TRIGGERnometry - How the Media Creates Delusional Tribes - Tim Urban

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

Tim Urban is a blogger who writes about a wide range of topics, from science and technology to psychology and philosophy. He is known for creating minimalist stick-figure illustrations to help explain complex concepts in a simple way. His musings are collected on his website, ‘Wait But Why’, and featured in his newly-released book, ‘What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies’ - available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVGH6T1Q/ Become a Premium Member to receive exclusive benefits https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:18 Tim Urban’s Background 02:51 What's Causing All the Division? 06:34 The Largest Contributor to Tribalism  12:15 The Population’s Exposure to Information 15:30 Biological Aspects to Tribalism 19:42 When Will We Need to Take Responsibility for How We Act? 23:14 Tim’s Optimism for the Future of Social Media  28:15 What is Elon’s Vision For Twitter? 31:09 Elon Musk's Power to Disrupt 41:11 Sponsor Message: easyDNS 42:16 How To Live & Take Greater Risks 45:17 Overcoming The Fear of Embarrassment 51:48 The Reality of Our Agency & How Much Time We Have Left 55:39 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. The way I think about it is like our brains always have this tribalism kind of switch that is there, ready to be turned on. People don't really want news necessarily. What they want is they want to watch a reality show. An entertaining, addictive reality show with good guys and bad guys, people you hate, people you love, especially if it feels like you're inside of it.

You know, it's my team and their team in the reality show. That will hook people. That will hook people hard because, again, this primitive mind is very into that. Now the model is, you know, can you entertain? Can you get people gripped and angry and feeling like, you know, they're just hooked on this reality show and they feel like they're inside of themselves. And accuracy, when that is going on, like just goes out the window. Accuracy stops mattering. They don't get penalized for it.

And neutrality, forget that. It's long gone. We think empathy is great, right? Empathy. What could be bad about that? We should have more empathy. But actually, empathy can be used very, you know, cleverly to make, to breed complete dehumanizing hate. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry.

I'm Francis Boston. I'm Constantine Kisten. And this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations. with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today is an author and one of the most popular bloggers in the world. Tim Urban, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. Tim, listen, before we get into the conversation itself, tell us a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Yeah, I mean, I've always been someone who is very curious and learning and thinking

and framing stuff. And I've also always liked, you know, like, I don't know, I would come back from a trip and I'd write like a long, kind of funny email to a group of friends about what happened. So I've always kind of liked like that form of writing, like casual. And in 2005, I started a blog on blogger.com. And realized that this was, I hated writing my whole life because it was school writing. So I thought writing is like, you know, humanities. You know, but I realized that I like blogging. It's fun.

And I like the kind of like wild card of like, you never know if something is going to go viral. You never know what people are going to think. It kind of makes it kind of exciting. So it was an activity I liked and then did it on the side for a bunch of years and then decided to go serious with it and go full time. in 2013. And that's what I've been doing since. So, Tim, one of the things you've been talking about a lot in recent years is how our brains are causing all the tribalism and the division that we're now seeing out in the world. Can you tell us a lot about that because you've got some very interesting ideas and ways of looking at it about how we've got to where we've got to?

Yeah. I mean, the way I think about it is like our brains always have this, this tribalism kind of switch that is there ready to be turned on. You know, it's that our brains haven't changed. But something more recently has been really triggering it. Like it's like, you know, we always have a craving for sugar and fat. And then you can have like a massive wave of, you know, fast food restaurants open and people aren't wise yet to the fact that they're selling you unhealthy food and they frame it as healthy and it's delicious and there's a giant wave of obesity.

And that switch was always there. They're just the environment changed and we didn't, we weren't wise to what was happening yet. And a lot of people kind of fall into it, fall for it and end up and it works. And we all end up in a tribal culture war that no one really wants to be in and that is stupid to be in. and that is, doesn't really map on to the, you know, zoom out of our time,

which is that it's a very prosperous time living as about as well as anyone in history has lived. And with high stakes things going on for the future, you know, like, you know, exploding technology and all this stuff where the last thing you'd want is for us to start descending into like an in inane culture war.

So, so yeah, I tried to like dig into what is what is going on in our brain. why do we have this switch? And the way I kind of, the way I kind of thought to kind of frame it is, there's this higher mind you could say we have in our head that is, that just kind of thinks clearly

and understands that, you know, that kind of hardcore tribes aren't really real and that we're just a bunch of individuals and that nuance is complicated and truth is hard. that there's no clear cut, you know, right and wrong and that has humility about what we know. Just the kind of thinking that anyone would do if they were in their right mind because it's just based on obvious reality. And then there's this other character in our brain. I call it the primitive mind, which is the kind that is just wired for survival in an ancient world.

And it is not concerned with, you know, it's not good at truth. It's not good at, it falls for kind of cheap tricks. like thinking that you're on this big tribe and these are the good guys and they're perfectly good and they're right about everything and those are the bad guys and the wrong run and everything. That's the same kind of part of our brain that would fall for, you know, seeing low fat wheat thins in the store and think, oh, that's healthy. It's healthy. And you think that it's healthy to eat skittles because it tastes delicious and it's chewy and that part of your brain doesn't get that this is bad for you. It thinks this must be so delicious. It must be a good thing to eat. So it's not a

very wise part of our brain. But it's totally been tricked. and inflamed over the past few decades by changes in, you know, the way the media is. This is I'm talking about the U.S. and probably other parts of the Western world, too. But, you know, I don't want to speak for other countries. But it's, you know, social media. All these environmental changes have just been an easy trap for that part of our brain. And we're seeing the results of that. And you mentioned social media.

