# Are We Alone In The Universe? (with Tim Urban)

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzpfGJW3mhM
Duration: 1 hr 14 min
Language: English
Words: 15617
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/fzpfGJW3mhM

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[0:00] and look every almost everyone anyone who understands the scale of the universe and thinks about how probability works almost all comes to the same conclusion of course we're not alone right it's like if you picked up one great note we have one example which is what happened on earth if you picked up one grain of sand from a beach and you looked in the microscope and you saw it was crawling with little critters you wouldn't conclude well maybe this is the only one that has that you'd say of course i'm sure they're on all kinds of you know i didn't just pick up the one that has it right

[0:30] [Music] dude great to uh great to meet you and thank you so much for taking the time yeah i'm happy to uh meet at one of my twitter friends i know exactly well it feels like everyone at this point is a twitter friend that i'm now meeting in real life like over the last two three years some of my best friends in the world now are just like people that were anonymously on twitter it's like a genuinely good way to um to meet people like they're like like twitter sucks in 100 ways but like the it's like really like fantastically great for like three or four really

[1:05] important things um yeah i found that it like yeah to your point it's it's both ends of the spectrum right it's i guess it's like anything else in life there's like the one percent you tweeted it actually just recently about like advice filters um and trust filters and i feel that same way it's like you need to know and figure out how to find the one percent that is super interesting that you're really going to engage with and learn a lot from um amidst all of the noise that is out there yeah you i think like it depending on who you follow it can be um a great way to learn a great way to

[1:40] like get a quick feel for you know to keep your finger on the pulse of what's going on it's a great way to do that in a way that like if you were just checking random news sites versus you know because twitter doesn't just teach doesn't just show you what the news is it shows you what the perception of the news is and it shows you what the arguments about the news and the different you know viewpoints and the different you can and if you follow the right you know array of people it actually gives you a feel for what's going on in every bubble you know

[2:10] yeah i had a really interesting conversation on this exact topic with a new york times journalist who i won't name but who's very famous well-known literally earlier this week and he was saying that they just had a memo go around internally at the new york times that basically encouraged them to stop using twitter so much and to stop reading so much because they have an internal perception that it is like five percent of what's actually happening but commanding 95 of their mind share of what is happening and so they're worried that it's like skewing their journalistic integrity or their the journalism so i'm curious just like

[2:42] generally how other people think about that i haven't floated it with anyone else since having that conversation today i am so excited to talk about riverside riverside is the leading platform for studio quality remote podcasts and video recordings from anywhere we absolutely love it at where it happens and you're going to love it too greg what have you enjoyed most about riverside what's amazing about riverside is that when you're recording a remote video podcast or remote interview the recording quality is independent of wi-fi stability it basically records locally which is a huge advantage in order to ensure a reliable and uncompressed content outcome the way i think about it it's basically

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[5:39] and it has a big effect on things so you know you don't want to totally have your head in the sand and just pretend it doesn't exist but i do think that we you know we're like we're really um social beings like i uh this is a random story here uh i i always used to like love traveling alone right it was one of my favorite things and you know the first time i you know i went i was kind of like oh i'm go to like a restaurant alone i'm in a foreign country this is still like embarrassing i'm like i started to like reframe and i was like

[6:10] this is not hey none of these people know who i am and they'll never see them again um but b it's like why would i be embarrassed anyway it's like who cares if anyone thinks and and i got into this mode where i suddenly was just like so comfortable being alone traveling whatever but then i found myself on like a little tour uh it was like in the amazon uh and it was this is one of my solo trips and it was a little tour and they were like and i often made friends you know i was very social when i went so i often did

[6:36] meet people and i like you know i liked making friends from other countries and i went to them this tour and there was this uh there was like six of us and i guess like the other the four of them like two couples or whatever had like gotten to know each other um and then the fifth one was like another european and they kind of befriended that person and i was like an american i don't know why they didn't like americans or they didn't they didn't like me but i felt very like out grouped in in a way it was like it was like a two-day thing

[7:00] and i found myself like caring so much about being outgrouped by five randos who i literally was never gonna see again and like it was just it was just a reminder that like there's a mechanism in our brain that can be flipped on and make us insane like to for me to care about being outgrouped by this group of complete strangers was like it was because i appreciate it even at the time i was like this is super irrational but i was really kind of upset about it three days after it was over i was like why did i care but anyway so back to twitter i think that what twitter does

[7:31] is it has a lot of dynamics on it a lot of kind of in-group out group bullying like you know um uh you know slandering and and it has like you know uh you know people have their crew they have you know that agree with them and people like me you know we we tweet we retweet this stuff whatever it is and i think it like switches on kind of a kind of a crazy part of our brains and i could see journalists kind of getting wrapped up in it and suddenly kind of feeling that like middle school kind of social pressure and and i don't think

[8:02] that's that's probably i don't think that's good for many people and i think journalists especially so it was a roundabout way of kind of explaining why i think it might be bad well i love that story because i've often talked about how i think a lot of society's problems or your individual problems would be solved if you went out on a date by yourself once a month and just like sat at a bar by yourself with your own thoughts i think we've lost as a society our ability to be uh in solitude and experience solitude because we're constantly you know we're on our phones i've got my

[8:29] phone you're getting pinged there's just stimuli all around you and so we've lost the ability to just be alone and i think that when you do that when you re-engage that sense a lot of positives come from it to your point it's interesting some of the like biases and psychological impacts of it like the spotlight effect which you kind of referred to um we constantly think that other people are looking at us the reality is everyone's just thinking about themselves everyone's selfish and just thinking about themselves no one cares how you look sitting alone at the bar nobody's thinking about you um but it's such a funny and even if someone is

[9:01] like it you have to if you just like it the the thought that it matters is a very crazy part of your brain that cares that it's like oh you know like you know when i'm in a good zone that kind of is comfortable and in a mature zone i can i can be pretty sure that other people i know even like people i know well are talking about me and i don't and it rolls off my back and i say you know i talk about people like it happens it's okay of course that's when i'm in a really good zone you know and when you're in a bad zone

[9:31] like you just like you care so much about social things yeah it's a uh it's such a funny like the ability to pull yourself away from your your own internal uh feelings like that is very rare i feel like i personally i i won't comment on my own uh experience with this but i've heard that when people are under the influence of psychedelic uh drugs or medicines that you have some people have the ability to step away from what they're feeling and so you're like wow there's all this crazy stuff going on but then you can pull back from it and experience it as like what is happening in my brain

[10:04] this is an interesting experience and process which is part of why scientists think there's a huge um you know potential use of for treatments of depression and other psychological disorders as well you can like unpack and deconstruct your own um your own perspectives and emotions well yeah it's like i feel like uh if usually you're kind of um the way i kind of like it's if you're in um a sphere of like you know experiences and feelings and um thoughts yeah it's like psychedelics allows you to kind of like step outside and look at the sphere and like maybe look at it from other angles and like walk around

