EP #3 Are Humans Headed Toward a Utopian or Dystopian Future? w/ Tim Urban

In this episode, Peter and Tim discuss how being curious can change the world. You will learn about: The advantage of a curiosity mindset How far passion (vs. purpose) will take you If utopia exists Tim Urban is one of the internet’s most popular writers with the success of his blog and website, 'Wait But Why.' He has garnered millions of unique page viewers, fans, and followers discussing topics ranging from procrastination to AI. Read Wait But Why. This episode is brought to you by Levels: real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your mind and body by visiting Life Force. Listen to Moonshots & Mindsets on: Diamandis.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  So we have a utopia in our future, potentially. We also have all this power to potentially screw it up for ourselves and really, really, really have a bad time in the future. And so I see it as, I don't see this much in between. I don't think we'd go to 2060 in a time machine and get out and say, it's okay here. It's either gonna be absolutely mind-blowingly awesome, or like perhaps like really awful and you'd say, oh my God, we didn't know how good we had it in 2022. That's how I see it.

• 0:57Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna do, this is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe.

• 1:10Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Mindsets and Moonshots. My guest today is Tim Urban, one of the most popular writers on the internet. Tim is the creator of the blog Wait But Why, which gets millions of unique page views, thousands of patrons, a bunch of very famous people on it, from Elon Musk and Sam Harris to Susan Cain, and of course Evan Williams. Tim's blog Wait But Why combines deep analytical, long, firm writing with an incredible range of topics and engaging illustrations. It manages to inform all of us. If you haven't seen Wait But Why, it's a treat for your mind and your cognitive surplus.

• 1:50Peter Diamandis?

  As Fast Company said, "Tim has captured a level of reader engagement that even the new media giants would be envious of." Tim, a couple of seconds about you, a graduate of Harvard University, I forgive you for that. You are an entrepreneur, co-founder of ArborBridge. How many students has ArborBridge prepared and tutored, or a magnitude?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  That's a good question. Started ArborBridge with my friend Andrew Finn, and we...

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Sold the company last year, so I don't know the exact numbers.

• 2:25Peter Diamandis?

  Take a guess.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Probably, I would say over time, we've tutored.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  We've, we've probably tutored three or 4,000 students, maybe, maybe 5,000 students. It's, you know, it's small, high-touch company, you know, we work with a few hundred a year.

• 2:41Peter Diamandis?

  Nice. And, and Wait But Why is on its, on its ninth year, started in 2013. You've been on the TED stage.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't believe that, but yes, yes, yeah, Wait But Why is 2013, so yeah, it's, it's coming up on year nine. And yeah, did TED a couple of years after that in 2016. Never again.

• 3:00Peter Diamandis?

  If you had to guess, how many more years of Wait But Why do you have? Is it 10? Is it 50? Is it 100?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  That's a great question. Well, let's, let's do an optimistic and pessimistic. The pessimistic, I'll say, well, really pessimistic, you know, not, medium pessimistic, I would say.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  40, which is, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm still publishing stuff into my late 70s, which I hope, I, I have no intention of stopping making stuff through the platform, whether it's podcasts or blog posts or books or whatever, just like, that's what I like to do. So that's medium pessimistic because I could obviously die before that. But then optimistic, it's like, well, you know, I'm talking to the right, the right guy here to, to, about this because, I mean, I don't know.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  100 years, only because I feel like if, just, so let's just discuss here, if I'm 140.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Some, some cool shit has happened, right? Like, like we're not in today's world anymore.

• 4:01Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, we're, we're plugged into each other's brains. Yes. We're uploading ourselves.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Right. So am I really writing blog posts at that point? Like, what, is that still a thing at all? Right? Like, but I, I consider, for me, I consider Wait But Why just like a platform where I can like express ideas and, and, and, and put out content. So. You know, yeah, we'll see.

• 4:24Peter Diamandis?

  I would consider the sort of the longevity of wait by wait, but why is a function of how long are blogs still relevant? How long are you still passionate about it? And ultimately, you know, is there a new form in which you're infecting people's minds with cool ideas?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I would say that like it's it's it's blogs being relevant, probably not because like, what's a blog, you know, it's like, but I would say in a hundred years, if we're if people are living a long time, people are still going to want to express themselves, right? There's still going to be certain people who they decide their calling in life is to, you know, learn stuff and explain it or think about stuff and and and synthesize it and put it out there or make people laugh or put out, you know, and whatever the various kind of and and so I feel like that will still be a thing. And so I imagine I would still be interested in doing that kind of stuff back that down then. But, you know, I do think that, you know, we're going to always want to hear from each other in some way or another.

• 5:21Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So at least the next year, maybe the next hundred, we'll find out.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Okay, can you imagine if there's like, sorry, but when how about when we can think with each other? Are there going to be like, I always think about Neuralink and stuff, you know, we can, oh, you and I could think together, maybe a group of four. But what if there's like a thinking broadcast where like someone is thinking to 10 million people? Like, that's weird. It's kind of intense.

• 5:43Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I think that's actually what life is, right? You're a collection of 30 trillion cells that operate together as a single organism. You call Tim, I call Peter. And, you know, so what happens when we connect 8 billion people's minds? Do we become conscious on a new level? And then, you know, what part of that conscious brain do you want to be? I mean, that's, I think, where we're going. I mean, you've spent a lot of time at Neuralink, not the topic I wanted to have the conversation on, but one that I absolutely love.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fascinating and weird, but I agree, there could be some crazy emergent properties we don't even know about yet.

• 6:19Peter Diamandis?

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• 7:04Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. So I want to talk about mindset, in particular, I want to talk about curiosity mindset. So if you don't mind, let's dive in, because I think wait, but why is a curiosity play? So let me ask a broad question.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  I definitely think I probably do, right? I mean, a curiosity mindset in general mindset

• 7:28Speaker 01

  is one in which, like, you are actively interested in pulling information in from the world, right? And adding to your little knowledge tower in your brain, adding, adding on to it, or whatever. I'm trying to think where it actually comes from, because sometimes I think it's a, like, for me, it's, I almost would call it like an desire to understand things that I don't understand. But that desire is kind of binary, where like, I haven't dug into crypto yet, in the full sense I would need to, to write a really good blog post about it. And I find myself not actually that curious.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Like, there's some part of me that's like... I do want to understand what's what really the big picture is here with something like crypto. What is really going on?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  But because I haven't gotten that tree trunk of knowledge yet, where I have like a basic understanding, it's not that interesting to me. But then, once I do, once I start learning about something, say like brain mission interfaces, and you know, I don't know anything about that. And then I start reading about it, I start learning about it and talking to the engineers. And I start to understand and it becomes kind of the structure in my brain that gets developed that knows how to think about that. And now I suddenly it lights up my curiosity. I want to learn everything. I want to read everything. I want to put it all in my AI is another thing. When I started doing that deep dive, you know, I couldn't get it. I read a bunch of what you had to say about that. So I could talk a lot more about it, but that's kind of some initial thoughts.

• 9:04Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I mean, I don't think everybody has this level of curiosity that you have and goes as deep as you do, do you?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of things that people can have this instinct to put their effort towards and curiosity is just one of them. And I'm trying to think like what makes, it's like where your focus is. Your focus has to be on like, you have, you get dopamine hits from learning things like in the short term. So there's a short term thing where you just like, you like learning something new. You see an article, you don't know anything about it, you're excited to read it and it feels great to, oh my, I'm learning about this. And then you go on Wikipedia and you go on a spiral and you start learning about stuff on the internet and you're watching YouTube videos on this topic. And three hours later, you learn so much about it and it feels great. But there's also kind of a macro project that I think can drive curiosity, which is

• 9:56Speaker 01

  you have this, this life story, which is that I'm a learner and you're so satisfied by how much you've learned in the past and how, and it's so fun to add to that and to continue to learn in the future. So, so I think, I think it's a mindset that not everyone has, but I think even amongst people who have a curiosity mindset, it can emerge from totally different places.

