back to indexBret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic | Lex Fridman Podcast #194
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The following is a conversation with Brett Weinstein,
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evolutionary biologist, author, cohost
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of the Dark Horse podcast, and, as he says,
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reluctant radical.
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Even though we've never met or spoken before this,
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we both felt like we've been friends for a long time,
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I don't agree on everything with Brett,
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but I'm sure as hell happy he exists
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in this weird and wonderful world of ours.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Jordan Harmon's show, ExpressVPN, Magic Spoon,
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and Four Sigmatic.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say a few words about COVID 19
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and about science broadly.
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I think science is beautiful and powerful.
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It is the striving of the human mind
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to understand and to solve the problems of the world.
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But as an institution,
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it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature,
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to fear, to greed, power, and ego.
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2020 is the story of all of these
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that has both scientific triumph and tragedy.
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We needed great leaders and we didn't get them.
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What we needed is leaders who communicate
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in an honest, transparent, and authentic way
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about the uncertainty of what we know
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and the large scale scientific efforts
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to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions.
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I believe there are several candidates for solutions
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that could have all saved hundreds of billions of dollars
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and lessened or eliminated
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the suffering of millions of people.
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Let me mention five of the categories of solutions.
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Masks, at home testing, anonymized contact tracing,
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antiviral drugs, and vaccines.
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Within each of these categories,
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institutional leaders should have constantly asked
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and answered publicly, honestly,
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the following three questions.
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One, what data do we have on the solution
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and what studies are we running
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to get more and better data?
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Two, given the current data and uncertainty,
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how effective and how safe is the solution?
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Three, what is the timeline and cost involved
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with mass manufacturing distribution of the solution?
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In the service of these questions,
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no voices should have been silenced,
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no ideas left off the table.
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Open data, open science,
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open, honest scientific communication and debate
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was the way, not censorship.
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There are a lot of ideas out there
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that are bad, wrong, dangerous,
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but the moment we have the hubris
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to say we know which ideas those are
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is the moment we'll lose our ability to find the truth,
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to find solutions,
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the very things that make science beautiful and powerful
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in the face of all the dangers that threaten the wellbeing
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and the existence of humans on Earth.
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This conversation with Brett
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is less about the ideas we talk about.
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We agree on some, disagree on others.
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It is much more about the very freedom to talk,
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to think, to share ideas.
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This freedom is our only hope.
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Brett should never have been censored.
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I asked Brett to do this podcast to show solidarity
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and to show that I have hope for science and for humanity.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast
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and here's my conversation with Brett Weinstein.
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What to you is beautiful about the study of biology,
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the science, the engineering, the philosophy of it?
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It's a very interesting question.
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I must say at one level, it's not a conscious thing.
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I can say a lot about why as an adult
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I find biology compelling,
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but as a kid I was completely fascinated with animals.
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I loved to watch them and think about why they did
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what they did and that developed into a very conscious
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passion as an adult.
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But I think in the same way that one is drawn to a person,
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I was drawn to the never ending series of near miracles
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that exists across biological nature.
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When you see a living organism,
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do you see it from an evolutionary biology perspective
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of like this entire thing that moves around
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in this world or do you see from an engineering perspective
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that first principles almost down to the physics,
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like the little components that build up hierarchies
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that you have cells, the first proteins and cells
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and organs and all that kind of stuff.
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So do you see low level or do you see high level?
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Well, the human mind is a strange thing
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and I think it's probably a bit like a time sharing machine
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in which I have different modules.
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We don't know enough about biology for them to connect.
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So they exist in isolation and I'm always aware
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that they do connect, but I basically have to step
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into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics
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of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to.
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I have to step into a different module to think
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of that lineage over a very long time scale,
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a different module still to understand
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what the mechanisms inside would have to look like
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to account for what we can see from the outside.
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And I think that probably sounds really complicated,
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but one of the things about being involved
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in a topic like biology and doing so for one,
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really not even just my adult life for my whole life
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is that it becomes second nature.
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And when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine
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or something like that, we think about what they must
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be doing in order to accomplish that.
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But of course, what they are doing is tapping
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into some kind of zone, right?
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They are in a zone in which they are in such command
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of their center of gravity, for example,
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that they know how to hurl it around a landscape
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so that they always land on their feet.
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And I would just say for anyone who hasn't found a topic
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on which they can develop that kind of facility,
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it is absolutely worthwhile.
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It's really something that human beings are capable
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of doing across a wide range of topics,
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many things our ancestors didn't even have access to.
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And that flexibility of humans,
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that ability to repurpose our machinery
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for topics that are novel means really,
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the world is your oyster.
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You can figure out what your passion is
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and then figure out all of the angles
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that one would have to pursue to really deeply understand it.
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And it is well worth having at least one topic like that.
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You mean embracing the full adaptability
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of both the body and the mind.
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So like, I don't know what to attribute the parkour to,
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like biomechanics of how our bodies can move,
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or is it the mind?
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Like how much percent wise,
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is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology
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that we've been talking about,
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or is it just all the mind?
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The way to think about creatures
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is that every creature is two things simultaneously.
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A creature is a machine of sorts, right?
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It's not a machine in the,
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I call it an aqueous machine, right?
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And it's run by an aqueous computer, right?
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So it's not identical to our technological machines.
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But every creature is both a machine
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that does things in the world
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sufficient to accumulate enough resources
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to continue surviving, to reproduce.
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It is also a potential.
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So each creature is potentially, for example,
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the most recent common ancestor
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of some future clade of creatures
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that will look very different from it.
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And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature,
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but not very good in terms of the potential
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it has going forward,
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then that lineage will not last very long into the future
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because change will throw at challenges
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that its descendants will not be able to meet.
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So the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform,
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and we have the ability to swap out our software
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to exist in many, many different niches.
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And I was once watching an interview
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with this British group of parkour experts
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who were being, they were discussing what it is they do
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And what they essentially said is,
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look, you're tapping into deep monkey stuff, right?
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And I thought, yeah, that's about right.
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And anybody who is proficient at something
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like skiing or skateboarding, you know,
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has the experience of flying down the hill
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on skis, for example,
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bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next.
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And if you really pay attention,
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you will discover that your conscious mind
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is actually a spectator.
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It's there, it's involved in the experience,
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but it's not driving.
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Some part of you knows how to ski,
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and it's not the part of you that knows how to think.
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And I would just say that what accounts
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for this flexibility in humans
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is the ability to bootstrap a new software program
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and then drive it into the unconscious layer
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where it can be applied very rapidly.
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And, you know, I will be shocked
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if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics.
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You know, if you programmed a robot
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to deal with circumstances that were novel to it,
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how would you do it?
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It would have to look something like this.
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There's a certain kind of magic, you're right,
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with the consciousness being an observer.
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When you play guitar, for example, or piano for me,
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music, when you get truly lost in it,
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I don't know what the heck is responsible
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for the flow of the music,
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the kind of the loudness of the music going up and down,
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the timing, the intricate, like even the mistakes,
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that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind.
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It is just observing,
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and yet it's somehow intricately involved.
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More, like, because you mentioned parkour,
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the dance is like that too.
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When you start up in tango dancing,
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if when you truly lose yourself in it,
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then it's just like you're an observer,
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and how the hell is the body able to do that?
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And not only that, it's the physical motion
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is also creating the emotion,
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the, like, the damn is good to be alive feeling.
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So, but then that's also intricately connected
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to the full biology stack that we're operating in.
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I don't know how difficult it is to replicate that.
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We're talking offline about Boston Dynamics robots.
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They've recently been, they did both parkour,
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they did flips, they've also done some dancing,
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and it's something I think a lot about
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because what most people don't realize
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because they don't look deep enough
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is those robots are hard coded to do those things.
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The robots didn't figure it out by themselves,
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and yet the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human
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is that process of figuring out, of making mistakes,
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and then there's something about overcoming
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those challenges and the mistakes
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and, like, figuring out how to lose yourself
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in the magic of the dancing or just movement
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is what it means to be human.
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That learning process, so that's what I want to do
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with the, almost as a fun side thing
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with the Boston Dynamics robots,
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is to have them learn and see what they figure out,
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even if they make mistakes.
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I want to let Spot make mistakes
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and in so doing discover what it means to be alive,
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discover beauty, because I think
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that's the essential aspect of mistakes.
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Boston Dynamics folks want Spot to be perfect
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because they don't want Spot to ever make mistakes
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because it wants to operate in the factories,
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it wants to be very safe and so on.
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For me, if you construct the environment,
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if you construct a safe space for robots
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and allow them to make mistakes,
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something beautiful might be discovered,
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but that requires a lot of brain power.
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So Spot is currently very dumb
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and I'm gonna give it a brain.
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So first make it see, currently it can't see,
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meaning computer vision, it has to understand
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its environment, it has to see all the humans,
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but then also has to be able to learn,
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learn about its movement, learn how to use its body
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to communicate with others, all those kinds of things
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that dogs know how to do well,
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humans know how to do somewhat well.
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I think that's a beautiful challenge,
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but first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes.
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Well, I think your objective is laudable,
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but you're gonna realize
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that the Boston Dynamics folks are right
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the first time Spot poops on your rug.
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I hear the same thing about kids and so on.
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I still wanna have kids.
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No, you should, it's a great experience.
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So let me step back into what you said
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in a couple of different places.
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One, I have always believed that the missing element
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in robotics and artificial intelligence
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is a proper development, right?
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It is no accident, it is no mere coincidence
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that human beings are the most dominant species
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on planet Earth and that we have the longest childhoods
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of any creature on Earth by far, right?
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The development is the key to the flexibility.
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And so the capability of a human at adulthood
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is the mirror image, it's the flip side
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of our helplessness at birth.
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So I'll be very interested to see what happens
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in your robot project if you do not end up
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reinventing childhood for robots,
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which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly.
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But I also wanna point out,
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you can see this issue of your conscious mind
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becoming a spectator very well
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if you compare tennis to table tennis, right?
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If you watch a tennis game, you could imagine
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that the players are highly conscious as they play.
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You cannot imagine that
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if you've ever played ping pong decently.
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A volley in ping pong is so fast
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that your conscious mind, if your reactions
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had to go through your conscious mind,
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you wouldn't be able to play.
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So you can detect that your conscious mind,
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while very much present, isn't there.
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And you can also detect where consciousness
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does usefully intrude.
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If you go up against an opponent in table tennis
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that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to,
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you will suddenly detect that something
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about your game is not effective,
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and you will start thinking about what might be,
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how do you position yourself so that move
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that puts the ball just in that corner of the table
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or something like that doesn't catch you off guard.
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And this, I believe, is we highly conscious folks,
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those of us who try to think through things
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very deliberately and carefully,
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mistake consciousness for the highest kind of thinking.
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And I really think that this is an error.
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Consciousness is an intermediate level of thinking.
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What it does is it allows you,
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it's basically like uncompiled code.
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And it doesn't run very fast.
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It is capable of being adapted to new circumstances.
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But once the code is roughed in,
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it gets driven into the unconscious layer,
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and you become highly effective at whatever it is.
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And from that point, your conscious mind
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basically remains there to detect things
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that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written.
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And so I don't exactly know how one would establish this,
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how one would demonstrate it.
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But it must be the case that the human mind
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contains sandboxes in which things are tested, right?
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Maybe you can build a piece of code
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and run it in parallel next to your active code
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so you can see how it would have done comparatively.
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But there's gotta be some way of writing new code
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and then swapping it in.
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And frankly, I think this has a lot to do
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with things like sleep cycles.
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Very often, when I get good at something,
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I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it.
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I get better at it when I'm not doing it,
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especially if there's time to sleep and think on it.
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So there's some sort of new program
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swapping in for old program phenomenon,
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which will be a lot easier to see in machines.
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It's gonna be hard with the wetware.
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I like, I mean, it is true,
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because somebody that played,
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I played tennis for many years,
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I do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis
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is when the conscious mind is a spectator.
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So the compiled code is the highest form of being human.
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And then consciousness is just some specific compiler.
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You used to have like Borland C++ compiler.
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You could just have different kind of compilers.
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Ultimately, the thing that by which we measure
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the power of life, the intelligence of life
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is the compiled code.
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And you can probably do that compilation all kinds of ways.
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Yeah, I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously
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and table tennis isn't.
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I'm saying that because tennis is slowed down
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by the just the space on the court,
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you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing.
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But when you shrink the court down,
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It becomes obvious.
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It becomes obvious that your conscious mind
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is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle.
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And weirdly for me,
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I would say this probably isn't true
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in a podcast situation.
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But if I have to give a presentation,
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especially if I have not overly prepared,
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I often find the same phenomenon
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when I'm giving the presentation.
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My conscious mind is there watching
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some other part of me present,
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which is a little jarring, I have to say.
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Well, that means you've gotten good at it.
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Not let the conscious mind get in the way
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of the flow of words.
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Yeah, that's the sensation to be sure.
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And that's the highest form of podcasting too.
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I mean, that's what it looks like
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when a podcast is really in the pocket,
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like Joe Rogan, just having fun
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and just losing themselves.
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And that's something I aspire to as well,
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just losing yourself in conversation.
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Somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people,
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like I'm such an introvert.
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I was scared before you showed up.
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I'm scared right now.
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There's just anxiety.
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There's just, it's a giant mess.
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It's hard to lose yourself.
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It's hard to just get out of the way of your own mind.
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Yeah, actually, trust is a big component of that.
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Your conscious mind retains control
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if you are very uncertain.
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But when you do get into that zone when you're speaking,
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I realize it's different for you
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with English as a second language,
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although maybe you present in Russian and it happens.
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But do you ever hear yourself say something
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and you think, oh, that's really good, right?
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Like you didn't come up with it,
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some other part of you that you don't exactly know
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I don't think I've ever heard myself in that way
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because I have a much louder voice
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that's constantly yelling in my head at,
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why the hell did you say that?
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There's a very self critical voice that's much louder.
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So I'm very, maybe I need to deal with that voice,
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but it's been like, what is it called?
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Like a megaphone just screaming
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so I can't hear the other voice that says,
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good job, you said that thing really nicely.
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So I'm kind of focused right now on the megaphone person
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in the audience versus the positive,
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but that's definitely something to think about.
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It's been productive, but the place where I find gratitude
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and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet moments
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when I don't talk, when I listen to the world around me,
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when I listen to others, when I talk,
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I'm extremely self critical in my mind.
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When I produce anything out into the world
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that originated with me,
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like any kind of creation, extremely self critical.
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It's good for productivity,
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for always striving to improve and so on.
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It might be bad for just appreciating
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the things you've created.
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I'm a little bit with Marvin Minsky on this
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where he says the key to a productive life
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is to hate everything you've ever done in the past.
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I didn't know he said that.
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I must say, I resonate with it a bit.
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And unfortunately, my life currently has me putting
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a lot of stuff into the world,
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and I effectively watch almost none of it.
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Yeah, what do you make of that?
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I just yesterday read Metamorphosis by Kafka,
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we read Metamorphosis by Kafka
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where he turns into a giant bug
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because of the stress that the world puts on him.
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His parents put on him to succeed.
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And I think that you have to find the balance
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because if you allow the self critical voice
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to become too heavy, the burden of the world,
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the pressure that the world puts on you
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to be the best version of yourself and so on to strive,
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then you become a bug and that's a big problem.
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And then the world turns against you because you're a bug.
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You become some kind of caricature of yourself.
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I don't know, you become the worst version of yourself
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and then thereby end up destroying yourself
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and then the world moves on.
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That's a lovely story.
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I do think this is one of these places,
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and frankly, you could map this onto
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all of modern human experience,
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but this is one of these places
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where our ancestral programming
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does not serve our modern selves.
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So I used to talk to students
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about the question of dwelling on things.
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Dwelling on things is famously understood to be bad
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and it can't possibly be bad.
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It wouldn't exist, the tendency toward it
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wouldn't exist if it was bad.
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So what is bad is dwelling on things
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past the point of utility.
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And that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize,
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but if you realize that your dwelling is the key, in fact,
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to upgrading your program for future well being
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and that there's a point, presumably,
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from diminishing returns, if not counter productivity,
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there is a point at which you should stop
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because that is what is in your best interest,
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then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful.
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This is the point at which it is no longer useful
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for me to dwell on this error I have made.
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That's what you're looking for.
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And it also gives you license, right?
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If some part of you feels like it's punishing you
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rather than searching, then that also has a point
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at which it's no longer valuable
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and there's some liberty in realizing,
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yep, even the part of me that was punishing me
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knows it's time to stop.
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So if we map that onto compiled code discussion,
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as a computer science person, I find that very compelling.
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You know, when you compile code, you get warnings sometimes.
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And usually, if you're a good software engineer,
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you're going to make sure there's no,
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you know, you treat warnings as errors.
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So you make sure that the compilation produces no warnings.
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But at a certain point, when you have a large enough system,
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you just let the warnings go.
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Like, I don't know where that warning came from,
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but, you know, just ultimately you need to compile the code
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and run with it and hope nothing terrible happens.
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Well, I think what you will find, and believe me,
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I think what you're talking about
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with respect to robots and learning
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is gonna end up having to go to a deep developmental state
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and a helplessness that evolves into hyper competence
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But I live, I noticed that I live by something
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that I, for lack of a better descriptor,
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call the theory of close calls.
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And the theory of close calls says that people
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typically miscategorize the events in their life
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where something almost went wrong.
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And, you know, for example, if you,
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I have a friend who, I was walking down the street
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with my college friends and one of my friends
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stepped into the street thinking it was clear
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and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles an hour,
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would have been an absolute disaster, might have killed her,
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certainly would have permanently injured her.
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But she didn't, you know, car didn't touch her, right?
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Now you could walk away from that and think nothing of it
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because, well, what is there to think?
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Or you could think, well, what is the difference
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between what did happen and my death?
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The difference is luck.
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I never want that to be true, right?
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I never want the difference between what did happen
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and my death to be luck.
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Therefore, I should count this as very close to death
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and I should prioritize coding
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so it doesn't happen again at a very high level.
