The following is a conversation with Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, author,

cohost of the Dark Horse podcast, and, as he says, reluctant radical.

Even though we've never met or spoken before this, we both felt like we've been friends for a long

time. I don't agree on everything with Brett, but I'm sure as hell happy he exists in this weird

and wonderful world of ours. Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, ExpressVPN,

Magik Spoon, and FourSigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say a few words about COVID 19 and about science broadly. I think science is

beautiful and powerful. It is the striving of the human mind to understand and to solve the

problems of the world. But as an institution, it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature,

to fear, to greed, power, and ego. 2020 is the story of all of these that has both scientific

triumph and tragedy. We needed great leaders, and we didn't get them. What we needed is leaders

who communicate in an honest, transparent, and authentic way about the uncertainty of what we

know and the large scale scientific efforts to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions.

I believe there are several candidates for solutions that could have all saved hundreds of

billions of dollars and lessened or eliminated the suffering of millions of people. Let me mention

five of the categories of solutions. Masks, at home testing, anonymized contact tracing,

antiviral drugs, and vaccines. Within each of these categories, institutional leaders should

have constantly asked and answered publicly, honestly, the following three questions. One,

what data do we have on the solution and what studies are we running to get more and better data?

Two, given the current data and uncertainty, how effective and how safe is the solution?

Three, what is the timeline and cost involved with mass manufacture and distribution of the

solution? In the service of these questions, no voices should have been silenced. No ideas

left off the table. Open data, open science, open honest scientific communication and debate

was the way, not censorship. There are a lot of ideas out there that are bad, wrong, dangerous,

but the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are is the moment we'll lose

our ability to find the truth, to find solutions, the very things that make science beautiful

and powerful in the face of all the dangers that threaten the well being and the existence of humans

on earth. This conversation with Brett is less about the ideas we talk about. We agree on some,

disagree on others. It is much more about the very freedom to talk, to think, to share ideas.

This freedom is our only hope. Brett should never have been censored. I asked Brett to do this

podcast, to show solidarity and to show that I have hope for science and for humanity.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's my conversation with Brett Weinstein.

What to you is beautiful about the study of biology, the science, the engineering, the philosophy of

it? It's a very interesting question. I must say, at one level, it's not a conscious thing. I can

say a lot about why as an adult I find biology compelling, but as a kid, I was completely

fascinated with animals. I loved to watch them and think about why they did what they did,

and that developed into a very conscious passion as an adult, but I think in the same way that one

is drawn to a person, I was drawn to the never ending series of near miracles that exist across

biological nature. When you see a living organism, do you see it from an evolutionary biology

perspective of this entire thing that moves around in this world, or do you see from an engineering

perspective that are like first principles almost down to the physics, the little components that

build up hierarchies that you have cells, the first proteins and cells and organs and all

that kind of stuff. Do you see low level or do you see high level? Well, the human mind is a

strange thing, and I think it's probably a bit like a time sharing machine in which I have

different modules. We don't know enough about biology for them to connect, so they exist in

isolation, and I'm always aware that they do connect, but I basically have to step into a

module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to.

I have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a very long time scale,

a different module still to understand what the mechanisms inside would have to look like to account

for what we can see from the outside. I think that probably sounds really complicated, but

one of the things about being involved in a topic like biology and doing so for

one really not even just my adult life or my whole life is that it becomes second nature.

And when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that,

we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that. But of course,

what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone, right? They are in a zone in which they are

in such command of their center of gravity, for example, that they know how to hurl it around

a landscape so that they always land on their feet. And I would just say, for anyone who hasn't

found a topic on which they can develop that kind of facility, it is absolutely worthwhile.

It's really something that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics.

Many things our ancestors didn't even have access to. And that flexibility of humans,

that ability to repurpose our machinery for topics that are novel, means really the world

is your oyster. You can figure out what your passion is and then figure out all of the angles

that one would have to pursue to really deeply understand it. And it is well worth having at

least one topic like that. You mean embracing the full adaptability of the both the body and the

mind? I don't know what to attribute the parkour to, like biomechanics of how our bodies can move

or is it the mind? How much percent wise is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that

we've been talking about or is it just all the mind? The way to think about creatures is that

every creature is two things simultaneously. A creature is a machine of sorts, right? It's not

a machine in the, I call it an aqueous machine, right? And it's run by an aqueous computer,

right? So it's not identical to our technological machines. But every creature is both a machine

that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving,

to reproduce. It is also a potential. So each creature is potentially, for example,

the most recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different

from it. And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature, but not very good in terms of

the potential it has going forward, then that lineage will not last very long into the future

because change will throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet. So

the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform. And we have the ability to swap out

our software to exist in many, many different niches. And I was once watching an interview

with this British group of parkour experts who were being, they were discussing what it is they

do and how it works. And what they essentially said is, look, you're tapping into deep monkey

stuff, right? And I thought, yeah, that's about right. And anybody who is proficient at something

like skiing or skateboarding has the experience of flying down the hill on skis, for example,

bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next. And if you really pay attention, you will discover

that your conscious mind is actually a spectator. It's there. It's involved in the experience,

but it's not driving. Some part of you knows how to ski, and it's not the part of you that

knows how to think. And I would just say that what accounts for this flexibility in humans

is the ability to bootstrap a new software program and then drive it into the unconscious

layer where it can be applied very rapidly. And I will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist

in robotics. If you programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that were novel to it,

how would you do it? It would have to look something like this.

There's a certain kind of magic. You're right with the consciousness being an observer. When

you play guitar, for example, or piano, for me, music, when you get truly lost in it,

I don't know what the heck is responsible for the flow of the music, the kind of the loudness of

the music going up and down, the timing, the intricate, like even the mistakes, all those

things, that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind. It is just observing. And yet it's somehow

intricately involved. More, like you mentioned parkour, dances like that too. When you start

up in tango dancing, if when you truly lose yourself in it, then it's just like you're an

observer and how the hell is the body able to do that? And not only that, it's the physical

motion is also creating the emotion, the damn is good to be alive feeling.

But then that's also intricately connected to the full biology stack that we're operating in.

I don't know how difficult it is to replicate that we're talking offline about Boston Dynamics

robots. They've recently been, they did both parkour, they did flips, they've also done some dancing.

And it's something I think a lot about because what most people don't realize, because they

don't look deep enough is those robots are hard coded to do those things. The robots didn't

figure it out by themselves. And yet the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human is that

process of figuring out, of making mistakes. And then there's something about overcoming

those challenges and the mistakes and like figuring out how to lose yourself in the magic of the

dancing or just movement is what it means to be human that learning process. So that's what I

want to do with the almost as a fun side thing with the Boston Dynamics robots is to have them

learn and see what they figure out even if they make mistakes. I want to let spot make mistakes

and in so doing discover what it means to be alive, discover beauty because I think that's

the essential aspect of mistakes. Boston Dynamics folks want spot to be perfect

because they don't want spot to ever make mistakes because they want to operate in the

factories, they want to be very safe and so on. For me, if you construct the environment,

if you construct a safe space for robots and allow them to make mistakes, something beautiful

might be discovered. But that requires a lot of brain power. So spot is currently very dumb

and I'm going to add give it a brain. So first make it see currently can't see meaning computer

vision has to understand its environment has to see all the humans, but then also has to be able

to learn learn about its movement, learn how to use his body to communicate with others,

all those kinds of things that dogs know how to do well, humans know how to do somewhat well.

I think that's a beautiful challenge. But first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes.

Well, I think your objective is laudable, but you're going to realize that the Boston

Dynamics folks are right the first time spot poops on your rug.

I hear the same thing about kids and so on. Yes. I still want to have kids.

No, you should. It's a great experience. So let me step back into what you said in a couple

of different places. One, I've always believed that the missing element in robotics and

artificial intelligence is a proper development. It is no accident. It is no mere coincidence

that human beings are the most dominant species on planet earth and that we have the longest

childhoods of any creature on earth by far. Development is the key to the flexibility.

And so the capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image. It's the flip side of our

helplessness at birth. So I'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project if you

do not end up reinventing childhood for robots, which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite

brilliantly. But I also want to point out you can see this issue of your conscious mind becoming

a spectator very well if you compare tennis to table tennis. If you watch a tennis game,

you could imagine that the players are highly conscious as they play. You cannot imagine

that if you've ever played ping pong decently. A volley in ping pong is so fast that your conscious

mind, if your reactions had to go through your conscious mind, you wouldn't be able to play.

So you can detect that your conscious mind, while very much present, isn't there. And you can also

detect where consciousness does usefully intrude. If you go up against an opponent in table tennis

that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to, you will suddenly detect that something

about your game is not effective. And you will start thinking about what might be, how do you

position yourself so that move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something

like that doesn't catch you off guard. And this, I believe, is we highly conscious folks,

those of us who try to think through things very deliberately and carefully, mistake consciousness

for the highest kind of thinking. And I really think that this is an error. Consciousness is an

intermediate level of thinking. What it does is it allows you, it's basically like uncompiled code.

And it doesn't run very fast. It is capable of being adapted to new circumstances. But once the

code is roughed in, right, it gets driven into the unconscious layer, and you become highly

effective at whatever it is. And that from that point, your conscious mind basically remains

there to detect things that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written. And so

I don't exactly know how one would establish this, how one would demonstrate it. But it

must be the case that the human mind contains sandboxes in which things are tested, right?

Maybe you can build a piece of code and run it in parallel next to your active code so you can

see how it would have done comparatively. But there's got to be some way of writing new code

and then swapping it in. And frankly, I think this has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles.

Very often, you know, when I get good at something, I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it.

I get better at it when I'm not doing it, especially if there's time to sleep and think on it.

So there's some sort of, you know, new program swapping in for old program phenomenon,

which, you know, will be a lot easier to see in machines. It's going to be hard with the wetwear.

I like, I mean, it is true because somebody that played, I played tennis for many years,

I do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis is when the conscious mind is a

spectator. So it's the compiled code is the highest form of being human. And then consciousness is

just some like specific compiler. You just have like Borland C++ compiler. You could just have

different kind of compilers. Ultimately, the thing that by which we measure the power of life,

the intelligence of life is the compiled code. And you can probably do that compilation all kinds

of ways. Yeah. I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously and table tennis isn't. I'm

saying that because tennis is slowed down by the just the space on the court, you could imagine

that it was your conscious mind playing. But when you shrink the court down, it becomes obvious

that your conscious mind is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle. And weirdly

for me, I would say this probably isn't true in a podcast situation. But if I have to give a

presentation, especially if I have not overly prepared, I often find the same phenomenon

when I'm giving the presentation, my conscious mind is there watching some other part of me

present, which is a little jarring, I have to say. Well, that means you've you've gotten good at it.

Not let the conscious mind get in the way of the flow of words.

Yeah, that's that's the sensation to be sure. And that's the highest form of podcasting too.

I mean, that's why I have that that's what it looks like when a podcast is really in the pocket

like like Joe Rogan just having fun and just losing themselves. And that's something I aspire to

as well, just losing yourself in conversation. Somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people

like I'm such an introvert. I'm scared. I was scared before you showed up. I'm scared right now.

There's just anxiety. There's just it's a giant mess. It's hard to lose yourself. It's hard to

just get out of the way of your own mind. Yeah, actually, trust is a big component of that. Your

conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain. But when you do when you do get into

that zone, when you're speaking, I realize it's different for you with English as a second language,

although maybe you present in Russian and, you know, and it happens. But do you ever hear yourself

say something and you think, oh, that's really good, right? Like, like you didn't come up with it?

Some other part of you that you don't exactly know came up with it? I don't think I've ever

heard myself in that way because I have a much louder voice that's constantly yelling in my head

at why the hell did you say that? There's a very self critical voice. That's much louder.

So I'm very maybe I need to deal with that voice. But it's been like, what is it called,

like a megaphone just screaming so I can't hear. Oh, no, it says, good job. You said that thing

really nicely. So I'm kind of focused right now on the megaphone person in the audience versus

the deposit. But that's definitely something to think about. It's been productive. But,

you know, the place where I find gratitude and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet

moments when I don't talk, when I listen to the world around me, when I listen to others,

when I talk, I'm extremely self critical in my mind. When I when I produce anything out into

the world that's that originated with me, like any kind of creation, extremely self critical,

it's good for productivity, for like always striving to improve and so on. It might be bad for

for like, just appreciating the things you've created. I'm a little bit with Marvin

Minsky on this, where he says the key to to a productive life is to hate everything you've

ever done in the past. I didn't know he said that. I must say I resonate with it a bit.

And, you know, I, unfortunately, my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into the world.

And, I effectively watch almost none of it. I can't stand it.

Yeah. What what do you make of that? I don't know. I just recently, I just yesterday read

Metamorphosis by Kafka, reread Metamorphosis by Kafka, where he turns into a giant bug

because of the stress that the world puts on him, his parents put on him to succeed.

And, you know, I think that's you have to find the balance because if you if you allow the

self critical voice to become too heavy, the burden of the world, the pressure

that the world puts on you to be the best version of yourself and so on to strive,

then you become a bug and that's a big problem. And then and then the world turns against you

because you're a bug. You become some kind of caricature of yourself. I don't know.

