Tim Urban - Idea Labs and High-Rung Thinking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.317]

I’m excited to share this conversation with Tim Urban. Tim is, in my opinion, one of the best and most engaging writers of our era. He’s tackled many of the most interesting topics in the world from AI to procrastination. I interviewed him in 2017 in an episode we called “Grand Theft Life”, and it remains one of my favorite episodes ever. In the 6 years since that episode, he hasn’t published almost anything. That’s because he’s been writing the book we discuss in this episode. The book is called “What’s Our Problem”, in which Tim investigates the big issues facing society. The reason I love Tim’s writing so much is its density of ideas and ridiculously clear explanations: a rare combo that makes reading a joy. I hope you enjoy this great round two with Tim Urban, and go buy and enjoy his great new book. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. Listen to Founders podcast. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:02:50] - [First question] - What it’s been like spending seven years thinking about a single topic: Tim's book, What’s Our Problem? [00:05:05] - How he’s come to articulate the big question he’s trying to answer in his book [00:07:58] - A dinner experience where a single question showed just how much of a problem there was to solve [00:09:47] - Group ideology and the different ladder rungs of human thinking [00:17:28] - The concept of a social golems and genies and their implications for society [00:23:02] - His favorite genies and golems throughout history and their impact [00:29:07] - Examples of canonical high functioning genies across history [00:34:20] - The key ingredients within liberal democracies that allow for and correct golems [00:40:44] - Media’s role in shaping ideas and society and what’s changed about it in today’s media landscape [00:46:46] - What else is going on that has him worried about modern institutions that are failing as social immune systems [01:01:15] - The gap between what we say publicly versus what we feel privately and the growing pile of unsaid things [01:07:18] - What’s to be done in order to help society repair itself [01:14:09] - Whether or not the direction we’re most afraid to run is where we should [01:17:37] - Thoughts on AI having written extensively on it and the new wave of emerging tools [01:22:13] - The role and impact of leadership in regards to golems and genies

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset management firms. And seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount and more risk. RidgeLine offers a better way forward. One unified platform that automates away the complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance, and more, all at scale. RidgeLine is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter, and stay ahead of the curve. See what RidgeLine can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai. This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. I'm a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I've been so consistently impressed

• 0:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  with that last of all, my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20 million to support Tegus's mission to expand its product ecosystem to unify and streamline investor research processes. In addition to the library of 55,000 transcripts, Tegus now combines at-cost, on-demand calls with a full suite of financial workflows. Whether it's quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls, Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4,000 fully drivable financial models. Tegus's maniacal focus on quality as well as its depth, breadth, and recency of content makes it the one-stop end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction, and surface high-quality alpha-driving

• 1:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. Before we transition to the episode, I want to highlight the Founders Podcast, which is part of our Colossus Network. David Senra, who hosts Founders, has devoted his life to learning from history's greatest entrepreneurs, and every week he distills the lessons of a different founder. If you want an entry point, I highly recommend starting with episode 136 on Estee Lauder or episode 288 on Ralph Lauren. I hosted David on Invest Like the Best last summer, and it's hard not to walk away insanely energized after listening to any episode with him. You can find a link to Founders and those episodes in the show notes of this conversation.

• 2:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You can also search all past transcripts on our website, joincolossus.com.

• 2:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 3:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm excited to share this conversation with Tim Urban. Tim is, in my opinion, one of the best and most engaging writers of our era. He's tackled many of the most interesting topics in the world, from AI to procrastination. I interviewed him in 2017 in an episode that we called Grand Theft Life, and it remains one of my favorite episodes ever. In the six years since that episode, he hasn't published almost anything. That's because he's been writing the book we discuss in this episode. The book is called What's Our Problem?, in which Tim investigates the big issues facing society. The reason I love Tim's writing so much is its density of ideas and ridiculously clear explanations, a rare combo that makes reading a joy. I hope you enjoy this great round two with Tim Urban, and go buy and enjoy his great new book.

• 3:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's so weird that the last time we did this was pretty soon into what became a seven-year exploration for you of a topic we'll talk a lot about today, and we're going to bounce all over the place, but... First, tell me what it's been like to spend seven years thinking about a single problem. Last time we talked, we talked about 25 different things and it was like a tasting menu of ideas. And then you've devoted, God knows how much time, energy, attention to it. Effectively, a single topic for seven years ever since. And that original episode we did is one of our all time most popular ones. What's that been like? I have to start there.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Well, it hasn't been pleasant because I'm a procrastinating writer and I didn't know this until I learned the lesson the hard way over the last six, seven years. Was that when I'm writing like a short post, the fact that it's coming out in a few days. There's this adrenaline that I have. It feels high stakes. There's the smart part of your mind and then the dumb part of your mind. Think about when you do VR, you don't want to step off a cliff, even though you know you're just on a rug in a room somewhere. The smart part of your brain knows that it's not a cliff, but the dumb part thinks it's a cliff. What I realized is that the smart part of my brain is always aware that if I'm writing a book, the stakes are just as high. It has, if anything, a bigger audience, but the dumb part of my brain cannot see the future. That's the thing about it.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  It doesn't have any kind of understanding that this is high stakes. So it can't get excited, so it just wants to procrastinate. So anyway, a book is a real nightmare for a procrastinator along, like I think any really long term project. But the one thing that I'll say about it is it's a single topic, but it's also like a hundred topics. So I wasn't intellectually bored because usually I like to do blog posts because I don't like to dive that deep on any single topic. I like to spread it around. And actually, this book is really like a collection of the hundred concepts, all relating to the general category of how we think, how we think as individuals or as groups, how tribalism works and our political history and modern day politics.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So I'd still had the enjoyment of constantly reading all different kinds of things. I have written about like a hundred topics in the last seven years. They're just all part of this one single arc.

• 6:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How have you come to articulate the big question that you're trying to answer in the book? It's interestingly titled as a self-help book for society, which I actually think is, having read it now, it's like a completely perfect way to think about it. But how do you articulate, if the book is answering a question, what is the question?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  One of the things I did a lot of before was I would write about future tech, the world that we might be living in down the road, trying to figure out what the giant paradigm shifts are that are happening and what that means for the future. It's part of the reason that's exciting is because we live in this time where exponential growth is really happening right in front of us. One year, there's the whole new paradigm shift happening in this area. Maybe it's in genetic engineering or something like that. And the next year, it's AI is back in the headlines because some crazy thing is happening currently with AI. But I had this nagging feeling as I wrote about these things. I didn't have in even 2013, 2014, when Weibo I started. I really started to have it 2015 and then 2016, which was that if we're moving and we're getting more godlike

• 7:16Speaker 02

  power every year as a species, because technology is giving us this crazy power. It could lead to such an awesome future, but the thing is, technology is a double-edged sword. I think of the 20th century as probably the most prosperous and awesome century by so many metrics ever, and also had the biggest wars, the biggest genocide, the biggest existential threats with nuclear weapons and stuff like that. And so I'm thinking the good times of the 21st century can be so incredible because of all this tech, but that also means the bad times could be unprecedentedly awful. You think about that, okay, so the stakes are going up. And so we need to have our wits about us, let's be as wise as possible. I saw it was the exact opposite. It felt like our society was devolving. Public shaming is back in fashion. Truce is at an all-time low.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  No one trusts any of the institutions suddenly, and political tribalism is suddenly like at its worst in decades. What's our problem? Why are we doing this now? This is such bad timing. It's not that the people are individually stupid. It's that there's something going on that's making us, what I would say, decline in wisdom, decline in like idle health at a time when our power as a species is just skyrocketing. And so that was the premise. I kind of said, what's our problem? But then the second thing also popped into my head, which was I'm scared to write about this. I'm not scared to write about anything. I'll write about religion. I'll write about life extension and artificial wombs. I'm a blogger on my own platform, but I was like, I don't want to talk about any of this stuff publicly.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Then I kind of said, okay, that might be part of the problem. That's interesting. I said, what's going on there? Who do I feel this pressure from to not say the wrong thing about this one topic? Why is it so scary? And maybe this is part of the problem. It was those two things. It was this is bad. What's happening? We need to figure out why we're doing this and let me explore for that. And then also like, why is it so hard to talk about this? That was the question.

• 9:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can we zoom in on a shared experience that we had? We were at a dinner together with a bunch of amazing, very smart, very talented people. And you created an incendiary conversation. And I think we're, I think attacked maybe isn't too strong a word. But most of them maybe except for me. And I'm just curious to have you tell that story and why that experience was maybe indicative of this problem that you're exploring in the book.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  If you saw a video of that convo, but it was no sound. So you just saw facial expressions. It would look like I said something really incendiary. Got this reaction. People were kind of looking at each other, shaking their heads. And are you serious right now? It was that kind of tone. Really? As if I said something pretty incendiary. What I actually said was something along the lines of, I used to be in this mindset. Blue good, red bad. The left is the good is always right about stuff. They're on the right side of all these things and the right is the problem and they're bad. And I don't really feel that way anymore. Like, I don't feel tribally aligned with the left anymore. And once I stopped feeling that way, I realized it was kind of like a prison, an intellectual prison.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  And once I shed that and I just said, no, these aren't my people. Neither of these are my people. I'm just independent human. I started seeing that the left, especially right now, is doing a bunch of bad things too. And that this mindset of left must be good, right must be bad, is holding us back from being able to like, figure out what's going on and solve hard problems. That was basically what I said. People thought that was insane. How could you say the left has any kind of whatever? At least that's how I remember it. That is at a table like that, a very controversial and it's almost, you know, a heresy, not at every table, but at that particular table that went over very badly.

