#194 – Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic

Bret Weinstein is and evolutionary biologist, author, and co-host of the DarkHorse Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – The Jordan Harbinger Show: https://www.youtube.com/thejordanharbingershow – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free – Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off – Four Sigmatic: https://foursigmatic.com/lex and use code LexPod to get up to 60% off EPISODE LINKS: Bret’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein Bret’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/BretWeinsteinDarkHorse Bret’s Website: https://bretweinstein.net/ Bret’s Book: https://amzn.to/3dhVWrv PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (09:04) – Why biology is beautiful (16:38) – Boston Dynamics (20:02) – Being self-critical (30:09) – Theory of close calls (38:46) – Lab leak hypothesis (1:12:41) – Joe Rogan (1:21:50) – Censorship (1:58:40) – Vaccines (2:12:26) – The paper on mice with long telomeres (2:40:09) – Martyrdom (2:48:54) – Eric Weinstein (2:58:13) – Monogamy (3:10:31) – Advice for young people (3:17:16) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, author, co-host of the Dark Horse Podcast, and, as he says, reluctant radical. Even though we've never met or spoken before this, we both felt like we've been friends for a long time. I don't agree on everything with Brett, but I'm sure as hell happy he exists in this weird and wonderful world of ours. Quick mention of our sponsors: Jordan Harbinger Show, ExpressVPN, Magic Spoon, and 4Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words about COVID-19 and about science broadly. I think science is beautiful and powerful.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  It is the striving of the human mind to understand and to solve the problems of the world. But as an institution, it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature, to fear, to greed, power, and ego. 2020 is a story of all of these that has both scientific triumph and tragedy. We needed great leaders, and we didn't get them. What we needed is leaders who communicate in an honest, transparent, and authentic way about the uncertainty of what we know and the large-scale scientific efforts to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions. I believe there are several candidates for solutions that could have all saved hundreds of billions of dollars and lessened or eliminated

• 1:27Lex Fridman?

  the suffering of millions of people. Let me mention five of the categories of solutions: masks, at-home testing, anonymized contact tracing, antiviral drugs, and vaccines. Within each of these categories, institutional leaders should have constantly asked and answered publicly, honestly, the following three questions. One, what data do we have on the solution? And what studies are we running to get more and better data? Two, given the current data and uncertainty, how effective and how safe is the solution? Three, what is the timeline and cost involved with mass manufacture and distribution of the solution? In the service of these questions, no voices should have been silenced,

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  no ideas left off the table. Open data, open science, open, honest scientific communication and debate was the way, not censorship. There are a lot of ideas out there that are bad, wrong, dangerous. But the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are, is the moment we lose our ability to find the truth, to find solutions, the very things that make science beautiful and powerful in the face of all the dangers that threaten the well-being and the existence of humans on earth. This conversation with Brett is less about the ideas we talk about. We agree on some, disagree on others. It is much more about the very freedom to talk, to think, to share ideas.

• 2:54Lex Fridman?

  This freedom is our only hope. Brett should never have been censored. I asked Brett to do this podcast to show solidarity and to show that I have hope for science and for humanity. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of As Now. No ads in the middle. I don't like those. Nobody likes those. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. I'm very picky with the sponsors we take on. So if you check them out and buy their stuff, I hope you will find value in it, just as I have. This episode is sponsored by The Jordan Harbinger Show. Search for it on YouTube. Subscribe to it.

• 3:38Lex Fridman?

  Listen, you won't regret it. He has a lot of incredible conversations on there. Recently, he had Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Cal Newport. Jordan challenges me to think as an interviewer about what makes for a good question. Because he's often very good at asking the question without the fluff that gets to the core of an idea. I think I often do a little too much mumbling, a little too much wandering around as I ask the question. Like, some questions I ask take like a minute or two. I guess the benefit of that is that it's authentically who I am is I'm thinking through the question. It's almost like I start to disagree with myself

• 4:21Lex Fridman?

  as I think through the question and you get to see that thinking process. But the downside is that sometimes just like a half a sentence or one sentence is enough to create that kind of tension that springs the mind of the guest into the space of the idea that they're going to explore. Again, search for Jordan Harbinger Show on YouTube. Check out the video version of the podcast. But you can also, of course, listen to everywhere podcasts are available, like Apple, Spotify, all that kind of stuff. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. They protect your privacy on the internet. Using the internet without it is like driving without car insurance.

• 5:02Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of which, I'm currently driving a rental car and I had to change a tire. That was a funny experience. It made me realize that it's been a while since I changed a tire. And I kind of enjoyed it in the summer, Austin heat. It kind of reminded me of that movie with Sean Penn. And I think it's Jennifer Lopez called U-Turn. I may be imagining it, but I remember it being like a really interesting film. It was about cars and heat and that tension. I think Nick Nolte was in it, too. He's an incredible actor. Anyway, that whole experience is exactly what it's like to not have a VPN. If you want to have a painless experience, you should get ExpressVPN.

• 5:46Lex Fridman?

  It protects you from the good guys, the bad guys, all of whom watch your data, the ISPs, the big companies, all that kind of stuff. If privacy is important to you, you should use a VPN. Go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod. This episode is also sponsored by Magic Spoon. Low carb keto-friendly cereal. It has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, only four net grams of carbs and 140 calories in each serving. They now ship to Canada. I posted on Twitter that I'm going to Toronto, Canada to visit a friend.

• 6:28Lex Fridman?

  And I asked for recommendations for people to talk to on a podcast. And I got some incredible recommendations. So, once I get a chance to visit, which will probably be brief, I'll have a lot of cool conversations to have over there. I love Canada in general. I love Toronto, I love Montreal. I feel like I want to take a road trip throughout Canada. And maybe on the road trip, I'll be eating Magic Spoon cereal. It's honestly my favorite snack that feels like a cheap meal, but it's not. Low carb and reminds me of like early high school when I would eat cereal that was terrible for you. But in this case, it's cereal that is really good for you. And so can bring happiness without the pain of malnutrition.

• 7:11Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, Magic Spoon has a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it, they will refund it. Go to magic spoon.com slash Lex and use code Lex at checkout to save five bucks off your order. That's magic spoon.com slash Lex and use code Lex. This show is sponsored by Four Sigmatic, the maker of delicious mushroom coffee and plant-based protein. Does the coffee taste like mushrooms, you ask? No, it does not. It tastes delicious. It's a part of my daily routine. It brings me joy. It brings me energy. It brings me focus. I drink a cup of coffee as I turn on the brown noise and my mind goes into this deep state of focus in the morning.

• 7:55Lex Fridman?

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• 8:39Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and here is my conversation with Bret Weinstein.

• 9:05Lex Fridman?

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

• 9:11Speaker 01

  It's a very interesting question. I must say, at one level, it's not a conscious thing. I can say a lot about why, as an adult, I find biology compelling. But as a kid, I was completely fascinated with animals. I loved to watch them and think about why they did what they did. And that developed into a very conscious passion as an adult. But I think, in the same way that one is drawn to a person, I was drawn to the never-ending series of near miracles that exists across biological nature.

• 9:53Lex Fridman?

  When you see a living organism, do you see it from an evolutionary biology perspective of like this entire thing that moves around in this world? Or do you see like from an engineering perspective, there are like first principles, almost down to the physics, like the little components that build up hierarchies? That you have cells, the first proteins and cells and organs and all that kind of stuff. So do you see low level or do you see high level?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Well, the human mind is a strange thing. And I think it's probably a bit like a time-sharing machine in which I have different modules. We don't know enough about biology for them to connect, right? So they exist in isolation. And I'm always aware that they do connect. But I basically have to step into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to. I have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a very long time scale. A different module still to understand what the mechanisms inside would have to look like to account for what we can see from the outside. And I think that probably sounds really complicated. But

• 11:08Speaker 01

  One of the things about being involved in a topic like biology and doing so for one, you know, really not even just my adult life, for my whole life, is that it becomes second nature. And, you know, when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that, we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that. But of course, what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone, right? They are in a zone in which they are in such command of their center of gravity, for example, that they know how to hurl it around a landscape so

• 11:47Speaker 01

  that they always land on their feet. And I would just say, for anyone who hasn't found a topic on which they can develop that kind of facility, it is absolutely worthwhile. It's really something that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics, many things our ancestors didn't even have access to. And that flexibility of humans, that ability to repurpose our machinery for topics that are novel, means really, the world is your oyster. You can, you can figure out what your passion is and then figure out all of the angles that one would have to pursue to really deeply understand

• 12:28Speaker 01

  it. And it is, it is well worth having at least one topic like that.

• 12:33Lex Fridman?

  You mean embracing the full adaptability of the, both the, the body and the mind? So like, because I don't know what to attribute the parkour to, like biomechanics of how our bodies can move, or is it the mind? Like, how much percent wise, is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that we've been talking about, or is it just all?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  The mind. The way to think about creatures is that every creature is two things simultaneously. A creature is a machine of sorts, right? It's not a machine in the, you know, it's, I call it an aqueous machine, right? And it's run by an aqueous computer, right? So it's not identical to our technological machines. But every creature is both a machine that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving, to reproduce. It is also a potential. So each creature is potentially, for example, the most recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different from it.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature, but not very good in terms of the potential it has going forward, then that lineage will not last very long into the future because change will throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet. So the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform and we have the ability to swap out our software to exist in many, many different niches. And I was once watching an interview with this British group of parkour experts who were being, you know, just, they were discussing what it is they do and how it works.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And what they essentially said is, look, you're tapping into deep monkey stuff, right? And I thought, yeah, that's about right. And, you know, anybody who is proficient at something like skiing or skateboarding, you know, has the experience of flying down the hill on skis, for example, bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next. And if you really pay attention, you will discover that your conscious mind is actually a spectator. It's there. It's involved in the experience, but it's not driving. Some part of you knows how to ski and it's not the part of you that knows how to think. And

• 15:04Speaker 01

  I would just say that the, what accounts for this flexibility in humans is the ability to bootstrap a new software program and then drive it into the unconscious layer where it can be applied very rapidly. And, you know, I will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics, you know, if you, if you programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that were novel to it, how would you do it? It would have to look something like this.

• 15:33Lex Fridman?

  There's a certain kind of magic. You're right. With the consciousness being an observer, when you play guitar, for example, or piano, for me, music, when you get truly lost in it, I don't know what the heck is responsible for the flow of the music, the kind of, the loudness of the music going up and down, the timing, the intricate, like even the mistakes, all those things, that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind. It's, it is just observing and yet it's somehow intricately involved more like, because you mentioned parkour, dances like that too. When you start up in tango dancing, if, when you truly lose yourself in it, then it's just like you're an observer and how the hell is the body

• 16:18Lex Fridman?

  able to do that? And not only that, it's the physical motion is also creating the emotion, the, like, the damn is good to be alive feeling. So, but then that's also intricately connected to the full biology stack that we're operating in. I don't know how difficult it is to replicate that. We're talking offline about Boston Dynamics robots. They've recently, they did both parkour, they did flips, they've also done some dancing. And it's something I think a lot about because what most people don't realize, because

• 16:58Lex Fridman?

  they don't look deep enough, is those robots are hardcoded to do those things. The, the robots didn't figure it out by themselves. And yet, the, the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human is that process of figuring out, of making mistakes. And then there's something about overcoming those challenges and the mistakes and like figuring out how to lose yourself in the magic of the dancing. Or just movement is what it means to be human. That learning process. So that's what I want to do with the, with the, almost as a fun side thing with the Boston Dynamics robots is to have them learn and see what they figure out, even if it, even if they make mistakes.

• 17:41Lex Fridman?

  I want to let Spot make mistakes and in so doing, discover what it means to be alive, discover beauty, because I think that's the essential aspect of mistakes. Boston Dynamics folks want Spot to be perfect because they don't want Spot to ever make mistakes because they want to operate in the factories. It wants to be, you know, very safe and so on. For me, if you construct the environment, if you construct a safe space for robots and allow them to make mistakes, something beautiful might be discovered. But that requires a lot of brain power. So Spot is currently very dumb and I'm going to add, give it a brain.

• 18:24Lex Fridman?

  So first make it see, currently can't see, meaning computer vision. It has to understand its environment, has to see all the humans, but then also has to be able to learn, learn about its movement, learn how to use its body to communicate with others, all those kinds of things. That dogs know how to do well, humans know how to do somewhat well. I think that's a beautiful challenge, but first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think your objective is laudable, but you're going to realize that the Boston Dynamics folks are right the first time Spot poops on your rug.

• 18:59Lex Fridman?

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

• 19:05Speaker 01

  No, you should. It's, it's, it's a great experience. So let me step back into what you said in a couple of different places. One, I have always believed that the missing element in robotics and artificial intelligence is a proper development, right? It is no accident, it is no mere coincidence that human beings are the most dominant species on planet earth and that we have the longest childhoods of any creature on earth by far, right? Development is the key to the flexibility and so. The capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image. It's the flip side of our helplessness at birth.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  So I'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project. If you do not end up reinventing childhood for robots, which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly. But I also want to point out, you can, you can see this issue of your conscious mind becoming a spectator very well if you compare tennis to table tennis. Right? If you watch a tennis game, you could imagine that the players are highly conscious as they play. You cannot imagine that if you've ever played ping pong decently. A volley in ping pong is so fast that your conscious mind, if it had, if your reactions

• 20:32Speaker 01

  had to go through your conscious mind, you wouldn't be able to play. So you can detect that your conscious mind, while very much present, isn't there. And you can also detect where consciousness does usefully intrude. If you go up against an opponent in table tennis that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to, you will suddenly detect that something about your game is not effective. And you will start thinking about what might be. How do you position yourself so that move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something like that doesn't catch you off guard? And this, I believe, is, we highly conscious folks, those of us who try to think through

• 21:14Speaker 01

  things very deliberately and carefully, mistake consciousness for like the highest kind of thinking. And I really think that this is an error. Consciousness is an intermediate level of thinking. What it does is it allows you, it's basically like uncompiled code. And it doesn't run very fast. It is capable of being adapted to new circumstances. But once the code is roughed in, right? It gets driven into the unconscious layer and you become highly effective at whatever it is. And that from that point, your conscious mind basically remains there to detect things that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written. And so. I don't exactly know how one would establish this, how one would demonstrate it.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  But it must be the case that the human mind contains sandboxes in which things are tested. Right? Maybe you can build a piece of code and run it in parallel next to your active code. So you can see how it would have done comparatively. But there's got to be some way of writing new code and then swapping it in. And frankly, I think this has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles. Very often, you know, when I get good at something, I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it. I get better at it when I'm not doing it, especially if there's time to sleep and think on it. So there's some sort of, you know, new program swapping in for old program phenomenon, which, um, you know, will be a lot easier to see in machines.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  It's going to be hard with the, the, the wetware.

• 22:44Lex Fridman?

  I like, I mean, it is true because somebody that played, I played tennis for many years. I do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis is when the conscious mind is a spectator. So it's the compiled code is the highest form of being human. And then consciousness is just some like specific compiler. You have to have like Borland C++ compiler. You could just have different kind of compilers. Ultimately, the, the thing that by which we measure the, um, the power of life, the intelligence of life is the compiled code. And you can probably do that compilation all kinds of ways.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously and table tennis isn't. I'm saying that because tennis is slowed down by the, just the space on the court, you could, you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing. But when you shrink the court down.

• 23:39Lex Fridman?

  It becomes obvious.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  It becomes obvious that your conscious mind is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle. And weirdly for me. I would say this probably isn't true in a podcast situation. But if I have to give a presentation, especially if I have not overly prepared, I often find the same phenomenon when I'm giving the presentation. My conscious mind is there watching some other part of me present, which is a little jarring, I have to say.

• 24:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, that that means you've you've gotten good at it. Not let the conscious mind get in the way of the flow of words.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that's the sensation, to be sure.

• 24:17Lex Fridman?

  And that's the highest form of podcasting, too. I mean, that's why I have that. That's what it looks like when a podcast is really in the pocket, like, like Joe Rogan, just having fun and just losing themselves. And that's that's something I aspire to as well, just losing yourself in conversation. Somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people, like I'm such an introvert. I'm scared. I was scared before you showed up. I'm scared right now. There's just anxiety. There's just it's a giant mess. It's hard to lose yourself. It's hard to just get out of the way of your own mind.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, trust is a big component of that. Your your conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain. But when you do, when you do get into that zone when you're speaking, I realize it's different for you with English as a second language, although maybe you present in Russian and, and, you know, and it happens. But do you ever hear yourself say something and you think, oh, that's really good? Right? Like, like you didn't come up with it? Some other part of you that you don't exactly know came up with it?

• 25:21Lex Fridman?

  I don't think I've ever heard myself in that way because I have a much louder voice that's constantly yelling in my head at, why the hell did you say that? There's a very self critical voice that's much louder. So I'm very, maybe I need to deal with that voice. But it's been like with with what is it called? Like a megaphone just screaming so I can't hear.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 25:46Lex Fridman?