• 10:18Peter Diamandis?

  So I want to dig deeper in here because it's really important. I want to learn from you about this. I honestly, truly want to learn from you about this because I view you as a very curious person who has a methodology for digging in and then making use of what you've learned to make the, you know, uplift humanity, right, to inspire people with that.

• 10:41Peter Diamandis?

  If we define a curiosity mindset as, as, you know, asking why a lot and, and not taking things for face value, is that a reasonable definition?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I think it's one definition.

• 10:55Peter Diamandis?

  How, what other definition?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I think like, well,

• 11:00Speaker 01

  you could ask how, like, someone who might be saying they see an engine and they say, how does that work? I need to know. I need to, I want to take it apart, put it back together, right? And, and that's different than why, right? That's, they might be bored by why, right? They, they, they might want to know how, how, how, right?

• 11:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Or, or even what they might want to know.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  They, they might be really curious to know where all the countries are and all the city, big cities are in the world. Or know all the historical events as well as they can. And so that's kind of a, that's what curiosity, right? They want to know, they, they want to kind of, so why curiosity is a type of curiosity that there's probably a lot of crossover, the how people probably also are interested in the why often. But I think the why is, I guess, you know, it gets a little semantic because you could say that, you know, why is the world the way it is? Well, you have to learn how it works and then you can understand why it is, right? But there's certain, like, there are certain elements of like, getting into the weeds with ethics, for example. It's like, some people are, cannot get enough, right? It's endlessly interesting. They want to understand what makes right and wrong and, and, you know,

• 12:06Speaker 01

  how we can live ethically together and, and what the, the, the most just kind of ways to do things are. I like it. I think it's kind of interesting. But in that, in that area, like, I feel like there's a lot of why there, right? That's a kind of a lot of.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And I think I'm, you know, I know the name of my site is Wait But Why, but I think, I think I'm probably more a how person, myself.

• 12:37Peter Diamandis?

  Do you remember the first time you got intensely curious about something, I mean, that you dug in and it became somewhat of an obsession to find out the why, how, where, or what about something? Was it as a kid? Were you born with it?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  You know, I've always liked the feeling of something that was confusing becoming clear, and then it becomes this incredibly fun mental toy. And the dopamine hits from it's clear and suddenly you feel so smart when you think about it and you can explain it to others. So my grandfather sat me down once, I was like five, and he was like, "So, you know, you can multiply anything, any two-digit number by 11 very easily." And I was like, "Oh, yeah?" He's like, "Yeah, in your head." I was like, "Okay." And he's like, "All right, so you just add the two numbers." So if you're gonna do 23 times 11, you add two and three together, it's five. You open the two and three and you put the five in the middle.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  253. Do it with 30, you know, do it with, with, uh, with 36. 396. And I was like, just, right? So I'm five. And I was so excited about this new trick. I told it to everyone, probably annoyingly. And, and it was like, you know, this boost of confidence, this boost of like intellectual excitement, right? So that's a little five-year-old mini version of I think the same exact thing I'm doing today when I will dig really deep into understanding how Cryonics works. And first I'm like, "What's this icky topic?" And it seems like it's full of weirdos. And then I start reading about it and then it clicks. And I start to be,

• 14:20Speaker 01

  you know, I read the Alcor FAQ, which is a great, really thorough page. And as I'm going there, it's all these holes are starting to fill in and I'm starting to develop this. Understanding the structure in my head for the topic and now boom, it's like the 11 trick. I'm like, okay, I love this topic now. Now I want to learn a lot more. Let me read a ton of stuff about this. Now, how can I now, then there's a lot of excitement for me. It wasn't just learning the 11 trick. It was explaining it to everyone else. That's a weird me thing, right? I happen to have that instinct. Um, I want to share it. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted other people to know and I want to, I want to talk about it with my friends. That's why I blog. So I could just read about cryonics and learn about it. A lot of people do and they stop there. I happen to be someone who now I have this instinct where it's like, I'm only halfway there.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Now I gotta tell everyone that I know about this cool new thing or people who are interested. And so a blog is a great tool for that, obviously. So now I'll spend time getting it together and I'm so excited to kind of share the same dopamine hit that I got. The same uh epiphany um uh and dose of clarity with a bunch of other people.

• 15:23Peter Diamandis?

  So I, I posit that having a curiosity mindset is a good thing. Um, that is going to help you in a multitude of ways. And just being passive and accepting the information coming in puts you in a less successful competitive position in life. Do you believe that?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  You, you, you're saying that not being curious puts you in a less competitive position?

• 15:49Peter Diamandis?

  I'm saying being curious has a lot of advantages to it and benefits, especially for an entrepreneur.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  I totally agree. And the reason is like, if you think about, if you're not curious, um,

• 16:05Speaker 01

  you go to school, you're forced to learn stuff because you have to spit it out on the exam. But when I'm not curious and I'm forced to memorize something, it, it's gone like a day later, right? So it's only, it's, it's, it's when I'm curious that my actual consciousness like wraps itself around this thing and thinks about it. If I'm not curious, it's some other dumb part of my brain can memorize it and spit it out and I'll forget it. So A, you're not really learning in school and then you're not really learning after school. You, you might learn in, you know, from life experience. Of course, everyone learns throughout their life. But um your knowledge of how the world works and how history works and how um and

• 16:50Speaker 01

  and you know all the kind of new things that are cropping up throughout your life, it stops because you're not going to put the it takes effort to learn new things and and and we're not going to just put in effort for no reason. In school, we do because we have to. A job in a job, you know, you know, ideally, you're putting in effort because you like to. But if you're but if you need to get paid, then at worst, you're going to put in effort because you have to. You're not going to put in effort to learn if you don't like it, right? No one's making you do it. So curiosity is a quality that makes people want to learn and like learning. And so therefore, they're going to learn a lot again and again and again.

• 17:26Peter Diamandis?

  And retain their learning and apply that learning. I love this. I have a personal example. When I was in medical school, my third year of medical school, I took a leave of absence because the idea of becoming a real doctor and an intern and being responsible with people's lives scared the hell out of me. And I went back to MIT and I did an aerospace engineering degree. And so I was in something called Unified Engineering, and I was a graduate student with all the sophomores. And all the sophomores are like in the back of the class. I'm in the front row because I love space and I want to learn everything I could.

• 18:06Peter Diamandis?