You become the worst version of yourself and then thereby end up destroying yourself and then

the world moves on. That's the story. That's a lovely story. I do think this is one of these

places and frankly, you could map this onto all of modern human experience, but this is one of

these places where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves. So I used to

talk to students about the question of dwelling on things. Dwelling on things is famously

understood to be bad and it can't possibly be bad. It wouldn't exist, the tendency toward it

wouldn't exist if it was bad. So what is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility.

And that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize, but if you realize that your

dwelling is the key in fact to upgrading your program for future well being and that there's

a point presumably from diminishing returns, if not counter productivity, there is a point at

which you should stop because that is what is in your best interest, then knowing that you're

looking for that point is useful. This is the point at which it is no longer useful for me

to dwell on this error I have made. That's what you're looking for. And it also gives you license.

If some part of you feels like it's punishing you rather than searching, then that also has a

point at which it's no longer valuable and there's some liberty in realizing, yep,

even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop.

So if we map that onto compiled code discussion as a computer science person, I find that very

compelling. When you compile code, you get warnings sometimes. And usually, if you're a

good software engineer, you're going to make sure there's no, you treat warnings as errors.

So you make sure that the compilation produces no warnings. But at a certain point when you have

a large enough system, you just let the warnings go. It's fine. I don't know where that warning

came from. But ultimately, you need to compile the code and run with it. And I hope nothing terrible

happens. Well, I think what you will find, and believe me, I think what you're talking about

with respect to robots and learning is going to end up having to go to a deep developmental

state and a helplessness that evolves into hyper competence and all of that.

But I live, I noticed that I live by something that I, for lack of a better descriptor, call

the theory of close calls. And the theory of close calls says that people typically miscategorize

the events in their life where something almost went wrong. And, you know, for example, if you,

I have a friend who I was walking down the street with my college friends and one of my

friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles

an hour, would have been an absolute disaster. Might have killed her, certainly would have

permanently injured her. But she didn't, you know, car didn't touch her, right? Now, you could walk

away from that and think nothing of it because, well, what is there to think nothing happened?

Or you could think, well, what is the difference between what did happen and my death?

The difference is luck. I never want that to be true, right? I never want the difference

between what did happen and my death to be luck. Therefore, I should count this as very close to

death. And I should prioritize coding so it doesn't happen again at a very high level.

So anyway, my basic point is the accidents and disasters and misfortune describe a distribution

that tells you what's really likely to get you in the end. And so, personally, you can use them to

figure out where the dangers are so that you can afford to take great risks because you have a really

good sense of how they're going to go wrong. But I would also point out civilization has this

problem. Civilization is now producing these events that are major disasters, but they're not

existential scale yet, right? They're very serious errors that we can see. And I would argue that

the pattern is you discover that we are involved in some industrial process at the point it has gone

wrong, right? So I'm now always asking the question, okay, in light of the Fukushima

Triple Meltdown, the financial collapse of 2008, the Deepwater Horizon blowout COVID 19 and its

probable origins in the Wuhan lab, what processes do I not know the name of yet that I will discover

at the point that some gigantic accident has happened? And can we talk about the wisdom or

lack thereof of engaging in that process before the accident, right? That's what a wise civilization

would be doing. And yet we don't. I just want to mention something that happened a couple of days

ago. I don't know if you know who JB Straubel is. He's the cofounder of Tesla, CTO of Tesla for many,

many years. His wife just died. She was riding a bicycle. And in the same thin line between death

and life that many of us have been in where you walk into the intersection and there's this close

call. Every once in a while, you get the short straw. I wonder how much of our own individual lives

and the entirety of the human civilization rests on this little roll of the dice.

Well, this is sort of my point about the close calls is that there's a level at which we can't

control it, right? The gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time

to do anything about. There's not a lot we can do to hedge that out, or at least not short term.

But there are lots of other things. Obviously, the financial collapse of 2008 didn't

break down the entire world economy. It threatened to, but a Herculean effort managed to pull us back

from the brink. The triple meltdown at Fukushima was awful. But every one of the seven fuel pools

held, there wasn't a major fire that made it impossible to manage the disaster going forward.

We got lucky. We could say the same thing about the blowout at the Deepwater horizon,

where a hole in the ocean floor large enough that we couldn't have plugged it could have opened up.

All of these things could have been much, much worse. And I think we can say the same thing

about COVID as terrible as it is. And we cannot say for sure that it came from the Wuhan lab,

but there's a strong likelihood that it did. And it also could be much, much worse.

So in each of these cases, something is telling us we have a process that is unfolding that keeps

creating risks where it is luck that is the difference between us and some scale of disaster

that is unimaginable. And that wisdom, you can be highly intelligent and cause these disasters.

To be wise is to stop causing them. And that would require a process of restraint,

a process that I don't see a lot of evidence of yet. So I think we have to generate it.

And somehow, at the moment, we don't have a political structure that would be capable of

taking a protective algorithm and actually deploying it, because it would have important

economic consequences. And so it would almost certainly be shot down. But we can obviously

also say, we paid a huge price for all of the disasters that I've mentioned. And we have to

factor that into the equation. Something can be very productive short term and very destructive

long term. Also, the question is how many disasters we avoided because of the ingenuity

of humans or just the integrity and character of humans? That's sort of an open question.

We may be more intelligent than lucky. That's the hope. Because the optimistic message here that

you're getting at is maybe the process that we should be, that maybe we can overcome luck

with ingenuity. Meaning, I guess you're suggesting the process is we should be listing all the ways

that human civilization can destroy itself, assigning likelihood to it, and thinking through,

how can we avoid that? And being very honest with the data out there about the close calls

and using those close calls to then create sort of mechanism by which we minimize the

probability of those close calls. And just being honest and transparent with the data that's out

there. Well, I think we need to do a couple things for it to work. So I've been an advocate for the

idea that sustainability is actually, it's difficult to operationalize, but it is an objective

that we have to meet if we're to be around long term. And I realized that we also need to have

reversibility of all of our processes because processes very frequently when they start do

not appear dangerous. And then when they scale, they become very dangerous. So for example,

if you imagine the first internal combustion engine in a vehicle driving down the street,

and you imagine somebody running after them saying, hey, if you do enough of that,

you're going to alter the atmosphere and it's going to change the temperature of the planet,

it's preposterous, right? Why would you stop the person who's invented this marvelous new

contraption? But of course, eventually you do get to the place where you're doing enough of this

that you do start changing the temperature of the planet. So if we built the capacity, if we

basically said, look, you can't involve yourself in any process that you couldn't reverse if you

had to, then progress would be slowed, but our safety would go up dramatically. And I think

in some sense, if we are to be around long term, we have to begin thinking that way. We're just

involved in too many very dangerous processes. So let's talk about one of the things that,

if not threatened human civilization, certainly hurt it at a deep level, which is COVID 19.

What percent probability would you currently place

on the hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

So I maintain a flow chart of all the possible explanations. And it doesn't break down exactly

that way. The likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very, very high. If it emerged from a lab,

the likelihood that the lab was the Wuhan Institute is very, very high.

There are multiple different kinds of evidence that point to the lab. And there is literally no

evidence that points to nature. Either the evidence points nowhere or it points to the lab. And the

lab could mean any lab, but geographically, obviously, the labs in Wuhan are the most likely.

And the lab that was most directly involved with research on viruses that look like COVID,

that look like SARS COVID 2, is obviously the place that one would start. But I would say

the likelihood that this virus came from a lab is well above 95%. We can talk about the question of

could a virus have been brought into the lab and escaped from there without being modified?

That's also possible. But it doesn't explain any of the anomalies in the genome of SARS COVID 2.

Could it have been delivered from another lab? Could Wuhan be a distraction

in order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way? That's conceivable. I currently have

that below 1% on my flow chart. But I think very dark thought that somebody would do that almost as

a political attack on China. Well, it depends. I don't even think that's one possibility.

Sometimes when Eric and I talk about these issues, we will generate a scenario just to prove that

something could live in that space. It's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened.

And so it doesn't have to have been an attack on China. That's certainly one possibility.

But I would point out, if you can predict the future in some unusual way better than others,

you can print money. That's what markets that allow you to bet for or against

virtually any sector allow you to do. So you can imagine simply a moral

person or entity generating a pandemic attempting to cover their tracks because it would allow them

to bet against things like cruise ships, air travel, whatever it is and bet in favor of,

I don't know, sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do. So am I saying that I think somebody

did that? No, I really don't think it happened. We've seen zero evidence that this was intentionally

released. However, were it to have been intentionally released by somebody who did not know, did not

want it known where it had come from. Releasing it in Wuhan would be one way to cover their tracks.

So we have to leave the possibility formally open, but acknowledge there's no evidence.

And the probability, therefore, is low. I tend to believe maybe this is the optimistic nature

that I have that people who are competent enough to do the kind of thing we just described

are not going to do that because it requires a certain kind of, I don't want to use the word

eval, but whatever word you want to use to describe the kind of this regard for human life

required to do that. It's just not going to be coupled with competence. I feel like there's a

trade off chart where competence on one axis and evils on the other. And the more evil you become,

the crapper you are at doing great engineering scientific work required to deliver weapons of

different kinds, whether it's bioweapons or nuclear weapons, all those kinds of things.

That seems to be the lessons I take from history, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's

going to be happening in the future. But to stick on the lab leak idea, because the flowchart is

probably huge here, because there's a lot of fascinating possibilities. One question I want

to ask is what would evidence for natural origins look like? So one piece of evidence for natural

origins is that it's happened in the past that viruses have jumped. Oh, they do jump. So that's

possible to have happened. So that's a sort of like a historical evidence like, okay, well,

it's possible that it happened. It's not evidence of the kind you think it is. It's a justification

for a presumption. So the presumption upon discovering a new virus circulating is certainly

that it came from nature. The problem is the presumption evaporates in the face of evidence,

or at least it logically should. And it didn't in this case. It was maintained by people who

privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of this

virus. Is there some other piece of evidence that we could look for and see that would say

this increases the probability that it's natural origins? Yeah. In fact, there is evidence. I always

worry that somebody is going to make up some evidence in order to reverse the flow. Well,

let's say I am a lot of incentive for that, actually, there's a huge amount of incentive. On

the other hand, why didn't the powers that be the powers that lied to us about weapons of mass

destruction in Iraq? Why didn't they ever fake weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Whatever

force it is, I hope that force is here too. And so whatever evidence we find is real.

It's the competence thing I'm talking about. But okay, go ahead. Sorry.

Well, we can get back to that. But I would say, yeah, the giant piece of evidence that will shift

the probabilities in the other direction is the discovery of either a human population in which

the virus circulated prior to showing up in Wuhan that would explain where the virus learned all

of the tricks that it knew instantly upon spreading from Wuhan. So that would do it or

an animal population in which an ancestor epidemic can be found in which the virus learned this

before jumping to humans. But I'd point out in that second case, you would certainly expect to see

a great deal of evolution in the early epidemic, which we don't see. So there almost has to be

a human population somewhere else that had the virus circulating or an ancestor of the virus

that we first saw in Wuhan circulating. And it has to have gotten very sophisticated in that prior

epidemic before hitting Wuhan in order to explain the total lack of evolution and extremely effective

virus that emerged at the end of 2019. So you don't believe in the magic of evolution to

spring up with all the tricks already there? Like everybody who doesn't have the tricks,

they die quickly. And then you just have this beautiful virus that comes in with the spike

protein and the through mutation and selection. The ones that succeed and succeed big are the

ones that are going to just spring into life with the tricks. Well, no. That's called a hopeful

monster and hopeful monsters don't work. The job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult.

It involves two very difficult steps and they both have to work. One is the ability to infect a

person and spread in their tissues sufficient to make an infection. And the other is to jump between

individuals at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct for one reason or another.

Those are both very difficult jobs. They require, as you describe, selection. And the point is,

selection would leave a mark. We would see evidence that it would stay in place.

In animals or humans, we would see both, right?

And we see this evolutionary trace of the virus gathering the tricks out.

Yeah. You would see the virus, you would see the clumsy virus get better and better. And yes,

I am a full believer in the power of that process. In fact, I believe it. What I know

from studying the process is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine, that what we

teach in the Evolution 101 textbook is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing and that

actually people should increase their expectation of the rapidity with which that process can produce

just jaw dropping adaptations. That said, we just don't see evidence that it happened here,

which doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But it means, in spite of immense pressure to find it somewhere,

there's been no hint, which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory.

So inside the laboratory, gain a function research on viruses. And I believe most of

that kind of research is doing this exact thing that you're referring to, which is

accelerated evolution. And just watching evolution do its thing on a bunch of viruses

and seeing what kind of tricks get developed. The other method is engineering viruses. So

manually adding on the tricks. Which do you think we should be thinking about here?

So mind you, I learned what I know in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging. I

started studying the question. And I would say, based on the content of the genome and other

evidence in publications from the various labs that were involved in generating this technology,

a couple of things seem likely. This SARS CoV2 does not appear to be entirely the result of

either a splicing process or serial passaging. It appears to have both things in its past.

