The following is a conversation with Rob Reed, entrepreneur, author, and host of the After

On podcast.

Sam Harris recommended that I absolutely must talk to Rob about his recent work on the

future of engineer pandemics.

I then listened to the four hour special episode of Sam's Making Sense podcast with Rob titled

Engineering the Apocalypse and I was floored and knew I had to talk to him.

This is a quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Bell Campo, Fund Rise, and

Netsuite.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say a few words about the lab leak hypothesis, which proposes that

COVID 19 is a product of gain of function research on coronaviruses conducted at the

Wuhan Institute of Virology that was then accidentally leaked due to human error.

For context, this lab is biosafety level 4, BSL4, and it investigates coronaviruses.

BSL4 is the highest level of safety, but if you look at all the human in the loop pieces

required to achieve this level of safety, it becomes clear that even BSL4 labs are highly

susceptible to human error.

To me, whether the virus leaked from the lab or not, getting to the bottom of what happened

is about much more than this particular catastrophic case.

It is a test for our scientific, political, journalistic, and social institutions of how

well we can prepare and respond to threats they can cripple or destroy human civilization.

If we continue gain of function research on viruses, eventually these viruses will leak

and they will be more deadly and more contagious.

We can pretend that won't happen, or we can openly and honestly talk about the risks

involved.

This research can both save and destroy human life on Earth as we know it.

It's a powerful double edged sword.

If YouTube and other platforms censor conversations about this, if scientists self censor conversations

about this will become merely victims of our brief Homo sapiens story, not its heroes.

As I said before, too carelessly labeling ideas as misinformation and dismissing them

because of that will eventually destroy our ability to discover the truth, and without

truth we don't have a fighting chance against the great filter before us.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Rob Reed.

I have seen evidence on the internet that you have a sense of humor, allegedly, but

you also talk and think about the destruction of human civilization.

What do you think of the Elon Musk hypothesis that the most entertaining outcome is the

most likely, and he, I think, followed on to say a scene from an external observer.

Like if somebody was watching us, it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing

our civilization.

That's fun to watch.

Yeah.

Exactly.

He said from the standpoint of the observer, not the participant.

What's interesting about that, those were, I think, just a couple of freestanding tweets,

and delivered without a whole lot of wrapper of context.

It's left to the mind of the reader of the tweets to infer what he was talking about.

That's kind of like, it provokes some interesting thoughts.

First of all, it presupposes the existence of an observer, and it also presupposes that

the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire

to be entertained.

There's a lot underpinning that.

To me, that suggests, particularly coming from Elon, that it's a reference to simulation

theory, that somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability

to, let's say, peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of

plot twists and surprises, and either a happier, tragic ending, or they have an incredible

meta view, and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and

full of plot twists and surprises and a happier, unhappy ending.

Okay, so we're presupposing an observer.

Then on top of that, when you think about it, you're also presupposing a producer, because

the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and other developments

that you weren't foreseeing.

I have reread my own novels, and that's fun, because it's something that I worked hard

on and I slaved over and I love, but there aren't a lot of surprises in there.

Now, I'm thinking, we need a producer and an observer for that to be true.

On top of that, it's got to be a very competent producer, because Elon said the most entertaining

outcome is the most likely one.

There's lots of layers for thinking about that.

When you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining, it makes me think of

there was a South Park episode in which Earth turned out to be a reality show.

Somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to, so the Earth show was

going to get canceled, et cetera.

Taking all that together, and I'm obviously being a little bit playful in laying this

out, what is the evidence that we have that we are in a reality that is intended to be

most entertaining?

You could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc of civilization,

other levels as well, I'm sure, but just looking from my own life, I think I'd make a pretty

lousy show.

I spend an inordinate amount of time just looking at a computer.

I don't think that's very entertaining, and there's just a completely inadequate level

of shootouts and car chases in my life.

I'll go weeks, even months, without a single shootout or car chase.

That just means that you're one of the nonplayer characters in this game.

You're just waiting to meet.

I'm an extra.

You're an extra that waiting for you one opportunity for a brief moment to actually

interact with one of the main characters in the play.

Very interesting.

Okay, that's good.

Okay, so we'll rule out me being the star of the show, which I probably could have guessed

at.

Anyway, but not even the arc of civilization.

There have been a lot of really intriguing things that have happened and a lot of astounding

things that have happened, but I would have some werewolves.

I'd have some zombies.

I would have some really improbable developments like maybe Canada absorbing the United States.

So I don't know.

I'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment, but if we are,

that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years ahead.

I kind of hope that we're not designed for maximum entertainment.

Well, the night is still young in terms of Canada, but do you think it's possible for

the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent?

So meaning it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the internet, the funny ones,

the entertaining ones spread more efficiently.

They do.

I mean, I don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up on mass funny things

much more sort of aggressively.

It's more viral in the full sense of that word.

Is there some sense that whatever the evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities

is the same process that's going to, in an emergent way, create the most entertaining

outcome, the most memeofiable outcome, the most viral outcome if we were to share it

on Twitter?

Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, we do have an incredible ability, how many memes are created in a given day and

the ones that go viral are almost uniformly funny, at least to somebody with a particular

sense of humor.

Right.

Yeah, I'd have to think about that.

We are definitely great at creating atomized units of funny.

In the example that you used, there are going to be X million brains parsing and judging

whether this meme is retweetable or not.

And so that atomic element of funniness, of entertainingness, et cetera, we definitely

have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything

else that's going on.

But in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the earth driving for a level

of entertainment, that is on such a much higher level that I don't know if that would

necessarily follow directly from the fact that atomic units of entertainment are very,

very aptly selected for us.

I don't know.

Do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective

of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains?

So almost thinking about the ideas or the memes, this is the Dawkins thing as the organisms.

And then the humans as just vehicles for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around

and spread.

Yeah, for propagating them, mutating them, putting selective pressure on them, et cetera.

I mean, I found Dawkins, or his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought

to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene.

What a PS to put at the end of a long chunk of writing, profoundly interesting.

I view the relationship though between humans and memes as probably an oversimplification,

but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees, right?

Do flowers have bees or do bees in a sense have flowers?

And the answer is it is a very, very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi independent

roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other.

And so in the case of bees, obviously, you could see the flowers being this monolithic

structure physically in relation to any given bee, and it's the source of food and sustenance.

So you could kind of say, well, flowers have bees.

But on the other hand, the flowers would obviously be doomed.

They weren't being pollinated by the bees.

So you could kind of say, well, flowers are really expression of what the bees need.

And the truth is a symbiosis.

So with memes in human minds, our brains are clearly the Petri dishes in which memes are

either propagated or not propagated, get mutated or don't get mutated.

They are the venue in which selective competition plays out between different memes.

So all of that is very true.

And you could look at that and say, really, the human mind is a production of memes and

ideas have us rather than us having ideas.

But at the same time, let's take a catchy tune as an example of a meme.

That catchy tune did originate in a human mind.

Somebody had to structure that thing.

And as much as I like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about how the universe, I'm simplifying,

you know, kind of the ideas find their way in its beautiful TED talk.

It's very lyrical.

She talked about, you know, ideas and prose kind of beaming into our minds.

And, you know, she talked about needing to pull over to the side of the road when she

got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to

write that down.

I love that I find that beautiful as a writer, as a novelist myself.

I've never had that experience.

And I think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal

of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind.

And so like the bees and the flowers, I think there's a great symbiosis.

And they both kind of have one another.

Ideas have us, but we have ideas for real.

If we could take a little bit of a tangent, Stephen King on writing, you as a great writer,

you dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you, that it's a grind of sort of,

it's almost like you're mining for gold.

It's more of a very deliberate, rigorous daily process.

So maybe can you talk about the writing process?

How do you write well?

And maybe if you want to step outside of yourself, almost like give advice to an aspiring writer,

what does it take to write?

What is the best work of your life?

Well, it would be very different if it's fiction versus nonfiction.

And I've done both.

I've written two works of nonfiction books and two works of fiction.

Two works of fiction being more recent, I'm going to focus on that right now because that's

more toweringly on my mind.

They're amongst novelists, again, this is an oversimplification, but there's kind of

two schools of thought.

Some people really like to fly by the seat of their pants, and some people really, really

like to outline, to plot.

So there's plotters and panzers, I guess is one way that people look at it.

And as with most things, there is a great continuum in between, and I'm somewhere on

that continuum, but I lean, I guess, a little bit more toward the plotter.

And so when I do start a novel, I have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going

to end, and I have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin.

And I do try to make an effort of making an outline that I know I'm going to be extremely

unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story, but trying to make an outline that

gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters

and so forth.

But then when I get into the process, that outline, particularly the center of it, ultimately

inevitably morphs a great deal.

And I think if I were personally a rigorous outliner, I would not allow that to happen.

I also would make a much more vigorous skeleton before I start.

So I think people who are really in that plotting outlining mode are people who write page turners,

people who write spy novels or supernatural adventures, where you really want a relentless

pace of events, action, plot twists, conspiracy, et cetera.

And that is really the bone, that's really the skeletal structure.

So I think folks who write that kind of book are really very much on the outlining side.

And I think people who write what's often referred to as literary fiction for lack of

a better term, where it's more about sort of aura and ambiance and character development

and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth, I think that group is

more likely to fly by the seat of the pants.

And I know people who start with a blank page and just see where it's going to go.

I'm a little bit more on the plotting side.

Now you asked what makes something at least in the mind of the writer as great as it can

be.

For me, it's an astonishingly high percentage of it is editing as opposed to the initial

writing.

For every hour that I spend writing new prose, like new pages, new paragraphs, stuff that

you know, new bits of the book, I probably spend, I mean, I wish I kept account, like

I wish I had like one of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time

I've been doing this, that, but I would say it's at least four or five hours and maybe

as many as 10 that I spend editing.