• 10:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If we abstracted away from politics, I think one of the early things you discuss in the book that is so interesting is this concept of the ladder of the different ways that humans approach problems. You could overlay left to right spectrums, not vertical spectrums, like politics onto the ladder too. But as a device, I'd love you to explain this concept. My sense is this is something you developed in the face of conversations like this one. We need to cut at this with a knife that goes a different direction. I really liked what you came up with. Can you explain that concept of the ladder?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  We have a lot of these one dimensional axes, left, right, center, politics. That's a horizontal, one dimensional axis. We also just have, if you lay out, you know, the spectrum of opinion on a certain topic, whether it's political or not, we would lay it out often on a horizontal axis. There's one extreme, there's the other extreme, and then there's the more in the middle or nuanced, partial opinions in the middle. And all of those, to me, they're fine. We need those. Those are useful, but they're what you think axes. They're axes that where you are on that depicts where you stand on the issue, what you think about it, what your beliefs are about it and that. And that's fine, but it tells you nothing about how you got there. So the vertical axis, the ladder, is it's

• 12:16Speaker 02

  a way to bring a how you think axis into the story and just turn the political axis, for example, into a square. So now you have a height component too. And at its simplest, it's just, I call it a ladder, and you have, there's a few different things in the middle, but basically there's the high rungs and the low rungs. And it's a place our psyche can be. When we're on the high rungs, we would care about things that seem like the obvious to care about, like truth. What we believe, we would want it to mirror reality. We'd want to believe things that are true. I don't think anyone would consciously want to be delusional. You behave in a way. That makes sense if that's your motivation.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  So if what you care about is truth, if that's the prime motivation, then first of all, you're not identifying with your views because your views could be wrong or whatever. And all you're trying to do is the end goal of figuring out what's right and wrong. You treat your ideas like, I think of it as like a little machine that you've built, your conclusions, and the machine is not precious. If someone wants to tell you you're wrong, all they're doing is saying that little machine you've got is not reflective of the truth. Let me show you why. And so they try to kick the machine and if they can break it, this shows that the machine wasn't what you thought it was. You're down to have criticism of your ideas and of course, you're willing to change your mind. If you're trying to find out what's true, if you're on a hiking trail and you're trying to get back to where you were and you're lost and someone can say, hey, you're going

• 13:40Speaker 02

  the wrong way, it's here, you're not going to be offended. You're going to say, thank you. You're not going to say, well, that's not what I thought, so I'm not going to believe you. You're going to say, oh, good, that's new information. Of course, you're going to change your mind. If your mind's up on the high rungs and all of us are there sometimes, you're just thinking that way, trying to figure out what's true. Of course, that comes along with a lot of humility because often when you're being honest with yourself, you don't know, you don't know the truth. So if someone says, what's your opinion on tax policy? And you're up there, you very well might say, I don't know, I haven't looked into that. I don't have a good answer to that right now because why would you have to pretend to be? That makes no sense. Now, when you're on the high rungs and you actually do have conviction, it means something. Now you go down to the low rungs of the ladder and the motivation switches. The low rungs of the ladder, we are in a different psychological place.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  I think thinking with a different part of our brain that sees our beliefs as a core part of who we are and a core part of our identity. And it sees our beliefs as something sacred, beliefs like political beliefs or religious beliefs, or how we raise our children, or our beliefs in nutrition. These are the kind of things that really trigger low rung thinking. And low rung thinking is, it's not really thinking. What it is, is it's a strong effort to try to continue to believe what you currently believe. Your goal is confirmation of your existing beliefs, deep down. And truth actually comes in second and is often in conflict with that. And when it's in conflict, truth loses. Likewise, you behave in a way that makes sense if that's your goal. So you like to spend time with other people who already agree.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  You don't want to hear your views challenged because it feels painful. It feels like they're hurting, instead of someone kicking your idea, your little machine on the ground like you are when you're in the high rungs. It feels like someone's kicking you, your body, because you feel like the idea is part of you. And so you'll do all this stuff to protect your ideas, the way you would protect your body, which is you spend time with other people who agree. If you read an article with someone who disagrees, you're doing all of this hard work to convince yourself that it has no merit. You probably won't read it at all, but if you did, you'd be saying, oh, well, this, you'll do some ad hominem thing. Well, this person doesn't know because they're not even a whatever. And what's interesting to me is that both of these ways of thinking are intimately tied to the social setting around us. So if a bunch of people who like high run thinking can get together,

• 15:51Speaker 02

  they can actually form an intellectual culture, a group that I call an idea lab. An idea lab is an intellectual culture that itself values truth. So it's basically collaborative high run thinking. And an idea lab arguing is cool. Saying, I don't know, is cool. Makes you seem smart. Expressing conviction, more conviction than your knowledge warrants is not cool. It makes you seem you lose credibility. And changing your mind is cool and disagreeing, no one takes it personally. And that group together, not only can they make each other smarter just by pointing out each other's flaws and one person discovers an epiphany and everyone can adapt it. But you're also helping each other stay up on the high run. Because it's a natural tendency to kind of drift down.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  But if the group is going to call you on that and call you on confirmation bias, or if you're always hearing opposing views, it makes it very hard to kind of slip into low rung thinking mode. So it's also kind of like a support group, helps people stay on it. Low rung group, we have a word for that. It's an echo chamber. And this is an intellectual culture that's collaborative, low rung thinking. A group where there is a certain set of sacred ideas that the whole group is basically bound together with. This is who we are, people who believe these things.

• 17:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Identity is like the key word I keep picking up here.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the identity of the group is tied to the fact that we believe these things. These are our politics or whatever. This is our religion. Those people over there who think we're wrong, they're not just wrong, they're bad people. They're the other people. They're people that aren't like us. They're bad people. They're our enemies. This is a very natural thing for us. Fifty thousand years ago, when we were evolving, this is probably how tribes, right way for tribes to be united and to hate the other tribes is to have this thinking. But we can still, we can drift into it today. So this axis in general, once I started thinking about it and just brought that into my thinking, I started kind of seeing it. So not to make myself the hero of the dinner table story. But if I'm going to use this language to talk about what happened there. Is I think that that was a group when it came to politics.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  This was New York City group of intellectuals and it was very much like a left wing echo chamber. Where one of the things that was very clear from that culture was that obviously all of us agree on politics. Obviously, we are right and good. And the people who disagree with us are bad people, bad people. They're wrong, they're stupid, they're dangerous and they're the problem. And what I did by saying, actually, I don't really think the left is necessarily morally he superior to the right or anything. I don't know, it can go either way. That was heresy because part of an echo chamber culture is pressuring everyone in the group. You get a huge negative reaction if you do something that can cause doubt in the narrative. I'm sure they would not tell the story that some guy was being an asshole, I'm sure.

• 18:37Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you think about what happens in the lower rungs, I liked how you said earlier, technology is like a double edged sword. One way to think about it could be like, it's a magnifier, like it magnifies all sorts of things in human nature. It magnifies inequities, it magnifies progress, it magnifies beliefs, identities, all these things. Cause we're ever more connected, there's less friction between us all than there used to be. In that context, talk about this idea of Gollum or Golem, I don't know how you pronounce it. When you wrote about it through the lens of Genghis Khan, for some reason, that like really clicked with me as a valuable way to understand this mechanism. And I'm sure we'll spend more time talking about Golem. So what is that term? Why do you invoke it in your explanation?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  So I talked about high wrong thinking, low wrong thinking, and then high wrong group thinking and low wrong group thinking. And where this led me thinking about those things, once I started thinking, I was looking everywhere, you know, is this an idea lab? Is this an echo chamber? Is my relationship an idea lab? Is my relationship in an echo chamber? Is classroom one way or the other? Is this forum online? And one of the things I started noticing was that I think those two intellectual environments have emergent properties. So I talked about how they affect individuals. They encourage people to think like the group is thinking. That's how the effect on the individuals within. But actually, if you kind of zoom out, the group itself has emergent properties. So the idea lab, a culture where people are disagreeing, where disagreement is

• 20:00Speaker 02

  cool. We talk about the concept of emergent. An individual ant is stupid, but the ant colony is smart, has all these brilliant things that can do that no individual ant could. The same thing goes for the a neuron in your brain is stupid. A neuron just fires, right? But a hundred billion neurons in your brain is this thinking machine. And I think you can scale that up. I think that one brain is limited. Human brains are impressive, but they're not that impressive. And if you look at the incredible achievements in human history, the buildings around you, you look at the scientific knowledge that we've built up, you look at the incredible inventions that we've done, and no one person could ever have done that. Doesn't matter how smart they

• 20:42Speaker 02

  are. Doesn't matter if they lived forever and had all the resources. They're not smart enough to figure it out. But individual brains via language and writing can connect together into a super brain. The reason idea lab culture is awesome. What it encourages is there's no idea that's sacred. It encourages people to just be honest and open about what they're thinking, to let whatever's happening in their brain come out of their skull and to the room. And now when everyone's doing that, just say there's six people, those six people have six brains in the room, and they're all thinking different things. And there's mechanisms where to figure out what's most true from those brains and to figure out what the mistakes are being made. And so those six people can be smarter. It's emergence because it's smarter than the sum

