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I painted a scenario that was going to result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take the problem is it's already underway on a time scale of decades and we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift people should they be preparing absolutely that's quite scary Dr Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and former Professor uncovering the world's most pressing and controversial issues and offering his solutions to save Humanity from a destructive future humanity is in terrible danger and the number of existential threats is growing for example I'm profoundly concerned we are going to squander the lesson of Co you can see the complete collapse of Journalism our political institutions our courts they all failed the tragedy is most people don't know that we are still not being honest about the origin of Co and the truth is but our political institutions don't want to talk about it which is going to mean that the failures we going to come back is there anything else on your list of concerns so I have five different existential threats that AI poses and we will go through them but we have no evolutionary preparedness for living in a world where a computer can out compete a human being that's a dangerous world to live in is there anything we can do to prepare or to avert this crisis yes here's what I suggest Brent of all these existential threats is there one that's at the very top of your list yes there's nothing more dangerous of this and that is this is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life um we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations um from the bottom of my heart but also on behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet there's almost 50 people now behind the dire of a CEO that work to put this together so from all of us thank you so much um we did a raffle last month and we gave away Prime for people that subscrib to the show up until 7 million subscribers and you guys love that raffle so much that we're going to continue it so every single month we're giving away money can't buy prizes including meetings with me
invites to our events and ,000 gift vouchers to anyone that subscribes to the dire Co there's now more than 7 million of you so if you make the decision to subscribe today you can be one of those lucky people thank you from the bottom of my heart let's get to the [Music] conversation R Who who are you and what mission are you on and when I ask that second question I'm looking at the full body of your work and I'm trying to encapsulate it maybe in just a couple of sentences sure I am an evolutionary biologist I'm a former college professor who has been cast into the role of a public intellectual by bizarre events at my college I am on a mission and I'm afraid it's going to sound weird to people I think humanity is in terrible danger I think we worry about the wrong things and I do not have any reason to believe that anything I could do is going to change the fate of humanity but I feel obligated to try that is to say if we're going to be doomed by our errors and I know something about what those errors are then it falls to me to try to make that clear to people and processes that might have the power to redirect us so I'm making that effort even though frankly I think it's unlikely to work that's quite scary Brett yep I've gotten over that part what exactly are you referring to when you say that you think Humanity might be doomed there's a basic set of premises that just comes out of biology no species is forever and that includes our species no matter what I or anyone else does but the objective of the exercise is really to Stave off Extinction as long as possible and I believe that that is a valid thing to do it is a vital thing to do even if in the end we know that no matter how successful we were we're not going to escape the destruction of the solar system we're not going to escape the Collision of our galaxy into another and even if we did ultimately the universe has a fate and it will take us out with it if we beat every odd but why are we in trouble well we're in trouble because all creatures are wellb built for the environments in which we evolved and human beings suffer from
something that uh my wife Heather and I in our book call hyper novelty so novelty is the state of something being not what you are evolutionarily prepared for and human beings are very good at dealing with novelty but what we're doing in the present is we're creating a rate of change that is so rapid that there is no conceivable way for us to keep up we cannot adapt fast enough to keep up with the novel influences that we are um forcing Upon Our ourselves and what that means is that with each passing year we end up ever more poorly adapted to the life that we have to lead and it's gotten so bad that the environments that we live in as adults don't even resemble the environments that existed for adults when we were kids the reason that human beings have a longer developmental period than any other creature that has ever existed on this planet is that you need a long developmental period for us to acquire the insight and the Nuance in order to be a functional adult that program doesn't work if the environment in which you are picking up those lessons is unrelated to the environment in which you have to do the adult stuff it's a non seiter so that's why we're in trouble we have technologies that are powerful enough to destroy us we have processes that we have unleashed the consequences of which we can scarcely imagine and as these things proliferate the number of existential threats to humanity is just simply growing we have to re in that problem the proliferation of existential threats means that the moment that which we blink out as a species is getting closer if it isn't this that takes us out it'll be that we have to arrest that process of all these pressing concerns and of all these existential threats is there one that's at the very top of your list of concerns well they're not even uh completely separable so for example there we are politically obsessed in this country and across the the Western World with anthropogenic climate change I'm sure you've noticed what is anthropogenic climate change anthropogenic climate change is a change in the average conditions on planet Earth that is driven by human
activity so the claim is that CO2 traps heat from the Sun causing the mean temperature to rise that will have impacts on for example how much ice persists at high altitudes and in the Arctic and the uh other cold regions and that that then is part of a positive feedback where because ice is white it reflects the sun's energy back into space so the more ice that melts the darker the world becomes the more light it absorbs the warmer it becomes so that positive feedback is actually a real reason for concern however the increasingly model driven Mania about global warming is at odds with what we understand about models models are not a valid test of a hypothesis in a complex system they can't be so we are treating these models as if they tell what's going to happen and that is not a philosophically valid thing to do but it is also just simply not in keeping with an understanding of the underlying requirements for functional science if you were in climatology today and you attempted to publish a paper that said actually uh anthropogenic climate change is only a quarter as bad as we fear you would have great difficulty publishing that and you would experience a spectacular uh decrease in your viability as an academic so what we can infer from that is that we probably have a lot of papers that point in a direction that the field is interested in promoting and that we have a dir of papers that might point in the other direction so in effect when we look at the sum total of papers and we say oh my God they all say the same thing we're in big trouble well do they all say the same thing cuz we're in big trouble and that's what an honest analysis would give you or is that just an echo of what we put into the system so I'm much less worried about anthrop penic climate change and I'm much more worried about some other threats that to my way of thinking clearly dwarf it in magnitude so we have several problems related to space weather the Sun goes through a cycle an 11-year Sunspot Cycle those sunspots often release solar flares those solar flares are in general directed randomly off the Sun and because the Earth is only in one spot
most of the solar flares that the sun flings off don't hit us what's a solar flare a solar flare is well it's really the coronal mass ejection that is the important part the flare is the thing you see on the Sun that looks like a big flame sort of flipping off the sun when it does that that actually in many cases ejects a concentrated glob of plasma right these are charged particles and they get flung off they get flung off at speeds that are not consistent they're not moving at the speed of light they're moving at the speed of stuff right and that speed of stuff is variable but a couple days after a solar flare that releases a coronal mass ejection in the direction of the earth we get a wave of these charged particles across the Earth yeah yeah and that causes things that we are all familiar with whether you've seen it or not this uh increases the the Aurora Borealis for example the Northern Lights so it's a very spectacular show and you probably are aware maybe you saw it yourself but we recently had a uh an aurora that reached as far south as Puerto Rico right that's a really unusual thing to happen and even more unusual is the fact so they usually reach sort of the top part of the earth is that is that right yeah you you if you're up near the Arctic Circle yeah you uh you see these things regularly the farther south you are the less likely you are to see them yeah I saw it in North Sweden and sort of Iceland as well perfect place right um but for the for people to see it in Puerto Rico is highly unusual and you would think that that indicates that the burst of plasma that hit the earth was in some way highly unusual and it wasn't something else is going on that Aurora reached farther south than it should have based on the magnitude of the coronal mass mass ejection which was substantial but hardly unprecedent now what most people don't know is that there was a major solar storm that hit the earth in 1859 it goes by the name of the Carrington event named for the astronomer who realized that the weird effects that happened on Earth were correlated to something he had seen on the sun he had effectively put those two he had seen the uh the flare and then
deduced that this was related to it now in 1859 the world was not a very electrical place in fact the primary use of electricity was telegraphs and at the time this burst of plasma caused those telegraphs stations caught fire the entire network went down Telegraph operators were shocked at their stations messages could be sent even though there was no power being delivered to the system it went down and the induced charge in the wires was enough for telegraph operators to send messages over distances so it was very dramatic if you were involved in telegraphs but for the rest of humanity it was a minor event now we live in a very different world we live in a world where every everything has an electrical component the way our cars function the way food shows up in the supermarket the way air travel and air traffic control works all of these things are heavily electrical and they are all tremendously vulnerable to the EMP effects that will come with a major solar impact what's the EMP effect it's an electromagnetic pulse which is basically an induced charge in uh uh electrically active materials so it's the kind of thing that uh a big enough one will fry every computer will uh take most of the cars off the road and what we don't commonly know is that our grids the grids that operate all of our electrical devices are um they operate with these Transformers right which uh control the flow of current these Transformers are huge complicated machines and if you needed one and you ordered it today it would take a year for you to get it if the world suddenly needed 70 of them or a 100 of them there's no telling what would happen so well we all have the experience of a power outage causing us to lose electricity for uh you know hours or days it is quite conceivable that a solar storm that took out a significant number of Transformers could take a continent and turn it dark with no plan for bringing the lights back on they would go out and they wouldn't come back and this was a ridiculous uh risk to run the Transformers can be hardened against this they cannot be perfectly immunized from this effect but they can be
hardened with well understood architecture architecture that effectively grounds out the EMP so that the Transformer comes back on after the event but we don't do it so we are running an incredibly large risk of a section of a continent or an entire continent going dark with no backup plan to me the risk of that dwarfs anything that might be true about antropogenic climate change what's more you've probably heard that um pole shifts happen that the North Pole isn't always where the North Pole currently is and that sometimes these things flip that's always struck me as an extremely dangerous condition and I always assumed well what are the chances you're going to be alive you know if you were alive within 500 years of a PO flip that would be kind of a close call but what are the chances going to happen during your lifetime well we are actually living in a moment where the pole is actively migrating we are in the midst of what's called a polar Excursion the pole seems to be flipping and it seems to be flipping at the same time that our electromagnetic field of the earth is decreasing now that decreasing field means that what's flung off the sun has a bigger impact on Earth that it would than it would ordinarily have and that pole flip threatens uh chaos you could imagine if we feared Y2K right that a programming error a failure to account for the fact that you were going to have this turnover in the dates uh worried people that an actual pull flip would create chaos and the fact that we are not at least as worried if not 10 times as worried about the fact that we are living through a polar Excursion and a radical decrease in the strength of our electromagnetic field on Earth says that we just have our priorities wrong what is causing the pole to flip and what does that does that mean because when I think about a pole flip does that mean the the North Pole just moves a little bit the South Pole moves a little bit it's not a little bit these things are going to move radically and the rate at which they are moving is accelerating this is is
happening on a time scale that's highly relevant to you and me we are both likely to be here to see um the full shift whatever that full shift entails and they're not always the same so it's a little hard to predict now I will say this is not my area of expertise I have learned tremendously from others um Ben Davidson being the primary person somebody I had on on the Dark Horse podcast and he has a very compelling model a hypothesis that I believe does explain many otherwise difficult to explain features of our solar environment his explanation is that the solar system is moving constantly within the Galaxy and that the Galaxy by its very nature contains an oscillating electromagnetic sheet and as the solar system moves through that sheet sheet we cross the plane in the middle which causes all the electrically active entities to experience an inversion the sun experiences an inversion the other planets experience an inversion the Earth experiences an inversion when you say inversion you mean the the sort of electromagnetic sense yeah it's you know it's the direction of pull if you when we talk about electric electromagnetism we're talking about attraction and rep repulsion and if you imagine that you flipped the sign on everything because you just crossed the middle of something like you know if you were holding a magnet here right and the north side is down and the south side is up and you moved another magnet by it the direction of pull would shift as you crossed that Equator so we are crossing something like an equator of the Galaxy and that cross is causing anomalous behavior on Earth but it's also causing it we know on eight of the nine other planets and the ninth planet we just simply don't have the data yet it's not that we know it it's somehow immune to it and we're seeing anomalous behavior on the Sun so what I understand is that there's a story about the Galaxy that we barely know that story interfaces with many things that we do know from the fossil record from geology which are hard to explain why does the pole flip and that at the very least we need a concentrated effort where we look into these questions and if Ben Davidson has it wrong if there is no Galactic current sheet if we are not Crossing its Meridian if the electromagnetic field is
