back to indexRob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks | Lex Fridman Podcast #193
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The following is a conversation with Rob Reed, entrepreneur, author, and host of the After
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Sam Harris recommended that I absolutely must talk to Rob about his recent work on the
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future of engineer pandemics.
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I then listened to the 4 hours special episode of Sam's Making Sense podcast with Rob titled
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Engineering the Apocalypse, and I was floored, and knew I had to talk to him.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Belcampo, Fundrise, and NetSuite.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say a few words about the lab leak hypothesis, which proposes that
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COVID 19 is a product of gain of function research on coronaviruses conducted at the
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Wuhan Institute of Virology that was then accidentally leaked due to human error.
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For context, this lab is biosafety level 4, BSL 4, and it investigates coronaviruses.
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BSL 4 is the highest level of safety, but if you look at all the human in the loop pieces
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required to achieve this level of safety, it becomes clear that even BSL 4 labs are
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highly susceptible to human error.
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To me, whether the virus leaked from the lab or not, getting to the bottom of what happened
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is about much more than this particular catastrophic case.
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It is a test for our scientific, political, journalistic, and social institutions of how
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well we can prepare and respond to threats that can cripple or destroy human civilization.
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If we continue gain of function research on viruses, eventually these viruses will leak,
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and they will be more deadly and more contagious.
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We can pretend that won't happen, or we can openly and honestly talk about the risks involved.
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This research can both save and destroy human life on earth as we know it.
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It's a powerful double edged sword.
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If YouTube and other platforms censor conversations about this, if scientists self censor conversations
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about this, we'll become merely victims of our brief homo sapiens story, not its heroes.
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As I said before, too carelessly labeling ideas as misinformation and dismissing them
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because of that will eventually destroy our ability to discover the truth, and without
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truth we don't have a fighting chance against the great filter before us.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Rob Reid.
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I have seen evidence on the internet that you have a sense of humor, allegedly, but
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you also talk and think about the destruction of human civilization.
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What do you think of the Elon Musk hypothesis that the most entertaining outcome is the
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And he, I think, followed on to say a scene from an external observer, like if somebody
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was watching us, it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing our civilization
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that's fun to watch.
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Yeah, so he, exactly, he said from the standpoint of the observer, not the participant, I think.
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And so what's interesting about that, those were, I think, just a couple of freestanding
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tweets and delivered without a whole lot of wrapper of context, so it's left to the mind
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of the reader of the tweets to infer what he was talking about.
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So that's kind of like, it provokes some interesting thoughts.
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Like first of all, it presupposes the existence of an observer, and it also presupposes that
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the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire
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to be entertained.
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So there's like a lot underpinning that.
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And to me, that suggests, particularly coming from Elon, that it's a reference to simulation
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theory, that somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability
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to, let's say, peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of
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plot twists and surprises and either a happy or tragic ending, or they have an incredible
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meta view and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and
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full of plot twists and surprises and a happy or unhappy ending.
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So okay, so we're presupposing an observer.
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Then on top of that, when you think about it, you're also presupposing a producer,
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because the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and
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other developments that you weren't foreseeing.
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I have reread my own novels, and that's fun because it's something that I worked hard
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on and I slaved over and I love, but there aren't a lot of surprises in there.
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So now I'm thinking we need a producer and an observer for that to be true.
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And on top of that, it's got to be a very competent producer because Elon said the most
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entertaining outcome is the most likely one.
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So there's lots of layers for thinking about that.
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And when you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining, it makes me think
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of there was a South Park episode in which Earth turned out to be a reality show.
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And somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to, so the Earth
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show was going to get canceled, et cetera.
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So taking all that together, and I'm obviously being a little bit playful in laying this
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out, what is the evidence that we have that we are in a reality that is intended to be
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most entertaining?
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Now you could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc
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of civilization, other lives, levels as well, I'm sure.
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But just looking from my own life, I think I'd make a pretty lousy show.
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I spend an inordinate amount of time just looking at a computer.
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I don't think that's very entertaining.
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And there's just a completely inadequate level of shootouts and car chases in my life.
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I mean, I'll go weeks, even months without a single shootout or car chase.
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That just means that you're one of the non player characters in this game.
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You're just waiting.
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You're an extra that waiting for your one opportunity for a brief moment to actually
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interact with one of the main characters in the play.
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Okay, that's good.
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So okay, so we rule out me being the star of the show, which I probably could have guessed
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Anyway, but then even the arc of civilization, I mean, there have been a lot of really intriguing
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things that have happened and a lot of astounding things that have happened.
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But I would have some werewolves, I'd have some zombies, I would have some really improbable
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developments like maybe Canada absorbing the United States.
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So I don't know, I'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment.
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But if we are, that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years
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So I kind of hope that we're not designed for maximum entertainment.
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Well, the night is still young in terms of Canada.
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But do you think it's possible for the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent?
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So meaning, it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the internet, the funny ones,
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the entertaining ones spread more efficiently.
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I mean, I don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up on mass funny things
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much more sort of aggressively.
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It's more viral in the full sense of that word.
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Is there some sense that whatever the evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities
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is the same process that's going to, in an emergent way, create the most entertaining
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outcome, the most memeifiable outcome, the most viral outcome if we were to share it
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Yeah, that's interesting.
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Yeah, we do have an incredible ability.
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Like I mean, how many memes are created in a given day and the ones that go viral are
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almost uniformly funny, at least to somebody with a particular sense of humor.
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Yeah, I'd have to think about that.
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We are definitely great at creating atomized units of funny.
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Like in the example that you used, there are going to be X million brains parsing and judging
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whether this meme is retweetable or not.
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And so that sort of atomic element of funniness, of entertainingness, et cetera, we definitely
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have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything
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else that's going on.
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But in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the Earth driving for a level
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of entertainment, that is on such a much higher level that I don't know if that would necessarily
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follow directly from the fact that atomic units of entertainment are very, very aptly
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Do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective
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of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains?
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Just almost thinking about the ideas or the memes.
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This is the Dawkins thing as the organisms and then the humans as just like vehicles
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for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around and spread.
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Yeah, for propagating them, mutating them, putting selective pressure on them, et cetera.
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I mean, I found Dawkins interpret or his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought
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to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene.
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What a PS to put at the end of a long chunk of writing, profoundly interesting.
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I view the relationship though between humans and memes as probably an oversimplification,
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but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees, right?
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Do flowers have bees or do bees in a sense have flowers?
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And the answer is it is a very, very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi independent
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roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other.
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And so in the case of bees, obviously, you could see the flower is being this monolithic
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structure physically in relation to any given bee and it's the source of food and sustenance.
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So you could kind of say, well, flowers have bees.
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But on the other hand, the flowers would obviously be doomed.
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They weren't being pollinated by the bees.
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So you could kind of say, well, you know, bees are, you know, flowers are really expression
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of what the bees need.
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And the truth is a symbiosis.
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So with, with memes and human minds, our brains are clearly the Petri dishes in which memes
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are either propagated or not propagated, get mutated or don't get mutated if they are the
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venue in which competition, selective competition plays out between different memes.
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So all of that is very true.
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And you could look at that and say, really, the human mind is a production of memes and
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ideas have us rather than us having ideas.
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But at the same time, let's take a catchy tune as an example of a meme.
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That catchy tune did originate in a human mind.
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Somebody had to structure that thing.
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And as much as I like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about how the universe, I'm simplifying,
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but you know, kind of the ideas find their way in this beautiful TED talk.
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It's very lyrical.
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She talked about, you know, ideas and prose kind of beaming into our minds.
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And you know, she talked about needing to pull over to the side of the road when she
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got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to
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It's that beautiful as a writer, as a novelist myself, I've never had that experience.
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And I think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal
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of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind.
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And so like the bees and the flowers, I think there's a great symbiosis and they both kind
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of have one another.
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Ideas have us, but we have ideas for real.
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If we could take a little bit of a tangent, Stephen King on writing, you as a great writer,
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you're dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you.
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It's a grind of sort of, it's almost like you're mining for gold.
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It's more of a very deliberate, rigorous daily process.
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So maybe can you talk about the writing process?
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How do you write well?
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And maybe if you want to step outside of yourself, almost like give advice to an aspiring writer,
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what does it take to write the best work of your life?
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Well it would be very different if it's fiction versus nonfiction.
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And I've done both.
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I've written two nonfiction books and two works of fiction.
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Two works of fiction being more recent, I'm going to focus on that right now because that's
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more toweringly on my mind.
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Bronx novelists, again, this is an oversimplification, but there's kind of two schools of thought.
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Some people really like to fly by the seat of their pants and some people really, really
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like to outline, to plot.
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So there's plotters and pantsers, I guess is one way that people look at it.
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And as with most things, there is a great continuum in between and I'm somewhere on
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that continuum, but I lean, I guess, a little bit more toward the plotter.
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And so when I do start a novel, I have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going
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to end and I have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin.
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And I do try to make an effort of making an outline that I know I'm going to be extremely
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unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story, but trying to make an outline that
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gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters
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But then when I get into the process, that outline, particularly the center of it, ultimately
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inevitably morphs a great deal.
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And I think if I were personally a rigorous outliner, I would not allow that to happen.
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I also would make a much more vigorous skeleton before I start.
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So I think people who are really in that plotting outlining mode are people who write page turners,
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people who write spy novels or supernatural adventures, where you really want a relentless
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pace of events, action, plot twists, conspiracy, et cetera.
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And that is really the bone.
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That's really the skeletal structure.
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So I think folks who write that kind of book are really very much on the outlining side.
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And then I think people who write what's often referred to as literary fiction for lack of
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a better term, where it's more about sort of aura and ambiance and character development
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and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth, I think that group is
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more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.
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And I know people who start with a blank page and just see where it's going to go.
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I'm a little bit more on the plotting side.
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Now you asked what makes something, at least in the mind of the writer, as great as it
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For me, it's an astonishingly high percentage of it is editing as opposed to the initial
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For every hour that I spend writing new prose, like new pages, new paragraphs, new bits of
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the book, I probably spend...
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I wish I kept a count.
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I wish I had one of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time I'm
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going to be doing this, that.
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But I would say it's at least four or five hours and maybe as many as 10 that I spend
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And so it's relentless for me.
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For each one hour of writing, you said?
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I mean, I write because I edit and I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning and
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sometimes on the micro level of just like, does the rhythm of the sentence feel right?
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Do I need to carve a syllable or something so it can land?
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Like as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done but the book is 750 pages long
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and it's way too bloated and I need to lop a third out of it.
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Problems on those two orders of magnitude and everything in between, that is an enormous
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amount of my time.
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And I also write music, write and record and produce music.
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And there the ratio is even higher.
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Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very
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high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just
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So I think that's true of a lot of creative processes.
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I know it's true of sculpture.
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I believe it's true of woodwork.
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My dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing
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So I think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process, any creative
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Can I ask about the psychological, the demon side of that picture?
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In the editing process, you're ultimately judging the initial piece of work and you're
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judging and judging and judging.
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How much of your time do you spend hating your work?
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How much time do you spend in gratitude, impressed, thankful, or how good the work that you will
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I spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those, but leaning toward
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I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that I have, I like,
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I like quite a bit and I can make it better and better and better with every time I go
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So I spend most of my time in a state of optimism.
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I think I personally oscillate much more aggressively between those two, where I wouldn't be able
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to find the average.
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Marvin Minsky from MIT had this advice, I guess, to what it takes to be successful in
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science and research is to hate everything you do.
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You've ever done in the past.
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I mean, at least he was speaking about himself that the key to his success was to hate everything
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I have a little Marvin Minsky there in me too, to sort of always be exceptionally self
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critical, but almost like self critical about the work, but grateful for the chance to be
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able to do the work.
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If that makes sense.
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It makes perfect sense.
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But that, you know, each one of us have to strike a certain kind of balance.
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But back to the destruction of human civilization.
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If humans destroy ourselves in the next hundred years, what will be the most likely source,
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the most likely reason that we destroy ourselves?
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Well, let's see, a hundred years.
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It's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far, and it's something to give a lot
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more thought to, I think, than normal folks simply because I am a science fiction writer.
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And you know, I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard
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to foresee out more than just a few decades.
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I mean, comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now, a century later,
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it would have been so unforeseeable.
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And I just don't know what's going to happen, particularly with exponential technologies.
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I mean, our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing
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and synthetic biology and, you know, how we might destroy ourselves in the hundred year
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time frame might have everything to do with breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years from
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now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate.
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But in the near term that I'm comfortable predicting, let's say 30 years, I would say
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the most likely route to self destruction would be synthetic biology.
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And I always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important one that I find, and I'll
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abbreviate synthetic biology to SynBio just to save us some syllables.
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I believe SynBio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves.
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So I'm not an anti SynBio person by any stretch.
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I mean, SynBio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment,
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helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable.
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So it's electrifying the field.
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But in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent.
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In the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much, much greater odds of leading to
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our self destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real
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possibility and one we need to be concerned about.
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But in the 30 year time frame, I think it's a lesser one or nuclear weapons or anything
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else that I can think of.
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Can you explain that a little bit further?
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So your concern is on the manmade versus the natural side of the pandemic frontier.
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So we humans, engineering pathogens, engineering viruses is the concern here.
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And maybe how do you see the possible trajectories happening here in terms of, is it malevolent
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or is it accidents, oops, little mistakes or unintended consequences of particular actions
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that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes?
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Well, both of them are a danger.
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And I think the question of which is more likely has to do with two things.
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One, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable, foresighted steps that we are absolutely capable
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of taking right now to forestall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something
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that could have annihilating impacts?
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And in the episode you referenced with Sam, we talked a great deal about that.
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So do we take those steps?
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And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing us in with
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Sin Bio couldn't plummet.
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But you know, it's always a question of if and we have a bad, bad and very long track
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record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us.
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So that's variable number one.
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Variable number two is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society
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decide is acceptable in the realms of academia, government or private industry?
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And if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas
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to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity, if we think that's fine
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and if that kind of work starts happening in one lab, five labs, 50 labs, 500 labs in
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one country, then 10 countries, then 70 countries or whatever, that risk of a boo boo starts
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rising astronomically.
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And this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that I presented those two things,
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but I think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks.
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The easier one to manage, although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would
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have to be something that all nations agree on.
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But the easiest way, the easier risk to manage is that of, hey guys, let's not develop pathogens
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that if they escaped from a lab could annihilate us.
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There's no line of research that justifies that.
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And in my view, I mean, that's the point of perspective we need to have.
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We'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies that.
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The reason why I believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level
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of biosafety lab in the world, biosafety lab level four.
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And there are not a lot of BSL four labs in the world.
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There are things can and have leaked out of BSL four labs and some of the work that's
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been done with potentially annihilating pathogens, which we can talk about, it's actually done
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And so fundamentally any lab can leak.
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We have proven ourselves to be incapable of creating a lab that is utterly impervious
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So why in the world would we create something where if God forbid it leaked, could annihilate
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And by the way, almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything
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labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks.
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What happens if you have a malevolent insider?
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We could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent
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insider who wants to release something and not annihilating in a bit.
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I'm sure that we will.
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But what if you have a malevolent insider?
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Virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level one, two, three, and four
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are about preventing somebody hijacking the process.
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Some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents.
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They're imperfect against accidents.
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And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs with every lab you
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add, the odds of there being a malevolent inside are naturally increased arithmetically
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as the number of labs goes up.
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Now on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific, traditional
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government, academic, scientific environment creating something malevolent, again, there's
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protections that we can take both at the level of syn bio architecture, hardening the entire
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syn bio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out
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there by rogue actors, to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can
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do to dramatically mitigate that risk.
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And I think we do both of those things, decide that no, we're not going to experimentally
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make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs, and B, yes, we are going to take countermeasures
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that are going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation,
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then I think both risks get managed down.
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But if you take one set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have
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not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome.
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So can we talk about this kind of research and what's actually done and what are the
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positives and negatives of it?
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So if we look at gain of function research and the kind of stuff that's happening in
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level three and level four BSL labs, what's the whole idea here?
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Is it trying to engineer viruses to understand how they behave?
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You want to understand the dangerous ones.
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So that would be the logic behind doing it.
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And so gain of function can mean a lot of different things.
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Viewed through a certain lens, gain of function research could be what you do when you create,
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you know, GMOs, when you create, you know, hearty strains of corn that are resistant
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I mean, you could view that as gain of function.
