YouSaid · the spoken record

Tim Urban

lines on the record: 230
first: 2023-02-20
most recent: 2023-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Because if you don't have awareness without courage does very little. So courage is when you take that awareness and you actually export it out into the world and it starts affecting other people. And so courage can happen on multiple levels. It can happen by, first of all, just stop saying stuff you don't believe. If you're being pressured by kind of a ideology or a movement to say stuff that you don't actually believe, just stop just staying your ground and don't say anything. That's courage. That's one first step. Start speaking out in small groups. Start actually speaking your mind. See what happens. The sky doesn't usually fall. Actually, people usually respect you for it. Not every group, but like you'd be surprised. And then eventually, you know, maybe start speaking out in bigger groups, start going public. You know, go public with it. But you don't need everyone doing this. Look, some people will lose their jobs for it. I'm not talking to those people. Most people won't lose their jobs, but they have the same fear.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How about my values? I used to identify with the blue party or the red party, but now they've changed. And I suddenly am okay with that. Is that because my values changed with it or am I actually anchored to the party, not to any principle? Asking yourself these questions, asking your, you know, looking for where do I feel disgusted by fellow human beings, you know, that maybe I'm being a crazy tribal person without realizing it. How about the people around me? Am I being bullied by some echo chamber without realizing it? Am I the bully somewhere, right? So that's the first, just I think just to kind of do a self-audit. And I think that just some awareness like that, just so just self-audit about these things can go a long way. But if you don't, if you keep it to yourself, it's almost useless.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The awareness piece is First, just no understanding the stakes. Like, getting your heads out of the sand and being like, technology is blowing up exponentially, where our society's trust is devolving. Like we're kind of falling apart in some important ways. We're losing our grip on some stability at the worst time. That's the first point, just the big picture. And then also awareness of, I think this vertical axis or whatever your version of it is, this concept of How do I really form my beliefs? Where do they actually come from? Are they someone else's beliefs? Am I following a checklist?”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's one of the smartest and kindest dudes, but he's also, he has courage at a time when it's hard. But here's the thing is that it's different than that you need so much less courage against a soft cudgel than you do. The Iranians throwing their hijabs into the fire, those people's courage just Just blows away any courage we have here because they might get executed. That's the thing that you can actually have courage right now. Don't worry about it.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can conquer a country with a hard cudgel, but you can't use that in the US. So what they have is a soft cudgel, which can have the same effect. Initially, you can scare people into shutting up. You can't maybe imprison them and murder them, but if you can socially ostracize them and get them fired, that basically is going to have the same effect. So the soft cudgel can have the same effect for a while, but the thing is it's a little bit of a house of cards because it relies on fear. And as soon as that fear goes away, the whole thing falls apart, right? The soft cudgel requires people to be so scared of getting canceled or getting whatever. And as soon as some people start, you know, Toby Lutka of Shopify, I always think about, you know, he just said, you know what, I'm not scared of this soft cudgel and spoke up and said, we're not political at this company and we're not a family. We're a team and we're going to do this. And you know what? Like they're thriving.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's the thing. So, a liberal democracy is always going to be vulnerable to a movement like this, right? And there will be more because it's not a totalitarian dictatorship. Because if you can socially pressure people to not say what they're thinking, you can suddenly start to just take over, right? You can break the liberalism of the liberal democracy quite easily. And suddenly a lot of things are illiberal. On the other hand, The same vulnerability, the same system that's vulnerable to that also is hard to truly conquer. Because now the Maoists. Similar kind of vibe. They were saying that science is evil and that the intellectuals are, you know, it's all this big conspiracy They could murder you And they had the hard cudgel in their hand, right? And the hard cudgel.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree. So to me, it is like a virus and an immune system. And I totally agree. I see the same story happening. And I'm sitting here rooting for the immune system.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me is because I realized that all of those things, if we were going to have a good future with those things and they're actually threats, like I said, we need to have our wits about us and we need the liberal gears and levers working. We need the liberal machine working. And so if something's threatening to undermine that, it affects everything else.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Destroy the workings in the liberal gears and tear them apart. And so here's the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years. And they all rely on trust, public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning. And I see this thing is, is as a parasite on that, that whose goal is and I'm not saying each individual by the way, each individual in this is, I don't think they're bad people. I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust. And so you talk about AI and you talk about all these other big problems, nuclear, right? The reason I stop, I like writing about that stuff a lot more than I like writing about politics. This wasn't a fun topic.