Living By the Books | AJ Jacobs on Writing Methods

27:30And they had strategy. You know, it's, you think jigsaw puzzles, is there really a strategy? Yeah. Yeah, there's fun. There's like, you gotta sometimes switch from colors to the shapes. And they had one person who was a specialist in the colors of the sky, like the monochromatic sky and ocean, like those can often mess you up. So what I love is that whatever the topic, you know, chess or mazes or jigsaws, like there are people who are so passionate and so knowledgeable and so just obsessed that it's just a joy. It's just a joy to see. And how long did it take you to solve? Did you solve any of the puzzles in the eight hours?

28:20We did. Thank you very much. We solved one of the four puzzles and it took us six hours. And then we started on the other and then it ended. So I remember as a kid, a basic strategy would be just separate the edges, the corners, and the inside. And then the inside you could separate by the colors because you know, oh, this is a human, this is a house, this is the sky. Did you do any strategies like that? Just like the puzzles 101? Oh yeah. Jigsaw 101? I mean, edges usually are good, but it depends on the puzzle. Like your professional puzzlers will tell you, sometimes that's not good. I'm actually working on a puzzle right now where all of the edges are white, but all of the inside has these very striking colors.

29:06So in that case, you can separate them, but don't do the border first. Start with the colors. That's another big lesson is always like find the toehold. Find what is the easiest way in. what's the weak spot and then attack it from there. So what other places you went to? You mentioned to me earlier something that sounded really interesting about long-terminism. What does that mean and where did you find out about it? Well, that's not related, which is good because my publisher will kill me for talking too much about puzzles. But this was the most fascinating conference I've ever been to, no exaggeration.

29:47and it was about a month ago. It was in England and it was with about 200 of the smartest people I've met. And I don't know why I was invited, but I was happy to be there. And it was called, the group is called Long View and it's sort of sci-fi meets humanitarian work. So the idea is the future could be very, very good, or it could be very, very bad. It's, you know, it could be a dystopia, like the dystopias are a real possibility. So let me back up a second and ask you, like you were invited, were you invited to speak or just attend? There were no speakers. It was all just meetings. So you had experts in pandemics and biosecurity and nuclear war and AI.

30:47AI is something that they're very concerned about, like robots taking over, which sounds funny and like Hollywood, and it won't look like the Terminator if it happens, but it is a real threat. This is not something that we should take lightly. So the idea was, how can we try to not just think about ourselves, but think about our 17th great grandkids? And how can we convince other people that this is something that they should do? Because it's a hard sell. Like, you know, if you see a commercial for, you know, a kid in Africa who doesn't have enough to eat or has a disease, like you are, that is viscerally, of course, you're going to give money.

31:35Of course, you're going to feel remorse and guilt and you're going to try to make their lives better. But how do you get people to care about someone who's not born yet, who you can't see, who won't be around for another 10 ,000 years? That is a huge challenge. Well, what are some of the issues that people are worried about for like 100 years from now? And by the way, was there ever a time when people were not both worried about dystopia and at the same time another group of people were also saying, no, it's going to be heaven on earth in 100 years? Well, that is a great point. That is a great point.

32:16The argument here is that we might actually be in what's called a hinge century, that we might be in the most important hundred years just because of the rate of technological change has gotten faster and faster. And it is just startlingly fast. And that AI, if it happens, if you get generalized AI, where it's actually, you know, something that we create that can think like a human, that is going to be the biggest technological change in history, like bigger, bigger than cars, bigger than computers. So, yeah, I guess there are a few things that they think about. One is nuclear war, which is, to me, so baffling.

33:03Like, we were obsessed with it in the 50s and 60s. We had things, you know, PSAs saying, with a turtle saying, duck and cover, get under your desk. And then in the 80s, we had this terrifying miniseries, the, what was it called? About the end of the world. And now, they're still, we can still blow up the world a thousand times when no one talks about it. It's so crazy to me. There's less, maybe they've gotten a lot more serious about tracking, you know, the old Soviet Union nuclear weapons and there's less nuclear material or like weapons-grade radioactive material in order to make a nuclear bomb, But arguably, your point about technology is relevant here, which is that it's probably easier to make a nuclear weapon now than it's ever been before.