That's obviously like the go-to. Have there been other things as well? I mean, you mentioned media more generally and the 24-hour news cycle, I imagine, is one of the big changes that has caused this. Is there anything else or is it really just about the way we consume information now, just like you mentioned McDonald's with food? Yeah, I mean, I saw on Twitter a graph the other day that was saying something like, you know, it was asking people, do they think that the government is generally working for the people or that it's like devious and doing awful things? 2002, it was like 50-50 split. And then that's just change and change. We're now almost everyone, you know,

or three quarters of the country thinks that the government is out to, you know, doing, doing evil, awful things behind everyone's back. And there's a lot of these, you know, that, you know, people's beliefs about race relations were steady for a while and then just plummeted starting in like 2013. And now everyone thinks that race relations are worse than ever. You know, things like these aren't necessarily all the same. anything, but like, people's just outlook in general. People's feeling like things are unfair

in general. People's feeling like the end is near. You know, all of this kind of, this thought has, is on the rise. But if you look at like crime statistics or poverty statistics or disease statistics, you know, it doesn't actually map on to the, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't, it's not, can't just be a result of, well, things are getting much worse. And so people believe that. So then you're reminded that like we don't really, none of us, the reality of a society, that is, you could spend a million years with perfect data on everything and still not be able to wrap your head around. What the hell? It's so complicated, right? So you can't think that your depiction of the world is going to be completely accurate. We have a picture painted for

us. And for many people, that's by the media. and if you think about the way the media used to be, the news media was there was a half hour of news a night on three major networks, a half hour. So, you know, and local news was always kind of trashy and covered like negative stuff and covered murderers and stuff. The national news was generally like, they just didn't have time for bullshit.

They had 30 minutes to be like, here's what's happening in like giant world affairs and like national affairs. And then people turned it off and did something else. And then what happened, you know, with the advent of cable TV, and then, you know, first it was CNN, which was kind of neutral for a while. And it was in the mid-90s that I think Fox News kind of pioneered a strategy that then

MSNBC picked up on and then and then CNN itself jumped on that. And then a ton of other, you know, a lot of our newspapers that used to be more professional and neutral and, of course, a million internet websites all jumped on this new business model, this genius new business model, which is that, People don't really want news necessarily. What they want is they want to watch a reality show, an entertaining, addictive reality show with good guys and bad guys, people you hate and people you love,

especially if it feels like you're inside of it. You know, it's my team and their team in the reality show. That will hook people. That will hook people hard because, again, this primitive mind is very into that. And so you start having is instead of news for 30 minutes a day, you now have 24 hours a day of programming that is essentially a reality show.

There's 10 or 12 politicians that are the cast. You know, you don't hear about most of the Congress. You hear about the cast. You hear about the, you know, Matt Gates, and you hear about AOC, and you hear about Trump. And they're not always the big decision makers, you know, the heads of committees and stuff. We often don't hear about those people.

We hear about the people who have been cast on the show. And they frame every issue. And, of course, they're not talking to the whole country and trying to be neutral, that was the incentive structure back then. If you're not neutral, you're going to get penalized for it. If you're biased and talk to one side of the country, it's not going to work. You're inaccurate.

You're going to be a joke. You're going to be laughed at if you're less accurate than the other. And then NBC is less accurate than ABC and CBS. Now the model is, you know, can you entertain? Can you get people gripped and angry and feeling like, you know, they're just hooked on this reality show and they feel like they're inside of it themselves. and accuracy when that is going on, like just goes out the window. Accuracy stops mattering.

They don't get penalized for it. And neutrality, forget that. It's long gone, right? It's very clear you're watching a news network and it's people, they're speaking to you, instead of being, you know, famously close to the vest about their political views like Ted Cople or, you know, Broca or Jennings, all those guys. Now it's, of course, you know exactly who all these news anchors voted for. They're extremely clear about that.

So the point, you know, now you have 20, so now you have this thing couched as news, but it's actually 24-7 entertainment. They have to fill all those time. And the same reason that local news back then did the negative thing, you know, because that's what's more gripping. Now these things are doing that and, you know, 24-7 and people are hooked on it. They don't, you know, people flip on that as their, as their entertainment. You know, it's a thing, why would you watch so much news?

Because they're not really watching news. They're watching their favorite reality shows. So I think that's a factor. The changes in media, just like social media, these are factors, but actually, like, you can look and there's a lot of different factors. It's hard to actually pinpoint, like, one thing that has led us to this moment. Francis, may I just finish this particular line of discussion? Tim, one of the things I'm curious about is, I think what you're saying is obviously true. And at the same time, if I switch on the low part of my brain and I go, hold on a second, if I'm on the left, I'm looking out at a

world where the last president of the United States refused to accept the results of an election. His supporters stormed the capital. Inequality is rising and affecting millions and millions of people. And if I'm on the right, I'm going, well, look, they're teaching about anal sex and schools and the libs are transing the kids. And I could give you plenty of example, you know, Donald Trump's about to be put in prison and whatever, right? So I understand your point about, you know, crime statistics and whatever.

Would you not agree, though, that perhaps maybe because of the way we have conversations, we actually are ending up in quite a bad place in reality now? Yeah. So actually, I think to be more clear, I think that it's like kind of a little bit of a meta situation where initially I think the beginnings of these trends of people starting to feel like everything was awful. I think you can attribute that to stuff like the media making people believe that in a way that doesn't represent reality. But when you do that for years to a nation and you start to build these really intense delusional tribes, now the actual delusional tribes themselves and people's

fear of them starts to create actual really bad problems. So I would say that if you trace, you know, January 6th back, I think, you know, you can trace it right to the advent of Fox News and to, you know, to put things like that. I think if you trace the rise of wokeness and how it's hijacked so many, you know, lowercase L liberal institutions with, with an ideology that's the opposite of liberal. I think you can look back and I think, you know, that's been around for a while kind of, you know, incubating in universities, that ideology, but it exploded out of the gates, I think, you can can trace that back to stuff like Twitter and stuff like MSNBC and things like this. And so I think it's that these trends were maybe started a little bit artificially,

