Josherich's Blog

#37 - Tim Urban - Beating Procrastination, Parenthood, and Politics

explain winston explain how he came into your life. I went to the pet store in 2005 to get a fighter fish for my office because I just wanted one of those little ethereal-looking fish. They’re very cranky, like an angel fish. They’re well, they’re cranky if you put two of them together; one of them will kill the other. If you put two of them in separate tanks next to each other, and you put the tanks next to each other, they’ll both face each other and start doing their thing, turning red with anger, trying to scare the other one away. I was like, they’re funny; let me get one of them.

While I was there, I noticed that they had these little tiny tortoises, and in fact, one of these pyramids was the size of the whole thing; it was like a golf ball, and I was like, I love you. Without thinking very hard about it, I bought him. He’s more relaxed with you holding him than us who’ve owned him for the last year. We have a complicated relationship. Do you miss him? I’m like the dad who abandoned him, but I also love him and raised him. But we’re really good adoptive parents, so now this is a happy ending for Winston.

So how’s the book writing going? I’m on chapter 17 of 17. Whoa, wow! But that chapter is going to turn into about a quarter of the book, right? Is it like the last book where it was exponentially growing? That last chapter was like—no, that was a much crazier situation. This is just that the last chapter is the future. I’m actually calling it “The Futures” because we don’t know which of the futures it is. There’s not one future.

It turns out there’s a lot of stuff to say about the future, and I’m trying to limit myself. I can’t go too crazy because I’ve already written so much getting up to the present and through the present from the Big Bang. I was like, okay, I’m going to do little mini explainers, but there are just a lot of things to explain and talk about. There’s AI part one, which is kind of up to potential AGI, like where we are now plus three years.

Then there are all the different trends in transportation. There are like five different things to discuss there. There are humanoid robots, cultivated meat, and all these different things in biotech and health span, like CRISPR and transcription factors and bioelectricity, and all of these things going on there. Then there’s energy infusion, space, brain-computer interfaces, brain-computer interfaces just longevity—like the more moonshot biotech stuff.

Then there’s the second part of AI, which is ASI. You can’t bring that up early because once you bring that up, nothing else seems like it matters. You have to talk about everything else first and then say, “Oh, by the way, if we actually get to this other thing—superintelligence—none of the other stuff really is.” So is that the ending for your book? By the way, all the things I wrote might be different.

No, I finish with ASI, and then yeah, that’s the last part of the future because, again, you can’t—nothing is exciting after you’ve talked about ASI. I find it so hard to think about what true superintelligence would lead to in our current world, and I think that’s actually in part why so many people kind of dismiss it or don’t believe in it because it’s just so difficult to imagine what it would be like to have 1000 remote workers constantly available with a 210 IQ or something, just working on everything.

Like people in a room basically with a computer sitting there doing it, it’s like a whole other category, and everything else is part of one category. It’s like a bunch of monkeys are living in a civilization, talking about different ways to harvest bananas and different ways to grow trees they can swing from, different kinds of branches and all that. Then it’s like, oh, we’re also doing this other thing in these certain labs; we’re inventing humans. Well, that seems like it is actually more important than all of these things combined, and that’s a little bit what it’s like.

But we also don’t know yet if that’s actually going to play out the way that we predict. Maybe we won’t get there for some reason or maybe it’ll take a lot longer. It’s not that you don’t want to discuss all these other things first. The same mechanism that’ll help us do the other things well because those things are scary, too. Bioweapons are terrifying and nukes are terrifying, so the same mechanism we need for all the other things—wisdom and the ability to think together—we also need for that.

It is one discussion in a way; the awesome capabilities that you get from brain-computer interfaces, fusion, etc., all of that with superintelligence. You might just, instead of when you write about it in 2040, we might be able to get it—we might get it in 2035 or in 2030. Or even the way I’m talking about, like these things are playing out, like a day in the life in 2039. We discuss those technologies in 2062, 2104, and 2270.

I’m like, oh, by the way, ASI; not only could ASI supersede all those technologies, but it can make everything we just discussed happen in like 12 years instead of 150 or 250. It’s funny that you mention now that “The Futures” is going to be the largest chapter of—well, that it would be one chapter at all because I remember when we spoke a couple of years ago—so to give people the context, can I say what the overall premise of the book is?

It’s essentially a book on anything and everything that’s ever happened and could ever happen, yes, from the Big Bang to the heat death of the universe. Yes, that’s the beginning. Those are the beginning ends, and then it’s everything in between as far as we know. You’re not going to go into multiverse, or? No, I talked about the multiverse. What’s funny is I remember you being like, well, yeah, the futures bit should be the fairly easy bit to be because we don’t know what’s going to happen, whereas there’s all the stuff that’s ever happened in history, and that’s going to take a long time.

That was hard. It took me a year and a half, but actually sounds like now you—you know, it’s one of those things. Once you start double-clicking on a potential future, or like oh wait, and then it’s like more things. Anything I’m doing at that moment, everything else seems easy. I wish I was just doing anything. The thing I’m doing is always difficult because then I’m confronted with all the bad parts of it, but still, I maintain this is easier than writing about the past because there you have facts that you could get wrong.

You have to understand what you’re talking about so that I’m never worried about the 95% of laymen reading because they’re going to say, “Wow, this is great.” In every topic, there’s the five percent who know most, and if they think you’re an idiot, your book’s credibility is screwed, so that’s hard. The future? No one knows about the future, so it is in a way easier.

It’s just still, there’s just a lot to talk about. There’s a lot of things. So, what’s the most interesting topic that you didn’t expect to find interesting that you’ve come across so far? I mean, the makeup of life, of biology—it just blew my mind. A cell, if you could just zoom in on a cell and be inside of it, it is a metropolis of molecules. Incredibly complex, you know, proteins made of thousands of little molecules doing crazy things; everything moving extremely quickly.