Or it's at least highly likely that it does. So for example, the Fern cleavage site

looks very much like it was added in to the virus. And it was known that that would increase its

infectivity in humans and increase its tropism. The virus appears to be excellent at spreading

in humans and minks and ferrets. Now minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other

and ferrets are very likely to have been used in a serial passage experiment. The reason being

that they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human ACE2 receptor. And so

were you going to passage the virus or its ancestor through an animal in order to increase

its infectivity in humans, which would have been necessary, ferrets would have been very

likely. It is also quite likely that humanized mice were utilized. And it is possible that human

airway tissue was utilized. I think it is vital that we find out what the protocols were. If this

came from the Wuhan Institute, we need to know it and we need to know what the protocols were

exactly because they will actually give us some tools that would be useful in fighting SARS CoV2

and hopefully driving it to extinction, which ought to be our priority. It is a priority that

does not, it is not apparent from our behavior, but it really is. It should be our objective if we

understood where our interests lie. We would be much more focused on it. But those protocols would

tell us a great deal. If it wasn't the Wuhan Institute, we need to know that. If it was nature,

we need to know that. And if it was some other laboratory, we need to figure out

what and where so that we can determine what we can determine about what was done.

You're opening up my mind about why we should investigate, why we should know the truth

of the origins of this virus. So for me personally, let me just tell the story of my own kind of journey.

When I first started looking into the lab leak hypothesis, what became terrifying to me and

important to understand and obvious is the sort of like Sam Harris way of thinking, which is

it's obvious that a lab leak of a deadly virus will eventually happen. My mind was,

it doesn't even matter if it happened in this case. It's obvious it's going to happen in the future.

So why the hell are we not freaking out about this? And COVID 19 is not even that deadly

relative to the possible future viruses. It's the way I disagree with Sam on this,

but he thinks about this way about AGI as well, not about artificial intelligence. It's a different

discussion, I think, but with viruses, it seems like something that could happen on the scale of

years, maybe a few decades. AGI is a little bit farther out for me, but it seemed the terrifying

thing seemed obvious that this will happen very soon for a much deadlier virus as we get better

and better at both engineering viruses and doing this kind of evolutionary driven research,

gain a function research. Okay, but then you started speaking out about this as well, but

also started to say, no, no, no, we should hurry up and figure out the origins now because they

will help us figure out how to actually respond to this particular virus, how to treat this

particular virus, what is in terms of vaccines, in terms of antiviral drugs, in terms of just

hand, although the number of responses we should have. Okay, I still am much more freaking out

about the future. Maybe you can break that apart a little bit. Which are you most focused on now?

Which are you most freaking out about now in terms of the importance of figuring out the origins of

this virus? I am most freaking out about both of them because they're both really important and

we can put bounds on this. Let me say first that this is a perfect test case for the theory of

close calls because as much as COVID is a disaster, it is also a close call from which we can learn

much. You are absolutely right. If we keep playing this game in the lab, especially if we do it

under pressure and when we are told that a virus is going to leap from nature any day and that the

more we know, the better we'll be able to fight it, we're going to create the disaster sooner.

Yes, that should be an absolute focus. The fact that there were people saying that this was dangerous

back in 2015 ought to tell us something. The fact that the system bypassed a ban and offshored the

work to China ought to tell us this is not a Chinese failure. This is a failure of something

larger and harder to see. But I also think that there's a clock ticking with respect to SARS

CoV2 and COVID, the disease that it creates. That has to do with whether or not we are stuck

with it permanently. If you think about the cost to humanity of being stuck with influenza,

it's an immense cost year after year. We just stopped thinking about it because it's there.

Some years you get to flu, most years you don't. Maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it. Maybe

the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted. But imagine just simply doubling that cost.

Imagine we get stuck with SARS CoV2 and its descendants going forward and that

it just settles in and becomes a fact of modern human life. That would be a disaster. The number

of people we will ultimately lose is incalculable. The amount of suffering that will be caused is

incalculable, the loss of well being and wealth incalculable. That ought to be a very high priority

driving this extinct before it becomes permanent. The ability to drive extinct

goes down the longer we delay effective responses to the extent that we let it have this very large

canvas, large numbers of people who have the disease in which mutation and selection can result

in adaptation that we will not be able to counter the greater its ability to figure out features

of our immune system and use them to its advantage. I'm feeling the pressure of driving an extinct.

I believe we could have driven an extinct six months ago and we didn't do it because of very

mundane concerns among a small number of people. I'm not alleging that they were brazen about

or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused. I have the sense that they

were working from a kind of autopilot in which let's say you're in some kind of a

pharmaceutical corporation. You have a portfolio of therapies that in the context of a pandemic

might be very lucrative. Those therapies have competitors. You of course want to position

your product so that it succeeds and the competitors don't and lo and behold at some point through

means that I think those of us on the outside can't really into it. You end up saying things

about competing therapies that work better and much more safely than the ones you're selling

that aren't true and do cause people to die in large numbers, but it's some kind of autopilot,

at least part of it is. There's a complicated coupling of the autopilot of institutions,

companies, governments, and then there's also the geopolitical game theory thing going on

where you want to keep secrets. It's the Chernobyl thing where if you messed up,

there's a big incentive, I think, to hide the fact that you messed up. So how do we fix this?

And what's more important to fix? The autopilot, which is the response that we often criticize

about our institutions, especially the leaders in those institutions, Anthony Fauci and so on,

as some of the members of the scientific community. And the second part is the game with China

of hiding the information in terms of on the fight between nations.

Well, in our live streams on Dark Horse, Heather and I have been talking from the beginning about

the fact that although, yes, what happens began in China, it very much looks like a failure of

the international scientific community. That's frightening. But it's also hopeful in the sense

that actually, if we did the right thing now, we're not navigating a puzzle about Chinese

responsibility. We're navigating a question of collective responsibility for something that has

been terribly costly to all of us. So that's not a very happy process. But as you point out,

what's at stake is in large measure, at the very least, the strong possibility this will happen

again, and that at some point, it will be far worse. So just as a person that does not learn

the lessons of their own errors, doesn't get smarter and they remain in danger,

we collectively, humanity has to say, well, there sure is a lot of evidence that suggests

that this is a self inflicted wound. When you have done something that has caused a massive

self inflicted wound, self inflicted wound, it makes sense to dwell on it exactly to the

point that you have learned the lesson that makes it very, very unlikely that something similar

will happen again. I think this is a good place to kind of ask you to do almost like a thought

experiment, or to steel man the argument against the lab leak hypothesis. So if you were to argue,

you know, you said 95% chance that it the virus leaf from a lab, there's a bunch of ways I think

you can argue that even talking about it is bad for the world. So if I just put something on the

table is to say that for one, it would be racism versus Chinese people that talking about that it

leaked from a lab, there's a kind of immediate kind of blame and it can spiral down into this idea

that's somehow the people are responsible for the virus and this kind of thing. Is it possible for

you to come up with other steel man arguments against talking or against the possibility

of the lab leak hypothesis? Well, so I think steel manning is a tool that is extremely

valuable, but it's also possible to abuse it. I think that you can only steel man a good faith

argument. And the problem is we now know that we have not been engaged in opponents who were

wielding good faith arguments because privately their emails reflect their own doubts. And what

they were doing publicly was actually a punishment, a public punishment for those of us who spoke up

with I think the purpose of either backing us down or more likely warning others not to engage

in the same kind of behavior. And obviously for people like you and me who regard science as our

likely best hope for navigating difficult waters, shutting down people who are using those tools

honorably is itself dishonorable. So I don't feel that it is, I don't feel that there's

anything to steel man. And I also think that immediately at the point that the world suddenly

with no new evidence on the table switched gears with respect to the lab leak, at the point that

Nicholas Wade had published his article and suddenly the world was going to admit that this

was at least a possibility if not a likelihood, we got to see something of the rationalization

process that had taken place inside the institutional world. And it very definitely involved the claim

that what was being avoided was the targeting of Chinese scientists. And my point would be,

I don't want to see the targeting of anyone. I don't want to see racism of any kind. On the other

hand, once you create license to lie in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake

in knowing what happened, then it is inevitable that that process, that license to lie will be

used by the thing that captures institutions for its own purposes. So my sense is it may be very

unfortunate if the story of what happened here can be used against Chinese people. That would be

very unfortunate. And as I think I mentioned, Heather and I have taken great pains to point out

that this doesn't look like a Chinese failure. It looks like a failure of the international

scientific community. So I think it is important to broadcast that message along with the analysis

of the evidence. But no matter what happened, we have a right to know. And I frankly do not

take the institutional layer at its word that its motivations are honorable and that it was

protecting goodhearted scientists at the expense of the world. That explanation does not add up.

Well, this is a very interesting question about whether it's ever okay to lie at the institutional

layer to protect the populace. I think both you and I are probably on the same,

have the same sense that it's a slippery slope, even if it's an effective mechanism in the short

term, in the long term, it's going to be destructive. This happened with masks. This

happened with other things. If you look at just history pandemics, there's an idea that panic

is destructive amongst the populace. So you want to construct a narrative, whether it's a lie or

not, to minimize panic. But you're suggesting that almost in all cases, and I think that was

the lesson from the pandemic in the early 20th century, that lying creates distrust and distrust

in the institutions is ultimately destructive. That's your sense that lying is not okay?

Well, okay. There are obviously places where complete transparency is not a good idea,

right, to the extent that you broadcast a technology that allows one individual to hold

the world hostage. Obviously, you've got something to be navigated. But in general,

I don't believe that the scientific system should be lying to us. In the case of this

particular lie, the idea that the well being of Chinese scientists outweighs the well being of

the world is preposterous. As you point out, one thing that rests on this question is whether we

continue to do this kind of research going forward. And the scientists in question, all of them,

American, Chinese, all of them were pushing the idea that the risk of a zoonotic spillover event

causing a major and highly destructive pandemic was so great that we had to risk this. Now,

if they themselves have caused it, and if they are wrong, as I believe they are, about the likelihood

of a major world pandemic spilling out of nature in the way that they wrote into their grant

applications, then the danger is, you know, the call is coming from inside the house. And

we have to look at that. And yes, whatever we have to do to protect scientists from

retribution, we should do. But we cannot protect them by lying to the world. And even worse,

by demonizing people like me, like Josh Rogan, like Yuri Dagan, the entire drastic group on

Twitter, by demonizing us for simply following the evidence is to set a terrible precedent.

Right. You're demonizing people for using the scientific method to evaluate evidence that is

available to us in the world. What a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson, right?

Thou shalt not use scientific tools. No, I'm sorry. Whatever your license to lie is,

it doesn't extend to that. Yeah, I've seen the attacks on you, the pressure on you has a very

important effect on thousands of world class biologists actually at MIT, colleagues of mine,

people I know, there's a slight pressure to not be allowed to one speak publicly and to actually

think. Like, do you even think about these ideas? It sounds kind of ridiculous, but just to

the, in the privacy of your own home, to read things, to think, it's many people, many world

class biologists that I know will just avoid looking at the data. There's not even that many

people that are publicly opposed and gain a function research. They're also like, it's not

worth it. It's not worth the battle. And there's many people that kind of argue that those battles

should be fought in private with colleagues in the privacy of the scientific community,

that the public is somehow not maybe intelligent enough to be able to deal with the complexities

of this kind of discussion. I don't know, but the final result is combined with the bullying of you

and all the different pressures in the academic institutions is that it's just people are self

censoring and silencing themselves and silencing the most important thing, which is the power of

their brains. Like, these people are brilliant. And the fact that they're not utilizing their brain

to come up with solutions outside of the conformist line of thinking is tragic.

Well, it is. I also think that we have to look at it and understand it for what it is. For one

thing, it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism. Somehow people's sense of what they're allowed

to think about, talk about, discuss is causing them to self censor. And I can tell you it's

causing many of them to rationalize, which is even worse. They're blinding themselves to what

they can see. But it is also the case, I believe, that what you're describing about what people

said and a great many people understood that the lab leak hypothesis could not be taken off the table.

But they didn't say so publicly. And I think that their discussions with each other about why they

did not say what they understood, that's what captures sounds like on the inside. I don't

know exactly what force captured the institutions. I don't think anybody knows for sure out here

in public. I don't even know that it wasn't just simply a process, but you have these institutions.

They are behaving towards a kind of somatic obligation. They have lost sight of what they

were built to accomplish. And on the inside, the way they avoid going back to their original mission

is to say things to themselves like, the public can't have this discussion, it can't be trusted

with it. Yes, we need to be able to talk about this, but it has to be private, whatever it is

they say to themselves, that is what capture sounds like on the inside. It's a institutional

rationalization mechanism. And it's very, very deadly. And at the point you go from lab leak

to repurposed drugs, you can see that it's very deadly in a very direct way.

Yeah, I see this in my field with things like autonomous weapons systems. People in AI do

not talk about the use of AI in weapons systems. They kind of avoid the idea that AI is used in

the military. It's kind of funny. There's this kind of discomfort and they're like, they all

hurry like something scary happens and a bunch of sheep kind of like run away. That's what it looks

like. And I don't even know what to do about it. And then I feel this natural pull every time I

bring up autonomous weapons systems to go along with the sheep. There's a natural kind of pull

towards that direction because it's like, what can I do as one person? Now there's currently

nothing destructive happening with autonomous weapons systems. So we're like in the early days

of this race that in 10, 20 years might become a real problem. Now we're the discussion we're

having now, we're now facing the result of that in the space of viruses, like for many years

avoiding the conversations here. I don't know what to do that in the early days. But I think we

have to, I guess, create institutions where people can stand out. People can stand out and like

basically be individual thinkers and break out into all kinds of spaces of ideas that allow us to

think freely, freedom of thought. And maybe that requires a decentralization of institutions.

