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- [00:00]
Coleman Hughes
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Tim Urban. Tim Urban is an American author, illustrator and co founder of the long form blog Wait, but why? Which averages over a million unique visitors monthly. He has one of the most viewed TED talks of all time called Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator and his new book, what's Our Problem? A self help book for Societies, is the subject of our conversation today. We talk about how the flaws inherent in human nature interact with the two party system to create polarization, echo chambers and extremism. Tim focuses equally on the problem with Republicans and Democrats in his book, but in this conversation we focus more on what's gone wrong with Republicans for obvious reasons. We also talk about the right way to be a skeptic and the wrong ways to be a skeptic. We also talk about how to handle political differences with your family members and in the dating world. So without further ado, Tim Urban Hi.
- [01:07]
Tim Urban
This is Joe from Vanta.
- [01:09]
Coleman Hughes
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- [01:15]
Tim Urban
Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SoC2 or ISO 27001 or.
- [01:27]
Coleman Hughes
A growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta.
- [01:29]
Tim Urban
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- [02:06]
Coleman Hughes
Okay Tim Urban, thanks for doing my show. Before we get into your book, what's Our Problem? Which is really fantastic. Can't recommend it enough, I wanted to publicly thank you for something you did a few years ago related to my fiasco with ted. I had a whole controversy with them surrounding my TED Talk where employees didn't want to release the talk and deliberately under promoted the talk. And when I went public about this, I was at risk of seeming paranoid in what I was accusing TED of doing. Though I was I was right about what they did to my talk, I could easily see how it would have looked paranoid if you hadn't really said it first. As the person with the either most watched or second most watched TED Talk of all time, which you didn't have to do, but you did. And it was. I don't know if I ever thanked you privately for it, but I definitely want to thank you publicly because it was a very menchie thing of you to do.
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Tim Urban
I mean, yeah, I didn't, I didn't do it to be a mensch. I, I did it because it made me angry at the time. And I, and I, it felt. The fuller context is that.
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Coleman Hughes
I spoke.
- [03:23]
Tim Urban
With the TED people years ago and I know them well and they're great. I love them. You know, they're. I really like the TED crew, you know, for all my, you know, I would also have criticisms of how they've handled, you know, some of the stuff with the age of political tribalism. I don't think it's gone so well over there. But I really like them as people. And one, and they earnestly. I do feel like there's a bunch of people that earnestly just want TED to be great. And one of the questions that one of them asked me is, do you have any recommendations for how we can be more, less of an echo chamber? Because that's the things I would always harp on with them is if TED is to be ideas worth sharing, one of the biggest platforms, and it has to be a bridge in a time like this not, you know, not captured by one of the, one of the tribes. That's obviously. No, that's. Then it's not a. Then it goes the other way where it's. Instead of being a force for good, it's just part of the. Adding fuel to the fire. And so I recommended certain speakers and you were one of them. And I think that I don't know whether, I don't know whether that's why you ended up there next year or whether you were going to already end up there. But then you were at TED as an attendee. We hung out there a little bit, and then a couple years pass and I hear you're doing a talk. And I said, amazing. You know, I said, that's that. And again, I, it's crazy that this should be a sign that something's good since you're like a extremely moderate person. It's not like they had, you know, Douglas Murray or, you know, Chris Rufo speaking there. That would have been like, oh, wow, you really have overcome, like all, you know, you're, you're really going for the full spectrum, but just to have kind of centrist voices who can, who, who, who by definition conflict with kind of the tribal left voices. The fact that that's even, even if it's just 5% of the talks, it's a huge step forward. So I was so happy. And then I hear about the fiasco there and I think, of course. And again, this is why I was. This is why it was a big deal that they had, because I knew. No, they knew. And I knew that that's gonna happen. There's this huge force trying to prevent Head from, From being a. Had to have him having a diversity of viewpoint on the stage. And, and then, you know, it was a question. Oh, my God, is. You know, actually we went up to dinner around this time and you told me that, you know, maybe the talk's not even going to go up. And I was like, I will go. I will publicly just make a huge stink about this if they do this, because that, that is just so. They can't let. They can't. They can't. You know, they, they had you on the stage. It's insane. Anyway, they ended up putting the talk on and we thought, that's all done. That's great. And then I was watching and I just noticed that there's no way. It's not that, oh, all these talks are just really popular, except Coleman's has 1/10 the views. This just didn't come on. So I didn't know what it was. I didn't know exactly what happened, but it just. And I probably, honestly, I probably shouldn't have told you because I'm just going to make you more upset. And I think that's probably what I did at the time, but it was just. And then I tweeted about it and, you know, it ended up blowing up into a whole thing.
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Coleman Hughes
Yeah, right. But I think, you know, in the end, I think it was good. It was good for the world because. And good for Ted, actually, that it became public because I think it forced them to respond by recommitting to the value of viewpoint diversity. And you could see that in the guests that they brought the next year and bringing. I think it was Barry Weiss and Bill Ackman. Right. So in the end, I think, you know, I, I feel that I'm on good terms with Chris Anderson and I still broadly like Ted. I mean, I, I know people would assume that it's some kind of permanent feud between me and them. It's really not. I'm on good terms with them, so far as I know, and, and I hope, I hope for the best. And in the end, you know, it's not about these petty battles. It's about the fact that we want ideas worth sharing. We want a place like TED to be the best it can be. And that pretty much gets into your book. The name is what's our Problem? And it's really a 10,000 foot view of society. How our society seems to be coming apart at the seams from your perspective, related to this problem of echo chambers. And so I want to get into it. It's a really good book. And one of the basic, really the basic thread of the whole book is this idea of the ladder of the higher self versus the lower self. You carry this really compellingly through a whole variety of topics. So can you tell the audience what is the latter?