decreasing but is about to turn around rather than continue to decline then we should find that out um but I think what we would find out if we looked deeply into this if we took it seriously is that there is a threat to to humanity that has very little to do with anything anthropogenic the only important component that is an anthropogenic is that we have created a fragile world that cannot endure this shift what does anthropogenic mean go word human-made human made okay human made so you know anthropogenic climate change means that we put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere that wasn't there before which we certainly have you know the uh our fuels are made of car carbon and when we break these more complex carbon molecules carbon dioxide is released that's not really a bad thing inherently because carbon dioxide isn't a poison right so taking these rings of carbon and breaking it into carbon dioxide and water is uh not the worst way to get energy if you can do it cleanly but the problem is there's a there's a an old equation called the arenus equation which tells us that c CO2 will actually cause the retention of heat from the Sun and as I mentioned at the beginning the fact of trapping a little extra heat might not be that important were it not for the fact that there's a positive feedback that involves the whiteness of the poles the amount of energy bounced back into space which keeps us cool and as the poles melt the Earth becomes darker it traps more heat so that's an anthropogenic effect because we've released all of this carbon that was trapped in fossil fuel deposits so on this point of the pole shifting I just want to make sure I'm super clear are you do you actually mean that the North and South Pole would move well this is in my opinion up in the air very serious people have inferred from various kinds of evidence that the Earth itself might actually rotate or appear to rotate that the uh crust that is the surface that we live on could unlock from the mantle currently they are locked together but it could unlock and rotate over the surface of the mantle now I am not convinced that that can happen I'm not convinced it's impossible people uh people as smart as
Einstein have considered this possibility and that in fact it would be driven to happen by the accumulated Mass on the pole in the form of ice that that would actually drag get towards the equator if they became unlocked so we have really two different disaster scenarios that could invol and unfold one involves simply the magnetic orientation of the earth shifting and leaving the crust where it is and the other involving the crust actually rotating um the reason that I am doubtful about the crust rotating and I wouldn't I wouldn't bet strongly in either direction but the reason that I am doubtful is that as a biologist I find the idea that the pole would move to the equator hard to reconcile with the distribution of species that we see on the earth so there's something that doesn't quite fit about that story for me it would require something in the biology that I believe is not described um it's possible I can imagine things that would do it but I don't see it so I'm hesitant about the idea of the crust unlocking but I don't regard it as uh nothing to worry about just so I'm clear when you point to um evolutionary history having and sort of the distribution of species on the earth giving a clue you essentially saying that if this had happened in the past we wouldn't see through the fossil records that certain species exist around the equator yeah and you know let's take the example of the the Amazon so there's a very famous biological experiment by kind of an old school biologist who I did have the Good Fortune of meeting uh many years ago guy named Paul colino who was testing the question there was a debate in biology about whether or not the Amazon became a grassland during glaciation and became a forest during interglacial periods and he went on one of the sort of old school excursions into the Amazon to take pollen cores from from Lakes um which is interesting it's not a lake filled environment but anyway he he found locations took these pollen cores which should tell the tale because they we can tell which pollen you're looking at and it gets laid down in layers and so if it was flipping back and forth between a grassland and a forest you could see it that was not
what they came up with what they came up with is this is this has been a forest and it has remained a forest without being a grassland now the problem is if you move it 90° off that should drive all of the creatures there extinct and you should have to go through some process that causes either massive migration from somewhere else or uh re-evolution and the problem is this model in which we are passing through this electromagnetic sheet every 12,000 years just doesn't leave time for these processes so you would expect the Amazon would have many fewer species in it than it does and I will tell you as somebody who has worked in the neotropics including the Amazon one of the paradoxes about the creatures that are in this environment is that they are absolutely ferocious competitors that are very fragile they require very narrow sets of conditions in order to live so the idea that there's some radical upheaval in their climate that leaves them standing uh it's hard hard for me to square but anyway what I would love is for a robust scientific institution of some kind to delve deeply into the set of questions involving this apparent 12,000-year disaster cycle the uh electromagnetic sheet in the Galaxy our location in that pattern and figure out what we do need to worry about and what we don't and if it's not that second um possibility that the crust itself is just sort of is Shifting and the mantle is staying in the same position the first possibility is that there's just a movement of um sort of electromagnetic poles yeah the North and South po stay in the same place but the axis of rotation could stay in the same place right okay um and then the Poes migrate to somewhere new and my understanding uh is that that migration is not the simple thing that uh that I and probably you learned when you heard that there was a pole shift where you hear it's like you know it just flips over um they are migrating around and actually the path of migration is something that is being tracked not widely discussed for some reason but it is being tracked and it's accelerating as I mentioned what's what's the risk of that and how long do does something like
that take if we look if we think back to the our history well I'm coming to understand understand this and what I'm uh what I'm recognizing is that the rate is far faster than I had understood and that it's already underway so that's an interesting fact we're talking about on the scale of decades um we are in the middle of a uh solar maximum in the Sunspot Cycle so that Aurora that you saw uh I guess month and a half or or so ago that was part of this very active period of sunspots in which we took a very substantial Chon chronal mass ejection that pattern of sunspots will Wan and we will go into a period of calm during which presumably the magnetic field will continue to decrease and then the sunspots will return 11 years down the road 11 years yeah oh okay and so I am concerned that probably we get away with it the level of decrease in the magnetic field is substantial but that we still have enough protection from it that we will get through this sunspot cycle and be unscathed and then we'll have a period of calm while the electromagnetic field continues to decrease and then the next Sunspot Cycle will be much more perilous now you know this can change tomorrow right these sunspots um come around the Sun and then they disappear onto the other side you know and it takes a month to do a full cycle new sunspots are being born a monster could arrive tomorrow it could rotate and point to the Earth and it could fling off a coronal mass ejection at the wrong moment or not um you know there's a lot of luck of the draw in there but uh we should be paying a lot more attention than we are and what could we do to prepare or to sort of avoid the catastrophe it depends on how catastrophic it is and um what I would say is I'm somebody who for whatever reason I sometimes struggle with mundane day-to-day organizational tasks but I'm very good in an emergency and the emergency answer is pretty clear here which is you get your house in order right you look at the fragility of our world and you start with the low hanging fruit you take care of the stuff that's low cost and high uh impact in terms of increasing
our robustness and you do that first so top two things on my list would be you harden the grids by retrofitting these Transformers so that they ground out rather than fry that's one and the second one is you look at our nuclear reactors and you realize that we've been setting ourselves up we we built a doom stay device I think accidentally um and the problem the problem is a compound problem what I didn't know about nuclear reactors until the Fukushima accident at which point I did a lot of research is that they are absolutely depend dependent on an electrical supply to keep them from melting down you have to have an energy input now if you have something like an earthquake a tsunami A disruption the reactors will shut themselves down if they have time but that doesn't get you out of the woods because you have to put energy in in order to keep the cooling water flowing and that cooling water is not just about keeping the reactors cool it's also about keeping the fuel pools cool so the fuel pools are where fuel is taken after it's removed from the reactor now for something like 5 years a set of rods taken out of a reactor is releasing what's called Decay heat that decay heat is sufficient to boil the water out of these fuel pools if you're not constantly circulating new cold water in there so these fuel pools look like they're unimportant but if you cut the power you've started the stopwatch right that water is going to boil off and when that water boils off they're going to catch fire the cladding on the rods Will C literally catch fire from the heat now the reactors for reasons that are almost too boring to recount contain not only the fuel rods from the most recent 5 years of refueling but they also contain Decades of rods that we never found any other solution for stuff what are these rods these are sort of nuclear rods yeah these are nuclear basically they are um physical rods clad in something called zirconium that contain fuel pellets this is uranium that has been packed in a particular way these rods get loaded into the
reactor and then there's a another set of rods that are used to modulate how much the rods interact with each other pull the modulator out and you get a a chain reaction um you put the rods the uh control rods back in and it tamps down the reaction so in an earthquake you Tamp down the reaction right and then you're not putting out uh Power but you do need to put Power in to keep it cool if the power goes and the water boils off the thing will explode explode as we saw in Fukushima you had a situation in which the cooling water literally got torn apart into hydrogen and oxygen so it goes from a coolant to an explosive and we had multiple explosions where the hydrogen oxygen mixture just blew the buildings apart um but the rods that have been stored for decades in these pools and the pools literally sit there right next to the reactor so if you lose control of of these reactors it threatens to take out the pool right and the pool can go dry if you can't circulate water through it the pool can crack and all the water can drain out and then there's not even a way that you could put water in and stop it and my point is that when that happens it's going to create a fire that fire is going to start spewing highly radioactive material into the atmosphere right around the plant that's going to make it impossible for human beings to do even the heroic stuff that we've seen in both Fukushima and Chernobyl and you're going to lose control of the site now combine what I just told you with the fact that we have a grid that is vulnerable to going down and not coming back up for months and the question is well do we start losing nuclear reactors things that if we could keep power flowing to them could remain cool and not blow up but as soon as we lose control of them boom there are 400 nuclear reactors on Earth today civilian nuclear reactors the world will look like a very different place if they all lose not only the containment of the reactor itself but all of the builtup material that exists in those fuel pools right some of the Isotopes in those fuel pools have have lives of 200,000 years jez so you don't want to live in a world in which these things have gotten away from us and all of that radioactive material
has been liberated into into the atmosphere by fires so second thing on my list right after hardening the grid by improving these Transformers is that you take all of the fuel in the spent fuel pools that is cool enough to remove and you put it into what's called dry Cask storage dry Cask storage are these sort of fancy containers that don't require you to circulate water through them they just sit there inert all right you could leave them for a thousand years so the risk to humanity would be hugely decreased if we took all of the fuel that doesn't have to be in the pools and we got it out of there and we put it in a place that we don't have to pay attention to it in order for it to remain contained why don't people do that it costs money it's too expensive no it's not too expensive I mean I I don't both of these measures are so cheap compared to the risk that we're running that I think you would have to be positively mad not to spend the money it's just more expensive yeah it's more expensive you know okay so the the incentives to do that on on on clear well not only are the incentives not clear but this is this is why you need good governance right for those who think that markets just simply solve every problem if competitors are making the decision whether or not to take their spent Fuel and put it in dry casks well the competitor that decides not to out compete the competitor that decides to do it because their bottom line is better but what you need is good governance to say actually you all have to put everything that can go into dryas storage as soon as it can go for Humanity's safety is there anything we can do on an individual level to prepare or to avert this crisis yes here's what I suggest let's talk about it on podcasts and hope that somebody with power realizes how dangerous this stuff is and starts the correct initiative within some governmental structure that remembers how to do its job is there anything else that on you know people people often think about prepping and preparing for these kinds of things B digging a bunker under their house and hiding in there or having supplies well so look I think preparing at all scales is a good
idea we've face many different uh scenarios some of them aren't survivable okay well if you've prepared and you hit an unsurvivable scenario I guess you could make an argument that you didn't make as much of the time you had but I don't find that very compelling seems to me that the the lwh hanging fruit phenomenon is it's the consequence of something that is essentially Universal which is a pattern of diminishing returns right diminishing returns means that over time if you keep putting the same uh solution to a problem you get less and less benefit but it has a positive side too a diminishing returns curve has this very steep face on it right that face is the bargain face that's the face where you get a ton of benefit for a small amount of investment you should certainly do all the stuff up until you get to that point where it goes from a steep face to a plateau so let's just do that right who knows maybe the calculations about um the galactic current sheet are off because there aren't enough people studying it we just don't get it yet okay maybe there's 500 more years than we think right maybe there's some Factor we haven't found yet that has some impact on the system we don't know so you should always be doing the stuff that makes you uh more capable of surviving the disaster even if you think it's not enough and then hopefully you discover things are better than you think um so we should be doing that at every scale and yes people should they be preparing absolutely should they spend everything on it no do you prepare in any way oh yeah what does that look like for you well you know I have little rules for myself one I realized okay if we were to take a if we were to map out all of the things that I'm worried are a threat and then you say well which are the ones that you're going to have an extremely difficult time affecting your likelihood of surviving it okay I'm going to ignore those yeah right the why would I spend everything on a solution that's almost certain to fail anyway right I mean none of us are getting out of here alive so at some level you can just say look there there are things that aren't worth preparing
