Transcript for #264 – Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity

The very small seems a lot more mysterious. I mean, the very big, I feel like we kind of understand. I mean, not the very, very big, not the multiverse, if there is a multiverse, anything outside of the observable universe. But the very small, I think we really have no idea what's going on, or very much less idea. But I find that, so I think the smallest more mysterious, but I think the big is sexier. I just cannot get enough of the bigness of space and the fairness of stars. And it just continually blows my mind.

Yeah, life. Well, extraterrestrial life is a true mystery. The most tantalizing mystery of all. But that's like our size. So that's maybe the actual, the big and the smaller, really cool, but it's actually the things that are potentially our size that are the most tantalizing.

Yeah, I mean, I wonder how small intelligent life could get. Probably not that small. And I assume that if there's a limit that you're not going to, I mean, you might have like a whale, blue whale size, intelligent being that would be kind of cool. But I feel like it's in the range of order of magnitude smaller and bigger than us for life. Maybe maybe not, maybe you could have some giant life form just seems like, I don't know, 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 when you change the gravity and other things.

I think of it kind of as if you think about I think of like an emergence elevator and so you've got an ant is on one floor and then and colonies that 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 it's the closest to being the animal. It's like the the individual thing where that competes with others while the. the individual ants are like cells in the animal's body. We are more like a colony in that regard, but the humans are weird because we kind of, I think if if emergence happens in an emergence tower, when you've got kind of, you know, as I said, cells and then humans and communities and societies and survey specific. The individual answer always cooperating with each other for the sake of the colony. So the colony is this unit that is the competitive unit. Humans can kind of go, we take the elevator up and down and merge its tower psychologically. Sometimes we are individuals that are 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 protester sporting event and you're just you know you're just chanting and screaming you're 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 and now that's what you know soldiers and so our our brains can kind of psychologically go up and down this elevator in an interesting way

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 biggest thing that we kind of can talk about without just imagining is the observable universe, the Hubble sphere. And that's about 10 to the 26th meters in diameter. The smallest thing we talk about is a plank length. But you could argue that that's kind of an imaginary thing. But that's 10 to the negative 35. Now, we're about conveniently, about 10 to the one, not quite 10 to the zero. We're about 10 to the zero meters long. So we're right, and so it's easy because you can just look and say, OK, well, for example, Adams are like 10 to the negative 15th or 10 to the negative 16th meters across, right? If you go 10 to the 15th or 10 to the 16th, which is right, that's now so an atom to us is us to this. You get to like nebulous smaller than the galaxy and bigger than the biggest star. So we're right in between nebulous and an atom. Now if you want to go down to quirk level, you might be able to get up to galaxy level. When you go up to the observable universe, you're getting down on the small side to things that we, I think are mostly theoretically imagining are there and I path the sizing are there. So I think, as far as real world objects that we really know a lot about, I would say we are smaller than we are big. But if you want to go onto the plank length, we're very quickly, we're bigger than we are small. If you think about strings,

Yeah. I mean, here's something cool. If a human is a neutrino, and again, neutrino, the size isn't really makes sense. It's not really a size, but when we talk about some of these neutrinos, I mean, if neutrinos a human, a proton is the sun. So that's like, I mean, a proton's real small. like really small. And so, yeah, the small gets like crazy small very quickly.

If I had gunned in my head, I had to take a guess. I would say it's teaming with life. I would say there is. I think running a Monte Carlo simulation, this paper by Andrew Sandberg and Drexler, and a few others a couple years ago, I think you probably know about it. I think they're the mean, you know, using different using, you know, running through randomized rate equation multiplication. You're ended up with 27 million as the mean of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, in the Milky Way alone. And so then if you go outside the Milky Way, that would turn into trillions. That's the mean. Now, what's interesting is that there's a long tail because they believe some of these multipliers in the Drake equation. So for example, the probability that life starts in the first place. They think that the kind of range that we use is for that variable is way too small. And that's constraining our possibilities. And if you actually extend it to some some crazy number of orders of magnitude like 200, they think should that that variable should be You get this long tail where I forget the exact number, but it's like a third or a quarter of the total outcomes have us alone. I think it's a sizable percentage has us as the only intelligent. life in the galaxy, but you can keep going in there. I think there's a non-zero 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 counterintuitive. It seems like you mentioned that people think you must be an idiot because if you picked up one grain of sand on a beach and examined it and you found all these little things on it, It's like saying, well, maybe this is the only one that has, and it's like probably not. They're probably, most of the sand probably, you're 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 still scoff at the concept that were potentially alone, they say, well, of course, there's lots of reasons we wouldn't have seen anything, and they can go list them. And they're very compelling. We don't know. And the truth is, if this were a freak thing, I mean, 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.

But then they don't seem very smart because if they were trying to communicate with us, they would surely, if they were super intelligent, they would be very, I'm sure if there's lots of life, we're not that rare, we're not some crazy weird species that hears and has different kinds of ways of perceiving signals. So they would probably be able to, you know, if you really wanted to communicate with an Earth-like species, with a human like species, you would send out all kinds of things. You've sent out radio waves and you send out gravity waves and lots of things. So they're communicating in a way. They're trying to communicate with us. And it's just we're too dumb to perceive the signals. It's like, well, they're not doing a great job of considering the primitive species we might be. So I don't know. I think of a super intelligent species wanted to get in touch with us. and had the capability of, I think probably they would.

Well, it just, it sounds a little like religious. It sounds like a spiritual. It, you know, it gets to that realm where there's something that more than meets the eye. Well,

Yeah, I mean, humans, just like any individual aunt can't do shit. But the colony can do these make this incredible structures and has this intelligence. And we're exactly the same. I mean, you know, the famous thing that no one know he human knows how to make a pencil. If 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. The paint, the different chemicals that make up the yellow paint, the eraser is a whole other thing. The metal has to be mined from somewhere and And then the graphite, whatever that is. And there's not one person on earth who knows how to kind of collect all those materials and create a pencil. But together, that's one of the channels play. It's just one of the easiest things. So, you know, the other thing I like to think about, I actually put this as a question on the blog once. There's a thought experiment. And I actually want to hear what you think. So if a witch kind of a dickish witch comes around and she says, I'm going to cast a spell on all of humanity and all material things that you've invented. are going to disappear all at once. So suddenly we're all standing there naked. There's no buildings. There's 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're all know it's going on. And we all got a note from her. So we understand the deal. And she says she communicates to every human. Here's the deal. You lost all your stuff. You guys need to make one working iPhone 13. And you make one working iPhone 13 that could pass in the Apple store today, in your previous world, for an iPhone 13, then I will restore everything. How long do you think? And so everyone knows, this is the mission, we're all aware of the mission, everyone all humans. How long would it take us?

But with what materials?

And you're going to mind them, you know, you got to mind the materials where you, you know, many cranes, you don't need, 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. It's on the ground and what used to be Manhattan. There's no building. You know, grassy island.

That's right. You know, where is everyone? You know, shit. How am I going to find other people underneath? Well, we have all the knowledge of, yeah, everyone has the knowledge that's in their current brain.

Even that, you know, even that's going to 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, 10, really smart people were designated the leader. So they could say, okay, I want, you know, everyone who can do this to walk west, you know, until you get to this, this is a little hotman. Everyone else, you know, and they could, they could actually coordinate, but they 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 you're going to be 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 going to try to murder the people with who know what they're talking about.

Well, and so if everyone may be everyone's hopeful, for they know we're all still civilized and hopeful for the first 30 days or something, and then things start to fall off. People get start to lose hope, and there's new kinds of governments popping up. New kinds of societies, and they're And they don't play nicely with the other ones. And, and I think very quickly, I think a lot of people would just give up and say, you know what, this is it. We're back in the Stone Age. Let's just create, you know, a grayery, and we don't also don't know how to farm. No one knows how to farm. There's like, even the farmers, you know, a lot of them are relying on their machines. And so we all serve as 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 fashion and trying to murder everyone who has

We have really primitive weapons now.

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 So we have no idea. Like the ancient hunter gatherer cities would laugh at what's going on here. You guys know, you're none of you know what you're doing. Yeah. And also the amount of people feeding this amount of people in a very in the Stone Age civilization. That's not going to happen.

Well, whoever's not near water is really screwed. So that's true. You're near a river, a fresh water river. Anyway, it's a very interesting question and what it does, this and the pencil, it makes me feel so grateful and like excited about like, man, our civilization is so cool. And this is talk about collective intelligence. Humans did not build any of this. It's collective human super. The collective human is a super intelligent, you know, being that is that can do absolutely, especially over long periods of time can do such magical things and we just get to be born. When I go, when I'm working and I'm hungry, I just go click, click, click and like a salad's coming. the salad arrives. If you think about the incredible infrastructure that's in place, for that quickly, or just the internet, the electricity, first of all, that's just powering the things, you know, how the amount of structures that have to be created for that electricity to be there. And then you've got the, of course, the internet, and then you have the system where delivery drivers, and they have their 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 like thinking about these things because 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

I mean, also imagine, so first of all, the ancient hunter gathers, you know, he picked you the mother gathering and eating for all this fresh fruit. No, so do you know what an avocado used to look like? It was a little sphere and the fruit of it, the actual avocado part was like a little tiny layer around this big pit that took almost the whole volume. We've made crazy like robot avocados today that are nothing to do with like what what they so simply bananas these big sweet, you know, you know, not invested with bugs and you know, they used to eat a shitty as food. 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 things raw. 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 process food, which, you know, we complain about, in our setting, oh, you know, we complain about, you know, we need to much process. That's a good problem. I mean, if you imagine what they would think, I'm like, a cracker, you know, delicious, a cracker would taste to them. You know, candy, you know, a substance, but getty stuff. 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 middle class salary, you can afford anything you want. I mean, that's, again, just like, incredible gratitude. Like, ah, yeah.

