Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and The Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Tim Urban:

If you look at what really matters in life, the kind of things that matter on your deathbed, that you think back on, written in your eulogy, that you regret deeply if you don’t do later, the majority of those things are not deadline based.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Tim Urban. He’s the brain behind the wildly popular blog, Wait But Why, where he writes long-form pieces about, well, almost everything. Artificial intelligence, relationships, mortality, human psychology, and so much more. Tim’s 2016 TED Talk about why people procrastinate is among the most viewed TED Talks ever. Tim’s work aims to dig deep into the human brain and explain huge, complicated topics to the everyday person. And to do that, he has to reach, in his words, about a six out of 10 on an expertise scale for each of the topics he writes about. Tim joins me to discuss what’s behind his work, why we procrastinate, and how what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance drives political and social tribalism. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Hey folks, Preet here. Today’s the day, March 31st. We’re bringing Stay Tuned to New York’s Town Hall theater for our first live show in over two years. I’ll be in conversation with Garry Kasparov, the chess grand master and one of our most powerful voices on Russia and Ukraine, and Ben Stiller, the hilarious and brilliant actor, director, producer, and Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency, plus a special appearance from Alexander Vindman, retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel and former Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council. It’s going to be a night that will make you think and laugh and reflect. You’ll also learn a whole lot about the challenges facing our democracy and the rest of the world. The show is tonight at 7:00 PM. You can buy tickets at cafe.com/events. That’s cafe.com/events. I can’t wait to see you there.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Amy who asks, “What’s the significance, if any, behind US district judge David Carter’s ruling that attorney-client privilege doesn’t hold up for certain communication between Donald Trump and his lawyer, John Eastman. Is judge Carter’s assessment in civil court applicable in a criminal prosecution against Trump?” Well, that’s a good question and something that I think a lot of people have been talking about and speculating about. To be clear, one of the basis on which the judge decided that attorney-client privilege does not attach or apply to some of these communications between Trump and Eastman is something called the crime fraud exception. That doctrine basically says that if instead of providing advice of a legal nature, you’re instead having communications about a future commission of a crime, a violation of a criminal statute, that should not be shielded by cynical use of the attorney-client privilege assertion.

Preet Bharara:

Here, the judge in pretty strong detail lays out the case, and he says this very flatly, for believing there is evidence to suggest that Donald Trump and John Eastman engaged in conduct, established by these communications, that related to the future commission of a crime, namely, obstruction of a proceeding in Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States of America. Now, the direct significance of that is that these documents have to be turned over, probably pending an appeal. What’s the significance for a public perception? I think pretty significant. It’s even significant to me because now, you have a federal district court judge. Not some random pundit or former federal prosecutor like me and others, but a sitting federal district court judge who is fairly clear-eyed and respected and a non-outlier, as far as I understand it, taking a cold, hard look at particular pieces of evidence, and drawing a conclusion that they support a potential finding of criminal conduct.

Preet Bharara:

It is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It does not mean that any other person, even if the judge himself was a prosecutor, would see fit to bring the case. But it meets a certain threshold for purposes of the crime fraud exception. Now, you ask, “Is the decision by the judge applicable in a criminal prosecution?” It’s not. The fact that the judge found support or evidence of a potential crime is not something that would be admissible in a grand jury proceeding for an indictment of Donald Trump, or in a future trial of Donald Trump. Rather, the way I think of the judge’s opinion is a basis or a model for other people who are looking at the evidence, namely, potentially, federal prosecutors in the Department of Justice to see what the analysis is, see if they agree with the analysis, and see if they independently come to the same conclusion. And if they do, and they think there’s enough of a quantum of evidence to ultimately prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, then they will. But they’re not directly related to each other.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in an email from Mark who asks, “What’s the importance of the revelation about internal White House records that show a gap in President Trump’s phone logs for more than seven hours on January 6th, 2021? Could this finally move the needle on a criminal investigation?” Well, Mark, this is a revelation that’s getting a lot of attention and specifically, the fact that there’s a seven hour and 37 minute gap. Now, as you can imagine, people are comparing this to the missing 18 minutes of tape in the Watergate scandal. What’s missing here in the Trump case are call logs, not the substance of the calls. There’s no taping of these calls that we’re aware of. But it does show that there’s a missing piece of evidence at the particular time that the events of January 6th were unfolding, and it’s a little bit odd. And as people have also pointed out, it’s not the case that Trump wasn’t making calls during that period because we have reporting and evidence that he was talking to other people during this time period. There’s just a gap in the official call log.

Preet Bharara:

Now, people are asking, “What’s the relevance to this with respect to Trump’s state of mind?” That depends. There’s a decent argument to be made, I guess, depending on what the other facts show, that the absence of this call record is an attempt by Trump or people around Trump to engage in something of a coverup, not wanting people to know who he was in contact with as the insurrection was taking place on Capitol Hill. It strikes me that the Trump folks might make an argument, I don’t know how far it goes, but they might make the argument that, “Look, Donald Trump is a guy who wasn’t trying to excuse or hide or cover up any particular things that were going on, on that day, January 6th, because this is the kind of sloppiness he engages in all the time.” Sometimes, he rips up documents as we’ve heard. There’s reporting that sometimes he flushes them down the toilet. A whole bunch of documents somehow and inappropriately ended up in Mar-a-Lago.

Preet Bharara:

So they would say, “There’s no particular insight to be gained from the fact that there’s this gap in the call log, because he does this all the time and has been doing it for some number of years.” Now, my response to that is, “I don’t know how far that gets you.” Because you could make the argument that the reason that Donald Trump engages in this behavior, ripping of notes and otherwise disposing of them and mishandling them, is there’s lots of things, over the course of his presidency, he’s trying to cover up or hide or not allow to become public. So, it’ll be an interesting back and forth. I think to the extent people are concerned that they won’t get to the bottom of who was calling whom, I’m not sure that’s a serious concern because we do know some of the other parties who were receiving phone calls and you can reverse engineer where those calls were coming from.

Preet Bharara:

But as with all things, I imagine that in the January 6th committee’s report, this will be another example of a way in which the Trump folks violated policy, violated rules, were not transparent, and they will suggest that you draw an adverse inference from those kinds of things. Yeah, all of that indicates some motivation, you can argue, to hide something. Stay tuned. There’s more coming up after this. Procrastination plagues many of us, myself included. But procrastinating on an assignment has different implications, than procrastinating on making big life changes. Tim Urban is the voice behind the popular blog, Wait But Why. He’s on a mission to explain things, how technologies, relationships, groups, and our minds operate. Tim Urban, writer, co-founder of Wait But Why, welcome to the show.

Tim Urban:

Thank you for having me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s great to talk to you. You have done so much writing, so much thinking, so much contemplating. I want to get to some of the issues you talk about, and I have a lot of favorites, but for the very few people among our audience who may not be familiar with you and your work, who is Tim Urban?

Tim Urban:

I am a writer, blogger… I’m not really sure what that word even means, but I write long things online. I do stick figure illustrations and long-form writing to kind of dive really hard, for a short amount of time, into one topic, and then move on to other topics so I can kind of follow my curiosity through the equivalent of a bunch of 101 classes. Yeah, that’s mostly what I do. And then, I’m now working on a book which is kind of a different beast of a project.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, we’re going to get to the book and how you went about writing it. I know it comes out in a few months. But you’re doing something interesting that there are a lot of naysayers about, and that is that you write long-form. I thought long-form was dead and nobody liked it anymore, and the whole world is moving towards the Axios list format.

