If you read a half hour a night, the calculation I came to is that you can read a thousand
books in 50 years.
All of the components are there to engineer intimate experiences.
Extraterrestrial life is a true mystery, the most tantalizing mystery of all.
How many humans need to disappear for us to be completely lost?
The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, author and illustrator of the amazing blog
called Wait But Why.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Tim Urban.
You wrote a Wait But Why blog post about the big and the small, from the observable universe
to the atom.
What world do you find most mysterious or beautiful, the very big or the very small?
The very small seems a lot more mysterious.
I mean, the very big, I feel like we kind of understand.
I mean, not the very, very big, not the multiverse, if there is a multiverse, not anything outside
of the observable universe.
But the very small, yeah, I think we really have no idea what's going on, or very much
less idea.
But I find that, so I think the small is more mysterious, but I think the big is sexier.
I just cannot get enough of the bigness of space and the farness of stars.
And it just continually blows my mind.
I mean, we still, the vastness of the observable universe has the mystery that we don't know
what's out there.
We know how it works, perhaps, like general relativity can tell us how the movement of
bodies works, how they're born, all that kind of things.
But how many civilizations are out there?
What are the weird things that are out there?
Oh yeah, life, well, extraterrestrial life is a true mystery, the most tantalizing mystery
of all.
But that's like our size.
So that's maybe the actual, the big and the small are really cool, but it's actually the
things that are potentially our size that are the most tantalizing.
Potentially our size is probably the key word.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder how small intelligent life could get.
Probably not that small.
And I assume that there's a limit that you're not gonna, I mean, you might have like a whale,
blue whale size intelligent being that would be kind of cool.
But I feel like it's, we're in the range of order of magnitude smaller and bigger than
us for life.
But maybe, maybe not.
Maybe you could have some giant life form just seems like, I don't know, there's gotta
be some reason that anything intelligence between kind of like a little tiny rodent or
finger monkey up to a blue whale on this planet, I don't know, maybe, maybe when you change
the gravity, you know, gravity and other things.
Well, you could think of life as a thing of self-assembling organisms and they just get
bigger and bigger and bigger.
Like there's no such thing as a human being, a human being is made up of a bunch of tiny
organisms that are working together and we somehow envision that as one entity because
it has consciousness.
But maybe it's just organisms on top of organisms.
Turtles all the way down.
Turtles all the way down.
So like earth can be seen as an organism for people, for alien species that's very different.
Like why is the human the fundamental entity that is living?
And then everything else is just either a collection of humans or components of humans.
I think of it kind of as, if you think about, I think of like an emergence elevator.
And so you've got an ant is on one floor and then the colony is, you know, a floor above
or maybe there's even units within the colony that's one floor above and the full colony
is two floors above.
And to me, I think that it's the colony that is closest to being the animal.
It's like the individual thing that competes with others while the individual ants are
like cells in the animal's body.
We are more like a colony in that regard, but the humans are weird because we kind of,
I think of it, if emergence happens in an emergence tower, when you've got kind of,
you know, as cells and then humans and communities and societies, ants are very specific.
The individual ants are always cooperating with each other for the sake of the colony.
So the colony is this unit that is the competitive unit.
Humans can kind of go, we take the elevator up and down, emergence tower psychologically.
Because we are individuals that are competing with other individuals and that's where our
mindset is.
And then other times, we get in this crazy zone, you know, a protest or a sporting event
and you're just, you know, you're just chanting and screaming and doing the same hand motions
with all these other people.
And you feel like one, you feel like one, you know, and you would sacrifice yourself
and now that's with, you know, soldiers and so our brains can kind of psychologically
go up and down this elevator in an interesting way.
Yeah.
I wonder how much of that is just the narrative we tell ourselves.
Maybe we are just like an ant colony.
We're just collaborating always, even in our stories of individualism, of like the freedom
of the individual, like this kind of isolation, lone man on an island kind of thing.
We're actually all part of this giant network of maybe one of the things that makes humans
who we are is probably deeply social, the ability to maintain not just the single human
intelligence, but like a collective intelligence.
And so this feeling like individual is just because we woke up at this level of the hierarchy.
So we make it special, but we very well could be just part of the ant colony.
This whole conversation, I'm either going to be doing a Shakespearean analysis of your
Twitter, your writing or a very specific statements that you've made.
So you've written answers to a mailbag of questions.
The questions were amazing, the ones you've chosen, and your answers were amazing.
So on this topic of the big and the small, somebody asked, are we bigger than we are
small or smaller than we are big?
Who's asking these questions?
This is really good.
You have amazing fans.
Okay.
So where do we sit at this level of the very small to the very big?
So are we bigger or are we smaller, are we bigger than we are small?
I think it depends on what we're asking here.
So if we're talking about the biggest thing that we kind of can talk about without just
imagining is the observable universe, the Hubble sphere.
And that's about 10 to the 26th meters in diameter.
The smallest thing we talk about is a plank length, but you could argue that that's kind
of an imaginary thing, but that's 10 to the negative 35.
Now we're about conveniently about 10 to the 1, not quite, 10 to the 0.
We're about 10 to the 0 meters long.
So it's easy because you can just look and say, okay, well, for example, atoms are like
10 to the negative 15th or 10 to the negative 16th meters across, right?
If you go 10 to the 15th or 10 to the 16th, which is right, that's now, so an atom to
us is us to this, you get to like nebulas, smaller than a galaxy and bigger than the
biggest star.
So we're right in between nebula and an atom.
Now if you want to go down to quark level, you might be able to get up to galaxy level.
When you go up to the observable universe, you're getting down on the small side to things
that we I think are mostly theoretically imagining are there and hypothesizing are there.
So I think as far as real world objects that we really know a lot about, I would say we
are smaller than we are big.
But if you want to go down to the plank length, we're very quickly, we're bigger than we
are small.
If you think about strings.
Yeah.
String.
Exactly.
String theory and so on.
That's interesting.
But I think like you answer, no matter what, we're kind of middle-ish.
Yeah.
I mean, here's something cool.
If a human is a neutrino, and again, neutrino, the size doesn't really make sense.
It's not really a size.
But when we talk about some of these neutrinos, I mean, if a neutrino is a human, a proton
is the sun.
So that's like, I mean, a proton is real small, like really small.
And so, yeah, the small gets like crazy small very quickly.
Let's talk about aliens.
We already mentioned it.
Let's start just by with the basic, what's your intuition as of today?
This is a thing that could change day by day.
But how many alien civilizations are out there?
Is it zero?
Is it a handful?
Is it almost endless, like the observable universe or the universe is teeming with life?
If I had gun to my head, I have to take a guess.
I would say it's teeming with life.
I would say there is.
I think running a Monte Carlo simulation, this paper by Anders Sandberg and Drexler and
a few others a couple of years ago, I think you probably know about it.
I think they're the mean, you know, using different, you know, running through randomized
rake equation multiplication, you ended up with 27 million as the mean of intelligent
civilizations in the galaxy, in the Milky Way alone.
And so then if you go outside the Milky Way, that would turn into trillions.
That's the mean.
Now what's interesting is that there's a long tail because they believe some of these multipliers
in the Drake equation.
So for example, the probability that life starts in the first place, they think that
the kind of range that we use is for that variable or is way too small.
And that's constraining our possibilities.
And if you actually extend it to, you know, some crazy number of orders of magnitude,
like 200, they think that that variable should be, you get this long tail where, I forget
the exact number, but it's like a third or a quarter of the total outcomes have us alone.
Like, you know, I think it's like, I think it's a sizable percentage has us as the only
intelligent life in the galaxy, but you can keep going.
And I think there's like, you know, a non zero like legitimate amount of outcomes there
that have us as the only life in the observable universe at all is on earth.
I mean, seems incredibly counterintuitive.
It seems like, you know, you mentioned that people think you're, you know, you must be
an idiot because, you know, if you picked up one grain of sand on a beach and examined
it and you found all these little things on it, it's like saying, well, maybe this is
the only one that has that.
And it's like, probably not.
They're probably most of the sand, probably you're a lot of the sand, right?
So on the other hand, we don't see anything.
We don't see any evidence, you know, which of course people would say that the people
who scoff at the concept that we're potentially alone, they say, well, of course, there's
lots of reasons we wouldn't have seen anything and they can go list them.
And they're very compelling, but we don't know.
And the truth is, if there were, if this were a freak thing, I mean, we don't, if this
were a completely freak thing that happened here, whether it's life at all or just getting
to this level of intelligence, that species, whoever it was, would think there must be
lots of us out there and they'd be wrong.
So just being, again, using the same intuition that most people would use, I'd say there's
probably lots of other things out there.
Yeah.
And you wrote a great blog post about it, but to me, the two interesting reasons that
we haven't been in contact, I too have an intuition that the universe is teaming one
life.
The interesting is around the great filter.
So we're either, the great filters either behind us or in front of us.
So the reason that's interesting is you get to think about what kind of things ensure
or ensure the survival of an intelligence civilization or lead to the destruction of intelligence
civilization.
That's a very pragmatic, very important question to always be asking, and we'll talk about
some of those.
And then the other one is, I'm saddened by the possibility that there could be aliens
communicating with us all the time.
In fact, they may have visited and we're just too dumb to hear it, to see it.
Like the idea that the kind of life that can evolve is just the range of life that can
evolve is so large that our narrow view of what is life and what is intelligent life
is preventing us from having communication with them.
But then they don't seem very smart because if they were trying to communicate with us,
they would surely, if they were super intelligent, they would be very, I'm sure if there's lots
of life, we're not that rare, we're not some crazy weird species that hears and has different
kinds of ways of perceiving signals.
So they would probably be able to, if you really wanted to communicate with an earth-like
species, with a human-like species, you would send out all kinds of things.
You'd send out radio waves and you'd send out gravity waves and lots of things.
So if they're communicating in a way, they're trying to communicate with us and it's just
we're too dumb to perceive the signals.
It's like, well, they're not doing a great job of considering the primitive species we
might be.
But I don't know, I think if a super intelligent species wanted to get in touch with us and
had the capability of, I think probably they would.
Well, they may be getting in touch with us, they're just getting in touch with the thing
that we humans are not understanding that they're getting in touch with us with.
I guess that's what I was trying to say is there could be something about earth that's
much more special than us humans.
Like the nature of the intelligence that's on earth or the thing that's of value and
that's curious and that's complicated and fascinating and beautiful.
Maybe something that's not just like tweets, like English language that's interpretable
or any kind of language or any kind of signal, whether it's gravity or radio signal that
humans seem to appreciate.
Why not the actual, it could be the process of evolution itself.
There could be something about the way that earth is breathing essentially through the
creation of life and this complex growth of life.
It's a whole different way to view organisms and view life that could be getting communicated
with and we humans are just a tiny fingertip on top of that intelligence and the communication
is happening with the main mothership of earth versus us humans that seem to treat ourselves
as super important and we're missing the big picture.
I mean, it sounds crazy, but our understanding of what is intelligent, of what is life, what
is consciousness is very limited and it seems to be, and just being very suspicious, it
seems to be awfully human centric.
This story, it seems like the progress of science is constantly putting humans down
on the importance, on the cosmic importance, the ranking of how big we are, how important
we are.
That seems to be the more we discovered that's what's happening and I think science is very
young and so I think eventually we might figure out that there's something much, much bigger
going on.
The humans are just a curious little side effect of the much bigger thing.
That's what, I mean, that as I'm saying, it just sounds insane, but-
Well, it sounds a little like religious, it sounds like a spiritual.
It gets to that realm where there's something that more than meets the eye.
Well, yeah, but not so religious and spiritual often of this kind of woo-woo characteristic
like when people write books about them, then go to wars over whatever the heck is written
in those books.
I mean, more like it's possible that collective intelligence is more important than individual
intelligence, right?
It's the ant colony.
What's the primal organism?
Is it the ant colony or is it the ant?
Yeah, I mean, humans, just like any individual ant can't do shit, but the colony can make
these incredible structures and has this intelligence and we're exactly the same.
You know the famous thing that no one, no human knows how to make a pencil.
Have you heard this?
No.
I mean, this is great.
There's not, a single human out there has absolutely no idea how to make a pencil.
So you have to think about, you have to get the wood, the paint, the different chemicals
that make up the yellow paint.
The eraser is a whole other thing.
The metal has to be mined from somewhere and then the graphite, whatever that is.
And there's not one person on earth who knows how to kind of collect all those materials
and create a pencil, but together that's one of the, that's child's play, it's one
of the easiest things.
So, you know, the other thing I like to think about, I actually put this as a question on
the blog once.
There's a thought experiment and I actually want to hear what you think.
So if a witch, kind of a dickish witch comes around and she says, I'm going to cast a spell
on all of humanity and all material things that you've invented are going to disappear
all at once.
So suddenly we're all standing there naked.
There's no buildings, there's no cars and boats and ships and no mines, nothing, right?
It's just the stone age earth and a bunch of naked humans, but we're all the same.
We have the same brain.
So we all know what's going on and we all got a note from her.
So we understand the deal and she says, she communicated to every human, here's the deal.
You lost all your stuff.
You guys need to make one working iPhone 13 and you make one working iPhone 13 that could
pass in the Apple store today, in your previous world.
For an iPhone 13, then I will restore everything.
How long do you think?
And so everyone knows, this is the mission.
We're all aware of the mission, everyone, all humans.
How long would it take us?
That's a really interesting question.
So obviously if you do a random selection of 100 or 1,000 humans within the population,
I think you're screwed to make that iPhone.
I tend to believe that there's fascinating specialization among the human civilization.
There's a few hackers out there that can solo build an iPhone.
With what materials?
So no materials whatsoever.
It has to, I mean, it's virtually, I mean, okay, you have to build factories, to fabricate.
Okay.
And how are you going to mine them, you know, you got to mine the materials where you don't
have any cranes, you don't have any, you know.
Okay, you 100% have to have the, this, everybody's naked.
Everyone's naked.
Everyone's where they are.
So you and I would currently be naked.
It's on the ground in what used to be Manhattan.
So no building.
You know, grassy island.
Yeah.
So you need a naked Elon Musk type character to then start building a company.
You actually have to have a large company then.
Right.
And see if you know where he, you know, where is everyone, you know, oh shit, how am I
going to find other people I need to talk to?
But we have all the knowledge of, yeah, everyone has the knowledge that's in their current
brains.
Yeah.
I've met some legit engineers.
Great.
Crazy polymath people.
Yeah.
But the actual labor of, cause you said, cause like the original Mac, like the Apple
two, that can be built, but even that, you know, even that's gonna be tough.
Yeah.
Well, I think part of it is a communication problem.
If you could suddenly have, you know, someone, if everyone had a walkie-talkie and there
was, you know, a couple, you know, 10 really smart people were designated the leaders.
They could say, okay, I want, you know, everyone who can do this to walk West, you know, until
you get to this, this little hub and everyone else, you know, and they could, they could
actually coordinate, but we don't have that.
So it's like people just, you know, and then what I think about is, so you've got some
people that are like trying to organize and you, you'll have a little community where
a couple hundred people have come together and maybe a couple thousand have organized
and they designated one person, you know, as the leader and then they have sub leaders
and okay, we have a start here, we have some organization.
They're also going to have some people that say, good, humans were a scourge upon the
earth and this is good and they're going to try to sabotage, they're going to try to
murder the people with the, and who know what they're talking about.
The elite that, that, that possessed the knowledge.
Well, and so maybe everyone's hopeful for the, you know, we're all civilized and hopeful
for the first 30 days or something and then things start to fall off.
You know, people get, start to lose hope and there's new kinds of, you know, new kinds
of governments popping up, you know, new kinds of societies and they're, they're, they're,
you know, and they don't play nicely with the other ones and, and I think very quickly,
I think a lot of people will just give up and say, you know what, this is it, we're
back in the stone age, let's just create, you know, agrarian, we don't also don't know
how to farm.
No one knows how to farm.
There's like, even the, even the farmers, you know, a lot of them are relying on their
machines and so we also, there's a lot of mass starvation and that, you know, when you're
trying to organize, a lot of people are, you know, coming in with, you know, spears they
fashion and trying to murder everyone who has food.
It's an interesting question, given today's society, how much violence would that be?
We've gotten softer, less violent.
And we don't have weapons.
So we don't have weapons.
We have really primitive weapons now.
But we have a, and also we have a kind of ethics where murder is bad.
Right.
It used to be less, like human life was less valued in the past, so murder was more okay,
like ethically.
But in the past, they also were really good at figuring out how to have sustenance.
They knew how to get food and water because they, they were, so we have no idea.
Like the ancient hunter gatherer societies would laugh at what's going on here.
They'd say, you guys know, you don't know what you're, none of you know what you're
doing.
Yeah.
And also the amount of people feeding this amount of people in, in the very, in the Stone
Age, you know, civilization, that's not going to happen.
So New York and San Francisco are screwed?
Well, whoever's not near water is really screwed.
So that's your near river or freshwater river.
And you know, anyways, it's a very interesting question.
And what it does, this and the pencil, it makes me feel so grateful and like excited
about like, man, our civilization is so cool.
And this is, talk about collective intelligence.
Humans did not build any of this.
