Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic | Lex Fridman Podcast #194

the following is a conversation with brett weinstein evolutionary biologist author co-host of the dark horse podcast and as he says reluctant radical even though we've never met or spoken before this we both felt like we've been friends for a long time i don't agree on everything with brett but i'm sure as hell happy he exists in this weird and wonderful world of ours quick mention of our sponsors jordan harbinger show expressvpn magic spoon and four sigmatic check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say a few words about covet 19 and about science broadly i think science is beautiful and powerful it is the striving of the human mind to understand and to solve the problems of the world but as an institution it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature to fear to greed power and ego 2020 is the story of all of these that has both scientific triumph and tragedy we needed great leaders and we didn't get them what we needed is leaders who communicate in an honest transparent and authentic way about the uncertainty of what we know and the large-scale scientific efforts to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions i believe there are several candidates for solutions that could have all saved hundreds of billions of dollars and lessened or eliminated the suffering of millions of people let me mention five of the categories of solutions masks at home testing anonymized contact tracing antiviral drugs and vaccines within each of these categories institutional leaders should have constantly asked and answered publicly honestly the following three questions one what data do we have on the solution and what studies are we running to get more and better data two given the current data and uncertainty how effective and how safe is the solution three what is the timeline and cost involved with mass manufacturing distribution of the solution in the service of these questions no voices should have been silenced no ideas left off the table open data open science open honest scientific communication and debate was the way not censorship there are a lot of ideas out there that are bad wrong dangerous but the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are is the moment we'll lose our ability to find the truth to find solutions the very things that make science beautiful and powerful in the face of all the dangers that threaten the well-being and the existence of humans on earth this conversation with brett is less about the ideas we talk about we agree on some disagree on others it is much more about the very freedom to talk to think to share ideas this freedom is our only hope brett should never have been censored i asked brad to do this podcast to show solidarity and to show that i have hope for science and for humanity this is the lex friedman podcast and here's my conversation with brett weinstein what to you is beautiful about the study of biology the science the engineering the philosophy of it it's a very interesting question i must say at one level it's not a conscious thing i can say a lot about why as an adult i find biology compelling but as a kid i was completely fascinated with animals i loved to watch them and think about why they did what they did and that developed into a very conscious passion as an adult but i think uh in the same way that one is drawn to a person i was drawn to the never-ending series of near-miracles that exists across biological nature when you see a living organism do you see it from an evolutionary biology perspective of like this entire thing that moves around in this world or do you see like from an engineering perspective they're like uh first principles almost down to the physics like the little components that build up hierarchies that you have cells if the first proteins and cells and organs and all that kind of stuff so do you see low level or dc high level well the human mind is a strange thing and i think it's probably a bit like a time sharing machine in which i have different modules we don't know enough about biology for them to connect right so they exist in isolation and i'm always aware that they do connect but i basically have to step into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to i have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a very long time scale a different module still to understand what the mechanisms inside would have to look like to account for what we can see from the outside and i think that probably sounds really complicated but one of the things about being involved in a topic like biology and doing so for one you know really not even just my adult life for my whole life is that it becomes second nature and you know when when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that but of course what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone right they are in a zone in which they are in such um command of their center of gravity for example that they know how to hurl it around a landscape so that they always land on their feet and i would just say for anyone who hasn't found a topic on which they can develop that kind of facility it is absolutely worthwhile it's really something that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics many things our ancestors didn't even have access to and that flexibility of humans that ability to repurpose our machinery for topics that are novel means really the world is your oyster you can you can figure out what your passion is and then figure out all of the angles that one would have to pursue to really deeply understand it and it is uh it is well worth having at least one topic like that you mean embracing the full adaptability of the both the the body and the mind so like because i don't know what to attribute to parkour too like biomechanics of how our bodies can move or is it the mind like how much percent wise is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that we've been talking about or is it just all the mind the way to think about creatures is that every creature is two things simultaneously a creature is a machine of sorts right it's not a machine in in the you know it's it's i call it an aqueous machine right and it's run by an aqueous computer right so it's not identical to our our technological machines but every creature is both a machine that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving to reproduce it is also a potential so each creature is potentially for example the most recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different from it and if a creature is very very good at being a creature but not very good in terms of the potential it has going forward then that lineage will not last very long into the future because change will uh throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet so the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform and we have the ability to swap out our software to exist in many many different niches and i was once watching a an interview with with this british group of parkour experts who were being you know just they were discussing what it is they do and how it works and what they essentially said is look you're tapping into deep monkey stuff right and i thought yeah that's about right and you know anybody who is proficient at something like skiing or skateboarding you know has the experience of flying down the hill on skis for example bouncing from the top of one mogul to the next and if you really pay attention you will discover that your conscious mind is actually a spectator it's there it's involved in the experience but it's not driving some part of you knows how to ski and it's not the part of you that knows how to think and i would just say that the what accounts for this flexibility in humans is the ability to bootstrap a new software program and then drive it into the unconscious layer where it can be applied very rapidly and you know i will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics you know if you if you programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that were novel to it how would you do it it would have to look something like this there's a certain kind of magic you're right with the consciousness being an observer when you play guitar for example or piano for me music when you get truly lost in it i don't know what the heck is responsible for the flow of the music the kind of the loudness of the music going up and down the timing the intricate like even the mistakes all those things that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind uh it's it is just observing and yet it's somehow intricately involved more like because you mentioned parkour the dance is like that too when you start i've been tango dancing you if when you truly lose yourself in it then it's just like you're an observer and how the hell is the body able to do that and not only that it's the physical motion is also creating the emotion the like that damn is good to be alive feeling so but then that's also intricately connected to the full biology stack that we're operating in i don't know how difficult it is to replicate that we were talking offline about boston dynamics robots they've recently been they did both parkour they did flips they've also done some dancing and something i think a lot about because what most people don't realize because they don't look deep enough is those robots are hard-coded to do those things the robots didn't figure it out by themselves and yet the the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human is that process of figuring out of making mistakes and then there's something about overcoming those challenges and the mistakes and like figuring out how to lose yourself in the magic of the dancing uh or just movement is what it means to be human that learning process so that's what i want to do with the with the um almost as a fun side thing with the the boston dynamics robots is to have them learn and see what they figure out even if it even if they make mistakes i want to let spot make mistakes and in so doing discover what it means to be alive discover beauty because i think that's the essential aspect of mistakes boston dynamics folks want spot to be perfect because they don't want spot to ever make mistakes because it wants to operate in the factories it wants to be you know very safe and so on for me if you construct the environment if you construct a safe space for robots and allow them to make mistakes something beautiful might be discovered but that requires a lot of brain power so spot is currently very dumb and i'm gonna add give it a brain uh so first make it c currently can't see meaning computer vision he has to understand his environment has to see all the humans but then also has to be able to learn learn about his movement learn how to use his body to communicate with others all those kinds of things that dogs know how to do well humans know how to do somewhat well i think that's a beautiful challenge but first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes well i think um your objective is laudable but you're going to realize that the boston dynamics folks are right the first time spot poops on your rug um i hear the same thing about kids and so on yes i still want to have kids no you should it's it's a great experience um so let me step back into what you said in a couple of different places one i have always believed that the missing element in robotics and artificial intelligence is a proper development right it is no accident it is no mere coincidence that human beings are the most dominant species on planet earth and that we have the longest childhoods of any creature on earth by far right the development is the key to the flexibility and so the capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image it's the flip side of our helplessness at birth um so i'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project if you do not end up reinventing childhood for robots which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly but i also want to point out you can you can see this issue of your conscious mind becoming a spectator very well if you compare tennis to table tennis right if you watch a tennis game you could imagine that the players are highly conscious as they play you cannot imagine that if you've ever played ping pong decently a volley in ping pong is so fast that your conscious mind if it had if your reactions had to go through your conscious mind you wouldn't be able to play so you can detect that your conscious mind while very much present isn't there and you can also detect where consciousness does usefully intrude if you go up against an opponent in table tennis that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to you will suddenly detect that something about your game is not effective and you will start thinking about what might be how do you position yourself so that move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something like that doesn't catch you off guard and this i believe is we highly conscious folks those of us who try to think through things very deliberately and carefully mistake consciousness for like the highest kind of thinking and i really think that this is an error consciousness is an intermediate level of thinking what it does is it allows you it's basically like uncompiled code and it doesn't run very fast it is capable of being adapted to new circumstances but once the code is roughed in right it gets driven into the unconscious layer and you become highly effective at whatever it is and that from that point your conscious mind basically remains there to detect things that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written and so i don't exactly know how one would establish this how one would demonstrate it but it must be the case that the human mind contains sandboxes in which things are tested right maybe you can build a piece of code and run it in parallel next to your active code so you can see how it would have done comparatively but there's got to be some way of writing new code and then swapping it in and frankly i think this has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles very often you know when i get good at something i often don't get better at it while i'm doing it i get better at it when i'm not doing it especially if there's time to sleep and think on it so there's some sort of you know new program swapping in for old program phenomenon which um you know will be a lot easier to see in machines it's going to be hard with the the the wet wear i like i mean it is true because somebody that played i played tennis for many years i do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis is when the conscious mind is a spectator so it's the compiled code is the highest form of being human and then consciousness is just some like specific compiler he has to have like borland c plus plus compile you could just have different kind of compilers ultimately the the thing that by which we measure the the power of life the intelligence of life is the compiled code and you can probably do that compilation all kinds of ways yep yeah i'm not saying that tennis is played consciously and table tennis isn't i'm saying that because tennis is slowed down by the just the space on the court you could you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing but when you shrink the court down it was obvious it becomes obvious that your conscious mind is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle and weirdly for me um i would say this probably isn't true in a podcast situation but if i have to give a presentation uh especially if i have not overly prepared i often find the same phenomenon when i'm giving the presentation my conscious mind is there watching some other part of me present which is a little jarring i have to say well that means you've you've gotten good at it not let the conscious mind get in the way of the flow of words yeah that's that's the sensation to be sure and that's the highest form of podcasting too i mean that's why i have that that's what it looks like when a podcast is really in the pocket like like joe rogan just having fun and just losing themselves and that's that's something i aspire to as well just losing yourself in the conversation somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people like i'm such an introvert i'm scared i was scared before you showed up i'm scared right now um there's just anxiety there's just it's a giant mess uh it's hard to lose yourself it's hard to just get out of the way of your own mind yeah actually uh trust is a big component of that your your conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain um but when you do when you do get into that zone when you're speaking i realize it's different for you with english as a second language although maybe you present in russian and you know and it happens but do you ever hear yourself say something and you think oh that's really good right like like you didn't come up with it some other part of you that you don't exactly know came up with it i i don't think i've ever heard myself in that way because i have a much louder voice that's constantly yelling in my head at why the hell did you say that there's a very self-critical voice that's much louder so i'm very maybe i need to deal with that voice but it's been like without what is it called like a megaphone just screaming so i can't hear you oh no good job you said that thing really nicely so i'm kind of focused right now on on the megaphone person in the audience versus the deposit but that's definitely something to think about it's been productive but you know the the place where i find gratitude and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet moments when i don't talk when i listen to the world around me when i listen to others i'm when i talk i'm extremely self-critical in my mind uh when i when i produce anything out into the world that's that originated with me like any kind of creation extremely self-critical it's good for productivity for like always striving to improve and so on it might be bad for for like just appreciating the things you've created i'm a little bit with marvin minsky on this where he says the the key to um to a productive life is to hate everything you've ever done in the past i didn't know he said that i must say i resonate with it a bit and you know i i unfortunately my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into the world and i effectively watch almost none of it i can't stand it yeah what what do you make of that i don't know i just recently i just yesterday read um metamorphosis by cough we read metamorphosis by kafka where he turns into jan bug because of the stress that the world puts on him his parents put on him to succeed and you know i think that's you have to find the balance because if you if you allow the self-critical voice to become too heavy the burden of the world the pressure that the world puts on you to be the best version of yourself and so on to strive then you become a bug and that's a big problem and then uh and then every and then the world turns against you because you're a bug you become some kind of caricature of yourself uh i don't know become the worst version of yourself and then thereby end up destroying yourself and then the world moves on that's the story that's a lovely story i do think this is one of these places and frankly you could map this on to all of modern human experience but this is one of these places where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves yeah so i used to talk to students about the question of dwelling on things you know dwelling on things is famously understood to be bad and it can't possibly be bad it wouldn't exist a tendency toward it wouldn't exist if it was bad so what is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility and you know that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize but if you realize that your dwelling is the key in fact to upgrading your program for future well-being and that there's a point you know presumably from diminishing returns if not counter productivity there is a point at which you should stop because that is what is in your best interest then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful right this is the point at which it is no longer useful for me to dwell on this error i have made right that is that's what you're looking for and um it also gives you license right if some part of you feels like it you know is punishing you rather than searching then that also has a point at which it's no longer valuable and there's some liberty in realizing yep even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop so if we uh map that onto compiled code discussion as a computer science person i find that very compelling you know there's a when you compile code you get warnings sometimes and usually if you're a good software engineer you're going to make sure there's no you know you treat warnings as errors so you make sure that the compilation produces no warnings but a certain point when you have a large enough system you just let the warnings go it's fine like i don't know where that warning came from but you know it's just uh ultimately you need to compile the code and and run with it and uh hope nothing terrible happens well i think what you will find and believe me i think what you're what you're talking about with respect to robots on learning is going to end up having to go to a deep developmental state and a helplessness that evolves into hyper competence and all of that but um i live i noticed that i live by something that i for lack of a better descriptor call the theory of close calls and the theory of close calls says that people typically miscategorize the events in their life where something almost went wrong and you know for example if you i have a friend who um i was walking down the street with my college friends and one of my friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles an hour would have been an absolute disaster might have killed her certainly would have permanently injured her but she didn't you know car didn't touch her right now you could walk away from that and think nothing of it because well what is there to think nothing happened or you could think well what is the difference between what did happen and my death the difference is luck i never want that to be true right i never want the difference between what did happen and my death to be luck therefore i should count this as very close to death and i should prioritize coding so it doesn't happen again at a very high level so anyway my my basic point is the accidents and disasters and misfortune describe a distribution that tells you what's really likely to get you in the end and so personally you can use them to figure out where the dangers are so that you can afford to take great risks because you have a really good sense of how they're going to go wrong but i would also point out civilization has this problem civilization is now producing these events that are major disasters but they're not existential scale yet right they're very serious errors that we can see and i would argue that the pattern is you discover that we are involved in some industrial process at the point it has gone wrong right so i'm now always asking the question okay in light of the fukushima triple meltdown the financial collapse of 2008 the deepwater horizon blowout covet 19 and its probable origins in the wuhan lab what processes do i not know the name of yet that i will discover at the point that some gigantic accident has happened and can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof of engaging in that process before the accident right that's what a wise civilization would be doing and yet we don't i just want to mention something that happened a couple of days ago i don't know if you know who jb strawball is he's the co-founder of tesla cto of tesla for many many years his wife just died she was riding a bicycle and in the same in that same thin line between death and life that