we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the

few things we can see, one of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living

cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty. And then at some point, things

like us appear very primitive, and then some of those stop being quiet and expand. And then for

a few billion years, they expand, and then they meet each other. And then for the next hundred

billion years, they commune with each other. That is, the usual models of cosmology say that in

roughly 150 billion years, the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have

left is some galaxy clusters that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then,

they will interact. There will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations, and each

one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others. And we might hope to join

them someday and become part of that community. The following is a conversation with Robin Hansen,

an economist at George Mason University, and one of the most fascinating, wild, fearless,

and fun minds I've ever gotten the chance to accompany for a time in exploring questions

of human nature, human civilization, and alien life out there in our impossibly big universe.

He is the coauthor of a book titled The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life,

The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and a fascinating recent paper

I recommend on quote, Grabby Aliens, titled If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness,

Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check

out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robin Hansen.

You are working on a book about quote, grabby aliens. This is a technical term, like the Big

Bang. So what are grabby aliens? Grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change

stuff. That's the key concept. So if they were out there, we would notice. That's the key idea. So

the question is, where are the grabby aliens? So Fermi's question is, where are the aliens? And we

could vary that in two terms, right? Where are the quiet, hard to see aliens? And where are the

big, loud, grabby aliens? So it's actually hard to say where all the quiet ones are, right?

There could be a lot of them out there because they're not doing much. They're not making a big

difference in the world. But the grabby aliens, by definition, are the ones you would see.

We don't know exactly what they do with where they went, but the idea is they're in some sort

of competitive world where each part of them is trying to grab more stuff and do something with

it. And almost surely, whatever is the most competitive thing to do with all the stuff they

grab isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right? So we humans, when we go around the Earth

and use stuff, we change it. We would turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city.

So the idea is aliens would do something with it. And so we're not exactly sure what it would look

like, but it would look different. So somewhere in the sky, we would see big spheres of different

activity where things had been changed because they had been there. Expanding spheres. Right.

So as you expand, you aggressively interact and change the environment.

So the word grabby versus loud, you're using them sometimes synonymously, sometimes not.

Grabby to me is a little bit more aggressive. What does it mean to be loud? What does it mean

to be grabby? What's the difference? And loud in what way? Is it visual? Is it sound? Is it some

other physical phenomena like gravitational waves? Are you using this kind of in a broad

philosophical sense or there's a specific thing that it means to be loud in this universe of ours?

My coauthors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model. And so we use the

term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model. And the idea is it's a

more particular model of the general concept of loud. So loud would just be the general idea that

they would be really obvious. So grabby is the technical term,

is it in the title of the paper? It's in the body. The title is actually about loud and quiet.

Right. So the idea is you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general

category of things everybody else might talk about. So that's how we distinguish.

The paper title is If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare.

If life on earth, God, this is such a good abstract. If life on earth had to achieve

N hard steps to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the nth

power. So we'll talk about power, we'll talk about linear increase. So what is the technical definition

of grabby? How do you envision grabbiness? And why are in contrast with humans, why aren't humans

grabby? So like, where's that line? Is it well definable? What is grabbing what is not grabby?

We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e. aliens in space

and time. That model has three parameters. And we can set each one of those parameters from data.

And therefore, we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space time.

So the key idea is they appear at some point in space time. And then after some short delay,

they start expanding. And they expand at some speed. And the speed is one of those parameters.

That's one of the three. And the other two parameters are about how they appear in time.

That is they appear at random places. And they appear in time according to a power law.

And that power law has two parameters. And we can fit each of those parameters to data. And so then

we can say, now we know, we know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time. So

we are right now a new civilization, and we have not yet started to expand. But plausibly,

we would start to do that within say, 10 million years of the current moment. That's plenty of time.

And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe. So we are at the

moment, a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might

appear. Because we may or may not become grabby. But if we do, we'll do it soon. And so our current

date is a sample. And that gives us one of the other parameters. The second parameter is the

constant in front of the power law. And that's arrived from our current date.

So power law, what is the N in the power law?

That's the more complicated thing to explain.

Right. Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps. So starting with very

simple life, and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life. And so we had

to go through some intermediate steps such as sexual selection, photosynthesis, multicellular

animals. And the idea is that each of those steps was hard. Evolution just took a long time searching

in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps. And the challenge was to achieve

all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host simple life. And so

Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there,

and that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the five billion years that

Earth can support simple life. So not all steps, but a lot of them, because we don't know how many

steps there are before you start the expansion. So these are all the steps from the birth of life

to the initiation of major expansion. Right. So we're pretty sure that it would happen really

soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last one. So in terms of taking

a long time. So when we look at the history of Earth, we look at the durations of the major

things that have happened. That suggests that there's roughly say six hard steps that happened,

say between three and 12, and that we have just achieved the last one that would take a long time.

Which is?

We don't know. But whatever it is, we've just achieved the last one.

We're talking about humans or aliens here. So let's talk about some of these steps. So

Earth is really special in some way. We don't exactly know the level of specialness. We don't

really know which steps were the hardest or not because we just have a sample of one. But you're

saying that there's three to 12 steps that we have to go through to get to where we are that are hard

steps, hard to find by something that took a long time and is unlikely. There's a lot of ways to fail.

There's a lot more ways to fail than to succeed. The first step would be sort of the very simplest

form of life of any sort. And then we don't know whether that first sort is the first sort that we

see in the historical record or not. But then some other steps are, say, the development of

photosynthesis, the development of sexual reproduction. There's the development of

eukaryote cells, which are certain kind of complicated cells that seems to have only

appeared once. And then there's multicellularity, that is multiple cells coming together to large

organisms like us. And in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite

window, the model actually predicts that these steps could be of varying difficulties. That is,

they could each take different amounts of time on average. But if you're lucky enough that they all

appear in a very short time, then the durations between them will be roughly equal. And the time

remaining leftover in the rest of the window will also be the same length. So we at the moment have

roughly a billion years left on Earth until simple life like us would no longer be possible.

Life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very

beginning. So those two numbers right there give you the rough estimate of six hard steps.

Just to build up an intuition here. So we're trying to create a simple mathematical model

of how life emerges and expands in the universe. And there's a section in this paper, how many

hard steps? Question mark. Right. The two most plausibly diagnostic Earth durations seem to be

the one remaining after now before Earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life. So you estimate

how long Earth lasts, how many hard steps. There's windows for doing different hard steps,

and you can sort of like cueing theory, mathematically estimate of like the solution

or the passing of the hard steps or the taking of the hard steps. Sort of like coldly mathematical

look. If life, pre expansionary life, requires n number of steps, what is the probability of taking

those steps on an Earth that lasts a billion years or two billion years or five billion years

or 10 billion years? And you say solving for E using the observed durations of 1.1 and 0.4

then gives E values of 3.9 and 12.5 range 5.7 to 26 suggesting a middle estimate of at least six.

That's where you said six hard steps. Right. Just to get to where we are. Right. We started at the

bottom. Now we're here. That took six steps on average. The key point is on average, these things

on any one random planet would take trillions or trillions of years, just a really long time.

And so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast in a short time before our window

closed. And the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power

of the number of steps. And so that was where the power we talked about before came from. And so

that means in the history of the universe, we should overall roughly expect advanced life to

appear as a power law in time. So that very early on, there was very little chance of anything

appearing. And then later on as things appear, other things are appearing somewhat closer to

them in time because they're all going as this power law. What is the power law? Can we, for

people who are not math inclined, can you describe what a power law is? So say the function X is

linear and X squared is quadratic. So it's the power of two. If we make X to the three, that's

cubic or the power of three. And so X to the sixth is the power of six. And so we'd say

life appears in the universe on a planet like Earth in that proportion to the time that it's

been ready for life to appear. And that over the universe in general, it'll appear at roughly a

power law like that. What is the X, what is N? Is it the number of hard steps?

Yes, the number of hard steps. So that's the idea.

It's like if you're gambling and you're doubling up every time, this is the probability you just

keep winning. So it gets very unlikely very quickly. And so we're the result of this unlikely

chain of successes. It's actually a lot like cancer. So the dominant model of cancer in an

organism like each of us is that we have all these cells and in order to become cancerous,

a single cell has to go through a number of mutations and these very unlikely mutations.

And so any one cell is very unlikely to have any, have all these mutations happen by the time

your lifespan's over. But we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any one cell

producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high, more like 40%.

And so the chance of cancer appearing in your lifetime also goes as a power law,

this power of the number of mutations that's required for any one cell in your body to become

cancerous.

The longer you live, the likely you are to have cancer cells.

And the power is also roughly six. That is the chance of you getting cancer is

roughly the power of six of the time you've been since you were born.

It is perhaps not lost on people that you're comparing power laws of the survival or the

arrival of the human species to cancerous cells.

The same mathematical model, but of course, we might have a different value assumption

about the two outcomes. But of course, from the point of view of cancer, it's more similar.

For the point of view of cancer, it's a win win. We both get to thrive, I suppose.

It is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of life forms on earth,

of viruses, of bacteria. They have a very different view.

It's like the Instagram channel, Nature is Metal.

The ethic under which nature operates doesn't often coincide, correlate with human

morals. It seems cold and machine like in the selection process that it performs.

I am an analyst, I'm a scholar, an intellectual, and I feel I should carefully distinguish

predicting what's likely to happen and then evaluating or judging what I think would be

better to happen. And it's a little dangerous to mix those up too closely because then we can

then we can have wishful thinking. And so I try typically to just analyze what seems likely to

happen regardless of whether I like it or that we do anything about it. And then once you see

a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing, then we can ask, well, what might we

prefer? And ask, where could the levers be to move it at least a little toward what we might prefer?

But often doing that just analysis of what's likely to happen if we do nothing offends many

people. They find that dehumanizing or cold or metal, as you say, to just say, well, this is

what's likely to happen and it's not your favorite, sorry, but maybe we can do something, but maybe

we can't do that much. This is very interesting that the cold analysis, whether it's geopolitics,

whether it's medicine, whether it's economics, sometimes misses some very specific aspect of

human condition. Like for example, when you look at a doctor and the act of a doctor helping a

single patient, if you do the analysis of that doctor's time and cost of the medicine or the

surgery or the transportation of the patient, this is the Paul Farmer question, you know, is it worth

spending ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars on this one patient? When you look at all the people

that are suffering in the world, that money could be spent so much better. And yet there's something

about human nature that wants to help the person in front of you, and that is actually the right

thing to do, despite the analysis. And sometimes when you do the analysis, there's something

about the human mind that allows you to not take that leap, that irrational leap to act in this way,

that the analysis explains it away. Well it's like, for example, the U.S. government, you know, the

DOT, Department of Transportation, puts a value of I think like nine million dollars on a human life.

And the moment you put that number on a human life, you can start thinking, well okay, I can start

making decisions about this or that, and with a sort of cold economic perspective, and then you

might lose, you might deviate from a deeper truth of what it means to be human somehow. You have to

dance, because then if you put too much weight on the anecdotal evidence on these kinds of human

emotions, then you're going to lose, you could also probably more likely deviate from truth.

But there's something about that cold analysis. Like I've been listening to a lot of people

coldly analyze wars. War in Yemen, war in Syria, Israel, Palestine, war in Ukraine, and there's

something lost when you do a cold analysis of why something happened. When you talk about energy,

talking about sort of conflict, competition over resources, when you talk about geopolitics,

sort of models of geopolitics, and why a certain war happened, you lose something about the suffering

that happens. I don't know. It's an interesting thing, because you're both, you're exceptionally good

at models in all domains, literally, but also there's a humanity to you. So it's an interesting

dance. I don't know if you can comment on that dance. Sure. It's definitely true, as you say,

that for many people, if you are accurate in your judgment of, say, for a medical patient,

what's the chance that this treatment might help? And what's the cost? And compare those

to each other, and you might say, this looks like a lot of cost for a small medical gain.

And at that point, knowing that fact, that might take the air out of your sails. You might

not be willing to do the thing that maybe you feel is right anyway, which is still to pay for it.

And then somebody knowing that might want to keep that news from you and not tell you about

the low chance of success or the high cost in order to save you this

tension, this awkward moment where you might fail to do what they and you think is right.

But I think the higher calling, the higher standard to hold you to, which many people

can be held to, is to say, I will look at things accurately, I will know the truth,

and then I will also do the right thing with it. I will be at peace with my judgment about what

the right thing is in terms of the truth. I don't need to be lied to in order to figure out what the

right thing to do is. And I think if you do think you need to be lied to in order to figure out

what the right thing to do is, you're at a great disadvantage because then people will be lying

to, you will be lying to yourself, and you won't be as effective at achieving whatever good you

were trying to achieve. But getting the data, getting the facts is step one, not the final

step. So I would say having a good model, getting the good data is step one, and it's a burden.

