Toxic Thinking: How Our Primitive Brain Is Flawed & Leads To Dangerous Woke Ideology | Tim Urban PT 2

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode: Toxic Thinking: How Our Primitive Brain Is Flawed & Leads To Dangerous Woke Ideology | Tim Urban PT 2
Date: June 28, 2023
Guest: Tim Urban (Author of Wait But Why)

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Episode Overview

In this stimulating continuation of Tom Bilyeu’s conversation with Tim Urban, the discussion dives into the nature of power structures, the flaws inherent in our “primitive” brains, and how these underpin everything from dangerous ideologies to debates about equality, liberalism, and the existential risks of AI. Urban draws sweeping parallels between animal instincts and societal constructs, while both he and Bilyeu wrestle with questions about fairness, progress, the pitfalls of utopian thinking, and the profound uncertainty of our technological future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Power Games vs. Liberal Games

[01:02–11:46]

• Power Games Defined: Tim Urban explains “Power Games” as the dominant force in animal society and most of human history, where “everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so. There is no other rule.” (Tim Urban, 03:03)

  • He illustrates this through a Komodo dragon eating a gazelle—not a matter of “fairness,” but raw power.
  • Human history is seen as an ongoing cycle where fleeting moments of fairness are quickly crushed by the reassertion of Power Games.

• Liberal Games Defined: By contrast, “Liberal Games” are the rare exception, most notably exemplified by liberal democracies that strive for rules, fairness, and resilience against the return of raw power.

  • Urban credits the American Founding Fathers for crafting a “really, really complex and well-thought-out set of rules,” grounded in historical scholarship and a pragmatic openness to amendment. (Tim Urban, 06:45)
  • The “American religion” of liberty, justice, and belief in the rule of law gives society collective buy-in—essential for the system’s robustness.

Memorable quote:

“We are animals, just like in the David Attenborough doc. The only difference is, in some rare cases, in modern times… there are little moments in history where you're like, wow, they really kind of had a fair thing, and then it gets toppled… until you've got these liberal democracies.”
— Tim Urban, [04:36]

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2. The Physics of Progress & Solving Novel Problems

[11:46–15:52]

• Tom Bilyeu describes his concept of the "physics of progress," which essentially mirrors the scientific method: form hypotheses, test them, adjust as needed, and iterate for progress.
• “If your ego’s around learning, this will work. If it’s around being right, you’re going to be in real trouble.” (Tom Bilyeu, 14:12)
• The two discuss the necessity of humility, experimentation, and the rejection of motivated reasoning—what Urban calls “the reasoning equivalent of drunk driving.” (Tim Urban, 14:41)

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3. Equality: Opportunity vs. Outcome

[15:52–25:02]

• Bilyeu and Urban debate the nuances between “equality of opportunity” (everyone should have a fair shot) and “equality of outcome” (everyone ends up in the same place).
• Urban acknowledges true equal opportunity is impossible because differences in IQ, ambition, temperament, and upbringing always affect outcomes.
• Attempting to enforce equal outcomes historically leads to totalitarianism and mass suffering, as seen in communist regimes:
  • Bilyeu references Red Famine and the horrors of forced equalization in Soviet Ukraine.

Notable exchange:

“We’ve tried [equal outcomes]. It turns into abject poverty and brutal equal outcomes. It turns into the rulers making the rules have billions and everyone else is in poverty and hungry.”
— Tim Urban, [21:55]

• Practicality and human flourishing should drive society’s approach; the best solution is near-complete equal opportunity with strategic support for the disadvantaged, but not so much as to stifle freedom and ambition.

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4. The Role of Education in Social Mobility

[25:02–40:18]

• Education is identified as the lynchpin for maximizing opportunity and bridging inequality—but both agree there are huge challenges:
  • The difficulty is not just agreeing what to teach, but that many formative factors are outside of school (e.g., home environment, access to books).
• Urban: “Education happens in lots of places, and there are lots of potential things we’d want to educate kids on. You can’t have just an ideological approach.” [36:53]
• Bilyeu on goals: “What I think the highest level thing is, is going to be human flourishing… steer toward that as our aim.” [37:42]

Notable quote:

“You help kids understand all the options out there and get to know themselves well enough to figure out what they want in life… and then what percentage of kids are getting what they want in life after they figure it out?”
— Tim Urban, [39:11]

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5. Manipulating Human Nature: Genetics & IQ

[42:12–47:16]

• The conversation turns to the future: Would Urban support genetic engineering to raise IQ?
• Urban surprises Bilyeu by saying, “With caution… but I’m all for it,” reasoning that it’s merely the next step in humanity’s “mega beaver” tendency to shape its world. [43:05]
• He warns that technological advances always come with big risks and that society must approach them with humility, dialogue, and rigorous testing.

Memorable moment:

“Beavers build dams. Would you say beavers are playing God with the river? No. We happen to be mega beavers… we manipulate everything.”
— Tim Urban, [44:17]

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6. AI: Alien Invasion or Magic Wand?

[47:16–55:39]

• Urban likens the impending arrival of superintelligent AI to an unpredictable alien encounter—“we don’t know if it’s four years away or 40… are they altruistic?”
• Both agree: AI is inevitable because innovation cannot be stopped; “the human colossus” will keep building regardless of individual dissent.
• Regulations are necessary but difficult to enforce globally due to competition and national interests.

Notable quote:

“If humanity were a single person, I would say, you’re an idiot for building this… but humanity is not.”
— Tim Urban, [48:22]

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7. Disinformation, Democracy, and Societal Stability

[55:39–62:51]

• Urban is deeply concerned about the fragility of the “liberal house”—and how technology (deepfakes, AI bots) could destabilize trust and democracy.
• The power of liberal systems is their capacity to aggregate wisdom through collective debate (“a giant brain by putting our brains together”).
• The danger: if the culture war erodes these institutions, not only domestic chaos but catastrophic errors on existential threats (like AI or nuclear war) may follow.

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8. The Fermi Paradox, Simulations, and the Nature of Existence

[63:45–70:42]

• The conversation detours into cosmic speculation: are we alone? Or are civilizations wiped out by “Great Filters” like misaligned AI before they can spread?
• Tom proposes that advanced civilizations might not bother physically exploring the galaxy, but would “turn inward,” living in simulated realities.

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9. Immortality, Consciousness, and Afterlife

[72:48–84:49]

• Bilyeu and Urban finish with a philosophical thought experiment: is it desirable to live forever?
• Urban, referencing the inconceivably large number “Graham’s number,” argues that infinite time would become torture—he prefers the right to choose his exit.
• Bilyeu says he would still press the “infinity” button, provided he chooses to leave when he wishes.
• Both agree: “Death becoming voluntary” might be the optimal scenario.

Notable quote:

“It is heartbreaking, the reality we all live in now. That said, I would much prefer to die at 80 or today than to have hit the infinity button.”
— Tim Urban, [74:48]

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “The reasoning equivalent of drunk driving.” — Tim Urban [14:41]
• “If you really want equal opportunity, then… true equal opportunity means equal outcomes.” — Tim Urban [18:29]
• “Equal outcome is not fair... Just right there. You're more ambitious than your siblings with the same upbringing.” — Tim Urban [41:25]
• “With all of the usual friction, I'm all for [improving genetics].” — Tim Urban [43:05]
• “The most important event in cosmic history is currently happening here on Earth.” — Tim Urban [65:41]
• “I'd much prefer to die at 80 or today than to have hit the infinity button.” — Tim Urban [74:48]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Power Games vs. Liberal Games: [01:02–11:46]
• Physics of Progress/Scientific Method: [11:46–15:52]
• Equality of Opportunity vs. Outcome: [15:52–25:02]
• Education & Social Mobility: [25:02–40:18]
• Genetics & Human Enhancement: [42:12–47:16]
• AI Existential Risk: [47:16–55:39]
• Democracy & Disinformation: [55:39–62:51]
• Fermi Paradox & Simulations: [63:45–70:42]
• Immortality & Afterlife: [72:48–84:49]

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Overall Tone and Takeaways

This episode is a profound, meandering, and often humorous conversation tackling civilization’s deepest questions. Tim Urban’s perspective is both optimistic and sobering: the liberal order is humanity’s best defense against the return of animalistic “power games,” but it is fragile, and the extraordinary technologies ahead magnify both the stakes and the required wisdom. Throughout, the spirit is curious, probing, and self-critical—modeling the sort of open-minded dialogue the “liberal house” was designed to support.

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Best For:
Listeners interested in philosophy, political history, social justice, AI risk, transhumanism, and mind-bending thought experiments. If you love “big questions” and aren’t afraid to have your assumptions—and optimism—tested, this episode is for you.

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

we're about to dive into part two of this incredible conversation with Tim Urban. His TED talk got over 65 million views and when you hear this episode today, you're going to understand exactly why. And Forbes magazine called his blog a global movement. In this part, take a deep dive with us as Tim breaks down power games, Liberal Games and what may be one of the best alternatives I've ever heard for equal opportunity. And did you know Impact Theory is now available on Amazon Music? Head over there right now. Subscribe for more amazing conversations just like this one. Do not wait. Subscribe to Impact Theory on Amazon Music right now. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. All right, talk to me about Power games versus liberal games because this feels like I love your optimism that ultimately liberal games will work. But like I was saying earlier, none of this made sense to me. And so I tell I started reading Nietzsche and the whole idea of will to power, will to power being this sort of innate thing where you want to have control of your own life, but also being this strong drive to want to just be in control. And when you look at the some of the current battling, it feels like that. It feels like will to power sort of taking over on both sides. What is the power game versus liberal game? Then we'll talk about how to break the trend.