It's collective human super, collective humans is a super intelligent, you know, being that
is, that can do absolutely, especially over a long period of time can do such magical
things.
And we just get to be born when I go out, when I'm working and I'm hungry, I just go
click, click, click, and like a salad's coming.
The salad arrives.
It's about the incredible infrastructure that's in place for that, for that quickly ages
the internet to, you know, the electricity.
First of all, that's just powering the things, you know, how the, where the, the amount of
structures that have to be created and for that electricity to be there.
And then you've got the, of course, the internet.
And then you have this system where delivery drivers and they have, they're riding bikes
that were made by someone else and they're going to get the salad and all those ingredients
came from all over the place.
I mean, it's just, so I think it's like, I like thinking about these things because
it, um, it makes me feel like just so grateful.
I'm like, man, it would be so awful if we didn't have this and people, people who didn't
have it would think this was such magic we live in and we do and like, cool.
That's fun.
Yeah.
One of the most amazing things when I showed up, I came here at 13 from the Soviet Union
and the supermarket was, uh, people don't really realize that, but the, the abundance
of food, it's not even, uh, so bananas was the thing I was obsessed about.
I just ate bananas every day for many, many months because the heaven had bananas in Russia
and the fact that you can have as many bananas as you want, plus there were like somewhat
inexpensive relative to the other food.
And the fact that you can somehow have a system that brings bananas to you without having
to wait in the long line, all of those things, that's, it's, it's magic.
I mean, also imagine.
So first of all, the ancient hunter gatherers, you know, picture the mother gathering and
eating for all this fresh food.
No.
So do you know what an avocado used to look like?
It was a little like a sphere and the, the fruit of it, the actual avocado part was like
a little tiny layer around this big pit that took up almost the whole volume.
We've, this, we've made a crazy like robot avocados today that are, they have nothing
to do with like what, what they, so same with bananas, these big, sweet, uh, you know, um,
you know, not infested with bugs and, and grow, you know, they used to eat the shittiest
food, um, and they're eating, and they're eating, you know, uncooked meat or maybe they
cook it and they're just, it's, it's gross and it's, um, things rot.
So you go to the supermarket and it's just, it's just a, it's like crazy super engineered
cartoon food, fruit and, and food, and then it's all this process food, which, you know,
we complain about in our setting, oh, you know, we complain about, you know, we need too much
process.
That's a, this is a good problem.
I mean, if you, if you imagine what they would think, oh my God, a cracker, you know, delicious
a cracker would taste to them, um, you know, candy, uh, you know, uh, uh, pasta and spaghetti.
They never had anything like this and then you have from all over the world, I mean,
things that are grown all over the place, all here in nice little racks organized and
on a, you know, middle class salary, you can afford anything you want.
I mean, it's again, just like incredible gratitude, like, uh, uh, yeah.
And the question is how resilient is this whole thing?
I mean, this is another darker version of your question is if we keep all the material possessions
we have, but we start knocking out some percent of the population, how resilient is the system
that we built up?
Or if we rely on other humans and the knowledge of built up on the past, the distributed nature
of knowledge, how, um, how much does it take?
How many humans need to disappear for us to be completely lost?
Well, I'm trying to go off one thing, which is, um, Elon Musk says that he has this number
a million in mind as the order of matter, right, order of magnitude of people you need
to be on Mars to truly be multi-planetary.
Multi-planetary doesn't mean, you know, uh, like when, when, when Neil Armstrong, you
know, goes to the moon, that's, they call it a great leap for mankind.
Yeah.
It's not a great leap for anything.
It is a great achievement for mankind.
And I always like think about if the first fish to kind of go on land, just kind of went
up and gave the shore a high five and goes back into the water, that's not a great leap
for life.
That's a great achievement for that fish.
And there should be a little statue of that fish and, you know, in the water and everyone
should celebrate the fish, but it's, um, but we talked about a great leap for life.
It's permanent.
It's something that now, from now on, this is how things are.
So this is part of why I get so excited about Mars, by the way, is because you can count
on one hand, like the number of great leaps that we've had, you know, like no life to
life and single cell or simple cell to complex cell and single cell organisms to animals,
to come, you know, multi-cell animals, um, and then ocean to land and then one planet
to two planets.
Anyway, diversion, but the point is that, um, we are officially that leap for all of
life, you know, has happened once the ships could stop coming from earth because there's
some horrible catastrophic World War three and everyone dies on earth and they're fine
and they can turn that certain X number of people into seven billion, you know, population
that's thriving just like earth.
They can build ships that can come back and recolonize earth because now we are officially
multi-planetary where it's just self-sustaining.
He says a million people is about what he thinks now that might be a specialized group.
That's great.
That's very specifically, you know, selected million that has, um, very, very skilled million
people, not just maybe the average million on earth, but I think it depends what you're
talking about.
I don't think, you know, so one million is one 7,000th, one 8,000th of the current population.
I think you need a very, very, very small fraction of humans on earth to get by.
Obviously, you're not going to have the same thriving civilization if you get to a too
small a number, but depends who you're killing off, I guess is part of the question.
Yeah.
If you killed off half of the people just randomly right now, I think we'd be fine.
It would be obviously a great awful tragedy.
Um, I think if you killed off three quarters of all people randomly, just three out of
every four people drops dead.
I think we'd have obviously the stock market would crash.
We'd have a rough patch, but I almost can assure you that the species would be fine.
Well, because the million number, like you said, it is specialized.
So I think, um, because you have to do this, you have to basically do the iPhone experiment
like literally you have to be able to be able to manufacture computers.
Yeah.
Everything.
If you're going to have the self sustaining means you can, you can, you know, any major
important skill, any important piece of interest, you know, kind of infrastructure on earth
can be built there in this, you know, just as well.
It'd be interesting to, um, list out what are the important things, what are the important
skills?
Yeah.
I mean, if you have to feed everyone.
So, you know, mass farming, things like that, um, you have to, um, you have to mining
these questions.
It's like the materials might be, I don't know, I don't know, five miles, two miles
underground, I don't know what the actual, but like, it's amazing to me just that these
things got built in the first place and then, you know, they never got, no one built the
first, the mine that we're getting, uh, stuff for the iPhone for probably wasn't built for
the iPhone, you know, or in general early mining, you know, was for, you know, I think
obviously I assume the industrial revolution when we realized, oh, fossil fuels, we want
to extract this magical energy source.
I assume that like mining took a huge leap without knowing very much about this.
I think, you know, you're going to need, you need mining, you're going to need like a lot
of electrical engineers.
If you're going to have a civilization like ours, and of course you could have oil and
lanterns, we could go way back, but if you're trying to build our today thing, you're going
to need, uh, you know, energy and electricity and then, and mines that can bring materials
and then you're going to need, um, a ton of plumbing and everything that entails.
Yeah.
And like you said, food, but also the manufacturer.
So like turning raw materials into something useful.
Yeah.
You know, we're talking like factories, some supply chain, transportation.
Right.
You know, I mean, you think about, when we talk about like world hunger, one of the major
problems is, you know, there's plenty of food and by the time it arrives, most of it's gone
bad in the truck, you know, in a, in a kind of an impoverished place.
So it's like, you know, we take, again, we take it so for granted.
All the food in the, in the supermarket is fresh.
It's all there.
And which always stresses me, if I were running a supermarket, I would always be so like miserable
about like things going bad on the shelves, um, or if you don't have enough, that's not
good, but if you have too much, it goes bad anyway.
Of course there would be entertainers too.
Like somebody would have a YouTube channel that's running on Mars.
There is something different about a civilization on Mars and Earth existing versus like a civilization
in the United States versus Russia and China.
Like that, that's a different, fundamentally different distance, like philosophically.
The quite, will it be like fuzzy?
You know, there'll be like a reality show on Mars that everyone on Earth is obsessed
with.
And you know, if, I think if people are going back and forth enough, then it becomes fuzzy.
It becomes like, oh, our friends on Mars and there's like this Mars versus Earth, you know,
like, you know, and it become like fun tribalism.
Uh, I think if people don't rarely go back and forth and it really, they're there for,
I think if you get kind of like, oh, we hate, you know, a lot of like us versus them stuff
going on.
There could be also war and space for territory.
As first colony happens, China, Russia, or whoever, the European, different European
nations, Switzerland finally gets their act together and starts wars.
This is supposed to stay out of all of them.
Yeah.
There's all kinds of crazy geopolitical things that like we have not even, no one's really
even thought about too much yet that, that like, that could get weird.
Think about the 1500s when it was suddenly like a race to like, you know, colonize or
capture land or discover new land that hasn't been, you know, so it was like this, this
new frontiers, right?
And there's not really, you know, the land is not, you know, the thing about crime,
it was like, this huge thing is this tiny peninsula switched.
That's how like optimized everything has become.
Everything is just like really stuck.
Mars is a whole new world of like, you know, territory, fighting for, naming things and
you know, and it's a chance for new kind of governments maybe or maybe it's just the colonies
of these governments.
So we don't get that opportunity.
I think it'd be cool if there's new countries being, you know, totally new experiments.
That's fascinating because Elon talks exactly about that and I believe that very much.
Like that should be like from, from the start, they should determine their own sovereignty.
Like they, they should determine their own thing.
There was one modern democracy in late 1700s, the U.S. I mean, it was the only, you know,
modern democracy and now of course that's, there's hundreds or dozen, many dozens.
But I think part of the reason that was able to start, I mean, it's not that people didn't
have the idea.
It was that it was, they had a clean slate new place, you know, and they suddenly were,
you know, so I think it's, it would be a great opportunity to have, there's a lot of people
have done that, you know, oh, if I had my own government on an island, my own country,
what would I do?
And it's the, the U.S. founders actually had the opportunity, that fantasy, they were
like, we can do it.
Let's make, okay, what's the perfect country?
And they tried to make something.
Sometimes progress is, it's not held up by our imagination.
It's held up by just, there's no, you know, blank canvas to try something on.
Yeah.
It's an opportunity for a fresh start.
You know, the funny thing about the conversation we're having is not often had, I mean, even
by Elon, he's so focused on starship and actually putting the first human on Mars.
I think thinking about this kind of stuff is inspiring.
It makes us dream and makes us hope for the future.
So, and it makes us somehow like thinking about civilization on Mars is helping us think
about the civilization here on Earth.
Yeah.
How we should run it.
Well, what do you think are, like in our lifetime, are we gonna, I think any effort
that goes to Mars, the goal is in this decade.
Do you think that's actually going to be achieved?
I have a big bet, $10,000 with a friend when I was drunk in an argument that the Neil Armstrong
of Mars, whoever he or she may be, will set foot by the end of 2030.
Now this was probably in 2018 when I had this argument.
So like what?
So a human has to touch Mars by 20 and by the end of 2030.
Oh, by the year 30.
Yeah.
By January 1st, 2031.
Yeah.
So.
Did you agree on the time zone or what?
No, no, yeah.
It's coming on that exact day.
That's going to be really stressful.
But anyway, I, because I think that there will be, that was 2018.
I was more confident then.
I think it's going to be around this time.
I mean, I still won the general bet because his point was, you are crazy, this is not
going to happen in our lifetime.
They're not for many, many decades.
And I said, you're wrong.
You don't know what's going on in SpaceX.
I think if the world depended on it, I think probably SpaceX could probably, I mean, I
don't know this, but I think the tech is almost there.
Like I don't think, of course, it's delayed many years by safety.
So they first want to send a ship around Mars and they want to land a cargo ship on Mars.
And there's the moon on the way too.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a lot.
But I think the moon a decade before seemed like magical tech that humans didn't have.
This is like, no, we can, it's totally conceivable that this, you've seen Starship, like it's,
it is a interplanetary colonial or interplanetary transport like system.
That's what they used to call it.
The SpaceX, the way they do it is, every time they do a launch, something fails usually,
you know, when they're testing and they learn a thousand things, the amount of data they
get and they improve so each one has, you know, it's like, they've moved up like eight
generations in each one anyway.
So it's not inconceivable that pretty soon they could send a Starship to Mars and land
it.
There's just no good reason.
I don't think that they couldn't do that.
And so if they could do that, they could in theory send a person to Mars pretty soon.
Now taking off from Mars and coming back again, I think, I don't think anyone want to be on
that voyage today because there's just, you know, they're still in, it's still amateur
hour here and getting that perfect.
I don't think we're too far away now.
The question is, so it's every, so every 26 months, Earth laps Mars, right?
It's like the sinusoidal, soil or orbit or whatever it's called, the period, 26 months.
So it's right now, like in the evens, like 2022 is going to have one of these 2020, late
2024.
So people could, this was the earliest estimate I heard Elon said, maybe we can send people
to Mars in 2024, you know, to land in 2020, early 2025.
That is not going to happen because that included 2022 sending a cargo ship to Mars.
Maybe even a one in 2020.
And so I think they're not quite on that schedule.
But to my bet, 2027, I have a chance and 2029, I have another chance.
We're not very good at like backing up and seeing the big picture.
We're very distracted by what's going on today and what's, what we can believe because it's
happening in front of our face.
There's no way that humans going to be landing on Mars and it's not going to be the only
thing everyone is talking about.
Right?
I mean, it's going to, it's going to be the moon landing, but even bigger deal going
to another planet, right?
And for it to start a colony, not just to, again, high five and come back.
So this is like the 2020s, maybe the 2030s is going to be the new 1960s.
We're going to have a space decade.
I'm so excited about, and it's again, it's one of the great leaps for all of life happening
in our lifetimes.
Like that's wild.
To paint a slightly cynical possibility, which I don't see happening.
But I just want to put sort of value into leadership.
I think it wasn't obvious that the moon landing would be so exciting for all of human civilization.
Some of that have to do with the right speeches, with the space race, like space, depending
on how it's presented, it could be boring.
I don't, I don't, I don't think it's been that so far, but I've actually
I think space is quite boring right now.
Not, not, not, you know, space is super, but like 10 years ago, space.
Yeah.
I forgot who wrote, it's like the best magic trick in the show happened at the beginning
and now they're starting to do this like easy, you know, it's like, you can't go in that
direction.
And the line that, that this writer said is like watching astronauts go up to the space
station after watching the moon is like watching Columbus sail to Ibiza.
It's just like, you know, it's, everything is so practical.
You're going up to the space station, not to explore, but to do science experiments in
microgravity and you're sending rockets up, you know, not, you know, mostly here and there
is a probe, but mostly you're sending them up to put satellites to, you know, for, for
direct TV, you know, and I or whatever it is.
It's kind of like lame earth industry, you know, usage.
So I agree with you, space is boring there.
The first human setting foot on Mars, that's got to be a crazy global event.
I can't imagine it not being, maybe you're right, maybe I'm taking for granted of the
speeches and the space race and that.
I think the value of, I guess what I'm pushing is the value of people like Elon Musk and
potentially other leaders that hopefully step up is extremely important here.
Like I would argue without the publicity of SpaceX, it's not just the ingenuity of SpaceX,
but like what they've done publicly by having a, a figure that tweets and all that kind
of stuff like that, that, that's a source of inspiration.
Totally.
NASA wasn't able to quite pull off with a shuttle.
That's one of his two reasons for doing this.
SpaceX is just for two reasons.
One life insurance for the species.
If we're on, you know, if you're, if you're, I always think about this way, if you're
an alien on some far away planet and you're rooting against humanity and you win the bet
if humanity goes extinct, you do not like SpaceX.
You do not want them to have their eggs in two baskets now.
Yeah.
You know, it's, sure, it's like obviously this, you know, you could have some, you know,
something that kills everyone on both planets, some AI war or something.
But, but the point is, obviously it's good for our chances, our long-term chances to
be having, you know, chooses self-sustaining civilizations going on.
The second reason he's, you know, he values this, I think, just as high is it's the greatest
adventure in history, you know, going multi-planetary and that, you know, it's, you know, people
need some reason to wake up in the morning and, and, and it'll, it'll just be this hopefully
great uniting event too.
I mean, I'm sure, and today's nasty, awful political environment, which is like a whirlpool
of that sucks everything into it.
So it doesn't mean you name a thing and it's become a nasty political topic.
So I hope, I hope that space can, you know, Mars can just bring everyone together.
But you know, it could become this hideous thing where it's, you know, billionaire,
some annoying storyline gets built.
So half the people think that anyone who's excited about Mars is an evil, you know, something.
Yeah.
Anyway, I hope it, it is super exciting.
So far, space has been a uniting, inspiring thing.
Yes.
And in fact, especially during this time of a pandemic has been just a commercial entity
putting out humans into space for the first time was just a, one of the only big sources
of hope.
Totally.
And aw, just like watching this huge skyscraper go up in the air, flip over, come back down
and land.
I mean, it just makes everyone just want to sit back and clap and kind of like, you know,
where I look at something like SpaceX is it makes me proud to be a human.
And I think it makes a lot of people feel that way.
It's like good for our self esteem.
It's like, you know what, we're pretty, you know, we have a lot of problems, but like,
we're kind of awesome.
Yeah, we're awesome.
And if we can put people on Mars, you know, sticking up an Earth flag on Mars, like, damn,
you know, we should be so proud of our like little family here.
Like we did something cool.