Well, I'm trying to go off one thing, which is Elon Musk says that he has this number of a million in mind. As the order of a rat, or a magnitude of people you need to. beyond Mars to truly be multi-planetary. Multi-planetary doesn't mean when Neil Armstrong goes to the moon, they call it a great leap from mankind. It's not a great leap for anything. It is a great achievement for mankind. I always think about if the first fish to kind of go on land, just kind of went up and gave the shore a high five and goes back into the water. That's not a great leap for life. That's a great achievement for that fish. And there should be a little statue of that fish in the water. And everyone should celebrate the fish. But we took 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 and then ocean to land and then one planet to two planets anyway diversion but the point is that 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 over three and everyone dies on earth and they're fine and they can turn that certain ex 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 a self-sustaining. He says a million people is about what he thinks. Now, that might be a specialized group. That's very specifically, you know, selected million that has very, very skilled million people. That's 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 7,000, one 8,000th of the current population. I think you need a very, very, very small fraction of humans on earth to get by. Obviously, you're not going to have the same thriving civilization if you get to a small number. But it depends who you're killing off, I guess, as part of the question. Yeah. If you feel like it's half of the people just randomly right now, I think we'd be fine. It would be obviously a great awful tragedy. I think if you killed off three quarters of all people randomly, just three out of every four people drops dead, I think we'd have obviously the stock market would crash. We'd have a rough patch, but I almost can assure you that this species would be fine.

Yeah, everything. If you're going to have the self-sustaining means you can, you know, any major important skill, any important piece of infrastructure on Earth can be built there in this, you know, just as well.

Yeah, I mean, if you're to feed everyone, so, you know, mass farming, things like that, you have to, you have mining. These questions, it's like, the materials might be, I don't know, I don't know, five miles, two miles underground, I don't know, with the actual, but like, It's amazing to me just that these things got built in the first place. And they never got no one built the first, the mind that we're getting stuff for the iPhone for probably wasn't built for the iPhone. Or in general, early mining. I think obviously, I assume that industrial revolution, when we realized, oh, fossil fuels, we want to extract this magical energy source. I assume that like mining took a huge leap without knowing very much about this. I think, you know, you're going to need mining, you're going to need like a lot of electrical engineers. If you're going to have a civilization like ours, of course, you could have oil and lantern to be go way back. But if you're trying to build our today thing, you're going to need energy and electricity and then mines that can bring materials and then you're going to need a ton of plumbing and everything that entails. Yeah.

Right, you know, I mean, do you think about, when we talk about the world hunger, one of the major problems is, you know, there's plenty of food, and by the time it arrives, most of it's gone bad in the truck, you know, in a 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 supermarket is fresh. It's all there, and which always stresses me, if I were running a supermarket, I would always be so miserable about like, Things going bad on the shelves, or if you don't have enough, that's not good, but if too much it goes bad.

The quiet will 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 becomes like oh our friends on Mars and there's like this Mars versus earth you know like you know and it become like fun tribalism I think if people don't really really go back and forth and it really they're there for I think if you get kind of like we hate you know a lot of like us versus them stuff going on

This is supposed to... Yeah, there's all kinds of crazy geopolitical things that we have not even, no one's really even thought about too much yet, that like, I could get weird, think about the 1500s. when it was suddenly like a race to like, you know, colonize or capture land or discover new land that hasn't been, you know, so it was like this, this new frontier is right. And there's not really, you know, the land is not, you know, the thing I cried me, I was like, this huge thing because it's a tiny peninsula switched. That's how like optimized everything has become, everything has just like really stuck. Mars is a whole new world of like, you know, territory, fighting for narrow naming things, and you know, and it's a chance for new kind of governments, maybe, or maybe it's just the colonies of these governments. So we don't, I get that opportunity. I think it would be cool if there's new countries being, you know, totally new experiments.

There was one modern democracy in the late 1700s, the US. I mean, it was the only modern democracy. And now, of course, there's hundreds or doesn't many dozens. But I think part of the reason that was able to start. People didn't have the idea. People had the idea. It was that they had a clean slate, new place. Suddenly, it would be a great opportunity to have There's a lot of people who've done that, you know, if I had my own government on an island, my own country, what would I do? And 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. 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.

I have a big bet, $10,000 with a friend when I was drunk in argument. That the Neil Armstrong of Mars, whoever he or she may be will set foot by the end of 2030. Now, this was probably the 2018 I had this argument. So like what a argument has to touch Mars by 20 and by the end 30. Oh, but the year. Yeah, by January 1st, 231. Yeah.

Yeah, it's coming on an exact day. That's going to be really stressful. But anyway, I think that there will be That was 2018. I was more confident then. I think it's going to be around this time. I mean, I still won the general bet because his point was you are crazy. This is not going to happen in our lifetime. They're not for many, many decades. And I said, you're wrong. You don't know what's going on in SpaceX. I think if the world depended on it, and 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 delayed many years by safety. So they first want to send a ship around Mars and they want to land a cargo ship on Mars.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot. But I think the moon a decade before seemed like magical tech that humans didn't have. This is like, no, we can It's totally conceivable that this scene starship, like it's interplanetary, or interplanetary transport 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, when they're testing, and they learn a thousand things, the amount of data they get, and they improve. Each one has, it's like they've moved up like eight generations in each one, anyway. It's not inconceivable that pretty soon they could send a Starship to Mars and land it. There's just no good reason. I don't think they couldn't do that. And so if they could do that, they could in theory send a person to Mars pretty soon. Now taking off from Mars and coming back again, I think I don't think anyone want to be on that voyage today because there's just, you know, there's still an amateur hour here and getting that perfect. I don't think we're too far away now. The question is, so every 26 months, earth lapse Mars, right? It's like the sinocidal or whatever it's called, the period. 26 months. So it's right now, like in the events, like 2022 is going to have one of these. 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 2025. That is not going to happen because that included 2022 sending a cargo ship to Mars. Maybe even a 12020 and so I think they're not quite on that schedule. But to win my bet, 2027 I have a chance and 2029 I have another chance. Nice. We're not very good at 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 a human is going to be landing on Mars and it's not going to be the only thing everyone is talking about. It's going to be the moon landing, but even bigger deal going to another planet, right? And for to start a colony and not just to, again, have five and come back. So this is like the 2020s, maybe the 2030s is going to be the new 1960s. We're going to have a space decade. I'm so excited about it. And again, it's one of the great leaps for all of life happening in our lifetime.

Not, you know, SpaceX is super, but like 10 years ago space. Yeah. Some writer I forget who wrote. It's like the best magic trick in the show happened at the beginning and now they're starting to do this like easy as you know, it's like you can't go in that direction and the line that that this writer said is like watching. astronauts go up to the space station after watching the moon is like watching Columbus sail to Ibiza. It's just like, you know, everything is so practical. You're going up to the space station not to explore but to do science experiments in microgravity and you're sending rockets up, you know, you know, mostly here in there there's a probe, but mostly you're sending that to put satellite to, you know, for for direct TV, you know, and I or whatever it is. It's kind of like lame earth industry, you know, usage. So I agree with your space is boring there. The first human setting foot on Mars, that's got to be a crazy global event. I can't imagine it, not being maybe you're right, maybe I'm taking for granted of the speeches and the space race and the need for it.

That's one of his two reasons for doing this. SpaceX is this for two reasons. life insurance for the species if you're 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 and two baskets now yeah um... you know it's in 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, choose to self-sustaining civilizations going on. The second reason, he's, you know, he values this, I think just as high is 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 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, doesn't mean you name a thing and it's become a nasty political topic. So I hope that space can, you know, the Mars can just bring everyone together, but you know, it could become this hideous thing where it's, you know, I'll, you know, billionaire some annoying storyline and get built. So have 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.

And oh, just like watching this huge skyscraper, what was the air flip over? Yeah. Back down in land. I mean, it just makes everyone just want to sit back and clap and kind of like, you know, where I look at something like SpaceX is it makes me proud to be a human. And I think it makes a lot of people feel that way. It's good for our self-esteem. We have a lot of problems, but we're kind of awesome. We can put people on Mars, sticking up an earth flag on Mars. Damn, we should be so proud of our little family here. We did something cool. And by the way, I've made it clear to SpaceX people, including Elon, many times. And I just want to hear a reminder that if they want to make this more exciting, they send the writer Two Mars on, you know, I was on the thing and I'll I'll blog about it. So I'm just, you know, continuing to throw this out. I'm trying to get them to send me to Mars.

I think my dream one to be honest would be like the, you know, like the Apollo 8 where they just looped around the moon and came back because landing on Mars, give you a lot of good content to write about. Great content, right? I mean, the amount of kind of high-minded, you know, and so I would go into the thing, and I would blog about it, and I'd be in microgravity, so I'd be bouncing around my little space. They can send me in a dragon. They don't need to do a whole starship. And I would bounce around, and I would get to, and I've always had a dream of going to one of those nice jails for a year, because I've just had nothing to do with how to read books and no responsibilities and no social plans. So this is the ultimate version of that. Anyway, it's a side topic, but I think it would be.

