Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #264

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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 546,493

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, blogs, elon musk, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mars, mars colony, mit ai, procrastination, robots, tim urban, wait but why, waitbutwhy, writer, writing books

Id: 0Jd7fJgFkPU

Length: 157min 3sec (9423 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/CyberArchimedes]

YES! I didn't even click on it yet, but YES!!!

[u/stststststststs]

AWESOME guest! Always want to see Tim!

[u/nonobu]

Given all of Tim's work on Musk, I'd love to hear him address some of the criticisms instead of just always praising him.

[u/evanagovino]

Lex, you host a podcast where you interview experts, including lots of scientists, about their field of expertise. Why don't you have some on? Speculating about motives and saying that people are fear mongering while admitting your own naivete on the subject is counterproductive when you have the platform and access you do.

[u/luvs2spwge117]

I was listening to this earlier today in the car and it’s so far such a great episode. Such witty, smart minds dancing together.

[u/indieadventurer]

Wish they had discussed the possible negative impacts of neuralink, like being able to read another persons mind or see what they are thinking (how possible this is, who knows. Were they reaching here? Hearing an input from an external devices that’s connected to your neuralink is one thing but tapping into whatever the visual cortex produces and translating that into an actual image to send to the person you’re having the link with could be a whole other jump in complexity imho) This could be an absolute catastrophe done the wrong way. Current social media has allowed us into one another’s head and to read what we’re all thinking with no filter and the outcome has been a social experiment that has divided and polarized our society and we have no handle or solution to even this base level problem at this point.

[u/GameOfScones_]

Why does Lex say he left the Soviet Union when he was 13 even though the wall fell when he was 5?

Is this common for Russians to continue to refer to it as the Soviet Union?

[u/Withyourfeetintheair]

save for later

[u/Admirable-Whole-6921]

Love the fact they talked about audiobooks, my job would be death without them