Ep 108: Tim Urban on Superintelligence, Mars, Fermi Paradox & How to Conquer a Society

0:01Intelligence yields power. Intelligence correlates with power. We have a little bit of an intelligence advantage over other primates, you know, other animals. And we play God over all of them. So I'm like, you know, we're very used to being the king of the intelligence castle on earth. That's the only thing we've ever been. That could be changing like next decade. What?

0:25My friend Tim is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. I've been reading his work for over 10 years and he's followed by millions of people online. He's not a great artist, but he also does these amazing illustrations that teach us about these concepts. And he explains them and forms them in ways that really advance how all of us think about the world. He's someone who's followed closely by Elon Musk, by a lot of my smartest friends. Tim's written a lot about AI. He's written about the Fermi paradox, about the great challenges humanity faces now and in the future and how we can think about them.

0:53Tim wrote an amazing book called What's Our Problem? Whether or not you're on the right or the left. I think it's inspiring for all of us to understand human nature and to try to inspire us to act out of the greater, higher parts of our mind. Tim's probably one of the most important public intellectuals on this topic. And it's always really fun to learn from him about it. I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to American Optimist. We have my friend Tim Urban with us here today. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks, Tim. It's great to have you here. I think I must have read your work at least 10 years before I got to know you in person.

1:19So it's awesome to have you. Yeah. And you kind of, you're a major social hub of Austin. So it's been fun on getting to know a bunch of your world here. I'm sad because Elon's not here anymore as much as in the White House, although I'm not sad about that in particular, but there's a lot of good people here. He'll be back. Yeah, he'll be back. So you're a writer and illustrator of the popular Wait But Why blog. You're the author of What's Our Problem, which is this awesome book you've written about kind of what's going on in our society. And it's not really political, but it's sort of political, I guess you'd call it.

1:47I think one of the most important books I've read in the last few years. Let's just start off a little bit of the history and things you've talked about in the past. I think it's fair to say you're one of the most forward-thinking kind of bloggers and thinkers online today. You went to Harvard and you studied government. How did you get into blogging? You know, I was running a small business, like an ed tech company with my friend Andrew Finn. And I was blogging on the side as kind of just a hobby, like five hours a week. But I had liked that more than I liked running the business. So at one point, we just decided we don't need both of us here.

2:18And I'm going to go and see, like, what if I put 60 hours a week instead of five hours a week into blogging? So I started this new blog, wait, but why? And what year was this? This was 2013. I mean, I guess the thesis was, you know, people said blogging's dead. That was like a common thing to say back then. And like the internet was just flooded with content. You had BuzzFeed now producing a trillion articles a week. And but the thesis we had was kind of that there's actually not very much high quality, like really high quality stuff. There's a lot of like B minus content, C plus content out there.

