Tim Urban of Wait But Why

Is the purpose of Wait But Why to start kind of informing people to get them to care before it's too late, or what is your intent with the whole, like, all the content you're making?

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

I like having great conversations with interesting people, and Wait But Why is connecting me to all kinds of great conversations. I love creating—like, just artistically creating. So a post is a piece of art in a way, and it allows me to kind of just, yeah, continually stay in excitable mode because I can switch topics again and again and again.

I just always feel like I'm in the honeymoon phase with the job all the time because I switch topics, and it's a whole new planet for me. So I love that, and if I didn't like it, I don't think I'm a good enough person to do it out of obligation for, you know, I think this is gonna help. Like, I like that I look— I think I would, you know, but I think I'm more than a person that might throw money at something good. I'm not sure I would dedicate my life just to something where I felt like it wasn't my calling; it wasn't something I really was passionate about. It was something I had fun doing.

That said, as Wait But Why has gotten more popular, as I've kind of begun to dive into a lot of more kind of intense deep topics, I started to appreciate the impact that a viral blog post can have. I appreciate it when times like when I go to— and I've spoken at a bunch of colleges—and I was at a place like MIT, and afterward a couple of students came up. They said they're going to work in—one of them was working at SpaceX, and one of them is going to work in AI next year, both because of my post.

And I was like, you know, so I was like right there. These two are probably smarter than me, both of them. They're 18, and like if they both got work that took 120 years of human effort going towards, like, really good important things, and maybe they instead would have gone into finance or something else. So to me, I was like, that's really awesome. And if that's, you know, two of—I don't know, however many—that to me is a massive impact if I can convince really smart people to turn their attention or their money or their time towards important things. I think that that's about as big an impact as I could have as a human because me going into it myself—that's one person. Plus, honestly, these MIT dudes are probably more capable than I am.

I think, you know, that, yeah, and just kind of since it is a battle for kind of awareness right now, awareness of the story that we're a part of—this human Colossus story is crazy. We woke up inside a thriller movie.

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

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

If page 490 you have Jesus, you have A.D. starts at ten pages ago, okay? And you have—you know, Islam starts at page 493 and around page 497 you have P.R. realism gets rolling. Then you have the Enlightenment the next page, and right at the beginning of page 500, the very last, you have the Industrial Revolution and you have the entire kind of—the Colossus kind of, like, it goes on steroids. The Colossus grows up very quickly and becomes far more powerful.

The population balloons from less than a billion to seven billion on page 500 alone. We go from every other page before page 500, you know, transportation meant walking, running, sailboats. Page 500—we're going to the Space Station. We're flying around in planes and cars.

Yeah, communication on page 499 and earlier meant, you know, talking to people and writing letters with your hand. Page 500—we have FaceTime, we have, you know, the Internet. So if you're the alien reading this book, suddenly you're on page 500, and you're like—and you just can't believe what you're reading. You're so riveted. You're saying: “Oh my god, this is the story! This is what this has all been leading to. What's about to happen?”

You turn the page to 501, and you're just like, “What is go—what? Something's about to happen here! We all were born, right? Right then?”

Yeah, it's crazy. So I think that part of what I can do is—the only reason I'm so aware of this right now is because I write about it. I think I have my job to think about this.

And so I think that part of what I can do is just take humans that are every bit as smart as I am, and everybody's curious, but it's not their job to think about this stuff, and kind of shake them and say, “Hey! Like, we're about to turn to page 501. It's either gonna be the coolest story for humans or it's the end. This is the—this is a 501-page book, and that's it. Or this is the beginning of like the new paradigm.

We have a new B.C.-A.D. situation. We have a B.C. which is like before something; you have is on page 501 when we all became immortal and we stand, all the suffering stopped, and whatever that is—and B.C. This will be the real B.C., much more important than any religious thing. It'll be the thing before humans came into their own— that's really exciting—or it'll be the end, and that'll be—there'll be no more monkeys.

So this is the barrier in the Fermi post, right? It has to be. I mean, I didn't know the thing is the problem is we're wired to think about—we're wired for a world when nothing changed ever. So when someone says, “This is gonna be the future. Everything's gonna be different,” why is it so naive? It's to feel—that's not like the snake oil alarm. It feels naive, and it should feel that naive because it used to be naive. Today, it actually is.

If you already do is look—just compare—there's no salesman needed here. Just look at the facts of page 500 versus 499 and every page before it. This is clearly not like every other time. So, yeah, I find it exciting. I'm very happy.

So people like the interest in startups and technology kind of ebbs and flows, it seems. And now, for better or worse, it seems to be like people are pushing tech away—like in big quotes—because they think of tech as like just Facebook. But in reality, it’s so, so, so much more.

And whenever when someone's like down on this stuff and they're like, “I don't need an app to like walk my dog,” or something, I'm like, “Change your point of view and look at this other stuff,” and it's crazy. There's so much going on! Heck, it's a monster god is on the horizon running towards us right now.

And when the god gets here, it's either gonna be a really good, benevolent, amazing God or a really bad God, depending on what we do right now. So we should go into tech. You should go spend your career in tech. Literally, the people in tech right now are the people who are created by God and deciding what that God’s gonna be like when it gets here.

And so, yes, you might object to the lifestyle that some of us have—that many of us have taken on due to early tech, kind of—sure, different topic than saying technology in general, you know. I want to—it's like, “No, no, no!” If you care about people—if you care about your grandchildren—you should be focusing on this too.

Yeah, and especially wary that the minds in tech right now, there are good people as they—maybe they're worried about their—they're humans, their primates—and what the primate wants is to succeed in its own life. So they are worried about glory and trying to succeed, and when everyone in that's doing that, you have this monster being developed in a way that's—that doesn't—larger kind of thought process here, it's just being developed to develop it.

