria. Featuring Mike Solana, Tim Urban Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Tim Twitter: https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro IMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - Welcome Tim Urban To The Pod! Discussing His Book "What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies" 6:45 - What We Are Missing Right Now.. 11:45 - Existential Threats 21:30 - Group Think - How Gollums Take Over 40:30 - Social Wars 55:45 - What Do We Do? 59:00 - Where To Find Tim Online & Go Read Tim's Book - See You All Next Friday!

The escalating thing that can happen with tribalism, and it goes here, and then they said this, and then we hate them more, and we hate them more, and now they're showing these pictures of these dead kids in this one. Before you know it, there's just kind of mania going on. Just confirm, confirm. They'll sit around for three hours at a dinner

just talking about how right they are the entire dinner. And everyone, of course, agrees. Because if you don't agree, you're an awful person. You're not in the group anymore. I think there's people in America right now, lots who would cheer if I was murdered for being Jewish tomorrow. They would say, that's part of the struggle that needs to happen.

But if I met them and knew them in a different context, I would think, oh, lovely person. And they would think about me. Yeah, I love that guy. Great guy. Independence Day, the thing that brings us all together is a new external villain, but it's another other. We're very online creatures. We're both writers, like we're online. I don't know how the average person is going to make it in this information environment. Tim Urban, welcome to the Pirate Wires pod. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you. So Tim is, I mean, Tim, man, you are one of my favorite writers. You're one of my favorite

internet personalities. You've written a book just recently, which is what we're going to talk about today called What's Our Problem? A self-help book for societies. And I think right off the bat, and this is going to be kind of maybe this is going to be a different sort of podcast for us. It's not just the news. I do want to talk about your book. I want to talk about some of the frameworks that you've laid down for sort of diagnosing a lot of the problems we're experiencing in the world right now. I think probably the high level problem, and you can correct me if I'm wrong in a second, is just this like relentless polarization that makes it impossible for us to come together and think kind of freely in any way. We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the framework. We're going to apply it to some stuff today.

And, um, I think first, just when I started reading the book, it like, is there a couple of things about you as a writer that I really like? And one is just your fun kind of not even fun there. There's a really, you have a really smart approach to infographics. You do this thing on page one or two where you lay out all of human history on little squares. It's like each square I think is 250... 250. 250. What was it? Years.

So it's a thousand page book. Yeah. So when you see that, when you lay out all of human history in 250 year increments, So it's a thousand page book. Yeah. infographic, but you introduced the idea of technology as this, and I agree with you. This is something that I've kind of struggled with throughout my 30s and have kind of come to this conclusion with the help of Marshall McLuhan. Technology is good and bad. It's really neither. It's just a way that we do more with less and there are good things about it and bad things, but the more technology we have, the sort of crazier things can become.

And when you see history in that narrow, narrow band, when you see all of the things that have happened, just the last few pages of history, let's say, we're talking from Jesus Christ to present day. That's nothing. That's a snap of a finger. Technology, the accelerating power of technology has put us in a situation where the world might look so radically different in just 25 or 30 years that it's inconceivable to us today. And with that comes problems. It comes many benefits. I talk about them at Pyrowires all the time, the benefits, but there are also significant problems. And when it comes to information technology in particular, it's like one of the very new problems we're dealing with is, I think, communication, social media, and what that means for us. Maybe right off of the bat, if you want to just maybe

lay down the premise for your for your book i've been talking about it for a second here i want you to kind of just like come in tell tell uh the audience you know what it was you were trying to accomplish here yeah um i just i like to write about you know the future and future technology and um just like kind of imagining what 2050 and 2100 are going to be like. And there's so many crazy, exciting things. And some of them are scary and some of them are really, you know, exhilarating to think about. And then I meanwhile looked around me in the society and I was like,

I don't think we're going to like get there if we don't, like none of that matters. If like the societal house we're't like none of that matters if we if like the that the societal house we're living in is like the support beams are starting to weaken and crumble like it's like it's like this is the house that we will need to carry with us into this future and if the house is not it's like this needs to come first you need to figure so to me i was like what what is you know we have more knowledge than we ever did before. We have more, you know, technology, more prosperity than we ever did before by most metrics.

Why are we kind of descending into so many of these things that, you know, these, you know, I would read about McCarthyism. And I'd say, wow, that was so recent. You know, you read about, you know, about World War II, the Holocaust and i'd say wow that was so recent you know you read about you know about world war ii the holocaust you're like this was so recent how could people but behave this way how could you know people like you know uh and you know more and more we're seeing oh okay that's how people behave that way because we're doing it we're doing we're doing little traces of this thing and that thing and you know um you go back to like the you know salem witch burnings and the witch hunts and you're like i you know i maybe we're not we're not burning witches but i'm like i get it now i see how a bunch of people no worse than you or you or me could

uh do really bad things you can just see it and it comes with come to this collective madness that happens so basically i and and and you know the the and of course there's just also the crazy like you said political polarization the fact that you know there's there's such collective wisdom that we can have you know we can we can understand the nature of you know we can understand um the nature of space time and i wanted to stop you right there because that part wisdom and so you you mentioned that like a handful of times throughout the book and i think it's such an interesting word that we don't use almost ever in society anymore it almost sounds like mystical or something and people just people just don't

use that word but i agree that that once you said thought, wow, that is truly what we are missing right now. You can feel that. It is just there's a broad lack of wisdom. Yes. So it's like, which is maybe like a transcendent beyond even what is objectively true and not true. Like you can build a weapon of mass destruction through empiricism. But like wisdom is is like what is the utility of that different than intelligence yeah and it's like wisdom is you know is is under

for example it's like understanding long-term consequences of things that happen understanding patterns understanding like you don't want to talk about you know if you have an individual and they're wise maybe they have you have an understanding of what makes a good marriage or what makes a good life or whatever. But when you talk about the collective, it's like a wise society really knows their history. They remember it. They know the patterns. They can see them coming. Because of that, they can understand the consequences of certain policies, certain rhetoric, certain kind of arrangements of discourse in a way that people before them didn't, but they have the benefit of the hindsight. So they have wisdom.