Because you can't just use that data to arrive at sort of the easy convenient thing. You have

to really deeply think about what is the right thing. So the dark aspect of data, of models,

is you can use it to excuse away actions that aren't ethical. You can use data to basically

excuse away anything. But not looking at data lets you excuse yourself to pretend and think

that you're doing good when you're not. Exactly. But it is a burden. It doesn't excuse you from

still being human and deeply thinking about what is right. That very kind of gray area,

that very subjective area, that's part of the human condition. But let us return for a time

to aliens. So you started to define sort of the model, the parameters of grabbiness.

As we approach grabbiness. So what happens? So again, there was three parameters. There's the

speed at which they expand, there's the rate at which they appear in time, and that rate has a

constant and a power. So we've talked about the history of life on Earth suggests that power is

around 6, but maybe 3 to 12. We can say that constant comes from our current date, sort of

sets the overall rate. And the speed, which is the last parameter, comes from the fact that when we

look in the sky, we don't see them. So the model predicts very strongly that if they were expanding

slowly, say 1% of the speed of light, our sky would be full of vast spheres that were full

of activity. That is, at a random time when a civilization is first appearing, if it looks out

into its sky, it would see many other grabby alien civilizations in the sky, and they would be much

bigger than the full moon. There'd be huge spheres in the sky, and they would be visibly different.

We don't see them. Can we pause for a second? Okay. There's a bunch of hard steps that Earth had to

pass to arrive at this place we are currently, which we're starting to launch rockets onto space.

We're kind of starting to expand a bit, very slowly. Okay. But this is like the birth. If you

look at the entirety of the history of Earth, we're now at this precipice of like expansion.

We could, we might not choose to, but if we do, we will do it in the next 10 million years.

10 million. Wow. Time flies when you're having fun.

10 million is a short time on the cosmological scale. So that is, it might be only a thousand,

but the point is if it's, even if it's up to 10 million, that hardly makes any difference to the

model. So I might as well give you 10 million. This, this makes me feel, I was, I was so stressed

about planning what I'm going to do today. And now you got plenty of time, plenty of time.

Uh, just need to be generating some offspring quickly here. Okay. Um, so, and there's this moment

this 10 million, uh, year gap, uh, or window when we start expanding and you're saying, okay,

so this is an interesting moment where there's a bunch of other alien civilizations that might at

some history of the universe arrived at this moment we're here, they passed all the hard steps.

There's a, there's a model for how likely it is that that happens. And then they start expanding

and you think of an expansion is almost like a sphere. Right. That's when you say speed,

we're talking about the speed of the radius growth. Exactly. Like the surface, how fast the

surface. Okay. And so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion, average speed,

and then we can play with that parameter. And if that speed is super slow, then maybe that

explains why we haven't seen anything. If it's super fast, the slow would create the puzzle.

It's slow predicts, we would see them, but we don't see them as a way to explain that is that

they're fast. So the idea is if they're moving really fast, then we don't see them until they're

almost here. Okay, this is counterintuitive. All right, hold on a second. So I think this

works best when I say a bunch of dumb things. Okay. And then you elucidate the full complexity

and the beauty of the dumbness. Okay. So there's these spheres out there in the universe that are

made visible because they're sort of using a lot of energy. So they're generating a lot of light

stuff. They're changing things. They're changing things. And change would be visible a long way

off. Yes. They would take apart stars, rearrange them, restructure galaxies. They would do all

kinds of big, huge stuff. Okay. If they're expanding slowly, we would see a lot of them

because the universe is old, is old enough to where we would see them. That is we're assuming

we're just typical, you know, maybe at the 50th percentile of them. So like half of them have

appeared so far. The other half will still appear later. And the math of our best estimate is that

they appear roughly once per million galaxies. And we would meet them in roughly a billion years

if we expanded out to meet them. So we're looking at a grabby aliens model

3D sim. That's the actual name of the video. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, the fun

begins. Okay. So this is, we're watching a three dimensional sphere rotating. I presume that's the

universe. And then grabby aliens are expanding and filling that universe with all kinds of fun.

Pretty soon it's all full. It's full. So that's how the grabby aliens come in contact. First of all,

with other aliens and then with us humans. The following is a simulation of the grabby aliens

model of alien civilizations. Civilizations are born that expand outwards at constant speed.

A spherical region of space is shown. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years,

this sphere will be about 3000 times as wide as the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda.

Okay. This is fun.

It's huge.

Okay. It's huge. All right. So why don't we see, we're one little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot in

that giant, giant sphere. Why don't we see any of the grabby aliens?

It depends on how fast they expand. So you could see that if they expanded at the speed of light,

you wouldn't see them until they were here. So like out there, if somebody is destroying the

universe with a vacuum decay, there's this, there's this doomsday scenario where somebody

somewhere could change the vacuum of the universe and that would expand at the speed of light and

basically destroy everything it hit. But you'd never see that until I got here because it's

expanding at the speed of light. If you're expanding really slow, then you see it from

a long way off. So the fact we don't see anything in the sky tells us they're expanding fast,

say over a third the speed of light. And that's really, really fast. But that's what you have to

believe if we look out and you don't see anything. Now you might say, well, how, maybe I just don't

want to believe this whole model. Why should I believe this whole model at all? And our best

evidence why you should believe this model is our early date. We are right now almost 14 billion

years into the universe on a planet around a star that's roughly 5 billion years old.

But the average star out there will last roughly 5 trillion years. That is a thousand times longer.

And remember that power law, it says that the chance of advanced life appearing on a planet

goes as the power of sixth of the time. So if a planet lasts a thousand times longer,

then the chance of it appearing on that planet, if everything would stay empty at least, is a

thousand to the sixth power or 10 to the 18. So enormous, overwhelming chance that if the universe

would just stay sit and empty and waiting for advanced life to appear, when it would appear

would be way at the end of all these planet lifetimes. That is the long planets near the end

of the lifetime, trillions of years into the future. So, but we're really early compared to that. And

our explanation is at the moment, as you saw in the video, the universe is filling up in roughly a

billion years, it'll all be full. And at that point, it's too late for advanced life to show up.

So you had to show up now before that deadline. Okay. Can we break that apart a little bit? Okay.

Or linger on some of the things you said. So with the power law, the things we've done on earth,

the model you have says that it's very unlikely, like we're lucky SOBs. Is that mathematically

correct to say? We're crazy early. That is when early means like in the history of the universe.

In the history. Okay. So given this model, how do we make sense of that? If we're super,

can we just be the lucky ones? Well, 10 to the 18 lucky, you know,

how lucky do you feel? So, you know, that's a pretty lucky, right? 10 to the 18 is a billion,

billion. So then if you were just being honest and humble, that that means, what does that mean?

It means one of the assumptions that calculated this crazy early must be wrong. That's what it

means. So the key assumption we suggest is that the universe would stay empty. So most life would

stay empty. So most life would appear like a thousand times longer later than now if everything

would stay empty, waiting for it to appear. So what is not empty?

So the grabby aliens are filling the universe right now. Roughly at the moment, they filled

half of the universe and they've changed it. And when they fill everything, it's too late for stuff

like us to appear. But wait, hold on a second. Did anyone help us get lucky? If it's so difficult,

what, how do like, so it's like cancer, right? There's all these cells, each of which randomly

does or doesn't get cancer. And eventually some cell gets cancer and you know, we were one of

those, but hold on a second. Okay. But we got it early. We got early compared to the prediction

with an assumption that's wrong. That's so that's how we do a lot of, you know, theoretical

analysis. You have a model that makes a prediction that's wrong. Then that helps you reject that

model. Okay. Let's try to understand exactly where the wrong is. So the assumption is that the

universe is empty, stays empty, stays empty and waits until this advanced life appears in trillions

of years. That is if the universe would just stay empty, if there was just, you know, nobody else

out there, then when you should expect advanced life to appear, if you're the only one in the

universe, when should you expect to appear? You should expect to appear trillions of years in the

future. I see. Right, right. So this is a very sort of nuanced mathematical assumption. I don't

think we can intuit it cleanly with words. But if you assume that you're just wait, the universe

stays empty and you're waiting for one life civilization to pop up, then it's gonna, it

should happen very late, much later than now. And if you look at Earth, the way things happen on

Earth, it happened much, much, much, much, much earlier than it was supposed to according to this

model. If you take the initial assumption, therefore you can say, well, the initial assumption of the

universe staying empty is very unlikely. Right. And the other alternative theory is the universe

is filling up and will fill up soon. And so we are typical for the origin data of things that

can appear before the deadline. Before the deadline. Okay, it's filling up. So why don't we see anything

if it's filling up? Because they're expanding really fast. Close to the speed of light. Exactly.

So we will only see it when it's here. Almost here. Okay. What are the ways in which we might see

a quickly expanding? This is both exciting and terrifying. It is terrifying. It's like watching

a truck, like driving at you at 100 miles an hour. And so we would see spheres in the sky,

at least one sphere in the sky, growing very rapidly. And like very rapidly, right? Yes,

very rapidly. So we're not, so there's, there's, you know, different def because we were just

talking about 10 million years. This would be, you might see it 10 million years in advance coming.

I mean, you still might have a long warning. Again, the universe is 14 billion years old.

The typical origin times of these things are spread over several billion years. So the chance

of one originating at a, you know, very close to you in time is very low. So they still might take

millions of years from the time you see it, from the time it gets here. You'll have a million years

of your years to be terrified of this mass sphere coming at you. But coming at you very fast. So if

they're traveling close to the speed of light, but they're coming from a long way away. So remember,

the rate at which they appear is one per million galaxies, right? So they're roughly a hundred

galaxies away. I see. So the Delta between the speed of light and their actual travel speed is

very important, right? So even if they're going at say half the speed of light, we'll have a long

time then. Yeah. But what if they're traveling exactly at a speed of light? Then we see them,

like then we wouldn't have much warning, but that's less likely. Well, we can't exclude it.

And they could also be somehow traveling faster than the speed of light.

But I think we can't exclude because if they could go faster than the speed of light, then

they would just already be everywhere. So in a universe where you can travel faster than the

speed of light, you can go backwards in space time. So any time you appeared anywhere in space

time, you could just fill up everything. Yeah. And so anybody in the future, whoever appeared,

they would have been here by now. Can you exclude the possibility that those kinds of aliens aren't

already here? Well, you have, we should have a different discussion of that. Okay. So let's

actually lead that. Let's leave that discussion aside just to linger and understand the grabby

alien expansion, which is beautiful and fascinating. Okay. So there's these giant expanding

spheres of alien civilizations. Now, when those spheres collide, mathematically,

it's very likely that we're not the first collision of grabby alien civilizations,

I suppose is one way to say it. So there's like the first time the spheres touch each other,

recognize each other. They meet. They recognize each other first before they meet.

They see each other coming. They see each other coming. And then, so there's a bunch of them.

There's a combinatorial thing where they start seeing each other coming. And then there's a

third neighbor. It's like, what the hell? And then there's a fourth one. Okay. So what does that,

you think, look like? What lessons from human nature, that's the only data we have,

well, can you draw the story of the history of the universe here is what I would call a living

cosmology. So what I'm excited about in part by this model is that it lets us tell a story of

cosmology where there are actors who have agendas. So most ancient peoples, they had cosmologies,

stories they told about where the universe came from and where it's going and what's happening

out there. And their stories, they like to have agents and actors, gods or something out there

doing things. And lately our favorite cosmology is dead, kind of boring. We're the only activity

we know about or see and everything else just looks dead and empty. But this is now telling us,

no, that's not quite right. At the moment, the universe is filling up and in a few billion years,

it'll be all full. And from then on, the history of the universe will be the universe full of aliens.

LW. Yeah. So that's a really good reminder, a really good way to think about cosmology is we're

surrounded by a vast darkness and we don't know what's going on in that darkness until the light

from whatever generate lights arrives here. So we kind of, yeah, we look up at the sky,

okay, there's stars, oh, they're pretty, but you don't think about the giant expanding spheres of

aliens because you don't see them. But now our date, looking at the clock, if you're clever,

the clock tells you. So I like the analogy with the ancient Greeks. So you might think that an

ancient Greek staring at the universe couldn't possibly tell how far away the sun was or how

far away the moon is or how big the earth is. All you can see is just big things in the sky,

you can't tell. But they were clever enough actually to be able to figure out the size of

the earth and the distance to the moon and the sun and the size of the moon and sun. That is,

they could figure those things out actually by being clever enough. And so similarly,

we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the

few things we can see, one of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living

cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point, things

like us appear very primitive and then some of those stop being quiet and expand. And then for

a few billion years, they expand and then they meet each other. And then for the next hundred

billion years, they commune with each other. That is, the usual models of cosmology say that in

roughly 150 billion years, the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have

left is some galaxy clusters that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then,

for the next hundred billion years, they will interact. There will be this community of all the

grabby alien civilizations and each one of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others.

