Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett The Professor Banned From Speaking Out: "We Need To Start Preparing! The Terrifying Lessons Of Covid We’re Ignoring!" - Bret Weinstein About this episode Are humans an endangered species? Just what can we do to survive extinction level challenges such as the sun, AI, or a nuclear war?
Dr Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and former professor at Evergreen State College. He is the co-host of the podcast, ‘DarkHorse’, and the author of the book, ‘A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life’.
In this episode, Dr Bret and Steven discuss topics such as, the 5 existential threats of AI, the 2 best ways to prepare for nuclear war, how pornography is impacting sex and relationships, and the dangers of AI sex robots.
(00:00) Intro
(01:27) Why Humanity Will Be Extinguished
(03:39) Bret's Top Existential Concern for Our Planet
(07:04) Solar Flares and Their Potential Impact
(10:36) Understanding EMP Effects & The Catastrophic Effects
(12:48) The Earth's Magnetic Poles Are Switching!
(16:01) The Inversion of Earth's Poles: Is Humanity Prepared?
(17:57) What Does Anthropogenic Mean?
(20:16) The Two Major Disaster Scenarios
(27:11) How to Prepare for Global Catastrophes
(34:57) Should You Become a ‘Prepper’?
(41:31) Is Society on the Brink of Collapse?
(50:33) Are Institutions Woke or Not?
(51:36) The Evergreen College Incident: What Really Happened
(01:03:47) The Decline of Mainstream Media
(01:11:46) We SHOULD Be Worried About AI
(01:15:50) Are Governments Ignoring AI's True Impact on the Planet?
(01:19:31) The Critical Role of Language in Human Survival and Evolution
(01:27:22) How AI Will Transform Human Communication Forever
(01:29:19) Why Regulating AI Might Be the Worst Idea Ever
(01:31:14) Brain Chips: Are We Turning Into Cyborgs?
(01:35:23) AI Is Coming for Your Job: What You Need to Know
(01:38:11) The Safest Careers in an AI-Dominated Future
(01:44:02) Universal Basic Income: Hidden Consequences You Should Know
(01:51:48) The Failures of COVID-19
(01:55:50) What Is Gain-of-Function Research
(01:57:59) What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Untold Story
(01:59:54) Anthony Fauci's Involvement in COVID Origins
(02:04:58) How We Should Have Handled COVID-19 Differently
(02:11:53) Why Lockdowns Might Not Work in the Next Pandemic
(02:15:23) Life-Changing Advice for a Happier, Healthier You
(02:22:35) The Hidden Dangers of Pornography
(02:31:38) What Parents Are Getting Wrong
(02:37:52) The Guest's Final Question
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Transcript 25,377 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I painted a scenario that was going to result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take. The problem is, it's already underway, on a time scale of decades. And we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift. People, should they be preparing? Absolutely.
0:18 Steven Bartlett? That's quite scary.
0:19 Speaker 02 Dr. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and former professor, uncovering the world's most pressing and controversial issues, and offering his solutions to save humanity from a destructive future.
0:30 Speaker 00 Humanity is in terrible danger, and the number of existential threats is growing. For example, I am profoundly concerned we are going to squander the lesson of COVID. You can see the complete collapse of journalism, our political institutions, our courts. They all failed. The tragedy is, most people don't know that we are still not being honest about the origin of COVID. And the truth is, it's all a lie. But our political institutions don't want to talk about it, which is going to mean that the failures are going to come back.
1:01 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything else on your list of concerns?
1:02 Speaker 00 So I have five different existential threats that AI poses, and we will go through them. But we have no evolutionary preparedness for living in a world where a computer can out-compete a human being. That's a dangerous world to live in.
1:17 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything we can do to prepare or to avert this crisis?
1:21 Speaker 00 Yes, here's what I suggest.
1:24 Steven Bartlett? Bret, of all these existential threats, is there one that's at the very top of your list?
1:28 Speaker 00 Yes, there's nothing more dangerous than this, and that is...
1:37 Steven Bartlett? Bret, who are you and what mission are you on? And when I ask that second question, I'm looking at the full body of your work, and I'm trying to encapsulate it maybe in just a couple of sentences.
1:52 Speaker 00 Sure. I am an evolutionary biologist. I'm a former college professor who has been cast into the role of a public intellectual by bizarre events at my college.
2:09 Speaker 00 I am on a mission and I'm afraid it's gonna sound weird to people. I think humanity is in terrible danger. I think we worry about the wrong things and I do not have any reason to believe that anything I could do is going to change the fate of humanity, but I feel obligated to try.
2:35 Speaker 00 That is to say, if we're going to be doomed by our errors and I know something about what those errors are, then it falls to me to try to make that clear to people and processes that might have the power to redirect us. So I'm making that effort, even though frankly, I think it's unlikely to work.
2:56 Steven Bartlett? That's quite scary, Bret.
2:58 Speaker 00 Yep, I've gotten over that part.
3:00 Steven Bartlett? What exactly are you referring to when you say that you think humanity might be doomed?
3:06 Speaker 00 There's a basic set of premises that just comes out of biology. No species is forever and that includes our species, no matter what I or anyone else does. But the objective of the exercise is really to stave off extinction as long as possible. And I believe that that is a valid thing to do. It is a vital thing to do, even if in the end, we know that no matter how successful we were, we're not going to escape the destruction of the solar system. We're not going to escape the collision of our galaxy into another. And even if we did, ultimately, the universe has a fate and it will take us out with it if we beat every odd.
3:50 Speaker 00 But why are we in trouble? Well, we're in trouble because all creatures are well-built for the environments in which we evolved. And human beings suffer from something that my wife Heather and I in our book call hyper novelty.
4:12 Speaker 00 So novelty is the state of something being not what you are evolutionarily prepared for. And human beings are very good at dealing with novelty. But what we're doing in the present is we're creating a rate of change that is so rapid that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up. We cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with the novel influences that we are forcing upon ourselves. And what that means is that with each passing year, we end up ever more poorly adapted to the life that we have to lead.
4:51 Speaker 00 And it's gotten so bad that the environments that we live in as adults don't even resemble the environments that existed for adults when we were kids. The reason that human beings have a longer developmental period than any other creature that has ever existed on this planet is that you need a long developmental period for us to acquire the insight and the nuance in order to be a functional adult. That program doesn't work if the environment in which you are picking up those lessons is unrelated to the environment in which you have to do the adult stuff. It's a non-sequitur. So that's why we're in trouble. We have technologies that are powerful enough to destroy us.
5:35 Speaker 00 We have processes that we have unleashed, the consequences of which we can scarcely imagine. And as these things proliferate, the number of existential threats to humanity is just simply growing. We have to rein in that problem. The proliferation of existential threats means that the moment at which we blink out as a species is getting closer. If it isn't this that takes us out, it'll be that. We have to arrest that process.
6:04 Steven Bartlett? Of all these pressing concerns and of all these existential threats, is there one that's at the very top of your list of concerns?
6:11 Speaker 00 Well, they're not even...
6:14 Speaker 00 Completely separable. So for example, there we are politically obsessed in this country and across the the Western world with anthropogenic climate change. I'm sure you've noticed.
6:29 Steven Bartlett? What is anthropogenic climate change?
6:31 Speaker 00 Anthropogenic climate change is a change in the average conditions on planet Earth that is driven by human activity. So the claim is that CO2 traps heat from the sun, causing the mean temperature to rise that will have impacts on, for example, how much ice persists at high altitudes and in the Arctic and the other cold regions. And that that then is part of a positive feedback where because ice is white, it reflects the sun's energy back into space. So the more ice that melts, the darker the world becomes, the more light it absorbs, the warmer it becomes.
7:15 Speaker 00 So that positive feedback is actually a real reason for concern. However, the increasingly model-driven mania about global warming is at odds with what we understand about models. Models are not a valid test of a hypothesis in a complex system. They can't be. So we are treating these models as if they tell us what's going to happen, and that is not a philosophically valid thing to do. But it is also just simply not in keeping with an understanding of the underlying requirements for functional science.
7:57 Speaker 00 If you were in climatology today and you attempted to publish a paper that said, actually, anthropogenic climate change is only a quarter as bad as we fear.
8:12 Speaker 00 You would have great difficulty publishing that and you would experience a spectacular decrease in your viability as an academic. So what we can infer from that is that we probably have a lot of papers that point in a direction that the field is interested in promoting and that we have a dearth of papers that might point in the other direction. So in effect, when we look at the sum total of papers and we say, oh my God, they all say the same thing, we're in big trouble. Well, do they all say the same thing because we're in big trouble and that's what an honest analysis would give you or is that just an echo of what we put into the system? So I'm much less worried about anthropogenic climate change and I'm much more worried
8:52 Speaker 00 about some other threats that, to my way of thinking, clearly dwarf it in magnitude. So we have several problems related to space weather. The sun goes through a cycle, an 11-year sunspot cycle. Those sunspots often release solar flares. Those solar flares are in general directed randomly off the sun and because the earth is only in one spot, most of the solar flares that the sun flings off don't hit us. What's a solar flare? A solar flare is, well, it's really the coronal mass ejection that is the important part.
9:36 Speaker 00 The flare is the thing you see on the sun that looks like a big flame sort of flipping off the sun. When it does that, that actually, in many cases, ejects a concentrated glob of plasma, right? These are charged particles and they get flung off. They get flung off at speeds that are not consistent. They're not moving at the speed of light, they're moving at the speed of stuff, right? And that speed of stuff is variable. But a couple of days after, a solar flare that releases a coronal mass ejection in the direction of the earth, we get a wave of these charged particles. Across the earth? Yeah. And that causes things that we are all familiar with.
10:20 Speaker 00 Whether you've seen it or not, this increases the aurora borealis, for example, the northern lights. So it's a very spectacular show and you probably are aware, maybe you saw it yourself, but we recently had a, an aurora that reached as far south as Puerto Rico.
10:38 Speaker 00 Right, that's a really unusual thing to happen. And even more unusual is the fact.
10:45 Steven Bartlett? So they usually reach sort of the top part of the earth? Is that, is that right?
10:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, you, you, if you're up near the Arctic Circle.
10:51 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
10:52 Speaker 00 You, uh, you see these things regularly. The farther south you are, the less likely you are to see them.
10:58 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I saw it in North Sweden and sort of Iceland as well.
11:01 Speaker 00 Perfect place.
11:02 Steven Bartlett? Right.
11:02 Speaker 00 Um, but for that, for people to see it in Puerto Rico is highly unusual. And you would think that that indicates that the burst of plasma that hit the earth was in some way highly unusual. And it wasn't. Something else is going on. That aurora reached farther south than it should have, based on the magnitude of the coronal mass, mass ejection, which was substantial, but hardly unprecedented. Now, what most people don't know is that there was a major solar storm that hit the earth in 1859. It goes by the name of the Carrington event, named for the astronomer who realized that
11:44 Speaker 00 the weird effects that happened on earth were correlated to something he had seen on the sun. He had effectively put those two, he had seen the, uh, the flare and then deduced that this was related to it. Now, in 1859, the world was not a very electrical place. In fact, the primary use of electricity was telegraphs. And at the time, this burst of plasma caused those telegraphs. Stations caught fire, the entire network went down, telegraph operators were shocked at their stations. Messages could be sent even though there was no power being delivered to the system. It went down and the induced charge in the wires was enough for telegraph operators to send messages over distances.
12:28 Speaker 00 So it was very dramatic if you were involved in telegraphs. But for the rest of humanity, it was a minor event. Now, we live in a very different world. We live in a world where everything has an electrical component. The way our cars function, the way food shows up in the supermarket, the way air travel and air traffic control works, all of these things are heavily electrical. And they are all tremendously vulnerable to the EMP effects that will come with a major solar impact.
13:01 Steven Bartlett? What's the EMP effect?
13:03 Speaker 00 It's an electromagnetic pulse, which is basically an induced charge in electrically active materials. So it's the kind of thing that a big enough one will fry every computer, will take most of the cars off the road. And what we don't commonly know is that our grids, the grids that operate all of our electrical devices, are, they operate with these transformers, right? Which control the flow of current. These transformers are huge, complicated machines.
13:47 Speaker 00 And if you needed one and you ordered it today, it would take a year for you to get it. If the world suddenly needed 70 of them or 100 of them, there's no telling what would happen. So while we all have the experience of a power outage causing us to lose electricity for, you know, hours or days, it is quite conceivable that a solar storm that took out a significant number of transformers could take a continent and turn it dark with no plan for bringing the lights back on. They would go out and they wouldn't come back. And this is a ridiculous risk to run. The transformers can be hardened against this.
14:30 Speaker 00 They cannot be perfectly immunized from this effect. But they can be hardened with well-understood architecture, architecture that effectively grounds out the EMP so that the transformer comes back on after the event. But we don't do it. So we are running an incredibly large risk of a section of a continent or an entire continent going dark with no backup.
15:02 Speaker 00 To me, the risk of that dwarfs anything that might be true about anthropogenic climate change. What's more, you've probably heard that pole shifts happen, that the North Pole isn't always where the North Pole currently is, and that sometimes these things flip. That's always struck me as an extremely dangerous condition. And I always assumed, well, what are the chances you're going to be alive? You know, if you were alive within 500 years of a pole flip, that would be kind of a close call. But what are the chances it's going to happen during your lifetime?
15:44 Speaker 00 Well, we are actually living in a moment where the pole is actively migrating. We are in the midst of what's called a polar excursion. The pole seems to be flipping, and it seems to be flipping at the same time that our electromagnetic field of the Earth is decreasing. Now, that decreasing field means that what's flung off the Sun has a bigger impact on Earth than it would ordinarily have. And that pole flip threatens chaos. You could imagine if we feared Y2K, right, that a programming error, a failure to account for the fact that you were going to have this turnover in the dates worried people,
16:27 Speaker 00 that an actual pole flip would create chaos. And the fact that we are not at least as worried, if not 10 times as worried, about the fact that we are living through a polar excursion and a radical decrease in the strength of our electromagnetic field on Earth says that we just have our priorities wrong.
16:45 Steven Bartlett? What is causing the pole to flip? And what does that mean? Because when I think about a pole flip, does that mean the North Pole just moves a little bit? The South Pole moves a little bit?
16:56 Speaker 00 It's not a little bit. These things are going to move radically. And the rate at which they are moving is accelerating. This is happening on a time scale that's highly relevant to you and me. We are both likely to be here to see the full shift, whatever that full shift entails. And they're not always the same, so it's a little hard to predict. And I will say, this is not my area of expertise. I have learned tremendously from others. Ben Davidson being the primary person, somebody I had on the Dark Horse Podcast.
17:36 Speaker 00 And he has a very compelling model, a hypothesis that I believe does explain many otherwise difficult to explain features of our solar environment. His explanation is that the solar system is moving constantly within the galaxy and that the galaxy by its very nature contains an oscillating electromagnetic sheet. And as the solar system moves through that sheet, we cross the plane in the middle, which causes all the electrically active entities to experience an inversion.