[Tim Urban]

Well, I mean the easiest way to understand what the power games is just look at the animal world. Watch a David Attenborough documentary and they get eaten.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I just literally today watched Komodo Dragon which gets big.

[Tim Urban]

Can't believe they're real. Like it's like, it's crazy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, my God. And it ate something the size of a deer. I don't know if it was a deer. Gazelle, whatever. It just ate it whole. It just ran up, grabbed it literally and swallowed that thing whole. It was the creepiest thing I've ever seen in my life.

[Tim Urban]

So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Tim Urban]

So let's talk about that. So the Komodo dragon ate the gazelle?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yup.

[Tim Urban]

Was that fair? Well, I don't know. And who determined? Because the gazelle had one plan. I want to keep my body for myself and keep living. And the Komodo dragon had a different plan which said, I want to use your body for energy. I want to eat it. Right. And they both. And it's fair. They both are allowed to want that. So was there a judge that said the Komodo dragon gets eaten? No. If the gazelle is fast enough, then the gazelle has the power. The Komodo dragon can want to eat the gazelle all at once, but doesn't have the power to. So. So it can't. In this case, the gazelle wasn't fast enough. The Komodo dragon was fast enough, so it had the power to do what it wanted. In other words, the rule in the animal world is everyone can do whatever they want if they have the power to do so. There is no other rule. There's no right or wrong. There's no one to make sure it's all okay. If someone has the power to do this, they do it. And otherwise you can't. And now think about a bunch of people on an island. Just drop them there, right? And before you know, they might create some little egalitarian thing. And then someone starts being really scary and beating someone to death who doesn't do what they want and start saying, everyone has to pay me tax. And they're acting like a mafia boss. And before you know it, they're a big bully. And then five people gang up together and they together can take down that big bully. And now they're in charge. And before you know it, the biggest bully is the dictator of the island. And that is the power games. That is the. You know, was Saddam running things the way he was running? Because it was fair, because it was right. He was doing. Because he had the power to do so. Because. Because people were scared of him. And so he created this story of his own ruthlessness and people were scared of it. And so people would like to topple him, but they didn't have the power to do so. So he got to make the rules and do what he wanted. Regardless of what's fair, regardless of who's suffering and who's not, and whether there's equality or whatever. That is so much of human history too. If you just. It boils down to the gazelle and the Komodo dragon, it is the raw power games are going on. And the real rule here in this dictatorship or kingdom or sultanate or the warlord territory is everyone can do what they want if they got the power to do so. And the dictator and their little consortium has the power to do what they want, so they do. And other people don't, so they can't. We are animals, just like we are just like the animals in David Attenborough doc. The only difference is in some rare cases in modern times, and maybe in little examples throughout other times, there are times, there are little moments in history where you're like, wow, they really kind of had an egalitarian or like a fair thing, and then it gets toppled by the Mongols or by whoever and there it goes or some coup and the king's son takes over and all those rules go out the window. So you have these little moments maybe of things seem kind of fair. Maybe there's some logic to this. It's not just the Power Games. And then they get conquered by them, stomped on by the Power Games. And so the Power Games continues to prevail and it really is the rule and everything else is an exception until you've got these liberal democracies which are basically designed to say we need to come up with a way not just that's fair and that's better, but than the Power Games, but something that's resistant to the Power Games. Inevitably people inside and outside the country are going to try to take over and impose the Power Games. And there has to be this, this resistance to that. And so that's when again, I talked about the liberal house. That to me is a house where the Power Games are on the outside.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's the key to that? Is it the ability to create a stalemate? Is it just we force ideas to battle? What, what is it that gives it that resilience?

[Tim Urban]

So first of all, it's a very well thought out set of rules. I mean, these are geniuses who are not just coming up with them themselves.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Talking about the Founding Fathers.

[Tim Urban]

The Founding Fathers, not only are they

[Tom Bilyeu]

really very unpopular these days.

[Tim Urban]

Well, I think that people should try living in a place that's run like the Power Games and maybe they'll come back here and say they didn't do Something so bad. But anyway. And of course they were flawed, but, but what they did was they did two things. They were historians. They knew history really well. Right. They knew everything. They knew everything from Greek philosophy to how the Romans functioned to how great dictatorships functioned. And then they of course understood the English monarchy and parliament system really well. So they had all of this. And they had all this Enlightenment philosophy that they were all scholars on. They also were all into law school. They really understood, you know, legal theory and everything like that. And then they collaborated together and they did something amazing which is they, they built a really, really complex and well thought out set of rules. It's. I don't even understand them. I mean, I don't think most America. It's really complicated try to understand like tort law. I mean it's really hard. But they, but it was so brilliant about. It is. It was, it was not just a set of rules, but it was rules. It was, they had a humility which is that some of these are going to be wrong or times are going to change. So they actually, they could, you could do, you could do amendments. The court justice system would actually develop and evolve through precedent over time. And, and, and the president could come in and impose a new bill and sign something new into law. And you know, they didn't anticipate the need for, you know, trust busting and you know, but, you know, breaking up of monopolies, you know, because then that became an issue later and so they, you know, whatever. And so they're continu. Continues to be, you know, new changes and then the system is able to argue and fight about it and end up coming to, you know, new rules that contain. So it's just rules are built upon rules and it's far from perfect. Right? It's, it's. It has all kinds of problems. There have been a lot of flaws and you know, but it, it's this kind of. It's almost like this living system of rules. Now that. That's again, that's half of it. The other half is that America has like a. American religion. We believe, you know, all men are created equal and equality of opportunity and you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and free speech and that, you know, you'll have, you know, you know, Americans really have this religion of freedom from the government and you know, and justice and fairness and whatever. Again, a lot of Americans haven't always followed that, but there is this real ethos and together it is the really, really well thought out set of living laws. And, and that enduring ethos that is, without that ethos, who's gonna uphold the law? I mean, if no one believes in it, it all goes to hell. So it's this belief in it, this reverence for those set of laws that together is robust and it can stand up to a lot. I mean, there's a great quote from. I forget who it was. Some Republican strategist in the early 50s. And he was basically saying, he was saying that, you know, Americans are acting, who are so scared of communism, they're acting like the very people that they're so scared of. We are not acting like that means something. Again, Reagan and Hillary Clinton, completely opposed ideologically, say the same thing about peaceful transition of power. So there's this American religion which is very powerful. And so that to me is the liberal games. The liberal games is composed of these laws and this ethos and this belief in those laws that together has, at least for a couple hundred years, pretty much fended off the power games. There's, you know, I always think, you know, we, we give terrorists a fair trial, someone can come to the US from outside the US and kill a hundred people and they will get a defense attorney and they will get into a jail cell and they will get a defense attorney and they'll get a fair trial. That is so civilized. I mean, sometimes I'm just like, damn, that is so, you know, like, it's not the power games here. And you know, again, it's the power games are always lurking under the surface, right? And so you could say, oh, there's, you know, crony capitalism and there's, there's, you know, there's instit. And there's these, you know, these things that are actually the power games in disguise. And that's true, but power games can't fully take over. The liberal games is really powerful and really strong. And I think people who live here, they don't realize how much suffering they're not experiencing that so many of the people in the past experience an uncertainty and fear of invasion and fear of, you know, dictatorship and fear of a coup that you just don't have to wake up and be scared of, that you can go live your life and that is. And you also can go to the grocery store and it's full of food. Because liberal games also has been incredible for, you know, for prosperity and for resources. So I'm a big liberal games fan and someone might say, well, you think liberalism is perfect? And I'd say, no. I bet in 300 years of our Enter time machine. I bet they come up with something even better. It's just at this moment, it's the best thing that we've done as far as I've seen. I'd like someone to tell me that actually this system, which was very anti liberal, has been better and for just as many centuries and show it to me. Someone points it out, I'll listen.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting, the time horizon being one of the key elements of it because, and maybe I'm painting the liberal picture inaccurately, but it feels to me like there isn't ever going to be anything better than what I call the physics of progress, which is essentially the scientific method recontextualized for other elements of life. This was me trying to teach entrepreneurs how to build a company, knowing that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, the thing you have to get right is you have to be able to solve novel problems. So not only problems that you haven't seen before, but problems nobody's ever seen before. And so it takes, takes a method of approach. So I write this whole thing down, how do I do this? How have I run my companies? And I end up writing out like these five or six points and I pitch it to my team here and I'm like, here's what it is. One of the guys goes, oh, that's the scientific method. And I was like, is it really? Like I unfortunately did not pay attention in high school. And so I went. And yes, it, in fact it is. I mean, it's a slight different set of words, but exactly the same idea. And it is basically going back to my definition of truth, that you're a prediction engine. If you're in science or otherwise, what you're doing is saying, I have this hypothesis which is just a guess. I have a guess that if I do this thing, it will yield this outcome. And in business, you're doing it in a motivated way. So it's like, hey, I'm trying to get to this outcome and there's an obstacle between where I'm at and where I want to get. And I have a hypothesis about what I need to do to overcome that obstacle to get where I want to go, then you're going to do it. And now this is where going back to this idea of your ego, if your ego's around learning this will work. Well, if it's around being right, you're going to be in real trouble. But you run that experiment with a metric in mind that this metric is success. So if you're the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It's like, hey, we're going to run this campaign and successes. We get elected ethically, maybe the right word. And so you try it. And if you get elected, it was the right thing. And if you don't, it wasn't. And if it wasn't, then you need to look with humility at, okay, what did I do wrong? What could I do better the next time? And then you go reformulate your thing that works in business, works in science, works anywhere. Only thing that's different in science is you don't want motivated thinking. You shouldn't be trying to get to a specific place other than, I guess you could say, understanding. We want to understand better what is true. And so that becomes, I think, a really important thing, that if people can begin to function from that perspective of, okay, I'm trying to predict the outcome of my behaviors, I need to look nakedly at the reality of whether this worked or not. And if it doesn't, I'm going to adjust my behaviors and keep going. That becomes a very tricky thing. If people have motivated reasoning, which you talk about in the book, I forget, you used a really clever phrase, reasoning while motivated. Yes, reasoning while motivated.