You know how if you have like, I don’t know, pong? You have a picture, you just have like a square, and there’s a ball kind of going slowly, but the ball’s velocity stays the same. But you make it smaller and smaller; the ball starts going kind of like this. If you get smaller and smaller, it’s going like this. So that’s what I mean. A cell is really small. Even though the things aren’t necessarily moving that many miles per hour, it’s just complete chaos in there. The micro machines that are building all this stuff, the proteins—are just wild.

I never understood why people thought, when they were saying cells have real intelligence, it was actually intelligent. How could it? It’s a cell; how smart could it be? If you actually zoom in, there’s a crazy situation in there, so that just blew my mind. Then you start to get into weird land where it’s like, if I zoom in on myself, what I actually see is this world of the cell of these molecules frenetically bouncing around and these micro machines doing stuff. That’s the reality; that’s what I actually am made of.

It’s not this; this is an illusion. If you zoom in, you see that, and what’s happening there is everything that’s happening there is because of the electromagnetic field. It’s happening because atoms are doing stuff because that’s what the electromagnetic field is making them do. I’m like, what is alive here? What I think we have is a definition. Actually, there are lots of definitions, but it’s something that you could say reproduces itself and has heritable traits. Therefore, it undergoes some kind of Darwinian evolution.

It maintains homeostasis by taking energy from the outside, taking in neg-entropy and turning it into entropy. Those are the ones that people agree on. There are some where the definitions get a bit different; people believe different things. It becomes weird. It allows for one to not call fire life, but it could make it interesting once. Fire isn’t life because it’s not heritable.

A little piece of this fire you use to make that fire isn’t going to have anything. It’s not going to be like, “Well, because this fire was a certain shape…” or whatever. That’s not going to happen. So we’re looking at the kind of the emergent structures rather than looking at the individual, like super zoomed in. On a zoomed-in level, it’s not just electromagnetic forces driving you to do a certain behavior.

These micro machines and electromagnetism make the protein shift from here to there repeatedly. That’s really what transistors are doing as well, just like flipping that switch, flipping this here over, changing it around. But the emergent properties are different, but that’s what’s weird; they’re actually kind of hard to pin down. They’re a little bit illusory.

What’s actually going on still is we’re all governed by the electromagnetic. Now we’re getting into a very cliché discussion about free will and stuff, but it will make you think. Zooming in on biology will just make you wonder what is alive and actually in me. Since we’re here, what is your view on free will? I haven’t dug in thoughtfully in a thoughtful way. What I can say is I fully understand why people would say there’s no free will and it’s hard to argue why there is because there doesn’t seem to be space within physics.

I can’t control what part of your theory—everything’s deterministic, exactly. What part of your will can control the atoms in there? How can you make them do something different from what the electromagnetic field wants them to do? I don’t think you can. Well, I mean, when you choose to go left instead of right, you’re making this set of atoms go over there. But where does that come from? Something in your brain, right?

What if you’re right and that all has a cause and effect? It’s all a deterministic process. Even if it’s not deterministic but stochastic because of various quantum effects at play, technically they’re also deterministic just coming out in every single way, but in any case, they’re partially things that exist stochastically. You don’t gain free will on the basis of there being dice thrown.

Yeah, I share his view of poetic naturalism where he describes it as he finds free will a useful descriptor for certain behaviors that humans have at the level of describing behavior. It’s a useful concept to keep in mind and use for that. The fact that you can’t necessarily find it with current understanding of physics within some micro zoomed-in processes shouldn’t just discard it. When you talk about a different kind of behavior, effectively what it sounds like is it’s an emergent property that can’t be predicted from the level of physics, but just because something is emergent doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Just because you can’t infer from a microscopic level that we would have societies and traffic lights and the interplay of vehicles around a roundabout or whatever, because it’s an emergent property of all these different stacks of complexity, it doesn’t make it any less real or meaningful. In theory, free will is this emergent property that comes from when a sufficient number of neurons are firing in a certain way that you can make these choices.

Certainly, yeah, I think it’s really about the part about is it useful to talk about things from that perspective? Can you predict what a human will be doing better on? That’s kind of like what you try to do whenever you use any scientific theory, right? Is it a useful predictor of something? Can you better predict what a human will do as they choose to eat this or that on the basis of giving them some amount of free will and describing it in terms of choices they make rather than looking at the micro physics processes?

That’s certainly the case. Similarly, treating psychology as somewhat relevant will make better predictions, I think. I don’t think it’s a better world if everyone thinks they have no free will. I don’t think it’s even possible; humans just extremely feel like there’s free will. Wow, so you’re one of these—their lived experience tells you that therefore it’s real.

Here’s the thing: if we look at the totally deterministic view, then everything we’re doing right now, including this conversation—buying Winston and giving him to you—is just ricocheting of the Big Bang. At some point, part of the universe is going to be bouncing into this, and that’s just what’s happening—we’re just along for the ride. Basically, we’re witnessing the Big Bang. It doesn’t feel correct, but a lot of things that we think are true or wrong—we’ve learned that throughout history.

I actually, as I asked the question, I meant it not to be a full segue but just I’m aware that we lose viewers whenever you ask about free will. I don’t like the topic. Yeah, we might even cut it out; we’ll see. I wanted to get back to writing. I’m actually honestly impressed that you have, in fact, taken lessons from the past horrendous books and book experience and have improved a lot. This book is going to be done, even though obviously your initial board that you showed us proudly about when something is going to be done by now remains only as a board of shame.

Just to give people context, you might not know Tim is obviously an author; this is his first book now in hardback, real physicality. I love it. It was a six-year affair, which, I mean frankly, was probably worth it looking back on it because it is such a masterpiece. I think that should have taken three to four years, not seven. I was still quite a bit—if I were one of these just incredibly efficient people, I could probably have done that in two years.

If you had used the processes that you have used writing your current book, how long would that have taken? Yeah, like three to four years. I would have cut—that took seven actually, from beginning to very end. I think it probably took about twice as long as it should have. There was just way too much research. I wrote three times as many words as are in there now.