many of us have been in where you walk into the intersection and there's this close call every once in a while it you get um short straw i wonder how much of our own individual lives and the entirety of the human civilization rests on this little roll of the dice well this is sort of my point about the close calls is that there's a there's a level at which we can't control it right the gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time to do anything about there's not a lot we can do to hedge that out or at least not short term but there are lots of other things you know obviously the financial collapse of 2008 didn't break down the entire world economy it threatened to but a herculean effort managed to pull us back from the brink the triple meltdown at fukushima was awful but every one of the seven fuel pools held there wasn't a major fire that made it impossible to manage the disaster going forward we got lucky you know we could say the same thing about the the blowout at the deepwater horizon where a hole in the ocean floor large enough that we couldn't have plugged it could have opened up all of these things could have been much much worse right and i think we can say the same thing about covet as terrible as it is and i you know we cannot say for sure that it came from the wuhan lab but there's a strong likelihood that it did and it also could be much much worse so in each of these cases something is telling us we have a process that is unfolding that keeps creating risks where it is luck that is the difference between us and some scale of disaster that is unimaginable and that wisdom you know you can be highly intelligent and cause these disasters to be wise is to stop causing them right and that would require a process of restraint a process that i don't see a lot of evidence of yet so i think we have to generate it and somehow we you know at the moment we don't have a political structure that would be capable of taking a protective algorithm and actually deploying it right because it would have important economic consequences and so it would almost certainly be shot down but we can obviously also say you know we paid a huge price for all of the disasters that i i've mentioned and we have to factor that into the equation something can be very productive short term and very destructive long term also the question is how many disasters we avoided because of the ingenuity of humans or just the integrity and character of humans that's sort of an open question we may be more intelligent than lucky that's the hope because the optimistic message here that you're getting at is maybe the process that we should be that maybe we can overcome luck with ingenuity meaning i guess you're suggesting the process is we should be listing all the ways that human civilization can destroy itself uh assigning likelihood to it and thinking through how can we avoid that and being very honest with the data out there about the close calls and using those close calls to uh to then create sort of mechanism by which we minimize the probability of those close calls and just being honest and transparent with the data that's out there well i think we need to do a couple things for it to work so i've been an advocate for the idea that sustainability is actually it's difficult to operationalize but it is an objective that we have to meet if we're to be around long term and i realize that we also need to have reversibility of all of our processes because processes very frequently when they start do not appear dangerous and then they when they scale they become very dangerous so for example if you imagine the first internal combustion engine in a vehicle driving down the street and you imagine somebody running after them saying hey if you do enough of that you're going to alter the atmosphere and it's going to change the temperature of the planet it's preposterous right why would you stop the person who's invented this marvelous new contraption but of course eventually you do get to the place where you're doing enough of this that you do start changing the temperature of the planet so if we built the capacity if we basically said look you can't involve yourself in any process that you couldn't reverse if you had to then progress would be slowed but our safety would go up dramatically and i think i think in some sense if we are to be around long term we have to begin thinking that way we're just involved in too many very dangerous processes so let's talk about one of the things that if not threatened human civilization certainly heard it at a deep level which is covid19 what percent probability would you currently place on the hypothesis that covet 19 league from the wuhan institute of virology so i maintain a flow chart of all the possible explanations and it doesn't break down exactly that way the likelihood that it emerged from a lab is very very high if it emerged from a lab the likelihood that the lab was the wuhan institute is very very high the there are multiple different kinds of evidence that point the lab and there is literally no evidence that points to nature either the evidence points nowhere or it points to the lab and the lab could mean any lab but geographically obviously the labs in wuhan are the most likely and the lab that was most directly involved with research on viruses that look like covid that look like sarsko v2 is obviously the place uh that one would start but i would say the likelihood that this virus came from a lab is well above 95 we can talk about the question of could a virus have been brought into the lab and escape from there without being modified that's also possible but it doesn't explain any of the anomalies in the genome of sarsko v2 could it have been delivered from another lab could wuhan be a distraction um in order that we would connect the dots in the wrong way that's conceivable i currently have that below one percent on my flow chart but i have a very dark thought that somebody would would do that almost as a a political attack on china well it depends i don't even think that's one possibility sometimes when eric and i talk about these issues we will generate a scenario just to prove that something could could live in that space right it's a placeholder for whatever may actually have happened and so it doesn't have to have been an attack on china that's certainly one possibility but i would point out if you can predict the future in some unusual way better than others you can print money right that's what markets that allow you to bet for or against virtually any sector allow you to do so you can imagine a simply amoral person or entity generating a pandemic attempting to cover their tracks because it would allow them to bet against things like you know cruise ships air travel whatever it is and bet in favor of i don't know uh sanitizing gel and whatever else you would do so am i saying that i think somebody did that no i really don't think it happened we've seen zero evidence that this was intentionally released however were it to have been intentionally released by somebody who did not know did not want it known where it had come from releasing it into wuhan would be one way to cover their tracks so we have to leave the possibility formally open but acknowledge there's no evidence so and the probability therefore is law i tend to believe maybe this is the optimistic nature that i have that people who are competent enough to do the kind of thing we just described are not going to do that because it requires a certain kind of i don't want to use the word evil but whatever word you want to use to describe the kind of uh this regard for human life required to do that you're just that that that's just not going to be coupled with competence i feel like there's a trade-off chart where competence on one axis and evil is on the other and the more evil you become the the the crappier you are at doing great engineering scientific work required to deliver weapons of different kinds whether it's bioweapons or nuclear weapons all those kinds of things that seems to be the lessons i i take from history but that doesn't necessarily mean that's what's going to be happening in the future but to stick on the lab leak idea because the flow chart is probably huge here because there's a lot of fascinating possibilities one question i want to ask is what would evidence for natural origins look like so one piece of evidence for natural origins is um that it has happened in the past that that viruses have jumped oh they do jump they so like that's one like that's possible to have happened you know so that that's a sort of like a historical evidence like okay well it's possible that it hap it's not it's not evidence of the kind you think it is it's a justification for a presumption right right so the presumption upon discovering a new virus circulating is certainly that it came from nature right the problem is the presumption evaporates in the face of evidence or at least it logically should and it didn't in this case it was maintained by people who privately in their emails acknowledged that they had grave doubts about the natural origin of of this virus is there some other piece of evidence that we could look for and see that would say this increases the probability that it's natural origins yeah in fact there is evidence you know i always worry that somebody is going to make up some evidence in order to reverse the flow boy well let's say i am a lot of incentive for that actually there's a huge amount of incentive on the other hand why didn't the powers that be the powers that lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in iraq why didn't they ever fake weapons of mass destruction in iraq whatever force it is i hope that force is here too and so whatever evidence we find is real it's the competence thing i'm talking about but okay go ahead sorry well we can get back to that but i would say yeah the the the giant piece of evidence that will shift the probabilities in the other direction is the discovery of either a human population in which the virus circulated prior to showing up in wuhan that would explain where the virus learned all of the tricks that it knew instantly upon spreading from wuhan so that would do it or an animal population in which an ancestor epidemic can be found in which the virus learned this before jumping to humans but i point out in that second case you would certainly expect to see a great deal of evolution in the early epidemic which we don't see so there almost has to be a human population somewhere else that had the virus circulating or an ancestor of the virus that we first saw in wuhan circulating and it has to have gotten very sophisticated in that prior epidemic before hitting wuhan in order to explain the total lack of evolution and extremely effective virus that emerged at the end of 2019. so you don't believe in the magic of evolution to spring up with all the tricks already there like everybody who doesn't have the tricks they die quickly and then you just have this beautiful virus that comes in with a spike protein and the and the through mutation uh and selection just do like the ones that succeed and succeed big are the ones that are going to just spring into life with the tricks well no that's that's called a hopeful monster and hopeful monsters don't work it's too the job of becoming a new pandemic virus is too difficult it involves two very difficult steps and they both have to work one is the ability to infect a person and spread in their tissues sufficient to make an infection and the other is to jump between individuals at a sufficient rate that it doesn't go extinct for one reason or another those are both very difficult jobs they require as you describe selection and the point is selection would leave a mark we would see evidence that it was in animals or humans both right and you see this evolutionary trace of uh of the virus gathering the tricks up yeah you would see the virus you would see the clumsy virus get better and better and yes i am a full believer in the power of that process in fact i believe it uh what i know from studying the process is that it is much more powerful than most people imagine that what we teach in the evolution 101 textbook is too clumsy a process to do what we see it doing and that actually people should increase their expectation of the rapidity with which that process can produce just jaw-dropping adaptations that said we just don't see evidence that it happened here which doesn't mean it doesn't exist but it means in spite of immense pressure to find it somewhere there's been no hint which probably means it took place inside of a laboratory so inside the laboratory gain of functional research on viruses and i believe most of that kind of research is doing this exact thing that you're referring to which is accelerated evolution and just watching evolution do its thing and a bunch of viruses and seeing what kind of uh tricks get developed the other method is engineering viruses so manually adding on the tricks what which do you think we should be thinking about here so mind you i learned what i know in the aftermath of this pandemic emerging i started studying the question and i would say based on the content of the genome and other evidence in publications from the various labs that were involved in in generating this technology a couple of things seem likely this sarsko v2 does not appear to be entirely the result of either a splicing process or serial passaging it appears to have both things in its past or it's at least highly likely that it does so for example the fern cleavage site looks very much like it was added in to the virus and it was known that that would increase its infectivity in humans and increase its tropism the virus appears to be excellent at spreading in humans and minks and ferrets now minks and ferrets are very closely related to each other and ferrets are very likely to have been used in a serial passage experiment the reason being that they have an ace2 receptor that looks very much like the human as2 receptor and so were you going to passage the virus or its ancestor through an animal in order to increase its infectivity in humans which would have been necessary ferrets would have been very likely it is also quite likely that humanized mice were utilized and it is possible that human airway tissue was utilized i think it is vital that we find out what the protocols were if this came from the wuhan institute we need to know it and we need to know what the protocols were exactly because they will actually give us some tools that would be useful in fighting sars kovi 2 and hopefully driving it to extinction which ought to be our priority it is a it's a priority that does not it is not apparent from our behavior but it really is uh it should be our objective if we understood where our interests lie we would be much more focused on it but those protocols would tell us a great deal if it wasn't the wuhan institute we need to know that if it was nature we need to know that and if it was some other laboratory we need to figure out who what and where so that we can determine what is what we can determine about about what was done you're opening up my mind about why we should investigate why we should know the truth of the origins of this virus so for me personally let me just tell the story of my own kind of journey when i first started looking into the lab leak hypothesis what became terrifying to me and important to under understand and obvious is the sort of like sam harris way of thinking which is it's obvious that a lab leak of a deadly virus will eventually happen my mind was it doesn't even matter if it happened in this case it's obvious that it's going to happen in the future so why the hell are we not freaking out about this and kova 19 is not even that deadly relative to the possible future viruses it's this the way i disagree with sam on this but he thinks about this way about agi as well about artificial intelligence it's a different discussion i think but with viruses it seems like something that could happen on the scale of years maybe a few decades agi is a little bit farther out for me but it seemed the terrifying thing it seemed obvious that this will happen very soon for a much deadlier virus as we get better and better at both engineering viruses and doing this kind of evolutionary driven research gain and functional research okay but then you started speaking out about this as well but also started to say no no we should hurry up and figure out the origins now because it will help us figure out how to actually respond uh to this particular virus how to treat this particular virus what is in terms of vaccines in terms of antiviral drugs in terms of just and although the the the number of responses we should have okay i still am much more freaking out about the future maybe you can break that apart a little bit which are you most focused on now which are you most freaking out about now in terms of the importance of figuring out the origins of this virus i am most freaking out about both of them because they're both really important and you know we can put bounds on this let me say first this is a perfect test case for the theory of close calls because as much as covet is a disaster it is also a close call from which we can learn much you are absolutely right if we keep playing this game in the lab if we are not if we are especially if we do it under pressure and when we are told that a virus is going to leap from nature any day and that the more we know the better we'll be able to fight it we're going to create the disaster all the sooner so yes that should be an absolute focus the fact that there were people saying that this was dangerous back in 2015 ought to tell us something the fact that the system bypassed a ban and offshored the work to china ought to tell us this is not a chinese failure this is a failure of something larger and harder to see but i also think that there's a there's a clock ticking with respect to sars kovi ii and covid the disease that it creates and that has to do with whether or not we are stuck with it permanently so if you think about the cost to humanity of being stuck with influenza it's an immense cost year after year and we just stopped thinking about it because it's there some years you get the flu most years you don't maybe you get the vaccine to prevent it maybe the vaccine isn't particularly well targeted but imagine just simply doubling that cost imagine we get stuck with sars kovi 2 and its descendants going forward and that it just settles in and becomes a fact of modern human life that would be a disaster right the number of people we will ultimately lose is incalculable the amount of suffering that will be caused is incalculable the loss of well-being and wealth incalculable so that ought to be a very high priority driving this extinct before it becomes permanent and the ability to drive extinct goes down the longer we delay effective responses to the extent that we let it have this very large canvas large numbers of people who have the disease in which mutation and selection can result in adaptation that we will not be able to counter the greater its ability to figure out features of our immune system and use them to its advantage so i'm feeling the pressure of driving it extinct i believe we could have driven it extinct six months ago and we didn't do it because of very mundane concerns among a small number of people and i'm not alleging that they were brazen about um or that they were callous about deaths that would be caused i have the sense that they were working from a kind of autopilot in which you you know let's say you're in some kind of a corporation a pharmaceutical corporation you have a portfolio of therapies that in the context of a pandemic might be very lucrative those therapies have competitors you of course want to position your product so that it succeeds and the competitors don't and lo and behold at some point through means that i think those of us on the outside can't really intuit you end up saying things about competing therapies that work better and much more safely than the ones you're selling that aren't true and do cause people to die in large numbers but it you know it's some kind of autopilot at least part of it is so the there's a complicated coupling of the autopilot of uh institutions companies governments and then there's also the geopolitical game theory thing going on where you want to keep secrets it's the chernobyl thing where if you messed up there's a big incentive i think to hide the fact that you messed up so how do we fix this and what's more important to fix the autopilot which is the response that we often criticize about our institutions especially the leaders in those institutions anthony fauci and so on uh some of the members of the scientific community and the second part is the the game with china of hiding the information in terms of on the fight between nations well in our live streams on dark horse heather and i have been talking from the beginning about the fact that although yes what happens began in china it very much looks like a failure of the international scientific community and that's frightening but it's also hopeful in the sense that actually if we did the right thing now we're not navigating a puzzle about chinese responsibility we're navigating a question of collective responsibility for something that has been terribly costly to all of us so that's not a very happy process but as you point out what's at stake is in large measure at the very least the strong possibility this will happen again and that at some point it will be far worse so you know just as a person that does not learn the lessons of their own errors doesn't get smarter and they remain in danger we collectively humanity has to say well there sure is a lot of evidence that suggests that this is a self-inflicted wound when you have done something that has caused a massive self-inflicted wound self-inflicted wound it makes sense to dwell on it exactly to the point that you have learned the lesson that makes it very very unlikely that something similar will happen again i think this is a good place to kind of ask you to do almost like a thought experiment or to steal man the argument against the lab leak hypothesis so if you were to argue you know you said 95 percent chance that it the virus leaked from a lab there's a bunch of ways i think you can argue that even talking about it is uh bad for the world so i if i just put something on the table it's to say that um for one it would be racism versus chinese people that talking about that a leak from a lab there's a kind of immediate kind of blame and it can spiral down into this idea that's somehow the people are responsible for the virus and this kind of thing is it possible for you to come up with other steel man arguments against talking or against the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis well so i think steel manning is a tool that is extremely valuable but it's also possible to abuse it i think that you can only steal man a good faith argument and the problem is we now know that we have not been engaged in opponents who are wielding good faith arguments because privately their emails reflect their own doubts and what they were doing publicly was actually a punishment a public punishment for those of us who spoke up with i think the purpose of either backing us down or more likely warning others not to engage in the same kind of behavior and obviously for people like you and me who regard science as our likely best hope for navigating difficult waters shutting down people who are using those tools honorably is itself dishonorable so i i don't really i don't feel that it is i don't feel that there's anything to steal man and i also think that you know immediately at the point that the world suddenly with no new evidence on the table switched years with respect to the lab leak you know at the point that nicholas wade had published his article and suddenly the world was going to admit that this was at least a possibility if not a likelihood we got to see