for either because they're too unlikely or because they're too catastrophic and you're not getting out of it and maybe you wouldn't want to live in such a world anyway Bingo that's the next thing is you know I'm not sure how thrilled I am about a world in which 400 civilian nuclear reactors have spilled the entire history of their uh their functioning into the environment um I I'm much more animated about getting us to reduce that Hazard on the front end than surviving it if it occurs um so I think I think people should look at their life and they should probably go through a little period of alarm if you if you look at the way your life works and then we flip the electricity off right suppose your continent loses electricity for a year how well prepared aren't you for that me totally unprepared totally unprepared my Tesla outside has like 50 miles left on it so I would I wouldn't even be able to get yep get far from here right so that's not a good plan but there are things you can do right you can let's put it this way the power going out for a year that's a pretty far down the list scenario that's pretty catastrophic in fact I wrote a uh an article for unheard in which I painted a scenario in which the sun did trigger the collapse of just a part of the North American grid and I uh described how that was going to result in the extinction of humanity and approximately how long it would take it was surprising how easy it was to write it actually um but could the power go out for two weeks yeah how you know how hard is it for you to prepare yourself and your family so that in a two week grid down scenario you'd be able to get through well depends if it's summer or winter right um if it's summer it looks like one thing you really need food and water if it's winter depending upon where you live you might need to figure out how you're going to generate heat um enough to keep you I would say you want to go beyond alive you want to get to where your com your family feels comfortable um but you know could you edit down to one room could you keep that room warm how would you do it you know you don't want to have to you don't
want to have to run through that in the circumstance because a twoe scenario I mean that just simply happens MH um so anyway yeah I think prepping is a great idea for many reasons for one thing it's mentally clarifying right just even understanding how dependent we all are on the systems around us makes us better citizens so let's say we managed to avoid the solar flare yep what else is sort of friend to mind for you in terms of concerns at the moment I'm very worried about the absolute collapse of our institutions I cannot think of a single sizable institution that still functions in any meaningful way many of our institutions actually function function to the inverse of the purpose for which they were created when you say collapse of Institutions which institutions are you referring to I believe I mean all of them and I will just give you some examples in the world I grew up in there was something called a newspaper yeah the newspaper was far from perfect it reported a lot of garbage there was a lot of propaganda in it and there was a lot of wrongheaded stuff that got reported as if it was true so I'm not pretending that it was uh a source of facts that one could just simply go to to look them up however I now live in a world in which the newspapers look like the newspapers I grew up with but they seem to bend over backwards not to report the news and then they finally do report the news only be when it becomes so embarrassing for it not to show up there that it would reveal how broken they are if it didn't get said and that's not normal we should be trying to make sense of the world you can tell this isn't normal because if there was a newspaper that just simply did what the newspapers of old did that had a newsroom it had a budget it sent people to places where important things were happening it assigned them the job of talking to people and seeking the facts and soliciting documents and taking pictures and all of that stuff and it did its best to give you a view of the world as that flawed Newsroom the best it could best sense it could make would you subscribe yes you and everybody else well I think I would I have to check
myself there because what I think I would do is probably different to what my innate biases might lead me to do and to click on well uh I will tell you that in a world where we are all quite unsure about what's actually taking place even just the basic facts that if there was such an object I think it's a slam dunk you'd sign up even if you don't spot it because the disadvantage when other people have access to the facts just not knowing what it is that they're even talking about would be uh it would be like everybody in the room knows a secret and you don't but do we want the news or do we want confirmation of what our existing beliefs well I think people differ and I think it is very easy to get addicted to confirmation bias but I also think that that's Downstream of the failure of another institution our academic institutions our schools do not teach people how thinking works and if you know how thinking works then you understand that actually confirmation bias will get you killed you don't want to be told something comforting you want to be told something true because the Comfort actually comes from utilizing that information to make yourself less vulnerable so having a newspaper would be a fantastic thing the fact that there are none let's say that you know 30% of thinking people would subscribe to a newspaper that just simply tried to do the job and was undaunted by competing incentives well then that's a slam dunk of a business model wouldn't you say do you know it's interesting because I I sometimes think that the reason why things I idolize or I I would like don't exist it's because there's actually not a market there for it and like simple sort of supply and demand economics mean that someone's probably tried it and their startup probably went bust well it did but I don't think that's organic I think it is a slam dunk and that the problem is that there is a competing Force okay and one thing that is true of the way our world is structured is that the go-to mechanism for making a fortune is inside information now Innovation also works
but it's difficult knowing a sector of the market so well that you can beat your competitors CU you understand what the future is going to look like is also possible but Again difficult and the incentive the financial incentive to know everything you know and out compete you in the market is so great that you will have a great many competitors struggling to make better sense with the very same data set that you've got inside information doesn't work like that if you you can get inside information you can print money so for anyone that doesn't know what inside information means in like the context of business or investing well in the context so this is one of these things that has a definition has a formal legal definition from the initial context in which it was identified as a as an issue but if you are um inside of a company and you're therefore privy to something that is about to be done then you can utilize that information which is not available to the public to make money by increasing your Holdings decreasing them buying stock options and that's illegal right because obviously this people would use this to make money um by creating events and betting on them in advance when nobody else knew the problem is that same logic applies in places where the law can't reach it so let me take one example there in the community of people who ended up uh sleuthing about the events of covid there's the moment at which covid became a feature of the public discussion at the beginning of 2020 and then there's the moment that it appears to have existed in circulation in the world which is much earlier the Wuhan games in October or September of 2019 if you were privy to the fact that there was a pathogen that was going to circulate that it was going to result in a major upheaval in people's ability to travel across borders that people were going to be fearful and locked in their homes that they were going to be seeking pharmaceutical remedies whatever if you had some sense of what was coming then you could position yourself in the market so that when it did come you'd make a mint so the question is when powerful
people did hear in September of 2019 that there was a pathogen that was on the loose in China that would spread worldwide was their first instinct to tell the public no there's a perverse incentive against it so now imagine that you're ruthless and you recognize that that scenario that I just painted isn't at all unique any place where you can get the jump on the public with respect to knowing what's coming is an opportunity to make millions into billions so maybe you don't want the public to have truth seeking institutions that work so this I think is liable to be the reason that there's not a single University in the US that still functions really you think that you think that's why yeah I think if we if you had one University that functioned then certainly that would be the place everybody wanted to send their kids I mean I have two College age kids if there was a university that still made sense it's the obvious place for them to go why don't they make sense anymore in your view they don't make sense because um well there's multiple layers you've got a scientific apparatus that is very powerful when it comes to finding the truth and very fragile when it comes to resisting perverse incentives as in like wokeism wokeism impresses to be politically correct exactly so where where is the American University that stood up and said I'm sorry but men can't become women MH right they can live as women they can addesses women there are surgeries there are Pharmaceuticals there's nothing you can do that takes your birth sex and changes it to the opposite one not a single University said that anywhere bizarre this is quite um personal to you because I was reading actually earlier today about what happened to you at University at Evergreen State University and it's funny because um I watched the videos of that event and I don't know whether it's because we now have some distance between those events now but I just want to say I think what you did was the right thing and I think history has made you look more and more correct as time has gone on because I I watched it and it just seemed to be a bunch of people living in some kind of
collective delusion these like people shouting at you in this hallway um for people that aren't aware as I wasn't aware before before I knew you were on your way here can you explain what happened there because I think it's kind of um evidence of this sort of collective delusion that you're talking about sure um there's a little uh a little difficulty because there's the public story of what happened right the the public narrative settled on a set of facts that isn't exactly right it's not so far off that it doesn't make the point but the basic thing that happened is that my wife and I were very popular professors at a very liberal school that had a uh a very unusual teaching model so the school was called The Evergreen State College it still exists The Evergreen State College was founded by radicals who threw out every single structure that would exist in a normal college or university there were no departments there were no grades the administrators did not have the ability to tell you what you had to teach there were no requirements about how you taught um and if you were the kind of person that was interested in figuring out what new might be done in the teaching environment if you wanted to figure out a new way to teach it was the perfect place that said many people took the freedom that the college offered and they squandered it they weren't really interested in doing anything other than reducing their workload so the college was kind of divided between the professors who thought that this Freedom was this gift and we used it um we ended up being popular and then there were other Prof professors who didn't and they were much less popular but in any case Heather was literally the college's most popular professor she's your wife yes uh she's my wife and the co-author of that book you have in front of you um she was the most popular Professor I wasn't too far behind we both had the equivalent of tenure although the place didn't formally have tenure it had something like it and so we were not vulnerable we were liberated to say what needed to be said and what happened is the college hired a new president a guy named George bridges for whatever reason
George Bridges wanted to completely reimagine the college as a much more standard much less interesting place and in order to do that he didn't really have the power because the founders of the college had created a place where the faculty were in a position to just simply say no and we would have so what he did did in order to overcome the faculty was he impanel a diversity equity and inclusion committee hand selected and he incited a at first cold and increasingly hot uh battle over race um it was my job to explain to my colleagues and to anyone involved in the decision-making process process why the plan that they were proposing would be a disaster for the college and although I did have trepidations about standing up because the environment was quite charged like I said I was a popular Professor I had the equivalent of tenure and you know the worst that could happen is people are going to call me names so I did stand up I stood up at a fact fault meeting and the faculty was in the process of voting for a resolution to force every member of The Faculty to explain what progress that they had made in the previous year against their own racism right now worse not only were we voting to mandate ourselves to reflect on our own progress Against Racism that was simply assumed to exist but these documents in which we reflected would become official documents that would then be utilized in promotion decisions firing decisions these sorts of things so the point was that's a Mech that's a takeover because you're I you know in my reflection annually I would say well actually I'm not a racist I've made very little progress because there wasn't an issue to begin with and the answer is well oh my God he's worse than we thought right he doesn't even recogniz his internal racism right so it was going to be that conversation again it didn't threaten me because I already had tenure but nonetheless I had to say to my colleagues look this is a terrible mistake and I stood up at the faculty meeting and I said this and it of course caused a stir several people came up to
me after the vote and they said we agree with you but only one other person voted with me across the entire faculty medium 70 votes that went the other direction um and one year later to the day I didn't realize that it was the one-year anniversary of that event until months later but one year later to the day 50 students that I had never met I had never met a single one of them streamed through my classroom door accusing me of racism and demanding that I resign or be fired now I later came to understand that these 50 students that I'd never met had been sent by my faculty colleague who had become my Nemesis they had been sent to create the impression of white Professor being accused of racism by students blah blah blah you can imagine in 2017 what that would have looked like except that it didn't go as they planned because as I mentioned before I had a teaching environment in which I knew my students extremely well not only did I know their names but I knew their backgrounds I knew their histories I knew their styles of thought their uh their disabilities I knew them really well and they knew me really well because we went to class every day and we simply talked about biology which brought us issues about their perspectives so I think what was expected was that when these protesters streamed through my classroom door in 2017 if you've got a bunch of students accusing a professor of racism that that professor's students are going to jump right on it they're all going to have gripes about you know some grade that they got that they thought wasn't wasn't fair and so they expected me to end up being faced with with a mob of students swearing that I was a racist now not a single one of my students turned on me in fact many of them spoke courageously on my behalf including students of color which then created a kind of Rift in the universe because when people from the outside world saw video video that was uploaded by the protesters themselves who were proud of what they were doing the world I didn't sound like a racist to them and what's more there were all of these students saying it was was nonsense so it was I think the case that that
