Tim Urban, Co-Founder of WaitButWhy - Imagining the Future of Humanity

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Tim, the co-founder and writer at Wait But Why. And they discuss how to tackle writing about huge topics like the Fermi Paradox, what it's been like for Tim working with Elon Musk to write about Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink, and imagining what the future may hold for the human race. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Tim Urban at 00:00:31) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Tim Urban at 00:00:44) I finished college and knew I wanted to do something on my own, you know, creative or entrepreneurship. And really, my first crack was I'm going to try to write music for movies because I wanted to write music, but I wanted to be a modern classical artist in the way that—not I'm writing classical music, but just what they did, which is they just wrote music and symphonies and stuff and no lyrics because I don't really know how to write lyrics. But there's not really careers like that today. It's hard, right, to be a just non-lyric composer, but movies is a way you can actually do that. So I started doing that.

(Tim Urban at 00:01:23) But I also have major procrastination issues, and there was no one making me do anything. There's no external deadlines, and I just moved very slowly. I wrote some scores and I took some classes to understand how to work with the different instruments. I got some reps in and it was fine, but it was just going very slowly. And in the meantime, I started tutoring students to kind of pay the bills, and then that turned into me starting a tutoring company, which is the kind of thing a procrastinator does. The thing that you're not trying to do is the thing you'll focus on, the thing that's not important to you.

(Tim Urban at 00:01:58) You know, because music in the first place was what I was doing when I was procrastinating in college. So I was like, let me just do that full-time. But then when I was doing music full-time, I was doing this tutoring thing. I'm like, well maybe I should do that full-time. So I started doing business full-time, procrastinated from that by starting blogging, and then I was like, maybe I should do this full-time.

(Tim Urban at 00:02:16) And that's when Wait But Why started. It started as kind of a—I don't know, a part business venture. I had a business partner, Andrew Finn, at our tutoring company, and we kind of thought, well, you know, maybe I could go and just kind of start some kind of media company of some—we had no idea. And then also, this was kind of my going back to when I graduated college. I was like, you know, sure, this maybe would be the creative thing I really wanted to do. So I went to Easter Island for a month alone because I wanted to just go somewhere really out of the way, but somewhere also kind of cool and inspiring, hopefully. And I wrote a bunch of blog posts, came up with the name of the blog and the design, and came back.

(Tim Urban at 00:03:00) I think I procrastinated for like five months in actually getting it started, but then got it started mid-2013 as, you know, a project. We didn't really know what it was, but I was just going to write the best articles I could and see what happened. My other blog that I had been doing on the side—I was spending five hours a week on it and just writing little write-ups. Here I was like, what if I spent my whole time on this one activity, this one craft?

(Tim Urban at 00:03:24) So that was the premise. And it got going right away. A couple articles went viral of the first bunch, pretty quickly, which was great because you immediately have external pressure, which someone like me needs. Immediately you have readers and they're expecting now. They're actually visiting the site waiting for the next post when you said you were going to put it up. So that's great for me.

(Tim Urban at 00:03:46) I suddenly had all this pressure to produce and quickly so that they wouldn't leave and they wouldn't forget about me and get an email list going and try to sign people up for the email list. So it became this very intense couple years of furiously writing and trying to grow this early audience. And as that happened, the writing evolved and the topics got more serious and longer—much longer posts. And I just started to get more confidence that I can get into longer things and people will still want to read it. And I can take on something more serious as opposed to kind of a funny listicle, and people like it.

(Tim Urban at 00:04:22) So I learned that kind of incrementally as I went. And then I started to kind of say, okay, the people who are here, they happen to be people who really like kind of the way I think or the way I write. And so therefore I'm going to really dig into just what I'm really truly interested in, my own sense of humor. And I'm not going to try to be anything else. I'm not going to try to go viral or, you know, what would pop on the internet. I'm just going to say, what is actually going on in my head? What's really interesting to me? What's really funny to me? And just do that stuff.

(Tim Urban at 00:04:54) And so then the articles then kept getting longer and longer and more thorough until I was kind of writing mini books, at which point I decided to just finally write a book book, which is what I'm working on now. And then I hope to get back to some shorter posts because I really like those and I like how you can switch topics every week. And I'm a little fatigued of working on one topic for so long.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:18) What type of style are you picking for your book? Is it a bunch of isolated content, like from the blog, or is there a theme throughout?

(Tim Urban at 00:05:26) Yeah, no. This is a very long blog post on a single topic is what this is. This started out as a post. There was supposed to be a short post and of course that immediately went out the window. It was a post when I started looking around the society around me and I started saying that something's quite wrong. It's not just the normal political polarization, but I was—as a writer who is pretty fearless because I have my own platform, no one can fire me or anything—I found myself being kind of terrified to write about politics, and I'm not scared to write about other stuff. You know, it was just kind of like, I felt like it was a minefield.

(Tim Urban at 00:06:00) And I was like, wait, what's going on? You know? And then just in general—this was 2016 I started having these thoughts. And I feel like if I write about with nuance this whole slew of important topics within society, I'll, like, be this horrible backlash or something. So I was like, what's—what became curious even more than society was, why am I so scared? What's that coming from? And who is making me scared? And is that rational or not?

(Tim Urban at 00:06:29) Is this normal or is this kind of a new thing? Are there historical precedents for this kind of thing? So I just didn't know and I wanted to dig in. And that turned into very long blog posts because it was a lot to talk about. It's like, oh, we have to go back to our evolutionary past and why we're tribal, and we have to go back to the history of the U.S. and we have to talk about the last 60 years in depth and what's going on. And then what's going on now? Let's dig really deep into it. So that turned into a blog series that then got so crazy there that in the middle of the series I said that I'm not even halfway done, I realized.

