What is our problem? What is the problem with society and what can we do about it? So Tim Urban who writes the huge blog, Wait but Why? I mean millions of people read his blog every month. He just wrote a book, What's our problem? A self-help book for societies. I happen to agree with him that this is a huge problem in society. The bifurcation of everybody's either on one team or another. And everyone just assumes that they're right and the other 150 million people are wrong. We talk about why this is a problem, the history of it. And Tim offers an excellent guide on what a solution could be. But I think it's more not just a self-help book for societies. It's ideas for how you and I can improve our lives in the way we think about the problems in our lives as well as society. I view this as a self-help book for me. This podcast improved me. But was super excited to have Tim on. I've been a fan of his blog for almost 10 years. Here he is.
我们的问题是什么?社会的问题是什么?我们能为此做些什么?Tim Urban写了一篇非常受欢迎的博客网站,叫做Wait but Why?每个月数百万人阅读这个网站。他现在写了一本书,叫做What's our problem?这是一本为社会写的自助书。我也认为这是社会中的一个重大问题。每个人要么站在这一边,要么站在那一边。每个人都认为自己是正确的,而其他1.5亿人是错误的。我们讨论了为什么这是一个问题,以及它的历史。Tim提供了一个非常好的解决方案指南。但我认为这不仅是一个自助书,它也是一些关于如何思考我们的生活和社会中的问题的想法。我认为这是我的一个自助书。这个播客让我有所提高。但我非常兴奋能够有Tim的加盟。我已经是他的博客的粉丝近10年了。这就是他。
This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altiger show. This is your first kid? First kid. Ray Page of 41. 41. So, that's hard work. Yeah. Like, I'm in my 50s. I don't think I can have another kid just because it would be too much energy for me. Yeah. It's, yeah, I wouldn't. Right now I have all this, like, how many kids do you have? Well, three step kids, two kids. So I had two babies. Yeah, that's a lot. Right. And it's like, this, right now I have all this energy and it's novel and it's so exciting. And I have all this, like, fatherhood to give. And I would not want to do this if I didn't have that. If I was feeling like this was like, I was like, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to father another kid. That would be really bad because it's not a small. You can just, yeah, it's a long-term company. Yeah, I can't hardly decide to have a kid. Unless you want to just like leave the kid, like have the kid and then leave it. Right. Then you can do that. I don't think that's the way I want to go, but you never know.
Which, by the way, I will make this an odd segue into your blog. One of my favorite blogs, Weight But Why. You've been doing this blog forever. I'm going to segue, I'm going to connect with that in a second. But you've been doing this blog like forever. I feel like I've been doing my blog since about 2010. How long have you been doing your blog? 2013. 2013, so a long time. And it's got, I'm usually popular. And would you say that blogging, like people don't look at blogs as much anymore, like when you started and at that time I remember very well, people were reading every blog post. And now I feel it's on and off. You know, I feel like when I started 2013, I was hearing a lot of blogging is dead. I feel like the age of a certain, because also blog is such a broad word, right? It's like, it's like an online solo publication, basically.
So there's a lot of different genres under that umbrella. But I think when they're saying blogging is dead, maybe that was for a certain type of blogger, you know, they had gone down in popularity. What I was doing is like really long in-depth deep dives into something. And it's just like to have that in the same category as someone who's doing celebrity gossip updates, you know, little short things every two hours. Versus me like every two months coming out of the big. So it's like, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know like whether I don't know what the state of like other blogging genres is. I get the impression that if someone writes a deep dive today, it's people are still interested. I don't know. I get that, you know, also I might have a cute thing because I have readers now. So my readers now know me and they're going to come read my thing. If I'm starting fresh today, I do think that the 2013 was a very good time to start when I started just got lucky because it was like Facebook was Facebook was like an incredible engine for like a couple years. And now I don't know if there's any engine is good today to have a new writer's articles go viral as Facebook was back then.
Yeah, I would say it's important to have like, like you have a newsletter like even an email list. And that's a way people get exposed to like when you have new blog posts out. Yeah, exactly. It's like and so it's actually early on because you have to decide, you know, if someone gets to the end of a lot of people get to the end of your article, a lot of people don't get to the end of your article, right?
And then a lot of people get to the end and they're like, that was good or that was bad. But either way, they're not coming back or they don't care enough. A few people get there and they're like, Oh my God, I love this writer. I love this article. I need more. You need to capture that person because they're still going to forget about you on stadium. There's too much on the internet, right? And so that's you have this one moment to like have that person follow you in a way that you can now remind them, Hey, I still exist. Here's a new one for you. And then that's a long term reader of yours.
And so what do you have to decide? What do you, what's the number one thing you want? And for a while, I was like, Facebook has to be Facebook follows because again, people forget now because Facebook is a totally different thing than it was. 2013, it was the only relevant social network. I mean, Twitter was minor. Facebook was everyone was on it. It was, it was just the main thing. It was the coolest thing and it was worldwide. And then at some point, Facebook, I realized like it was like, it was like, it was like a six months in.
I would post something, I realized I had to pay now to reach my own followers, which is not criticizing Facebook for that. It's the business they should be making money for it. But I realized I was like, wait a second. I don't want to trust whoever's running Facebook in eight years. I mean, a people, yes, Facebook could go out of style, but B, they could decide, you know what? Now it's going to cost 50 grand if you want to reach all your people. And I'm like, well, I'm screwed. So quickly made a change and said email email.
It's still, by the way, still don't know what's going to, you know, how, if email can go out of style. But I said, the first thing you're going to see is sign up for the email list. And that's what I've been doing since I'm very happy that I did that. Yeah. I mean, that was probably the best decision I ever made was building an email list on top of my blog, which I probably started around at the same time, the email list. And it worked out well because then you have a permanent relationship with your readers, no matter what platform is like the platform of the day.
Especially if you're like me, and you don't publish regularly. You know, if it's if it's every single Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you know, you know, like Randall Monroe does XKCD. I don't know if he needs an email list because everyone knows Monday, Wednesday, Friday, there's a new comic and people are going to go check it out. If I, I might publish something two weeks in a row and then disappear for six months. And what do you do during those six months? Are you just researching for the next article? It depends.