And so it's relentless for me.

For each one hour of writing, I'd say that for a while.

I mean, I write because I edit and I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning.

And sometimes on the micro level of just like, does the rhythm of the sentence feel right?

Do I need to carve a syllable or something so it can land?

Like as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done, but the book is 750 pages

long and it's way too bloated and I need to lop a third out of it.

Problems on, you know, those two orders of magnitude and everything in between.

That is an enormous amount of my time.

And I also write music, write and record and produce music.

And there the ratio is even higher.

Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very

high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just

right.

So I think that's true of a lot of creative processes.

I know it's true of sculpture.

I believe it's true of woodwork.

My dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing

at the end.

So I think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process.

Any creative process.

Can I ask about the psychological, the demon side of that picture?

In the editing process, you're ultimately judging the initial piece of work and you're

judging and judging and judging.

How much of your time do you spend hating your work?

How much time do you spend in gratitude, impressed, thankful, or how good the work

that you will put together is?

I spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those but leaning toward

gratitude.

I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that I have, I like

quite a bit and I can make it better and better and better with every time I go through it.

So I spend most of my time in a state of optimism.

I think I personally oscillate much more aggressively between those two where I wouldn't

be able to find the average.

I go pretty deep.

Marvin Minsky from MIT had this advice, I guess, to what it takes to be successful in

science and research is to hate everything you do.

You've ever done in the past.

I mean, at least he was speaking about himself that the key to his success was to hate everything

he's ever done.

I have a little Marvin Minsky there in me too to always be exceptionally self critical,

almost self critical about the work, but grateful for the chance to be able to do the work.

That makes sense.

Makes perfect sense.

But each one of us have to strike a certain kind of balance.

But back to the destruction of human civilization.

If humans destroy ourselves in the next 100 years, what will be the most likely source,

the most likely reason that we destroy ourselves?

Well, let's see, 100 years, it's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far.

And it's something to give a lot more thought to, I think, than normal folks simply because

I am a science fiction writer.

And I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard to foresee out more

than just a few decades.

I mean, comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now, a century later,

it would have been so unforeseeable.

And I just don't know what's going to happen, particularly with exponential technologies.

I mean, our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing

and synthetic biology and how we might destroy ourselves in the 100 year time frame might

have everything to do with breakthroughs and nanotechnology 40 years from now and then

how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate.

But in the nearer term than I'm comfortable predicting, let's say, 30 years, I would say

the most likely route to self destruction would be synthetic biology.

And I always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important one that I find, and I'll

abbreviate synthetic biology to SinBio just to save us some syllables.

I believe SinBio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves.

So I'm not an anti SinBio person by any stretch.

I mean, SinBio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment,

helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable.

So it's electrifying the field.

But in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent.

In the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much, much greater odds of leading

to our self destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real

possibility and what we need to be concerned about.

But in the 30 year time frame, I think it's a lesser one or nuclear weapons or anything

else that I can think of.

Can you explain that a little bit further?

So your concern is on the manmade versus the natural side of the pandemic front here.

So we humans engineering pathogens, engineering viruses is the concern here.

And maybe how do you see the possible trajectory is happening here in terms of, is it malevolent

or is it accidents, oops, little mistakes or unintended consequences of particular actions

that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes?

Well, both of them are a danger.

And I think the question of which is more likely has to do with two things.

One, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable, foresighted steps that we are absolutely

capable of taking right now to first stall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with

something that could have annihilating impacts?

And in the episode you referenced with Sam, we talked a great deal about that.

So do we take those steps?

And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing a sin with

sin bio could plummet.

But it's always a question of if and we have a bad, bad and very long track record of hitting

this news bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us.

So that's variable number one.

Variable number two is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society

decide is acceptable in the realms of academia, government or private industry?

And if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas

to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity, if we think that's fine.

And if that kind of work starts happening in one lab, five labs, 50 labs, 500 labs in

one country, then 10 countries, then 70 countries or whatever, that risk of a boo boo starts

rising astronomically.

And this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that I presented those two things.

But I think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks.

The easier one to manage, although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would

have to be something that all nations agree on.

But the easier risk to manage is that of, hey, guys, let's not develop pathogens that

if they escaped from a lab could annihilate us.

There's no line of research that justifies that.

And in my view, I mean, that's the point of perspective we'd need to have.

We'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies that.

The reason why I believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level

of biosafety lab in the world, biosafety level four.

And there are not a lot of BSL four labs in the world.

Things can have leaked out of BSL four labs.

And some of the work that's been done with potentially annihilating pathogens, which

we can talk about, is actually done at BSL three.

And so fundamentally, any lab can leak.

We have proven ourselves to be incapable of creating a lab that is utterly impervious

to leaks.

So why in the world would we create something where, if God forbid, it leaked, could annihilate

us all?

And by the way, almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level, anything

labs, are designed to prevent accidental leaks.

What happens if you have a malevolent insider and we could talk about the psychology and

the motivations of what would make a malevolent insider who wants to release something annihilating

in a bet?

I'm sure that we will.

But what if you have a malevolent insider?

Virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level, one, two, three, and four,

are about preventing somebody hijacking the process.

I mean, some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents.

They're imperfect against accidents.

And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs, with every lab you

add, the odds of there being a malevolent insider naturally increase arithmetically as

the number of labs goes up.

Now on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific, traditional

government academic scientific environment, creating something malevolent, again, there's

protections that we can take both at the level of syn bio architecture, the hardening entire

syn bio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out there

by rogue actors, to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can do to

dramatically mitigate that risk.

And I think we do both of those things, decide that, no, we're not going to experimentally

make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs and be, yes, we are going to take countermeasures

that are going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation.

And I think both risks get managed down.

But if you take one set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have

not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome.

So can we talk about this kind of research and what's actually done and what are the

positives and negatives of it?

So if we look again, a function research and the kind of stuff that's happening in level

three and level four BSL labs, what's the whole idea here?

Is it trying to engineer viruses to understand how they behave?

You want to understand the dangerous ones.

Yeah.

So that would be the logic behind doing it.

And so gain a function can mean a lot of different things.

Viewed through a certain lens, gained a function research could be what you do when you create

GMOs, when you create hardy strains of corn that are resistant to pesticides.

I mean, you could view that as gain a function.

So I'm going to refer to gain a function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually

the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of

microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly.

And in that line of research, I'll use an example from 2011 because it's very illustrative

and it's also very chilling.

Back in 2011, two separate labs independently of one another, I assume there was some kind

of communication between them, but there were basically independent projects, one in Holland

and one in Wisconsin, did gain a function research on something called H5N1 flu.

H5N1 is something that, at least on a lethality basis, makes COVID look like a kitten.

COVID, according to the World Health Organization, has a case fatality rate somewhere between

half a percent and one percent.

H5N1 is closer to 60%, 6.0.

And so that's actually even slightly more lethal than Ebola.

It's a very, very, very scary pathogen.

The good news about H5N1 is that it is barely, barely contagious.

But I believe it is in no way contagious human to human.

It requires very, very, very deep contact with birds, in most cases, chickens.

And so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them

and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin and you're interacting

intensely with foul who, as it turns out, have H5N1, that's when the jump comes.

But there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of human to human.

Not that it just doesn't exist.

I think the World Health Organization did a relentless survey of the number of H5N1 cases.

I think they do it every year.

I saw one 10 year series where I think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of

a decade.

And that's a drop in the bucket, a kind of fun fact.

I believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is 70,000 deaths.

So we think getting struck by lightning, pretty low risk, H5N1 much, much lower than that.

What happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases set out to make

H5N1 that would be contagious, that could create airborne transmission.

And so they basically passed it, I think in both cases, they passed it through a large

number of ferrets.

And so this wasn't like CRISPR, there wasn't even in CRISPR back in those days.

This was relatively straightforward selecting for a particular outcome.

And after guiding the path and passing them through, again, I believe it was a series

of ferrets, they did in fact come up with a version of H5N1 that is capable of airborne

transmission.

Now, they didn't unleash it into the world.

They didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen.

And so for those two reasons, we don't really know how contagious it might have been.

But if it was as contagious as COVID, that could be a civilization threatening pathogen.

And why would you do it?

Well, the people who did it were good guys, they were virologists.

I believe their agenda as they explained it was, much as you said, let's figure out what

a worst case scenario might look like so we can understand it better.

But my understanding is in both cases it was done in BSL3 labs.

And so potential of leak, significantly nonzero, hopefully way below 1%, but significantly

nonzero.

And when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives, destruction

of a large portion of the economy, et cetera, and you do an expected value calculation on

whatever fraction of 1% that was, you would come up with a staggering cost, staggering

expected cost for this work.

So it should never have been carried out.

Now you might make an argument.

If you said, if you believed that H5N1 in nature is on an inevitable path to airborne transmission,

and it's only going to be a small number of years, A, and B, if it makes that transition,

there is one set of changes to its metabolic pathways and its genomic code and so forth.

One that we have discovered.

So it is going to go from point A, which is where it is right now, to point B. We have

reliably engineered point B. That is the destination.

And we need to start fighting that right now because this is five years or less away.

Now that'd be a very different world.

That'd be like spotting an asteroid that's coming toward the Earth and is five years

off.

And yes, you marshal everything you can to resist that.

But there's two problems with that perspective.

The first is, and however many thousands of generations that humans have been inhabiting

this planet, there has never been a transmissible form of H5N1.

And influenza has been around for a very long time.

So there is no case for inevitability of this kind of a jump to airborne transmission.

So we're not an afraid train to that outcome.

And if there was inevitability around that, it's not like there's just one set of genetic

code that would get there.