  That says, good job. You said that thing really nicely. So I'm kind of focused right now on on the megaphone person in the audience versus the the positive. But that's definitely something to think about. It's been productive. But, you know, the the place where I find gratitude and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet moments when I don't talk, when I listen to the world around me, when I listen to others. When I talk, I'm extremely self-critical in my mind. When I produce anything out into the world that originated with me, like any kind of creation, extremely self-critical. It's good for productivity, for like always striving to improve and so on.

• 26:31Lex Fridman?

  It might be bad for like just appreciating the things you've created. I'm a little bit with Marvin Minsky on this where he says the key to to a productive life is to hate everything you've ever done in the past.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  I didn't know he said that. I must say I resonate with it a bit. And, you know, I unfortunately, my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into the world. And I effectively watch almost none of it. I can't stand it.

• 27:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What do you make of that? I don't know. I just recently, I just yesterday read Metamorphosis by Kafka. We read Metamorphosis by Kafka where he turns into a giant bug because of the stress that the world puts on him. His parents put on him to succeed. And, you know, I think that's you have to find the balance. Because if you allow the self-critical voice to become too heavy, the burden of the world, the pressure that the world puts on you to be the best version of yourself and so on, to strive, then you become a bug and that's a big problem. And then, and then, and then the world turns against you because you're a bug. You become some kind of caricature of yourself.

• 27:50Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. Become the worst version of yourself and then thereby end up destroying yourself. And then the world moves on. That's the story.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  That's a lovely story. I do think this is one of these places, and frankly, you could map this on to all of modern human experience. But this is one of these places where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves. So I used to talk to students about the question of dwelling on things. You know, dwelling on things is famously understood to be bad. And it can't possibly be bad. It wouldn't exist. The tendency toward it wouldn't exist if it was bad. So what is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility. And, you know, that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize. But if you realize that your dwelling is the key, in fact, to upgrading your program

• 28:45Speaker 01

  for future well-being and that there's a point, you know, presumably from diminishing returns, if not counter productivity, there is a point at which you should stop because that is what is in your best interest, then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful, right? This is the point at which it is no longer useful for me to dwell on this error I have made, right? That is, that's what you're looking for. And it also gives you license, right? If some part of you feels like it, you know, is punishing you rather than searching, then that also has a point at which it's no longer valuable. And there's some liberty in realizing, yep, even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop.

• 29:27Lex Fridman?

  So if we map that on to compiled code discussion, as a computer science person, I find that very compelling. You know, there's a, when you compile code, you get warnings sometimes. And usually, if you're a good software engineer, you're going to make sure there's no, you know, you treat warnings as errors. So you make sure that the compilation produces no warnings. But at a certain point, when you have a large enough system, you just let the warnings go. It's fine. Like, I don't know where that warning came from, but, you know, it's just ultimately you need to compile the code and run with it and hope nothing terrible happens.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Well, I think what you will find, and believe me, I think what you're, what you're talking about with respect to robots and learning is going to end up having to go to a deep developmental state and a helplessness that evolves into hyper competence and all of that. But I live, I noticed that I live by something that I, for lack of a better descriptor, call the theory of close calls. And the theory of close calls says that people typically miscategorize the events in their life where something almost went wrong. And you know, for example, if you, I have a friend who um,

• 30:54Speaker 01

  I was walking down the street with my, my college friends and one of my friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear and was nearly hit by a car going forty-five miles an hour. Would have been an absolute disaster, might have killed her, certainly would have permanently injured her. But she didn't, you know, car didn't touch her, right? Now, you could walk away from that and think nothing of it because, well, what is there to think? Nothing happened. Or you could think, well, what is the difference between what did happen and my death? The difference is luck. I never want that to be true, right? I never want the difference between what did happen and my death to be luck. Therefore, I should count this as very close to death.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  And I should prioritize coding so it doesn't happen again at a very high level. So anyway, my, my basic point is

• 31:44Speaker 01

  the accidents and disasters and misfortune describe a distribution that tells you what's really likely to get you in the end. And so personally, you can use them to figure out where the dangers are so that you can afford to take great risks because you have a really good sense of how they're going to go wrong. But I would also point out civilization has this problem. Civilization is now producing these events that are major disasters, but they're not existential scale yet, right? They're very serious errors that we can see. And I would argue that the pattern is you discover that we are involved in some industrial process at the point it has gone wrong, right?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  So I'm now always asking the question, okay, in light of the Fukushima triple meltdown, the financial collapse of two thousand eight, the Deepwater Horizon uh blowout.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Covid nineteen and its probable origins in the Wuhan lab. What processes do I not know the name of yet that I will discover at the point that some gigantic accident has happened? And can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof of engaging in that process before the accident, right? That's what a wise civilization would be doing. And yet we don't.

• 33:03Lex Fridman?

  I just want to mention something that happened a couple of days ago. I don't know if you know who J.B. Strabel is. He's the co-founder of Tesla, CTO of Tesla for many, many years. His wife just died. She was riding a bicycle. And in the same, in that same thin line between death and life that many of us have been in, where you walk into the intersection and there's this close call. Every once in a while, it, you get the, the short straw. I wonder how much of our own individual lives and the entirety of the human civilization

• 33:48Lex Fridman?

  rests on this little roll of the dice.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Well, this is sort of my point about the close calls is that there's a, there's a level at which we can't control it, right? The gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time to do anything about. There's not a lot we can do to hedge that out, or at least not short term. But there are lots of other things, you know? Obviously, the financial collapse of 2008 didn't break down the entire world economy. It threatened to, but a Herculean effort managed to pull us back from the brink. The triple meltdown at Fukushima was awful, but every one of the seven fuel pools held. There wasn't a major fire that made it impossible to manage the disaster going forward. We got lucky.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  You know, we could say the same thing about the the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon, where a hole in the ocean floor, large enough that we couldn't have plugged it, could have opened up. All of these things could have been much, much worse. Right? And I think we can say the same thing about COVID, as terrible as it is. And I, you know, we cannot say for sure that it came from the Wuhan lab, but there's a strong likelihood that it did. And it also could be much, much worse. So in each of these cases, something is telling us we have a process that is unfolding, that keeps creating risks where it is luck that is the difference between us on some scale of disaster that is unimaginable. And that wisdom, you know, you can be highly intelligent and cause these disasters.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  To be wise is to stop causing them, right? And that would require a process of restraint, a process that I don't see a lot of evidence of yet. So I think we have to generate it. And somehow, we, you know, at the moment, we don't have a political structure that would be capable of taking a protective algorithm and actually deploying it, right? Because it would have important economic consequences, and so it would almost certainly be shot down. But we can obviously also say, you know, we paid a huge price for all of the disasters that I've mentioned, and we have to factor that into the equation.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Something can be very productive short term and very destructive long term.

• 36:07Lex Fridman?

  Also, the question is how many disasters we avoided because of the ingenuity of humans or just the integrity and character of humans? That's sort of an open question. We may be more intelligent than lucky. That's the hope. Because the optimistic message here that you're getting at is maybe the process that we should be That maybe we can overcome luck with ingenuity. Meaning, I guess you're suggesting the process is we should be listing all the ways that human civilization can destroy itself, assigning likelihood to it, and thinking

• 36:51Lex Fridman?

  through how can we avoid that? And being very honest with the data out there about the close calls and using those close calls to then create sort of mechanism by which we minimize the probability of those close calls. It's just being honest and transparent with the data that's out there.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Well, I think we need to do a couple of things for it to work. So I've been an advocate for the idea that sustainability is actually, it's difficult to operationalize, but it is an objective that we have to meet if we're to be around long term. And I realize that we also need to have reversibility of all of our processes because processes very frequently, when they start, do not appear dangerous. And then they, when they scale, they become very dangerous. So for example, if you imagine the first internal combustion engine, you know, vehicle driving down the street, and you imagine somebody running after them saying, hey, if you do enough of that, you're going to alter the atmosphere and it's going to change the temperature of the planet, it's preposterous, right?

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Why would you stop the person who's invented this marvelous new contraption? But of course, eventually you do get to the place where you're doing enough of this that you do start changing the temperature of the planet. So if we built the capacity, if we basically said, look, you can't involve yourself in any process that you couldn't reverse if you had to, then progress would be slowed, but our safety would go up dramatically. And I think, I think in some sense, if we are to be around long term, we have to begin thinking that way. We're just involved in too many very dangerous processes.

• 38:33Lex Fridman?

  So let's talk about one of the things that if not threatened, human civilization certainly heard it at a deep level, which is COVID-19.

• 38:47Lex Fridman?

  What percent probability would you currently place on the hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  So I maintain a flowchart of all the possible explanations, and it doesn't break down exactly that way. The likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very, very high. If it emerged from a lab, the likelihood that the lab was the Wuhan Institute is very, very high.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  The, there are multiple different kinds of evidence that point to the lab, and there is literally no evidence that points to nature. Either the evidence points nowhere, or it points to the lab. And the lab could mean any lab, but geographically, obviously, the labs in Wuhan are the most likely, and the lab that was most directly involved with research on viruses that look like COVID, that look like SARS-CoV-2, is obviously the place that one would start. But I would say the likelihood that this virus came from a lab is well above 95%. We can talk about the question of could a virus have been brought into the lab and escaped from there without being modified?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  That's also possible, but it doesn't explain any of the anomalies in the genome of SARS-CoV-2.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Could it have been delivered from another lab? Could Wuhan be a distraction in order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way? That's conceivable. I currently have that below 1% on my flowchart, but I think-

• 40:21Lex Fridman?

  A very dark thought that somebody would do that, almost as a political attack on China?

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Well, it depends. I don't even think, that's one possibility. Sometimes when Eric and I talk about these issues, we will generate a scenario just to prove that something could live in that space, right? It's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened. And so it doesn't have to have been an attack on China. That's certainly one possibility. But I would point out- If you can predict the future in some unusual way, better than others, you can print money, right? That's what markets that allow you to bet for or against virtually any sector allow you to do.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  So you can imagine a simply amoral person or entity generating a pandemic, attempting to cover their tracks because it would allow them to bet against things like, you know, cruise ships, air travel, whatever it is, and bet in favor of, I don't know, sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do. So am I saying that I think somebody did that? No, I really don't think it happened. We've seen zero evidence that this was intentionally released. However, were it to have been intentionally released by somebody who did not know, did not want it known where it had come from, releasing it into Wuhan would be one way to cover their tracks.

• 41:52Speaker 01

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

• 41:57Lex Fridman?

  And the probability therefore is low. I tend to believe, maybe this is the optimistic nature that I have, that people who are competent enough to do the kind of thing we just described are not going to do that because it requires a certain kind of, I don't want to use the word evil, but whatever word you want to use to describe the kind of disregard for human life required to do that, you're just, that's just not going to be coupled with competence. I feel like there's a trade off chart where competence on one axis and evils on the other. And the more evil you become, the crapper you are

• 42:41Lex Fridman?

  at doing great engineering, scientific work required to deliver weapons of different kinds, whether it's bioweapons or nuclear weapons, and all those kinds of things. That seems to be the lessons I take from history, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's going to be happening in the future. But to stick on the lab leak idea, because the flow chart is probably huge here because there's a lot of fascinating possibilities. One question I want to ask is, what would evidence for natural origins look like? So one piece of evidence for natural origins is that it's happened in the past.

• 43:20Lex Fridman?

  That that viruses have jumped.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Oh, they do jump.

• 43:25Lex Fridman?

  They so like that's one like that's possible to have happened. You know, so that that's a sort of like a historical evidence like, OK, well, it's possible that it have.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  It's not it's not evidence of the kind you think it is. It's a justification for a presumption.

• 43:41Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Right. So the presumption upon discovering a new virus circulating is certainly that it came from nature. Right. The problem is the presumption evaporates in the face of evidence, or at least it logically should. And it didn't in this case. It was maintained by people who privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of of this virus.

• 44:05Lex Fridman?

  Is there some other piece of evidence that we could look for and see that would say, this increases the probability that it's natural origins?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, in fact, there is evidence, you know, I always worry that somebody is going to make up some evidence in order to reverse the flow.

• 44:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Well, let's say I am.

• 44:27Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of incentive for that, actually.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  There's a huge amount of incentive. On the other hand, why didn't the powers that be, the powers that lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Why didn't they ever fake weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Whatever force it is, I hope that force is here too. And so whatever evidence we find is real.

• 44:45Lex Fridman?

  It's the competence thing I'm talking about, but OK, go ahead. Sorry.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Well, we can get back to that. But I would say, yeah, that the the giant piece of evidence that will shift the probabilities in the other direction is the discovery of either a human population in which the virus circulated prior to showing up in Wuhan that would explain where the virus learned all of the tricks that it knew instantly upon spreading from Wuhan. So that would do it. Or an animal population in which an ancestor epidemic can be found in which the virus learned this before jumping to humans. But I point out in that second case. You would certainly expect to see a great deal of evolution in the early epidemic, which we don't see.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  So there almost has to be a human population somewhere else that had the virus circulating or an ancestor of the virus that we first saw in Wuhan circulating. And it has to have gotten very sophisticated in that prior epidemic before hitting Wuhan in order to explain the total lack of evolution and extremely effective virus that emerged at the end of 2019.

• 45:52Lex Fridman?

  So you don't believe in the magic of evolution to spring up with all the tricks already there? Like, everybody who doesn't have the tricks, they die quickly. And then you just have this beautiful virus that comes in with a spike protein and the through mutation and selection, just like, the ones that succeed and succeed big are the ones that are going to just spring into life with the tricks?

• 46:17Speaker 01

  Well, no. That's called a hopeful monster. And hopeful monsters don't work. It's too, the job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult. It involves two very difficult steps, and they both have to work. One is the ability to infect a person and spread in their tissues sufficient to make an infection. And the other is to jump between individuals at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct for one reason or another. Those are both very difficult jobs. They require, as you describe, selection. And the point is, selection would leave a mark. We would see evidence that it was taking place.

• 46:53Lex Fridman?

  In animals or humans?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Both, right?

• 46:55Lex Fridman?

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

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, you would see the virus, you would see the clumsy virus get better and better. And yes, I am a full believer in the power of that process. In fact, I believe it, what I know from studying the process is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine, that what we teach in the Evolution 101 textbook is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing, and that actually people should increase their expectation of the rapidity with which that process can produce just jaw-dropping adaptations. That said, we just don't see evidence that it happened here, which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it means... In spite of immense pressure to find it somewhere, there's been no hint, which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory.

• 47:46Lex Fridman?

  So, inside the laboratory, gain-of-function research on viruses, and I believe most of that kind of research is doing this exact thing that you're referring to, which is accelerated evolution. And just watching evolution do its thing on a bunch of viruses and seeing what kind of tricks get developed. The other method is engineering viruses. So manually adding on the tricks. Which do you think we should be thinking about here?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  So, mind you, I learned what I know in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging. I started studying the question. And I would say, based on the content of the genome and other evidence in publications from the various labs that were involved in generating this technology, a couple of things seem likely. This SARS-CoV-2 does not appear to be entirely the result of either a splicing process or serial passaging. It appears to have both things in its past, or it's at least highly likely that it does. So, for example, the Ferren cleavage site looks very much like it was added in to the

• 49:05Speaker 01

  virus, and it was known that that would increase its infectivity in humans and increase its tropism. The virus appears to be excellent at spreading in humans and minks and ferrets. Now, minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other, and ferrets are very likely to have been used in a serial passage experiment, the reason being that they have an ACE2 receptor that looks very much like the human ACE2 receptor. And so... Were you going to passage the virus or its ancestor through an animal in order to increase its infectivity in humans, which would have been necessary? Ferrets would have been very likely.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  It is also quite likely that humanized mice were utilized, and it is possible that human airway tissue was utilized. I think it is vital that we find out what the protocols were. If this came from the Wuhan Institute, we need to know it, and we need to know what the protocols were exactly, because they will actually give us some tools that would be useful in fighting SARS-CoV-2 and hopefully driving it to extinction, which ought to be our priority. It is a priority that does not, it is not apparent from our behavior, but it really is, it should be our objective. If we understood where our interests lie, we would be much more focused on it. But those protocols would tell us a great deal.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  If it wasn't the Wuhan Institute, we need to know that. If it was nature, we need to know that. And if it was some other laboratory, we need to figure out who, what, and where, so that we can determine what is, what we can determine about, about what was done.

• 50:43Lex Fridman?

  You're opening up my mind about why we should investigate, why we should know the truth of the origins of this virus. So for me personally, let me just tell the story of my own kind of journey. When I first started looking into the lab leak hypothesis, what became terrifying to me and important to understand and obvious is the sort of like Sam Harris way of thinking, which is, it's obvious that a lab leak of a deadly virus will eventually happen. My mind was, it doesn't even matter if it happened in this case. It's obvious that it's going to happen in the future.

• 51:28Lex Fridman?

  So why the hell are we not freaking out about this? And COVID-19 is not even that deadly relative to the possible future viruses. It's this, the way, I disagree with Sam on this, but he thinks about this way about AGI as well, about artificial intelligence. It's a different discussion, I think, but with viruses, it's Seems like something that could happen on the scale of years, maybe a few decades. AGI is a little bit farther out for me, but it seemed the terrifying thing seemed obvious that this will happen very soon for much deadlier virus as we get better and better at both engineering viruses and doing this kind of evolutionary driven research, gain of function research.