[Tim Urban]

The reasoning equivalent of drunk driving.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, very well said, very well said. So, yeah, I don't see a way around that. That feels like you said there might be something better than liberalism. If that is liberalism, I'll be very surprised if there is something better. The sort of fine tuning of the mechanics of how government works. Sure, I'm sure that can be better.

[Tim Urban]

I mean, the underlying concepts that individuals should have dignity and like live, you know, with equal under the law, I mean, it's gonna, it's hard for me to imagine a better. So the underlying philosophy there, you know, just general human rights, equality of opportunity. I mean, it's hard to see that improving upon that. Now the actual methods to get there and all the different systems and laws and you know, the way we try to think how complicated equality of opportunity is, we don't just say, okay, everyone can apply for a job. Well, some people's parents were oppressed by other people's parents. You know, it's like, it's complicated. So you have to have, you know, this and then, and then what if someone's born dirt poor and they don't have. It's not actually equal opportunity. Okay, so let's do these social systems. Not too much, because now you're infringing upon freedom and you're, you're so it's very, very Nuanced and complex attempt to achieve.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is really interesting. So now you get into something that really does sound better. Like if you just came to me out of the blue and said, hey, right now we're doing equal opportunity, but we want to do equal outcome, I'd be like, oh, word, that sounds a lot better. So that would be something where I would say, I get why people get behind that. From where I'm sitting, that seems destined to fail though, once you stop and think about it. Based on human nature. Do you agree with that or do you think that no, there really is. We really ought. That's probably the right word to use. We really ought to strive for equal outcome.

[Tim Urban]

Well, it's a hard one because it depends how deep you go. You can say if two people are able to, but you know freely, no matter who, who they were born as, try to become a billionaire, then there's equal opportunity. Someone else could say, well, if someone's born with a lot more that, you know, a lot more money in their family in connection, someone else is born into poverty.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And you know, that doesn't track well. What? Yeah, that doesn't track well.

[Tim Urban]

Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Being, being born rich is, does not

[Tim Urban]

track well, whatever it is, if they're born. You know that's not true, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, it is true.

[Tim Urban]

You're saying people that are born into abject poverty do just as well as people that are born into.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Definitely not. But being, being born rich doesn't. It like doesn't track at all. So the reason I interrupted you is because I think that there is a. There's only. Is it the only thing? There's almost only one thing that there's two things that matter. There we go. That breaks my hesitation. There are two things that matter. One is iq, it matters so much. And then the other is basically the zip code you're born into, which I. God, this is going to be controversial, but I really believe this, having seen it up close. It's mindset and iq, Those are the only two things that matter.

[Tim Urban]

Okay, but people who are born into a two parent family are so much less likely to end up in jail, in poverty.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think that's mindset. I'm very open. Beat me to death. Show me how I'm wrong.

[Tim Urban]

No, I mean, you might be right. I don't know that much about this. I would say that there are so. Okay, so here's the thing. You could say, you know, different zip codes, different whatever. You know, there is something to wealth in terms of just the aggregate of a bunch of people born to people who are upper middle class versus people who are in the bottom 10%. I mean, you're just going to see a lot less crime, a lot more whatever. You might say that's mindset and IQ maybe, I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But the point is not iq, unfortunately. Mindset.

[Tim Urban]

Yes, but. So if you really want equal opportunity, then you could argue that true equal opportunity would say, well, then if someone is born with two different IQ or different temperament or whatever, then they're not actually on equal footing and that therefore any single disparate outcome, well, you can trace it to something. You can trace it to their internal motivation. Maybe someone's just more ambitious and cares more about success and other people, okay, well, they were. That's not equal. Then they were born with this magical, you know, tool called ambition, whatever. So you could do this all the way to the bottom. Now, I don't think that's very wise because.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Why not?

[Tim Urban]

Well, first of all, I think that it's an inherent infringement on freedom to say, well, person A is less ambitious than person B so we should make sure they have equal. I think person B wants to be ambitious and work hard to get rich, and person A wants to hang around and hang out with their family and be satisfied to be lower middle class. I don't see why it's a better situation to force them to have the. I like the idea of freedom and I think that people should. There's, you know, we really, you know, there's these studies with little kids and one kid does three times the work of the other kid and then they're both given the same reward and they actually, the kids think that's unfair. It goes deep into our, like, wiring to think that you should get, you know, proportional rewards to your effort and to your contribution or whatever. So I think people should be free to pursue, you know, what they want. So on one extreme you say if there isn't some actual thing where jobs aren't accepting people from this background or whatever because that's actually not equal, then therefore it's equal opportunity enough and what will happen will happen. And then the other extreme is saying inherently anything that's different you could trace to something that was different about them. Maybe it's literally their brain itself, but that's not fair because they didn't choose to be born as this person. And so then you should have basically true. Equal opportunity means equal outcomes. And I would say I'm two thirds, three quarters of the way to the first extreme, which is that I think that you should mostly have equal opportunity and that is inherently going to be unfair sometimes. And it's going to yield inequality and it's going to sometimes yield unfair advantage. But you should do some stuff to mitigate that. You should have some forms of social safety net and you should have scholarships and programs that try to give ambitious, smart people of disadvantaged backgrounds a better springboard. I think you should to have some of that, but just enough that you know you're doing something, but not so much that you're starting to infringe upon freedom. So I think there's a fairness. There's two factors here. There's what is the right thing to do, what is fair. And to me, I think that almost equal opportunity with some, you know, some adjustments is still unfair, but these are all unfair. And to me, that is the best balance that makes the most fair situation. Even though again, it's just not always. It's not one situation that's you, you force equal un outcome. That's just not fair to the person who works harder than the other. But then there's also what's practical. And so equal, equal outcomes. We've tried it. It turns into abject poverty and brutal equal outcomes. Right. It turns into the rulers making the rules have billions and everyone else is in poverty and there's, you know, everyone's hungry.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do you think that is?

[Tim Urban]

I think it's, I mean, again, I'm not a scholar on why communism doesn't work, but it seems partially because human nature. I think if you have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you mean by that?

[Tim Urban]

Okay, if you have 10 factories and they're in a free market, they're all incentivized to try to out compete the other factories and work really hard. And if one of the factories is producing half of the total yield of the 10 factories, they would get a lot more. And if you change that system, you say doesn't matter how much you're all producing, you're all going to end up with one tenth of the total yield. It's obviously a disincentive for the productive factor. How did the productive factor get productive in the free market? It thought really hard about strategy. It worked extra hard, it worked those extra hours, it innovated all those extra things. Super hard work, innovative. Just the human spirit of how can we be creative here? It's going to melt away. Not some people will still have it, but most people are going to. I mean, I'm. I don't think I'd be nearly as ambitious if I knew I was Going to have the same outcomes not just in money, but in anything. Just if I knew that what I did didn't have any outcome on, on my life, I'm not that I, I'm kind of a lazy dude. I don't think I would do very

[Tom Bilyeu]

much think anybody would.

[Tim Urban]

Right. And so it's obvious, and this is, this is kind of like human 101 that like this is not a good situation for, for prosperity. And inherently the other thing is that it requires totalitarian government to keep everyone equal. You have to shove. Humans are so inherently unequal in so many ways that to make them all equal you have to really apply a pretty oppressive force. And so what you end up with is the power game. So you have, you know, a brutal dictator who. And you have rebellions that want to happen and they have to put down the rebellions and you end up with the leaders have everything and you have the most inequality. It's just now there's a vast underclass. So now I think lots of communists would say, what they do say is that that's not real communism. That's a dictatorship. That was supposed to be communism. Just like you would say wokeness isn't real social justice. That's not real communism. Okay, sure, but there's been a hundred experiments or so and they've really, they've all pretty much turned into abject poverty. So this is not like I'm just basing this on history going full to the end of forcing equal outcome. Even if in some arguments you might say that is the fairest way. Okay, that's one philosophical position. I don't necessarily think that's true. But regardless of the fairness argument there, it just is deeply impractical. So you can't not think about practicality. And so to me, the US is trying to, I think that. And again, just right here you have the Republicans and Democrats disagree on where they should be on that spectrum of equal. So I don't know where I should, where I want to be exactly. I don't know. But I would say I'm three quarters of the way to the pure equal opportunity free markets and one quarter of the way to the forced equal outcome. And that to me is somewhere in there seems to me, and I admit that I might be wrong about any of that seems like the best balance of fairness and productivity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So interesting. So yeah, the whole communist thing, I don't understand. This feels like one that people can eliminate at the thought experiment place to what you already said, which is no one is going to work Hard and be ambitious if they're going to be rewarded in exactly the same way across the spectrum. Did you read the book the Red Famine?

