Tim Urban - Grand Theft Life - [Invest Like the Best, EP.59]

I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset managers, and seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount, and more risk. Ridgeline offers a better way forward, one unified platform that automates away all that complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance, and more, all at scale. Ridgeline is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter, and stay ahead of the curve. See what Ridgeline can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgelineapps.com. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. This week's conversation is about artificial intelligence and interplanetary travel. It's about content creation, thinking from first principles, and death progress units. It's about brain-machine interfaces and why it is crucial that you be a chef and not a cook. My guest is Tim Urban, along with his business partner, Andrew Finn. Tim is the most entertaining writer I've come across in years, who explains complicated and interesting topics to his millions of dedicated readers on the website Wait But Why. As an example, Tim's last post on Elon Musk's Neuralink venture is 40,000 words long. roughly the length of a short book. It explains almost all of human progress and our potential future using drawings and cartoons. It's impossible to stop reading. While this conversation is wildly entertaining, it is also chock full of metaphors and lessons that will be useful to anyone doing creative work or building a company. I hope this leaves you as energized as it left me. I call this episode Grand Theft Life because that is the name that Tim and Andrew give to their worldview, which I think will change the way you behave too. Please enjoy my great conversation with Tim Urban.

So I think a perfect arc to start or frame the entire conversation is for you to describe your idea of planets one, two, three, and four, what those represent. And then we'll use those as avenues to explore a lot of your favorite topics. Yeah. So I think of. This little kind of planet metaphor with an alien, a tourist alien that's just traveling around looking at all different kinds of planets with life in them in the universe and analyzing. Maybe this is his job back on his home planet. So he sees one planet that happens to be identical to Earth 10 million years ago. He looks around and he sees, you know, this green land and blue water and, you know, maybe some like, you know, he zooms in, sees some little herds of elephants and other things in the, you know, in the savannah. And okay, you know, whatever, typical. And then he moves on to another. solar system, and he comes across a planet that happens to be, so that's planet one, he comes across what we're calling planet two, a planet that happens to be exactly what Earth was in 50,000 BC. And he sees basically the same thing, except maybe he notices little specks of light. Okay, so his little specks of light turns out to be those are human fires, but he's basically the same thing. Okay, bored, show me something different, and he goes to another solar system, and he comes across a planet that happens to be Earth today. It's exactly like Earth today. Maybe it is Earth today. And first thing he notices is, you know, he has to jump his ship out of the way, you know, swerve it out of the way of the International Space Station coming by. Then he looks down and he sees these massive gray areas, and he zooms in, he sees towering, you know, buildings, and he sees all this activity in the oceans, and he says the air around the planet's crawling with little, looks like little bugs in their airplanes, and he sees, you know, just giant, all this deforestation, all this, it's just giant impact. everywhere and he says okay well so he goes home and they say well what did you find he says well i found two planets that basically had that i don't think they had any intelligent life and the third one had like had definitely had an extremely intelligent species on it doing some crazy stuff that would be a natural instinct right if you looked at those three planets but it's actually wrong planet two and three 50 000 bc and today had the same exact species with the same exact level of intelligence

So what's going on? What's the difference? Not the most intelligent species on the planet, because that's the same for planet two and three. The difference is what I call the human colossus, which is like the, it's the collective knowledge that humanity has built, the collective kind of ability to create and invent, and it builds upon itself. And it's this kind of mountain of achievement that's this... cumulative thing that no one human or no one generation could do on their own. Even something like the match, you think, oh, the match. No one person invented the match. If you look at the history of the match, there's like 10 different people over a span of like 400 years that each had a critical innovation that it was like this over time collaboration that led to the match. And you can look at everything around you and no human's smart enough to create this. No one even knows how to make a pencil on their own. No one knows how to do all the different parts that create a pencil on their own. I call this the human colossus. It's this kind of force that's greater than humanity itself, greater than any of the people, greater than the smartest people. And it has grown substantially in between 50,000 BC and today. And it is creating. at a level we can't even fathom right now. It's very hard for us to even understand how weird a time this is to be alive. But that's the difference. It's not humanity. Humans are the same. It's that this colossus is far bigger and it can create things like the International Space Station now. And it couldn't do that back in 50,000 BC. It just hadn't grown yet. It's a cumulative effort. And planet four then is effectively the unknown future, right? So my wife, I was reading, rereading a bunch of your posts last night for like four or five hours, which was incredibly fun to do all at once. And my wife said, Tell me about this guy that you're going to talk to tomorrow. And I said, I think the best way to describe him is that he has done the most effective job of anyone I've come across at explaining the idea of compounding. That compounding is a beautiful, elegant little thing. And if you look at all of human history and this kind of exponential growth curves, whether it's AI or exploration or knowledge or anything, these things all compound. And effectively, I like to think of your work, especially your more recent work.

as explaining that in incredibly fun, simple terms. So maybe we can start with some of the early iterations of that idea. And I'll let you pick. It could be artificial intelligence. I think that's a fairly clean one. We could talk about technology and Elon Musk. We'll talk about all these things. What is your favorite of the topics that you've tackled manifestation of this idea of the human colossus, of our knowledge compounding over time? It's almost hard to pick one because there's so many different parallel. exponential curves happening. The example I like to use is I think of, okay, just say we went and got George Washington in a time machine. Bring him back here, which I actually fantasize about doing. We were Thomas Jefferson, these really curious dudes. It would be so fun to bring them here and just be like, okay, I have a lot to show you. You're going to be so excited. So I picture bringing George Washington here. Now, this is recent history. This is yesterday in history. He's 17, 1750. He was a young guy. Just say, okay, 1750, we bring him here. 250, 270 years ago. That is nothing, right? That's like your grandparents Great-great-grandparent means nothing. So bring him here. And yet, if you think about the world that he is from, okay, he's from a world where the power is out permanently. There's no such thing as power. There's no such thing as electricity in your life. Transportation means you're on a horse or you're on a sailboat. Communication means long-distance communication. You might have like a smoke signal or like a fire cannonball in the air. I mean, you're not, or you send, again, you send a letter on a horse. You just think about the world they lived in, right? And then you come here and you see telephone, the iPhone. You FaceTime with someone across the world. You play music for him that was recorded 50 years ago. You show him a baseball game that was being played, currently being played a thousand miles away. You show him the International Space Station in the sky. You show him the internet. You show him, you tell him that people walked on the moon. I mean, I always say that he, it's not just he would be mind blown or shocked. He would die. I think he would die from the level of progress that's been made of his shock. So then I get to this concept, this, what I call a die progress unit, a DPU.

How far do you have to go in the future to die from the level of progress? The George Washington today level. But what's interesting is if George Washington went back the same amount of time, 250 years or so, he's not going to be able to make Leonardo da Vinci. die by coming from 1500 to 70. It's not the same. It'll be cool. But remember, he's still coming to a world where there's no power and people are still on horses. And, you know, they have a cooler world map and they have telescopes. So they have some mind blowing things, but it's just not the same. You have to go way farther back to like a time before like the cities, before the agricultural revolution, like 12,000 years ago. And if you do this, if you keep doing this, you realize that like the DPUs are getting dramatically shorter. So this gets back to planet four. The alien then goes to the other solar system and sees Earth in the future. What does it look like? And I think that if you look at the DPU length, if it's getting shorter and shorter, it means the next one could be in our lifetimes. Sometime, if you take a snapshot of something later in our own lives, it might be as shocking to us as today would be to George Washington. That's this mind-blowing concept. So to get back to your question about what in particular, this compounding thing, computers is a perfect example. You start off with these big transistors, these vacuum tubes, and then you have the integrated circuit, and suddenly we're on an exponential path. And you can just watch, as Moore's Law happens and all this other innovation, the power of computing just skyrockets in our lives, and then we may have quantum computing in the future, but we also have software on the other side. That's hardware, but then we have the software side, which is the even crazier side that people don't think about enough now. Moore's Law is a discussion of hardware more than anything. AI, we're talking about this, we're creating this kind of other kind of colossus in a way, this artificial computer colossus that is going to best humans as the smartest thing on this planet for the first time ever. Can you talk about the different stages of AI, starting with Nero, and maybe some of the positives and negatives or biggest concerns associated with those kind of three major stages? So artificial Nero Intelligence is...