Sometimes that’s helpful. Even for this book, I’m writing the first draft; it’s too long. The way I like to view it is I’m auditioning topics. I’m writing something, and it’s both the topic and how well I can write it and just how inspired I am. I give it a crack, throw it in there, and at the end we look at the first draft. It’s a big audition, and we say who gets to make the cut, you know, “This is boring; cut it, cut it, cut it.”

That is good; I think it’s the way to make a good book. Rather than try to figure out what’s going to be—because sometimes it surprises you. You think something is going to be boring and you end up in an inspired zone. Oh, you had a really good stroke of insight and it turned out great. Sometimes you think something’s great, and it just goes on, and it’s not interesting, and it’s nothing people don’t know.

There’s a line somewhere, and I went way past it. The one thing I’ll say that I think was valuable about it is that I wrote it in the midst of this crazy time in our society. Watching that evolution, letting it play out and actually observing it and adjusting as I went wasn’t the worst thing. I think if that book had come out in 2019, like it could have—it wouldn’t have been able to— I think it would have seemed pretty outdated today because so much happened in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

I am kind of grateful that it went, and now I think there’s a new wave of some stuff going on in the new administration. But basically, the stuff in that book I think reflects kind of the big things that happened, so there was something valuable about that going from 2020, 2016 to 2023 and actually being able to really capture that whole window.

I imagine I was extending it; the new events were happening. Your new book is writing about the past and the future; this was writing about today. Today is changing, so you had to update and update. I will never write a book about current events again. That said, though, you’re writing about the future and the rate of change of the future is—yes, the near future is the one part of this book that has the same problem.

That past book was really painful, not only for your wife, but also for us, I imagine. You had put up a decent amount of pain around you as well; when did you realize that it was getting to a bad state? How many years in was that? Okay, so I’m a delusional person, and so if you ask me at any point—you probably did ask me—at any point throughout those seven years, what’s going on with the book?

My answer, and I believed it with all my heart, was, “I’m a few months away.” So actually, it was so often a few months away. The problem with that is that if something is two years away, well, I have to have a work-life balance of some kind here. I have to be a good husband, I have to be a good friend, I have to sleep.

But if something’s a couple of months away, you’re in crunch time. For these two months, I want to get into kind of like final exams mode, and just neglect everything and everyone and my own body and whatever else. Just to get it done, but then that goes on for a bunch of years— and that’s not good. So do you think you were intentionally doing that to get your panic monster engaged?

That was for those who don’t know. The panic monster is like the thing that helps chronic procrastinators knuckle down. I think that I really believed it was close to being done, and the problem was the reason it wasn’t close to being done was because I didn’t have a panic monster. The panic monster is precisely defined as panic. What I felt was pressure; I felt guilt, I felt anxiety, I felt frustration, right—all those things. None of those are panic.

Panic is when I’m doing a talk tomorrow or in two days. I’m doing a talk tomorrow. That feeling of suddenly, I won’t eat—nothing matters, right? It’s just deeply serious. The problem was that I hadn’t felt that because I felt a lot of pressure from a lot of things, and it was just not good to keep going. But there was no, “If this doesn’t get done by two months from now, something awful will happen.”

So it was the lack of panic that was the problem. That said, observing this time around you going through this new book process, I’m so impressed to the point I feel a sort of personal shame at how hard you are working and how many hours and how regimented you are. You know, we’re like, “Oh, let’s hang out.” You’re like, “I can’t; I’m in a writing block for the next six hours.”

So what have you done to master your procrastination in your mind? It’s so notable, the shift. Doing this first book was a huge growing experience, and I do feel like I learned how to be an author because the problem is I was a blogger. A blogger has a certain set of mechanisms they need in order to be a successful blogger, and I had those.

Then you take those tools and apply them to a book and you’re missing some. I wasn’t being efficient with it. The mechanism to make me say “move on” and make run-up decisions wasn’t there. It wasn’t just that; there’s the adrenaline that comes from people about to see the thing I’m working on right now. It feels like high stakes.

I can’t wait to see what people think, and people might not like it, and people might love it. It gets the adrenaline going. The part of the brain that gets excited in that moment is not a very smart part of the brain; it can’t really think long-term. The next time when people are going to see this is years from now instead of days from now.

Even though the stakes are just as high, just as many people are going to see it, it matters maybe even more because it’s a book. The adrenaline is just not there. It’s the same thing if you told me right now, “I’m going to be doing a huge talk in 2027.” Okay, I don’t feel any actual adrenaline or panic or primitive fight or flight hormones, but if it’s tomorrow, you do.

Even though the talk is the same stakes, it just doesn’t feel serious. So, this is the part about being a solo creator; you have to become a master at your own psychology. I learned through this book how this animal can be a successful author, not just a blogger and can be a productive, healthy author.

Have you done any setting? Because obviously one of the upsides of being a blogger is you get regular dopamine rewards when you post a post, especially if you’re posting every week or every day or whatever. You get feedback; you get immediate feedback. You get people telling you whether it was good or bad. You can iterate on your style of writing, essentially, whereas with this?

When do you get the dopamine reward? Maybe or did you never become dependent on it because you are someone who has a big social media following, etc.? But you don’t seem to have the same level of addiction that, say, I do. I know I need to post and know whether people are liking what I’m thinking and get that sort of reward. Have you never had it or have you learned how to manage it?

No, I have that too. It’s just that it’s a little less fun writing a book. Again, the release of it, the book is extremely fun and super gratifying and deeply gratifying in a way that no post could ever be. But you have to—the process itself has to be done without that kind of dopamine. That’s what I had depended upon more when I was a blogger.

Did you create any intermittent rewards for yourself that are like semi-fake, like, “Whenever I finish chapter one out of 17, I’m going to have a day off” or something? Yeah, I’m not good. That’s something I haven’t figured out yet. When I have time off now, if I finish on time, I’m not— I think it’s really important to give yourself a good reward, and I don’t usually. I think I need to be better about that.