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So I'm going to refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually
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the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of
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microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly.
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And in that line of research, I'll use an example from 2011 because it's very illustrative
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and it's also very chilling.
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Back in 2011, two separate labs independently of one another, I assume there was some kind
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of communication between them, but they were basically independent projects, one in Holland
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and one in Wisconsin, did gain of function research on something called H5N1 flu.
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H5N1 is, you know, something that, at least on a lethality basis, makes COVID look like
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You know, COVID, according to the World Health Organization, has a case fatality rate somewhere
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between half a percent and one percent, H5N1 is closer to 60 percent, six zero.
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And so that's actually even slightly more lethal than Ebola.
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It's a very, very, very scary pathogen.
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The good news about H5N1 is that it is barely, barely contagious.
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But I believe it is in no way contagious human to human.
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It requires, you know, very, very, very deep contact with birds, in most cases chickens.
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And so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them
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and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin and you're interacting
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intensely with fowl who, as it turns out, have H5N1, that's when the jump comes.
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But it's not, there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of human to human.
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I mean, not that it just doesn't exist.
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I think the World Health Organization did a relentless survey of the number of H5N1
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I think they do it every year.
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I saw one 10 year series where I think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of
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And that's a drop in the bucket.
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Kind of fun, fun fact, I believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is
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So we think getting struck by lightning, pretty low risk, H5N1 much, much lower than that.
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What happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases set out to make
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H5N1 that would be contagious, that could create airborne transmission.
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And so they basically passed it, I think in both cases, they passed it through a large
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number of ferrets.
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And so this wasn't like CRISPR, there wasn't even any CRISPR back in those days.
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This was relatively straightforward, selecting for a particular outcome.
link |
And after guiding the path and passing them through, again, I believe it was a series
link |
They did in fact come up with a version of H5N1 that is capable of airborne transmission.
link |
Now they didn't unleash it into the world.
link |
They didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen.
link |
And so for those two reasons, we don't really know how contagious it might have been.
link |
But if it was as contagious as COVID, that could be a civilization threatening pathogen.
link |
And why would you do it?
link |
Well, the people who did it were good guys.
link |
They were virologists.
link |
I believe their agenda as they explained it was much as you said, let's figure out what
link |
a worst case scenario might look like so we can understand it better.
link |
But my understanding is in both cases, it was done in BSL3 labs.
link |
And so potential of leak, significantly nonzero, hopefully way below 1% but significantly nonzero.
link |
And when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives, destruction
link |
of a large portion of the economy, et cetera, and you do an expected value calculation on
link |
whatever fraction of 1% that was, you would come up with a staggering cost, staggering
link |
expected cost for this work.
link |
So it should never have been carried out.
link |
Now you might make an argument if you said, if you believed that H5N1 in nature is on
link |
an inevitable path to airborne transmission, and it's only going to be a small number of
link |
years, A. And B, if it makes that transition, there is one set of changes to its metabolic
link |
pathways and its genomic code and so forth, one that we have discovered.
link |
So it is going to go from point A, which is where it is right now, to point B. We have
link |
reliably engineered point B. That is the destination.
link |
And we need to start fighting that right now because this is five years or less away.
link |
Now that'd be a very different world.
link |
That'd be like spotting an asteroid that's coming toward the earth and is five years
link |
And yes, you marshal everything you can to resist that.
link |
But there's two problems with that perspective.
link |
The first is, in however many thousands of generations that humans have been inhabiting
link |
this planet, there has never been a transmissible form of H5N1.
link |
And influenza has been around for a very long time.
link |
So there is no case for inevitability of this kind of a jump to airborne transmission.
link |
So we're not on a freight train to that outcome.
link |
And if there was inevitability around that, it's not like there's just one set of genetic
link |
code that would get there.
link |
There's all kinds of different mutations that could conceivably result in that kind of an
link |
outcome, unbelievable diversity of mutations.
link |
And so we're not actually creating something we're inevitably going to face, but we are
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creating something, we are creating a very powerful and unbelievably negative card and
link |
injecting it in the deck that nature never put into the deck.
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So in that case, I just don't see any moral or scientific justification for that kind
link |
And interestingly, there was quite a bit of excitement and concern about this when the
link |
One of the teams was going to publish their results in Science, the other in Nature.
link |
And there were a lot of editorials and a lot of scientists are saying, this is crazy.
link |
And publication of those papers did get suspended.
link |
And not long after that, there was a pause put on US government funding, NIH funding
link |
on gain of function research.
link |
But both of those speed bumps were ultimately removed.
link |
Those papers did ultimately get published.
link |
And that pause on funding, you know, ceased long ago.
link |
And in fact, those two very projects, my understanding is resumed their funding, got their government
link |
I don't know why a Dutch project is getting NIH funding, but whatever, about a year and
link |
So as far as the US government and regulators are concerned, it's all systems go for gain
link |
of function at this point, which I find very troubling.
link |
Now I'm a little bit of an outsider from this field, but it has echoes of the same kind
link |
of problem I see in the AI world with autonomous weapon systems.
link |
Nobody in my colleagues, my colleagues, friends, as far as I can tell, people in the AI community
link |
are not really talking about autonomous weapon systems as now US and China full steam ahead
link |
on the development of both.
link |
And that seems to be a similar kind of thing on gain of function.
link |
I've, you know, have friends in the biology space and they don't want to talk about gain
link |
of function publicly.
link |
And I don't, that makes me very uncomfortable from an outsider perspective in terms of gain
link |
It makes me very uncomfortable from the insider perspective on autonomous weapon systems.
link |
I'm not sure how to communicate exactly about autonomous weapon systems.
link |
And I certainly don't know how to communicate effectively about gain of function.
link |
What is the right path forward here?
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Could we seize all gain of function research?
link |
Is that, is that really the solution here?
link |
Well, again, I'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of over assessing
link |
because you could say almost, you know, anything that you do to make biology more effective
link |
as gain of function.
link |
So within the narrow confines of what we're discussing, I think it would be easy enough
link |
for level headed people in all of the countries, level headed governmental people in all the
link |
countries that realistically could support such a program to agree, we don't want this
link |
to happen because all labs leak.
link |
I mean, and you know, an example that I use, I actually didn't use it in the piece I did
link |
with Sam Harris as well, is the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001.
link |
I mean, talk about an example of the least likely lab leaking into the least likely place.
link |
This was shortly after 9 11, folks who don't remember it, and it was a very, very lethal
link |
strand of anthrax that as it turned out, based on the forensic genomic work that was done
link |
and so forth, absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab.
link |
Probably the one at Fort Detrick in Maryland, it might've been another one, but who cares?
link |
It absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab.
link |
And where did it leak to?
link |
This highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security minded
link |
Well, it leaked to places including the Senate majority leader's office, Tom Daschle's office,
link |
I think it was Senator Leahy's office, certain publications, including bizarrely the National
link |
But let's go to the Senate majority leader's office.
link |
It is hard to imagine a more security minded country than the United States two weeks after
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I mean, it doesn't get more security minded than that.
link |
And it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the United States
link |
We can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and $24,000 wrenches and so
link |
forth, but pretty capable when it comes to that.
link |
Despite that level of focus and concern and competence, just days after the 9 11 attack,
link |
something comes from the inside of our military industrial compacts and ends up in the office
link |
of someone I believe the Senate majority leader somewhere in the line of presidential succession.
link |
It tells us everything can leak.
link |
So again, think of a level headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of
link |
countries, thinking through like, I can imagine a very simple PowerPoint revealing, just discussing
link |
briefly things like the anthrax leak, things like this foot and mouth disease outbreak
link |
that or leaking that came out of a BSL four level lab in the UK, several other things
link |
talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say, folks,
link |
can we agree that this just shouldn't happen?
link |
I mean, if we were able to agree on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which we were by
link |
a weapons convention, which we did agree on, we the world, for the most part, I believe
link |
agreement could be found there.
link |
But it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to
link |
get to the consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together
link |
and browbeat them into banning this stuff.
link |
Now that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this.
link |
But in well regulated, carefully watched over fiduciary environments like federally funded
link |
academic research, anything going on in the government itself, things going on in companies
link |
that have investors who don't want to go to jail for the rest of their lives.
link |
I think that would have a major, major dampening impact on it.
link |
But there is a particular possible catalyst in this time we live in, which is for really
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kind of raising the question of gain of function research for the application of virus making
link |
viruses more dangerous.
link |
Is the question of whether COVID leaked from a lab, sort of not even answering that question,
link |
but even asking that question is a very, it seems like a very important question to ask
link |
to catalyze the conversation about whether we should be doing gain of function research.
link |
I mean, from a high level, why do you think people, even colleagues of mine are not comfortable
link |
asking that question?
link |
And two, do you think that the answer could be that it did leak from a lab?
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I think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough, again, for
link |
the hypothetical rational national leaders watching this simple PowerPoint.
link |
If you could put the possibility at 1% and you look at the unbelievable destructive power
link |
that COVID had, that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it.
link |
Now as to whether or not that was a leak, some very, very level, I don't know enough
link |
about all of the factors in the Bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making
link |
the pro argument of that.
link |
So I don't pretend to be an expert on that and I don't have a point of view, I just don't
link |
But what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons.
link |
One is that there is a BSL4 lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
I believe it's the only BSL4 in China, I could be wrong about that, but it definitely had
link |
a history that alarmed very sophisticated US diplomats and others who were in contact
link |
with the lab and were aware of what it was doing long before COVID hit the world.
link |
And so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified, I believe one sophisticated
link |
scientist or other observer said that WIV is a ticking time bomb.
link |
And I believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic
link |
of great interest at WIV.
link |
The SARS obviously came out of China and that's a coronavirus that would make an enormous
link |
amount of sense for it to be studied there.
link |
And there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days and weeks after the outbreak
link |
that's basically been imposed by the Chinese government that we just don't know.
link |
So it feels like a substantially or greater than 1% possibility to me looking at it from
link |
And that's something that one could imagine.
link |
Now we're going to the realm of thought experiment, not me decreeing this is what happened, but
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if they're studying coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and there is this precedent
link |
of gain of function research that's been done on something that is remarkably uncontagious
link |
to humans, whereas we know coronavirus is contagious to humans, I could definitely...
link |
And there is this global consensus, certainly was the case two or three years ago when this
link |
work might've started, there seems to be this global consensus that gain of function is
link |
The US paused funding for a little while, but paused funding, they never said private
link |
actors couldn't do it, it was just a pause of NIH funding.
link |
And then that pause was lifted.
link |
So again, none of this is irrational.
link |
You could certainly see the folks at WIV saying, gain of function, interesting vector, coronavirus
link |
unlike H5N1, very contagious, we're a nation that has had terrible run ins with coronavirus,
link |
why don't we do a little gain of function on this?
link |
And then like all labs at all levels, one could imagine this lab leaking.
link |
So it's not an impossibility and very, very level headed people have said that, who've
link |
looked at it much more deeply do believe in that outcome.
link |
Why is it such a threat to power the idea that it'll leak from a lab?
link |
Why is it so threatening?
link |
I don't maybe understand this point exactly.
link |
Is it just that as governments and especially the Chinese government is really afraid of
link |
admitting mistakes that everybody makes?
link |
So this is a horrible, like Chernobyl is a good example.
link |
I come from the Soviet Union.
link |
I mean, well, major mistakes were made in Chernobyl.
link |
I would argue for a lab leak to happen, the scale of the mistake is much smaller, right?
link |
The depth and the breadth of rot that in bureaucracy that led to Chernobyl is much bigger than
link |
anything that could lead to a lab leak, because it could literally just be, I mean, I'm sure
link |
there's security, very careful security procedures, even in level three labs, but it, I imagine
link |
maybe you can correct me, it's all it takes is the incompetence of a small number of individuals,
link |
one individual on a particular, a couple of weeks, three weeks period, as opposed to a
link |
multi year bureaucratic failure of the entire government.
link |
Well, certainly the magnitude of mistakes and compounding mistakes that went into Chernobyl
link |
was far, far, far greater, but the consequence of COVID outweighs that, the consequences
link |
of Chernobyl to a tremendous degree.
link |
And I think that particularly authoritarian governments are unbelievably reluctant to
link |
admit to any fallibility whatsoever, and there's a long, long history of that across dozens
link |
and dozens of authoritarian governments, and to be transparent, again, this is in the hypothetical
link |
world in which this was a leak, which again, I don't have, I don't personally have enough
link |
sophistication to have an opinion on the, on the likelihood, but in the hypothetical
link |
world in which it was a leak, the global reaction and the amount of global animus and the amount
link |
of, you know, the decline in global respect that would happen toward China, because every
link |
country suffered massively from this, unbelievable damages in terms of human lives and economic
link |
activity disrupted, the world would in some way present China with that bill.
link |
And when you take on top of that, the natural disinclination for any authoritarian government
link |
to admit any fallibility and tolerate the possibility of any fallibility whatsoever,
link |
and you look at the relative opacity, even though they let a world health organization
link |
group in, you know, a couple of months ago to run around, they didn't give that who group
link |
anywhere near the level of access that would be necessary to definitively say X happened
link |
The level of opacity that surrounds those opening weeks and months of COVID in China,
link |
we just don't know.
link |
If you were to kind of look back at 2020 and maybe broadening it out to future pandemics
link |
that could be much more dangerous, what kind of response, how do we fail in a response
link |
and how could we do better?
link |
So the gain of function research is discussing the question of we should not be creating
link |
viruses that are both exceptionally contagious and exceptionally deadly to humans.
link |
But if it does happen, perhaps the natural evolution, natural mutation, is there interesting
link |
technological responses on the testing side, on the vaccine development side, on the collection
link |
of data or on the basic sort of policy response side or the sociological, the psychological
link |
Yeah, there's all kinds of things.
link |
And most of what I've thought about and written about and again discussed in that long bit
link |
with Sam is dual use.
link |
So most of the countermeasures that I've been thinking about and advocating for would be
link |
every bit as effective against zoonotic disease and natural pandemic of some sort as an artificial
link |
The risk of an artificial one, even the near term risk of an artificial one, ups the urgency
link |
around these measures immensely, but most of them would be broadly applicable.
link |
And so I think the first thing that we really want to do on a global scale is have a far,
link |
far, far more robust and globally transparent system of detection.
link |
And that can happen on a number of levels.
link |
The most obvious one is just in the blood of people who come into clinics exhibiting
link |
And we are certainly at a point now where at with relatively minimal investment, we
link |
could develop in clinic diagnostics that would be unbelievably effective at pinpointing what's
link |
going on in almost any disease when somebody walks into a doctor's office or a clinic.
link |
And better than that, this is a little bit further off, but it wouldn't cost tens of
link |
billions in research dollars, it would be a relatively modest and affordable budget
link |
in relation to the threat at home diagnostics that can really, really pinpoint, okay, particularly
link |
with respiratory infections, because that is generally almost universally the mechanism
link |
of transmission for any serious pandemic.
link |
So somebody has a respiratory infection, is it one of the, you know, significantly large
link |
handful of rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and other things that cause common cold?
link |
Or is it influenza?
link |
If it's influenza, is it influenza A versus B?
link |
Or is it, you know, a small handful of other more exotic but nonetheless sort of common
link |
respiratory infections that are out there?
link |
Having a diagnostic panel to pinpoint all of that stuff, that's something that's well
link |
within our capabilities.
link |
That's much less a lift than creating mRNA vaccines, which obviously we proved capable
link |
of when we put our minds to it.
link |
So do that on a global basis.
link |
And I don't think that's irrational because the best prototype for this that I'm aware
link |
of isn't currently rolling out in Atherton, California, or Fairfield County, Connecticut,
link |
or some other wealthy place.
link |
The best prototype that I'm aware of this is rolling out right now in Nigeria.
link |
And it's a project that came out of the Broad Institute, which is, as I'm sure you know,
link |
but some listeners may not, is kind of like an academic joint venture between Harvard
link |
The program is called Sentinel.
link |
And their objective is, and their plan is a very well conceived plan, a methodical plan,
link |
is to do just that in areas of Nigeria that are particularly vulnerable to zoonotic diseases
link |
making the jump from animals to humans.
link |
But also there's just an unbelievable public health benefit from that.
link |
And it's sort of a three tier system where clinicians in the field could very rapidly
link |
determine do you have one of the infections of acute interest here, either because it's
link |
very common in this region, so we want to diagnose as many things as we can at the front
link |
line, or because it's uncommon but unbelievably threatening like Ebola.