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“NGO. Yeah, and many tech companies. And so it's not that I think this thing is so bad. It's a little like we said with Trump. It's that the reason Trump scares me is not because Trump's so bad. It's that because it shows it reveals that we were vulnerable to a demagogue. Candidate. And what wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently, and until something changes, we'll continue to be, vulnerable to a... A bully movement and a forcefully expansionist movement that wants to actually.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the US, which is they've managed to Hijack institutions all across the country and hijack. Medical journals and universities and the ACLU activist organizations and nonprofits and”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've gotten probably a thousand arguments about this. That's one nice thing about spending six years procrastinating on getting a book done is you end up test battle testing your ideas a million times. So I've heard this one a lot, right? Which is There's kind of three groups of former Obama voters. One is super woke now. Another one is super anti-woke now. And the third is what you just said, which is sure, wokeness is over the top, right? You're not woke, but I think that the anti-woke people are totally lost their mind. And it's just not that big a deal, right? Now here's why I disagree with that because it's not wokeness itself. It's that a radical political movement of which there will always be a lot in the country.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would never say it's the biggest problem. It might be. If someone, if it turns out in 50 years, someone says actually it was, I wouldn't be shocked. But I also wouldn't bet on that because there's a lot of problems.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what every liberal, regardless of what you think of the actual horizontal beliefs, doesn't matter what they believe when they start violating live and let live and shutting down other segments of society. And kind of, it's almost like it's not the best analogy, but like an echo chamber is like a benign tumor. And what you have to watch out for is a tumor that starts to metastasize, starts to forcefully spread and damage the tissue around it. And that's what this particular ideology has been doing.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason that it must be written about right now, this particular ideology, is because it's not playing nicely with others. If you want to be a hardcore, you know, evangelical Christian, the US says live and let live. Not only are you allowed to have an echo chamber of some kind, it's actively protected here. Live and let live. They can do what they want. You do what you want. Now, if the evangelical Christians started saying, by the way, anyone who says anything that conflicts with evangelical Christianity is going to be severely socially punished and they have the cultural power to do so, which they don't in this case. They might like to, but they don't have the power. But they're able to get anyone fired who they want. And they're able to actually change the curriculum in all these schools to suddenly not conflict with no more evolution in the textbooks because they don't want it. Now I would write a book about why about evangelical Christianity.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be clear, I don't like the ideology. I think it's a low-rung ideology. I think it's morally inconsistent based on, you know, it flip-flops on its morals depending on the group. I think it's echo chambery. I think it's full of inaccuracies and kind of can't stand up to debate. So I think it's a low, but there's a ton of low-rung ideologies I don't like. I don't like a lot of religious doctrines. I don't like a lot of political doctrines, right? The US is a place inherently that is a mishmash of a ton of ideologies. And I'm not going to like two-thirds of them at any given time. So my problem, the reason I'm writing about this is not because I'm like, by the way, this ideology is not something I like. That's not interesting.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stitch together Frankenstein. And if you notice, and which is not necessarily bad, but in this case, I think it's actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti-science. And it's violating the postmodernism because what postmodernists were, they were radical skeptics, not just of they were radical skeptics, not just of the way things were, but of their own beliefs. And social justice fundamentalism is not at all self-criticical. It says that we have the answers, which is the opposite of what postmodernists would ever say. They said, no, you just have another meta-narrative. And it's also violating, of course, the tradition of liberal social justice in a million ways because it's anti-liberal. And so this Frankenstein comes together. Meanwhile, liberal social justice doesn't have a Frankenstein. It's very clear. It's very, it's a crisp ideology that says we need, they're trying to make, we're trying to get to a more perfect union. They're trying to keep the promises made in the Constitution.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marx, you know, this Marxist framework, kind of with a new skin on it, which is American social justice. And then made even more radical with the infusion of postmodernism, where not just as liberalism bad, but actually the, like you said, math can be racist. So it's this kind of like philosophical Frankenstein, this like stitch together of these. And so again, it's called they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice. They say social justice, right? You know, racial equality, but it has nothing to do with liberal social justice. It is directly opposed to liberal social justice.