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So anyway, my basic point is
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the accidents and disasters and misfortune
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describe a distribution that tells you
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what's really likely to get you in the end.
link |
And so personally, you can use them to figure out
link |
where the dangers are so that you can afford
link |
to take great risks because you have a really good sense
link |
of how they're gonna go wrong.
link |
But I would also point out civilization has this problem.
link |
Civilization is now producing these events
link |
that are major disasters,
link |
but they're not existential scale yet, right?
link |
They're very serious errors that we can see.
link |
And I would argue that the pattern is
link |
you discover that we are involved in some industrial process
link |
at the point it has gone wrong, right?
link |
So I'm now always asking the question,
link |
okay, in light of the Fukushima triple meltdown,
link |
the financial collapse of 2008,
link |
the Deepwater Horizon blowout, COVID 19,
link |
and its probable origins in the Wuhan lab,
link |
what processes do I not know the name of yet
link |
that I will discover at the point
link |
that some gigantic accident has happened?
link |
And can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof
link |
of engaging in that process before the accident, right?
link |
That's what a wise civilization would be doing.
link |
I just wanna mention something that happened
link |
a couple of days ago.
link |
I don't know if you know who JB Straubel is.
link |
He's the co founder of Tesla,
link |
CTO of Tesla for many, many years.
link |
His wife just died.
link |
She was riding a bicycle.
link |
And in the same thin line between death and life
link |
that many of us have been in,
link |
where you walk into the intersection
link |
and there's this close call.
link |
Every once in a while, you get the short straw.
link |
I wonder how much of our own individual lives
link |
and the entirety of the human civilization
link |
rests on this little roll of the dice.
link |
Well, this is sort of my point about the close calls
link |
is that there's a level at which we can't control it, right?
link |
The gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space
link |
that you don't have time to do anything about.
link |
There's not a lot we can do to hedge that out,
link |
or at least not short term.
link |
But there are lots of other things.
link |
Obviously, the financial collapse of 2008
link |
didn't break down the entire world economy.
link |
It threatened to, but a Herculean effort
link |
managed to pull us back from the brink.
link |
The triple meltdown at Fukushima was awful,
link |
but every one of the seven fuel pools held,
link |
there wasn't a major fire that made it impossible
link |
to manage the disaster going forward.
link |
We could say the same thing about the blowout
link |
at the Deepwater Horizon,
link |
where a hole in the ocean floor large enough
link |
that we couldn't have plugged it, could have opened up.
link |
All of these things could have been much, much worse, right?
link |
And I think we can say the same thing about COVID,
link |
as terrible as it is.
link |
And we cannot say for sure that it came from the Wuhan lab,
link |
but there's a strong likelihood that it did.
link |
And it also could be much, much worse.
link |
So in each of these cases, something is telling us,
link |
we have a process that is unfolding
link |
that keeps creating risks where it is luck
link |
that is the difference between us
link |
and some scale of disaster that is unimaginable.
link |
And that wisdom, you can be highly intelligent
link |
and cause these disasters.
link |
To be wise is to stop causing them, right?
link |
And that would require a process of restraint,
link |
a process that I don't see a lot of evidence of yet.
link |
So I think we have to generate it.
link |
And somehow, at the moment,
link |
we don't have a political structure
link |
that would be capable of taking
link |
a protective algorithm and actually deploying it, right?
link |
Because it would have important economic consequences.
link |
And so it would almost certainly be shot down.
link |
But we can obviously also say,
link |
we paid a huge price for all of the disasters
link |
that I've mentioned.
link |
And we have to factor that into the equation.
link |
Something can be very productive short term
link |
and very destructive long term.
link |
Also, the question is how many disasters we avoided
link |
because of the ingenuity of humans
link |
or just the integrity and character of humans.
link |
That's sort of an open question.
link |
We may be more intelligent than lucky.
link |
Because the optimistic message here that you're getting at
link |
is maybe the process that we should be,
link |
that maybe we can overcome luck with ingenuity.
link |
Meaning, I guess you're suggesting the processes
link |
we should be listing all the ways
link |
that human civilization can destroy itself,
link |
assigning likelihood to it,
link |
and thinking through how can we avoid that.
link |
And being very honest with the data out there
link |
about the close calls and using those close calls
link |
to then create sort of mechanism
link |
by which we minimize the probability of those close calls.
link |
And just being honest and transparent
link |
with the data that's out there.
link |
Well, I think we need to do a couple things for it to work.
link |
So I've been an advocate for the idea
link |
that sustainability is actually,
link |
it's difficult to operationalize,
link |
but it is an objective that we have to meet
link |
if we're to be around long term.
link |
And I realized that we also need to have reversibility
link |
of all of our processes.
link |
Because processes very frequently when they start
link |
do not appear dangerous.
link |
And then when they scale, they become very dangerous.
link |
So for example, if you imagine
link |
the first internal combustion engine vehicle
link |
driving down the street,
link |
and you imagine somebody running after them saying,
link |
hey, if you do enough of that,
link |
you're gonna alter the atmosphere
link |
and it's gonna change the temperature of the planet.
link |
It's preposterous, right?
link |
Why would you stop the person
link |
who's invented this marvelous new contraption?
link |
But of course, eventually you do get to the place
link |
where you're doing enough of this
link |
that you do start changing the temperature of the planet.
link |
So if we built the capacity,
link |
if we basically said, look, you can't involve yourself
link |
in any process that you couldn't reverse if you had to,
link |
then progress would be slowed,
link |
but our safety would go up dramatically.
link |
And I think in some sense, if we are to be around long term,
link |
we have to begin thinking that way.
link |
We're just involved in too many very dangerous processes.
link |
So let's talk about one of the things
link |
that if not threatened human civilization
link |
certainly hurt it at a deep level, which is COVID 19.
link |
What percent probability would you currently place
link |
on the hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked
link |
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
So I maintain a flow chart of all the possible explanations,
link |
and it doesn't break down exactly that way.
link |
The likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very, very high.
link |
If it emerged from a lab,
link |
the likelihood that the lab was the Wuhan Institute
link |
is very, very high.
link |
There are multiple different kinds of evidence
link |
that point to the lab,
link |
and there is literally no evidence that points to nature.
link |
Either the evidence points nowhere or it points to the lab,
link |
and the lab could mean any lab,
link |
but geographically, obviously,
link |
the labs in Wuhan are the most likely,
link |
and the lab that was most directly involved
link |
with research on viruses that look like COVID,
link |
that look like SARS COVID 2,
link |
is obviously the place that one would start.
link |
But I would say the likelihood that this virus
link |
came from a lab is well above 95%.
link |
We can talk about the question of could a virus
link |
have been brought into the lab and escaped from there
link |
without being modified.
link |
That's also possible,
link |
but it doesn't explain any of the anomalies
link |
in the genome of SARS COVID 2.
link |
Could it have been delivered from another lab?
link |
Could Wuhan be a distraction
link |
in order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way?
link |
That's conceivable.
link |
I currently have that below 1% on my flowchart,
link |
A very dark thought that somebody would do that
link |
almost as a political attack on China.
link |
I don't even think that's one possibility.
link |
Sometimes when Eric and I talk about these issues,
link |
we will generate a scenario just to prove
link |
that something could live in that space, right?
link |
It's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened.
link |
And so it doesn't have to have been an attack on China.
link |
That's certainly one possibility.
link |
But I would point out,
link |
if you can predict the future in some unusual way
link |
better than others, you can print money, right?
link |
That's what markets that allow you to bet for
link |
or against virtually any sector allow you to do.
link |
So you can imagine a simply amoral person
link |
or entity generating a pandemic,
link |
attempting to cover their tracks
link |
because it would allow them to bet against things
link |
like cruise ships, air travel, whatever it is,
link |
and bet in favor of, I don't know,
link |
sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do.
link |
So am I saying that I think somebody did that?
link |
No, I really don't think it happened.
link |
We've seen zero evidence
link |
that this was intentionally released.
link |
However, were it to have been intentionally released
link |
by somebody who did not know,
link |
did not want it known where it had come from,
link |
releasing it into Wuhan would be one way
link |
to cover their tracks.
link |
So we have to leave the possibility formally open,
link |
but acknowledge there's no evidence.
link |
And the probability therefore is low.
link |
I tend to believe maybe this is the optimistic nature
link |
that I have that people who are competent enough
link |
to do the kind of thing we just described
link |
are not going to do that
link |
because it requires a certain kind of,
link |
I don't wanna use the word evil,
link |
but whatever word you wanna use to describe
link |
the kind of disregard for human life required to do that,
link |
that's just not going to be coupled with competence.
link |
I feel like there's a trade off chart
link |
where competence on one axis and evil is on the other.
link |
And the more evil you become,
link |
the crappier you are at doing great engineering,
link |
scientific work required to deliver weapons
link |
of different kinds, whether it's bioweapons
link |
or nuclear weapons, all those kinds of things.
link |
That seems to be the lessons I take from history,
link |
but that doesn't necessarily mean
link |
that's what's going to be happening in the future.
link |
But to stick on the lab leak idea,
link |
because the flow chart is probably huge here
link |
because there's a lot of fascinating possibilities.
link |
One question I wanna ask is,
link |
what would evidence for natural origins look like?
link |
So one piece of evidence for natural origins
link |
is that it's happened in the past
link |
that viruses have jumped.
link |
So like that's possible to have happened.
link |
So that's a sort of like a historical evidence,
link |
like, okay, well, it's possible that it have...
link |
It's not evidence of the kind you think it is.
link |
It's a justification for a presumption, right?
link |
So the presumption upon discovering
link |
a new virus circulating is certainly
link |
that it came from nature, right?
link |
The problem is the presumption evaporates
link |
in the face of evidence, or at least it logically should.
link |
And it didn't in this case.
link |
It was maintained by people who privately
link |
in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts
link |
about the natural origin of this virus.
link |
Is there some other piece of evidence
link |
that we could look for and see that would say,
link |
this increases the probability that it's natural origins?
link |
Yeah, in fact, there is evidence.
link |
I always worry that somebody is going to make up
link |
some evidence in order to reverse the flow.
link |
Well, let's say I am...
link |
There's a lot of incentive for that actually.
link |
There's a huge amount of incentive.
link |
On the other hand, why didn't the powers that be,
link |
the powers that lied to us about weapons
link |
of mass destruction in Iraq,
link |
why didn't they ever fake weapons
link |
of mass destruction in Iraq?
link |
Whatever force it is, I hope that force is here too.
link |
And so whatever evidence we find is real.
link |
It's the competence thing I'm talking about,
link |
but okay, go ahead, sorry.
link |
Well, we can get back to that.
link |
But I would say, yeah, the giant piece of evidence
link |
that will shift the probabilities in the other direction
link |
is the discovery of either a human population
link |
in which the virus circulated prior to showing up in Wuhan
link |
that would explain where the virus learned all of the tricks
link |
that it knew instantly upon spreading from Wuhan.
link |
So that would do it, or an animal population
link |
in which an ancestor epidemic can be found
link |
in which the virus learned this before jumping to humans.
link |
But I point out in that second case,
link |
you would certainly expect to see a great deal of evolution
link |
in the early epidemic, which we don't see.
link |
So there almost has to be a human population
link |
somewhere else that had the virus circulate
link |
or an ancestor of the virus that we first saw
link |
in Wuhan circulating.
link |
And it has to have gotten very sophisticated
link |
in that prior epidemic before hitting Wuhan
link |
in order to explain the total lack of evolution
link |
and extremely effective virus that emerged
link |
at the end of 2019.
link |
So you don't believe in the magic of evolution
link |
to spring up with all the tricks already there?
link |
Like everybody who doesn't have the tricks,
link |
And then you just have this beautiful virus
link |
that comes in with a spike protein
link |
and through mutation and selection,
link |
just like the ones that succeed and succeed big
link |
are the ones that are going to just spring into life
link |
Well, no, that's called a hopeful monster.
link |
And hopeful monsters don't work.
link |
The job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult.
link |
It involves two very difficult steps
link |
and they both have to work.
link |
One is the ability to infect a person and spread
link |
in their tissues sufficient to make an infection.
link |
And the other is to jump between individuals
link |
at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct
link |
for one reason or another.
link |
Those are both very difficult jobs.
link |
They require, as you describe, selection.
link |
And the point is selection would leave a mark.
link |
We would see evidence that it would stay.
link |
In animals or humans, we would see.
link |
And we see this evolutionary trace of the virus
link |
gathering the tricks up.
link |
Yeah, you would see the virus,
link |
you would see the clumsy virus get better and better.
link |
And yes, I am a full believer in the power of that process.
link |
In fact, I believe it.
link |
What I know from studying the process
link |
is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine.
link |
That what we teach in the Evolution 101 textbook
link |
is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing
link |
and that actually people should increase their expectation
link |
of the rapidity with which that process can produce
link |
just jaw dropping adaptations.
link |
That said, we just don't see evidence that it happened here
link |
which doesn't mean it doesn't exist,
link |
but it means in spite of immense pressure
link |
to find it somewhere, there's been no hint
link |
which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory.
link |
So inside the laboratory,
link |
gain of function research on viruses.
link |
And I believe most of that kind of research
link |
is doing this exact thing that you're referring to
link |
which is accelerated evolution
link |
and just watching evolution do its thing
link |
and a bunch of viruses
link |
and seeing what kind of tricks get developed.
link |
The other method is engineering viruses.
link |
So manually adding on the tricks.
link |
Which do you think we should be thinking about here?
link |
So mind you, I learned what I know
link |
in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging.
link |
I started studying the question and I would say
link |
based on the content of the genome and other evidence
link |
in publications from the various labs
link |
that were involved in generating this technology,
link |
a couple of things seem likely.
link |
This SARS CoV2 does not appear to be entirely the result
link |
of either a splicing process or serial passaging.
link |
It appears to have both things in its past
link |
or it's at least highly likely that it does.
link |
So for example, the fern cleavage site
link |
looks very much like it was added in to the virus
link |
and it was known that that would increase its infectivity
link |
in humans and increase its tropism.
link |
The virus appears to be excellent
link |
at spreading in humans and minks and ferrets.
link |
Now minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other
link |
and ferrets are very likely to have been used
link |
in a serial passage experiment.
link |
The reason being that they have an ACE2 receptor
link |
that looks very much like the human ACE2 receptor.
link |
And so were you going to passage the virus
link |
or its ancestor through an animal
link |
in order to increase its infectivity in humans,
link |
which would have been necessary,
link |
ferrets would have been very likely.
link |
It is also quite likely
link |
that humanized mice were utilized
link |
and it is possible that human airway tissue was utilized.
link |
I think it is vital that we find out
link |
what the protocols were.
link |
If this came from the Wuhan Institute,
link |
we need to know it
link |
and we need to know what the protocols were exactly
link |
because they will actually give us some tools
link |
that would be useful in fighting SARS CoV2
link |
and hopefully driving it to extinction,
link |
which ought to be our priority.
link |
It is a priority that does not,
link |
it is not apparent from our behavior,
link |
but it really is, it should be our objective.
link |
If we understood where our interests lie,
link |
we would be much more focused on it.
link |
But those protocols would tell us a great deal.
link |
If it wasn't the Wuhan Institute, we need to know that.
link |
If it was nature, we need to know that.
link |
And if it was some other laboratory,
link |
we need to figure out what and where
link |
so that we can determine what we can determine
link |
about what was done.
link |
You're opening up my mind about why we should investigate,
link |
why we should know the truth of the origins of this virus.
link |
So for me personally,
link |
let me just tell the story of my own kind of journey.
link |
When I first started looking into the lab leak hypothesis,
link |
what became terrifying to me
link |
and important to understand and obvious
link |
is the sort of like Sam Harris way of thinking,
link |
which is it's obvious that a lab leak of a deadly virus
link |
will eventually happen.
link |
My mind was, it doesn't even matter
link |
if it happened in this case.
link |
It's obvious that it's going to happen in the future.
link |
So why the hell are we not freaking out about this?
link |
And COVID 19 is not even that deadly
link |
relative to the possible future viruses.
link |
It's this, the way I disagree with Sam on this,
link |
but he thinks about this way about AGI as well,
link |
not about artificial intelligence.
link |
It's a different discussion, I think,
link |
but with viruses, it seems like something that could happen
link |
on the scale of years, maybe a few decades.
link |
AGI is a little bit farther out for me,
link |
but it seemed, the terrifying thing,
link |
it seemed obvious that this will happen very soon
link |
for a much deadlier virus as we get better and better
link |
at both engineering viruses
link |
and doing this kind of evolutionary driven research,
link |
gain of function research.
link |
Okay, but then you started speaking out about this as well,
link |
but also started to say, no, no, no,
link |
we should hurry up and figure out the origins now
link |
because it will help us figure out
link |
how to actually respond to this particular virus,
link |
how to treat this particular virus.
link |
What is in terms of vaccines, in terms of antiviral drugs,
link |
in terms of just all the number of responses
link |
that we should have.
link |
Okay, I still am much more freaking out about the future.
link |
Maybe you can break that apart a little bit.
link |
Which are you most focused on now?
link |
Which are you most freaking out about now
link |
in terms of the importance of figuring out
link |
the origins of this virus?
link |
I am most freaking out about both of them
link |
because they're both really important
link |
and we can put bounds on this.
link |
Let me say first that this is a perfect test case
link |
for the theory of close calls
link |
because as much as COVID is a disaster,
link |
it is also a close call from which we can learn much.
link |
You are absolutely right.
link |
If we keep playing this game in the lab,
link |
if we are not, if we are,
link |
especially if we do it under pressure
link |
and when we are told that a virus
link |
is going to leap from nature any day
link |
and that the more we know,
link |
the better we'll be able to fight it,
link |
we're gonna create the disaster,
link |
So yes, that should be an absolute focus.
link |
The fact that there were people saying
link |
that this was dangerous back in 2015
link |
ought to tell us something.
link |
The fact that the system bypassed a ban
link |
and offshored the work to China
link |
ought to tell us this is not a Chinese failure.
link |
This is a failure of something larger and harder to see.
link |
But I also think that there's a clock ticking
link |
with respect to SARS CoV2 and COVID,
link |
the disease that it creates.
link |
And that has to do with whether or not
link |
we are stuck with it permanently.
link |
So if you think about the cost to humanity
link |
of being stuck with influenza,
link |
it's an immense cost year after year.
link |
And we just stop thinking about it because it's there.
link |
Some years you get the flu, most years you don't.
link |
Maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it.
link |
Maybe the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted.
link |
But imagine just simply doubling that cost.
link |
Imagine we get stuck with SARS CoV2
link |
and its descendants going forward
link |
and that it just settles in
link |
and becomes a fact of modern human life.
link |
That would be a disaster, right?
link |
The number of people we will ultimately lose
link |
The amount of suffering that will be caused is incalculable.
link |
The loss of wellbeing and wealth, incalculable.
link |
So that ought to be a very high priority,
link |
driving this extinct before it becomes permanent.
link |
And the ability to drive extinct goes down
link |
the longer we delay effective responses.
link |
To the extent that we let it have this very large canvas,
link |
large numbers of people who have the disease
link |
in which mutation and selection can result in adaptation
link |
that we will not be able to counter
link |
the greater its ability to figure out features
link |
of our immune system and use them to its advantage.
link |
So I'm feeling the pressure of driving it extinct.
link |
I believe we could have driven it extinct six months ago
link |
and we didn't do it because of very mundane concerns
link |
among a small number of people.
link |
And I'm not alleging that they were brazen about
link |
or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused.
link |
I have the sense that they were working
link |
from a kind of autopilot in which you,
link |
let's say you're in some kind of a corporation,
link |
a pharmaceutical corporation,
link |
you have a portfolio of therapies
link |
that in the context of a pandemic might be very lucrative.
link |
Those therapies have competitors.
link |
You of course wanna position your product
link |
so that it succeeds and the competitors don't.
link |
And lo and behold, at some point through means
link |
that I think those of us on the outside
link |
can't really intuit, you end up saying things
link |
about competing therapies that work better
link |
and much more safely than the ones you're selling
link |
that aren't true and do cause people to die
link |
But it's some kind of autopilot, at least part of it is.
link |
So there's a complicated coupling of the autopilot
link |
of institutions, companies, governments.
link |
And then there's also the geopolitical game theory thing
link |
going on where you wanna keep secrets.
link |
It's the Chernobyl thing where if you messed up,
link |
there's a big incentive, I think,
link |
to hide the fact that you messed up.
link |
So how do we fix this?
link |
And what's more important to fix?
link |
The autopilot, which is the response
link |
that we often criticize about our institutions,
link |
especially the leaders in those institutions,
link |
Anthony Fauci and so on,
link |
some of the members of the scientific community.
link |
And the second part is the game with China
link |
of hiding the information
link |
in terms of on the fight between nations.
link |
Well, in our live streams on Dark Horse,
link |
Heather and I have been talking from the beginning
link |
about the fact that although, yes,
link |
what happens began in China,
link |
it very much looks like a failure
link |
of the international scientific community.
