[REPLAY] Tim Urban - Grand Theft Life

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is a replay of the Tim Urban interview, which originally aired on Tuesday, October 17th, 2017 We will be back with a new episode of Invest Like the Best next week.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:14)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:35)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:57)
This week's conversation is about artificial intelligence and interplanetary travel. It's about content creation, thinking from first principles and death progress units. It's about brain machine interfaces and why it is crucial that you be a chef and not a cook.
My guest is Tim Urban along with his business partner Andrew Finn. Tim is the most entertaining writer I've come across in years who explains complicated and interesting topics to his millions of dedicated readers on the website Wait, But Why. As an example, Tim's last post on Elon Musk's Neuralink venture is 40,000 words long, roughly the length of a short book. It explains almost all of human progress and our potential future using drawings and cartoons. It's impossible to stop reading. While this conversation is wildly entertaining, it is also chock full of metaphors and lessons that will be useful to anyone doing creative work or building a company. I hope this leaves you as energized as it left me. I called this episode Grand Theft Life because that is the name that Tim and Andrew give to their worldview, which I think will change the way you behave too. Please enjoy My Great Conversation with Tim Urban.
So I think a perfect arc to start or frame the entire conversation is for you to describe your idea of planets one, two, three and four. What those represent and then we'll use those as avenues to explore a lot of your favorite topics.

**Tim Urban** (2:15)
Yeah, so I think of this little kind of planet metaphor with an alien, a tourist alien that's just traveling around looking at all different kinds of planets with life and them in the universe and analyzing. Maybe this is his job back on his home planet. So he sees one planet that happens to be identical to Earth 10 million years ago. He looks around and he sees, you know, there's green land and blue water and, you know, maybe some like, you know, he zooms in, see some little herds of elephants and other things and, you know, and the savanna and okay, you know, whatever, typical. And then he was on to another solar system and he comes across a planet that happens to be, so that's planet one. He comes across what we're calling planet two, a planet that happens to be exactly what Earth was in 50,000 BC.
And he sees basically the same thing, except he doesn't know, maybe he notices little specks of light. Okay, so his little, you know, little specks of light turns out to be those are human fires. But, you know, he's basically the same thing. Okay, you know, Ford can show me something different and he goes to another solar system and he comes across a planet that happens to be Earth today.
It's exactly like Earth today, maybe it is Earth today.
And first thing he notices is, you know, he has to jump his ship out of the way, you know, swerve it out of the way of the International Space Station coming by. Then he looks down and he sees these massive gray areas and he zooms in, he sees towering, you know, buildings and he sees all this activity in the oceans. And he says the air around the planet is crawling with little looks like little bugs in their airplanes. And he sees, you know, just, just giant, all this deforestation is all this is just giant impact everywhere. And he says, okay, well, so he goes home and they say, well, what did you find? He says, well, I found two planets that basically had, I don't think they had any intelligent life. And the third one had like, had definitely had an extremely intelligent species on it, doing some crazy stuff.