Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks | Lex Fridman Podcast #193
the following is a conversation with rob reed entrepreneur author and host of the after on podcast sam harris recommended that i absolutely must talk to rob about his recent work on the future of engineer pandemics i then listened to the four hours special episode of sam's making sense podcast with rob titled engineering the apocalypse and i was floored and knew i had to talk to him quick mention of our sponsors athletic greens volcano fund rise and netsuite check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say a few words about the lab leak hypothesis which proposes that covet 19 is a product of gain of function research on coronaviruses conducted at the wuhan institute of virology that was then accidentally leaked due to human error for context this lab is biosafety level 4 bsl4 and it investigates coronaviruses bsl4 is the highest level of safety but if you look at all the human in the loop pieces required to achieve this level of safety it becomes clear that even bsl4 labs are highly susceptible to human error to me whether the virus leaked from the lab or not getting to the bottom of what happened is about much more than this particular catastrophic case it is a test for our scientific political journalistic and social institutions of how well we can prepare and respond to threats that can cripple or destroy human civilization if we continue to gain a function research on viruses eventually these viruses will leak and they will be more deadly and more contagious we can pretend that won't happen or we can openly and honestly talk about the risks involved this research can both save and destroy human life on earth as we know it it's a powerful double-edged sword if youtube and other platforms censor conversations about this if scientists self-censored conversations about this would become merely victims of our brief homo sapiens story not its heroes as i said before too carelessly labeling ideas as misinformation and dismissing them because of that will eventually destroy our ability to discover the truth and without truth we don't have a fighting chance against the great filter before us this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with rob reed i have seen evidence on the internet that you have a sense of humor allegedly but you also talk and think about the destruction of human civilization what do you think of the elon musk hypothesis that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely and he i think followed on to say a scene from an external observer like if somebody was watching us it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing our civilization that's fun to watch yeah so he exactly he said from the standpoint of the observer not the participant right and so what's interesting about that this were i think just a couple of freestanding tweets and and delivered without a whole lot of rapper of context so it's left to the mind of the the reader of the tweets yes to infer what he was talking about but so that's kind of like it provokes some interesting thoughts like first of all it presupposes the existence of an observer and it also presupposes that the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire to be entertained so there's like a lot underpinning that and to me that suggests particularly coming from elon that it's a reference to simulation theory that you know somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability to let's say peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and either a happier tragic ending or they have a incredible meta view and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and a happy or unhappy ending so okay so we're presupposing an observer then on top of that when you think about it you're also presupposing a producer because the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and other developments that you weren't foreseeing i have re-read my own novels and that's fun because it's something i worked hard on and i slaved over and i love but there aren't a lot of surprises in there so now i'm thinking we need a producer and an observer for that to be true and on top of that it's got to be a very competent producer because elon said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely one so there's lots of layers for thinking about that and when you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining it makes me think of there was a south park episode in which earth turned out to be a reality show yeah and somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to so the earth show was going to get cancelled et cetera so taking all that together and i'm obviously being a little bit playful and laying this out what is the evidence that we have that there we are in a reality that is intended to be most entertaining now you could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc of civilization other lives you know levels as well i'm sure but just looking from my own life i think i'd make a pretty lousy show i spend an inordinate amount of time just looking at a computer i don't think that's very entertaining and there's just a completely inadequate level of shootouts and car chases in my life i mean i'll go weeks even months without a single shootout or car chase that just means that you're one of the non-player characters in this game you're just waiting you're an extra that waiting for you one opportunity for a brief moment to actually interact with one of the main um one of the main characters in the play just saying okay that's that's good so okay so we'll rule out me being the star of the show which i probably could have guessed at anyway but then even the arc of civilization yeah i mean there have been a lot of really intriguing things that have happened and a lot of astounding things that have happened but you know i would have some werewolves i'd have some zombies you know i would have some really improbable developments like maybe canada absorbing the united states you know so i don't know i'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment but if we are uh that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years ahead so i i kind of hope that we're not designed for maximum entertainment well the night is still young in terms of canada but do you think it's possible for the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent so meaning it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the internet the funny ones the entertaining ones spread more efficiently they do i mean i don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up on mass funny things much more sort of aggressively it's more viral like in in the full sense of that word is is there some sense that whatever this the evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities is the same process that's going to in an emergent way create the most entertaining outcome the most memorable outcome the most viral outcome if we were to share it on twitter yeah that's interesting um yeah we do have an incredible ability like i mean how many memes are created in a given day and the ones that go viral are almost uniformly funny at least to somebody with a particular sense of humor right um yeah i have to think about that we are definitely great at creating atomized units of funny like in the example that you used there are going to be x million brains parsing and judging whether this meme is retweetable or not yes and so that sort of atomic universe atomic element a funniness of entertainingness etc we definitely have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything else that's going on but in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the earth driving through for a level of entertainment that is on such a much higher level that i don't know if that would necessarily follow directly from the fact that you know atomic units of entertainment are very very aptly selected for us i don't know do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains so almost thinking about the ideas or the memes this is the dawkins thing as the organisms and then the humans as just like uh vehicles for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around and spread yeah for propagating them mutating them putting selective pressure on them etc yeah um i mean i found um dawkins interpret or his his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene like what a ps to put at the end of a long chunk of writing profoundly interesting i view the relationship though between human and humans and memes is probably an oversimplification but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees right do flowers have bees or do bees in a sense have flowers and the answer is it is a very very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi-independent roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other and so in the case of bees obviously you know you could see the flower as being this monolithic structure physically in relation to any given bee and it's the source of food and sustenance so you could kind of say well flowers have bees but on the other hand the flowers would obviously be doomed they weren't being pollinated by the bees so you could kind of say well you know bees you know flowers are really expression of what the bees need and the truth is a symbiosis so with with memes and human minds our brains are are clearly the petri dishes in which memes are either propagated or not propagated get mutated or don't get mutated if they are the venue in which competition selective competition plays out between different memes so all of that is very true and you could look at that and say really the human mind is a production of memes and ideas have us rather than us having ideas but at the same time let's take a catchy tune as an example of a meme um that catchy tune did originate in a human mind somebody had to structure that thing and as much as i like elizabeth gilbert's ted talk about how the universe i'm simplifying but you know kind of the ideas find their way in this beautiful ted talk it's very lyrical she talked about you know ideas and prose kind of beaming into our minds and you know she talked about needing to pull over the side of the road when she got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to write that down i love that i find that beautiful as a as a writer as a novelist uh myself i've never had that experience and i think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind and so like the bees and the flowers i think there's a great symbiosis and they both kind of have one another ideas have us but we have ideas for real if we could take a little bit of a tangent stephen king on writing you as a great writer you you're dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you that it's a grind of sort of it's almost like you're mining for gold it's more of a very uh deliberate rigorous daily process so maybe can you talk about the writing process how do you write well and maybe if you want to step outside of yourself almost like give advice to an aspiring writer what does it take to write the best work of your life well it would be very different if it's fiction versus nonfiction and i've done both i've written two works of not two non-fiction books and two works of fiction two works of fiction being more recent i'm gonna focus on that right now because that's more toweringly on my mind there are amongst novelists again this is an oversimplification but there's kind of two schools of thought um some people really like to fly by the seat of their pants and some people really really like to to outline to plot you know so there's plotters and pantsers i guess is one way that people look at it and you know as with most things there is a great continuum in between and i'm somewhere on that continuum but i lean i guess a little bit a little bit more toward the plotter and so when i do start a novel i have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going to end and i have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin and i do try to make an effort of making an outline that i know i'm going to be extremely unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story but trying to make an outline that gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters and and so forth but then when i get into the process that outline particularly the center of it ultimately inevitably morphs a great deal and i think if i were personally a rigorous outliner i would not allow that to happen i also would make a much more vigorous skeleton before i start so i think people who are really in that plotting outlining mode are people who write page turners people who write you know spy novels or you know supernatural adventures where you really want a relentless pace of events action plot twists conspiracy etc and that is really the bone that's that's really the you know the skeletal structure so i think folks who write that kind of book are really very much on the outlining side and i think people who write um what's often referred to as literary fiction for lack of a better term where it's more about you know sort of aura and ambiance and character development and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth i think that group is more likely to fly by the seat of their pants and i know people who start with a blank page and just see where it's going to go i'm a little bit more on the plotting side now you asked what makes something at least in the mind of the writer as great as it can be for me it's an astonishingly high percentage of it is editing as opposed to the initial writing for every hour that i spend writing new pros you know like new pages new paragraphs stuff that you know new bits of the book i probably spend i mean i wish i i wish i kept a count like i wish i had like one of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time i've been doing this that but i would say it's at least four or five hours and maybe as many as 10 that i spend editing and so it's relentless for me for each one hour of writing i'd say that for wow i mean i i write because i edit and i spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning and sometimes on the micro level of just like did the does the rhythm of the sentence feel right do i need to carve a syllable or something so it can land like as micro as that to his macro as like okay i'm done but the book is 750 pages long and it's way too bloated i need to lop a third out of it problems on you know those two orders of magnitude and everything in between that is an enormous amount of my time and i also um i also write music write record and produce music and there the the ratio is even higher of every minute that i spend or my band spends laying down that original audio it's a very high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just right so i think that's true of a lot of creative processes i i know it's true of sculpture um i believe it's true of woodwork my dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing at the end so i think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process any creative process can i ask about the psychological the demon side of that picture in the editing process you're ultimately judging the initial piece of work and you're judging and judging and judging how much of your time do you spend hating your work how much time do you spend in gratitude impressed thankful for how good the work that you will put together is um i spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those but leaning toward gratitude i spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that i have i like i like quite a bit and i can make it better and better and better with every time i go through it so i spend most of my time in a state of optimism i think i i personally oscillate much more aggressively between those two where i wouldn't be able to find the average i i go pretty deep um marvin minsky from mit had this advice i guess to uh what it takes to be successful in science and research is to hate everything you do you've ever done in the past i mean at least he was speaking about himself that the key to his success was to uh hate everything he's ever done i have a little marvin minsky there in me too to sort of uh always be exceptionally self-critical but almost like self-critical about the work but grateful for the chance to be able to do the work yeah that makes sense it makes perfect sense but that you know each one of us have have to strike a certain kind of a certain kind of balance but back to the uh destruction of human civilization if humans destroy ourselves in the next hundred years what will be the most likely source the the most like the reason that we destroy ourselves well let's see 100 years it's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far and it's something to give a lot more thought to i think than you know normal folks simply because i am a science fiction writer and you know i feel with the acceleration of technological progress it's really hard to foresee out more than just a few decades i mean comparing today's world to that of 1921 where we are right now a century later it's been so unforeseeable and i just don't know what's going to happen particularly with exponential technologies i mean our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing and synthetic biology and you know how we might destroy ourselves in the 100 year time frame might have everything to do with breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years from now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate but in the nearer term that i'm comfortable predicting let's say 30 years i would say the most likely route to self-destruction would be synthetic biology and i always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important one that i find and i'll abbreviate synthetic biology to sin bio just to save us some syllables i believe synbio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves so i'm not an anti-sin bio person by any stretch i mean sin bio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer helping us rescue the environment helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable so it's electrifying the field but in the wrong hands those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent in the wrong hand synthetic biology to me has a much much greater odds has much greater odds of leading to our self-destruction than something running amok with super ai which i believe is a real possibility and one we need to be concerned about but in the 30-year time frame i think it's a lesser one or nuclear weapons or anything else that i can think of can you explain that a little bit further so your concern is on the man-made versus the natural side of the pandemic front here so we humans engineering pathogens engineering viruses is the concern here yeah and maybe how do you see the possible trajectories happening here in terms of mo is it malevolent or is it um accidents oops little mistakes or unintended consequences of particular actions that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes well both of them are in danger and i think the question of which is more likely has to do with two things one do we take a lot of methodical affordable four-sided steps that we are absolutely capable of taking right now to first all the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something that could have annihilating impacts and in the the episode you referenced with sam we talked a great deal about that so do we take those steps and if we take those steps i think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing us in with sin bio couldn't plummet but you know it's always a question of if and we have a bad bad and very long track record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked have attacked us so that's variable number one variable number two is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society decide is acceptable in the realms of academia government or private industry and if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity if we think that's fine and if that kind of work starts happening in you know one lab five labs 50 labs 500 labs in one country than 10 countries then 70 countries or whatever that risk of a boo-boo starts rising