The following is a conversation with Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, author,
co-host of the Dark Horse podcast, and, as he says, reluctant radical.
Even though we've never met or spoken before this, who both felt like we've been friends for a long
time, I don't agree on everything with Brett, but I'm sure as hell happy he exists in this weird
and wonderful world of ours. Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, ExpressVPN,
Magic Spoon, and FourSigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say a few words about COVID-19 and about science broadly. I think science
is beautiful and powerful. It is the striving of the human mind to understand and to solve the
problems of the world. But as an institution, it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature,
to fear, to greed, power, and ego. 2020 is the story of all of these that has both scientific
triumph and tragedy. We needed great leaders, and we didn't get them. What we needed is leaders
who communicate in an honest, transparent, and authentic way about the uncertainty of what we
know and the large-scale scientific efforts to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions.
I believe there are several candidates for solutions that could have all saved hundreds of
billions of dollars and lessened or eliminated the suffering of millions of people. Let me mention
five of the categories of solutions. Masks, at-home testing, anonymized contact tracing,
antiviral drugs, and vaccines. Within each of these categories, institutional leaders should
have constantly asked and answered, publicly, honestly, the following three questions. One,
what data do we have on the solution and what studies are we running to get more and better data?
Two, given the current data and uncertainty, how effective and how safe is the solution?
Three, what is the timeline and cost involved with mass manufacture and distribution of the
solution? In the service of these questions, no voices should have been silenced. No ideas
left off the table. Open data, open science, open honest scientific communication and debate
was the way, not censorship. There are a lot of ideas out there that are bad, wrong, dangerous,
but the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are is the moment we'll lose
our ability to find the truth, to find solutions, the very things that make science beautiful
and powerful in the face of all the dangers that threaten the well-being and the existence of humans
on earth. This conversation with Brett is less about the ideas we talk about. We agree on some,
disagree on others. It is much more about the very freedom to talk, to think, to share ideas.
This freedom is our only hope. Brett should never have been censored. I asked Brett to do this
podcast, to show solidarity and to show that I have hope for science and for humanity.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here's my conversation with Brett Weinstein.
What to you is beautiful about the study of biology, the science, the engineering, the philosophy of it?
It's a very interesting question. I must say at one level, it's not a conscious thing. I can
say a lot about why as an adult I find biology compelling, but as a kid, I was completely
fascinated with animals. I loved to watch them and think about why they did what they did and
that developed into a very conscious passion as an adult, but I think in the same way that one is
drawn to a person, I was drawn to the never-ending series of near miracles that exist across biological
nature. When you see a living organism, do you see it from an evolutionary biology perspective
of this entire thing that moves around in this world, or do you see from an engineering perspective
that are like first principles almost down to the physics, like the little components that build up
hierarchies that you have cells, the first proteins and cells and organs and all that
kind of stuff. Do you see low level or do you see high level?
Well, the human mind is a strange thing and I think it's probably a bit like a time-sharing
machine in which I have different modules. We don't know enough about biology for them to
connect. They exist in isolation and I'm always aware that they do connect, but I basically
have to step into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the
lineage that it belongs to. I have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a
very long time scale, a different module still to understand what the mechanisms inside would have
to look like to account for what we can see from the outside. I think that probably sounds
really complicated, but one of the things about being involved in a topic like biology and doing
so for one, really not even just my adult life or my whole life, is that it becomes second nature.
When we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that,
we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that. But of course,
what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone, in a zone in which they are in such
command of their center of gravity, for example, that they know how to hurl it around a landscape
so that they always land on their feet. And I would just say, for anyone who hasn't found a topic
on which they can develop that kind of facility, it is absolutely worthwhile. It's really something
that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics. Many things our ancestors
didn't even have access to. And that flexibility of humans, that ability to repurpose our machinery
for topics that are novel, means really the world is your oyster. You can figure out what
your passion is and then figure out all of the angles that one would have to pursue
to really deeply understand it. And it is well worth having at least one topic like that.
You mean embracing the full adaptability of both the body and the mind? I don't know what
to attribute the parkour to, like biomechanics of how our bodies can move, or is it the mind?
How much percent-wise is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that we've been talking
about, or is it just all the mind? The way to think about creatures is that every creature
is two things simultaneously. A creature is a machine of sorts, right? It's not a machine in
the, you know, I call it an aqueous machine, right? And it's run by an aqueous computer,
right? So it's not identical to our technological machines. But every creature is both a machine
that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving,
to reproduce. It is also a potential. So each creature is potentially, for example, the most
recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different from it.
And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature, but not very good in terms of the
potential it has going forward, then that lineage will not last very long into the future because
change will throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet. So
the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform. And we have the ability to swap out
our software to exist in many, many different niches. And I was once watching an interview
with this British group of parkour experts who were being, you know, just they were discussing
what it is they do and how it works. And what they essentially said is, look, you're tapping
into deep monkey stuff, right? And I thought, yeah, that's about right. And, you know, anybody who
is proficient at something like skiing or skateboarding, you know, has the experience of
flying down the hill on skis, for example, bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next.
And if you really pay attention, you will discover that your conscious mind is actually a spectator.
It's there. It's involved in the experience, but it's not driving. Some part of you knows how to
ski and it's not the part of you that knows how to think. And I would just say that the,
what accounts for this flexibility in humans is the ability to bootstrap a new software program
and then drive it into the unconscious layer where it can be applied very rapidly. And,
you know, I will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics, you know, if you
programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that were novel to it, how would you do it?
It would have to look something like this.
There's a certain kind of magic. You're right. With the consciousness being an observer,
when you play guitar, for example, or piano, for me, music, when you get truly lost in it,
I don't know what the heck is responsible for the flow of the music, the kind of the loudness of
the music going up and down, the timing, the intricate, like even the mistakes, all those
things, that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind. It is just observing and yet it's somehow
intricately involved. More like, because you mentioned parkour, the dance is like that too.
When you start up in tango dancing, if when you truly lose yourself in it, then it's just like
you're an observer and how the hell is the body able to do that? And not only that, it's the physical
motion is also creating the emotion, the, like, the damn is good to be alive feeling.
So, but then that's also intricately connected to the full biology stack that we're operating in.
I don't know how difficult it is to replicate that. We're talking offline about Boston Dynamics
robots. They've recently, they did both parkour, they did flips, they've also done some dancing,
and it's something I think a lot about because what most people don't realize,
because they don't look deep enough, is those robots are hard-coded to do those things.
The robots didn't figure it out by themselves. And yet the fundamental aspect of what it means to be
human is that process of figuring out, of making mistakes. And then there's something about overcoming
those challenges and the mistakes and like figuring out how to lose yourself in the magic of the dancing
or just movement is what it means to be human. That learning process, so that's what I want to do
almost as a fun side thing with the Boston Dynamics robots is to have them learn and
see what they figure out, even if they make mistakes. I want to let spot make mistakes
and in so doing discover what it means to be alive, discover beauty, because I think that's
the essential aspect of mistakes. Boston Dynamics folks want spot to be perfect because they don't
want spot to ever make mistakes because they want to operate in the factories, they want to be
very safe and so on. For me, if you construct the environment, if you construct a safe space
for robots and allow them to make mistakes, something beautiful might be discovered.
But that requires a lot of brain power. So spot is currently very dumb and I'm going to give it
a brain. So first make it see, currently can't see, meaning computer vision has to understand
its environment has to see all the humans, but then also has to be able to learn, learn about
its movement, learn how to use its body to communicate with others, all those kinds of
things that dogs know how to do well, humans know how to do somewhat well. I think that's a
beautiful challenge, but first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes. Well, I think your
objective is laudable, but you're going to realize that the Boston Dynamics folks are right the first
time spot poops on your rug. I hear the same thing about kids and so on. I still want to have kids.
No, you should. It's a great experience. So let me step back into what you said in a couple
of different places. One, I have always believed that the missing element in robotics and artificial
intelligence is a proper development. It is no accident. It is no mere coincidence that human
beings are the most dominant species on planet earth and that we have the longest childhoods of any
creature on earth by far. The development is the key to the flexibility and so
the capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image. It's the flip side of our helplessness
at birth. So I'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project if you do not end
up reinventing childhood for robots, which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly.
But I also want to point out you can see this issue of your conscious mind becoming a spectator
very well if you compare tennis to table tennis. If you watch a tennis game, you could imagine
that the players are highly conscious as they play. You cannot imagine that if you've ever played
ping pong decently. A volley in ping pong is so fast that your conscious mind, if your reactions
had to go through your conscious mind, you wouldn't be able to play. So you can detect that your
conscious mind, while very much present, isn't there. And you can also detect where consciousness
does usefully intrude. If you go up against an opponent in table tennis that knows a trick that
you don't know how to respond to, you will suddenly detect that something about your game is not
effective. And you will start thinking about what might be, how do you position yourself so that
move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something like that doesn't catch you
off guard. And this, I believe, is we highly conscious folks, those of us who try to think
through things very deliberately and carefully, mistake consciousness for like the highest kind
of thinking. And I really think that this is an error. Consciousness is an intermediate level
of thinking. What it does is it allows you, it's basically like uncompiled code. And it doesn't
run very fast. It is capable of being adapted to new circumstances. But once the code is roughed in,
right, it gets driven into the unconscious layer, and you become highly effective at whatever it is.
And that from that point, your conscious mind basically remains there to detect things that
aren't anticipated by the code you've already written. And so I don't exactly know how one would
establish this, how one would demonstrate it. But it must be the case that the human mind
contains sandboxes in which things are tested, right? Maybe you can build a piece of code and run it
in parallel next to your active code so you can see how it would have done comparatively. But
there's got to be some way of writing new code and then swapping it in. And frankly, I think this
has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles. Very often, you know, when I get good at something,
I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it. I get better at it when I'm not doing it,
especially if there's time to sleep and think on it. So there's some sort of, you know,
new program swapping in for old program phenomenon, which, you know, will be a lot easier to see in
machines. It's going to be hard with the wet wear. I like, I mean, it is true because somebody that
played, I played tennis for many years, I do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis
is when the conscious mind is a spectator. So it's the compiled code is the highest form of
being human. And then consciousness is just some like specific compiler. You just have like Borland
C++ compiler. You could just have different kind of compilers. Ultimately, the thing that by which
we measure the power of life, the intelligence of life is the compiled code. And you can probably
do that compilation all kinds of ways. Yeah. I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously,
and table tennis isn't. I'm saying that because tennis is slowed down by the just the space on
the court, you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing. But when you shrink the
court down... It becomes obvious. It becomes obvious that your conscious mind is just present
rather than knowing where to put the paddle. And weirdly for me, I would say this probably
isn't true in a podcast situation. But if I have to give a presentation, especially if I have not
overly prepared, I often find the same phenomenon when I'm giving the presentation. My conscious
mind is there watching some other part of me present, which is a little jarring, I have to say.
Well, that means you've gotten good at it, not let the conscious mind get in the way of the flow
of words. Yeah, that's the sensation to be sure. And that's the highest form of podcasting too.
That's what it looks like when a podcast is really in the pocket, like Joe
Rogan just having fun and just losing themselves. And that's something I aspire to as well,
just losing yourself in the conversation. Somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people,
like I'm such an introvert. I'm scared. I was scared before you showed up. I'm scared right now.
There's just anxiety. It's a giant mess. It's hard to lose yourself. It's hard to just
get out of the way of your own mind. Yeah, actually, trust is a big component of that. Your
conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain. But when you do get into that zone,
when you're speaking, I realize it's different for you with English as a second language,
although maybe you present in Russian and it happens. But do you ever hear yourself say
something and you think, oh, that's really good, right? Like you didn't come up with it,
some other part of you that you don't exactly know came up with it? I don't think I've ever
heard myself in that way because I have a much louder voice that's constantly yelling in my head
at, why the hell did you say that? There's a very self-critical voice. That's much louder.
Maybe I need to deal with that voice, but it's been like, what is it called,
like a megaphone just screaming so I can't hear it. Oh no. It says, good job. You said that thing
really nicely. So I'm kind of focused right now on the megaphone person in the audience versus
the positive. But that's definitely something to think about. It's been productive, but the place
where I find gratitude and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet moments when I don't talk,
when I listen to the world around me, when I listen to others, when I talk, I'm extremely
self-critical in my mind. When I produce anything out into the world that originated with me,
like any kind of creation, extremely self-critical. It's good for productivity,
for always striving to improve and so on. It might be bad for appreciating the things you've
created. I'm a little bit with Marvin Minsky on this where he says the key to a productive life
is to hate everything you've ever done in the past. I didn't know he said that. I must say I
resonate with it a bit. Unfortunately, my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into
the world and I effectively watch almost none of it. I can't stand it.
Yeah. What do you make of that? I don't know. I just recently, I just yesterday read
Metamorphosis by Kafka, re-read Metamorphosis by Kafka where he turns into a giant bug
because of the stress that the world puts on him, his parents put on him to succeed.
I think that you have to find the balance because if you allow the self-critical voice to become too
heavy, the burden of the world, the pressure that the world puts on you to be the best version of
yourself and so on to strive, then you become a bug and that's a big problem. Then the world
turns against you because you're a bug. You become some kind of caricature of yourself. I don't know.
You become the worst version of yourself and then thereby end up destroying yourself and then the
world moves on. That's the story. That's a lovely story. I do think this is one of these places,
and frankly, you could map this onto all of modern human experience, but this is one of these places
where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves. I used to talk to students
about the question of dwelling on things. Dwelling on things is famously understood to be bad,
and it can't possibly be bad. It wouldn't exist. The tendency toward it wouldn't exist if it was
bad. What is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility. That's obviously easier to say
than to operationalize, but if you realize that your dwelling is the key in fact to upgrading
your program for future well-being and that there's a point, presumably from diminishing returns, if
not counter productivity, there is a point at which you should stop because that is what is in your
best interest, then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful. This is the point at
which it is no longer useful for me to dwell on this error I have made. That's what you're looking
for. It also gives you license. If some part of you feels like it's punishing you rather than
searching, then that also has a point at which it's no longer valuable and there's some liberty in
realizing, yep, even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop.
So if we map that onto compiled code discussion, as a computer science person, I find that very
compelling. When you compile code, you get warnings sometimes and usually if you're a good
software engineer, you're going to make sure there's no, you treat warnings as errors. So you make
sure that the compilation produces no warnings, but at a certain point when you have a large
enough system, you just let the warnings go. It's fine. I don't know where that warning came from,
but ultimately you need to compile the code and run with it. I hope nothing terrible happens.
Well, I think what you will find, and believe me, I think what you're talking about with respect to
robots and learning is going to end up having to go to a deep developmental state and a helplessness
that evolves into hyper competence and all of that. But I live, I noticed that I live by something
that I, for lack of a better descriptor, call the theory of close calls. And the theory of close
calls says that people typically miscategorize the events in their life where something almost
went wrong. And, you know, for example, if you, I have a friend who I was walking down the street
with my college friends and one of my friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear
and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles an hour, would have been an absolute disaster,
might have killed her, certainly would have permanently injured her. But she didn't, you
know, car didn't touch her, right? Now you could walk away from that and think nothing of it because,
well, what is there to think? Nothing happened. Or you could think, well, what is the difference
between what did happen and my death? The difference is luck. I never want that to be true,
right? I never want the difference between what did happen and my death to be luck.
