EP 70: Tim Urban (Author, "Wait But Why") on Wokeness, AI Girlfriends and Humans Living to 150 Years Old

Tim Urban is the Author of the blog "Wait But Why" and has one of the most listened-to Ted talks of all time. His work covers a broad range of topics from why we procrastinate, to how much time we have left with our parents, to breaking down the US involvement in the Iraq war. In this episode, Logan and Tim dive into some of the ideas that Tim has written about, as well as newer topics like the role AI will play in social relationships and how genetic engineering could impact the human lifespan. (0:00) Intro (1:23) Welcome Tim Urban (5:11) Thousand-page book (18:40) Living to 150 Years Old (24:04) Looking back on eating meat (29:39) Changing expectations of success (36:01) Shortform vs longform writing (42:11) TikTok and different internets for different audiences (49:10) College is an eternity (55:39) North star for writing (1:03:03) Tim's favorite part besides publishing (1:17:55) Tribalism, wokeness, and politics (1:43:25) Awareness and Courage (1:52:01) Keeping identity small (1:57:16) Feeling different about old blog posts (2:03:55) AI Girlfriends (2:08:19) Talking Elon (2:15:54) Advice on picking a career (2:21:43) AI and will it kill humanity? (2:30:51) Signing up for Cryonics (2:34:25) Twitter Talk (2:38:15) Disagreeing with conventional wisdom Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-cartoon-avatars/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the 70th episode of the Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation I have with Tim Urban. Tim is a writer at the blog WaitButWhy.com, where he goes in on a bunch of interesting topics, including being invited by Elon Musk to write about both SpaceX and Tesla. Tim was also early to artificial intelligence, writing about the path that we were potentially on back in 2015. He's also done explainers on things more simple, like how much time we have left with our parents, and more complicated, like the conflict of the Iraq War. In this conversation, we discuss a number of different things, including who really wants to suppress free speech, artificial intelligence, and the likelihood of AI-related

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  best friends and girlfriends, as well as genetic engineering and increasing the human lifespan. A really fun, wide-ranging conversation with someone that I grew up reading and following, and it was a pleasure to finally be able to sit down with him and talk about all this stuff in person. Now, here's Tim. Tim, thanks for doing this. Thanks for having me. So, I want to talk about a bunch of different things, one of which, you wrote a book recently. It took you a little while. Which, I want to understand what writing a book for six and a half years actually entails. But, the way it opens up, and one of the things that I think you open up a lot of your talks and posts and the book itself,

• 1:26Logan Bartlett?

  is just how society's gotten weird. And, we're at a point of exponential growth, where what 50 years ago looks very different like than, you know, 100 years ago versus 200 years ago and all that. And, it's a weird thing to internalize, right? Because everything looks very similar to us every day as we go about it. So... Do you, at what point do you sort of feel like that kicked off? That is it going back to like a steam engine, basically, and the industrial revolution? And ever since then, we've been on this exponential curve of change? Or how do you sort of think about when this started?

• 2:09Logan Bartlett?

  And, and what the implications are for us as a society as it keeps going and getting weirder and weirder?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's so interesting to like, think about, because it's like, there's this great story that's better than any fiction story that we're living in. And, you know, historians, like, their job is to try to, but we don't know the story. Come out, you know, we, we, we start off just not knowing what happened. And then the historians like Kodo try to piece the puzzle together and archaeologists and whatever to, so it's like, it's just so interesting. It's like, we're trying to figure out our own story.

• 2:44Logan Bartlett?

  As it's going on.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46Logan Bartlett?

  And, and we stitch together some narrative that like, ultimately might not hold true over some period of time.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  No, and it changes and we're wrong about a lot of things. And then also, like, what happened is, is also very relevant to what's happening, because it's the same species creating what happened and what happened. So, so that, so the technology changes, the knowledge changes. But the people and all the human nature are the same. And it's amazing when you read about, you know, the Assyrian Empire in 700 B.C. Or, you know, the Greeks or the Romans or the Mongols. And it's just like, there's so much of, just like, yep, that looks like this, you know? The Nazis and it's, it's just, it's the same primates doing all of these things.

• 3:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  And so if one of the questions we have about the future is what are the primates going to do now? Where are we headed? It's obviously very useful to, to, it's almost like a wisdom cheat to get to, instead of just experience what you experience in your own lifetime. If there's like a couple of wisdom cheats, you can, you can study what happened and like, learn those lessons, even though you didn't get to live through them, learn other people's lessons collectively together. So it's like, there can be this like, two dimensional cheating. It's like, we can collectively share our own life experience and collectively explore the past and discuss it. So that like, as a collective, we can be as wise as possible, like way above our, our, our actual pay grade for wisdom. But anyway, to your question, like, I see two.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And again, this is, I'm no historian. This is based on me listening to a bunch of history podcasts and reading a bunch of history books because I'm curious. There seems to be, get brought up again and again and again, two like major inflection points. And like, one is, you could always, you could go all the way back, you know, cognitive revolution. We start having like language. We can, you know, that's when the first humans start moving away from other primates, but then That was long and over a very extended period of time. And it went, it was just, so I have this diagram I use, this thousand page book. If human, if human history is a thousand, if we've been around for a thousand page book,

• 5:01Speaker 01

  950 of those pages, that's 95% of the book is just hunter gatherers. That's it. So again, maybe there's a cognitive revolution, but not, it doesn't, it's not enough alone to make the change. It basically, it was like, there was kind of a, there was a dormant massive thing that was like, that could happen. The potential had, had, had woken up, but it had, it couldn't, it didn't come together for a long time. I mean, think how long, we think of Jesus ago and the, and the Romans. I mean, 2,000 years. We're talking like

• 5:36Speaker 01

  200,000 years, 2,000 centuries is how long the, we were just sitting around hunting and gathering. What page in the book is Jesus? Jesus is like page 993. 993. AD is the epilogue of the book. It's like epilogue, AD, the last eight pages. The, the people point to the agricultural revolution. Right. Which was about, that was, so let's see, that was about maybe 10, 12,000 years ago. So that is about page 950, let's say, maybe even 960. So 950, 960.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  You have people. The reason this was an inflection point in progress is, yes, there's a different way to get food, but it was hurting and there was hunting and gathering. And it wasn't that like now we had food, more food. I mean, it was, but the reason that it was to me and as far as this story, an inflection point is because one of the magic things about humans, again, this dormant thing that happened, once we have this cognitive revolution and now we can, I can take my life experience and send it to you through words, like in a very nuanced way, even if we're not, you know, it's not just about something that's here. I can talk about something that happened last year. And that's crazy. It's a magical

• 6:56Speaker 01

  superpower. And so a tribe now could, could over time, collect wisdom, collect knowledge together. And I think of it as like a little knowledge tower in the middle of the tribe that's being built. And every generation, it gets a little higher. And that they got, that's how I'm sure weapons got developed over many generations. You know, chimps aren't developing, developing anything over many generations. They develop life experience, but they, because they can't photocopy it into each other's brains, it's just stagnant. So things got better, but the agricultural revolution happens and now you have 10,000 plus people together instead of 100, 150. And so the knowledge tower just starts shooting up. And then of course, then a giant, you know, mini inflection point happens around

• 7:40Speaker 01

  975, page 975, which is writing. Because now, instead of just coming from, I can give it to you, the information if we're in person, and you can give it to someone else, and it's kind of lossy. Instead, now I can put it onto an object. Again, we take this for granted. We think like, it's early writing. This is magic. We are taking information in our brains and we're imprinting it onto a rock or a piece of papyrus. And in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a,

• 8:25Speaker 01

  in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, Very small and then they print the transcript and thousands of books and you get hundreds and thousands X of people reading the same debate. It's almost like it's like an old school recording. Right? It's like a book is like a recording of this event and they were actually getting to like

• 8:46Speaker 01

  watch the debate even though in their own living room a year later. It's just bizarre. And so this concept of information spread is just it's just useful sometimes to think to about how amazing any of it is.

• 8:58Logan Bartlett?

  Sure, totally.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  So agricultural revolution.

• 9:01Logan Bartlett?

  But most of those were like, I mean, it's sort of slow graphs.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Still really slow.

• 9:06Logan Bartlett?

  Step functions along the way.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we talk about inflection point, like in the big scheme of things, like big evolution, like the human history is this blip. So then everything looks really quick. But if you just extend human history out, the agricultural revolution was still, you know, it was okay, page nine fifty, but fifty pages of this book is a long time. That's again, that's AD times five or six. It's an, you know, epics and eras and just, you know, these, so this was still, you know, it's like, okay, now we have agriculture, which by the way, wasn't just like, it all starts at 10,000. It rolls out worldwide over like a 5,000 year span, 7,000 year span. You know, and, and it happens very slowly. And so the, but, but it's so, so it's, it's still quite slow. Like, I don't know what happened in the year 9,000, 8,000, 7,000, 6,000, like,

• 9:53Speaker 01

  there are some developments, but they're, they're, they're, they're very, they're very slow. It's from my knowledge, it just seems from around like around the year like 3,000 B.C. or so, and maybe it has to do with writing. The speed seems to pick up. At least it could also be that we know a lot more about those times because there was writing. So maybe there was all kinds of things that we just don't know about and there probably were, but it seems like maybe it's writing, but you start to have these like, these more legit civilizations start to form. Obviously Mesopotamia and you have all these other, that was like the first, but then all these river valleys around the world start developing these like pretty big cities, hundreds of thousands of people. Like, that's a lot back then. And, and, and so, but it's

• 10:35Speaker 01

  still kind of like a steady, of course, then you have start to have empires and, and then you have, you know, empire, again, crazy concept. It's like a human, one person. Is in charge, is in power over tens of thousands of people. Like, that didn't happen in most of human history. That's weird. You had a chief that maybe was in charge of 150 people. Like, this is, it's just this unprecedented amount of power held by single humans. You know, the king of Syria or whatever. We can probably say that the second major inflection point is, like you said, steam engine. The Industrial Revolution was just, it's just hard to wrap our heads around what a big deal it was. It basically was the birth of modern civilization.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  It just, modern civilization just exploded into the world. And it started us, and it's not just the Industrial Revolution, by the way. I would say it's like, it seems like there's like the Scientific Revolution, which is, which is, was like putting the knowledge tower, the collective knowledge tower on steroids. Now there was a method for finding the truth that everyone in any language all around the world could participate in and collaborate together. It was, it became a species-wide project to build the knowledge tower. And just the freedom from a lot of like the religious structures for knowledge to just build unfettered worldwide. So that happened in the same ballpark. The Enlightenment, basically, you know, innovated on, you know,

• 12:01Speaker 01

  many previous trials of different kinds of governments and just came up with the best system yet, which is the liberal democracy, which is what we all live in now. And, you know, I don't know what percentage, but a large percentage of the world. So the system of government that kind of enabled progress, the best system of government for progress yet, formed. The methods for finding knowledge, Scientific Revolution. And then you have the Industrial Revolution. So we can build and make things in crazy scales and lower the price and prosperity can just grow. And, and so, these things all kind of happened around the same time. And, and so, if you think about the thousand-page book, 250 years a page.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  We live at the end of page 1,000, right? By this definition. So 1770s to today, which seems like a long time to us, but it's the last one page. That's anyone who lived in there is on our page of the book. And those revolutions, these things we just talked about, all kind of happened right on page 999 on the border between 999. And so this is why page 1,000 is a crazy anomaly. It doesn't make any sense compared to the rest of anything. Everything about our modern world is brand new, basically. Everything you do today, you live your life, go into your hot shower, you go to the grocery store, you open your phone, you make a call, you like, just name a thing you're doing today, and it is basically a page, almost definitely just a page 1,000 phenomenon.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Except ironically, what we're doing right now, talking, Yeah. goes all the way back to the beginning of the book, which is so weird, or maybe like halfway through the book, which we can talk about later. But that's like the one thing that I think, and that could change, we might have a different way to do this. But talking is the like the OG human technology, but almost everything else we do. Like there were couches before page 1,000, but they were, a nice couch like this would be so much more expensive because you just can't mass produce anything. A frying pan? Imagine trying to get a frying pan in the year 1500. Great, but someone's going to handcraft that for you, and you better be real rich to have a frying pan. Now everyone can have a frying pan because we have these mass production.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  So the grocery store is just, it looks normal to us. This is crazy. It's everything we might want to eat. By the way, all this human engineered fruit, all this food packaged, preservatives, doesn't go bad, and like every kind of everything. You walk around and it's just all neatly on the aisles with expiration dates, and it's cheap. It is, it's just like, so that's the, that is the, this is the book and the fact that page 1,000 is an anomaly in every way it can be. Is my like, starting place for a lot of what I think about and a lot of like, it's a good place to frame your mind when you start thinking, you know, it's a way to zoom out and just remind ourselves what is going on.

• 14:59Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. And it makes it seem like how weird quote unquote, in the sense of how different it is just on that page compared to any other page. And in projecting forward of what the next page is likely to look like, it's probably, if we're following the slope of the line forward, it's probably going to be beyond anything that we can actually comprehend today, in the same way that George Washington in 1776 could not fathom anything going around here. It would just be so mind blowing.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  He would be wrong about almost all his predictions.

• 15:39Logan Bartlett?

  Everything would be wrong, right? And I think there's a quote you said, "We may be living at the climax of the movie of our world," right? Or like, "This could be the..."

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Human movie, yeah.

• 15:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, this could be the, the B.C. period for whatevers to come.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Well, it kind of feels like we're,

• 15:58Speaker 01

  page 1001 is probably not going to be like, just okay.

• 16:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  It's probably going to be unfathomably awesome, in the way that I think George Washington would think today was unfathomably awesome.

• 16:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Like, the life expectancy, the medicine, the phones, the technology, the heated rooms, like, the lights, everything, just magic everywhere. Or it's the apocalypse, or maybe it's like the apocalypse light when we just destroy our civilization, so we are still humans here, but we're all back in the Stone Age, it's like, you know, under like, local warlords, like, having to murder people for food, like, so, so if it goes badly, obviously that's the climax, because it's the big end of the movie. It's crazy, after 200, 200, remember, 2,000, 2,500 centuries, we would be alive at the end, which by the way,

• 16:45Speaker 01

  shouldn't be surprising necessarily. It seems like, what are the chances? Well, actually, one of the things you might expect before the end is crazy progress, because it's progress that kills you, it's that, right? And so what does crazy progress also involve? Population explosion, which means a lot of people are here for the end. When the population's exploding, you know, this is, I forget the name of the theory, but it's a, it's a common theory, it's like, Population is exploding at the end. I think Nick Bostrom talks about it. It's like,

• 17:14Speaker 01

  yeah, maybe that's something that happens before the very end. And like, so a lot of people are gonna, it is not, you know, it's still only a 1 in 15 chance or so, but not like a 1 in 1,000 chance that you're here for it. But, or if it's the unfathomably awesome future, I think it's so amazing. Like, I think we conquer mortality, for example. We look back, it'll be like, I think it has to be a new kind of VC AD, where whatever page 1,001 and on are like, is gonna be so vastly different. I think it'll have to be just like called a different era entirely than anything before. And I think, you know, we're living on the, if things go well, we're living on the cusp of that, which is also amazing and crazy. And who knows what the, you know, historians in 1,000

• 17:58Speaker 01

  years, maybe the cusp started in 1700s and goes till 2100. Maybe the cusp started in 1990 and goes till 2150. Who knows what the way they'll actually want to have some hindsight. Maybe we're inside the cusp right now, or maybe we don't realize how crazy things are about to get. And so we're still in VC. It's getting closer, but actually, the crazy stuff hasn't even started yet.

• 18:18Logan Bartlett?

  There's a few things in there that I want to touch on. And at least you've written about a few different things that I think are to the mainstream weird, including cryonics. You were very early in artificial intelligence and writing about like the implications of it, at least for the mainstream discourse and consumption, brain emulations as well. Are there any other things that maybe you haven't written about? Like, as we sort of think about the future of what technology or life, are there other things that are kind of, because I want to go through each of those individually. But are there any other things that have been ruminating in your brain

• 18:58Logan Bartlett?

  about like as we look forward to, I mean, obviously, I sort of put cryonics and mortality together, like beating mortality. But is there anything else that's sort of in your mind as you sort of fantasize or theorize about what the utopian state of the future could look, or the negative one, I guess, as well?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a ton. I mean, because we live in a time where there are like 20

• 19:24Speaker 01

  World-changing paradigm shifts happening simultaneously. That's the craziness of living at the end of page 1,000. So, yeah, you mentioned a few. I would love to write about genetic engineering. What? We can get into our software? So life extension is almost a smaller topic. I do want to get into life extension. Chronics is like a subtopic of that, but just in general, what are the prospects of? You know, if you look at these graphs of life extension of human lifespan, it's such a great story, except it's like pinned down like a year, 100 around, you know? It's just like, there aren't even outliers. There's not one person who like happens to live to 150. This, this, our software, that's a software problem. Otherwise, it would be some freak, you know, just like a seven foot five NBA player.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  There'd be a freak 160-year-old. The fact that there's not means there's something in our software that basically says, without question, 100%, this person must be shut down. Because for the sake of the tribe, whatever it is. I don't think there's some inherent law of nature. I think it is actually like our, you know, you don't have a 90-year-old who can't see or hear very well, but they run fast, right? Like, every single part of the system shuts down simultaneously. And it's sad because once you have this really healthy, awesome, you know, with it 90-year-old and you just know, you know what's coming, doesn't matter. It's like, there is this plan in their software and they will probably not be here in 10 years, even if it seems like they were doing great.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  So genetic, so, so, so life extension involves, you know, of course, what are the things that do kill the 100-year-old? There's, there's cancer, there's stroke, there's heart disease, there's Alzheimer's. There's not too many things. There's like four or five things that really kill almost all of us. And then, so you conquer those, but again, it still feels like then, you know, it's...

