Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for politically eclectics.

I'm Ravi Gupta, and this is a special episode.

I'm having a conversation with one of my favorite writers, Tim Urban,

who's a writer, illustrator, and co-founder of Wait But Why, which is a website that is really hard to describe.

You've got to go to it if you've never been to it before.

His posts have millions of views and tons of fans from, you know, rank and file folks like me all the way up to people like Elon Musk.

And he uses illustration and really pithy writing to talk about some of the most important things going on in society.

And for us personally, I think he wrote this post that kind of changed the way I think about time when he talked about just how much time we have left, you know, on average on this planet and how much

time we spend with our parents versus doing other things. And it honestly made me visit my mom more at

home. But he wrote this book recently called What's Our Problem, which is a book right in the

wheelhouse of the listeners of this podcast. It's about political polarization,

why we're divided as a society, how we think about issues, and how we can have better

conversations and show more humanity to each other. It's basically a book for political

eclectics. And so, Tim, welcome to this podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Well, Tim, let's start with, you have this framework that you lay out at the beginning of the book about, you know, basically saying we spend so much time as a society about what people think, but not enough about how people think.

And you talk about two different types of thinking, high-rung thinking and low-rung thinking.

Do you mind just laying out for our audience audience like how you think about those two categories? Yeah, I mean, it's like natural for us to be

concerned with how someone, you know, not just what their ideas are, their beliefs or their

conclusions, but how they arrived at them in some areas. Like you're on an airplane and you have an issue and someone next to you says, you know, here, take this pill, right? Because you're having, you're having trouble. You're not going to just say, okay, yes, you know, because you're in my, because you share some of my other beliefs, you're going to want to know what, why, who are you?

How do you know that I should take the pill?

Like, what's your background?

Are you a doctor, right?

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