Tim Urban:

Yeah. I mean, but if you think about it, books aren’t dead, right? A good book comes out and everyone’s talking about it. I also hear some people be like, “Oh, no one reads books.” But that’s not true. People do read books, and they love books. So, long-form on the internet is actually a really short book. I think that hits a sweet spot for a lot of people who… They might not want to read a 300 page book on AI, but they really would’ve loved an 80 page or 60 page book on AI. And it’s this really, but as soon as you put it on the internet, it stops seeming short like, “Oh, wow, that’s pretty short for a book,” and it starts seeming like, “Holy shit, that’s long for an article.” Am I allowed to swear by the way?

Preet Bharara:

Yes, you are.

Tim Urban:

Okay, yeah. And-

Preet Bharara:

But only in long-form.

Tim Urban:

Okay, fine. And so, it’s all about framing. A really long article is also just like a single book chapter. So, I think that part of the problem is long-form… If you have the nerve to do long-form, which is to write long-form, which is basically asking readers to dedicate a significant chunk of their time to reading what you have to write, you better put the time and you better make it really good. You better structure it well, you better try to get rid of redundancies, you better make it funny and enjoyable to read, you better make sure you’ve done your research, and make it fun. Because I do think people have room for a really good long-form article, but only if it’s really done with the quality of a book, then it happens to be online. I think that if it’s long-form because the person’s kind of rambling and going through and not editing well, I mean, then that’s obnoxious.

Preet Bharara:

And you have pictures. How important is the art?

Tim Urban:

Well, I think it’s different people learn in different ways. Some people love visual, some people don’t. I’m someone who does, and I always just use myself as kind of a litmus test like when I love it. If someone sent me an article, would I prefer a long-form article that I just scroll down and I’m like, “Oh damn, that’s a lot of paragraphs,” or the same article, but throughout there are drawings and charts and visuals? I prefer the visuals, and I think probably more than 50% of people agree with that. Not a hundred though. I mean, I think some people are probably annoyed with having how much it breaks up the flow. A lot of us are visual learners and it just helps, especially in a long article, to just… It’s almost like you can look forward to the next visual coming down four paragraphs later and okay. Yeah, so I particularly happen to like it.

Preet Bharara:

How do you feel about The New Yorker?

Tim Urban:

So, New Yorker is a perfect example.

Preet Bharara:

Do you enjoy it? Yeah, do you enjoy-

Tim Urban:

Well-

Preet Bharara:

The New Yorker or…

Tim Urban:

I always think of the really long New Yorker article as a thing like the 20… And I actually measured one once. So, I think it was the one about Scientology.

Preet Bharara:

Did you have a long enough ruler?

Tim Urban:

Yeah. I had to do a lot of scrolling, paste it into Microsoft Word, and I saw it was 24,000 words, which is… That’s one of those, it’s like you’re reading it for… 24,000 words, for reference, is about 80 pages in a book. Even maybe a little-

Preet Bharara:

My book came out to 300 and something pages and it was 104,000 words. That’s a quarter of a substantial book.

Tim Urban:

Right. And so, again, that seems crazy long unless you reframe and you’re like, “This is a tight little 80 page book. Check it out.” And I think we’ve seen that with TV. It used to be there’s a movie for two hours, or there’s a half hour TV show, but there’s no good reason those have to be the… For budget reasons has the movie makes sense for it to be two hours because it’s one night, a single viewing experience in a theater you can have, and it justifies the budget, and people will pay 12 bucks to go see that. So there’re certain reasons that, that particular time exists. But now that we have Netflix and all this YouTube, we see great things out there for…

Tim Urban:

Yeah, Kurzgesagt is one of my favorite YouTube channels. They make 12 minute things, 14 minute things. That’s perfect. TED Talks was another example. They did 14 or 18 minute things. And then, you’ve got TV series that are now actually more like 50 hour movies. And so, the point is that there’s no good reason that these kind of well defined slots have to have any particular value over other. So I think the same thing can go for writing where it’s like yes, we have book length is a thing. And then, article length is a thing. And The New Yorker long articles, it’s kind of doing something different. And that’s kind of what I started doing is my long posts are just about that length.

Tim Urban:

Some posts are 12,000 word, which is half the length of a crazy long New Yorker article that’s 40 pages in a book. Some of mine are 25,000, which is the same length of The New Yorker article. And I actually have a couple articles that are 40,000 words, which is now half of a normal length book. The only thing I think is not great because I think that some… I like the idea of taking on a topic and instead of saying, “Well, it’s going to be a book. So, it has to be 200 to 400 pages,” I can say exactly what number of pages should this particular topic be for me right now. Maybe, that answer is 43 pages. Maybe, that answer is 150 pages, or maybe it’s two pages.

Tim Urban:

The one thing that I do think is hard is the internet is not really… Stuff on the internet is not the experience of reading it. If you have an iPad, it can be great. Then it’s the same as reading as a book. But you’re not going to go to the beach and have a nice reading day and take your laptop. You can scroll on your phone, but it’s not ideal. You scroll forever, and then it just looks like you’re on your phone at the beach. Which you’re not really, you’re reading, but it just is a bad look. And also, you lose your spot. Now, you have to scroll down for a million years to find it. So-

Preet Bharara:

Or you want to go back and you want to look at an earlier page.

Tim Urban:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

[crosstalk 00:15:44] the person was that’s being written about, and that’s difficult-

Tim Urban:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

On the phone too.

Tim Urban:

And that’s the problem with a new kind of length is that we actually don’t have the mediums quite built for that yet.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It’s also interesting, people sometimes try to divide the world into folks who like short-form and folks who like long-form. I like both. It depends on the circumstances. I read Axios articles. I also read New Yorker articles. So, I don’t know why everyone’s always trying to pigeonhole somebody. Sometimes you watch a music video, and sometimes you go to a concert. They’re different.

Tim Urban:

Right. We would never be like, “Oh, do you like movies or do you like half hour TV shows?” And you’d be like, “Um, I like good versions of both.” And the same thing. It’s like, “Do you like YouTube videos or do you like movies?” The answer isn’t one or the other.

Preet Bharara:

Who is your audience?

Tim Urban:

So when you have an online publication, what happens is sometimes your articles go viral here and there. And when they do, a lot of new people, who’ve never heard of you, pass through your art gallery of stuff. It’s kind of a self-filtering system where the people who don’t like it, they’re going to read three paragraphs and be like, “This guy is annoying,” and leave, right? Or they just look, scroll down, “This is way too long.” They’re going to leave. Other people are going to like it, but liking it doesn’t equal sticking. When I like an article, I barely look at who the author is. I don’t really care what publications it’s on. I read it, I leave. Maybe, I share it, and then I leave and I forget about it.

Tim Urban:

The people who happen to love it, right? Who say, “Oh, my God! This is exactly how I like having something explained to me, it’s exactly my sense of humor,” whatever it is, they might take notice of your name, of the site they’re on. They still might not, by the way. They might love the article, share it, and then forget about it. But then, they’re on it again three months later. And they notice a sidebar, there’s a popular posts list, and they say, “Oh, Mike, wait a second. That other article that I love, this is by the same person. Who is this?” Right? So now, it’s that second or third time someone who loves it-

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Tim Urban:

It’s that moment it clicks, and they become a fan of what’s going on here. They subscribe to the email list, they suddenly go back and they binge through all the other stuff, they evangelize it, they tell all their friends, right? So if you think about that process, that’s a one in 20 people or one in 50 or one… I don’t know what the number is, but it filters. The people who subscribe to your email list, they happen to be… It’s the collection of all the people who happen to love what you do. And if I’m writing in my own voice and writing with my sense of humor and indulging my own curiosity, those people are going to be people that happen to share a lot of things with me. Curiosity, they share my particular sense of humor. So I always feel like if someone is a big Wait But Why reader, which is the name of my blog, I always assume we would get along.