(Tim Urban at 00:07:07) And this is not a fun place for most people to read this, is sitting on a website or scrolling on their phone. Let's do this right, because there's so much to say here. I've learned a lot from what I've already posted, which was the first bunch of chapters. I've learned a lot because I've gotten a ton of feedback. You know, it's a luxury for an author to be able to put stuff out in the world, get a ton of feedback from thousands of people who are picking apart your stuff, and then get to go write a book with the benefit of really having seen what has clicked to people, what makes sense, what's confusing, what has been misunderstood, where was I being callous, you know?

(Tim Urban at 00:07:38) So it was really great. And so then I went and was like, okay, let's just do this right and get this thing out. And that's been now a couple years and getting very close to that and probably going to come out this year. So yeah, I'll be excited to move on. It's not even my favorite thing to write about. I just thought it was a really important thing to write about because I looked around and I said, there's all this cool technology happening, all this cool stuff for the future. You know, I always think about what's life going to be like in 2030, 2040, and there's so much exciting things, you know, so many exciting possibilities. But all of the good future relies on us as a society being able to talk to each other and make decisions together and cooperate. And if we can't do that, none of that stuff matters. This is how great societies just fall apart.

(Tim Urban at 00:08:33) And all those dreams you had about the future, they don't happen, and something much worse happens. So I was like, this is the most important thing to talk about first. Because if we don't get this right, nothing else matters. So we have to figure out what's going on with our—if the society's declining in some important way—then we can get back to all the fun stuff again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:47) Yes. You've got my mind spinning. There's so many things, but I'm excited to—put me on the list, man. I want to buy it. Are you going to do the Audible?

(Tim Urban at 00:08:56) Yeah, it's going to be audio, e-book, print book, all that stuff. Probably online as well for some subscription, something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:03) Are you going to read it, though?

(Tim Urban at 00:09:04) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to read it. I've had—you know, it makes—I'd like to have all my blog posts be audio, and it's a huge amount of time and I'm not a professional at it. So we worked with a couple professionals and they read, you know, read a post as like a trial. And they sound great. It just doesn't sound like me. It's not—that's not what that sentence is supposed to sound like.

(Tim Urban at 00:09:29) There's this very specific tone to every word here that I realized that is not necessarily obvious. And so I was like, I can't have anyone else do this. I have to do it. So I will be reading the book. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:41) Hey, what was the origin story for the name? Like, why did you choose Wait But Why?

(Tim Urban at 00:09:46) Well, I was on GoDaddy trying out a thousand things to see if there's any .coms available, and there really aren't. And at the end, I had a list of a handful where I found the—I happened to like the name or maybe like the name and the .com was available. And so then Wait But Why was on that list. And I thought it had a couple—you know, it was kind of interesting and it had a couple—it kind of resonated with me. It kind of had a—that the—it made a point that I think I wanted to kind of bring out in my writing, which was to try to get past the assumptions that we all have about why everything is the way it is or what's going on.

(Tim Urban at 00:10:33) I think there's often just groupthink that all of us are a part of without realizing it. And I wanted this to be a place of, like, let's, you know, pause and reflect and really look at what's going on and try to understand why. So I can't remember if I really had that idea when I was coming up with it or I've invented that story after. But since then it has come to mean that to me. So I don't remember whether I actually was thinking that in the beginning.

(Tim Urban at 00:10:56) But either way, I was like, okay, you know, this works. I ran it by some people. My wife liked eight of the ideas. It was some very odd ideas, and this was one that everyone seemed to kind of like, and then that was the end. You know, I also just kind of—and I still believe this—I kind of think that it's one of those things where it doesn't really matter. I think a few things don't really matter if you're a writer, if you're trying to be an online writer and get some buzz.

(Tim Urban at 00:11:19) I don't think the name matters. I look—a great name can maybe help. A bad name maybe can hurt, but it doesn't really matter. I don't think the look of the website really matters. It matters a little. I don't think that if it's a high-quality website with—you know, if your social buttons at the bottom of the post where you can share, those are not aligned, which might work. I just don't think—but in the end, what people are there for is the ideas. And if the ideas are good, if the articles are making them think and they're delighted by the jokes or whatever, that's 98% of what matters. So I think I had that sense early on that I was like, I'm not going to start hiring someone to make a beautiful site. That's not what's going to be important here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) You can get tripped up on that too and put way too much time and energy into all of those things.

(Tim Urban at 00:12:04) And by the way, really nice websites are everywhere. So it's like you don't even stand out. It's not like, wow, look at the website, it looks so clean. And it's like every website's nice, right? So it's like that's—it's the same where, you know, I try to make my drawings kind of just like the authentic drawings of one single not very talented artist. Because that's actually—okay, that's something that's like a real thing from a real person versus when you make the graphics too good, now they blend in with every corporation's graphics out there.

(Tim Urban at 00:12:32) That's—it's like in a weird way, when you make things really nice, sometimes they actually lose a little bit of—they—it makes it a little harder to stand out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) Yeah. And I like the rawness and the realness. Like, I don't know. I love the stick figures, man. Like, it's just so—it's so cool and it feels super genuine. One of my favorite ones was your interview with Elon Musk.

(Tim Urban at 00:12:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:56) Like, the person calls you and the head of the stick figure's on the floor. That's what actually happened.

(Tim Urban at 00:13:01) Yeah. Yeah, that was crazy. But yeah, I just myself, I happen to like visual things. Like if I open a book, a new book I get, and I'm flipping through and it's full of comics and charts, and I'm thrilled. Because that's how I learn.