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So maybe you get, maybe we're now healthy until 110, but it's like, okay, but how do we elbow this? Think about what we've done with the rest of our, we've exploded through limitations in so many ways astronomically, a hundred X are old limitations. So, so what's this like nudging 5% with all of our modern tech? And so that's a software problem. And it's like, let's, how can we, so genetic engineering is so interesting. Can we get in there and change the software? I mean, there's also the, you know, the nanotech that might allow you to replace the cells and things like that. And then of course, there's mind upload, which is just fuck the body. Okay, we don't know how to do the genetic engineering and it's too risky anyway. And once, I think, right now, we're just used to it. We just go out, we daredevil, you go skiing. As soon as like

• 21:58Speaker 01

  actual like living 50 centuries is a possibility, the idea that you would like do anything to risk. So you'd either have a backed up consciousness or you would be like, I think, pretty careful because it would just, right now, it seems like, okay, worst that happens is I lose a few decades. You know, it's bad. All my instincts go against that happening, but it's a few decades. It's not like, it's a, it's a much bigger tragedy. If someone was going to live to 5,000 if they die in at 80 or 40. So all of those are kind of related to me. I want to get into all of that. Like that, that, basically the question of mortality, human mortality involves like seven different technologies, cryonics, mind upload, all of this. And, you know, with AI, AI is interesting

• 22:41Speaker 01

  because it touches all of these. AI can explode all, it's, it can be kind of like the industrial revolution wasn't just helping to with textiles, right? It, it, it turned, it eventually turned into the development of electricity and it turned into every single part of our world progressing. So likewise, I think AI could be something like that where it's like another inflection point, which is crazy because it's already going so fast. Another inflection point where now everything gets on steroids even more, like steroids cubed now, if it's already squared. I also would love to write about like artificial meat seems really interesting. I could just, it's much less big topic, but it's also in some ways a pretty huge topic. It's, you know,

• 23:24Speaker 01

  it's a lot livestock is, you know, a major, major contributor to emissions. Obviously, there's a lot of food inefficiency, which leads to hunger around the world.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It's kind of like a Holocaust for animals going on that, you know, we might look back on as like absolutely horrified, which I think we probably will.

• 23:43Logan Bartlett?

  You wrote about it in your book, but like it could be very well something that we look back on like we have a really hard time explaining to our grandkids. Yeah, no, no, it was mass slaughter of animals and like and like a lot of them were, yeah, we knew they were kind of intelligent, but we lined them up and we just killed them.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  A pig is as smart as a dog.

• 24:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And we're just like, yeah, we're pretty fine with it. We don't really think that much about it.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  It's this bizarre thing we're doing where all you have to do is imagine a thousand golden retrievers in a tiny pen crying and suffering and bleeding and, and they never see the light of day and then they're taken to the thing terrified, shaking and they have their throats slit. People would react to that almost like they'd react to humans, right? Maybe, maybe somehow some people more, it would be even worse because it's like this innocent creature. And it's like this sweet, innocent, helpless creature. And that's actually happening.

• 24:37Logan Bartlett?

  And we've normalized it and

• 24:38Speaker 01

  and I feel like a lot of people know it and we're just kind of like, oh, but meat's good, you know?

• 24:42Logan Bartlett?

  Vegetarian?

• 24:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:43Logan Bartlett?

  No, neither am I.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I'm a huge mass hypocrite.

• 24:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, neither. I, I like, I know it to be true. And in 75 years, my grandkids will watch, uh, maybe this will exist on YouTube still or whatever. And they'll be like, so you were aware of all that and you just kind of laughed about it and then went about eating pigs? And I'm like, yeah, no, that's all right.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  But then we'll look back at people who are like cheering it like witch burnings. We're like, well, barbarians. And it's like, they also were like, this is so awful. Imagine being that person, but like, eh, it's life. Like we, again, it's the same people who did the witch burnings who are now being like, well, pork is good. So, um, I don't know if we have the discipline as a species to actually like stop our addiction to delicious meat. And of course, like, it's a great business.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  But it seems like, just again, the environmental impact is like, I mean, you learn about it, you're like, damn.

• 25:30Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  And then, you know, across lots of fronts, like land, water, you know, just ecosystems, and then, and then the cruelty to the animals.

• 25:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. The environmental impact, I sort of, I'm a techno optimist in the way that I'm kind of, and maybe this is just blind naivety, I'm kind of like, yeah, we'll figure that part out.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I agree, but it just also just takes up a lot of land. It's just like, the point is, that's not the reason to stop it, at least to me, but that is, that would, it would just like, free up a lot of things.

• 25:59Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, totally.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Time, space, so.

• 26:01Logan Bartlett?

  Government subsidies.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's just, it was just, it's huge. It's just kind of albatross.

• 26:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  So, artificial meat is one of those things that, when people hear it, they're like, ah, and I think, once we have it, it'll become like, almost gross to be eating real, it's like, oh, it's from a real animal.

• 26:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Right? It's like, there's like actual like veins in there. I, I want like, and much healthier, better tasting, cheaper, eventually. Right now, it's massively expensive, right? So this is the, this is like the 1960s giant room-sized computer that we have.

• 26:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Eventually, we'll have the iPhone, which will be cheaper, incredibly delicious, and nutritious. It won't be bad for you. And it'll be plentiful, and, and so, I, I'm saying this not, I haven't done my deep dive, so maybe I'll get there and be like, actually, this is harder than we thought, we're not going to get there. But it seems to me like, want something that's going to move in that direction. So that's, to me, is, is interesting. Transportation is always like, super, like, will we have flying cars? Because that was always like, the joke about people in the 60s thought that, and oh, we don't, didn't happen, and like, we couldn't, that would be ridiculous. And then I talked to some people building some stuff, and I'm like, you're building flying cars? And there's obviously a bunch of hurdles with regulations, and noise, and safety, you know? But maybe down the road, you hop in your.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  You know, New Yorkers like to go to the Hamptons. You, you.

• 27:19Logan Bartlett?

  I'm going this afternoon.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's gonna take you how long?

• 27:23Logan Bartlett?

  Way too long.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Right. Three hours of probably hideous traffic.

• 27:27Logan Bartlett?

  I'm going to Montauk, which is about as far away as you possibly can.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna be sitting in traffic. Right. So now imagine instead, you call your Uber and you say, Montauk. And you get in it and it.

• 27:38Logan Bartlett?

  It goes up.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  It'll probably drive for 12 minutes to one of the nearby takeoff strips. It'll get in a little line, woo, woo, and you're fourth and then, and you go and now it's 30 minutes and it lands in a landing strip. Again, waits for a minute and then heads, drives right to your door. And you, the crazy thing is the first time, of course, you'll be, I did it. You people will want to hear about it. Like the first iPhone, can I, can I hold it? And then we'll all get incredibly used to it and just be like, lying there, not even looking out the window. Just like lying there complaining on our phone or being like, this thing took like eight minutes to arrive, you know?

• 28:14Logan Bartlett?

  Do you ever see the Louis C.K. bit about?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Everything's amazing and no one's happy. The wifi on the internet.

• 28:20Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  The funny thing about that clip is, so he talks about it as, um. He is like, that was one of the first times I had heard of him. He was on, um.

• 28:27Logan Bartlett?

  Conan?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, Conan. And that was like, that clip helped like blow him up. Um, and it was, he was saying how the guy next to him was like, there's no wifi. And he's like, you didn't.

• 28:36Logan Bartlett?

  This is bullshit.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  He's like, what are you gonna do after this? Retake in the miracle of human flight? But then he said in another interview once, he was like, oh yeah, there was no guy. That was me complaining. And then I realized it was funnier if I said it was someone else.

• 28:47Logan Bartlett?

  That's funny.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Just a separate point.

• 28:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  But that's such a great point. It's such a relevant point, like. The hedonic treadmill, it doesn't matter how, it's like, if you picture the future and you're like, imagine people can live 500 centuries if they want. They die when they're ready. And they all fly around. And no one has to work and you'd be like, they must be so happy and you know that's gonna happen.

• 29:10Logan Bartlett?

  No, no.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Unless we've really re-coded human nature, which maybe we can do, you're gonna get there and they're all gonna be depressed and bitching about all the same things, just like we are depressed about.

• 29:18Logan Bartlett?

  No matter where you get to, you reorient around what the, the level you're at is.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  It's such a shitty quality.

• 29:24Logan Bartlett?

  Change. And it's true of success. I'm sure you feel this way of like, if you go back 10 years ago or 15 years ago and you were like, I have this blog. And I have this book and people know me for my thoughts. And it's incredible that I get to, I get to research and think about interesting things and then I get gratification from people and all that. But then, you know, whatever, the first week of book sales come out and you're like, fuck. Well, okay, maybe, you know, if, maybe if I had done the press tour a little bit better, it would be a little bit higher on the list or whatever. You just recalibrate to some level that like you never could have imagined, right?

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I really have a numerical way to measure it, which is that I had an old blog. Which, you know, I never, I never was writing it to go viral. It was, I, I, it was just my stories about my day, whatever, but I still was really excited when things, you know, got a little attention. You know, there might be 50 readers a day usually, and then like, sometimes something would like blow up and there'd be like 800 readers a day or a thousand. And that, that's even high. Maybe it's more like 250. I'm like, oh my God, like this, people are passing this around. It was like hugely exciting, like dopamine hit. And then, wait, but why? Of course, at the beginning, you know, when, when you're, when things are going up, it's like accelerating. You feel acceleration in, in a plane, in a car. And then you stop, and then it hits this constant velocity and it feels like you're still again, right? It's like relativity.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  It's the same thing. It's like when you're accelerating, either up or down, it feels, you feel it emotionally. It feels really good or really bad. And when you feel that, it feels like I'll always feel happy about this. Or when it's going down, this will always be, this, nothing could be worse than this, whatever. And then you hit constant velocity. Or even you get used to the acceleration, all your emotions settle back into the hedonic treadmill. So for me, wait, but why now is getting a thousand X the viewers. And I got used to that and suddenly I'd be like, okay, just like 50,000, whatever. And then I'd be like, ooh, you got up to like 250 today. It's, it's like human, it's madness.

• 31:24Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. And it's like, if you saw all those people in a room, that's one of the things.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  If I saw the 50 people in a room, I would have been like, oh my God, I have a whole like, I have a whole like, it's bigger than a classroom, all here to listen to me.

• 31:35Logan Bartlett?

  You know, it's funny is I, similarly with doing this, I, I did a talk recently and 250 people were in the room. And I was like anxious, you know, I was like, oh fuck. I like had to psych myself up to go do it. And I'm like, Every, every single one of these gets like, you know, whatever, 10, 20, 100 times.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Any sense.

• 31:57Logan Bartlett?

  And I'm just like, this doesn't make me nervous at all. It's two of us sitting here. Uh, but the number of people that are going to see this is so much more than having all the people look at you. It's a weird like internalization thing that I, I, yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's one, it's a reminder, one of many that both of these, the gratitude reminder, the fact that you just get used to it. And then this fact that a 250 person live audience seems scary and it, whatever, that 100,000, it doesn't matter how big it is. If it's, if it's on the internet, it seems less. It's a reminder that the human brain is not a magical thinking tool that is smart.

• 32:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  It is a, an organ in our body that was developed to help a hunter gatherer survive, survive in the wild. That's what it is.

• 32:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And, and, and it is amazing organism and it, and it's amazing how plastic it is where it can adjust to this totally different world than it was evolved for and actually kind of make it work. But it's not meant to be here and it's not meant to understand things like it's 250 person audience is intuitive to it. Because they were.

• 33:02Logan Bartlett?

  You can see it.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  You're the chief and you're making a, you're going to fire up your, your little, you know, tribe to go fight the other tribe. Okay. That, we know that 2,500 people, 25 million people behind the screen or behind the microphone is just, it's the same way that we are, I, I, if you, if there's a cockroach on this thing, I would jump up like a baby right now and embarrass myself. But I'll drive in a car and text. Cause the cockroaches, the brain is like, ah, I know that, that's in the world I was for, that was, that's pre-programmed. That might have disease. That may be scary. Right? Um, driving is, it, there's no idea what this is.

• 33:38Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Right? So there's a hundred examples and it's just the most important thing to remember all the time. Don't trust this thing necessarily. Like, consider, ask what it is doing and whether it's actually making any sense.

• 33:50Logan Bartlett?

  I had a funny one where a family member was going to, it was in the peak of COVID and they, they didn't want to get on a plane. And so instead they were going to drive, uh, 18 hours down to Georgia. Uh, and I was just like, Getting on a plane is so much safer than driving for 18 hours. But there's this weird feeling of control, right? When you're driving versus this scary COVID thing and be on a plane.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  The numbers are crazy.

• 34:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Planes are actually, I read somewhere that being on a plane, like in the air, is the safest place you could be on Earth. Because you're the least likely to be murdered or like die on Earth.

• 34:28Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  In the air, because there's no one, no one can murder you. Or it's hard. And so you're actually in the safest place on Earth, but it's just.

• 34:37Logan Bartlett?

  I saw, I forget the stat, but it was like per 10,000 miles traveled, like, or maybe, maybe it was a million miles traveled or something. And like commercial aircrafts have like one death or two deaths and cars are like 650 or something. And it's just like such a funny, whatever.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Driving is, unless you're like a daredevil person who does like, you know, kind of physical things, like physical scary things, driving is for 99% of us, by far the most dangerous thing we do. It's not even a question. Like, there's not, like, for a young person, like 30-year-old me living, or I guess I was 25-year-old me living in LA where I drove a lot.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  I, it's like if you looked at like the pie chart of things that might kill me this year, driving must have been 99. Because driving, I was constantly kind of like, ooh, that was a close one, like. And meanwhile, nothing else. I'm like a young, healthy person. Like, there's no tiger's gonna run out and get me. Like, I'm very safe in every other way.

• 35:29Logan Bartlett?

  And there's a weird internalization of having the wheel versus not. And that lets you feel like you're in control. But in truth, it's, yeah, no. You haven't written as much in the last seven years as you've been writing the book. You clearly have other stuff ruminating in your head. Have you missed the process of like going through in a much shorter form and putting some different thoughts out there?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Very much. I, um, I really like writing blog posts because, um, A, the dumb brain so is, is most aware of, like, people, actual real people, hearing what I'm saying if I'm on stage, right? Same with you.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  But and then a book is the opposite side of the spectrum. It's like this, the words I'm typing will be read by a much bigger stage than any I could be on. And it just, I can't, but the dumb part of my brain can't conceive of that. So it doesn't feel, the high stakes adrenaline. It's what makes me work hard and perform and really like it also awakens my creativity. And it's really hard to get those things with a book. I learned. Blog post is somewhere in the middle where it, because this people, and people might see this on, you know, in three days. It's just some adrenaline and there's some pressure, some deadline pressure. It's like, you know, people are expecting this versus this very open thing, which is again, it's just, there's something motivating to the

• 36:53Speaker 01

  kind of dumb instant gratification monkey in my head about A, an impending deadline, but also the fact that if I have a good, wake up in the morning and I crush it today, I could finish the whole post today. Finish the whole post, it's gonna go up tomorrow if I, if I really just get in a flow or the next day if I don't. A book, I'm like, if I crush it today, I'm going to get from 34% done to 34 and a half percent done. That's if I crush it. If I don't crush it, I'll get from 34% done to 34.2% done. If I do nothing, I'll just stay there. Those feel very similar. The incrementality of progress. It's so depressing. It's so, so just like, it's so demoralizing being like, I had a great day and, and okay. It just doesn't feel like it, it just, so I think this is different personalities.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  I think some people function great with that. They work great. They like to put a brick down every day and then this is a house. For me, it was very hard to motivate to put one brick down. It's like the perfectionist in me, I wanted to like do the whole thing or it's like, I'm just gonna do one brick. That's, and it, and so I didn't like that. Now I am doing another book, but this book I try, I was like, let me learn every lesson I can from this last book. So A, the topic is 100 topics, basically. There's a ton of the things we've already talked about are in this book. It's like everything I'm excited to talk about or write about right now is in this book together. And I gave myself, and I'm like, working really hard to keep it like a one year deadline. So not six years like the last book, can I do an even better book in one year? And that's, I don't know if I can, but that is, I'm trying to like.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Work with my own psychology and be like, look, this is not, this is not that smart of a primate here that we're living in. And it's just a fact. It, we, we saw what it happened to this primate over this, like, how do we, let's manage the primate better now. What, how do we get this primate to do with it? That's what I'm.

• 38:37Logan Bartlett?

  What was the six and a half years of like, literally your days of doing, doing it? Like, was it, was it like, one day you'd, you'd have some breakthrough and write a bunch of stuff down and then you would go, uh, you know, you have famous Ted talk about watching, uh, YouTube's of Justin Bieber's mom or, uh, or the, uh, Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan Wikipedia page.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Those are all real examples.

• 39:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I believe, I mean, Tonya Harding, uh, Nancy Kerrigan, crazy story. I mean, really, I'm glad it's gotten its due now that they've made like, we've seen that and stuff. It's like, you kind of forget some of the weird pop culture things that happen.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. Even just going back to OJ, it's just like, you forget, there's, going back to like 90s, kind of, or, or my, my wife has become obsessed with, like, I think everyone's wife that I know, true crime. Um, and so she'll go back to like Scott Peterson or JonBenet Ramsey. And I'm like, first I'm kind of like, and then I'm like, ooh, this is interesting. I see why this is such a, so yeah.

• 39:32Logan Bartlett?

  So you're 41?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Forty one.

• 39:34Logan Bartlett?

  Forty one. I'm, I'm 35. Uh, my fiance's 29. And so like a lot of the pop culture stuff, I was in second grade with OJ. I was in eighth grade with nine 11. But like, you know, I kind of remember Branch Davidian's in Waco, Texas, but like, not really. And so over the years, I loved that stuff. So I'll go back and study it. For my fiance, it's her first time learning about all this. And so that is really fun for me. I'm like, no, no, no. Now we're going to go learn about David Koresh. Totally. Like, this is going to be a really, or like, she missed, um, the jinx and that. And so I'm like, we're going to go learn about Robert Durst now. Right? So all these little pop culture things, it's fun for me as like the six-year-old guy that loves pop culture, going and teaching all that.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. She, she knows about. Waco because of me and I know all the lyrics to every Taylor Swift song because of her.