18:20 Speaker 00 The Sun experiences an inversion, the other planets experience an inversion, the Earth experiences an inversion.
18:25 Steven Bartlett? When you say inversion, you mean the electromagnetic sense?
18:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's the direction of pull. When we talk about electromagnetism, we're talking about attraction and repulsion. And if you imagine that you flipped the sign on everything because you just crossed the middle of something, like, you know, if you were holding a magnet here, right? And the north side is down, the south side is up, and you moved another magnet by it, the direction of pull would shift as you crossed that equator. So we are crossing something like an equator of the galaxy. And that cross is causing anomalous behavior on Earth, but it's also causing it, we know, on eight of the nine other planets. And the ninth planet, we just simply don't have the data yet.
19:14 Speaker 00 It's not that we know it, it's somehow immune to it. And we're seeing anomalous behavior on the Sun. So. What I understand is that there is a story about the galaxy that we barely know. That story interfaces with many things that we do know from the fossil record, from geology, which are hard to explain. Why does the pole flip? And that, at the very least, we need a concentrated effort where we look into these questions. And if Ben Davidson has it wrong, if there is no galactic current sheet, if we are not crossing its meridian, if the electromagnetic field is decreasing but is about to turn around
19:57 Speaker 00 rather than continue to decline, then we should find that out. But I think what we would find out if we looked deeply into this, if we took it seriously, is that there is a threat to humanity that has very little to do with anything anthropogenic. The only important component that is anthropogenic is that we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift.
20:22 Steven Bartlett? What does anthropogenic mean, the word?
20:25 Speaker 00 Human-made.
20:26 Steven Bartlett? Human-made, okay.
20:26 Speaker 00 Human-made. So anthropogenic climate change means that we put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere that wasn't there before, which we certainly have.
20:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
20:34 Speaker 00 You know, our fuels are made of carbon, and when we break these more complex carbon molecules, carbon dioxide is released. That's not really a bad thing inherently, because carbon dioxide isn't a poison, right? So taking these rings of carbon and breaking it into carbon dioxide and water is not the worst way to get energy, if you can do it cleanly. But the problem is, there's an old equation called the Arrhenius equation, which tells us that CO2 will actually cause the retention of heat from the sun. And as I mentioned at the beginning, the fact of trapping a little extra heat might
21:19 Speaker 00 not be that important, were it not for the fact that there's a positive feedback that involves the whiteness of the poles, the amount of energy bounced back into space, which keeps us cool. And as the poles melt, the earth becomes darker, it traps more heat. So that's an anthropogenic effect, because we've released all of this carbon that was trapped in fossil-fueled deposits.
21:40 Steven Bartlett? So on this point of the poles shifting, I just want to make sure I'm super clear. Do you actually mean that the north and south pole would move?
21:49 Speaker 00 Well, this is, in my opinion, up in the air. Very serious people have inferred from various kinds of evidence that the Earth itself might actually rotate, or appear to rotate, that the crust, that is the surface that we live on, could unlock from the mantle. Currently, they are locked together. But it could unlock and rotate over the surface of the mantle. Now, I am not convinced that that can happen. I'm not convinced it's impossible. People, as smart as Einstein, have considered this possibility. And that, in fact, it would be driven to happen
22:34 Speaker 00 by the accumulated mass on the pole in the form of ice, that that would actually drag it towards the equator if they became unlocked. So we have really two different disaster scenarios that could unfold. One involves simply the magnetic orientation of the Earth shifting and leaving the crust where it is. And the other involving the crust actually rotating. The reason that I am doubtful about the crust rotating, and I wouldn't bet strongly in either direction, but the reason that I am doubtful is that as a biologist, I find the idea that the pole would move to the equator
23:14 Speaker 00 hard to reconcile with the distribution of species that we see on the Earth. So there's something that doesn't quite fit about that story for me. It would require something in the biology that I believe is not described. It's possible I can imagine things that would do it, but I don't see it. So I'm hesitant about the idea of the crust unlocking, but I don't regard it as nothing to worry about.
23:45 Steven Bartlett? Just so I'm clear, when you point to evolutionary history and sort of the distribution of species on the Earth giving a clue, you're essentially saying that if this had happened in the past, we wouldn't see through the fossil records that certain species exist around the equator?
24:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, and you know, let's take the example of the the Amazon. So there's a very famous biological experiment by kind of an old school biologist who I did have the good fortune of meeting many years ago, a guy named Paul Collin-Voe, who was testing the question, there was a debate in biology about whether or not the Amazon became a grassland during glaciation and became a forest during interglacial periods. And he went on one of these sort of old school excursions into the Amazon to take pollen cores from lakes, which is interesting, it's not a lake-filled environment. But anyway,
24:44 Speaker 00 he he found locations, took these pollen cores, which should tell the tale, because they'll, we can tell which pollen you're looking at, and it gets laid down in layers. And so if it was flipping back and forth between a grassland and a forest, you could see it. That was not what they came up with. What they came up with is this is, this has been a forest, and it has remained a forest without being a grassland. Now, the problem is, if you move it 90 degrees off, that should drive all of the creatures there extinct, and you should have to go through some process that causes either massive migration from somewhere else, or re-evolution. And the problem is, this model in which we
25:28 Speaker 00 are passing through this electromagnetic sheet every 12,000 years just doesn't leave time for these processes. So you would expect the Amazon would have many fewer species in it than it does. And I will tell you, as somebody who has worked in the Neotropics, including the Amazon, one of the paradoxes about the creatures that are in this environment is that they are absolutely ferocious competitors that are very fragile. They require very narrow sets of conditions in order to live. So the idea that there's some radical upheaval in their climate that leaves them standing, that's hard for me to square.
26:10 Speaker 00 But anyway, what I would love is for a robust scientific institution of some kind to delve deeply into the set of questions involving this apparent 12,000 year disaster cycle, the electromagnetic sheet in the galaxy, our location in that pattern, and figure out what we do need to worry about and what we don't.
26:36 Steven Bartlett? And if it's not that second possibility that the crust itself is just sort of is shifting and the mantle is staying in the same position, the first possibility is that there's just a movement of sort of electromagnetic poles.
26:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:53 Steven Bartlett? The north and south poles stay in the same place, but.
26:54 Speaker 00 The axis of rotation could stay in the same place.
26:59 Steven Bartlett? Right, okay.
27:00 Speaker 00 And then the poles migrate to somewhere new. And my understanding is that that migration is not the simple thing that that I and probably you learned when you heard that there was a pole shift where you hear it's like whoop, you know, it just flips over. They are migrating around. And actually, the path of migration is something that is being tracked, not widely discussed for some reason, but it is being tracked and it's accelerating, as I mentioned.
27:28 Steven Bartlett? What's the risk of that? And how long does something like that take if we look, if we think back to our history?
27:35 Speaker 00 Well, I'm coming to understand this. And what I'm, what I'm recognizing is that the rate is far faster than I had understood and that it's already underway. So that's an interesting fact. We're talking about on the scale of decades. We are in the middle of a solar maximum in the sunspot cycle. So that aurora that you saw, I guess, month and a half or so ago, that was part of this very active period of sunspots in which we took a very substantial coronal mass ejection.
28:17 Speaker 00 That pattern of sunspots will wane and we will go into a period of calm during which presumably the magnetic field will continue to decrease and then the sunspots will return 11 years down the road.
28:34 Steven Bartlett? 11 years?
28:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:35 Steven Bartlett? Oh, okay.
28:36 Speaker 00 And so I am concerned that probably we get away with it. The level of decrease in the magnetic field is substantial, but that we still have enough protection from it that we will get through this sunspot cycle and be unscathed and then we'll have a period of calm while the electromagnetic field continues to decrease. And then the next sunspot cycle will be much more perilous. Now, you know, this can change tomorrow, right? These sunspots come around the sun and then they disappear onto the other side, you know, and it takes a month to do a full cycle. New sunspots are being born.
29:20 Speaker 00 A monster could arrive tomorrow. It could rotate and point to the earth and it could fling off a coronal mass ejection at the wrong moment or not. You know, there's a lot of luck of the draw in there, but we should be paying a lot more attention than we are.
29:36 Steven Bartlett? And what could we do to prepare? Or to sort of avoid the catastrophe?
29:43 Speaker 00 It depends on how catastrophic it is. And what I would say is I'm somebody who, for whatever reason, I sometimes struggle with mundane, day-to-day organizational tasks, but I'm very good in an emergency. And the emergency answer is pretty clear here, which is you get your house in order, right? You look at the fragility of our world and you start with the low-hanging fruit. You take care of the stuff that's low cost and high impact in terms of increasing our robustness and you do that first. So, top two things on my list.
30:29 Speaker 00 Would be you harden the grids by retrofitting these transformers so that they ground out rather than fry? That's one. And the second one is you look at our nuclear reactors and you realize that we've been setting ourselves up. We built a doomsday device, I think accidentally. And the problem, the problem is a compound problem. What I didn't know about nuclear reactors until the Fukushima accident, at which point I did a lot of research, is that they are absolutely dependent on an electrical supply to keep them from melting down.
31:14 Speaker 00 You have to have an energy input. Now, if you have something like an earthquake, a tsunami, a disruption, the reactors will shut themselves down if they have time. But that doesn't get you out of the woods because you have to put energy in in order to keep the cooling water flowing. And that cooling water is not just about keeping the reactors cool, it's also about keeping the fuel pools cool. So the fuel pools are where fuel is taken after it's removed from the reactor. Now, for something like five years, a set of rods taken out of a reactor is releasing what's called decay heat.
31:56 Speaker 00 That decay heat is sufficient to boil the water out of these fuel pools if you're not constantly circulating new cold water in there. So these fuel pools look like they're unimportant, but if you cut the power, you've started the stopwatch, right? That water is going to boil off. And when that water boils off, they're going to catch fire. The cladding on the rods will literally catch fire from the heat. Now, the reactors, for reasons that are
32:29 Speaker 00 Almost too boring to recount. Contain not only the fuel rods from the most recent five years of refuelings, but they also contain decades of rods that we never found any other solution for.
32:43 Steven Bartlett? What are these rods? These are sort of nuclear rods?
32:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, these are nuclear. Basically, they are
32:50 Speaker 00 physical rods clad in something called zirconium that contain fuel pellets. This is uranium that has been packed in a particular way. These rods get loaded into the reactor. And then there's another set of rods that are used to modulate how much the rods interact with each other. You pull the modulator out and you get a chain reaction. You put the rods, the control rods, back in and it tamps down the reaction. So in an earthquake, you tamp down the reaction, right? And then you're not putting out power, but you do need to put power in to keep it cool.
33:33 Speaker 00 If the power goes and the water boils off, the thing will explode. As we saw in Fukushima, you had a situation in which the cooling water literally got torn apart into hydrogen and oxygen. So it goes from a coolant to an explosive. And we had multiple explosions where the hydrogen oxygen mixture just blew the buildings apart.
33:59 Speaker 00 But the rods that have been stored for decades in these pools, and the pools literally sit there right next to the reactor. So if you lose control of one of these reactors, it threatens to take out the pool, right? And the pool can go dry if you can't circulate water through it. The pool can crack and all the water can drain out. And then there's not even a way that you could put water in and stop it. And my point is that when that happens. It's going to create a fire. That fire is going to start spewing highly radioactive material into the atmosphere right around the plant. That's going to make it impossible for human beings to do even the heroic stuff that we've seen in both Fukushima and Chernobyl. And you're going to lose control of the site.
34:44 Speaker 00 Now, combine what I just told you with the fact that we have a grid that is vulnerable to going down and not coming back up for months. And the question is, well, do we start losing nuclear reactors? Things that if we could keep power flowing to them, could remain cool and not blow up. But as soon as we lose control of them, boom. There are 400 nuclear reactors on Earth today, civilian nuclear reactors. The world will look like a very different place if they all lose not only the containment of the reactor itself, but all of the built-up material that exists in those fuel pools.
35:25 Speaker 00 Some of the isotopes in those fuel pools have lives of 200,000 years. Yes. So you don't want to live in a world in which these things have gotten away from us and all of that radioactive material has been liberated into the atmosphere by fires. So, second thing on my list, right after hardening the grid by improving these transformers, is that you take all of the fuel in the spent fuel pools that is cool enough to remove, and you put it into what's called dry cask storage. Dry cask storage are these sort of fancy containers that don't require you to circulate water through them. They just sit there inert. All right, you could leave them for a thousand years.
36:08 Speaker 00 So, the risks to humanity would be hugely decreased if we took all of the fuel that doesn't have to be in the pools and we got it out of there. And we put it in a place that we don't have to pay attention to it in order for it to remain contained. Why do people do that? It costs money. It's too expensive? No, it's not too expensive. I mean, I don't...
36:31 Speaker 00 Both of these measures are so cheap compared to the risk that we're running, that I think you would have to be positively mad not to spend the money.
36:39 Steven Bartlett? It's just more expensive.
36:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's more expensive, you know.
36:43 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so is the incentives to do that aren't clear?
36:48 Speaker 00 Well, not only are the incentives not clear, but this is, this is why you need good governance, right? For those who think that markets just simply solve every problem. If competitors are making the decision whether or not to take their spent fuel and put it in dry casks, well, the competitor that decides not to outcompetes the competitor that decides to do it because their bottom line is better. But what you need is good governance to say, actually, you all have to put everything that can go into dry cask storage as soon as it can go for humanity's safety.
37:22 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything we can do on an individual level to prepare or to avert this crisis?
37:28 Speaker 00 Yes, here's what I suggest. Let's talk about it on podcasts and hope that somebody with power realizes how dangerous this stuff is and starts the correct initiative within some governmental structure that remembers how to do its job.
37:44 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything else that on it? You know, people, people often think about prepping and preparing for these kinds of things, big digging a bunker under their house and hiding in there or having supplies.
37:55 Speaker 00 Well, so, look, I think preparing at all scales is a good idea. We face many different scenarios. Some of them aren't survivable, okay? Well, if you've prepared and you hit an unsurvivable scenario, I guess you could make an argument that you didn't make as much of the time you had. But I don't find that very compelling. It seems to me that the
38:27 Speaker 00 The low hanging fruit phenomenon is
38:32 Speaker 00 it's the consequence of something that is essentially universal, which is a pattern of diminishing returns. Right diminishing returns means that over time, if you keep putting the same solution to a problem, you get less and less benefit. But it has a positive side, too. The diminishing returns curve has this very steep face on it. Right that face is the bargain face. That's the face where you get a ton of benefit for a small amount of investment. You should certainly do all the stuff up until you get to that point where it goes from a steep face to a plateau. So let's just do that. Right, who knows, maybe
39:18 Speaker 00 the calculations about the galactic current sheet are off because there aren't enough people studying it. We just don't get it yet. Okay, maybe there's 500 more years than we think. Right, maybe there's some factor we haven't found yet that has some impact on the system we don't know. So you should always be doing the stuff that makes you more capable of surviving the disaster, even if you think it's not enough. And then hopefully you discover things are better than you think.
