The Right Way To Be A Skeptic w/ Tim Urban 

29:40Now they've let the party, they've let the low-rung faction define the party for, you know, for, and with all the consequences that will come with that. So I think that the low-rung conservatism made a big push in the 60s. And I think it made another big push right after Reagan finished. So if you look at Reagan's rhetoric versus four years later in the 1992 Republican National Convention, you have Pat Buchanan on stage using the absolute epitome of low-rung rhetoric. He's saying, we are this, they are that. We believe this, they believe. And he's totally caricaturizing the left as this, It's the exact opposite of how Reagan was speaking.

30:26It's low-rong. It's tribal talk. It's us and them. We are perfectly good and righteous. They are perfectly bad. And granted, conventions is going to have an aspect of this, but this was extreme. The things he was saying on stage were just, you know, people were appalled at the time, which tells you today, I don't think anyone would be surprised. Back then, it was like, oh, my God, that's not how Republicans talk. What is this? Then this all gets, you know, so the tug of war is still going on. now you've got the a few things happened in the 90s which is you've got the uh the gingrich revolution gingrich was i mean he's he has he started out as a moderate and then he basically openly says oh we're in war if we can just treat this like a war and just basically he basically says we can use in his own words we can use low-rung politics to win and he was right the gingrich revolution was gingrich going around and basically saying we don't we don't even uh we don't consult with the enemy.

31:21We don't talk to the enemy. The enemy is, we want to frame them as just almost inhuman Satan. They are the worst ever. And if you can, you know, if you try to compromise with the enemy, you're out of our tribe and we're going to win. And they had a big revolution and they did well. Then you've got Fox News, the Drudge Report, you have the internet, you know, and so you have these, you know, Fox News was one of the first to say, wait a second, cable is different than than you know network television we don't have to do what the news has always done which is say well we can't be biased because then we'll lose half the country we have to try to be neutral or at least somewhat neutral uh and they said what if we just say screw the screw screw one half of the country and just go full in tribal with the with the right you know right wing tribal and of course it did really well and it and it it brought a bunch of primitive minds out and it was the primitive mind kind of super spreader and it brought that you know it brought the center of gravity of of the the right down you know the tug of it basically was the superpower popeye spinach for the low rung part of the tug of war and so that's the trajectory i think you know i think you know during the obama you know administration it gets even worse it's not it's not that it's been pure low rung there's a high rung aspect in there on the right but you can see that the trend is that the low rungs have kind of taken over um and the struggle for the soul of the party has has been won by the lower rung aspect um a while back yeah so to what extent is donald trump really rather than a brand new break from republican history really just a product of 90s era low-rung strategy.

33:07I was struck reading the book that the phrase take back our country is verbatim Pat Buchanan, which is one of Trump's favorite refrains. The idea of calling Democrats quote, sick and pathetic, which is pretty much every third tweet from Trump, was literally recommended, I found this out in your book, literally recommended on a strategy memo to use those exact words by Newt Gingrich in the 90s. So to what extent did he really just absorb that playbook? Yeah, I think he has a knack for figuring out what will actually win voters over and having his finger kind of on the pulse of that moment. And I don't think any, he doesn't seem to have any, and he doesn't seem to have any qualms with or any kind of obligation to some, any form of kind of propriety or the way, you know, the way a presidential way, he just, I just think from the beginning rejects that.

34:12And I think what he has going for him, part of the reason it works is A, yes, this has been now 30 years of kind of, whether it's Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Fox News, There's been like, you know, 30 straight years of kind of training a lot of right-wing America to think this way and to not feel any kind of, this is wrong. We shouldn't talk that way. I think that's just been so washed away. And of course, you know, we're not talking about the left, but the left is a huge part of the culprit here that has made the right this way. But the fact that he won't get penalized for low-rung rhetoric, which is otherwise very helpful.