• 40:20Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Because she's actually at the generation, she's 33.

• 40:24Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, yeah.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And she claims that like all the teeny boppers at the concert that she just went to are like not the real fans because she is Taylor Swift's age and she's like, I actually grew up with her. I'm the actual OG fan.

• 40:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I remember Tim McGraw when it came out in 2006 or whatever versus all these teeny boppers. Uh, like that was her whatever, original song and all these teeny boppers weren't even born then.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  No, no, no, totally. I mean, it's, and also it's like, there's some interview with Billie Eilish where they're like asking her who she's heard of and she hasn't heard of any of the people that I think of as like house. You know, you know, when your dad's like, you know, oh, like Dick Clark, you know, of course, you know, I'm like, who's that again? And he's like, that's, you know, that, that, that sounds like Brad Pitt to me, right?

• 41:04Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, totally. I play, I play a mean game at times and I'm like Mick Jagger, what band? And she's like, stop, I don't want to play this game.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 41:12Logan Bartlett?

  Which is like, it, it makes me feel old, but also it's weirdly gratifying.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  But it's also like, so Mick Jagger was before our time, but it was like close enough that like we all are familiar. But like, I also can't name 10 Rolling Stones songs, probably. If you, if you played them for me, I'd be like, okay, I know that song. But like my, my parents for sure can. But then you get to the next generation and it's just everything, it's, it's like the treadmills move 30 years. So Billie Eilish had never heard of The Grateful Dead. And I was like, okay, that, that is crazy to me because I just, I just feel like they're a household name, but they're, you don't realize it's like, it's kind of like parallel universes. And I am realizing also that the internet is in a nice way, actually makes you feel very like not old because inevitably who am I, who are I'm interacting with on Twitter is a bunch of people within 10 years of me.

• 42:00Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  When I go on TikTok, very quickly it gets, it's like, okay, you're, you're, we're not going to be sending you teen stuff. We're very quickly sending me stuff, maybe not exactly my age, but like my references. I, I'll see a thing like you know, you're a nineties kid when, or you know, you're an eighties kid when. 15 year olds are never coming across that meme. It's just not that the algorithm is never going to feed them that meme. They're going to see you're, you know, you're a 2010 kid when. And so it's almost like the internet segments these parallel universes and keeps us like contained, which I think is nice because I, if the whole thing was flooded with teen stuff, which is like, I think before the internet, it's like, oh, all the pop stuff. Everything is young people now and I feel old. I think it's nice because it kind of like makes you feel like your generation still has memes.

• 42:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Yourself contained and the like Furbies and Tamagotchis still get shown to us.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Cause they're, cause all those people are still here.

• 42:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And so I'm like, we're all here. Let's like still have a fun time talking about our generation and not just be like, oh, that's for the kids now. It's like, well, let's all hang out still. So.

• 42:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like my dad. Yeah, I use TikTok and it's like deck improvement self, you help TikTok, you know? And I'm like, that's not exactly the same TikTok.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  That's when people are like, I mean, I love TikTok and then I got rid of it when people freaked me out about China. Looking at my texts. I don't know. I, I miss it a lot, actually. Cause now I'm on Twitter for you, which I go on one trashy video and then start scrolling. And it's just guy gets his pinky bit off by a shark fistfight and then it's addictive, but it's trash. And then Instagram reels to me is just hugely inferior. YouTube, YouTube flipping is just a lot of like, I don't know, like Joe Rogan or just like, it's just like podcast clips. It's just very like these, these things. TikTok was, had a variety. It could be, I could flip up and see anything. And, and it was like, they really had, they mixed from like a really funny comedian doing impressions to like a crazy science fact to like a funny dog video too.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  But they, but, but I just liked it the most. I think it had that.

• 43:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  So I miss it and people.

• 43:48Logan Bartlett?

  I, I've totally ceded to the CCP, like the brain manipulation they're doing to me. I'm like, listen, I, I need that dopamine hit of the dog videos mixed with like, you know, whatever the comedian mixed with the sports news. So I am totally willing for China to manipulate.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Okay. So, okay. I want to, if you, because you're like a, a smart dude who's decided that it's fine. So maybe is it fine if I just put TikTok back on my phone?

• 44:14Logan Bartlett?

  I kind of think so. I, I sort of think all these things are like when Facebook did the big study on, uh, on like how they were actually manipulating stuff to see how it changed people's moods and all that. It was so much at the incremental margin about like 0.1% here to like 1% there about how they were actually able to manipulate. I think like-

• 44:33Speaker 01

  I don't care about that. I don't want them like downloading all the contents of my phone and using it as blackmail 10 years from now.

• 44:38Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. I haven't given as, quite as much thought to all that stuff. I sort of think I am very willing to have the totality of my life, the famous last words when someone ultimately airs the totality of my life. But I'm sort of willing to be out there in some way. And so like whatever they find, I sort of think we're operating in a world-

• 44:58Speaker 01

  It's not just me too. It's also like if my texts get leaked, all of my friends' texts get leaked. And that's part of it is like, I'm like, I feel like, I, I would feel really guilty about, and that, I guess that goes for, you know, that's why it's my own texts. I, if I were really worried about it, I would tell everyone I've ever texted.

• 45:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  So it's not, I'm not really, it's more like, you know, if it's my texts, it's, I'm the epicenter of this disaster.

• 45:22Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. That's right. I, I doubt if it happens, I doubt Tim Urban or Logan Bartlett are going to be the atomic unit of how we all get taken down. And so I, that's sort of at least my justification for it. I'm trading the dog videos and the, you know, whatever, the random Shane Gillis clips in exchange for, uh, that catastrophic risk. And I assume we're all going down one way or the other if that happens. So-

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Right. At that point, it'll just be everyone's things and it's just you live in a whole catastrophe.

• 45:48Logan Bartlett?

  It's, it's sort of like once, once, uh, Barack Obama got elected president and like admitted to smoking weed and doing coke as a kid. It's sort of like, okay, we're like, cards are going on the table for presidents now going forward. And I think everyone's going to accept there's going to be some level of like adolescence that's going to be captured online.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  He admitted to doing coke?

• 46:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah. I think in his book or something, which is interesting. But yeah. So wait, your process of actually going in and doing the deep dive-

• 46:16Speaker 01

  So you know, you know, if I ask you, like, what were you doing on, uh-

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Thursday afternoon in college, you might have a hard time like remembering.

• 46:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  It's like, what was I doing?

• 46:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, long hits, I don't know.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And if you, if you tried to guess and like map out your time, you might actually, I would bet if they went and actually said, well, here's what you really did, it would not be a great reflection.

• 46:37Logan Bartlett?

  You know what's funny about that, by the way, is when I, I took up like a month off in between jobs and, uh, and during that month, like the first two days, I was so productive and reading books and doing my laundry and going out and like seeing parts of New York I hadn't seen before. And by the like, week two or something, I, I was like, yeah, you know, I have a haircut later that day, so I'm not sure, like, my day's already pretty full. It's just like a funny, different like.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Time is such a mind.

• 47:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's like when your day's super regimented, it's very easy. It's like, okay, I got a 30 minute window. I'm going to go get a haircut versus when you had nothing going on all day, going into your haircut feels like the totality of the day.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  That, that is how I feel right now, where it's like, if I have like a meeting at three, it kind of ruins my day, like hangs over my entire day as opposed to being like, I have clear open, I'm like, ah, how am I, how is this going to be coming up? And then when that's done, it's like dinner is a couple of hours away. This makes no sense. And if you just blocked out every hour and you're like, I have these four work hours and then this and this, and then it would just, I should do that more often, probably. People who work now, there's such an epidemic now of everyone working from home. I think a lot of people are probably struggling in a way they weren't before with like freedom.

• 47:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Again, our brain in our head is not, it's good at general freedom. It's not good at freedom plus advanced civilization. Like, um, when you have all these expectations and, and this feeling of if I'm not being productive, I'm wasting time that like civilization makes us feel.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  And also our friends are working, so it's like, we don't sound like we can just like be social. It's like, I, I feel like our brain struggles with that and ends up, it seems like, and if you don't have that, it seems like, how could anyone who, who can work from home ever be unhappy? Oh my God, your life is amazing. But then when you're doing it, I think actually, um, you're often, I would, I would guess that the cumulative work from home people are less happy on average than they were when they were working in the office. I don't know, but, um, anyway, so back to what I spent my six years doing. And this was, it's, it's, I also like moved a lot. So I was like, oh, that apartment I was working on through that apartment and that apartment.

• 48:41Logan Bartlett?

  Which is nice milestones, by the way, to have.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it helps, yeah. Apartments and cities you moved in and relationships you started are always like these.

• 48:49Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, like, like, four years of college, living in four different places feels like such a long period of time. And then if you spend four years in the same apartment, working at the same job.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  This was one of the things that really bummed me out is when I realized college is an eternity when you're in it. It's like, it's an era of your life.

• 49:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  When you graduate college and you now you're 22, living somewhere, you think senior year of high school, it's like, I was a different human and entirely different world. I was a different stage in my life. I was a kid, now I'm a grown up. And I'm reading this book and thinking, this has been longer than college. So even like a part, I was working on this part four years ago. Like, I'm on like a new part now. And I look back and I was like, oh, my God, this document, this notes doc, which doesn't feel that long ago, is from when a kid was starting college and now that kid is graduating. That, that was, that hurt.

• 49:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Um, that's part of why I was like, never again. You know, it was just like, that is my, is my personal hashtag, never again. Um, because actually, the finished product, I'm like, you know, it is a pretty long, fully hand illustrated by me, extremely thoroughly researched. Like, I read, I just, there's, there's like 100 pages of end notes and it covers so much, right? And I'm like, that's a six year project. I don't, I don't, maybe it's, maybe it's a three year project if I'm at my best, but it's not like a, it's not like I just like, that's a beast. It's a giant researched book about society, you know, drawn and, and written and revised and feedback and all that. So the bummer for me was that it, that wasn't the plan. The plan was a blog post. And then I was like, oh, this is taking so long. This is such a long blog post. I could gotta make it a

• 50:17Speaker 01

  series. And then I was like, oh, the series is now, that's the last thing is going to be more longer than the whole series. I gotta make it a book. And then I was like, but I'm every time it was like the delusion. It was like, but I'm going to knock this book out really quickly because I gotta move on. And then the book takes on forever. And then, and so it was the expectations, you know, it's expectations minus reality equals happiness, right? Uh, sorry, reality minus expectations. So my, if my expectations were, this is, I'm, I'm settling in for a six year project on this, then I would have been totally fine. Um, and I don't think there, you know, but it was the fact that I always thought I should, I should be done by now. This is a problem. This is a mistake. It was like this constant feeling of something is like wrong in my world for six straight years. So that was

• 50:58Speaker 01

  a bummer. As far as like the actual time, like actual writing is, is a good chunk of the time, but not that much. Cause on a good like writing day, I'll write. On a really flow day, I'll write three or 4,000 words, just like beast. But that's unusual. Usually, I don't know, 1,000 to 2,000 words on a good, good writing day. And the totality of the book was how many words? 120,000. So people, I always think in words and everyone else thinks in pages. Yeah, 1,000 to 2,000 words is like four Microsoft, two to four Microsoft Word pages, five Microsoft Word pages, single spaced.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  So the book was 120, and I wrote, I wrote at least 300 total. And then most of that was cut and revised. And so I would say, including like the new writing and stuff, I probably wrote, yeah, let's say 300 total thousand words to make this book. So even there, on a, even on a, on a not such a great writing day, 1,000 words, that's still only one year, you know, or if I'm not working weekends, which I did. I also crushed my social life. I was just like, because I always felt like it's almost done. So I was working on weekends and stuff.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  But, so that's one year. So the time, you know, and a lot of that was, you know, I, I've written about procrastination. Yes. It was, you know, it was, I was procrastinate by tweeting. I would procrastinate by researching too much or just going into a research spiral that was no longer that productive. In some ways, it would be, get worse because I would then, I would get a book to read a chapter that was relevant and then I would just get kind of hooked and read. But then not only was that a waste of time, not a waste, you're learning something, but it's not a productive, it's not good for work time. But then I'd learn something later in the book. I'm like, well, that needs to get incorporated. And so with so much time and so much, so much going on in the world, that's another big part of it is, you know, George Floyd, I mean, it's like, this, I have to, you know, blow up this whole section and rewrite a huge chunk of it because there's a whole

• 52:46Speaker 01

  this new information, this new thing happened. There's 10 of those examples. The entire Trump presidency happened during the book. So I mean, it was like, I was going to say something about Trump and by the end I had a whole different thing to say. So there was, there was that going on and there was just like a lot of different areas and everything seemed relevant. So then it was like a nightmare of outlining was like, how do you wrangle? Everything from like the history of media to, you know, the way confirmation bias to the history of the Republican Party, to cancel culture, you know, to social media and deep far history and human nature and how that maps on to today and 100 other things. I was

• 53:30Speaker 01

  like, how do you wrangle that all into one book? And I think, you know, maybe I could have focused in and done something, but I was just, at that point, perfectionism was like, I have to tell this whole story because it's one big story. And so the times pass. Like, I would, my ideal schedule is I wake up in the morning, and this happens rarely, but I've gotten there. And I first little stretches, I wake up in the morning and I just start writing and I just like, deep focus, barely look at my phone till like noon. And then, then days will win. And now I can work more, I can stick around.

• 54:05Logan Bartlett?

  That's for, that's for a book or is that for a blog post?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  In general, that would be.

• 54:10Logan Bartlett?

  How do you go about on the blog post side, like picking a topic and then researching it? Like, what do you actually do to, like, where do you start?

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:21Logan Bartlett?

  You just start, is it a YouTube rabbit hole? Is it a talking to experts in the field? I'm sure it's some of all the above. But like, how do you actually go about doing that?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Psychonics.

• 54:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  I will say, okay, I've heard about this thing, freezing people after their death. And especially I've now heard about it from some very smart people. That's what got me interested. Because I heard about it with Ted Williams, like a lot of people. And I was like, this is like for kooks, whatever. And then, and then I heard, but then much more recently, like 2013, 14, 15, I'm hearing some like, very smart people say, no, no, no, this is, this is very important technology. People should do it. Really? So, okay, that's all I need to know, that it's a good topic. Whether I, whether it ends up being something I agree with or not, the fact that I'm like, huh, I didn't know this was a real thing. And it's such an interesting thing to be a real thing.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  I now know for sure, because my only focus group is myself. I know there's a lot of people out there just like me, right?

• 55:18Logan Bartlett?

  Is that your North Star in this stuff?

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:20Logan Bartlett?

  It's just like when I find it.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  There's not that, you know, we're all not that unique. Like, there's just a lot of other people who happen to share my interests, my self sense of humor, and the exact place I am with that topic, where they also would be interested in it, but they haven't learned about it yet.

• 55:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  That's what AI, when I took it on, I was like, this is a good topic, because I'm sure a lot of other people are saying, what's this thing I keep hearing about? Topic is easy there. Now, that part's easy. I pick it, and now I'll just open Chrome. And I'll, I'll, I'll, maybe the very first thing I'll do is just like read the Wikipedia page. It's just a nice, it just lays out the topic in general.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  And then at that point, I'll have a little bit of sense of where I need to go. So then I'll just open, I'll just hold down Command, and I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll search in Google for like,

• 56:05Speaker 01

  cryonics. And then I'll hold Command and just click, click, click, click, click, click. And then a new window, and I'll, I'll, I'll search,

• 56:13Speaker 01

  why cryonics can work. Click, click, click.

• 56:16Logan Bartlett?

  Are you pulling salient points out along the way?

• 56:18Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I'm just clicking the links. I'm opening them in tabs right now, just opening them. And why cryonics makes, why cryonics will never work? Let's get all the skeptics and hear what they're saying. How cryonics works, click, click, click, whatever. But I may have learned something in the article also, in the Wikipedia article about the fact that it's vitrification. It's not freezing. Those are two different things. Vitrification, freezing is when your water, when water turns to ice, right? So it expands, and it becomes rigid. And if that happens in your body, all your cells explode. Can't freeze a human. Vitrification is what we do for organs, for example, organ transplants. When we have to put something on ice, but you can't actually freeze it, or it'll destroy the organ. You use antifreeze, you pump antifreeze through this, through it.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  And then you use something like liquid nitrogen to bring it to like 195, negative 195 degrees.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  I forget if it's Celsius or Fahrenheit. And some crazy cold temperature. And what you're doing is it's like, it's almost like a glass. Glass isn't actually like a solid. It's a liquid. It's a very viscous liquid. It's the same thing here where you're basically turning this into your, the crystalline structure doesn't happen. It's just all the atoms, all the molecules just stop moving right where they are. Cause they can't, because there's not enough heat. So you're just pausing it exactly as it is. So it can't, because if you leave an organ out with not neither of those things, it will just deteriorate, right? That the world will just, all the bacteria will eat it away, whatever, decompose. So this is the solution. So I'll go read about vitrification. What's the science of it? How does it work? Where is it used in other things? I heard about cryonics. I always thought it was cryogenics. What's the difference?

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Cryogenics, let me just read about what's cryo. I'll Google cryonics versus cryogenics and be there. Anyway, so now I have all those open and I'll just start going. And I don't read every article. Sometimes I'll just look and that looks like trash or whatever, or I'll get, I'll get the picture, but I will just, just absorb. And, and it's, it's, it can be kind of icky at first and then it becomes really fun. When you start to get it, because now then what I like to do, and this is, this is like, you know, it's hard to know if this is actually an efficient thing to do, but I think it does help the article is now that I get it and I feel like I really have a good sense. You know, I'll go fill the holes. I'll, I'll like, now I'll go on YouTube or somewhere. And I'll watch videos explaining what I already know, which I think is a really fun thing to do.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  When you really understand something to watch a really good explainer explain it, because they're gonna, either it's either you already know, and that's just satisfying. But also, you know, you can kind of in your head predict what's coming next. And if I, if I can't predict every, if I, if I, if there's stuff in that video that I'm like, I shouldn't, didn't understand that at all. Good, that tells me. So I'll test myself, but it's also just kind of a fun process. It's fun. Once you have a tree trunk of knowledge to just add leaves to it, little leaves, and just to keep kind of like soaking in how much you know. It's like really fun. So I'll do that.