• 52:09Lex Fridman?

  Okay, but then you started speaking out about this as well, but also started to say, no, no, no, we should hurry up and figure out the origins now because it will help us figure out how to actually respond to this particular virus, how to treat this particular virus, what is in terms of vaccines, in terms of antiviral drugs, in terms of just and although the the the number of responses we should have. Okay. I still am much more freaking out about the future. Maybe you can break that apart a little bit. Which are you most focused on now?

• 52:54Lex Fridman?

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

• 53:01Speaker 01

  I am most freaking out about both of them because they're both really important and, you know, we can put bounds on this. Let me say first that this is a perfect test case for the theory of close calls because as much as COVID is a disaster, it is also a close call from which we can learn much. You are absolutely right. If we keep playing this game in the lab, if we are not, if we are, especially if we do it under pressure and when we are told that a virus is going to leap from nature any day and that the more we know, the better we'll be able to fight it, we're going to create the disaster all the sooner. So yes, that should be an absolute focus. The fact that there were people saying that this was dangerous back in 2015

• 53:44Speaker 01

  ought to tell us something. The fact that the system bypassed a ban and offshored the work to China ought to tell us this is not a Chinese failure. This is a failure of something larger and harder to see. But

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I also think that there's a clock ticking with respect to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID, the disease that it creates. And that has to do with whether or not we are stuck with it permanently. So if you think about the cost to humanity of being stuck with influenza, it's an immense cost, year after year. And we just stop thinking about it because it's there. Some years you get the flu, most years you don't. Maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it. Maybe the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted. But imagine just simply doubling that cost. Imagine we get stuck with SARS-CoV-2 and its descendants going forward and that it just settles in and becomes a fact of modern human life. That would be a disaster, right?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  The number of people we will ultimately lose is incalculable. The amount of suffering that will be caused is incalculable. The loss of well-being and wealth, incalculable. So that ought to be a very high priority, driving this extinct before it becomes permanent. And the ability to drive it extinct goes down the longer we delay effective responses. To the extent that we let it have this very large canvas, large numbers of people who have the disease in which mutation and selection can result in adaptation, that we will not be able to counter the greater its ability to figure out features of our immune system and use them to its advantage. So I'm feeling the pressure of driving it extinct.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  I believe we could have driven it extinct six months ago, and we didn't do it because of very mundane concerns among a small number of people. And I'm not alleging that they were brazen about, or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused. I have the sense that they were working from a kind of autopilot in which you, you know, let's say you're in some kind of a corporation, a pharmaceutical corporation, you have a portfolio of therapies that in the context of a pandemic might be very lucrative. Those therapies have competitors. You, of course, want to position your product so that it succeeds and the competitors don't. And lo and behold, at some point...

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Through means that I think those of us on the outside can't really intuit, you end up saying things about competing therapies that work better and much more safely than the ones you're selling that aren't true and do cause people to die in large numbers. But it's some kind of autopilot, at least part of it is.

• 56:32Lex Fridman?

  So there's a complicated coupling of the autopilot of institutions, companies, governments. And then there's also the geopolitical game theory thing going on where you want to keep secrets. It's the Chernobyl thing where if you messed up, there's a big incentive, I think, to hide the fact that you messed up. So how do we fix this? And what's more important to fix? The autopilot, which is the response that we often criticize about our institutions, especially the leaders in those institutions, Anthony Fauci and so on, some of the members

• 57:17Lex Fridman?

  of the scientific community. And the second part is the game with China of hiding the information in terms of on the fight between nations.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Well, in our live streams on Dark Horse, Heather and I have been talking from the beginning about the fact that although, yes, what happens began in China, it very much looks like a failure of the international scientific community. That's frightening, but it's also hopeful in the sense that actually, if we did the right thing now, we're not navigating a puzzle about Chinese responsibility. We're navigating a question of collective responsibility for something that has been terribly costly to all of us. So that's not a very happy process. But as you point out, what's at stake is, in large measure at the very least, the strong

• 58:13Speaker 01

  possibility this will happen again and that at some point it will be far worse. So just as a person that does not learn the lessons of their own errors, doesn't get smarter and they remain in danger, we collectively, humanity, has to say, well,

• 58:32Speaker 01

  There sure is a lot of evidence that suggests that this is a self-inflicted wound. When you have done something that has caused a massive self-inflicted wound, self-inflicted wound, it makes sense to dwell on it exactly to the point that you have learned the lesson that makes it very, very unlikely that something similar will happen again.

• 58:52Lex Fridman?

  I think this is a good place to kind of ask you to do almost like a thought experiment, or to steel man the argument against the lab leak hypothesis. So if you were to argue, you know, you said 95% chance that the virus leaked from a lab. There's a bunch of ways I think you can argue that even talking about it is bad for the world. So if I just to put something on the table is to say that, one, it would be racism versus

• 59:36Lex Fridman?

  Chinese people that talking about that it leaked from a lab, there's a kind of immediate kind of blame and it can spiral down into this idea that somehow the people are responsible for the virus and this kind of thing. Is it possible for you to come up with other steel man arguments against talking or against the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Well, so I think steel manning is a tool that is extremely valuable, but it's also possible to abuse it. I think that you can only steel man a good faith argument. And the problem is, we now know that we have not been engaged in opponents who were wielding good faith arguments because privately their emails reflect their own doubts. And what they were doing publicly was actually a punishment, a public punishment for those of us who spoke up with, I think, the purpose of... Either backing us down or more likely warning others not to engage in the same kind of behavior. And obviously, for people like you and me who regard science as our

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  likely best hope for navigating difficult waters, shutting down people who are using those tools honorably is itself dishonorable. So I don't really, I don't feel that it is, I don't feel that there's anything to steal man. And I also think that, you know, immediately at the point that the world suddenly, with no new evidence on the table, switched gears with respect to the lab leak, you know, at the point that Nicholas Wade had published his article, and suddenly the world was going to admit that this was at least a possibility, if not a likelihood, we got to see something of the rationalization process that had taken place inside the institutional world. And it very definitely involved the claim that

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  what was being avoided was the targeting of Chinese scientists. And my point would be, I don't want to see the targeting of anyone. I don't want to see racism of any kind. On the other hand, once you create license to lie in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake in knowing what happened, then it is inevitable that that process, that license to lie, will be used by the thing that captures institutions for its own purposes. So my sense is, it may be very unfortunate if the story of what

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  happened here can be used against Chinese people. That would be very unfortunate. And as I think I mentioned, Heather and I have taken great pains to point out that this doesn't look like a Chinese failure. It looks like a failure of the international scientific community. So I think it is important to broadcast that message along with the analysis of the evidence. But no matter what happened, we have a right to know. And I frankly do not take the institutional layer at its word, that its motivations are honorable, and that it was protecting, you know, good-hearted scientists at the expense of the world. That explanation does not add up.

• 1:02:50Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:03:03Lex Fridman?

  I think both you and I are probably on the same

• 1:03:08Lex Fridman?

  have the same sense that it's a slippery slope. Even if it's an effective mechanism in the short term, in the long term, it's going to be destructive. This happened with masks. This happened with with other things. If you look at just history pandemics.

• 1:03:26Lex Fridman?

  There is a there's an idea that panic is destructive amongst the populace. So you you want to construct a narrative, whether it's a lie or not, to minimize panic.

• 1:03:40Lex Fridman?

  But you're suggesting that almost in all cases, and I think that was the lesson from the the pandemic in the early 20th century, that lying creates distrust and distrust in the institutions is ultimately destructive. That's your sense that lying is not okay?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Well, okay. You know, there are obviously places where complete transparency is not a good idea. Right to the extent that you broadcast a technology that allows one individual to hold the world hostage. Right? Obviously, you've you've got a something to be navigated. But in general, I don't believe that the scientific system should be lying to us. In the case of this particular lie, the idea that the well being of Chinese scientists outweighs the well being of the world is preposterous.

• 1:04:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Right? As you as you point out, one thing that rests on this question is whether we continue to do this kind of research going forward. And the scientists in question, all of them, American, Chinese, all of them, were pushing the idea that the risk of a zoonotic spillover event causing a major and highly destructive pandemic was so great that we had to risk this. Now, if they themselves have caused it. And if they are wrong, as I believe they are about the likelihood of a major world pandemic spilling out of nature in the way that they wrote into their grant applications, then the danger is, you know, the call is coming from inside the house. And we have to look at that.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  And yes, whatever we have to do to protect scientists from retribution, we should do. But we cannot.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Protecting them by lying to the world and even worse by demonizing people like me, like Josh Rogan, like Yuri Dagan, the entire Drastic group on Twitter, by demonizing us for simply following the evidence is to set a terrible precedent. Right? You're demonizing people for using the scientific method to evaluate evidence that is available to us in the world. What a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson. Right? Thou shalt not use scientific tools? No, I'm sorry. Whatever your license to lie is, it doesn't extend to that.

• 1:06:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've seen the attacks on you, the pressure on you has a very important effect on thousands of world-class biologists, actually, at MIT, colleagues of mine, people I know. There's a slight pressure to not be allowed to, one, speak publicly and, two, actually think. Like, to even think about these ideas. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but just in the privacy of your own home, to read things, to think. It's many people, many world-class

• 1:06:54Lex Fridman?

  biologists that I know will just avoid looking at the data. There's not even that many people that are publicly opposing gain-of-function research. They're also like, it's not worth it. It's not worth the battle. And there's many people that kind of argue that those battles should be fought in private, in, you know, with colleagues, in the privacy of the scientific community, that the public is somehow not maybe intelligent enough to be able to deal with the complexities of this kind of discussion. I don't know. But the final result is, combined with the bullying of you and all the different pressures in

• 1:07:37Lex Fridman?

  the academic institutions, is that it's just people are self-censoring and silencing themselves and silencing the most important thing, which is the power of their brains. Like, these people are brilliant. And the fact that they're not utilizing their brain to come up with solutions outside of the conformist line of thinking is tragic.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Well, it is. I also think that we have to look at it and understand it for what it is. For one thing, it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism. Somehow, people's sense of what they're allowed to think about, talk about, discuss, is causing them to self-censor. And I can tell you, it's causing many of them to rationalize, which is even worse. They are blinding themselves to what they can see. But it is also the case, I believe, that what you're describing about what people said, and a great many people understood that the lab-leak hypothesis could not be taken off the table, but they didn't say so publicly. And I think that their discussions with each other about why they did not say what they

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  understood, that's what capture sounds like on the inside. I don't know exactly what force captured the institutions. I don't think anybody knows for sure out here in public. I don't even know that it wasn't just simply a process. But you have these institutions. They are behaving towards a kind of somatic obligation. They have lost sight of what they were built to accomplish. And on the inside, the way they avoid going back to their original mission is to say things to themselves like, "The public can't have this discussion. It can't be trusted with it. Yes, we need to be able to talk about this, but it has to be private." Whatever it is they say to themselves, that is what capture sounds like on the inside.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  It's an institutional rationalization mechanism, and it's very, very deadly. And at the point you go from lab-leak to repurposed drugs, you can see that it's very deadly in a very direct way.

• 1:09:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I see this in my field of, was, um...

• 1:09:49Lex Fridman?

  Things like autonomous weapon systems. People in AI do not talk about the use of AI in weapon systems. They they kind of avoid the idea that AIs use them in the military. It's kind of funny, there is this like kind of discomfort and they're like, they all hurry like, you know, like something scary happens and a bunch of sheep kind of like run away. That's what it looks like. And I don't even know what to do about it because and then I feel this natural pull. Every time I bring up autonomous weapon systems to go along with the sheep. There's a natural kind of pull towards that direction because it's like, what can I do as one person? Now, there's currently nothing destructive happening with autonomous weapon systems.

• 1:10:32Lex Fridman?

  So we're in like in the early days of this race that in 10, 20 years might become a real problem. Now, where the discussion we're having now, we're now facing the result of that in the space of viruses. Like for many years, avoiding the conversations here. I don't know what to do that in the early days. But I think we have to, I guess, create institutions where people can stand out. People can stand out and like basically be individual thinkers and break out into all kinds of spaces of ideas that allow us to think freely, freedom of thought. And maybe that requires a decentralization of institutions.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Well, years ago, I came up with a concept called cultivated insecurity. And the idea is, let's just take the example of the average Joe. Right? The average Joe has a job somewhere and their mortgage, their medical insurance, their retirement, their connection with the economy is to one degree or another dependent on their relationship with the employer.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  That means that there is a strong incentive, especially in any industry where it's not easy to move from one employer to the next. There's a strong incentive to stay in your employer's good graces. Right? So it creates a very top down dynamic, not only in terms of who gets to tell other people what to do, but it really comes down to who gets to tell other people how to think. So that's extremely dangerous. The way out of it is to cultivate security to the extent that somebody is in a position to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe for their family and their ability to earn, you will see that behavior a lot more.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  So I would argue that some of what you're talking about is just a simple predictable consequence of the concentration of the sources of well being and that this is a solvable problem.

• 1:12:42Lex Fridman?

  You got a chance to talk with Joe Rogan yesterday.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Yes, I did.

• 1:12:47Lex Fridman?

  And I just saw the episode was released and ivermectin is trending on Twitter. Joe told me it was an incredible conversation and I look forward to listening to it today. Many people have probably by the time this is released have already listened to it. I think it would be interesting to discuss a postmortem. How do you feel how that conversation went? And maybe broadly, how do you see the story as it's unfolding of ivermectin from the origins from before COVID-19 through 2020 to today?

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I very much enjoyed talking to Joe and I'm undescribably grateful that he would take the risk of such a discussion, that he would, as he described it, do an emergency podcast on the subject, which I think that was not an exaggeration. This needed to happen. For various reasons that he took us down the road of talking about the censorship campaign against ivermectin, which I find utterly shocking, and talking about the drug itself. And I should say, we talked, we had Pierre Corey available. He came on the podcast as well. He is, of course, the face of the FLCCC, the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Alliance. These are doctors who have innovated ways of treating COVID patients, and they happened on ivermectin and have been using it. And I hesitate to use the word advocating for it, because that's not really the role of doctors or scientists. But they are advocating for it in the sense that there is this pressure not to talk about its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into.

• 1:14:35Lex Fridman?

  So maybe you step back and say, what is ivermectin? And how much studies have been done to show its effectiveness?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  So ivermectin is an interesting drug. It was discovered in the 70s by a Japanese scientist named Satoshi Omura. And he found it in soil near a Japanese golf course. So I would just point out in passing that if we were to stop self silencing over the possibility that Asians will be demonized over the possible lab leak in Wuhan, and to recognize that actually the natural course of the story has a likely lab leak in China, it has a unlikely hero in Japan. The story is naturally not a simple one. But in any case, Omura discovered this

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  molecule. He sent it to a friend who was at Merck, a scientist named Campbell. They won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the ivermectin molecule in 2015.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Its initial use was in treating parasitic infections. It's very effective in treating the worm that causes river blindness, the pathogen that causes elephantitis, scabies. It's a very effective anti-parasite drug. It's extremely safe. It's on the WHO's list of essential medications. It's safe for children. It has been administered something like four billion times in the last four decades. It has been given away in the millions of doses by Merck in Africa. People have been on it for long periods of time. And in fact, one of the reasons that Africa may have had less severe impacts from COVID-19

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  is that ivermectin is widely used there to prevent parasites. And the drug appears to have a long lasting impact. So it's an interesting molecule. It was discovered some time ago, apparently, that it has antiviral properties. And so it was tested early in the COVID-19 pandemic to see if it might work to treat humans with COVID. It turned out to have very promising evidence that it did treat humans. It was tested in tissues. It was tested at a very high dosage, which confuses people. They think that those of us who believe that ivermectin might be useful in confronting this disease are advocating those high doses, which is not the case.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  But in any case, there have been quite a number of studies. A wonderful meta-analysis was finally released. We had seen it in pre-print version, but it was finally peer-reviewed and published this last week. It reveals that the drug, as clinicians have been telling us, those who have been using it, it's highly effective at treating people with the disease, especially if you get to them early. And it showed an 86% effectiveness as a prophylactic to prevent people from contracting COVID. And that number, 86%, is high enough to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction if we wished to deploy it.

• 1:17:46Lex Fridman?

  First of all, the meta-analysis, is this the ivermectin for COVID-19 real-time meta-analysis of 60 studies? Or there's a bunch of meta-analysis there? Because I was really impressed by the real-time meta-analysis that keeps getting updated. I don't know if it's the same.

• 1:18:03Speaker 01

  The one at IVM meta.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Dot com.

• 1:18:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, I saw it. It's C19ivermectin.com.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Um, no, this is not that meta-analysis. So that is, as you say, a living meta-analysis where you can watch as evidence.

• 1:18:18Lex Fridman?