Yeah, but then I'm gone. And I don't even get to like experience the publication of it, which is the full point.

I don't really think that I think like I think back to Jesus and I'm like, oh man, that guy really like crushed it. You know, but then if you think about it, it doesn't like you could literally die today and then become the next Jesus, like 2000 years from now and this civilization that's like, they're, you know, they're like in magical in the clouds. And they're worth being you. They're worth being lex like that. And like that sounds like your ego probably would be like, wow, that's pretty cool, except it irrelevant to you because you never even knew it happened. This physical Rick and Morty. It does. It does.

I think that obviously there's a lot of things that he's very good at. He has 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 and vicious and hardworking, right? Now, 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 a 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 the hearts in the right place. To me, it is the very unusual quality he has is that he's sane in a way that almost every human is crazy. What I mean by that is we are programmed to trust conventional wisdom over our own reasoning. For good reason. If you go back 50,000 years, and conventional wisdom says, don't eat that berry, or this is the way you tire a spearhead to a spear. And you're thinking, I'm smarter than that. You're not. 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 equivalent of making a pencil today. people back then like the conventional wisdom like had this super this knowledge that no human could ever accumulate. So we're very wired to trust it plus secondary thing is that the people who you know just say that they believe the mountain is they worship the mountain is their god right and the mountain determines their fate that's not true right and the conventional wisdom is wrong there but Believing it was helpful to survival because you were part of the crowd and you stayed in the tribe and if you started to, you know, insult the mountain God and say that's just a mountain. It's not. You didn't fair very well, right? So for a lot of reasons, it was a great survival trait to just trust what other people said and believe it. And truly, you know, obviously, you know, the more you really believed it, the better. Today, conventional wisdom, in a rapidly changing world, and a huge giant society, our brains are not built to understand that. They have a few settings. And none of them is 300 million person society. So your brain is basically is treating a lot of things like a small tribe, even though they're not. And they're treating conventional wisdom 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 if that's like conventional wisdom in the old days, then very few things change. Like your, your 10, you know, great, great, great-grandmother probably lived a similar life to you, maybe on the same piece of land. And so old people really knew what they were talking about. Today, the bucket's moving really quickly. And so the wisdom doesn't accumulate, but we think it does, because our brain settings doesn't have the, oh, move, you know, quickly moving bucket setting on it. So my grandmother gives me advice all the time. And I have to decide is this, so there are certain things that are not changing, like relationships and love and loyalty and things like this. Her advice on those things, I'll listen to it all day. She's one of the people who said, you gotta live near your people you love. Live near your family, right? I think that is like tremendous wisdom, right? That is wisdom, because that's happened to be something that hasn't, doesn't change from generation to generation. For no, right. She all right. She's also telling, right?

That will actually be in some metaverse, like being like, exactly. It doesn't matter. I'm like, it's not the same when you're not in person. They're going to say it. It's exactly the same. And then it'll also be thinking to me with their New York Lincoln.

I don't understand what you're just talking like a normal person anyway. So so my grandmother then, but then she says, you know, you're, I don't know what about this writing you're doing. You should go to law school and you know, you know, you want to be secure. And that's not good advice for me, you know, given the world I'm in and what I like to do and what I'm good at, that's not the right advice. But because the world is totally, she's in a different world. So she became wise for a world that's no longer here, right? Now, if you think about that, so then when we think about conventional wisdom, it's a little like my grandmother, and there's a lot of notes, not maybe 60 years outdated, like her software. It's maybe 10 years outdated, conventional wisdom, sometimes 20. So anyway, I think that we all continually Don't have the confidence in our own reasoning when it conflicts with what everyone else thinks, what seems right. We don't have the guts to act on that reasoning for that reason, right? You know, we, and so there's so many Elon examples. I mean, just from the beginning, building zip two was the first company. It was internet advertising and the time when people said, this internet was brand new, like kind of like kind of thinking of like the metaverse VR metaverse today. And people were like, oh, we said, we, you know, we facilitate internet advertising. People were saying, yeah, people are going to advertise on the internet. Yeah, right. 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 whenever one else is laughing, saying, well, you're wrong. I mean, I did the math and here it is, right? Next company, you know, X.com, which became eventually PayPal. People say, oh, yeah, people are going to put their financial information on the internet. No way. to us it seems so obvious. If you went back then you would probably feel the same way you'd think this is that is a that is a fake company that no is just obviously not a good idea. He looked around and said you know I see what 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. Space X is the ultimate example. 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 you but just even the bigger picture the amount of billionaires who have like thought this was I'm going to start launching rockets and you know the amount of failed I mean it's it's not conventional wisdom said this isn't a bad endeavor who's putting all this money into yeah landing rockets was another thing you know well while if you know here's the classic kind of way we're 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. It's obviously something that can't be done. And the math on his envelope said, well, I think it can be done. And so he just did it. So in each of these cases, I think actually, in some ways, he long gets too much credit as, you know, people think it's that he's, you know, it's that his Einstein intelligence or he can see the future. He has incredible, he has incredible gutsy, so courageous. I think if you actually are looking at reality, And you're just assessing probabilities and you're ignoring all the noise, which is wrong. So wrong, right? And then you just have to be pretty smart and pretty courageous. And you have to have this magical ability to be saying and trust your reasoning over conventional wisdom because you're individual reasoning. You know, part of it is that we see that we can't build a pencil. We can't build, you know, the civilization on our own, right? We, we, we kind of count, you know, how to the, um, to the collective, because for, for good reason, but this is different when it comes to kind of what's possible, you know, the Beatles were doing their kind of motowny chord patterns in the early sixties 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 were so popular they had this confidence to say let's just we're going to start just experimenting and it turns out that like if you just all these people are in this like one groove together doing music and it's just like there's a lot of land over there And it seems like, you know, I'm sure the manager is would say in that the all the record exact, which I know you have to be here. This is what sells. And it's just not true. So I think that Elon is, well, I, the, the, the term for this that actually Elon likes to use is reasoning from first principles to physics term. First principles are your axioms. And physicists, they don't say, well, what do people think? No, they say, what are the axioms? Those are the puzzle pieces. Let's use those to make build a conclusion. That's our hypothesis. Now, let's test it, right? And they come up with all kinds of new things constantly by doing that. If Einstein was assuming conventional wisdom was right, he never would have even tried to create something that really disproved Newton's laws. And the other way to reason is reasoning by analogy, which is a great shortcut. It's one we look at other people's reasoning and we've got a photocopy it into or had 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, you know, most of us do it most of the time, and that's good, but there's certain moments when you're, forget just for a second, like, succeeding in, like, the world of, like, Elon, just who you're going to marry? Where are you going to settle down? How are you going to raise your kids? How you're going to educate your kids, how you should educate yourself, what kind of career paths in terms 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 how you're supposed to be when you're a super famous, you know, industry-tight and you're not supposed to just be silly on Twitter and do memes and get in little, little quibbles where he just does things his own way regardless of what you're supposed to do, which sometimes serves him and sometimes doesn't, but I think it has taken him where it has taken.

I think it is. Well, first of all, I will say that a lot of tweets people think, oh, he's going to be done after that. He's fine. He's just born a man in the time of the year. Like it's something is it's not sinking 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 Twitter is just silly side, but I think that he

Yeah, and I think what all the great artists, you know, all the great inventors and entrepreneurs, almost all of them, they had a moment when they trusted their reason. I mean, Airbnb was over 60 with VCs. A lot of people would say, obviously, they know something we don't, 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.

The first principles are rocket are the price of raw materials and gravity. These are your first principles and fuel. What made Henry Ford blow up as an entrepreneur, assembly line, right? I mean, he did a, he, he thought for a second and said, this isn't how maddening filtering 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 happened is when someone reasons from first principles, they often fail and you know, 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 doing? And then they all, they flock over. Look at the iPhone. I found Steve Jobs was obviously famously good at for reasoning for his principles, because that guy had crazy self-confidence. He just said, if I think this is right, I don't know how he does that. And I don't think Apple can do that anymore. I mean, they lost that. That one brain is ability to do that made it an 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, if it was a team at Apple who said, they didn't look at the flip phones and and say, OK, what kind of, you know, let's make a no keyboard that's like clicky and you know, really cool Apple, they keep what they said, what should a mobile device be? You know, what the axioms, what are the axioms here? And none of them involved 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 are they doing? We're not, and now every phone looks like the iPhone. I mean, that's, that's how it goes.

So I'm writing right now, just finishing a book on kind of why our society is such a shit place at the moment, just polarized. And we have all these gifts like we're talking about, just the supermarket. We have these exploding technology, fewer people are in poverty. It's Louis C.K., likes to say, everything's amazing and no one's happy, right? But it's really extreme moment right now where it's like, Hate is on the rise like crazy things, right?

Yeah, I mean, when you when you were in a reputation as a as they tried into procrastinary, you're just gonna get shit. Yeah. For ever, and that's fine, I accept my fate there.