And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community. That's an interesting

thing to aspire to. Yes, interesting is an interesting word. Is the universe of alien

civilizations defined by war as much or more than war defined human history?

I would say it's defined by competition and then the question is how much competition implies war.

So up until recently, competition defined life on Earth. Competition between species and organisms

and among humans, competitions among individuals and communities and that competition often took

the form of war in the last 10,000 years. Many people now are hoping or even expecting to sort

of suppress and end competition in human affairs. They regulate business competition, they prevent

military competition and that's a future I think a lot of people will like to continue and

strengthen. People will like to have something close to world government or world governance or

at least a world community and they will like to suppress war and many forms of business and

personal competition over the coming centuries. And they may like that so much that they prevent

interstellar colonization which would become the end of that era. That is interstellar colonization

would just return severe competition to human or our descendant affairs and many civilizations may

prefer that and ours may prefer that. But if they choose to allow interstellar colonization,

they will have chosen to allow competition to return with great force. That is, there's really

not much of a way to centrally govern a rapidly expanding sphere of civilization. And so I think

one of the most solid things we can predict about Graviolians is they have accepted competition

and they have internal competition and therefore they have the potential for competition when they

meet each other at the borders. But whether that's military competition is more of an open question.

LW. So military meaning physically destructive, right.

So there's a lot to say there. So one idea that you kind of proposed is progress might be maximized

through competition, through some kind of healthy competition, some definition of healthy. So like

constructive not destructive competition. So like we would likely grab the alien civilizations would

be likely defined by competition because they can expand faster because competition allows

innovation and sort of the battle of ideas.

LW. The way I would take the logic is to say competition just happens if you can't coordinate

to stop it and you probably can't coordinate to stop it in an expanding interstellar way.

LW. So competition is a fundamental force in the universe.

LW. It has been so far and it would be within an expanding Graviolian civilization. But we today

have the chance, many people think and hope, of greatly controlling and limiting competition

within our civilization for a while. And that's an interesting choice whether to allow competition

to sort of regain its full force or whether to suppress and manage it.

LW. Well one of the open questions that has been raised in the past less than 100 years

is whether our desire to lessen the destructive nature of competition or the destructive kind

of competition will be outpaced by the destructive power of our weapons. Sort of if nuclear weapons

and weapons of that kind become more destructive than our desire for peace then all it takes is

one asshole at the party to ruin the party.

LW. It takes one asshole to make a delay, but not that much of a delay on the cosmological

scales we're talking about. So even a vast nuclear war, if it happened here right now on Earth,

it would not kill all humans and it certainly wouldn't kill all life.

And so human civilization would return within 100,000 years.

LW. So all the history of atrocities and if you look at the Black Plague,

which is not human caused atrocities or whatever.

LW. There are a lot of military atrocities in history, absolutely.

LW. In the 20th century. Those are, those challenge us to think about human nature,

but the cosmic scale of time and space, they do not stop the human spirit, essentially.

The humanity goes on through all the atrocities, it goes on.

LW. Most likely.

LW. So even a nuclear war isn't enough to destroy us or to stop our potential from expanding,

but we could institute a regime of global governance that limited competition,

including military and business competition of sorts, and that could prevent our expansion.

LW. Of course, to play devil's advocate, global governance is centralized power,

power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. One of the aspects of competition

that's been very productive is not letting any one person, any one country, any one center of power

become absolutely powerful, because that's another lesson, is it seems to corrupt.

There's something about ego in the human mind that seems to be corrupted by power,

so when you say global governance, that terrifies me more than the possibility of war,

because it's...

LW. I think people will be less terrified than you are right now,

and let me try to paint the picture from their point of view. This isn't my point of view,

but I think it's going to be a widely shared point of view.

LW. Yes. This is two devil's advocates arguing.

LW. Two devils.

LW. Okay. So for the last half century and into the continuing future, we actually have had

a strong elite global community that shares a lot of values and beliefs and has created a lot

of convergence in global policy. So if you look at electromagnetic spectrum or medical experiments

or pandemic policy or nuclear power energy or regulating airplanes or just in a wide range

of area, in fact, the world has very similar regulations and rules everywhere, and it's not

a coincidence because they are part of a world community where people get together at places

like Davos, et cetera, where world elites want to be respected by other world elites, and they

have a convergence of opinion, and that produces something like global governance,

but without a global center. This is what human mobs or communities have done for a long time,

that is, humans can coordinate together on shared behavior without a center by having

gossip and reputation within a community of elites. And that is what we have been doing and

are likely to do a lot more of. So for example, one of the things that's happening, say, with the

war in Ukraine is that this world community of elites has decided that they disapprove of the

Russian invasion and they are coordinating to pull resources together from all around the world in

order to oppose it, and they are proud of that, sharing that opinion in there, and they feel that

they are morally justified in their stance there. And that's the kind of event that actually brings

world elite communities together, where they come together and they push a particular policy and

position that they share and that they achieve successes. And the same sort of passion animates

global elites with respect to, say, global warming or global poverty and other sorts of things. And

they are, in fact, making progress on those sorts of things through shared global community of

elites. And in some sense, they are slowly walking toward global governance, slowly strengthening

various world institutions of governance, but cautiously, carefully watching out for the

possibility of a single power that might corrupt it. I think a lot of people over the coming

centuries will look at that history and like it. It's an interesting thought. And thank you for

playing that devil's advocate there. But I think the elites too easily lose touch of the morals

that the best of human nature and power corrupts. Sure, but their view is the one that determines

what happens. Their view may still end up there, even if you or I might criticize it from that

point of view. So from a perspective of minimizing human suffering, elites can use topics of the war

in Ukraine and climate change and all of those things to sell an idea to the world. And with

disregard to the amount of suffering it causes, their actual actions. So like you can tell all

kinds of narratives. That's the way propaganda works. Hitler really sold the idea that everything

Germany is doing is either it's the victim is defending itself against the cruelty of the world,

and it's actually trying to bring out about a better world. So every power center thinks they're

doing good. And so this is the positive of competition, of having multiple power centers.

This kind of gathering of elites makes me very, very, very nervous. The dinners, the meetings

and the closed rooms. I don't know. But remember we talked about separating our cold analysis of

what's likely or possible from what we prefer. And so this isn't exactly enough time for that.

We might say, I would recommend we don't go this route of a strong world governance. And because

I would say it'll preclude this possibility of becoming rabid aliens, of filling the next

nearest million galaxies for the next billion years with vast amounts of activity and interest

and value of life out there. That's the thing we would lose by deciding that we wouldn't expand,

that we would stay here and keep our comfortable shared governance.

So you wait, you think that global governance is, makes it more likely or less likely that

we expand out into the universe?

Less.

Okay.

This is the key, this is the key point.

Right. Right. So screw the elites.

We want to, wait, do we want to expand?

So again, I want to separate my neutral analysis from my evaluation and say,

first of all, I have an analysis that tells us this is a key choice that we will face and that

it's key choice other aliens have faced out there. And it could be that only one in 10 or one in 100

civilizations chooses to expand and the rest of them stay quiet. And that's how it goes out there.

And we face that choice too. And it'll happen sometime in the next 10 million years,

maybe the next thousand. But the key thing to notice from our point of view is that

even though you might like our global governance, you might like the fact that we've come together,

we no longer have massive wars and we no longer have destructive competition.

And that we could continue that, the cost of continuing that would be to prevent

interstellar colonization. That is once you allow interstellar colonization, then you've lost

control of those colonies and whatever they change into, they could come back here and compete with

you back here as a result of having lost control. And I think if people value that global governance

and global community and regulation and all the things it can do enough, they would then

want to prevent interstellar colonization.

I want to have a conversation with those people. I believe that both for humanity,

for the good of humanity, for what I believe is good in humanity and for expansion, exploration,

innovation, distributing the centers of power is very beneficial. So this whole meeting of elites

and I've been very fortunate to meet quite a large number of elites. They make me nervous

because it's easy to lose touch of reality. I'm nervous about that in myself to make sure that

you never lose touch as you get sort of older, wiser, you know, how you generally get like

disrespectful of kids, kids these days. No, the kids are okay. But I think you should hear

a stronger case for their position. So I'm going to play for the elites. Yes. Well, for the limiting

of expansion and for the regulation of behavior. Okay. Can I link on that? So you're saying those

two are connected. So the human civilization and alien civilizations come to a crossroads.

They have to decide, do we want to expand or not? And connected to that, do we want to give a lot

of power to a central elite? Or do we want to distribute the power centers, which is naturally

connected to the expansion? When you expand, you distribute the power. If say over the next thousand

years, we fill up the solar system, right? We go out from earth and we colonize Mars and we change

a lot of things. Within a solar system, still everything is within reach. That is, if there's

a rebellious colony around Neptune, you can throw rocks at it and smash it and then teach them

discipline. Okay. A central control over the solar system is feasible. But once you let it escape the

solar system, it's no longer feasible. But if you have a solar system that doesn't have a central

control, maybe broken into a thousand different political units in the solar system, then any one

part of that that allows interstellar colonization and it happens. That is interstellar colonization

happens when only one party chooses to do it and is able to do it. And that's what it is there for.

So we can just say in a world of competition, if interstellar colonization is possible, it will

happen and then competition will continue. And that will sort of ensure the continuation of

competition into the indefinite future. And competition, we don't know, but competition

can take violent forms and many forms. And the case I was going to make is that I think one of

the things that most scares people about competition is not just that it creates holocausts and death

on massive scales, is that it's likely to change who we are and what we value.

Yes. So this is the other thing with power. As we grow, as human civilization grows,

becomes multi planetary, multi solar system potentially, how does that change us, do you think?

I think the more you think about it, the more you realize it can change us a lot.

So first of all, this is pretty dark, by the way. Well, it's just honest.

Right. Well, I'm trying to get there. But I think the first thing you should say,

if you look at history, just human history over the last 10,000 years,

if you really understood what people were like a long time ago, you'd realize they were really

quite different. Ancient cultures created people who were really quite different. Most historical

fiction lies to you about that. It often offers you modern characters in an ancient world.

But if you actually study history, you will see just how different they were and how differently

they thought. And they've changed a lot many times, and they've changed a lot across time.

So I think the most obvious prediction about the future is, even if you only have the mechanisms

of change we've seen in the past, you should still expect a lot of change in the future.

But we have a lot bigger mechanisms for change in the future than we had in the past.

So I have this book called The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life, and Robots Rule the Earth. And

it's about what happens if brain emulations become possible. So a brain emulation is where you take

a actual human brain, and you scan it and find spatial and chemical detail to create

a computer simulation of that brain. And then those computer simulations of brains

are basically citizens in a new world. They work, and they vote, and they fall in love,

and they get mad, and they lie to each other. And this is a whole new world. And my book is

about analyzing how that world is different than our world, basically using competition as my key

lever of analysis. That is, if that world remains competitive, then I can figure out how they change

in that world, what they do differently than we do. And it's very different. And it's different in

ways that are shocking sometimes to many people and ways some people don't like. I think it's an

okay world, but I have to admit, it's quite different. And that's just one technology.

If we add dozens more technologies, changes into the future, we should just expect it's possible

to become very different than who we are. I mean, in the space of all possible minds,

our minds are a particular architecture, a particular structure, a particular set of habits,

and they are only one piece in a vast base of possibilities. The space of possible minds is

really huge. So yeah, let's linger on the space of possible minds for a moment, just to sort of

humble ourselves. How peculiar our peculiarities are, like the fact that we like a particular kind

of sex, and the fact that we eat food through one hole and poop through another hole. And that seems

to be a fundamental aspect of life, is very important to us. And that life is finite in a

certain kind of way, we have a meat vehicle. So death is very important to us. I wonder which

aspects are fundamental, or would be common throughout human history and also throughout,

sorry, throughout history of life on Earth, and throughout other kinds of lives. Like what is

really useful? You mentioned competition seems to be a one fundamental thing.

I've tried to do analysis of where our distant descendants might go in terms of what are robust

features we could predict about our descendants. So again, I have this analysis of sort of the

next generation, so the next era after ours. If you think of human history as having three eras

so far, right? There was the forager era, the farmer era, and the industry era. Then my attempt

in age of M is to analyze the next era after that. And it's very different, but of course,

there could be more and more errors after that. So analyzing a particular scenario and thinking

it through is one way to try to see how different the future could be, but that doesn't give you

some sort of sense of what's typical. But I have tried to analyze what's typical.