• 21:25Speaker 02

  of their parts. They can form this kind of super brain. I call that a genie. Came up with a name for it. This being is formed, and it's a super intelligent being called a genie. Now, the entire modern scientific establishment is made on specific rules to foster this. Someone puts out an hypothesis. And all the other science institutions instinctively try to criticize it and show why it's wrong. And they usually do. And when it's not wrong, when no one can show why it's wrong, it becomes an accepted theory. This is mass scale genie making, and this is why we know about quantum mechanics and relativity and all of these things. And that's one of the most amazing things about humans, that we can do that. Other animals can't really do that because they don't have the language capabilities we have. Now, what happens on the low rungs? When an echo chamber is acting a certain way, they're actually

• 22:09Speaker 02

  doing something they probably don't realize they're doing. They're acting like ants in a colony in a certain way. And I think there's an emergent property of an echo chamber, too. And I call it a golem, kind of a big dumb lumbering monster. And to me, the golem, it has a superpower, too, but it's not intelligence. It's strength and scariness. If the genie gains its power via disagreement, that's how it becomes smart. The golem becomes powerful and scary via the opposite, which is conformity. When everyone agrees on the same thing, and we're good, they're bad. Environment is very normal to the us versus them mindset and to dehumanize the other side. For obvious reasons, this is something our species does.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  We do this. We have the capability of turning into a really, read about World War II. I don't see a bunch of individual bad people. I see a bunch of people who are really got sucked into golem mode together and created this terrifying golem that almost took over the world. A golem is kind of the emergent property of echo chamber culture, of low rung thinking. And part of what I look around, when I look around society, I see that lots of reasons we could discuss, golems seem to be on the rise. They are always here. A liberal democracy is a place where echo chambers are free to be echo chambers. Golems are free to do their thing. And so you have to live and let live, right? You can't start terrorizing the rest of society. And there's kind of an immune system in a liberal democracy to protect against that, to protect against golems taking over the country, because the

• 23:37Speaker 02

  golem is kind of like a force of nature that doesn't have a natural like, oh, we've gone far enough switch. It'll just keep trying to acquire strength and power and forcing its ways upon others until it's stopped, which is why the liberal democracies, they have an immune system against that. And that's part of what the answer to this, what's our problem that I started to realize is, I think the problem isn't golems themselves, it's that the immune system against them doesn't seem to be working very well. And so golems are running rampant. They're tramping through our institutions and our conversations, and it is causing mass scale damage.

• 24:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm going to come back to why that seems to be happening in just a moment. But to really nail home the point, I'd love to hear about the favorite genies and golems that you discovered through history. Like the Genghis Khan one was so visceral for me because I can just remember the line about these units of 10 soldiers. If one deserted, the remaining nine were killed. Talk about conformity. They literally structured units in like a fractal way that had these norms and punishments and everything. And then the guy basically took over the world with this golem. So tell us a couple of the genie and golems of a different styles that you've encountered through history, just to make sure like those two concepts are so powerful are in people's minds.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the Mongols is the Michael Jordan of golems. Because the best golem possible is one where everyone is on the same page and there is a way to enforce the strictest obedience and conformity. The Mongols, it's funny because there's this pope, this guy, I think he was a minister named Giovanni, and the pope came to him and he, this guy was 65, so he was retired. I mean, back then, the 1200, that's old, 65 is the new 80 back then. And the pope came to him and was like, can you go way, way east and find out what the deals with these scary barbarians that we're all hearing about? And it's scary.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Giovanni like had no choice and he had to go 2,000 miles and he actually got there and somehow got all this information and they didn't kill him or anything. And then he came back and he reported on what was going on. And he learned about how it worked. So they had this decimal system, this groups of 10, where there's like a 10 man unit. And if one member deserted, then the whole group of 10 were killed. If one or two went into battle and the other ones didn't follow, all the ones who didn't follow are killed. But it gets more intense than that because every group of 10 was part of a 100 man unit. So there's 10 groups of 10 in 100 pod. Now, if one of the groups of 10 together, I'll say, you know what, let's all desert together.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  The other 90 in the pod are put to death. It's really intense. So what does that do? It creates this situation where everyone is enforcing the conformity upon everyone else. You have to enforce it. If you see a group acting out, you have to take matters into your own hands. It's the leaders don't have to do all this enforcement because the people are going to do it themselves out of fear. But if you think about the golem as a, an organism, think about it as a big organism. Its lifeblood is obedience and conformity. So what is the opposite of obedience conformity is kind of dissent and doubt and going against the party line. If you're thinking of it like an organism, that's cancer.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  That's cancer. When a group deserts, that's a little cancer and if others start to get that idea and follow, the cancer is metastasizing. And the golem very quickly will shatter. It'll lose all of its strengths and there goes the whole mission. So what do you do? They did chemo. They went in there. They did surgery. They cut out the cancer. The fact that two men deserted from this 10 man unit tells me that 10 man unit has a cancer problem. Get rid of it. Cut it out. So then the second thing you learn about the golems is how they treated others, which is just, they'd go ahead and they'd say to a new place they'd conquer. And they'd get there and say, join us and nothing bad will happen to you. You have to obey and you have to be part of the golem, basically. Or we will flatten you. And they would, they would absolutely slaughter every man, woman and child.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  If any resistance was put up, they would leave for a few days, knowing that some people probably were hiding and then come back. And they'd go and kill anyone who was hiding and they were ruthless. So there's this internal ruthlessness to their own people to keep them in conformity. And then there's this external ruthlessness. We are conquering you. You can join or you can be destroyed. Now, in a society, obviously no one is murdering people in a golem. That's or not usually, that's not how it works. But you see the same kind of thing. You see this idea in a political golem, which is internal. Rootlessness, internal pressure. If you're part of this and you go against the party line, you're going to be in big troubles, big social trouble. You're going to be ostracized, you're going to be fired, whatever it is. You're going to be smeared, you're all these

• 28:27Speaker 02

  really strong social penalties, which have a lot of effect on humans. It might not be quite as powerful as the physical penalties, but it goes a long way for a really social species. So they have this internal, but then they also have the external thing. There's no playing nice with others. It's you're with us or against us. And that's the kind of trademark of the low rung movement is you're with us or against us. And when you're with us, you better have your fists salutes up in unison. It's marching at the exact pace that we're all marching. And that's golem behavior. Again, it scales up to something really amazing, which is raw power, scariness. It turns a group of humans into a big scary monster. What it doesn't do is it doesn't scale up to anything smart. No wisdom there, it's a force of destruction. If you want to do a coup against a king, if you can get

• 29:11Speaker 02

  a big enough golem, you can probably pull it off. If you want to conquer a neighboring country, you don't want a bunch of dissenters in the army. You want everyone marching in unison with the sacred flag being held up. And what do they do to deserters in the army? They put them death, or they put them in jail for the same exact reasons. Because they're trying to make a golem, because the golem is what we need to conquer that country. Deserters are cancer. The other people can get those ideas. Treason versus patriotism. Patriotism is you're doing the right thing. Treason is you're going to get death or jail because you're a cancer in the golem. We have the amazing society around us, partially because we live in a place, modern liberal democracies did something amazing, which is they didn't stop golems. They're still very present, but they found

• 29:51Speaker 02

  a way to control them so that genies could actually thrive. And so you have these institutions, academia, and you've got science, and you've got modern day journalism. Again, a lot of these things have gone a little off the rails in the last 10 years, but in general, those things are magical inventions that can thrive because there's clear rules that protect genie making. And so now you have all this incredible advancement, which is part of why we have this exponential technology going on.

• 30:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What are your favorite examples of long duration genies? Through history, what do you think are the genies? Think of like the founding fathers as this group of people that maybe could be described in that way. But what do you think, or Manhattan Project or something, even though the outcome there is something very destructive? What do you think are the canonical examples of a high functioning genie through history?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  There's been these little pockets throughout history where knowledge could really accumulate. Ancient Greece, there was debate, the Socratic method. It was all about genie behavior. It was about disagreement. Disagreement was awesome. What do you have? You had this explosion of philosophy and art and knowledge. Again, humans are incredible when they're doing that. And what often happens, though, is because of civilization like that, there's always golems around, external and also internal, trying to take over and impose a new kind of rule. And so you have to have a strong military that you can handle it. And at some point that devolves, you get conquered by a neighboring thing. What often happens is the books are burnt and destroyed and back into, I have a term for it, the power games.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  The power games is basically the laws of nature. I use the example of a bunny and a bear. If a bear is trying to eat a bunny, and I don't know if that actually happens in the world, but that's what I decided.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  There's no rules. There's no like, well, the bear is allowed to eat the bunny today because he earned this or the bunny deserves to. No, no, it's literally can the bunny run fast enough? And if the answer is yes, then the bunny has more power than the bear in this situation. So the bunny wins. If the bunny can't run fast enough, it gets brutally eaten by the bear. It's not fair. It's not right. It doesn't matter. The rule of power, and the rule is everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so. But this extends to humans, right? So 1,000 people on a desert island, what you're often going to have is a bully starts bullying you in your little area and takes your stuff. And what are you going to do? You're going to appeal to maybe a group of people together can band together and say, no bullying. Okay. And often what happens is you end up with the biggest bully of all finding, getting a kind of a little group of people that no one can physically beat. And now they're the dictator.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  And this is that tiny version of a totalitarian dictatorship, which is just the power games on a mass scale. It's saying the dictator is making all these rules. It's not fair at all, but they have the power to do so. What are you going to do? We have the army. Everyone's dealing with that. So anyway, so ancient Greece was a place where, I'm not an expert on it, but clearly there was something going on there that allowed for this very nuanced concept of disagreement. And they were big into writing, so they captured it and different generations could collaborate. Now the Romans come along and the Romans, if they wanted to, could have burnt all the ancient Greek stuff. One emperor could have said, I don't like ancient Greece. I think it's evil and bad. And that would be the end. We would never probably have heard of Aristotle and Socrates and today if the Romans hadn't happened to like ancient Greece a lot.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  And they loved it and they preserved it and they amplified it. But then it was kind of within the walls of the Byzantine Empire for a long time. One of the things that actually stoked the Renaissance, thousand years after the end of the Roman Empire, was the fall of Constantinople and all of these Eastern Roman Empire scholars and academics, they flooded West. And one of the things that launched the Renaissance. So now you have this amazing thing, which is these people, what are the insights of ancient Greece? What does it come from? It comes from little aha moments in individual brains back in whatever it was, 300 B.C. Little insight in one person's brain, they put it out there and that's one of a thousand insights that month in the group of scholars there. But that one is the best of them. So it really mixed arounds and it ends up being something everyone talks about.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  And then other people develop that insight and then it gets written about and then the next generation enhances it. And so now suddenly the Renaissance is happening, those insights 1600 years later, 1700 years later are suddenly flourishing again. And now there's new collaboration. Now it's being melded with modern 1400 sensibilities, whatever. And so now it then informs the more modern tradition, right? You look at the Renaissance to today, a lot of these ideas develop. So when a country like the U.S. starts, I mean, it is based on enlightenment thinkers, de enlightenment thinkers. They knew their history and really it's this giant 2000 year collaboration that spans through time and space, but it's fragile. This one happened to make it. It didn't get destroyed by a golem along the way. And then it disappeared for a thousand years, then it comes back.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  There's this persistence to knowledge that can kind of flow through, but it often gets squashed. Religions and dictators have often burned the books, punished the scholars. And there's this kind of repression of genies by golems throughout history. So much of it's an exact answer to your question, but that's always what I think about is this 2000 year epic story that's going on. And what's cool about modern day, modern day liberal democracies is they are the best crack yet at wide mass scale genie making. What the Greeks couldn't do is they couldn't collaborate with people in South America. But today you literally have people from every corner of the world, playing by the same scientific method rules, the same as kind of a global scientific way of doing things. And you don't have to speak the same language.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  You put out the results of a paper, it can be tacked and criticized or built upon by anyone in the world. And the results are amazing, but it's fragile. There's always the other impulse, which is to shut down dissent, disagreement and enforce conformity, which is the exact opposite.