Preet Bharara:

I’m curious how you pick your topics. But before you answer, it’s very interesting how you think about your work. It reminds me of some advice I got when I started out doing this new thing, interviewing people on podcasts. And the person said, “Don’t think necessarily about what the audience wants to hear. Ask your guest about what you’re truly curious about, and people will follow along and be interested because they will sense your tremendous curiosity in the conversation.” Is that how you think about the topics you pick?

Tim Urban:

Yeah, I think that seems very intuitive to me, which is, there’s enough people out there that even if only a small percentage really jibe with your brand of curiosity, or your sense of humor, or just the way you like to think about things, even if there’s only a small percentage, that in an almost eight billion person world adds up to a huge potential audience.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a lot of folks.

Tim Urban:

Yeah. I mean, so even if a third of them, or even on the internet, reading English page, English language things, or even just say, it’s a fifth and only 1000th of the people who would like you ever find you, that’s still a million people or something like that. So anyway, I do think that makes sense. I have a lot of friends who are successful bloggers. You just get to know each other over time. One of the things we all have in common is that there’s just kind of a confidence in who we are. Meaning, it’s okay to just be your exact self. Just go for it. Be yourself.

Tim Urban:

And we have this rational understanding, that just comes from doing some math, that there’s a lot of people who happen to like who you are. Doesn’t mean that you’re amazingly likable and that everyone loves you. That’s definitely not true. It’s just that there’s enough people out there who happen to. So, just do your thing. And I feel like the people I know, they’re just acting. James Clear, Mark Manson. I just think of Randall Monroe. These people are just furiously being themselves on the internet. So yeah, I think that’s correct. [crosstalk 00:20:30]-

Preet Bharara:

So, you write about a lot of things fairly wide ranging. You write about issues of community, artificial intelligence, extraterrestrials, life in other places, Elon Musk. How do you go about picking what the thing is that you’re going to dive deep into?

Tim Urban:

Well, I think it has to be inside of a certain Venn diagram. The first circle of the Venn is, does it lighten me up? Am I dying to read and write about it? And that often comes from I’m having a good conversation on a… With someone like you on a podcast, or at a lunch with a friend, or with my wife at dinner and whatever. And something comes up. Some new concept. Either we discover it together in the conversation and we start talking about it, or they introduce it to me. Or I’ve always thought about it, but then suddenly, talking about it with this person and their brain suddenly, it’s like, “Oh, it just got way more interesting.” Whatever it is, there’s that moment. We all have these moments when you just, “Ooh, I’m super fascinated by this concept or this topic,” or whatever it is. Or this news story, or this piece of history, or this new kind of tech. And-

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Tim Urban:

The difference is for me, just like a standup comedian… We all have moments when we notice something funny, but a standup comedian is in the habit of taking out the phone or the notepad and writing it down. That’s why they’re a standup comedian, because they write down all those moments. So for me, I’m always looking at things through the lens of blogging, so that if something lights me up, that’s the first Venn circle. The second Venn circle is would this make a good blog post? And not everything that’s interesting necessarily would. There’s a lot of kind of complex reasons why something would fall into the second circle or not. Sometimes, it would make a great blog post, but not for… I’m not the person to write it for whatever reason. Or it would just require too big a deep dive. I’ve avoided things, climate change, crypto, so far. And I might want to do these things, but I’m not going to take those on, unless I can read a ton of books and talk to a ton of people.

Preet Bharara:

That’s super interesting. It brings me to this quote from you, which has fascinated me, and that is you talk about levels of expertise and how much expertise you have to get to be able to speak fairly ably to lay people about something. Here’s what you said in an interview a few years ago, “If there’s a one through 10 scale of how much you know about something, 10 is a world leading expert, and one has absolutely never heard of the term. I started at two or three on most stuff like most layman. I’m a layman about everything, but I’ll take as long as I need to learn enough to get me to maybe a five or a six out of 10.” And you say, “I’m not going to get a PhD,” but if you get to a five or a six, you can do a Q&A with an audience on this topic for 10 hours and they’ll have a pretty good solid answer to everything. Explain that metric, and how long it takes you to get up to a five or six?

Tim Urban:

Yeah, I think it’s good to think about it this way because it’s not a binary thing. Are you an expert on this or not? Are you knowledgeable or not? And again, we sometimes put these things in these buckets just like movie length and show length, or book length and article length. Sometimes, these things are actually spectrums and we need to just remember that. I didn’t go into blogging thinking about things like this. I didn’t say, “I’m going to go and I’m going to become the guy who takes people from a three to a six in knowledge.” It just kind of happened naturally in that there’s a lot of hunger for people who are at a three to get to a five or a six. Of course, everyone would like to get higher in most things, right?

Tim Urban:

But it turns out getting from a three to a five or three to a six in knowledge is actually doesn’t… It’s the low hanging fruit. The learning curve goes quickly there, and then when you want to get to a 7, 8, 9, 10, now you have to put in, it’s diminishing returns, exponentially more hours to get there. And so, it’s this kind of best bang for your buck knowledge acquisition range I find. If you’re at a three and you’re curious, because curiosity is the engine. Otherwise, there’s no desire to go up. If you’re at a three and you’re curious, it’s amazing how many fives and sixes you can get to across topics. And then, you get to the six? Okay. Rather than put the million hours in to get to an eight, move on [crosstalk 00:24:33].

Preet Bharara:

Move onto something.

Tim Urban:

Get [crosstalk 00:24:34].

Preet Bharara:

What’s an example of something about which you were a two or three, became curious about, got yourself up to a six? And how much time did it take?

Tim Urban:

Okay, one example is the AI. AI, I-

Preet Bharara:

Artificial intelligence?

Tim Urban:

Yeah, artificial intelligence.

Preet Bharara:

See, I’m at least at a one. I’m above a one because I know the term. [crosstalk 00:25:00]-

Tim Urban:

There you go. Exactly. A one means you’ve never heard the term before. So [crosstalk 00:25:04]-

Preet Bharara:

So, I’m starting out at a two.

Tim Urban:

You’re at a one and a half. So-

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Tim Urban:

So, this is talking about the other circle and would this make a good blog post. Partially, the question there is timing. I think I got lucky with this one, but I’m starting to learn about timing better is I happened to write about AI at the perfect time. And what I mean by that is there were lot of people at a three who were hearing a lot about AI. It was kind of exploding in the kind of public discourse. And yet, there were a lot of people at a three who suddenly had this… It was a huge demand for three to six transportation basically. And so, what I did was I did what most of the people at a three just didn’t have time to do, or didn’t know where to start, which is I read, I don’t know, four books. Nothing crazy. Again, I was not trying to get to an eight or nine. I wasn’t trying to get to a level where I could talk to a bunch of AI experts and tell them anything [crosstalk 00:26:03]-

Preet Bharara:

You were not trying to get a job at MIT-

Tim Urban:

No.

Preet Bharara:

In AI, right?

Tim Urban:

No, I’m not going to do anything professional. No one’s going to rely on me for anything with AI, life or death. I’m not advising experts on anything. I’m not creating new knowledge of any kind. What I’m doing is understanding what’s the landscape here. What did the terms even mean? What’s the structure we can use to think about this? And so, I was like, “Okay, artificial narrow intelligence versus artificial general intelligence.” That blew my mind, such a simple but brilliant concept. I think now, a lot of people know what that means, but at the time, almost no one did.

Tim Urban:

And so, it was a perfect moment to say, “Hey, everyone, check out this concept of narrow intelligence to general intelligence, and then super intelligence.” Oh, my God. And so a good gauge, again, thinking about the fact that the people who I’m collecting as readers happened to be like me, I can gauge my own experience. So I was mind blown reading Nick Bostrom’s book, and Ray Kurzweil, and a few others, and then, 50 or 60 articles and having some conversations. I was just continually, my mind was like, “I can’t believe how interesting this is.” That’s all I need to know. I know there’s a lot of other people who are going to feel the exact same way as I did.

