#37 - Tim Urban - Beating Procrastination, Parenthood, and Politics

38:26And I'm like, shit, my alarm is set for seven. You guys are like what why are you over here and i'm like you guys are not um point is if i'm waking up at seven two or three days a week i can't your circadian rhythm can't go back and forth like now i'm just gonna suddenly be someone who needs to go to bed before midnight or i'm gonna be exhausted which i never was i was always at like a two or three a.m to 10 or 11 have you had any all-nighters since you had your daughter like zero it's funny as i pulled an all-nighter the day this got published you know getting the website ready getting into the promo ready all the little things of course there's glitches at the last second you know it's not up on kindle what's going on why isn't that showing up on amazon you know and so my assistant and i both pulled up all-nighter and that all-nighter continued till like 11 p.m that launch day so we pulled not night before launch it went all the way through till like your assistant did this too oh she's what a superstar she's i always tell her you go to bed i'll stay up go to sleep and she's like it's fine I got it she's like she's amazing um and then finally go to bed at 11 done it's like this book is published now I have two weeks till this baby is due which was a huge extra panic monster and I have all these podcasts lined up and I can just relax I can just enjoy the fruits of my you know I published it I can have a couple weeks of podcasts I had a lot of podcasts lined up and I was like, just so excited.

39:50The next morning I wake up from a text that Tannis' water broke and the baby was born. So she literally can't six, you know, six and a half year project. The next day, baby's born. 18 year, 18 year project. That was the last all-nighter I've pulled since then. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Do you think there's like, like, it seems statistically improbable that your first child came literally she started a few hours from you and and tandis knew that that was your like final moment right well but if then i would have expected the other thing of it to to uh to happen where uh if tim had not finished the book yet and was still going while the due date was about to arrive and tandis was still not uh her water still hadn't broken and then he was one week in and she She was basically like holding on and then she released, but she actually just, maybe she was just so happy.

40:46She was just fine. She finally relaxed for the first time in years.

40:52Actually, what happened? Now I understand. I'm distressed in this book. How does she look at it? What does she think happened? I mean, the water breaks when the baby basically punctures the amniotic sac. I mean, the baby also was kind of annoyed a little bit by... Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. what I'm happy is at least this baby held out for that if she come one one two days earlier disaster right um so at least she held out then and so I was just in the hospital like you know we're now rushing to the hospital I'm like texting all the podcasts I'm like we have to reschedule not ideal but what a reason yeah very good reason it was actually really fun because I went to like get the car from this garage that our car was in New York and I got to for the one moment be the guy who's like i'm like i'm sorry i really need my wife's in labor and he didn't care like no one cared they're like okay buddy like great what yeah he didn't care he was like he was like uh-huh yeah well going as fast as i can i thought i would at least i get to like play that card i remember reading your post about this the actual you you know you have this image that the drive to the hospital is like very intense and she's like and it apparently was completely chill no because when your water breaks it's i used to think it was like water breaks like It's actually just like the sack is broken, but like she's not in labor yet.

42:07But now you have now the baby's risks infection because the fluid's gone. So you have to usually have to induce labor if it's not already happening. So she wasn't actually in labor. We're going to the hospital to find out if we need to induce or not. And I was like, oh, this is the this is the drive I was like anticipating. And it was just kind of boring. Yeah. And then we got there and like you're kind of tired. Yeah. And she wasn't. So then they give her the induction stuff, Pitocin, and it started. So in your 2014 post on the importance of picking a right life partner, there's a quote in it which said, if it were me, I would rather adopt children with the right life partner than have biological children with the wrong one.

42:53How now that you've had your own child and you've got a second on the way, do you still adhere to that statement? Do you? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, biological children is ideal, right? Like, I'm really happy that I have this biological child. It's really, I think, a tragedy when someone who wants biological children can't and has to adopt. And I think it's just a way bigger tragedy marrying the wrong person. To me, it's not even close. If you're the right person, it's like, okay, let's together work on coping with the fact that we're not going to have biological children. Let's talk about it. Let's make a bunch of philosophies around it together, and that's it.

43:39Now let's just joke about the fact that we have these hilarious adopted children that we love and raise them, and everything's great. And that's fine. It's like, if you put me in that situation, once you get over the disappointment for me, then you adjust, and life is great. If you're married to the wrong person, everything sucks all the time. Right. um including for the biological children growing up in a household with an unhappy marriage is not fun yeah and of course it can be really unhappy it can be abusive or it can just be like you really hate each other that's obviously just terrible but even just like you like your friends a lot more than you like this person like they're fine you get along with them fine you're somewhat compatible but like you don't really like spending time with them very much and you don't really like talking to them that much and when you're with your friends you're like ah my people and then you leave and it's just the two of you getting in the car heading home and you're kind of like yeah you call it the traffic test yeah i want to feel the opposite i want to feel like what's the traffic test the traffic test is there's certain people i'll put you both in this category who if you're just the two of you out to lunch and one of you is going to drive the other one home because you came in one car and you're heading home and uh you're chatting in the car and you hit traffic there's certain people who i like talking to so much that i'm like yes traffic like ah like and then we get there i'm like damn it we're home ah good to see you and because it's just so fun talking to them you wish the car ride going another hour because it's so great right and i have again my really close friends that's how i feel about all of them that's why they're my really close friends and what a shame if the person you spend 10 times more time with than any of your friends you don't feel that about it's the ultimate long drive you're with on you know through life with them and so again it's not i don't think it's that high a bar because i have it with my friends um I want to put a caveat on it so like I agree and I think that uh Liv and I have are lucky to have found a partner in each other to have to share that with and the same applies to you and Tandas as well and like we often look to you at that but I think that relationships can be like extremely happy relationships without that characteristic actually and like where I think like some people just really value the feeling of security that someone gives or like the feeling of like they're such a good like uh mother or like just just just these things and it's like a totally different value system i want to point that out because i'm thinking of some people like watching it and wondering whether they should be having it and they don't etc and it's i think that other marriages can be totally happy but like if you're the type of person who has that often and seeks that the kind of being able to hang out with someone and like chatting like this and like you want it in a partner and you don't have that that's probably so i can agree with that caveat which is that really what i was talking about with the traffic test is it was my criteria right for my personality um i happen to be someone who the thing i love about all my friends most is i just love brain playing with them i love talking to them laughing talking analyzing whatever it is and so for me and it really what i think was encouraging people to do in that post was like come up with your what are your criteria you should have them.