I mean, yeah, for a really long, I've, I've done some really big deep dives where it's, you know, the length of a short book. And other times I'm just, I, I, I, you know, I try, I write a couple articles on it like them and I go back to the draw and bring it just takes me a while sometimes. And if you're a reader, it's really annoying to have to like check the site and refresh nothing new. And it's like, instead, I'm just like, sign up for the email list, forget about me. I'll let you know when I have something new. And then I can just boom, I can reach everybody when I'm ready.
So I'm very grateful for the email medium. Since then you've written a bunch of books. The latest one, what's our problem, a self-help book for societies? And I want to talk about that. But my question also is, why haven't you written more books? Like because you do these deep dives, you have so many interesting posts about a variety of topics. Like first, you could have written an entire book about Elon Musk just by stapling together some books.
I basically did. It's just on the internet. Oh, right. That's right. It's an ebook on the internet. But it's, you could have just said to Amazon, hey, make this a paperback also. Like self-published it. No, no, no, totally. No, I just meant, I also had, I did happen to make it knee-burke, but I was just saying, I basically wrote a book in its blog post form.
And so I understand your question, which is like, why not just do books? And I think it's an evolving thing. I think back, I think when I honestly with the Elon thing, I didn't think I was going to write so much. And as I got going, I realized this is, by the end I looked at it and I said, I think I just wrote a book. I didn't mean to. But I just wrote four really long blog posts that added up to 95,000 words.
And then most recently, again, because I'm not good at predicting what I'm actually doing here. So like for this most recent thing, this is my first, I would say, my first real book. And even this is an print book. My first print book is going to be the next one, which I'm starting working on now. You know, I was thinking about it, by the way, if you did this as a print book, it would be a beautiful book.
Like there's so many, like, great drawings and man. I might still. I've gotten so many requests for it. I'm like, okay, well, I did. I knew I'd get some requests, but I'm not too surprised by the number of people who have been like, I want a hard copy, dude. And I'm like, all right, maybe, maybe we'll do one.
The part of the reason that we didn't hear is because this topic felt timely. But we're working on it forever, I really wanted to get it out. And then it was already going to be like the summer. So if it did print, it would be a few months away from coming out. And then we learned that because of, I guess, paper supply shortage or something, it was going to be more like the fall, like September.
And I was like, absolutely not. I was like, you know what? Let's just go and publish this in February. And then we'll talk about a print book later, maybe. But like, let's just get this out there because I'm not waiting another eight months to get this out there. That's the problem with traditional publishing, is that you got to wait like a year.
You get your deal. The good thing about traditional publishing, like with your number of followers and the popularity of your blog and the popularity of your TEDx talks, you would get easily a seven figure advance from a traditional publisher. The sucky thing about traditional publishing is from that point where you get the advance, your book won't come out for a year and a half.
My next book is not going to have anything to do with current events, right? It's going to be timeless. It's going to be about the universe and stuff. So there I'm like, fine, go take it. It'll appear in the world in a year and a half. This one is so specific. It's about current events. It was going to kill me to, it actually, like, there's something really nice, one of the things that could, I would because there was no print book, I could put a book out in February.
And there are examples, there are stories from 2023 in the book. It's like, it's almost like a blog post, you know, the ebook, you know, takes like a month to get it together. So it's really fresh. It's like, as recent as you could possibly be reading a book. So this would not have been a good one to wait a year and a half for. It's like, it's right on the pulse of early 2023 at the moment.
Yeah, no, your book's very timely because the topic of your book comes up in my house constantly, which is our society in and the US specifically, US society is having some big issues, no matter what side of this you're on. And you do, you really kind of build up the argument beautifully, but maybe kind of describe top level what your book is about and why people should be interested.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's something that was making me uneasy about my society. You know, and I think of, you know, a group in American society and it's not perfect, but it's great. You know, it's liberal. And I mean that lowercase L and that, you know, in that there is free speech and the government's never going to arrest you for saying the wrong thing.
And, you know, there's just, you know, I feel like it's, you know, I feel like it's you feel like it's a very kind of grown up place in a lot of ways, even though of course America's not in many ways, but it just felt like it was, you know, I felt like I could trust the society for the most part. And that feeling was going away. Like it was 2016 and I was just like something feels weird.
Like I feel scared to talk right now publicly about anything to do with politics. What's up with that? Yeah, it's not how America is supposed to be like. And I wasn't scared of the government. I was like scared of, and the weird thing for me was that I was like scared of the people who I thought like we were like the people, I wasn't scared of, you know, I was like, no, bomb a voter.
I wasn't scared of right wingers because I don't think the right wing has had any power to do anything. I didn't care what, you know, if they, I was like scared of my, you know, people who also probably voted for Obama and I was like, this is what's going on? You know, why? And then the media was just getting like worse and worse. Like journalistic integrity was just like just evaporating. And there was so much tribalism like rising like crazy political tribalism. And I was like, we seem to be like descending in some important way, like losing our grip on kind of stability in some important way. So that's what got me into this.
And I was like, what's going on? You know, what's our problem? Like, why are we doing this? And then I had the second thought, which is like, the stakes are high right now because technology is continuing to explode. Like there's new paradigm shifts every year in some industry. And like, that's not going to change. We need to like be smart and wise and like be able to talk about stuff together and like make wise decisions and I felt like we were going in the total opposite direction.
I was like, I don't think my society can make a wise decision about anything right now. And so that's what got me into it and and and it swallowed my life for six years trying to answer that question. You know, it's really interesting because I think like the pandemic accelerated this trend where, you know, like as my kids say it, silence is violence. So even when you don't say something, there could be a negative reaction against you.
And specifically, as you pointed, there's two teams, right? There's this kind of social justice team that has one menu and then there's the other people who have another menu and you have to agree with everything that's on the menu of your team. And if you don't agree with like one thing, even people get angry at you. Like there's no liberalism where, you know, the technical meaning of liberalism has nothing to do with liberal or conservative.