Preet Bharara:

You did a very well received and famous TED talk about procrastination. I think the current numbers of viewership of that exceeds the total number of humans in the United Kingdom. It’s some scores of millions of people. And I watched it, and I am a world class procrastinator. And I was telling the team before we started taping, “How is this guy talking about me with such insight?” I mean, you literally open up your TED Talk about procrastination by talking about your senior thesis and how you left it to the last minute.

Preet Bharara:

And listeners may not appreciate this or know this, you and I went to the same college. We had the same major, we both wrote theses. You’re a bit younger than I am. Yours was 90 pages, mine was 86 pages, and we both waited till basically the end. I just want to set this up, and then I want you to explain your theory of procrastination because I think this is important to everybody in the world, whether they think they’re a procrastinator or not, as you point out, is that there are two kinds of brains. There’s the rational decision maker, and then there’s the person with the instant gratification monkey, right? What is the instant gratification monkey?

Tim Urban:

Yeah. So, I think that a lot of things that seem like crazy human behavior, humans are just acting crazy, self-defeating, what are they doing, what it actually comes down to is there are different parts of the brain. I like to think of them as characters, little people living in there. And they have different wiring. They have different functions in the brain, and that’s fine in the world that they were built to live in. And the world they were built to live in, which is a tribe of people 50,000 years ago, maybe even a little village 10,000 years ago, in that world, I think probably the human brain didn’t self-defeat that much. It kind of was jibing with the general motives of the person and the general things they needed to do, which makes sense.

Tim Urban:

Now, unfortunately what happened is… Or I wouldn’t quite say unfortunately, because I don’t want to live in that world, but the civilization that… Exponential progress started taking hold. And very quickly, the environment around us started getting vastly changed quickly, in a blink of an eye evolutionarily speaking, way quicker than our actual biology would have time to adjust or keep up. So what we’re doing is we’re living with tools for world A, except we’ve all been kidnapped out of that world, dropped in world B, which is an advanced civilization, and told to use the same tools that are not actually made very well for this world. So now, these parts of the brain that are different functions for different things, they’re firing at different things, they’re misunderstanding things. And especially, the limbic system character that I call the instant gratification monkey, which is not an evil character, it’s not a… That’s why I make it a silly monkey, because it’s not good or bad. It just is [crosstalk 00:30:27]-

Preet Bharara:

Monkeys are fun.

Tim Urban:

Yeah, the monkey is also critical. Again, your dog is being run, and almost entirely, by an instant gratification monkey in his head, which is why-

Preet Bharara:

I think you say in your talk that people who have this brain, they just want to do stuff that’s easy and fun. And if you’re a dog and all you want to do is stuff that’s easy and fun, you can be very successful-

Tim Urban:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

As a dog.

Tim Urban:

A monkey. I mean, a monkey who spends his whole life doing easy and fun things is a very successful monkey. It’s like you survived, you had enough food to have free time, you conserved energy-

Preet Bharara:

You have friends, people. You’re popular.

Tim Urban:

Yeah, you’re popular. You’re conserving energy when you can. It’s great. And then, you fulfill your kind of immediate needs when you need them. So now you get hungry, “Okay, I go and do that exact moment when I’m hungry.” Right? That’s fine. And the instant gratification monkey is great at that life, at running that animal, at running the cockpit in that animal’s head for that world. Now, the problem is in an advanced civilization, it’s a whole different game. A lot of the immediate needs are easy and taken care of, unlike the other world, but there’s all these other things. Long term planning is needed in a way that’s not needed anywhere in the animal kingdom. You need to come up with long term goals, and work on something on November 5th that you will not see the results of until March. That is completely foreign to our brains. And so, the instant gratification monkey is going to resist that because it literally is not built to see the future that far away. So, it doesn’t understand why would ever work [crosstalk 00:32:05]-

Preet Bharara:

You think of your future self. That’s a different guy.

Tim Urban:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

That future guy. The other thing, you have another character which explains my life and a lot of my professional career very well, is at the end of the day, whether it’s a thesis or a paper or a speech or some finite thing, how does the procrastinating person become successful in life and move along? And then, you introduce this other character, the panic monster, who I know very well. Who is the panic monster?

Tim Urban:

I think the base situation is two characters. There’s instant gratification monkey and the rational decision maker. The rational decision maker is your neocortex, the prefrontal cortex part of your brain, that’s very much in real time seeing the real world around it. It’s not misinterpreting the world for 50,000 BC, and is actually thinking, “Okay, I can long term plan. Then we have to long term plan.” And it’s fighting all the time over the controls with this monkey who is very powerful in the brain and who’s fighting with it not because it wants to hurt you, because it thinks it’s… Monkey’s trying to help you, and so is the rational decision maker. They have two different interpretations of the world. That goes on and on. The definition of the procrastinator is they’re not good at that battle.

Tim Urban:

Their rational decision maker continues to lose to the monkey, and they’re hating themselves and they’re so mad at themselves, and they’re saying, “I’m going to change next time. This is my own worst enemy.” And all this stuff. So then, the big question is, well, so what… Yeah, like you said, how does the procrastinator actually do anything? And the answer is the panic monster comes rushing in the room sometimes. The reason the panic monster works, so this happens when there’s a deadline that’s-

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Tim Urban:

Creeping up or you’re about to… Something scares you. You’re like, “Oh, my God! I’m going to be so embarrassed. I have to public speak and I’m not ready,” or, “Oh, my God! I’m going to get fired, or I’m going to…” Whatever it is.

Preet Bharara:

It kicks in a little late, right? And so, it requires…. I mean, at least in my life. I never handed in a paper early. I never do work, generally speaking, ahead of time. I was still preparing for this interview, maybe I shouldn’t confess, up to the moment that we began.

Tim Urban:

I was preparing for the first three minutes while we were talking. I was also on the internet getting-

Preet Bharara:

Who’s this Preet guy?

Tim Urban:

Fully ready. No.

Preet Bharara:

Who is Preet?

Tim Urban:

[crosstalk 00:34:27]-

Preet Bharara:

[crosstalk 00:34:27] research this guy.

Tim Urban:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean, I just found it very compelling, and obviously many millions of people did too, because I had never heard it explained quite so simply and quite so compellingly. So I’ll be in my slumber and think, “Oh, I can do it later.” And then yes, the panic monster arrives, and I realize I only have X number of hours between now and the time that the brief is due or the speech has to be given or the podcast has to be taped. And then, and you say this also, I find myself having basically herculean strength and stamina to do that which I thought it would be impossible to do in a short period of time. And then, I wonder to myself and I wonder if you have an answer to this, that when I’m completed and it happens and it goes successfully, not always, but often it does, I think, “Why couldn’t I channel the energy I got from the panic monster and sort of amortize that over time and be a reasonable person instead of an idiot?”

Tim Urban:

The panic monster is like Popeye’s spinach. It’s like you’re weak, you’re getting beat up by Bluto, which is the project or the monkey, and then-

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Tim Urban:

And then suddenly, you pop open this thing, a spinach, and these muscles sprout up and you’re suddenly Superman, right? This is…

Preet Bharara:

Right. Why can’t you have a spinach patch?

Tim Urban:

Right. I mean, trust me, this is-

Preet Bharara:

[crosstalk 00:35:48].

Tim Urban:

The bane of my existence is this question because-

Preet Bharara:

[crosstalk 00:35:51], right?

Tim Urban:

The reason is this. Panic is one language the monkey does speak. Think about it. If a Tiger’s running at you and you’re as a hunter and suddenly you have this big cat just jumps out of the woods and starts running at you… Panic, right? The monkey gets that. Run like life and death or fight or flight. And so, what happens is the rational decision maker can make all the rational arguments that he wants and say, “You’re going to regret this. You’re going to have so much fun later tonight if you just do your work now.” Completely and utterly sensible, right? It just makes perfect sense. And yet, the monkey’s thinking, “Sure, that all sounds great. But not right now. No, I’m not doing it in this minute. Some other minute, some other… Tim in 10 minutes from now will do it, not me.”