34:49And then now there's no penalty. But then separately, he can take advantage of the fact that the right has grown resentful for a bunch of reasons, many of which are quite valid. A lot of his, you know, a lot of his voters used to be left wing kind of working class whites. And they've been betrayed in many ways by the left. And so they and that their factories have left and they live in ghost towns. And, you know, there's opioid epidemics and they're suffering while meanwhile they're getting told by the media and others that they're, you know, these awful privileged people. That's just putty. I mean, that's so easy to, you know, especially now you're not going to get penalized for low rung rhetoric.

35:24And, you know, you can just see that there's this group that is willing to be, you know, that will come over and vote in great numbers for someone who can say, fuck the whole establishment. Fuck the left. Fuck the media. These people are disgusting. They're awful. And it's just too easy in a way. And and I think, you know, it's more complicated. I mean, these people, it's not just that it's low-rung right wing. He also is really, really critical of the Republican establishment that's been in power. And his thing was much more populist. The whole, all the elites on all sides have been failing and treating you badly.

36:06And like, I'm your voice was his word. So yeah, I think you see it. Yeah, he's the product of this long-term shift in the Republican Party. but he's also kind of taking advantage of a bunch of the real resentments. I think one barrier to someone buying your story of high-rung versus low-rung in politics is the intuition many people have that all of the seemingly high-rung people are just low-rung and good at acting high rung. In other words, Donald Trump comes right out and says, yes, of course I try to pay as little tax as possible. Everyone does. He comes right out and says, yes, I love beautiful women.

36:59I just find myself touching them. Whereas all of these other politicians, in fact, to do all of those things, but then say all of the right things, like a Sunday morning preacher that's behaving terribly the other six days of the week. And so if that's the case, then people feel there's something more transparent. Honest is the wrong word because Trump lies all the time, but there's something more transparent about someone who shows you who they are without shame rather than pretending to be this high-minded person, when in reality, we know what they're doing behind closed doors. So what about that criticism of this high-rung versus low-rung schema?

37:47Well, I think that the schema still works. In fact, I think it's useful to be able to say, these people appear to be high-rung, but they're not. Okay, it's not that the, you know, you're not arguing that with the schema itself, you're using the schema to point out exactly what you don't like, which is that these people pretend to be high rung and they're not, they're not really high rung. So the problem is not that we, it's not that high rung doesn't exist. It's that you're saying these people happen to not actually be high rung. And that Donald, this is by the way, I know this argument well, because I have one of my smart, smartest friends is a very big Trump person.

38:23And he says stuff exactly like this, that people who don't like Trump, oh, they don't like the way he talks basically. that they're all appalled by, you know, his, you know, he's not following the right, you know, the right manners, the right playbook. But meanwhile, he's actually calling real shit out that all these other people who are all talking the right way and get praised on the Sunday shows, you know, they're all these awful people behind the scenes and that they've done these, you know, they've done so much, so much worse and that, and that, you know, he does a lot of what about is him.

38:51If I, if I ever criticized Trump in any way, he'll be like, oh yeah, well, how about, you know, these people don't even, you know, so I get this all the time. And there's plenty of validity to that argument. But I think that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as high-rungness in politics. I think it doesn't mean that every single politician is equally at the very bottom of the ladder. I think that it does range. I mean, I'm not an Abraham Lincoln expert, but like, you know, Lincoln and his rhetoric and his style of governing just strikes me as not equal on the ladder to, you know, the last couple of presidents and what we've seen from the White House.

39:33it just seems to you know there is by the way and by the way there is something to rhetoric again people can argue that Reagan was actually bad or that Lincoln was actually bad or that Obama was actually bad but those three guys they did speak in a way that you know Americans I think can be proud of and I think that how you speak does set the tone and even if he you know even if Obama was actually you know doing all these bad things as a lot of people would argue he I think there's just it's its own good to speak in a kind of a high-minded way that can serve as a good example and help reduce tribalism.