intelligence that is really good at one thing or two things. So if you picture kind of an XY coordinate graph, right, and you have the Y axis is magnitude of intelligence, but the X axis is just full of, you know, has many, many tick marks for different kinds of intelligence. Okay. General intelligence goes across horizontally across the whole thing. It's smart in all of those ways. The question is how smart, but it's, it's horizontal. It's breadth, has breadth. Narrow intelligence. is very narrow. It's good at one of those tick marks. So it's a bar. It's like a vertical bar. And the question is how high. So what AI is good at now is it's really good at narrow intelligence, meaning it has these little, you know, it has bars, these vertical bars that has a high magnitude of intelligence at one very narrow thing. So there's an AI in your car that... It fine-tunes the parameters of your fuel injection system, right? It's brilliant at it, but it can't give you dating advice, right? I mean, it's really good at this one thing. And so that's where we are right now. We're in a world run by ANI, narrow intelligent computers. And there's a lot of things that are tremendously, that are advancing, you know, tremendously quickly here. Like, you know, in the medical world, for example, there's doctors tend to get mammograms correct. Their analysis of a mammogram correct about 80% of the time. That's pretty, you know, throughout, you know, that's a fairly, you know, over a large sample size, that seems to be about right. So they now have an AI that's analyzing mammograms that gets it right 99.6% of the time. And it does it way, way faster, almost instantaneously. It can flip through 100 of them, and doctors take forever. That is one example of so many of, it's not even close. I mean, AI, when it's better than humans at something, is so much better that it's not even close, and it's so much quicker, and it doesn't. get tired and it doesn't it's just so superior so there's going to be a lot of things that as this narrow intelligence starts to just kind of invade industries a lot of people compare it to the electrical revolution you had a world with no electricity and suddenly electricity wasn't just in you know a big part of the world it was everywhere it was part of every single industry it was part of every single one's everyone's personal life a lot of people think that just narrow intelligence alone is going to get there it's going to be management malfeasance to have a company that doesn't use

It's going to be medical malpractice to have your hospital not fully being run with AI analysts and things like that. And so... There's a lot of just discussion, but even this is talking about 2025. I mean, we're talking like eight years, seven years from this is really near future that this is going to start invading more and more industries. It'll start with more kind of the more rote things like collation tasks and decision tree tasks and things like that. And then it starts to extend outward to things that involve more maybe empathy and creativity and real time decision making and judgment and things that we associate with only a human, you know, the classic joke. Because every time only a human can do this, it always ends up proving you wrong. That goalpost keeps getting pushed. Oh, yeah. So gaming is a perfect example. I mean, AI cannot beat a human in chess. It's too complicated. Well, then in 1996 it happened. I think it was 1996 against Garry Kasparov, Deep Blue. Then you say, well, they'll never win in Go. After two moves in chess, there's about 400 possible moves. You can brute force that. And a computer can go through all of them. After two moves in Go, there's, I think it's 350,000 is the number. I mean, you can't brute force it. And there's more configurations, possible configurations of a Go board than there are atoms in the universe. So you can't brute force that. The computer needs to actually be kind of good at the game, smart. And sure enough, just last year, Best Go player in the world lost to AI. Then they said it could never win at poker, because that involves lying. That involves, that's an art. Well, Carnegie Mellon, a team of poker players, played this computer called Libratus. And Libratus, sure enough, after the first seven days, they'd go home at night, and the people would strategize and see what they're doing and come back, and they'd be beating the computer. Seven days in, the computer never lost again. When AI starts beating us, it never looks back. It gets so much better at us than we are so. That gets us to the big question. Now, how about when this AI intelligence can gain breadth, can get to general intelligence the way that humans have it, this kind of across-the-board, this horizontal intelligence, smart, as far as humans are across the board. If the patterns hold, and I don't see why they wouldn't, it's not just going to...

be human level at that point. It's going to be just as better at us at being smart as it currently is at us at chess or anything else. This gets into that DPU unit, right? Where people I'm sure have heard the singularity or some version of progress line basically going vertical so that the time it takes to make enormous leaps in progress is tiny and we can't even recognize it. It just blows right through our own intelligence. Have you found interesting arguments, skeptical arguments that say, So if you think about artificial intelligence, a good friend of mine would say, if you hear that word, just think machine learning. If you hear machine learning, just think linear regression. And there's just better and better techniques. So it's really just better and better pattern recognition. So you can take data, find patterns quicker, more efficiently, create some sort of prediction outcome, which is why the narrow applications of it have been so good. Have you ever thought about... what it would take to go from the narrow to the broad. How would those individual packets of improving regressions basically scale in a way that the thing was generally intelligent? First of all, very few people I've talked to. I mean, some, but it's a small number of people that really just are super skeptical of this. The question is more about when. But the thing is, like, the human intelligence isn't that complicated. Like, intelligence in the end just isn't, I don't think it's just that, it's not a magical thing that's going on. And you can see that from the AI getting better and better at these games that involve an increasing degrees, you know, increasing degrees of freedom. So, you know, Go is more than chess and poker is more than Go. And now it's starting to win things like League of Legends, which is, you know, even more. And eventually you have the real world as the ultimate degrees of freedom, right? War and other things, the economy. why wouldn't it suddenly just absolutely own the economy and just know everything? So to me, it's more like I feel like the burden of proof is on people to prove to me why this wouldn't happen. It's just not like, yeah, to me, it's just, I don't know. I just don't see it as that. I don't see any good reason why these things wouldn't be able to do what we can do. So I'd like to take a huge step back in order to be able to move forward.

And talk about what I feel is one of the most interesting and useful frameworks that you've written about, which I think you call cook versus chef. Planet four is an unknown. We are in large part creating whatever that future is, or at least creating the machines or the intelligences that will create that future. Let's talk in some detail about this idea of I think it was a result of your deep dive into trying to basically understand Elon Musk. So maybe tell tell that backstory. And from that story, we'll explore this idea of a cook versus a chef. I think this is like one of the most important. I know an idea is important when I write seven posts about seven different topics and it keeps coming up. And it keeps coming up when I think about the world and I think about my own life. And it's just so relevant to everything. And it's just this concept I think we should all have in our heads at all times. And so it started when we started this blog, this company, this idea like... Sorry, I don't do a lot of background. No, that's right. 2013, just not even knowing what it was going to become. And then I did this long article on AI and Elon Musk read it, which is a big moment in a blogger's life. So we were pumped. And then, you know, even more surprisingly, he reached out and was kind of like, you know, would you want to do some kind of similar type writing about some of the industries I work in? So obviously, you know, the answer is yes. The answer is, can we hang out and cuddle immediately? And so it was really cool. You know, I had a lot of chances to interact with Elon over the next kind of six months, went out into the factories, met a bunch of his executives. And really, you know, he really, I think he thinks messaging is very important. And I think he thinks that. He's frustrated very reasonably with the difficulty in kind of explaining why he's doing what he's doing to the world. So I think he thinks messaging is very important. So he really dedicated a lot of time to this project. And that allowed me to do two things. I mean, the thing that he wanted me to do was... explain why he's doing what he's doing. He didn't want me to say how awesome Tesla is. That's not what he cares about. Why is Tesla important? And what's the actual, the telos, what's the final, the actual objective of Tesla's existence? And it's to accelerate the advent of a sustainable energy world. Most people, you ask them what Tesla is, what they do, they'll say, oh, it's a fancy car maker. Or maybe they know it's electric cars. It's just so far from getting to the actual end there.

And SpaceX, people say, oh, it's, you know, it's this cool new kind of private rocket company or it's, you know, this billionaire wants to go to Mars. So he's making this thing. But that's not what it is. It's SpaceX exists in order to both two things, you know, reduce the cost of space travel so that humanity can be a space faring civilization in general in a way that we're not. to make us a multi-planetary civilization, to make life on Earth multi-planetary. For the first time, that's like one of the five, you know, you can count the great leaps for all of life on your hand, like one hand, and that gets like a thumb. That gets one of the fingers, like simple cell to complex cell, complex cell to multi-cell organism, ocean out onto land. and then moving to another planet. Like, it's a big deal. It's a pretty cool thing. So that's what SpaceX's goal is. It was one of the great leaps for all of life. But also why. These things are important, both of them, for the same reason, the same end reason. They both are actually, you know, the forks that go to the same end point, which is to help humanity have a long future, a good, the best possible probability of a good future. So this is what he would say. And he does these quick interviews and they're often about controversial things or about specifics or logistics of what's going on and investing. And he doesn't have the time to really explain it. So that was what he wanted me to do. Question one, why is he doing what he's doing? I had my own selfish purpose, which was question two, which he doesn't care about. But I knew my readers would and I definitely cared, which is why is this dude able? to do what he's doing. This is nuts. This person is nuts. No one can do this. This would be like if you took Henry Ford and combined him with Marie Curie and Thomas Edison somehow into one human who also watches South Park constantly. It just doesn't make sense. Nothing makes sense. And I said, look, I went in with an open mind. Maybe he's just that. He's just an unusual combination of top 0.01% intelligence, drive. You know, he has an ambition to do good. He has, you know, a fearlessness. He's got this, you know, all these things. I said, no, because if it were just, you know, being smart and wealthy, because, you know, PayPal helped him be rich. If it's just smart and rich and connected and driven and hardworking, there's a lot more Elon Musks out there. I mean, what I just said is not that rare. I mean, you can probably find, you know, 100 people in Manhattan right now that basically have what Elon has in those five things.