  Which is super cool, by the way.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  It's really cool. And they've got some really nice graphics that allow you to understand, well, what is the evidence? You know, it's concentrated around this level of effectiveness, et cetera. So anyway, it's a great site, well worth paying attention to. No, this is a meta-analysis. Um, I don't know any of the authors, but one. Second author is Tess Laurie of The Bird Group. Bird being a, a group of analysts and doctors in Britain that is playing a role similar to the F L triple C here in the U.S. Um, so anyway, this is a meta-analysis that, that, uh, that Tess Laurie and others did of all of the available evidence. And, um, it's quite compelling. People, if people can look for

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  it on my Twitter, I will, I will put it up and people can find it there.

• 1:19:05Lex Fridman?

  So what about dose here that in terms of safety? Uh, what do we understand about the, the kind of dose required to, to have that level of effectiveness? And what do we understand about the safety of that kind of dose?

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  So let me just say, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a biologist. Uh, I'm on ivermectin, uh, in lieu of vaccination. In terms of dosage, there is one reason for concern, which is that the most effective dose for prophylaxis involves something like weekly administration. And that that is because that is not a historical pattern of use for the drug. Um, it is possible that there is some long-term implication of being on it for, uh, being on it weekly for a long period of time. There's not a strong indication of that. The safety signal that we have, uh, over people using the drug over many years and using it in high doses. In fact, Dr. Corey told me yesterday, um, that there are cases in which people have

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  made, uh, calculation errors and taken a massive overdose of the drug and had no ill effect. So anyway, there's lots of reasons to think the drug is comparatively safe, but no drug is perfectly safe. And I do worry about the long-term implications of taking it. I also think it's very likely.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Because the drug is administered in a dose, something like, let's say, 15 milligrams for somebody my size, once a week after you've gone through the initial, the initial double dose that you take 48 hours apart. It is apparent that if the amount of drug in your system is sufficient to be protective at the end of the week, then it was probably far too high at the beginning of the week. So there's a question about whether or not you could flatten out the intake so that the amount of ivermectin goes down, but the protection remains. I have little doubt that that would be discovered if we looked for it.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  But that said, it does seem to be quite safe, highly effective at preventing COVID. The 86% number is plenty high enough for us to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction in light of its R0 number of slightly more than two. And so why we are not using it is a bit of a mystery.

• 1:21:26Lex Fridman?

  So even if everything you said now turns out to be not correct, it is nevertheless obvious that it's sufficiently promising, and it always has been, in order to merit rigorous scientific exploration, investigation, doing a lot of studies, and certainly not censoring the science or the discussion of it. So before we talk about the various vaccines for COVID-19, I'd like to talk to you about censorship. Given everything you're saying, why did YouTube and other places censor discussion of ivermectin?

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Well, there's a question about why they say they did it, and there's a question about why they actually did it. Now, it is worth mentioning that YouTube is part of a consortium. It is partnered with Twitter, Facebook, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Washington Post, some other notable organizations. And that this group has appointed itself the arbiter of truth. In effect, they have decided to control discussion ostensibly to prevent the distribution of misinformation. Now, how have they chosen to do that?

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  In this case, they have chosen to simply utilize the recommendations of the WHO and the CDC and apply them as if they are synonymous with scientific truth. Problem, even at their best, the WHO and CDC are not scientific entities. They are entities that are about public health. And public health has this, whether it's right or not, and I believe I disagree with it, but it has this self-assigned right to lie that comes from the fact that there is game theory that works against, for example, a successful vaccination campaign.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  That if everybody else takes a vaccine, and therefore the herd becomes immune through vaccination, and you decide not to take a vaccine, then you benefit from the immunity of the herd without having taken the risk. So, people who do best are the people who opt out. That's a hazard. And the WHO and CDC as public health entities effectively oversimplify stories in order that that game theory does not cause a predictable tragedy of the commons. With that said, once that right to lie exists... Then it finds out, it turns out to serve the interests of, for example, pharmaceutical companies, which have emergency use authorizations that require that there not

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  be a safe and effective treatment and have immunity from liability for harms caused by their product. So that's a recipe for disaster, right? You don't need to be a sophisticated thinker about complex systems to see the hazard of immunizing a company from the harm of its own product at the same time that that product can only exist in the market if some other product that works better somehow fails to be noticed. So somehow YouTube is doing the bidding of Merck and others, whether it knows that that's what it's doing, I have no idea. I think this may be another case of an autopilot that thinks it's doing the right thing because

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  it's parroting the corrupt wisdom of the WHO and the CDC. But the WHO and the CDC have been wrong again and again in this pandemic. And the irony here is that with YouTube coming after me, well, my channel has been right where the WHO and CDC have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic. So how is it that YouTube is censoring us because the WHO and CDC disagree with us when in fact, in past disagreements, we've been right and they've been wrong?

• 1:25:29Lex Fridman?

  There's so much to talk about here. So I've heard this many times, actually, on the inside of YouTube and with colleagues that I've talked about, talked with, is they kind of, in a very casual way, say their job is simply to slow or prevent the spread of misinformation. And they say like, that's an easy thing to do. Like, to know what is true or not is an easy thing to do. And so from the YouTube perspective, I think they

• 1:26:07Lex Fridman?

  basically outsource of the task of knowing what is true or not to public institutions that on a basic Google search claim to be the arbiters of truth.

• 1:26:23Lex Fridman?

  So if you were YouTube, who are exceptionally profitable and exceptionally powerful in terms of controlling what people get to see or not, what would you do? Would you take a stand, a public stand against the WHO, CDC? Or would you instead say, you know what? Let's open the dam and let any video on anything fly? What do you do here? If you're, say you were put, if Bret Weinstein was put in charge of YouTube for a month in this most critical of times, where YouTube actually has incredible amounts of power

• 1:27:06Lex Fridman?

  to educate the populace, to give power of knowledge to the populace such that they can reform institutions, what would you do? How would you run YouTube?

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Well, unfortunately, or fortunately, this is actually quite simple. The founders, the American founders, settled on a counterintuitive formulation that people should be free to say anything. They should be free from the government blocking them from doing so. They did not imagine that in formulating that right, that most of what was said would be of high quality, nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things. What they correctly reasoned was that the benefit of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost, which everyone understands to be substantial.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  What I would say is they could not have anticipated the impact, the centrality of platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. If they had, they would not have limited the First Amendment as they did. They clearly understood that the power of the federal government was so great that it needed to be limited by granting explicitly the right of citizens to say anything.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook may be more powerful in this moment than the federal government of their worst nightmares could have been. The power that these entities have to control thought and to shift civilization is so great that we need to have those same protections. It doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said, but it means that nothing has changed about the cost-benefit analysis of building the right to censor. So if I were running YouTube, the limit of what should be allowed is the limit of the law, right? If what you are doing is legal, then it should not be YouTube's place to limit what gets said or who gets to hear it. That is between speakers and audience. Will harm come from that? Of course it will.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  But will net harm come from it? No, I don't believe it will. I believe that allowing everything to be said does allow a process in which better ideas do come to the fore and win out.

• 1:29:21Lex Fridman?

  So you believe that in the end, when there's complete freedom to share ideas, that truth will win out? So what I've noticed, just as a brief side comment, that certain things become viral irregardless of their truth. I've noticed that things that are dramatic and/or funny, like things that become memes are not, don't have to be grounded in truth. And so that, what worries me there is that we basically maximize for drama versus maximize for truth in a system where everything is free. And that's worrying in a time of emergency.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Well, yes, it's all worrying in time of emergency, to be sure. But I want you to notice that what you've happened on is actually an analog for a much deeper and older problem. Human beings are the, we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. And there's a reason for that, right? It's where our flexibility comes from. We have effectively, we are robots in which the, a large fraction of the cognitive capacity has been, or of the behavioral capacity, has been offloaded to the software layer, which gets written and rewritten over evolutionary time.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  That means effectively that much of what we are, in fact, the important part of what we are, is housed in the in the cultural layer and the conscious layer and not in the hardware, hard coding layer. That layer is prone to make errors, right? And anybody who's watched a child grow up knows that children make absurd errors all the time, right? That's part of the process, as we were discussing earlier. It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term does not

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. And you have to keep that in mind. It's not like the genome, right? Everything is happening at a much higher rate. Things are being created, they're being destroyed. And I can't say that, you know, I mean, obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like, hey, freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies? And I believe that it does.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:18Lex Fridman?

  I believe so as well. The thing is, in the short term, freedom of speech, absolute freedom of speech can be quite destructive. But you nevertheless have to hold on to that because in the long term, I think you and I, I guess, are optimistic in the sense that good ideas will win out.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  I would also point out that there's something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring, which is the majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  That's automatic. But the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide, hey, the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid of it. Right? Hey, that's a strong win. We're getting rid of 99% garbage for 1% something or other. And the point is, yeah, but that 1% something or other is the key. You're throwing out the key. And so that's what YouTube is doing. Frankly, I think at the point that it started censoring my channel, you know, in the immediate aftermath of this major reversal of a lab leak, it should have looked at itself and said, well, what the hell are we doing? Who are we censoring? We're censoring somebody who was just right, right?

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  In a conflict with the very same people on whose behalf we are now censoring. Right? That should have caused them to wake up.

• 1:33:59Lex Fridman?

  So you said one approach, if you're on YouTube, is just basically let all videos go that do not violate the law.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Well, I should fix that. Okay? I believe that that is the basic principle. Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, doxing, these other things. So I agree, there's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know. But, you know, what I'm talking about is, yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad. And hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out.

• 1:34:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's an interesting line between, you know, like, ideas, like, the earth is flat, which I believe you should not censor. And then, like, you start to encroach on, like, personal attacks. So not, you know, doxing, yes, but like, not even getting to that. Like, there's a certain point where it's like, that's no longer ideas, that's more...

• 1:35:05Lex Fridman?

  That's somehow not productive, even if it's it feels like believing the earth is flat is somehow productive. Because maybe there's tiny percent chance it is. You know, like it just feels like personal attacks. It doesn't, well, you know, it's I'm torn on this because there's assholes in this world, there's fraudulent people in this world. So sometimes personal attacks are useful to reveal that. But there's a line you can cross. Like there's a comedy where people make fun of others. I think that's amazing, that's very powerful, that's very useful, even if it's painful. But then there's like, once it gets to be.

• 1:35:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a certain line, it's a gray area where you cross where it's no longer in any possible world productive. And that's a really weird gray area for YouTube to operate in. And it feels like should be a crowdsourced thing. Where people vote on it, but then again, do you trust the majority to vote on what is crossing the line and not? I mean, this is where this is really interesting. On this particular, like the scientific aspect of this. Do you think YouTube should take more of a stance? Not censoring, but

• 1:36:24Lex Fridman?

  to actually have scientists within YouTube having these kinds of discussions? And then be able to almost speak out in a transparent way. This is what we're going to let this video stand. But here's all these other opinions. Almost like take a more active role in its recommendation system? In trying to present a full picture to you. Right now, they're not, and they're the recommender systems are not human fine tuned. They're all based on how you click and there's this clustering algorithms. They're not taking an active role on giving you the full spectrum of ideas in the space of science. They just censor or not?

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Well, at the moment, it's going to be pretty hard to compel me that these people should be trusted with any sort of curation or comment on matters of evidence, because they have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it well. You could make such an argument, and I guess I'm open to the idea of institutions that would look something like YouTube that would be capable of offering something valuable. I mean, and you know, even just the fact of them literally curating things and putting some videos next to others, you know, implies something. So, yeah, there's a question to be answered, but at the moment, no. At the

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  moment, what it is doing is quite literally putting not only individual humans in tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion of useful tools and making tools that are more hazardous than has been acknowledged seem safe, right? But it is also placing humanity in danger of a permanent relationship with this pathogen. I cannot emphasize enough how expensive that is. It's effectively incalculable. If the relationship becomes permanent, the number of people who will ultimately suffer and die from it is indefinitely large.

• 1:38:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's, currently, the algorithm is very rabbit hole driven, meaning if you, if you click on the Flat Earth videos, that's all you're going to be presented with, and you're not going to be nicely presented with arguments against the Flat Earth. And the flip side of that, if you watch like quantum mechanics videos, or no, general relativity videos, it's very rare you're going to get in a recommendation, have you considered the Earth is flat? And I think you should have both. Same with vaccine. Videos that present the power and the incredible, like, biology, genetics, virology about the vaccine, you're rarely going to get videos from

• 1:39:02Lex Fridman?

  Well-respected scientific minds presenting possible dangers of the vaccine. And the vice versa is true as well, which is if you're looking at the dangers of the vaccine on YouTube, you're not going to get the highest quality of videos recommended to you. And I'm not talking about like manually inserted CDC videos that are like the most untrustworthy things you can possibly watch about how everybody should take the vaccine. It's the safest thing ever. No, it's about incredible, again, MIT colleagues of mine, incredible biologists, virologists that talk about the details of how the mRNA vaccines work and all those kinds of things. I think, maybe this is me with the AI hat on, is I think the algorithm can fix a lot

• 1:39:47Lex Fridman?

  of this. And YouTube should build better algorithms and trust that to, and a couple of complete freedom of speech, to expand the, what people are able to think about, present always varied views, not balanced in some artificial way, hardcoded way, but balanced in a way that's crowdsourced. I think that's an algorithm problem that can be solved because then you can delegate it to the algorithm as opposed to this hard code censorship of basically creating artificial boundaries on what can and can't be discussed. Instead, creating a full spectrum of exploration that can be done and trusting the intelligence

• 1:40:32Lex Fridman?

  of people to do the exploration.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot there. I would say we have to keep in mind that we're talking about a publicly held company with shareholders and obligations to them and that that may make it impossible. And I remember many years ago, back in the early days of Google.

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  I remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search. And it used to be that the that Google, if you searched, came up with the same thing for everyone. And then it got personalized. And for a while, it was possible to turn off the personalization, which was still not great. Because if everybody else is looking at a personalized search and you can tune into one that isn't personalized, what are, you know, that doesn't tell you why the world is sounding the way it is. But nonetheless, it was at least an option. And then that vanished. And the problem is, I think this is literally deranging us. That in effect, I mean, what you're describing is unthinkable.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  It is unthinkable that in the face of a campaign to vaccinate people in order to reach herd immunity, that YouTube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines. When this is, you know, how hazardous the vaccines are is an unsettled question.

• 1:41:54Lex Fridman?

  Why is it unthinkable? That doesn't make any sense. For what, from a company perspective, if intelligent people in large amounts are open minded and are thinking through the hazards and the benefits of a vaccine, a company should should find the best videos to present what people are thinking about.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Well, let's come up with a hypothetical. Okay, let's come up with a very deadly disease for which there's a vaccine that is very safe, though not perfectly safe. And we are then faced with YouTube trying to figure out what to do for somebody searching on vaccine safety. Suppose it is necessary in order to drive the pathogen to extinction, something like smallpox, that people get on board with the vaccine.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  But there's a tiny fringe of people who thinks that the vaccine is a mind control agent.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  All right. So should YouTube direct people to the only claims against this vaccine, which is that it's a mind control agent, when in fact, the vaccine is very safe, whatever that means. If that were the actual configuration of the puzzle, then YouTube would be doing active harm pointing you to this other video potentially. Now, yes, I would love to live in a world where people are up to the challenge of sorting that out. But my basic point would be, if it's an evidentiary question, and there is essentially no evidence that the vaccine is a mind control agent, and there's plenty of evidence that

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  the vaccine is safe, then, well, you look for this video, we're going to give you this one, puts it on a par, right? So for the mind that's tracking how much thought is there behind it's safe versus how much thought is there behind it's a mind control agent, will result in artificially elevating this. Now, in the current case, what we've seen is not this at all. We have seen evidence obscured in order to create a false story about safety. And we saw the inverse with ivermectin. We saw a campaign to portray the drug as more dangerous and less effective than the evidence clearly suggested it was. So we're not talking about a comparable thing,

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  but I guess my point is the algorithmic solution that you point to creates a problem of its own, which is that it means that the way to get exposure is to generate something fringy. If you're the only thing on some fringe, then suddenly YouTube would be recommending those things. And that's, that's obviously a gamable system at best.

• 1:44:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but the solution to that, I know you're, you're creating a thought experiment, maybe playing a little bit of a devil's advocate. I think the solution to that is not to limit the algorithm in the case of the super deadly virus. It's for the scientists to step up and become better communicators, more charismatic, fight the battle of ideas, sort of create better videos. You know, like if the virus is truly deadly, you have a lot more ammunition, a lot more data, a lot more material to work with in terms of communicating with the public. So be better at communicating and stop being, you have to start trusting the intelligence of people and also being transparent and playing the game of the internet, which is

• 1:45:27Lex Fridman?

  like, what is the internet hungry for, I believe? Authenticity? Stop looking like you're full of shit. The scientific community, if there's any flaw that I currently see, especially the people that are in public office, like Anthony Fauci, they look like they're full of shit. And I know they're brilliant. Why don't they look more authentic? So they're losing that game. And I think a lot of people observing this entire system now, younger scientists are seeing this and saying, okay, if I want to continue being a scientist in the public eye, and I want to be effective at my job, I'm gonna have to be a lot more authentic. So they're learning the lesson.

• 1:46:09Lex Fridman?