• 59:07Logan Bartlett?

  And you have a note document?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, okay. So you're keeping it pretty comprehensive. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the note doc gets, there's both usually a couple of docs open. There's like a note doc and then there's like an outline doc. So there's like, also what's the game we're going to play here with cryonics? I was like, if you're gonna do it, here's the, here's how you have to do it. Step one, two, three, four, step five was die. You know, step six was now you do this, whatever. But that's not obvious. That's it, you know, it, the, the obvious thing would just be like, here's this technology. Here's how it works. Here's, here's the pros and cons. And I'm like, let's have more fun than that, right? Let's make it more of a addictive kind of read. Um, and more fun to write too. So I want to always come up with like, what's a good game here? What's like the structure? Sometimes it is just chronological, but usually there's something come up with it's better. Um, so I'm, I'm also like thinking of, I'm pasting quotes and stats and notes along with the links. I'll need to source it or go back to it.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Um, I've made that mistake before. Where the fuck did this stat come from? I can't find it. And then

• 1:00:00Logan Bartlett?

  That's my problem, by the way. Sometimes I'll put things in quotes.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  You don't remember

• 1:00:03Logan Bartlett?

  And I'll be like, did, did he say that? Or did I take that from someone else that was quoted in it?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  You gotta be really careful, by the way, with a good quote, a good colloquial quote. Cause I write colloquially. If I just paste it in, I'll think that's me writing my idea.

• 1:00:17Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. And now you're plagiarizing it.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  So I have to be very careful and write like, call someone colon, blah, blah, blah. Um, it's like, I'm always terrified of accidental plagiarism. And so, so yeah, then the chat, then it's just like collecting all the info. And while you're collecting the info, that's a useful exercise where you're also thinking, what are the buckets here of, of areas? There, there, there's like how it works. And then there starts to be, what's the game? And then once you have that game, okay, now I'm going to go through the steps. And I want to talk about this in the intro and this in the conclusion. Then I will go and take the most, the stuff I really need from the note stock and make basically a second version of that outline and put the, the much of the long one that has all the things I need in it. Now I'm ready to write and then I'll go and write it out. And, and this, honestly, this point, the, the hard part is done. Like the, the, that, that's the icky, the reading is fun.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  The outlining is shitty. It's just like, I feel like I'm doing like home, high school homework. It's not fun. Writing, if you happen to be in one of those like glorious flows, which does happen, anyone who does any kind of creative work, or probably any kind of work at all knows the feeling of like, it's just, you're on fire and you have all this adrenaline and you have dopamine and it's just, it's just going and you know what, you have to go to the bathroom for an hour and you don't even get up because you're just, no one can, and that's a good metric, by the way, because when I'm procrastinating, I'll be like, do I have to go to the bathroom? I think maybe just a little, I'll just go, anything. Do I need to get something from the fridge? Just anything to get up. So it's the opposite. You're like, it's a magnet to your work. So unless I'm in that zone, which is hard to come by, and of course, it's dumb brain. When I'm in that zone, I don't, I take it

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  for granted. I think, good, I'm just, this topic is good for me. I'm just, oh, I'm on a roll this week. No, you're on a roll right now. Don't fuck it up. Like, go, get as, get as much as you can, right? I'll just be like, oh, this is who I am now. It's like when you hit a good golf shot. And you're like, oh, I got this. You know, it's amazing how much I can just like hit two good drives in a row. And I'm like, oh, I'm like, I finally cracked it. I'm like, good, this now. You're not, you're in a good zone for two holes. So then, and then drawing is also miserable. So basically, the whole thing sucks. But, but then once the drawings are done and I finish and I read it and I'm revising it now, I'm like so satisfied. I did it. Wrangled this topic into this thing and then publishing it is great. Publishing is great because you're actually connecting it to all, this is what it's all for, is all the brains that you've collected that think like

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  you. You have all this fondness for them. You get to, guess what I have to show you now? Boom. And they're, you know, people are all reading it and absorbing it and they're having the same epiphanies that you had. And it's great.

• 1:02:42Logan Bartlett?

  What's the most fun part of all, besides the publishing side? What, what part of that do you enjoy the most?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  I mean, if I'm in a writing flow, that's great. That's euphoric. It's like, or you know, someone just, you write a really funny joke or a really good line and you're just like, yes, that was great. Same with drawing, it's like up and down, like a new blank canvas, hell. Just sitting there just being like, no, I don't want to do this.

• 1:03:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  I'm just bad. It's also, I'm like, how do I draw a horse? I don't know. But then once the drawing is like coming along and I'm like, do we get into details or a diagram? Diagrams are kind of fun because you're not, there's nothing with the pen. I'm like, if I'm making like a chart, those are kind of fun. I like those. And then, And then, and then research, you know, learning is exhilarating if I'm like, if I'm like, really, if it's a topic like cryonics or AI where I go from, I feel like at one through 10 knowledge, I'm like at a two to start off and I get myself up to like a six, getting, you know, every, it's orders of magnitude difficult. So at that point, it's like logarithmic. If you want to get from a six to an eight, you're going to have to probably spend a year. You want to get from an eight to a 10, you have to spend a career, right?

• 1:03:38Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  You know, you get a PhD and all that. So I like to get to like right before it starts to get hard, like get to a six where I'm like, I can, the way I would define that is I can explain the shit out of it to like a table of smart friends who don't know about it and, and, or I can do a talk on it to a group of laymen and be accurate. Like I'm, I'm saying things that an expert would say, yeah, he's right about those things. And I can also crush the Q and A. So it's not just like, I better not go out of what I know. It's like, no, no, you can ask me anything about this and I'll either, you know, either I'll, I know what I know and I know what I don't know, but I, I have a pretty good sense. That's a six. It's like, you know, a lot. You know enough to write a really good explainer on the internet. I'm not going to go write a paper on it. I'm not going to go and sit on a panel with experts and I'm not going to do a talk to experts unless

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  sometimes I do a talk to experts just because my angle there is I'm not going to teach you something you don't know about the topic, but I'm going to introduce you to my framing.

• 1:04:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Maybe it's helpful to you.

• 1:04:29Logan Bartlett?

  The simplification.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe this will help you explain to others or, you know, maybe it'll inspire, sometimes it can, you know, maybe it'll remind you how important your work is or whatever.

• 1:04:40Logan Bartlett?

  So I want to talk about your book. It was a big task. We've talked about how long it was and it's called, the name of the book is What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Society. Took you six and a half years to, to write it. Why did you do it? I know it started as a blog post.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Let me tell you, if this were six years ago and someone said, you have, here's an option. You can write, you can spend the next six years writing a book. Right there, I'd say no.

• 1:05:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  I'm not going to spend six years doing any project. Life is too short. And then they say a book about society and politics and human nature. I would say definitely no. That's not even like my topic.

• 1:05:21Logan Bartlett?

  It's like Tim Urban, your, your MPS is in the high 90s and let's pick something that's going to piss off people inevitably.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And it's not what I'm most interested in.

• 1:05:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I think it's really important. That's why I write, I was going to dive in even though I didn't want to write about politics at all because I felt like this page 1000 thing we talked about, none of these, it felt, it felt a little bit, there was this cloud hanging over all of those futuristic topics I wrote about. Genetic engineering, life extension. Chronics, AI, because I was like, we're gonna fuck all of this up right now. You know, if our society is a house we live in, and that house is the only way we're gonna get to a good future is if that house is sturdy, and that, I see the foundation is crumbling, I'm not gonna be like, in the house being like, let's talk about the future. I'm like, the foundation is crumbling, like, you know, or potentially crumbling. So it did feel

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  like the root topic. It felt like the topic beneath all the other topics. And it's like, so that's why I took it on, and I don't regret taking on the topic. It's just that a book, I'm gonna spend even three years on a book, it's like, it should be one of my favorite, most Tim topics. And this was not that. And it just became that. So it is what it is. Like, I'm happy with the result. I'm happy, I think it can make a good impact, at least. At least it was, you know, but that was the impetus to get into it. It was like, I was looking around and I was like, we are going, we are declining in wisdom right now. Like,

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  collectively, we're like, mobs and shamings and like, demagogues are on the rise. Like, what? This is stuff that like, you should think other countries do, or people in the past did, like the Red Scare. And like, I'm like, we're doing this stuff now, right? As like, technology is accelerating at the unprecedented rate, and we need to be like, grownups right now, if we're not gonna fuck this up and end up in the dystopia. And so that was like, the genesis of the...

• 1:07:25Logan Bartlett?

  And so the root of the issue, or that you talk about, and there's a bunch of different things that we can go into, but basically, the book frames that were addicted, in your words, to the real politicians of Washington DC, and it talks about we have a left and right axis, but actually, you introduced the concept of having a high and low rung on those accesses, which I want to talk about. But one of the things I heard you say is, maybe three quarters of your readers at one point in time voted for Hillary?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did a survey in 2016.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  During the general election, I said, you know, who you're voting for. And it was three, three quarters Hillary, one eighth Trump and one eighth another Republican, which tells me that I would guess a little more than a quarter are Republicans then because I'm sure some Republicans are saying the other Republican is not going to win. And I'd rather have Hillary than Trump, but I'd still vote for most Republicans in most elections. So maybe I have their 30% Republican readers. And, and also, you know, I think lots of change in the I wouldn't be surprised if that I should do it again. I think I wouldn't be surprised if it's different today. More even more 50 50 or closer to it. But that that was what it was then.

• 1:08:38Logan Bartlett?

  What's, what's the feedback been like from the book? I mean, you've written about like the need to be to have approval and the need to feel gratification from people. I assume just inevitably, I have to imagine not everyone loved the book, right? So what has that been like?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I write about procrastination, you know, I do a TED talk on procrastination.

• 1:09:00Logan Bartlett?

  50 million viewers on procrastination. Everyone loves it.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Everyone, either they have the problem and they relate, or they don't. And they're like laughing at you and they're being self deprecating.

• 1:09:09Logan Bartlett?

  Or you made some good jokes on there. Like, great. Yeah.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  There's a lot of topics and even AI, which is a little controversial. No one's like hates me for what I said about it. So yeah, no, it's, it's like you said, it's like, I have a friend that was like, you don't have any haters. Why are you doing this? And I was just like, A, it feels important. B, sunk costs, man, I'm perfectionist. I'm already in it. I'm not stopping now. So the result, I will say, if I had published this in 2020, 2021, I think it would have been way bigger negative reaction than it was in 2023. I think that was a big couple of years in a lot of, and A, a lot of people who were pretty tribal, like chilling out a little bit. And B, I think just a little bit like.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Forget, I'm not gonna, I'm not cancelable because I have my own plan, but cancel culture vibe, that vibe of we will, we should try to ruin the reputation of a person who says something. It's still very present and it could have, and it goes in waves. It might, it might go back up. But at least when I published, it felt like it was a little bit less fashionable because it's all about fashion. Most of the people doing this, they're not very grown up. They're not acting grown up. And when we're not being grown up, what do we care most about? It's like approval tribalism, right? We want to be in the in-group. We want to show off, peacock, you know, for virtue signal. And we want everyone to like us and want to be popular, right? It's middle school vibe that does cancel culture and that same vibe cares so much about what is cool and what's not.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  So I think a huge amount of the people who, who participate in that are, um, are really just doing whatever's popular. Whatever's going to get them the most popularity points. And they probably did that in, when they were in middle school too, or maybe they were unpopular in middle school. And, and, and, and they, they feel like they can be suddenly in the in-group and it feels so good. I don't know what the psychology is, um, but as soon as that goes out of fashion,

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  90%, I don't know what the percent, huge hordes of people start acting kindly again. Because they're, they're not kind or mean. They're, they're social climbers. They're, they want to be popular, right? They want to, and so they will, when it, when it starts to be like, hey, it's just his opinion, you know? Don't blow out. When that becomes the thing that all the cool kids are saying, they're going to say that too. Uh, and when, when it's saying this person is dangerous and like, now we know that they're a terrible person. Let's find their old tweets and show everyone this is what as righteous people we need to do to protect marginalized people. Whatever it is, they'll say that. And so it, I, it's, so I'm, I'm paying a lot of attention to that. Trying to keep my like finger on the pulse of that because it's been, I had to for the book.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  I had to, I had to follow a ton of divisive Twitter accounts, which is just enraging also across the spectrum. I had to listen to a bunch of podcasts because I was like, I need to really have a sense of what's going on if I'm writing this book. Now I can go back to being a little bit more out of it. But I, I think that cancel culture is just, even the, the term was very helpful in making it a thing and making people see that it's a form of bullying, maybe at least some people see a lot of it. There's a whole other group that says there's no such thing as cancel culture. But I, I feel like it's a little less fashionable and I think that the, the book's reaction benefited from that in that there was plenty of negativity and, and plenty of people who. No, I got plenty of, this is so disappointing from Tim. I, you know, I used to connect with him so much and he just, or you know, Tim's, you know, he's really gone off the whatever. There's some of

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  that, but just not that much. Like, I thought there was gonna be more and I thought that, you know, there was a couple of articles, one in New Republic, I think, you know, just kind of tearing it apart. But I thought there would be more. And I also thought that the things they would be saying would be much more like ad hominem, like cutting, like this guy is not a good guy. Like this is, like, this guy's either a hack or he's a, he's a bad dude that you shouldn't, we shouldn't like, his colors, all of his other stuff. Not much of that. Most of it is saying that, you know, you know, I took on the wrong, I spent way too much time on this problem when like, there's real problems going on. When like, I, for reasons I said, I totally think that's the opposite. But, so anyway, I was heartened by the response. I was also heartened by the other

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  thing I thought in 2021, I think a lot of people secretly agreed with me and would have liked the book. But it would have harder time spreading because it would be something that would be a little scary to share. Because you see, you know, the way that these, in a scary mob environment, which America and all societies can go into. If it's, if it's like, so when there's like a little cancel culture in the air, then someone who writes something can get punished. But like, if you share it, no one cares. When there's a more cancel culture in the air, it starts to cancel the, in the book, I depict it like paint, like a smear. The smear travels to the association. So it travels to people who hire them. It travels to people who have them on their podcast. If this

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  were 2021, you might be getting some flack for having me. This is not gonna be, I mean, we'll see, but I don't think there's gonna be any of that here. It travels to people who share their stuff, who compliment their stuff, who defend them from cancellation. They might say, I disagree, but this person, we shouldn't be trying to get them fired. It travels to that person. And so, and if it's really bad, it'll go multiple degrees away. I saw, you know, I saw something, it's somewhere said something like,

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  They were criticizing someone for being in a movie with,

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  this is right in the Me Too hot zone.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  They were criticizing someone for being in a movie with Justin Timberlake because Justin Timberlake doesn't care about women because as evidenced by he was in a movie with Woody Allen, a different movie with Woody Allen. So Justin Timberlake now is smeared and anyone who's in a movie now, great, I don't know if that like actually hurt him or whatever, but now anyone, so the podcast is another example where it's like, if I am a demon, right? Because of this book, if to a certain crowd. Now I go on and now they will not forget, you know, this is like Sam Harris having Charles Murray on. Yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Now, you know, a left wing person who really wants to be popular amongst the left might not go on Sam Harris. I mean, they probably wouldn't go on Sam Harris anyway, but for a lot of reasons because he's very tarnished in that crowd, but they would, they might not go on him specifically because they can't go on someone that he also had this person. So you see what I'm saying? It's a smear, a smear web. Yeah, yeah. And, and that's by the way, not a mistake. This is psychology. This is, you know, mob psychology. It's,

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  if you can not just punish this person, but punish all the people who might defend them, you A, hinder anyone who's criticizing the mob and you also you isolate them and you make it so, so undesirable for anyone else to end up in this situation. So like a mafia. It's like the mafia. There's all these, these, these power. It's, it's a, it goes back to real.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  This is again, this organ in our head. One of the things it is natural at is this, is power dynamics between people, social dynamics, right? Because in tribe, you had to negotiate a lot of that. If you were on the unpopular crowd in a tribe. You might die, right? You might starve, you might get killed, you might get kicked out, you might never mate again. And, and, and you can imagine how someone who defends the unpopular person may be there now also on the out group with the chief. So you have to suck up to the chief. Look at middle school. This is just tribal dynamics just going. And then we grow out of that, some of us, and some of us don't, but we all have it in us still. And then a certain environment takes over and like the kind of it's in the air

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  suddenly. And all these grownups, you see who it's just, you can, it actually reveals a lot of true colors. You see who really has overcome that and they're genuinely kind out of principle. And you see who is just being kind because that's what it was, it was acceptable for grownups, it was unacceptable for grownups to act like that. Now it's acceptable? Same with bigotry. A certain kind of bigotry, it becomes okay to say, you know, to just group all white men together as a negative stereotype. Boom. All the true color, anyone who doesn't, anyone who has a principle against bigotry, doesn't jump in on that. Someone who jumps in on that, but they were really anti all other kinds of, you don't, you're not anti bigotry, you're anti unpopular bigotry. That's a huge difference. So I think a time like this reveals like, I'm sure, I'm sure Nazi Germany, if you could have gone back

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  then, revealed so many true colors. So, yeah.

• 1:17:34Logan Bartlett?

  Wait, so, so, so on the, on the distinction for people that haven't read it, so, so there's, there's left, right, there's high rung, low rung, and the distinction on high rung and low rung is low is going to be much more just beholden to the tribalism that exists within that group and sort of not willing to engage in the discourse across versus high rung, willing to hold views, but also engage and understand and have conversations or at least shift views coming at it from an intellectually pure standpoint around, around that kind of stuff. Now, one question, I guess, on this tribalism, how we ended up here. In your book, you talk about social media, you talk about cable news, you talk about whatever, all the different things.