(Tim Urban at 00:13:15) Some people would look at that and be like, what is this? I'd be bored. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) You know? They're aliens.

(Tim Urban at 00:13:19) But I like that. And so I'm sure other people like that too because, you know. So that's why I do it because that's what I happen to like as a reader. It's lots of visuals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) One thing I am curious about—I read your Fermi Paradox article and I was wondering, I was like, is he partnering with a physicist? Like, how is he getting all of this information and checking it for accuracy? I'm just so curious about that.

(Tim Urban at 00:13:47) Yeah, I mean, so I think of knowledge that you could have on a topic going from like one to 10. And I always just try to think about—I'm trying to get to like a six. So I'm trying to get from like wherever I am, a two or three, up to like a six. And then I'm trying to bring readers up to maybe like a five. You know?

(Tim Urban at 00:14:09) You want to be a little higher than what you're writing. You don't want to be writing to the exact max of what you know. That's because there's always some stuff when you learn more, you look back and you're like, oh, okay, I was oversimplifying this, or I didn't, you know?

(Tim Urban at 00:14:21) You're never fully oriented to right where you are at your max. So I want to bring people to a five. And if you're at a two and reading one good thorough article brings you to a five, like, that's a really fun experience. Right? Like, wow.

(Tim Urban at 00:14:34) I just learned so much about this. I can talk about this now. And now I want to go from there and dig in. Or even if I bring people from a two to a four or, you know, a three to a four, I mean, that's super fun because it's this exhilarating feeling of understanding something better than you did from one article. So if I can do that, that's a huge success, and none of us in this process, me or the reader, has to become, has to be a physicist or talk to a physicist because they're up at higher.

(Tim Urban at 00:15:00) Now, sometimes I'll ask this question to an expert if it's just going to help fill in the gap, but the Internet is an amazing place to learn. And if your goal is to get to a six, the Internet kind of has you covered. And the Internet includes, by the way, being able to buy a book on Kindle or iBooks and just, you know. So for me, there's always, you know, iBooks or Kindle open, and there's a bunch of tabs open. And I'll often, you know, that morning have been listening to a podcast or an audiobook on the topic, and I just kind of immerse myself in it. YouTube is sometimes just great.

(Tim Urban at 00:15:32) You know? Look. So you can see when something is good or not good, but there are some great teachers on YouTube explaining things. It's one of the things with the Fermi Paradox. I remember watching a bunch of panels and debates with the people who are truly experts arguing with each other. You learn so much hearing an argument.

(Tim Urban at 00:15:49) You know? And people disagreeing is when you learn a lot more than, you know, one person just explaining their things, because you watch them try to poke holes in each other's things, and you get a much more rounded idea. So for the Fermi Paradox, I probably read a ton, you know, a bunch of. First, I'll start with the fun, basic articles. I'll read the Gizmodo on it. Just okay.

(Tim Urban at 00:16:07) What's the, I'll go read Wikipedia from beginning to end. And Wikipedia is a nice overview. You know? You don't want to trust every single thing as 100% accurate because, you know, you don't know if it is.

(Tim Urban at 00:16:17) But in the beginning, I'm not worried about that. I'm just trying to get a picture of the topic. And you read ten articles. Surprising how much you suddenly know about it, and you know where the gaps are, and you know where then you can start to dig in, read some journal articles, which you understand better now because of the first set. You can watch, you know, as I said, a bunch of YouTube videos, first maybe explainers, then I'll start watching the experts debate each other.

(Tim Urban at 00:16:38) I might pick up a book or two and read those. And at the end of that, I often am ready to go. For the Fermi Paradox, I wasn't trying to go and explain anything too technical. I was trying to say, so what are all the different people, the people who do think about this for a living? Because the Fermi Paradox is, for anyone who doesn't know, it's the, you know, when you look at the stars at night and you think, there's got to be some life up there, and yet we've never seen any signs of any.

(Tim Urban at 00:17:06) That's this paradox. Doesn't make sense. Right? It's a big universe. Why have you not seen any, you know, heard any signals, radio signals, seen any kind of activity that would suggest there's life out there?

(Tim Urban at 00:17:17) Does that mean there's no life? Does that mean there's another, there's a good reason we haven't seen it? And, actually, it's an interesting topic because when you dig in, you realize that there are so many fascinating hypotheses. And that's all they are. It's all we have right now is a collection of hypotheses.

(Tim Urban at 00:17:31) And so I collected those. And then I did the thing that I think a good writer should do, which is not just sit there and say, because there's one more step. After, you know, I could have just said 13. I think there's 13 hypotheses I have in there. And I could have easily just said 13 reasons, you know, 13 explanations to the Fermi Paradox, or why haven't we seen aliens?

(Tim Urban at 00:17:53) 13, you know, 13 hypotheses. That's fine. It's not an awful way to do it. But, you know, it's like if there's a, if there's a way to do it that's, a, I think more interesting, but, b, in a way that actually adds a further layer of organization into the reader's head. If they can really be clear.

(Tim Urban at 00:18:11) Because 13, remember, 13 scattered reasons. That's just interesting, but a year later, you're not going to remember. But if you look at it and you say, wait a second. In this case, I thought there were two categories, two big categories that were distinct, and that was more important than within those, you have the potential hypotheses. That to me was what made the article good because, you know, you can present the hypotheses and that's kind of fun, but what I realized, the two hypotheses in this case were, the two buckets.

(Tim Urban at 00:18:41) One was the hypotheses that suggest that we are alone. So we know that, and then the other ten, I think, were, no. The people who say, no. We're not alone. There were two camps.

(Tim Urban at 00:18:57) You know? One camp says we're alone, and here are some reasons why they say that. And then the other camp says, we're not alone. We're almost definitely not alone. And there's a lot of other reasons we wouldn't have seen evidence.