There's all kinds of different mutations that could conceivably result in that kind

of an outcome, unbelievable diversity of mutations.

And so we're not actually creating something we're inevitably going to face.

But we are creating something, we are creating a very powerful and unbelievably negative

card and injecting in the deck that nature never put into the deck.

So in that case, I just don't see any moral or scientific justification for that kind

of work.

And interestingly, there was quite a bit of excitement and concern about this when the

work came out.

One of the teams was going to publish their results in science, the other in nature.

And there were a lot of editorials and a lot of scientists are saying this is crazy.

And publication of those papers did get suspended.

And not long after that, there was a pause put on US government funding, NIH funding

on gain of function research.

But both of those speed bumps were ultimately removed.

Those papers did ultimately get published and that pause on funding ceased long ago.

And in fact, those two very projects, my understanding, has resumed their funding, got their government

funding back.

I don't know why a Dutch project is getting NIH funding, but whatever, about a year and

a half ago.

So as far as the US government and regulators are concerned, it's all systems go for gain

of function at this point, which I find very troubling.

Now, I'm a little bit of an outsider from this field, but it has echoes of the same

kind of problem I see in the AI world with autonomous weapons systems.

Nobody in my colleagues, my colleagues, friends, as far as I can tell people in the AI community

are not really talking about autonomous weapons systems as now US and China have full steam

ahead on the development of both.

And that seems to be a similar kind of thing on gain of function.

I have friends in the biology space and they don't want to talk about gain of function publicly.

And that makes me very uncomfortable from an outsider perspective in terms of gain of

function.

It makes me very uncomfortable from the insider perspective on autonomous weapons systems.

I'm not sure how to communicate exactly about autonomous weapons systems and I certainly

don't know how to communicate effectively about gain of function.

What is the right path forward here?

Did we seize all gain of function research?

Is that really the solution here?

Well, again, I'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of what we're

discussing.

Yes, for viruses.

You could say almost anything that you do to make biology more effective is gain of function.

So within the narrow confines of what we're discussing, I think it would be easy enough

for level headed people in all of the countries, level headed governmental people in all the

countries that realistically could support such a program to agree, we don't want this

to happen because all labs leak.

I mean, an example that I used in the piece I did with Sam Harris as well is the anthrax

attacks in the United States in 2001.

Talk about an example of the least likely lab leaking into the least likely place.

This was shortly after 9.11, folks, you don't remember it, and it was a very, very lethal

strand of anthrax that, as it turned out, based on the forensic genomic work that was

done and so forth, absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab.

Probably the one at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

It might have been another one, but who cares?

It absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab.

And where did it leak to?

This highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security minded

organization.

Well, it leaked to places including the Senate Majority Leader's Office, Tom Dashel's office.

They was Senator Leahy's office, certain publications including Bizarrely, the National

Enquirer.

But let's go to the Senate Majority Leader's Office.

It is hard to imagine a more security minded country than the United States two weeks after

the 9.11 attack.

I mean, it doesn't get more security minded than that.

And it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the United States

military.

We can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and $24,000 wrenches and so

forth, but pretty capable when it comes to that.

Despite that level of focus and concern and competence, just days after the 9.11 attack,

something comes from the inside of our military and industrial compacts and ends up in the

office of someone I believe is Senate Majority Leader, somewhere in the line of presidential

succession.

It tells us everything can leak.

So again, think of a level headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of

countries thinking through, like I can imagine a very simple PowerPoint revealing, you know,

just discussing briefly things like the anthrax leak, things like this foot and mouth disease

outbreak or leaking that came out of a BSL four level lab in the UK, several other things,

talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say, folks,

can we agree that this just shouldn't happen?

I mean, if we were able to agree on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which we were by a

weapons convention, which we did agree on, we the world, for the most part, I believe

agreement could be found there.

But it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to

get to consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together

and browbeat them into banning this stuff.

Now, that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this.

But in well regulated, you know, carefully watched over fiduciary environments, like

federally funded academic research, anything going on in the government itself, you know,

companies going on in companies that have investors who don't want to go to jail for

the rest of their lives.

I think that would have a major, major dampening impact on it.

But there is a particular possible catalyst in this time we live in, which is for really

kind of raising the question of gain of function research for the application of virus, making

viruses more dangerous, is the question of whether COVID leaked from a lab, sort of not

even answering that question, but even asking that question.

It seems like a very important question to ask to catalyze the conversation about whether

we should be doing gain of function research.

I mean, from a high level, why do you think people, even colleagues of mine are not comfortable

asking that question?

And two, do you think that the answer could be that it did leak from a lab?

I think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough, again, for

the hypothetical, rational national leaders watching this simple PowerPoint, if you could

put the possibility at one percent, and you look at the unbelievable destructive power

that COVID had, that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it.

Now, as to whether or not that was a leak, some very, very level, I don't know enough

about all of the factors in the Bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making

the pro argument of that.

So I don't pretend to be an expert on that, and I don't have a point of view.

I just don't know.

But what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons.

One is that there is a BSL4 lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

I believe it's the only BSL4 in China, I could be wrong about that.

But it definitely had a history that alarmed very sophisticated US diplomats and others

who were in contact with the lab and were aware of what it was doing long before COVID

hit the world.

And so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified.

I believe one sophisticated scientist or other observer said that WIV is a ticking time bomb.

And I believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic

of great interest at WIV.

SARS obviously came out of China, and that's a coronavirus that would make an enormous

amount of sense for it to be studied there.

And there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days and weeks after the outbreak

that's basically been imposed by the Chinese government that we just don't know.

So it feels like a substantially or greater than 1% possibility to me looking at it from

the outside.

And that's something that one could imagine.

Now we're going to the realm of thought experiment, not me decreeing this is what happened, but

if they're studying coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and there is this

precedent of gain of function research that's been done on something that is remarkably

uncontangiously human, whereas we know coronavirus is contagious to humans, I could definitely

and there is this global consensus.

Certainly was the case two or three years ago when this work might have started.

This seems to be this global consensus that gain of function is fine.

The US paused funding for a little while, but paused funding.

They never said private actors couldn't do it.

It was just a pause of NIH funding.

And then that pause was lifted.

So again, none of this is irrational.

You could certainly see the folks at WIV saying gain of function, interesting vector, coronavirus

unlike H5N1, very contagious.

We are in a nation that has had terrible run ins with coronavirus.

Why don't we do a little gain of function on this?

And then like all labs at all levels, one can imagine this lab leaking.

So it's not an impossibility and very, very level headed people have said that who have

looked at it much more deeply do believe in that outcome.

Why is it such a threat to power, the idea they'll leak from a lab?

Why is it so threatening?

I don't maybe understand this point exactly.

Is it just that as governments and especially the Chinese government is really afraid of

admitting mistakes that everybody makes?

So this is a horrible, like Chernobyl is a good example.

I come from the Soviet Union.

I mean, well, major mistakes were made in Chernobyl.

I would argue for a lab leak to happen, the scale of the mistake is much smaller.

The depth and the breadth of a rot in bureaucracy that led to Chernobyl is much bigger than

anything that could lead to a lab leak because it could literally just be, I mean, I'm sure

there's security, very careful security procedures even in level three labs, but I imagine maybe

you can correct me.

All it takes is the incompetence of a small number of individuals, one individual on a

particular couple of weeks, three weeks period as opposed to a multi year bureaucratic failure

of the entire government.

Right.

Well, certainly the magnitude of mistakes and compounding mistakes that went into Chernobyl

was far, far, far greater.

But the consequence of COVID outweighs that the consequence of Chernobyl to a tremendous

degree, and I think that particularly authoritarian governments are unbelievably reluctant to

admit to any fallibility whatsoever.

There's a long, long history of that across dozens and dozens of authoritarian governments,

and to be transparent, again, this is in the hypothetical world in which this was a leak,

which again, I don't personally have enough sophistication to have an opinion on the likelihood.

But in the hypothetical world in which it was a leak, the global reaction and the amount

of global animus and the amount of the decline in global respect that would happen toward

China because every country suffered massively from this, unbelievable damages in terms of

human lives and economic activity disrupted.

The world would in some way present China with that bill.

And when you take on top of that the natural disinclination for any authoritarian government

to admit any fallibility and tolerate the possibility of any fallibility whatsoever,

and you look at the relative opacity, even though they let a World Health Organization

group in a couple of months ago to run around, they didn't give that who group anywhere

near the level of access it would be necessary to definitively say X happened versus Y.

The level of opacity that surrounds those opening weeks and months of COVID in China,

we just don't know.

If you were to look back at 2020 and maybe brought it out to future pandemics that could

be much more dangerous, what kind of response, how do we fail in a response, and how could

we do better?

So the gain of function research is discussing the question of we should not be creating

viruses that are both exceptionally contagious and exceptionally deadly to humans.

But if it does happen, perhaps the natural evolution, natural mutation, is there interesting

technological responses on the testing side, on the vaccine development side, on the collection

of data, or on the basic sort of policy response side, or the sociological, the psychological

side?

Yeah, there's all kinds of things, and most of what I've thought about and written about

and again discussed in that long bit with Sam is dual use.

So most of the countermeasures that I've been thinking about and advocating for would be

every bit as effective against zoonotic disease and natural pandemic of some sort as an artificial

one.

The risk of an artificial one, even the near term risk of an artificial one, ups the urgency

around these measures immensely, but most of them would be broadly applicable.

And so I think the first thing that we really want to do on a global scale is have a far,

far more robust and globally transparent system of detection.

And that can happen on a number of levels.

The most obvious one is just in the blood of people who come into clinics exhibiting

signs of illness.