Tim Urban:

And that just goes on and on, right? And so, the rational decision maker is screaming in a language that the monkey does not speak. The panic monster then runs into the room. The monkey suddenly is incredibly attuned to that and freaks out, and I use the metaphor, runs up the tree, and the rational decision maker can actually take the wheel and do all the things that he’s been trying to get you to do. It’s that you have this superhuman strength in that moment, because the monkey is alert and on your side suddenly and gets it. The monkey gets the situation suddenly for the first time. And so, when you want to spread that out and say, “Yeah, I would be so much…”

Tim Urban:

It’s like you said. Sometimes, I think a lot of the time, it’s a big tragedy which is that you don’t achieve what you want in life because of this problem, or you don’t do as good work. But even in the situation, like you’re saying, sometimes you crush it. Sometimes, you really do great work in those situations and you’re super successful with it. Even then, the journey itself is awful for you. So, maybe the end goal’s the same, but most of your life is spent in the journey and you’re sitting there. So there’s another term that I like to bring into this which is the dark playground. So, this is a very specific-

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Tim Urban:

Place. This is a place that you spend… The procrastinator is rarely sitting around having a nice, guilt-free, happy, pure time, and then the last second panics and does it. That’s not how it works. If this is a one week project and you’re doing the whole thing in the last night, the first six and a half days is… They’re not happy for the procrastinator because the procrastinator usually-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, no. They’re not happy at all.

Tim Urban:

Right. So you’re not working, but you’re not happy either. It’s like the monkey won’t let you work.

Preet Bharara:

It’s actually insane.

Tim Urban:

It’s insane. And so, I call it the dark playground, which is you know what it like. It’s that you’re digging around at a time when you know you shouldn’t be, and it’s just you’re soaking in a swamp of guilt and dread and anxiety and self-loathing. And sometimes, you can distract yourself for 30 seconds and you tweet something and people like it. “Okay, 30 seconds or five minutes of… Oh, this is fun.” And then, you can kind of distract [crosstalk 00:38:40]-

Preet Bharara:

You’re describing me, Mr. Urban, once again. [crosstalk 00:38:45]-

Tim Urban:

Or your lunch arrives and it’s lunchtime, and you’re having a great thing, or you go have sex-

Preet Bharara:

And-

Tim Urban:

Okay, great. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Have you performed some machine merger brain thing on me? You may have.

Tim Urban:

Well, here’s the thing.

Preet Bharara:

You may have.

Tim Urban:

The reason that people clicked with the TED Talk is just that this is a very common problem. Look, think how many songs are written about love and breaking up and heartbreak, right? Because it’s just a human experience. This is another human experience, because it’s not… It’s-

Preet Bharara:

There’s not a lot of music about it.

Tim Urban:

No, it’s much less sexy.

Preet Bharara:

Because the songwriters never get to it.

Tim Urban:

Exactly. The people with this problem never start their music career.

Preet Bharara:

And then, I want to get to what I think is the great insight of your talk about procrastination in a moment. But sticking to deadline based projects, the paper is due or the speech is due or the PowerPoint is due, not everyone’s like you and me. My daughter’s not for example. There are people who don’t need the panic monster and they work diligently over time. I don’t know if you know this, crazy when I discovered this, there are some people who turn things in early. I’ve never done that once in my entire time.

Tim Urban:

Adam Grant calls that a precrastinator. He’s the opposite of me. He gets an assignment. All this anxiety comes from having it looming over his head.

Preet Bharara:

He gets the panic monster at the start.

Tim Urban:

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s… It’s either he gets panic, or he gets fear of the panic monster later, or it’s just that the looming cloud over him of the thing that’s not done is causing him a certain level of anxiety. It doesn’t cause me. And so, he will do something right away, which he actually argues is also problematic, and that you don’t do your best work.

Preet Bharara:

What?

Tim Urban:

You don’t do your best work because-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I see.

Tim Urban:

You rush it out, you don’t give yourself time to percolate. And he thinks there’s some happy medium. And that’s fine. But a lot of people misinterpret that as, “Oh, procrastination is good.” And I say, “No, it’s good to a very light extent. And then, it’s just extremely bad if it goes to the extreme.” Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

The thing that really resonated with me is you’re saying all this stuff that reminds me of myself, and you describe the panic monster who I have known very… We know each other very well over the course of my life. But then you say, “The panic monster works fine and allows people to be functional procrastinators when there’s a deadline.” But there are things in life that are important, like career prospects, and getting into shape, and maintaining and gaining additional relationships, for which there is no deadline. And when there’s no deadline, the panic monster doesn’t show up. And tell me if I’m probably oversimplifying it. Talk about that kind of procrastination and how insidious that is, because that’s the thing that really struck me.

Tim Urban:

Well, so let’s bring Popeye back in. I think that when there’s a deadline, some external pressure that’s not in your hands, that you’re scared of, eventually the panic monster rushes in the room with his cape, Popeye takes the spinach, grows the muscles, punches Bluto out, saves the day, right? If you look at what really matters in life, the kind of things that matter on your deathbed, that you think back on, written in your eulogy, that you regret deeply if you don’t do later, the majority of those things are not deadline based. At least the beginning, especially when things are… You’re trying to get some momentum started in something. There’s no deadline and this again, within your career… So many people are… They can’t even start chasing the career they really want.

Tim Urban:

And then, also outside your career. I mean, seeing your family enough is a classic example. Something people regret once it’s gone, and you take it for granted when it’s here. Even though you know you should be doing it more, you procrastinate on it. You procrastinate getting in shape, about going on the diet, about breaking up with someone who you know you should break up with, or getting out of a marriage you know you should get out of, quitting a job. So these are all these big things where there’s no spinach coming, there’s no heroic panic monster rushing in to save the day, because you could have kind of a deep, blunt, general widespread panic in your life about something, but that you need the acute panic. And that doesn’t happen without the deadline. You can be depressed as hell. No, you should be changing your ways. But it’s different than saying, “This is due tomorrow. Oh, my God!”

Tim Urban:

You kind of sit up and you kind of can’t… Food doesn’t matter, going to the bathroom doesn’t matter, and you just kind of panic, that never happens. And so, you can be so upset about something or whatever, but there’s no spinach. So Bluto will punch you to the ground and beat you in every day of your life, and you will end up dying and never having gotten your spinach there and doing the thing you do, unless you find a way to actually do stuff without the panic monster. This is the major challenge. By the way, when I talk about [inaudible 00:43:16] talk about chronic procrastinators. We’re talking about people who do stuff at the very last second when they have a deadline, which is a subset of people.

Tim Urban:

There’s a bigger group, that they’re part of, that includes the Adam Grants for example. Because those people are driven by the deadline also, they do something right away because there’s a deadline they don’t want to get anywhere near. So the people doing things early, not all, but a lot of them, are also driven by the deadline. That’s still the engine for them. They just comes out in a different way. So, those people too. A lot of people, even non procrastinators in the classical sense, are still deadline driven. And when there’s no deadline? Suddenly, they’re indistinguishable from the all-nighter guy.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It’s making me think what’s a part of your life that is basically all deadline driven? And it’s school. It’s grade school, it’s high school. There’s a test or there’s class participation, and you have exams and then you take the SATs or the ACTs, you have to apply to college if you want to go to college. There’s a deadline. And then, if you go to graduate school, you have all that. And so, you can end up in your mid 20s having achieved a success, largely because of the panic monster. I mean, certain jobs, obviously there are deadlines, but general career success is not like school, at least in most careers. Do you have a thought on whether we should be doing something different during the school years to cause people to think more long term and not be reliant on the panic monster because it doesn’t solve the things for which you’ll have the greatest regrets at the end of your life?