And so I have two predictions I think I can make pretty solidly. One thing is that we know at the

moment that humans discount the future rapidly. So we discount the future in terms of caring

about consequences, roughly a factor of two per generation. And there's a solid evolutionary

analysis why sexual creatures would do that. Because basically your descendants only share

half of your genes and your descendants are a generation away. So we only care about our

grandchildren. Basically that's a factor of four later because it's later. So this actually

explains typical interest rates in the economy. That is interest rates are greatly influenced by

our discount rates. And we basically discount the future by a factor of two per generation.

But that's a side effect of the way our preferences evolved as sexually selected

creatures. We should expect that in the longer run creatures will evolve who don't discount the

future. They will care about the long run and they will therefore not neglect the long run.

So for example, for things like global warming or things like that, at the moment, many commenters

are sad that basically ordinary people don't seem to care much, market prices don't seem to care

much and more ordinary people, it doesn't really impact them much because humans don't care much

about the longterm future. And futurists find it hard to motivate people and to engage people about

the longterm future because they just don't care that much. But that's a side effect of this

particular way that our preferences evolved about the future. And so in the future, they will neglect

the future less. And that's an interesting thing that we can predict robustly. Eventually,

you know, maybe a few centuries, maybe longer, eventually our descendants will

care about the future. Can you speak to the intuition behind that? Is it

useful to think more about the future? Right. If evolution rewards creatures for having many

descendants, then if you have decisions that influence how many descendants you have,

then that would be good if you made those decisions. But in order to do that, you'll have to

care about them. You have to care about that future. So to push back, that's if you're trying

to maximize the number of descendants. But the nice thing about not caring too much about the

longterm future is you're more likely to take big risks or you're less risk averse. And it's possible

that both evolution and just life in the universe rewards the risk takers. Well, we actually have

analysis of the ideal risk preferences too. So there's a literature on ideal preferences that

evolution should promote. And for example, there's literature on competing investment funds and what

the managers of those funds should care about in terms of risk, various kinds of risks, and in terms

of discounting. And so managers of investment funds should basically have logarithmic risk, i.e. in

shared risk, in correlated risk, but be very risk neutral with respect to uncorrelated risk. So

that's a feature that's predicted to happen about individual personal choices in biology and also

for investment funds. So that's other things. That's also something we can say about the long

run. What's correlated and uncorrelated risk? If there's something that would affect all of your

descendants, then if you take that risk, you might have more descendants, but you might have zero.

And that's just really bad to have zero descendants. But an uncorrelated risk would be a

risk that some of your descendants would suffer, but others wouldn't. And then you have a portfolio

of descendants. And so that portfolio ensures you against problems with any one of them.

I like the idea of portfolio descendants. And we'll talk about portfolios with your idea of

you briefly mentioned, we'll return there with M, EM, the age of EM, work, love, and life when

robots rule the earth. EM, by the way, is emulated minds. So this one of the...

M is short for emulations.

M is short for emulations. And it's kind of an idea of how we might create artificial minds,

artificial copies of minds, or human like intelligences.

I have another dramatic prediction I can make about long term preferences.

Yes.

Which is, at the moment, we reproduce as the result of a hodgepodge of preferences that

aren't very well integrated, but sort of in our ancestral environment induced us to reproduce.

So we have preferences over being sleepy and hungry and thirsty and wanting to have sex and

wanting to be excitement, et cetera, right? And so in our ancestral environment, the packages

of preferences that we evolved to have did induce us to have more descendants. That's why we're here.

But those packages of preferences are not a robust way to promote having more descendants.

They were tied to our ancestral environment, which is no longer true. So that's one of the

reasons we are now having a big fertility decline because in our current environment,

our ancestral preferences are not inducing us to have a lot of kids,

which is, from evolution's point of view, a big mistake.

We can predict that in the longer run, there will arise creatures who

just abstractly know that what they want is more descendants.

That's a very robust way to have more descendants is to have that as your direct preference.

First of all, your thinking is so clear. I love it. So mathematical. And thank you

for thinking so clear with me and bearing with my interruptions and going on the tangents when we go

there. So you're just clearly saying that successful long term civilizations will prefer to have

descendants, more descendants.

Not just prefer, consciously and abstractly prefer. That is, it won't be the indirect

consequence of other preference. It will just be the thing they know they want.

There'll be a president in the future that says, we must have more sex.

We must have more descendants and do whatever it takes to do that.

Whatever. We must go to the moon and do the other things. Not because they're easy,

but because they're hard. But instead of the moon, let's have lots of sex. Okay.

But there's a lot of ways to have descendants, right?

Right. So that's the whole point. When the world gets more complicated and there are many possible

strategies, it's having that as your abstract preference that will force you to think through

those possibilities and pick the one that's most effective.

So just to clarify, descendants doesn't necessarily mean the narrow definition of

descendants, meaning humans having sex and then having babies.

Exactly.

You can have artificial intelligence systems in whom you instill some capability of cognition

and perhaps even consciousness. You can also create through genetics and biology clones of yourself

or slightly modified clones, thousands of them. So all kinds of descendants. It could be descendants

in the space of ideas too, for somehow we no longer exist in this meat vehicle. It's now just

like whatever the definition of a life form is, you have descendants of those life forms.

Yes. And they will be thoughtful about that. They will have thought about what counts as a

descendant and that'll be important to them to have the right concept.

So the they there is very interesting, who the they are.

But the key thing is we're making predictions that I think are somewhat robust about what

our distant descendants will be like. Another thing I think you would automatically accept is

they will almost entirely be artificial. And I think that would be the obvious prediction

about any aliens we would meet. That is they would long since have given up reproducing

biologically.

Well, it's like organic or something. It's all real.

It might be squishy and made out of hydrocarbons, but it would be artificial in the sense of made

in factories with designs on CAD things, right? Factories with scale economy. So the factories

we have made on earth today have much larger scale economies than the factories in ourselves.

So the factories in ourselves are, there are marvels, but they don't achieve very many scale

economies. They're tiny little factories.

But they're all factories.

Yes.

Factories on top of factories. So everything, the factories that are designed is different

than sort of the factories that have evolved.

Yeah. I think the nature of the word design is very interesting to uncover there. But

let me, in terms of aliens, let me go, let me analyze your Twitter like it's Shakespeare.

Okay.

There's a tweet says, define hello, in quotes, alien civilizations as one that might the

next million years identify humans as intelligent and civilized, travel to earth and say hello

by making their presence and advanced abilities known to us. The next 15 polls, this is a

Twitter thread, the next 15 polls ask about such hello aliens. And what these polls ask

is your Twitter followers, what they think those aliens will be like certain particular

qualities. So poll number one is what percent of hello aliens evolved from biological species

with two main genders? And you know, the popular vote is above 80%. So most of them have two

genders. What do you think about that? I'll ask you about some of these because they're

so interesting. It's such an interesting question.

It is a fun set of questions.

Yes, it's a fun set of questions. So the genders as we look through evolutionary history, what's

the usefulness of that as opposed to having just one or like millions?

So there's a question in evolution of life on earth, there are very few species that

have more than two genders. There are some, but they aren't very many. But there's an

enormous number of species that do have two genders, much more than one. And so there's

a literature on why did multiple genders evolve, and that's sort of what's the point of having

males and females versus hermaphrodites. So most plants are hermaphrodites, that is they

would mate male female, but each plant can be either role. And then most animals have

chosen to split into males and females. And then they're differentiating the two genders.

And there's an interesting set of questions about why that happens.

Because you can do selection, you basically have like one gender competes for the affection

of other and there's sexual partnership that creates the offspring. So there's sexual

selection. It's nice to have like to a party, it's nice to have dance partners. And then

then each one get to choose based on certain characteristics. And that's an efficient

mechanism for adapting to the environment, being successfully adapted to the environment.

It does look like there's an advantage. If you have males, then the males can take higher

variants. And so there can be stronger selection among the males in terms of weeding out genetic

mutations because the males have a higher variance in their mating success.

Yes. Sure. Okay. Question number two, what percent of hello aliens evolved from land

animals as opposed to plants or ocean slash air organisms? By the way, I did recently

see that there's only 10% of species on earth are in the ocean. So there's a lot more variety

on land. There is. It's interesting. So why is that? I can't even intuit exactly why that would

be. Maybe survival on land is harder and so you get a lot more. The story that I understand is

it's about small niches. So speciation can be promoted by having multiple different species.

So in the ocean, species are larger. That is there are more creatures in each species because the

ocean environments don't vary as much. So if you're good in one place, you're good in many

other places. But on land, and especially in rivers, rivers contain an enormous percentage of

the kinds of species on land, you see, because they vary so much from place to place. And so

a species can be good in one place and then other species can't really compete because they came

from a different place where things are different. So it's a remarkable fact actually that speciation

promotes evolution in the long run. That is more evolution has happened on land because there have

been more species on land because each species has been smaller. And that's actually a warning

about something called rot that I've thought a lot about, which is one of the problems with

even a world government, which is large systems of software today just consistently rot and decay

with time and have to be replaced. And that plausibly also is a problem for other large

systems, including biological systems, legal systems, regulatory systems. And it seems like

large species actually don't evolve as effectively as small ones do. And that's an important thing

to notice about that. And that's different from ordinary sort of evolution in economies on Earth

in the last few centuries, say. On Earth, the more technical evolution and economic growth happens in

larger integrated cities and nations. But in biology, it's the other way around. More evolution

happened in the fragmented species. Yeah, it's such a nuanced discussion because you can also

push back in terms of nations and at least companies. It's like large companies seems to evolve

less effectively. There is something that they have more resources, they don't even have better

resilience. And when you look at the scale of decades and centuries, it seems like a lot of

large companies die. But still large economies do better, like large cities grow better than small

cities. Large integrated economies like the United States or the European Union do better than small

fragmented ones. So, yeah, sure. That's a very interesting, long discussion. But so most of the

people, and obviously votes on Twitter represent the absolute objective truth of things.

But an interesting question about oceans is that, okay, remember I told you about how most

planets would last for trillions of years and be later, right? So people have tried to explain why

life appeared on Earth by saying, oh, all those planets are going to be unqualified for life

because of various problems. That is, they're around smaller stars, which last longer, and

smaller stars have some things like more solar flares, maybe more tidal locking. But almost

all of these problems with longer lived planets aren't problems for ocean worlds. And a large

fraction of planets out there are ocean worlds. So if life can appear on an ocean world, then

that pretty much ensures that these planets that last a very long time could have advanced life

because there's a huge fraction of ocean worlds. So that's actually an open question.

So when you say, sorry, when you say life appear, you're kind of saying life and intelligent life.

So that's an open question. Is land, and that's I suppose the question behind

the Twitter poll, which is a grabby alien civilization that comes to say hello,

what's the chance that they first began their early steps, the difficult steps they took on

land? What do you think? 80%, most people on Twitter think it's very likely on land.

I think people are discounting ocean worlds too much. That is, I think people tend to assume that

whatever we did must be the only way it's possible. And I think people aren't giving

enough credit for other possible paths. Dolphins, Waterworld, by the way,

people criticize that movie. I love that movie. Kevin Costner can do me no wrong.

Okay, next question. What percent of hello aliens once had a nuclear war with greater

than 10 nukes fired in anger? So not in the incompetence and as an accident,

intentional firing of nukes and less than 20% was the most popular vote.

And that just seems wrong to me.

So like, I wonder what, so most people think once you get nukes, we're not going to fire them.

They believe in the power.

I think they're assuming that if you had a nuclear war, then that would just end

civilization for good. I think that's the thinking.

That's the main thing.

And I think that's just wrong. I think you could rise again after a nuclear war.

It might take 10,000 years or 100,000 years, but it could rise again.

So what do you think about mutual assured destruction

as a force to prevent people from firing nuclear weapons? That's a question that I knew

to a terrifying degree has been raised now and what's going on.

Well, I mean, clearly it has had an effect. The question is just how strong an effect for how

long. I mean, clearly we have not gone wild with nuclear war and clearly the devastation that you

would get if you initiated a nuclear war is part of the reasons people have been reluctant to start

a war. The question is just how reliably will that ensure the absence of a war?

Yeah. The night is still young.

Exactly.

This has been 70 years or whatever it's been.

I mean, but what do you think? Do you think we'll see nuclear war in the century?

I don't know if in the century, but it's the sort of thing that's likely to happen eventually.

That's a very loose statement. Okay. I understand. Now this is where I pull you out of your

mathematical model and ask a human question. Do you think this particular human question...

I think we've been lucky that it hasn't happened so far.

But what is the nature of nuclear war? Let's think about this. There's dictators, there's democracies,

miscommunication. How do wars start? World War I, World War II.