and then they actually create real problems. And then this is, you know, I'm far from saying that we don't have any real problems. This is all fake. Now I think partially because of these trends, the reason I would write about these trends, if I thought they were just a bunch of delusion, then what, okay, it's because they have giant effects, actually. they create, they actually, they create a lot of instability and they, the power in, in, in, the country has in a lot of cases really swung from kind of the vast majority of lowercase L,

liberal, somewhat moderate people to, you know, kind of fringe groups that usually would be fringe. And, you know, and then, and then those groups because people are scared of them can actually recruit and get a lot bigger and get more powerful. So, so, yeah, there's, I guess that's just two separate things in a way. Tim, look, I agree completely with your analysis on this. And there's also a hormonal element to it, which is oxytocin. We had a guest on the show a few years back called Dr. Mike Martin. And he was actually explaining to us that the hormone oxytocin is what creates a group,

but it also gives you mistrust of the other. And that's really worrying because if there's a deep biological aspect to this, then you go, how can we solve this problem? I was just reading a great book by Tobias Rose Stockwell, a new book called The Outrage Machine. And it's about social media and all that. And he talks about this. We think empathy is great, right?

Empathy. What could be bad about that? We should have more empathy. But actually, empathy can be used very, you know, cleverly to make, to breed complete dehumanizing hate. And so, you know, an example would be, you know, think about how many people in the Arab world, you know, would like to legitimately genocide the entire population of Israel. And they're not, you know, they're not necessarily genocidal people. It's, it's that the, the, the narrative that, the, the narrative that,

pervades the Arab world about that conflict, there's two sides of the coin. The hatred of what Israel's doing and what they do, whatever, is tied directly to deep empathy for the Palestinians and what they're going through, what they believe they're going through. And so, you know, you look at any war where there's a huge, you know, you have to, you know, and often dehumanize the enemy during a war. And that's why all this propaganda.

It's very common thing to do. And usually that's going to be tied with empathy for our people, right? So these emotions go very close together. So oxytocin, I don't know the science of that, but I'm sure that's a similar concept here. And I think that when you're thinking with this kind of primitive mind, when I think we get ourselves into trouble where we're not being wise, a telltale sign is that we have a ton of empathy,

selectively. Like we have so much empathy for people we consider to be in our in group. And that doesn't mean necessarily with the look like us, right? It's people that we consider, you know, sometimes there's racial or ethnic or the are the core tribes, right? So then, yes, as people look like you. In the U.S. it's not like that at all. It's political tribes. So it's people who, who I think are in the good, in the good side of the political divide. there's just endless excuses for anything they do wrong, apologize, or, you know, you could say genuine empathy, understanding, looking at the context.

And then as soon as it's the other side, all that goes out the window and just bigotry, just rank bigotry that is, you know, no one feels, no one thinks they're being a bigot when they're being a bigot, right? It's always, you know, you always have to look at that sneaky bigotry that's going to be happening is always the kind that doesn't get seen as bigotry.

Like everyone knows that saying racial slum, is as bigotry right now. And which is why it doesn't happen very often. But talking, you know, saying most awful stereotyping, you know, mocking, dehumanizing stereotypes of conservatives or of, of, you know, woke people or whatever. That is so common because no one's recognizing it as bigotry. So that is, to me, it's selective empathy.

And just like, you know, you can't, okay, so someone is for free speech, truly for it. They, it is specifically tested by how much are you for the free speech of people you hate saying things you hate, right? If you don't think they should have free speech, you are against free speech. Everyone is for free speech of people that agree with them. And I would say the same thing. Whether you're actually an empathetic person and whether empathy is a true principle of yours is entirely determined by whether you apply it universally or selectively. Everyone applies empathy to their in group. So anyway, yeah. Yeah. No, it's a very good

point. And I guess my follow-up question is go, look, I think everybody, at this point, no social media is bad for you. No one goes on Instagram comes off half an hour later and goes, now that was half an hour well spent job done. So at what point does the individual have to take responsibility not only for their attitudes, but also for their behavior? Yes, you're getting hacked. Yes, certain behaviors are getting, how should I put it, encouraged. But you've got responsibility as well. So I might, I'm not sure I would quite phrase it as social media is purely bad and therefore the best thing to do is to remove ourselves. Like, like, you know, like soda and candy and cigarettes, right?

These are, these should be done in moderation if you do too much of those. It's 100% officially bad. There's no other way around it. Social media, I think it's early in this game. And I think that we will look back upon, first of all, there's just an element of, it's not going any. right? There's no way you're going to take that back. It is a part of the world and it's not going anywhere. So, you know, that gets me thinking, okay, you know, given that we're not going to all get off, what can we do? But I do think that people in the future will look back at today.

At least I, this is a possible, possible prediction. People will look back and say that, oh my God, this was like the, it was the wild west. It was just, it was, it was like, it was like McCarthyism. You know, we look at McCarthyism, you know, the Red Scare or, you know, farther back stuff like the Salem witch trials and we're like sometimes humans just go nuts for a while collectively and I think we will look back upon this era as just be like oh it was like it was it was clown town a little bit um and I think that um my hope is that is that we we look back and it's like no it wasn't that social because first of all you know you said you know if you go on for a half hour you never feel I'm not sure that's true for me I I agree actually you know I have a lot of I in

And I have a lot of friends on Twitter, and I love interacting with my readers on Twitter. And, you know, granted, when I post about politics, I'm going to get more shit. It's going to be more frustrating. It's going to maybe trigger that primitive mind. But I think there's such a, there's, I think it's a lot like life. There's a really good side here.