46:43Um, and then, uh, you know, you need to know what you're, you're both, what you're, uh, selecting for and also what you're not selecting for. Something's not a deal breaker. Then don't let that, you know, put that aside. Like that's a nice to have, not a need to have traffic test was a need to have for me. I just know myself. If I was at a dinner with a couple friends and my wife and we're all having a great time talking and then we get in the car and I'm like, uh, now I'm bored. I'm not gonna be happy. I'm not gonna be happy. I agree with you. I think some people, they just get something totally different out of a relationship that is magical and special and wonderful.

47:17And they have a deep love for each other and they respect each other and they're super compatible and it just works. And they have like maybe a, you know, this crush on each other that like can, no one else could ever reach, but like, it's not, they're not that good friends. They don't, they don't intellectually stimulate one another. They don't, or they don't, they either don't value intellectual stimulation, which is fine. Maybe they're just not, or they get it from elsewhere for them not even intellectual just just verbal basically yeah and there's just i think we've done the caveats on that we we we get that and it's not one of their best friends basically and i think for me it just i think part of it is that i grew up with probably like three of my six seven best friends in the world were females and i have two sisters who i'm really tight with so that's part of for me it was like I can't feel closer with those girls in my life than my wife.

48:06Like I, and so I just had this really high standard for, and I think that, I think that, that again, that's, it's personal to me. I think some people don't need to be best friends, really, really close friends with their wife. They have their friends for that and they have their way for other stuff. So I agree. Yeah. Okay. I have in my notes here, Igor, to talk to Tim about the bloody heat map once and for all that, do you know what referring to you and you and Igor had your first lovers spat well it wasn't your first but your most major lovers spat over the uh this political heat map uh which we'll put up on the screen people interpret as that the difference between liberals and conservatives is that uh it seems like conservatives there's some kind of cluster of heat around people who are closest to them and then with liberals there's a sort of uh tendency to have more focus on the outer edges of their moral circle oh sorry i'm not explaining well you explain it because you want to talk about this topic basically the study uh was going around which some people put on their hats and just like it became a massive meme where it's like these two structures one is an avocado form it has a wider shape on the outside and the other is a steak wider on the inside where it's like concentric circles that show whether um your uh moral circle of concern is for the inner most closest people to you to like the furthest people to you to uh animals to even like non non-living organisms to not to rocks those are the moral circles of concern and allegedly liberals liberal structure had a heat map that concentrated around the outer layers and the conservative structure had a heat map concentrating around the inner layers but the in the insane interpretation that people got from it was that liberals actually care more for the layers 13 and 14 than layer 1, 2, where there was no color, which if one even looks at the study, it says that these are the inner circle are like, it's your proximate family, and the outer one is like fish.

50:08So the literal interpretation that people went with, if taking them by the word, would mean that liberals prefer value fish over their proximate family and that should make one pause and the thing that annoyed me about this heat map is that it didn't make people pause because the exact interpretation that was going around because it fit the narrative of liberals care less about their own countrymen than they care about some people in a far away in a distant country even though it may be true or not obviously is not true to the extent to which it was interpreted in that heat map picture and the it to me basically therefore it was a moment kind of of one why do people i mean you can't always expect that people read the study but if one does read it it says it was like 130 mechanical turkers so some of these moral circles were answered by like five people and they made a whole study of it and put it out and then they used a 2d map with 3d the heat to describe a 1d or 2d thing so they added an additional dimension totally unnecessary they could have just like not done the circles but just a normal graph so it was bad data presentation that allowed people to misinterpret it and then it was a like willful desire to misinterpret it and just like look for it was like confirmation bias basically like it wasn't even questioned whether this is the accurate interpretation and it led to people just literally thinking that yeah liberals prefer outer layers to inner layers to the degree that they would even prefer fish over proximate family and obviously that's insane because that's to just wrap it up what the study actually says is what is your most outer layer of concern i.e what is the final layer i.e you care about all of the ones within it and this is the one where you're still like i give more than zero fucks but actually this is the interesting question about it which then was raised by as i was having one of the twitter debates around it with someone and they actually came to a reasonable objection which was um well i don't count uh like saying that i care as care so if the liberal says uh like in this world that oh yeah i care for fish but they don't do anything about it he's like i don't that that's not caring like that's in my world that's not what do you identify as caring it's really yeah so one i think the first interpretation totally insane.