33:57Right. I mean, I'm not an expert, but according to these people that I was with, yeah, we should not be letting up our guard about this. We should be instituting systems that make it really hard to obtain this material and to launch it. And what's crazy, this one, James, blew me away, is all these stories of the near misses of how the world almost blew up and that are totally under-publicized. Like, do you know the story of Petrov? This was in the 80s. And he was a Soviet army officer who was in charge, basically, of greenlighting a nuclear retaliation on the United States. And one day on his radar, it showed that there were five missiles from the United States coming.

34:49And if he had followed his instructions, if he had done what he was supposed to do, he would have told the head general to launch a retaliatory strike. But he just had this feeling like, well, maybe it's a mistake. And thank God he didn't do it. And it turned out it was a mistake that there was some weird light reflected. But there's a movement to start something called Petrov Day, where every, I think it's September 24th, we remember how close we came to ending the world. Because we just take it for granted that we haven't had a nuclear war and there's never going to be a nuclear war. But this is still around.

35:33This is a huge deal. So what's another near miss? Were there other ones? Oh, yeah, there's a bunch. There's one with a submarine that it just so happened that one of the Soviet, it always seems to be the Soviet, but I'm sure there are American problems. We're better keeping it secret. Exactly. So, yeah, there are several near misses. And, you know, it's terrifying. Actually, how do we know that Petrov's story is true? Like, why did they put out a press release? Petrov saved the world by not launching a nuclear attack. Well, we didn't know about it for years. It was just, yeah, it was very recently, a little before he died, that it was released.

36:17I forget who uncovered it, but someone interviewed him and he told the story.

36:37So how many nuclear weapons from the old Soviet Union are not accounted for at the moment? Like, are they missing nuclear weapons? Great question. I wish I were more of that. You know, that's why I went to the conference as someone who could get the word out about how we should be thinking about the future. And also, I just want to stress, it wasn't all doom and gloom. Like the idea is the future could be the most amazing. It could be like heaven on earth. It could be, you know, no one has to work. You just do what, you know, you follow the creative bliss. You do puzzles all day. You play chess.

37:16You know, it could be, we can't even imagine how good life could be. It's almost like saying to, you know, an ape, imagine if like you had all the bananas you could eat. Yeah, but you couldn't explain to an ape, like imagine that there are movies and our TV. You know, the ape just couldn't comprehend it. We cannot comprehend how good the future could be. So part of it is getting that point across and part of it is avoiding that we blow each other up. Now, but it does seem that technology evolves roughly at the same pace as the problems. So, for instance, a classic example, which I've mentioned on this podcast before, it's actually mentioned in the book, I think, Super Freakonomics, when horse manure, around the year 1900, horse manure was so big in New York because everybody traveled with horses that they had to shovel out like, I don't know, 20 inches of manure that covered all the streets in the entire city every single day and dump it over to New Jersey or the ocean or whatever.

38:24And of course, the development of cars was a technology that, like everybody, the environmental disaster of 1900 was that horse maneuver was going to bury the world. And suddenly, though, cars were invented and that solved the problem. And so in general, it seems like technology has kept pace with problems in, you know, like overpopulation. Oh, we created GMOs to feed the extra two or three billion people that exist. Even climate change, like solar power has been improving exponentially. Nuclear fusion, if we ever switch to that, would provide clean energy for thousands of years easily. So coming out of this conference, what do you view as a real problem?

39:08And also talk about what the AI problem is. Sure. And I love your point. I love your point. I think that is generally true, but there is absolutely no guarantee that that will continue, that we'll have our solutions. And I would say that I think the environmental, I'm not sure that we have the technology yet or the political will to stop that from being a real catastrophe. I hope we do. But anyway, yeah, the AI, the idea is that it wouldn't be the Terminator, it wouldn't be robots, it wouldn't be like a Will Smith movie. But the fear is that we create these AIs that are so smart and that their goals are not aligned with human goals and that that could be a disaster.