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Tim Urban
Yeah, it's this idea that I think there's two totally different modes of thinking going on in our heads at the same time. We're very strange species. We have one part of our brain is basically just kind of hardwired. Ancient software that is there that has been designed by tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years of evolution that has a very clear purpose, which is this software commands the organism to behave in a way that will maximize the chances of survival in a small tribe a long time ago, because that's what it was designed for. And that software, it changes very slowly. And civilization came around real quickly. So it's very outdated. It serves us in some ways and it, you know, just sends us in total wrong direction in many others. And so I call this like the primitive mind. But we're not like, you know, that all animals have software like that. And what's interesting about humans is we also have this kind of very big cortex that allows us to just actually see the world in real time and do things really rationally. And at times can actually override the. When they disagree, these two minds, what I call the higher mind, really can override the primitive mind. When I go to buy something at Walgreens, I see the Skittles there and sometimes my sweet tooth is active and I think I want to go buy that and eat that, but I don't. The primitive mind just wants me to eat the Skittles because it has no idea that we're in this civilization where food is plentiful. It thinks there's a chewy, sweet fruit right there, like eat it, because you never know when you're gonna get next, your next calorie because it's Completely outdated software. And the higher mind has, you know, I've learned in this particular case, my higher mind is good at saying that makes no sense to just put this chemical poison in our bodies right now. We're gonna feel like shit. And like, it's just, you know, you can't do that. So we all understand this concept, right? I mean, when I procrastinate, which I do all the time, this is what my TED talk is about. It is the same battle here. It's that they, you know, my primitive mind doesn't understand, you know, the. If the reward of work is not right there in front of it, like immediate, it's just not. I can't understand that. Oh, this book will be done in a year and a half, and then it'll be a great reward. And I have to just do 1% of the book this week so that I can get there. Your higher mind is going to have to do a lot of work to try to get you to do that, because the primitive mind is going to fight against that and you're going to run, procrastinate. Because in that moment. So anyway, coming back to this idea of the latter is I also kind of thought about what is the problem here. And I think both of these minds have an interest in how we form our beliefs about political things, moral things, religious things. These kind of core realms of thinking. They both have an opinion and they get to beliefs totally differently. The primitive mind identifies with these certain realms of beliefs that have to do with kind of. That maybe were important in the ancient tribe, like politics or religion or, you know, ethnicity or, you know, it tends to form beliefs based on what the tribe believes and it will kind of form kind of a super brain with the rest of the tribe that protects and supports and strengthens these group beliefs and it personally identifies with those beliefs. That's part of who we are. Is people who believe this, who I am part of this tribe. So I believe those things because we believe these things. And the people who don't believe these things, they're the bad people and they dehumanize the people who don't believe these things. Those are the bad guys and we're the good guys. Everything's very black and white. And obviously none of us here would disagree with these ideas because we're good people and this is what good people believe. We would never be one of them, of course. Right. It's just very. It's a very primitive tribal way of thinking that definitely served us back in the day. I mean, whether it's whether we admire it or not, it's those people who thought that way. They, they survived better than the people who didn't. Diversity of viewpoint wasn't an important survival mechanism back in 20,000 BC. It was group solidarity and cooperating because we all have these, shared these beliefs. So that's still in us and it's fighting to form a bunch of our beliefs about. Again, I focus in on politics. The higher mind, again, is just not like that. The higher mind is rational. The higher mind knows that. Wait, these, these, these, these issues are very complicated and truth is really hard to come by. You have to work really hard to just be a little less wrong and you have to learn a ton of stuff and listen to a bunch of viewpoints and you can start to maybe develop a framework in your head where you can now have an opinion of your own. But you should stay humble because that opinion might be challenged and you're always going to be learning new things. You should be able to update that opinion and often it's going to be nuanced. It won't be just one side or the other is right. Maybe, you know, you believe this and this and, and on different, different issues, the higher mind is going to have totally different nuanced views. But the primitive mind, every issue is, there's a checklist and you're always going to be on the, you're going to line up every single issue you're going to agree with your tribe on, which is, you know, when someone's primitive mind is really doing their thinking, you tell me one of their political beliefs and I'll tell you all of them very easily. There's no question, no question they're not going to deviate because they're totally beholden. They're stuck in this tribal thinking. So the latter is just emphasizing that this is not black and white. It's a spectrum. There are times when your higher mind is doing all the thinking and you're just in a totally rational zone where you're not identifying with anything. You're totally fine to be told you're wrong and change your mind. And then there's times when you're super crazy. You know, I call them like a zealot. The lowest rung of the ladder is when your full primitive mind is just taken over. You're just, you, you, you, you, you just find even the concept of a disagreement about this to be like, you know, appalling. And then more often we're probably somewhere in the middle where we're, we're Thinking with our higher mind. But we're, we're clearly biased towards one side confirmation bias. We have to keep fighting it because obviously we really like the people that believe these things. We really don't like the people that believe that. But we do take in new information and we will argue about it and we don't think it's. That anyone who disagrees with me is an awful person. So we're often somewhere in the middle, maybe on the second or third rung of what I think of as a four rung ladder. So that's kind of this core concept that I think it's just helpful to think because. And it's not that some people are low rung people and some people are high rung. I have caught myself on the low rungs many times. So we all go up and down the ladder depending on the issue, depending on our mood that day, depending on our history, our own past. And it's just helpful as a metric. It's kind of a vertical axis that can go alongside the horizontal axis of left, right, center, far right, far left, right. These are horizontal words and they're important, but they're what you think words. The latter is a how you think axis. And I think it's just helpful to be like, okay, instead of assessing someone, where are you on the left? You know, are you. Is this person center right? Is this person far left? Okay, let's ask that question. But we have to ask, ask it in context of. But where are they vertically? Also, if they're a low rung centrist, which exists even more common, you're going to find low rung, far left, far right. I don't care what they say because I know that their views were developed based on a tribal checklist and that they're not taking into information and that they're not. That their beliefs are not formed out of real information. And so it's just, I can just rule that out more versus if someone's on the high rungs, I don't care where they are horizontally, I'm going to listen to them because that's information. I'm curious how they got there and why they think that. And you know, especially if it's someone who I disagree with and I think they're a high rung thinker. I really want to hear what they have to say. And so I think this is useful. And then the second thing I would, then we go from here and we can apply this to groups. Groups where the primitive minds in certain group cultures, you know, we all have an every group, whether it's like a couple or a group, group of friends or a larger community, a school, there is an intellectual culture there. And it, it is, has a rung of the ladder. And so if you go to a really hardcore group of friends who are really, really sure that the, you know, that everything that the kind of the far left says is correct and that the worst people in the world are like centrists because they're, you know, the right is obviously so bad, but like the same, you know, and everyone in the group agrees. And every single person in the group has the same exact opinion about this. And they spend all their time not, you know, exploring, exploring alternative viewpoints. If you just look, all their time is spent talking about how right they are and how awful the people who disagree with them are. That's an intellectual culture that is on the bottom. It's called an echo chamber. Right. We already have a term for this. And what I see it is as, it's that the primitive minds in the heads of the group have formed a kind of coalition and they are policing the group, making sure the higher minds don't get involved here and mess everything up. And I think it's all subconscious, but the primitive in the group are working together and the pheromones are out. And that makes everyone, once, once that vibe is in place, everyone has a hard time disagreeing. Comes pretty scary to disagree and you just have this urge to please the group and to say the right things to be approved of by the group. We all have this, you know, none of us are above this. And then the, the opposite kind of group is the, is the idea lab where disagreement is the way of life. We disagree just for fun. That showing unearned conviction makes you sound like an idiot. Versus in the echo chamber. The only way to sound smart is conviction. If you act humble, you sound wishy washy, like you're not morally clear about this on the high rungs. If you say, I don't know, you sound smart, you sound trustworthy. And it's a culture of disagreement. It's a culture where people don't identify with their ideas. It's like a bunch of scientists messing around with experiments. So someone challenges an idea, no one gets offended, no one thinks it's a fight. You might get heated debates, but it's not. But we're arguing about the things and you trying to actually get to the core of where is the disagreement Here you're exploring like detectives, why do we disagree? Let's figure this out in the Low rungs, disagreement is you're an asshole if you disagree. You're actually not. I don't. We don't want to be friends with you anymore because we can't be friends with a terrible person. So. And again, it's a spectrum. So you see some that are somewhere in the middle. But this is useful framework just to evaluate yourself, your own thinking, thinking of people around you and the intellectual cultures that you're a part of.
