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Podcast Notes: Lex Fridman Podcast “#264 – Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity”

  • Podcast
  • Lex Fridman Podcast
  • Episode Title
  • #264 – Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity
  • Episode links
  • Apple Podcasts • YouTube

Tim Urban writes “Wait, But Why” which is the blog where calling it a “blog” is one of the great understatements in history. There’s putting a dent in the universe and he’s certainly put a dent in the internet through his mega posts on space, tech, and how to approach life.

Some of my favorite points from the interview were around his own productivity as he’s tried finishing a book over the past few years.

  • You really (really) only need a few hours a day: It adds up. It’s clear it’ll add up. If you sit down and write for a focused 3 hours a day you’ll get where you want, eventually. Some days you’ll write less. Some days more. And still, much of the time you’ll just find some other thing to do instead. One thing he’s found effective: have a teammate watching him work from 9am-noon. It’s worth trying all the different approaches to focus if you can eventually find one that works.
  • Audiobooks are fine: Both Tim and Lex agree that (1) audiobooks are great for learning and entertainment and (2) physical books are still a better learning experience. But (3) you’ll just get through way more audiobooks than print books.
  • Revenge against your procrastination (but it’s too late): When you don’t have the right tools, instead it’s easy to let the day go by doing a little work here, a little work there, and never really getting into a focused state for any good chunk. Until it’s time for bed. Then the distractions are done and you can focus. But taking revenge against your procrastination then means you’re taking energy from tomorrow.
  • The dark playground (and how you shouldn’t spend five years there.): The dark playground is the state where you know you have work to do, but you put it off with some “leisure” activity. Scare quotes because the thing you should be doing for fun ends up not being fun and not being productive. You’re not really living life. And it’s easy to go on like that for long spans. Tim Urban says he spent maybe five years like that and kicks himself for the opportunity cost. Some people go their entire lives in that state.

The first step to get out of the dark playground is to recognize you’re in it. Figure out the triggers that take you there. Then learn how and do the work to avoid it.

(Hint: the “work harder” answer might be a trap door straight into it.)

Can’t miss content (and Hulk Hogan losing the title on a Monday Night)

From “NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW” by Guy Evans

“The final point was of particular importance to Bischoff. An earlier discussion with Siegel led to the implementation of a research project to devise Nitro’s creative formula (Ted Turner, presumably, was kept in the dark). The outcomes of the study were clear-WCW’s target audience wanted a feeling of spontaneity to permeate the new program. They wanted ‘can’t miss TV’, a drastically different television format (as compared to the WWF strategy of giving away ‘squash matches’, i.e. bouts where established superstars predictably beat up on hapless underdogs), and an avoidance of the tried-and-true tactic of reserving the major, often more unpredictable match-ups for pay-per-view.”

People want to be surprised. It does become boring knowing that titles will only change hands at PPV events.

If there was a title match on a Monday night show, you were just waiting for someone to run in and cause a disqualification.

Some creative lessons…

  • There’s room to differentiate (even if both products looks like giant men in scripted fights): WWE definitely felt different from WCW. Even when DX was a bit of a clone of nWO, it was more punk rock where Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were going for west coast gangster rap. One bald star in black tights talked his ass off and now, of course, has a wrestling podcast. The other bald star in black tights built one of the hottest runs in wrestling without talking much at all.
  • Better to create a category than to compete in SEO for the term “productivity”: Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole (pretty solid starts for wrestling names, by the way) created Ship 30 for 30 for learning to write online. One of their main lessons is getting more and more and more specific when you can. That’s in terms of individual essays and in terms of your own set of category buckets. Vince McMahon couldn’t compete with major sports but he became a billionaire leading “sports entertainment”.
  • Don’t save your best idea for Wrestlemania: It might never come around. You’ll have other good ideas. Especially if you’re working in an online medium, you probably have plenty of chances to launch things. Go ahead and get that good idea out there in some way. (1) It might not be good and it’s better to find out now. (2) If it’s the execution that matters, you can really just run that idea back later. Nobody will notice if you aren’t big enough in the first place. (3) I promise, you’ll have more good ideas and a better one will come along.

Some of the most memorable title changes happened on Monday nights.

Some of your most popular content will be the least expected.