Well, we created—for the past book, we’re very happy that you did end up finishing it because, with the world constantly updating, etc., one question was, have you reached writing escape velocity? Will you keep writing because the amount of new content you have to add is higher than your ability to write?

One of the things that helped you finish was that at some point, we went out to the beach with you and created a wager, which was I have to think at the final final final final final—this time for real draft of yours—no, it was the finished first draft delivered to the publisher.

It was the first draft delivered, okay. So what was it? You had the manuscript; you had edited it, but this is the—no, I was still trying to—I was still trying to one. Before you start drawing, I had no drawings yet, or except for the ones I had done when I was posting part of it online.

I was trying to—I was saying certain amounts of money, and Live was going, “It’s not enough; it has to hurt.” To back up, so you had been dragging on for a very, very long time, very long. This was like year five, yeah, something like that, year four probably.

We the four of us—your wife and me—go. We’d gone on a vacation; it’s kind of like a working vacation, etc., as well. I remember we were talking about it, and you were like, “I need some kind of deadline or something like that to get over this.” I needed a panic monster; you need it, exactly.

How do we get the panic monster involved? That’s where the idea came up of a negative incentive like a really strong negative incentive, and I believe I asked you, “What is your least favorite organization on earth?” We don’t have to say what it was.

You basically, first, it had to be a lot of money where it was going to be like—that’s a lot, like not a small amount. I’m going to be probably on tilt about losing that amount of money for— I think we settled on like 20% of net worth or something. Then, secondly, it has to go to a place that you hate. So we came up with one for that, and where it would make a real impact.

It can’t be too big of an organization, you know? And thirdly, to sweeten the deal, you said, “I’m going to contribute a six-figure amount of my own money, and I am going to be like I might never forgive you if I lose this.” On top of this, to not just hurt myself or in helping this cause, this added in a little bit more guilt. It’s like every possible incentive there could be.

It was about a month away, and you still—yes, you still basically nearly didn’t make it. Well, you got in on a technicality—4 a.m.—the night—the 4 a.m. right. It was technically or whatever the date was. I said June 30th; it had to be in. You got it in at 4 a.m. on July the 1st because here’s why, buddy. For me, June 30th ends when I go to sleep. That’s what it was.

I woke up June 30th. I said it has to be done today. Guess what? It actually worked because what happened was I didn’t do what I wanted to do, which was really, really get it done in a good way. I had to really rush the last few days and kind of do stuff that probably was going to get cut, but that’s the key. You had to get over that first draft line, and then you can—first of all, I could send it to my publisher, who later with that whole thing didn’t even work out because it got too controversial for the publisher.

That was exactly the point that I was making; points like mine should not be controversial. Now they’re so controversial that I can’t… inherently bad, damaging, and harmful.

So, what happens? Then you have another reaction that emerges to that, which is the anti-woke movement. A lot of people who start identifying with that are pushing back against something that they see as so absurd, aggressive, and tyrannical. However, it’s easy to then create a new kind of reactionary form of ideology. It’s like a new form of wokeness.

I do think that in the case of the anti-woke movement, there is a necessary corrective that comes with addressing the absurdity of wokeness. Yet, if it becomes its own form of dogmatism or tribalism, then it defeats the purpose. The danger is that it becomes its own ideology, where people just start screaming ‘anti-woke’ without necessarily thinking through the nuances of individual cases or the larger picture.

That pendulum swing could very easily switch again if the anti-woke movement does not remain rooted in critical thinking and open inquiry. We can’t turn it into another rigid ideological framework or form of extremism. The moment we do that, we lose the plot again, and we risk repeating history.

In a way, I think a healthy society thrives on tension between these forces. An ongoing dialogue about what we value and how we evaluate social norms is essential. Ideally, we find ourselves navigating between two extremes, learning from both sides, and finding common ground that respects individual rights and freedoms without compromising the principles of social justice.

So, while I don’t think we’ve hit ‘peak woke’ and are definitely not ‘post-woke’, we are certainly in a transitional phase where people are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations and potential toxicities of both extremes. That awareness can lead to more balanced discourse, provided we engage with it thoughtfully. But if we slide into a simplistic ‘us versus them’ mentality, we risk missing the more complex and nuanced truths that could guide us forward.

In conclusion, it’s about recognizing the problems with both sides while fostering an environment of open dialogue and respect, ultimately seeking a middle way that benefits everyone. Bad. The U.S. is fundamentally bad. Western civilization is bad, right? The authoritarians, yeah, exactly the opposite of what it is. But it’s wearing the same uniform, and it tricks people and it captures a lot of institutions. So that happened, and then it was just… I could see it coming from a mile away. It’s gonna swing back, and when it does, that’s this great thing—good for liberalism, good for America, good for the West, good for all the people that social justice cares about.

Come away from this very bad movement, and then an illiberal group’s gonna jump on the bandwagon and start using it to get power and to do things that they have been wanting to do forever. Now they can under the guise of this anti-wokeness. Well, that’s what worries me because I just feel like we’re already starting to see that. It’s like the rate with which the authoritarians and the bullies can catch on, the grifters and the genuine bigots—the people that wokeness claims were everywhere. The small number of them were actually now on the right. Exactly, they always did exist. It’s just they didn’t have any power at all, but now they’ve got a new opportunity.

But there were bigots on the left—that’s the thing. So, really, as always, it’s like a battle against bigotry, but it feels like now the right-wing bigots are going to have a new fresh chance. Again, the right-wing bigots rising up—guess who that’s going to help? A new wave of wokeness, right? You’re going to see a new wave of wokeness, and it’s going to come back, and it’s going to seem justified. It feels like the speed with which the pendulum shifts is getting shorter and shorter, and also like the overcorrections are stacking on top of one another.