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mathematics notion in math that there's a right answer and a wrong answer that they believe is a meta-narrative that serves white supremacy or in the postmodernists might have said it serves just the powerful or the wealthy. But so what social justice fundamentalism is, is you take the Marxist thread that has been going on in lots of countries and whoever the upper and lower is. That's what they all have in common. But the upper and lower, you know, for Marx was the ruling class and the oppressed class. It was economic. And then, but you come here and the economic class doesn't resonate as much here as it did maybe in some of those other places. But what does resonate here in the 60s and 70s is race and gender and these kind of social justice disagreements. And so what social justice fundamentalism is, is basically this tried and true framework of”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foundation. Now, what's below liberalism is kind of the core tenets of modernity, this idea of reason and the notion that there is an objective truth and science as the scientific method, right? These things are actually beneath and even the Marxist. If you look at the Frankfurt School, you know, these post-Marxist thinkers and Marx himself, they were not anti-science. They believed in that bottom bottom foundation. They were actually wanted to preserve modernity, but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on top of it. The postmodernists is even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom level and overthrow it. They think science itself is a tool of oppression. They think it's a tool where oppression kind of flows through they think that the white Western world has invented these concepts like they claim that there's an objective truth and that there's reason in science and they think all of that is”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More extreme, right? It's this no, no, it's the polar opposite, polar opposite. And so now that's the Marxist thread. Now, postmodernism is kind of this term that is super controversial and I don't think anyone calls themselves a postmodernist or take all of this with a grain of salt in terms of the term, but what's the definition of radical? The definition of radical to me is how deep you want change to happen at. So a liberal progressive and a conservative progressive will disagree about policies, the liberal progressive wants to change a lot of policies. Change, change, change, right? And the conservative wants to keep things the way they are. But they're both conservative when it comes to liberalism beneath it, the liberal kind of foundation of the country. They both become conservatives about that. The Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper and actually overthrow that.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people in the civil rights and other movements, they think the opposite. They think he thinks liberalism is good, we need to preserve it. They said liberalism is the problem. These other problems with racism and inequality that we're seeing, those are inevitable results of liberalism. Liberalism is a rigged game and it's just the power games in disguise. There is no liberal games. It's just the power games in disguise and there's the upper people that oppress the lower people and they convince the lower people. There's all about false consciousness. They convince the lower people that everything is fair. And now the lower people vote against their own interests and they work to preserve the system that's suppressing them. And what do we need to do? We need to actually, there's much more revolutionary. We need to overthrow liberalism, right? So people think is, oh, you know, like what we call wokeness is just a normal social justice activist activism, but it's like.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting because Marxism is in all of its various descendants. Obviously, there's a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren't the same thing as what Carl But what do they all have in common? They think liberalism is bad, right? They actually think that”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it had to get out of, but it got out of them one by one, and it's still getting out of them. That's what's cool about America. And liberal social justice basically is the practice of saying, where are we not being perfect liberals? And now let's fix that.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The laws that were a violation of liberalism to expose that this is illiberal, that the Constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the bus. And so it was kind of really patriotic, the civil rights movement. It was saying, this is a beautiful, we have a liberalism as this beautiful thing, and we need to do better at it. So I call it liberal social justice, and it used the tools of liberalism to try to improve the flaws that were going on. So free speech, you know, Mario Savio in the 60s was the, you know, he's a leftist. And what would the leftist doing in the 60s on Berkeley campus? They were saying we need more free speech because that's what liberal social justice was fighting for. But you can also go back to the 20s. Women's suffrage. I mean, the emancipation, the thing that America obviously has all of its are all ugly things.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me also, when people say wokeness is bad, social justice is bad, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the proudest tradition in the US is liberal social justice. And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning with lowercase L, it is intertwined with liberalism. So Martin Luther King classic example, I have a dream speech. He says stuff like this country, you know, has made a promise to all of its citizens and it has broken that promise to its black citizens, right? In other words, liberalism, the Constitution, the core ideals, those are great. We're not living up to them. We're failing on some of them. So civil disobedience, the goal of it wasn't to hurt liberalism. It was to specifically break the laws that were already violating liberal.