• 1:18:20Logan Bartlett?

  Where do you think this tribalism has come from and come to be such a identity politics, right, as it's defined? Is there, is it all this social media? Is it a lack of, I don't know, what used to take the place of organized religion? And now people are defining themselves in a different way around politics and these types of things? What is the root cause of the lack of discourse that we're able to sort of have as a society?

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's many, many causes. This is like, you know, you could write whole books just on the different hypotheses of what has made this more tribal. But so without like identifying these as the causes, here's what I see as some of the major ones. You've got, first of all, the, it's like before we get to like even like media or any of these environmental changes, the structure of US tribalism is a thing that I don't think we often think about. So tribalism happens on different levels.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  1950s, it's known as a time that was very un-trivial, right? But actually, it was just as much tribalism, it was just divided. So you had, on the high level, you have patriotism versus other countries. That's Soviet Union and before that, World War II. So there was a lot of like, there had been a lot of reason for Americans to feel like a single tribe on that level. And probably a lot of bigotry and nasty, ugly tribalism stuff towards other countries in those times. It's still ugly, it's still tribalism. And then there's Republican versus Democrat, which was still a thing, you know, every

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  state race, some people are proud Democrats and lifelong Republicans and the presidential election. So there's still plenty of national tribalism. And then there is inter-party tribalism. And in the 50s, you had a ton of it because there were lots of conservatives and progressives in both parties, which is a weird concept to us today, but that's how it was. There was actually... People who are concerned that that it was actually a problem because it actually removed the power of the voter, because if the voter wants to vote for conservative things, they can't really, a conservative voter can't really, doesn't have much power because whoever they vote in is going to have a lot of conservatives and progressives in power, and it's going to mostly be amongst the party to negotiate what really happens,

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  not the voter. So they're saying there, you know, there was this, this kind of recommendation from a think tank that was saying, you know, we think this party should be more clear and divided. Again, it's kind of careful what you wish for and how things turned out, but you can see the reasoning. And so if you go back to the 60s and the 50s, I mean, people inside the parties, the factions hated each other, maybe more than they even hated the other party. They sometimes would, you know, collaborate with the other party against people in their own party. So what you have is three levels of political tribalism. There's also, of course, religious and all kinds of other tribalism you can have. And I think in a way what you want is distributed tribalism, distributed amongst different arenas and

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  also within politics, kind of vertically distributed. Because the hatred of the foreign country unites, you know, simmers the tribalism against each other. And likewise, the hatred of people within their party simmers the national divide. So the national divide didn't, couldn't have that much gravity. It was just, it just, it just only took up a little bit of space. And then a couple of things happened. The national one melts away as the Soviet, you know, World War II moves further into memory, and including people who ever experienced that level of patriotism that World War II must have engendered are just older and dying. And so more and more of the population has no memory of World War II. And the Soviet

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Union becomes less of a threat until eventually it's a non-threat in the 90s. And so you lose that upper tier, that kind of thing that glues us here, gone.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  It's a little harder to be maybe proud patriots altogether, right? And so then you also have the realignment of the parties. And this was no one's fault. It was something that if anything, it's kind of like when there's mixed, it's a little bit unstable. And it just takes like something to nudge it. And then the whole thing starts a feedback loop. So this was maybe the Civil Rights Act. More Republicans than Democrats percentage wise voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act. People often forget that. It was still close. Both parties were torn because you had northern young Democrats that were very progressive. But the southern Democrats were the least progressive people in the country. And then Republicans were the party of Lincoln.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  You know, they were for civil rights and stuff, but they also were kind of a white country club party that was icked out by multiculturalism. So you had a little bit of both. But Goldwater was the candidate and it's a whole other story, but it kind of, you know, kind of a freak rise that then went back down. He was an underdog and he voted against the Civil Rights Act. And so now you have all these black Americans and progressive Republicans, black Republicans, Republicans leaving and going to the, and now it makes less sense for the next candidate to pander to those people and to try to, and it makes maybe more so and so a bunch of southern Democrats move to their, now it makes maybe we want to almost capture those southern states. We can actually get those for the first time in a century. And so, and very quickly, the messaging now it feeds now politicians that are still in

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  this party feel ostracized and that their voters are gone. And you can see it very quickly, not quickly, it took a few decades, but it just polarizes. So now you've got no upper level and no lower level. You have the red team and the blue team. But even in the nineties, it was still on for Congress.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  They were still running based on their hometown needs, mostly. And like, whether they were Republican or Democrat, didn't really map on to the national thing so much. And there's this evidence, clear evidence, in that they have this, there's this interesting metric, which is basically partisan loyalty. It's in the, in, in, in the, I think it's as recently as the 90s, people were like, half the people voted for at least both parties in one election. So one for Democrat, one for Congress, another for President, whatever. And that has completely disappeared. Likewise, in Congress, the overlap ideologically was kind of like a sizable overlap, and that is just gone. Like, there's, the most conservative Democrat is still more progressive, voting-wise ideologically, than the most progressive Republican.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  So, you have this extreme, you know, it's like, it's anything, it's like feedback loops, these things. They happen, and once they happen, they become hard to reverse because it becomes them. So then you have these mega-cultures start to form around it. The kind of people like us that vote for that party are the kind of Americans that, and you see that, and you know, Reagan didn't talk like that at all. He was the opposite. Reagan talked like, you know, if you love America, you love your fellow Americans, and you know, we're all, are all Americans, and, you know, and Obama more recently actually talked like that, you know, that we're not a red states and blue states, we're the United States of America, right? That, that, that was the theme a lot, but early 90s, you start having a lot of Republicans.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Gingrich is famous, of course, for this, and then, you know, Pat Buchanan's 1992 speech, and he's saying, the convention, you know, you know, there's the real America, and then there's that America that, that, that is, that is for gay people, and for women in the military, and for the, you know, declining values, and then there's real Americans. And that sounds very familiar today, but then it was horrifying. People got a really negative backlash, but that... Sentiment started to kick in and then again, then it takes on a life of its own. It becomes much bigger than politics. It becomes like, obviously, I am a good person and my friends are gonna be like, well, obviously, we're on this side, we're not. And then it becomes this whole crazy thing where you're, it's, it might as well be Hitler's Germany.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  It's like the total, you know, bigotry is just the, the kind of rank stereotyping of a giant group of people who you probably don't know any of them and negative, negative stereotyping and then, you know, and, and, and so when it's, of course, race is so sensitive in the US. So bigotry against black people from a white person is completely out of fashion. I think in almost all circles, I'm sure there are some circles that it's, but it is really out of fashion where it's, and, and, and it, it sounds to us like bigotry, like an awful person would say that. Political bigotry doesn't have any stigma at all. You can say, of course, the, the right wingers with their blah, blah, blah, right? And with no stigma, again, true colors, you see kind of who is totally into bigotry, they

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  just are also into being fashionable and who is, they don't talk like that. That's, and that's what I'm talking about, the high rung, low rung, and the high rungs, no one talks about half of America is the problem. It's just, it's, it's not true, first of all. It's not accurate. It's, it's, it's not nuanced at all. It's complicated. Every individual is complicated. Society is insanely complicated. So it's just kind of like, um, it's like a dumb part of your brain is in a mode where I call it political Disney world. You're in a mode where it's like a Disney movie. There's protagonists and then there's like, there's Aladdin and Jafar and, you know, it's like, obviously the bad guys, obviously the good guys, and obviously we're right about everything and smart and they're dumb and wrong about everything and every problem is their fault. We are the completely correct, completely smart, completely righteous, good people.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  And they are the bad, dumb, evil people and every problem in our country is their fault, right? That is not real. That's, no thinking adult could ever think that's how it is, but we stop being thinking adults when we get into this mode. So now you can, you compound this with.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  The changes in the media, right? So you had, again, it was kind of, it was, you had these, these television stations, ABC, NBC, CBS, that had to broadcast to the whole country. If one of them started being blatantly right wing or left wing, they would lose all the viewers. They would become the joke, the laughing stock. If they started being less accurate than the others, they'd become a laughing stock. So there was this pressure, this incentive to keep them near kind of the media north star, where they're being reasonably neutral and accurate. And then cable TV, talk radio, that fairness doctrine goes away, which is a law that we used to prevent one-sidedness. And so suddenly you have Rush Limbaugh, you have Fox News, you have MSNBC, you have these stations and these voices who are very much out in the table.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Instead of telling people, instead of having their political leanings be very secret, which is what it used to be, they're very clearly on one side. And instead of telling you who's gonna win the election, who might win the election, they're saying who ought to win the election. And it's very clear, we all agree that there's the good candidate. That is not news, that's weird, right? If people in the 60s, I think, or 70s, or even 80s, if they saw today, they'd be like, what is, this isn't news, this is appalling, this is like so unprofessional and ridiculous, it's like trash. But that's what we have. And that's where almost everyone gets their news, is from something that is basically political junk food. It's catering to kind of our primitive minds, our tribal minds, and it is doing so by firing up the tribe about how good and right and we are confirming that political Disney

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  World worldview over accuracy, neutrality, all out the, out the window. Then you have social media on top of that, the internet starts, social media starts. I think social media can actually, can, can be good in some ways too. It becomes hard to really, for a mob to truly silence anything when there's social media, but it has been very good for echo chambers and even more so for scaring people. It's, it's, it's a digital mob is a new concept. Now, there were never digital mobs in the human history before, very recently, a decade, basically. So we, the digital mob, it springs on the scene, scares the shit out of everyone, and everyone starts saying what the digital mob wants to hear. And so... And then there's all these other structural factors that are super boring that I won't

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  go into, you know, campaign finance, lectures are way more expensive now, gerrymandering the red and blue districts, there's so many more, so it used to be a lot more purple districts, and purple districts incentivize voters to vote for the most reasonable person on their side, the person that can win over the other side, they have to win the general election. When it's a red district, it's who can be the reddest red, who hates the blue the most, and likewise, and this is both parties fault, Republicans have done more of it, but it's a lot of times in agreement where they'll say, if we turn these two purple districts into one red, one blue, neither of us have to spend money on either, they don't have to spend money on them, the national party, so that's been bad, there's a, there's a big list of those, and it seems like a lot of different factors are all feeding into

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  this story, this, this problem, and it's led us to a place that I kind of dub, hypercharged tribalism, it's like, you have distributed tribalism, which I think is the best, and then you have kind of concentrated, but then concentrated, if, if the factors are right, can turn it to hypercharged, hypercharged is when it subsumes everything, it's not just, no one's arguing about tax policy, some people are, that's not tariffs, that's not what we're sitting there hating each other about, it's that there's the good kind of American and the bad, evil kind of American, that's something we all have in us, and it happens to be politics, happens to be politics, that has, that has exploded that into, it could have been religion in another time, it could have been, you know, east versus western, north, south, and in this case, it happens to be politics, but it's, politics isn't

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  really what's going on, it's that we're having a, a wave of a flare up, a very, very common human problem.

• 1:32:05Logan Bartlett?

  So, social justice fundamentalism is basically the term that you use, I mean, I think the, this is a very loaded term, the woke-ism of stuff, but the book itself has three chapters-ish dedicated to S J F.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a big part of the book.

• 1:32:22Logan Bartlett?

  Big part of the book, and one chapter dedicated to like, the rise of Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, and Fox News, and all that, the proportionality of those two things, why did you do it that way?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  It wasn't, I didn't, I wouldn't have designed it that way, it doesn't really make sense, it was that, I initially was just gonna take on the social justice side, I was gonna do, I was gonna build this framework, talk about the history, and then use this one thing that's happening, not as, this is the problem. This is a symptom of the problem and we look at it up close and it's, I think it's a huge problem. I think it's damaging. By the way, I think it's the biggest problem for social justice causes. I think progressives should be the most upset about what's happened here, but I think it's a great friend of Trump. I think, you know, the far right loves woke ism, but anyway. So that was, I was going to take that on. I didn't expect to make it as thorough, but it was just, I was like, if you're going to do this, you have to do it right. And it's also, I did think it was interesting. Once you really start digging

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  into the history in this, what is the really far left ideology? What even is it? What does that mean? And how did it develop? And how does, how does an ideology that such a small number of people actually subscribe to and understand have such crazy influence over the country that's supposed to be kind of democratic, you know, based on what the will of the people. So, and then just there's so much psychology and victimhood culture and cancel culture and all of this. So anyway, there was a lot to say there and that turned long. And then I kind of thought that even though I can say a hundred times in the book, this is not, but I'm not saying that our problem is this movement. That's blinders on. I'm saying our problem is this giant trend that emerges from human nature sometimes

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  that's happening now at the worst possible time. And there are lots of symptoms of it all around the world, but in the US multiple, and this is one that I'm going to focus on. It's still going to get read as this is, this is Tim's anti woke book about he thinks the problem is, is, is social justice, wokeness, whatever. So I said, it was, and to me, it was also, it was painful to, I had a few paragraphs in basically showing all the parallels on the right, but I was seeing so many parallels on the right. I was seeing the MAGA movement's another perfect example of a symptom of the, a demagogue, a classic demagogue who lies, who will do anything to get in power, has no actual principles, and who will undermine the core pillars of the country for, for gain, right? Classic demagogue.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  That person is always here. There was always a hundred, a thousand of those guys who want to run right every year. Some of them, one of them won. What's going on? That's part of this story to me. Why is this bully mob movement and this demagogue both rising up at the same time and helping each other? So I said, it's, it's, it's worth a chapter. But by the time it was all done, I just had spent so many more years on the other problem. And so, yeah, so, so some people will still read it as that's bias or whatever. I wasn't trying to even make an equivalency or not. It's not that I'm saying they're the same. It's that I'm saying that, that, that they are both wrecking balls outside the house we live in and that I'm anti wrecking ball and I'm pro house. And so that makes me both sides is I'm sure. But like, I'm not saying that inside the house, the left and the right are equal. I'm saying that they're, I haven't

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  even expressed my opinions on left or right. But the wrecking balls of all kinds outside the house are a problem.

• 1:35:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I mean, the cancellation stuff is, especially within academia, it's pretty crazy. I didn't realize, just going through the list of people that have been revoked as speakers, like Justice John Roberts being revoked from Butler, Condoleezza Rice from Rutgers, Christine Lagarde from Smith College. It's, it's super, the examples you give of-

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  It's almost like with someone like Christine Lagarde. I mean, she's like the first female head of the-

• 1:36:00Logan Bartlett?

  IMF, right.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, the IMF, right. And she massively, was it Wellesley?

• 1:36:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, uh, Smith.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Smith, women's college. She would be massively aspiring to so many people. And it's almost like, it's like every, you ask anyone alone in a room, if you've got all the faculty and all the students alone, you say, do you think it makes sense to actually kick her out from the cancel spotters? Like, you know, 90%, I believe, even at Smith, a really progressive place, would be like, well, no, let's not, I'm not gonna like revoke the thing, but like, maybe it wasn't the right choice. And yet, publicly now, someone says, she shouldn't come. And it's like, dare me. I dare any of you to say, to say otherwise. And suddenly there's this, everyone starts saying, yeah, it's a bully in, in, in, in middle school, saying that kid's a loser. Suddenly, it's all these- Sidekicks start coming on and they say, "Yeah," you know, and the petition. And who wants to be the professor to say, "This isn't what a college should be. This is insane."

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  And they're all thinking it and they're all having that private conversation. And so they, and it's just, and there's hundreds of these fire the website, you know.

• 1:37:00Logan Bartlett?

  Hundred examples of it and.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  Hundreds of examples and, and it's going like this and it's. Uh, and it's, and by the way, disinvitations is just the tip because there's the shutdown, which is they seeker comes and they, they either won't let people in, they'll forcefully, or they'll, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll block the entrance or they'll scream in the thing until people give up on the talk. Uh, or more, the much bigger part of the iceberg is all the people who are saying, "We want to invite this speaker. It's just not worth it. Let's just get someone else." So it's the same thing with all the, the books that are canceled. How about all the books that sit on the publisher's desk that never get published? How about all the books that never get written? Those are the much bigger part of the iceberg than the famous cancellation stories.

• 1:37:39Logan Bartlett?

  There are so many fascinating examples of social justice fundamentalism and the woke-ism. The academic thing, I just want to read this off, just, everyone should read your book. But, uh, the proportionality of people donating, uh, or supporters of different political ideologies within universities, I just found to be crazy. And so I'm just going to rattle it off for the sake of people hearing it. But it used to be, I think you quoted two to one to four to one between Democrat to Republican within academia. Uh, STEM fields now are four and a half within chemistry. Uh, the five and a half within mathematics, uh, between Democrats and Republicans.

• 1:38:18Logan Bartlett?

  Psychology, 12 to one, philosophy, 11 to one, English, 27 to one, sociology, 27 to one, anthropology, 42 to one, interdisciplinary studies, not a single example.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  And those are all the social justice fields.

• 1:38:32Logan Bartlett?

  All the social justice fields. Not a single, uh, Republican that.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Maybe in the whole country.

• 1:38:38Logan Bartlett?

