Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #55 - Tim Urban of Wait But Why

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Tim Urban cofounded the blog Wait But Why with Andrew Finn in 2013.His posts about Artificial Intelligence, Elon Musk, and the Fermi Paradox have been read millions of times.We discussed Tim's research strategy, the purpose of Wait But Why, and his thoughts on technologies including cryptocurrencies, A.I., and AR/VR.

Hey, happy New Year, everyone. This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Our first episode of 2018 is with Tim Urban. Tim co-founded the blog Wait But Why with Andrew Finn in 2013. He's become well known for his long-form explainer post about things like AI, Elon Musk, and the Fermi Paradox. So I met up with Tim in New York to talk about his research strategy, the purpose of Wayput why, and his thoughts on technologies including cryptocurrency, AI, and VR. All right, here we go. Is the purpose of wait but why to start kind of informing people to get them to care before it's too late? Or what is your intent with the whole, like all the content you're making?

The purpose in general is for me to do something I'm having fun at doing. I spent nine years after college doing something that was kind of objectively a cool thing, but I was not doing what I wanted to be doing. So honestly, I was like, I want to be doing, I want to be excited to wake up. I want to be excited to do my work. I want to feel like I'm playing when I'm doing my work. And this fits a lot of things for me. I'm very curious.

So I get to be a constant learner. I like having great conversations with interesting people and wait but wise connecting me to all kinds of great conversations. I love creating, like just artistically creating. So a post is a piece of art in a way. And it allows me to kind of just, yeah, continually stay in excitable. mode because I can switch topics again and again and again. And I'm just always very, I feel like I'm in the honeymoon phase with the job all the time because I switch topics and it's a whole new

planet for me. So I love that. And if I didn't like it, I don't think I'm a good enough person to do it out of obligation for, you know, I think this is going to help. Like, I like I think I would. But I think I'm more the kind of person that might throw money at something good. I'm not sure I would dedicate my life to something where I was just, I felt like it wasn't my calling. It wasn't something I really was passionate about. It wasn't something I had fun doing. So, um, that said, as Wait But Why has gotten more popular as I've kind of, uh, you know, begun to dive into a lot more kind of intense, deep topics. I started to appreciate, uh, the impact that a, that a viral blog post can have. Um, I appreciate it when times like when I go to, you know, I've spoken at a bunch

of colleges and I was at a place like MIT. and afterwards a couple of students came up and they said they're going to work in one of them is working in SpaceX and one of them is going to work in AI next year both because of my post and I was like you know so I was like right there these two were probably smarter than me both of them they're 18 and like if they both go work that's like 120 years of human effort going towards like really good important things and maybe they instead would have gone into finance or something else so to me I was like that's really awesome and and if that's you know, two of, I don't know, however many, that to me is a massive impact.

If I can convince really smart people to turn their attention or their money or their time towards important things, I think that that's about as big an impact as I could have as a human because me going into it myself, that's one person. Plus, honestly, these MIT dudes are probably more capable than I am. So I think, I think, you know, yeah, and just kind of, since it is a battle for kind of awareness right now. Awareness of the story that we're a part of. This human colossus story is crazy. We woke up inside of a thriller movie.

And, you know, I use this analogy. So if human history is a thousand centuries, about, 100,000 years. Okay. Picture every page of a, there's a 500-page book telling the story. And every page is two centuries, okay? If you're an alien, again, and you pick up this book and you're trying to understand what human history is like, so the first 450 pages, okay, the first 90,000 years, gets us to, it's just hunter-gatherers, that's it, migrations and hunter-gatherers and very, very slight

biological changes. You are bored as an alien reading that book. Page 450 of the Agriculture Revolution. And you have cities and you have the first, you know, kind of wide-scale cooperation. This colossus takes a huge leap forward, right? Things start to get a little interesting. That's just the last 50 pages of the book. And things do develop in a kind of interesting, cool way.

Page 490, you have Jesus. You have AD starts at 10 pages ago, okay? And you have, you know, Islam starts at page 493, and around page 497. You have imperialism. rolling, then you have the Enlightenment, the next page. And right at the beginning of page 500, the very last page, you have the Industrial Revolution, and you have the entire kind of, the Colossus kind of like goes on steroids. The colossus grows up very quickly and becomes far more powerful. The population balloons from less than a billion to seven billion on page 500 alone.

We go from every other page before page 500, you know, transportation meant walking, running sailboats. Page 500, we're going to the space station. We're flying around planes and cars. Communication on page 499 and earlier meant, you know, talking to people and writing letters with your hand. Page 500, we have FaceTime. We have, you know, internet. So if you're the alien reading this book, suddenly you're on page 500 and you're like, and you just can't believe what you're reading and you're so riveted. You're saying, oh my God, this is the story. This is what this has all been leading to. What's about to happen? You turn the page to 501 and you're just like what is good, what, something's about to, big's about to happen here. We, we all were born

right then. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. So, uh, I think that part of what I can do is, in the only reason I'm so aware of this right now is because I write about it. I think I have my job is to think about this. Okay. And so I think that part of what I can do is just take humans that are every bit as smart as I am and everybody is curious, but it's not their job to think about this stuff and kind of shake them and say, hey, like, we're about to turn to page 501. It's either going to be the coolest story for humans or it's the end. This is the, that is a, it is a 5001 page book. And that's it. Or this is the beginning of like the new paradigm. We have a new BC AD situation. We have a BC, which is like before something that is on page 501 when we all became immortal and we,

and all the suffering stopped and whatever that is. And the BC, this will be the real BC, much more important than any religious thing. It'll be the thing before humans came into their own. That's really exciting or it'll be the end and that'll be there'll be no more book. So this is the barrier in the Fermi post, right? It has to be right? I mean, and the thing is the problem is, we're wired to think about, we're wired for a world when nothing changed ever. So when someone says, this is going to be the future. Everything's going to be different. It's wise to be naive. It's it to feel that that's naive. It's kind of like the snake oil alarm. It feels naive and it should feel naive because it used to be naive.