[10:44] it look under it and like and that is um uh incredible like it's an incredible um uh tool it relates to um exactly how i wanted to it's funny we had a roundabout way of leading to the exact thing that i wanted to frame up this discussion with and i always think about like what is the right way to um sort of frame up like as a framework or mental model the kind of line of of discussion and and chat and you know i thought i would kind of go meta here in uh using one of your own pieces one of my favorite pieces from wait but y um

[11:20] which was your neural ink piece and you had a line in there that i just thought was fantastic and i think it's a great way of framing up the discussion and what you said was i learned that you can only fully wrap your head around certain companies abstract companies to really anything by zooming both way way in and way way out in on the technical challenges facing the engineers out on the existential challenges facing our species in on a snapshot of the world right now out on the big story of how we got to this moment and what our far future could look like so maybe just to kick off what did you mean

[11:53] by that when you when you wrote that um and i want to just kind of use that thread of zooming way in and zooming way out to examine a few different a few different topics today yeah i think um i just in general are talking about zooming i to me it's like a very uh it's a it's an axis kind of you know that we can be on it's a spectrum of um how can i think backed up or you know sometimes i think about it as you're backing up but i think maybe sometimes even a better metaphor is like uh you're so um when you're zoomed in it's like you're

[12:31] on a beach and you can like look down you know you really know you're on a beach and you're looking around you see so like the coast goes around you know wraps around over there and over there and you see some you know water goes out and you just you don't see anything else um and so first of all you can zoom in which is you could take a microscope and start examining the grains of sand and um you know just really getting down there and and understanding how did this happen how did each grain of sand get you know get like this and um you know how

[13:02] how do these trees grow and you know what are these little tiny organisms doing but to me you know what what's so that that's one that's one thing that i think can help you really understand a beach better but um often we're you know we're looking at something and we don't know is this are we on an island is this part of a continent is this is this a little strip stretch of a ton of beach or is this the only little area of beach uh is that am i looking at a lake a big lake or is this the ocean um and so what what we can do is like

[13:35] if you i think about like a news story if a news story that day is just like looking at a strip of beach sometimes you don't know like is that news is this new story actually important like how like in 10 years will russia ukraine be like one of the biggest things of the decade or will it be like this kind of like oh yeah remember that russia ukraine thing that was on for like four months like it's hard to know right like um there's all these you know stories that it's so i think of it as a helicopter you go up and now you can see

[14:01] more you can start to like so if you if you look back at them last month um and i know i'm like yeah bringing news stories and now it's a little bit convoluted but basically if you look at the last month of news stories you can start to see like oh okay this matters that's like when you can like zoom up and you can see the whole um kind of region here but you still can't really see is this how big is this place is it continent is a huge island i don't know you go up farther and farther until you're actually now you can see

[14:27] actually okay now you can you can see the whole continent and the outline of it and where you were on it and you go up even further you can see the whole earth and you can kind of fully see to me it's like um if you you know if you zoomed out uh um on a lot of things you can see the huge huge story and and so often i think we're like caught in the middle um we're caught in the middle like time wise as i said with like news stories like it's hard to it's it's hard for us to see the big big picture here what's

[14:56] the real overarching story that's going on in 2022 right now and and and you know we time gives us that that helicopter hindsight um uh but also it's not just time it's also just you know in an industry if there's a company well what's the big story of this company what's really going on in this industry what are the major forces in play so i think um um we need to do a lot more zooming out uh the best we can obviously again hindsight helps and um certain statistics can help to get a feel for uh i i think that uh whenever i want to understand something that's my

[15:32] instinct he's like what's the big big story going on like what's all of this a part of again is this is this part of an island is this part of a giant continent is this it's you know how relevant is each thing but then also zooming in um i find that so often like we just again we're caught in the middle where we like read the news story um or we um we we understand you know we try to study how a company works or you know the basic deal with the company uh but it's when you you know if you go in and you actually talk to

[16:05] the engineers and start to understand the problems they're facing you watch what they're doing on a wednesday at 2 p.m and you sit in on some of the meetings it's amazing how much clearer everything gets suddenly when you look back to what you thought like a week ago before all this and you're like wow i i really had this like depiction that was just wrong it was not accurate um it's so interesting because my perception is that we often spend i think most humans spend the vast majority of their time in the middle not zoomed in not zoomed down it's because it's most comfortable right that's like

[16:39] the the point of peak abstraction where uh to use your thought experiment um the pencil just looks like a pencil and you don't worry about it and you're like yeah write with it you know this is my thing it's my pencil and zooming in is really uncomfortable because you go in and you realize all of the different components and like your thought experiment of no one in the world knows how to build a pencil because it has lead and or what you know all of the different components of it not there's not a single human who can build that pencil and know how to put it the entire

[17:06] thing together but then when you zoom out it's also really uncomfortable you zoom out and you're like what is the meaning of all of this and what how does the pencil how has that changed society over the last thousand years you know in all of the writing and so most people because it's the most comfortable end up just sitting in the middle and you kind of play that like peak abstraction throughout your entire life the middle is important too it's just that it's only one of the areas and yeah it's actually probably the best place to live but to understand you kind of need to go to both extremes yeah and it's

[17:38] probably the point where it's like you go to both extremes and then you can coast in the middle and be happy and like feel fulfilled in there and i do think uh the secret of if you if it's some of the most you know people who seem super prescient like they can just you know read the future amazing at investing in stocks or they're incredible entrepreneurs they just can see opportunities or whatever it is um i think even you know stand-up comedians you know which is a good standard comedian is they really see the the the bigger social forces going on and they can point them out in a way that everyone

[18:12] says oh my god that's so true you know i think that one thing that people have in common is that they often are really good at the zoom in and zoom out like elon musk classic example like no one's a better zoom outer i mean he he he just seems to like see the overarching farthest back stories of like uh you know humanity is you know the um uh like trying to keep the light of human consciousness uh uh uh and and he sees um you know the the the major existential threats uh he just thinks that's where his head is he's always thinking about that but then also you

[18:47] know he knows exactly the four elements that make up the paint on the rocket you know and and you know and he can tell you how much the rocket weighs uh more if you use this paint versus that paint and you know every single component of the tesla you know he can tell you about so but when you have that level of both out and in kind of clarity it just um you're just like seeing without any fog you know we have so much so if you think about it as you know we see it in the middle kind of even there you know the middle often we can get deceived if you

[19:21] don't see the top and bottom you know we can often be deceived by news stories you know or by by you know headlines and you know you know kind of dogmatic story lines like you know political narratives can kind of fool us but when you when you really see the big big picture and then you also kind of understand what's going on i feel like it's at the small level i think it's just you're much harder to trick and you can you can work magic uh in investing and entrepreneurship and the arts and other things like that so i i want to spend like a couple of