You make space (sometimes literally)

Sometimes you’re constrained on time and need to carve 15 minutes out of your day.

Sometimes you need to grapple with Artem in the hotel room.

From “Win or Learn” by John Kavanagh:

He had Artem Lobov with him along the way, so they were training as they travelled. We’ve learned over the years that there’s always time to train, even if that involves moving the beds aside in a hotel room to create sufficient space for a session.

Some lessons…

  • Healthy: It’s sort of literally in the example. To get started, you’ll need to find ways to get moving and to make time that you thought you didn’t have. Once you’re at the top of the game, you might need to find edges here. A little goes a long way, especially if a little is all you’ve got.
  • Wealthy: One of my favorite creative concepts is from Chase Jarvis about staying “creative ready”. You won’t always have your full studio with you. Do you have a minimal toolset for whatever it is that you’re creating? I know that all I really need to write is my phone. But I’ll convince myself day in and day out that I need my desk and chair and ergonomic keyboard. If Conor can grapple in a hotel room, I can make something without my laptop.
  • Wise: Don’t take all that time away though. When you’re getting started, you might have plenty of time to spare. If you’re running on all cylinders, it can become tempting to start carving time out of things that shouldn’t be carved. Don’t sleep deprive yourself in the name of working out for health.

Make time. Make space.

Make sure to push the beds back when you’re done.

Info Diet: WCW/nWo, “Winging It”, and daily content with Pomp

I’m writing this on Saturday morning. Heading to the Warriors/Lakers game later tonight and neither team was involved in any of the trade deadline craziness. I’ve been journaling a lot more lately but, as always, am trying to get back to hitting publish on things. In any case, the info diet is the old reliable when I have nothing else to write about.

Read: NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW

I’ve been listening to this before bed so I definitely wouldn’t count it toward a “Books I (actually) read this year” list, but I’d definitely count it on a “How I read 200 books this year” list. That said, it’s been great hearing behind-the-scenes stories of things I watched growing up.

Creative takeaway: Steal like a hairstylist. The first nWo promos were inspired by an old Paul Mitchell commercial. Not sure which one specifically but it might be one like this.

Listen: “Winging It Podcast” by Janis Ozolins and Alex Llull (Spotify, YouTube)

Learned about this podcast through Janis, who does great visualizations about the creative process. Janis (@OzolinsJanis) and Alex (@AlexLlullTW) just got started with a few episodes so I’m binging on it to catch up. Lots of good insight into how Janis and Alex think about Twitter as a tool and how visuals and writing fit in.

Creative takeaway: Mimic if it makes sense. Mimicking your favorite person on Twitter is okay but understand what they’re doing and whether the outcome you want is aligned. The more your business depends on Twitter, the higher your signal has to be and the less you can just talk about whatever.

(Also, kudos to them for not using the first podcast to talk entirely about starting a podcast. They just get right into talking about creativity.)

Watch: “My First Million” This App Entrepreneur Made $10,000,000 By Cloning a Viral Game (YouTube)

Sam Parr (@thesamparr) and Shaan Puri (@shaanvp) talk about Pomp (@apompliano) and all the different content he creates. This was in relation to Shaan and Ben’s new newsletter The Milk Road. I took Shaan’s Power Writing course and one of the concepts in there is being a curious novice when writing content. It’s cool to see Shaan apply it himself. He’s not a crypto expert but he wants to level up his knowledge and he’s sharing what he’s learning as he’s going along.

Creative takeaway: if you’re going to make content daily, you better find a way to enjoy making the content: Pomp has mentioned that doing the daily live show isn’t as difficult as you might think. He gets to talk to his brothers about things they’re interested in.

Bonus takeaway: When I eat we all eat. It’s great seeing how Pomp helped his brothers build up their own followings. They were successful in their own careers but Pomp knows how to build audiences on the internet and helped them do the same. Now they’re creating content together. Shaan has mentioned this in a previous episode: some of the best friends you’ll make are the friends you create things with.

If you want an audience like Pomp has, study WCW/nWo and professional wrestlers because they’re masters of personal branding. And remember that most people are just winging it.

4 Lessons from “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman

What’s the last crazy thing you saw on the internet?