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so like the term wokeness is so loaded with baggage, it's kind of like mocking and derogatory. And that's, I was trying not to do that in this book. If it's the terms loaded with baggage, you're already kind of from the first minute, you're already behind.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you can see it going both ways. But in the 60s, what did you have? You had ABC, NBC, CBS, you know, the 70s, you know, you had these three news channels and they weren't always right. And they definitely sometimes spun a narrative together maybe about the Vietnam or whatever. If one of them was just lying, they'd be embarrassed for it. They would be penalized. They'd be dinged, and they'd be known as this is the trash one. And that would be terrible for their ratings because they weren't just catering to half the country. They all were catering to the whole country. So both on the axis of accuracy and on the access of neutrality, they had to try to stay somewhere in the reasonable range. And that's just gone.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you kind of pander to the progressive senses in all the right ways, I always joke that Ted, you always have a couple token conservatives, but they get on stage and they're basically like, so. Totally, you're all, you know, the progressivisms are right about all of this, but maybe, maybe, you know, libertarianism isn't all bad. You know, it's this. So there is an element, but you know what? It's something. It's better than being a total tribal thing. I think you can see the New York Times tug of war, the internal tug of war. You can see it because then they also have these awful instances, you know, or like, you know, the firing of James Bennett, which is this whole other story. But like they have.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a handful of, here and there, they put out a pretty, an article that strays from the, the, the, the, the, Hannah, Barry Weiss wrote there for a long time. And then you've got, they wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus stuff recently. And they have, you know, they have a couple very left progressive friendly conservatives, but they have conservatives that are operating the op-eds. Fox News, you know, you're not seeing thoughtful Breitbart. You're not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there, right?”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And it's scary because. Almost you can't survive if you're just an old school honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and does it with nuance. What you can be is you can be a big time substacker or big-time podcaster. A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor and they have huge audiences. If you're working in a big company right now, especially, I mean, I think that many of the big media brands are very much controlled by the left. But I will say that the ones that are controlled by the right are even more egregious, not just in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of, you know, the New York Times for all of its criticisms.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So John Hytt wrote a great article about the true, we basically truth is in an all-time low right now. The media is not penalized for lying. MSNBC, Fox News, these are not penalized for being inaccurate or penalized if they stray from the orthodoxy. Social media. It's not the truest tweets that go viral, right? And so Trump. Understood that better than anyone, right? He took advantage of it. He was living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past. And he saw that and he just lied. Everything he said, you know, truth was not relevant at all, right? It's just truly, it's not relevant to him when what he's talking about. He doesn't care. And he knew that neither do a subset of the country.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can pull the right strings and pull and push all the right emotional buttons right now and get my self-power by taking advantage of the circumstances. And that is what Trump totally did.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You actually look at the stats, it's pretty bad. Like, the people who, because it's not just who voted for Trump, a lot of people just vote for the red, right? What's interesting is who voted for Obama against Romney and then voted for Trump. These are not racists, right? These are not hardcore Republicans. They voted for Obama. And where did the switch come from? places that had economic despair where bridges were not working well that's a signifier you know where where paints chipping in the schools you know these little things like this so i think that you know you had this a lot of these kind of rural towns you have true despair and then you also have the number one indicator of voting for trump was distrust in media and the media has become much less trustworthy you know and so you you have the the all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue and a demagogue is someone who takes advantage right they're someone who comes in and says”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right? Like, is it the person or is it the times? I think he's a perfect example of it's a both situation. I don't think that, I don't think if you pluck Trump out of this situation, I don't think that Trump was inevitable. But I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue. And if you hadn't been, Trump would have had no chance. And so, and why were we vulnerable to a demagogue is because you have these, I mean, I think specifically on the right,”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But today, you don't have that. You have ideological realignment, so you kind of got rid of a lot of the in party fighting. And then there hasn't been that big of a foreign threat. Nothing like the USSR for a long time. So you kind of lost that. And