And by the way, I've made it clear to SpaceX people, including Elon, many times and I just
like once a year reminder that if they want to make this more exciting, they send the
writer to Mars on, you know, I was on the thing and I'll blog about it.
So I'm just, you know, continuing to throw this out on which I'm trying to get them to
send me to Mars.
I understand that.
So I just want to clarify on which trip does the writer want to go?
I think my dream one to be honest would be like the, you know, like the Apollo eight
where they just looped around the moon and came back because landing on Mars give you
a lot of good content to write about great content, right?
I mean, the amount of kind of high minded, you know, and so I would go into the thing
and I would blog about it and I'd not be in microgravity, so I'd be bouncing around my
little space.
I get a little, they can just send me in a dragon.
I don't need to do a whole starship and I would bounce around and I would get to, I've
always had a dream of going to like one of those nice jails for a year because I just
have nothing to do besides like read books and no responsibilities and no social plans.
So this is the ultimate version of that.
And anyway, it's a side topic, but I think it would be.
But also if you, I mean, to be honest, if you land on Mars, it's epic.
And then if you die there of like finishing your writing, it will be just even that much
more powerful for the, for the impact.
Yeah.
But then I'm gone and I don't even get to like experience the publication of it, which
is the whole point.
Well, some of the greatest writers in history didn't get a chance to experience the publication
of their.
I know.
I don't really think that, I think like, I think back to Jesus and I'm like, oh man,
that guy really like crushed it, you know?
But then if you think about it, it doesn't like, you could literally die today and then
become the next Jesus like 2000 years from now in this civilization that's like, they're
you know, they're like magical in the clouds and they're worshiping you.
They're worshiping Lex.
And like that sounds like your ego probably would be like, wow, that's pretty cool, except
it irrelevant to you because you never even knew it happened.
This feels like a Rick and Morty episode.
It does.
It does.
Okay.
You've, you've talked to Elon quite a bit.
You've written about him quite a bit.
Just it'd be cool to hear you talk about what are your ideas of what, you know, the magic
sauce as you've written about, about with Elon, what, what makes him so successful?
His style of thinking, his ambition, his dreams, his, the people he connects with, the kind
of problems he tackles.
Is there a kind of comments you can make about what makes him special?
I think that obviously there's a lot of things that he's very good at.
He has, he's, he has, he's obviously super intelligent.
His heart is very much in like, I think the right place.
Like, you know, I really, really believe that.
Like, and I think people can sense that, you know, he just doesn't seem like a grifter
of any kind.
He's truly trying to do these big things for the right reasons.
And he's obviously crazy ambitious and hardworking, right?
Not everyone is.
Some people are as talented and have cool visions, but they just don't want to spend their life
that way.
So, but that's, none of those alone is what makes Elon, Elon.
I mean, if it were, there'd be more of him because there's a lot of people that are very
smart and smart enough to accumulate a lot of money and influence and they have great
ambition and they have, you know, their hearts in the right place.
To me, it is the very unusual quality he has is that he's sane in a way that almost every
human is crazy.
What I mean by that is we are programmed to trust conventional wisdom over our own reasoning
for good reason.
If you go back 50,000 years and conventional wisdom says, you know, don't eat that berry,
you know, or this is the way you tie a spearhead to a spear and you're thinking, I'm smarter
than that.
Like, you're not, you know, that comes from the accumulation of life experience, accumulation
of observation and experience over many generations and that's a little mini version of the collective
super intelligence.
It's like, you know, it's equivalent of like making a pencil today like people back then,
like the conventional wisdom like had this super, this knowledge that no human could
ever accumulate.
So we're very wired to trust it plus the secondary thing is that the people who, you know, just
say that they believe the mountain is, they worship the mountain is their God, right?
And the mountain determines their fate.
That's not true, right?
And the conventional wisdom is wrong there, but believing it was helpful to survival because
you were part of the crowd and you stayed in the tribe.
And if you started to, you know, you know, insult their, the mountain God and say, that's
just a mountain, it's not, you know, you didn't fare very well, right?
So for a lot of reasons, it was a great survival trait to just trust what other people said
and believe it and truly, you know, obviously, you know, the more you really believed it,
the better.
Today, conventional wisdom in a rapidly changing world and a huge, giant society, our brains
are not built to understand that they have a few settings, you know, and none of them
is, you know, 300 million person society.
So they're, so your brain is basically is treating a lot of things like a small tribe,
even though they're not in there.
And they're treating conventional wisdom as, as, you know, very wise in a way that it's
not, if you think about it this way, it's like a picture, a like a bucket that's not
moving very much, very moving like a millimeter a year.
And so it has time to collect a lot of water and that's like conventional wisdom in the
old days when very few things change, like your, your 10, you know, great, great, great
grandmother probably lived a similar life to you, maybe on the same piece of land.
And so old people really knew what they were talking about today, the buckets moving really
quickly.
And so, you know, the wisdom doesn't accumulate, but we think it does because our brain settings
doesn't have the, oh, move, you know, quickly moving bucket setting on it.
So my grandmother gives me advice all the time and I have to decide is this, so there
are certain things that are not changing like relationships and love and loyalty and things
like this.
Her advice on those things, I'll listen to it all day.
She's one of the people who said, you've got to live near your people you love, live near
your family.
Right.
I think that is like tremendous wisdom, right?
That is wisdom because that happens to be something that hasn't, doesn't change from
generation to generation.
For now.
Right.
She all right.
For now.
She's also telling, right.
So I'll be the idiot telling my great, that they'll actually be in the, it's a metaverse
life.
Exactly.
It doesn't matter.
And I'm like, it's not the same when you're not in person.
They're going to say it.
It's exactly the same.
And they'll also be thinking to me with their near link and I'm going to be like, slow down.
I don't understand what you're saying.
You just talk like a normal person.
Anyway.
So, so my grandmother then, but then she says, you know, you're, I don't know about this
writing you're doing.
You should go to law school and, you know, you know, you want to be secure.
And that's not good advice for me.
You know, given the world I'm in and what I like to do and what I'm good at, that's
not the right advice, but because the world is totally, she's in a different world.
So she became wise for a world that's no longer here.
Now, if you think about that, so then when we think about conventional wisdom, it's a
little like my grandmother.
And there's a lot of, no, it's not maybe, you know, 60 years outdated, like her software,
it's maybe 10 years outdated, conventional wisdom, sometimes 20.
So anyway, I think that we all continually don't have the confidence in our own reasoning
when it conflicts with what everyone else thinks, when with what seems right.
We don't have the, the guts to act on that reasoning for that reason, right?
You know, we, we, we, and so there's so many Elon examples.
I mean, just from the beginning, building zip to was the first company.
And it was internet advertising at the time when people said, you know, this internet
was brand new, like kind of like kind of thinking of like the metaverse VR metaverse today and
people being like, oh, we're saying, you know, we, you know, we facilitate internet advertising.
People are saying, yeah, people are going to advertise on the internet.
Yeah.
And you see, it wasn't that he's magical and saw the future is that he looked at the present,
looked at what the internet was, thought about, you know, the obvious like advertising
opportunity this was going to be.
It wasn't rocket science.
It wasn't genius.
I don't believe.
I think it was just seeing the truth.
And when everyone else is laughing saying, well, you're, you're wrong.
I mean, I did the math and here it is, right?
Next company, you know, x.com, which became eventually PayPal.
People said, oh yeah, people are going to put their financial information on the internet.
No way.
To us, it seems so obvious.
If you went back then, you would probably feel the same way you'd think this is a, that
is a fake company that no, it's just obviously not a good idea.
He looked around and said, you know, I see where this is.
And so again, he could see where it was going because he could see what it was that day.
And not what it, you know, not people, conventional wisdom was still a bunch of years earlier.
SpaceX is the ultimate example.
A friend of his apparently bought, actually compiled a montage, video montage of rockets
blowing up to show him, this is not a good idea.
And if, but just even the bigger picture, the amount of billionaires who have like thought
this was, I'm going to start launching rockets and, you know, the amount to failed.
I mean, it's not, conventional wisdom said this isn't a bad endeavor.
He was putting all of his money into landing rockets was another thing.
You know, well, well, if, you know, here's the classic kind of way we are, we reason,
which is if this could be done, NASA would have done it a long time ago because of the
money it would save.
This could be done.
The Soviet Union would have done it back in the sixties.
It's obviously something that can't be done.
And the math on his envelope said, well, I think it can be done.
And so he just did it.
So in each of these cases, I think actually in some ways he long gets too much credit
as, you know, people think it's, it's that he's, you know, it's that his Einstein intelligence
or his, he can see the future.
He has incredible, he has incredible guts.
He's so courageous.
I think if you actually are looking at reality and you're just assessing probabilities and
you're ignoring all the noise, which is wrong, so wrong, right?
And you just, then you just have to be, you know, pretty smart and, you know, pretty courageous.
And you have to have this magical ability to be sane and trust your reasoning over conventional
wisdom because your individual reasoning, you know, part of it is that we see that we
can't build a pencil.
We can't build, you know, the civilization on our own, right?
So we kind of count, you know, to the, to the collective, for good reason, but this
is different when it comes to kind of what's possible, you know, the Beatles were doing
their kind of Motown-y chord patterns in the early 60s and they were doing what was normal.
They were doing what was clearly this kind of sound is a hit.
Then they started getting weird because they had, they were so popular, they had this confidence
to say, let's just, we're going to start just experimenting.
And it turns out that like, if you just, all these people are in this like one groove together
doing music and it's just like, there's a lot of land over there.
And it seems like, you know, I'm sure the managers would say, and that the, all the
record exacts would say, no, you have to be here.
This is what sells.
And it's just not true.
So I think that Elon is why, the term for this that actually Elon likes to use is reasoning
from first principles, the physics term.
First principles are your axioms and physicists, they don't say, well, what's, you know, what,
what do people think?
No, they say, what are the axioms?
Those are the puzzle pieces.
Let's use those to build a conclusion.
That's our hypothesis.
Now let's test it, right?
And they come up with all kinds of new things constantly by doing that.
If Einstein was assuming conventional wisdom was right, he never would have even tried
to create something that really disproved Newton's laws.
And the other way to reason is reasoning by analogy, which is a great shortcut.
It's when we look at other people's reasoning and we kind of photocopy it into our head,
we steal it.
So reasoning by analogy, we do all the time.
And it's usually a good thing.
I mean, we don't, if you, it takes a lot of mental energy and time to reason from first
principles, it's actually, you know, you don't want to reinvent the wheel every time, right?
You want to often copy other people's reasoning most of the time.
And I, you know, most of us do it most of the time and that's good, but there's certain
moments when you're forget just for a second, like succeeding in like the world of like
Elon, just who you're going to marry, where are you going to settle down?
How are you going to raise your kids?
How are you going to educate your kids?
How you should educate yourself?
What kind of career paths in terms of these moments?
This is what on your deathbed, like you look back on and that's what these are the few
number of choices that really define your life.
Those should not be reasoned by analogy.
You should absolutely try to reason from first principles.
And Elon, not just by the way in his work, but in his personal life.
I mean, if you just look at the way he's on Twitter, it's not how you're supposed to
be when you're a super famous, you know, you know, industry Titan, you're not supposed
to just be silly on Twitter and do memes and, and getting little, little quibbles with you.
He just does things his own way, regardless of what you're supposed to do, which sometimes
serves him and sometimes doesn't, but I think it has taken him where it has taken him.
Yeah.
I mean, I probably wouldn't describe his approach to Twitter as first principles, but I guess
it has the same element.
I think it is.
Well, first of all, I will say that a lot of tweets, people think, oh, like he's going
to be done after that.
He's fine.
He's on, you know, he's just, he's just one man, time man of the year.
Like it's something is, it's, it's not sinking him.
And I think, you know, it's not that I, it's not that I think this is like super reasoned
out.
I think that, you know, Twitter is his silly side.
But I think that he saw, he, with his reasoning, did not feel like there was a giant risk in
just being his silly self on Twitter when a lot of billionaires would say, well, no one
else is doing that.
So it must be a good reason, right?
Well, I got to say that he inspires me to, that's okay to be silly on Twitter.
And but yeah, you're right.
The big inspiration is the willingness to do that when nobody else is doing it.
Yeah.
And I think about all the great artists, you know, all the great inventors and entrepreneurs,
almost all of them, they had a moment when they trusted their reason.
I mean, Airbnb was over 60 with VCs.
A lot of people would say, obviously they know something we done, right?
But they didn't.
They said, I think they're all wrong.
I mean, that's, that takes some kind of different wiring in your brain.
And then that's both for big picture and detailed, like engineering problems.
It's fun to talk to him.
It's fun to talk to Jim Keller, who's a good example of this kind of thinking about like
manufacturing, how to get cost down.
They always talk about like, they talk about SpaceX rockets this way.
They talk about manufacturing this way, like cost per pound or per ton to get to orbit
or something like that.
Yeah.
This is not the reason we need to get the cost down.
It's a very kind of raw materials.
Yeah.
Like just very basic way of thinking.
The first principles.
It's really, yeah.
And the first principles of a rocket are like the price of raw materials and gravity and
wind.
I mean, these are your first principles and fuel.
Henry Ford, what made Henry Ford blow up as an entrepreneur?
The assembly line.
Right?
I mean, he thought for a second and said, this isn't how manufacturing is normally done
this way, but I think this is a different kind of product.
And that's what changed it.
Because, you know, and then what happens is when someone reasons from first principles,
they often fail.
You're going out into the fog with no conventional wisdom to guide you.
But when you succeed, what you notice is that everyone else turns and says, wait, what,
what are they doing?
What are they all?
They flock over.
Look at the iPhone.
iPhone, you know, Steve Jobs was obviously famously good at reasoning from first principles
because that guy had crazy self-confidence.
He just said, you know, if I think this is right, like everyone and that, I mean, I don't
know how, I don't know how he does that.
And I don't think Apple can do that anymore.
I mean, they lost that, that one brain, his ability to do that was made of that in a totally
different company.
Even though there's tens of thousands of people there.
He said, he didn't say, you know, I'm giving a lot of credit to Steve Jobs, but of course
it was a team at Apple who said they didn't look at the flip phones and say, okay, well,
kind of, you know, let's make a, you know, keyboard that's like clicky and, you know,
really cool Apple keyboard.
They said, what should a mobile device be?
You know, what the axioms, what are the axioms here?
And none of them involved a keyboard necessarily and by the time they piece it up, there was
no keyboards.
It didn't make sense.
Everyone suddenly is going, wait, what?
What are they doing?
What are they doing?
And now every phone looks like the iPhone.
I mean, that's, that's how it goes.
You tweeted, what's something you've changed your mind about?
That's the question you've tweeted.
Elon replied, brain transplants, Sam Harris responded, nuclear power.
There's a bunch of people with cool responses there.
In general, what are your thoughts about some of the responses and what have you changed
your mind about, big or small, perhaps in doing the research for some of your writing?
So I'm writing right now, just finishing a book on kind of why our society is such a
shit place at the moment, just polarized and, you know, we have all these gifts like we're
talking about just the supermarket, you know, we have these exploding technology, fewer and
fewer people are in poverty.
You know, it's Louis CK, you know, likes to say, you know, everything's amazing and
no one's happy, right?
But, but, but it's really extreme moment right now where it's like, hate is on the
rise, like crazy things, right?
And if I could interrupt briefly, you did tweet that you just wrote the last word.
I sure did.
And then there's some hilarious asshole who said, now you just have to work on all the
ones in the middle.
Yeah, I've heard that.
I mean, when you, when you earn a reputation as a, as a tried and true procrastinator,
you're just going to get shit forever.
And that's fine.
I accept my fate there.
So do you mind sharing a little bit more about the details of what you're writing?
So you're, uh, what, what, how do you approach this question about the state of society?
I wanted to figure out what was going on because, um, what I noticed was a bad trend.
It's not that, you know, things are bad.
It's that things are getting worse in certain ways, not in every way.
And if you look at Max Rosar stuff, um, you know, he comes up with all these amazing graphs.
This is what's weird is that things are getting better in almost every important metric you
can think of, um, except the amount of people who hate other people in their own country
and the amount of people that hate their own country, that the amount of Americans that
hate America is on the rise, right?
The amount of Americans that hate other Americans is on the rise, uh, the amount of Americans
that hate the president is on the rise, all these things, like on the very steep rise.
So what the hell?
What's going on?
Like there's something, there's something causing that.
It's not that, you know, a bunch of new people were born who were just dicks.
It's that something is going on.
So I think of it as a very simple, oversimplified equation, um, human behavior, uh, and it's
the output that I think the two inputs are human nature and environment, right?
And this is basic, you know, super, super kindergarten level, like, you know, uh, animal
behavior, but I think it's worth thinking about.
You've got human nature, which is not changing very much, right?
And then you got, you throw that nature into a certain environment and it reacts to the
environment, right?
It's, it's shaped by the environment.
And then eventually what comes out is behavior, right?
Human nature is not changing very much, but suddenly we're, we're behaving differently,
right?
We are, again, you know, look at the polls.
Like it used to be that the president, you know, was liked by, I don't remember the exact
numbers, but you know, 80% or 70% of, of their own party and, you know, 50% of the other
party.