[19:49] minutes doing a zoom in zoom out on you um i feel like everybody uh knows you as you know the most popular blogger in the world whether or not uh that's like an official title you might not be in the guinness book of world records for that i don't know if people still make those or if they're uh they commanded like a massive outsized share of my childhood i kind of took a view it was like it was like one of the it was like the peak you know that was the pinnacle of human achievement was being in the guinness book of world records in my mind it was like one of

[20:16] the main it was like one of the three or four main things it was like right it was like it really i tweeted out something uh maybe like i don't know a few weeks ago like what was one thing that you thought was really important when you were a kid that actually turned out to be totally useless and like the most common responses were guinness book of world records um and then the other ones which i thought which i find hilarious are like quicksand uh piranhas like the bermuda triangle i really wondered why no one was looking into the bermuda triangle i was like man planes are

[20:48] falling out of the sky in this thing and no one's nightmare to it nightmarish yeah i mean quicksand is a very good one like i think part part of it has to do with the princess bride um but i think it's just in general it was it was in cartoons and it was like it was like very kind of a scary part of life yeah it was quick i mean i thought i was like really going to encounter that stuff as an adult i really thought that was going to be a part of my life so back to the broader point on you um like you know you were born now you're

[21:19] here you know kind of what what happened in between how did you um you know form your maps of reality like what were the what were the kind of um key parts of your life that you feel like have impacted where you are today um yeah i uh i think i've always just kind of been an analytical person like i just it's just my instinct to um when something is going on or i feel a certain way or something happens to just like try to categorize it you know and um and and like make sense of it in a way and and and and so i also then like people who do

[22:03] that i end up connecting well with them and when i find someone who also happens to do that we become really good friends um because we just do a lot of that um and so were there downsides to that were there ever downsides from a relationship standpoint or growing up where you kind of felt different as a result of that analytical nature um i mean there's downsides in that it just can like you're thinking you're just thinking all the time right it's hard you can take you out of being present um i think it can cause you anxiety i think you can overanalyze stuff i think if

[22:42] something unfortunate happens like instead of just being like yeah that was a bummer you might like really you you might like internalize exactly how big a mistake it was in a way that like you know been better to kind of just not be thinking so hard about it um i always thought you were a pitcher right yeah yes baseball fidget toy that i carry around yeah like i i would have uh been an awful uh match for that because i would have been like you know um you know i don't know because you know i'm just saying i'm like a relief pitcher and i come in and and i and i

[23:21] you know i have two outs and there's like a man on second and i just like in my head i would start thinking whether this third guy gets out or gets a hit is the difference between my entire like like week being like a good having been like a good you know weekend like and like you know and then of course it's like the playoffs i would i would have a moment when i'm like i would just not be able to get it out of my head that like this what i do now will like affect the rest of my life you can extrapolate by the

[23:49] way like i bet there is a very clear correlation if you looked at pictures the one common thread that i always found among great pitchers and i think it applies to all athletes i actually think it applies to entrepreneurs is this like almost irrational arrogance uh around your own abilities and like with pitchers you had to be so uh irrational that you could go out and give up a grand you know the worst outing of your life and come out of the game and be like those guys suck man that was you know lucky whatever like i'm way better than that's uh you had to have

[24:20] that like completely irrational it made no sense if you actually evaluated every single outing you would have gone nuts and to your point you'd never be able to do it at scale yeah yeah you have to have some kind of um kind of like emotional shield that's just like when when bad things happen just like bounces off so you stay strong you know and um and so i think i think you know analytical people like analytical i'm not even sure is the word just i don't know whatever it is but like it's a little bit of a zoom out thing like i guess if i were pitching i'd be

[24:51] zooming out and being like i see the whole career and be like oh like this might be my one time in the playoffs like if or you know like if i like uh you know whatever it is like i would the zoom out is not helpful in that moment you know it's like you want to totally it's kind of like a weird partially uh permeable shield too like to your point on the shield i think that's a great reference but you sort of need something to break through so that you can actually adapt and get better too you want like most of it to deflect off and

[25:21] shoot off back into space and the like little inkling of insight that might make you better the next time out to actually permeate and kind of hit you i think that goes for a lot more than sports too like i think if you think about um your beliefs your ideas and who you are as a person your personality like the way you are i think it's good to be a little bit on the arrogant side a little bit like enough where you're like proud of who you are you're confident in what you know and and uh your values and your beliefs and you go with them you're not always you know

[25:53] rethinking them or questioning them or self-doubt you know you're you're maybe even have a little less than rational self-doubt like you know you're you're kind of just like this is who i am i'm proud of it and that is what i believe and i think that that's a good thing to a point um and i think that it's like that's a and it's like you said you have to you have to mix that with being able to sometimes say something's not working for me here or maybe i can grow up a little bit in this way or maybe i'm wrong about this like and if you can't

[26:18] do that now it's like a rubber shield that's so thick because maybe you're so maybe you're so scared of what it would feel like to not have that because usually once it gets when arrogance gets to a certain point i think it's not a result of confidence it's a result of some kind of fear when it gets to and now it's a rubbish shield all new information bounces off of all negative feedback bounces off of and you know you know you know you can tell when someone's like this when they get negative feedback they get really angry and they end up even more sure of themselves and they hate that person i

[26:46] mean that's someone who has a i think an arrogance a problem with feedback um but i i think that um being totally rational about like maybe i well maybe i should question this because that's i don't i think i think it's that's actually can can be a paralyzing place and you can quickly drift when you think of this as like a spectrum of arrogance all the way down to like insecurity you can drift below that totally rational line to a place where now you're you're doubting yourself even when it doesn't make sense to you right and so um but like for example like this is the kind of thing

[27:15] i've always done for we're having this conversation and now in my head i've formed a an axis a spectrum that goes from arrogant with a dotted line in the middle totally rational down to totally insecure and then i think the right thing is like a quarter of the or third of the way from the dotted line to the but that's just like that's just how i think i've always done that right um or like i remember in college i met these a couple of my best friends you know we really connected over our just like we were really really interested in the topic of like how to find love like how to find the

[27:46] right person to marry or whatever um what what makes a good relationship first is a bad what should deal breakers be so so much so many of the things i write like i've written now a couple posts about that kind of thing and so many of those emerge from these conversations um that i've had and like i remember we were like you know i kind of come up with a theory um you know just talking i was like okay i think what matters is um you know three there's three things that you have to be good and then everything else can be bad and it's fine like the

[28:17] three things have to be you have to have like a general attraction you can't just see them as like your buddy you have to you have to have like a crush or you know you know physical attraction of some kind of physical attraction is you know especially at the beginning but like if it starts off with a lot of that i think that carries you it's always feels a little more special than just a friend so there has to be something there um there has to be like a best friendship type thing where like you don't want to feel like when you're out to dinner with your person