So the biggest datum here is that we've had an enormous decline in major war over the last

century. So that has to be taken into account now. So the problem is war is a process that has a very

long tail. That is, there are rare, very large wars. So the average war is much worse than the

median war because of this long tail. And that makes it hard to identify trends over time. So

the median war has clearly gone way down in the last century at a medium rate of war. But it could

be that's because the tail has gotten thicker. And in fact, the average war is just as bad,

but most wars are gonna be big wars. So that's the thing we're not so sure about.

There's no strong data on wars with one, because of the destructive nature of the weapons,

kill hundreds of millions of people. There's no data on this.

So, but we can start intuiting.

But we can see that the power law, we can do a power law fit to the rate of wars and it's a

power law with a thick tail. So it's one of those things that you should expect most of the damage

to be in the few biggest ones. So that's also true for pandemics and a few other things. For

pandemics, most of the damages in the few biggest ones. So the median pandemics of ours, less than

the average that you should expect in the future. But those, that fitting of data is very questionable

because everything you said is correct. The question is like, what can we infer about the

future of civilization, threatening pandemics or nuclear war from studying the history of the

20th century? So like, you can't just fit it to the data, the rate of wars and the destructive

nature. Like that's not, that's not how nuclear war will happen. Nuclear war happens with two

assholes or idiots that have access to a button.

Small wars happen that way too.

No, I understand that, but that's, it's very important. Small wars aside, it's very important

to understand the dynamics, the human dynamics and the geopolitics of the way nuclear war happens

in order to predict how we can minimize the chance of a...

But it is a common and useful intellectual strategy to take something that could be really

big or, but is often very small and fit the distribution of the data, small things, which

you have a lot of them and then ask, do I believe the big things are really that different? Right?

I see.

So sometimes it's reasonable to say like, say with tornadoes or even pandemics or something,

the underlying process might not be that different for the big and small ones.

It might not be. The fact that mutual sure destruction seems to work to some degree

shows you that to some degree it's different than the small wars.

So it's a really important question to understand is, are humans capable, one human, like how many

humans on earth, if I give them a button now, say you pressing this button will kill everyone on

earth, everyone, right? How many humans will press that button? I want to know those numbers,

like day to day, minute to minute, how many people have that much irresponsibility, evil,

incompetence, ignorance, whatever word you want to assign, there's a lot of dynamics of the

psychology that leads you to press that button, but how many? My intuition is the number, the more

destructive that press of a button, the fewer humans you find. And that number gets very close

to zero very quickly, especially people have access to such a button, but that's perhaps

a hope than a reality. And unfortunately we don't have good data on this,

which is like how destructive are humans willing to be?

So I think part of this just has to think about, ask what your time scales you're looking at,

right? So if you say, if you look at the history of war, you know, we've had a lot of wars pretty

consistently over many centuries. So if I ask, if you ask, will we have a nuclear war in the

next 50 years? I might say, well, probably not. If I say 500 or 5,000 years, like if the same sort

of risks are underlying and they just continue, then you have to add that up over time and think

the risk is getting a lot larger the longer a timescale we're looking at.

But okay, let's generalize nuclear war because what I was more referring to is something that

kills more than 20% of humans on earth and injures or makes the other 80%

suffer horribly, survive, but suffer. That's what I was referring to. So when you look at 500 years

from now, that might not be nuclear war. That might be something else. That's that kind of,

has that destructive effect. And I don't know, these feel like novel questions in the history

of humanity. I just don't know. I think since nuclear weapons, this has been, you know,

engineering pandemics, for example, robotics, so nanobots. It just seems like a real new

possibility that we have to contend with it. We don't have good models or from my perspective.

So if you look on say the last thousand years or 10,000 years, we could say we've seen a certain

rate at which people are willing to make big destruction in terms of war. Okay. And if you're

willing to project that data forward, that I think like if you want to ask over periods of

thousands or tens of thousands of years, you would have a reasonable data set. So the key

question is what's changed lately? Okay. And so a big question of which I've given a lot of thought

to what are the major changes that seem to have happened in culture and human attitudes over the

last few centuries and what's our best explanation for those so that we can project them forward into

the future. And I have a story about that, which is the story that we have been drifting back toward

forager attitudes in the last few centuries as we get rich. So the idea is we spent a million years

being a forager and that was a very sort of standard lifestyle that we know a lot about.

Foragers sort of live in small bands. They make decisions cooperatively. They share food. They,

you know, they don't have much property, et cetera. And humans liked that. And then 10,000 years ago,

farming became possible, but it was only possible because we were plastic enough to really change

our culture. Farming styles and cultures are very different. They have slavery, they have war,

they have property, they have inequality, they have kings. They stay in one place instead of

wandering. They don't have as much diversity of experience or food. They have more disease.

This farming life is just very different. But humans were able to sort of introduce conformity

and religion and all sorts of things to become just a very different kind of creature as farmers.

Farmers are just really different than foragers in terms of their values and their lives.

But the pressures that made foragers into farmers were part mediated by poverty.

Farmers are poor. And if they deviated from the farming norms that people around them supported,

they were quite at risk of starving to death. And then in the last few centuries,

we've gotten rich. And as we've gotten rich, the social pressures that turned foragers into farmers

have become less persuasive to us. So, for example, a farming young woman who was told,

if you have a child out of wedlock, you and your child may starve, that was a credible threat.

She would see actual examples around her to make that a believable threat. Today,

if you say to a young woman, you shouldn't have a child out of wedlock, she will see other young

woman around her doing okay that way. We're all rich enough to be able to afford that sort of a

thing. And therefore, she's more inclined often to go with her inclinations, her sort of more

natural inclinations about such things rather than to be pressured to follow the official

farming norms of that you shouldn't do that sort of thing. And all through our lives, we have been

drifting back toward forager attitudes because we've been getting rich. And so, aside from at

work, which is an exception, but elsewhere, I think this explains trends toward less slavery,

more democracy, less religion, less fertility, more promiscuity, more travel, more art, more leisure,

fewer work hours. All of these trends are basically explained by becoming more forager like.

And much science fiction celebrates this, Star Trek or the culture novels, people

like this image that we are moving toward this world. We're basically like foragers, we're peaceful,

we share, we make decisions collectively, we have a lot of free time, we are into art.

So forger, you know, forger is a word and it has, it's a loaded word because it's connected to

the actual, what life was actually like at that time. As you mentioned, we sometimes don't do a

good job of telling accurately what life was like back then. But you're saying if it's not exactly

like foragers, it rhymes in some fundamental way. You also said peaceful. Is it obvious that a

forager with a nuclear weapon would be peaceful? I don't know if that's 100% obvious. So we know,

again, we know a fair bit about what foragers lives were like. The main sort of violence they

had would be sexual jealousy. They were relatively promiscuous and so there'd be a lot of jealousy.

But they did not have organized wars with each other. That is, they were at peace with their

neighboring forager bands. They didn't have property in land or even in people. They didn't

really have marriage. And so they were, in fact, peaceful.

When you think about large scale wars, they don't start large scale wars.

They didn't have coordinated large scale wars like the way chimpanzees do. Our chimpanzees do

have wars between one tribe of chimpanzees and others, but human foragers do not. Farmers return

to that, of course, the more chimpanzee like styles. Well, that's a hopeful message. If we

could return real quick to the Hello Aliens Twitter thread. One of them is really interesting

about language. What percent of Hello Aliens would be able to talk to us in our language?

This is the question of communication. It actually gets to the nature of language.

It also gets to the nature of how advanced you expect them to be.

So I think some people see that we have advanced over the last thousands of years,

and we aren't reaching any sort of limit. And so they tend to assume it could go on forever.

And I actually tend to think that within, say, 10 million years, we will sort of max out on

technology. We will sort of learn everything that's feasible to know for the most part. And then

obstacles to understanding would more be about sort of cultural differences, like ways in which

different places had just chosen to do things differently. And so then the question is, is it

even possible to communicate across some cultural distances? And I could imagine some maybe advanced

aliens who just become so weird and different from each other, they can't communicate with each other.

But we're probably pretty simple compared to them. So I would think, sure, if they wanted to,

they could communicate with us. So it's the simplicity of the recipient. I tend to,

just to push back, let's explore the possibility where that's not the case. Can we communicate

with ants? I find that this idea that... We're not very good at communicating in general.

Oh, you're saying... All right, I see. You're saying once you get orders of magnitude better

at communicating... Once they had maxed out on all communication technology in general,

and they just understood in general how to communicate with lots of things, and had done

that for millions of years. But you have to be able to... This is so interesting. As somebody

who cares a lot about empathy and imagining how other people feel, communication requires empathy,

meaning you have to truly understand how the other person, the other organism sees the world.

It's like a four dimensional species talking to a two dimensional species. It's not as trivial as,

to me at least, as it might at first seem. So let me reverse my position a little,

because I'll say, well, the hello aliens question really combines two different scenarios

that we're slipping over. So one scenario would be that the hello aliens would be like grabby

aliens. They would be just fully advanced. They would have been expanding for millions of years.

They would have a very advanced civilization, and then they would finally be arriving here

after a billion years perhaps of expanding, in which case they're going to be crazy advanced

at some maximal level. But the hello aliens about aliens we might meet soon, which might be sort of

UFO aliens, and UFO aliens probably are not grabby aliens. How do you get here if you're

not a grabby alien? Well, they would have to be able to travel. Oh. But they would not be expansive.

So the road trip doesn't count as a grabby. So we're talking about expanding the colony,

the comfortable colony. So the question is, if UFOs, some of them are aliens,

what kind of aliens would they be? This is sort of the key question you have to ask in order to

try to interpret that scenario. The key fact we would know is that they are here right now,

but the universe around us is not full of an alien civilization. So that says right off the bat

that they chose not to allow massive expansion of a grabby civilization.

Is it possible that they chose it, but we just don't see them yet? These are the stragglers,

the journeymen. So the timing coincidence is, it's almost surely if they are here now,

they are much older than us. They are many millions of years older than us. And so they

could have filled the galaxy in that last millions of years if they had wanted to.

That is, they couldn't just be right at the edge. Very unlikely. Most likely they would have been

around waiting for us for a long time. They could have come here any time in the last millions of

years and they just chosen, they've been waiting around for this or they just chose to come

recently. But the timing coincidence, it would be crazy unlikely that they just happen to be able to

get here, say in the last hundred years. They would no doubt have been able to get here far

earlier than that. Again, we don't know. So this is a friend like UFO sightings on earth. We don't

know if this kind of increase in sightings have anything to do with actual visitations.

I'm just talking about the timing. They arose at some point in space time.

And it's very unlikely that that was just to the point that they could just barely get here

recently. Almost surely they could have gotten here much earlier. And throughout the stretch

of several billion years that earth existed, they could have been here often. Exactly. So

they could have therefore filled the galaxy long time ago if they had wanted to. Let's push back

on that. The question to me is, isn't it possible that the expansion of a civilization is much

harder than the travel? The sphere of the reachable is different than the sphere of the colonized.

So isn't it possible that the sphere of places where like the stragglers go, the different

people that journey out, the explorers, is much, much larger and grows much faster than the

civilization? So in which case, like they would visit us. There's a lot of visitors, the grad

students of the civilization. They're like exploring, they're collecting the data, but

we're not yet going to see them. And by yet, I mean across millions of years.

The time delay between when the first thing might arrive and then when colonists could arrive in

mass and do a mass amount of work is cosmologically short. In human history, of course, sure, there

might be a century between that, but a century is just a tiny amount of time on the scales we're

talking about. So this is, in computer science, ant colony optimization. It's true for ants.

So it's like when the first ant shows up, it's likely if there's anything of value,

it's likely the other ants will follow quickly. Yeah.

Relatively short. It's also true that traveling over very long distances, probably one of the

main ways to make that feasible is that you land somewhere, you colonize a bit, you create new

resources that can then allow you to go farther. Many short hops as opposed to a giant long journey.

Exactly. Those hops require that you are able to start a colonization of sorts along those hops.

You have to be able to stop somewhere, make it into a way station such that you can then support

you moving farther. So what do you think of, there's been a lot of UFO sightings. What do

you think about those UFO sightings and what do you think if any of them are of extraterrestrial

origin and we don't see giant civilizations out in the sky, how do you make sense of that then?