[Tim Urban]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, if you want to terrify yourself, read the Red Famine. So I like to read books as I'm falling asleep. I couldn't do that one while falling asleep because in the book there is a point at which. So this is what happened to the Ukraine in like the 1920s. And about the time the woman ate her 7 year old I was like, I'm out. I have to read this while I'm awake. I can't do as I'm drifting off sleeves. Fucking nightmarish. And that's what happens when you go, okay, everybody to each according their need based on your ability. I can't remember the exact phrase. Hopefully people know it, the whole mantra of communism. And so they went and they were like, oh, the kulaks are outperforming other people. They must be evil, they're stealing, they're taking advantage of people. So they killed them and in doing so they then left. Nobody knew how to farm. So you have the worst farmers trying to feed the country. Everybody's basically starving to death. The government's taking everything from them. And so the hard reality and please, I hate this, I hate that this is true. But we have different abilities, we have different levels of intellectual and, and I do not think this breaks along racial, socio, economic. It's just humans in the same family have different intellects and abilities and all that. And so it's just look at athleticism, facts.

[Tim Urban]

Why would this be different? Right? It's just right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, so that one is just you. You are going to put yourself in a really dark position when you do that. So I, I, I will often speak on People always say, just don't talk about things Tom that you don't know and you'll be fine forever. I like to talk about things as a way of saying this is how I would think through a problem that is novel. Going back to my whole thing about entrepreneurs, you have to be able to think through a novel problem. So I obviously do not know what the answer to any of this is. It is all insanely complicated. And I come to this truly with humility. I come to this assuming I'm wrong at all times. I just want somebody to show me how I'm wrong. But I do need a hypothesis which is just a guess, but I need a hypothesis in order to effectuate action. So here is my hypothesis. You're never going to get equal outcome without the most sinister hammer to beat down the people that rise up. Because getting the people that are underperforming to rise is brutally difficult. It's just way, way, way too hard. It's so people are always going to default to beating the people that are succeeding down. But if you want to get close to equal opportunity, it is when you take practicality into it. It's. Education is the only question. And you've got to just have the world's most unbelievably effective education system, which will take iteration and trial and error and all that stuff. But if you don't do that, if you don't say, hey, as a nation, we're just going to educate the life out of our populace, you're always going to be in bad shape.

[Tim Urban]

Yeah, I mean, when you educate, what you're doing is you're taking the raw talents and you're actually bridging the gap between raw talent and productivity. Right. Because there is a big gap there. If someone's born in the woods. If Einstein is raised in the woods by a pack of wolves, he won't even be able to invent the bow and arrow, because it doesn't matter how smart he is. There's this giant knowledge tower that humanity has contributed to over, you know, thousands of years and built that he was born on top of, just like we're all born on top of it. And with all of that, he then figured out general relativity. And so think about how much more Einstein could do for the world because he was educated. And so of course, it's just, that's the extreme example. But like, every kid has some talent and some ability, and when you're educating them all, you're just, you're just maximizing the potential. There's. And you're getting closer to something that is more fair, that is more, you know, you are. That is a way to level the playing field a little bit. But there is an ethos in the US Right now that is not that different than this, that if there is inequality, it is instead of saying, instead of the nuanced position, which is that there is some unfairness that created the inequality and that maintains it, and there's also some fairness, actually, that would lead to, you know, inequality. You have a million people that are all different, different abilities, different, different ambition levels, different energy, different values, and you're going to have inequality. If everything is as fair as possible, you're still going to have inequality. So instead of the nuanced thing, which is saying we have to look at inequality whether it's not in unequal representation or whether it's in wealth inequality. And we have to try to suss out what ingredients that went into this are injustice and which ingredients in here are not injustice, because there's both. Instead, the ethos is injustice. Inequality equals injustice, period. And that to me, is not an. It's an ethos that it does not yield productivity or fairness in the end. And I think it's a very disempowering. It's a very disempowering thing to teach kids that this country, because there's inequality, is inherently oppressive. And I think it's demotivating.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So how do you deal with the country having an imperfect past, being founded by people that owned slaves, at least some of them? How do you do that? Is it to separate the message from the messenger? Is it contextualizing them? Yeah.

[Tim Urban]

Well, first of all, you have to contextualize everyone. I mean, 96% of Americans in 1958 vote said that interracial marriage was immoral. Today, someone who says interracial marriage is immoral is probably a pretty bigoted person. So is everyone back then and someone that you wouldn't really want to be friends with or that you wouldn't admire? If I went back to 1958, would I? Is everyone just that kind of person? No, it's that these are not people that worse than. They're no worse than we are. They just live in a different time. Right. So it's not excusing it, just like it's not excusing the fact that people own slaves. Especially given that some of them didn't like John Adams and was saying this is bad and this is evil. And a lot of the founders who. Who own slaves grappled with. I mean, they knew this was bad. But the point is, yes, I think of course it should be in context. But book a loved by guest property with VRBO and you get a top rated vacation rental that's loved for all the right reasons, like being in a great location or having great amenities. Ugh, I love my VRBO for the view. Good reason.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Tim Urban]

Sweet. Another good reason. And that it's one of those good saunas with the hot rock thing. Ugh.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Tim Urban]

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[Tim Urban]

But your other point is that, the point is that, for example, black Americans are one generation away from Jim Crow. They're five generations away from slavery. You know, maybe they're two from Jim Crow, five from slavery and one from a bunch of like, you know, housing policies and genuine illiberal, you know, examples of the house not being what it's supposed to be. And so obviously that is going to have a long term effect given how much, you know, these things compound over time. And so as I said, I'm three quarters of the way to the equal opportunity thing. I think, oh, let's take that into account and let's do something about it. But not go so overboard that you end up hurting everybody, which is, I think a lot of the policy suggestions go so overboard with that that they actually hurt everyone and it becomes unfair and it's not good for, I don't think it's good for any parties at that point.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Any answer to me that doesn't include just an absolute perfection of the education system is destined to fail.

[Tim Urban]

That's a tough one though, because what do you educate kids on, you know, Seth Godin, is that something like that

[Tom Bilyeu]

in alphabetical order or order of importance?

[Tim Urban]

Well, the point is that a lot of people disagree on what I mean, it's like you and I probably don't agree on everything and 100 no, but

[Tom Bilyeu]

you and I, I guarantee after this conversation we would both say, okay, here's my stance. You say here's your stance. And then we'd go, but we're gonna predict an outcome that we want, a very desired outcome. And if what we're doing isn't getting that outcome, then we know we need to change and we'll go into what I call the physics of progress and we'll keep refining, refining and refining. We're never going to get it right on the first swag. But I'm just saying there is a system that you can set up. This goes back to the idea of liberal values. And I do not know liberal values in that way well enough. Like I am so coming at all of this as like an entrepreneur who's just seeing everything from the outside now and Coming in. So I could be using these words wrong, wrong. But like, when I think about liberal values, I think about the scientific method, I think about enlightenment values, I think about, oh, I think doing this will yield this result. But if it doesn't, then I'm going to go, I was wrong. And I need to update my model of the world and my thinking, and I need to tweak and change until I can accurately predict the outcome of my behaviors. So I really want to believe, and strike me down if I'm incorrect, that if you and I were building the education system, we'd be like, okay, we're going to take our best guess, it's going to be a little wacky in the beginning, and then we're just going to refine, refine, refine, and we're going to try to put things in place, much like the founding of the US where it's like, hey, wildly imperfect system, Wildly imperfect people that have put this in place. So we want a system that will self correct, self heal, et cetera, et cetera, so that over time it just gets better and better and better. True.

[Tim Urban]

Yes. I think you talk about with entrepreneurship, you have a metric which helps. You have something to measure. You know, here you could do test scores, but then you have teachers teaching to the test. Right. You could say it's in wealth, but maybe you have mass depression. So it is also, you have to figure out it's a tough one because sometimes you're not going to see the results for 20 years. So it's also not a quick experiment,

[Tom Bilyeu]

unfortunately, far longer than 20 years, I'm sure.

[Tim Urban]

Right. And so you're not going to see the results for a while. And you have to also argue about what the metrics even are that you're going for. Are you trying to. Then there's also the weird. There's a lot of facts that a lot of education doesn't happen in schools, as evidenced by the fact that so many experiments, when they pour money into schools, it doesn't change anything about the test scores or the outcomes. And what changes it is how many books the parents have in the house. That's a metric that tends to track with success and with crime and stuff better than how much money was poured into their public school. So it's also really complicated where education even happens. But. Yeah, but that's exactly why what you're saying.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But are you saying the problem is unsolvable?

[Tim Urban]

No, that's what I'm saying. That's why I agree with you, actually. Actually is that you can't have just ideological approach to this. You have to say, okay, yeah, there's a lot of places education happens. There's a lot of potential things that we would want to educate kids on. And there's a lot of ways we can measure success and disagree on that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I think that's the one thing we'd have to really pick up. Yes. Because if you can agree on what we're trying to do now, there's some obvious ones.

[Tim Urban]

Obviously you want not fewer people in jail. Right. That's a big one. You know, so crime is just at the, at the, at the, you know, that's, that's that we can all agree on that. And then I think you could say, you know, crime and poverty. Right. So you want the most, the highest percentage of kids emerging from or, you know, not falling into poverty later in life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can I give you the highest level thing? What I think the highest level thing is going to be human flourishing. We won't agree on what that means, but at least if we can steer towards. Okay, human flourishing is our aim. Now let's.