something of the rationalization process that had taken place inside the institutional world and it very definitely involved the claim that what was being avoided was the targeting of chinese scientists and my point would be i don't want to see the targeting of anyone i don't want to see racism of any kind on the other hand once you create license to lie in order to protect individuals when the world has a stake in knowing what happened then it is inevitable that that process that license to lie will be used by the thing that captures institutions for its own purposes so my sense is it may be very unfortunate if the story of what happened here can be used against uh chinese people that would be very unfortunate and as i think i mentioned heather and i have taken great pains to point out that this doesn't look like a chinese failure it looks like a failure of the international scientific community so i think it is important to broadcast that message along with the analysis of the evidence but no matter what happened we have a right to know and um i frankly do not take the institutional layer at its word that its motivations are honorable and that it was protecting you know good-hearted scientists at the expense of the world that that explanation does not add up well this is a very interesting question about whether it's ever okay to lie at the institutional layer to protect the populace i think both you and i are probably on the same have the same sense that it's a slippery slope even if it's an effective mechanism in the short term in the long term it's going to be destructive this happened with masks this happened with with other things if you look at just history pandemics there is um there's an idea that panic is destructive amongst the populace so you you want to construct a narrative whether it's a lie or not to minimize panic but you're suggesting that almost in all cases and i think that was the lesson from the the pandemic in the early 20th century that lying creates distrust and distrust in the institutions is ultimately destructive that's your sense that lying is not okay well okay you know there are obviously places where complete transparency is not a good idea right to the extent that you broadcast a technology that allows one individual to hold the world hostage right obviously you've got a something to be navigated but in general i don't believe that the scientific system should be lying to us in the case of this particular lie the idea that the well-being of chinese scientists outweighs the well-being of the world is preposterous yeah right as you as you point out one thing that rests on this question is whether we continue to do this kind of research going forward and the scientists in question all of them american chinese all of them were pushing the idea that the risk of a zoonotic spillover event causing a major and highly destructive pandemic was so great that we had to risk this now if they themselves have caused it and if they are wrong as i believe they are about the likelihood of a major world pandemic spilling out of nature in the way that they uh wrote into their grant applications then the danger is you know the call is coming from inside the house and we have to look at that and yes whatever we have to do to protect scientists from retribution we should do but we cannot protecting them by lying to the world and even worse by demonizing people like me like uh josh rogan like yuri dagan the entire drastic group on twitter by demonizing us for simply following the evidence is to set a terrible precedent right you're demonizing people for using the scientific method to evaluate evidence that is available to us in the world what a terrible crime it is to teach that lesson right thou shalt not use scientific tools no i'm sorry whatever your license to lie is it doesn't extend to that yeah i've seen the the attacks on you the pressure on you has a very important effect on thousands of world-class biologists actually at mit colleagues of mine people i know there's a there's a slight pressure to not be allowed to uh one speak publicly and to actually think like to even think about these ideas it sounds kind of ridiculous but just the in the in the privacy of your own home to to read things to to think it's many people many world-class biologists that i know will just avoid looking at the data there's not even that many people that are publicly opposing gain of function research they they're they're also like it's not worth it it's not worth the battle and there's many people that kind of argue that those battles should be fought in private in uh um you know with colleagues in the um in the privacy of the scientific community that the public is somehow not maybe intelligent enough to be able to deal with the the complexities of this kind of discussion i don't know but the final result is combined with the bullying of you and uh all the different pressures in the academic institutions is that it's just people are self-censoring and silencing themselves and silencing the most important thing which is the power of their brains like these people are brilliant and the fact that they're not utilizing their brain to come up with solutions uh outside of the conformist line of thinking is tragic well it is i also think that it we have to look at it and understand it for what it is for one thing it's kind of a cryptic totalitarianism somehow people's sense of what they're allowed to think about talk about discuss is causing them to self-censor and i can tell you it's causing many of them to rationalize which is even worse they are blinding themselves to what they can see but it is also the case i believe that what you're describing about what people said and a great many people understood that the lab leak hypothesis could not be taken off the table but they didn't say so publicly and i think that their discussions with each other about why they did not say what they understood that's what capture sounds like on the inside i don't know exactly what force captured the institutions i don't think anybody knows for sure out here in public i don't even know that it wasn't just simply a process but you have these institutions they are behaving towards a kind of somatic obligation they have lost sight of what they were built to accomplish and on the inside the way they avoid going back to their original mission is to say things to themselves like the public can't have this discussion it can't be trusted with it yes we need to be able to talk about this but it has to be private whatever it is they say to themselves that is what capture sounds like on the inside it's a institutional rationalization mechanism and it's very very deadly and at the point you go from lab leak to repurposed drugs you can see that it's very deadly in a very direct way yeah i see this on in my field of with uh things like autonomous weapon systems people in ai do not talk about the use of ai in weapon systems they they kind of avoid the idea that ai is used in the military it's kind of funny there there's this like kind of discomfort and they're like they all hurry like uh you know like something scary happens and a bunch of sheep kind of like run a run away that's what it looks like and it i don't even know what to do about it because and then i feel this natural pull every time i bring up autonomous weapon systems to go along with the sheep there's a natural kind of pull towards that direction because it's like what can i do as one person now there's currently nothing destructive happening with autonomous weapons systems so we're in like in the early days of this race that in 10 20 years might become a real problem now where the discussion we're having now we're not facing the result of that in the space of viruses uh like for many years avoiding the conversations here i don't know what to do that in the early days um but i think we have to i guess create institutions where people can stand out people can stand out and like basically be individual thinkers and break out into all kinds of spaces of ideas that allow us to think freely freedom of thought and maybe that requires the decentralization of institutions well years ago i came up with a concept called cultivated insecurity and the idea is let's just take the example of the average joe right the average joe has a job somewhere and their mortgage their medical insurance their retirement their connection with the economy is to one degree or another dependent on their relationship with the employer that means that there is a strong incentive especially in any industry where it's not easy to move from one employer to the next there's a strong incentive to stay in your employer's good graces right so it creates a very top-down dynamic not only in terms of who gets to tell other people what to do but it really comes down to who gets to tell other people how to think so that's extremely dangerous the way out of it is to cultivate security to the extent that somebody is in a position to go against the grain and have it not be a catastrophe for their family and their ability to earn you will see that behavior a lot more so i would argue that some of what you're talking about is just a simple uh predictable consequence of the concentration of the uh the sources of well-being and that this is a solvable problem you got a chance to talk with joe rogan yesterday yes i did and i just saw the episode was released and uh ivermectin is trending on twitter joe told me it was an incredible conversation i look forward to listening today many people have probably by the time this is released i've already listened to it i think it would be interesting to discuss uh a postmortem how do you feel how that conversation went maybe broadly how do you see the story as its unfolding of ivermectin from the origins from before covert 19 through 2020 to today i very much enjoyed talking to joe and i'm indescribably grateful that he would take the risk of such a discussion that he would as he described it do an emergency podcast on the subject which i i think that was not an exaggeration this needed to happen for various reasons that he uh he took us down the road of talking about the censorship campaign against ivermectin which i find utterly shocking and talking about the drug itself and i should say we talked we had pierre corey available he came on the podcast as well he is of course the face of the fl triple c the frontline covet 19 critical care alliance these are doctors who have innovated ways of treating covet patients and they happened on ivermectin and have been using it and i hesitate to use the word advocating for it because that's not really the role of doctors or scientists but they are advocating for it in the sense that there is this uh pressure not to talk about its effectiveness for reasons that we can go into so maybe step back and say what is ivermectin and how much studies have been done to show its effectiveness so ivermectin is an interesting drug it was discovered in the 70s by a japanese scientist named satoshi omura and he found it in soil near a japanese golf course so i would just point out in passing that if we were to stop self-silencing over the possibility that asians will be demonized over the possible lab leak in wuhan and to recognize that actually the natural course of the story has a likely lab leak in china it has a unlikely hero in japan the story is naturally not a simple one but in any case uh amura discovered this molecule he uh sent it to a friend who was at merck a scientist named campbell they won a nobel prize for the discovery of the ivermectin molecule in 2015. its initial use was in treating parasitic infections it's very effective in treating the the worm that causes river blindness uh the pathogen that causes elephantitis scabies it's a very effective anti-parasite drug it's extremely safe it's on the who's list of essential medications it's safe for children it has been administered something like four billion times in the last four decades it has been given away in the millions of doses by merck in africa people have been on it for long periods of time and in fact one of the reasons that africa may have had less severe impacts from covid19 is that ivermectin is widely used there to prevent parasites and the drug appears to have a long lasting impact so it's an interesting molecule it was discovered some time ago apparently that it has antiviral properties and so it was tested in early in the covet 19 pandemic to see if it might work to treat humans with covid it turned out to have very promising uh evidence that it did treat humans it was tested in tissues it was tested at a very high dosage which confuses people they think that those of us who believe that ivermectin might be useful in confronting this disease are advocating those high doses which is not the case but in any case there have been quite a number of studies a wonderful meta-analysis was finally released we had seen it in pre-print version but it was finally peer-reviewed and published this last week um it reveals that the drug as clinicians have been telling us those who've been using it it's highly effective at treating people with the disease especially if you get to them early and it showed an 86 percent effectiveness as a prophylactic to prevent people from contracting covid and that number 86 percent is high enough to drive sars cov2 to extinction if we wished to deploy it first of all the the the meta analysis is this the uh ivermectin foucault 19 real-time meta-analysis of 60 studies or there's a bunch of meta-analysis there because i i was really impressed by the real-time meta-analysis that keeps getting updated i don't know it's the same kind of the one at uh ivmmeta.com well i saw it it's uh c19 no this is not that meta-analysis stuff so that is as you say a living meta analysis where you can watch as evidence which is super cool by the way it's really cool and they've got some really nice graphics that allow you to understand well what is the evidence you know it's concentrated around this level of effectiveness etc so anyway it's great site well worth paying attention to no this is a meta-analysis um i don't know any of the authors but one second author is tess laurie of the bird group bird being a a group of analysts and doctors in britain that is playing a role similar to the fl triple c here in the u.s so anyway this is a meta-analysis that that that uh test laurie and others did of all of the available evidence and um it's quite compelling people if people can look for it on my twitter i will i will put it up and people can find it there so what about those here that in terms of safety uh what do we understand about the the kind of dust required to to have that level of effectiveness and what do we understand about is the safety of that kind of dose so let me just say i'm not a medical doctor i'm a biologist i'm on ivermectin uh in lieu of vaccination in terms of dosage there is one reason for concern which is that the most effective dose for prophylaxis involves something like weekly administration and that that is because that is not a historical pattern of use for the drug um it is possible that there is some long-term implication of being on it for being on it weekly for a long period of time there's not a strong indication of that the safety signal that we have uh over people using the drug over many years and using it in high doses in fact dr corey told me yesterday that there are cases in which people have made uh calculation errors and taken a massive overdose of the drug and had no ill effect so anyway there's lots of reasons to think the drug is comparatively safe but no drug is perfectly safe and i do worry about the long-term implications of taking it i also think it's very likely because the drug is administered in a dose something like let's say 15 milligrams for somebody my size once a week after you've gone through the initial the initial double dose that you take 48 hours apart it is apparent that if the amount of drug in your system is sufficient to be protective at the end of the week then it was probably far too high at the beginning of the week so there's a question about whether or not you could flatten out the intake so that the amount of ivermectin goes down but the protection remains i have little doubt that that would be discovered if we looked for it but that said it does seem to be quite safe highly effective at preventing covid the 86 number is plenty high enough for us to drive uh sarsko v2 to extinction in light of its r naught number of slightly more than two um and so why we are not using it as a bit of a a mystery so even if everything you said now turns out to be not correct it is nevertheless obvious that it's sufficiently promising it always has been in order to merit rigorous scientific exploration investigation doing a lot of studies and certainly not censoring the science or the discussion of it so before we talk about the various vaccines for code 19 i'd like to talk to you about censorship given everything you're saying why did youtube and other places censor discussion of um have a mechtin well there's a question about why they say they did it and there's a question about why they actually did it now it is worth mentioning that youtube is part of a consortium it is partnered with twitter facebook reuters ap financial times washington post some other notable organizations and that this group has appointed itself the arbiter of truth in effect they have decided to control discussion ostensibly to prevent the distribution of misinformation now how have they chosen to do that in this case they have chosen to simply utilize the recommendations of the who and the cdc and apply them as if they are synonymous with scientific truth problem even at their best the who and cdc are not scientific entities they are entities that are about public health and public health has this whether it's right or not and i believe i disagree with it but it has this uh self-assigned right to lie that comes from the fact that there is game theory that works against for example a successful vaccination campaign that if everybody else takes a vaccine and therefore the herd becomes immune through vaccination and you decide not to take a vaccine then you benefit from the immunity of the herd without having taken the risk so people who do best are the people who opt out that's a hazard and the who and cdc as public health entities effectively oversimplify stories in order that that game theory does not cause a predictable tragedy of the commons with that said once that right to lie exists then it finds out it turns out to serve the interests of for example pharmaceutical companies which have emergency use authorizations that require that there not be a safe and effective treatment and have immunity from liability for harms caused by their product so that's a recipe for disaster right you don't need to be a sophisticated thinker about complex systems to see the hazard of immunizing a company from the harm of its own product at the same time that that product can only exist in the market if some other product that works better somehow fails to be noticed so somehow youtube is doing the bidding of merck and others whether it knows that that's what it's doing i have no idea i think this may be another case of an autopilot that thinks it's doing the right thing because it's parroting the corrupt wisdom of the who and the cdc but the who and the cdc have been wrong again and again in this pandemic and the irony here is that with youtube coming after me well my channel has been right where the who and cdc have been wrong consistently over the whole pandemic so how is it that youtube is censoring us because the who and cdc disagree with us when in fact in past disagreements we've been right and they've been wrong there's so much to talk about here so i've heard this many times actually on the inside of youtube and with colleagues that i've talked about talked with is they kind of in a very casual way say their job is simply to slow or prevent the spread of misinformation and they say like that's an easy thing to do like to know what is true or not is an easy thing to do and so from the youtube perspective i think they basically outsource of of the the task of knowing what is true or not to public institutions that on a basic google search claim to be the arbiters of truth so if you were youtube who are exceptionally profitable and exceptionally powerful in terms of controlling what people get to see or not what would you do would you take a stand a public stand against the w.h.o who cdc or would you instead say you know what let's open the damn and let any video on anything fly what do you what do you do here if you say you were put if brett weinstein was put in charge of youtube for a month in this most critical of times where youtube actually has incredible amounts of power to educate the populace to give power of knowledge to the populace such that they can reform institutions what would you do how would you run youtube well unfortunately or fortunately this is actually quite simple the founders the american founders settled on a counter-intuitive formulation that people should be free to say anything they should be free from the government blocking them from doing so they did not imagine that in formulating that right that most of what was said would be of high quality nor did they imagine it would be free of harmful things what they correctly reasoned was that the benefit of leaving everything so it can be said exceeds the cost which everyone understands to be substantial what i would say is they could not have anticipated the impact the centrality of platforms like youtube facebook twitter etc if they had they would not have limited the first amendment as they did they clearly understood that the power of the federal government was so great that it needed to be limited by granting explicitly the right of citizens to say anything in fact youtube twitter facebook may be more powerful in this moment than the federal government of their worst nightmares could have been the power that these entities have to control thought and to shift civilization is so great that we need to have those same protections it doesn't mean that harmful things won't be said but it means that nothing has changed about the cost benefit analysis of building the right to censor so if i were running youtube the limit of what should be allowed is the limit of the law right if what you are doing is legal then it should not be youtube's place to limit what gets said or who gets to hear it that is between speakers and audience will harm come from that of course it will but will net harm come from it no i don't believe it will i believe that allowing everything to be said does allow a process in which better ideas do come to the fore and win out so you believe that in the end when there's complete freedom to share ideas that truth will win out so what i've noticed just as a brief side comment that certain things become viral irregardless of their truth i i've noticed that things that are dramatic and or funny like things that become memes are not don't have to be grounded in truth and so that what worries me there is that we basically maximize for drama versus maximize for truth in a system where everything is free and that's worrying in the time of emergency well yes it's all worrying in time of emergency to be sure but i want you to notice that what you've happened on is actually an analog for a much deeper and older problem human beings are the we are not a blank slate but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised and there's a reason for that right it's where our flexibility comes from we have effectively we are robots in which the a large fraction of the cognitive capacity has been or of the behavioral capacity has been offloaded to the software layer which gets written and rewritten over evolutionary time that means effectively that much of what we are in fact the important part of what we are is housed in the in the cultural layer and the conscious layer and not in the hardware hard coding layer that