link |
That's frightening, but it's also hopeful
link |
in the sense that actually if we did the right thing now,
link |
we're not navigating a puzzle about Chinese responsibility.
link |
We're navigating a question of collective responsibility
link |
for something that has been terribly costly to all of us.
link |
So that's not a very happy process.
link |
But as you point out, what's at stake
link |
is in large measure at the very least
link |
the strong possibility this will happen again
link |
and that at some point it will be far worse.
link |
So just as a person that does not learn the lessons
link |
of their own errors doesn't get smarter
link |
and they remain in danger,
link |
we collectively, humanity has to say,
link |
well, there sure is a lot of evidence
link |
that suggests that this is a self inflicted wound.
link |
When you have done something
link |
that has caused a massive self inflicted wound,
link |
self inflicted wound, it makes sense to dwell on it
link |
exactly to the point that you have learned the lesson
link |
that makes it very, very unlikely
link |
that something similar will happen again.
link |
I think this is a good place to kind of ask you
link |
to do almost like a thought experiment
link |
or to steel man the argument against the lab leak hypothesis.
link |
So if you were to argue, you said 95% chance
link |
that the virus leak from a lab.
link |
There's a bunch of ways I think you can argue
link |
that even talking about it is bad for the world.
link |
So if I just put something on the table,
link |
it's to say that for one,
link |
it would be racism versus Chinese people
link |
that talking about that it leaked from a lab,
link |
there's a kind of immediate kind of blame
link |
and it can spiral down into this idea
link |
that's somehow the people are responsible for the virus
link |
and this kind of thing.
link |
Is it possible for you to come up
link |
with other steel man arguments against talking
link |
or against the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis?
link |
Well, so I think steel manning is a tool
link |
that is extremely valuable,
link |
but it's also possible to abuse it.
link |
I think that you can only steel man a good faith argument.
link |
And the problem is we now know
link |
that we have not been engaged in opponents
link |
who were wielding good faith arguments
link |
because privately their emails reflect their own doubts.
link |
And what they were doing publicly was actually a punishment,
link |
a public punishment for those of us who spoke up
link |
with I think the purpose of either backing us down
link |
or more likely warning others
link |
not to engage in the same kind of behavior.
link |
And obviously for people like you and me
link |
who regard science as our likely best hope
link |
for navigating difficult waters,
link |
shutting down people who are using those tools honorably
link |
is itself dishonorable.
link |
So I don't feel that there's anything to steel man.
link |
And I also think that immediately at the point
link |
that the world suddenly with no new evidence on the table
link |
switched gears with respect to the lab leak,
link |
at the point that Nicholas Wade had published his article
link |
and suddenly the world was going to admit
link |
that this was at least a possibility, if not a likelihood,
link |
we got to see something of the rationalization process
link |
that had taken place inside the institutional world.
link |
And it very definitely involved the claim
link |
that what was being avoided was the targeting
link |
of Chinese scientists.
link |
And my point would be,
link |
I don't wanna see the targeting of anyone.
link |
I don't want to see racism of any kind.
link |
On the other hand, once you create license to lie
link |
in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake
link |
in knowing what happened, then it is inevitable
link |
that that process, that license to lie will be used
link |
by the thing that captures institutions
link |
for its own purposes.
link |
So my sense is it may be very unfortunate
link |
if the story of what happened here
link |
can be used against Chinese people.
link |
That would be very unfortunate.
link |
And as I think I mentioned,
link |
Heather and I have taken great pains to point out
link |
that this doesn't look like a Chinese failure.
link |
It looks like a failure
link |
of the international scientific community.
link |
So I think it is important to broadcast that message
link |
along with the analysis of the evidence.
link |
But no matter what happened, we have a right to know.
link |
And I frankly do not take the institutional layer
link |
at its word that its motivations are honorable
link |
and that it was protecting good hearted scientists
link |
at the expense of the world.
link |
That explanation does not add up.
link |
Well, this is a very interesting question about
link |
whether it's ever okay to lie at the institutional layer
link |
to protect the populace.
link |
I think both you and I are probably on the same,
link |
have the same sense that it's a slippery slope.
link |
Even if it's an effective mechanism in the short term,
link |
in the long term, it's going to be destructive.
link |
This happened with masks.
link |
This happened with other things.
link |
If you look at just history pandemics,
link |
there's an idea that panic is destructive
link |
amongst the populace.
link |
So you want to construct a narrative,
link |
whether it's a lie or not to minimize panic.
link |
But you're suggesting that almost in all cases,
link |
and I think that was the lesson from the pandemic
link |
in the early 20th century,
link |
that lying creates distrust
link |
and distrust in the institutions is ultimately destructive.
link |
That's your sense that lying is not okay?
link |
There are obviously places where complete transparency
link |
is not a good idea, right?
link |
To the extent that you broadcast a technology
link |
that allows one individual to hold the world hostage,
link |
obviously you've got something to be navigated.
link |
But in general, I don't believe that the scientific system
link |
should be lying to us.
link |
In the case of this particular lie,
link |
the idea that the wellbeing of Chinese scientists
link |
outweighs the wellbeing of the world is preposterous.
link |
Right, as you point out,
link |
one thing that rests on this question
link |
is whether we continue to do this kind of research
link |
And the scientists in question, all of them,
link |
American, Chinese, all of them were pushing the idea
link |
that the risk of a zoonotic spillover event
link |
causing a major and highly destructive pandemic
link |
was so great that we had to risk this.
link |
Now, if they themselves have caused it,
link |
and if they are wrong, as I believe they are,
link |
about the likelihood of a major world pandemic
link |
spilling out of nature
link |
in the way that they wrote into their grant applications,
link |
then the danger is the call is coming from inside the house
link |
and we have to look at that.
link |
And yes, whatever we have to do
link |
to protect scientists from retribution, we should do,
link |
but we cannot protecting them by lying to the world.
link |
by demonizing people like me, like Josh Rogin,
link |
like Yuri Dagan, the entire drastic group on Twitter,
link |
by demonizing us for simply following the evidence
link |
is to set a terrible precedent, right?
link |
You're demonizing people for using the scientific method
link |
to evaluate evidence that is available to us in the world.
link |
What a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson, right?
link |
Thou shalt not use scientific tools.
link |
Whatever your license to lie is, it doesn't extend to that.
link |
Yeah, I've seen the attacks on you,
link |
the pressure on you has a very important effect
link |
on thousands of world class biologists actually.
link |
At MIT, colleagues of mine, people I know,
link |
there's a slight pressure to not be allowed
link |
to one, speak publicly and two, actually think.
link |
Like do you even think about these ideas?
link |
It sounds kind of ridiculous,
link |
but just in the privacy of your own home,
link |
to read things, to think, it's many people,
link |
many world class biologists that I know
link |
will just avoid looking at the data.
link |
There's not even that many people
link |
that are publicly opposing gain of function research.
link |
They're also like, it's not worth it.
link |
It's not worth the battle.
link |
And there's many people that kind of argue
link |
that those battles should be fought in private,
link |
with colleagues in the privacy of the scientific community
link |
that the public is somehow not maybe intelligent enough
link |
to be able to deal with the complexities
link |
of this kind of discussion.
link |
I don't know, but the final result
link |
is combined with the bullying of you
link |
and all the different pressures
link |
in the academic institutions is that
link |
it's just people are self censoring
link |
and silencing themselves
link |
and silencing the most important thing,
link |
which is the power of their brains.
link |
Like these people are brilliant.
link |
And the fact that they're not utilizing their brain
link |
to come up with solutions
link |
outside of the conformist line of thinking is tragic.
link |
I also think that we have to look at it
link |
and understand it for what it is.
link |
For one thing, it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism.
link |
Somehow people's sense of what they're allowed
link |
to think about, talk about, discuss
link |
is causing them to self censor.
link |
And I can tell you it's causing many of them to rationalize,
link |
which is even worse.
link |
They're blinding themselves to what they can see.
link |
But it is also the case, I believe,
link |
that what you're describing about what people said,
link |
and a great many people understood
link |
that the lab leak hypothesis
link |
could not be taken off the table,
link |
but they didn't say so publicly.
link |
And I think that their discussions with each other
link |
about why they did not say what they understood,
link |
that's what capture sounds like on the inside.
link |
I don't know exactly what force captured the institutions.
link |
I don't think anybody knows for sure out here in public.
link |
I don't even know that it wasn't just simply a process.
link |
But you have these institutions.
link |
They are behaving towards a kind of somatic obligation.
link |
They have lost sight of what they were built to accomplish.
link |
And on the inside, the way they avoid
link |
going back to their original mission
link |
is to say things to themselves,
link |
like the public can't have this discussion.
link |
It can't be trusted with it.
link |
Yes, we need to be able to talk about this,
link |
but it has to be private.
link |
Whatever it is they say to themselves,
link |
that is what capture sounds like on the inside.
link |
It's a institutional rationalization mechanism.
link |
And it's very, very deadly.
link |
And at the point you go from lab leak to repurposed drugs,
link |
you can see that it's very deadly in a very direct way.
link |
Yeah, I see this in my field with things
link |
like autonomous weapon systems.
link |
People in AI do not talk about the use of AI
link |
in weapon systems.
link |
They kind of avoid the idea that AI's use them
link |
It's kind of funny, there's this like kind of discomfort
link |
and they're like, they all hurry,
link |
like something scary happens and a bunch of sheep
link |
kind of like run away.
link |
That's what it looks like.
link |
And I don't even know what to do about it.
link |
And then I feel this natural pull
link |
every time I bring up autonomous weapon systems
link |
to go along with the sheep.
link |
There's a natural kind of pull towards that direction
link |
because it's like, what can I do as one person?
link |
Now there's currently nothing destructive happening
link |
with autonomous weapon systems.
link |
So we're in like in the early days of this race
link |
that in 10, 20 years might become a real problem.
link |
Now where the discussion we're having now,
link |
we're now facing the result of that in the space of viruses,
link |
like for many years avoiding the conversations here.
link |
I don't know what to do that in the early days,
link |
but I think we have to, I guess, create institutions
link |
where people can stand out.
link |
People can stand out and like basically be individual
link |
thinkers and break out into all kinds of spaces of ideas
link |
that allow us to think freely, freedom of thought.
link |
And maybe that requires a decentralization of institutions.
link |
Well, years ago, I came up with a concept
link |
called cultivated insecurity.
link |
And the idea is, let's just take the example
link |
of the average Joe, right?
link |
The average Joe has a job somewhere
link |
and their mortgage, their medical insurance,
link |
their retirement, their connection with the economy
link |
is to one degree or another dependent
link |
on their relationship with the employer.
link |
That means that there is a strong incentive,
link |
especially in any industry where it's not easy to move
link |
from one employer to the next.
link |
There's a strong incentive to stay
link |
in your employer's good graces, right?
link |
So it creates a very top down dynamic,
link |
not only in terms of who gets to tell other people
link |
what to do, but it really comes down to
link |
who gets to tell other people how to think.
link |
So that's extremely dangerous.
link |
The way out of it is to cultivate security
link |
to the extent that somebody is in a position
link |
to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe
link |
for their family and their ability to earn,
link |
you will see that behavior a lot more.
link |
So I would argue that some of what you're talking about
link |
is just a simple predictable consequence
link |
of the concentration of the sources of wellbeing
link |
and that this is a solvable problem.
link |
You got a chance to talk with Joe Rogan yesterday.
link |
And I just saw the episode was released
link |
and Ivermectin is trending on Twitter.
link |
Joe told me it was an incredible conversation.
link |
I look forward to listening to it today.
link |
Many people have probably, by the time this is released,
link |
have already listened to it.
link |
I think it would be interesting to discuss a postmortem.
link |
How do you feel how that conversation went?
link |
And maybe broadly, how do you see the story
link |
as it's unfolding of Ivermectin from the origins
link |
from before COVID 19 through 2020 to today?
link |
I very much enjoyed talking to Joe
link |
and I'm undescribably grateful
link |
that he would take the risk of such a discussion,
link |
that he would, as he described it,
link |
do an emergency podcast on the subject,
link |
which I think that was not an exaggeration.
link |
This needed to happen for various reasons
link |
that he took us down the road of talking about
link |
the censorship campaign against Ivermectin,
link |
which I find utterly shocking
link |
and talking about the drug itself.
link |
And I should say we talked, we had Pierre Corey available.
link |
He came on the podcast as well.
link |
He is, of course, the face of the FLCCC,
link |
the Frontline COVID 19 Critical Care Alliance.
link |
These are doctors who have innovated ways
link |
of treating COVID patients and they happened on Ivermectin
link |
and have been using it.
link |
And I hesitate to use the word advocating for it
link |
because that's not really the role of doctors or scientists,
link |
but they are advocating for it in the sense
link |
that there is this pressure not to talk about
link |
its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into.
link |
So maybe step back and say, what is Ivermectin
link |
and how much studies have been done
link |
to show its effectiveness?
link |
So Ivermectin is an interesting drug.
link |
It was discovered in the 70s
link |
by a Japanese scientist named Satoshi Omura
link |
and he found it in soil near a Japanese golf course.
link |
So I would just point out in passing
link |
that if we were to stop self silencing
link |
over the possibility that Asians will be demonized
link |
over the possible lab leak in Wuhan
link |
and to recognize that actually the natural course
link |
of the story has a likely lab leak in China,
link |
it has a unlikely hero in Japan,
link |
the story is naturally not a simple one.
link |
But in any case, Omura discovered this molecule.
link |
He sent it to a friend who was at Merck,
link |
scientist named Campbell.
link |
They won a Nobel Prize for the discovery
link |
of the Ivermectin molecule in 2015.
link |
Its initial use was in treating parasitic infections.
link |
It's very effective in treating the worm
link |
that causes river blindness,
link |
the pathogen that causes elephantitis, scabies.
link |
It's a very effective anti parasite drug.
link |
It's extremely safe.
link |
It's on the WHO's list of essential medications.
link |
It's safe for children.
link |
It has been administered something like 4 billion times
link |
in the last four decades.
link |
It has been given away in the millions of doses
link |
by Merck in Africa.
link |
People have been on it for long periods of time.
link |
And in fact, one of the reasons
link |
that Africa may have had less severe impacts from COVID 19
link |
is that Ivermectin is widely used there to prevent parasites
link |
and the drug appears to have a long lasting impact.
link |
So it's an interesting molecule.
link |
It was discovered some time ago apparently
link |
that it has antiviral properties.
link |
And so it was tested early in the COVID 19 pandemic
link |
to see if it might work to treat humans with COVID.
link |
It turned out to have very promising evidence
link |
that it did treat humans.
link |
It was tested in tissues.
link |
It was tested at a very high dosage, which confuses people.
link |
They think that those of us who believe
link |
that Ivermectin might be useful in confronting this disease
link |
are advocating those high doses, which is not the case.
link |
But in any case, there have been quite a number of studies.
link |
A wonderful meta analysis was finally released.
link |
We had seen it in preprint version,
link |
but it was finally peer reviewed and published this last week.
link |
It reveals that the drug, as clinicians have been telling us,
link |
those who have been using it,
link |
it's highly effective at treating people with the disease,
link |
especially if you get to them early.
link |
And it showed an 86% effectiveness as a prophylactic
link |
to prevent people from contracting COVID.
link |
And that number, 86%, is high enough
link |
to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction if we wished to deploy it.
link |
First of all, the meta analysis,
link |
is this the Ivermectin for COVID 19
link |
real time meta analysis of 60 studies?
link |
Or there's a bunch of meta analysis there.
link |
Because I was really impressed by the real time meta analysis
link |
that keeps getting updated.
link |
I don't know if it's the same kind of thing.
link |
The one at ivmmeta.com?
link |
Well, I saw it at c19ivermeta.com.
link |
No, this is not that meta analysis.
link |
So that is, as you say, a living meta analysis
link |
where you can watch as evidence rolls in.
link |
Which is super cool, by the way.
link |
And they've got some really nice graphics
link |
that allow you to understand, well, what is the evidence?
link |
It's concentrated around this level of effectiveness,
link |
So anyway, it's a great site, well worth paying attention to.
link |
No, this is a meta analysis.
link |
I don't know any of the authors but one.
link |
Second author is Tess Lorry of the BIRD group.
link |
BIRD being a group of analysts and doctors in Britain
link |
that is playing a role similar to the FLCCC here in the US.
link |
So anyway, this is a meta analysis
link |
that Tess Lorry and others did
link |
of all of the available evidence.
link |
And it's quite compelling.
link |
People can look for it on my Twitter.
link |
I will put it up and people can find it there.
link |
So what about dose here?
link |
In terms of safety, what do we understand
link |
about the kind of dose required
link |
to have that level of effectiveness?
link |
And what do we understand about the safety
link |
of that kind of dose?
link |
So let me just say, I'm not a medical doctor.
link |
I'm on ivermectin in lieu of vaccination.
link |
In terms of dosage, there is one reason for concern,
link |
which is that the most effective dose for prophylaxis
link |
involves something like weekly administration.
link |
And because that is not a historical pattern of use
link |
for the drug, it is possible
link |
that there is some longterm implication
link |
of being on it weekly for a long period of time.
link |
There's not a strong indication of that.
link |
The safety signal that we have over people using the drug
link |
over many years and using it in high doses.
link |
In fact, Dr. Corey told me yesterday
link |
that there are cases in which people
link |
have made calculation errors
link |
and taken a massive overdose of the drug
link |
and had no ill effect.
link |
So anyway, there's lots of reasons
link |
to think the drug is comparatively safe,
link |
but no drug is perfectly safe.
link |
And I do worry about the longterm implications
link |
I also think it's very likely
link |
that because the drug is administered
link |
in a dose something like, let's say 15 milligrams
link |
for somebody my size once a week
link |
after you've gone through the initial double dose
link |
that you take 48 hours apart,
link |
it is apparent that if the amount of drug in your system
link |
is sufficient to be protective at the end of the week,
link |
then it was probably far too high
link |
at the beginning of the week.
link |
So there's a question about whether or not
link |
you could flatten out the intake
link |
so that the amount of ivermectin goes down,
link |
but the protection remains.
link |
I have little doubt that that would be discovered
link |
if we looked for it.
link |
But that said, it does seem to be quite safe,
link |
highly effective at preventing COVID.
link |
The 86% number is plenty high enough
link |
for us to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction
link |
in light of its R0 number of slightly more than two.
link |
And so why we are not using it is a bit of a mystery.
link |
So even if everything you said now
link |
turns out to be not correct,
link |
it is nevertheless obvious that it's sufficiently promising
link |
and it always has been in order to merit rigorous
link |
scientific exploration, investigation,
link |
doing a lot of studies and certainly not censoring
link |
the science or the discussion of it.
link |
So before we talk about the various vaccines for COVID 19,
link |
I'd like to talk to you about censorship.
link |
Given everything you're saying,
link |
why did YouTube and other places
link |
censor discussion of ivermectin?
link |
Well, there's a question about why they say they did it
link |
and there's a question about why they actually did it.
link |
Now, it is worth mentioning
link |
that YouTube is part of a consortium.
link |
It is partnered with Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, AP,
link |
Financial Times, Washington Post,
link |
some other notable organizations.
link |
And that this group has appointed itself
link |
the arbiter of truth.
link |
In effect, they have decided to control discussion
link |
ostensibly to prevent the distribution of misinformation.
link |
Now, how have they chosen to do that?
