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Language: en
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
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
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