It's this idea that a society can have many people who have many different viewpoints and in a politically liberal society, everybody gets together, argues it out and then sort of decides on a compromise that some people are happy with and some people aren't happy with and they move on to the next issue. And that's political liberalism. But now liberalism is sort of interpreted as, you know, you have to believe that everything that's under this banner of social justice is correct. Everything else is incorrect. You should be silenced if you're incorrect.
And I'm oversimplifying, there's been similar periods where things have been the opposite, where if you're not like on the religious right, then you could be silenced also. There's it's kind of this pendulum that goes back and forth. But what are you actually afraid of when you when you speak or have an issue? So I think you're right. Like this feeling that there's two teams, both are entirely sure that they're right.
They're both scary if you're within that world to disagree with your own team.
如果你身处那个世界,和自己的团队意见不同,两种情况都很可怕。
People are scared of their own team, much more than the other team. But what I realized when you took a step back is I said, that's two teams playing one game. And there's a whole second game, which is what you just described, kind of classic liberalism. There's two games. And what's happened is this one game where these two, I call it political Disney world, right? Here are those in villains.
Our team is perfectly good and righteous and their team is perfectly evil and awful. And we're right about everything and they're wrong about everything and we're righteous whatever. That to me is not reality, right? That's this crazy childish kind of way to view the world. And to me, it seems like they're two different teams and they are, but they're really, they're both in political Disney world.
They're playing one game. What I realized is that most people aren't actually down there in that game. That's a lot of people are scared of the people in that game. But most people are much more like, they're not exactly sure if they think or even if they are. They don't try to silence people who disagree with them. They care about nuance and they want to, you know, they're open to compromise because every democracy built on compromise.
And I realized this is a whole second game that no one has a label for. No one, you know, people in that, they want to play that game. Don't think they're all alone. They don't realize how many that the majority of people wish they were playing that game. And though there needs to be like a broad pushback from game number two against game number one. And that includes both teams that are to me kind of one really in another way, they're kind of working together.
Nothing was better for Donald Trump than the rise of authoritarian wokeness. Nothing is better for authoritarian wokeness than the rise of a demagogue right wing president like Trump. These are, they're each other is best friend, right? And so even though that's not how they feel, that's what's actually happening.
And here's the thing about it that really got me going was thinking that like it's not like, you know, some people would hear this and say, oh, well, game number two he's talking about is all high pollutant and they want to talk about things. They don't want to actually get on the ground and make change. But the thing is if you look at all these different statistics, the people in that political Disney world game, they're actually harmful to the causes that they say the people in the the kind of hardcore woke people, they are really bad for social justice causes.
So the idea that you have to see the rejector except social justice is missing a huge distinction which is that there's liberal social justice, which is the great tradition of the US, women, you know, emancipation, women's suffrage, civil rights movement, gay rights, all of that is the product of liberal social justice, social justice movements that leverage liberal tools that are pro free speech that persuade, they don't coerce, they get out there through campaigns of persuasion and they make huge change. And that's great for social justice causes.
And then there's this other thing. I don't use the term woke very much because I don't think it's productive. It's too vague and it's low to a baggage. So I'll say social justice fundamentalism, which is a whole different thing and it calls itself social justice. But I think it's kind of the antithesis of liberal social justice. And I think it's not a, and likewise, you know, people say, oh, look at Trump, look how far right the Republican party has moved. I don't think that's true.
I think that actual principle conservatism is a direct odds with someone like Trump. And that Trump isn't assaulting us with conservatism. He's depriving the country of principled conservatism, which we need. We need both principled progressivism and conservatism. So game number two is actually the productive one that actually helps these causes that are actually good for the country. And that game is so scared into silence by game number one. And game number one likes to tell game number two people that, you know, we're the ones on the ground. We're the ones making change. But that's not true. It doesn't map on to reality.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second. I'm going to steal man your argument. So free speech is something you described initially as a social justice thing, but maybe not part of social justice fundamentalism. So what specifically do you think you can't say? And I'm not holding you to this as a belief, but like what's an example of something one can't say to the social justice fundamentalist for fear of being either canceled or blocked on Twitter or whatever?
Well, you really can't disagree with any of the tenants of the S.J.F. social justice fundamentalism narrative. So the S.J.F. narrative is treated like the Bible in a church. And if you go into a church and you start saying, I don't like this passage in the Bible. And I actually think that this isn't true and this is wrong. I mean, look, I'm sure some churches are all about debating that. But in a lot of very hardcore churches, you're going to be kicked out. They're going to say, no, the Bible is the sacred text here.
So they're the narrative, which is, you know, it's very extreme, right? It's extreme. And what I mean by that is they'll have an un very unnew on. It's very extreme, very one dimensional depiction of society. So for example, they'll say, you know, any disparity of outcome. So there's more men than women at Google, for example, or this industry. There's not enough people of color and leadership or whatever. Any disparity, one of the things that their narrative says is any disparity is only caused by systemic oppression of some kind. That's the only explanation. And secondly, the only remedy to that is through reverse discrimination, basically, right?
And so, you know, if there's not a 50-50 gender at Google, the only explanation is that Google has a sexism problem. Google is, you know, harassment problem, discrimination problem of some kind against women. And the hiring process should be shifted so that it kind of forced into 50-50, no matter what.
A, I don't agree with that. I think that's too extreme. I think that that certainly discrimination is probably playing a role. And I think that perhaps hiring changes might be good, right? But there's a lot of different things that can be causing this. It's a complicated thing. Societies are complicated. Google is complicated, right? And people are complicated. And so I would say, let's go look at the more nuanced story.
Now, my problem with social justice fundamentalism is not that they have extreme tenets. There's a lot of groups in society that have extreme tenets. And in the liberal society, they're all welcome, right? My problem is that instead of saying, well, we think this. And you think that and you're wrong. And here's why. They don't say that.