Tim Urban:

Yeah. I think in general, there’s a set of skills and habits and values that are nurtured and grown in the school years, based on the structure of what’s needed and what matters then. And then, you go to the real world and it’s a pretty different set of… It’s a different game. So you get really good at one kind of game, and you build up all these values and you judge yourself based on that kind of game, and your habits, your work habits, all develop around that kind of game. Suddenly, you get to the real world and welcome to the real game here. Oh, by the way, it’s pretty different than the game you’re used to, and some of it is completely the opposite of the game you’re used to.

Tim Urban:

The way you won that game, actually that’s going to hurt you here. You win the school game with conformity, with relying on external structures to push you, and you just have to do stuff within them. You have to kind of please the authority and do things the right way and not stand out. And definitely, don’t think outside the box too much. Do the assignment the way you’re supposed to, right? And sit and listen in class… Listen and sit still and memorize, right? You get to the real world and it’s like, “So, why are we…” Yes, so the big answer is I definitely think that there should be much more game matching. We should have school mimic the real world much more if we can.

Tim Urban:

I mean, this is easy for me to say. I mean, changing education is incredibly difficult and you do need to teach kids a basic set of things, which is not something that has to happen in the real world. There is different needs then. It’s not that easy to just mimic the real world when you have to teach them stuff. But we could be doing a lot better. Yeah, I think that’s part of the problem is people like me and you, we got by in game number one. We were able to get by as procrastinators and it never really hurt us because what actually mattered, the big picture, was the grade. You got the A, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t some better A you could have gotten. You got the A.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Tim Urban:

In the real-

Preet Bharara:

It’s just not good for your health.

Tim Urban:

It’s not good for your health, no.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’m a terrible procrastinator when it comes to deadlines. To have better mental health in fact, I adopted a strategy in college where I tried very hard. We talked about the fact that you get an assignment, it’s due a week. Those first six days when you’re not working on it are not so pleasant. So, I would sometimes try to be Adam Grant and start it on the first day. And what would end up happening is there’s this sort of nether world of procrastination in which you’re actually sitting with your computer open, your pen and your legal pad, and you’re trying to do the assignment, but you’re not really doing it because your heart’s not in it. And the panic monster hasn’t shown up and you’re very inefficient. And so, I would sometimes spend, when I tried to be that guy, four days futilely trying to get the assignment done, an assignment that should only take two days. I would spend four days doing it in a half-assed way, not doing anything else, not having any fun with the monkey-

Tim Urban:

Purgatory.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but then I would still have a panic monster show up and pull an all-nighter on the last night. And so, I adopted a strategy of just knowing myself and deliberately not even trying to work on it until the last minute. And that actually helped a little bit. Do you have a reaction to that?

Tim Urban:

Yeah. First of all, you just now were in my head with that description of the four days thing. I mean, I actually drew this out as a comic once, a very common experience of mine is. And in the comic, there’s a guy, me, working at my desk, miserable. Two friends come and say, “Hey, we’re going to a movie. You want to come?” And I say, “No, I definitely can’t. I have a ton of work to do.”

Preet Bharara:

Oh, yes. They go to the movie, they come back and say, “Hey, how’s the work?” This is shameful, and I probably don’t even admit it to them, I haven’t done anything. And so, I skipped the movie. Basically, the rational decision maker wouldn’t let me go to the movie, but the monkey wouldn’t let me work. So, I do neither. One character says, “Well, I’m not working.” Other character says, “Well, then we’re not having fun.” And now, you’re sitting here in this crazy, shameful-

Preet Bharara:

So I learned that at sometime, when I was 20 years old. So then, I started going to the movie. [crosstalk 00:48:59]-

Tim Urban:

This is where we depart. And I think I’m impressed actually, because one of the great procrastinator traits is delusion and denial about who they are and about the magnitude of the problem. So, instead of resigning off… And they have all this hope. They think next one’s going to be great. They read one good article-

Preet Bharara:

[crosstalk 00:49:17].

Tim Urban:

One article on tips for procrastination, and suddenly, they think, “I’m done. I just solved it with this article.” We have this incredible delusional optimism, at least I do. So I always think, “No, next paper, I’m definitely doing it the right way. This one?” As I say this, I have a book I’m doing, and I’m actually doing another book after this. And in my head, I 100% think that the next book is going to be totally different. I’m going to do it. Everything’s going to be different. This is how I am. And so, I’m impressed that you actually had the kind of the rational hopelessness that allows you to actually adjust your schedule based on reality. I’m impressed. That’s a step up, I think, from where I am.

Preet Bharara:

I guess I’m just slightly less delusional. And the other way that I think I’ve done a reasonable job is even though I’m terrible about the things with deadlines and I need the panic monster, I think I have some version of a long term panic monster with respect to bigger things in life like the arc of my career. I did find times to do those things that you need to do to build relationships. So, I think I’m very far gone in the one category and hopefully will have not as many regrets as I might have had in the other category. Is that uncommon?

Tim Urban:

I think it probably is uncommon honestly. I think you’ve reached an interesting middle ground where you’ve… I mean, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to know. I don’t have the stats on that. But I would say that I think that, that is some actual progress that I think some procrastinators don’t make. And I think that’s great. I think you end up with a lot fewer regrets because in the end, it’s like you’re making… You’re basically saying, “Okay, if I’m going to be this way, I’m not going to ruin the journey by being this way. I’m just going to accept it and still enjoy.”

Tim Urban:

The problem is I think that some people, it’s hard to have that time pre the work being done as truly happy playground. It still is dark playground for a lot of people because it’s looming. So I think if you can truly accept you’re going to do it the last second, have that one period of time be miserable, and actually be in kind of a guilt-free, satisfying leisure time or free time before that, I think that’s amazing. I think that’s an amazing kind of hack you’ve come up with. Without fully fixing the boat, you’ve kind of fixed a… Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Tim Urban after this. You have this phrase that denotes a concept that I think is very interesting and I think very relevant today. And when I first saw it, I misread the term. And the term that you use is pluralistic ignorance. The first time I saw the term in prepping for the interview, I saw it as pugilistic ignorance, which maybe is not that far off. What is pluralistic ignorance and why should we care about it?

Tim Urban:

I think if you want to really understand societies, you have to think about individual psychology and then group psychology. What happens to individual psychology when you put a hundred or a thousand or a million of it in the same room together in the same place together? Now, what happens? What emerging properties start happening? When I think about pluralistic ignorance, the way I like to think about it is there’s… Just like we have two characters that I’ve been talking about… Well, let’s try two new characters. One is what we would call inner self, which is just in this case what you’re thinking in your head, what your opinion on something, your morals about something.

Tim Urban:

And then, there’s what you say. There’s outer self. Outer self, it represents what you express, what you allow from within yourself to come out, what comes out, right? So sometimes ideally, when you’re being authentic, and if you’re in a safe environment to be so, and you feel good about who you are and a bunch of these important things are in place, then they will match each other. You’ll just be who you are. There’ll be no shame, there’ll be no fear, there’ll be no reason to hold it back. If you have a viewpoint or a certain thing you want to say, or a certain way you feel, or a certain thing you think is right or wrong, morally or intellectually, then you’ll just say it. There’s no reason not to. Why wouldn’t you?

Tim Urban:

And this magical thing happens when we all do that. If a group of people are all saying what they’re thinking, then basically, the outer self is removed as an entity. Inner selves are just connecting, wiring up together. So a group of people, 10 people in a room or a 100, and they’re all being exactly themselves, and they’re having conversations and they’re saying what they think, what happens is… First of all, you’re going to see a lot of disagreement, because why would everyone happen to agree on everything? It doesn’t make sense, more often than not. We’re all super unique. So, we all have a different take. We blend our life experience with a certain topic, whether it’s political topic or something, and we come up with some kind of nuanced version of an opinion.

