The Startup Ideas Podcast - Are We Alone In The Universe? (with Tim Urban)

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Do advanced civilizations exist? Can psychedelics help us better understand ourselves? What goes on in Elon's mind? Can one episode answer all of these questions? When Tim Urban is the guest that's exactly what happens. Tim is an incredible writer known for his blog, Wait But Why, which has gained the respect of some of the world's brightest minds, including Elon Musk. He joins host Sahil Bloom to help answer many deep questions, including evidence that explains our place in the universe.SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► Riverside is our go-to platform to record studio-quality podcasts or videos. We use it for all of our episodes of Where It Happens. Their secret sauce is the ability to record locally, which means you get uncompressed audio and video that works even if your WiFi isn’t cooperating.Once you’re done recording, it’s so easy to edit and download all of your files. To get 15% off your plan, use code HAPPENS at https://riverside.fm/?via=wih►► This episode is brought to you by Fundrise. Fundrise is on a mission to use technology to build a better financial system for the individual. With over $2.4B AUM and 250k active investors, it’s the largest direct-to-investor real estate investor platform in America.Their platform is so easy to use and they make it so easy to diversify your portfolio. For a limited time if you sign-up, you can get $10 bonus. Just go to www.fundrise.com/room►► Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comTHIS EPISODETim Urban: https://twitter.com/waitbutwhySahil Bloom: https://twitter.com/SahilBloomProduction & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/FIND US ON SOCIALTwitter: https://twitter.com/_trwihInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/_trwihTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@_trwihWeb: https://trwih.comSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6aB0v6amo3a8hgTCjlTlvhApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-it-happens/id1593424985

And look, 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 grade, no, 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 a 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. I didn't just pick up the one that has it, right? Dude, great to meet you and thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah, I'm happy to 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. Totally. It's like a genuinely good way to meet people. Like Twitter sucks in a hundred ways, but like it's like really. really, like, fantastically great for, like, three or four really important things. Yeah, I found that it, like, yeah, to your point, it's both ends of the spectrum, right?

I guess it's like anything else in life. There's, like, the 1%. You tweeted it actually just recently about, like, advice filters and trust filters. And I feel that same way. It's like you need to know and figure out how to find the 1% that is super interesting that you're really going to engage with and learn a lot from amidst all of the noise that is out there. Yeah, I think, like, it, depending on who you follow, it can be a great way to learn, a great way to, 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 is and a different, you know, a viewpoints and the different, you can, and if you follow a. the right, you know, array of people, it actually gives you a feel for what's going on in every bubble. You know, you can't, 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 5% 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 the journalism. So I'm curious just like 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 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 V, and the New York Times. It's an amazing experience, super easy and intuitive to use. You don't need a 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.

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Signing up is easy. Just head over to fundrise.com Again, that's F-U-N-D-R-I-S-E dot com slash room to get started today. My instinct is that that's, it's hard because on one hand, like, what's going on in Twitter is part of what's going on in reality, like, and it has a big effect on things. So, you know, you don't want to totally have your head in the sand to just pretend it doesn't exist, but I do think that, you know, we're like, we're really social beings. Like I, this is a random story here.

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 alone in a restaurant. I started to like reframe and I was like, this is not, A, none of these people know

who I am and they'll never see them again. But B, it's like, why would I be embarrassed anyway? It's like, who cares who anyone thinks? 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. It was like in the Amazon. And this is one of my solo trips.

And there 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 meet people and I like, you know, I liked making friends from other countries. And I went to this tour and there was this, 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. 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 whether they didn't like Americans or they didn't just, they just didn't like me. But I felt very like out grouped in a way. It was like a two day thing. And I found myself like caring so much about being outgroomed by five randos who I literally was never going to 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 for me to care about being outgrieved. 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 it 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 is it has a lot of dynamics on it, a lot of kind of in group, out group, bullying, like, you know, slandering. And it has like, you know, people have their crew that, you know, they agree with them. And people like me, you know, 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 can see journalists kind of getting wrapped up in it and suddenly kind of feeling that like middle school kind of social pressure. And I don't think that's probably, I don't think that's good for many people. And I think journalists especially. So I 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 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 in solitude and experience solitude because we're constantly, you know, we're on our phones. I've got my 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, and when you reengage 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, 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. But it's such a funny and even if someone is like you have to, if you just like the thought that it matters is a very crazy part of your brain that cares that is like, oh, you know, like, you know, when I'm in a good