- [19:18]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So there's a lot. There's a lot of things to say there. What came to mind when I read this in your book was that at some level, wisdom and maturity in life is just moving from the lower rung to the higher rung in your own habits and decisions. So, you know, the lower rung, primitive brain, it wants, you know, it wants sugar, it wants sex, it wants pleasure, it wants tribal warfare. It wants all of these things. And it drives you every day to seek out things that as soon as you get them, make you unhappy or dissatisfied or actually are just stupid to pursue and you regret. Whereas the higher mind, is that the prefrontal cortex, it's that part of you that says, actually, I'm not going to grab that extra donut because it's going to make me constipated and it's going to make me feel like shit and whatever it is. So at some level, wisdom in a person is just moving from the lower rungs to the higher rungs, which can even include feeding the lower rung in responsible ways. Right. So you talk about, you know, sports in the book Sports, like following a team is a great analogy because if you're a psychologically normal person that has a sports team, it's like, okay, you were upset that the New York Knicks lost the playoffs, but you know, in that the one play where Tyrese Halliburton, like, appear to double dribble. Right. And you can see that he was actually also fouled on that play by the Knicks. So if you put your scientist, your referee hat on and you're. You take your Knicks jersey off, you can say, well, actually, actually that play was called correctly because there was two canceling violations. Whereas if you're, if you're looking at that play as a Knicks fan, you should be screaming at the refs about how the guy on the other team double dribbled and was therefore able to get. Get the winning shot. Right. But most, most sports fans, at least most that I know, can sort of separate those two things. They can, they can see what's an objective call where Their team committed a foul while at the same time rooting for their team and not actually wanting to, say, commit violence against the fans of the other team. There are of course, some people in the world, many who actually aren't able to make that distinction, or at least the bar for them to do it is much higher. So I do think there are individual differences in the ability to move from the low rung to the high rung. But yeah, I mean, at some level what you're describing is just the wisdom arc that hopefully every individual is on with respect to themselves. But also you describe how our society itself, and in particular political parties can move from a higher rung version of themselves to a lower rung version of themselves. And you have a really interesting chapter on the Republican Party where you talk about how the party of Reagan was essentially high rung, or at least Reagan himself was in your view, a high rung, higher minded individual, whatever his politics were, and how the lower rung elements of the party captured and took over the party. And this, you know, what's interesting about this is as you say, instead of analyzing politics on a left to right spectrum, you're analyzing politics on an up to up and down spectrum. So can you give me a little of why you think how has the Republican Party changed in the past 50 years? I know that's a big question. Maybe you can give the simplified answer. How did we get from the party of, you know, Eisenhower and later Reagan to now the party of Donald Trump?
- [23:22]
Tim Urban
I think with something as big as a political party, you're going to have always a high rung and a low rung component, who both call themselves right wing, they agree on a handful of policies or maybe some underlying philosophies, and they agree that the left is a problem. But they're quite different and even opposite in other ways. And I think any political party has this. And it's almost like there's a tug of war going on at all times, a vertical tug of war between who really has the soul of the party. There's actually a quote from, I'm forgetting his name right now, but he was the head of kind of the moderate Republicans in the 60s and the 60s had a burst of low rung, right wing activity. Barry Goldwater was kind of the product, his nomination was the product of a, a campaign that was basically to make the right more tribal. And it was very tribal. And it was very, they would go to war not just against the left, but against anyone in their own party who disagreed. And it was less intellectually curious and much more sure of itself. And there was a big pushback within the right then amongst the. From the more moderate component. And the words they say are so it's amazing how similar it is to the kind of struggle going on today. They say stuff like, you know, they criticize what I'm calling the low rung right for being less concerned with accuracy, more concerned with conforming to a certain set of black and white views. They rejected gray area and nuance. And that.
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Coleman Hughes
To emphasize that point for a second, one thing people don't appreciate is they think of Republicans as having opposed the civil rights movement and civil rights legislation full stop. The truth is Barry Goldwater opposed the civil rights bill of 1964, but the Republican Party on the whole, definitely in the Senate at minimum, voted for it.
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Tim Urban
Actually at a higher rate than the Democrats voted for.
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Coleman Hughes
At a higher rate than the Democrats voted for it. That's right. So that highlights how Barry Goldwater was an extreme end of the party that the majority of the party really did not support.