That's really, really scary.

So is there like a canon of literature around that specific topic, or is this kind of a new idea—like developing something that—I mean, I guess you could think about it as a religion basically. Like, how do we get past our short-term monkey mind to care about more people when we're developing technology?

I think, you know, I think as humans, okay? Yeah, the thing that when you want to really make a change, you have to—you don’t try to change humans fundamentally; that’s not easy. What you try to do is you have to build some kind of structure or system that will naturally incentivize shitty, selfish humans to do the right thing.

This is the Elon Musk formula and many others. And so, in this case, but the thing that drives humans more than anything—more than absolutely anything—is culture. Because we want—deeply want—to be accepted by our culture and our system, whatever society we're in. We want to be cool in it.

Whatever Society says these are the cool kinds of people, everyone will put all their energy to try to be like that. Whatever, you know, the people around us—whatever will make us fit in, stand out, be admired, and be attracted to the opposite sex. And all of this—if society decided that money was unattractive and that, and that, you know, working with your hands and living on as little as possible really made you awesome, and that’s what all the movie characters suddenly were doing and that’s what, again, the opposite sex really started to like—no one's in finance anymore.

We'd all be, yeah, working out and trying to get out in construction fields and be really good. The money is only a big deal to us because that’s currently what, you know, society has just told us matters.

Because, you know, it's a remnant of a world where resources, you know, we're so scarce. Now that's not—resources aren't scarce anymore, but the values have stuck around. The value of—let's obsess over resources is still here. Now you have, you know, rich people obsessing their whole life over getting richer.

So if you want people to obsess over AI safety right now—the AI development's a big thing—because development, you know, entrepreneurship is getting rich—getting successful is what we value. If suddenly it became extremely cool in society to be a philosopher thinking about them, or someone in tech obsessed with AI safety, and we—and if we—I think the way this could happen is if people that were aware enough of this page 500 situation suddenly—there’d be all this fear around it, right?

And all of this excitement but all this fear—and if someone could have a breakthrough now, didn’t develop, and development—people would kind of almost look at kind of suspiciously like just—you know, you know, are you okay? That's fine! But if someone comes out with a big breakthrough in AI safety and they became kind of a Nobel Prize front-page of Time magazine, you know, they were interviewed everywhere, and they were the biggest celebrity because—because we were all scared, and they—oh my god, this person might save us!

Yeah, kind of like, you know, them people thought, you know, the Manhattan Project might save us back then—anytime there's, you know, fear. And in humans, that, that takes over everything.

And if you can then—if you can kind of sway that fear somehow. So I think that if you really wanted this to happen, I think that you need—I mean, someone like, you know, Elon Musk, who's really prominent but also really concerned with AI safety—that helps. I think many people like me trying to make these points helps, but again, it’s not telling people you should want safety to be a good person.

It's saying this is the big challenge of our time. This is the great, you know, decision moment we’re about to be at. This is the great filter or not, and who's gonna be the hero that can figure this out? This is the great problem. This is it.

If the development is happening automatically, it's like a wave coming in—a tsunami coming towards us—like who wants to be the hero? Who wants to be the person that saved all of us? Who, you know, everything in the world will be named after them; they'll be basically a god in the future world that they came up with a solution.

If we can—that will happen if people understand the reality, and if people—that happens, then you'll see all kinds of people all thinking about it, forming clubs, and it'll be the coolest thing to be going in to be that. People are gonna be the most noble thing you can go into, and the raddest.

So, you know, the smartest people—it's like, “Oh, you're really smart—you should go into that!” Then, you know, the cancer research now might be that—yeah, you know, it’s something like that, totally.

So when you were a kid, who was the person who you’re like, “Man, that person is so cool! Like, if I could just be like them, then I'll have made it?”

Ameel Wallner basically asked this question—like, were there bloggers or writers that you looked up to as communicators?

I don't think as a kid writing was on my radar as much. As a kid, I think I wanted to be—like I wanted to compose music in a way. I wanted to be like Andrew Lloyd Webber or like Billy Joel or like the Beatles. I think that when I was like eleven would have done—at some point I wanted to be the president. I had like a little ego Easter; I knew then that disappeared by about—I actually became the class president, and that when I was like in like middle school or high school—okay, I was 18.

I was like, I’m not gonna do more of this. This was never campaigning again! Yeah, and also being a class president is a useless job! You're not really doing anything; you’re raising small amounts of money for one thing or two things that are already gonna be funded somehow anyway.

And that's actually—I think a microcosm of a lot of real politicians' lives—not that politicians as a unit don't together have a lot of power, but each trying to be a senator forever—I feel like I can do more, actually, in a lot of ways and have a lot more fun. So that disappeared, and then I went back into a creative lane where I want to either music or writing, you know, one of those.

And when I first started to think about blogging—I was blogging on the side for like six years before I started Wait But Why. I didn't look necessarily to—well, early on, Bill Simmons, you know, in college—I was one of—in college right when he was at his peak popularity—big sports fan, Boston, so I was, you know, a big Bill Simmons reader.

And I wouldn’t say I necessarily wanted to mimic his specific style, but it was his kind of personality integrity—just the fact that he would go on and just be himself and be colloquial and be kind of like fun; like the way he would write an email to his friends is how he would write an article—that resonated with me. That seemed very obvious.

I was like, that is clearly the way to go if I ever, as a writer—when I started my blog, it wasn’t even a question. I wasn't gonna try to be a journalist or have any kind of formula. I was gonna go and just try to be a fun writer.