broke the the woke narrative because it just didn't add up and in any case that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing is that the world actually recognized that there was something as you say that there was a delusion going on and that was apparent enough in my lack of fear over the accusation in my students willingness to actually stand up and say that it was a a bum rap I I will also just point out my students of color who spoke up on my behalf they actually faced the worst retribution because in order for the woke Revolution to function you can't very well have people of color standing by a white Professor it just breaks the whole thing so anyway they needed to be punished from the point of view of this protest so that it wouldn't happen again and my wife and I ended up resigning our oh there there's another aspect of the story that I should probably mention when this protest happened um there was a lot of drama the protest spread from those 50 students who confronted me at my classroom to a campus-wide Riot that went on for days the president of the college who was indirectly responsible for all of this ordered the police who were a campus police department they were real police but they were under his Direction he ordered them to stand down so they locked themselves inside their police station and were literally forbidden to intervene students started patrolling the campus as if they were the police patrolling the campus with weapons they started stopping traffic on a public road passing through campus looking for me the police called me up to warn me about this and they told me they couldn't protect me and um it was on fast forward a test of the claims of these revolutionaries right they have this sort of anarchist vibe to them that if we can just simply get rid of the cops that we will we will govern ourselves and it will be beautiful and instead it became a dangerous violent Riot on the scale of days and in 2017 the same year that this happened you resigned from the college and you got to pay out essentially yep I asked this question because we were talking about newspapers
and then we we moved to the education system and you said that there's not not a university in the land that's still doing what it's supposed to do so it felt somewhat correlated linked to to what you were saying because it kind of sets the backdrop of he maybe why you you have you know clear personal experience here but also what you saw there was kind of a symptom I think of some of the pressures that are being applied to the scientific education institution that are stopping it being able to do what it should be doing 100% it's doing the inverse of what it should do it's indoctrinating people uh and you know the tragedy of it is that the people who are indoctrinated end up hurting themselves yeah right they have an opportunity and they will squander it on a fiction and in the end it will not result in them being uh hireable right they've learned they've learned how to demand things of the system rather than to contribute something to it and that's not their fault I mean at some point it becomes their fault but that's the that's the failure of those who were charged with delivering them in education to do so it's it's educational malpractice you cited this as one of your big concerns you started talking about basically the the loss of the media um what is the what is the downstream implications of that because that it just I just feel like I'll get my media in other places I'll just go on X I'll you know that's not going to cause any issues with Society well um I believe the consequence of it is something that I call The cartisian Crisis cartisian crisis cartisian a reference to Renee deart and the reason I reference him is that he had a kind of philosophical freakout where he realized that almost everything that he took to be a fact he had not tested himself and therefore all of those facts that felt objective were really Downstream of somebody's Authority and he realized how dangerous that was and in fact it results in one of his most famous contributions to humanity which is the uh what masquerades as a proof of his existence I think therefore I am um now I don't think it is a very good proof right maybe it works for him
he can prove to himself that he exists but why we should take his word for the fact that he exists you know if a computer said I think therefore I am it doesn't make it true so in any case we can remember that Dart was troubled by the fact that he couldn't establish any facts um in any way other than to take somebody's word for the fact that that's what they were we are increasingly living in a world where the chain of logic of evidence of reason that might allow us to have some confidence in a fact is breaking down and this problem is going to get worse and worse course not only is every single truth seeking institution captured or broken but AI is going to change the very nature of what it means for something to be a fact right if you can have a compelling video of you saying something that you never once said right well you know if I show you a video of you saying something last week that you didn't say you're going to be pretty darn sure you didn't say it but if I show you something that you said 15 years ago you may not be so certain other people won't be so certain so what I think this is going to do is is going to produce a an allergic reaction to belief and it is going to cause a cynicism about factual material that is going to make it impossible for us to interact with each other to govern ourselves it's just there's no future in a world in which we can't figure out here is what I believe and here is why I believe it all right that is an essential feature doesn't the internet just become a bit of a wasteland in such a case and we'll I was thinking of sort of political comment commentators is is it likely that there might just become a channel which we switch to which is a verified channel to watch you know Donald Trump or rishy sunak or the prime ministers talking and to get our news source where we know that particular channel is truth and then we assume that the Internet is just a wasteland of dis misinformation well the problem is if you had such a channel boy would that be a prize if you controlled it right oh yeah if you've got the fact Channel then oh the world's your oyster you're you're now Emperor so were there going to be a
fact Channel it would get captured and that's the world we're living in now I will say the idea that there are no institutions that work is the flip side of another idea which I I goes by the um the phrase zero is a special number and what I mean by zero is a special number is that when you have zero universities that work zero newspapers that report the news zero social media Platforms in which you are allowed to speak freely One World unfolds but a single exception in any of those spaces changes the overall Dynamic and the reason for that is because if you had one social media platform in which people were truly free to seek the truth to discuss anything and everything and nothing bad happened to them and they weren't deboosted or any of that then that's obviously where all of the people who want an adult conversation are going to go right you don't want to be treated like a child you want to have a conversation in which you can actually entertain all possibilities reject those for which there's no evidence Etc so if you get one platform then people are going to go to it and if people go to that one platform it's going to force the other platforms to deliver something similar so the competitive environment means that a single exception can actually changed the whole landscape and we are in a battle I don't think X has achieved that status of being completely free but it's certainly Freer than the other platforms and it is having an effect it is changing the dynamic and it is in part why the co narrative broke wide open why the political narrative in the US is uh becoming radically different than it was even a few years ago so the question is are we going to see an exceptional University break the trend and become the next Harvard because you'd be crazy to send your kid anywhere else are we going to see somebody put together a newspaper in which they get all of the subscribers because you'd be crazy to get your news from a propaganda Source when they was a real source so hopefully courageous people will recognize it's not as hopeless as as we are led to believe a single exception can change the whole dynamic I'm actually quite shocked at the impact that Elon buying Twitter um now called X has had on so many things and even quite
frankly the the impact I'm starting to see it have on someone like Mark Zuckerberg at at meta I watched an interview yesterday with Mark who I think met had previously banned Trump from being able to talk on the platform basically saying that he's pretty badass and I do not believe he would have been able to say that had X and Twitter not changed I agree with you and I think that actually if you start looking for other examples of that pattern you will see them everywhere there are certain things that once had magical power that no longer do the claim that somebody is a conspiracy theorist does not cause them to be shunned from society in fact my feeling is when I hear somebody's a conspiracy theorist my question is oh are they any good at it um but same thing is true for uh the idea of an antivaxer right well you know okay somebody's an antivaxer is that because they reflexively believe that no such thing could work or is this somebody with an injured kid who has legitimate questions right we've just seen the leading proponent of vaccines publish a paper in which he acknowledges that the testing to establish that they were safe was never done so we're living in a whole different world and I think it's uh it is a symptom of musk primarily having broken the dynamic by as he said said paying $44 billion uh because that was the price of free speech you mentioned AI there in your sort of list of concerns pressing concerns where does where does AI feel and it feels like it's come out of nowhere you know because if we go back a year um a year yeah about about a year it wasn't really front of mind for anybody for the vast population for the general population but now it it appears to be front of everybody's mind any everyone thinking's mind I think that's the right way to view it I think it should be top of mind and not because it is independently uh everything that its worst critics imagine in fact I have my doubts about the safest crowd and their demands for regulation but there's plenty to worry about in this space um so I have five different exit substantial threats that AI poses um let's see off the top of my
head let's start with the uh the most fanciful first AI could decide that we are its competitors and it could leverage its skills and uh decide to eliminate us I find that unlikely but I don't think we can discount it entirely second is the so-called paperclip problem that an AI that was very powerful could have trouble operationalizing a command and it could result in human extinction and the example that uh people who think this way use is if you were to tell a an AI you wanted it to make as many paper clips as possible that it could interpret that as license to go liquidate the universe and turn it all into paperclips right not what I meant but mhm you know but there you have it and actually I will give a different example that I think uh maybe functions better there are uh people in our intellectual space who make claims like it would be great if we were to end all suffering personally I think that's about the most insane idea I've ever heard it's a terrible one you wouldn't want to live in that world but you can understand why people think that it might be a moral obligation now imagine that you tell an AI hey let's end all suffering it's actually possible just drive everything that can suffer extinct yeah right so the idea that we have a non-trivial problem figuring out how to give a powerful AI an instruction that can't be misunderstood it's worth worrying about again I think that one's fanciful too but it should be on our list but then we get to the three that I don't think are easily dismissed one is that AI is going to enable uh people with malign intent to it's going to enable them more than it is going to enable those with benevolent intent and this is an unfortunate asymmetry that just exists in the world that a an a moral actor somebody who has no moral compass they have total flexibility they can do whatever a moral person can do and then they've got a whole list of other things that they can also do right whereas a moral person is constrained they just have the limited set of things
that are available to them so the question is does AI liberate us all or does it liberate those who are um monstrous more than it liberates those of us who behave like like decent humans I'm concerned about that I think we are in some danger of it being leveraged against us in a way that transforms things I remember hearing a hacker say that the malicious hackers the people with malicious intent are always ahead of those the sort of ethical hackers that have benevolent attempt that are that are good and he he was talking about how like the you know encryption systems and password systems he goes the hackers always ahead and the defense systems that companies are trying to put in place are always behind because the Hacker's intent is obviously always to find new ways of breaking the current system whereas the people that defend security systems are just trying to defend against the known um forms of attack so someone in I don't know some kid in Russia right now could be at his computer figuring out new ways to use a large language model to attack systems and new ways whereas the people who are working to defend that are currently just trying to figure out how to um m the risks of current weapons so it's it's you know what I mean like the the attackers are always thinking forward really yep do you think the general public and also just institutions and governments are currently underestimating the profundity and the impact that AI is going to have on the planet yes and in fact I think we are crossing over what would be described as an event horizon so an event horizon I think the term initially comes from an understanding of what happens at a black hole that there's a point at which light is pulled back in and so you can't see beyond it MH right there's literally no mechanism to see beyond it we are crossing a threshold that none of us can see beyond and that is inherently frightening are people underestimating they are simultaneously underestimating and overestimating right the the fear of being turned into a paperclip is overblown in my opinion the fear of well I've just gotten to the third one on the list the fourth one on the list is a total collapse in our understanding of the world around us
and each other that the way in which an artificial intelligence interfaces with our human API with our interface is profound already and we're not very far in right I'm already looking at Little movies that this thing makes and I'm not just talking about the clip of the cat walking through the garden right little vignettes I'm talking about actual movies in which characters of a madeup species are having a conversation about humans right okay that's a hell of a moment where will we be in 5 years it it's unimaginable how much change that is going to create because we have no evolutionary preparedness at all for living in a world where the product of a computer can out compete the product of a human in narrative space that's a dangerous world to live in because narratives are so profoundly important to who we are stories yeah stories stories are what we're all about you know even profound ideas are unfathomable until somebody has written them into a story that people can can Gro but also language just generally is I don't think um I was listening to something the other day which was just making the case for how our our entire Society is pretty much held together with with language and it's so interesting that large language models were really the thing that blew open this conversation about AI because we don't realize that like like my every relationship I have is held together with language in fact all my passwords are language the way that I think the way that I understand the world is through language so if there's a a super intelligent species that has a better grasp of language and a certain level of autonomy um it's hard to think you know it's interesting because what made us dominate the world was I think was our intelligence and our and then our ability to collaborate through through language and communication and this is the the very thing that AI has entered the scene with well I will tell you I wrote a piece and I keep meaning to release it just so people can see I didn't get it exactly right but many