I said, it's gotta be something else. And that's what I spent six months while I'm working with him, but I'm also listening to the way he phrases things. I'm listening to how he talks and what he seems to really care about. I'm watching interviews with him to just kind of supplement that. And I kind of realized that I think it's about how he thinks. It's about how he reasons. And that, to me, was not just what makes him, I think, so rare and special, but I think it's also the same thing that makes so many... disruptors is even the word, the kind of people that literally just turn an industry on its head, like a Henry Ford with the assembly line or the Beatles, like just totally changed music. How did they do that? Steve Jobs with the iPhone. I mean, every, you know, it's one of these moments when someone creates a new product, usually an outsider, and then everyone in the industry suddenly like drops what they're doing and scrambles for survival to try to create a copy product. That's someone doing something special. Why do those things happen? And that's when I came to kind of this, and I've heard this is Elon's words himself. He talks about, If you ask him advice, he'll probably say you should reason from first principles instead of reasoning by analogy. What he means by that, reasoning from first principles, it's a physics term. First principles in physics are your axioms, your base facts that you use as puzzle pieces to construct. a conclusion. And thinking like a scientist, when new evidence comes in, and it constantly does, you know, Newton's laws were laws until Einstein came around, and then you realize that you're looking at like a little piece of something that's like this much bigger shape that's not what you thought it was. So new facts come in, new evidence comes in, it immediately just reverberates up the tower that you've built, the puzzle you've built, and it hits the conclusion at the top, and the conclusion changes. And you trust those first principles, and you trust your reasoning process. And then you have reasoning by analogy, which is, well, what are other people doing? doing. Let me just look at what's already being done. Look at what seems to be the conventional wisdom. And let me just iterate a little on that. Okay. And that's what most people do when they start companies. That's how most people live their lives, choose their life decisions. It's how most people do most stuff. Now, reasoning by analogy is an evolutionary adaptation that helps us save energy. So I'm wearing right now a t-shirt and jeans because

And I copied that. That's what other people like me wear, so I'm going to just copy them because I don't care about clothes. It's not important to me. The problem is when people start reasoning by analogy and things that are important, like who they marry or where they settle down or what kind of things they do with their life. And once they have maybe a company or an investment kind of strategy, how are they really determining how this thing grows? And so that's when you need to do the hard, unpleasant, kind of scary. work of reasoning from first principles. And I call that being like a chef. And then for me, a chef is someone who in this case writes a recipe. The first principles for a chef are the ingredients, the raw food ingredients. And they, they experiment and they make a lot of bad things. In the meantime, they're going to fail a lot, much more than someone who's copying recipes, but they're going to once in a while stumble upon something new. Then you have what I'm calling a cook, which is someone who follows a recipe. And there's so many, you know, you have to always think about what's your recipe. And, you know, for people in the 1600s studying the Grand Canyon, there were the chefs who said, well, we don't know anything, so let's just... observe and see what we find. And they learned that the earth was 5 billion years old. But then there were a lot of people who I called them, you know, these are the flood geologists who said, well, we know the Bible says the earth is 6,000 years old. So we have to reconcile with that. And they ended up not being able to find truth because their Bible got in the way. They didn't have the ability to reason from what they observed. So the question is, what's your Bible? What's your recipe in all of these different areas? And what Elon is so amazing at is just, he looks at something like SpaceX. Before he starts it and says, well, he does some calculations and says, I think we can learn how to land a rocket. I think we can reduce the cost. It seems like they're spending way too much. It seems like this is something a private company could do. And every part of conventional wisdom and all of his friends are saying, don't do it. Every billionaire that's tried has failed. You're going to lose all your money. What are you doing? 99.9% of humans are not wired to overpower that, to overcome that. We are wired to say, yeah, you know what? And if no one else is doing it.

I'm sure there's a reason. Or if it were a great idea, it would already be done. Or whatever, you know, this is the kind of things people do when they start a business. They think that way. Elon said, well, okay, but that's fine because my first principles calculations say it's possible, so I'm just going to go with it. Shocking. No one does that. That makes you unbelievably different. So, you know, it can go on and on. Steve Jobs didn't say, well, let's build a new phone. Well, what should our keyboard look like? It should be like an Apple-y, slick kind of keyboard. That would be reasoning by analogy. Instead, he said, what should a mobile device be? Let's just think about that. And by the time they were done reasoning, there was no keyboard. And then, of course, it comes out with something new and everyone stumbles over themselves, tramples over each other to try to create something. You talk about the difference between human hardware, human software. Obviously, there's the nature nurture debate is interesting. Of course, there's some innate abilities, you know, probably some measure of your intelligence or your interest is kind of inborn. But my impression from reading the cook versus chef post was that your conclusion was that this is actually actionable information, that if the distribution of people along the cook chef spectrum is, I don't know what percentage it is, but some large percent are kind of natively cooks. We're an imitative species. It's like you said, energy saving to basically just if something's working for that guy, I'll just do that. Not to think too hard about it. But I think your conclusion was and the reason why I think it's maybe the most important thing that you've written in terms of the effect it might have on people. is that you can engender chef-like mindset, software, and behavior. So am I reading that right, that that was at least in part your conclusion? Yeah, well, this is the good news when I studied Elon. I was like, hey, what makes him, what really makes him stand out is actually not something we can't do. That was great. He's not the Michael Jordan of thinking. You can't just think your way to be Michael Jordan. But I was like, this is something that we can do. And it's like you said, hardware and software. So hardware. Humans have this, you know, hardware is like a ball of clay that you're born with. And not all clay is equal. There's different IQ. There's different talents. There's all this kind of thing.

But software is the tool that the clay is shaped into, usually in your youth, but it's also wired to shape a certain way because we are evolved as tribal people. So in the tribe, your brain, your biology is still, it doesn't adjust as quickly as society and civilization, again, because it's compounding effect that doesn't happen in your biology. So your biology is sure that it's 50,000 BC and you better fit in with your tribe and you better follow the leader and you want to rise up in status. It doesn't care about originality. It's the opposite. Originality is going to get you into trouble. Fit in. Do what other people around you do. Don't take any risk and definitely don't fail. Don't fail publicly. It could ruin your reputation forever. You might end up out of the tribe where you will die. This is what your brain thinks and it's wired very cleverly for that. If you somehow ended up in a time machine and you're back in 50,000 BC, don't worry. You're going to be fine. All you have to do is just be a normal human who's terrified of what other people think and wants to fit in desperately and give away all their individuality for that out of social fear and you're going to do great in your tribe. You suck up to the Let people in authority be a pleaser. It's perfect. So what Elon does, and I think he does it extraordinarily well, is he somehow, so we have a lot of delusion that is built around, that's like this fog of delusion that is built around this tribal wiring that doesn't want us to be in touch with reality. That's not helpful. He wants us to survive. Elon somehow, I think, sees the world through this clear lens. He just sees things as they are, including what's actually risky. So he'll look at starting a business. He'll say, well, this is naturally risky. This is, you know, this is just, you know, he has this funny quote from him with a seven. He was seven in the playground. He told some little girl, he said, she's scared of the dark. He said, I used to be scared of the dark. And then I realized it was just absence of photons in the visible light sphere. It's like a psychopath. On the other hand, he's right. And we look at the little, we say, oh, that's cute. She's scared of the dark. She doesn't know better. And it's cute that he knows better. That's so funny. And yet today when he says, I don't know why people are so scared of starting a business. What's going to happen? You know, what's the worst? You're not going to die. It's the same quote.

Except we're the little kid now. We're all scared of the dark. So he just sees things clearly in all situations. And we have this delusion in all these situations. On the other hand, he sees when things actually are dangerous that we don't think they are. Like AI. And he's like, dude, we are creating something smarter than we are. So he's just clear-headed, including about decisions in his own life and what really matters. Back to, you know, what you're saying about, you know, the hardware and the software. I think that the key is self-awareness. You know, what I realized when I studied Elon is that it's not that he's doing something so amazing. It's that we're all, what's our problem? Like we're all kind of crazy, actually. He's kind of a sane person on a planet of crazy people. And that to me is, you know, like. The key is just kind of like having enough self-awareness to understand your own tribal psychology and all the delusion that comes along with it and to trust your own reasoning and realize that conventional wisdom is usually, here's the thing, in 50,000 years ago, conventional wisdom was wise because it goes 20 generations back of all people basically living the same life as their great, great, great, great grandparents out in their hunter-gatherer life. So if someone says, don't eat that berry, don't eat that berry, conventional wisdom knows. Today, when your grandmother says, don't eat that berry, You know, Tim, don't start some company. Go to law school. That's wisdom for a world that's not here anymore. Right. And our tribal wiring is not good at realizing that Elon somehow just sees right through that and says conventional wisdom. Of course, it's usually wrong. It's usually outdated and based on something that's not for me. It's based on fear. It's based on like social fear, whatever it is. And he just is able to kind of, yeah, to work without that. The other interesting thing was you talked about artificial narrow intelligence. If cooks are fundamentally just imitating a recipe, it's like one of the things I always try to find subjects where there is no good book written about it yet because it probably means that you can be at the edge of exploring it. There's no playbook yet, right, that you can go imitate. It seems like cooks may feel secure, like being a chef is like a risk because you expose yourself to uncertainty. But really, if artificial narrow intelligence or general intelligence is proliferating, that's cook.