If I say, actually, I think there could be other reasons than just discrimination that there are more men than women at Google, they'll say victim blaming, misogynist. In other words, social penalties. That's kind of social penalties. I'll get smeared as a bad person. And so it's this kind of coercive tactic to shut down debate.
I have a question there. Like what if you say, listen, the population is 50-50, but the population of men and women at Google is 80% male, 20% female, which is what this guy wrote in his initial article about it. But that's because that's the breakdown of the population of men and women in the tech industry. So what if you were to kind of make an argument why Google has this disparity?
So I'm saying with SJF, there's no room for anything. They would be saying, stop making a, you're an apologist, you're a misogynist. You know, look at the reaction that happened. And again, my point about that memo isn't that everything in it was correct. It's that the people I criticize in the book with the guard to that member are not the people who said this memo is wrong. Great. I love people who say this. Say this memo is wrong. Tell me why. Let's hear this debate. And I read so much interesting debate about it. My problem is with the people that said he should be fired for saying the memo because that's totally different.
That's attacking the person that's punishing a person for disagreeing with you as opposed to punishing their ideas, which is great. And every liberal society should be full of disagreement, criticism. And this makes our discussions richer and makes us all smarter.
So again, it's like, you don't even have to get into, forget what his memo said. It's like, it's like, should he be fired for it? And so the other thing that I would criticize SJF for is it's also hypocritical. Like there's 60% of college students are women, 40% are men. You know if that were reversed, the story would be colleges are systemically sexist against women, right?
And there's discrimination. And there's bad social norms. And there's bad gender norms in society and bad messaging to women. But it's the other way. And there's no consistency. They'll never say, well, there's something wrong. What are we doing against men? Suddenly, there's no problem. There's no discrimination. It's not symbolic of any kind of systemic discrimination.
That's just how it is. So I would criticize any ideology on left or right or in any religion or any other area that is just hypocritical. That applies it's stuff when it applies certain tenets and prescriptions when the story fits with their narrative and then ignores the ones that don't fit with the narrative. But that's not even my big problem.
Again, there's a lot of ideologies I don't respect or don't think are productive. It's that this one will try to ruin your life if you make the points I'm making. I'm lucky because I have an independent platform. If I worked at the New Yorker, I worked at Harvard, I worked at the ACLU right now and I start trying to make these points. I'm probably out of a job. And that's my problem.
Like it's this punitive nature of it. This coercive kind of like agree with us or else, that is not okay. Again, I don't care if that's on the left or right.
And what do you think that's happened? I think there's a lot of reasons. I get into a lot of different back stories in the book. But part of it is because there's always ideologies, go back to the 60s.
I read a lot about the 60s in politics in the US. And there's ideologies always that want to do this. That want to not just have an extreme view but punish anyone who disagrees. They don't want to have to win fair and square in the persuasion game. They want to say, we're not even going to play that game. Our ideas are right. End of story. If you try to fight against the ideas, you're in trouble.
There's always groups that want to do that. The question to me was, and there's always, by the way, there's always Donald Trump's out. There's always demagogue people who want to play on people's worst instincts, who want to lie incessantly and kind of cheat their way to the top. And there's always people who would have loved to undermine trust in the election after they lost.
So, why is a demagogue doing so well now? Why is a political group that likes to bully, likes to scare people? Why is that group succeeding so much right now? And I think it is a few reasons.
I mean, one is the general political environment has gone from, you know, general political hot button stuff to total hypercharged tribalism. And I think part of the reasons for this, there's a lot of reasons.
But one big one is like, if you look at the 50s and 60s, political tribalism was distributed. And what I mean by that is some people, the parties themselves had a really like rich diversity. There were progressives and conservatives in both parties and everyone in between. So a lot of people were really, most of their iron, their tribal iron, was worked up about the other guys in their party.
They hated those people. Some people were not thinking about that. They were thinking about Republican versus Democrat. That they were really worked up about that. And then another group of people were most worked up about the US versus the Soviet Union.
Or, you know, before that, the US versus Hitler. And so their minds were, their tribalism was on the national level. So you have a lot of tribalism still and a lot of division. It's just in, it's distributed in whole different arenas.
And what's happened since then is that lower arena, kind of the factions within the parties disappeared mostly because all the conservatives, because of a lot of reasons, all, you know, with civil rights movement kind of started. All the conservatives went to the Republicans. All the progressives moved over to the Democrats.
So you start, you kind of that intra party tribalism disappeared. And then on the top level, we just haven't had like a real, like as big a threat, foreign threat as the Soviet Union was in people's minds since then. And so those two arenas melt away a little bit.
And what's left is this one hot political divide. Left versus right. The good guys versus the bad guys, whatever it is. And then the media landscape is totally shifted. So there's a lot of explanations. But yeah.
Do you notice that like when you talk to people, like I tend to be pretty neutral or at least, you know, I don't feel strong enough about so many issues that I'm going to fight for them. But people who talk to me, it's almost like this chameleon effect, whether someone's like right or left.
People always talk to me as if they assume I'm the same as them. Do you find that also like yes, people all the way on the woke left will just talk to me thinking, of course, James is a smart guy. I'm talking to him. He must be extreme woke left like I am.
And the same thing like people who are like super pro Trump, bar right, they talk to me thinking, oh, James is smart must think like me because I'm talking to him. And so they assume that I'm like, bar right. And they never even like wonder because of course, he's not the other side, which is like a bunch of idiots, even though the country is basically 50, 50 right now. Yeah.
I think part of that. So again, to talk about hypercharge tribalism, what does that environment do when it's like there's this raging tribal divide in the country? You know, I'm sure if you went back to pre civil war, you'd find another raging, you know, division and the end of the 20th century, another raging division was going on.
And then during the 60s, rage, right? That's not always the case. Most decades, it's not we're in one of those right now. And when you're in one of those, what you're going to find is a lot of people in that environment either become really tribal themselves or they get real scared because the most people are just not that disagreeable.