zone, like 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 shit about me. And I don't, and it, and it rolls off my back. And I say, you know, I talk shit 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, like, you just like, you care so much about social things. It's a, it's such a fun, like, the ability to pull yourself away from your, your own internal feelings like that is very rare. I've felt like I personally, I won't comment on my own experience with this, but I've heard that when people are under the influence of psychedelic 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. This is an interesting experience and process, which is part of why scientists think there's a huge, you know, potential use for treatments of depression and other psychological disorders as well. You can, like, unpack and deconstruct your own, your own perspectives and emotions. Well, yeah, it's like, I feel like, if usually you're kind of, 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 it look under it and like and that is um 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 discussion and chat. And, you know, I thought I would kind of go meta here in using one of your own pieces, one of my favorite pieces from Wait, but Why, which was your neuralink 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 by that when you wrote that? And I want to just kind of use that thread of zooming way in and zooming way out

to examine a few different topics today. Yeah, I think I just in generally talk, about zooming. To me, it's like a very, it's an axis kind of, you know, that we can be on. It's a spectrum of how, you know, 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 you're, so when you're zoomed in, it's like you're on a beach and you can like look down, you know, you're on a beach and you're looking around and 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 don't see anything else. And so, first of all, you can zoom in,

which is you can take a microscope and start examining the grains of sand and, you know, just really getting down there and understanding, you know, how did this happen? How did each grain of sand get, you know, get like this? And, you know, how, how do these trees grow? And, you know, what are these little tiny organisms doing? But to me, you know, so that's one thing that I think can help you really understand a beach better. But often 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 a little stretch of a ton of beach?

Or is this the only little area of beach? Is that, am I looking at a lake, a big lake? Or is this the ocean? And so what we can do is like if you, I think about it 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 news 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, like, oh, yeah, remember that Russia, Ukraine thing that was on for like four months? Like, it's hard to know, right? Like, there's all these, you know, stories that it's. And so I think of it as a helicopter. You go up and now you can see more. You can start to like, so if you look back at the last month, and I know I'm like, yeah,

bringing news stories in 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 matter, this. That's like when you can zoom up and you can see the whole kind of region here. But you still can't really see. Is this how big is this place? Is a continent? Is it a huge island?

I don't know. You go up farther and farther until you're actually, now you can see. Actually, okay, now you can see the whole continent and the outline of it and where you were on it. And you go up even further and you can see the whole earth. And you can kind of fully see. to me it's like if you you know if you zoomed out on a lot of things you can see the huge huge story and so often I think we're like caught in the middle we're caught in the middle

time wise as I said with like news stories like it's hard to it's hard for us to see the big big picture here what's the real overarching story that's going on in 2022 right now and and you know time gives us that that helicopter hind insight. 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 we need to do a lot more zooming out the best we can. Obviously, again, hindsight helps. And so statistics can help to get a feel for, I think that whenever I want to understand something, that's my instinct. He's like, what's the big, big story

going on. Like, what's all of this a part of? Again, is this part of an island? Is this part of a giant continent? Is this, you know, how relevant is each thing? But then also zooming in, I find that so often, like, we just, again, we're caught in the middle where we, like, read the news story. Or we, we understand, you know, we try to study how a company works or, you know,

the basic deal with the company. But it's when you, you know, if you go in and you actually. talk to 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. And you look back to what you thought like a week ago before all this. And you're like, wow, I really had this like depiction that was just wrong. It was not accurate. 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 zoom down. It's because it's most comfortable, right? That's like the point of peak abstraction where to use your thought experiment, the pencil just looks like a pencil and you don't worry about it. And you're like, yeah, I 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, you know, all of the different components of it. not a single human who can build that pencil and know how to put it the entire 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 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 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 the secret of 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. I even, you know, stand-up comedians, you know, which is a good stand-up comedian is they really see the, the bigger social forces going on and they can point them out in a way that everyone says, oh, my God, that's so true, you know. I think that one of the things people have in common is 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 just seems to like see the overarching farthest back stories of like, you know, humanity. is, you know, like trying to keep the light of human consciousness. And he sees, you know, the major existential threats. He just thinks that's where his head is.