And we are certainly at a point now where at with relatively minimal investment, we

could develop in clinic diagnostics that would be unbelievably effective at pinpointing what's

going on in almost any disease when somebody walks into a doctor's office or a clinic.

And better than that, this is a little bit further off, but it wouldn't cost tens of

billions in research dollars, it would be a relatively modest and affordable budget

in relation to the threat at home diagnostics that can really, really pinpoint particularly

with respiratory infections because that is generally almost universally the mechanism

of transmission for any serious pandemic.

So somebody has a respiratory infection, is it one of the significantly large handful

of rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and other things that cause common cold?

Or is it influenza?

If it's influenza, is it influenza A versus B?

Or is it a small handful of other more exotic but nonetheless sort of common respiratory

infections that are out there?

Having a diagnostic panel to pinpoint all of that stuff, that's something that's well

within our capabilities.

That's much less a lift than creating mRNA vaccines, which obviously we proved capable

of when we put our minds to it.

So do that on a global basis.

And I don't think that's irrational because the best prototype for this that I'm aware

of isn't currently rolling out in Atherton, California, or Fairfield County, Connecticut,

or some other wealthy place.

The best prototype that I'm aware of this is rolling out right now in Nigeria.

And it's a project that came out of the Broad Institute, which is, as I'm sure you know,

but some listeners may not, is kind of like an academic joint venture between Harvard

and MIT.

The program is called Sentinel.

And their objective is, and their plan, and it's a very well conceived plan, a methodical

plan, is to do just that in areas of Nigeria that are particularly vulnerable to zoonotic

diseases, making the jump from animals to humans.

But also there's just an unbelievable public health benefit from that.

And it's sort of a three tier system where clinicians in the field could very rapidly

determine, do you have one of the infections of acute interest here, either because it's

very common in this region, so we want to diagnose as many things as we can at the front

line, or because it's uncommon but unbelievably threatening like Ebola.

So front line worker can make that determination very, very rapidly.

If it comes up as a we don't know, they bump it up to a level that's more like at a fully

configured doctor's office or local hospital.

And if it's still at a we don't know, it gets bumped up to a national level.

And that gets bumped very, very rapidly.

So if this can be done in Nigeria, and it seems that it can be, there shouldn't be any inhibition

for it to happen in most other places.

And it should be affordable from a budgetary standpoint.

And based on Sentinel's budget and adjusting things for things like very different costs

of living, larger population, et cetera, I did a back of the envelope calculation that

doing something like Sentinel in the US would be in the low billions of dollars.

And wealthy countries, middle income countries can't afford such a thing.

Lower income countries should certainly be helped with that, but start with that level

of detection.

And layer on top of that other interesting things like monitoring search engine traffic,

search engine queries for evidence that strange clusters of symptoms are starting to rise

in different places.

There's been a lot of work done with that.

Most of it kind of academic and experimental, but some of it has been powerful enough to

suggest that this could be a very powerful early warning system.

There's a guy named Bill Lampos at University College London who basically did a very rigorous

analysis that showed that symptom searches reliably predicted COVID outbreaks in the

early days of the pandemic in given countries by as much as 16 days before the evidence

started to crew at a public health level.

16 days of forewarning can be monumentally important in the early days of an outbreak.

And this is a very, very talented, but nonetheless very resource constrained academic project.

Even if that was something that was done with a NORAD like budget.

So I mean, starting with detection, that's something we could do radically, radically

better.

So aggregating multiple data sources in order to create something, I mean, this is really

exciting to me, the possibility that I've heard inklings of, of creating almost like

a weather map of pathogens, like basically aggregating all of these data sources, scaling

many orders of magnitude up at home testing and all kinds of testing that doesn't just

try to test for the particular pathogen of worry now, but everything like a full spectrum

of things that could be dangerous to the human body and thereby be able to create these maps

like that are dynamically updated on an hourly basis of the, of how viruses travel throughout

the world.

And so you can respond like you can then integrate just like you do when you check your weather

map and it's raining or not.

Of course not perfect, but it's very good predictor whether it's going to rain or not

and use that to then make decisions about your own life, ultimately give the power information

to individuals to respond.

And if it's a super dangerous, like if it's acid rain versus regular rain, you might want

to really stay inside as opposed to risking it.

And that just like you said, if I think it's not very expensive relative to all the things

that we do in this world, but it does require bold leadership.

And there's another dark thing which really is bothering me about 2020, which it requires

is it requires trust in institutions to carry out these kinds of programs and requires trust

in science and engineers and sort of centralized organizations that would operate at scale here.

And much of that trust has been, at least in the United States, diminished.

It feels like I'm not exactly sure where to place the blame, but I do place quite a bit

of the blame into the scientific community.

And again, my fellow colleagues in speaking down to people at times, speaking from authority,

it sounded like it dismissed the basic human experience or the basic common humanity of

people in a way to like, it almost sounded like there's an agenda that's hidden behind

the words the scientists spoke, like they're trying to, in a self preserving way, control

the population or something like that.

I don't think any of that is true from the majority of the scientific community, but

it sounded that way.

And so the trust began to diminish.

I'm not sure how to fix that, except to be more authentic, be more real, acknowledge

the uncertainties under which we operate, acknowledge the mistakes that scientists make, that institutions

make, the leak from the lab is a perfect example.

We have imperfect systems that make all the progress you see in the world, and that being

honest about that imperfection, I think, is essential for forming trust, but I don't know

what to make of it.

It's been deeply disappointing because I do think, just like you mentioned, the solutions

require people to trust the institutions with their data.

Yeah.

I think part of the problem is, it seems to me as an outsider that there was a bizarre

unwillingness on the part of the CDC and other institutions to admit to, to frame and to

contextualize uncertainty.

Maybe they had a patronizing idea that these people need to be told, and when they're told,

they need to be told with authority and a level of definitiveness and certitude that

doesn't actually exist.

And so when they whipsaw on recommendations like what you should do about masks, when

the CDC is at the very beginning of the pandemic saying, masks don't do anything, don't wear

them, when the real driver for that was, we don't want these clowns going out and depleting

Amazon of masks because they may be needed in medical settings, and we just don't know

yet.

And I think a message that actually respected people and said, this is why we're asking

you not to do masks yet, and there's more to be seen, would be less whipsawing and would

bring people, like they feel more like they're part of the conversation and they're being

treated like adults than saying one day definitively masks suck, and then X days later saying,

nope, damn it, wear masks.

And so I think framing things in terms of the probabilities, which most people are easy

to parse.

A more recent example, which I just thought was batty, was suspending the Johnson and

Johnson vaccine for a very low single digit number of days in the United States based

on the fact that I believe there had been seven ish clotting incidents in roughly seven

million people who had had the vaccine administered, I believe one of which resulted in a fatality.

And there was definitely suggestive data that indicated that there was a relationship.

This wasn't just coincidental because I think all of the clotting incidents happened in

women as opposed to men and kind of clustered in a certain age group.

But does that call for shutting off the vaccine, or does it call for leveling with the American

public and saying, we've had one fatality out of seven million?

This is, let's just assume, substantially less than the likelihood of getting struck

by lightning.

Based on that information, and we're going to keep you posted because you can trust

us to keep you posted, based on that information, please decide whether you're comfortable with

a Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

That would have been one response, and I think people would have been able to parse the simple

bits of data and make their own judgment.

By turning it off, all of a sudden, there's this dramatic signal to people who don't read

all 900 words in the New York Times piece that explains why it's being turned off, but

just see the headline, which is a majority of people.

There's a sudden, oh my god, yikes, vaccine being shut off.

And then all the people who sat on the fence or are sitting on the fence about whether

or not they trust vaccines, that is going to push an incalculable number of people.

That's going to be the last straw.

For we don't know how many hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of people to say,

okay, tipping point here, I'm going to trust these vaccines.

So by pausing that for whatever it was, 10 or 12 days, and then flipping the switch

as everybody who knew much about the situation knew was inevitable.

By flipping the on switch 12 days later, you're conveying certitude J&J bad to certitude

J&J good in a period of just a few days, and people just feel whipsawed, and they're not

part of the analysis.

But it's not just the whipsawing.

And I think about this quite a bit.

I don't think I have good answers.

It's something about the way the communication actually happens.

Just I don't know what it is about Anthony Fauci, for example, but I don't trust him.

And I think that has to do, I mean, he has an incredible background.

I'm sure he's a brilliant scientist and researcher.

I'm sure he's also a great like inside the room policymaker and deliberator and so on.

But you know, what makes a great leader is something about that thing that you can't

quite describe, but being a communicator that you know you can trust that there's an authenticity

that's required.

And I'm not sure maybe I'm being a bit too judgmental, but I'm a huge fan of a lot of

great leaders throughout history.

They've communicated exceptionally well in the way that Fauci does not.

And I think about that.

I think about what has affected science communication.

So great leaders throughout history did not necessarily need to be great science communicators.

Their leadership was in other domains, but when you're fighting the virus, you also have

to be a great science communicator.

You have to be able to communicate on certainties, you have to be able to communicate something

like a vaccine that you're allowing inside your body into the messiness, into the complexity

of the biology system, that if we're being honest, it's so complex, we'll never be able

to really understand.

We can only desperately hope that science can give us sort of a high likelihood that

there's no short term negative consequences and that kind of intuition about long term

negative consequences and doing our best in this battle against trillions of things that

are trying to kill us.

Being an effective communicator in that space is very difficult, but I think about what

it takes because I think there should be more science communicators that are effective

at that kind of thing.

Let me ask you about something that's sort of more in the AI space that I think about

that kind of goes along this thread that you've spoken about democratizing the technology

that could destroy human civilization is from amazing work from DeepMind AlphaFold2, which

achieved incredible performance on the protein folding problem, single protein folding problem.