Like they don't want to get out there and like disagree. They just, if someone's being real scary, but it's sure like I'll just say quiet or pretend I agree with you. So what happens is you end up with an intellectual culture. You know, we talk about echo chambers. I think of it as echo chamber is an intellectual culture. It's a culture where disagreement is bad and it's to be part of the group you have to agree.
I have the opposite kind of culture, ideal ab culture, I call it, which is the opposite. It's like disagreement is fun and being in the group has nothing to do with your specific views. We actually like when we disagree. It's fun, right? It's ideas are not sacred. And so when you have a hypercharged decade, like we're in right now, what you're going to see is that ideal ab culture starts to kind of go into the private places and people get scared. And what echo chamber culture kind of rises up and takes over.
What you're describing is I think people who are so used to being in an echo chamber and when I, they're just everyone they know agrees with them or pretends to, they're not even considering that someone might not. Now I feel lucky because I haven't done that. I don't like echo chamber culture. I find it extremely boring and stressful. I'm not like, I don't want to be like, I have to like be a contrarian all the time or like be someone everyone's mad at.
And I also don't want to have to like pretend to agree with people. So I'm surrounded by, if I'm in, you know, if my friend groups are mostly ideal ab's, I say something. I'm just waiting for someone to be like, you're being hypocritical and biased and here's why and you're, you know, this is a straw man argument. And so I'm not going to go to you and assume you think that you agree with me because I'm so used to people disagreeing with me. So when someone is doing that to you, it tells me that they probably are just that that's part of one of their friend criteria is if you're my friend, you agree with me, which means they are enforcing kind of echo chamber culture around them or they're just so used to being in it.
Yeah. And it's interesting because again, there's this what I call menu phenomenon, which is that if you believe in one thing that your team believes in, we have to believe in everything on the menu that your team believes in. So for instance, in the pandemic, if you thought there was the slightest chance that hydroxocloroquine was good for COVID, like, you know, prevents COVID, then it also happens to mean that you're pro life, which also means you're against the war in Ukraine right now. Like there's all these things that are lumped together that have nothing to do with each other in any intellectual way whatsoever.
But one team believes all these things and the other team believes the opposite of all these things. Why did that happen also that all the smart people kind of quote unquote, gang together on all the same positions on all the same ideas and all the other people gang together on all the opposite ideas? Well, that's game number one game number one in political Disney world. There is a narrative and it includes a it's like a little it's a little special package that gives you all your opinions in one one stop shop for all of your opinions.
You can you know your view and by the way, that might change the party line might change and might reverse on Russia or might reverse on tax policy or might reverse on government overreach or whatever. And then you quickly get the message and everyone gets the message and now we're all we all think this right? To me, that's such a waste of human the human mind. I mean, like think about what and if you actually are truly independent learning and thinking about all of these issues, I think what a smart independent knowledgeable person would say about a lot of them is I don't know. I don't have enough info.
You know, the Obamacare, I need to I need to research that for a month before I have an opinion. And then sometimes they would have an opinion, but it would be nuanced and it would be kind of weird and it would definitely not abide by the checklist that would be very unusual, very huge coincidence. If they had the exact same opinion as a tribe as one of these tribes on guns and abortion and climate change and like you said, COVID and any other thing on the war. Like before you can have an opinion, you have to know where your where your team is.
Like COVID, the lab leak theory. This is new news, this theory that maybe came out of the lab instead of the market. And you can have opinion, but I think before you, before most people voice their opinion, they have to know, well, which side am I supposed to be on? Is it the lab leak theory or is it the wet market theory? Like what is one side believe and what is the other side believe?
Game number one has no reverence for individual thinking. You know, does not say, oh, you're a rogue individual. Great. It says you're a rogue individual like you're a terrible person. You know, if you disagree with us on any of these check every, you can disagree on every single issue, but you have the wrong opinion on guns, you're a terrible person. Yeah. So game number one basically says screw the individual, screw the individual thinking and independent thinking and that is not valued. That's actually a negative. I mean, it's really, it's in place. No, again, no one says that out loud. No one's actually thinking that, but that is the ultimate thing that's going on. As it says, it basically stops on the individual and says, this is, this is our collective opinions. And that's that.
And that is, again, that's boring to be part of. And you don't learn anything. And it collectively produces stupidity because no one is thinking, think about the lab leak. What if we could have just talked about that? Someone puts out an opinion on that and say, well, let's examine that. Let's criticize the idea. Let's talk about it. As opposed to saying that person just said, I, you know, so Brett Weinstein is, you know, a famous person who's talked about lab leak early. And I remember tweeting something totally unrelated about Brett Weinstein and it was like a positive thing.
And someone was like, I saw someone else be like, Tim has jumped the shark. He's praising a lab leak person now. So think about what that means. Not only is Brett tarnished forever because he has this view. So that's punishing him. That's making, you know, no one's going to want to, no one wants that for themselves. Right. It's labeling him on a team. But it's also now labeling me. Tim has jumped the shark. It's punishing me for associating with him for praising him. So it's basically this guilt by association.
I mean, well, what does that do to discourse? Is anyone in the right mind going to go talk about the lab leak thing now? No, it's just not worth it for most people unless you're like a Glenn Greenwald like suit you, you know, you're super disagreeable and that most people just aren't like that. And so they're going to shut up and think and then other people are going to think, well, if everyone thinks lab leak hypothesis is an awful thing for awful people, it must be. It must be racist.
Meanwhile, how much like lost time did we have there when we could have been discussing this thing and discussing like our vi virology and epidemiology policies, which are really important for the future. I mean, there's a big scary thing virology and like instead of actually having any discussion, it just silences discussion. And you have that kind of checklist. If you think about it, the stakes are really high, right? Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, knowingly answer helps us prevent the next five million deaths that come from some leaked or not leaked virus.
So it's really important that we not be political and you have this idea spectrum where you describe, we can either think like a scientist, think like a sports fan, think like an attorney, or think like a zealot. And think like a scientist, you describe this intellectual culture of an idea lab where you could pull together disparate ideas for my hypothesis, figure out a test hypothesis and so on, all the way down to thinking like a zealot where you must believe this or else. And you know, this is kind of the problem and then you say this is a self-help for societies, but it's really self-help for individuals. It's both.