  And it was a very different experience learning with that curiosity mindset. Like, why does that happen? You know, why do rocket engines work that way? Why do wings have lift in that in that design? So you're right, that was that is a hugely powerful element.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I have a friend who my friend Noah, who is every bit as smart as I am, like we're we're, you know, very equal in so many ways. We took a class together called The Magic of Numbers. And he does not like that topic. It was about probability. You know, we learned, we learned how to, it was a probability. We would learn how to, you know, take, if there's 10 things, you have to organize them in a certain way. You take factorials, you do 10 choose 6, or you know, this kind of thing.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  And I loved it. I thought it was delicious and super interesting. And like, it just clicked with, it clicked with how I think and the kind of stuff I'm good at. And I aced the class, which is rare in college for me. I was a terrible college student. Aced the class, you know, it was a breeze. And so I was talking to him the other, he was his least favorite class. And we were talking about it and I was talking about the actual things in the class. And he was like, how do you remember anything from that class? And I was like, I remember everything from the class. And again, it's he, meanwhile, we talk about other classes of his, other things. And he can tell you every single thing he learned. So it really is like, there's some part of your brain that retains that is not necessarily on when you're, you know, being forced to learn something.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  You know, another example of this is if you read an article. So I could use, I, you know, might use like crypto as an example right now. Cause crypto is where, is a topic where I feel disoriented. Again, I know the basics. I know that I could, I could explain like the, the kind of idea about how blockchain works. I could explain a lot of the theories about why this is might be important in the future and why decentralized things can be a big deal. I don't really understand it. I don't have, it doesn't, I don't have all the analogies that I have in my head for things when I really understand things. And I am, and it's all a little icky, right? I haven't like dug in. I don't know where things are going when I buy something on Coinbase. What's actually going on behind the scenes?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  When I don't know that, now it's the whole thing kind of is this gray fog. So, so if I read an article about crypto right now, and it's not a really big explanatory article, it's just kind of like an opinion about a certain kind of thing. Or I'm hearing a conversation at a lunch and the people are arguing about, you know, the future of Ethereum and whether it's going to be whatever.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  I'm not actually going to learn very much, even if I'm listening to every word, even if I'm trying to memorize every word, because I don't have the tools yet to learn on this topic. This is a, you know, you can think of knowledge as kind of like a tree, right? This is, I think Elon Musk, I think, is the first person who I heard talk about this. If knowledge is a tree, you need a tree trunk before you can add leaves and branches and twigs. Because if you read an article, it's like a leaf and you, what are you going to stick it to? It falls down, falls to nothing. If you have a tree trunk, now you can start sticking stuff to it. And of course, it's interesting. All the articles are suddenly fascinating because, oh, I see where that fits in. Oh, that's enhancing this part of the tree trunk. So cool. Otherwise, so, um,

• 21:35Speaker 01

  so it's the same concept where it's like, if you, if you're, if you don't have a tree trunk, because we think, oh, I'm not interested in this thing and therefore I don't learn when I, right? But it can go the other way. Because you don't understand it, you're not interested. So crypto will flip from a not that interesting topic to a fascinating topic for me as soon as I get my tree trunk. And then I'll start learning.

• 21:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So it's interesting, right? The idea that if you're curious about a subject, it's prepping your brain to receive data and information and actually engage with it and store it. And it's when you're asking questions and getting answers and you get, like you said, that dopamine hit and it locks it in. I mean, the neurochemistry of learning is extraordinary. I want to stick on the subject of the benefits of curiosity. So enhanced learning is definitely one. If you're curious, you're going to likely learn things and apply it more. Other benefits of curiosity?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're not, it's not just that you're going to learn and apply more. You're going to explore more in life, you know, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna go outside your comfort zone. You're gonna, you're gonna leave your comfort zone because it's, you're curious. Look, there's, there's, there's a negative, there's a, there's a negative aspect of leaving your comfort zone for almost everyone. And the question is, if curiosity can be a positive aspect of leaving it, and if it's strong enough, it can outweigh the negative aspects of leaving it, right? I mean, it's just, you know, the fear that we have of leaving our comfort zone, but also just the energy it requires. And, um, and, um, but, but so, so curiosity can thrust us out of our comfort zone,

• 23:12Speaker 01

  whether that's in trying new things, trying new hobbies or skills, traveling to new places, meeting new kinds of people, right? I mean, curiosity can lead to a lot more friends over time. But also, I, I think this is a really important thing. You know, the most important thing for happiness in all the studies is relationships, close relationships, right?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  One of the best qualities someone can have is curiosity about other people.

• 23:39Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, love that, love that.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And, and when you're, and a really curious person, not only are they gonna, you know, be out there meeting more people, all right? And, and, but they're gonna, when they're in a conversation, they're gonna be actually interested. They're gonna be listening to what's being said. They're gonna ask questions. It's amazing how if, if, if you just approach, if you, sometimes you almost forget a curious person to pull out, pull out your curiosity in that moment when you're meeting someone. Pull it out, see where it takes you. And it's amazing how close you're about to get with that person, because they're gonna love you, because they're gonna think, wow, this person, you know, it's, it's so noticeable when someone genuinely cares about what you're saying and they're asking good questions and you're like, wow, what an awesome person. All they're doing is they're, they're, they're, they're applying their curiosity to this. So you'll not just meet more, more people and try new things and travel to new places,

• 24:26Speaker 01

  but when you meet people, you'll dig deeper. When you travel to places, you'll learn the history, you'll, you'll talk to locals, you'll actually, you'll soak in the experience much more than if you travel with not curious, without curiosity. So, yeah.

• 24:38Peter Diamandis?

  One way to think about it is you don't know if you're living your best life, if you're stuck doing what you're doing and with the people you're with. And there is, as you said, there's a cost to, maybe you are, maybe you are spending the time with the most extraordinary people in your life, doing the most amazing job you'll ever do in your life. But you'll never know that if you don't, you know, if you aren't curious and look around. And so it's a chance to, uh, to truly explore, uh, your passions, your purpose, uh, and maximizing your happiness. That's a, it's a fantastic benefit of curiosity.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And otherwise you, you're going to stick with what you did first, with what people around you are doing, with what you thought you were going to do when you were seven, with what your parents want you to do.

• 25:22Peter Diamandis?

  Your parents, yeah, exactly.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  With who, with who you grew up with, with who you work with, you know, and, and, you know, that's, that's, it's a very small chance that that's the best life for you, right? And so you're, you're, you're just gonna, you know, yeah, it's exactly what you said.

• 25:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Uh, and that's probably, you know, out of all the, all the benefits for curiosity, for me, that's probably the most, uh, compelling in terms of, uh, magnitude of impact on an individual, I would say. Um, I would say you've had another benefit of curiosity, which is, uh, it's led you to meet, and it's along the same lines of this, but led you to meet some amazing people. Uh, I think, you know, Wait But Why led you to, uh, a relatively, uh, strong relationship with Elon, uh, and his companies and Neuralink and so forth. So, uh, would you say the more curious you are, the more, uh, sort of unique opportunities or, uh, you know, good luck comes your way?

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think, I think getting out of your comfort zone and trying new things is the best way to stumble upon something you happen to be really good at and, and really like. And when you find that thing you're really good at and you really like, um, you're, you know, a lot more is going to happen. Uh, it's gonna, it's gonna, yes, you're gonna meet great people through it. You're going to feel more gratified, probably will be good for your relationships because you'll be happier and more satisfied and you can give more time to others and, um, And you probably will be, you know, usually when you're doing, that's when you do really good work that actually can have a really good impact on others, you know, the, so,

• 27:04Speaker 01

  so, so, yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's not necessarily, um, uh, like my curiosity in my way, but why work? Cause I think you can do lots of work, whether it involves curiosity or not, but it was my curiosity in general, I think that like led me to continue to search and try a bunch of things and explore, you know, when I, I first blogged in 2005, when a friend of mine was like, you know, you can put something on the internet on your own page. I was like, wow, really? And it was like crazy. Blogger had just started. The site Blogger was like this revel, revel, you know, revelation. And people forget at the time, it was like, no one knew how to put something on the internet themselves without like a developer. Blogger was like, wow, anyone could just from their computer just suddenly that's my webpage. It was crazy. So I started doing it, but like, when I saw

• 27:49Speaker 01

  that, like I lit up and I didn't know I was gonna be, uh, drawn to it. I didn't know it was gonna be something I really liked or not. It was just like, I wanna try that. Right? And so, um, that it's, it's, it's that kind of attitude of like something new? Let me try it. Maybe I'll love it. Is, is a, I think a good, it's a good way to find, stumble upon things.

• 28:10Peter Diamandis?

