#AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
Next up is my good friend Tim Urban from Wait But Why. I asked him to do this as a favor. He gets a huge speaking fee. I said, we have no budget. He said, Jake, I think it's 7,500 take-in. I said, I have no budget, I stole it all.
And he has the number one talk in the history of TED on YouTube.

**Tim Urban** (0:40)
He said something yesterday to Nate Silver when he ate one poker and he was like, Oh, I'm going to take away your speaking fee. And I was like, the fuck, speaking fee.
All right. So the title of my talk is Tim talks about politics and other things that are probably a bad idea to talk about in front of all these people.
And I want to start with, why am I even writing about politics? I don't like politics. I like writing about the science and tech and the future and procrastination and things that interest me.
But as I'm thinking about the future and all this awesome stuff that we could have, I started to have a bad feeling. I would think of society kind of like a giant organism. And this is how I always grew up assuming that society was like, is like a big grown up. But when I looked around, it looked more like a poopy pants six-year-old who dropped its ice cream.
And I feel like this is what a lot of people are kind of getting at in these talks. You know, we're talking about kind of all this crazy polarization and you know, mobs and all that. And to me, I just look out and I see this. I see kind of reverting and people are acting like they're in middle school and like, you know, we can't communicate and what's going on. So I started putting my mind to this. Now, what was the problem?
And the problem is very complicated and I'm not gonna try to get into the whole thing today, but I think that what we can do is have a better framework to talk about the problem.
I think that we are very constrained to this one-dimensional axis. It's like a straight jacket in our conversations. You hear people say, the problem is the far left and the far right, we need to be in the center, we need to be more moderate. What is that? And the center is just a policy position. The far left and far right aren't inherently bad. The far left is just kind of radical and questioning everything and they're experimental and the far right is just questioning. Maybe we messed up, maybe we should go back to the way things were. I mean, there's nothing inherently better or worse about any part of the spectrum, but we're using these words to try to get at something else. We'd say centrist, moderate. We don't really mean in the middle of the spectrum. I think we're talking about a different axis. I call it the ladder.
So I think bringing our political discussions into two dimensions can be hugely helpful. Now, sometimes you'll see like the political compass, you'll see politics in 2D, but that's still all what you think. That's all different ways to look at what you think about politics. The ladder is a how you think axis.
So there's some nuance to it, it's a spectrum, but for our purposes, let's just focus on the 2 core ideas here. There's high rung political thinking, high rung politics and low rung politics.
So the high rungs, you can divide it to high rung progressivism and high rung conservatism, which I think is like 2 arguing giants. The collective efforts of high rung progressivism, conservatism are like lawyers in a courtroom. They're heated, they don't like each other a lot, a lot of the time, they have very different ideas of how things should go. But it's like the two lawyers in the courtroom, this is a wink that goes on where they understand ultimately, they're on the same team, they're two sides of a truth discovery machine. I think this is the same thing. They don't like each other, but they're actually ultimately on the same team trying to figure out the roadmap. How do we move forward? The conversations in high rung politics are complexed, they're nuanced. There's different realms, there's what is, those science and history arguing about what is, that's hard to figure out. There's what should be, that's philosophy and ethics. Then there's even if they agree on those two things, how do we get there? What are the right policies, strategies, experimentation, testing?
There's a lot of nuance, there's a lot of complexity.