astronomically and this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that i presented those two things but i think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks the easier one to manage although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would have to be something that all nations agree on but the easiest way the easier risk to manage is that of hey guys let's not develop pathogens that if they escape from a lab could annihilate us there's no line of research that justifies that and in my view i mean that's the point of perspective we need to have we'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies that the reason why i believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level of biosafety lab in the world biosafety lab level four and they're not a lot of bsl4 labs in the world there have there are things can can and have leaked out of bsl4 labs and some of the work that's been done with potentially annihilating pathogens which we can talk about is actually done at bsl3 and so fundamentally any lab can leak we have proven ourselves to be incapable of creating a lab that is utterly impervious to leaks so why in the world would we create something where if god forbid it leaked could annihilate us all and by the way almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks what happens if you have a malevolent insider and we could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent insider who wants to release something and not annihilating in a bit i'm sure that we will but what if you have a malevolent insider virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level one two three and four are about preventing somebody hijacking the process i mean some of them are but they're mainly designed against accidents they're imperfect against accidents and if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs with every lab you add the odds of there being a malevolent insider naturally increase arithmetically as the number of labs goes up now on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific traditional government science academic scientific environment creating something malevolent again there's protections that we can take both at the level of sin bio architecture the sin hardening the entire sin bio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out there by rogue actors to early detection to lots and lots of other things that we can do to dramatically mitigate that risk and i think we do both of those things decide that no we're not going to experimentally make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs and b yes we are going to take counter measures that are costs going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to to preclude their creation then i think both that both both risks get managed down but if you take one set of precautions and not the other then the the thing that you have not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome so can we talk about this kind of research and what's actually done and what are the positives and negatives of it so if we look at gain of function research and the kind of stuff that's happening level three and level four bsl labs what's the whole idea here is it trying to engineer viruses to understand how they behave you want to understand the dangerous ones yeah so that that would be the logic behind doing it and so gain a function can mean a lot of different things um viewed through a certain lens gain-to-function research could be what you do when you create you know gmos when you create you know hearty strains of corn that are resistant to pesticides i mean you could view that as gain of function so i'm going to refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense which is actually the sense that the term is usually used which is in some way magnifying capabilities of microorganisms to make them more dangerous whether it's more transmissible or more deadly and in that line of research i'll use an example from 2011 because it's very illustrative and it's also very chilling back in 2011 two separate labs independently of one another i assumed there was some kind of communication between them but they were basically independent projects one in holland and one in wisconsin did gain a function research on something called h5n1 flu h5n1 is you know something that at least on a lethality basis makes kovad look like a kitten you know coveted according to the world health organization has a case fatality rate somewhere between half a percent and one percent h5n1 is closer to sixty percent six zero and so that's actually even slightly more lethal than ebola it's a very very very scary pathogen the good news about h5n1 it is that it is barely barely contagious and i believe it is in no way contagious human to human it requires um you know very very very deep contact uh with birds in most cases chickens and so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin and you're interacting intensely with with fowl who as it turns out have h5n1 that's when the jump comes um but it's not there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of human human i mean they're not that way it just doesn't exist um i think the world health organization did a relentless survey of the number of h5n1 cases i think they do it every year i saw one 10-year series where i think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of a decade and that's a drop in the bucket kind of fun fun fact i believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is 70 000 deaths so we think getting struck by lightning pretty low risk h5n1 much much lower than that what happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases um set out to make h5n1 that would be contagious that could create airborne transmission and so they basically passed it i think in both cases they passed it through a large number of ferrets and so this wasn't like crispr there wasn't even a crisper back in those days this was relatively straightforward you know selecting for a particular outcome and after guiding the path and passing them through again i believe it was a series of ferrets they did in fact come up with a version of h5n1 that is capable of airborne transmission now they didn't unleash it into the world they didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen and so for those two reasons we don't really know how contagious it might have been but you know if it was as contagious as covid that could be a civilization threatening pathogen and why would you do it well the people who did it were good guys they were virologists i believe their agendas they explained it was much as you said let's figure out what a worst case scenario might look like so we can understand it better but my understanding is in both cases it was done in by bsl3 labs and so potential of leak uh significantly non-zero hopefully way below one percent but significantly non-zero and when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives destruction of a large portion of the economy etc and you do an expected value calculation on whatever fraction of one percent that was you would come up with a staggering cost staggering expected cost for this work so it should never it should never have been carried out now you might make an argument if you said if you believed that h5n1 in nature is on an inevitable path to airborne transmission and it's only going to be a small number of years a and b if it makes that transition there is you know one set of changes to its metabolic pathways and you know it's genomic code and so forth one that we have discovered so it is going to go from point a which is where it is right now to point b we have reliably engineered point b that is the destination and we need to start fighting that right now because this is five years or less away now that'd be very different world that'd be like spotting an asteroid that's coming toward the earth and is five years off and yes you marshal everything you can to resist that but there's two problems with that perspective the first is in however many thousands of generations that humans have been inhabiting this planet there has never been a transmissible form of h5n1 and influenza has been around for a very long time so there is no case for inevitability of this kind of a jump to airborne transmission so we're not on a freight train to that outcome and if there was inevitability around that it's not like there's just one set of genetic code that would get there they're just there's there's all kinds of different mutations that could conceivably result in that kind of an outcome unbelievable diversity of mutations and so we're not actually creating something we're inevitably going to face uh but we are creating something we are creating a very powerful and unbelievably negative card and injecting in the deck that nature never put into the deck so in that case um i just don't see any moral or scientific justification for that kind of work and interestingly there was quite a bit of excitement and concern about this when the work came out one of the teams was going to publish their results in science the other in nature and there were a lot of editorials and a lot of scientists are saying this is crazy and publication of those papers did get suspended and not long after that there was a pause put on u.s government funding nih funding on gain of function research but both of those speed bumps were ultimately removed those papers did ultimately get published and that pause on funding you know ceased long ago and in fact those two very projects my understanding has resumed their funding got their government funding back i don't know why a dutch project's getting nih funding but whatever about a year and a half ago so as far as the us government and regulators are concerned it's also systems go for gain of function at this point which i i find very troubling now i'm a little bit of an outsider from this field but it has echoes of the same kind of problem i see in the ai world with autonomous weapon systems nobody in my colleagues my colleagues friends as far as i can tell people in the ai community are not really talking about autonomous weapons systems as now us and china are full steam ahead on the development of both right and that seems to be a similar kind of thing on getting a function i've uh you know have friends in the biology space and they don't want to talk about gain of function publicly it and i don't that makes me very uncomfortable from an outsider perspective in terms of gain of function it makes me very uncomfortable from the insider perspective on autonomous weapon systems i'm not sure how to communicate exactly about autonomous weapon systems and i certainly don't know how to communicate effectively about getting a function what is the right path forward here should we seize all gain of function research is that is that really the solution here well again i'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of overview because you could say almost you know anything that you do to make biology more effective is gain a function so within the narrow confines of what we're discussing i think it would be easy enough for level-headed people in all of the countries level had any governmental people in all the countries that realistically could support such a program to agree we don't want this to happen because all labs leak i mean and you know an example that i i use i actually didn't use it in the piece i did with sam harris as well um is the anthrax attacks in the united states in 2001 i mean talk about an example of the least likely lab leaking into the least likely place shortly after 9 11 for folks who don't remember it and it was a very very lethal strand of anthrax that as it turned out based on the for forensic genomic work that was done and so forth absolutely leaked from a high-security u.s army lab probably the one at fort detrick in maryland it might have been another one but who cares it absolutely leaked from a high security u.s army lab and where did it leak to this highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security-minded organization well it leaked to places including the senate majority leader's office tom daschle's office i think it was senator leahy's office certain publications including bizarrely the national enquirer but let's go to the senate majority leader's office it is hard to imagine a more security-minded country than the united states two weeks after the 911 attack i mean you it doesn't get more security-minded than that and it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the united states military we can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and you know 24 000 wrenches and so forth but pretty capable when it comes to that despite that level of focus and concern and competence just a days after the 9 11 attacks something comes from the inside of our military industrial compacts and ends up you know in the office of someone i believe the senate majority leader somewhere in the line of presidential succession it tells us everything can leak so again think of a level-headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of countries thinking through like i can imagine a very simple powerpoint revealing you know just discussing briefly things like the anthrax leak um things like uh this this foot and mouth disease outbreak that or leaking that came out of a bsl four-level lab in the uk several other things talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say folks can we agree that this just shouldn't happen i mean if we were able to agree on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty which we were by a weapons convention which we did agree on we the world for the most part i believe agreement could be found there but it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to get to consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together and browbeat them into banning this stuff now that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this but in well-regulated you know carefully watched over fiduciary environments like federally funded academic research anything going on in the government itself you know things going on in you know companies that have investors who don't want to go to jail for the rest of their lives i think that would have a major major dampening impact on it but there is a particular possible catalyst in this time we live in which is uh for really kind of raising the question of gain of function research for the application of virus making viruses more dangerous is the question of whether covid leaked from a lab sort of not even answering that question but even asking that question is a very it seems like a very important question to ask to uh catalyze the conversation about the whether we should be doing gain of function research i mean from a high level uh why do you think people even colleagues of mine are not comfortable asking that question and two do you think that the answer could be that it did leak from a lab i i think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough again for the hypothetical rational national leaders watching this simple powerpoint if you could put the possibility at one percent and you look at the unbelievable destructive power that covet had that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it now as to whether or not that was a leak some very very level i don't i don't know enough about all of the factors in the bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making the pro argument of that so i don't pretend to be an expert on that and i i don't have a point of view i i just don't know but what i what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons one is that there is a bsl4 lab in wuhan the wahan institute of virology i believe it's the the only bsl4 in china i could be wrong about that but it definitely had a history that alarmed very sophisticated uh u.s diplomats and others who were in contact with the lab and were aware of what it was doing uh long before covid uh coveted um hit the world and so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified i believe one sophisticated scientist or other observer said that wiv is a ticking time bomb and i believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic of great interest at wiv sars obviously came out of china and that's a that's a coronavirus that would make an enormous amount of sense for it to be studied there um and there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days and weeks after the outbreak that's basically been imposed by the chinese government that we just don't know so it feels like a substantially or greater than one percent possibility to me looking at it from the outside and that's something that one could imagine now we're going to the realm of thought experiment not me decreeing this is what happened but you know if they're studying coronavirus at the wuhan institute of virology um and there is this precedent of gain of function research that's been done on something that is remarkably uncontagious to humans whereas we know coronavirus is contagious to humans i could definitely and there is this global consensus you know certainly was the case you know two or three years ago when this work might have started this seems to be this global consensus that gain a function is fine the u.s paused funding for a little while but paused funding they never said private actors couldn't do it it was just the pause of nih funding and then that pause was lifted so again none of this is irrational you could certainly see the folks at wiv saying gain a function interesting vector coronovice virus unlike h5n1 very contagious uh we are in a a nation that has had terrible run-ins with coronavirus why don't we do a little getting function on this and then like all labs at all levels one can imagine this lab leaking so it's not an impossibility and very very level-headed people have said that you know who've looked at it much more deeply do believe in that outcome uh why is it such a threat to power the idea that leaked from a lab why is it so threatening i don't maybe understand this point exactly like is it just that as governments and especially the chinese government is really afraid of admitting mistakes that everybody makes so this is a horrible mystery like uh chernobyl is a good example i come from the soviet union i mean well major mistakes were made in chernobyl i would argue for a lab league to happen the the the scale of the mistake is much smaller um right there the the depth and the breadth of rot that in bureaucracy that led to chernobyl is much bigger than anything that could lead to a lab leak because it could literally just be i mean i'm sure there's security very careful security procedures even in level three labs but it uh i i imagine maybe you can correct me it's all it takes is the incompetence of a small number of individuals or even one yeah one individual on a particular a couple weeks three weeks period as opposed to a multi-year bureaucratic failure of the entire government right well certainly the magnitude of mistakes and compounding mistakes that went into chernobyl was far far far greater but the consequence of kovitt outweighs that the consequence of chernobyl to a tremendous degree and you know i think that that particularly um authoritarian governments are unbelievably uh reluctant to admit to any fallibility whatsoever there's a long long history of that across dozens and dozens of authoritarian governments and to be transparent again this is in the hypothetical world in which this was a leak which again i don't have i don't personally have enough sophistication to have an opinion on the on the likelihood but in the hypothetical world in which it was a league the global reaction and the amount of global animus and the amount of you know the decline in global respect that would happen toward china because every country suffered massively from this unbelievable damages in terms of human lives and economic activity disrupted the world would in some way present china with that bill and when you take on top of that the natural disinclination for any authoritarian government to admit any fallibility and tolerate the possibility of any fallibility whatsoever and you look at the relative opacity even though they let a world health