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Tim Urban
Yeah, yeah, Goldwater. And this. Then, you know, then this triggered a bunch of other things where, you know, black voters actually voted for. They were black. Black voters were not, you know, were totally split between right and left up until that point. If anything, the Republicans were historically the party for black people because that's Lincoln's party. And it was more split by this point. But then Goldwater and the rejection of the Civil Rights act and Goldwater, he himself, Martin Luther King has some quote where he said that Goldwater himself is not a racist, but he rubs shoulders with racists and he condones other people who are genuine racists. And so there was an element of, you know, the KKK definitely supported Goldwater, for example, at that time to the extent that they were still active. And so this was a time when, if you notice, if you look back then, oh, a lot of the things that we think of as just night, you know, like the sky is blue today. Of course Republicans don't like this and of course Democrats like this and you know, abortion, guns, all these things seem so obvious. Religion very obviously coded one side and the other wasn't like that. Actually. These things were up in the air. It was a time when a lot of things were chang up in the air in little moments like Goldwater getting that nomination, which you can argue happened because they had these guerrilla tactics with their, you know, capturing California for governor first. So, you know, get into, get into the weeds too much there. But, but basically there was a lot that was up in the air and little things affected. It ended up changing things for decades to come. But there was some quote from this moderate in the article I'm talking about and I quoted it in my book. He said the words and it struck with me. There is a struggle for the soul of the party going on right now. You know, the tug of war kind of for the soul of the party. You know, who are we? And the moderate said that Republicans aren't anti intellectual, Republicans aren't, you know, aren't racist. Republicans aren't a lot of things right. You know, you know, we're nuanced, we're whatever, we're the party of Lincoln, we care about whatever. And then there's other people who totally disagree with us. And there's a struggle for this all going on. And what I see is that the struggle was. And there's a great book that really gets into this Rule and Ruin by Geoffrey Cobba service which is like the full story here. But to me it's like there was a struggle for the soul of the party. And it looks like that we see what happened which is I think over over 50 years that struggle ended up going to the lower rungs winning. Now it didn't happen all at once because I said Reagan. Twenty years later, I still think he was a high minded again. You got people, a lot of people hate Reagan or hate his policies or argue that his policies were really bad. Regardless if you listen to his rhetoric and he was so popular at the time, his rhetoric is very high minded. He was big, he was very non tribal, he was compassionate about immigrants, he was passionate even towards his political enemies. He had a humility about his words and that's. It was inspiring for the whole world in some ways some of Reagan's speeches. And so what I see is there's this tug of war and it goes back and forth. There's kind of pulses of low rung flare ups and then it's the high rung's job to the high rung components job to push that down and say no, you are not who we are. Because the second they start to say, well you know, I guess you're still on our side now. They've let the party, they've let the lowering faction define the party for, you know, for with all the consequences that will come with that. So I think that the low rungs, you know that the low rung conservatism made a big push in the 60s and I think it made another big push right after Reagan finished. So if you look at Reagan's rhetoric versus four years later in the 1992 Republican National Convention. You have Pat Buchanan on stage using the absolute epitome of low rung rhetoric. He's saying, we are, you know, this, they are that, you know, we believe this, you know, they believe. And there he's, he's totally, you know, caricaturizing the left as this. It's the exact opposite of how Reagan speak. It's low wrong. It's tribal talk. It's us and them. We are perfectly good and righteous. They are perfectly bad. And granted, conventions have, is going to have an aspect of this, but this was extreme. The things he was saying on stage were just, you know, people were appalled at the time, which tells you today, I don't think anyone would be surprised. Back then it was like, oh my God, that's not how Republicans talk. What is this? Then? This all gets so the tug of war is still going on. Now you've got a few things happened in the 90s, which is you've got the Gingrich revolution. Gingrich was, he started out as a moderate and then he basically openly says, oh, we're at war. If we can just treat this like a war. And just basically, he basically says we can use, in his own words, we can use low rung politics to win. And he was right. The Gingrich revolution was Gingrich going around and basically saying, we don't, we don't even, we don't consult with the enemy. We don't talk to the enemy. The enemy is, we want to frame them as just almost inhuman Satan. They are the worst ever. And if you can, you know, if you try to compromise with the enemy, you're out of our tribe and we're going to win. And they had a big revolution and they did well. Then you've got Fox News, the Drudge Report, you have the Internet, you know, and so you have these, you know, Fox News was one of the first to say, wait a second, cable is different than, you know, network television. We don't have to do what the news has always done, which is say, well, we can't be biased because then we'll lose half the country. We have to try to be neutral or at least somewhat neutral. And they said, what if we just say screw the, screw in half of the country and just go full in tribal with the, with the right, you know, right wing tribal. And of course it's did really well. And it, and it brought a bunch of primitive minds out. And it was the primitive mind kind of super spreader. And it brought the, you know, it brought the center of gravity of the right down, you know, the tug of war. It basically was the superpower Popeye Spinach for the low rung part of the tug of war. And so that's the trajectory, I think, you know, I think during the Obama, you know, administration, it gets even worse. And it's not that it's been pure low rung. There's a high rung aspect on the right, but you can see that the trend is that the low rungs have kind of taken over and the struggle for the soul of the party has, has been won by the lower rung aspect a while back.
- [32:38]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So to what extent is Donald Trump really, rather than a brand new break from Republican history, really just a product of 90s era low rung strategy? Because, you know, I was struck reading the book that, you know, the phrase take back our country is verbatim Pat Buchanan, which is one of Trump's favorite refrains. The idea of calling Democrats, quote, sick and pathetic, which is pretty much every third tweet from Trump was literally recommended. I found this out in your book, literally recommended on like a strategy memo to use those exact words by Newt Gingrich in the 90s. So to what extent is he, is he really just, did he really just absorb that playbook?