39:59And let me give you one of the most famous fables in AI when people think about how AI could go wrong. Suppose you programmed an AI and you gave it the goal of making paperclips and said make as many paperclips as you can. It's a self-learning, so it becomes smarter and smarter as it starts this goal to make paperclips. Well, it's not going to just stop at making a paperclip factory. if it has unlimited resources if it has this intelligence it can figure out a way to hack into the grid hack into the internet it's going to start shipping all metals in the world to itself to turn those it's going to harvest humans to turn them into paperclips it's going to send rocket ships off to other planets so that you can get materials to turn paperclips so the idea the worry is that we will not be able to stop once we give it a goal, that that goal has unintended consequences that we can't even imagine.

41:10Yeah, so that's interesting. So obviously you can program something in that you could put boundaries or limits on it. And then there's, do you remember Isaac Asimov's iRobot series? So didn't he have like rules for robots that they could never break certain rules? So there were three laws of robotics. A robot may not injure a human being or through an inaction allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. And a robot must protect its own existence as long as it doesn't go into conflict with the first or second laws.

41:49So in your situation, the AI would break all three of those rules, which seem like basic rules you would program into any super powerful AI. Right. And I do think, I mean, that's the goal of these people who are in the long-termist movement. That's the name of it, long-termism, is to figure out how to program these things in really safely. But it's not so easy. I mean, imagine if you tell a five-year-old to stop adults from stealing his toys. So he sets up some blocks and says, okay, no one can get over the blocks. So we're kind of like, if we get a computer, if we have this computer who gets smarter and smarter, then they're going to be like the adults.

42:39They're going to figure out a way, whether it's bribing the child, whether it's, you know, getting the, you know, just stepping over the blocks or getting a bulldozer to mow down the block, whatever it is, they might be able to find a way around it. So, like, I mean, Asimov is right. We've got to figure out a way to program this in. Because AI could be amazing. It could make the world. Like I said, it could. You would never have to have a crap job again. Like you would never, there would be no such thing as a, you know, a maid or housekeeper that AI would do it. They would take care of it. Yeah.

43:17I mean, what are the other bad possibilities from AI? And I agree there are many. I've talked about this with other guests before, but I'm curious what came up in this conference. Well, one example that really resonated with me is because it's not sci-fi, it exists, it happened, which is YouTube. So YouTube has the algorithm that they want to recommend videos that you will click on. So that's the only, that was the goal of this algorithm, like present you with other videos that you're going to click on and like. Unfortunately, in reality, what happened is if you watched a video about, I don't know, that maybe NASA didn't land on the moon, then it's going to recommend, hey, you think that's something?

44:10You should look at this. The Earth is really flat. And that, you know, the government has been keeping this from you. And that has spread misinformation and disinformation everywhere. You know, we have a thriving flat earth community that we didn't have 20 years ago because of this insanity. That's really interesting because obviously, you know, presenting you with videos that are going to be harmful to you goes against Asimov's first law of robotics. But how would you have programmed that in? there's no real way because the only way, okay, there's a sort of human way of programming it and there's an AI way of programming it.

44:54So the AI way is called deep learning where the AI figures things out on its own, but the human could say, could decide what's harmful or not, but now we have that problem with censorship on all those social media platforms when the humans are deciding what to put into the AI that's considered harmful. But if the AI decides it, how would you do it? You'd have to see okay, what videos make someone blood pressure consistently rise up? Let's avoid those videos. So like anything that makes them fuel this addiction to conspiracy theories is gonna make your blood pressure go up, your anxiety go up, your cortisol go up, and so on.

45:31So maybe there's some way it could learn based on body states before and after watching a video. It could learn what's bad, what will increase your life and what will decrease your life. So too much cortisol will probably decrease your life. You need cortisol because you need to be able to react to danger. But if it's too much, if your body feels like it's constantly in danger, that'll lead to heart attacks and strokes and so on. So I wonder if there's an AI way to learn what videos are good or bad for you. Well, yeah, it is. I mean, that's why these people are there, to wrestle with these deep questions.