• 35:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What do you think is so key in the ingredients of the modern liberal democracies that created the immune conditions to allow, but ultimately correct for large scale golems? Like I think about McCarthyism or something in the realm of politics, which I think probably is like a classic example of a big scary golem that was doing all sorts of harm, but the system like on a long enough time horizon corrected it. Now we look back on it as this evil awful guy and aberration. My next question is going to be what is going on now? That seems to maybe be a violation of this, but what about the system settings of the modern liberal democracies? Do you think allow the flourishing of genies and the sort of course correcting when golems do emerge?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  What's interesting is that just say you have a desert island, you have total anarchy. Inherently, the power games will prevail. You can have a lot of people that are saying, hey, let's do things right. Let's have laws and rules and then let's make things fair. But if 10 of the strongest dudes get together and say, you know what? We're going to do things our way and we get all the women and we get all the resources and.

• 36:34Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Screw your rules.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't matter what everyone else wants because the power games have prevailed and they have the power. They're going to kill you if you disagree. So anarchy often will turn into a totalitarian dictatorship, which is the exact opposite. If everyone has a hundred percent freedom to do whatever they want, there's no rules. So everyone has free to do whatever they want, which is the power games. Very quickly, what that turns into is few people with a ton of power, with a ton of freedom, who can do whatever they want and everyone else with very little freedom. So that's the pattern through history. Most humans have not had very much freedom because there was no overarching laws protecting freedom. So what the liberal democracy is, and I call it the liberal games as a kind of the opposite of the power games or as an alternative to the power games.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  The liberal games basically says, we're going to have a nuanced amount of rules, just enough rules.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  To prevent the power games from taking over, but not so many rules that we become the power games. You can have equality of opportunity is a nuanced rule. Equality of opportunity is very specific. It says, we want everyone to have an equal opportunity. Of course, people will argue forever about how well we're doing that. If that's the liberal democracy rule, so everyone has the opportunity to vie for whatever they want. But you don't have the opportunity to get what you ever want. That's what they said, pursuit of happiness. It's not that everyone is entitled to happiness. They're entitled to the pursuit. Everyone's entitled to vie for political power, but you gotta win an election to get it. Everyone's allowed to vie for economic wealth, but you gotta go and prove your value. But the free market has some rules that protect it from just being a total mafia situation.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Everyone can vie for power, but there's very strict election rules. Everyone can vie for influence. That's free speech. But you have to win over people's attention and convince people. You have to win over via persuasion. So it's this kind of thing that tries to set up fair game rules and then stay out of it. If the power games rule is everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so. The liberal games rule is everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Basically, this harm principle where you're really free in the US, but you can't mess with people's inalienable rights, life, liberty. And so it's this specific thing that's supposed to create the fairest situation, you know, maximize freedom and, and equal opportunity and stuff, while also creating this amazing ability to harness human selfishness into productivity.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Free speech can harness human brains into widespread changing of the mind of the society over time. And that's this awesome thing. It's vulnerable. So the immune system is made up of two things. You need the liberal laws. You need the basic laws preventing physical force, basically, from being used. Because once this physical force is used, now the scariest people are in charge or in the power games again. So you need those laws that prevent physical force. But because liberal democracy inherently doesn't have that many rules, laws can alone provide the full immune system. There's a two-piece puzzle here and laws are only one. The second piece of the puzzle is liberal norms. So I think if it liberal laws are the bricks in the wall, the norms are the mortar that kind of glues it all together.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  And if the norms go away, actually, you can knock over the wall pretty easily. Or you can get through the cracks, you can cheat and it's not actually an airtight wall anymore. And so the immune system to me is specifically the virus it's trying to protect against is the complete takeover of the country by the power games. So I think if you think of an echo chamber, a political echo chamber, a religious echo chamber, whatever, is kind of a little benign tumor in a larger genie brain, a larger free society. And that's fine. We're okay with that. You can go into your church, into your classroom, and if you want to set up an institution that is, has a sacred set of rules and no one's allowed to disagree on this private property, you are allowed to. If you want to say my friend group is going to all think this way and I won't be friends with them, but they don't,

• 40:16Speaker 02

  that is totally fine. Live and let live. You want to form echo chambers, you want to form little golems, you're allowed to. There's just the harm principle. The golems can't mess with other people's life and liberty. And the laws, they can prevent the physical force, but what the laws can't do is prevent social pressure. And they can't prevent social bullying. And so McCarthyism, what it was, was it wasn't necessarily, you could say that loyalty oaths were not illegal, you know, until later. And so, yeah, some of the laws weren't doing their job. But mostly, what it was is, it was a complete breakdown of the second puzzle piece, of the system of liberal norms that is in place to protect broader atmosphere from being subsumed by the power games. So I think of

• 40:58Speaker 02

  a culture as kind of a group of people saying, this is how we do things here. And in the early 50s, people were being smeared as communists who were political enemies and then getting fired for it. There were loyalty oaths when applying to jobs. And really, that's not really the government's job to do something about that, nearly as much as it's the culture's job to say, that's not American. That's not how we do things in America. We don't fire people based on what they believe. We don't ruin someone's life with a smear because they're a political enemy. And the culture kind of got scared. And so it shrunk away. And it got really scared and allowed this golem to form and start tramping through society at will. And that was a breakdown of the immune system. But usually in the

• 41:40Speaker 02

  US, it's not the laws, it's the other puzzle piece. It's that people all get scared at the same time and stop standing up for what they know is right. What they know is the liberal way, the live and let live way. They stop standing up for that.