52:51Sorry, you want to give the counter first, actually, maybe to the first. No, I agree with you that I think it's a good metric that we should always be thinking about is, is, are you so worked up about a certain political divide or intellectual divide where there is no form of confirmation that your side is correct, no matter how regregiously absurd it is that you won't just right away believe because it agrees with you. And if you're in that zone, we've seen this a lot of times of course there's just so many examples of you know where we see this i mean this is like you know i don't know you had peter bogotian and james lindsey and helen pluck rose to publish the most insane pseudoscience papers to kind of woke journals but because they were agreeing with the ideology they got published right and that's of course even worse because it's a journal not just twitter shit posters but um but then the opposite started happening with the people who were anti woke as well.

53:47Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing is if you, if you feel anti-woke, you have to ask yourself as a litmus test for yourself, is there something I'll see about how awful wokeness is or how much it's invaded institutions or how ridiculous what they believe is? Is there, is there anything you can see that are you ever seeing tweets about this stuff that, that are causing you to say, I don't know if that's true. Or are you just saying, yep, yep, yep. Because it agrees with me. And we all can be in that zone. And what you're, I think what you were getting frustrated by is noticing this is a perfect this this this thing is a perfect litmus test out there because it was so insane yes the direct it was like comic book villain liberal level literally like preferring rocks to but now we now our argument i think what we boiled it down to was or my objection was not that you're wrong that i i i but after we talked about it for a while i i agreed with you that the that the the the interpretation is totally wrong you can see what the study is saying and it's not what they're saying and no one in the world cares more about fish than their children right as obviously but yes but i think a lot of people use that graph to actually represent something that is true um or at least that a lot of people think is true which is that there is a divide that if you go away from friends and family So beyond friends and family and before non-humans, that it is the conservative tendency to be America first, you know, then other countries.

55:22Maybe even my race first, then other races. So you can see that's kind of the stereotypical kind of conservative stuff. And I think that what liberals do sometimes, I think sometimes as a reaction against what they see as conservative chauvinism, they don't want to be like that. They want to be higher minded than that. My team first, my in-group. But I think then it can go so far where it's like any group that looks different than us or anyone who's not Western is good. And all those cultures must be better. And Western culture is bad in general. And, you know, and and so that that I think is true.

56:00And I think it's actually I think both sides deserve criticism. So I agree that that may be a truth that exists. Again, for me, this was more of a frustration with how we're doing truth finding in the world rather than the specific point. And this specific point served to be an example of like us just falling into tribalism rather than truth finding too easily. And my claim would be that, in particular, when it agrees with your tribe's beliefs, is when you should probably question a bit more whether it's like you're just falling into it and looking whether this is a truth that you're sharing. Because actually, if you wanted to make the point about far people, then distant people, like not in America.

56:42Yeah, what you would then, if it's a true point, the last thing I would recommend for someone wanting to defend that point is to take an extremer version of it that is not true, spread that to defend your true point, and then have people counter this falsehood that you shared by that reducing the perceived validity of the true point that you have. it reminds me example being like yeah with like uh there were plenty people in the past that people uh rightfully objected with trump and then they did the whole charlottesville thing that was just so obviously untrue he never said or just calling him a nazi yeah just just like obviously he didn't do the he didn't mean the anyway you can just watch the original footage was obviously the charlottesville good people on both sides thing oh he just obviously didn't say that and it was just so necessary you can just like talk about something else why are you making up falsehoods because that reduces the credibility of a point.

57:36Similarly, and then on the other side, when like the, oh, we're paying 50 million for condoms in Gaza. It's like, well, it sounds worse, but that's not what was happening. What was happening was it was going to like a completely different country for like some other reasons. And it's still like, wait, why are we paying for condoms to this other place? It's still frustrating. It didn't need to be in a more extreme version that then becomes attackable. Agreed. And I think when I'm, especially when I see people who I agree with me do that, it drives me crazy because it's like you're, it's such an own goal.

58:14Like, it's just like when people who agree with me, like then go extra far and they, or they really, really demonize the other side and a really kind of, now I'm like, it's just like, it just crushes your own cause. What other, are you satisfied? Have you two kissed and made up on this now? Wait, oh, so final point on this was that an interesting point that someone made around it was that, yeah, the degree, the thing that someone may define as concern may strongly affect it. And it actually may be not that, because I kind of doubt that conservatives' final point of concern is that different to liberals.

58:50Like, people are usually closer to each other. I mean, for one, it's a small m-ter group that should never get to see that light of day. to I kind of doubt it and I wonder whether there is also a thing therefore where conservatives may define concern as a stricter kind of like higher bar thing than liberals do which I could see where like it wasn't a thing of conservatives as much should just spread awareness as it was for liberals I think it was a bad study because it didn't even make that clear and like a small group and that's why that part of what's annoying is just why is this shitty study right why is it getting so much airtime it was like a bad study including now we're like giving it even more it's like oh We want to put a nail in the coffin.

59:28What's your current take? Obviously, you with What's Our Problem? And, you know, no one arguably studied the sort of political divide harder than you did over the last few years. It feels to me like some kind of pendulum has swung. Obviously, not only just with Trump's election, but there's like a big, big vibe shift. And I'm curious what your take is. like is is it are we past what's called peak woke is this is this another manifestation of the same kind of you know what we're seeing now is where it feels like I don't know, it like almost like in the anti woke movement is becoming a new form of wokeness in a strange way.