46:07And I don't have, I'm not an expert. I'm just, you know, I was brought in just to give my thoughts on communication. there's some amazing people that you should have on the podcast like Will McCaskill and Toby Ord are both philosophers at Oxford who think about this stuff all the time but yeah like even that what you presented is very hard how do we define what's good and bad because you can imagine doing an AI that's a you know your job is to recommend videos that lower cortisol level but then it It becomes, you know, through deep learning, it becomes smarter and smarter. And eventually it's got you on an operating table taking out your amygdala to get rid of all your cortisol.

46:51So it's, you know, it's a deep problem. Luckily, there are people thinking about it, but we need tons more of creative, courageous people looking into these massive problems. And I'd recommend people watch or rewatch the podcast I did with Kai-Fu Lee, who wrote a book called 2041 that kind of explores all of these issues in a fictional setting of what could occur 20 years from now because of AI, because of genomics, and because of all sorts of things that he predicts in that book. It's really fascinating. And it sounds like he would have been an excellent addition to this conference. What else did you guys talk about?

47:32Well, there are, you know, pandemics. How do we prevent another one? And how do we prevent human-made pandemics? You know, it's not clear what really happened with this pandemic, but in the future, it'll just get easier and easier to create horrible pandemics. I met one great guy who is working on, his idea is, you know, we spend billions of dollars fireproofing our buildings. Shouldn't we spend some money pandemic-proofing our buildings? Like, if our buildings and houses had better air filtration, this pandemic would have been so much better. Like, this pandemic does not spread outside. If we can get the same level of air being recycled inside as outside, we would not have had, we would have, you know, it would have been a minor problem, not this massive world-stopping problem.

48:40Is that true that pandemics don't spread outside? What if you're at like an outdoor wedding that, I mean, weren't they worried initially that outdoor weddings were super spreader events? uh yeah you shouldn't take my you know definitely look at the statistics from the cdc and my understanding my understanding is that it is much much harder it still can spread outside but this and it depends on the virus but this particular variant that we're dealing with now is much much harder to spread outside than it is inside yeah so okay i'm not so much worried like obviously i'm worried about pandemics because they kill a lot of people.

49:21COVID, there's, I don't know how many deaths, but it's a huge number. But a pandemic probably can't destroy the world. It can't kill everybody because once it starts killing people, the virus ends with the person who's dead. So if it kills very quickly, like Ebola kills people very quickly, Ebola doesn't really spread worldwide. It's a very localized virus when it comes out because everybody who can transmitted dies right away. I think the thing about COVID was that you don't exhibit symptoms for about 10 days, so you're able to transmit it. So maybe, I guess maybe the perfect, and you know, the viruses that spread the most are the ones that have no symptoms at all.

50:04Like we all have thousands of viruses in our body right now, but they just didn't exhibit any symptoms. And those probably spread to everybody in the world. So there's some spectrum there, But I wonder maybe the perfect storm of viruses is if you could create a virus where there's no symptoms for 200 days and then suddenly within one day you die. That is a terrifying thought. And I will say, like you said, it may not cause human extinction, but it could do so much damage that it would be catastrophic and set us back thousands of years and we would be living in sort of a societal collapse like you see in the movies.

50:40And that is one of the other big topics was this idea of lock-in. How do we avoid locking into a society that is really bad, like an authoritarian lock-in, where it becomes so hard for, you know, the American Revolution was good. And, you know, the fact that we beat the— Why? Why is it good? Yeah. I think this is one of those things we assume is a good move. Well, we can talk about that on our upcoming podcast, Good or Bad. Oh, yeah. And it is a fascinating issue whether, like, maybe we should have taken Canada's route. But regardless, putting that aside, the fact that we were able to wage a successful revolution against England, That is not a given in the future when you've got an authoritarian government that controls all, you know, that has massive power.

51:40So how do we avoid that? How do we keep democracy safe? Well, let me ask you a question. How do you even know what's insidious about authoritarian governments, like whether it's Soviet Russia or Venezuela under Chavez or, you know, there's hundreds of examples. It's very, or Nazi Germany. It's very insidious because at first, everyone's excited for the new leadership. The new leadership says, everybody should have everything and we're going to bring us into a new dawn. Everyone's going to have everything they ever wanted. And of course, bad things happen. Under Mao Zedong, who was very popular, very popularly brought into, you know, became the leader of China.