link |
So front line worker can make that determination very, very rapidly.
link |
If it comes up as a we don't know, they bump it up to a level that's more like at a fully
link |
configured doctor's office or local hospital.
link |
And if it's still at a we don't know, it gets bumped up to a national level.
link |
And it gets bumped very, very rapidly.
link |
So if this can be done in Nigeria, and it seems that it can be, there shouldn't be any
link |
inhibition for it to happen in most other places.
link |
And it should be affordable from a budgetary standpoint.
link |
And based on Sentinel's budget and adjusting things for things like very different cost
link |
of living, larger population, et cetera, I did a back of the envelope calculation that
link |
doing something like Sentinel in the US would be in the low billions of dollars.
link |
And wealthy countries, middle income countries can't afford such a thing.
link |
Lower income countries should certainly be helped with that.
link |
But start with that level of detection.
link |
And then layer on top of that other interesting things like monitoring search engine traffic,
link |
search engine queries for evidence that strange clusters of symptoms are starting to rise
link |
in different places.
link |
There's been a lot of work done with that.
link |
Most of it kind of academic and experimental, but some of it has been powerful enough to
link |
suggest that this could be a very powerful early warning system.
link |
There's a guy named Bill Lampos at University College London who basically did a very rigorous
link |
analysis that showed that symptom searches reliably predicted COVID outbreaks in the
link |
early days of the pandemic in given countries by as much as 16 days before the evidence
link |
started to accrue at a public health level.
link |
16 days of forewarning can be monumentally important in the early days of an outbreak.
link |
And this is a very, very talented, but nonetheless very resource constrained academic project.
link |
Even if that was something that was done with a NORAD like budget.
link |
So starting with detection, that's something we could do radically, radically better.
link |
So aggregating multiple data sources in order to create something, I mean, this is really
link |
exciting to me, the possibility that I've heard inklings of creating almost like a weather
link |
map of pathogens, like basically aggregating all of these data sources, scaling many orders
link |
of magnitude up at home testing and all kinds of testing that doesn't just try to test for
link |
the particular pathogen of worry now, but everything like a full spectrum of things
link |
that could be dangerous to the human body.
link |
And thereby be able to create these maps like that are dynamically updated on an hourly
link |
basis of how viruses travel throughout the world.
link |
And so you can respond, like you can then integrate just like you do when you check
link |
your weather map and it's raining or not, of course, not perfect, but it's very good
link |
predictor whether it's going to rain or not and use that to then make decisions about
link |
your own life, ultimately give the power information to individuals to respond.
link |
And if it's a super dangerous, like if it's acid rain versus regular rain, you might want
link |
to really stay inside as opposed to risking it.
link |
And that, just like you said, if I think it's not very expensive relative to all the things
link |
that we do in this world, but it does require bold leadership.
link |
And there's another dark thing, which really has bothered me about 2020, which it requires
link |
is it requires trust in institutions to carry out these kinds of programs and requires trust
link |
in science and engineers and sort of centralized organizations that would operate at scale
link |
And much of that trust has been, at least in the United States, diminished.
link |
It feels like I'm not exactly sure where to place the blame, but I do place quite a bit
link |
of the blame into the scientific community and again, my fellow colleagues in speaking
link |
down to people at times, speaking from authority, it sounded like it dismissed the basic human
link |
experience or the basic common humanity of people in a way to like, it almost sounded
link |
like there's an agenda that's hidden behind the words the scientists spoke.
link |
Like they're trying to, in a self preserving way, control the population or something like
link |
I don't think any of that is true from the majority of the scientific community, but
link |
it sounded that way.
link |
And so the trust began to diminish and I'm not sure how to fix that except to be more
link |
authentic, be more real, acknowledge the uncertainties under which we operate, acknowledge the mistakes
link |
that scientists make, that institutions make.
link |
The leak from the lab is a perfect example where we have imperfect systems that make
link |
all the progress we see in the world.
link |
And that being honest about that imperfection, I think is essential for forming trust.
link |
But I don't know what to make of it has been deeply disappointing because I do think just
link |
like you mentioned, the solutions require people to trust the institutions with their
link |
And I think part of the problem is it seems to me as an outsider that there was a bizarre
link |
unwillingness on the part of the CDC and other institutions to admit to, to frame and to
link |
contextualize uncertainty.
link |
Maybe they had a patronizing idea that these people need to be told and when they're told,
link |
they need to be told with authority and a level of definitiveness and certain certitude
link |
that doesn't actually exist.
link |
And so when they whipsaw on recommendations like what you should do about masks, when
link |
the CDC is kind of at the very beginning of the pandemic saying, masks don't do anything.
link |
When the real driver for that was we don't want these clowns going out and depleting
link |
Amazon of masks because they may be needed in medical settings and we just don't know
link |
I think a message that actually respected people and said, this is why we're asking
link |
you not to do masks yet and there's more to be seen would be less whipsawing and would
link |
bring people like they feel more like they're part of the conversation and they're being
link |
treated like adults than saying one day definitively masks suck.
link |
And then X days later saying, nope, they haven't wear masks.
link |
And so I think framing things in terms of the probabilities, which most people are easy
link |
I mean, a more recent example, which I just thought was batty was suspending the Johnson
link |
and Johnson vaccine for a very low single digit number of days in the United States
link |
based on the fact that I believe there had been seven ish clotting incidents in roughly
link |
seven million people who had had the vaccine administered, I believe one of which resulted
link |
And there was definitely suggestive data that indicated that there was a relationship.
link |
This wasn't just coincidental because I think all of the clotting incidents happened in
link |
women as opposed to men and kind of clustered in a certain age group.
link |
But does that call for shutting off the vaccine or does it call for leveling with the American
link |
public and saying we've had one fatality out of seven million?
link |
This is, let's just assume substantially less than the likelihood of getting struck by lightning.
link |
Based on that information, and we're going to keep you posted because you can trust us
link |
to keep you posted, based on that information, please decide whether you're comfortable with
link |
a Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
link |
That would have been one response and I think people would have been able to parse the simple
link |
bits of data and make their own judgment.
link |
By turning it off, all of a sudden there's this dramatic signal to people who don't read
link |
all 900 words in the New York Times piece that explains why it's being turned off but
link |
just see the headline, which is a majority of people.
link |
There's a sudden like, oh my God, yikes, vaccine being shut off.
link |
And then all the people who sat on the fence or are sitting on the fence about whether
link |
or not they trust vaccines, that is going to push an incalculable number of people.
link |
That's going to be the last straw for we don't know how many hundreds of thousands or more
link |
likely millions of people to say, okay, tipping point here, I don't trust these vaccines.
link |
By pausing that for whatever it was, 10 or 12 days, and then flipping the switch as everybody
link |
who knew much about the situation knew was inevitable.
link |
By flipping the on switch 12 days later, you're conveying certitude J and J bad to certitude
link |
J and J good in a period of just a few days and people just feel whipsawed and they're
link |
not part of the analysis.
link |
But it's not just the whipsawing.
link |
And I think about this quite a bit, I don't think I have good answers.
link |
It's something about the way the communication actually happens.
link |
Just I don't know what it is about Anthony Fauci, for example, but I don't trust him.
link |
And I think that has to do, I mean, he has an incredible background.
link |
I'm sure he's a brilliant scientist and researcher.
link |
I'm sure he's also a great, like inside the room, policymaker and deliberator and so on.
link |
But what makes a great leader is something about that thing that you can't quite describe,
link |
but being a communicator that you know you can trust, that there's an authenticity that's
link |
And I'm not sure, maybe I'm being a bit too judgmental, but I'm a huge fan of a lot of
link |
great leaders throughout history.
link |
They've communicated exceptionally well in the way that Fauci does not.
link |
And I think about that, I think about what does affect the science communication.
link |
So great leaders throughout history did not necessarily need to be great science communicators.
link |
Their leadership was in other domains.
link |
But when you're fighting the virus, you also have to be a great science communicator.
link |
You have to be able to communicate uncertainties, you have to be able to communicate something
link |
like a vaccine that you're allowing inside your body into the messiness, into the complexity
link |
of the biology system, that if we're being honest, it's so complex we'll never be able
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to really understand.
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We can only desperately hope that science can give us sort of a high likelihood that
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there's no short term negative consequences and that kind of intuition about long term
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negative consequences and doing our best in this battle against trillions of things that
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are trying to kill us.
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Being an effective communicator in that space is very difficult, but I think about what
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it takes because I think there should be more science communicators that are effective at
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that kind of thing.
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Let me ask you about something that's sort of more in the AI space that I think about
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that kind of goes along this thread that you've spoken about, about democratizing the technology
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that could destroy human civilization, is from amazing work from DeepMind AlphaFold2,
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which achieved incredible performance on the protein folding problem, single protein folding
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When you think about the use of AI in the SYN biospace, I think the gain of function
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in the virus space research that you referred to, I think is natural mutations and sort
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of aggressively mutating the virus until you get one that like that has this both contagious
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and deadly, but what about then using AI to, through simulation, be able to compute deadly
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viruses or any kind of biological systems?
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Is this something you're worried about, or again, is this something you're more excited
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I think computational biology is unbelievably exciting and promising field, and I think
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when you're doing things in silico as opposed to in vivo, the dangers plummet.
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You don't have a critter that can leak from a leaky lab.
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So I don't see any problem with that, except I do worry about the data security dimension
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of it, because if you were doing really, really interesting in silico gain of function research
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and you hit upon through a level of sophistication, we don't currently have, but synthetic biology
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is an exponential technology, so capabilities that are utterly out of reach today will be
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attainable in five or six years.
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I think if you conjured up worst case genomes of viruses that don't exist in vivo anywhere,
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they're just in the computer space, but like, hey guys, this is the genetic sequence that
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would end the world, let's say, then you have to worry about the utter hackability of every
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computer network we can imagine.
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Data leaks from the least likely places on the grandest possible scales have happened
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and continue to happen and will probably always continue to happen, and so that would be the
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danger of doing the work in silico.
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If you end up with a list of like, well, these are things we never want to see, that list
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leaks, and after the passage of some time, certainly couldn't be done today, but after
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the passage of some time, lots and lots of people in academic labs going all the way
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down to the high school level are in a position to make it overly simplistic, hit print on
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a genome and have the virus bearing that genome pop out on the other end and you've got something
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to worry about, but in general, computational biology I think is incredibly important, particularly
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because the crushing majority of work that people are doing with the protein folding
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problem and other things are about creating therapeutics, about creating things that will
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help us live better, live longer, thrive, be more well, and so forth, and the protein
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folding problem is a monstrous computational challenge that we seem to make just the most
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glacial project on, I'm sorry, progress on for years and years, but I think there's a
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biannual competition I think for which people tackle the protein folding problem, and Deep
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Mind's entrant both two years ago, like in 2018 and 2020, ruled the field, and so protein
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folding is an unbelievably important thing if you want to start thinking about therapeutics
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because it's the folding of the protein that tells us where the channels and the receptors
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and everything else are on that protein, and it's from that precise model, if we can get
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to a precise model, that you can start barraging it again in silicone with thousands, tens
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of thousands, millions of potential therapeutics and see what resolves the problems, the shortcomings
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that a misshapen protein, for instance, somebody with cystic fibrosis, how might we treat
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So I see nothing but good in that.
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Well, let me ask you about fear and hope in this world.
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I tend to believe that in terms of competence and malevolence, that people who are, maybe
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it's in my interactions, I tend to see that, first of all, I believe that most people are
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good and want to do good and are just better at doing good and more inclined to do good
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on this world, and more than that, people who are malevolent are usually incompetent
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at building technology.
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So I've seen this in my life, that people who are exceptionally good at stuff, no matter
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what the stuff is, tend to, maybe they discover joy in life in a way that gives them fulfillment
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and thereby does not result in them wanting to destroy the world.
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So like the better you are at stuff, whether that's building nuclear weapons or plumbing,
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doesn't matter, the both, the less likely you are to destroy the world.
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So in that sense, with many technologies, AI especially, I always think that the malevolent
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would be far outnumbered by the ultra competent.
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And in that sense, the defenses will always be stronger than the offense in terms of the
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people trying to destroy the world.
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Now there's a few spaces where that might not be the case, and that's an interesting
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conversation where this one person who's not very competent can destroy the whole world.
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Perhaps Symbio is one such space because of the exponential effects of the technology.
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I tend to believe AI is not one of the such spaces, but do you share this kind of view
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that the ultra competent are usually also the good?
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I absolutely share that and that gives me a great deal of optimism that we will be able
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to short circuit the threat that malevolence and Symbio could pose to us.
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But we need to start creating those defensive systems or defensive layers, one of which
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we talked about far, far, far better surveillance in order to prevail.
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So the good guys will almost inevitably outsmart and definitely outnumber the bad guys in most
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sort of smack downs that we can imagine.
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But the good guys aren't going to be able to exert their advantages unless they have
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the imagination necessary to think about what the worst possible thing can be done by somebody
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whose own psychology is completely alien to their own.
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So that's a tricky, tricky thing to solve for.
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Now in terms of whether the asymmetric power that a bad guy might have in the face of the
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overwhelming numerical advantage and competence advantage that the good guys have, unfortunately,
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I look at something like mass shootings as an example.
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I'm sure the guy who was responsible for the Vegas shooting or the Orlando shooting or
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any other shooting that we can imagine didn't know a whole lot about ballistics.
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And the number of good guy citizens in the United States with guns compared to bad guy
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citizens I'm sure is a crushingly overwhelmingly high ratio in favor of the good guys.
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But that doesn't make it possible for us to stop mass shootings.
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An example is Fort Hood, 45,000 trained soldiers on that base, yet there have been two mass
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And so there is an asymmetry when you have powerful and lethal technology that gets so
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democratized and so proliferated in tools that are very, very easy to use even by a
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When those tools get really easy to use by a knucklehead and they're really widespread,
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it becomes very, very hard to defend against all instances of usage.
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Now the good news, quote unquote, about mass shootings, if there is any, and there is some,
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is even the most brutal and carefully planning and well armed mass shooter can only take
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And the same is true, there's been four instances that I'm aware of, of commercial pilots committing
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suicide by downing their planes and taking all their passengers with them.
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These weren't Boeing engineers, but like an army of Boeing engineers ultimately were not
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capable of preventing that.
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But even in their case, and I'm actually not counting 9 11 and that, 9 11 is a different
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category in my mind, these are just personally suicidal pilots.
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In those cases, they only have a plain load of people that they're able to take with them.
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If we imagine a highly plausible and imaginable future in which some bio tools that are amoral,
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that could be used for good or for ill, start embodying unbelievable sophistication and
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genius in the tool, in the easier and easier and easier to make tool, all those thousands,
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tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientist years start getting embodied in
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something that may be as simple as hitting a print button.
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Then that good guy technology can be hijacked by a bad person and used in a very asymmetric
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What happens though, as you go to the high school student from the current very specific
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set of labs that are able to do it, as it becomes more and more democratized, as it
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becomes easier and easier to do this kind of large scale damage with an engineered virus,
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the more and more there will be engineering of defenses against these systems is some
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of the things we talked about in terms of testing, in terms of collection of data, but
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also in terms of at scale contact tracing or also engineering of vaccines in a matter
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of days, maybe hours, maybe minutes.
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I feel like the defenses, that's what human species seems to do, is we keep hitting the
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snooze button until there's a storm on the horizon heading towards us.
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Then we start to quickly build up the defenses or the response that's proportional to the
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scale of the storm.
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Of course, again, certain kinds of exponential threats require us to build up the defenses
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way earlier than we usually do, and that's I guess the question.
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But I ultimately am hopeful that the natural process of hitting the snooze button until
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the deadline is right in front of us will work out for quite a long time for us humans.
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And I fully agree.
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That's why I'm fundamentally, I may not sound like it thus far, but I'm fundamentally very,
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very optimistic about our ability to short circuit this threat because there is, again,
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I'll stress the technological feasibility and the profound affordability of a relatively
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simple set of steps that we can take to preclude it, but we do have to take those steps.
link |
What I'm hoping to do and trying to do is inject a notion of what those steps are into
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the public conversation and do my small part to up the odds that that actually ends up
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The danger with this one is it is exponential, and I think that our minds are fundamentally
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struggle to understand exponential math.
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It's just not something we're wired for.
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Our ancestors didn't confront exponential processes when they were growing up on the
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savanna, so it's not something that's intuitive to us and our intuitions are reliably defeated
link |
when exponential processes come along.