2:49and if you can just work really hard and and really put out you know a level content that people will notice that was the idea and i think a lot of us know i think all my friends were reading your stuff like you had a few that was super viral what was the first one or two that went super viral the first one that went really viral was actually like basically it was an article about why millennials were so unhappy as people um and that you know they had some like awful perfect storm of uh the they you know are that they are super ambitious and told that you know they're going to change the world but they're also told that they specifically are special but every single one of them thinks that uh and then they fortunately you and i are special we actually are and i actually call everyone on that and in the post i say i bet the readers right now are thinking oh good point but uh but i actually am special and this is the problem um but then also then they look on like facebook which is a new thing then and they see all their friends uh kind of showing better versions of their life than they really have so everyone thinks everyone's doing better than they are anyway that blew up um because it just hit that it was the right thing at the right moment i've learned with blogging it's not the post itself as much like if i posted that a year later it might not have done anything it's just the right exact week to post it by luck there's some kind of like thing going on in media and culture where you have to catch the wave exactly and it's just it's just the right thing that's why the way to do blogging is if you want to build an audience is just like take a lot of swings at the bat one of my favorite early ones was the fermi paradox that was that was relatively early then yeah that was early i was in the first year um and at the time actually that was i felt like i was venturing out into like what i really really wanted to write about and as opposed to kind of trying to go viral i was like i actually didn't even consider that that post was had a chance to go viral because i felt like it was just kind of like for nerds like super interesting to think about it i think about these things a lot but i hadn't spelled it out as well as you have which was really cool you kind of like took a lot of our views and you pushed them further but let's talk about this a bit so fermi paradox is like why aren't there like tons of other intelligent species that we've encountered that we can see out there and and i guess the idea is like how many stars are in the galaxy like between one and 400 billion and then there's like billions of galaxies yeah like like like more galaxies and there are stars in the galaxy like almost a trillion galaxies we've found this is absolutely crazy it's an insane number of chances i mean wild number this is really what's called a great filter cue like like why like what's the hard thing for intelligent life and i originally thought oh maybe they're just like not just like single cell life that develops that seems really really weird for like things to turn into that but but then it turns out it's actually maybe not that hard for for like self-replicating like rna and single cells potentially to develop themselves right we don't know i mean so so there's two kind of camps you know because there's a million theories yeah but you can group them in two camps one camp kind of fundamentally believes of course there's lots of life out there like we're not special that's like the most naive human thing to think is that we're legit we're the only one so they think that and they come up with all these other reasons we might not have seen they might we might be in the zoo or they're protecting us who knows exactly we're looking for the wrong signals like we're like in a building today we'll send you a walkie-talkie no one's here and there's no one coming through the walkie because no one's on or anyone who speaks up goes and gets destroyed by predator species exactly which is terrifying yeah or there's just it would be very easy if they wanted to conceal themselves from us it would be as easy as we we would have to conceal ourselves from kind of birds in a zoo if we wanted to.

5:55When they're smarter than us, like they can just fool us. They're just living on a different plane potentially. Yes. Now the other group says, actually, you know, even if most of them tried to conceal themselves from us, a species of a certain level of advancement would, in a blink of a kind of an eye universe-wise, would start to colonize so many stars and wrap Dyson spheres around the stars and kind of make, it would be obvious. It would look different. Life makes things, think about humans. When you look down at the planet, like the planet looks different than it did 50 ,000 years ago because like radiation coming out everything's different exactly yeah like you just we would notice something and the fact that we see nothing they say is actually points to us being alone so i don't know who's right but the people who say we're alone they come up they say that there may be a great filter something that either the origin of life is super rare or maybe going maybe maybe prokaryotes are everywhere you know little bacteria but but going to this eukaryote kind of like more complex cell is maybe the great filter maybe that's really rare or maybe there's a lot of that but actually it just it's very rare for something to get to specific human level intelligence for some reason it's just very very uncommon it took 600 million years to happen here yeah maybe it's very rare so or maybe there's a lot of people like us because and we're not doing that much yet and then ai kills everyone that's the scary great filter that it's ahead of us yeah the scariest answer is that the great filter is ahead of us and this is and of course this ties into ai and into into spacex and all these things They're all kind of related, right?

7:21Because, you know, it's interesting to me. I agree. I'm so inspired by SpaceX. I think you're right. This is like an inspiring, positive thing for the world. So I'm a huge fan of what Elon's doing, just for that sake and what it does to us. And Elon talks a lot about being a multi-planetary species. I think what he's doing is really good, so I don't want to criticize. But to me, that being the great filter seems unlikely. Although I guess it is possible that you just blow up all your planet or destroy a planet. There could be some technology that just makes the planet unlivable, I guess. Yeah, I mean, we're building such insane technology in the future that even just AI manufacturers, the worst pandemic that you can ever imagine.

7:56And just like, we have no chance. But maybe if we're on two planets, maybe it's somehow harder. I mean, Elon calls it life insurance for the species. And I think Stephen Hawking said that the dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a good enough space program.

8:11There's definitely something there that's positive overall. Think if there's a solar system far away we're observing and you're rooting for them to go extinct. What you don't want is them to start spreading out. Oh, no, now they're on three planets and seven space habitats and they're on moons. And now they're probably going to stick around for a long time. So we have all our eggs on one planet right now, basically. That's fair. So it seems like a universally good thing. Although if the great filter is like AI or something, it probably could hunt us down on multiple planets. Yeah. It's a scary thing to talk about, but you have to kind of understand.