  This evolutionary system is working. So there's just a younger generation of minds coming up that I think will do a much better job in this battle of ideas that when the much more dangerous virus comes along, they'll be able to be better communicators. At least that's the hope. Using the algorithm to control that is, I feel like is a big problem. So you're going to have the same problem with a deadly virus as with the current virus if you let YouTube draw hard lines by the PR and the marketing people versus the broad community of scientists.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  Well, in some sense, you're suggesting something that's close kin to what I was saying about, you know, freedom of expression ultimately provides an advantage to better ideas. So I'm in agreement broadly speaking. But I would also say there's probably some sort of, you know, let's imagine the world that you propose where YouTube shows you the alternative point of view.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  That has the problem that I suggest, but one thing you could do is you could give us the tools to understand what we're looking at, right? You could give us, so first of all, there's something, I think, myopic, solipsistic, narcissistic about an algorithm that serves shareholders by showing you what you want to see rather than what you need to know, right? That's the distinction is flattering you, you know, playing to your blind spot is something that algorithm will figure out, but it's not healthy for us all to have Google playing to our blind spot. It's very, very dangerous. So what I really want is analytics that allow me, or maybe options and analytics.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  The options should allow me to see what alternative perspectives are being explored, right? So here's the thing I'm searching and it leads me down this road, right? Let's, let's say it's ivermectin, okay? I find all of this evidence that ivermectin works. I find all of these discussions and people talk about various protocols and this and that. And then I could say, all right, what is the other side? And I could see who is searching, not as individuals, but what demographics are searching alternatives? And maybe you could even combine it with something Reddit like where effectively, let's say that there was a position that, I don't know, that, that a vaccine is a mind control

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  device and you could have a steel man this argument, competition effectively. And the better answers that steel manning as well as possible would rise to the top. And so you could read the top three or four explanations about why this really credibly is a mind control product. And you can say, well, that doesn't really add up. I can check these three things myself and they can't possibly be right, right? And you could dismiss it. And then as an argument that was credible, let's say, plate tectonics before that was an accepted concept, you'd say, wait a minute. There is evidence for plate tectonic, as crazy as it sounds, that the continents are floating around on liquid. Actually, that's not so implausible. You know, we've got these subduction

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  zones. We've got geology that is compatible. We've got puzzle piece continents that seem to fit together. Wow, that's a surprising amount of evidence for that position. So I'm gonna file some Bayesian probability with it that's updated for the fact that actually the steel man argument's better than I was expecting. Right? So I could imagine something like that where A, I would love the search to be indifferent to who's searching. Right? The solipsistic thing is too dangerous. So the search could be general. So we would all get a sense for what everybody else was seeing too. And then some layer that didn't have anything to do with what YouTube points you to or not, but allowed you to see, you

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  know, the general pattern of adherence to searching for information. And again, a layer in which those things could be defended. So you could hear what a good argument sounded like, rather than just hear a caricatured argument.

• 1:50:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and also reward people, creators, that have demonstrated like a track record of open mindedness and correctness, correctness, as much as it can be measured over a long term. And sort of, I mean, a lot of this maps to incentivizing good long term behavior, not immediate kind of dopamine rush, kind of signals. I think ultimately, the algorithm on the individual level should optimize for personal growth, long term happiness, just

• 1:50:53Lex Fridman?

  growth intellectually, growth in terms of lifestyle, personally, and so on, as opposed to immediate. I think that's going to build a better society, not even just like truth, because I think truth is a complicated thing. It's more just you growing as a person, exploring the space of ideas, changing your mind often, increasing the level to which you're open minded, the knowledge base you're operating from. The willingness to empathize with others, all those kinds of things the algorithm should optimize for, like creating a better human at the individual level, that you're all, I think that's a great business model because the person that's using this tool will then

• 1:51:35Lex Fridman?

  be happier with themselves for having used it and will be a lifelong quote unquote customer. I think it's a great business model to make a happy, open-minded, knowledgeable, better human being.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  It's a terrible business model under the current system. What you want is to build the system in which it is a great business model.

• 1:51:56Lex Fridman?

  Why is it a terrible model?

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  Because it will be decimated by those who play to the short term.

• 1:52:03Lex Fridman?

  I don't think so.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  I mean, I think we're living it. We're living it.

• 1:52:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, because if you have the alternative that presents itself, it points out the emperor has no clothes. I mean, it points out that YouTube is operating in this way, Twitter is operating in this way, Facebook is operating in this way.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  How long term would you like the wisdom to prove out?

• 1:52:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, even a week is better when it's currently happening.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  Right, but the problem is, you know, if a week loses out to an hour, right? And

• 1:52:37Lex Fridman?

  I don't think it loses out. It loses out in the short term.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  That's my point.

• 1:52:40Lex Fridman?

  If you're a great communicator and you basically say, look, here's the metrics, and a lot of it is like how people actually feel, like this is what people experience with social media. They look back at the previous month and say, I felt shitty on a lot of days because of social media.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:00Lex Fridman?

  Like, if you look back at the previous few weeks and say, wow, I'm a better person because of that month happened, that's, they immediately choose the product that's going to lead to that. That's what love for products looks like. If you, if you love, like a lot of people love their Tesla car, like that's, or iPhone, or like beautiful design, that's what love looks like. You look back, I'm a better person for having used this thing.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Well, you gotta ask yourself the question, though. If this is such a great business model, why isn't it evolving?

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Why don't we see it?

• 1:53:34Lex Fridman?

  Honestly, it's competence. It's like, people are just, it's not, it's not easy to build new, it's not easy to build products, tools, systems on new ideas. It's kind of a new idea. We've gone through this. Everything we're seeing now comes from the ideas of the initial birth of the internet. There just needs to be new sets of tools that are incentivizing long-term personal growth and happiness. That's it.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  Right, but, but what we have is a market that doesn't favor this. Right? I mean, for one thing, you know, we had an alternative to Facebook, right? That looked, you know, you owned your own data. It wasn't exploitative. And Facebook bought a huge interest in it and it died. I mean, who, who do you know who's on diaspora?

• 1:54:25Lex Fridman?

  The execution there was not good.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Right, but it could have gotten better. Right?

• 1:54:30Lex Fridman?

  I don't think that the argument that, why hasn't somebody done it? A good argument for, it's not going to completely destroy all of Twitter and Facebook when somebody does it. Or Twitter will catch up and pivot to, to the algorithm.

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  This is not what, this is not what I'm saying. There's obviously great ideas that remain unexplored because nobody has gotten to the foothill that would allow you to explore them. That's true, but you know, an internet that was non-predatory is an obvious idea. And many of us know that we want it. And many of us have seen prototypes of it and we don't move because there's no audience there. So the network effects cause you to stay with the predatory internet. But let me just, I wasn't kidding about build the system in which your idea is a great business plan. So in our upcoming book, Heather and I, in our last chapter, explore something called the Fourth Frontier. And Fourth Frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version of civilization, which we

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  freely admit, we can't tell you very much about. It's something that would have to be, we would have to prototype our way there. We would have to effectively navigate our way there. But the result would be very much like what you're describing. It would be something that effectively liberates humans meaningfully. And most importantly, it has to feel like growth without depending on growth. In other words, human beings are creatures that, like every other creature, Is effectively looking for growth, right? We are looking for underexploited or unexploited opportunities. And when we find them, our ancestors, for example, if they happen into a new valley that was unexplored by people, their population would grow until it hit carrying capacity.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  So there would be this great feeling of there's abundance until you hit carrying capacity, which is inevitable, and then zero sum dynamics would set in. So in order for human beings to flourish long term, the way to get there is to satisfy the desire for growth without hooking it to actual growth, which only moves in fits and starts. And this is actually, I believe, the key to avoiding these spasms of human tragedy when in the absence of growth, people do something that causes their population to experience growth, which is they go and make war on or commit genocide against some other population, which is something we obviously have to stop.

• 1:56:53Lex Fridman?

  By the way, this is a hunter gatherer's guide to the 21st century, co-authored

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:56:59Lex Fridman?

  With your wife Heather, being released in September. I believe you said you're going to do a little bit of a preview videos on each chapter leading up to the release. So I'm looking forward to the last chapter, as well as all the previous ones. I have a few questions on that. So you generally have faith, to clarify, that technology could be the thing that empowers this kind of future?

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  Well, if you just let technology evolve, it's going to be our undoing, right? One of the things that I fault my libertarian friends for is this faith that the market is going to find solutions without destroying us. And my sense is, I'm a very strong believer in markets, right? I believe in their power even above some market fundamentalists. But what I don't believe is that they should be allowed to plot our course, right? Markets are very good at figuring out how to do things. They are not good at all about figuring out what we should do, right? What we should want. We have to tell markets what we want, and then they can tell us how to do it best.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  And if we adopted that kind of pro-market, but in a context where it's not steering, where human well-being is actually the driver. We can do remarkable things and the technology that emerges would naturally be enhancing of human well-being. Perfectly so, no, but overwhelmingly so. But at the moment, markets are finding our every defect of character and exploiting them and making huge profits and making us worse to each other in the process.

• 1:58:38Lex Fridman?

  Before we leave COVID-19, let me ask you about a very difficult topic, which is the vaccines. So I took the Pfizer vaccine, the two shots. You did not. You have been taking ivermectin.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:59:03Lex Fridman?

  So one of the arguments against the discussion of ivermectin is that it prevents people from being fully willing to get the vaccine. How would you compare ivermectin and the vaccine for COVID-19?

• 1:59:20Speaker 01

  All right. That's a good question. I would say, first of all, there are some hazards with the vaccine that people need to be aware of. There are some things that we cannot rule out and for which there is some evidence. The two that I think people should be tracking is the possibility, some would say a likelihood, that a vaccine of this nature, that is to say, very narrowly focused on a single antigen, is an evolutionary pressure that will drive the emergence of variants that will escape the protection that comes from the vaccine. So this is a hazard.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  It is a particular hazard in light of the fact that these vaccines have a substantial number of breakthrough cases. So one danger is that a person who has been vaccinated will shed viruses that are specifically less visible or invisible to the immunity created by the vaccines. So we may be creating the next pandemic by applying the pressure of vaccines at a point that it doesn't make sense to. The other danger has to do with something called antibody-dependent enhancement, which is something that we see in certain diseases like dengue fever. You may know that dengue, one gets a case and then their second case is much more devastating.

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  So break-bone fever is when you get your second case of dengue and dengue effectively utilizes the immune response that is produced by prior exposure to attack the body in ways that it is incapable of doing before exposure. So this is apparently, this pattern has apparently blocked past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses. Whether it will happen here or not, it is still too early to say. But before we even get to the question of harm done to individuals by these vaccines, we have to ask about what the overall impact is going to be. And it's not clear in the way people think it is that if we vaccinate enough people, the pandemic will end. It could be that we vaccinate people and make the pandemic worse.

• 2:01:29Speaker 01

  And while nobody can say for sure that that's where we're headed, it is at least something to be aware of.

• 2:01:34Lex Fridman?

  So don't vaccines usually create that kind of evolutionary pressure to create deadlier, different strains of the virus? Isn't, so is there something particular with these mRNA vaccines that's uniquely dangerous in this regard?

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's not even just the mRNA vaccines. The mRNA vaccines and the adeno vector DNA vaccine all share the same vulnerability, which is they are very narrowly focused on one subunit of the spike protein. So that is a very concentrated evolutionary signal. We are also deploying it in mid-pandemic and it takes time for immunity to develop. So part of the problem here, if you inoculated a population before encounter with a pathogen, then there might be substantially enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from happening. But in this case... We are inoculating people as they are encountering those who are sick with the disease.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  And what that means is the disease is now faced with a lot of opportunities to effectively evolutionarily practice escape strategies. So, one thing is the timing, the other thing is the narrow focus. Now, in a traditional vaccine, you would typically not have one antigen, right? You would have basically a virus full of antigens and the immune system would therefore produce a broader response. So, that is the case for people who have had COVID, right? They have an immunity that is broader because it wasn't so focused on one part of the spike protein. So, anyway, there is something unique here. So, these platforms create that special hazard. They also have components that we haven't used before in people.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  So, for example, the lipid nanoparticles that coat the RNAs are distributing themselves around the body in a way that will have unknown consequences. So, anyway, there's reason for concern.

• 2:03:30Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible for you to steelman the argument that everybody should get vaccinated?

• 2:03:37Speaker 01

  Of course. The argument that everybody should get vaccinated is that nothing is perfectly safe. Phase three trials showed good safety for the vaccines. Now, that may or may not be actually true, but what we saw suggested high degree of efficacy and a high degree of safety for the vaccines, that inoculating people quickly and therefore dropping the landscape of available victims for the pathogen to a very low number so that herd immunity drives it to extinction, requires us all to take our share of the

• 2:04:14Speaker 01

  risk, and that because driving it to extinction should be our highest priority, that really people shouldn't think too much about the various nuances because overwhelmingly fewer people will die if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine than will die from COVID if they're not vaccinated.

• 2:04:35Lex Fridman?

  And with the vaccine as it currently is being deployed, that is quite a likely scenario that...

• 2:04:45Lex Fridman?

  Everything, you know, the virus will fade away. In the following sense, that the probability that a more dangerous strain will be created is non-zero, but it's not 50%. It's something smaller. And so the most likely, well, I don't know, maybe you disagree with that, but the scenario we're most likely to see now that the vaccine is here is that the virus, the effects of the virus will fade away.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  First of all, I don't believe that the probability of creating a worse pandemic is low enough to discount. I think the probability is fairly high, and frankly, we are seeing a wave of variants that we will have to do a careful analysis to figure out what exactly that has to do with campaigns of vaccination, where they have been, where they haven't been, where the variants emerged from. But I believe that what we are seeing is a disturbing pattern that reflects that those who were advising caution may well have been right.

• 2:05:42Lex Fridman?

  The data here, by the way, and a small tangent, is terrible.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Terrible. Right. And why is it terrible is another question, right?

• 2:05:49Lex Fridman?

  This is where I start getting angry.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:52Lex Fridman?

  It's like, there's an obvious opportunity for exceptionally good data, for exceptionally rigorous, like even the self, like the website for self-reporting side effects for, not side effects, but negative effects.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Adverse events.

• 2:06:05Lex Fridman?

  Adverse events, sorry, for the vaccine. Like, there's many things I could say from both a study perspective, but mostly, let me just put on my hat of like HTML and like web design. Like, it's like the worst website. It makes it so unpleasant to report. It makes it so unclear what you're reporting. If somebody actually has serious effects, like if you have very mild effects, what are the incentives for you to even use that crappy website with many pages and forms that don't make any sense? If you have adverse effects, what are the incentives for you to use that website? What is the trust that you have that this information will be used well? All those kinds of things.

• 2:06:48Lex Fridman?

  And the data about who's getting vaccinated, anonymized data about who's getting vaccinated, where, when, with what vaccine, coupled with the adverse effects, all of that we should be collecting. Instead, we're completely not. And we're doing it in a crappy way and using that crappy data to make conclusions that you then twist, you're basically collecting in a way that can...

• 2:07:14Lex Fridman?

  Arrive at whatever conclusions you want. And the data is being collected by the institutions, by governments. And so therefore, it's obviously they're going to try to construct any kind of narratives they want based on this crappy data. It reminds me of much of psychology, the field that I love, but is flawed in many fundamental ways. So rant over, but coupled with the dangers that you're speaking to, we don't have even the data to to understand the dangers.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm going to pick up on your rant and say, we estimates of the degree of underreporting in VAERS are that it is 10% of the real to 100%.

• 2:07:56Lex Fridman?

  And that's the system for reporting.

• 2:07:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the VAERS system is the is the system for reporting adverse events. So in the US, we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination. That is an undercount almost certainly, and by a large factor. We don't know how large. I've seen estimates 25,000 dead in the US alone. Now, you can make the argument that, OK, that's a large number, but the necessity of immunizing the population to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction is such that it's an acceptable number. But I would point out that that actually does not make any sense.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  And the reason it doesn't make any sense is, actually, there's several reasons. One, if that was really your point, that, yes, many, many people are going to die, but many more will die if we don't do this. Were that your approach, you would not be inoculating people who had had COVID-19, which is a large population. There is no reason to expose those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them is greater. So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face a risk of death if this was really about an acceptable number of deaths arising out of this, the set of vaccines. I would also point out, there's something incredibly bizarre, and I would, I struggle

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects, because they are going to live longer, and because this is earlier in their development, therefore, it impacts systems that are still forming. They tolerate COVID well, and so the benefit to them is very small. And so the only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think, and therefore, they may be integral to the way the virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that we are inoculating children, and there has been some revision in the last day or two about the recommendation on this

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  because of the adverse events that have shown up in children, but to the extent that we were vaccinating children, we were doing it to protect old infirm people who are the most likely to succumb to COVID-19. What society puts children in danger, robs children of life to save old infirm people? That's upside down. So, there's something about the way we are going about vaccinating, who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending don't exist, that suggests that to some set of people, vaccinating people is a good in and of itself, that that is the objective of the exercise, not herd immunity. And the

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  last thing, and I'm sorry, I don't want to prevent you from jumping in here, but the second reason, in addition to the fact that we're exposing people to danger that we should not be exposing them to.