It was probably within the past day. Maybe the past hour. There are so many interesting, short, shareable things online. You can (and probably have) filled hours of a day sucked into your phone reading tweets, watching videos, refreshing for new threads, looking for comments.

At the end of a thorough session, you might have some regret. Even in the middle of it when you catch yourself going to open Instagram while you have Instagram open already, you still can’t pull yourself out of the loop.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

It’s a safe bet that none of those three million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst; nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel as though they were freely choosing to do so. “I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on Facebook.

It takes pretty conscious effort now to start trimming the fat out of your information diet. (And there’s for sure an interesting TikTok video explaining why fat is not the enemy, but you know what I mean.)

Add some buffer time (good rule, sometimes)

There are always going to be unexpected things that come up with long projects. So it makes sense to plan a little more time for it.

But be careful because work fills up the space you give it.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse.

Use the rule when it’s worth it.

A key thing from Ali Abdaal’s PTYA course that I’ve kept in mind is that it’s important to focus your energy on getting a video out a week.

Lower your bar if necessary. Don’t expect it to be a good video each week.

But also don’t keep expanding the time you give to any one video. You’ll certainly fill the extra time up with more effort. Whether it leads to a better video is less of a certainty.

Better to put that effort toward the next video.

If it’s a feature film you’ve been working for three years on, sure, add a few more weeks to polish things.

But it’s not.

(Someday I hope to upgrade “kept in mind” to “actually applied and gained 1000s of new subscribers…)

When you think about the epiphany moments in your life…

… few of them were planned. That’s what made them so significant.

Now, you can’t live your day to day trying to optimize for random epiphanies. But it might at least remove some of the desire to control and time box every 15-minute block of your day.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now. You might never have been invited to the party where you met your future spouse. Your parents might never have moved to the neighborhood near the school with the inspiring teacher who perceived your undeveloped talents and helped you shine.

If you want to have some luck, allow yourself to leave some things up to chance.

3 principles: accept problems, solve them slowly, and stay on the bus

Those are some steps toward being patient and reaping the benefits.

(1) You won’t get rid of every problem in life. There’s always going to be something that’s an issue. If your ideal vision of a future day to day is one without problems, that itself is a problem that may never go away.

(2) You might not be able to solve some problems all in one go. You can’t complete that book in a day. Take it a bite at a time. Sometimes a radically small bite at a time.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

(3) If you’re trying to finish a large project, figure out the steps that lead there, then just keep walking that path. Unless you’re doing something radically innovative, there are validated paths toward finishing nearly everything. Even in innovation work, there are at least well-trodden sub-paths to stay on.

You just have to stay on that path.

Take a small step. Over and over.

Then you just keep going.

(And avoid your phone.)

5 lessons from Ali Abdaal and David Perell

Ali Abdaal has a thriving online business.

David Perell has a thriving online business.

Ali and David have a great video together where they talk about their paths to sort of the same place. Ali did it mainly through videos on YouTube. David did it mainly through writing on his blog and on public platforms.

Some takeaways:

The main part of their business is courses: As in, most of their millions of revenue are made in courses that they’ve created. Ali has one for building a YouTube channel. David has one for writing online.

But content is the engine for building an audience: You don’t build your audience for your course by starting with creating a course. (I’m guessing there are methods with ads and things but that wasn’t their path.) The students came from the audience of their work that’s available free online.

Waves to ride: Writing on a blog nobody goes to will not work. You can hitch a ride on someone else’s wave: David had posts good enough that they were shared by Tyler Cowen, who has the most popular economics blog on the internet. Ali studied the changing wave of the YouTube algorithm: he looked at what topics other successful channels did and made versions through his lens of interests. You can ride the wave of emerging platforms. You can ride the wave of topical trends.

Videos vs. writing – feedback: Ali points out that videos make it difficult to get feedback on drafts. Instead, his approach has been to get feedback on published videos to apply to the next video. However, you don’t want to fall into the trap of pressuring yourself to make every video better than the last.

Videos vs. writing – POP works for both: POP is one of David Perell’s frameworks for writing. It should be personal, observational, or playful. (Or some combination.) That works well for videos as well. A big portion of Ali’s video course is about writing your video scripts or outlines, so there’s a ton of overlap.

Those are just a few ideas and there are plenty more in the video. It’s about 40 minutes long so check it out