[28:44] and then also your friends and you're having so much fun with your friends and you then they leave and you're heading home with your person you're like damn it's just just us again like you don't want to feel that way you want to feel excited oh it's just us now we can like really get into it you know um like you you don't want to feel like bummed out that like your friends aren't there all the time because you're just kind of bored with your person and i i actually used something called the traffic test there which is if you know there's certain friends of mine uh friends family members who when

[29:10] i'm i like talking to them so much i have so much fun just being with them and just talking to them that when we're like in a car somewhere and i'm driving them home right or vice versa i'm actually like it's pumped up when we hit traffic i'm like yes traffic yes we have more time as opposed to like you know normally traffic sucks i think that your person should pass the traffic test you know you should it should be one of those people uh where it's just super fun okay and then the third area so there's like attraction like best friendship the third area is just like a

[29:38] deep trust that you just like you just know that they're you feel a very good person you feel like they're just like they're they're they're like you know deep down they're that you totally trust them they're not gonna like hurt you badly you're not like kind of always like scared that you're gonna get you know or you know you can just kind of be yourself and know that it's okay um so it sounds like that's a lot but actually there's a lot of other things you know there's stuff you like to do in common there's like mutual friends there's like same philosophies on values on these other things you know religion

[30:07] you know there's a lot of other things that i think are there that i think that you know if the uh if those big three things are there that's right so anyway that's the kind of thing that i've done in real life it reminds me of like john nash uh you know uh hypothesizing around the nash equilibrium and like game theory around the women at the bar yeah it's in beautiful mind it's like that scene you know from the scene it's a very vulnerable scene it reminds me of that uh you know it's like uh breaking down this situation in a mathematical way and in such an analytical way it's

[30:35] very um it's very interesting how did um how did wait but y actually come about were you writing before it like i don't know the origin story of how it actually came to be and like the stick figures and all of your amazing drawings and like how did you actually launch into that endeavor yeah i um i was writing um i basically i i uh i always wanted to do something creative professionally um and the thing i was trying to do was music but it's like the worst match for a procrastinator because you know you can't just you know you you know and perfectionist you know you always i

[31:12] would be paralyzed by wanting to write like the best movie score for this thing possible and then you just like end up behind deadline and like or i just don't go out in the first place and do the networking i need to it was a lot of like things where i i was not i did not have the work habits to like that i needed to be like really getting that career rolling and so i was procrastinating on that by doing a couple other things starting a test prep company which is just like my side job and then i ended up hiring friends who were all out there and they also needed

[31:38] job and tutoring and then i started blogging just for fun which i didn't take seriously it was like just a fun procrastination activity on i made like a blogger um and you know just super simple and um and i found it was part of it was it was this it was this i didn't know i tricked myself where i was doing a creative pursuit that i wasn't being perfectionist about because i didn't pride myself on being good at it and i didn't wasn't trying to do anything big with it and so that's often how you end up in a really kind of loose carefree creative zone having fun

[32:19] and so i ended up writing what i think was a pretty good blog it was it was it was not i didn't put anywhere near the time that i put in now it was just kind of stuff about my day or my theories on this or a bunch you know 20 things i don't understand you know um and i would just you know i just had fun with it right and um and uh and then so meanwhile on the test prep side of things i uh my uh my best friend since we were five moved to la which is where i was and we partnered up and we were doing that together and

[32:49] uh you know now now i'm like 30 and i'm basically telling him i'm going crazy doing these like creative pursuits on the side i was writing a musical on the side i was doing blogging on the side while doing this test prep company i didn't feel like i was giving my all to the business and i wasn't giving my all to anything and it was this kind of classic me situation to end up in like super miserable um not really you know and and i was like i need to go full time with one of these creative pursuits and we decided to do something that you

[33:13] know uh could be also maybe like something that could be um a a a business venture possibly um you know it's like because it was a way to like keep working together because i liked working with him but he would manage the um the kind of the business we were doing and i would go and start a new thing that was the kind of idea it was like a way to have my cake and eat it too without having to like fully quit everything but also get to do something i really wanted but something that maybe was a fun thing for him to be part of if

[33:40] it grew as opposed to like a musical which is just like it's such a long time process it's like so hard to get that to actually make money and so anyway because it was deciding between those i was like i do a lot of blogging and i'd do this this musical so i decided to go with blogging that's kind of this long story but the like the bigger picture was like i finally at 31 did what i should have done a long time ago which is just go full in with one of my creative pursuits it's so interesting um because there's a generalized version of this story which i've

[34:12] experienced as well which is just this idea that you almost like most people that go and build something really unique or um something impressive successful etc they had the like janky version of it that happened before and then that led to and sort of allowed and enabled the really beautiful polished version of it and like i i used to write this um like once a month newsletter that i would send out to probably at like a max distribution of like 500 people and it was like what i read that month basically and it was sort of just me like reviewing a few books and it was pretty crappy like the

[34:45] writing probably wasn't good but it was loose to your point and it was kind of um again like a janky version of the audience building and the thing that i ended up doing at scale um was the seed had been planted and i was working on it and i think about that when i hear you tell the story of wait but why like you'd been working writing you know you kind of opened yourself up creatively put yourself in the arena a bit and you had to do that small thing in order for the big thing to actually happen there's actually even another level which is when i started this first blog i

[35:14] realized that what i was actually doing is i was doing something i'd done forever which is i'd come back from a trip or a crazy weird day and i would just type an email to like 12 friends and and i would do it you know i'd be like okay you know like you know throughout the day like the following things happen like tick this take this take this right i just do that i'll write these long kind of you know emails to friends and i realized when i started blogging it's like oh i'm just actually doing the thing that i used to just do on as an email i'm doing this now as a

[35:39] blog and then then i took it and did it as a full-time job you know so there's even like more layers like and i think that is a lot of times something you're doing very casually actually you know is um you you actually sometimes find something that man i'm good at this and i really like it and it doesn't feel like it it could go anywhere because it seems like it's such a casual thing but sometimes you can make that connection and say i think this like thing that i do with my friends actually is pretty special maybe i can do something with that like sometimes that's what you know that

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[37:42] it happens and you're going to love it too greg what have you enjoyed most about riverside what's amazing about riverside is that when you're recording a remote video podcast or a remote interview the recording quality is independent of wi-fi stability it basically records locally which is a huge advantage in order to ensure a reliable and uncompressed content outcome the way i think about it it's basically like a studio inside your browser and it's not just us who uses it it's 70 000 plus people ranging from guy raz gary vee and the new york times it's an amazing experience super easy and intuitive to use you don't need a