Well, that just came with the Internet too, it did, exactly. So, he was one of the first really famous ones. But, um, but, but so, and then I looked at, you know, other successful bloggers who I respected, you know, Allie Brosh at Hyperbole and a Half and Randall Munroe and, you know, Jason Kottke and these, you know, certain blogs that I thought were great.

And the thing I really appreciated about them is they were all very unique—kind of like molded to the person's personality who made them. Like, they were just clearly a reflection of the person. The person wasn't trying to be a brand or anything different. They were just kind of like being their best selves, you know, in writing form, you know, drawing form.

And so, again, it wasn't that I think—I was very adamant about trying to actually not look at other styles because I was like, I want to do my exact style because that's what I think is the key, actually. But it was the integrity of these styles that I saw there people use, and I think it really kind of stuck with me as it made it very clear that like—I’m gonna double down on my own style versus trying to fit into any other kind of form.

Yeah, totally. And like, integral—that I haven’t read your old blog—is it still up?

The old blog?

So it is somewhere. It's called “Underneath the Turban.” Okay, it is—it’s very few people have read it. It was just me. It was much more classic blog style stuff. I would write about my day, I'd rant about something, I’d write a list of things I didn’t understand in the world.

So was it as thoroughly researched as—?

Okay, so there was another Twitter question—a nice Gary S. Basically, what styles and techniques do you use to learn things quickly enough to—I think you’ve talked about it—like getting from basically to like level five in an ability to communicate, you know, like this is a—“I—this is why it's interesting; this is why you should care.” What do you use to go from like reading a—I on Wikipedia to writing, you know, a ten thousand or—what is it? Like thirty thousand-word post about it? What do you do?

Yeah, yeah, so the Internet is a real godsend to a curious person or to a blogger trying to order procrastinating or do a procrastinator to a lot of things. But if you can consider like one through ten knowledge on something, ten is like—you know, the world’s leading expert; you know, Ph.D.s get you to like maybe seven or an eight.

My goal is I’m starting at a two or three as a layman, you know? If I'm a really curious layman, I’ll be to 3x already known, and I don’t give myself up to, like you said, a five, maybe a six. Becoming an eight would take years. I would have to focus in on one topic only. I’d rather become a six on fifty topics than an eight on three, you know, or ten on one. So that for—that's me.

Not everyone—some people, the thing they love is being a nine or a ten in knowledge. That's just—I don’t—that doesn’t excite me that much; it would be great; it’s just it’s the lesser of excitement. So and then—and then my goal as a blogger is to, after I’ve gotten to level six, to then package everything I just learned.

And the road I just went down—I basically look at the road I went down and said if I could do this road again, how could I do it efficiently now? How can I—and how can I package this in a way that doesn't just take someone down this road efficiently and thoroughly to get them to where I am, but does it in a way more fun way than I just had?

Let's have—I want the reader to have a lot more fun. I wanted to feature. Yeah—a lot more pictures, more kind of storytelling and just funnier and just more enjoyable than what I just did. So, it’s—that I just went down a road; now let me take this road and make it awesome, and that's my job.

And I got a new road, then I don’t know whatever, so I think the question is about how do I go down my road to get for myself from that to—to a six. Huh?

And the—so I start with Wikipedia or general kind of Googling. I would all do is I'll Google the question I have. So if I want to understand cryonics—if I—you know, whatever it is, I look Google, “What is cryonics?” Cryonics versus cryogenics at home? And we all have heard those terms. And I'll Google “Cryonics scam,” and I'll Google “Does cryonics work?”

And I'll Google—I’ve heard Peter Thiel said something, so I'll say “Peter Thiel cryonics,” and I'll Google “Alcorn chronicles.” I heard there was a company core, and I'll Google “How many cryonics companies are out there? Cost of cryonics.” I'll Google these each in a different tab.

Then, in each tab, I'll basically, without even looking—I'll have those open, every link, you know, eight links on each tab. So I’ll go—but like seventy or eighty links, okay? And, you know, among those are all the four were different Wikipedia articles and then a bunch of just articles written, you know, secondary stores, kind of articles, just, you know, written in Gizmodo and other places like that.

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

And so are you writing notes yourself at this point? Are you trying to communicate this to, you know, like your girlfriend or your friends so you actually know that you're understanding it instead of just reading words?

I am. I have a big document open that I'm pulling quotes that are really interesting or fact or stat or an opinion, and then when I see in a counter-opinion, I'll find that opinion and I'll put it underneath it into the document so they’re next to each other. And then I have a lot of thoughts of my own as I’m going. I’m suddenly bursting with thoughts, and I’m bursting with metaphors. I’m saying, “This is a lot like, you know,” or I’ll say, “Cryonics is kind of like long-term patient care,” or “It’s like pausing you biologically.”

It’s not that I’ll just write it down, right? And I’ll write down all my thoughts as that goes—a lot of the best ideas just couldn’t come out as you’re researching.

And then, depending on the topic, you know, first of all, sometimes it’s a very different process if I’m thinking about procrastination and why you procrastinate, if I’m thinking about why we care what other people think of us or why we get into so many bad marriages. I'm much more likely to gonna be thinking or I'm just gonna be pacing around thinking—maybe having some conversations with friends and writing stuff down. There’s less research, but so I'm specifically talking about one kind of post idea right now, which is their heavy research post—I need to kind of an explainer post, right?

And so at that point, I have a foundation, but there’s a lot more I need to learn. I’ll feel very insecure about my knowledge in many different of these areas, and I’ll just have certain things I don’t understand at all, so I’ll have to go deeper. Like I won’t understand why freezing your cells is not good, but vitrify—is. So I’ll want to dig deeply into that. So I’ll just first look at why—why water expands when it freezes, and I’ll go read about that for a half hour, okay?