rolls are exactly what those things are good at because it's a recipe like it can be repeated or taught or automated so if anything while a chef may be the risky seeming proposition it's actually rationally the safer proposition in a world dominated by artificial intelligence, right? No, yeah. If you're, if you're all running away right now from AI, taking our jobs, uh, the cooks are, are like the slow gazelles in the back of the pack. Uh, the, the, the more you are, I mean, and by the way, the chefs are in trouble too, eventually. I mean, AI is going to get good. It's going to be better. It's going to be the best chef that we've ever seen. Uh, cause it's also not going to have all that social fear. It's going to just be this fantastic innovator, but for a long, that's going to be a lot longer, you know, it's going to, the more you are following, as I said, like a, yeah, like a recipe. Let's talk a little bit about the process, the discovery process itself. This ties back into like the ingredients that a chef starts with. So, you know, some of the best books on creativity, we'll talk about like a fairly simple process where step one is like gathering the raw stuff. There's nothing new. There's only new patterns or combinations. So the step one is like, get the raw stuff. First question would be, is it just kind of just an internal curiosity that directs you towards the next thing that you're going to explore? How do you know when you found something? And then what is the process kind of bit by bit that you start to build out this understanding and then kind of coalesce it back into something that you can share with people? The process for picking, you know, so far it's been mostly blog posts. So, so the picking for a new post, there's a few different kinds of posts. Sometimes it's just a, it's like an age old kind of psychological quandary that humans deal with. There was one of these many examples of primate body is in 50,000 BC and our like conscious mind is in 2017. And we're this bizarre kind of like stitched together organism of these two things. So much of our just problems within life with relationships, with social stuff, with anxiety, with all this, it's just as,

a result of this bizarre, we're this binary creature. So sometimes it's just thinking about one of those, you know, thinking about one of these sociological things. And I think, and I know I've already had a bunch of thoughts about this and I think there's a lot there. And I just think that if I can just spend 70 hours really thinking through and brainstorming and organizing that and come up with some structure, that's a really interesting way to present that in a memorable way that people can like 10 years later, still doesn't remember like the characters I created for that or something. Cause that's, that's what's helpful. I always think with some of these, self-help psych things that we all need to be better at. The problem isn't what we know. It's like, I never read like one of these why humans are unhappy type situations. And I'm like, I'd never heard that before. I never, we all know what's going on. You know, we all know the deal that we, and what's hard is remembering what's hard is, is being reminded and being empowered by kind of the imagery that that was presented to you with that really kind of sticks. It just sticks in a deeper place. So that's what I try to do with those. For topics like AI or something to do with anything with the future or whatever, something big with society, I'm working right now on a big post about politics, society. Usually what I look for there is something that first... Again, going back to the point that if you only need 1% of 1% of people to like you, that's enough where I can say that humans all think we're all super, super unique. But deep down, we're all kind of just like a photocopy of at least 100,000 other people out there. So I'm just like, there's a lot of Tims out there who happen to be just like me. They happen to like the things I like. They happen to be interested in the same thing, the same sense of humor. They know about the same amount. They're curious about the same amount. So they want to go from like, they're on step three with knowledge because they are curious enough to have gotten there. But they really like to go to step seven. But they don't need

to go to step 10 because they don't want to be an expert. That's me. And I'm like, there's a lot of other people out there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get myself from step three to step seven through a bunch of research, which is a lot easier than I don't have to get a PhD to get to step seven. And then I'm going to just bring readers from who are on step two or three or four to step seven. And that's a very specific group. It's a bunch of Tim's and they all, again, they all have my sense of humor. So I picture the stadium of Tim's. I'm writing for those people. It's very easy. Suddenly you don't have to worry about what people want. You just know what you would like. So I judge by my own reaction to my own research. So when I'm researching AI and I'm reading, you know, Nick Bostrom's book, Super Intelligence, my eyes are like wide, like physically wide as I'm reading. And I keep like putting the book down and being like, oh my God, done. Absolutely a blog post because when I have that reaction, You know that works. That's a winner. When I started researching cryonics, I was like, it didn't seem compelling to me. I was like, oh, I'm one of these rich white men who freezes themselves after they die. I mean, it's like so narcissistic. Then I started reading, and all my conceptions were flipped on their head, and I realized that we're all in a big delusion about this kind of thing. Cryonics, all it is is basically pausing a human who's not dead yet. to try to transport them to a hospital in the future. You know, use the example if you would race across the street to transfer a dying patient to a hospital that had a machine that was needed. Of course you would do that. Well, what if that hospital was just in the future? And you could pause them biologically. And they have all this technology and all these reasons to think that it might be possible. And why not? So suddenly it was such a no-brainer. And I had this big, I just kept telling all my friends about it. That's a winner of a blog post. That's going to be a winner. I don't know what it's going to look like yet. I have to do a lot more readings. I have to get myself to step seven, which is, so then answer your second question about once I pick a topic.

So the first thing is, again, I'm on step three or so. I usually know a little bit. Sometimes I'm even below that. But I'm somewhere where I'm a layman. I don't know anything more than a layman because I've never studied any of this stuff. But I'm sometimes a curious layman who's read a bunch of like, watch a bunch of YouTube videos, whatever. So I'll try to get myself from there to a whole different level without becoming an expert because that's not a good use of my time and I don't want it. It's boring for me to become an expert. So I'll just literally, you can just use the internet mostly. It's amazing how much, if you just go to YouTube and Google the thing you want to learn, there are hundreds of videos and the ones that have a lot of views is like the teaching. talent of that person is usually like the best professor in your college. That's why that video has 2 million views. You know, like a Hank Green type situation. There's so many good explainers just teaching things on YouTube and then podcasts. Go search podcasts. You're going to find hours of discussion about this stuff. Then go and you can read just a bunch of articles. I start with a Wikipedia article just to give myself a foundation. And then the bottom of the Wikipedia articles, all these references. So you go and start reading those. And then, so what happens is you read a little bit. You might be reading a very biased view. You might be reading just a hack job when you read enough and listen to enough and you've done this for now like i would say 40 hours you know you've done three or four big days of this just endless you start to get a feel for what the consensus are around this and where there are controversies and where there's a disagreement. You start to understand that. And then you can dig deeper if you really want to. You can go into things like medical journals and you can read things like scientific papers. And those are boring, but sometimes they're really important to just make sure you're getting the real kind of meat of what we actually know. And it's okay to sometimes I'll come out of that and be like, okay, I understand all of this. And here are some holes because I don't think that humans really know this answer. Or they do and I simply

just couldn't get to the bottom of myself. And I'll admit that in the post. That's the beauty of not needing to pretend to be an expert. You don't have to, you can just say, yeah, I don't, I don't understand this part of it. That's okay. As long as you're not pretending to, no one cares. So I get myself to a level where I'm like, I really, really like get this. And then I, then I go to the next process, still pre-writing, which I is outlining. I kind of call it, but it's really just taking this pile of information. I've collected quotes and facts and thoughts of my own. And it's just this huge, disgusting Word document that's like hundreds of pages long. And they have to sit there and where's the blog post here? What is the arc? Because you want to make it entertaining. You want to make it fun to read. For cryonics, I said, here's the steps if you want to become, if you want to do cryonics. And it included, you have to die. And then you have to, you know, this, you know, it went to the end. And I just thought, after a lot of thinking, because I could have just said, you know, why, you know, I started off with misconceptions about cryonics. And then that was one way. I could have just done myth, fact. But I decided. I'm going to do this kind of chronology. That took me a lot of time to think of that particular thing. Or if I'm trying to talk about procrastination, there's so many different ways to talk about that. If I have all my thoughts, so I ended up coming up with three characters that are in every procrastinator's head. But that took me a long time of kind of, so there's a lot of like taking the pile and like the art of like turning that into a good blog post or a good explanation. Then the rest of the part's much more kind of brute force. You write, which is just taking the outline and executing it. And that's. That can be slow or fast, but it's usually not so bad. And then I'd draw a bunch of...

images because for me, and again, I'm thinking about the Timbs in the stadium. I'm sure some people find my images annoying and distracting and immature. Other people would want way less writing, but I would happen to like this balance. So that's what I do. If there's something, some kind of concept I can explain better with a diagram or a funny kind of drawing, I'll choose that because I would rather see that as a reader. So then I draw those. And then I send it to Andrew and my fiance and our employee and, you know, a couple other people and they all read it and give feedback. And Andrew's never caught a typo in his life, but Andrew's really good at very big picture feedback. So Andrew will read it and be like this whole section. I think you lost me a little, or like you're not getting to like the core of why this matters enough at the beginning. So he does that. That's really valuable. My fiance tells me what, when I'm being unfunny. She'll just be like, that's unfunny. And like this, this is like a thing. This is like your voice, your voice is off here. It's not like you're writing your voice. You're being like an annoying voice here. And then like my, my little sister will read it. I'm very fortunate. I have a lot of support around me. I can be writing about why Mein Kampf is actually the greatest book and she won't notice. She doesn't notice what's going on. She just finds the typos. So combined, they're like a little editing team and then post it. One of the things that always stands out is. Sorry to keep coming back to this cook chef thing, but it's stuck in my head. This is me too. It comes up everywhere all the time. So it seems like one way to think about that is that chefs create metaphors or analogies and then cooks or everyone else kind of uses them to understand. And a lot of it seems what you're doing in that move from step three to step seven is effectively creating models or analogies that will help. like a cheat code, like you're putting in the actual work it takes to get from three to seven. And then you're basically creating a bunch of cheat codes to like lift people, like an elevator from three to seven instead of the stairs. And so the bit of advice that I take from all that is the incredible value is to train yourself to be better at creating metaphors to help people understand complicated things. Like the conversion of, if you're willing to put in the hard work.