40:12Now, again, people will argue that Obama did not help reduce tribalism, that he made it worse. And I think that we can get into that some other time. But yes, I don't think it's as simple as all these other politicians who speak in these more presidential ways are more high-rung than Donald Trump, who says that these people are disgusting. I don't think that's necessarily the argument. It's just that I think that most of these people are fairly low rung at this point. And we have a political culture issue. Yeah. So you describe this as actually a prisoner's dilemma scenario where basically the first side to go, like, let's say we're at a stable equilibrium where you've got a Reagan type on the right and an Obama type on the left, both of whom speak very respectfully about their fellow Americans.

41:07They try to court the other side rather than calling the other side terrible people. The problem with this is, as you describe, a prisoner's dilemma scenario where each side can be outflanked in their own party by someone who goes low, someone who goes low and appeals to the tribal low-rung elements of the democratic party is going to cause an obama problems from the left well i guess you could say from below in your scheme right if we're thinking about politics on a on a on a y-axis instead of on an x-axis and someone like trump is going to cause you know someone like mccain or someone like Romney problems from below because you're activating the tribal energy that basically the high-rung people don't tap into, not because it doesn't benefit them, but because they actually observe a norm against it.

42:07And so when one side goes low, the other side now feels kind of an incentive to go low, and then all of society is brought down to a lower level. this is a very depressing picture because if if true it says to me that there's like we there's no clear way out of our society's uh our political culture's decline so is this is your assessment really that pessimistic or is there a way to climb out of this I think it's a tug of war And I think when In moments in history When the low rungs Had an unusual amount of power Which sometimes happened Because we're Inflamed by wartime Like McCarthyism Came right after World War II And there was a lot of fear Of the Soviet Union And nukes were freaking everyone out And the Red Scare was kind of a low-rung flare-up.

43:12And in that moment, once suddenly, you can see where the winds are blowing. Oh, anyone who tries to fight against that now is going to be out of their, you know, they're going to lose the election. And there's all of this pressure, if you want to succeed, to jump on the low-rung bandwagon, or at least not to fight against it. But then, you know, why did the Red Scare not just go on forever? Because people get sick of tribalism and low-rungness. And there's still a higher mind in everyone's head, and that is getting really tired of tribalism. And when that moment happens, the tug of war culturally has kind of quietly shifted back, and there's all of this opportunity now for someone to kind of do the opposite, for a high-rung politician to say, oh my God, this is such a breath of fresh air, and do great, and start a movement the other direction.

44:05So I don't think it's inherently that the higher-rung politicians are always going to get brought down by the lower-rung. I think that it depends on the status of the kind of national tug-of-war, psychological tug-of-war, and at that moment, how it's going. I see a struggle for it right now going on. So, yeah, let's talk about the soul of the Democratic Party now. Yeah. Lest the left half of my audience feel too good about themselves. so what's going on with the democratic party right now in your view is it um is it embracing its lower rung elements or is it pivoting towards a higher rung mindset yeah well the same exact story i mean has really you can look at the the right and i talked about fox news and um you know Rush Limbaugh or whatever, who were kind of inflaming the lower right.

45:06I mean, you've had very similar things going on on the lower left. I don't know if it's exactly parallel. Maybe it's, you know, MSNBC is quite parallel to Fox and things like that. But I would say it's more that most of the media has not gone like crazy left like MSNBC, but they've all kind of increasingly swayed to the left. They've always been, media has always been a little bit maybe left biased, but it's just become worse and worse and worse.

45:41And I mean, it's kind of a separate thing, but you can just, the struggle for the soul of the entity, you can see it everywhere. You see it, I just look at like the New York Times, you can see such a struggle for the soul of the New York Times going on. You can see, you know, this, this totally biased reporting or whatever, or just this, and then you can see this effort to put in, you know, an op ed that conflicts with that, that actually is, you know, okay, we're, you know, maybe, you know, New York Times still has a diversity of viewpoint, and you can see there's a huge backlash against that.