Therefore, I should count this as very close to death. And I should prioritize coding so it
doesn't happen again at a very high level. So anyway, my basic point is the accidents and
disasters and misfortune describe a distribution that tells you what's really likely to get you
in the end. And so personally, you can use them to figure out where the dangers are so that you
can afford to take great risks because you have a really good sense of how they're going to go
wrong. But I would also point out civilization has this problem. Civilization is now producing
these events that are major disasters, but they're not existential scale yet, right? They're very
serious errors that we can see. And I would argue that the pattern is you discover that we are
involved in some industrial process at the point it has gone wrong, right? So I'm now always asking
the question, okay, in light of the Fukushima Triple Meltdown, the financial collapse of 2008,
the Deepwater Horizon blowout COVID-19 and its probable origins in the Wuhan lab,
what processes do I not know the name of yet that I will discover at the point that some
gigantic accident has happened? And can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof
of engaging in that process before the accident, right? That's what a wise civilization would be
doing. And yet we don't. I just want to mention something that happened a couple of days ago.
I don't know if you know who JB Straubel is. He's the co-founder of Tesla,
CTO of Tesla for many, many years. His wife just died. She was riding a bicycle.
And in the same, in the same thin line between death and life that many of us have been
in, where you walk into the intersection and there's this close call, every once in a while
it, you get the short straw. I wonder how much of our own individual lives and the entirety
of the human civilization rests on this little roll of the dice. Well, this is sort of my point
about the close calls is that there's a level at which we can't control it, right? The
gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time to do anything about.
There's not a lot we can do to hedge that out, or at least not short term.
But there are lots of other things. Obviously, the financial collapse of 2008 didn't
break down the entire world economy. It threatened to, but a Herculean effort managed to pull us
back from the brink. The triple meltdown at Fukushima was awful, but every one of the seven
fuel pools held. There wasn't a major fire that made it impossible to manage the disaster going
forward. We got lucky. We could say the same thing about the blowout at the Deepwater horizon,
where a hole in the ocean floor large enough that we couldn't have plugged it, could have opened up.
All of these things could have been much, much worse. And I think we can say the same thing
about COVID as terrible as it is. And we cannot say for sure that it came from the Wuhan lab,
but there's a strong likelihood that it did. And it also could be much, much worse.
So in each of these cases, something is telling us we have a process that is unfolding that keeps
creating risks where it is luck that is the difference between us and some scale of disaster
that is unimaginable. And that wisdom, you can be highly intelligent and cause these disasters.
To be wise is to stop causing them. And that would require a process of restraint,
a process that I don't see a lot of evidence of yet. So I think we have to generate it.
And somehow, at the moment, we don't have a political structure that would be capable of
taking a protective algorithm and actually deploying it, because it would have important
economic consequences. And so it would almost certainly be shot down. But we can obviously
also say, we paid a huge price for all of the disasters that I've mentioned. And we have to
factor that into the equation. Something can be very productive short-term and very destructive
long-term. Also, the question is how many disasters we avoided because of the ingenuity
of humans or just the integrity and character of humans? That's sort of an open question.
We may be more intelligent than lucky. That's the hope. Because the optimistic message here that
you're getting at is maybe the process that we should be, that maybe we can overcome luck
with ingenuity. Meaning, I guess you're suggesting the process is we should be listing all the ways
that human civilization can destroy itself, assigning likelihood to it, and thinking through,
how can we avoid that? And being very honest with the data out there about the close calls
and using those close calls to then create sort of mechanism by which we minimize the probability
of those close calls. And just being honest and transparent with the data that's out there.
Well, I think we need to do a couple things for it to work. So I've been an advocate for the idea
that sustainability is actually difficult to operationalize, but it is an objective that
we have to meet if we're to be around long term. And I realized that we also need to have reversibility
of all of our processes because processes very frequently when they start do not appear dangerous.
And then when they scale, they become very dangerous. So for example, if you imagine
the first internal combustion engine in a vehicle driving down the street,
and you imagine somebody running after them saying, hey, if you do enough of that,
you're going to alter the atmosphere and it's going to change the temperature of the planet,
it's preposterous, right? Why would you stop the person who's invented this marvelous new
contraption? But of course, eventually you do get to the place where you're doing enough of this
that you do start changing the temperature of the planet. So if we built the capacity,
if we basically said, look, you can't involve yourself in any process that you couldn't reverse
if you had to, then progress would be slowed, but our safety would go up dramatically. And I think
in some sense, if we are to be around long term, we have to begin thinking that way. We're just
involved in too many very dangerous processes. So let's talk about one of the things that,
if not threatened human civilization, certainly hurt it at a deep level, which is COVID-19.
What percent probability would you currently place
on the hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
So I maintain a flow chart of all the possible explanations. And it doesn't break down exactly
that way. The likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very, very high. If it emerged from a lab,
the likelihood that the lab was the Wuhan Institute is very, very high.
There are multiple different kinds of evidence that point to the lab. And there is literally no
evidence that points to nature. Either the evidence points nowhere or it points to the lab. And the
lab could mean any lab, but geographically, obviously, the labs in Wuhan are the most likely.
And the lab that was most directly involved with research on viruses that look like COVID,
that look like SARS-CoV-2, is obviously the place that one would start. But I would say
the likelihood that this virus came from a lab is well above 95%. We can talk about the question of
could a virus have been brought into the lab and escaped from there without being modified?
That's also possible. But it doesn't explain any of the anomalies in the genome of SARS-CoV-2.
Could it have been delivered from another lab? Could Wuhan be a distraction
in order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way? That's conceivable. I currently have
that below 1% on my flow chart. But I think a very dark thought that somebody would do that almost
is a political attack on China. Well, I don't even think that's one possibility. Sometimes
when Eric and I talk about these issues, we will generate a scenario just to prove that
something could live in that space. It's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened.
And so it doesn't have to have been an attack on China. That's certainly one possibility.
But I would point out, if you can predict the future in some unusual way better than others,
you can print money. That's what markets that allow you to bet for or against
virtually any sector allow you to do. So you can imagine a simply amoral person or entity
generating a pandemic attempting to cover their tracks because it would allow them to bet against
things like cruise ships, air travel, whatever it is and bet in favor of, I don't know,
sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do. So am I saying that I think somebody did that?
No, I really don't think it happened. We've seen zero evidence that this was intentionally released.
However, we're to have been intentionally released by somebody who did not know,
did not want it known where it had come from. Releasing it in Wuhan would be one way to cover
their tracks. So we have to leave the possibility formally open, but acknowledge there's no evidence.
And the probability, therefore, is low. I tend to believe maybe this is the optimistic nature
that I have that people who are competent enough to do the kind of thing we just described
are not going to do that because it requires a certain kind of, I don't want to use the word
eval, but whatever word you want to use to describe the kind of this regard for human life
required to do that. It's just not going to be coupled with competence. I feel like there's a
trade-off chart where competence on one axis and evils on the other. And the more evil you become,
the crapper you are at doing great engineering scientific work required to deliver weapons of
different kinds, whether it's bioweapons or nuclear weapons, all those kinds of things.
That seems to be the lessons I take from history, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's
going to be happening in the future. But to stick on the lab leak idea, because the flowchart is
probably huge here, because there's a lot of fascinating possibilities. One question I want
to ask is what would evidence for natural origins look like? So one piece of evidence for natural
origins is that it's happened in the past that viruses have jumped. Oh, they do jump. So that's
possible to have happened. So that's a sort of like a historical evidence like, okay, well,
it's possible that it happened. It's not evidence of the kind you think it is. It's a justification
for a presumption. So the presumption upon discovering a new virus circulating is certainly
that it came from nature. The problem is the presumption evaporates in the face of evidence,
or at least it logically should. And it didn't in this case. It was maintained by people who
privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of this
virus. Is there some other piece of evidence that we could look for and see that would say
this increases the probability that it's natural origins? Yeah. In fact, there is evidence. I always
worry that somebody is going to make up some evidence in order to reverse the flow. Well,
let's say I am a lot of incentive for that, actually, there's a huge amount of incentive. On
the other hand, why didn't the powers that be the powers that lied to us about weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq? Why didn't they ever fake weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Whatever
force it is, I hope that force is here too. And so whatever evidence we find is real.
It's the competence thing I'm talking about. But okay, go ahead. Sorry.
Well, we can get back to that. But I would say, yeah, the giant piece of evidence that will shift
the probabilities in the other direction is the discovery of either a human population in which
the virus circulated prior to showing up in Wuhan that would explain where the virus learned all
of the tricks that it knew instantly upon spreading from Wuhan. So that would do it or
an animal population in which an ancestor epidemic can be found in which the virus learned this
before jumping to humans. But I point out in that second case, you would certainly expect to see
a great deal of evolution in the early epidemic, which we don't see. So there almost has to be
a human population somewhere else that had the virus circulating or an ancestor of the virus
that we first saw in Wuhan circulating. And it has to have gotten very sophisticated in that prior
epidemic before hitting Wuhan in order to explain the total lack of evolution and extremely effective
virus that emerged at the end of 2019. So you don't believe in the magic of evolution to
spring up with all the tricks already there? Like everybody who doesn't have the tricks,
they die quickly. And then you just have this beautiful virus that comes in with the spike
protein and the through mutation and selection. The ones that succeed and succeed big are the
ones that are going to just spring into life with the tricks. Well, no. That's called a hopeful
monster and hopeful monsters don't work. The job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult.
It involves two very difficult steps and they both have to work. One is the ability to infect a
person and spread in their tissues sufficient to make an infection. And the other is to jump between
individuals at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct for one reason or another.
Those are both very difficult jobs. They require, as you describe, selection. And the point is,
selection would leave a mark. We would see evidence that it would stay in place.
In animals or humans, we would see both, right?
We would see this evolutionary trace of the virus gathering the tricks out.
Yeah. You would see the virus, you would see the clumsy virus get better and better. And yes,
I am a full believer in the power of that process. In fact, I believe it. What I know
from studying the process is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine, that what we
teach in the Evolution 101 textbook is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing and that
actually people should increase their expectation of the rapidity with which that process can produce
just jaw-dropping adaptations. That said, we just don't see evidence that it happened here,
which doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it means, in spite of immense pressure to find it
somewhere, there's been no hint, which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory.
So, inside the laboratory, gain a function research on viruses. And I believe most of
that kind of research is doing this exact thing that you're referring to, which is
accelerated evolution. And just watching evolution do its thing on a bunch of viruses
and seeing what kind of tricks get developed. The other method is engineering viruses. So,
manually adding on the tricks. Which do you think we should be thinking about here?
So, mind you, I learned what I know in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging. I
started studying the question and I would say, based on the content of the genome and other
evidence in publications from the various labs that were involved in generating this technology,
a couple of things seem likely. This SARS-CoV-2 does not appear to be entirely the result of
either a splicing process or serial passaging. It appears to have both things in its past.
Or it's at least highly likely that it does. So, for example, the Fern cleavage site
looks very much like it was added in to the virus. And it was known that that would increase its
infectivity in humans and increase its tropism. The virus appears to be excellent at spreading
in humans and minks and ferrets. Now, minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other
and ferrets are very likely to have been used in a serial passage experiment. The reason being
that they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human ACE2 receptor. And so,
were you going to passage the virus or its ancestor through an animal in order to increase its
infectivity in humans, which would have been necessary? Ferrets would have been very likely.
It is also quite likely that humanized mice were utilized and it is possible that human airway
tissue was utilized. I think it is vital that we find out what the protocols were. If this came
from the Wuhan Institute, we need to know it and we need to know what the protocols were exactly
because they will actually give us some tools that would be useful in fighting SARS-CoV-2
and hopefully driving it to extinction, which ought to be our priority. It is a priority that
does not, it is not apparent from our behavior. But it really is, it should be our objective if
we understood where our interests lie. We would be much more focused on it. But those protocols
would tell us a great deal. If it wasn't the Wuhan Institute, we need to know that. If it was nature,
we need to know that. And if it was some other laboratory, we need to figure out
what and where so that we can determine what we can determine about what was done.
You're opening up my mind about why we should investigate, why we should know the truth
of the origins of this virus. So for me personally, let me just tell the story of my own kind of journey.
When I first started looking into the lab leak hypothesis, what became terrifying to me and
important to understand and obvious is the sort of like Sam Harris way of thinking, which is
it's obvious that a lab leak of a deadly virus will eventually happen. My mind was,
it doesn't even matter if it happened in this case. It's obvious this is going to happen in the future.
So why the hell are we not freaking out about this? And COVID-19 is not even that deadly
relative to the possible future viruses. It's the way I disagree with Sam on this,
but he thinks about this way about AGI as well, about artificial intelligence. It's a different
discussion, I think, but with viruses, it seems like something that could happen on the scale of
years, maybe a few decades. AGI is a little bit farther out for me, but it seemed, the terrifying
thing seemed obvious that this will happen very soon for a much deadlier virus as we get better
and better at both engineering viruses and doing this kind of evolutionary driven research,
gain a function research. Okay, but then you started speaking out about this as well, but
also started to say, no, no, no, we should hurry up and figure out the origins now because they
will help us figure out how to actually respond to this particular virus, how to treat this
particular virus. What is in terms of vaccines, in terms of antiviral drugs, in terms of just
hand, although the number of responses we should have. Okay, I still am much more freaking out
about the future. Maybe you can break that apart a little bit. Which are you most focused on now?
Which are you most freaking out about now, in terms of the importance of figuring out the origins
of this virus? I am most freaking out about both of them because they're both really important,
and we can put bounds on this. Let me say first that this is a perfect test case for the theory
of close calls because as much as COVID is a disaster, it is also a close call from which we
can learn much. You are absolutely right. If we keep playing this game in the lab, especially if
we do it under pressure and when we are told that a virus is going to leap from nature any day and
that the more we know, the better we'll be able to fight it, we're going to create the disaster
all the sooner. So yes, that should be an absolute focus. The fact that there were people saying
that this was dangerous back in 2015 ought to tell us something. The fact that the system bypassed a
ban and offshored the work to China ought to tell us this is not a Chinese failure. This is a failure
of something larger and harder to see. But I also think that there's a clock ticking with respect
to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID, the disease that it creates. And that has to do with whether or not
we are stuck with it permanently. So if you think about the cost to humanity of being stuck with
influenza, it's an immense cost year after year. And we just stop thinking about it because it's
there. Some years you get to flu, most years you don't. Maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it.
Maybe the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted. But imagine just simply doubling that cost.
Imagine we get stuck with SARS-CoV-2 and its descendants going forward and that
it just settles in and becomes a fact of modern human life. That would be a disaster. The number
of people we will ultimately lose is incalculable. The amount of suffering that will be caused is
incalculable, the loss of well-being and wealth incalculable. So that ought to be a very high
priority, driving this extinct before it becomes permanent. And the ability to drive extinct goes
down the longer we delay effective responses to the extent that we let it have this very large
canvas, large numbers of people who have the disease in which mutation and selection can result
in adaptation that we will not be able to counter its ability to figure out features of our immune
system and use them to its advantage. So I'm feeling the pressure of driving an extinct.