1:00:15um i'm curious what your sort of just general the way you're thinking about this like are you concerned about the direction things are heading or you think this is a necessary over correct you know correction yeah i don't see actually i don't really see it as a vibe shift recently i think that you know you can talk about wokes you know wokeness is um kind of stranglehold over the culture and i think that peaked in you know 2020 2021 it peaked before that in like 2017 2016 to 2018 whatever and then it kind of it kind of hovered there and then it went up another to another level and then it kind of um and that other level 2020 2020 and following george floyd got so extreme that i think it it kicked you know in 2016 2017 there were a lot of people who were kind of former obama voters who then said wait a second this thing is not great but there were a bigger group of former obama voters who just did not see it as they saw this is this new civil rights.

1:01:13This is the new, you know, you know, this is this is just a continuation of feminism, whatever it is, and that the right wing is the rights of everything we should be focusing on. So there was this divide. And I think that slowly the second group started to trickle over to the first group and realize that this thing is not actually progressive. It's not actually. In fact, it's the opposite of almost every single thing that we stand for. It's almost opposite of almost everything that the civil rights activists and the second wave feminists of this middle of the century stood for um it's not liberal and lowercase a liberal it's not constitutional it's not anything about it um and uh so that was a slow trickle and then when the crazy 2020 2021 stuff happened i think a bigger group shifted and then it kind of stayed there for a little while and And then I think that October 7th happens and you now have a bunch of, I think, a large group of kind of reform, liberal reform Jews shifted.

1:02:14So what you're starting to see is more and more. And I think that that started to the group that said this thing is not good outweighed the other, I think, earlier. And it happened slowly and steadily over a long period of years with some, you know, bumps along the way. but it was completely entrenched in institutions and there was nothing that that you know that that was and people didn't even know you know some people knew but there was just nothing you could do about it it was in academia and hollywood and tech and just so many different companies in ngos i mean you could just go on and on and on and lots of government as we're learning now and even more than we realized um and that's what's shifted i mean that's and and and if you want to say that the tech CEOs who I know from the people I know personally, they've been shifted for a long time.

1:03:03They all decided together, and I can't tell you all the reasons why, I don't know, but they all decided together, let's just come out of the closet together now on this. Like so many others already had done. They were quite late to the party, but they all came out. So maybe it seems like, oh, wow. But that's all that happened to me is a bunch of people who already agree with it. One group, one other group that's very prominent started being vocal. But what you've seen is the lever of power to actually do something about the institutional entrenchment that this ideology had, that has majorly shifted and see all these DEI departments going away.

1:03:33And I thought that that was going to be there for decades. I thought that's just going to be there for, you know, it was a chaotic moment in 2020, 2021, took advantage, got into the vital organs of these institutions and no one's getting them out. It doesn't matter how much the culture turns on it. And actually that's quickly shifting. And I'm happy to see that. Now your second question, I mean, this is the most predictable thing in the world. First of all, wokeness is itself an overreaction to a pendulum swing, right? We're coming, you know, more social justice in a good way, you know, more liberal social justice, more civil rights, more gay marriage, you know, first black president, like all these awesome things.

1:04:12And then this illiberal group co-ops it, the good name of that, and its success and rides the wave to do a bunch of really illiberal things really anti-anti-liberal things like like uh you know just just a group that fundamentally thinks liberalism is bad the u.s is fundamentally bad western civilization is bad right the author authoritarians yeah exactly exactly the opposite of what it is but it's wearing the same uniform and it tricks people and it captures a lot of institutions so that happened and then it was just i could see it coming from a mile away it's going to swing back and when it does that's this great thing good for liberalism good for america good for the west good for all the people that social justice cares about come away from this very bad movement and then a group's gonna an illiberal group's gonna jump on the bandwagon and start using it to get power and to do things that they have been wanting to do forever and now they can under the guise of this anti-woken well that's what worries me because i just feel like we're already starting to see that because it's it's like the the rate with which the the authoritarians and the bullies and so on can catch on the grifters and the genuine bigots that the people that wokeness claims were everywhere the small number of them were actually now on the right exactly they they always they did exist it's it's just they didn't have any power at all but now they've got a new opportunity but there were bigots on the left that's the thing so really it's like it's as always it's like a battle against bigotry but it feels like it's now the right-wing bigots are going to have a new fresh chance again the the right-wing bigots rising up guess who that's going to help a new wave of wokeness right you're going to see a new wave of wokeness and it's going to come back and it's going to seem justified and it's going to get and it feels like the the speed with which the pendulum shift is is getting the period of it is getting shorter and shorter and also like the the over corrections are on you know they're like stacking on top of one another it's you know it's not like a pendulum like like a normal word Is it escalatory or de-escalatory?

1:06:05It's not like it does this. If anything, it's like some alternative thing. It's getting energy from somewhere else. And what happens when it just starts going around? Like things, will the system break? So if you had any, what do you think could be the most promising paths to make it, like dampening this process where like the corrections can start being smaller than before? Well, this was what I tried. This was basically my purpose of this book. was to say we need a vertical axis to go along with left, right, center. If we only have left and right, it's hard to be like, well, that's the good left and bad left and the good right.

1:06:40It's like this axis, which you can either, if you're, in the broadest sense, it's just kind of like truth-focused and kind of just like generally like wise, grown-up behavior that has humility and tries to get to answers through discourse and cares about facts, down to this super tribal. And there's very few principles, and it's just power games against each other. Or you could say in the context of the U.S., you could say it's liberal and illiberal. Either way, we need that access. And if you have that, you can just start to see it more as opposed to these movements on the left and right that aren't good.