layer is prone to make errors right and anybody who's watched a child grow up knows that children make absurd errors all the time right that's part of the process as we were discussing earlier it is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things a lot of what is said is pure nonsense it's garbage but the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term does not say that over the long term what sticks is not the valuable ideas so there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct and you have to keep that in mind it's not like the genome right everything is happening at a much higher rate things are being created they're being destroyed and i can't say that you know i mean obviously we've seen totalitarianism arise many times and it's very destructive each time it does so it's not like hey freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage but the question is over time does it produce more open fairer more decent societies and i believe that it does i can't prove it but that does seem to be the pattern i i believe so as well the thing is in the short term freedom of speech absolute freedom of speech can be quite destructive but you nevertheless have to hold on to that because in the long term i think you and i i guess are optimistic in the sense that good ideas will win out i don't know how strongly i believe that it will work but i will say i haven't heard a better idea yeah i would also point out that there's something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring which is the majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense that's automatic but the heterodoxy at the fringe which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas is the key to progress so if you decide hey the fringe is 99 garbage let's just get rid of it right hey that's a strong win we're getting rid of 99 garbage for one percent something or other and the point is yeah but that one percent something rather is the key you're throwing out the key and so that's what youtube is doing frankly i think at the point that it started censoring my channel you know in the immediate aftermath of this major reversal of lab for lab leak it should have looked at itself and said well what the hell are we doing who are we sensory we're sensory somebody who was just right right in a conflict with the very same people on whose behalf we are now censoring right that should have caused them to wake up so you said one approach if you were on youtube was just basically let all videos go that do not violate the law well i should fix that okay i believe that that is the basic principle eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks doxing these other things so i agree there's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives even if there's a technical legal defense for it now how you draw that line i don't know but you know what i'm talking about is yes people should be free to traffic and bad ideas and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad and hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out yeah there's an interesting line between you know like uh ideas like the earth is flat which i believe you should not censor and then like you start to encroach on like personal attacks so not not you know doxxing yes but like not even getting to that like there's a certain point where it's like that's no longer ideas that's more that's somehow not productive even if it's it feels like uh believing the earth is flat it's somehow productive because maybe this tiny percent chance it is you know like it just feels like personal attacks it doesn't um well you know it's i'm torn on this because there's in this world there's fraudulent people in this world so sometimes personal attacks are useful to reveal that but there's a line you can cross like there's a comedy where people make fun of others i think that's amazing that's very powerful and that's very useful even if it's painful but then there's like once it gets to be um yeah there's a certain line it's a gray area where you cross where it's no longer in any possible world productive and that's a really weird gray area for youtube to operate in and it feels like should be a crowdsource thing where people vote on it but then again do you trust the majority to vote on what is crossing the line and not i mean this is where this is really interesting on this particular like the scientific aspect of this do you think youtube should take more of a stance not censoring but to actually have scientists within youtube having these kinds of discussions and then be able to almost speak out in a transparent way this is what we're going to let this video stand but here's all these other opinions almost like take a more active role in uh its recommendation system in trying to present a full picture to you right now they're not and they're the recommender systems are not human fine-tuned they're all based on how you click and there's this clustering algorithms they're not taking an active role on giving you the full spectrum of ideas in the space of science they just censor or not well at the moment it's going to be pretty hard to compel me that these people should be trusted with any sort of curation or comment on matters of evidence because they have demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it well um you could make such an argument and i guess i'm open to the idea of institutions that would look something like youtube that would be capable of offering something valuable i mean and you know even just the fact of them literally curating things and putting some videos next to others you know implies something so yeah there's a question to be answered but at the moment no at the moment what it is doing is quite literally putting not only individual humans in tremendous jeopardy by censoring discussion of useful tools and making tools that are more hazardous than has been acknowledged seems safe right but it is also placing humanity in danger of a permanent relationship with this pathogen i cannot emphasize enough how expensive that is it's effectively incalculable if the relationship becomes permanent the number of people who will ultimately suffer and die from it is indefinitely large yeah there's uh currently the algorithm is very rabbit hole driven meaning if you uh if you click on the flat earth videos that's all you're going to be presented with and you're not going to be nicely presented with arguments against the flat earth and the flip side of that if you watch like quantum mechanics videos or no general relativity videos it's very rare you're going to get a recommendation have you considered the earth as flat and i think you should have both same with vaccine videos that present the power and the incredible like biology genetics biology about the vaccine you're rarely going to get videos from well-respected scientific minds presenting possible dangers of the vaccine and the vice versa is true as well which is if you're looking at the danger of the vaccine on youtube you're not going to get the highest quality of videos recommended to you and i'm not talking about like manually inserted cdc videos that are like the most untrustworthy things you can possibly watch about how everybody should take the vaccine it's the safest thing ever no it's about incredible again mit colleagues of mine incredible biologists biologists that talk about the the details of how the mrna vaccines work and all those kinds of things i think maybe this is me with the ai hat on is i think the algorithm can fix a lot of this and youtube should build better algorithms and trust that to and a couple of complete freedom of speech to expand the what people are able to think about present always varied views not balanced in some artificial way hard-coded way but balanced in a way that's crowdsourced i think that's an algorithm problem that could be solved because that then you can delegate it to the algorithm as opposed to this hard code censorship of basically creating artificial boundaries on what can and can't be discussed instead creating a full spectrum of exploration that can be done and trusting the intelligence of people to do the exploration well there's a lot there i would say we have to keep in mind that we're talking about a um a publicly held company with shareholders and obligations to them and that that may make it impossible and i remember many years ago back in the early days of google i remember a sense of terror at the loss of general search right it used to be that that google if you searched came up with the same thing for everyone and then it got personalized and for a while it was possible to turn off the personalization which was still not great because if everybody else is looking at a personalized search and you can tune into one that isn't personalized what are you know that doesn't tell you why the world is sounding the way it is but nonetheless it was at least an option and then that vanished and the problem is i think this is literally deranging us that in effect i mean what you're describing is unthinkable it is unthinkable that in the face of a campaign to vaccine vaccinate people in order to reach hurt immunity that um youtube would give you videos on hazards of vaccines when this is you know how hazardous the vaccines are is an unsettled question why is it unthinkable that doesn't make any sense for well from a company perspective if intelligent people in large amounts are open-minded and are thinking through the the hazards and the benefits of a vaccine a company should should find the best videos to present what people are thinking about well let's come up with a hypothetical okay let's come up with a a very deadly disease for which there's a vaccine that is very safe though not perfectly safe and we are then faced with youtube trying to figure out what to do for somebody searching on vaccine safety suppose it is necessary in order to drive the pathogen to extinction something like smallpox that people get on board with the vaccine but there's a tiny fringe of people who thinks that the vaccine is a mind control agent right so should youtube direct people to the only claims against this vaccine which is that it's a mind control agent when in fact uh the vaccine is very safe whatever that means if that were the actual configuration of the puzzle then youtube would be doing active harm pointing you to um this other video potentially now yes i would love to live in a world where people are up to the challenge of sorting that out but my basic point would be if it's an evidentiary question and there is essentially no evidence that the vaccine is a mind control agent and there's plenty of evidence that the vaccine is safe then well you look for this video we're going to give you this one puts it on a par right so for the mind that's tracking how much uh thought is there behind it's safe versus how much thought is there behind it's a mind control agent will result in artificially uh elevating this now in the current case what we've seen is not this at all we have seen evidence obscured in order to create a false story about safety and we saw the inverse with ivermectin we saw a campaign to portray the drug as more dangerous and less effective than the evidence clearly suggested it was so we're not talking about a comparable thing but i guess my point is the algorithmic solution that you point to creates a problem of its own which is that it means that the way to get exposure is to generate something fringy if you're the only thing on some fringe then suddenly youtube would be recommending those things and that's that's obviously a gameable system at best yeah but the solution to that i know you're you're creating a thought experiment maybe playing a little bit of a devil's advocate i think the solution to that is not to uh limit the algorithm in the case of the super deadly virus it's for the scientists to step up and become better communicators more charismatic is fight the battle of ideas so to create better videos you know the like if the virus is truly deadly you have a lot more ammunition a lot more data a lot more material to work with in terms of communicating with the public so be better at communicating and stop being uh you have to start trusting the intelligence of people and also being transparent and playing the game of the internet which is like what is the internet hungry for i believe authenticity stop looking like you're full of it's the scientific community if there's any flaw that i currently see especially the people that are in public office that like anthony fauci they look like they're full of and i know they're brilliant why don't they look more authentic so they're losing that game and i think a lot of people observing this entire system now younger scientists are seeing this and saying okay if i want to continue being a scientist in the public eye and i want to be effective in my job i'm going to have to be a lot more authentic so they're learning the lesson this evolutionary system is working uh so there's just a younger generation of minds coming up that i think will do a much better job in this battle of ideas that when the when the much more dangerous virus comes along they'll be able to be better communicators at least that's the hope the the using the algorithm to control that is uh i feel like is a big problem so you're going to have the same problem with a deadly virus as with the current virus if you let youtube draw hard lines by the pr and the marketing people versus the broad community of scientists well in some sense you're you're suggesting something that's close akin to what i was saying about you know freedom of expression ultimately uh provides an advantage to to better ideas so i'm in agreement broadly speaking um but i would also say there's probably some sort of you know let's imagine the world that you propose where youtube shows you the alternative point of view that has the problem that i suggest but one thing you could do is you could give us the tools to understand what we're looking at right you could give us so first of all there's something i think myopic solipsistic narcissistic about a an algorithm that serves shareholders by showing you what you want to see rather than what you need to know right that's the distinction is flattering you you know playing to your blind spot is something that algorithm will figure out but it's not healthy for us all to have google playing to our blind spot it's very very dangerous so what i really want is analytics that allow me or maybe options and analytics the options should allow me to see what alternative perspectives are being explored right so here's the thing i'm searching and it leads me down this road right let's let's say it's ivermectin okay i find all of this evidence that ivermectin works i find all of these discussions and people talk about various protocols and this and that and then i could say all right what is the other side and i could see who is searching not as individuals but what demographics are searching alternatives and maybe you could even combine it with something reddit like where effectively let's say that there was a position that i don't know that that a vaccine is a mind control device and you could have a steel man this argument uh competition effectively and the better answers that steel man and as well as possible would rise to the top and so you could read the top three or four explanations about why this really credibly is a mind control uh uh product and you can say well that doesn't really add up i can check these three things myself and they can't possibly be right right and you could dismiss it and then as an argument that was credible let's say plate tectonics before that was an accepted concept you'd say wait a minute there is evidence for plate tectonic as crazy as it sounds that the continents are floating around on liquid actually that's not so implausible you know we've got these subduction zones we've got uh geology that is compatible we've got puzzle piece continents that seem to fit together wow that's a surprising amount of evidence for that position so i'm going to file some bayesian probability with it that's updated for the fact that actually the steel man argument's better than i was expecting right so i could imagine something like that where a i would love the search to be indifferent to who's searching right the the solipsistic thing is too dangerous so the search could be general so we would all get a sense for what everybody else was seeing too and then some layer that didn't have anything to do with what youtube points you to or not but allowed you to see you know the general pattern of uh adherence to searching for um information and again a layer in which those things could be defended so you could hear what a good argument sounded right like rather than just hear a caricatured argument yeah and also reward people creators that have demonstrated like a track record of open-mindedness and correctness correctness as much as it could be measured over a long term and sort of uh i mean a lot of this maps to incentivizing good long-term behavior not immediate kind of dopamine rush uh kind of signals i think ultimately the algorithm on the individual level should optimize for personal growth long-term happiness just growth intellectually growth in terms of lifestyle personally and so on as opposed to immediate uh i think that's going to build a better society not even just like truth because i think truth is a complicated thing it's more just you growing as a person exploring the space of ideas changing your mind often increasing the level to which you're open-minded the knowledge base you're operating from the willingness to empathize with others all those kinds of things the algorithm should optimize for like creating a better human at the individual level that you're all i think that's a great business model because the person that's using this tool will then be happier with themselves for having used it and will be a lifelong quote-unquote customer i think it's a great business model to make a happy open-minded knowledgeable better human being it's a terrible business model under the current system what you want is to build the system in which it is a great business model why is it a terrible model because it will be decimated by those who play to the short term i don't think so why well i mean i think we're living it we're living it well no because if if you have the alternative that presents itself it it it points out the emperor has no clothes i mean it points out that youtube is operating in this way twitter's operating in this way so facebook is operating in this way how long term would you like the wisdom to to prove that well even though a week is better what's currently happening right but the problem is you know if a week loses out to an hour right and i don't think it loses out it loses out in the short term that's my point at least you're a great communicator and you basically say look here's the metrics and a lot of it is like how people actually feel like this this is what people experience with social media they look back at the previous month and say i felt shitty and a lot of days because of social media right like if you look back at the previous few weeks and say wow i'm a better person because that month happened that's they immediately choose the product that's going to lead to that that's what love for products looks like if you if you love like a lot of people love their tesla car like that's or iphone or like beautiful design that's what love looks like you look back i'm a better person for having used this thing well you got to ask yourself the question though if this is such a great business model why isn't it devolving why don't we see it honestly it's competence it's like people are just it's not it's not easy to build new it's not easy to build products tools systems on new ideas it's kind of a new idea we've gone through this everything we're seeing now comes from the ideas of the initial birth of the internet this just needs to be new sets of tools that are uh incentivizing long term personal growth and happiness that's it right but but what we have is a market that doesn't favor this right i mean for one thing you know we had an alternative to facebook right that looked you know you owned your own data it wasn't exploitative and facebook bought a huge interest in it and it died i mean who do you know who's on diaspora the execution there was not good right but it could have gotten better right i don't think that the argument that why hasn't somebody done it a good argument for it's not going to completely destroy all of twitter and facebook when somebody does it or twitter will catch up and pivot to to the algorithm this is not what this is not what i'm saying there's obviously great ideas that remain unexplored because nobody has gotten to the foothill that would allow you to explore them that's true but you know an internet that was non-predatory is an obvious idea and many of us know that we want it and many of us have seen prototypes of it and we don't move because there's no audience there so the network effects cause you to stay with the predatory internet um but let me just i wasn't kidding about build the system in which your idea is a great business plan um so in our upcoming book heather and i in our last chapter explore something called the fourth frontier and fourth frontier has to do with sort of a 2.0 version of civilization which we freely admit we can't tell you very much about it's something that would have to be we would have to prototype our way there we would have to effectively navigate our way there but the result would be very much like what you're describing it would be something that effectively liberates humans meaningfully and most importantly it has to feel like growth without depending on growth in other words human beings are creatures that like every other creature is effectively looking for growth right we are looking for underexploited or unexploited opportunities and when we find them our ancestors for example if they happened into a new valley that was unexplored by people their population would grow until it had carrying capacity so there would be this great feeling of there's abundance until you hit carrying capacity which is inevitable and then zero-sum dynamics would set in so in order for human beings to flourish long-term the way to get there is to satisfy the desire for growth without hooking it to actual growth which only moves in fits and starts and this is actually i believe the key to avoiding these you know spasms of human tragedy when in the absence of growth people do something that causes their population to experience growth which is they go and make war on or commit genocide against some other population which is something we obviously have to stop by the way this is uh a hunter hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century co-authored that's right with your wife heather being released to september i believe you said you're going to do a little bit of a preview videos on each chapter leading up to the release so i'm looking forward to the last chapter as well as well as all the the previous one i have a few questions on that so you you have um you generally have faith to clarify that technology could be the thing that empowers this kind of future well if you just let technology evolve it's going to be our undoing right one of the things that i um fault my libertarian friends for is this faith that the market is going to find solutions without destroying us and my sense is i'm a very strong believer in markets right i believe in their power even above some market fundamentalists but what i don't believe is that they should be allowed to plot our course right markets are very good at figuring out how to do things they are not good at all about figuring out what we should do right what we should want we have to tell markets what we want and then they can tell us how to do it best and if we adopted that kind of pro market but in a context where it's not steering where human well-being is