• 2:11:02Lex Fridman?

  By the way, as a tiny tangent, another huge part of this soup that should have been part of it, that's an incredible solution, is large-scale testing.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:12Lex Fridman?

  But that, that might be another couple hour, but conversation, but there's these solutions that are obvious, that were available from the very beginning. So, you could argue that iveractin is not that obvious, but maybe the whole point is you have aggressive, very fast research, at least a meta-analysis, and then large-scale production and deployment. Okay, at least that possibility should be seriously considered, coupled with the serious consideration of large-scale deployment of testing, at-home testing, that could have

• 2:11:49Lex Fridman?

  Accelerated the the the speed at which we reached that herd immunity. But I don't even want to.

• 2:11:59Speaker 01

  Well, let me just say, I am also completely shocked that we did not get on high quality testing early and that we are still suffering from this even now, because just the simple ability to track where the virus moves between people would tell us a lot about its mode of transmission, which would allow us to protect ourselves better. Instead, that information was hard won and for no good reason. So I also find this mysterious.

• 2:12:25Lex Fridman?

  You've spoken with Eric Weinstein, your brother, on his podcast, The Portal, about the ideas that eventually led to the paper you published titled The Reserved Capacity Hypothesis. I think first, can you explain this paper and the ideas that led up to it?

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  Sure. Easier to explain the conclusion of the paper. There's a question about why a creature that can replace its cells with new cells grows feeble and inefficient with age. We call that process, which is otherwise called aging. We call it senescence. And senescence, in this paper, it is hypothesized, is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention feature of our bodies, that each cell has a limit on the number of times it can divide.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  There are a few cells in the body that are exceptional, but most of our cells can only divide a limited number of times. That's called the Hayflick limit. And the Hayflick limit reduces the ability of the organism to replace tissues. It therefore results in a failure over time of maintenance and repair. And that explains why we we become decrepit as we grow old. The question was, why would that be? Especially in light of the fact that the mechanism that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce is something called a telomere. Telomere is a, it's not a gene, but it's a DNA sequence at the ends of our chromosomes that is just simply repetitive.

• 2:14:16Speaker 01

  And the number of repeats functions like a counter. So there's a number of repeats that you have after development is finished. And then each time the cell divides, a little bit of telomere is lost. And at the point that the telomere becomes critically short, the cell stops dividing, even though it still has the capacity to do so, stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes than it did when it had more telomere. So what my work did was it looked at the fact that the telomeric shortening was being studied by two different groups. It was being studied by people who were interested in counteracting the aging process. And it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion by people who were interested in tumorogenesis and cancer.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  The thought being, because it was true that when one looked into tumors, they always had telomerase active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt to the lengthening of telomeres in order to counteract cancer. And the folks who were studying the senescence process were interested in lengthening telomeres in order to generate greater repair capacity. And my point was, evolutionarily speaking, this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  replace themselves are providing a benefit in youth, which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient and eventually die. And that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams, one of the great 20th century evolutionists. Who argued that senescence would have to be caused by pleiotropic genes that cause early life benefits at unavoidable late life costs. And although this isn't the exact nature of the system he predicted, it matches what he was expecting in many regards to a shocking degree.

• 2:16:26Lex Fridman?

  That said, the focus of the paper is about the, well, let me just read the abstract. "We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed," this is the end of the abstract. "We observed that captive rodent breeding protocols designed to increase reproductive output simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminate selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression. This appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice. With their telomeric failsafe effectively disabled, these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation."

• 2:17:05Lex Fridman?

  So basically, using these mice is not going to lead to the right kinds of conclusions. "Safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence." So I think, especially with your discussion with Eric, the conclusion of this paper has to do with the fact that we shouldn't be using these mice to test the safety or to make conclusions about cancer or senescence. Is that the basic takeaway? Like, basically saying that the length of these telomeres is an important variable to consider?

• 2:17:50Speaker 01

  Well, let's put it this way. I think there was a reason that the world of scientists who was working on telomeres did not spot the pleiotropic relationship that was the key argument in my paper. The reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result that everybody knew, which seemed inconsistent. The result was that mice have very long telomeres, but they do not have very long lives. Now, we can talk about what the actual meaning of "don't have very long lives" is, but in the end, I was confronted with a hypothesis that would explain a great many features

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  of the way mammals and indeed vertebrates age, but it was inconsistent with one result. And at first, I thought, maybe there's something wrong with the result. Maybe this is one of these cases where the result was achieved once through some bad protocol and everybody else was repeating it. Didn't turn out to be the case. Many laboratories had established that mice had ultra-long telomeres. And so I began to wonder whether or not there was something about the breeding protocols that generated these mice. And what that would predict is that the mice that have long telomeres would be laboratory mice and that wild mice would not. And Carol Greider, who agreed to collaborate with me, tested that hypothesis and showed

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  that it was indeed true, that wild-derived mice, or at least mice that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time, did not have ultra-long telomeres. Now, what this implied, though, as you read, is that our breeding protocols generate lengthening of telomeres. And the implication of that is that the animals that have these very long telomeres will be hyper-prone to create tumors. They will be extremely resistant to toxins because they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace any damaged tissue. And so ironically, if you give one of these ultra-long telomere lab mice a toxin, if

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  the toxin doesn't outright kill it, it may actually increase its lifespan because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy. So the reason that chemotherapy works is that dividing cells are more vulnerable than cells that are not dividing. And so if this mouse has effectively had its cancer protection turned off, and it has cells dividing too rapidly, and you give it a toxin, you will slow down its tumors faster than you harm its other tissues. And so you'll get a paradoxical result that actually some drug that's toxic seems to benefit the mouse. Now, I don't think that that was understood before I published my paper. Now, I'm pretty sure it has to be.

• 2:20:37Speaker 01

  And the problem is that this actually is a system that serves pharmaceutical companies that have the difficult job of bringing compounds to market, many of which will be toxic, maybe all of them will be toxic. And these mice predispose our system to declare these toxic compounds safe. And in fact, I believe we've seen the errors that result from using these mice a number of times, most famously with Vioxx, which turned out to do conspicuous heart damage.

• 2:21:08Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think this paper and this idea has not gotten significant traction?

• 2:21:13Speaker 01

  Well, my collaborator, Carol Greider, said something to me that rings in my ears to this day. She initially, after she showed that laboratory mice have anomalously long telomeres and that wild mice don't have long telomeres, I asked her where she was going to publish that result so that I could cite it in my paper. And she said that she was going to keep the result in-house rather than publish it. And at the time, I was a young graduate student. I didn't really understand what she was saying. But in some sense, the knowledge that a model organism is broken in a way that creates

• 2:21:54Speaker 01

  the likelihood that certain results will be reliably generatable, you can publish a paper and make a big splash with such a thing, or you can exploit the fact that you know how those models will misbehave and other people don't. So there's a question. If somebody is motivated cynically, and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight into biology because they predict things better than others do, knowing where the flaw is so that your predictions come out true is advantageous. At the same time, I can't help but imagine that the pharmaceutical industry, when it figured out that the mice were predisposed to suggest that drugs were safe, didn't leap to fix

• 2:22:37Speaker 01

  the problem because in some sense, it was the perfect cover for the difficult job of bringing drugs to market and then discovering their actual toxicity profile, right? This made things look safer than they were, and I believe a lot of profits have likely been generated downstream.

• 2:22:54Lex Fridman?

  So to kind of play devil's advocate, it's also possible that this particular, the length of the telomeres is not a strong variable for the conclusions for the drug development and for the conclusions that Carol and others have been studying. Is that, is that, is it possible for that to be the case? That this, like, so one reason she and others could be ignoring this is because it's not a strong variable?

• 2:23:20Speaker 01

  Well, I don't believe so. And in fact, at the point that I went to publish my paper, Carol published her result. She did so in a way that did not make a huge splash.

• 2:23:30Lex Fridman?

  Did she, like, I apologize if I don't know how, what was the emphasis of her publication of that paper? Was it purely just kind of showing data or is there more? Because in your paper, there's a kind of more of a philosophical statement as well.

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  Well, my paper was motivated by interest in the evolutionary dynamics around senescence. I wasn't, you know, pursuing grants or anything like that. I was just working on a puzzle I thought was interesting. Carol has, of course, gone on to win a Nobel Prize for her co-discovery with Elizabeth Greider of telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. But anyway, she's a heavy hitter in the academic world. I don't know exactly what her purpose was. I do know that she told me she wasn't planning to publish, and I do know that I discovered that she was in the process of publishing very late. And when I asked her to send me the paper to see whether or not she had put evidence

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  in it that the hypothesis had come from me, she grudgingly sent it to me, and my name was nowhere mentioned, and she has, she broke contact at that point.

• 2:24:41Speaker 01

  What it is that motivated her, I don't know. But I don't think it can possibly be that this result is unimportant. The fact is, the reason I called her in the first place and established contact that generated our collaboration was that she was a leading light in the field of telomeric studies. And because of that, this question about whether the model organisms are distorting the understanding of the functioning of telomeres is central.

• 2:25:11Lex Fridman?

  Do you feel like you've been, as a young graduate student, do you think Carol or do you think the scientific community broadly screwed you over in some way?

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  You know, I don't think of it in those terms, probably partly because it's not productive. But, you know, I have a complex relationship with this story, right? On the one hand, I'm livid with Carol Greider for what she did, right? She absolutely pretended that I didn't exist in this story, and I don't think I was a threat to her. My interest was as an evolutionary biologist, I had made an evolutionary contribution. She had tested a hypothesis, and frankly, I think it would have been better for her if she had acknowledged what I had done. I think it would have enhanced her work. And, you know, I was, let's put it this way. When I watched her Nobel lecture, and I should say, there's been a lot of confusion about this Nobel stuff.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  I've never said that I should have gotten a Nobel Prize. People have misportrayed that. My, in listening to her lecture, I had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences of my life because she presented the work that resulted from my hypothesis. She presented it as she had in her paper with no acknowledgement of where it had come from, and she had, in fact, portrayed the distortion of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact because it allowed testing hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable.

• 2:26:47Speaker 01

  You have to understand, as a young scientist, to watch work that you have done presented in what's surely the most important lecture of her career, right? It's thrilling. It was thrilling to see, you know, her, her figures projected on the screen there, right? To have been part of work that was important enough for that felt great. And of course, to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible. So anyway, that's sort of where I am with it. My sense is I, what I'm really troubled by in the story is the fact that, as far as

• 2:27:31Speaker 01

  I know, the flaw with the mice has not been addressed. And actually, Eric did some looking into this. He tried to establish by calling the Jack's Lab and trying to ascertain what had happened with the colonies, whether any change in protocol had occurred. And he couldn't get anywhere. There was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue. So I'm very troubled by the fact that, as a father, for example, I'm in no position to protect my family from the hazard that I believe lurks in our medicine cabinets, right? I'm, even though I'm aware of where the hazard comes from, it doesn't tell me anything useful about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage if that is ultimately tested.

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  And that's a very frustrating position to be in. On the other hand, you know, there's a part of me that's even still grateful to Carol for taking my call. She didn't have to take my call and talk to some young graduate student who had some evolutionary idea that wasn't, you know, in her wheelhouse specifically. And yet she did. And, you know, for a while, she was a good collaborator, so.

• 2:28:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, can I, I have to proceed carefully here because it's, it's a complicated topic. So she took the call. And you kind of, you're kind of saying that she basically erased credit, you know, pretending you didn't exist in some kind of, in a certain sense.

• 2:29:01Lex Fridman?

  Let me phrase it this way. I've, as a, as a research scientist at MIT, I've had, and especially just part of a large set of collaborations, I've had a lot of students come to me and talk to me about ideas, perhaps less interesting than what we're discussing here in the space of AI, that I've been thinking about anyway. In general, with everything I'm doing with robotics, people have told me a bunch of ideas that I'm already thinking about. The point is, taking that idea, see, this is different because the idea has more power

• 2:29:45Lex Fridman?

  in the space that we're talking about here, and robotics is like, your idea means shit until you build it. Like, so the engineering world is a little different, but it, there's a kind of sense that I probably forgot a lot of brilliant ideas have been told to me. Do you think she pretended you don't exist? Do you think she was so busy that she kind of forgot? You know, that she has like this stream of brilliant people around her, that there's a bunch of ideas that are swimming in the air, and you just kind of forget people that are a little bit on the periphery, on the idea generation? Like, or is it some mix of both?

• 2:30:23Speaker 01

  It's not a mix of both. I know that because we corresponded. She put a graduate student on this work. He emailed me excitedly when the results came in. So there was no ambiguity about what had happened. What's more, when I went to publish my work, I actually sent it to Carol in order to get her feedback, because I wanted to be a good collaborator to her. And she absolutely panned it, made many critiques that were not valid, but it was clear at that point that she became an antagonist. And none of this adds that she couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation.

• 2:31:05Speaker 01

  I believe I even sent her tissues at some point, in part, not related to this project, but as a favor. She was doing another project that involved telomeres, and she needed samples that I could get ahold of because of the Museum of Zoology that I was in. So this was not a one-off conversation. I certainly know that those sorts of things can happen, but that's not what happened here. This was a relationship that existed and then was suddenly cut short at the point that she published her paper by surprise without saying where the hypothesis had come from and began to be a opposing force to my work.

• 2:31:45Lex Fridman?

  Is there, there's a bunch of trajectories you could have taken through life.

• 2:31:50Lex Fridman?

  Do you think about the trajectory of being a researcher, of then going to war in the space of ideas, of publishing further papers along this line? I mean, that's often the dynamic of that fascinating space is you have a junior researcher with brilliant ideas and a senior researcher that starts out as a mentor that becomes a competitor. I mean, that, that happens, but then the way to, it's almost an opportunity to shine is to publish a bunch more papers in this place, to tear it apart, to dig into, like really make it a war of ideas. Did you consider that possible trajectory?

• 2:32:35Speaker 01

  I did. A couple of things to say about it. One, this work was not central for me. I took a year on the Telomere Project because something fascinating occurred to me and I pursued it. And the more I pursued it, the clearer it was there was something there. But it wasn't the focus of my graduate work and I didn't want to become a Telomere researcher. What I want to do is to be an evolutionary biologist who upgrades the toolkit of evolutionary concepts so that we can see more clearly how organisms function and why. And Telomeres was a proof of concept, right? That paper was a proof of concept that the toolkit in question works.

• 2:33:20Speaker 01

  As for the need to pursue it further.

• 2:33:26Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of absurd and you're not the first person to say, maybe that was the way to go about it. But the basic point is, look, the work was good. The, it turned out to be highly predictive. Frankly, the model of senescence that I presented is now widely accepted. And I don't feel any misgivings at all about having spent a year on it, said my piece, and moved on to other things, which frankly, I think are bigger. I think there's a lot of good to be done. And it would be, it would be a waste to get overly narrowly focused.

• 2:33:58Lex Fridman?

  There's so many ways through, through the space of science. And the, the most common way is to just publish a lot. Publish a lot of papers, do these incremental work and exploring the space, kind of like ants looking for food. You're tossing out a bunch of different ideas. Some of them could be brilliant breakthrough ideas, nature, some of them are more conference kind of publications, all those kinds of things. Did you consider that kind of path in science?

• 2:34:28Speaker 01

  Of course, I considered it. But I must say, the experience of having my first encounter with the process of peer review be this story, which was frankly, a debacle from one end to the other with respect to the process of publishing. It did not, it was not a very good sales pitch for trying to make a difference to publication. And I would point out part of what I ran into, and I think frankly, part of what explains Carol's behavior, is that in some parts of science, there is this dynamic where PIs parasitize their underlings. And if you're very, very good, you rise to the level where

• 2:35:10Speaker 01

  one day, instead of being parasitized, you get to parasitize others. Now, I find that scientifically despicable. And it wasn't the culture of the lab I grew up in at all, my lab. In fact, the PI, Dick Alexander, who's now gone, but who was an incredible mind and a great human being, he didn't want his graduate students working on the same topics he was on. Not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting, but because in effect, he did not want any confusion about who had done what. Because he was a great mentor. And the idea was actually A great mentor is not stealing ideas and you don't want, you don't want people thinking

• 2:35:53Speaker 01

  that they are. So anyway, my point would be, I wasn't up for being parasitized. I don't like the idea that if you are very good, you get parasitized until it's your turn to parasitize others. That doesn't make sense to me. A, you know, crossing over from evolution into cellular biology may have exposed me to that. That may have been par for the course, but it doesn't make it acceptable. And I would also point out that my work falls in the realm of synthesis. My work generally takes evidence accumulated by others and places

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  it together in order to generate hypotheses that explain sets of phenomena that are otherwise intractable. And I am not sure that that is best done with narrow publications that are read by few. And in fact, I would point to the very conspicuous example of Richard Dawkins, who I must say I've learned a tremendous amount from and I greatly admire. Dawkins has almost no publication record in the sense of peer reviewed papers in journals. What he's done instead is done synthetic work and he's published it in books, which are not peer reviewed in the same sense. And frankly, I think there's no doubting his

• 2:37:15Speaker 01

  contribution to the field. So my sense is if Richard Dawkins can illustrate that one can make contributions to the field without using journals as the primary mechanism for distributing what you've come to understand, then it's obviously a valid mechanism and it's a far better one from the point of view of accomplishing what I want to accomplish.

