Kind: captions
Language: en
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 and i mean they're very big i
feel like we kind of understand i mean
not the very very big not the not the
multiverse if there is a multiverse not
anything outside of the observable
universe
um but the very small we i think we
really have no idea what's going on um
or very you know much less idea but i
find that so i think the smaller more
mysterious but i think the big is
sexier um
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
the movement of bodies works how they're
born all that kind of things
but like how many lit how many
civilizations are out there how many
like what are the weird things that are
also yeah life well extraterrestrial
life is a true mystery the most
tantalizing mystery of all um
uh but that that's like our size so
that's maybe it's that the the actual uh
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 um and i
assume that there's a limit that you're
not gonna i mean you might have like a
whale blue whale sized intelligent being
that would be kind of cool um but i 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 a there's got to 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
like working together and we somehow
envision that as one
entity because it has consciousness but
maybe it's just organisms on top of
organisms
organisms all the way down turtles all
the way down so like earth can be seen
as an organism for people for um
alien species that's very different
like why is the human the fundamental
entity that is living
and then every everything else is just
either a collection of humans or
components of humans i think if it kind
of is 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 ant
colonies you know a floor above
or maybe there's even units within the
colony that's one floor above and the
full colonies of two floors above and to
me i think that it's the colony that is
the closest to being the animal uh it's
like the the individual thing where that
competes
with others um while the
the individual ants are like cells in
the animal's body we are more like a
colony in that regard but the the humans
are weird because we kind of we i think
of it if emergence happens in an
emergency tower
where you've got kind of you know as i
said cells and then humans and
communities and societies ants are very
specific you know the individual ants
are always cooperating with each other
uh for the sake of the colony so the
colony is this unit that is that is the
competitive unit
humans can kind of go we take the
elevator up and down emergence tower
psychologically sometimes we are
individuals that are
uh competing with other individuals and
that 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 sacrifice
yourself you know that's what 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 a
narrative we tell ourselves maybe it's
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
alone 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
a 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 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 uh or very specific
statements that you've made so
you've written answers to uh a mailbag
of questions
the questions are amazing the ones
you've chosen and your answers are
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 uh so
where do we sit
um at this level of the very small to
the very big
so are we bigger or are we small are we
bigger than we are small i think it
depends on what we're asking here so if
we're talking about the the 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
planck 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 not quite 10 to the zero we're about
10 to the zero um meters long so we're
writing so it's easy because you can
just look and say okay well
uh for example uh atoms are like 10 to
the negative 15 or 10 to the negative 16
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
um
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
um imagining are there and and and
hypothesizing are there so i think
um
as far as real world objects that we
really know a lot about i would say we
are smaller than we are big uh but if
you want to go down to the plank length
we're very quickly we're bigger than we
are small if you're if you think about
strings
yeah string exactly with 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 if 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
neutrinos are human a proton is the sun
so that's like
i mean a proton is real small
like really small um
and uh
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 out
there is it zero
is it
a handful is it almost endless like the
the
the you know 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 teaming with life i
would say there is i think uh running a
monte carlo simulation this paper by
ander sandberg and drexler and a few
others um a couple years ago i think you
probably know about it um i think
they're they're
the
mean
um
you know using different
uh
using different you know running through
randomized rake equation uh
multiplication
you ended up with 27 million as the mean
in of intelligent civilizations in the
galaxy in the milky way alone
um and so then if you go outside the
milky way that would turn into trillions
that's the 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 uh 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 you know some some crazy
number of orders of magnitude like 200
they think should that that variable
should be uh
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 so you know
i think it's like i think it's a 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 it seems incredibly
counter-intuitive it seems like you know
you mentioned that people think um
you're you know you must be an idiot
because um you know if you picked up one
grain of sand on the 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 hear a lot of
the sand right
so and then 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
um 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 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 uh we haven't been in contact i i
too have an intuition that the universe
is teaming with life
so one interesting is around the great
filter
so we're either the grade 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 intelligent
civilization or lead to the destruction
of intelligent civilization that's a
very pragmatic very important question
to always be asking and we'll talk about
some of those and then um the other one
is
i'm saddened by the possibility that
there could be aliens communicate 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
um
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 that 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
you know has different kinds of ways of
of
perceiving signals so they would
probably be able to see you know if you
really wanted to communicate with an
earth-like species
with a human-like species um you would
send out all kinds of things you'd send
out you know radio
radio waves and and you send out gravity
waves and 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 uh considering the primitive
species we might be so i i don't know i
think i think if a super intelligent
species wanted to get in touch with us
um
uh and had the capability of i think
probably
they would
well that
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 that 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
might be something that's not just like
uh tweets
okay like english language that's
interpretable or any kind of language or
any kind of signal whether it's uh
gravity or radio signal that humans seem
to appreciate
what 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 light there's like
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
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
like this story it seems like the
progress of science is
you know um constantly
putting humans down on the importance
like on the cosmic importance the
ranking of how big we are how important
we are
that that seems to be the more we
discover 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 that 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 just it sounds a little um
like religious it sounds like a
spiritual um
you know 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 characteristic like and people write
books about them then go to wars over
whatever the heck is written in those
books
i
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 i mean humans just like you
know any individual ant can't do shit
but the colony can do make this
incredible structures and and has this
intelligence and we're exactly the same
i mean yeah you know you know the famous
thing that you know no one no human
knows how to make a pencil
uh have you heard this
basically 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
that the paint the the 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
and 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
uh and create a pencil but but together
that's one of the that's that's child's
play it's one of the easiest things so
um you know the the other thing i like
to think about i actually put this as a
question on the on the blog once um
there's a thought experiment um 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
gonna cast a spell on all of humanity
and all material things that you've
invented
are gonna disappear all at once so
suddenly we're all standing there naked
there's no buildings
there's there's 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
um she communicated to every human
here's the deal you lost all your stuff
you guys need to make one working iphone
13.