Today, it actually is, all you do is look, just compare. Just, just, there's no salesman needed here. Just look at the facts of page 500 versus 499 in every page before it. This is clearly not like every other time. So, yeah, I think there's a, I find it exciting. I'm very happy. I mean, that's always, so people, like, the interest, and startups and technology kind of ebbs and flows, it seems. And now for better or worse,

it seems to be like people are pushing tech away, like in big quotes because they think of tech as like just Facebook. But in reality, it's so, so, so much more. And whenever, when someone's like down on this stuff and they're like, I don't need an app to like walk my dog or something, I'm like, change your point of view and look at this other stuff. And it's crazy. There's so much going on. Tech is a monster God that is on the horizon running towards us right now. And when the God gets here, it's either going to be a really good, benevolent, amazing God, or a really bad God depending on what we do right now.

So we should go into tech. You should go spend your career in tech. Literally, the people in tech right now are the people who are creating that God and deciding what that God's going to be like when it gets here. And so, yes, you might object to the lifestyle that some of us have, that many of us have taken on due to early tech kind of, sure, different topic than saying technology in general. You know, I want to, it's like, no, no, no.

If you care about people, if you care about your grandchildren, you should be focusing on this too. Yeah. And especially wary that the minds in tech right now, as good people as they may be, they're worried about, they're humans, they're primates. And what the primate wants is to succeed in its own life. So they are worried about glory and trying to succeed. And when everyone in it is doing that, you have this monster being developed in a way that doesn't have a larger kind of thought process here.

It's just being developed to develop it. That's really, really scary. So is there like a canon of literature around that specific topic or is this kind of a new idea? Like developing something that, I mean, I guess you could think about it as a religion, basically. Like, how do we get past our short-term monkey mind to care about more people when we're developing technology? I think, you know, I think as humans, look, the thing that when you want to really make a change, you have to, you don't try to change humans fundamentally. That's not easy. What you try to do is you try to build some kind of structure or system that will naturally,

incentivize shitty selfish humans to do the right thing. This is the Elon Musk formula and many others. And so in this case, the thing that drives humans more than anything, more than absolutely anything, is culture and because we deeply want to be accepted by our culture and whatever society we're in, we want to be cool in it. Whatever society says these are the cool kinds of people, everyone will put all their energy to try to be like that. Whatever, you know, the people around us, whatever will make us fit in and stand out and be admired and be attracted to the opposite sex and, and all of this,

if society decided that money was unattractive and that, you know, working with your hands and living on as little as possible really made you awesome. And that's what all the movie characters suddenly were doing. And that's what, again, the opposite sex really started to like. No one's in finance anymore. We'd all be working out and trying to get out in construction fields and be really good. Money is only a big deal to us because that's currently what society has just told us matters. Because it's a remnant of a world where resources were so scarce. Now that's not, resources aren't scarce anymore, but the values have stuck around.

The value of let's all obsess over resources is still here. So now you have, you know, rich people obsessing their whole life over getting richer. So if you want people to obsess over AI safety, right now, AI development's a big thing because development, you know, entrepreneurship is getting rich, getting successful is what we value. If suddenly it became extremely cool in society to be a philosopher thinking about the, or someone in tech obsessed with, with AI safety. And if we, if we, if I think the way this could happen is if people were. aware enough of this page 500 situation, suddenly there'd be all this fear around it, right? And all of this excitement, but all this fear. And if someone could have a breakthrough, not in development, development people would kind

of almost look at kind of suspiciously, like just, you know, are you, okay, that's fine. But if someone comes up with a big, a big breakthrough in AI safety, and they became kind of Nobel Prize, front page of Time magazine, you know, they were interviewed everywhere. And they were the biggest celebrity because we were all scared and they, oh my God, this person might save us. Kind of like, you know, the people thought, you know, the Manhattan Project might save us back then. Or anytime there's, you know, fear in humans, that takes over everything. And if you can then if you can kind of assuage that fear somehow.

So I think that if you really wanted this to happen, I think that you need, I mean, someone like, you know, Elon Musk, who's really prominent but also really concerned with AI safety, that helps. I think many people like me trying to. make these points helps, but again, it's not telling people, you should want safety to be a good person. It's saying, this is the big challenge of our time. This is the great decision moment we're about to be at. This is the great filter or not. And who's going to be the hero that can figure this out? This is the great problem. This is it. If the development's happening automatically,

it's like a wave coming, a tsunami coming towards us. Like, who wants to be the hero? Who wants to be the person that saved all of us who, you know, everything in the world will be named after them. They'll be basically a God in the future world if they came up with a solution. If we can kind of, that will happen if people understand the reality. And if people, if that happens, then you'll see all kinds of people all thinking about it and forming clubs. And it'll be the coolest thing to be going into. It'll be the most noble thing you can go into and the raddest, you know, the smartest people. It's like, oh, you're really smart.

You should go into that then. You know, cancer research now might be that, you know, something like that. Totally. And so when you were a kid, who was the person who you're like, man, that person is so cool. Like if I could just be like them, then I'll have made it. Emile Walner basically asked us question. Like, were there bloggers or writers that you looked up to as communicators? I don't think as a kid writing was on my radar as much.

As a kid, I think I wanted to be like, I wanted to compose music in a way. I wanted to be like Andrew Lloyd Weber or like Billy Joel or like the Beatles. I think that when I was like 11 would have done it. At some point I wanted to be the president. I had like a little egoy stretch there. Then that disappeared by. I actually became the class president. And that when I was like done.