39:52 Speaker 00 So we should be doing that at every scale. And yes, people, should they be preparing? Absolutely, should they spend everything on it? No. Do you prepare in any way? Oh, yeah. What does that look like for you? Well, you know, I have little rules for myself. One, I realized, okay, if we were to take a if we were to map out all of the things that I'm worried are a threat. And then you say, well, which are the ones that you're going to have extremely difficult time affecting your likelihood of surviving it?
40:28 Speaker 00 Okay, I'm gonna ignore those.
40:29 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
40:30 Speaker 00 Right. Why would I spend everything on a solution that's almost certain to fail anyway? Right? I mean, none of us are getting out of here alive. So at some level, you can just say, look, there are things that aren't worth preparing for, either because they're too unlikely, or because they're too catastrophic and you're not getting out of it.
40:47 Steven Bartlett? And maybe you wouldn't want to live in such a world anyway.
40:50 Speaker 00 Bingo. That's the next thing is, you know, I'm not sure how thrilled I am about a world in which 400 civilian nuclear reactors have spilled the entire history of their their functioning into the environment.
41:07 Speaker 00 I'm much more animated about getting us to reduce that hazard on the front end than surviving it if it occurs.
41:16 Speaker 00 So I think, I think people should look at their life and they should
41:24 Speaker 00 probably go through a little period of alarm. If you,
41:29 Speaker 00 if you look at the way your life works, and then we flip the electricity off, right? Suppose your continent loses electricity for a year.
41:41 Speaker 00 How well-prepared are you for that?
41:43 Steven Bartlett? Me? Totally unprepared.
41:45 Speaker 00 Totally unprepared.
41:46 Steven Bartlett? My Tesla outside has like 50 miles left on it, so I wouldn't even be able to
41:49 Speaker 00 Yep.
41:50 Steven Bartlett? get far from here.
41:51 Speaker 00 Right. So that's not a good plan. But there are things you can do, right? You can,
41:59 Speaker 00 let's put it this way.
42:03 Speaker 00 The power going out for a year, that's a pretty far down the list scenario.
42:10 Speaker 00 That's pretty catastrophic. In fact, I wrote a, an article for Unheard in which I painted a scenario in which the sun did trigger the collapse of just a part of the North American grid. And I
42:28 Speaker 00 described how that was going to result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take. It was surprising how easy it was to write it, actually.
42:38 Speaker 00 But.
42:40 Speaker 00 Could the power go out for two weeks? Yeah. How, you know, how hard is it for you to prepare yourself and your family? So that in a two week grid down scenario, you'd be able to get through. Well, it depends if it's summer or winter, right? If it's summer, it looks like one thing. You really need food and water.
43:06 Speaker 00 If it's winter, depending upon where you live, you might need to figure out how you're going to generate heat enough to keep you. I would say you want to go beyond alive. You want to get to where your family feels comfortable. But, you know, could you edit down to one room? Could you keep that room warm? How would you do it? You know, you don't want to have to, you don't want to have to run through that in the circumstance because a two week scenario, I mean, that just simply happens. So anyway, yeah, I think prepping is a great idea for many reasons. For one thing, it's mentally clarifying, right?
43:47 Speaker 00 Just even understanding how dependent we all are on the systems around us makes us better citizens.
43:56 Steven Bartlett? So let's say we managed to avoid the solar flare.
43:58 Speaker 00 Yep.
43:59 Steven Bartlett? What else is sort of front of mind for you in terms of concerns at the moment?
44:04 Speaker 00 I'm very worried about the absolute collapse of our institutions. I cannot think of a single sizable institution that still functions in any meaningful way. Many of our institutions actually function to the inverse of the purpose for which they were created.
44:25 Steven Bartlett? When you say collapse of institutions, which institutions are you referring to?
44:29 Speaker 00 I believe I mean all of them. And I will just give you some examples.
44:37 Speaker 00 In the world I grew up in, there was something called a newspaper.
44:41 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
44:42 Speaker 00 The newspaper was far from perfect. It reported a lot of garbage. There was a lot of propaganda in it and there was a lot of wrong headed stuff that got reported as if it was true. So I'm not pretending that it was a
44:59 Speaker 00 source of facts that one could just simply go to, to look them up. However,
45:07 Speaker 00 I now live in a world in which the newspapers look like the newspapers I grew up with. But they seem to bend over backwards not to report the news.
45:23 Speaker 00 And then they finally do report the news only when it becomes so embarrassing for it not to show up there that it would reveal how broken they are if it didn't get said.
45:35 Speaker 00 And that's not normal.
45:38 Speaker 00 We should be trying to make sense of the world.
45:42 Speaker 00 You can tell this isn't normal because if there was a newspaper that just simply did what the newspapers of old did, that had a newsroom, it had a budget, it sent people to places where important things were happening. It assigned them the job of talking to people and seeking the facts and soliciting documents and taking pictures and all of that stuff. And it did its best to give you a view of the world as that flawed newsroom, the best it could, best sense it could make. Would you subscribe?
46:16 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
46:17 Speaker 00 You and everybody else?
46:18 Steven Bartlett? Well, I think I would. I have to check myself there. Because what I think I would do is probably different to what my innate biases might lead me to do and to click on.
46:29 Speaker 00 Well,
46:32 Speaker 00 I will tell you that in a world where we are all quite unsure about what's actually taking place, even just the basic facts, that if there was such an object, I think it's a slam dunk you'd sign up, even if you don't spot it. Because the disadvantage, when other people have access to the facts, just not knowing what it is that they're even talking about would be, it would be like everybody in the room knows a secret and you don't.
46:58 Steven Bartlett? But do we want the news or do we want confirmation of what our existing beliefs?
47:02 Speaker 00 Well, I think people differ and I think it is very easy to get addicted to confirmation bias. But I also think that that's downstream of the failure of another institution. Our academic institutions, our schools do not teach people how thinking works. And if you know how thinking works.
47:26 Speaker 00 Then you understand that actually confirmation bias will get you killed. You don't want to be told something comforting. You want to be told something true because the comfort actually comes from utilizing that information to make yourself less vulnerable. So having a newspaper would be a fantastic thing. The fact that there are none, let's say that, you know, 30% of thinking people would subscribe to a newspaper that just simply tried to do the job and was undaunted by competing incentives.
48:10 Speaker 00 Well, then that's a slam dunk of a business model, wouldn't you say?
48:13 Steven Bartlett? Do you know what's interesting? Cause I, I sometimes think that the reason why things I idolize or I, I would like don't exist is because there's actually not a market there for it. And like simple sort of supply and demand economics mean that someone's probably tried it and their startup probably went bust.
48:32 Speaker 00 Well, it did, but I don't think that's organic. I think it is a slam dunk and that the problem is that there is a competing force.
48:43 Steven Bartlett? Ah, okay.
48:44 Speaker 00 And one thing that is true of the way our world is structured is that the go-to mechanism for making a fortune is inside information.
49:01 Speaker 00 Now, innovation also works, but it's difficult. Knowing a sector of the market so well that you can beat your competitors because you understand what the future is going to look like is also possible, but again, difficult. And the incentive, the financial incentive to know everything you know and out compete you in the market is so great that you will have a great many competitors struggling to make better sense with the very same data set that you've got.
49:34 Speaker 00 Inside information doesn't work like that. If you can get inside information, you can print money.
49:40 Steven Bartlett? So for anyone that doesn't know what inside information means in like the context of business or investing?
49:44 Speaker 00 Well, in the context, so this is one of these things that has a definition, has a formal legal definition from the initial context in which it was identified as a, as an issue. But if you are inside of a company and you're therefore privy to something that is about to be done, then you can utilize that information, which is not available to the public, to make money by increasing your holdings, decreasing them, buying stock options. And that's illegal, right? Because obviously this, people would use this to make money by creating events and betting on them in advance when nobody else knew.
50:28 Speaker 00 The problem is that same logic applies in places where the law can't reach it. So let me take one example. There in the community of people who ended up sleuthing about the events of COVID. There's the moment at which COVID became a feature of the public discussion at the beginning of 2020. And then there's the moment that it appears to have existed in circulation in the world, which is much earlier. The Wuhan Games in October, September of 2019.
51:08 Speaker 00 If you were privy to the fact that there was a pathogen that was going to circulate, that it was going to result in a major upheaval in people's ability to travel across borders, that people were going to be fearful and locked in their homes, that they were going to be seeking pharmaceutical remedies, whatever. If you had some sense of what was coming, then you could position yourself in the market so that when it did come, you'd make a mint. So the question is, when powerful people did hear in September of 2019
51:48 Speaker 00 that there was a pathogen that was on the loose in China that would spread worldwide, was their first instinct to tell the public?
52:02 Steven Bartlett? No.
52:02 Speaker 00 There's a perverse incentive against it. So now imagine that you're ruthless and you recognize that that scenario that I just painted isn't at all unique. Any place where you can get the jump on the public with respect to knowing what's coming is an opportunity to make millions into billions. So maybe you don't want the public to have truth-seeking institutions that work. So this, I think, is liable to be the reason that there's not a single university in the US that still functions.
52:39 Steven Bartlett? Really? You think that? You think that's why?
52:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. I think if we, if you had one university that functioned, then certainly that would be the place everybody wanted to send their kids. I mean, I have two college-age kids. If there was a university that still made sense, it's the obvious place for them to go.
52:58 Steven Bartlett? Why don't they make sense anymore, in your view?
53:00 Speaker 00 They don't make sense because, um, well, there's multiple layers. You've got a scientific apparatus that is very powerful when it comes to finding the truth and very fragile when it comes to resisting perverse incentives.
53:20 Steven Bartlett? As in like woke-ism? Woke-ism and pressures to be politically correct?
53:25 Speaker 00 Exactly. So where, where is the American university that stood up and said, "I'm sorry, but men can't become women"?
53:33 Steven Bartlett? Mm-hmm.
53:34 Speaker 00 Right? They can live as women, they can dress as women, there are surgeries, there are pharmaceuticals, there's nothing you can do that takes your birth sex and changes it to the opposite one. Not a single university said that, anywhere? That's bizarre.
53:49 Steven Bartlett? This is quite, um, personal to you, because I was reading, actually, earlier today about what happened to you at university, at Evergreen State University. And it's funny, because I watched the videos of that event. I don't know whether it's because we now have some distance between those events now, but... I just want to say, I think what you did was the right thing. And I think history has made you look more and more correct as time has gone on. Because I watched it and it just seemed to be a bunch of people living in some kind of collective delusion. These like people shouting at you in this hallway. And for people that aren't aware, as I wasn't aware before, before I knew you were on your way here. Can you explain what happened there? Because I think it's kind of evidence of this sort of collective delusion that you're talking about.
54:33 Speaker 00 Sure, there's a little
54:37 Speaker 00 a little difficulty because there's the public story of what happened, right? The the public narrative settled on a set of facts that isn't exactly right. It's not so far off that it doesn't make the point. But the basic thing that happened is that my wife and I were very popular professors at a very liberal school that had a a very unusual teaching model. So the school was called the Evergreen State College. It still exists. The Evergreen State College was founded by radicals who threw out every single structure that would exist in a normal college or university.
55:20 Speaker 00 There were no departments, there were no grades. The administrators did not have the ability to tell you what you had to teach. There were no requirements about how you taught.
55:31 Speaker 00 And if you were the kind of person that was interested in figuring out what new might be done in the teaching environment, if you wanted to figure out a new way to teach, it was the perfect place.
55:45 Speaker 00 That said, many people took the freedom that the college offered and they squandered it. They weren't really interested in doing anything other than reducing their workload. So the college was kind of divided between the professors who thought that this freedom was this gift and we used it. We ended up being popular. And then there were other professors who didn't, and they were much less popular. But in any case, Heather was literally the college's most popular professor.
56:12 Steven Bartlett? She's your wife?
56:13 Speaker 00 Yes, she's my wife and the co author of that book you have in front of you.
56:19 Speaker 00 She was the most popular professor. I wasn't too far behind. We both had the equivalent of tenure, although the place didn't formally have tenure. It had something like it. And so we were not vulnerable. We were liberated to say what needed to be said. And what happened is the college hired a new president, a guy named George Bridges. For whatever reason, George Bridges wanted to completely reimagine the college as a much more standard, much less interesting place. And in order to do that, he didn't really have the power because the founders of the college had created a place where the faculty were in a position to just simply say no,
57:03 Speaker 00 and we would have. So what he did in order to overcome the faculty was he impaneled a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee, hand-selected, and he incited a, at first, cold and increasingly hot, battle over race. It was my job to explain to my colleagues and to anyone involved in the decision-making process why the plan that they were proposing would be a disaster for the college.
57:42 Speaker 00 And although I did have trepidations about standing up because the environment was quite charged, like I said, I was a popular professor. I had the equivalent of tenure. And, you know, the worst that could happen is people are going to call me names. So I did stand up. I stood up at a faculty meeting, and the faculty was in the process of voting for a resolution to force every member of the faculty to explain what progress that they had made in the previous year against their own racism.
58:24 Speaker 00 Right. Now, worse, not only were we voting to mandate ourselves to reflect on our own progress against racism that was simply assumed to exist, but these documents in which we reflected would become official documents that would then be utilized in promotion decisions, firing decisions, these sorts of things. So the point was, that's a mecca, that's a takeover. Because, you're right, you know, in my reflection annually, I would say, "Well, actually, I'm not a racist. I've made very little progress because there wasn't an issue to begin with." And the answer is, "Well, oh, my God, he's worse than we thought, right? He doesn't even recognize his internal racism, right? So it was going to be that
59:08 Speaker 00 conversation." Again, it didn't threaten me because I already had tenure, but nonetheless, I had to say to my colleagues, "Look, this is a terrible mistake." And I stood up at the faculty meeting, and I said this. And it, of course, caused a stir. Several people came up to me after the vote, and they said, "We agree with you." But only one other person voted with me across the entire faculty meeting. Seventy votes that went the other direction. And one year later to the day, I didn't realize that it was the one-year anniversary of that event until months later. But one year later to the day, 50 students
59:48 Speaker 00 that I had never met, I had never met a single one of them, streamed through my classroom door, accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired. Now, I later came to understand that these 50 students that I had never met had been sent by my faculty colleague who had become my nemesis. They had been sent to create the impression of
1:00:22 Speaker 00 White professor being accused of racism by students, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine in 2017 what that would have looked like. Except that it didn't go as they planned because, as I mentioned before, I had a teaching environment in which I knew my students extremely well. Not only did I know their names, but I knew their backgrounds. I knew their histories. I knew their styles of thought, their,
1:00:54 Speaker 00 their disabilities. I knew them really well and they knew me really well because we went to class every day and we simply talked about biology, which brought up issues about their perspectives. So I think what was expected was that when these protesters streamed through my classroom door in 2017, if you've got a bunch of students accusing a professor of racism, that that professor's students are going to jump right on it. They're all going to have gripes about, you know, some grade that they got that they thought wasn't, wasn't fair. And so they expected me to end up being faced with a mob of students swearing that I was racist.