52:28And of course he killed 40 million people, similar to Stalin, similar to what Hitler did. And how do you know when authoritarianism is creeping up? So for instance, in the US last year, every single business in the country was shut down for months, causing maybe a million small businesses to go bankrupt and many people to commit suicide, have depression. and all of this was maybe a good thing because it prevented, maybe it saved millions of lives because COVID didn't spread. But what was authoritarian and what wasn't even in that scenario? That's a big question and I don't have all the answers, of course.

53:09But I would say one safeguard is making sure that we limit misinformation and disinformation, which is, you know, I thought when the internet came, I was like, oh my God, this is it. This is the solution. Everyone is going to have access to all the correct knowledge. But, of course, it went possibly the opposite way where we have access to all the bad knowledge, all the incorrect knowledge. And the incorrect knowledge is more exciting. You know, it's much more fun to think that, you know, a bunch of mafiosa and Cubans united to kill JFK than it was just this one loser with a bad haircut. But I think that is one safeguard against authoritarianism, is just trying to make sure that we have institutions that are self-correcting and that provide real information in context and that admit when they make mistakes because authoritarians never admit that they made any mistakes.

54:16But I wonder if, like, when in U.S. history has a president and I'm just, I'm playing the devil's advocate. So, but like, what in US history has a president ever admitted he made a mistake? That's a good question. I got to look back. I don't have it off the top of my head. My sense is that Obama sometimes, and I think with the beige suit, he did admit he made a mistake. But I do think there were times when he admitted he made a mistake. But it's a good question. And I think also that is, that's why I think science is the best route to knowledge because it is self-correcting. A good scientist will change their mind.

54:59They will look at the evidence. And not all do. And it's, you know, science can be corrupt and, you know, refuse to admit they're wrong. But good science is, to me, a whole different level of knowledge of epistemology. That's a great point because if you look again at this past year, because we didn't know that much about COVID in the beginning, science did change its mind several times about what specifically is not that important. But I noticed, A, people started mistrusting science when they would change their mind. So kind of people need to be a little bit more knowledgeable about what it means to be a skeptic and how most good science comes out of being skeptical of bad science.

55:43So science isn't always 100 % correct. Like you say, it's self-correcting. And policy and public opinion have to acknowledge that. You can't make a policy based on one set of scientific facts and then see those facts change as new discoveries develop. You know, for instance, in the beginning of the pandemic, we were told not to wear masks, that it wouldn't be a big deal. Now, we were told that for many reasons, maybe not some scientific, but then it became clear you have to wear a mask to best avoid transmission. So, okay. And then I was talking to one person who's an expert on the constitution and he's, and you know, in the constitution, it says we're all entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or maybe it was even the pursuit of property.

56:27I forget. But that's the original, that's John Locke's version. Yeah, so, but this person pointed out that life comes first and then things like property come after that. So that's the lockdowns could be constitutionally justified because it helped, the scientific argument was that it preserved life. But then you have to really start to ask, well, how much life did it preserve and how much life did it destroy? Like, because, you know, in New York City right now, as we're speaking, you can't have elective surgeries because people are worried about the Omicron variant. It's much more transmissible.

57:01But I don't know if it causes death or causes even a sickness. No one's said. So we kind of have to weigh things But now if you block elective surgeries, well, now you're blocking,

57:18what's it called when you open up the body to see if they have cancer? I forget. Biopsies? Yeah, yeah. Now you can't have biopsies because that's considered an elective surgery. So some people might die because of this policy, even if nobody's dying from the Omicron variant. I think somehow even that process has to be self-correcting. Now, maybe you should ban elective surgeries now. I'm not saying one way. the other. Maybe the Omicron variant is the worst thing that's ever happened in the world. But everybody has to understand how to weigh the pros and cons. And I'm afraid people just don't know what that means.

57:51We've never been taught statistics in school. We learned trigonometry or geometry or, I don't know, linear algebra, which is useless for daily life. But basic statistics is incredibly useful. And we're never actually taught that in school. Most people aren't taught that. Well, I'm not going to weigh in on the COVID stuff because I haven't studied enough to know. You know, I am very pro-mask and pro-indoors anyway. I am very pro-indoors, just in life in general. And I have no argument. When someone wants me to wear a mask, I'll wear a mask. I have no, you see people on airplanes get into fights, like just relax and fly in the air and get to your location.

