we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in spacetime 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 100 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 and they 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 we come 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 a 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. Support it.

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

Robin, you are working on a book about, quote, grabby aliens. This is a technical term,

like the big bang. So what are grabby aliens?

Robin Hansen Grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change stuff.

That's the key concept. So if they are 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 there 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 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, whereas 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 ways? A visual? Is it sound? Is it some other

physical phenomenon like gravitational waves? What 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. 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 titles, if loud aliens explain human

eerliness, quiet aliens are also rare. If life on earth, God, this is such a good abstract,

if life on earth had to achieve and hard steps to reach humanity's level,

then the chance of this event rose as time to the end of 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 where's that line? Is it well definable? What is grabby? What is non 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 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

a 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. 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 ones 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,

and 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?

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

Are we 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 eukaryite cells,

which are a certain kind of complicated cell 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 a varying difficulties. That is,

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

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

And the time remaining left over 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 on 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 queuing 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 a 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. And that took six steps on average. The key point is on average, these things

on any one random planet would take 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 short,

not 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.

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

of 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 are very unlikely mutations.

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

life spans 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 anyone's 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 the roughly the

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

It is perhaps not lost. And people, 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,

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

It is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of lifeforms 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 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.

That's useful. 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. Is it worth

spending 10, 20, $30,000 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. For example, the US government, the DOT, Department of

Transportation, puts a value of, I think, like $9 million 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 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 wing, 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, 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, you will be lying to yourself and you won't be as

effective at achieving whatever good you are trying to achieve.

But getting the data, getting the facts is step one, not the final step. Absolutely.

So it's a, 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. You can't use the, 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, let you explore 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.

Right. Or the, as we approach grabbiness. So what happens?

So again, there was three parameters. Yes. 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 six, but maybe three to 12.

And 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 out into space.

We're kind of starting to expand. A bit. Right. 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 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. I was taking more time on the cosmological

scale. So that is, it might be only a thousand. But the point is, 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 makes me feel, I was so stressed about planning what I'm going to do today.

Right. You got plenty of time. Plenty of time. I just need to be generating some offspring quickly

here. Okay. So in this moment, this 10 million year gap 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, were here.

They passed all the hard steps. There's a model for how likely it is that that happens.

And then they start expanding. And you think of an expansion as almost like a sphere.

Right. That's when you say speed, we're talking about the speed of the radius growth.

Exactly. The surface, how fast, the surface. How faithful. 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, well, if the slow would create the puzzle, it's low predicts we would see them,

but we don't see them. Okay. And so the 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 till 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 just

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 that. 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 grab the aliens model, 3d sim, right?

What's what's this? That's the actual name of the video. What by the time we get to 13.8 billion

years, the fun begins. Okay. So this is, this is, we're watching a three dimensional sphere

rotating. I presume that's the universe and then grab the aliens are expanding and feeling that

universe exactly with all kinds of fun pretty soon. It's awful. It's full. So that's how

the grab the aliens come in contact. First of all, with other aliens and then

with us humans, the following is a simulation of the grab the 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. Right. Why don't we see any of the grab the 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 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 it got here because it's expanding at the speed of

light. If you're spanning 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 you look out and you don't see

anything. Now you might say, well, 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 at almost 14 billion years into the universe on a planet around a star

that's roughly five billion years old. But the average star out there will last roughly five

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 set 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. 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 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 pretty lucky, right? You know, 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. Yeah, that's what it means. So the key assumption

we suggest is that the universe would stay empty. So most life would appear like 1000 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. 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. 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 waiting, the universe stays empty

and you're waiting for one life civilization to pop up, then it's going to, 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. Okay. And the other, 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, 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 a hundred miles an hour. And right. 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 depth,

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. Or 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.

A lot of million years of your years would be terrified of this sphere coming at you.

But, but, 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, 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 exclude because if they could go faster than 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 to have a different discussion of that.

Right. 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. Right. 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? So 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,

the 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. Yeah. So that's a, it's a really good reminder, a really good way to think about

cosmologies. 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, they're stars. Oh, they're pretty. But you don't think about

the giant expanding spheres of aliens. Right. Because you don't see them. But now we're

dating. 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, you know, 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

is that 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 100 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 100 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

that's one of the most solid things we can predict about grabiolins 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. 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 grabiolins civilizations

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

allows innovation and sort of the battle of ideas. The way I would take the logic is to say,

you know, 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. So competition is a fundamental force

in the universe. It has been so far. And it would be within an expanding grabiolins 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 re to sort of regain its full force, or whether to suppress

and manage it. 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.