And then I’ll look at vitrification. I'll realize, “Oh, we vitrified embryos and organs. So how does that work? What actually goes on in the cell? What goes on in the actual atoms? What’s happening? Antifreeze?” And I’ll go into how antifreeze works in cars to understand what antifreeze is because there’s an antifreeze type solution. Is it the same solution? Is it different? Is it, you know?

And I just started going down rabbit holes of rabbit holes. Sometimes these become unproductive because I just get curious. I end up on YouTube, and like 12 hours later, I’m like watching, you know, like people in road rage fights and all. But then I’ll reel it in and I’ll come back, and—but there’s just—the point is there’s a lot of different—depending on how broad you want to go, and I often want to go really broad.

They don’t go into the Alcor websites—they have this great Q&A. There’s this great FAQ, so I’ll go and read their whole FAQ. And then I’ll go—but then I know that their one voice only, and they have maybe an incentive, so then I’ll go read a competitor's FAQ. And I realize even all of that is silk Raunak’s companies. Then I want to go read a bunch of—so then I’ll start to understand like what the best argument is for cryonics, and I’ll understand the science behind it and a lot of my own thinking about how I want to frame how I can explain this or my own. I want to track my own thought process. I’ll go from skeptical to kind of like super excited to then like a little less excited, but a believer or something, and I want to track that so I can—because I assume a lot of readers are gonna go through that.

So I'm gonna want to like talk—I like to talk about my own—where my own head’s at at the end of a post because I feel like I brought readers here—we can almost like as a group discuss, even though I’m the only one in the room. But so then I want to go and do a hardcore session on the skeptics—what they say. I want to go just Google things like cryonics scam, cryonics like, you know, won’t work, cryonics bogus science, pseudoscience—others Google these things, and I’ll read as many articles as I can, and it’s not that I’m gonna get to the bottom, especially since a lot of times there is no bottom right now, but what I will do is I’ll have a sense of there’s a difference between the skepticism and many—and they’re diverse in their viewpoints, but there seems to be some big fatal flaws, and it seems like the cryonics people aren’t acknowledging them and whatever.

Or you look the other way; you say, “You know, actually, the skeptics don’t seem to really understand what’s going on here. They kind of seem to have a knee-jerk reaction; some of them even talk about freezing a body, which is not even—that’s like what the first thing you learn when you raise—that’s not what’s happening,” in which case—I think in—and I’ll have a sense of I’m like, you know, the cryonics people actually seem like the more serious thinkers right here versus the skeptics or whatever it is.

But I want to understand that too. Yeah, at the end of that, I have this huge pile of thoughts and research, and then I go on to the next phase, which is, you know, outlining and then writing and then drawing and then revising.

But that’s by the end of that, I—I know the [__] out of the topic, you know? It’s like—but what I’m really done—and especially since you then solidify it by outlining it and then writing it and then discussing it—you know, usually the next week you solidify it with a—but by the time I’m done, I mean, again, I'm not a true expert.

And you ask me, you know, I don’t know. I’m not gonna advise a cryonics company on a new kind of technique to use. Nowhere near that level. But what I can do is basically talk to any layman and answer basically any question they have.

There’s almost no question at the end of that where I can’t—not just give you an answer, but I can explain like the science behind it, and I can explain the different—you know, the different contrarian views to the prevailing opinion. So and this is just the Internet. This is just a pretty smart guy on the Internet. We’re not calling people. You're not—you’re reading stuff.

Yeah, sometimes I will. Like, I—for example, for this, I called my doctor friend who I knew would be skeptical because I know he—and I wanted to just hear why, and I wanted to kind of play devil's advocate to his skepticism with what I’ve learned and kind of set up a mock argument between a Crownist and a skeptic by me playing the Crownist.

So I’ll do that for like the post I just did on Neuralink, on brain-machine interfaces. Yeah, that is so new, and there are so many different opinions, and I had access in this case to a lot of great people that I went through, and I went to Neuralink and I met with all the founders and I met with Moulton many of the multiple times. I talked to a bunch of other chronicists, I’m a BMI people too and some sci-fi people. So I thought people I find—this how bad people are—the ones who have the best handle on things like page 500, on things like this big picture—it's crazy.

Yeah, those people—those are the people that think really big picture, and they know about all the different technologies versus a lot of times the people in an industry—they have their blinders on and they’re not that great at thinking about the really big picture. Some of them are, but many times, actually, I’m talking to a scientist—I, for example, I talk to Reza Nam, in this case, a science fiction guy about, you know, brain-machine interfaces versus language. You know, is this the next paradigm? Is language this one big movement?

This—with this big kind of change and now is brain-machine interfaces—the next thing, or is there, like going from—is writing kind of on that level?

Well, he’s a perfect part. We had this great conversation about that because that's the kind of stuff that he thinks about versus the people I had, I talked to in the brain-machine interfaces industry— they were kind of like, well, they just didn’t, they didn’t have much of an answer.

Well, I think that’s actually what causes the rift between a lot of these people because some people are so deep in it—they're engineers, they care about the practical day-to-day progress, and then there are these, like, writers, philosophers in the subject, and they both kind of think the other part is like—that I don't know what they're talking about, or they're so, you know, the people—there are a lot of times—the people in it are so annoyed bythe idiots who basically lie about how quickly this is gonna happen to people who say we’re all gonna be thinking to each other in three years, and they're so mad about that, that someone actually way closer to them—but but being pretty optimistic, they just group them all together to say, “Oh no,” they—but actually know that they reject any kind of their—so dug in now on their stance that this is gonna take a long time, that they can actually go too far at that.