organization group in you know a couple months ago to run around they didn't give that who group anywhere near the level of access it would be necessary to definitively say x happened versus y the level of opacity that surrounds those opening weeks and months of covet in china we just don't know if you were to kind of look back at 2020 and maybe broadening it out to future pandemics that could be much more dangerous what kind of response how do we fail in the response and how could we do better so the gain of function research is discussing which you know the the question of we should not be creating viruses that are both exceptionally contagious and exceptionally deadly to humans but if it does happen perhaps the natural evolution natural mutation is there interesting technological responses on the testing side on the vaccine development side on the collection of data or on the basic sort of policy response side or the sociological the psychological side yeah there's all kinds of things and most of what i've thought about and written about and again discussed in that long bit with with sam is dual use so most of the countermeasures that i've been thinking about and advocating for would be every bit as effective against zoonotic disease a natural pandemic of some sort as an artificial one the the risk of an artificial one even the near-term risk of an artificial one ups the urgency around these measures immensely but but most of them would be broadly applicable and so i think the first thing that we really want to do on a global scale is have a far far far more robust and globally transparent system of detection and that can happen on a number of levels the most obvious one is you know just in the blood of people who come into clinics exhibiting signs of illness and there we are certainly at a point now with we're at with relatively minimal investment we could develop in clinic diagnostics that would be unbelievably effective at pinpointing what's going on in almost any disease when somebody walks into a doctor's office or a clinic and better than that um this is a little bit further off further off but it wouldn't cost tens of billions in research dollars it would be you know a relatively modest and affordable budget in relation to the threat at home diagnostics that can really really pinpoint you know okay particularly with respiratory infections because that is generally almost universally the mechanism of transmission for any serious pandemic so somebody has a respiratory infection is it one of the you know significantly large handful of rhinoviruses coronaviruses and other things that cause common cold uh or is it influenza if it's influenza is it influenza a versus b um or is it you know a small handful of other more exotic but nonetheless sort of common respiratory infections that are out there developing a diagnostic panel to pinpoint all of that stuff that's something that's well within our capabilities that's much less a lift than creating mrna vaccines which obviously we proved capable of when we put our minds to it so do that on a global basis and i don't think that's irrational because the best prototype for this than i'm aware of isn't currently rolling out in atherton california or fairfield county connecticut or some other wealthy place the best prototype that i'm aware of this is rolling out right now in nigeria and it's a project that came out of the broad institute which as as i'm sure you know but uh some listeners may not is kind of like an academic joint venture between harvard and mit the program is called sentinel and their objective is and their plan and is a very well conceived plan a methodical plan is to do just that in areas of nigeria that are particularly vulnerable to zoonotic diseases making the jump from animals to humans but also there's just an unbelievable public health benefit from that and it's sort of a three-tier system where clinicians in the field could very rapidly determine do you have one of the infections of acute interest here either because it's very common in this region so we want to diagnose as many as things as we can at the front line or because it's uncommon but unbelievably threatening like ebola so frontline worker can make that determination very very rapidly if it comes up as a we don't know they bump it up to a level that's more like at a fully configured doctor's office or local hospital and if it's still it we don't know it gets bumped up to a national level and that and it gets bumped very very rapidly so if this can be done in nigeria and it seems that it can be there shouldn't be any inhibition for it to happen in most other places and it should be affordable from a budgetary standpoint and based on sentinel's budget and adjusting things for things like you know very different cost of living larger population etc i did a back of the envelope calculation that doing something like sentinel in the u.s would be in the low billions of dollars and you know wealthy countries middle-income countries can't afford such a thing lower income companies in income countries should certainly be helped with that but start with that level of detection and then layer on top of that other interesting things like you know monitoring search engine traffic search engine queries for evidence that strange clusters of symptoms are starting to rise in different places there's been a lot of work done with that most of it kind of like academic and experimental but some of it has been powerful enough to suggest that this could be a very powerful early warning system there's a guy named bill lampos at university college london who basically did a very rigorous analysis that showed that symptom searches reliably predicted coveted outbreaks in the early days of the pandemic in given countries by as much as 16 days before the evidence started to crew at a public health level 16 days of forewarning can be monumentally important in the early days of an outbreak and this is you know a very very talented but nonetheless very resource constrained academic project imagine if that was something that was done with a norad like budget yeah yeah so i mean starting with detection that's something we could do radically radically better so aggregating multiple data sources in order to create something i mean this is really exciting to me the possibility that i've heard inklings of of creating almost like a weather map of pathogens like basically aggregating all of these data sources scaling many orders of magnitude up at home testing and all kinds of testing that doesn't just try to test for the particular pathogen of worry now but everything like a full spectrum of things that could be dangerous to the human body and thereby be able to create these maps like that are dynamically updated on an hourly basis of the of how viruses travel throughout the world and so you can respond like you can then integrate just like you do when you check your weather map and it's raining or not of course not perfect but it's very good predictor whether it's going to rain or not uh and use that to then make decisions about your own life ultimately give the power information to individuals to respond and if it's a super dangerous like if it's acid rain versus regular rain you might want to really stay inside as opposed to risking it i mean that um just like you said if i think it's not very expensive relative to all the things that we do in this world but it does require bold leadership and there's another dark thing which really is bothering me about 2020 which it requires is it requires trust in institutions to carry out these kinds of programs and it requires trust and science and engineers and uh sort of centralized organizations that would operate at scale here and much of that trust has been um at least in the united states diminished it feels like not exactly sure where to place the blame but i do place quite a bit of the blame into the scientific community and again my fellow colleagues in speaking down to people at times speaking from authority it sounded like it dismissed the basic human experience or the the basic common humanity of people in a way like it almost sounded like there's an agenda that's hidden behind the words the scientists spoke like they're trying to in a self-preserving way control the population or something like that i don't think any of that is true from the majority of the scientific community but it sounded that way and so the trust began to diminish and i'm not sure how to fix that except to be more authentic be more real acknowledge the uncertainties under which we operate acknowledge the mistakes we've that scientists make that institutions make the leak from the lab is a perfect example where we have imperfect systems that make all the progress you see seeing the world and that being honest about that imperfection i think is essential for forming trust but i don't know what to make of it it's been uh it's been deeply disappointing because i do think just like you mentioned the solutions require people to trust the institutions with their data yeah and i think part of the problem is it seems to me as an outsider that there was a bizarre unwillingness on the part of the cdc and other institutions to admit to to frame and to contextualize uncertainty maybe they had a patronizing idea that these people need to be told and when they're told they need to be told with authority and a level of definitiveness and certain certitude that doesn't actually exist and so when they whip saw on recommendations like what you should do about masks you know when the cdc is kind of at the very beginning of the pandemic saying masks don't do anything don't wear them when the real driver for that was we don't want these clowns going out and depleting amazon of masks because they may be needed in medical settings and we just don't know yet i think a message that actually respected people and said this is why we're asking you not to do masks yet and there's more to be seen would be less whip sawing and would bring people like they feel more like they're part of the conversation and they're being treated like adults than saying one day definitively masks suck and then x days later saying nope damn it wear masks and so i think framing things in terms of the probabilities which most people are easy to parse i mean a more recent example which i just thought was batty was suspending the johnson johnson vaccine for a you know a very low single digit number of days in the united states based on the fact that i believe there had been uh seven-ish clotting incidents um in roughly seven million people who had had the the vaccine administered i believe one of which resulted in a fatality and there was definitely suggestive data that indicated that there was a relationship this wasn't just coincidental because i think all of the clotting incidents happened in women as opposed to men and kind of clustered in a certain age group but does that call for shutting off the vaccine or does it call for leveling with the american public and saying we've had one fatality out of seven million this is let's just assume substantially less than the likelihood of getting struck by lightning um based on that information you know and we're going to keep you posted because you can trust us to keep you posted based on that information please decide whether you're comfortable with a johnson johnson vaccine that would have been one response and i think people would have been able to parse those simple bits of data and make their own judgment by turning it off all of a sudden there's this dramatic signal to people who don't read all 900 words in the new york times piece that explains why it's being turned off but just see the headline which is a majority of people there's a sudden like oh my god yikes vaccine being shut off and then all the people who sat on the fence or sitting on the fence about whether or not they trust vaccines that is going to push an incalculable number of people that's going to be the last straw for we don't know how many hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of people to say okay tipping point here i don't trust these vaccines so by pausing that for whatever it was 10 or 12 days and then flipping the switch as everybody who knew much about the situation knew was inevitable by switching flipping the on switch 12 days later you're conveying certitude j and j bad to certitude j and j good in a period of just a few days and people just feel whipsawed and they're not part of the analysis but it's not just the the whipsawing and i think about this quite a bit i don't think i have good answers it's something about the way the communication actually happens just i don't know what it is about anthony fauci for example but i don't trust him and i think that has to do i mean he's he did he's he has an incredible background i'm sure he's a brilliant scientist and researcher i'm sure he's also a great like inside the room policy maker and deliberator and so on but you know uh what makes a great leader is something about that thing that you can't quite describe but being a communicator that you know you can trust that there's an authenticity that's required and i'm not sure maybe i'm being a bit too judgmental but i'm a huge fan of a lot of great leaders throughout history they've they've communicated exceptionally well in the way that fauci does not and i think about that i think about what has affected science communication so you know great leaders throughout history did not necessarily need to be great science communicators their leadership wasn't in other domains but when you're fighting the virus you also have to be a great science communicator you have to be able to communicate uncertainties you have to be able to communicate something like a vaccine that you you're allowing inside your body into the messiness into the complexity of the biology system that if we're being honest it's so complex we'll never be able to really understand we have we can only desperately hope that science can give us sort of a high likelihood that there's no short-term negative consequences and that kind of intuition about long-term negative consequences and doing our best in this battle against trillions of things that are trying to kill us i mean being being an effective communicator in that space is very difficult but i think about what it takes because i think there should be more science communicators that are effective at that kind of thing let me ask you about something that's sort of more in the ai space that i i think about that kind of goes along this thread that you're that you've spoken about about democratizing the technology that could destroy human civilization is uh from amazing work from deep mind alpha fold to which achieved uh incredible performance on the protein folding problem single protein fold folding problem do you think about the use of ai in the syn biospace of uh i think the the gain of function in the virus-based research that you refer to i think is natural mutations and sort of aggressively mutating the virus until you get one that like uh that has this both contagious and um deadly but what about then using ai to through simulation be able to compute deadly viruses or any kind of biological systems is this something you're worried about or again is this something you're more excited about i think computational biology is unbelievably exciting and promising field and i think when you're doing things in silico as opposed to in vivo um you know that the dangers plummet you don't have a critter that can leak from a leaky lab yes so i don't see any problem with that except um i do worry about the data security dimension of it because if you were doing really really interesting and silico gain of function research and you hit upon you know through a level sophistication we don't currently have but you know synthetic biology is an exponential technology so capabilities that are utterly out of reach today will be attainable in five or six years um i think if you conjured up worst-case genomes of viruses that don't exist in vivo anywhere they're just in they're just in the computer space but like hey guys this is the genetic sequence that would end the world let's say um then you have to worry about the utter hackability of every computer network we can imagine i mean data leaks from the least likely places on the grandest possible scales have happened and continue to happen and will probably always continue to happen and so that would be the danger of doing the work in silico if you end up with a list of like boy these are things we never want to see that list leaks and after the passage of some time certainly couldn't be done today but after the passage of some time lots and lots of people in academic labs going all the way down to the high school level are in a position to you know to make it overly simplistic hit print on a genome and have the virus bearing that genome pop out on the other end then you got something to worry about but in general computational biology i think is incredibly important particularly because the crushing majority of work that people are doing with the protein folding problem and other things are about creating therapeutics about creating things that will help us you know live better live longer thrive be bit more well and so forth and the protein folding problem is a monstrous computational challenge that we seem to make just the most glacial project on i'm sorry progress on for years and years but i think there's like a there's a bi-annual competition i think uh for for at which people tackle the protein folding uh problem and um deepmind's entrant uh both two years ago like in 2018 and 2020 ruled the field and so you know protein folding is an unbelievably important thing if you want to start thinking about therapeutics because you know it's the folding of the protein that tells us where the where the channels and the receptors and everything else are on that protein and it's from that precise model if we can get to a precise model that you can start barraging it again in silicon with you know thousands tens of thousands millions of potential therapeutics and see what resolves the problems the shortcomings that a you know about a misshapen uh pro protein for instance somebody with cystic fibrosis how might we treat that so i see nothing but good in that well let me ask you about fear and hope in this world i tend to believe that um that uh in terms of competence and malevolence that people who are maybe it's in my interactions i tend to see that first of all i believe that most people are good and want to do good and are just better doing good and more inclined to do good on this world and more than that people who are malevolent are usually incompetent at uh building technology so like i i've seen this in my life that people who are exceptionally good at stuff no matter what the stuff is tend to maybe they discover joy in life in a way that gives them fulfillment and thereby does not result in them wanting to destroy the world so like the better you are at stuff whether that's building nuclear weapons or plumbing it doesn't matter they're both the less likely you are to destroy the world so in that sense with many technologies the ai especially i always think that uh the the the malevolent would be far outnumbered by the ultra competent and in that sense the defenses will always be stronger than the offense in terms of the people trying to destroy the world now there's a few spaces where them that might not be the case and that's an interesting conversation where is this one person who's not very competent can destroy the whole world perhaps synbio is one such space because of the uh exponential effects of the technology i tend to believe ai's is not one of those such spaces but do you share this kind of view that uh the ultra competent are usually also the good yeah absolutely i absolutely share that and that gives me a great deal of optimism that we will be able to short circuit the threat that malevolent synbio could pose to us but we need to start creating those defensive systems or defensive layers one of which we talked about far far far better surveillance in order to prevail so the good guys will almost inevitably outsmart and definitely outnumber the bad guys in most sort of smackdowns that we can imagine