Creon was employed as a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center for over 30 years working in applied physics, aerodynamics, data visualization, computational chemistry, molecular nanotechnology, celestial mechanics, launch systems, optics, and satellite systems engineering. Since 2015 he has been chief technologist at Planet Labs - a satellite imaging company headquartered in San Francisco. Creon is a Planet Fellow at Planet Labs and a Senior Fellow at the Foresight institute. He serves on var...
I have the pleasure of sitting today with Creon Levitt, who for three decades plus was a NASA scientist.
He is now still functioning as a scientist, but in a private capacity.
He is at a company called Planet Labs that was founded by some folks from NASA.
Creon, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
It's such a pleasure, Brad.
We've been having private conversations and social interactions for a couple of years now, but it's nice to be... I guess this is as close face-to-face as we're going to get for a little while, but lovely to see you.
Yep.
So I should probably explain, since I think you are not widely known, this podcast was born of the idea that each time we interacted, we found fascinating things to discuss, and the Dark Horse podcast is certainly about conversations with people you might not ordinarily encounter who have lots of important things to convey.
So, anyway, you're a perfect example of a dark horse who I think people will be fascinated to hear.
But before we get into the heart of the matter, I have to ask you, as a 32-year NASA scientist, how do you feel about it when people say, it's not rocket science, Oh, that's a complicated topic, but let's just say that arguably rocket science is not so hard.
Rocket engineering is pretty hard.
And because like 10,000 things have to go right in order for a rocket to successfully deliver its payload to orbit.
And if any one of them doesn't go right, chances are it's not going to work.
So it's a really daunting engineering task.
And when people Say it's not rocket science, I guess I get some solace in that, because I worked on some rocket stuff like that.
Go Boost!
Yeah, I agree with you about the distinction between the rocket science, which is pretty straightforward once you get it, and the rocket engineering, which is never straightforward because of the number of unknowns and uncontrollables that interface with any given rocket.
By the way, can I drill down on that for a moment?
Because there's a very interesting thing about rockets, particularly about rockets that launch from the Earth, which a lot of people don't know.
You might ask yourself, for instance, why is it that like 60 years after we started launching rockets, they still blow up and they still fail?
Like what other technology has this characteristic?
And the thing about rockets launched from the Earth is that It is at the absolute limit of molecular physics to be able to reach orbit from the Earth.
What I mean by that is that you have to take the highest energy chemical reactions that are available from the periodic table, basically.
Like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, or kerosene and liquid oxygen.
There's almost nothing that combines with more megajoules per kilogram than that.
You have to take the highest energy chemical reactions known to man.
You have to shove like, you know, thousands of gallons a second into a chamber that can hold this extreme heat.
I mean, basically, it's what we would call an explosion under any other terms, but it's a, we call it burning or firing or whatever.
And then this chamber has to be made out of the highest melting point materials, and it has to be cooled and all this kind of stuff.
And the reason is because it's containing these extremely high energy chemical reactions.
And the point is, is that with all that and with these giant rockets, you get a payload fraction to Earth orbit of just a few percent of the mass of the rocket.
And it's interesting that if the Earth was any more massive, you know, with deeper gravity well, if you will, they wouldn't, you couldn't bring a payload to orbit.
The payload fraction would be zero.
And so, because of these, because of the situation, using these extremely energetic chemical reactions, the most energetic known, and using these materials, and you have to lightweight everything so that you get, you know, you can apply that mass to the payload fraction.
You're running with razor-thin margins, basically.
So, unlike when you build a building and you just, like, make the beams twice as big as they have to be, because you want margin, with rockets, if you made everything twice as thick and strong as you needed it to be, no payload.
So, everything is razor-thin margins and everything is right at the edge.
And the technology hasn't really changed very much in 60 years.
I mean, we have computers and stuff now, but it's basically turbopumps and liquid fuel and the same chemicals.
And so, this is kind of why they still blow up.
Well, that's fascinating.
I was going to say before you launched into that that I find an important analogy between the kind of thinking one has to do to understand biology well.
It is not similar to chemistry or physics.
It is similar to engineering and economics for various reasons.
One, because there's an objective.
but two, because of the balancing of compromising, of competing goals.
And so anyway, it's not surprising to me, What you've just described is not terribly dissimilar to the argument I deployed in my dissertation about at least part of the explanation for why species accumulate in the tropics at a much higher rate than they do in the temperate zone.
And the part that's analogous to what you were describing is that species, in the temperate zone, it's impossible to have two species that are equally capable, given the same environment.
You would have one that had a slight competitive edge, inevitably.
In the tropics this isn't true, because they bump up on the same physical limits to what is possible.
And the point is, those physical limits cause them to converge so that they have exactly the same competitive capacity, and nobody displaces anybody else.
They actually drift in competition against each other.
They are competing ferociously, but you can't get an edge.
And so, what you're saying about rockets is, we figured out how to do this at the limits Long ago, it's not so different.
We can now calculate more effectively with a computer, but it's the same limit that we're reaching.
It's a physical limit.
You told me something I didn't know, which is that if the planet were denser or bigger, that it would make the launching of rockets that had a positive payload impossible.
Well, let's just say exponentially worse.
Like it's like the payload fraction is already down to a few percent with the Earth, and the payload fraction kind of gets exponentially worse as the gravity increases.
And this is, on the other hand, why they could launch back from the moon with this little tiny thing that had almost no power at all, you know, and used very simple.
Because the moon's gravity is so much less, it's relatively quite easy to escape.
And because the moon doesn't have an, the thing people don't intuit about something like air, you intuit it if you're a cyclist and you realize that, you know, the difference between going 10 miles an hour and the difference between going 10 miles an hour and 15 miles per hour is nothing like the difference between going 15 miles per hour and 20 miles per hour.
That the reluctance of the air to get out of the way creates this obstacle that grows ever more ferocious as you, as you, the difference between your speed and it's standing still.
Right, so presumably if the Earth had bigger gravity then you'd have a thicker atmosphere and then it would just be doubly worse.
I mean, yes, you're right, atmospheric losses, gravity losses, all kinds of losses accumulate.
Everything's right at the edge.
It's very strange that it's like almost an anthropic coincidence that You know, we're living on a planet where not only is everything tuned for life, but it's like just below the threshold of getting access to space.
Well, but this also raises another question.
So, just before we close out that other topic.
So, the other nice thing, as a biologist looking at something like the moon landing, getting off the moon, not only do you have low gravity and there's no atmosphere that you have to push out of the way, but the lack of an atmosphere means that any old shape will do, which takes away a lot of the constraints on What the thing had to look like, which is why you got such an ugly duckling of a lander.
Yes.
You know, able to get back up to the orbiter.
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You mentioned the anthropic principle, the anthropic principle essentially being that although the parameters for, let's say, life are very unlikely to converge, it's not surprising that a living creature would discover they live in a place with exactly the right parameters, because of course that's where a living creature would come to discover that property.
If it's, you know, it's a very rare set of conditions, and those are the only conditions where life will arise, and that's where the question will be generated.
So it's a reason not to take this as a falsification of the organic nature of evolution.
Absolutely true.
And Nick Bostrom wrote a whole book on this called Anthropic Bias, which is related to this matter.
So let me ask you this.
I have not read Bostrom's book, so maybe this is addressed there.
So you point to this second kind of anthropic principle where it's not the conditions necessary for life, but it's the conditions necessary for us to do something like rocketry.
The Earth allows it in a way that then allows us to leave the Earth and do things elsewhere.
But here's what I want to know.
Where you started, you made an argument that suggested that given a planet, let's say, twice the size, otherwise similar, but twice the size, thicker atmosphere, more gravity, or stronger gravity, that rocketry of the sort we know would effectively be impossible.
Is that fair?
From an engineering perspective, yes.
I mean, theoretically, if the Earth had, if we had it twice the gravity, then we might be able to build a rocket that was like a million times bigger that would get a few kilograms to space, but that's not practical.
Okay.
So here's what I want to know.
And is there a size of planet that just simply takes rocketry off the table?
Obviously a black hole.
In a mathematical sense, there may not be, because if you can build an infinitely large rocket, then you can eventually get to the velocities you need.
But in a practical sense, it's impossible.
Now, of course, we're talking chemical rocketry.
That's what I was going to ask you, is can we extrapolate from this Insight to the idea that we will not find other creatures out there having left their planet above a certain size We might find life on a planet of a different Magnitude but that there is a limit to the size of the home planet of any spacefaring creature We would encounter is that yeah, I think we would expect a severe drop-off.
You know what?
I mean, okay drop-off as the planets get bigger the spacefaring gets way exponentially less but you know, there's also the possibility of nuclear propulsion and experiments have been done with that and there's a lot more energy and Available there, but that brings other problems of its own, like the weight of nuclear reactors and things like this.
And then there's, uh, beamed energy propulsion where you use lasers or something, or microwaves to send energy to the, um, craft.
And so, uh, and, and, and all this stuff was kind of figured out actually by the founders of, of rocketry a century ago, they knew that these possibilities were available.
And what about something, could you, Could you deploy the power on Earth and make a projectile that would get itself to orbit?
Interesting you should mention that.
There's a couple of startups right now which are doing just that.
They're building and scaling systems where essentially the first stage of the rocket is on the ground and it's either a big centrifuge or a big gun and it launches a hypervelocity projectile.
Which is a little rocket in itself, but in a way you're taking that first booster stage of the rocket and replacing it with a fully reusable system on the ground.
So these look quite promising.
Nothing, of course, has been scaled up to the level where it could reach orbit using this, but it's looking reasonable.
Interesting.
All right.
Well, that's fascinating.
Not somewhere I expected us to spend time, but I've learned a lot.
Where else should we focus?
There's lots of stuff that we could talk about with respect to COVID.
There's stuff we could talk about with respect to intellectual curiosity and how it develops and what sustains it and what threatens it.
Where do you think we should head?
Well, whichever way we head, do you mind if I just say a certain thing about my opinion of you?
Well, that depends.
If your opinion of me is a very low one, then I'd rather you didn't.
No, no, no.
It's a very high one.
And you and Heather and Zach, I believe that the That the discussions you've been having and the routing around of the censorship industrial complex that you've been forced to engage in will go down in history as some of the most important information of our contemporary era.
I think that you are engaged in what I like to call holy work.
A lot of people who I associate with are like, oh, you know, Brad Weinstein, like he's just like, The Dead Horse Podcast.
It's like COVID, COVID, COVID.
And it's not.
You talk about more.
But I actually think that this is super important that we don't let it go.
And most people are, and you are not.
And so I want to praise you for your bravery, your tenacity.
Your open-mindedness and just your work.
You and the whole team.
Thank you.
That means a tremendous amount to me and I really appreciate it.
There are elements of what you say that I agree with.
Let's take me out of the equation.
I think it is vital that we understand what happened during COVID.
And as I have said from the beginning, it wasn't about COVID.
COVID Revealed what was true of our system, having nothing to do with disease.
And it revealed it across the board, such that if we could look at it and say, how did this happen?
And actually get to an answer to that question, we would know what we had to do to fix it.
So that's why I don't want to let it go.
Right.
Well, I don't want you to let it go, but let me bring this around to a very interesting convergence between rockets and COVID, sort of.