[38:24] whole team on the back end to manage it to get it up onto all of the podcasting platforms it is just a great overall experience truly a podcast studio in your pocket that you can use from anywhere we absolutely love it and you're going to as well so to check out riverside go to riverside.fm and use code happens for 15 off a membership plan again that's riverside.fm and use code happens for 15 off at checkout so it's led you to some amazing things you've you know built relationships built a reputation around your writing and your creative work that is astounding and you know and far-reaching your posts which you're a bit of a

[39:06] unicorn within the um you know blogging and newsletter writing sphere because you don't really have a set cadence for these posts you're not like you know one of these hey i'm going to write one a week or one a month your posts are sort of few and far between but when you release them they go completely nuts and people you know dive in they're these longer posts really exploring a topic from what i love about them is it feels like you come at a topic from basically any every any and every angle that might exist at it and really envelop the topic one of the things

[39:38] that sort of kind of vaulted you to another level of prominence along the way was your relationship with elon musk and you mentioned him earlier and some of your insights on him and so i feel like a need to to unpack that a little bit can you just tell the quick story of how you originally got connected with him in the first place to write the pieces you did on spacex tesla neurolink etc yeah um it really started when so at the you know as i said this was a partnership with my friend andrew finn and so we're every week i was you know coming up with what's the next

[40:16] topic you know what's the next um it's the beginning it was more regular and it was like you know you know it you know i i was able to kind of go longer and less regular once it was already an audience i shouldn't be there um and it was always like you know what's like you know so many topics potential topics what's the choice and he said to me one day andrew was like um he's like you might want to write about ai there's you know the um nick i think he's like you know there's a bunch of people are reading this book by nick bostrom um

[40:47] super intelligent so i was like all right so i picked it up read it was like had you know jaw on the floor um and then i um read you know another book um uh and then i read uh i forget what the second book was called it's in the post at the bottom um i read a third book i read ray kurzweil's um singularity is near i read you know a bunch of long articles i read a handful of papers i watched a bunch of people on youtube and i just started to like absorb this crazy topic and wrote a big long post about sometimes you happen to you know

[41:21] sometimes you write something at the right time and sometimes you don't right it's part of the skill is trying to like figure out when it's a good time for a topic you know a good time is when it's it's it's fuzzy but people don't quite understand it yet is a good time for a topic like that you don't want to do it when everyone's like read a bunch of stuff and they already have a sense of it and it's become like now there's camps political camps about it it's controversial you want it at the beginning when everyone's like what is this new thing you know um

[41:44] everyone's wide-eyed still about it and trying to understand but if you do it too early then also it doesn't hit either you know it's it's it's there's a goldilocks there's a goldilocks moment for things to hit yes so i feel like i got lucky uh here with you know um i ai was it was the right time and the post you know really went pretty viral um and then one day you know we used chart beat to see how many people are on the site um and one day you know there's you know get the notification from chart beat like you know high activity or something

[42:17] and you go and there was like a trillion people on this on the site it was like it was like a you know it was like a few days or a week after this thing was published and you see on the side like tweets they don't do that anymore unfortunately but i showed you like tweets that are sending people to your site elon musk uh went to the see what the tweet was and he was like you know funny you know interesting post you know good primer on on ai and i was like damn it was like super exciting obviously yeah um you know i was i was a fan i already thought

[42:44] he was like a super awesome dude um and so i had part two coming out in a couple weeks and now i'm writing part two thinking you know elon musk might read this right and so you know it was uh it's kind of stressful and also in my head i was like he's not gonna like he already dedicated you know 15 minutes of his like ridiculously precious time to my idiot blog i'm not don't don't expect more you know my hopes were done but i published it turns out i don't know how he got back to it but he ended up reading that and he ended up tweeting about it again

[43:16] and i was like wow uh so i was like okay this dude like likes this blog that's pretty awesome so then um then i got an email from his uh you know like a staff member of his who basically was like you know do you want to you know elon likes your stuff we'd like to talk to you about like maybe doing some writing about you know his stuff yeah you know and again i expect that to be him on the phone for a second or maybe not even at all like it's he but it's actually someone else and he's on the phone for a second then he gets off and

[43:44] i talk to like you know a person who's working for him about what turns out he calls me one on one and it's just uh just us on the phone for like an hour um talking about spacex and solarcity tesla and like um ai and other things and like super interesting conversation um and did you feel over your depth in that conversation you know i think the the way this started was very helpful if this has been something where it's like a i i had a good friend that knew him and like asked if he would talk to me for a minute i would have been like you know

[44:27] so but he this he came to me after like clearly liking my stuff so i think that gave me some like confidence like and i'm very much myself on the blog i'm like i don't have to pretend to be someone else you're clearly like he's coming he specifically like is interested in me writing because he he likes like the way i am thinking about this stuff so you ticked up north on your own spectrum that we talked about yeah yeah i i think i mean look i'm not saying this now i think probably if you asked me at the time i would have been like yeah this is horrifying like this

[44:55] um i probably was like you know just a mess like you know rambling but um he also like you know to his credit is pretty easy to talk to like you know he he like uh you just ask him a question and he kind of just goes on like he would in an interview or anywhere else he just kind of starts talking about it and um very very upfront you know you know there's there's just really he's really interested in the things he's working on so if you ask him about it he'll just go and it becomes very easy so um we had a great combo and and the

[45:24] idea was like we were trying to figure out he had no specific idea was like should you write some stuff on the tesla website because there was a blog there um written by actually uh hamish mckenzie who now is the one of the founders of sub stack and it was like oh should you do some stuff on that blog and i was like i didn't want to do that because i was trying to build my own site and i don't want to spend a lot of time writing something that was going to bring traffic to the tesla website um um and so i you know i wasn't sure if you know he

[45:56] was going to be like well that's the only way i'm going to do it he again very laid back i was like i was like i think it should be on weight but why uh and then i can really like i can have all the features i want i can put footnotes i can make it long i can have images and uh and he was like okay and i was like cool uh and so then we were like what's and then so i kind of came up with the plan though he didn't really have like any like instructions for me it was like i liked what you did on ai i liked that

[46:22] he felt it was like entertaining and accurate those are the two things you know that's what he he cares about accurate and he also like prefers something to be you know a tone that peop you know that might broke people in so i basically was like well why don't i do a post on tesla and on spacex and you know see you know what else whatever else and so that that turned into a four-part series first one was just a big picture about him the second one was a long post about tesla and third one was even longer post about spacex and the whole story there

[46:51] and the fourth one was about like why is this guy so successful like what's going on and to me it was like the way he reasons and that was the answer there um and i've more since written about other companies of his like neuralink but um but but what was really interesting is because he just doesn't do things in normal way you know he doesn't you know you think someone like him would have this pr team that's doing his tweets there's no pr team right this is him you know he's a guy he's acting like a guy he opens up his twitter and he tweets something funny he just doesn't do