when you make one working iphoto 13 that
could pass in the apple store today you
know in your previous world for an
iphone 13 then i will restore everything
how long do you think and so everyone
knows this is 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 a
thousand 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 like
there's a few hackers out there
that can like solo build an iphone
but with what materials
so no materials whatsoever
it has to i mean it's it's virtually i
mean okay you have to build factories i
mean two right and to fabricate
okay
and how are you going to mine them you
know you got to mine the materials where
you know how many cranes you know how
many you know okay you 100 have to have
the this everybody's naked everyone's
naked and everyone's where they are so
you and i would currently be naked uh
it's on the ground in what used to be
manhattan
buildings no grassy island yeah um so
you need a a naked elon musk type
character to then start building a
company yes you have to have a large
company then right and he doesn't even
know where he you know where is everyone
you know shit how am i going to find
other people well 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 me because you
said it's like the the original
mac like the apple ii
that could be built
but
even that you know even that's gonna be
tough 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 ten
really smart people were designated the
leaders they could say okay i want you
know everyone who can do this to 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'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 you'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 trying to murder the
people with the and who know what
they're talking about
the elite that yeah that possess the
knowledge well and so everyone maybe
everyone's hopeful for 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
they're you know
they don't play nicely with the other
ones and and i think very quickly i
think a lot of people 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 the even the even the
farmers you know a lot of them are
relying on their machines um
and uh so we also usually a 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've fashioned and trying to murder
everyone who has an interesting question
given today's society how much violence
would that be we've gotten softer or
less violent and 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
we used to be less like human life was
less valued
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
so we have no idea like the ancient
hunter gatherer societies would laugh at
what's going on here they 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 uh in in a very in a 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
something you're near a river freshwater
river and you know anyways it's a very
interesting question and what it does
this and the pencil
it makes me
um
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 uh 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 is coming
the salad arrives if you think about the
incredible infrastructure that's in
place for that's for that quickly ages
the internet to you know the electricity
first of all that's just powering the
things you know how the h 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 um where delivery drivers and
they have they're running 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
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 i came here at 13
from the soviet union and the
supermarket
was
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 i
haven't had bananas in russia and the
fact you can have as many bananas as you
want plus they 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 a long line
all of those things that's it's magic i
mean also imagine
so first of all the ancient hunter
gatherers you know you picture the
mother gathering and eating for all this
fresh fruit no so you know what an
avocado used to look like it was a
little like a sphere yeah
and 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 crazy like robot
avocados today that are they have
nothing to do with like what they so
same with bananas these big sweet yeah
uh you know um you know and not infested
with bugs 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 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 food and then it's all
this processed 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 some this is a good problem
if you imagine what they would think oh
my god a cracker you know how delicious
a cracker would taste to them um
you know candy uh you know 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 ah 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 that built up on the
past the distribute
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 ma right or magnitude of people
you need to
be on mars to truly be multi-planetary
yeah multi-planetary doesn't mean you
know
uh
like
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 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 it's you know in the
water and everyone should celebrate the
fish but it's um
but we talk 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 it's a self-sustaining he
says a million people is about what he
thinks now that might be a specialized
group that's that's a very specifically
you know selected million that
um has
very skilled million people not just
maybe the average million on earth but i
think it depends what you're talking
about but i don't think you know so one
million is one seven thousand one eight
thousandth 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 it depends who
you're killing off i guess is part of
the question yeah
if you killed all 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
dropped dead i think we'd have obviously
the stock market would crash uh we'd
have a a rough patch but um i almost can
assure you that the species would be
fine well because the million number you
like you said it is specialized
so
i 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 inverse you know kind
of infrastructure on earth can be built
there in this you know just as well
it'd be interesting to uh
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 you have mining these
questions it's like
the materials might be i don't know i
don't know five mile two miles
underground i don't know with the actual
but like
it's amazing to me just that these
things got built in the first place and
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 manny took a huge leap
without knowing very much about this i
think you know you're gonna need you
need
mining you're gonna need like heart a
lot of electrical engineers if you're
gonna 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 gonna need
uh you know energy and electricity and
then and mines that can bring materials
and then you're gonna need a ton of
plumbing and everything that entails
yeah
and like i said food but also the
manufacturer so like turning raw
materials into something useful yeah
that whole thing like factories
some supply chain transportation
right you know i mean you think about
when we talk about 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 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 uh have a youtube
channel that's running on mars
i 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 yeah philosophically will it be
like fuzzy we 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 friend's 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 it could 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 uh 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 be
staying up
all kinds of crazy geopolitical things
that like we have not even
no one's really even thought about too
much yet that like it could get weird
think about the 1500s
when it was suddenly like a race to like
you know colonize or capture or land or
discover new land that hasn't been you
know so it was like this this new
frontiers and there's not really you
know the land is not you know the thing
about crimea was like this huge thing
because 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 funding for naming things
and you know
um
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 yeah
and that's fascinating because elon
talks exactly about that and i 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 the
late 1700s the u.s i mean it was the
only
modern democracy and now
of course that's there's there's
hundreds or doesn't many dozens but i
think part of the reason that was able
to start i mean it's not the people
didn't have the idea people had the idea
it was that it was uh they had of 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 us 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 um 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 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 um inspiring
it makes us dream it makes us hope for
the future so
and it makes us somehow like thinking
about civilization on mars is um
helping us think about the civilization
here on earth yeah how we should run it
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
uh that's actually gonna be achieved i
have a big bet ten thousand dollars with
a friend uh when i was drunk uh okay in
an argument um this is great that the
neil armstrong of mars whoever he or she
may be will set foot
by the end of 2030.
now this was probably 2018 when i had
this argument so like what a human has
to touch mars by 20 and by the end of
30. oh by the year 30 yeah by january
1st 2031. yeah so um did you agree on
the time zone or whatever no no yeah
it's coming on that exact day that's
going to be really stressful but um
but anyway i i think that there will be
that was 2018 i was more confident then
um 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 lifetimes
or 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 it's delayed
many years by safety so they first want
to send a ship you know around mars and
they want to land a cargo ship on mars
and there's the moon on the way too yeah
there's there's but i think the moon
a decade before seemed like magical tech
that we that humans didn't have this is
like no we we can
it's it's it is it's totally conceivable
that this you've seen starship like it's
um
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 uh when
they're testing and they learn a
thousand things the amount of data they
get and they improve so each one has is
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 uh 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
wants to be on that voyage today because
there's just you know there's still it's
still amateur hour here i mean getting
that perfect
i don't think we're too far away now the
question is
so every so every 26
months earth laps mars right it's like
the sinocidal soil or orbit or whatever
it's called the period 26 months
so it's right now like in the evens like
2022 is gonna have one of these 20 20
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 uh maybe even a one in 2020 and so
i think they're not quite on that
schedule but to win my bet uh 2027 i
have a chance in 2029 i have another
chance nice 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 gonna be
landing on mars and it's not gonna be
the only thing everyone is talking about
right i mean it's gonna it's it's gonna
be the moon landing but even bigger deal
going to another planet right and and
for to start a colony not just again
high five and come back
so this is like
the 2020s maybe the 2030s
is gonna be the new 1960s we're gonna
have a space decade i'm so excited about
it yeah uh 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 um
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 a space
race
like space
depending on how it's presented can be
boring
i don't i don't
i i don't think it's been that so far
but i've actually i i think space is
quite boring right now