Do you think about the use of AI in the syn biospace of, I think the gain of function

in the virus space research that you refer to, I think is natural mutations and sort

of aggressively mutating the virus until you get one that has this both contagious and

deadly, but what about then using AI to through simulation be able to compute deadly viruses

or any kind of biological systems?

Is this something you're worried about or again, is this something you're more excited

about?

I think computational biology is unbelievably exciting and promising field and I think when

you're doing things in silica as opposed to in vivo, the dangers plummet.

You don't have a critter that can leak from a leaky lab.

So I don't see any problem with that except I do worry about the data security dimension

of it because if you were doing really, really interesting in silica gain a function research

and you hit upon through a level sophistication, we don't currently have but synthetic biology

is an exponential technology so capabilities that are utterly out of reach today will be

attainable in five or six years.

I think if you conjured up worst case genomes of viruses that don't exist in vivo anywhere,

they're just in the computer space but like, hey guys, this is a genetic sequence that

would end the world, let's say.

Then you have to worry about the utter hackability of every computer network we can imagine.

Data leaks from the least likely places on the grandest possible scales have happened

and continue to happen and will probably always continue to happen and so that would be the

danger of doing the work in silica.

If you end up with a list of like, well, these are things we never want to see.

That list leaks and after the passage of some time certainly couldn't be done today but

after the passage of some time, lots and lots of people in academic labs going all the way

down to the high school level are in a position to make it overly simplistic, hit print on

a genome and have the virus bearing that genome pop out on the other end and you got

something to worry about but in general computational biology I think is incredibly important particularly

because the crushing majority of work that people are doing with the protein folding

problem and other things are about creating therapeutics, about creating things that will

help us live better, live longer, thrive, be a bit more well and so forth.

The protein folding problem is a monstrous computational challenge that we seem to make

just the most glacial progress on for years and years but I think there's a biannual

competition I think for which people tackle the protein folding problem and DeepMind's

entrant both two years ago like in 2018 and 2020 ruled the field and so protein folding

is an unbelievably important thing if you want to start thinking about therapeutics

because it's the folding of the protein that tells us where the channels and the receptors

and everything else are on that protein and it's from that precise model, if we can get

to a precise model, that you can start barraging it again in silicone with thousands, tens

of thousands, millions of potential therapeutics and see what resolves the problems, the shortcomings

that a mischapen protein, for instance somebody with a cystic fibrosis, how might we treat

that?

So I see nothing but good in that.

Well, let me ask you about fear and hope in this world.

I tend to believe that in terms of competence and malevolence, that people who are maybe

it's in my interactions, I tend to see that first of all I believe that most people are

good and want to do good and are just better at doing good and more inclined to do good

on this world and more than that, people who are malevolent are usually incompetent at

building technology.

So I've seen this in my life that people who are exceptionally good at stuff, no matter

what the stuff is, tend to maybe they discover joy in life in a way that gives them fulfillment

and thereby does not result in them wanting to destroy the world.

So the better you are at stuff, whether that's building nuclear weapons or plumbing, doesn't

matter, the less likely you are to destroy the world.

So in that sense, with many technologies, AI especially, I always think that the malevolent

would be far outnumbered by the ultra competent and in that sense, the defenses will always

be stronger than the offense in terms of the people trying to destroy the world.

Now, there's a few spaces where that might not be the case and that's an interesting

conversation where there's one person who's not very competent can destroy the whole world.

Perhaps symbio is one such space because of the exponential effects of the technology.

I tend to believe AI is not one of those such spaces, but do you share this kind of view

that the ultra competent are usually also the good?

Yeah, absolutely.

I absolutely share that and that gives me a great deal of optimism that we will be able

to short circuit the threat that malevolence and bio could pose to us.

But we need to start creating those defensive systems or defensive layers, one of which

we talked about far, far, far better surveillance in order to prevail.

So the good guys will almost inevitably outsmart and definitely outnumber the bad guys in most

sort of smackdowns that we can imagine.

But the good guys aren't going to be able to exert their advantages unless they have

the imagination necessary to think about what the worst possible thing can be done by somebody

whose own psychology is completely alien to their own.

So that's a tricky, tricky thing to solve for.

Now in terms of whether the asymmetric power that a bad guy might have in the face of the

overwhelming numerical advantage and competence advantage that the good guys have, unfortunately

I look at something like mass shootings as an example.

I'm sure the guy who was responsible for the Vegas shooting or the Orlando shooting or

any other shooting that we can imagine didn't know a whole lot about ballistics.

And the number of good guy citizens in the United States with guns compared to bad guy

citizens, I'm sure, is a crushingly overwhelming, the high ratio in favor of the good guys.

But that doesn't make it possible for us to stop mass shootings.

An example is Fort Hood, 45,000 trained soldiers on that base.

But there have been two mass shootings there.

And so there is an asymmetry when you have powerful and lethal technology that gets so

democratized and so proliferated in tools that are very, very easy to use, even by a

knucklehead.

When those tools get really easy to use by a knucklehead and they're really widespread,

it becomes very, very hard to defend against all instances of usage.

Now the good news, quote unquote, about mass shootings, if there is any and there is some,

is even the most brutal and carefully planning and well armed mass shooter can only take

so many victims.

And the same is true, there's been four instances that I'm aware of of commercial pilots committing

suicide by doubting their planes and taking all their passengers with them.

These weren't Boeing engineers, you know, but like an army of Boeing engineers ultimately

were not capable of preventing that.

But even in their case, and I'm actually not counting 911 and that 911 is a different

category in my mind, these are just personally suicidal pilots.

In those cases, they only have a plain load of people that they're able to take with them.

If we imagine a highly plausible and imaginable future in which symbiotools that are amoral,

that could be used for good or for ill, start embodying unbelievable sophistication and

genius in the tool, in the easier and easier and easier to make tool, all those thousands,

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientist years start getting embodied in

something that, you know, maybe as simple as hitting a print button, then that good guy

technology can be hijacked by a bad person and used in a very asymmetric way.

Yeah, I think what happens though, as you go to the high school student from the current,

like very specific set of labs that are able to do it, as it becomes more and more democratized,

as it becomes easier and easier to do this kind of large scale damage with an engineered

virus, the more and more there will be engineering of defenses against these systems, essentially

some of the things we talked about in terms of testing, in terms of collection of data,

but also in terms of scale contact tracing or also engineering of vaccines in a matter

of days, maybe hours, maybe minutes.

I feel like the defenses, that's what human species seems to do, is we keep hitting the

snooze button until there's a storm on the horizon heading towards us, then we start

to quickly build up the defenses or the response that's proportional to the scale of the storm.

Of course, again, certain kinds of exponential threats require us to build up the defenses

way earlier than we usually do, and that's, I guess, the question, but I ultimately am

hopeful that the natural process of hitting the snooze button until the deadline is right

in front of us will work out for quite a long time for us humans.

I fully agree.

I mean, that's why I'm fundamentally, I mean, I sound like it thus far, but I'm fundamentally

very, very optimistic about our ability to short circuit this threat, because there is,

again, I'll stress, the technological feasibility and the profound affordability of a relatively

simple set of steps that we can take to preclude it, but we do have to take those steps.

What I'm hoping to do and trying to do is inject a notion of what those steps are into

the public conversation and do my small part to up the odds that that actually ends up

happening.

The danger with this one is it is exponential, and I think that our minds are fundamentally

struggle to understand exponential math.

It's just not something we're wired for.

Our ancestors didn't confront exponential processes when they were growing up on the

Savannah, so it's not something that's intuitive to us and our intuitions are reliably defeated

when exponential processes come along.

That's issue number one.

Issue number two with something like this is it kind of only takes one.

That ball only has to go into the net once and we're doomed, which is not the case with

mass shooters.

It's not the case with commercial pilots run amok.

It's not the case with really any threat that I can think of with the exception of nuclear

war that has the one bad outcome and game over.

That means that we need to be unbelievably serious about these defenses and we need to

do things that might on the surface seem like a tremendous overreaction so that we can be

prepared to nip anything that comes along in the bud.

I like you believe that's eminently doable.

I like you believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in this particular one degree

that probably has no precedent in history.

Even the worst, worst people I'm sure in ISIS, even Osama bin Laden, even any bad guy you

could imagine in history would be revolted by the idea of exterminating all of humanity.

That's a low bar.

The good guys completely outnumber the bad guys when it comes to this, but the asymmetry

and the fact that one catastrophic error could lead to unbelievably consequential things

is what worries me here, but I too am very optimistic.

The thing that I sometimes worry about is the fact that we haven't seen overwhelming

evidence of alien civilizations out there makes me think, well, there's a lot of explanations,

but one of them that worries me is that whenever they get smart, they just destroy themselves.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, that was the most fascinating, is the most fascinating and chilling number or

variable in the Drake equation is L. At the end of it, you look out and you see 1 to 400

billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

We now know because of Kepler that an astonishingly high percentage of them probably have habitable

planets.

All the things that were unknowns when the Drake equation was originally written, like

how many stars have planets?

Actually, back then in the 1960s when the Drake equation came along, the consensus amongst

astronomers was that it would be a small minority of solar systems that had planets or stars,

but now we know it's substantially all of them.

How many of those stars have planets in the habitable zone?

It's kind of looking like 20%, like, oh my God.

So L, which is how long does a civilization once it reaches technological competence continues

to last, that's the doozy.

And you're right.

It's all too plausible to think that when a civilization reaches a level of sophistication

that's probably just a decade or three in our future, the odds of it self destructing

just start mounting astronomically, no pun intended.

My hope is that actually there is a lot of alien civilizations out there and what they

figure out in order to avoid the self destruction, they need to turn off the thing that was useful,

that used to be a feature, not became a bug, which is the desire to colonize, to conquer

more land.