I'm not out of this. In like middle school? High school. Oh, okay. I was 18 and I was like, I'm not going to do more of this. This was never campaigning again. And also being a class president is a useless job. You're not really doing anything.

you're raising small amounts of money for one thing or two things that are already going to be funded somehow anyway. And that's actually, I think, a microcosm of a lot of real politicians' lives. Not that politicians as a unit don't together have a lot of power, but each trying to be a senator for ever. I mean, I feel like I can do more, actually, in a lot of ways and have a lot more fun. So that disappeared. And then I was back in creative lane where I wanted to either music or writing, you know, one of those. and when I first started to think about blogging, actually was blogging on the side

for like six years before I started away, but why. I didn't look necessarily to, well, early on Bill Simmons, you know, in college, I was one of, in college right when he was at his peak popularity, big sports fan, Boston, so I was, you know, a big Bill Simmons reader. And I wouldn't say I necessarily wanted to mimic his specific style, but it was his kind of personality. integrity, just the fact that he would go on and just be himself and be colloquial and be kind of like fun, like the way he would write an email to his friends is how he would write an article.

That resonated with me. That seemed very obvious. I was like that that is clearly the way to go if I ever were a writer. And when I started my blog, it was just, it wasn't even a question. I wasn't going to try to be a journalist or have any kind of formula. I was going to go and just try to be a fun writer. Well, that just came with the internet too. It did. Exactly. So it was, he was one of the first really famous ones. But, but so, and then I looked at, you know, other successful bloggers who I respected Ali Brash at hyperbole and a half and Randall Monroe and Jason Kotke

and these certain blogs that I thought were great and the thing I really appreciated about them is they were all very unique kind of like molded to the person's personality who made them like they they were just clearly a reflection of the person the person wasn't trying to be a brand or anything different they were just kind of like being their best selves

you know in writing form or drawing form and so again it wasn't that I think I was very adamant about trying to actually not look at other styles because I was like I want to do my exact style because that's what I think is the key actually but it was the integrity of these styles that I saw other people use and I think it really kind of stuck with me as it made it very clear that like I'm going to double down on my own style versus trying to fit into any other kind of form yeah totally and like integral I haven't read your old block is it still up the your old stuff it is somewhere it's called underneath the turban. Okay. It is, uh, it's very few people have read it. It's, uh, it was just me, it was much more classic blog style stuff. I would write about my day.

I'd rant about something. I'd write a list of things I didn't understand in the world. So was it, uh, as thoroughly researched as, okay. So there was one, another Twitter question. Uh, Anish Gehry asks, um, basically, uh, what styles and techniques do you use to learn things quickly enough to, I think you've talked about it, like getting from basically to like level five, an ability to communicate, you know, like, this is AI, this is why it's interesting, this is why you should care. What do you use to go from like reading AI on Wikipedia to writing, you know, a 10,000

or what is it like 30,000 word post about it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you do to get? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the internet is a real godsend to a curious person or to a blogger trying to do. Or a procrastinator. Or do a procrastinator to a lot of things. Yeah.

But if you can consider like 1 through 10 knowledge on something, 10 is like, you know, the world's leading expert. You know, PhDs get you to like maybe a seven or an eight. My goal is I'm starting a two or three as a layman. You know, if I'm really curious, layman I'll be to three because I've already known. And I want to give myself up to like you said, a five, maybe a six.

Becoming an eight would take years. I would have to focus in on one topic only. I'd rather become a six on 50 topic. than an eight on three, you know, or 10 on one. So that's me, not everyone. Some people, the thing they love is being a nine or a ten of knowledge. That's just, I don't, that doesn't excite me that much. It would be great.

It's just, it's the lesser of excitement. So, and then my goal as a blogger is to, after I've gotten to level six to then package everything I just learned and the road I just went down, I basically look at the road I went down and said if I could do this road again, how could I do it efficiently now? how can I and how can I package this in a way that doesn't just take someone down this road efficiently and thoroughly to get them to where I am, but does it in a way more fun way than I just had. Let's have, I want the reader to have a lot more fun. More pictures. Yeah, a lot more pictures, more kind of storytelling and, uh, and just funnier and just more enjoyable, uh, than what I just did. So, um, it's, it's, it's that. I just went down a road. Now let me take this road and make it awesome. And that's my job. And I go on a new road. and then I'd know, whatever. So I think the question is about how do I go down my road to get for myself from that two to a six?

And the, um, so I start with Wikipedia or general kind of Googling. I, what I'll do is I'll Google the question I have. So if I want to understand cryonics, if I, you know, whatever it is, I'll Google what is cryonics? Cryonics versus cryogenics, because I don't remember me. I'll have heard those terms. and I'll Google cryonics scam

and I'll Google does cryonics work and I'll Google I've heard Peter Thiel said something so I'll say Peter Thiel Cryonix and I'll Google Alcor Crionics because I heard there was a company called Alcor and I'll Google how many cryonics

companies are there, cost of cryonics I'll Google all these each in a different tab then in each tab I'll basically without even looking I'll just open every link you know eight links on each tab so I'll end up like 70 or 80 links Okay. And, you know, among those are, you know, all the, you know, four different Wikipedia articles, and then a bunch of just articles written, you know, secondary source kind of articles, just, you know, written in Gizmodo and other places like that.