  So, final subject on curiosity for me, your advice for people. We've said being curious is, uh, got advantages, uh, we named a couple. Uh, how do you advise someone to become more curious? Are there tricks or, or, you know, what would someone, how would they change or shape their mindset to become more curious? What would they do on a daily basis? Any, any advice?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think, so I, I really think that, um, there's very few people who are not curious people about anything. I think everyone, if you actually think about, um...

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Something is grabbing you, right? Something is interesting to you. Something is delicious. You can't stop watching this YouTube video. You can't look away from something, right? Everyone's curious. Everyone has curiosity.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  But some people, as part of their identity, you and I, for example, we both are very openly, very proudly curious people. Other people, I think they have given up on themselves as a curious person. They've actually kind of, they've, they have.

• 29:24Peter Diamandis?

  They've pruned the branches of their tree.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've made their own identity as someone who, I don't care about that. That's boring, you know? And this is what I was saying before about the tree trunk is, I think what it looks like is some people are curious naturally, and that leads them to learn. And I'll do all this stuff and explore all these things and stumble upon great things. And other people are just not curious. And then they don't. And I don't think that's what it is. I think it's that some people have built up a confidence in their own, in their, some kind of confidence that has made curiosity a fun thing and had made them believe in their own curiosity and believe that curiosity will lead them to good things. And so now they run with it. And other people gave up on, gave up on themselves as a curious person. And again, I use this tree trunk example

• 30:12Speaker 01

  because I can see it in myself. I will think that I'm not curious about a topic, crypto. I'll think I'm not curious about a topic. And I know from experience now that that's not true. It's that I don't have my tree trunk yet. And that when I have my tree trunk, I will realize this, where has this topic been my whole life? And so I think people who think they're bored by things, I think that they simply, they haven't gotten the basics of it yet. And that no one has the basics of stuff when they're born, right? You have to, everyone at some point learns and you can do that too. There's nothing stopping you from getting a tree trunk on any topic. And I think you'll be shocked how much curiosity will spring out of you that you didn't realize was there. So someone said to me once, like, if you, just as like

• 30:56Speaker 01

  the last point here, like, if you.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  It's like, it's a choice a lot of the time to be curious. One of the best ways to be charismatic is to, when you're talking to someone, ask yourself, what is fascinating about this person? And be on a mission to find it out. Be on a mission to say, I will figure out what is fascinating about this person. And if you go on that, if you go on that mission, what will happen is, you know, it's like you start forcing yourself to go on the mission. But a second later, you will find you're in a great conversation. You are, you're, you're actually, probably actually, wow, this is much more interesting. And I actually do want to keep learning about this now. And they'll, they of course will think you're the best person in the world because of how an incredible listener you are in all of this. So that's an example for interpersonal.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  But I think you can, you can do that, apply that anywhere.

• 31:49Peter Diamandis?

  Like, for example, if you're listening to a lecture on something you don't care about or bored, I mean, maybe asking the question, there is something here that's useful to me. I'm going to find that thing that's useful to me on this, on this topic, whatever it might be. That's, would you agree that that's, yeah, okay. It was in one of your, in one of your Wait But Why cartoons, which I loved, was about kids. Let me just read this. It says, "When kids repeatedly ask why, they're trying to see the underlying reasoning behind what they've been, what they're told by authorities. Because I said so, rejects the instinct and says, stop reasoning and obey.

• 32:32Peter Diamandis?

  We then become adults, only know how to trust authorities other than ourselves." That was fascinating. And we're all inherently curious as kids, but a lot of people turn that off as they grow up.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  So there's actually a lot of research about, there's been some amazing studies where they track five-year-olds, like a same group of five-year-olds. And they have a certain criteria for whether they have, you know, kind of creative instincts, whether they are creative. And then they track the same group when they're 20. And it's like, it's some number like 25. There's some pretty high number of the five year olds that are very creative. And then it plummets to like a 10th of that number when they're 20. And it's that because I think we have the creativity trained out of us. I mean, what is creativity? It's, it's, it's original thinking. It's making something new. You're creating, right? You're not copying.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  It's the opposite of creativity is you're gonna photocopy the way something's already been done. You're gonna follow an existing recipe, which is again, fine, most of the time. But there's some times when it's good to be creative, to, to, to, to make your own reasoning, to make your own art, to make your own new ideas, right? Which is, it's a hard thing to do. And kids, when they're saying, why, why, why? What they're trying to do is understand how are conclusions built? You know, it's the same thing where I said about, you know, an engine. There are certain people that will want to take the engine apart and see how it's put together. And when you, you know, Richard Feynman says, anything that I can't, like, I think he says, anything that I can't construct myself, I don't understand. I think there's some, some version of that.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  And it's this idea where the kid is trying to take apart the conclusion. Their parents say, this is what you have to do. This is what's important in life. You know, you're, here's how you're a good person. The kid says, why? They're trying to say, well, they, they wanna understand the pieces of that puzzle. So they can make their own. And if you, if, and that is this instinct, which is the heart of creativity. It's the instinct to reason from first principles, to, to be able to take the axioms that you see and that you know, and the, the very basic things, and then build conclusions from them. And kids are trying to basically say, help me become a good conclusion builder, a good, you know, or a good reasoner.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  And what parents and teachers say, and society in general kinda says, is because I said so, right? They say, don't, don't hurt yourself reasoning. Leave that to the authorities. And your job is to obey, to obey authority, essentially. And then they go to school where, you know, they are trained specifically to, you know, conform. Everyone's going to sit in these rows of seats and we're going to answer the same exact questions on the test. And, you know, this is kind of Seth Godin talks about how that that that is a remnant of a really old system that was built in the industrial era to try to create assembly line workers. And so, um, so yeah, I think, I think a lot of,

• 35:36Speaker 01

  uh, a lot of these instincts are trained out of us. And then, once they're trained out of us, we don't, we don't use those muscles. We don't practice with them. We don't, we lose our confidence in them. We forget that we ever even had them. And we don't think of ourselves as a creative person. And we don't think of ourselves as original. And sometimes they'll still have original thoughts, but you don't trust them. You, you, you assume, well, if, if this was such a good business idea, it would have been done. If this were, um, i- i- if, you know, if, if this were, if, if, um, you, you just, you just assume, well, conventional wisdom is smarter than I am. Uh, because that's what you're, again, that's obey the authority, you know, that conventional wisdom is the ultimate because, because society said so, right? So, um, I think it's a great practice for grownups

• 36:19Speaker 01

  to try to bring back that muscle and realize that conventional wisdom is quite dumb. And on the authorities, often, you know, the, the way things are supposed to be is often not very well thought out. Sometimes it stems back to the industrial era, you know, and, uh, and, and yeah, a lot of things.

• 36:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And, and I think it's, you know, creativity and curiosity are the two elements that are, uh, sort of trained out of us or is, uh, is silenced in us, so to speak, uh, because, uh, we conform to society better. Uh, Tim, I want to, I want to turn the conversation now to passion and purpose. Um, something I'm, uh, I'm on a mission, uh, to help people find their passion and purpose. And, uh, let's start with a question. Uh, how do you see the difference between passion and purpose? Do you have a distinction between the two?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Well, I think passion.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Is internal, right? Passion is what do you, what grabs you? What do you like? And I think it's totally valid to say I have one life and what I really like is going to be my purpose. And the truth is, I often tell people, you know, some people think, oh, I need to make impact. So I should do something that's like very directly impactful. I should, you know, you know, so that, you know, some kind of philanthropic thing and, and maybe that maybe, but for example, I didn't do that, right? I, I was like, uh, I'm going to follow what I like and I like writing and I'm having fun. That was honestly fun. Me having fun was my main instinct here. I'd like to be like, oh, I wanted to explain things and, and, and, and, and really help.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  And yes, also, but like, if it weren't fun, I wouldn't have done it. But by doing something I really liked and that was really fun, it ended up actually having an impact that I couldn't quite see when I started. And I think that goes for all kinds of people in all kinds of professions. If there's something that just you love, that's really grabbing you. So passion. I think that is, I think that is enough for a lot of people. And I don't think that you should have to feel like you need more than that to say, that's also my purpose. And this is grabbing me to this extent and I feel this passion, that's my purpose. Now, I think you could also argue that if you wanted to, if, if, if, if you felt that, um, so some people would say, I think that you need, you know, purpose should, should be something that is not just about you and what you like, but how it impacts others, right?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  So it's passion is what you, how, how, how it feels for you. And then impact is how it affects others. And when you have a combo of something that is both a good, you know, for you, it is passionate on your end and it's also a good impact on others. Now that's a purpose, right? So I think that's a kind of an answer a lot of people would say, that you need that middle of the Venn diagram between passionate impact and that's purpose. I don't particularly think that. I think that to me, I think you, what you're really passionate about is a good enough purpose for you right there.