8:37True. No, if it's something like really bad AI, it doesn't seem like AI would have, and they wanted to wipe us out. it doesn't seem like being on multiple planets in the solar system would really help. Maybe if you're in different solar systems and now there's a speed of light, you know, big speed of light difference between you, but... Good overall, though, to go to multiple planets, definitely insurance premium. But like at the same time, it's like there are lots of scary filters that could be coming up. Yeah, we just don't know. I mean, that's what's wild about this time is like, you know, technology is power, right?

9:04I mean, technology is power to your footprint gets bigger. you just are able to manipulate the world and the environment more and more. And like technology is exploding. So like, so is our power, you know, God-like power is kind of like. Yeah. I'm very nervous about the Firmary Paradox in the future still myself and sort of the great filters. But let's talk a bit about that. You said in 2015 that it hit you pretty quickly that the world of AI is not just an important topic, but the most important topic. And you wrote an amazing piece on AI that everyone should read on the Wait But Why blog. But let's talk about it a little bit.

9:33You're obviously prophetic because AI hadn't really been as much in the consciousness in 2015 a bunch of us were trying to invest in it trying to figure it out but obviously it didn't really explode like as something that was working until the last few years so what did you see that led you to this conclusion what did you know i think that uh actually it's i think that uh nick bostrom and ray kosewell and some others i think they're they're the prophets um because um all i did was read some of their book basically my judge for whether it's a good thing to something's a good thing to write about um is i just use my own self like it do i find it interesting i assume that my audience is a big group of me because they're they're close enough that usually that's a good gauge so when i hear about when i started hearing about ai in 2015 it was really you know that's pretty early where i think people forget how recently it still seemed just like a sci-fi concept ai seemed like something that is in sci-fi movies only um and 2015 that started to change it was actually 2014 as to first start hearing about i wrote about at the very beginning of 2015 and i started to hear about real serious people talking about it i said what what's it what's going on so i read nick bostrom's book i read you know the singularity is near by kurswell nick bostrom's book is super intelligent i mean these are these are these books really i i think were way ahead of their time and my eyes were wide and so i said holy shit you know and if i feel this way i'm sure my readers are also kind of hearing about it wondering what's going on and they're going to have their minds blown so i decided to just basically take everything i read then a bunch of more things and i just tried to synthesize what's the story here and my conclusion was that this is the most important possible thing because like we were just saying, intelligence yields power.

11:09Intelligence translates, you know, correlates with power. Oh, so we have a, just a, you know, we have a little bit of an intelligence advantage over other primates, you know, other, other animals. And we play God over all of them. So I'm like, you know, we're very used to being the king of the intelligence castle on earth. That's the only thing we've ever been. That could be changing like next decade what like in our lifetimes and so it was just it just i can't believe everyone's not talking about this and so then i wrote about it and you knew that might be changed because these other guys books they kind of convinced you it was coming yeah i just started to understand um what was going on which was i didn't you know i just started to understand the concept of um of of that that real intelligence can exist in a computer and that and that it's going to it's getting rapidly smarter as moore's law continues and there's more processing power uh and we come up with new different architectures at the time you know the thing we do today neural nets and deep learning that was just very that was one of many potential ideas then i don't think it was so obvious it was going to be the thing no until they came up with the transformer architecture in 2017 it didn't it didn't make sense how it gets there and it was one potential interesting you know pathway um but but the thing that these books made me understand is that um um that if if if ai can start moving up in intelligence it's not going to stop at the human intelligence station it's going to just race right by us because all of these limitations that our intelligence has so it's the size of our skull like the brain can't get much bigger even if it could it doesn't move learn neurons don't communicate quick enough for it to function as one system if it were too much bigger but ai brains are a speed of light they could be huge and keep going uh you know ai is editable upgradable all the ai in the world can share knowledge with each other and and and be this collective intel that there's just you know suddenly it's going to pass us and when it passes us it's not just going to be you know so this is the this is the core concept that i think people because people think okay well the chess ai has been beating humans for 30 years 40 years like um so ai is already smarter than us and that that's when you get to this key concept that i first understood in 2015 which is that there's two axes of intelligence there's you can think of the horizontal axis as magnitude so that's like the chess ai is higher than us at chess it crushes us yeah um and then the other axis we can call it breadth so it's like narrow intelligence versus general versus super so when you people talk about narrow versus general they're talking about the what i'm calling the x-axis the breadth um and and this is the thing that we're unmatched at including today still so ai is amazing at narrow skills when you give ai a narrow skill chess or you know direct you know map directions or in this you know language 100 things it just quickly becomes better than us at it you know because again it doesn't have these limitations and and um and animals you know elephants can i think smell water from 400 miles away you know other animals use you know echolocation or you You know, the dog's ability to kind of have a whole landscape of smell.