And what it feels like today is you still have lots of individuals, many, many that I follow on Twitter who seem to fully still grasp wisdom, you know, the modern, you know, the lessons that we've all learned. And then yet there's this kind of other strain that is deeply unwise, like falling into every single trap, like just making every amateur error. And that force kind of has this kind of like, it's almost like it has this, it's like a living thing and it's like growing and it's spreading. I think what will be helpful is to get into some examples right now, before we get into your framework for thinking through a lot of the problems we're facing. And before we even get into examples, I started something earlier that I didn't fully finish,

which is your style as a writer. And I think it is linked to this wisdom thing. I feel when I'm reading your work as if I have a very thoughtful friend sitting next to me, trying his absolute best to see it from all sides, to be empathetic and to step outside of himself. And I can just feel that in you, that intense desire to be fair. I can just feel that in you that like intense desire to be fair. And you're, I will just say like much more fair than I am. I am like more of a,

I would say like wartime writer to a certain extent. I am like, I find an idea. I murder the idea. I saw myself in some of the, in some of the, I think you like diagnosed me as we'll get into that later of like where I would perhaps fall into some of these. I'm not sure about that.

I mean, maybe it's because I happen to agree with you on 99 of the things so i but i i you are you're definitely you have a lot of sass for sure um and like you're you're you know um but uh but you um i i i don't think you're um like uh small small minded or like unfair about what you say. I think most of what you say is like spot on. So I give yourself. Thank you. But I will say just like you, what you established with me was a certain level of trust.

And a big part of that was kind of taking it from multiple angles. And so maybe before we get into your framework, what I would love is just a couple of examples. What are some examples of maybe just the problems? I don't want golems or genies yet. We'll get into those in a second, the latter, none of that, but just some high-level problems that we are facing as a society that we want to overcome in order to build a better world. that we want to overcome in order to, you know, build a better world. So, I mean, you know, this is so, so, so we had this capacity for both collective wisdom, but also just collective intelligence. Again, we can, we can discover the, we can discover the subatomic particles, right? No human can do that. But collectively we're, we're, we're like a,

it's like, there's a species that is way smarter than humans. That is our collective brain. And it can do stuff that none of us can begin to do. And so this is part of why humans are amazing. And we can call up stuff like human rights and call up stuff like, you know, just the concepts of fairness and ethics and stuff that no other animal is beginning to do, right? On the other hand, we have crazy capacity to for collective madness like just stupidity evil um just just you know psychopathy basically just like just like collective everything bad and we can we are both this is what you know and and you know it kind of makes

sense to think about you know we evolved to be a successful tribe a long time ago. And that tribe had to both be able to solve problems and cooperate and, and really useful ways. And then it also needed to turn into a giant, you know, a group psychopath and murder other people because the ones who weren't like that, they didn't stick around. We're the- Well, it was existential, right? And I think one thing you do a really good job of is you explain, I mean, that is a problem that is baked into us at probably some kind of genetic level that we don't even understand. But in the context of a technologically advanced world, it's no longer just a small, the problem of a tribe or two. It's the problem of the fate of humanity. What happens when that collective madness that we know

we are capable of, we just saw, I mean, COVID was a collective, I think you talked about, you did, you talked about COVID in the book. That was a collective madness. There were moments of that in different ways that you were experiencing a collective madness. You have all sorts of examples from the GOP and from the social justice movements where like through history we've seen recent collective madnesses uh now in the middle east it's like very clear that we are in the middle of a collective madness and it's it's polarized like you see two collective madnesses i mean i'm maybe a little more consistent like i i don't know that i've been expressing everything on this because i don't know i don't really want to be getting into Middle Eastern politics. I know.

But my group chats are wild. And I find myself stepping back and being like, wait a minute, am I the moderate here? This is crazy. Yeah. When you have the technology to annihilate an entire people, the stakes are just higher. So I would say that's maybe the high level. It's like that atom bomb drop is what i am worrying about yeah i know it's it's like you see um you're seeing people you know like i'm a jew and i'm seeing people marching the streets who would cheer if someone murdered me today right and and yet and

yet if i met that person that someone who would cheer for that in a different context, and they went and met my, my baby and they went and they came over and we hosted them and they, and then we went to their house, we would love each other and think, Oh, what a great person. And there'll be, they'd be incredibly empathetic, lovely person. That's the crazy. This is like this. We have this weird switch in our head to turn into complete maniacs. I would say unless you're in Israel, then I think they don't care. There's no way that you're going to meet

and they're going to be nice. I still think that even the craziest people there, if you get them in a totally different context, of course, maybe you have some people who are like, if you are a Jew or whatever, you're just the devil but like it's just in america all the the the you know march is happening and it's uh i think there's

people in america right now lots who would cheer if i you know i was murdered for being jewish tomorrow they would they would say this is that's part of the struggle that needs to happen you were a colonizer and if i but if i met them and knew them in a different context i would think oh lovely person and they would think about me yeah i love that guy yeah that's true and and this is that's weird like we have um yeah and and and but the the negative side it almost always happens as a collective you know it's not just you know you have a crazy random you know ranting person on the street corner but usually it's that um kind of crazy psychopathy happens in this big collective and it like spreads like wolf pheromones people can and something like twitter is as much as i think it's an incredibly positive thing in many ways