on behalf of everybody else, and this is not just blocking, this is literally anything, right? Because we're all in the business of sales and explaining things. Every teacher. That if you're willing to put in that work and create metaphors rather than use them, which means doing it by first principles, going to the bottom of the scientific journal, not just reading the Wikipedia page. That's what really stands out to me in your... posts you know the planet thing or like there's countless countless examples of metaphors you've created where like all of a sudden something makes a ton of sense without having to do the underlying work and like if there's any business model that works it's like taking a pain point of hard work and making it easier and that seems like a really really good effective way of doing that i find that to be a very like gratifying good use of my time to sit around and be like you know how can i explain this compounding technology thing better and i'll just like think about that for a few hours and sometimes i'll have a long discussion with andrew about it or with my fiance about it and it's really helpful to kind of bounce ideas off and get feedback and you know two heads is often better than one in those moments and when you when you hit on the analogy then then suddenly your thinking clarifies and but you but in order to even get there you have to really understand it well yourself so it just takes a lot of That's why some people are like, oh, you get research help? And I'm like, I can't. That's when I learn. Research is when the ideas start to come up. It's not that I need someone to send me the facts. I need to learn this stuff. I think the extra layer to it is taking that, but then also making it entertaining and fun. And I think that's kind of what has really helped. Because I think there's a lot of things out there that explain things, but if you can make it like it's a super fun journey you look forward to, that's when it's next level. And that's, I think, whenever you talk about a post, you're like, all right, I want to... explain to me it's interesting but like it still has to be a fun experience for the reader no matter what because i know that i don't like adult reading i never have i don't like when someone gives me like an adult article it's boring i'd much rather have a fun article with drawings and diagrams and i'm also kind of like visual mathy i like like diagrams and charts way more than paragraphs

And, um, yeah, and I like, it's like, I'm very immature. Like I'm, I'm, here's what it is. I'm a curious baby is the way I've described it. I'm, I'm, I'm intensely curious. I want to know everything and I want to know complex things. I don't want to just know. I'm frustrated with short articles. I'm like, no, tell me more. Tell me the meat of it. I want to get to the bottom of it. But I'm also, I don't want, I want to have fun while we do it. I want, I want to be having fun. I want us to be having fun and, and I want to laugh and I want to be, I want you to talk to me like I'm five the whole time. So. then that's what I try to do. And what we learned from doing this is that there's a lot of people who agree with that. There's a lot of curious people out there, but no one wants to be in school. No one wants to feel like they're in school. I mean, and the truth is we've all had these great teachers that... Both satisfy your curiosity, but they're just fun to listen to and they wrap you up. And of course, as I said, if you look on YouTube, there's a lot of people making great livings who are just unbelievably good at explaining things. Like there's a YouTube video channel called Kurzgesagt. It's hard to, or like in a nutshell, that's the translation. It's German, but they do it in English. And it's like. They do these cartoon animations, and they explain it to things so well, and it's just such a joy. I'm just like, I want to do that. I don't want to always be that good if I can. But I think also the colloquial voice is what makes it really absorbable for the reader, but also makes it so that it's not imitable, in that you're not playing the character of a guy who explains things on the internet. Like you're actually just explaining it the way that you want to explain it. Like in Silicon Valley, they'll say product market fit. This is like talent market fit. Like it takes what you're good at and your own sensibilities and just rolls with them. Like uses them. That's what you're doing with your podcast, right? I mean, if your podcast disappears, it's not like some people are going to be like, oh, I'll just, I'll find, I'll just, there's plenty of these out there. They're going to be, they lost something that you can't replace. They can get something, maybe that's doing something similar. Just like if I stopped doing it, there's other things.

It's a unique product because it's the product of a human's kind of personality. Right. It's like any content business. The metric is basically like, does the world give a shit if it goes away or not? That's any business. The same thing that makes it unscalable also makes it irreplaceable. So it's a trade-off there in terms of value. What is the most fun that you've had researching a topic? What was the topic? I think it, well, the Elon stuff was so, I mean, SpaceX. I mean, it's like, I couldn't believe when I got like the opportunity to write about SpaceX and like interview all like the top people there because when I was like three, what I cared about were like planets and space and dinosaurs. That was it. That's where my son's at right now. Like just, just anything with planets or dinosaurs and I'm good. And so like SpaceX to me was always like the coolest possible company. I was already like a huge fan board. I didn't know that much about it though. Like most people, I just knew that Elon was awesome and they were like fabulously successful, like private space company. So getting to kind of like really dig in there was so gratifying because not only did I get to basically go like talk to all these heroes of mine that are like these, you know, rocket scientists and these like first, all these super first principles people just. Great people to be around. It's good for your thinking to be around like the kind of people Elon hires. And so not only was that, but then when I dug in, it was so much cooler than I even thought it was going to be. Like, you know, you expect to be a little disappointed. You get in, you're like, oh, it's just a company in the end. And they're just trying to. No, it was like their mission is actually as noble as is like you could imagine it is like it's truly trying to like make a great leap for life in order to give humanity the best probability of a good future. Can you talk quickly about there's a visual, I can't remember which post it's in that shows. like the Musk model of building a business where there's like a super far reach goal that is not really the thing that people realize or talk about. That's the orientation point. But then there's this whole kind of engine underneath that to get to that goal. And each one follows the same pattern. It's amazing. I analyzed Tesla and then SpaceX and then Neuralink. So in depth, I thought about these forever. And when you have to write about something, you really have to absorb the core of what's going on.

And it was amazing. I was like, this is the same formula. This dude is doing the same thing again and again. And it's so simple. All it is, is he works backwards. He starts with his core motivation, which is what this is the, you know, all entrepreneurs start with is, you know, why am I going to do anything? What do I want to change about the world, if anything? And so his thing is always because he's this like unusually like altruistic person deep down in his soul, like he really is, which is unusual. His first thing is give humanity the best probability of a good future. Simple. Okay. That's what he wants to do. He wants the light of human consciousness to not be extinguished for a long time. And he wants to, right. So then he thinks about, okay, small girl, it's incredible. And then he managed to attack it from four different angles. So he thinks, okay, so what are the main things that you, What are the biggest levers you can pull to truly alter that probability in some way? And he comes up with different things. So one of them is energy is going to create like a great catastrophe on this earth and energy crisis. And we also have a global warming potential crisis. Those are two massive things that are all, and they can be potentially both addressed because one of the, one of the major. things that, you know, uses fossil fuels is the auto industry. And it's, it's in like a, one of these market, the market isn't functioning optimally because there's no carbon tax. So because the market doesn't penalize you for dumping trash into the atmosphere, the market is optimizing in a way that's not good. And so he would love to implement a carbon tax, but he doesn't have that political power. So instead he says, well, we need to get everyone to use electric cars. We need to get everyone. You don't do that by telling people to be a good person. Okay. You do it by building the iPhone of cars. And then suddenly. Everyone wants it. Suddenly, gas car seems like some kind of old, disgusting thing. It becomes kind of taboo. How do you do that? You have to create this unbelievable product. You have to innovate on batteries. You have to innovate on electric motors. You have to innovate on self-driving. Then he thinks, in this case with Tesla, it's the secondary goal that leads to the probability of a better future. In that case,

accelerate the advent of a sustainable energy world. From there, he says in order to do that, I want to get people to buy electric cars and make electric cars. I want to bring upon the electric car world sooner rather than later. How do I do that? Not by making enough cars to give to everyone, by getting all the other car companies that make 10 million cars a year, like General Motors to suddenly have to do electric cars. How do I do that? By creating a little company that shows everyone what an iPhone looks like, the iPhone of cars. And then suddenly every one of these car companies has to change and throw away their whole fleet and, you know, really over time. So he creates, he starts innovating and creates Tesla. Okay. So then, and then there's always some business model in the meantime that supports the innovation that's needed in order to kind of strike a match that lights this acceleration on fire. And in this case, it was selling cars. We can sell cars first to rich people and then to less rich people and eventually to middle class people. And by doing that, we can innovate. So that's the business model that is going to support it. So as always, what does Tesla do? And then what does Tesla really do? What Tesla does is they sell really awesome electric vehicles to people. What Tesla really does is they try to accelerate the advent of a sustainable energy world. And now, of course, they're They have innovations with batteries and solar as well because they bought SolarCity. Then you look at SpaceX. Same end goal. Best probability of a good future. The goal that leads to that goal in this case is make humanity a space-faring civilization and also a multi-planetary civilization. And he says that both of those... And he says, of course, but he's always thinking like a business person. You're not going to convince anyone to be good. Treat everyone as if they're only going to be selfish forever. Okay, so what do you do? You create ships. He likes this example, which I think is great. The ship that Columbus took across the ocean was basically the same ships that Julius Caesar was using because the ships then only needed to cross the Mediterranean. These were little dinghies, basically. It's amazing that those ships made it across the ocean. As soon as suddenly there were colonies and there was all this business reason, all this financial incentive to start going across the ocean, they started to be cargo routes. And suddenly the shipping industry exploded and all these ships. And by the time you're 200 years later, you have these massive, amazing ships.