• 39:13Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. Let me tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebonmas come to my home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my Body and it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure forty different biomarkers every quarter, put them up on a dashboard. So I can see what's in range, what's out of range, and then get the right supplements, medicines, peptides, hormones to optimize my health. It's something that I want for all my friends and family and I'd love it for you. If you're interested, go to mylifeforest.com backslash peter to learn more. Let's get back to

• 39:57Peter Diamandis?

  the episode. Would you then describe wait, but why and your writing career as a passion or a purpose or both for you?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I think it's a it was started as a passion and it has become both a passion and a purpose, I think. And maybe if it hadn't felt like a purpose, if it just felt, you know, maybe I would have gotten bored of it. And in a way that I know that now I won't because I know that it, you know, knowing that it impacts others is a huge part of what fuels and continues to make it a passion.

• 40:24Peter Diamandis?

  I want to dig a little bit deeper here. If I were to ask you, I'll ask you this question. Do you know your purpose in life? There's a, there's a great quote that I love. Mark Twain's, Mark Twain says, you know, there are two important days in your life, the day that you're born and the day that you found out that you find out why.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  That is a good quote. Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  So I think purpose is a story that that we tell about ourselves in our lives and it helps us feel like there's meaning and it helps us feel like, you know, it's almost, it's almost tied to some concept that there's some higher force, right? And we were put on this earth for a reason and all. I'm not sure I quite see it that way. I see, I like,

• 41:10Speaker 01

  did I do it? Does everyone have a purpose? A purpose, you know, for what? It's almost like there has to be some kind of higher thing for there to be a purpose. It's like otherwise, like, is there a purpose for every monkey? Right, like, you know, if we're just kind of animals surviving and getting by, I think human civilization is so cool because you can actually feel like you have a purpose and you can, but this is part of why I go back to passion where I'm like, passion is real because that's how you feel. And if you're loving what you're doing, I think that you're A, enjoying your one life, right? That's important. If you're doing something that's good for the world, but you hate it, I don't think you succeeded. I think you died and you didn't have fun and enjoy your one life.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  So I think enjoying your own life. And secondly, I believe that when people are, people who are doing what they're passionate about are almost always having a positive impact on others. Right? Unless you're making, you know, super weapons or something. But so, but, but like, so, so I, I, I think that, you know, if you're passionate about it in your, at a workplace, that your people are going to feed off that. You're going to impact the people around you. You're going to make good things. You're going to, you're going to create good stuff. You're going to, if you're working or you're not creating stuff, you're working, again, you're working as a, as a caretaker, but you're passionate about it. You're going to be so good at that, right? You're going to, um, so.

• 42:25Peter Diamandis?

  So what people, what people say is that, you know, yes, I completely agree. Passion is emotional energy that allows you to have a great time and it fuels you and you're in your unique ability in many times. But when you connect passion and purpose,

• 42:43Peter Diamandis?

  I guess what conventional wisdom says is that gives you not only happiness, but fulfillment in life, that you've done something meaningful by whatever stretch of whatever measure.

• 42:57Peter Diamandis?

  There is.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  What would you say purpose is?

• 43:02Peter Diamandis?

  I would say purpose is, uh, is rooted in passion, but it is doing something that you feel is, is going to make a, a positive lasting impact on the, on the things that you care about. It could be raising your kids. It could be, you know, cleaning up your community.

• 43:23Peter Diamandis?

  But I, I think one of the most important things is a, a purpose driven life

• 43:29Peter Diamandis?

  gives fulfillment and also fuels you to do.

• 43:34Peter Diamandis?

  As well as you can and the things that you that you value. So I'm really looking to explore that that connection between passion and purpose. And I see sort of what you've been doing as as passion driven. You've enjoyed writing, you've enjoyed that curiosity journey. And I think I would, you know, tell me if it's if it's correct or not, but purpose. You know, I heard you speak about a visit you did to MIT in which you were speaking to a group of students there and you felt like your the work that you've been doing helped

• 44:19Peter Diamandis?

  inspire them to explore different areas. Is that potentially a purpose to help people, you know, go beyond their comfort zones and explore areas through your writing?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  It's certainly an extremely positive impact that I feel immensely gratified about, right? So that that's for sure. Like when someone tells me I, you know, or, you know, I moved closer to my parents because of an article I read from you, you know, that's like, man, the that is a huge impact. And like, I love to hear that, right? It's incredible. And so this, yeah, an MIT student saying, I went into, you know, this industry or that industry because of your article, like, man, if they really stick with that, that's 50 years of human effort just got went from the arrow got turned to a different direction, potentially, by something I did like, you know, so I, I, I think it's, I guess, part

• 45:17Speaker 01

  of my discomfort with saying it's my purpose is it feels like it's tying that to your identity in a way that I don't like, because what if in 10 years, I'm, you know, before Wait But Why, I was writing musicals? What if I'm going back and I'm writing musicals again, right? Now am I abandoning my purpose, right? Like, I feel like-

• 45:34Peter Diamandis?

  I think you can have multiple purposes over time, right? My purpose early on was space, and then I got focused on exponential technologies. And now in this decade, I'm focused on adding 30 healthy years on people's lives, right? So I don't think, just like, I mean, you could have multiple passions in life, right?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:56Peter Diamandis?

  I think I think purpose is a focusing force to maximize the impact that you have.

• 46:04Peter Diamandis?

  But I do think it's, I do think a purpose driven life has a bigger impact and bigger sense of fulfillment. And I'm just curious if you agree, more than just passion, you know, and I agree with you.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I guess purpose gives a real why behind what you're doing, you know, passion kind of is just can, is just a feeling. And purpose is, um, is kind of, it connects to the result of what you're doing, right? And, and you want to feel, um, you know, I, I, I think, I think, you know, probably we're, it's, it's so. We're saying something similar and maybe in different words, like where if I, if I wrote, um, something or, or made something, right?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And I just do it and I leave it on my computer. It, it wouldn't, nothing would, it would not feel the same, right? It's not, it's, it's, it's the, the passion for me, for it is specifically connected to the, the, the fact that it, what I make can delight someone else or fascinate someone else, or make someone else laugh or whatever, you know, uh, or, or make someone else really think, uh, in a way that, and, and, and I consider, you know, I, I, I, I consider my readers to be very similar to me. Uh, that's just how I think about them is, you know, we think similar layer, we're somewhat similar, which is why I think they connect. And so I'm thinking I've had these great experiences, being fascinated by something or laughing at something or, um, having something just changed the way I think.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  And I wanna, I wanna, you know, capture those moments in my life and then give them to others and, and, and stoke them in other people and have, and kind of share, share those things. Um, and so to me, like, it is specifically the, the connection on the other side and, and the impact it has on, on other people. That makes it gratifying, that makes it fulfilling, right?