[47:18] things the normal way for someone like that right in so many ways how does he think i mean you spent time with him he's obviously in the news and you know his prominence since you first interacted with him is probably a hundred asked a million because he was already yeah i think he had a million twitter followers when we yeah so if you just take twitter it's a hundred x that if you look at any other metric you know his influence in the world is yeah um completely astounding you know with all the different companies with starlink now with everything that he's doing how do you think he

[47:47] uh what is your perception of how he thinks about new opportunities and like i'm asking this question in the context of all this stuff that he's talking about with twitter now and with all the different stuff that he's doing in the world of atoms you know that's out there like how do you think um like what is his mental model or his framework for evaluating what to take on and new opportunities what's your perception of that um i think he always starts from the big goal and works backwards from there so the big goal for him he's very clear-headed about it and he's been saying in the

[48:24] same wording the same goal since if you look back to interviews from his you know or you know things he wrote or said in 2001 2002 um which is uh to increase the probability of a good future for humanity uh and an even bigger picture maybe to he wants the light of human consciousness to go on for a long time and he wants it to be a good future he wants it so increase the probability of a good and long future for humanity not not for each individual person you know he's not he's not working on life extension for people as much you know he's concerned about the

[48:57] species and again i think if you really zoom out and you take a big step back and you picture the whole milky way galaxy in front of you and you know that there's this little like dot of of higher consciousness there maybe there's a lot of places where that exists but maybe not we don't know but we know is that it's one place and it and and you know he thinks about the fermi paradox a lot why don't we see other aliens he's worried that maybe we're very rare and maybe you know it's very precarious to keep a civilization like ours going so he wants to keep that

[49:23] dot that little flame alive really badly um and so at that point now you start thinking okay so you work backwards from there so if that's what you want to raise the probability of a good future what are the threats to a a good future what are the threats to a long future right so what are the major biggest you know existential things going on um and then from there what are okay so now you've identified some threats like he thinks you know advanced ai is a threat he thinks that um you know not moving to a sustainable energy world is a threat to a good

[50:03] future um he thinks being stuck on one planet alone you know all our eggs in one's basket is a threat to a good future um he's you know so there there's some major things like this um and so it's almost like inverting like he kind of inverts like if the goal is the big future he's inverted that and said like what would lead to a bad future yeah and now go solve those problems that could potentially lead to that bad future yeah you know which which of these has potential solutions like where can human effort um have an effect a positive effect on some of these things and raise the

[50:40] probability of a good future um so the erosion of free speech is a threat to a good future he you know i see twitter very much i see twitter very much as part of the same story here he sees um and this is you know this he sees uh what's just in general the polarization of society and and the threats of authoritarianism from many angles um as a threat to a good future um and and um and again it's not just that it's a threat but he thinks he sees ways that human effort can make it better he's he he he sees ways that if we change things in this way it could

[51:17] be better with you know sustainable energy future he you know uh if if if everyone went electric for vehicles like that would have be a big help and it seems doable like electric vehicles are good enough where people will want to switch over if they could you know so it has to be practical has to make sense but he'll talk about even if he thinks something has a 10 chance of succeeding but it's really important it's worth trying well this is like his uh charlie munger lunch right like charlie munger spent the whole lunch i don't know if this is actually a true story but it's

[51:48] definitely been told several times of like charlie munger at a lunch with with elon musk tells the entire table all the reasons why tesla will fail and elon responded by basically agreeing with all of the reasons and saying i agree all of those are real reasons why it is likely to fail but it is still worth trying yeah yeah i mean you know it's like you miss 100 of the shots you don't take kind of thing like if this really matters well the one way to guarantee the failure is to not try it at all but you know he's not crazy if he thought if he thinks it's a point one

[52:19] percent chance of succeeding he's not gonna put his time into that but ten percent it's also it's an ev right like it's an expected value bet and he's a highly analytical person as as you are as well right and so you're calculating even if it's a ten percent chance but if the outcome in that scenario is astronomically better than in the event of not trying it or in the event of failure you should probably take that bet and you would do it over and over again and the overall ev of society will be hugely positive from doing that yeah yeah yeah exactly like whatever he could be working on that's

[52:49] more of a 90 chance of success he does he doesn't see that eevee as as as matching up so i have to route back to something that you mentioned in passing there on the fermi paradox because i absolutely love this one uh you've written a long post on it which i thought was which i thought was fantastic um for anyone that doesn't know this is like the where is everybody uh question of you know like if life in the universe exists as we you know as people surmise shouldn't we have encountered it by now um you know if there's like millions of stars and there's likely to be planets that look

[53:23] like earth um where is the life that would have progressed to the point of interstellar travel why haven't we met them yet um so i'm curious just for your perspective on this like what is your current thinking on this paradox is there life in the universe why haven't we encountered it yet yeah i mean it's like it's it's the world's most interesting question right i think there's nothing if you take a again zoom out like there's nothing more interesting than than this um and and the reason it's so tantalizing i mean first of all it seems like it's something i suspect that we're gonna get an answer to in the

[53:57] next like 50 years like i think we're at the end of our i think this is the this one in the last not last it's one of like the the it's it's it's the it's one of the big questions that's probably going to be solved in our lifetimes in my opinion i just think that and it can only be solved in one direction because the absence of evidence is not evident correct i think i think yes although although the better your tools get the more that the argument that maybe we're alone starts to go up if you don't find anything so but yes that's not a clear answer

[54:25] obviously um and uh and our tools is just like you know if you think about it it's not like oh well it's been millennia and we haven't answered it so well we've only been actually searching for like a few decades in in a real way and our tools are getting exponentially better so it's just um you know it's unbelievable what they can do now like just by looking at the wavelengths of light emerging from uh a star system they can actually understand what gases are on a planet like they can understand the atmospheric makeup it's like insane to me totally interesting just like imagine how knowing how to do that and so they can

[55:00] be like yeah there's you know and they and there's a certain kind of fingerprint that we you know maybe life exists in lots of different kind of atmospheric fingerprints but we know one we know one where it really worked here and so we if we see another fingerprint that looks a lot like this with a certain amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen or whatever uh i think that you know that's a that can be a signal so so anyway and obviously the big things you're looking for is like some weird you know thing where a star is you know one of my favorite i'll get to the

[55:28] answer in a second but just i just there's a lot to think about here one of my favorite scary theories is like um there's this boots void it's called uh which is like this insanely large space out in the universe with no galaxies or like very few like a much smaller it's almost entirely blank it's just like a sphere of black uh when when that's not normal like in any other sphere that size there's like you know thousands of galaxies and so it could be a lot of things it could be that that's a big black hole you know like or or there's a group of

[56:02] black holes that like merge there's a lot of different ways of good things it could be referred to as the great nothing yes colloquially or referred to i'm i'm kind of scared after that it's it's upsetting it's an upsetting concept like i'm just like i don't want to be in the middle of that where like what's crazy is that light that go that leaves one side of the boots for it doesn't hit the other side for like a billion years so it's like so you can be you can be so so so and the thing is there are planets there are some stars and planets like