14:14Other animals beat us at certain narrow skills, but none of them can match our breadth. So this is called general intelligence, which is this idea that we can be good at anything. We can learn any skill. A dog can't learn any skill. And at the moment, neither can AI. One example you use is we have, so LLMs today are more general than they used to be. So LLMs can do a wide variety of things and really kind of impressive. But they're more statistical engines and reasoning engines, right? Yeah. And here's like a litmus test that I forget who I was talking to. Someone brought this litmus test up, which is LLMs still can't run a gas station, you know, just because it involves all of these things that for us with general intelligence, it's no big deal.

15:01For an AI, it's going to have it's just it's not there. So we're still the king of the general intelligence. castle for now one of the one of the interesting frameworks for this that i thought i want to push back on the super exponentials my general view is it's going to be it's extremely important but i think the world works in like in like these s shapes so i think i think a lot of times things can hit an ass dope for quite a long time and so one of the interesting questions is you try to do things we can't do with ai and lms and our reasoning right now our reasoning engines is that is that you don't know what questions to ask to get the job done there's like a space you can call it question space and like one of the hypotheses is like the nerd is like the neural net for question space is a lot harder to build and define because there's only so much feedback you can get from reality to make question space better and because because think about it if you want if you want to do something you have to know all the questions asked to get to do that and so if you're like thinking in question space it may be there's only like so much data and input you can have you can only have a certain size neural net to do question space and get it right and then one of the hypotheses is that human brains actually grew to the optimal size and no bigger of like how much data there is for questions-based data rate.

16:07And therefore there may be like natural limits to certain types of intelligence if there's not more data to iterate on. Yeah, this is all totally unprecedented. So we literally don't know if we're about to hit a big wall or if the wall's way, way higher, the ceiling's way, way higher. But what's interesting about like AI until 2000 and really until pretty recently mostly was symbolic AI. It was programmed, specifically programmed logical steps that the programmer, the developer programmed and it executes and it so the programmer can tell you exactly why ai is doing what it's doing and how it works inside anymore yeah yeah this is a totally different thing people say um we don't build deep learning networks we don't we don't build no we're building giant brains that are you know we grow them we grow them so you basically build a nursery yeah yeah and this thing grows out of it and then we say okay who are you what can you do are you conscious like can you do can you play chess like we we didn't know that gpt4 could play chess until like a year after it came out and then people realized, oh, it's good at chess.

17:06So this is a decade later since you wrote this. And obviously a lot's happened now. I think a few years ago, you said in a Reddit AMA that you were in favor of pausing any research because it's kind of scary and we don't know what we're growing here. Like, do you still feel that way? Like, how do you think about this? I mean, we're in a quandary here because we have to ask, what is a scarier prospect? An arms race that throws caution to the wind and tries to accelerate the process of building these, you know, superhuman brains or risking, you know, slowing down and risking that China gets ahead of us and now has a massive technological advantage that might be, you know, permanent.

17:42Those are both terrifying, I would say to an American or they should be. And the question is, what's scarier? You know, what's the bigger risk? And so you can try to find that middle ground and say, listen, we should we should try to stay ahead, but go cautious while staying ahead but now you know china's shown that maybe it's going to be harder to stay ahead of them than we thought maybe this limit on chips is not gonna well they're good at stealing stuff and then iterating on it right so i honestly i wish i had a good answer here i think that we have to try to i mean what you would want is everyone to become scared enough of this thing to feel like it's you know i want people should feel like game of thrones where these are the white walkers coming.

18:22And that's how we should think about it. No, it might not be. I think that there's a good chance AI is great and doesn't hurt us. The point is, but the downside we have to worry about because it could be bad. And if it's bad, it's going to be massively powerful. So we should think about it as, you know, I think that I would hope that China and the US could be grown up enough to say in this moment, like, let's not create like a giant existential risk for the whole planet by racing. We have to come up with some. Now, maybe that's naive and maybe that'll never happen. I just don't know. The problem is anytime they're going to try to put some rules in place, you know, they're going to be gaming it to try to trick us.