not not no spacex is super but like 10
years ago space yeah some writer i
forget who wrote um it's like the best
magic trick in the show happened at the
beginning and now they're starting to do
this like easy hazard you know it's like
you can't go in that direction and the
line that this writer said is like
watching uh
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 um
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 you know
mostly here and there there's a probe
but mostly you're sending enough to put
satellites to you know for for directv
you know an eye or whatever it is um
it's kind of like lame earth industry
you know usage
so i agree with you space is boring
there
the the the first human
um 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 then
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 it's 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
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 the shuttle that's one of his
two reasons for doing this spacex exists
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 um
you know
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 um
but the point is obviously it's good for
our chances our long-term chances to be
having you know two self-sustaining
civilizations going on
the second reason he's he's 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 um
and it'll it'll just be this hopefully
great uniting event too i mean i'm sure
in today's nasty awful political
environment which is like a whirlpool of
that sucks everything into it so it
doesn't you name a thing and it's become
a nasty political topic so i hope i hope
that um space can you know mars can just
bring everyone together but you know it
could become this hideous thing where
it's you know oh you know billionaire or
something annoying story line 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
it is super exciting so far space has
been a uniting inspired yes
thing and in fact especially during this
time of pandemic has been
just
a commercial entity putting out humans
into space for the first time
was just
one of the only big sources of hope
totally and awe just like watching this
huge skyscraper go up in the air flip
over get back down and land i mean it
just makes everyone just want to sit
back and clap and kind of like the way 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 we have a lot of problems but like
we're kind of awesome yeah
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 other things i'll
i'll blog about it so i'm just you know
continuing to throw this out
which i'm trying to get them to send me
to mars now i understand that um so i
just want to clarify on which trip does
the the writer want to go i think my
dream one to be honest would be like the
you know like the the apollo 8 where
they just looped around the moon and
came back because landing on mars
um 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 and so
i would go into the thing and i would
blog about it uh and i and i and i'd be
in microgravity so i'd be bouncing
around my little space i get a little
they can just send me in a dragon they
don't need to do a whole starship and um
and i would bounce around and i would
get to my i've always had a dream of
going to like
one of those nice jails for a year yes
because i just have nothing to do
besides like read books and no
responsibilities 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 a few 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 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 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
um it doesn't like you could literally
die today and then become the next jesus
like 2000 years from now and this
civilization that's like they're you
know they're like in magical in the
clouds
and they're worshiping you they're
worshiping lex like and like that sounds
like your ego probably would be like wow
that's pretty cool except irrelevant to
you because you never even knew what
happened this feels like a rick and
morty episode
it does it does
okay you've uh you've talked to elon
quite a bit you've written the bottom
quite a bit just
it'd be cool to to hear you
talk about what are your ideas of what
you know the magic sauces you've written
about about with elon what what makes
him so successful
his style of thinking his ambition his
dreams his um 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 um he's he
has
he's obviously super intelligent his
heart is very much in like i think the
right place like and 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 hard working 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
um 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
uh and conventional wisdom says you know
don't eat that berry you know or this is
the way you tire tie a spearhead to a
spear
uh and you're thinking i'm smarter than
that like you're not you know that 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
um
people back then like the the
conventional wisdom like had this super
this 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 they go and the mountain determines
their fate that's not true right and the
conventional wisdom is wrong there but
um believing it was helpful to survival
because you were one you you 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
it would for a lot of reasons it was a
great survival trait to just trust what
other people said uh and believe it and
truly obviously you know the more you
really believed it the better
today
um conventional wisdom
in a rapidly changing world
um 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 uh
you know 300 million person society so
they're so your brain is basically
um
uh
is treating a lot of things like a small
tribe even though they're not they're tr
and and they're treating conventional
wisdom as as you know very wise
in a way that it's not you think about
it this way it's like a picture a like a
bucket that's not moving very much
moving like a millimeter a year and so
it has time to collect a lot of water
and it that's like conventional wisdom
in the old days when very few things
change like your your ten your
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 bucket's
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 uh
setting on it so um 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 got to live near you 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 me that they'll
actually be in some metaverse like
exactly it doesn't matter and i'm like
you have to it's not the same when
you're not in person they're going to
say it's exactly the same
and they'll also be thinking to me with
their link and i'm going to be like slow
down i don't understand what you're
saying you just talk like a normal
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 uh 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 right
now if you think about that so then when
we think about conventional wisdom it's
a little like my grandmother and and um
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 the confidence in our own
reasoning when it conflicts with what
everyone else thinks when with what
seems right
uh we don't have the um the guts to act
on that reasoning for that reason right
you know um we we we and so there's so
many elon examples i mean just from the
beginning building zip2 was his first
company
and um
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 you know
we you know we still facilitate internet
advertising people are saying yeah
people are going to advertise on the
internet yeah right but actually
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 um
people say oh yeah people gonna 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 you'd think this is that as 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
uh 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 gonna
start launching rockets and you know the
amount that failed i mean it's it's not
conventional wisdom said this isn't a
bad endeavor he was putting all of his
money into it yeah
landing rockets was another thing you
know 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 60s uh 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 elon 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 he can see the
future he has incredible uh he has
incredible guts he's so you know
courageous i think if you actually are
looking at reality
uh 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 um
and you have to have this magical
ability to be seen 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 this civilization on our own
right we it's so so we we we kind of
count you know doubt to the um
to the collective
because for good reasons but this is
different when it comes to kind of
what's possible you know the beatles
were doing their kind of motowny chord
patterns in the early 60s and they 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're
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 the the
all the record exactly say no you have
to be here this is what sells and it's
just not true so i think that elon is
like that's why the the the term for
this that actually elon likes to use is
reasoning from first principles the
physics term uh first principles are
your axioms and physicists they don't
say well what's you know what what's
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 and they they
come up with all kinds of new things
constantly by doing that
if einstein was 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
uh great shortcut it's it's when we look
at other people's reasoning and we kind
of photocopy it into our head we steal
it
so uh 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
uh 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 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 and turns these
moments this is what on your deathbed
like you look back on and that's what
these are these
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 he's not
it's not how you're supposed to be when
you're a super famous uh 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 uh
it has taken him where it has taken yeah
i mean i probably wouldn't describe his
approach to twitter as first
first principles but i guess that's the
same i think it is well first of all i
will say that a lot of tweets people
think oh like he's gonna 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 not syncing him
and i think you know it's not that 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 would his reasoning did not feel
like there was a giant risk and just
being his silly self on twitter when a
lot of billionaires would say well no
one else is doing that yes so it must be
a good reason right
well i gotta say that he inspires me too
that it's okay to be silly
totally on twitter and um
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 reasoning i mean airbnb
was
over 60 with vcs
a lot of people 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
details like engineering problems
it's fun to talk to him it's fun to talk
jim keller who's a good example of this
kind of thinking
about like manufacturing how to get
costs down they always talk about like
they talk about spacex rockets this way
they talk about manufacturing this way
like
um
cost per pound or
per ton
to get to orbit or something like that
this is other reason we need to get the
cost down it's a very kind of raw
materials yeah
like just very basic way of thinking
first principles
it's really yeah and the first
principles of rocket are like the price
of raw materials and gravity
you know and
wind i mean these are your first
principles and and fuel um
henry ford you know what made henry ford
blow up uh as an entrepreneur
the assembly line right i mean he did
that he he thought for a second and said
this isn't how manufacturing is normally
you know it's 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 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 they
all they flock over look at the iphone