[56:30] scattered in there what's crazy is that if there are you know planets around there and there's life on there they'll look out and they will be sure that there's no such thing as like a galaxy or there's no such thing as like other galaxies they're just gonna see you know they're only gonna see anyway so one of the territories one of the potential theories is that actually what you're seeing here because you know one of the one of the ideas about what advanced life more advanced than us might do is you know we think about it in terms of energy so there's this thing called the kardashev scale

[57:00] level ones a level one species can now harness all the energy of their home planet so we're not there it's logarithmic we're like a point seven out of one but that's not seventy percent we're like two percent but logarithmically it's like seven point seven so we're a little below that like you know we're there's obviously all kinds of energy from the inside of the earth and from you know rivers and from wind that we're not harnessing right now um then level two is you can harness the energy of your whole star so that can be a dyson sphere around the star you know this idea of like a sphere

[57:33] that captures because you think oh you can't sometimes i think intuitively you can't put a sphere on a star it'll go out i'm like no no it's not fire that needs oxygen it's it's fusion there's nothing to do because i'm like you can't like but say you know you could cover up the sun and it would be burning just as bright and just as as as you know doesn't there's nothing it needs from the outside of it so you can put a sphere around it and all the thing goes into the surface of the sphere and it gets channeled into different you know tubes they go out to the you know

[57:56] whatever it's like that that would be so vastly more energy than we have right now that we could ever need but but a super advanced civilization they might have thousands of space habitats and they might be on hundreds of planets and they might be doing way higher level kind of uh stuff that you know energy requirements anyway level three is when you harness the whole energy of your whole galaxy which again sounds insane when there's you know over 100 billion maybe uh maybe you know half a bill half a trillion stars but if somewhere if someone mastered the dyson sphere thing you know once you get it you get like

[58:32] it's like it's like building um a building was really impossible for like early humans like a big tall building but once we did it we just replicated in other buildings or everywhere right so you can see once they get it now so they just start to go out and they start to uh even if it takes them a few million years because you know and and you know to go build these dyson spheres and anyway the one of the theories about the boots void is that there's an extraordinarily advanced civilization that has been you don't see the light because it's all been covered up by their things and they're living this

[59:01] vast thing that you just can't see it and that's that's the evidence of their expansion anyway long answer to get back to you asked is just a big picture for the fermi paradox um and look every almost everyone anyone who understands the scale of the universe and thinks about how probability works almost all comes to the same conclusion of course we're not alone right it's like if you picked up one great note we have one example which is what happened on earth if you picked up one grain of sand from a beach and you looked in the microscope and you saw it was crawling with little critters

[59:36] you wouldn't conclude well maybe this is the only one that has that you'd say of course i'm sure they're on all kinds you know i didn't just pick up the one that has it right so we we have one example here um or one solar system and we see that civilization happen to think that well maybe this is the only place it happened makes no sense right of course with the scale of course this must be coming that said there are some very compelling papers and arguments out there that that say we don't have any good reason to be confident that what happened here wasn't outrageously rare

[1:00:15] like that's on a scale so it could be so rare that it pops up in a galaxy once every couple million years so we're here now and then maybe there's another one over there and then maybe you know these two die out and a million years passes and the other one pops up so it could be like that and again if you if you picture those as like little lights flashing on if you zoomed out you still see if you see all the galaxies you still see all these lights everywhere and all the galaxies you know so that but but if that would be rare enough

[1:00:41] that there would be nothing else in our whole galaxy right now right that would be mean we are unbelievable freak incident if it happens like once in a galaxy every once in a while you can go further and say that you know maybe this is the only time this has ever happened in the milky way but it's happened in other galaxies here and there you can go even further and say actually this is the only time it's happened in the observable universe um again it's it's it goes counter-intuitive but we have no sense of how rare it was how freak of an incident it was obviously it's some kind

[1:01:10] of freak incident that life began because it took so long before it happened right so a lot of collisions of molecules before it happened clearly it's a hard thing to have happen uh we also know i want to propose yeah i want to propose something that's a bit i don't know whether anyone has ever thought of um this kind of angle to it so have you ever heard of cope's rule no so cope's rule is this idea that like organisms basically scale in size linearly over time um kind of up to a point right like then basically like becoming too big you know if if you followed that humans would be

[1:01:44] you know the size of the sky would be giants etc and so like there's this idea that as you get too big you know it's bad right like there's like an actual you kind of asymptote from a size standpoint you can't actually get much bigger it's bad for you for various reasons and you see it play out like you know companies get too big and then struggle or like investors like once you get big a lot of large numbers it becomes difficult to perform et cetera so i wonder whether there is an intelligence asymptote of societies where at scale you actually will not see interstellar travel ever

[1:02:17] become a thing because societies find a way to die off uh from an intelligence standpoint when they basically like get too smart for their own good so like in the same way that size becomes a disadvantage when it gets like too too big does intelligence actually become a disadvantage and are we seeing the beginning of that with the fracturing of society and the way that we're seeing today yeah i mean so you're talking about is is is human level intelligence a possible great filter candidate great filter is a robin hansen term that is you know is there some point along the evolutionary path that it that

[1:02:55] that that almost every single attempt hits a wall there um and and and there's a few options here it's not just what you said it's like the great filter might be behind us it may be maybe going from simple cell to complex cell with a nucleus because that took a i don't know it took a billion years it took a huge amount of time i think it took a billion years of simple sales i mean that's but maybe actually the average is it would have taken a thousand uh you know a trillion years and it happened really really early here it was a freak incident so maybe it's behind us and all

[1:03:26] the other attempts they don't get past that we happen to that would be great news it also could be ahead of us um meaning you know we look this is you know nick bostrom talks about how uh what if you could make a nuclear weapon by microwaving sand right set up a nuclear bomb by putting sand in the microwave just something like something that anyone could do you have to imagine we would be set back to the stone age at this point right because one out of every 100 000 people is a maniac who would love to extinct humans and love to go down in the you know look

[1:04:01] at school shooters i mean i don't think that they're choosing to only kill 15 people i think they could kill a thousand they pro a lot of them would right and they're obviously trying to go down with the biggest bang possible so it doesn't matter if 99.999 of people are good and reasonable if it becomes easy to blow up the planet the planet it's going to be blown up right so uh this the scary thing is to think about well as our technology gets better and better and better um and you look at stuff like social media maybe this happens on a lot of planet maybe every planet that you know all