And that's the following.
At NASA, when you have a mission failure, which does happen, you know, unfortunately not all that often, but you know, we had the Apollo 1 fire, and the Apollo 13 mishap, and the Challenger explosion, and the Columbia disintegration on re-entry, and we've had a number of uncrewed missions that have also failed.
The Hubble Space Telescope had issues when it was first deployed and other things have not worked, missions have failed even if no humans were on board.
When NASA has a mission failure, here's what they do.
They convene a panel of experts who had nothing to do with the project.
They empower that panel of experts to have access to all documentation and all personnel who worked on the project.
And they instruct the personnel to be completely honest and transparent to the inquiries.
And these mishap investigation boards or failure investigation boards or accident investigation boards, they work oftentimes for months or even a year.
And you know what happens?
They almost always figure out what went wrong and why it went wrong.
And then they write up their reports, like the Challenger one with Richard Feynman is quite famous.
They write up their findings.
It's not about blame.
It's about figuring out what went wrong, documenting why it happened, and then making recommendations to make sure it never happens again.
And so I always thought during COVID when things started to obviously get weird and go off the rails and you know it was obvious the huge mistakes were had been made I was like why don't we convene a failure investigation board or or maybe several because there's so many different aspects like why did we get this wrong why did we get that wrong what did we learn what do we do and and I for a long time thought this was the obvious answer and this is what you know a competent government agency would do but you know it it It didn't really happen.
Some individuals have tried to do it.
RFK Jr.
comes to mind with his book, Letter to Liberals.
But, you know, it's just one man.
And now, unfortunately, I think... I'm not going to say it's too late, but maybe it's too late and too early at the same time.
I think that the problem is you can't find people who have nothing to do with it to be on this committee, because everybody's polarized one way or the other and their mind's made up.
No, I don't think that's why, actually.
That may be a component.
But I think when you consider what NASA is, the chances that somebody has an interest in mission failure, Are very low.
Right.
Your enemies might, but the chances that they're going to get into NASA and they're going to cause rockets to blow up that would otherwise succeed, that, you know, I'm not saying it will never happen, but that has not been the answer to what has happened yet.
And what that means is that although certainly, you know, there have been embarrassing errors.
We've had mission failures.
Because of unit conversion errors.
Yeah.
Imperial versus metric units.
But aside from covering your ass when you've made an error or you've, you know, you've, you've made the call that the space shuttle will launch in spite of temperatures to which the O-rings aren't tolerant as happened in the Challenger disaster.
So there is a cover your ass instinct, but there is not a Nobody sells out the public to hijack a NASA mission for other purposes.
And therefore, the covering your ass is of a normal human scale.
Yeah, I don't want to bash on NASA, but I want to push back just a little bit.
I basically agree with what you said.
And, and, and, uh, I think you're right that that's a possibly substantial, uh, divergence between COVID mission failure and NASA mission failure.
But it is, but look, there is a certain amount of capture, even within NASA, like there's companies that, you know, are on the gravy train and they want to keep building these expensive systems.
So like it shows up in less dramatic ways, but like maybe they're not interested in building more efficient systems or, you know, you know, it's a standard kind of defense contractor mentality.
It's SpaceX has disrupted that to some extent, but it's there.
So, but, but it's a smaller, it's a less, it's insidious, but far less deadly form of capture than we saw arguably in COVID and food and health in general.
Well, I also think that the, there's a question of how divergent the incentives are.
It's, It used to be that one expected pharma, for example, to push its profitable drugs and to drive out previous drugs that had lost their patent.
You expected a certain amount of that.
And you didn't necessarily expect them to push a drug that would actually harm patients.
You just thought there was some sort of shell game about which prescription you were going to get.
And you might get a drug that was 20% less effective because it was under patent.
But you weren't expecting a toxin.
And I believe this is, maybe I've just woken up to it, but I believe this has gotten, this has changed over time.
And that now you actually have an industry, in the case of pharma, where You know, what is demand called with respect to pharma products?
Ill health.
So you have an industry that wants demand, which means it wants ill health, and it has woken up to how to create that demand and then fill it with the supply of something that may or may not be efficacious by creating the impression that something is efficacious.
But put that aside.
In the NASA context, even if you've got a contractor who wants you to put something that they make on your rocket and it's less efficient than some competing thing that you might source that would be better for the mission, it's still not antagonistic to the mission.
And so if it became antagonistic to the mission, then I think your argument about why NASA failures are frequently understood in their aftermath would fail, it would break down.
But for the moment, as long as everybody has an interest in figuring out what went wrong so it doesn't happen next time, you can have a proper investigation.
And the punchline to that is, in the case of COVID, you have people with the power to succeed actively obstructing our comprehension of what just happened. - Well, okay, let me ask you something based on that.
I agree, but I wanna know, I don't mean to turn the tables and like interview you, so feel free to redirect.
This isn't an interview.
I don't do interviews.
This is a discussion.
Do what you feel is right.
Okay.
So, you know, I'm a longtime listener, and in fact a longtime listener from before COVID, and we're going to get to this about certain interesting Polarizations that did and did not happen with COVID.
But for the moment, I just want to ask you this.
You've said a number of times, it's an observation that I think you were the first in my awareness to make, which is it's not just that, you know, we had incompetency because you'd expect them to be right half the time if they were just doing no better than a coin flip on, you know, whether we should mask or not, or lockdown or not, or, you know, rush the
Treatments or not, but they seem to have made arguably the wrong choice, wrong in terms of beneficial to the public every single opportunity.
And what I'm wondering is, do you Do you have any more thoughts on that?
Like, how can that even be explained?
I mean, it can't be that all these, everybody involved in all this stuff is like an absolutely evil person and we're all great, good people.
I mean, can it?
It's got to be.
Isn't there some kind of coupled bad incentive moloch situation which is making it go this way?
What do you think?
I think there's a... I have come to an understanding, at least a placeholder, for what could explain such a thing with normal human failing.
Sort of a banality of evil level of understanding.
And it works sort of like this.
First thing to realize is that we have misunderstood sociopathy.
That those of us who are not sociopaths need to realize that there are quadrants over which we have that capability.
The fact that if I spend five bucks on a cup of coffee, and that that five bucks could potentially rescue somebody from a debilitating disease halfway around the world, I'll never know their name, they will never know that I've helped them, Why do I buy the cup of coffee?
It's still a human suffering.
So why am I not struggling to figure out how I could just forgo coffee for the rest of my life and every day I could save somebody from something terrible?
I think that would be a moral imperative if I could figure it out.
Somehow, some feature of my wiring, presumably normal ancestral wiring, Okay.
Whereas this person that I might theoretically help remote enough from me that their suffering is something I easily miss.
I just, I go weeks without thinking of it.
So I would argue that that is the stuff of which, you know, sociopathy may be a person who can do only that.
They are inherently indifferent to anyone suffering at all moments.
But the point, the fact that we all have it facultatively on board is all I need for my explanation here.
Now imagine that you're a normal person, that you do care about other people, but you don't care about all other people, and certainly not equally.
And you're capable of caring about other people not at all in cases where there's nothing you can do, or it's sufficiently hard to figure out what to do that it would occupy you, it would waste all your time, right?
You learn to become indifferent to that suffering.
So let's say everybody brings that to work, all the normal people bring that thing to work.
And then you go to work in a context where decisions that you make are definitely going to kill some people.
Right?
Like, for example, you're in pharma.
Let's say that you're in pharma for the right reasons.
You want to figure out what drugs can be deployed to reduce suffering, to preserve life, to do all the things that pharma might aspire to.
Right.
And you realize, oh, every drug that I'm going to deploy is going to kill some people who would otherwise have lived.
And so it's a net calculation.
I'm going to kill some people who should have lived in order to save some other people who would have died.
Yeah.
And so you just get comfortable with that.
Now imagine that you're designing automobile interiors.
That doesn't really sound like a life or death thing until you realize that, of course, if you make a car that's perfectly safe, nobody can afford it, and nobody will buy it, and it won't pass the economy standards for fuel efficiency.
So you're going to make compromises that are going to result in some people whose names you'll never know dying who didn't have to.
And you just get comfortable with that.
So what I'm getting at is, There are all kinds of places where people end up on what turns out to be a slippery slope of indifference.
And what they trade is, hey, I'm going to get my paycheck and I'm going to, in order to get my paycheck, I'm going to have to tune out the suffering of other humans that are going to suffer as a result of decisions I will make.
Once you're on that slippery slope, maybe it requires a moral defect.
But people can end up almost completely indifferent to almost everyone suffering.
And I think what we saw in COVID is people who made decisions of a kind that were very normal.
My paycheck, my reputation depends on me ignoring the suffering of people who will suffer downstream of decisions that I will make.
And that there's no limit to how much suffering these folks were willing to inflict In order to play the game of Pharma and get ahead and to us that sounds shocking because we just tuned into it and we don't realize how much the game of Pharma is this every day.
It's about getting favorable coverage in scientific journals, which shouldn't be giving you favorable coverage.
They should be giving honest coverage, right?
Well, I'm well, I understand what you're saying.
I agree it's a possibility and it's certainly a one of the forces at play.
That can help explain this stuff.
I mean, obviously, people's moral weaknesses and blindness to consequences and self-interest, you know, of course, it can all conspire to make things rather awful.
I'm not sure that explains all of it.
But I want to mention something interesting to you, because I'm pretty much in your camp on all things COVID.
But You know, I also am involved in a lot of molecular biology stuff.
It used to be something I did semi-professionally a little bit, and then that's where I learned the immunology that we've talked about in the past.
And then I just stayed involved in some seminar groups that are studying longevity and life extension mostly, but the course spreads out into all kinds of pharma and biotech stuff.
And it's funny because on the one hand, I'm right with you that there was like, you know, inadequate testing and inadequate objectivity and inadequate comment periods and all this stuff for these various COVID decisions that resulted arguably in inadequate testing and inadequate objectivity and inadequate comment periods and all this stuff for these On the other hand, when you hang out with these communities of people who are trying to actually make new therapeutics that solve really new problems, what's their big Complaint?
You know, the FDA takes too long.
The FDA slows everything down.
You know, we need to have an agile FDA.
And so it's an interesting thing that like, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't, you know?
Well, that's the problem is everybody's damned if they do and damned if they don't.
I certainly found myself there a thousand times during COVID.
But if you think about what happened with statins, for example, or with SSRIs, where a phony scientific explanation
It became gospel because it justified the administration, the standard of care being changed to embrace compounds that overwhelmingly, it will turn out, harmed the people to whom they were prescribed.
Yeah, or at least didn't do what they were supposed to do except making a lot of people rich who were selling them.
Yes, by the way, and so I want to ask you another thing and see.
I wrote down a list of names.
This was a couple years ago during like the sort of real pivot point in COVID where the wheels started falling off the narrative and everything.
And I realized that there were a bunch of people who I had been following for years because of my interest in health and longevity.
And I turned my health around.
I used to be an obese person with terrible biomarkers.
And now for my age, I'm quite Optimal even for someone much younger.
And I did that by doing my own research, which used to be okay.
Used to be called reading, as we know it.
That great routine, absolutely.