So none of those alone is like an awesome source. Yeah. It's that on the whole, the group of those articles will give me, will give me a foundational understanding. Wikipedia is good for a foundational understanding. it'll give me a foundational understanding and it'll also tell me what the big opinions are. I'll realize where the big disagreements are where the kind of uncertainties are and it just kind of like orientes me in general and I'm like okay I now understand what I need to start learning even

and so are you writing notes to yourself at this point? Are you trying to communicate this to, you know, like your girlfriend or your friends so you actually know that you're understanding it instead of just reading words? I have a big document open that I'm pulling quotes that's really interesting or fact or stat or an opinion and then when I see a counter opinion I'll find that opinion I'll put it underneath it into the document so they're next to each other and then I have a lot of thoughts on my own as I'm going I'm suddenly bursting with thoughts and I'm bursting with metaphors I'm saying

this is a lot like you know or I'll say cryonics is kind of like um long-term patient care. Or it's like pausing you biologically. It's not that, and I'll just write it down, right? And I'll write down all my thoughts as I go, because a lot of the best ideas just kind of come out as you're researching. And then, depending on the topic, first of all, sometimes it's a very different process.

If I'm thinking about procrastination and why you procrastinate, but thinking about why we care what other people think of us or why we get into so many bad marriages, people, I'm much more likely going to be thinking. where I'm just going to be pacing around thinking, maybe having some conversations with friends and writing stuff down. There's less research. So I'm specifically talking about one kind of post I do right now,

which is a heavy research post. I need to kind of an explainer post, right? And so at that point, I have a foundation, but there's a lot more I need to learn. I'll feel very insecure about my knowledge in many different of these areas. And I'll just have certain things I don't understand at all. So I'll have to go deeper. I won't understand why freezing your cells is,

Not good, but vitrifying it. So I'll want to dig deeply into that. So I'll just first look at why water expands when it freezes. And I'll go read about that for a half hour. And then I'll look at vitrification. I'll realize, oh, vitrify, we vitrify embryos and organs. So how does that work? What actually goes on in the cell?

What goes on in the actual atoms? What's happening? Antifreeze. And I'll go into how antifreeze works in cars to understand what antifreeze is because there's an anti-free type solution. Is it the same solution? Is it different? Is it, you know, and I'll just start going down rabbit holes after rabbit holes.

Sometimes these become unproductive because I just get curious and I end up on YouTube. And like 12 hours later, I'm like watching, you know, like people in road rage, like fights and all kind of fuck. But but then I'll reel it in and I'll come back. And but there's just the point is there's a lot of different, depending on how broad you want to go. And I often want to go really broad. Then I'll go into the Alcor website because they have this great Q&A or this great FAQ. So I'll go and just read their whole FAQ. And then I'll go, but I know that they're one voice only and they have maybe an incentive.

So then I'll go read a competitor's FIQ and then I realize even all of that is still cryonics companies. Then I want to go read a bunch of, so then I'll start to understand what the best argument is for cryonics and I'll understand the science behind it.

And I'll have done a lot of my own thinking about how I want to frame how I can explain this or my own, I want to track my own thought process. I'll go from skeptical to kind of like super excited to then like a little less excited but a believer or something and I want to track that

because I assume a lot of readers are going to go through that. So I'm going to want to like talk. I like to talk about where my own heads at at the end of a post because I feel like I brought readers here. We can almost like as a group discuss even though I'm the only one in the room. But so then I want to go and do a hardcore session on the skeptics what they say. I want to go just Google things like cryonics scam. Cryonics like, you know, won't work.

Cryonics, bogus science, pseudoscience. I'll just Google these things and I'll read as many articles as I can. And it's not that I'm going to get to the bottom, especially since a lot of times there is no bottom right now. but what I will do is I'll have a sense of there's a difference between the skeptics are many and they're diverse in their viewpoints but there seems to be some big fatal flaws

and it seems like the cryonics people aren't acknowledging them and whatever or you look the other way and you say you know actually the skeptics don't seem to really understand what's going on here they kind of seem to have a knee-jerk reaction some of them even talk about freezing a body which is not even that's like the first thing you learn when you read is that's not what's happening in which case I think and I'll have a sense of I'm like you know the the cryonics people actually

are seeming like the more serious thinkers right here versus the skeptics or whatever it is but I want to understand that too yeah at the end of that I have this huge pile of thoughts and research and then I go on to the next phase which is you know outlining and then writing and then drawing and then revising but that's by the end of that I I know the shit out of the topic you know it's like, but when I'm really done, and especially since you then solidify it by outlining it and then writing it and then discussing it, you know, usually the next week, you solidify it with a, but by the time I'm done, I mean, again, I'm not a true expert. And then I, you ask me, you know, I don't know, I'm not going to advise a cry onx company on a new kind of technique to use. Nowhere and near that level. But what I can do is basically talk to any layman and answer basically any question they have. There's almost no question at the end of that where, I can't not just give you an answer, but I can explain like the science behind it, and I can explain the different, you know, the different, the contrarian views to the prevailing opinion. So, and this is just the internet.

This is just a pretty smart guy on the internet with a week. You're not calling people. You're not, you're just reading stuff. Now, sometimes I will. Like, for example, for this, I called my doctor friend who I knew would be skeptical because I know he, and I wanted to just hear why. And I wanted to kind of play devil's advocate to his skepticism with what I've learned and you kind of set up a mock argument

between a cryonist and a skeptic by me playing the cryonist. So I'll do that. For like the post I just did on Neurrelink on brain machine interfaces, that is so new and there's so many different opinions. And I had access in this case to a lot of great people. Right, you went there, right? I went to NeurLink, and I met with all the founders, and I met with many of them multiple times.