1:07:15I would call them low-rung movements. They get their, they ride along on this delusion that, that, you know, the blue, the blue low rung, you know, movement rides along, gets all of its protection and its power from the other blue people who think blue is good, red is bad. So these people must be good. And the same way over here. Now you have people who don't like wokeness who will just say, say all those people who don't like wokeness, they're all good because they're on the right side. And if you can just start to see things vertically, you can say, wait a second. No, no, no. This very clearly is not.

1:07:48This is down here. This is down here. This is not. So I just think we need a new language. You need to be able to identify it and see it. And, you know. Bringing us back to the heat map as well, because that was a low-rung way of dealing with that item of information. Which, of course, wokeness is the worst thing. If you care about social justice progress and the plight of, you know, groups that have been marginalized in the U.S., the worst thing for those people is wokeness, I'm convinced. It sets so much progress back. It actually inflamed real bigots, you know. And so the same thing. It's like if you care about a cause, stop focusing all your energy on the low-rung groups that oppose you.

1:08:27All your energy should be focused. There's so much of it on the low-rung groups that are supposedly wearing your uniform. Right. What's your own flank? Yeah, watch your own flank. And those people are also tarnishing your own ability to, like if someone started a blog called Wait But Why and they had my logo and they started publishing these awful, nasty, bigoted things, I'm not going to be like, hey, you're on my team, represent. I'm going to be like, cease and desist. You're crushing my credibility. You're killing my ability to help because no one's going to trust me because they think you're me and they don't know they're going to get confused.

1:08:57That's what, if you're an anti-woke person and you see the really bigoted right, you have to specifically be like, no, no, you will not screw up our credibility at a time when we have a lot of it right now. And same thing they should have said to Wilkness. And that's my criticism. I'd say of the new government that's coming in, like, yes, I mean, they've got a million things to do, but obviously there are a bunch of actual bigots who will try and worm their way into your ranks. And I don't see them standing up to them sufficiently. There was one positive moment of that. There was one great moment online when Sriram Krishnan got the new position under David Sachs And then a bunch of like anti-immigration people came out and like around that where there are justifiable reasons to discuss H-1Bs.

1:09:40Obviously, that's worthy of a discussion to discuss H-1B visas. But truly the people hating immigration of any kind and hating anyone who is not white looking American came out. And that was great where Elon just took a stance and just like said, these people are awful. They are not part of us. And he just like totally more of that. That was an awesome moment that made me hopeful about that we're really like having the vertical axis. Frankly, then there were also moments recently there. I mean, he can't do all the things, obviously, but like where I still worry about that. Ah, maybe my hope is not justified and maybe the new right movement will still fall back into the overcorrection.

1:10:23Well, apparently because everyone's so like still understandably pissed at the like worst axis of the woke left. Yeah, totally. like they were so vicious they were so authoritarian everyone got told they were evil for so long like they were a little bit they're like i have to taste your own medicine it's like but we this eye for the eye thing you know is gonna all you're gonna do is is all you're gonna you're gonna do is you're gonna you're gonna give them new energy and new life right now they are dead in the water and there's such an incredibly obvious recent lesson from watching what happened on the left it's like remember remember when wokeness completely destroyed social justice and also lost the left elections and give them an identity crisis, literally just don't repeat that.

1:11:07That's not a left problem. That's a human nature problem. And it comes from when tribalism is so strong that you can't bear to stand up against your own tribe. That's the hard thing. It takes no courage to get on X and to criticize the other tribe. Coming at your own tribe is the hard thing for everyone. and that's where that and that that's where successful movements are made with that one skill yeah and i get a little bit of celebrating the win etc that finally this is over and i think like the charitable parts of that is really just a celebration of at last we we don't have to be oppressed by these things anymore but yeah the celebration is like done maybe maybe just move on to work and some have others haven't and are still celebrating and doing crazy i think if you are a hardcore woke ideologue what do you want you want them to be as childish as possible and you want them to make you seem like an actual victim because they're being so bad and you want to start rallying your troops and saying look look at all the actual anti-semitism look at all the actual white supremacy going on whatever it is look at all the authoritarianism going on so the if you actually want to defeat these people and you want to really have the smackdown be high-minded about it be super legal and constitutional about it you know and now like Like they're going to be, they are just an angry fringe group yelling into the ether.