years ago I wrote a piece in which I said that I believed that artificial intelligence was going to emerge from the project to get a computer to translate seamlessly between two languages and I explained why that would be the thing that cracked the uh the nut and that is what happened for a reason the reason is because the relationship between human language and Consciousness is profound and largely unknown so U Heather and I descri cribed this model in in our book hun gathers Guide to the 21st century human beings are a unique species the primary way in which we are unique is that if you if you think about the question about well what do human beings do right if I say you know what does a tiger do right we could describe the things that a tiger does to meet its caloric needs to get the materials necess Neary to maintain its body to produce Offspring right we could describe the niche of the tiger can't really do that with people right what do we do sometimes we Farm the oceans sometimes we hunt big game on land sometimes we terraform a piece of territory and we plant crops we do a lot of different things and if you think about all the things that human beings have done for our entire history as a species it's immense The Collection so we are unlike any other species because our Niche is the movement between niches both over time and across space so how does that work well we have a tool that no other species has when you think about the question of what makes human beings special the answer really is language and the reason that it's language is that language allows the breaching of the boundary between one mind and another so that ability allows human beings to pull their cognitive capacity and what Heather and I argue in our book is that the the way human beings get through time is they oscillate between two modes when the ancestors when your ancestors know how to exploit the habitat that you live in then you take take their wisdom in all of the stories that it's encoded in and you apply it maybe you build it out a little bit you figure out how to do something the ancestors didn't quite know how to do
but mostly what you're doing is just applying the toolkit that you've been handed to the problems that it works on but what happens when you get on a canoe and you cross some body of water and the place you've landed doesn't have the same plants and animals that your ancestors knew well it's not like they they got Dumber but it they stuff is less applicable so what you do is you pull your cognitive capacity you and all the people in your tribe and you talk about well what are the opportunities here and what might you do about them you know I saw an animal this morning and it looked like it might be uh pretty good eating but I don't know how you're going to catch one well what if we were to drive it into that Canyon right that sort of thing so by pooling our cognitive Resources by reaching a collective Consciousness which is the inverse of that cultural mode of the ancestors the conscious mode when we Face novelty allows us to come up with new Solutions and then to refine them and when we've got it nailed well then we're the ancestors who knew what to do and our stories get driven into that cultural layer and they get handed on generation after generation and then eventually they run out of usefulness and we have to return to consciousness and come up with a new way so that's what human beings do both spreading across space and moving through time they oscillate between that cultural mode of the ancestors and the conscious mode of what the hell do we do now so I want to make sure I fully understand this um as if a 10-year-old would understand it is we have kind of two modes we have what we had passed to us and because of Consciousness and language and our ability to communicate we have what we we're discovering now about the nature of the world and I think the very pres the very presence of a skyscraper is quite an interesting thing because it's built on the knowledge passed to us from people that no longer live with also you know if the skysc SK skyscraper has something on top of it like a it's solar powered or something much of that understanding has come from our current thinking of the people that live right now so you have the combination of uh relatives from the past that are no longer here all of their Collective
knowledge and you have the collective knowledge that we're discussing and thinking through now together that's what makes humans so special and really what ties that all together is language and the ability to communicate right it is that ability to communicate whether you're in the cultural mode where you're picking up the stories of your ancestors so that you know what to do or you're in that conscious mode where you're parallel processing the problems of the moment and figuring out what new solution you might come up with and the orang Tang can't do that no other creature comes anywhere close it's so many orders of magnitude different from the next near and I'm not arguing that other animals aren't smart there are plenty of smart animals this is a whole different kind of smart this is a smart where it's impossible to actually draw the boundary between my smart and your smart right there's a collective smart it's very real you can't locate it right it has to do with some ancient mechanism for pooling understanding and pooling understanding isn't even like he everybody bring your understanding it's like you know what what I don't trust that guy's understanding because I've seen him screw up and not fix it that guy he sounds crazy but he's got a track record actually I take what he says very seriously so it's like a there's a waiting of who whose input plays what role somebody might have Insight in one realm and be unreliable in another that ability to figure out how to take the sum total of all of the different skill sets that people bring to the table and come out of it with something like a proposal for what we do next right that is a profound adaptive process that we don't even have a name for and AI changes this well AI scrambles it because on the one hand I can make the argument that AI is like a a flint napped blade it's just another tool and it is is just another tool at one level on the other hand because you know the blade you're in pretty big trouble when a blade starts talking to you you know what I'm saying that's a bad moment that's you need to lay off the mushrooms at that point right in this case the blade the tool that we've created it is talking to
us in fact it's sensitive to what we think about what it says to us we means it is it is certain that you will have an evolutionary process in which the AI gets exquisitely good at telling us what we want to hear there's nothing more dangerous than that you want an AI that tells you what you need to know whether or not you want to hear it right that would be a useful tool an AI that responds to the fact that you think that what it said is good oh my God we are we are going to end up in a um I'm struggling for a better metaphor than an infinite Hall of Mirrors but that's what it's going to be it's going to be a big fractal Hall of Mirrors in which you can't be certain of stuff and I will say because I know that um there's a lot of concern you've got a kind of safest crowd that wants to regulate AI because the dangers are profound and you've got a bunch of other people who think regulating AI is dangerous and what I've realized is that failing to regulate AI is dangerous regulating it is worse regulating AI is worse oh yeah why well for one thing you create an asymmetry between those who abide by the regulation and those that don't so say China won't have a regulation but America do have one right do you want to be ruled by whoever violates your regulation I don't but that's what we effectively guarantee if we create that uh Dynamic so I don't like the idea of heading across the Event Horizon created by AI without a plan I really don't like that idea that's not safe on the other hand the alternative is only going to make that problem worse so somehow we have to face this with our eyes wide open I mean how does one face it with their eyes wide open I mean all I'm hearing is you can do nothing about it well I don't know that you can do nothing about it here's what I want to know why are we not obsessed with tracking the thought process of the AIS in other words if there were one thing that I would want it's AIS to report how they arrived where they did so that when the catastrophe happens we can figure out why it happened we could
potentially get through this very perilous Moment by coming to understand it and becoming wise about how to leverage this so I do think there are things to do but what is not wise is the sort of naive oh I'm just going to get to the point where I realize that regulating AI makes problems worse and now I'm not going to worry about it right that I think I think not regulating it is the right thing to do and worrying about about it tremendously is also the right thing to do I also think about a world I think maybe the world that Elon is really trying to create where we are able to interface with AI via brain interface devices like neuralink you know it's interesting because I I watched elon's narrative emerge around Nal Link at the very start and he was very focused on being able to interface with AI that was all all the interviews he was doing at the time were centered on the reason why I'm doing neuralink is because we need to be able to interface with this technology or else we're going to get left behind and then more recently it's become about allowing people that can't use their arms and legs to use them again which I think is maybe a marketing spin but at the heart of his narrative and other people's narratives is that we are probably all going to have these brain um interface devices put into our brains or maybe outside of our bodies if you'll look at some of the other companies so that we can interface with AI and I mean that fundamentally changes what humans are we become side side borgs or something yes it's not the time we will have fundamentally changed what humans are though and I think this is an important thing to realize is that we do we do this regularly you know the printing press did this television did this the internet did this and you know the uh the gloom and doom crowd each time has said oh my God if you print books it's going to cause our minds to become feeble because you won't need to remember and the funny thing is I think in each case the gloom and doomers were right there's definitely an element that they correctly spotted what's difficult to do is or impossible is to look over the Event Horizon and say what does it mean and in this
case what does it mean right are we going to get through this incredibly perilous period and look back on this you know the way we look back at the cell phone right the cell phone oh no it's going to destroy human sociality it's going to you know it's going to do that well it did drove us crazy absolutely insane so yeah AI is going to be that and worse and that the only thing to do is to try to understand that change so we can mitigate the harm and hopefully re in the overarching pattern of hyper novelty that we are cre for ourselves do you think this technology is comparable to any of those it's like those but 50 times worse I mean the phone was really a tragic innovation in many ways and it's not the phone itself I actually I I sometimes say it's not the box it's the business model right a phone is a terrifically enabling device and it has made us more powerful it has made us more fragile I was talking to to Heather about um the problem if if we Face a major disruption right if solar flare takes out uh the grid and you have to get home well do you have a map because not so long ago you could have bought a map on paper now the fact that we have these maps in our phones means that the ability to buy the map doesn't even exist anymore where would you I'm not even sure where I would go to find a map so we are less secure than we were because we are so hyper enabled in the present and um yeah we're we're in for some really interesting times I will just say to completed I've gotten through four of the five uh existential threats that conceivably come from the a I at least as far as I can spot it the last one is the most mundane and that's just the massive economic disruption that's coming from a technology that will take what most people do for a living and make it useless there's a lot of people at the moment kind of denying this fact that I think they'll be fine yep is there anyone that will be fine and who are those people and who won't be fine and what's the I guess the
important part as well when we think about this disruption is the speed of disrup ruption because that that gives us a clue as to how long we'll have to adjust as a society find new jobs upskill people learn train maybe go to find something else to do most people are not going to be able to retrain for something that will be relevant I think and in fact the advice I've given my kids is invest in tools invest in a toolkit a cognitive toolkit that works for a future that you cannot imagine right if you five years ago people were saying learn to code that was bad advice yeah okay that's something that AI can do if however you invest in things that cause an upgrade to the quality of your thinking if you invest in the kinds of skills that can be mapped onto new Realms then I can't promise you'll be all right but you'll be a lot better off than people whose skill set is so narrowly focused on some task that made sense in 2024 that in 2027 they're a drift you know be a generalist invest in clear thinking figure out who you can trust develop your interpersonal relationships maybe that should even have been the head of the list right people who you can depend on who have the Insight the values that makes them worthy of your investment in them and know them in person so that no matter what happens if the forces that wish to confuse us leverage AI to get in between us which would not be a terrible description of what happened during Co except that AI was presumably not a big player but if people try to get in between us they're going to have a lot easier time doing it if your relationship with somebody is intermediated by a screen you want to know people in person so that you can turn off the screen and you can say do you know what the hell is going on what do you think what did you see what did you hear what what do you think is occurring right you want to be able to have that conversation with somebody who's a real flesh and blood human who uh you know who you're willing to to go all in with are there any careers that if your children turned to you and said you know Dad what sh what
career should I do in a world where AI is getting smarter by the weak um the funny thing is that almost strikes me I know you don't intend it this way but it's almost a trick question at this moment right anybody body who thinks they know how to answer it is probably at least kidding themselves it is it is that you know it's like if we were let's say we found ourselves you know a drift uh on an outrigger in the middle of you know the South Pacific we don't know if we're going to survive and you want to know hey well if we do if we find some land what do we do then and it's like well I don't know um but let's find the land and then let's think very carefully about what to do when we get there so but if your kid literally came up to you would you say that to your kid yeah so but they say well Dad I'm do I go to school University do what do I do I think the question that you're really asking is what would you do in their shoes which is not really a career question MH what I would do in their shoes is I would if I was going to go to college I would make damn sure that I left college with a tangible project that I had accomplished that I could establish was my own that proved I was competent right if you develop something I don't care if it does something useful or not right it could be you ever seen um a most useless machine no a most useless machine is kind of an interesting thing uh the classic version of it is it's a little box with a switch on the top and if you flip the switch a hand comes out and flips it back the other way goes back in the box right totally useless but the point is look anybody who can make a most useless machine well I know something about their skill set so what I'm saying is I don't want to see anybody's transcript I don't know why your transcript says what it does I don't know that your professors knew what they were talking about right it's not useful but if you show me a most useless machine and the answer is okay if you really made that then I know a you know something about prototyping B you know how to uh manage a project C I know that your motivational structure allows you to go from the concept to a finished