- [33:32]
Tim Urban
Yeah, I think he, Trump, you know, he has a knack for figuring out what will actually win voters over and having his finger kind of on the pulse of that moment. And I don't think any, he doesn't seem to have any, and he doesn't seem to have any qualms with or any, any kind of obligation to some, any form of kind of propriety or the way, you know, the way a presidential way, he just, I just think from the beginning rejects that. And I think what he has going for him, part of the reason it works is a yes, this has been now 30 years of kind of, whether it's Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Fox News, there's been like, you know, 30 straight years of kind of training a lot of right wing America to think this way and to not feel any kind of this is wrong. We shouldn't talk that way. I think that's just been so washed away. And of course, we're not talking about the left, but the left is a huge part of the culprit here that has made the right this way. But the fact that he won't get penalized for low rung rhetoric, which is otherwise very helpful and then now there's no penalty. But then separately he can take advantage of the fact that, that the right has grown resentful for a bunch of reasons, many of which are quite valid. A lot of his, you know, a lot of his voters used to be left wing kind of working class whites. And they've been, you know, betrayed in many ways by the left. And so they, and that their factories have left and they live in ghost towns and you know, there's opioid epidemics and they're suffering while meanwhile they're getting told by, you know, the media and others that they're, you know, these awful privileged people. That's just putty. I mean that's so easy to just, you know, especially so now you're not going to get penalized for low rung rhetoric. And you know, you can just see that there's this group that is willing to be, you know, that, that will come over and vote in great numbers for someone who can say fuck the whole establishment, fuck the left, fuck the media. These people are disgusting. They're awful. And it's just, it's too easy in a way. And, and I think, you know, it's more complicated. I mean these people, it's not just that, that it's low rung, right wing, it's. He also is really, really critical of the left. The, the, the Republican establishment that's been in power. And his thing was, you know, is much more populous. The whole, all the elites on all sides have been, you know, have been failing and treating you badly and like I, I'm your voice was his word. So yeah, I think you see he, yeah, he's the product of, of, of this long term shift in the Republican party. But he's also kind of taking advantage of a bunch of the real resentments.
- [36:12]
Coleman Hughes
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- [37:36]
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- [38:04]
Coleman Hughes
I think one barrier to someone buying your story of high rung versus low rung in politics is the intuition many people have that all of the seemingly high rung people are just low rung and good at acting. Hiram in other words, Donald Trump comes right out and says, yes, of course I try to pay as little tax as possible. Everyone does, he said. He comes right out and says, you know, yes, I love, I love beautiful women. I just can't, you know, like I just find myself touching them. Right. Whereas all of these other politicians in fact do all of those things, but then say all of the right things. Like, like, like a Sunday morning preacher that's behaving terribly the other six days of the week. And so if that's the case, then people feel there's something more transparent. Honest is the wrong word because Trump lies all the time. But there's something more transparent about someone who shows you who they are without shame rather than pretending to be this high minded person, when in reality we know what they're doing behind closed doors. So what about that criticism of this Hrung versus low rung schema?
- [39:25]
Tim Urban
Well, I think that the schema still works. In fact, I think it's useful to be able to say these people appear to be high rung, but they're not. Okay, it's not that you're not arguing that with the schema itself. You're using the schema to point out exactly what you don't like, which is that these people pretend to be high rung. And they're not, they're not really high rung. So the problem is it's not that high rung doesn't exist. It's that you're saying these people happen to not actually be hiring and that. Donald, this is, by the way, I know this argument well because I have one of my smartest friends is a very big Trump person and he says stuff exactly like this, that people who don't like Trump, oh, they don't like the way he talks, basically that they're all appalled by, you know, his, you know, he's not following the right, you know, the right manners, the right playbook. But meanwhile he's actually calling real out that all these other people who are all talking the right way and get praised on the Sunday shows, you know, they're all these awful people behind the scenes and that they've done these, you know, they've done so much, so much worse and that, and that, you know, you know, he does a lot of what about is, and if I, if I ever criticize Trump in any way, he'll be like, oh yeah, how about, you know, these people don't even, you know, so I get this all the time and I, and I, and there's plenty of, plenty of validity to that argument. But I think that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as high rungness in politics. I think it doesn't mean that every single politician is equally at the very bottom of the ladder. I think that it does range. I mean, I'm not an Abraham Lincoln expert, but Lincoln and his rhetoric and his style of governing just strikes me as not equal on the ladder to, you know, the last couple presidents and what we've seen from the White House. It just seems to, you know, there is, by the way, and by the way, there is something to rhetoric. Again, people can argue that Reagan was actually bad or that Lincoln was actually bad or that Obama was actually bad, but those three guys, they did speak in a way that, you know, Americans I think can be proud of. And I think that how you speak does set the tone. And even if he, you know, even if Obama was actually, you know, doing all these bad things, as a lot of people would argue, he, I think there's just, it's its own good to speak in a kind of a high minded way that can serve as a good example and help reduce tribalism. Now, again, people argue that Olamon did not help reduce tribalism, that he made it worse. And I think that we can get into that some other time. But yes, I don't think it's as simple as all these other politicians who speak in these more presidential ways are more high rung than Donald Trump. Who says, you know, who says these people are disgusting? I don't think that's necessarily the argument. It's just that I think that most of these people are fairly low rung at this point and we have a political culture issue.
- [42:23]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So you describe this as actually a prisoner's dilemma scenario where basically the first side to go, like, let's say we're at a stable equilibrium where you've got a Reagan type on the right and an Obama type on the left, both of whom speak very respectfully about their fellow Americans. They try to court the other side rather than calling the other side terrible people. The problem with this is, as you describe, a prisoner's dilemma scenario where each side can be outflanked on their own, in their own party by someone who goes low. Someone who goes low and appeals to the tribal low rung elements of the Democratic Party is going to cause an Obama problems from the left. Well, I guess you could say from below in your scheme. Right. If we're thinking about politics on a, on a, on a Y axis instead of on an X axis and someone like Trump is going to cause, you know, someone like McCain or someone like Romney problems from below because you're activating the, the tribal energy that basically the high rung people don't tap into, not because it doesn't benefit them, but because they actually observe a norm against it. And so when one side goes low, the other side now feels kind of an incentive to go low and then all of society is brought down to a lower level. This is a very depressing picture because if, if true, it says to me that there's like we, there's no clear way out of our societies, our political culture's decline. So is this, is your assessment really that pessimistic or is there a way to climb out of this?