18:53Because there's no trust there. And for good reason, because they have stolen a bunch of stuff. So with nukes, you know, we did bring down the number of nukes, right? But nukes, we all kind of understood about how they worked, about where they were going. This is a very different thing. You can understand like, okay, the nukes are going to get bigger maybe or something. Like Tsar Bomba was just like a much bigger scary thing. And that's like kind of crazy. but it's i don't think it's analogous to like this we don't not knowing where this thing goes and and what we can put in place to have an advantage or not with it you know it's still also required of a human to set off the nuke the point and a massive industrial complex like you could have like 10 guys doing an ai right right and and the it's like it's if the nuke itself could wake up and and start a nuclear the nukes themselves could start fighting each other without our permission or consent without our control like that's what we're dealing with so do you really think that's the biggest threat because for me i still think it's people using ai for the next decade it's going to probably cause the problems you but you you're worried about the ai itself at some point i'm worried about both i mean i i think that in the near future of course you're going to have a higher risk of bad guys with using ai you know to do things like manufacturing scary bioweapons um things like that that you really you know things that could really kill a billion people i mean people with you know with ai can you know there's obviously the smaller concerns where you can start creating deep fakes and all of that.

20:10I mean, that's a big concern for civilization as well. But I'm thinking like bioweapon or autonomous drones, you know, swarms of drones that can go into a city and specifically, you know. So, but I think as time goes on, I just think it's totally unprecedented. We're literally like monkeys building humans. I mean, like we should be scared. We should be scared of that. Like it could turn out well, but you kind of have to get lucky. And there's a lot of people that think we're just not, we don't know how to do this. We don't know how to align this thing before it becomes too powerful to change. The bioweapon one is probably the one that scares me the most.

20:43I'm not to talk about horrible things, but I do think it's fascinating. I do a lot in biotech as well. And we have all these new machines that are able to construct and build chains of things and build viruses and stuff like they did in China. Maybe we should be regulating those. I'm so against regulation for most AI stuff because I don't think these random people paid 100K a year are going to be able to save the world from AI. I think it's going to harass us and break things. but maybe there should be some rules around certain things in bio or something like well so actually i think you know you you even helped connect me to some of these biotech companies and talked to a bunch of them um and i um i asked you know they're all very optimistic you know most of the people building things are and i would get so excited talking to them about you know the the incredible things they're doing for we're going to cure a lot of diseases oh my god cancer i mean alzheimer's i mean and and then augmentation in ways that will become normal and i don't think will anyone want to come back to this world when we have this dumb medicine that you know smart precision medicine and then i would ask you know does this same technology you know help the people who want to make bio weapons and just yes every year everyone said yes and so that's gonna have to be something we uh you know that that but then hopefully maybe also the same technology can help create really rapid vaccines um really rapid you know so there's gonna be you know it's like cyber crime and cyber security i mean there's gonna be a good guys versus bad guys thing going on here i guess we don't know this is a fascinating thing about warfare last few thousand years is you have the offense and the defense which is better right like cannons like are such better offense that they change the dynamic and you got rid of small cities like i wonder who wins an offense defense and bio i don't i don't know it well enough and if the problem is if bio is not like you know a cannon uh that can you know screw a city over if the offense wins with bio like a billion people you know also i think it's scary because you can imagine an ai or some evil person like creating something maybe shouldn't be talking about these but they that like could hide in you and then get turned on all at once by something and it's just like there's like really scary things they could do totally and that's a theme honestly you know you look at any technology right now and it's like wow the power for this to do good and like revolutionize everything and solve all our problems and then it's like wow like the the bad guys and with this in their hands could do some really bad things and it's just a it's high stakes this is why it's tied to the fermi paradox very closely in scary ways right so one the the you I know we're on the optimist show, but the pessimistic view, the people would say something like, look at how this is going.