So like Asim Malhotra, the whole low-carb community
Even Stephen Gundry, who's an interesting case, Gordon Lauck, the founder of Glycomics, Johnny Anotis, you know, I was following, I could read off a list of dozen people, but I had been following all these people before COVID because they seemed to have information that was counter-narrative, but basically really stood up to scrutiny.
Anti-statin, anti-stenting, anti-angioplasty, I think, anti-sugar, of course, anti-carb, pro-meat.
You know, all this stuff was starting to make sense to me and I was transforming my own body and the bodies of my friends using this information.
And then COVID came along.
And wouldn't you know it, but like, More than 90% of these people all ended up on our team on COVID.
And so that to me was part of the reason that I kind of became, at least in my friend group, really on the outside contrarian on COVID, because they were all like marching in line with the narrative.
But I was like, you know, These authorities are totally untrustworthy.
I knew this before COVID.
Like, they were untrustworthy about statins.
They were untrustworthy about sugar.
They were untrustworthy about fat.
They were untrustworthy about cardiac stents.
And now you expect me to all of a sudden turn around and trust them on all this other stuff?
It's like, I think I'm gonna reserve judgment and do my own research for a little while.
And it's funny because all these people who were good at Understanding the subtleties of health in the previous context seemed to pretty much, you know, we know there's a few, like there was other people who weren't biologists and doctors, you know, there could be everybody from like Barry Weiss to, you know, various physicist friends of mine and like, Melissa Chen, you know, various people, right?
And they also ended up kind of on our team.
But since they didn't start off in biology and medicine, that was just interesting to me.
But what was interesting to me was like, almost to a man, or almost to a person, everyone I was following in biology and medicine ended up kind of in my contrarian camp on COVID.
How did you, how did that work out for you?
Well, I'm, I don't know how to put it exactly, but I'm concerned about the way people woke up.
I'm all for people waking up.
I am not, as you know, I've described something I call the middle ground scramble.
True enough.
The power structure that screwed COVID up so badly and then lost control of the narrative so it can't cover its own ass cannot afford to empower people who saw through it early and have been making these points and that it worked so hard to silence.
The last thing it wants to do is to validate that perspective so that those people get asked, what are we supposed to do next?
How do we avoid this happening again?
So what it wants to do is it wants to empower people.
The public is not going to accept the mainstream narrative that it was fed all along because it knows that's bullshit.
So it has to the power structure has to be scolded and it has to be scolded in a way that the public finds credible.
But the public is looking for a an explanation of how it got taken for a ride.
Why was it so credulous when there was so much evidence that it was being lied to?
So you've got this confluence of forces that's looking for contrarians who...
who will not upset the natural order of things.
They will not go after those who created this problem in the first place and seek to reveal their full level of culpability.
So they'll sort of slap both sides.
They'll say the folks who were in charge- Say that again?
Mistakes were made, you know.
Yeah, mistakes were made.
The power structure certainly didn't perform well.
There were lots of signals that should have been paid attention to earlier.
Obviously, it's very embarrassing that behind the scenes, there were lots of folks at the top aware that a laboratory leak was the most likely explanation, and they sought to cover it up, and that's all very shameful.
On the other hand, The COVID dissidents were so clearly in love with the idea that everything was wrong, that they embraced lots of wrong concepts like Ivermectin works, blah blah blah blah blah.
You'll get this scramble to become the new authorities in the middle who will do very well.
Their careers will soar in exchange for them willing to create a new narrative that scolds the people in power just enough but leaves them exactly where they are.
Maybe picks a scapegoat or two.
But nothing important is going to change and we will be right back here next time.
So I'm afraid of that.
And so what that means is we have to distinguish between people who had an organic trajectory where they actually did wake up.
And I include myself in this.
You know, I've told the story a number of times, but I became aware it wasn't called COVID yet.
It was called novel coronavirus.
But I became aware of it when Heather and I came out of the Amazon after completing our the first draft of our And because I had been a bat biologist, I read the story of how, you know, this was a type of virus that circulates in bats, blah, blah, blah, seems to have jumped to people.
And I put out a tweet that said, yeah, this adds up to me.
I know the family of bats in question.
I know that they carry these viruses.
So superficially speaking, this makes sense.
And I got pushback immediately.
And it took me, and the pushback was, so it's just a coincidence that this happened?
right on the doorstep of one of the biosafety level four laboratories studying these exact viruses and I thought I didn't I didn't know that it was on the doorstep and I certainly wouldn't have said that I felt it was likely to have come from bats if I had known that I would have dug deeper and so In exactly one hour, I began to turn around.
Now, I also blew it on hydroxychloroquine.
I believed the evidence that it did not work and was dangerous.
It took me too long to figure out that that was not true.
I was early on ivermectin.
But in any case... And I harassed you into the right mass position.
I like to take partial credit.
Yes, you did harass me into the right mask position.
Initially, I was on board.
In fact, I was, I would say, a pioneer in the idea that we should be masking as a useful precaution.
And then it turned out that the evidence just simply didn't support it, and I changed position.
So anyway, all of that is to say I had an organic An organic evolution of my perspective.
And some places I wish I had been faster.
There's obviously a degree to which you can't whipsaw back and forth with every new data point.
But some of the progression is not organic.
And by that, what I mean is it is what the traffic will bear periodically.
People say, people know more than they say, they move at the rate that they avoid reputational damage rather than saying what needs to be said when it needs to be said.
And so I don't know.
I think I did a lot of that.
You know, I'm in, I'm in, I was employed by a medium sized, I'm still employed by a medium sized company.
They had their rules.
I was involved in groups.
They had their expectations.
I self censored, you know, not a hundred percent.
That's just impossible for me, but I self centered a lot and I got slapped on the wrist a lot and also more heavily penalized, but nothing like you, like you, I mean, the traffic will bear.
You tried to do beyond what the traffic will bear, and then they tried to shut you down, and then, as they say, the internet used censorship as damage and routes around it.
And so, you know, here we are.
Well... You'll be vindicated.
I wish—you've said a couple things now.
You've said history will record what we did as correct and all of that.
I'm less confident of this than you are, in part because I know I believe that we decisively won the first round.
That there was a narrative that needed to float, and that narrative involved, there's nothing to do about COVID involving repurposed drugs, the right solution is vaccines, they are safe and effective, yes, maybe there will be some side effects, because there always are, but nothing significant, cost-benefit analysis, all of these things.
I believe we decisively blew up their phony narrative about COVID origins, about repurposed drugs, and repurposed drugs is still controversial, but at least people are aware of the question, and vaccine safety and effectiveness.
It, however, seems to be winning round two.
Because it's changed strategy.
Instead of trying to silence us in an overt and provable way, it has now resorted to interfering with our ability to reach people.
And I think what it is doing is it is keeping us isolated in In a context where the people who can hear us are already lost to them and new people are not finding us at nearly the rate that it would make sense.
So anyway, my point is... This is sort of a duel to audience capture.
It's not that Brett is giving a message and he's already got his audience who believe his message and the other people don't care to hear it.
It is that They're kind of making sure your audience stays captured, as in imprisoned.
And nobody else can get in or out, you know?
Yeah, it's a kind of quarantine.
And I can tell you, it's not subtle from my chair.
You can see it happen.
That is different than being able to establish it to somebody else's satisfaction when they do not have the history, they cannot feel the change in various parameters, and therefore don't know whether you have a misunderstanding of your own significance, or likeability, or relevance, or whatever.
I can say, interestingly, I hope I'm entitled to say this, I had a discussion with Elon Musk and he told me, I think he actually said this elsewhere as well, but he told me that before he bought Twitter, he had the largest account or the most interacted with account on Twitter.
And that he could feel in his account the meddling.
And now, of course, having bought what he describes as a crime scene, he was in a position to find all of the meddling.
And it's buried in ways that it is not obvious.
It's not like you can just turn those things off.
They're very subtle.
So the fact that he felt it and then had the resources and insight that he should purchase the thing and was able to find those things says it is at least not inconceivable that a person who is suffering from this kind of meddling, can simply detect it.
And yes, somebody could make it up or somebody could lie to themselves.
But what I'm telling you is that we feel this very directly and it is having a huge impact, I believe, on... Oh!
How far we can can reach?
It's still to this day.
And obviously, I mean, apparently even with Hunt, what is it called?
Missouri versus Biden, which was to me like there wasn't just a smoking gun that was like, that was like the Twitter files times hundreds, you know, it was like, they just had Massive evidence of collusion between the government.
Massive evidence of basic government censorship in all sorts of platforms, not just Twitter.
And, you know, what everybody knew that there was Facebook files and YouTube files and all this stuff, even though those companies were not revealing them.
But then they did reveal them under discovery for this case.
And then there was that ruling, right, that Allegedly, you know, that the courts forbade the government from collaborating with social media companies to alter or promote or de-promote content.
I mean, we'll see if anyone, you know, to what extent that is enforced or whatever the right word is followed.
But I guess what I'm saying is, so Even with that, I guess, even that the government is supposed to stop all this stuff, you know, you, your YouTube's not like offering to, to, uh, reinstate you and, and you're kind of, am I correct that you're still feeling?
Well, it's very interesting.
That's happened at YouTube.
And I, the pattern again is absolutely conspicuous from my chair.
Let me describe it to you.
We, went far enough that they felt that they could get away with demonetizing the channel, and I believe that their plan was to kick us off the platform.
We had two channels, we had 400 plus thousand subscribers on each, a main channel and a clips channel, and frankly, we were making money in a way that was new to us.
It lasted for one month.
I did a live discussion with Pierre Corey about the Ivermectin question, and then I did a live podcast with Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone.
I remember it very well.
They pulled both of those things.
They struck the channel.
They set up the conditions to remove us.
I believe they would have accepted it if we had self-censored.
They would have backed off, and they would have restored our ability to earn.
That's, I think, what they wanted, but failing that.
They were perfectly ready to throw us off.
And then Joe Rogan, through what he declared an emergency podcast, he held an emergency podcast about the situation.
And it resulted in YouTube backing off entirely.
The channel remains.
It is unmonetized.
YouTube refuses to remonetize it.
But conspicuously, the audience is completely static.
It was absolutely skyrocketing before they demonetized us.
And then it just was going up, up, up, up, plateau.
And it's been at a plateau ever since.
So what that tells me is that they are interfering, that they have, they zeroed out more than half our family's income.
But here's the other part of the pattern.
We can say whatever we want.
They don't strike the channel.
Hmm.
So I think the point is, you can say whatever you want, but, but you think that, do you think people are actively like, how can I say this?
Are they actively not able to access your videos or is it just that for whatever reason your subscriber count froze?
The beast decides who sees what.
It decides what to suggest when.
It decides who to unsubscribe.
We don't know the full range, and it decides what to tell us about who's watching.
It could be that more people are seeing it than we know, but the numbers are artificially flat.
It could be that it's being kept from people.
It could be that there's a target number that are allowed to see it.
People who have already been lost.
Whatever.
So I don't know what the pattern is, but the idea that we derailed a plan to get rid of us, By creating pain.
Joe Rogan created pain.
It wasn't worth it to Google to admit what they were doing as they would have had to if they threw us off.
And so they backed off their overt plan.
They block our reach or our ability, you know, the fact is the number of subscribers to the channel dictates what it is that we can earn if we source an advertiser from outside of that ecosystem.