(Tim Urban at 00:19:08) And these are both super compelling. It's like, that's why it was so interesting, because I was like, well, I don't know who's right here. And they don't think they know who's right. So that's just kind of taking you through my process. And then I would, you know, then I would also think about what should the visuals be and, you know, once that outline is done, you know, what would this look like visually and then just kind of knock it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:27) Well, you crush it. I love it. You take really complicated things, make them very simple. And then, like you said, you didn't just list it ties everything. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:37) That would be like observing and reporting, but you did some, you did some processing on it. Right? And so you kind of chewed our food a little bit for us. You put some of your own thoughts into it and found the groupings and then talked about those. And so that's where I think some of the big value is too.

(Tim Urban at 00:19:55) Yeah. Yeah. I think outlining is really important, you know, to try to be creative there and just step back and say, well, what's the story here? What's the, you know, if I were going to teach this to a group of people in front of a classroom or whatever, how could I really make this interesting and not just kind of methodical? That's always a thought.

(Tim Urban at 00:20:15) Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I, I thought the Fermi Paradox was a win in that regard. And I think other ones I've done, and I'm like, I made the outline too complicated or, you know, whatever it is. I'd, too thorough. I think I often fail at that too. It's a hard skill to try to nail.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:28) So you do heavy, heavy outlining first, figure out everything, and then you start?

(Tim Urban at 00:20:32) Yeah. I think if it's a really long post, you can't outline in too much detail because inevitably when you start writing that, there's some creative part of my brain at least that does not visit me in the outlining phase. I don't know where it is, but it's not there. And I'm sitting there kind of in left brain mode, you know, trying to structure like an architect, and it's kind of boring myself with this outline. And then I actually start writing, and suddenly these connections are coming.

(Tim Urban at 00:21:01) And this interesting metaphor just popped into my head. And it's amazing how much creativity emerges when actually writing, when the actual process of writing or drawing. So now that I've learned that lesson, it took me a while. But you also can't do no outline because that creative brain that's writing, without some structure, will just meander and be redundant, and you'll miss important parts and you'll explain it in the wrong order. So I try to do it. For short posts, I think you can just do kind of a basic outline, write it out, and you're done.

(Tim Urban at 00:21:32) As they get longer and longer, I think you kind of just do the basic structure, and then you go to each section. You start, now it's time to write section one, and you go and make a little bit more detail, and then you just start writing. And, inevitably, that's going to change what you want to do with the rest of the sections after you've written the first section.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:49) Excellent. No. I like it. I've only written one book, my first book, and it's much like building your first anything. You look back on it and you're like, oh man, there's so many things I could have done better.

(Tim Urban at 00:21:58) Oh, yeah. How long did that take you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:02) All right. So failed attempts. It took me about, the first year I kind of failed at it because I didn't know how to write. I had never written and I made all of these mistakes. And then the thing that ended up working for me was I found this writer online named Vincent, and I said, Vincent, let's get together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:19) I'll pay you for your time. Let's get together every week for an hour or two, we'll record the sessions. And I want you to talk to me and hear some topics I care about. And I want you to learn how I speak because I don't like books that are written like an editor wrote them. This is just hard to read.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) I like books that just read like plain English. Right? That's one of the reasons why I like your writing. You just read how you talk and I love it. And so I met with him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) It took about twelve weeks. And every time he took our conversation, went back, listened to it, wrote up some stuff, and then we had another session on it. And so, you know, that whole process took, you know, three to five months of doing that. So the first year of this complete failure and not going anywhere, ended up with a bunch of crazy notes, voice memos, half-baked things. And then once I decided with Vincent, that was three to five months, and we had the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) And, by the way, I love that you were talking about how you sort of tested your content because what I did was I took versions of the chapters, and I put them on my blog, but at the time I didn't have many people reading. So I just ran a hundred dollars of Facebook ads to my target audience with the blog post and got thousands of shares and likes and comments and people ripping it apart.

(Tim Urban at 00:23:36) When was this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) 2018? Okay.

(Tim Urban at 00:23:40) '19? Okay. So '19.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:43) Yeah. So then I got thousands of likes and comments and everything and people ripping it in these massive debates so I could tell where the tension was on certain topics and which ones mattered more and then what the different views were. And then I went back and edited the chapter so that, you know, it met those things. But the key mistake that I made, because, you know, I put the book out and then I got a ton of great feedback on Amazon, and then I got a bunch of people who were upset. So I realized that there's two camps, at least for this type of book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) There's one camp that wants the story, wants it to be quick and short and to the point, is okay with abstract thinking because they have good imaginations and they can understand abstract concepts pretty well. And then there's the other people who just want the instructions after the talking. They want the bullet point steps of what to do, and it's almost like they completely ignore the whole story and they're just looking for the, and I didn't have any bullet point steps of what to do. I was just like, here's some concepts and you know, because that's how my mind works and I realized, all right, I'm either going to edit that book or just in my second book, I'm going to make sure that I have that sort of summary wrap-up takeaway checklist thing at the end of the chapters.

(Tim Urban at 00:24:53) Yeah. I'm actually torn about that myself. If it, some part of me feels like it feels like you're reading a textbook when you get to that, but I also appreciate it as a writer. I mean, a lot of people do it now. And the other thing is I worry that a lot of people will just read those.