• 48:04Peter Diamandis?

  Let me try a different distinction on you and, and see if this, if this holds true for you. Some of the things I've taken on, uh, and have been like, I like to joke overnight successes after 11 years of hard work.

• 48:19Peter Diamandis?

  And if they were just a passion, I think I would have let go of them a lot quicker. Uh, I think because it was a purpose, right? So opening up the space frontier during my first 20 years of my entrepreneurial career was, space was a passion, you know, Star Trek and curiosity and all of that, but like, opening up space, a purpose. And so when it became really hard and failure after failure after failure occurred, um, because it was a purpose and not a passion, there was this, when the smoke or the fog cleared, there was this bright guiding star

• 48:59Peter Diamandis?

  still there for me. Uh, and I almost, I would say, purpose is that. It's, it's a long-term,

• 49:10Peter Diamandis?

  guiding star, a long-term, uh, you know, uh, energy versus passion can be, could be fleeting. Does that feel right?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Maybe it's like, um, yeah, I, I feel like what the, the, the vision that just popped into my head as you were saying that is like, passion is an engine like behind you that's pushing you.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  And purpose is like, when you said a guiding star, I'm picturing something out there that's pulling you and that, that, that's like a, that you're, you're, you're, you have this like desire to go towards and that the, the, the passion can get you into it and can fuel a lot of the energy, but that, that, that when, especially when things are failing or hard, that, that's going to go away. You're not going to feel very passionate about it and that engine's going to turn off. And it's that second force, that thing pulling you, constant pull of that thing, can, can be a constant where the, maybe that, that, the, and the passion engine is not.

• 50:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I, I think absolutely. There's a quote, I don't have it offhand where, uh, it's like, you know, passion is your ship, your, uh, purpose is the rudder, so to speak. Like, uh, it's,

• 50:21Peter Diamandis?

  And that that that's steering you. Do you have a long term purpose? I mean, do you have something that is, you know, let's take it into the realm of a of a moonshot? Is there a moonshot there for you? Something that in the back of your mind, you're thinking about like, wow, if I could do that over the next decade or two, that would be amazing.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  There it's we're going into such an uncertain time. You know, we already live in such.

• 50:51Peter Diamandis?

  For humanity, you're saying?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, with with where humanity is going and what's going to happen with all this exploding technology and also all of this political division. Right. And all of these new environmental changes that spring upon us like social media and then we're caught off guard and we're all acting badly. And we haven't adjusted to it. And there's going to be more and more, you know, we're going to be having to decide. You know, is it OK if we're choosing, you know, looking at embryos and choosing the highest IQ embryo of the group? Is it OK if we're tweaking embryos? Like, is it OK? What are we doing when brain machine interfaces come around? What should the rules be? And I guess when I think about that,

• 51:31Speaker 01

  I I think that

• 51:34Speaker 01

  I guess maybe, you know, maybe I could say a purpose I feel at this moment. Because I have built up a platform of a lot of very smart people who trust me, or at least will listen and and consider what I say.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  And

• 51:50Speaker 01

  and so if I can kind of keep my head straight and continue to be curious and and really think deeply about these things and have, you know, a lot of what I say comes out of great conversations. So keep having conversations with some of the smartest people I know. And then try to add that as a voice into the mix in a way that, you know, adding a voice over an extended period of time on a pretty big platform. That can change things like, you know, that that can actually affect and and some of the people listening are, you know, like you've mentioned, some of these very powerful people are, you know, occasionally will listen to something I say. And so I I do feel like that is a responsibility to try to

• 52:35Speaker 01

  to to I would love to say in 20 years. That I think I have done a little part in helping kind of get I feel like the way I think about it is we're there. Our technology is exploding, you know, exponential tech. I learned a lot of this from you. I mean, you're one of the greatest thinkers in this kind of thing about how, you know, the future is just gonna be crazy, right? The more you talk to people who really know. I was talking to a friend the other day who really knows, you know, he's invested. He funds a lot of future tech and he just looked at me and he said, the future is gonna be weird, you know?

• 53:07Peter Diamandis?

  No, it's like soon.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Soon. Right. And so the way I look at it is a species with this much power, which is, you know, comes from tech can can build themselves a utopia, something that would seem like a utopia to us, the same way that our world would seem like a utopia to Chamos Jefferson, if he were here. He'd be blown away by the comforts and the magic that we live inside of, you know, and the health, you know, advances and, you know,

• 53:35Peter Diamandis?

  Access to knowledge.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  His kids, half the kids died before five when he was. I mean, imagine how amazing this would seem. So we have a utopia in our future, potentially. We also have all this power to potentially screw it up for ourselves and really, really, really have a bad time in the future. And so I'd see it as I don't see this much in between. I don't think we'd go to 2060 in a time machine and get out and say, it's okay here. It's either gonna be absolutely mind blowing the awesome or like perhaps like really awful. And you'd say, oh, my God, we didn't know how good we had it in 2022. That's how I see it. So, given that, if, if, if you ask me in 10, 20 years, and I can say, I think I've done what I can to try to just nudge that in the right direction and that and that maybe

• 54:19Speaker 01

  that's actually had an impact. That's about as good a thing as I can put myself towards.

• 54:23Peter Diamandis?

  So I think that's a, I think that's a great purpose in life, right?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:28Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it's

• 54:29Speaker 01

  You actually said something once, I think it was on Tim Ferriss's podcast.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  That I never forgot. I thought it was a great quote. I've actually quoted you a bunch of times. You said something like, if you want to figure out what you should do in the world, don't ask yourself, the common question is, what would you, what would you do if someone gave you a billion dollars? But ask yourself, what would you do if someone allowed you to deploy a billion dollars? And you know, and, and I would add to that, you know, and you can't tell anyone, no one can know. Cause then you take out all the virtue signaling and all the social approval and all. No one will ever know that you had this opportunity. The billion will end up there, but no one will know you had anything to do with it. What would you, so just take, it isolates everything of like, where do I want a billion dollars to go affect something? Where do I want to push something in the world? And I just thought that was really great. And, and, and, uh, so it's just kind of a side topic, but it just seems relevant to bring up here because I'm talking to you and it's just such a good way to like,

• 55:20Speaker 01

  figure out what, what, what do you really deep down actually wish was, was changing? You know, that's a good way to maybe point yourself.

• 55:27Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. And, and you know, I talk about my purpose as inspiring and guiding entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. And I, I say that 10 times a day, right? And I think the ability for you to guide and inspire people through your writing is an extraordinary, extraordinary platform for doing that. And I think you're absolutely right. Uh, we have two divergent futures ahead.

• 55:58Peter Diamandis?

  And, uh, you know, I'm out there talking about an abundant future as much as possible. Cause I think an abundant future is a more peaceful, uh, future for humanity as well. But it's by no means guaranteed. So, uh, you know, for me, helping people find their purpose is, is, is critically important. And within that, uh, a moonshot. You know, one of the things that, uh, you've talked about before that I don't think everybody really understands is how much of our, of our mindset and thinking is wired from the early days in the savanna, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

• 56:41Peter Diamandis?