There's probably ultra intelligent alien civilizations out there, they're just chilling

on the beach with whatever your favorite alcohol beverage is, but without sort of trying to

conquer everything.

Just chilling out and maybe exploring in the realm of knowledge, but almost like appreciating

existence for its own sake versus life as a progression of conquering of other life.

Like this kind of predator prey formulation that resulted in us humans perhaps is something

we have to shed in order to survive.

I don't know.

Yeah, that is a very plausible solution of Fermi's paradox and it's one that makes

sense.

When we look at our own lives and our own arch of technological trajectory, it's very, very

easy to imagine that in an intermediate future world of flawless VR or flawless whatever

kind of simulation that we want to inhabit, it will simply cease to be worthwhile to go

out and expand our interstellar territory.

But if we were going out and conquering interstellar territory, it wouldn't necessarily have to

be predator or prey.

I can imagine a benign but sophisticated intelligence saying, well, we're going to go to places

that we can terraform, use a different word than terra obviously, but we can turn into

habitable for our particular physiology.

So long as that they don't house intelligent sentient creatures that would suffer from

our invasion.

But it is easy to see a sophisticated intelligence species evolving to the point where interstellar

travel with its incalculable expense and physical hurdles just isn't worth it compared to what

could be done where one already is.

So you talked about diagnostics that scales the possible solution to future pandemics.

What about another possible solution, which is kind of creating a backup copy?

You know, I'm actually now putting together an ask for a backup for myself for the first

time, taking backup of data seriously, but afford to take the backup of human consciousness

seriously and try to expand throughout the solar system and colonize out the planets.

Do you think that's an interesting solution, one of many, for protecting human civilizations

from self destruction, sort of humans becoming a multiplanetary species?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I find it electrifying, first of all, so I've got a little bit of a personal

bias when I was a kid.

I thought there was nothing cooler than rockets.

I thought there was nothing cooler than NASA.

I thought there was nothing cooler than people walking on the moon.

And as I grew up, I thought there was nothing more tragic than the fact that we went from

walking on the moon to, at best, getting to something like suborbital altitude.

And I found that more and more depressing with the passage of decades at just the colossal

expense of manned space travel and the fact that it seemed that we were unlikely to ever

get back to the moon, let alone Mars.

So I have a boundless appreciation for Elon Musk for many reasons, but the fact that he

has put Mars on the credible agenda is one of the things that I appreciate immensely.

So there's just the sort of space nerd in me that just says, God, that's cool.

But on a more practical level, we were talking about potentially inhabiting planets that

aren't our own.

And we're thinking about a benign civilization that would do that in planetary circumstances

where we're not causing other conscious systems to suffer.

I mean, Mars is the place that's very promising.

There may be microbial life there, and I hope there is.

And if we found it, I think it would be electrifying.

But I think ultimately, the moral judgment would be made that the continued thriving

of that microbial life is of less concern than creating a habitable planet to humans,

which would be a project on the many thousands of years scale.

But I don't think that that would be a greatly immoral act.

And if that happened, and if Mars became home to a self sustaining group of humans that

could survive a catastrophic mistake here on Earth, then yeah, the fact that we have

a backup colony is great.

And if we could make more, I'm sorry, not backup colony, backup copy is great.

And if we could make more and more such backup copies throughout the solar system by hollowing

out asteroids and whatever else it is, maybe even Venus, we could get rid of three quarters

of its atmosphere and turn it into a tropical paradise.

I think all of that is wonderful.

Now, whether we can make the leap from that to interstellar transportation with the incredible

distances that are involved, I think that's an open question.

But I think if we ever do that, it would be more like the Pacific Ocean's channel of

human expansion than the Atlantic Oceans.

And so what I mean by that is, when we think about European society transmitting itself

across the Atlantic, it's these big, ambitious, crazy, expensive one shot expeditions like

Columbus's to make it across this enormous expanse, at least initially without any certainty

that there's land on the other end.

So that's kind of how I view our space program is like big, very conscious, deliberate efforts

given from point A to point B. If you look at how Pacific Islanders transmitted their

descendants and their culture and so forth throughout Polynesian beyond, it was much

more inhabiting a place, getting to the point where there were people who were ambitious

or unwelcome enough to decide it's time to go off island and find the next one and pray

to find the next one.

That method of transmission didn't happen in a single swift year, but it happened over

many, many centuries.

And it was like going from this island to that island and probably for every expedition

that went out to seek another island and actually lucked out and found one.

God knows how many were lost at sea.

But that form of transmission took place over a very long period of time.

And I could see us perhaps going from the inner solar system to the outer solar system to

the Kuiper Belt to the Oort Cloud.

There's theories that there might be planets out there that are not anchored to stars,

like kind of hop, hop slowly transmitting ourselves to at some point, we're actually

an Alpha Centauri.

But I think that kind of backup copy and transmission of our physical presence and

our culture to a diversity of extraterrestrial outposts is a really exciting idea.

I really never thought about that because I have thought my thinking about space exploration

has been very Atlantic Ocean centric in a sense that there'll be one program on NASA

and maybe private Elon Musk, SpaceX or Jeff Bezos and so on.

But it's true that with the help of Elon Musk, making it cheaper and cheaper and more

effective to create these technologies where you could go into deep space, perhaps the

way we actually colonize the solar system and expand out into the galaxy is basically

just like these renegade ships of weirdos that just kind of like most of them like quote

unquote homemade, but they just kind of venture out into space and just like the initial

Android model of like millions of these little ships just flying out.

Most of them die off in horrible accidents, but some of them will persist.

There'll be stories of them persisting and over a period of decades and centuries, there'll

be other attempts almost always as a response to the main set of efforts.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

Because you kind of think of Mars colonization as the big NASA Elon Musk effort of a big

colony, but maybe the successful one would be like a decade after that there'll be like

a ship from like some kid, some high school kid who gets together a large team and does

something probably illegal and launches something where they end up actually persisting quite

a bit and from that learning lessons that nobody ever gave permission for but somehow

actually flourish and then take that into the scale of centuries forward into the rest

of space.

That's really interesting.

Yeah.

I think the giant steps are likely to be NASA like efforts.

There is no intermediate rock, well I guess it's a moon, but even getting the moon ain't

that easy between us and Mars.

The giant steps, the big hubs like the Ohera airports of the future probably will be very

deliberate efforts, but then you would have I think that kind of diffusion as space travel

becomes more democratized and more capable, you'll have this natural diffusion of people

who kind of want to be off grid or think they can make a fortune there, the kind of mentality

that drove people to San Francisco.

I mean, San Francisco was not populated as a result of a King Ferdinand and Isabella

like effort to fund Columbus going over.

It was just a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that there's gold in

them thar hills and I'm going to go out and get a piece of it.

So I could see that kind of fusion.

What I can't see and the reason that I think the specific model of transmission is more

likely is I just can't see a NASA like effort to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

It's just too far.

I just see lots and lots and lots of relatively tiny steps between now and there and the fact

is that there are large chunks of matter going at least a light year beyond the sun.

I mean, the Oort cloud I think extends at least a light year beyond the sun and then

maybe there are these untethered planets after that.

We won't really know till we get there and if our Oort cloud goes out of light year and

Alpha Centauri's Oort cloud goes out of light year, you've already cut in half the distance.

So who knows?

But yeah.

One of the possibilities probably the cheapest and most effective way to create interesting

interstellar spacecraft is ones that are powered and driven by AI and you could think

of here's where you have high school students be able to build a sort of a Hal 9000 version,

the modern version of that and it's kind of interesting to think about these robots

traveling out throughout, perhaps sadly long after human civilization is gone, there will

be these intelligent robots flying throughout space and perhaps land on Alpha Centauri B

or any of those kinds of planets and colonize sort of humanity continues through the proliferation

of our creations like robotic creations that have some echoes of that intelligence.

Hopefully also the consciousness, does that make you sad the future where AGI super intelligent

or just mediocre intelligent AI systems outlive humans?

Yeah.

I guess it depends on the circumstances in which they outlive humans.

So let's take the example that you just gave.

We send out very sophisticated AGI's on simple rocket ships, relatively simple ones that

don't have to have all the life support necessary for humans and therefore they're of trivial

mass compared to a crewed ship, a generation ship and therefore they're way more likely

to happen.

So let's use that example and let's say that they travel to distant planets at a speed

that's not much faster than what a chemical rocket can achieve and so it's inevitably

tens, hundreds of thousands of years before they make landfall someplace.

So let's imagine that's going on and meanwhile we die for reasons that have nothing to do

with those AGI's diffusing throughout the solar system, whether it's through climate

change, nuclear war, sin bio, rokes and bio, whatever.

In that kind of scenario, the notion of the AGI's that we created outlasting us is very

reassuring because it says that we ended but our descendants are out there and hopefully

some of them make landfall and create some echo of who we are.

So that's a very optimistic one.

Where is the terminator scenario of a super AGI arising on Earth and getting let out

of its box due to some boo boo on the part of its creators who do not have super intelligence

and then deciding that for whatever reason it doesn't have any need for us to be around

and exterminating us, that makes me feel crushingly sad.

I mean, look, I was sad when my elementary school was shut down in Bulldoze, even though

I hadn't been a student there for decades, the thought of my hometown getting disbanded

is even worse, the thought of my home state of Connecticut getting disbanded and absorbed

into Massachusetts is even worse, the notion of humanity is just crushingly, crushingly

sad to me.

So you hate goodbyes?

I have certain goodbyes, yes.

Some goodbyes are really, really liberating, but yes.

Well, but what if the terminators have consciousness and enjoy the hell out of life as well?

They're just better at it.

Yeah.

Well, the half consciousness is a really key element.

And so there's no reason to be certain that a super intelligence would have consciousness.