I wanted to figure out what was going on because what I noticed was a bad trend. It's not that things are bad. It's that things are getting worse in certain ways. Not in every way. If you look at Max Rosa's stuff, You know, he comes up with all these amazing graphs. This is what's weird is that things are getting better and 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, the amount of Americans that hate America's on the rise, right? The amount of Americans that hate other Americans is on the rise. The amount of Americans that hate the president is on the rise, all these things, like on the very steep rise. So 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, human behavior. And it's the output. And I think the two inputs are human nature and environment, right? And this is basic, you know, super, super kindergarten level like, you know, 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've 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 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 in the exact numbers, but, you know, 80% or 70% 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. It's maybe some people would argue that they are, but more so. There's a lot of, you know, idiot presidents throughout the, but what's going on is something in the environment is changing. And the, that's, that's, that's, you're seeing is a change in behavior. 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 is 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 numbers plummeting. But racial grievance is a 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? And is this magical, I always think of this, I'm very optimistic in a lot of ways. And I think that our world would be a utopia, would seem like actual heaven. Like whatever Thomas Jefferson was picturing as heaven, Other than maybe the eternal life aspect, I think that if you came to 2021 US, it would be better. It's cooler than heaven. What we live in a place that's cooler than 1700's heaven. 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 choice to die when you want. Maybe we're uploaded. Maybe we can refresh our bodies. I don't know what it is. But the point is, I think about that utopia. And I do believe that if we don't botch this, we'd be heading towards somewhere that would seem like heaven, maybe in our lifetimes. Of course, if 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. The bad things in the 20th century were kind of the worst things ever in terms of absolute magnitude. World War II, the biggest genocide ever. You've got maybe climate change if it is the existential threat that many who will think it is. I mean, we never had an existential threat on that level before. I mean, so the good is getting better and the bad is getting worse. And so what I think about the future, I think of us as some kind of big, you know, long canoe as a species. Five million mile long canoe each of us sitting in a row. And we have 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 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 going to be really good. A really bad. The question is, which side should we be rolling on? We can't see up there, right? But it really matters. So I'm ready about this future stuff. And I'm saying none of this matters. If we're squabbling our way into kind of like a civil war right now. So what's going on?

One of my big sources of hope, and this is my putting my answer to what I changed my mind on, is I think I always knew this, but it's easy to forget it. Our primitive brain does not remember this fact, which is that I don't think there are very many bad people. Now, you say bad, you know, there are selfish people. Most of us, I think if you think of people, 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 is that other tribe. There was zeros. And then you'd be dehumanized them, right? These people, these people are awful. So dehumanize yourself. So when when when when we get into this land, I call it political Disney world because the Disney movies have good guys, I mean, you know, scar is totally bad and you move fastest totally good, right? There's no, you don't see you move fastest character flaws. And you don't see scars up, you know, upbringing that made him like that that humanized is no lionized is him, whatever. You are well done. Yeah. Moffas is at one and scars as zero. Very simple. Yeah. So political Disney world is a place, a psychological place that all of us have been in. And it can be religious Disney world. It can be national Disney world and 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 five or maybe point six to point fours. in that we are also in 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 that you know most of us have you know if you get in really into our most shameful memories things we've done that with it or 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 unadverable stuff, right? On the other hand, if you actually got into, really got into someone else's brain, and you looked at their upbringing, you looked at the trauma that they've experienced, and then you looked at the insecurities they have, and you looked at all their, if you, if you assembled a highlight reel of your worst moments, the meanest things you've ever done. The worst, they're most selfish. The time you, you know, you stole something, whatever. And you just have people like, wow, Lex is an awful person. If you highlighted, if you did a montage of your best moments, people would say, oh, he's a god, right? But of course, we all have both of those. So I've started to really try to remind myself that everyone's a point five. And point-fives 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 are good enough that we should be able to create a good society together. There's a lot of love in every human. And I think there's more love in the humans than hate. I always remember this moment. This is weird anecdote, but I was at it. I'm a red socks fan Boston red sock baseball and Derek Geter is who we hate the most. He's on the Yankees is and hate, right? Oh, Geter, right? He was his last game in Fenway. He's retiring and he got this rising standing ovation and I almost cried. And it was like, what is going on? We hate this guy, but actually, there's so much love in all humans. You know, it felt so good to just give a huge cheer to this guy we hate because it's like this moment of like a little fist pound mean like, of course, we all actually love each other. And I think there's so much of that. And so the thing that I think I've come around on is I just, I don't, I think that we are 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 a lot of a human nature, I'd be more upset. It's the two independent variables here, or there's a fixed variable, there's a constant, which is a human nature, and there's the independent variable environment, and it behaviors 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.

I think that well, I think that I think maybe if we're all yeah, for all 0.5s, I think that that that environments can bring out our good side, you know, yeah, so maybe we're all on some kind of distribution and the right environment can yes can bring out our higher side 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, you're probably going to yell at you might get your ass kicked by someone for doing that. You also might end up in jail, you know, if it's security cameras, And there's just norms. You know, we're all trained that that's what awful people do, right? So there's not that human nature doesn't have it in it to be like that. It's that this environment where in his has made that a much, much, much smaller experience for people. There's so many examples like that where it's like, man, you don't realize how much of the worst human nature is contained by our environment. But I think that rapidly changing environment, which is what we have right now, social media starts. I mean, what are 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 can really kind of lose our grip on some of the good behavior.

It's just, Sam's, I think, is, I have a friend, is a bulbolomec guy who has a, who's a nuclear power, you know, influencer. I've become very convinced, and I've, I've not done my deep dive on this, but here's, in this case, this is, 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 a mission free, but the concerns about meltdowns and waste, they say completely overblown. So judging from those people, secondary knowledge here, I will say, I'm a strong advocate. I haven't done my own deep dive yet, but it does seem like a little bit odd that you've got people who are so concerned about climate change. who have, it seems like it's kind of an ideology where nuclear power doesn't fit rather than rational, you know, fear of climate change that somehow is anti-nuclear power.

I mean, either, because it's so, man, it seems like a deep dive. And my reasoning binology there currently has me thinking it's a truly existential thing, but feeling hopeful.

Well, this is part of I wrote the book because I said, we're going to have more and more of these, like, big, collective, what should we do here, situations? You know, whether it's how about when, you know, we're probably not that far away from people being able to go and decide the IQ of their kid or like, you know, make a bunch of embryos and actually, you know, pick the highest IQ and can possibly go wrong.

And also, like, imagine the political sides of that and like, something like, well, people can afford it first and just the nightmare, right? We need to be able to have our wits about us as a species where we can actually get into a topic like that and come up with where the collective brain can be smart. I think that there are certain topics where I think of this and this is again another simplistic model, but I think it works is that there's a higher mind and a primitive mind in your head. and these team up with others. So when the higher mind is more rational and puts out ideas that it's not attached to and so it can change its mind easily because it's just an idea and the higher mind can get criticized. Their ideas can get criticized and it's no big deal. And so in the higher minds, team up, it's like all these people in the room like throwing out ideas and kicking them and one idea goes out and everyone criticizes it, which is like, you know, shooting bows and arrows at it and there's the truth, the true idea is, you know, the arrows bounce off and it's okay, it rises up and the other ones get shot down. So this incredible system, this is what, you know, this is what 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 hay stack 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 is the more limbic system we part of our brain. It's the 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 separating it identifies with its ideas. It only gets involved when it finds an idea sacred. It starts holding an idea sacred and I start identifying. So what happens is they team up, too. And so when you have a topic that about your primitive, that really rouses a bunch of primitive minds, it quickly, the primitive minds team up and they create an echo chamber. where suddenly no one can criticize this. In fact, if it's powerful enough, people outside the community, you can know and criticize it. We will get your paper retracted. We will get you fired. 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 single reasoning individual. You have this collective is suddenly attached to this sacred scripture with the idea, and they will not change their mind. And they get dumber and dumber. And so climate change, what's worrisome, is that climate change has in many ways become a sacred topic, where if you come up with a nuanced thing, you might get called branded a denier. So there goes this, there goes the superintelligence. All the arrows, no arrows can be fired. But if you get called it anire, that's a social penalty for firing an arrow at a certain orthodoxy, right? And so what's happening is the big brain gets frozen, right? And it comes very stupid now. You can also say that about a lot of other topics right now. You know, you know, you just mentioned another one I forget what it was, but that's also kind of the world of vaccines. Yeah, yeah, it's COVID, okay. And here's my point earlier is that what I see is that the political divide has like a whirlpool that's pulling everything into it. And in that whirlpool, thinking is done with the primitive mind tribes. And so I get, okay, obviously something like race. That makes sense. That also right now, the topic of race, for example, or gender, these things are in the whirlpool. But that at least is like, okay, that's something that the primitive mind would always get really worked up about. It taps into our deepest kind of like primal selves. COVID, you know, make this COVID in a way to, you know, climate change. Like, that should just be something that our rational brain journalists solve this complex problem. But the problem is that it's all gotten sucked into the red versus blue world pool. And once that happens, it's in the hands of the primitive minds. And we're losing our ability to be wise together to make decisions where it's like, it's like the big species brain is like, are the big American brain is like, get drunk at the wheel right now. And we're about to go into our future with more and more big technologies. Scary things with to make big right decisions and not, you know, we're getting dumbered as a collective and that's part of this environmental problem.