Well, years ago, I came up with a concept called cultivated insecurity. And the idea is,

let's just take the example of the average Joe, right? The average Joe has a job somewhere and

their mortgage, their medical insurance, their retirement, their connection with the economy

is to one degree or another dependent on their relationship with the employer.

That means that there is a strong incentive, especially in any industry where it's not easy to

move from one employer to the next, there's a strong incentive to stay in your employer's good

graces, right? So it creates a very top down dynamic, not only in terms of who gets to tell

other people what to do, but it really comes down to who gets to tell other people how to think.

So that's extremely dangerous. The way out of it is to cultivate security to the extent that

somebody is in a position to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe for their family

and their ability to earn, you will see that behavior a lot more. So I would argue that some

of what you're talking about is just a simple predictable consequence of the concentration

of the sources of well being and that this is a solvable problem.

You got a chance to talk with Joe Rogan yesterday?

Yes, I did.

And I just saw the episode was released and Ivor Mekton is trending on Twitter.

Joe told me it was an incredible conversation. I look forward to listening to you today. Many

people have probably by the time this is released have already listened to it. I think it would be

interesting to discuss a postmortem. How do you feel how the conversation went? And maybe broadly,

how do you see the story as it's unfolding of Ivor Mekton from the origins from before COVID 19

through 2020 to today? I very much enjoyed talking to Joe and I'm

undescribably grateful that he would take the risk of such a discussion that he would,

as he described it, do an emergency podcast on the subject, which I think that was not an exaggeration.

This needed to happen for various reasons that he took us down the road of talking about

the censorship campaign against Ivor Mekton, which I find utterly shocking and talking about

the drug itself. And I should say we had Pierre Corey available. He came on the podcast as well.

He is, of course, the face of the FLCCCC, the frontline COVID 19 critical care alliance. These

are doctors who have innovated ways of treating COVID patients and they happened on Ivor Mekton

and have been using it. And I hesitate to use the word advocating for it because that's not

really the role of doctors or scientists, but they are advocating for it in the sense that there is

this pressure not to talk about its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into. So maybe step

back and say, what is Ivor Mekton and how much studies have been done to show its effectiveness?

So Ivor Mekton is an interesting drug. It was discovered in the 70s by a Japanese

scientist named Satoshi Omura. And he found it in soil near a Japanese golf course. So I would

just point out in passing that if we were to stop self silencing over the possibility that

Asians will be demonized over the possible lab leak in Wuhan and to recognize that actually the

natural course of the story has a likely lab leak in China. It has a unlikely hero in Japan.

The story is naturally not a simple one. But in any case, Omura discovered this molecule. He

sent it to a friend who was at Merck, a scientist named Campbell. They won a Nobel Prize for the

discovery of the Ivor Mekton molecule in 2015. Its initial use was in treating parasitic infections.

It's very effective in treating the worm that causes river blindness, the pathogen that causes

elephantitis, scabies, the very effective anti parasite drug. It's extremely safe. It's on the

who's list of essential medications. It's safe for children. It has been administered something

like four billion times in the last four decades. It has been given away in the millions of doses

by Merck in Africa. People have been on it for long periods of time. And in fact,

one of the reasons that Africa may have had less severe impacts from COVID 19 is that Ivor Mekton

is widely used there to prevent parasites. And the drug appears to have a long lasting impact.

So it's an interesting molecule. It was discovered some time ago, apparently,

that it has antiviral properties. And so it was tested early in the COVID 19 pandemic to see if

it might work to treat humans with COVID. It turned out to have very promising evidence that it did

treat humans. It was tested in tissues. It was tested at a very high dosage, which confuses people.

They think that those of us who believe that Ivor Mekton might be useful in confronting this

disease are advocating those high doses, which is not the case. But in any case, there have been

quite a number of studies. A wonderful meta analysis was finally released. We had seen it in

preprint version, but it was finally peer reviewed and published this last week. It reveals that the

drug, as clinicians have been telling us, those who've been using it, it's highly effective at

treating people with the disease, especially if you get to them early. And it showed an 86%

effectiveness as a prophylactic to prevent people from contracting COVID. And that number, 86%,

is high enough to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction if we wished to deploy it.

First of all, the meta analysis, is this the Ivor Mekton for COVID 19 real time meta analysis

of 60 studies? Or there's a bunch of meta analysis there, because I was really impressed by the

real time meta analysis that keeps getting updated. I don't know if it's the same kind.

The one at IVMMeta.com? Well, I saw it. It's C19IvorMekton.com.

No, this is not that meta analysis. So that is, as you say, a living meta analysis where you can

watch as evidence. Which is super cool, by the way. It's really cool. And they've got some

really nice graphics that allow you to understand, well, what is the evidence? It's concentrated

around this level of effectiveness, et cetera. So anyway, it's great site, well worth paying

attention to. No, this is a meta analysis. I don't know any of the authors, but one.

Second author is Tess Laurie of the Bird Group. Bird being a group of analysts and doctors in

Britain that is playing a role similar to the FLCCC here in the US. So anyway, this is a meta

analysis that Tess Laurie and others did of all of the available evidence. And it's quite compelling.

People, if people can look for it on my Twitter, I will put it up and people can find it there.

So what about dose here? In terms of safety, what do we understand about the kind of dose

required to have that level of effectiveness? And what do we understand about the safety of that

kind of dose? So let me just say I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a biologist. I'm on ivermectin in

lieu of vaccination. In terms of dosage, there is one reason for concern, which is that the most

effective dose for prophylaxis involves something like weekly administration. And that that is because

that is not a historical pattern of use for the drug. It is possible that there is some

long term implication of being on it weekly for a long period of time. There's not a strong

indication of that, the safety signal that we have over people using the drug over many years

and using it in high doses. In fact, Dr. Corey told me yesterday that there are cases in which

people have made calculation errors and taken a massive overdose of the drug and had no ill

effect. So anyway, there's lots of reasons to think the drug is comparatively safe, but no drug is

perfectly safe. And I do worry about the long term implications of taking it. I also think it's very

likely because the drug is administered in a dose something like let's say 15 milligrams for somebody

my size once a week after you've gone through the initial double dose that you take 48 hours

apart. It is apparent that if the amount of drug in your system is sufficient to be protective at

the end of the week, then it was probably far too high at the beginning of the week. So there's a

question about whether or not you could flatten out the intake so that the amount of ivermectin

goes down, but the protection remains. I have little doubt that that would be discovered if we looked

for it. But that said, it does seem to be quite safe, highly effective at preventing COVID. The

86% number is plenty high enough for us to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction in light of its R not

number of slightly more than two. And so why we are not using it as a bit of a mystery.

So even if everything you said now turns out to be not correct, it is nevertheless obvious that it's

sufficiently promising. It always has been in order to merit rigorous scientific exploration,

investigation, doing a lot of studies, and certainly not censoring the science or the

discussion of it. So before we talk about the various vaccines for COVID 19, I'd like to talk

to you about censorship. Given everything you're saying, why did YouTube and other places censor

discussion of ivermectin? Well, there's a question about why they say they did it,

and there's a question about why they actually did it. Now, it is worth mentioning that YouTube

is part of a consortium. It is partnered with Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, AP, Financial Times,

Washington Post, some other notable organizations, and that this group has appointed itself

the arbiter of truth. In effect, they have decided to control discussion ostensibly to

prevent the distribution of misinformation. Now, how have they chosen to do that? In this case,

they have chosen to simply utilize the recommendations of the who and the CDC and apply

them as if they are synonymous with scientific truth. Problem, even at their best, the who and

CDC are not scientific entities. They are entities that are about public health. Public health has

this, whether it's right or not, and I believe I disagree with it, but it has this

self assigned right to lie that comes from the fact that there is game theory that works against,

for example, a successful vaccination campaign, that if everybody else takes a vaccine and,

therefore, the herd becomes immune through vaccination and you decide not to take a vaccine,

then you benefit from the immunity of the herd without having taken the risk. So,

people who do best are the people who opt out. That's a hazard, and the who and CDC as public

health entities effectively oversimplify stories in order that that game theory does not cause

a predictable tragedy of the commons. With that said, once that right to lie exists,

then it finds out, it turns out to serve the interests of, for example, pharmaceutical

companies which have emergency use authorizations that require that they're not be a safe and

effective treatment and have immunity from liability for harms caused by their product.

So, that's a recipe for disaster, right? You don't need to be a sophisticated

thinker about complex systems to see the hazard of immunizing a company from the harm of its own

product at the same time that that product can only exist in the market if some other product

that works better somehow fails to be noticed. So, somehow YouTube is doing the bidding of Merck

and others. Whether it knows that that's what it's doing, I have no idea. I think this may

be another case of an autopilot that thinks it's doing the right thing because it's parroting the

corrupt wisdom of the who and the CDC, but the who and the CDC have been wrong again and again

in this pandemic. And the irony here is that with YouTube coming after me, well, my channel has been

right where the who and CDC have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic. So, how is

it that YouTube is censoring us because the who and CDC disagree with us when in fact in past

disagreements we've been right and they've been wrong? There's so much to talk about here. So,

I've heard this many times actually on the inside of YouTube and with colleagues that

I've talked with is they kind of in a very casual way say their job is simply to slow or prevent

the spread of misinformation. And they say like that's an easy thing to do. Like to know what is

true or not is an easy thing to do. And so, from the YouTube perspective, I think they basically

outsource of the task of knowing what is true or not to public institutions that on a basic

Google search claim to be the arbiters of truth. So, if you were YouTube who are exceptionally

profitable and exceptionally powerful in terms of controlling what people get to see or not,

what would you do? Would you take a stand, a public stand against the WHO who CDC?

Or would you instead say, you know what, let's open the dam and let any video on anything fly?

What do you do here? If you say you were put, if Brett Weinstein was put in charge of YouTube for

a month in this most critical of times or YouTube actually has incredible amounts of power to educate

the populace, to give power of knowledge to the populace such that they can reform institutions,

what would you do? How would you run YouTube? Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is

actually quite simple. The founders, the American founders settled on a counterintuitive formulation

that people should be free to say anything. They should be free from the government blocking them

from doing so. They did not imagine that in formulating that right that most of what was said

would be of high quality, nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things. What they

correctly reasoned was that the benefit of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost,

which everyone understands to be substantial. What I would say is they could not have anticipated

the impact, the centrality of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If they had,

they would not have limited the First Amendment as they did. They clearly understood that the

power of the federal government was so great that it needed to be limited by granting explicitly the

right of citizens to say anything. In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook may be more powerful

in this moment than the federal government of their worst nightmares could have been.

The power that these entities have to control thought and to shift civilization is so great

that we need to have those same protections. It doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said,

but it means that nothing has changed about the cost benefit analysis of building the right to

censor. If I were running YouTube, the limit of what should be allowed is the limit of the law.

If what you are doing is legal, then it should not be YouTube's place to limit

what gets said or who gets to hear it. That is between speakers and audience. Will harm come

from that? Of course it will. Will net harm come from it? No, I don't believe it will. I believe

that allowing everything to be said does allow a process in which better ideas do come to the

fore and win out. You believe that in the end, when there's complete freedom to share ideas,

that truth will win out? What I've noticed, just as a brief side comment,

that certain things become viral, regardless of their truth. I've noticed that things that are

dramatic or funny, things that become memes don't have to be grounded in truth. What worries me

there is that we basically maximize for drama versus maximize for truth in a system where

everything is free. That's worrying in the time of emergency. Well, yes, it's all worrying in

time of emergency, to be sure. But I want you to notice that what you've happened on is actually an

analog for a much deeper and older problem. We are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest

slate that nature has ever devised, and there's a reason for that. It's where our flexibility comes

from. We have, effectively, we are robots in which a large fraction of the cognitive capacity has

been or of the behavioral capacity has been offloaded to the software layer, which gets

written and rewritten over evolutionary time. That means, effectively, that much of what we are,

in fact, the important part of what we are, is housed in the cultural layer and the conscious

layer and not in the hardware hard coding layer. That layer is prone to make errors, right? And

anybody who's watched a child grow up knows that children make absurd errors all the time, right?

That's part of the process, as we were discussing earlier. It is also true that as you look across

a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense. It's garbage.

But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread on the short term does not say that over

the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. There is a high tendency for novelty to

be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct.

You have to keep that in mind. It's not like the genome, right? Everything is happening at a much

higher rate. Things are being created. They're being destroyed. I can't say that, obviously,

we've seen totalitarianism arise many times and it's very destructive each time it does. So,

it's not like, hey, freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of

carnage, but the question is over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies?

And I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern.

I believe so as well. The thing is, in the short term, freedom of speech, absolute freedom of

speech can be quite destructive, but you nevertheless have to hold on to that, because in the long

term, I think you and I, I guess, are optimistic in the sense that good ideas will win out.

I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say I haven't heard a better idea.