but the good guys aren't going to be able to exert their advantages unless they have the imagination necessary to think about what the worst possible thing can be done by somebody whose own psychology is completely alien to their own so that's a tricky tricky thing to solve for now in terms of whether the asymmetric power that a bad guy might have in the face of the overwhelming numerical advantage and competence advantage that the good guys have you know unfortunately i look at something like mass shootings as an example you know i'm sure the guy who who was responsible for the vegas shooting or the orlando shooting or any other shooting that we can imagine didn't know a whole lot about ballistics and the number of you know good guy citizens in the united states with guns compared to bad guys citizens i'm sure is a crushingly overwhelmingly high ratio in favor of the good guys but that doesn't make it possible for us to stop mass shootings an example is fort hood 45 000 trained soldiers on that base yet there have been two mass shootings there and so there is an asymmetry when you have powerful and lethal technology that gets so democratized and so proliferated in tools that are very very easy to use even by a knucklehead when those tools get really easy to use by a knucklehead and they're really widespread it becomes very very hard to defend against all instances in instances of usage now the good news quote unquote about mass shootings if there is any and there is some is even the most brutal and carefully planning and well-armed mass shooter can only take so many victims and same is true as there's been four instances that i'm aware of of commercial pilots committing suicide by downing their planes and taking all their passengers with them these weren't boeing engineers you know but like an army of boeing engineers ultimately were not capable of preventing that but even in their case and i'm actually not counting 911 and that 911 is a different category in my mind these are these are just personally suicidal pilots in in those cases they only have a plain load of people that they're able to take with them if we imagine a highly plausible and imaginable future in which some biotools they could be that are amoral that could be used for good or for ill start embodying unbelievable sophistication and genius in the tool in the easier and easier and easier to make tool all those thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of scientist years start getting embodied in something that you know maybe as simple as hitting a print button um then that good guy technology can be hijacked by a bad person and used in a very asymmetric way yeah i think what happens though as because you go to the high school student from the current like very specific set of labs they're able to do it as we get as it becomes more and more democratized as it becomes easier and easier to do this kind of large-scale damage with a with an engineered virus the more and more there will be engineering of defenses against these systems is some of the things we talked about in terms of testing towards the collection of data but also in terms of like uh at scale contact tracing or also engineering of vaccines like in a matter of like days maybe hours maybe minutes so like i just i feel like the defenses that's what human species seems to do it's like we hit keep hitting the snooze button until there's like a like a storm on the horizon heading towards us then we start to quickly build up uh the defenses or the response that's proportional to the scale of the storm of course again certain kinds of exponential threats require us to build up the defenses way earlier than we usually do and that's i guess the question but i ultimately am hopeful that the natural process of hitting the snooze button until the deadline is right in front of us will work out for quite a long time for us humans and i fully agree i mean that's why i'm fundamentally may not sound like it thus far but i'm fundamentally very very optimistic about our ability to short-circuit this threat because there is again i'll stress um the technological feasibility and the profound affordability of a relatively simple set of steps that we can take to preclude it but we do have to take those steps and so you know what i'm hoping to do and trying to do is inject a notion of what those steps are you know into the public conversation and do my small part to up the odds that that actually ends up happening um you know it's the the danger with this one is it is exponential and i think that our minds are fundamentally struggle to understand exponential math it's just not something we're wired for our ancestors didn't confront exponential processes when they were growing up on the savannah so it's not something that's intuitive to us and our intuitions are reliably defeated when exponential processes come along so that that's issue number one and issue number two with something like this is you know it kind of only takes one you know that ball only has to go into the net once and we're doomed which is not the case with mass shooters it's not the case with you know commercial pilots run amok it's not the case with really any threat that i can think of with the exception of nuclear war that has the you know one bad outcome and game over and that that means that we need to be unbelievably serious about these defenses and we need to do things that might on the surface seem like a tremendous over reaction so that we can be prepared to nip anything that comes along in the bud but i like you believe that's imminently doable um i like you believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in this particular one to a degree that probably has no precedent in history i mean even the worst worst people i'm sure in isis even osama bin laden even any bad guy you could imagine in history would be revolted by the idea of exterminating all of humanity i mean you know it's just that's a low bar and so the good guys completely outnumber the bad guys when it comes to this but the asymmetry and the fact that one catastrophic error could lead to unbelievably consequential things is what worries me here but i too am very optimistic the thing that i sometimes worry about is the fact that we haven't seen overwhelming evidence of alien civilizations out there makes me think um well there's a lot of explanations but one of them that worries me is that whenever they get smart they just destroy themselves oh yeah i mean that was the most fascinating is the most fascinating and chilling number or variable in the drake equation is l at the end at the end of it you look out you see you know one to 400 billion stars in the milky way galaxy and we now know because of kepler that an astonishingly high percentage of them probably have habitable planets and you know so all the things that were unknowns when the drake equation was originally written like you know how many stars have planets actually back then in the 1960s when the drake equation came along the consensus amongst astronomers was that it would be a small minority of solar systems that had planets or stars but now we know it's substantially all of them how many of those stars have habit have planets in the habitable zone it's kind of looking like 20 like oh my god and so l which is how long does a civilization once it reaches technological competence continues to last that's the doozy and and you're right it's it's all too plausible to think that when a civilization reaches a level of sophistication that's probably just a decade or three in our future the odds of it self-destructing just start mounting astronomically no pun intended my hope is that that uh actually there is a lot of alien civilizations out there and what they figure out in order to avoid the self-destruction they need to turn off the thing that was useful that used to be a feature now became a bug which is uh the desire to colonize to conquer more land so they like there's probably ultra intelligent alien civilizations out there they're just like chilling like on the beach with the with the whatever your favorite alcohol belt beverages but like without sort of trying to conquer everything just chilling out and maybe exploring in the in the realm of knowledge but almost like appreciating existence for its own sake versus uh life as a progression of conquering of other life like this kind of predator prey formulation that resulted in uh us humans perhaps is something we have to shed in order to survive i don't know yeah that that is um a very plausible solution to fermi's paradox and it's it's one that makes sense you know when we look at our own lives and their own archive project of technological um you know trajectory it's very very easy to imagine that in an intermediate future world of you know flawless vr or flawless you know whatever kind of simulation that we want to inhabit it will just simply cease to be worthwhile to go out and and expand our our interstellar territory and but if we were going out and conquering interstellar territory wouldn't necessarily have to be predator or prey i can imagine um a benign but sophisticated intelligence saying well we're going to go to places we're going to go to places that we can terraform and use a different word than terra obviously but we can turn into habitable for our particular physiology so long is that they don't house you know intelligent sentient creatures that would suffer from our invasion um but it is easy to see a sophisticated intelligent species evolving to the point where interstellar travel with its incalculable expense and physical hurdles just isn't worth it compared to what could be done you know where one already is so you talked about diagnostics at scale as a possible solution to future pandemics what about another possible solution which is kind of creating a backup copy you know i'm actually now um putting together nas for backup for myself for the first time taking backup of data seriously but if we were to take the uh the backup of human consciousness seriously and uh try to expand throughout the solar system and colonize other planets do you think that's an interesting uh solution one of many uh for protecting human civilizations from self-destruction sort of humans becoming a multi-planetary species oh absolutely i mean i find it electrifying first of all so i got a little bit of a personal bias when i was a kid i thought there was nothing cooler than rockets i thought there was nothing cooler than nasa i thought there was nothing cooler than people walking on the moon and as i grew up i thought there was nothing more tragic than the fact that we went from walking on the moon to at best getting to something like suborbital altitude and just i found that more and more depressing with the passage of decades at just the colossal expense of you know manned space travel and the fact that it seemed that we were unlikely to ever get back to the moon level on mars so i have a boundless appreciation for elon musk for many reasons but the fact that he has put mars on the incredible agenda is one of the things that i appreciate immensely so there's just this sort of space nerd in me that just says god that's cool but on a more practical level we were talking about you know uh potentially inhabiting planets that aren't our own and we're thinking about a benign civilization that would do that in in planetary circumstances where we're not causing other conscious systems to suffer i mean mars is a place that's very promising there may be microbial life there and i hope there is and if we found it i think it would be electrifying but i think ultimately the moral judgment would be made that you know the continued thriving of that microbial life is of less concern than creating a habitable planet to humans which would be a project on the many thousands of years scale but i don't think that that would be a greatly immoral act and if that happened and if mars became you know home to a self-sustaining group of humans that could survive a catastrophic mistake here on earth then yeah the fact that we have a backup quality is great and if we could make more i'm sorry not backup colony backup copy is great and if we can make more and more such backup copies throughout the solar system by hollowing out asteroids and whatever else it is maybe even venus we could get rid of three quarters of its atmosphere and you know turn it into a tropical paradise um i think all of that is wonderful now whether we can make the leap from that to interstellar trans transportation with the incredible distances that are involved um i think that's an open question but i think if we ever do that it would be more like the pacific ocean's uh channel of human expansion than the atlantic oceans and so what i mean by that is uh when we think about european society transmitting itself across the atlantic it's these big ambitious crazy expensive one-shot expeditions like columbus's to make it across this enormous expanse and at least initially without all any certainty that there's land on the other end right so that's kind of how i view our space program is like big you know very conscious deliberate efforts go from point a to point b if you look at how pacific islanders um transmitted you know their descendants and their culture and so forth throughout polynesia and beyond it was much more you know inhabiting a place getting to the point where there were people who were ambitious or unwelcome enough to decide it's time to go off island and find the next one and pray to find the next one that method of transmission didn't happen in a single con swift year but it happened over many many centuries and it was like going from this island to that island and probably for every expedition that went out to seek another island and actually lucked out and found one god knows how many were lost at sea but that form of transmission took place over a very long period of time and i could see us you know perhaps you know going from the inner solar system to the outer solar system to the kuiper belt to the oort cloud you know there's there's theories that there might be you know planets out there that are not anchored to stars like kind of hop hop slowly transmitting ourselves at some point we're actually an alpha centauri but i think that kind of backup copy and transmission of our physical presence and our culture to a diversity of you know extraterrestrial outposts is a really exciting idea i really never thought about that because i i have thought my thinking about space exploration has been very atlantic ocean-centric in the sense that there will be one program with nasa and maybe private uh elon musk spacex or jeff bezos and so on but it's true that with the help of elon musk making it cheaper and cheaper more effective to create these technologies where you could go into deep space perhaps the way we actually colonize the solar system and uh and expand out into the galaxy is basically just like these like renegade ships of of uh weirdos it's just kind of like like home like most of them like quote-unquote homemade but they just kind of venture out into space and just like like you know the android the initial android model like millions of like these little ships just flying out most of them die off uh in horrible accidents but some of them will will persist or there'll be stories of them persisting and over a period of decades and centuries there'll be other attempts almost always as a response to the main set of efforts that's interesting yeah because you kind of think of mars colonization as the big nasa elon musk effort of a big colony but maybe the successful one would be you know like a decade after that there'll be like a ship from like some kid some high school kid who gets together a large team and does something probably illegal and launches something where they end up actually persisting quite a bit and from that learning lessons that nobody ever gave permission for but somehow actually flourish and and then take that into the scale of uh centuries forward into the into the rest of space that's really interesting yeah i think i think the giant steps are likely to be nasa-like efforts like there is no intermediate rock well i guess it's the moon but even getting the moon ain't that easy between us and mars right so like the giant sat steps the the big hubs like the o'hare airports yeah of the future probably will be very deliberate efforts but then you know you would have i think that kind of diffusion as space travel becomes more democratized and more capable you'll have this sort of natural diffusion of people who kind of want to be off grid or think they can make a fortune there you know kind of mentality that drove people to san francisco i mean san francisco was not populated as a result of a king ferdinand and isabella-like effort to fund columbus going over it was just a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that there's gold in them thar hills and i'm going to go out and get a piece of it so i could see that kind of fusion what i can't see and the reason that i think the specific model of transmission is more likely is i just can't see a nasa-like effort to go from earth to alpha centauri it's just too far i just see lots and lots and lots of relatively tiny steps between now and there and the fact is that there is there are large chunks of matter going at least a light year beyond the sun i mean the oort cloud i think extends at least a light year beyond the sun and you know then maybe there are these untethered planets after that we won't really know till we get there and if our cloud goes out a light year and alpha centauri's or cloud goes out of light year you've already cut in half the distance you know so who knows but yeah one of the possibilities probably the cheapest and most effective way to create interesting interstellar spacecraft is ones that are powered and driven by ai and you can think of here's where you have high school students be able to build a sort of a hal 9000 version uh the modern version of that and it's kind of interesting to think about these uh robots traveling out throughout perhaps perhaps sadly long after human civilization is gone there will be these intelligent robots flying throughout space and perhaps land on uh office entire bee or any of those kinds of planets and uh and colonize sort of humanity continues through the proliferation of our creations like uh like robotic creations that have some echoes of that uh intelligence hopefully also the consciousness does that make you sad the future where agi super intelligent or just mediocre intelligent ai systems outlive humans yeah i guess it depends on the circumstances in which they outlive humans so let's take the example that you just gave uh we send out you know very sophisticated agis on simple rocket ships relatively simple ones that don't have to have all the life support necessary for humans and therefore they're of trivial mass compared to a crude ship a generation ship and therefore they're way more likely to happen so let's use that example and let's say that they travel to distant planets at you know a speed that's not much faster than what a chemical rocket can achieve and so it's inevitably tens hundreds of thousands of years before they make landfall someplace so let's imagine that's going on and meanwhile we die for reasons that have nothing to do with those agis diffusing throughout the solar system whether it's through climate change nuclear war you know syn bio rogues and bio whatever in that kind of scenario the notion of the agis that we created outlasting us is very reassuring because it says that like we we ended but our descendants are out there and hopefully some of them make landfall and create some echo of who we are so that's a very optimistic one where is the terminator scenario of a super agi arising on earth and getting left let out of its box due to some boo-boo on the part of its creators who do not have super intelligence and then deciding that for whatever reason it doesn't have any need for us to be around and exterminating us that makes me feel crushingly sad i mean look i was sad when my elementary school was shut down and bulldozed even though i hadn't been a student there for decades yeah you know the thought of my hometown getting disbanded is even worse that's