right now for in a time like this it's also you know social media um it's like spreads psychopathy uh and it comes in at like pheromones and it like switches something in people's heads that just turn them into legitimate psychopaths it activates that survival instinct like when i feel it myself right now i feel this pull when those what you're talking about those protests, the rape parades, in the early days especially, I think Saturday, it was very, very, very clear what those parades were, what those celebrations were. look at that and i feel like i don't want that in my country like i feel like unsafe for my loved ones if that is what we are becoming and um and that once that gets in your head that like oh my like i literally that all saturday and sunday i was thinking about my sister and her kids and like that's that becomes very very very hard to remain rational at a moment like that once like once that kind of worms in and you see people going off on twitter it is very

like yeah collective madness status begins even now and it escalates so it's like what happens is you have these so you know um the uh i um read a book recently by Tobias Rhodes Stockwell, Outrage Machine, and basically he talks about how we think of empathy as purely a good thing, right? Empathy makes you feel for others and makes you feel love for them and whatever. And actually, empathy, while it can be great, is the lever that pulls the psychopathy switch. It is when you're going to see dead children on whatever side that you feel like you're on, that's going to suddenly, you're going to start to feel like, kill them all, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Craziness, right? And so what happens is, if you look at you know i actually you know i wrote a senior thesis in college about al jazeera tv this is back in like 2004 but you know what i noticed

there is like in order to kind of in order to deflect um uh criticism of themselves like the leaders in these these dictators in the middle east or whatever a lot of them would um you know it was such like an obvious tactic to just broadcast like dead Palestinians, like whatever, because it just creates this, it just is, it's just this, it deflects all of this anger that they have. And so it's like the amount of this

that is generated by kind of propaganda and PR, and granted there are actual people dying that like but but like specifically kind of showing certain things over and over it's it's it triggers certain psychology i want to introduce two concepts um from your book and then disagree with you a little bit uh so or maybe maybe not i might have just misread this stuff but um let's start so there's there's the concept of the. And then there is something a little bit later, which is like sort of optimal states or not optimal states. I would say like final states or something of different kinds of thinking. One leads to the genie and one leads to the golem. the golem. And I think that the genie golem thing was really interesting. It's like a very colorful and evocative way of talking about some of these ideas as they come alive and sort of dominate us online. But I want to start with the high level one, the ladder of thinking. Can you just break that down? How people think about ideas on this left or wrong ladder?

Basically, we have like the what you think axis, right? And that's, you know, in politics, there's far left and left and center and right and far right right and that's this horizontal axis we also could lay it out like what people think about any policy and you have one extreme here and the other extreme in the modern present these all these horizontal what you think axis axes and it just felt like we badly needed how you think axis um where at the top you know uh the and i call it a ladder and at the at the you can overlay on any what you think axis. And at the top, you're just you're deep down, deep down. True motivation is true.

You're just trying to figure out what's right. And as you creep down, you start to have a rooting interest for a certain position. And you want to kind of be right more than get it right. And as you get to the bottom, you become like afledged zealot who there's no there's no amount of evidence that could ever change your mind um because what you are you you now basically are a faithful disciple of a certain idea you you don't you're not the boss in your own head anymore you you live to serve that idea and to protect it you you will you will not let it info you won't ever believe info that contradicts it. And you will seek out cherry pick info that does. And it's not that you're this, oh, yeah, I'm stubborn,

awesome thinker. I don't change my mind. It's that you've given up the reins in your head. You're not the boss in your own head. If you're at the top, humbly searching for truth and inevitably saying, I don't know about all kinds of stuff because who could know about everything? You're actually, you seem humble, but you're also the, you're kind of like, you know, you're the, you're the alpha dog in your own head. And you're saying, yeah, none of these ideas are, have a permanent residence here. If something proves it wrong, it's out and you'll change your mind about anything. So it's a spectrum, right?

It's hard to be with the very, very top, especially about political things and things that. But along that spectrum, the very top of it, things and things that um but along that spectrum yeah well yeah the very top of it you have the scientist yeah and by the way i don't mean career scientists as we learned during open and play plenty of career scientists are way down down that ladder about their scientific ideas scientific method it's the scientific method right so scientific way of thinking where you're just like hypothesis and then look for evidence and then if it's true it's true and if it's not it's not and if something disproves it's out um and then look for evidence. And then if it's true, it's true. And if it's not, it's not. And if something disproves it, it's out. And then what happens to certain topics like politics, religion, certain things, you know, our lifestyle, you know, nutrition, you know,

you know, how you raise your kids, there's certain topics that really, they bring our identity starts being attached to our ideas. And when your identity is attached to your ideas, changing those ideas is not just, oh, I'm going to kick this idea out of my head because it's wrong. I'm going to be a little smarter. No, it's that I have an identity crisis here. It actually, an actual fight or flight part of your brain literally lights up and fMRIs when those ideas are challenged because it's like you feel like it's a personal, like dangerous attack almost because it's an attack on your identity. And so when that happens, we sink down on the ladder and there's nothing that can change our minds. So this is like an individual. This is how I think about individual thinking. If someone comes to me and says something, some strong opinion about anything in the news, the first thing I'm going to ask is that where do they stand? Where do they stand? What do they think? No. What kind of thinker is this person? What part of the ladder were they on when they came up with this idea? And I'm trying to learn about that before I know whether to trust them or not. were they on when they came up with this idea?

And I'm trying to learn about that before I know whether to trust them. Okay. So I'm thinking whether I should kind of lay down my pushback now or get into the golem idea first. I feel like they are related. These are related. So why don't let's do that now. Tell me the, yeah,

bring me to the, the genie versus the golem. Right. So, so, so we can like, you know, simplify, I have four rungs and a lot of we can simplify it to like high rung thinking, which is like truth first, even if there's a little confirmation bias. Truth ends up winning.