link |
In this case, they have chosen to simply utilize
link |
the recommendations of the WHO and the CDC
link |
and apply them as if they are synonymous
link |
with scientific truth.
link |
Problem, even at their best,
link |
the WHO and CDC are not scientific entities.
link |
They are entities that are about public health.
link |
And public health has this, whether it's right or not,
link |
and I believe I disagree with it,
link |
but it has this self assigned right to lie
link |
that comes from the fact that there is game theory
link |
that works against, for example,
link |
a successful vaccination campaign.
link |
That if everybody else takes a vaccine
link |
and therefore the herd becomes immune through vaccination
link |
and you decide not to take a vaccine,
link |
then you benefit from the immunity of the herd
link |
without having taken the risk.
link |
So people who do best are the people who opt out.
link |
And the WHO and CDC as public health entities
link |
effectively oversimplify stories in order to make sense
link |
of oversimplify stories in order that that game theory
link |
does not cause a predictable tragedy of the commons.
link |
With that said, once that right to lie exists,
link |
then it turns out to serve the interests of,
link |
for example, pharmaceutical companies,
link |
which have emergency use authorizations
link |
that require that there not be a safe
link |
and effective treatment and have immunity from liability
link |
for harms caused by their product.
link |
So that's a recipe for disaster, right?
link |
You don't need to be a sophisticated thinker
link |
about complex systems to see the hazard
link |
of immunizing a company from the harm of its own product
link |
at the same time that that product can only exist
link |
in the market if some other product that works better
link |
somehow fails to be noticed.
link |
So somehow YouTube is doing the bidding of Merck and others.
link |
Whether it knows that that's what it's doing,
link |
I think this may be another case of an autopilot
link |
that thinks it's doing the right thing
link |
because it's parroting the corrupt wisdom
link |
of the WHO and the CDC,
link |
but the WHO and the CDC have been wrong again and again
link |
And the irony here is that with YouTube coming after me,
link |
well, my channel has been right where the WHO and CDC
link |
have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic.
link |
So how is it that YouTube is censoring us
link |
because the WHO and CDC disagree with us
link |
when in fact, in past disagreements,
link |
we've been right and they've been wrong?
link |
There's so much to talk about here.
link |
So I've heard this many times actually
link |
on the inside of YouTube and with colleagues
link |
that I've talked with is they kind of in a very casual way
link |
say their job is simply to slow
link |
or prevent the spread of misinformation.
link |
And they say like, that's an easy thing to do.
link |
Like to know what is true or not is an easy thing to do.
link |
And so from the YouTube perspective,
link |
I think they basically outsource of the task
link |
of knowing what is true or not to public institutions
link |
that on a basic Google search claim
link |
to be the arbiters of truth.
link |
So if you were YouTube who are exceptionally profitable
link |
and exceptionally powerful in terms of controlling
link |
what people get to see or not, what would you do?
link |
Would you take a stand, a public stand
link |
against the WHO, CDC?
link |
Or would you instead say, you know what?
link |
Let's open the dam and let any video on anything fly.
link |
What do you do here?
link |
Say you were put, if Brent Weinstein was put in charge
link |
of YouTube for a month in this most critical of times
link |
where YouTube actually has incredible amounts of power
link |
to educate the populace, to give power of knowledge
link |
to the populace such that they can reform institutions.
link |
What would you do?
link |
How would you run YouTube?
link |
Well, unfortunately, or fortunately,
link |
this is actually quite simple.
link |
The founders, the American founders,
link |
settled on a counterintuitive formulation
link |
that people should be free to say anything.
link |
They should be free from the government
link |
blocking them from doing so.
link |
They did not imagine that in formulating that right,
link |
that most of what was said would be of high quality,
link |
nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things.
link |
What they correctly reasoned was that the benefit
link |
of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost,
link |
which everyone understands to be substantial.
link |
What I would say is they could not have anticipated
link |
the impact, the centrality of platforms
link |
like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera.
link |
If they had, they would not have limited
link |
the First Amendment as they did.
link |
They clearly understood that the power of the federal
link |
government was so great that it needed to be limited
link |
by granting explicitly the right of citizens
link |
In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook may be more powerful
link |
in this moment than the federal government
link |
of their worst nightmares could have been.
link |
The power that these entities have to control thought
link |
and to shift civilization is so great
link |
that we need to have those same protections.
link |
It doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said,
link |
but it means that nothing has changed
link |
about the cost benefit analysis
link |
of building the right to censor.
link |
So if I were running YouTube,
link |
the limit of what should be allowed
link |
is the limit of the law, right?
link |
If what you are doing is legal,
link |
then it should not be YouTube's place
link |
to limit what gets said or who gets to hear it.
link |
That is between speakers and audience.
link |
Will harm come from that? Of course it will.
link |
But will net harm come from it?
link |
No, I don't believe it will.
link |
I believe that allowing everything to be said
link |
does allow a process in which better ideas
link |
do come to the fore and win out.
link |
So you believe that in the end,
link |
when there's complete freedom to share ideas,
link |
that truth will win out.
link |
So what I've noticed, just as a brief side comment,
link |
that certain things become viral
link |
irregardless of their truth.
link |
I've noticed that things that are dramatic and or funny,
link |
like things that become memes are not,
link |
don't have to be grounded in truth.
link |
And so that what worries me there
link |
is that we basically maximize for drama
link |
versus maximize for truth in a system
link |
where everything is free.
link |
And that is worrying in the time of emergency.
link |
Well, yes, it's all worrying in time of emergency,
link |
But I want you to notice that what you've happened on
link |
is actually an analog for a much deeper and older problem.
link |
Human beings are the, we are not a blank slate,
link |
but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised.
link |
And there's a reason for that, right?
link |
It's where our flexibility comes from.
link |
We have effectively, we are robots
link |
in which a large fraction of the cognitive capacity
link |
has been, or of the behavioral capacity,
link |
has been offloaded to the software layer,
link |
which gets written and rewritten over evolutionary time.
link |
That means effectively that much of what we are,
link |
in fact, the important part of what we are
link |
is housed in the cultural layer and the conscious layer
link |
and not in the hardware hard coding layer.
link |
So that layer is prone to make errors, right?
link |
And anybody who's watched a child grow up
link |
knows that children make absurd errors all the time, right?
link |
That's part of the process, as we were discussing earlier.
link |
It is also true that as you look across
link |
a field of people discussing things,
link |
a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage.
link |
But the tendency of garbage to emerge
link |
and even to spread in the short term
link |
does not say that over the long term,
link |
what sticks is not the valuable ideas.
link |
So there is a high tendency for novelty
link |
to be created in the cultural space,
link |
but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct.
link |
And you have to keep that in mind.
link |
It's not like the genome, right?
link |
Everything is happening at a much higher rate.
link |
Things are being created, they're being destroyed.
link |
And I can't say that, I mean, obviously,
link |
we've seen totalitarianism arise many times,
link |
and it's very destructive each time it does.
link |
So it's not like, hey, freedom to come up
link |
with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage.
link |
But the question is, over time,
link |
does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies?
link |
And I believe that it does.
link |
I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern.
link |
I believe so as well.
link |
The thing is, in the short term, freedom of speech,
link |
absolute freedom of speech can be quite destructive.
link |
But you nevertheless have to hold on to that,
link |
because in the long term, I think you and I, I guess,
link |
are optimistic in the sense that good ideas will win out.
link |
I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work,
link |
but I will say I haven't heard a better idea.
link |
I would also point out that there's something
link |
very significant in this question of the hubris involved
link |
in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion
link |
by censoring, which is the majority of concepts
link |
at the fringe are nonsense.
link |
But the heterodoxy at the fringe,
link |
which is indistinguishable at the beginning
link |
from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress.
link |
So if you decide, hey, the fringe is 99% garbage,
link |
let's just get rid of it, right?
link |
Hey, that's a strong win.
link |
We're getting rid of 99% garbage for 1% something or other.
link |
And the point is, yeah, but that 1% something or other
link |
You're throwing out the key.
link |
And so that's what YouTube is doing.
link |
Frankly, I think at the point that it started censoring
link |
my channel, in the immediate aftermath
link |
of this major reversal over LabLeak,
link |
it should have looked at itself and said,
link |
well, what the hell are we doing?
link |
Who are we censoring?
link |
We're censoring somebody who was just right, right?
link |
In a conflict with the very same people
link |
on whose behalf we are now censoring, right?
link |
That should have caused them to wake up.
link |
So you said one approach, if you're on YouTube,
link |
is this basically let all videos go
link |
that do not violate the law.
link |
Well, I should fix that, okay?
link |
I believe that that is the basic principle.
link |
Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction
link |
between ideas and personal attacks,
link |
doxxing, these other things.
link |
So I agree, there's no value in allowing people
link |
to destroy each other's lives,
link |
even if there's a technical legal defense for it.
link |
Now, how you draw that line, I don't know.
link |
But what I'm talking about is,
link |
yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas,
link |
and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad.
link |
And hopefully that process results
link |
in better ideas winning out.
link |
Yeah, there's an interesting line between ideas,
link |
like the earth is flat,
link |
which I believe you should not censor.
link |
And then you start to encroach on personal attacks.
link |
So not doxxing, yes, but not even getting to that.
link |
There's a certain point where it's like,
link |
that's no longer ideas, that's more,
link |
that's somehow not productive, even if it's wrong.
link |
It feels like believing the earth is flat
link |
is somehow productive,
link |
because maybe there's a tiny percent chance it is.
link |
It just feels like personal attacks, it doesn't,
link |
well, I'm torn on this
link |
because there's assholes in this world,
link |
there's fraudulent people in this world.
link |
So sometimes personal attacks are useful to reveal that,
link |
but there's a line you can cross.
link |
There's a comedy where people make fun of others.
link |
I think that's amazing, that's very powerful,
link |
and that's very useful, even if it's painful.
link |
But then there's like, once it gets to be,
link |
yeah, there's a certain line,
link |
it's a gray area where you cross,
link |
where it's no longer in any possible world productive.
link |
And that's a really weird gray area
link |
for YouTube to operate in.
link |
And that feels like it should be a crowdsource thing,
link |
where people vote on it.
link |
But then again, do you trust the majority to vote
link |
on what is crossing the line and not?
link |
I mean, this is where,
link |
this is really interesting on this particular,
link |
like the scientific aspect of this.
link |
Do you think YouTube should take more of a stance,
link |
not censoring, but to actually have scientists
link |
within YouTube having these kinds of discussions,
link |
and then be able to almost speak out in a transparent way,
link |
this is what we're going to let this video stand,
link |
but here's all these other opinions.
link |
Almost like take a more active role
link |
in its recommendation system,
link |
in trying to present a full picture to you.
link |
Right now they're not,
link |
the recommender systems are not human fine tuned.
link |
They're all based on how you click,
link |
and there's this clustering algorithms.
link |
They're not taking an active role
link |
on giving you the full spectrum of ideas
link |
in the space of science.
link |
They just censor or not.
link |
Well, at the moment,
link |
it's gonna be pretty hard to compel me
link |
that these people should be trusted
link |
with any sort of curation or comment
link |
on matters of evidence,
link |
because they have demonstrated
link |
that they are incapable of doing it well.
link |
You could make such an argument,
link |
and I guess I'm open to the idea of institutions
link |
that would look something like YouTube,
link |
that would be capable of offering something valuable.
link |
I mean, and even just the fact of them
link |
literally curating things and putting some videos
link |
next to others implies something.
link |
So yeah, there's a question to be answered,
link |
but at the moment, no.
link |
At the moment, what it is doing
link |
is quite literally putting not only individual humans
link |
in tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion
link |
of useful tools and making tools that are more hazardous
link |
than has been acknowledged seem safe, right?
link |
But it is also placing humanity in danger
link |
of a permanent relationship with this pathogen.
link |
I cannot emphasize enough how expensive that is.
link |
It's effectively incalculable.
link |
If the relationship becomes permanent,
link |
the number of people who will ultimately suffer
link |
and die from it is indefinitely large.
link |
Yeah, currently the algorithm is very rabbit hole driven,
link |
meaning if you click on Flat Earth videos,
link |
that's all you're going to be presented with
link |
and you're not going to be nicely presented
link |
with arguments against the Flat Earth.
link |
And the flip side of that,
link |
if you watch like quantum mechanics videos
link |
or no, general relativity videos,
link |
it's very rare you're going to get a recommendation.
link |
Have you considered the Earth is flat?
link |
And I think you should have both.
link |
Same with vaccine.
link |
Videos that present the power and the incredible
link |
like biology, genetics, virology about the vaccine,
link |
you're rarely going to get videos
link |
from well respected scientific minds
link |
presenting possible dangers of the vaccine.
link |
And the vice versa is true as well,
link |
which is if you're looking at the dangers of the vaccine
link |
on YouTube, you're not going to get the highest quality
link |
of videos recommended to you.
link |
And I'm not talking about like manually inserted CDC videos
link |
that are like the most untrustworthy things
link |
you can possibly watch about how everybody
link |
should take the vaccine, it's the safest thing ever.
link |
No, it's about incredible, again, MIT colleagues of mine,
link |
incredible biologists, virologists that talk about
link |
the details of how the mRNA vaccines work
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
I think maybe this is me with the AI hat on,
link |
is I think the algorithm can fix a lot of this
link |
and YouTube should build better algorithms
link |
and trust that to a couple of complete freedom of speech
link |
to expand what people are able to think about,
link |
present always varied views,
link |
not balanced in some artificial way, hard coded way,
link |
but balanced in a way that's crowdsourced.
link |
I think that's an algorithm problem that can be solved
link |
because then you can delegate it to the algorithm
link |
as opposed to this hard code censorship
link |
of basically creating artificial boundaries
link |
on what can and can't be discussed,
link |
instead creating a full spectrum of exploration
link |
that can be done and trusting the intelligence of people
link |
to do the exploration.
link |
Well, there's a lot there.
link |
I would say we have to keep in mind
link |
that we're talking about a publicly held company
link |
with shareholders and obligations to them
link |
and that that may make it impossible.
link |
And I remember many years ago,
link |
back in the early days of Google,
link |
I remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search.
link |
It used to be that Google, if you searched,
link |
came up with the same thing for everyone
link |
and then it got personalized and for a while
link |
it was possible to turn off the personalization,
link |
which was still not great
link |
because if everybody else is looking
link |
at a personalized search and you can tune into one
link |
that isn't personalized, that doesn't tell you
link |
why the world is sounding the way it is.
link |
But nonetheless, it was at least an option.
link |
And then that vanished.
link |
And the problem is I think this is literally deranging us.
link |
That in effect, I mean, what you're describing
link |
It is unthinkable that in the face of a campaign
link |
to vaccinate people in order to reach herd immunity
link |
that YouTube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines
link |
when this is, how hazardous the vaccines are
link |
is an unsettled question.
link |
Why is it unthinkable?
link |
That doesn't make any sense from a company perspective.
link |
If intelligent people in large amounts are open minded
link |
and are thinking through the hazards
link |
and the benefits of a vaccine, a company should find
link |
the best videos to present what people are thinking about.
link |
Well, let's come up with a hypothetical.
link |
Okay, let's come up with a very deadly disease
link |
for which there's a vaccine that is very safe,
link |
though not perfectly safe.
link |
And we are then faced with YouTube trying to figure out
link |
what to do for somebody searching on vaccine safety.
link |
Suppose it is necessary in order to drive
link |
the pathogen to extinction, something like smallpox,
link |
that people get on board with the vaccine.
link |
But there's a tiny fringe of people who thinks
link |
that the vaccine is a mind control agent.
link |
So should YouTube direct people to the only claims
link |
against this vaccine, which is that it's a mind control
link |
agent when in fact the vaccine is very safe,
link |
whatever that means.
link |
If that were the actual configuration of the puzzle,
link |
then YouTube would be doing active harm,
link |
pointing you to this other video potentially.
link |
Now, yes, I would love to live in a world where people
link |
are up to the challenge of sorting that out.
link |
But my basic point would be, if it's an evidentiary
link |
question, and there is essentially no evidence
link |
that the vaccine is a mind control agent,
link |
and there's plenty of evidence that the vaccine is safe,
link |
then while you look for this video,
link |
we're gonna give you this one, puts it on a par, right?
link |
So for the mind that's tracking how much thought
link |
is there behind it's safe versus how much thought
link |
is there behind it's a mind control agent
link |
will result in artificially elevating this.
link |
Now in the current case, what we've seen is not this at all.
link |
We have seen evidence obscured in order to create
link |
a false story about safety.
link |
And we saw the inverse with ivermectin.
link |
We saw a campaign to portray the drug as more dangerous
link |
and less effective than the evidence
link |
clearly suggested it was.
link |
So we're not talking about a comparable thing,
link |
but I guess my point is the algorithmic solution
link |
that you point to creates a problem of its own,
link |
which is that it means that the way to get exposure
link |
is to generate something fringy.
link |
If you're the only thing on some fringe,
link |
then suddenly YouTube would be recommending those things,
link |
and that's obviously a gameable system at best.
link |
Yeah, but the solution to that,
link |
I know you're creating a thought experiment,
link |
maybe playing a little bit of a devil's advocate.
link |
I think the solution to that is not to limit the algorithm
link |
in the case of the super deadly virus.
link |
It's for the scientists to step up
link |
and become better communicators, more charismatic,
link |
fight the battle of ideas, sort of create better videos.
link |
Like if the virus is truly deadly,
link |
you have a lot more ammunition, a lot more data,
link |
a lot more material to work with
link |
in terms of communicating with the public.
link |
So be better at communicating and stop being,
link |
you have to start trusting the intelligence of people
link |
and also being transparent
link |
and playing the game of the internet,
link |
which is like, what is the internet hungry for, I believe?
link |
Authenticity, stop looking like you're full of shit.
link |
The scientific community,
link |
if there's any flaw that I currently see,
link |
especially the people that are in public office,
link |
that like Anthony Fauci,
link |
they look like they're full of shit
link |
and I know they're brilliant.
link |
Why don't they look more authentic?
link |
So they're losing that game
link |
and I think a lot of people observing this entire system now,
link |
younger scientists are seeing this and saying,
link |
okay, if I want to continue being a scientist
link |
in the public eye and I want to be effective at my job,
link |
I'm gonna have to be a lot more authentic.
link |
So they're learning the lesson,
link |
this evolutionary system is working.
link |
So there's just a younger generation of minds coming up
link |
that I think will do a much better job
link |
in this battle of ideas
link |
that when the much more dangerous virus comes along,
link |
they'll be able to be better communicators.
link |
At least that's the hope.
link |
Using the algorithm to control that is,
link |
I feel like is a big problem.
link |
So you're going to have the same problem with a deadly virus
link |
as with the current virus
link |
if you let YouTube draw hard lines
link |
by the PR and the marketing people
link |
versus the broad community of scientists.
link |
Well, in some sense you're suggesting something
link |
that's close kin to what I was saying
link |
about freedom of expression ultimately
link |
provides an advantage to better ideas.
link |
So I'm in agreement broadly speaking,
link |
but I would also say there's probably some sort of,
link |
let's imagine the world that you propose
link |
where YouTube shows you the alternative point of view.
link |
That has the problem that I suggest,
link |
but one thing you could do is you could give us the tools
link |
to understand what we're looking at, right?
link |
You could give us,
link |
so first of all, there's something I think myopic,
link |
solipsistic, narcissistic about an algorithm
link |
that serves shareholders by showing you what you want to see
link |
rather than what you need to know, right?