I talked to a bunch of other cryonics, I mean, BMI people too and some sci-fi people. So I find the sci-fi people are the ones who have the best handle on things like page 500, on things like this big picture. It's crazy. Yeah. Those people, those are the people that think really big picture and they know about all the different technologies versus a lot of times the people in an industry, they have their blinders on. And they're not that great at thinking about the really big picture a lot. Some of them are, but many times actually talking to a science, for example, I talked to Remez-Nam in this case,

science fiction guy about, you know, brain machine interfaces versus language. You know, is this the next paradigm? Is language? Is language this one big movement, this big kind of change, and now is brain machine interfaces like the next thing or is they're like going from, is writing kind of on that level. He's a perfect person. We had this great conversation about that because that's the kind of stuff that he thinks about versus the people at, I talked to the brain machine interfaces industry. They were kind of like, well, they just didn't, they had, they didn't have much of an answer. Well, I think that's actually what causes the rift between a lot of these people because some people are so deep in it.

they're engineers, they care about the practical day-to-day progress. And then there are these, like, writers, philosophers in the subject, and they both kind of think the other party is like, oh, they don't know what they're talking about. Or they're so, you know, a lot of times the people in it are so annoyed by the idiots who basically lie about how quickly this is going to happen, the people who say, we're all going to be thinking to each other in three years. And they're so mad about that, that someone actually way closer to them, but being pretty optimistic, Yeah. They just group them all together.

They say, oh, no, but actually, you know, they reject any kind of, they're so dug in now on their stance that this is going to take a long time that they can actually go too far with that too. But anyway, so I, so for cryonics, for example, I didn't talk to anyone else other than my doctor friend. Everything I needed was on the internet. AI, I didn't talk to a soul. I read three books, probably 200 articles, including, you know, once you get to, once you understand stuff, well, then you want to get to, some really hardcore science. You get to the papers, and I started reading all these mindless,

boring papers. I read a bunch of philosophy, you know, papers on this stuff. So I just got deep in, but I just read for like a, maybe two weeks. Which isn't that much.

It's not that much. It's not that much. I mean, two weeks, 80 hours of, um, of reading and taking stuff out. Like, you can get the,

it's not like, you know, you can get the pretty big picture, especially if it's an industry that we're not even sure yet as a species. We're arguing about it. You can understand everyone's viewpoints

pretty well. Yeah. And one good book, like Super Intelligence, in the case of AI, can give you a really, really great foundation right there. And then you can just kind of tack on information to that foundation or poke holes in that foundation and then you end up with a solid understanding. How often do you let a post go where you're doing the research and you just can't get a handle on it or you feel like the research isn't even there and you have to stop?

I don't think I've ever really done that. I think I'll often like brainstorm a new post and then stop. Usually that's because I just get, I suddenly, that's this icky, a daunting thing that I'm, because they're all daunting, but when I'm looking at this one particular daunting topic, suddenly every other topic sounds better. The grass is greener phenomenon. If I'm writing about life and I'm just like, oh, I have to come up my own philosophy on this. And I'm just like, oh, imagine just researching something in science, how easy that would be.

When I'm, you know, just buried in, you know, really thick research trying to understand something. I said, imagine if I could just sit back and think. about, you know, how we think, like, you know, or if I'm trying to be funny, you know, when I'm doing either of those, it sounds so easy to just try to do a funny kind of observational comedy post. And if I'm doing one of those, I'm like, oh, the other ones I can just kind of be earnest. I have to like try to like be witty here and it's a nightmare. So I'm always switching for that reason early on, really early on. But I think when I dug into a research post, usually I only start those in the first place because I already know it's a good topic,

because I heard enough people talking about it and I'm curious enough about it. I know there's a lot to say. And whatever it is, it's going to be worth explaining, whatever I can find out. So if I find this, I'm researching that actually, like, there's not really any good answers to this. That's interesting in its own. To be able to say, you know what, like, don't feel bad about not knowing because no one knows what this is. But here's what we do know. You know, that's fine.

I'm fine to do that. So usually when I pick the topic, I'm just, I'm going to explain what is out there, whatever that is and that's fine. And do you ever feel that you ought to do kind of like an anti-skeptic post? You know, if you fall into a YouTube rabbit hole, you can quickly, come across, you know, flat earth or any of like the sort of related topics. Have you ever felt drawn to like doing a, you know, a disproving of that or any particular crazy conspiracy theory? I'm writing a post now that is kind of taking aim at political dogma. Okay. And just, you know,

on all sides and talking about how all of these stats that, you know, one political side takes is gospel. I mean, they're almost always wrong because in an echo chamber environment, there's no kind of like white blood cells to kill the virus. And so it just explained, it just, because dissent isn't okay over there. You know, it's not, not only is it not valued, it's very much frowned upon. So everyone's agreeing, everyone's confirming, and you have these bad stats to live on. And so I'm trying to take a bunch of those in this case and show that they're not true and show why we got there and how we. think is, you know, and so that's one example. I've done, you know, a few other times I've kind of tried to take a contrarian view on something that I really believe. But most of the time,

especially with kind of like a researching topic, I find that the contrarian, to be a contrarian, you have to have conviction, you have to have strong opinion that this is wrong. And for me, if I get conviction, it's going to be because I stole it from the stuff I read. I'm only getting conviction from what I'm reading. So all I'm really doing in that case is regurgitating someone else's contrarian argument. And I'd rather just credit them and kind of present both sides and let the reader make a decision. So people are like, what's your stance on AI? I'm like, well, here's this person stance and here's this person.

This one seems a little more credible to me, but who knows, versus me being like, this is right. I'm like, well, but like, on the other hand, if I'm talking about we shouldn't be so dogmatic, like, that's deep in me. I believe that. And I think it's very much like pervasive how dogmatic we are and it needs to be said. So there's certain moments like that that I can do that. But if it's like I'm disproving flat earth, I mean, I could do that. But the point is there is also like, what's that doing?