project that actually works Etc so I know a bunch of things that your transcript can't tell me um now a recommendation from the right person might mean something you know who was really the right person but a recommendation from a random person I don't know that just says you're marvelous I don't know what that means um but so one thing is make damn sure you graduate with something that you can show other people that is unfakeable um the other thing that I have told them is if you invest in a skill well one of my sons asked me about electrical engineering what did I think about electrical engineering I said I think electrical engineering is great but it's not enough if you go into electrical engineering you are going to face a huge number of people who also went into electrical engineering who are very good at what they do and maybe you're just awesome what you do but distinguishing yourself in a world where you've got a bunch of competitors many of them maybe they're not as likable and so they have more time to just dedicate to Pure electrical engineering you don't want to compete it's not a it's not a winning bet however if you if you invest in electrical engineering and one or two other things that have some relation to it well maybe you're the only person on Earth who has the skill set to to combine these things so that you come up with something that's unique and then it doesn't have to be perfect and you don't want to have to make perfect things perfect things are almost impossible to make the expense of making something perfect is through the roof you're exactly that reason of diminishing returns you'd much rather bring something to the world that's novel and useful and then let other people perfect it right that's where you want to be so combining things that are not usually combined is one way to distinguish yourself and tangible product that actually establishes that you have those characteristics and then the hidden punchline there is if you say okay my dad told me uh I need to make a project that makes it clear what skill set I have and you set out to do it you know
what you're going to find out what skills you don't have yeah right if your motivational structure is broken you're going to learn that and then you can fix it right if you think oh I'm going to learn the skills I'm in college I better you know buckle down and get all the skills in the textbook and then when I get out I'll start making stuff if you do that then the point is well when you get out it's too late to discover that your motivational structure doesn't allow you to complete a project or that you you so dislike failure that when you make a prototype you don't even realize what the meaning is all you see is that it doesn't work very well right on that fifth point of your AI concerns this idea of sort of economic turmoil for whatever reason um Sam alman's other business called worldcoin intends to I think it intends to distribute basically value let's just to simplify it distribute money to people in a world where there's been so much economic disruption that we've kind of lost our jobs that's kind of how I understood it so people are going around the world scanning their retinas on these machines that have been placed all over the world and that's going to become the mechanism to identify you as a unique individual as a as a as a human so that they can send you free money Universal basic income in a world where people are going to struggle to have jobs now I I think I've I don't think I've butchered that too much but do you believe that world is going to happen where there's going to be so much disruption in the labor force that so many people are going to be unemployed that we're going to need to just basically give out money to people I think that's going to be a short ride you think it's going to be a short ride yeah I do what do you mean by that unfortunately the story of human evolution and competition is it's one of great Triumph and overcoming adversity in some chapters and it's one of uh tragedy and atrocity in others I am very concerned that the idea of useless eaters is about to make a huge comeback and that Ubi has two impacts Ubi meaning Universal basic income Universal basic income and everything that functions like it you
know so some distribution of value one it's going to make the people who are creating the value or people who think they're creating the value resent those who are absorbing the value just to live and it is therefore going to trigger a quest to reduce that line item on the balance sheet and there will be all kinds of excuse making but um it's pretty it it's pretty ugly I mean we see that in society already people that are working hard and that are paying a lot of tax get resentful towards the people at the very bottom of the income Spectrum who are maybe not um working at all and are getting paid um yeah and and interestingly another factor in here is people that earn more money seem to have less kids and that becomes a point of contention in society yep uh so I think you're seeing the picture and you're you're exactly you're exactly understanding why this will turn into uh the usual demonization of some set of people uh as a pretext for getting rid of them so that's bad the other bad effect that will come from Ubi is learned helplessness and I I think we've actually seen this in fact the woke Revolution I think is a tragic story because on the one hand while you know I was chased out of a job that I loved by a bunch of people who accused me of things that I wasn't guilty of in a kind of Madness on the other hand how did they end up there they ended up there because they were betrayed they were betrayed by A system that was supposed to deliver them a life that worked it was you know if you did what you were asked to do if you went to school if you did the homework you were supposed to come out of it with a skill set that would allow you to live a decent life and instead they were given many of them were given drugs that we biologically had no understanding of you know because somebody was profiting off their dependency and we sent them to schools and we provided them with Majors that they could dedicate themselves to that weren't real that didn't create skills
or Insight in many cases created exactly the inverse it created confusion and at some point they realized you know what I don't have a plan and in such a case those people who don't have skills that are going to allow them to live a decent life are going to look for someone to blame and they're probably going to R land on the wrong person right and especially if somebody is cynically willing to sell them the story that you know who you should blame it's straight white guys or something like that they'll listen and I will say uh I've done a lot of thinking uh um about the game theory of human competition and one thing has struck me in recent years which is that there's a reason that communism continues to reemerge it doesn't work so why would people keep Landing there and I think it is unfortunately the natural consequence of a a a meritocracy that does not take care of those who lose if you have a meritocracy where the way to have a decent life is to figure out how to provide something that people want right but you don't have a plan for the people who try that and it doesn't work for whatever reason then what you will end up with is a large number of people who will correctly understand that they are on the losing end of a bargain those people don't have an investment in keeping that system running they want to overturn it and in fact with some cause they will look at all of the fortunes that have been created in that meritocracy and they will say you realize how much of that is illegitimate do you realize how much of that was parasitic we want it back and so I think communism is you know game theoretically it can't be made to work it has a fundament mental flaw at its heart which is that it punishes those who contribute and it rewards those who don't such a system will inherently be unproductive everyone that knows me knows that my downtime is spent watching football I'm a big Manchester United fan and if I can't make it to the game I'll be watching wherever I am in the world with Nord VPN who sponsor this podcast
and they allow me to switch my virtual location to a country where the match is streaming so I never miss a game you're probably thinking but what about viruses well there threat protection feature keeps you safe from viruses malware and fishing sites so that's something you'll never have to worry about when you're using it plus you can use one nordvpn account on up to 10 devices which is really helpful sometimes I'm on my phone and sometimes I'm on my laptop or my iPad for a limited time the nordvpn team have kindly offered the D Community an exclusive deal just head to nordvpn.com doac or use the link in the description below for a huge discount plus four extra months on your 2-year plan and with nordvpn's 30-day money back guarantee there is absolutely no risk try it at nordvpn.com doac or click the link in the description below is there anything else that exists on your list of concerns that we haven't crossed um so we've covered AI the solar flight issue yeah there is a big concern that I have so I Heather and I on our podcast spend a lot of time sorting out the landscape of the co debacle and what we saw was quite dark virtually everything that we were told was upside down and backwards if you wanted to know medically what you should do about covid you literally couldn't do better than looking at what the CDC told you and doing the inverse of all of it right they got every single thing wrong which is improbable what's the CDC for anyone that doesn't know Center for Disease Control should probably be renamed the Center for Disease because they resulted in it spreading farther and having worse impacts but nonetheless I sometimes say certain stories diagnose the system right you can see what's wrong with your system by the way a particular story flows through it you can see the complete collapse of Journalism through the co story you can see the utter dereliction of Duty of our universities from that story you can see the Brokenness of our political institutions our courts all of this they all failed and you can see where we live based on that story alone but unfortunately in the US the
two major parties both have their fingerprints all over the failure and neither of them want to talk about it so aside from a few exceptions people who shined during this period mostly there's a tcid agreement to move on and I think it's a terrible error what was the failing well I would point to three and a half separate failures one the covid crisis and mind you all of the words here need caveats I do believe that there was a pathogen SARS K2 I do not believe that we had anything that would by the prior definition be called a pandemic I do not believe it was inherently an emergency but nonetheless these are the terms we use the covid pandemic was some kind of emergency we were delivered something wrongly called vaccines we were prop propagandized into avoiding off-patent drugs that really did work and so uh and you know we made our situation vastly worse we locked down which injured people we put masks on children which literally disrupted their normal developmental processes we kept vaccinating and revaccinated which has created an an entire landscape of Adverse Events and early deaths which we are still not being honest about so the three and a half Realms are the origin of the virus which is all but certain to have been laboratory and very probably the Wuhan Institute but the Wuhan Institute isn't the Wuhan Institute of virology it's also connected to uh the NIH Anthony fouchy this enhancement this gain of function research that was embarked upon was Downstream of a weapons program and what's gain of function research gain of function research is where various techniques are employed to give a pathogen in this case a virus capabilities that it didn't otherwise have okay so what I I think happened in the origin of Co we can now tell a pretty good story you have a vast um network of Laboratories working to find new pathogens that can be turned into weapons what story they tell themselves about why we need these weapons I don't
know but it is clear that if you are working to enhance human health or you say you are that you are allowed to to enhance The lethality of germs as part of a dual use program so the excuse is oh we're working to prepare the world from a pandemic it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when right that's what they tell us it's not true the likelihood of a pathogen leaping from nature to humans is actually quite remote for reasons that it took me a long time to realize but I now get it loud and clear pathogens don't jump from animals to humans very easily because it's not an easy jump right they have to do two tricks and they have to do it in Rapid succession in order for it to work the first trick is they have to actually infect a human being the second trick is before that human being dies or gets better they have to learn to jump to a second human being that is not an easy trick so what human beings have done is they have started accelerating that process in Laboratories that are spe specifically attempting to create these highly path pathogenic um creatures that infect people for the purpose of creating weapons so what happened in Wuhan I believe is there was a case where some Chinese miners who were working in a mine that was full of bats they were actually literally shoveling bat guano out of this mine six of them became sick and three of them died none of them made anybody else sick and they were all compromised because they were breathing this dust in in the mine which made them vulnerable but the fact that six miners got sick from a virus in this mine told the folks at the Wuhan Institute of virology who were connected directly to some American researchers told them aha there is a virus in a cave in yam Province and the virus already knows one of the two tricks it can infect a human what we need to do is find that virus and enhance it so that we have a virus that can spread between people why would they want a virus that can spread between people because they're part of a cryptic weapons program ah okay now if that sounds preposterous to you and I can
imagine that it would I can imagine myself 5 years ago thinking that sounds absolutely ridiculous and uh paranoid frankly I would I would suggest that people read Robert Robert F Kennedy Jr's uh most recent book it's called the Wuhan coverup in which he explores at Great length this weapons program and it's probable link to SARS K to it is also Al worth reading the book he wrote before that the real Anthony fouchy when one comes to understand that the reason that Anthony fouchy was the highest paid federal worker in the US bar nun that's because he was the head of a weapons program disguised as a public health program okay so Anthony fouchy is the guy that I saw on TV telling giving us advice on what to do about this pandemic he was he was the guy and he was like the medical advisor guy the medical advisor guy but the funny thing is Anthony fouchy is largely responsible for the gain of function research that created the virus in the first place that made it a human pathogen how do we know that um because we now know that there was a ban on gain of function research in the US and that Anthony fouchy was part of the effort to Offshore the work to Ralph barck who was an American researcher still is an American researcher his Partners in the Wuhan Institute of virology XI Jang Lee being the primary so what they did was they evaded a ban that arose in the US I believe in 2015 as a result of very realistic fears that a virus would escape from gain a function research they offshored it to the Wuhan Institute of virology so the work could continue that was Anthony fouche's work so somehow he ends up both in a position to fund and fuel the the research that creates the virus and then he's the go-to guy for advice about what we should do about it that's a very odd coincidence and it worked out very badly for planet Earth why would Anthony fouchy send offshore it to China who are I would consider to be one of the US's arch nemesis yeah that is a great question I don't know the answer to it you would want China to have that information it's like developing the nuclear bomb in Russia or something well I actually think that uh folks like you and me are we don't get it we think that China is a nation and