iphone you know steve jobs was famously
good at for reasoning for 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 and i don't think apple can do
that anymore i mean they lost that that
one brain ability to do that was made
that in a totally different company even
though there's tens of thousands of
people there
he said he didn't say
and 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 and say okay what kind of you know
let's make a you know keyboard that's
like clicky and you know really cool
appley keyboard they said what should a
mobile device be
you know what the
axioms what are the axioms here and none
of them involve the 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 now every phone
looks like the iphone i mean
that's that's how it goes
you tweeted
what's something you 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 um just
finishing a book on
uh 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 it's
exploding technology fewer and fewer
people are in poverty um you know it's
louis ck you know likes to say you know
everything's amazing and no one's happy
right and but but it's really extreme
moment right now where it's like hate is
on the rise like crazy things right and
uh 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 on all the ones in the
middle yeah i earned that i mean when
you when you earn a reputation as a uh
as a tried and true procrastinator
you're just gonna get shit yeah forever
and that's fine i accept my faith there
so do you mind uh sharing a little bit
more about the details of what you're
writing so you're yeah 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 if you look at max
roser's 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
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 we 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 shaped by
the environment and then eventually what
what comes out is behavior
right human nature is not changing very
much but suddenly 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 percent of of the their own
party and you know 50 of the other party
and now it's like 40 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 since maybe some
people would argue that they are but
more so 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 you're seeing
is 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 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 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
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 it 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 u.s it
would be better it's cooler than heaven
but we live in a place that's cooler
than 1707 yeah again other than the fact
that we still die now i think the future
world actually probably would have
quote eternal life i don't think anyone
wants eternal life actually if people
think they do eternal is a long time but
i think the true 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 uh and i do believe
that like if we don't botch this we'd be
heading towards somewhere that would
seem like heaven maybe in our lifetimes
of course if we
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
um
the the bad things in the 20th century
were kind of the worst things
ever in terms of just absolute magnitude
you know world war ii you know the
biggest genocides ever um you've got uh
you know 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's getting worse and so what i
think about the future i think of us in
some kind of
big you know long canoe as a species uh
five million mile long canoe uh each of
us sitting in a row we have a we each
have one or we can paddle on the left
side of 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 that's we're probably not
headed for just an okay future it's just
the way tech is exploding like it's
probably gonna 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 all
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 what are your your sources of hope
in this
so like how do you steer the the canoe
one of my big sources of hope and this
is my i thing my answer to what i
changed my mind on
is i i think i always knew this but i
for it's easy to forget it
our primitive brain does not remember
this fact which is that i don't think
there are
um
very many bad people
now you say bad you know there are there
selfish people most of us i think if you
know i think that if you think of people
uh if you know
there's there's you know 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 you
know 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's these people
are awful so d you know zero is not a
human place no one's a zero and no one's
a one those are you're dehumanizing
yourself so when when we get into this
land i call it political disney world
because the disney movies are good guys
you know scar is totally bad and mufasa
is totally good right there's no you
don't see mufasa's character flaws you
don't see scars up you know upbringing
that made him like that that humanizes
no lionizes him whatever um you are uh
well done yeah
mufasa is 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
um and it can be religious disney world
it can be national disney world and 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
point fives or maybe point six is two
point fours
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 um 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 if you
assemble the highlight reel of your
worst moments
the the meanest things you've ever done
the worst the most selfish the time you
you know you stole something whatever
and you just people think wow lex is an
awful person if you highlighted your if
you did a montage of your best moments
people 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 .5s are 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 point fives and point
fives um are good enough that we should
be able to create a good society
together there's a lot of love in every
human and and i think there's more love
in humans than hate um
you know i yeah i always remember this
moment uh
this is weird anecdote but i was 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 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 we 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 yeah 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 um or that
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 uh a
0.7 to a 0.9
if the environment
is uh
is properly calibrated with incentives i
think that well i think that i think
maybe if we're all yeah if we're all
point fives i think that that uh that
environments can bring out our good side
you know yeah so maybe we're all on uh
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 us environment we take for granted
how the liberal laws and liberal
environment that we live in
i mean like
in new york city right if you walk down
the street and you like assault someone
hey if anyone sees you they're probably
going to yell you might get your ass
kicked by someone for doing that you
also might uh end up in jail um 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 that human nature
doesn't have it in it to to be like that
it's that this environment we're in has
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 is contained by our
environment and um 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 uh we can we can really
kind of lose our grip on some of the
good behavior were you surprised by
elon's answer about uh
brain transplants or sounds about
nuclear power or anything else just sims
i think is uh i have a friend isabel
bellameck gay who has a uh who's a
nuclear power you know influencer i've
become very convinced and i i've not
done my deep dive on this yeah but it's
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 wastes they see that
they're completely overblown
so
judging from those people secondary
knowledge here i will say i'm 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
um
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 i personally am
uncomfortably reasoning about analogy
with climate change i've actually have
not done a deep dive me neither because
it's so uh man it seems like a deep dive
and yeah
and uh 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 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 in 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
um
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 gonna have to
move around this is happening gradually
are we gonna be able to respond to this
how would we respond to this what are
the best ma like what are the best
models for how everything goes wrong
again i was uh this is a question i keep
starting to ask myself without doing any
research uh with like motivating myself
to get up to the this deep dive that i
feel is deep
just watching people not do a great job
with that kind of modeling with the
pandemic and so 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 so this is part of why i wrote
the book because i said
we're going to have
more and more of these like yeah big
collective what should we do here
situations you know whether it's how
about when you know uh we're probably
not that far away from people being able
to
um go and decide the iq of their kid or
like you know make a bunch of embryos
and actually you know you know pick the
high highest like you can possibly go
wrong yeah and also like imagine the
political sides of that and like that's
something only wealthy people can afford
at first and just a 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
and come up with where the collective
brain can be smart
i think that there are certain topics
where i think of 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
is more rational and puts out ideas that
it's not attached to and so it can arg
it can change its mind easily because
it's just an idea and and the higher
mind can uh 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 and one idea goes out and everyone
criticizes it which is like you know
shooting bows and arrows at it and the
the truth the true idea is you know the
boat the arrows bounce off and it's okay
it rises up and the other ones get shot
down so it'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 mechanism 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 the the more limbic
systemy 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 starts
identifying so what happens is they team
up too and so when you have a topic uh
that a bunch of primitive that really
rouses a bunch of primitive minds um it
uh it quickly the primitive minds team
up and they create an echo chamber where
suddenly no one can criticize this and
in fact if the idea is powerful enough
people outside the community you can no
one can criticize it we will get your
paper attracted 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 and they will not change their
mind and they get dumber and dumber and
so climate change which 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 this 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
right and so what's happening is the big
brain gets like frozen right and it
becomes very stupid now you can also say
that about a lot of other topics right
now uh you know you you know um uh you
just mentioned another one i forget what
it was but that's also kind of like
the world of vaccines yeah yeah covet
okay and here's my point earlier is that
we what i see is that the political
divide
has is like a whirlpool that's pulling
everything into it and in that whirlpool
uh thinking is done with the primitive
mind
tribes
and so
i get you know okay obviously something
like race right that makes sense that
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 you know it taps into
like our deepest kind of like primal
selves
um
covet you know make this cove in a way
too you know 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 we're losing our
ability to be wise together to make