23:02You know, it doesn't matter how good the good guys are. It takes us in one of these fields, the bad guys to get an edge for a little bit and they can just wipe everyone out. And that's going to be got to be so common that that's why we don't see they all do this. And then, again, optimists have a bunch of different arguments. I guess it makes you more biased towards Elon's like, let's have the backup planet. Let's have maybe some people living out by the asteroid belts. They could be like weirdos, but maybe just in case, you know, they can repopulate us. Yeah. And beyond just Elon, like it's, it's an art.

23:29It's when you remind yourself what's going on and the crazy stakes, it's like, let's be grownups. Everyone can we like, let's be wise. How can we be wise together right now? Like stop being childish. Okay, well, let's go from being wise to your book because that was, so you spent like five or six years all of a sudden on this crazy side quest to like figure out what had gone wrong with our civilization. It's called What's Our Problem is the book. So what inspired you to do this? I mean, exactly this conversation. I was writing about stuff like AI. I wrote about neuro-link. I wrote about cryonics.

23:57I wrote about all these incredible things. And I was thinking about, you know, because people focus on the dystopia, but like the utopia that we could have, I want to be there. I want to be in the good 2050. It's possible for us to solve like every problem. Everything, including our own mortality. I mean, you can really like crazy things like anything humans are scared of, we could solve. And then the dystopia is really scary. And that ranges from, you know, full apocalypse to we're in a permanent kind of dystopias with an AI dictator to just we're set back to the Stone Age. The whole thing blows up.

24:28And, you know, now we have no technology. We're trying to learn how to do electricity again. Does this ever bother you that we just happen to be alive right at this time when all this is happening? Isn't that kind of suspicious? Well, I think on one hand, it might just be a coincidence. On the other hand, a lot of people are around right now. The population is swelling. There's going to be a lot of people here in a time like this because the population is so much bigger than it used to be. So it's also not that big a coincidence. I think one-fifteenth of humans that have ever lived are currently alive.

25:02So of course we happen to be alive. It's not like a one in a million that we were here. It's like a one in fifteen that we were here. in a way you can think about it that's a good way of putting it yeah if i was gonna have like a show where like aliens get to go live as like humans on this fascinating planet as a piece of art though this would probably be the time you'd have them be alive if you're watching the if you're observing earth this is when you're saying to everyone hey hey hey guys come here come here it's getting really good right because this this is when this is when are we gonna pull it off basically are we gonna pull it off and are we gonna kind of be one of the cosmic civilizations up in this exploring the galaxy for the next hundred million years or are we gonna just ruin it all right now And so I'm having these thoughts and then simultaneously, you know, I'm on social media, I'm reading the news and I'm just seeing us descending into an extremely childish culture war where you have grownups behaving like middle schoolers, you know, clicks and punishments for saying the wrong thing and gotchas and lying, just misleading and, you know, using, you know, using populations of less fortunate Americans.

26:06as kind of pawns in your game against each other status obsessed stats middle school middle school and i said what is going on i don't believe that these people are all just inherently immature i think that something is in the air that is bringing out the worst in a lot of people and it's and that's what i that's what i was trying to so what's our problem what is our problem is what i wanted to dig into and of course that's a quite a big rabbit hole it's a huge rabbit hole so you created a bunch of frameworks that i thought were really interesting and we're gonna probably show a couple of these directly like one of the frameworks i really liked is like you had an x and y axis and i think on the on the y axis it's like the high end is like a scientist it's like that you're operating as a scientist but on the very low end you're a zealot and then in between from a zealot you become like an attorney trying to argue for yourself and a little bit above that you're like a sports fan but maybe you could be convinced tell us a little bit about some of these frameworks yeah um the the big idea is it's like a vertical axis that i just think we need in our conversations We have left, right, center, right?

27:01Far right, far left, like, and we need that. That's important. And you can extend that to a square and you can have, you know, authoritarian, libertarian, you know, and, you know, whatever. You know, we people, you see the compass. That's still a what you think space. We need to also just ask ourselves, how did you get there? Did you get there because you are identifying with a certain tribe's beliefs and that's what the tribe said to do? And you're just lockstep following and you're only reading things that confirm that. and you're not at all actually concerned with truth, even though you think you are?