I want to do some clearing of throats, which people like to do on this topic, right? They want

to make sure you understand they're saying this and not that, right? So I would say the analysis

needs both a prior and a likelihood. So the prior is what are the scenarios that are at all plausible

in terms of what we know about the universe. And then the likelihood is the particular actual

sightings, like how hard are those to explain through various means. I will establish myself

as somewhat of an expert on the prior. I would say my studies and the things I've studied make me an

expert and I should stand up and have an opinion on that and be able to explain it. The likelihood,

however, is not my area of expertise. That is, I'm not a pilot. I don't do atmospheric studies of

studies of things I haven't studied in detail, the various kinds of atmospheric phenomena or

whatever that might be used to explain the particular sightings. I can just say from

my amateur stance, the sightings look damn puzzling. They do not look easy to dismiss.

The attempts I've seen to easily dismiss them seem to me to fail. It seems like these are

pretty puzzling, weird stuff that deserve an expert's attention in terms of considering,

asking what the likelihood is. So analogy I would make as a murder trial. On average, if we say,

what's the chance any one person murdered another person as a prior probability, maybe one in a

thousand people get murdered. Maybe each person has a thousand people around them who could

plausibly have done it. So the prior probability of a murder is one in a million. But we allow

murder trials because often evidence is sufficient to overcome a one in a million prior because the

evidence is often strong enough, right? My guess, rough guess for the UFOs as aliens

scenario, at least some of them, is the priors roughly one in a thousand,

much higher than the usual murder trial, plenty high enough that strong physical evidence could

put you over the top to think it's more likely than not. But I'm not an expert on that physical

evidence. I'm going to leave that part to someone else. I'm going to say the prior is pretty high.

This isn't a crazy scenario. So then I can elaborate on where my prior comes from.

What scenario could make most sense of this data? My scenario to make sense has two main parts.

First is panspermia siblings. So panspermia is the process by which life might have arrived on

earth from elsewhere. And a plausible time for that, I mean, it would have to happen very early

in earth's history because we see life early in history. And a plausible time could have been

during the stellar nursery where the sun was born with many other stars in the same close proximity

with lots of rocks flying around, able to move things from one place to another.

If a rock with life on it from some rock with planet with life came into that stellar nursery,

it plausibly could have seeded many planets in that stellar nursery all at the same time. They're

all born at the same time in the same place, pretty close to each other, lots of rocks flying

around. So a panspermia scenario would then create siblings, i.e. there would be, say, a few thousand

other planets out there. So after the nursery forms, it drifts, it separates, they drift apart.

And so out there in the galaxy, there would now be a bunch of other stars all formed at the same

time. And we can actually spot them in terms of their spectrum. And they would have then started

on the same path of life as we did with that life being seeded, but they would move at different

rates. And most likely, most of them would never reach an advanced level before the deadline. But

maybe one other did, and maybe it did before us. So if they did, they could know all this,

and they could go searching for their siblings. That is, they could look in the sky for the other

stars that match the spectrum that matches the spectrum that came from this nursery.

They could identify their sibling stars in the galaxy, the thousand of them. And those would be

of special interest to them because they would think, well, life might be on those. And they

could go looking for them. Can we just, such a brilliant mathematical, philosophical, physical,

biological idea of panspermia siblings, because we all kind of started at a similar time

in this local pocket of the universe. And so that changes a lot of the math.

So that would create this correlation between when advanced life might appear,

no longer just random independent spaces and space time. There'd be this cluster, perhaps.

And that allows interaction between non grabby alien civilizations, like kind of

primitive alien civilizations, like us with others. And they might be a little bit ahead.

That's so fascinating.

They would probably be a lot ahead. So the puzzle is, if they happened before us,

they probably happened hundreds of millions of years before us.

But less than a billion.

Less than a billion, but still plenty of time that they could have become grabby and filled

the galaxy and gone beyond. So the fact is, they chose not to become grabby. That would

have to be the interpretation. If we have panspermia siblings...

Plenty of time to become grabby, you said. So they should be gone.

Yes, they had plenty of time and they chose not to.

Are we sure about this? A hundred million years is enough.

So I told you before that I said, within 10 million years, our descendants will become

grabby or not.

And they'll have that choice. Okay.

Right? And so they, clearly more than 10 million years earlier than us, so they chose not to.

But still go on vacation, look around, just not grabby.

If they chose not to expand, that's going to have to be a rule they set to not allow

any part of themselves to do it. If they let any little ship fly away with the ability

to create a colony, the game's over. Then the universe becomes grabby from their origin

with this one colony, right? So in order to prevent their civilization being grabby,

they have to have a rule they enforce pretty strongly that no part of them can ever try

to do that.

Through a global authoritarian regime or through something that's internal to them,

meaning it's part of the nature of life that it doesn't want...

As like a political officer in the brain or whatever.

Yes. There's something in human nature that prevents you from what or like alien nature

that as you get more advanced, you become lazier and lazier in terms of exploration

and expansion.

So I would say they would have to have enforced a rule against expanding and that rule would

probably make them reluctant to let people leave very far. You know, any one vacation

trip far away could risk an expansion from this vacation trip. So they would probably

have a pretty tight lid on just allowing any travel out from their origin in order to

enforce this rule. But then we also know, well, they would have chosen to come here.

So clearly they made an exception from their general rule to say, okay, but an expedition

to Earth, that should be allowed.

It could be intentional exception or incompetent exception.

But if incompetent, then they couldn't maintain this over 100 million years, this policy of

not allowing any expansion. So we have to see they have successfully, they not just

had a policy to try, they succeeded over 100 million years in preventing the expansion.

That's a substantial competence.

Let me think about this. So you don't think there could be a barrier in 100 million years,

you don't think there could be a barrier to like technological barrier to becoming expansionary.

Imagine the Europeans have tried to prevent anybody from leaving Europe to go to the new

world. And imagine what it would have taken to make that happen over 100 million years.

Yeah, it's impossible.

They would have had to have very strict, you know, guards at the borders saying, no, you

can't go.

But just to clarify, you're not suggesting that's actually possible.

I am suggesting it's possible.

I don't know how you keep, in my silly human brain, maybe it's the brain that values freedom,

but I don't know how you can keep, no matter how much force, no matter how much censorship

or control or so on, I just don't know how you can keep people from exploring into the

mysterious, into the unknown.

You're thinking of people, we're talking aliens. So remember, there's a vast space

of different possible social creatures they could have evolved from, different cultures

they could be in, different kinds of threats. I mean, there are many things, as you talked

about, that most of us would feel very reluctant to do.

This isn't one of those.

Okay, so how, if the UFO sightings represent alien visitors, how the heck are they getting

here under the panspermia siblings?

So panspermia siblings is one part of the scenario, which is that's where they came

from. And from that, we can conclude they had this rule against expansion and they've

successfully enforced that. That also creates a plausible agenda for why they would be here,

that is to enforce that rule on us. That is, if we go out and expanding, then we have defeated

the purpose of this rule they set up.

Interesting.

Right? So they would be here to convince us to not expand.

Convince in quotes.

Right? Through various mechanisms. So obviously, one thing we conclude is they didn't just

destroy us. That would have been completely possible, right? So the fact that they're

here and we are not destroyed means that they chose not to destroy us. They have some degree

of empathy or whatever their morals are that would make them reluctant to just destroy

us. They would rather persuade us.

Destroy their brethren. And so they may have been, there's a difference in arrival and

observation. They may have been observing for a very long time.

Exactly.

And they arrive to try to, not to try, I don't think to try to ensure that we don't become

grabby.

Which is because we can see that they did not, they must have enforced a rule against

that and they are therefore here to, that's a plausible interpretation why they would

risk this expedition when they clearly don't risk very many expeditions over this long

period to allow this one exception because otherwise, if they don't, we may become grabby.

And they could have just destroyed us, but they didn't.

And they're closely monitoring the technological advancing of our civilization. Like what

nuclear weapons is one thing that, all right, cool. That might have less to do with nuclear

weapons and more with nuclear energy. Maybe they're monitoring fusion closely. Like how

clever are these apes getting?

So no doubt they have a button that if we get too uppity or risky, they can push the

button and ensure that we don't expand. But they'd rather do it some other way. So now

that's, that explains why they're here and why they aren't out there. But there's another

thing that we need to explain. There's another key data we need to explain about UFOs if

we're going to have a hypothesis that explains them. And this is something many people have

noticed, which is they had two extreme options they could have chosen and didn't chose.

They could have either just remained completely invisible. Clearly an advanced civilization

could have been completely invisible. There's no reason they need to fly around and be

noticed. They could just be in orbit and in dark satellites that are completely invisible

to us watching whatever they want to watch. That would be well within their abilities.

That's one thing they could have done. The other thing they could do is just show up

and land on the White House lawn, as they say, and shake hands, like make themselves

really obvious. They could have done either of those and they didn't do either of those.

That's the next thing you need to explain about UFOs as aliens. Why would they take

this intermediate approach, hanging out near the edge of visibility with somewhat impressive

mechanisms, but not walking up and introducing themselves nor just being completely invisible?

So, okay, a lot of questions there. So one, do you think it's obvious where the White

House is or the White House lawn?

Obvious where there are concentrations of humans that you could go up and introduce.

But is humans the most interesting thing about Earth?

Yeah.

Are you sure about this? Because...

If they're worried about an expansion, then they would be worried about a civilization

that could be capable of expansion. Obviously humans are the civilization on Earth that's

by far the closest to being able to expand.

I just don't know if aliens obviously see...obviously see humans, like the individual

humans, like the meat vehicles, as the center of focus for observing a life on a planet.

They're supposed to be really smart and advanced. Like, this shouldn't be that hard for them.

But I think we're actually the dumb ones, because we think humans are the important

things. But it could be our ideas. It could be something about our technologies.

But that's mediated with us. It's correlated with us.

No, we make it seem like it's mediated by us humans. But the focus for alien civilizations

might be the AI systems or the technologies themselves. That might be the organism. Like,

what humans are like...human is the food, the source of the organism that's under observation,

versus like...

So what they wanted to have close contact with was something that was closely near humans,

then they would be contacting those. And we would just incidentally see, but we would still see.

But don't you think that...isn't it possible, taking their perspective,

isn't it possible that they would want to interact with some fundamental aspect that

they're interested in without interfering with it? And that's actually a very...no

matter how advanced you are, it's very difficult to do.

But that's puzzling. So, I mean, the prototypical UFO observation is a shiny,

big object in the sky that has very rapid acceleration and no apparent surfaces for

using air to manipulate at speed. And the question is, why that? Again, if they just...

For example, if they just wanted to talk to our computer systems, they could move some sort of

like a little probe that connects to a wire and reads and sends bits there. They don't need a

shiny thing flying in the sky.

But don't you think they would be looking for the right way to communicate, the right

language to communicate? Everything you just said, looking at the computer systems,

I mean, that's not a trivial thing. Coming up with a signal that us humans would not freak out

too much about, but also understand, might not be that trivial.

Well, so the not freak out part is another interesting constraint. So again, I said,

like the two obvious strategies are just to remain completely invisible and watch,

which would be quite feasible, or to just directly interact, come out and be really

very direct, right? I mean, there's big things that you can see around. There's big cities,

there's aircraft carriers, there's lots of... If you want to just find a big thing and come

right up to it and like tap it on the shoulder or whatever, that would be quite feasible,

then they're not doing that. So my hypothesis is that one of the other questions there was,

do they have a status hierarchy? And I think most animals on earth who are social animals

who are social animals have status hierarchy, and they would reasonably presume that we have

a status hierarchy. And...

Take me to your leader.

Well, I would say their strategy is to be impressive and sort of get us to see them

at the top of our status hierarchy. That's how, for example, we domesticate dogs, right?

We convince dogs we're the leader of their pack, right? And we domesticate many animals that way,

but as we just swap into the top of their status hierarchy and we say,

we're your top status animal, so you should do what we say, you should follow our lead.

So the idea that would be, they are going to get us to do what they want by being top status.

You know, all through history, kings and emperors, et cetera, have tried to impress their citizens

and other people by having the bigger palace, the bigger parade, the bigger crown and

diamonds, right? Whatever, maybe building a bigger pyramid, et cetera. It's a very well

established trend to just be high status by being more impressive than the rest.

To push back when there's an order of several orders of magnitude of power differential,

asymmetry of power, I feel like that status hierarchy no longer applies. It's like memetic

theory. It's like...

Most emperors are several orders of magnitude more powerful than any one member of their empire.

Let's increase that by even more. So like if I'm interacting with ants,

I no longer feel like I need to establish my power with ants. I actually want to lower myself

to the ants. I want to become the lowest possible ant so that they would welcome me.

So I'm less concerned about them worshiping me. I'm more concerned about them welcoming me.

It is important that you be nonthreatening and that you be local. So I think

for example, if the aliens had done something really big in the sky, 100 light years away,

that would be there, not here. And that could seem threatening. So I think their strategy to

be the high status would have to be to be visible, but to be here and nonthreatening.