link |
That's the distinction is flattering you,
link |
playing to your blind spot
link |
is something that algorithm will figure out,
link |
but it's not healthy for us all
link |
to have Google playing to our blind spot.
link |
It's very, very dangerous.
link |
So what I really want is analytics that allow me
link |
or maybe options and analytics.
link |
The options should allow me to see
link |
what alternative perspectives are being explored, right?
link |
So here's the thing I'm searching
link |
and it leads me down this road, right?
link |
Let's say it's ivermectin, okay?
link |
I find all of this evidence that ivermectin works.
link |
I find all of these discussions
link |
and people talk about various protocols and this and that.
link |
And then I could say, all right, what is the other side?
link |
And I could see who is searching, not as individuals,
link |
but what demographics are searching alternatives.
link |
And maybe you could even combine it
link |
with something Reddit like where effectively,
link |
let's say that there was a position that, I don't know,
link |
that a vaccine is a mind control device
link |
and you could have a steel man this argument competition
link |
effectively and the better answers that steel man
link |
and as well as possible would rise to the top.
link |
And so you could read the top three or four explanations
link |
about why this really credibly is a mind control product.
link |
And you can say, well, that doesn't really add up.
link |
I can check these three things myself
link |
and they can't possibly be right, right?
link |
And you could dismiss it.
link |
And then as an argument that was credible,
link |
let's say plate tectonics before
link |
that was an accepted concept,
link |
you'd say, wait a minute,
link |
there is evidence for plate tectonics.
link |
As crazy as it sounds that the continents
link |
are floating around on liquid,
link |
actually that's not so implausible.
link |
We've got these subduction zones,
link |
we've got a geology that is compatible,
link |
we've got puzzle piece continents
link |
that seem to fit together.
link |
Wow, that's a surprising amount of evidence
link |
for that position.
link |
So I'm gonna file some Bayesian probability with it
link |
that's updated for the fact that actually
link |
the steel man arguments better than I was expecting, right?
link |
So I could imagine something like that
link |
where A, I would love the search to be indifferent
link |
to who's searching, right?
link |
The solipsistic thing is too dangerous.
link |
So the search could be general,
link |
so we would all get a sense
link |
for what everybody else was seeing too.
link |
And then some layer that didn't have anything to do
link |
with what YouTube points you to or not,
link |
but allowed you to see, you know,
link |
the general pattern of adherence
link |
to searching for information.
link |
And again, a layer in which those things could be defended.
link |
So you could hear what a good argument sounded like
link |
rather than just hear a caricatured argument.
link |
Yeah, and also reward people,
link |
creators that have demonstrated
link |
like a track record of open mindedness
link |
and correctness as much as it could be measured
link |
over a long term and sort of,
link |
I mean, a lot of this maps
link |
to incentivizing good longterm behavior,
link |
not immediate kind of dopamine rush kind of signals.
link |
I think ultimately the algorithm on the individual level
link |
should optimize for personal growth,
link |
longterm happiness, just growth intellectually,
link |
growth in terms of lifestyle personally and so on,
link |
as opposed to immediate.
link |
I think that's going to build a better society,
link |
not even just like truth,
link |
because I think truth is a complicated thing.
link |
It's more just you growing as a person,
link |
exploring the space of ideas, changing your mind often,
link |
increasing the level to which you're open minded,
link |
the knowledge base you're operating from,
link |
the willingness to empathize with others,
link |
all those kinds of things the algorithm should optimize for.
link |
Like creating a better human at the individual level
link |
that you're, I think that's a great business model
link |
because the person that's using this tool
link |
will then be happier with themselves for having used it
link |
and will be a lifelong quote unquote customer.
link |
I think it's a great business model
link |
to make a happy, open minded, knowledgeable,
link |
better human being.
link |
It's a terrible business model under the current system.
link |
What you want is to build the system
link |
in which it is a great business model.
link |
Why is it a terrible model?
link |
Because it will be decimated by those
link |
who play to the short term.
link |
I mean, I think we're living it.
link |
Well, no, because if you have the alternative
link |
that presents itself,
link |
it points out the emperor has no clothes.
link |
I mean, it points out that YouTube is operating in this way,
link |
Twitter is operating in this way,
link |
Facebook is operating in this way.
link |
How long term would you like the wisdom to prove at?
link |
Well, even a week is better when it's currently happening.
link |
Right, but the problem is,
link |
if a week loses out to an hour, right?
link |
And I don't think it loses out.
link |
It loses out in the short term.
link |
At least you're a great communicator
link |
and you basically say, look, here's the metrics.
link |
And a lot of it is like how people actually feel.
link |
Like this is what people experience with social media.
link |
They look back at the previous month and say,
link |
I felt shitty on a lot of days because of social media.
link |
If you look back at the previous few weeks and say,
link |
wow, I'm a better person because of that month happened.
link |
That's, they immediately choose the product
link |
that's going to lead to that.
link |
That's what love for products looks like.
link |
If you love, like a lot of people love their Tesla car,
link |
like that's, or iPhone or like beautiful design.
link |
That's what love looks like.
link |
You look back, I'm a better person
link |
for having used this thing.
link |
Well, you got to ask yourself the question though,
link |
if this is such a great business model,
link |
why isn't it devolving?
link |
Why don't we see it?
link |
Honestly, it's competence.
link |
It's like people are just, it's not easy to build new,
link |
it's not easy to build products, tools, systems
link |
It's kind of a new idea.
link |
We've gone through this, everything we're seeing now
link |
comes from the ideas of the initial birth of the internet.
link |
There just needs to be new sets of tools
link |
that are incentivizing long term personal growth
link |
Right, but what we have is a market
link |
that doesn't favor this, right?
link |
I mean, for one thing, we had an alternative to Facebook,
link |
right, that looked, you owned your own data,
link |
it wasn't exploitative and Facebook bought
link |
a huge interest in it and it died.
link |
I mean, who do you know who's on diaspora?
link |
The execution there was not good.
link |
Right, but it could have gotten better, right?
link |
I don't think that the argument that why hasn't somebody
link |
done it a good argument for it's not going to completely
link |
destroy all of Twitter and Facebook when somebody does it
link |
or Twitter will catch up and pivot to the algorithm.
link |
This is not what I'm saying.
link |
There's obviously great ideas that remain unexplored
link |
because nobody has gotten to the foothill
link |
that would allow you to explore them.
link |
That's true, but you know, an internet
link |
that was non predatory is an obvious idea
link |
and many of us know that we want it
link |
and many of us have seen prototypes of it
link |
and we don't move because there's no audience there.
link |
So the network effects cause you to stay
link |
with the predatory internet.
link |
But let me just, I wasn't kidding about build the system
link |
in which your idea is a great business plan.
link |
So in our upcoming book, Heather and I in our last chapter
link |
explore something called the fourth frontier
link |
and fourth frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version
link |
of civilization, which we freely admit
link |
we can't tell you very much about.
link |
It's something that would have to be,
link |
we would have to prototype our way there.
link |
We would have to effectively navigate our way there.
link |
But the result would be very much
link |
like what you're describing.
link |
It would be something that effectively liberates humans
link |
meaningfully and most importantly,
link |
it has to feel like growth without depending on growth.
link |
In other words, human beings are creatures
link |
that like every other creature
link |
is effectively looking for growth, right?
link |
We are looking for underexploited
link |
or unexploited opportunities and when we find them,
link |
our ancestors for example, they happen into a new valley
link |
that was unexplored by people.
link |
Their population would grow until it hit carrying capacity.
link |
So there would be this great feeling of there's abundance
link |
until you hit carrying capacity, which is inevitable
link |
and then zero sum dynamics would set in.
link |
So in order for human beings to flourish longterm,
link |
the way to get there is to satisfy the desire for growth
link |
without hooking it to actual growth,
link |
which only moves and fits and starts.
link |
And this is actually, I believe the key
link |
to avoiding these spasms of human tragedy
link |
when in the absence of growth,
link |
people do something that causes their population
link |
to experience growth, which is they go and make war on
link |
or commit genocide against some other population,
link |
which is something we obviously have to stop.
link |
By the way, this is a hunter gatherers guide
link |
to the 21st century coauthored.
link |
With your wife, Heather, being released in September.
link |
I believe you said you're going to do
link |
a little bit of a preview videos on each chapter
link |
leading up to the release.
link |
So I'm looking forward to the last chapter
link |
as well as all the previous ones.
link |
I have a few questions on that.
link |
So you generally have faith to clarify that technology
link |
could be the thing that empowers this kind of future.
link |
Well, if you just let technology evolve,
link |
it's going to be our undoing, right?
link |
One of the things that I fault my libertarian friends for
link |
is this faith that the market is going to find solutions
link |
without destroying us.
link |
And my sense is I'm a very strong believer in markets.
link |
I believe in their power
link |
even above some market fundamentalists.
link |
But what I don't believe is that they should be allowed
link |
to plot our course, right?
link |
Markets are very good at figuring out how to do things.
link |
They are not good at all about figuring out
link |
what we should do, right?
link |
What we should want.
link |
We have to tell markets what we want
link |
and then they can tell us how to do it best.
link |
And if we adopted that kind of pro market
link |
but in a context where it's not steering,
link |
where human wellbeing is actually the driver,
link |
we can do remarkable things.
link |
And the technology that emerges
link |
would naturally be enhancing of human wellbeing.
link |
No, but overwhelmingly so.
link |
But at the moment, markets are finding
link |
our every defective character and exploiting them
link |
and making huge profits
link |
and making us worse to each other in the process.
link |
Before we leave COVID 19,
link |
let me ask you about a very difficult topic,
link |
which is the vaccines.
link |
So I took the Pfizer vaccine, the two shots.
link |
You have been taking ivermectin.
link |
So one of the arguments
link |
against the discussion of ivermectin
link |
is that it prevents people
link |
from being fully willing to get the vaccine.
link |
How would you compare ivermectin
link |
and the vaccine for COVID 19?
link |
All right, that's a good question.
link |
I would say, first of all,
link |
there are some hazards with the vaccine
link |
that people need to be aware of.
link |
There are some things that we cannot rule out
link |
and for which there is some evidence.
link |
The two that I think people should be tracking
link |
is the possibility, some would say a likelihood,
link |
that a vaccine of this nature,
link |
that is to say very narrowly focused on a single antigen,
link |
is an evolutionary pressure
link |
that will drive the emergence of variants
link |
that will escape the protection
link |
that comes from the vaccine.
link |
So this is a hazard.
link |
It is a particular hazard in light of the fact
link |
that these vaccines have a substantial number
link |
of breakthrough cases.
link |
So one danger is that a person who has been vaccinated
link |
will shed viruses that are specifically less visible
link |
or invisible to the immunity created by the vaccines.
link |
So we may be creating the next pandemic
link |
by applying the pressure of vaccines
link |
at a point that it doesn't make sense to.
link |
The other danger has to do with something called
link |
antibody dependent enhancement,
link |
which is something that we see in certain diseases
link |
like dengue fever.
link |
You may know that dengue, one gets a case,
link |
and then their second case is much more devastating.
link |
So break bone fever is when you get your second case
link |
of dengue, and dengue effectively utilizes
link |
the immune response that is produced by prior exposure
link |
to attack the body in ways that it is incapable
link |
of doing before exposure.
link |
So this is apparently, this pattern has apparently blocked
link |
past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses.
link |
Whether it will happen here or not,
link |
it is still too early to say.
link |
But before we even get to the question
link |
of harm done to individuals by these vaccines,
link |
we have to ask about what the overall impact is going to be.
link |
And it's not clear in the way people think it is
link |
that if we vaccinate enough people, the pandemic will end.
link |
It could be that we vaccinate people
link |
and make the pandemic worse.
link |
And while nobody can say for sure
link |
that that's where we're headed,
link |
it is at least something to be aware of.
link |
So don't vaccines usually create
link |
that kind of evolutionary pressure
link |
to create deadlier, different strains of the virus?
link |
So is there something particular with these mRNA vaccines
link |
that's uniquely dangerous in this regard?
link |
Well, it's not even just the mRNA vaccines.
link |
The mRNA vaccines and the adenovector DNA vaccine
link |
all share the same vulnerability,
link |
which is they are very narrowly focused
link |
on one subunit of the spike protein.
link |
So that is a very concentrated evolutionary signal.
link |
We are also deploying it in mid pandemic
link |
and it takes time for immunity to develop.
link |
So part of the problem here,
link |
if you inoculated a population before encounter
link |
with a pathogen, then there might be substantially
link |
enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from happening.
link |
But in this case, we are inoculating people
link |
as they are encountering those who are sick with the disease.
link |
And what that means is the disease is now faced
link |
with a lot of opportunities
link |
to effectively evolutionarily practice escape strategies.
link |
So one thing is the timing,
link |
the other thing is the narrow focus.
link |
Now in a traditional vaccine,
link |
you would typically not have one antigen, right?
link |
You would have basically a virus full of antigens
link |
and the immune system would therefore
link |
produce a broader response.
link |
So that is the case for people who have had COVID, right?
link |
They have an immunity that is broader
link |
because it wasn't so focused
link |
on one part of the spike protein.
link |
So anyway, there is something unique here.
link |
So these platforms create that special hazard.
link |
They also have components that we haven't used before
link |
So for example, the lipid nanoparticles
link |
that coat the RNAs are distributing themselves
link |
around the body in a way that will have unknown consequences.
link |
So anyway, there's reason for concern.
link |
Is it possible for you to steel man the argument
link |
that everybody should get vaccinated?
link |
The argument that everybody should get vaccinated
link |
is that nothing is perfectly safe.
link |
Phase three trials showed good safety for the vaccines.
link |
Now that may or may not be actually true,
link |
but what we saw suggested high degree of efficacy
link |
and a high degree of safety for the vaccines
link |
that inoculating people quickly
link |
and therefore dropping the landscape of available victims
link |
for the pathogen to a very low number
link |
so that herd immunity drives it to extinction
link |
requires us all to take our share of the risk
link |
and that because driving it to extinction
link |
should be our highest priority that really
link |
people shouldn't think too much about the various nuances
link |
because overwhelmingly fewer people will die
link |
if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine
link |
than will die from COVID if they're not vaccinated.
link |
And with the vaccine as it currently is being deployed,
link |
that is a quite a likely scenario
link |
that everything, you know, the virus will fade away.
link |
In the following sense that the probability
link |
that a more dangerous strain will be created is nonzero,
link |
but it's not 50%, it's something smaller.
link |
And so the most likely, well, I don't know,
link |
maybe you disagree with that,
link |
but the scenario we're most likely to see now
link |
that the vaccine is here is that the virus,
link |
the effects of the virus will fade away.
link |
First of all, I don't believe that the probability
link |
of creating a worse pandemic is low enough to discount.
link |
I think the probability is fairly high
link |
and frankly, we are seeing a wave of variants
link |
that we will have to do a careful analysis
link |
to figure out what exactly that has to do
link |
with campaigns of vaccination,
link |
where they have been, where they haven't been,
link |
where the variants emerged from.
link |
But I believe that what we are seeing is a disturbing pattern
link |
that reflects that those who were advising caution
link |
may well have been right.
link |
The data here, by the way, and the small tangent is terrible.
link |
And why is it terrible is another question, right?
link |
This is where I started getting angry.
link |
It's like, there's an obvious opportunity
link |
for exceptionally good data, for exceptionally rigorous,
link |
like even the self, like the website for self reporting,
link |
side effects for, not side effects,
link |
but negative effects, right?
link |
Adverse events, sorry, for the vaccine.
link |
Like, there's many things I could say
link |
from both the study perspective,
link |
but mostly, let me just put on my hat of like HTML
link |
and like web design.
link |
Like, it's like the worst website.
link |
It makes it so unpleasant to report.
link |
It makes it so unclear what you're reporting.
link |
If somebody actually has serious effect,
link |
like if you have very mild effects,
link |
what are the incentives for you to even use
link |
that crappy website with many pages and forms
link |
that don't make any sense?
link |
If you have adverse effects,
link |
what are the incentives for you to use that website?
link |
What is the trust that you have
link |
that this information will be used well?
link |
All those kinds of things.
link |
And the data about who's getting vaccinated,
link |
anonymized data about who's getting vaccinated,
link |
where, when, with what vaccine,
link |
coupled with the adverse effects,
link |
all of that we should be collecting.
link |
Instead, we're completely not.
link |
We're doing it in a crappy way
link |
and using that crappy data to make conclusions
link |
that you then twist.
link |
You're basically collecting in a way
link |
that can arrive at whatever conclusions you want.
link |
And the data is being collected by the institutions,
link |
by governments, and so therefore,
link |
it's obviously they're going to try
link |
to construct any kind of narratives they want
link |
based on this crappy data.
link |
Reminds me of much of psychology, the field that I love,
link |
but is flawed in many fundamental ways.
link |
So rant over, but coupled with the dangers
link |
that you're speaking to,
link |
we don't have even the data to understand the dangers.
link |
Yeah, I'm gonna pick up on your rant and say,
link |
we, estimates of the degree of underreporting in VAERS
link |
are that it is 10% of the real to 100%.
link |
And that's the system for reporting.
link |
Yeah, the VAERS system is the system
link |
for reporting adverse events.
link |
So in the US, we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths
link |
that seem in time to be associated with vaccination.
link |
That is an undercount, almost certainly,
link |
and by a large factor.
link |
We don't know how large.
link |
I've seen estimates, 25,000 dead in the US alone.
link |
Now, you can make the argument that, okay,
link |
that's a large number,
link |
but the necessity of immunizing the population
link |
to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction
link |
is such that it's an acceptable number.
link |
But I would point out
link |
that that actually does not make any sense.
link |
And the reason it doesn't make any sense
link |
is actually there are several reasons.
link |
One, if that was really your point,
link |
that yes, many, many people are gonna die,
link |
but many more will die if we don't do this.
link |
Were that your approach,
link |
you would not be inoculating people who had had COVID 19,
link |
which is a large population.
link |
There's no reason to expose those people to danger.
link |
Their risk of adverse events
link |
in the case that they have them is greater.
link |
So there's no reason that we would be allowing
link |
those people to face a risk of death
link |
if this was really about an acceptable number of deaths
link |
arising out of this set of vaccines.
link |
I would also point out
link |
there's something incredibly bizarre.
link |
And I struggle to find language that is strong enough
link |
for the horror of vaccinating children in this case
link |
because children suffer a greater risk of longterm effects
link |
because they are going to live longer.
link |
And because this is earlier in their development,
link |
therefore it impacts systems that are still forming.
link |
They tolerate COVID well.
link |
And so the benefit to them is very small.
link |
And so the only argument for doing this
link |
is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID
link |
than we think, and therefore they may be integral
link |
to the way the virus spreads to the population.
link |
But if that's the reason that we are inoculating children,
link |
and there has been some revision in the last day or two
link |
about the recommendation on this
link |
because of the adverse events
link |
that have shown up in children,
link |
but to the extent that we were vaccinating children,
link |
we were doing it to protect old, infirm people
link |
who are the most likely to succumb to COVID 19.
link |
What society puts children in danger,
link |
robs children of life to save old, infirm people?
link |
That's upside down.
link |
So there's something about the way we are going about
link |
vaccinating, who we are vaccinating,
link |
what dangers we are pretending don't exist
link |
that suggests that to some set of people,
link |
vaccinating people is a good in and of itself,
link |
that that is the objective of the exercise,
link |
not herd immunity.