(Tim Urban at 00:25:10) And so much of the nuance is not captured in those bullet points. So I'm torn about it. I think there's such pros and cons to that. But it depends also on the kind of book, obviously. But, yeah, I'm trying to think about ways to do it that aren't necessarily, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) I think one of the things that hurt me is it did so well, and it's niche, you know, niche or whatever you say. It did so well with CTOs that it became popular enough on Amazon to where people who weren't in the industry or anything saw it as like, oh, this is an instructional book on how to become a CTO. And I'm like, no, no, no. I actually adjusted the descriptions because it was a bunch of sales, two or three months. It was just going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:55) It was at the top of, you know, Amazon for its category and everything, which is a great screenshot. Right?

(Tim Urban at 00:26:00) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:01) And then all of a sudden, boom, just negative review, negative review, and I realized that it had just spilled over into a different audience.

(Tim Urban at 00:26:09) People's expectations had changed or people were assuming it was one thing and then, you know, not seeing that thing and thinking it was, yeah. That's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:20) Yeah. So I adjusted the description significantly, with caps and everything. I was like, this is a story. Yeah. This is a story of how I became a CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:28) You know?

(Tim Urban at 00:26:29) Totally. It's, but it's interesting that you tried one way. And a lot of people, I think, I mean, you have some kind of perfectionism thing that I have too because a lot of people after that first year would have just been like, okay. Well, this is, let's just publish it and see what, but you were like, nuh-uh. It's not where it needs to be, and then you tried a whole other way to do it.

(Tim Urban at 00:26:49) Yeah. That's a lot of effort. That's a big bummer to realize, oh, okay. No. I have to do a whole different way.

(Tim Urban at 00:26:54) And I just think a lot of people don't aren't going to deal with that. So, I mean, that's part of probably the reason that went over really well is you really, this is your second crack at it. You know, no one saw the first crack. This is already the second edition. You know?

(Tim Urban at 00:27:11) That's, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:15) Yeah. I'm excited. If you ever want to send me an early copy of your book.

(Tim Urban at 00:27:18) Yeah. I will. I will. I'll be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) More than happy. Yeah. Um, one of the things I was curious about was, you know, because I am a fan of Elon Musk. I don't know how you could not be a fan of his, unless you're one of those two or three writers he has a feud with. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:34) They just do it for the popularity. Right? And so I was just curious what it was like interacting with him. You got to interview him more than once. Right?

(Tim Urban at 00:27:44) Yeah. Yeah. He was very available. I think he thought that the messaging of their, you know, teaching the world about why those companies exist and what they're actually trying to do, I think he thinks it's really important. And so he actually put, you know, he put some effort into helping with this, which was great.

(Tim Urban at 00:28:04) It was great to get to dig deep with him. I mean, I talked to a bunch of his staff, and I could ask them a lot. At first, I just did a ton of research, so I didn't want to waste anyone's time here. I wanted to learn, you know, anything I could learn online, I wanted to. Then I filled in a bunch of gaps with his staff.

(Tim Urban at 00:28:18) And with him, I tried to keep it to the big, big picture. You know, like, what is the future going to be like, and what scares you about it? And why are these companies helping to make the future better? So that was fascinating, obviously.

(Tim Urban at 00:28:34) He's a very well-rounded thinker. He thinks a lot about history, and, you know, he loves sci-fi, and he's—everyone knows he's a very big thinker, but he truly is always thinking about the really big story. What's the big, big story going on? And to him, that story could end well or not well. It could have a happy ending or not, or a happy next chapter or not.

(Tim Urban at 00:28:59) And he wants the story to go on for a long time, and he wants it to be a good story that everyone's happy to live inside of. And from there, he kind of says, "Okay, what are the big threats to that vision? What could make this a short story or a bad future story? And what's the best thing that we could be doing?" What are the best things we could be doing to try to mitigate those existential risks and increase our probability of that good future? And it's as simple as that. I mean, every one of his companies stems from that initial kind of brainstorm. And then the companies themselves, when you dig in, they're doing such cool things. The technology is super cool in each of these things. They're so just awe-inspiring, you know, these incredible machines they're building in different areas. And so, yeah, I couldn't think of a more fun group of companies to write about. I got very lucky and very fortunate that I had the chance to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58) Yeah. You're amplifying good stuff, right?

(Tim Urban at 00:30:01) Yeah. Exactly. It's like, it just makes for great blog posts because this is the exact kind of thing I wanted to write about anyway. But, you know, to me, it's just like the Fermi paradox: big zoom-out on what's really going on, and then how could we solve it, and why this matters, and what we, you know, what's exciting about the next five years and all the stuff I like writing about anyway. And then, yeah, I really believe in the mission of these companies. And if I can do a tiny part to help more people, you know, help people maybe apply to work there that wouldn't have, or just help people support it that may not have, then I want to put any effort I can to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:40) Yeah. I've struggled with the—I've gone back and forth on wanting to interview him. When I first started, obviously, I definitely wanted to interview him because it would be the coolest thing in the world. But then as, you know, the platform grew and everything changed, I started thinking, you know, I watch a lot of his interviews. I watch his Joe Rogan interviews. When he posts stuff online, he'll do some YouTube interviews, and, you know, he does a lot of interviews. And so I'll watch them, and then I get a real feeling, an understanding of him. I think one thing that's sort of almost underreported in the different interviews, or that interviewers don't pick up on, is his self-sacrificing nature. The fact that he's working and doing all of this because he wants to ensure a better future for humanity. I mean, it's almost always just a passing thing, and I never hear interviewers dig into, like, why, you know, he's like that.

(Tim Urban at 00:31:37) Yeah. He doesn't like to—I don't think he usually wants to talk about the companies themselves and what he's doing, and, you know, yeah. I think he, you know, often probably won't dig into that kind of question. But yeah. I mean, maybe you should try to get him on and ask him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:54) Well, that's what I was struggling with. I was like, obviously my team wants me to do it and pursue it. But I was saying, like, unless—he's doing such important work out there, right? And he's running these companies and he's doing this stuff, and it's like, if I'm going to take up some of his time, I want to be able to, A, ask him something super unique things that he hasn't covered a hundred times in all his other interviews. And so until I have those questions, I'm not going to waste his time. And then B, something that would bring value to the mission he's on.