So he's thinking the same thing. If we can establish some kind of regular cargo route to Mars and we can establish a little city there and an opportunity, we don't know who's going to take it, who's going to need it. We don't know what that, but some people are going to want it badly and all this money is going to pour in automatically. Not because people care about giving humanity a good future, but because they want glory and wealth for themselves. That's what he's trying to do there. So then he says, we need to innovate. We can reduce the cost of space travel by a hundredfold. If we learn to land rockets, imagine if in the airplane industry, you took a flight from New York to California, you all parachuted out and the airplane went and blew up in the ocean. They built a new airplane for the next flight. Every coach seat is $5 million. Okay. Not. You know, you would never have been on a flight. Neither would we. Only billionaires and governments would be. And who flies in space? Billionaires and governments, right? So he's trying to, if you land rockets, suddenly a lot of people can use this. And suddenly, you know, all kinds of, and everything explodes. You have this just massive, you know, explosion of this industry. So we need to create that innovation. And we can do that with, we need a sustainable business model in the meantime that's going to carry us because no one's going to fund this. Again, he's not relying on the goodness of anyone else. And the sustainable business model for SpaceX is we need to build a smaller rocket that's not going to take us to Mars, but it's going to deliver stuff to low Earth orbit for satellite companies and for NASA. And we're just going to basically create a space delivery service. And while we do that, every single delivery flight, we're going to try a new innovation. So simple. And then, you know, again... Neuralink's a whole other can of worms, but Neuralink. We're about to go there, so. Okay, I mean, it's all the same model. It's so simple when you look at it. And I think this just gets to the same kind of theme of all these discussions, that when you look at what the most brilliant people do, and I think this definitely goes for investing, a lot of it is just if you just can clear human delusion out of your way and just use your simple logic and trust it.

suddenly you seem that you can do genius things. And you're not afraid of a lot of failure, which is all chefs do. You know, chefs do a lot of that. And you can just look at things logically. You seem like this great visionary. Because if everyone else is stuck in conventional wisdom and they believe a reality that conventional wisdom tells them is real, but it's actually 30 years old, and they just look at real reality and they just kind of think about what makes sense today, what actually makes sense given their facts, you seem like this genius visionary and you'll be a great leader and all these people will trample over themselves to follow you once you succeed. You'll fail a bunch and they'll shake their heads at you, of course, and then you'll hit on something new that they have no chance on hitting because they're all just following the recipes. like you said and then everyone else will follow those recipes that becomes the bible that becomes the you know whatever so such an amazing framework you said somewhere in the post something like people mistake just a simple clear understanding of risk and of the real world for like courage and genius like these aren't courage and genius necessarily these are just it's just a first principles mindset just seeing things for how they are versus referencing back to how everyone else thinks about things it's seeing the actual reality for what it is of danger, of risk, of opportunity, of possibility. And if you just can see reality, you're like one in a hundred thousand. On the thing I just finished with cryptocurrencies, some of the conversations would veer off into deep philosophical corners unrelated to the topic. And one of the things that you hear often is the world's greatest superpower would be not caring what anyone else thought that. Our kind of tribalism or the fact that we do care so much about what other people think about us is a massive impediment. And like you said, that's an evolutionarily adapted form. We have a great term for this, grand theft life. And what that means is Andrew and I have been using this since we were like 11. Grand theft auto is like. This cool metaphor because you'll like run over people on the sidewalk and it's just this fun opportunity to be like, it's a world with no consequence. It's a world where, you know, you can just do whatever you want and nothing bad happens, right? Now, it's not saying that it's awesome to run over people on the sidewalk, but it's this mindset where if you were suddenly playing a game called Grand Theft Life, right? And you just had to kind of like build a career and do stuff and you had to like act it out in real life.

I think people would be so much more suddenly successful and true to themselves and risky and bold and creative and they would try some interesting things and they would just like, if people started playing Grand Theft Life where there's a caveat where you can't do illegal things, I just think people would succeed wildly and be much happier, really. That's kind of an example of a metaphor and a framework where you like... have that in your head and you're like okay i'm just gonna flip the switch in my head right now and pretend like i'm a video game character and it's do this thing that like my biological self definitely does not want to do so and and this is you know when we used to we actually use this example the most was so if you're in a bar and you're single and you see a girl you really want to go talk to okay a stranger your tribal mind is saying Do not do this. And if you do it, you know, your rejection is a nightmare. And if you get rejected, it's going to be so horrible. Because why? Because in the old days, there were like... 15 women of like marriable age that you knew in their, in the whole extended, like, you know, the village. And if you get rejected by one of them, especially you do it in a really embarrassing way. And you're kind of a, she tells all her friends, they all snicker at you. You're done. You're never going to mate. You're, you're a loser. And all those girls might, they're going to want you after that. And so that's very serious. So our brains are terrified. If it makes no sense in the bar, it doesn't apply in the bar. This is a fit. She's might as well be a figment of your imagination. If you go up and you stumble over your words and you're a loser, you just walk away and you say, well, she doesn't exist. Not that ever happened. It doesn't matter. So when we were single and we would want to kind of like have courage as single people, we would just remind each other, grand theft life, like go talk to someone. If you want to talk to them, don't worry about rejection because it's just a reminder to your brain that we are to override the wiring that thinks it's in 50,000 BC when it has zero rational purpose right now. Let's talk about Neuralink. So this is the most virgin topic probably.

Almost everyone's going to have heard of Tesla. Pretty much everyone's going to have heard of SpaceX. Everyone's going to have heard of Elon Musk. Probably a minority will have heard of Neuralink. So first describe what the hell it is. And then given that it was. probably my favorite post of yours, just given the depth of research that went into it, kind of walk through the journey of researching it and kind of what it means. Yeah. So Neuralink, again, it starts with Elon and his people kind of reaching out and saying, so we're actually about to launch a new company. We thought we could kind of launch in conjunction with a wait but why post. And just for a second, just to give people a frame of reference, how many people would read, say, like the biggest post that you put out? The most viral post we put out, like, had like 14 million uniques in a month and then and then it also went on huffington post early on because like this is back when we were like you know syndicate with them and it was like their most popular post of the year basically um definitely of the month i don't remember if it was of the year just like for appreciation like that is i don't know what the last book that sold that many copies maybe there hasn't been one right so that's a lot of people yeah yeah no it was it was it was shocking i think it was like probably the most read posts and English speaking internet for that entire year. It might have been decent chance. So, so it's just important because I think the word blog or blogger, like I hate that fricking word. And. this is not people think I'm doing like lace latest, like celebrity gossip. And I'm like, it's not what you think. Okay. Just, I just wanted to, to frame that for people. So back to, back to Neuro. So, so, but that was unusual, but I would say that, you know, the typical post now that goes up, we'll end up with over a million people reading it after a few weeks at a minimum, sometimes in the first week. And the ones that stick, you know, then they stick around forever. A lot of them are evergreen concepts. So they will get to, you know, four or 5 million pretty, pretty commonly. And so, and, and, and again, I think, you know, what, what Elon cares about when he launches a new company.