I believe we could have driven an extinct six months ago and we didn't do it because of very
mundane concerns among a small number of people. And I'm not alleging that they were brazen about
or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused. I have the sense that they were
working from a kind of autopilot in which you, let's say you're in some kind of a corporation,
a pharmaceutical corporation, you have a portfolio of therapies that in the context of a pandemic
might be very lucrative. Those therapies have competitors. You of course want to position
your product so that it succeeds and the competitors don't. And lo and behold, at some point,
through means that I think those of us on the outside can't really intuit, you end up saying
things about competing therapies that work better and much more safely than the ones you're selling
that aren't true and do cause people to die in large numbers. But it's some kind of autopilot,
at least part of it is. So there's a complicated coupling of the autopilot of
institutions, companies, governments. And then there's also the geopolitical game theory thing
going on where you want to keep secrets. It's the Chernobyl thing where if you messed up,
there's a big incentive, I think, to hide the fact that you messed up. So how do we fix this?
And what's more important to fix? The autopilot, which is the response that we often criticize
about our institutions, especially the leaders in those institutions, Anthony Fauci and so on,
as some of the members of the scientific community. And the second part is the game
with China of hiding the information in terms of on the fight between nations.
Well, in our live streams on Dark Horse, Heather and I have been talking from the beginning about
the fact that although, yes, what happens began in China, it very much looks like a failure of
the international scientific community. That's frightening. But it's also hopeful in the sense
that actually if we did the right thing now, we're not navigating a puzzle about Chinese
responsibility. We're navigating a question of collective responsibility for something that
has been terribly costly to all of us. So that's not a very happy process. But as you point out,
what's at stake is in large measure at the very least, the strong possibility this will happen
again, and that at some point, it will be far worse. So just as a person that does not learn
the lessons of their own errors, doesn't get smarter and they remain in danger,
we collectively, humanity has to say, well, there sure is a lot of evidence that suggests
that this is a self inflicted wound. When you have done something that has caused a massive
self inflicted wound, self inflicted wound, it makes sense to dwell on it exactly to the
point that you have learned the lesson that makes it very, very unlikely that something
similar will happen again. I think this is a good place to kind of ask you to do almost like a
thought experiment or to steal man the argument against the lab leak hypothesis. So if you were to
argue, you said 95% chance that the virus leaf from a lab, there's a bunch of ways I think you
can argue that even talking about it is bad for the world. So if I just to put something on the
table is to say that for one, it would be racism versus Chinese people that talking about that it
leaked from a lab, there's a kind of immediate kind of blame and it can spiral down into this idea
that's somehow the people are responsible for the virus and this kind of thing. Is it possible for
you to come up with other steel man arguments against talking or against the possibility of the
lab leak hypothesis? Well, so I think steel manning is a tool that is extremely valuable,
but it's also possible to abuse it. I think that you can only steal man a good faith argument. And
the problem is we now know that we have not been engaged in opponents who were wielding good
faith arguments because privately their emails reflect their own doubts. And what they were
doing publicly was actually a punishment, a public punishment for those of us who spoke up
with, I think, the purpose of either backing us down or more likely warning others not to engage in
the same kind of behavior. And obviously for people like you and me who regard science as our
likely best hope for navigating difficult waters, shutting down people who are using those tools
honorably is itself dishonorable. So I don't feel that there's anything to steel man.
And I also think that immediately at the point that the world suddenly with no new evidence on
the table switched gears with respect to the lab leak at the point that Nicholas Wade had
published his article and suddenly the world was going to admit that this was at least a possibility
if not a likelihood. We got to see something of the rationalization process that had taken
place inside the institutional world and it very definitely involved the claim that what was being
avoided was the targeting of Chinese scientists. And my point would be I don't want to see the
targeting of anyone. I don't want to see racism of any kind. On the other hand, once you create
a license to lie in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake in knowing what happened,
then it is inevitable that that process, that license to lie, will be used by the thing that
captures institutions for its own purposes. So my sense is it may be very unfortunate if
the story of what happened here can be used against Chinese people. That would be very
unfortunate. And as I think I mentioned, Heather and I have taken great pains to point out that
this doesn't look like a Chinese failure. It looks like a failure of the international
scientific community. So I think it is important to broadcast that message along with the analysis
of the evidence. But no matter what happened, we have a right to know. And I frankly do not
take the institutional layer at its word that its motivations are honorable and that it was
protecting good-hearted scientists at the expense of the world. That explanation does not add up.
Well, this is a very interesting question about whether it's ever okay to lie at the institutional
layer to protect the populace. I think both you and I are probably on the same,
have the same sense that it's a slippery slope. Even if it's an effective mechanism in the short
term, in the long term, it's going to be destructive. This happened with masks. This
happened with other things. If you look at just history pandemics, there's an idea that panic
is destructive amongst the populace. So you want to construct a narrative,
whether it's a lie or not, to minimize panic. But you're suggesting that almost in all cases,
and I think that was the lesson from the pandemic in the early 20th century, that
lying creates distrust. And distrust in the institutions is ultimately destructive.
That's your sense that lying is not okay? Well, okay. There are obviously places where
complete transparency is not a good idea to the extent that you broadcast a technology that allows
one individual to hold the world hostage. Obviously, you've got something to be navigated.
But in general, I don't believe that the scientific system should be lying to us. In the case of this
particular lie, the idea that the well-being of Chinese scientists outweighs the well-being of
the world is preposterous. As you point out, one thing that rests on this question is whether we
continue to do this kind of research going forward. And the scientists in question, all of them,
American, Chinese, all of them were pushing the idea that the risk of a zoonotic spillover event
causing a major and highly destructive pandemic was so great that we had to risk this.
Now, if they themselves have caused it, and if they are wrong, as I believe they are,
about the likelihood of a major world pandemic spilling out of nature in the way that they
wrote into their grant applications, then the danger is the call is coming from inside the
house. And we have to look at that. And yes, whatever we have to do to protect scientists
from retribution, we should do. But we cannot protect them by lying to the world. And even worse,
by demonizing people like me, like Josh Rogan, like Yuri Dagan, the entire drastic group on
Twitter, by demonizing us for simply following the evidence is to set a terrible precedent.
You're demonizing people for using the scientific method to evaluate evidence
that is available to us in the world. What a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson, right?
Thou shalt not use scientific tools? No, I'm sorry. Whatever your license to lie is,
it doesn't extend to that. Yeah, I've seen the attacks on you, the pressure on you,
has a very important effect on thousands of world-class biologists, actually. So,
at MIT, colleagues of mine, people I know, there's a slight pressure to not be allowed to,
one, speak publicly and to actually think. Like, to even think about these ideas,
it sounds kind of ridiculous, but just in the privacy of your own home, to read things, to
think, it's many people, many world-class biologists that I know will just avoid looking
at the data. There's not even that many people that are publicly opposing gain-of-function
research. They're also like, it's not worth it. It's not worth the battle. And there's many
people that kind of argue that those battles should be fought in private, with colleagues in
the privacy of the scientific community, that the public is somehow not maybe intelligent enough
to be able to deal with the complexities of this kind of discussion. I don't know, but the final
result is combined with the bullying of you and all the different pressures in the academic
institutions is that it's just people are self-censoring and silencing themselves and silencing
the most important thing, which is the power of their brains. Like, these people are brilliant.
And the fact that they're not utilizing their brain to come up with solutions outside of the
conformist line of thinking is tragic. Well, it is. I also think that we have to look at it and
understand it for what it is. For one thing, it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism. Somehow,
people's sense of what they're allowed to think about, talk about, discuss is causing them to
self-censor. And I can tell you it's causing many of them to rationalize, which is even worse.
They're blinding themselves to what they can see. But it is also the case, I believe,
that what you're describing about what people said and a great many people understood that the
lab leak hypothesis could not be taken off the table, but they didn't say so publicly.
And I think that their discussions with each other about why they did not say what they understood,
that's what capture sounds like on the inside. I don't know exactly what force captured the
institutions. I don't think anybody knows for sure out here in public. I don't even know that it
wasn't just simply a process. But you have these institutions. They are behaving towards a kind
of somatic obligation. They have lost sight of what they were built to accomplish. And on the
inside, the way they avoid going back to their original mission is to say things to themselves
like the public can't have this discussion. It can't be trusted with it. Yes, we need to be
able to talk about this, but it has to be private. Whatever it is they say to themselves, that is
what capture sounds like on the inside. It's a institutional rationalization mechanism. And
it's very, very deadly. And at the point you go from lab leak to repurposed drugs, you can see
that it's very deadly in a very direct way. Yeah, I see this in my field with things like
autonomous weapons systems. People in AI do not talk about the use of AI in weapons systems.
They kind of avoid the idea that AI is used in the military. It's kind of funny. There's
this discomfort. They all hurry. Something scary happens and a bunch of sheep run away.
That's what it looks like. And I don't even know what to do about it. And then I feel this natural
pull every time I bring up autonomous weapons systems to go along with the sheep. There's
a natural kind of pull towards that direction because it's like, what can I do as one person?
And now there's currently nothing destructive happening with autonomous weapons systems.
So we're like in the early days of this race that in 10, 20 years might become a real problem.
Now we're, the discussion we're having now, we're now facing the result of that in the space of
viruses, like for many years avoiding the conversations here. I don't know what to do
that in the early days. But I think we have to, I guess, create institutions where people can
stand out. People can stand out and like basically be individual thinkers and break out into all kinds
of spaces of ideas that allow us to think freely, freedom of thought. And maybe that requires the
decentralization of institutions. Well, years ago, I came up with a concept called cultivated
insecurity. And the idea is, let's just take the example of the average Joe, right? The average Joe
has a job somewhere and their mortgage, their medical insurance, their retirement, their
connection with the economy is to one degree or another dependent on their relationship
with the employer. That means that there is a strong incentive, especially in any industry
where it's not easy to move from one employer to the next, there's a strong incentive to stay in your
employer's good graces, right? So it creates a very top down dynamic, not only in terms of
who gets to tell other people what to do, but it really comes down to who gets to tell other
people how to think. So that's extremely dangerous. The way out of it is to cultivate security to
the extent that somebody is in a position to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe
for their family and their ability to earn, you will see that behavior a lot more. So I would
argue that some of what you're talking about is just a simple predictable consequence of the
concentration of the sources of well-being and that this is a solvable problem.
You got a chance to talk with Joe Rogan yesterday?
Yes, I did.
And I just saw the episode was released and Ivor Mekton is trending on Twitter. Joe told me it
was an incredible conversation. I look forward to listening to you today. Many people have probably
by the time this is released have already listened to it. I think it would be interesting to discuss
a postmortem. How do you feel how the conversation went? And maybe broadly,
how do you see the story as it's unfolding of Ivor Mekton from the origins from before COVID-19
through 2020 to today?
I very much enjoyed talking to Joe and I'm undescribably grateful that he would take
the risk of such a discussion, that he would, as he described it, do an emergency podcast on the
subject, which I think that was not an exaggeration. This needed to happen for various reasons,
that he took us down the road of talking about the censorship campaign against Ivor Mekton,
which I find utterly shocking and talking about the drug itself. And I should say,
we had Pierre Corey available. He came on the podcast as well. He is, of course, the face of
the FLCCCC, the frontline COVID-19 critical care alliance. These are doctors who have
innovated ways of treating COVID patients and they happened on Ivor Mekton and have been using it.
And I hesitate to use the word advocating for it because that's not really the role
of doctors or scientists, but they are advocating for it in the sense that there is this
pressure not to talk about its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into.
So maybe step back and say, what is Ivor Mekton and how much
studies have been done to show its effectiveness?
So Ivor Mekton is an interesting drug. It was discovered in the 70s by a Japanese
scientist named Satoshi Omura, and he found it in soil near a Japanese golf course.
So I would just point out in passing that if we were to stop self-silencing over
the possibility that Asians will be demonized over the possible lab leak in Wuhan and to recognize
that actually the natural course of the story has a likely lab leak in China. It has a
unlikely hero in Japan. The story is naturally not a simple one. But in any case, Omura
discovered this molecule. He sent it to a friend who was at Merck, a scientist named Campbell.
They won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Ivor Mekton molecule in 2015.
Its initial use was in treating parasitic infections. It's very effective in treating
the worm that causes river blindness, the pathogen that causes elephantitis, scabies,
the very effective anti-parasite drug. It's extremely safe. It's on the who's list of
essential medications. It's safe for children. It has been administered something like four
billion times in the last four decades. It has been given away in the millions of doses
by Merck in Africa. People have been on it for long periods of time. And in fact, one of the
reasons that Africa may have had less severe impacts from COVID-19 is that Ivor Mekton
is widely used there to prevent parasites, and the drug appears to have a long-lasting impact.
So it's an interesting molecule. It was discovered some time ago, apparently,
that it has antiviral properties. And so it was tested early in the COVID-19 pandemic to see if
it might work to treat humans with COVID. It turned out to have very promising evidence
that it did treat humans. It was tested in tissues. It was tested at a very high dosage,
which confuses people. They think that those of us who believe that Ivor Mekton might be useful
in confronting this disease are advocating those high doses, which is not the case.
But in any case, there have been quite a number of studies. A wonderful meta-analysis was
finally released. We had seen it in pre-print version, but it was finally peer-reviewed and
published this last week. It reveals that the drug, as clinicians have been telling us,
those who have been using it, it's highly effective at treating people with the disease,
especially if you get to them early. And it showed an 86% effectiveness as a prophylactic to prevent
people from contracting COVID. And that number, 86%, is high enough to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction
if we wished to deploy it. First of all, the meta-analysis, is this the
Ivor Mekton for COVID-19 real-time meta-analysis of 60 studies? Or there's a bunch of meta-analysis
there? Because I was really impressed by the real-time meta-analysis that keeps getting updated.
I don't know if it's the same kind of data. The one at IVMmetta.com?
Well, I saw it. It's C19IvorMekton.com. No, this is not that meta-analysis. So that is,
as you say, a living meta-analysis where you can watch as evidence rolls in. Which is super cool,
by the way. It's really cool. And they've got some really nice graphics that allow you to
understand, well, what is the evidence? It's concentrated around this level of effectiveness,
et cetera. So anyway, it's a great site, well worth paying attention to.
No, this is a meta-analysis. I don't know any of the authors, but one. Second author is Tess
Laurie of the Bird Group. Bird being a group of analysts and doctors in Britain that is playing
a role similar to the FLCCCC here in the US. So anyway, this is a meta-analysis that Tess Laurie
and others did of all of the available evidence. And it's quite compelling. People can look for
it on my Twitter. I will put it up and people can find it there.
So what about dose here? In terms of safety, what do we understand about the kind of dose
required to have that level of effectiveness and what do we understand about the safety of that
kind of dose? So let me just say I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a biologist. I'm on ivermectin in
lieu of vaccination. In terms of dosage, there is one reason for concern, which is that the most
effective dose for prophylaxis involves something like weekly administration. And that that is,
because that is not a historical pattern of use for the drug, it is possible that there is some
long-term implication of being on it weekly for a long period of time. There's not a strong
indication of that, the safety signal that we have over people using the drug over many years
and using it in high doses. In fact, Dr. Corey told me yesterday that there are cases in which
people have made calculation errors and taken a massive overdose of the drug and had no ill effect.