  In the whole country, which is, it's just, it's crazy. I mean, that's the, and the fact, I guess the interesting thing for me is it used to be like, and you talk about this in the book, but academia was the bastion of, of free speech and different thought and just, you know, at least hearing the other side of the ideals in the sixties and seventies. Like it used to be that the left was the ones bringing in the progressive thought. And that was where the controversy was coming from. Whether Vietnam or civil rights or whatever it is, now it's actually the opposite of all this, that we're not actually letting these people on campus or to speak at all, which I just, it's an interesting.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Well, and there's, there's really two reasons, I would say. The first is like, who really wants to suppress free speech? The powerful. If you're in power, you like the status quo. Free speech is not the friend of the status quo. You want everyone to have to shut up and do what the powerful say. In the 50s and 60s, when all these free speech, Berkeley and stuff, and free speech was the main thing in those 60s protests was one of the main things. The left was not powerful. The right had the money, had the power. But today, the top, like I have some crazy number, like of the top 50 earning congressional districts, something like 48 or 47 are blue, right? And culturally, who can get you fired? Not the right. When, when, when the right hates me, which they do plenty of the time too,

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  I don't even care. It doesn't have, they had no power, no effect to do anything. The left, if they hate me enough, can kind of, I can, can kind of really hurt my career. So it's a little bit of that, where it's that the now the left is powerful culturally and financially, maybe not politically all the time, but culturally and financially. And so, yeah, free speech is no longer so fun. But also, it's the fact that in a somewhat purple environment, diverse environments like diversity. They're friendly to diversity. So when you have even four to one, even if it's for, you know, 75% or 80% Democrats on campus, that's a sizable minority, a vocal enough minority where people appreciate

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  the minority, they appreciate the differences. And this is, there's studies on this, many studies, as long as that, when that 20% starts going down to 10, 5, even just at 5%, now the environment has gone from a little bit, you know, purplish blue to blue, blue. And that, a blue, blue or red, red environment is going to be much more hostile to the other side and hostile to the concept of opinion diversity and viewpoint diversity in general. And so as these things, it's a feedback loop. As there's a little bit of more hostility towards the, the right. Wing on campus, they just some of them filter off to think tanks, a little bit worse, more than filter off. Suddenly it's getting bluer and bluer, more hostility starts to happen.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  It becomes scarier for those people to speak up. So that the the big point here is that you don't have to go to zero Republicans to essentially have that effect. When you have the, when the ratio is four to one, that one does a huge amount of work in keeping the the four honest. So when all those progressive papers come out, they're going to have to go through and progressive ideas and progressive think they're going to have to go through the filter. A conservative filter, which is really good for truth.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  And and there's going to be debate. And even when I was in college in 2004 at Harvard, a super progressive place. There were lots of debates, lots of vocal conservatives. Today it is just because it's not that there aren't, they aren't, they're not there, they're there in lesser amount. But it got into a critical mass where now it doesn't make sense for anyone to speak up. So it might as well be zero. And now you just have an echo chamber, which is, I got so much intellectual invigoration. I went to college pretty bright, bright blue and left still pretty blue. But I was so invigorated by watching smart conservatives say their thing, and especially debate. Oh, I went to like so many debates. I just would always go to Pinker and Larry Summers and and, you know, Michael Sandel. And I, you know, I would just go to so many different debates and like, I just thought it was so interesting.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  And I just feel like kids today are legit not getting that. They would be, they would be fired for saying what they said in debates back then. Anyway, it's, it's, it's sad because college has two huge things. It educates our future adults, our future society and teaches them how to think. It teaches them the response to dissent, which is now they're being taught their responses to punish the person. And of course it produces knowledge. It's where we get our research and knowledge. And so it's a really bad institution to go south.

• 1:43:04Logan Bartlett?

  The you, you concluded the book with awareness and courage as the important things to help find our way out of this. Allowing people to really speak their mind, have the bravery to do it. One, know it exists and two, to have the bravery to do it. And I, maybe that's the answer. I left. I left yearning for more of a silver bullet just because it's such a big problem that we have in trying to communicate across the aisle and political spectrums and all that.

• 1:43:40Logan Bartlett?

  Now that the book's published and you've had time to digest it, you've gotten feedback on it. Are there any specific tactics or things, if someone's listening to this and they realize like, I've been in my echo chamber either way, I assume more of my listeners are liberal than they are conservative in their politics. But you know, I have no idea.

• 1:44:03Logan Bartlett?

  Do you have any advice of like breaking out of this and just trying to be more open minded to the high rungness? I assume most people think they're high rung. Certainly if they're willing to listen to whatever, two plus hours of us talking about this, they probably are a little bit more high rung. But like, what would you encourage people to help break this mold in this tribalism that we have?

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  So the reason I say awareness and courage and not more concrete examples, because there's could be a whole book on concrete examples. Maybe we should have rank choice voting. Maybe we should change the way primaries work. Maybe we, you know.

• 1:44:36Logan Bartlett?

  I like all those.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's just a different, that's for, that's for a political scientist to really write about, or if I spend another six years, which I'm not going to do. And so I do think there are some concrete things that can help. But to me, the reason I have these kind of much more kind of abstract solutions is because I actually think if my prescription here was, I think our society is rotten to its core. It's fucked. We need to, we need a new kind of society. We need a revolution. That's a tall order, right? And I'm happy to say that that's not what I think we need. I think that the house that we're in, this lowercase l liberal democracy is the right house to get us to the future. I'm open to other suggestions, but I haven't heard one yet that sounds better.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  And when I talk to most people, most people, left, right and center, agree with that. They, and so being agreeing with the liberal house means being pro free speech, very, very pro free speech. It means being, you know, individualism and, and just, you know, just general kind of equality of opportunity, all the things that, you know, grew up hearing about. Most people want that and most people do not want political Disney world to sit there and, you know, there's some people that are just really mired in it. Some people say my, my parent has just totally gotten sucked into it or whatever, or my sister or whatever. But

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  most people I talk to are Pretty much just like, yeah, like I'm sick of political tribalism. It's super annoying and like, I just want people to, I just want like government to function well and like be able to compromise and us to be able to make better decisions. And so therefore, but, but they're not saying it out loud right now because it's become scary. So that's nice as opposed to say, we need to revolt. I'm like, no, no, no. We just need people to, to resume saying and what they think and defending the house that we're all in against any wrecking balls outside of it, whether it's, I think, go into, in the book, I spend half the book explaining why I think wokeness, not liberal social justice, which is the opposite of wokeness to me, Martin Luther King style, which is Martin Luther

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  King said, "The house is great, but it's, it's failing in some areas. We need to make a better house so that it supports, so, so that all people in it are getting what they were promised." Wokeness says, "The house is rotten to its core." You know, it's, it's a Marxist ideology. It says, "It is inherently oppressive, this house. It is the master's house. It'll always be the master's house. Knock it down." So whether that's from the left or from the right, you know, Trump undermining trust in the election to me as, as, is wrecking ball outside the house. That is, that is a drill into the foundation. Um, and so a lot of people agree with this, but I, so the, the first thing is awareness. Just to, first of all, where am I being tribal? Where am I totally doing confirmation bias and trying to confirm my existing beliefs

• 1:47:23Speaker 01

  much more than I'm actually trying to, um, get to the truth and open to changing my mind? We all have these things where it's like, you know, you're just, you're, you're too emotional about this topic, you're, it's too tied to your identity, it's too fun to have this viewpoint, it's too convenient to have this viewpoint with all your friends having it too. For whatever reason, you're not open to changing your mind. So be aware of that because you're not thinking. You're doing a very primitive thing, which is you, you've stopped playing with ideas intellectually and you're now playing with them tribally. Um, and stop doing that because your brain is too awesome to like make it, you're, you're letting the ideas be your boss. You work for the ideas now and you'll read all the right things to confirm it. You are your, you're, you are those ideas loyal servant. You're the disciple of that and fuck that.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  You're way too impressive and smart to do that with your own brain. Like you be the boss of your ideas, which means you're down to change them. There's no idea that's too sacred to argue against or change. So first, think about yourself and then concentric circles. Think about the people around you. Are you in an echo chamber at times? Who's enforcing that? Is it you? Is it someone else? Is it the whole group's kind of culture? Is it the vibe? Is it something where we actually would all rather not be in this? If someone we just could just break out of it? Or is there, would it go really badly? And it's not saying that you should always try to break out of that. If your family is super blue and you know that it's going to hurt your relationship with them to say it, you know, maybe don't give up, maybe over time. But I would say your family is more important than any of this. So like, don't hurt your relationships for this, but maybe seek out some people also that can be like this.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  Or if you think a group is, you think, you know, I can, this, we can be better than this. Let's work on your own group and try to make it more of what I call the opposite of an echo chamber, an idea lab where it's a safe space to say what you think because no one takes it personally. And people like to kick ideas around and people disagreement is cool as opposed to an echo chamber where it's all about, we all agree. And then, and then finally, you know, like what, what, what are the big things going on? That's what my book is about. You know, read books like mine and lots of others and try to see what you think about, what's the big story going on in society? This is awareness. This is all about you getting clear headed about what is the right way for things to be going and wrong and what we should be doing. Then courage is the second thing because if you, there's a lot of people who are aware of all this,

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  but they're not, they're keeping it to themselves or to their little conversations. And that just doesn't do anything. You're not, you're, you're, you know, the worst thing you can do is actually pander to the people you disagree with because it's popular or because you're scared not to. Because now you're actually, you know, if there's a boat we're in, headed towards that fork in the river. And I was talking about utopia and dystopia. You're actually paddling towards dystopia with them. So at least take your, first thing, take your rope, your oar out of the river and don't, just stay silent and don't say stuff you don't believe out of pressure or out of popularity. Then if you can, start rowing in the other direction and going against the grain maybe. And maybe it's not that socially fun, but like. If you're part of the liberal democracy and you care about the house and you care about

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  the future, like it's kind of your part. It's like you recycle. Why do you recycle? Because it's kind of doing your part. Well, I think you should be, you know, trying to speak out against tribalism and against kind of collective stupidity. And then finally, if you can, concentric circles, go. If you're not going to get fired, I don't want people to get fired. Maybe, maybe they can be a martyr, great, but most people aren't going to get fired. They're just going to deal with some backlash and maybe not even that much. I thought I was going to get more than I got. Go public. Start talking about this in classrooms, at your company. And again, talking about this, I'm not saying you should talk about why a political side is right or wrong. I'm saying why political tribalism, taking over companies and institutions and shutting down discourse and killing our ability

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  to have productive discussions and to be wise as a, as a collective for the future. That's what I'm talking about. Push back against that. So that's why I wrote this book to get people in the zone where they could like read it and be like, fuck yeah, like, yes, I'm going to start talking about this. That's what I'm hoping. Hoping I can change some minds and also fire up some people who already agreed with me to start speaking out. That is not a silver bullet. And I'm not sure there is one. Maybe there is. And I just, I just think first, let's go for the low hanging fruit. If we could just do that, we'd already be a lot better than we are now. Then I think there should be a lot of people writing hopefully great books about specific changes we can make to change the environment and tweak it so that we make good decisions for the future. But, but yeah, that's, that's not what I tried to do here.

• 1:51:39Logan Bartlett?

  One thing I, I, I heard you say at some point, I think it's a Paul Graham quote about keeping your identity small. Why is that an important quote to you? And what do you think? Like, how does that actually apply to your life?

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just think of your identity as kind of like a, well, it's, it's, at its core, it's just like a, an awareness, like a, a human awareness working its way through life. That's like the, the most basic thing that it is. And then, then there's a backpack on your back. And every more specific thing you attach to your identity is like a rock in that backpack. And I don't think you should have nothing. I don't think it's, it's okay to be like, yeah, I'm the kind of person who this or like, I, I'm like a proud American or.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Like, I love this. I'm the kind of person who has a dog. I love, you know, it's like, you're gonna have some things, having a personality, you're gonna have some things that are just, it's kind of fun to just have some stuff that's part of who you are.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  But when you have too much, and especially certain things, they're like big rocks and that backpack can get very heavy.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  And it can be of a kind of like a, another analogy could be that it's like, it's like bars and eventually you're like inside of a cage that you built for yourself. So a classic one I think is a bad thing is to be like, I'm a proud progressive or conservative or Republican or Democrat. All you're doing is saying, I cede my independent mind to that corporation, the Democrat Party of America, or to this ideology or this concept. Why? Why would you box yourself in like that? Maybe, if, by the way, if you think conservatives are right about most stuff, and the conservatism is, you just really tap in, great, you can still be mostly have, your views tend to fall

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  conservative and, but, but, but, if you say, I would never have a progressive policy viewpoint or vote for a Democrat.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  Because that's not who I am. All you've done is removed your independence from the equation. And now it's like that, that's, by the way, that's exactly where like those big parties want you, is just blindly in their pocket, just like, uh, Apple wants you to be, that I'm the kind of person who has an iPhone, not just I happen to have an iPhone because it seemed like the best phone right now. And if, you know, they want you to, I get Apple products, right? That's great for them. And, and by the way, I think that that one is a lot less harmful, because, okay, so just say you're a tribal Apple person, which I am. I think that one at least is so maybe the downside for me is I'll maybe have a little bit less exploration in tech products, which can be fun.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  An upside is that I don't have to spend that time doing that. A downside is that maybe there's a better Android phone here and there, or maybe there's a better tablet that I'll just never get and maybe I'm overpaying. That's minor compared to letting your seeding your intellect to a political party or to, you know. So I think it once you start saying, or even worse, another bad one is career. I am a lawyer. No, you're not. You're someone who's practicing law right now. You know, if you are a lawyer, then it's going to feel like an identity crisis to change careers. Um, I'm, I live in this city. I'm a New York City person through and through. It's like, well, okay, maybe this isn't right for you in 10 years and you're not going to even consider that now.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  So with all of those things, um, if, if, if now I'm a, a proud Democrat lawyer, lives in New York, um, who like, who loves to travel this to, to beaches, but not to mountains and a hundred other things, um, you're just, you dug in your heels in these things. You've backed yourself into an unpleasant corner. So the point is that it's, that we all have a kind of a tendency, some of us more than others to do this. And partially is because it feels like that's what a personality is. And if you don't do that, you're boring. You're, what are you, just a person? You're nothing. And that's what gives me my person. And it's actually not true, actually.

• 1:55:53Speaker 01

  Like, uh, I think a lot of people feel like they're boring if they don't have either like a job they can stick to themselves that sounds cool, or a bunch of really strong opinions, or a bunch of like quirks. And it's like, um, at least I don't judge my friends that way. I want to be friends with people who are fun to talk to, who are like, nice people, who are funny, who laugh a lot, you know, and who like laugh at the same things I laugh at and who think of them. And it's, and it's, and it's, I don't know, and I don't know anyone who's like, I want to be friends with the, you know, with New York lawyers like me. No one's there. So the point is, it's just like, I, I think that, um, we do this as kind of a shield. And it's like, one, and it, the Paul Graham. Quote is so good because it's a reminder that just put the backpack down.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  You can just knock these bars down that you've set up and it's so liberating. I can just like, oh, I'm just a, I'm just a wandering guy figuring it out. And this is what I like right now, and this is what I believe right now. And that might all be different next year. Freedom and suddenly all this creativity and openness and exploration can emerge from that.

• 1:56:55Logan Bartlett?

  Do you have any blogs that you've written where your thoughts have really evolved or changed? Or that you regret the wait, but why posts that sit out there?

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  Usually I, so there's every post I, if I go back and reread a post. I'm always like wincing from either like the slang I was using back then. Or the, um, the fact that I've learned a lot more now. There's a lot of posts where I'm like, whoa, that was, I have such a more nuanced thought or that's just wrong now. But I don't actually mind those. I'm like, that's fine. That was being 2014. And the date's right at the top there. Um, and so I'm like, that's, it's, uh, it's like an old picture of me. It's like, whatever. So I don't usually have any problem with those. I'm like, that's okay. Um, uh, and I think, you know, I, I, I, I'm proud of most of them. I think most of them hold up really well. There are, there's like, there's some like, um, again, I, I don't go back and read them that often.

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  So I think I probably would have a lot more answers if I had to go read the whole thing. I'd be like, oh, fuck it. There's like all these that I can't believe I said that publicly. The very first post, this is so old now, it's almost not even relevant, but it's called seven ways to be insufferable on Facebook. And it was fully me saying, I want to get some buzz for this new blog.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  And I think it's a funny post. I think I make some good points in it. And I, it was an early take on social media. It was like image crafting. Look at all this image crafting we're doing.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  But it was just kind of like mean. I don't know. I feel like looking back on it, I'm like, that's not me. And that's like, and I feel like a lot of. My readers, they come to it, but why? Because they can, they, it helps them feel comfortable in their skin and like, and that, that is who I am and who I want to be. And so I like, and I look back at that, I'm like, I'm like, I feel like if my big readers, who really like my stuff, go back and read the first post, I feel like they're, it's like, it's, it's mean just in that I'm like, basically making fun of people who are just like, like, why are you posting? Why are you telling all of us that you like had this for lunch? It's so like boring, but like, people are doing that because they're lonely and they're just sharing with their friends. And like, so I just felt, I, I felt bad about that one, like pretty soon after. And I, so, so that, that's one.

• 1:58:58Logan Bartlett?

  You have a TED Talk that has 50 million views on YouTube. I think it's one of the most popular TED Talks of all time.

• 1:59:08Logan Bartlett?

  It's about procrastination and how people procrastinate, how you procrastinate.

• 1:59:14Logan Bartlett?

  Are there any methods for dealing with procrastination? I, I had heard you say that you actually have a coworker or somebody you work with that actually has access to your screen to watch what you're doing at all times? Like, are there any tactics?

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  I have so many methods.

• 1:59:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, so what are?

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  And, and, and, and they, they're each for different things. I, I've, so the worst method by far is underwriting the problem and thinking like, I'm just not going to procrastinate tomorrow. I'm just going to get up tomorrow and unlike today and all the other days tomorrow, I'm going to just crush it. That's a terrible method because that's your dumb brain being delusional. And that's how you'll do it day after day, after day after day. You should continue to think tomorrow will be different. So methods are good.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  One method is the one that you just mentioned, which is like, like in the old days, when I was in school, I'd have a free period and I'd be hanging out with my friends. And then I'd be like, it's five of, I have to go to class. And I really didn't want to go to class. I wanted to stay and hang out with my friends. I was having fun, I was like, oh, I have to go to class now.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  But I went to class because I had to because there was external pressure to. If I didn't, bad things would happen. I had to go, so I would just get up and go. And it wasn't like torture. I would just be like, okay, I gotta go to class. See you later. And I get up and go and then you kind of forget it and you're in class and it's fine. Once you're there, it's actually not so bad, you know? And it's that little moment of like, I don't want to, but I have to and then you do it.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  So part of a, I think a problem for a lot of today's procrastinators, especially ones working at home with a lot of like freedom is there's no one making them go to class. So it's like that. It's like, I should be, oh, it's nine 20 a.m. I said, I'm gonna start writing at nine 30 and I should have that feeling of like, but I gotta do it. So I gotta sit down and start doing it. But there is no class starting. That's just a me rule in my head. I can just. So and even then I won't say to myself, oh, I'm gonna skip the rule. I'll say, no, no, I'm gonna do it. I'm just gonna like do it in a second. Go do some other stuff and sit down at the computer and I'm like, well, I'm not gonna start writing right now. It's in a second. I'm just gonna, suddenly it's 11, suddenly it's one, right?