20% of their own party and 10% of the other party, you know, it's, it's, and it's not
that the presidents are getting worse and maybe some people would argue that they are,
but more so, and there's a lot of, you know, idiot presidents throughout the, what's going
on is something in the environment is changing and that's, that's, you're seeing as a change
in behavior.
A easy example here is that, you know, by a lot of metrics, racism is getting, is becoming
less and less of a problem.
Um, you know, the, the, the, the, this hard to measure, but there's metrics like, you
know, how upset would you be if your kid married someone of another race?
And that number is plummeting, but racial grievance is skyrocketing, right?
There's a lot of examples like this.
So I, I wanted to look around and say, and the reason I took it on, the reason I don't
think this is just an unfortunate trend, unpleasant trend that hopefully we come out of is that
all this other stuff I like to write about, all this future stuff, right?
And is this magical?
I always think of this, I'm very optimistic in a lot of ways.
And I think that our world would be a utopia, would seem like actual heaven, like whatever
Thomas Jefferson was picturing as heaven.
Other than maybe the eternal life aspect, I think that if he came to 2021 us, it would
be better.
It's cooler than heaven.
What we live in a place that's cooler than 1700s heaven again, other than the fact that
we still die.
Now, I think that future world actually probably would have a quote, eternal life.
I don't think anyone wants to turn to life actually, if people think they do eternal
is a long time.
But I think the truth, the choice to die when you want, maybe we're uploaded, maybe, maybe
we can refresh our bodies.
I don't know what it is, but the point is, I think about that utopia.
And I do believe that if we don't botch this, we'd be heading towards somewhere that would
seem like heaven, maybe in our lifetimes.
Of course, if things go wrong, now think about the trends here.
Just like the 20th century would seem like some magical utopia to someone from the 16th
century, the bad things in the 20th century were kind of the worst things ever in terms
of just absolute magnitude, World War II, the biggest genocides ever.
You've got maybe climate change, if it is the existential threat that many people think
it is.
I mean, we never had an existential threat on that level before.
I mean, so the good is getting better and the bad is getting worse.
And so what I think about the future, I think of us as some kind of big, long canoe as a
species, 5 million mile long canoe, each of us sitting in a row.
We each have one oar and we can paddle on the left side or the right side.
And what we know is there's a fork up there somewhere.
And at the river forks, and there's a utopia on one side and a dystopia on the other side.
And I really believe that we're probably not headed for just an okay future.
It's just the way tech is exploding, like it's probably going to be really good or really
bad.
The question is which side should we be rowing on?
We can't see up there, right?
But it really matters.
So I'm writing about this future stuff and I'm saying none of this matters if we're squabbling
our way into kind of like a civil war right now, so what's going on?
So it's a really important problem to solve.
What are your sources of hope in this?
So like how do you steer the canoe?
One of my big sources of hope, and this is my putting my answer to what I changed my
mind on, is I think I always knew this, but it's easy to forget it.
Our primitive brain does not remember this fact, which is that I don't think there are
very many bad people.
Now you say bad, are there selfish people?
Most of us, I think that if you think of people, there's digital languages, ones and zeros.
And our primitive brain very quickly can get into the land where everyone's a one or a
zero.
Our tribe, we're all ones.
We're perfect.
I'm perfect.
My family is that other family.
It's that other tribe.
There are zeros.
And you dehumanize them, right?
These people are awful.
So zero is not a human place.
No one's a zero and no one's a one.
You're dehumanizing yourself.
So when we get into this land, I call it political Disney world, because in Disney movies, good
guys have, you know, scar is totally bad and Mufasa is totally good, right?
You don't see Mufasa's character flaws and you don't see Scar's upbringing that made
him like that, that humanizes him.
No, lionizes him, whatever.
You are-
Well done.
Yeah.
Mufasa's a one and Scar's a zero.
Very simple.
Yeah.
So political Disney world is a place, a psychological place that all of us have been in, and it can
be religious Disney world, it can be national Disney world and the war, whatever it is,
but it's a place where we fall into this delusion that there are protagonists and antagonists
and that's it, right?
That is not true.
We are all 0.5s or maybe 0.6s to 0.4s in that.
We are also, on one hand, it's not, I don't think there's that many really great people,
frankly.
I think if you get into it, people are kind of a lot of people, you know, most of us
have, you know, if you get really into our most shameful memories, the things we've done
that are worse, the most shameful thoughts, the deep selfishness that some of us have
in areas we wouldn't want to admit, right?
Most of us have a lot of unadmirable stuff, right?
On the other hand, if you actually got into, really got into someone else's brain and you
looked at their upbringing, you looked at the trauma that they've experienced and then
you looked at the insecurities they have and you look at all their, if you assemble the
highlight reel of your worst moments, the meanest things you've ever done, the worst,
the most selfish, the times, you know, you stole something, whatever, and you just,
people were like, wow, Lex is an awful person.
If you highlighted your, if you did a montage of your best moments, people would say, oh,
he's a god, right?
But of course, we all have both of those.
So I've started to really try to remind myself that everyone's a 0.5, right?
And 0.5s are all worthy of criticism and we're all worthy of compassion.
And the thing that makes me hopeful is that I really think that there's a bunch of 0.5s
and 0.5s are good enough that we should be able to create a good society together.
There's a lot of love in every human.
And I think there's more love in humans than hate.
You know, I always remember this moment.
This is weird anecdote, but I was at, I'm a Red Sox fan, Boston Red Sox baseball, and
Derek Jeter is who we hate the most.
He's on the Yankees.
Yes.
And hate, right?
Jeter, right?
Yeah.
He was his last game in Fenway.
He's retiring.
And he got this rousing standing ovation and I almost cried.
And it was like, what is going on?
We hate this guy, but actually there's so much love in all humans, you know.
It felt so good to just give a huge cheer to this guy we hate because it's like this moment
of like a little fist pound, being like, of course, we all actually love each other.
And I think there's so much of that.
And so the thing that I think I've come around on is I just, I don't, I think that we are
in an environment that's bringing out really bad stuff.
I don't think it's, if I thought it was the people, I would be more hopeful.
Like if I thought it was human nature, I'd be, you know, I'd be more upset.
It's the two independent variables here, or there's a fixed variable, there's a constant,
which is human nature.
And there's the independent variable environment and the behavior is the dependent variable.
I like that the thing that I think is bad is the independent variable, the environment,
which means I think we can, the environment can get better.
And there's a lot of things I can go into about why the environment I think is bad.
But I have hope because I think the thing that's bad for us is something that can change.
The first principles idea here is that most people have the capacity to be a 0.70 to 0.9
if the environment is properly calibrated with the right incentives.
I think that, well, I think that, I think maybe if we're all, yeah, if we're all 0.5s,
I think that environments can bring out our good side.
You know, yes, if maybe we're all on some kind of distribution and the right environment
can, yes, can bring out our higher sides.
And I think a lot of, in a lot of ways, you could say it has, I mean, the U.S. environment,
we take for granted how the liberal laws and liberal environment that we live in, I mean,
like in New York City, if you walk down the street and you assault someone, A, if anyone
sees you, they're probably going to yell at you, you might get your ass kicked by someone
for doing that.
You also might end up in jail, you know, if it's security cameras and there's just norms.
You know, we're all trained, that's what awful people do, right?
So there's, it's not the human nature doesn't have it in it to be like that.
It's that this environment we're in has made that a much, much, much smaller experience
for people.
There's so many examples like that where it's like, man, you don't realize how much of
the worst human nature is contained by our environment.
And but I think that, you know, rapidly changing environment, which is what we have right now,
social media starts.
I mean, what a seismic change to the environment.
There's a lot of examples like that rapidly changing environment can create rapidly changing
behavior and wisdom sometimes can't keep up.
And so we, you know, we can, we can really kind of lose our grip on some of the good
behavior.
Were you surprised by Elon's answer about brain transplants or sands about nuclear power
or anything else?
Just Sam's, I think is, I have a friend, Isabel Bo-Mecke, who has a, who's a nuclear
power influencer.
I've become very convinced and I've not done my deep dive on this.
But here's, in this case, this is, this is reasoning by analogy here.
The amount of really smart people I respect who all, who seem to have dug in, who all
say nuclear power is clearly a good option.
It's obviously emission free, but you know, the, the concerns about meltdowns and waste,
they see, they say they're completely overblown.
So judging from those people, secondary knowledge here, I will say I'm, I'm a, I'm a strong
advocate.
I haven't done my own deep dive yet, but it does seem like a little bit odd that you've
got people who are so concerned about climate change who have, it seems like it's kind of
an ideology where nuclear power doesn't fit rather than rational, you know, fear of climate
change that somehow is anti-nuclear power.
It just, yeah.
I personally am uncomfortably reasoning by analogy with climate change.
I've actually have not done a deep dive myself.
Me neither, because it's so, man, it seems like a deep dive.
And my reasoning by analogy there currently has me thinking it's a truly existential thing,
but feeling hopeful.
So let me, this is me speaking, and this is speaking from a person who's not done the
deep dive.
I'm a little suspicious of the amount of fear mongering going on.
I've, especially over the past couple of years, I've gotten uncomfortable with fear
mongering in all walks of life.
There's way too many people interested in manipulating the populace with fear.
And so I don't like it.
I should probably do a deep dive because to me it's at the, well, the, the big problem
with the opposition to climate change or whatever the fear mongering is that it also grows
the skepticism and science broadly.
It's like, and that, so I need to make sure I do that deep dive.
I have listened to a few folks who kind of criticize the fear mongering and all those
kinds of things, but they're few and far between.
And so it's like, all right, what is the truth here?
And it feels lazy, but it also feels like it's hard to get to the, like there's a lot
of kind of activists talking about idea versus like sources of objective, like calm first
principles type reasoning.
Like one of the things, I know it's supposed to be a very big problem, but when people
talk about catastrophic effects of climate change, I haven't been able to like see really
great deep analysis of what that looks like in 10, 20, 30 years, raising, rising sea levels.
What are the models of how that changes human behavior, society?
What are the things that happen?
There's going to be constraints on the resources and people are going to have to move around.
This is happening gradually.
Are we going to be able to respond to this?
How would we respond to this?
What are the best, like what are the best models for how everything goes wrong?
And I was, this is a question I keep starting to ask myself without doing any research,
like motivating myself to get up to this deep dive that I feel is deep, just watching people
not do a great job of that kind of modeling with the pandemic and sort of being caught
off guard and wondering, okay, if we're not good with this pandemic, how are we going
to respond to other kinds of tragedies?
Well, this is part of why I wrote the book, because I said, we're going to have more
and more of these like big collective, what should we do here situations, whether it's
how about when we're probably not that far away from people being able to go and decide
the IQ of their kid or like make a bunch of embryos and actually pick the highest IQ.
Can possibly go wrong.
And also imagine the political sides of that and like something only wealthy people can
afford it first and just the nightmare, right?
We need to be able to have our wits about us as a species where we can actually get
into a topic like that and come up with it where the collective brain can be smart.
I think that there are certain topics where I think of this and this is again another
simplistic model, but I think it works is that there's a higher mind and a primitive
mind, right?
You can, you know, in your head and these team up with others.
So when the higher minds are in a higher mind is more rational and puts out ideas that it's
not attached to.
And so it can, it can change its mind easily because it's just an idea and the higher mind
can get criticized.
Their ideas can get criticized and it's no big deal.
And so when the higher minds team up, it's like all these people in the room, like throwing
out ideas and kicking them and one idea goes out and everyone criticizes it, which is like,
you know, shooting bows and arrows at it and the truth, the true idea is, you know, the
arrows bounce off and it's so, okay, it rises up and the other ones get shot down.
So there's this incredible system.
This is what, you know, this is what a good science institution is, is, you know, someone
puts out a thing, criticism, arrows come at it and, you know, most of them fall and the
needle is in the haystack end up rising up, right?
Incredible mechanisms.
So what that's happening is a bunch of people, a bunch of flawed medium scientists are creating
super intelligence.
Then there's the primitive mind, which, you know, is the more limbic system part of our
brain.
It's the, it's a part of us that is very much not living in 2021.
It's living many tens of thousands of years ago and it does not treat ideas like this
separate thing.
It identifies with its ideas.
It only gets involved when it finds an idea sacred.
It starts holding an idea sacred and it starts identifying.
So what happens is they team up too.
And so when you have a topic that a bunch of primitive, that really rouses a bunch of
primitive minds, it quickly, the primitive minds team up and they create an echo chamber
where suddenly no one can criticize this.
And in fact, if it's powerful enough, people outside the community, no one can criticize
it.
We will get your paper retracted.
We will get you fired.
Right?
That's not higher mind behavior.
That is crazy primitive mind.
And so now what happens is the collective becomes dumber than an individual, a dumber
than a reason, a single reasoning individual.
You have this collective is suddenly attached to this sacred scripture with the idea and
they will not change their mind and they get dumber and dumber.
And so climate change, what's worrisome is that climate change has in many ways become
a sacred topic where if you come up with a nuanced thing, you might get called branded
a denier.
Yes.
So there goes the super intelligence, all the arrows, no arrows can be fired, but if
you get called a denier, that's a social penalty for firing an arrow at a certain orthodoxy.
And so what's happening is the big brain gets frozen and it becomes very stupid.
Now, you can also say that about a lot of other topics right now.
You just mentioned another one.
I forget what it was, but that's also kind of like this.
The world of vaccine.
Yeah.
COVID.
Okay.
And here's my point earlier is that what I see is that the political divide is like
a whirlpool that's pulling everything into it.
And in that whirlpool, thinking is done with the primitive mind tribes.
And so I get, okay, obviously something like race.
That makes sense.
That also right now.
The topic of race, for example, or gender, these things are in the whirlpool.
But that at least is like, okay, that's something that the primitive mind would always get really
worked up about.
It taps into like our deepest kind of like primal selves.
COVID, maybe it's COVID in a way too, but climate change, like that should just be something
that our rational brains are like, let's solve this complex problem.
But the problem is that it's all gotten sucked into the red versus blue whirlpool.
And once that happens, it's in the hands of the primitive minds and we're losing our
ability to be wise together to make decisions where it's like, it's like the big species
brain is like, or the big American brain is like, drunk at the wheel right now.
And we're about to go into our future with more and more big technologies, scary things
with to make big, right decisions and not, you know, we're getting dumber as a collective
and that that's part of this environmental problem.
So within the space of technologists and the space of scientists, we should allow the
arrows.
And that's one of the saddest things to me about is like the scientists, like I've seen
arrogance.
There's a lot of mechanisms that maintain the tribe.
It's the arrogance.
It's, it's, it's how you built up the, this mechanism that defends this wall that defends
against the arrows.
It's arrogance, credentialism, like just ego really, and then just it protects you from
actually challenging your own ideas, this ideal of science that makes science beautiful
in, in a time of fear and in a time of division created by perhaps politicians that leverage
the fear.
It, like you said, makes the whole system dumber.
The science system dumber, the, the tech developer system dumber, if they don't allow
the challenging of ideas.
What's really bad is that like in a normal environment, you're always going to have echo
chambers.
And so what's the opposite of an echo chamber?
I created a term for it because I think we need it, which is called an ideal lab, an
ideal lab, right?
It's like people treat, it's like people act like scientists, even they're not doing
science.
They just treat their ideas like science experiments and they toss them out there and everyone
disagrees and disagreement is like the game.
Everyone likes to disagree, you know, on a certain text thread where everyone is just,
you know, saying, you know, it's almost like someone throws something out and just it's
an impulse for the rest of the group to say, oh, I think you're being like overly general
there.
Yeah, aren't you kind of being, I think that's like your bias showing and it's like no one's
getting offended because it's like we're all just messing, we all of course respect each
other.
Obviously, we're just, we're just, you know, trashing each other's ideas and that the
whole group becomes smarter.
You're always going to have ideal labs and echo chambers, right, in different communities
and most of us participate in both of them, you know, and, you know, maybe in your marriage
is a great idea lab.
You love to disagree with your, your spouse and maybe in, but the, this group of friends
are at your family at home, you know, you know, in front of that sister, you do not
bring up politics because she's now enforced when that happens, her bullying is forcing
the whole room to be an echo chamber to appease her.
Now, what's, what scares me is that usually have these things existing kind of in bubbles
and usually there's like an, they each have their natural defenses against each other.
So an echo chamber person stays in their echo chamber.
They don't like, they will cut you out.
They don't like, they don't like to be friends with people who disagree with them.
You notice that they will cut you out.
They'll cut out their parents if they vote for Trump or whatever, right?
So they're, that's how they do it.
They will say, I'm going to stay inside of an echo chamber safely.
So my ideas, which I identify with, because my primitive mind is doing the thinking are
not going to ever have to get challenged because it feels so scary and awful for that to happen.
But if they leave and they go into an idea lab environment, they're going to, people
are going to say, what?
No, they're going to disagree.
And they're going to say, and the person is going to try to bully, you know, they're
going to say, that's really offensive and people are going to say, no, it's not.
And they're going to, they're going to immediately say, these people are assholes, right?
So the echo chamber person, it doesn't have much power once they leave the echo chamber.