1:12:27Right. Don't show them that their worst fears were actually true. Yes. And yeah, I don't see people sufficiently doing that. No, no, no. It literally is injecting them with like. Justification. Power and energy to, you know, every time you do that, you adjust. And this pendulum will just swing back harder in that direction. And it's just very, you know. And it's frustrating because I think a lot of people can see this. and yet the larger dynamics are just hard to you're watching it happen it's just like oh my god well i mean again and that's part of the problem with social media because it's just everyone is no one's actually thinking they just they see they react they get emotional and they post yeah and it's like this is not conducive to like tampering the what you're saying why is the pendulum speeding up and why is there's kind of this this energy social media is a huge part of it of course yeah it's just making everybody mentally ill i'm quite sure of it yeah yeah and it's also part of why all these institutions you know went downhill you know the media itself has become worse and and and feeds this in a way they didn't used to because they're influenced by social media they're scared of social media and so they started to hire based on and it's empowered the lowest common denominator yeah unfortunately and thus it just sort of drags everybody i thought it you know you'd think oh it's an increased competition so the cream rises to the top it's like that's only partially true at the same time it's just the the the equivalent of the crazy person standing in the street corner like flinging shit at people they also now have a public social media account that actually often gets artificially amplified yes um but if you look at some of the worst of these movements in history all often what what one of the things social media does is it also makes it hard to hide bad things and so i think so much of the bad stuff that wokeness did actually came out a decade sooner than it would have and you know and and and so there is it it's both good and bad it inflames the culture war but it also provides some kind of mitigant against most excesses of the craziest excesses of it yeah like speaking of pendulum swinging i can't help but like feel that the uk um is not following the us's lead here which is going back towards you know more classical liberal things of like free speech and um meritocracy it almost feels like they're like doubling down on the worst excesses of like lefty authoritarianism uh they recently you know obviously there was an awful southport stabbings and then there were these riots off the back of it many of which were well at least at the time seemed like they were based off misinformation although now it turns out that at least some of the misinformation was actually kind of true um but nonetheless like people were being put in jail just for saying stuff like they didn't actually go and do anything um and like that's a really scary precedent where people are getting jailed for memes and the things that they say and even worse they've just now come out with this like they're trying to put a backdoor into um all like it's end-to-end encryption and making it basically into iCloud yeah end-to-end encryption um which is not and they're like they're doing it shamelessly so it's weird i want to understand why it is that the uk is like lagging behind so much i i kind of see two things when i look at europe i see them going through i feel like they're in like 2019 u.s woke culture war stuff i just see a lot of the kind of earlier kind of iterations of this starting to happen there and it seems like they're just like you know they're caught off guard the way that the u.s was maybe five six years ago and then like a lot of the same ways um kind of also maybe unprepared for this type of movement but then you know i always assumed growing up that of course you know all the all the you know modern democracies have a first amendment type thing and i was actually shocked to learn that like the uk to me is like as civilized as a country could could be right it's like one of the really kind of modern democracies in every way you could be and i was like it just seemed it was crazy that you don't actually have you know they don't have kind of like you know protection against the government when it comes to speech um it's a trade-off in the uk like uh basically in all of the laws it is seen as uh yeah what's the harm that the speech can cause versus what is the amount of rights that it we should grant the citizen to speak freely rather than this like hard rule of wow the threshold is so so high but But I feel like it was in the 1770s that the American founding fathers understood why that was naive, which is that as soon as you say the government can only arrest you for hate speech, now the definition of hate speech can quickly become whatever the most powerful group doesn't like or dissent against the government itself, criticism of the government.

1:17:15I read a story recently, a Pakistan jailed an atheist blogger for, I think it was hate speech against minorities. It just made no sense at all. It was just like it's the thing that sounds good that everyone would say, well, that kind of thing isn't okay. So we should. And they just decided that that's what he was doing. So to me, it's, you know, I don't know any countries that say we censor our people. They say we protect our people against. It's always the framing. So what the founding fathers understand in the U.S. is that if there's room for kind of the government to abuse it, they will eventually.

1:17:58And it won't always, it won't happen all the time. You'll go through a few decades and everything's fine. It's specifically the First Amendment is there for moments when you have a really intense kind of cultural wave. And that's the moment when the First Amendment is critical because that's the moment when cultural forces often will pressure government to start, you know, enacting on their behalf with the rule of law and the monopoly on violence. So right now you're seeing the UK's lack of this rearing its ugly head because it's a moment of crazy culture war stuff, probably struck by social media.

1:18:33And, you know, what happens in America kind of moves its way over there. So, you know, you're the UK expert. I just can't, you know, did you grow up learning about freedom of speech? No, I think looking back on it, it wasn't really a thing that was discussed openly. It was just kind of, I didn't ever grow up feeling like I didn't have it, but it wasn't a thing that was drilled into us as a core value. Well, so my eighth grade social studies teacher, I just remember this very clearly. she you know we all had the constitution and she said by far the five most important words in american history by far the five most important words in the constitution are the first five words of the first amendment and they are those five words are congress shall make no law and then it says you know abridging the freedom of speech religion for the press um and that that That was like this fundamental religion.

1:19:28And just the idea is that, yes, there's going to be now some bad speech that needs to be, you know, in a decent country needs to be policed. And that it just cannot be policed by the government because that is the road to hell. And that so it has to be policed by the culture. And whatever it is, it's better than the government having that power because it will inevitably be abused. now maybe UK has the UK has gotten along for a long time like pretty well but again it all it takes is one kind of crazy cultural wave to happen and now that it's like a it's like a support beam in the house that's loose and it's that one you know a little earthquake in the whole thing yeah I'd actually argue that the UK had issues with not having had that yeah rule um even though it was less about speech in the past but uh the I mean in the US it came about because it was specifically the Bill of Rights, which included as the First Amendment, the Free Speech Amendment, specifically had the goal of limiting government's powers.