• 2:01:17Speaker 01

  And, um, and so I will have my way but wise manager of lots of things, Alicia. It's like she does a little of everything.

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  And she deals with me. She has to deal with my shortcomings day in and day out. So she's very used to it. Um, one of the things was like, let's co-work. And during COVID, it became let's co-work on Zoom. You sit next to me or I'll share my screen. And now I'm in class, like it's again, it's not that like it's, you don't need. It's not like there's a mountain you have to climb. There's just a bump you have to get over. You need something to push you over the bump and alone, it's just like, there's not enough momentum. So even just having someone who I respect, who's going to, uh, be shaming me if I'm not doing this, it's just push me over the thing. And then I'm working again, it's like class. Once I'm actually writing, I'm often like, I'm having fun. Like, and I get kind of like in a flow and I'm like, this is great. So it's not rational. It's not like I hate writing and I'm tortured and I'm doing it.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  It's that it's just starting writing and then you get into momentum. And then the perfectionist in my head that will also go down other spirals will also sometimes get kind of addicted to the writing and get kind of into it. And then suddenly I want to have a great day then. So that's one. Another one is I will have, I have these two friends.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  They're YouTubers Philip Detmer and CGP Gray and we talk every week. And One of us will say, I have to finish this thing for next week, so I have to do this. Either every day I have to do something, I'll send an emoji when it's done, or else I'll send you each 200 bucks. Or by the end of the week, I have to show you this is done. And you have to be honest. You can't lie and not so you have to. And so that is very effective. These are all just ways of getting external. Now, this is, this is the immediate duct taping the boat that's not, that's leaking solutions. If you really want to fix it, you have to get deeper into psychology and build different habits, which we could talk about forever. But like, that's something I'm also just working on is like, what is the psychology here?

• 2:03:21Speaker 01

  How do I turn it? How do I flip a switch over time that can make me not need these things? And I'm, I'm working on it. I have more to say about that in a future post sometime.

• 2:03:33Logan Bartlett?

  AI best friends and AI girlfriends slash boyfriends. It's something that feels pretty dystopian to me, but I'm not actually sure it's wrong. Do you think we're going to live in a world in which some of our best friends are actually AI? Or that people are in relationships with chatbots in different ways?

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  I think we are, and I'm unsure if it's right or wrong.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  Or if it's good or bad. And I don't think it's anything morally wrong about it. Whether it's going to have a positive or negative effect. It seems to people today, and me too, probably like first instinct, this is bad. Right? People are going to not be socializing with their real friends and they're going to be like stuck, you know, inside talking to their AI friends and whatever.

• 2:04:25Speaker 01

  But I saw a tweet or someone quote or something that someone said, extroverts think the internet makes people lonelier. Introverts may think the internet makes people less lonely. And I'm like, I think that's a lot of what's going on is extroverts will always be horrified at a concept like this. They're like, this isn't real. This isn't real life. This isn't real socialization. You're in the internet, you're on a Reddit thread, like get outside, right? Introverts are saying, this is the first time I've found a community. This is the first time I can be myself and have all these friends. So I think that's a big part of it. I think like, of course, extroverts won't like this. And I think they should take, they should have some humility and think about what's it like to not be them? Someone with a lot of friends should be very, you know, slow to comment on this and think, what would it be like? There's a lot of people that have no friends. They go to work, they talk to their colleagues or whatever.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  They leave, there's no one to call. They wake up in the morning on a, they're a single and they wake up on a Saturday morning and there's just no one to hang out. That's a lot of people's reality. Or there's a couple of friends they'll see once a month for a drink and they're just deeply lonely, of course, is like such a human, it's like a, it's a core need, right? It's we're social species. So that inclines me to think that it might be a little like social media, there's a wild west phase where like at first it's just like all these people that end up getting convinced to commit suicide, just all really awful things start to happen and, you know, people go off the map in depression. And I think maybe then it matures into a place when the AI friends are very integrated and they're real friends and it's great. And it's a little like, when I look at like a very weird Reddit thread, like a very weird subreddit, and I see all these people like joking and there's all these private jokes, I don't get on it.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  I'm like, this is clearly a good thing, I think, for those people. Like, you know, maybe they'd be outside more, seeing people more, but like, they are socializing right now. They're getting all that, they're getting a lot of what they need there. And I don't think these are real extroverts, stuck on Reddit all the time. I think there's a, there's like the, you know, the Myers-Briggs thing, that second thing, N versus S. I mean, these are all like INTP or INTJs. I did a survey of my own readers. It's like, it's like 80% of the world are S's. This is like, you have to know that. Basically, N is like your heads up in the clouds, you're like thinking a bunch of like other versus S, you're like in the room with the, 80% of the world's S's and like 80% of my readers are N's. And I think Reddit's probably like that. It's just like, these are a certain profile and I think that it could be really good for them.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  As far as like romantic relationships, I think it's interesting. Now, the one thing that is very scary is looking at Japan, you have a lot of, they're ahead of us on all this stuff. You know, you have sex dolls and you have like cuddle,

• 2:06:53Speaker 01

  rooms that you can like pay someone to cuddle with you and you have a big sex industry and you have fewer kids. Because if you're a lot, you know, there are at least a sizable portion of men are getting what they need now that they would otherwise seek out, a family, a wife, and then that would turn into kids. I think you could see a decline in marriages and real, real life marriages where kids are, you know, and kids, maybe, I mean, I'm just thinking now, maybe someone and their AI wife have a, a kid with, um, your AI husband have a kid with a sperm donor and, or whatever, a surrogate, and then they have a kid and they actually raise it together. I mean, the AI people are going to be real people like. And so maybe they legitimately, and someone grows

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  up with a person dad and an AI mom, and it doesn't seem to matter.

• 2:07:41Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, requests for wait, but why on sex dolls in Japan and AI culture and cuddle rooms?

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  They're gonna be ahead of, if you want to see wherever any of this industry's going, just look there, because they're like five, 10 years ahead.

• 2:07:52Logan Bartlett?

  I want, I want you to do the deep dive, so I don't have to. Uh, I think that'll probably lead me into some more weird forums, but, um, so, so Elon, uh, you're friends with them. Uh, I don't want to, um, ask too much about, uh, yeah, how, how he operates or all that stuff, but I guess interesting question of what you've done blog posts on what makes him like special and unique as an operator. If you were to distill down what was tens of thousands of words and, and I guess that was what, 2015, 16 that you did all those posts on it? So you've had communication with him since then. What trait or traits

• 2:08:33Logan Bartlett?

  or characteristics or like if you could, if you could extrapolate all of that stuff and actually say, here's one or two, just like very unique things that you wish more people had or more people emulated that he does so, so well, what would that be?

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  It's interesting because when I tried to figure out like, why is this guy able to do what he does? He has a lot of things. He's extremely smart, right? He's a lot of money to work with. Um, he's, he's ambitious, you know, he has, he has these big goals. But what was interesting was, I think it was a reflection on us, on the rest of us more than him. It's almost like what he lacks that a lot of us have. So I talked about our brain is an organ that is made for a certain thing. And it's going to misfire all kinds of ways in today's world. And so we have a weird relationship with risk. You know, starting a company seems scary. It's not dangerous.

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  So scary, you know, it should something you're like, oh, I can't quit my job and start a company. What if I had to? What, well, what if? And if you actually play it out often, it's like nothing that bad is going to happen, actually. And this is a dream of yours. It could change your whole life and you really want to build this thing. And you're not because what? Because you might have to get a smaller apartment and then what? And then some people talk about you behind your back and then you, you, you feel frustrated for a little and then so what? Right? And so there's a lot of examples like that of, of, of things that are, um, that seem scary to us that aren't actually scary. I think he's like five standard deviations above the mean at this particular quality,

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  which is ability to override, um, so many of these weird human irrationality traits that we have. We, we are, we just have a certain things, areas where we have really struggled being rational. And it's a superpower if you can actually be rational in those. So another classic example is, uh, you know, who was great at doing this was, um, you know, I was using an example like Steve Jobs, Apple, right? The human mind there says, you're a computer company. You don't know how to make phones. Okay, right there, don't do it. Secondly, there's all these companies that have been doing this forever. Obviously your idea of no keyboard, if it were a good idea, they would have done it a long time ago.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  And the fact that no one's doing it is kind of proof that it's not. And just don't, don't, you know, whatever. And that's why most computer companies stay out of the phone industry because they stopped there. They say, yeah, let's, this is not our thing. And, and there was a huge innovation to do, they, they would have figured it out. You know, we're not going to. Steve Jobs said, people are wrong all the time. He has this great quote, he said, the world around you is built by- People no smarter than you and like the fact that all those phones suck might just mean that those companies are not doing a good job and like let's go to right so superpower and this is why he's Steve Jobs so Elon you know the classic example with he has example after example but like starting SpaceX lots of billionaires have tried to start a rocket company they've all failed this is a terrible idea you're gonna be a laughing stock you're also gonna waste all your money and imagine if you went from you know being so rich after PayPal

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  to having nothing and and secondly you want to land a rocket you know once SpaceX starts you want to land a rocket like obviously NASA and the Soviet Union with their billions of dollars would have done that if they if it was possible obviously you're with your startup in Silicon Valley or in LA not gonna do that and he same as Steve Jobs he says he just that mean nothing right he's he'll look at that as a little piece of information but he'll say companies are often bad NASA is often you know whatever they haven't been innovating in a long time okay I'll do the math the raw materials cost this much they weigh this much gravity is this much I think we can land a rocket maybe I think we have a chance and that's first principles reasoning

• 2:12:27Speaker 01

  the first principles there are the laws of nature and the materials and the the weight of them and the gravity and with those he said the conclusion says my math says this can be done all that other information all you know about NASA so that's not well disagrees with the first principles reasoning so I don't care Steve Jobs said we have multi-touch technology now they you know if they don't doing it must just because they suck so and then and and so he's really really really really really good at reasoning from first principles in the face of conventional wisdom that says the opposite of what first what his reasoning comes to he's really good at saying I guess conventional wisdom is wrong and I'm gonna put my money behind it and my

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  reputation behind it and even then we fail I'm still gonna stick with it because it seems like so and likewise that then then kind of layered on top of that is the second is the other thing I was talking about is like this idea that failure is bad and he's like what's what's wrong with failure like I'm gonna die one day who cares if I like tried a bunch of projects and it's an experiment and so again overriding human stuff so we all should be he's just he's not doing anything magical in that case I mean again it's very impressive to do the engineering feat but to try in the first place is a superpower just based on Not being crazy like we all are. You could use a totally different example of in my single days. I used to be, you know, this is before the apps frustratingly.

• 2:13:53Speaker 01

  So I'd be in a bar and I'd like, I want to go talk to that girl. And a huge part of my brain is like, you know, warning, warning, like terrifying. You might get rejected, you might get, you know, humiliated. And at some point I figured out that that is nonsensical stuff from our tribal days. Back when if you got rejected by one of the girls in the tribe, your reputation was ruined forever. We're the only people you'll ever know. And so I used to think of it like grand theft auto and you can just like, drive over someone and it doesn't matter, it's not real. I was like, this is grand theft life. Let's pretend I'm in a video game playing this. Of course I would just go up and talk to her because who cares? Because it essentially is, it might as well be a video game in terms of the,

• 2:14:37Speaker 01

  how 0% it matters if this person laughs at me or rejects me or whatever. I will walk away and never, I will, three seconds later, I will never see them again. And so I started just like being way more bold and it served me so well. It's how I met my wife. It's like so, like I would just like end up on all these like fun first dates from people who I just met just by like maybe a coffee shop. Because I realized that like the fear is irrational. And so I developed a little mini superpower on something very small for my life. And it's the same concept. Now, I wish I could apply that everywhere in my life because it was like, it was like, that was the best version of me is when I could tap into this ability to say, this is my brain, my fear makes no sense here. I'm just going to stop paying attention to it.

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  And, and so I think we should all try to do that in so many different areas of our lives. Because fear, irrational fear holds us back in so many ways. So that's why, that to me is, is Elon's superpower beyond like the things he's good at. That to me is like why he's Elon.

• 2:15:33Logan Bartlett?

  Career, you wrote a great one about picking your career and how people should go about doing that. If you were to distill that down, I'd recommend people go read the totality of it. But if you were to go distill down like the way, if you're an 18 to 22 year old that's trying to find, or maybe you're a 26 year old and you're kind of aimless in your career right now. And you want to find something that you uniquely enjoy or get energy and passion out of. What would you recommend? What are, what are the things that you would suggest for someone like that?

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  It's tough because 18 to 25, they are such precious years because it is both the best time to not have a job and responsibilities and be settled and just travel and have fun and try things and date. And like, it is amazing time for that. You'll never have a better time for that. You haven't even dug into your life. You also have no reason to have any money. There is no shame in having dirt poor. You can be, you know, living on your friend's couch. No one cares. Like, it is a beautiful time for that. It's also the best time to experiment with your career, figure out what you want to do.

• 2:16:45Logan Bartlett?

  To set the slope of the line of what can be.

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, if you do have an idea, if you know what you want to do, it's like, if you start early and you can get a startup under your belt, it's a huge advantage. And so it's, you can't waste the time. I mean, the only way you can waste the time is if you do, the worst thing you can do in that time is to do a job you don't like, that you're not learning from, in a career you don't really want to do, just to like, make money or something. That is a terrible, or like, or being too concerned about money right now versus like, money later. It's like, you don't need to be rich right now. Like, it's such a, you know, I, so my, my, my business partner, Andrew Finn, and I started a test prep company. This is before we put why. And a huge advantage we had was, we

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  were just like, we're each going to take 40 and then maybe 50,000 a year for our whole twenties. And it's just, we just don't need much more. And everything got invested in the company. It would have been such a huge, it would have held the company back from growth so much if we needed to be rich dudes at 25. So anyway, as far as career goes, what I would say is, I say, first of all, having fun and doing life experiences and stuff, it does help you figure out who you are, and that is important. But like, the best way to figure out what you want to do, Is to try a lot of things. Put your, go apprentice for people. See if you can shadow people at work. Get different internships.

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Like if you want to, if you have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit, like just start something. You have, if you, if you start a company in your early twenties and it just flops, there is zero shame in that. That if anything, that makes, if I hear about that person, like, oh, cool person. I want to hear more from them. What are they going to do next? So, um, so it's, I've said this about dating. It's like people who sit there and they're like, if you wanted to figure out, if you wanted to get married, would the right thing be to sit at home and think on a spreadsheet about every quality you want? And just obsess, oh, no, no, I'm going to get the perfect profile. No, obviously you go out and you go on a hundred dates and you, and something will eventually happen. So the same thing here is, um, I think it's, you know, when you're 35, I think, I think by the way, 35 year olds

• 2:18:54Speaker 01

  still should more than they do, feel like my whole life's ahead of me. I'm going to go and try a bunch of things, but there's, it's harder than, because a lot, you know, you might have a family. You might now be used to a nicer lifestyle. Um, your friends might be doing more expensive things. You want to join them. So, um, it's like, uh, it's, it is the best time ever to like, just learn and try and, and learn as well. Like, it's like, it's a good thing to remember that if you're 22 or 24 or 25, there's no skill or expertise in the world that you cannot still get. So like, you might, you know, think all the people who are like physics experts, you may, oh, I didn't do physics in college. You still can, you go to physics, go to grad school right now and you can become the world's leading physics expert by 40.

• 2:19:38Speaker 01

  You know, you want to become, you want to, you know, music, you can become an absolute master, yo-yo ma level cellist, if you have the talent with the time you still have. So it's also like, you also, but now, now granted, this, I can hear someone being stressed out by what I'm saying too, because the tyranny of choice. And it's like, well, why, I, I don't know. I'm, if I go to the cello and then five years later now, now it's like I'm going, and now I'm closing off all the other things. So should I be trying a bunch of things or should I be specializing? And there is no good answer. It's just that the good news is that if you're either having a lot of fun or you're really. Trying a bunch of things, or you're learning something, you're digging deep in something that you might really want to do forever. Those are all good uses, but a lot of people do none of those because they're doing a job that they don't like because, or they're

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  just kind of living in their hometown because they don't really like it there. And it's like, no, you know, do something that is serving the rest of your life because 30s you, 40s you, 50, 60, 70s, we're all thank you for, you know, and none of them, I don't think any of them will look back on you and be annoyed that you had so much fun either. I mean, I don't know, maybe some people say I should have started earlier and I was dicking around. I personally think that like, you know, what is in the end all of this about? If you had amazing time for seven years, that is itself a good. That is like, you know, unless it really hindered you for the long run, I feel like that's like, great. Most, some people never get seven years of fun in their whole life, and you did, you win in some ways. I'm not sure that's a satisfying answer.

• 2:21:01Logan Bartlett?

  No, it's good. I mean, honestly, it's a hard thing to internalize to figure out, but I think the pressure people feel at 22 to 25 to kind of get it sorted out. And it's scary to me to talk to the number of people at like 19 that think they want to be venture capitalists. And I'm like, why, like, how do you possibly know that? Maybe, maybe, but like, probably not. Shifting gears, so you wrote a long blog post in 2015 about artificial intelligence, where you outlined both the euphoric potential as well as the concern for building so much smarter than humans. Ironic timing, that was probably around the time OpenAI was founded. Did you know that that was going on, the Puerto Rico meeting and at the time of actually writing?

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  I think I probably learned about it after.