Anyway, so I am—so for cryonics for example, I didn’t talk to anyone else other than my doctor friend. Everything I need was on the Internet. AI, I didn’t talk to a soul. I read three books, probably 200 articles, including, you know, once you get to—once you understand stuff well, then you want to get to some really hardcore science, you get to the papers—I started reading all these mindless, boring papers, and then read a bunch of philosophy, you know, papers on this stuff.

So I just got deep in— but I just read for like, oh, maybe two weeks, which isn’t that much—it’s not that much meat. You really—80 hours of nothing of reading, taking stuff out like— you can get the—it’s not like you know, you—yeah, you can get the pretty big picture, especially if it’s an industry that we’re not even sure yet there’s a species were arguing about it.

You can understand everyone's viewpoints pretty well. Yeah, one good book like “Superintelligence” in the case of AI can give you a really, really great foundation right there, and then you can just kind of tack on information to that foundation or poke holes in that foundation and you end up with a solid understanding.

How often do you let a post go where you're like, you're doing the research and you just can't get a handle on it or you—you feel like the research isn't even there and you have to stop?

I don’t think I’ve ever really done that. I think, um, I’ll often like brainstorm a new post and then stop, but usually that's because I just get it. I suddenly am—that’s—this is a key—a daunting thing that I’m sure all daunting. But when I’m looking at this one particular daunting topic, suddenly every other topic sounds better—the grass is greener phenomenon.

If I’m writing about life, and I’m just like—I have to come up with my own philosophy on this, and I’m just like, “Imagine just researching something in science, how easy that would be,” when I’m, you know, just buried in, you know, a really thick research trying to understand something. I said, “Imagine if I could just sit back and think about, you know, how we think, like you know?”

Or— or if I'm trying to be funny. You know, what—when I’m doing either of those, it sounds so easy to just try to do a funny kind of observational comedy post, and if I’m doing one of those, I’m like, “Oh, the other ones! I can just kind of be earnest! I have to like, try like, be witty here! It’s a nightmare!”

So I’m always switching for that reason really early on. But what I’ve dug into a research post, usually I only start those in the first place because I already know it's a good topic because I heard enough people talking about it and I'm curious enough about it. I know there’s a lot to say, and whatever it is, it’s gonna be worth explaining, whatever I can find out.

So if I find this, I’m researching, that actually—like there’s not really any good answers to this, that's interesting in its own. You’ll be able to say, you know what? Like, don’t feel bad about not knowing because no one knows what this is, but here's what we do know, you know? That’s fine!

I’m fine to do that. So usually ones that pick the topic I’m just, I’m gonna explain what is out there, whatever that is, and that—that’s fine.

And do you ever feel that you ought to do kind of like a—a disproving of that or any particular crazy conspiracy theory?

I'm writing a post now that is kind of taking aim at political dogma and just beyond on all sides and talking about how all these stats that, you know, one political side takes is gospel. I mean, they’re almost always wrong because, in an echo chamber environment, there’s no kind of like white blood cells to kill the virus, and so it just explains it.

Just because the scent isn’t okay over there—you know, it’s not—it’s not—that’s not only is it not valued, it’s very much frowned upon, so everyone’s agreeing. Everyone’s confirming and you have these bad stats that live on and so I’m trying to take a bunch of those in this case and show that they're not true, and show why we got there and how we think is, you know.

And so that's one example. I've done, you know, a few other times I've kind of tried to take a contrarian view on something that I really believe, but most of the time, especially with kind of like a research-y topic, I find that the contrarian—to be a contrarian, you have to have conviction; you have to have a strong opinion that this is wrong.

And for me, if I get conviction, it’s gonna be because I stole it from the can stuff I read. Like, I’m only getting conviction from what I’m reading. So I could—all I’m really doing in that case is regurgitating someone else's contrarian argument, and I’d rather just credit them and kind of present both sides and let the readers make a decision.

So it’s super, like, what's your stance on AI? I’m like, well, here’s this person’s stance, here’s this person’s—this one seems a little more credible to me, but who knows? Versus me being like, “This is right!" I’m like—but like, on the other hand, if I’m talking about we shouldn’t be so dogmatic—like that’s deep in me. I believe that, and I and I think it’s very much like pervasive how dogmatic we are, and it needs to be said.

So there are certain moments like that that I can do that, but if it’s like I'm proving or disproving flat Earth, I mean, I could do that, but the point is there is also like what’s that do we’re gonna pick on the, you know, the point oh, oh one percent of crazies who think this?

Like, so we can altogether like, it’s fun. I agree— that would be a kind of a fun thing to do, but it’s not—that’s—I—it’s—what's the point, you know? It’s just—we can all be like, “Yeah, it’s like great! No one who reads Wait But Why thinks the Earth is flat,” although I just was interviewed on a documentary about the flat Earth, and apparently there’s like 10,000 plus very serious flat Earthers in the US.

Okay, and they’re not like the—a lot of them are really obsessed with the fact that they think it’s science-based. Why is flat Earth? They have all these measurements; they’ve done experiments. They have these, you know, they have all this math and data showing it, and they—and as they seem to have always kind of found some way they can create kind of a logic loophole that makes it seem true.

But they— but I was asking, do they really believe it? And is it with all their heart they’re sure? And they’re sure that that like this is this crazy world that everyone is believing this? I think it’s like the genetic other side of that like snake oil coin where you’re like, “Oh, I know the secret! Like I get this!” and like knowing the secret is this weird like monkey sensation that makes us feel good and different.