Yeah. I would also point out that there's something very significant in this question

of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring,

which is the majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense. That's automatic. But the heterodoxy

at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas,

is the key to progress. So, if you decide, hey, the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid

of it, right? Hey, that's a strong win. We're getting rid of 99% garbage for 1% something or

other. And the point is, yeah, but that 1% something or other is the key. You're throwing

out the key. And so that's what YouTube is doing. Frankly, I think at the point that it started

censoring my channel, you know, in the immediate aftermath of this major reversal of lab or for

lab leak, it should have looked at itself and said, well, what the hell are we doing? Who are we

censoring? We're censoring somebody who was just right, right, in a conflict with the very same

people on whose behalf we are now censoring, right? That should have caused them to wake up.

So, you said one approach, if you're on YouTube, is this basically let all videos go that do not

violate the law? Well, I should fix that. Okay. I believe that that is the basic principle.

Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks,

doxing, these other things. So, I agree there's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's

lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know.

But, you know, what I'm talking about is, yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas,

and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad. And hopefully that process results in

better ideas winning out. Yeah, there's an interesting line between, you know,

like, ideas like the Earth is flat, which I believe you should not censor. And then,

like, you start to encroach on, like, personal attacks. So, not, you know, doxing, yes, but,

like, not even getting to that. Like, there's a certain point where it's like, that's no longer

ideas, that's more, that's somehow not productive, even if it's, it feels like believing the Earth

is flat, it's somehow productive. Because maybe there's a tiny percent chance it is. You know,

like, it just feels like personal attacks, it doesn't. Well, you know, it's, I'm torn on this

because there's assholes in this world, there's fraudulent people in this world. So, sometimes

personal attacks are useful to reveal that. But there's a line you can cross. Like, there's a

comedy where people make fun of others. I think that's amazing, that's very powerful,

and that's very useful, even if it's painful. But then there's like, once it gets to be,

yeah, there's a certain line, it's a gray area where you cross where it's no longer

in any possible world productive. And that's a really weird gray area for YouTube to operate in.

And it feels like it should be a crowdsourced thing where people vote on it. But then again,

do you trust the majority to vote on what is crossing the line or not? I mean, this is where,

this is really interesting on this particular, like the scientific aspect of this. Do you think

YouTube should take more of a stance? Not censoring, but to actually have scientists within YouTube,

having these kinds of discussions, and then be able to almost speak out in a transparent way.

This is what we're going to let this video stand. But here's all these other opinions,

almost like take a more active role in its recommendation system in trying to present

a full picture to you. Right now, they're not there. The recommender systems are not human

fine tuned. They're all based on how you click. And there's this clustering algorithms. They're

not taking an active role on giving you the full spectrum of ideas in the space of science.

They just censor or not. Well, at the moment, it's going to be pretty hard to compel me that

these people should be trusted with any sort of curation or comment on matters of evidence because

they have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it well. You could make such an argument.

And I guess I'm open to the idea of institutions that would look something like YouTube that would

be capable of offering something valuable. And even just the fact of them literally curating

things and putting some videos next to others implies something. So yeah, there's a question

to be answered. But at the moment, no. At the moment, what it is doing is quite literally putting

not only individual humans in tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion of useful tools and making

tools that are more hazardous than has been acknowledged seem safe. But it is also placing

humanity in danger of a permanent relationship with this pathogen. I cannot emphasize enough

how expensive that is. It's effectively incalculable if the relationship becomes permanent,

the number of people who will ultimately suffer and die from it is indefinitely large.

Yeah, there's currently the algorithm is very rabbit hole driven, meaning if you click on

flat earth videos, that's all you're going to be presented with. And you're not going to be

nicely presented with arguments against the flat earth. And the flip side of that,

if you watch like quantum mechanics videos or no, general relativity videos,

it's very rare you're going to get in a recommendation, have you considered the earth

as flat? And I think you should have both. Same with vaccine, videos that present the power and

incredible like biology, genetics, biology about the vaccine, you're rarely going to get videos

from well respected scientific minds presenting possible dangers of the vaccine. And the vice

of versus true as well, which is if you're looking at the dangers of the vaccine on YouTube,

you're not going to get the highest quality of videos recommended to you. And I'm not talking

about like manually inserted CDC videos that are like the most untrustworthy things you can possibly

watch about how everybody should take the vaccine. It's the safest thing ever. No, it's about

incredible. Again, MIT colleagues of mine, incredible biologists, virologists that I'll

talk about the details of how the mRNA vaccines work and all those kinds of things. I think

maybe this is me with the AI head on is I think the algorithm can fix a lot of this. And YouTube

should build better algorithms and trust that to a couple of complete freedom of speech to expand

the what people are able to think about, present always varied views, not balance in some artificial

way, hard coded way, but balance in a way that's crowdsourced. I think that's an algorithm problem

that can be solved because then you can delegate it to the algorithm as opposed to this hard code

censorship of basically creating artificial boundaries on what can and can't be discussed,

instead creating a full spectrum of exploration that can be done and trusting the intelligence of

people to do the exploration. Well, there's a lot there, I would say we have to keep in mind

that we're talking about a publicly held company with shareholders and obligations to them and

that that may make it impossible. And I remember many years ago back in the early days of Google,

I remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search. It used to be that Google,

if you searched, came up with the same thing for everyone and then it got personalized and for a

while it was possible to turn off the personalization, which was still not great because if everybody

else is looking at a personalized search and you can tune into one that isn't personalized,

that doesn't tell you why the world is sounding the way it is. But nonetheless,

it was at least an option and then that vanished. And the problem is, I think this is literally

deranging us that in effect, what you're describing is unthinkable. It is unthinkable

that in the face of a campaign to vaccinate people in order to reach herd immunity that

YouTube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines when this is how hazardous the vaccines are

is an unsettled question. Why is it unthinkable? That doesn't make any sense from a company

perspective. If intelligent people in large amounts are open minded and are thinking through the

hazards and the benefits of a vaccine, a company should find the best videos to present what

people are thinking about. Well, let's come up with a hypothetical. Let's come up with a

very deadly disease for which there's a vaccine that is very safe, though not perfectly safe.

And we are then faced with YouTube trying to figure out what to do for somebody searching

on vaccine safety. Suppose it is necessary in order to drive the pathogen to extinction,

something like smallpox, that people get on board with the vaccine.

But there's a tiny fringe of people who thinks that the vaccine is a mind control agent.

So should YouTube direct people to the only claims against this vaccine,

which is that it's a mind control agent, when in fact the vaccine is very safe,

whatever that means. If that were the actual configuration of the puzzle, then YouTube would

be doing active harm pointing you to this other video potentially. Now, yes, I would love to

live in a world where people are up to the challenge of sorting that out. But my basic

point would be, if it's an evidentiary question, and there is essentially no evidence that the

vaccine is a mind control agent and there's plenty of evidence that the vaccine is safe,

then, well, you look for this video, we're going to give you this one puts it on a par, right?

So for the mind that's tracking how much thought is there behind it's safe versus how much thought

is there behind it's a mind control agent will result in artificially elevating this. Now,

in the current case, what we've seen is not this at all. We have seen evidence obscured in order

to create a false story about safety. And we saw the inverse with ivermectin. We saw a campaign

to portray the drug as more dangerous and less effective than the evidence clearly suggested

it was. So we're not talking about a comparable thing. But I guess my point is the algorithmic

solution that you point to creates a problem of its own, which is that it means that the way to get

exposure is to generate something fringy. If you're the only thing on some fringe,

then suddenly YouTube would be recommending those things. And that's obviously a gameable system at

best. Yeah, but the solution to that, I know you're creating a thought experiment, maybe playing a

little bit of a devil's advocate. I think the solution to that is not to limit the algorithm

in the case of the super deadly virus. It's for the scientists to step up and become better

communicators, more charismatic, is fight the battle of ideas, sort of create better videos.

Like if the virus is truly deadly, you have a lot more ammunition, a lot more data,

a lot more material to work with in terms of communicating with the public.

So be better at communicating and stop being, you have to start trusting the intelligence of

people and also being transparent and playing the game of the internet, which is like,

what is the internet hungry for? I believe authenticity. Stop looking like you're full of

shit. It's the scientific community. If there's any flaw that I currently see,

especially the people that are in public office that like Anthony Fauci, they look like they're

full of shit. And I know they're brilliant. Why don't they look more authentic? So they're losing

that game. And I think a lot of people observing this entire system now, younger scientists are

seeing this and saying, okay, if I want to continue being a scientist in the public eye,

and I want to be effective on my job, I'm going to have to be a lot more authentic.

So they're learning the lesson. This evolutionary system is working.

So there's just a younger generation of minds coming up that I think will do a much better job

in this battle of ideas that when the much more dangerous virus comes along,

they'll be able to be better communicators. At least that's the hope. The using the algorithm

to control that is, I feel like is a big problem. So you're going to have the same problem with a

deadly virus as with the current virus. If you let YouTube draw hard lines by the PR and the

marketing people versus the broad community of scientists. Well, in some sense, you're

suggesting something that's close kin to what I was saying about freedom of expression ultimately

provides an advantage to better ideas. So I'm in agreement, broadly speaking. But I would also

say there's probably some sort of, let's imagine the world that you propose where YouTube shows

you the alternative point of view. That has the problem that I suggest. But one thing you could

do is you could give us the tools to understand what we're looking at. You could give us, so first

of all, there's something, I think, myopic, solipsistic, narcissistic about an algorithm

that serves shareholders by showing you what you want to see rather than what you need to know.

That's the distinction is flattering you, playing to your blind spot is something that

algorithm will figure out, but it's not healthy for us all to have Google playing to our blind spot.

It's very, very dangerous. So what I really want is analytics that allow me or maybe options and

analytics, the options should allow me to see what alternative perspectives are being explored.

So here's the thing I'm searching and it leads me down this road. Let's say it's ivermectin.

I find all of this evidence that ivermectin works. I find all of these discussions and people

talk about various protocols and this and that. And then I could say, all right, what is the other

side? And I could see who is searching not as individuals, but what demographics are searching

alternatives. And maybe you could even combine it with something Reddit like where effectively,

let's say that there was a position that, I don't know, that a vaccine is a mind control device

and you could have a steelman this argument competition effectively. And the better answers

that steelman and as well as possible would rise to the top. And so you could read the top three

or four explanations about why this really credibly is a mind control product. And you can say, well,

that doesn't really add up. I can check these three things myself and they can't possibly be

right. Right. And you could dismiss it. And then as an argument that was credible, let's say

plate tectonics before that was an accepted concept, you'd say, wait a minute, there is evidence

for plate tectonics. Crazy as it sounds that the continents are floating around on liquid.

Actually, that's not so implausible. You know, we've got these subduction zones. We've got a geology

that is compatible. We've got puzzle piece continents that seem to fit together. Wow,

that's a surprising amount of evidence for that position. So I'm going to file some Bayesian

probability with it that's updated for the fact that actually the steelman argument is better

than I was expecting. Right. So I could imagine something like that where A, I would love the

search to be indifferent to who's searching. Right. The solipsistic thing is too dangerous.

So the search could be general. So we would all get a sense for what everybody else was seeing to.

And then some layer that didn't have anything to do with what YouTube points you to or not,

but allowed you to see the general pattern of adherence to searching for information and,

again, a layer in which those things could be defended so you could hear what a good argument

sounded like rather than just hear a caricatured argument. Yeah. And also reward people, creators

that have demonstrated like a track record of open mindedness and correctness as much as it

could be measured over a long term and sort of, I mean, a lot of this maps to incentivizing

good long term behavior, not immediate kind of dopamine rush kind of signals.

I think ultimately the algorithm on the individual level should optimize for personal growth,

long term happiness, just growth intellectually growth in terms of lifestyle personally and so

on as opposed to immediate. I think that's going to build a better site, not even just like truth,

because I think truth is a complicated thing. It's more just you growing as a person, exploring

in the space of ideas, changing your mind often, increasing the level to which you're open minded,

the knowledge base you're operating from, the willingness to empathize with others,

all those kinds of things the algorithm should optimize for that creating a better human at

the individual level that you're all I think that's a great business model, because the person

that's using this tool will then be happier with themselves for having used it, and it'll be a lifelong

quote unquote customer. I think it's a great business model to make a happy, open minded,

knowledgeable, better human being. It's a terrible business model under the current system.

What you want is to build the system in which it is a great business model.

Why is a terrible model? Because it will be decimated by those who play to the short term.

I don't think so. I mean, I think we're living it. We're living it.

Well, no, because if you have the alternative that presents itself,

it points out the emperor has no clothes. It points out that YouTube is operating in this way,

Twitter is operating in this way, Facebook is operating in this way.

How long term would you like the wisdom to prove that? Even though a week is better

when it's currently happening. Right. But the problem is, if a week loses out to an hour, right?

I don't think it loses out. It loses out in the short term.

That's my point. At least you're a great communicator and you basically say,

look, here's the metrics. A lot of it is how people actually feel.

This is what people experience with social media. They look back at the previous month and say,

I felt shitty in a lot of days because of social media. If you look back at the previous few weeks

and say, wow, I'm a better person because of that month happened, they immediately choose

the product that's going to lead to that. That's what love for products looks like.

If you love, a lot of people love their Tesla car or iPhone or beautiful design,

that's what love looks like. You look back, I'm a better person for having used this thing.