is that the messaging, because, you know, of course, also he has a lot of enemies and a lot of people like to bring down, you know, someone who's really successful. And there'll be a lot of people who right away just come up with a bunch of reasons. This is like a selfish or stupid thing, whatever. And so he wants people to at least understand why this is important and why this industry is important. And again, why in general he's doing this, he's doing it because he thinks this is important for humanity. He wants... people to be educated on that. So of course you're not going to turn down, you know, Elon when he's starting a new company and it's the most, it's the greatest opportunity ever for a writer to just get to dig into that. It's so interesting for a curious person to get to dig into that a whole new ideas is great. So I flew out to California and sat around with the Neuralink founding team. This was all stealth at the moment. No one knew, you know, there was all this, didn't even know the name of the company. This was all, I was going to be, you know, announcing this on, on the blog post they were and they wanted to like launch at the same time. What they forgot is that I'm a psychotic person who's going to spend not one week doing a 3,000 word post, but six weeks doing a 40,000 word post. But anyway, they flew me out to meet with the founding team. And I was just so, it's just that feeling, talk about level three, I was on level one and a half here. It's a bad feeling of being just disoriented. I come in, they quickly start talking about kind of, you know, how an electrode would kind of communicate with a cell. And I'm just, I'm like, why are we doing electrodes? And what kind of cell? And we're just like, we're just like suddenly in a micro discussion about something. And I'm like, I don't even know the macro picture yet. So it's this bad feeling, but I'm just recording everything. So I'm like, I told them I'm gonna record everything. And then I know I'm gonna listen back later. did and by the time I was done with everything I listened back to the conversation and it was so great because I understood everything suddenly and it was like this everything suddenly so this is this concept another concept I think I've probably stolen from from Elon's way of thinking which is that knowledge is like a tree and if you don't have a tree trunk in place

which is the foundation of understanding of that topic and the kind of the topic around the context. Then you read an article about concept, like maybe cryptocurrency, you read an article and that's like is a leaf or a branch or a twig and there's no trunk for it to hold on to. It just falls into nothingness. It just falls in one ear, out the other. You won't really absorb it. You won't really understand it and you definitely won't remember it. If you have a tree trunk, suddenly that branch just sticks onto the tree trunk and it adds to it and it sticks and you remember it. And then you can suddenly start reading and listening and reading and you become really knowledgeable. But all of that's a waste if you don't build your tree trunk first. So that's with all these Elon posts and any post, AI, anything I do, my thought is I'm gonna build my own tree trunk and then I'm gonna build a reader tree trunk. So with Neuralink... I started going in there, they're giving me leaves and twigs and they're all just falling into my recorder. I'm saying, okay, I don't know. And I asked a ton of questions to try to get to the bottom, but it's this feeling where I was just very disoriented. And then I spent, you know, maybe three weeks. just furiously reading, and I re-interviewed a bunch of them one-on-one after. I had lots of conversations, and I had two or three long conversations with Elon, but I waited later. I didn't want to talk to him until my tree trunk's in place, because I'll ask all the wrong questions, and that's a waste. What's the one-sentence description of this project? What are they trying to do? Well, what they're trying to do is increase the probability of a good future for humanity, like all of us companies. That's what they're really trying to do. They're trying to build Planet 4 where humans still get to be around. Elon's thinking about Planet 4, wherever humanity will be 2050 or whatever. That's a world we don't understand. And I think Elon probably has a better sense of what that world is going to be than almost anyone because he's just a great thinker and he thinks about this stuff all the time. And he's trying to build protection for us in that world. He's trying to build, he's trying to...

Give us the probability that we still exist in that world and that things are great for us, as opposed to that's a really scary or bad world for us. And being on two planets, he thinks, can be helpful for that. And not having an energy crisis or a coastal flooding crisis can be helpful for that. And in this case, I don't think I've ever had a conversation with him where he hasn't at some point brought up his fear of AI. It is his, it plagues him. He definitely lies in bed at night. tossing and turning about ai which is which should scare us because this dude sees reality clearer than anyone okay and if something scares him and he also is on the board of deep mind and all this stuff he knows more about it when he's scared of it we should all probably listen to that he's not being crazy you know this is someone who in general has a sense of seeing things better than most of us so he's thinking he first he said we shouldn't be building ai This is his one sentence description, by the way. First, he says we shouldn't be building AI. And then he says, okay, he sees this human colossus, wants to build something. He knows it's going to happen. The human colossus, when it wants to build something, there's no one that can stop it. You can try all you want. Stop it from building nukes in the 40s. It's not going to happen. And especially something that a lot more people can work on than we're able to work on nukes. So the human colossus wants to build it. Why? The human colossus is not... The human Colossus is this, you know, humanity's general kind of achievement and output and whatever. It's not incentivized by giving humanity a good probability. It can only see the present moment and it's incentivized by financial reward and ego reward, glory and things like that. And self-perpetuation. Yeah. And so... There's a lot of money in something like AI right now, development, not research for safety, research for development. So when there's money in it and there's immense amount of you said, this is electricity, the next electricity where it's in everything, you're not stopping the Colossus from making it. So what you can do instead, Elon says, okay, well, plan B, let's see what we can, let's work with it somehow. Let's try to create the best safe situation for that world.

So he started OpenAI, which is like if a lot of people are creating a magic wand, a couple of big companies are trying to create a magic wand, for example, that once you build it, if you can be the first one to really build it, you have ultimate power over the rest of humanity, including governments. You have power over everyone. that's not really great. That's not ideal, right? We don't really want that to happen. And so Elon says, well, we're not stopping that. There's going to be people make, try to make a magic wand. So you know what? Let's have everyone make a magic wand. Let's all work on it. Let's everyone work on it. And let's build a hundred different kinds of magic wands for different reasons. And that each, and no one has ultimate power because there's lots of magic wands. That's open AI. Okay. That's at least a broad idea of what, what open AI is doing. But there's another half of that. He thinks that even if we can build a lot of different kinds of AI, AI itself might be bored with humans. AI itself might start having its own goals. This thing is going to be smarter than we are, but you can't anthropomorphize and assume that something smart is going to be... empathetic and have human life as a value. Why would it? I mean, it's, it's, it's not a biological creature. It just sees humans like anything else is a pile of atoms doing something, right? It's just atoms doing something unless we program it differently, but it's very hard to program AI to do good because what's, what is good? 10 different people on the planet, different definitions of good. Some people would say kill all humans because then it's good for all the other animals. I mean, good. This is really, really hard. So he says is we don't want the AI to become the other. That's not good because then we'll be left in the, if we're not the smartest thing, we're house cats now in a world of people. We're house cats. So we want to become AI. We want to be on board with this thing. We want it to take us up in intelligence with it. How do we do that? Because, you know, think about what AI means. Artificial intelligence. It's a kind of intelligence. We have biological intelligence in our heads. We're building artificial intelligence on the outside. What he wants is us to have both biological and artificial intelligence in our heads.

So he's trying to do that by the key thing you need in order to try to have you not, he doesn't want to put the AI actual CPU inside your skull. He wants to put a layer of electrodes in a human head, physically in the head that can communicate through wifi beautifully and seamlessly with computer on the outside world. And when that happens, it's, if it's inside your brain, it's like you have your limbic system. which is your tribal kind of biological system, fear, fight or flight, you know, all your survival needs. And you have your cortex, which is the thing that separates humans from animals. It's where your reason lives and your ability to plan and think and see the big picture and all of that. So what he wants to do is have, and those two systems he points out, they're different systems, but it's both of you. If you're saying, I shouldn't eat that brownie, that second brownie, but I really want to, but I shouldn't, but I... You sound like a crazy person. I mean, there's two different systems arguing. The cortex says, no, this makes no sense to have a second brownie. Your limbic system says, give me the brownie. I want calories because I might not eat again for two weeks because it's 50,000 BC. You never know when you're going to get another food, right? So your cortex says, it's not 50,000 BC. So don't eat the brownie, right? But it just feels like thinking. It doesn't feel like two systems are debating. So he thinks that when you have a third system in there, you have AI. So there'll be some AI system. Picture Siri, but a far more developed thing and something that's with you from a very young age and you just learn to think with it. And if you want to know something and the AI can access the cloud and all that, it's just in your head as if you're thinking. So when you're arguing, even when your AI wants to do something and you want to do something different, it's going to feel like systems in your own brain arguing. It's going to feel like thinking. So he has this vision of... This world where we are AI in that sense. Now, there's lots of different kinds of AI. There's lots of different AI systems, just like there's lots of different software now. But at least one of them is yours. And you think with it. You think using it. And so his vision is that we have this world where instead of having one person become Superman,

or no one's Superman because AI is its own, the magic wand is its own Superman that then doesn't care about humans at all. We all have a magic wand. We all, you know, many, many different people, millions of people have AI in their own heads. So now you get to, for SpaceX, you need to learn how to land a rocket and reduce the cost. For Tesla, you need to reduce the cost of batteries and make an awesome car. For Neuralink, the innovation you need is you need high bandwidth communication between your brains, neurons, and the outside world. And so that's all about what we call brain machine interfaces. There's already an industry of brain machine interfaces. They already exist. There are cochlear implants. Deaf people can hear now. It's crude, but they can do it. You have retinal implants for blind people who can now see shadows and shapes. It's crude. but it's real, right? You have brain machine interfaces, people who have seizures or for people who have strokes that currently genuinely help with those things. You have bionic arms and legs for people who are paralyzed. You have ability, a quadriplegic person can now move a cursor on a screen using their motor cortex in their head as if, so they try to move their arm, their motor cortex does that motion, but it's not hooked up to an arm. And instead it's hooked up to this thing that then reads the signal. And it says, you know, you wanted to move your arm to the right. It starts to understand what signals. in your head would have moved the arm to the right and it takes those and moves the cursor to the right instead so it's this really cool stuff but it's all crude now the key is it's low res it's crude because at max maybe one or two hundred neurons are being communicated with at once they have these little tiny devices they don't know how to communicate with more than that at once first of all they don't have the physical devices that they can do that yet. They haven't figured out how to do that yet. It's very, very new technology. And two, they don't have the AI to understand the signals. It's not like the brain talks in English. The brain sends out a bunch of firings. Every brain works differently. That's the hard part. It's not that there's one language. Every brain speaks its own language. We don't realize that, but it does. So we need amazing AI that can take this firing, just like this suit. It's like a picture of a thousand fireworks firing at once. They can take that and say, oh yeah, I know what that means. Humans cannot. And now once you have, imagine instead of a hundred, you have