CB – 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. It certainly wouldn't kill all life. And so human civilization

would return within 100,000 years. CB – So all the history of atrocities,

and if you look at the Black Plague, which is not human cause atrocities or whatever.

CB – There are a lot of military atrocities in history.

CB – Absolutely. CB – In the 20th century. Those challenges 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. Like most likely. 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. CB – 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... CB – 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.

CB – Yes. This is two devils advocates arguing, two devils.

CB – 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 and their feel that

they are morally justified in their stance there. And that's this 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,

there are 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

this is the positive of competition of not having multiple power centers. This kind of

gathering of elites makes me very, very, very nervous. The dinners, the meetings in the closed

rooms. I don't know. I another but remember we talked about separating our cold analysis of

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

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

And because I would say it'll preclude this possibility of becoming grabby 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. So okay, this is the key. This is the key point. Right. Right.

So screw the elites. 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 1000. 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 made me nervous

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

to make sure that you never lose touch as you get older, wiser,

you know, how you generally get like disrespectful of kids, kids these days.

No, the kids are... Okay, but I think we 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. Can I link on that? Sure. 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? 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.

How did that work for the British Empire? 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 ensure the continuation of competition into the indefinite future.

And competition, we don't know, but competition can take violent forms or productive 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,

because 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, it's pretty dark, by the way. Well, it's just honest.

Right. Well, I was trying to get you there. 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 an 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

and changes into the future, we should just expect it's possible to become very different than who

we are. 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. It's 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 history of life on earth and throughout other

kinds of lives. Like what is really useful? You mentioned competition seems to be 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, 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 eras 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 wrong one. 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 long term future. And futurists find it hard to motivate people and to engage people about

the long term 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,

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'll 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 long term 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 evolutions should promote.

And for example, there's a 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 of descendants. And we'll talk about portfolios with

your idea of, you briefly mentioned, we'll return there with M. E. M. The age of E. M. Work, love,

and life when robots rule the earth. E. M., 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.

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

M. E. M. Yes.

L. M. 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 induce us to reproduce.

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

wanting to be excited, 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

provoke having more descendants. They were tied to our ancestral environment, which 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 ticket 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 preferences. 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. But 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 that 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. Right.

So all kinds of descendants. It could be descendants in the space of ideas too.

But 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 will 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 sense have given up reproducing biologically.

Well, it's all it's like organic or something. It's all real and 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 our cells. So the factories in

our cells are there are marvels, but they don't achieve very many scale economies. They're tiny

little factories. But they're all factories. Yes. Factors on top of factories. So everything,

the fact that the factories that are designed is different than sort of the factories that have

evolved. 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

in 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 it's so interesting. It's

such an interesting question. It is a fun set of questions. Yes. I like fun set of questions. So

the genders as we look through revolutionary 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 hemaphrodites. So most plants are hemaphrodites. 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 their sexual partnership that creates

the offspring. So there's sexual selection. It's nice to have, to a party, it's nice to have dance

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

mechanism for adopting to the environment, being successfully adopted to the environment.

It does look like there's an advantage in, 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 higher variants in their mating success.

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

a, 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 don't even, I can't even intuit exactly why that

would be. Maybe survival on land is harder. And so you get a lot. 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, 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. And that's actually 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 seem to evolve less effectively. There is something

they have more resources, they don't even have better resilience. 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. Large cities grow better than small cities. Large

integrated economies like the United States or the European Union do better than small fragmented

ones. That's a very interesting long discussion. But so most 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 then 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 most, no, 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 as 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 is very likely on land. What do you think?

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. But dolphins, water world, 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.

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 of the game. 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 mutually assured destruction as a force to prevent people from

firing nuclear weapons? That's a question that's a new to a terrifying degree has been raised now

and what's going on. Clearly it has had an effect. The question is just how strong an effect for how

long? Clearly we have not gone wild with nuclear war and clearly the devastation that you would get

if you initiated 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. It's been 70 years or whatever it's been. But what do you think? Do you think

we'll see nuclear war in the century? I don't know in the century, but it's the sort of thing

that's likely to happen eventually. There'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 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. 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

that a median 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 going to 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. 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 damage is in the few biggest ones. So the median

pandemic so far is less than the average that you should expect in the future.