He's always thinking about that. But then also, you know, he knows exactly the four elements that make up the paint on the rocket, you know. And he can tell you how much the rocket weighs 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 when you have that level of both out and in kind of clarity, it just, you're just like seeing without any fog. You know, we have so much. So if you think about it is, you know, we see it in the middle kind of, even there, you know, the middle often we can get deceived if you don't see the top and bottom. You know, we can often be deceived by new stories, you know, by, you know, headlines and, you know,

you know, kind of dogmatic storylines, like, you know, political narratives can kind of fool us. But 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 in investing and entrepreneurship and the arts and other things like that. So I want to spend like a couple of minutes doing a zoom in, zoom out on you. I feel like everybody knows you as, you know, the most popular blogger in the world. Whether or not 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, they, they commanded

like a massive outsized share of my childhood. I kind of view. 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 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, maybe like, I don't 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 Booker World Records.

And then the other ones, which I thought, which I find hilarious, are like Quicksand, piranhas, like the Bermuda Triangle. I really wondered why no one was looking into the Bermuda Triangle. I was like, man, planes are falling out of the sky in this thing and no one's looking into it. Nightmarish. Yeah, I mean, quicksand is a very, very. very good one. Like, I think part part of it has to do with the Princess Bride. But I think it's just in general. It was in cartoons and it was like, it was like very kind of a scary part of life.

Yeah. 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. Like, you know, you were born, now you're here. You know, kind of what, what happened in between? How did you, you know, form your maps of reality? Like, what were the, what were the kind of key parts of your life that you feel like have impacted where you are today? Yeah, I, I think I've always just kind of been an analytical person. Like, it's just my instinct to, when something is going on, or I feel a certain way,

or something happens to just, like, try to categorize it, you know, and, and, like, make sense of it in a way. And so I also then like people who do that. I end up connecting well with them. And when I find someone who also happens to do that, we become really good friends because we just do a lot of that. And so I think- 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? 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. I think it can cause you anxiety. I think you can overanalyze stuff. I think if something unfortunate happens, like, instead of just being like, yeah, that was a bummer, you might like really, you might like internalize exactly how big a mistake it was in a way that like, you know, it had been better to kind of just not be thinking so hard about it. I always thought you were a pitcher, right? Yeah.

Yes. You could see the baseball fidget toy that I carry around. Yeah. Like, I would have been an awful match for that because I would have been like, you know, I don't know, just say I'm like a relief pitcher and I come in and I, and I, 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 week being like a good having been like a good you know week and 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 and you can extrapolate by the way like I bet there is a very clear correlation if you look to pitchers 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 around your own abilities? And like with pitchers, you had to be so 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 lucky, whatever. Like I'm way better than them. That's bullshit.

You had to have that like completely irrational. I 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 zooming out and being like, I'd see the whole career and be like, oh shit 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 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 shoot off back into space and the little inkling of insight that might make you better the next timeout to actually permeate and kind of hit you. I think that goes for a lot more than sports too. I think if you think about 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 arrogance side, a little bit, like enough where you're

like proud of who you are, you're confident in what you know and your values and your beliefs. And you go with them, you're not always, you know, rethinking them or questioning them or self-doubt, you know, 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 this is what I believe. And I think that that's a, 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 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 it. And now it's a rubber shield that all new information bounces off of. All negative feedback bounces off of. And, 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 mean, that's someone who has, I think, an arrogance, a problem with feedback. But I think that being totally rational about like maybe I, well, maybe I should question this. That's, I don't, I think it's, that's actually can be a paralyzing place. And you can quickly drift when you, if 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. Right. And so, but like for example, like this is the kind of thing I've always done for having this conversation.

and now in my head I've formed 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? 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 right person to marry. or whatever. What makes a good relationship versus a bad? What should deal breakers be? So 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 that I've had. And like I remember we were like, you know, I kind of come up with a theory, you know, just talking. I was like, okay, I think what matters is, you know,

there's three things that you have to be good. And then everything else can be bad and it's fine. Like The 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 have like a crush or, you know, physical attraction of some kind. A 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 always feels a little more special than just a friend. So there has to be some of the thing there.

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 and then also your friends. And you're having so much fun with your friends. And then they leave and you're heading home with your person. And you're like, oh, damn, it's 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.