(Tim Urban at 00:32:25) So I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) Was like, when those things sort of come together, I'm a patient person.

(Tim Urban at 00:32:28) Right. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) I've gotten to do every interview I've ever wanted to do. The coolest—one of the coolest ones was the creator of the World Wide Web. I got to meet that guy.

(Tim Urban at 00:32:36) Tim Berners-Lee or something?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:38) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Tim Urban at 00:32:39) That guy should be so much more famous than he is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:42) I know. I never asked him—

(Tim Urban at 00:32:43) He is the—it's just crazy. But he kind of invented the internet, or whatever the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) Oh, yeah. I got roasted on this.

(Tim Urban at 00:32:54) Again, like, I—it's very—I get con—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:55) Yeah.

(Tim Urban at 00:32:56) Is it now the thing that—like, www, I mean, that is—yeah, right? So he kind of invented the internet or what? Explain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) I got schooled on this, by the way. Yeah. Because I hang out with nerds. I mean, the smartest people in technology in the world. And so I was going around saying, like, "Oh, I got to interview the creator of the internet." And someone's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy. Slow down. You got to interview the creator of the World Wide Web."

(Tim Urban at 00:33:24) Right. And I was like, "Oh, by the way—"

(Intro Narrator at 00:33:26) That was David Mazières, the inventor of the Stellar cryptocurrency network.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:31) Oh, yeah.

(Intro Narrator at 00:33:32) Um, that's the one who schooled Joel on that—

(Tim Urban at 00:33:34) Yeah.

(Intro Narrator at 00:33:34) Which I think is important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Yeah. And we let that air for sure because it's important. It's like—I'll give you the brief. There's several layers of the internet. Like, what we call the internet, you know, you got the fiber optic cables that are underground, then you have—there's these layers, and there's actually a graph—or an infographic I can send you—

(Tim Urban at 00:33:55) Right. There's the physical internet, which is like an—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) Yeah. Yeah.

(Tim Urban at 00:33:58) Of wires and, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) Yes. It's actually—it's literally a web spun around the Earth. There's these giant ships, and they have them over the—they're on the ocean floors. It's literally a web of wires around the Earth. I know. I know. Right now, when we're talking, data is being transferred, bouncing as light around the world, or at least between our two locations, and that's how we're seeing each other and talking to each other.

(Tim Urban at 00:34:25) It's bouncing light. I know. You zoom out, this is yesterday. This whole thing wasn't here, and now it's here. It's just—it's a crazy time. I mean, we're so used to it. Nothing—the internet is not normal. It's an insane thing that's here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:41) I know. And we've only had electricity for a hundred and ten years.

(Tim Urban at 00:34:45) All just started. It's like people who are alive today—their grandparents grew up before any of this stuff. It's, yeah. But, anyway—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) I actually—one thing stood out to me in one of your Fermi articles, or a part of it, is something to the tone of "Humans advanced a thousand years or humans advanced one million years would look back at us as monkeys, as what we're doing," right? Socially. And I was like, that's so true, because I've always had this thought—I don't know where it came from, probably just life. When I see the little aliens, I'm like, I think those are just future us. After we figured out genetic engineering and, you know, the—I think that's probably just, like, what if that's just the evolution of DNA? And that's where we end up. And maybe we're just, uh, you know, they are like, "Hey, we figured out everything. Let's just go start it over."

(Tim Urban at 00:35:44) Start what over?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:46) Like life. Like, let life start over.

(Tim Urban at 00:35:47) Oh. And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:48) And maybe, like, these aliens created us.

(Tim Urban at 00:35:51) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I definitely think that we might have a creator. As someone who was a proud atheist a while back, I'm like, "Wait, that's dumb," because I cannot believe in the Bible or the Quran and still be very open about—it's probably likely we do. I mean, it could be the simulation creator, or it could be aliens planted us as crops somehow. They're forming something. Could be some philanthropic thing. They want to spread life through the universe and spread consciousness. Who knows? But I also think one of the things about the Fermi paradox that crosses my mind is that we might be looking for things in the physical world, and it might be at some point that you just—the physical world, you just leave that, and you go into some virtual world. And, you know, not the way we do it with physical servers, but way cooler than that. Something where they're going into some quantum—some virtual something—but where they control everything and they don't rely on the physical universe anymore for anything. And so we're looking at the physical world for "Where are they?" But it's like, that's like, you know, that's like apes looking in—chimps looking in the trees being like, "Well, where are the humans? There's no humans in the trees, so they're nowhere." It's like, "No, we left the trees a long time ago. We're in houses. Way better." And maybe they're in the equivalent of that, and the physical universe is way too big and cold and dangerous, and, you know, you need resources. So I don't know. There's just so much of the thinking we do when we imagine big questions like that, either the far future or things like alien life—we're really applying a lot of what we know to it and assuming that a lot of these things hold in a way crazy different situations, and it's probably a fallacy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can take truths of the universe and then try to abstract them out. For one, living things grow and replicate. Right? That's what they do—grow and replicate and expand. And so we think about that. It happens on all of these different levels. It happens on our cellular level. It happens on our social level. You know, we have kids or we have families or whatnot. But why would it just stop? If it happens on all of these levels up the stack, why would it just stop at civilizations?