1:01:40 Speaker 00 Now, not a single one of my students turned on me. In fact, many of them spoke courageously on my behalf, including students of color, which then created a kind of rift in the universe. Because when people from the outside world saw video, video that was uploaded by the protesters themselves, who were proud of what they were doing, the world, I didn't sound like a racist to them. And what's more, there were all of these students saying it was nonsense. So it was, I think, the case that, that broke the woke narrative because.
1:02:17 Speaker 00 It just didn't add up. And in any case, that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing is that the world actually recognized that there was something, as you say, that there was a delusion going on, and that was apparent enough in my lack of fear over the accusation, in my students' willingness to actually stand up and say that it was a bum rap. I will also just point out, my students of color, who spoke up on my behalf, they actually faced the worst retribution.
1:02:56 Speaker 00 Because in order for the woke revolution to function, you can't very well have people of color standing by a white professor. It just breaks the whole thing. So, anyway, they needed to be punished from the point of view of this protest so that it wouldn't happen again. And my wife and I ended up resigning. Oh, there's another aspect of the story that I should probably mention. When this protest happened, there was a lot of drama. The protest spread from those 50 students who confronted me at my classroom to a campus-wide riot that went on for days.
1:03:40 Speaker 00 The president of the college, who was indirectly responsible for all of this, ordered the police, who were a campus police department, they were real police, but they were under his direction, he ordered them to stand down. So they locked themselves inside their police station and were literally forbidden to intervene. Students started patrolling the campus as if they were the police, patrolling the campus with weapons. They started stopping traffic on a public road passing through campus looking for me. The police called me up to warn me about this, and they told me they couldn't protect me. And...
1:04:21 Speaker 00 It was, on fast forward, a test of the claims of these revolutionaries. Right? They have this sort of anarchist vibe to them, that if we can just simply get rid of the cops, that we will, we will govern ourselves and it will be beautiful. And instead, it became a dangerous, violent riot on the scale of days.
1:04:49 Steven Bartlett? And in 2017, the same year that this happened, you resigned from the college and you got a payout, essentially.
1:04:56 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:04:57 Steven Bartlett? I asked this question because we were talking about newspapers and then we, we moved to the education system and you said that there's not, not a university in the land that's still doing what it's supposed to do. So it felt somewhat correlated, linked to, to what you were saying, because it kind of sets the backdrop of, A, maybe why you, you have, you know, clear personal experience here, but also what you saw there was kind of a symptom, I think, of some of the pressures that are being applied to the scientific education institution that are stopping it being able to do what it should be doing.
1:05:28 Speaker 00 Hundred percent. It's doing the inverse of what it should do. It's indoctrinating people. And, you know, the tragedy of it is that the people who are indoctrinated end up hurting themselves.
1:05:42 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:05:43 Speaker 00 Right? They have an opportunity and they will squander it on a fiction and in the end, it will not result in them being, uh, hirable, right? They've learned, they've learned how to demand things of the system rather than to contribute something to it and that's not their fault. I mean, at some point, it becomes their fault, but that's the, that's the failure of those who were charged with delivering them an education to do so. It's, it's educational malpractice.
1:06:11 Steven Bartlett? You cited this as one of your big concerns. You started talking about basically the, the loss of the media. What is the, what is the downstream implications of that? Because that, it just, I just feel like I'm, I'll get my media in other places. I'll just go on X. I'll, you know, that's not going to cause any issues with society.
1:06:28 Speaker 00 Well, um.
1:06:31 Speaker 00 I believe the consequence of it is something that I call the Cartesian crisis. Cartesian crisis. Cartesian, a reference to Rene Descartes. And the reason I reference him is that he had a kind of philosophical freakout. Where he realized that almost everything that he took to be a fact, he had not tested himself. And therefore, all of those facts that felt objective were really downstream of somebody's authority. And he realized how dangerous that was. And in fact, it results in one of his most famous contributions to humanity, which is the,
1:07:14 Speaker 00 what masquerades as a proof of his existence, "I think therefore I am."
1:07:22 Speaker 00 Now, I don't think it is a very good proof, right? Maybe it works for him. He can prove to himself that he exists. But why we should take his word for the fact that he exists, you know, if a computer said, "I think therefore I am," it doesn't make it true. So, in any case, we can remember that Descartes was troubled by the fact that he couldn't establish any facts
1:07:43 Speaker 00 in any way other than to take somebody's word for the fact that that's what they were. We are increasingly living in a world where the chain of logic, of evidence, of reason, that might allow us to have some confidence in a fact, is breaking down. And this problem is going to get worse and worse. Not only is every single truth-seeking institution captured or broken, but AI is going to change the very nature of what it means for something to be a fact, right? If you can have a compelling video of you saying something that you never once said, right?
1:08:27 Speaker 00 Well, you know, if I show you a video of you saying something last week that you didn't say, you're going to be pretty darn sure you didn't say it. But if I show you something that you said 15 years ago, you may not be so certain. Other people won't be so certain. So, what I think this is going to do is going to produce an allergic reaction to belief.
1:08:49 Speaker 00 And it is going to cause a cynicism about factual material that is going to make it impossible for us to interact with each other, to govern ourselves. It's just, there's no future in a world in which we can't figure out, here is what I believe and here is why I believe. That is an essential feature.
1:09:10 Steven Bartlett? Doesn't the internet just become a bit of a wasteland in such a case? And we'll, I was thinking of sort of political commentators. Is it likely that there might just become a channel which we switch to, which is a verified channel to watch, you know, Donald Trump or Rishi Sunak or the prime ministers talking and to get our news source where we know that particular channel is truth and then we assume that the internet is just a wasteland of misinformation?
1:09:38 Speaker 00 Well, the problem is, if you had such a channel, boy, would that be a prize if you controlled it, right?
1:09:44 Steven Bartlett? Oh, yeah.
1:09:45 Speaker 00 If you've got the fact channel, then, oh, the world's your oyster. You're now emperor. So where there going to be a fact channel, it would get captured. And that's the world we're living in. Now, I will say, the idea that there are no institutions that work is the flip side of another idea, which I, it goes by the phrase, zero is a special number. And what I mean by zero is a special number is that when you have zero universities that work, zero newspapers that report the news, zero social media platforms in which you are allowed to speak freely, one world unfolds.
1:10:27 Speaker 00 But a single exception in any of those spaces changes the overall dynamic. And the reason for that is because if you had one social media platform in which people were truly free to seek the truth, to discuss anything and everything, and nothing bad happened to them, and they weren't de-boosted or any of that. Then that's obviously where all of the people who want an adult conversation are gonna go. Right? You don't want to be treated like a child. You want to have a conversation in which you can actually entertain all possibilities, reject those for which there's no evidence, etc. So if you get one platform, then people are gonna go to it. And if people go to that one platform, it's gonna force the other platforms to deliver something similar.
1:11:09 Speaker 00 So the competitive environment means that a single exception can actually change the whole landscape. And we are in a battle. I don't think X has achieved that status of being completely free. But it's certainly freer than the other platforms. And it is having an effect. It is changing the dynamic. And it is in part why the COVID narrative broke wide open. Why the political narrative in the US is
1:11:41 Speaker 00 becoming radically different than it was even a few years ago. So the question is, are we gonna see an exceptional university break the trend and become the next Harvard because you'd be crazy to send your kid anywhere else? Are we gonna see somebody put together a newspaper in which they get all of the subscribers? Because you'd be crazy to get your news from a propaganda source when there was a real source. So hopefully courageous people will recognize it's not as hopeless as as we are led to believe. A single exception can change the whole dynamic.
1:12:18 Steven Bartlett? I'm actually quite shocked at the impact that Elon buying Twitter, now called X, has had on so many things. And even quite frankly, the the impact I'm starting to see it have on someone like Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. I watched an interview yesterday with Mark, who I think Meta had previously banned Trump from being able to talk on the platform, basically saying that he's pretty badass. And I do not believe he would have been able to say that had X and Twitter not changed.
1:12:49 Speaker 00 I agree with you, and I think that actually if you start looking for other examples of that pattern, you will see them everywhere. There are certain things that once had magical power that no longer do. The claim that somebody is a conspiracy theorist does not cause them to be shunned from society. In fact, my feeling is when I hear somebody is a conspiracy theorist, my question is, oh, are they any good at it? But the same thing is true for the idea of an anti-vaxxer, right? Well, you know, okay, somebody's an anti-vaxxer. Is that because they reflexively believe that no such thing could work?
1:13:34 Speaker 00 Or is this somebody with an injured kid who has legitimate questions, right? We've just seen the leading proponent of vaccines publish a paper in which he acknowledges that the testing to establish that they were safe was never done. So we're living in a whole different world, and I think it's a it is a symptom of Musk primarily having broken the dynamic by, as he said, paying forty-four billion dollars because that was the price of free speech.
1:14:11 Steven Bartlett? You mentioned AI there. In your sort of list of concerns, pressing concerns, where does AI feel? It feels like it's come out of nowhere, you know, because if we go back a year, a year? Yeah, about a year, it wasn't really front of mind for anybody, for the vast population, for the general population. But now it appears to be front of everybody's mind, everyone thinking's mind.
1:14:37 Speaker 00 I think that's the right way to view it. I think it should be top of mind and not because it is independently everything that its worst critics imagine. In fact, I have my doubts about the safetyist crowd and their demands for regulation, but there's plenty to worry about in this space. So I have five different existential threats that AI poses.
1:15:10 Speaker 00 Let's see, off the top of my head, let's start with the the most fanciful first. AI could decide that we are its competitors. And it could leverage its skills and decide to eliminate us.
1:15:27 Speaker 00 I find that unlikely, but I don't think we can discount it entirely.
1:15:32 Speaker 00 Second is the so-called paperclip problem. That AI that was very powerful could have trouble operationalizing a command. And it could result in human extinction. And the example that people who think this way use is if you were to tell an AI, you wanted it to make as many paperclips as possible, that it could interpret that as license to go liquidate the universe and turn it all into paperclips. Right, not what I meant, but you know, but there you have it. And actually, I will give a different example that I think
1:16:10 Speaker 00 maybe functions better. There are people in our intellectual space who make claims like it would be great if we were to end all suffering. Personally, I think that's about the most insane idea I've ever heard. It's a terrible one. You wouldn't want to live in that world. But you can understand why people think that it might be a moral obligation. Now imagine that you tell an AI, hey, let's end all suffering. That's actually possible. Just drive everything that can suffer extinct.
1:16:47 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:16:47 Speaker 00 Right, so the idea that we have a non-trivial problem figuring out how to give a powerful AI an instruction that can't be misunderstood. It's worth worrying about. Again, I think that one's fanciful too. But it should be on our list. But then we get to the three that I don't think are easily dismissed. One is that AI is going to enable.
1:17:18 Speaker 00 People with malign intent to
1:17:23 Speaker 00 it's going to enable them more than it is going to enable those with benevolent intent. And this is an unfortunate asymmetry that just exists in the world. That a an amoral actor, somebody who has no moral compass. They have total flexibility. They can do whatever a moral person can do, and then they've got a whole list of other things that they can also do. Right?
1:17:48 Speaker 00 Whereas a moral person is constrained. They just have the limited set of things that are available to them. So the question is, does AI liberate us all? Or does it liberate those who are
1:18:01 Speaker 00 monstrous more than it liberates those of us who behave like like decent humans? I'm concerned about that. I think we are in some danger of it being leveraged against us in a way that transforms things.
1:18:15 Steven Bartlett? I remember hearing a hacker say that the malicious hackers, the people with malicious intent are always ahead of those, the sort of ethical hackers that have benevolent attempt that are that are good. And he was talking about how like the encryption systems and password systems, he goes, the hackers are always ahead. And the defense systems that companies are trying to put in place are always behind because the hackers intent is obviously always to find new ways of breaking the current system, whereas the people that defend security systems are just trying to defend against the known forms of attack. So someone in, I don't know, some kid in Russia right now could be at his computer figuring out new ways to use a large language model to
1:18:58 Steven Bartlett? attack systems in new ways, whereas the people who are working to defend that are currently just trying to figure out how to mitigate the risks of current weapons. So it's, you know what I mean? Like the attackers are always thinking forward, really.
1:19:11 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:19:11 Steven Bartlett? Do you think the general public and also just institutions and governments are currently underestimating the profundity and the impact that AI is going to have on the planet?
1:19:21 Speaker 00 Yes, and in fact, I think we are crossing over what would be described as an event horizon. So an event horizon, I think the term initially comes from an understanding of what happens at a black hole, that there's a point at which light is pulled back in, and so you can't see beyond it. Right? There's literally no mechanism to see beyond it. We are crossing a threshold that none of us can see beyond. And that is inherently frightening.
1:19:55 Speaker 00 Are people underestimating? They are simultaneously underestimating and overestimating. Right? The fear of being turned into a paperclip is overblown, in my opinion. The fear of, well, I've just gotten to the third one on the list. The fourth one on the list is a total collapse in our
1:20:18 Speaker 00 understanding of the world around us and each other. That the way in which an artificial intelligence interfaces with our
1:20:30 Speaker 00 human API, with our interface, is profound already. And we're not very far in. And I'm already looking at little movies that this thing makes. And I'm not just talking about the clip of the cat walking through the garden, right? Little vignettes. I'm talking about actual movies in which characters of a made-up species are having a conversation about humans, right? Okay.
1:21:06 Speaker 00 That's a hell of a moment. Where will we be in five years? It's unimaginable how much change that is going to create because we have no evolutionary preparedness at all for living in a world where the product of a computer can out compete the product of a human in narrative space. That's a dangerous world to live in because narratives are so profoundly important to who we are.
1:21:41 Steven Bartlett? Stories.
1:21:42 Speaker 00 Yeah, stories. Stories are what we're all about. You know, even profound ideas are unfathomable until somebody has written them into a story that people can can grok.
1:21:56 Steven Bartlett? But also, language just generally is, I don't think, I was listening to something the other day, which was just making the case for how our entire society is pretty much held together with with language. And it's so interesting that large language models were really the thing that blew open this conversation about AI because we don't realize that like, like my every relationship I have is held together with language. In fact, all my passwords are language. The way that I think, the way that I understand the world is through language. So if there's a super intelligent species that has a better grasp of language and a certain level of autonomy, it's hard to think, you know, it's interesting because what made us dominate the world was, I think, was our intelligence and our and then our ability to collaborate through through language and communication. And this is the
1:22:41 Steven Bartlett? the very thing that AI has entered the scene with.