• 41:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can we take a little detour into the world of media? I'm interested in the history of it and obviously the present state of it, where social media is like an obvious piece of this technology stack or a layer of this discussion that is the way that stuff gets disseminated, ideas, echo chambers, like it's a tool that can be used to create genies or gollums. What has changed about the nature of media from like the Walter Cronkite days? When it all seems so sensible and looking back on it, it seems very like truth seeking and I don't know, balanced, rooted in truth and what's actually going on versus rooted in identity and echo chamber type stuff? So talk about the technology of media and how much of a role it has played in where we sit today.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  We take human nature, which is a constant, and you put it into three different environments, you're going to get three different kinds of behavior. And the environment, for a long time, the media environment was incentivizing, at least some semblance of truth seeking as the core. If ABC, CBS and NBC are all presenting the news and one of them is more biased and more wrong than the others, it's going to get a real bad reputation very quickly and people, it's going to get crushed their ratings. They had to be careful not to express too much political bias, hopefully any, because if they did, they lose half the country or whatever. They'd lose a huge chunk of the country. These were national brands and they cater to everybody. That environment start change, starting with the advent of cable television.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  And cable TV exploded in the eighties. And there was actually something called the fairness doctrine for a long time, which was a rule that if you're broadcasting to a certain size, you had to present both sides of an issue, couldn't just focus on one. And that actually might've been like a nice policy, but it grounds that it probably violated the first amendment, which it probably did. It was repealed in eighty seven. Basically, at that point, all of this new stuff starts happening. Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio just explode onto the scene, illustrated that there is a totally new way to do this, which is you don't have to be neutral and cater to everyone. Instead, go the opposite of neutral, go totally one-sided. Don't worry about truth so much.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Instead of trying to kind of get it close to the truth and stay neutral. Confirm the beliefs of one particular group. We talked earlier about high rung thinking and low rung thinking, right? If the old model, they were incentivized to be reasonably high rung, to try to get it right and to stay unbiased. Rush Limbaugh pioneered a new thing, which was low rung media, which is media that is specifically trying to confirm a certain set of sacred beliefs instead of trying to find the truth. So Rush Limbaugh just said, the right wing or the far right is correct about everything. And these other people are bad and it is very one sided. So then what happens in, you know, 1990, Fox News and MSNBC were born, basically adopting this model. A decade later, you got the Drudge Report and Breitbart.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  It quickly becomes the best way to make money by picking a side and going low rung with it, rather than trying to stay high rung and get to everyone. Because there's a lot of low rung mentality in a country when it comes to politics. Politics brings out a low rung side. So if you can get in there and just be super political, you be super low rung, you'll actually do really well. You'll cater to it. It's a little bit like they were trying to sell nutritious food to the smart part of people's brains, what I would call the higher mind. And then they realized, oh, we could sell Skittles to the dumb part of the brain, to the primitive mind. They started selling political junk food. And so I think Ezra Klein talks about how people were still really curious about the election. So they still had a ton of time to talk about the election and people were hungry for it.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  But because they had to stay neutral, they would fill the time with who's gonna win? Who's gonna win? What's the latest developments? Like almost like, is the hurricane gonna come like weather? They were almost meteorologists trying to predict the future. Here's the latest developments. Who's gonna win? And that has transformed in the world of modern, we might call it a broadcast media, narrow cast media, that's narrow casting to a certain segment. In the narrow cast media, that went from who's going to win to who ought to win. I remember seeing Ted Koppel, actually, in college, 2004 or something like that. He came and spoke and the interviewer said, so you're famously secretive. Who do you vote for? And he just kind of smiled and everyone laughed because obviously he wasn't going to say it. That would have been incredibly unprofessional. You did not know which way these people voted. That was important.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Of course, today, it's unbelievably obvious where every single news anchor votes, because they're telling you who should win, their partisan, they act like that. And so all that professionalism. Went away because the business model changed, which is an important lesson. It's like, sometimes you think the ways things are and the systems we have, they have it because it's right and it's good. But sometimes it's actually because it's being incentivized socially. And when that goes away, there's not really that much holding it in place often. So there's other factors. It was a 30 minutes of news every night back then. And now you've got 24 hour cable. This is just a news network. NBC had news in this little slot. MSNBC has news all the time. So you've got to fill that time. And so you suddenly you can fill it endlessly.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  There's an endless hunger for low rung, really partisan tribal footage. And I think of it as political reality TV. Reality is boring most of the time, but reality TV is always interesting. They're editing it. They're making it look more negative than it is. There's always negativity and fighting and it's interesting because it's juicy and it's gossip. Well, politics is boring. There's 50 committees that pass bills every week. When you talk to someone who's super political, ask them about those bills. They probably can't name one of them. Talk to someone who's going crazy about the presidential election and ask them to name the congresspeople in your state. Name the state senators in your state. They can't because they're not actually into politics because politics is boring. What they're into is they're a trashy reality show.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  The real politicians of Washington DC, they're either addicted to political reality TV. And that's what, again, it started to be that rather than try to be news, forget news. Let's make a reality show, make a lot more money.

• 47:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So what else is going on now? Like there's a pyramid. The book is full of these just incredible names and visuals and characters. Everyone has to read the whole thing. We're scratching the surface here today. But I remember this one pyramid talking about where the argument lies, at what level of the pyramid. And at the top is this idea of norms and institutions and policies and laws. You described as the mortar between the bricks. And it seems like institutions is a key one here that seem to have been potentially invaded by some sort of virus today where conformity to a set of beliefs has stymied the ability of genies to sort of do their thing.

• 48:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  In addition to media and this echo chamber path that media as a thing has been on, what else is going on that has you worried about academia or academic institutions or other key modern institutions that are supposed to serve as part of the like immune system that maybe had been not playing that role in the last 10 years, as you said?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  If you want to see if an institution is healthy, ask what is its telos? That's the philosophical term for it's end. The telos of a knife is to cut things. So what is the telos of a college? You look at college mottos and a ton of them, a huge percentage of them have the word truth in them. Thomas Jefferson founded UVA by saying something like, "Here we are unafraid to search for truth wherever it may lead." Harvard, Veritas, their actual logo is the word truth. In a case of academia, has two different arenas. There's education, so there's trying to teach, I would say, not teach kids the truth, but teach kids how to become good truth finders, to teach young people

• 49:37Speaker 02

  how to be high rung thinkers, how to be skeptical and the right level of skeptical, how to think like a scientist, how to be humble about what they know and how to discover information and how to think clearly. This is what an ideal college would do education wise, teaches young people to be truth finders, to be high rung thinkers. And the second arena is in research. Knowledge is produced in universities. There are knowledge production mechanisms. They're the knowledge factories. There's these systems in place that try to keep the compass pointed towards truth. There's peer review and there's a whole set of rules and methods that universities use to keep their knowledge that they're finding accurate and useful. So that's the telos. If you go into a church, you'd see the cross everywhere

• 50:20Speaker 02

  because the telos of the church is to serve Christ, whatever it might be. Healthy, non-corrupt institution? What they do matches what they say they do, right? They say that they're dedicated towards truth and they behave that way. Corruption to me, you think of corruption, they think of political corruption with money, but that's just really to me, corruption is when you say this is our sacred value and some other motive has corrupted it. And now you're secretly doing this thing. This has actually become like, if you think of values in a stack, the one at the top is the most sacred. Some other value has come up and become the, deep down, the sacred value. And you know which value is more sacred? Values often butt against each other and which one wins out. And so if the sacred value is getting beaten by some other value, that means their corruption has happened. The institution is corrupt. Unless they go and announce, "We've changed.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  We now value this." That's fine. No problem there. They're publicly changing who they are. They actually, a lot of the colleges used to serve Christ as their number one thing. They were divinity schools and they changed to be Veritas schools. Great. Announce it and be honest about it and everything's good. So what happened at colleges in the last, going on for a few decades, but it's really accelerated, is that one ideology, and people call it wokeness, and you know, has a ton of baggage, that term. I call it SJS, social justice fundamentalism. And I call it that, A, because I don't want it to have the baggage, I don't want it to be a mocking term. It is an ideology. And I want to distinguish it from what I would call liberal social justice. So liberal social justice is the very proud tradition of the US.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  It is the kind of social justice that says, the civil rights movement in the 60s, it says liberalism is good. We need more of it. Liberalism is good, and the constitution is great, and we're violating it. There were promises made by the founders, by this country, by that flag, and those promises are being broken. Martin Luther King would talk about the promissory note, the black Americans have gotten a bad check. And so they would use civil disobedience to break specifically the laws that were not liberal, the laws that were violating the constitution to expose them. There's a great tradition of that in the country. That's one thing, the US has definitely not been perfect. It's been a lot of different kinds of oppression and unfairness. But one thing it's really good at is it can be overcome. Those things can be fixed.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  The glitches in the thing can be repaired over time, and it takes a long time, and it's ongoing. That's the tradition of liberal social justice. It wants to use the tools of liberalism, like free speech and free protest and free assembly, to fix liberalism. Social justice fundamentalism is actually completely different. It's actually in the opposite, in that it's rooted in Marxism. Its fundamental thing is that liberalism is bad. Free markets will always exploit and lead to oppression. Free speech is a tool of the powerful. Free speech should be shut down when it's dangerous. Someone's saying something dangerous, they should be canceled for it, they should be punished for it. It's actually anti-liberal. I'm saying things that I believe most of the scholars of this would nod their head and say, yes, we do think liberalism is bad.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  We think that it is an invention of the West, and it's kind of a tool of oppression. And so it's much more revolutionary, it's much more radical. If you define radical with how deep do you want to go and overhaul? A liberal progressive might want to go and overhaul a bunch of the norms and laws, but the more radical person wants to go and actually change the whole concept, tear up the constitution, build something new. And that's what they want. And so there's nothing wrong with that. One of the cool things about liberalism is it's nimble, it's big. Bring it on. Bring all the ideas in here. Have it out, but live and let live. Don't shut down discussion. Bring it all in. So social justice fundamentalism. Universities have always been very left wing. But traditionally in the sixties, the protests were about, we want more free speech.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  They were actually liberal social justice protests. They were protests for racial equality and gender equality and things like this, which are all part of liberal social justice. Social justice fundamentalism started developing in the corners of these universities as more obscure neo-Marxist take on social justice, which was again, not just a more extreme liberal social justice. The polar opposite of it in that it wants to uproot the very thing liberal social justice is trying to preserve liberalism. So that's fun. You're going to have a really radical corner of every university. And I think it's great. Sometimes the radicals point out something we're all missing. We want the radicals around, just like we want the far conservatives around. I want all of those people in the room because they're all have a different lens.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  And once in a while, there is something fundamentally flawed and the radicals are the ones who are going to see it because their lens is looking at why this whole thing could be messed up. But at some point, they stopped playing nicely with others. In universities, they started to basically transformed into something that was more like a golem, where it saw descent to its own ideology as violence, as a form of racism or whatever. And it also started to forcefully expand where it would try to shut down dissent of it even outside of its own circles elsewhere. It would start to create internal conformity and try to forcefully expand. Now, this is inevitable and every university is going to have it. And this is when the immune system has to kick in and say, we don't do things like this.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  So an example would be, one of the things that has skyrocketed recently is disinvitations. So speaker gets invited, maybe it's a conservative speaker. Often, actually, I looked at the database, most of the speakers are more like liberal progressives. They're people like me who probably voted for Obama and are criticizing social justice fundamentalism. Or maybe just talking about one of the things that violates one of its sacred beliefs, like talking about police reform in a way that doesn't fit with what social justice fundamentalism says that it should be. What does a liberal do? Even liberal who hates the idea. So we'll say there's four ways to handle a speaker you hate saying things you hate coming to campus. One way is go to the talk and say, I'm gonna listen. This is what the high rung person does. It says, I'm gonna throw my idea out there and let this idea bash it.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Maybe I'll learn something, maybe I won't. I'm just interested, whatever. There's another way, which is, I'm not going to that talk. A low rung would say, I don't want to hear that disgusting set of ideas. Why would I listen to something like that? It's blasphemy. Okay. Also, fine. Both of those are totally fine because you're living in that living. You don't have to go to the talk. Now, a third way is what I would call a social bully, which is not only am I not going to go to the talk, but I'm going to actually not be friends with anyone who does. I'm not being friends with anyone who goes to the talk. That's what I call a social bully, which means you're gonna use your social power to try to prevent others from going. Even that's okay, because other students can just say, well, I'm not gonna be friends with you then. That's a choice. You're letting them voluntarily opt out of your friendship and go to the talk, or they can stay. That's a choice, a free choice.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  All three of those are okay. I don't have much respect for the social bully. I think they need to grow up a little bit, but they're not harming other people. The fourth kind of person is the one that's not okay, and I call this the idea supremacist. The idea is if the social bully says, if you go to the talk, you can't be my friend. The idea supremacist says, no one is allowed to go to the talk, whether you're my friend or not. And so they do something different than the first three. They try to shut down the talk. They say, I want to prevent it from happening in the first place. And they will petition the school to get it to go away. If they doesn't, they'll go and they'll shut down the speaker. That's a big thing is to shut down. They'll go to the talk and just get up there and shout until they cancel the event. They're not banning the speaker. The speaker will go speak somewhere else.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  What they're banning is all of their fellow students who paid money to be able to hear a wide variety of views. They're banning them from hearing the talk. Now, this is the antithesis of veritas. Genies are made of disagreement. If you want to have a truth finding institution, it has to be that all the brains are really saying what they're thinking, and everyone's disagreeing, and it's a big mishmash of ideas. And what the idea supremacist says is, I live in a little echo chamber, and I'm now going to try to turn to force the whole campus to be. Played by my echo chambers rules, which is the opposite of Veritas. And what's happened is they've succeeded in a lot of times. The immune system of the college, instead of the president saying, absolutely not, we will not cancel this talk. I don't care if it's a Nazi. This is not how we do things here.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  This is a free marketplace of ideas. If you don't like the talk, set up your own talk to refute it. Write an article about how awful and wrong those speakers' ideas are. Great. This is what a Veritas campus does. So no, we will not cancel the talk. Instead, university presidents and leadership have been saying, we're canceling the talk. Not just canceling it, affirming the reasoning of S J F by saying something like, we apologize, we need to do better, we need to learn more. This should never have happened in the first place. The speaker never should have been invited. It makes this campus an unsafe place. All these euphemisms for, we are basically going to seed the culture, seed the telos, the Veritas telos of this to this group who has a totally different motive,