actually the driver we can do remarkable things and the technology that emerges would naturally be enhancing of human well-being perfectly so no but overwhelmingly so but at the moment markets are finding our every defect of character and exploiting them and making huge profits and making us worse to each other in the process before we leave covet 19 let me ask you about a very difficult topic which is the vaccines so i took the fisa vaccine the two shots you did not you have been taking ivermectin yep so one of the arguments against the discussion of ivermectin is that it prevents people from being fully willing to get the vaccine how would you compare ivermectin and the vaccine for coven 19. all right that's a good question i would say first of all there are some hazards with the vaccine that people need to be aware of there are some things that we cannot rule out and for which there is some evidence the two that i think people should be tracking is the possibility some would say a likelihood that a vaccine of this nature that is to say very narrowly focused on a single antigen is a an evolutionary pressure that will drive the emergence of variants that will escape the protection that comes from the vaccine so this is a hazard it is a particular hazard in light of the fact that these vaccines have a substantial number of breakthrough cases so one danger is that a person who has been vaccinated will shed viruses that are specifically less visible or invisible to the immunity created by the vaccines so we may be creating the next pandemic by applying the pressure of vaccines at a point that it doesn't make sense to the other danger has to do with something called antibody dependent enhancement which is something that we see in certain diseases like dengue fever you may know that dengue one gets a case and then their second case is much more devastating so break bone fever is when you get your second case of dengue and dengue effectively utilizes the immune response that is produced by prior exposure to attack the body in ways that it is incapable of doing before exposure so this is apparently this pattern has apparently blocked past efforts to make vaccines against coronaviruses whether it will happen here or not it is still too early to say but before we even get to the question of harm done to individuals by these vaccines we have to ask about what the overall impact is going to be and it's not clear in the way people think it is that if we vaccinate enough people the pandemic will end it could be that we vaccinate people and make the pandemic worse and while nobody can say for sure that that's where we're headed it is at least something to be aware of so don't vaccines usually create that kind of evolutionary pressure to create more deadlier different strains of the virus so isn't so is there something particular with these mrna vaccines that's uniquely dangerous in this regard well it's not even just the mrna vaccines the mrna vaccines and the adenovector dna vaccine all share the same vulnerability which is they are very narrowly focused on one subunit of the spike protein so that is a very concentrated evolutionary signal we are also deploying it in mid pandemic and it takes time for immunity to develop so part of the problem here if you if you inoculated a population before encounter with a pathogen then there might be substantially enough immunity to prevent this phenomenon from happening but in this case we are inoculating people as they are encountering those who are sick with the disease and what that means is the disease is now faced with a lot of opportunities to effectively evolutionarily practice escape strategies so one thing is the timing the other thing is the narrow focus now in a traditional vaccine you would typically not have one antigen right you would have basically a virus full of antigens and the immune system would therefore produce a broader response so that is the case for people who have had covet right they have an immunity that is broader because it wasn't so focused on one part of the spike protein so anyway there is something unique here so these platforms create that special hazard they also have components that we haven't used before in people so for example the lipid nanoparticles that coat the rnas are distributing themselves around the body in a way that will have unknown consequences so anyway there's there's reason reason for concern is it possible for you to steal man the argument that everybody should get vaccinated of course the argument that everybody should get vaccinated is that nothing is perfectly safe phase 3 trials showed good safety for the vaccines now that may or may not be actually true but what we saw suggested high degree of efficacy and a high degree of safety for the vaccines that inoculating people quickly and therefore dropping the landscape of available victims for the pathogen to a very low number so that herd immunity drives it to extinction requires us all to take our share of the risk and that that because driving it to extinction should be our highest priority that really people shouldn't think uh too much about the various nuances because overwhelmingly fewer people will die if the population is vaccinated from the vaccine then will die from covet if they're not vaccinated and with the vaccine as the current as being deployed that is a quite a likely scenario that the everything you know the virus will fade away in in the following sense that the the probability that a more dangerous strain will be created is non-zero but it's not 50 it's something smaller and so the most likely well i don't know maybe you disagree with that but the the scenario we're most likely to see not that the vaccine is here is that the via the effects of the virus will fade away first of all i don't believe that the probability of creating a worse pandemic is low enough to discount i think the probability is fairly high and frankly we are seeing a wave of variance that um we will have to do a careful analysis to figure out what exactly that has to do with campaigns of vaccination where they have been where they haven't been where the variance emerged from but i believe that what we are seeing is a disturbing pattern that reflects that those who were advising caution may well have been right the data here by the way a small tangent is terrible terrible right and why is it terrible is another question right this is where i started getting angry yeah it's like there's a obvious opportunity for exceptionally good data for exceptionally rigorous like even the self like the website for self reporting side effects for not side effects but negative effects adverse events at first event sorry for the vaccine like there's many things i could say from both the study perspective but mostly let me just put on my hat of like html and like web design like it's like the worst website it makes it so unpleasant to report it makes it so unclear what you're reporting if somebody actually has serious effect like if you have very mild effects what are the incentives for you to even use that crappy website with many pages and forms that don't make any sense if you have adverse effects what are the incentives for you to use that website what is the trust that you have that this information will be used well all those kinds of things and the data about who's getting vaccinated anonymized data about who's getting vaccinated where when what that with what vaccine coupled with the adverse effects all of that we should be collecting instead we're completely not we're doing it in a crappy way and using that crappy data to make conclusions that you then twist you're basically collecting in a way that can arrive at whatever conclusions you want and the data is being collected by uh the institutions by governments and so therefore it's obviously they're going to try to construct any kind of narratives they want based on this crappy data reminds me of much of psychology the field that i love but is flawed in many fundamental ways so rant over but uh coupled with the dangers that you're speaking to we don't have even the data to um to understand the dangers yeah uh i'm going to pick up on your rant and say we estimates of the degree of under reporting in vares are uh that it is ten percent of the real to a hundred percent and that's the one for reporting yeah the fair system is the is the system for reporting adverse events so um in the u.s we have above 5 000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination that is an undercount almost certainly and by uh a large factor we don't know how large i've seen estimates 25 000 dead in the u.s alone um now you can make the argument that okay that's a large number but the necessity of immunizing the population to drive sars kovi 2 to extinction is such that it's an acceptable number but i would point out that that actually does not make any sense and the reason it doesn't make any sense is actually there's several reasons one if that was really your point that yes many many people are going to die but many more will die if we don't do this were that your approach you would not be inoculating people who had had covet 19 which is a large population there is no reason to expose those people to danger their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them is greater so there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face a risk of death if this was really about an acceptable number of deaths arising out of this uh the set of vaccines i would also point out there's something incredibly bizarre and i would i struggle to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case because children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects because they are going to live longer and because this is earlier in their development therefore it impacts systems that are still forming they tolerate covid well and so the benefit to them is very small and so the only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more covert than we think and therefore they may be integral to the way the virus spreads to the population but if that's the reason that we are inoculating children and there has been some revision in the last day or two about the recommendation on this because of the adverse events that have shown up in children but to the extent that we were vaccinating children we were doing it to protect old infirm people who are the most likely to succumb to covet 19. what society puts children in danger robs children of life to save old infirm people that's upside down so there's something about the way we are going about vaccinating who we are vaccinating what dangers we are pretending don't exist that suggests that to some set of people vaccinating people is a good in and of itself that that is the objective of the exercise not hurt immunity and the last thing i'm sorry i don't want to prevent you from jumping in here but the second reason in addition to the fact that we're exposing people to danger that we should not be exposing them to by the way as a tiny tangent another huge part of the soup that should have been part of it that's an incredible solution is large-scale testing but that that might be another couple-hour but conversation but there's these solutions that are obvious that were available from the very beginning so you could argue that ivaractin is not that obvious but maybe the whole point is you have aggressive very fast research that leads to meta-analysis and then large-scale production and deployment okay at least that possibility should be uh seriously considered coupled with a serious consideration of large-scale deployment of testing at home testing that could have uh accelerated the the speed at which we reach that um hurt immunity but i don't even want to well let me just say i am also completely shocked that we did not get on high quality testing early and that we are still suffering from this even now because just the simple ability to track where the virus moves between people would tell us a lot about its mode of transmission which would allow us to protect ourselves better instead that information was hard won and for no good reason so i i also find this mysterious you've spoken with eric weinstein your brother on his podcast the portal about the ideas that eventually led to the paper you published titled the reserved capacity hypothesis i think first can you explain this paper and the ideas that led up to it sure easier to explain the conclusion of the paper um there's a question about why a creature that can replace its cells with new cells grows feeble and inefficient with age we call that process which is otherwise called aging we call it senescence and senescence in this paper it is hypothesized is the unavoidable downside of a cancer prevention feature of our bodies that each cell has a limit on the number of times it can divide there are a few cells in the body that are exceptional but most of our cells can only divide a limited number of times that's called the hayflick limit and the hayflick limit uh reduces the ability of the organism to replace tissues it therefore results in a failure over time of maintenance and repair and that explains why we we become decrepit as we grow old the question was why would that be especially in light of the fact that the mechanism that seems to limit the ability of cells to reproduce is something called a telomere telomere is a it's a not a gene but it's a dna sequence at the ends of our chromosomes that is just simply repetitive and the number of repeats functions like a counter so there's a number of repeats that you have uh after development is finished and then each time the cell divides a little bit of telomere is lost and at the point that the telomere becomes critically short the cell stops dividing even though it still has the capacity to do so stops dividing and it starts transcribing different genes than it did when it had more telomere so what my work did was it looked at the fact that the telomeric shortening was being studied by two different groups it was being studied by people who were interested in counteracting the aging process and it was being studied in exactly the opposite fashion by people who were interested in tumerogenesis and cancer the thought being because it was true that when one looked into tumors they always had telomerase active that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres so those folks were interested in uh bringing about a halt to the lengthening of telomeres in order to counteract cancer and the folks who were studying the senescence process were interested in lengthening telomeres in order to generate greater repair capacity and my point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a plyotropic effect that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves are providing a benefit in youth which is that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient and eventually die and that matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody i was fortunate enough to know george williams one of the great 20th century evolutionists who argued that senescence would have to be caused by plyotropic genes that cause early life benefits at unavoidable late life costs and although this isn't the exact nature of the system he predicted it matches what he was expecting in many regards uh to a shocking degree that said the the the focus of the paper is about the well let me just read the abstract we observed that captive rodent breeding protocol is designed this is the end of the abstract we observe that captive rodent breeding protocol is designed to increase reproductive output simultaneously exert strong selection against reproductive senescence and virtually eliminates selection that would otherwise favor tumor suppression this appears to have greatly elongated the telomeres of laboratory mice with their telomeric fail-safe effectively disabled these animals are unreliable models of normal senescence and tumor formation so basically using these mice is not going to lead to the right kinds of conclusions safety tests employing these animals likely overestimate cancer risks and underestimate tissue damage and consequent accelerated senescence so i think especially with your discussion with eric the conclusion of this paper has to do with the fact that like we shouldn't be using these mice to test the safety or to make conclusions about uh cancer or senescence is that the basic takeaway like basically saying that the length of these telomeres is an important variable to consider well let's put it this way i think there was a reason that the world of scientists who was working on telomeres did not spla did not spot the plyotropic relationship that was the key argument in my paper the reason they didn't spot it was that there was a result that everybody knew which seemed inconsistent the result was that mice have very long telomeres but they do not have very long lives now we can talk about what the actual meaning of don't have very long lives is but in the end i was confronted with a hypothesis that would explain a great many features of the way mammals and indeed vertebrates age but it was inconsistent with one result and at first i thought maybe there's something wrong with the result maybe this is one of these cases where the result was achieved once through some bad protocol and everybody else was repeating it didn't turn out to be the case many laboratories had established that mice had ultra-long telomeres and so i began to wonder whether or not there was something about the breeding protocols that generated these mice and what that would predict is that the mice that have long telomeres would be laboratory mice and that wild mice would not and carol grider who agreed to collaborate with me tested that hypothesis and showed that it was indeed true that while derived mice or at least mice that had been in captivity for a much shorter period of time did not have ultra-long telomeres now what this implied though as you read is that our breeding protocols generate lengthening of telomeres and the implication of that is that the animals that have these very long telomeres will be hyperprone to create tumors they will be extremely resistant to toxins because they have effectively an infinite capacity to replace any damaged tissue and so ironically if you give one of these ultra-long telomere lab mice a toxin if the toxin doesn't outright kill it it may actually increase its lifespan because it functions as a kind of chemotherapy so the reason the chemotherapy works is that dividing cells are more vulnerable than cells that are not dividing and so if this mouse has effectively had its cancer protection turned off and it has cells dividing too rapidly and you give it a toxin you will slow down its tumors faster than you harm its other tissues and so you'll get a paradoxical result that actually some drug that's toxic seems to benefit the mouse now i don't think that that was understood before i published my paper now i'm pretty sure it has to be and the problem is that this actually is a system that serves pharmaceutical companies that have the difficult job of bringing compounds to market many of which will be toxic maybe all of them will be toxic and these mice predispose our system to declare these toxic compounds safe and in fact i believe we've seen the errors that result from using these mice a number of times most famously with vioxx which turned out to do conspicuous heart damage why do you think this paper on this idea has not gotten significant traction well my collaborator carol grider said something to me that rings in my ears to this day she initially after she showed that laboratory mice have anomalously long telomeres and that wild mice don't have long telomeres i asked her where she was going to publish that result so that i could cite it in my paper and she said that she was going to keep the result in-house rather than publish it and at the time i was a young graduate student i didn't really understand what she was saying but in some sense the knowledge that a model organism is broken in a way that creates the likelihood that certain results will be reliably generatable you can publish a paper and make a big splash with such a thing or you can exploit the fact that you know how those models will misbehave and other people don't so there's a question if somebody is motivated cynically and what they want to do is appear to have deeper insight into biology because they predict things better than others do knowing where the flaw is so that your predictions come out true is advantageous at the same time i can't help but imagine that the pharmaceutical industry when it figured out that the mice were predisposed to suggest that drugs were safe didn't leap to fix the problem because in some sense it was the perfect cover for the difficult job of bringing drugs to market and then discovering their actual toxicity profile right this made things look safer than they were and i believe a lot of profits have likely been generated downstream so to kind of play devil's advocate it's also possible that this particular the length of the telomeres is not a strong variable for the conclusions for for the drug development and for the conclusions that carol and others have been studying is that is that is it possible for that to be the case that this like so one reason she and others could be ignoring this is because it's not a strong variable well i don't believe so and in fact at the point that i went to publish my paper carol published her result um she did so in a way that did not make a huge splash did she like whoa i apologize if i don't know how what was the emphasis of her publication of that paper was it purely just kind of showing data or is there more because in your paper there's a kind of more of a philosophical statement as well well my paper was motivated by interest in the evolutionary dynamics around senescence i wasn't um you know pursuing grants or anything like that i was just working on a puzzle i thought was interesting carol has of course gone on to win a nobel prize for her co-discovery with elizabeth grider of telomerase the enzyme that lengthens telomeres but anyway she's a heavy hitter in the academic world i don't know exactly what her purpose was i do know that she told me she wasn't planning to publish and i do know that i discovered that she was in the process of publishing very late and when i asked her to send me the paper to see whether or not she had put evidence in it that the hypothesis had come from me she grudgingly sent it to me and my name was nowhere mentioned and she has she broke contact at that point what it is that motivated her i don't know but i don't think it can possibly be that this result is unimportant the fact is the reason i called her in the first place and established contact that generated our collaboration was that she was a leading light in the field of telomeric studies and um because of that this question about whether the model organisms are distorting the uh the understanding of the functioning of telomeres is it's central do you feel like you you've been as a young graduate student do you think carol or do you think the scientific community broadly screwed you over in some way you know i don't think of it in those terms probably partly because it's not productive but you know i have a a complex relationship with this story right on the one hand i'm livid with carol grider for what she did right she absolutely pretended that i didn't exist in this story and i don't think i was a threat to her my interest was as an evolutionary biologist i had made an evolutionary contribution she had tested a hypothesis and frankly i think it would have been better for her if she had acknowledged what i had done i think it would have enhanced her work and you know i was let's put it this way when i watched her nobel lecture and i should say there's been a lot of confusion about this nobel stuff i've never said that i should have gotten a nobel prize people have misportrayed that um my in listening to her lecture i had one of the most bizarre emotional experiences of my life because