The question is, well, how many people can you reach?
So that number is directly interfering with our ability to earn.
It's interesting, the thing you described with YouTube is an example of scramble for the middle.
Yes, well, it is an intermediate solution.
I know because insiders at Google have told me that the decision about what to do with our channel, the decision not to remonetize it, was made in the C-suite, quite possibly by the CEO, but certainly in the C-suite.
So it was a top-level concern.
And I think the other thing that people perhaps don't quite understand is this is a big channel.
But it's not a gigantic one.
So when I say that we're being interfered with at this level, it sounds like a delusion of grandeur.
On the other hand, if you think about what it is that actually happened to the COVID narrative, well, who showed up on Dark Horse and then went to Joe Rogan?
Right?
We had Pierre Cory.
We had Robert Malone.
We had Peter McCullough.
So that was...
Dark Horse violated a sacred rule.
You can't have two PhD biologists saying, actually this is complex, but it's not as complex as you think it is.
This is more comprehensible than you know.
Let's unpack it.
Let's talk about what the actual facts of the disease are, what the actual facts of the therapy are, what the evidence really suggests, where the evidence seems to be phony.
So we did that.
And we talked to people who had been targeted for dismissal.
And you on-ramped them onto Rogan, who couldn't be dismissed.
Right.
Now, I don't want to underrate what Joe was doing.
Yes, Joe was paying attention to Dark Horse and he listened to the discussions with these folks, but Joe is an incredibly smart guy and very widely read and he has an excellent bullshit detector.
He knew that this story wasn't making sense and he knew what sense sounded like.
It sounds like Pierre Kory.
It sounds like Robert Malone.
And when you look into these people's backgrounds and you hear they're supposed to be quacks and then it turns out actually these are top flight people in their fields with impeccable credentials.
So I think the point was you can't The role that Dark Horse played in this story was in its own way, yeah, maybe on-ramp is the right descriptor.
It's a good one.
But the point is, oh, if we can do away with the on-ramp, that solves a big problem.
And I believe that they've decided to do away with the on-ramp.
And you know, I'm not complaining about the quality of my life.
I live wonderfully.
Uh-huh.
The interference with our family's ability to earn, the interference with my ability to produce security for my children in light of a very dangerous world that's being made dangerous by the very people who are doing the interfering is absolutely maddening.
It's maddening.
I agree.
I find it maddening and I'm not even, you know, running any sort of media company or whatever we want to call it, entrepreneur, media entrepreneur thing.
Um, this tells me I should have gone into rocket science.
Oh, I don't know about that.
I could, I would, you know, I, I'm not going to go into my personal, um, battles over all this stuff.
Let's just put it this way.
I was within one day of being fired for being an unvaccinated person who worked at a U S company with over a hundred employees.
And then the Supreme court stepped in and said, I don't know.
So, you know, that's as much as I'll say about it.
To be fair, I can't blame my company for this.
This was the law, supposedly.
They had to fire me.
What are they going to do?
Close the company?
Like a thousand people?
Because like three or four, you know, contrarians?
No, of course not.
And so anyway, it didn't happen.
Thank goodness for the Constitution.
Thank goodness for the Constitution, although among the many jaw-dropping facts of COVID are the number of people who could not find that constitutional protection.
Could not find protection under the Nuremberg Code.
Right.
Healthcare workers.
Right.
Healthcare workers, members of the military.
And that, you know, I get stopped fairly regularly by people with literally two exceptions since Evergreen happened.
What they say, what people say in person is always nice.
And Something that I have been hearing a lot in the last year is thank you.
I did not get vaccinated because you and Heather were making so much sense on this topic.
And it gave me the courage to resist.
And every time I hear this, I, I feel this powerful sense of having done something right.
The danger of the shots was so great that the idea that there are people walking around out there who Don't have to worry about the damage that they did because we made sense to them.
I don't know.
I'm heartened by it.
That's why I said, and I think it's only just begun.
When I say that history will, in my estimation, remember you well, I don't mean the history of the next couple of years.
What I mean is that once there are dispassionate, once people, once this is like, history and not present.
And I know that's a loaded term because who knows what road we're headed down with the inevitability of future pandemics and all the other crises that are being promoted.
But, you know, in the Eventually, there'll be scholars who will be mining all this stuff.
And you know, obscure videos on like former platforms that no longer exist.
It's going to be like historical gold.
And, and I think, I think the truth will prevail.
You know, I want to mention one thing.
Robert Anton Wilson, I don't know if you know who he is.
He's late.
Sure.
Yeah.
He said something about in praise of the Constitution.
He said, the US Constitution May not be perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we've got.
And he also wrote this book, The Thing That Ate the Constitution.
This was written many years ago, long before COVID.
And there's a quote, which hopefully I'll find to read to you from there.
But he describes a mad czar of medicine who is controlling things.
And he's like, how did we go from having a constitution to having a mad czar in control of our health policies who's ruining everything.
And this was like in the 90s that he said this. - So I've been marveling on this too.
And there's a biological analogy that just, I can't escape it.
In fact, probably the right person to talk to about it are doctors, critical care doctors. - Okay, okay.
When a person is healthy, you don't notice their physiology.
it just kind of hums along.
And when something gets knocked sufficiently far out of whack, their health collapses.
Yeah, right.
Systems that are dependent on each other start coming apart.
And so I think we were like a nation.
I'm loathe to describe our system as healthy anytime in my lifetime, but it was healthy enough that it worked.
And then something in recent decades was dislodged just far enough that things became possible here that although I, in the abstract, knew they were possible all along, I did not expect to see it in my lifetime.
I assume they were impossible.
Yeah, right.
Like, for instance, large-scale mass censorship across the board.
Like, you know, failures of the biological kind.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
The harming of children.
Yes, right.
Based on erroneous beliefs about gender.
Yes, that's a whole other topic.
I want to ask, though, Ask you as an evolutionary biologist what you think of this.
Because I was shocked.
COVID was the major shock.
But as I mentioned, there were shocks to me before about other health advice from the authorities that, as far as I could tell, was 180 degrees wrong.
Like, almost every time I looked.
I mean, I guess don't smoke cigarettes.
They were right about that eventually.
Then during COVID, what I found, and I, like you, have a rather, what I consider a very intelligent and, I thought, open-minded social circle.
And whoever was very close to, still am.
But what shocked me was that even amongst the very intelligent and seemingly open-minded social circle, so many of that group, which kind of mirrored the population at large, if you will, in some ways, so many of that which kind of mirrored the population at large, if you will, in some ways, so many of that group totally bought the narrative and even
from even speaking.
Now, that was weird because I had always been a kind of contrarian voice in my community on all sorts of different things.
And people, like, loved me for it.
They were like, put Creon on that one.
You know, he'll tear down.
He's like a bulldog.
Like, he'll figure out what's buried.
And this used to be, like, one of my superpowers that people engaged with and utilized.
I'm hardly alone in this.
Right.
Many contrarians and sort of intellectuals go on these rabbit holes or whatever you want to call them.
But then with COVID, I guess because everyone was so afraid, primarily, people were like, you know, shut the fuck up.
You're going to kill us all, like that sort of thing.
Now, so then I was wondering, I was like, Okay, why am I a contrarian?
Because I've kind of been that way most of my life, you know, rebellious little kid, you know, in college, I was always arguing.
For a while, I thought I was contrarian, because I like to argue.
I like to be right.
But I mean, I didn't become a lawyer.
I don't like to argue, particularly.
I don't even like to be right.
you argue, but it's a mark of respect.
Like you argue with your colleagues because you're trying to come up with the best solution.
And so, you know, finding flaws in their, in their design or their analysis is, is, is like, that's why you're together in the first place on the team.
Anyway, I don't like to argue particularly.
I don't even like to be right.
I certainly don't like to be polarized against my friends.
And I don't like to be that guy who's like always got I don't want that to be what people think of me.
He's the guy, he's always going to take the other side, you know.
Why am I contrarian if it's not those things?
And then I kind of came to the, you know, I had a lot of time to self-reflect on this while I was kind of isolated, both physically and socially during the lockdowns.
And I was like thinking, here's what it is.
The reason I'm a contrarian is because I have a lot of smart friends.
And if all my smart friends are over here exploring this territory, kind of near the middle of the bell curve, if you will, I want to go out on the tail.
One tail or the other.
Why do I want to go out on the tail?
I know that I'm unlikely, that it's kind of arguably unlikely that you find something out on the tail that's really of interest, but at least everybody else isn't searching out there.
At least it's virgin territory.
So I was like, that's why I like to do it, because I don't really feel like I'm, it's not like I'm some genius who's going to go where everybody else is looking and find something amazing.
Like, probably not.
My, you know, hack is to go look where people aren't looking, to some extent.
So that, I was kind of happy with that.
And then this is where it gets into evolutionary biology, where I want your opinion.
And then I was like, well, what explains that like 90% of my circle and 90% of everybody just walked along with the narrative.
And what I was thinking was, you know, it's gotta be that way from evolutionary perspective because proto because early prehistoric tribe of humans, you gotta follow the leader.
If you don't follow the leader, it's not a tribe.
Like, if everybody's doing their own thing, there can't be any collective action, hunting, you know, whatever they have to do.
Like, you have to have leadership and it has to be followed.
And that's what gets selected for, except you probably also select for a small fraction of people who are renegades.
Because if you don't, if they don't go out literally and explore other places and other ideas and kind of go off on their own, Nothing's ever going to change.
Nothing's ever going to advance.
So I think we have an evolutionary equilibrium where most people follow the leader and some people don't, and it may have been selected for.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I feel certain that this unfolds in many related ways.
I've used the example of the guy, if you imagine somebody 500 years ago, Who noticed in the shimmering of the aspen leaves something that implied a binary encoding of the world, right?
They might be triggered to notice the way a particular leaf went from light to dark in the wind, and they might think, I wonder how much we could load into a on-off... They wouldn't be wrong, right?
They would be hundreds of years ahead of their time.
And so on the one hand, good show.
It's great to be able to see things that are deeply in the future.
On the other hand, you could imagine somebody who couldn't help themself and was doing that on a battlefield or doing that during a famine when you should be hunting.
Right.
And the point is, no, cut it out.
What we're doing is this other thing.
And don't do that.
So there is a legitimate argument for this is not the place for that.
This is not the place for contrarianism.
This is not the place for Speculation.
This is the place to do something else.
So we are always caught in a bind when something says, this is not the place for that.
It may be that that's true.
Or it may be, oh, this is actually exactly the place for that.
This is not the time to question vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Really?
You've just introduced something, it doesn't even appear to match the definition of the term vaccine.
Right.
It's based on a brand new technology and it's never been demonstrated to function and you haven't had very long to test it.
You're telling me this isn't the time to question whether it's a good idea to inject that?
I think it's exactly the time.
Well, fair enough.
I mean, I hear you.
But I mean, if we can't we even say like, look at warfare, like we're going to war, you know, you don't have a choice.
Like it's not good for your health.
You know, it's even worse for your health than some crazy new drug, right?
That hasn't been tested, like going to war is probably going to be very bad for your health.
But you're going, you know, this is the collective action of the group.
I mean, that's sort of the extreme example of it.