It’s not like a pendulum—like a naughty word. Is it escalatory or de-escalatory? Right? It’s not like it does this. If anything, it’s like some alternative thing. It’s getting energy from somewhere else, and what happens when it just starts going around? Like things will—will the system break? So, like if you had any—what do you think could be the most promising paths to make it like dampen this process where like the corrections can start being smaller than before?

Well, this was what I tried—this was basically my purpose of this book was to say we need a vertical axis to go along with left, right, center. If we only have left and right, it’s hard to be like, “Well, that’s the good left and bad left and the good right.” It’s like this axis which you can either—if in the most broadest sense it’s just kind of like truth-focused and kind of just like, you know, wise grown-up behavior that has humility and tries to get to answers through discourse and cares about facts down to this super tribal and there’s very few principles and it’s just power games against each other.

Or you could say in the context of the U.S., you could say it’s liberal and illiberal. Either way, we need that axis. If you have that, you can just start to see it more as opposed to these movements on the left and right that aren’t good. I would call them low-rung movements. They get there, they ride along on this delusion that, you know, the blue low-rung movement rides along, gets all of its protection and its power from the other blue people who think blue is good, red is bad, so these people must be good.

And the same way over here now you have people who don’t like wokeness who will just say all those people who don’t like wokeness, they’re all good because they’re on the right side. If you can just start to see things vertically, you can say, “Wait a second, no, no, no, this very clearly is not… this is down here, this is down here, this is not.” So I just think we need a new language. You need to be able to identify it and see it.

And, you know, back to the heat map as well because that was a low-rung way of dealing with that item of information. Of course, wokeness is the worst thing if you care about social justice progress and the plight of groups that have been marginalized in the U.S. The worst thing for those people is wokeness. I’m convinced it is. It sets so much progress back. It actually inflamed real bigots, you know?

The same thing—it’s like if you care about a cause, don’t stop focusing all your energy on the low-rung groups that oppose you. All your energy should be focused—there’s so much of it on the low-rung groups that are supposedly wearing your uniform. You know, watch your own flank. Those people are also tarnishing your own ability to… like if someone’s… if someone started a blog called “Wait But Why” and they had my logo and they started publishing these awful, nasty, bigoted things, I’m not gonna be like, “Hey, that’s… you’re on my team, represent.” I’m gonna be like, “Cease and desist. You’re crushing my credibility. You’re killing my ability to help because no one’s going to trust me.”

They think you’re me, and they don’t know… they’re going to get confused. That’s what if you’re an anti-woke person and you see the really bigoted right. You have to specifically be like, “No, no, you will not screw up our credibility at a time when we have a lot of it right now.” Same thing they should have said to wokeness, and that’s my criticism—I’d say of the new government that’s coming in. Yes, I mean, they’ve got a million things to do, but there are obviously a bunch of actual bigots who will try and worm their way into your ranks. I don’t see them standing up to them sufficiently.

One positive moment of that—there was one great moment online when Sriram Krishnan got the new position under David Sacks and then a bunch of anti-immigration people came out. Around that, there are justifiable reasons to discuss H1B. Obviously, that’s a worthy discussion to discuss H1B visas. But truly, the people hating immigration of any kind and hating anyone who’s not white American came out. That was great where Elon just took a stance and just like said, “These people are awful. They are not part of us.”

And he just, like, totally. More of that! We need that. That was an awesome moment that made me hopeful about that—we’re really having the vertical axis. Frankly, then there were also moments recently. I mean, he can’t do all the things obviously, but like where I still worry about that—ah, maybe my hope is not justified, and maybe the new right movement will still fall back into the overcorrect.

Well, partly because everyone’s so understandably pissed at the worst excesses of the woke left. Yeah, totally. They were so vicious. They were so authoritarian. Everyone got told they were evil for so long. They want a little bit— they’re like, “I have to taste your own medicine.” It’s like, but this eye-for-an-eye thing, you know, is gonna… all you’re gonna do is you’re gonna give them new energy and new life.

Right now, they are dead in the water, and there’s such an incredibly obvious recent lesson from watching what happened on the left. Remember when wokeness completely destroyed social justice and also lost the left elections? It gave them an identity crisis, literally. Just don’t repeat that! That’s not a left problem. That’s a human nature problem, and it comes from when tribalism is so strong that you can’t bear to stand up against your own tribe.

That’s the hard thing. It takes no courage to get on X and to criticize the other tribe. Coming at your own tribe is the hard thing for everyone, and that’s where successful movements are made—with that one skill. Yeah, and I get a little bit of celebrating the win, etc.; that finally this is over. And I think the charitable parts of that is really just a celebration of, at last, we don’t have to be oppressed by these things anymore. But yeah, the celebration is done, maybe. Maybe just move on to work, and some have, others haven’t, and are still celebrating and doing crazy things.

I think if you are a hardcore woke ideologue, what do you want? You want them to be as childish as possible, and you want them to make you seem like an actual victim because they’re being so bad. You want to start rallying your troops and saying, “Look! Look at all the actual anti-Semitism, look at all the actual white supremacy going on, whatever it is. Look at all the authoritarianism going on.”

So if you actually want to defeat these people and you want to really have the smackdown, be high-minded about it. Be super legal and constitutional about it. You know? And now, like they’re—they’re just an angry fringe group yelling into the ether. Right? Don’t show them that their worst fears were actually true. Yes, and that I don’t see people sufficiently doing. No, no, it literally is injecting them with justification, power, and energy.

Every time you do that, you adjust, and this pendulum will just swing back harder in that direction, and it’s just very… you know, it’s frustrating because I think a lot of people can see this, and yet the larger dynamics are just hard to… you’re watching it happen; it’s just like, “Oh my god.” Well, I mean, again, that’s part of the problem with social media because it’s just… no one’s actually thinking. They just… they see, they react, they get emotional, and they post.