Well, you got to ask yourself the question though, if this is such a great business model,

why isn't it evolving? Why don't we see it? Honestly, it's competence.

It's like people are just, it's not easy to build new, it's not easy to build products, tools,

systems on new ideas. It's kind of a new idea. We've gone through this,

everything we're seeing now comes from the ideas of the initial birth of the internet.

There just needs to be new sets of tools that are incentivizing long term personal growth

and happiness. That's it. Right. But what we have is a market that doesn't favor this.

For one thing, we had an alternative to Facebook that looked, you owned your own data,

it wasn't exploitative and Facebook bought a huge interest in it and it died. Who do you know

who's on diaspora? The execution there was not good. Right. But it could have gotten better.

Right. I don't think that the argument that why hasn't somebody done it,

a good argument for it's not going to completely destroy all of Twitter and Facebook when somebody

does it or Twitter will catch up and pivot to the algorithm. This is not what I'm saying.

There's obviously great ideas that remain unexplored because nobody has gotten to the

foothill that would allow you to explore them. That's true. But an internet that was non predatory

is an obvious idea and many of us know that we want it and many of us have seen prototypes

of it and we don't move because there's no audience there. So the network effects

cause you to stay with the predatory internet. But let me just, I wasn't kidding about build

the system in which your idea is a great business plan. So in our upcoming book,

Heather and I in our last chapter explore something called the fourth frontier and fourth

frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version of civilization, which we freely admit we can't

tell you very much about. It's something that would have to be, we would have to prototype our

way there. We would have to effectively navigate our way there. But the result would be very much

like what you're describing. It would be something that effectively liberates humans

meaningfully and most importantly, it has to feel like growth without depending on growth.

In other words, human beings are creatures that like every other creature is effectively looking

for growth, right? We are looking for underexploited or unexploited opportunities. And when we find

them, our ancestors, for example, if they happen into a new valley that was unexplored by people,

their population would grow until it had carrying capacity. So there would be this great feeling

of there's abundance until you hit carrying capacity, which is inevitable. And then zero

some dynamics would set in. So in order for human beings to flourish long term, the way to get there

is to satisfy the desire for growth without hooking it to actual growth, which only moves and

fits and starts. And this is actually, I believe the key to avoiding these spasms of human tragedy

when in the absence of growth, people do something that causes their population to experience

growth, which is they go and make war on or commit genocide against some other population,

which is something we obviously have to stop. By the way, this is a hunter gatherers guide to

the 21st century coauthored with your wife, Heather, being released this September. I believe you

said you're going to do a little bit of a preview videos on each chapter leading up to the release.

So I'm looking forward to the last chapter as well as all the previous one. I have a few

questions on that. So you generally have faith to clarify that technology could be the thing

that empowers this kind of future? Well, if you just let technology evolve,

it's going to be our undoing, right? One of the things that I fault my libertarian friends for

is this faith that the market is going to find solutions without destroying us. And my sense is

I'm a very strong believer in markets, right? I believe in their power even above some market

fundamentalists. But what I don't believe is that they should be allowed to plot our course,

right? Markets are very good at figuring out how to do things. They are not good at all about

figuring out what we should do, right? What we should want. We have to tell markets what we want,

and then they can tell us how to do it best. And if we adopted that kind of pro market but

in a context where it's not steering, where human well being is actually the driver,

we can do remarkable things and the technology that emerges would naturally be enhancing of human

well being. Perfectly so, no, but overwhelmingly so. But at the moment, markets are finding our

every defective character and exploiting them and making huge profits and making us worse to each

other in the process. Before we leave COVID 19, let me ask you about a very difficult topic,

which is the vaccines. So I took the Pfizer vaccine, the two shots. You did not. You have

been taking ivermectin. So one of the arguments against the discussion of ivermectin is that

it prevents people from being fully willing to get the vaccine. How would you compare ivermectin

and the vaccine for COVID 19? All right. That's a good question. I would say, first of all,

there are some hazards with the vaccine that people need to be aware of. There are some things that

we cannot rule out and for which there is some evidence. The two that I think people should

be tracking is the possibility, some would say a likelihood that a vaccine of this nature,

that is to say very narrowly focused on a single antigen, is an evolutionary pressure

that will drive the emergence of variants that will escape the protection that comes from the

vaccine. So this is a hazard. It is a particular hazard in light of the fact that these vaccines

have a substantial number of breakthrough cases. So one danger is that a person who has been

vaccinated will shed viruses that are specifically less visible or invisible to the immunity created

by the vaccines. So we may be creating the next pandemic by applying the pressure of vaccines

at a point that it doesn't make sense to. The other danger has to do with something

called antibody dependent enhancement, which is something that we see in certain diseases

like dengue fever. You may know that dengue one gets a case and then their second case is much

more devastating. So break bone fever is when you get your second case of dengue and dengue

effectively utilizes the immune response that is produced by prior exposure to attack the body

in ways that it is incapable of doing before exposure. So this is apparently, this pattern

has apparently blocked past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses, whether it

will happen here or not. It is still too early to say, but before we even get to the question

of harm done to individuals by these vaccines, we have to ask about what the overall impact is

going to be. And it's not clear in the way people think it is that if we vaccinate enough people,

the pandemic will end. It could be that we vaccinate people and make the pandemic worse.

And while nobody can say for sure that that's where we're headed, it is at least something to

be aware of. So don't vaccines usually create that kind of evolutionary pressure to create

more deadlier different strains of the virus? So is there something particular with these mRNA

vaccines that's uniquely dangerous in this regard? Well, it's not even just the mRNA vaccines. The

mRNA vaccines and the adeno vector DNA vaccine all share the same vulnerability, which is they are

very narrowly focused on one subunit of the spike protein. So that is a very concentrated

evolutionary signal. We are also deploying it in mid pandemic, and it takes time for immunity

to develop. So part of the problem here, if you inoculated a population before encounter with

a pathogen, then there might be substantially enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from

happening. But in this case, we are inoculating people as they are encountering those who are

sick with the disease. And what that means is the disease is now faced with a lot of opportunities

to effectively, evolutionarily practice escape strategies. So one thing is the timing. The

other thing is the narrow focus. Now, in a traditional vaccine, you would typically not have

one antigen, right? You would have basically a virus full of antigens, and the immune system

would therefore produce a broader response. So that is the case for people who have had COVID,

right? They have an immunity that is broader because it wasn't so focused on one part of the

spike protein. So anyway, there is something unique here. So these platforms create that

special hazard. They also have components that we haven't used before in people. So for example,

the lipid nanoparticles that coat the RNAs are distributing themselves around the body in a way

that will have unknown consequences. So anyway, there's reason for concern. Is it possible for

you to steal man the argument that everybody should get vaccinated? Of course. The argument that

everybody should get vaccinated is that nothing is perfectly safe. Phase three trials showed

good safety for the vaccines. Now, that may or may not be actually true, but what we saw suggested

high degree of efficacy and a high degree of safety for the vaccines that inoculating people

quickly and therefore dropping the landscape of available victims for the pathogen to a very low

number so that herd immunity drives it to extinction requires us all to take our share of the risk

and that because driving it to extinction should be our highest priority that really

people shouldn't think too much about the various nuances because overwhelmingly fewer people will

die if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine than will die from COVID if they're not

vaccinated. And with the vaccine as it grows being deployed, that is a quite a likely scenario

that everything, you know, the virus will fade away in the following sense that the probability

that a more dangerous strain will be created is nonzero, but it's not 50%. It's something smaller.

And so the most like, well, I don't know, maybe you disagree with that, but the scenario we're

most likely to see now that the vaccine is here is that the virus is not going to be

most likely to see now that the vaccine is here is that the virus will fade away.

First of all, I don't believe that the probability of creating a worse pandemic is

low enough to discount. I think the probability is fairly high. And frankly, we are seeing a wave

of variants that we will have to do a careful analysis to figure out what exactly that has

to do with campaigns of vaccination where they have been, where they haven't been, where the

variants emerged from. But I believe that what we are seeing is a disturbing pattern

that reflects that those who were advising caution may well have been right.

The data here, by the way, and the small tangent is terrible.

Terrible. Right. And why is it terrible is another question, right?

This is where I started getting angry. Yes.

It's like, there's an obvious opportunity for exceptionally good data, for exceptionally

rigorous, even the website for self reporting side effects for, not side effects, but negative

effects. Adverse events.

Adverse events, sorry, for the vaccine. There's many things I could say from both the study

perspective. But mostly, let me just put on my hat of HTML and web design. It's like the

worst website. It makes it so unpleasant to report. It makes it so unclear what you're

reporting. If somebody actually has serious effects, like if you have very mild effects,

what are the incentives for you to even use that crappy website with many pages and forms

that don't make any sense? If you have adverse effects, what are the incentives for you to

use that website? What is the trust that you have that this information will be used?

Well, all those kinds of things. And the data about who's getting vaccinated,

anonymized data about who's getting vaccinated, where, when, with what vaccine, coupled with

the adverse effects, all of that we should be collecting. Instead, we're completely not.

We're doing it in a crappy way. And using that crappy data to make conclusions that you then

twist, you're basically collecting in a way that can arrive at whatever conclusions you want.

And the data is being collected by the institutions, by governments. And so therefore, it's obviously

they're going to try to construct any kind of narratives they want based on this crappy data.

It reminds me of much of psychology, the field that I love, but is flawed and many fundamental

ways. So rent over, but coupled with the dangers that you're speaking to, we don't have even the

data to understand the dangers. Yeah, I'm going to pick up on your rant and say we, estimates of

the degree of underreporting in VAERS are that it is 10% of the real to 100% and that's the

system for reporting. Yeah, the VAERS system is the system for reporting adverse events. So

in the US, we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination.

That is an undercount almost certainly. And by a large factor, we don't know how large I've seen

estimates 25,000 dead in the US alone. Now, you can make the argument that, okay, that's a large

number, but the necessity of immunizing the population to drive SARS CoV2 to extinction

is such that it's an acceptable number. But I would point out that that actually does not

make any sense. And the reason it doesn't make any sense is actually there are several reasons.

One, if that was really your point that, yes, many, many people are going to die,

but many more will die if we don't do this. Were that your approach, you would not be

inoculating people who had had COVID 19, which is a large population. There's no reason to expose

those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them is greater.

So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face a risk of death if this was

really about an acceptable number of deaths arising out of this set of vaccines. I would also

point out there's something incredibly bizarre. And I would, I struggle to find language that is

strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because children suffer a

greater risk of long term effects because they are going to live longer. And because this is

earlier in their development, therefore it impacts systems that are still forming,

and they tolerate COVID well. And so the benefit to them is very small. And so the only argument

for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think,

and therefore they may be integral to the way the virus spreads to the population.

But if that's the reason that we are inoculating children, and there has been some revision in

the last day or two about the recommendation on this because of the adverse events that have

shown up in children, but to the extent that we were vaccinating children, we were doing it

to protect old, infirm people who are the most likely to succumb to COVID 19.

What society puts children in danger, robbs children of life to save old,

infirm people? That's upside down. So there's something about the way we are going about

vaccinating, who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending don't exist, that suggests that

to some set of people, vaccinating people is a good in and of itself, that that is the objective

of the exercise, not herd immunity. And the last thing, sorry, I don't want to prevent you from

jumping in here, but the second reason, in addition to the fact that we're exposing people to danger

that we should not be exposing them to.

By the way, as a tiny tangent, another huge part of this soup that should have been part of it,

that's an incredible solution, is large scale testing. But that might be another couple of

hour conversation, but there's these solutions that are obvious, that were available from the

very beginning. So you could argue that Iverrectin is not that obvious, but maybe the whole point

is you have aggressive, very fast research that leads to meta analysis and then large scale

production and deployment. Okay, at least that possibility should be seriously considered,

coupled with a serious consideration of large scale deployment of testing, at home testing,

that could have accelerated the speed at which we reached that herd immunity. But I don't even want to...

Well, let me just say, I am also completely shocked that we did not get on high quality

testing early and that we are still suffering from this even now, because just the simple

ability to track where the virus moves between people would tell us a lot about its mode of

transmission, which would allow us to protect ourselves better. Instead, that information was

hard won and for no good reason. So I also find this mysterious.

You've spoken with Eric Weinstein, your brother, on his podcast, The Portal, about the ideas that

eventually led to the paper you published titled, The Reserved Capacity Hypothesis.

I think first, can you explain this paper and the ideas that led up to it?

Sure. Easier to explain the conclusion of the paper. There's a question about why a creature

that can replace its cells with new cells grows feeble and inefficient with age. We call that

process, which is otherwise called aging. We call it senescence. And senescence in this paper,

it is hypothesized, is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention

feature of our bodies, that each cell has a limit on the number of times it can divide.

There are a few cells in the body that are exceptional, but most of our cells can only

divide a limited number of times. That's called the Hayflick limit. And the Hayflick limit

reduces the ability of the organism to replace tissues. It therefore

results in a failure over time of maintenance and repair. And that explains why we become

decrepit as we grow old. The question was, why would that be, especially in light of the fact

that the mechanism that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce is something

called a telomere. Telomere is not a gene, but it's a DNA sequence at the ends of our chromosomes

that is just simply repetitive. And the number of repeats functions like a counter.