Critically though, scientific method, I would say. Yeah, scientific method. Like how can you get to the truth? Yeah. And in the end, there is enough, even if you have some confirmation bias, if there's really good evidence against your idea, you will change your mind. That's the definition. When you cross below that midpoint, you're a low rung thinker and now even if you you you think you're a good thinker you'll find evidence and stuff but deep

down there's nothing that could actually make you say i was wrong about this then you're in low you're in low rung thinking land so i kind of you can kind of say you know there's simplify it's just two kind of ways of thinking now this is an individual all of us kind of go up and down in that ladder and when i was what i've talked a little bit about earlier with kind of we can have collective wisdom and intelligence we also can have collective stupidity and madness and evil and those happen uh that that to me that is is that if you that these this individual way of thinking, they have emergent properties. So a group of people together, whether it's your text thread or classroom or just an individual married couple or a whole political party, there's an intellectual culture that takes over. And that intellectual culture can either serve the purpose of truth ultimately,

where it's like cool to disagree, cool to change your mind, saying I don't know makes you sound smart, not stupid. And disagreement is kind of the culture where it's like you're never going to, no one takes it personally. And so I call that an idea lab, idea lab culture, intellectual culture. And down below you have echo chamber culture, right? So echo chamber culture basically is low rung thinking on a mass scale, low rung thinking collectively, where the group itself does what the individual low rung thinker does when they say, I'm not going to change my mind. I won't listen to evidence that disagrees. The group now punishes, socially punishes people who say something that contradicts the sacred belief of the group. And it's something, and they're constantly together, like sourcing sources, sourcing information that confirms

their beliefs, just confirm, confirm. They'll sit around for three hours at a dinner, just talking about how right they are the entire dinner. And everyone, of course, agrees, because if you don't agree, you're an awful person, you're not in the group anymore. So that's echo chamber culture. And what I thought about is that, you know, these don't just affect each individual, what kind of the culture you surround yourself with, but they have this emergent property. So the genies can't, right? Genies can't. Genies can have wisdom. It's like, that's like this super brain when all of our brains connect like neurons with each other

and everyone can disagree, which means everyone can say what they're really thinking. Now you have this thing that's smarter than any human. That's what I call a genie. On the other hand, echo chamber culture is it makes another kind of giant, an emergent property of it is uh this giant i call a golem this big kind of dumb giant and and the genie while it's very wise and intelligent

smarter than any human the golem is like just mindless and has no and is and is and is a psychopath thinks that you know we you know you know kill the kill whoever else if you're not in my in group you're an awful person those people are bad we are good it's just tribalism kind of it's like tribalism um as a character and i call it that's golem and when i see you know really you know it marches in the street that are chanting awful things i just i don't see a bunch of people i see this tramping like godzilla like um you know uh big golem probably okay so i thought it was also in the echo chamber, the sort of breeding ground of the golem.

You mentioned the quality of enforcement or the tool of enforcement is the taboo, which strikes me as true. I would say that probably it's not just mobs of people chanting things in the street that are golems. Any mob of people chanting anything in the street, whether we like it or not, is a golem. Like, I think that they're... Okay.

So I guess the question I have is, while you framed all of these things on a gradient from the best to the worst or the most aspirational to the least, maybe the most dangerous, I kind of have seen a place for... There's utility in zealotry, I think, and there's utility in the golem that I want us to maybe have a quick discussion about. And I want to start with just, when we're talking about the zealotry of ancient knowledge, which feels like very antithetical to somebody at that top rung as a scientist, you know, using the scientific method, you look at something like the dietary laws in the Old Testament, and it's like, you should not be eating shellfish or pork or whatnot.

And 99.9% of people who follow these faiths just blindly adhere to that. And it's silly and it makes no point. I eat shellfish all the time and pork. I'm totally fine because I live in a world of refrigeration. But that ancient knowledge that went unchallenged, most people throughout time where maybe, or in these religions were, were perhaps following that there was utility in them following that guidance, even though they weren't thinking about it. And, um, so just like right off of the bat, that one's obvious because we understand it. And it's like, oh, probably that's a law because it

saved a lot of people's lives, you know, in the, in the Bible, in the old Testament. Um, lives you know in the in the bible in the old testament um what other knowledge is in there that is also serving some kind of utility that we just don't understand and has been passed on and and so in this way maybe like there are ideas that you can follow that um that are saving your life. And so I see like this, there's just this tension in, yes, we should be interrogating ideas, but I don't know that everything that hasn't been fully interrogated

should be discarded. And in fact, you know, the high level thing, all this polarization that we're looking at, this just increasingly, I i mean 20th century was the most violent century in history i think it just in terms of raw numbers of deaths um all of it kind of coincides with the decline of faith in the west which is like the decline of

this inherited knowledge structure um now people have fought wars for faith, and I understand it's extremely bloody and it's extremely violent, and maybe the only difference is technology. But just right there, before we get to the golem, do you maybe see what I'm saying that I misunderstand? What is your response? No, I do see what you're saying. I think that the...

So what you're saying is that sometimes there is an idea that is, it's ideal if everyone just would believe it. It would be best for everyone. And there, in an idea like that, if there's kind of widespread. No, I'm saying the zealotry of faith has perhaps protected us in ways that we don't even understand. And so as we discard these things, we could be in danger in ways that we don't even understand and so as we discard these things we could be in danger in ways that we don't yet understand i i think with faith that i think that is i i used to you know like a lot of kind of for you know i don't know people who used to be center left whatever would say is they they went through a similar path where um they you know in 20 2008 and 2006

and 2012 thought you know the christian right was the big problem christianity you know religion was bad um and i think i think like like me a lot of us have kind of come around and realize that um that we are a religious species and we will be religious about something and maybe that the thing that's gone through 2 000 years of trial and error and actually has a bunch of incentives to behave well to your fellow human is not the worst thing and that when you take one yeah when you replace it with some political religion that was invented yesterday um you know it has no kind of moral you know under um you know structure underneath it um that's how you get things like the the nazis and you know stalin and just like maoists just like mass death and you know yes religion also causes mass death but you know the kind of american