Tim Urban:

Now, what about when all those are connecting and you’re hearing everyone else’s things, and you’re arguing and debating, and the things that are misguided, that are actually wrong factually, will quickly get discovered, and the big brain is being formed by all these little brains like neurons connecting together into a bigger brain? The big brain becomes very smart because it can quickly… If one person has a truth that the other 99 haven’t discovered, well, it’ll spread. And that truth will quickly get known by the big brain. But if 99 have a falsehood and one can prove it wrong, all the other 99 can drop it because, “Oh, it’s wrong.” So it’s this incredible capacity for human collaboration, intellectual collaboration. And this is when we’re at our best. This is why we have a civilization. When no one in the world knows how to build a building or a… But we altogether have a collective knowledge, which is super intelligent, which is way more than the sum of its parts.

Tim Urban:

Now, unfortunately, that’s not how things often are. We have a capacity to get our identity attached to certain viewpoints, whether it’s religious, or political, or moral, there’s sexual. There’s certain things that light up what I call the primitive mind, which is… It’s synonymous with the instant gratification monkey. This is kind of a wider application of it here, which is just general, that part of our brain gets attached… Actually, it likes to take ideas and stitch it to your identity. And now, instead of just saying, “No, I am just a curious awareness. I am just this, the inner self.” The primitive mind thinks, “No, I need to protect myself. I am my set of viewpoints. I am this religion. I am this. I am a liberal. I am a Christian. And quickly, I am a lawyer.”

Tim Urban:

And it starts to say, “That’s who I really am” because it doesn’t have… It comes from a world 50,000 years ago where individual authenticity wasn’t getting you anywhere. You wanted to be part of the tribe, be one with it. So, that psychology gets active in certain topics. And what happens is certain people now will start to say, “This is what we think, and you better all think it. And if you differ from me politically…” I’m not going to say, “Oh, your idea is wrong. Let’s look at the idea together like kicking a science experiment around.” I’m going to say, “You are bad,” because when I’m in that psychology, I actually think of ideas and people as the same. So I am this idea, and if you’re expressing that, that means that you are actually a threat to me.

Tim Urban:

And as opposed to, “Your idea disagrees with my idea,” no, “You are a different kind of person. You’re not part of us anymore. You’re not one of us. People like us don’t think that.” And so, you get out-grouped and you get ostracized and you get lambasted and you get smeared. And all these social punishments which for a social species are unbelievable penalties, real ones that are… And so, the same part of our brain that identifies with ideas is also terrified of those kinds of ostracism, punishments, and stuff like that. So, everyone falls in line. What does falling in line mean? Does it mean everyone thinks the same thing? No. What it means is that everyone starts concealing their inner selves. And the outer selves all start expressing the same exact thing.

Tim Urban:

Once that happens, that can stick for so long because now, no matter what, everyone is alone in their own heads assuming that everyone else must think opinion A, because opinion A is the popular opinion and opinion B and C and D are the taboo opinion. So all the people who think B, C, and D assume they’re the only one because that’s all they hear. They can’t see what’s in people’s heads, and no longer is what is in people’s heads coming out freely. So, everyone assumes they’re alone. Everyone thinks everyone else must think this thing, even if that’s not true. And so now, there’s so much fear. And then eventually, what happens is people start to believe opinion A more because they hear it. That’s all they hear. And so now, everyone is kind of… Opinion A is kind of playing dictator, is the totalitarian dictator over this group’s intellectual life.

Tim Urban:

And instead of having this big, rich brain of diverse thinking or neurons connecting together, you have one opinion that is running the show, the shadow of its cudgel is hanging over the social interactions. And this happens all the time, and all of us are guilty. All of us have been the person enforcing that whether we like to admit it or not. We’ve also been the person that has been too scared to speak out because we’re scared of it. At some time, I’m sure we’ve been the person that does the thing that can break this, which is, we’ve been courageous. We’ve said, “You know what? I don’t actually think…” If there’s this group of friends is all talking shit about this other person, how bad… And they’re being kind of mean, right? Clearly, it’s the culture to be mean about this person we all hate.

Tim Urban:

And at some point, all of us have been that brave person and just said, “You know what? Come on, we’re being a little over the top. I kind of like them actually.” And suddenly, someone else can say, “Yeah, you know what? Actually, that’s…” Very quickly, people start to say, “Wait a second. Maybe, not everyone doesn’t think that person’s awful or whatever.” Or everyone pretends to like this band, but then… No one actually likes them, but everyone thinks it’s so cool to like them. So, everyone likes them. And someone finally says, “I don’t actually like this movie,” or, “I don’t like this song.” And then, everyone starts to say, “I don’t either.” Whatever. So I obviously can go on forever with examples, but it’s this core idea of we have this amazing ability to form a super brain. Because of our primitive brains that developed in a long ago tribal time, we have this tendency to fall into echo chambers. It generates a life of its own, and then all the group intelligence goes away and we become very dumb as a group.

Preet Bharara:

So, is there a particular current social or political phenomenon that gives rise to this thinking and the reason you write about this?

Tim Urban:

Oh, of course. I mean, first of all, go to any time-

Preet Bharara:

Does this really happen? [crosstalk 00:59:54]-

Tim Urban:

Go to any time, any country, and you’re going to find first of all. It can be worse and better. And I think right now we’re in a time, probably because of social media and because of tribal media and a lot of these other things that I’ve written about, there is a… Pluralistic ignorance is on the rise. It’s gone viral. So, I think we see this with a ton of well-intentioned people on the left who just wanted actually… Social justice, this idea is so… It lights them up and they want to… These are genuinely good people who want to make the world better, who hate the fact that not everyone has the same position in society and not everyone has a… It’s not fair. They don’t like that. They want justice, and this is a great instinct. But there is a certain group on the left right now, which people call wokeness or whatever, that has taken on this kind of, “We have one very specific prescription for how to fix things. We have one very specific worldview about how things are.”

Tim Urban:

And instead of just throwing that into the ring and saying, “Hey…” I’d love to have those people’s viewpoint in the ring, within the part of the larger discussion. They have said, “This is the only acceptable way to see things. And if you don’t… If you see things in a different way, even if you have the same motives, even if you also care about justice and you want to help the same situations, if you see it differently and you disagree with us, we will destroy you. We will hurt you.” And what happens? We’re not that brave as a species. We quickly go into our holes. And so quickly, the rich discussion about social justice topics that is so critical to solve problems, the super brain is what can solve these problems, the super brain disappears and we end up with a bunch of people terrified to talk about it and just wanting to kind of avoid it. So, that’s one and now-

Preet Bharara:

I’m still weird about that, because part of what you’re describing is a marketplace of ideas and that’s the way we talk about this stuff, and the Supreme Court cases talk about the marketplace of ideas and that’s how we talk about the first amendment. Why isn’t it the case that if the minority view is the one that people are shaming others into mouthing or keeping quiet about a contrary view, why is it the minority silencing that prevails? Does that make sense?

Tim Urban:

Well, first of all, if it were not the minor… If their ideas were convincing enough that the majority, enough people came around to them, they wouldn’t need to be bullies, right? If I think that slavery is bad, I don’t need to bully anyone into that because everyone agrees with that, right? That’s such a compelling idea in today’s world that why would you ever need to bully anyone into silence? If somebody wants to go write an article about why slavery is good, I’m not worried about them. I’m not concerned about, “And now, everyone’s going to believe that.” I think they’re going to be laughed off the stage, right? So in general, bullying only needs to happen, coercion only needs to happen in the absence of… When persuasion is not working, when persuasion is not good enough.