• 58:58Speaker 02

  which is to turn the campus into a church for one set of ideas. Social justice fundamentalism. They're trying to change the rules where now, instead of a free marketplace, an open marketplace of ideas. Instead, it's that if you say ideas that we agree with, great, you probably get promoted. And if you don't, you're going to get fired. If you're a speaker, you're going to get shut down. So that's completely flipping it on its head. But the websites, the university websites still say, this is a place where ideas can flow and it's a play intellectual variety and it's a lie. Because that's what happened because they've actually allowed a corruption, this classic corruption. This is just the expression on campus. The two areas I talked about, it's really invaded those. So education, I mean, if professors are teaching something that offends S J F sensibilities,

• 59:42Speaker 02

  a student can report them, that professor can be fired. There are dozens of stories every year of professors who offend this particular ideology. It's never professors who offend any other ideology, being punished, fired, investigated, students being punished, fired, investigated or kicked out. And so, of course, instead of teaching students to be high rank thinkers, it's doing the opposite of teaching students that this is the one truth. And you already know it. You don't have to learn how to find it. This is true. And anyone who says something else, they're a bad person. It's the opposite. It's teaching students how to be zealots. On the research side, this is really scary because you really want your research, your journals and stuff be doing things the rigorous way. But what you've seen is some corruption here, too. You've seen papers that go through double

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  peer review that end up in the journal, but they actually say something that conflicts with, you know, an S J F tenant. Maybe they're criticizing affirmative action policies, whatever it is. And the reaction is huge. And that's this moment of truth. Does the university stand up for its values and say, we publish all different kinds of the journal stand up for, this is an idea lab. Does it do that? And therefore uphold its own telos and uphold its own immune system against this virus? Or does it say the opposite, which is, we are so sorry, we need to do better. We were tracking the article and we reaffirm our commitment to social justice, whatever. And that's what this happened. And when that happens, that is the immune system failing and the virus comes in and takes over, takes over the host. And likewise, you see papers that are published that shouldn't

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  not be published. They don't match the rigor that is supposed to be there, but they do confirm S J F. And so they're published with a much easier track than they should. I don't want to go ahead and say all papers right now are suddenly from corrupt journals. Most journals are fine. But this has happened a lot, and it's happening a lot increasingly. So this is one example of an institution, academia, that is supposed to be a classic example of liberalism in a liberal country. It's supposed to be the classic liberal place. And it has its immune system out of a cowardice of leadership and a fear of social media and other things has faltered. The virus has rushed in and hijacked the host. And now the university becomes, at its worst, goes from an instrument of truth to an instrument

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  of this ideology, of this movement. It becomes a tool of the movement. Again, not to go over the top and say this is every university has been hijacked. The point is, this is happening more and more often, to a greater and greater degree, very recently, we should pay attention. If you live in the liberal democracy, that should raise huge red flags, regardless of what you believe, by the way. If this be equally concerning, no matter what the ideology was. The point is that no ideology should have the power to go into a classically liberal institution and completely corrupt it. And that says something is wrong. Something's up right now.

• 1:02:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  As I was reading and thinking about your ideas, one of the things that really stood out was this, in my mind, is like this giant growing pile of unsaid things. And I think a lot about incentives. And let's just take someone like me, for example, that has a public footprint that I try very hard to say nothing particularly inflammatory in either direction, because there's like a horrible asymmetry for me. But if I say something that's directionally one way or the other, nothing really great happens. Whereas if I say something that's explicitly offensive to whomever, it could lead to a horrible outcome, a left tail outcome for me. And that's how I think about it is just, what's the system of incentives? My incentive is to ask questions well, and host a lot

• 1:03:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  of interesting people on this show in the context of my media activities, and not create a tax surface for people to come after me. And what that happens is like, I have opinions and ideas, and I want to be part of an idea factory too. But my incentives are basically to say nothing. There are things that I think or I'm curious about that I don't say anything about because of this like incentive system that's sort of like sprung up around me. And so now there's this like growing pile for me and for society, let's say, of unsaid things. There's like what I say in public and there's what I believe in private. And it seems like the gap between those two things for society is widening. Is that a fair summation of the problem? What would you say about

• 1:03:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  that problem, about that pile of unsaid ideas or unsaid things? And what can we do about it?

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  I think of the unsaid things as like an iceberg, because people hear about this invited speaker, for example, or the canceled journalist, because they said something wrong, or the tech employee, or whatever. It seems like, oh, those stories happen here and there, but it's not that big a problem. But first of all, you're hearing about the big ones that make the news. There's all kinds of million little stories about someone in a small company who's been run out because they offended the wrong person or whatever. And so there's a lot of those stories, but much, it's an iceberg, because that's what's above the water. Under the water are all the self censorship that happens. The king doesn't need to execute that many people to have everyone shut up, to have an institute of policy of censorship. The king executes five people, hangs them in the public square for saying something that goes against the king's doctrine, and suddenly everyone else

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  shuts up. What I see when I see cancel culture or something like that is I see a few executions in the public square and people hanging there for everyone to see. And what that does is it creates an atmosphere of fear. And in atmosphere of fear, it's suddenly not a safe place. Liberal democracy is supposed to be a safe place to speak your mind and to argue and be wrong and okay to be wrong and to disagree and whatever. And even if you say something offensive, you should get a social penalty. You know, people should be mad at you for a little bit and give you a talking to or tell you that they hurt their feelings or whatever. Instead, if you say something that's, forget widely offensive, just something that is offensive to one small, powerful political group, it's not that they'll come talk to you and say you hurt their feelings. No, no, you will have your life ruined.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  An example I can give with you is if you become someone that becomes, that a powerful political group of one kind or another, some mob decides is bad. Not only will they say, okay, Patrick is bad. He's an awful person. He's a fascist. He's a commie. He's a racist, whatever it is. Now, not only does this hurt you as a person, but if I go on your podcast, I'm going to have to be a little brave to do that because I'm going to get some shit. People are going to say, oh, don't buy that guy's book. He went on Patrick. He went on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's thing. You know who that guy is? No, no, you don't want to go on someone who's been talking to these people. If that gets enough attention, if you're bad enough, that transfers to me, that smear on you transfers to me.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  And now it can go further. Or now, once people start saying, no, no, no, Tim Urban's bad. You know, he goes, he was on people like Patrick. You don't want to talk to him. Suddenly, people don't want to share my book publicly. I don't want to, I just want to deal with it. Even if they just don't want to deal with. It's the same thing. Yeah. It's just not worth it. Even if nothing that bad would happen, let's, I don't want to go put that guy's book on Twitter and have a bunch of people tell me I shouldn't be sharing that. And very quickly, you see how this spider web extends outward. That's not something that happens in a normal liberal democracy at a normal time. That's the kind of thing that happens when the immune system is down, when the balance is tipped towards the golem. So the McCarthyism, the Red Scare was a perfect example of a time when there was kind of a low rung flare up. There was a flare up where the immune system failed and there was fear, a perfect storm