So anyway, there's lots of reasons to think the drug is comparatively safe, but no drug is perfectly
safe. And I do worry about the long-term implications of taking it. I also think it's very likely
because the drug is administered in a dose something like, let's say, 15 milligrams for
somebody my size once a week after you've gone through the initial double dose that you take
48 hours apart, it is apparent that if the amount of drug in your system is sufficient to be protective
at the end of the week, then it was probably far too high at the beginning of the week. So there's
a question about whether or not you could flatten out the intake so that the amount of ivermectin
goes down, but the protection remains. I have little doubt that that would be discovered
if we looked for it. But that said, it does seem to be quite safe, highly effective at preventing
COVID. The 86% number is plenty high enough for us to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction in light of
its R-NOT number of slightly more than two. And so why we are not using it is a bit of a mystery.
So even if everything you said now turns out to be not correct,
it is nevertheless obvious that it's sufficiently promising and it always has been in order to
merit rigorous scientific exploration, investigation, doing a lot of studies,
and certainly not censoring the science or the discussion of it. So before we talk about
the various vaccines for COVID-19, I'd like to talk to you about censorship. Given everything
you're saying, why did YouTube and other places censor discussion of ivermectin?
Well, there's a question about why they say they did it and there's a question about why
they actually did it. Now, it is worth mentioning that YouTube is part of a consortium. It is
partnered with Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Washington Post, some other
notable organizations, and that this group has appointed itself the arbiter of truth. In effect,
in effect, they have decided to control discussion ostensibly to prevent the distribution of
misinformation. Now, how have they chosen to do that? In this case, they have chosen to simply
utilize the recommendations of the who and the CDC and apply them as if they are synonymous
with scientific truth. Problem, even at their best, the who and CDC are not scientific entities.
They are entities that are about public health. Public health has this, whether it's right or
not, and I believe I disagree with it, but it has this self-assigned right to lie that comes from
the fact that there is game theory that works against, for example, a successful vaccination
campaign, that if everybody else takes a vaccine and therefore the herd becomes immune through
vaccination and you decide not to take a vaccine, then you benefit from the immunity of the herd
without having taken the risk. So people who do best are the people who opt out. That's a hazard,
and the who and CDC as public health entities effectively oversimplify stories in order that
that game theory does not cause a predictable tragedy of the comments. With that said, once that
right to lie exists, then it turns out to serve the interests of, for example, pharmaceutical
companies which have emergency use authorizations that require that they're not be a safe and
effective treatment and have immunity from liability for harms caused by their product.
So that's a recipe for disaster, right? You don't need to be a sophisticated thinker
about complex systems to see the hazard of immunizing a company from the harm of its own
product at the same time that that product can only exist in the market if some other product
that works better somehow fails to be noticed. So somehow YouTube is doing the bidding of Merck
and others. Whether it knows that that's what it's doing, I have no idea. I think this may
be another case of an autopilot that thinks it's doing the right thing because it's parroting the
corrupt wisdom of the who and the CDC, but the who and the CDC have been wrong again and again
in this pandemic. And the irony here is that with YouTube coming after me, well, my channel has been
right where the who and CDC have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic. So how
is it that YouTube is censoring us because the who and CDC disagree with us when in fact,
in past disagreements, we've been right and they've been wrong?
There's so much to talk about here. So I've heard this many times actually on the inside of YouTube
and with colleagues that I've talked about, talked with is they kind of in a very casual way say
their job is simply to slow or prevent the spread of misinformation. And they say like that's an
easy thing to do. Like to know what is true or not is an easy thing to do. And so from the YouTube
perspective, I think they basically outsource of the task of knowing what is true or not to
public institutions that on a basic Google search claim to be the arbiters of truth.
So if you were YouTube, who are exceptionally profitable and exceptionally powerful in terms
of controlling what people get to see or not, what would you do? Would you take a stand,
a public stand against the WHO who CDC? Or would you instead say, you know what, let's open the
dam and let any video on anything fly? What do you do here? If you say you were put, if Brett
Weinstein was put in charge of YouTube for a month in this most critical of times where YouTube
actually has incredible amounts of power to educate the populace, to give power of knowledge to the
populace such that they can reform institutions, what would you do? How would you run YouTube?
Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is actually quite simple.
The founders, the American founders settled on a counterintuitive formulation that people
should be free to say anything. They should be free from the government blocking them from doing
so. They did not imagine that in formulating that right, that most of what was said would be of high
quality, nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things. What they correctly reasoned
was that the benefit of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost, which everyone
understands to be substantial. What I would say is they could not have anticipated the impact,
the centrality of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. If they had,
they would not have limited the First Amendment as they did. They clearly understood that the power
of the federal government was so great that it needed to be limited by granting explicitly the
right of citizens to say anything. In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook may be more powerful
in this moment than the federal government of their worst nightmares could have been.
The power that these entities have to control thought and to shift civilization is so great
that we need to have those same protections. It doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said,
but it means that nothing has changed about the cost-benefit analysis of building the right
to censor. If I were running YouTube, the limit of what should be allowed is the limit of the law.
Right? If what you are doing is legal, then it should not be YouTube's place to limit what gets
said or who gets to hear it. That is between speakers and audience. Will harm come from that?
Of course it will. But will net harm come from it? No, I don't believe it will. I believe that
allowing everything to be said does allow a process in which better ideas do come to the fore
and win out. You believe that in the end, when there's complete freedom to share ideas, that
truth will win out? What I've noticed just as a brief side comment that certain things become viral
regardless of their truth, I've noticed that things that are dramatic and or funny,
like things that become memes don't have to be grounded in truth. What worries me there
is that we basically maximize for drama versus maximize for truth in a system where everything
is free. That's worrying in the time of emergency. Well, yes, it's all worrying in time of emergency
to be sure. But I want you to notice that what you've happened on is actually an analog for a much
deeper and older problem. Human beings are the, we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest
slate that nature has ever devised. And there's a reason for that. It's where our flexibility comes
from. We have effectively, we are robots in which a large fraction of the cognitive capacity has
been or of the behavioral capacity has been offloaded to the software layer, which gets
written and rewritten over evolutionary time. That means effectively that much of what we are,
in fact, the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural layer and the conscious
layer and not in the hardware hard coding layer. That layer is prone to make errors, right? And
anybody who's watched a child grow up knows that children make absurd errors all the time, right?
That's part of the process as we were discussing earlier. It is also true that as you look across
a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense. It's garbage.
But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread on the short term does not say that over
the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty
to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct.
And you have to keep that in mind. It's not like the genome, right? Everything is happening at a
much higher rate. Things are being created, they're being destroyed. And I can't say that, you know,
I mean, obviously we've seen totalitarianism arise many times and it's very destructive each
time it does. So it's not like, hey, freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced
a whole lot of carnage, but the question is over time, does it produce more open, fairer,
more decent societies? And I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the
pattern. I believe so as well. The thing is in the short term, freedom of speech, absolute freedom
of speech can be quite destructive, but you nevertheless have to hold on to that because
in the long term, I think you and I I guess are optimistic in the sense that good ideas will
win out. I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say I haven't heard a
better idea. Yeah. I would also point out that there's something very significant in this question
of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring,
which is the majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense. That's automatic. But the heterodoxy
at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas,
is the key to progress. So if you decide, hey, the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid
of it. Hey, that's a strong win. We're getting rid of 99% garbage for 1% something or other.
And the point is, yeah, but that 1% something or other is the key. You're throwing out the key.
And so that's what YouTube is doing. Frankly, I think at the point that it started censoring my
channel, in the immediate aftermath of this major reversal of her lab leak, it should have looked
at itself and said, well, what the hell are we doing? Who are we censoring? We're censoring
somebody who was just right in a conflict with the very same people on whose behalf we are now
censoring. That should have caused them to wake up. So you said one approach, if you're on YouTube,
was to basically let all videos go that do not violate the law? Well, I should fix that. I believe
that that is the basic principle. Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between
ideas and personal attacks, doxing, these other things. So I agree, there's no value in allowing
people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now,
how you draw that line, I don't know. But what I'm talking about is, yes, people should be free to
traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad. And hopefully,
that process results in better ideas winning out. Yeah, there's an interesting line between
ideas like the Earth is flat, which I believe you should not censor. And then you start to
encroach on personal attacks. So doxing, yes, but not even getting to that. There's a certain point
where it's like, that's no longer ideas, that's somehow not productive, even if it feels like
believing the Earth is flat, it's somehow productive. Because maybe there's a tiny
percent chance it is. It just feels like personal attacks, it doesn't... Well, I'm torn on this
because there's assholes in this world, there's fraudulent people in this world. So sometimes
personal attacks are useful to reveal that. But there's a line you can cross. There's a comedy
where people make fun of others. I think that's amazing, that's very powerful, and that's very
useful, even if it's painful. But then there's a certain line, it's a gray area where you cross,
where it's no longer in any possible world productive. And that's a really weird gray area
for YouTube to operate in. And it feels like it should be a crowdsourced thing where people vote
on it, but then again, do you trust the majority to vote on what is crossing the line or not?
I mean, this is where... This is really interesting on this particular, like the scientific aspect
of this. Do you think YouTube should take more of a stance? Not censoring, but to actually have
scientists within YouTube having these kinds of discussions, and then be able to almost speak
out in a transparent way. This is what we're going to let this video stand, but here's all these
other opinions. Almost like take a more active role in its recommendation system, in trying to
present a full picture to you. Right now, they're not. The recommender systems are not human fine
tuned. They're all based on how you click, and there's this clustering algorithms. They're not
taking an active role on giving you the full spectrum of ideas in the space of science.
They just censor or not. Well, at the moment, it's going to be pretty hard to compel me that
these people should be trusted with any sort of curation or comment on matters of evidence,
because they have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it well.
You could make such an argument, and I guess I'm open to the idea of institutions
that would look something like YouTube that would be capable of offering something valuable.
I mean, and even just the fact of them literally curating things and putting some videos next to
others implies something. So yeah, there's a question to be answered, but at the moment, no.
At the moment, what it is doing is quite literally putting not only individual humans in
tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion of useful tools and making tools that are
more hazardous than has been acknowledged seem safe, but it is also placing humanity in danger
of a permanent relationship with this pathogen. I cannot emphasize enough how expensive that is.
It's effectively incalculable if the relationship becomes permanent. The number of people who will
ultimately suffer and die from it is indefinitely large.
Yeah, currently, the algorithm is very rabbit hole driven, meaning if you
click on the Flat Earth videos, that's all you're going to be presented with,
and you're not going to be nicely presented with arguments against the Flat Earth,
and the flip side of that, if you watch like quantum mechanics videos or no, general relativity videos,
it's very rare you're going to get a recommendation, have you considered the Earth as flat?
And I think you should have both. Same with vaccine, videos that present the
power and incredible like biology, genetics, virology about the vaccine,
you're rarely going to get videos from well respected scientific minds presenting possible
dangers of the vaccine, and the vice versa is true as well, which is if you're looking at the dangers
of the vaccine on YouTube, you're not going to get the highest quality of videos recommended to you.
And I'm not talking about like manually inserted CDC videos, they're like the most
untrustworthy things you can possibly watch about how everybody should take the vaccine,
it's the safest thing ever. No, it's about incredible, again, MIT colleagues of mine,
incredible biologists, virologists that I'll talk about the details of how the mRNA vaccines
work and all those kinds of things. I think maybe this is me with the AI hat on,
is I think the algorithm can fix a lot of this. And YouTube should build better algorithms and
trust that to a couple of complete freedom of speech to expand what people are able to think
about, present always varied views, not balanced in some artificial way, hard coded way, but balanced
in a way that's crowdsourced. I think that's an algorithm problem that could be solved.
Because then you can delegate it to the algorithm, as opposed to this hard code
censorship of basically creating artificial boundaries on what can and can't be discussed,
instead creating a full spectrum of exploration that can be done and trusting the intelligence
of people to do the exploration. Well, there's a lot there, I would say, we have to keep in
mind that we're talking about a publicly held company with shareholders and obligations to them,
and that that may make it impossible. And I remember many years ago, back in the early days
of Google, I remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search. It used to be that Google,
if you searched, came up with the same thing for everyone. And then it got personalized. And for
a while, it was possible to turn off the personalization, which was still not great, because
if everybody else is looking at a personalized search, and you can tune into one that isn't
personalized, that doesn't tell you why the world is sounding the way it is. But nonetheless,
it was at least an option. And then that vanished. And the problem is, I think this is
literally deranging us, that in effect, I mean, what you're describing is unthinkable. It is
unthinkable that in the face of a campaign to vaccinate people in order to reach herd immunity
that YouTube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines when this is how hazardous the
vaccines are is an unsettled question. Why is it unthinkable? That doesn't make any sense from
a company perspective. If intelligent people in large amounts are open-minded and are thinking
through the hazards and the benefits of a vaccine, a company should find the best videos
to present what people are thinking about. Well, let's come up with a hypothetical.
Okay, let's come up with a very deadly disease for which there's a vaccine that is very safe,
though not perfectly safe. And we are then faced with YouTube trying to figure out what to do
for somebody searching on vaccine safety. Suppose it is necessary in order to drive
the pathogen to extinction, something like smallpox, that people get on board with the vaccine.
But there's a tiny fringe of people who thinks that the vaccine is a mind control agent.
So should YouTube direct people to the only claims against this vaccine, which is that it's a mind
control agent, when in fact the vaccine is very safe, whatever that means? If that were the actual
configuration of the puzzle, then YouTube would be doing active harm pointing you to this other
video potentially. Now, yes, I would love to live in a world where people are up to the challenge
of sorting that out. But my basic point would be, if it's an evidentiary question and there is
essentially no evidence that the vaccine is a mind control agent and there's plenty of evidence that
the vaccine is safe, then while you look for this video, we're going to give you this one,
puts it on a par, right? So for the mind that's tracking how much thought is there behind it's
safe versus how much thought is there behind it's a mind control agent will result in artificially
elevating this. Now, in the current case, what we've seen is not this at all. We have seen
evidence obscured in order to create a false story about safety. And we saw the inverse
with ivermectin. We saw a campaign to portray the drug as more dangerous and less effective than
the evidence clearly suggested it was. So we're not talking about a comparable thing. But I guess
my point is the algorithmic solution that you point to creates a problem of its own, which is
that it means that the way to get exposure is to generate something fringy. If you're the only
thing on some fringe, then suddenly YouTube would be recommending those things. And that's
obviously a gameable system at best. Yeah, but the solution to that, I know you're
creating a thought experiment, maybe playing a little bit of a devil's advocate. I think the
solution to that is not to limit the algorithm in the case of the super deadly virus. It's for the
scientists to step up and become better communicators, more charismatic, is fight the battle of ideas,
sort of create better videos. Like if the virus is truly deadly, you have a lot more ammunition,
a lot more data, a lot more material to work with in terms of communicating with the public.
So be better at communicating and stop being, you have to start trusting the intelligence
of people and also being transparent and playing the game of the internet, which is like,
what is the internet hungry for, I believe? Authenticity? Stop looking like you're full of
shit. It's the scientific community. If there's any flaw that I currently see, especially the people
that are in public office, like Anthony Fauci, they look like they're full of shit. And I know
they're brilliant. Why don't they look more authentic? So they're losing that game. And I think
a lot of people observing this entire system now, younger scientists are seeing this and saying,
okay, if I want to continue being a scientist in the public eye, and I want to be effective in my
job, I'm going to have to be a lot more authentic. So they're learning the lesson, this evolutionary
system is working. So is there's just a younger generation of minds coming up that I think will
do a much better job in this battle of ideas that when the much more dangerous virus is
coming along, they'll be able to be better communicators. At least that's the hope.