Likewise, the idea lab person, they have this great environment, but if they go into an
echo chamber where everyone else is, and they do that, they'll get kicked out of the group,
they'll get branded as something, you know, a denier or a racist, you know, a right-wing
or a radical, you know, these, these, these nasty words.
The thing that I don't like right now is that the echo chambers have found ways to forcefully
expand into places that normally are, have a pretty good immune system against echo chambers
like universities, like science journals, places where usually it's like there's a strong
idea lab culture.
They're veritas, you know, you know, that's, that's an idea lab slogan.
You have is that these people have found a way to, a lot of people have found a way to
actually go out of their thing and keep their echo chamber by making sure that everyone
is scared because they can punish anyone, whether you're in their community or not.
That's all brilliantly put.
Here's the book coming up and the idea June, July, we're not quite sure yet.
Okay.
I can't wait.
Thanks.
It's awesome.
Do you have a title yet?
Or you can't talk about that.
Still working on it.
Okay.
If it's okay, just a couple of questions from Mailbag.
I just love these.
I would love to, I would love to hear you riff on these.
So one is about film and music.
Why do we prefer to watch the question goes?
Why do we prefer to watch a film?
We haven't watched before, but we want to listen to songs that we have heard hundreds
of times.
This question and your answer really started to make me think like, yeah, that's true.
That's really interesting.
Like we draw that line somehow.
So what's the answer?
So I think let's use these two minds again.
I think that when you're higher mind is the one who's taking something in and they're
really interested in, you know, what are the lyrics or I'm going to learn something or
what, you know, like reading a book or whatever and the higher mind is, is trying to get information
and once it has it, there's no point in listening to it again, it has the information, you know,
your rational brain is like, I got it.
But when you eat a good meal or have sex or whatever, you're, that's something you can
do again and again because it actually, your primitive brain loves it, right?
And it never gets bored of things that it loves.
So I think music is a very primal thing.
I think music goes right into our primitive brain a lot, you know, you know, I think it's
of course it's a collaboration, your, you know, your, your rational brain is absorbing
the actual message and, but I think it's all about emotions and even more than emotions.
It literally like the music taps into like some very, very deep, you know, primal part
of us.
And so when you hear a song once, even your, some of your favorite songs, the first time
you heard it, you were like, I guess that's kind of catchy.
Yeah.
And then some, and then then you end up loving it on the 10th listen, but sometimes you even
don't even like a song, you're like, oh, this song sucks, but you suddenly you find yourself
on the 40th time because it's on the radio all the time, just kind of being like, oh,
I love this song.
And you're like, wait, I don't, I hated the song.
And what's happening is that the sound is actually, the music is actually carving a
pathway in your brain and it's a dance.
And when your brain knows what's coming, it can dance, it knows the steps.
So your brain is your internal kind of, your brain is actually dancing with the music and
it knows the steps and it's, it can anticipate and it, and it, and so there's something
about knowing, having memorized the song that makes it incredibly enjoyable to us.
But when we hear it for the first time, we don't know where it's going to go.
We're like an awkward dancer.
We don't know the steps and your primitive brain can't really have that much fun yet.
That's how I feel.
And in the movies, that's more, that's less primitive.
That's the story you're, you're, you're taking in.
But a really good movie that we really love, often we will watch it like 12 times, you
know, it's still like it, you know, not, not that many, but versus if you're watching
a talk show, right?
You're listening to, if you're listening to a pot, one of your podcasts as a perfect
example, there's not many people that will listen to one of your podcasts, no matter
how good it is 12 times because it's, you, you, once you've got it, you got it.
It's a form of information that's very higher mind focused.
That's, that's how I, well, you know, the funny thing is there is people that listen
to a podcast episode many, many times.
And often I think the reason for that is not because of the information is the chemistry
is the music of the conversation.
So it's not the actual.
It's the art of it they like.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They'll, they'll fall in love with some kind of person, some weird personality and they'll
just be listening to, they'll be captivated by the, the beat of that kind of person.
Or like a stand up comic.
I've watched like certain things like episodes like 20 times, even though, you know, I have
to ask you about the wizard hat.
You're at a blog about Neuralink.
I got a chance to visit Neuralink a couple of times hanging out with those folks.
Um, your, that was one of the pieces of writing you did that like changes culture and changes
the way people think about a thing.
The ridiculousness of your stick figure drawings or somehow, um, it's like, you know, it's like
calling the origin of the universe, the big bang, the silly title, but it somehow sticks
to be the representative of, of, uh, of that in the same way the wizard hat for the Neuralink
is, um, somehow was a really powerful way to, to explain that.
You actually proposed that the, the man of the year cover of time should be, um,
One of my drawings.
One of your drawings.
Yes.
This is an outrage that it wasn't.
It was.
Okay.
So, uh, what are your thoughts about like all those years later about Neuralink?
What would you find this idea like, what excites you about is the big longterm philosophical
things is that the practical things do you think is super difficult to do on the neurosurgery
side and the material engineering, the robotics side, or do you think, um, the machine learning
side for the brain computer interfaces where they get to learn and bought each other, all
that kind of stuff.
I would just love to get your thoughts because you're one of the people that really considered
this problem, really studied it.
Yeah.
Computer interfaces.
I mean, I'm super excited about it.
Um, it's a, I really think it's actually Elon's most ambitious.
More than colonizing Mars, because that's just a bunch of people going somewhere, even
though it's somewhere far, Neuralink is changing what a person is, um, eventually.
Now I think that Neuralink engineers and Elon himself would all be the first to admit that
it is a maybe that whether they can do their goals here, I mean, it is so crazy ambitious
to try to, you know, their eventual goals are, you know, of course, in the interim,
they have a higher probability of accomplishing smaller things, which are still huge.
Like basically solving paralysis, uh, you know, strokes, Parkinson, things like that.
I mean, it can be unbelievable and, you know, anyone who doesn't have one of these things,
like we might, you know, we should, everyone should be very happy about, um, this kind
of, um, helping with different disabilities.
Um, but the thing that is like, so the, the grand goal is this augmentation where it's
you take someone who's totally healthy and you put a brain machine interface in any way
to give them superpowers.
Um, I, you know, it's the, the possibilities if they can do this, if they can really, so
you know, they've already shown that they are for real with, you know, they've created
this robot.
Elon talks about like, it should be like LASIK where it's not, it shouldn't be something
that needs a surgeon that shouldn't just be for rich people who have waited in line for
six months.
It should be for anyone who can afford LASIK and eventually hopefully something that is
not covered by insurance or, you know, something that anyone can do, um, something this big
a deal should be something that anyone can afford eventually.
And when we have this, again, I'm talking about a very advanced phase down the road.
So maybe a less advanced phase just to, just there, maybe right now, uh, if you think about
when you listen to a mute, when you listen to a song, what's happening is do you actually
hear the sound?
Well, not really, it's that the sound is coming out of the speaker.
The speaker is vibrating, it's vibrating air molecules, those air molecules, you know,
get vibrated all the way to your, your head, um, uh, the pressure wave.
And then it vibrates your eardrum.
Your eardrum is really the speaker now in your head that then vibrates bones and fluid,
which then stimulates neurons in your auditory cortex, which give you the perception that
you're hearing sound.
Now, if you think about that, do we really need to have a speaker to do that?
You could just somehow, if you had a little tiny thing that could vibrate your eardrums,
you could do it that way.
That seems very hard.
But really what you need, if you go to the very end with a thing that really needs to
happen is your auditory cortex neurons need to be stimulated in a certain way.
If you have a ton of neurolink things in there, neurolink electrodes, and then they're
getting really good at stimulating things, you could play a song in your head that you
hear that not is not playing anywhere.
There's no sound in the room, but you hear it and no one else could.
It's not like they can get close to your head and hear it.
There's no sound.
They could not hear anything, but you hear sound, you can turn up, so you open your phone,
you have the neurolink app, you open the neurolink app, you know, and, and, or it's just neural.
So basically you can open your Spotify and you can play to, you know, you're, you're,
you can play to your speaker, you can play to your computer, you can play right out of
your phone, to your headphones, or you can, you have now have a new one.
You can play into your brain.
And this is one of the earlier things.
This is, you know, something that seems like really doable.
So, you know, no more headphones.
I always think that's so annoying because I can leave the house with just my phone,
you know, and nothing else.
So even just an Apple watch, but there's always this one thing I'm like, and headphones.
You do need your headphones, right?
So I feel like, you know, that'll be the end of that.
But there's so many things that you, and you keep going, the ability to think together.
You know, you can talk about like super brains.
I mean, one of the examples Elon uses is that the low bandwidth of speech.
If I go to a movie and I, and I come out of a scary movie and you say, how was it?
Oh, it was terrifying.
Well, what did I just do?
I just gave you a, I just gave you, I had five buckets I could have given you.
One was horrifying, terrifying, scary, eerie, creepy, whatever.
That's about it, and I had a much more nuanced experience than that.
And I don't, all I have is, you know, these, these words, right?
And so instead I just hand you the bucket where I put the stuff in the bucket and give
it to you.
But all you have is the bucket.
You just have to guess what I put into that bucket.
All you can do is look at the label of the bucket and say, I'll, when I say terrifying,
here's what I mean.
So the point is it's very lossy.
I had this, all this nuanced, nuanced information of what I thought of the movie, and I'm sending
you a very low res package that you're going to now guess what the high res thing looked
like.
That's language in general.
Our thoughts are much more nuanced.
We can think to each other.
We can do amazing things.
We could have a brainstorm that doesn't feel like, oh, we're not talking in each other's
head.
It's not just that I hear your voice.
No, no, no.
We are just thinking.
No, no words are being said internally or externally.
The two brains are literally collaborating.
It's something, it's a skill.
I'm sure we'd have to get good at it.
I'm sure young kids will be great at it and old people will be bad.
But you think together and together you like, oh, have they joined Epiphany?
And now how about eight people in a room doing it?
So it gets, there's other examples.
How about when you're a dress designer or a bridge designer and you want to show people
what your dress looks like?
Well, right now you've got to sketch it for a long time.
Here just beam it onto the screen from your head.
So you can picture it.
If you can picture a tree in your head, well, you can just suddenly, whatever's in your
head, you can be pictured.
So we'll have to get very good at it and take a skill.
You're going to have to.
But the possibilities, my God, talk about like, I feel like if that works, if we really
do have that as something, I think it'll almost be like a new ADBC line.
It's such a big change that the idea of like anyone living before everyone had brain machine
interfaces is living in like before the common era.
It's that level of like big change if it can work.
Yeah.
And like replay of memories, just replaying stuff in your head.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
And copying, you know, you can hopefully copy memories onto other things and you don't have
to just rely on your, you know, your wet circuitry.
It does make me sad because you're right.
The brain is incredibly neuroplastic and so it can adjust, it can learn how to do this.
I think it'll be a skill, but probably you and I will be too old to truly learn.
Well, maybe we can get, they'll be great trainings, you know, I'm spending the next three months
in like a, you know, in a, one of the neurolinked trainings, but it'll still be a bit of like
grandpa.
I can definitely.
This is, you know, I was saying, how am I going to be old?
I'm like, no, I'm going to be great at the new phones.
It's like, how can it be the phones?
It's going to be the, you know, the kid's going to be thinking to me.
I'm going to be like, I just, can you just talk please?
And they're going to be like, okay, I'll just talk and they're going to.
So that'll be the equivalent of, you know, yelling to your grandpa today.
I really suspect, I don't know what your thoughts are, but I grew up in a time when physical
contact interaction was valuable.
I just feel like that's going to go the way that's going to disappear.
Well, why?
I mean, is there anything more intimate than thinking with each other?
I mean, that's, you talk about, you know, once we were all doing that, it might feel
like, man, everyone was so isolated from each other before.
Yeah.
Sorry.
So I didn't say that intimacy disappears.
I just meant physical, having to be in the same, having to touch each other is people
like that.
If it is important, won't, won't there be whole waves of people start to say, you know, there's
all these articles that come out about how, you know, in our metaverse, we, we've lost
something important.
And then now there's a huge, I'll first, the hippies start doing it and then eventually
it becomes this big wave and now everyone won't, won't, you know, if something truly
is lost, won't we recover it?
Well, I think from first principles, all of the components are there to engineer intimate
experiences in the metaverse or in the, in the, in the cyberspace.
And so to me, it's, it, I don't see anything profoundly unique to the physical experience.
Like, I don't understand.
But then why are you saying there's a loss there?
No, I'm just sad because I won't, oh, it's a loss for me personally because I'll, it,
the, the world.
So then you do think there's something unique in the physical experience?
For me, because I was raised with it.
Oh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So whatever, so that anything you're raised with, you fall in love with, like people in
this country came up with baseball.
I was raised in the Soviet Union.
I don't understand baseball.
I get, I like it, but I don't love it the way Americans love it because a lot of times
they went to, to, to baseball games with their father and then there's that family connection.
There's a young kid dreaming about, I don't know, becoming an MLB player himself.
I don't know, something like that.
But that, that's what you're raised with, obviously, is really important.
But I mean, fundamentally to the human experience, listen, we're doing this podcast in person.
So clearly I still value it, but, but it's true.
If this were, obviously if there were scream, we all agree that's not the same.
Yeah, it's not the same.
But if this were some, you know, we had contact lenses on and like, you know, maybe Neuralink,
you know, play, maybe again, forget, again, this is all the devices, even if it's just
cool as a contact lens, that's all old school.
Once you have the brain machine interface, it'll just be projection of, you know, it'll
take over my visual cortex.
My visual cortex will get put into a virtual room and so will yours.
So we will see, we will hear, really hear and see as if where you won't have any masks,
no VR mask needed.
And at that point, it really will feel like you'll forget, you'll say, we'll read together
and physically or not, you won't even, it'd be so unimportant, you won't even remember.
And you're right.
This is one of those shits in society that changes everything.
But romantically, people still need to be together, that there's a whole set of like
physical things with a relationship that are needed, you know, like what, like sex, sex,
but also just like that, there's pheromones, like there's the physical touch is such a,
it's like music, it's such a deeply primitive part of us, that what physical touch with
a romantic partner does, that I think that, so I'm sure there'll be a whole wave of people
who, their new thing is that, you know, you're romantically involved with people you never
actually are in person with, but, and I'm sure there'll be things where you can actually
smell what's in the room and you can, yeah.
And touch.
Yeah.
But I think that'll be one of the last things to go.
I think there'll be, there's something that to me seems like something that'll be a while
before people feel like there's nothing lost by not being in this room.
It's, it's very difficult to replicate the human interaction.
Although sex also, again, you could not to get too like weird, but you could have a thing
where you, you're basically, you know, or, you know, you're, let's just do a massage
because it's less like awkward, but like you, someone, you know, everyone is still imagining
sex.
A masseuse could massage a fake body and you could feel whatever's happening, right?
So you're lying down in your apartment alone, but you're feeling a full.
That'll be the new like YouTube or like streaming where it's one masseuse massaging one body,
but like a thousand people are experiencing.
Exactly.
Right.
No, think about it right now.
You know, you don't want Taylor Swift doesn't play for one person.
It has to go around and everyone of her fans, she has to go play for, or a book, right?
You do it and it goes everywhere.
So it'll be the same idea.
You've written and thought a lot about AI.
So AI safety specifically, you've mentioned you're actually starting a podcast, which
is awesome.
You're so good at talking, so good at thinking, so good at being weird in the most beautiful
of ways.
But you've been thinking about this AI safety question.
Where today does your concern lie for the, for the near future, for the longterm future?
Like quite a bit of stuff happened, including with Elon's work at Tesla autopilot.
There's a bunch of amazing robots with Boston Dynamics and everyone's favorite vacuum robot,
iRobot, Roomba.
And there's obviously the applications of machine learning for recommender systems in
Twitter, Facebook, and so on.
And you know, face recognition for surveillance, all these kinds of things are happening.
Just a lot of incredible use of not the face recognition, but the incredible use of deep
learning, machine learning to capture information about people and try to recommend to them
what they want to consume next.
Some of that can be abused, some of that can be used for good, like for net.
Flix or something like that.
What are your thoughts about all this?
Yeah, I mean, I really don't think humans are very smart.
All, like all things considered, I think we're like limited.
And we're, we're, we're not, we're dumb enough that we're very easily manipulable.
Not just like, oh, like our emotions, people can, you know, yeah, our emotions can be pulled
like puppet strings.
I mean, again, I look at, like I do look at what's going on in political polarization
now.
And I see a lot of a puppet string emotions happening.
So yeah, there's a lot to be scared of for sure, like very scared of, um, I, I get excited
about a lot of very specific things.
Like one of the things I get excited about is I like, um, so the future of wearables,
right?
Again, I think that they would be like, oh, the wrist, the fit bit around my wrist is
going to see, you know, the whoop is going to seem really hilariously old school in
20 years.
Like when you're like a big bracelet, right?
It's going to turn into little sensors in our blood probably, or, you know, even, you
know, infrared wear, you know, just, just, just, just things that are going to be, it's
going to be collecting 100 times more data than it collects now, more nuanced data, more
specific to our body.
And it's going to be, you know, super reliable, but that's the hardware side.
And then the software is going to be, this is, I've not done my deep dive.