- [44:19]
Tim Urban
I think it's a tug of war and I think when the, in moments in history when the low rungs had an unusual amount of power, which sometimes happened because we're inflamed by wartime. Like McCarthyism came right after World War II and there was a lot of fear of the Soviet Union and nukes were freaking everyone out and the Red Scare was kind of a low rung flare up. And in that moment, once, suddenly you can see where the winds are blowing. Oh, anyone who tries to fight against that now is going to be out of a, out of their, you know, they're going to lose the election. And there's all of this pressure, if you want to succeed, to jump on the low rung bandwagon, or at least not to fight against it. But then, you know, why did the Red Scare not just go on forever? Because people get sick of tribalism and low wrongness. And there's still a high rung. There's still a kind of higher mind in everyone's head, and that is getting really tired of tribalism. And when that moment happens, the tug of war culturally has kind of quietly shifted back. And there's all of this opportunity now for someone to kind of do the opposite for, for a high rung politician to say, oh, my God, this is such a breath of fresh air and do great and start a movement the other direction. So I don't think it's inherently that, that, you know, the higher rung politicians are always going to get brought down by the lowering. I think that depends on the status of the kind of national tug of war, psychological tug of war, and at that moment, how it's going to. I see a struggle for it right now going on.
- [46:01]
Coleman Hughes
So, yeah, yeah, let's talk about the soul of the Democratic Party now.
- [46:05]
Tim Urban
Yeah.
- [46:06]
Coleman Hughes
Lest the left half of my audience feel too good about themselves. So what's going on with the Democratic Party right now, in your view? Is it embracing its lower rung elements or is it pivoting towards a higher rung mindset?
- [46:27]
Tim Urban
Yeah, well, the same exact story, I mean, has really, you can look at the right and I talked about Fox News and, you know, Rush Limbaugh or whatever, who were kind of inflaming the lower right. I mean, you've had very similar things going on on the lower left. I don't know if it's exactly this, exactly parallel. Maybe it's, you know, MSNBC is quite parallel to Fox and things like that. But I would say it's more that most of the media has not gone like crazy left like msnbc, but they've all kind of increasingly swayed to the left. Media has always been a little bit maybe left biased, but it's just become worse and worse and worse. And I mean, it's kind of a separate thing. But you can just. The struggle for the soul of the entity. You can see it everywhere you see it. I just look at, like the New York Times. You can see such a struggle for the soul of the New York Times going on. You can see, you know, this, this Totally biased reporting or whatever, or just this. And then you can see this effort to put in, you know, an op ed that conflicts with that, that actually is, you know, okay, you know, maybe, you know, New York Times still has a diversity of viewpoint and you can see there's a huge backlash against that. You know, I think we talked earlier is there was a struggle for the soul of Ted going on. And I think that what you see is that a lot of entities way more than you see on the right side, a lot of institutions, you know, big media brands, but also just, you know, universities. And there's been a struggle for the soul there. And it's been not between, you know, anything with the right. It's really been between being kind of moderately left, you know, high rung mostly, but a little bit left to like kind of on the other side of the tug of war, like a hardcore lower left full kind of tribe. And I think that the epicenter there, I mean, has been, you know, at universities where if you look at universities in the 70s, 80s, even 90s, you see a, even the 2000s, you see kind of like a 4 to 1 or between 2 to 1 and 4 to 1 ratio of left leading faculty and admin to right leaning right. So it's, it's definitely left weighted, but it's that 4 to 1, 2 to 1, you know, that's a, the, the right wing size of the pie is substantial enough that there is a loud right wing voice which is of course important for a bunch of things. It, it's a filter for left wing ideas. It's like, oh, the pesky right is going to, you know, if we are pushing our ideas but we're too biased or that we're, they're not, you know, or we're not, you know, accurate for some reason that we're going to get destroyed by the people on campus who kind of provide the first filter against this. And more diverse places tend to be, there's a lot of research on this, tend to be more tolerant of diversity. So when you have a 4 to 1 or 2 to 1 ratio, someone comes out and the right wingers on campus are tolerated because we're a diverse place. And what happens is as the ratio goes down, it goes up. So you go from 4 to 1 to 8 to 1 to 12 to 1 to 16 to 1, you start to see the opposite, that there's increasing hostility towards the increasingly small minority. That's different because within, when 95% of people are on one side, there's going to develop A very hardcore tribalism against a very small kind of helpless little group at that point. And that group is going to get quiet out of fear. And most of them are. So it's going to, you know, the ones, the people that do disagree are going to be very reluctant to speak up. And the ones who do speak up usually are now are so isolated that they just get run out of campus. The mob basically lynches them, metaphorically. And that's awful for the university's core purpose, which is to both discover truth and educate on truth. Because now you're going to have the tug of war is going to, you're going to have no ability that, you know, the high rung campus, the high rung sensibility on campus wants diversity of viewpoint point. Because for all the reasons I said, it's just the mech, it is the proper mechanism to discover truth. And the lo rung component, again, there's not principles there. It's just use the university as a tool to further our activism, to push our viewpoint onto society. So it's the opposite of trying to find truth. It's trying to confirm our existing beliefs, strengthen them, put out papers that confirm them. Doesn't matter if the papers are accurate, as long as they had the right viewpoint, as long as they're on the right part of the horizontal axis. We don't care about the vertical axis, right. So it's kind of a zero something. If you care about that, if you're insistent on where things must be on the horizontal axis, then you're going to just totally sacrifice the vertical axis. So this has been this story that's been building up for a while and you can just look at it in detail and watch the struggle for the soul of universities be torn between truth and tribal victory. And you've watched it just get totally sucked into. The tug of war has gone full low rung on campuses and from there it has spread out. And you've seen the same story now play out in institution after institution, whether it's, you know, Hollywood media, you know, the corporate world, nonprofits, arts. Most of these institutions were, you know, because over the last few decades, elite has started to be more and more left. You know, the elites across the country have kind of coalesced on the left and most of the institutions are run by elites. And so you start to just see all these institutions that are a little bit left leaning, all kind of, just kind of. It's like the hill and they start to just as they go, the hill gets steeper and the ball just Starts rolling down faster. And this, of course, is the story behind why. What I see as a classic, just very low rung tribe that happens to be left coded. But, you know, in the end, all the long roaring tribes are really the same, which is, you know, wokeness, this woke movement. I think that it has risen out, risen because of this tug of war, has gone in the wrong direction. And it's a natural thing. Now you're going to have this opening, right.