46:13you know i think we talked earlier is there was a struggle for the soul of ted going on and i think that uh what you see is that a lot of entities way more than you see on the right side a lot of institutions you know big media brands but also just you know universities and there's been a struggle for the soul there and it's been not between you know anything with the right it's really been between being kind of moderately left you know high rung mostly but a little bit left to like kind of on the other side of the tug of war like a hardcore lower left full kind of tribe um and i think that the epicenter there i mean has been um you know at universities where if you look at universities in the 70s, 80s, even 90s, you see a, even the 2000s, you see a kind of like a four to one or between two to one and four to one ratio of, you know, left-leaning faculty and admin to right-leaning, right?

47:29So it's definitely left-weighted, but it's that four-to-one, two-to-one, you know, that's the right-wing size of the pie is substantial enough that there is a loud right-wing voice, which is, of course, important for a bunch of things. it um it's a filter for left-wing ideas it's like oh the the pesky right is going to you know if we are pushing our ideas but that we're too biased or that we're they're not you know or we're not um you know accurate for some reason that we're going to get destroyed by the that the people on campus who kind of provide the first filter against this um and more diverse places tend to be, there's a lot of research on this, tend to be more tolerant of diversity.

48:18So when you have a four to one or two to one ratio, someone comes out and the right wingers on campus are tolerated because we're a diverse place. And what happens is as the ratio goes down, it goes up. So you go from four to one to eight to one to 12 to one to 16 to one, you start to see the opposite. There's increasing hostility towards the increasingly small minority that's different because within you know when it's when 95 percent of people are on one side there's going to develop a very hardcore tribalism against a very small kind of helpless little group at that point and that group because i think it's going to get quiet out of fear and most of them are so it's going to you The people that do disagree are going to be very reluctant to speak up.

49:08And the ones who do speak up usually are now are so isolated that they just get run out of campus. The mob basically lynches them metaphorically. um and that's awful for the university's core purpose which is uh to both uh discover truth and educate on truth because now you're going to have the tug of war is gonna you're going to have no ability that the you know the high-rung campus the high the high-rung sensibility on campus wants diversity of viewpoint because for all the reasons i said it's just the it is the proper mechanism to discover truth. And the low-rung component, again, there's not principles there.

49:55It's just use the university as a tool to further our activism, to push our viewpoint onto society. So it's the opposite of trying to find truth. It's trying to confirm our existing beliefs, strengthen them, put out papers that confirm them. It doesn't matter if the papers are accurate, as long as they have the right viewpoint. As long as they're on the right part of the horizontal axis, we don't care about the vertical axis right so it's kind of a zero-sum thing if you care about if you're insistent on where things must be on the horizontal axis then you're gonna just could totally sacrifice the vertical axis so this has been this story that's been building up for a while and you can just look at it in detail and watch the struggle for the soul of universities be torn between truth, you know, and tribal victory.

50:50And you've watched it just get totally sucked into that, you know, the tug of war has gone full low rung on campuses. And from there, it has spread out. And you've seen the same story now play out in institution after institution, whether it's, you know, Hollywood, media, you know, the corporate world, nonprofits, arts. Most of these institutions were, you know, because over the last, you know, few decades, elite has started to be more and more left. You know, the elites across the country have kind of coalesced on the left. And most of the institutions are run by elites. And so, you know, you start to just see all these institutions that are a little bit left-leaning, all kind of just like the hill.

51:44And they start to just, as they go, the hill gets steeper and the ball just starts rolling down faster. And this, of course, is the story behind why what I see is a classic, just very low-rung tribe that happens to be left-coded. But, you know, in the end, all the low-rung tribes are really the same, which is, you know, wokeness, this woke movement. I think that it has risen because of this tug of war has gone in the wrong direction. And it's a natural thing. Now you're going to have this opening. Right. You say some things in the book about skepticism that I found interesting, which is, you know, obviously when you're thinking in a high rung manner, you're thinking like a scientist, which means you have the right balance of skepticism, right?