It is. It's—we all have in us a susceptibility to conspiracy theory. It's a spectrum of conspiracy. I think it goes from totally objective on one side to bias, a confirmation bias, cherry-picking, you know, kind of luring our way to conclusions where we kind of already know the conclusion we find arguments, right?

Then you can get down the spectrum further that ends in full schizophrenia which is everything I see is part of this thing. Yeah, you know, you can—your left brain is powerful, which is helpful in many ways. It finds a lot of patterns; it’s—that's incredibly ingenious in a lot of ways, but it also gets us into huge trouble because it’s—it's this great lawyer; it can find patterns and in anything and create an art.

If you want to believe something, your left brain will find the evidence to make you believe it. So before you get to full-blown schizophrenia where suddenly there's this one story and everything you see is in it, and it says you get to this land in the middle—which is conspiracy land.

And, you know, we all laugh at something like, you know, all the people who think 9/11 was caused by the US or the moon landing didn’t happen or flat Earthers—we don’t look at ourselves in the mirror. There was a lot of times we genuinely believe conspiracy, and we will—and you don’t realize it, but then, you know, you’re reading a bunch of news that is all cater to your eternity.

Yeah, and you don’t realize that—that, like, you know—I’ve read an article the other day about how when it comes to like Trump and Russia, the left is believing a lot of crazy [__] now. There are just people out there who are just kind of making stuff up at this point about these ties, and there are smart people passing it around being like, “This is it! He’s gonna—this is when he goes out! They’re being crazy!” Because there’s just no—there they want to believe something so badly, and they're so in a bubble where everything is—there's nothing challenging bad ideas that we can get there, any of us.

I’m sure it happens with me on this podcast in terms of like people I invite— it’s like, “Oh, you fall in line with these things that I believe in, so therefore we should do a podcast together and keep it election-selection-bias.”

How do you break that with your posts? Like, I’m sure you fall into this, alright? I always, I’m gonna read a ton of skepticism about any opinion I have.

What does that do?

Think about how we do this, okay? The marketplace of ideas, the idea isn't that the idea is—that it’s specifically the clash of ideas that the dust settles and truth is left, right? The clash of ideas helps us teachers now think about.

Think about a courtroom. A courtroom has one attorney that is full selection bias, cherry-picking, Trump bias of every kind, intentionally as their job of getting to one conclusion. Is there no defense attorney that says, “You know, the prosecution’s made some good points; actually, I think, like, that’s good to know.”

Their job is to be one-sided. Yeah, but because you have both of them, you have the clash, and the jury can maybe start to see—after watching them clash what the treaty is.

So with cryonics, like I said, I'm gonna read once—I don’t to read the skeptics as much as I can. By the time they’re done clashing, it’s not that I know for sure just like the jury doesn’t know for sure. I’m gonna have a hunch, I’m gonna start to feel like these people are the other ones who are much more fact-based here.

Hmm, these people have thought about this more. These people are talking in more reasonable words. They seem to be more humble and more—whatever it is. And so if I’m reading now in the news, we—the news is hopeless to get an objective source. Don’t even try.

I’m trying to be an objective guy! If I tried to create a news source, it's gonna be biased in some way of my own. So what I will do is I’ll read the New York Times article, and I'll go right away and Google the same thing on National Review.

Hmm. Or I’ll watch something on MSNBC, and then I’ll go try to find a clip on Fox News. Pressure to be the first pair. But, you know, New York Times people get mad at—they think it’s biased or Fox or, you know, one of these.

It's just—if you just treat it like one of the attorneys, it's fine. It's serving its role. The problem is when people treat it like the grand truth, like this objective truth. So instead, it's what I find is when I read— I’ve become through this post—and I’m not gonna stop now.

I read a ton of conservative media along with my standard kind of, you know, left-wing media. And together, I just get a healthy degree of skepticism. It makes it very hard for me to feel very convicted about a lot of quick show about anything because if you only read one thing, you could say this is obviously true when I’m saying I heard a really smart good argument by a really smart person saying this wasn’t true and this was overblown and that this was a made-up stat.

And I—and so you end up feeling very humble, which isn’t feel good all the time, but it feels at least like honest. And I—I don’t feel delusional, I don’t feel like I’m in some bubble anymore.

So I think that’s how we can do this is, you know, I—if you have guests on a podcast, get some people on that fundamentally disagree with you, not just on what’s gonna happen but think differently.

That’s really, you know, and just examine their branding; you put it out on the table and examine the way they think. Either you’ll still disagree with the way they think, but you’ll understand them better afterwards, which can then lead you to be able to convince much, you know, change minds better if you understand.

Or they’ll poke some hole in your logic, or humble you out a little bit in a way that will make you—it’ll hurt at the time, it'll make you a better thinker in the long run! Or they’ll literally point out a way you’re wrong or you’ll do something likewise to them.

But for your listeners, right—they’ll benefit a ton from that! I love, you know, Intelligence Squared is this debate podcast. I’d much rather learn something in the form of a debate than in the form of one person. Because now you just it’s like a courtroom to me.

Yeah, and a jury, you know? Okay, I get to be a jury with both sides. Well, that’s why I’ve fallen into the longer form podcast because you really learn how someone thinks instead of their edited, like, sound clip version.

So one of the, like, the hotly debated and contested topics is cryptocurrency right now. Julian asked on Twitter: Do you have thoughts or strong opinions?

Definitely no strong opinions. I have read a little bit. I get more requests for this topic than I’ve gotten about anything in three months! It’s crazy! Yeah, and I do think it’s a good way polite topic. I don’t, right now, have the time at this moment, but I do wanna dive in because it’s exactly the kind of topic I like, which is—this is important! This is extremely complex, and it’s incredibly hard to understand from an 800-word article, which is what everyone writes!