- [53:56]
Coleman Hughes
You say some things in the book about skepticism that I found interesting, which is, you know, obviously when you're thinking in a high rung manner, you're thinking like a scientist, which means you have the right balance of skepticism. Right. The word skeptic often is used as a positive, a kind of positive noun to describe someone who thinks like a scientist. But really, it's not that you want to be skeptical of everything. It's that you want to have the exact right balance of skepticism. So like when, when I see a post on X that says that Meghan Markle, you know, has staged a fake pregnancy and that's why she's able to, you know, dance around hours before delivery and that, you know, that that's, that's the most rational explanation of what's going on here. Total conspiracy theory. You want to have the instinct to be skeptical of that. Right. But when, you know, in the early days of COVID when you learn that there's a coronavirus lab in Wuhan that makes novel coronaviruses and was in fact doing gain of function research, you do want to be skeptical of the narrative which says it couldn't have possibly come from there. Right? So there's. There is a balance of skepticism that conspiracy theorists fall on one end of in a very dangerous way and sort of mindless sheep that believe everything they read in the New York Times fall on, on the wrong, wrong side of as well. So, yeah, I mean, how do you know when you have the right balance of skepticism?
- [55:47]
Tim Urban
I think of skepticism as like a filter in your head. And when this filter is really tight and closed, you're kind of like cynical. You're like, everyone's lying to me. You can't trust anyone, so no new information can come in. That's not good. Right. It's not a good way to learn. When the filter's too open, you're gullible. You believe whoever. The last person you talk to you. That's what you believe. You just believe everything you hear that you don't have any faith in your own reasoning abilities. That's not good either. Those are both bad ways to learn. So what you want is the skepticism filter that is, like you said, balanced and also has the capacity to open and close strategically based on a certain criteria. So when your mind is on the high rung with a certain topic and you're just in scientist mode, you're just trying to get to the truth. Deep down, deep down your deepest place, your motive is really justifying the truth. Your skepticism filter is going to serve that purpose. So its settings are going to be tuned to if some, if there's a new source you don't know any, anything about, your skepticism filter is going to be a little bit tighter until you learn more. Because who is this person? How do I know? And you're going to be assessing people while you know, this podcaster has shown me that they will disagree with both sides. They don't seem to be tribally bound. They seem to. I've seen them apologize for or correct their errors. They seem to be actually concerned with truth. They speak in a way that strikes me as their conviction, and their voice only comes out when they really know what they're talking about. Okay, I'm going to label, in my head, I'm going to label this person a pretty high rung thinker. My skepticism filter now will open a little bit wider when they talk. I don't have to. I put you in this camp, Coleman. I trust you as a high rung thinker. When I hear you say something until you burn me and until you show me otherwise and I have to reconsider, I'm going to have a pretty. It's an efficiency thing where my filter is going to be open with you because when you say something, I'm just going to assume it's been vetted, it's been researched. You know, he's saying this because he knows what he's talking about. And I'm going to just be able to. It's a shortcut. I can now just assume that's correct without much of my own work. That's great. Meanwhile, when someone on X who I've seen many times lie or exaggerate, they get community noted all the time. They clearly are biased with one tribe or the other politically, that my filter's just very tight and I'm not going to get much from them because when they say something, you know, I'll put it in the okay, this is information I heard, but it has. But I need to verify it somewhere else before I believe it because I don't believe this person. So when you're filter when you care about truth, this is just what you're going to do. Your filters, you're going to start, you know, opening and closing for people and for sources based on, you know, how they've proven to be with truth. And you're going to have a balance where you're going to be skeptical enough to try to weed out bullshit, but you're going to open enough to change and update your ideas and to be able to learn new things and to, and to be challenged. Now that's great, right? It's, it's an amazing human tool, the skepticism filter. In our heads, if the settings are being driven by a motive for truth when we drift down on the lower rung. So there's a certain political topic that, you know, gets you, you know, your abortion. You really, really get worked up about abortion and you are just super tribal with this particular issue because maybe you personal to you or you just really, you know, it riles up your primitive mind. What's going to happen is your skepticism filter, this valuable tool of yours is going to be, the settings are going to be hijacked to direct that filter towards serving not truth, but serving confirmation. So what you'll have, what you'll do, and you'll see this very all the time, is that the person whose primitive mind is controlling the skepticism filter will, when information is presented that confirms the sacred belief, doesn't matter whose voice it's from, doesn't matter how trustworthy that person is, doesn't matter what this random news site I've never heard of, what their deal is. If it confirms it, yes, see, that's it. You'll bring it up in arguments and you'll send it to your friends. Look at this article, see, and you'll read it and you'll say, yes, 100%. There's no skepticism at all. This is exactly. And that strengthens your conviction because you're, you're without any filtering, just accepting the information as true. And then you just jump to the other side of the, you know, your filter just goes into the entire opposite direction and just shuts tight when information contradicts your viewpoints. And again, that can come from a very reputable source or from really hard data. It doesn't matter. You will, you might, you, you might go so far as to block that account. So you don't even want to see it. Don't even, I even want to see that in front of me. But if I do see it in front of me, I immediately I'll say, well, of course it's from that trash publication. Of course it's from. Yeah, I'm sure. Oh, that person. I'm sure they're not biased at all. You know, you can just. And you know this, if you tried to, if you tried to argue with a. Someone who's really mired in the low rungs, a friend or relative, and you try to send them an article or a data point or a tweet that you think will show your side of the argument, they will immediately just reject it out of hand. They will not say, let me consider, maybe I'm wrong about this. Because when you're in the low rungs, you don't ever say that, you know, and so the filter now is working overtime to protect and strengthen your sacred beliefs and make sure it protects your beliefs against anything that might challenge them by immediately, you know, ruling it out with pure cynicism. And so we all have a skepticism filter. It opens and closes for all of us. And the question is what, what is the core motivation driving the settings of the filter? And that's what you have to look at. Is it opening and closing based on a motive for truth? And then you don't have to think about, then everything else falls into place. It just obviously opens and closes here or opens there, closes here. Because if you're looking for truth, that's what you would do. Or is it opening and closing in order to confirm and strengthen your sacred ground beliefs?
- [61:52]
Coleman Hughes
Right. So speaking of family members, one of the most common questions I get from listeners is how, how can you help? Help me? Can you give me advice with talking about political subjects with family members? And then the second related question is, can you give me advice on bridging a political divide in.