27:31Or did you get there because you learned a ton and you started off with a humble, I don't know, and you slowly started to gather evidence and you eventually arrived there way later and you could happily defend that, you know, in a debate in front of, you know, where does your, you know, what's your certainty made of? You know, is it, is it, is it, is it unearned? You know, is it, is it strongly held weekly? Is it strongly felt weekly or strongly held weekly supported beliefs or not right or strongly held uh weak strongly supported beliefs so um there's that that that and to me that access is everything i don't care if you're in the in that what i call the low rungs which is you know you're you're forming your yeah you're just in the tribal zone you're not no one's going to change your mind unless the tribe itself gives you permission to and you're just kind of uh you know i don't and again i'm mighty and that's probably how we evolve as a species is we just work with these tribes in order to succeed right so there's like i feel like all of us have a part of our animal brains that like even even if you do get something as this i have friends i won't mention who who you're very prominent guys in the tech world who are like scientists in so many ways but like but like i guess see there being like zealot tribal people about some of these things right now because they're so convinced and they just and they just live in that area sometimes yeah that way i kind of framed it is we each have kind of two minds in our head this is like you know really kind of more primitive brain which is just basically why a piece of software that helps us survive in a 50 000 bc tribe which yeah conformity rigid conformity and and doing what the authority says i love that if human history were a thousand page book visual you made and it's like we basically all evolved from like all these things that are from tribes yeah we the first 990 pages of the thousand page human story are basically just you know trying to you know be a good member of an ant hill an ant colony tribe and survive against the other ant colonies so that's in our heads now yeah but then we also have this other crazy ability this thing that separates us from other animals this amazing ability to um to actually override that and to free yourself and become an independent thinker and actually you know um uh and and be in touch with reality and and search for truth and and i think all and again when i when i do talk about these rungs in the book i'm not saying those people on the low rungs i'm saying when all of us slip down there we act like this i think it's important is all of us have that i mean i think i think we have to be honest with ourselves a lot of times and especially for me when i'm like more tired or i'm like not in like a like an uplifting mood i'll like when i read or see something like there's a part of my brain that's just looking for is this my tribe or not which is yeah it's just messed up but it just does that you know of course we all do it and especially when you know emotions get heightened or something we're really close to your identity gets you know gets gets the identity is is part of like these views sometimes well i think for the dumb brain i think it identifies with views if you use are you when they get attacked it feels like i'm being attacked the people who disagree with those views you hate them you dehumanize them you don't care if they die basically that's that brain the other brain doesn't think like that at all the other brain says yeah bring it on i'm sure i'm wrong about some stuff like if you disagree with me like let's figure out how you got there let's talk about it like it's just a totally different part it's again it's a grown-up part of your brain and i i think that i first wanted people to just have this access so they could start assessing themselves try to okay remember we're all on this ladder try to be high up on it um when i say scientists i don't mean that scientists all think like this of course there's a lot of zealot scientists out there i'm talking about the scientific method right that humble scientific method um and then secondly when you're you know reading an article or absorbing information you know and you're figuring who to trust assess them on this don't assess them they're on the right with me they're on the left with me assess them are they does this person have they shown me that they're up on the high rungs when the way they think and form beliefs otherwise tune them out someone who's just repeating their tribes thing is not in real information it's not interesting it doesn't matter what they're saying that's like most stuff online these days is just the tribal stuff and it's really hard to go over it's it's exactly and you just know what people are going to say before the issue starts i can tell you they're going to say this they're going to say this in these words these specific words because that's the words that are going around as the words you use right now to refute this argument it's actually really tough for me because the feedback of the tribal stuff is really strong and positive from social media so i have like an x account and i try to put interesting things up and I try to put thoughtful things up, but you're kind of like trained by the algorithm for like what is going to get thousands of likes.

31:42And even the fact that you're thinking about that puts you ahead of it. Most people don't even know that they just think I'm awesome. You know, and they're - Well, I do think that's - And like the algorithms specifically, specifically incentivize what I would call like low-rung thinking and low-rung rhetoric, you know, really tribal and also just really confident. because in the lower rungs the more conviction you say something with the smarter you seem on the high rungs saying i don't know makes you seem smart you know in the lower rungs it makes you seem wishy-washy and like you know morally you seem like a rhino in the right exactly exactly so or even among the rhinos which is its own tribe you know then expressing um you know uh maybe some actually i think the conservatives are actually right about this and then then then you know that you seem bad so that's funny every single group is going to have an element you know some groups are going to be more tribal than others.