[1:04:36] these civilizations they end up with their social media phase and when they get there very quickly you know madness starts to prevail over reason which is what's happening on social media this most people are reasonable but the forces of madness are on the rise and and squashing the forces of reason right now and maybe this isn't you know maybe this is just very predictable and happens all the time and at some point you get too interconnected and the weapons get too easy to make and all the reason in the world doesn't matter because suddenly everyone's back in the state of nature just shine trying to protect themselves and

[1:05:07] and maybe it doesn't extinct them maybe it sets them back you know to the stone age or whatever and then they can you know so you know it doesn't have to extinct us to so yeah i mean it that's a very possible thing but here's here okay here's an argument against it if life you know because there's also lots of theories that say even if even if this is pretty rare there's so many stars out there so many sun-like stars with earth-like planets around them habitable planets that a lot of other people say well what we would expect is that there's not just other civilizations like ours there's

[1:05:37] milli tens of millions of them in the milky way alone milk is just one of hundreds you know two trillion galaxies um and so even if this were the case what you were saying there'd be a freak incident there'd be outliers there'd be some species that developed this all-encompassing religion that was so you know that did such a good job of policing people's behavior that they that they made it past they got to the point where they could now all upload their consciousness and you couldn't kill off people any more easily and they were on many many planets and they had developed you know intelligence that

[1:06:11] allowed them to snuff out any threats i don't know so or maybe not but it seems like you know man it really it's a great filter that filters everyone if it's working right it's a pretty amazing i mean it's just amazing to go to the like reaches of thinking on this the boots uh the boots boy

[1:06:38] because there's so much space in between stars but all of the stars around us we're all in like a tiny like a super like urban neighborhood you know a galaxy is like super condensed but yet when you actually get in here you're like oh my god there's so much space between galaxies is even more space and the boots void is like it's next level it's like it's upset it is amazing to just think about like humans do have a fascination with the very very big um and like the zooming out you know cosmos like neil degrasse tyson and cosmos and and how he kind of brought a

[1:07:10] um you know an abstraction of the complexity of the very big to the masses um you know and before him obviously the original cosmos um with carl sagan and um that there's always been this amazing fascination with the unknown of space and the scale of it and it like you know you watch the first episode of cosmos and i defy you to not like get pushed back into your pillow or wherever you're watching it and feel like holy what is the meaning of all this why am i here um but the big has this allure that i find personally the like very small doesn't necessarily have in zooming in i

[1:07:44] mean it's just the bigness is just so because like the smallness we know it's there right we know at some point you can just get it's like you know it's like yes if you zoom in enough on anything you're going to see really small particles right but the bigness like we didn't i don't think you know humans knew about how big things were for a long time um which which of course is another way of saying they didn't know how small they were right it makes us really small like tiny um but not to mention that there are things about the bigness one of the things i find fascinating

[1:08:14] historically is like galileo was ostracized cast off um you know a complete pariah for um you know theories that he had about the universe and about the bigness uh a few hundred years later he was obviously proven completely correct and was no longer you know considered a pariah historically but there are going to be things that today uh we are hilariously wrong about that we are like ostracizing people um saying you're an idiot you know pushing them off like they're on the fringes of science that 100 years from now that person will be like the genius that you know predicted x y or z whatever it was

[1:08:51] yeah yeah it's uh they're uh i mean there's i forget who said it but you know if you go back to any point in history uh to any society there's gonna be a bunch of things that you will that you should not say out loud a bunch of truths that you better not say out loud right and it's easy to look back at the people in the past and the societies in the past and see what they were and say oh my god you know if you said this very obvious normal thing today out loud back in 1620 england or in you know the roman empire

[1:09:29] um you're you're done you know you're you're at best ostracized you know um and uh yeah and it's hard to unders it's hard to see you know again we have that we have the helicopter view of those those societies now so we can see um uh but we are ridiculous like you said we are for sure without question i mean i think 20 years ago it would have been like wow we're probably ridiculous in some ways today it's almost like it's it's painfully clear to see like just looking at social media um looking at like like the way like we're being manipulated by in information warfare and

[1:10:07] um you know the fact that there's like um still like lots and lots of like brutal dictatorships um and like our livestock farming there's so many areas where i'm like you can see like it's annoying to know the things that we're gonna be laughed at in the future but like i'm sure people in the 1700s and you know if you look at like abigail adams letters to john adams people were aware how bad slavery was you know there were a lot of abigail adams is writing these letters basically being like this is like the worst thing ever they knew right so i think a lot of the time

[1:10:41] like there are a lot of people who know how bad things are but there's there's some forces that are keeping it up upheld uh so yeah i think about this kind of thing all the time it's like yeah the ridiculousness of the human state the the one thing i will leave you with and i know we're running up against end of time um is one of your one of your tweets i think it was last year which is sort of to this day one of my favorite tweets and and general thoughts which is this idea that like if you went back in time to a few days before you were um

[1:11:10] conceived or born um you would be very careful about the actions you took because you would know that there was the potential that any action you took back then might lead to you not being born back to the feedback to the future if you went back to before your parents met you'd be like don't touch anything hide in the closet don't say anything right because you know yeah and so it's a good reminder if that's the case that in the present to think just as carefully about the things you were doing because your actions have very real impacts um on the future and yeah where everything goes from here right

[1:11:46] you don't have to like worry about like oh no like i just interrupted that conversation now those few people might not like have gotten married you have to worry because it doesn't matter because any of the future paths might be equally as bad or good when you're in the present but it's a reminder that you know any i do think that like we take any person who lives from like a baby to like old age and then they die whether they're totally you know ordinary person living an ordinary life the ripple effects that that person causes and the the the secondary kind of consequences i think you have a totally

[1:12:17] different world uh if if they if they lived or if they didn't live most cases you know and yeah and certainly today you know um so yeah i think it's it's it's empowering to be like yes what we do matters yeah yeah it's empowering um and the last one is on the fermi paradox uh you said it has two possibilities both of them make me want to hug you either the universe is teeming with aliens which means we're a single family in a cosmic society great or there's no one else in which case we're stranded together on a tiny island in the vast darkness but gladly not the

[1:12:54] boots boyd yes and that's true that's part of why the fairy paradox is so cool because like either way it's mind-blowing right there's no non there's no non-mind-blowing outcome here and either way it it is a reminder that like fighting with each other above dumb like human tribalism is so stupid it's it's only when your like head is so like zoomed in that you can't like just remind yourself what the hell is really going on here that's how i feel a good a good reason to not fight on twitter with strangers oh man well thank you so much tim by the way i love you i love your twitter i uh

[1:13:31] i appreciate it it was uh you know it's been an absolute blast talking with you i feel like i owe you money um for how much i learned from this conversation and i also feel like i'm gonna be kind of mad at you when i think about the boots void later tonight so i appreciate it so much look forward to to getting together uh when you're out in new york and uh thanks so much for joining me thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at hi trwih leave us a review at apple or spotify to

[1:14:02] help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see you soon [Music] never let the world

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