(Tim Urban at 00:38:12) Yeah. Well, maybe—but maybe because replicating and growing is a very, like, oh, that's an animal thing to do. But we're—we've—we're trans-animal now, and we don't replicate anymore. There are a certain number of consciousnesses, and we don't create new ones for some ethical reason. And we also don't die, because replication is needed if you die, right? You can't have death without replication or everything's over. So maybe when you get rid of death and it's like, "Oh, now we're all uploaded in this virtual thing," there's no death unless you're sick of being conscious. Maybe then replication would stop. Um, that—but I know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:57) It's interesting topics.

(Tim Urban at 00:38:58) Wait, but what's the World Wide Web?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) What's the World Wide Web? It would—

(Tim Urban at 00:39:03) Those are back to the—we're back to the internet. So what did Tim Berners-Lee create?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) So I believe the best way to explain it would be a web page, like the HTTP browsers, stuff that you're experiencing through your browsers would be sort of the easiest way to explain it.

(Tim Urban at 00:39:18) Like a system—a software-based system to use this physical network in a way that was usable and efficient or something?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) Yeah. Yeah. So there's SSH, which is, you know, not the World Wide Web. It's a way of communicating between machines. I could send you data and things of that nature, but we've got to exchange these private keys and log in in a certain way. So it's just machine to machine. So you think of—think of the internet as a computer that exposes a certain section of that computer to anyone who wants to view it publicly, right? So before domains, we had IP addresses. That's why you have bookmarks in your browser—it's a legacy thing—because you wouldn't want to type in, you know, 76.142.whatever to get to the place you want to go. And so it started out—computers, we had the terminal, right? And so we could SSH, and it was just text, and we would do it like that. And then slowly browsers came, and he developed it out of a project at CERN, as a way to share information broadly, from what I understand. So he developed that from CERN as a way to share information broadly and publicly.

(Tim Urban at 00:40:39) Wow. Is he really rich? He should be so rich.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:42) I don't know.

(Tim Urban at 00:40:43) Like, the biggest thing ever. Everyone who writes www—that's because he invented that, right? It's nuts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:52) Yeah. And he's super—and he's making a second one, man, which is even cooler. If you do some writing on data privacy and the future of data privacy, checking out his new project that they're working on with—that's why we had him on, because it was like, "Okay, Tim Berners-Lee is creating a second internet." And so we're like, "We need to talk about that."

(Tim Urban at 00:41:13) Yeah. The two industries I'm convinced are not going anywhere are data privacy and cybersecurity, which are similar, related. But as more and more data goes on these things, and maybe some of the computers end up in our brains—you know, that's actually a thing of the future probably—and the more AI that can hack in and grab people's things, and, you know, it's—man, this is just going to be a battle of people trying to keep things safe and people trying to break those systems. I don't see that going anywhere for many decades.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:55) Oh, yeah. Have you ever looked into the—there's a documentary on Amazon Prime, I think, called Cyborgs Among Us.

(Tim Urban at 00:42:02) Mm-mm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:03) There are people just embedding electronics into their bodies.

(Tim Urban at 00:42:05) Oh, yeah. Well, this is what, you know, this is what—yeah. And Elon Musk's point is he says that all people are cyborgs now, or anyone who has a phone is a cyborg or computer. And at first, I was kind of like, "Well, no. I mean, we can act like a cyborg if we're holding a phone." And he's like, "No, no, no. You are a cyborg." And, you know, you can get information from anywhere you want into your brain instantly, just like—and you can talk to anyone anywhere. And when it clicked for me is when I kind of realized that what he's saying is true, because if only this phone were on the inside of my skin instead of the outside, officially, a hundred percent would be a cyborg.

(Tim Urban at 00:42:47) So who cares what side of the skin this thing is on? So if the phone then becomes a brain-machine interface in your brain where you can now call this stuff up just by thinking it, you know, asking it as a thought and getting the answer, it's not that material a difference. I mean, the difference is only in how high-tech the cyborg capabilities are and how seamless it is. But the important thing is that we have—we're, look, maybe we're low-grade cyborgs. We're kind of not very impressive cyborgs, but we are, you know, in that category now, and it's kind of crazy. And that's just gonna—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:21) I love it. Yeah. When he said that, I was like, yeah, dude. It's just a bandwidth problem. It's just a speed problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:26) It's just because my brain has to go through my fingers to type it and then get the information back.

(Tim Urban at 00:43:30) Really bad cyborgs. We're really 1.0 cyborgs right now, and he wants to make us really good cyborgs so that we can protect ourselves against AI.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:41) I'll give us some love, though, because 50 years ago, we were walking to a library to try to get information from old printed books that were old.

(Tim Urban at 00:43:49) And I mean, again, if we take a zoom out here, 500 years ago, which is still yesterday in the bigger scheme of things—you know, that's less than a percent of human history ago—there were no printed books. So there were no printed books. Now what you have is, you know, scrawled writing. Now if you go back 5,000 years, which is, again—we're talking, you know, a couple percent of human history—there's no writing at all. So everything that is known is just contained in human brains. The body of human knowledge is passed on through language and contained in brains. And that's it. The only hard drives that contain the info are brains.

(Tim Urban at 00:44:27) There's no other—and it's just the accumulation of knowledge, you know, via these other things is extremely new. And it's, you know, it's easy to feel like when you're born into a world that it's normal. But we live in an anomaly within a bigger anomaly within a bigger anomaly within human history.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:50) That's a party.

(Tim Urban at 00:44:51) Human history itself is an anomaly. It's a strange 100,000 years for a species that no other species has had anything like this before. So this is a very crazy time to be a human.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:04) I'm pumped up. Did you hear about Zuckerberg's plan for the metaverse?