Yeah, and it’s like this is not conducive to—like, and that’s you tampering with what you’re saying. Why is the pendulum speeding up and why is there kind of this energy? Social media is a huge part of it, of course. Yeah, it’s just making everybody mentally ill; I’m quite sure of it. Yeah, and it’s also part of why all these institutions, you know, went downhill. You know, the media itself has become worse and feeds this in a way they didn’t used to because they’re influenced by social media. They’re scared of social media, and so they started to hire based on—it’s empowered the lowest common denominator, unfortunately.

And thus, it just sort of drags everybody. I thought you’d think, “Oh, it’s increased competition so the cream rises to the top.” It’s like that’s only partially true. At the same time, it’s just the equivalent of the crazy person standing in the street corner flinging shit at people. They also now have a public social media account that actually often gets artificially amplified.

But if you look at some of the worst of these movements in history, one of the things social media does is it also makes it hard to hide bad things. True. I think so much of the bad stuff that wokeness did actually came out a decade sooner than it would have. And, you know, there is… it’s both good and bad; it inflames the culture war, but it also provides some kind of mitigant against the craziest excesses of it.

Yeah, speaking of pendulum swinging, I can’t help but feel that the UK is not following the U.S.’s lead here, which is going back towards more classical liberal things like free speech and meritocracy. It almost feels like they’re doubling down on the worst excesses of lefty authoritarianism. They recently… obviously there was an awful Southport stabbing, and then there were these riots off the back of it, many of which were… well, at least at the time seemed like they were based off misinformation.

Although now it turns out that at least some of the misinformation was actually kind of true. But nonetheless, people were being put in jail just for saying stuff—like they didn’t actually go and do anything. That’s a really scary precedent, where people are getting jailed for memes and the things that they say. And even worse, they’ve just now come out with this—they’re trying to put a backdoor into all like it’s end-to-end encryption and making it basically into iCloud.

End-to-end encryption, which is not… and they’re doing it shamelessly. So it’s weird. I want to understand why it is that the UK is lagging behind so much. I kind of see two things when I look at Europe. I feel like they’re in like 2019 U.S. woke culture war stuff. I just see a lot of the earlier kind of iterations of this starting to happen there, and it seems like they’re just, you know, they’re caught off guard the way that the U.S. was maybe five, six years ago and then like a lot of the same way.

They’re kind of also maybe unprepared for this type of movement, but then, you know, I always assumed growing up that, of course, you know, all the modern democracies have a First Amendment type thing. I was actually shocked to learn that, like, the UK—to me—is as civilized as a country could be, right? It’s like one of the really kind of modern democracies in every way you could be, and I was like… it just seemed—it’s crazy that you don’t actually have… you know, they don’t have protection against the government when it comes to speech.

It’s a trade-off in the UK. Like, basically in all of the laws, it is seen as, “Yeah, what’s the harm that the speech can cause versus what is the amount of rights that we should grant the citizen to speak freely?” Rather than this hard rule of, “Wow, the threshold is so high.” But like I feel like it was in the 1770s that the American founding fathers understood why that was naive, which is that as soon as you say the government can only, you know, arrest you for hate speech, now the definition of hate speech can quickly become whatever the most powerful group doesn’t like or dissent against the government itself.

I read a story recently about a Pakistan, who jailed an atheist blogger for, I think it was hate speech against minorities. It made no sense at all; it was just like… it’s the thing that sounds good that everyone would say, “Well, that kind of thing isn’t okay, so we should…” and they just decided that that’s what he was doing. It, to me, is… I don’t think I know any countries that say, “We censor our people.” They say, “We protect our people against…” It’s always the framing.

So what the founding fathers understood in the U.S. is that if there’s room for the government to abuse it, they will eventually. And it won’t happen all the time. You’ll go through a few decades, and everything’s fine. Specifically, the First Amendment is there for moments when you have a really intense kind of cultural wave, and that’s the moment when the First Amendment is critical. Because that’s the moment when cultural forces often will pressure government to start enacting on their behalf with the rule of law and the monopoly on violence.

So right now, you’re seeing the UK’s lack of this rearing its ugly head because it’s a moment of crazy culture war stuff probably struck by social media. What happens in America kind of moves its way over there. So you’re, you know, you’re the UK expert. I just can’t… you know, did you grow up learning about freedom of speech?

No, I think looking back on it, it wasn’t really a thing that was discussed openly. It was just kind of… I didn’t ever grow up feeling like I didn’t have it, but it wasn’t a thing that was drilled into us as a core value. Well, so I remember my eighth-grade social studies teacher. I just remember this very clearly. She, you know, we all had the Constitution, and she said, “By far the five most important words in American history—by far the five most important words in the Constitution of the First Amendment—and they are those five words: Congress shall make no law.”

And then it says, you know, abridging the freedom of speech, religion, and for the press. And that was like this fundamental religion. And just the idea is that, yes, there’s going to be now some bad speech that needs to be policed, and that just cannot be policed by the government because that is the road to hell. So it has to be policed by the culture. Whatever it is, it’s better than the government having that power because it will inevitably be abused.

Now, maybe the UK has gotten along for a long time pretty well, but again, it all it takes is one kind of crazy cultural wave to happen, and now it’s like a… it’s like a support beam in the house that’s losing… that one, you know, a little earthquake in the whole thing. I’d actually argue that the UK had issues with not having had that rule, even though it was less about speech in the past.

In the U.S., it came about because it was specifically aimed—the Bill of Rights—which included as the First Amendment, the free speech amendment specifically had the goal of limiting government’s powers. After the Constitution was written and neither one of the three houses had massive power, now it’s like, “Well, now the people have a bit too little power; let’s give them extra power.” That’s the thing that the UK hasn’t sufficiently done, and Germany also hasn’t.

Is there a push in these countries? I mean, are there movements to say we need this? Or does everyone just think… I haven’t heard of… have you heard of either saying, “Let’s establish a constitutional free speech…”? I don’t know. Maybe someone does it; maybe like an electronic foundation or something.