1:20:28That after the Constitution was written and neither one of the three houses had massive power, now it's like, well, now the people have a bit too little power. Let's give them extra power. And that's the thing that the UK hasn't sufficiently done. And Germany also hasn't. That's why Germany has the same... Is there a push in these countries? I mean, are there movements to say we need this or does just everyone think it's not important? i haven't heard of have you heard of either saying let's establish a constitutional free speech i don't know maybe maybe someone does it maybe like an electronic foundation or something yeah there are some i mean there's like the free speech union and there's good organizations in the uk that really are trying to fight for this and they'll like support people who are being um you know tyrannized by the government for saying saying things which like should be within their rights as free speech um i think but it's not it doesn't feel like it's part of like the real cultural it's just not a thing that's really talked about but in in particular because it's there is no first amendment in the uk i find something like what is happening with apple and the request of the government to get a backdoor to all of the iCloud uh data to be much more worrisome in a country where there is no free speech rights because they can now come out and prosecute any sort of thing right they can just decide what are the like arbitrary lines of this well that meme was okay but that one oh no and i saw a post on x today that was basically saying that uh and again i don't i don't know how true it is or not but someone says you know in two weeks i face years in prison because of the government you know use an ai tool in a group chat where um his chat uh his i guess he said some cultures are inferior backward cultures that still practice female genital mutilation for example that was in a private chat and that message got you know surveilled and rated as 100 out of 100 toxic and sexist and racist and now he could go to jail so this is what you're talking about it's like you it's a little north korea-esque where you don't feel safe in your own texts with your friends you know and which is kind of your own the phone is almost the extension of the mind right at this point and it's like it's it's really bordering onto like thought policing.

1:22:40And when there's a crazy culture war, what happens is a lot of grown-up, you know, wisdom goes out the window. And now you also have, you know, this kind of thing where it's, you know, being labeled as hate speech based on what this kind of should be kind of a fringe radical movement believes is hate speech. That's what's getting people put in jail. The crazy thing is I looked a bit into the history of the specific laws and acts that are allowing some of it so with the with apple it's because um the uk had the investigatory powers act in 2016 where they wanted to update allegedly only update kind of um in the past they had rights to check uh with when you when you used phone lines uh like who you were calling the the the intelligence agencies were able to see that the government was able to see that to identify um like just very bad criminal activities.

1:23:33And they're like, well, now we don't have the sufficient similar rights around the Internet. Now everything is happening online. And now a lot of like various actually at the time, the Islamic State, they were worried about in the preceding years and wanted to be able to combat terrorism more, which was facilitated through the Internet. So they wanted to update those rights to now getting your browsing history and various other things as well. and having access to just a bunch of online data of yours. And it was never meant to ban encryption. And it was also never meant to... At the time, it was discussed as this is to combat child abuse, to combat terrorism, just basically the very, very worst offenses, obviously.

1:24:17And interestingly, also specifically worried about Islamic State terrorism. And now it's in part that may be the door that is used to then go with people being worried about effects of these things. Once there's a door, it's to hold into whatever the current wave is. And then there was the specific act, the Communications Act of 2003, which says the following. Section 127 there says, it makes it an offense to use a public electronic communications network to send messages that are grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing. So each of these words is obviously very open to interpretation, given the times that you live in.

1:25:01And so two things about it are interesting. One, it's the same wording as in the original act that it built on from 1935, the Post Office Act, where it was updated to electronic communications, but in the past it was not legal to send messages that were menacing, etc., via mail to mostly at the time being done to someone in government. So they wanted to prohibit that you send just like hate mail constantly to someone over and over, and you just are annoying them for one-on-one communication. And then later when phone lines started existing, they're like, okay, also we want to forbid that on phone lines.

1:25:43Both of those utilities were by the government, paid for by the government at the time. So one argument that also existed and that one judge has since upheld, and that's why he ruled against some things prosecuted under this act, is that, well, we're going to have kind of like a lower bar, i.e. we will allow fewer things to be said that are mean given that it's paid for by taxes because the mail and the phone lines were paid for by taxes when they were monopolies so and i kind of get the desire to like hey we're paying for by taxes everyone's paying for it you should be having better behavior than all on all of these private networks in any case in 2003 they updated it when the internet changed things and just like copied it over to all of the private communications as well and since then the prosecutions around it shot up because now you like yeah you also had more communication etc happening and the thing that's like particularly insane to me outside of that they've like prosecuted various kind of like minor offenses we would say is that particularly the UK shouldn't be the place I think like they they that that goes after indecency like they have the history of oscar wilde was uh prosecuted for indecent behavior because he was a homosexual uh and then he was like called left and like led a much worse life he only wrote one novel i love his novel picture of dorian gray and alan turing was prosecuted and like driven to death basically by the uk government for indecency laws again in what late 40s and then they the uk felt so bad about what they've done to Alan Turing on the basis of indecency laws that they like one uh they walked it back now in 2008 or whatever and put him on the 50 pound note or one of the notes clearly feeling so bad about it and now they're just years later back again doing it again doing going after indecency laws it's like as if Germany now was running around proudly uh like just doing the Nazi salute basically like it's it's it's a little bit it has that flavor like you've learned your lesson, please.

1:27:56And one more point on it is that I looked up where did it all start, the indecency laws. It started with a buggery act of 1533. That's just what it started with. And then 200 years later, the first time the precedent that was set was when a guy was convicted who published the Venus in the Cloister or the Nun in Her Smack, which was like a novel that was written which was like over like very sexual at the time and that set a precedent in 1727 for uh prosecuting like the publishing of in when something indecent is published which is kind of insane that you can set a precedent for indecency 300 years ago that then carries over and over and over like we should have changed our laws but we still really care about indecency in the uk i i I think it's just a total lack of moral humility.