Yeah, like it's nice to say this is self-help for societies because we're all kind of fine saying something's wrong with society, but no one wants to think there's something wrong with themselves. But ultimately, this is a self-help for people about how to be more aware of this style of thinking that has taken over society and so that you could rid yourself of this potential disease. What's important to emphasize here is like, there's so much of the, say, what in political Disney world, the message is always the same. We are perfect and right and they are bad. This tribal thing. This is a them problem.
But the thing about that ladder you just described that I talk about, you know, that different ways of thinking is it's not like there's the good people on the high wrongs of the ladder and the bad people on the lower. It's not true, actually. We all go up and down this ladder. We all have susceptible to this.
This is something that is a problem for every person in different areas. Some people are better at it than others and some areas of your thinking will be, you'll be just great at being very kind of evidence-based and humble and then others, you just find yourself with this kind of like your ego is involved and you have this under-conviction and you hate, you hate when someone argues with you, you get really angry. When you're talking about a certain thing and it's like, this is a problem for all humans. It just I think makes it hopefully easier for people to look in the mirror because no one is saying that you're one of the bad people. It's saying you're one of the human people that, you know, we all do this stuff.
Echo chamber culture. You know, I love to talk about ideal-ab culture but I've been part of many echo chambers. I've probably enforced echo chamber on someone somewhere.
I can almost guarantee I've been someone at a dinner table where people are like, don't bring this topic up in front of Tim, he's going to flip out. That's me enforcing an echo chamber on that dinner table. I'm sure I've been that person. So, yeah, it's self-awareness is I think what is a good starting place.
You have this top-down way of describing like, there's these type of people and this is the sort of intellectual culture we could aspire to. And again, you say this for societies but as an individual, I should be aware, hey, am I thinking like a sports fan, one team or the other? Am I thinking like a zealot? Like I believe this and you should be silenced if you don't believe it or am I thinking like a scientist where I pull things apart?
Like it's very much awareness combined with remedy. This self-help idea is very important.
这个自助理念很重要,就像是深入认知和解决措施的结合一样。
This is other thing I feel that's been going on though, which is that the extreme social justice fundamentalism, you describe the 60s where we saw a big split on issues like civil rights. I feel there was a slight difference where yes, there was a split that seems almost as big as it is now. But the split wasn't the exact same.
Like civil rights was about equality of opportunity and let everybody have the opportunity to drink out of the same water fountain, to go to the same schools, to vote, you know, all of these things.
But now I feel like you described before as almost like a reverse racism thing. I feel like people are insisting on equality of outcome. It's not good enough that everyone has the opportunity, equal opportunity to work at Google is that everyone, there needs to be equal outcome.
50% of Google needs to be men, 50% of Google needs to be women. And then if you throw in this ideology called intersectionalism, okay, of the women, some need to be this sexual preference, some need to be this ethnic background and on and on, like the weakest voice should have more rights than the historically strongest voices.
And I feel like that extreme starts the border on insanity. But they don't say we care about equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity.
我感觉极端会让人疯狂,但他们不关心机会平等,只关心结果平等。
With this particular narrative, this ideology, what it says is, it's worldview is so simple that it says there's only one reason that there's ever a disparity like that. And it's discrimination.
Therefore, if there were a quality of opportunity, then there would be a quality of outcome. And the fact that there's not is evidence that there's not a quality of opportunity, which is again, that's very one dimensional way to look at something.
So they're ultimately are arguing for a quality of outcome, but because they believe that they're one in the same. And of course, they're not one in the same.
所以,他们最终是在为结果质量辩论,但因为他们认为这是同样的事情。当然,它们并不是同样的事情。
It's just, it's, you know, all you have to do is look at like white Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. You know how much, you know, Russian Americans out-earn Polish Americans who out-earn English Americans who out-earn French Americans, for example.
Suddenly there, I mean, like, why would we ever expect that every white ethnicity earned exactly the same? We would never think that. Of course, it would just be a huge, and why do those earn differently? It's not discrimination, right?
It is what are the cultural values? Different interests, different feelings about ambition, different feelings about what makes success, different feelings about achievement in school and how much it matters about how much family matters versus career.
Right? There's just a million reasons, just culturally, where those groups would end up with different outcomes. But as soon as you say that, you know, white Americans in this industry out-earned black Americans, you can't apply that same nuanced, obvious kind of complex reasoning.
You have to say, according to this group, that is discrimination, period, no more discussion. There's no other thing that could be causing it. And it's just unnecessary.
Like, at Google, like, there is a lot, I mean, look, there's a lot of reasons here, but there's a lot of evidence, a lot of research done. This is not like new research.
在谷歌公司,嗯,有很多原因,看,这里有很多证据,做了很多研究。这不是新研究。
That on average, men are more interested in professions that involve things, and women are more interested in professions that involve people. In fact, some of the research shows that women who are qualified to be top engineers at Google have more options than men who are qualified to be top engineers at Google.
Because they tend to also have better verbal skills. So they can go to a lot of industries. When the men, more likely, who are qualified there, they're not going to be as good at other industries. So there's just so many reasons.
And when you learn about them all, you don't end up more of a misogynist. You end up like appreciating the value of gender diversity more because you're like, wow, there's different interests, there's different things. And of course, this also applies broadly.
It's not, you can't tell you anything about any one person. So again, when you're just grown up reasoning here, I'm not like, this is just basic, one on one, grown up reasoning that societies are complex, people are complex, men and women are complex, and on broad averages, you're going to see different things, and it's going to have different outcomes.
To wipe all of that away and make it all taboo to even talk about. And then say, no, this is going to only be discrimination. What does that do? A, you don't solve any problems. You don't figure anything out, right? Because you just know all the real discussions done.
B, you end up furthering this narrative that there is rank discrimination. And that's the only thing, which makes people angry and it's divisive. Why are you making that seem even, you know, there are probably some discrimination. Why are you making it seem worse than it is?