We're going to pick on the 0.001% of crazies. We think this like so we can all together like it's fun. I agree that would be a kind of a fun thing to do. But it's not, it's what's the point? You know, it's just so we can all be like, yeah. Yeah. Like, great. No one who reads weight, but why thinks the earth is flat. Although I just was interviewed on a documentary about the flat earth. And apparently there's like 10,000 plus very serious flat Earthers in the U.S. And they're not like, a lot of them are really obsessed with the fact that they think it's science-based to why it's flat Earth. They have all these measurements. They've done experiments. They have these, you know, they have all this math and data showing it. And they, and they, and they, um, they, um, you know, and they seem to have always kind of found some way they can, like, create kind of a logic loophole that makes it seem true. But they, but I was asking, do they really believe it?

And they said, with all their heart, they are sure. And they're sure that, like, this is this crazy world that everyone is believing this. I think it's, like, the genetic other side of that, like, snake oil coin where you're like, oh, I know the secret. Like, I get this. And, like, knowing the secret is this weird, like, monkey sensation that makes us feel good and different. It is. We all have in us a susceptibility to conspiracy theory. It's a spectrum conspiracy. I think it goes from totally objective on one side to bias, confirmation bias, cherry picking, kind of lawyering our way to conclusions where we kind of already know the conclusion we find arguments, right? Then you can get down the spectrum further that ends at full schizophrenia, which is, Everything I see is part of this thing. Yeah.

You know, you can, your brain, your left brain is powerful, which is helpful in many ways. It finds a lot of patterns. That's incredibly ingenious in a lot of ways. But it also gets us into huge trouble because it's this great lawyer. It can find patterns in anything and create an art. If you want to believe something, your left brain will find the evidence to make you believe it. So before you get to full-blown schizophrenia, where suddenly there's this one story and everything you see is in it. And it's this, you get to this land in the middle, which is conspiracy land.

And, you know, we all laugh at something like, you know, all the people who think 9-11 was caused by the U.S. Or the moon landing didn't happen or flat earthers. We don't look at ourselves in the mirror. There's a lot of times we genuinely believe conspiracy. And we will, and you don't realize it, but then, you know, you're reading a bunch of news that is all catered to your time. And you don't realize that, like, you know, I read an article the other day about how the, when it comes to, like, Trump and Russia, the left is believing a lot of. crazy shit now there's just people out there who are just kind of making stuff up at this point about these ties and there's smart people passing it around being like this is it he's going to this is

when he goes down they're being crazy they're being crazy because there's there's just no they're they want to believe something so badly and they're so in a bubble where everything is there's nothing no one's challenging bad ideas that we can get there any of us i'm sure it happens with me on this podcast just in terms of like people i invite it's like oh you fall in line with these things that i believe in, so therefore we should do a podcast together and keep it going. Selection, selection bias. How do you break that with your post? Like, I'm sure you fall into it. Well, I just said this. So I always am going to read a ton of skepticism about any opinion I have. What is that doing? Think about how we do this. Okay. The marketplace of ideas, the idea isn't that,

um, the idea is that it's the, it's specifically the clash of ideas that the dust settles and truth is left, right? The clash of ideas helps us see truth. Now think about a courtroom. A courtroom. A courtroom has one attorney that is full selection bias, cherry-picking, you know, confirmation bias of every kind, intentionally is their job of getting to one conclusion. There's no defense attorney that says, you know, the prosecution's made some good points. Actually, I think my client's good. No, their job is to be one-sided, right? But because you have both of them, you have the, they clash and the jury can maybe start to see, after watching them clash with the truth. So with cryondex, like I said, I'm going to read one side. I'm going to read the skeptics as much as I can.

By the time they're done clashing, it's not that I know for sure, just like the jury doesn't know for sure. I'm going to have a hunch. I'm going to start to feel like these people are the ones who are the ones who are much more fact-based here. These people have thought about this more. These people are talking in more reasonable words. They seem to be more humble and more whatever it is. And so if I'm reading now in the news, the news is hopeless to get an objective source. Don't even try.

If I try to be an objective guy, if I try to create a news source, it's going to be biased in some way of my own. So what I will do is I'll read the New York Times article and then I'll go right away and Google the same thing on National Review or I'll watch something on MSNBC and then I'll go try to find a clip on Fox News, preferably be the first pair, but, but, you know, New York Times people get mad at. They think it's biased or Fox or, you know, one of these. It's just, if you just treat it like one of the attorneys, it's fine. It's serving its role. The problem is when people treat it like the grand truth. like this objective truth.

So instead, but what I find is when I read, I've become through this post, and I'm not going to stop now, I read a ton of conservative media, along with my standard kind of, you know, left-wing media. And together, I just get a healthy degree of skepticism. It makes it very hard for me to feel very conviction, a lot of conviction about anything. Because if you only read one thing, you can say,

this is obviously true. And I'm saying, I read a really smart, good argument by a really smart person saying this wasn't true, and that this was overblown, and that this was a made-up stat, And so you end up feeling very humble, which doesn't feel good all the time, but it feels at least like honest. And I don't feel delusional. I don't feel like I'm in some bubble anymore.

So I think that's how we can do this is, you know, if you have guests on a podcast, get some people on that fundamentally disagree with you, not just on what's going to happen, but think differently. Totally. You know, and just examine their brain. Put it out in the table and examine the way they think. Either you'll still disagree with the way they think, but you'll understand them better afterwards, which can then lead you to be able to convince, you know, change minds better if you understand.

Or they'll poke some hole in your logic or humble you out a little bit in a way that will make you, it'll hurt at the time and it'll make you a better thinker in the long run, or they'll literally point out a way you're wrong. Or you'll do something likewise to them, but for your listeners, they'll benefit a ton from that. I love, you know, Intelligence Squared is this debate podcast. I'd much rather learn something in the form of a debate than in the form of one person

because now you just, it's like a courtroom to me. Yeah. And a jury, you know, I get to be a jury with both sides. Well, that's why I've fallen into the longer form podcast because you really learn how someone thinks instead of their edited, like, sound clip version. Exactly. So one of like the hotly debated and contested topics is cryptocurrency right now. Julian asked on Twitter, do you have thoughts or strong opinions?