But 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 you can't just fit it to the

data, the rate of wars and the destructive nature. 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... 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,

save with tornadoes or even pandemics or something. The underlying process might not be

that different. But that's a high possible one. It might not be. The fact that mutual

assured 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 to 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. 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 you about your time scales you're looking

at, right? Right. So if you say, if you look at the history of war, 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 5000 years, 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, right? 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 engineering

pandemics, for example, robotics, so nanobots. It just seems like a real new possibility that

we have to contend with and we don't have good models for my perspective.

So if you look on, say, the last 1000 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.

If you're willing to project that data forward, then I think 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? Yes. 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 don't have much property, etc. 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 in their lives. But the pressures that made

foragers into farmers were part mediated by poverty. Farmers were 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 believable threat. Today, if you say to a young woman, you shouldn't have a child out

of wedlock, she will see other young women 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 or 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 where basically like foragers

were peaceful, we share, we make decisions collectively, we have a lot of free time,

we are into art. So 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 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 in the ways 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 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

differences? And I might think, I could imagine some maybe advanced aliens who've 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, you know, 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. It's 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 two dimensional species. It's not as trivial as,

to me at least, as it might have foreseen. So let me reverse my position a little,

because I'll say, well, the whole 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 Grebi

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,

you know, after a billion years perhaps of expanding, in which case they're going to be

crazy advanced at some and 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 Grebi aliens.

How do you get here if you're not a Grebi alien? Well, they would have to be able to travel.

Oh, but they would not be expansive. So if it's a road trip, it doesn't count as

Grebi. So we're talking about expanding the colony, the comfortable colony.

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 Grebi 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. They're 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've been waiting around for this, or they just chose

to come recently. But the timing coincidence would be crazy unlikely that they just happened to be

able to get here, say in the last 100 years. They would no doubt have been able to get here

far earlier than that. Again, we don't know. So this is a fringe like UFO sightings on Earth.

We don't know if this kind of increase in sightings have anything to do with actual visitation.

I'm just talking about the timing. They arose at some point in space time.

And it's very unlikely that that was just at a point that they could just barely get here recently.

Almost surely they could have been 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 a 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 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 they would visit us. There's a lot of visitors, the grad students of the civilization.

They're 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 and colony optimization. It's true for ants. So it's like

when the first ant shows up, it's likely, and 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, right? You have to be able to stop somewhere, make it into a waystation

such that you can then support your 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 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 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.

So in terms of considering asking what the likelihood is. So an analogy I would make

is 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

on one in a million prior because the evidence is often strong enough, right? My guess, rough guess

for the UFOs as aliens scenario, 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 priors 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

hypothesized 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 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. 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 of this and they could go searching for their

siblings. That is, they could look in the sky for the other stars with 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.

We just such a brilliant mathematical, philosophical, physical, biological idea

of panspermia siblings, because we all kind of started 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 in space time. There'd be this cluster, perhaps.

And that allows interaction between elements of the cluster. Yes.

Non grabby alien civilizations, kind of primitive alien civilizations like us

with others. And they might be a little bit ahead. That's so fascinating.

Well, they would probably be a lot ahead. So the puzzle is, if they happen before us,

they probably happen 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. So plenty of time to become grabby, you said.

So yes, they should be. And they chose not to.

Are we sure about this? So again, 100 million years is enough.

100 million. 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.

And so they clearly more than 10 million years earlier than us. So they chose not to.

But still go on vacation, look around. So 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. Like 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. 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 that,

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 want 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. Anyone vacation tripped

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're not just had a policy to

try, they succeeded over 100 million years in preventing the expansion. That's 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 that 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 to have very strict guards at the borders.

I just don't know. They're 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 my silly human brain.

Maybe it's a 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 end. 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

that 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 in us. That is, if we go out and expanding, then we have defeated

the purpose of this rule they set up. 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. 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. They're destroying their brethren. And so 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 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 do 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 explains why they're here and why they aren't out there.

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 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 and 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 of hanging out near the edge of visibility

with somewhat impressive mechanisms, but not walking up and introducing themselves,

nor just being completely invisible? Okay. A lot of questions there. So one,

do you think it's obvious where the White House lawn is? Well, it's 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 humans, like the individual humans,

like the organ of the meat vehicles as the center of focus for observing a life on a planet.

They're supposed to be really smart in advance. This shouldn't be that hard for that.

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.

Okay. Human is the food, the source of the organism that's under observation.

But 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 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. 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.

The question is why that? Again, for example, if they just wanted to talk to our computer

systems, they could move some sort of 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 I don't think they would be, they are, 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. How would you talk to things?