what's left is just this left versus right thing. And so that's kind of this hypercharged whirlpool that subsumes everything. And so yeah, it's, I mean, people point to Newt Gingrich, you know, and people like there's certain characters that enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing, but I think this is a much bigger kind of environmental shift”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's partially because it's become so, we've been so subsumed with this one national divide of left versus right that people are whoever, you know, they're voting for the same party for president all the way down the ticket now. And so you have this just kind of 50-50 color war, and that's awful for compromise. So there's like 10 of these things that have redistricting, but also it is social media. I call it hypercharged tribalism. In the 60s, you had kind of distributed tribalism. You had some people that are worked up about the USSR. They're national. That's what they care about. U.S. versus foreign. Some people that were saying left versus right, like they today, and then other people that were saying that they were fighting within the party.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used it for a long time actually first it was the Republicans and then the Democrats just had a stranglehold on Congress. There was no, it was not even competitive. The Democrats for 40 years had the majority. And so therefore it actually is a decent environment to compromise in because now we can both, you know, what you want is Congress people thinking about their home district and voting yes on a national policy because we're going to get a good deal on it back at home. That's actually healthy as opposed to voting in lockstep together because this is what the Red Party is doing, regardless of what's good for my home district. You know an example is Obamacare. There were certain Republican districts that would have actually officially been benefited by Obamacare, but every Republican voted against it. So part of the reason is because there's no longer this obvious majority. Every few years it switches. It's a 50-50 thing.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very complex. So Ezra Klein is a great book, Why We're Polarized, where he talks about a lot of this. And there's some of these are, it's really no one's fault, first of all. It's the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned. And what happens when you take human nature, which is a constant and you put it into an environment, behavior comes out. The environment's the independent variable. When that changes, the dependent variable, the behavior changes with it, right? And so the environment has changed in a lot of ways. So one major one is”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, but today it's just like do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies. And so I'm seeing a rise in power games. And I talk about the Republicans because they did a lot of these things first. They have been a little bit more egregious, but both parties have been doing it over the last 20, 30 years.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precedent. They said, no, oh, actually, we changed our mind. We're going to nominate Amy Barrett. So to me, that is classic power games, right? There's no actual rule. And what you're doing is they did technically have the power to block the nomination then, and then they technically had the power to put someone in, and they're pretending there's some principle to it, but they're just extra, they're going for a short-term edge at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run. And then one of the Democrats have to do in that situation, because both parties have been doing this, is they either can lose now all the time or they start playing the power games too. And now you have a prisoner's dilemma where it's like both end up doing this thing and everyone ends up worse off. The debt ceiling, all these PowerPlays that are being made where these holding the country hostage, this is power games. And to me, that's what Goldwater was doing in the 60s, but it was a healthier time in a way because there was this plurality within the parties reduced some of the national tribalism. And there wasn't as much of an appeal.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making another charge for it, but this time succeeding and really taking over the party for a long period of time. I see the same story, which is the power games are being played in a situation when it had always been, the government relies on all these unwritten rules and norms to function. But for example, you have in 2016, Merritt Garland gets nominated by Obama. And the unwritten norm says that when the president nominates a justice, then you pass them through unless there's some egregious thing. That's what has happened. But they said actually this is the last year of his presidency and the people should choose. I don't think we should set a new precedent where the president can't nominate people, nominate a Supreme Court justice in the last year. So they passed it through and it ends up being Gorsuch. And so they lose that seat. Now, three years later, Trump's last year, and it's another election year, and Ginsburg dies. And what did they say? They say, oh, let's keep.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said that, like, he feels like he was a Jew, and Hitler's Germany with the way that blacks were being treated there. And it was nasty. But what do they do? They had fiery plurality enough to win. And they won. They ended up getting crushed in the general election and they kind of faded away. But to me, I was like, that was an interesting story. I see it as I have this character in the book called The Golem, which is a big kind of a big dumb, powerful monster that's the emergent property of like a political echo chamber. It's like this big giant. It's stupid, but it's powerful and scary. And to me, I was like, a golem rose up, conquered the party for a second, knocked it on its ass, and then faded away. And to me, when I looked at the Trump revolution and a lot, and not just Trump, the last 20 years, I see that same lower right, that lower right monster kind of...”