The using the algorithm to control that is, I feel like is a big problem. So you're going to
have the same problem with a deadly virus as with the current virus. If you let YouTube draw hard
lines by the PR and the marketing people versus the broad community of scientists.
Well, in some sense, you're suggesting something that's close kin to what I was saying about
freedom of expression ultimately provides an advantage to better ideas. So I'm in agreement,
broadly speaking. But I would also say there's probably some sort of, let's imagine the world
that you propose where YouTube shows you the alternative point of view. That has the problem
that I suggest. But one thing you could do is you could give us the tools to understand what
we're looking at, right? You could give us so first of all, there's something I think
myopic, solipsistic, narcissistic about a an algorithm that serves shareholders by showing
you what you want to see rather than what you need to know, right? That's the distinction is
flattering you, you know, playing to your blind spot is something that algorithm will figure out,
but it's not healthy for us all to have Google playing to our blind spot. It's very, very dangerous.
So what I really want is analytics that allow me or maybe options and analytics. The options
should allow me to see what alternative perspectives are being explored, right? So here's the thing
I'm searching and it leads me down this road, right? Let's let's say it's ivermectin. Okay,
I find all of this evidence that ivermectin works. I find all of these discussions and people talk
about various protocols and this and that. And then I could say, all right, what is the other side?
And I could see who is searching not as individuals, but what demographics are searching
alternatives. And maybe you could even combine it with something Reddit like where effectively,
let's say that there was a position that I don't know that that a vaccine is a mind control device
and you could have a steelman this argument competition effectively. And the better answers
that steelman and as well as possible would rise to the top. And so you could read the top three
or four explanations about why this really credibly is a mind control product. And you can say, well,
that doesn't really add up. I can check these three things myself and they can't possibly be
right, right? And you could dismiss it. And then as an argument that was credible, let's say
plate tectonics before that was an accepted concept, you'd say, wait a minute, there is evidence
for plate tectonics. Crazy as it sounds that the continents are floating around on liquid.
Actually, that's not so implausible. You know, we've got these subduction zones. We've got a geology
that is compatible. We've got puzzle piece continents that seem to fit together. Wow,
that's a surprising amount of evidence for that position. So I'm going to file some Bayesian
probability with it that's updated for the fact that actually the steelman argument is better
than I was expecting, right? So I could imagine something like that where, A, I would love the
search to be indifferent to who's searching, right? The solipsistic thing is too dangerous.
So the search could be general. So we would all get a sense for what everybody else was seeing to.
And then some layer that didn't have anything to do with what YouTube points you to or not,
but allowed you to see the general pattern of adherence to searching for information and,
again, a layer in which those things could be defended so you could hear what a good argument
sounded like rather than just hear a caricatured argument. Yeah, and also reward people, creators
that have demonstrated like a track record of open-mindedness and correctness as much as it
could be measured over a long term and sort of, I mean, a lot of this maps to incentivizing
good long-term behavior, not immediate kind of dopamine rush kind of signals.
I think ultimately, the algorithm on the individual level should optimize for personal
growth, long-term happiness, just growth intellectually, growth in terms of lifestyle,
personally, and so on, as opposed to immediate. I think that's going to build a better site,
not even just like truth, because I think truth is a complicated thing,
it's more just you growing as a person, exploring in the space of ideas, changing your
mind often, increasing the level to which you're open-minded, the knowledge base you're operating
from, the willingness to empathize with others, all those kinds of things the algorithm should
optimize for, like creating a better human at the individual level. I think that's a great
business model because the person that's using this tool will then be happier with themselves
for having used it and will be a lifelong, quote unquote, customer. I think it's a great
business model to make a happy, open-minded, knowledgeable, better human being.
It's a terrible business model under the current system. What you want is to build the system in
which it is a great business model. Why is it a terrible model? Because it will be decimated by
those who play to the short term. I don't think so. I mean, I think we're living it.
Well, no, because if you have the alternative that presents itself, it points out the emperor
has no clothes. I mean, it points out that YouTube is operating in this way, Twitter's
operating in this way, Facebook is operating in this way. How long term would you like the wisdom
to prove that? Even though a week is better once it's currently happening. Right, but the problem
is if a week loses out to an hour, right? I don't think it loses out. It loses out in the short
term. That's my point. At least you're a great communicator and you basically say, look, here's
the metrics. A lot of it is how people actually feel. This is what people experience with social
media. They look back at the previous month and say, I felt shitty in a lot of days because of
social media. If you look back at the previous few weeks and say, wow, I'm a better person because
that month happened, they immediately choose the product that's going to lead to that. That's what
love for products looks like. A lot of people love their Tesla car or iPhone or beautiful
design. That's what love looks like. You look back, I'm a better person for having used this thing.
Well, you got to ask yourself the question though, if this is such a great business model,
why isn't it evolving? Why don't we see it? Honestly, it's competence. It's not easy to build new,
it's not easy to build products, tools, systems on new ideas. It's kind of a new idea. We've
gone through this. Everything we're seeing now comes from the ideas of the initial birth of the
internet. There just needs to be new sets of tools that are incentivizing long-term personal
growth and happiness. That's it. Right. But what we have is a market that doesn't favor this.
For one thing, we had an alternative to Facebook that looked, you owned your own data, it wasn't
exploitative and Facebook bought a huge interest in it and it died. I mean, who do you know who's
on diaspora? The execution there was not good. Right. But it could have gotten better. Right.
I don't think that the argument that why hasn't somebody done it, a good argument for it's not
going to completely destroy all of Twitter and Facebook when somebody does it or Twitter will
catch up and pivot to the algorithm. This is not what I'm saying. There's obviously great
ideas that remain unexplored because nobody has gotten to the foothill that would allow you to
explore them. That's true. But an internet that was non-predatory is an obvious idea and many of
us know that we want it and many of us have seen prototypes of it and we don't move because there's
no audience there. So the network effects cause you to stay with the predatory internet.
But let me just, I wasn't kidding about build the system in which your idea is a great business
plan. So in our upcoming book, Heather and I in our last chapter explore something called the
fourth frontier and fourth frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version of civilization,
which we freely admit we can't tell you very much about. It's something that would have to be,
we would have to prototype our way there. We would have to effectively navigate our way there.
But the result would be very much like what you're describing. It would be something
that effectively liberates humans meaningfully. And most importantly, it has to feel like growth
without depending on growth. In other words, human beings are creatures that like every other creature
is effectively looking for growth. We are looking for underexploited or unexploited opportunities.
And when we find them, our ancestors, for example, if they happened into a new valley that was
unexplored by people, their population would grow until it had carrying capacity. So there would
be this great feeling of there's abundance until you had carrying capacity, which is inevitable,
and then zero sum dynamics would set in. So in order for human beings to flourish long term,
the way to get there is to satisfy the desire for growth without hooking it to actual growth,
which only moves in fits and starts. And this is actually, I believe, the key to avoiding
these spasms of human tragedy when in the absence of growth, people do something that causes their
population to experience growth, which is they go and make war on or commit genocide against some
other population, which is something we obviously have to stop. By the way, this is a hunter-gatherers
guide to the 21st century co-authored with your wife, Heather, being released this September.
I believe you said you're going to do a little bit of a preview videos on each chapter leading
up to the release. So I'm looking forward to the last chapter as well as the previous one.
I have a few questions on that. So you generally have faith to clarify that technology could be
the thing that empowers this kind of future? Well, if you just let technology evolve,
it's going to be our undoing. One of the things that I fault my libertarian friends for
is this faith that the market is going to find solutions without destroying us. And my sense is
I'm a very strong believer in markets. I believe in their power even above some market fundamentalists,
but what I don't believe is that they should be allowed to plot our course.
Markets are very good at figuring out how to do things. They are not good at all about figuring
out what we should do, what we should want. We have to tell markets what we want, and then they
can tell us how to do it best. And if we adopted that kind of pro-market, but in a context where
it's not steering, where human well-being is actually the driver, we can do remarkable things and
the technology that emerges would naturally be enhancing of human well-being. Perfectly so,
no, but overwhelmingly so. But at the moment, markets are finding our every defect of character
and exploiting them and making huge profits and making us worse to each other in the process.
Before we leave COVID-19, let me ask you about a very difficult topic,
which is the vaccines. So I took the Pfizer vaccine, the two shots. You did not. You have
been taking ivermectin. So one of the arguments against the discussion of ivermectin is that
it prevents people from being fully willing to get the vaccine. How would you compare ivermectin
and the vaccine for COVID-19? All right, that's a good question. I would say, first of all,
there are some hazards with the vaccine that people need to be aware of. There are some things
that we cannot rule out and for which there is some evidence. The two that I think people should
be tracking is the possibility, some would say a likelihood, that a vaccine of this nature,
that is to say very narrowly focused on a single antigen, is an evolutionary pressure
that will drive the emergence of variants that will escape the protection that comes from the
vaccine. So this is a hazard. It is a particular hazard in light of the fact that these vaccines
have a substantial number of breakthrough cases. So one danger is that a person who has been
vaccinated will shed viruses that are specifically less visible or invisible to the immunity created
by the vaccines. So we may be creating the next pandemic by applying the pressure of vaccines
at a point that it doesn't make sense to. The other danger has to do with something
called antibody dependent enhancement, which is something that we see in certain diseases
like dengue fever. You may know that dengue one gets a case and then their second case is much
more devastating. So break bone fever is when you get your second case of dengue and dengue
effectively utilizes the immune response that is produced by prior exposure to attack the body
in ways that it is incapable of doing before exposure. So this is apparently, this pattern
has apparently blocked past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses, whether it
will happen here or not. It is still too early to say, but before we even get to the question
of harm done to individuals by these vaccines, we have to ask about what the overall impact is
going to be. And it's not clear in the way people think it is that if we vaccinate enough people,
the pandemic will end. It could be that we vaccinate people and make the pandemic worse.
And while nobody can say for sure that that's where we're headed, it is at least something to
be aware of. So don't vaccines usually create that kind of evolutionary pressure to create
more deadlier different strains of the virus? So is there something particular with these mRNA
vaccines that's uniquely dangerous in this regard? Well, it's not even just the mRNA vaccines. The
mRNA vaccines and the adeno vector DNA vaccine all share the same vulnerability, which is they are
very narrowly focused on one subunit of the spike protein. So that is a very concentrated
evolutionary signal. We are also deploying it in mid-pandemic and it takes time for immunity
to develop. So part of the problem here, if you inoculated a population before encounter with
a pathogen, then there might be substantially enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from
happening. But in this case, we are inoculating people as they are encountering those who are
sick with the disease. And what that means is the disease is now faced with a lot of opportunities
to effectively, evolutionarily practice escape strategies. So one thing is the timing. The
other thing is the narrow focus. Now, in a traditional vaccine, you would typically not have
one antigen, right? You would have basically a virus full of antigens and the immune system
would therefore produce a broader response. So that is the case for people who have had COVID,
right? They have an immunity that is broader because it wasn't so focused on one part of the
spike protein. So anyway, there is something unique here. So these platforms create that
special hazard. They also have components that we haven't used before in people. So for example,
the lipid nanoparticles that coat the RNAs are distributing themselves around the body in a
way that will have unknown consequences. So anyway, there's reason for concern.
Is it possible for you to steal man the argument that everybody should get vaccinated?
Of course. The argument that everybody should get vaccinated is that nothing is perfectly safe.
Phase three trials showed good safety for the vaccines. Now, that may or may not be actually
true. But what we saw suggested high degree of efficacy and a high degree of safety for the
vaccines that inoculating people quickly and therefore dropping the landscape of available
victims for the pathogen to a very low number so that herd immunity drives it to extinction
requires us all to take our share of the risk. And that because driving it to extinction should
be our highest priority that really people shouldn't think too much about the various nuances
because overwhelmingly fewer people will die if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine
than will die from COVID if they're not vaccinated. And with the vaccine as it currently is being
deployed, that is a quite a likely scenario that everything, the virus will fade away
in the following sense that the probability that a more dangerous strain will be created
is nonzero, but it's not 50%. It's something smaller. And so the most like, well, I don't know,
maybe you disagree with that, but the scenario we're most likely to see now that the vaccine is
here is that the virus, the effects of the virus will fade away. First of all, I don't believe
that the probability of creating a worse pandemic is low enough to discount. I think the probability
is fairly high. And frankly, we are seeing a wave of variants that we will have to do a careful
analysis to figure out what exactly that has to do with campaigns of vaccination, where they have
been, where they haven't been, where the variants emerged from. But I believe that what we are seeing
is a disturbing pattern that reflects that those who were advising caution may well have been right.
The data here, by the way, and the small tangent is terrible.
Terrible. Right. And why is it terrible is another question, right?
This is where I started getting angry. There's an obvious opportunity for exceptionally good
data, for exceptionally rigorous, like even the website for self-reporting side effects for,
not side effects, but negative effects. Adverse events.
Adverse events, sorry, for the vaccine. There's many things I could say from both the study
perspective. But mostly, let me just put on my hat of HTML and web design. It's like the worst
website. It makes it so unpleasant to report. It makes it so unclear what you're reporting.
If somebody actually has serious effects, if you have very mild effects, what are the incentives
for you to even use that crappy website with many pages and forms that don't make any sense?
If you have adverse effects, what are the incentives for you to use that website?
What is the trust that you have that this information will be used? Well, all those kinds
of things. And the data about who's getting vaccinated, anonymized data about who's getting
vaccinated, where, when, with what vaccine coupled with the adverse effects, all of that we should
be collecting. Instead, we're completely not. We're doing it in a crappy way and using that
crappy data to make conclusions that you then twist. You're basically collecting in a way that can
arrive at whatever conclusions you want. And the data is being collected by the institutions,
by governments. And so therefore, it's obviously they're going to try to construct any kind of
narratives they want based on this crappy data. Reminds me of much of psychology, the field that
I love, but is flawed in many fundamental ways. So rent over, but coupled with the dangers that
you're speaking to, we don't have even the data to understand the dangers.
Yeah. I'm going to pick up on your rant and say estimates of the degree of under-reporting in
VAERS are that it is 10% of the real to 100%. And that's the system for reporting. Yeah. The VAERS
system is the system for reporting adverse events. So in the US, we have above 5,000
unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination. That is an
undercount almost certainly. And by a large factor, we don't know how large I've seen estimates
25,000 dead in the US alone. Now, you can make the argument that, okay, that's a large number,
but the necessity of immunizing the population to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction
is such that it's an acceptable number. But I would point out that that actually
does not make any sense. And the reason it doesn't make any sense is actually there are
several reasons. One, if that was really your point that, yes, many, many people are going to die,
but many more will die if we don't do this. Were that your approach, you would not be
inoculating people who had had COVID-19, which is a large population. There's no reason to
expose those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them
is greater. So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face a risk of death
if this was really about an acceptable number of deaths arising out of this, the set of vaccines.
I would also point out, there's something incredibly bizarre and I would, I struggle to find
language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because
children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects because they are going to live longer and because
this is earlier in their development. Therefore, it impacts systems that are still forming.