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  of fear and all of this stuff where this thing could take advantage and start tramping through society. And I think we're in another one of those now. And you're feeling that and that I bet people in the early 50s were saying same thing you're saying, they're saying, I feel this pressure to not speak my mind. In a way that I didn't five years ago. This comes on quickly and especially in the era of social media and stuff. It comes on really quickly. And so if you think about what you're actually saying is you self censor a lot. That's a loss for society. That's a loss for your listeners. The thing is, you're not self censoring because all of your listeners are going to be offended. Probably less than 1% ended up in a total shitstorm. Probably less than 1% of your listeners, when they actually heard it, would have thought anything of it.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  The 1% that did think he shouldn't have said that, they think eh, people say stuff I don't like sometimes and they keep listening. We're talking about the tiniest group of people that actually think he needs to be punished for that. But that group has an outsized amount of power right now and you can feel that pressure. That's part of what I felt when I started this book. I said, I'm scared to write about this. That's interesting in itself. So if you think about the books, there's been a bunch of books that have been taken off of Amazon, taken out of Target because the mob gets angry on Twitter about it. And then there's a profuse apology. For every one of those books, there's a lot more that sit on the publisher's desk. There's a lot more, even bigger part of the iceberg of idea in someone's head. And they say, no way, I'm just not worth it in this environment. And it just never gets written in the first place. And eventually people stop thinking about it.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  That's what's scary is when the social censorship works, it works in that people stop talking without communicating. You can't form that smarter brain that's working on these problems. It kind of goes quiet publicly and then people stop thinking about it. Or they think about it in these tiny groups and we lose this mass intelligence capability we have and the ability to think together.

• 1:08:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's to be done? It is a self-help book for society after all. Usually there's some clever acronym or something in a self-help book. What acronym do you have for us? What can people listening that this resonates with think about, do differently, mention to others, whatever?

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  I asked the question, what's our problem? Well, the answer isn't that there's an asteroid coming towards Earth. The answer isn't that the laws are creating censorship or oppressing people or whatever. The real problem is, is cultural. I focused on social justice fundamentalism because we were talking about academia. The whole Trump phenomenon of totally violating the telos of conservatism in a hundred different ways. Of totally violating the most sacred thing that the outgoing president ever says is, you know, what Reagan said and Hillary's seven G loss, which is that the thing that makes America magical is what you're watching right now, the peaceful transition of power. So he also violated the stuff that should not be, it is something's up. Why are we so vulnerable to a demagogue at this moment? Why are we so vulnerable to a mob?

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  There's always people who want to be demagogues and mobs that want to form. Why are they doing so well right now? So anyway, the problem isn't, I don't believe, one of these hard laws of nature or anything like that. The problem is the soft cudgel that's happening, the soft power of a mob. That's a brittle power. It's actually a house of cards and completely praise on fear and self censorship, or even worse, by the way, even worse than self censorship, much worse, is saying things you don't believe. A lot of people are out there right now saying things that are popular with the mob because they want to be popular, because they want status, because it feels good to say things and get approved. You have one big element of courage in that you don't do that. You don't pander, but you also self censor. So I think it's a little bit of a house of cards. It relies on widespread fear.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  It's fear and some kind of delusion, some kind of confusion. So one of the things that social justice fundamentalism relies on is confusion about it versus liberal social justice. Its goal is to convince people that anyone who disagrees with things it wants to do are today's version of the people who disagreed with people who wanted to stop school segregation in the sixties and in the fifties. It's trying to convince people that, oh, that template we all have in our heads, that liberal social justice is good. The civil rights people were obviously the good guys. The southern racists were obviously the bad guys. The people who didn't want women's suffrage were obviously the bad guys. Well, today, people who disagree with us, that's them. And it's not true. So there's confusion. The difference between cancel culture, which shuts down conversation, chills discussion,

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  and criticism culture, which is something that makes genies. It's great. It makes people smarter. There's a very important difference. Criticism punishes the idea, hits the idea. Cancel culture tries to hit the person for saying the idea. Opposite, but we have a lot of confusion right now. So try to criticize cancel culture. They say, oh, now you're doing the canceling, right? It's wrong. That's part of why I wanted to do a whole book, because I was just like, I need to say this thoroughly. Because in conversation, the words we have, they're not nuanced enough a lot of the time. And there's such room for confusion. So I think we have a problem of fear and confusion. And I think those two beget each other. It's a spiral we've been on. Now, the reverse of that spiral is the opposite of each of those things. Courage and awareness. Awareness and courage beget each other.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  When someone has courage to speak out, and I use the example of Toby Look at Shopify, basically just stood up to the mob and was like, hey, look, it's not what we do here. And didn't say they were wrong or right, just said that you're not running the show here. We're a team and this is what we do. And that's the end of it. He showed strength. They kind of left him alone. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's been going through hell I don't realize. Unlike Genghis, they can't come and lynch you. They don't actually have hard power. They have soft power. So the epiphany that someone like Toby and hopefully lots of others have is I think the emperor has no clothes here. I think I can speak out and what are they really going to do? They're going to try to throw a Twitter thing, but I can just show strength in the face of that. Most people actually respect that. Most people agree with Toby there, even though they're not saying it. And now suddenly they're going to go elsewhere.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  They don't want to go to someone who's showing strength. They want to go to the college president or the CEO who says, I'm so sorry. We made a huge mistake. We're firing the person who you don't like. And we reaffirm our commitment to that's who's in trouble. They're acting like the mob has weapons, physical weapons. That's how they're acting, but they don't. So I think that courage is, we don't need that much courage. It's not like the Iranian women that are burning their hijabs. That is real courage because you might get executed or imprisoned. This is minor league courage here. We don't even need that much. And, and the mob can't stand up to any form of courage really. So when one person stands up, it is scary because the mob can come after you and no one stands up for you. But once that starts to go and hit a tipping point, I believe. And meanwhile, if people are speaking up, then all these people in their heads who are thinking,

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  I kind of think this movement is bad, even though they say, oh, my God, I'm not alone. I'm not alone. Wait a second. And now the discussion starts again. And when the discussion's starting, we can start to suss out the differences between criticism and canceling. And we can talk about teloses and corruption of institutions. And I think very quickly, awareness can just spiral upwards. And a lot of this confusion can melt away because the discussion's going on again. It makes it less scary to speak up. So awareness begets courage, which begets more awareness. It's not that satisfying an answer because it's not like we need to change this one policy or this one system. But I really think it's that some people will genuinely lose their job for speaking out. I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to the vast majority of people who the sky won't actually fall if they start being authentic. They owe it to themselves to represent themselves in the world.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Why are you hiding yourself away because you're scared of these people? These aren't wise people. They're trying to punish you for saying what you think. Fuck those people. A little bit of that. They're bullying you and it's working. And it's like, fuck bullies. It's easy to say. It's hard to do. The hundred people that are right now scared to do this, eight of them will have a real, serious consequence. A friend of mine is a teacher in a school and he has to say he has to whisper, whisper in a middle school. They have this policy they just instituted where for any new teacher who's applying, they have to basically show that they're a proven social justice activist of the S J F variety. If they haven't shown a long history of that, they can't even get hired to be a teacher in that school. A very big leftist, and he thinks that's wrong. We shouldn't have a political litmus test for hiring teachers.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  He said, if I said that out loud in a staff meeting, I would be out of a job. I have two kids and I can't afford to lose the health insurance. I can't afford. He shouldn't be courageous. I don't want him to be courageous. He's one of the eight people that truly will have a very big consequence. I'm talking to everyone else. And by the way, it's not about necessarily going public. You don't have to say it in a staff meeting necessarily, but start saying it around your friends. Start just representing yourself accurately more often because you're probably not a terrible person. You've probably been made to think that these things are offensive or bad. And probably they're not because most people are humans and humans are not usually awful people, I find.

• 1:15:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I like how in the beginning you said you felt some fear writing this book. And I wonder if you think that really reflecting on what you're most afraid to say is in fact, the North Star of the direction that you should run as you think about courage and awareness. You wrote a chapter on gender, for example, which to me feels like, oh God, I'm just not going to talk about that because I have anything to say in this case, but it just seems like a terrifying lose-lose proposition right now, the white-hot center of an off-limits topic or something. Do you think that's right? I'm just using that as an example that seems visceral to me, that the direction to run is the direction that you're most afraid to run?