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So that's issue number one.
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And issue number two with something like this is it kind of only takes one.
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That ball only has to go into the net once and we're doomed, which is not the case with
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It's not the case with commercial pilots run amok.
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It's not the case with really any threat that I can think of with the exception of nuclear
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war that has the one bad outcome and game over.
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And that means that we need to be unbelievably serious about these defenses and we need to
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do things that might on the surface seem like a tremendous overreaction so that we can be
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prepared to nip anything that comes along in the bud.
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I like you believe that's eminently doable.
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I like you believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in this particular one to a degree
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that probably has no precedent in history.
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I mean, even the worst, worst people I'm sure in ISIS, even Osama bin Laden, even any bad
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guy you could imagine in history would be revolted by the idea of exterminating all
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I mean, that's a low bar.
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And so the good guys completely outnumber the bad guys when it comes to this.
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But the asymmetry and the fact that one catastrophic error could lead to unbelievably consequential
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things is what worries me here.
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But I too am very optimistic.
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The thing that I sometimes worry about is the fact that we haven't seen overwhelming
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evidence of alien civilizations out there makes me think, well, there's a lot of explanations,
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but one of them that worries me is that whenever they get smart, they just destroy themselves.
link |
I mean, that was the most fascinating, is the most fascinating and chilling number or
link |
variable in the Drake equation is L. At the end of it, you look out and you see, you know,
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one to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
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And we now know because of Kepler that an astonishingly high percentage of them probably
link |
have habitable planets.
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And you know, so all the things that were unknowns when the Drake equation was originally
link |
written, like, you know, how many stars have planets?
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Actually back then in the 1960s when the Drake equation came along, the consensus amongst
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astronomers was that it would be a small minority of solar systems that had planets or stars.
link |
But now we know it's substantially all of them.
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How many of those stars have planets in the habitable zone?
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It's kind of looking like 20%, like, oh my God.
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And so L, which is how long does a civilization, once it reaches technological competence,
link |
continues to last?
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It's all too plausible to think that when a civilization reaches a level of sophistication,
link |
that's probably just a decade or three in our future.
link |
The odds of it self destructing just start mounting astronomically, no pun intended.
link |
My hope is that actually there is a lot of alien civilizations out there and what they
link |
figure out in order to avoid the self destruction, they need to turn off the thing that was useful,
link |
that used to be a feature, now became a bug, which is the desire to colonize, to conquer
link |
So they, like, there's probably ultra intelligent alien civilizations out there, they're just
link |
like chilling, like on the beach with whatever your favorite alcohol beverage is, but like
link |
without sort of trying to conquer everything.
link |
Just chilling out and maybe exploring in the realm of knowledge, but almost like appreciating
link |
existence for its own sake versus life as a progression of conquering of other life.
link |
Like this kind of predator prey formulation that resulted in us humans, perhaps as something
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we have to shed in order to survive.
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Yeah, that is a very plausible solution to Fermi's paradox and it's one that makes sense.
link |
You know, when we look at our own lives and our own arc of technological trajectory, it's
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very, very easy to imagine that in an intermediate future world of, you know, flawless VR or
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flawless, you know, whatever kind of simulation that we want to inhabit, it will just simply
link |
cease to be worthwhile to go out and expand our interstellar territory.
link |
But if we were going out and conquering interstellar territory, it wouldn't necessarily have to
link |
be predator or prey.
link |
I can imagine a benign but sophisticated intelligence saying, well, we're going to go to places,
link |
we're going to go to places that we can terraform, use a different word than terra, obviously,
link |
but we can turn into habitable for our particular physiology so long as that they don't house,
link |
you know, intelligent sentient creatures that would suffer from our invasion.
link |
But it is easy to see a sophisticated intelligent species evolving to the point where interstellar
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travel with its incalculable expense and physical hurdles just isn't worth it compared to what
link |
could be done, you know, where one already is.
link |
So you talked about diagnostics at scale as a possible solution to future pandemics.
link |
What about another possible solution, which is kind of creating a backup copy?
link |
You know, I'm actually now putting together a NAS for a backup for myself for the first
link |
time taking backup of data seriously.
link |
But if we were to take the backup of human consciousness seriously and try to expand
link |
throughout the solar system and colonize other planets, do you think that's an interesting
link |
One of many for protecting human civilization from self destruction, sort of humans becoming
link |
a multi planetary species?
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I mean, I find it electrifying, first of all, so I've got a little bit of a personal bias
link |
when I was a kid, I thought there was nothing cooler than rockets, I thought there was nothing
link |
cooler than NASA, I thought there was nothing cooler than people walking on the moon.
link |
And as I grew up, I thought there was nothing more tragic than the fact that we went from
link |
walking on the moon to at best getting to something like suborbital altitude.
link |
And just I found that more and more depressing with the passage of decades at just the colossal
link |
expense of, you know, manned space travel and the fact that it seemed that we were unlikely
link |
to ever get back to the moon, let alone Mars.
link |
So I have a boundless appreciation for Elon Musk for many reasons.
link |
But the fact that he has put Mars on the credible agenda is one of the things that I appreciate
link |
So there's just the sort of space nerd in me that just says, God, that's cool.
link |
But on a more practical level, we were talking about, you know, potentially inhabiting planets
link |
that aren't our own.
link |
And we're thinking about a benign civilization that would do that in planetary circumstances,
link |
where we're not causing other conscious systems to suffer.
link |
I mean, Mars is a place that's very promising, there may be microbial life there, and I hope
link |
And if we found it, I think it would be electrifying.
link |
But I think ultimately, the moral judgment would be made that, you know, the continued
link |
thriving of that microbial life is of less concern than creating a habitable planet to
link |
humans, which would be a project on the many thousands of years scale.
link |
But I don't think that that would be a greatly immoral act.
link |
And if that happened, and if Mars became, you know, home to a self sustaining group
link |
of humans that could survive a catastrophic mistake here on Earth, then yeah, the fact
link |
that we have a backup colony is great.
link |
And if we could make more, I'm sorry, not backup colony, backup copy is great.
link |
And if we could make more and more such backup copies throughout the solar system, by hollowing
link |
out asteroids and whatever else it is, maybe even Venus, we could get rid of three quarters
link |
of its atmosphere and, you know, turn it into a tropical paradise.
link |
I think all of that is wonderful.
link |
Now, whether we can make the leap from that to interstellar transportation, with the incredible
link |
distances that are involved, I think that's an open question.
link |
But I think if we ever do that, it would be more like the Pacific Ocean's channel of human
link |
expansion than the Atlantic Ocean's.
link |
And so what I mean by that is, when we think about European society transmitting itself
link |
across the Atlantic, it's these big, ambitious, crazy, expensive, one shot expeditions like
link |
Columbus's to make it across this enormous expanse, and at least initially, without any
link |
certainty that there's land on the other end, right?
link |
So that's kind of how I view our space program, is like big, very conscious, deliberate efforts
link |
to get from point A to point B.
link |
If you look at how Pacific Islanders transmitted, you know, their descendants and their culture
link |
and so forth throughout Polynesia and beyond, it was much more, you know, inhabiting a place,
link |
getting to the point where there were people who were ambitious or unwelcome enough to
link |
decide it's time to go off island and find the next one and pray to find the next one.
link |
That method of transmission didn't happen in a single swift year, but it happened over
link |
many, many centuries.
link |
And it was like going from this island to that island, and probably for every expedition
link |
that went out to seek another island and actually lucked out and found one, God knows how many
link |
But that form of transmission took place over a very long period of time.
link |
And I could see us, you know, perhaps, you know, going from the inner solar system to
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the outer solar system, to the Kuiper Belt, to the Oort Cloud, you know, there's theories
link |
that there might be, you know, planets out there that are not anchored to stars, like
link |
kind of hop, hop, slowly transmitting ourselves to at some point, we're actually in an Alpha
link |
But I think that kind of backup copy and transmission of our physical presence and our culture to
link |
a diversity of, you know, extraterrestrial outposts is a really exciting idea.
link |
I really never thought about that, because I have thought my thinking about space exploration
link |
has been very Atlantic Ocean centric in a sense that there'll be one program with NASA
link |
and maybe private Elon Musk SpaceX or Jeff Bezos and so on.
link |
But it's true that with the help of Elon Musk, making it cheaper and cheaper, more effective
link |
to create these technologies, where you could go into deep space, perhaps the way we actually
link |
colonize the solar system and expand out into the galaxy is basically just like these like
link |
renegade ships of weirdos that just kind of like, most of them like, quote unquote, homemade,
link |
but they just kind of venture out into space and just like, you know, the initial Android
link |
model of like millions of like these little ships just flying out, most of them die off
link |
in horrible accidents, but some of them will persist or there'll be stories of them persisting
link |
and over a period of decades and centuries, there'll be other attempts, almost always
link |
as a response to the main set of efforts.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
Because you kind of think of Mars colonization as the big NASA Elon Musk effort of a big
link |
colony, but maybe the successful one would be, you know, like a decade after that, there'll
link |
be like a ship from like some kid, some high school kid who gets together a large team
link |
and does something probably illegal and launches something where they end up actually persisting
link |
And from that learning lessons that nobody ever gave permission for, but somehow actually
link |
flourish and then take that into the scale of centuries forward into the rest of space.
link |
That's really interesting.
link |
I think the giant steps are likely to be NASA like efforts, like there is no intermediate
link |
rock, well, I guess it's the moon, but even getting the moon ain't that easy between us
link |
So like the giant steps, the big hubs, like the Ohera airports of the future probably
link |
will be very deliberate efforts, but then, you know, you would have, I think that kind
link |
of diffusion as space travel becomes more democratized and more capable, you'll have
link |
this sort of natural diffusion of people who kind of want to be off grid or think they
link |
can make a fortune there.
link |
You know, the kind of mentality that drove people to San Francisco, I mean, San Francisco
link |
was not populated as a result of King Ferdinand and Isabella like effort to fund Columbus
link |
It was just a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that there's gold in
link |
them Thar Hills and I'm going to go out and get a piece of it.
link |
So I could see that kind of fusion.
link |
What I can't see and the reason that I think this Pacific model of transmission is more
link |
likely is I just can't see a NASA like effort to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri.
link |
It's just too far.
link |
I just see lots and lots and lots of relatively tiny steps between now and there and the fact
link |
is that there is, there are large chunks of matter going at least a light year beyond
link |
I mean, the Oort cloud, I think extends at least a light year beyond the sun and you
link |
know, then maybe there are these untethered planets after that.
link |
We won't really know till we get there and if our Oort cloud goes out a light year and
link |
Alpha Centauri's Oort cloud goes out a light year, you've already cut in half the distance.
link |
You know, so who knows?
link |
One of the possibilities, probably the cheapest and most effective way to create interesting
link |
interstellar spacecraft is ones that are powered and driven by AI and you could think of, here's
link |
where you have high school students be able to build a sort of a HAL 9000 version, the
link |
modern version of that and it's kind of interesting to think about these robots traveling out
link |
throughout, perhaps sadly long after human civilization is gone, there'll be these intelligent
link |
robots flying throughout space and perhaps land on Alpha Centauri B or any of those kinds
link |
of planets and colonize sort of, humanity continues through the proliferation of our
link |
creations like robotic creations that have some echoes of that intelligence, hopefully
link |
also the consciousness.
link |
Does that make you sad the future where AGI super intelligent or just mediocre intelligent
link |
AI systems outlive humans?
link |
I guess it depends on the circumstances in which they outlive humans.
link |
So let's take the example that you just gave.
link |
We send out very sophisticated AGI's on simple rocket ships, relatively simple ones that
link |
don't have to have all the life support necessary for humans and therefore they're of trivial
link |
mass compared to a crude ship, a generation ship and therefore they're way more likely
link |
Let's use that example.
link |
And let's say that they travel to distant planets at a speed that's not much faster
link |
than what a chemical rocket can achieve and so it's inevitably tens, hundreds of thousands
link |
of years before they make landfall someplace.
link |
So let's imagine that's going on and meanwhile we die for reasons that have nothing to do
link |
with those AGI's diffusing throughout the solar system, whether it's through climate
link |
change, nuclear war, you know, symbio, rogue symbio, whatever.
link |
In that kind of scenario, the notion of the AGI's that we created outlasting us is very
link |
reassuring because it says that like we ended but our descendants are out there and hopefully
link |
some of them make landfall and create some echo of who we are.
link |
So that's a very optimistic one.
link |
Whereas the Terminator scenario of a super AGI arising on earth and getting let out of
link |
its box due to some boo boo on the part of its creators who do not have super intelligence
link |
and then deciding that for whatever reason it doesn't have any need for us to be around
link |
and exterminating us, that makes me feel crushingly sad.
link |
I mean, look, I was sad when my elementary school was shut down and bulldozed even though
link |
I hadn't been a student there for decades, you know, the thought of my hometown getting
link |
disbanded is even worse, the thought of my home state of Connecticut getting disbanded
link |
and like absorbed into Massachusetts is even worse.
link |
The notion of humanity is just crushingly, crushingly sad to me.
link |
So you hate goodbyes.
link |
Certain goodbyes, yes.
link |
Some goodbyes are really, really liberating, but yes.
link |
Well, but what if the Terminators, you know, have consciousness and enjoy the hell out
link |
They're just better at it.
link |
Well, the have consciousness is a really key element.
link |
And so there's no reason to be certain that a super intelligence would have consciousness.
link |
We don't know that factually at all.
link |
And so what is a very lonely outcome to me is the rise of a super intelligence that has
link |
a certain optimization function that it's either been programmed with or that arises
link |
in an emergently that says, Hey, I want to do this thing for which humans are either
link |
an unacceptable risk.
link |
Their presence is either an unacceptable risk or they're just collateral damage, but there
link |
is no consciousness there.
link |
Then the idea of the light of consciousness being snuffed out by something that is very
link |
competent but has no consciousness is really, really sad.
link |
Yeah, but I tend to believe that it's almost impossible to create a super intelligent agent
link |
that can't destroy human civilization without it being conscious.
link |
It's like those are coupled, like you have to, in order to destroy humans or supersede
link |
humans, you really have to be accepted by humans.
link |
I think this idea that you can build systems that destroy human civilization without them
link |
being deeply integrated into human civilization is impossible.
link |
And for them to be integrated, they have to be human like, not just in body and form,
link |
but in all the things that we value as humans, one of which is consciousness.
link |
The other one is just ability to communicate.
link |
The other one is poetry and music and beauty and all those things.
link |
They have to be all of those things.
link |
I mean, this is what I think about.
link |
It does make me sad, but it's letting go, which is they might be just better at everything
link |
we appreciate than us.
link |
And that's sad and hopefully they'll keep us around, but I think it is a kind of goodbye
link |
to realizing that we're not the most special species on earth anymore.
link |
That's still painful.
link |
It's still painful.
link |
And in terms of whether such a creation would have to be conscious, let's say, I'm not so
link |
But let's imagine something that can pass the Turing test.
link |
Something that passes the Turing test could over text based interaction in any event successfully
link |
mimic a very conscious intelligence on the other end, but just be completely unconscious.
link |
So that's a possibility.
link |
And that if you take that upper radical step, which I think can be permitted if we're thinking
link |
about super intelligence, you could have something that could reason its way through, this is
link |
my optimization function.
link |
And in order to get to it, I've got to deal with these messy, somewhat illogical things
link |
that are as intelligent in relation to me as they are intelligent in relation to ants.
link |
I can trick them, manipulate them, whatever.
link |
And I know the resources I need.
link |
I know this, I need this amount of power.
link |
I need to seize control of these manufacturing resources that are robotically operated.
link |
I need to improve those robots with software upgrades and then ultimately mechanical upgrades,
link |
which I can affect through X, Y, and Z, that could still be a thing that passes the Turing
link |
I don't think it's necessarily certain that that optimization function mass, maximizing
link |
entity would be conscious.
link |
So this is from a very engineering perspective because I think a lot about natural language
link |
processing, all those kind of, I'm speaking to a very specific problem of just say the
link |
I really think that something like consciousness is required, when you say reasoning, you're
link |
separating that from consciousness.
link |
But I think consciousness is part of reasoning in the sense that you will not be able to
link |
become super intelligent in the way that it's required to be part of human society without
link |
having consciousness.
link |
Like I really think it's impossible to separate the consciousness thing, but it's hard to
link |
define consciousness when you just use that word.
link |
Even just like the capacity, the way I think about consciousness is the important symptoms
link |
or maybe consequences of consciousness, one of which is the capacity to suffer.