America is a nation and that these nations are antagonists we don't understand that actually the United States while it is a nation is also a set of factions and those factions don't agree one faction decided to forbid gain of function research another faction decided oh no you don't and we know how to get it done and it was partnered with some faction of that Chinese entity you know uh across the water and if I if I think about how America looks to Outsiders right I can imagine people talking about oh the Americans are doing this right but if you're talking about what the Biden Administration is doing you're not talking about me the Biden Administration isn't on my team I'll guarantee that right so the point is the Biden Administration is my antagonist the Americans are a composite of antagonists I mean I guess in one sense but I don't know why we offshored weapons research to China I don't know that there isn't a partnership between entities that is much more relevant to the unfolding of events that simply doesn't have a name I would recognize but somehow we know that we did it we know that the research was forbidden here and we know you know Ralph baric trained XI Jang Lee in how to do techniques including what he calls no CM edits those are edits you can't see why would a biologist interested in studying pathogens in order to make people healthier care whether you could see their edits could could it not be the case that fouchy moved the project to China the gain of function research to China was involved in that because he wanted to come up he wanted to understand these pathogens these viruses better so that we could do experiments on them to better understand them to figure out how to defend against them this is exactly what they tell you I'm a biologist maybe I'm dumb but that story doesn't make any sense to me you're going to create a new virus from a ancestor you've pulled out of a cave in Yan province that you've enhanced in some way that you decided to enhance it it doesn't tell you about some virus that's going to LEAP out of nature of its own accord it tells you about the virus you just created it doesn't make sense from the point of
view of enhancing human health for two reasons one there's no demonstrated evidence that such research has given us any benefit whatsoever in fighting off pathogens there's no case in which we've seen that what we do have are multiple cases of leaks of pathogens from Labs studying them so we've just got a simple comparison what are the chances if you study some virus you plucked out of some cave that you're going to come up with something useful that's actually going to help us certainly didn't happen with covid chances are very low what are the chances that things going to leak from your lab and cause a global pandemic um pretty high actually I just I just imagine scientists in the lab would take a sample of it they'd put it in the lab they'd start analyzing it they might start doing tests on it to see how it responds to certain things and then you know through no fault of their own maybe it leaked okay but let's let's see how that played out we've got some genan jocks pulling a virus out of a unon cave and enhancing it so that it becomes a communicable human pathogen they should in theory in studying it have come up with information that would tell us what to do if such a pathogen ever got out which it did because they lost control of it well what did they tell us they told us don't use Ivermectin don't use hydroxy chloroquin that what you should do is you should wait at home until you're actually your lips are turning blue then you should come get medical help now that's wrong in every way the right thing to do was to allow doctors to look at the patients who were coming into their office and to figure out how to treat them those doctors should have said oh this person uh they appear to be sick with a uh a respiratory pathogen there's a good chance that it's an RNA virus they could have quickly actually ascertained that it was an RNA virus you know what works on all RNA viruses icton then they could have treated it and they would have oh iacon works for Co if you give it very early if you give it in sufficient Doses and if you give
it with fat okay doctors would have figured that out on their own instead what we got was a message from the very people who had engaged in offshoring this research ostensibly to figure out how to deal with covid who then gave us exactly the inverse of the right advice right then what did they do well then they told us the route out of this this is a vaccine what they delivered was not a vaccine it was a gene therapy that gene therapy we were told blocks the contraction and the transmission of covid and what happened was they demonized everybody who questioned either the safety or the efficacy or both of these treatments turned out that didn't work so what we have this is why I say that the covid story uh diagnoses the system if you think and a person could be well within their rights to think well I'm sure we were studying the virus to protect people and that it would tell us something about what should be done if it ever were to LEAP into humans well we got a perfect test of how well that worked every single thing they told us to do was wrong and upside down if you took what they called the vaccine you put yourself in Jeopardy if you ignored their advice and you used icton and hydroxy chloroquine and you used it early and you used it in sufficient quantities it actually was highly effective and actually rendered this uh illness perfectly manageable for almost every single person so we've seen how well they did they failed across the board do you think there's malicious intent somewhere because when people hear these stories they and because because that the average Joe doesn't know how systems above them work they tend to think of this like Illuminati group of people coming together deciding this was going to happen then executing this plan for some because these you know this this room of people who are evil who people refer to as like they um wanted to do harm and they want to control us that's the kind kind of conspiracy narrative um I have no idea what motivates such people my guess is most of the people who Park
participated in the programs that did so much harm thought they were doing the right thing I don't think that's true for all of them though I don't think that's true for Anthony fouchy you you don't think he thinks he was doing the right thing I think he knows he's a weapons guy and that when you're a weapons guy you are inherently comfortable with the destruction of human beings that's what you do for a living you're trying to create things that destroy human beings and I don't know what it would be like to have such a job I've never had one but my guess is there is a mechanism for rationalizing absolutely ghastly things if what you do for a living is plot the destruction of others now you rais this as a concern as one of your key concerns because I guess you think we haven't learned all lessons from this no we haven't um we and I think things are a little bit inverted in uh in Britain in the US there is widespread discussion of the harms that came from the so-called vaccines but the question of the repurposed drugs uh has still that story has not broken people still think that iacon on hydroxy chloroquin don't work and never worked for Co um I think this story is in general the inverse um the vaccine harms are still Taboo in Britain and there's more acceptance of of repurposed drugs but really what we need is a No Holds Barred exploration of what happened irrespective of what it was maybe I've got it all wrong and maybe that would emerge in an investigation but we need to look at the viral Origins how exactly that happened we need to look at what was done the coup that public health staged against medicine in which directives about how to treat patients came down from on high rather than the normal medical process of doctors figuring out how how to treat their patients empirically and pooling their insights and we need to talk about what happened where these Gene therapies came from what was understood about the danger and uh how it is that we treat all of the people who frankly did exactly what they were asked to do and have had their lives compromised or lost because of injuries that they were not told were
possible are you at all concerned that if there is a pandemic that breaks out now people would be so distrusting in institutions that we wouldn't be able to communicate any kind of instructions to Society at large we wouldn't be able to tell them what medicine to take we wouldn't tell them to lock down we wouldn't be able to tell them pretty much anything 100% it would be an absolute nightmare um but what we do have that we didn't have in 2020 is a sizable dedicated group of dissidents many of whom have lost jobs who did figure out how to treat the disease what its implications were medically what the vaccine harms are how you mitigate them and we have another group of people who were able to make excellent progress on the question of where did this thing come from and uh what was the process that created it so I guess on the one hand yes the distrusting institutions would make a an actual pandemic if such a thing happened um night marish on the other hand we've got people people that are actually worthy of our trust but I will say one other thing in 2020 I was somewhere in the mainstream with respect to how much concern I had over um xonotic pandemics seeing what happened during covid I have come to understand the world is not nearly as dangerous on front as we thought even the stories that we think we know like Spanish Flu turn out not to mean what we thought they meant Spanish Flu was largely a self-inflicted wound yes there was a flu that circulated much of what people died from was bacterial pneumonia that followed on from that flu which we could currently treat with antibiotics and much of the harm that was done in fact what panicked people tremendously was that young healthy people were succumbing why because they were being given huge doses of aspirin that today would be understand understood to be lethal so I'm not convinced that the story of Spanish Flu is what we thought it was in the absence of such a story how often is Humanity faced with a terrifying pandemic the answer is it's very rare
and the degree to which humans make it better and not I mean make it worse and not better is substantial so can we afford to wait 5 years as we sort out the truth of what happened during covid yeah absolutely we can afford to wait the chances of something 1918 happening you know in the present is very very low and our ability to deal with it is much better so um yeah if if it were mine to say I would say relax about the xonotic stuff you've been you've been sold a bill of goods by a lot of people who actually wanted to study how to make uh weaponized pathogens and pay attention to the people who have a good track record and that doesn't mean a perfect track record it means people who recognized their mistakes and got smarter over time BR we spent a lot of time talking about macro concerns and big things um it's funny because when I sat down with you I I what I there's two things I wanted to talk about which is the macro stuff but also to just get a I guess a bit of a clear understanding of how our biology our evolutionary biology and the world we're living in are misaligned so that on a day-to-day basis for the next you know as I navigate through my life the decisions I make with my food my partners my relationships the day-to-day decisions I can make them better now in that regard could you give me some advice sure on how I can live a better life because I'm aware now of the big macro picture much of it but on a day-to-day basis what things can I do to live a happier healthier life the primary alteration that you can make and none of us can do this perfectly the world doesn't allow it but we are beautifully designed for a world we no longer live in you have no idea how good your design is because your design interfaces kind of poorly with the modern world and so it sort of feels like Evolution yeah it did pretty well given what it's made of but you know it kind of missed the mark in a lot of ways really not the case uh if you lived as an ancestor lived in a world for which they were not only exquisitly well built but also brilliantly programmed then you would see that you lived in a kind of Flow State and that that flow state was only
broken by the occasional interaction with something new right we live in the opposite world right you have a a food in your pantry and the question of whether you should actually put it in your mouth really hinges on a you know a list of ingredients some of which you may not even be able to understand right that's not normal right um so if you want to live a healthier happier more fulfilling life the key is to remove as much of the novelty as you can from as many of the Realms that exist in your life as you're able to what you want to be doing is eating things that look more or less like what your ancestors look like is that a carnivore diet no but it's not a vegetarian diet either right it's a diet that has these things in proper proportion that has the unadulterated by novel stuff like seed oils right seed oils are strangely repurposed lubricants that people figured out you could sell as food and then were packaged as if they were heart healthy it's the inverse of the truth right olive oil is not a seed oil avocado oil is not a seed oil those are safe why because you're eating oil from the Flesh of a fruit not the seed plants don't want you eating their seeds plants reproduce by keeping their seeds from getting eaten so using detergents to extract the uh the toxins from a seed oil is not a safe process so in any case eating things that make sense unadulterated things that look like the actual foods that your ancestors ate will make you very much healthier realizing that in general a state of health is one in which you are not disrupted until very late in life your body is built to function it's built to fix itself and the idea that health is a matter of which pills to take is insane we've been sold another bill of goods by people who get rich when we buy pills Pharma is healthy when we are sick so don't get the idea that the way to get healthy is to figure out which things you're deficient in and you know get some corrective medicine there are some places where you're deficient you and I are probably both deficient in vitamin D right we're
deficient in vitamin D not because human beings can't make enough vitamin D but because we live in a novel world where the UV light that we would have been interfacing with in our ancestral environment is being blocked by clothing by buildings by glass and that is causing us not to synthesize the stuff so vitamin D that's a place where actually you probably are deficient and you should correct for it but in General Health does not come from pills there are drugs that are worth taking when something has gone wrong for which this is an appropriate remedy but in general the the style of thinking in which people are you know put on statins for because some number on their chart suggested to somebody that they were in danger this is nonsense and it doesn't it doesn't pan out if you look at the the evidence we harmed people with stattin right the number of people who benefited from them was Tiny the number of people who sold them was large and then you can extend this logic to other things too how much are you wired for this world and how much could you restore St a relationship with other people and with the environment that just simply matches what your ancestors would have done right we would all benefit by spending more time outside we all benefit from having close relationships with friends with lovers things that last a lifetime and the obsession with modernizing everything is self-defeating right in general there are things that are worth Mo modernizing but it should be a fairly High bar when we depart from an ancestral pattern it should be for a very good reason and it should be with our eyes wide open about the unintended consequences of doing it so I don't know whether this is striking you as operationalizable but you want your environment to look as ancestral as it can you want the developmental environment of a child to be a good match for the environment that they're going to live in as an adult you want your relationships to be uh I'm again I'm not arguing for perfectly traditional but you want them to be recognizably traditional right and those things um it's kind of a high bar
because frankly you've you've got something that your ancestors didn't have this two last questions I have for you if that's okay one of them is kind of raised there which was wait we was absolutely was not raised there but it was in between the lines of one of the things you said about relationships is pornography and we live in a world now because of screens and and all of these things that we can access these sort of artificial romantic relationships and stimulation using the screens that 11year olds have in their pocket my question is is pornography bad for us uh it's an unmitigated disaster but I will say that with a caveat I am not arguing against erotica humans have a very long-standing relationship with erotic content and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with erotic content the problem is pornography itself and I I know I'm not supposed to be able to Define it but I will anyway pornography is erotic content the motivation for producing it have having been profit so what's happening is the people who are making porn are transferring our wealth to them and I don't just mean money they are destroying the um sacred sexual um toolkit that is the birthright of every human being they are destroying it for money they are distorting it and that Distortion I would say comes in two two identifiable Realms one is that well actually maybe it's more than two but men have two general reproductive strategies that work evolutionarily women have one the two that men have are a soand go love them and leave them don't invest in women or their offspring mode and the other is invest in Offspring and contribute to protecting them and raising them when men are in that second mode they are not exactly like women but they are symmetrical to women in terms of how choosy they are about mates about how um careful they are in their interactions