What's really bad is that like, in a normal environment, you're always gonna have echo chambers. And so, what's the opposite of a echo chamber? I created a term for, cause I think we need it, which is called an ideal lab, an ideal lab, right? It's like people act like scientists, even, they're not doing science. They just treat their ideas, like science experiments, and they toss them out there, and everyone disagrees. And disagreement is like the game. Everyone likes to disagree, you know, on a certain text thread, where everyone is just, you know, saying, you know, it's almost like someone throws something out and just is an impulse, so they're actually the group to say, I think you're being like, Uh, overly general there. I think like, uh, 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 not 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. We're always going to have ideals and echo chambers, right, in different communities. And most of us participate in both of them. And you know, maybe in your marriage is a great idea, lab, you love to disagree with your spouse and maybe in, but this group of friends are your family at home, you know, you know, in front of that sister, you do not bring up politics because she's now in force. And that happens. Her bullying is forcing the whole room to be an echo chamber to appease her. Now, what scares me is that usually have these things existing kind of in bubbles. And usually there's like, and they each have their natural defenses against each other. So in an echo chamber person stays in their echo chamber. They will cut you out. They don't like, they don't like, they don't like to be friends with people who disagree with them. You notice that they will cut you out. Look at out their parents. If they vote over Trump or whatever, right? So that's how they do it. They will say, I'm going to stay inside of an echo chamber safely. So my ideas, which I identify with, because my primitive mind is doing the thinking are not going to ever have to get challenged because it feels so scary and awful for that to happen. But if they leave and they go into an idea lab environment, they're going to say, well, no, they're going to disagree, and they're going to say, and the person is going to try to bully, and they're going to say, that's really offensive, and people are going to say, no, it's not. And they're going to immediately say, these people are assholes, right? So the echo chamber person, it doesn't have much power when they leave the echo chamber. Likewise, the idea lab person, they have this great environment, but they go into an echo chamber where everyone else is, and they do that, they'll get kicked out of the group. They'll get branded as something, a deny or a racist, a right-wing or a radical, these nasty words. The thing that I don't like right now is that the echo chambers have found ways to forcefully expand into places that normally have a pretty good immune system against ego chambers, like universities, like science journals. Places where usually it's like there's a strong idea lab culture, their veritas, you know, that's an idea lab slogan. You have is that these people have found a way to a lot of people have found a way to actually go out of their thing and keep their echo chamber by making sure that everyone is scared because they can punish anyone, whether you're in their community or not.

So I think, let's use these two minds again. I think that when you're higher mind is the one who's taking something in and they're really interested in, you know, what are the lyrics? So I'm going to learn something or what, you know, reading a book or whatever and the higher mind is is trying to get information. And once it has it, there's no point in listening to it again. It has the information. You know, your rational brain is like, I got it. But when you eat a good meal or have sex or whatever, that's something you can do again and again because it actually, your primitive brain loves it, right? And it never gets bored of things that it loves. So I think music is a very primal thing. I think music goes right into our primitive brain a lot. Um, you know, I think, of course, that's a column of collaboration. You're, you know, your irrational brain is absorbing the actual message. And, but I think it's all about emotions 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 your, some of your favorite songs, the first time you heard it, you were like, I guess that's kind of catchy. And then you're loving it on the 10th listen, but sometimes you even don't even like a song like this song sucks, but you suddenly you find yourself on the 40th time because it's on the radio all the time, just kind of being like, oh, I love this song. And you're like, wait, I don't, I hated 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, and it, and so there's something about knowing, having memorized the song that makes it incredibly enjoyable to us. But when we hear 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.

But a really good movie that we really love often we watch it like 12 times. You know, it's delicious. You know, not that many, but versus if you're watching a talk show, right, you're listening to, if you listen to a podcast as a perfect example, there's not many people that will listen to one of your podcasts, no matter how good it is 12 times. Because it's, once you got it, you got, it's a form of, information that's very higher mind focused. That's how it is.

Like a stand-up comic. I've watched like certain things like episodes like 20 times, even though you know,

I mean, I'm super excited about it. 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. Nurelyk is changing what a person is. eventually. Now, I think that Neurlink engineers and Elon himself would all be the first to admit that it is a maybe, whether they can do their goals here. I mean, it is so crazy ambitious to try to, even though the eventual goals are, you know, of course in the interim, they have a higher probability of accomplishing smaller things, which are still huge, like, basically solving paralysis. You know, strokes, Parkinson, things like that. I mean, it can be unbelievable and, you know, anyone who doesn't have one of these things like we might, you know, we should everyone should be very happy about this kind of helping with different disabilities. 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 permission interface in any way to give them superpowers. The possibilities that they can do this, if they can really, so they've already shown that they are for real, but they've created this robot. Elon talks about like, it should be like LASIC, where it's not, it shouldn't be something that needs a surgeon. There shouldn't just be for rich people who have waited in line for six months. It should be for anyone who can afford LASIC and eventually, hopefully something that isn't covered by insurance or something that anyone can do. Something this big a deal should be something that anyone can afford eventually. 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, maybe right now, if you think about when you listen to a mute, when you listen to a song, what's happening? is 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 get vibrated all the way to your head. Pressure wave. And then it vibrates your ear drum. Your ear drum is really the speaker now in your head. That then vibrates bones and fluid, which then But 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 your drums, you could do it that way. That seems very hard. But really what you needed, you go to the very end with a thing that really needs to happen is your auditatory cortex neurons need to be stimulated in a certain way. if you have a ton of neural link things in there, neural link electrodes, and then they're getting really good at stimulating things. You could play a song in your head that you hear that not is not playing anywhere. There's no sound in the room, but you hear, and no one else could, and 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 gap. You open the neural link gap, you know, and or just neural, so basically you can open your Spotify and you can play too, you know. 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 have now a new one. You can play into your brain. And this is one of the earlier things. This is something that seems like really doable. So, you know, no more headphones. I always think that someone knowing, because I can leave the house with just my phone. You know, and nothing else, or you've just watched, there's always this one thing, like, and headphones. You do need your headphones, right? So, and 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, I said, oh, it's terrifying. Well, what did I just do? I just gave you a, I just gave you, I had five buckets I could have given you. One was horrifying, terrifying, scary, eerie, creepy, whatever. That's about it. And I had a much more nuanced experience than that. And I don't all I have is, you know, these, these words, right? And so instead I just hand you the bucket. I put the stuff in the bucket and give it to you. But all you have is the bucket. You just have to guess what, what I put into that bucket. All you can do is look at the label of the bucket and say, I'll, when I say terrifying, here's what I mean. So the point is it's very lossy. I had this, all this nuanced information of what I thought of the movie. And I'm sending you a very low-res package that you're going to now guess what the high-res thing looked like. That's language in general. Our thoughts are much more nuanced. If we can think to each other, we can do amazing things. We could have a brainstorm that doesn't feel like, oh, we're not talking in each other's head. It's not just that I hear your voice. No, no, no, we are just thinking. No words are being said internally or externally. The two brains are literally collaborating something. It's a skill. I'm sure we 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 like, I have the joint epiphany. And 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 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 going to have to, but the possibilities, my God, talk about like, I feel like if that works, if we really do have that as something, I think it'll almost be like a new ADBC line. It's such a big change that the idea of like anyone living before everyone had brain machine interfaces is living in Like, before the common era, it's that level of like, big change if it can work.

Oh my god, yeah. And copying, you know, you can hopefully copy memories onto other things and you don't have to just rely on your, you know, your wet circuitry.

Well, maybe we can get, there'll be great trainings. You know, I'm spending the next three months and like I'm, you know, one of the neural trainings.

This is, you know, I was saying, how am I going to be old? I'm like, no, I'm going to be great at the new phones. It's like, I'm going to be the phones. It's going to be that, you know, the kids going to be thinking to me. I'm going to be like, I just can you just talk, please. And I'm going to be like, okay, I'll just talk and they're going to. So that'll be equivalent of, you know, yelling to your grandson today.

Why? Is there anything more intimate than thinking with each other? I mean, that's, you talk about, you know, once we were all doing that, it might feel like, man, everyone was so isolated from each other.

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 hippie start doing and then eventually becomes this big wave and how everyone won't, you know, if something truly is lost, won't we recover it?

But then why are you saying there's a loss there?

But it's true, if this were obviously through a screen, we all agree that's not the same. But if this were some, you know, we had contact lenses on and like, you know, maybe neural link, you know, play, maybe, again, forget, again, this is all that the devices, even if it's just cool as a contact lens, that's all old school. Once you have the brain machine interface, it'll just be projection of, you know, it'll take over my visual cortex. My visual cortex will get put into a virtual room in so a year. So we will see We will hear, really hear and see, is it where you won't have any masks? You know, VR masks needed. And at that point, it really will feel like you will forget, you'll say, well, we together, and physically or not, you won't even, it would be so unimportant, you won't even remember.

Romantically people still need to be. together. There's a whole set of like physical things with a relationship that are needed, you know, like what? Like sex, sex, but also just like that there's fair amounts. Like there's the physical touch is such a, that's like music. It's go so such a deeply primitive part of us that that 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 are their new thing is that you know you you're romantically involved people you never actually in person with but and I'm sure there'll be things where you can actually smell it'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's something That to me seems like something that'll be a while before people feel like there's nothing lost by not being this.

Although sex also, again, you could not get too weird, but you could have a thing where you basically, you know, you know, you're, let's just do a massage because it's less awkward. But like, you, someone, you know, someone is still imagining sex.

I'm a suit 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.

Right now, you know, Taylor Swift doesn't play for one person has to go around and everyone ever fans just to go play for or a book, right? You do it and it goes everywhere. So it'll be the same idea.