They tolerate COVID well. And so the benefit to them is very small. And so the only argument
for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think. And therefore,
they may be integral to the way the virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that
we are inoculating children, and there has been some revision in the last day or two about the
recommendation on this because of the adverse events that have shown up in children, but
to the extent that we were vaccinating children, we were doing it to protect old,
infirm people who are the most likely to succumb to COVID-19. What society puts children in danger,
robs children of life to save old, infirm people? That's upside down. So there's something about
the way we are going about vaccinating, who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending
don't exist that suggests that to some set of people, vaccinating people is a good in and of
itself, that that is the objective of the exercise, not herd immunity. And the last thing, and I'm
sorry, I don't want to prevent you from jumping in here. But the second reason, in addition to the
fact that we're exposing people to danger, that we should not be exposing them to.
By the way, as a tiny tangent, another huge part of this soup that should have been part of it,
that's an incredible solution, is large-scale testing. But that might be another couple of
hour conversation, but there's these solutions that are obvious that were available from the
very beginning. So you could argue that Ivorrectin is not that obvious, but maybe the whole point
is you have aggressive, very fast research that leads to meta-analysis and then large-scale
production and deployment. Okay, at least that possibility should be seriously considered,
coupled with a serious consideration of large-scale deployment of testing, at-home testing,
that could have accelerated the speed at which we reached that herd immunity. But I don't even want to...
Well, let me just say, I am also completely shocked that we did not get on high-quality
testing early and that we are still suffering from this even now. Because just the simple
ability to track where the virus moves between people would tell us a lot about its mode of
transmission, which would allow us to protect ourselves better. Instead, that information
was hard won and for no good reason. So I also find this mysterious.
You've spoken with Eric Weinstein, your brother, on his podcast, The Portal, about the ideas that
eventually led to the paper you published titled, The Reserved Capacity Hypothesis.
I think first, can you explain this paper and the ideas that led up to it?
Sure. Easier to explain the conclusion of the paper. There's a question about why a creature
that can replace its cells with new cells grows feeble and inefficient with age. We call that
process, which is otherwise called aging. We call it senescence. And senescence in this paper,
it is hypothesized, is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention
feature of our bodies. That each cell has a limit on the number of times it can divide.
There are a few cells in the body that are exceptional, but most of our cells can only
divide a limited number of times. That's called the Hayflick limit. And the Hayflick limit
reduces the ability of the organism to replace tissues. It therefore
results in a failure over time of maintenance and repair. And that explains why we become
decrepit as we grow old. The question was, why would that be, especially in light of the fact
that the mechanism that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce is something
called a telomere. A telomere is not a gene, but it's a DNA sequence at the ends of our chromosomes
that is just simply repetitive. And the number of repeats functions like a counter.
So there's a number of repeats that you have after development is finished. And then each
time the cell divides, a little bit of telomere is lost. And at the point that the telomere becomes
critically short, the cell stops dividing even though it still has the capacity to do so.
It stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes than it did when it had more
telomere. So what my work did was it looked at the fact that the telomeric shortening was being
studied by two different groups. It was being studied by people who were interested in counteracting
the aging process. And it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion by people who were
interested in tumorogenesis and cancer. The thought being, because it was true that when
one looked into tumors, they always had telomerase active. That's the enzyme that lengthens our
telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt to the lengthening of
telomeres in order to counteract cancer. And the folks who were studying the senescence process
were interested in lengthening telomeres in order to generate greater repair capacity.
And my point was evolutionarily speaking, this looks like a pleiotropic effect that the
genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves
are providing a benefit in youth, which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer
at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient and eventually die.
And that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate
enough to know, George Williams, one of the great 20th century evolutionists who argued
that senescence would have to be caused by pleiotropic genes that cause early life benefits
at unavoidable late life costs. And although this isn't the exact nature of the system he
predicted, it matches what he was expecting in many regards to a shocking degree.
That said, the focus of the paper is about the, let me just read the abstract.
We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed at the end of the abstract.
We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed to increase reproductive
output simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually
eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly
elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice where their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled.
These animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation.
So basically using these mice is not going to lead to the right kinds of conclusions.
Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate
tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence. So I think, especially with your
discussion with Eric, the conclusion of this paper has to do with the fact that we shouldn't be
using these mice to test the safety or to make conclusions about cancer or senescence. Is that
the basic takeaway? Basically saying that the length of these telomeres is an important variable
to consider. Well, let's put it this way. I think there was a reason that the world of scientists
who was working on telomeres did not spot the pleiotropic relationship that was the key argument
in my paper. The reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result that everybody knew which
seemed inconsistent. The result was that mice have very long telomeres, but they do not have
very long lives. Now, we can talk about what the actual meaning of don't have very long lives is,
but in the end, I was confronted with a hypothesis that would explain a great many features of the
way mammals and indeed vertebrates age, but it was inconsistent with one result. And at first,
I thought maybe there's something wrong with the result. Maybe this is one of these cases where
the result was achieved once through some bad protocol and everybody else was repeating it.
Didn't turn out to be the case. Many laboratories had established that mice had ultra long telomeres.
And so I began to wonder whether or not there was something about the breeding protocols
that generated these mice. And what that would predict is that the mice that have long telomeres
would be laboratory mice and that wild mice would not. And Carol Greider, who agreed to collaborate
with me, tested that hypothesis and showed that it was indeed true that wild-derived mice or at
least mice that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time did not have ultra-long
telomeres. Now, what this implied though, as you read, is that our breeding protocols generate
lengthening of telomeres. And the implication of that is that the animals that have these very
long telomeres will be hyper-prone to create tumors. They will be extremely resistant to
toxins because they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace any damaged tissue. And so,
ironically, if you give one of these ultra-long telomere lab mice a toxin, if the toxin doesn't
outright kill it, it may actually increase its lifespan because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy.
So the reason that chemotherapy works is that dividing cells are more vulnerable than cells
that are not dividing. And so if this mouse has effectively had its cancer protection turned off
and it has cells dividing too rapidly and you give it a toxin, you will slow down its tumors
faster than you harm its other tissues. And so you'll get a paradoxical result that actually
some drug that's toxic seems to benefit the mouse. Now, I don't think that that was understood
before I published my paper. Now, I'm pretty sure it has to be. And the problem is that this actually
is a system that serves pharmaceutical companies that have the difficult job of bringing compounds
to market, many of which will be toxic. Maybe all of them will be toxic. And these mice predispose
our system to declare these toxic compounds safe. And in fact, I believe we've seen the errors that
result from using these mice a number of times, most famously with Vioxx, which turned out to do
conspicuous heart damage. Why do you think this paper on this idea has not gotten significant
traction? Well, my collaborator, Carol Greider, said something to me that rings in my ears to this
day. She initially, after she showed that laboratory mice have anomalously long telomeres and that
wild mice don't have long telomeres, I asked her where she was going to publish that result so that
I could cite it in my paper. And she said that she was going to keep the result in house rather than
publish it. And at the time, I was a young graduate student. I didn't really understand what she was
saying. But in some sense, the knowledge that a model organism is broken in a way that creates
the likelihood that certain results will be reliably generatable, you can publish a paper and make a
big splash with such a thing, or you can exploit the fact that you know how those models will
misbehave and other people don't. So there's a question, if somebody is motivated cynically,
and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight into biology because they predict things
better than others do, knowing where the flaw is so that your predictions come out true is
advantageous. At the same time, I can't help but imagine that the pharmaceutical industry,
when it figured out that the mice were predisposed to suggest that drugs were safe, didn't leap to
leap to fix the problem, because in some sense, it was the perfect cover for the difficult job of
bringing drugs to market and then discovering their actual toxicity profile, right? This made
things look safer than they were. And I believe a lot of profits have likely been generated downstream.
So to kind of play devil's advocate, it's also possible that this particular the length of the
telomeres is not a strong variable for the conclusions for the drug development and for
the conclusions that Carol and others have been studying. Is it possible for that to be the case?
So one reason she and others could be ignoring this is because it's not a strong variable.
Well, I don't believe so. And in fact, at the point that I went to publish my paper,
Carol published her result. She did so in a way that did not make a huge splash.
I apologize if I don't know how. What was the emphasis of her publication of that paper?
Was it purely just kind of showing data? Or was there more, because in your paper,
there's a kind of more of a philosophical statement as well?
Well, my paper was motivated by interest in the evolutionary dynamics around senescence. I wasn't
pursuing grants or anything like that. I was just working on a puzzle I thought was interesting.
Carol has of course gone on to win a Nobel Prize for her co-discovery with Elizabeth
Greider of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. But anyway, she's a heavy hitter
in the academic world. I don't know exactly what her purpose was. I do know that she told
me she wasn't planning to publish. And I do know that I discovered that she was in the process of
publishing very late. And when I asked her to send me the paper to see whether or not she had
put evidence in it that the hypothesis had come from me, she grudgingly sent it to me,
and my name was nowhere mentioned. And she broke contact at that point.
What it is that motivated her, I don't know. But I don't think it can possibly be that this
result is unimportant. The fact is, the reason I called her in the first place and established
contact that generated our collaboration was that she was a leading light in the field of
telomeric studies. And because of that, this question about whether the model organisms
are distorting the understanding of the functioning of telomeres is central.
Do you feel like you've been as a young graduate student, do you think Carol or do you think the
scientific community broadly screwed you over in some way? I don't think of it in those terms,
probably partly because it's not productive. But I have a complex relationship with this story.
On the one hand, I'm livid with Carol Greider for what she did. She absolutely pretended that I
didn't exist in this story. And I don't think I was a threat to her. My interest was as an
evolutionary biologist, I had made an evolutionary contribution. She had tested a hypothesis. And
frankly, I think it would have been better for her if she had acknowledged what I had done. I
think it would have enhanced her work. And you know, I was, let's put it this way, when I watched
her Nobel lecture, and I should say there's been a lot of confusion about this Nobel stuff,
I've never said that I should have gotten a Nobel Prize. People have misportrayed that.
My in listening to her lecture, I had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences of my life,
because she presented the work that resulted from my hypothesis. She presented it as she had in her
paper with no acknowledgement of where it had come from. And she had, in fact, portrayed the
distortion of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact, because it allowed testing hypotheses that
would otherwise not be testable. You have to understand as a young scientist to watch work
that you have done presented in what's surely the most important lecture of her career, right?
It's thrilling. It was thrilling to see, you know, her figures projected on the screen there,
right? To have been part of work that was important enough for that felt great. And of
course, to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible. So anyway, that's sort of where I am
with it. My sense is, what I'm really troubled by in the story is the fact that as far as I know,
the flaw with the mice has not been addressed. And actually, Eric did some looking into this. He
tried to establish by calling the Jax lab and trying to ascertain what had happened with the
colonies, whether any change in protocol had occurred. And he couldn't get anywhere. There
was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue. So I'm very troubled by the fact that as
a father, for example, I'm in no position to protect my family from the hazard that I believe
lurks in our medicine cabinets, right? Even though I'm aware of where the hazard comes from,
it doesn't tell me anything useful about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage if that
is ultimately tested. And that's a very frustrating position to be in. On the other hand, you know,
there's a part of me that's even still grateful to Carol for taking my call. She didn't have
to take my call and talk to some young graduate student who had some evolutionary idea that
wasn't, you know, in her wheelhouse specifically. And yet she did. And, you know, for a while,
she was a good collaborator. So, well, can I have to proceed carefully here because it's a
complicated topic. So she took the call and you kind of, you're kind of saying that she basically
erased credit, you know, pretending you didn't exist in some kind of, in a certain sense.
Let me phrase it this way. I've, as a research scientist at MIT, I've had, especially just
part of a large set of collaborations, I've had a lot of students come to me
and talk to me about ideas, perhaps less interesting than what we're discussing here
in the space of AI that I've been thinking about anyway. In general, with everything I'm
doing with robotics, people will have told me a bunch of ideas that I'm already thinking about.
The point is taking that idea, see, this is different because the idea has more power in
the space that we're talking about here. And robotics is like your idea means shit until
you build it. Like, so the engineering world is a little different, but there's a kind of
sense that I probably forgot a lot of brilliant ideas that have been told to me. Do you think she
pretended you don't exist? Do you think she was so busy that she kind of forgot, you know,
she has like the stream of brilliant people around her that there's a bunch of ideas that
are swimming in the air? And you just kind of forget people that are a little bit on the periphery
on the idea generation, like, or is it some mix of both?
It's not a mix of both. I know that because we corresponded. She put a graduate student on this
work. He emailed me excitedly when the results came in. So there was no ambiguity about what
had happened. What's more, when I went to publish my work, I actually sent it to Carol in order to
get her feedback because I wanted to be a good collaborator to her. And she absolutely panned
it, made many critiques that were not valid. But it was clear at that point that she became an
antagonist. And none of this adds that she couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation.
I believe I even sent her tissues at some point in part, not related to this project, but as a
favor, she was doing another project that involved telomeres, and she needed samples that I could
get a hold of because of the Museum of Zoology that I was in. So this was not a one off conversation.
I certainly know that those sorts of things can happen, but that's not what happened here. This
was a relationship that existed and then was suddenly cut short at the point that she
published her paper by surprise without saying where the hypothesis had come from
and began to be a opposing force to my work.
There's a bunch of trajectories you could have taken through life. Do you think about
the trajectory of being a researcher of then going to war in the space of ideas of publishing
further papers along this line? I mean, that's often the dynamic of that fascinating space,
is you have a junior researcher with brilliant ideas and a senior researcher that starts out
as a mentor, then becomes a competitor. I mean, that happens. But then the way to it's almost
an opportunity to shine is to publish a bunch more papers in this place, like to tear it
apart, to dig into, like really make it a war of ideas. Did you consider that possible trajectory?
I did. I have a couple of things to say about it.
One, this work was not central for me. I took a year on the Telemire project
because something fascinating occurred to me and I pursued it. And the more I pursued it,
the clearer it was. There was something there, but it wasn't the focus of my graduate work.
And I didn't want to become a Telemire researcher. What I want to do is to be an evolutionary
biologist who upgrades the toolkit of evolutionary concepts so that we can see more clearly how
organisms function and why. And Telemires was a proof of concept. That paper was a proof of
concept that the toolkit in question works. As for the need to pursue it further, I think it's
kind of absurd. And you're not the first person to say maybe that was the way to go about it.
But the basic point is, look, the work was good. It turned out to be highly predictive.
Frankly, the model of senescence that I presented is now widely accepted. And I don't
feel any misgivings at all about having spent a year on it, said my piece, and moved on to other
things, which frankly, I think are bigger. I think there's a lot of good to be done. And
it would be a waste to get overly, narrowly focused.
I mean, there's so many ways through the space of science. And the most common ways to just
publish a lot. Publish a lot of papers, do these incremental work, and exploring the space,
kind of like ants looking for food. You're tossing out a bunch of different ideas. Some of them
could be brilliant breakthrough ideas, nature. Some of them are more conference kind of publications,
all those kinds of things. Did you consider that kind of path in science?
Of course, I considered it. But I must say, the experience of having my first encounter with the
process of peer review be this story, which was frankly, a debacle from one end to the other
with respect to the process of publishing. It was not a very good sales pitch for
trying to make a difference through publication. And I would point out part of what I ran into,
and I think frankly, part of what explains Carol's behavior, is that in some parts of science,
there is this dynamic where PIs parasitize their underlings. And if you're very,
very good, you rise to the level where one day, instead of being parasitized, you get to parasitize
others. Now, I find that scientifically despicable. And it wasn't the culture of the lab I grew up in
at all, my lab. In fact, the PI, Dick Alexander, who's now gone, but who was an incredible
mind and a great human being, he didn't want his graduate students working on the same topics he
was on, not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting, but because in effect, he did not
want any confusion about who had done what because he was a great mentor. And the idea was actually,
a great mentor is not stealing ideas. And you don't want people thinking that they are. So
anyway, my point would be, I wasn't up for being parasitized. I don't like the idea that if you
are very good, you get parasitized until it's your turn to parasitize others. That doesn't make
sense to me. A crossing over from evolution into cellular biology may have exposed me to that.