decisions uh where it's like 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 her future with more and more
big technologies uh scary things but 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
that's one of the saddest things to me
about is like
the scientists like i
i've seen arrogance there's a lot of
mechanisms that maintain the tribe it's
the arrogance it's it's a it's how you
build up the this mechanism that defends
this wall that defends against the
arrows it's uh
arrogance credentialism
like
um
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
uh the 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
i created a term for because i think we
need it which is called an ideal lab an
idea lab right it's like people treat
it's like people act like scientists
even if 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 is an
impulse for the rest of the group to say
i think you're being like uh overly
general there or i think like 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 idea 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 but this
group of friends or 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 uh appease her now what's what scares
me is that usually you have these things
existing kind of in bubbles and usually
there's like and they each have their
natural defenses against each other so
an
echo chamber person stays in their echo
chamber they don't like they they will
cut you out they don't 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 voted for trump or whatever right
so
they're um
that's how they do it they will say i'm
gonna stay inside of an echo chamber
safely so my ideas which i identify with
um
because my primitive mind is doing the
thinking it are not gonna 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 id
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's going to try to bully you
know they're going to say uh that's
really offensive and people say no it's
not and they're going to they're gonna
immediately say these people are
assholes right so the echo chamber uh
person uh 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 will get kicked
out of the group they will get branded
as something you know a denier a racist
uh you know a a right winger a radical
you know these these these nasty words
um
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 that's that's an idea lab
slogan um 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 uh all brilliantly put when's the
book coming up
any 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 out okay uh
if it's okay just a couple of questions
from mailbag i just love these
i would love to uh i would love to hear
you uh 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 your 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
reading a book or whatever and the
higher mind is um
is
trying to get information and once it
has it there's no point in listening to
it again it has the information um 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 sport 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
um you know i think it's of course it's
a collaboration you're you know your
your rational brain is absorbing the
actual message and but i think it's all
about emotions and and even more than
emotions it literally like the you know
music taps into like some very very
deep
um
you know
primal part of us and so when you hear a
song once
even you're 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 and then you end up
loving it on the 10th listen but
sometimes you even don't eat 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 i don't
i hated this song and what's happening
is that
the sound is actually the music's
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 can
anticipate um and it and it
and so there's something about
knowing having memorized the song that
makes it incredibly enjoyable to us um
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 then 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 watch it like 12 times you
know and still like it you know not not
that many but versus if you're watching
a talk show right listening to if you're
listening to a pod one of your podcast
is 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 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 it is well you
know the funny thing is there's people
that listen to a podcast episode many
many times and often i think the reason
for that is not because the information
is the chemistry is the music of the
conversation yeah so it's not the action
it's the art of it they like yeah yeah
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 like a stand-up comic i've
watched like certain things like
episodes like 20 times yeah even though
i you know
i have to ask you about the wizard hat
you wrote a blog about neurolink i got a
chance to visit you know like a couple
times hanging out with those folks
um
you're 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 are somehow um
it's like you know it's like
calling the origin of the universe the
big bang it's a slowly titled but it
somehow sticks to be the representative
of uh
of that the same way the wizard had for
the new link is um
somehow it was a really powerful way to
to explain that you actually propose
that the the man of the year cover of
time should be um one of my drawings why
are your drawings yes yes there's an
outrage that it wasn't it was
okay
so
uh what are your thoughts about like all
those years later about your link
do you find this idea like what excites
you about is the big long term
philosophical things is it the 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 about 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 okay on computer interfaces i
mean i'm super excited about it um it's
a
i really think it's actually elon's most
ambitious thing
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 i think that neuralink
engineers and elon himself would all be
the first to admit that it is a maybe
that when they 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 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 everyone
should be very happy about um
this kind of um helping with different
disabilities
um
but the thing that is like so the grand
goal is this augmentation where it's you
take someone who's totally healthy and
you put a pre-machine interface in any
way to give them super powers
um
you know it's the the possibilities that
they can do this if they can really so
you know they've already shown that they
are for real but 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 this 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 isn't 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 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
it 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 ear drums you could do it that
way that seems very hard but really what
you need if you go to the very end but
the 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 knurling things in
there neural link electrodes and then
they'll get 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 neural link
app you open the knurling gap you know
and and or just know so so basically you
can open your spotify and you can play
to you know your 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 now have a new one you can
play into your brain and this is uh one
of the earlier things this is you know
something that seems like really doable
um so
you know no more headphones i always
think it's so annoying because i can
leave the house with just my phone
you know and nothing else or 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 that oh it's
terrifying well
what did i just do i just gave you 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
i put the stuff in the head in the
bucket and give it to you but all you
have is the bucket you just have to
guess what what i put into that bucket
all you can do is look at the label of
the bucket and say i'll us when i say
terrifying here's what i mean so the
point is it's very lossy i had this all
this nuanced information of what i
thought of the movie and i'm sending you
a very low res package that you're gonna
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 a have a brainstorm that doesn't
feel like oh we're not talking in each
other's heads it's not just that i hear
your voice 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 yeah but
you think together and together you're
like have they joined epiphany and now
how about eight people in a room doing
it right so it gets you know there's
other examples how about when you're a
dress designer or a bridge designer and
you you want to
show people what your dress looks like
well right now you 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 know 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 right and take a skill right you
know you're gonna have to but the
possibilities my god talk about like i
feel like if that works if we really do
have that uh 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 the like replay of memories
just replaying stuff in your head oh my
god yeah and 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 well maybe we can get there'll be
great trainings you know i'm spending
the next three months in like a you know
in one of the neural link trainings but
it'll still be a bit of like grandpa can
definitely this is i always think how am
i going to be old i'm like no i'm going
to be great at the new phones it's not
going to be the phones it's gonna be
that you know the kid's gonna be
thinking to me i'm gonna be like i just
can you just talk please they're gonna
be like okay i'll just talk and they're
gonna
so that'll be the equivalent of you know
yelling to your grandpa today i i really
suspect i don't know what your thoughts
are but
i 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
why i mean is there anything more
intimate than thinking with each other i
mean that's you talk about you know once
we're 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 uh is people like
that
if it is important 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've lost something important and then
now there's a huge all first the hippies
start doing and then eventually becomes
this big wave and now everyone
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 meta verse
or in 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 uh 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 so whatever any so
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
um it's because a lot of times they went
to to to baseball games with the father
and then there's that family connection
there's a young kid
dreaming about i don't know
um
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
through a screen we all agree that's not
the same yeah that's not the same but if
this were some you know we had contact
lenses on and like yeah maybe neuralink
you know play maybe again forget con
again this is all the the devices even
if it's as cool as a contact lens that's
all old school yeah once you have the
brain interface it'll just be projection
um
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 is 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 uh relationship that are needed you
know like what like success
sex but also just like that there's
pheromones like there's the the physical
touch is such a that's like music it's
such a deeply primitive
part of us the the what physical touch
with a romantic partner does that i
think that so i'm sure there'll be a
whole whole wave of people who their new
thing is that you know you're
romantically involved people you're
never actually 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 um it'd be a while before people feel
like there's nothing lost by not being
the same 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 basically um
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 so 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 they'll be the new like youtube or