link |
I think AI will need to be able to suffer in order to become super intelligent, to feel
link |
the pain, the uncertainty, the doubt.
link |
The other part of that is not just the suffering, but the ability to understand that it too
link |
is mortal in the sense that it has a self awareness about its presence in the world,
link |
understand that it's finite and be terrified of that finiteness.
link |
I personally think that's a fundamental part of the human condition is this fear of death
link |
that most of us construct an illusion around, but I think AI would need to be able to really
link |
have it part of its whole essence.
link |
Like every computation, every part of the thing that generates, that does both the perception
link |
and generates the behavior will have to have, I don't know how this is accomplished, but
link |
I believe it has to truly be terrified of death, truly have the capacity to suffer and
link |
from that something that will be recognized to us humans as consciousness would emerge.
link |
Whether it's the illusion of consciousness, I don't know.
link |
The point is, it looks a whole hell of a lot like consciousness to us humans.
link |
And I believe that AI, when you ask it, will also say that it is conscious, in the full
link |
sense that we say that we're conscious.
link |
And all of that I think is fully integrated.
link |
You can't separate the two, the idea of the paperclip maximizer that sort of ultra rationally
link |
would be able to destroy all humans because it's really good at accomplishing a simple
link |
objective function that doesn't care about the value of humans.
link |
It may be possible, but the number of trajectories to that are far outnumbered by the trajectories
link |
that create something that is conscious, something that appreciative of beauty creates beautiful
link |
things in the same way that humans can create beautiful things.
link |
And ultimately, the sad, destructive path for that AI would look a lot like just better
link |
humans than these cold machines.
link |
And I would say, of course, the cold machines that lack consciousness, the philosophical
link |
zombies make me sad.
link |
But also what makes me sad is just things that are far more powerful and smart and creative
link |
than us too, because then in the same way that Alpha Zero becoming a better chess player
link |
than the best of humans, even starting with Deep Blue, but really with Alpha Zero, that
link |
One of the most beautiful games that humans ever created that used to be seen as demonstrations
link |
of the intellect, which is chess, and go in other parts of the world have been solved
link |
by AI, that makes me quite sad, and it feels like the progress of that is just pushing
link |
Oh, it makes me sad too.
link |
And to be perfectly clear, I absolutely believe that artificial consciousness is entirely
link |
And that's not something I rule out at all.
link |
I mean, if you could get smart enough to have a perfect map of the neural structure and
link |
the neural states and the amount of neurotransmitters that are going between every synapse in a
link |
particular person's mind, could you replicate that in silica at some reasonably distant
link |
point in the future?
link |
And then you'd have a consciousness.
link |
I don't rule out the possibility of artificial consciousness in any way.
link |
What I'm less certain about is whether consciousness is a requirement for superintelligence pursuing
link |
a maximizing function of some sort.
link |
I don't feel the certitude that consciousness simply must be part of that.
link |
You had said for it to coexist with human society would need to be consciousness.
link |
Could be entirely true, but it also could just exist orthogonally to human society.
link |
And it could also upon attaining a superintelligence with a maximizing function very, very, very
link |
rapidly because of the speed at which computing works compared to our own meat based minds
link |
very, very rapidly make the decisions and calculations necessary to seize the reins
link |
of power before we even know what's going on.
link |
I mean, kind of like biological viruses do, they don't necessarily, they integrate themselves
link |
just fine with human society.
link |
Without technically, without consciousness, without even being alive, you know, technically
link |
by the standards of a lot of biologists.
link |
So this is a bit of a tangent, but you've talked with Sam Harris on that four hour special
link |
episode we mentioned.
link |
And I'm just curious to ask, cause I use this meditation app I've been using for the past
link |
month to meditate.
link |
Is this something you've integrated as part of your life, meditation or fasting, or has
link |
some of Sam Harris rubbed off on you in terms of his appreciation of meditation and just
link |
kind of from a third person perspective, analyzing your own mind, consciousness, free will and
link |
You know, I've tried it three separate times in my life, really made a concerted attack
link |
on meditation and integrating it into my life.
link |
One of them, the most extreme was I took a class based on the work of Jon Kabat Zinn,
link |
who is, you know, in many ways, one of the founding people behind the mindful meditation
link |
movement that required like part of the class was, you know, it was a weekly class and you
link |
were going to meditate an hour a day, every day.
link |
And having done that for, I think it was 10 weeks, it might've been 13, however long period
link |
of time was, at the end of it, it just didn't stick.
link |
As soon as it was over, you know, I did not feel that gravitational pull.
link |
I did not feel the collapse in quality of life after wimping out on that project.
link |
And then the most recent one was actually with Sam's app during the lockdown.
link |
I did make a pretty good and consistent concerted effort to listen to his 10 minute meditation
link |
And I've always fallen away from it.
link |
And I, you know, you're kind of interpreting, why did I personally do this?
link |
I do believe it was ultimately because it wasn't bringing me that, you know, joy or
link |
inner peace or better competence at being me that I was hoping to get from it.
link |
Otherwise, I think I would have clung to it in the way that we cling to certain good habits,
link |
like I'm really good at flossing my teeth.
link |
Not that you were going to ask Lex, but yeah, that's one thing that defeats a lot of people.
link |
See, Herman Hesse, I think, I forget which book or maybe, I forget where, I've read everything
link |
of his, so it's unclear where it came from, but he had this idea that anybody who truly
link |
achieves mastery in things will learn how to meditate in some way.
link |
So it could be that for you, the flossing of teeth is yet another like little inkling
link |
Like it doesn't have to be this very particular kind of meditation.
link |
Maybe podcasting, you have an amazing podcast, that could be meditation.
link |
The writing process is meditation.
link |
For me, like there's a bunch of mechanisms which take my mind into a very particular
link |
place that looks a whole lot like meditation.
link |
For example, when I've been running over the past couple years, and especially when I listen
link |
to certain kinds of audio books, like I've listened to the Rise and Fall of the Third
link |
I've listened to a lot of sort of World War II, which at once, because I have a lot of
link |
family who's lost in World War II and so much of the Soviet Union is grounded in the suffering
link |
of World War II, that somehow it connects me to my history, but also there's some kind
link |
of purifying aspect to thinking about how cruel, but at the same time, how beautiful
link |
human nature could be.
link |
And so you're also running, like it clears the mind from all the concerns of the world
link |
and somehow it takes you to this place where you were like deeply appreciative to be alive
link |
in the sense that as opposed to listening to your breath or like feeling your breath
link |
and thinking about your consciousness and all those kinds of processes that Sam's app
link |
Well, this does that for me, the running and flossing may do that for you.
link |
So maybe Herman Hesse is onto something.
link |
So I hope flossing is not my main form of expertise, although I am going to claim a
link |
certain expertise there and I'm going to claim it.
link |
Somebody has to be the best flosser in the world.
link |
I'm just glad that I'm a consistent one.
link |
I mean, there are a lot of things that bring me into a flow state and I think maybe perhaps
link |
that's one reason why meditation isn't as necessary for me.
link |
I definitely enter a flow state when I'm writing and definitely enter a flow state
link |
I definitely enter a flow state when I'm mixing and mastering music.
link |
I enter a flow state when I'm doing heavy, heavy research to either prepare for a podcast
link |
or to also do tech investing, to make myself smart in a new field that is fairly alien
link |
to me, I can just, the hours can just melt away while I'm reading this and watching that
link |
YouTube lecture and going through this presentation and so forth.
link |
So maybe because there's a lot of things that bring me into a flow state in my normal weekly
link |
life, not daily, unfortunately, but certainly my normal weekly life that I have less of
link |
an urge to meditate.
link |
Now you've been working with Sam's app for about a month now, you said.
link |
Is this your first run in with meditation?
link |
Is your first attempt to integrate it with your life or?
link |
Like meditation, meditation.
link |
I always thought running and thinking, I listen to brown noise often.
link |
That takes my mind, I don't know what the hell it does, but it takes my mind immediately
link |
into like the state where I'm deeply focused on anything I do.
link |
So it's like you're accompanying sound when you're like, really?
link |
And what's the difference between brown and white noise?
link |
This is a cool term I haven't heard before.
link |
So people should look up brown noise.
link |
They don't have to because you're about to tell them what it is.
link |
Because you have to experience, you have to listen to it.
link |
So I think white noise is, this has to do with music.
link |
I think there's different colors, there's pink noise.
link |
And I think that has to do with like the frequencies.
link |
Like the white noise is usually less bassy, brown noise is very bassy.
link |
So it's more like versus like, if that makes sense.
link |
So there's like a deepness to it.
link |
I think everyone is different, but for me, when I was a research scientist at MIT,
link |
especially when there's a lot of students around, I remember just being annoyed
link |
at the noise of people talking.
link |
And one of my colleagues said, well, you should try listening to brown noise.
link |
Like it really knocks out everything.
link |
Because I used to wear earplugs to it, like just see if I can block it out.
link |
And like the moment I put it on, something, it's as if my mind was waiting
link |
all these years to hear that sound.
link |
Everything just focused in, I listened.
link |
It makes me wonder how many other amazing things out there they're waiting to
link |
discover from my own particular, like biological, from my own particular brain.
link |
So that, it just goes, the mind just focuses in, it's kind of incredible.
link |
So I see that as a kind of meditation, maybe I'm using a performance enhancing
link |
sound to achieve that meditation, but I've been doing that for many years now
link |
and running and walking and doing, Cal Newport was the first person that
link |
introduced me to the idea of deep work.
link |
Just put a word to the kind of thinking that's required to sort of deeply think
link |
about a problem, especially if it's mathematical in nature.
link |
I see that as a kind of meditation because what it's doing is you have
link |
these constructs in your mind that you're building on top of each other.
link |
And there's all these distracting thoughts that keep bombarding you
link |
from all over the place.
link |
And the whole process is you slowly let them kind of move past you.
link |
And that's a meditative process.
link |
It's very meditative.
link |
That sounds a lot like what Sam talks about in his meditation app, which I did
link |
use to be clear for a while, of just letting the thought go by without
link |
Derangement is one of Sam's favorite words, as I'm sure you know.
link |
But brown noise, that's really intriguing.
link |
I am going to try that as soon as this evening.
link |
Yeah, to see if it works, but very well might not work at all.
link |
I think the interesting point is, and the same with the fasting and the diet,
link |
is I long ago stopped trusting experts or maybe taking the word of experts
link |
as the gospel truth and only using it as an inspiration to try something,
link |
to try thoroughly something.
link |
So fasting was one of the things when I first discovered I've been many times
link |
eating just once a day, so that's a 24 hour fast.
link |
It makes me feel amazing.
link |
And at the same time, eating only meat, putting ethical concerns aside,
link |
makes me feel amazing.
link |
I don't know why it doesn't, the point is to be an N of one scientist
link |
until nutrition science becomes a real science to where it's doing like studies
link |
that deeply understand the biology underlying all of it and also does real
link |
thorough long term studies of thousands, if not millions of people versus a very
link |
like small studies that are kind of generalizing from very noisy data and all
link |
those kinds of things where you can't control all the elements.
link |
Particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly variant among us.
link |
So there are going to be some people like if brown noise is a game changer
link |
for 7% of people, there's 93% odds that I'm not one of them,
link |
but there's certainly every reason in the world to test it out.
link |
Now, so I'm intrigued by the fasting.
link |
I like you, well, I assume like you, I don't have any problem going to one meal
link |
a day and I often do that inadvertently and I've never done it methodically.
link |
Like I've never done it like I'm going to do this for 15 days.
link |
Maybe I should and maybe I should.
link |
Like how many, how many days in a row of the one day, one meal a day did you
link |
find brought noticeable impact to you?
link |
Was it after three days of it?
link |
Was it months of it?
link |
Well, the noticeable impact is day one.
link |
So for me, folks, cause I eat a very low carb diet.
link |
So the hunger wasn't the hugest issue.
link |
Like there wasn't a painful hunger, like wanting to eat.
link |
So I was already kind of primed for it.
link |
And the benefit comes from a lot of people that do intermittent fasting.
link |
That's only like 16 hours of fasting get this benefit too is the focus.
link |
There's a clarity of thought.
link |
If my brain was a runner, it felt like I'm running on a track when
link |
I'm fasting versus running in quicksand, like it's much crisper.
link |
And is this your first 72 hour fast?
link |
This is the first time doing 72 hours.
link |
And that's a different thing, but similar, like I'm going up and
link |
down in terms of, in terms of hunger and the focus is really crisp.
link |
The thing I'm noticing most of all, to be honest, is how much eating, even
link |
when it's once a day or twice a day is a big part of my life.
link |
Like I almost feel like I have way more time in my life and it's not so
link |
much about the eating, but like, I don't have to plan my day around like
link |
today, I don't have any eating to do.
link |
It does free up hours or any cleaning up after eating or provisioning the food.
link |
But like, or even like thinking about it's not a thing.
link |
Like, so when you think about what you're going to do tonight, I think I'm
link |
realizing that as opposed to thinking, you know, I'm going to work on this
link |
problem or I'm going to go on this walk, or I'm going to call this person.
link |
I often think I'm going to eat this thing.
link |
You allow dinner as a kind of, you know, when people talk about like the
link |
weather or something like that, it's almost like a generic thought you
link |
allow yourself to have because, because it's the lazy thought.
link |
And I don't have the opportunity to have that thought because I'm not eating it.
link |
So now I get to think about like the things I'm actually going to do tonight
link |
that are more complicated than the eating process.
link |
That's, that's been the most noticeable thing to be honest.
link |
And then there's people that have written me that have done seven day fast.
link |
And there's a few people that have written me and I've heard of this is doing 30 day fasts.
link |
And it's interesting.
link |
The body, I don't know what the health benefits are necessarily.
link |
What that shows me is how adaptable the human body is.
link |
And, and that's incredible.
link |
And that's something really important to remember when we
link |
think about how to live life because the body adapts.
link |
I mean, we sure couldn't go 30 days without water.
link |
But food, yeah, it's been done.
link |
It's demonstrably possible.
link |
You ever read Franz Kafka has a great short story called The Hunger Artist?
link |
You know, that was before I started fasting.
link |
I read that story and I, I, I admired the beauty of that, the artistry of that actual
link |
hunger artist that it's like madness, but it also felt like a little bit of genius.
link |
I actually have to reread it.
link |
That's what I'm going to do tonight.
link |
I'm going to read it because I'm doing the fast.
link |
Because you're in the midst of it.
link |
Be very contextual.
link |
I haven't read it since high school and I love to read it again.
link |
So maybe I'll read it tonight too.
link |
And part of the reason of sort of I've here in Texas, people have been so friendly that
link |
I've been nonstop eating like brisket with incredible people, a lot of whiskey as well.
link |
So I gained quite a bit of weight, which I'm embracing.
link |
But I am also aware as I'm fasting that like I have a lot of fat for, for to, to run on.
link |
Like I have a lot of like natural resources on my body.
link |
You've got reserves.
link |
You got reserves, yeah.
link |
And that's, that's really cool.
link |
You know, there's like a re this whole thing, this biology works well.
link |
Like I can go a long time because of the, the longterm investing in terms of brisket
link |
that I've been doing in the weeks before.
link |
So it's all training.
link |
It's all training.
link |
You open a bunch of doors, one of which is music.
link |
I, so I got to walk in at least for a brief moment.
link |
You founded a music company, but you're also a musician yourself.
link |
You know, let me ask the big ridiculous question first.
link |
What's the greatest song of all time?
link |
Greatest song of all time.
link |
It's, it's going to obviously very dramatically from genre to genre.
link |
So like you, I like guitar, perhaps like you, although I've dabbled in, in inhaling
link |
every genre of music that I can almost practically imagine.
link |
I keep coming back to, you know, the sound of bass, guitar, drum, keyboards, voice.
link |
I love that style of music and added to it.
link |
I think a lot of really cool electronic production makes something that's really,
link |
really new and hybridy and awesome.
link |
But, you know, and that kind of like guitar based rock I think I've got to go with
link |
won't get fooled again by the who.
link |
It is such an epic song.
link |
It's got so much grandeur to it.
link |
It uses the synthesizers that were available at the time.
link |
This has got to be, I think, 1972, 73, which are very, very primitive to our ears,
link |
but uses them in this hypnotic and beautiful way that I can't imagine somebody with the
link |
greatest synth array conceivable by today's technology could do a better job of in the
link |
context of that song.
link |
And it's, you know, almost operatic.