Tim Urban:

So I think in general, it’s going to be a group of people who cannot get their ideas to be held by the majority the fair way by persuasion. And so, they need to cheat. And cheating is saying, “Well, okay, if my idea can’t win in the boxing ring, no boxing is allowed. If anyone boxes my idea, they’re going to be sent to social jail, or they’re going to be fired.” That’s a way to say, “Okay, well, now I can crown my idea champion without having to have it fight.” I think if people see it that way, the problem is the… The framing’s very clever. Right now, I think what I’m saying, I think someone listening would think, “Okay, this person is pro-social justice, is probably pretty progressive himself, and does not like bullying, and does not like discussions being shut down, and does not like pluralistic ignorance being enforced.”

Tim Urban:

But what this would be framed as is, “Oh, I thought Tim was a good person, but it turns out he’s a right wing… He turns out he’s a right-winger, turns out he is a racist right-winger,” whatever you want to say. This is such a transparent, childish smear attack. But the problem is with pluralistic ignorance, 99 out of 100 people can think, “Well, that’s stupid. He doesn’t seem like a racist right-winger right now.” But no one’s going to say it. And so, the only thing you would hear on Twitter about this would be, “Tim is this and this.” That can harm me, right? It makes it very scary to speak out and say obvious things that almost everyone would agree with. Now, by the way, I want to add that this… Anytime, you start to get cocky about other people’s pluralistic ignorance, you have to be careful because there’s also an anti-woke movement, right?

Tim Urban:

Which has very high minded parts, that I think are making great points, and then other parts that are actually using this as a new kind of tribalism that are… Where suddenly, not just as woke bad, but anything left. If you defend anything left, you’re one of them. You’re woke. There’s a lot of social pressure now on the anti-woke side, which is turning into a different kind of pluralistic ignorance, where you have to… The only thing you’re allowed to say is that, “Wokeness is the devil and the worst thing in the whole world, and that nothing is the fault of anything except for wokeness.” And that’s another kind of pluralistic ignorance. I feel that pressure because while I have some readers that get really mad at me when I criticize wokeness, I have other readers that will be so disappointed and angry at me if I say anything other than a critique of wokeness.

Tim Urban:

When I criticize Trump, when I criticize… Forget even Trump. If I defend a certain aspect of wokeness, I get shit from that side because you can feel the pressure. That’s why I don’t think wokeness is the problem. I think it’s the environment is the problem. And if it weren’t wokeness, it would be a hundred other things. And I think that probably in the MAGA communities, you’re going to find anyone who says, “Maybe, Trump isn’t the right guy. Even if he says lot of the right things, maybe he’s not the right guy,” they’re going to be ostracized in that community. We have a problem here, which is that the current environment is actually enabling… I think is fostering a lot of this right now.

Preet Bharara:

Final question. You mentioned this new book that’s coming out, The Story of Us. I’m just very curious, given our discussion about procrastination and pulling all-nighters, what was the workflow for your book? You couldn’t do that in one night, right?

Tim Urban:

Yeah. So, this was an example where I’ve been direly lacking my Popeye spinach. Bluto the book has been punching me around for five straight years right now, and it’s been very unpleasant. Yeah, this was a cold reminder to me, man.

Preet Bharara:

Your publisher didn’t give you a deadline?

Tim Urban:

Yeah, they did, but it was too soft unfortunately. It was-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, the only reason I ever was able to write a book was they were pretty strict about it.

Tim Urban:

Well, the problem is that other-

Preet Bharara:

Which I blew past by about two months.

Tim Urban:

Well, that’s the thing these other authors told me, which I wish they hadn’t. They told me, “Ah, those deadlines are… Everyone misses their deadline.” I was like, “Oh, great. Well, now…” And it was [crosstalk 01:06:46]-

Preet Bharara:

So, the panic monster remained in hibernation for you.

Tim Urban:

Yeah, that’s right. The panic monster has not shown up. And again, it’s not that I’ve been sitting here free of panic. It’s this kind of broad blunt panic about the years are going by, that I want to make this point, it’s important to get these points out there now, I have other projects I’m dying to work on. All this. But that’s not acute panic, and the monkey doesn’t understand the language of blunt, long, big picture depression. It only understands the acute panic. And so, it’s been really hard. I’m finally getting very close. I’ve had to make some crazy bets with friends to try to create a panic monster. I was going to have to pay a huge amount of money if I hadn’t get a certain draft in at a certain day to my friend, [Liv Berie 01:07:29]. My friends, Philip and Gray have been… Weekly deadlines, I’ve been giving myself using them. So, I’ve been trying to duct tape this broken boat as well as I can without the help of the panic monster engine. But man, it’s been rough.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe, AI can help at some point in the future for your next book. Tim Urban, you’ve been really generous with your time. It’s been great talking with you. Thanks for being on the show, and good luck with the book and with the blog.

Tim Urban:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Tim Urban continues for members of the CAFE insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

There is so much news going on in the world every day, especially in the last week. But I want to end the show this week by taking a moment to remember Madeleine Albright who died last week of cancer at the age of 84. As most of you know, Albright was the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. But did you know that in fact, when she was appointed to that position in 1997 by President bill Clinton, she became the highest ranking woman in the history of American government? She was also an immigrant. Born in Czechoslovakia, Albright and her family were twice forced into exile as refugees. First by the Nazis, and later when the Soviet backed communist party took control in Prague. In 1948, at the age of 11, Madeleine Albright landed in America. She would later say, “Becoming a US citizen is the most important thing that ever happened to me.”

Preet Bharara:

I might say the same. Only in America, she would say, did her family find a country willing to embrace them as full citizens. “My father said that when we were in Europe during World War II, people would say, we are sorry for your troubles and hope that have everything you need. By the way, when will you be leaving to go back home? But in America, people said, we are sorry for your troubles and hope that you have everything you need. By the way, when will you become a citizen?” Later as a diplomat and policymaker, Albright fought so that America could continue to be a home for people fleeing oppression. In 2016, in the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis, she said, “America resettles more refugees than any other nation because it reflects one of our noblest traditions as a nation, providing support to those who are most vulnerable.

Preet Bharara:

When I came here as a child, I will never forget sailing into New York harbor for the first time and beholding the statue of Liberty. I did not have to face refugee camps or the kind of danger that many refugees endure. But like all refugees, I shared a hope to live a safe life with dignity and a chance to give back to my new country.” After being nominated to be Secretary of State, Albright had the jarring experience of finding out that her family history was not what she’d been told. She learned that she was of Jewish heritage and that her parents had converted to Roman Catholicism during World War II. She also discovered that 26 family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust. Her parents never once told her she said. This week, I came across some recent reflections by Albright written just months before her death. They are excerpted from the new afterward of her most recent book and published in the Washington Post. She writes about the process of overcoming hardship and how it is resilience of spirit, not intellect, that is the essential ingredient of a full life.

Preet Bharara:

In Albright’s words, “Collectively, we have had to bounce back not only from the pandemic, but also from doubts about our willingness to pursue social justice, our power to make self-government succeed, and our capacity to prevent advanced technology from causing more harm than good. Worldwide, we have undergone a period of trial that has changed us in ways not yet fully revealed. Clearly, our future leaders will have to be gutsy and resourceful, and so each in our own way, will we. To those who despair of that possibility, I have a measure of sympathy, but little patience. There is no shortage of worthwhile work to be done, and as those broken headstones remind us, no surplus of seasons in which to achieve our goals. So let us buckle our boots, grab a cane if we need one and march.” Amen. Rest in peace, Secretary Madeleine Albright.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Tim Urban. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara, with the #askpreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and The Vox Media Podcast Network. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The Technical Director is David Tatasciore. The Senior Producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. And the CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh, and Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew [Dost 01:13:43]. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.