[Tim Urban]

Maybe it's those happiness scores versus, like, you know, you're measuring people's happiness. And if you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to get crazy here and I'm going to say we're going to take blood levels because I'm going to get real weird on everybody. So I don't want a subjective measurement of happiness. I want an objective measurement of like stress markers. So looking at stress markers, looking at longevity, I guess you do want some subjective measurements of like, happiness. Tell me, you know, are you living the life that you want so that you can get some adjustments? You want to look at what are markers of access to nutrition, access to jobs? You certainly can't say that somebody is going to do well in that job or not because of all the things we talked about earlier. But, but are you able to access the information so that I know you at least have a shot? I don't know if it's a test or whatever, but that you have a shot to learn the thing that allows you to pass the test, that allows you to gain access to the knowledge that you would then need to apply for a job in your given thing? Look, this. I don't know the answers. I want to be very clear. This is just me trying to see where the edges of how I think through the problem.

[Tim Urban]

I feel like it would be maybe is also. It's like you might want to measure. You help kids understand all the options out there and get to know themselves well enough to figure out what they want in life. So that's half. And then what percentage of kids are getting what they want in life after they figure it out? So it's. Are they learning about all the options and learning about themselves so that they actually develop goals wisely in a way that actually is useful? And then how are they achieving? So it's like two things. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to measure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Complex. I am. I am way beyond.

[Tim Urban]

I'm very happy. It's not my problem to do this because it just sounds the most daunting issue because, you know, and it's also like, yeah, maybe you had, you know, billions of dollars and a thousand test kids. Okay, now we can really. But that's not what you have. You have these underfunded school districts and you have kids coming with behavioral problems. And it's just like, it's. It's just also such a hard problem because it's like trying to run a business, but you're underfunded and you're. Your half of your building's on fire as you're trying to. So it's. It's really difficult.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. And I think in the beginning. So I'll. I'll take us off this topic in a second because I. I clearly do not have deep wisdom here that I'm sharing, but I do think that you also have to look at things like gdp. How are we performing at large?

[Tim Urban]

Maybe that goes against maybe. Maybe a bunch of people that are trained on an ideology where success and wealth is the most important thing. Maybe that's going to yield a good gdp, but those stress markers in the blood are going to go the exact wrong direction. So you also.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is why you want people to be able to choose. And I think that's going to be one of the fundamental drivers. So you have people like me that want to just work and work and work and work and work because I love what I do, and I derive meaning and purpose through that, and I just love it. I have been ambitious since I was a little kid. I sure, to some extent, I was born with it. Something about the family. I was. I don't know, but I was an outlier in my family. Everybody thought I was crazy. I've been saying I'm going to get rich. From the time that I was like 11 or 12, my entire family used to make fun of me. But there is not, it's not a coincidence that the one person in the family that was Just obsessed and was like, I'm going to get rich, I'm going to get rich. Ended up getting rich.

[Tim Urban]

This is why equal outcome is not fair. I mean forget all the controversial things about you can say about natural ability or about nepotism and starting place. Forget those just right there. You're more ambitious than your siblings with the same upbringing. Probably pretty similar natural, innate ab.

[Tom Bilyeu]

As a kid, anyone would have told you that my sister was smarter than me for sure.

[Tim Urban]

And maybe she is. And the fact is I don't think your sister would say it's so unfair that he has more money than I. She would say, well yeah, he's nuts.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't want to work like a maniac.

[Tim Urban]

Yeah, exactly. And so it's just an equal outcome. You probably would have given less to the world. And yeah, so anyway, we don't have to go back onto that, but it's just a perfect example right there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very interesting. Okay, so while we're on the topic of equal outcome, equal opportunity, and I know that you look into the future. In fact, I think you're writing a book about the future that you're faced.

[Tim Urban]

It involves the future.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would you. How do you feel about people manipulating the IQ of their offspring?

[Tim Urban]

I. With caution. And I think just like anything, think about new technology that is developed. Well, what do we do? We start to understand it. We argue about it, we have political fights about it. We, we get wiser, new kids are born with fresher eyes on it and we see a bunch of bad mistakes that are made and we learn from them and over time we develop wise policies. So with all of the usual friction, I'm all for it. Because

[Tom Bilyeu]

first of all, I wasn't expecting that answer. I love it.

[Tim Urban]

Oh yeah, because first of all, like you said, IQ matters. I mean it's a predictor of crime and success and mental health and happiness and all these other things. I'm not sure about happiness, but it is predictor of all these things that are important in life. So more of it I would say is probably on the aggregate. Good. I think we can be better at solving problems. I think people can be better at getting what they want from life and living rich lives if they have higher iq. And I think that they, I think on the aggregate, I think we can solve more problems and be wiser together. And the other bigger point here is that it's not like we're living these perfect life without manipulating anything in harmony with nature right now and we're suddenly going to be doing this unnatural thing playing God, with our kids brains. Every piece of fruit you eat has been invented by us. Your dog was invented by people inside. Inside doesn't exist. We invented the concept of being inside. We invented these homes, clothes. None of this is natural. The nutrition, the supplements you take, the people get pacemakers in their heart. You go get surgery, you get an organ transplant, right? We are already completely weird transhumanists. I can talk to you from across the world with this rectangle in my hand. That's a cyborg ability that we have. Just because it happens to be in my hand and not in my brain, who cares? So we are already on this train and has overwhelmingly on the aggregate, made things better over time. I mean, some people might argue that the hunter gatherers were actually way happier. Maybe, but I don't want to go be a hunter gatherer. So as someone who much prefers to be here with a long lifespan and general kind of freedom and safety and nutrition and options, and I owe those things to all the weird things. You know, beavers build dams. Would you say beavers are playing God with the river? No, it's like that's what they do. We happen to be mega beavers and we build all kinds of weird. They manipulate a river, we manipulate everything. Right. And so of course you can go too far. You climate change, right? You can obviously like you can you. You this ability can get us into trouble. That's why you want to be wise and sure, I'm sure the IQ manipulation of kids, genetic engineering, obviously that can go in really unwise, awful directions. And there will be some horrible tragedies. But just like cars come around, million people, maybe 2 million die every year in car accidents, right. I don't think many of us want to go back to horses. So there will be tragedies, it will come along with real downsides. But I think it'll be a giant net positive over the long run, or even, I don't even have to say that, that strong. I'm not sure it'll be a net positive, but either way it's what we do. We build all kinds of dams and this is going to be the latest. And so we're not going to stop it, we're not going to stop humanity from innovating. So the best we can do is say, okay, what have you learned from the giant technological paradigm shifts of the past? Let's try to be as wise as possible about this crazy thing that's going to happen and the best thing we can do for this and all future crazy debates that we're going to have to have. About these new things that are happening and how to handle them is scientific method stuff. Can we experiment? Can we argue? Can we have nuanced debates? Can we come up with wiser solutions? If the genetic engineering thing becomes abortion and you have the pro this side and the pro this side, forget it now. The whole thing's just a religious war and no one's thinking and it's just. And if someone on this side disagrees with their side, they're going to be ostracized. And so it could get there. And that's what. Part of what concerns me about our current political environment is that we have so many hard problems ahead. Big discussions we have to have as a species. And, you know, our society has to be able to have its wits about us. We have to have our wits about us going into this future where we're getting more godlike power and be wise about it because the stakes are going up. And when I hear about a debate like that, I just kind of have this, this nightmare scenario in my head of today's culture, you know, handling that. And I think very quickly you have this crew and this crew and this conspiracy theories and this, and just, yeah, we won't be wise. That's a great way for us to be our worst selves and make bad decisions and really screw things up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I wrote a comic book about this called Neon Future. Not, not about this, but about this culture making a very important decision about AI and robotics. And in the comic, my hypothesis is that the world will bifurcate and there will be people that are like, over my dead body. Revert technology, go back to somewhere in the mid-90s, and then other people will embrace it wholeheartedly and that you'll get this schism. As you think about the realities of this culture is going to make decisions about AI. It's happening right now. What do you think? Is this all going to go awry? Because we're having to contend this minute?

[Tim Urban]

I mean, it's. Any prediction I would make is totally out of my ass because we haven't done this. It's like AI is the way to think about it is there's a super intelligent alien species on its way here and we don't know if it's. We see the spaceship, we're not sure how fast it's moving. We don't know if it's four years away or 40 years away way, but it's coming. And someone's like, well, I'm an optimist. Someone's like, well, I'm hesitant. It's like, who the hell knows? Are they altruistic? Are they coming here to conquer us? Do they not care? And they're just going to stomp all over us by accident while doing their thing because they just don't care either way. We don't know. We don't know what they want. And we are, in this case, we're building it. Just, I think, you know, if humanity were a single person, I would say you're an idiot for building this. But humanity is not. And it's a collective and it has a life of its own. You know, the collective humanity, I call it the human colossus. It builds and there's not really anything you can do to stop it. And even if the individuals all say this is bad, someone will be building, and then it's an arms race and then you have to. It just. It builds. And so progress is happening. The aliens are coming. We are summoning them, regardless of whether each individual is saying, we shouldn't do this, this. And so I have no idea what it's going to be like. I think we should. Now, the one difference is here we are actually creating. I think it is inevitable that the aliens come because we're going to build this. What's not inevitable is we actually can possibly control the personalities of these aliens and their goals. Maybe not. You know, some people would say we're, you know, Eliezer Yudkowski would say we're 50 years away of AI alignment research from being able to have any ability to control what they're going to be like and we should stop and do it when we can't. So it's doom. And then other people argue that we should be able to. Actually, Yann Lecun says, you know, we should be able to raise it like children into being who we want it to be. I don't know. We've never built this before, so how would I know? The AI researchers, the ones actually building it, they don't know how it works or what's going to happen. So I certainly don't know. And I think a lot of times people's optimism or pessimism in this situation like this is just about who they are. Some people are just optimistic and that's what their default is. Unless it's officially bad. They know then they're going to always just default to optimism. And I'm like that. So in my head, deep down, if you set me in a time machine and say, I'm pressing 2060, and you get out of the time machine, my gun to my head, I expect I get out and I'm like, this is awesome. Everything's amazing. That's what I think, partially because that's what's happened in the past. Someone from 50 years ago or 100 years ago, that's what they would think about today's world. They would think it's incredible. Most time of the. And so I think I'll. And I think some other people, they, they assume 26, you get out and it's just, just either humans are gone or it's just back to the Stone Age or there's an AI dictatorship or human dictatorship using AI and we're awful. Dystopia. Who knows?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are you on board with pressing pause on the development or do you want to see it go?