the thought of my home state of connecticut getting disbanded and like absorbed into massachusetts is even worse the notion of humanity is just crushingly crushingly sad to me so you you hate goodbyes i i certain goodbyes yes some goodbyes are really really liberating but yes well but what if the terminators um you know have consciousness and enjoy the hell out of life as well they're just better at it yeah well the have consciousness is a really key element and so there's no reason to be certain that a super intelligence would have consciousness we don't know that factually at all and so what is a very lonely outcome to me is the rise of a super intelligence that has a certain optimization function that it's either been programmed with or that arises in an emergently that says hey i want to do this thing for which humans are either an unacceptable risk their presence is either an unacceptable risk or they're just collateral damage but there is no consciousness there then the idea of the light of consciousness being snuffed out by something that is very competent but has no consciousness is really really sad yeah but i tend to believe that it's almost impossible to create a super intelligent agent that can't destroy human civilization without it being conscious it's like those are coupled like you have to in order to destroy humans or supersede humans you really have to be accepted by humans i think this idea that you can build systems that that destroy human civilization without them being deeply integrated into human civilization is impossible and for them to be integrated they have to be human-like not just in body and form but in in all the things that we value as humans one of which is consciousness the other one is just ability to communicate the other ones poetry music and beauty and all those things like they have to be all of those things i mean this is what i think about it it does make me sad but it's letting go which is uh they might be just better at everything we appreciate than us and that's sad and and hopefully they'll keep us around but i think it's a kind of it is a kind of goodbye to uh like realizing that we're not the most special species on earth anymore that's still painful it's still painful and in terms of whether such a creation would have to be conscious let's say i'm not so sure i mean you know let's imagine something that can pass the turing test you know that something that passes the turing test could over text based interaction in any event um successfully mimic uh you know a very conscious intelligence on the other end but just be completely unconscious so that's a possibility and that if you take that up a radical step which i think we can be permitted if we're thinking about super intelligence um you could have something that could reason its way through this is my optimization function and in order to get to it i've got to deal with these messy somewhat illogical things that are as intelligent in relation to me as they are intelligent relation to ants i can trick them manipulate them whatever and i know the resources i need i know this i need this amount of power i need to seize control of these manufacturing resources that are robotically operated i need to improve those robots with software upgrades and then ultimately mechanical upgrades which i can affect through x y and z that doesn't you know that could still be a thing that passes the turing test i don't think it's necessarily certain that that optimization function mass you know um maximizing entity would be conscious see i so this is from a very engineering perspective because i i think a lot about natural language processing all those kind of from so very i'm speaking to a very specific problem of just say the touring test i really think that something like consciousness is required when you say reasoning you're separating that from consciousness but i think consciousness is part of reasoning in in the sense that you will not be able to become super intelligent in the way that it's required to be part of human society without having consciousness like i i really think it's impossible to separate the consciousness thing but it's hard to define consciousness when you just use that word sure even just like the capacity the way i think about consciousness is the important symptoms or maybe consequences of consciousness one of which is the capacity to suffer i think ai will need to be able to suffer in order to become super intelligent to feel the pain the uncertainty the doubt the other part of that is not just the suffering but the con the ability to understand that it too is mortal in in a sense that has a self-awareness about his presence in the world understand that it's finite and be terrified of that finiteness i personally think that's the fundamental part of the human condition is this fear of death that most of us construct an illusion around but i think ai would need to be able to really have it part of its whole essence like every computation every part of the thing that generates that does both the perception and generates the behavior will have to have i don't know how this is accomplished but it i believe it has to truly be terrified of death truly have the capacity to suffer and from that something that would be recognized to us humans as consciousness would emerge whether it's the illusion of consciousness i don't know the point is it looks a whole hell of a lot like consciousness to us humans and i believe the ai when you ask it will also say that it is conscious you know in the full sense that we say that we're conscious and all of that i think is fully integrated like you can't separate the two the idea of the paper clip maximizer that sort of ultra rationally would be able to destroy all humans because it's really good at that at accomplishing the um a simple objective function that doesn't care about the value of humans it may be possible but the number of trajectories to that are far outnumbered by the trajectories that create something that is conscious something that appreciative of beauty creates beautiful things in the same way that humans can create beautiful things and ultimately like the the sad destructive path for that ai would look a lot like just better humans than uh than like these cold machines and i would say of course the cold machines that lack consciousness the the philosophical zombies make me sad but also what makes me sad is just things that are far more powerful and smart and uh creative than us too because then then um in the same way that alpha zero becoming a better chess player than the best of humans even starting with deep blue but really with alpha zero that makes me sad too one of the most beautiful games that humans ever created uh that used to be seen as demonstrations of the intellect which is chess and go in other parts of the world have been solved by ai that that makes me quite sad and it feels like the progress of that is just pushing on forward oh it makes me sad too and to be perfectly clear i i absolutely believe that artificial consciousness is entirely possible and it's not something i rule out at all i mean you if you could get smart enough to have a perfect map of the neural structure and the neural states and the amount of neurotransmitters that are going between every synapse in a particular person's mind could you replicate that in silica at some you know reasonably distant you know point in the future absolutely and then you'd have a consciousness i don't rule out the possibility of artificial consciousness in any way what i'm less certain about is whether consciousness is a requirement for super intelligence pursuing a maximizing function of some sort um i don't i don't feel the certitude that consciousness simply must be part of that um you had said you know for it to coexist with human society would need to be consciousness could be entirely true but it also could just exist orthogonally to human society and it could also upon attaining a superintelligence with a maximizing function very very very rapidly because of the speed at which computing works compared to our own you know meat based minds very very rapidly make the decisions and calculations necessary to seize the reigns of power before we even know what's going on yeah i mean kind of like biological viruses do yeah don't necessarily they they integrate themselves just fine with human society yeah without technically without consciousness without even being alive you know technically by the standards of a lot of biologists so this is a bit of a tangent but you've uh talked with sam harris on that four hour special episode we mentioned and um i just curious to ask because i use this meditation app i've been using the past month to meditate is this something you've integrated as part of your life meditation or fasting or has has some of sam harris rubbed off on you in terms of his appreciation of of meditation and just kind of from a third person perspective analyzing your own mind consciousness free will and so on you know i have tried it three separate times in my life really made a concerted attack on meditation and integrating it into my life um one of them the most extreme was i i took a class based on the work of john kabat-zinn uh who is you know in many ways one of the the founding people behind the mindful meditation movement uh that required like part of the class was you know it was a weekly class and you were going to meditate an hour a day every day and having done that for i think was 10 weeks it might have been 13 however long period of time was at the end of it it just didn't stick as soon as it was over you know i did not feel that gravitational pull i did not feel the collapse in quality of life after wimping out on that on that project and then the most recent one was actually with sam's app uh during during the lockdown i did make a pretty good and consistent concerted effort to listen to his 10-minute meditation every day and i've always fallen away from it and i i you know you're kind of interpreting why did i personally do this i do believe it was ultimately because it wasn't bringing me that you know joy or inner peace or better confidence of being me that i was hoping to get from it otherwise i think i would have clung to it in the way that we cling to certain good habits like i'm really good at flossing my teeth not that you were going to ask lex but that's one thing that defeats a lot of people i'm good at that see uh herman hesse i think uh if you know which book or maybe i forget where i've read everything of his so it's it's unclear uh where it came from but he had this idea that anybody who is um who truly achieves mastery in things will learn how to meditate in some way so it could be the that for you the flossing of teeth is is yet another like little inkling of meditation like it doesn't have to be this very particular kind of meditation maybe podcasting of an amazing podcast that could be meditation the writing process is meditation for me like there's there's a bunch of there's a bunch of mechanisms which take my mind into a very particular place that looks a whole lot like meditation for example when i've been running uh for the over the past couple years and um especially when i listen to certain kinds of audiobooks like i've listened to the rise and fall of the third reich i've listened to a lot of sort of world war ii which at once because i have a lot of family who's lost in world war ii and so so much of the soviet union is grounded in the suffering of world war ii that somehow it connects me to my history but also there's some kind of purifying aspect to thinking about how cruel but at the same time how beautiful human nature could be and so you're also running like it clears the mind from all the concerns of the world and somehow it takes you to this place where you're like deeply appreciative to be alive in the sense that as opposed to listening to your breath or like feeling your breath and thinking about your consciousness and all those kinds of processes that uh sam's app does well this does that for me the the running and flossing may do that for you so maybe herman has these onto something so yeah i hope flossing is not my main form of expertise although i am going to claim a certain expertise there and i'm going to claim somebody has to be the best flosser in the world that ain't me i'm just glad that i'm a consistent one i mean there are a lot of things that bring me into a flow state and i think maybe perhaps that's one reason why meditation isn't as necessary for me um i definitely enter a flow state when i'm writing i'm definitely in her flow state when i'm editing i definitely enter a flow state when i'm mixing and mastering music um i enter a flow state when i'm doing heavy heavy research to either prepare for a podcast or to also do tech investing you know to make myself smart in a a new field that is fairly alien to me um i can just the hours can just melt away while i'm you know reading this and watching that youtube lecture and you know going through this presentation and so forth so maybe because there's a lot of things that bring me into a flow state in my normal weekly life not daily unfortunately but certainly my normal weekly life that i have less of an urge to meditate you've been working with sam's app for about a month now you said um is this your first run-in with meditation it's your first attempt to integrate it with with your life for like meditation meditation yeah i always thought running and thinking i listened to brown noise often that takes my mind i don't know what the hell it does but it takes my mind immediately into like the state where i'm deeply focused on anything i do i don't know why so it's like you're accompanying sound yeah really what's the difference between brown and white noise this is a cool term i haven't heard before so people should look up brown noise they don't have to because you're about to tell them what it is oh because you have to experience you have to listen to it so i think white noise is uh this is this has to do with music i think there's different colors there's pink noise and i think that has to do with uh like the frequencies like the white noise is usually uh less bassy brow noise is very bassy so it's more like like versus like like the if that makes sense so yeah it takes there's like a deepness to it i think it everyone is different but for me uh i i was it was when i was uh i was a research scientist at mit when i would especially when there's a lot of students around i remember just being annoyed at the noise of people talking and one of my colleagues said well you should try listening to brown noise like it really knocks out everything because i used to wear your earplugs too like just see if i can block it out and one like the moment i put it on something it's as if my mind was waiting all these years to hear that sound everything's just focused in at least it makes me wonder how many other amazing things out there they're waiting to discover from my own particular like biological for my own particular brain so that it just goes the mind just focuses in it's kind of incredible so i see that as a kind of meditation maybe uh i'm using a performance-enhancing uh uh sound to achieve that meditation but i've been doing that for for many years now and running and walking and doing uh cal newport was the first person that introduced me to the idea of deep work just put a word to the kind of thinking that's required to sort of deeply think about a problem especially if it's mathematical in nature i see that as a kind of meditation because what it's doing is you're you have these constructs in your mind that you're building on top of each other and there's all these distracting thoughts that keep bombarding your from all over the place and the whole process is you slowly let them kind of move past you and that's a meditative process it's very meditative that sounds a lot like what sam talks about um in his meditation app which i did use to be clear for a while of just letting the thought go by without deranging you derangement is one of sam's favorite words as i'm sure you know um but uh brown noise that's really intriguing i am i am going to try that as soon as this evening yeah to see to see if it works but very well might not work at all so yeah yeah i think the interesting point is and the same with the fasting and the diet is uh i long ago stopped trusting experts or maybe taking the word of experts as the gospel truth and only using it as a an inspiration to try something to try thoroughly something so fasting was one of the things when i first discovered i've been many times eating just once a day so that's a 24-hour fast it makes me feel amazing and at the same time eating only meat putting ethical concerns aside makes me feel amazing i don't know why it doesn't the the point is to be an n of one scientist until nutrition science becomes a real science to it to where it's doing like studies that deeply understand the biology underlying all of it and also does real thorough long-term studies of thousands if not millions of people versus uh versus a very like small studies that are kind of generalizing from the very from very noisy data and all those kinds of things where you can't control all the elements particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly variant among us so there are going to be some people like if brown noise is a game changer for seven percent of people yeah there's 93 odds that i'm not one of them but there's certainly every reason in the world to test it out now so i'm intrigued by the fasting i i like you um well i assume like you i don't have any problem going to one meal a day and i often do that inadvertently and i've never done it methodically like i've never done it like i'm going to do this for 15 days maybe i should and maybe i should like how many how many days in a row of the one day one meal a day did you find brought noticeable impact to you was it after three days of it was it months of it like what was it well the noticeable impact is day one so for me folk because i i eat a very low carb diet so the hunger wasn't the hugest issue like if there wasn't a painful hunger egg like wanting to eat yeah so i was already kind of primed for it and uh the the benefit comes from a lot of people that do intermittent fasting that's only like 16 hours of fasting get this benefit too is the focus there's a clarity of thought if my brain was a runner it felt like i'm running on a track when i'm fasting versus running in quicksand like it's much crisper and is this your first 72 hour faster first time during 72 hours yeah and that's a different thing but similar like i'm going up and down in terms of in terms of hunger and the focus is really crisp the thing i'm noticing most of all to be honest is um how much eating even when it's once a day or twice a day is part a big part of my life like i almost feel like i have way more time in my life right and it's not so much about the eating but like i don't have to plan my day around like today i don't have any eating to do it does free up hours or any cleaning up after eating yeah or provisioning of food but like or even like thinking about it's not a thing like so when you think about what you're going to do tonight i think i'm realizing that as opposed to thinking you know i'm going to work on this problem or i'm going to go on this walk or i'm going to call this person i often think i'm going to eat this thing you you allow dinner as a kind of uh you know when people talk about like the weather or something like that it's almost like a generic thought you allow yourself to have because uh because it's the lazy thought and i don't have the opportunity to have that thought because i'm not eating it right so now i get to think about like the things i'm actually gonna do tonight that are more complicated than the eating process that's that's been the most noticeable thing and to be honest and then there's people that have written me that have done seven day fast and uh there's a few people that written me and i've heard of this is doing uh 30 day fasts and it's interesting the body i don't know what the health benefits are necessarily what that shows me is how adaptable the human body is yeah and and that's incredible and that's something