she presented the work that resulted from my hypothesis she presented it as she had in her paper with no acknowledgment of where it had come from and she had in fact portrayed the distortion of the telomeres as if it were a lucky fact because it allowed testing hypotheses that would otherwise not be testable you have to understand as a young scientist to watch work that you have done presented in what's surely the most important lecture of her career right it's thrilling it was thrilling to see you know her uh her figures projected on the screen there right to have been part of work that was important enough for that felt great and of course to be erased from the story felt absolutely terrible so anyway that's sort of where i am with it my sense is i what i'm really troubled by in this story is the fact that as far as i know the flaw with the mice has not been addressed and actually eric did some looking into this he tried to establish by calling the jacks lab and trying to ascertain what had happened with the colonies whether any change in protocol had occurred and he couldn't get anywhere there was seemingly no awareness that it was even an issue so i'm very troubled by the fact that as a father for example i'm in no position to protect my family from the hazard that i believe lurks in our medicine cabinets right i'm even though i'm aware of where the hazard comes from it doesn't tell me anything useful about which of these drugs will turn out to do damage if that is ultimately tested and that's a very frustrating position to be in on the other hand you know there's a part of me that's even still grateful to carol for taking my call she didn't have to take my call and talk to some young graduate student who had some evolutionary idea that wasn't you know in her wheelhouse specifically and yet she did and you know for a while she was a good collaborator so well can i i have to proceed carefully here because it's a complicated topic so she took the call and you kind of you're kind of saying that she basically erased credit you know pretending you didn't exist in some kind of in a certain sense let me phrase it this way i've um as a as a research scientist at mit i've had especially just part of a large set of collaborations i've had a lot of students come to me and talk to me about ideas perhaps less interesting than what we're discussing here in the space of ai that i've been thinking about anyway it's in in general with everything i'm doing with robotics people will have told me a bunch of ideas that i'm already thinking about the point is taking that idea see this is different because the idea has more power in the space that we're talking about here and robotics is like your idea means until you build it like so the engineering world is a little different but it there's a kind of sense that i probably forgot a lot of brilliant ideas have been told to me do you think she pretended you don't exist do you think she was so busy that she kind of forgot you know that she has like the stream of brilliant people around her that there's a bunch of ideas that are swimming in the air and you just kind of forget people that are a little bit on the periphery on the idea generation like or is it some mix of both uh it's not a mix of both um i know that because we corresponded she put a graduate student on this work he emailed me excitedly when the results came in so there was no ambiguity about what had happened what's more when i went to publish my work i actually sent it to carol in order to get her feedback because i wanted to be a good collaborator to her and she absolutely panned it made many critiques that were not valid but it was clear at that point that she became an antagonist and none of this adds up she couldn't possibly have forgotten the conversation um i believe i even sent her tissues at some point in in part not related to this project but as a favor she was doing another project that involved telomeres and she needed samples that i could get a hold of because of the museum of zoology that i was in so this was not a one-off conversation i certainly know that those sorts of things can happen but that's not what happened here this was a relationship that existed and then was suddenly cut short at the point that she published her paper by surprise without saying where the hypothesis had come from and uh began to be a opposing force to my work is there there's a bunch of trajectories you could have taken through life do you think about the trajectory of being a researcher of then going to to war in the space of ideas of publishing further papers along this line i mean that's often the dynamic of that fascinating space is you have a junior researcher with brilliant ideas and a senior researcher that that starts out as a mentor that becomes a competitor i mean that that happens but then the way to uh it's an almost an opportunity to shine is to publish a bunch more papers in this place like to tear it apart to dig into like really uh make it a war of ideas did you consider that possible trajectory i did a couple things to say about it one this work was not central for me i took a year on the telomere project because something fascinating occurred to me and i pursued it and the more i pursued it the clearer it was there was something there but it wasn't the focus of my graduate work and i didn't want to become a telomere researcher what i want to do is to be an evolutionary biologist who upgrades the toolkit of evolutionary concepts so that we can see more clearly how organisms function and why and telomeres was a proof of concept right that paper was a proof of concept that the toolkit in question works um as for the need to pursue it further i think it's kind of absurd and you're not the first person to say maybe that was the way to go about it but the basic point is look the work was good the it turned out to be highly predictive frankly the model of senescence that i presented is now widely accepted and i don't feel any misgivings at all about having spent a year on it said my piece and moved on to other things which frankly i think are bigger i think there's a lot of good to be done and it would be it would be a waste to get overly narrowly focused there's so many ways through the space of science and the the most common ways to just publish a lot let's publish a lot of papers do these incremental work and uh exploring the space kind of like ants looking for food is you're tossing out a bunch of different ideas some of them could be brilliant breakthrough ideas nature some of the more confidence kind of publications all those kinds of things did you consider that kind of path and science of course i considered it but i must say the experience of having my first encounter with the process of peer review be this story which was frankly a debacle from one end to the other with respect to the process of publishing it did not it was not a very good sales pitch for um trying to make a difference to publication and i would point out part of what i ran into and i think frankly part of what explains carol's behavior is that in some parts of science there is this dynamic where pis parasitize their underlings and if you're very very good you rise to the level where one day instead of being parasitized you get to parasitize others now i find that scientifically despicable and it wasn't the culture of the lab i grew up in at all my lab in fact the pi dick alexander who's now gone but who was an incredible mind and a great human being he didn't want his graduate students working on the same topics he was on not because it wouldn't have been useful and exciting but because in effect he did not want any confusion about who had done what because he was a great mentor and the idea was actually a great mentor is not stealing ideas and you and you don't want you don't want people thinking that they are so anyway my point would be um i wasn't up for being parasitized i don't like the idea that if you are very good you get parasitized until it's your turn to parasitize others that doesn't make sense to me a you know crossing over from evolution into cellular biology may have exposed me to that that may have been par for the course but it doesn't make it acceptable and i would also point out that my work falls in the realm of synthesis my work generally takes evidence accumulated by others and places it together in order to generate hypotheses that explain sets of phenomena that are otherwise intractable and i am not sure that that is best done with narrow publications that are read by few and in fact i would point to the very conspicuous example of richard dawkins who i must say i've learned a tremendous amount from and i greatly admire dawkins has almost no publication record in the sense of peer-reviewed papers in journals what he's done instead is done synthetic work and he's published it in books which are not peer-reviewed in the same sense and frankly i think there's no doubting his contribution to the field so my sense is if richard dawkins can illustrate that one can make contributions to the field without uh using journals as the primary mechanism for distributing what you've come to understand then it's obviously a valid mechanism and it's a far better one from the point of view of accomplishing what i want to accomplish yeah it's really interesting there is of course several levels you can do the kind of synthesis and that does require a lot of both broad and deep thinking is exceptionally valuable you could also public i'm working on something with andrew huberman now you can also publish synthesis sure that's like review papers they're exceptionally valuable for the communities it brings the community together tells a history tells a story where the community has been it paints a picture of where the path lays for the future i think it's really valuable and richard dawkins is a good example of somebody that does that in book form that he kind of walks the line really interestingly like somebody who like neil degrasse tyson who's more like a science communicator richard dawkins sometimes is a science communicator but he gets he gets like close to the technical to where it's a little bit it's not shying away from being really a contribution to science no he's made he's made real contributions um in book form yes he really is fascinating i mean uh roger penrose i mean some similar kind of idea that's interesting that's interesting synthesis does not especially synthesis work work that synthesizes ideas does not necessarily need to be peer reviewed it it it's peer reviewed by peers reading it well and reviewing it that's it it is reviewed by peers which is not synonymous with peer review and that's the thing is people don't understand that the two things aren't the same right peer review is an anonymous process that happens before publication in a place where there is a power dynamic right i mean the joke of course is that peer review is actually peer preview right your biggest competitors get to see your work before it sees the light of day and decide whether or not it gets published and you know again when your formative experience with the publication apparatus is the one i had with the telomere paper there's no way that that seems like the right way to advance important ideas yeah and you know what's the harm in publishing them so that your peers have to review them in public where they actually if they're gonna disagree with you they actually have to take the risk of saying i don't think this is right and here's why right with their name on it i'd much rather that it's not that i don't want my work reviewed by peers but i want it done in the open you know for the same reason you don't meet with dangerous people in private you meet at the cafe i want the work reviewed out in public can i ask you a difficult question sure there is popularity in martyrdom there's popularity in pointing out that the emperor has no clothes that that can become a drug in itself i've confronted this in scientific work i've done at mit where there are certain things they're not done well people are not being the best version of themselves and particular aspects of a particular field are in need of a revolution and part of me wanted to point that out versus doing the hard work of publishing papers and doing the revolution basically just pointing out look you guys are doing it wrong and then just walking away are you aware of the drug of martyrdom of uh the the ego involved in it that it can cloud your thinking probably one of the best questions i've ever been asked um so let me let me try to sort it out first of all we are all mysteries to ourself at some level so it's possible there's stuff going on in me that i'm not aware of that's driving but in general i would say one of my better strengths is that i'm not especially ego driven i have an ego i clearly think highly of myself but it is not driving me i do not crave that kind of validation i do crave certain things i do love a good eureka moment there is something great about it and there's something even better about the phone calls you make next when you share it right it's pretty it's pretty fun right i really like it i also really like my subject right there's something about a walk in the forest when you have a tool kit in which you can actually look at creatures and see something deep right i like it that drives me and i could entertain myself for the rest of my life right if i if i was somehow isolated from the rest of the world but i was in a place that was biologically interesting you know hopefully i would be with people that i love and pets that i love believe it or not but you know if i were in that situation and i could just go out every day and look at cool stuff and figure out what it means i could be all right with that so i'm not heavily driven by the um the ego thing as you put it so i i'm completely the same except instead of the pets i would put robots but so it's not it's the eureka it's the exploration of of the subject that brings you joy and fulfillment it's not the ego well there's there's more to say no i really don't think it's the ego thing um i will say i also have kind of a secondary passion for robot stuff i've never made anything useful but i do believe i believe i found my calling but if this wasn't my calling my calling would have been inventing stuff i really i really enjoy that too so i get what you're saying about the analogy quite quite well um as far as the martyrdom thing i i understand the drug you're talking about and i've seen it more than i felt it i do if i'm just to be completely candid and that this question is so good it deserves a candid answer i do like the fight right i like fighting against people i don't respect and i like winning but i have no interest in martyrdom one of the reasons i have no interest in martyrdom is that i'm having too good a time right i very much enjoy my life and that's such a good answer i have a wonderful wife i have amazing children i live in a lovely place i don't want to exit any quicker than i have to that said i also believe in things and a willingness to exit if that's the only way is not exactly inviting martyrdom but it is an acceptance that fighting is dangerous and going up against powerful forces means who knows what will come of it right i don't have the sense that the thing is out there that used to kill inconvenient people i don't think that's how it's done anymore it's primarily done through destroying them reputationally which is not something i relish the possibility of but there's a difference between a willingness to face the hazard rather than a desire to face it because of the thrill right for me the thrill is in um fighting when i'm in the right i've i think i feel that that is a worthwhile way to take what i see as the the kind of brutality that is built into men and to channel it to something useful right if it is not channeled into something useful it will be channeled into something else so it damn we'll better be channeled into something useful it's not motivated by fame and popularity those kinds of things it's there you know you're just making me realize that enjoying the fight fighting the powerful an idea that you believe is right is a kind of um it's a kind of optimism for the human spirit it's like we can win this it's almost like you're uh turning into action into personal action this hope for for humanity by saying like we can win this uh and that makes you feel good about like the rest of humanity that if there's people like me then we're going to be okay even if you're like your ideas might be wrong or not but if you believe they're right and you're fighting the powerful against all odds then we're going to be okay that that to me if i were to project i mean that because i enjoy the fight as well i think that's the way i that's what brings me joy is it's almost like uh it's optimism um in action well it's a little different for me and again i think you know i uh i recognize you you're familiar your construction is familiar even if it isn't mine right um for me i actually expect us not to be okay and i'm not okay with that but what's really important if i feel like what i've said is i don't know of any reason that it's too late as far as i know we could still save humanity and we could get to the fourth frontier or something akin to it but i expect us not to i expect us to it up right i don't like that thought but i've looked into the abyss and i've done my calculations and the number of ways we could not succeed are many and the number of ways that we could manage to get out of this very dangerous phase of history is small but the thing i don't have to worry about is that i didn't do enough right that i was a coward that i you know prioritized other things at the end of the day i think i will be able to say to myself and in fact the thing that allows me to sleep is that when i saw clearly what needed to be done i tried to do it to the extent that it was in my power and you know if we fail as i expect us to i can't say well jeez that's on me you know and you know frankly i regard what i just said to you as something like a personality defect right i'm trying to free myself from the sense that this is my fault on the other hand my guess is that personality defect is probably good for humanity right it's a good one for me to have it you know the externalities of it are positive so i don't feel too bad about it yeah it's funny so yeah our perspective on the world are different but they rhyme like you said because i i've also looked into the abyss and it kind of smiled nervously back so uh i have a more optimistic sense that we're going to win more than likely we're going to be okay right there with you brother i'm hoping you're right i'm expecting me to be right but back to eric because you had a wonderful conversation in that conversation he played the big brother role and he was very happy about it he was self-congratulatory about it i mean can you talk to the ways in which eric made you a better man throughout your life yeah hell yeah i mean for one thing you know eric and i are interestingly similar in some ways and radically different in some other ways and it you know it's often a matter of fascination to people who know us both because almost always people meet one of us first and they sort of get used to that thing and then they meet the other and it throws the model into chaos but you know i had a great advantage which is i came second right so although it was kind of a pain in the ass to be born into a world that had eric in it because he's a force of nature right it was also terrifically useful because a he was a very awesome older brother who you know made interesting mistakes learned from them and conveyed the wisdom of what he had discovered and that was uh you know i i don't know who else ends up so lucky is to have that kind of person blazing the trail it also probably you know my my hypothesis for what birth order effects are is that they're actually adaptive right that the reason that a second born is different than a firstborn is that they're not born into a world with the same niches in it right and so the thing about eric is he's been completely dominant in the realm of fundamental thinking right like what he's fascinated by is the fundamental of fundamentals and he's excellent at it which meant that i was born into a world where somebody was becoming excellent in that and for me to be anywhere near the fundamental of fundamentals was going to be pointless right i was gonna be playing second fiddle forever and i think that that actually drove me to the other end of the continuum between fundamental and emergent and so i became fascinated with biology and have been since i was three years old right i think eric drove that and i have to thank him for it because you know i mean i never thought of you so eric drives towards the fundamental and you drive towards the emergent the physics and the biology right opposite ends of the continuum and as eric would be quick to point out if he was sitting here i treat the emergent layer i seek the fundamentals in it which is sort of an echo of eric's style of thinking but applied to the very far complexity he's uh overpoweringly argues for the importance of physics the fundamental of the fundamental he's not here to defend himself is there an argument to be made against that or biology the emergent the study of the thing that emerged when the fundamental acts at the universal at the cosmic scale and builds the beautiful thing that is us is much more important like uh uh psychology biology the systems that we're actually interacting with in this human world are much more important to understand than low-level uh theories of uh quantum mechanics and general relativity now i can't say that one is more important i think there's probably a different time scale i think understanding the emergent layer is more often useful but the bang for the buck at the far fundamental layer may be much greater so for example the fourth frontier i'm pretty sure it's going to have to be fusion powered i don't think anything else will do it but once you had fusion power assuming we didn't just dump fusion power on the market the way we would be likely to if it was invented usefully tomorrow but if we had fusion power and we had a little bit more wisdom than we have you could do an awful lot and that's not going to come from people like me who you know look at dynamics can i argue against that please i think the way to uh unlock fusion power is through artificial intelligence is so i think most of the breakthrough ideas in the futures of science will be developed by ai systems and i think in order to build intelligent ai systems you have to be a scholar of the fundamental of the emergent of biology of the neuroscience of the way the brain works of intelligence of consciousness and those things at least directly don't have anything to do with physics well you're making me a little bit sad because my addiction to the aha moment thing is incompatible with you know uh outsourcing that job like outsourcing i don't want to outsource that thing to you yeah moment you know and actually i've seen this happen before because some of the people who uh trained heather and me were phylogenetic systematists arnold kluge in particular and the problem with systematics is that to do it right when your technology is primitive you have to be deeply embedded in the philosophical and the logical right your method has to be based in the highest level of rigor once you can sequence genes genes can spit so much data at you that you can overwhelm high quality work with just lots and lots and lots of automated work and so in any in some sense there's like a generation of phylogenetic systematists who are the last of the greats because what's replacing them is sequencers um so anyway i maybe you're right about the ai and i guess you said i like figuring stuff out is there something that you disagree with ericon they've been trying to convince them you've failed so far but uh you will eventually succeed you know that is a very long list eric and i have have uh tensions over certain