52:33The word skeptic often is used as a positive, a kind of positive noun to describe someone who thinks like a scientist. But really, it's not that you want to be skeptical of everything. It's that you want to have the exact right balance of skepticism. So when I see a post on X that says that Meghan Markle has staged a fake pregnancy, and that's why she's able to dance around hours before delivery. And that's the most rational explanation of what's going on here, total conspiracy theory. You want to have the instinct to be skeptical of that. But in the early days of COVID, when you learn that there's a coronavirus lab in Wuhan that makes novel coronaviruses and was, in fact, doing gain-of-function research, you do want to be skeptical of the narrative which says it couldn't have possibly come from there, right?

53:42So there is a balance of skepticism that conspiracy theorists fall on one end of in a very dangerous way, and sort of mindless sheep that believe everything they read in the New York Times fall on the wrong side of as well. um so yeah i mean how do you know when you have the right balance of skepticism i think of skepticism as like a filter in your head and when this filter is really tight and closed you're kind of like cynical you're like i you know everyone's everyone's lying to me you know no you can't trust anyone right so you know no new information can come in that's not good right it's not a good way to learn when the filter is too open you're gullible you believe whoever the last person to talk to you, that's what you believe.

54:30You just believe everything you hear that you don't have any faith in your own reasoning abilities. That's not good either, right? Those are both bad ways to learn. So what you want is the skepticism filter that is, like you said, balanced and also has the capacity to open and close strategically based on a certain criteria. So when your mind is on the high rung with a certain topic and you're just in scientist mode, you're just trying to get to the truth deep down, deep down in your deepest place, your motive is really justifying the truth. Your skepticism filter is going to serve that purpose.

55:05So its settings are going to be tuned to if there's a new source you don't know anything about, your skepticism filter is going to be a little bit tighter until you learn more because who is this person? How do I know? And you're going to be assessing people while this podcaster has shown me that they will disagree with both sides. They don't seem to be tribally bound. I've seen them apologize for or correct their errors. They seem to be actually concerned with truth. They speak in a way that strikes me as their conviction and their voice only comes out when they really know what they're talking about.

55:37Okay. In my head, I'm going to label this person a pretty high-rung thinker. My skepticism filter now will open a little bit wider when they talk. I don't have to. I put you in this camp, I trust you as a high-rung thinker. When I hear you say something, until you burn me, And, you know, until you show me otherwise, and I have to reconsider, I'm going to have a pretty, it's an efficiency thing where my filter is going to be open with you. Because when you say something, I'm just going to assume it's been vetted. It's been researched. He's saying this because he knows what he's talking about. And I'm going to just be able to, it's a shortcut.

56:11I can now just assume that's correct without much of my own work. That's great. Meanwhile, when someone on X who I've seen many times lie or exaggerate, they get community noted all the time. They clearly are biased with one tribe or the other politically. My filter is just very tight. And I'm not going to get much from them because when they say something, I'll put it in the, okay, this is information I heard, but I need to verify it somewhere else before I believe it because I don't believe this person. So when you care about truth, this is just what you're going to do. Your filter is going to start opening and closing for people and for sources based on how they've proven to be with truth.

56:46And you're going to have a balance where you're going to be skeptical enough to try to weed out bullshit, but you're going to open enough to change, to update your ideas and to be able to learn new things and to, and to be challenged. Now that's great, right? It's an amazing human tool to skepticism filter in our heads. If the settings are being driven by a motive for truth, when we drift down on the lower rung, so there's a certain political topic that, you know, gets you, you know, your abortion, you really, really get worked up about abortion and you are just super tribal with this particular issue because maybe it's personal to you or you You just really, you know, it riles up your primitive mind.

57:24What's going to happen is your skepticism filter, this valuable tool of yours is going to be the settings are going to be hijacked to direct that filter towards serving not truth, but serving confirmation. So what you'll do, and you'll see this all the time, is that the person whose primitive mind is controlling the skepticism filter will, when information is presented that confirms the sacred belief, doesn't matter whose voice it's from, doesn't matter how trustworthy that person is, doesn't matter what this random news site I've never heard of, what their deal is, if it confirms it, yes, see, that's it.