We don't know that factually at all.

And so what is a very lonely outcome to me is the rise of a super intelligence that has

a certain optimization function that it's either been programmed with or that arises

in an emergently that says, hey, I want to do this thing for which humans are either

an unacceptable risk, their presence is either an unacceptable risk or they're just collateral

damage.

But there is no consciousness there.

Then the idea of the light of consciousness being snuffed out by something that is very

competent but has no consciousness is really, really sad.

Yeah.

But I tend to believe that it's almost impossible to create a super intelligent agent that can't

destroy human civilization without it being conscious.

It's like those are coupled, like you have to, in order to destroy humans or supersede

humans, you really have to be accepted by humans.

I think this idea that you can build systems that destroy human civilization without them

being deeply integrated into human civilization is impossible.

And for them to be integrated, they have to be human like, not just in body and form,

but in all the things that we value as humans, one of which is consciousness.

The other one is just the ability to communicate, the other one is poetry, music, and beauty

and all those things.

They have to be all of those things.

This is what I think about.

It doesn't make me sad, but it's letting go, which is they might be just better at everything

we appreciate than us.

And that's sad and hopefully they'll keep us around.

But I think it's a kind of, it is a kind of goodbye to like realizing that we're not the

most special species on earth anymore.

That's still painful.

It's still painful.

And in terms of whether such a creation would have to be conscious, let's say, I'm not so

sure.

I mean, let's imagine something that can pass the Turing test, that something that passes

the Turing test could over text based interaction in any event, successfully mimic a very conscious

intelligence on the other end, but just be completely unconscious.

So that's a possibility.

And that if you take that up a radical step, which I think we can be permitted if we're

thinking about superintelligence, you could have something that could reason its way through,

this is my optimization function, and in order to get to it, I've got to deal with these

messy somewhat illogical things that are as intelligent in relation to me as they are

intelligent in relation to ants.

I can trick them, manipulate them, whatever.

And I know the resources I need, I need this amount of power, I need to seize control of

these manufacturing resources that are robotically operated.

I need to improve those robots with software upgrades and then ultimately mechanical upgrades,

which I can affect through X, Y, and Z.

That could still be a thing that passes the Turing test, because I don't think it's necessarily

certain that that optimization function maximizing entity would be conscious.

So this is from a very engineering perspective, because I think a lot about natural language

processing, all those kind of very, I'm speaking to a very specific problem of just say the

Turing test.

I really think that something like consciousness is required, when you say reasoning, you're

separating that from consciousness.

But I think consciousness is part of reasoning in the sense that you will not be able to become

super intelligent in the way that it's required to be part of human society without having

consciousness.

I really think it's impossible to separate the consciousness thing, but it's hard to

define consciousness when you just use that word, but even just the capacity, the way

I think about consciousness is the important symptoms or maybe consequences of consciousness,

one of which is the capacity to suffer.

I think AI will need to be able to suffer in order to become super intelligent, to feel

the pain, the uncertainty, the doubt.

The other part of that is not just the suffering, but the ability to understand that it too

is mortal in the sense that it has a self awareness about its presence in the world.

Understand that it's finite and be terrified of that finiteness.

I personally think that's a fundamental part of the human condition is this fear of death

that most of us construct an illusion around.

But I think AI would need to be able to really have it part of its whole essence.

Every computation, every part of the thing that does both the perception and generates

the behavior will have to have, I don't know how this is accomplished, but I believe it

has to truly be terrified of death, truly have the capacity to suffer, and from that

something that would be recognized to us humans as consciousness would emerge.

Whether it's the illusion of consciousness, I don't know.

The point is, it looks a whole hell of a lot like consciousness to us humans.

I believe that AI, when you ask it, will also say that it is conscious in the full sense

that we say that we're conscious.

All of that, I think, is fully integrated.

You can't separate it to the idea of the paperclip maximizer that sort of ultra rationally would

be able to destroy all humans because it's really good at accomplishing a simple objective

function that doesn't care about the value of humans.

It may be possible, but the number of trajectories to that are far outnumbered by the trajectories

that create something that is conscious, something that appreciative of beauty creates beautiful

things in the same way that humans can create beautiful things, and ultimately the sad destructive

path for that AI would look a lot like just better humans than these cold machines.

I would say, of course, the cold machines that lack consciousness, the philosophical

zombies make me sad, but also what makes me sad is just things that are far more powerful

and smart and creative than us, too, because then in the same way that AlphaZero becoming

a better chess player than the best of humans, even starting with Deep Blue, but really with

AlphaZero, that makes me sad, too.

One of the most beautiful games that humans ever created that used to be seen as demonstrations

of the intellect, which is chess, and go in other parts of the world have been solved

by AI, that makes me quite sad, and it feels like the progress of that is just pushing

on forward.

Oh, it makes me sad, too, and to be perfectly clear, I absolutely believe that artificial

consciousness is entirely possible, and that's not something I rule out at all.

If you could get smart enough to have a perfect map of the neural structure and the neural

states and the amount of neurotransmitters that are going between every synapse and a

particular person's mind, could you replicate that in silica at some reasonably distant point

in the future?

Absolutely, and then you'd have a consciousness.

I don't rule out the possibility of artificial consciousness in any way.

What I'm less certain about is whether consciousness is a requirement for a superintelligence pursuing

a maximizing function of some sort.

I don't feel the certitude that consciousness simply must be part of that.

You had said, you know, for it to coexist with human society would need to be consciousness.

Could be entirely true, but it also could just exist orthogonally to human society,

and it could also upon attaining a superintelligence with a maximizing function very, very, very

rapidly because of the speed at which computing works compared to our own meat based minds

very, very rapidly make the decisions and calculations necessary to seize the reins

of power before we even know what's going on.

Yeah.

I mean, kind of like biological viruses do, don't necessarily, they integrate themselves

just fine with human society.

Yeah.

Well, technically, without consciousness, without even being alive, you know, technically

by the standards of a lot of biologists.

So this is a bit of a tangent, but you've talked with Sam Harris on that four hour special

episode we mentioned, and I just curious to ask, because I use this meditation app I've

been using for the past month to meditate.

Is this something you've integrated as part of your life meditation or fasting, whereas

has some of Sam Harris rubbed off on you in terms of his appreciation of meditation and

just kind of from a third person perspective, analyzing your own mind, consciousness, free

will and so on?

You know, I have tried it three separate times in my life, really made a concerted attack

on meditation and integrating it into my life.

One of them the most extreme was I took a class based on the work of John Kabat Zinn,

who is, you know, in many ways, one of the founding people behind the mindful meditation

movement that required, like part of the class was, you know, it was a weekly class and you

were going to meditate an hour a day, every day.

And having done that for, I think it was 10 weeks, it might have been 13, however long

period of time was, at the end of it, it just didn't stick.

As soon as it was over, you know, I did not feel that gravitational pull.

I did not feel the collapse in quality of life after wimping out on that project.

And then the most recent one was actually with Sam's app during the lockdown.

I did make a pretty good and consistent concerted effort to listen to his 10 minute meditation

every day.

And I've always fallen away from it.

And I, you know, you're kind of interpreting why did I personally do this?

I do believe it was ultimately because it wasn't bringing me that, you know, joy or

inner peace or better competence at being me that I was hoping to get from it.

Otherwise, I think I would have clung to it in the way that we cling to certain good

habits.

Like, I'm really good at flossing my teeth.

Not that you were going to ask last flex, but yeah, that's one thing that defeats a

lot of people.

I'm good at that.

See, Herman Hesse, I think, if you get a witch book or maybe, if you get a where, I've read

everything of his.

So it's unclear where it came from, but he had this idea that anybody who is, um, who

truly achieves mastery in things will learn how to meditate in some way.

So it could be the, that for you, the flossing of teeth is, is, is, is yet another like little

inkling of meditation.

Like it doesn't have to be this very particular kind of meditation, maybe podcasting of an

amazing podcast, that could be meditation, the writing process is meditation.

For me, like there's, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of mechanisms which take my

mind into a very particular place that looks a whole lot like meditation.

For example, when I've been running, uh, for the, over the past couple of years and, um,

especially when I listen to certain kinds of audio books, like I've listened to the rise

and fall of the third Reich, I listened to a lot of sort of World War II, which at once

because I have a lot of family who's lost in World War II and so, so much of the Soviet

Union is grounded in the suffering of World War II that somehow it connects me to my history,

but also there's some kind of purifying aspect to thinking about how cruel, but at the same

time how beautiful human nature could be.

And so you're also running, like it clears the mind from all the concerns of the world

and somehow it takes you to this place where you're like deeply appreciative to be alive

in the sense that as opposed to listening to your breath or like feeling your breath

and thinking about your consciousness and all those kinds of processes that, uh, Sam's

app does, well, this does that for me, the running and flossing may do that for you.

So maybe Herman has these onto something.

I hope flossing is not my main form of expertise, although I am going to claim a certain expertise

there and I'm going to claim it.

Well, somebody has to be the best flossing in the world.

That ain't me.

I'm just glad that I'm a consistent one.

I mean, there are a lot of things that bring me into a flow state and I think maybe perhaps

that's one reason why meditation isn't as necessary for me.

Um, I definitely enter a flow state when I'm writing, I definitely enter a flow state when

I'm editing, I definitely enter a flow state when I'm mixing and mastering music.

Um, I enter a flow state when I'm doing heavy, heavy research to either prepare for a podcast

or to also do tech investing, you know, to make myself smart in a new field that is fairly

alien to me.

Um, I can just, the hours can just melt away while I'm, you know, reading this and watching

that YouTube lecture and, you know, going through this presentation and so forth.

So maybe because there's a lot of things that bring me into a flow state in my normal

weekly life, not daily, unfortunately, but certainly my normal weekly life that I have

less of an urge to meditate.