Yeah, there are some. I mean, there’s like the Free Speech Union, and there are good organizations in the UK that are really trying to fight for this, and they’ll support people who are being, you know, tyrannized by the government for saying things which, like, should be within their rights as free speech. I think… but it doesn’t feel like it’s part of like the real cultural… it’s just not a thing that’s really talked about.

But in particular, because there is no First Amendment in the UK, I find something like what is happening with Apple and the request of the government to get a backdoor to all their iCloud data to be much more worrisome in a country where there is no free speech rights, because they can now come out and prosecute any sort of thing, right? They can just decide what are the arbitrary lines of this? “Well, that meme was okay, but that one—oh no!”

And I saw a post on X today that was basically saying that, and again, I don’t know how true it is or not, but someone says, “In two weeks I face years in prison because the government used an AI tool in a group chat where his chat… I guess he said some cultures are inferior, backward cultures that still practice female genital mutilation, for example. That was in a private chat, and that message got surveilled and rated as a hundred out of a hundred toxic and sexist and racist, and now he could go to jail.”

So this is what you’re talking about. It’s like you… it’s a little North Korea-esque where you don’t feel safe in your own texts with your friends, you know? Which is kind of… your phone is almost the extension of the mind, right? At this point. And it’s really bordering onto thought policing. And when there’s a crazy culture war, what happens is a lot of grown-up, you know, wisdom goes out the window.

Now you also have this kind of thing where it’s, you know, being labeled as hate speech based on what this kind of should be kind of a fringe radical movement believes is hate speech. That’s what’s getting people put in jail. Yeah, the crazy thing is I looked a bit into the history of the specific laws and acts that are allowing some of it.

So with Apple, it’s because the UK had the Investigatory Powers Act in 2016, where they wanted to update… allegedly only update, kind of in the past, they had rights to check when you used phone lines, like who you were calling. The intelligence agencies were able to see that; the government was able to see that to identify just very bad criminal activities. And they were like, “Well, now we don’t have sufficient rights around the internet.”

Now everything is happening online. A lot of like various… actually at the time, they had the Islamic State they were worried about in the preceding years and wanted to be able to combat terrorism more, which was happening facilitated through the internet. So they wanted to update those rights to now getting your browsing history and various other things as well. And having access to like just a bunch of online data of yours is…

And that’s obvious—it was never meant to ban encryption, and it was also never meant to… like at the time it was discussed as this is to combat child abuse, to combat terrorism—just basically the very, very worst offenses, obviously—right? And interestingly, also specifically worried about Islamic State terrorism. And now it’s in part that may be the door that is used to then go with people being worried about effects of… once there’s a door, yes…

It’s a hold into whatever the current wave is. And then there was the specific act, the Communications Act of 2003, which makes it an offense to use a public electronic communications network to send messages that are grossly offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing. So each of these words is obviously very open to interpretation, given the times that you live in.

And so two things about it are interesting: one, it’s the same wording as in the original act that it built on from 1935, the Post Office Act, where the communicate… well, it was updated to electronic communications, but in the past, it was not illegal to send messages that were menacing, etc., via mail to mostly at the time being done to someone in government. So they wanted to prohibit that you sent just like hate mail constantly to someone over and over and you just like are annoying them for one-on-one communication.

And then later when phone lines started existing, they’re like, “Okay, we expanded it; also we want to forbid that on phone lines,” and both of those utilities were by the government, paid for by the government at the time. So one argument that also existed, and that one judge has since upheld, and that’s why he ruled against some things prosecuted under this act is that, “Well, we’re gonna have kind of like a lower bar, i.e. we will allow fewer things to be said that are mean, given that it’s paid for by taxes because the mail and the phone lines were paid for by taxes when they were monopolies.”

So, and I kind of get the desire to like, “Hey, we’re paying for it by taxes; everyone’s paying for it; you should be having better behavior than all on all of these private networks.” In any case, in 2003 they updated it when the internet changed things and just copied it over to all of the private communications as well. Since then, the prosecutions around it shot up because now you also had more communication, etc., happening.

And the thing that’s like particularly insane to me, outside of that they have like prosecuted various kinds of like minor offenses, we would say, is that particularly the UK shouldn’t be the place—I think like they have… that goes after indecency. They have the history of Oscar Wilde was prosecuted for indecent behavior because he was a homosexual. And then he was like called… and led a much worse life—he only wrote one novel, I love his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and Alan Turing was prosecuted and like driven to death basically by the UK government’s indecency laws again in, like, what, late 40s?

And then they… the UK felt so bad about what they’ve done to Alan Turing on the basis of indecency laws that they, like, one… they walked it back now in 2008 or whatever and put him on the 50-pound note or one of the notes, clearly feeling so bad about it. And now they’re just years later back again doing it, going after indecency laws. It’s like as if Germany now was running around proudly just doing the Nazi salute basically.

Like, it’s a little bit… it has that flavor, like, you’ve learned your lesson, please! And one more point on it is that I looked up, where did it all start? The indecency laws. It started with a Buggery Act of 1533. That’s just what it started with, and then 200 years later the first time the precedent that was set was when a guy was convicted who published the Venus in the Cloister or the Nun in Her Smack, which was like a novel that was written, which was very sexual at the time.

And that set a precedent in 1727 for prosecuting like publishing of—when something indecent is published, which is kind of insane that you can set a precedent for indecency 300 years ago that then carries over and over and over. Like, we should have changed our laws, but we still really care about indecency in the UK. I think it all… it’s just a total lack of moral humility, and it’s assuming now we have all the answers; now we know what’s officially, objectively indecent enough to put someone in jail for it and what’s not.

And it’s like you haven’t learned from the past that, well, what we thought in the 1950s that we now think was totally off and wrong and behind. In 1850, wow, even worse! You know the things they thought about, I don’t know, race, and whatever, and now it’s like… it’s that the point of the First Amendment is to say like this needs to be a fluidly evolving system, and offensiveness needs to be tolerated because we’re not sure where we’re going and we need to figure it out together.