58:05and you'll bring it up in arguments and you'll send it to your friends. Look at this article, see? And you'll read it and you'll say, yes, a hundred percent. There's no skepticism at all. This is exactly, and that strengthens your conviction because you're without any filtering, just accepting the information as true. And then you just jump to the other side of the, you know, your filter just goes into the entire opposite direction and just shuts tight. when information contradicts your viewpoints. And again, that can come from a very reputable source or from really hard data. It doesn't matter.

58:44You might go so far as to block that account. So you don't even want to see it. I don't even want to see that in front of me. But if I do see it in front of me, I immediately I'll say, well, of course, it's from that trash publication. Of course, it's from, yeah, I'm sure, oh, that person, I'm sure they're not biased at all. You know, you can just, and you know this if you tried to argue with someone who's really mired in the low rungs, a friend or relative, and you try to send them an article or a data point or a tweet that you think will show your side of the argument, they will immediately just reject it out of hand.

59:15They will not say, let me consider, maybe I'm wrong about this because when you're in the low rungs, you don't ever say that. And so the filter now is working overtime to protect and strengthen your sacred beliefs and make sure it protects your beliefs against anything that might challenge them by immediately, you know, ruling it out with pure cynicism. And so we all have a skepticism filter. It opens and closes for all of us. And the question is, what is the core motivation driving the settings of the filter? And that's what you have to look at is is is it opening and closing based on a motive for truth and then you don't have to think about then everything else falls into place it just obviously opens and closes here or close you know opens there closes here because if you're looking for truth that's what you would do or is it um is it is it is it opening and closing in order to confirm confirm and strengthen your sacred beliefs right so speaking of family members uh one of the most common questions I get from listeners is, how can you help me?

1:00:24Can you give me advice with talking about political subjects with family members? And then the second related question is, can you give me advice on bridging a political divide in dating?

1:00:41so okay uh i think i'd give two different answers for that i think if your family member is not just disagree you know if a family member is is is kind of thinking from the high rungs and so are you this is not even a problem you just will argue with them it's just fun to argue you'll just, and if you disagree, you'll laugh at each other about the disagreement or you'll just say, yeah, of course we disagree on a lot of things. Like, and it's just not a problem. It's not a problem. It's interesting, right? If their disagreements are probably, you like that because it's going to help, you know, it makes conversation fun.

1:01:17So when I hear that question, what, how do I cope with this family member disagreeing? I see that as one of three things are happening. Either the person asking that is mired on the low rungs themselves, in which case they see it as any good person would of course agree with me how is my family so awful that they that they seem to not fully get it why do they not get that this is so important right that's what a low-rung person thinks about anyone who disagrees with them or the family the family member is the one in the low runs and this person is just like i just want to get through to them because they're so wrong and it's like you know and and it's like they think it just like bothers me that this family member is, you know, there's so much better than this, whatever.

1:02:03Or you're both in the low rungs, which is often common, both people. So it's either one or both is what's going on. Now, I would say first is just evaluate if you are the low-rung person. If you think like you're 100 % right about this issue and they're 100 % wrong, and how could they be such an one of these awful people who disagrees? You know, I don't even want to be, I don't even want, it's going to hurt my relationship. I don't even want to be in the same room as that. Okay, you have a low-rung problem. You need to address your low-rung problem. That's the first thing. Then you can worry about your family because you're not acting like a sane person.

1:02:34You're acting as someone who you cannot handle when someone else disagrees with you and that you're judging them for it. You're letting political beliefs hurt your relationship with them. You're sure that you're right, which is a huge sign that you're not thinking straight. You're sure that you're 100 % right and that it's a clear black and white issue. So, right, you know, you're kind of in it. You have your own problem. And that's fine. We've all been there. But, like, understand what's going on here, which is that it's a you thing right now. Now, the other kind of person, another kind of situation when your family member is so long, where you disagree with your friends all the time.