• 2:37:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. There is of course several levels. You can do the kind of synthesis and that does require a lot of both broad and deep thinking is exceptionally valuable. You could also, I'm working on something with Andrew Huberman now, you can also publish synthesis.

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:37:52Lex Fridman?

  That's like review papers. They're exceptionally valuable for the communities. It brings the community together, tells a history, tells a story of where the community's been. It paints a picture of where the path lays for the future. I think it's really valuable. And Richard Dawkins is a good example of somebody that does that in book form. That he kind of walks the line really interestingly. You have like somebody who like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's more like a science communicator. Richard Dawkins, sometimes a science communicator, but he gets, he gets like close to the technical to where it's a little bit. It's not shying away from being really a contribution to science.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  No, he's made, he's made real contributions.

• 2:38:34Lex Fridman?

  In book form.

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:38:36Lex Fridman?

  He really has. Fascinating. I mean, Roger Penrose, I mean, similar, similar kind of idea. That's interesting. That's interesting. Synthesis does not, especially synthesis work. Work that synthesizes ideas does not necessarily need to be peer reviewed. It, it is peer reviewed by peers reading it.

• 2:38:58Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:38:59Lex Fridman?

  And reviewing it.

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  That's it. It is reviewed by peers, which is not synonymous with peer review. And that's the thing is people don't understand that the two things aren't the same. Right? Peer review is an anonymous process that happens before publication in a place where there is a power dynamic. Right? I mean, the joke, of course, is that peer review is actually peer preview. Right? Your biggest competitors get to see your work before it sees the light of day and decide whether or not it gets published. And, you know, again, when your formative experience with the publication apparatus is the one I had with the Telomere paper. There's no way that that seems like the right way to advance important ideas.

• 2:39:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, what's the harm in publishing them so that your peers have to review them in public where they actually, if they're going to disagree with you, they actually have to take the risk of saying, I don't think this is right. And here's why. Right? With their name on it. I'd much rather that. It's not that I don't want my work reviewed by peers, but I want it done in the open. You know, for the same reason you don't meet with dangerous people in private, you meet at the cafe. I want the work reviewed out in public.

• 2:40:09Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a difficult question?

• 2:40:11Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:40:14Lex Fridman?

  There is popularity in martyrdom. There's popularity in pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

• 2:40:24Lex Fridman?

  That, that can become a drug in itself.

• 2:40:31Lex Fridman?

  I've confronted this in scientific work I've done at MIT, where there are certain things that are not done well. People are not being the best version of themselves. And particular aspects of a particular field are in need of a revolution. And part of me wanted to point that out versus doing the hard work of publishing papers and doing the revolution. Basically, just pointing out, "Look, you guys are doing it wrong," and then just walking away. Are you aware of the drug of martyrdom?

• 2:41:13Lex Fridman?

  Of the ego involved in it? That it can cloud your thinking?

• 2:41:23Speaker 01

  Probably one of the best questions I've ever been asked. So let me try to sort it out. First of all, we are all mysteries to ourself at some level. So it's possible there's stuff going on in me that I'm not aware of that's driving. But in general, I would say one of my better strengths is that I'm not especially ego-driven. I have an ego. I clearly think highly of myself, but it is not driving me. I do not crave that kind of validation. I do crave certain things. I do love a good eureka moment. There is something great about it. And there's something even better about the phone calls you make next when you share it. It's pretty fun. I really like it.

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  I also really like my subject. There's something about a walk in the forest when you have a toolkit in which you can actually look at creatures and see something deep. I like it. That drives me. And I could entertain myself for the rest of my life. If I was somehow isolated from the rest of the world, but I was in a place that was biologically interesting, you know, hopefully I would be with people that I love and pets that I love, believe it or not. But, you know, if I were in that situation and I could just go out every day and look at cool stuff and figure out what it means, I could be all right with that. So I'm not heavily driven by the ego thing,

• 2:42:52Speaker 01

  as you put it.

• 2:42:53Lex Fridman?

  So I am completely the same, except instead of the pets, I would put robots. But so it's not, it's the eureka, it's the exploration of the subject that brings you joy and fulfillment. It's not the ego.

• 2:43:08Speaker 01

  Well, there's more to say. No, I really don't think it's the ego thing. I will say I also have kind of a secondary passion for robot stuff. I've never made anything useful, but I do believe, I believe I found my calling. But if this wasn't my calling, my calling would have been inventing stuff. I really, I really enjoy that, too. So I get what you're saying about the analogy quite, quite well. As far as the martyrdom thing, I, I understand the drug you're talking about, and I've seen it more than I've felt it. I do, if I'm just to be completely candid, and that this question is so good, it deserves a candid answer. I do like the fight, right?

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  I like fighting against people I don't respect, and I like winning. But I have no interest in martyrdom. One of the reasons I have no interest in martyrdom is that I'm having too good a time, right? I very much enjoy my life and-

• 2:44:08Lex Fridman?

  That's such a good answer.

• 2:44:09Speaker 01

  I have a wonderful wife. I have amazing children. I live in a lovely place. I don't want to exit any quicker than I have to. That said, I also believe in things, and a willingness to exit, if that's the only way, is not exactly inviting martyrdom. But it is an acceptance that fighting is dangerous and going up against powerful forces means who knows what will come of it, right? I don't have the sense that the thing is out there that used to kill inconvenient people. I don't think that's how it's done anymore. It's primarily done through destroying them reputationally, which is not something I relish the possibility of. But there's a difference between a-

• 2:44:56Speaker 01

  Willingness to face the hazard rather than a desire to face it because of the thrill. Right. For me, the thrill is in fighting when I'm in the right. I think I feel that that is a worthwhile way to take what I see as the the kind of brutality that is built into men and to channel it to something useful. Right. If it is not channeled into something useful, it will be channeled into something else. So it damn well better be channeled into something useful.

• 2:45:29Lex Fridman?

  It's not motivated by fame and popularity, those kinds of things. It's that there, you know, you're just making me realize that enjoying the fight, fighting the powerful and idea that you believe is right, is a kind of, um, is a kind of optimism for the human spirit. It's like, we can win this. It's almost like you're turning into action, into personal action, this hope for, for humanity by saying like, we can win this. And that makes you feel good about like the rest of humanity.

• 2:46:13Lex Fridman?

  That if there's people like me, then we're going to be okay. Even if you're like, your ideas might be wrong or not, but if you believe they're right and you're fighting the powerful against all odds, then we're going to be okay. That, that, if I were to project, I mean, that is, because I enjoy the fight as well. I think that's the way I, that's what brings me joy is it's almost like, uh, it's optimism, um, in action.

• 2:46:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's a little different for me. And again, I think, you know, I, I recognize you. You're familiar, your construction is familiar, even if it isn't mine, right? For me, I actually expect us not to be okay. And I'm not okay with that. But what's really important, if I feel like what I've said is I don't know of any reason that it's too late. As far as I know, we could still save humanity and we could get to the fourth frontier or something akin to it. But I expect us not to, I expect us to fuck it up. Right? I don't like that thought, but I've looked into the abyss and I've done my calculations. And the number of ways we could not succeed are many, and the number of ways that we could

• 2:47:30Speaker 01

  manage to get out of this very dangerous phase of history is small. But the thing I don't have to worry about is that I didn't do enough. Right? That I was a coward, that I, you know, prioritized other things. At the end of the day, I think I will be able to say to myself, and in fact, the thing that allows me to sleep is that when I saw clearly what needed to be done, I tried to do it to the extent that it was in my power. And, you know, if we fail, as I expect us to, I can't say, well, geez, that's on me. You know, and, you know, frankly, I regard what I just said to you as something like a personality defect. Right? I'm trying to free myself from the sense that this is my fault.

• 2:48:16Speaker 01

  On the other hand, my guess is that personality defect is probably good for humanity. Right? It's a good one for me to have it, you know, the, the externalities of it are positive. So I don't feel too bad about it.

• 2:48:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's funny. So, yeah, our perspective on the world are different, but they rhyme, like you said. Cause I, I've also looked into the abyss and it kind of smiled nervously back. So I have, I have a more optimistic sense that we're gonna win more than likely, we're going to be okay.

• 2:48:49Speaker 01

  I'm right there with you, brother. I'm hoping you're right. I'm expecting me to be right.

• 2:48:54Lex Fridman?

  But back to Eric, you had a wonderful conversation. In that conversation, he played the big brother role. And he was very happy about it. He was self congratulatory about it. I mean, can you talk to

• 2:49:10Lex Fridman?

  the ways in which Eric made you a better man throughout your life?

• 2:49:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, hell yeah. I mean, for one thing, you know, Eric and I are interestingly similar in some ways and radically different in some other ways. And it, you know, it's often a matter of fascination to people who know us both, because almost always people meet one of us first and they sort of get used to that thing and then they meet the other and it throws the model into chaos. But, you know, I had a great advantage, which is I came second. Right? So although it was kind of a pain in the ass to be born into a world that had Eric in it because he's a force of nature. Right? It was also terrifically useful because A, he was a very awesome older brother who, you know, made interesting mistakes, learned from them and conveyed the wisdom of what he had discovered.

• 2:49:59Speaker 01

  And that was, you know, I don't know who else ends up so lucky as to have that kind of person blazing the trail. It also probably, you know, my, my hypothesis for what birth order effects are is that they're actually adaptive. Right? That the reason that a second born is different than a first born is that they're not born into a world with the same niches in it. Right? And so the thing about Eric is he's been completely dominant in the realm of fundamental thinking, right? Like what he's fascinated by is the fundamental of fundamentals. And he's excellent at it, which meant that I was born into a world where somebody was becoming excellent in that.

• 2:50:44Speaker 01

  And for me to be anywhere near the fundamental of fundamentals was going to be pointless. Right? I was going to be playing second fiddle forever. And I think that that actually drove me to the other end of the continuum between fundamental and emergent. And so I became fascinated with biology and have been since I was. Three years old, right? I think Eric drove that. And I have to thank him for it because, you know, I mean.

• 2:51:09Lex Fridman?

  I never thought of, so Eric drives towards the fundamental and you drive towards the emergent, the physics and the biology.

• 2:51:18Speaker 01

  Right, opposite ends of the continuum. And as Eric would be quick to point out if he was sitting here, I treat the emergent layer, I seek the fundamentals in it, which is sort of an echo of Eric's style of thinking, but applied to the very far complexity.

• 2:51:33Lex Fridman?

  He's overpoweringly argues for the importance of physics, the fundamental of the fundamental. He's not here to defend himself. Is there an argument to be made against that? Or biology, the emergent, the study of the thing that emerged when the fundamental acts at the universal, at the cosmic scale and then builds the beautiful thing that is us is much more important. Like, psychology, biology, the systems that we're actually interacting with in this

• 2:52:13Lex Fridman?

  human world are much more important to understand than low level theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

• 2:52:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't say that one is more important. I think there's probably a different time scale. I think understanding the emergent layer is more often useful, but the bang for the buck at the far fundamental layer may be much greater. So for example, the fourth frontier, I'm pretty sure it's going to have to be fusion powered. I don't think anything else will do it. But once you had fusion power, assuming we didn't just dump fusion power on the market the way we would be likely to if it was invented usefully tomorrow. But if we had fusion power and we had a little bit more wisdom than we have, you could do an awful lot. And that's not going to come from people like me who, you know, look at dynamics.

• 2:53:08Lex Fridman?

  Can I, can I argue against that?

• 2:53:09Speaker 01

  Please.

• 2:53:11Lex Fridman?

  I think the way to unlock fusion power is through artificial intelligence. It's so I think most of the breakthrough ideas in the futures of science will be developed by AI systems. And I think in order to build intelligent AI systems, you have to be a scholar of the fundamental of the emergent, of biology, of the neuroscience, of the way the brain works, of intelligence, of consciousness. And those things, at least directly, don't have anything to do with physics.

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  Well, you're making me a little bit sad because my addiction to the aha moment thing is incompatible with, you know, outsourcing that job.

• 2:53:57Lex Fridman?

  I don't want to outsource that thing to the AI.

• 2:54:00Speaker 01

  You know, and actually, I've seen this happen before because some of the people who trained Heather and me were phylogenetic systematists, Arnold Kluge in particular. And the problem with systematics is that to do it right, when your technology is primitive, you have to be deeply embedded in the philosophical and the logical, right? Your method has to be based in the highest level of rigor. Once you can sequence genes, genes can spit so much data at you that you can overwhelm high-quality work with just lots and lots and lots of automated work. And so in any, in some sense, there's like a generation of phylogenetic systematists

• 2:54:45Speaker 01

  who are the last of the greats because what's replacing them is sequencers. So anyway, I, maybe you're right about the AI and I guess I'm.

• 2:54:54Lex Fridman?

  It makes you sad.

• 2:54:55Speaker 01

  I like figuring stuff out.

• 2:54:58Lex Fridman?

  Is there something that you disagree with Eric on, that you've been trying to convince him, you failed so far, but you will eventually succeed?

• 2:55:08Speaker 01

  You know, that is a very long list. Eric and I have, have tensions over certain things that recur all the time. And I'm trying to think what would be, you know, the ideal.

• 2:55:20Lex Fridman?

  Is it in the space of science, in the space of philosophy, politics, family, love, robots?

• 2:55:29Speaker 01

  Well, all right, let me, I'm just gonna use your podcast to make a bit of cryptic war and just say there are many places in which I believe that I have butted heads with Eric over the course of decades and I have seen him move in my direction substantially over

• 2:55:46Lex Fridman?

  time. You've been winning. He might, he may win a battle here or there, but you've been winning the war.

• 2:55:51Speaker 01

  I would not say that. It's quite possible he could say the same thing about me. And in fact, I know that it's true. There are places where he's absolutely convinced me. But in any case, I do believe it's at least, you know, it may not be a totally even fight, but it's more even than some will imagine. But yeah, we have, you know, there are things I say that drive him nuts, right? Like when something, you know, like you heard me talk about the, what was it? It was the autopilot that seems to be putting a great many humans in needless medical jeopardy over the COVID-19 pandemic. And my feeling is, we can say this

• 2:56:34Speaker 01

  almost for sure. Anytime you have the appearance of some captured gigantic entity that is censoring you on YouTube and, you know, handing down dictates from the WHO and all of that, it is sure that there will be a certain amount of collusion, right? There's going to be some embarrassing emails in some places that are going to reveal some shocking connections. And then there's going to be an awful lot of emergence that didn't involve collusion, right? In which people were doing their little part of a job and something was emerging. And you never know what the admixture is. How much are we looking at actual collusion? And how much are we looking at an emergent process? But you should always walk in with the sense that it's going to be a ratio. And the question is, what is the ratio in

• 2:57:16Speaker 01

  this case? I think this drives Eric nuts because he is very focused on the people. I think he's focused on the people who have a choice and make the wrong one. And anyway, he may-

• 2:57:29Lex Fridman?

  Discussion of the ratio is a distraction to that.

• 2:57:31Speaker 01

  I think, I think he takes it almost as an offense because it grants cover to people who are harming others. And I think, I think it offends him morally.

• 2:57:46Speaker 01

  And if I had to say, I would say it alters his judgment on the matter. But anyway, certainly useful just to leave open the two possibilities and say it's a ratio, but we don't know which one.

• 2:58:00Lex Fridman?

  Brother to brother, do you love the guy?

• 2:58:04Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. And, you know, I'd love him if he was just my brother, but he's also awesome. So I love him and I love him for who he is.

• 2:58:13Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask you about, back to your book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century. I can't wait both for the book and the videos you do on the book. That's really exciting that there's like a structured, organized way to present this.

• 2:58:30Lex Fridman?

  A kind of, from an evolutionary biology perspective, a guide for the future, using our past as the fundamental, the emergent way to present a picture of the future. Let me ask you about something that, you know, I think about a little bit in this modern world, which is monogamy.

• 2:58:58Lex Fridman?

  So I personally value monogamy. One girl, ride or die.

• 2:59:02Speaker 01

  There you go. Right. No, that's exactly it.

• 2:59:06Lex Fridman?

  But that said, I don't know what's the right way to approach this, but from an evolutionary biology perspective, or from just looking at modern society, that seems to be an idea that's not, what's the right way to put it, flourishing?

• 2:59:27Speaker 01

  It is waning.

• 2:59:28Lex Fridman?

  It's waning.

• 2:59:31Lex Fridman?

  So I suppose based on your reaction, you're also a supporter of monogamy, or you value monogamy. Are you and I just delusional?

• 2:59:44Lex Fridman?

  What can you say about monogamy? From the context of your book, from the context of evolutionary biology, from the context of being human?

• 2:59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can say that I fully believe that we are actually enlightened and that although monogamy is waning, that it is not waning because there is a superior system, it is waning for predictable other reasons. So, let us just say, it is, there is a lot of pre-trans fallacy here where people go through a phase where they recognize that actually, we know a lot about the evolution of monogamy and we can tell from the fact that humans are somewhat sexually dimorphic, that there has been a lot of polygyny in human history. And in fact, most of human history was largely polygynous.