1:22:45 Speaker 00 Well, I will tell you, I wrote a piece, and I keep meaning to release it just so people can see. I didn't get it exactly right, but many years ago, I wrote a piece in which I said that I believed that artificial intelligence was going to emerge from the project to get a computer to translate seamlessly between two languages. And I explained why that would be the thing that cracked the the nut. And
1:23:13 Speaker 00 That is what happened for a reason. The reason is because the relationship between human language and consciousness is profound and largely unknown. So Heather and I described this model in our book, Hunter Gathers: Guide to the 21st Century. Human beings are a unique species. The primary way in which we are unique is that if you think about the question about, well, what do human beings do? All right, if I say, you know,
1:23:56 Speaker 00 what does a tiger do? We could describe the things that a tiger does to meet its caloric needs, to get the materials necessary to maintain its body, to produce offspring. We could describe the niche of the tiger. Can't really do that with people. Right? What do we do? Sometimes we farm the oceans. Sometimes we hunt big game on land. Sometimes we terraform a piece of territory and we plant crops. We do a lot of different things. And if you think about all the things that human beings have done for our entire history as a species, it's immense, the collection. So we are unlike any other species because our niche is the movement between niches,
1:24:39 Speaker 00 both over time and across space. So how does that work? Well, we have a tool that no other species has. When you think about the question of what makes human beings special, the answer really is language. And the reason that it's language is that language allows the breaching of the boundary between one mind and another.
1:25:07 Speaker 00 So that ability allows human beings to pool their cognitive capacity. And what Heather and I argue in our book is that the, the way human beings get through time is they oscillate between two modes. When the ancestors, when your ancestors know how to exploit the habitat that you live in, then you take their wisdom and all of the stories that it's encoded in and you apply it. And maybe you build it out a little bit, you figure out how to do something the ancestors didn't quite know how to do. But mostly what you're doing is just applying the toolkit that you've been handed to the problems that it works on.
1:25:50 Speaker 00 But what happens when you get on a canoe and you cross some body of water and the place you've landed doesn't have the same plants and animals that your ancestors knew? Well, it's not like they, they got dumber, but it, their stuff is less applicable. So what you do is you pool your cognitive capacity, you and all the people in your tribe, and you talk about, well, what are the opportunities here and what might you do about them? You know, I saw an animal this morning and it looked like it might be pretty good eating, but I don't know how you're going to catch one. Well, what if we were to drive it into that canyon, right? That sort of thing. So by pooling our cognitive resources, by reaching a collective consciousness, which
1:26:35 Speaker 00 is the inverse of that cultural mode of the ancestors, the conscious mode, when we face novelty, allows us to come up with new solutions and then to refine them. And when we've got it nailed, well, then we're the ancestors who knew what to do. And our stories get driven into that cultural layer and they get handed on generation after generation and then eventually.
1:27:00 Speaker 00 They run out of usefulness and we have to return to consciousness and come up with a new way. So that's what human beings do, both spreading across space and moving through time. They oscillate between that cultural mode of the ancestors and the conscious mode of what the hell do we do now?
1:27:15 Steven Bartlett? So I want to make sure I fully understand this, as if a 10-year-old would understand it, is we have kind of two modes. We have what we had passed to us and because of consciousness and language and our ability to communicate, we have what we're discovering now about the nature of the world. And I think the very presence of a skyscraper is quite an interesting thing because it's built on the knowledge passed to us from people that no longer live. With also, you know, if the skyscraper has something on top of it, like it's solar powered or something, much of that understanding has come from our current thinking of the people that live right now. So you have the combination of relatives from the past that are no longer here, all
1:27:58 Steven Bartlett? of their collective knowledge, and you have the collective knowledge that we're discussing and thinking through now. Together, that's what makes humans so special. And really what ties that all together is language and the ability to communicate.
1:28:08 Speaker 00 Right. It is that ability to communicate, whether you're in the cultural mode where you're picking up the stories of your ancestors so that you know what to do, or you're in that conscious mode where you're parallel processing the problems of the moment and figuring out what new solution you might come up with.
1:28:23 Steven Bartlett? And the orangutan can't do that.
1:28:25 Speaker 00 No other creature comes anywhere close. It's so many orders of magnitude different from the next near. And I'm not arguing that other animals aren't smart. There are plenty of smart animals. This is a whole different kind of smart. This is a smart where it's impossible to actually draw the boundary between my smart and your smart. Right? There's a collective smart. It's very real. You can't locate it. Right? It has to do with some ancient mechanism for pooling understanding. And pooling understanding isn't even like, hey, everybody bring your understanding. It's like, you know what? I don't trust that guy's understanding because I've seen him screw up and not fix it.
1:29:11 Speaker 00 That guy, he sounds crazy, but he's got a track record. Actually, I take what he says very seriously. So it's like, oh, there's a weighting of whose, whose input plays what role. Somebody might have insight in one realm and be unreliable in another. That ability to figure out how to take the sum total of all of the different skillsets that people bring to the table and come out of it with something like a proposal for what we do next, right? That is a profound adaptive process that we don't even have a name for.
1:29:48 Steven Bartlett? AI changes this.
1:29:50 Speaker 00 Well, AI scrambles it. Because on the one hand, I can make the argument that AI is like a flint-napped blade. It's just another tool. And it is just another tool at one level. On the other hand, because, you know, the blade, you're in pretty big trouble when a blade starts talking to you. You know what I'm saying? That's a bad moment. That's, you need to lay off the mushrooms at that point, right? In this case, the blade, the tool that we've created, it is talking to us. In fact, it's sensitive to what we think about what it says to us, which means it
1:30:35 Speaker 00 is, it is certain that you will have an evolutionary process in which the AI gets exquisitely good at telling us what we want to hear.
1:30:48 Speaker 00 There's nothing more dangerous than that. You want an AI that tells you what you need to know, whether or not you want to hear it, right? That would be a useful tool. An AI that responds to the fact that you think that what it said is good? Oh, my God, we are, we are going to end up in a.
1:31:09 Speaker 00 I'm struggling for a better metaphor than an infinite hall of mirrors, but that's what it's gonna be. It's gonna be a big fractal hall of mirrors in which you can't be certain of stuff. And I will say, because I know that there's a lot of concern. You've got a kind of safetyist crowd that wants to regulate AI because the dangers are profound. And you've got a bunch of other people who think regulating AI is dangerous. And what I've realized is that failing to regulate AI is dangerous. Regulating it is worse.
1:31:44 Steven Bartlett? Regulating AI is worse?
1:31:45 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
1:31:47 Steven Bartlett? Why?
1:31:48 Speaker 00 Well, for one thing, you create an asymmetry between those who abide by the regulation and those that don't.
1:31:55 Steven Bartlett? So say China won't have a regulation, but America do have one.
1:31:59 Speaker 00 Right. Do you want to be ruled by whoever violates your regulation? I don't, but that's what we effectively guarantee if we create that dynamic. So I don't like the idea of heading across the event horizon created by AI without a plan. I really don't like that idea. That's not safe. On the other hand, the alternative is only going to make that problem worse. So somehow we have to face this with our eyes wide open.
1:32:28 Steven Bartlett? I mean, how does one face it with their eyes wide open? I mean, all I'm hearing is you can do nothing about it.
1:32:33 Speaker 00 Well, I don't know that you can do nothing about it. Here's what I want to know.
1:32:40 Speaker 00 Why are we not obsessed with tracking the thought process of the AIs? In other words, if there were one thing that I would want, it's AIs to report how they arrived where they did. So that when the catastrophe happens, we can figure out why it happened. We could potentially get through this very perilous moment by coming to understand it and becoming wise about how to leverage this.
1:33:14 Speaker 00 So I do think there are things to do, but what is not wise is the sort of naive, oh, I'm just gonna get to the point where I realize that regulating AI makes problems worse, and now I'm not gonna worry about it. Right? That, I think, I think not regulating it is the right thing to do, and worrying about it tremendously is also the right thing to do.
1:33:39 Steven Bartlett? I also think about a world, I think maybe the world that Elon is really trying to create, where we are able to interface with AI via brain interface devices like Neuralink. You know, it's interesting because I watched Elon's narrative emerge around Neuralink at the very start, and he was very focused on being able to interface with AI. That was all the interviews he was doing at the time were centered on, the reason why I'm doing Neuralink is because we need to be able to interface with this technology, or else we're going to get left behind. And then more recently, it's become about allowing people that can't use their arms and legs to use them again, which I think is maybe a marketing spin. But at the heart of his narrative and other people's narratives is that we are probably all going to have these brain interface devices put into our brains, or maybe outside of our bodies, if you look at some of the other companies,
1:34:23 Steven Bartlett? so that we can interface with AI. And I mean, that fundamentally changes what humans are. We become cyborgs or something.
1:34:32 Speaker 00 Yes, it's not the first time we will have fundamentally changed what humans are, though. And I think this is an important thing to realize, is that we do, we do this regularly. You know, the printing press did this, television did this, the internet did this. And, you know, the gloom and doom crowd each time has said, oh my God, if you print books, it's going to cause our minds to become feeble because you won't need to remember. And the funny thing is, I think in each case, the gloom and doomers were right. There's definitely an element that they correctly spotted.
1:35:14 Speaker 00 What's difficult to do is, or impossible, is to look over the event horizon and say, what does it mean?
1:35:22 Speaker 00 And in this case, what does it mean, right? Are we going to get through this incredibly perilous period and look back on this, you know, the way we look back at the cellphone, right? Cellphone, oh no, it's going to destroy human sociality. It's going to, you know, it's going to do that. Well, it did. Drove us crazy, absolutely insane. So yeah, AI is going to be that and worse. And that the only thing to do is to try to understand that change. So we can mitigate the harm and hopefully rein in the overarching pattern of hyper novelty that we are creating for ourselves.
1:36:04 Steven Bartlett? Do you think this technology is comparable to any of those?
1:36:08 Speaker 00 It's like those, but 50 times worse. I mean, the phone was really a tragic innovation in many ways, and it's not the phone itself. I actually, I sometimes say it's not the box, it's the business model. Right? A phone is a terrifically enabling device. And it has made us more powerful. It has made us more fragile. I was talking to Heather about the problem. If, if we face a major disruption, right? If solar flare takes out the grid and you have to get home.
1:36:52 Speaker 00 Well, do you have a map?
1:36:56 Speaker 00 Because not so long ago, you could have bought a map on paper. Now, the fact that we have these maps in our phones means that the ability to buy the map doesn't even exist anymore. Where would you, I'm not even sure where I would go to find a map. So we are less secure than we were because we are so hyper-enabled in the present. And yeah, we're, we're in for some really interesting times.
1:37:26 Speaker 00 I will just say to complete it, I've gotten through four of the five existential threats that conceivably come from the AI, at least as far as I can spot it. The last one is the most mundane, and that's just the massive economic disruption that's coming from a technology that will take what most people do for a living and make it useless.
1:37:48 Steven Bartlett? There's a lot of people at the moment kind of denying this fact that think they'll be fine.
1:37:53 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:37:54 Steven Bartlett? Is there anyone that will be fine? And who are those people? And who won't be fine? And what's the, I guess, the important part as well? When, when we think about this disruption is the speed of disruption. Because that, that gives us a clue as to how long we'll have to adjust as a society. Find new jobs, upskill people, learn, train, maybe go do, find something else to do.
1:38:16 Speaker 00 Most people are not going to be able to retrain for something that will be relevant.
1:38:23 Speaker 00 I think, and in fact, the advice I've given my kids is invest in tools.
1:38:33 Speaker 00 Invest in a toolkit, a cognitive toolkit that works for a future that you cannot imagine.
1:38:42 Speaker 00 Right? If you, five years ago, people were saying, learn to code.
1:38:47 Speaker 00 That was bad advice.
1:38:49 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:38:49 Speaker 00 Okay? That's something that AIs can do. If, however, you invest in things that cause an upgrade to the quality of your thinking. If you invest in the kinds of skills that can be mapped onto new realms, then I can't promise you'll be all right. But you'll be a lot better off than people whose skill set is so narrowly focused on some task that made sense in 2024 that in 2027, they're adrift. You know? Be a generalist. Invest in clear thinking. Figure out who you can trust. Develop your interpersonal relationships. Maybe that should even have been the head of the list.
1:39:35 Speaker 00 Right? People who you can depend on, who have the insight, the values that makes them worthy of your investment in them and know them in person. So that no matter what happens, if the forces that wish to confuse us leverage AI to get in between us, which would not be a terrible description of what happened during COVID, except that AI was presumably not a big player. But if people try to get in between us, they're going to have a lot easier time doing it. If your relationship with somebody is intermediated by a screen.
1:40:15 Speaker 00 You want to know people in person so that you can turn off the screen and you can say, do you know what the hell is going on? What do you think? What did you see? What did you hear? What do you think is occurring? Right? You want to be able to have that conversation with somebody who's a real flesh and blood human, who, you know, who you're willing to go all in with.
1:40:36 Steven Bartlett? Are there any careers that if your children turned to you and said, you know, Dad, what career should I do in a world where AI is getting smarter by the week?
1:40:55 Speaker 00 The funny thing is that almost strikes me. I know you don't intend it this way, but it's almost a trick question at this moment. All right? Anybody who thinks they know how to answer it is probably at least kidding themselves. It is that, you know, it's like if we were, let's say we found ourselves, you know, adrift on an outrigger in the middle of, you know, the South Pacific. We don't know if we're going to survive. And you want to know, hey, well, if we do, if we find some land, what do we do then? And it's like, well, I don't know.
1:41:39 Speaker 00 But let's find the land and then let's think very carefully about what to do when we get there.
1:41:44 Steven Bartlett? So, but if your kid literally came up to you, would you say that to your kid?
1:41:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:41:48 Steven Bartlett? So, but they say, well, Dad, do I go to school, university? What do I do?
1:41:52 Speaker 00 I think the question that you're really asking is, what would you do in their shoes? Which is not really a career question.
1:42:02 Speaker 00 What I would do in their shoes.
1:42:06 Speaker 00 Is I would, if I was gonna go to college, I would make damn sure that I left college with a tangible project that I had accomplished, that I could establish was my own, that proved I was competent. Right? If you develop something, I don't care if it does something useful or not. Right? It could be, you ever seen a most useless machine?
1:42:36 Steven Bartlett? No.
1:42:37 Speaker 00 A most useless machine is kind of an interesting thing. The classic version of it is it's a little box with a switch on the top. And if you flip the switch, a hand comes out and flips it back the other way. And it goes back in the box, right? Totally useless. But the point is, look, anybody who can make a most useless machine, well, I know something about their skill set. So what I'm saying is, I don't wanna see anybody's transcript. I don't know why your transcript says what it does. I don't know that your professors knew what they were talking about. Right? It's not useful. But if you show me a most useless machine, and the answer is, okay, if you really made that, then I know, A, you know something about prototyping;
1:43:22 Speaker 00 B, you know how to manage a project; C, I know that your motivational structure allows you to go from the concept to a finished project that actually works, etc. So I know a bunch of things that your transcript can't tell me. Now, a recommendation from the right person might mean something. You know, who was really the right person? But a recommendation from a random person I don't know that just says, "You're marvelous." I don't know what that means. But, so one thing is, make damn sure you graduate with something that you can show other people that is unfakeable. The other thing that I have told them is...