  And I'm, I'm talking about the topic of cognitive, cognitive biases. What are your favorite cognitive biases? Define a cognitive bias for folks first.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  So a cognitive bias is a, I would say it's a glitch. It's a thinking glitch that is Yes. That is that is wired into humans or taught to humans. And if you ask like, why is your hand look the way it does? Why does your foot and your bones the way they are? Because they were built for the specific gravity on earth? For the specific materials? For the for the for the things you're gonna, you know, it was it was. It was, uh, you know, evolution shaped these things to be perfect tools or very close to perfect tools for something very specific. Right?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  The brain is another one of these tools, right? Why would the brain be some magical different thing? So then that's this crazy thought, which is the thing we're all using to think, which is who we all really are in there. That thing was shaped by evolution and optimized for a very different kind of life to to to to to drive, uh, to drive the ship in a very different universe than the one we actually live in. Right? And so we, for example, we have confirmation bias, right? Which is, you know, when we I agree with you. Already believes. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  When we, well, this is this is the problem is, you know, it doesn't matter how smart you are and how aware you are of cognitive biases. I mean, of course, it helps to be to be self aware and and humility is the most important thing here. Because humility is when you say, I have a flawed tool in here. Don't forget that flawed tool. So it can be a great tool, but it's always going to be flawed. And it's gonna it's gonna trick me into things because it doesn't understand that I am in this world and I want it to to understand the truth. It thinks I want to other things. So. Humility goes a long way, but even if you're really humble and you understand these biases, you will do them yourself. And I, it's amazing how often I will be, I'll be writing about cognitive biases.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  I'll be writing these and I find myself doing it. I find myself, oh, I'm doing, I'm totally like avoiding, read, you know, in my research, I'm avoiding the articles that seem like they disagree with me. Wow. Why am I, you know, because, oh, man, if I read the articles disagree with me, it feels so good right now to feel like I'm so right. If I, if I read those too, too closely, I'm going to have to change things. And so there's this motivation, not necessarily out of like, sometimes it's because I want to, I want to, I'm right and I better be, no, I, I often, I'm, I'm fine being wrong. It's more that I don't want to, it's laziness. I don't want to have to go and like redo this whole section because I read it. So I'm just like, ah, let me just, and I'm totally doing confirmation bias. I'm, I'm acting in a way,

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I'm driving my research in a way that will, that is intended to not have me find the, the truth, but intended to have me confirm that this is how I do, you know, so there's a lot of it and, and we can talk through a few of these here.

• 59:47Peter Diamandis?

  Confirmation biases just makes your life a lot easier and you feel a lot better.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 59:52Peter Diamandis?

  About, uh, what's another, what's another cognitive bias that you're, you're dealing with? And I'm going to ask you, what's your advice for avoiding those cognitive biases?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  I mean, ad hominem fallacy is a big one, like the, the,

• 1:00:06Peter Diamandis?

  Define that, please.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  We will, um, um, ad hominem fallacy is when, well, an ad hominem argument is, is a bullshit argument, where you basically, someone who you don't like says an argument that you don't like. And instead of saying, here's why the argument is wrong, you say, you know, this person is, of course, they would say that because they're, uh, you know, this politics or they're, or, or, or, you know, yeah, they don't even have a degree in this and blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is. They, they will attack the person and discredit the argument based on who said it, instead of just approaching the argument, right? Which is, you know, if you if you haven't, if you have an ironclad

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  counter to a certain argument, you wouldn't need to do that. You would just say here's it's clearly wrong. But so when you go there, it to me, it seems like it's it's someone who is taking a shortcut to not have to actually address the argument they don't like, and they're disqualifying it from the beginning based on the mouth it came out of. So the ad, but that's the argument, right? The ad hominem like fallacy to me that the cognitive bias is that we just do this in our thinking that we the way a certain person is talking or who they are, you know, you know, in the world, we will just have this just either trust or distrust to, you know, look, obviously, if someone has proven themselves to be trustworthy, it's rational to actually

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  lower your skepticism when they're talking and trust them more. And likewise, when someone's proven to be a snake oil salesman, I mean, it it it does make sense. So it's not that you can never judge based on who the person is, but I think I find that we take that shortcut a little too much, you know, on Twitter, you're looking down, you're scrolling down and you're just going to assume they're right, they're wrong, they're right, they're wrong because of who they are before you before anything else.

• 1:01:48Peter Diamandis?

  Let's do a rapid fire round of cognitive biases and we'll go back and forth. How's that?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:55Peter Diamandis?

  So a recent a recency bias, right? Where you're going to give more value to more recent information than older information. What do you got?

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  What's what? What's the definition of the availability heuristic? It's, you know, availability bias, which is when you when you when you when you see something, when something is

• 1:02:16Peter Diamandis?

  accessible.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:20Peter Diamandis?

  You're gonna grab for you're gonna grab for that information and away it have more than stuff that's harder to find in research.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Right. So like stuff that's being blubbed on Twitter constantly, you're going to start to just assume it must be.

• 1:02:33Peter Diamandis?

  There's a negativity bias, of course, right? Which is from our early days of evolution. Stuff that might kill you or is dangerous is more viable because you want to stay away from it. So hence, the crisis news network CNN, all the negative news there.

• 1:02:56Peter Diamandis?

  What else?

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I would say the bandwagon effect, which is when everyone is saying it, you think you assume it must be true. So this is how you get group madness, where you have, it becomes fashionable. It becomes fashionable to believe a certain thing. And so therefore, a lot of people are doing it, you know, saying it because it makes them look like a good person or it looks cool or whatever. And then everyone starts doing it. So other people start to assume, well, everyone thinks this around me, so it must be true.

• 1:03:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. There's a, I think, a familiarity bias that you tend to believe something that someone who looks like you said more than someone who doesn't. So.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Which is a subset of the ad hominem.

• 1:03:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, yes, for sure.

• 1:03:41Peter Diamandis?

  Let's see. I mean, anybody who wants to go deep on this, just, you know, Google. There's a whole Wikipedia page on these cognitive biases. It's interesting, right? There's these heuristics, these shortcuts that we are biased on. There are a huge number.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  I would say that like a lot of what I think of as cognitive biases. I think there's a whole realm of what I would, what I think of as fallacies

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  nested under kind of confirmation bias. So like correlation causation, right? It's statistics 101, that correlation does not imply causation, right? You see?

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, gun deaths are up during COVID. Uh, must be, it must be COVID. And my gun deaths are up, you know, after defund the police. It must be that, right? We just, you see it in politics all the time, right? Like, we see one trend and we see another and we just, and, and, but, but the, but the, the, the reason this is confirmation bias is what you're gonna see is something happens and, uh, and, and what people will do was they will attribute the cause to that thing in a way that always helps confirm their political views. Um, and likewise, when there is a, when there is a cause of something that, that conflicts with your political views, you will separate and say, you know, there's nothing to do with each other, you know?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  And so it's, it's like, you know, um, I, I, I see, I see a lot of that. Trends and anecdotes, when something is, um, uh, a news story helps your political story, you'll frame it as a trend. Uh, see, here we go again with this whole thing. This is, this is what they do. This is what they do. This, this is why we need, you know? And when you see a news story that conflicts with your thing, you'll say it's a one-off thing. It's a freak thing, you know? You're sensational, you're, you're cherry picking, you're sensationalizing. So, um, yeah.

• 1:05:37Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, it's, it's, you know, and the challenge is we don't actually, we're not, we're not conscious of this as it's happening in the moment. And everybody is, uh, is, uh, has, have these biases. You know, one of my favorite uses for AI, uh, Tim, in the future is gonna be, I wanna turn on my AI's cognitive bias alert and, and have it listen to my conversations.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  It won't be, you, you'll hate it. You'll hate it because it's gonna be constantly saying, and you're gonna be like, shut up, okay? I just, you know, we'll all realize how full of, of cognitive biases we are at all times. And, um, yeah, I think, I think we'll say, if I'm doing something more than like 30% bad, then do it. And the little ones, let me do it, because otherwise I won't be able to function in the world. Because, uh, because we are, because again, our brain, think about it. The brain, was it built to be a truth finding ma- machine? Not really. Sometimes, right? Sometimes like i- i- it was helpful to be able to know the truth of where, you know, where that bear is, or where that buffalo is gonna be in two, five seconds when you're, you know? So it wants to know the truth in some ways.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  But in other ways, what it really wants is for you to believe what the people around you believe about the world and about ethics and about right and wrong. It wants you to conform with it, because that's how you stayed alive, right? Don't be an individual too hard in this tribe of people because you will be killed or cut out or whatever.