like streaming whereas one masseuse
massaging one body but like a thousand
people are experiencing exactly right
now think about it right now you know
what taylor swift doesn't play for one
person has to go around and every one of
her fans just to go play for or a book
right you do it and it goes everywhere
so it'll be the same idea
uh you've written and thought a lot
about ai
so
uh ai safety specifically you've uh
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 uh but you've been thinking about
this ai safety question
where
today does your concern lie for the for
the near future for the long term future
like
quite a bit of stuff happened including
with elon's work with tesla autopilot
there's a bunch of amazing robots with
boston dynamics
and uh everyone's favorite vacuum robot
irobot roomba
and then 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 that could be used for for good
like for netflix 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
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
political polarization now and i see a
lot of puppet string emotions happening
so yeah there's a lot to be scared of
for sure like very scared of um i 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
we're like oh the wrist the fitbit
around my wrist is going to see you know
the whoop
is going to seem really
hilariously old school in 20 years
like a big bracelet right it's going to
turn into little sensors in our blood
probably or you know
even you know infrared we're you know
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 were 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
we 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 um
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 you might be immune from
all that kind of stuff also of course it
knows how fast your heart is beating and
it knows how much you you know exactly
the amount of exercise uh it knows your
muscle mass and your weight and all that
but it also maybe you can even know your
emotions i mean make if emotions you
know what are they you know where do
they come from probably pretty obvious
chemicals once we get in there um so
again neuralink can be involved here
maybe in collecting information
um 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 you're in a bad mood it's hard to
even but uh by the way just as a shout
out uh lisa feldman barrett who's a
neuroscientist
at northeastern just wrote
not just like a few years ago wrote a
whole book saying our expression of
emotions has 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 yes i was on my phone i
shouldn't 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 ia 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 for money 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
million ingredients and supplements and
vitamins and everything
and
i i give the i 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 or i want to you know i just want
to be very healthy and i want obviously
everyone wants the same like 10 basic
things like you want to avoid cancer you
want to oh you know various things you
want to age
slower so now the ai has my goals and
a drone
comes at you know it says
a little thing pops up and says like you
know be 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 from
my genome from my blood contents and
it's it's because 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 i 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 music it knows
you way better than you know yourself
better than any human could ever know
you and it a little thing pops up it
still has you still have some choice
right still it pops up and it says like
you know coffee uh 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 um and then this
isn't these aren't important decisions
you're you're important decision making
energy your 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 and 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 exciting i think
we'll all be so much healthier the the
when we look back today one of the
things that's going to look so primitive
is the one-size-fits-all thing and
getting like reading advice about keto
um
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 bullshit is
being done by companies that we need to
have our wits about us as a society like
yeah this is free speech
is the mechanism by which the big brain
can think can think for itself can can
think straight can see straight when you
take away free speech when you start
saying that in every topic when when any
topic's 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 a incredible market to
to polarize people you know for media to
polarize people and to bring any topic
it can into that uh 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
you know people say oh people like to
say outside you know you don't even know
what free speech is free speech you know
it's you know this is uh your free
speech is not being violent like no
you're right uh 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
uh you know police shootings um uh or
you know what's going on in you know
k-12 schools or you know even you know
climate change you know take take any of
these
and
the first amendment's 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
um
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 you 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
you say something wrong and people say
oh wow you've changed oh wow like look
this is his real you know colors he
knows
the big brain is is done 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 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 to 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 is the
the
end on the compass for every thinker
doesn't mean we're you know necessarily
on the on our way or finding but we're
all aiming in the same direction we all
believe that there's a place we can
eventually get closer to
it's not an objective truth you know
teaching them that disagreement is bad
violence you know it's it's
you know
uh 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 if i was had my own country
i mean
it's like i would teach kids some very
specific things that this is the doing
the exact opposite of
um
and it sucks it sucks
speaking of way to escape this you've
tweeted 30 minutes of reading a day
equals yeah this whole video and this
it's cool to think about reading like in
an um as a habit and something that
accumulates he said 30 minutes of
reading a day equals 1 000 books in 50
years i love like thinking about this
like chipping away at the mountain
can you expand on that sort of um 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 have 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
uh
two to a
you know 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
uh
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 is just two percent
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're
right two pages a week um sorry that's
not true that was two pages a day okay
two pages a week 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 here
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 so reading is another
example
where um someone who reads uh 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 uh his 10 favorite books of the
year 20 his 20 favorite books of the
year i'm like
20 favorites
like i'm trying to just read 20 books
like that would be an amazing year so um
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 as
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
non-fiction areas they can be you know
an amazing fiction reader avid fiction
reader
um and again that's a half hour a day
some people can do an hour half hour in
the morning audiobook half hour at night
in bed now they've read 2000 books so um
i i
i think it's um
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 um i on the reading front i'm a very
slow reader which is just
just a very frustrating fact about me um
but i'm faster with audio books uh and
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 uh until i sit down
and that's i can read uh yeah 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
just fun it makes the morning so fun i'm
like having a great time the whole
morning i'm like oh i'm so into this
book so i think that you know audiobooks
is another amazing gift to people who
have a hard time reading i find that
that's actually an interesting skill i
do audiobooks 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 at least
well the the 10 second back button is
very valuable oh so i just i just if i
get lost it 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 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 yeah 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 in thought maybe i should try that
yeah and just when you asked and thought
by the way you're processing the book
that's not wasted time that that's your
brain really categorizing and cataloging
what you just read and like well there
are 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 tr
continually thinking about something
else i just i'm not i i it's not i just
pause the book yeah yeah especially in
the shower or something when like
that's sometimes when really great
thoughts come out if i'm having all
these thoughts about other stuff i'm
saying clearly my mind wants to work on
something else so i'll just pause it
yeah quiet dan carl and i'm thinking
about something else right now exactly
exactly also you can things like you're
you have to head out to the store like
i'm gonna 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
shitting the security line i'm reading
the whole time like um i know this is
not groundbreaking people know what
audiobooks are but i think that more
people should probably get into them
than do because i know a lot of people
they have this stubborn kind of thing i
don't like i i like to have the paper
book and sure but like
it's pretty fun to be able to read i i
still to this day 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 uh you go to these websites like
that estimate how long a book takes on
average those always annoying they do
like a page a minute when i read like
best a page every two minutes at best at
best when you're like really like right
actually not positive just my add it's
like i 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 will
be like what i don't remember any like
details i'm 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 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 uh it's an app called anki
i don't know if you don't 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 this it
you review it and the one the things you
remember it takes longer and longer to
bring back up it's like flash cards but
a digital app it's called inky i
recommend it to a lot of people there's
a huge community of people that are just
like obsessed with it a-n-k-e
a-n-k-i
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 um
like when you read history if you think
this
particular factoid they'd probably be
extremely useful for you because you're
um that 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
all the time store that in yeah and
that's why i go anky drop it in and oh
you can just drop it in yeah and you
drop 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 spacer repetition there's a bunch
of apps that are much nicer anky anki is
the uh
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 they 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 this yeah i
realized that how have i not come
you are the person yeah i guarantee
you'll probably write a blog about it i
can't believe you actually haven't well
it's also just like you're people too
and um my people say what do you write
about literally anything i find
interesting and so for me every once in
once you start a blog like your entire
world view becomes would this be a good
blog post with this video i mean it's