Yep, but it’s not actually that hard to understand in a 10,000-word article. So to me, it’s like I—it’s not that this is that complicated; it’s not that you need to be super smart; it’s just it needs to be really thoroughly explained. No one's doing that very well, and this is important!

Yeah, I was—and I think cryonics and pretty machine interfaces and many other things I’ve taken on. So from what I’ve read, the best analogy, the best like metaphor that pops into my head for what this seems like—and I think out that all changes as I research more—is it seems like it's 1988, and there's not one internet, but there are many different interwebs competing— competitor interwebs kind of trying to start, and maybe none of them will take hold and the whole thing will, you know, end up not existing, or there’ll be many of them, multiple, or there’ll be one that ends up becoming this giant thing like the internet.

And I think the people buying cryptocurrency right now is kind of like buying domain names on various ones of these and hoping that they take off. So maybe there’s an inter-web, but not mean even any websites on it yet, but there’s domain names you can buy, and you’re taking a lottery ticket that maybe this is gonna become the internet, and then I’ll have this super valuable currency.

But I also think that’s probably like explaining like magnets is like having a rubber band where it’s like, “Yes, it tells you what the basic deal is, but it’s actually fundamentally different than what's really happening.” So I think when I research more, I will probably reject my own metaphor as, as maybe a first starting point, but then it needs to be explained further why this is not actually like that.

Because it is—but—but I think it’s a really cool concept. I think that we right now assume that the only way to do things is centralized systems—governments, centralized governments—these trusted authority units we can all kind of hang on to for safety and for, like, organization.

And you know, governments—we invented that, you know, that you know—countries are invented, let you know, pretty recently—page 497 we started having countries basically. So, though, of course, there’ll be other paradigms. Big things are gonna change, and you know, I’m sure that the way that the mining happens right now and things like this is gonna look very primitive. They’ll come up with different ways, especially when you have other kind of interfaces, you have brain-machine interfaces, for example, we may be able to come up with very—you know, just the way that no, a voice scanner, fingerprints work faster than like a password; it’s way more—we might come up with things that are even cooler ways to kind of verify transactions and everything like that and records.

But I’m very intrigued, and I think it is definitely worth understanding and starting to think about it. I think anyone investing right now, you know, I think has to be aware that like, you know, it could be amazing, but like very good chance that like any one of these currencies just becomes nothing, and I think that people know that.

So, but I think it's just so cool, it’s fascinating, and I think I think understanding it starts with understanding kind of the blockchain concept, and I think that starts with understanding encryption and just literally how the encryption works and, you know, the public key and the private key. And when I dug into that of the log, I started to like—it started to make sense and I started to say, “I see.”

Otherwise, that people—they hear about this like mythical ledger on computers and they just tune out because they think I don’t know what does that mean? Once you get what it means it starts to be kind of delicious.

So I think that that’s—it’s a great topic. Or they think it’s just this fake thing that you’re buying into, only prices rising and so you’re gonna make money that way, or they—they one-dimensionalize it as this is just like a different kind of currency, but it’s not! It’s the currency itself is one of many kinds of things that can happen in a decentralized system.

So, yeah, I have a two-week reading stretch ahead of me there, and I'll come out of that and I'll have way better answer for you.

Okay, cool, and so I just want to wrap up with one more question from Facebook. So Casey Sten asked, “You gave an awesome talk about AI in Carmel, it sounds like in May, and what incredibly complex technology that’s coming needs our attention?”

What’s something that all of us should know or think about?

Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot right now. I mean, it’s exciting; it’s overwhelming. So I think I'm going to name a few, okay?

I think—I mean I think crypto is one of one thing to think about. Things that might be as big a deal as the Internet in 10 years is kind of how I’m thinking about it. Or way bigger, I think so, you know—you know, there’s this hype kind of trajectory that goes big, big, you know, something first starts to actually work as a technology; massive hype! Then it’s not really ready for primetime yet though and everyone gets—everyone just suddenly becomes like, “Oh, everyone that—you know everyone’s over that! It’s never gonna work,” right?

And then it creeps back in as an actual existing thing. So we’ve had AI and a few different of these bumps. I think VR, AR is one of these. There was a big stretch a couple years ago. You know, Oculus is new, and the Vive—and you know, people are doing these cool demos, and you know, you have first AR kind of big explosion with Pokémon Go, and you have the Google cardboard—you know, and you have Samsung Gear and all this stuff, right?

And I think there was huge hype, and now you don’t hear much about it right now. It’s—it’s in a dead period because it was—the only way to do it well is it’s really expensive. You had to get a fancy computer and a fancy thing. They were hard to even get; they were backlogged, the headsets and you had to be tethered to your computer. You had to put stuff on the walls. I did all this, so I know!

And then you got in them, and sometimes they made you nauseous. There were some programs that were unbelievable, and I was just blown away. This is 1.0, this is MS-DOS! And it’s so good already, but a lot of them weren’t that good. A lot of them made you nauseous; the headset, it’s exhausting to have on for a long time—it’s heavy.

Yeah, take it off! You’re sweating! And now all I'm thinking the whole time is people in ten years are gonna look at—you know, I'm gonna go to my closet and pull out my 5.1.0, they're gonna say, “Oh my god! Look how big this is! You could put it oughta be like, oh my god, you were this!" and it’s gonna seem like, you know, the cell phone in a briefcase.

Yeah, so—so, but I’ve done this a lot more than most because I was—I’m gonna write a post on it, and I went to the Oculus conference. I’ve tried all the—basically all of the programs, and I was just floored by how awesome this is!