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Well, it depends what your goals are, but you think about what being afraid comes from. It comes from the amount you're being bullied to not say that. So there are tiers of what's okay to say right now. Opinion A is popular with everyone. You're not going to get any pushback. Opinion B is fine, a little controversial, but fine. Opinion C, you're now going to get a lot of people who hate you for it. Opinion D is going to end your career. It's going to end your total disaster. What that tells me is that there is some kind of group, it might be a small political group, or maybe it's the majority of society in some cases, and they have a rule. They're instituting echo chamber culture around opinion C and especially D,

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  where they're saying that opinion C is blasphemy and opinion D is unforgivable evil. To just question, if I went and started saying racial slurs, that would be a punish by society. But I would reflect on that and say, well, that's for a good reason, because racial slurs are a really low-rung, nasty, tribal, hurtful thing to say. That's not one to run towards. I think that is blasphemy for a good reason. I think that if you want to talk about affirmative action policies, or even just have a nuanced discussion about it, and it's blasphemy to even bring that up, well, that's a bad one, because that is something that affects everyone. It's really important. It deals with important things like fairness. And I'm not even sure

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  what I think, by the way, about them. I think it's really complicated. I think there's a ton of pros and cons and historical factors and all of this. The fact is, the discussion itself is taboo. Literally, anything other than saying, more of it, the better, is taboo right now. That is not good. That's one where I'm going to say, who are the people that are making that blasphemy topic? When I know that most Americans like open discussion, and it's usually a small group of people that have a lot of power. And I say, no, screw those people. I think it depends. And I don't think everyone has to go and start saying controversial things. I just think it's when you feel yourself with the urge to and you feel yourself scared to. Know what's happening, which is that you're being bullied by a bully. That's it. You're being bullied by a bully. And that should make us angry because who's okay with that? Get out of here.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  It's my one life and you're not letting me express myself in my one life, in my society, that I'm allowed to express myself in. And because it defends your things in your echo chamber, instead of just hiding in your echo chamber where you belong and being friends with people that agree with you, you're actually trying to enforce your echo chamber on everyone else. And every liberal person, little L liberal, should be offended by that. No matter what the actual beliefs are, even if they agree with you. If you see someone who agrees with you, who's doing that to other people, you should stop them because it's not about what they believe. It's about there being idea supremacists. They're actually violating live and let live, the sacred thing in a liberal democracy.

• 1:18:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I think the ideas of courage and awareness are like a great aspirational bow to put on what you've written. Like I said, we barely scratched the surface of all the cool frameworks and ideas. The book feels in many ways like a toolkit, like a mental toolkit for attacking different ideas, different plans, different trends, et cetera. It's such a rich collection. I highly encourage everyone to go check it out. I can't close, though, our conversation without asking you about AI, because we were texting beforehand, saying, we got to make sure this whole conversation doesn't devolve into us talking about AI. You wrote extensively about this before it was a thing. You were probably the most in-depth explorer of these ideas for the mass public.

• 1:19:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What has it been like to watch the last six to eight months of the explosion of some of these tools? And I'm sure You've thought about it, how these tools fit into everything else that we just talked about, because you're already seeing the original one had a political bias when you put it through like a test or something and they've corrected that and it's way more eccentric. The tuning, talk about power, these things are so powerful and getting more powerful. The tuning matters. What's been your reaction to all this, given that you used to study it in such detail?

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  First, I'm happy it's not my responsibility. I would not want to be in charge. The closest thing we've had to it in recent years is when these social media networks blew up. Mark Zuckerberg, who never asked for his role, he never thought he was getting into what he was getting into. And Jack Dorsey and they ended up realizing that they're pulling political strings and they're changing people's brains and they're creating mass depression in teen girls. It's scary. Basically, you're opening a bottle and like this power roars out and starts having all these unintended consequences. And I feel that, and again, I never criticized those people running it because I'm just like, they have the hardest job in the world.

• 1:20:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And imagine, yeah.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Just imagine them tossing and turning at night, thinking about how much responsibility, how much damage they inadvertently caused. I don't blame them. So I see this as similar where it's the people running it. We don't even begin to know the unintended consequences yet. This is 1993 discussing this new internet thing. And imagine in 93 predicting Uber from that. Imagine in 93 predicting Twitter. People were just talking about this cool thing. You could send a message. You can send mail electronically. So when I see this, I don't see GPT-3 and I don't see like, oh, it's that's what this is. It's a chatbot. I see a new paradigm, a new S curve just starting to heat up and a new source of godlike power for humanity. And I have no idea how it's going to evolve.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if we have what it takes to make it evolve in a way that we all look back and say, thank God for this thing. It was such a good thing. I don't know if I feel optimistic or pessimistic. What I know is that I know it's directionally correct. What I mean is the most basic thing is directionally correct, not to bring it back to all this, but is that we need to be as wise as we possibly can as a society about new crazy technology that's coming out all the time. And the way we do that is by open discussion. Right now, it's not controversial really to talk about GPT-3 and GPT-4 and what's it going to bring and what should it be? What shouldn't it be? All it takes, it becomes a big enough topic that one of the presidential candidates starts saying this and the other one starts saying this. And before you know it, the one side has this view on it and the other side has this view on it, like masks. The left liked the masks,

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  the right didn't like the masks. As soon as that happens, all wisdom goes out the window. The macro society brain becomes stupid, goes dark. And we have these two unnuanced positions and it becomes taboo to even suggest new things. That's the worst thing we can do. We need to have our wits about us. And the way we do that is by, so you can't let this political whirlpool that has sucked everything in, including COVID, which should have been a uniting thing, Russia, Ukraine, everything gets sucked into this red versus blue color war in the US. You cannot let that thing happen. And so when you see someone doing that, punishing opinion, punishing a certain viewpoint and making it taboo to have that viewpoint about AI, that has to be shut down immediately. So as far as what's going to happen, man, I don't know. I hope people enjoyed my articles because I don't know how much longer anyone's going to need

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  to read any human writer. Easy to be scared is also so easy to be excited. I mean, think about the industrial revolution or the internet and all of the vast good that came from it as well. All of the jobs, all of the productivity, all of the quality of life improvements that happened from it. So that's going to happen too. And I'm so excited to see like, what kind of amazing upward trajectories we end up on because of it. I just hope that the upward ones are bigger, more powerful.

• 1:23:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You just made me think of one final question, which is the role of leadership. One of the things about the Gullums through history is at the top of them directing their activity, there often is this very small or even singular person, literally a single person or a small group of people or council or something. And ditto on the other side, that there's great defenders of liberal democratic ideas and so on. Anything, as you're writing the book, on the role of leadership in all of this? Because we've talked about the natural tendencies, the emergent properties of human brains in the good and the bad way in Genies and Gullums. But what about the role of actual individual leaders? How much does it matter versus someone just ends up being at the head of one of these things? And the mob sort of determines

• 1:24:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  the leader versus the other way around? Any closing thoughts on the role of leadership?

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  It's the most important topic right now. Right now is leadership, I think, because what is leadership? I mean, it's easy to lead when you're saying something popular. It's easy to lead when you're basically copying the reasoning that's already accepted. So if you're the head of a company and you're just doing what that company's always done, and you're doing what the other companies are doing, and you're saying the right social, political things that are popular, you're not being a leader at all. You're being the lead follower. You're being the most vocal follower. And I think that it's not that all moments require the same level of leadership. Sometimes maybe leadership is X important. And then there's a time when I think things are going off the rails. If the immune system seems to be breaking down, that's when leadership becomes 10x important. And specifically because the immune system fails when leaders,

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  again, I use Toby as an example. You could also talk about a bunch of small, I have a friend who at a smaller company just stood up to the forces that were trying to corrupt the company and hasn't had a problem since. There are some great examples of people throughout society who have kept their integrity in a tough time to keep their integrity. And I think true colors are shown in a time like this. You see who really has integrity. I do think that we should be looking at that and assessing that and demanding that the leaders that we have the ear of, encouraging them at least, to lead and to lead even though it's hard. And that doesn't just go for CEOs of companies. It goes for people with public platforms of all kinds. It goes for smaller leaders, teachers in a classroom, professors.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  It goes for people sitting at a dinner table with their friends. I mean, the leadership on the mob side, the truth is, I don't think there's that many bad people in this story. I don't think it's something where it's like the evil people are trying to take over. If you actually look at any individual person who's participating in mob activity, first of all, often this person, they got into this because of their empathy. They want to be an activist. They want to make things better. And they've been convinced that this is the way to do so. And I think they're wrong in that, but they're good people trying to do good a lot of the time. Then other times, there's people that know they're doing something that's not so good. They're being bullies, they're being opportunists. And even that, that's human. I don't think there's evil people here. The environment has changed. Virus have sprung loose, multiple kinds of viruses have sprung loose. And I think the leadership, when I think about it, I think much more.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  On the side of people who need to stand up to stuff versus bad leaders. Trump is maybe an example of someone who is taking advantage of the times. That's what he's really doing is he's taking advantage of the times and really doing a really good job at it and leading as a demagogue, demagogue who's being an opportunist. So yeah, I think there are some, I don't think the answer is those people are bad. I think the answer is we have all the tools we need right here to restore this immune system and get things back on track like we did in the 50s with McCarthyism. Like you said, it trailed away. We have the tools, you just have to start being more annoyed about being bullied and standing up for the things that we know are right. Because by the way, it doesn't always end like McCarthyism. There's a lot of great civilizations that have genuinely just crumbled over time.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  And we could be one of those too. You don't know, so we shouldn't get cocky. Look at some history and then you won't feel very cocky about the strength of a liberal democracy. You'll feel like so grateful that you're in one and you will want to work hard to keep it afloat because the alternative, the power games is not good for anyone.

• 1:27:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Well, Tim, this is just such a fun conversation. Funny little like inside factoid is our first conversation was actually the very first time on the podcast that we did cover art. Your Face was the very first cartoon that we ever made, which is kind of fun to think back on, like I said, six years ago, kind of hard to believe. I for one, I'm very thankful that I know it was a slog for you, but I'm thankful that you took a long time to write something that is incredibly dense and rich with ideas. I can't wait to see what you do next as well, but thank you for taking the time today with us to explain the work you've been doing all these years.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me on.

• 1:27:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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