[Tim Urban]

Yeah, I mean that there was like that letter. There was like something very basic. It was like these large language models are moving very quickly. Let's press pause on those. Yeah, that just seems wise. You're like we're in a car barreling up a mountain of progress and there's kind of thin ridges and we don't go off the edge. Let's just pause for a second. Let's talk about. That's how any smart human would do something important with such high stakes, they would say. But in this case, some people would argue, well, China is not stopping, so you can't get the whole thing to stop and talk about it. So, you know, it's complicated. But yeah, I mean, I think that going full speed ahead with the only mechanism of that driving the whole thing is just like ambition to build without any kind of like conscience or like discussion or like a bigger picture. Thinking is obviously not the best plan. I just don't know if, I don't know if it's realistic. I don't know if that does anything. But yes, I'm all for a pause.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

So given that that seems to have gone unheeded, although there is now some talk about regulation. Do you have a, like, if you were going to put your ideas in the ring for what the, what we should do with that pause is it all around alignment. Is it just creating a regulatory environment?

[Tim Urban]

Yeah, I mean, you know, regulatory stuff is hard here because you, again, you can't, you can't halt things. You can't, you know, you can't fully control it and make sure, okay, now we stopped it and now we can let it go as we please safely. You can't do that. You know, you can maybe do some kind of regulation with giant computing centers, which is needed for this. That's one thing that we have going

[Tom Bilyeu]

for us is just not let them get too big. Big.

[Tim Urban]

Yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe that we treat them like nuclear reactors in Iran and we're just like, we don't want them to, you know, and, and I, that that's, you know, that's one possibility. That's the thing, One thing you have going for us is that you can't at this moment at least create super intelligence AI in your basement, your mom's basement, you know, someone genius programmer, because you just need so much raw computational power that right now, you know, big tech almost has a monopoly on like, like the ability at least for certain things like large language models to actually train those from scratch, I think just requires a huge, at least, you know, a solid. I don't know if it's just big tech, but you can't just do it from your compute laptop. So, yes, I think there should at least be lots of vigorous conversations about regulation and what would you regulate and what is regulatable here and what are the risks and what are the pros and cons. I mean, just to be having those vigorousness, to be like that should be one of their main political discussions we're having right now and one of the main intellectual discussions we're having. And then, yeah, I mean, it's like when these new large language models hit, it's just like all these new companies are springing up and it's like this paradigm shift is coming at us very quickly and yeah, just I think pausing to catch our breath and like, see what this thing can really do. You have discussions about could this lead to super intelligence or is this a dead end for that? Which, you know, that's a debate right now. Could this thing turn into general intelligence, you know, or, or is it not? Is it just kind of like a very brute, forced, but dumb big autocorrect, some extremely fancy autocorrect? Is that all it really is? And it can't understand English, it can't actually understand the words? Or is it actually learning to understand concepts? I don't know and there are some people to talk about having GPT4 describe how GPT3 works. Let's experiment with that. Can the AI tell us about the AI? So I don't know. Right now I'm just shooting from the hip because a, I just like, I haven't dug as deep with this as I will have by the time I

[Tom Bilyeu]

finish with this book.

[Tim Urban]

But also, I just think it's when we're going into totally unprecedented waters again. If we're discussing the aliens are coming, should we all have our guns or should we create a peace treaty, or should we ignore them, or should we. It's like you can take guesses, but I don't know. One of the ways I gauge as a writer who reads, I'll read a lot of different people's opinion and I'll at look at what the different lines of thought are when I'm researching something, I can tell there's a certain type of topic where the experts are wildly disagreeing with each other, completely opposing each other. And that's what tells me that the species has no idea what it's talking about yet. Once we start to figure it out, then most of the experts start to. And that doesn't mean they're necessarily right, but they're more likely to. Means the species might be starting to figure this one out right now. I'm like, the species does not know how dangerous AI is, how to make it safer, how great it could be. I also think that we forget that this thing could solve all of our problems if we're still here to have problems. And it also could allow. The AI itself could of course, become super intelligent, which is super scary. But also, even if it doesn't, it doesn't. You're giving, you know, magic wands to all kinds of people. You know, you're going to be able to have a zoom convo with someone who maybe you met online, who's been, you know, you started liking their tweets, you DM with them, you became friends, you had a phone call with them, and now you're having a zoom and we're talking and you don't know if they're a real person or not. That's crazy, right? And so that's when you combine the video synthesis and the voice synthesis and then the language. You put those three together, you have a zoom call with someone and you do not know if that's just some code putting on pixels on a screen that looks like a person or if that's a human. And so we're not that far from that. And then when you have that, what does that mean? So there's one debate about, well, will AI become sentient? And if it becomes sentient, that's really scary. Okay, but you don't even need that. You can have people believe that sentient. And so now people think that's a real person. And that person can manipulate millions of people into voting a certain way, into undermining the support beams, undermining trust, Convincing people that the election is stolen, spreading. It's pretty scary because if you think about what. There's not some like, you know, it's not like we're on some. The liberal house is made of steel bars, physical ones, right. And we can. It's made of these concepts, these abstract things like trust and shared understanding. And so those who want to erode that will have an easier time. Liberal democracies have been extremely robust through crazy waves of change. Can they stand up to this? I don't know. I hope they can. I hope this is yet another thing that liberal democracies, man, it even survived this. Or maybe not. Maybe this is the end. We could be. And you have to accept this scary, but we could be at the end of America as we know it. And in 10 years we're looking back, in 20 years we're saying we did not know how good we had it. Oh my God. Imagine if you just go back and you could. And that's real. One of the things I think people should do or this isn't again, I feel deep down probably optimistic, but I still think there's countries you want to go to, if there's things you want to do, just enjoying yourself out there. If you want to go and pick up a new hobby, do it. Because I don't know, you shouldn't count on 20 years down the road and you don't know what's going to be going on. You might be sheltering somewhere, trying to find your next meal and being scared of that you're going to get shot by the warlord down the street and thinking about when you could have just picked up and gone on a camping trip. I mean, do the things you want to do now because I don't. You don't know how long it's going to last.

[Tom Bilyeu]

God, I hope that does not become a clip that people snap out and it's like they're watching it in the radioactive rubble.

[Tim Urban]

I know it's sad and scary and it's just. I think we should feel a little sad thinking about it and that will help us to be wiser. The worst thing we can be is cocky and think America always survives. My parents, my grandparents, they all had risks and they survived theirs and we'll survive ours. And this is just how things happen are and my grandkids are going to be living in the similar life than I. Just that that attitude will absolutely give us the worst shot at a good future.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What scares you more, the collapse of liberal values or AI?

[Tim Urban]

Well, I mean, I think they go together. And so some people criticize me for saying, you know, why is he so focused on like, you know, the culture war when there's things like AI and nukes and all this. But to me, what I'm really focused on is the house, the liberal house. The culture war to me is a kind of a mechanism that is destructive to the house. And when it's heating up, that puts the house under more strain. And to me, the liberal house is not just what has given us a good pass, but it gives us the best shot to solve big problems. It allows us to be wise as a people because when we have free speech, we can form a giant brain by putting our brains together like neurons and a larger brain and make better decisions. That's how we built this incredible civilization, magical that no human can do because we actually can have super intelligence together, together in a place like the liberal house better than in other places. So to me, it's like this house is not just what allows us to have good times now, but it gives us the best shot of staying in good times and solving big problems and rising to challenges. And when the liberal house starts to go away and suddenly it's just kind of a war of scary ideologies and everyone's scared and everyone and people start quarantining their thoughts to their little conversations or to their own head, that's when we become really stupid as a species. And that's when I just think, now the threats all are much worse. Now we're much more likely to have nuclear war. Now we are much more likely to build misaligned AI, I think. And so, yeah, so I think they go together. I think in some ways the liberal house is like the. It's almost the first thing because it's like, it's like put your own mask on before, like, starting to do stuff like let's just make sure that we have like a functioning, you know, know, societal structure that we are functioning in and now we can try to solve problems. If the structure fails, like, forget the problem. So, but obviously if, if I had to Say, okay, you know, what's more likely to have a safe future? If I could press a button and say, AI just goes away, or the liberal democracy, the culture war, you know, heats up and starts to really erode our electoral trust and stuff. I think if you zoom way out, probably the safest thing would be to get rid of AI and just accept, yeah, we might just be another civilization that ends up in civil war. And then there are really some bad times, but we're still around. Well, AI could legit extinct everyone. So, I mean, I think that maybe it's like, AI is a bigger risk, but the thing we can do to control it is. That's why the liberal house is strength gives us the best shot to do well with this thing, which is happening either way. So I guess that's how I see it. That's the thing we can control more, is how we're functioning together and how we're having these conversations and how we're solving problems.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Once you stop thinking about the individual and you just start thinking about the society, I agree with you. I am certainly in the short term, far more worried about people, certainly people in groups, and how that can click over and become madness very fast in all one wave and gets really scary than I am AI but for sure, if you're like, wow, look, it's only 50, 60 years of absolutely agonizing turmoil, trauma and loss. But we come back and I totally agree with you.