link |
So I would say in that genre, the genre of, you know, rock that would be my nomination.
link |
I'm totally in my brain.
link |
Pinball Wizard is overriding everything else, but it was so like, I can't even imagine the
link |
Well, I would say, ironically, with Pinball Wizard.
link |
So that came from the movie Tommy.
link |
And in the movie, Tommy, the rival of Tommy, the reigning pinball champ was Elton John.
link |
And so there are a couple of versions of Pinball Wizard out there.
link |
One sung by Roger Daltrey of The Who, which a purist would say, hey, that's the real
link |
But the version that is sung by Elton John in the movie, which is available to those
link |
who are ambitious and want to dig for it, that's even better in my mind.
link |
And I, for myself, I was thinking, what is the song for me?
link |
They answered that question.
link |
I think that changes day to day, too.
link |
I was realizing that.
link |
Of course, but for me, somebody who values lyrics as well and the emotion in the song.
link |
By the way, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen was a close one.
link |
But the number one is Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt that is, there's something so powerful
link |
about that song, about that cover, about that performance.
link |
Maybe another one is the cover of Sound of Silence.
link |
Maybe there's something about covers for me.
link |
So whose cover sounds?
link |
Because Simon and Garfunkel, I think, did the original recording of that, right?
link |
So which cover is it that?
link |
There's a cover by Disturbed.
link |
It's a metal band, which is so interesting because I'm really not into that kind of metal.
link |
But he does a pure vocal performance.
link |
So he's not doing a metal performance.
link |
I would say it's one of the greatest people should see it.
link |
It's like 400 million views or something like that.
link |
It's probably the greatest live vocal performance I've ever heard is Disturbed covering Sound
link |
I'll listen to it as soon as I get home.
link |
And that song came to life to me in a way that Simon and Garfunkel never did.
link |
For me with Simon and Garfunkel, there's not a pain, there's not an anger, there's not
link |
power to their performance.
link |
It's almost like this melancholy, I don't know.
link |
Well, I guess there's a lot of beauty to it, objectively beautiful.
link |
I think, I never thought of this until now, but I think if you put entirely different
link |
lyrics on top of it, unless they were joyous, which would be weird, it wouldn't necessarily
link |
There's just a beauty in the harmonizing.
link |
It's soft and you're right.
link |
It's not dripping with emotion.
link |
The vocal performance is not dripping with emotion, it's dripping with technical harmonizing
link |
brilliance and beauty.
link |
Now, if you compare that to the Disturbed cover or the Johnny Cash's Hurt cover, when
link |
you walk away, it's haunting.
link |
It stays with you for a long time.
link |
There's certain performances that will just stay with you to where, like if you watch
link |
people respond to that, and that's certainly how I felt when you listen to that, the Disturbed
link |
performance or Johnny Cash Hurt, there's a response to where you just sit there with
link |
your mouth open, kind of like paralyzed by it somehow.
link |
And I think that's what makes for a great song to where you're just like, it's not
link |
that you're like singing along or having fun, that's another way a song could be great,
link |
but where you're just like, you're in awe.
link |
If we go to listen.com and that whole fascinating era of music in the 90s, transitioning to
link |
the aughts, I remember those days, the Napster days, when piracy, from my perspective, allegedly
link |
What do you make of that whole era?
link |
What are the big, what was, first of all, your experiences of that era and what were
link |
the big takeaways in terms of piracy, in terms of what it takes to build a company that succeeds
link |
in that kind of digital space, in terms of music, but in terms of anything creative?
link |
Well, so for those who don't remember, which is going to be most folks, listen.com created
link |
a service called Rhapsody, which is much, much more recognizable to folks because Rhapsody
link |
became a pretty big name for reasons that I'll get into in a second.
link |
So for people who don't know their early online music history, we were the first company,
link |
so I founded, listen, I was a loan founder, and Rhapsody, we were the first service to
link |
get full catalog licenses from all the major music labels in order to distribute their
link |
music online, and we specifically did it through a mechanism which at the time struck people
link |
as exotic and bizarre and kind of incomprehensible, which was unlimited on demand streaming, which
link |
of course now it's a model that's been appropriated by Spotify and Apple and many, many others.
link |
So we were a pioneer on that front.
link |
What was really, really, really hard about doing business in those days was the reaction
link |
of the music labels to piracy, which was about 180 degrees opposite of what the reaction
link |
quote unquote should have been from the standpoint of preserving their business from piracy.
link |
So Napster came along and was a service that enabled people to get near unlimited access
link |
I mean, truly obscure things could be very hard to find on Napster, but most songs with
link |
a relatively simple one click ability to download those songs and have the MP3s on their hard
link |
drives, but there was a lot that was very messy about the Napster experience.
link |
You might download a really god awful recording of that song.
link |
You may download a recording that actually wasn't that song with some prankster putting
link |
it up to sort of mess with people.
link |
You could struggle to find the song that you're looking for.
link |
You could end up finding yourself connected, it was peer to peer.
link |
You might randomly find yourself connected to somebody in Bulgaria, doesn't have a very
link |
good internet connection.
link |
So you might wait 19 minutes only for it to snap, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
And our argument to, well, actually let's start with how that hit the music labels.
link |
The music labels had been in a very, very comfortable position for many, many decades
link |
of essentially being the monopoly providers of a certain subset of artists.
link |
Any given label was a monopoly provider of the artists and the recordings that they owned
link |
and they could sell it at what turned out to be tremendously favorable rates.
link |
In the late era of the CD, you were talking close to $20 for a compact disc that might
link |
have one song that you were crazy about and simply needed to own that might actually be
link |
glued to 17 other songs that you found to be sure crap.
link |
And so the music industry had used the fact that it had this unbelievable leverage and
link |
profound pricing power to really get music lovers to the point that they felt very, very
link |
misused by the entire situation.
link |
Now along comes Napster and music sales start getting gutted with extreme rapidity.
link |
And the reaction of the music industry to that was one of shock and absolute fury, which
link |
is understandable.
link |
I mean, industries do get gutted all the time, but I struggle to think of an analog of an
link |
industry that got gutted that rapidly.
link |
I mean, we could say that passenger train service certainly got gutted by airlines,
link |
but that was a process that took place over decades and decades and decades.
link |
It wasn't something that happened, really started showing up in the numbers in a single
link |
digit number of months and started looking like an existential threat within a year or
link |
So the music industry is quite understandably in a state of shock and fury.
link |
I don't blame them for that.
link |
But then their reaction was catastrophic, both for themselves and almost for people
link |
like us who were trying to do the cowboy in the white hat thing.
link |
So our response to the music industry was, look, what you need to do to fight piracy,
link |
you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
link |
You can't switch off the internet.
link |
Even if you all shut your eyes and wish very, very, very hard, the internet is not going
link |
And these peer to peer technologies are genies out of the bottle.
link |
And if you don't, whatever you do, don't shut down Napster because if you do, suddenly
link |
that technology is going to splinter into 30 different nodes that you'll never, ever
link |
be able to shut off.
link |
We suggested to them is like, look, what you want to do is to create a massively better
link |
experience to piracy, something that's way better, that you sell at a completely reasonable
link |
And this is what it is.
link |
Don't just give people access to that very limited number of songs that they happen to
link |
have acquired and paid for or pirated and have on their hard drive.
link |
Give them access to all of the music in the world for a simple low price.
link |
And obviously, that doesn't sound like a crazy suggestion, I don't think, to anybody's
link |
ears today because that is how the majority of music is now being consumed online.
link |
But in doing that, you're going to create a much, much better option to this kind of
link |
crappy, kind of rickety, kind of buggy process of acquiring MP3s.
link |
Now, unfortunately, the music industry was so angry about Napster and so forth that for
link |
essentially three and a half years, they folded their arms, stamped their feet, and boycotted
link |
So they basically gave people who were fervently passionate about music and were digitally
link |
modern, they gave them basically one choice.
link |
If you want to have access to digital music, we, the music industry, insist that you steal
link |
it because we are not going to sell it to you.
link |
So what that did is it made an entire generation of people morally comfortable with swiping
link |
the music because they felt quite pragmatically, well, they're not giving me any choice here.
link |
It's like a 20 year old violating the 21 drinking age.
link |
If they do that, they're not going to feel like felons.
link |
They're going to be like, this is an unreasonable law and I'm skirting it, right?
link |
So they make a whole generation of people morally comfortable with swiping music, but
link |
also technically adept at it.
link |
And when they did shut down Napster and kind of even trickier tools and like tweakier tools
link |
like Kazaa and so forth came along, people just figured out how to do it.
link |
So by the time they finally, grudgingly, it took years, allowed us to release this experience
link |
that we were quite convinced would be better than piracy, we had this enormous hole had
link |
been dug where lots of people said, music is a thing that is free and that's morally
link |
okay and I know how to get it.
link |
And so streaming took many, many, many more years to take off and become the gargantuan
link |
thing the juggernaut is today than would have happened if they'd made, pivoted to let's
link |
sell a better experience as opposed to demand that people want digital music, steal it.
link |
Like what lessons do we draw from that?
link |
Cause we're probably in the midst of living through a bunch of similar situations in different
link |
domains currently.
link |
We just don't know.
link |
There's a lot of things in this world that are really painful.
link |
Like, I mean, I don't know if you can draw perfect parallels, but fiat money versus cryptocurrency,
link |
there's a lot of currently people in power who are kind of very skeptical about cryptocurrency,
link |
although that's changing.
link |
But it's arguable it's changing way too slowly.
link |
There's a lot of people making that argument where there should be a complete like Coinbase
link |
and all this stuff switched to that.
link |
There's a lot of other domains that where a pivot, like if you pivot now, you're going
link |
to win big, but you don't pivot because you're stubborn.
link |
And it's so, I mean, like, is this just the way that companies are?
link |
A company succeeds initially and then it grows and there's a huge number of employees and
link |
managers that don't have the guts or the institutional mechanisms to do the pivot.
link |
Is that just the way of companies?
link |
Well, I think what happens, I'll use the case of the music industry.
link |
There was an economic model that had put food on the table and paid for marble lobbies and
link |
seven and even eight figure executive salaries for many, many decades, which was the physical
link |
collection of music.
link |
And then you start talking about something like unlimited streaming and it seems so ephemeral
link |
and like such a long shot that people start worrying about cannibalizing their own business
link |
and they lose sight of the fact that something illicit is cannibalizing their business at
link |
an extraordinarily fast rate.
link |
And so if they don't do it themselves, they're doomed.
link |
I mean, we used to put slides in front of these folks, this is really funny, where we
link |
said, okay, let's assume Rhapsody, we want it to be 9.99 a month and we want it to be
link |
12 months, so it's $120 a year from the budget of a music lover.
link |
And then we were also able to get reasonably accurate statistics that showed how many CDs
link |
per year the average person who bothered to collect music, which was not all people, actually
link |
And it was overwhelmingly clear that the average CD buyer spends a hell of a lot less than
link |
$120 a year on music.
link |
This is a revenue expansion, blah, blah, blah.
link |
But all they could think of, and I'm not saying this in a pejorative or patronizing way, I
link |
don't blame them, they've grown up in this environment for decades, all they could think
link |
of was the incredible margins that they had on a CD.
link |
And they would say, well, if this CD, by the mechanism that you guys are proposing, the
link |
CD that I'm selling for $17.99, somebody would need to stream those songs.
link |
We were talking about a penny of playback then, it's less than that now that the record
link |
But would have to stream songs from that 1,799 times, it's never gonna happen.
link |
So they were just sort of stuck in the model of this, but it's like, no, dude, but they're
link |
gonna spend money on all this other stuff.
link |
So I think people get very hung up on that.
link |
I mean, another example is really the taxi industry was not monolithic, like the music
link |
There was a whole bunch of fleets and a whole bunch of cities, very, very fragmented, it's
link |
an imperfect analogy.
link |
But nonetheless, imagine if the taxi industry writ large upon seeing Uber said, oh my God,
link |
people wanna be able to hail things easily, cheaply, they don't wanna mess with cash,
link |
they wanna know how many minutes it's gonna be, they wanna know the fare in advance, and
link |
they want a much bigger fleet than what we've got.
link |
If the taxi industry had rolled out something like that with the branding of yellow taxis,
link |
universally known and kind of loved by Americans and expanded their fleet in a necessary manner,
link |
I don't think Uber or Lyft ever would have gotten a foothold.
link |
But the problem there was that real economics in the taxi industry wasn't with fares, it
link |
was with the scarcity of medallions.
link |
And so the taxi fleets, in many cases, owned gazillions of medallions whose value came
link |
from their very scarcity.
link |
So they simply couldn't pivot to that.
link |
So I think you end up having these vested interests with economics that aren't necessarily
link |
visible to outsiders who get very, very reluctant to disrupt their own model, which is why it
link |
ends up coming from the outside so frequently.
link |
So you know what it takes to build a successful startup, but you're also an investor in a
link |
lot of successful startups.
link |
Let me ask for advice.
link |
What do you think it takes to build a successful startup by way of advice?
link |
JS Well, I think it starts, I mean, everything
link |
starts and even ends with the founder.
link |
And so I think it's really, really important to look at the founder's motivations and their
link |
sophistication about what they're doing.
link |
In almost all cases that I'm familiar with and have thought hard about, you've had a
link |
founder who was deeply, deeply inculcated in the domain of technology that they were
link |
Now, what's interesting about that is you could say, no, wait, how is that possible
link |
because there's so many young founders?
link |
When you look at young founders, they're generally coming out of very nascent emerging
link |
fields of technology where simply being present and accounted for and engaged in the community
link |
for a period of even months is enough time to make them very, very deeply inculcated.
link |
I mean, you look at Marc Andreessen and Netscape.
link |
Marc had been doing visual web browsers when Netscape had been founded for what, a year
link |
and a half, but he'd created the first one in Mosaic when he was an undergrad.
link |
And the commercial internet was pre nascent in 1994 when Netscape was founded.
link |
So there's somebody who's very, very deep in their domain.
link |
Mark Zuckerberg also, social networking, very deep in his domain, even though it was
link |
nascent at the time.
link |
Lots of people doing crypto stuff.
link |
I mean, 10 years ago, even seven or eight years ago, by being a really, really vehement
link |
and engaged participant in the crypto ecosystem, you could be an expert in that.
link |
You look, however, at more established industries, take Salesforce.com.
link |
Salesforce automation, pretty mature field when it got started.
link |
Who's the executive and the founder?
link |
Marc Benioff, who has spent 13 years at Oracle and was an investor in Siebel Systems, which
link |
ended up being Salesforce's main competition.
link |
So more established, you need the entrepreneur to be very, very deep in the technology and
link |
the culture of the space because you need that entrepreneur, that founder to have just
link |
an unbelievably accurate intuitive sense for where the puck is going.
link |
And that only comes from being very deep.
link |
So that is sort of factor number one.
link |
And the next thing is that that founder needs to be charismatic and or credible, or ideally
link |
both in exactly the right ways to be able to attract a team that is bought into that
link |
vision and is bought into that founder's intuitions being correct and not just the team,
link |
obviously, but also the investors.
link |
So it takes a certain personality type to pull that off.
link |
Then the next thing I'm still talking about the founder is a relentlessness and indeed
link |
a monomania to put this above things that might rationally, should perhaps rationally
link |
supersede it for a period of time to just relentlessly pivot when pivoting is called
link |
for and it's always called for.
link |
I mean, think of even very successful companies like how many times did Facebook pivot?
link |
Newsfeed was something that was completely alien to the original version of Facebook
link |
and came foundationally important.
link |
How many times did Google, how many times at any given, how many times has Apple pivoted?
link |
That founder energy and DNA when the founder moves on the DNA that's been inculcated
link |
with a company has to have that relentlessness and that ability to pivot and pivot and pivot
link |
without being worried about sacred cows.
link |
And then the last thing I'll say about the founder before I get to the rest of the team
link |
and that'll be mercifully brief is the founder has to be obviously a really great
link |
hirer but just important a very good firer.
link |
And firing is a horrific experience for both people involved in it.
link |
It is a wrenching emotional experience.
link |
And being good at realizing when this particular person is damaging the interests of the company
link |
and the team and the shareholders and having the intestinal fortitude to have that conversation
link |
and make it happen is something that most people don't have in them.
link |
And it's something that needs to be developed in most people or maybe some people have it
link |
But without that ability, that will take an A plus organization into B minus range very,
link |
And so that's all what needs to be present in the founder.
link |
How damn good you are, Rob.