you know version of christianity for all its faults like i you know it's there's there's on the left 70 i think of people on the, just like very similar numbers to the right, consider themselves Christians like in 1990. And now it's down to like 35 on the left. Right. The right has remained the same. That gap's gotten filled by something that's pretty nasty. So I think you're making a totally good point here. I think that the only issue is that if you're relying on like, you know, you're saying that

some zealotry is good and sure, you just, you have to get lucky. You have to hope that the things people are being zealots about happen to be serving us in some way. And so often they don't. And at least if you have independent thought, you know, you know, you can, you sometimes will lose the benefit of like mindless zealotry towards something that happens to be helpful, but you also cure yourself of all the, I think in general, you'd have a net positive. If you just turn people into more humble, independent thinkers, yeah, you're going to lose something.

But the problem for me isn't necessarily that we're losing zealotry of one kind, it's that we're getting zealotry of another kind. And it's something like uh shellfish whatever and you know that i still think we can arrive at so much of here's what's actually best using the scientific method and then people can feel a hundred percent about it because of the good for good reasons because they actually had no and and they have institutions that can figure this stuff out and they trust those institutions so we can get to kind of i

really you know um uh just kind of strongly held views about good things the other way but so i'd thought that i think zealotry is always like a bad thing like you're saying it's just that i think that if that's the rule you're gonna have so many bad worse so so many more bad tribes doing bad things than you will have good you know i think if you look at history i i agree i mean first of all just i agree that there are all sorts of things in this sort of ancient inherited knowledge that are wrong and counterproductive and and even dangerous often dangerous um i just have increasingly this sense that it's Lindy. It's survived for a reason. It was beneficial. And the modern world has untethered me from that to such a degree that I'm a little bit blind right now. And maybe we're always a little bit blind. You can only

interrogate so many facts about your world and independent thinkers can only think through so much. These stories in the Bible, for example, they feel like super, super bound, tight, coded bits of information. These stories, the various parables and whatnot, there's a lot in there that we've thrown away. And think yeah if you could rethink through everything for the modern world you'd make a lot of changes but until we get there like i would also something to to rest on on top of so i'd also say that you know maybe if i could press a button and you know we just kind of go back in time to a time when most people are kind of blindly following the Bible or whatever. Would that be better than today? Maybe.

But that's not what's happening. Like, there's also just the fact that in the modern world of the Internet, and I think you're going to it was inevitably you're going to see a breakdown of those religious assumptions. And I'm not hearing you're right but i'm not hearing anything from so let's just call it what we're talking about the left's new faith is this intersectional like oppression based woke ideology whatever you want to call it that thing um and then you have on the other side let's's talk about like Islamism or something like a radical concert, like super right wing patriarchal at its most extreme, which is like 15 to 20% of practitioners. We're talking like prison state status, religion, kind of like what people think of when I was in college. And I used to think about the Christian right, which was like a completely made up idea in my head i was thinking about

radical islam yeah um really really actual so like these are the two like these are the two faiths that i see at work in the world right now and uh i don't want either and so what is like your mass defense from that but some other kind of like well but i'm saying i don't i i look i i just think that the idea that that um you'll have giant masses of new young people kind of um blindly believing one of the old ideas that's 2000 years old i just think that that's unlikely to happen. Maybe there's a big wave of, you know, new, you know, born again, whatever. But to me, I just think that for, you know, for better or worse, I think that those days are not here

anymore. And you're going to have more and more people defecting from the old things because the internet is there to break things down and you're not in these silos. And therefore, given that fact, I think that we would love to start training a lot of people on independent thought because at least a bunch of independent thinkers are not going to end up chanting for the death of innocents. A bunch of independent thinkers just don't do that. It's when everyone hands over their independence to this collective golem, that you have total psychopathy. So, yeah, I just think, yeah, I think that at least that's better than what we're getting. When it comes to the golem, you do this interesting, you kind of take the American historical context of this, and you demonstrate how when you have a collective golem, for example, strong nationalism in the 20th century, is kind of the infographic that you use, like the American patriotic looking golem, for example, strong nationalism in the 20th century is kind of the infographic that you use.

You have the American patriotic looking golem. And then beneath that golem, you had the red and the blue. Yeah. They were able to get along because they had this higher level. And lower. So, okay. So, if you think about tribalism, if you think about tribalism tribalism as my team versus yours, but actually, there's different layers. So if you go to 1950s, and people think, oh, it was a time of relative unity politically, you elected this moderate Eisenhower who wasn't even sure which party he was going to run for. I mean, a totally different kind of time. It's that the tribalism was distributed. So you had some people whose minds were just fixated on patriotism and xenophobia and, you know, America versus first Hitler and then Soviet Union.

Then you also then below that you have some people who are so worked up about hated each other. And they would actually, so down below, those factions encouraged people to actually, they hated their own brother and their thing so much that they would go with the kind of the cousin in the other party over anything besides my brother. So that was a force of unity up above in the national red versus blue thing. And likewise, you had the national thing was a sense of unity that kind of calmed down the red versus blue thing. And likewise, you had the national thing was a sense of unity that kind of calmed down the red versus blue thing. So each of these diffuses the other layers, right? And it kind of is healthy in some ways. It's distributed tribalism from the top, the high to the low level.

And then you see for both two different reasons, the factions, we realign politically. So all those factions kind of change and now it becomes much more two teams. And if you're not on that team, it's not that we're going to fight factions we you know what we we realign politically so all those factions kind of change change and now it becomes much more two teams and if you're not on that team you're not it's not that you're we're going to fight within our party you're out of the party and you're in the other party and now you have this ideological kind of consolidation and then we stop having the heart real serious scary threat of soviet union hitler and the soviet union like we lose our real fear there

which loses our which takes our tribalism down a notch. And suddenly, and then you have these media stations popping up, Fox News, MSNBC, et cetera. Right. Well, I'll get into broadcast in a second, but it doesn't, US versus Taylor was highly tribal. Right. But it was one form and it helped diffuse the national hatred of each other. Right. So there was a utility. Yeah, just like if aliens attacked Earth, of course, we'd all suddenly get along.