Like, 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 actually use something called the traffic test there, which is if, you know, there's certain friends of mine, friends, family members who when I'm, I like talking to 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, 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, it should be one of those people 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 that like a deep trust that you just like, you just know that they're, you feel a very good person. You feel like they're, they're like, deep down, you totally trust them. They're not going to, like, hurt you badly. You're not, like, kind of always, like, scared that you're going to get, you know, or, you know, you can just kind of be yourself and know that it's okay.

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, you know, there's a lot of other things that I think are there. That I think, you know, if the other, if those big three things are there, those friends. So anyway, that's the kind of thing that I've done a lot. It reminds me of like John Nash, you know, hypothesizing around the Nash equilibrium and like game

theory around the women at the bar. Yeah, exactly. It's in beautiful mind. It's like that scene. I remember. It's a very memorable scene. It reminds me of that. You know, it's like breaking down this situation in a mathematical way and in such an analytical way.

It's very, it's very interesting. How did, how did Wait But Why 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 was writing. Basically, I always wanted to do something creative professionally.

And the thing I was trying to do is music. But it's like the worst match for a procrastinator because, you know, you can't just, you know, you're, you know, and perfectionist. You know, you always, I 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 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 are out there and they also needed a 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. I made like a blogger. And, you know, just super simple. And I found it was part of 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. And so I ended up writing what I think was a pretty good blog. 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. And I would just, you know, I know, I just had fun with it, right? And, and, and then so meanwhile, on the test prep side of things, my, my best friend since we were five moved to L.A., which is where I was, and we partnered up and we were doing that together.

And 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 a 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 given my all to anything. And it was this kind of classic me situation to end up in like super miserable, not really, you know, and I was like, I need to go full time with one of these creative pursuits. And we decided to do something that, you know, could be also maybe like, something that could be a business venture possibly. It was like, because it was a way to like keep working together because I liked working with him.

But he would manage 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 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 just sat in between those.

I was like, I do a lot of blogging and I do this musical. So I decided to go with blogging. That's kind of this long story. But 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 because there's a generalized version of this story, which I've experienced as well, which is just this idea that you all, 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 in 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,

the writing probably wasn't good, but it was loose to your point. And it was kind of, again, like a janky version of the audience building and the thing that I ended up doing at scale 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 realized that what I was actually doing is I was doing something I had 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 I would do it. You know, I'd be like, okay, you know, like, throughout the day, like the following things happen, like tick this, tick this, tick this, right? I just do that. I already these long kind of, you know, emails to friends. And I realized when I started blogging, it was like, oh, I'm just actually doing the thing that I used to just do one as an email.

I'm doing this now as a blog. And 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, you actually sometimes find something that, man, I'm good at this and I really like it. And it doesn't feel like 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.

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You don't need a 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.com and use code happens for 15% off a membership plan. Again, that's riverside. com and use code happens for 15% off at checkout. So it's led you to some amazing things. You've, you know, built relationships, build 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 unicorn within the, 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. There are 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 and every angle that might exist at it and really envelop the topic. One of the things 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 I need to unpack that a 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, et cetera? Yeah. 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 them, what's the next topic? You know, what's the next at the beginning, it was more regular. And it was like, you know, I was able to kind of go longer and less regular once it was already an audience. I need to be there. 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, he was like, he's like, he might want to write about AI.

There's, you know, Nick, I think, he's like, you know, there's a bunch of people are reading this book by Nick Bostrom. super intelligence. So I was like, all right. So I picked it up, read it, was like, had, you know, jaw on the floor. And then I read, you know, another book. And then I read, I forget what the second book was called. It's in the post at the bottom. I read a third book.

I read Ray Kurzweil's 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 start to like absorb this crazy topic and wrote a big long post about it. Sometimes you happen to, you know, 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 it's buzzy, but people don't quite understand it yet.

It's a good time on 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 and it's controversial. You want it at the beginning when everyone's like, what is this new thing, you know? 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 here with, you know, AI was, it was the right time. And the post, you know, really went pretty viral. And then one day, you know, we used chart beat to see how many people are on the site. and one day there's a you know get the notification from chart beat like you know

high activity or something and it'd go on there was like a trillion people on this on the site and it was like I don't 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

was like whoa uh went to 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. You know, I was, I was a fan. I already thought he was like a super awesome dude. 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 kind of stressful.

And also in my head, I was like, he's not going to like, he already dedicated, you know, 15 minutes of his like ridiculously precious time to my idiot blog. I'm not, 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. And I was like, wow.