- [62:19]
Tim Urban
So, okay, I think I'd give two different answers for that. I think if your family member is not just disagree, you know, if a family member is, is kind of thinking from the high rungs and so are you, this is not even a problem. You just will argue with them. It's just fun to argue. You'll just. And if you disagree, you'll laugh at each other about the disagreement or you'll just say, yeah, of course we disagree on a lot of things. Like, and it's just not a problem. It's not a problem. It's interesting, right? If their disagreements are probably you like that because it's going to help, you know, it makes conversation fun. So when I hear that question, how do I cope with this family member disagreeing? I see that as one of three things. Are Happening either the person asking that is mired in the low rungs themselves, in which case they see it as any good person would of course agree with me. How is my family so awful that they, that they seem to not fully get it? Why do they not get that this is so important? Right? That's what a low rung person thinks about anyone who disagrees with them or the family. The family member is the one in the low rungs. And this person is just like, I just want to get through to them because they're so wrong. And it's like, you know, and it's like they, it's just like bothers me that this family member is, you know, there's so much better than this, whatever, or you're both in the low rungs, which is often common. Both people. So it's either one or both is what's going on. Now. I would say first is just evaluate if you are the low rung person. If, if you think like you're 100% right about this issue and they're 100% wrong and how could they be such one of these awful people who disagrees? You know, I don't even want to be, I don't even want. It's going to hurt my relationship. I don't even want to be in the same room as, okay, you have a low rung problem and you need to address your low rung problem. That's the first thing. Then you can worry about your family because you're not acting like a sane person. You're acting as someone who you cannot handle when someone else disagrees with you and that you're, you're judging them for it and it's hurting you're. You're letting political beliefs hurt your relationship with them. And you're sure that you're right, which is a huge sign that you're not thinking straight. You know, you're sure that you're 100% right. And that's a clear black and white issue. So, right. You know, you're kind of in, you have your own problem. And that's fine. We've all been there. But like, understand what's going on here, which is that it's your, it's a you thing right now. Now the other kind of person, another kind of situation when it's when your family member is solo wrong, where you disagree with your friends all the time and you can have all kinds of. But you bring it up in front of that family member or your whole family in general, and you're going to get like either icy silence or like a explosion of like mean disagreement because you violated a sacred tenant in the family or with that person. I personally, my advice there is, you know, some people are, you can tell that they have a, there's a little humility in there and they, they, they, they don't agree with you. And maybe they're only reading sources from one side. So they've got, but you can tell that they have an earnestness that they would, you can work on them. You know, you can send them in different things. You can just talk to them, you know, and not in a judgy way. You can, you can actually kind of, you can be the someone was probably helped you learn to think this way. You can try to help them to be, bring themselves up to the high rungs and remind them how much nuance and how complicated these issues are. But if you're talking about a really low rung family member who is just, just in this issue, if you bring it up, it's going to be a bad for your relationship. I'd say don't bring it up like it's, it's a shame for them. They're the ones suffering. They're, they're losing like, you know, interesting high rung conversation as a part of their life because they're, they're, they're, they're frightening everyone else from doing that. They're forcing every environment they're in to be an echo chamber of their choosing. I would say your family is more important than these issues, like in terms of what, who believes what. Let them be a zealot. Love them anyway. Hopefully they start to change and if they do, then you can start to work on it. I would say just like don't let it get in the way of your relationships. You know, in the end, like they're not perfect. They're a zealot on this issue, you know, like let it be. That's what I would say. Now for the partner question, I have a pretty different answer, which is I think a. I think if you're a high rung thinker, you really want to marry another high rung thinker or date. I don't think you have to. I don't think it's inherently a bad relationship, but man, that's the person you're going to be spending most of the rest of your life with. And it's such a sad thing for a high rung mind to have no one to play with and to basically either have to be in a fight all the time. Or to just hide your real self and pretend you agree, or just, let's not bring up these topics. That's just not a good place to spend your life. Like, come on, you know, like, I think, I think you should. If you're in the process of dating and you consider yourself a high rank thinker who likes disagreement, you've got to find someone else like that. I think if you are a low rung thinker, if you're, if you think that anyone who disagrees with me on, again, we can use abortion or religion or on racism. Anyone who disagrees with me on this topic is unacceptable because they're a terrible person. Okay, well, first I would say again, you probably want to work on this quality in yourself that you are clearly, you know, your primitive mind is too involved in your thinking. But if that's how you are and you've been like that for a long time and it's a sacred thing for you, then I just say, yeah, marry another low rung person who agrees with you on that because that's clearly a sacred thing. It's, you know, and it's okay. You're allowed to be low rung in certain areas against someone who's a hardcore evangelical Christian. I would argue that probably it's a lot of the primitive mind is the one who has, has that conviction, but that's okay. Maybe you get a lot of joy from that. Maybe it's very important to you. I would say marry another evangelical Christian. Almost certainly that's the right decision. So I think if you find, you know, if you're sacred, if you have like a, if you're a zealot about an issue, I would try to marry another zealot. If you're not, I really would try to not marry a zealot and marry someone who's open minded and who's open to disagreement because you're gonna have a lot more fun, you're gonna learn a lot more, you're gonna be able to be yourself. You want to be able to be yourself with your partner, of all people again, with your sister, with your aunt, with your dad. I think it's okay to just be like, I'm just not bringing this up in front of them because that's. But with your partner, it's really sad.
- [68:37]
Coleman Hughes
All right, great advice. Thank you. Tim Urban. Thanks so much for coming on my show. The book again, it's called what's Our Problem? I highly recommend it. Even if you feel you're familiar with these subjects, the way, Tim, that you write about this, and this is also why you're such a successful blogger, is extremely accessible without dumbing anything down, which is really my favorite kind of writing. So well done.
- [69:02]
Tim Urban
Thank you for having me on. And I do commend you as, I think, a very, very good example of a high rung thinker and a high rung someone who. Yes, I mean, you are. I never know what you're going to think about a certain issue because you're going to come up with some nuanced point of view. And it sometimes surprises me, and sometimes doesn't mean that's low rung thinkers, you know exactly what they're going to think about everything and you. So I think you're a very good example for a lot of people. And I think more people should think like Coltman. That would be good.
- [69:33]
Coleman Hughes
Thanks, Tim.