I was thinking about Independence Day. Right. Exactly. So Independence Day, the thing that brings us all together is a new external villain. Yes. But it's another other. Or the other way around. If you start having Republicans fighting about Trump, that's going to make the red versus blue thing

calm down a little bit because they're so mad at each other. And likewise, if you have Muslims start to fight about something, that's going to calm down the tribalism. So we lost that. And in the US, it basically all consolidated into this one layer

of national red versus national blue. And it's this concentrated tribalism. And that's when things get scary that's when things become really psychotic so the thing that i'm struggling with is because it just seems like what was really beneficial was having a common enemy and that is still really bad like it is still it seems like hardwired into us to be searching for the enemy period and uh to be searching for the enemy period. And obviously an external is better,

seems much healthier than an internal, but an external is still really bad. A little bit of patriotism and a little bit of like, we're all Americans is healthy. And, you know, of course, going to its extreme, you have hardcore xenophobia and people hate criming immigrants and stuff.

So we don't want to go there, but it's like a little bit right now we have so little of that there's very little red and blue people from across the aisle hugging each other me like hey we're all Americans and no one's saying that that's not and likewise by the way like you know when Israel Palestine picks up you know it's making Muslims who are you know

in fierce battle with each other in a different sects and different political groups well you see this with they're saying you know you're I love you, brother. The Sunnis don't like each other until there's a war with Israel. It diffuses it when there's Israel. We don't have that right now in the U.S. We don't have this Israel.

We don't have something. And that's what I was saying. It's like Al Jazeera. You see that this is used to kind of simmer the national stuff because they can all focus on this other thing. And Americans don't have that right now. Something that all Americans can say, of course, I prefer any american over this thing no one has that yeah um it seems when you are at war you need a golem to survive what do you think about that so yeah yeah this

is why we all have the capability to do this we all of us including me you, we have this switch that will make us suddenly just kind of crazy. And we'll be thinking, good, kill as many people. I mean, just madness. Evil, right? We all have it. And it's because we evolved in a world where these golems were tramping around the land. And if you couldn't, when you needed to, form an even bigger golem and defend yourself you're done so the people that didn't have that switch they're just not around anymore and so um i do think like

if if you're if your country is invaded you know that's the time when you you you you need to for your own arrival you need to form psychopathic golem yourself and or else you're gone so yeah this capacity is the thing the reason that every person on the planet has his capacities because every person on this planet has an ancestor who survived because of this capacity yes has many many ancestors that survived both the golem and the i and the genie you need it because because in peacetime cooperation is how you're you became you know you was prosperous and you had food and you you know you so um it's but but what i what's upsetting is you know what we it's like yes if literally the u.s has invaded okay you know we

should all just form a golem and just become psychopaths to try to defend ourselves but until that time i do think that that switch is very you know it's it's um uh we we we are very um uh prone to set a switch it because our brain thinks we're still in 50,000 BC. And there's this group that we don't like on Twitter and it makes us suddenly activate. And no one's going to kill us right now. Right now, 99% of the time, golems are being activated. It's not because it's existential.

It's because it's just our nature. And then what happens is those golems activate each other and it escalates until maybe you do have a civil war or you do have something. So I think- One other, sorry, finish your point. No, no, no. I was just going to say another funny thing about that online

is just how often the golems manifest in the stupidest way possible over the stupidest things imaginable. So it's like the entire, let's just say like the entire, like really almost everything with gender. Like the gender golems are so crazy and they're go they're straight up golemed up like they're golemed up fighting yeah like like like the trans swimmer or something like that is what's driving people

nuts and you know you know you're in the presence of this kind of low rung echo chamber golem psychology when you know if you if you say something even if it's something that 90 of normal people would just say obviously you get this incredible negative reaction because you've you've you've you've given an existential threat to the goal so golem so genies are actually very robust right you know you can bring disagreement and they say great they thrive off disagreement golems are they're strong but they're brittle and they're fragile. And their entire being is glued together by agreement, by 100% zealotry agreement. And so any doubt within the group or outside the group has to be squashed immediately. This is the blasphemy because it can't handle any form of doubt.

The golem melts away, right? The switches, the psychopath switches go off once there of doubt. The goal melts away, right? The switches, the psychopath switches go off once there's doubt. So you will see it when you notice a crazy strong reaction to any dissent, you're looking at that psychology. The internet itself strikes me as, I mean, certainly structurally, it's built to be a kind of idea lab. And yet it seems like it's maybe fallen a lot. It's fallen pretty short in this respect. What do you think is causing that? I think there really is a good and bad story here

in that, you know, like the people I follow on Twitter, I do because I wrote this book. I follow a lot of zealots on both sides of every issue because I just want to see what they're saying, even though it's maddening. Wow, your feed must be very fun now. But that's not the majority. The majority of people I follow are people who I think are extremely well-reasoned and

high-rung thinking. So I do feel like I'm getting... When I go on Twitter for a few hours, I come out with a bit more nuanced understanding. And I'm a little humbled about something I thought. And I just feel like I am, versus if I live in like, if it's 1980 and I'm just around the same 12 people at work or in my friend group,