That may have been par for the course, but it doesn't make it acceptable. And I would also
point out that my work falls in the realm of synthesis. My work generally takes evidence
accumulated by others and places it together in order to generate hypotheses that explain
sets of phenomena that are otherwise intractable. And I am not sure that that is best done with
narrow publications that are read by few. And in fact, I would point to the very conspicuous
example of Richard Dawkins, who I must say I've learned a tremendous amount from and I greatly
admire. Dawkins has almost no publication record in the sense of peer reviewed papers in journals.
What he's done instead is done synthetic work and he's published it in books, which are not
peer reviewed in the same sense. And frankly, I think there's no doubting his contribution
to the field. So my sense is if Richard Dawkins can illustrate that one can make contributions
to the field without using journals as the primary mechanism for distributing what you've
come to understand, then it's obviously a valid mechanism. And it's a far better one from the
point of view of accomplishing what I want to accomplish.
Yeah, it's really interesting. There is, of course, several levels you can do the kind of
synthesis and that does require a lot of both broad and deep thinking is exceptionally valuable.
You could also publish, I'm working on something with Andrew Huberman now, you can also publish
synthesis that's like review papers. They're exceptionally valuable for the communities.
It brings the community together, tells a history, tells a story where the community has been,
it paints a picture of where the path lays for the future. I think it's really valuable.
And Richard Dawkins is a good example of somebody that does that in book form,
that he kind of walks the line really interestingly. You have somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson,
who's more like a science communicator. Richard Dawkins sometimes is a science communicator,
but he gets like close to the technical to where it's a little bit, it's not shying away from
being really a contribution to science.
No, he's made real contributions. In book form.
Yes, he really has.
It's fascinating. Roger Prineros, I mean, similar kind of idea. That's interesting,
that's interesting. Synthesis does not, especially synthesis work, work that synthesizes ideas
does not necessarily need to be peer reviewed. It's peer reviewed by
peers reading it, well, and reviewing it.
That's it. It is reviewed by peers, which is not synonymous with peer review. And that's the thing
is people don't understand that the two things aren't the same. Peer review is an anonymous
process that happens before publication in a place where there is a power dynamic. I mean,
the joke of course is that peer review is actually peer preview. Your biggest competitors get to see
your work before it sees the light of day and decide whether or not it gets published.
And again, when you're formative experience with the publication apparatus is the one I
had with the telomere paper, there's no way that that seems like the right way to advance
important ideas. And what's the harm in publishing them so that your peers have to review them in
public where they actually, if they're going to disagree with you, they actually have to take
the risk of saying, I don't think this is right. And here's why, right, with their name on it.
I'd much rather that it's not that I don't want my work reviewed by peers, but I want it done
in the open, you know, for the same reason you don't meet with dangerous people
in private, you meet at the cafe, I want the work reviewed out in public.
Can I ask you a difficult question? Sure.
There is popularity in martyrdom. There's popularity in pointing out
that the emperor has no clothes. That can become a drug in itself.
I've confronted this in the scientific work I've done at MIT
where there are certain things that are not done well. People are not being the best version of
themselves. And particular aspects of a particular field are in need of a revolution.
And part of me wanted to point that out versus doing the hard work
of publishing papers and doing the revolution. Basically just pointing out, look,
you guys are doing it wrong and then just walking away. Are you aware of the drug of martyrdom,
of the ego involved in it that it can cloud your thinking?
Probably one of the best questions I've ever been asked. So let me try to sort it out.
First of all, we are all mysteries to ourself at some level. So it's possible there's stuff going
on in me that I'm not aware of that's driving. But in general, I would say one of my better
strengths is that I'm not especially ego driven. I have an ego. I clearly think highly of myself,
but it is not driving me. I do not crave that kind of validation. I do crave certain things.
I do love a good Eureka moment. There is something great about it. And there's something even better
about the phone calls you make next when you share it. It's pretty fun. I really like it.
I also really like my subject. There's something about a walk in the forest when
you have a toolkit in which you can actually look at creatures and see something deep. I like it.
That drives me. And I could entertain myself for the rest of my life. If I was somehow isolated
from the rest of the world, but I was in a place that was biologically interesting,
hopefully I would be with people that I love and pets that I love, believe it or not. But
if I were in that situation and I could just go out every day and look at cool stuff and figure
out what it means, I could be all right with that. So I'm not heavily driven by the ego thing,
as you put it. So I am completely the same, except instead of the pets, I would put robots.
But so it's not, it's the Eureka. It's the exploration of the subject that brings you joy
and fulfillment. It's not the ego. Well, there's more to say. No, I really don't think it's the
ego thing. I will say I also have kind of a secondary passion for robot stuff. I've never
made anything useful, but I do believe, I believe I found my calling, but if this wasn't my calling,
my calling would have been inventing stuff. I really enjoy that too. So I get what you're
saying about the analogy quite well. As far as the martyrdom thing, I understand the drug you're
talking about and I've seen it more than I felt it. I do, if I'm just to be completely candid
and that this question is so good, it deserves a candid answer, I do like the fight, right? I like
fighting against people I don't respect and I like winning. But I have no interest in martyrdom.
One of the reasons I have no interest in martyrdom is that I'm having too good a time,
right? I very much enjoy my life and such a good answer. I have a wonderful wife. I have
amazing children. I live in a lovely place. I don't want to exit any quicker than I have to.
That said, I also believe in things and a willingness to exit if that's the only way
is not exactly inviting martyrdom, but it is an acceptance that fighting is dangerous
and going up against powerful forces means who knows what will come of it, right? I don't have
the sense that the thing is out there that used to kill inconvenient people. I don't think that's
how it's done anymore. It's primarily done through destroying them reputationally,
which is not something I relish the possibility of. But there's a difference between a
willingness to face the hazard rather than a desire to face it because of the thrill, right?
For me, the thrill is in fighting when I'm in the right. I think I feel that that is a worthwhile
way to take what I see as the kind of brutality that is built into men and to channel it to something
useful, right? If it is not channeled into something useful, it will be channeled into
something else, so it damn well better be channeled into something useful.
It's not motivated by fame or popularity, those kinds of things. You're just making me realize
that enjoying the fight, fighting the powerful and idea that you believe is right, is a kind of
optimism for the human spirit. It's like we can win this. It's almost like you're turning into
action, into personal action, this hope for humanity by saying we can win this. That makes you feel
good about the rest of humanity. That if there's people like me, then we're going to be okay.
Even if your ideas might be wrong or not, but if you believe they're right
and you're fighting the powerful against all odds, then we're going to be okay.
If I were to project, because I enjoy the fight as well, I think that's the way I,
that's what brings me joy is it's almost like it's optimism in action.
Well, it's a little different for me. Again, I recognize you. Your construction is familiar,
even if it isn't mine. For me, I actually expect us not to be okay, and I'm not okay with that,
but what's really important, if I feel like what I've said is I don't know of any reason
that it's too late. As far as I know, we could still save humanity and we could get to the
fourth frontier or something akin to it, but I expect us to fuck it up. I don't like that thought,
but I've looked into the abyss and I've done my calculations and the number of ways we could not
succeed are many and the number of ways that we could manage to get out of this very dangerous
phase of history is small, but the thing I don't have to worry about is that I didn't do enough.
That I was a coward, that I prioritized other things. At the end of the day, I think I will be
able to say to myself, and in fact, the thing that allows me to sleep is that when I saw clearly
what needed to be done, I tried to do it to the extent that it was in my power. And if we fail,
as I expect us to, I can't say, well, geez, that's on me. And frankly, I regard what I just said to
you as something like a personality defect. I'm trying to free myself from the sense that this
is my fault. On the other hand, my guess is that personality defect is probably good for humanity,
right? It's a good one for me to have. The externalities of it are positive,
so I don't feel too bad about it. Yeah, that's funny. So yeah, our perspective on the world
are different, but they rhyme, like you said. Because I've also looked into the abyss and
it kind of smiled nervously back. So I have a more optimistic sense that we're gonna win more than
likely we're going to be okay. Right there with you, brother. I'm hoping you're right. I'm expecting
me to be right. But back to Eric, you had a wonderful conversation. In that conversation,
he played the big brother role, and he was very happy about it. He was self-congratulatory about it.
I mean, can you talk to the ways in which Eric made you a better man throughout your life?
Yeah, hell yeah. I mean, for one thing, Eric and I are interestingly similar in some ways
and radically different in some other ways. And it's often a matter of fascination to
people who know us both because almost always people meet one of us first and they sort of
get used to that thing, and then they meet the other and it throws the model into chaos.
But I had a great advantage, which is I came second, right? So although it was kind of a pain
in the ass to be born into a world that had Eric in it because he's a force of nature,
it was also terrifically useful because he was a very awesome older brother who made interesting
mistakes, learned from them, and conveyed the wisdom of what he had discovered. And that was,
you know, I don't know who else ends up so lucky is to have that kind of person blazing the trail.
It also probably, you know, my hypothesis for what birth order effects are is that they're
actually adaptive, right? That the reason that a second born is different than a first born
is that they're not born into a world with the same niches in it, right? And so the thing about
Eric is he's been completely dominant in the realm of fundamental thinking, right? Like what he's
fascinated by is the fundamental of fundamentals. And he's excellent at it, which meant that I was
born into a world where somebody was becoming excellent in that. And for me to be anywhere
near the fundamental of fundamentals was going to be pointless, right? I was going to be playing
second fiddle forever. And I think that that actually drove me to the other end of the
continuum between fundamental and emergent. And so I became fascinated with biology and have been
since I was three years old, right? I think Eric drove that. And I have to thank him for it because,
you know, I mean, I never thought of, so Eric drives towards the fundamental and you drive
towards the emergent, the physics and the biology, right? Opposite ends of the continuum. And as Eric
would be quick to point out, if he was sitting here, I treat the emergent layer, I seek the
fundamentals in it, which is sort of an echo of Eric's style of thinking, but applied to the very
far complexity. He's overpoweringly argues for the importance of physics, the fundamental of the
fundamental. He's not here to defend himself. Is there an argument to be made against that?
Or biology, the emergent, the study of the thing that emerged when the fundamental acts at the
universal, at the cosmic scale and builds the beautiful thing that is us, is much more important.
Psychology, biology, the systems that we're actually interacting with in this human world are much
more important to understand than low level theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Yeah, I can't say that one is more important. I think there's probably a different time scale.
I think understanding the emergent layer is more often useful, but the bang for the buck at the
far fundamental layer may be much greater. So for example, the fourth frontier,
I'm pretty sure it's going to have to be fusion powered. I don't think anything else will do it,
but once you had fusion power, assuming we didn't just dump fusion power on the market the way we
would be likely to if it was invented usefully tomorrow, but if we had fusion power and we had
a little bit more wisdom than we have, you could do an awful lot. And that's not going to come from
people like me who look at dynamics. Can I argue against that, please? I think the way to unlock
fusion power is through artificial intelligence. So I think most of the breakthrough ideas in
the futures of science will be developed by AI systems. And I think in order to build intelligent
AI systems, you have to be a scholar of the fundamental of the emergent, of biology,
of the neuroscience, of the way the brain works, of intelligence, of consciousness,
and those things at least directly don't have anything to do with physics.
Well, you're making me a little bit sad because my addiction to the aha moment thing is incompatible
with outsourcing that job. I don't want to outsource that thing to the AI.
Actually, I've seen this happen before because some of the people who trained Heather and me
were phylogenetic systematists, Arnold Kluge in particular. And the problem with systematics
is that to do it right when your technology is primitive, you have to be deeply embedded in
the philosophical and the logical, right? Your method has to be based in the highest level of rigor.
Once you can sequence genes, genes can spit so much data at you that you can overwhelm
high quality work with just lots and lots and lots of automated work. And so in any in some
sense, there's like a generation of phylogenetic systematists who are the last of the greats
because what's replacing them is sequencers. So anyway, maybe you're right about the AI,
and I guess I'm I like figuring stuff out. Is there something that you disagree with
Eric on even trying to convince them you failed so far, but you will eventually succeed?
You know, that is a very long list. Eric and I have have tensions over certain things that
recur all the time. And I'm trying to think what would be, you know, the ideal space of
science and the space of philosophy, politics, family, love, robots.
Well, all right, let me I'm just going to use your podcast to make a bit of cryptic war and
just say there are many places in which I believe that I have butted heads with Eric over the course
of decades. And I have seen him move in my direction substantially over time. You've been
winning. He might he might win a battle here or there, but you've been winning the war.
I would not say that. It's quite possible he could say the same thing about me. And in fact,
I know that it's true. There are places where he's absolutely convinced me. But in any case,
I do believe it's at least, you know, it may not be a totally even fight, but it's more even than
some will imagine. But yeah, we have, you know, there are things I say that drive him nuts, right?
Like when something, you know, like you heard me talk about the, what was it? It was the autopilot
that seems to be putting a great many humans in needless medical jeopardy over the COVID-19 pandemic.
And my feeling is we can say this almost for sure. Anytime you have the appearance of some
captured, gigantic entity that is censoring you on YouTube and, you know, handing down
dictates from the who and all of that, it is sure that there will be a certain amount of collusion,
right? There's going to be some embarrassing emails in some places that are going to reveal
some shocking connections. And then there's going to be an awful lot of emergence
that didn't involve collusion, right? In which people were doing their little part of a job
and something was emergent. And you never know what the admixture is. How much are we looking
at actual collusion? And how much are we looking at an emergent process? But you should always walk
in with the sense that it's going to be a ratio. And the question is, what is the ratio in this case?
I think this drives Eric Knott's because he is very focused on the people. I think he's focused
on the people who have a choice and make the wrong one. And anyway, the question of the ratio
is the distraction to that. I think he takes it almost as an offense because it grants cover
to people who are harming others. And I think it offends him morally. And if I had to say,
I would say it alters his judgment on the matter. But anyway, certainly useful just to leave open
the two possibilities and say it's a ratio, but we don't know which one.
Brother to brother. Do you love the guy?
Hell yeah. Hell yeah. And you know, I'd love him if he was just my brother, but he's also awesome.
So I love him and I love him for who he is. So let me ask you about back to your book,
Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. I can't wait both for the book and the videos you
do on the book. That's really exciting that there's like a structured, organized way to present this.
A kind of, from an evolutionary biology perspective, a guide for the future using our past
as it's the fundamental of the emergent way to present the picture of the future. Let me ask
you about something that, you know, I think about a little bit in this modern world, which is monogamy.
So I personally value monogamy. One girl, ride or die.
There you go. Ride or not. It's exactly it. But that said, I don't know what's the right way to
approach this, but from an evolutionary biology perspective or from just looking at modern
society, that seems to be an idea that's not, what's the right way to put it, flourishing.