things that recur all the time and i'm trying to think what would be you know the idea in the space of science in the space of philosophy politics family love robots well all right let me i'm just going to use your podcast to uh make a bit of cryptic war and just say that there are many places in which i believe that i have butted heads with eric over the course of decades and i have seen him move in my direction substantially over you've been winning he might he wouldn't battle here there but you've been winning the war i would not say that it's quite possible he could say the same thing about me and in fact i know that it's true there are places where he's absolutely convinced me but in any case i do believe it's at least you know it may not be a totally even fight but it's it's more even than some will imagine um but yeah we have um you know there are things i say that drive him nuts right like when something you know like you heard me talk about the um what was it it was the autopilot that seems to be putting a great many humans in needless medical jeopardy over the covet 19 pandemic and my feeling is we can say this almost for sure anytime you have the appearance of some captured gigantic entity that is censoring you on youtube and you know handing down dictates from the who and all of that it is sure that there will be a certain amount of collusion right there's going to be some embarrassing emails in some places that are going to reveal some shocking connections and then there's going to be an awful lot of emergence that didn't involve collusion right in which people were doing their little part of a job and something was emerging and you never know what the admixture is how much are we looking at actual collusion and how much are we looking at an emergent process but you should always walk in with the sense that it's going to be a ratio and the question is what is the ratio in this case i think this drives eric knots because he is very focused on the people i think he's focused on the people who have a choice and make the wrong one and anyway he makes a question of the ratio is a distraction to that i think i think he takes it almost as an offense because it grants cover to people who are harming others and i think i think it offen offends him uh morally and if i had to say i would say it alters his judgment on the matter but anyway certainly useful just to leave open the two possibilities and say it's a ratio but we don't know which one brother to brother do you love the guy um hell yeah hell yeah and you know i'd love him if he's just my brother but he's also awesome so i love him and i love him for who he is so let me ask you about uh back to your book hunter gatherers guide to the 21st century i can't wait both for the book and the videos you do on the book that's really exciting that there's like a structured organized way to present this um i kind of uh from an evolutionary biology perspective a guide for the future using our past at its the fundamental the emergent way uh to uh present a picture of the future let me ask you about uh something that you know i think about a little bit in this modern world which is monogamy so i personally value monogamy one girl ride or die there you go ryder no that's exactly it but that said i i don't know what's the right way to approach this but from an evolutionary biology perspective or from just looking at modern society that seems to be an idea that's not what's the right way to put it flourishing it is waning it's waning um so i suppose based on your reaction you're also a supporter of monogamy or the you value monogamy are you and i just um delusional um what can you say about monogamy from the context of your book from the context of evolutionary biology from the context of being human yeah i can say that i fully believe that we are actually enlightened and that although monogamy is waning that it is not waning because there is a superior system it is waning for predictable other reasons so let us just say it is there is a lot of pre-trans fallacy here where people go through a phase where they recognize that actually we know a lot about the evolution of monogamy and we can tell from the fact that humans are somewhat sexually dimorphic that there has been a lot of pollution in human history and in fact most of human history was largely polignous but it is also the case that most of the people on earth today belong to civilizations that are at least nominally monogamous and have practiced monogamy and that's not anti-evolutionary what that is is part of what i mentioned before where human beings can swap out their software program and different mating patterns are favored in different periods of history so i would argue that the benefit of monogamy the primary one that drives the evolution of monogamous patterns in humans is that it brings all adults into child rearing now the reason that that matters is because human babies are very labor in order to raise them properly having two parents is a huge asset and having more than two parents having an extended family also very important but what that means is that for a population that is expanding a monogamous mating system makes sense it makes sense because it means that the number of offspring that can be raised is elevated it's elevated because all potential parents are involved in parenting whereas if you sideline a bunch of males by having a polygenous system in which one male has many females which is typically the way that works what you do is you sideline all those males which means the total amount of parental effort is lower and the population can't grow so what what i'm arguing is that you should expect to see populations that face the possibility of expansion endorsed monogamy and at the point that they have reached carrying capacity you should expect to see polygeny break back out and what we are seeing is a kind of false sophistication around polyamory which will end up breaking down into polygony which will not be in the interests of most people really the only people whose interests could be argued to be in would be the very small number of males at the top who have many partners and everybody else suffers is it possible to make the argument if we focus in on those males at the quote unquote top with uh many female partners is it possible to say that that's a sub-optimal life that a single partner is the optimal life well it depends what you mean i have a feeling that you and i wouldn't have to go very far to figure out that um what might be evolutionarily optimal doesn't match my values as a person then i'm sure it doesn't match yours either you know try to can we try to dig into the that gap between those two sure um i mean we can do it very simply uh selection might favor your engaging in war against a defenseless enemy or genocide right it's not hard to figure out how that might put your genes at advantage i don't know about you lex i'm not getting involved in no genocide it's not going to happen i won't do it i will do anything to avoid it so some part of me has decided that my conscious self and the values that i hold trump my evolutionary self and once you figure out that in some extreme case that's true and then you realize that that means it must be possible in many other cases and you start going through all of the things that selection would favor and you realize that a fair fraction of the time actually you're not up for this you don't want to be some robot on a mission that involves genocide when necessary you want to be your own person and accomplish things that you think are valuable and so among those are not advocating you know let's suppose you're in a position to be one of those males at the top of a politicianist system we both know why that would be rewarding right but we also both recognize we yeah sure lots of sex yeah okay what else lots of sex and lots of variety right so look every red-blooded american russian male can understand why that's appealing right on the other hand it is up against an alternative which is having a partner with whom one is bonded especially closely right right and so a love right well you know i don't wanna i don't wanna uh strawman the polygamy position obviously polygamy is complex and there's nothing that stops a man presumably from loving multiple partners and from them loving him back but in terms of you know if love is your thing there's a question about okay what is the quality of love if it is divided over multiple partners right and what is the net consequence for love in a society when multiple people will be frozen out for every individual male in this case who has it and what i would argue is and you know this is weird to even talk about but this is partially me just talking from personal experience i think there actually is a monogamy program in us and it's not automatic but if you take it seriously you can find it and frankly marriage and it doesn't have to be marriage but whatever it is that results in a lifelong bond with a partner has gotten a very bad rap you know it's the butt of too many jokes but the truth is it's hugely rewarding it's not easy but if you know that you're looking for something right if you know that the objective actually exists and it's not some utopian fantasy that can't be found if you know that there's some real world you know warts and all version of it then you might actually think hey that is something i want and you might pursue it and my guess is you'd be very happy when you find it yeah i think there is uh getting to the fundamentals of the emergence i feel like there is some kind of physics of love so one when there's a conservation thing going on so if you have like many partners yeah in theory you should be able to love all of them deeply but it seems like in reality that love gets split yep now there's another law that's interesting in terms of monogamy i don't know if it's the physics level but if you are in a monogamous relationship by choice and almost as in slight rebellion to social norms that's much more powerful like if you choose that one partnership that's also more powerful if if like everybody's in the monogamy there's this pressure to be married in this pressure of society that's different because that's almost like a constraint on your freedom that is enforced by something other than your own ideals it's by by somebody else when you yourself choose to i guess create these constraints that enriches that love so there's some kind of love function like e equals mc squared but for love that i feel like if you have less partners and it's done by choice that can maximize that and that love can transcend the biology transcend the evolutionary biology forces that have to do much more with survival and all those kinds of things it can transcend to take us to to a richer experience which we have the luxury of having exploring of happiness of of joy of fulfillment all those kinds of things totally agree with us and there's no question that by choice when there are other choices imbues it with meaning that it might not otherwise have i would also say you know i'm i'm really struck by and i have a hard time not feeling terrible sadness over what younger people are coming to think about this topic i think they're missing something so important and so hard to phrase that and they don't even know that they're missing it they might know that they're unhappy but they don't understand what it is they're even looking for because nobody's really been honest with them about what their choices are and i have to say if i was a young person or if i was advising a young person which i used to do again a million years ago when i was a college professor four years ago but i used to you know talk to students i knew my students really well and they would ask questions about this and they were always curious because heather and i seemed to have a good relationship and many of them knew both of us so they would talk to us about this if i was advising somebody i would say do not bypass the possibility that what you are supposed to do is find somebody worthy somebody who can handle it somebody who you are compatible with and that you don't have to be perfectly compatible it's not about dating until you find the one it's about finding somebody whose underlying values and viewpoint are complementary to yours sufficient that you fall in love if you find that person opt out together get out of this damn system that's telling you what's sophisticated to think about love and romance and sex ignore it together right that's the key and i believe you'll end up laughing in the end if you do it you'll discover wow that's a hellscape that i opted out of and this thing i opted into complicated difficult worth it nothing that's worth it is ever not difficult so we should we should even just skip the whole statement about difficult yeah all right i just i want to be honest it's not like oh it's you know it's non-stop joy no it's freaking complex but um but worth it no question in my mind is there advice outside of love that you can give to young people you were a million years ago a professor is there advice you can give to young people high schoolers college students uh about career about life yeah but it's not they're not gonna like it because it's not easy to operationalize so and this was a problem when i was a college professor too people would ask me what they should do should they go to graduate school i had almost nothing useful to say because the job market and the market of you know pre-job training and all of that these things are all so distorted and corrupt that i didn't want to point anybody to anything right because it's all broken and i would tell them that but i would say that results in a kind of uh meta-level advice that i do think is useful you don't know what's coming you don't know where the opportunities will be you should invest in tools rather than knowledge right to the extent that you can do things you can repurpose that no matter what the future brings to the extent that you know if you as a robot guy right you've got the skills of a robot guy now if civilization failed and the stuff of robot building disappeared with it you'd still have the mind of a robot guy and the mind of a robot guy can re-tool around all kinds of things whether you're you know forced to work with uh you know you know fibers that are made into ropes right your mechanical mind would be useful in all kinds of places so invest in tools like that that can be easily repurposed and invest in combinations of tools right if civilization keeps limping along you're going to be up against all sorts of people who have studied the things that you studied right if you think hey computer programming is really really cool and you pick up computer programming guess what you just entered a large group of people who have that skill and many of them will be better than you almost certainly on the other hand if you combine that with something else that's very rarely combined with it if you have i don't know if it's carpentry and computer programming if you take combinations of things that are even if they're both common but they're not commonly found together then those combinations create a rarefied space where you inhabit it and even if the things don't even really touch but nonetheless they create a mind in which the two things are live and you can move back and forth between them and you know step out of your own perspective by moving from one to the other that will increase what you can see and the quality of your tools and so anyway that isn't useful advice it doesn't tell you whether you should go to graduate school or not but it does tell you the one thing we can say for certain about the future is that it's uncertain and so prepare for it and like you said there's cool things to be discovered in the intersection of uh fields and ideas and i would look at grad school that way actually if you do go or i see i mean this is such a like every course in grad school undergrad too was like this little journey that you're on that explores a particular field and it's not immediately obvious how useful it is but it allows you to to discover intersections between that thing and some other thing so you you're bringing to the table this these pieces of knowledge some of which when intersected might create a niche that's completely novel unique and will bring you joy i have that i mean i took a huge number of courses in uh theoretical computer science most of them seem useless but they totally changed the way i see the world in ways that are i'm not prepared or is a little bit difficult to kind of make explicit but taken together they've allowed me to see for example the world of robotics totally different and different from many of my colleagues and friends and so on and i think that it's a good way to see if you go to grad school was as a opportunity to explore intersections of fields even if the individual fields seem useless yeah and useless doesn't mean useless right useless means not directly applicable but directly a good useless course can be the best one you ever took um yeah i took uh james joyce a course on james joyce and that was truly useless well i took uh i took immunobiology in the medical school when i was at penn as uh i guess i would have been a freshman or a sophomore i wasn't supposed to be in this class it blew my goddamn mind and it still does right i mean we had this i don't even know who it was but we had this great professor who was like highly placed in the world of immunobiology you know the course is called immunobiology not immunology immunobiology it had the right focus and as i recall it the professor stood sideways to the chalkboard staring off into space literally stroking his beard with this bemused look on his face through the entire lecture and you know you had all these medical students who were so furiously writing notes that i don't even think they were noticing the person delivering this thing but you know i got what this guy was smiling about it was like so what he was describing you know adaptive immunity is so marvelous right that it was like almost a privilege to even be saying it to a room full of people who were listening you know but anyway yeah i took that course and you know lo and behold that's gonna be useful well yeah suddenly it's front and center and wow am i glad i took it but um anyway yeah useless courses are great and actually eric gave me one of the greater pieces of advice at least for college than anyone's ever given which was don't worry about the prereqs take it anyway right but now i don't even know if kids can do this now because the prereqs are now enforced by a computer but back in the day if you didn't mention that you didn't have the prereqs nobody stopped you from taking the course and what he told me which i didn't know was that often the advanced courses are easier in some way the materials complex but you know you know it's not like intro bio where you're learning a thousand things at once right it's like focused on something so if you dedicate yourself you can you can pull it off yeah stay with an idea for many weeks at a time and it's ultimately rewarding and not as difficult as it looks can ask you a ridiculous question please what do you think is the meaning of life well i i feel terrible having to give you the answer i realize you asked the question but if i tell you you're gonna again feel bad i don't want to do that but look there's two there can be a disappointment it's no it's gonna be a horror right because we actually know the answer the question oh no it's completely meaningless there is nothing that we can do that escapes the heat death of the universe or whatever it is that happens at the end and we're not going to make it there anyway but even if you were optimistic about our ability to escape every existential hazard indefinitely ultimately it's off or not and we know it right that said once you stare into that abyss and then it stares back and laughs or whatever happens right then the question is okay given that can i relax a little bit right and figure out well what would make sense if that were true right and i think there's something very clear to me i think if you do all of the you know if i just take the values that i'm sure we share and extrapolate from them i think the following thing is actually a moral imperative being a human and having opportunity is absolutely awesome right a lot of people don't make use of the opportunity and a lot of people don't have opportunity right they get to be human but they're too constrained by keeping a roof over their heads to really be free but being a free human is fantastic and being a free human on this beautiful planet crippled as it may be is unparalleled i mean what could be better how lucky are we that we get that right so if that's true that it is awesome to be human and to be free then surely it is our obligation to deliver that opportunity to as many people as we can and how do you do that well i think i know what job one is job one is we have to get sustainable the way to get the maximum number of humans to have that opportunity to be both here and free is to make sure that there isn't a limit on how long we can keep doing this that effectively requires us to reach sustainability and then at sustainability you could have a horror show of sustainability right you could have a totalitarian sustainability that's not the objective the objective is to liberate people and so the question the whole fourth frontier question frankly is how do you get to a sustainable and indefinitely sustainable state in which people feel liberated in which they are liberated to pursue the things that actually matter to pursue beauty truth compassion connection all of those things that we could list as unalloyed goods those are the things that people should be most liberated to do in a system that really functions and anyway my point is i don't know how precise that calculation is but i'm pretty sure it's not wrong it's accurate enough and if it is accurate enough then the point is okay well there's no ultimate meaning but the proximate meaning is that one how many people can we get to have this wonderful experience that we've gotten to have right and there's no way that's so wrong that if i invest my life in it that i'm making some big error yeah sure that life is awesome and we want to spread the awesome as much as possible yeah you sum it up that way spread the awesome spread the loss so that's the fourth frontier and if that fails if the fourth frontier fails the fifth frontier will be defined by robots and hopefully they'll learn the lessons that the of the mistakes that the humans made and build a better world hopefully very happy here and that they do a better job with the place than we did but i can't believe it took us this long uh to talk as i as i mentioned to you before that we haven't actually spoken i think at all and i i've always felt that we're already friends i don't know how that works because i've listened to your podcast a lot i've also sort of uh loved your brother and so like it it was like we've known each other for the longest time and i hope we can be friends and talk often again i hope to that you get a chance to meet some of my robot friends as well and fall in love and i'm so glad that you love robots as well so we get to share in that love so i can't wait for us uh to interact together so we went from talking about some of the worst failures of humanity to so some of the most beautiful aspects of humanity what else can you uh ask for from a conversation thank you so much for talking today you know lex i feel uh the same way towards you and i really appreciate it this has been a lot of fun and i'm looking forward to our next one thanks for listening to this conversation with brett weinstein and thank you to jordan harbinger's show expressvpn magic spoon and for sigmatic check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from charles darwin ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge it is those who know little not those who know much who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 1,682,714