Well, so not freak out a 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. That's 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 wanted 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,

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. Just to, 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 in to 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, etc, 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, etc. Just, 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 anyone,

a 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

lessen, I 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. Well, it is important that you be non threatening and that

you be local. So I think, for example, if the aliens had done something really big in the sky,

you know, 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 non threatening. I just don't know if it's obvious how to do that. Like, take your own

perspective, you see a planet with with relatively intelligent, like complex structures being formed,

like, yeah, life forms, we could see this under in Titan, or something like that, the moon,

you know, right, 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 some giant, gigantic cellular automata type of

construct. How do you make yourself known to them in an impressive fashion without destroying it?

Like, 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 touch, 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 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, you know, interested in foreigners and people from other plant lands.

And we were generally interested in their varying cult customs, etc. 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? They there's just going to be something about them that we hate. They eat babies,

who knows what it is, but something they don't think is offensive, but that they think we might

find. And so they would be 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 mimetic 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.

Pretend to be close enough, right. And not reveal much that mystery that old Clint Eastwood cowboy

say less. 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. The, the, so returning to Penn's spermia 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.

Yes. And it went through part of the stages of evolution to advance life, but not all the way

to advanced 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 upon 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 damn 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 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. And so 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 it's only

300 million years at most when it appeared, and then it was really complicated at that point.

So Panspermi allows you to explain that complexity by saying, well, it's been another

five 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.

Well, 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 Panspermi as 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'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 false flag ops or whatever. 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 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's been lying and faking things and paying people to lie about what they saw,

etc. 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. There's some secret

organizations 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 one in a thousand sort of priors. The question is,

could they be in that level of plausibility? Can we just link on this? 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 and

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. So clearly, in history, we've had many large

coordinated keepings of secrets, say the Manhattan Project. And there was hundreds of thousands of

people working on that over many years, but they kept it a secret. Clearly, many large military

operations have kept things secrets over even decades with many thousands of people involved.

So clearly, it's possible to keep some things secret over time periods. But the more people

you involve and the more time you are assuming and 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 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

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 conspiracy theories. 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 a 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 of 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 have been extremely

powerful propaganda machines 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 a propaganda thought in a single individual's mind. So I don't,

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,

I don't know if you can elucidate, cause suffering at scale. But of course, say during war time,

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, you know, most of the way there. So I have learned many over the years, many things

that most ordinary people should be interested in, but somehow don't know even though the data's

been very widespread. So, you know, I have this book, The Elephant in 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, 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. They're just no connection. Oh, in randomized experiments, there's no relationship

between more medicine. So it's not a negative relationship, but it's just no relationship.

Right. And so the conspiracy theories 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, you know,

I've lived in the Washington area for several decades now reading the Washington Post regularly.

Every week there was a special, you know, 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?

Not most people. There are many things about which people don't want to know certain kinds of

truths 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 hidden 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. Yeah. And so 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

to 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 and 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. 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. Many norms are about motives. If I hit you on purpose, that's a big

violation of hit you accidentally, that's okay. I need to be able to explain why it was an accident

and not on purpose. 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. 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 them, 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 all 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 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 directly. 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, etc. 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.

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 the light in the young in

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 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

other things. But we're very constantly thinking, what do other people think? So let me ask you

this question then about you, Robin Hansen, who 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. Yes. 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 ways, things that are very surprising, like things that would be,

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. 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?

Why not? To make true claims. 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? 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 arguments and structures and evidence to persuade

somebody who has higher standards because why bother? You can get away with something much

easier. And of course, if you are a salesperson or 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% of

the most gullible customers and make plenty of sales. So I think one of the main ways

intellectuals varies 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? 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're 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're hanging out with Tyler Cohen a

lot and trying to convince him yourself? From the point of view of just making money or having

sex or other sorts of things, this is misdirected energy. 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 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 tried 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

well, 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 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 in 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 YouTube. 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

certainly 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

by the producer being incentivized to manipulate the decision making processes of the voter and

the consumer. Well, 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 steelman 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 steelman the case that it's case by case? It's always super complicated. Like it's a complex

system that's very difficult to have a simple model about. It's very difficult to disrespect.

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 motivation to play and we are able to really introspect our own mind. And like

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 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 in 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, right? 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

in order, if what 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, draw 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 is effective. And when I respond,

I will have to point you to our most reliable evidence and ask you to consider the possibility

that the literature is biased in that when the evidence isn't as reliable, when they have more

degrees of freedom in order to get the answer they want, they do tend to get the answer they want.