It is waning. It's waning. So I suppose based on your reaction, you're also a supporter of
monogamy or the value of monogamy. Are you and I just delusional? What can you say about monogamy
from the context of your book, from the context of evolutionary biology, from the context of being
human? Yeah. I can say that I fully believe that we are actually enlightened and that although
monogamy is waning, that it is not waning because there is a superior system. It is waning for
predictable other reasons. So let us just say it is, there is a lot of pre-transfalacy here where
people go through a phase where they recognize that actually we know a lot about the evolution
of monogamy. And we can tell from the fact that humans are somewhat sexually dimorphic,
that there has been a lot of polygyny in human history. And in fact, most of human history
was largely polygynous. But it is also the case that most of the people on earth today belong
to civilizations that are at least nominally monogamous and have practiced monogamy. And that's
not anti-evolutionary. What that is is part of what I mentioned before, where human beings can swap
out their software program. And different mating patterns are favored in different periods of
history. So I would argue that the benefit of monogamy, the primary one that drives the evolution
of monogamous patterns in humans, is that it brings all adults into child-rearing. Now the
reason that that matters is because human babies are very labor-intensive. In order to raise them
properly, having two parents is a huge asset. And having more than two parents, having an extended
family, also very important. But what that means is that for a population that is expanding,
a monogamous mating system makes sense. It makes sense because it means that the number of offspring
that can be raised is elevated. It's elevated because all potential parents are involved in
parenting. Whereas if you sideline a bunch of males by having a polygynous system in which one male
has many females, which is typically the way that works, what you do is you sideline all those males,
which means the total amount of parental effort is lower and the population can't grow. So what
I'm arguing is that you should expect to see populations that face the possibility of expansion
in Doris monogamy. And at the point that they have reached carrying capacity, you should expect to see
polygyny break back out. And what we are seeing is a kind of false sophistication around polyamory,
which will end up breaking down into polygyny, which will not be in the interest of most people.
Really, the only people whose interest it could be argued to be in would be the very small number
of males at the top who have many partners and everybody else suffers.
Is it possible to make the argument, if we focus in on those males at the quote unquote top with
many female partners, is it possible to say that that's a suboptimal life, that a single partner
is the optimal life? Well, it depends what you mean. I have a feeling that you and I wouldn't
have to go very far to figure out that what might be evolutionarily optimal doesn't match my values
as a person and I'm sure it doesn't match yours either. Can we try to dig into that gap between
those two? Sure. I mean, we can do it very simply. Selection might favor your engaging in war
against a defenseless enemy or genocide, right? It's not hard to figure out how that might put
your genes at advantage. I don't know about you, Lex. I'm not getting involved in no genocide.
It's not going to happen. I won't do it. I will do anything to avoid it. So some part of me has
decided that my conscious self and the values that I hold trump my evolutionary self. And
once you figure out that in some extreme case, that's true, and then you realize that that means it
must be possible in many other cases and you start going through all of the things that selection
would favor and you realize that a fair fraction of the time, actually, you're not up for this.
You don't want to be some robot on a mission that involves genocide when necessary. You want to be
your own person and accomplish things that you think are valuable. And so among those are not
advocating, you know, let's suppose you were in a position to be one of those males at the top of a
polygynous system. We both know why that would be rewarding, right? But we also both recognize
it. Do we? Yeah, sure. Lots of sex? Yeah. Okay, what else? Lots of sex and lots of variety, right?
So look, every red-blooded American slash Russian male could understand why that's appealing, right?
On the other hand, it is up against an alternative, which is having a partner with whom one is bonded
especially closely, right? Right. And so, a love, right. Well, you know, I don't want to straw man
the polygyny position. Obviously, polygyny is complex and there's nothing that stops a man,
presumably from loving multiple partners and from them loving him back. But in terms of, you know,
if love is your thing, there's a question about, okay, what is the quality of love if it is divided
over multiple partners, right? And what is the net consequence for love in a society when multiple
people will be frozen out for every individual male in this case who has it? And what I would argue
is, and, you know, this is weird to even talk about, but this is partially me just talking
for personal experience. I think there actually is a monogamy program in us and it's not automatic.
But if you take it seriously, you can find it. And frankly, marriage, and it doesn't have to
be marriage, but whatever it is that results in a lifelong bond with a partner has gotten a very
bad rap, you know, it's the butt of too many jokes. But the truth is, it's hugely rewarding. It's not
easy. But if you know that you're looking for something, right, if you know that the objective
actually exists, and it's not some utopian fantasy that can't be found, if you know that there's some
real world, you know, warts and all version of it, then you might actually think, hey, that is
something I want, and you might pursue it. And my guess is you'd be very happy when you find it.
Yeah, I think there is getting to the fundamentals of the emergent. I feel like there is some kind
of physics of love. So one, there's a conservation thing going on. So if you have like many partners,
yeah, in theory, you should be able to love all of them deeply. But it seems like in reality,
that love gets split. Yep. Now, there's another law that's interesting in terms of monogamy.
I don't know if it's the physics level, but if you are in a monogamous relationship by choice,
in almost this, in slight rebellion to social norms, that's much more powerful. Like if you choose
that one partnership, that's also more powerful. If like everybody's in a monogamy,
there's this pressure to be married in this pressure society, that's different,
because that's almost like a constraint on your freedom that is enforced by something
other than your own ideals. It's by somebody else. When you yourself choose to, I guess,
create these constraints, that enriches that love. So there's some kind of love function,
like E equals MC squared, but for love, that I feel like if you have less partners and is done by
choice, they can maximize that. And that love can transcend the biology, transcend the evolutionary
biology forces that have to do much more with survival and all those kinds of things. It can
transcend to take us to a richer experience, which we have the luxury of having, exploring,
of happiness, of joy, of fulfillment, all those kinds of things.
I totally agree with this. And there's no question that by choice, when there are other choices,
imbues it with meaning that it might not otherwise have. I would also say, I'm really struck by,
and I have a hard time not feeling terrible sadness over what younger people are coming
to think about this topic. I think they're missing something so important and so hard to phrase
that, and they don't even know that they're missing it. They might know that they're unhappy,
but they don't understand what it is they're even looking for, because nobody's really been honest
with them about what their choices are. And I have to say, if I was a young person, or if I was
advising a young person, which I used to do, again, a million years ago when I was a college
professor four years ago, but I used to talk to students, I knew my students really well,
and they would ask questions about this, and they were always curious because Heather and I
seemed to have a good relationship, and many of them knew both of us. So they would talk to us
about this. If I was advising somebody, I would say, do not bypass the possibility that what you
are supposed to do is find somebody worthy, somebody who can handle it, somebody who you are
compatible with, and that you don't have to be perfectly compatible. It's not about dating until
you find the one. It's about finding somebody who's underlying values and viewpoint are complementary
to yours, sufficient that you fall in love. If you find that person, opt out together. Get out
of this damn system that's telling you what's sophisticated to think about love and romance
and sex. Ignore it together. That's the key, and I believe you'll end up laughing in the end
if you do it. You'll discover, wow, that's a hellscape that I opted out of, and this thing
I opted into, complicated, difficult, worth it. Nothing that's worth it is ever not difficult,
so we should even just skip the whole statement about difficult. I want to be honest. It's not
like, oh, it's nonstop joy. No, it's freaking complex, but worth it, no question in my mind.
Is there advice outside of love that you can give to young people? You were a million years ago,
a professor. Is there advice you can give to young people, high schoolers, college students
about career, about life? Yeah, but they're not going to like it because it's not easy to
operationalize. This was a problem when I was a college professor, too. People would ask me
what they should do. Should they go to graduate school? I had almost nothing useful to say
because the job market and the market of pre-job training and all of that, these things are all
so distorted and corrupt that I didn't want to point anybody to anything because it's all broken,
and I would tell them that. But I would say that results in a kind of meta-level advice
that I do think is useful. You don't know what's coming. You don't know where the opportunities
will be. You should invest in tools rather than knowledge. To the extent that you can do things,
you can repurpose that no matter what the future brings, to the extent that if you,
as a robot guy, you've got the skills of a robot guy. Now, if civilization failed
and the stuff of robot building disappeared with it, you'd still have the mind of a robot guy,
and the mind of a robot guy can retool around all kinds of things, whether you're forced to work
with fibers that are made into ropes. Your mechanical mind would be useful in all kinds
of places. So invest in tools like that that can be easily repurposed and invest in combinations
of tools. If civilization keeps limping along, you're going to be up against all sorts of people
who have studied the things that you studied. If you think, hey, computer programming is really,
really cool, and you pick up computer programming, guess what? You just entered a large group of
people who have that skill, and many of them will be better than you, almost certainly.
On the other hand, if you combine that with something else that's very rarely combined with it,
if you have, I don't know if it's carpentry and computer programming, if you take combinations
of things that are, even if they're both common, but they're not commonly found together,
then those combinations create a rarefied space where you inhabit it. And even if the things
don't even really touch, but nonetheless, they create a mind in which the two things are live
and you can move back and forth between them and step out of your own perspective by moving from
one to the other, that will increase what you can see and the quality of your tools.
And so anyway, that isn't useful advice. It doesn't tell you whether you should go to
graduate school or not, but it does tell you the one thing we can say for certain about the future
is that it's uncertain and so prepare for it. And like you said, there's cool things to be
discovered in the intersection of fields and ideas. And I would look at grad school that way
actually, if you do go or I see, I mean, this is such a, like every course in grad school,
undergrad too, was like this little journey that you're on that explores a particular field.
And it's not immediately obvious how useful it is, but it allows you to discover
intersections between that thing and some other thing. So you're bringing to the table these
pieces of knowledge, some of which when intersected might create a niche that's completely novel,
unique and will bring you joy. I mean, I took a huge number of courses in theoretical computer
science. Most of them seem useless, but they totally changed the way I see the world in ways
that I'm not prepared or is a little bit difficult to kind of make explicit. But
taken together, they've allowed me to see, for example, the world of robotics totally different
and different from many of my colleagues and friends and so on. And I think that's a good way
to see if you go to grad school was as an opportunity to explore intersections of fields,
even if the individual fields seem useless. Yeah. And useless doesn't mean useless, right?
Useless means not directly applicable, but a good useless course can be the best one you ever took.
Yeah, I took James Joyce course on James Joyce and that was truly useless.
Well, I took immuno biology in the medical school when I was at Penn as,
uh, I guess I would have been a freshman or a sophomore. I wasn't supposed to be in this class.
It blew my goddamn mind and it still does, right? I mean, we had this, I don't even know who it was,
but we had this great professor who was like a highly placed in the world of immuno biology.
You know, the course is called immuno biology, not immunology. Immuno biology, it had the right
focus. And as I recall it, the professor stood sideways to the chalkboard staring off into space,
literally stroking his beard with this bemused look on his face through the entire lecture.
And, you know, you had all these medical students who were so furiously writing notes that I don't
even think they were noticing the person delivering this thing. But, you know, I got what this guy
was smiling about. It was like so, what he was describing, you know, adaptive immunity is so
marvelous, right? That it was like almost a privilege to even be saying it to a room full
of people who were listening, you know? But anyway, yeah, I took that course and, you know, low and
behold, COVID. That's gonna be useful. Well, yeah, suddenly it's front and center. And wow,
am I glad I took it. But anyway, yeah, useless courses are great. And actually, Eric gave me
one of the greater pieces of advice, at least for college that anyone's ever given, which was,
don't worry about the pre-rex, take it anyway, right? But now I don't even know if kids can do
this now because the pre-rex are now enforced by a computer. But back in the day, if you didn't
mention that you didn't have the pre-rex, nobody stopped you from taking the course. And what he
told me, which I didn't know, was that often the advanced courses are easier in some way,
the materials complex. But, you know, it's not like intro bio where you're learning a thousand
things at once, right? It's like focused on something. So if you dedicate yourself, you can
pull it off. Yeah, stay with an idea for many weeks at a time. And it's ultimately rewarding.
And not as difficult as it looks. Yep. Can I ask you a ridiculous question? Please.
What do you think is the meaning of life?
Well, I feel terrible having to give you the answer. I realize you asked the question,
but if I tell you, you're gonna again feel bad. I don't want to do that. But look,
there's two, there can be a disappointment is no, it's going to be a horror, right? Because we
actually know the answer to the question. Oh, no. It's completely meaningless. There is nothing
that we can do that escapes the heat death of the universe or whatever it is that happens at the end.
And we're not going to make it there anyway. But even if you were optimistic about our ability to
escape every existential hazard indefinitely, ultimately, it's all for nothing. We know it,
right? That said, once you stare into that abyss, and then it stares back and laughs or
whatever happens, right? Then the question is, okay, given that, can I relax a little bit,
right? And figure out, well, what would make sense if that were true, right? And I think
there's something very clear to me. I think if you do all of the, you know, if I just take
the values that I'm sure we share and extrapolate from them, I think the following thing is actually
a moral imperative. Being a human and having opportunity is absolutely fucking awesome,
right? A lot of people don't make use of the opportunity and a lot of people don't have
opportunity, right? They get to be human, but they're too constrained by keeping a roof over
their heads to really be free. But being a free human is fantastic. And being a free human on
this beautiful planet, crippled as it may be, is unparalleled. I mean, what could be better?
How lucky are we that we get that, right? So if that's true that it is awesome to be human and
to be free, then surely it is our obligation to deliver that opportunity to as many people as we
can. And how do you do that? Well, I think I know what job one is. Job one is we have to get sustainable.
The way to get the maximum number of humans to have that opportunity to be both here and free
is to make sure that there isn't a limit on how long we can keep doing this. That effectively
requires us to reach sustainability. And then at sustainability, you could have a horror show
of sustainability, right? You could have a totalitarian sustainability. That's not the
objective. The objective is to liberate people. And so the question, the whole fourth frontier
question, frankly, is how do you get to a sustainable and indefinitely sustainable state
in which people feel liberated, in which they are liberated to pursue the things that actually
matter to pursue beauty, truth, compassion, connection, all of those things that we could list
as unalloyed goods. Those are the things that people should be most liberated to do in a system
that really functions. And anyway, my point is, I don't know how precise that calculation is,
but I'm pretty sure it's not wrong. It's accurate enough. And if it is accurate enough,
then the point is, okay, well, there's no ultimate meaning, but the proximate meaning is that one.
How many people can we get to have this wonderful experience that we've gotten to have, right?
And there's no way that's so wrong that if I invest my life in it, that I'm making some big error.
Yeah, life is awesome, and we want to spread the awesome as much as possible.
Yeah, you sum it up that way, spread the awesome, spread the awesome. So that's the fourth frontier.
And if that fails, if the fourth frontier fails, the fifth frontier will be defined by robots,
and hopefully they'll learn the lessons of the mistakes that the humans made and build a better
world. I hope they're very happy here and that they do a better job with the place than we did.
But I can't believe it took us this long to talk. As I mentioned to you before, that we haven't
actually spoken, I think, at all. And I've always felt that we're already friends. I don't know how
that works, because I've listened to your podcast a lot. I've also sort of loved your brother.
And so it was like we've known each other for the longest time. And I hope we can be friends and
talk often again. And I hope that you get a chance to meet some of my robot friends as well
and fall in love. And I'm so glad that you love robots as well. So we get to share in that love.
So I can't wait for us to interact together. So we went from talking about some of the worst
failures of humanity to some of the most beautiful aspects of humanity. What else can you ask for
from a conversation? Thank you so much for talking to me. You know, Alex, I feel the same way towards
you. And I really appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun. And I'm looking forward to our next one.
Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.