millions of neurons doing that at once. We simply don't have, we can't do that. We need AI to do that. So Neuralink's challenges are A, the actual hardware. Like we need to build electrode arrays that can go into a human head that can interface with not just hundreds or thousands, but millions of neurons. Once you interface with millions of neurons and the blind person doesn't see shapes, they see everything that you see. Once you have millions of neurons, I can't just use my brain to move a cursor to the right. I can use my brain to speak into your head and we can have a, we can think back and forth to each other. And so we need to bring up the resolution of thought, the thought resolution, right? The signal resolution. And so you need to build the devices, but you also need to build it so it's not invasive because Elon's goal, the beginning, they're going to be building this for prosthetics and people that have a disability. Eventually, Elon wants a world where everyone gets this. It's a no brainer. not to use a pun, but it's just an obvious thing that you want that everyone has. You just install it in your kids. Cause of course we all just think back and forth. Imagine if you didn't know this thing, imagine a world where you didn't have that. It's going to seem crazy. But again, if you talk about the big leaps for life, you know, and I said, multi-planetary is one of them. The big leaps for humanity, language was a big one. This is the next thing after language. Cause if still you bring a caveman or George Washington, you bring him here. And the one thing that's not cool is if you're just in a field with one, two people, they're just talking. It's like, Oh, that's how we do it. That's how you guys do it. You don't do anything cooler than that. You just, Just talk, because we actually haven't innovated on that, and this is the first time that would happen. So 100,000 years later, after language, we are now innovating on that. That's another big Elon thing he's trying to do. So because if he wants to have it in everyone, not just people who have a dire need for it, then you need to have it non-invasive. You need to be able to do it without basically opening your skull. And you need to be able to do it like Lasex, where you don't need the surgeon doing it. You can have it cheap and quick and non-invasive and safe, and it lasts forever. So they're trying to build this really cool. They're innovating in a lot of ways. We need the array. We need the technique to get it in non-invasively. And then third, and they're not doing this. They think that once they build this, the world will.

pour in money and innovation AI to read the signals. And of course, the machines on the outside, the bionic arms and the refrigerators that you can open with your head now. You know, you should remote control. You just think open and it opens. All of that's going to happen, he thinks. But the big leap, the big thing that the industry needs to overcome, the hump, is to get the resolution up in a non-invasive way. So that's what Neuralink's trying to do. Now, we get to their business model. How do they fund the innovation? OK, and we always have SpaceX deliver stuff. Tesla makes good cars. Neuralink is going to make prosthetic devices. So they're working on something in the beginning that has to do with people who have strokes. And they're working on something that can help kind of restore pathways that have been lost in the brain. And then they'll work on other things. I'm sure they'll create other kinds of. So they're starting there. And that's those are the people that will have their skull opened up because you're not going to you can't beta test this very easily. But people who are going to die or have been damaged, their brain's been damaged, they will open their head up. And so. He doesn't think it's going to be a problem to have people test this stuff. That's the vision. That's the vision. Small potatoes. And then so in order to explain that, I had to understand the brain really well. So I did a whole set of research just understanding the brain, which was so interesting. The thing is, it was so fun because how cool is our brain? And it's just so much more interesting than I realized. And then you have to tell the whole story of the human colossus because you have to understand the story of why Elon is trying to... do this in the first place. And then you need to dig into the details, the brain electrodes, you know, in the future. What I love about it was I finished it. And my big question was, okay, like what is, what is like a fundamental orienting purpose? And this gets almost like religious or deeply philosophical, because if we're going to integrate with AI is effectively be like augmented human intelligence, biological intelligence. That implies to me that we still bring something to the, you mentioned earlier that intelligence is not this complicated thing, but that, that fusion of biological intelligence with the broader AI, that's like the fourth layer above the cortex seems like we're still bringing something, some unique spark to the equation, because if we're not.

then the same problem exists. Why bother with us at all? Why not just be pure artificial general intelligence and pursue whatever goal it is that intelligences pursue? Maybe you have come up with an idea of what this might be. Is it consuming? Maybe we could talk about Fermi's paradox here. Why, if there are simultaneous evolution of intelligences elsewhere in the universe, we haven't seen them yet? Is it because we destroy ourselves? How do you think about some of these? So let's say Elon does this. We fuse with there's general AI and there's Neuralink. We're wearing wizard hats. We're all connected through this kind of ether. What then? Have you thought that far ahead? Yeah, there's all this research that like AI is better than humans at what it does, but human plus AI team is usually better than an AI. Human plus AI chess is better than the best AI chess player, for example, when they collaborate. That might change when general intelligence humans just might simply not be helpful. However, that could say more about the AI than it does about the AI that is built to be our third layer. Those systems. have our goals. And you can say, well, you know, what are goals in general? All of this is atoms. So knowledge, that's our goal. That's a human goal, right? Like human life is a human goal. So if you just look at atoms, atoms don't have goals, right? Stars and space gas doesn't have goals at all. There's no such thing as a goal. A goal is a human idea. So the point is we are goal oriented and our prime goal over everything else is human survival. So the point is by building AI that is us, we are now giving a bunch of AI on this planet the goal of human survival. So the reason that, so you're saying, oh, we're doing it because we'll provide some spark that can help. It's not that we're helpful. It's that we can provide its direction. We can provide, we can basically align a bunch of AI with our own goals. And the human brain is extremely efficient hardware to lay all that software on top of. Right. Especially at the beginning when, you know. Right. Right. It's the most efficient. You know, human brain runs on 20 watts and the equivalent.

computer runs on a million times as many watts 20 megawatts i mean it is it's a magical device the human brain so yeah it could be an interesting it's also just different you know one thing that i learned is you can't think that the problem is that the brain the reason brain machine interfaces are so hard is the brain is a computer but it's a totally different kind of computer it's the our computers they all function exactly the same computer chip is the same in your computer as in mine and it's done rigidly with these metal things right the human brain It's a neural net. It's a neural network. It is totally different kind of like, it speaks a different language entirely. It's like a different, it's an entirely kind of just different kind of system, right? And so the human brain, you need A, devices that kind of can work with that. You know, neural pathways, you have neurons. Each neuron communicates with a thousand other neurons at once. It's just... really different and it works much slower than like you know doesn't work at the speed of light but it also works far more complexly and efficiently and it also adjusts on the fly it's constantly it's plastic in a way that no computer chip has ever been and it's different for everyone your life experience is literally physically shaped your neural pathways in a unique way. So your arm moves because neurons fire in your mortal cortex in a certain pattern. Mine fire differently. It's just the brain is a plastic thing that says I need to learn how to do a bunch of stuff. Maybe I'm a warrior in 1400. Maybe I need to be a scribe in China in 1750. Maybe I need to be a human in 2017 in America. It's ready for any of that because it's just this plastic thing that can basically work with whatever the outside world needs. So the brain machine interfaces need to think like that. You have these rigid electrodes right now. They don't fit well. It needs to be soft and squishy kind of device that can get wet. It's just so different. So anyway, it's a little off the topic, but it's just such a challenge. It's a good, I always try to tie these things back in a complete circle, but it's a great closing topic for this idea of like chef versus cook, which has been the theme of the whole thing, right? That the plasticity.

of the brain itself is the foundation of the potential to be a chef in any field, to do things from first principles in a unique way. So a fascinating closing story. The last question I ask everybody is for the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you. I would say my parents went to, I think, every single one of my sporting games my entire life, and they must have sat through some really, really boring, like baseball is excruciatingly boring, especially little kids playing. And, yeah, so I don't know. They probably had to go to, like, 1,000 of those games. So that's pretty kind. I might say, I mean, parents, I think, I mean, just for the sake of not giving the same answer because, yeah, I mean, what a boring thing to, like, raise me. So boring and just deal with that and, like. Yeah, I know. So that, but, um, but also they're also like biologically wired to, I would say for me, um, I've been with my fiance six years and she's just been like ridiculously supportive in every situation. I changed my mind a lot about what I want to do. And now like I'm working on this one blog post that everyone else has heard about for an hour. She's heard about it for 150 hours. And she's still just every time, like she just is a good sport about it because she knows I need it. And she's just this like really, and even though she's a lot of, she's trying to figure out what to do with her life. She has her own things, but she just is like always there to like help. So I would say that like her support, especially through like wait, but why? And like all the different things and all the traveling and all the all nighters and the fact that I haven't had time for her during these big posts, I would put it there. Fantastic. Well guys, this has been a incredible. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thanks. Hey, everyone. Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest Like the Best, go to InvestorFieldGuide.com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at InvestorFieldGuide.com forward slash book club. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away and then three to four suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Oshag, O-S-H-A-G. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes,

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