[Tim Urban]

Most important to me selfishly right now is just, let's have our society functioning well and not collapsing. If I'm an alien watching Earth and I'm rooting for them to go extinct. Extinct. I'm thinking, I'm not worried about the culture war. I'm like, that's not going to extinct them. AI might. Right? You know, AI oh, yes, they're making AI this is. This is when they're really gonna. This. They're. They're building the Great Filter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Great Filter.

[Tim Urban]

I had a crazy thought the other day that, like, one of the things for the Fermi Paradox, which is the paradox of why we don't see evidence of alien life, given that we should see so much of it. And one of the theories is that we might be early, really early. Like, maybe there were gamma ray bursts and other hectic kind of conditions in the early universe that made it very hard for intelligent life to develop because planets just got sizzled at some point along the way before enough time had passed or intelligent life did develop and it got sizzled. So now we're actually Starting to be one of the first. There's one of the many, you know, there's theories that say no, we might be very rare, maybe actually it's very unlikely that we got here, but we did. And most of the others don't because they don't ever form complex cells. You know, that sort of freak thing that happens happen or there's. There's theories that say, no, there's a lot of things that get to our level and then there's something, there's some great filter that they all hit and we're about to hit it ourselves at some point that's really depressing or that no, there's none of this and there's tons of species out there and there's just lots of other reasons we wouldn't have seen them. But the most interesting one to me in some ways is that maybe we're early and we're one of the very first to get to this level. So there will be a lot, but we. Someone's got to be early, right? And they're going to assume that they must not be, but they are. So maybe that's us. And if that's us, because you know, one of the things you say is, well, why wouldn't we see. Maybe AI kills off things like us when they build it. But then a. We'd see evidence of AI going and doing things amongst the stars. So maybe this is the first or one of the very first times that a species has gotten to a level where they can create advanced AI, super intelligent AI and that something crazy is happening for the whole universe right now where the AI we're creating here is going to end up being a super predator that all other species forever have to deal with with. And it's unlikely this is dark. No. So it's unlikely. It's unlikely because of course you know that. Why, what are the chances? But it's just a weird thought that like maybe we're, we're doing like the most important event in cosmic history is currently happening here on Earth. Like the fact, the Fermi paradox fact that we haven't seen any aliens at least gives that a chance. Like it's one plausible explanation. So anyway, side topic, but it's just been something I've thinking about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, I find that really interesting. So here is my. I have not looked deeply into this, but my gut instinct around the Fermi paradox goes something like this. The least interesting thing a super intelligence could do would be to physically explore the stars. And that what you end up doing without needing to Harness the power of a star or anything that dramatic is you just turn inward. And so if we can really create simulations that, that meld, they don't even have to be like crazy, they don't

[Tim Urban]

have to be crazy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

High fidelity. If, if you're able to jack into your own nervous system, they just have to feel real. And so you would probably two things would happen. Phase number one is you would begin manipulating your own neurochemistry, your own physiology. And you would have call them dreamlike experiences where you can explore not only infinite universes, but you can explore infinite universes that are not beholden to any sort of laws of physics or even logic. So you can just have these incredible dreamlike states or imagine effectively being able to lucid dream your entire life. That would be pretty intriguing. And then the other would be that if you could, and I don't know if I've not thought through this well enough to know if you could truly become a self sufficient energy generating species that lived in a virtual world, that's the one thing. Would you always need a correlate in the real world harnessing energy? It's a great question. But if you could again going completely digital, you now don't need to be bouncing around the universe. Especially a universe, at least from our corner of it that's just so empty.

[Tim Urban]

Like there's so many distances are so huge. It's so expensive to go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have a feeling long before you figure out how to bend space time,

[Tim Urban]

you just upload to some magical virtual world. You go, you know. Right. And, and, and why would you deal with also like bio biology.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Tim Urban]

Why would you biology. And why would you deal with physics in the universe when you could just go into. Yeah, you could just upload. What's interesting is maybe if one of the characteristics of this thing that advanced civilizations do when they upload themselves is that they don't like to, they, they, if they know it's fake, then it doesn't do as much for them. So they create this situation where they don't know that it's not real. Which means you might be in one right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Tim Urban]

And either I'm in it too, because we share it. You go in and there's lots of other consciousnesses or you're in your own little brain vat and we're all figments of your imagination. We're all just created for the simulation. And you're the only consciousness here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Or there is no consciousness and it's all a simulation.

[Tim Urban]

Well, you know, there's consciousness because you have have it, I guess. I don't know you have it, but I know I have.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Meat based, I should say, right?

[Tim Urban]

There's no meat based.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So are you. When you say brain vats, do you mean literal brain vats?

[Tim Urban]

Yeah, no, no, the concept of uploading the more fancy version of that, which is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So we are a simulation, but we're all conscious.

[Tim Urban]

Maybe I'm just at least one of us. It's just there's a chance, there's always a chance that this is currently what's happening. And of course there's also the theories that we are all one Similis sim. You know, we are in a simulated simulation of some other species that does these things and we're one of them. And there's way more simulations in existence than real ones because you can create a trillion simulations, one species. So it's much more likely we're in one than not. That's this Nick Bostrom line of argument. But that's another solution to the Fermi paradox because you'd say, okay, well, you know, if you're. It's like a Minecraft world. It's just like a rendered universe and they don't spend that much time on it, so why would they program other species into it? They're trying to stuff. Study us, so they build a universe around us and see how long it takes us to figure out what's going on or whatever. And that's the experiment or not. I don't know. But maybe there's lots of other things in this simulation. But I think that when I look back at people who had thought the earth was flat or thought that the stars were the underside of the Dome of Heaven, they feel so. In the dark. They feel so like, wow, you just didn't know about reality. Look at this conversation we're having. Like, so, yeah, we know more than they did about this particular situation. We don't know what the universe is. We don't know if it's one of those things where you go really far in one direction, you come back from the other side eventually. Like it's this four dimensional kind of self contained space where it's, you know, like a 4D version of. When you walk straight in line on the Earth, eventually you'll come back from the other direction. Maybe it's a. We don't know. We don't know if it's a hologram. That's a theory. We don't know if it's part of a frothing multiverse. We all know if we're in a simulation, we don't know if there's a creator because if there's a simulation, there, there is a creator, like religious style. There's a creator and we don't know if that creator would have our consciousness recycled somewhere else. So there could be an afterlife. Even if you're not religious, the fact that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Don't go deeper on that, that doesn't make sense to me.

[Tim Urban]

So just say if you just think we are in a cold, dark physical universe and you're an atheist, which is how I grew up, it's pretty grim because you don't have any hope for an afterlife. You think you die and it's just lights out and that's it. And I was always jealous of people who believed in an afterlife because man, they could have even if they weren't sure, they just had some hope. But now I have two lines of hope as an atheist that I've developed. One is just concept of cryonics right now or whatever, that future tech will allow humans to live a lot longer or to upload their consciousness or whatever. And so again, I wouldn't put my money on it necessarily that I live to 500, but I would. It's a. And it's definitely a non zero chance. And I didn't grow up thinking that. I thought everyone dies by 110 or whatever. So there is that possibility genuine. And that's again, as an optimist, a little hope goes a long way for my psyche to be like, ah, so it's probably gonna happen, you know. And then the whole other line of thought is that if we are created, we are in a simulation. It means that what am I? I'm just like a program in the simulation. And when I die, as far as I know, one of the things that that creator does is they take your die and you end up somewhere else. Where now you're going to be interviewed by the simulator and you're going to go live in some happy world that they put you. Who knows, it could be anything. But there's no reason to think that it's lights out that they could take that code and they say no, no, no, that code, that person's learned so much now we send them to the next thing where given what they've learned, we want to do another, you know, another set of world world that they live in. I just don't know. The point is there's a non zero chance that the simulator, again it's very religious at sounding. It's like there's a creator Creator who can do what they want with my soul, my code after. And those two things give me this little, like the sky, the gray sky, like a little bit of blue sky is there. I'm like, hey, who knows? And that's all I want is just the. Who knows? If you're starting places, there's nothing. There's just blackness after death and for non existence, for eternity. That's a pretty grim starting point. You can only go up from there. So a little hope I'll take. Take it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now. I've heard you say that nobody wants to live forever.

[Tim Urban]

That is true.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Help me reconcile.

[Tim Urban]

Some people think they want to live forever for sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I definitely do.

[Tim Urban]

I definitely thought I did. And then I wrote a post on this thing called Graham's number, so.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But why then do you consider the possibility of an afterlife to be a parting of the clouds?

[Tim Urban]

Because I can choose. I actually once did a post asking readers, how long would you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you had a calculator, is this Graham's number?

[Tim Urban]

No, you could type in any number and that's how many years you're gonna live. What would you type in? Right? And again, some people, I said there's an infinity button. Some people hit that. And I think that I'll explain why that is very wrong.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're gonna have to, because I am convinced.