link |
And the last thing, and I'm sorry,
link |
I don't wanna prevent you from jumping in here,
link |
but the second reason, in addition to the fact
link |
that we're exposing people to danger
link |
that we should not be exposing them to.
link |
By the way, as a tiny tangent,
link |
another huge part of this soup
link |
that should have been part of it
link |
that's an incredible solution is large scale testing.
link |
But that might be another couple hour conversation,
link |
but there's these solutions that are obvious
link |
that were available from the very beginning.
link |
So you could argue that iveractin is not that obvious,
link |
but maybe the whole point is you have aggressive,
link |
very fast research that leads to a meta analysis
link |
and then large scale production and deployment.
link |
Okay, at least that possibility
link |
should be seriously considered,
link |
coupled with a serious consideration
link |
of large scale deployment of testing,
link |
at home testing that could have accelerated
link |
the speed at which we reached that herd immunity.
link |
But I don't even wanna.
link |
Well, let me just say, I am also completely shocked
link |
that we did not get on high quality testing early
link |
and that we are still suffering from this even now,
link |
because just the simple ability to track
link |
where the virus moves between people
link |
would tell us a lot about its mode of transmission,
link |
which would allow us to protect ourselves better.
link |
Instead, that information was hard won
link |
and for no good reason.
link |
So I also find this mysterious.
link |
You've spoken with Eric Weinstein, your brother,
link |
on his podcast, The Portal,
link |
about the ideas that eventually led to the paper
link |
you published titled, The Reserved Capacity Hypothesis.
link |
I think first, can you explain this paper
link |
and the ideas that led up to it?
link |
Sure, easier to explain the conclusion of the paper.
link |
There's a question about why a creature
link |
that can replace its cells with new cells
link |
grows feeble and inefficient with age.
link |
We call that process, which is otherwise called aging,
link |
we call it senescence.
link |
And senescence, in this paper, it is hypothesized,
link |
is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention
link |
feature of our bodies.
link |
That each cell has a limit on the number of times
link |
There are a few cells in the body that are exceptional,
link |
but most of our cells can only divide
link |
a limited number of times.
link |
That's called the Hayflick limit.
link |
And the Hayflick limit reduces the ability
link |
of the organism to replace tissues.
link |
It therefore results in a failure over time
link |
of maintenance and repair.
link |
And that explains why we become decrepit as we grow old.
link |
The question was why would that be,
link |
especially in light of the fact that the mechanism
link |
that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce
link |
is something called a telomere.
link |
Telomere is a, it's not a gene, but it's a DNA sequence
link |
at the ends of our chromosomes
link |
that is just simply repetitive.
link |
And the number of repeats functions like a counter.
link |
So there's a number of repeats that you have
link |
after development is finished.
link |
And then each time the cell divides a little bit
link |
of telomere is lost.
link |
And at the point that the telomere becomes critically short,
link |
the cell stops dividing even though it still has
link |
the capacity to do so.
link |
Stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes
link |
than it did when it had more telomere.
link |
So what my work did was it looked at the fact
link |
that the telomeric shortening was being studied
link |
by two different groups.
link |
It was being studied by people who were interested
link |
in counteracting the aging process.
link |
And it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion
link |
by people who were interested in tumorigenesis and cancer.
link |
The thought being because it was true that when one looked
link |
into tumors, they always had telomerase active.
link |
That's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres.
link |
So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt
link |
to the lengthening of telomeres
link |
in order to counteract cancer.
link |
And the folks who were studying the senescence process
link |
were interested in lengthening telomeres
link |
in order to generate greater repair capacity.
link |
And my point was evolutionarily speaking,
link |
this looks like a pleiotropic effect
link |
that the genes which create the tendency of the cells
link |
to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves
link |
are providing a benefit in youth,
link |
which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer
link |
at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble
link |
and inefficient and eventually die.
link |
And that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory
link |
by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams,
link |
one of the great 20th century evolutionists
link |
who argued that senescence would have to be caused
link |
by pleiotropic genes that cause early life benefits
link |
at unavoidable late life costs.
link |
And although this isn't the exact nature of the system,
link |
he predicted it matches what he was expecting
link |
in many regards to a shocking degree.
link |
That said, the focus of the paper is about the,
link |
well, let me just read the abstract.
link |
We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed,
link |
this is the end of the abstract.
link |
We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols
link |
designed to increase reproductive output,
link |
simultaneously exert strong selection
link |
against reproductive senescence
link |
and virtually eliminate selection
link |
that would otherwise favor tumor suppression.
link |
This appears to have greatly elongated
link |
the telomeres of laboratory mice.
link |
With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled,
link |
these animals are unreliable models
link |
of normal senescence and tumor formation.
link |
So basically using these mice is not going to lead
link |
to the right kinds of conclusions.
link |
Safety tests employing these animals
link |
likely overestimate cancer risks
link |
and underestimate tissue damage
link |
and consequent accelerated senescence.
link |
So I think, especially with your discussion with Eric,
link |
the conclusion of this paper has to do with the fact that,
link |
like we shouldn't be using these mice to test the safety
link |
or to make conclusions about cancer or senescence.
link |
Is that the basic takeaway?
link |
Like basically saying that the length of these telomeres
link |
is an important variable to consider.
link |
Well, let's put it this way.
link |
I think there was a reason that the world of scientists
link |
who was working on telomeres
link |
did not spot the pleiotropic relationship
link |
that was the key argument in my paper.
link |
The reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result
link |
that everybody knew, which seemed inconsistent.
link |
The result was that mice have very long telomeres,
link |
but they do not have very long lives.
link |
Now, we can talk about what the actual meaning
link |
of don't have very long lives is,
link |
but in the end, I was confronted with a hypothesis
link |
that would explain a great many features
link |
of the way mammals and indeed vertebrates age,
link |
but it was inconsistent with one result.
link |
And at first I thought,
link |
maybe there's something wrong with the result.
link |
Maybe this is one of these cases
link |
where the result was achieved once
link |
through some bad protocol and everybody else
link |
was repeating it, didn't turn out to be the case.
link |
Many laboratories had established
link |
that mice had ultra long telomeres.
link |
And so I began to wonder whether or not
link |
there was something about the breeding protocols
link |
that generated these mice.
link |
And what that would predict is that the mice
link |
that have long telomeres would be laboratory mice
link |
and that wild mice would not.
link |
And Carol Greider, who agreed to collaborate with me,
link |
tested that hypothesis and showed that it was indeed true,
link |
that wild derived mice, or at least mice
link |
that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time
link |
did not have ultra long telomeres.
link |
Now, what this implied though, as you read,
link |
is that our breeding protocols
link |
generate lengthening of telomeres.
link |
And the implication of that is that the animals
link |
that have these very long telomeres
link |
will be hyper prone to create tumors.
link |
They will be extremely resistant to toxins
link |
because they have effectively an infinite capacity
link |
to replace any damaged tissue.
link |
And so ironically, if you give one of these
link |
ultra long telomere lab mice a toxin,
link |
if the toxin doesn't outright kill it,
link |
it may actually increase its lifespan
link |
because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy.
link |
So the reason that chemotherapy works
link |
is that dividing cells are more vulnerable
link |
than cells that are not dividing.
link |
And so if this mouse has effectively
link |
had its cancer protection turned off,
link |
and it has cells dividing too rapidly,
link |
and you give it a toxin, you will slow down its tumors
link |
faster than you harm its other tissues.
link |
And so you'll get a paradoxical result
link |
that actually some drug that's toxic
link |
seems to benefit the mouse.
link |
Now, I don't think that that was understood
link |
before I published my paper.
link |
Now I'm pretty sure it has to be.
link |
And the problem is that this actually is a system
link |
that serves pharmaceutical companies
link |
that have the difficult job of bringing compounds to market,
link |
many of which will be toxic.
link |
Maybe all of them will be toxic.
link |
And these mice predispose our system
link |
to declare these toxic compounds safe.
link |
And in fact, I believe we've seen the errors
link |
that result from using these mice a number of times,
link |
most famously with Vioxx, which turned out
link |
to do conspicuous heart damage.
link |
Why do you think this paper and this idea
link |
has not gotten significant traction?
link |
Well, my collaborator, Carol Greider,
link |
said something to me that rings in my ears to this day.
link |
She initially, after she showed that laboratory mice
link |
have anomalously long telomeres
link |
and that wild mice don't have long telomeres,
link |
I asked her where she was going to publish that result
link |
so that I could cite it in my paper.
link |
And she said that she was going to keep the result in house
link |
rather than publish it.
link |
And at the time, I was a young graduate student.
link |
I didn't really understand what she was saying.
link |
But in some sense, the knowledge that a model organism
link |
is broken in a way that creates the likelihood
link |
that certain results will be reliably generateable,
link |
you can publish a paper and make a big splash
link |
with such a thing, or you can exploit the fact
link |
that you know how those models will misbehave
link |
and other people don't.
link |
So there's a question, if somebody is motivated cynically
link |
and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight
link |
into biology because they predict things
link |
better than others do, knowing where the flaw is
link |
so that your predictions come out true is advantageous.
link |
At the same time, I can't help but imagine
link |
that the pharmaceutical industry,
link |
when it figured out that the mice were predisposed
link |
to suggest that drugs were safe,
link |
didn't leap to fix the problem because in some sense,
link |
it was the perfect cover for the difficult job
link |
of bringing drugs to market and then discovering
link |
their actual toxicity profile, right?
link |
This made things look safer than they were
link |
and I believe a lot of profits
link |
have likely been generated downstream.
link |
So to kind of play devil's advocate,
link |
it's also possible that this particular,
link |
the length of the telomeres is not a strong variable
link |
for the drug development and for the conclusions
link |
that Carol and others have been studying.
link |
Is it possible for that to be the case?
link |
So one reason she and others could be ignoring this
link |
is because it's not a strong variable.
link |
Well, I don't believe so and in fact,
link |
at the point that I went to publish my paper,
link |
Carol published her result.
link |
She did so in a way that did not make a huge splash.
link |
Did she, I apologize if I don't know how,
link |
what was the emphasis of her publication of that paper?
link |
Was it purely just kind of showing data
link |
or is there more, because in your paper,
link |
there's a kind of more of a philosophical statement as well.
link |
Well, my paper was motivated by interest
link |
in the evolutionary dynamics around senescence.
link |
I wasn't pursuing grants or anything like that.
link |
I was just working on a puzzle I thought was interesting.
link |
Carol has, of course, gone on to win a Nobel Prize
link |
for her co discovery with Elizabeth Greider
link |
of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres.
link |
But anyway, she's a heavy hitter in the academic world.
link |
I don't know exactly what her purpose was.
link |
I do know that she told me she wasn't planning to publish
link |
and I do know that I discovered that she was
link |
in the process of publishing very late
link |
and when I asked her to send me the paper
link |
to see whether or not she had put evidence in it
link |
that the hypothesis had come from me,
link |
she grudgingly sent it to me
link |
and my name was nowhere mentioned
link |
and she broke contact at that point.
link |
What it is that motivated her, I don't know,
link |
but I don't think it can possibly be
link |
that this result is unimportant.
link |
The fact is, the reason I called her in the first place,
link |
an established contact that generated our collaboration,
link |
was that she was a leading light in the field
link |
of telomeric studies and because of that,
link |
this question about whether the model organisms
link |
are distorting the understanding
link |
of the functioning of telomeres, it's central.
link |
Do you feel like you've been,
link |
as a young graduate student, do you think Carol
link |
or do you think the scientific community
link |
broadly screwed you over in some way?
link |
I don't think of it in those terms.
link |
Probably partly because it's not productive
link |
but I have a complex relationship with this story.
link |
On the one hand, I'm livid with Carol Greider
link |
She absolutely pretended that I didn't exist in this story
link |
and I don't think I was a threat to her.
link |
My interest was as an evolutionary biologist,
link |
I had made an evolutionary contribution,
link |
she had tested a hypothesis and frankly,
link |
I think it would have been better for her
link |
if she had acknowledged what I had done.
link |
I think it would have enhanced her work
link |
and I was, let's put it this way,
link |
when I watched her Nobel lecture,
link |
and I should say there's been a lot of confusion
link |
about this Nobel stuff.
link |
I've never said that I should have gotten a Nobel prize.
link |
People have misportrayed that.
link |
In listening to her lecture,
link |
I had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences
link |
of my life because she presented the work
link |
that resulted from my hypothesis.
link |
She presented it as she had in her paper
link |
with no acknowledgement of where it had come from
link |
and she had in fact portrayed the distortion
link |
of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact
link |
because it allowed testing hypotheses
link |
that would otherwise not be testable.
link |
You have to understand as a young scientist
link |
to watch work that you have done presented
link |
in what's surely the most important lecture
link |
of her career, it's thrilling.
link |
It was thrilling to see her figures
link |
projected on the screen there.
link |
To have been part of work that was important enough
link |
for that felt great and of course,
link |
to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible.
link |
So anyway, that's sort of where I am with it.
link |
My sense is what I'm really troubled by in this story
link |
is the fact that as far as I know,
link |
the flaw with the mice has not been addressed.
link |
And actually, Eric did some looking into this.
link |
He tried to establish by calling the Jack's lab
link |
and trying to ascertain what had happened with the colonies,
link |
whether any change in protocol had occurred
link |
and he couldn't get anywhere.
link |
There was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue.
link |
So I'm very troubled by the fact that as a father,
link |
for example, I'm in no position to protect my family
link |
from the hazard that I believe lurks
link |
in our medicine cabinets, right?
link |
Even though I'm aware of where the hazard comes from,
link |
it doesn't tell me anything useful
link |
about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage
link |
if that is ultimately tested.
link |
And that's a very frustrating position to be in.
link |
On the other hand, there's a part of me
link |
that's even still grateful to Carol for taking my call.
link |
She didn't have to take my call
link |
and talk to some young graduate student
link |
who had some evolutionary idea
link |
that wasn't in her wheelhouse specifically, and yet she did.
link |
And for a while, she was a good collaborator, so.
link |
Well, can I, I have to proceed carefully here because
link |
it's a complicated topic.
link |
So she took the call.
link |
And you kind of, you're kind of saying that
link |
she basically erased credit, you know,
link |
pretending you didn't exist in some kind of,
link |
in a certain sense.
link |
Let me phrase it this way.
link |
I've, as a research scientist at MIT,
link |
I've had, and especially just part of
link |
a large set of collaborations,
link |
I've had a lot of students come to me
link |
and talk to me about ideas,
link |
perhaps less interesting than what we're discussing here
link |
in the space of AI, that I've been thinking about anyway.
link |
In general, with everything I'm doing with robotics, people
link |
have told me a bunch of ideas
link |
that I'm already thinking about.
link |
The point is taking that idea, see, this is different
link |
because the idea has more power in the space
link |
that we're talking about here,
link |
and robotics is like your idea means shit
link |
until you build it.
link |
Like, so the engineering world is a little different,
link |
but there's a kind of sense that I probably forgot
link |
a lot of brilliant ideas have been told to me.
link |
Do you think she pretended you don't exist?
link |
Do you think she was so busy that she kind of forgot,
link |
you know, that she has like the stream
link |
of brilliant people around her,
link |
there's a bunch of ideas that are swimming in the air,
link |
and you just kind of forget people
link |
that are a little bit on the periphery
link |
on the idea generation, like, or is it some mix of both?
link |
It's not a mix of both.
link |
I know that because we corresponded.
link |
She put a graduate student on this work.
link |
He emailed me excitedly when the results came in.
link |
So there was no ambiguity about what had happened.
link |
What's more, when I went to publish my work,
link |
I actually sent it to Carol in order to get her feedback
link |
because I wanted to be a good collaborator to her,
link |
and she absolutely panned it,
link |
made many critiques that were not valid,
link |
but it was clear at that point
link |
that she became an antagonist,
link |
and none of this adds up.
link |
She couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation.
link |
I believe I even sent her tissues at some point in part,
link |
not related to this project, but as a favor.
link |
She was doing another project that involved telomeres,
link |
and she needed samples that I could get ahold of
link |
because of the Museum of Zoology that I was in.
link |
So this was not a one off conversation.
link |
I certainly know that those sorts of things can happen,
link |
but that's not what happened here.
link |
This was a relationship that existed
link |
and then was suddenly cut short
link |
at the point that she published her paper by surprise
link |
without saying where the hypothesis had come from
link |
and began to be a opposing force to my work.
link |
Is there, there's a bunch of trajectories
link |
you could have taken through life.
link |
Do you think about the trajectory of being a researcher,
link |
of then going to war in the space of ideas,
link |
of publishing further papers along this line?
link |
I mean, that's often the dynamic of that fascinating space
link |
is you have a junior researcher with brilliant ideas
link |
and a senior researcher that starts out as a mentor
link |
that becomes a competitor.
link |
I mean, that happens.
link |
But then the way to,
link |
it's almost an opportunity to shine
link |
is to publish a bunch more papers in this place
link |
to tear it apart, to dig into,
link |
like really make it a war of ideas.
link |
Did you consider that possible trajectory?
link |
A couple of things to say about it.
link |
One, this work was not central for me.
link |
I took a year on the T. Lemire project
link |
because something fascinating occurred to me
link |
And the more I pursued it,
link |
the clearer it was there was something there.
link |
But it wasn't the focus of my graduate work.
link |
And I didn't want to become a T. Lemire researcher.
link |
What I want to do is to be an evolutionary biologist
link |
who upgrades the toolkit of evolutionary concepts
link |
so that we can see more clearly
link |
how organisms function and why.
link |
And T. Lemire's was a proof of concept, right?
link |
That paper was a proof of concept
link |
that the toolkit in question works.
link |
As for the need to pursue it further,
link |
I think it's kind of absurd
link |
and you're not the first person to say
link |
maybe that was the way to go about it.
link |
But the basic point is, look, the work was good.
link |
It turned out to be highly predictive.
link |
Frankly, the model of senescence that I presented
link |
is now widely accepted.
link |
And I don't feel any misgivings at all
link |
about having spent a year on it, said my piece,
link |
and moved on to other things
link |
which frankly I think are bigger.
link |
I think there's a lot of good to be done
link |
and it would be a waste to get overly narrowly focused.
link |
There's so many ways through the space of science
link |
and the most common ways is just publish a lot.
link |
Just publish a lot of papers, do these incremental work
link |
and exploring the space kind of like ants looking for food.
link |
You're tossing out a bunch of different ideas.
link |
Some of them could be brilliant breakthrough ideas, nature.
link |
Some of them are more confidence kind of publications,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
Did you consider that kind of path in science?
link |
Of course I considered it,
link |
but I must say the experience of having my first encounter
link |
with the process of peer review be this story,
link |
which was frankly a debacle from one end to the other
link |
with respect to the process of publishing.
link |
It did not, it was not a very good sales pitch
link |
for trying to make a difference through publication.
link |
And I would point out part of what I ran into
link |
and I think frankly part of what explains Carol's behavior
link |
is that in some parts of science,
link |
there is this dynamic where PIs parasitize their underlings
link |
and if you're very, very good, you rise to the level
link |
where one day instead of being parasitized,
link |
you get to parasitize others.
link |
Now I find that scientifically despicable
link |
and it wasn't the culture of the lab I grew up in at all.
link |
My lab, in fact, the PI, Dick Alexander, who's now gone,
link |
but who was an incredible mind and a great human being,
link |
he didn't want his graduate students working
link |
on the same topics he was on,
link |
not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting,
link |
but because in effect, he did not want any confusion
link |
about who had done what because he was a great mentor
link |
and the idea was actually a great mentor
link |
is not stealing ideas and you don't want people
link |
thinking that they are.