• 2:21:45Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, got it. It seems to me like people have the hard time internalizing AI being like euphorically good or bad. And I think what you wrote was something that was, I don't know, one of the first very mainstream accessible things about the potential of it. So I want to read something that you wrote in 2015. When I'm thinking about this, the only thing I want, the only thing I want is for us to take our time and be incredibly cautious with AI. Nothing in existence is as important as getting this right, no matter how long we need to spend in order to do so. But then I think about not dying, not dying. And then I might consider humanities, music and art is good, but it's not that good. And actually, a lot of it is actually just bad. A lot of people's laughter is annoying, and those millions of future people aren't actually hoping for anything because they

• 2:22:29Logan Bartlett?

  don't exist. And maybe we don't need to be over the top cautious, since who really wants that? So in the writing, you basically talk about like, hey, maybe it's all going to kill us, or maybe it's all going to save us, right? There's two different courses of action. Now, we're in 2023, and it actually is pretty prescient today in terms of how it's held up. What, as you reflect on that and have watched AI evolve over the course of the last couple of years, do you agree that maybe we haven't been super cautious about?

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  We haven't been cautious at all.

• 2:23:04Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, fair. With your perspective.

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically, what I was saying then is that if you're still thinking about the species, it's extremely obvious. If your concern is the human species, don't build it. Or if you're going to build it, build it always. Spend 50 years worrying about AI safety first, then resume building. If I'm thinking about me as a non-religious person.

• 2:23:30Logan Bartlett?

  As a 41-year-old who has 50 years to figure this out, like, let's keep going.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, it's not, and it's not that I'm so scared of death. I just like life. I want to live for 50 centuries. And I'm like, if AI stopped today, I have no chance, I think. I think I'll probably, I mean, cryonics, maybe for the, send me to the future where at a time, but it's 5% or less chance that I can, that we can have some dramatic life extension technology. AI, I think, pretty high chance, actually. So if AI stops today, I don't, and so then I'm thinking like, if I'm just being totally rational and being a dick, like, thinking selfishly, especially dick to all the future people, I'm thinking, let's roll the dice. What do I have to lose? I have four decades that I could lose, but I have 50, 100, I could, 1,000 I could gain.

• 2:24:17Logan Bartlett?

  If humanity ends, I'm dying. And if humanity doesn't end, I'm not dying.

• 2:24:22Speaker 01

  I'm having my own apocalypse in 50 years.

• 2:24:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:24:24Speaker 01

  Either way.

• 2:24:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  So I'll take a chance.

• 2:24:26Logan Bartlett?

  If society goes out with me, then, you know, so be it.

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  This is just pure game theory here. I'll take a chance with the big apocalypse, since I already have an apocalypse coming, because whatever.

• 2:24:34Logan Bartlett?

  On a personal level.

• 2:24:35Speaker 01

  And then it, the big, but taking a chance with the big apocalypse is the only way we can maybe not have any apocalypse. So that was my thinking there.

• 2:24:43Logan Bartlett?

  And the thought, the thought being, just to be crystal clear on it, that artificial intelligence is probably our best way to figuring out all the different things around. We talked about, you know, gene replacements and whatever.

• 2:24:56Speaker 01

  And everything else.

• 2:24:57Logan Bartlett?

  Splicing, sequencing, all that.

• 2:24:58Speaker 01

  I mean, solving everything. People get stressed about climate change, or poverty, or disease. I mean, it's just all just solved. And, I mean, I just, I read the Ian Banks Culture series. I read six of those books. Like, I yearned to live there. And maybe that's never, maybe there's nowhere in the entire universe where something like that is able to happen. For some reason or another, it's just not possible. But maybe it is possible. And it's just this utopia. It's a utopia where everyone is safe, everyone, you can live in any kind of space habitat you want. You kind of have conquered the galaxy. And you can do whatever you want with your time, and you can leave when you're ready. You get to get out when you're ready, you know. It just sounds awesome. Especially, I'm sure once we were there, I'd be complaining about all the same things.

• 2:25:42Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 2:25:43Speaker 01

  We said hedonic treadmill. But still, you know. And so, AI actually is, like, when I read a book like that, usually you're like, yeah, well, not, that's sci-fi. When you hear about AI advancements, intelligence, a little bit of intelligence advantage over chimps, gives us the ability to build a civilization. They can't do shit like that. Think about equivalent advantage over us, or 100 times more of that. It's mind blowing. You can't even, talk about, you know, George Washington not being able to predict today. To predict a world where super intelligent AI is here, let alone what it's doing and building and

• 2:26:24Speaker 01

  the world it makes for us, or for itself that we live in, is beyond comprehension. And I'm curious. And it sounds like, if it's good, it could be the best thing ever. Of course, people like Eliezer Yurkowsky and all the doomers, they say, they would snicker at this, saying, dude, Why would it be good? It's not that it's like, it's like, they think the burden of proof is on the people saying it's gonna be good to say, you map out how this is not gonna go badly with this non-human, super-intelligent thing that does not inherently care about us.

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

  That, and we're so fragile and our ecosystems are so fragile and this giant thing with a huge footprint is coming and, you know. Look at what we did to pigs. Right. Something's gonna be a lot smarter than us. Yeah, and, and we didn't, we don't hate pigs. Yeah. Uh, we also do it to a million other species without realizing it. Look what we're doing to polar bears, you know, in the Arctic with the climate changing. Like, the, the little things that could just totally destroy our civilization. You, you don't realize how fragile everything is until something way more powerful than you comes here. A lot of ecosystems that have been destroyed by us weren't fragile before we were here. They were actually robust and they, you know, and then something with this footprint comes down and just starts mowing down trees and just changing the temperature and like, boom, just. So, I get it.

• 2:27:47Speaker 01

  I also, a little part of me says, well, they don't know, Lea's was a smart dude, but like, they still don't know anything. We, we have no idea what this is gonna be like. I get those arguments. And I guess part of the way I feel about them is, I don't necessarily disagree. It's that, I kind of, as I said, I feel like in a lot of ways, selfishly, I don't have that much to lose. Now, unselfishly, when I'm not in dick mode, thinking about the species, then I'm like, we should pay attention to the doomers. We should be cautious. They sound pretty, you know, logical in what they're saying. And even if they're wrong, like, let's not do the dumbest experiment in history, as Elon likes to say about climate change.

• 2:28:31Speaker 01

  This is the even more dumbest experiment in history. Let's spend 50 years getting it right. So, you know, very obvious, but as I say, little, uh, my little primate brain is also very self-absorbed. And so, that little part, part of me is kind of like, ooh, but I'm also kind of excited to see what happens. It's also just part of it, it's just like, it's just so interesting, like, what, super-intelligence, like, maybe it's, it's gonna be awful, but like, it's gonna be so. Cool. I think it's Elias who says like, or someone says, you know, we will have the apocalypse, but there'll be some great companies along the way. I'm like, well, those companies are gonna be cool. I'm like, you know, I want to see how cool the phones are gonna get. So,

• 2:29:03Logan Bartlett?

  Repper necking on a highway is, you know, it's interesting to see the car crash, right?

• 2:29:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and, uh, I, it look, I will say that the other day I did have, I think it was a dream or a thought, something where it was like, I learned that AI was gonna be okay. Everything was gonna be fine. And it's like, this was all overblown. And I felt this immediate emotion of like, oh, thank God. Which tells me that deep down somewhere in me, I'm like, pretty scared and upset about this whole situation and like, kind of wish it would go away and like, would love someone to tell me it's gonna be okay. Because like, it is really scary, obviously. And so like, think like, gun to my head, I probably press to like, shut it down button if I have to. But,

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  but also, I think a lot of what people's opinion on this comes down to is, who are they? I'm an optimist. I just am. I have a friend who says, I think AI is gonna be fine because I was held as a child. I have no other good reason to say that. And, and like, that's a little how I feel. I'm like, I just kind of have a hope in general about the world and about the future. And I think that that's coloring how I feel. I couldn't really defend it. I would not want to go in like a debate against a doomer because I, A, I don't necessarily disagree with them. And I, but I also don't feel confident that they're right. I just don't know. But I certainly don't have any good argument for optimism. Like, there's plenty of potential reasons for optimism, but I don't have like, a strong reason why, no, optimism makes more sense here than, but I just kind of still feel that way.

• 2:30:29Logan Bartlett?

  What about Cryonics? We've touched on it earlier. We've talked about it a little bit. Do you, are you actually signed up?

• 2:30:36Speaker 01

  I am signed up. I have a life insurance plan, which is what the way, the way you do it. You just pay a couple hundred bucks a year. It's like a term insurance plan, then you can deal with the rest later, but.

• 2:30:45Logan Bartlett?

  Is your logic just, why not?

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  Well, it's so, well, this is complicated because certainly, it would be an absolute no brainer. Because I said, burial, 0% chance of being woken up in a magical utopia in the future. Cremation, 0% chance of being woken up in a magical utopia in the future. Cryonics, non-zero chance, right? Like, maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 5. I might even put it at 5. Don't underestimate the future. The future is gonna be mind blowing. So this is a way to toss your brain to the future. Pause it. Right before you die with all of your memories and personality in there and toss it to the future and like, think about how mind blown George Washington would be by today. Like, the future might be able to say, "Yeah, we can easily upload that to it." I wouldn't necessarily bet against it. Of course, a lot of things have to go right. You know, the facility has to stay intact and like, there has to be altruistic future.

• 2:31:31Speaker 01

  So, that actually takes, you know, treats you like a long-term patient, which is what they're phrasing it as. So, a lot of things have to go right, but it's again, what are they, against what? Now, there's this other, so otherwise, it would be, I'd be signed up and I would tell everyone I know, "Don't be an idiot. You spend this much on your phone every year, just for potential, like, many more centuries."

• 2:31:50Logan Bartlett?

  Plus, it helps keep those business going, more people sign up, right?

• 2:31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, of course. I still have to do one thing, which is I have to get, like, the final form notarized before I'm officially a member. I've done, I'm paying currently. And I've been procrastinating. And the reason is, A, getting a notary is like, the most icky thing ever. But secondly, there's this Black Mirror. I've seen too many Black Mirror episodes. And so, there's a non-zero chance that you come back, and a much smaller, but still non-zero, chance that you come back into the hands of a sick fuck who wants to torture you for a million years. And that's true. It's a, it is a possibility. If you

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  die normally, 0% chance. So, it's about weighing, like, these are pretty big decisions to make. It's, you're making a big decision for potentially millions of years of future you. And it's like, the upside is so good. The downside is terrifying, way scarier than death. Death is nothing in the face of that. The upside, I think, is way bigger. I just think of this, what the chances that Future's gonna be torturing their long-term patients? Future's gonna be probably more evolved than we are. And like, even if it's an apocalypse, they also have these contingencies, by the way, that you can say, if they're, if the government seems like it's gonna go down and plug me, you know? So, you can, so, it's so unlikely.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  But would I take a, is it worth taking a one in a thousand chance of a million years of torture? It's easy to say, well, you know, even a million, a million years of torture. What if you're in minute 12 of that and you think I have a million years of it? So Black Mirror has fucked me up a little bit. I still think I'll probably do it, but I just know that I'm not the only person thinking about this and I want, when there's a bigger industry, they will for sure have some kind of safeguard against this, right? And I'm just, I want that to happen. I want it to be a bigger industry with this problem very well labeled and identified and discussed in papers about it and solutions so that like, there's no way you're going to be left in the wrong hands. And then I'm, then it's back to no brainer.

• 2:33:57Speaker 01

  I still think I, right now, if I had to, if I knew I was dying tomorrow, I'd be like, yep, cry necks. But it's just a little part of me that's like icked out.

• 2:34:04Logan Bartlett?

  I don't want to ask you about your friend Elon and running Twitter and what all that's been like, but the product that is Twitter today, it feeds into your, are you still a big user of it?

• 2:34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use it every day.

• 2:34:20Logan Bartlett?

  What's your perspective today of Twitter, the product? And are you optimistic about the future of it and where it's headed? Do you think it's sort of this, it is what it is and we're always going to be dealing with the balance of trade offs of vitriol with, you know, whatever, the feedback loops and all the great reasons I use it and you use it as well?

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  Well, I kind of see today's social media platforms as like flip phones. I think that the future us will look back and be like, oh, I was like, that was such a shit show. There were like mobs and it was like political junk everywhere and everyone's being nasty and it was like addictive and, and I, I, I hope that this is like the Wild West phase when we just didn't know what to do. We didn't know how bad, dangerous it was. It's causing depression, teen girls and all that. And I hope that we get to a place where we have like a way, like if I went in a time machine 10, 15 years, I'd hope to get out and be like, oh, social media is like awesome now. It's like everyone likes it now. You know, Steve Jobs, when he introduced the iPhone said, One of the things, everyone hates their phone.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  And it's like, I forget that now, because I mean, I, I, I love my phone. It's like my favorite object. I think it's like, so, you know, some people, of course, like, don't like phones and don't like that. But I think it's just like, I just look at them like, you're so magical. It's like so crazy. It's like, you're so like incredibly well-made and useful and like, um, but I hated my phone before that. I was like, ah, so impossible to send a text and like this typing is slow. And so, right now, everyone hates social media, right? Or almost everyone. Um, and I, I, I, I, I don't think it's going away. But I, I think that, so, so anyway, Elon, the reason I'm thrilled that he bought Twitter is because, um, I, I think he can, Steve Jobs entered the, the phone industry from, from outside and was like,

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  applying a bunch of like computer, Apple principles to this industry and, um, was able to reason from first principles and do something, right? Uh, social media is harder because he's not starting, you know, this is, it's like, it's like, this would be like if Steve Jobs bought Nokia, you know? It's a little harder, but, um, and it's just, I think in some ways a harder problem in general than just making a good piece of hardware and software. Um, um, but people like Elon. I, that's the person who I think is gonna, you know, be able to like, rather than little iterations on something that has some major fundamental problem, just come in and start to just Try. dirty and just, yeah, not be, nothing sacred, throw away the, so I actually think, you know, and I think a lot of people, maybe even he would say this now, like,

• 2:36:51Speaker 01

  the blue check thing was not handled the perfect way, like, I should have, could have kept verification, made it politically neutral, which it wasn't, and then also had like Twitter blue, right? Okay, that's my personal opinion. Those are mistakes. I agree with that. And by the way, every first principles kind of innovator is gonna just make some big mistakes along the way. So, um, but what I like is just, you see, it's changing, it's iterations happening, it's just different. Oh, there's long videos now, and every week, something new. That's what I wanna see. I don't want the lazy, Twitter before had so many employees, probably way too many, and it was sitting around, you know, being lazy and like making the tiniest changes once a year or whatever.

• 2:37:31Speaker 01

  So, um, yes, I want big changes to happen and, uh, and I want just innovation. Um, and I think if one of these can become really good, like really great, and maybe Twitter could get there. Um, then I think the other ones will copy, like phones. iPhone comes out, suddenly everyone's making a big glass screen and.

• 2:37:51Logan Bartlett?

  App Store and all, yeah.

• 2:37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:54Logan Bartlett?

  Last one before I let you go, um, what's one thing that you, that's conventional wisdom? Uh, or commonly held among people that you fundamentally disagree with?

• 2:38:06Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I mean, it's, it's a little bit we've talked about already, but like, I think it's conventional wisdom that I, I just had a baby that she will probably live to be around 90 or 100. And I think if I had to bet, um,

• 2:38:25Speaker 01

  she's, that's, that's not likely. I think that.

• 2:38:28Logan Bartlett?

  One way or the other.

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I, it's, this is crazy, but I actually, I was, you know, feeding her the other day and she's like this little larva and I'm like, you.

• 2:38:38Logan Bartlett?

  You said 12 weeks?

• 2:38:39Speaker 01

  Uh, 16.

• 2:38:40Logan Bartlett?

  16.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  Almost four months. Um, and I'm like,

• 2:38:45Speaker 01

  you are probably,

• 2:38:49Speaker 01

  it's, it is, it is a solid probability you die in the apocalypse. It's a solid probability you live to 500. It's a, it's also, also I would give it another solid probability that we're overestimating all these changes and that she does live to 94 and it lives in a slightly more futuristic world. I doubt it. I would give that less of a chance. I would give, you know, normal, her having a normal life, less of a chance than like really awful or really great. And, and I just don't think that we are wired to

• 2:39:22Speaker 01

  believe that, even if all the signs are saying that, if it's not, if it doesn't fit with our life experience and that of our parents and grandparents. So we just look at me and say, nothing that crazy.

• 2:39:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Why, why the world?

• 2:39:33Speaker 01

  But at some point, at some point you hit that A, D, B, C line with utopia, or you hit the apocalypse and whoever lived in then wasn't thinking it was going to happen because it hasn't happened yet. So.

• 2:39:45Logan Bartlett?

  Did that consideration actually factor into having a kid or not?

• 2:39:48Speaker 01

  No, because I'm a dumb human and I'm just like, I want to have a kid, you know, like if I'm thinking totally rationally, like maybe I wouldn't, uh. But I'm just same, I also eat meat like, you know, I'm a hypocrite. We're hypocrites. At least I'm a hypocrite. Um, so.

• 2:40:02Logan Bartlett?

  I know I am.

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  But, but, but even that said, with the meat, I'm like, this is obviously bad. With having a baby, I'm like, I don't know if it's, it might be.

• 2:40:08Logan Bartlett?

  The chance of 500, it sounds great.

• 2:40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it might be just like a super cool life to be living the next 100 years or, or not. I don't know. But, um, and as I said, like, as, if, if, if, as a non-religious person, if she dies in the apocalypse at 30, I'm like, okay, well, she had her own apocalypse coming at 80 anyway, or 90. So like, it's not like the worst, worst thing in the world. I don't know. Again, I don't want her to be tortured. Then I would, if, if I thought there's a chance of like, of true, deep suffering, like a high chance of that, then I wouldn't have a kid. But maybe, maybe AI tortures us. That would suck. You never know. Nothing is predictable, but like, I don't know. I don't, I don't think, I think there's more upside than downside if the starting place is that we all expire in our first century right now.

• 2:40:53Logan Bartlett?

  Tim, thanks for doing this.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 2:40:55Logan Bartlett?

  This is fun.