So there's a number of repeats that you have after development is finished. And then each

time the cell divides, a little bit of telomere is lost. And at the point that the telomere becomes

critically short, the cell stops dividing even though it still has the capacity to do so.

It stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes than it did when it had more

telomere. So what my work did was it looked at the fact that the telomeric shortening was being

studied by two different groups. It was being studied by people who were interested in counteracting

the aging process. And it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion by people who were

interested in tumorogenesis and cancer. The thought being, because it was true that when

one looked into tumors, they always had telomerase active. That's the enzyme that lengthens our

telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt to the lengthening of

telomeres in order to counteract cancer. And the folks who were studying the senescence process

were interested in lengthening telomeres in order to generate greater repair capacity.

And my point was evolutionarily speaking, this looks like a pleiotropic effect that the

genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves

are providing a benefit in youth, which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer

at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient and eventually die.

And that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate

enough to know, George Williams, one of the great 20th century evolutionists who argued

that senescence would have to be caused by pleiotropic genes that cause early life benefits

at unavoidable late life costs. And although this isn't the exact nature of the system he

predicted, it matches what he was expecting in many regards to a shocking degree.

That said, the focus of the paper is about the, let me just read the abstract.

We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed at the end of the abstract.

We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed to increase reproductive

output simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually

eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly

elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice where their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled.

These animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation.

So basically using these mice is not going to lead to the right kinds of conclusions.

Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate

tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence. So I think, especially with your

discussion with Eric, the conclusion of this paper has to do with the fact that we shouldn't be

using these mice to test the safety or to make conclusions about cancer or senescence. Is that

the basic takeaway? Basically saying that the length of these telomeres is an important variable

to consider. Well, let's put it this way. I think there was a reason that the world of scientists

who was working on telomeres did not spot the pleiotropic relationship that was the key argument

in my paper. The reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result that everybody knew which

seemed inconsistent. The result was that mice have very long telomeres, but they do not have

very long lives. Now, we can talk about what the actual meaning of don't have very long lives is,

but in the end, I was confronted with a hypothesis that would explain a great many features of the

way mammals and indeed vertebrates age, but it was inconsistent with one result. And at first,

I thought maybe there's something wrong with the result. Maybe this is one of these cases where

the result was achieved once through some bad protocol and everybody else was repeating it.

Didn't turn out to be the case. Many laboratories had established that mice had ultra long telomeres.

And so I began to wonder whether or not there was something about the breeding protocols

that generated these mice. And what that would predict is that the mice that have long telomeres

would be laboratory mice and that wild mice would not. And Carol Greider, who agreed to collaborate

with me, tested that hypothesis and showed that it was indeed true that wild derived mice or at

least mice that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time did not have ultra long

telomeres. Now, what this implied though, as you read, is that our breeding protocols generate

lengthening of telomeres. And the implication of that is that the animals that have these very

long telomeres will be hyper prone to create tumors. They will be extremely resistant to

toxins because they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace any damaged tissue. And so

ironically, if you give one of these ultra long telomere lab mice a toxin, if the toxin doesn't

outright kill it, it may actually increase its lifespan because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy.

So the reason that chemotherapy works is that dividing cells are more vulnerable than cells

that are not dividing. And so if this mouse has effectively had its cancer protection turned off

and it has cells dividing too rapidly and you give it a toxin, you will slow down its tumors

faster than you harm its other tissues. And so you'll get a paradoxical result that actually

some drug that's toxic seems to benefit the mouse. Now, I don't think that that was understood

before I published my paper. Now I'm pretty sure it has to be. And the problem is that this actually

is a system that serves pharmaceutical companies that have the difficult job of bringing compounds

to market, many of which will be toxic, maybe all of them will be toxic. And these mice predispose

our system to declare these toxic compounds safe. And in fact, I believe we've seen the errors that

result from using these mice a number of times, most famously with Vioxx, which turned out to do

conspicuous heart damage. Why do you think this paper on this idea has not gotten significant

traction? Well, my collaborator, Carol Greider, said something to me that rings in my ears to this

day. She initially, after she showed that laboratory mice have anomalously long telomeres and that

wild mice don't have long telomeres, I asked her where she was going to publish that result so that

I could cite it in my paper. And she said that she was going to keep the result in house rather than

publish it. And at the time, I was a young graduate student, I didn't really understand what she was

saying. But in some sense, the knowledge that a model organism is broken in a way that creates

the likelihood that certain results will be reliably generatable, you can publish a paper and make a

big splash with such a thing, or you can exploit the fact that you know how those models will

misbehave and other people don't. So there's a question, if somebody is motivated cynically,

and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight into biology because they predict things

better than others do, knowing where the flaw is so that your predictions come out true is

advantageous. At the same time, I can't help but imagine that the pharmaceutical industry,

when it figured out that the mice were predisposed to suggest that drugs were safe, didn't leap to

leap to fix the problem, because in some sense, it was the perfect cover for the difficult job of

bringing drugs to market and then discovering their actual toxicity profile, right? This made

things look safer than they were. And I believe a lot of profits have likely been generated downstream.

So to kind of play devil's advocate, it's also possible that this particular the length of

the telomeres is not a strong variable for the conclusions for the drug development and for

the conclusions that Carol and others have been studying. Is it possible for that to be the case?

So one reason she and others could be ignoring this is because it's not a strong variable.

Well, I don't believe so. And in fact, at the point that I went to publish my paper,

Carol published her result. She did so in a way that did not make a huge splash.

I apologize if I don't know how. What was the emphasis of her publication of that paper? Was

it purely just kind of showing data? Or was there more? Because in your paper, there's a kind of

more of a philosophical statement as well. Well, my paper was motivated by interest in the evolutionary

dynamics around senescence. I wasn't pursuing grants or anything like that. I was just working

on a puzzle I thought was interesting. Carol has, of course, gone on to win a Nobel Prize for her

co discovery with Elizabeth Greider of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres.

But anyway, she's a heavy hitter in the academic world. I don't know exactly what her purpose was.

I do know that she told me she wasn't planning to publish. And I do know that I discovered that

she was in the process of publishing very late. And when I asked her to send me the paper to see

whether or not she had put evidence in it that the hypothesis had come from me, she grudgingly

sent it to me. And my name was nowhere mentioned. And she broke contact at that point. What it is

that motivated her, I don't know. But I don't think it can possibly be that this result is

unimportant. The fact is, the reason I called her in the first place and established contact that

generated our collaboration was that she was a leading light in the field of

telomeric studies. And because of that, this question about whether the model organisms

are distorting the understanding of the functioning of telomeres is central.

Do you feel like you've been, as a young graduate student, do you think Carol or do you think the

scientific community broadly screwed you over in some way?

You know, I don't think of it in those terms, probably partly because it's not productive.

But I have a complex relationship with this story. On the one hand, I'm livid with Carol

Greider for what she did. She absolutely pretended that I didn't exist in this story.

And I don't think I was a threat to her. My interest was as an evolutionary biologist,

I had made an evolutionary contribution. She had tested a hypothesis. And frankly,

I think it would have been better for her if she had acknowledged what I had done.

I think it would have enhanced her work. And you know, I was, let's put it this way,

when I watched her Nobel lecture, and I should say there's been a lot of confusion about this

Nobel stuff, I've never said that I should have gotten a Nobel Prize. People have misportrayed that.

My in listening to her lecture, I had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences of my life,

because she presented the work that resulted from my hypothesis. She presented it as she had in her

paper with no acknowledgement of where it had come from. And she had, in fact, portrayed the

distortion of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact, because it allowed testing hypotheses

that would otherwise not be testable. You have to understand, as a young scientist,

to watch work that you have done presented in what's surely the most important lecture of her

career. It's thrilling. It was thrilling to see her figures projected on the screen there,

to have been part of work that was important enough for that felt great. And of course,

to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible. So anyway, that's sort of where I am

with it. My sense is, what I'm really troubled by in the story is the fact that as far as I know,

the flaw with the mice has not been addressed. And actually, Eric did some looking into this. He

tried to establish by calling the Jax lab and trying to ascertain what had happened with the

colonies, whether any change in protocol had occurred. And he couldn't get anywhere. There

was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue. So I'm very troubled by the fact that as

a father, for example, I'm in no position to protect my family from the hazard that I believe

lurks in our medicine cabinets. Even though I'm aware of where the hazard comes from,

it doesn't tell me anything useful about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage if that

is ultimately tested. And that's a very frustrating position to be in. On the other hand, there's

a part of me that's even still grateful to Carol for taking my call. She didn't have to take my

call and talk to some young graduate student who had some evolutionary idea that wasn't

in her wheelhouse specifically. And yet she did. And for a while, she was a good collaborator.

So can I have to proceed carefully here? It's a complicated topic. She took the call and you're

saying that she basically erased credit pretending you didn't exist in a certain sense.

Let me phrase it this way. As a research scientist at MIT, I've had especially just

part of a large set of collaborations. I've had a lot of students come to me

and talk to me about ideas, perhaps less interesting than what we're discussing here

in the space of AI that I've been thinking about anyway. In general, everything I'm doing with

robotics, people have told me a bunch of ideas that I'm already thinking about. The point is

taking that idea, see, this is different because the idea has more power in the space that we're

talking about here. And robotics is like your idea means shit until you build it. So the

engineering world is a little different. But there's a kind of sense that I probably forgot

a lot of brilliant ideas that have been told to me. Do you think she pretended you don't exist?

Do you think she was so busy that she kind of forgot? She has like the stream of brilliant

people around her that there's a bunch of ideas that are swimming in the air. And you just kind

of forget people that are a little bit on the periphery on the idea generation. Or is it some

mix of both? It's not a mix of both. I know that because we corresponded. She put a graduate

student on this work. He emailed me excitedly when the results came in. So there was no ambiguity

about what had happened. What's more, when I went to publish my work, I actually sent it to Carol

in order to get her feedback because I wanted to be a good collaborator to her. And she absolutely

panned it, made many critiques that were not valid. But it was clear at that point that she became

an antagonist. And none of this adds that she couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation.

I believe I even sent her tissues at some point in part, not related to this project,

but as a favor, she was doing another project that involved telomeres. And she needed samples that

I could get a hold of because of the Museum of Zoology that I was in. So this was not a one off

conversation. I certainly know that those sorts of things can happen, but that's not what happened

here. This was a relationship that existed and then was suddenly cut short at the point that she

published her paper by surprise without saying where the hypothesis had come from

and began to be a opposing force to my work.

Is there, there's a bunch of trajectories that could have taken through life.

Do you think about the trajectory of being a researcher of then going to war in the space

of ideas of publishing further papers along this line? I mean, that's often the dynamic of

that fascinating space is you have a junior researcher with brilliant ideas and a senior

researcher that that starts out as a mentor that becomes a competitor. I mean, that, that,

that happens. But then the way to, it's an almost an opportunity to shine is to publish a bunch

more papers in this place, like to tear it apart, to dig into, like really make it a war of ideas.

Did you consider that possible trajectory? I did have a couple of things to say about it.

One, this work was not central for me. I took a year on the telomere project because something

fascinating occurred to me and I pursued it. And the more I pursued it, the clearer it was.

There was something there, but it wasn't the focus of my graduate work. And I didn't want to become

a telomere researcher. What I want to do is to be an evolutionary biologist who upgrades the toolkit

of evolutionary concepts so that we can see more clearly how organisms function and why.

And telomeres was a proof of concept, right? That paper was a proof of concept that the

toolkit in question works as for the need to pursue it further. I think it's kind of

absurd and you're not the first person to say, maybe that was the way to go about it. But the

basic point is, look, the work was good. It turned out to be highly predictive. Frankly,

the model of senescence that I presented is now widely accepted. And I don't feel any misgivings

at all about having spent a year on it, said my piece and moved on to other things, which frankly,

I think are bigger. I think there's a lot of good to be done and it would be a waste to get

overly, narrowly focused. There's so many ways through the space of science and the most common

ways to just publish a lot. Publish a lot of papers, do these incremental work and exploring the

space, kind of like ants looking for food. You're tossing out a bunch of different ideas. Some of

them could be brilliant breakthrough ideas, nature. Some of them are more conference kind of publications,

all those kinds of things. Did you consider that kind of path in science?

Of course I considered it, but I must say the experience of having my first encounter with

the process of peer review be this story, which was frankly a debacle from one end to the other

with respect to the process of publishing. It was not a very good sales pitch for

trying to make a difference through publication. I would point out part of what I ran into and

I think frankly part of what explains Carol's behavior is that in some parts of science,

there is this dynamic where PIs parasitize their underlings and if you're very, very good,

you rise to the level where one day instead of being parasitized, you get to parasitize others.

Now I find that scientifically despicable and it wasn't the culture of the lab I grew up in

at all, my lab. In fact, the PI, Dick Alexander, who's now gone, but who was an incredible

mind and a great human being, he didn't want his graduate students working on the same topics he

was on. Not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting, but because in effect he did not

want any confusion about who had done what because he was a great mentor and the idea was actually

a great mentor is not stealing ideas and you don't want people thinking that they are. So

anyway, my point would be I wasn't up for being parasitized. I don't like the idea that if you

are very good, you get parasitized until it's your turn to parasitize others. That doesn't

make sense to me. A crossing over from evolution into cellular biology may have exposed me to that.