Rating: 4.7764874 out of 5

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, bret weinstein, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai

Id: TG6BuSjwP4o

Length: 197min 9sec (11829 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Booberdaboob]

Research that Bret cites for those that are interested.

Ivermectin Prophylaxis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/

Very notably: "In a much larger follow-up prospective, observational controlled trial by the same group that included 1195 health care workers, they found that over a 3-month period there were no infections recorded among the 788 workers who took weekly ivermectin prophylaxis, whereas 58% of the 407 controls had become ill with COVID-19. "

Tess Lawrie meta analysis. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34145166/

[u/firebeard1001]

Their conversation about social media and it’s potential changes was interesting. My understanding is these products manipulated our own dopamine responses from their inception. Jaren Lanier was talking about this process years ago.

P.S. Jaren Lanier would be a great guest for Lex.

[u/JewshyJ]

The issues raised in this podcast on the debate between unfettered free speech and authoritarianism are INCREDIBLY complex and really have no easy solution - the intense importance of this debate, and the intractability of the underlying problems always make me feel hopeless when I think too long about them.

It seems to me that on the surface, both options are recipes for disaster: censored speech for the reasons mentioned in the podcast, but also free speech. It seems simply naive to think that the typical arguments for free speech hold in the current era of social media and viral posts: it's been shown many times over that false, sensationalist content spreads faster than true content (props to Lex for pushing back on this slightly.)

As I see it, there are two options here: in a world with free speech, the conversation is dominated by crazy fringe groups who leverage social media to spread their untrue but magnetic ideas (despite Brett's optimism, there is tangible evidence of this phenomenon, compared to a lack of even anecdotal evidence of the fact that the truth can prevail in the world of social media). On the other side, we listen to experts - flawed, biased, sometimes wrong experts - but people who have spent their lives studying the things they talk about nonetheless. I know which side seems to make more sense to me.

[u/samsaffron]

"25,000 out of 170 million are DEAD cause of the DANGEROUS MRNA COVID vaccine and the Jury is still out about lipid nanoparticles that are floating around your body, who knows ... maybe in 3 years many more will die?"

"The vaccine will cause mutations, cause it will select for vaccine resistant mutations"

Lex please stop platforming this hot garbage please. There is a difference between encouraging discourse and platforming hot garbage.

25,000 people did not die from the MRNA vaccines, when you get to 1 out of a million like the adnovirus vaccines seem to be at, the scientists and politicians rightfully freak out.

There is no evidence anywhere and no peer reviewed articles that claim MRNA vaccines are sitting at 1.4 in 10,000 death. ZERO.

Platforming this lie is dangerous and can potentially kill people.

[u/Sharp-King1317]

Here’s my problem with Bret he is evolutionary biologist not a biochemist infectious disease doctor and so on. Lex get Michael Mina back on the podcast to discuss covid vaccines. Also Bret career is basically based on being censored.

[u/Blitqz21l]

Just started, so probably the least sexy part of the podcast and the conscious mind in sports. I kinda feel they missed it a little here. Simply put, your conscious mind plays a huge role, not necessarily while you're in the zone, but as you learn a sport, study the sport, and continuously think through the sport. For example, recognizing a weakness in your game, and figuring a way to counter it or just get better.

I would agree and disagree the "when you're in the zone" and your body just takes over, but while it does, you still run into obstacles, or people guarding you or how you get around someone.

Example, playing basketball, I've in the zone a few times, and being somewhat ambidextrous, because practice, making a decision to shoot right handed or left handed depending on where the defender is, I've definitely noticed conscious mind choices going on in my head, "guys on my left, so I'll shoot right or drive to the basket on the right, etc... Granted, at some point deep into it and with massive amounts of experience and muscle memory, you might just do it, but conscious choices are always available, and esp because while sports can be repetitive, because we're human means there's always something different that your conscious mind has to process.

[u/Neoxide]

Lex's opening remarks were spot on.

Additionally, Bret was on the JRE before this and its bewildering seeing people on that JRE subreddit hate on Bret presumably because they see him as a political enemy.

Some claim that by being on these podcasts, he is not censored despite being censored by YouTube and other social media platforms as well as his entire channel being put in jeopardy. Others justify the censorship, arguing that only approved authority figures should be allowed to talk about COVID, and any ideas that contradict the approved narrative should be forcibly silenced.

This is driven by groupthink; the desire to seek conformity over the desire to seek the truth. It is fundamentally unscientific and pure authoritarianism.

[u/okonkwo__]

Bret Weinstein says that covid has a 95% change originating from a lab - IMO we will never know the truth of the origins of COVID. Theres way too much at stake if it becomes admitted that it originated at the lab. What Lex and Bret should have talked about:

1. Will we ever get the truth about covid?
2. What would be the implications if the lab leak hypothesis becomes "confirmed"

If Trump was still in office, he would blame China but China would deny it, and I doubt the international community would do anything about it, so it would just die down. Now that Biden is in office, this is a headline for yesterday as maybe we simply dont care anymore about Covid?

[u/coinexpertsexchange]

Is Brett or Joe on a prophylactic dose of Ivermectin?

I see you can purchase it on Amazon (it's commonly sold for treating parasites in animals).

I trusted science and went with the free vaccine.