when men are in the first mode when they're thinking in terms of not investing in a sexual partner that is effectively predatory and the reason that it's predatory is that human babies are so expensive to raise that no woman with a choice would elect to raise one alone if she could instead have a partner join her in that so women are built to avoid sex that does not come with commitment they've been convinced by modernity that that's not sophisticated that that's male oppression whatever it might be but the truth is we have moved in the direction of women behaving like men at their worst rather than men behaving like women at their best and it's a mistake so you don't want relationship especially really ones about the most powerful stuff there is a human sexual interaction is about as close as you get and you don't want that relationship to be about some predatory mode that you have for I don't know ANC ancestral circumstances that frankly were often uh ghastly and Unforgivable yeah rape and things like that exactly so what we should really want is a society that actually causes men to find this other side of themselves which is an investing caring decent side and that's not an unmasculine side right a man you know investing in a woman and defending his family and providing for them that's all perfectly masculine stuff right it's a lot more mature than than the other alternative but in any case the pornography is pushing Us in the direction of this predatory mindset being synonymous with sexuality it also inherently leads to a view of sex that is Extreme and the reason for that has to do with Market competition that pornographers are all selling the same thing right they're selling human sex how do you capture attention in a market where every competitor has the same stuff well you figure out what taboo hasn't been broken yet and you break it that will distinguish you from your competitor so you've got an arms race in which pornographers are trying to find more and more extreme stuff to get the attention and therefore the money of consumers it's not a good idea you don't
want an arms race this is not sex isn't some new thing you know it's not a technology that we're trying to figure out where it goes this is an ancient thing and we're wrecking it in a economic arms r race that is really bad for the people who consume this stuff and it's really bad for society it's causing people not to want to partner because when they do start a sexual relationship they may find that their partner is uh violent because I mean here here's the the hidden aspect of this human beings figure out what sex is in large measure through observation of other humans that's natural and in fact in hunter gatherer societies we know that as weird as this sounds kids learn what sex is because they're housed with their parents and they may you know be half asleep and so they observe something real so the human is built to learn this through some kind of observation and inference but if your if your detectors are saturated with phony sexual interaction designed to get you to you know pay attention rather than real sexual interactions that actually happen between people then it corrupts your whole understanding of what you're supposed to be doing and then we've got AI humanoid robots the same time so you're GNA have there's going to be in our lifetime there's going to be a news story that breaks and it's going to be describing this very large community of millions and millions of men and maybe women as well who are in a committed relationship with a humanoid robot who is pleasuring them in all the right ways and it's having sex with them and giving them no problems and affirming everything they want to hear and helping them around the house oh the worst thing you said is affirming everything they want to hear yeah but but you just think about what's stopping them doing that and the only thing stopping you doing that honestly if I'm being completely honest is the stigma and stigma as we we look back through history evaporates in a moment when enough people start doing it Y and we saw this with porn right oh of course yeah that used to have a stigma oh my God it had such a stigma and now people just talk about it like it's nothing yeah um and you know you're absolutely right but I mean look
maybe I have a a wonderful relationship really I know I married the right person um and which is odd because I met her when I was 16 wow um yeah that's incredible it is incredible but it does tell me something because as much as I know that I'm with the right person and I can look back on my history and just uh understand what an important role it played in everything good about my life it's not simple yeah you don't want it to be simple you don't want a beautiful robot to tell you what you want to hear that will wreck your life right I mean it's like if I let's take the Perfect Analogy if I said to you hey how would you like just to feel really awesome all the time it's 10 tempting oh it's so tempting but it's kind of what cocaine does right it just triggers the pleasure Center without it having to be accompanied by success or anything wrecks your life right if you really get into that stuff you'll betray every value you've got just to keep the high going so this is the same thing you don't want a sexy beautiful robot to make you feel great about yourself because you will become nothing struggle matters yeah it does which is why why suffering is not something we should be trying to cure and that brings me to the last question I was going to ask you um of the two which was just about what parents are getting wrong because I'm going to be a parent at some point I'm 31 me and my partner have started trying for um for kids and my brother is a year older he has three kids under the age of six and I'm trying to navigate now what advice or what you know very top level things I should be thinking about as a parent I'm so glad you asked me that um why cuz I've got some actually useful advice um and you know look I made mistakes with my kids and I know what they were in large measure maybe I don't know all of them yet but but I also think Heather and I did really well and and our kids bear that story out kids are built to be raised correctly they are not fragile in the sense that you're going to make plenty of Errors you're going to yell at them when you shouldn't you're going to do all sorts of stuff
you shouldn't do that does not wreck kids the signal to noise ratio is what you got to focus on right in general you want your successes the things that you do right to sufficiently outpace the things that you screw up that they get the idea right they're not their purpose is not to game you it's not to evade your Authority they're trying to figure out how to be in the world and your job as a parent is to mirror the world that they will live in right to do so in a way that they can get the message so that they can become you don't want a panicky kid who is going to face danger and freak out that's not useful that'll get you killed what you want is somebody who when they are faced with something challenging brings the right tools to bear so you'll model it for them and you'll produce a world in which those kinds of challenges exists right at first in a very crude form and then they will get more and more sophisticated over time it's all designed to work what you want to do is not break it not fall in love with fads or beliefs like you know childhood is a time of Innocence right child you're supposed to be playing well you know what play is practice right yes you should be playing you should be having a blast but you should be playing with things that actually have some relevance to what you want to be as an adult right the fun you have should be correlated with the skills that you will want to have picked up and um anyway I think the key is reduce the novelty in their lives as much as you can novelty but by what you mean um stuff for which they have no evolutionary preparedness screens screens being very high on the list um I will tell you Heather and I knew very little about raising kids when we had our first and we literally had a conversation said do you do you know how to do this no did you have were you around people who did when you were a kid not really you know that was true for both of us and so we just kind of decided to wing it um and one of the things we did was we started talking to our then infant as if he was a college student you know it was kind of funny to do and it didn't seem harmful and the funny thing is it worked really well um you your job is to shoot over their
heads and then they rise to meet it right and so don't assume that you should be meeting your child at their level that's not what you're supposed to do you're supposed to shoot above their heads and then they come to meet it you're supposed to ignore all the the garbage that they used to tell parents about oh you'll ruin your kid if you love them too much that kind of thing it's all nonsense right you're programmed to know you're supposed to love the the tiny kid unconditionally they're supposed to feel very very secure in that right that's what allows them to confront the terrifying world is that they're completely secure at home and then at the point where it's not so simple you know right you're built for this so are they and that system works and the thing that makes it break is novel influences especially where you have an antagonist right you're not supposed to have an antagonist your ancestors there was some set of things that a child should eat there was nobody trying to trick your child into eating something they shouldn't because it's profitable that's new right so anyway you're built for it you're also extremely uh thoughtful which is a great tool because you're going to be living in a world with novel stuff your book is is is so incredibly important because it's you know until I went through this book I didn't understand that pretty much everything as you say is Downstream from my evolutionary biology and I thought of evolutionary biology as like why is my finger the shape that it is or what's inside or what you know what's the structure of the human body but actually understanding that everything from from the foods we eat and why that's misaligned to the back pain that I get to uh to the the way that I make why I have a girlfriend and and not five girlfriends and all of society and the way it's constructed and all of my biases link back to my evolutionary biology it allows me to see a kind of different lens on the world and I used to think that psychology was the answer to the world but after reading this essential book I now know that the answer to the world is actually much of it exists in our evolutionary biology
our ability to see the future and to understand the past exists in our evolutionary biology and so I highly recommend everybody gets this book and has a read of it it's called a hunter gatherer Guide to the 21st century Evolution and the challenges of Modern Life um by both Brett and his wife Heather I'll link it below for everybody to read it's a New York Times bestselling book as well Brett we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for and the question left for you is okay do I get to know who left it you never get to know unless the they all these questions become conversation cards so we have a pack for you so if you turn it over and scan it with your iPhone you can watch who answered the question on the other side oh so your question will become a card and then you can turn it over and scan it and on the other side will be the person that answered it um if you could travel back to meet one member of your family when they were the age you are now what would you ask them W I guess I would ask ask my grandfather who I was very close with who had a great many he had Great Hopes for Humanity and he had tremendous fears about exactly what we're doing wrong not in detail but he understood that our power to break the world exceeded our wisdom about how to manage those Powers I guess I would ask him if he could have been certain that he was actually right and that the magnitude of the danger in 2024 would exceed even his substantial concerns what might he do differently to raise the alarm is that what you're trying to do yeah I I I live by the following premise if you were on a canoe being pulled towards a waterfall and the chances of your paddling out of the danger was growing vanishingly small there's no point at which it makes sense to stop paddling you don't know what you don't
know and the chances that you might just barely escape a terrible disaster because you didn't give in to hopelessness means that what you do as things get very dire is you double down and you you push as hard as you can and so what I honestly believe is that it is very very late but as far as I know it is not too late if we began the process now of waking up to what's actually causing our problem which is hyper novalty hyper novalty for in simple terms meaning meaning the rate of change is simply too great for our ability to adapt to catchup if we woke up to that problem and we got serious about addressing it I believe that we could still do it are you hopeful let's put it this way one of the tools that we use in evolutionary biology to think about the process of a creature becoming some other kind of creature is called the Adaptive landscape and it involves thinking about opportunities as Peaks the value of an opportunity is the height of the peak and the obstacles to going from one Peak to a Higher One are valleys there's no guarantee that just because you've gone into a valley that you're going to go up a peak on the other side right that involves some luck and some careful navigation because if that other Peak is far away in the clouds and you're off by four degrees you could just simply miss it so the Peril is real we are entering an Adaptive Valley we can feel it everybody feels it there is no guarantee that we get out of it but the fact that things look very dark does not mean that we are not moving through an Adaptive Valley to a better Peak on the other side so there is every reason not to give up and to try to play our roles in this chapter as effectively as we can to maximize the chances that we do get to the foothill of that other Peak and can deliver our descendants of world as good as the one we inherited or better and uh let's put it this way we all go to the movie and we watch The Fellowship of the Ring or whatever the collection of weird Heroes that we see on the screen we we root for them and we admire
them we know what we are supposed to do at this moment we are supposed to enter the next chapter of the book and we are supposed to do as well as we can and bring our best characteristics to bear in the hope that it works out and if it doesn't we will have tried and if it does we will get to look back on this dark phase and say isn't it great that we kept going are you hopeful um you know the funny thing is I know the answer to that question and I also know the other answer to that question yeah I'm hopeful and we'll see other answer to that question um I mean you really want to know yes okay because it breaks the spell the problem is um in order to get everybody to do what they need to do in order that we do get out of this we have to believe that it's more likely to get out of it than it probably is so I'm comfortable with that if other people are comfortable with that then the answer is yeah it's a pretty dire moment um we're going to need some luck but what's the way to approach it often the way to approach things is in some conflict with how we understand them I don't believe in fate I don't think it's a real thing but I know that it's very often extremely useful to behave as if you do believe in fate so I do Brett thank you thank you for your generosity with your time and thank you for your wisdom your honesty and for all the work that you do across your YouTube channel which I'm a big fan of your books um and everything else that you do if someone wants to find you where's the best place to go is it your website or Is it um they should find the Darkhorse podcast Darkhorse is one word um they can find me on Twitter at Brett Warstein um we also have a Twitter account for the podcast they can pick up the book yeah um I think those are the best places I'll link all of those below so everyone has easy access to them on all platforms so thank you so much BR it's been a real honor and I feel enlightened I feel like my eyes have been opened in a number of ways and I feel focused well that's great to hear it was a a very rewarding [Music]
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