VR knows even getting to AR, which is probably even bigger concept, you know the magic leap stuff—and just things where you just—whether it’s through headset or glasses or eventually contact lenses—whatever—you actually can, you know, you just add stuff on to your world. Your whole computer interface is just floating there in front of you and whatever it is—I’m, you know, a lot of things we can’t even imagine!

So I think that those—I think that that the implications for gaming and entertainment, but also for you know just kind of experiences for—for communication, for training for, you know, building empathy and for, you know, the classroom of third graders in the—you in in Missouri going on a fun-filled trip to the moon with a class from third graders in Saudi Arabia and coming back!

And like this is good for empathy! This is good for the world, right?

Yeah, you know, being able to sit around with your grandmother even though she died 40 years ago and sit there at the table like she’s there, and you’re just watching her look at you and laugh, and you’re having a conversation that—you know, you’re watching the conversation that took place!

So this is—I can go on many, many examples, but I was in that headset, and I also learned enough about—like, what's coming with the technology that the headsets are gonna get—it’s very much smaller.

They’re gonna stop needing to be tethered to something and needing to have things on the wall—you’re gonna have cameras on the actual headset—they’re gonna see the walls and it’s just gonna get better and better and better, and batteries are gonna get better, and the computers, and they’re gonna get better.

So we’re gonna end up, I think in 10 years, with a billion people using VR! A billion! Like, it’s gonna be the new kind of smartphone or cell phone.

And you know, young entrepreneurs who want to get into, you know, something that’s new; you know, this is a heaven—start your company when it’s not being talked about, start developing, start making really good things, you know, or AR or whatever it is and when the headsets are ready and when suddenly, you know, there’s a killer kind of headset that’s in everyone’s pocket and it ends up, you know, all over the world—you’re gonna be one of them, you’re gonna—you know, you'll be in the position to be Google; you know, there's the Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg of the VR world.

Like, they don’t— they don’t exist! You don’t—will they? They probably exist, but yeah, yeah, they’re not—they’re not famous yet unless, unless, you know, I mean, I know that Mark Zuckerberg also wants to be the Mark Zuckerberg of the—but there’s gonna be new, you know, giants and they’re not there yet!

So that’s one. Another one I would just say quickly is, you know, genetic stuff—CRISPR and all that! I mean, it costs—I think it was almost $2 billion—he was almost $3 billion—like 20 years ago to sequence the human genome, and today it’s like 50 bucks!

Okay, things are about to get really crazy. I mean, we—I think that your grandkids are gonna be born here. Your grandkids are gonna say to you, you just had a baby and hoped it was a good baby. It's gonna seem crazy!

He’s gonna seem so old-school. Yeah, it’s gonna be just, you know—and only the crazy hippies are gonna be like, “We just had a natural base in the way it is,” and people are gonna hate them like anti-vaxxers like, “You're a horrible parent! You should've never done so!”

And all the implications of this enhancing ourselves, creating, you know, just—just getting rid of disease, creating smarter people. I mean, you can really go on and on and on.

There you’ll have—you’ll have four people, like two couples decide to make a baby—the four of them, really kind of cool [__]—so if that really gets rolling, we’re gonna look back at the world when, you know, you just had normal pee also, so I did this! I have researched, but like pregnancy is, god, it’s gotta go! It’s crazy!

Yeah, once we have that—you incubate the fetus, the embryo, and you in this perfect chamber that has all the mothers—you know—all the mothers' hormones—all the mothers' blood.

And so it’s not like this: it has all this exact same chemicals that would be going into it with the perfect diet! It’s monitored perfectly, and the mother gets to live her normal life, and then it doesn’t have to—the fact it would be that way—your grandmother gave birth like an animal! She was pregnant; she gave birth like out of her vagina—like an animal!

It’s gonna seem so primitive! And then, you know—so anyway, you can go on and on! I mean, I think brain-machine interfaces are another huge one. I think—I broke! No one is talking about Mars right now; give it five years. There’s gonna be humans on Mars in a decade! No one realizes this!

Okay? We’re—you know, the amount of leaps for all of life on Earth that you can say are as big as gold multiplanetary—there's like simple cell—complex cell—complex cell to multicellular organism—multicellular—like animal, to out of the ocean, on land—multiplanetary!

I mean, this is so big and it’s happening in our lifetimes! It’s so exciting! And it’s gonna be the new kind of moon decade; it’s gonna be the new one—yeah, the 20s is the new 60!

So lots of exciting things! This is why people should probably go—go into some kind of tech, and—and the word Tech is it, you know, they should— they should move to California or other places. It may be Austin has a scene, Boulder, but they should get involved in the future because it’s like we’re inventing this new planet that we’re all gonna live on.

So—and I would also say just don’t be intimidated to learn—like similar to you— just like go for it! You just get—it’s easy to get involved, and it’s also easy to get scared, and I don’t think people should be scared. Plus, a lot of other people think they need to be great at math or coding!

Totally! A lot of what we need are smart philosophers, smart, you know, people can make great metaphors, people who can who can, you know, talk about ethics, you know something, but we just—you know, it doesn’t matter what you’re good at! Like, you have a role to play in this I mean being pretty good at two things means you’re extraordinary at that one thing!

Absolutely! And that’s like—exactly—exactly! So I mean, right, you can—you know, some people go for breadth, and then you offer something different. You see a big picture that other people don’t, like the sci-fi author, or you get really into depth on one thing, and then you really are—whatever it is, like, there’s a role. There’s definitely a role.

Maybe your job is communicating what’s happening to other people like me. So yeah, I think that people need to just get excited and scared at the same time, which is gonna fire them up!

So, alright, man! Thanks for coming in!

Okay! Thank you!