1:44:08 Speaker 00 If you invest in a skill, one of my sons asked me about electrical engineering. What did I think about electrical engineering? I said, I think electrical engineering is great, but it's not enough. If you go into electrical engineering, you are going to face a huge number of people who also went into electrical engineering, who are very good at what they do. And maybe you're just awesome at what you do, but distinguishing yourself in a world where you've got a bunch of competitors, many of them, maybe they're not as likable. And so they have more time to just dedicate to pure electrical engineering. You don't want to compete. It's not a, it's not a winning bet. However, if you,
1:44:53 Speaker 00 if you invest in electrical engineering and one or two other things that have some relation to it, well, maybe you're the only person on earth who has the skill set to combine these things so that you come up with something that's unique. And then it doesn't have to be perfect. And you don't want to have to make perfect things. Perfect things are almost impossible to make. The expense of making something perfect is through the roof for exactly that reason of diminishing returns. You'd much rather bring something to the world that's novel and useful and then let other people perfect it. That's where you want to be. So combining things that are not usually combined is one way to distinguish yourself. And tangible product that actually establishes
1:45:38 Speaker 00 that you have those characteristics. And then the hidden punchline there is, if you say, okay, my dad told me, I need to make a project that makes it clear what skill set I have. And you set out to do it. You know what you're going to find out? What skills you don't have. If your motivational structure is broken, you're going to learn that. And then you can fix it. Right? If you think, oh, I'm going to learn the skills. I'm in college. I better buckle down and get all the skills in the textbook. And then when I get out, I'll start making stuff. If you do that, then the point is, well, When you get out, it's too late to discover that your motivational structure doesn't allow you to complete a project, or that you so dislike failure that when you make a prototype, you don't even realize what the meaning is.
1:46:23 Speaker 00 All you see is that it doesn't work very well. Right?
1:46:27 Steven Bartlett? On that fifth point of your AI concerns, this idea of sort of economic turmoil for whatever reason, Sam Altman's other business called World Queen intends to, I think it intends to distribute basically value, let's just to simplify it, distribute money to people in a world where there's been so much economic disruption that we've kind of lost our jobs. That's kind of how I understood it. So people are going around the world, scanning their retinas on these machines that have been placed all over the world. And that's going to become the mechanism to identify you as a unique individual, as a human, so that they can send you free money, universal basic income in a world where people are going to struggle to have jobs. Now, I think I've, I don't think I've butchered that too much,
1:47:12 Steven Bartlett? but do you believe that world is going to happen where there's going to be so much disruption in the labor force that so many people are going to be unemployed, that we're going to need to just basically give out money to people?
1:47:23 Speaker 00 I think that's going to be a short ride.
1:47:25 Steven Bartlett? You think it's going to be a short ride?
1:47:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, I do.
1:47:27 Steven Bartlett? What do you mean by that?
1:47:28 Speaker 00 Unfortunately,
1:47:31 Speaker 00 the story of human evolution and competition is it's one of great triumph and overcoming adversity in some chapters, and it's one of tragedy and atrocity in others. I am very concerned that the idea of useless eaters is about to make a huge comeback and that UBI has two impacts.
1:48:05 Steven Bartlett? UBI meaning universal basic income?
1:48:07 Speaker 00 Universal basic income and everything that functions like it, you know? So some distribution of value. One, it's going to make the people who are creating the value, or people who think they're creating the value, resent those who are absorbing the value just to live. And it is therefore going to trigger
1:48:30 Speaker 00 A quest to reduce that line item on the balance sheet. And there will be all kinds of excuse making, but it's pretty, it's pretty ugly.
1:48:42 Steven Bartlett? I mean, we see that in society already. People that are working hard and that are paying a lot of tax get resentful towards the people at the very bottom of the income spectrum who are maybe not working at all and are getting paid.
1:48:58 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. And interestingly, another factor in here is people that earn more money seem to have less kids. And that becomes a point of contention in society.
1:49:06 Speaker 00 Yep.
1:49:08 Speaker 00 So I think you're seeing the picture and you're, you're exactly, you're exactly understanding why this will turn into the usual demonization of some set of people as a pretext for getting rid of them. So that's bad. The other bad effect that will come from UBI is learned helplessness.
1:49:32 Speaker 00 And I think we've actually seen this. In fact, the woke revolution, I think is a tragic story because on the one hand, while, you know, I was chased out of a job that I loved by a bunch of people who accused me of things that I wasn't guilty of in a kind of madness. On the other hand, how did they end up there?
1:49:59 Speaker 00 They ended up there because they were betrayed. They were betrayed by a system that was supposed to deliver them a life that worked. It was, you know, if you did what you were asked to do, if you went to school, if you did the homework, you were supposed to come out of it with a skill set that would allow you to live a decent life. And instead, they were given, many of them were given drugs that we biologically had no understanding of, you know, because somebody was profiting off their dependency.
1:50:38 Speaker 00 And we sent them to schools and we provided them with majors that they could dedicate themselves to that weren't real, that didn't create skills or insight. In many cases, created exactly the inverse, it created confusion. And at some point.
1:50:59 Speaker 00 They realize, you know what? I don't have a plan. And in such a case, those people who don't have skills that are going to allow them to live a decent life are going to look for someone to blame. And they're probably going to land on the wrong person. Right? And especially if somebody is cynically willing to sell them the story that you know who you should blame? It's straight white guys or something like that. They'll listen. And I will say, I've done a lot of thinking about the game theory of human competition.
1:51:37 Speaker 00 And one thing has struck me in recent years, which is that there's a reason that communism continues to reemerge. It doesn't work, so why would people keep landing there? And I think it is unfortunately, the natural consequence of a meritocracy that does not take care of those who lose. If you have a meritocracy where the way to have a decent life is to figure out how to provide something that people want, right?
1:52:19 Speaker 00 But you don't have a plan for the people who try that and it doesn't work, for whatever reason. Then what you will end up with is a large number of people who will correctly understand that they are on the losing end of a bargain. Those people don't have an investment in keeping that system running. They want to overturn it. And in fact, with some cause, they will look at all of the fortunes that have been created in that meritocracy and they will say, do you realize how much of that is illegitimate? Do you realize how much of that was parasitic? We want it back. And so I think communism is, you know, game theoretically, it can't be made to work.
1:53:01 Speaker 00 It has a fundamental flaw at its heart, which is that it punishes those who contribute and it rewards those who don't. Such a system will inherently be unproductive.
1:53:12 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything else that exists on your list of concerns? That we haven't crossed? So we've covered AI, the solar flare issue.
1:53:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, there is a big concern that I have. So I
1:53:28 Speaker 00 Heather and I on our podcast spent a lot of time sorting out the landscape of the COVID debacle. And
1:53:41 Speaker 00 what we saw was quite dark. Virtually everything that we were told was upside down and backwards. If you wanted to know medically what you should do about COVID, you literally couldn't do better than looking at what the CDC told you and doing the inverse of all of it. Right. They got every single thing wrong, which is improbable.
1:54:02 Steven Bartlett? What's the CDC for anyone that doesn't know?
1:54:04 Speaker 00 Center for Disease Control. Should probably be renamed the Center for Disease because they resulted in it spreading farther and having worse impacts. But nonetheless,
1:54:17 Speaker 00 I sometimes say certain stories diagnose the system. Right. You can see what's wrong with your system by the way a particular story flows through. You can see the complete collapse of journalism through the COVID story. You can see the utter dereliction of duty of our universities from that story. You can see the brokenness of our political institutions, our courts, all of this. They all failed and you can see where we live based on that story alone. But unfortunately, in the US, the two major parties,
1:54:55 Speaker 00 both have their fingerprints all over the failure and neither of them want to talk about it. So aside from a few exceptions, people who shined during this period, mostly there's a tacit agreement to move on. And I think it's a terrible error.
1:55:15 Steven Bartlett? What was the failing?
1:55:17 Speaker 00 Well, I would point to three and a half separate failures. One, the COVID
1:55:26 Speaker 00 crisis and mind you, all of the words here need caveats. I do believe that there was a pathogen, SARS-CoV-2. I do not believe that we had anything that would, by the prior definition, be called a pandemic. I do not believe it was inherently an emergency. But nonetheless, these are the terms we use. The COVID pandemic was some kind of emergency. We were delivered something wrongly called vaccines. We were propagandized into avoiding off patent drugs that really did work.
1:56:08 Speaker 00 And so, and you know, we made our situation vastly worse. We locked down, which injured people. We put masks on children, which literally disrupted their normal developmental processes. We kept vaccinating and revaccinating, which has created an entire landscape of adverse events and early deaths, which we are still not being honest about. So the three and a half realms are the origin of the virus, which is all but certain to have been laboratory and very probably the Wuhan Institute.
1:56:53 Speaker 00 But the Wuhan Institute isn't the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's also connected to the NIH, Anthony Fauci. This enhancement, this gain of function research that was embarked upon was downstream of a weapons program. And
1:57:15 Steven Bartlett? What's gain of function research?
1:57:17 Speaker 00 Gain of function research is where various techniques are employed to give a pathogen, in this case, a virus, capabilities that it didn't otherwise have.
1:57:28 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
1:57:28 Speaker 00 So what I think happened in the origin of COVID, we can now tell a pretty good story. You have a vast
1:57:39 Speaker 00 Network of laboratories. Working to find new pathogens that can be turned into weapons. What story they tell themselves about why we need these weapons, I don't know. But it is clear that if you are working to enhance human health, or you say you are, that you are allowed to enhance the lethality of germs as part of a dual-use program.
1:58:06 Steven Bartlett? Uh huh.
1:58:08 Speaker 00 So the excuse is, oh, we're working to prepare the world from a pandemic. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, right? That's what they tell us. It's not true. The likelihood of a pathogen leaping from nature to humans is actually quite remote for reasons that it took me a long time to realize, but I now get it loud and clear. Pathogens don't jump from animals to humans very easily because it's not an easy jump, right? They have to do two tricks and they have to do it in rapid succession in order for it to work. The first trick is they have to actually infect a human being. The second trick is before that human being dies or gets better, they have to learn to jump to a second human being.
1:58:52 Speaker 00 That is not an easy trick. So what human beings have done is they have started accelerating that process in laboratories that are specifically attempting to create these highly pathogenic creatures that infect people for the purpose of creating weapons. So what happened in Wuhan, I believe, is there was a case where some Chinese miners who were working in a mine that was full of bats, they were actually literally shoveling bat guano out of this mine.
1:59:35 Speaker 00 Six of them became sick and three of them died.
1:59:41 Speaker 00 None of them made anybody else sick. And they were all compromised because they were breathing this dust in the mine, which made them vulnerable. But the fact that six miners got sick from a virus in this mine told the folks at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who were connected directly to some American researchers, told them, aha, there is a virus in a cave in Yunnan Province. And the virus already knows one of the two tricks. It can infect a human. What we need to do is find that virus and enhance it so that we have a virus that can spread between people.
2:00:23 Steven Bartlett? Why would they want a virus that can spread between people?
2:00:25 Speaker 00 Because they're part of a cryptic weapons program.
2:00:28 Steven Bartlett? Ah, OK.
2:00:29 Speaker 00 Now, if that sounds preposterous to you, and I can imagine that it would, I can imagine myself five years ago thinking that sounds absolutely ridiculous and paranoid, frankly. I would suggest that people read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s most recent book. It's called The Wuhan Cover-Up, in which he explores at great length this weapons program and its probable link to SARS-CoV-2. It is also worth reading the book he wrote before that, The Real Anthony Fauci. When one comes to understand that the reason that Anthony Fauci was the highest-paid federal worker in the US, bar none,
2:01:14 Speaker 00 that's because he was the head of a weapons program disguised as a public health program.
2:01:19 Steven Bartlett? OK, so Anthony Fauci is the guy that I saw on TV telling, giving us advice on what to do about this pandemic.
2:01:25 Speaker 00 Yep, he was the guy.
2:01:27 Steven Bartlett? And he was like the medical advisor guy?
2:01:29 Speaker 00 The medical advisor guy, but the funny thing is Anthony Fauci is largely responsible for the gain-of-function research that created the virus in the first place, that made it a human pathogen.
2:01:41 Steven Bartlett? How do we know that?
2:01:42 Speaker 00 Because we now know that there was a...
2:01:48 Speaker 00 Ban on gain-of-function research in the US and that Anthony Fauci was part of the effort to offshore the work to Ralph Baric, who was an American researcher, still is an American researcher, his partners in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Ji Zhengli being the primary. So what they did was they evaded a ban that arose in the US, I believe in 2015, as a result of very realistic fears that a virus would escape from gain-of-function research. They offshored it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology so the work could continue. That was Anthony Fauci's work. So somehow, he ends up both in a position to fund and fuel the research that creates
2:02:33 Speaker 00 the virus, and then he's the go-to guy for advice about what we should do about it. That's a very odd coincidence, and it worked out very badly for Planet Earth.
2:02:42 Steven Bartlett? Why would Anthony Fauci send offshore it to China, who are, I would consider, to be one of the US's arch-nemesis?
2:02:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, that is a great question. I don't know the answer to it.
2:02:55 Steven Bartlett? You wouldn't want China to have that information. It's like developing the nuclear bomb in Russia or something.
2:02:58 Speaker 00 Well, I actually think that folks like you and me are... we don't get it. We think that China is a nation, and America is a nation, and that these nations are antagonists. We don't understand that actually, the United States, while it is a nation, is also a set of factions, and those factions don't agree. One faction decided to forbid gain-of-function research. Another faction decided, oh, no, you don't, and we know how to get it done. And it was partnered with some faction of that Chinese entity, you know, across the water.
2:03:42 Speaker 00 If I, if I think about how America looks to outsiders, right? I can imagine people talking about, oh, the Americans are doing this, right? But if you're talking about what the Biden administration is doing, you're not talking about me. The Biden administration isn't on my team, I'll guarantee you that, right? So the point is, the Biden administration is my antagonist. The Americans are a composite of antagonists. I mean, I guess in one sense, but I don't know why we offshored weapons research to China. I don't know that there isn't a partnership between entities that is much more relevant
2:04:24 Speaker 00 to the unfolding of events that simply doesn't have a name I would recognize. But somehow, we know that we did it. We know that the research was forbidden here, and we know, you know, Ralph Baric trained Zhang Li in how to do techniques, including what he calls no-see-em edits. Those are edits you can't see. Why would a biologist interested in studying pathogens in order to make people healthier care whether you could see their edits?
2:04:51 Steven Bartlett? Could, could it not be the case that Fauci moved the project to China, the gain-of-function research to China, or was involved in that? Because he wanted to come up, he wanted to understand these pathogens, these viruses better, so that we could do experiments on them, to better understand them, to figure out how to defend against them?