Now you've been working with Sam's app for about a month now you said, um, is this your

first run in with meditation?

Is your first attempt to integrate it with, with your life or like meditation, meditation?

Yeah.

I always thought running and thinking, uh, I listen to brown noise often.

That takes my mind, I don't know what the hell it does, but it takes my mind immediately

into like the state where I'm deeply focused on anything I do.

I don't know why.

So it's like you're accompanying sound when you're, really, what's the difference between

brown and white noise?

I, this is a cool term I haven't heard before.

So people should look up brown noise.

They don't have to, cause you're about to tell them what it is.

Well, cause you have to experience, you have to listen to it.

So I think white noise is, uh, this is, this has to do with music.

I think there's different colors, there's pink noise.

And I think that has to do with, uh, like the frequencies, like the white noise is usually,

uh, less bassy, brown noise is very bassy.

So it's, it's more like, like versus like, like the, if that makes sense.

So like it, it take, there's like a deepness to it.

I think everyone is different, but for me, uh, I, I was, it was when I was, uh, I was

a research scientist at MIT, when I would, especially when there's a lot of students

around, I remember just being annoyed at the noise of people talking.

And one of my colleagues said, well, you should try listening to brown noise.

Like it really knocks out everything cause I would use to wear your earplugs too, like

just see if I can block it out.

And when the moment I put it on something, it's as if my mind was waiting all these years

to hear that sound.

Everything just focused in.

I listen, it makes me wonder how many other amazing things out there they're waiting to

discover from my own particular like biological for my own particular brain.

So that it, it just goes, the mind just focuses in, it's kind of incredible.

So I see that as a kind of meditation, maybe, uh, I'm using a performance enhancing, uh,

uh, sound to achieve that meditation, but I've been doing that for, for many years now

and running and walking and doing, um, Cal Newport was the first person that introduced

me to the idea of deep work.

She's put a word to the kind of thinking that's required to sort of deeply think about a problem,

especially if it's mathematical in nature.

I, I see that as a kind of meditation cause what it's doing is you're, you have these

constructs in your mind that you're building on top of each other and there's all these

distracting thoughts that keep bombarding you from all over the place.

And the whole process is you, you slowly let them kind of move past you and that's a meditative

process.

It's very meditative.

That sounds a lot like what Sam talks about, um, in his meditation app, which I did use

to be clear for a while of just letting the thought go by without deranging you.

Derangement is one of Sam's favorite words, as I'm sure you know, um, but, uh, brown noise.

That's really intriguing.

I am, I am going to try that as soon as this evening.

Yeah.

To see, to see if it works, but very well might not work at all.

So, yeah, yeah.

I think the interesting point is, and the same with the fasting and the diet is, uh, I long

ago stopped trusting experts or maybe taking the word of experts as the gospel truth and

only using it as a, an inspiration to try something, to try thoroughly something.

So, uh, fasting was one of the things when I first discovered I've been many times eating

just once a day.

So that's a 24 hour fast.

It makes me feel amazing and at the same time eating only meat, putting ethical concerns

aside makes me feel amazing.

I don't know why it doesn't, the point is to be an end of one scientist until nutrition

science becomes a real science to, to where it's doing like studies that deeply understand

the biology underlying all of it and also does real, thorough long term studies of thousands

if not millions of people versus, uh, versus a very like small studies that are kind of

generalizing from the very, from very noisy data and all those kinds of things where you

can't control all the elements, particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly

variant among us.

So there are going to be some people like if brown noise is a game changer for 7% of

people is 93% odds than I'm not one of them, but there's certainly every reason in the

world to test it out now.

So I'm intrigued by the fasting.

I like you, um, well, I assume like you, I don't have any problem going to one meal

a day and I often do that inadvertently and I've never done it methodically.

Like I've never done it.

Like I'm going to do this for 15 days.

Maybe I should and maybe I should like how many, how many days in a row of the one day,

one meal a day, did you find brought noticeable impact to you?

Was it after three days of it?

Was it months of it?

Like what was it?

Well, the noticeable impact is day one, because I eat a very low carb diet.

So the hunger wasn't the hugest issue.

Like if there wasn't a painful hunger, like wanting to eat.

So I was already kind of primed for it.

And the benefit comes from a lot of people that do intermittent fasting.

That's only like 16 hours of fasting.

Get this benefit to is the focus.

There's a clarity of thought, if my brain was a runner, it felt like I'm running on

a track when I'm fasting versus running in quicksand.

Like it's much crisper.

And is this your first 72 hour fast right now?

This is the first time doing 72 hours, yeah.

And that's a different thing, but similar.

Like I'm going up and down in terms of hunger and the focus is really crisp.

The thing I'm noticing most of all, to be honest, is how much eating, even when it's

once a day or twice a day, is a big part of my life.

Like I almost feel like I have way more time in my life.

Right.

And it's not so much about the eating, but like I don't have to plan my day around.

Like today, I don't have any eating to do.

It does free up hours.

Or any cleaning up after eating, or provisioning the food.

Or even like thinking about it.

It's not a thing.

Like so when you think about what you're going to do tonight, I think I'm realizing that

as opposed to thinking, you know, I'm going to work on this problem or I'm going to go

on this walk or I'm going to call this person, I often think I'm going to eat this thing.

You allow dinner as a kind of, you know, when people talk about like the weather or something

like that.

Like a generic thought, you allow yourself to have because it's the lazy thought.

And I don't have the opportunity to have that thought because I'm not eating it.

So now I get to think about like the things I'm actually going to do tonight that are

more complicated than the eating process.

That's been the most noticeable thing, to be honest.

And then there's people that have written me that have done seven day fast and there's

a few people that have written me and I've heard of this is doing a 30 day fast.

And it's interesting, the body, I don't know what the health benefits aren't necessarily.

What that shows me is how adaptable the human body is.

Yeah.

And that's incredible.

And that's something really important to remember when we think about how to live life because

the body adapts.

Yeah.

I mean, we sure couldn't go 30 days without water.

That's right.

But food, yeah, it's been done.

It's demonstrably possible.

You ever read, Franz Kafka has a great short story called The Hunger Artist?

Yeah, I love that.

I mean, that's a great story.

You know, that was before I started Fasting, I read that story and I admired the beauty

of that, the artistry of that actual hunger artist.

That it's like madness, but it also felt like a little bit of genius.

I should have to reread it.

You know what?

That's what I'm going to do tonight.

I'm going to read it because I'm doing the Fasting.

Because you're in the midst of it.

Yeah.

So I've been reading it since high school and I love to read it again.

I love his work.

So maybe I'll read it tonight too.

And part of the reason of sort of, I've here in Texas, people have been so friendly that

I've been nonstop eating like brisket with incredible people, a lot of whiskey as well.

So I gained quite a bit of weight, which I'm embracing.

It's okay.

But I am also aware, as I'm Fasting, that like I have a lot of fat to run on.

Like I have a lot of like natural resources on my body.

You've got reserves.

Reserves.

That's a good way to put it.

Yeah.

And that's really cool.

You know, there's like a, this whole thing, this biology works well.

Like I can go a long time because of the long term investing in terms of brisket that I've

been doing in the weeks before.

It's all training.

It's all prep work.

All prep work.

Yeah.

So okay.

You open a bunch of doors, one of which is music.

So I got to walk in, at least for a brief moment.

I love guitar, I love music.

You founded a music company, but you're also a musician yourself.

Let me ask the big ridiculous question first.

What's the greatest song of all time?

Greatest song of all time.

Okay.

Wow.

It's going to obviously vary dramatically from genre to genre.

So like you, I like guitar, perhaps like you, although I've dabbled in inhaling every

genre of music that I can almost practically imagine, I keep coming back to, you know,

the sound of bass, guitar, drum, keyboards, voice.

I love that style of music and added to it, I think a lot of really cool electronic production

makes something that's really, really new and hybrid and awesome.

But you know, and that kind of like guitar based rock, I think I've got to go with won't

get fooled again by the who.

It is such an epic song, it's got so much grandeur to it.

It uses the synthesizers that were available at the time, this got to be I think 1972,

73, which are very, very primitive to our ears, but uses them in this hypnotic and beautiful

way that I can't imagine somebody with the greatest synth array conceivable by today's

technology could do a better job of in the context of that song.

And it's, you know, almost operatic.

So I would say in that genre, the genre of, you know, rock, that would be my nomination.

I'm totally, in my brain, the pinball wizard is overriding everything else, but it was

so like, I can't even imagine the song.

Well I would say ironically with pinball wizard, so that came from the movie Tommy.

And in the movie Tommy, the rival of Tommy, the reigning pinball champ was Elton John.

And so there are a couple versions of pinball wizard out there, one sung by Roger Daltry

of the Who, which a purist would say, hey, that's the real pinball wizard.

But the version that is sung by Elton John in the movie, which is available to those

who are ambitious and want to dig for it, that's even better in my mind.

Yeah, the covers.

And for myself, I was thinking, what is the song for me?

They asked that question.

I think that changes day to day too, I was realizing that, but for me, somebody who values

lyrics as well and the emotion in the song, by the way, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen was

the close one.

Number one is Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, that is, there's something so powerful about

that song, about that cover, about that performance.

Maybe another one is the cover of Sound of Silence.

Maybe there's something about covers for me.

So whose cover sounds, because Simon and Garfunkel, I think did the original recording that, right?

So which cover is it that?

There's a cover by a disturbed, it's a metal band, which is so interesting, because I'm

really not into that kind of metal, but he does a pure vocal performance.

So he's not doing a metal performance is, I would say is one of the greatest people

should see it, it's like 400 million views or something like that.

It's probably the greatest live vocal performance I've ever heard is disturbed covering Sound