58:34But I do want to agree with you 100 % about statistics. That to me is so crucial. We under, you know, we focus on the one cute girl in the well, which is terrible. She fell down a well. That's terrible. But let's also keep in mind the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are endangered by malaria. And there's actually a quote. One of my favorite philosophers, Bertrand Russell, said a quote. And he didn't actually say these exact words, but I like it better the way that he supposedly said it, which was, he said, the mark of a truly advanced person is that they can look at a column of numbers and weep, which is very hard to do.

59:24Statistics do not resonate emotionally. Like I said, you know, the picture of the cute girl down the well, that resonates emotionally. But reading a statistic like 500 ,000 people per year die of malaria, that does not resonate emotionally. But we should fight that. We should try to make it resonate emotionally. And that's why I love what you said about statistics. We've got to teach more statistics in schools. Well, you make a good point because you look at evolution. I mean, for most of the existence of humans, we didn't know how to count further than 10. And, but we did communicate information generation after generation through storytelling.

1:00:08So our brains are built for stories and not necessarily numbers. But I just wonder why do they decide that the standard curriculum in schools would include trigonometry, but not probability, when probability is how we make almost every decision in our lives. Oh my goodness. We should create like a curriculum. So with math, I would say, you need to learn everything you need to do up until you get good at probability and statistics. So that means no calculus, no trigonometry, no advanced algebra, probably very little geometry actually, unless you want to be like a construction builder or whatever, or an architect.

1:00:43But everybody needs to learn probability, which is not taught in any grade school in the country as far as I know. I love that idea. What would you teach in science? Well, I would teach, like you said, the scientific method, just knowing that, that, that, you know, it's not perfect, but it is the best way. Um, and, uh, I love, but yeah, the probability is huge. That is, let's teach our kids. Let's know. I want to pick it. I want to pick it. Well, think about it before the scientific method, you need to learn probability and you need to know, because you need to know what's, what's significant when a control group acts one way, but the test group acts another way.

1:01:24Is it meaningful? Well, you only know that through statistics. Or what if you're not using a control group? Like with COVID now, it's too early to have a real control group and test group. So you have to look at a population sample, which is a different type of scientific method. And you have to understand what statistically significant means there. What would you teach in history? In history? Well, I would teach looking at the world history through several different lenses. So you can look at history

1:01:57through class warfare. You can look at history through race, but you can also look at history through medical advances or sickness, or you can look at history through technological advances and lifespan. And so there are many ways to look at history. It should not be a single prism that we say. Yeah, you're right. And for the past 20 or 30 years, there's been a kind of popular type of book. Like you ever see the book Salt? Yeah, I love that book. Yeah. So that's looking at history through the use of, it's working at world history for the past 5 ,000 years through the use of salt. Right. And Steven Johnson's got a lot of books like this, like air conditioning.

1:02:43If you look at the history of air conditioning, you could describe the entire history of urbanization and technological advances in the US because you couldn't literally work in the South or have skyscrapers in the South until there was air conditioning. Oh, I love that. Well, and then the other thing is one that you mentioned earlier, like the horse manure. I would stress just how terrible the past used to be. It was not, you know, the good old days were not good. They were dangerous, violent, sexist, smelly. So we've got a lot of problems now, as I've said, You know, we're facing some serious problems, but we should gain confidence from looking at history to see that we can make progress and progress can be a real thing.

1:03:31We can stop suffering. So that would be another big, because sometimes people read history and are just like, oh, humans are so terrible. Let's just give up. So what fully impressed you about this long-termism conference? Like, what's your biggest takeaway? How has your life improved by going to this conference? Well, there's a phrase that was used for one of the meetings that I moderated. I wish I'd come up with a phrase. But it was, the phrase is the opposite of cold and calculating. You know how people say, oh, it's so cold and calculating. Warm and calculating. Let's all be warm and calculating.