2:05:08 Speaker 00 This is exactly what they tell you. I'm a biologist. Maybe I'm dumb, but that story doesn't make any sense to me. You're going to create a new virus from a ancestor you've pulled out of a cave in Yunnan Province that you've enhanced in some way that you decided to enhance it. It doesn't tell you about some virus that's going to leap out of nature of its own accord. It tells you about the virus you just created. It doesn't make sense from the point of view of enhancing human health for two reasons. One, there's no demonstrated evidence that such research has given us any benefit whatsoever in fighting off pathogens.
2:05:52 Speaker 00 There's no case in which we've seen that. What we do have are multiple cases of leaks of pathogens from labs studying them. So.
2:06:02 Speaker 00 We've just got a simple comparison. What are the chances, if you study some virus you plucked out of some cave, that you're going to come up with something useful that's actually going to help us? Certainly didn't happen with COVID. Chances are very low. What are the chances that things are going to leak from your lab and cause a global pandemic? Pretty high, actually.
2:06:23 Steven Bartlett? I just imagine scientists in the lab would take a sample of it. They'd put it in the lab. They'd start analyzing it. They might start doing tests on it to see how it responds to certain things. And then, you know, through their own, maybe it leaked.
2:06:36 Speaker 00 Okay. But let's, let's see how that played out.
2:06:41 Speaker 00 We've got some gene jocks pulling a virus out of a Yunnan cave and enhancing it so that it becomes a communicable human pathogen.
2:06:56 Speaker 00 They should, in theory, in studying it, have come up with information that would tell us what to do if such a pathogen ever got out, which it did because they lost control of it. Well, what did they tell us? They told us, don't use ivermectin. Don't use hydroxychloroquine. That what you should do is you should wait at home until you're actually, your lips are turning blue. Then you should come get medical help. Now, that's wrong in every way. The right thing to do was to allow doctors to look at the patients who were coming into their office and to figure out how to treat them.
2:07:40 Speaker 00 Those doctors should have said, well, this person, they appear to be sick with a respiratory pathogen. There's a good chance that it's an RNA virus. They could have quickly actually ascertained that it was an RNA virus. You know what works on all RNA viruses? Ivermectin. Then they could have treated it and they would have seen, oh, ivermectin works for COVID if you give it very early, if you give it in sufficient doses, and if you give it with fat. Okay, doctors would have figured that out on their own. Instead, what we got was a message from the very people who had engaged in offshoring this research ostensibly to figure out how to deal with COVID,
2:08:23 Speaker 00 who then gave us exactly the inverse of the right advice. Right? And then what did they do? Well, then they told us the route out of this is a vaccine. What they delivered was not a vaccine. It was a gene therapy. That gene therapy, we were told, blocks the contraction and the transmission of COVID. And what happened was they demonized everybody who questioned either the safety or the efficacy or both of these treatments. Turned out that didn't work. So what we have, this is why I say that the COVID story diagnoses the system.
2:09:08 Speaker 00 If you think, and a person could be well within their rights to think, "Well, I'm sure we were studying the virus to protect people and that it would tell us something about what should be done if it ever were to leap into humans." Well, we got a perfect test of how well that worked. Every single thing they told us to do was wrong and upside down. If you took what they call the vaccine, you put yourself in jeopardy. If you ignored their advice and you used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and you used it early and you used it in sufficient quantities, it actually was highly effective and actually rendered this illness perfectly manageable for almost every single person.
2:09:52 Speaker 00 So we've seen how well they did. They failed across the board.
2:09:56 Steven Bartlett? Do you think there's malicious intent somewhere? Because when people hear these stories, they and because the average Joe doesn't know how systems above them work, they tend to think of this like Illuminati group of people coming together, deciding this was going to happen, then executing this plan for some because these, you know, this, this room of people who are evil, who people refer to as like "they", wanted to do harm and they want to control us. That's the kind of conspiracy narrative.
2:10:22 Speaker 00 I have no idea what motivates such people. My guess is most of the people who participated in the programs that did so much harm thought they were doing the right thing. I don't think that's true for all of them, though. I don't think that's true for Anthony Fauci.
2:10:42 Steven Bartlett? You don't think he thinks he was doing the right thing?
2:10:44 Speaker 00 I think he knows he's a weapons guy and that when you're a weapons guy, you are inherently comfortable with the destruction of human beings. That's what you do for a living. You're trying to create things that destroy human beings. And I don't know what it would be like to have such a job. I've never had one. But my guess is there is a mechanism for rationalizing absolutely ghastly things if what you do for a living is plot the destruction of others.
2:11:19 Steven Bartlett? Now, you raise this as a concern, as one of your key concerns, because I guess you think we haven't learned our lessons from this?
2:11:26 Speaker 00 No, we haven't. We, and I think things are a little bit inverted in Britain. In the US, there is widespread discussion of the harms that came from the so-called vaccines. But the question of the repurposed drugs has still, that story has not broken. People still think that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine don't work and never worked for COVID. I think this story is, in general, the inverse. That the vaccine harms are still taboo in Britain and there's more acceptance of repurposed drugs.
2:12:10 Speaker 00 But really, what we need is a no-holds-barred exploration of what happened, irrespective of what it was. Maybe I've got it all wrong and maybe that would emerge in an investigation. But we need to look at the viral origins, how exactly that happened. We need to look at what was done, the coup that public health staged against medicine, in which directives about how to treat patients came down from on high, rather than the normal medical process of doctors figuring out how to treat their patients empirically and pooling their insights. And we need to talk about what happened,
2:12:54 Speaker 00 where these gene therapies came from, what was understood about the danger, and how it is that we treat all of the people who frankly did exactly what they were asked to do and have had their lives compromised or lost because of injuries that they were not told were possible.
2:13:17 Steven Bartlett? Are you at all concerned that if there is a pandemic that breaks out now, people would be so distrusting in institutions that we wouldn't be able to communicate any kind of instructions to society at large? We wouldn't be able to tell them what medicine to take? We wouldn't tell them to lock down? We wouldn't be able to tell them pretty much anything?
2:13:35 Speaker 00 Hundred percent. It would be an absolute nightmare. But what we do have that we didn't have in 2020 is a sizable, dedicated group of dissidents, many of whom have lost jobs, who did figure out how to treat the disease, what its implications were medically, what the vaccine harms are, how you mitigate them. And we have another group of people who were able to make excellent progress on the question of where did this thing come from? And what was the process that created it? So I guess, on the one hand,
2:14:20 Speaker 00 yes, the distrust in institutions would make an actual pandemic, if such a thing happened, nightmarish. On the other hand, we've got people that are actually worthy of our trust. But I will say one other thing. In 2020, I was somewhere in the mainstream with respect to how much concern I had over zoonotic pandemics.
2:14:54 Speaker 00 Seeing what happened during COVID, I have come to understand the world is not nearly as dangerous on this front as we thought. Even the stories that we think we know, like Spanish flu, turn out not to mean what we thought they meant. Spanish flu was largely a self-inflicted wound. Yes, there was a flu that circulated. Much of what people died from was bacterial pneumonia that followed on from that flu, which we could currently treat with antibiotics. And much of the harm that was done, in fact, what panicked people tremendously was that young, healthy people were succumbing. Why?
2:15:35 Speaker 00 Because they were being given huge doses of aspirin that today would be understood to be lethal. So I'm not convinced that the story of Spanish flu is what we thought it was. And the absence of such a story, how often is humanity faced with a terrifying pandemic? The answer is, it's very rare, and the degree to which humans make it better and not, I mean, make it worse and not better, is substantial. So can we afford to wait five years as we sort out the truth of what happened during COVID? Yeah, absolutely, we can afford to wait. The chances of something 1918 happening, you know, in the present is very, very low,
2:16:20 Speaker 00 and our ability to deal with it is much better. So, um, yeah, if it were mine to say, I would say, relax about the zoonotic stuff. You've been sold a bill of goods by a lot of people who actually wanted to study how to make weaponized pathogens. And pay attention to the people who have a good track record. And it doesn't mean a perfect track record. It means people who recognized their mistakes and got smarter over time.
2:16:48 Steven Bartlett? Right, we've spent a lot of time talking about macro concerns and big things.
2:16:51 Speaker 00 Yes.
2:16:52 Steven Bartlett? It's funny, because when I sat down with you, I, I, what I, there was two things I want to talk about, which is the macro stuff, but also to just get a, I guess, a bit of a clear understanding of how our biology, our evolutionary biology and the world we're living in are misaligned. So that on a day to day basis for the next year, as I navigate through my life, the decisions I make with my food, my partners, my relationships, the day to day decisions, I can make them better. Now, in that regard, could you give me some advice?
2:17:21 Speaker 00 Sure.
2:17:22 Steven Bartlett? On how I can live a better life? Because I'm aware now of the big macro picture, much of it. But on a day to day basis, what things can I do to live a happier, healthier life?
2:17:33 Speaker 00 The primary alteration that you can make, and none of us can do this perfectly. The world doesn't allow it. But we are beautifully designed for a world we no longer live in. You have no idea how good your design is because your design interface is kind of poorly with the modern world. And so it sort of feels like evolution, yeah, it did pretty well, given what it's made of. But, you know, it kind of missed the mark in a lot of ways. Really not the case. If you lived as an ancestor lived in a world for which they were not only exquisitely well built,
2:18:15 Speaker 00 but also brilliantly programmed, then you would see that you lived in a kind of flow state. And that that flow state was only broken by the occasional interaction with something new. Right? We live in the opposite world, right? You have a, a food in your pantry. And the question of whether you should actually put it in your mouth really hinges on a, you know, a list of ingredients, some of which you may not even be able to understand, right? That's not normal, right? So if you want to live a healthier, happier, more fulfilling life,
2:18:59 Speaker 00 the key is to remove as much of the novelty as you can from as many of the realms that exist in your life as you're able to.
2:19:13 Speaker 00 What you want to be doing is eating things that look more or less like what your ancestors look like. Is that a carnivore diet? No. But it's not a vegetarian diet either. Right? It's a diet that has these things in proper proportion, that has them unadulterated by novel stuff like seed oils. Right? Seed oils are strangely repurposed lubricants that people figured out you could sell as food and then were packaged as if they were heart healthy. It's the inverse of the truth. Right? Olive oil is not a seed oil. Avocado oil is not a seed oil. Those are safe. Why?
2:19:58 Speaker 00 Because you're eating oil from the flesh of a fruit, not the seed. Plants don't want you eating their seeds. Plants reproduce by keeping their seeds from getting eaten. So using detergents to extract the toxins from a seed oil is not a safe process. So in any case, eating things that make sense, unadulterated things that look like the actual foods that your ancestors ate will make you very much healthier. Realizing that in general, a state of health is one in which you are not disrupted. Until very late in life, your body is built to function. It's built to fix itself.
2:20:44 Speaker 00 And the idea that health is a matter of which pills to take is insane. We've been sold another bill of goods by people who get rich when we buy pills. Pharma is healthy when we are sick. So don't get the idea that the way to get healthy is to figure out which things you're deficient in and
2:21:07 Speaker 00 You know, get some corrective medicine. There are some places where you're deficient. You and I are probably both deficient in vitamin D. Right? We're deficient in vitamin D, not because human beings can't make enough vitamin D, but because we live in a novel world where the UV light that we would have been interfacing with in our ancestral environment is being blocked by clothing, by buildings, by glass, and that is causing us not to synthesize the stuff. So vitamin D, that's a place where actually you probably are deficient and you should correct for it. But in general, health does not come from pills. There are drugs that are worth taking when something has gone wrong, for which this is an appropriate remedy.
2:21:50 Speaker 00 But in general, the, the style of thinking in which people are, you know, put on statins for, because some number on their chart suggested to somebody that they were in danger. This is nonsense and it doesn't, it doesn't pan out. If you look at the, the evidence, we harmed people with statins, right? The number of people who benefited from them was tiny. The number of people who assaulted them was large. And then you can extend this logic to other things, too. How much are you wired for this world?
2:22:28 Speaker 00 And how much could you restore a relationship with other people and with the environment that just simply matches what your ancestors would have done? Right? We would all benefit by spending more time outside. We all benefit from having close relationships with friends, with lovers, things that last a lifetime. And the obsession with modernizing everything is self-defeating. Right? In general, there are things that are worth modernizing, but it should be a fairly high bar. When we depart from an ancestral pattern, it should be for a very good reason, and
2:23:12 Speaker 00 it should be with our eyes wide open about the unintended consequences of doing it. So I don't know whether this is striking you as operationalizable, but you want your environment to look as ancestral as it can. You want the developmental environment of a child to be a good match for the environment that they're going to live in as an adult. You want your relationships to be,
2:23:45 Speaker 00 again, I'm not arguing for perfectly traditional, but you want them to be recognizably traditional. Right? And those things, it's kind of a high bar because frankly, you've you've got something that your ancestors didn't have.
2:23:59 Steven Bartlett? There's two last questions I have for you, if that's okay. One of them is kind of raised there, which was, well, we absolutely was not raised there, but it was in between the lines of one of the things you said about relationships
2:24:11 Steven Bartlett? is pornography.
2:24:13 Steven Bartlett? And we live in a world now because of screens and all of these things that we can access these sort of artificial romantic relationships and stimulation using the screens that 11 year olds have in their pocket.
2:24:27 Steven Bartlett? My question is, is pornography bad for us?
2:24:30 Speaker 00 It's an unmitigated disaster, but I will say that with a caveat. I am not arguing against erotica. Humans have a very longstanding relationship with erotic content, and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with erotic content. The problem is pornography itself. And I know I'm not supposed to be able to define it, but I will anyway. Pornography is erotic content. The motivation for producing it having been profit. So what's happening is the people who are making porn are transferring our wealth to them, and I don't just mean money. They are destroying the
2:25:17 Speaker 00 Sacred sexual toolkit, that is the birthright of every human being. They are destroying it for money. They are distorting it. And that distortion, I would say, comes in two, two identifiable realms. One is that, well, actually, maybe it's more than two, but men have two general reproductive strategies that work evolutionarily. Women have one. The two that men have are a sew and go,
2:26:00 Speaker 00 love them and leave them, don't invest in women or their offspring mode. And the other is invest in offspring and contribute to protecting them and raising them. When men are in that second mode, they are not exactly like women, but they are symmetrical to women in terms of how choosy they are about mates, about how careful they are in their interactions. When men are in the first mode, when they're thinking in terms of not investing in a sexual partner, that is effectively predatory.
2:26:42 Speaker 00 And the reason that it's predatory is that human babies are so expensive to raise that no woman with a choice would elect to raise one alone if she could instead have a partner join her in that. So women are built to avoid sex that does not come with commitment. They've been convinced by modernity that that's not sophisticated, that that's male oppression, whatever it might be. But the truth is,
2:27:15 Speaker 00 We have moved in the direction of women behaving like men at their worst, rather than men behaving like women at their best. And it's a mistake. So you don't want relationships, especially really ones about the most powerful stuff there is. A human sexual interaction is about as close as you get. And you don't want that relationship to be about some predatory mode that you have for, I don't know, ancestral circumstances that frankly were often ghastly and unforgivable.