I'm going to be maybe more in an echo chamber than I am now. So I think the internet really is a place where idea lab culture can spread. The problem is the current first, I feel like we're still in kind of V1 of social media. Maybe we're in V2 of social media of social media maybe we're in v2 of social media algorithms and i think maybe in 20 30 years we'll look back and say oh my god those algorithms were just totally um hardwired to misery engines and and and to stoke the switches

to stoke low run culture to bring people down and so you'll see there'll be one completely wrong, infuriatingly worded tweet that is misleading, intentionally misleading in propaganda, right? And on Twitter right now, not only is that tweet doing really well amongst the people who it's targeted for, you see 7,000 retweets and you're like, oh my God, this is so annoying. But also it's being passed around all the people who hate that side and it's making them really angry and it's making it feel like there's no reason over there. And so I think that right now you do have the escalating thing that can happen with tribalism and it goes here and then they said this and that. We hate them more and we hate them more. And now they're showing these pictures of these dead kids and this one. Before you know it,

there's just kind of mania going on that the internet is really good at producing that that's that's the social media side i mean then there's also the the way tribal media has that that's all let's say so you talked in the in the book you talk about uh the difference between broadcast and narrowcast and throughout the 20th century we had more of a broadcast model where um you had a handful of media giants speaking to everybody and that forced people more to the center. And it seemed like a much more ascended intellectual model, even though it's missing a lot of details. The narrowcast model, which begins, I don't know where you would say it begins, but you cited in 1996 was both um both fox and msnbc were formed and certainly by the internet now we're living in a new media world which is entirely narrow cast by that we

mean um smaller entities speaking to very niche audiences giving them basically exactly what they want to hear um it seems like it's framed in such a way as as broadcast would be sort of um better in some in some way uh and maybe in most ways, than narrowcasting, which feeds the golem-like demons. And yet, I would just quickly introduce this idea that what we're seeing right now while infuriating on the topic of Israel and Gaza, it seems like we can't come to agreement on something in earlier days. So the 20th century was a time of war, big nationalistic war constantly in America. I thought about Iraq was the most recent example of this. But before that, I think the much worse example, the reason that we all hate ourselves now in America, I think is Vietnam, which was a really horrifying war. And my dad's a Vietnam vet and it's very complicated. And I think the only way Vietnam could happen was the broadcast model. I think in a narrow cast world, don't know that vietnam would have happened i think that's a really good point i think that there's there's such a clean clear story about

the negatives of transitioning from broadcast to narrowcast and i i think that vietnam's a perfect example of the upsides of narrowcast upsides of social media i think that vietnam the americans would have figured out that that was a stupid war and that it was, you know, whatever in a couple of weeks. Yeah. And it took over a decade instead. And so I do think that there's something I think that, you know, there's just a lot more real info out there. And there's the, you know, again, Twitter has a lot more info than the mainstream media. You know, you're going to really you want You want to see what's going on now and what everyone thinks about it. And it happens quickly on Twitter and all the sides form. Everything.

Yeah. I just had a disagreement with Noah Smith about this. He said he kind of denied that he was on Twitter during the weekend terrorist attacks on Israel and that he was getting all this news from the New York Times when I was like, that's just, I don't believe you. Everything I learned, I would not have known what was going on in Israel were it not for my live feed of carnage, which is perhaps not healthy, but I certainly think like I am immune to the, to the, I was immune to the coverage that the New York Times was giving

on Saturday night. And that was because I was looking at it, right? Like, I was actually seeing the people kidnapped. I was actually seeing the death. It's not just seeing it. It's like, on Twitter, because again, it depends who you follow, but I follow a wide variety. So on Twitter, I go on and a couple hours later, I've seen all the pictures. I've seen the claims that the pictures are not real. I've seen the people refute those claims. The community notes, the notes on the notes. I've seen 10 different takes on history. I've seen 10 different takes on comparing the rising anti-Semitism to another time. I've seen all these comparing Israel-Palestine to Liberia and other people comparing it to Algeria and other people

comparing it to the US, the slaves. And I also, in my head, I have a little meter of where I think how high rung each of those thinkers is from my own experience in the past. So each time I'm also kind of taking certain things with different grains of salt. And two hours later, I have such a rich, nuanced, I feel like picture of what's going on. You know, and if I go to the New York Times, even if they were completely the most unbiased, just trying to say the truth, it's just one point of view and it's a couple of journalists trying to do it. And then, of course, you have the issue that the mainstream media does PR for whatever side that they want to do PR for in addition to doing the news. So that is a massive

upgrade over. Now, granted, the New York Times today is partially less trustworthy because of the narrowcast model where at least CBS, NBC and ABC in the 60s, I think would be more trustworthy maybe than the New York Times today. But and definitely more trustworthy than MSNBC, Fox News today, I think, for a typical issue. But on the other hand, that's all you got. So it's like, you know, so for understanding an issue like something that's happening right now, I'll take today over that. But there's a huge, huge other story about the downside here about how this became a model where it used to be the business model was

be accurate and seem totally neutral. Because if you start to seem biased, you're going to lose half the country. You're going to become a laughingstock if you seem inaccurate. If you get proven, NBC seems to be wrong more than the other two, you're done. Then in 90s, right mid 90s, you start to have these, Fox News, I think, kind of pioneered it. And it was like, wait a second. The country's gotten really tribal. We can have a whole other business model. And we throw accuracy and neutrality out the window. Not totally, but we throw it largely out the window and instead tell one tribe what they really want to hear. And it's just a completely different business model. And then suddenly a hundred copycats come on because it's a brilliant business model today and it makes a

ton of money. And then you have social media algorithms. And I think that this is very, it stokes tribalism in a very hardcore way. Yeah. I would say the broadcast monopoly was captured ideologically. Like Fox, when it comes out, they're saying, we're going to give you the real truth because you know you've been lied to. The reason the message resonated was because people knew that they were not getting the entire truth. They were getting a very biased version of that. People are always going to be imperfect. So unbiased, right? I am very biased. Everything that we write at PirateWire is biased. It's biased. It's biased by our perspective. And I try and own that and say, this is who we are. This is how I see things. This is what I want to happen. You take everything what I'm saying with a grain of salt. I think that