really important to remember when we uh think about how to live life because the body adapts yeah i mean we sure couldn't go 30 days without water that's right um but food yeah it's been done it's demonstrably possible you ever read um franz kafka has a great short story called the hunger artist yeah i love that great story you know that was before i started fasting i read that story and i i admired the beauty of that the artistry of that actual hunger artist yeah that uh it's like madness but it also felt like a little bit of genius i actually have to reread it you know what that's what i'm going to do tonight and i read it because i'm doing the fast because you're in the midst of it yeah it makes me very contextual i haven't read it since high school and i'd love to read it again i love his work so we'll read it tonight too and part of the reason of sort of i've uh here in texas people have been so friendly that i've been non-stop eating like brisket with incredible people a lot of whiskey as well so i gained quite a bit of weight which i'm embracing it's okay but i am also aware as i'm fasting that like i have a lot of fat for for to run on like i have a lot of like um natural resources on my body you've got reserves reserves yeah and that's that's really cool you know there's like a re this whole thing this biology works well i can go a long time because of the uh the long-term investing in terms of brisket that i've been doing in the weeks before so it's all training it's all true prep work prep work yeah so okay you open a bunch of doors one of which is music so i gotta walk in at least for a brief moment i love guitar love music you founded a music company uh but you're also a musician yourself let me ask the big ridiculous question first what's the greatest song of all time greatest song of all time okay wow it's it's gonna obviously vary dramatically from genre to genre so like you i like guitar uh perhaps like you although i've dabbled in in inhaling every genre of music that i can almost practically imagine i keep coming back to you know the sound of bass guitar drum keyboards voice i love that style of music and added to it i think a lot of really cool electronic production make something that's really really new and hybridy and awesome but you know that kind of like guitar-based rock um i think i've gotta go with won't get fooled again by the who um it is such an epic song it's got so much grandeur to it it uses the synthesizers that were available at the time this has got to be i think 1972-73 which are very very primitive to our ears but uses them in this hypnotic and beautiful way that i can't imagine somebody with the greatest synthetic conceivable by today's technology could do a better job of in the context of that song and it's you know almost operatic so i would say in that genre the genre of you know rock um that would be my nomination i'm totally in my brain pinball wizard is overriding everything else but who's so like i can't even imagine the song well i would say ironically with pinball wizard so that came from the movie tommy and in the movie tommy uh the rival of tommy the reigning pinball champ was elton john and so there are a couple versions of pinball wizard out there one sung by roger daltrey of the who which a purist would say hey that's the real pinball wizard but the version that is sung by elton john in the movie which is available though to those who are ambitious and want to dig for it that's even better in my mind yeah the covers and i for myself i was thinking what is the song for me um i think uh i think that changes day to day too i was realizing that but for me somebody who values lyrics as well and the emotion in the song by the way hallelujah by uh leonard cohen was the close one but the number one is the johnny cash's cover of hurt that is um there there's something so powerful about that song about that cover about that performance maybe another one is the cover of sound of silence uh maybe there's something about covers for me so who's cover sounds because simon and garfunkel i think did the original recording yes right so which cover is it that there's a cover by a disturbed it's a metal band which is so interesting because i'm really not into that kind of metal but he does a pure vocal performance so he's he's not doing a metal performance is i would say is one of the greatest people should see it it's like 400 million views or something like that it's a it's probably the greatest live vocal performance i've ever heard is disturbed covering sound of silence and then do it as soon as i get home and that song came to life to me in the way that simon gothanka never did there was no for me it was simon and garfunkel there's not a there's not a pain there's not an anger there's not uh like um power to their performance it's it's almost like this uh melancholy i don't know well there's a lot i guess there's a lot of beauty to it like yeah objectively beautiful and yes i think i never thought of this until now but i think if you put entirely different lyrics on top of it unless they were joyous which would be weird um it wouldn't necessarily lose that much it's just a beauty in the harmonizing it's soft and you're right it's not it's not it's not dripping with emotion right the vocal performance is not dripping with emotion it's dripping with with you know harmonizing you know technical harmonizing brilliance and beauty now if you compare that to the disturbed cover or the johnny cash's herd cover when you walk away there's a few it's it's haunting it's uh it stays with you for a long time there's certain performances that will just stay with you to where like if you watch people respond to that and that's certainly how i felt when you listen to that the disturbed performance or giant cash hurt there's a response to where you just sit there with your mouth open kind of like paralyzed by it somehow and i think that's what makes for a great song to where you're just like it's not that you're like singing along or having fun that that's another way a song could be great but where you're just like what this is you're in awe yeah if we go to uh listen.com and that whole fascinating era of music yeah in the in the 90s transitioning to the arts the so i remember those days the napster days when piracy from my perspective allegedly ruled the land um what do you make of that whole era what what are the big what was first of all your experiences of that era and uh what were the big takeaways in terms of piracy in terms of what what it takes to build a company that succeeds in that kind of in in that kind of digital space in terms of music but in terms of anything creative well um so for those who don't remember which is going to be most folks listen.com created a service called rhapsody which is much much more recognizable to folks because rhapsody became a pretty big name for reasons i'll get into in a second so um for people who aren't you know don't know their early online music history we were the first company so i founded listen i was alone founder and um rhapsody was we were the first service to get full catalog licenses from all the major music labels uh in order to distribute their music online and we specifically did it through a mechanism which at the time struck people as exotic and bizarre and kind of incomprehensible which was unlimited on demand streaming which of course now you know it's a model that's been you know appropriated uh by spotify and apple and many many others so we were a pioneer on that front what was really really really hard about doing business in those days was the reaction of the music labels to piracy which was about 180 degrees opposite of what their reaction quote unquote should have been from the standpoint of preserving their business from piracy so napster came along and was a service that enabled people to get near unlimited access to most songs i mean truly obscure things could be very hard to find on napster but most songs with a relatively simple you know one-click uh ability to download those songs that have the mp3s on on their hard drives but there was a lot that was very messy about the napster experience you might download a really god-awful recording of that song you may download a recording that actually wasn't that song with some prankster putting it up to sort of mess with people you could struggle to find the song that you're looking for you could end up finding yourself connected with peer-to-peer you might randomly find yourself connected to somebody in bulgaria doesn't have a very good internet connection so you might wait 19 minutes only for it to snap etc etc and our argument to well actually let's start with how that hit the music labels the music labels had been in a very very comfortable position for many many decades of essentially you know having monopoly you know having been the monopoly providers of a certain subset of artists any given label was a monopoly provider of the artists and the recordings that they owned and they could sell it at what turned out to be tremendously favorable rates in the late era of the cd um you know you were talking close to twenty dollars for a compact disc that might have one song that you were crazy about and simply needed to own that might actually be glued to 17 other songs that you found to be sure crap and so the music industry had used the fact that it had this unbelievable leverage and profound pricing power to really get music lovers to the point that they felt very very misused by the entire situation now along comes napster and music sales start getting gutted with extreme rapidity and the reaction of the music industry to that was one of shock and absolute fury which is understandable you know i mean industries do get gutted all the time but i struggle to think of an analog of an industry that got it got gutted that rapidly i mean we could say that passenger train service certainly got gutted by airlines but that was a process that took place over decades and decades and decades it wasn't something that happened you know really started showing up in the numbers in a single digit number of months and started looking like an existential threat within a year or two so the music industry is quite understandably in a state of shock and fury i don't blame them for that but then their reaction was catastrophic both for themselves and almost for people like us who were trying to do you know the cowboy and the white hat thing so our response to the music industry was look what you need to do to fight piracy you can't put the genie back in the bottle you can't switch off the internet even if you all shut your eyes and wish very very very hard the internet is not going away and these peer-to-peer technologies are genies out of the bottle and if you god don't whatever you do don't shut down napster because if you do suddenly that technology is going to splinter into 30 different nodes that you'll never ever be able to shut off what we suggested to them is like look what you want to do is to create a massively better experience to piracy something that's way better that you sell at a completely reasonable price and this is what it is don't just give people access to that very limited number of songs that they happen to have acquired and paid for or pirated and have on their hard drive give them access to all of the music in the world for a simple low price and obviously that doesn't sound like a crazy suggestion i don't think to anybody's ears today because that is how the majority of music is now being consumed online but in doing that you're going to create a much much better option to this kind of crappy kind of rickety kind of you know buggy process of acquiring mp3s now unfortunately the music industry was so angry about napster and so forth that for essentially three and a half years they folded their arms stamped their feet and boycotted the internet so they basically gave people who were fervently passionate about music and were digitally modern they gave them basically one choice if you want to have access to digital music we the music industry insists that you steal it because we are not going to sell it to you yeah so what that did is it made an entire generation of people morally comfortable with swiping the music because they felt quite pragmatically well they're not giving me any choice here it's like a you know 20 year old violating the 21 drinking age they do that they're not going to feel like felons they're going to be like this is an unreasonable law and i'm skirting it right so i make a whole generation of people morally comfortable with swiping music but also technically adept at it and when they did shut down napster and kind of even trickier tools and like tweakier tools like kazaa and so forth came along people just figured out how to do it so by the time they finally grudgingly it took years allowed us to release this experience that we were quite convinced would be better than piracy we had this enormous hole had been dug where lots of people said music is a thing that is free and that's morally okay and i know how to get it and so streaming took many many many more years to take off and become the you know the gargantuan thing the juggernaut it is today then would have happened if they'd made you know pivoted to let's sell a better experience as opposed to demand that people want digital music steal it like what lessons do we draw from that because we're probably in the midst of living through a bunch of similar situations in different domains currently we just don't know there's a lot of things in this world that are really painful like uh i mean i don't know if you can draw perfect parallels but fiat money versus cryptocurrency there's a lot of currently people in power who are kind of very skeptical about cryptocurrency although that's changing but it's arguable it's changing way too slowly there's a lot of people making that argument where there should be a complete like coinbase and all this stuff switched to that there's a lot of other domains that where a pivot like if you pivot now you're going to win big but you don't pivot because you're stubborn and so i mean it's like is this just the way that companies are the company succeeds initially and then it grows and there's a huge number of employees and managers that don't have the guts or the institutional mechanisms to do the pivot is that's just the way of companies well i think what happens i'll use the case of the music industry there was an economic model that had put food on the table and paid for marble lobbies and seven and even eight-figure executive salaries for many many decades which was the physical collection of music and then you start talking about something like unlimited streaming and it it seems so ephemeral one like such a long shot that people start worrying about cannibalizing their own business and they lose sight of the fact that something illicit is cannibalizing their business at an extraordinarily fast rate and so if they don't do it themselves they're doomed i mean we used to put slides in front of these folks this is really funny where we said okay let's assume rhapsody we want it to be 9.99 a month and we want it to be 12 months so it's 120 a year from the budget of a music lover and then we were also able to get reasonably accurate statistics that showed how many cds per year the average person who bothered to collect music which was not all people actually bought and it was overwhelmingly clear that the average cd plot buyer spends a hell of a lot less than 120 a year on music this is a revenue expansion blah blah blah but all they could think of and i'm not saying this in a pejorative or or patronizing way i don't blame them they'd grown up in this environment for decades all they could think of was the incredible margins that they had on a cd and they would say well if this cd you know by the mechanism that you guys are proposing you know the cd that i'm selling for 17.99 somebody would need to stream those songs we were talking about a penny a play back then it's less than that now that the record labels get paid but you know would have to stream songs from that 1799 times it's never going to happen so they were just sort of stuck in the model of this but it's like no dude but they're going to spend money on all this other stuff so i think people get very hung up on that i mean another example is really the taxi industry was not monolithic like that like the music labels it was a whole bunch of fleets and a whole bunch of cities very very fragmented it's an imperfect analogy but nonetheless imagine if the taxi industry writ large upon seeing uber said oh my god people want to be able to hail things easily cheaply they don't want to mess with cash they want to know how many minutes it's going to be they want to know the fair in advance and they want a much bigger fleet than what we've got if the taxi industry had rolled out something like that with the branding of yellow taxis universally known and kind of loved by americans and expanded their fleet in a necessary manner i don't think uber lyft ever would have gotten a foothold yeah um but the problem there was that real economics in the taxi industry wasn't with fairs it was with the scarcity of medallions and so the taxi fleets in many cases owned gazillions of medallions whose value came from their very scarcity so they simply couldn't pivot to that so you think you end up having these vested interests with economics that aren't necessarily visible to outsiders who get very very reluctant to disrupt their own model which is why it ends up coming from the outside so frequently so you know what it takes to build a successful startup but you're also an investor in a lot of successful startups let me ask for advice what do you think it takes to build a successful startup by way of advice well i think it starts i mean everything starts and even ends with the founder and so i think it's really really important to look at the founders motivations and their sophistication about what they're doing um in almost all cases that i'm familiar with and have thought hard about you've had a founder who was deeply deeply inculcated in the domain of technology that they were taking on now what's interesting about that is you could say you know wait how is that possible because there's so many young founders when you look at young founders they're generally coming out of very nascent emerging fields of technology we're simply being present and accounted for and engaged in the community for a period of even months is enough time to make them very very deeply inculcated i mean you look at mark andreessen and netscape um you know mark had been doing visual web browsers when netscape had been founded for what a year and a half but he created the first one you know and in mosaic when he was an undergrad and the commercial internet was pre-nascent in 1994 when that escape was was founded so there's somebody who's very very deep in their domain mark zuckerberg also social networking very deep in his domain even though it was nascent at the time lots of people doing crypto stuff i mean you know in the you know ten years ago even seven or eight years ago by being a really really vehement and engaged participant in the crypto ecosystem you could be an expert in that you look however more established industries take salesforce.com salesforce automation pretty mature field when it got started who's the executive and the founder um mark benioff who spent 13 years at oracle and was an investor in siebel systems which ended up being salesforce's main competition so you know more established you need the entrepreneur to be very very deep in the technology and the culture and the winter of the space because you need that entrepreneur that founder to have just an unbelievably accurate intuitive sense for where the puck is going right and that only comes from being very deep so that is sort of factor number one and the next thing is that that founder needs to be charismatic and or credible or ideally both in exactly the right ways to be able to attract a team that is bought into that vision and is bought into that founders intuitions being correct and not just the team obviously but also the investors so it takes a certain personality type to pull that off then the next thing i'm still talking