the lens i see everything through but um
i constantly coming across something or
you know or just a tweet you know um
something that i'm like oh i need to
like share this with my readers 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 um 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 like tweet and all that kind
of stuff
is uh 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
uh
i i don't know uh
uh when churchill did something right
i'm reading about world war two a lot
now like a particular event here's that
do you remember one 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 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
review concepts yeah 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 and
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 yes is you know
it you don't have to be the executive
calling that like the program the
memorization program someone else's
handling yeah i would love to
to hear about like you trying it out or
space repetition is an idea there's a
there's a few other apps but enki's 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 treated like a
silly problem
um
it people don't take it seriously as a
dire
problem um
but it can be
it can it can
ruin your life
um
there's uh
like talk we told you we talked about
the compiling com uh concept with you
know if you read a little you know you
if you okay 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 person's working so
hard it's 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 had 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 um 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 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 doesn't 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 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
um the internal mechanism in their brain
is not doing what the other person's is
they don't have the respect for the the
part of them that made 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 their eating habits
make them
obese over time or their exercise habits
um
that you know that's a huge loss for
that person that person is is is you
know the health problems and it's just
probably making them miserable um and
it's and it's self-inflicted right it's
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 compl 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 you realize
you hits you you shouldn't be in this
marriage you should get divorced and you
wait 20 extra years before you do it or
you don't do it at all
um
that is uh you know you're not living
the life that you know you should be
living right and so uh
i think it's fascinating now the problem
is it's also a funny problem because
there's short-term procrastination uh
which i talk about as you know the kind
that has a deadline now some people you
know
uh this is when i bring in the there's
different characters there's that the
panic monster comes in the room and
that's when you actually you know that
the procrastinator can um
there's different levels there's the
kind that even when there's
um a deadline they they stop panicking
they just they given up and they 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 uh
you know becoming a writer when you
never have been before getting out of
your relationship um
uh you'll be doing whatever you need to
the changes you need to make in order to
get into a relationship there's a thing
after one launching a startup launching
a startup right uh or once you're 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 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
uh has no deadline it just has to be
coming from yourself
and
um
i think that a ton of people have a
problem
where they
will they they think this delusion that
you know i'm gonna do that i'm
definitely gonna do that you know but
not not this week not this month not
today because whatever and they make
this excuse again and again it just sits
there on their list
collecting dust um
and so yeah to me it's uh
it is a very real suffering and the fix
isn't fixing the habits
just uh
uh
still working on the fix first of all so
there's okay
there is um
there's it just say you have a boat that
sucks and it's leaking and it's gonna
sink you can fix it with duct tape for a
couple right you know for one ride or
whatever uh that's not really fixing the
boat but you can get you buy 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 um 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
um that's because the panic monster is
gonna freak out if they don't
so you can you can create a panic
monster if you wanna you know you really
wanna write music you really want to
become a singer-songwriter well book a
venue
um
tell 40 people about it and say hey on
you know this day two months from now
come come and see i'm gonna play you
some of my songs you now have a
paintbrush you're gonna write songs
you're gonna have to right so um
there's there's
there's duct tape things you know you
can do things you know people do there's
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
solve 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 there there's
there's
all the incentives 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 not 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 um and
in some ways i've gotten really
successful at solving it in other ways
i'm still still floundering um so you're
the world's greatest duct taper
yes well i 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 literally like yes there's
nothing i won't um 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 i don't 6 a.m
or anything insane or i'm not going to
be one of those
crazy people at 5 30
jogs
i'm going to wake up at whatever you
know
7 30 8 8 30 and i should have a block
like just say nine to noon
[Music]
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
some of them have done that that that's
common there's some that i like these
writers they do the late night sessions
but most of them they do it there's a
session but there's a session that's
most writers write in the morning and
there's a reason i i don't think i'm
different than those people um
it's a great time to write you're 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 a 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 right yes so now what's
happening is that every weekday is a
minimum of a b i'll give myself i know 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 that's 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 uh either all 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 wake
up and there's just you know i'll say i
was gonna do a few emails and i'll open
it up and i'm suddenly on text and i'm
texting and 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 this is icky and i'll go do
something else
so duct tape what i've done is um uh
wait but y has one employee alicia she's
the manager of lots of things that's her
role
she truly does lots of things um
and one of the things we started doing
yeah 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
procrastination 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 shit i have class in five
minutes or it's monday morning you go
ugh
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
you know you have a trainer and he says
okay next set you go okay and you do
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 this sucks but i
guess i'll do it if no one's there
though the problem with the
procrastinator is they don't have that
person in 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 um and so
anyway alicia is sitting there next to
me
now she's doing her own work but 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 it's too
weird and too embarrassing so i get it
done and it's amazing it's like a 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 you know conserve
energy and like fulfill our needs as we
need them and like do immediate things
and
um we're overriding our natural ways
when we wake up and get to it and i
think sometimes because the the pain i
think a lot of times we're just avoiding
suffering and a lot 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 it 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 and yeah but i think that
there's this feeling that you captured
with your body language and so on
like the 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 yeah
just march forward like i talked to elon
about this a lot actually offline it's
like he doesn't have this
no it's clearly not it's an it's it's
the way i think he talks about the way i
think about it is it's like you just
pretend you're like a machine and
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 it's framing
frame it differently yeah you know yeah
you can frame it as like it can feel
like homework or it can feel like you're
like you're living your best life or
something when you're doing your work
yeah um 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 um
i've
i'm now on
on a kick where i exercise every day it
doesn't doesn't matter what that
exercise is it's not serious it could be
uh 200 push-ups but it's a thing that
like i make sure exercise every day has
become way way easier
because of the habit and i just um
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 yeah and it
is effort like if it were something else
i would be like i don't want to live in
the bathroom i'm going to do that i just
feel like 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 yeah 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 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 right like unless i
didn't have a toothbrush like i was in
the woods or something and what is that
because it's well annoying
to me there's um there so the character
that makes me procrastinate is the
instant gratification monkey now that's
what i've labeled him right and um
there's the rational decision maker and
the instant gratification monkey and
these battle with each other um but the
for procrastinator the
monkey wins yeah i think the monkeys you
know if we you know you read about this
kind of stuff i think that the
this kind of more primitive brain
is always winning and in the
non-procrastinators that primitive brain
is on board for some reason
um
and 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 now
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 monkey's like ooh 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 is this isn't so bad okay i'm kind
of into it then then sometimes you can't
tear me away you know that then i
suddenly i'm like i get into a flow so
it's like once i get into 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 ugh 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 um 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 relate a lot of places
it's i will procrastinate getting ready
to go to the airport
um even though i know i should leave at
three so i cannot be stressed i'll leave
it 336 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 um yeah there's some very very odd
irrational
yeah like i i was waiting for you to
come and you said that you're running a
few minutes late and i was like i did
um
i was like i'll go get 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 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 conference i'd be
preparing more right like it's like it's
like i obviously care about the person
but yeah misinterpreted it is like there
i mean there are some people that like
show up late because they like they kind
of like that quality in themselves and
that 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 yeah they're so regretful
exactly i mean that's me and i mean
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 like it's hilarious yeah
uh you've tweeted a quote by james
baldwin saying quote i imagine one of
the reasons people cling to their hates
so stubbornly is because this
is because they sense once hate is gone
they will be forced to deal with the
pain