Definitely no strong opinions. I have read a little bit. I get more requests for this topic than I've gotten about anything in the last three months by far. Yeah, it's gone crazy. And I do think it's a good way but wide topic. I don't right now have the time at this moment. But I do want to dive in because it's exactly the kind of topic I like, which is this is important. This is extremely complex and it's incredibly hard to understand from an 800.

word article, which is what everyone writes. Yep. But it's not actually that hard to understand in a 10,000 word article. So to me, it's like, it's not that this is that complicated. It's not that you need to be super smart.

It's just it needs to be really thoroughly explained. No one's doing that very well. And this is important than AI was, and I think cryonics and brain machine interfaces and many other things I've taken on. So from what I've read, the best metaphor that pops into my head for what this seems like, and I think that all change as I research more, is it seems like it's 1988 and there's not one internet, but there's many different interwebs, competitor interwebs kind of trying to start.

And maybe none of them will take hold and the whole thing will end up not existing, or there'll be many of them or multiple, or there'll be one that ends up becoming this giant thing like the internet. And I think the people buying cryptocurrency right now is kind of like buying domain names on various ones of these and hoping that they take off. So maybe there's an interweb would not even any websites on it yet. But there's domain names you can buy and you're taking a lottery ticket that maybe this is going to become the internet and then I'll have this super value.

valuable currency. But I also think that's probably like explaining like magnets is like having a rubber band where it's like, yes, it tells you what the basic deal is, but it's actually fundamentally different than what's really happening. So I think when I research more, I will probably reject my own metaphor as maybe a first starting point, but then it needs to be explained further why this is not actually like that. Because it is, but I think it's a really cool concept. I think that we right now assume that the only way to do this.

things is centralized systems, governments, centralized governments, these trusted authority units that we can all kind of hang on to for safety and for like organization. And, you know, governments, we invented that, you know, countries are invented, you know, pretty recently, page 497, we started having countries, basically. So, of course, there'll be other paradigms. Big things are going to change. And, you know, I'm sure that the way that mining happens right now and things like this is going to look very primitive, that will come up with different ways,

especially when you have other kind of interfaces. You have brain machine interfaces, for example. We may be able to come up with very, you know, just the way that, you know, a eye scanner fingerprints way faster than like a password. It's way more. We might come up with things that are even cooler ways to kind of verify transactions and everything like that and records. But I'm very intrigued.

And I think it is definitely worth understanding and starting to think about, I think, anyone investing right now, you know, I think has to be aware that, like, you know, it could be amazing, but like very good chance that like any one of these currencies just becomes nothing. And I think that people know that. So, but I think it's just so cool. It's fascinating. And I think, I think understanding it starts with understanding kind of the blockchain concept. And I think that starts with understanding encryption. And I think that starts with understanding encryption. And just literally how the encryption works and you know the public key and the private key And when I when I dug into that a little I started to like it started to make sense And I started to say I see because otherwise people They hear about this like mythical ledger on computers and they just tune out because they think I know what does that mean

Once you get what it means it starts to be kind of delicious So I think that that's it's a great topic Or they think it's just this fake thing that you're buying into only because it's rising and so you're going to make money that way Or they one-dimensionalize it as this is just like a different kind of currency, but it's not. The currency itself is one of many kinds of things that can happen in a decentralized system.

So, yeah, I have a two-week reading stretch ahead of me there, and I'll come out of that, and I'll have a way better answer for you. Okay, cool, man. So I just want to wrap up with one more question from Facebook. So Casey Stanton asked, you gave an awesome talk about AI

in Carmel, it sounds like in May, and what incredibly complex technology that's coming needs our attention, what's something that all of us should know or think about. Yeah. There's a lot. There's a lot right now. I mean, it's exciting. It's overwhelming. So I think, I'm going to name a few. Okay. I think, I mean, crypto is one of one thing to think about. Things that might be as big a deal as the internet in 10 years is kind of how I'm about it, or way bigger. I think, so you know, there's this hype kind of trajectory that goes big, big, you know,

something first starts to actually work as a technology, massive hype, then it's not really ready for prime time yet, though, and everyone just suddenly becomes like, oh, everyone, everyone's over that. It's never going to work. Right. And then it creeps back in as a actual existing thing. So we've had AI in a few different of these bumps. I think VR AR is one of these.

There was a big stretch a couple years ago. You know, Oculus is new and the Vive and, you know, you people are doing these cool demos and, you know, you have first AR kind of big explosion with Pokemon Go and you have the Google Cardboard, you know, and you have Samsung gear and all this stuff, right? And I think it was a huge hype, and now you don't hear much about it right now.