Then, you know, and then of course, if you institute the other thing, which is reverse discrimination. So now make sure that it's 50-50. That's just actually not, that is not fair to the men who you're actually who are losing their spot because it doesn't, I mean, Google is welcome to do it, but it's not like it's a moral good.
It's not like it's a moral win. So the SJF ideas don't stand up to scrutiny very often. It's very easy.
这并不是一个道德上的胜利。所以,SJF的想法很少经得起审查。这很容易理解。
Like I just did to very quickly break down and be like, this doesn't make sense. This is not how we should be, which is part of the, I think, the reasoning behind why the reaction is not, let's debate this. You'll never hear them say, you know, let's debate this. It's, you're a bad person.
No one talked to this guy because he has this evil, misogynist, bad person argument. He's a privileged, white guy who blah, blah, blah. And so that's what you do when you don't think you can win the debate, right?
If you think you have no chance of winning this game, well, let's make the game illegal in the first place. But then there's the question like, so there are very smart, intelligent, and even powerful people who are extreme.
And by the way, I'm not saying any of these, like, yeah, maybe Google's hiring practices maybe do need to look at war women. Who knows? Like, we're just, we're just using this as an example. But basically, the fringes on both sides are maybe 1 to 5% of the population.
And yet we've seen over and over again that 3% of the population could be strong enough to basically set the entire narrative of an entire population. And why is it the case that, you know, university presidents are willing to fire professors or saying something that might be very reasonable, might be very understandable.
Okay, let's question whether this is a lab leak or not. And yet those professors get fired who question too much.
好的,我们来质疑这是否是实验室泄漏。然而那些质疑过多的教授被解雇了。
Again, the university presidents are usually, I'm going to assume that they're either more moderate or diplomatic. I mean, they have to be diplomatic to rise up to where they are because you have to all every wrong on the career ladder, you have to opi's a fairly large population, particularly, you know, in a university environment.
So why is it the case that people are getting fired from high-level jobs if they say something that's even questionable?
那么为什么人们会因为说出一些可疑的话而被解雇高层职位呢?
It's, you know, people are like, oh, the mob, you know, the person got fired by the rock. The mob doesn't fire anyone. I've yet to see the mob call someone into their office and say, you're fired.
Who, you know, what's happening is that the very, usually, the university president, who if you got them alone almost definitely, they're going to say, yeah, this is crazy. This person shouldn't be fired, but what can you do?
It's just so much easier to not want to be in the target of the mob. I don't want to be associated with this guy. Let me just fire them and move on. And it's kind of like deal with the devil kind of shameful thing and then forget about it and it's over, right?
And so it's almost like, I like to point out there's like this moment of truth here when it's like someone, the professor says something that offends the mob.
所以这种情况就像是,我喜欢指出这种“真相时刻”,就好像当某个教授说了一些引起群众不满的话时一样。
The mob says fire them. Okay. So that's what's happened so far.
暴民说要解雇他们。好的,这就是目前发生的事情。
Now, the president or whoever it is, the CEO, whoever has the ability to make this, you know, the Google CEO, whoever, the university president has a moment when they can either defend, not again, not even the professor because maybe they disagree with the president, defend the basic liberal values of the institution that we have, we have a diversity of ideas here, which is that they, in their head, you know, that's the thing that they're saying, this is the right thing to do.
Or did they say not worth it, must fire them and move on. That's the moment of truth.
他们是不是说不值得,必须解雇他们然后继续前进。那就是真正的关键时刻。
And what's happened so much recently is they've, the moment of truth has gone the wrong way.
最近发生了很多事情,真相的时刻走了错误的路。
Because again, it's easier. It's just easier, right? But what it is, it's just, that is cowardice.
因为再说一遍,这样更容易。对吧,只是更容易而已?但实际上,这是懦弱的表现。
And it should be thought of this is pretty like, it's pretty, it's harmful because you in that moment are, the mob doesn't have any power without that moment.
它应该被认为是相当严重的,因为在那一刻,如果没有那个时刻,群众是没有任何力量的,这是有害的。
And so what you're doing is you're actually giving the mob its power.
所以你现在的做法是在实际上赋予了暴徒它们的权力。
Is there a solution like, are we going to trend in the other direction ever?
我们是否有解决方案,或者我们会朝着另一个方向趋势吗?
Because the problem with, we've gone so deep down this trend, like it's suddenly all the university presidents and all the media and all the heads of diversity and all these companies are all of a sudden they're going to be ashamed for things they've done because we realize they took it to an extreme.
Like it doesn't seem like, like your book is great as a solution.
你的书似乎不像是一个有效的解决方案。
And again, I would apply it more as a self-help book to the end of everyone should read it because it's more of a way to think as an individual and it would be great if everyone thought that way because then society would kind of correct this trend.
But realistically, is this trend going to correct itself? Yeah, I mean, the thing about like, if you're in another country and in a different time maybe and offending the mob will get you lynched and maybe your whole family, right?
You need people with ridiculous amount of courage to overcome that.
你需要有着荒谬的勇气的人才能克服那个问题。
We're in a country where like that is happening.
我们现在所处的国家正在发生这样的事情。
You're getting killed now because your ability to make an income is like death.
你现在被打败了,因为你赚钱的能力就像死亡一样糟糕。
Yes, okay, but it's different than getting murdered and for a, and also a bill is sure that some people genuinely will lose their ability to make an income. But a lot of people just have to deal with a shit storm for a few days.
A lot of people will just have to get criticized and get bullied by the mob and then they move on to someone else.
很多人只能被暴徒批评和欺负,然后才转向其他人。
A lot of things times the sky doesn't actually fall, right?
许多事情大多数时候天空并不会真的塌下来,对吧?
And so there's a huge difference between the hard cudgel of murder and what the mob has here, which is a soft cudgel of social fear.
所以,在谋杀的硬棍棒和这里的暴民所拥有的社会恐惧的软棍棒之间存在巨大的差别。
And they rely on widespread social fear.
他们依赖于广泛的社会恐惧。
And as soon as the thing about that is that it's kind of a house of cards.