This is all speculation, but the software is going to get really good.
And this is the AI component.
And so I get excited about specific things like that.
Like think about if, if you're, if, if hardware we're able to collect, first of all, the
hardware knows your whole genome.
And we know a lot more about what a genome sequence means, because you can collect your
genome now.
And we just don't know much.
Okay.
We don't have much to do with that information as AI gets.
So now you have your genome, you've got what's in your blood at any given moment, all the
levels of everything, right?
You have the exact width of your heart arteries at any given moment.
You've got all the, all the virons, all the viruses that ever visited your body because
there's a trace of it, so you have all the pathogens, all the things that like you should
be concerned about health wise and might, might have threatened you or you might be immune
from all of that kind of stuff.
They also, of course, it knows how a faster heart is beating and it knows how much you,
you know, exactly the amount of exercise it knows your muscle mass and your weight and
all that.
But it also maybe can even know your emotions.
I mean, if emotions, you know, what are they, you know, where do they come from?
Probably pretty obvious chemicals once we get in there.
So again, Neuralink can be involved here maybe in collecting information, you know, because
right now you have to do the thing.
What's your mood right now?
And it's hard to even assess, you know, and you're in a bad mood, it's hard to even.
But by the way, just as a shout out, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's in your scientist at
Northeastern just wrote a, I mean, not just like a few years ago, wrote a whole book saying
our expression of emotions is nothing to do with the experience of emotion.
So you really actually want to be measuring that.
That's exactly.
And you can tell because one of these apps pops up and says, you know, what, how do
you feel right now?
Good bad.
I'm like, I don't know.
Like I feel bad right now because the thing popping up reminded me that I'm procrastinating
because I was on my phone.
I should be more, you know, like that's not my, you know, so, um, I think it will probably
be able to very get all this info, right?
Now the AI can go to town.
Think about when the AI gets really good at this and it knows your genome and it knows
it can just, I want the AI to just tell me what to do when it turns up.
Okay.
So how about this?
Now imagine attaching that to a meal service, right?
And the meal service has everything, you know, all the, you know, a million ingredients
and supplements and vitamins and everything.
And I give the, I tell the AI my broad goals.
I want to gain muscle or I want to, you know, maintain my weight, but I want to have more
energy or whatever.
I just want to, you know, I just want to be very healthy and I want to, obviously everyone
wants the same, like 10 basic things like you want to avoid cancer.
You want to, you know, various things you want to age slower.
So now the AI has my goals and a drone comes at, you know, it's a little thing pops up
and this is like, you know, beep, beep, like, you know, 15 minutes you're going to eat because
it knows that's a great, that's the right time for my body to eat.
15 minutes later, a little slot opens in my wall where a drone has come from the factory,
the eating the food factory and dropped the perfect meal for my, that moment for me, for
my mood, for my genome, for my blood contents.
And it's, it's cause it knows my goals.
So, you know, it knows I want to feel energy at this time and then I want to wind down
here.
So those things you have to tell it.
Well, plus the pleasure thing, like it knows what kind of components of a meal you've enjoyed
in the past.
So you can assemble the perfect meal.
Exactly.
It knows you way better than you know yourself, better than any human could ever know you.
And a little thing pops up, you still have, you still have some choice, right?
It pops up and it says like, you know, coffee, because it knows that, you know, they, my
cutoff, they says, you know, I can have coffee for the next 15 minutes only because at that
point it knows how long it stays in my system, it knows what my sleep is like when I have
it too late.
It knows I have to wake up at this time tomorrow.
That's my calendar.
And so I think a lot of people's, this is, I think something that humans are wrong about
is that most people will hear this and be like, that sounds awful.
That sounds dystopian.
No, it doesn't.
It sounds incredible.
And if we all had this, we would not look back and be like, I wish I was like making
awful choices every day, like I was in the past.
And then this isn't, these aren't important decisions.
You're important decision making energy, you're important focus and your attention can go
on to your kids and on your work and on, you know, helping other people and things that
matter.
And so I think AI can, I think when I think about like personal lifestyle stuff like that,
I really love, like, I love thinking about that.
I think it's going to be very, and I think we'll all be so much healthier that when we
look back today, one of the things that's going to look so primitive is the one size
fits all thing.
Like reading advice about keto.
Each genome is going to have very specific, one, you know, unique advice coming from AI.
And so, yeah.
Yeah.
The customization that's enabled by collection of data and the use of AI, a lot of people
think what's the, like they think of the worst case scenario, that data being used
by authoritarian governments to control you, all that kind of stuff.
They don't think about most likely, especially in a capitalist society, it's most likely
going to be used as part of a competition to get you the most delicious and healthy
meal possible as fast as possible.
Yeah.
So the world will definitely be much better with the integration of data.
But of course, you want to be able to be transparent and honest about how that data is misused.
And that's why it's important to have free speech and people to speak out like when some
bullshits being done by companies.
That we need to have our wits about us as a society.
Like this is, free speech is the mechanism by which
the big brain can think, can think for itself, can think straight, can see straight.
When you take away free speech, when you start saying that in every topic, when any topic
is political, it becomes treacherous to talk about.
So forget the government taking away free speech.
If the culture penalizes nuanced conversation about any topic that's political and the politics
is so all-consuming and it's such an incredible market to polarize people, you know, for media
to get to polarize people and to bring any topic it can into that and get people hooked
on it as a political topic, we become a very dumb society.
So free speech goes away as far as it matters.
People say, oh, people like to say, oh, that's not, you know, you don't even know what free
speech is.
Free speech is, you know, it's, you know, this is, your free speech is not being violent.
It's like, no, you're right.
My first amendment rights are not being violated.
But the culture of free speech, which is the second ingredient of two, you need the first
amendment and you need the culture of free speech.
And now you have free speech.
And the culture is much more specific.
You obviously can have a culture that believes people right now take any topic again that
has to do with like, you know, some very sensitive topics, you know, police shootings or, you
know, what's going on in, you know, K through 12 schools or, you know, even, you know, climate
change, you know, take, take any of these.
And the first amendment is still there, you know, you're not going to get arrested no
matter what you say.
The culture of free speech is, is gone because you will be destroyed.
Your life can be over, you know, as far as it matters.
If you say the wrong thing, but even, you know, but a culture of a really vigorous culture
of free speech, you get no penalty at all for even saying something super dumb.
People will say, like people will laugh and be like, well, that was like kind of hilariously
offensive and like not at all correct.
Like, you know, you're wrong.
And here's why.
But no one's like mad at you.
Now the brain is thinking at its best that the IQ of the big brain is like as high as
it can be in that culture and the culture where, and you say something wrong and people
will say, oh, wow, you've changed, oh, wow, like, look, this is his real, you know, colors.
The big brain is, is dumb.
You still have mutual respect for each other.
So like you don't think lesser of others when they say a bunch of dumb things, you know,
it's just the play of ideas, but you still have respect, you still have love for them.
Because I think the worst case is when you have a complete free like anarchy of ideas
where it's like, like everybody lost hope that the something like a truth can even be
converged towards like everybody has their own truth.
Then it's just chaos.
Like if you have mutual respect and a mutual goal of arriving at the truth and the humility
that you want to listen to other people's ideas and a forgiveness that other people's
ideas might be dumb as hell, that doesn't mean they're lesser beings, all that kind
of stuff.
But that, that's like a weird balance of strike.
Right now people are being trained, little kids, college students being trained to think
the exact opposite way, to think that there's no such thing as objective truth, which is,
you know, the objective truth is the end on the compass for every thinker.
It doesn't mean we're, you know, necessarily on our way or refining, but we're all aiming
in the same direction.
And we all believe that there's a place we can eventually get closer to.
Not objective truth, you know, teaching them that disagreement is bad violence, you know,
it's, you know, it's like, you know, it's, you quickly sound like you're just going
on like a political rant with this topic, but like it's really bad.
It's like genuinely the worst, if I had my own country, I mean, it's like, I would teach
kids some very specific things that this is doing the exact opposite of.
And it sucks.
It sucks.
Speaking of a way to escape this, you've tweeted 30 minutes of reading a day equals, yeah,
this whole video and it's cool to think about reading like in an, as a habit and something
that accumulates.
You said 30 minutes of reading a day equals 1000 books in 50 years.
I love like thinking about this, like chipping away at the mountain.
Can you expand on that sort of the habit of reading?
How do you recommend people read?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's incredible.
If you do something, a little of something every day, it compiles, it compiles.
You know, I always think about like the people who achieve these incredible things in life,
these great, like famous legendary people, they had the same number of days that you
do.
And it's not like they were doing magical days.
They just, they got a little done every day and that adds up to, to a monument, you know,
they're putting one brick in a day, eventually they have this building, this legendary building.
So you can take writing, someone who, you know, there's two aspiring writers and one
doesn't ever write, doesn't, you know, manages to never, you know, zero write, zero pages
a day, and the other one manages to do two pages a week.
Right?
Not very much.
The other one does zero pages a week, two pages a week, 98% of both of their time is
the same.
The other person, just 2%, they're doing one other thing.
One year later, they have written, they write two books a year.
This prolific person, you know, in 20 years, they've written 40 books.
They're one of the most prolific writers of all time.
They write two pages a week.
Sorry.
That's not true.
That was two pages a day.
Okay.
In 20, you're still writing about a book every two years.
So in 20 years, you've still written 10 books, also prolific writer, right?
Huge massive writing career, you write two pages every Sunday morning.
The other person has the same exact week, and they don't do that Sunday morning thing.
They are a wannabe writer.
They always said they could write.
They talk about how they used to be, and nothing happens, right?
So it's, it's inspiring, I think, for a lot of people who feel frustrated, they're not
doing anything.
I think it's another example where someone who reads very, you know, doesn't read, and
someone who's a prolific reader, you know, I always think about like the Tyler Cowan
types.
I'm like, how the hell do you read so much?
It's infuriating, you know, or like James Clear puts out his like, his 10 favorite books
of the year, 20, his 20 favorite books of the year, I'm like, you're 20 favorites.
Like I'm trying to just read 20 books, like that would be an amazing year.
So, but the thing is, they're not doing something crazy and magical.
They're just reading a half hour a night.
You know, if you read a half hour a night, the calculation I came to is that you can
read a thousand books in 50 years.
So if someone who's 80 and they've read a thousand books, you know, between 30 and 80,
they are extremely well read.
They can, they can delve deep into many nonfiction areas.
They can be, you know, an amazing fiction reader, avid fiction reader.
And again, that's a half hour a day.
People can do an hour, half hour in the morning audio book, half hour at night in bed.
Now they've read 2000 books.
So I, I think it's, it's just, it's just, it's motivating.
And you realize that a lot of times you think that the people who are doing amazing things
and you're not, you think that there, there's, there's a bigger gap between you and them
that there really is.
I, on the reading front, I'm a very slow reader, which is just a, just a very frustrating
fact about me, but I'm faster with audio books.
And I also, I just, you know, I'll just, it's just hard to get myself to read.
But I've started doing audio books and I'll wake up, throw it on, do it in the shower,
brushing my teeth, you know, making breakfast, dealing with the dogs, things like that, whatever,
until I sit down.
And that's, I can read, I can read a book a week, a book every 10 days at that clip.
And suddenly I'm this big reader because I'm just, while doing my morning stuff, I have
it on.
And also it's this fun, it makes the morning so fun.
Like having a great time the whole morning, cause I'm like, oh, I'm so into this book.
So I think that, you know, audio books is another amazing gift to people who have a
hard time reading.
I find that that's actually an interesting skill.
I do audio books quite a bit, like it's a skill to maintain, at least for me, probably
the kind of books I read, which is often like history or like there's a lot of content.
And if you miss parts of it, you, you miss out on stuff.
And so it's a skill to maintain focus.
Well, the 10 second back button is very valuable.
So I just, I just, if I get lost, sometimes the book is so good that I'm thinking about
what the person just said.
And I just get the skill for me is just remembering to pause.
And if I don't, no problem, just back, back, back, back, just three quick backs.
So that of course is not that efficient, but that's, but it's, I do the same thing when
I'm reading.
I'll read a whole paragraph and realize I was tuning out, you know?
You know, I haven't actually even considered to try that.
I've been so hard on myself, maintaining focus because you do get lost and thought, maybe
I should try that.
Yeah.
And when you get lost and thought, by the way, you're processing the book.
That's not wasted time.
That's your brain really categorizing and cataloging what you just read and like, well, there's
several kinds of thoughts, right?
There's thoughts related to the book and there's a thought that it could take you elsewhere.
Well, I find that if I am continually thinking about something else, I just say, I'm not,
I just paused the book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially in the shower or something when like that's sometimes when really great thoughts
come up.
And when I think about other stuff, I'm saying, clearly my mind wants to work on something
else.
I'll just pause it.
Yeah.
Quiet, Dan Carlin.
I'm thinking about something else right now.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Also, you can, things like you have to head out to the store, like, I'm going to read
20 pages on that trip.
Just walking back and forth, going to the airport.
I mean, flights, you know, the Uber and then you're walking to the, walking through the
airport, you're sharing the security line.
I'm reading the whole time, like, I know this is not groundbreaking.
People know what audiobooks are, but I think that more people should probably get into them
than do.
They have this stubborn kind of things.
I don't like, I like to have the paper book and sure, but like, it's pretty fun to be
able to read.
I still, I listen to a huge number of audiobooks and podcasts, but I still, the most impactful
experiences for me are still reading and I read very, very slow and it's very frustrating
when like, you go to these websites, like that estimate how long a book takes on average.
Those always annoy me.
They do like a page a minute when I read like best, a page every two minutes at best.
When you're like really, like, actually not pausing.
I just, my ADD, it's like, I just, it's hard to keep focusing.
And I also like to really absorb.
So on the other side of things, when I finish a book, 10 years later, I'll be like, you
know, that scene when this happens and another friend of red would be like, what?
I don't remember any like details and like, oh, I can tell you like the entire, so I absorbed
the shit out of it, but I don't think it's worth it to like have to read so less, so much
less in my life.
I actually, so in terms of going to the airport, you know, in these like filler moments of life,
I do a lot of us, it's an app called Anki, I don't know if you know, know about it.
It's a space repetition app.
So there's all of these facts I have.
When I read, I write it down.
If I want to remember it and it's, it, you review it and the one, the things you remember,
it takes longer and longer to bring back up, it's like flashcards, but a digital app.
It's called Anki.
I recommend it to a lot of people.
There's a huge community of people that are just like obsessed with it.
Anki.
So this is extremely well known app and idea, like among students who are like medical students,
like people that really have to study, like this is not like fun stuff.
They really have to memorize a lot of things.
They have to remember them well, they have to be able to integrate them with a bunch
of ideas.
So, and I find it to be really useful for, like when you read history.
If you think this particular factoid, they'll probably be extremely useful for you because
you're, that'd be interesting actually thought because you're doing, you talked about like
opening up a trillion tabs and reading things.
You know, you probably want to remember some facts you read along the way.
Like you might remember, okay, this thing I can't directly put into the writing, but
it's a cool little factoid.
I want to store that in there.
And that's what I go Anki, drop it in.
Oh, you can just drop it in.
You drop it in a line of a podcast or like a video.
Well, no.
I guess I can type it though.
So yes.
So Anki, there's a bunch of, it's called space repetition, there's a bunch of apps that
are much nicer than Anki.
Anki is the ghetto, like Craigslist version, but it has a giant community because people
are like, we don't want features.
We want a text box, like it's very basic, very stripped down.
So you can drop in stuff.
You can drop it.
That sounds really, I can't believe I have not come across this.
You actually, once you look into it, you realize that how have I not come?
You are the person, I guarantee you'll probably write a blog about it.
I can't believe you actually haven't come across it.
Well, it's also just like your people too.
And my people say, what do you write about?
Literally anything I find interesting.
And so for me, once you start a blog, like your entire worldview becomes, would this
be a good blog post?
Would this be?
I mean, it's the lens I see everything through, but I'm constantly coming across something
or, you know, or just a tweet, you know, something that I'm like, oh, I need to like
share this with my readers.
And my readers to me are like my, like, my, like, my friends who I'm like, I'm gonna,
oh, I need to show, I need to tell them about this.
And so I feel like just a place to, I mean, I collect things in a document right now if
it's like really good, but it's the little factoids and stuff like that.
I think, especially if I'm learning something, if I'm like,
So the problem is when you say stuff, when you look at it, a tweet and all that kind
of stuff is you also need to couple that with a system for review.
Because what Anki does is like literally, it determines for me, I don't have to do anything.
There's this giant pile of things I've saved and it brings up to me, okay, here's, I don't
know, when Churchill did something, right, I'm reading about World War II a lot now,
like a particular event, here's that, do you remember when, what year that happened and
you say yes or no, or like you, you get to pick, you get to see the answer and you get
to self-evaluate how well you remember that fact.
And if you remember, well, it'll be another month before you see it again.
If you don't remember, it'll bring it up again.
That's a way to review tweets, to review concepts.
And it offloads the kind of, the process of selecting which parts you're supposed to
review or not.
And you can grow that library, I mean, obviously medical students use it for like tens of thousands
of facts.
It just gamifies it too.