There's a bad side here. Now, with social media, it's easier for the bad side to take over because we don't see the people. So we quickly can dehumanize. It brings out the worst. And it also brings a lot of people who might be the, you know, the asshole. in the company, whoever knows so they get marginalized

or they get fired, it really elevates assholes and makes them front and center. So there's a lot of problems. But I feel like we're very early and my hope is that in 10 or 15 years, we just between actual algorithmic, structural changes and cultural changes

where it becomes really uncool to publicly shame on social media, becomes really an ad hominem attack. It just makes you seem like a moron to everyone. And then we'll stop doing because everyone ultimately wants to be cool. want to be part of the, so part of the recent things have gotten so bad is that for a while, and maybe still now a bit, a little less so, it's been cool to be, you know, outraged in a really

tribal kind of dehumanizing, publicly shaming way on something like Twitter. It's been like, that's what gets you like. And I feel like we are, I hope growing out of that quickly and some kind of etiquette will come back that we have in the real world. And Tim, I agree with you. You know, I really enjoy Twitter. Not all the time. sometimes you'll laugh. But most of the time, I have a great time. I interact with friends. I make friends that I never would have had.

I interact with people who read my stuff or watch our content. And it's fun and it's great. But as a society, we've acknowledged some of the impacts that social media is having. And then it loops with the real world as we talked about. Obviously, Elon Musk, a guy you've interviewed a number of times and whose companies you've looked at in depth, not Twitter per se, but others. he recently spent a hell of a lot of money, $44 billion, acquiring Twitter, and he's now playing around with it,

making changes, he's rebranding it, he's paying creators a share of the ad revenue, he's got a big vision. Do you have a sense of the broad vision that Elon has for a platform like Twitter, which he now calls X? And are you optimistic that he's going to make positive changes with that? I mean, what I'll say about it,

is like the thing I just said, which is that I have this hope. But if I go in a time machine to 2040, 2035, even 2030, I get out of the time machine and social media is just totally different and better. Now, that happens through changes. And it's very easy for companies that have been around a long time to just stop making changes. I mean, look at the difference between, you know, Apple in the late Steve Jobs years, when they were just, just enter an industry, like a bull in a China shop and just do stuff, and they'll put out a thing, and then they don't like it, they take it back,

and they were just very kind of like raw creativity. And, of course, that changed the world. And now they've gotten into comfortable incremental changes, which, like, you know, I mean, if I were Tim Cook, I'd probably do the same thing because it's great money-making. and why mess with it. But so I think that a lot of the social media companies have gotten there where they're just kind of stuck with their stuck in their own legacy, stuck in their own baggage. It's hard to make changes.

It's unpopular. There's a lot of exists. So that's all to say that I totally welcome a complete outsider to come in and just start, just start getting their hands dirty. And let's try this. And let's experiment with a whole new model. Let's see if this thing can make more money. And then, you know, let's mess with the algorithm.

And now it's going to make a lot of people angry. And even myself, there's been times when I'm like, this new algorithm is like screwing over my traffic. You know, it's not like I've been always happy and neither will everyone, right? But as I'm taking a step back, I'm very happy with this storyline. I love it. I think just keep doing it. Keep making changes, trying things and not settling.

If something's, you know, part of the importance, important thing is that when you put through a change, if you're doing that, if you're in that mode where you're getting things dirty, you know, you're going to make a lot of mistakes. You're going to do things that, okay, we did it quickly. It wasn't that's fine. So it's fine as long as you have no, you have no problem just saying, oh, we were wrong. Let's let's try this new thing, right? No, so it's, there's different speeds you can go.

Some people might have taken a more measured approach and, you know, and done more focus groups and tried beta tests. That's not Elon's style. it never has been. It never has been. He jumped into, you know, he jumped into, you know, into cars, into rockets and just started making stuff and blew up a bunch of rockets and, you know, and so some people like that style. Some people don't. And for whatever, you know, for better worse, that is his style. It's obviously served him a lot in the past. I don't know what's going to happen, but I do feel

like when the people who are really criticizing, like, now X and like a lot of these changes, I think it's not that I think they're necessarily wrong about every criticism. I think it's that take a step back and just realize that you are seeing a, of the very few first few months of a bigger story here. And again, the bigger question is, in five years, do you get out of that time machine? Do you think that X is now a very good social media company, like something that has led a lot of other companies

that's done a lot of new things? Or do you see that and say, I wish old Twitter is back? This is worse, I don't know. But that's the question to be asking, not whether every little microchange you're seeing now or every fumble along the way is good or bad. People have a lot of strong opinions.

I'm saying this more with humility. Like, I don't have a strong opinion either way. I'm very happy someone who's very smart, who has a great track record, is in there. Raw experimenting. That, I think, is great. And then as far as how it'll go, I don't know. But the point is, I'll take change with the uncertainty of whether that change will ultimately be better or worse over the alternative, which is inertia, stagnation with a model

that we all know is not so great. It was 1.0 version of all this. and we didn't get it right before now. Agreed. And people like us who get a lot of impressions on Twitter are now getting the paycheck out of there. So I've definitely got no problem with that. I suppose the question I was asking you as well, Tim, is Elon clearly overpaid for this company, at least I think he himself said this. And usually people do that when there's a mission purpose to what they're doing, right?

He's buying the company because he believes it has a material impact on the world, along the lines of what we've been discussing for the first part of this interview. What does Elon want? What is he trying to do? And I don't just mean with Twitter or X specifically. I just mean more broadly, what is his vision for what he's doing? Well, okay, so to be clear, I haven't talked to him about his other companies thoroughly in the past. I haven't had a chance to talk to him about X so far.