2:27:58 Steven Bartlett? Right.
2:27:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, rape and things like that, exactly. So what we should really want is a society that actually causes men to find this other side of themselves, which is an investing, caring, decent side. And that's not an unmasculine side, right? A man, you know, investing in a woman and defending his family and providing for them, that's all perfectly masculine stuff, right? It's a lot more mature than the other alternative. But in any case, pornography is pushing us in the direction of this predatory mindset being synonymous with sexuality. It also inherently leads to a view of sex that is extreme.
2:28:43 Speaker 00 And the reason for that has to do with market competition. That pornographers are all selling the same thing, right? They're selling human sex. How do you capture attention in a market where every competitor has the same stuff? Well, you figure out what taboo hasn't been broken yet, and you break it. That will distinguish you from your competitors. You've got an arms race in which pornographers are trying to find more and more extreme stuff to get the attention and therefore the money of consumers. It's not a good idea. You don't want an arms race. This is not, sex isn't some new thing, you know? It's not a technology that we're trying to figure out where it goes. This is an ancient thing.
2:29:26 Speaker 00 And we're wrecking it in an economic arms race that is really bad for the people who consume this stuff, and it's really bad for society. It's causing people not to want to partner because when they do start a sexual relationship, they may find that their partner is violent because, I mean, here's the hidden aspect of this. Human beings figure out what sex is in large measure through observation of other humans. That's natural. And in fact, in hunter-gatherer societies, we know that, as weird as this sounds, kids
2:30:07 Speaker 00 learn what sex is because they're housed with their parents and they may, you know, be half asleep and so they observe something real. So the human is built to learn this through some kind of observation and inference. But if your detectors are saturated with phony sexual interactions designed to get you to, you know, pay attention rather than real sexual interactions that actually happen between people, then it corrupts your whole understanding of what you're supposed to be doing.
2:30:41 Steven Bartlett? And then we've got AI humanoid robots at the same time. So you're gonna, there's gonna be, in our lifetime, there's gonna be a new story that breaks and it's gonna be describing this very large community of millions and millions of men, and maybe women as well, who are in a committed relationship with a humanoid robot, who is pleasuring them in all the right ways and is having sex with them and giving them no problems and affirming everything they want to hear and helping them around the house.
2:31:07 Speaker 00 Oh, the worst thing you said is affirming everything they want to hear.
2:31:10 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. But you just think about what's stopping them doing that. And the only thing stopping you doing that, honestly, if I'm being completely honest, is the stigma. And stigma, as we look back through history, evaporates in a moment when enough people start doing it.
2:31:23 Speaker 00 Yep, and we saw this with porn, right?
2:31:25 Steven Bartlett? Oh, of course, yeah. That used to have a stigma.
2:31:27 Speaker 00 Oh, my God, it had such a stigma and now people just talk about it like it's nothing.
2:31:31 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:31:32 Speaker 00 And, you know, you're absolutely right. But, I mean, look, maybe...
2:31:40 Speaker 00 I have a wonderful relationship, really. I know I married the right person. And which is odd because I met her when I was 16.
2:31:47 Steven Bartlett? Wow.
2:31:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:31:49 Steven Bartlett? That's incredible.
2:31:49 Speaker 00 It is incredible, but it does tell me something because as much as I know that I'm with the right person and I can look back on my history and just understand what an important role it played in everything good about my life.
2:32:07 Speaker 00 It's not simple. You don't want it to be simple.
2:32:10 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:32:11 Speaker 00 You don't want a beautiful robot to tell you what you want to hear. That will wreck your life, right? I mean, it's like if I, let's take the perfect analogy. If I said to you, hey, how would you like just to feel really awesome all the time?
2:32:29 Steven Bartlett? It's tempting.
2:32:29 Speaker 00 Oh, it's so tempting, but it's kind of what cocaine does, right? It just triggers a pleasure center without it having to be accompanied by success or anything. Wreck your life, right? If you really get into that stuff, you'll betray every value you've got just to keep the high going. So this is the same thing. You don't want a sexy, beautiful robot to make you feel great about yourself because you will become nothing.
2:32:56 Steven Bartlett? Struggle matters.
2:32:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, it does, which is why suffering is not something we should be trying to cure.
2:33:03 Steven Bartlett? And that brings me to the last question I was gonna ask you of the two, which was just about what parents are getting wrong. Because I'm gonna be a parent at some point. I'm 31. Me and my partner have started trying for, for kids and my brother is a year older. He has three kids under the age of six. And I'm trying to navigate now. What advice or what, you know, very top level things I should be thinking about as a parent?
2:33:25 Speaker 00 I'm so glad you asked me that.
2:33:27 Steven Bartlett? Why?
2:33:28 Speaker 00 Because I've got some actually useful advice.
2:33:31 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
2:33:32 Speaker 00 And, you know, like I made mistakes with my kids and I know what they were in large measure. Maybe I don't know all of them yet, but, but I also think Heather and I did really well and, and our kids pair that story out.
2:33:46 Speaker 00 Kids are built to be raised correctly. They are not fragile in the sense that you're gonna make plenty of errors. You're gonna yell at them when you shouldn't. You're gonna do all sorts of stuff you shouldn't do. That does not wreck kids. The signal to noise ratio is what you gotta focus on, right? In general, you want your successes, the things that you do right, to sufficiently outpace the things that you screw up, that they get the idea, right? They're not, their purpose is not to game you. It's not to evade your authority. They're trying to figure out how to be in the world.
2:34:29 Speaker 00 And your job as a parent is to mirror the world that they will live in, right? To do so in a way that they can get the message, so that they can become, you don't want a panicky kid who is gonna face danger and freak out. That's not useful. That'll get you killed. What you want is somebody who, when they are faced with something challenging, brings the right tools to bear. So you'll model it for them, and you'll produce a world in which those kinds of challenges exist, right? At first, in a very crude form, and then they will get more and more sophisticated over time. It's all designed to work.
2:35:08 Speaker 00 What you wanna do is not break it, not fall in love with fads or beliefs, like, you know, childhood is a time of innocence, right? Kind of, you're supposed to be playing. Well, you know what play is? Practice, right? Yes, you should be playing. You should be having a blast, but you should be playing with things that actually have some relevance to what you wanna be as an adult, right? The fun you have should be correlated with the skills that you will want to have picked up. And...
2:35:39 Speaker 00 Anyway, I think the key is reduce the novelty in their lives as much as you can.
2:35:45 Steven Bartlett? Novelty, by what you mean?
2:35:49 Speaker 00 Stuff for which they have no evolutionary preparedness.
2:35:51 Steven Bartlett? Screens.
2:35:52 Speaker 00 Screens being very high on the list. I will tell you, Heather and I knew very little about raising kids when we had our firsts. And we literally had a conversation. I said, "Do you know how to do this?" "No." "Were you around people who did when you were a kid?" "Not really." You know, that was true for both of us. And so we just decided to wing it. And one of the things we did was we started talking to our then infant as if he was a college student. You know, it was kind of funny to do and it didn't seem harmful. And the funny thing is, it worked really well.
2:36:37 Speaker 00 Your job is to shoot over their heads. And then they rise to meet it, right? And so, don't assume that you should be meeting your child at their level. That's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to shoot above their heads and then they come to meet it. You're supposed to ignore all the garbage that they used to tell parents about. "Oh, you'll ruin your kid if you love him too much," that kind of thing. It's all nonsense, right? You're programmed to know. You're supposed to love the tiny kid unconditionally. They're supposed to feel very, very secure in that, right? That's what allows them to confront the terrifying world, is that they're completely secure at home.
2:37:21 Speaker 00 And then at the point where it's not so simple, you know, right? You're built for this, so are they. And that system works. And the thing that makes it break is novel influences, especially where you have an antagonist, right? You're not supposed to have an antagonist. Your ancestors, there were some set of things that a child should eat.
2:37:46 Speaker 00 There was nobody trying to trick your child into eating something they shouldn't because it's profitable. That's new. Alright, so anyway, you're built for it. You're also extremely thoughtful, which is a great tool because you're going to be living in a world with novel stuff.
2:38:05 Steven Bartlett? Your book is so incredibly important because it's, you know, until I went through this book, I didn't understand that pretty much everything, as you say, is downstream from our evolutionary biology. And I thought of evolutionary biology as like, why is my finger the shape that it is? Or what's inside? Or what, you know, what's the structure of the human body? But actually, understanding that everything from, from the foods we eat and why that's misaligned to the back pain that I get to, to the, the way that I mate, the why I have a girlfriend and not five girlfriends and all of society and the way it's constructed and all of my biases link back to my evolutionary biology. It allows me to see a kind of different lens on the world. And I used to think that psychology
2:38:47 Steven Bartlett? was the answer to the world. But after reading this essential book, I now know that the answer to the world is actually, much of it exists in our evolutionary biology. Our ability to see the future and to understand the past exists in our evolutionary biology. And so I highly recommend everybody gets this book and has a read of it. It's called A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by both Bret and his wife Heather. I'll link it below for everybody to read. It's a New York Times bestselling book as well. Bret, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left for you is, okay.
2:39:24 Speaker 00 Do I get to know who left it?
2:39:25 Steven Bartlett? You never get to know unless they, all these questions become conversation cards. So we have a pack for you. So if you turn it over and scan it with your iPhone, you can watch who answered the question on the other side.
2:39:38 Speaker 00 Oh, cool.
2:39:38 Steven Bartlett? So your question will become a card and then you can turn it over and scan it. And on the other side will be the person that answered it. If you could travel back to meet one member of your family, when they were the age you are now, what would you ask them?
2:39:58 Speaker 00 I guess I would ask my grandfather, who I was very close with,
2:40:04 Speaker 00 who had a great many,
2:40:09 Speaker 00 he had great hopes for humanity and he had tremendous fears about exactly what we're doing wrong, not in detail, but he understood that our power to
2:40:26 Speaker 00 break the world exceeded our wisdom about how to manage those powers.
2:40:37 Speaker 00 I guess I would ask him
2:40:44 Speaker 00 if he could have been certain
2:40:49 Speaker 00 that he was actually right and that the magnitude of the danger in 2024 would exceed even his substantial concerns.
2:41:04 Speaker 00 What might he do differently to raise the alarm?
2:41:09 Steven Bartlett? Is that what you're trying to do?
2:41:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:41:14 Speaker 00 I, I, I live
2:41:18 Speaker 00 by the following premise.
2:41:22 Speaker 00 If you were on a canoe being pulled towards a waterfall and the chances of your paddling out of the danger was growing vanishingly small,
2:41:37 Speaker 00 there's no point at which it makes sense to stop paddling.
2:41:42 Speaker 00 You don't know what you don't know and the chances that you might just barely escape a terrible disaster because you didn't give in to hopelessness means that what you do as things get very dire is you double down and
2:42:01 Speaker 00 you, you push as hard as you can. And so what I honestly believe is that it is very, very late. But as far as I know, it is not too late.
2:42:16 Speaker 00 If we began the process now of waking up to what's actually causing our problem, which is hyper novelty.
2:42:24 Steven Bartlett? Hyper novelty in simple terms, meaning?
2:42:26 Speaker 00 Meaning the rate of change is simply too great for our ability to adapt, to catch up.
2:42:35 Speaker 00 If we woke up to that problem and we got serious about addressing it, I believe that we could still do it.
2:42:45 Steven Bartlett? Are you hopeful?
2:42:49 Speaker 00 Let's put it this way. One of the tools that we use in evolutionary biology to think about the process of a creature becoming some other kind of creature is called the adaptive landscape. And it involves thinking about opportunities as peaks. The value of an opportunity is the height of the peak. And the obstacles to going from one peak to a higher one are valleys.
2:43:16 Speaker 00 There's no guarantee that just because you've gone into a valley, that you're going to go up a peak on the other side. Right? That involves some luck and some careful navigation. Because if that other peak is far away in the clouds and you're off by four degrees, you could just simply miss it. So the peril is real. We are entering an adaptive valley. We can feel it. Everybody feels it. There is no guarantee that we get out of it.
2:43:49 Speaker 00 But the fact that things look very dark does not mean that we are not moving through an adaptive valley to a better peak on the other side. So there is every reason not to give up and to try to play our roles in this chapter as effectively as we can to maximize the chances that we do get to the foothill of that other peak and can deliver our descendants a world as good as the one we inherited or better. And let's put it this way. We all go to the movie and we watch The Fellowship of the Ring or whatever, the collection of.
2:44:34 Speaker 00 Weird heroes that we see on the screen. We root for them and we admire them. We know what we are supposed to do at this moment. We are supposed to enter the next chapter of the book. And we are supposed to do as well as we can and bring our best characteristics to bear in the hope that it works out. And if it doesn't, we will have tried. And if it does, we will get to look back on this dark phase and say, isn't it great that we kept going?
2:45:10 Steven Bartlett? Are you hopeful?
2:45:14 Speaker 00 You know, the funny thing is, I know the answer to that question. And I also know the other answer to that question. Yeah, I'm hopeful.
2:45:23 Steven Bartlett? And what's the other answer to that question?
2:45:31 Speaker 00 I mean, you really want to know?
2:45:32 Steven Bartlett? Yes.
2:45:32 Speaker 00 Okay. Because it breaks the spell. The problem is, in order to get everybody to do what they need to do in order that we do get out of this, we have to believe that it's more likely to get out of it than it probably is. So I'm comfortable with that. If other people are comfortable with that, then the answer is, yeah, it's a pretty dire moment.
2:45:58 Speaker 00 We're going to need some luck. But what's the way to approach it? Often the way to approach things is in some conflict with how we understand them. I don't believe in fate. I don't think it's a real thing. But I know that it's very often extremely useful to behave as if you do believe in fate. So I do.
2:46:23 Steven Bartlett? Bret, thank you. Thank you for your generosity with your time and thank you for your wisdom, your honesty, and for all the work that you do across your YouTube channel, which I'm a big fan of, your books and everything else that you do. If someone wants to find you, where's the best place to go? Is it your website or is it?
2:46:38 Speaker 00 They should find the Dark Horse Podcast. Dark Horse is one word. They can find me on Twitter at Bret Weinstein. We also have a Twitter account for the podcast. They can pick up the book.
2:46:51 Steven Bartlett? Yep.
2:46:53 Speaker 00 I think those are the best places.
2:46:54 Steven Bartlett? I'll link all of those below so everyone has easy access to them on all platforms. So, thank you so much, Bret. It's been a real honour and I feel enlightened. I feel like my eyes have been opened in a number of ways and I feel focused.
2:47:10 Speaker 00 Well, that's great to hear. It was a very rewarding conversation.
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