That may have been par for the course, but it doesn't make it acceptable. And I would also

point out that my work falls in the realm of synthesis. My work generally takes evidence

accumulated by others and places it together in order to generate hypotheses that explain sets

of phenomena that are otherwise intractable. And I am not sure that that is best done with

narrow publications that are read by few. And in fact, I would point to the very conspicuous

example of Richard Dawkins, who I must say I've learned a tremendous amount from and I greatly

admire. Dawkins has almost no publication record in the sense of peer reviewed papers in journals.

What he's done instead is done synthetic work and he's published it in books which are not

peer reviewed in the same sense. And frankly, I think there's no doubting his contribution

to the field. So my sense is if Richard Dawkins can illustrate that one can make contributions

to the field without using journals as the primary mechanism for distributing what you've come to

understand, then it's obviously a valid mechanism and it's a far better one from the point of view

of accomplishing what I want to accomplish. Yeah, it's really interesting. There is, of course,

several levels. You can do the kind of synthesis and that does require a lot of both broad and

deep thinking is exceptionally valuable. You could also, I'm working on something with Andrew

Huberman now. You can also publish synthesis that's like review papers. They're exceptionally

valuable for the communities. It brings the community together, tells a history, tells a

story where the community has been. It paints a picture of where the path lays for the future.

I think it's really valuable. And Richard Dawkins is a good example of somebody that does that in

book form, that he kind of walks the line really interestingly. You have like somebody who like

Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's more like a science communicator. Richard Dawkins sometimes is a

science communicator, but he gets like close to the technical to where it's a little bit,

it's not shying away from being really a contribution to science. No, he's made real

contributions in book form. Yes, he really has. It's fascinating. Roger Pernarose,

I mean, similar kind of idea. That's interesting. That's interesting. Synthesis does not, especially

synthesis work. Work that synthesizes ideas does not necessarily need to be peer reviewed.

It's peer reviewed by peers reading it. Well, and reviewing it. That's it. It is reviewed by peers,

which is not synonymous with peer review. And that's the thing is people don't understand

that the two things aren't the same, right? Peer review is an anonymous process that happens

before publication in a place where there is a power dynamic. I mean, the joke, of course,

is that peer review is actually peer preview, right? Your biggest competitors get to see

your work before it sees the light of day and decide whether or not it gets published. And

you know, again, when you're formative experience with the publication apparatus is the one I had

with the telomere paper, there's no way that that seems like the right way to advance important

ideas. And you know, what's the harm in publishing them so that your peers have to review them in

public where they actually, if they're going to disagree with you, they actually have to take

the risk of saying, I don't think this is right. And here's why, right? With their name on it.

I'd much rather that it's not that I don't want my work reviewed by peers, but I want it done

in the open, you know, for the same reason you don't meet with dangerous people in private,

you meet at the cafe, I want the work reviewed out in public.

Can I ask you a difficult question? Sure.

There is popularity in martyrdom. There's popularity in pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

That, that can become a drug in itself.

I've confronted this in scientific work I've done at MIT,

where there are certain things they're not done well. People are not being the best version of

themselves. And particular aspects of a particular field are in need of a revolution.

And part of me wanted to point that out versus doing the hard work of publishing papers and

doing the revolution, basically just pointing out, look, you guys are doing it wrong and then

just walking away. Are you aware of the drug of martyrdom, of the ego involved in it,

that it can cloud your thinking? Probably one of the best questions I've ever been asked.

So let me, let me try to sort it out. First of all, we are all mysteries to ourselves at some

level. So there's possible there's stuff going on in me that I'm not aware of that's driving.

But in general, I would say one of my better strengths is that I'm not especially ego driven.

I have an ego. I clearly think highly of myself, but it is not driving me. I do not crave that

kind of validation. I do crave certain things. I do love a good Eureka moment. There is something

great about it. And there's something even better about the phone calls you make next when you share

it. It's pretty fun. I really like it. I also really like my subject. There's something about

a walk in the forest when you have a toolkit in which you can actually look at creatures and see

something deep. I like it. That drives me. And I could entertain myself for the rest of my life.

If I was somehow isolated from the rest of the world, but I was in a place that was biologically

interesting, you know, hopefully I would be with people that I love and pets that I love,

believe it or not. But, you know, if I were in that situation and I could just go out every day

and look at cool stuff and figure out what it means, I could be all right with that.

So I'm not heavily driven by the ego thing as you put it. So I am completely the same except

that instead of the pets, I would put robots. But so it's not, it's the Eureka. It's the exploration

of the subject that brings you joy and fulfillment. It's not the ego.

Well, there's more to say. No, I really don't think it's the ego thing. I will say I also have

kind of a secondary passion for robot stuff. I've never made anything useful, but I do believe,

I believe I found my calling. But if this wasn't my calling, my calling would have been

inventing stuff. I really enjoy that too. So I get what you're saying about the analogy quite

well. As far as the martyrdom thing, I understand the drug you're talking about, and I've seen it

more than I felt it. I do, if I'm just to be completely candid and that this question is

so good, it deserves a candid answer, I do like the fight. I like fighting against people I don't

respect and I like winning. But I have no interest in martyrdom. One of the reasons I have no

interest in martyrdom is that I'm having too good a time. I very much enjoy my life and

such a good answer. I have a wonderful wife. I have amazing children. I live in a lovely place.

I don't want to exit any quicker than I have to. That said, I also believe in things and a

willingness to exit if that's the only way is not exactly inviting martyrdom, but it is an

acceptance that fighting is dangerous and going up against powerful forces means who knows what

will come of it, right? I don't have the sense that the thing is out there that used to kill

inconvenient people. I don't think that's how it's done anymore. It's primarily done through

destroying them reputationally, which is not something I relish the possibility of. But

there is a difference between a willingness to face the hazard rather than a desire to face it

because of the thrill, right? For me, the thrill is in fighting when I'm in the right. I think I

feel that that is a worthwhile way to take what I see as the kind of brutality that is built into

men and to channel it to something useful, right? If it is not channeled into something useful,

it will be channeled into something else. So it damn well better be channeled into something

useful. It's not motivated by fame and popularity, those kinds of things. You're just making me

realize that enjoying the fight, fighting the powerful and idea that you believe is right,

is a kind of optimism for the human spirit. It's like we can win this.

It's almost like you're turning into action, into personal action, this hope for humanity

by saying we can win this. That makes you feel good about the rest of humanity. If there's people

like me, then we're going to be okay. Even if your ideas might be wrong or not, but if you believe

they're right and you're fighting the powerful against all odds, then we're going to be okay.

If I were to project, because I enjoy the fight as well, I think that's the way I,

that's what brings me joy, is it's almost like it's optimism in action.

Well, it's a little different for me. And again, I recognize you. You're familiar,

your construction is familiar, even if it isn't mine, right? For me, I actually expect us not to

be okay. And I'm not okay with that. But what's really important, if I feel like what I've said is

I don't know of any reason that it's too late. As far as I know, we could still save humanity and

we could get to the fourth frontier or something akin to it. But I expect us not to, I expect us

to fuck it up, right? I don't like that thought, but I've looked into the abyss and I've done my

calculations and the number of ways we could not succeed are many and the number of ways that we

could manage to get out of this very dangerous phase of history is small. But the thing I don't

have to worry about is that I didn't do enough, right? That I was a coward, that I, you know,

prioritized other things. At the end of the day, I think I will be able to say to myself, and in

fact, the thing that allows me to sleep is that when I saw clearly what needed to be done, I tried

to do it to the extent that it was in my power. And, you know, if we fail, as I expect us to,

I can't say, well, geez, that's on me, you know, and, you know, frankly, I regard what I just said

to you as something like a personality defect, right? I'm trying to free myself from the sense

that this is my fault. On the other hand, my guess is that personality defect is probably

good for humanity, right? It's a good one for me to have it, you know, the externalities of it

are positive, so I don't feel too bad about it. Yeah, that's funny. So, yeah, our perspective on the

world are different, but they rhyme, like you said, because I've also looked into the abyss, and it

kind of smiled nervously back. So, I have a more optimistic sense that we're going to win more than

likely we're going to be okay. Right there with you, brother. I'm hoping you're right. I'm expecting

me to be right. But back to Eric, you had a wonderful conversation. In that conversation,

he played the big brother role, and he was very happy about it. He was self congratulatory about

it. I mean, can you talk to the ways in which Eric made your better man throughout your life?

Yeah, hell yeah. I mean, for one thing, you know, Eric and I are interestingly similar in some ways

and radically different in some other ways. And, you know, it's often a matter of fascination to

people who know us both because almost always people meet one of us first, and they sort of get

used to that thing, and then they meet the other, and it throws the model into chaos. But, you know,

I had a great advantage, which is I came second, right? So, although it was kind of a pain in the

ass to be born into a world that had Eric in it because he's a force of nature, right? It was

also terrifically useful because, A, he was a very awesome older brother who, you know, made

interesting mistakes, learned from them and conveyed the wisdom of what he had discovered,

and that was, you know, I don't know who else ends up so lucky as to have that kind of person

blazing the trail. It also probably, you know, my hypothesis for what birth order effects are

is that they're actually adaptive, right? That the reason that a second born is different than a

first born is that they're not born into a world with the same niches in it, right? And so, the

thing about Eric is he's been completely dominant in the realm of fundamental thinking, right? Like,

what he's fascinated by is the fundamental of fundamentals, and he's excellent at it, which

meant that I was born into a world where somebody was becoming excellent in that, and for me to be

anywhere near the fundamental of fundamentals was going to be pointless, right? I was going to be

playing second fiddle forever. And I think that that actually drove me to the other end of the

continuum between fundamental and emergent. And so, I became fascinated with biology and have

been since I was three years old, right? I think Eric drove that, and I have to thank him for it

because, you know, I mean... Oh, I never thought of... So, Eric drives towards the fundamental

and you drive towards the emergent, the physics and the biology, right? Opposite ends of the

continuum. And, as Eric would be quick to point out if he was sitting here, I treat the emergent

layer, I seek the fundamentals in it, which is sort of an echo of Eric's style of thinking,

but applied to the very far complexity. He's overpoweringly argues for the importance of physics,

the fundamental of the fundamental. He's not here to defend himself. Is there an argument to be made

against that? Or biology? The emergent, the study of the thing that emerged when the fundamental

acts at the universal, at the cosmic scale and builds the beautiful thing that is us,

is much more important. Like, psychology, biology, the systems that we're actually

interacting with in this human world are much more important to understand than low level

theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Yeah, I can't say that one is more

important. I think there's probably a different time scale. I think understanding the emergent

layer is more often useful, but the bang for the buck at the far fundamental layer may be much

greater. So, for example, the fourth frontier, I'm pretty sure it's going to have to be fusion

powered. I don't think anything else will do it. But once you had fusion power, assuming we didn't

just dump fusion power on the market the way we would be likely to if it was invented usefully

tomorrow, but if we had fusion power and we had a little bit more wisdom than we have,

you could do an awful lot. And that's not going to come from people like me who, you know, look

at dynamics. Can I argue against that, please? I think the way to unlock fusion power is through

artificial intelligence. So, I think most of the breakthrough ideas in the futures of science

will be developed by AI systems. And I think in order to build intelligent AI systems,

you have to be a scholar of the fundamental of the emergent of biology, of the neuroscience,

of the way the brain works, of intelligence, of consciousness, and those things at least directly

don't have anything to do with physics. Well, you're making me a little bit sad because my

addiction to the aha moment thing is incompatible with outsourcing that job.

I don't want to outsource that thing to the AI. Actually, I've seen this happen before,

because some of the people who trained Heather and me were phylogenetic systematists,

Arnold Kluge in particular. And the problem with systematics is that to do it right

when your technology is primitive, you have to be deeply embedded in the philosophical

and the logical, right? Your method has to be based in the highest level of rigor.

Once you can sequence genes, genes can spit so much data at you that you can overwhelm

high quality work with just lots and lots and lots of automated work. And so in any in some

sense, there's a generation of phylogenetic systematists who are the last of the greats

because what's replacing them is sequencers. So anyway, maybe you're right about the AI,

and I guess I'm... Makes you sad. I like figuring stuff out.

Is there something that you disagree with Eric on? They've been trying to convince them,

you failed so far, but you will eventually succeed? You know, that is a very long list.

Eric and I have tensions over certain things that recur all the time, and I'm trying to think

what would be the ideal... Is it in the space of science, in the space of philosophy, politics,

family, love, robots? Well, all right, let me... I'm just gonna use your podcast to

make a bit of a cryptic war and just say there are many places in which I believe

that I have butted heads with Eric over the course of decades, and I have seen him move in

my direction substantially over time. You've been winning. He might win a battle here or there,

but you've been winning the war. I would not say that. It's quite possible he could say the same

thing about me, and in fact, I know that it's true. There are places where he's absolutely

convinced me, but in any case, I do believe it's at least... It may not be a totally even fight,

but it's more even than some will imagine. There are things I say that drive him nuts.

When something... You heard me talk about the... What was it? It was the autopilot that seems to

be putting a great many humans in needless medical jeopardy over the COVID 19 pandemic,

and my feeling is we can say this almost for sure. Anytime you have the appearance of some