What this is saying is that the government and their officials basically have… they finally have moral truth. It’s like, “Okay, guys, like, you know?” And you’re gonna keep making the same mistake, and it’s… and the country evolves morally and intellectually when the emergent brain can think, and it thinks via open discussion. When you start limiting that, which can happen either via government or via something like cancel culture, it silences people but it actually limits what people can say, but it limits what the big brain can think.

So when you say that these thoughts can’t be said, you’re saying that thought can’t actually be percolated by the big brain, can’t be pondered, and then it just freezes evolution. You’re kind of like putting think caps on. So similar as with when you try to put price caps on various things in the economy, then usually you just hold it down here, and it just comes out somewhere else. It’s just… very, very rarely, very few situations where it’s a sensible system.

I think the same thing happens here; you put caps on the marketplace of ideas, and it’s like these weird effects where people get frustrated that they can’t do it, and right? And then you end up with riots because people feel like they’re not being listened to. What about, like, you know, mass immigration or something like that? They feel like the cultures aren’t assimilating properly or something you end up with the riots.

Like, let people listen to people! Let them express their views and vent their frustrations, and then you don’t get these toxic outcries. The government has, you know, it can make violence illegal. That is actual violence. Yes! The government says, “Listen, you can talk about—you’re gonna offend each other, you’re gonna be… it’s gonna be a mess—but no one can be violent!”

And that’s a system that has a lot of wisdom in it. It’s not perfect, but that’s the best way you’re going to have a fluidly evolving culture. And it’s, you know, any less or more and it’s not great, and… I don’t know what’s going on, and what’s kind of depressing for me is I think I don’t know—it’s maybe an younger idealistic view—is when I see what’s going on in Europe, I think, “Oh, well, you know, the Brits aren’t going to stand for that!”

Or just, you know, wait, this is gonna… you know, I just think, “Well, put this clearly, they’re gonna… wow, this is gonna have a huge uproar, and they’ll fix it!” Sometimes you realize like maybe they won’t; maybe this… they’re just kind of like… this is the new way, and like maybe, you know, five generations later, they’ll come out of it and people now will just live and die without much freedom because no one’s going to stand up for it. No one’s going to fix it.

Yeah, I hope that’s not what happens, but it currently doesn’t look good with like so much police enforcement. Well, like literal jailing of tweets—it’s wild! So, as is now becoming an institution on Win-Win, I like to finish up these quick episodes with rapid-fire predictions. So first, number that comes to your head or to your gut. Don’t think it through, just throw out your probability likelihood that your edit is handed in on whatever your latest deadline is.

1. That’s like one over e; that’s about right. Is it? It’s probably… I wouldn’t be surprised if this somehow follows that. Well, what it is is that deep down I feel like it’s 80, but then I know I’m trying to correct for my delusion, my historical delusion, so I cut it in a little bit more than half. Nice—this, yes, actual math! Okay, likelihood that you’ll write another 100,000-plus word book in your lifetime?

2. Sorry, and to add, and within the next 10 years? 70 percent. Okay, likelihood that some kind of external intelligence like God or a simulator exists? 10. Likelihood that there is life at least advanced in the galaxy?

70 percent. Wow, that’s high! It’s a big galaxy. It is a big galaxy. Likelihood you’ll be using a brain-computer interface by 2050? 68 percent. Likelihood you’ll live to the age of 200? 12 percent. Age of 5,000? 2 percent. Likelihood that we make it as a civilization up to the year 2075 and pass it through AI, ASI, all of that? 80 percent.

And I would channel you there, which is I would say the reason that’s so high is because I was held as a child, and I don’t have any other… I could not defend that against someone who thinks it’s 10. I’m not going to be able to argue against them, so hold your children. Likelihood that when it comes to that question of existential probability of doom or probability of success, that probability is the entirely wrong paradigm of thinking about it?

15 percent. I feel like it’s… what’s better than probability for a species groping in the dark trying to figure out what’s going on? Like, probability is exactly what you want instead of camps—100 camps—which is just saying, “Do it, and then do it, and then get it done.” I know something tells me that the whole concept of probability breaks down when it comes to this stuff.

Well, I just think it’s a useful way of expressing how—expressing why you feel, because you can hear someone talk about it forever and you think that they are sure that we’re all doomed. And then they say their p-doom is 20, and you say, “Oh, okay.” I was thinking, you know, just… it succinctly shows you the counter-systems might be something like, as long as you think in probabilities, then you have too much uncertainty.

Whereas if you think you can have a self-fulfilling and self-unfulfilling prophecies, it’s like a way to be wishy-washy? Yeah. Well, it’s… it’s a way to hyperstition things into reality—to make them real just because you’ve, like, put so much force into it. Like Eliezer, you know, he’s a pretty high p-doom and you could say that…

Yeah, I don’t want that! Yeah, well, thoughts do create things. You know, there is some degree that’s what’s the mindfuck right now is it’s like we’re trying to… we’re trying to like figure out what’s true, but we’re also trying to figure out how we should talk in the most useful way to govern, to nudge human behavior of others.

You know, it’s like climate change; you can think we’re on the right trajectory, but if you say that and that becomes the thing, then everyone acts differently and now we’re not in the right trajectory. So it’s like, it’s a weird thing where you’re trying to figure out what the ideal mindset is. Yeah, a friend called it that. In the friend’s term, it was a self-unfulfilling prophecy. As long as we take it really seriously, it’s going to be fine.

If we think it’s fine, it’s going to be a total disaster. And I think that’s kind of where we are. People have been taking a lot of effort, and we were at a conference and people were talking about what they do—like 20, 25 percent of people are like, “I’m working on climate change.” Whoa. It’s some effort going into it.

Yeah. Right. Thank you very much. All right, thank you.