So all I can do is guess based on what I've heard him say publicly, which is that he wants to, A, he cares a lot about social media because he thinks it's important. He thinks that, and I agree with that. You know, some people are saying, why is this guy wasting his time on Twitter and software instead of, you know, being out in the world? And like, I see what they're saying, but I don't agree. I mean, if this is kind of the public square or it's kind of the way that the human brain is, you know, the collective brain is doing a lot of its thinking, that is really important

and it's important for every other part of society. and it's not great. We all know it needs changes. So I think it's a worthy mission. I think he thinks it's obviously a worthy mission. He also loves Twitter. He's someone who uses it a lot, and I think he cares about it.

And I think he's thinking, I can get in there and make this better. And then what he said about his big mission is, he looks at WeChat and China, and he thinks, you know, there should be more of an everything app, an app that is really something that, you know, almost everyone needs and uses,

and that it's kind of a hole in Western societies where that app is in China and that, you know, he has, you know, he bought the name X.com years ago. And I think he's always had visions of what it could have become with, you know, with what we ended up, you know, kind of turning into the right turn into PayPal there. But I think he has a bigger vision with X that never quite got done. And so he's thinking about, you know, that vision plus, you know, improving social media, plus making an app that can, um, be something new. Like something that Americans, it's hard for probably Americans to even understand what in everything that means because we don't have one. So, and I, I truly don't,

I don't really get how we chat works. But I think that he's thinking we could use something like that over here. And this is, and, you know, he's said before he's tweeted something like, someone said, why not, why not leave Twitter alone and just start X.com? He said, he could have done that, but he thinks that starting with Twitter is a, is a multi-year, head start on that project. Tim, it seems to me that Elon Musk has is a very disruptive force. Do you think that's his superpower, the fact that he's prepared to come in, to disrupt, to challenge the status quo, to make changes, some of them which don't work, some of them which enrage people, and some of them which do?

Yeah, I mean, I wrote about this in the series I did on him. I know, I just, you know, I just, I wrote about SpaceX and Tesla. And then for that last post, I said, okay, so that's what he's doing. But how about, why is this dude able to do what he does? Right? What's the secret sauce? And that's, you know, the answer I came to,

and this is partially his own words, is that he reasons from first principles. He likes that term. And once I started to understand, you know, what does that really mean? And, you know, it's one of the two major ways to reason. You know, reasoning from first principles, it's a physics term.

It means you just, you ignore all the noise. You ignore all the conventional wisdom and the assumptions and your own previous dogma and everything else. And you just look at the facts. You look at how much the parts of the rocket weigh and the force of gravity and the wind resistance. And you use that to say, can a rocket be landed? Can you launch a rocket and then land it?

And his answer to that question was yes. So he did it. Now, there's a whole other kind of reason. reasoning by analogy, which is when, reasoning from first principles is creating a conclusion from scratch based on first principles, core kind of axioms and facts. Reasoning by analogy is taking one of the many

existing conclusions or dogmas out there and basically photocopying it into your own head as what you believe is true. So to use the rocket example again, what most people like Elon would have done in that situation is say, If you could land a rocket, the Soviet Union and NASA would have done it a long time ago. They have every reason to do it.

It saves a ton of money. They had the budgets. They have the scientists. I, coming out of this, there's no way, I must be missing something. People do this with companies. I have this good idea for a company, but if it was such a good idea, someone else would have done it. Or, you know, just, you know, there's, you can name any major part of life. politics, you know, scientific, you know, beliefs,

beliefs about the world or, you know, about the business world or whatever. All of it is, or art, you know, what makes good art about it. All of that is almost always there's just this big kind of tapestry of conventional wisdom. And most of us just say that's reality. And so if my independent reasoning disagrees with the tapestry of conventional wisdom, I must be wrong. I must be missing something. And that is a humble, normal way to think if you're in 30,000 BC or 10,000 BC, when generation

after generation after generation, things didn't change very much. So conventional wisdom was wise. It was the accumulation of a lot of trial and error about the same repeated kind of life. And so you were stupid. You were naive if you thought you were smarter than that. But now when the world changes so quickly and technology changes in every five years, the new possibilities that are different than the old ones. Conventional wisdom is actually very, it lags behind.

It's very foolish. It's wrong. And so it's not often wrong. It's not always wrong. And so it's actually very rational to say, I'm going to trust my own reason, when it disagrees with conventional wisdom, but it were so wired not to do that. So most people, they say, I'm not going to build the rocket because there's no way I'm right, NASA's wrong.

Elon doesn't think that way. To me, his secret sauce is that he is extremely good. It just, he just has that. He doesn't have this irrational thing. that overrides his own reasoning, he's able to say, I guess everyone's wrong. I guess NASA didn't do it right.

And that just separates him right there. I mean, there's a lot of things that he's good at, but that right there makes him very unusual. And so, again, with Twitter, someone who reasons from first principles, they're going to experiment a lot. They're going to get something stuff right. They're going to get some stuff wrong,

but they're going to create change. You know, Steve Jobs with the iPhone. that example too. Like, you know, they didn't just say, well, what should our keyboard look like? Because that's conventional wisdom that there had to be a keyboard. They just said, what should a mobile device be and really reasoned from first principles and came up with something totally different and then turned out to disrupt the entire industry? So real disruption, whether it's artistic or entrepreneurial or technological or intellectual. It's usually there's some real original thinking going on from someone who has the kind of that epiphany that my original reasoning

is as good as anything else out there, and that I'm just as good as a person to figure this out as anyone. But there's always a fine line, isn't there, Tim, between bravery and recklessness. And a lot of the time, it's if your idea works. So if your idea works, everyone goes, yeah, he was brave. Well, wow, what a brave dude.

But if it doesn't work, it's like, do you see what I mean? So it's a superpower, and at the same time, it can be your greatest weakness. Definitely. It's a riskier way to live in general. But another thing that Elon points out is that a lot of times people are more afraid than they should be. They think, you know, I drew this in my post as a scale of danger from 1 to 10. And I said that just say 7 to 10 is actually dangerous, you know, either physically dangerous or you're truly going to have to not be able to feed your kids or something.