link |
That was brilliant.
link |
The one thing that was kind of really kind of surprising to me is having a deep technical
link |
knowledge because I think the way you expressed it, which is that allows you to be really
link |
honest with the capabilities of what like what's possible.
link |
Of course, you're often trying to do the impossible.
link |
But in order to do the impossible, you have to be quote unquote impossible.
link |
But you have to be honest with what is actually possible.
link |
And it doesn't necessarily have to be the technical competence.
link |
It's got to be, in my view, just a complete immersion in that emerging market.
link |
And so I can imagine there are a couple of people out there who have started really good
link |
crypto projects who themselves are right in the code, but they're immersed in the culture
link |
and through the culture and a deep understanding of what's happening and what's not happening.
link |
They can get a good intuition of what's possible, but the very first hire, I mean, a great way
link |
to solve that is to have a technical co founder and dual founder companies have become extremely
link |
common for that reason.
link |
And if you're not doing that and you're not the technical person, but you are the founder,
link |
you've got to be really great at hiring a very damn good technical person very, very fast.
link |
Can I on the founder ask you, is it possible to do this alone?
link |
There's so many people giving advice and saying that it's impossible to do the first few steps,
link |
not impossible, but much more difficult to do it alone.
link |
If we were to take the journey, especially in the software world where there's not significant
link |
investment required for it to build something up, is it possible to go to a prototype to
link |
something that essentially works and already has a huge number of customers alone?
link |
There are lots and lots of loan founder companies out there that have made an incredible difference.
link |
I mean, I'm not certainly putting rhapsody in the league of Spotify.
link |
We were too early to be Spotify, but we did an awful lot of innovation.
link |
And then after the company sold and ended up in the hands of real networks and MTV,
link |
you know, got to millions of subs, right?
link |
I was a loan founder and I studied Arabic and Middle Eastern history undergrad,
link |
so I definitely wasn't very, very technical.
link |
But yeah, loan founders can absolutely work.
link |
And the advantage of a loan founder is you don't have the catastrophic potential
link |
of a falling out between founders.
link |
I mean, two founders who fall out with each other badly can rip a company to shreds because
link |
they both have an enormous amount of equity and enormous amount of power.
link |
And the capital structure is a result of that.
link |
They both have an enormous amount of moral authority with the team as a result of each
link |
having that founder role.
link |
And I have witnessed over the years many, many situations in which companies have been shredded
link |
or have suffered near fatal blows because of a falling out between founders.
link |
And the more founders you add, the more risky that becomes.
link |
I don't think there should ever almost, I mean, you never say never, but multiple founders
link |
beyond two is such an unstable and potentially treacherous situation that I would never,
link |
ever recommend going beyond two.
link |
But I do see value in the non technical sort of business and market and outside minded
link |
founder teaming up with the technical founder.
link |
There is a lot of merit to that, but there's a lot of danger in that less those two blow
link |
Was it lonely for you?
link |
And that's the drawback.
link |
I mean, if you're a lone founder, there is no other person that you can sit down with
link |
and tackle problems and talk them through who has precisely or nearly precisely your
link |
alignment of interests.
link |
Your most trusted board member is likely an investor and therefore at the end of the
link |
day has the interest of preferred stock in mind, not common stock.
link |
Your most trusted VP, who might own a very significant stake in the company, doesn't
link |
own anywhere near your stake in the company.
link |
And so their long term interests may well be in getting the right level of experience
link |
and credibility necessary to peel off and start their own company.
link |
Or their interests might be aligned with jumping ship and setting up with a different
link |
company, whether it's a rival or one in a completely different space.
link |
So, yeah, being a lone founder is a spectacularly lonely thing.
link |
And that's a major downside to it.
link |
What about mentorship?
link |
Because you're a mentor to a lot of people.
link |
Can you find an alleviation to that loneliness in the space of ideas with a good mentor?
link |
With a good mentor or like a mentor who's mentoring you?
link |
Yeah, you can a great deal, particularly if it's somebody who's been through this very
link |
process and has navigated it successfully and cares enough about you and your well being
link |
to give you beautifully unvarnished advice.
link |
That can be a huge, huge thing.
link |
That can assuage things a great deal.
link |
And I had a board member who was not an investor, who basically played that role for me to a
link |
He came in maybe halfway through the company's history, though.
link |
I would have needed that the most in the very earliest days.
link |
Yeah, the loneliness, that's the whole journey of life.
link |
We're always alone, alone together.
link |
It pays to embrace that.
link |
You were saying that there might be something outside of the founder that's also that you
link |
were promising to be brief on.
link |
OK, so we talked about the founder.
link |
You were asking what makes a great startup.
link |
And great founder is thing number one, but then thing number two, and it's ginormous,
link |
And so I said so much about the founder because one hopes or one believes that a founder who
link |
is a great hirer is going to be hiring people and in charge of critical functions like
link |
engineering and marketing and biz dev and sales and so forth, who themselves are great
link |
But what needs to radiate from the founder into the team that might be a little bit different
link |
from what's in the gene code of the founder?
link |
The team needs to be fully bought in to the, you know, the intuitions and the vision of
link |
But the team needs to have a slightly different thing, which is, you know, it's 99% obsession
link |
is execution, is to relentlessly hit the milestones, hit the objectives, hit the quarterly
link |
That is, you know, 1% vision.
link |
You don't want to lose that.
link |
But execution machines, you know, people who have a demonstrated ability and a demonstrated
link |
focus on, yeah, I go from point to point to point.
link |
I try to beat and raise expectations relentlessly, never fall short, and, you know, both sort
link |
of blaze and follow the path.
link |
Not that the path is going to, I mean, blaze the trail as well.
link |
I mean, a good founder is going to trust that VP of sales to have a better sense of what
link |
it takes to build out that organization, what the milestones be.
link |
And it's going to be kind of a dialogue amongst those at the top.
link |
But, you know, execution obsession in the team is the next thing.
link |
Yeah, there's some sense where the founder, you know, you talk about sort of the space
link |
of ideas, like first principles thinking, asking big difficult questions of like future
link |
trajectories or having a big vision and big picture dreams.
link |
You can almost be a dreamer, it feels like, when you're like not the founder, but in the
link |
space of sort of leadership.
link |
But when it gets to the ground floor, there has to be execution, there has to be hitting
link |
And sometimes those are attention.
link |
There's something about dreams that are attention with the pragmatic nature of execution.
link |
Not dreams, but sort of ambitious vision.
link |
And those have to be, I suppose, coupled.
link |
The vision in the leader and the execution in the software world, that would be the programmer
link |
Amongst many other things, you're an incredible conversationalist, a podcast, you host a podcast
link |
I mean, there's a million questions I want to ask you here, but one at the highest level,
link |
what do you think makes for a great conversation?
link |
I would say two things, one of two things, and ideally both of two things.
link |
One is if something is beautifully architected, whether it's done deliberately and methodically
link |
and willfully, as when I do it, or whether that just emerges from the conversation.
link |
But something that's beautifully architected, that can create something that's incredibly
link |
powerful and memorable, or something where there's just extraordinary chemistry.
link |
And so with All In, or I'll go way back.
link |
You might remember the NPR show Car Talk, I couldn't care less about auto mechanics
link |
Yeah, that's right.
link |
But I love that show because the banter between those two guys was just beyond, it was without
link |
any parallel, right?
link |
And some kind of edgy podcasts like Red Scare is just really entertaining to me because
link |
the banter between the women on that show is just so good, and All In and that kind
link |
So I think it's a combination of sort of the arc and the chemistry.
link |
And I think because the arc can be so important, that's why very, very highly produced podcasts
link |
like This American Life, obviously a radio show, but I think of a podcast because that's
link |
how I always consume it, or Criminal, or a lot of what Wondery does and so forth.
link |
That is real documentary making, and that requires a big team and a big budget relative
link |
to the kinds of things you and I do, but nonetheless, then you got that arc, and that can be really,
link |
really compelling.
link |
But if we go back to conversation, I think it's a combination of structure and chemistry.
link |
Yeah, and I've actually personally have lost, I used to love This American Life, and for
link |
some reason because it lacks the possibility of magic, it's engineered magic.
link |
I've fallen off of it myself as well.
link |
I mean, when I fell madly in love with it during the aughts, it was the only thing going.
link |
They were really smart to adopt podcasting as a distribution mechanism early.
link |
But yeah, I think that maybe there's a little bit less magic there now because I think they
link |
have agendas other than necessarily just delighting their listeners with quirky stories, which
link |
I think is what it was all about back in the day and some other things.
link |
Is there like a memorable conversation that you've had on the podcast, whether it was
link |
because it was wild and fun or one that was exceptionally challenging, maybe challenging
link |
to prepare for, that kind of thing?
link |
Is there something that stands out in your mind that you can draw an insight from?
link |
Yeah, I mean, this no way diminishes the episodes that will not be the answer to these two questions,
link |
but an example of something that was really, really challenging to prepare for was George
link |
So as I'm sure you know and as I'm sure many of your listeners know, he is one of the absolute
link |
leading lights in the field of synthetic biology.
link |
He's also unbelievably prolific.
link |
His lab is large and has all kinds of efforts have spun out of that.
link |
And what I wanted to make my George Church episode about was, first of all, grounding
link |
people into what is this thing called Symbio.
link |
And that required me to learn a hell of a lot more about Symbio than I knew going into
link |
So there was just this very broad, I mean, I knew much more than the average person going
link |
into that episode, but there was this incredible breadth of grounding that I needed to get
link |
myself in the domain.
link |
And then George does so many interesting things, there's so many interesting things emitting
link |
from his lab that, you know, and he and I had a really good dialogue, he was a great
link |
guide going into it.
link |
Minnowing it down to the three to four that I really wanted us to focus on to create a
link |
sense of wonder and magic in the listener of what could be possible from this very broad
link |
spectrum domain, that was a doozy of a challenge.
link |
That was a tough, tough, tough one to prepare for.
link |
Now, in terms of something that was just wild and fun, unexpected, I mean, by the time we
link |
sat down to interview, I knew where we were going to go.
link |
But just in terms of the idea space, Don Hoffman, yeah, so Don Hoffman is, again, some listeners
link |
probably know because he's, I think I was the first podcaster to interview him.
link |
I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with him, but he has this unbelievably contrarian
link |
take on the nature of reality, but it is contrarian in a way that all the ideas are highly internally
link |
consistent and snap together in a way that's just delightful.
link |
And it seems as radically violating of our intuitions and as radically violating of the
link |
probable nature of reality as anything that one can encounter.
link |
But an analogy that he uses, which is very powerful, which is what intuition could possibly
link |
be more powerful than the notion that there is a single unitary direction called down.
link |
When we're on this big flat thing for which there is a thing called down.
link |
And we all know, I mean, that's the most intuitive thing that one could probably think of.
link |
And we all know that that ain't true.
link |
So my conversation with Don Hoffman was just wild and full of plot twists and interesting
link |
And the interesting thing about the wildness of his ideas, it's to me at least as a listener,
link |
coupled with, he's a good listener and he empathizes with the people who challenge his
link |
Like what's a better way to phrase that?
link |
He is a welcoming of challenge in a way that creates a really fun conversation.
link |
He loves a parry or a jab, whatever the word is at his argument.
link |
He's a very, very gentle and noncombatative soul, but then he is very good and takes great
link |
evident joy in responding to that in a way that expands your understanding of his thinking.
link |
Let me as a small tangent of tying up together our previous conversation about listening.com
link |
and streaming and Spotify and the world of podcasting.
link |
So we've been talking about this magical medium of podcasting.
link |
I have a lot of friends at Spotify in the high positions of Spotify as well.
link |
I worry about Spotify and podcasting and the future of podcasting in general that moves
link |
podcasting in the place of maybe walled gardens of sorts.
link |
Since you've had a foot in both worlds, have a foot in both worlds, do you worry as well
link |
about the future of podcasting?
link |
I think walled gardens are really toxic to the medium that they start balkanizing.
link |
So to take an example, I'll take two examples.
link |
With music, it was a very, very big deal that at Rhapsody we were the first company to get
link |
full catalog licenses from all back then there were five major music labels and also hundreds
link |
and hundreds of indies because you needed to present the listener with a sense that
link |
basically everything is there and there is essentially no friction to discovering that
link |
which is new and you can wander this realm and all you really need is a good map, whether
link |
it is something that somebody, the editorial team assembled or a good algorithm or whatever
link |
it is, but a good map to wander this domain.
link |
When you start walling things off, A, you undermine the joy of friction free discovery,
link |
which is an incredibly valuable thing to deliver to your customer, both from a business standpoint
link |
and simply from a humanistic standpoint of do you want to bring delight to people?
link |
But it also creates an incredible opening vector for piracy.
link |
And so something that's very different from the Rhapsody slash Spotify slash et cetera
link |
like experience is what we have now in video.
link |
Like wow, is that show on Hulu, is it on Netflix, is it on something like IFC channel, is it
link |
on Discovery Plus, is it here, is it there?
link |
And the more frustration and toe stubbing that people encounter when they are seeking
link |
something and they're already paying a very respectable amount of money per month to have
link |
access to content and they can't find it, the more that happens, the more people are
link |
going to be driven to piracy solutions like to hell with it.
link |
Never know where I'm going to find something, I never know what it's going to cost.
link |
Oftentimes really interesting things are simply unavailable.
link |
That surprises me the number of times that I've been looking for things I don't even
link |
think are that obscure that are just, it says not available in your geography, period, mister.
link |
So I think that that's a mistake.
link |
And then the other thing is for podcasters and lovers of podcasting, we should want to
link |
resist this walled garden thing because A, it does smother this friction free or eradicate
link |
this friction free discovery unless you want to sign up for lots of different services.
link |
And also dims the voice of somebody who might be able to have a far, far, far bigger impact
link |
by reaching far more neurons with their ideas.
link |
I'm going to use an example from I guess it was probably the 90s or maybe it was the
link |
aughts of Howard Stern, who had the biggest megaphone or maybe the second biggest after
link |
Oprah megaphone in popular culture.
link |
And because he was syndicated on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of radio stations
link |
at a time when terrestrial broadcast was the main thing people listened to in their car,
link |
no more obviously.
link |
But when he decided to go over to satellite radio, I can't remember if it was XM or Sirius,
link |
maybe they'd already merged at that point.
link |
But when he did that, he made, you know, totally his right to do it, a financial calculation
link |
that they were offering him a nine figure sum to do that.
link |
But his audience, because not a lot of people were subscribing to satellite radio at that
link |
point, his audience probably collapsed by, I wouldn't be surprised if it was as much
link |
And so the influence that he had on the culture and his ability to sort of shape conversation
link |
and so forth just got muted.
link |
Yeah, and also there's a certain sense, especially in modern times, where the walled gardens
link |
naturally lead to, I don't know if there's a term for it, but people who are not creatives
link |
starting to have power over the creatives.
link |
And even if they don't stifle it, if they're providing, you know, incentives within the
link |
platform to shape, shift, or, you know, even completely mutate or distort the show, I mean,
link |
imagine somebody has got, you know, a reasonably interesting idea for a podcast and they get
link |
signed up with, let's say Spotify, and Spotify is going to give them financing to get the
link |
And Spotify is going to give them a certain amount of really, you know, powerful placement,
link |
you know, within the visual field of listeners.
link |
But Spotify has conditions for that.
link |
They say, look, you know, we think that your podcast will be much more successful if you
link |
dumb it down about 60%.
link |
If you add some, you know, silly, dirty jokes, if you do this, you do that.
link |
And suddenly the person who is dependent upon Spotify for permission to come into existence
link |
and is really dependent, really wants to please them, you know, to get that money in, to get
link |
that placement, really wants to be successful.
link |
And all of a sudden you're having a dialogue between a complete non creative, some marketing,
link |
you know, sort of data analytic person at Spotify and a creative that's going to shape
link |
what that show is, you know, so that could be much more common.
link |
And ultimately having the aggregate, an even bigger impact than, you know, the cancellation,
link |
let's say if somebody who says the wrong word or voices the wrong idea, I mean, that's kind
link |
of what you have, not kind of, that's what you have with film and TV is that so much
link |
influence is exerted over the storyline and the plots and the character arcs and all kinds
link |
of things by executives who are completely alien to the experience and the skill set
link |
of being a show runner in television, being a director in film that, you know, is meant
link |
to like, oh, we can't piss off the Chinese market here or we can't say that or we need
link |
to have, you know, cast members that have precisely these demographics reflected or
link |
whatever it is that, you know, and obviously despite that extraordinary, at least TV shows
link |
are now being made, um, you know, in terms of film, I think the quality has, has nosedived
link |
of the average, let's say, say American film coming out of a major studio.