而关于这件事情的问题就在于它有点像一座纸牌屋。
And a few people start standing up and very quickly it can be kind of just like you're going to have a downward spiral of cowardice where everyone's kind of copying each other's cowardice.
有一些人站了起来,很快就会变得像你会陷入一种懦弱的下降螺旋,每个人都在模仿彼此的懦弱。
You can have upward spiral of courage.
你可以拥有勇气的向上螺旋。
You can have people start to copy each other's courage and say, well, you know what, they did it and they did it.
你可以让人们开始相互鼓励,说:“你知道吗,他们做到了,我们也可以!”
You know, I even saw one of the worst cancel stories is James Bennett at the New York Times.
你知道吗,我甚至看到了《纽约时报》最糟糕的撤职故事之一,就是詹姆斯·贝内特。
He's the op-ed writer, op-ed editor. And he gets fired for publishing an op-ed that half the country agreed with, but it offended the staff at the New York Times.
Right. He got fired. The editor got fired for publishing. Yeah.
没错,他被解雇了。因为出版了那篇文章,编辑也被解雇了。
With all 150 million people were fine with it.
对于这件事情,一亿五千万人都没意见。
And his point, he's first tried to defend his decision to publish it.
他想表达的是,他首先试图为自己发表那篇文章的决定辩护。
He said, I disagree with the op-ed. But if we're only publishing things that people like me and probably you agree with, then we're not much of a newspaper, right?
He was basically saying we have to be an ideal in other words.
他的意思基本上是说,换句话说,我们必须成为一个理想的典范。
Then when the mob reached a fever pitch, changed his tune entirely, said this was a huge mistake, we shouldn't have done it and I'm going to resign.
当群众情绪达到极点时,他完全改变了态度,表示这是一个巨大的错误,我们不应该这样做,我将辞职。
And you know, you got fired whatever it was.
你知道的,不管那是什么,你都被解雇了。
So you could say, okay, that's an example of like the leadership at the New York Times had a moment of truth.
那么,你可以这样说,纽约时报的领导层经历了一个真相时刻。
They know that this is the worst decision to fire this guy.
他们知道开除这个人是最糟糕的决定。
It's so at the antithesis of what the New York Times is supposed to be, but they do it anyway.
这完全不符合《纽约时报》应具备的风格,但他们还是这么做了。
But now flash a couple of years later, just recently, the Washington Post published an article where someone was talking about the James Bennett thing and they said, you know what?
It was wrong and we should have said it then and we didn't because we were scared and we're saying it now.
这是错误的,我们当时应该说出来,但由于害怕,我们没有说,现在我们说出来了。
Boom, courage, right?
“砰,勇气,对吗?”
And it doesn't take too many of those because no one wants to feel like a cow.
这种情况不需要太多次,因为没有人想感觉自己像一头牛。
So if you're watching him post a saying that maybe now the LA Times is going to say, you know what, we also should have said something. It could very quickly spiral the other way. So I think actually I would be scared if I were the mom because I'm thinking we don't have the hard cut your little violence. We're relying on this fear and that could crumble pretty quickly if people start getting courageous.
So yeah, I feel optimistic actually. You know, Tim, I wish I'm usually an optimistic person. This stuff scares me particularly, you know, way to your kid, you knew newborn gets older. Like the kind of arguments I have in my house. And by the way, I don't really argue with my kids. I let them say their thing and I try to be as quiet as possible. But when you hear over and over again, silence is violence. You know, if you don't believe this, then you're that. And depending on whatever the argument of the day is whether 10 year old girls should be allowed to get penises or an issue whether, you know, one war is better than another war or F the police everywhere. These are the kind of arguments that come up with people who are on the front lines of this kind of fundamentalism.
And it's hard to look at nuanced positions when the common phrase is silence is violence or even, you know, nuanced is violence. But I think your book, which is called What's Our Problem, A Self-Help Book for Societies, this is a great book which not only describes what's going on, but looks at the history of ideas in the past 100 years or more. You have great graphics describing everything, great essays and chapters describing everything. This is really a must read book about what's happening in our society right now. I encourage everyone to read it.
But also I encourage everyone to read your blog. Wait, but why? I am an avid reader. You have great posts, by the way, about the nature of time. Like, you know, like you're one, how do you, you know, you have 100 blocks in a day, how do you use them? Or you're, you start off this book, actually, with kind of a, you know, your thoughts about the history of the human race, where if you divide it into a thousand pages, pages one through nine hundred ninety-nine sort of look the same. And then the final page is like huge differences. And you have a really good sense about how to describe time in different situations. Like, we might have only, you know, ten more things, giving's left with our parents and whatever. So, so I encourage everybody to read your blog. It's filled with so many fascinating topics where you've done a deep dive.
But most importantly, read this book, what's our problem, a self-help book for societies, which I really, again, do feel this has been like a self-help book for me. And it's a, it's a good reminder when I get too much of a sports fan or an attorney or a zealot. And it brings me back to my, I, what I feel are my idea lab roots. So thanks for coming on the podcast. You don't know this, but I've been a huge fan of your blog for since you started it. Thanks again for reaching out and wanting to come on the podcast.
Yeah, thanks James. And I, by the way, you know, when I was starting this blog, you were one of like, I was listening to you and Tim Ferriss a lot. And you know, I think part of it is, you know, you're kind of like very frank upfront style where you're just openly a human. You're just being yourself flagrantly. And I thought that was inspiring. And I think it probably helped me encourage you to do that. So I also appreciate you and, you know, what they kind of work you do.
Oh, thanks Tim. I appreciate it. And I will say it's often gotten me into a lot of trouble too, just being myself.
哦,谢谢 Tim。我很感激。我要说,有时只是做我自己,就会惹上不少麻烦。
So yeah, well, that's also why you have a lot of listeners though because people like a rogue individual, you know, it's interesting. Yeah, I hope so. Well, thanks again, Tim. And hopefully come on the podcast again. I'd love to talk more about all this stuff anytime.