the narrow cast thing feels, it's weird, it's both. It feels healthier, but then also what you were just describing on Twitter, having to go onto Twitter for a couple hours and download every crazy opinion and history, that's exhausting. And we're very online creatures. We're both writers. We're online. I don't know how the average person is going to make it in this information environment. Well, one thing you can start to do is you can find proxies. You can say, this person I've now seen five or six times seem to have a nuanced view or maybe these two people. So I'm just going to listen to this person's podcast and that's how I want to get it. And, and, and, you know, I vetted that, that they're a high rung thinker. They can go do all the

looking what's going on in Twitter and they can come back and I'll at least trust them. Of course, a lot of people end up trusting a hardcore zealot who agrees with them instead. But this is, uh, Oliver, John Oliver, is this for people? Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, a lot of people end up trusting a hardcore zealot who agrees with them instead. This is Oliver. John Oliver. Is this for people? Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan. Is this for people?

Like, yeah, these are the and I listen, I am not an Oliver guy. I like Joe Rogan, but both of them are very clearly speaking. Joe is more honest about it. Maybe that he's like, this is my perspective or whatever. John Oliver is doing the classic sort of John Stewart thing, who i also used to love it was like i'm just a comedian but it's like no you're you're a cult leader and that was in the cult so i loved it i was in the cult too i was in that john stewart i think that joe rogan will if he has a viewpoint he'll say it and piss off his base i'll piss off you know or piss off the center right hardcore and make them really angry by defending Bernie

Sanders or something. I don't see that from John Oliver. I don't think he has the willingness. I don't think it's necessarily his particular... I don't think that HBO or whatever, I don't think he's even allowed to... We did see it briefly from... To go back to our original cult, Jon Stewart during COVID, I feel like was one of the main reasons. We would have happened eventually. It was just so stupid. But when we had this sort of intellectual embargo on the lab leak and we couldn't talk about the virus perhaps coming from the COVID factory, Stewart was the one who was like, I was so excited for him to come back and just be like a voice of reason. And he comes back

and he starts creating Robin D'Angelo's ideas around. i was like bro like yeah i was so disappointed i was like be cooler than that yeah like i really just you i thought he was about to shake the world and then it was just like no you're just like an older version of other people who are saying dumb things like you it's he's not the john stewart oh he still doesn't want to piss off like woke people like all the other i'm just like this is a small group of people that most no one agrees with and you're gonna be another one of these big voices that just can't disagree with them um i want to maybe wrap it up with an idea that so we have these frameworks for thinking about um for thinking about thinking you know thinking about navigating our uh this this information ecosystem that we live inside of um how now facing i mean a serious like the terrorist attacks that i saw were like

unlike anything i've ever seen or even in that it was horrible um and we're just very clearly entering now a period of total war because i mean it's like real crazy violence is what we're just very clearly entering now a period of total war because, I mean, it's like real crazy violence is what we're approaching. And with that's going to come insane tribalism. It's going to become, I think, very hard to function online as I don't want to call myself reasonable because I'm often not reasonable, but I'm more reasonable than what I'm seeing online right now. And how do you advise navigating this right now? You've studied this for years. You've got this history book and this self-help book. What do we do? How do we learn about the world right now in a world that is so fraught with misinformation and just emotion? Just think to be aware of what we're seeing.

We see golems forming to at least see it for what it is understand that this isn't like these people are evil but that there's a psychologist you know psychological switch in our heads that has been switched and to to just see you know see propaganda for what it is to to know that the people you're going to need to convince are going to have a tendency to be really tribal, to kind of be manipulated by a lot of the propaganda. And so if we just start there and we just kind of like understand this is what humans have done throughout history. We're doing a lot of it. You can see people doing it now. This is how it works. This is how propaganda works. This is how tribalismism works i think that at least prepares us better to a avoid falling into the pitfalls ourselves and b like figure out you know just i just try

you know to retweet the people that are being high rock regardless of whether they agree with you or not like to try to add you know if we're all in a boat and uh there's you know steering on one side points us towards this and there's a fork in the river and one side we're just going to just kind of utter destruction way down you know down the road and the other side we can get out of this and go to like a much happier world what side of the boat are you paddling you know and it's like you know just if it just if that's the first thing like put your own mask on before helping a western man meme with the dark castle and the and the night yeah exactly i thought about that all throughout

your opening of this book right it's it's like just just first just paddle on the right side yourself just try to now to simmer those things and to uh and to call out and be brave some courage you know like so many people know what the right thing is to say and they don't want to tweet it they don't want to say it out loud because they just why why would you want to but you know that that means you're taking your paddle out of the water and you know put your paddle in the water and steer in the right side and then you can maybe try to maybe try to convince others to do the same because when you're not paddling you know it's like you're still being paddled people are paddling oh yeah and so many people right now just in a time like this think i'm not going to get involved i don't want to deal with

the repercussions of this and it's like okay great but you're allowing like the boat to go in a certain direction you're not you know and if if there's just a kind of a lack of courage um and you know saying courage can be contagious when you get out there and start saying something you know other people will too um so i think i think that was part of what got us into so much trouble um over the last few years with you know i think I think with woke stuff and with MAGA stuff, like I think you have just a lack of courage. You're people that think this is madness and no one's saying it.

And so just to not, to learn from that and not do it again. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me. You guys should definitely check out Tim's book again. It is What's Our Problem? Self-help, a self-help book for societies. That's What's Our Problem?

And Tim, what is your handle on Twitter? Is it just Tim Urban? WaitButWhy. Wait book for societies that's what's our problem and tim what is your handle on twitter so just tim urban wait but why wait but why that's what it was uh yeah check out wait but why um this uh this was great thanks again thanks mate