And then everything 1 to 7 is, you know, increase risk, but it's not, nothing that bad is going to happen if it goes wrong. And that I think that we all hang in the 1 to 3 zone or, you know, maybe 1 to 4 zone. And we think four, five, six, and seven that area is super dangerous. And so we don't do it. And the people that realize the danger doesn't start till seven. Huge superpower because they can go play in the five, six, you know, four, five, six, seven areas and change the world and do stuff. And they might fail. And what they realize is that it doesn't really matter.

Failure is okay. Elon has a quote about like, he says, I don't know why more people don't start a company. What's the worst that happens? You're not going to starve. You're not going to die of exposure, right? Like, what's the worst that's going to happen if the company doesn't work out? And not, you know, thinking like that would make a lot more people start companies. And so many people sit there and they dream about their company their whole life.

They dream about writing that album their whole life or whatever it is, writing that book. And they never do it because they think that it is, their brain is incorrectly assessed that as real risk to fail at that. maybe it's a little bit of embarrassment and the truth is most people are self-absorbed not even thinking about you. It's a dumb reason not to do something. So again, I can say this but I feel it too. We all have this kind of irrational fear of failure.

And so yes, you can be more reckless and I think if someone who's so reckless they go up to the 8, 9, 10, that's too far. I mean, maybe not for everyone, but like you have one life. I don't think you should actually risk your life very often. I don't think you should risk completely destroying your financial situation

to the point where you again, you have a family and they can't go to school anymore, whatever it is. I think that reckless, though, a lot of people call that four to seven area reckless when they see it, and that, I think, is wrong. I think that's good recklessness. People should get up there and not worry about failing in that area. That makes sense. And I guess the thing with someone like Elon and other people who have high wealth is that

you can risk tremendous amounts of money without actually risking your family's feelings. or comfort or security at all. And so you are able to take calculated risks with really huge vast sums of money without actually exposing yourself to any true risk of the kind that you're talking about. So you're probably never in the 7 to 10 range at all with, you know, with example of what he's doing with X. If that company goes to value zero, he's still going to be okay. But there's also another huge thing that we think is risky is reputational risk. Yes. So so many people would say, I'm not going to go buy X because if that doesn't go well, I'll be made fun of it. I'll be disgraced. I'll be mocked. People won't think, you know,

it'll tarnish my reputation and blah, blah, blah, blah. And Elon just doesn't care. He doesn't think like that. He says stuff like if something's important and it has a 10% chance of succeeding, it's worth trying, if something's important enough, even if it's only 10% chance of succeeding. So, you know, it's that's one of those things where, when our brain was wired 30,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, whatever, for that world, reputational risk was a big deal. You know, if you're thought of as, you know, someone you can't be relied on and on the hunting or in the battlefield or you were, you know, someone who couldn't be trusted or

someone who everyone mocked, your social, the social, your social standing was incredibly important for so many real hard reasons. Like, you need to have food and you don't want to get kicked out. want to mate in your life. It's just as true today, right? But we still have that wiring, that we are so scared of rejection, romantic rejection. We're so scared of being seen like a failure of people talking about us behind our back, of people thinking they're better than us, of, you know, people making fun. Again, if you step back, what's the worst that happens here? Are you going to die? Nothing that bad is actually going to happen. You're not even in the room when the people

are talking shit about you. You're not there. You won't know what's happening. And again, most people are self-absorbed. They're just not thinking that much about you. Elon is very central. People are thinking about him. And again, it's so what, right? He's going to be dead in a few decades. Like, who cares about that? Go for the mission that matters and if it fails and people make fun of you,

but again, it's easy to say. It's hard to do. And that's why most people don't do it. And Tim, there are probably people listening to this who are getting inspired and them thinking to themselves. You know what? I've lived all my life. However old I am in the one to three,

I want to live my life in the four to seven. What do I need to do? How do I live it? Well, I think first of all, it's thinking about what you truly want to do. Not that, you know, not that what you've talked yourself into that you want to do or the way you want to be. It's easy that, you know, we talk ourselves into a worse story that is safer so that we feel better about not having gone. So if you're, what do you, you know, if you had a genie and you could just wish for the kind of life you wanted or the kind of change you wanted to make or the kind of, of family you want, whatever it is.

No, don't be scared. What is that? Maybe you're not going to get it all. You probably won't, but like, don't be scared to look at it. Don't be like depressed to even think. Just look at it, right? And then start to think about what is it until, why have I not gone for that, whatever it is? Why am I not going for it?

And assess that because that is so often is that your brain mistakenly, because it's up in step five of risk. and your brain mistakenly is treating that like real danger. It's incorrectly, delusionally, irrationally, treating that like real danger. When the fact is, you're actually, the suffering you're having from not doing the thing you want to do is real, and that is taking a toll on you.

And you're taking that toll as a heavy cost to avoid what is not actually risky, but seems risky to us. like potential failure or embarrassment or reputational damage or, you know, maybe having some hard financial years. Ask yourself, is that, are those things worse than the, there you have a, you have a posit. That's if things go badly, right? There's maybe those things happen. And maybe you achieve your dream.

You get the thing you really want. As instead, it's saying, because I don't want to take the chance of the negative outcome there, I'm going to take a hundred percent chance of kind of living with. yearning and a little bit of sadness and a little bit of envy and maybe a lot of those things and a little bit of bitterness and you know it's like that's real that sucks that's human pain like you're accepting a lot of pain to avoid the other potential human pain but at least there there's the upside of it so you know it's all it's very personal everyone for some people and embarrassment is way way way worse than pain than um than envy or

you know, bitterness ever could be. For some, I think for a lot of people, embarrassment seems so much worse than it actually is when it happens, or, you know, whatever, you know. So I get criticism, rejection. Just seems so scary to us because we think we're in a tribe a long time ago.