Yeah, I mean, I really don't think humans are very smart. All things considered, I think we're like limited. And we're not, we're dumb enough that we're very easily manipulable. Not just like, our emotions, people can, you know, our emotions can be pulled like puppet strings. I mean, again, I look at, like I do look at what's going on in political polarization now and I see a lot of puppet string emotions happening. So yeah, there's a lot to be scared of for sure, like very scared of. I get excited about a lot of very specific things. Like one of the things I get excited about is I like the so the future of wearables, right? Again, I think that we're like, oh, the risk, the fit around my wrist is going to see you know the whoop. It's going to seem really hilariously old school in 20 years. If you remember when you were like, big bracelet, right? It's going to turn into little sensors in our blood probably, or, you know, even, you know, infrared weird, you know, just just things that are going to be, it's going to be collecting a hundred 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, and this is, I've not done my deep dive. This is all speculation, but The software isn't 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 you're, if, if hardware were able to collect, not for 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 what, we all, 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?

They also, of course, it knows how a faster heart is beating and it knows how much you know exactly the amount of exercise. It knows your muscle mass and your weight and all that, but it also may be can even know your emotions. I mean, if emotions, you know, what are they, you know, where do they come from? Probably pretty obvious chemicals once we get in there. So again, Maryland can be involved here, maybe in collecting information. You know, because right now you have to do the thing, what's your mood right now? It's hard to even assess, you know, and you're in a bad mood, it's hard to even.

That's exactly. You can tell, because one of these apps pops up and says, you know, 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. So I was on my phone. I should've been like, that's not my, you know, so I think it would probably be able to very get all this info, right? Now the AI can go to town. Think about when the AI gets really good at this and it knows your genome and it knows it can just, I want the AI to just tell me what to do. When it turns it, okay, so how about this? Now imagine attaching that to a meal service, right? And the meal service has everything, you know, all the, you know, million ingredients and supplements and vitamins and everything. And I give the, I tell the AI my broad goals. I want to gain muscle or I want to, you know, maintain my weight, but I want to have more energy or whatever. I just want, you know, I just want to be very healthy and I want to obviously everyone wants to say like 10 basic things like you want to avoid cancer. You want to, you know, various things. You want to age slower. So now the air has my goals and Uh, drone comes at, you know, it's a, a little thing pops up and this is like, you know, be people 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 our drone has come from the factor that eating the food factory and dropped the perfect meal for my, that moment for me, for my mood for my genome, for my blood contents and it's, 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 like those things you have to Tell it.

It knows you way better than you know yourself better than any human could ever know you and it a little thing pops up. So I've just lost some choice, right? So it pops up and it says like you know, coffee, because it knows that, you know, my cutoff, they says, fit, 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 a too late, it knows I have to wake up at this time tomorrow, because that's my calendar. And so I think a lot of people, 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 wasn't the past. And then, this isn't, these are important decisions. You're important decision-making energy. You're important. focus and your attention can go on to your kids and on your work and on, you know, helping other people and things that matter. And so I think AI, 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. And I think will all be so much healthier. When we look back today, one of the things that's going to look so primitive is the one size fits all thing, getting like reading advice about keto. Each genome is going to have very specific one, you know, unique advice coming from AI and so yeah.

is the mechanism by which the big brain can think, can think for itself, can think straight and see straight. When you take away free speech, when you start saying that an every topic, when an 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 an incredible market to polarize people. For media to polarize people and to bring any topic it can into that and get people hooked on it as a political topic. We become a very dumb society. So free speech goes away as far as it matters. People say, oh, people like to say, oh, it's not, you know, you don't even know what free speech is. Free speech is, you know, it's, you know, this is that your free speech is not being bought and it's like, no, you're right. My first amendment rights are not being violated, but the culture of free speech, which is the second ingredient of two, you need the first amendment and you need the culture of free speech and now you have free speech in the culture as much more specific. Obviously, you can have a culture that believes people right now take any topic, again, that has to do with some very sensitive topics, police shootings, or what's going on in K-12 schools, or even climate change. Take any of these. The first amendment's still there. No, you're not going to get arrested, no matter what you say. The culture of free speech is gone because you will be destroy your life can be over as far as it matters if you say the wrong thing. But even, you know, but a culture of 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 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. The brain is thinking at its best. 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, look, this is his real, you know, colors. The big brain is dumped.

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 the objective truth is the end on the compass for every thinker. Doesn't mean we're necessarily 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. Not objective truth, teaching them that disagreement is bad violence. It's like, you know, it's you quickly sound like you're just going on like a political rant. It's just topic, but like it's really bad. It's like genuinely the worst. If I was ahead of 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. And it sucks. It sucks.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's incredible. If you do something a little of something every day, it compiles, it compiles, you know, I always think about like the people who achieve these incredible things in life. These great like famous legendary people. They had the same number of days that you do and it's not like they were doing magical days. They just they got a little done every day and that adds up. to, 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 in the other one manages to do two pages a week, right? Not very much. The other one does zero pages a week, two pages a week. 98% of both of their time is the same. The other person just 2% are 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. The right, two pages a week. 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 still written 10 books, also prolific, 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 something more anything. They are a wannabe writer. They always said they could write. They talk about how they used to be. And nothing happens, right? So it's inspiring, I think, for a lot of people who feel frustrated, they're not doing anything. So reading is another example. where someone who reads, you know, doesn't read. And someone who's a prolific reader, you know, I always think about like the Tyler Cowen type. So I'm like, how the hell do you read so much? It's in Fury. I think, you know, like James Clear puts out his like his 10 favorite books of the year 20, his 20 favorite books of the year. I'm like 20. They're 20 favorites. They're trying to just read 20 books like, and it would be an amazing year. But the thing is, they're not doing something crazy and magical. They're just reading a half hour, and if you read a half hour, and the calculation I came to is that you can read a thousand books in 50 years. So if someone who's 80, and they've read a thousand books between 30 and 80, they are extremely well, right? They can delve deep into many non-fiction areas. They can be an amazing fiction reader, a fiction reader, Um, and again, that's a half hour day. Some people can do an hour, half hour in the morning audio book, half hour at night, and bed, and I've read two thousand books. So, um, 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. There really is. Um, I, on the reading front, I'm a very slow reader, which is just a just a very frustrating fact about me. But I'm faster with audio books. And I also, I just, you know, I'll just, it's just hard to get myself to read. But I've started doing audio books and I'll wake up, throw it on, do it in the shower. brushing my teeth, you know, making breakfast dealing with the dogs, things like that, whatever, until I sit down. And that's, I can read, I can read a book our week, 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 it, and also it's this fun, it makes the morning so fun. I'm like, I mean, great time the whole morning, so I'm like, well, 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.

No, the 10 second back button is very valuable. So I just if I'd get lost at some of 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 back so that of course is not that efficient but it's I do this thing when I'm reading I'll read a whole paragraph from realize I was tuning out.

Yeah, and when you get lost and thought by the way, you're processing the book. That's not wasted time. That's you're really categorizing and cataloging what you just read and like, well, there are several kinds of thoughts, right?

Well, I find that if I am continually thinking about something else, I just, I'm not, I'm just, I'm just positive about it. Yeah. Yeah. It's pushing 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. I'll just pause it. Quiet Dan Carl. I'm thinking about something that's exactly exactly. Also, you can things like, you have to head out to the store. I'm going to read 20 pages on that trip just walking back and forth, going to the airport. I mean, flights, you know, the Uber and then you're walking to the walking through the airport, you're shedding security line. I'm reading the whole time. I know this is not groundbreaking people know it all to your books are, but I think that more people should probably get into them than dudes. I don't know a lot of people to have this stubborn kind of things. I don't like I like to have the paper broken and sure, but like

They do like a page a minute when I read like, best, a page every two minutes at best. invest when you're like really like right actually not positive my ADD it's like I just it's hard to keep focusing and I also like to really absorb so on 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 it would be like what I don't remember any like details and like, oh, I can tell you like the entire. So I absorbed the shit out of it, but I don't think it's worth it to like have to read so less as much less in my life.

ANK-E.

You drop in a line of a podcast or like a video.

Well, it's also just like your people too. And my people say, what do you write about? Literally anything I find interesting. And so for me, once I once you start a blog, like your entire world view becomes, would this be a good blog post? But this way, I mean, it's the lens I see everything through. But I constantly coming across something, or you know, or just a tweet, you know, something that I'm like, oh, I need to like share this with my readers. My readers to me are 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 a little fact towards and stuff like that.

It just gamifies it too. It's like you can massively sit back and just, and the thing will make sure you eventually learn it all. You know, you don't have to be the executive. calling that like the program, the memorization program, someone else's handling.