Societies do this, and to some extent they've been selected, maybe not so much recently, to Sure.
And you can have, you know, presumably a well-adjusted person knows when not to do such things.
As the ship is sinking, it's not the time to be thinking about where the failures in its design may have been.
I think so, since I've agreed. - Sure.
And you can have, you know, presumably a well-adjusted person knows when not to do such things.
As the ship is sinking, it's not the time to be thinking about where the failures in its design may have been.
It's the time to think about how to preserve life.
But some people are gonna be prone to keeping their head down and doing their job, and other people are gonna be prone to figuring out what jobs might be done that would be useful that we're not thinking to do.
So there's a natural division there.
I do want to push back a little bit on your idea of contrarianism.
Okay.
I've been dismissed.
Heather and I have both been dismissed as contrarian.
In fact, people who We're reaching the judgment that we had been incorrect based on nothing at all have told us what went wrong.
The reason you got this wrong is that you were used to being a contrarian and being right.
And so you just did it reflexively.
Now, by the way, I don't want to interrupt you except to say so people that we would dismiss as conformists dismissed you as a contrarian.
I think that's right.
Now, what I would say is I don't I don't even the word contrarian has no Positive connotation to me.
In fact, it has a negative one.
The word the word dissident Has a positive connotation because a dissident is somebody with the courage to stand up against a regime in general That's a regime that needs someone to stand up against it But what I think happened to me and what I suspect I hope you'll upgrade your term for yourself as well Yes, I do tend to look for Unlikely possibilities, because even though most of the unlikely possibilities that you entertain you have to throw out because they're not right.
Right.
When you find something, and you are more likely to find something rather than searching where everybody else is looking, it can be useful and, you know, exhilarating.
But what I try to do, I live downstream of a very strong distaste for being wrong.
I really don't like it.
And you could, in fact, we've seen some important examples of people who have some fraction of that.
They don't like being wrong.
So what they do is when they are wrong, they bend over backwards not to see it.
I don't do that.
I try when I'm wrong to fix my thinking as quickly as possible so I don't have to spend time, any more time in that wrong space than necessary.
So what that means is, I'm looking, A, I'm not looking to find out what everybody else thinks is true.
Because it is certainly possible for everybody else to be wrong.
And I don't want to get led into being wrong because I'm following everybody else.
So I want to go first principles and figure out, is that likely to be right?
What's bugging me about it?
I want to do my homework there.
And what I would say is, this becomes Indistinguishable from contrarianism in an era where society is, for whatever reason, reflexively wrong.
Right?
COVID, we got everything wrong publicly.
That means that if what you were doing is spotting bullshit... We meaning the big we got it wrong, not you and me.
Civilization told you exactly the wrong things to do.
It told you exactly the wrong origin story for the virus.
It got everything upside down.
So it doesn't make you a contrarian if you disagreed on everything.
It means that you were doing your own work and that this was actually deducible if you could overcome the social pressure to conform.
Yes.
I don't, I don't feel like a contrarian.
If I feel like if we had gotten it all right, I would have been on board with it.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not, it's not contrarianism for me.
I doubt it is for you.
This is all related.
It's related to, you know, the, the, The guys on the side of censorship never turn out to be the good guys.
It's like, how many times do we have to learn this lesson?
So, um, I'm fully with you, uh, on that.
I like the idea of dissident, uh, instead of contrarian.
Um, and thanks, thanks for that.
Um, let me see.
Oh, so, so are you going to, so how can I say this?
I'm not sure what more I can do on this.
I thought for a while that I could advocate for setting up these Failure Investigation Board, Accident Investigation Board.
I'm a little bit, I kind of pitched that to a lot of people, you know, important people, rich people, influential people.
And now it's kind of like, yeah, with this, with this, with this scramble for the middle and this kind of everybody's chosen their side, it's going to be very hard.
And so what you're doing, continuing to speak the truth, or at least make an honest effort to find the truth and speak what you find.
There's got to be something in the middle, though, between individual voices and the collective action that seems to not be happening.
I have argued, I'm not alone in this, I've seen other people say something similar, but wisdom is almost synonymous with delayed gratification.
The wisdom is almost always the triumph over a longer-term style of thinking, a longer-term reward structure.
You know, I'm going to exercise today because I will feel better six months from now if I do that every day.
I will suffer in the short term, but in the long term the reward will be even greater.
People are at the moment retreating from a recognition of how many errors they made, how many places they were misled, how much damage they may have done.
And I get it.
If that had been me, it would be a very hard place to look in the mirror.
Wait, you mean if it had been you creating it?
If I had gone along with the narrative and had discovered at this late date that the vaccines were not safe, they weren't effective, there were other treatments, the disease didn't come from where I thought it had come from, The variants were in fact induced by the inoculation campaign, all of that.
If I had been on board with the public narrative, rather than spotting its defects, I would be, I believe, I wouldn't have ended up in that situation, but if I had, my instinct would cause me to look at it, how could that possibly have happened?
I think the point that needs to be made to people who are retreating from looking at themselves in the mirror and figuring out what defects we're taking advantage of to get them on board, the point is, if you could go back and you could unvaccinate yourself, a huge fraction of people who got these shots would do it.
The point is, There's a part of you that's saying it doesn't matter because you can't do that.
But you can save your future self.
Your future self is going to be, it may not be a shot next time, but your future self is going to be exposed to similar bullshit.
It's going to be coerced in similar ways.
And the way to save your future self is to have an accounting of what happened this time.
So this is not.
In that case, the accounting is not so much about the particulars.
It's about the general flaws in our society and ourselves that allowed this particular set of particulars to dominate in the narrative.
And will presumably, unfortunately, allow the next set of panic, crisis, coercion to dominate.
And it's like, it's hard because it's not like people waking up about treatments or any of these things.
It's about people waking up to their own, their own, I, are you genetic propensity to follow the leader?
That's a hard thing to wake up from.
It's a hard thing to wake up from, but...
I mean, if you could see the look in people's eyes when they tell me, I didn't get those shots because of what you said.
The point was there, I mean, and I'm a little embarrassed.
I, I'm not sure we could have done better.
We, we threaded a needle remaining.
We could have, Gone full bore every platform from the first moments it was obvious.
Right.
And if we had, it would have been a very short ride.
So could we have reached more people with a more direct message?
I don't know.
But there was a way to save yourself from this.
Some people had more power to do it because their job allowed it.
Sure.
And some people didn't have that freedom.
But in any case, what I would suggest is, as I said to people early in the pandemic, we are never gonna get a better shot in our lifetime at figuring out what has gone wrong with our system than we are never gonna get a better shot in our lifetime It was visible.
I love that, that positive spin.
That's fantastic.
Thank you.
This is the best shot we're ever going to get.
And so in light of that, do you really want to have to go through another one of these in order to get another data set?
This is the data set.
This is the data set that allows us to see it, and if we're ever going to fix it, this is the one that we should proceed from.
And that is why I'm still on this topic.
We've been inoculated.
We'll see if it's effective.
Yeah, we have natural immunity on this topic, having bought it at a very high price.
I have an old, old friend I've known for 40 years.
I knew her when she was a little girl.
She's a classical French horn player.
She's like, you know, at the top of her career.
Her husband is a classical French horn player.
They're both at the peak level of their careers playing professional orchestra.
The orchestra mandated vaccination.
They refused.
Didn't mandate vaccination for the audiences, by the way, just for the players.
And so they both chose to be fired.
And if you can imagine how rare it is for these two people to be playing in the same orchestra with the same skills and be married, and then, you know, their livelihood was taken away.
No, they're making it work.
But what was shocking to me, actually...
was that they're dues-paying members of the Musicians' Union for all these years.
And what did the Musicians' Union do?
It sided with management.
It was like, well, we're not going to help you with the legal battle against the orchestra.
It's just, it shows so much that's wrong.
It's not like this is people dying and stuff like that, but you know, it's close.
It's people's livelihood, both of their livelihoods, kind of like you and Heather.
So it reveals an interesting feature of the pattern.
When Heather and I had our bizarre eviction from Evergreen, where we were teaching, our union also sided with management.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
It's a feature of this puzzle, and it has a lot to do with how you end up in dissident space.
It's kind of like...
Journalists siding with the government.
It's a similar sort of...
Exactly.
It is that unholy alliance that tells you you're not where you think you are.
Right, exactly.
I would also point out, we have an example that is part of our, not our daily lives, but our weekly lives here up in the San Juan Islands.
The San Juan Islands are islands off the state of Washington that are served by state ferries and the state ferries are marvelous.
They're a joy and it's wonderful that but they exist and all of the infrastructure is there.
And it's been a part of the state of Washington for I don't know how long.
- Mm-hmm. - The- - These are car ferries.
- Yep, these are car ferries.
The governor, who is actually the same world-class dimwit, whose office is seven miles from Evergreen, and he, as far as I know, still has not mentioned the debacle that happened there Absolutely refused to call in any help even though You know, seven miles from his office, students were roving the campus with weapons, battering each other, hunting professors.
But anyway, that same genius who failed to do anything about that episode fired all of the people who refused vaccination, or so-called vaccination, who were part of the ferry system.
Still has not rehired them and the ferry system went from being this highly reliable Mechanism for getting from the mainland to the islands and back into something that is now completely unreliable ferries are routinely being cancelled because of mechanical failures because of lack of crew and It it's a daily reminder that For some reason these people felt entitled to purge
These were people who were largely working outdoors on ferries who were no threat to anyone.
And not only were they fired, which is incredible, but they haven't been rehired even though civilization has moved on from prioritizing this or thinking that the vaccines were any kind of solution at all.
Yeah, well, part of the war on meritocracy and competence and, you know, it's like, get rid of the dissidents.
Absolutely.
It's like, we don't send them to the gulag anymore.
We do the best we can.
Well, we have a diffuse gulag where they can interrupt.
If you're a French horn player, you can suddenly find yourself out of work.
And I don't know what a French horn player does when the tiny number of French horn playing positions are mandated to go to people who have shown compliance.
They do chamber music with less management, and they do Alternative career paths.
But where is the reckoning that causes all of the people who turned out to be right, that this was not society's right to mandate these things because they had no capacity to prevent the spread of the disease.
When do all these people get restored to their former positions?
When do they get an apology that they were ever thrown out of work?
That they were threatened?
When does that happen?
Well, it's an interesting question.
I mean, we can point to all sorts of past societal wrongs.
And we can certainly think of people who are like saying, when are we going to get an apology?
You know, it's the usual suspects, right?
But there's plenty of, unfortunately, sorry for the background noise.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of precedent for apologies being if they come at all being generations down the line um um you know i'm not sure that that has to be true and i would point out that the apology and i don't know this history perfectly well
i hope i don't make an error but the apology that galileo got from the catholic church and the apology uh the acknowledgement that darwin got that uh evolution was more than just a theory and that it had an explanatory role in uh just ...describing the origin of species.
These things came close together in time, which means that Darwin's Apology was on a fast track.
So I'm not sure that we haven't... something about our informational environment hasn't changed in a way that these things could come a lot faster and should come a lot faster.
No, I think, I appreciate your positive take on it, and I think that's actually quite likely, and we might see it.
I mean, the gap has been closing, arguably.
Like, Germany apologized for all sorts of things, you know?