1:03:08And you can have all kinds of, but you bring it up in front of that family member or your whole family in general. And you're going to get, like, either icy silence or, like, an explosion of, like, mean disagreement because you violated a sacred tenant in the family or with that person. Um, I personally, my advice there is, you know, some people are, you can tell that they have a, there's a little humility in there and they, they, they, they don't agree with you. And maybe they're only reading sources from one side. So they've got, but that you can tell that they have an earnestness that they would, you can work on that.

1:03:40You know, you can send them in different things. You can just talk to them, you know, and, and not in a judgy way, you can, you can actually kind of, you can be the, someone was probably helped you learn to think this way. you can try to help them to be bringing themselves up to the high rungs and, and remind them how much nuance and how complicated these issues are. But if you're talking about a really low rung family member who is just, just in this issue, if you bring it up, it's going to be a bad for your relationship. I'd say don't bring it up. Like it's, it's a shame for them. They're the ones suffering.

1:04:09They're, they're losing like, you know, interesting high rung conversation as a part of their life because they're, they're, they're, they're frightening everyone else from doing that. They're forcing every environment they're in to be an echo chamber of their choosing. I would say your family is more important than these issues, like in terms of who believes what, let them be a zealot, love them anyway. Hopefully they start to change. And if they do, then you can start to work on it. I would say just like, don't let it get in the way of your relationships. You know, in the end, like they're not perfect.

1:04:38They're a zealot on this issue, you know, like let it be. That's what I would say. Now, for the partner question, I have a pretty different answer, which is, I think if you're a high-rung thinker, you really want to marry another high -rung thinker or date. I don't think you have to. I don't think it's inherently a bad relationship. But, man, that's the person you're going to be spending most of the rest of your life with. and it's such a sad thing for a high-rung mind to have no one to play with and to basically either have to be in a fight all the time or to just hide your real self and pretend you agree or just not bring up these topics that's just not a good place to spend your life like come on you know like i think i think you should if you're in the process of dating and you consider yourself a high-rung thinker who likes disagreement and so you've got to find someone else like that I think if you are a low-rung thinker, if you think that anyone who disagrees with me on, again, we can use abortion or religion or on racism, anyone who disagrees with me on this topic is unacceptable because they're a terrible person.

1:05:53Okay, well, first I would say, again, you probably want to work on this quality in yourself that you are clearly, you know, your primitive mind is too involved in your thinking. But if that's how you are, you've been like that for a long time and it's a sacred thing for you, then I just say, yeah, marry another low rung person who agrees with you on that because that's clearly a sacred thing. It's, you know, it's okay. You're allowed to be low rung in certain areas. Again, someone who's a hardcore evangelical Christian, I would argue that probably it's a lot of the primitive mind is the one who has that conviction.

1:06:22But that's okay. Maybe you get a lot of joy from that. Maybe it's very important to you. I would say marry another evangelical Christian. Almost certainly that's the right decision. So I think if you find, you know, if you're sacred, if you have like a, if you're a zealot about an issue, I would try to marry another zealot. If you're not, I really would try to not marry a zealot and marry someone who's open-minded and who's open to disagreement because you're going to have a lot more fun. You're going to learn a lot more. You're going to be able to be yourself. You want to be able to be yourself with your partner of all people.

1:06:49Again, with your sister, with your aunt, with your dad, I think it's okay to just be like, I'm just not bringing this up in front of them. But with your partner, it's really sad. All right, great advice. Thank you, Tim Urban. Thanks so much for coming on my show. The book, again, it's called What's Our Problem? I highly recommend it. Even if you feel you're familiar with these subjects, the way Tim, that you write about this, and this is also why you're such a successful blogger, is extremely accessible without dumbing anything down, which is really my favorite kind of writing. So, well done. thank you for having me on and i i do commend you as i think a very very good example of a high-rung thinker and a high-rung somebody yes i mean you you uh are i never know what you're going to think about a certain issue because you're going to come up with some nuanced point of view and it sometimes surprises me and sometimes doesn't mean that's low-rung thinkers you know exactly where they're going to think about everything and you uh so i think you're a very good example for a lot of people.

1:07:51And I think more people should think like Coleman, that would be good. Thanks, Tim.