• 3:00:35Speaker 01

  But it is also the case that most of the people on earth today belong to civilizations that are at least nominally monogamous and have practiced monogamy. And that's not anti-evolutionary. What that is, is part of what I mentioned before, where human beings can swap out their software program. And different mating patterns are favored in different periods of history. So I would argue that the benefit of monogamy, the primary one that drives the evolution of monogamous patterns in humans, is that it brings all adults into child rearing. Now, the reason that that matters is because human babies are very labor-intensive.

• 3:01:20Speaker 01

  In order to raise them properly, having two parents is a huge asset and having more than two parents, having an extended family, also very important. But, what that means is that for a population that is expanding, a monogamous mating system makes sense. It makes sense because it means that the number of offspring that can be raised is elevated. It's elevated because all potential parents are involved in parenting. Whereas if you sideline a bunch of males by having a polygynous system in which one male has many females, which is typically the way that works, what you do is you sideline all those males, which means the total amount of parental effort is lower and the population can't grow.

• 3:02:02Speaker 01

  So what I'm arguing is that you should expect to see... Populations that face the possibility of expansion endorse monogamy. And at the point that they have reached carrying capacity, you should expect to see polygyny break back out. And what we are seeing is a kind of false sophistication around polyamory, which will end up breaking down into polygyny, which will not be in the interest of most people. Really, the only people whose interests it could be argued to be in would be the very small number of males at the top, who have many partners and everybody else suffers.

• 3:02:39Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible to make the argument, if we focus in on those males at the quote unquote "top" with many female partners, is it possible to say that that's a suboptimal life? That a single partner is the optimal life?

• 3:02:55Speaker 01

  Well, it depends what you mean. I have a feeling that you and I wouldn't have to go very far to figure out that what might be evolutionarily optimal doesn't match my values as a person, and I'm sure it doesn't match yours either.

• 3:03:09Lex Fridman?

  You know, can we try to dig into that gap between those two?

• 3:03:13Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, we can do it very simply. Selection might favor your engaging in war against a defenseless enemy or genocide. Right? It's not hard to figure out how that might put your genes at advantage. I don't know about you, Lex. I'm not getting involved in no genocide. It's not going to happen. I won't do it. I will do anything to avoid it. So some part of me has decided that my conscious self and the values that I hold trump my evolutionary self. And once you figure out that in some extreme case that's true, and then you realize that that means it must be possible in many other cases,

• 3:03:58Speaker 01

  and you start going through all of the things that selection would favor, and you realize that a fair fraction of the time, actually, you're not up for this. You don't want to be some robot on a mission that involves genocide when necessary. You want to be your own person and accomplish things that you think are valuable. And so among those are not advocating, you know, let's suppose you were in a position to be one of those males at the top of a polygynous system. We both know why that would be rewarding, right? But we also both recognize.

• 3:04:30Lex Fridman?

  Do we?

• 3:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 3:04:31Lex Fridman?

  Lots of sex?

• 3:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:33Lex Fridman?

  Okay, what else?

• 3:04:34Speaker 01

  Lots of sex and lots of variety, right? So, look, every red-blooded American slash Russian male can understand why that's appealing, right? On the other hand, it is up against an alternative, which is having a partner with whom one is bonded especially closely, right?

• 3:04:55Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 3:04:56Speaker 01

  And so.

• 3:04:56Lex Fridman?

  AKA, love.

• 3:04:58Speaker 01

  Right. Well, you know, I don't wanna, I don't wanna straw man the polygyny position. Obviously, polygyny is complex, and there's nothing that stops a man presumably from loving multiple partners and from them loving him back. But in terms of, you know, if love is your thing, there's a question about, okay, what is the quality of love if it is divided over multiple partners, right? And what is the net consequence for love in a society when multiple people will be frozen out for every individual male in this case who has it? And what I would argue is, and you know, this is weird to even talk about,

• 3:05:40Speaker 01

  but this is partially me just talking from personal experience. I think there actually is a monogamy program in us, and it's not automatic. But if you take it seriously, you can find it. And frankly, marriage, and it doesn't have to be marriage, but whatever it is that results in a lifelong bond with a partner, has gotten a very bad rap. You know, it's the butt of too many jokes. But the truth is, it's hugely rewarding. It's not easy. But if you know that you're looking for something, right? If you know that the objective actually exists, and it's not some utopian fantasy that can't be found, if you know that there's some real-world, you know, warts and all version of it, then you

• 3:06:23Speaker 01

  might actually think, hey, that is something I want, and you might pursue it. And my guess is you'd be very happy when you find it.

• 3:06:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think there is, getting to the fundamentals of the emergent, I feel like there is some kind of physics of love. So, one, there's a conservation thing going on. So if you have, like, many partners.

• 3:06:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, in theory, you should be able to love all of them deeply. But it seems like in reality, that love gets split.

• 3:06:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:06:49Lex Fridman?

  Now, there's another law that's interesting in terms of monogamy. I don't know if it's at the physics level, but if you are in a monogamous relationship by choice and almost as in slight rebellion to social norms, that's much more powerful. Like if you choose that one partnership, that's also more powerful. If, if like everybody's in a monogamous, there's this pressure to be married and this pressure of society, that's different because that's almost like a constraint on your freedom that is enforced by something other than your own ideals. It's by, by somebody else. When you yourself choose to, I guess, create these constraints,

• 3:07:32Lex Fridman?

  that enriches that love. So there's some kind of love function, like E equals MC squared, but for love, that I feel like if you have less partners and it's done by choice, that can maximize that. And that love can transcend the biology, transcend the evolutionary biology forces that have to do much more with survival and all those kinds of things. It can transcend to take us to, to, to a richer experience, which we have the luxury of having, exploring of happiness, of, of joy, of fulfillment, all those kinds of things.

• 3:08:09Speaker 01

  Totally agree with this. And there's no question that by choice, when there are other choices, imbue it with meaning that it might not otherwise have. I would also say, you know, I'm, I'm really struck by, and I have a hard time not feeling terrible sadness over what younger people are coming to think about this topic.

• 3:08:37Speaker 01

  I think they're missing something so important and so hard to phrase that, and they don't even know that they're missing it. They might know that they're unhappy, but they don't understand what it is they're even looking for, because nobody's really been honest with them about what their choices are. And I have to say, if I was a young person, or if I was advising a young person, which I used to do, again, a million years ago, when I was a college professor, four years ago. But I used to, you know, talk to students. I knew my students really well, and they would ask questions about this. And they were always curious, because Heather and I seemed to have a good relationship, and many of them knew both of us. So they would talk to us about this. If I was advising somebody, I would say, do not bypass the possibility

• 3:09:21Speaker 01

  that what you are supposed to do is find somebody worthy, somebody who can handle it, somebody who you are compatible with, and that you don't have to be perfectly compatible. It's not about dating until you find the one. It's about finding somebody whose underlying values and viewpoint are complementary to yours, sufficient that you fall in love. If you find that person, opt out together. Get out of this damn system that's telling you what sophisticated to think about love and romance and sex. Ignore it together, right? That's the key. And I believe you'll end up laughing in the end if you do it.

• 3:10:02Speaker 01

  You'll discover, wow, that's a hellscape that I opted out of. And this thing I opted into, complicated, difficult, worth it.

• 3:10:13Lex Fridman?

  Nothing that's worth it is ever not difficult. So we shouldn't, we shouldn't even just skip the whole statement about difficult.

• 3:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. I just, I want to be honest. It's not like, oh, it's, you know, it's nonstop joy. No, it's fricking complex, but, um, but worth it? No question in my mind.

• 3:10:31Lex Fridman?

  Is there advice outside of love that you can give to young people? You were a million years ago, a professor.

• 3:10:40Lex Fridman?

  Is there advice you can give to young people, high schoolers, college students about career, about life?

• 3:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's not, they're not gonna like it because it's not easy to operationalize. So, and this was a problem when I was a college professor too. People would ask me what they should do, should they go to graduate school? I had almost nothing useful to say because the job market and the market of, you know, pre-job training and all of that, these things are all so distorted and corrupt that I didn't want to point anybody to anything, right? Because it's all broken and I would tell them that. But I would say that results in a kind of meta-level advice that I do think is useful. You don't know what's coming. You don't know where the opportunities will be.

• 3:11:29Speaker 01

  You should invest in tools rather than knowledge, right? To the extent that you can do things, you can repurpose that, no matter what the future brings, to the extent that, you know, if you, as a robot guy, right? You've got the skills of a robot guy. Now, if civilization failed and the stuff of robot building disappeared with it, you'd still have the mind of a robot guy. And the mind of a robot guy can retool around all kinds of things, whether you're, you know, forced to work with, you know, fibers that are made into ropes, right? Your mechanical mind would be useful in all kinds of places. So invest in tools like that that can be easily repurposed and invest in combinations of tools, right?

• 3:12:14Speaker 01

  If civilization keeps limping along, you're gonna be up against all sorts of people who have studied the things that you studied, right? If you think, hey, computer programming is really, really cool and you pick up computer programming, guess what? You just entered a large group of people who have that skill and many of them will be better than you, almost certainly. On the other hand, if you combine that with something else that's very rarely combined with it, if you have... I don't know if it's carpentry and computer programming. If you take combinations of things that are, even if they're both common, but they're not commonly found together, then those combinations create a rarified space where you inhabit it.

• 3:12:57Speaker 01

  And even if the things don't even really touch, but nonetheless, they create a mind in which the two things are live and you can move back and forth between them and, you know, step out of your own perspective by moving from one to the other. That will increase what you can see and the quality of your tools. And so, anyway, that isn't useful advice. It doesn't tell you whether you should go to graduate school or not, but it does tell you the one thing we can say for certain about the future is that it's uncertain, and so prepare for it.

• 3:13:26Lex Fridman?

  And like you said, there's cool things to be discovered in the intersection of fields and ideas. And I would look at grad school that way, actually, if you do go. Or I see, I mean, this is such a, like, every course in grad school, undergrad too, was like this little journey that you're on that explores a particular field. And it's not immediately obvious how useful it is, but it allows you to discover intersections between that thing and some other thing. So you're bringing to the table this, these pieces of knowledge, some of which, when intersected, might create a niche that's completely novel.

• 3:14:11Lex Fridman?

  You need and will bring you joy. Out of that, I mean, I took a huge number of courses in theoretical computer science. Most of them seem useless, but they totally changed the way I see the world in ways that are, I'm not prepared or is a little bit difficult to kind of make explicit. But taken together, they've allowed me to see, for example, the world of robotics totally different and different from many of my colleagues and friends and so on. And I think that's a good way to see if you go to grad school was. As an opportunity to explore intersections of fields, even if the individual fields seem useless.

• 3:14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and useless doesn't mean useless, right? Useless means not directly applicable.

• 3:14:59Lex Fridman?

  Not directly.

• 3:15:00Speaker 01

  A good useless course can be the best one you ever took.

• 3:15:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I took James Joyce, a course on James Joyce, and that was truly useless.

• 3:15:11Speaker 01

  Well, I took, I took immunobiology in the medical school when I was at Penn as, I guess I would have been a freshman or a sophomore, I wasn't supposed to be in this class. It blew my goddamn mind, and it still does, right? I mean, we had this, I don't even know who it was, but we had this great professor who was like highly placed in the world of immunobiology. You know, the course is called immunobiology, not immunology. Immunobiology, it had the right focus. And as I recall it, the professor stood sideways to the chalkboard, staring off into space, literally stroking his beard with this bemused look on his face through the entire lecture. And, you know, you had all these medical students

• 3:15:56Speaker 01

  who were so furiously writing notes that I don't even think they were noticing the person delivering this thing. But, you know, I got what this guy was smiling about. It was like so, what he was describing, you know, adaptive immunity is so marvelous, right? That it was like almost a privilege to even be saying it to a room full of people who were listening, you know? But anyway, yeah, I took that course. And, you know, lo and behold.

• 3:16:18Lex Fridman?

  That's not gonna be useful.

• 3:16:19Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, suddenly it's front and center. And wow, am I glad I took it. But, um, anyway, yeah, useless courses are great. And actually, Eric gave me one of the greater pieces of advice, at least for college, that anyone's ever given, which was, don't worry about the prereqs. Take it anyway, right? But now, I don't even know if kids can do this now because the prereqs are now enforced by a computer. But back in the day. If you didn't mention that you didn't have the prereqs, nobody stopped you from taking the course. And what he told me, which I didn't know, was that often the advanced courses are easier in some way. The material's complex, but you know, it's not like intro

• 3:17:01Speaker 01

  bio where you're learning a thousand things at once, right? It's like focused on something. So if you dedicate yourself, you can, you can pull it off.

• 3:17:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Stay with an idea for many weeks at a time and it's ultimately rewarding and not as difficult as it looks.

• 3:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:16Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a ridiculous question?

• 3:17:17Speaker 01

  Please.

• 3:17:20Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the meaning of life?

• 3:17:24Speaker 01

  Well,

• 3:17:27Speaker 01

  I feel terrible having to give you the answer. I realize you asked the question, but if I tell you, you're going to again feel bad. I don't want to do that. But look, there's two.

• 3:17:36Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna be a disappointment, isn't it?

• 3:17:37Speaker 01

  No, it's gonna be a horror, right? Because we actually know the answer to the question.

• 3:17:43Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 3:17:44Speaker 01

  It's completely meaningless. There is nothing that we can do that escapes the heat death of the universe, or whatever it is that happens at the end. And we're not going to make it there anyway. But even if you were optimistic about our ability to escape every existential hazard indefinitely, ultimately it's all for naught and we know it, right? That said, once you stare into that abyss and then it stares back and laughs or whatever happens, right? Then the question is, okay, given that, can I relax a little bit, right? And figure out, well, what would make sense if that were true, right? And I think there's

• 3:18:25Speaker 01

  something very clear to me. I think if you do all of the, you know, if I just take the values that I'm sure we share and extrapolate from them, I think the following thing is actually a moral imperative. Being a human and having opportunity is absolutely fucking awesome. Right? A lot of people don't make use of the opportunity and a lot of people don't have opportunity, right? They get to be human, but they're too constrained by keeping a roof over their heads to really be free. But being a free human is fantastic. And being a free human on this beautiful planet, crippled as it may be, is unparalleled. I mean, what could be better? How lucky are we that we get that? Right? So if that's

• 3:19:09Speaker 01

  true, that it is awesome to be human and to be free, then surely it is our obligation to deliver that opportunity to as many people as we can. And how do you do that? Well, I think I know what job one is. Job one is, we have to get sustainable. The way to get the maximum number of humans to have that opportunity to be both here and free is to make sure that there isn't a limit on how long we can keep doing this. That effectively requires us to reach sustainability. And then, at sustainability, you could have a horror show of sustainability, right? You could have a totalitarian sustainability. That's not the objective. The objective is to liberate people. And so, the question,

• 3:19:53Speaker 01

  the whole fourth frontier question, frankly, is how do you get to a sustainable and indefinitely sustainable state in which people feel liberated, in which they are liberated to pursue the things that actually matter, to pursue beauty, truth, compassion, connection, all of those things that we could list as unalloyed goods? Those are the things that people should be most liberated to do in a system that really functions. And anyway, my point is, I don't know how precise that calculation is, but I'm pretty sure it's not wrong. It's accurate enough. And if it is accurate enough, then the point is, okay, well, there's no ultimate

• 3:20:35Speaker 01

  meaning, but the proximate meaning is that one. How many people can we get to have this wonderful experience that we've gotten to have, right? There's no way that's so wrong that if I invest my life in it, that I'm making some big error. I'm sure of that.

• 3:20:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, life is awesome and we want to spread the awesome as much as possible.

• 3:20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you sum it up that way. Spread the awesome.

• 3:20:56Lex Fridman?

  Spread the awesome. So that's the fourth frontier. And if that fails, if the fourth frontier fails, the fifth frontier will be defined by robots and hopefully they'll learn the lessons of the, of the mistakes that the humans made and build a better world.

• 3:21:10Speaker 01

  I hope they're very happy here and that they do a better job with the place than we did.

• 3:21:14Lex Fridman?

  Brett, I can't believe it took us this long to talk. As I, as I mentioned to you before, that we haven't actually spoken, I think, at all. And I, I've always felt that we're already friends. I don't know how that works because I've listened to your podcasts a lot. I've also sort of love your brother. And so like, it, it was like, we've known each other for the longest time and I hope we can be friends and talk often again. I hope to, that you get a chance to meet some of my robot friends as well and fall in love. And I'm so glad that you love robots as well. So we get to share in that love. So I can't wait for us to interact together.

• 3:21:58Lex Fridman?

  So we went from talking about some of the worst failures of humanity to some of the most beautiful aspects of humanity. What else can you ask for from a conversation? Thank you so much for talking today.

• 3:22:10Speaker 01

  You know, Lex, I feel the same way towards you and I really appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to our next one.

• 3:22:17Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bret Weinstein and thank you to Jordan Harbridge Show, ExpressVPN, Magic Spoon, and Four Sigmatic. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.