about a founder is a relentlessness and indeed a mono mania to put this above things that might rationally you know should perhaps rationally supersede it for a period of time um to just relentlessly pivot when pivoting's called for and it's always called for i mean think of even very successful companies like how many times did facebook pivot you know news feed was something that was completely alien to the original version of facebook and came found foundationally important how many times at google how many times had any given how many times has apple pivoted you know that founder energy in dna when the foundry moves on the dna that's been inculcated with a company has to have that relentlessness and that ability to pivot and pivot and pivot without you know being worried about sacred cows and then the last thing i'll say about the founder before i get to the rest of the team and that'll be mercifully brief is the founder has to be obviously a really great hirer but just important a very good fire and firing is a horrific experience for both people involved in it it is a wrenching emotional experience and being good at realizing when this particular person is damaging the interests of the company and the team and the shareholders and you know having the intestinal fortitude to have that conversation and make it happen is something that most people don't have in them and it's something that needs to be developed in most people um or maybe some people have it naturally but without that ability that will take an a plus organization into b minus range very very quickly and um so that's all what needs to be present in the founder can you just say sure how damn good you are rob that was brilliant the the one thing that was kind of really kind of surprising to me is um having a deep technical knowledge because um i think the way you expressed it which is that allows you to be really honest with the capabilities of what like what's possible like of course you're often trying to do the impossible but in order to do the impossible you have to be quote unquote impossible but you have to be honest with what is actually possible and it doesn't necessarily have to be the technical competence it's got to be in my view just a complete immersion in that emerging market and so i can imagine there are a couple people out there who have started really good crypto projects who themselves aren't right in the code but they're immersed in the culture and through the culture and a deep understanding of what's happening and what's not happening they can get a good intuition of what's possible but the very first power higher i mean a good great way to solve that is to have a technical co-founder and you know dual founder companies have become extremely common for that reason uh and if you're not doing that and you're not the technical person but you are the founder you've got to be really great at hiring a very damn good technical person very very fast can i can i on the founder ask you is it possible to do this alone there's so many people giving advice on saying that it's impossible to do the first few steps not impossible but much more difficult to do it alone if we were to take the journey saying especially in the software world where there's not significant investment required for to build something up yeah is it possible to go to the uh to a prototype to something that essentially works and already has a huge number of customers alone sure um there are lots and lots of low f loan founder companies out there that have made an incredible difference um i mean i'm not certainly putting rhapsody in the league of spotify we were too early to be spotify but we did an awful lot of innovation and then after the company sold and ended up in the hands of real networks and mtv you know got to millions of subs right i was a lone founder and i studied arabic and middle eastern history undergrad so i def wasn't very very technical but yeah loan founders can absolutely work and the advantage of a loan founder is you don't have the catastrophic potential of a falling out between founders i mean two founders who fall out with each other badly can rip a company to shreds because they both have an enormous amount of equity an enormous amount of power and the capital structure is a result of that they both have an enormous amount of moral authority with the team as a result of each having that founder role and i have witnessed over the years many many situations in which companies have been shredded or have suffered near fatal blows because of a falling out between founders and the more founders you add the more risky that becomes i i i don't think there should ever almost i mean you never say never but multiple founders beyond two um is such an unstable and potentially treacherous situation that i would never ever recommend going beyond two but i do see value in the non-technical sort of business and market and outside-minded founder teaming up with the technical founder um there is a lot of merit to that but there's a lot of danger in that unless those two blow apart was it lonely for you unbelievably and that's the drawback i mean if you're a lone founder um there is no other person that you can sit down with and tackle problems and talk them through who has precisely or nearly precisely your alignment of interests your most trusted board member is likely an investor and therefore at the end of the day has the interest of preferred stock in mind not common stock your most trusted vp who might own a very significant stake in the company doesn't own anywhere near your stake in the company and so their long-term interest may well be in getting the right level of experience and credibility necessary to peel off and start their own company or their interests might be aligned with you know jumping ship and and setting up with another with a with a different company whether it's a rival or one in a completely different space so yeah being a loan founder is a spectacularly lonely thing and that's a major downside to what what about mentorship because you're a mentor to a lot of people can you find an alleviation to that loneliness in the space of ideas with a good mentor with a good mentor like a mentor who's mentoring you yeah yeah you can a great deal particularly if it's somebody who's been through this very process and has navigated it successfully and cares enough about you and your well-being being to give you you know beautifully unvarnished advice that can be a huge huge thing that can disraise things a great deal and i had a board member who who was not an investor who basically played that role for me to a great degree he came in maybe halfway through the company's history though i would have needed that the most in the very earliest days yeah the loneliness um it's the whole journey of life we're always alone alone together it pays to embrace that you were saying that there might be something outside of the founder that's also that you were promising to be brief on yeah okay so we talked about the founder you were asking what makes a great startup yes and great founder is thing number one but then thing number two and it's ginormous is a great team and so i said so much about the founder because one hopes or one believes that a founder who is a great hirer is going to be hiring people and in charge of critical functions like engineering and marketing and biz dev and sales and so forth who themselves are great hirers but what needs to radiate from the founder into the team that might be a little bit different from what's in the gene code of the founder the team needs to be fully bought in to the you know the intuitions and the vision of the founder great we've got that but um the team needs to have a slightly different thing which is you know it's 99 obsession is execution is to relentlessly hit the milestones hit the objectives hit the quarterly goals that is you know one percent vision you don't want to get lose that but execution machines you know people who have a demonstrated ability and a demonstrated focus on yeah i go from point to point to point i try to beat and raise expectations relentlessly never fall short and you know both sort of blaze and follow the path not that the path is getting i mean blaze the trail as well i mean a good founder is going to trust that vp of sales to have a better sense of what it takes to build out that organization what the milestones be and it's gonna be kind of a dialogue amongst those at the top but you know execution obsession in the team is the next thing yeah there's some sense where the founder you know you talk about sort of the space of ideas like first principles thinking asking big difficult questions of like future trajectories or having a big vision and big picture dreams you can almost be a dreamer it feels like when you're like not the founder but in the space of sort of leadership but when it gets to the ground floor there has to be execution there has to be hitting deadlines and uh sometimes those are attention there's something about dreams that um our attention with the pragmatic nature of execution not dreams but sort of ambitious vision and though those have to be i suppose coupled the vision in the leader and the execution in the in the software world that would be the programmer or the designer absolutely amongst many other things you're an incredible conversationalist a podcaster you host a podcast called after on what i mean there's a million questions i want to ask you here but one at the highest level what do you think makes for a great conversation i would say two things one of two things and ideally both of two things one is if something is very is beautifully architected whether it's done deliberately and methodically and willfully as you know as when i do it or whether that just emerges from the conversation but something that's beautifully architected that can create something that's incredibly powerful and memorable um or something where there's just extraordinary chemistry yes and so with all in or go way back you might remember the npr show car talk oh yeah i wouldn't care less about auto mechanics myself that's right but i love that show because the banter between those two guys was just beyond it without any parallel right you know and some kind of edgy podcast like red scare is just really entertaining to me because the banter the women on that show is just so good and all in and that kind of thing so i think it's it's a combination of sort of the arc and the chemistry and i think because the arc can be so important that's why very very highly produced uh podcasts like this american life obviously a radio show but i think of a podcast because that's how i always consume it or criminal or you know a lot of what wonder he does and so forth that is real documentary making and that requires a big team and a big budget relative to the kinds of things you and i do but nonetheless then you got that arc and that can be really really compelling but if we go back to conversation i think it's a combination of structure and chemistry yeah and i've actually personally have lost i used to love this american life and for some reason because it lacks the possibility of magic it's engineered magic i i've fallen off of it myself as well i mean when i fell madly in love with it during the auts it was the only thing going yeah they were really smart to adopting to adopt podcasting as a distribution mechanism early um but yeah i think that maybe there's a little bit less magic there now because i think they have agendas other than necessarily just delighting their listeners with quirky stories which i think is what it was all about back in the day and some other things is there like a memorable conversation that you've had on the podcast whether it was because it was wild and fun or one that was exceptionally challenging maybe challenging to prepare for that kind of thing is there something that stands out in your mind that that's uh you can draw an insight from yeah i mean this no way diminishes the episodes that will not be the answer to these two questions but an example of something that was really really challenging to prepare for was george church so as i'm sure you know and as i'm sure many of your listeners know he is one of the absolute leading lights in the field of synthetic biology he's also unbelievably prolific his lab is large and has all kinds of efforts have spun out of that and what i wanted to make my george church episode about was first of all you know grounding people into what is this thing called syn bio and that required me to learn a hell of a lot more about sin bio than i knew going into it so there was just this very broad i mean i knew much more than the average person going into that episode but there was this incredible breadth of grounding that i needed to give myself in the domain and then george does so many interesting things there's so many interesting things emitting from his lab that you know and and he had he and i had a really good dialogue he was a great guide going into it winnowing it down to the three to four that i really wanted us to focus on to create a sense of wonder and magic in the listener of what could be possible from this very broad spectrum domain that was a doozy of a challenge that was a tough tough tough one to prepare for now in terms of something that was just wild and fun and unexpected i mean by the time we sat down to interview i knew where we were going to go but just in terms of the idea space don hoffman oh wow yeah so don hoffman uh as again some listeners probably know because he's i think i was the first podcaster to interview him i'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with them but he has this unbelievably contrarian take on the nature of reality but it is contrarian in a way that all the ideas are highly internally consistent and snap together in a way that's just delightful and it seems as radically violating of our intuitions and is radically violating of the probable nature of reality as anything that one can encounter but an analogy that he uses which is very powerful which is what intuition could possibly be more powerful than the notion that there is a single unitary direction called down and we're on this big flat thing for which there is a thing called down and we all know that i mean that's the most intuitive thing that one could probably think of and we all know that that ain't true so my conversation with don hoffman is just wild and full of plot twists and interesting stuff and the interesting thing about the wildness of his ideas it's to me at least as a listener coupled with uh he's a good listener and he empathizes with the people who challenge his ideas like uh what's uh what's a better way to phrase that he is a welcoming of challenge in a way that creates a really fun conversation oh totally yeah he he he loves a perry or a jab whatever the word is yeah at his argument he honors it he's a very very you know gentle and and non-combative soul but then he is very good and takes great evident joy in responding to that in in a way that expands your understanding of his thinking let me as a small tangent of tying up together our previous conversation about listening.com and streaming and spotify and the world of podcasting so we've been talking about this magical medium of podcasting i have a lot of friends at spotify at in the high positions of spotify as well i worry about spotify and podcasting and the future of podcasting in general that moves podcasting in the place of maybe wild gardens of sorts um since you've had a foot in both worlds have a foot in both worlds do you worry as well about the future of podcasting yeah i think walled gardens are really toxic to the medium that they start balkanizing so to take an example i'll take two examples with music it was a very very big deal that at rhapsody we were the first company to get full catalog licenses from all back then there were five major music labels and also hundreds and hundreds of indies because you needed to present the listener with a sense that basically everything is there and there is essentially no friction to discovering that which is new and you can wander this realm and all you really need is a good map whether it is something that somebody that the editorial team assembled or a good algorithm or whatever it is but a good map to wander this domain when you start walling things off a you undermine the joy of friction free discovery which is an incredibly valuable thing to deliver to your customer both from a business standpoint and simply from you know a humanistic standpoint of you want to bring delight to people but it also creates an incredible opening vector for piracy and so something that's very different from the rhapsody spotify etc like experience is what we have now in video you know like wow is that show on hulu is it on netflix is it on something like ifc channel is it on discovery plus is it here is it there and the more frustration and toe stubbing that people encounter when they are seeking something and they're already paying a very respectable amount of money per month to have access to content they can't find it the more that happens the more people are going to be driven to piracy solutions like to hell with it never know where i'm going to find something i never know what it's going to cost oftentimes really interesting things are simply unavailable that surprises me the number of times that i've been looking for things i don't even think are that obscure that are just it says not available in your geography period mister right so i think that that's a mistake and then the other thing is you know for podcasters and lovers of podcasting we should want to resist this wall garden thing because it a it it does um smother this friction free or eradicate this friction free discovery unless you want to sign up for lots of different services and also dims the voice of somebody who might be able to have a far far far bigger impact by reaching far more neurons you know with their ideas i'll use an example from it was probably the 90s or maybe it was the oughts of howard stern who had the biggest megaphone or maybe the second biggest after oprah megaphone and popular culture and because he was syndicated on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of radio stations at a time when terrestrial broadcast was the main thing people listened to in their car no more obviously but when he decided to go over to you know satellite radio if you can't remember was xm or sirius maybe they'd already merged at that point but when he did that he made you know totally his right to do it a financial calculation that they were offering him a nine figure sum to do that but his audience because not a lot of people were subscribing to satellite radio at that point his audience probably collapsed by i wouldn't be surprised if it was as much as 95 and so the influence that he had on the culture and his ability to sort of shape conversation and so forth just gotten muted yeah and also there's a certain sense especially in modern times where the walled gardens naturally lead to um i don't know if there's a term for it but people who are not creatives starting to have power over the creatives right and even if they don't stifle it if they're providing you know incentives within the platform to shape shift or you know even completely mutate or distort the show i mean imagine somebody has got um you know reasonably interesting idea for a podcast and they get signed up with let's say spotify then spotify is going to give them financing to get the things spun up and that's great and spotify is going to give them a certain amount of really uh you know powerful placement you know within the visual field of listeners but spotify's conditions for that they say look you know we think that your podcast will be much more successful if you dumb it down about 60 uh if you add some you know silly dirty jokes if you do this you do that and suddenly the person who is dependent upon spotify for permission to come into existence and is really different really wants to please them you know to get that money in to get that placement really wants to be successful now all of a sudden you're having a dialogue between a complete non-creative some marketing you know sort of data analytic person