• 1:07:04Peter Diamandis?

  Fascinating, just the notion that wanting to be accepted in the tribe is such a powerful force.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Also, you know what else is powerful, like zealous belief? So there's, you know, two tribes and one of them says, well, you know, we're not so sure, the humble tribe, right? So there's the humility tribe and they're not sure what they think and they have some strong views, but they call them theories and they know they can always be disproven and they like to play devil's advocate. And then there's the other tribe and they zealously believe what they believe and they believe that their god is the good god and they believe that they are the righteous people and they are the, this is their land and no one else, you know, and that when they, and that they're all destined for heaven or whatever it is like, and they're not going to question, well, do we have evidence for that? They don't need evidence because they're the zealous people, right? Which tribe is gonna, would you bet on to pass on their genes more, right?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  It's not that, I would much rather hang out with the humble tribe, but back on the savanna, when all that matters, if you're in a, we're in a rough, you know, state of nature, I am betting on that. So we, so we have the instinct today because we are the descendants, unfortunately, the humble tribe didn't pass on their genes. Those awesome people, they're not here. We're all the zealous tribe and so, and so we have the instinct to, you know, so yeah.

• 1:08:21Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, amazing. Love this conversation, could keep it going. Tim, X Prize. So our job is get the world's smartest people to bring their cognitive surplus, their treasures, their talent to solving the world's biggest problems. We've launched about $300 million in X Prizes. So here's my chance to ask you, if you had a chance to direct where we did our X Prizes, what would you want us to do? I know this is out of the blue, but it's my question for you. What are some problems or challenges or capabilities you want solved or you wish people would be going after? Where should we launch our next X Prize?

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  I have a, I have a very clear answer, I think, which is I wish that you would...

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Get people working on cryonics capabilities. And I'll tell you why.

• 1:09:17Peter Diamandis?

  Please.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  So cryonics, for people who don't know, is the concept not of freezing yourself after you die. Cause that wouldn't work, cause you're, the liquid in your cells would expand and you would, they would, you don't freeze, it's vitrifying, it's a very specific technology. And it sounds creepy, right? You're gonna have a frozen dead person, you're gonna bring them back. It's not, what all it is, is right before you actually, you know, when, when, when, uh, when you're clinically dead, which means that we don't have the, um, or you're legally dead. We don't have the medical technology to save you today. Right? Fifty years ago, if someone keels over on the curb and they, their heart stops beating and they're, they're not breathing, they're dead.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Cause they, they don't have the technology to save you in 1950, right? So they, they were as dead as, as you could be back then. But today, that person's not dead, there's defibrillators, there's gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna do all kinds of, um, you know.

• 1:10:12Peter Diamandis?

  They're, they're drone, drone delivered, drone delivered defibrillators that will come to you.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Right, exactly, like they, they, we can save you today. So, so, so guess what? That dead person, genuinely dead back then, is not dead today. Whoa, what does that mean? That death is a process. And that what's happening is, uh, when you get to a certain level, we call you dead when we can't save you today. And then what happens is we give up on you, you're, then you actually decay and decay until eventually the arrangement of atoms in your brain is now lost forever. Now you're officially gone, right? No one can save. But there's a big window between when you are unable to be saved today and when, and when you're actually no longer preserved. And when, and so, so if, if there were a hospital across the street that we could send you to, that had a, a machine that could save you, but we didn't have it here, of

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  course, everyone would say, get them over to this, across the street to the hospital. Cryonics is an attempt to get you to a hospital in the future that can save you. And what it is, is it pauses your biology. It doesn't freeze you. It just gets you to a temp, they use antifreeze, so you don't actually, nothing freezes, but they slow down your, they use cold temperatures to slow down all the atoms in your body from, to the point where they can't move anymore. So everything is just stopped, paused, right where it was. Nothing is going to change now. You're not going to decay. They put, they put a human on pause and they say, "We're going to store them here. Medical technology will get better and better and one day, when there will be that hospital, in some future time, they can absolutely, the hospital's in the future,

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  it'll be child's play. They'll say, "Yeah, of course we can save them. We, you know, there's no problem for us." Now, we will probably also have the technology to safely un-vitrify the person and save them.

• 1:11:55Peter Diamandis?

  We've all seen Star Trek, so you know, we have absolutes coming.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  So here's how I think about it. There's all kinds of things I would love if you worked on that involved life extension, you know, Alzheimer's and, and you know, heart disease and all this, right? But people are working on those and, and it's happening. Over time, we're getting better and better at these things.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  And, and maybe even down the road, uploading our consciousness and freeing ourselves from the dying mammal that we're stuck in right now. So that's great. That's all going to happen in the future, but for all the people alive today, we're probably going to miss out. We're probably a little bit early, maybe 20, 50 years. I don't know. Maybe not, but, but I don't feel confident.

• 1:12:31Peter Diamandis?

  I'm working on it as hard as I can.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  I know you are. So, but the point is, it's much, if we just get this one technology to be really, really good, cryonics. Now, none of us have to worry so much. We say, "Well, I hope it's here in my lifetime, but if it's not, I will pause myself and then the future will, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll wait till it is." That's awesome. So this, this basically is a bridge to that future for everyone alive today, who won't be here to take that bridge.

• 1:12:58Peter Diamandis?

  I like that. I actually like that idea for next prize and I've had some conversations in the past around, the first increment is can you store organs for future transplantation, right? Cause a number of organs today have a lifetime and if you don't transplant them within a certain period of time, they're thrown away. But imagine if you could store organs.

• 1:13:23Peter Diamandis?

  So that might be an incremental step towards

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Because the brain is just another organ and if we can do that, then we can store the brain and now we're good. You know, it's tossing your brain to the future and saying, you know, better than rotting in a grave for me. Send it to the future. See what they can do with it. See if they can bring me back. Um. So yes, that's where I would, that's where I would have you do it.

• 1:13:42Peter Diamandis?

  Are you an Alcor client?

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:45Peter Diamandis?

  You are. Okay. Fantastic.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:13:47Peter Diamandis?

  I, I am not yet. I've like held off at Alcor is one of these companies that you sign a contract with, you pay a a fee and they'll come and grab you. And so let me ask you the other question that people may or may not know you should ask, which is, are you whole body or just the head?

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Just the head. And the reason is, um, the head of Alcor, Max Moore, who's an awesome guy. I just talked to him and I said, you know, he said, look, we're right now, and this is just because it's early, it's primitive. We are so focused on preserving your brain that that's what we're worried about. And like, it's almost. I, I think honestly, I should switch it anyway, just because you never know, right? And maybe the body's helpful, but I, I, I suspect in 10 or 20 years, it'll, it'll be whole body for everyone. But I think right now it's that the tech is just not there where they can preserve everything. They're so focused on just the getting this person's brain with their memories and their personality and who they really are safely into the future.

• 1:14:42Peter Diamandis?

  All right, Tim, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ping you on this one as we, as we get forward. Cause I do think that's a, a great X prize, just to get more people thinking on it and focusing on it.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, working on the technology.

• 1:14:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, why not? Just inspiring people and guiding in that direction. Tim, thank you for joining me on, on mindsets and moonshots and a super fun conversation. And grateful for the work that you do. Thank you for inspiring people.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Likewise, and, and, and thanks for having me on.

• 1:15:12Peter Diamandis?

  You're welcome, pal.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

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