It took a generation, but at least it didn't take ten, right?
Yep.
And so maybe, and that was, you know, pre- Internet, by and large.
So, yeah.
Well, I appreciate your positive look at it.
Hey, do we want to pivot and move on to some other topics?
I was going to suggest it.
There are many things we could discuss.
We could discuss AI.
We could discuss SpaceX.
There are lots of topics on which we have mutual interest.
What do you think?
Well, speaking of SpaceX, this My data is coming to you via Starlink.
And so far, we haven't had a dropout, so that's very nice.
Don't want to jinx it.
But yeah, I've switched over and never went back.
By the way, and let's tie it together here.
I used to have cable, broadband, like everyone else in the desert suburbs where I reside.
But when Starlink, I have a group of friends who were We run and work together on a property in Northern California, and we have connections.
So we got one of the very first Starlink terminals that was available for anybody.
It was gifted to us by a man who you've met.
And so once I saw how good it was, even three and a half years ago when the constellation was quite sparse compared to what it is now, I was like, well, as soon as it's available to me, I'm going to get it.
So it took another two years or so before I got it.
I got onto Starlink right before it showed up in Home Depot and all this kind of stuff.
Now it's everywhere and everybody's got it.
But anyway, I was like, this was during the height of censorship.
And I was like, if I'm going to have an internet service provider, I want it to be run by this guy who's a so-called free speech absolutist.
Whether it's, you know, let's just believe him, right?
That's who I want my ISP to be.
Because I was like, Look, it is technically within the, it is technically within the capabilities of your internet service provider to decide that, um, packets to this destination are, you know, that's, it's like a, it's like the red firewall of China.
They can just say, Oh, you want to go to, uh, uh, are you guys on rumble, right?
Oh, yeah.
Rumble.
You can't, you can't, Send and receive packets from Rumble.
You're living in the 15 minute city, we don't allow that.
And so I'm like, thank you, I'll take a channel to the sky, run by a free speech absolutist, because although it can also be censored, it's probably gonna be the last to go.
Yeah, I agree.
The vulnerabilities are many, and a direct channel to the sky As you point out, owned by a self-described free speech absolutist is a better bet, to be sure.
And I actually think, I wrote about this, I don't write that much, but I wrote about this on Substack, which is, I think he's got a plan.
I think if you look at Elon's trajectories, his strategies, okay, what did he do?
A sustainable energy and transport Tesla, both the vehicles and the energy systems.
He's got, you know, humans to space.
The Mars multi-planetary thing, SpaceX, obviously that's the vision, and they're doing other things along the way to make the business sustainable.
Then he goes and makes a relatively uncensorable internet backbone.
It's politically censorable because, like, you have to get permission from certain countries to... If you're going to beam radio in and out of a country, technically you need that country's permission.
I mean, you don't need it physically, but, uh, like... Anyway, so uncensorable communications, sustainable energy, access to space, Neuralink is like another whole kettle of fish, but let's just say that that's a play to merge humans and AI rather than just have AI running the entire show.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
And now, Yeah, uncensorable internet.
And now, Twitter.
And people are like, well, Twitter's the odd one here.
Like, what does that have to do with any of these things?
And I think it's actually, all of this stuff is dedicated, it seems to me, or can be viewed, can be steel-manned, as dedicated to human progress.
And Twitter was kind of like part of the central nervous system of the human collective.
And it was arguably Diseased.
And so he bought it to do surgery on part of our central nervous system to rid us, at least in large part, of certain disease states that had taken over this information conduit and was blocking information.
So I kind of view all this stuff as roughly coherent.
I agree with you there is a coherence.
It's a little hard to distinguish between good bets and an overarching plan.
The, you know, the case of the Boring Company, for example, it's not obvious that this is a solution to the actual problem that was described, that the problem of traffic is best solved by Creating space underground.
There's lots of, you can make as many lanes as you want underground.
But it is a very good technology to have in your quiver for all sorts of foreseeable future scenarios.
Right.
It's a mining technology.
It could be coupled with other planetary tech and etc.
But let's go back to Twitter for a second.
I do think there is, I would say that Twitter is as close to the locus of collective human consciousness as we've got.
And it was, if disease is not the right term, something in that neighborhood.
It was clearly broken in the sense that if you're going to have a technological locus for consciousness, that locus can't have an opinion of its own.
If it has an opinion of its own, then it...
It doesn't allow you to conclude what should be concluded the way a consciousness must.
So, I love the idea of freeing that thing from whatever the ghost in the machine was.
And I find it interesting that Musk is struggling with the process of freeing it.
There are really two parts to that struggle.
One, you can't have a total free-for-all in which people violate the law.
You have to deploy some mechanism for making judgments about what is and is not tolerated on the platform, free speech, absolutist or not.
So that's a problem.
And then there's the question of all of the entities with various levels of capacity who wish to shape our collective consciousness, as we've just seen them do with COVID, convincing the public en masse of things that simply were not the case, so that they will behave on the basis of those things.
Twitter is one of the places where that happened.
And Twitter is what, you know, as you know, I've said zero is a special number, which is to say, if you have a single platform in which adults can actually have a conversation in which all relevant points of view are voiced and every other platform censors, then of course, all adults will want to be on the platform where they can have the conversation that has to be had.
So that's the The number of platforms that work has to be zero, which is why all of the effort has been spent to derail Musk, to drive people from the platform.
So anyway, I think it's a noble effort, a valuable effort, and that we really should think of it in terms of the manifestation, the most useful manifestation of human collective consciousness that we've got.
Because if it isn't Twitter, what is it?
Well, I mean, if we got the censorship industrial complex cleaned out of some of the other platforms, then it would also be them.
Like, YouTube is a fantastic resource if you want to learn how to fix your dishwasher or, you know, clean your garden.
Certain places they've decided are to, you know, they've decided for whatever silly reasons to censor maybe some They censor porn, they censor this, and they censor you, you know, so they make bad decisions, or somebody's forcing them to make bad decisions.
I could imagine house cleaning and that becoming part of our collective consciousness, or a better, it already is part of it, but like becoming more of it.
I mean, we have Substack, you know, we have It's like the internet has kind of got a bit of its former glory still, you know.
Yeah, and it's reformulating, which I think is fantastic.
I think that has to happen because the regime we were living under was so oppressive.
Should we pivot further over, you have a long history in AI.
Most of us have I have never officially worked in that realm.
I've been thinking about it enough that I wrote a piece in what would have been 2016 about it.
So anyway, you and I have shared interests in this space, but you certainly know a lot more at the professional and technical level than I do.
So tell us what you think.
Where are we?
First of all, before I start pontificating about AI, I want to come clean about my long history in AI.
My long history in AI is, as an interested person, since the 1980s, I was, and maybe even a little before, like I read the original books by Minsky and stuff like that when I was in high school.
But when I became a young professional, I had access to the NASA library, which is quite good, the NASA Ames Library.
And I would read everything I could find that came into the library or that I could dig through in the stacks on AI, particularly neural nets, which were considered just so passe back then.
It's like, well, everybody knows neural nets.
That's not how you do AI.
You do AI with logic and, you know, databases and declarative programming, like neural nets.
They thought that was going to work in the 1960s.
It didn't turn out.
So, but I always thought they were cool, and so I kept reading about them and thinking about them and playing with programs.
But I never, it's not like I published in AI, it's not like I'm some kind of a machine learning professor.
I used some amount of machine learning and other techniques to do data analysis at NASA over the years, to varying degrees of success.
Mostly I found data visualization to be more useful than machine learning back in the 90s and early 2000s and such.
Sort of using my own biological learning to analyze data rather than relying on just statistical classifiers and stuff like that.
But then of course the AI winter ended and the Deep learning revolution came along.
I'd like to say I saw that coming because I remember when backpropagation was first discovered, and I was like, OK, well, this changes things.
But then we had to have, like, giant data and giant computers.
And now we are where we are.
And so you ask, where are we?
And I just want to make clear that I was sort of an interested person, mathematically literate, computer science literate, but not Like a contributor to this field.
All right, caveat accepted.
So where are we now?
Where I think we are is, you know, we're at an interesting place.
I am now working on some projects in this area, as you might guess, because I work for a satellite imaging data company.
Build and launch and operate satellites.
And then our product is the data images of the earth that we bring down from the satellites.
And so we bring down a titanic amount of data, like many terabytes a day.
And so to some extent, nobody can look at all that.
And so if you want to know about what's going on and what's not going on and what's changing and what's, you know, what's happening, you have to arguably use computer vision.
And so I'm heavily involved in that kind of stuff right now.
I used to design telescopes and camera systems and satellite systems, like what they call systems engineering, where you combine the different subsystems like propulsion, payload, power, and comms.
Anyway, then I've recently kind of like, oh, I've had enough of doing satellite engineering and payload engineering for a number of, like, Nine years now, I'm going to go back into software for a while.
And so working on some really great people on some software projects, but they're mostly focused on vision, machine vision, image understanding, that sort of thing.
I'm just going to leave it at that because it's kind of early stage, somewhat proprietary stuff at this point.
And there's lots of people working on this kind of thing.
I mean, it's not like we're great pioneers.
We're just trying to apply it to our own unique data source, which is all these terabytes of satellite imagery.
And so that's very interesting to me, but that's not what most people mean when they say, where are we at in AI?
They mean, oh, what about the large language models and GPTN plus one and all this kind of stuff?
And I think we're at a fairly interesting place, but I don't know that it is so profound as a lot of people think.
And I've certainly, and could probably even repeat, you made these, like an augmented list of AI dangers that goes beyond the standard AI risks and talks about sort of risks to people's cognitive apparatus and risks to our social fabric and things that is not the classic AI risks of paperclips.
So I know your position on that, roughly speaking.
And I agree, although I would have to say that, you know, this is what was supposed to be wrong with social media and this was supposed to be what was wrong with television before.
It's like it's going to corrupt the minds of the youth and there's going to be scams.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever read this book called The Victorian Internet.
It's fascinating.
It came out in the early 2000s, I believe.
It's one of my favorite books.
It talks about the telegraph network.
So the Victorian era transfers eventually international communication system that enabled instant communications.
I mean, this was the thing.
This was like nuclear energy.
It was like all of a sudden communications became a million times as fast.
You used to have to take weeks to send something by ship, documents.
That was the only way to get information across the Atlantic and that or the oceans.
And then Within a fairly short time, cables were strung for wireless radio.
Cables were strung and information could travel effectively instantly.
Like, let's say it's a million times faster.
Like, this is a step change.
And everyone was very excited about it.
And, you know, it was interesting to see what it was used for before it was used for anything else.
It was used for warfare, of course, because fast communications gives you decisive advantage, and it was used for people to arrange secret love affairs and, like, rich business people to arrange for their mistresses to be in the right place at the right time.
So basically porn and war, just like the current internet.
Anyway... I wouldn't call that porn, but I get your point.
It was used for...
Sex.
Yeah, there you go.
Sax and violins, as they like to say.
Anyway, so yeah, so what am I saying here?
So everyone was like up in arms because obviously this was the, this was going to destroy civilization, you know, because it enabled these kinds of high efficiency disruption of, you know, the old ways of war and the old ways of love.