And then it happens and the sky doesn't fall and then you're a little stronger because now you're not scared of it as much in the future. It's so interesting that you make that point because we're both, when we started this, we're both stand-up comedians. And a lot of people would say doing stand-up

was one of their greatest fears, actually. And that is, it's so liberating doing it, because particularly when you start out, you're by definition not very good. So you have times when you tell a joke and no one laughs. And to most people, that is the scariest thing possible. And comedians even call it dying

when you don't do well at a gig. We call it dying. But actually, when it happens, it's incredibly liberating because you realize it's nowhere near as bad as you thought. I had a friend who was a kind of amateur comedian and actually one night went out and bombed unpurpose

like was just unbler. Just to say this is the worst thing that can happen. He got some booze. It was some silence. And he left. He was like, was that so bad? No, it's not a big deal. Right?

And so, you know, sometimes you have to, you can't just tell yourself. You have to show yourself. You have to actually do it. And then it can, you know, standard comedian, you know, anything artistic, you know, in movies, you know, somebody wants to make movies. They want to make music. They want to, they want to write a book.

People are so scared to write fiction, especially, including me, by the way. I'd love to write fiction, but it, eh. And public speaking, of course, you know, people avoid whole careers. They avoid, you know, being ambitious at work because if they get it in promotion, going to have to speak in public more. You know, I mean, and, and so there's so many examples like this. And in each case, your brain is not being very wise. It's actually, it's actually like, you know, it's like a little kid.

It's like hiding under a blanket because I think there's a monster there. It's not much wiser than that. And then, you know, you get older and you say, oh, that's cute. Of course, kids think there's marks that are scared in the dark. It's not actually, but then we do this in our own way. Humid adults do the same exact thing. they do indeed and it seems to me one of the great tragedies of our age Tim is that we don't achieve the things that we want we don't seek the lives that we desire because we're not used to

experiencing discomfort discomfort feels a lot worse than it actually is because we've inoculated ourselves against it by avoiding uncomfortable situations all the time there's a great line in my favorite TV show, the British office, the UK version. I'm so glad that you said that. There's so many Americans I know who say it's the American office and they should all burn in hell for that. Sorry, thank you. I like the American office, but it's a show. He thinks you should burn in hell for that. It's another good show. It is. UK office is the best show ever made in his completely agree. Whenever you want to come back on the show, you're more than welcome to. Okay. So there's a line where Tim, who's a great character,

He's kind of the relatable character. He says, you know, he has this, he hates his life. He hates his job. He knows he should be doing something different than selling paper. And he's, you know, he's a clever guy. He could do a lot in the world. And, you know, he's building up courage. And he's saying, yep, I'm going to quit.

And he kind of does. And then, you know, that fear, that irrational fear kicks in. And suddenly he's back at the job. And, you know, the mockumentary crew asks him why. And he says, well, you know. If you look at life like rolling a dice, then my situation now, as it stands, yeah, it may only be a three. If I jack that in now, go for something bigger and better. Yeah, I could easily roll a six.

No problem. I could roll a six. I could also roll a one. Okay. So I think sometimes just leave the dice alone. You know, and it's again, it's so depressing, right? But so many of us think that way. So many of us think that way where, like you said, the avoidance of discomfort, we will take

you know, if you're actually truly comfortable, that's fine. I don't think people should feel like, oh, that's not enough. But what does comfort mean? Comfort doesn't just that you have the financial means and that things are kind of easy. It also means you're comfortable in your brain. You feel good about life. You feel good about the world. You wake up in the morning and you like where you are, right?

That's real comfort. Okay, I think that's great. A lot of people what they're thinking of as comfort and avoiding discomfort when they're actually in a tremendous amount of discomfort already, because, they don't feel like they're living the right kind of life. So again, it's always assessing, like, people don't like to think, people ignore this factor when they're thinking about the, you know, this change they could make. They forget, they're not factoring in the cost that they're experiencing every day right now

by not doing the thing. And by the way, it's not just for you. It's not just a selfish, narcissistic discussion to be having. It's, you know, if you're, if you go out and do something that you know you really want to do, the world is better off if you do it. You know, you're depriving the world of your gift if you're not doing that. Or, you know, likewise, if you're not in the best relationship and so many people aren't, you can stay in it forever because nothing seems scarier to our primitive brains than going off on our own.

And what if I don't find someone and everyone's going to talk about my divorce or my breakup and it's going to be conflict? And so we'll just stay in it forever. Meanwhile, like, you're not doing the other person any favors or anyone. And you know, when you hang out with other people, you depress people, you know, when you You are not a great deal. You are doing so much more for the world if you go out and get yourself into a better kind of relationship. It's better for your family. It's better for your friends. It's better for that person and for your ex as well. There's such a good point you make, Tim, because one of the things I think when people talk

about being comfortable is we, I mean, it's not quite living in the moment, but we live sort of without looking into the future enough to see that if you play the movie forward of where you are and realize that this is going to be the rest of your life, how uncomfortable does that make you if you're not on the right path? And I think not enough of us do that in order to actually jolt ourselves into action about pursuing our dreams or going for whatever it is that we're going to go for. I find that a very useful way of checking whether I'm doing the right thing is going, if I carry on down this path for the next five, 10, 10, 15 years, is that really how I want my life to look like at that point. And if it isn't, it's time to change something.