So I was like, okay, this dude likes this blog. That's pretty awesome. So then I got an email from his, you know, like a staff member of his who basically was like, you know, do you want to, you know, Elon likes your stuff, would like to talk to you about like maybe doing some writing about, you know, his stuff. Yeah. 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 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 us on the phone for like an hour. Talking about SpaceX and Solar City, Tesla and like AI and other things. And like super interesting conversation. and did you feel over your depth in that conversation? You know, I think the way this started was very helpful.

If this has been something where it's like a, 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, 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 think, I mean, look, like, I'm saying this now. I think probably if you asked me at the time, I would have been like, yeah, this is horrifying. Like, this is I don't know, I probably was like, you know, just a mess, like, you know, rambling. But he also, like, you know, to his credit is pretty easy to talk to. Like, you know, he, like, you just asked him a question. 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 very, very upfront. You know, 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 we had a great combo. And the idea was like we were trying to figure out, he had no specific idea. It was like, should you write some stuff on the Tesla website? Because there was a blog there, written by actually Hamish McKenzie, who now is one of the founders of substack. 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 didn't want to spend a lot of time writing something that was going to bring traffic to the Tesla website. And so I, you know, I wasn't sure

if, you know, he 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 wait, but why. 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 he was like, okay. And I was like, cool.

And so then we were like, what's, and then so I kind of came up with the plan. He didn't really have like any like instructions for me. It was like, I like you did on AI. I liked that he felt it was like entertaining and accurate. Those are the two things. You know,

and that's what he cares about accurate. And he also like prefers something to be, you know, a tone that people, you know, that might wrote people in. So I basically was like, well, why don't I do a post on Tesla and on SpaceX? And, you know, let's see, you know, whatever else.

And so they, yeah, that turned into a four-part series. First one was just a big picture about him. The second one was long post about Tesla. And the third one was even longer post about SpaceX and the whole story there. 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.

And I've since written about other companies of his, like Nerling. But what was really interesting is because he just doesn't do things. a 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 has it. He opens up his Twitter and he tweets something funny. He just doesn't do 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 100xed, which is crazy because he was already. Yeah, I think

he had a million Twitter followers when we first talked. And now it's, if you just take Twitter, it's 100x that. If you look at any other metric, you know, his influence in the world is completely astounding, you know, with all the different companies, with Starlink now with everything that he's doing. How do you think he, 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 Adams, you know, that's out there. Like, how do you think, like, what is his mental model or his framework for evaluating what to take on and new opportunities.

What's your perception of that? I think he always starts from the big goal and works backwards from there. So the big goal for him, he's very clearheaded about it. And he's been saying it in the same wording, the same goal, since if you look back to interviews from his, you know, or things he wrote or said in 2001, 2002, which is, to increase the probability of a good future for humanity. And in 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.

So increase the probability of a good and long future for humanity. Not for each individual person. He's not working on life extension for people as much. You know, he's concerned about a 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 it is a lot of places where that exist,

but maybe not. We don't know. What we know is that it's one place. And 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 dot, that little flame alive really badly.

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 it. a good future. What are the threats to a good future? What are the threats to a long future? So what are the major biggest, you know, existential things going on? 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, you know, not moving to a sustainable energy world is a threat to a good future. he thinks being stuck on one planet alone, you know,

all our eggs in one's basket is a threat to a good future. He's, you know, so there's some major things like this. 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. No, which of these has potential solutions? Like where can, human effort have an effect,

a positive effect on some of these things and raise the probability of a good future. 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, and this is, you know, he sees what's just in general, the polarization of society and the threats of authoritarianism

from many angles. as a threat to a good future. 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 sees ways that if we change things in this way, it could be better. With, you know, sustainable energy future, you know, 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. So it has to be practical, it 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 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 definitely been told several times of like Charlie Munger at a lunch 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 if he thinks it's a 0.1% chances, Cicini's not going to put his time into that. Yeah, well, it's also, it's an EV, right? Like, it's an expected value bet. And he's a highly analytical person as you are as well, right? And so you're calculating, even if it's a 10% 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 more of a 90% chance of success, he doesn't see that EV 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. this one. You've written a long post on it, which I thought was, which I thought was fantastic. For anyone that doesn't know, this is like the where is everybody 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? You know, if there's like millions of stars and there's likely to be planets that look like Earth, where is the life that would have progressed to the point of interstellar travel? Why haven't we met them yet? So I'm curious just for your perspective. 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 the world's most interesting question, right? I think so. There's nothing, if you take it, again, zoom out, like, there's nothing more interesting than this. And the reason it's so tantalizing, I mean, first of all,