1:04:14Why should compassion and logic and statistics be at odds? No, we can be compassionate. And the fact is that if humans exist, if humans exist as long as the average mammalian species exists, then we are at the very, very start. And we have had just a tiny percentage of humans to come. There are billions, trillions of humans in the future, and it's our responsibility to try to look out for them. You know, I call it the golden rule is to treat your neighbor as you would have your neighbor treat yourself. But the titanium rule, in my opinion, because titanium is kind of futuristic, is treat your future neighbor.

1:05:03Treat your descendants like you would have them treat you. And that can mean 100 years or 1 ,000 years, whatever. So to me, it was just an amazing way of looking at the world. And bringing it full circle, obviously, the question, what could go wrong? And if it could go wrong, how to solve it? And what could go right over the next 100 years? These are huge puzzles. And you need a puzzle-like mind and that kind of creativity. Like if everyone says, oh, we're going to just continue to improve and AI is going to be great and quantum computing is going to be great and nanotechnology is going to be great.

1:05:40If you just say that and don't look at the opposite and at least consider it, you could be in trouble. Like nanotechnology could run amok and create, you know, every atom-like computer could create another atom-like computer or they could create two atom-like computers which could create two more and two more. And it goes on until it covers the entire planet with atomic-sized computers and we all die in seconds. So even though nanotechnology is great for fashion and computing and all these other things, it could cause problems. Excellent. I love the full circle because I totally agree. We got to approach it like the most important puzzle ever.

1:06:19And do you look long term in your life or do you think about what's like right now you have a book coming out in April, The Puzzler. Do you look beyond that in your life? That is an awesome question. I don't really look long-term in my life as much as I try to now. When I'm thinking of doing good, you know, it's not just doing, you know, there are a lot of problems now, but let's also give some thought to the problems yet to come. So I will say it has changed the way I think about probability in my life because I do. Like you said, I try to incorporate probability. We often think something is going to happen or isn't.

1:07:04It's very black and white. But when my wife says, what time will you be home? I'll be like, there's a 70 % chance I'll be home at around 6.30. And she rolls her eyes. She's 99 % chance she's annoyed by that. But I think we've all got to start thinking in probabilities because that is going to make the world a lot better. But the unfortunate thing about what you just did, although it's probably when we when humans assess probabilities without actual data, we tend to be wrong most of the time. So you ever read Philip Tetlock's work on forecasting? Oh, yeah, I love it. He is a hero of the long termist movement.

1:07:44Yeah, because basically he says almost everybody who makes forecasts for a living is wrong almost all the time. Right. But the upside is you can be trained to be a better forecaster. And there are these super forecasters who use these various tricks to figure out probabilities that are better than the so-called professionals. Excellent topic for a podcast, actually. I'm in. How to be a super forecaster. Well, AJ, A, there's some takeaways. One is we're going to get you 200 puzzle books by AJ Jacobs within the next year or so. We need to develop a new academic curriculum that focuses on quality of life instead of just the same standard curriculum that we've had for the past 200 years.

1:08:29And I think understanding skepticism vis-a-vis long-termism could help really solve problems in society. Like, again, you know, I think it was in 1972, someone wrote a book that said that England won't exist anymore because of overpopulation. And, you know, by 1980, they said this. And of course that didn't happen. And people have been making forecasts about the end of the world every decade since the 50s or 60s, whether it's nuclear war or climate change or whatever. And almost every forecast has been wrong. Although to your point, which I think is correct, the rate of technological change cannot be ignored now.

1:09:10That's what makes this time different because before 1900, there was not really technological change. For a thousand years, things stayed the same. But now everything is changing. And the faster things change, the faster there's more technological changes because computers are getting faster and faster and they're able to sequence genomes faster, which means we could start cloning, which means we could, who knows what else? Like everything is growing exponentially. So it's all to say we've got to be careful and maybe spend time studying puzzles more. Definitely. and buying my book when it comes out in April.

1:09:51Yeah, well, we'll have you on in April to talk about puzzles and maybe you'll give us some puzzles as well. So challenge us. Love it. Love it. All right. Thanks so much, AJ. Thanks for coming on again. Thanks, James. I loved it.