1:28:50And it's assuming now we have all the answers. Now we know what's officially, objectively indecent enough to put someone in jail for it and what's not. And it's like you haven't learned from the past that, well, what people thought in 1950s, that we now think that was totally off and wrong and behind. And in 1850, wow, even worse, you know, the things they thought about, I don't know, race and whatever. and now it's like it's that the point of the first amendment is to say like this needs to be a fluidly evolving system and offensiveness needs to be tolerated because we're not sure where we're going and we need to figure it out together and what this is saying is the you know the government and their officials basically have the have have their finally have moral truth it's like okay guys like you know and you're gonna keep making the same mistake and it's uh and and the country evolves morally and intellectually when the emergent brain can think and it thinks via open discussion and when you start limiting that which you can happen either via government or via something like cancel culture it it it silences people but it actually it's it uh it limits what people can say but it limits what the big brain can think so when you say that these thoughts can't be said you're saying is that thought can't actually be percolated by the big brain can't be pondered and and then it just freezes evolution you're kind of like putting think caps on so similar as with when you try to put price caps on various things in the economy then usually you just like hold it down here and it just comes out somewhere else it's it's very very rarely very few situations where it's a sensible system i think the same thing happens here you put like caps on marketplace of ideas and it just like has these weird effects where like people get frustrated that they can't do it and like right and then you end up in with riots because people feel like they're not being listened to what about like you know mass immigration or something like that they feel like the cultures aren't assimilating properly or something you end up with the riots like let people listen to people let them express their views and vent their frustrations and then you don't get these toxic outcomes and the government has you know it makes violence illegal that's the that is actual violence yes that's what words right the government says listen, you can talk about it, you're going to offend each other, you're going to be, it's going to be a mess, but no one can be violent.

1:31:08And that's a system that has a lot of wisdom in it. That's the, it's not perfect, but that's the best way you're going to have a fluidly evolving culture. And it's, you know, any less or more, and it's not great. And, you know, and so I don't know what's going on. And I, what's, what's kind of depressing for me is I think, I don't know, maybe a younger idealistic view is when I see what's going on in Europe, I'll think, oh, well, well, you know, the Brits aren't going to stand for that. Or just, you know, this is going to, you know, or I think, you know, I just think, well, clearly they're going to, wow, this is going to have a huge uproar and they'll fix it.

1:31:44Sometimes you realize, like, maybe they won't. Maybe they're just kind of like this is a new way. And, like, maybe, you know, five generations later they'll come out of it. And people now will just live and die without much freedom because no one's going to stand up for it. No one's going to fix it. Yeah, I hope that's not what happens, but it currently doesn't look good with like so much police enforcement. Well, and like literal jailing of tweets. It's wild. So as is now becoming an institution on WinWin, I like to finish up these quick episodes with rapid fire predictions. So first number that comes to your head or to your gut, don't think it through.

1:32:28Just throw out your probability. likelihood that your edit is handed in on whatever your latest deadline is? 37%. That's like one over E. That's about right. It's probably is. I wouldn't be surprised if this somehow like follows that. Well, what it is is that deep down, I feel like it's 80, but then I know I'm trying to correct for my delusion, my historical delusion. So I cut it in a little bit more than half. Nice. Yes. Actual math. Okay. Likelihood that you'll write another a hundred thousand plus word book in your lifetime 90 sorry and to add and within the next 10 years 70 okay uh likelihood that some kind of external intelligence like god or a simulator exists 10 uh likelihood that there is life at least advances us in the galaxy

1:33:2770 percent wow that's high it's a big galaxy it is a big galaxy likelihood you'll be using a brain computer interface by 2050 2050 68 percent uh likelihood you'll live to the age of 200 12 % Age of 5 ,000 2 % Likelihood that we make it as civilization up to the year 2075 and pass it through AI, ASI, all of that

1:34:0680 % and I would channel you there which is I would say the reason that's so high is because I was held as a child And I don't have any other... I could not defend that against someone who thinks it's 10%. I'm not going to be able to argue against them. So hold your children. Likelihood that when it comes to that question of existential probability of doom or probability of success, that probability is the entirely wrong paradigm of thinking about it. 15 %? I feel like it's... What's better than probability? I don't know. For a species groping in the dark trying to figure out what's going on, probability is exactly what you want instead of camps, 100 % camps.

1:34:47Just saying do it and then do it and then get it done. I know. Something tells me that the whole concept of probability breaks down when it comes to this stuff. Well, I just think it's a useful way of expressing how you feel because you can hear someone talk about it forever and you think that they are sure that we're all doomed and then they say their P-doom is 20. And you say, oh, okay. I was thinking, you know, it just very succinctly shows you what they actually... Right, but the counter systems might be something like, as long as you think in probabilities, then you have too much uncertainty.

1:35:17Whereas if you think, you can have self-fulfilling and self-unfulfilling prophecies and such. It's like a way to be wishy-washy, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a way to hyperstition things into reality, to make them real just because you've put so much force into it. Like Eliezer, he's a pretty high P-doom, and you could say that that's the rational way to behave. yeah well thoughts do create things yeah you know there is some degree of everything that's what's the mind fuck right now is it's like you're trying to we're trying to like figure out what's true but we're also trying to figure out how we should talk in the most useful way to govern to nudge human behavior others of others um you know it's like climate change you can think it's we're on the right trajectory but if you say that and that becomes the thing then everyone acts differently and now we're not in the right trajectory.

1:36:07So it's like, it's a weird thing where you're trying to figure out what the ideal mindset is. Yeah, a friend called it, that in the friend's term was a self-unfulfilling prophecy. As long as we take it really seriously, it's going to be fine. If we think it's fine, it's going to be a total disaster. And I think that's kind of where we are. People have been taking a lot of effort and we were at a conference and people were talking what they do. Like 20, 25 % of people are like, I'm working on climate change. Whoa. it's some effort going into it yeah um right thank you very much all right thank you