(Tim Urban at 00:45:09) I did not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:13) Yeah. Dude, Zuckerberg—have you seen the series on, I think it's Hulu, called Upload where they're putting their consciousness into the cloud?

(Tim Urban at 00:45:24) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:24) Dude. All right. I want you to write on—I'm sure so many people tell you this type of stuff. But, man, the future of consciousness. You could take the Neuralink—have you written on Neuralink specifically?

(Tim Urban at 00:45:34) Yeah. I wrote a really long, thorough thing about Neuralink.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:38) Did you hypothesize about the future with Neuralink?

(Tim Urban at 00:45:41) It's the most fun game. What will we be able to do in 2040? We might be able to think with each other and, you know, show each other what our eyes are seeing, and show—you know, play for each other what our ears are hearing and play music directly into our brains and, you know, call up information right into our brains, which basically means we know that stuff. I mean, what is knowledge? You know, you don't have everything on the top of your mind at all times. If I want to remember what year something was, I still have to go kind of dig into my brain, retrieve that info. Right? There's still that process. It's not just immediately on the tip of my tongue.

(Tim Urban at 00:46:20) And so it's just a different kind of retrieving info. So instead of having to retrieve it from the neurons in your brain, you're retrieving it from the cloud. But either way, it's all happening inside your brain. So it's like suddenly we all know everything. It's very intense. It's a lot of fun. I'm excited. I'm gonna get one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) I look forward to it. Yes.

(Tim Urban at 00:46:38) Well, one of the things Neuralink is doing is, you know, it's not just the—you know, of course, the software will get better and better and better. They'll have Neuralink 5 and Neuralink 8, just like the iPhone, iPhone 12, iPhone 13 thing. But the hardware is what they're also doing. You know, the implantation process—they do not want this to be invasive or dangerous or expensive or slow or painful or anything like that. They want it to be like LASIK.

(Tim Urban at 00:47:00) You go in. Hopefully, your insurance covers it. You can go on a payment plan so that, you know, anyone in the U.S. who can afford, you know, cable can afford to get one of these. And eventually, even cheaper. Eventually, it'll be something that is, you know, maybe covered so everyone can have one. You know? I mean, right now, smartphones—it's hard to find people on Earth that don't have smartphones. I mean, I've been in some—I was in a visit in Nigeria, and I spent a week with this family, and they had nothing. They lived in a little place that had—you know, their rent was $5 a month.

(Tim Urban at 00:47:31) And, you know, I bought a bag of rice, and he was saying this is gonna—my mom will use this for six months. This is great. And it was a $50 bag of rice. It was a huge deal. They had smartphones. The kids had smartphones. So to me, you know, that is where this will go eventually. And, and the point is that it'll also be easy. You'll go in, and say, okay, I have the Neuralink 6. I want the Neuralink 10. I haven't upgraded in a while. Still on the 6. So I can't share those, you know, those sounds in high quality the way you can. I want to go get the better one.

(Tim Urban at 00:48:03) So you go in for a two-hour appointment or one-hour thing, and this machine safely takes the old one out, puts the new one in, patches you up. You know, there's some local anesthetic, you know, anesthesia in there. And you walk out. And you're like, oh, wow. This is so much more fun. Oh, yeah. Look at all this stuff I can do now with my head, because that's the device now—is your head. So this is all—and by the way, Neuralink has not told me much of this. This is all my, you know, my fantasy here. But I do think some of that is based on, you know, the ad machine they're using. A lot of this is based on stuff they told me. But from there, you can just have a fun time imagining.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:39) I love it. I love thinking about this stuff. That's why I was so excited when I saw that series called Upload because they just visualize it in a really unique way. And, you know, then all the social behavioral stuff comes out around it, and it's just kind of—it's, I think you would enjoy it if you like thinking about that type of stuff.

(Tim Urban at 00:48:57) So it's Upload, it's a series, you said?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:01) Yeah. It's only one season of something, but basically, you know, they live in the real world, and then there's also this metaverse. Yeah. When you die, if you die correctly or if you go in before you die, you can get your consciousness uploaded. But then there's different tiers, because it's all monetized. And so different people live in the different tiers. And then there's a story that goes with all of it that makes it compelling and interesting.

(Tim Urban at 00:49:30) Sounds great. Sounds very.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:33) So I want to give you a couple shout-outs. One for the book—does the book have a title yet?

(Tim Urban at 00:49:39) Thinking about The Story of Us, but still making that final decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:44) Cool. And people will be able—do you have a preregistration on your website or anything?

(Tim Urban at 00:49:48) Yeah. But if anyone, you know, if anyone's interested in this or keeping up with what I'm doing, just sign up for the email list, which you can find on the website because that's the place where I notify people what's going on, you know, what's happening or when.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:02) Excellent. Excellent. And then I saw you just sold your company, your test prep company?

(Tim Urban at 00:50:05) Yes. Though that one—that was way back from when I was procrastinating in 2005 from doing music. And the credit there goes mostly to my business partner, Andrew, who, you know, while I've been doing Wait But Why the last bunch of years, has been, you know, working really hard growing that. And the staff and, you know, really long-term staff now, they've just built something really good that actually was sellable. I never considered that a tutoring company was something that we could sell. And when I started doing Wait But Why, you probably couldn't have. So I'm very grateful that they, you know, they crushed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:43) Awesome. No, I love it. I love what you're doing out there in the world. I'm a big fan. I look forward to future content. I want to make sure that we get you as much publicity and things as possible. Was there anything else we want to plug or talk about?

(Tim Urban at 00:50:56) No. For me, everything lives on waitbutwhy.com, and people should just go check it out there. And that's—it's all really—that's, it's all in one place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:08) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.