link |
So anyway, my point would be,
link |
I wasn't up for being parasitized.
link |
I don't like the idea that if you are very good,
link |
you get parasitized until it's your turn
link |
to parasitize others.
link |
That doesn't make sense to me.
link |
Crossing over from evolution into cellular biology
link |
may have exposed me to that.
link |
That may have been par for the course,
link |
but it doesn't make it acceptable.
link |
And I would also point out that my work falls
link |
in the realm of synthesis.
link |
My work generally takes evidence accumulated by others
link |
and places it together in order to generate hypotheses
link |
that explain sets of phenomena
link |
that are otherwise intractable.
link |
And I am not sure that that is best done
link |
with narrow publications that are read by few.
link |
And in fact, I would point to the very conspicuous example
link |
of Richard Dawkins, who I must say I've learned
link |
a tremendous amount from and I greatly admire.
link |
Dawkins has almost no publication record
link |
in the sense of peer reviewed papers in journals.
link |
What he's done instead is done synthetic work
link |
and he's published it in books,
link |
which are not peer reviewed in the same sense.
link |
And frankly, I think there's no doubting
link |
his contribution to the field.
link |
So my sense is if Richard Dawkins can illustrate
link |
that one can make contributions to the field
link |
without using journals as the primary mechanism
link |
for distributing what you've come to understand,
link |
then it's obviously a valid mechanism
link |
and it's a far better one from the point of view
link |
of accomplishing what I want to accomplish.
link |
Yeah, it's really interesting.
link |
There is of course several levels
link |
you can do the kind of synthesis
link |
and that does require a lot of both broad
link |
and deep thinking is exceptionally valuable.
link |
You could also, I'm working on something
link |
with Andrew Huberman now, you can also publish synthesis.
link |
That's like review papers that are exceptionally valuable
link |
for the communities.
link |
It brings the community together, tells a history,
link |
tells a story of where the community has been.
link |
It paints a picture of where the path lays for the future.
link |
I think it's really valuable.
link |
And Richard Dawkins is a good example
link |
of somebody that does that in book form
link |
that he kind of walks the line really interestingly.
link |
You have like somebody who like Neil deGrasse Tyson,
link |
who's more like a science communicator.
link |
Richard Dawkins sometimes is a science communicator,
link |
but he gets like close to the technical
link |
to where it's a little bit, it's not shying away
link |
from being really a contribution to science.
link |
No, he's made real contributions.
link |
Yes, he really has.
link |
Which is fascinating.
link |
I mean, Roger Penrose, I mean, similar kind of idea.
link |
That's interesting, that's interesting.
link |
Synthesis does not, especially synthesis work,
link |
work that synthesizes ideas does not necessarily need
link |
to be peer reviewed.
link |
It's peer reviewed by peers reading it.
link |
Well, and reviewing it.
link |
That's it, it is reviewed by peers,
link |
which is not synonymous with peer review.
link |
And that's the thing is people don't understand
link |
that the two things aren't the same, right?
link |
Peer review is an anonymous process
link |
that happens before publication
link |
in a place where there is a power dynamic, right?
link |
I mean, the joke of course is that peer review
link |
is actually peer preview, right?
link |
Your biggest competitors get to see your work
link |
before it sees the light of day
link |
and decide whether or not it gets published.
link |
And again, when your formative experience
link |
with the publication apparatus is the one I had
link |
with the telomere paper, there's no way
link |
that that seems like the right way
link |
to advance important ideas.
link |
And what's the harm in publishing them
link |
so that your peers have to review them in public
link |
where they actually, if they're gonna disagree with you,
link |
they actually have to take the risk of saying,
link |
I don't think this is right and here's why, right?
link |
With their name on it.
link |
I'd much rather that.
link |
It's not that I don't want my work reviewed by peers,
link |
but I want it done in the open, you know,
link |
for the same reason you don't meet
link |
with dangerous people in private, you meet at the cafe.
link |
I want the work reviewed out in public.
link |
Can I ask you a difficult question?
link |
There is popularity in martyrdom.
link |
There's popularity in pointing out
link |
that the emperor has no clothes.
link |
That can become a drug in itself.
link |
I've confronted this in scientific work I've done at MIT
link |
where there are certain things that are not done well.
link |
People are not being the best version of themselves.
link |
And particular aspects of a particular field
link |
are in need of a revolution.
link |
And part of me wanted to point that out
link |
versus doing the hard work of publishing papers
link |
and doing the revolution.
link |
Basically just pointing out, look,
link |
you guys are doing it wrong and then just walking away.
link |
Are you aware of the drug of martyrdom,
link |
of the ego involved in it,
link |
that it can cloud your thinking?
link |
Probably one of the best questions I've ever been asked.
link |
So let me try to sort it out.
link |
First of all, we are all mysteries to ourself at some level.
link |
So it's possible there's stuff going on in me
link |
that I'm not aware of that's driving.
link |
But in general, I would say one of my better strengths
link |
is that I'm not especially ego driven.
link |
I have an ego, I clearly think highly of myself,
link |
but it is not driving me.
link |
I do not crave that kind of validation.
link |
I do crave certain things.
link |
I do love a good eureka moment.
link |
There is something great about it.
link |
And there's something even better about the phone calls
link |
you make next when you share it, right?
link |
It's pretty fun, right?
link |
I also really like my subject, right?
link |
There's something about a walk in the forest
link |
when you have a toolkit in which you can actually look
link |
at creatures and see something deep, right?
link |
I like it, that drives me.
link |
And I could entertain myself for the rest of my life, right?
link |
If I was somehow isolated from the rest of the world,
link |
but I was in a place that was biologically interesting,
link |
hopefully I would be with people that I love
link |
and pets that I love, believe it or not.
link |
But if I were in that situation and I could just go out
link |
every day and look at cool stuff and figure out
link |
what it means, I could be all right with that.
link |
So I'm not heavily driven by the ego thing, as you put it.
link |
So I am completely the same except instead of the pets,
link |
I would put robots.
link |
But so it's not, it's the eureka, it's the exploration
link |
of the subject that brings you joy and fulfillment.
link |
Well, there's more to say.
link |
No, I really don't think it's the ego thing.
link |
I will say I also have kind of a secondary passion
link |
I've never made anything useful, but I do believe,
link |
I believe I found my calling.
link |
But if this wasn't my calling,
link |
my calling would have been inventing stuff.
link |
I really enjoy that too.
link |
So I get what you're saying about the analogy quite well.
link |
But as far as the martyrdom thing,
link |
I understand the drug you're talking about
link |
and I've seen it more than I've felt it.
link |
I do, if I'm just to be completely candid
link |
and this question is so good, it deserves a candid answer.
link |
I do like the fight, right?
link |
I like fighting against people I don't respect
link |
and I like winning, but I have no interest in martyrdom.
link |
One of the reasons I have no interest in martyrdom
link |
is that I'm having too good a time, right?
link |
I very much enjoy my life and.
link |
It's such a good answer.
link |
I have a wonderful wife.
link |
I have amazing children.
link |
I live in a lovely place.
link |
I don't wanna exit any quicker than I have to.
link |
That said, I also believe in things
link |
and a willingness to exit if that's the only way
link |
is not exactly inviting martyrdom,
link |
but it is an acceptance that fighting is dangerous
link |
and going up against powerful forces
link |
means who knows what will come of it, right?
link |
I don't have the sense that the thing is out there
link |
that used to kill inconvenient people.
link |
I don't think that's how it's done anymore.
link |
It's primarily done through destroying them reputationally,
link |
which is not something I relish the possibility of,
link |
but there is a difference between
link |
a willingness to face the hazard
link |
rather than a desire to face it because of the thrill, right?
link |
For me, the thrill is in fighting when I'm in the right.
link |
I think I feel that that is a worthwhile way
link |
to take what I see as the kind of brutality
link |
that is built into men and to channel it
link |
to something useful, right?
link |
If it is not channeled into something useful,
link |
it will be channeled into something else,
link |
so it damn well better be channeled into something useful.
link |
It's not motivated by fame or popularity,
link |
those kinds of things.
link |
It's, you know what, you're just making me realize
link |
that enjoying the fight,
link |
fighting the powerful and idea that you believe is right
link |
is a kind of optimism for the human spirit.
link |
It's like, we can win this.
link |
It's almost like you're turning into action,
link |
into personal action, this hope for humanity
link |
by saying like, we can win this.
link |
And that makes you feel good about the rest of humanity,
link |
that if there's people like me, then we're going to be okay.
link |
Even if you're like, your ideas might be wrong or not,
link |
but if you believe they're right
link |
and you're fighting the powerful against all odds,
link |
then we're going to be okay.
link |
If I were to project, I mean,
link |
because I enjoy the fight as well,
link |
I think that's the way I, that's what brings me joy,
link |
is it's almost like it's optimism in action.
link |
Well, it's a little different for me.
link |
And again, I think, you know, I recognize you.
link |
You're a familiar, your construction is familiar,
link |
even if it isn't mine, right?
link |
For me, I actually expect us not to be okay.
link |
And I'm not okay with that.
link |
But what's really important, if I feel like what I've said
link |
is I don't know of any reason that it's not okay,
link |
or any reason that it's too late.
link |
As far as I know, we could still save humanity
link |
and we could get to the fourth frontier
link |
or something akin to it.
link |
But I expect us not to, I expect us to fuck it up, right?
link |
I don't like that thought, but I've looked into the abyss
link |
and I've done my calculations
link |
and the number of ways we could not succeed are many
link |
and the number of ways that we could manage
link |
to get out of this very dangerous phase of history is small.
link |
The thing I don't have to worry about is
link |
that I didn't do enough, right?
link |
That I was a coward, that I prioritized other things.
link |
At the end of the day, I think I will be able to say
link |
to myself, and in fact, the thing that allows me to sleep,
link |
is that when I saw clearly what needed to be done,
link |
I tried to do it to the extent that it was in my power.
link |
And if we fail, as I expect us to,
link |
I can't say, well, geez, that's on me, you know?
link |
And frankly, I regard what I just said to you
link |
as something like a personality defect, right?
link |
I'm trying to free myself from the sense
link |
that this is my fault.
link |
On the other hand, my guess is that personality defect
link |
is probably good for humanity, right?
link |
It's a good one for me to have the externalities
link |
of it are positive, so I don't feel too bad about it.
link |
Yeah, that's funny, so yeah, our perspective on the world
link |
are different, but they rhyme, like you said.
link |
Because I've also looked into the abyss,
link |
and it kind of smiled nervously back.
link |
So I have a more optimistic sense that we're gonna win
link |
more than likely we're going to be okay.
link |
Right there with you, brother.
link |
I'm hoping you're right.
link |
I'm expecting me to be right.
link |
But back to Eric, you had a wonderful conversation.
link |
In that conversation, he played the big brother role,
link |
and he was very happy about it.
link |
He was self congratulatory about it.
link |
Can you talk to the ways in which Eric made you
link |
a better man throughout your life?
link |
I mean, for one thing, you know,
link |
Eric and I are interestingly similar in some ways
link |
and radically different in some other ways,
link |
and it's often a matter of fascination
link |
to people who know us both because almost always
link |
people meet one of us first, and they sort of
link |
get used to that thing, and then they meet the other,
link |
and it throws the model into chaos.
link |
But you know, I had a great advantage,
link |
which is I came second, right?
link |
So although it was kind of a pain in the ass
link |
to be born into a world that had Eric in it
link |
because he's a force of nature, right?
link |
It was also terrifically useful because A,
link |
he was a very awesome older brother
link |
who made interesting mistakes, learned from them,
link |
and conveyed the wisdom of what he had discovered,
link |
and that was, you know, I don't know who else
link |
ends up so lucky as to have that kind of person
link |
blazing the trail.
link |
It also probably, you know, my hypothesis
link |
for what birth order effects are
link |
is that they're actually adaptive, right?
link |
That the reason that a second born is different
link |
than a first born is that they're not born
link |
into a world with the same niches in it, right?
link |
And so the thing about Eric is he's been
link |
completely dominant in the realm of fundamental thinking,
link |
right, like what he's fascinated by
link |
is the fundamental of fundamentals,
link |
and he's excellent at it, which meant
link |
that I was born into a world where somebody
link |
was becoming excellent in that, and for me
link |
to be anywhere near the fundamental of fundamentals
link |
was going to be pointless, right?
link |
I was going to be playing second fiddle forever,
link |
and I think that that actually drove me
link |
to the other end of the continuum
link |
between fundamental and emergent,
link |
and so I became fascinated with biology
link |
and have been since I was three years old, right?
link |
I think Eric drove that, and I have to thank him for it
link |
because, you know, I mean.
link |
I never thought of, so Eric drives towards the fundamental,
link |
and you drive towards the emergent,
link |
the physics and the biology.
link |
Right, opposite ends of the continuum,
link |
and as Eric would be quick to point out
link |
if he was sitting here, I treat the emergent layer,
link |
I seek the fundamentals in it,
link |
which is sort of an echo of Eric's style of thinking
link |
but applied to the very far complexity.
link |
He's overpoweringly argues for the importance of physics,
link |
the fundamental of the fundamental.
link |
He's not here to defend himself.
link |
Is there an argument to be made against that?
link |
Or biology, the emergent,
link |
the study of the thing that emerged
link |
when the fundamental acts at the cosmic scale
link |
and then builds the beautiful thing that is us
link |
is much more important.
link |
Psychology, biology, the systems
link |
that we're actually interacting with in this human world
link |
are much more important to understand
link |
than the low level theories of quantum mechanics
link |
and general relativity.
link |
Yeah, I can't say that one is more important.
link |
I think there's probably a different time scale.
link |
I think understanding the emergent layer
link |
is more often useful, but the bang for the buck
link |
at the far fundamental layer may be much greater.
link |
So for example, the fourth frontier,
link |
I'm pretty sure it's gonna have to be fusion powered.
link |
I don't think anything else will do it,
link |
but once you had fusion power,
link |
assuming we didn't just dump fusion power on the market
link |
the way we would be likely to
link |
if it was invented usefully tomorrow,
link |
but if we had fusion power
link |
and we had a little bit more wisdom than we have,
link |
you could do an awful lot.
link |
And that's not gonna come from people like me
link |
who look at the dynamics of it.
link |
Can I argue against that?
link |
I think the way to unlock fusion power
link |
is through artificial intelligence.
link |
So I think most of the breakthrough ideas
link |
in the futures of science will be developed by AI systems.
link |
And I think in order to build intelligent AI systems,
link |
you have to be a scholar of the fundamental
link |
of the emergent, of biology, of the neuroscience,
link |
of the way the brain works,
link |
of intelligence, of consciousness.
link |
And those things, at least directly,
link |
don't have anything to do with physics.
link |
You're making me a little bit sad
link |
because my addiction to the aha moment thing
link |
is incompatible with outsourcing that job.
link |
Like the outsource thing.
link |
I don't wanna outsource that thing to the AI.
link |
You reap the moment.
link |
And actually, I've seen this happen before
link |
because some of the people who trained Heather and me
link |
were phylogenetic systematists,
link |
Arnold Kluge in particular.
link |
And the problem with systematics
link |
is that to do it right when your technology is primitive,
link |
you have to be deeply embedded in the philosophical
link |
and the logical, right?
link |
Your method has to be based in the highest level of rigor.
link |
Once you can sequence genes,
link |
genes can spit so much data at you
link |
that you can overwhelm high quality work
link |
with just lots and lots and lots of automated work.
link |
And so in some sense,
link |
there's like a generation of phylogenetic systematists
link |
who are the last of the greats
link |
because what's replacing them is sequencers.
link |
So anyway, maybe you're right about the AI.
link |
And I guess I'm...
link |
What makes you sad?
link |
I like figuring stuff out.
link |
Is there something that you disagree with the error con,
link |
even trying to convince them you failed so far,
link |
but you will eventually succeed?
link |
You know, that is a very long list.
link |
Eric and I have tensions over certain things
link |
that recur all the time.
link |
And I'm trying to think what would be the ideal...
link |
Is it in the space of science,
link |
in the space of philosophy, politics, family, love, robots?
link |
Well, all right, let me...
link |
I'm just gonna use your podcast
link |
to make a bit of a cryptic war
link |
and just say there are many places
link |
in which I believe that I have butted heads with Eric
link |
over the course of decades
link |
and I have seen him move in my direction
link |
substantially over time.
link |
So you've been winning.
link |
He might win a battle here or there,
link |
but you've been winning the war.
link |
I would not say that.
link |
It's quite possible he could say the same thing about me.
link |
And in fact, I know that it's true.
link |
There are places where he's absolutely convinced me.
link |
But in any case, I do believe it's at least...
link |
It may not be a totally even fight,
link |
but it's more even than some will imagine.
link |
But yeah, we have...
link |
There are things I say that drive him nuts, right?
link |
Like when something, like you heard me talk about the...
link |
It was the autopilot that seems to be putting
link |
a great many humans in needless medical jeopardy
link |
over the COVID 19 pandemic.
link |
And my feeling is we can say this almost for sure.
link |
Anytime you have the appearance
link |
of some captured gigantic entity
link |
that is censoring you on YouTube
link |
and handing down dictates from the who and all of that,
link |
it is sure that there will be
link |
a certain amount of collusion, right?
link |
There's gonna be some embarrassing emails in some places
link |
that are gonna reveal some shocking connections.
link |
And then there's gonna be an awful lot of emergence
link |
that didn't involve collusion, right?
link |
In which people were doing their little part of a job
link |
and something was emerging.
link |
And you never know what the admixture is.
link |
How much are we looking at actual collusion
link |
and how much are we looking at an emergent process?
link |
But you should always walk in with the sense
link |
that it's gonna be a ratio.
link |
And the question is, what is the ratio in this case?
link |
I think this drives Eric nuts
link |
because he is very focused on the people.
link |
I think he's focused on the people who have a choice
link |
and make the wrong one.
link |
And anyway, he may.
link |
Discussion of the ratio is a distraction to that.
link |
I think he takes it almost as an offense
link |
because it grants cover to people who are harming others.
link |
And I think it offends him morally.
link |
And if I had to say, I would say it alters his judgment
link |
But anyway, certainly useful just to leave open
link |
the two possibilities and say it's a ratio,
link |
but we don't know which one.
link |
Brother to brother, do you love the guy?
link |
Hmm, hell yeah, hell yeah.
link |
And I'd love him if he was just my brother,
link |
but he's also awesome.
link |
So I love him and I love him for who he is.
link |
So let me ask you about back to your book,
link |
Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
link |
I can't wait both for the book and the videos
link |
you do on the book.
link |
That's really exciting that there's like a structured,
link |
organized way to present this.
link |
A kind of from an evolutionary biology perspective,
link |
a guide for the future,
link |
using our past as the fundamental, the emergent way
link |
to present a picture of the future.
link |
Let me ask you about something that,
link |
I think about a little bit in this modern world,
link |
which is monogamy.
link |
So I personally value monogamy.
link |
One girl, ride or die.
link |
Ride or, no, that's exactly it now.
link |
But that said, I don't know what's the right way
link |
but from an evolutionary biology perspective
link |
or from just looking at modern society,
link |
that seems to be an idea that's not,
link |
what's the right way to put it, flourishing?
link |
So I suppose based on your reaction,
link |
you're also a supporter of monogamy
link |
or you value monogamy.
link |
Are you and I just delusional?