[Tim Urban]

But I would say 5,000 years. When I came up, I said 50 centuries is a nice chunk of time. 50 centuries, I could do a lot. And you know, I probably, you know, granted, I'm sure on century 49 I'd suddenly be like, I wouldn't be like, I'm ready. I'd be like, no, I. So much more, of course. But at least give me 50 centuries. Give me 10 centuries. One century is nothing. Think about how recent the year 2000 was. Remember Y2K? That was almost a quarter century ago. We get like, we get max a century. So that's a quarter of a human life. Since Y2K, this is not enough time. So I party in the clouds because I want my other 49 centuries. Maybe I would like 400 centuries. I'd like my ability to choose. I want to choose. And I think once we are in a world where people decide when it's time to bow out and there's a whole ritual and there's a ceremony and it's beautiful and everyone says goodbye to them and they do. There's all this closure and they've chosen and everyone respects that. And it's a whole new culture that's built around this concept. They'll look back on today when everyone got taken by their dying mammal that they live in in the hundred year, first hundred years. And some people got taken really early and they lose loved ones, and people still want to live. If it is so sad and so tragic and like, it is heartbreaking, the reality we all live in now. That said, I would much prefer to die at 80 or today than to have hit the infinity button.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Tim Urban]

Yes. What? Graham's number. So before I wrote about Graham's number, Graham's number for reference is just. There's, you know, these endless giant numbers you could conceive of. But this one is famous because it's one of the biggest numbers ever used, used in an actual mathematical proof. So it's a real number that mathematicians have used. And before I knew about this, I would have said something like the biggest number. Okay, well, you know what a googolplex is? A googol is one with a hundred zeros. So that's a big number. I could write a googol in two minutes. One minute. One minute of little zeros. Done. Okay. You would have to have the universe packed with tiny grains of sand packed all directions, all to the observable universe, and that is 1/10 billionth of a googol, grains of sand. So you'd have to. Now go on to. So what a googolplex is, is it's one with a googol zeros. So now picture each of those tiny grains of sand has 10 billion microscopic zeros written on it. And every direction for billions of light years in every direction is just sand, sand, sand, tiny grains of sand. Each one has 10 billion years. That is the number Googleplex. So that's a Google zeros. Now, the number Googleplex, of course, is. This is just writing it out. That's just writing the number. So I would have said before, something like, the biggest number I could conceive of is like a Googleplex to the Googleplex power. And then I started. And I'm not gonna get into it fully here because it's very nerdy. But basically, if you start just doing this, you can have these iterations of signs. So addition is iterated counting. So I can go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or I can just go 1 plus 4 and shoot all the way to 5. I can go 5, 10, 15, 20, 25. Or I can go 5 times 5 and skip it and just, just. It's like. It's like you're. You're doing a shortcut. An addition shortcut is multiplication. A multiplication shortcut is exponentation So I can say three times three times three. I could say three to four third, right? Three to the hundredth. That's just two numbers as opposed to writing three times 300 times. And so the point is that's so you go addition, multiplication, exponentation, you can keep going and you can go to the next and next and next and next. And when you keep going, crazy things start to happen where like a googleplex to the googleplex power is like child's play. You realize it's like nothing. So anyway, if someone's actually nerdy enough to like that, they can go search rape wide Graham's number and read it. But the point is that some of these numbers get so big that it literally gives me nightmares thinking about how big the number is. Okay, so three to the third, to the third to the third. Just that little four tower is like a size of a googleplex. Now what if that tower went all the way to the sun? And now if you multiply that tower out and that's the height of the next tower and you just keep going for the point is you very quickly get to a place where it's like no one would want to be conscious for anywhere near that long and then you could just keep going. So I promise you, you don't want to be conscious forever. It'll be tort. The worst torture is living forever that someone could possibly imagine. It's just too much time. The amount of time is scary that you'd have to be around. It's scary to think about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting. I'm not persuaded by that at all. So here is what I have found is when two intelligent well meaning people disagree, they have different base assumptions. And if for what you're saying to make sense, one of your base assumptions is that there is some stacking level of fatigue and that as that fatigue grows, you just can't imagine being alive. What I would say is let's play a game that I play with myself all the time whenever I'm getting overwhelmed by the past. And that is to say, what if I literally just came into existence right now, this second second and all of my memories are just context so that I as a meet AI can keep moving forward, that I, I have enough contextual information that I can have a decision making rubric and so I can move forward. I could ask the exact same question in the opposite direction. What if I have existed forever but you just have this either looping memory setup or you forget get everything beyond the last 25 years or last Thousand years. If you're comfortable with a thousand years. Once you remove that, I'm going to take sort of psychic scars and have this ever increasing psychic fatigue. Why would you ever want to unplug?

[Tim Urban]

But if you're looping memory, isn't that just living a bunch of different lives? That's like reincarnation. You're not really you, so you might as well be someone else. You could say that when you die, a new kid is born, and that might as well be you with your memories now looped.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. And so I. I'm trying to soothe you, not me. So I don't believe that it stacks with like these psychic scars or that I will at any point want to reset. But I am also very cognizant that you those in. In a meat suit for sure. Assuming we are meat suits, whatever this is.

[Tim Urban]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If I'm the only conscious being and everybody else is not, I have to be very careful not to let those things stack back. And this is why people ask me all the time, so, hey, you're wealthy, you've already succeeded. Why are you working so hard? And the reality is, because I understand the way the human mind works, which is you can never eat a meal so satisfying that you'll never be hungry again. So I've just completely given myself over to the nature of the human animal, that I will always want to strive, I will always want progress, I will always want to grow and be more. And so in giving myself over to that, never thinking that there is a finish line, the only thing that bums me out the gray clouds are I will run out of the ability to generate ATP long before I run out of things that I'm passionate about. And so that is the thing that scares me is living a life that lacks meaning or something that just energizes you to the extreme. That would be scary. But I have not. I don't want to bullshit you. I would say I've not known a day where I didn't have that sort of drive. And it's not quite true.

[Tim Urban]

So you're saying that here's my life so far and what I see is an atom, okay? This is what I've lived so far. And on this atom, it's always been good. And I've never wanted to not be around, never even begun to fatigue. And now you're saying, so therefore, if we pack the observable universe with atoms so they're touching each other all everywhere, and then each of those universes gets shrunk down to the Size of an atom. And we pack the universe with universes of atoms. Right. And we just keep doing that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes.

[Tim Urban]

You're confident that on all of those atoms it's going to be a life worth living. You're not going to be begging to be unconscious and saying this is. That is a lot of confidence from having experienced one atom. And again, you can keep doing this. You can now do this. A universe of atoms number of times.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Your base assumption that in all of that amount of time something is statistically likely to go so wrong that I will want out of this.

[Tim Urban]

It's that the amount of time is so vast. It is. I wrote this post and you have to actually, like, read the post step by step to. For a second.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now you got me there. Like, I understand what you're saying, but

[Tim Urban]

it's like you don't even. Because I don't even right now. It's like, it's like, it's like. It's like it's even. What I just said about the universe full of atoms and then smaller. That is like in the. In the post. That's like a joke, what I just said. It's like the scale of Graham's number is. And then you could say, like, Graham's number, a gram number, time, whatever it is, is so crazy that it's just like there's. There's no way you don't go completely mad. And it's like.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Does all of your anxiety go away if I say you can kill yourself at any time?

[Tim Urban]

Of course.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so this.

[Tim Urban]

No, my optimal situation is that. Is that death becomes voluntary and people can bow out when they're ready. I would. I would love to press the infinity button on, like someone else forcing me to die.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I would admittedly press the infinity button. I won't lie. But I would be much more comfortable

[Tim Urban]

that thought experiment if I had an exit. Yeah, that thought experiment is that you have to. You. There's nothing you can do to kill yourself. You will be conscious for that amount of time.

[Commercial Narrator]

And.

[Tim Urban]

And the infinity button. You wouldn't.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are you worried about being alone? Are you worried about suffering? What's the.

[Tim Urban]

It's. Did you see the Black mirror episode where there's a black mirror episode where a guy is. A simulated guy, whatever. He's a real consciousness and is in this house. And the people who are running his simulation, it's like every minute that goes by for them is a thousand years for him.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't think so. What? I don't think I've seen it.

[Tim Urban]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I Get it?

[Tim Urban]

But the point is, every minute that goes by for them is a thousand years of experience. For this guy just in the house, and this is a sick show, likes to do really sick concepts. So they say. You know, they say, should we. Okay, should we. Should we, like, shut him off now? No, let's, like, leave him. Leave him for the next few days. And so I did the calculation. I was like, he's in there for. Suddenly for 2 million years, and he just can't. He. Whatever. And again, that is like, so. So that's the moment when you're like, oh, my God. So even if you were living, like, a rich life, like 2 million years, they just. And again, this is nothing compared to the vastness of time is a very scary concept to me. If you had to be there for it. It's like, we can't even conceive of a million years. A thousand millennia is very hard for us. But that is like, okay, you know, you can kind of picture a millennium and you can picture a thousand, but. But then. Yeah. So I challenge you to read the grams number post and then tell me that you want to press the infinity button, because I don't think you do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, I'll check it out for sure. Dude, this has been amazing. Where can people find you?

[Tim Urban]

My blog. Wait, but why? And my email address is how people. My email list, which is. You can just find that on any blog post to mine. At the bottom is how people know when I post something new, because I don't do it regularly. I do it sporadically. And so people should sign up for the email list and then Twitter. Wait, but why? I love it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

[Tim Urban]

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