And then we just see this, I guess my point is, every time there's a breakthrough in, or step change in information, you know, radio, television, email, social media, and now language models.
It's like, okay, I guess eventually you pull a black ball from the urn, as they say, and the fact that you pulled out... No, no, I'm going to disagree with you.
The internet is going to destroy civilization.
Did it?
I don't know, but we are at a place where civilization is facilitating the medical disfigurement of children on the basis of a faulty unscientific model of gender.
We have lost our once universally held belief that pedophilia is bad.
We are now questioning fundamental logic at the level of whether one or two plus two necessarily equals four.
It does for us because we're white, right?
But anyway.
What did you say?
I said it does for us because we're white.
Isn't that the argument?
I don't know what the argument is, but I guess my point would be, I think the idea that Lots of people have looked at television, the internet, etc., and decided that it's going to destroy us, and that it hasn't happened.
Might not be right, because I don't know that it isn't actually happening.
We are seeing something in which the most fundamental agreements at the heart of our civilization are now not just under scrutiny but are universally being rejected every single value is now under threat simultaneously so i don't know what did it and we still can we still man the opposition here sure or as i guess
that's a fancy way for saying let me argue with you let me push back Even though I don't necessarily believe everything I say, but it's not like I totally disbelieve it either.
Okay, we have had panics and fevers in the figurative sense, and the madness of crowds, and Uh, you know, manias of various groups, civilizational manias of all sorts, from probably before written history, but certainly, this, like, this kind of crazy rejection of what was believed to be universally acknowledged, this has happened before.
People have been swept away by craziness, and you know, Pendulum swings back and forth and different people have different ideas of what's crazy and what's not.
I think the pendulum probably has, I'd have to agree with you, it's swung too far in the directions that you're complaining about.
But, you know, one might argue that it was too far in the other direction before where, like, nobody was allowed to question anything about gender and no one was allowed to, you know, explore.
So, yeah, I have a feeling, don't you think that there's a chance that we're gonna converge or do you think the oscillations are undamped and getting wilder?
It's a little hard to say because oscillation itself is an imprecise term that's hard to map onto this landscape but of course I think there is a chance that we will come to our senses.
I wouldn't be taking the kinds of risks that I'm taking for myself or for my family if I didn't think there was a decent chance that we could Put us back on course but I do think that no argument that is based on the fact that people have
Feared the implications of technological especially informational change in the past and been wrong is Has the justifiable presumption of truth at this point because There comes a point there are certain topics mm-hmm two plus two equals four and
is not an interesting topic because it's so fundamental that no rational person would seriously challenge it.
The idea that pedophilia is something we need to rethink because something, something, something.
No, this is not something you rethink.
The idea that doctors not only should be allowed to hack apart
Perfectly healthy young people rendering them incapable and medically dependent for the rest of their lives but that anybody who gets between a Child and such a doctor is guilty of some sort of a moral failing We are talking about
A decoherence that is so profound that I think the presumption goes in the exact opposite direction.
We are watching civilization come apart in a way that we don't have good examples of civilizations recovering from this level of insanity.
Do we?
Well, I'm not a historian, and I don't really know what I'm talking about here.
I hope that you're wrong, of course.
I'm not saying that you're wrong in your claims.
I hope that you're wrong in your projections.
The fact that no civilization has rescued itself from this level of insanity doesn't mean we can't.
Again, that's the only reason that I'm doing what I'm doing.
Well, also, I tend to think We might be.
I don't know if this is true but aren't isn't there a danger like the filter bubble danger like isn't there the danger of like how common is all are all these craziness isn't all these failings, just because.
Like man bites dog.
You know what I mean?
It's that sort of a thing, isn't it?
No, it is not such a thing, Creon.
And we can tell that because where is the university where they say no A child who is gender non-conforming not only is not in need of some sort of medical intervention, but it would be immoral to engage in it.
Where is that university?
I do not know.
I mean, if we're now going to get into the... yeah.
So maybe this is what's more concerning.
And I know this is near and dear to you.
What's more concerning to me is that academia is falling apart.
It's... Well, but I wasn't going to stop with academia.
Where's the newspaper in which this is plainly stated?
There are a few of those newspapers, but, you know... There are a few.
Maybe the Wall Street Journal... And they would be censored if the...
Where is the major scientific journal in which these things are simply rejected?
I see them embraced in top-tier journals.
There are a couple of exceptions, but my point would be, if this was a matter of filter bubbles, And focusing on something that is very localized and isolated and small and imagining that it extends to the whole.
It wouldn't be the majority of journals.
It wouldn't be all of the universities.
It wouldn't be the majority of newspapers.
It would be the rare newspaper.
And we would debate whether or not the fact that some newspaper was saying these things was an ominous sign about the future.
But it clearly is much more global This is a place, kind of like maybe rocketry or something like this, like this is a focus interest of yours that I don't know that much about, so I'm just going to have to refer to your expertise on it, because I'm not sure I can, you know, cogently riff on it that much.
But one thing I don't want to know is historically, and again, I'm not a historian, but this seems to be, when we talk about these institutions, the press, the journals, the academias, I forget which was the other one you said, medicine, you know, it's like the elites.
I don't mean elites like the, you know, the trilateral commissioners kind of conspiracy elites.
I mean, like elite classes of society, the high professionals, the well-educated, it's a madness that seems to be mostly infecting them, is it not?
Like, working class people don't have time for this shit, do they?
Well, that's an interesting question.
My impression is that there is less focus on it, but that if the elites are setting the rules of engagement, That it is not that there is that medicine for working class people is humming along the way it used to and medical medicine for the elites is suffering from some sort of a delusion.
Medicine is suffering from a delusion.
Right.
And that means it's reaching everyone.
Anyway, I mean, look, this is a diversion from your central point, which is we have a new technology.
New technologies come with dangers.
Those dangers are often misunderstood until years after these things have been deployed.
So maybe we're not where we think we are.
Well, isn't there that law, I forget whose eponym gets applied to it, but it's like, there's that law that we tend to overestimate the near-term effects of any new technology and underestimate the long-term effects of that same technology.
And so everyone who's worried that, like, we're going to have fast AI takeoff and, you know, Wake up one morning to AI overlords making turning us into paperclips.
I think, you know, I know that's kind of a ridiculous version of it, but I tend to think that, you know, those people are going to be disappointed just like they are going to be disappointed with room temperature superconductors and humans to Mars and all these things in the short term.
I mean, when I was a kid, I thought we were going to have fusion and we'll be living on the moon and, you know, all this stuff was obvious to me by the time I was an adult.
This was going to be the undead.
And it's like, eh, the world is kind of pretty much like it was when I was a kid, except that we've got, you know, we've got internet and we've got, you know, a few other things.
But I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that, so I think that in the long term, AI might be a very potent change to our culture, just like computers and electricity and all these other breakthroughs before them.
But in the short term, I'm not quite sure that I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't, you know, because I've done a fair amount, I'm not an expert, but I've done a fair amount of experimentation with some of the larger LLM products as well as some of the smaller ones.
And I have to say that, um, you know about the term gal man amnesia?
Yeah, I do.
You want to define it for people who don't?
Yeah, so as I understand it, Gell-Mann and Amnesia were named after Murray Gell-Mann, who either claimed or was known to read an article in the newspaper or magazine about physics, because he was a physicist, Nobel Prize winner, created the concept of quarks and a bunch of other things.
He would read an article about physics in Scientific American or the newspaper or Time magazine, and he'd be like, well, they got that totally wrong.
They got everything wrong in that article pretty much that you could possibly get wrong.
And then he turned to the next article, which was about something he didn't know about, and he would just accept it as probably true.
And this is sort of the idea of the general phenomenon that, you know, when we scrutinize mass media in some way that we are an expert, it's very easy to find flaws, but then we forget that those same types of flaws may be universal or far too common in popularizations.
Anyway, so I kind of get a Gell-Mann amnesia effect from the large language models.
If I ask them about something that I really know, they don't do a very good job.
They get a lot of things wrong.
They miss important stuff.
Sometimes they're, like, completely wrong.
And, you know, maybe occasionally I find something useful, but that's hard to find something useful because I'm already an expert.
You would have to be more expert than me.
But it gets stuff wrong.
And then when I ask it about stuff I don't know about, it sounds quite plausible.
And I'm very impressed.
Am I suffering?
You're also looking at it in the very earliest phase.
Which, you know, to your point about long-term effects being more interesting than the short-term impact here.
Now, as you know, although I think the possibility of misaligned AI is real, it's not where my concern is focused.
I'm much more focused on the Types of disaster that I believe are certain to flow from what we've already seen and can extrapolate is coming in the near future.
the ability to leverage these things that the AI may not be misaligned, but that bad people have a force multiplier in AI, that their ability to con other people has gone up, and the ability to resist has not gone up at the same rate.
It's like with Massacre, they already have such an ability to con people.
I'm not sure how much more can go up.
Oh, don't say things like that, Creon.
We just fell for over the last couple of years.
Yeah, well, I think we're in for a rough ride.
But then there is the simple fact that if everybody has these things in their arsenal, then it's going to be very hard to know how to evaluate anything you hear from just about anyone. - Mm-hmm.
Or anything you see.
These things are... I understand your concern.
I mean, do you have a bright side?
Can you think of a bright side?
Because I sure can.
The bright side is that...
A, we're not cooked yet, and it's possible we could level up faster, fast enough.
But B, more importantly, and I'm borrowing here from my friend Alexandros Marinos.
I heard your, that was a good one.
Say that again?
I heard your discussion with him, it was great.
Yeah, he's a very interesting guy, and his point His point has two sides to it.
One is, there are many wicked problems in the organization of a society that we have not solved, and AI offers the potential for generating solutions we cannot access directly, which I believe is accurate.
And his other point, which is not quite the silver lining that that first point is, is that we are already so screwed with respect to our current trajectory and the dysfunction that flows from it, that the danger that AI will hasten a bad end, though it is real, is not something that should preoccupy us, because what we're really looking for is something that can steer us out of the nosedive that we're already in.
All right.
That's a sort of, uh, what is the word there?
That's like calling that an optimistic is stretching the bounds of optimistic.
Well, you know, when you come to me for, for optimism, you're already kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Fair enough.
I'd like to say, and again, I'm not a therapist, so I don't know if this is true.
And I'd like to have some therapists weigh in on this after they do some serious work.
I think that Language models could be really good therapists, or at least, not necessarily really good therapists, but adequate therapists to intervene for people who are depressed, who can't afford a therapist.
I mean, I think that they could be trained to really coach people out of bad situations.
I think they could actually, I mean, because really, if you think about it, what do they do?
They create talk, they create words, they create Sentences and things like this.
And so who does that for a living?
Well, yeah, journalists do it.
And, you know, well, I guess podcasters do it and and pundits do it, you know, but but there's a whole class of people who heal people with words.
And I suspect that that these things might be really good to help.
Depressed people, violent people, even Get back on track.
Well, I see a, if all you did was prevented them from having the capacity to prescribe drugs that don't work and make your problems worse, that that would be an improvement.
But I would also say in order to, to refine the capacity that you're talking about, and mind you realize that An LLM that was trained to respond to augment capacities that the person being talked to
Felt were positive could produce very bad effects.