link |
What can you say about monogamy
link |
from the context of your book,
link |
from the context of evolutionary biology,
link |
from the context of being human?
link |
Yeah, I can say that I fully believe
link |
that we are actually enlightened
link |
and that although monogamy is waning,
link |
that it is not waning because there is a superior system.
link |
It is waning for predictable other reasons.
link |
So let us just say it is,
link |
there is a lot of pre trans fallacy here
link |
where people go through a phase
link |
where they recognize that actually
link |
we know a lot about the evolution of monogamy
link |
and we can tell from the fact
link |
that humans are somewhat sexually dimorphic
link |
that there has been a lot of polygyny in human history.
link |
And in fact, most of human history was largely polygynous.
link |
But it is also the case that most of the people
link |
on earth today belong to civilizations
link |
that are at least nominally monogamous
link |
and have practiced monogamy.
link |
And that's not anti evolutionary.
link |
What that is is part of what I mentioned before
link |
where human beings can swap out their software program
link |
and different mating patterns are favored
link |
in different periods of history.
link |
So I would argue that the benefit of monogamy,
link |
the primary one that drives the evolution
link |
of monogamous patterns in humans
link |
is that it brings all adults into child rearing.
link |
Now the reason that that matters
link |
is because human babies are very labor intensive.
link |
In order to raise them properly,
link |
having two parents is a huge asset
link |
and having more than two parents,
link |
having an extended family also very important.
link |
But what that means is that for a population
link |
that is expanding, a monogamous mating system makes sense.
link |
It makes sense because it means that the number of offspring
link |
that can be raised is elevated.
link |
It's elevated because all potential parents
link |
are involved in parenting.
link |
Whereas if you sideline a bunch of males
link |
by having a polygynous system
link |
in which one male has many females,
link |
which is typically the way that works,
link |
what you do is you sideline all those males,
link |
which means the total amount of parental effort is lower
link |
and the population can't grow.
link |
So what I'm arguing is that you should expect to see
link |
populations that face the possibility of expansion
link |
And at the point that they have reached carrying capacity,
link |
you should expect to see polygyny break back out.
link |
And what we are seeing
link |
is a kind of false sophistication around polyamory,
link |
which will end up breaking down into polygyny,
link |
which will not be in the interest of most people.
link |
Really the only people whose interest
link |
it could be argued to be in
link |
would be the very small number of males at the top
link |
who have many partners and everybody else suffers.
link |
Is it possible to make the argument
link |
if we focus in on those males at the quote unquote top
link |
with many female partners,
link |
is it possible to say that that's a suboptimal life,
link |
that a single partner is the optimal life?
link |
Well, it depends what you mean.
link |
I have a feeling that you and I wouldn't have to go very far
link |
to figure out that what might be evolutionarily optimal
link |
doesn't match my values as a person
link |
and I'm sure it doesn't match yours either.
link |
Can we try to dig into that gap between those two?
link |
I mean, we can do it very simply.
link |
Selection might favor your engaging in war
link |
against a defenseless enemy or genocide, right?
link |
It's not hard to figure out
link |
how that might put your genes at advantage.
link |
I don't know about you, Lex.
link |
I'm not getting involved in no genocide.
link |
It's not gonna happen.
link |
I will do anything to avoid it.
link |
So some part of me has decided that my conscious self
link |
and the values that I hold trump my evolutionary self
link |
and once you figure out that in some extreme case,
link |
that's true and then you realize
link |
that that means it must be possible in many other cases
link |
and you start going through all of the things
link |
that selection would favor
link |
and you realize that a fair fraction of the time,
link |
actually, you're not up for this.
link |
You don't wanna be some robot on a mission
link |
that involves genocide when necessary.
link |
You wanna be your own person and accomplish things
link |
that you think are valuable.
link |
And so among those are not advocating,
link |
let's suppose you were in a position
link |
to be one of those males at the top of a polygynous system.
link |
We both know why that would be rewarding, right?
link |
But we also both recognize.
link |
Lots of sex and lots of variety, right?
link |
So look, every red blooded American slash Russian male
link |
can understand why that's appealing, right?
link |
On the other hand, it is up against an alternative
link |
which is having a partner with whom one is bonded
link |
especially closely, right?
link |
Well, I don't wanna straw man the polygyny position.
link |
Obviously polygyny is complex
link |
and there's nothing that stops a man presumably
link |
from loving multiple partners and from them loving him back.
link |
But in terms of, if love is your thing,
link |
there's a question about, okay, what is the quality of love
link |
if it is divided over multiple partners, right?
link |
And what is the net consequence for love in a society
link |
when multiple people will be frozen out
link |
for every individual male in this case who has it?
link |
And what I would argue is, and you know,
link |
this is weird to even talk about,
link |
but this is partially me just talking
link |
from personal experience.
link |
I think there actually is a monogamy program in us
link |
and it's not automatic.
link |
But if you take it seriously, you can find it
link |
and frankly, marriage, and it doesn't have to be marriage,
link |
but whatever it is that results in a lifelong bond
link |
with a partner has gotten a very bad rap.
link |
You know, it's the butt of too many jokes.
link |
But the truth is, it's hugely rewarding, it's not easy.
link |
But if you know that you're looking for something, right?
link |
If you know that the objective actually exists
link |
and it's not some utopian fantasy that can't be found,
link |
if you know that there's some real world, you know,
link |
warts and all version of it, then you might actually think,
link |
hey, that is something I want and you might pursue it
link |
and my guess is you'd be very happy when you find it.
link |
Yeah, I think there is, getting to the fundamental
link |
and the emergent, I feel like there is some kind of physics
link |
So one, there's a conservation thing going on.
link |
So if you have like many partners, yeah, in theory,
link |
you should be able to love all of them deeply.
link |
But it seems like in reality that love gets split.
link |
Now, there's another law that's interesting
link |
in terms of monogamy.
link |
I don't know if it's at the physics level,
link |
but if you are in a monogamous relationship by choice
link |
and almost as in slight rebellion to social norms,
link |
that's much more powerful.
link |
Like if you choose that one partnership,
link |
that's also more powerful.
link |
If like everybody's in a monogamous,
link |
this pressure to be married and this pressure of society,
link |
that's different because that's almost like a constraint
link |
on your freedom that is enforced by something
link |
other than your own ideals.
link |
It's by somebody else.
link |
When you yourself choose to, I guess,
link |
create these constraints, that enriches that love.
link |
So there's some kind of love function,
link |
like E equals MC squared, but for love,
link |
that I feel like if you have less partners
link |
and it's done by choice, that can maximize that.
link |
And that love can transcend the biology,
link |
transcend the evolutionary biology forces
link |
that have to do much more with survival
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
It can transcend to take us to a richer experience,
link |
which we have the luxury of having,
link |
exploring of happiness, of joy, of fulfillment,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
Totally agree with this.
link |
And there's no question that by choice,
link |
when there are other choices,
link |
imbues it with meaning that it might not otherwise have.
link |
I would also say, I'm really struck by,
link |
and I have a hard time not feeling terrible sadness
link |
over what younger people are coming
link |
to think about this topic.
link |
I think they're missing something so important
link |
and so hard to phrase that,
link |
and they don't even know that they're missing it.
link |
They might know that they're unhappy,
link |
but they don't understand what it is
link |
they're even looking for,
link |
because nobody's really been honest with them
link |
about what their choices are.
link |
And I have to say, if I was a young person,
link |
or if I was advising a young person,
link |
which I used to do, again, a million years ago
link |
when I was a college professor four years ago,
link |
but I used to talk to students.
link |
I knew my students really well,
link |
and they would ask questions about this,
link |
and they were always curious
link |
because Heather and I seemed to have a good relationship,
link |
and many of them knew both of us.
link |
So they would talk to us about this.
link |
If I was advising somebody, I would say,
link |
do not bypass the possibility
link |
that what you are supposed to do is find somebody worthy,
link |
somebody who can handle it,
link |
somebody who you are compatible with,
link |
and that you don't have to be perfectly compatible.
link |
It's not about dating until you find the one.
link |
It's about finding somebody whose underlying values
link |
and viewpoint are complimentary to yours,
link |
sufficient that you fall in love.
link |
If you find that person, opt out together.
link |
Get out of this damn system
link |
that's telling you what's sophisticated
link |
to think about love and romance and sex.
link |
Ignore it together, all right?
link |
That's the key, and I believe you'll end up laughing
link |
in the end if you do it.
link |
You'll discover, wow, that's a hellscape
link |
that I opted out of, and this thing I opted into?
link |
Complicated, difficult, worth it.
link |
Nothing that's worth it is ever not difficult,
link |
so we should even just skip
link |
the whole statement about difficult.
link |
I just, I wanna be honest.
link |
It's not like, oh, it's nonstop joy.
link |
No, it's fricking complex, but worth it?
link |
No question in my mind.
link |
Is there advice outside of love
link |
that you can give to young people?
link |
You were a million years ago a professor.
link |
Is there advice you can give to young people,
link |
high schoolers, college students about career, about life?
link |
Yeah, but it's not, they're not gonna like it
link |
because it's not easy to operationalize,
link |
and this was a problem when I was a college professor, too.
link |
People would ask me what they should do.
link |
Should they go to graduate school?
link |
I had almost nothing useful to say
link |
because the job market and the market of prejob training
link |
and all of that, these things are all so distorted
link |
and corrupt that I didn't wanna point anybody to anything
link |
because it's all broken, and I would tell them that,
link |
but I would say that results in a kind of meta level advice
link |
that I do think is useful.
link |
You don't know what's coming.
link |
You don't know where the opportunities will be.
link |
You should invest in tools rather than knowledge.
link |
To the extent that you can do things,
link |
you can repurpose that no matter what the future brings
link |
to the extent that if you, as a robot guy,
link |
you've got the skills of a robot guy.
link |
Now, if civilization failed
link |
and the stuff of robot building disappeared with it,
link |
you'd still have the mind of a robot guy,
link |
and the mind of a robot guy can retool
link |
around all kinds of things, whether you're forced to work
link |
with fibers that are made into ropes.
link |
Your mechanical mind would be useful in all kinds of places,
link |
so invest in tools like that that can be easily repurposed,
link |
and invest in combinations of tools, right?
link |
If civilization keeps limping along,
link |
you're gonna be up against all sorts of people
link |
who have studied the things that you studied, right?
link |
If you think, hey, computer programming
link |
is really, really cool, and you pick up computer programming,
link |
guess what, you just entered a large group of people
link |
who have that skill, and many of them will be better
link |
than you, almost certainly.
link |
On the other hand, if you combine that with something else
link |
that's very rarely combined with it,
link |
if you have, I don't know if it's carpentry
link |
and computer programming, if you take combinations
link |
of things that are, even if they're both common,
link |
but they're not commonly found together,
link |
then those combinations create a rarefied space
link |
where you inhabit it, and even if the things
link |
don't even really touch, but nonetheless,
link |
they create a mind in which the two things are live
link |
and you can move back and forth between them
link |
and step out of your own perspective
link |
by moving from one to the other,
link |
that will increase what you can see
link |
and the quality of your tools.
link |
And so anyway, that isn't useful advice.
link |
It doesn't tell you whether you should go
link |
to graduate school or not, but it does tell you
link |
the one thing we can say for certain about the future
link |
is that it's uncertain, and so prepare for it.
link |
And like you said, there's cool things to be discovered
link |
in the intersection of fields and ideas.
link |
And I would look at grad school that way,
link |
actually, if you do go, or I see,
link |
I mean, this is such a, like every course
link |
in grad school, undergrad too,
link |
was like this little journey that you're on
link |
that explores a particular field.
link |
And it's not immediately obvious how useful it is,
link |
but it allows you to discover intersections
link |
between that thing and some other thing.
link |
So you're bringing to the table these pieces of knowledge,
link |
some of which when intersected might create a niche
link |
that's completely novel, unique, and will bring you joy.
link |
I mean, I took a huge number of courses
link |
in theoretical computer science.
link |
Most of them seem useless, but they totally changed
link |
the way I see the world in ways that I'm not prepared
link |
or is a little bit difficult to kind of make explicit,
link |
but taken together, they've allowed me to see,
link |
for example, the world of robotics totally different
link |
and different from many of my colleagues
link |
and friends and so on.
link |
And I think that's a good way to see if you go
link |
to grad school was as a opportunity
link |
to explore intersections of fields,
link |
even if the individual fields seem useless.
link |
Yeah, and useless doesn't mean useless, right?
link |
Useless means not directly applicable,
link |
but a good, useless course can be the best one
link |
Yeah, I took James Joyce, a course on James Joyce,
link |
and that was truly useless.
link |
Well, I took immunobiology in the medical school
link |
when I was at Penn as, I guess I would have been
link |
a freshman or a sophomore.
link |
I wasn't supposed to be in this class.
link |
It blew my goddamn mind, and it still does, right?
link |
I mean, we had this, I don't even know who it was,
link |
but we had this great professor who was highly placed
link |
in the world of immunobiology.
link |
The course is called Immunobiology, not immunology.
link |
Immunobiology, it had the right focus,
link |
and as I recall it, the professor stood sideways
link |
to the chalkboard, staring off into space,
link |
literally stroking his beard with this bemused look
link |
on his face through the entire lecture.
link |
And you had all these medical students
link |
who were so furiously writing notes
link |
that I don't even think they were noticing
link |
the person delivering this thing,
link |
but I got what this guy was smiling about.
link |
It was like so, what he was describing,
link |
adaptive immunity is so marvelous, right?
link |
That it was like almost a privilege to even be saying it
link |
to a room full of people who were listening, you know?
link |
But anyway, yeah, I took that course,
link |
and lo and behold, COVID.
link |
That's gonna be useful.
link |
Well, yeah, suddenly it's front and center,
link |
and wow, am I glad I took it.
link |
But anyway, yeah, useless courses are great.
link |
And actually, Eric gave me one of the greater pieces
link |
of advice, at least for college, that anyone's ever given,
link |
which was don't worry about the prereqs.
link |
Take it anyway, right?
link |
But now, I don't even know if kids can do this now
link |
because the prereqs are now enforced by a computer.
link |
But back in the day, if you didn't mention
link |
that you didn't have the prereqs,
link |
nobody stopped you from taking the course.
link |
And what he told me, which I didn't know,
link |
was that often the advanced courses are easier in some way.
link |
The material's complex, but it's not like intro bio
link |
where you're learning a thousand things at once, right?
link |
It's like focused on something.
link |
So if you dedicate yourself, you can pull it off.
link |
Yeah, stay with an idea for many weeks at a time,
link |
and it's ultimately rewarding,
link |
and not as difficult as it looks.
link |
Can I ask you a ridiculous question?
link |
What do you think is the meaning of life?
link |
Well, I feel terrible having to give you the answer.
link |
I realize you asked the question,
link |
but if I tell you, you're gonna again feel bad.
link |
I don't wanna do that.
link |
But look, there's two.
link |
There can be a disappointment.
link |
No, it's gonna be a horror, right?
link |
Because we actually know the answer to the question.
link |
It's completely meaningless.
link |
There is nothing that we can do
link |
that escapes the heat death of the universe
link |
or whatever it is that happens at the end.
link |
And we're not gonna make it there anyway.
link |
But even if you were optimistic about our ability
link |
to escape every existential hazard indefinitely,
link |
ultimately it's all for naught and we know it, right?
link |
That said, once you stare into that abyss,
link |
and then it stares back and laughs or whatever happens,
link |
then the question is, okay, given that,
link |
can I relax a little bit, right?
link |
And figure out, well, what would make sense
link |
if that were true, right?
link |
And I think there's something very clear to me.
link |
I think if you do all of the,
link |
if I just take the values that I'm sure we share
link |
and extrapolate from them,
link |
I think the following thing is actually a moral imperative.
link |
Being a human and having opportunity
link |
is absolutely fucking awesome, right?
link |
A lot of people don't make use of the opportunity
link |
and a lot of people don't have opportunity, right?
link |
They get to be human, but they're too constrained
link |
by keeping a roof over their heads to really be free.
link |
But being a free human is fantastic.
link |
And being a free human on this beautiful planet,
link |
crippled as it may be, is unparalleled.
link |
I mean, what could be better?
link |
How lucky are we that we get that, right?
link |
So if that's true, that it is awesome to be human
link |
and to be free, then surely it is our obligation
link |
to deliver that opportunity to as many people as we can.
link |
And how do you do that?
link |
Well, I think I know what job one is.
link |
Job one is we have to get sustainable.
link |
The way to get the maximum number of humans
link |
to have that opportunity to be both here and free
link |
is to make sure that there isn't a limit
link |
on how long we can keep doing this.
link |
That effectively requires us to reach sustainability.
link |
And then at sustainability, you could have a horror show
link |
of sustainability, right?
link |
You could have a totalitarian sustainability.
link |
That's not the objective.
link |
The objective is to liberate people.
link |
And so the question, the whole fourth frontier question,
link |
frankly, is how do you get to a sustainable
link |
and indefinitely sustainable state
link |
in which people feel liberated,
link |
in which they are liberated,
link |
to pursue the things that actually matter,
link |
to pursue beauty, truth, compassion, connection,
link |
all of those things that we could list as unalloyed goods,
link |
those are the things that people should be most liberated
link |
to do in a system that really functions.
link |
And anyway, my point is,
link |
I don't know how precise that calculation is,
link |
but I'm pretty sure it's not wrong.
link |
It's accurate enough.
link |
And if it is accurate enough, then the point is, okay,
link |
well, there's no ultimate meaning,
link |
but the proximate meaning is that one.
link |
How many people can we get to have this wonderful experience
link |
that we've gotten to have, right?
link |
And there's no way that's so wrong
link |
that if I invest my life in it,
link |
that I'm making some big error.
link |
Life is awesome, and we wanna spread the awesome
link |
as much as possible.
link |
Yeah, you sum it up that way, spread the awesome.
link |
Spread the awesome.
link |
So that's the fourth frontier.
link |
And if that fails, if the fourth frontier fails,
link |
the fifth frontier will be defined by robots,
link |
and hopefully they'll learn the lessons
link |
of the mistakes that the humans made
link |
and build a better world with more awesome.
link |
I hope they're very happy here
link |
and that they do a better job with the place than we did.
link |
I can't believe it took us this long to talk,
link |
as I mentioned to you before,
link |
that we haven't actually spoken, I think, at all.
link |
And I've always felt that we're already friends.
link |
I don't know how that works
link |
because I've listened to your podcasts a lot.
link |
I've also sort of loved your brother.
link |
And so it was like,
link |
we've known each other for the longest time,
link |
and I hope we can be friends and talk often again.
link |
And I hope that you get a chance to meet
link |
some of my robot friends as well and fall in love.
link |
And I'm so glad that you love robots as well.
link |
So we get to share in that love.
link |
So I can't wait for us to interact together.
link |
So we went from talking about some of the worst failures
link |
of humanity to some of the most beautiful
link |
aspects of humanity.
link |
What else can you ask for from a conversation?
link |
Thank you so much for talking today.
link |
You know, Lex, I feel the same way towards you,
link |
and I really appreciate it.
link |
This has been a lot of fun,
link |
and I'm looking forward to our next one.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
with Brett Weinstein,
link |
and thank you to Jordan Harbridge's show,
link |
Express CPN, Magic Spoon, and Four Sigmatic.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now, let me leave you with some words
link |
from Charles Darwin.
link |
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence
link |
than does knowledge.
link |
It is those who know little, not those who know much,
link |
who so positively assert that this or that problem
link |
will never be solved by science.
link |
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.