I don't think the suffer is in quotes. I think that's a huge part of the problem is that it's treated like a silly problem. People don't take it seriously as a dire problem, but it can be. It can ruin your life. Like talk we talk, as we talked about the compiling concept with, you know, if you read a little, you know, if you, if you write two pages a week, you write a book every two years. You're a prolific writer, right? And the difference between, you know, the, again, it's not that that that person's working so hard is that they have the ability to, when they commit to something like on Sunday mornings, I'm going to write two pages. That's it. They respect, they have enough, they respect the part of them that made that decision is a respected character in their brain. And they say, well, that's I decided it, so I'm going to do it. The procrastinator won't do those two pages. That's just exactly the kind of thing the procrastinator will keep on their list and they will not do. But the doesn't mean there are any less talented than the writer who does the two pages doesn't mean they wanted any less. maybe they want to 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, best sellers, and they go on these book tours, and they just are so gratified with their career. And they think about what the other person is missing, who does none of that, right? So that is a massive loss, a massive loss. And it's because the internal mechanism in their brain is not doing what the other person is. So they don't have the respect for the 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 they are eating habits, make them obese over time, or they're exercise habits. That's a huge loss for that person. That person is the health problems and it's just probably making them miserable. It's self-inflicted. It's self-defeating, but that doesn't make it an easy problem to fix just because you're doing it to yourself. To me, procrastination is another one of these where you are the only person in your own way. You are failing at something or not doing something that you really want to do. You know, a kid does not be work. Maybe you want to get out of that marriage that you know, you realize you, 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. That is, you know, you're not living the life that you know you should be living, right? And so, I think it's fascinating now. The problem is it's also a funny problem because there's short-term procrastination, which I talk about as, you know, the kind that has a deadline. Now, some people, you know, this is when I bring in, there's different characters, there's that the panic monster comes in the room and that's when you actually, you know, that the procrastinator can, there's different levels. There's the kind that even when there's A deadline, they stop panicking. They just, they give an 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. You know, becoming a writer when you never had been before, getting out of your relationship. and be doing whatever you need to, the changes you need to make in order to get into a relationship. There's a thing after launching a startup. Launching a startup, right? Or once you've launched a startup, firing is the right someone that needs to be fired, right? Yes. I mean, going out for fundraising and says, instead of just trying to, you know, there's so many moments when the big change that you know you should be making that would completely change your life if you just did it. has no deadline. It just has to be coming from yourself. And 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 it's they're on their list collecting dust and so yeah to me it's uh it is very real suffering and the fixes and fix in the habits just uh i'm still working on the fix first of all so there's there is okay there is um There's just that you have a boat that sucks and it's leaking and it's kind of sink. You can fix it with duct tape for a couple of right, you know, for a one ride, whatever. That's not really fixing the boat, but you can get you by. So there's duct tape solutions. To me, so the panic monster is the character that rushes into the room once the deadline gets too close or once there's some scary external pressure, not just from yourself. And that's a huge aid to a lot of procrastinators. Again, there's a lot of people who won't do that thing. You write that book they wanted to write, but there's way fewer people who will not show up to the exam. Most people show up to the exam. That's because the panic monster is going to freak out if they don't. So you can then you can create a panic monster. If you want to, you know, you really want to write music, you really want to become a singer songwriter. Well, book a venue. tell 40 people about it and say, hey, they two months from now, come and see, I'm going to play you some of my songs. You know, you're going to write songs, you're going to have to. Right. So 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.

Yeah, 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's, there's a lot. All the incentives should be in the right place. And yet, if I don't say that, I will 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 pal this money, okay, now I'll panic and I'll do it. So that's duct tape. Fixing their boat is something where I don't have to do that. I just will do the things that I, again, it's not, I'm talking about super crazy work ethic, just like, For example, okay, I have a lot of examples because I have a serious problem that I've been working on. And in some ways I've gotten really successful at solving it in other ways, I'm still still floundering.

Yes, well, I'm pretty good at duct taping. I probably could be even better and I'm like, and I'm you're procrastinating and becoming a better duct taping. Literally, like yes, there's nothing I won't. So here's what I know what I should do as a writer, right? It's very obvious to me. Is that I should wake up? They don't have to be crazy. I don't say, I'm not going to be one of those crazy people of 530 jogs. I'm going to wake up at whatever, you know, 738, 830 and I should have a block like just say 9 to noon. Where I get up and I just really quick make some coffee and write.

Some of them have done that. That's common. There's some that I like these writers. They do the late night sessions.

And there's a reason. I don't think I'm different than those people. It's a great time to write your fresh. Your ideas from the dreaming have kind of collected. You have all 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, your phone's away. You're not talking to anyone. You're not opening your email. You are focused writing for three hours, but that's a big week for most writers, right? So now what's happening is that every weekday is a minimum of a B. I'll give myself. If I don't A might be, you know, while I really just got into a flow of over six hours and had, you know, great. But it's a minimum of a B. I can keep going of how I want. And every week is a minimum of a B without 15 hours. Right. And if I just had to talk about compiling, if I, this is the two pages a week. If I just did that, Every week, I achieve all my writing goals in my life. And yet, I wake up, and most days, I just either all revenge procrastination, late at night, and go to bed, wait 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 in this just, you know, also I was going to do a few emails, and I'll open it up, and I'm something on text, and I'm texting, 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. Or I'll start writing and then I hit a little bit of a wall, but because there's no sacred, this is a sacred writing block, I'll just hit the wall and say, well, this is Iki and I'll go do something else. So duct tape, what I've done is, uh, there, wait, but why 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 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 it's usually, you're not kicking screaming. I don't want to do this. It's the feeling of, you know, in the old days when you had to go to class. You know, your lunch block is over and it's like, oh, shit, I've classed in five minutes. Oh, it's Monday morning. You go, oh, more. 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 and 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 sucks. But I guess I'll do it. If no one's there though, the problem with the procrastinators, they don't have that in person in their head. Other people, I think were raised or the sense of shame if they don't do stuff and that stick in their head. is hugely helpful. I don't really have that. And so, anyway, Alicia is sitting there next to me. She's doing her own work, but she can see my screen and she developed people knows exactly what I should be doing when I shouldn't be doing. That's all it takes. The shame of just having her see me while she's sitting there not working would just be too weird and too embarrassing. So I get it done and it's amazing. It's like game changer for me. So duct tape can solve sometimes duct tape is enough. But I'm curious to I'm still trying to what is going on. Yeah. I think part of it is that we are actually wired. I think I'm being I'm being very sane human actually is what's happening. You're not saying this out the right word. I'm being like and being a natural human that we are not programmed to sit there and do homework of a certain kind that we get the results like six months later. Like that is not, so we're supposed to conserve energy and fill our needs as we need them and do immediate things. And we're overriding our natural ways when we wake up and get to it. And I think sometimes because the pain, I think a lot of them were just avoiding suffering and a lot of people, the pain of not doing it is actually worse because they feel shame. So if they don't get up and take a jog and get up early and get to work, I'll feel like a bad person. And that is worse than doing those things. And then it becomes a habit eventually and it becomes just easy automatic, which becomes I do it because that's what I do. But I think that if you don't have a lot of shame necessarily, the pain of doing those things is worse in that immediate moment than not doing it.

Yeah, you know, yeah, you can frame it as like, I can feel like homework or I can feel like you're like, you're living your best life or something when you're doing your work.

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 know, bathroom. I do that. And I just want to 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, yeah, morning routine for me stuff is like, you know, that stuff is kind of just like automated.

Yeah, that's what I've played with him, right? And there's the rational decision maker and the instant gratification monkey is these battle with each other. But the for procrastinator, the monkey wins. Yeah. I think the monkeys, you know, for me, you know, you read about this kind of stuff. I think that the this kind of more primitive brain. is always winning and in non procrastinators that primitive brain is on board for some reason 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 doesn't even like get there's no hope monkey has no hope there so doesn't even like get involved and it's just like yeah 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. It doesn't even like wake up. It's like, yeah, we're doing this now. For other things, the monkey's like, oh, no, no, no, most days I can win this one. And so the monkey 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 I jump in, once I start riding, suddenly I'm like, oh, this isn't so bad or I'm kind of into it. And then as soon as you can't tear me away, you know, then I suddenly am 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, but I go to the gym with a trainer. in 45 minutes, I do a full last workout. And it's not because I'm having a good time, but it's because it's that, okay, I have to go to class feeling, right? But when I go to the gym alone, I will literally do a set and then dig around my phone for 10 minutes before the next set. And I'll spend an over an hour there and do way less. So it is the transition. Once I'm actually doing this set, I'm never like, I don't want to stop in the minute. Now it's just like I'm going to do this and I feel happy. I just did it. So it's something about transitions that is very. That's why procrastinators relate a lot of places. I will procrastinate getting ready to go to the airport. Even though I know I should leave it three so I cannot be stressed. I'll leave it three 36 and I'll be super stressed once I'm on the way to the airport immediately I'm like why did I do this earlier now I'm back to on my phone doing what I was doing I just had to get in the damn car or whatever So yeah, there's some very very odd irrational

It is like, there are some people that like, show up late because they like, they kind of like that quality in themselves. And that's a dick, right? There's a lot of those people. But more often, it's someone who shows up frazzled and they feel awful. And they're furious at themselves. Yeah. So regretful. Exactly. I mean, that's me. And I mean, also, all you have to do is look at those people alone running through the airport. Right. There's, they're not being disrespectful to anyone there. They just implicit this on themselves.