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just sat there and they sat in the chair talking for their candidate until everyone eventually left and then they declared victory. So basically they came in there. There was a certain set of rules agreed upon rules and they came in playing the power games saying, well, actually, if we do this, you won't have the power. We have the power to take it if we just break all the rules, right? And so they did. And they won. And that became a hugely influential thing, which then they conquered California through, again, people were taken aback, these proper Republican candidates were appalled by the kind of like, you know, the insults that were being hurled at them and the intimidation and the bullying. And eventually they ended up in the National Convention, which was called the right-wing Woodstock. It was like, you know, the Republican National Convention in 64 was just, again, there was jeering and they wouldn't let the moderates or their progressives even speak and there was racism, you know, you know, Jackie Robinson was there and he was a proud Republican and he”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's this interesting plurality, right? Something we don't have today. And what happened was the Goldwater contingent, which was the underdog. They were small, right? Eisenhower was the president, had just been the president, and was, it seemed like the moderates were, you know, that's the, he said, you have to be close to the center of the chessboard. That's how you maintain power. These people were very far from the center of the chessboard, but they ended up basically have like a hostile takeover. They conquered their own party. And they did it by breaking all of the kind of unwritten rules and norms. So they did things like they first started with like the college Republicans, which was like this feeder group that turned in, you know, a lot of the politicians started there. And they went to the election and they wouldn't let the current president, the incumbent, speak. And they were throwing chairs and they were fist fights. And eventually people gave up.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So we're using this again. It's just like you're calling yourself centrist when it's not exactly what you mean, even though it also is. So again, I was like, okay, this vertical lens helps with other things. Let's apply it to the Republicans. And here's what I saw is. I looked at the 60s, and I saw an interesting story, which I don't think that not everyone's familiar with what happened in the early 60s. But in 1960, the Republican Party was very, it was a plurality. You had progressives, like genuine Rockefeller, you know, pretty progressive people, all the way to then you had the moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey. And then you go all the way to the farther right, you had Goldwater and what you might call them the fundamentalists.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at this through my vertical ladder, I'm saying, what is this familiar story of the Republicans from the 60s to today? What does it look like through the vertical lens, right? Does it look different? And is there an interesting story here that's been kind of hidden because we're always looking at the horizontal? Now, the horizontal story, you'll hear people talk about it, and they'll say something like the Republicans have moved farther and farther to the right. And to me, that's not really true. It was Trump more right-wing than Reagan? I don't think so. I think he's left left.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lowercase L, a liberal. There'll always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who are much more interested in playing the power games. And there has to be kind of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says, that's not how we do things here in America, actually. We don't excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs or not. We don't disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs. And if it doesn't stand up for itself, it's like the immune system of the country failing. power games rushes in.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a First Amendment, so you're not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing Christianity. But if the social penalties are so extreme. That it's just never worth it. You might as well be in a country that imprisons people for criticizing Christianity. And so that same thing goes for wokeness, right? This is what people get, you know, cancel culture and stuff. So the reason these things are bad is because they're actually depriving Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by imposing a social culture that is very power games-esque. It's basically a power games culture comes in and you might as well be in the power games now. And so liberal, if you live in a liberal democracy, there will always be challenges to a liberal culture.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, But the government basically says we're going to let everyone be mostly free. But no one is going to be free to physically harm other people or to steal their property, right? And so we're all agreeing to sacrifice that that 20% of our freedom. And then in return, all. Can be 80% free. And that's kind of the bargain. But now that's a lot of freedom to leave people with. And a lot of people choose. It's like you're so free in the U.S. You're actually free to be unfree if you choose. That's kind of what an echo chamber is to me. It's you can choose to kind of be friends with people who Essentially, make it so uncomfortable to speak your mind that it's no actual effective difference for you than if you lived in a country. If you can't criticize Christianity in a certain community.”
2023-02-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #360 – Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source