at spotify and a creative that's going to shape what that show is yeah you know so that could be much more common and ultimately having the aggregate um an even bigger impact than you know the cancellation let's say if somebody who says the wrong word or voices the wrong idea i mean that's kind of what you have not kind of what you have with film and tv is that so much influence is exerted over the storyline and the plots and the character arcs and all kinds of things by executives who are completely alien to the experience and the skill set of being a show runner in television being a director in film that you know is meant to like oh we can't piss off the chinese market here or we can't say that we need to have you know cast members that have precisely these demographics reflected or whatever it is that you know and obviously despite that extraordinary at least tv shows are now being made um you know in terms of film i think the quality has has nose-dived of the average let's say say american film coming out of a major studio the average quality and my view is nose dived over the past decade is it's kind of everything's got to be a superhero franchise but you know great stuff gets made despite that but i have to assume that in some cases at least in perhaps many cases greater stuff would be made if there was less interference from non-creative executives it's like the flip side of that though and this is was the pitch of spotify because i've heard their pitch is netflix from everybody i've heard that i've spoken with about netflix is they actually empower the creator i don't know i don't know what the heck they do but they do a good job of giving creators even the crazy ones like tim dillon like joe rogan like comedians freedom to be their crazy cells and the result is like some of the greatest television some of the greatest cinema whatever you call it ever made true right and i don't know what the heck they're doing it's a relative thing it's not from what i understand it's a relative thing they're interfering far far far less yeah than you know nbc or you know amc would have interfered so it's a relative thing and obviously they're the ones writing the checks and the other ones giving the platform so they have every right to their own influence yeah obviously uh but my understanding is it's they're relatively way more hands-off and that has had a demonstrable effect because i agree some of the greatest you know video produced video content of all time an incredibly inordinate percentage of that is coming out from netflix in just a few years when the history of cinema goes back many many decades and spotify wants to be that for podcasting and i hope they do become that for podcasting but i'm uh wearing my skeptical goggles or skeptical hat whatever the heck it is because it's not easy to do and it requires uh it requires letting go of power yeah giving power to the creatives it requires pivoting which large companies even as innovative as spotify is still now a large company pivoting into a whole new space is very tricky and difficult so i'm skeptical but hopeful yeah what advice would you give to a young person today about life about career we talked about startups we talked about music we talked about the end of human civilization is there advice you would give to a young person today maybe in college maybe in high school about uh about their life well let's see i mean there's so many domains you can advise on and you know i i'm not going to give advice on life because i i fear that i would drift into sort of hallmark bromides that really wouldn't be all that distinctive and they might be entirely true sometimes the greatest insights about life turn out to be like the kinds of things you'd see on a hallmark card so i'm gonna steer clear that on a career level you know one thing that i think um is unintuitive but unbelievably powerful is to focus not necessarily in on being you know in the top sliver of one percent in excelling at one domain that's important and valuable but to think in terms of intersections of two domains which are rare but valuable and there's a couple reasons for this the first is in an incredibly competitive world that is so much more competitive than it was when i was coming out of school radically more competitive than when it's when i was coming out of school to navigate your way to the absolute pinnacle of any domain let's say you want to be you know really really great at you know python pick a language whatever it is you want to be one of the world's greatest python developers javascript whatever your language is hopefully it's not cobalt um but by the way if you listen to this i am actually looking for a cobalt expert to interview because i find the language fascinating and there's not many of them so please if you're if you know a world expert in cobalt uh or fortran but both actually or if you are one or if you are one please email me yeah so i mean if you're going out there and you want to be in the top sliver one percent of python develops a very very difficult thing to do particularly would be number one in the world something like that and i'll use an analogy is i had a friend in college um who was um on a track and indeed succeeded at that to become an olympic meddler medalist and i think 100 meter breaststroke and he mortgaged a significant percentage of his sort of college life to that goal i should say dedicated or invested or whatever you wanted to say but he didn't participate in a lot of the social a lot of the late night a lot of this a lot of that because he was training so much and obviously he also wanted to keep up with his academics and at the end of the day story has a happy ending and that he did meddle in that bronze not gold but holy cow anybody who gets an olympic medal that's an extraordinary thing and at that moment he was you know one of the top three people on earth at that thing but wow how hard to do that how many thousands of other people went down that path and made similar sacrifices and didn't get there it's very very hard to do that whereas i'll use a personal example when i came out of business school i went to a good business school and and learned the things that were there to be learned and i came out and i entered a world with lots of harvard business school by the way okay yes it was harvard it's true you're the first person who went there who didn't say where you went it was just beautiful i appreciate that it's one of the greatest business schools uh in the world it's a it's a whole another fascinating conversation about that world but anyway but anyway so i learned the things that you you learn getting to be an mba from a from a top program and i entered a world that had hundreds of thousands of people who had mbas uh probably hundreds of thousands who have them from you know top ten programs uh but so i was not particularly great at being an mba person i was inexperienced uh relative to most of them and there were a lot of them but it was okay mba person right newly minted uh but then as it happened i found my way into working on the commercial internet in 1994 so i went to a at the time giant hot computing company called silicon graphics which had enough heft and enough you know head count that they could take on and experienced mbas and try to train them in the world of silicon valley but within that comp that company that had an enormous amount of surface area and was touching very a lot of areas and was had unbelievably smart people at the time uh it was not surprising that sgi started doing really interesting and innovative and trailblazing stuff on the internet before almost anybody else and part of the reason was that our founder jim clark went off to co-found netscape with mark andreessen so the whole company was like wait what was that what's this commercial internet thing so i end up in that group now in terms of being a commercial internet person or a world web world wide web person um again uh i was in that case barely credentialed i couldn't write a stitch of code but i got a i had a pretty good mind for grasping the business and and and cultural uh significance of this transition and this was again we were talking earlier about emerging areas within a few months you know i was in the relatively top echelon of people in terms of just sheer experience because like let's say it was five months into the program there were only so many people who had been doing world wide web stuff commercially for five months you know and then what was interesting though was the intersection of those two things the commercial web as it turned out grew into uh unbelievable vastness and so by being a pretty good okay web person and a pretty good okay mba person that intersection put me in a very rare group which was web oriented mbas and in those early days you could probably count on your fingers the number of people who came out a really competitive programs who were doing stuff full-time on the internet and and there was a greater appetite for great software developers in the internet domain but there was an appetite and a real one and a rapidly growing one for mba thinkers who were also seasoned and networked in the emerging world of the commercial world wide web and so finding an intersection of two things you can be pretty good at but is a rare intersection and a special intersection is probably a much easier way to make yourself distinguishable and in demand from the world than trying to be world-class at this one thing so in the intersection is where there's a to be discovered opportunity and success that's really interesting yeah there's actually more intersection of fields and fields themselves right so yeah i mean i'll give you kind of a funny hypothetical here but it's one i've been thinking about a little bit um there's a lot of people in crypto right now it'd be hard to be in the top percentile of crypto people whether it comes from just having a sheer grasp of the industry a great network within the industry technological skills whatever you want to call it um and then there's this parallel world an orthogonal world called crop insurance and there's you know i'm sure that's a big world crop insurance is a very very big deal particularly in the wealthy and industrialized world where people through sophisticated financial markets rule of law and you know large agricultural concerns that are worried about that um somewhere out there is somebody who is pretty crypto savvy but probably not top one percent but also has kind of been in the crop insurance world and understands that a hell of a lot better than almost anybody who's ever had anything to do with cryptocurrency and so i think that um decentralized finance defy one of the interesting and i think very world positive things that i think it's almost inevitably we'll be bringing to the world is crop insurance for small holding farmers you know i mean people who have tiny tiny plots of land in places like india etc where there is no crop insurance available to them because just the financial infrastructure doesn't exist but it's highly imaginable that using oracle networks that are trusted outside deliverers of factual information about rainfall in a particular area you can start giving drought insurance to folks like this the right person to come up with that idea is not a crypto whiz who doesn't know a blasted thing about small holding farmers the right person to come up with that is not a crop insurance whiz who isn't quite sure what bitcoin is but somebody occupies that intersection that's just one of gazillion examples of things that are going to come along for somebody who occupies the the right intersection of skills but isn't necessarily the number one person at either one of those expertises that's making me kind of wonder about my own little things that i'm average at and seeing were the intersections that could be exploited that's pretty profound so we talked quite a bit about the end of the world and how we're both optimistic about us figuring our way out unfortunately for now at least both you and i are going to die one day way too soon first of all that sucks it does i mean one i'd like to ask if you ponder your own mortality how does that kind of um what kind of wisdom inside does it give you about your own life and and broadly do you think about your life and what the heck it's all about yeah with respect to pondering mortality um i do try to do that as little as possible because there's not a lot i can do about it um but it's inevitably there and i think that what it does when you think about it in the right way is it makes you realize how unbelievably rare and precious the moments that we have here are and therefore how consequential the decisions that we make about how to spend our time are you know like do you do those 17 nagging emails or do you have dinner with somebody who's really important to you who haven't seen in three and a half years if you had an infinite expanse of time in front of you you might well rationally conclude i'm going to do those emails because collectively they're rather important and i have tens of thousands of years to catch up with my buddy tim but i think the scarcity of the time that we have helps us choose the right things if we're tuned to that and we're attuned to the context that mortality puts over the consequence of every decision we make of how to spend our time that doesn't mean that we're all very good at it doesn't mean i'm very good at it but it does add a dimension of choice and significance to everything that we elect to do it's kind of funny you say you try to think about it as little as possible i would venture to say you probably think about the end of human civilization more than you do about your own life you're probably right because that's it that feels like a problem that could be solved right and whereas the end of my own life can't be solved well i don't know i mean there's transhumanists who have incredible optimism about you know near or intermediate future therapies that could really really change human lifestyle lifespan i really hope that they're right but i don't have a whole lot to add to that project because i'm not a life scientist myself so i'm i'm in part also afraid of immortality not as much but close to as as i'm afraid of death itself so it feels it feels like the things that give us meaning give us meaning because of the scarcity that surrounds it agreed i'm almost afraid of um of having too much of stuff yeah although although if there was something that said this can expand your your enjoyable well spanned or life span by 75 years i'm all in well part of the reason i wanted to not do a startup really the only thing that worries me about doing a startup is if it becomes successful because of how much i dream how much i'm driven to be successful that there will not be enough silence in my life enough scarcity to appreciate the moments i appreciate now as deeply as i appreciate them now like yeah there's a simplicity to my life now that it feels like you might disappear with success i wouldn't say might um i think if you start a company that has um ambitious investors ambitious for the returns that they'd like to see yeah that has ambitious employees ambitions for you know the career trajectories they want to be on and so forth um and is driven by your own ambition uh there's a profound monogamy to that you know and it is it is very very hard to carve out time to be creative to be peaceful to be so forth because of you know with every new employee that you hire that's one more mouth to feed with every new investor that you take on that's one more person who to whom you really do want to deliver great returns and as the valuation ticks up the threshold to delivering great returns for your investors always rises and so there is an extraordinary monogamy to being a founder ceo um above all for the first few years and first in people's minds could be as many as 10 or 15. so but i i guess the the the fundamental calculation is whether the passion for the vision is greater than the cost you'll pay right it's all opportunity cost it's all opportunity cost in terms of time and attention and experience and some things like i'm i'm everyone's different but i'm less calculating some things you just can't help sometimes you just dive in oh yeah i mean you can do balance beats all you want on this versus that and what's the right i mean i've done it in the past and it's never worked you know it's always been like okay what's my gut screaming at me to do yeah but about the the meaning of life you ever think about about that yeah i mean this is not going to go all hallmarking on you but i think that you know there's a few things and um you know one of them is certainly love and the love that we experience and feel and cause to well up in others is something that's just so profound and goes beyond almost anything else that we can do and whether that is something that lies in the past like maybe there was somebody that you were dating and loved very profoundly in college and haven't seen in years i don't think the significance of that love is anyway diminished by the fact that it had a notional beginning and end the fact is that you experienced that and you triggered that in somebody else and that happened and it doesn't have to be certainly doesn't have to be love of romantic partners alone it's family members it's love between friends um it's love between creatures you know i had a dog for 10 years who passed away a while ago and you know experienced unbelievable love with with her um it can be love of that which you create and we were talking about the flow states that we enter and and the pride or lack of pride or the minsky case your hatred of that which you've done but nonetheless the the creations that we make and whether it's the love or the joy or the engagement or the perspective shift that that cascades into other minds i think that's a big big big part of the meaning of life it's not something that everybody participates in necessarily although i think we all do you know at least in a very local level by you know the example that we set by the interactions that we have but for people who create works that travel far and reach people they'll never meet that reach countries they'll never visit that reach people perhaps that come along and come across their ideas or their works or their stories or their aesthetic creations of other sorts long after they're dead um i think that's really really big part of the fabric of the the meaning of life and um you know so all these things like you know love and creation um i think really is what it's all about and part of love is also the loss of it there's a louis episode with louis c.k was a an old gentleman is giving him advice that this this sometimes the sweetest parts of love is when you lose it and you remember it sort of you reminisce on the loss of it and um there's some aspect in which and i have many of those in my own life that almost like the memories of it and the intensity of emotion you still feel about it is like the sweetest part is you're like after saying goodbye you relive it so that that goodbye is what um is also a part of love the lawsuit is also a part of love i don't know it's it's back to that scarcity i won't say the loss is the best part personally but it definitely is an aspect of it and you know the grief you might feel about something that's gone makes you realize what a big deal it was yeah yeah speaking of which uh this particular journey we we went on together come to an end so i have to say goodbye and i hate saying goodbye rob this is truly an honor i've really been a big fan uh people should definitely check out your podcast your master what you do in the conversation space in the writing space it's been uh an incredible honor that you would show up here and spend this time with me i really really appreciate it well it's been a huge honor to be here as well and uh also a fan and heaven for a long time thanks rob thanks for listening to this conversation with rob reed and thank you to athletic greens valcampo fundrise and netsuite check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from plato we can easily forgive a child who's afraid of the dark the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light thank you for listening and hope to see you next time