I just don't know if it's obvious how to do that. Take your own perspective. You see a planet

with relatively intelligent complex structures being formed, life forms. You could see this

under in Titan or something like that, Europa. You start to see not just primitive bacterial

life, but multicellular life. And it seems to form some very complicated cellular colonies,

structures that they're dynamic. There's a lot of stuff going on. Some gigantic cellular automata

type of construct. How do you make yourself known to them in an impressive fashion

without destroying it? We know how to destroy potentially.

Right. So if you go touch stuff, you're likely to hurt it, right? There's a good risk of hurting

something by getting too close and touching it and interacting, right?

Yeah, like landing on a White House lawn.

Right. So the claim is that their current strategy of hanging out at the periphery of

our vision and just being very clearly physically impressive with very clear physically impressive

abilities is at least a plausible strategy they might use to impress us and convince us sort of

we're at the top of their status hierarchy. And I would say if they came closer, not only would

they risk hurting us in ways that they couldn't really understand, but more plausibly, they would

reveal things about themselves we would hate. So if you look at how we treat other civilizations

on Earth and other people, we are generally interested in foreigners and people from other

plant lands. And we were generally interested in their varying cult customs, et cetera,

until we find out that they do something that violates our moral norms and then we hate them.

And these are aliens for God's sakes, right? There's just going to be something about them

that we hate. They eat babies. Who knows what it is? Something they don't think is offensive,

but that they think we might find. And so they would be risking a lot by revealing a lot about

themselves. We would find something we hated. Interesting. But do you resonate at all with

memetic theory where like, we only feel this way about things that are very close to us.

So aliens are sufficiently different to where we'll be like, fascinated, terrified or fascinated,

but not like. Right, but if they want to be at the top of our status hierarchy to get us to

follow them, they can't be too distant. They have to be close enough that we would see them that

way. But pretend to be close enough. Right. And not reveal much that mystery that old Clint Eastwood

cowboy. I mean, we're clever enough that we can figure out their agenda. That is just from the

fact that we're here. If we see that they're here, we can figure out, Oh, they want us not to expand

and look, they are this huge power and they're very impressive. So, and a lot of us don't want

to expand. So that could easily tip us over the edge toward we already wanted to not expand. We

already wanted to be able to regulate and have a central community. And here are these very advanced

smart aliens who have survived for a hundred million years and they're telling us not to expand

either. This is brilliant. I love this so much. Uh, the, the, so returning to panspermia siblings,

just to clarify one thing in that framework, how would, who originated, who planted it?

Would it be a grabby alien civilization that planted the siblings or no? The simple scenario

is that life started on some other planet billions of years ago and it went through part of the

stages of evolution to advance life, but not all the way to advance life. And then some rock hit

it, grabbed a piece of it on the rock and that rock drifted for maybe in a million years until

it happened to prong the stellar nursery where it then seeded many stars. And something about that

life without being super advanced, it was nevertheless resilient to the harsh conditions

of space. There's some graphs that I've been impressed by that show sort of the level of

genetic information in various kinds of life on the history of earth. And basically we are now

more complex than the earlier life, but the earlier life was still pretty complex. And so if

you actually project this log graph in history, it looks like it was many billions of years ago

when you get down to zero. So like plausible, you could say there was just a lot of evolution that

had to happen before you to get to the simplest life we've ever seen in history of life on earth

was still pretty damn complicated. Okay. And so that race, that's always been this puzzle. How

could life get to this enormously complicated level in the short period it seems to at the

beginning of earth history. So where, you know, it's only 300 million years at most when it

appeared. And then it was really complicated at that point. So panspermia allows you to

explain that complexity by saying, well, it's been another 5 billion years on another planet

going through lots of earlier stages where it was working its way up to the level of

complexity you see at the beginning of earth. We'll try to talk about other ideas of the

origin of life, but let me return to UFO sightings. Is there other explanations that are possible

outside of panspermia siblings that can explain no grabby aliens in the sky and yet alien arrival

on earth? Well, the other categories of explanations that most people will use is, well,

first of all, just mistakes, like, you know, you're, you're, you're confusing something

ordinary for something mysterious, right? Or some sort of secret organization, like our

government is secretly messing with us and trying to do a, you know, a false flag ops

or whatever, right? You know, they're trying to convince the Russians or the Chinese that

there might be aliens and scare them into not attacking or something, right? Because

if you, you know, the history of World War II, say the US government did all these big

fake operations where they were faking a lot of big things in order to mess with people.

So that's a possibility. The government has been lying and, you know, faking things and

paying people to lie about what they saw, et cetera. That's a plausible set of explanations

for the range of sightings seen. And another explanation people offer is some other hidden

organization on earth or some, you know, secret organization somewhere that has much more

advanced capabilities than anybody's given a credit for, for some reason it's been keeping

secret. I mean, they all sound somewhat implausible, but again, we're looking for maybe,

you know, one in a thousand sort of priors. Question is, you know, could, could they be

in that level of plausibility? Can we just linger on this? So you, first of all, you've written,

talked about, thought about so many different topics. You're an incredible mind. And I just

thank you for sitting down today. I'm almost like at a loss of which place we explore,

but let me on this topic, ask about conspiracy theories because you've written about institutions

authorities. What, this is a bit of a therapy session, but what do we make of conspiracy

theories? The phrase itself is pushing you in a direction, right? So clearly in history,

we've had many large coordinated keepings of secrets, right? Say the Manhattan project,

right? And there was hundreds of thousands of people working on that over many years,

but they kept it a secret, right? Clearly many large military operations have kept things secrets

over, you know, even decades with many thousands of people involved. So clearly it's possible to

keep some things secret over time periods. You know, but the more people you involve and the

more time you are assuming and the more, the less centralized an organization or the less

discipline they have, the harder it gets to believe. But we're just trying to calibrate

basically in our minds, which kind of secrets can be kept by which groups over what time periods

for what purposes, right? But let me, I don't have enough data. So I'm somebody, I, you know,

I hang out with people and I love people. I love all things really. And I just, I think that most

people, even the assholes have the capacity to be good and they're beautiful and I enjoy them.

So the kind of data, my brain, whatever the chemistry of my brain is that sees the beautiful

in things is maybe collecting a subset of data that doesn't allow me to intuit the competence

that humans are able to achieve in constructing a conspiracy theory. So for example, one thing

that people often talk about is like intelligence agencies, this like broad thing. They say the CIA,

the FSB, the different, the British intelligence. I've fortunate or unfortunate enough, never gotten

the chance that I know of to talk to any member of those intelligence agencies nor like take a

peek behind the curtain or the first curtain. I don't know how many levels of curtains there are.

And so I don't, I can't intuit my interactions with government. I was funded by DOD and DARPA

and I've interacted, been to the Pentagon, like with all due respect to my friends, lovely friends

in government. And there are a lot of incredible people, but there is a very giant bureaucracy

that sometimes suffocates the ingenuity of the human spirit is one way I can put it. Meaning

they are, I just, it's difficult for me to imagine extreme competence at a scale of hundreds or

thousands human beings. Now that doesn't mean that's my very anecdotal data of the situation.

And so I try to build up my intuition about centralized system of government, how much

conspiracy is possible, how much the intelligence agencies or some other source can generate

sufficiently robust propaganda that controls the populace. If you look at World War II, as you

mentioned, there've been extremely powerful propaganda machines on the Nazi, on the side of

Nazi Germany, on the side of the Soviet Union, on the side of the United States and all these different

mechanisms. Sometimes they control the free press through social pressures. Sometimes they control

the press through the threat of violence, as you do in authoritarian regimes. Sometimes it's like

deliberately the dictator, like writing the news, the headlines and literally announcing it. And

something about human psychology forces you to embrace the narrative and believe the narrative.

And at scale that becomes reality when the initial spark was just the propaganda thought in a single

individual's mind. So I can't necessarily intuit of what's possible, but I'm skeptical of the power

of human institutions to construct conspiracy theories that cause suffering at scale, especially

in this modern age when information is becoming more and more accessible by the populace. Anyway,

that's the, I don't know if you can elucidate for us.

It's called suffering at scale, but of course, say during wartime, the people who are managing

the various conspiracies like D Day or Manhattan Project, they thought that their conspiracy was

avoiding harm rather than causing harm. So if you can get a lot of people to think that supporting

the conspiracy is helpful, then a lot more might do that. And there's just a lot of things that

people just don't want to see. So if you can make your conspiracy the sort of thing that people

wouldn't want to talk about anyway, even if they knew about it, you're most of the way there.

So I have learned many over the years, many things that most ordinary people would never want to

hear, many things that most ordinary people should be interested in, but somehow don't know,

even though the data has been very widespread. So I have this book, The Elephant and the Brain,

and one of the chapters is there on medicine. And basically, most people seem ignorant of the very

basic fact that when we do randomized trials where we give some people more medicine than others,

the people who get more medicine are not healthier. Just overall, in general, just like

induce somebody to get more medicine because you just give them more budget to buy medicine, say.

And not a specific medicine, just the whole category. And you would think that would be

something most people should know about medicine. You might even think that would be a conspiracy

theory to think that would be hidden, but in fact, most people never learn that fact.

So just to clarify, just a general high level statement, the more medicine you take,

the less healthy you are.

Randomized experiments don't find that fact. Do not find that more medicine makes you more healthy.

There's just no connection. In randomized experiments, there's no relationship between

more medicine and being healthier.

So it's not a negative relationship, but it's just no relationship.

Right.

And so the conspiracy theory would say that the businesses that sell you medicine don't want you

to know that fact. And then you're saying that there's also part of this is that people just

don't want to know.

They just don't want to know. And so they don't learn this. So I've lived in the Washington area

for several decades now, reading the Washington Post regularly. Every week there was a special

section on health and medicine. It never was mentioned in that section of the paper

in all the 20 years I read that.

So do you think there is some truth to this caricatured blue pill, red pill,

where most people don't want to know the truth?

There are many things about which people don't want to know certain kinds of truths.

Yeah. That is bad looking truths, truths that discouraging, truths that sort of take away the

justification for things they feel passionate about.

Do you think that's a bad aspect of human nature? That's something we should try to overcome?

Well, as we discussed, my first priority is to just tell people about it, to do the analysis

and the cold facts of what's actually happening, and then to try to be careful about how we can

improve. So our book, The Elephant in the Rain, coauthored with Kevin Simler, is about how we

hide motives in everyday life. And our first priority there is just to explain to you what are

the things that you are not looking at that you have reluctant to look at. And many people try

to take that book as a self help book where they're trying to improve themselves and make

sure they look at more things. And that often goes badly because it's harder to actually do

that than you think. But we at least want you to know that this truth is available if you want

to learn about it.

It's the Nietzsche, if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. Let's talk about

this elephant in the brain. Amazing book. The elephant in the room is, quote, an important

issue that people are reluctant to acknowledge or address a social taboo. The elephant in the brain

is an important but unacknowledged feature of how our mind works, an introspective taboo.

You describe selfishness and self deception as the core or some of the core elephants,

some of the elephants, elephant offspring in the brain. Selfishness and self deception.

All right.

Can you explain, can you explain why these are the taboos in our brain that we

don't want to acknowledge to ourselves?

Your conscious mind, the one that's listening to me that I'm talking to at the moment, you like

to think of yourself as the president or king of your mind, ruling over all that you see,

issuing commands that immediately obeyed. You are instead better understood as the press secretary

of your brain. You don't make decisions. You justify them to an audience. That's what your

conscious mind is for. You watch what you're doing and you try to come up with stories that explain

what you're doing so that you can avoid accusations of violating norms. So humans compared to most

other animals have norms, and this allows us to manage larger groups with our morals and norms

about what we should or shouldn't be doing. This is so important to us that we needed to be

constantly watching what we were doing in order to make sure we had a good story to avoid norm

violations. So many norms are about motives. So if I hit you on purpose, that's a big violation.

If I hit you accidentally, that's okay. I need to be able to explain why it was an accident

and not on purpose.

So where does that need come from for your own self preservation?

Right. So humans have norms and we have the norm that if we see anybody violating a norm,

we need to tell other people and then coordinate to make them stop and punish them for violating.

So such benefits are strong enough and severe enough that we each want to avoid being successfully

accused of violating norms. So for example, hitting someone on purpose is a big clear norm

violation. If we do it consistently, we may be thrown out of the group and that would mean we

would die. Okay. So we need to be able to convince people we are not going around hitting people on

purpose. If somebody happens to be at the other end of our fist and their face connects, that was

an accident and we need to be able to explain that. And similarly for many other norms humans

have, we are serious about these norms and we don't want people to violate. We find them

violating, we're going to accuse them. But many norms have a motive component. And so we are

trying to explain ourselves and make sure we have a good motive story about everything we do,

which is why we're constantly trying to explain what we're doing. And that's what your conscious

mind is doing. It is trying to make sure you've got a good motive story for everything you're

doing. And that's why you don't know why you really do things. What you know is what the good

story is about why you've been doing things. And that's the self deception. And you're saying that

there is a machine, the actual dictator is selfish. And then you're just the press secretary who's

desperately doesn't want to get fired and is justifying all of the decisions of the dictator.