But when we get to the kind of evidence that's much harder to mess with, that's where we will see

the truth be more revealed. So with respect to medicine, we have millions of papers published

in medicine over the years, most of which give the impression that medicine is useful.

There's a small literature on randomized experiments of the aggregate effects of medicine

where there's maybe a few half dozen or so papers where it would be the hardest to hide it

because it's such a straightforward experiment done in a straightforward way that it's hard

to manipulate. And that's where I will point you to to show you that there's relatively little

correlation between health and medicine. But even then, people could try to save the phenomenon and

say, well, it's not hidden motives, it's just ignorance. They could say, for example,

medicine's complicated, most people don't know the literature. Therefore, they can be excused

for ignorance. They are just ignorantly assuming that medicine is effective. It's not that they

have some other motive that they're trying to achieve. And then I will have to do, as with a

conspiracy theory analysis, and I'm saying, well, how long has this misperception been going on?

How consistently has it happened around the world and across time? And I would have to say, look,

if we're talking about, say, a recent new product like Segway scooters or something,

I could say not so many people have seen them or used them. Maybe they could be confused about

their value. If we're talking about a product that's been around for thousands of years,

used in roughly the same way all across the world, and we see the same pattern over and over again,

this sort of ignorance mistake just doesn't work so well.

It also is a question of how much of the self deception is prevalent versus foundational,

because there's a kind of implied thing where it's foundational to human nature versus just

a common pitfall. This is a question I have. So maybe human progress is made by people

who don't fall into the self deception. It's a baser aspect of human nature,

but then you escape it easily if you're motivated.

The motivational hypotheses about the self deceptions are in terms of how it makes you

look to the people around you. Again, the press secretary. So the story would be,

most people want to look good to the people around them. Therefore, most people present

themselves in ways that help them look good to the people around them. That's sufficient

to say there would be a lot of it. It doesn't need to be 100%. There's enough variety in people

and in circumstances that sometimes taking a contrarian strategy can be in the interest of

some minority of the people. So I might, for example, say that that's a strategy I've taken.

I've decided that being contrarian on these things could be winning for me in that there's a room

for a small number of people like me who have these sort of messages who can then get more

attention even if there's not room for most people to do that. And that can be explaining

sort of the variety. Similarly, you might say, look, just look at most obvious things. Most

people would like to look good in the sense of physically, just you look good right now,

you're wearing a nice suit, you have a haircut, you shaved, right? So and we...

Got my own hair, by the way.

Okay. Well then, all the more impressive.

That's a counter argument for your client though most people want to look good.

Clearly, if we look at most people and their physical appearance, clearly most people are

trying to look somewhat nice, right? They shower, they shave, they comb their hair,

but we certainly see some people around who are not trying to look so nice, right? Is that a

big challenge, the hypothesis that people want to look nice? Not that much, right? We can see

in those particular people's context more particular reasons why they've chosen to

be an exception to the more general rule.

So the general rule does reveal something foundational generally.

Right.

That's the way things work. Let me ask you, you wrote a blog post about the accuracy of

authorities since we were talking about this, especially in medicine. Just looking around us,

especially during this time of the pandemic, there's been a growing distrust of authorities,

of institutions, even an institution of science itself. What are the pros and cons of authorities,

would you say? So what's nice about authorities? What's nice about institutions and what are

their pitfalls?

One standard function of authority is as something you can defer to respectively without

needing to seem too submissive or ignorant or gullible. That is, when you're asking what should

I act on or what belief should I act on, you might be worried if I chose something too contrarian,

too weird, too speculative, that would make me look bad. So I would just choose something

very conservative. So maybe an authority lets you choose something a little less conservative

because the authority is your authorization. The authority will let you do it and somebody

says, why did you do that thing? And they say, the authority authorized. The authority tells me,

I should do this. Why aren't you doing it? Right.

So the authority is often pushing for the conservative.

Well, the authority can do more. So for example, we just think about, I don't know, in a pandemic

even, you could just think, I'll just stay home and close all the doors or I'll just ignore it.

You could just think of some very simple strategy that might be defensible if there were no

authorities. But authorities might be able to know more than that. They might be able to look

at some evidence, draw a more context dependent conclusion, declare it as the authority's opinion,

and then other people might follow that. And that could be better than doing nothing.

So what you mentioned, WHO, the world's most beloved organization. So this is me speaking