I, you know, it reminded me of this visual that I like to use. And it's basically, if you think about the past, when we think about our past, we often see there's kind of a life path that you could trace and it's, and it's led to this moment. So it's kind of a wiggly line from birth to here. But what we also implicitly often see are all these branch-offs that didn't happen, right? these different lines that, you know, I should have gone and, you know, I should have moved to that city when I was younger. I should have seen my parents more. I should have done this. Whatever. So many different regrets. And, you know, sometimes we were happy we didn't take those paths and we like our path in certain ways. And then other times, you know, we say, you know, I should have,

whatever. But the implicit idea when we think about all these branch offices is that we had agency in the past. We could have had those paths. They were open there to us, but we didn't take them. And then that feeling of agency when we think about the future so often is gone. So we think that now, though, I'm on this path, and it's just straight. It's a path that, you know, I'm on it. I'm on the yellow brick road, and here I am, and that's it. And actually, in 20 years, you look back to today, and you'll see all the same branch outs that you could have and didn't do. And they're all still open to you right now, because those are in the future. And you, so you actually don't have a single path. You have a web in front of you, a big web, and they're all

open to you right now. And so there's a kind of a double delusion going on. I feel like we think that we have we had agency in the past but we don't anymore we also have this feeling that we have infinite time i like to think like you know i went to both barbie and oppenheimer it was like two movies in a year i usually go to like maybe a movie a year right in the theater but i love it and in my head i'm like oh i'm gonna go to hundreds thousands more movies in the theater if i stay at this rate i don't know i'll go to 40 30 40 more whoa like that's a tiny number there's so many things like this when you actually think about it you realize time is quite finite and so the combo of thinking that we have unlimited time ahead and that we also don't have agency

is just a perfect recipe for complacency. It's like we don't change anything because we don't think we can and we also think it's okay because later I'll do all those things anyway. Yeah. And I would say our society exacerbates that type of behavior in people because we don't talk about our own mortality. We don't talk about the fact that this is finite. We don't talk about the fact that there is going to come a day a moment when we die. We're just like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to talk about it. Well, yeah, then you're going to live a life of complacency because you're not going to realize you have a finite amount of time to do the stuff that you want and need to do. Yeah, and by the way, it's not even just when you die. Like, my grandmother's 97 and still going

strong mentally, but she's blind and cannot go anywhere, basically. And so, well before, you know, the day she actually dies, she stopped being able to do most of the things she loves, right? And that can happen a lot earlier. People can start declining in different ways, you know, 10, 15 years before they, so it's super depressing. But on the other hand, it's real. And so what's what's the much more depressing is,

because you don't want to think about that, like you said, you actually live in a very irrationally complacent way. That's why I like to like do stuff like show, how many weeks you have left in a chart because it's like, holy shit, but also it's like, okay, fucking let's go. Because, you know, it's like if that's real, it's not like it makes it more real to talk about it, then, you know, denial is not helping anything. Tim, before we head on over to locals where we'll ask you questions from our supporters, we always end with the same question, but I should just say, what a positive uplifting episode

this has been. You're going to die or become disabled very soon. So hurry up and get. get on with it, I think is the message. On that happy note, Tim, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we should be? Feel free to talk about the British office again. But no, I joke. Yes, that. But actually, I would say my answer here is extremely related to what we were just talking

about, which is we should be talking about longevity and longevity science. I was just at a like a little great gathering recently where there were so many top people in life extension and you know health extension and and and there's so many fascinating amazing developments happening and like that's you know the crazy thing about the time we live in is like technology is moving quickly enough where there's a chance you know you'd get in again time machine go 30 40 years forward and get out and like you'd be as shocked by the world you see as someone from the 1700s would be coming to today because the time you know tech moves faster as you go along

and in a world that's that shocking to us what might come along with it is oh people don't die involuntarily anymore people die when they're ready you know people you know most people don't want to live forever but they they choose and you you um we can refresh the human body we can reverse aging, we can stop aging. It sounds sci-fi and magical. It's not. What is the body? It's just a bunch of atoms. If we start to learn how to work with those atoms and do stuff, you can do anything. And so you talk to some of these people who are working in this areas. And look, we're far away. We have a lot to do, but things can move really quickly. You know, exponential progress is intense. And so I would say there's a good chance that a lot of people maybe our age or especially younger,

people could legitimately live like to an age that would shock most of us. And, you know, you could say, oh, well, no, no one's done that before, you know, you know, you can't seem to break through this hundred barrier. And it's like, yeah, well, also no one flew airplanes before people started, you know, it's like at some point, some dramatic thing changes. And this seems to be one that's kind of on the cusp of potentially having changes. And to me, the reason this doesn't get enough attention is because it's, it's, it's, It has this bad rep for some crazy reason where people are like, oh, it's narcissistic,

oh, the billionaires want to live forever. It's like, first of all, then you should call anyone fighting cancer narcissistic. What are they trying to do? They're trying to fight against this force of nature that's trying to end their lives and they're fighting. We say, great, they're brave, they're heroic, which they are. And then as soon as someone says, well, now let's fight against all those things so we can try to expand the human lifespan. They say, oh, narcissists. It doesn't make any sense.

It's this Stockholm syndrome we have thing we have with death. It's like Nick Bostrom's famous, you know, Tale of the Dragon, Fable of the Dragon, I recommend anyone read it. We have this Stockholm syndrome. We think death is a lot of man. Don't try to, you know, anyone who tries to push against that, they're a fool and they're narcissists. So I think that's all very incorrect.

And I think that that's part of the reason that more people aren't working in this area. We should all be talking about it. This depressing thing that we just talked about actually can be changed. Like, it really can. You can have a lot more healthy long years if we can get funding and attention and smart brains into these industry. All right. So you've just amended the takeaway from this episode.

The takeaway from the episode is you're going to die or become disabled, so get on with it. However, a moment may be coming in the future when you're not going to die or become disabled. So grab that bag of Doritos, stick the office on, have a good time. Unless you're over 50, in which case you're screwed. Yeah, exactly. Tim and everybody watching, head on over with us to locals where we ask some of your questions and continue the conversation. My procrastination is so bad that it is destroying my potential to do something truly meaningful with my life. How do I conquer this fun monkey,

in inverted commas, hanging from my neck?