It's like you can passively sit back and just, and the thing will like make sure you eventually
learn it all versus, you know, you don't have to be the executive calling that like the program,
the memorization program someone else is handling.
I would love to, to hear about like you trying it out or space repetition is an idea.
There's a few other apps about Yankees, the big, I totally want to try.
You've written and spoken quite a bit about procrastination.
I like you suffer from procrastination, like many other people suffering quotes.
How do we avoid procrastination?
I don't think the suffer is in quotes.
I think that's a huge part of the problem is that it's, it's, it's treated like a silly
problem.
People don't take it seriously as a dire problem, but it can be.
It can, it can ruin your life.
There's like talking, we talked about the compiling concept with, you know, if you read
a little, you know, you, if you write, if you write two pages a week, you write a book
every two years, you're a prolific writer, right?
And the difference between, you know, the, again, it's not that, that, that person's
working so hard is that they have the ability to, when they commit to something like on
Sunday mornings, I'm going to write two pages.
That's it.
They, they respect, they have, they have enough.
They have, they respect the, the part of them that made that decision is, is a respected
character in their brain.
And they say, well, that's, I decided it, so I'm going to do it.
The procrastinator won't do those two pages.
That's just exactly the kind of thing the procrastinator will keep on their list and
they will not do.
But the, it doesn't mean they're any less talented than the writer who does the two
pages.
Doesn't mean they want it any less.
Maybe they want it even more.
And it doesn't mean that they wouldn't be just as happy having done it as the writer
who does it.
So what they're missing out on, picture a writer who writes 10 books, you know, best
sellers and they go on these book tours and, you know, they, and they just are so gratified
with their career and, you know, and they think about what the other person is missing
who does none of that, right?
So that, that is a massive loss, a massive loss.
And it's because the internal mechanism in their brain is not doing what the other person
is.
So they don't have the respect for the, the, the part of them that made the, the choice.
They feel like it's someone they can disregard.
And so to me, is this in the same boat as someone who is obese because they're eating
habits make them obese over time or their exercise habits that, you know, that's a huge
loss for that person.
That person is, is, is, is, you know, the health problems and it's just probably making
them miserable.
And it's, and it's self-inflicted, right?
It's self-defeating, but that doesn't make an easy problem to fix just because you're
doing it to yourself.
So to me, procrastination is another one of these where you are the only person in your
own way.
You are, you know, you are failing at something or not doing something that you really want
to do.
You know, it doesn't have to be work.
Maybe you're, you want to get out of that marriage that, you know, you realize it hits
you.
You get divorced.
You get divorced and you wait 20 extra years before you do it or you don't do it at all.
That is, you know, you're not living the life that you know you should be living, right?
And so I think it's fascinating.
Now the problem is it's also a funny problem because there's short-term procrastination,
which I talk about as, you know, the kind that has a deadline.
Now some people, you know, this is when I bring in, there's different characters.
There's the panic monster comes in the room.
And that's when you actually, you know, the procrastinator can, there's different levels.
There's the kind that even when there's a deadline, they stop panicking.
They just, they've given up and they really have a problem.
Then there's the kind that when there's a deadline, they'll do it, but they'll wait
to the last second.
Both of those people, I think, have a huge problem once there's no deadline because,
and most of the important things in life, there's no deadline, which is, you know, changing
your career, you know, becoming a writer when you never have been before, getting out of
your relationship, you know, be doing whatever you need to, the changes you need to make
in order to get into a relationship.
There's the thing after, launching a startup, launching a startup, right?
Or once you've launched a startup, firing is the right someone that needs to be fired,
right?
Yes.
I mean, going out for fundraising instead of just trying to, you know, there's so many
moments when the big change that you know you should be making that would completely
change your life if you just did it, has no deadline.
It just has to be coming from yourself.
I think that a ton of people have a problem where they will, they think this delusion
that, you know, I'm going to do that, I'm definitely going to do that, you know, but
not this week, not this month, not today, because whatever, and they make this excuse
again and again, and it just sits there on their list, collecting dust.
And so, yeah, to me, it's a, it is a very real suffering.
And the fixes and fixing the habits, just like not working on the fix, first of all.
So there's, okay, there is, there's, just so you have a boat that sucks and it's leaking
and it's going to sink, you can fix it with duct tape for a couple of, you know, for one
ride or whatever.
That's not really fixing the boat, but you can get you by.
So there's duct tape solutions.
To me, so the panic monster is the character that rushes into the room once the deadline
gets too close, or once there's some scary external pressure, not just from yourself.
And that's a huge aid to a lot of procrastinators.
Again, there's a lot of people who won't, you know, do that thing, they've been writing
that book they wanted to write, but there's way fewer people who will not show up to the
exam, you know, most people show up to the exam.
So that's because the panic monster is going to freak out if they don't.
So you can, then you can create a panic monster.
If you want to, you know, you really want to write music, you really want to become
a singer-songwriter.
Well, book a venue, tell 40 people about it and say, hey, on, you know, this day, two
months from now, come, come and see, I'm going to play you some of my songs.
You now have a panic monster.
You're going to write songs.
You're going to have to.
Right.
So there's, there's duct tape things, you know, you can do things, you know, people
do, I've done a lot of this with a friend and I say, if I don't get X done by a week
from now, I have to donate a lot of money somewhere.
I don't want to donate.
And that's, you would put that in the category of duct tape solutions.
Yeah.
Because it, because it's not, why do I need that?
Right.
If I really had solved this, this is something I want to do for me.
It's selfish.
This is, I just literally just want to be selfish here and do the work I need to do to get the
goals I want to get.
Right.
And I'm not, all the incentives are should be in the right place.
And yet, if I don't say that, I will, it'll be a week from now and I won't have done it.
Something weird is going on.
There's some resistance.
There's some force that is prevent, that is in my own way, right?
And so doing something where I have to pay all this money.
Okay.
Now I'll panic and I'll do it.
So that's duct tape.
Fixing the boat is something where I don't have to do that.
I just will do the things that I, again, it's not, I'm talking about super crazy work ethic.
Just like, for example, okay, I have a lot of examples because I have a serious problem
that I've been working on.
And in some ways I've gotten really successful at solving it and other ways I'm still, still
floundering.
Yeah.
The world's greatest duct taper.
Yes.
Well, I'm pretty good at duct taping.
I probably could be even better and I'm like, and I'm, and I'm, you're procrastinating and
becoming a better duct tape reader.
Literally.
Like, yes, I, there's nothing, I won't.
So here's what I know what I should do as a writer, right?
It's very obvious to me.
Is that I should wake up, doesn't have to be crazy on six a.m. or anything insane or
I'm not going to be one of those crazy people of 530 jogs.
I'm going to wake up at whatever, you know, 738, 830, and I should have a block, like
just say nine to noon where I get up and I just really quick make some coffee and write.
It's obvious because all the great writers in history did exactly that.
Some of them have done that.
That's common.
Some of them that I like these writers, they do the late night sessions, but most of them
they do a session, but there's a session that's most writers right in the morning.
And there's a reason I don't think I'm different than those people.
It's a great time to write your fresh, right?
Your ideas from the, the, from dreaming have kind of collected.
You have all, you know, new answers that you didn't have yesterday and you can just go.
But more importantly, if I just had a routine where I wrote from noon nine to noon weekdays,
every week would have a minimum of 15 focused hours of writing, which doesn't sound like
a lot, but it's a lot of 15, 15, no, this is no joke.
This is, you know, you're not, your phone's away.
You're not talking to anyone.
You're not opening your email.
You are focused writing for three hours, five.
That's a big week for most writers.
So now what's happening is that every weekday is a minimum of a B. I'll give myself, you
know, an A might be, you know, wow, I really just got into a flow and wrote for six hours
and had, you know, great, but it's a minimum of a B.
I can keep going if I want.
And every week is a minimum of a B with those 15 hours.
Right.
And if I just talk about compiling, if I, this is the two pages a week.
If I just did that every week, I achieve all my writing goals in my life.
And yet I wake up and most days I just either I'll revenge procrastination late at night
and go to bed way too late and then wake up later and get on a bad schedule and I just
fall into these bad schedules or I'll wake up and there's just, you know, I'll say, I'm
just going to do a few emails and I'll open it up and I'm suddenly on text and I'm texting
and I, or I'll just go and, you know, I'll make a phone call and I'll be on phone calls
for three hours.
It's always something.
Yeah.
Or I'll start writing and then I hit a little bit of a wall, but because there's no sacred,
this is a sacred writing block, I'll just hit the wall and say, well, this is icky
and I'll go do something else.
So duct tape, what I've done is they're white, but why has one employee, Alicia?
She's the manager of lots of things.
That's her role.
She truly does lots of things.
And one of the things we started doing is either she comes over and sits next to me
where she can see my screen from nine to noon.
That's all it takes.
The thing about procrastinations is usually they're not kicking and screaming.
I don't want to do this.
It's the feeling of, you know, in the old days when you had to go to class, you know, your
lunch block is over and it's like, oh, I have class in five minutes or it's Monday morning.
You go, oh, yeah.
But you said, you know what?
But, you know, you go, you say, okay, and then you get to class and it's not that bad
once you're there.
Right?
It is.
You know, you have a trainer and he says, okay, next set.
Okay.
And you do it.
That's all it is.
It's someone, some external thing being like, okay, I have to do this.
And then you have that moment of like, it sucks, but I guess I'll do it.
If no one's there though, the problem with the procrastinators, they don't have that
in person in their head.
Other people I think were raised with a sense of shame if they don't do stuff and that stick
in their head is hugely helpful.
I don't really have that.
And so anyway, Alicia is sitting there next to me.
Now she's doing her own work where she can see my screen and she of all people knows
exactly what I should be doing, what I shouldn't be doing.
That's all it takes.
The shame of just having her see me while she's sitting there not working would just
be too, it's too weird and too embarrassing.
So I get it done and it's amazing.
It's like game changer for me.
So duct tape can solve, sometimes duct tape is enough, but I'm curious to, I'm still
trying to, what is going on?
Yeah.
I think part of it is that we are actually wired.
I think I'm being, I'm being very sane, human actually is what's happening.
You're not saying it's not the right word, I'm being like, I'm being a natural human
that we are not programmed to sit there and do homework of a certain kind that we get
the results like six months later, like that is not, so we're supposed to conserve energy
and fulfill our needs as we need them and do immediate things.
And we're overriding our natural ways when we wake up and get to it.
And I think sometimes it's because the pain, I think a lot of times we're just avoiding
suffering and a lot of, for a lot of people, the pain of not doing it is actually worse
because they feel shame.
So if they don't get up and take a jog and get up early and get to work, I'll feel like
a bad person and that is worse than doing those things.
And then it becomes a habit eventually and it becomes just easy, automatic, which becomes
I do it because that's what I do.
But I think that if you don't have a lot of shame necessarily, the pain of doing those
things is worse in that, in the immediate moment than not doing it.
But I think that there's this feeling that you've captured with your body language and
so on, I don't want to do another set.
That feeling, the people I've seen that are good at not procrastinating are the ones
that have trained themselves to like, the moment they would be having that feeling,
they just, it's like Zen, like Sam Harris style Zen, you don't experience that feeling.
Just march forward.
Like I talked to Elon about this a lot actually offline, it's like he doesn't have this.
No, clearly not.
The way I think, he talks about it, the way I think about it is it's like you just pretend
you're like a machine running an algorithm.
Like you know this, you should be doing this.
Not because somebody told you so on, this is probably the thing you want to do.
Like look at the big picture of your life and just run the algorithm.
Like ignore your feelings, just run as if you're-
Just framing, frame it differently.
You can frame it as like, it can feel like homework or it can feel like you're living
your best life or something when you're doing your work.
Yeah.
And maybe you reframe it, but I think ultimately is whatever reframing you need to do, you
just need to do it for a few weeks and that's how the habit is formed and you stick with
it.
Like I've, I'm now on a kick where I exercise every day.
It doesn't matter what that exercise is, it's not serious.
It could be 200 pushups, but it's the thing that like I make sure I exercise every day
and it's become way, way easier because of the habit and I just, and I don't like, at
least with exercise because it's easier to replicate that feeling.
I don't allow myself to go like, I don't feel like doing this.
Right.
Well, I think about that even just like little things like I brush my teeth before I go to
bed and it's just a habit.
And it is effort.
Like if it were something else, I would be like, I'm not going to let them in the bathroom
and I'm going to do that.
I'm just going to lie down right now, but it doesn't even cross my mind.
It's just like that I just robotically go and do it and it almost has become like a
nice routine.
It's like, oh, this part of the night.
You know, it's like a morning routine for me stuff is like, you know, that, that stuff
is kind of just like automated.
Yeah, it's funny because you don't like go, like, I don't think I've skipped many days.
I don't think I skipped any days brushing my teeth like unless I didn't have a tooth
part like I was in the woods or something.
And what is that?
Cause it's annoying.
Yeah, to me, there's, um, so the character that makes me procrastinate is the instant
gratification monkey.
That's what I've labeled him, right?
And there's the rational decision maker and the instant gratification monkey in these
battle with each other.
But the procrastinator, the monkey wins.
Yeah.
I think the monkeys, you know, from you, you know, you read about this kind of stuff,
I think that the, this, this kind of more primitive brain is always winning.
And in the non procrastinator is that primitive brain is on board for some reason.
It isn't resisting.
So, but, but when I think about brushing my teeth, it's like the monkey doesn't even
think there's an option to not do it.
So it doesn't even like get, there's no hope.
The monkey has no hope there.
So it doesn't even like get involved.
And it's just like, yeah, you know, we have to just like kind of like robotically, just
like, you know, it's kind of like Stockholm syndrome, just like, oh, no, no, I have to
do this.
Um, it doesn't even like wake up.
It's like, yeah, we're doing this now.
For other things, the monkeys like, ooh, no, no, no, most days I can win this one.
And so the monkey, um, puts up that like fierce resistance and it's like, it's, it's a lot
of it's like the initial transition.
So I think of it as like jumping in a cold pool where it's like, I will spend the whole
day pacing around the side of the pool in my bathing suit, just being like, I don't want
to have that one second when you first jump in and it sucks.
And then once you're, once I'm in, once I jump in, I'm usually, you know, once I start
writing, I'm suddenly, I'm like, oh, this isn't so bad.
Okay.
I'm kind of into it.
It's like throwing me away.
You know, then I suddenly am like, I get into a flow.
So it's like, once I get in the cold water, I don't mind it, but I will spend hours standing
around the side of the pool.
And by the way, I do this in a more literal sense when I go to the gym with a trainer
in 45 minutes, I do a full, full ass workout.
And it's not because I'm, I'm having a good time, but it's, it's, it's because it's that
I have to go to class feeling, right?
But when I go to the gym alone, I will literally do a set and then dick around my phone for
10 minutes before the next set.
And I'll spend an over an hour there and do way less.
So it is the transition, once I'm actually doing the set, I'm never like, I don't want
to stop in the middle.
Now it's just like, I'm going to do this.
And I feel happy.
I just did it.
So it's something, there's something about transitions that is very, that's why procrastinators
are late a lot of places.
It's, I will procrastinate getting ready to go to the airport, even though I know I should
leave at three.
So I cannot be stressed.
I'll leave at three 36 and I'll be super stressed.
Once I'm on the way to the airport immediately, I'm like, why didn't I do this earlier?
Now I'm back to, on my phone doing what I was doing, I just had to get in the damn car
or whatever.
So yeah, there's some very, very odd irrational.
Yeah.
Like I was waiting for you to come and you said that you're running a few minutes late.
And I was like, I was like, I'll go get you a coffee because I can't possibly be the one
who's early.
Right.
I can't, I don't understand.
I'm always late to stuff and I know it's disrespectful in the eyes of a lot of people.
I can't help.
It's not, you know, you know what I'm doing ahead of it?
It's not like I don't care about the people.
I'm often like, you know, for like this conversation, I'd be preparing more.
Right.
Like it's like, I obviously care about the person, but for some,
Yeah.
This interpreted it as like, there are some people that like show up late because they
like, they kind of like that quality in themselves and that's a dick, right?
There's a lot of those people.
But more often, it's someone who shows up frazzled and they feel awful and they're furious
at themselves.
They're so regretful.
Exactly.
I mean, that's me.
And I mean, also, all you have to do is look at those people alone running through the
airport.
Right.
They're not being disrespectful to anyone there.
They just inflicted this on themselves.
This is hilarious.
You've tweeted a quote by James Baldwin saying, quote, I imagine one of the reasons people
claim to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense once hate is gone, they will be
forced to deal with the pain.
What has been a painful, but formative experience in your life?
What's the flavor, the shape of your pain that fuels you?
I mean, honestly, the first thing that jumped to mind is my own like battles against myself
to get my work done because it affects everything.
When I just took five years in this book and granted it's a beast, like I probably would
have taken two or three years, but it didn't need to take five.
And that was a lot of, not just that I'm not working, it's that I'm over researching.
I'm adding in things I shouldn't because I'm perfectionist, being a perfectionist about
like, oh, well, I learned that.
Now I want to get it in there.
I know I'm going to end up cutting it later, or I over outline something, trying to get
it perfect when I know that's not possible.