it seems like it's something I suspect that we're going to get an answer to in the next, like, 50 years. Like, I think we're at the end of our, I think this is one of the last, last, not last. It's one of like the, it's, it's one of the big questions that's probably going to be solved in our lifetimes, in my opinion. I just think that it can only be solved in one direction, because the absence of evidence is not evidence. Correct. 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, obviously. And, and our tools is just like, you know, if you think about it, it's not like, oh, well, it's been

millennia. We haven't answered it. It's like, well, we've only been actually searching for like a few decades in a real way. And our tools are getting exponentially better. So it's just, you know, it's unbelievable what they can do now. Like just by looking at the wavelengths of light emerging from 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 insane. It's just like, imagine knowing how to do that. And so they can be like, yeah, there's, you know, 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 if we see another fingerprint that looks a lot like this with a certain amount

of oxygen and carbon dioxide and nitrogen and whatever, 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, one of my favorite, I'll get to the answer in a second, but just, there's a lot to think about here. One of my favorite. favorite scary theories is like there's this boots void it's called which is like this insanely

large space out in the universe with no galaxies or like very few like a much smaller is it's almost entirely blank it's just like a sphere of black 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 there's a group of black holes that, like, merge. There's a lot of different ways of things it could be. Referred to as the Great Nothing. Yes. Colloquially referred to.

I'm kind of obsessed with it. It's upsetting. It's an upsetting concept. Like, I'm just like, I don't want to be in the middle of that. Like, what's crazy is that light that goes, 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 scattered in there.

What's crazy is that if there are, you know, planets are on 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 going to see, you know, they're only going to see. Anyway, so one of the theories, one of the potential theories is that actually what you're seeing here, because, you know, 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. 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 0.7 out of one, but that's not 70%. We're like 2%. But logarithmically, it's like 7.7. So we're a little below that. Like, you know, 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.

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 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. And I'm like, no, no, it's not fire that needs oxygen. It's fusion. There's nothing to do. Because I'm like, you can't like, but it's like, you can cover up the sun and it would be burning just as bright and just as, as, you know, 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 service of the sphere and it gets channeled into different, you know, tubes that go out to the, you know, whatever. It's

like that would be so vastly more energy than we have right now that we could ever need. 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 stuff that, you know, energy requirements. Anyway, level three is when you've harnessed the whole energy of your whole galaxy, which again sounds insane when there's, you know, over 100 billion, maybe, you know, half a billion stars. But if someone mastered the Dyson sphere thing, you know, once you get it, you get it.

Like, it's like, it's like building, a building was really impossible for like early humans, like a big tall building. But once we did it, we just replicate it. Now their buildings are everywhere. Right. So you can see once they get it, now they just start to go out and they start to, even if it takes them a few million years. Because, you know, and, you know, to go build these Dyson spheres. And anyway, one of the theories about the boots void is that there's an extremely.

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 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. And look, 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, no, 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 a 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? So we have one example here, or one solar system, and we see that civilization happened. 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 say we don't have any good reason to be confident that what happened here wasn't outrageously rare. 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 another one pops up. So it could be like that.

And again, 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 galaxy. You know, so that, but if that would be rare enough 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 is. 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. Again, it's, it's, it goes counterintuitive, but we have no sense of how rare it was, how freak of an

incident it was. Obviously, it's some kind of freak incident that life began because it took so long before it happened, right? So a lot of collisions of molecule before it happened. Clearly, it's a hard thing to have happened. We also know. I want to propose. Yeah. I want to propose. I want to propose something that's, I don't know whether anyone has ever thought of 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 and size linearly over time, kind of up to a point, right? Like then basically like becoming too big, you know, if you follow that, humans would be, you know, the size of the sky would be giants, et cetera. 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, law of large numbers, it becomes difficult to perform, etc. So I wonder whether there is an intelligence asymptote of societies where at scale you actually will not see interstellar travel ever become a thing because societies find a way to die off. from an intelligence standpoint when they basically 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 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 almost every single attempt hits a wall there. 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 going from simple cell to complex cell with a nucleus because that took a billion years. It took a huge amount of time. I think it took a billion years of simple cells. I mean, that's, but maybe actually the average is it would have taken 1,000. a trillion years, and it happened really, really early here.