I mean, honestly, the first thing that jumped to mind is my own like battles against myself to get my work done because it affects everything. When I, I just took five years in this book and granted it's a beast. I probably would have taken two or three years, but I didn't need to take five. And that was a lot of, not just, you know, not just that I'm not working. Instead, I'm over researching. 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 learn that. Now I want to get it in there. I know I'm going to end up cutting it later. Just, you know, or I over outline, you know, something, you know, trying to get it perfect when I know that's not possible. She's making a lot of immature kind of, I'm not actually that much of a writing amateur. I written, including my old blog. I've been a writer for 15 years. I know what I'm doing. I could advise other writers really well. And yet, I do a bunch of amateur things that I know, while I'm doing them, is I'm not being an amateur. So the A, it hurts the actual product, it makes you know, it'd be a waste of your precious time. C, when you're in mind at yourself, and you're in a negative self-defeating spiral, it almost inevitably will be less good to others. I used to, early on in my now marriage, One of the things we always used to do is I used to plan mystery dates. 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 was serving you for Thursday night, you know, at seven. Okay. And it was such a fun part of our relationship. Started writing this book and gotten to a really bad, you know, personal space where I was like, in my head, I was like, I can't do anything until this is done, you know, like, no. And I just stopped like ever valuing like, like, join of any kind. Like I was like, no, no, that's what I'm done. And that's a trap, or very quickly, you know, because 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, we don't live very long. Like about your prime decades, like that's like a sixth of my prime years. Like, wow, that's a huge loss. So to me, that was excruciating. And you know, and it was a bad, pattern, a very unproductive, unhelpful pattern for me, which is at wake up in the morning in this great mood. Great mood every morning, wake up, thrilled to be awake at the whole day ahead of me. I mean, it's so much work done today and but you know, first I'm going to do all these other things and it's all going to be great. And then I end up kind of failing for the day with those goals, 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 of it reality hits me, suddenly so much regret, so much anxiety, furious in myself, wishing I could take a time machine back three months, six months a year, or just even to the beginning of that day. And just tossing and turning now, I mean, this is a very bad place. That's why I said suffering, procrastinators suffer in a very serious way. So look, I know this probably sounds like a lot of like first world problems and it is, but it's real suffering as well. Like it's, so to me, it's like, it's painful because you're not being a 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 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 reader so it's just a lot of this 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, you just suddenly are just doing that nine to 12 and you get in that habit. Everything else falls into place. The all of this reverses. So if I feel hopeful, but it's like, it is a, I have not figured I haven't fixed about. Yeah, I have some good duct tape.

Right. This is the irrational thing. If a lot of people's jobs, people especially who work for themselves, you be a shock, how much you could wake up at nine. or eight or seven or whatever. Get to work and stop at one, but you really focus in those hours. One or two, and do 25 really focused hours of stuff, products, stuff a week, and then there's 112 waking hours in the week, right? So we're talking about 80 something hours of free time. You can live, you know, if you're just really focused in your, you know, in and young of your time. And that's where that's my goal is black and white time. I really focused time and then totally like clean conscience free time. Right now I need there. It's a lot of gray. It's a lot of I should be working, but I'm not, oh, I'm wasting this time. This is bad and it's just as massive. So if you can just get really good at. The black and the white so you just wake up and it's just like full work and then I think a lot of people could have like all this retirement 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 at any fun. It's not like I'm having fun. I call it the dark playground by the way, which is where you are when you know you should be working but you're doing something else. It's you're doing something fun on paper, but it's never it feels awful. And so yeah, I spend a lot of time in the dark.

It's not clean conscience fun. It's bad. It's toxic. And I think that it's there's something about you know you're draining yourself all the time and if you just did your focus hours and then if you actually have good clean fun fun can be anything reading a book can be hanging out with someone can be really fun. You can go and do something cool in the city, you know. That is critical. It's your 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 experience is when I have had, you know, good stretches. It's like, 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 we treat ourselves well. Like it's how you're internally feel like I treat myself. And it's like, yeah, no, it's work time. And then later, you're like, now it's play time. And it's like, okay, back to work. And you're in this very healthy parent child relationship in your head versus like, this constant conflict. And like, the kid doesn't respect the parent and parent hates the kid. Like, yeah.

But you know, this podcast is very regular. I mean, I'm impressed like, and I think partially what there is a bit of a duct tape solution here, which is you just, because it's always easy to schedule stuff for the future for myself, because that's future Tim, and future Tim is not my problem. So I'll schedule all kinds of shit for future Tim, and I will not do it, but in this case, you can schedule podcasts, and you have to show up. Yeah, as a show. Right. It seems like a good medium for.

I know, but at least this is the kind of thing, especially if it's not your main thing, especially if something is the kind of thing that you would dream of doing and want to do and never do. And I feel like you're your regular, you know, production here is a sign that something is working, at least in this regard.

This is your procrastinating. If you're thinking about being 80 and if you can get into that person's head and look back and be like, and just deep regret, you just, you know, you're earning, 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 a partner with someone, now you could say, we meet. these 15 hours every week and that point you're going to get it done. So working with someone can help.

I mean, there's just, no, there's there's specific list of things that really excite me, but it's a big list that I know I'll never get through them all. And that's part of why The last five years really like, you know, when I feel like I'm not moving as quickly as I could, it bothers me because I have so much genuine excitement to try so many different things and I get so much joy from finishing things. I don't like doing things, but a lot of writers like that. I publishing something is usually joyful. and makes it all worth it. You know, we're just finishing something you're proud of. Putting it out there and have people appreciate it. It's like the best thing in the world, right? You know, a lot of every kid makes some little bargain with themselves, has a little, you know, a dream or, you know, something. And I feel like when I do something that 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 owed to myself to do certain things and I just did one of the things I just paid off some debt to myself. I owed it and I paid it and it feels great. It feels like very like you feel very in a lot of inner peace when you do. So the more things I can do with you know, and I just have fun doing it, right? And so I just it's for me that includes a lot more writing I just a short short short blog post I write very long blog post but basically short writing in the form of long blog blog post is a great I love that medium when I do a lot more of that books yet to be seen I'm going to do this and I'm having 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 did a little travel series once. I love doing that. I want to do, you know, more of that stuff.

No, it was, I let readers in a survey pick five countries they wanted me to go. They picked, they sent me to weird places. They sent me, I went to Siberia, I went to Japan, I went from there to, there's all in a row into Nigeria, from there to Iraq, and from there to Greenland. And then I went back to New York, like two weeks in each place. And I got to, you know, each one I got to, you know, have some weird experiences. I tried to, like, really dig in and have like, you know, some interesting experiences. And then I wrote about it. And I taught readers a little bit about the history of these places. And it was just, I love doing that. I love, right? So, you know, and I'm like, man, like, I haven't done one of those in so long. And then I have a big desire to do fictional stuff. Like I want to write a sci-fi, at some point, and I would love to write a musical. That's actually what I was doing before, wait, but why I was with a partner, Ryan, Langer, we were halfway through a musical, and he got tied up with his other musical, and wait, but why I 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.

Yes, yes. It's just that if there's a chance on a new medium, I could do something good. I want to do it. I want to try it. It sounds like so gratifying, so fun.

Yeah podcast, I'm really excited about, but I'm like, I like going to other people's podcasts and I never try to have a moment.

Yeah, but it's also, I like to like, I go on like, as you know, long asked monologues. And you can't do, if you're the interviewer, like you're not supposed to do that as much. So I have to like, rain it in and that can be that might be hard.

That's funny. Yeah, or even if it's 50, 50, that's fine. Like if it's just a friend who I want to like really riff with, I just don't, 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, you know, interviewing someone, and I'm like, I can't, I don't, I just, it's not my, I can grill someone. That's different. That's my curiosity being like, wait, how about this? And I interrupt them and I'm fine.

I'm listening to a podcast because then it's not even like, but once I'm in the room, I suddenly can't help myself.

the meaning of like an individual life your existence here and earth or maybe broadly this whole thing we've got going on descendants of apes basically creating yeah for me I feel like I want to be around as long as I can and if I can if I can do some kind of crazy life extension or upload myself I'm done because who doesn't want to see how cool 20 the year 3000 is you did same mortality was not appealing no it's not appealing at all to me now It's ultimately appealing, as I said, no one wants to turn a life, I believe. If they understood what it turns, it really was. I did grams number as opposed. And I was like, OK, no one wants to live that many years. But I'd like to choose. Let's say, you know, I'm truly over it now. And I'm going to have, you know, at that point, we live our whole society would have, like, sit, we'd have a ceremony. We'd have a whole process of someone signing off. And, you know, it would be beautiful. And it wouldn't be cool.

Maybe maybe, yeah, 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 I'm thinking 50 centuries sounds great. I don't know if I want more than that. 50, 50 sounds like a right number. And so if you're thinking, you would sound up for 50, if you had a choice, one is what I get that is bullshit. Like if you're someone who wants 51 is a hideous number, right? You know, anyway. So for me personally, I want to be around as long as I can. And then honestly, the reason I love writing, the thing that I love most is like, is like 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 there are personalities like hidden behind the writing. Um, or like a, even a biographer, you know, there's a lot of people who do great writers, but it's I like to personally connect. And if I can take something that's in my head and other people can say, Oh, my God, I think that too. And this made me feel so much better. It made me feel seen like that feels amazing. And I just feel like, um, uh, we're all having such a weird common experience on this one little rock in this one little moment of time where this weird. these weird four limb beings and we're all the same and it's like we're all we all the human experience so I feel like someone 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 death bed 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.

Honestly not not sometimes you know when we did in person event tonight you know meet a bunch of people and it's incredibly gratifying or you know you just you know you get emailed but I think it is easy to forget that how many people sometimes you're just sitting there alone typing yeah

But that's why publishing is so gratifying because that's the moment when all this connection happens. And especially if I had to put my finger on it, it's like, it's having a bunch of people who feel lonely and they're like, existence is all really like all connect, right? So that, if I'm doing a lot of that, and that includes, of course, my actual spending a lot of really high quality time with friends and family and like, and make the whole thing as heartbreaking is like mortality and life can be, make the whole thing like fun and at least we can laugh at ourselves together while going through it.

Yeah, I would like to go to Mars and go there for a week and be like, yeah, here we are and then come back

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 malfunction. Right.

If I could be writing.

And actually 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.

If I could say, also, that would bring out great writing.

If you got your deathbed on Mars alone. I think so. Yeah.