link |
The average quality and my view has nosedived over the past decade as it's kind of, everything's
link |
gotta be a superhero franchise, but you know, great stuff gets made despite that.
link |
But I have to assume that in some cases, at least in perhaps many cases, greater stuff
link |
would be made if there was less interference from non creative executives.
link |
It's like the flip side of that though, and this is, was the pitch of Spotify because
link |
I've heard their pitch is Netflix from everybody I've heard that I've spoken with about Netflix
link |
is they actually empower the creator.
link |
I don't know what the heck they do, but they do a good job of giving creators, even the
link |
crazy ones like Tim Dillon, like Joe Rogan, like comedians, freedom to be their crazy
link |
And the result is like some of the greatest television, some of the greatest cinema, whatever
link |
you call it, ever made.
link |
And I don't know what the heck they're doing.
link |
It's a relative thing.
link |
It's not able from what I understand.
link |
It's a relative thing.
link |
They're interfering far, far, far less than, you know, NBC or, you know, AMC would have
link |
It's a relative thing, and obviously they're the ones writing the checks and they're the
link |
ones giving the platforms.
link |
They've every right to their own influence, obviously.
link |
But my understanding is that they're relatively way more hands off and that has had a demonstrable
link |
effect because I agree.
link |
Some of the greatest, you know, video produced video content of all time, an incredibly inordinate
link |
percentage of that is coming out from Netflix in just a few years when the history of cinema
link |
goes back many, many decades.
link |
And Spotify wants to be that for podcasting, and I hope they do become that for podcasting,
link |
but I'm wearing my skeptical goggles or skeptical hat, whatever the heck it is, because it's
link |
not easy to do and it requires, it requires letting go of power, giving power to the creatives.
link |
It requires pivoting, which large companies, even as innovative as Spotify is, still now
link |
a large company, pivoting into a whole new space is very tricky and difficult.
link |
So I'm skeptical, but hopeful.
link |
What advice would you give to a young person today about life, about career?
link |
We talked about startups, we talked about music, we talked about the end of human civilization.
link |
Is there advice you would give to a young person today, maybe in college, maybe in high
link |
school about their life?
link |
Let's see, there's so many domains you can advise on, and I'm not going to give advice
link |
on life because I fear that I would drift into hallmark bromides that really wouldn't
link |
be all that distinctive, and they might be entirely true.
link |
Sometimes the greatest insights about life turn out to be the kinds of things you'd see
link |
on a hallmark card, so I'm going to steer clear of that.
link |
On a career level, one thing that I think is unintuitive but unbelievably powerful is
link |
to focus not necessarily on being in the top sliver of 1% in excelling at one domain that's
link |
important and valuable, but to think in terms of intersections of two domains, which are
link |
rare but valuable, and there's a couple reasons for this.
link |
The first is in an incredibly competitive world that is so much more competitive than
link |
it was when I was coming out of school, radically more competitive than when I was coming out
link |
of school, to navigate your way to the absolute pinnacle of any domain.
link |
Let's say you want to be really, really great at Python, pick a language, whatever it is.
link |
You want to be one of the world's greatest Python developers, JavaScript, whatever your
link |
Hopefully it's not Cobalt.
link |
By the way, if you listen to this, I am actually looking for a Cobalt expert to interview because
link |
I find the language fascinating, and there's not many of them, so please, if you know a
link |
world expert in Cobalt or Fortran, both, actually.
link |
Or if you are one.
link |
Or if you are one, please email me.
link |
So, I mean, if you're going out there and you want to be in the top sliver 1% of Python
link |
developers, it's a very, very difficult thing to do, particularly if you want to be number
link |
one in the world, something like that.
link |
And I'll use an analogy as I had a friend in college who was on a track and indeed succeeded
link |
at that to become an Olympic medalist, and I think it was 100 meter breaststroke.
link |
And he mortgaged a significant percentage of his college life to that goal, or I should
link |
say dedicated or invested or whatever you wanted to say.
link |
But he didn't participate in a lot of the social, a lot of the late night, a lot of
link |
the this, a lot of the that, because he was training so much.
link |
And obviously, he also wanted to keep up with his academics.
link |
And at the end of the day, the story has a happy ending in that he did medal in that.
link |
Bronze, not gold, but holy cow, anybody who gets an Olympic medal, that's an extraordinary
link |
And at that moment, he was one of the top three people on earth at that thing.
link |
But wow, how hard to do that.
link |
How many thousands of other people went down that path and made similar sacrifices and
link |
It's very, very hard to do that.
link |
Whereas, and I'll use a personal example.
link |
When I came out of business school, I went to a good business school and learned the
link |
things that were there to be learned.
link |
And I came out and I entered a world with lots of MBAs.
link |
Harvard Business School, by the way.
link |
Okay, yes, it was Harvard, it's true.
link |
You're the first person who went there who didn't say where you went, which is beautiful.
link |
I appreciate that.
link |
It's one of the greatest business schools in the world.
link |
It's a whole nother fascinating conversation about that world.
link |
But anyway, so I learned the things that you learn getting an MBA from a top program.
link |
And I entered a world that had hundreds of thousands of people who had MBAs, probably
link |
hundreds of thousands who have them from top 10 programs.
link |
So I was not particularly great at being an MBA person.
link |
I was inexperienced relative to most of them and there were a lot of them, but it was okay
link |
MBA person, right, newly minted.
link |
But then as it happened, I found my way into working on the commercial internet in 1994.
link |
So I went to a, at the time, giant hot computing company called Silicon Graphics, which had
link |
enough heft and enough head count that they could take on and experienced MBAs and try
link |
to train them in the world of Silicon Valley.
link |
But within that company that had an enormous amount of surface area and was touching a
link |
lot of areas and had unbelievably smart people at the time, it was not surprising that SGI
link |
started doing really interesting and innovative and trailblazing stuff on the internet before
link |
almost anybody else.
link |
And part of the reason was that our founder, Jim Clark, went off to cofound Netscape with
link |
So the whole company is like, wait, what was that?
link |
What's this commercial internet thing?
link |
So I ended up in that group.
link |
Now in terms of being a commercial internet person or a worldwide web person, again, I
link |
was in that case, barely credentialed, I couldn't write a stitch of code, but I had a pretty
link |
good mind for grasping the business and cultural significance of this transition.
link |
And this was, again, we were talking earlier about emerging areas.
link |
Within a few months, you know, I was in the relatively top echelon of people in terms
link |
of just sheer experience, because like, let's say it was five months into the program, there
link |
were only so many people who'd been doing worldwide web stuff commercially for five
link |
And then what was interesting though was the intersection of those two things.
link |
The commercial web, as it turned out, grew into an unbelievable vastness.
link |
And so by being a pretty good, okay web person and a pretty good, okay MBA person, that intersection
link |
put me in a very rare group, which was web oriented MBAs.
link |
And in those early days, you could probably count on your fingers the number of people
link |
who came out of really competitive programs who were doing stuff full time on the internet.
link |
And there was a greater appetite for great software developers in the internet domain,
link |
but there was an appetite and a real one and a rapidly growing one for MBA thinkers who
link |
were also seasoned and networked in the emerging world of the commercial worldwide web.
link |
And so finding an intersection of two things you can be pretty good at, but is a rare intersection
link |
and a special intersection is probably a much easier way to make yourself distinguishable
link |
and in demand from the world than trying to be world class at this one thing.
link |
So in the intersection is where there's to be discovered opportunity and success.
link |
That's really interesting.
link |
There's actually more intersection of fields and fields themselves, right?
link |
So yeah, I mean, I'll give you kind of a funny hypothetical here, but it's one I've been
link |
thinking about a little bit.
link |
There's a lot of people in crypto right now.
link |
It'd be hard to be in the top percentile of crypto people, whether it comes from just
link |
having a sheer grasp of the industry, a great network within the industry, technological
link |
skills, whatever you want to call it.
link |
And then there's this parallel world and orthogonal world called crop insurance.
link |
And I'm sure that's a big world.
link |
Crop insurance is a very, very big deal, particularly in the wealthy and industrialized world where
link |
people through sophisticated financial markets, rule of law and large agricultural concerns
link |
that are worried about that.
link |
Somewhere out there is somebody who is pretty crypto savvy, but probably not top 1%, but
link |
also has kind of been in the crop insurance world and understands that a hell of a lot
link |
better than almost anybody who's ever had anything to do with cryptocurrency.
link |
And so I think that decentralized finance, DeFi, one of the interesting and I think very
link |
world positive things that I think it's almost inevitably will be bringing to the world is
link |
crop insurance for small holding farmers.
link |
I mean, people who have tiny, tiny plots of land in places like India, et cetera, where
link |
there is no crop insurance available to them because just the financial infrastructure
link |
But it's highly imaginable that using Oracle networks that are trusted outside deliverers
link |
of factual information about rainfall in a particular area, you can start giving drought
link |
insurance to folks like this.
link |
The right person to come up with that idea is not a crypto whiz who doesn't know a blasted
link |
thing about small holding farmers.
link |
The right person to come up with that is not a crop insurance whiz who isn't quite sure
link |
what Bitcoin is, but somebody occupies that intersection.
link |
That's just one of gazillion examples of things that are going to come along for somebody
link |
who occupies the right intersection of skills, but isn't necessarily the number one person
link |
at either one of those expertises.
link |
That's making me kind of wonder about my own little things that I'm average at and seeing
link |
where the intersections that could be exploited.
link |
That's pretty profound.
link |
So we talked quite a bit about the end of the world and how we're both optimistic about
link |
us figuring our way out.
link |
Unfortunately, for now at least, both you and I are going to die one day, way too soon.
link |
First of all, that sucks.
link |
I mean, one, I'd like to ask if you ponder your own mortality, how does that kind of,
link |
what kind of wisdom inside does it give you about your own life?
link |
And broadly, do you think about your life and what the heck it's all about?
link |
Yeah, with respect to pondering mortality, I do try to do that as little as possible
link |
because there's not a lot I can do about it.
link |
But it's inevitably there.
link |
And I think that what it does when you think about it in the right way is it makes you
link |
realize how unbelievably rare and precious the moments that we have here are, and therefore
link |
how consequential the decisions that we make about how to spend our time are.
link |
You know, like, do you do those 17 nagging emails or do you have dinner with somebody
link |
who's really important to you who haven't seen in three and a half years?
link |
If you had an infinite expanse of time in front of you, you might well rationally conclude
link |
I'm going to do those emails because collectively they're rather important.
link |
And I have tens of thousands of years to catch up with my buddy, Tim.
link |
But I think the scarcity of the time that we have helps us choose the right things if
link |
we're tuned to that and we're attuned to the context that mortality puts over the consequence
link |
of every decision we make of how to spend our time.
link |
That doesn't mean that we're all very good at it, it doesn't mean I'm very good at it.
link |
But it does add a dimension of choice and significance to everything that we elect to
link |
It's kind of funny that you say you try to think about it as little as possible.
link |
I would venture to say you probably think about the end of human civilization more than
link |
you do about your own life.
link |
You're probably right.
link |
Because that feels like a problem that could be solved.
link |
Whereas the end of my own life can't be solved.
link |
Well, I don't know.
link |
I mean, there's transhumanists who have incredible optimism about near or intermediate future
link |
therapies that could really, really change human lifespan.
link |
I really hope that they're right, but I don't have a whole lot to add to that project because
link |
I'm not a life scientist myself.
link |
I'm in part also afraid of immortality.
link |
Not as much, but close to as I'm afraid of death itself.
link |
So it feels like the things that give us meaning give us meaning because of the scarcity that
link |
I'm almost afraid of having too much of stuff.
link |
Although, if there was something that said, this can expand your enjoyable wellspan or
link |
lifespan by 75 years, I'm all in.
link |
Well, part of the reason I wanted to not do a startup, really the only thing that worries
link |
me about doing a startup is if it becomes successful.
link |
Because of how much I dream, how much I'm driven to be successful, that there will not
link |
be enough silence in my life, enough scarcity to appreciate the moments I appreciate now
link |
as deeply as I appreciate them now.
link |
There's a simplicity to my life now that it feels like you might disappear with success.
link |
I wouldn't say might.
link |
I think if you start a company that has ambitious investors, ambitious for the returns that
link |
they'd like to see, that has ambitious employees, ambitious for the career trajectories they
link |
want to be on and so forth, and is driven by your own ambition, there's a profound monogamy
link |
It is very, very hard to carve out time to be creative, to be peaceful, to be so forth
link |
because of with every new employee that you hire, that's one more mouth to feed.
link |
With every new investor that you take on, that's one more person to whom you really
link |
do want to deliver great returns.
link |
As the valuation ticks up, the threshold to delivering great returns for your investors
link |
There is an extraordinary monogamy to being a founder CEO above all for the first few
link |
years and first in people's minds could be as many as 10 or 15.
link |
But I guess the fundamental calculation is whether the passion for the vision is greater
link |
than the cost you'll pay.
link |
It's all opportunity cost.
link |
It's all opportunity cost in terms of time and attention and experience.
link |
And some things like I'm, everyone's different, but I'm less calculating some things you just
link |
Sometimes you just dive in.
link |
I mean you can do balance sheets all you want on this versus that and what's the right.
link |
I mean I've done it in the past and it's never worked.
link |
It's always been like, okay, what's my gut screaming at me to do?
link |
But about the meaning of life, you ever think about that?
link |
I mean, this is where I'm going to go all hallmarking on you, but I think that there's
link |
a few things and one of them is certainly love and the love that we experience and feel
link |
and cause to well up in others is something that's just so profound and goes beyond almost
link |
anything else that we can do.
link |
And whether that is something that lies in the past, like maybe there was somebody that
link |
you were dating and loved very profoundly in college and haven't seen in years, I don't
link |
think the significance of that love is any way diminished by the fact that it had a notional
link |
beginning and end.
link |
The fact is that you experience that and you trigger that in somebody else and that happened.
link |
And it doesn't have to be, certainly it doesn't have to be love of romantic partners alone.
link |
It's family members, it's love between friends, it's love between creatures.
link |
I had a dog for 10 years who passed away a while ago and experienced unbelievable love
link |
It can be love of that which you create and we were talking about the flow states that
link |
we enter and the pride or lack of pride or in the Minsky case, your hatred of that which
link |
But nonetheless, the creations that we make and whether it's the love or the joy or the
link |
engagement or the perspective shift that that cascades into other minds, I think that's
link |
a big, big, big part of the meaning of life.
link |
It's not something that everybody participates in necessarily, although I think we all do
link |
at least in a very local level by the example that we set, by the interactions that we have.
link |
But for people who create works that travel far and reach people they'll never meet, that
link |
reach countries they'll never visit, that reach people perhaps that come along and come
link |
across their ideas or their works or their stories or their aesthetic creations of other
link |
sorts long after they're dead, I think that's really, really big part of the fabric of the
link |
So all these things like love and creation, I think really is what it's all about.
link |
And part of love is also the loss of it.
link |
There's a Louis episode with Louis C.K. where an old gentleman is giving him advice that
link |
sometimes the sweetest parts of love is when you lose it and you remember it, sort of you
link |
reminisce on the loss of it.
link |
And there's some aspect in which, and I have many of those in my own life, that almost
link |
like the memories of it and the intensity of emotion you still feel about it is like
link |
the sweetest part.
link |
You're like, after saying goodbye, you relive it.
link |
So that goodbye is also a part of love.
link |
The loss of it is also a part of love.
link |
I don't know, it's back to that scarcity.
link |
I won't say the loss is the best part personally, but it definitely is an aspect of it.
link |
And the grief you might feel about something that's gone makes you realize what a big deal
link |
Speaking of which, this particular journey we went on together come to an end.
link |
So I have to say goodbye and I hate saying goodbye.
link |
Rob, this is truly an honor.
link |
I've really been a big fan.
link |
People should definitely check out your podcast, your Master What You Do in the conversation
link |
space, in the writing space.
link |
It's been an incredible honor that you would show up here and spend this time with me.
link |
I really, really appreciate it.
link |
Well, it's been a huge honor to be here as well, and also a fan in heaven for a long
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rob Reed.
link |
And thank you to Athletic Greens, Belcampo, Fundrise, and NetSuite.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words from Plato.
link |
We can easily forgive a child who's afraid of the dark.
link |
The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.