It could reinforce you right for example if if you take and mind you regular shrinks can do this too, but if you and actually the economic model around psychology is likely to do this if somebody walks into the office of a shrink and
They are unhappy because the people around them don't like them, don't want to spend time with them, don't want to collaborate with them in business, whatever.
And the shrink helps the person feel better about themselves.
That may be exactly the opposite of what the person needs.
The person may need to... No, I agree.
It's not just about feeling better.
It's about making... It's about moving your life into the direction that you would like it to be.
So in order for LLMs to do that properly, you have to train them on metrics that are long-term well-being metrics rather than short-term feel-better metrics.
Right.
Well, I just think this is a very interesting fertile ground that I'm not going to pursue.
I'm not going to make an AI therapy company, but I bet there's hundreds of people who are trying.
So, before we close this out, I know there were a couple other topics that you wanted to discuss.
What were they?
Well, I mean, I've got a long list and we're not going to get through it.
Maybe another time.
But I wanted to go back to something, revisit because I realized I missed the question.
That I wanted to ask you and then maybe we can go on to fission and Carrington events and that sort of thing if you care to revisit that.
But my going back question is, you know how I was saying that we wanted to have a NASA style failure investigation board and I didn't see it happening regarding COVID and now it's maybe too late, but you were noticeably present on the DeSantis Commission.
Did anything happen with that?
I mean, I saw what was available on video.
You did great.
You did exceptionally well, as did others.
But then what?
Did you get called back?
Did they get called back?
Are they going to do anything?
Do you know?
Because that seemed like the closest thing.
It is the Public Health Integrity Committee.
I think it's a great idea.
It is not the kind of thing that is best deployed at the level of an individual state, but what I like about what DeSantis is up to and his Surgeon General, Latipo, they are using
The power of a large state, the way California often gets environmental regulations to take hold because California is a very large state, it can drive people to do things like clean up the exhaust coming from their cars so that we have less smog, etc.
So by using Florida as an oasis of reason on topics like COVID, we can model what a proper response should look like and investigate what it is that took place and how it came to be.
So yes, I'm still on that panel.
I don't know what happens next with it.
And there is a limit to how far a single state can go, but I'm very pleased with how it has functioned so far.
Have there been, like, further meetings?
There have been a couple of in-person meetings, and the committee still exists.
Well good, I hope they issue a giant report of some sort or do something to, like, because There, as far as I know, there's no, and I could be wrong, but there's no body of serious Yeah, I agree, and it needs one.
I misspoke.
It's not a couple of meetings.
There have been three in-person meetings, and we still exist as a body, so we'll see where it goes.
Yeah, let's see.
So, I know you have these... I wanted to know if your thinking has evolved at all on fission power, and particularly your kind of
That particular kind of doomy scenario that you came up with about Carrington events and spent fuel pools, or fishing power in general, if your thinking has evolved, has changed, or if you'd like to revisit that, because it's a kind of... Yeah, it's evolved a little bit as a result of conversations with a number of people who are well informed.
My position has moved a little.
I think their position needs to move a lot.
But, let's just say this.
I would not rule out the possibility That fission could play an important role in the future.
What I'm going to be very hard to persuade about is whether or not the designs that are currently deployed are rescuable, or are they too flawed to be utilized on the basis that the spent fuel that they produce has no
mechanism by which to detoxify it, no long-term plan for storing it that is viable, and that the hazard it poses to hired life is so significant that those designs should never have been deployed in the first place.
That said, there are...
Okay, go ahead.
Sorry.
Say again?
No, go ahead.
I'm sorry I interrupted.
Well, that said, there are other fourth-gen reactor designs that not only could potentially have a fail-safe capacity built into them that would be satisfactory, but could actually aid in the process of doing away with waste we've already produced.
Yeah, well okay, I'm not going to argue against advanced reactors.
So therefore I agree with that last bit that you said.
So where's all this higher life that's been destroyed by the current third generation previous reactors?
Where are the species that have been driven extinct by nuclear weapon exchanges?
Yeah.
Well, we haven't been having nuclear weapon exchanges for 60 years, but we've been building more nuclear power plants and running them out.
Do you deny that nuclear weapons have the capacity to destroy species?
That we could alter the globe with nuclear weapons in such a way that, you know, we might lose many organisms?
Yeah, I'm not enough of a biologist to know how many species we could if we set our minds to it.
Not set our minds to it.
Ignored them and on and off they got into an exchange with another nuclear power.
I have a feeling humans would suffer the most from that.
Except for perhaps some rare animals in zoos in large cities that might actually go extinct because the last of them disappear when the cities get nuked But I don't I mean you tell me if I'm wrong like I don't imagine that I mean Did Japan I believe you're I believe you are wrong and the fact that we have not driven anything to extinction with nuclear weapons does not mean that it is outside the realm of possibility or even probability if we were to get into a major nuclear exchange.
And so I'm not going to be arguing for major nuclear exchanges, no matter whether the extinctions of species or not, I'm kind of are going to argue against I mean, that's obviously to be avoided at all costs.
But with nuclear power, it's a different thing.
With nuclear power, we've been, we've been, you know, let me get into this debate in detail right now.
I'm going to suggest, do you want me to suggest a guest for you offline or online?
I mean, I've got guests who I would be interested in having this discussion with, and in fact, I already had one discussion with Michael Schellenberger that I thought was very productive.
But anyway... Well, I urge you to have a look, even if you don't invite him as a guest, have a look at Brett Kugelmast.
Have you heard of him?
Nope.
Great first name.
Anyway.
How many T's does he have?
I don't know.
Actually, one or two.
And so he has been doing a podcast on nuclear energy into the thousands of episodes.
And he's interviewed and talked to, he claims, 10,000 people in industry, government, uh, uh, academia, et cetera.
And his, this is his gig is vision.
And, um, you should hear, you should hear some of his lectures on it because the problem is if you, if you talk to the people whose gig is virology, you would have been drenched in nonsense for three straight years.
It's about how important it is for us to do gain-of-function research and blah, blah, blah.
Right, right.
You would have gotten nonsense.
So I'm not all that impressed with us going to the people who have the deepest perspective, because the deepest perspective may just be wrong.
Well, wait a minute.
The deepest... I mean, he talks... Well, look, I don't... I'm not saying he's wrong.
I don't know his work.
But my point is, I'm not impressed by the number of podcast episodes.
Were they good episodes?
I'm on board.
Were they bad episodes?
Not so much.
Okay, I guess my point would only be that that He's got some very interesting contrarian views on nuclear energy, or excuse me, dissident views on nuclear energy.
And for instance, one of them is that, you know, who's actually responsible for the slowdown?
Who is most responsible for the slowdown and cost escalation and trouble that the nuclear industry is in, in the United States?
Whether you think it's a good idea or not.
Like most people, if you ask them this question, like who stopped nuclear power?
They're gonna be like, well, it was the environmentalists or it was the regulators.
And it's like, no, it was the nuclear industry.
They just found they could make more money selling safety upgrades than building reactors in the US.
And so that's what they've been doing is selling safety upgrades.
Now, you know, one might argue that these safety upgrades are a wise investment or that they're not, but the industry just pivoted.
And they're like, you know, We don't want to produce power, we want to produce, you know, safety scanners and stuff like this.
You want to vaccinate the reactors to make them... Prevent them, right?
Yeah.
Well, anyway, I think that I suspect, Brett, that if you do a deep dive on fission power,
Deeper even than you may already have that you will change your opinion even more I suspect well look I would love to change my opinion if it was actually Viable because energy is a key concern reducing energy in a way that is actually non-destructive of The biosphere is great, but it has to work that way long term Right, yes, I agree it has to work that way long term.
So a good thing to look at is Fukushima.
Fukushima is the worst possible accident that you could imagine for a water-moderated reactor.
No way.
We got lucky and we avoided the worst accident.
Barely.
Barely.
No, I don't understand.
The worst accident was multiple meltdowns, total failure of all backup.
The worst accident, which we were not far from, was an accident that forced the abandonment of the site.
People maintained control, barely.
Barely.
That was a terrible accident, but it was the tiniest fraction of what might have happened.
Really?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, this is something that I should revisit and you should revisit, although perhaps not with each other, because I have a feeling that maybe both of us might be a little bit over our skis on this one.
But the truth is out there, as they say.
I'm not even wearing skis, man.
Okay.
Well, it does seem to me that, I mean, I know you're good.
It's the same old argument again.
It's like, Nobody was killed from radiation at Fukushima.
And you had like complete failure of all these reactors all at once.
And oh, and a tsunami on top of it all else, killing tens of thousands.
I don't know where you get the idea.
Well, I do know where you get the idea that no one was killed.
What I don't understand is why you do not deploy the same skepticism on this one, given the level of perverse incentives that you would deploy in the context of COVID.
Because I think the Fukushima panic narrative shares a lot with the COVID panic narrative, and so I am deploying similar skepticism.
I don't think so.
I think, by and large, I find that people don't know what happened at Fukushima.
They're just unaware.
You know, it had new cycles for a while, but people don't understand, they don't understand the difference between radiation and radionuclides that have escaped into the environment.
They don't understand the difference between mixed oxide fuels and regular fuels.
They don't understand what the explosions that tore apart the reactor buildings - What caused them?
They don't understand the design. - Well, people don't even understand the basic differences between Chernobyl and Western water moderate reactors.
It's like, if they don't understand that, then it's like, we're not even past the first half hour of class on reactor design.
So I think it's a fascinating thing.
Unfortunately, my plate's kind of full.
But I look forward to you having a really qualified guest, another really qualified guest on your podcast to talk about this.
All right, but to be fair, I have had one such guest, and we did discuss this very issue.
Was this a recent one about Schellenberger or an older one?
It's an older one.
It's not the most recent one.
He was just on, but he and I, you know, it wasn't that long ago.
In the last year, somewhere.
All right.
Gosh, I can't believe I missed it.
I thought I would listen to you religiously, but... You don't have to.
We have lots of atheists in our audience, too.
I really enjoy, I'm gonna have to go in a couple minutes, Brett, but I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me.
And I want to just, again, give you and Heather and Zach lots of love because you're doing holy work.
Appreciate that.
Thank you very much for joining me.
It's been a great conversation.
Where can people find you?
Well, there's not that many Creon Levits that show up when you do it.
I would grant you that.
You can find a few of my lectures on YouTube and workshops that I've participated in, and I have a little sub stack.
They can find me in Palm Springs if they're ever coming through.
What's your sub stack called?
I think it's called Creon.substack.
Oh no, it's called Mutual Information.
Mutual Information.
And your... I'm not going to call it by its new name.
Your Twitter handle?
My Twitter handle is Creon.
It's Creon.
There you go.
I've been there since back long before it was even Twitter.
Before it was Twitter.
No, I mean, it was like, I remember when Twitter was a novelty that only a few computer geeks knew about, and so I signed up.
Right, well, it's an idea that still doesn't make any sense.
You're gonna just type these very limited fortune cookie messages and broadcast them into the void, and why would anybody do that?
Well, apparently it's worth a lot of money.
Yes.
No, in retrospect, it's a great idea, but it's like Velcro or a zipper.
If you describe it to somebody, it doesn't sound all that likely to work.
I look forward to our paths crossing in real life again, Brett.