32:35Then with, you know, you're going to find more, you're going to find more like low rung thinking on the far left and far right. Not all of them. So stepping back, like you have a bunch of interesting graphs about like things that went wrong in our culture. One of them that stuck out to me was like people's perception of racial relations in our country, which it seems that really, really went down a lot the last 15 years. And it seems like some of those perceptions got caught up maybe in some of these low rung thinking on different extremes. Like, is that getting better now? Is it getting fixed?

33:00Like, where are we? Yeah, I mean, what you saw was, I mean, I focused a lot of the book on the book movement because it was very current and it was just such a good example of what's going on where you have, you know, the history of, you know, civil rights and women's suffrage before that. And, you know, gay marriage more recently. That's like a proud part of America. That's what makes America great is that a group that isn't, you know, getting fair treatment can fight for it and get it. It's revisable. It's editable. Yeah. And the history of America is just full of that. You know, new immigrants come, they're not getting treated and eventually, you know, treated well.

33:34And eventually they rise up and they become powerful and they get their rights. And it's just instant amazing. It is really cool. I'm Irish on one side and Jewish on our side. And both of those groups got like the shit beat out of them in America for a long time and like really nasty ways. And it's very funny because now I'm seeing, of course, is like the sign of privilege. Of course. Because we've shifted, which I guess I appreciate. But it's funny. Totally. Don't ask my grandparents about that, you know. I would call that a hot. That's like, you know, that's what I would call like. Those are high rung movements.

33:59I like to think of America as a, like, liberalism, lowercase L liberalism, as a, like, a house that we're all living in. And support beams are stuff like free speech and free assembly and, you know, free press and whatever you want to say. The justice system. These are the support beams of the house. And I think the healthy way that America is is when you have people who totally disagree with each other within the liberal house. Who all agree the liberal house is good. The constitution is good. but we're not achieving it right for this reason they said no you're wrong we're not achieving it right for this reason and this is actually what the founders intended blah blah blah and they're arguing about healthy yeah that's what they should and and and this group's getting left out and like no well now this group's getting okay get perfect that's what it should be that's you're never going to have everyone happy that's the best case scenario and again left right and center all inside the house and um now i think what people had to realize is that some groups are literally not in the house they're outside with the wrecking balls the post-modernists like yeah just marxists um you could say some elements of the far right today like they're they're actually with a wrecking ball and what they're doing is they're they're not they're not saying the liberal house is good first of all like you know the the the the the you know marxist left you know literally they're they they would they would agree with me here they say that liberalism is itself a bad exploitative system that entrenches power of the the powerful people whatever so their goal is And the house should be complete.

35:25They want revolution, liberation from the house. They purposely try to break things in our society and our cities in order to create the revolution. People don't realize this about the Marxists in our cities. They are literally trying to break things because that caused revolution. They would probably admit this. I mean, again, this isn't like their secret belief. Marxism literally is the belief that liberalism is bad. They think that it is inherently oppressive. And so, of course, not only are they trying to break it, but they're doing it through means that are not liberal. So like, you know, that's why they will try to be censoring people.

35:55You know, and because free speech is not important. If you think the whole house is bad, who cares about that support? And it seems like they got in charge of a lot of things. I think one thing that was crazy as an example was that PayPal, they threatened to take away$2 ,500 out of your account. If you are caught inciting hatred or misinformation, which they were defining as they wanted. This actually red pilled the former PayPal CEO, David Marcus, who ended up speaking out on the right. Colin Wright, you know, he's on Twitter and he said something about, he said, you know, he writes about biological sex and the importance of the binary biological sex for, you know, sports and stuff.

36:31And he got PayPal. I think they confiscated$2 ,500 of his money for writing about that. I mean, I have to look into the details again. But like, I mean, so this is the kind of thing where you're like, this is that. I don't care what he said. That does not belong in the liberal house. Yeah, exactly. It just doesn't make any. There's a lot of things where I'm like, so this is what I was trying to say in the book to people. And this is why you can't just have left, right, center. Because if you say, I'm on the left, left is good, blue good, red bad. Then you see this woke movement come along. And all you can say is they're on my team.