uh what has been a painful but formative
experience in your life
or what's the flavor the shape of your
pain that fuels you i mean honestly the
the first thing that jumped to mind is
my own like battles against myself to to
get my work done because it affects
everything when i i just took five years
in this book and granted it's a it's a
beast like i 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 you know not just that
i'm not working it's that i'm i'm over
researching i'm i'm making it i'm adding
in things i shouldn't because i'm
perfectionist you know 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 just you know or or i over
outline you know something you know
until you know trying to get it perfect
when i know that's not possible it's
making a lot of immature kind of
like i know 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 isn't i
know i'm being an amateur so
that a it it it hurts the actual product
it makes you know it b it wastes your
vet your precious time
c
um when you're mad at yourself when
you're
in a 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
um 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
it was like in my head i was like i
can't do anything until this is done you
know like no and i and i just stopped
like ever valuing like
like joy of any kind like i was like no
i i no that's for when i'm done and and
that that's a trap or very quickly you
know you know cause i always think you
know i think it's gonna 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 you talk 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 and it was a bad um
pattern
a very unproductive unhelpful pattern
for me which is that wake up in the
morning in this great mood
great mood every morning wake up
thrilled to be awake have the whole day
ahead of me i'm gonna get so much work
done today and but you know first i'm
gonna do all these other things and it's
all gonna be great and then i end up
kind of failing for the day um with
those goals usually sometimes miserably
sometimes only partially
and then
i get in bed probably a couple 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 um or just even to the beginning of
that day
and
uh just tossing and turning now i mean
this is a very bad place that's what i
said suffering real procrastinators
suffer in a very serious way so look i i
you know i know this probably sounds
like a lot of like first world problems
and it is but it's real suffering as
well like it's um so to me it's like
it's
painful because
you're not being 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 um
and it's like it feels like it's one
small tweak away sometimes it's like
that's what i said it's like if you just
suddenly are just doing that nine to 12
and you get in that habit everything
else falls into place all of this
reverses
so
if i feel hopeful but it's like it is a
i have not figured i haven't fixed the
boat yet i i have some good duct tape
though and you also don't want to
romanticize it because it is true that
some so some of the greats in history
especially writers suffer from all the
same stuff like they they weren't quite
i mean
you might only write for
two or three hours a day but the rest of
the day is often spent you know like
kind of tortured by 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 shocked 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 and you're you know yin
and yang of your time and that's what
that's my goal is black and white time i
really focused time and then totally
like
clean conscience free time
right now right 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 this
massive so if you can just get really
good at
uh 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
um 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 spend a lot of time in the dark
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 it's toxic
um 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 it 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 is just pounding
the other part like you're like you're
like we got it like like we we treat we
treat ourselves well like it's how
you're internally feeling like i treat
myself and it's like yeah i know it's
work time and then later you're like now
it's play time and it's like okay back
to work because 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 the parent hates the
kid and like yeah
and you're right 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 uh i guess i have the same kind of
hope um 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
because it's always easy to schedule
stuff for the future for myself right
because 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 progress but this is not my
this is what i do 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 regular you know
production here is a is a sign that
something is working at least in this
regard yeah in this regard 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 you procrastinate if you're
thinking about being 80 and if you can
get into that person's head and look
back and be like 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 gonna get it done so working with
someone can help um 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 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 a little bit so and
there co-founder really helps that's the
idea
um
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 um
is there projects that you want to write
is there movies you want to write or
direct or endless
so it's just endless scenes
it's just no there's a 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
um 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 i get so much joy
from finishing things i don't like doing
things but a lot of writers 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 uh putting it out there
and how 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 when i
do something that i i make something and
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 oh i just paid off some debt to myself
i 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 it so
the more things i can do you know and i
just have fun doing it right so i'm just
it's it's for me that includes
a lot more writing i just you know short
short no short blog post i write very
long blog posts but basically short
writing in the form of long blog post is
a great i love that medium i want to do
a lot more of that um books yet to be
seen i'm going to do this and i'll 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 um
i i did a little travel series once i
love doing that i want to do you know
more of that it's almost like a vlog
like no it was um i let readers in a
survey
pick five countries they wanted me to go
that's awesome and they they picked they
they sent me to weird places they sent
me i would i went to uh 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 um
and i get 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
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 um
and then um and 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 um write a musical that's
actually what i was doing before we put
y i was i was with a partner ryan langer
um we were halfway through a musical and
uh and and he got
tied up with his other musical and wait
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
these mediums on which you can be
creative and create something and you
like the variety of it yes yes
it's just that i 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
or making videos especially with a super
creative mind like yours you don't
really know what you're gonna make of it
until you try it yeah podcast i'm really
excited about but i'm like i like going
on other people's podcasts yeah and i've
never tried having wrong things
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
effect yeah but it's also i like to like
i'll go on like as you know long ass
monologues yeah and you can't do it if
you're the interviewer like you're not
supposed to do that as much so i have to
like reign it in and um
and that's that can be that might be
hard but well you could also do solo
type stuff yeah maybe i'll 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 you it's really you ranting which i
think i think you'd be extremely good
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 um i
just don't um
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 um
you know interviewing someone and i'm
like i can't i don't even know i don't i
just it's not my i can grill someone
yeah that's different that's my
curiosity being like wait how about this
and i interrupt them and i'm trying 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 like listening to people
yeah so this is like me right now having
just listening to a podcast like this is
me listening to your podcast listening
to a podcast because then it's not even
like but once i'm in the room i suddenly
can't help myself jumping in you know
okay
um big last ridiculous question what is
the meaning of life
the meaning of like an individual life
your 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 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 i mean i didn't 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 yeah but i'd like to
choose i'd like to say you know i'm
truly over it now and i'm gonna have you
know at that point we'd have our whole
society would have like 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
would it wouldn't be so well i think
you'd be super depressed by that point
like who's gonna 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 you
know but my i'm thinking 50 century
sounds great like i don't know if i want
more than that 50 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 um i for me personally i
want to be around as long as i can and
then honestly the reason i love writing
the thing 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
um
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 or made me
feel seen like that feels amazing and
and i just feel like um
uh we're all having such a weird comment
experience on this one little rock in
this one little moment of time where
this weird
these weird four limbed beings and we're
all the same and it's like we're all we
all the human experience so i feel like
so many 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 uh not alone do you feel that as a
writer do you 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 that
sometimes you're just sitting there
alone typing yeah dealing with your
procrastination but that's why
publishing is so gratifying because
that's the moment all this connection
happens yeah and especially if i had to
put my finger on it's like it's having
um a bunch of people who feel lonely and
their like existence is all real like
all you know connect right so that if i
do 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
um
and making the whole thing as
heartbreaking as like mortality and 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 i know that's what
you want being there yeah and that's
fine by the way if i if i yeah if so you
think you're picturing me alone on mars
as the first person there and then it
malfunctions right no you're supposed to
return but it malfunctions and then
there's this
the the 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 you
get to write yeah yeah perfectly also
that would bring out great writing yeah
i think sorry deathbed 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 jim thank you so
much you're you're for spending your
really valuable time with me i can't
wait to hear your podcast i can't wait
uh
to read your next blog post which you
said in a twitter reply you'll you'll
get more
yeah
after the book which add that to the
long list of ideas to procrastinate
about tim thanks so much for uh talking
today man 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 and
less afraid of things that don't matter
thanks for listening and hope to see you
next time