It's making a lot of immature kind of, I'm not actually that much of a writing amateur.
I've written, including my old blog, I've been a writer for 15 years.
I know what I'm doing.
I could advise other writers really well.
And yet I do a bunch of amateur things that I know while I'm doing them is, I know I'm
being an amateur.
So that A, it hurts the actual product to make, you know, B, it's waste your precious
time.
C, when you're mad at yourself, when you're in a negative, you know, self-defeating spiral,
it almost inevitably will, you'll be less good to others.
Like, you know, I'll just just, I used to, you know, early on in my now marriage, one
of the things we always used to do is I used to plan mystery dates, you know, New York
City, great, great place for this.
I'd find some weird little adventure for us, you know, it could be anything.
And I wouldn't tell her what it was.
I said, I'm reserving you for Thursday night, you know, at seven, okay.
And it was such a fun part of our relationship.
Started writing this book and got into a really bad, you know, personal space where I was
like, in my head, I was like, I can't do anything until this is done, you know, like, no.
And I just stopped like ever valuing like, like joy of any kind.
Like I was like, no, no, that's for when I'm done.
And that's a trap or very quickly, you know, because I always think, you know, think it's
going to be a six months away, but actually five years later, I'm like, wow, I really
wasn't living fully.
And for five years is not, we don't live very long, like about your prime decades, like
that's like a sixth of my prime years, like, wow, like that's a huge loss.
So to me, that was excruciating and, you know, and it was a bad pattern, a very unproductive,
unhelpful pattern for me, which is I'd wake up in the morning in this great mood, great
mood every morning, wake up, thrilled to be awake, I have the whole day ahead of me.
I'm going to get so much work done today and but, you know, first I'm going to do all these
other things and it's all going to be great.
And then I end up kind of failing for the day with those goals, usually sometimes miserably,
sometimes only partially, and then I get in bed probably a couple of hours later than
I want to.
And that's when all the real reality hits me suddenly.
So much regret, so much anxiety, furious in myself, wishing I could take a time machine
back three months, six months a year, or just even to the beginning of that day.
And just tossing and turning now, I mean, this is a very bad place.
That's why I said suffering procrastinators suffer in a very serious way.
So look, I know this probably sounds like a lot of first world problems and it is, but
it's real suffering as well.
So to me, it's painful because you're not being as good a friend or a spouse or whatever
as you could be.
You're also not treating yourself very well, you're usually not being very healthy in these
moments, you know, you're often, and you're not being, I'm not being good to my readers.
So it's just a lot of this, and it feels like it's one small tweak away.
Sometimes it's like, that's what I said, it's like, you just suddenly are just doing that
nine to 12 and you get in that habit.
Everything else falls into place.
I think all of this reverses.
So I feel hopeful, but it's like, it is a, I have not figured, I haven't fixed the boat
yet.
I have some good duct tape though.
And you also don't want to romanticize it because it is true that some of the greats
in history, especially writers suffer from all the same stuff, like they, they weren't
quite a, I mean, you might only write for two or three hours a day, but the rest of
the day is often spent, you know, kind of tortured.
Well, right.
This is the irrational thing is if I, if, and this goes for a lot of people's jobs,
people, especially who work for themselves, you'd be a shock how much you could wake up
at nine or eight or seven or whatever, get to work and stop at one, but you're really
focused in those hours, one or two.
And do 25 really focused hours of stuff, product stuff a week, and then there's 112 waking
hours in the week.
Right.
So we're talking about 80 something hours of free time.
You can live, you know, if you're just really focused in your, you know, yin and yang of
your time, and that's, that's my goal is black and white time.
I really focused time and then totally like clean conscience, free time.
Right now I have neither.
It's a lot of gray.
It's a lot of, I shouldn't be working, but I'm not, oh, I'm wasting this time.
This is bad.
And that's just massive.
So if you can just get really good at the black and the white.
So you just wake up and it's just like full work.
And then I think a lot of people could have like all this free time, but instead I'll
do those same three hours.
It's like you said, I'll do them really late at night or whatever after having tortured
myself the whole day and not had any fun.
It's not like I'm having fun.
I call it the dark playground, by the way, which is where you are when you know you should
be working, but you're doing something else.
It's, you're doing something fun on paper, but it's, it's never, it feels awful.
And so yeah, I spent a lot of time in the dark.
And you know, you shouldn't be doing it and you still do it and yeah.
It's not clean conscience fun.
It's bad.
It's toxic.
And I think that it's, there's something about, you know, you're draining yourself all the
time.
And if you just did your focused hours and then if you actually have good clean fun, fun
can be anything.
Reading a book can be hanging out with someone who can be really fun.
You can go and do something cool in the city, you know, that is critical.
It's you're recharging some part of your psyche there.
And I think it makes it easier to actually work the next day.
And I say this from the experiences when I have had, you know, good stretches.
It's like, it's, you're, you know what it is?
It's like, you feel like you're fist pounding one part of your brain's fist pounding the
other part.
Like you're like, you're like, we got that.
Like we, we treat, we treat ourselves well.
Like this is how you're internally feel like I treat myself.
And it's like, yeah, no, of course it's work time.
And then later you're like, now it's play time.
And it's like, okay, back to work.
Cause, and you're in this very healthy, like parent-child relationship in your head versus
like this constant conflict and like the kid doesn't respect the parent and parent
hates the kid.
And like, yeah.
And you're right.
And it always feels like it's like one fix away so that there's hope.
I mean, I, I guess, I mean, so much of what you said just brings so true.
I guess I have the same kind of hope.
But you know, this podcast is very regular.
I mean, I'm impressed like, and I think partially what, what there is a bit of a duct tape solution
here, which is you just, the, the, the, cause it's always easy to schedule stuff for the
future for myself, right?
Cause that's future Tim and future Tim is not my problem.
So I'll schedule all kinds of shit for future Tim.
And I will, um, and I will, uh, not then not do it, but in this case you can schedule podcasts
and you have to show up.
Yeah, you have to show up.
Right.
It seems like a good medium for procrastinating.
But this is not my, this is what I do for fun.
I know.
But at least this is the kind of thing, especially if it's not your main thing, especially it's
not your main thing.
It's the kind of thing that you would dream of doing and want to do and never do.
And I feel like your, your, your regular, you know, production here is a, is a sign
that something is working at least in this regard.
Yeah.
And this forgot, but this, I'm sure you have this same kind of thing with the pocket.
In fact, because you're going to be doing the podcast as possible, the podcast becomes
what the podcast is for me.
This is your procrastinate.
If you think about being 80 and if you can get into that person's head and look back
and be like, and just deep regret, you just, you know, yearning, you could do anything
to just go back and have done this differently.
That is desperation.
It's just, you don't feel it yet.
It's not in you yet.
The other thing you could do is if you have a partner, if you want to partner with someone,
now you could say, we meet these 15 hours every week and that point you're going to
get it done.
So working with someone can help.
Yeah.
That's why they say like a co-founder is really powerful for many reasons, but that's, that's
kind of one of them.
But because to actually, for the startup case, you, unlike writing, perhaps you, it's really
at like a hundred hour plus thing, like once you really launch, you, you go all in.
Like everything else just disappears.
Like you can't even have a hope of a balanced life for, for a little bit.
So and there co-founder really helps.
That's the idea.
When you, you're one of the most interesting people on the internet.
So as a, as a writer, you look out into the future, do you dream about certain things
you want to still create?
Is there, is there projects that you want to write?
Is there movies you want to write or direct or?
Endless.
So it's just endless.
No, there's, there's, there's specific list of things that really excite me, but it's
a big list that I know I'll never get through them all.
And that's part of why the last five years really like, you know, when I feel like I'm
not moving as quickly as I could, it bothers me because I have so much genuine excitement
to try so many different things and they get so much joy from finishing things.
I don't like doing things, but a lot of writers are like that.
I, I, I publishing something is greatly, is hugely joyful and makes it all worth it.
You know, or just finishing something you're proud of putting it out there and have people
appreciate it.
It's like the best thing in the world.
Right.
You know, a lot of every kid makes some little bargain with themselves, has a little, you
know, a dream or, you know, something.
And I feel like when I'm, when I do something that I make something in this, you know, for
me, it's been mostly writing and I feel proud of it and I put it out there.
I feel like I like, again, I'm like fist pounding my seven year old self.
Like there's a little like, I'm, I like, I owe it to myself to do certain things and
I just did one of the things I owe, I just paid off some debt to myself.
I owed it and I, and I paid it and it feels great.
It feels like very like, you just feel very, a lot of inner peace when you do.
And so the more things I can do, you know, and I just have fun doing it.
Right.
And so I'm just, it's, it's, for me, that includes a lot more writing.
I just, you know, short, short, short blog posts, I write very long blog posts, but basically
short writing in the form of long blog, blog post is a great, I love that medium.
I want to do a lot more of that.
Books you have to be seeing, I'm going to do this and I'm going to have another book
I'm going to do right after and we'll see if I like those two.
And if I do, I'll do more otherwise I won't, but I also want to try other mediums.
I want to make more videos.
I want to, I did a little travel series once.
I love doing that.
I want to do, you know, more of that.
Almost like a vlog, like, no, it was, I let readers in a survey pick five countries
they wanted me to go.
That's awesome.
And they picked, they picked, they sent me to weird places.
They sent me, I went to Siberia, I went to, to Japan.
I went from there to, this is all in a row into Nigeria, from there to Iraq and from
there to Greenland.
And then I went back to New York, like two weeks in each place.
And I got to, you know, each one, I got to, you know, have some weird experiences.
I tried to like really dig in and have like, you know, some interesting experiences.
And then I wrote about it and I taught readers a little bit about the history of these places
and it was just, I love doing that.
I love, right.
So, you know, and I'm like, oh man, like I haven't done one of those in so long.
And then, then I have a big like desire to do fictional stuff.
Like I want to write a sci-fi at some point and I would love to write a musical.
That's actually what I was doing before Weep It Why.
I was, I was with a partner, Ryan Langer.
We were halfway through a musical and, and, and he got tied up with his other musical
and Weep It Why started taking off and we just haven't gotten back to it, but it's such
a fun medium.
So, it's such a silly medium, but it's so fun.
So, you think about all of these mediums on which you can be creative and create something
and you like the variety of it.
Yeah.
It's, it's just that I, if there's a chance on, on a new medium, I could do something
good.
I want to, I want to do it.
I want to try it.
It sounds like so gratifying and so fun.
You know, like.
I think it's fun to just watch you actually sample these.
So I can't wait for your podcast.
I'll be listening to all of them.
I mean, that, that's a cool medium to see like where it goes.
The cool thing about podcasting and making videos, especially with a super creative mind
like yours, you don't really know what you're going to make of it until you try it.
Yeah.
Podcasts I'm really excited about, but I'm like, I like going on other people's podcasts
and I never tried having my own.
So there's this, with every medium, there's the, the challenges of how the sausage is
made.
So like the challenges of the challenge of, yeah, but it's also, I like to like, I'll
go on like, as you know, long ass monologues and you can't do that.
If you're the interviewer, like you're not supposed to do that as much.
So I have to like reign it in and, and that's, that can be, that might be hard, but we'll
see.
You could also do solo type stuff.
Yeah.
I might be able to do a little of each.
You know what's funny?
I mean, some of my favorite is more like solo, but there's like a side cake.
So you're, you're, you're having a conversation, but you're like friends, but it's really
you ranting, which I think, I think you'd be extremely good at.
That's funny.
Yeah.
Or even if it's 50, 50, that's fine.
Like if it's just a friend who I want to like really riff with, I just don't, I don't like
interviewing someone, which I won't, that's not what the podcast will be, but I can't
help.
I've tried moderating panels before and I cannot help myself.
I have to get involved and no one likes a moderator who's too involved.
It's very unappealing.
So I, you know, interviewing someone and I'm like, I can't, I don't even know.
I just, it's not my, I can grill someone, but that's different.
That's my curiosity being like, wait, how about this?
And I interrupt them.
I see the way your brain works.
It's hilarious.
It's awesome.
It's like lights up with fire and excitement.
Yeah.
I actually, I love listening.
I like watching people.
I like listening to people.
Yeah.
So this is like me right now having just listening to a podcast.
This is me listening to your podcast right now.
I love listening to a podcast because then it's not even like, but once I'm in the room,
I suddenly can't help myself by jumping in.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, big last ridiculous question.
What is the meaning of life?
The meaning of like an individual life.
Or existence here on earth, or, or maybe broadly this whole thing we got going on, descendants
of apes, um, basically creating, yeah, well, there's, yeah, for, for me, I feel like, um,
I want to be around as long as I can.
If I can, if I can do some kind of crazy life extension or upload myself, I'm gonna, because
who doesn't want to see how cool 20, uh, the year 3000 is imagine, you did say mortality
was not appealing.
No, it's not appealing at all to me.
Now it's ultimately appealing as I said, no one wants eternal life, I believe.
If they understood what eternity really was, you know, I did Graham's number as a post
and I was like, okay, no one wants to live that many years.
But I'd like to choose.
I'd like to say, you know, I'm truly over it now and I'm going to have, you know, at
that point we'd have our whole society would have like sit, we'd have a ceremony.
We'd have a whole process of someone signing off and, you know, it would be, it would
be beautiful and it wouldn't be sad.
Well, you know, I think you'd be super depressed by that point, like who's going to sign off
when they're doing.
Maybe, maybe.
Yes.
Okay.
Maybe it's dark.
But at least, but the point is if I'm happy, I can stay around for five.
I'm thinking 50 century sounds great.
Like, I don't know if I want more than that, 50 sounds like a right number.
And so if you're thinking if you would sign up for 50, if you had a choice, one is what
I get that is bullshit.
Like if you want, if you're somebody who wants 50, one is a hideous number, right?
You know, anyway, so for me personally, I want to be around as long as I can.
And then honestly, the reason I love writing, the thing that I love most is like, is like
a warm, fuzzy connection with other people, right?
And that can be my friends and it can be readers.
And that's why I would never want to be like a journalist where their personality is like
hidden behind the writing or like even a biographer, you know, there's a lot of people who are
great writers, but it's, I like to personally connect.
And if I can take something that's in my head and other people can say, oh my God, I think
that too.
And this made me feel so much better.
It made me feel seen.
Like that feels amazing.
And, and I just feel like we're all having such a weird common experience on this one
little rock in this one little moment of time where this weird, these weird four limb beings
and we're all the same.
And it's like, we're all the human experience.
So I feel like so many of us suffer in the same ways and we're all going through a lot
of the same things.
And to me, it is very, if I lived, if I was on my deathbed and I feel like I had like
I had a ton of human connection and like shared a lot of common experience and made a lot
of other people feel like, like not alone.
Do you feel that as a writer?
Do you like hear and feel like the inspiration, like all the people that you make smile and
all the people you inspire?
Honestly, not sometimes, you know, when we did an in-person event and I, you know, meet
a bunch of people and it's incredibly gratifying or, you know, you just, you know, you get
emails.
But I think it is easy to forget that how many people sometimes you're just sitting there
alone typing, dealing with your procrastination, but that's why publishing is so gratifying
because that's the moment when all this connection happens.
And especially if I had to put my finger on it, it's like, it's having a bunch of people
who feel lonely and they're like, the existence is all realized, like all, you know, connect,
right?
So that, if I'm doing a lot of that, and that includes, of course, my actual spending,
you know, a lot of really high quality time with friends and family and like, and making
the whole thing as heartbreaking as like mortality in life can be, make the whole thing like fun
and at least we can like laugh at ourselves together while going through it.
Yeah.
And that to me is that, yeah.
And then your last blog post will be written from Mars as you get the bad news that you're
not able to return because of the malfunction in the rocket.
Yeah.
I would like to go to Mars and like go there for a week and be like, yeah, here we are.
And then come back.
No, I know that's what you want.
Staying there.
Yeah.
And that's fine, by the way.
If I, if I, yeah.
So you think you're picturing me alone on Mars as the first person there and then it
malfunctioned.
Right.
No, you were supposed to return, but it malfunctions.
And then there's this, so it's both the hope, the awe that you experience, which is how
the blog starts.
And then it's the overwhelming like feeling of existential dread.
But then it returns to like the love of humanity.
Well, that's the thing.
If I could be writing.
Yeah.
And actually like writing something that people would read back on earth, it would make it
feel so much better.
Yeah.
You know, if I were just alone and no one was going to realize what happened.
No, no, no.
You get to write.
Yeah.
And also that would bring out great writing.
Yeah.
I think so.
Your death bed on Mars alone.
I think so.
Yeah.
Well, that's exactly the future I hope for you, Tim.
All right.
This was an incredible conversation.
You're, you're a really special human being, Tim.
Thank you so much.
You're, you're for spending a really valuable time with me.
I can't wait to hear your podcast.
I can't wait to read your next blog post, which you said in a Twitter reply, you'll, you'll
get more, uh, to, uh, after the book, which add that to the long list of ideas to procrastinate
about.
Tim, thanks so much for, uh, talking to David.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Urban to support this podcast.
Please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Tim Urban himself.
Be humbler about what you know, more confident about what's possible.
Just afraid of things that don't matter.
Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.