It's a freak incident. So maybe it's behind us. And all the other attempts, they don't get past that we happen to. That would be great news. It also could be ahead of us, meaning, you know, look, this is, you know, Nick Bostrom talks about how, what if you could make a nuclear weapon by microwaving sand, right? Set off a nuclear bomb by putting sand in the microwave, just something that anyone could do. You have to imagine we would be.

be upset 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 and, you know, look 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. A lot of them would, right? 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'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, like, you know, all 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. 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 is, 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 trying to protect themselves. 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 it doesn't have to

extinct us to. So yeah, I mean, 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 sunlike stars with earthlike planets around 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 millions of millions of them in the Milky Way alone. Milky is just one of hundreds, you know, two trillion galaxies. And so even if this were the case, what you're 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 made it pass. They got to the point where they can now upload their consciousness and you couldn't kill off people anymore easily and they were on many, many planets and they had developed, you know, intelligence that 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, what, the boots void. The boots void is going to be like in my nightmares. It's a bad time. Yeah. I don't want to go. 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.

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. And like the zooming out, you know, Cosmos, like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos and how he kind of brought a, you know, an abstraction of the complexity of the very big to the masses. You know, and before him, obviously the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan. And there has always been this amazing fascination with the unknown of space and the scale of it.

And 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 shit, what is the meaning of all this? Why am I here? But the big has this allure that I find personally, the like very small doesn't necessarily have in zooming in. I mean, it's just the bigness is just so. 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, 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. Yeah. But not to mention that there are things about the bigness. One of the things I find fascinating historically is like Galileo was obviously. ostracized, cast off, you know, a complete pariah for, you know, theories that he had about the universe and about the bigness. 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, we are hilariously wrong about that. We are like ostracizing people, saying you're an idiot, you know, pushing them off, like they're on the fringes of science. That a hundred years from now, that person will be like the genius that, you know, predicted X, Y, or Z, whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, there, 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 going to 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, you're done. You know, you're at best ostracized, you know. And yeah, and it's hard to understand. It's hard to see, you know, again, we have that we have the helic of those societies now. So we can see. 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, looking at like the way like we're being manipulated by information warfare. And, you know, the fact that there's like still.

like lots and lots of like brutal dictatorships. 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 going to 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. I mean, they knew, right? So I think a lot of the time,

like there are a lot of people who know how bad things are, but there's some forces that are keeping it upheld. So, yeah, I think about this kind of thing all the time. It's like, yeah. The ridiculousness of the human state. The one thing I will leave you with, and I know we're running up against the end of time, is one of your tweets, I think it was last year, which is sort of to this day, one of my favorite tweets and general thoughts, which is this idea that, like, if you went back in time

to a few days before you were conceived or born, 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 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 impact.

on the future and on where everything goes from here. Right. You don't have to worry about like, oh, no. Like, I just interrupted that conversation. Now those two people might not have gotten married. You don't 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 in ordinary life, the ripple effects that person causes. And the secondary kind of consequences, I think you have a totally different world if they lived or if they didn't live in most cases. You know? And certainly today, you know. So, yeah, I think it's it's empowering to be like, yeah, what we do matters. Yeah, it's empowering. And the last one is on the Fermi paradox.

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 boots void. Yes. And that's true. That's part of why the Farby Paradox is so cool because either way it's mind-blowing, right? There's no non-mind-blowing outcome here. And either way, it is a reminder that, like, fighting with each other

abhor dumb shit and human tribalism is so stupid. It's only when your 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 reason to not fight on Twitter with strangers. Oh, man. Well, thank you so much. By the way, I love your Twitter.

I appreciate it. It was, you know, it's been an absolute blast talking to you. I feel like I owe you money for how much I learned from this conversation. And I also feel like I'm going to be kind of. mad at you when I think about the boots void later tonight. So I appreciate it so much. Look forward to getting together when you're out in New York. And thanks so much for joining, man. 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 high at t rw iH.com. Leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to

help us grow the reach of this podcast. Until next time, we will see you soon. want you in that same or predicament misery level company think on it pray on it sip a cup of tea never let the world we go get in the borders and I'm a too