And that's the self deception.

Right. Now, most people actually are willing to believe that this is true in the abstract. So

our book has been classified as psychology and it was reviewed by psychologists. And the basic

way that psychology referees and reviewers responded is to say, this is well known. Most

people accept that there's a fair bit of self deception.

But they don't want to accept it about themselves.

Well, they don't want to accept it about the particular topics that we talk about. So people

accept the idea in the abstract that they might be self deceived or that they might not be honest

about various things. But that hasn't penetrated into the literatures where people are explaining

particular things like why we go to school, why we go to the doctor, why we vote, et cetera. So

our book is mainly about 10 areas of life and explaining about in each area what our actual

motives there are. And people who study those things have not admitted that hidden motives are

explaining those particular areas.

So they haven't taken the leap from theoretical psychology to actual public policy.

Exactly.

And economics and all that kind of stuff. Well, let me just linger on this and bring up my old

friends Zingman Freud and Carl Jung. So how vast is this landscape of the unconscious mind,

the power and the scope of the dictator? Is it only dark there? Is it some light? Is there some

love?

The vast majority of what's happening in your head, you're unaware of. So in a literal sense,

the unconscious, the aspects of your mind that you're not conscious of is the overwhelming

majority. But that's just true in a literal engineering sense. Your mind is doing lots of

low level things, and you just can't be consciously aware of all that low level stuff. But there's

plenty of room there for lots of things you're not aware of.

But can we try to shine a light at the things we're unaware of specifically? Now, again,

staying with the philosophical psychology side for a moment, can you shine a light in the Jungian

shadow? What's going on there? What is this machine like? What level of thoughts are happening

there? Is it something that we can even interpret? If we somehow could visualize it, is it something

that's human interpretable? Or is it just a kind of chaos of monitoring different systems in the

body, making sure you're happy, making sure you're fed all those kind of basic forces that form

abstractions on top of each other, and they're not introspective at all?

We humans are social creatures. Plausibly being social is the main reason we have these unusually

large brains. Therefore, most of our brain is devoted to being social. And so the things we are

very obsessed with and constantly paying attention to are, how do I look to others? What would others

think of me if they knew these various things they might learn about me?

So that's close to being fundamental to what it means to be human, is caring what others think.

Right. To be trying to present a story that would be okay for what others think. But we're very

constantly thinking, what do other people think?

So let me ask you this question then about you, Robin Hansen, who in many places, sometimes for

fun, sometimes as a basic statement of principle, likes to disagree with what the majority of people

think. So how do you explain, how are you self deceiving yourself in this task? And how are you

being self, like, why is the dictator manipulating you inside your head to be so critical? Like,

there's norms. Why do you want to stand out in this way? Why do you want to challenge the

norms in this way?

Almost by definition, I can't tell you what I'm deceiving myself about. But the more practical

strategy that's quite feasible is to ask about what are typical things that most people deceive

themselves about, and then to own up to those particular things.

Sure. What's a good one?

So for example, I can very much acknowledge that I would like to be well thought of,

that I would be seeking attention and glory and praise from my intellectual work, and that that

would be a major agenda driving my intellectual attempts. So if there were topics that other

people would find less interesting, I might be less interested in those for that reason,

for example. I might want to find topics where other people are interested, and I might want to

go for the glory of finding a big insight rather than a small one, and maybe one that was

especially surprising. That's also, of course, consistent with some more ideal concept of what

an intellectual should be. But most intellectuals are relatively risk averse. They are in some

local intellectual tradition, and they are adding to that, and they are staying conforming to the

sort of usual assumptions and usual accepted beliefs and practices of a particular area

so that they can be accepted in that area and treated as part of the community. But you might

think for the purpose of the larger intellectual project of understanding the world better,

people should be less eager to just add a little bit to some tradition, and they should be looking

for what's neglected between the major traditions and major questions. They should be looking for

assumptions maybe we're making that are wrong. They should be looking at things that are very

surprising, things that you would have thought a priori unlikely that once you are convinced of it,

you find that to be very important and a big update. So you could say that one motivation

I might have is less motivated to be sort of comfortably accepted into some particular

intellectual community and more willing to just go for these more fundamental long shots that should

be very important if you could find them.

Which would, if you can find them, would get you appreciated across a larger number of people

across the longer time span of history. So like maybe the small local community will say,

you suck, you must conform. But the larger community will see the brilliance of you

breaking out of the cage of the small conformity into a larger cage. There's always a bigger cage

and then you'll be remembered by more. Yeah. Also that explains your choice of colorful shirt that

looks great in a black background. So you definitely stand out.

Right. Now, of course, you could say, well, you could get all this attention by making false

claims of dramatic improvement. And then wouldn't that be much easier than actually working through

all the details to make true claims?

Why not? Let me ask the press secretary. Why not? So of course you spoke several times about how

much you value truth and the pursuit of truth. That's a very nice narrative. Hitler and Stalin

also talked about the value of truth. Do you worry when you introspect as broadly as all humans

might that it becomes a drug, this being a martyr, being the person who points out that the emperor

wears no clothes, even when the emperor is obviously dressed, just to be the person who points

out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Do you think about that?

So I think the standards you hold yourself to are dependent on the audience you have in mind.

So if you think of your audience as relatively easily fooled or relatively gullible, then you

won't bother to generate more complicated, deep, you know, arguments and structures and evidence

to persuade somebody who has higher standards because why bother? You don't have to worry

about it. Why bother? You can get away with something much easier. And of course, if you are,

say, a salesperson, you know, you make money on sales, then you don't need to convince the top few

percent of the most sharp customers. You can just go for the bottom 60 percent of the most gullible

customers and make plenty of sales, right? So I think intellectuals have to vary. One of the main

ways intellectuals vary is in who is their audience in their mind? Who are they trying to

impress? Is it the people down the hall? Is it the people who are reading their Twitter feed? Is it

their parents? Is it their high school teacher? Or is it Einstein and Freud and Socrates, right?

So I think those of us who are especially arrogant, especially think that we're really

big shot or have a chance at being a really big shot, we were naturally going to pick the

big shot audience that we can. We're going to be trying to impress Socrates and Einstein.

Is that why you hang out with Tyler Cohen a lot and try to convince him yourself?

And you might think, you know, from the point of view of just making money or having sex or

other sorts of things, this is misdirected energy, right? Trying to impress the very

most highest quality minds. That's such a small sample and they can't do that much for you anyway.

Yeah. So I might well have had more, you know, ordinary success in life,

be more popular, invited to more parties, make more money if I had targeted a lower tier

set of intellectuals with the standards they have. But for some reason I decided early on

that Einstein was my audience or people like him and I was going to impress them.

Yeah. I mean, you pick your set of motivations, you know, convincing,

impressing Tyler Cohen is not going to help you get laid. Trust me, I tried. All right.

What are some notable sort of effects of the elephant in the brain in everyday life? So you

mentioned when we try to apply that to economics, to public policy. So when we think about medicine,

education, all those kinds of things, what are some things that we're...

The key thing is medicine is much less useful health wise than you think. So, you know,

if you were focused on your health, you would care a lot less about it. And if you were focused

on other people's health, you would also care a lot less about it. But if medicine is, as we

suggest, more about showing that you care and let other people showing that they care about you,

then a lot of priority on medicine can make sense. So that was our very earliest discussion

in the podcast. You were talking about what, you know, should you give people a lot of medicine

when it's not very effective? And then the answer then is, well, if that's the way that you show

that you care about them and you really want them to know you care, then maybe that's what

you need to do if you can't find a cheaper, more effective substitute. So if we actually just pause

on that for a little bit, how do we start to untangle the full set of self deception happening

in the space of medicine? So we have a method that we use in our book that is what I recommend

for people to use in all these sorts of topics. The straightforward method is first, don't look

at yourself. Look at other people, look at broad patterns of behavior and other people, and then

ask, what are the various theories we could have to explain these patterns of behavior? And then

just do the simple matching, which theory better matches the behavior they have. And the last step

is to assume that's true of you too. Don't assume you're an exception. If you happen to be an

exception, that won't go so well, but nevertheless, on average, you aren't very well positioned to

judge if you're an exception. So look at what other people do, explain what other people do,

and assume that's you too. But also in the case of medicine, there's several parties to consider.

So there's the individual person that's receiving the medicine. There's the doctors that are

prescribing the medicine. There's drug companies that are selling drugs. There are governments that

have regulations that are lobbyists. So you can build up a network of categories of humans in this

and they each play their role. So how do you introspect the sort of analyze the system at a

system scale versus at the individual scale? So it turns out that in general, it's usually much

easier to explain producer behavior than consumer behavior. That is, the drug companies or the

doctors have relatively clear incentives to give the customers whatever they want. And so many say

governments in democratic countries have the incentive to give the voters what they want.

So that focuses your attention on the patient and the voter in this equation and saying,

what do they want? They would be driving the rest of the system.

Whatever they want, the other parties are willing to give them in order to get paid. So now we're

looking for puzzles in patient and voter behavior. What are they choosing? And why do they choose

that? And how much exactly? And then we can explain that potentially again, returning to

the producer, but the producer being incentivized to manipulate the decision making processes of

the voter and the consumer. Now, in almost every industry, producers are in general happy to lie

and exaggerate in order to get more customers. This is true of auto repair as much as human

body repair and medicine. So the differences between these industries can't be explained

by the willingness of the producers to give customers what they want or to do various things

that we have to again, go to the customers. Why are customers treating body repair different

than auto repair? Yeah, and that potentially requires a lot of thinking, a lot of data

collection and potentially looking at historical data too, because things don't just happen

overnight. Over time, there's trends. In principle it does, but actually it's a lot,

actually easier than you might think. I think the biggest limitation is just the willingness

to consider alternative hypotheses. So many of the patterns that you need to rely on are actually

pretty obvious, simple patterns. You just have to notice them and ask yourself, how can I explain

those? Often you don't need to look at the most subtle, most difficult statistical evidence that

might be out there. The simplest patterns are often enough. All right. So there's a fundamental

statement about self deception in the book. There's the application of that, like we just did

in medicine. Can you steel man the argument that many of the foundational ideas in the book are

wrong? Meaning there's two that you just made, which is it can be a lot simpler than it looks.

Can you steel man the case that it's, case by case, it's always super complicated. Like it's

a complex system. It's very difficult to have a simple model about. It's very difficult to

introspect. And the other one is that the human brain isn't, not just about self deception. That

there's a lot of, there's a lot of motivations at play and we are able to really introspect our own

mind. And like what, what's on the surface of the conscious is actually quite a good representation

of what's going on in the brain. And you're not deceiving yourself. You're able to actually

arrive to deeply think about where your mind stands and what you think about the world. And

it's less about impressing people and more about being a free thinking individual.

So when a child tries to explain why they don't have their homework assignment, they are sometimes

inclined to say, the dog ate my homework. They almost never say the dragon ate my homework.

The reason is the dragon is a completely implausible explanation. Almost always when we

make excuses for things, we choose things that are at least in some degree plausible. It could

perhaps have happened. That's an obstacle for any explanation of a hidden motive or a hidden

feature of human behavior. If people are pretending one thing while really doing another,

they're usually going to pick as a pretense something that's somewhat plausible. That's

going to be an obstacle to proving that hypothesis if you are focused on sort of the local data that

a person would typically have if they were challenged. So if you're just looking at one

kid and his lack of homework, maybe you can't tell whether his dog ate his homework or not.

If you happen to know he doesn't have a dog, you might have more confidence. You will need to have

a wider range of evidence than a typical person would when they're encountering that actual excuse

in order to see past the excuse. That will just be a general feature of it. So if I say,

there's this usual story about where we go to the doctor and then there's this other explanation,

it'll be true that you'll have to look at wider data in order to see that because people don't

usually offer excuses unless in the local context of their excuse, they can get away with it. That

is, it's hard to tell, right? So in the case of medicine, I have to point you to sort of larger

sets of data. But in many areas of academia, including health economics, the researchers there

also want to support the usual points of view. And so they will have selection effects in their

publications and their analysis whereby they, if they're getting a result too much contrary to the

usual point of view everybody wants to have, they will file drawer that paper or redo the analysis

until they get an answer that's more to people's liking. So that means in the health economics

literature, there are plenty of people who will claim that in fact, we have evidence that medicine