It's in a dead period because it was extremely, the only way to do it was these really the only way to do it well was these really expensive you had to get a fancy computer and a fancy thing they were hard to even get they were backlogged the headsets and you have to be tethered to your computer you had to put stuff on the walls I did all this so I know

and then you got in them and sometimes they made you nauseous there were some programs they were unbelievable and I was just blown away that this is 1.0 this is MS DOS and it's so good already but a lot of them weren't that good a lot of them made you nauseous the headset it's exhausting to have it on for a long time it's heavy take it off you're sweating and now all i'm thinking the whole time is people in 10 years are gonna look at it i'm gonna go to my closet and pull up my 5.1.0 they're gonna say oh my god look how big this is they're gonna put

it on and be like oh my god you were this and it's gonna seem like a you know the cell phone in a briefcase yeah so um but i've done this a lot more than most because i was i'm gonna write a post on it i went to the oculus conference i've tried all of the basically all of the the programs. And I was just floored by how awesome. This is VR. So this isn't getting into AR, which is probably the even bigger concept. You know, the magic leap stuff and just things where you're just, whether it's through a headset or glasses or eventually contact lenses or whatever, you actually can, you know, you just add stuff onto your world. Your whole computer interface is just floating there in front of you and whatever it is. You know, a lot of things we can't even imagine. So,

I think that those, I think that the implications for gaming and entertainment, but also for, you know, just kind of experiences for for communication, for training, for, you know, building empathy and for, you know, the classroom of third graders in the U, in Missouri going on a fun field trip to the moon with a classroom of third graders in Saudi Arabia and coming back in like, This is good for empathy. This is good for the world, right? You know, be able to sit around with your grandmother, even though she died 40 years ago and sit there at the table. Like, she's there, and you're just watching her look at you and laugh and you're having a conversation that you're watching the conversation that took place. So this is, I can go on many, many examples, but I was in that headset

and I also learned enough about, like, what's coming with the technology. The headsets are going to get very much smaller. They're going to stop needing to be tethered to something and needing to have things on the wall. You're going to have cameras on the actual headset. They're going to see the walls. And it's just going to get better and better and better. And batteries are going to get better. And the computers are going to get better.

So we're going to end up, I think, in 10 years of a billion people using VR. A billion. Like it's going to be the new kind of smartphone or cell phone. And, you know, young entrepreneurs who want to get into, you know, something that's new. You know, this is the kind of start a VR company when it's not being talked about. Start it, start developing, start making. really good things, you know, or AR, whatever it is. And when the headsets are ready and when suddenly, you know, there's a killer kind of headset that's in everyone's pocket and it ends up,

you know, all over the world, you're going to be one of the, you know, you're going to, you know, you'll be in a position to be Google, you know, there's the Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg of the VR world. Like, they don't, they don't exist yet. Well, they probably exist, but yeah. Yeah. They're not, they're not famous yet, unless, you know, I mean, I know that Mark Zuckerberg also wants to be the Mark Zuckerberg of the, but there's going to be new, you know, giants and they're not there yet. So that's one. Another one I would just say quickly is you know genetic stuff, CRISPR and all that.

I mean it cost I think it was almost $2 billion. Maybe it was almost $3 billion like 20 years ago to sequence the human genome. And today it's like 50 bucks. Okay. Things are about to get really crazy. I mean we I think that your grandkids are going to be born. Your grandkids are going to say to you you just had a baby and

hoped it was a good baby. It's going to seem crazy. It's going to seem so old school. It's going to be just, you know, and only the crazy hippies are going to be like, we just have a natural baby. It's a natural world. And people are going to hate them, like anti-baxos. Like you're a horrible parent. You know, you should never do it. So, and all the implications of this. Enhancing ourselves, creating, you know, just getting rid of disease, creating smarter people. I mean, you can really go on and on and on there. You'll have you all that for people, like two couples decide to make a baby the four of them. Really kind of cool shit.

So if that really gets rolling, we're going to look back to the world when, you know, you just had normal people. Also, sorry, this side I have research, but like pregnancy has got, it's got to go. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Once we, once we have the, that you incubate the fetus, the embryo, and you, in, in, this perfect chamber that has all the mothers, you know, we got all the, you extract all the mother's hormones, all the mother's blood.

And so it's not like this, it has all the exact same. chemicals that would be going into it. But the perfect diet, it's monitored perfectly, and the mother gets to live her normal life, and then it doesn't have to... The fact that it would be like, wait, your grandmother gave birth like an animal?

Like, she was pregnant, and she gave birth out of her vagina like an animal. It's going to seem so primitive. And then, you know, so... Anyway, you can go on and on. I mean, I think brain machine interfaces says there's another huge one. I think we're all... No one is talking about

Mars right now. Give it five years. There's going to be humans on Mars in a decade. No one realizes this. Okay. You know, the amount of leaps for all of life on Earth that you can say are as big as going multi-planetary, there's like simple cell to complex cell, complex cell to multi-cell organism, multi-cell like animal to out of the ocean, you know, on land. Multi-planetary.

I mean, this is so big and it's happening in our lifetimes. It's so exciting. And it's going to be the new kind of moon decade. It's going to be the new ones. the 20s is the new 60s. So lots of exciting things. This is why people should probably go into some kind of tech. And the word tech is they should, they should move to California or other places. Maybe Austin has a scene Boulder, but they should get involved in the future because it's like we're inventing this new planet that we're all going to live on. And I would also say just don't be

intimidated to learn. Like similar to you. Just like go for it. It's so easy to just get, it's easy to get involved. And it's also easy to get scared. And I don't think people should be scared. Plus, a lot of people think they need to be great at math or coding. Totally. A lot of what we need are smart philosopher, smart, you know, people can make great metaphors, people who can, you know, talk about ethics, you know, something like that. It doesn't matter what you're good at. Like, you have a role to play in this.

I mean, being pretty good at two things means you're extraordinary at that one thing. Absolutely. And that's like... Exactly. Exactly. So, I mean, right, you can, you know, some people go for breadth and then you offer something different because you see a big picture that other people don't like the sci-fi authors. Or you get really into depth on one thing and then you really are... Whatever it is, like there's a role. There's definitely a role. Maybe your job is communicating what's happening to other people like me. So, yeah, I think people need to just get excited and scared at the same time, which is going to fire them up. All right, man. Thanks for coming in. Okay, thank you.

All right, thanks for listening. So as always, the video and transcript are at blog.wycombinator.com. And if you have a second, please subscribe and review the show. All right, see you next week.