want to start with a quote from Ilyas at

skever he said for people that don't

know he's a co-founder of openai he said

it may be that today is large General

networks are slightly conscious so I

want to pose that question to you are

computers becoming conscious right now I

think it's uh

a question that doesn't make much sense

because we don't even have a clear

scientific understanding of what

conscious means

So based on that I would say no there

are lots of properties of our

Consciousness that are missing what it

means to be conscious in other words

what sort of computations are going on

in our brain when we become conscious of

something

and and

you know how that is is related to

Notions for example of self or relations

to others

um

our thoughts emerge and how they're

related to each other all kinds of Clues

we have about Consciousness including

how it's implemented in neural circuits

that are completely missing in large

language models all right as we as we

think about Consciousness from an

evolutionary standpoint we think about

its utility

um and for for people that haven't heard

Consciousness defined before it

the I think the easiest way to explain

it is it feels like something to be a

human and so the question is does it

feel like something to be a machine and

the most important question I think as

we think about the dangers of AI and

what's coming is does it matter

is it additional utility for it to feel

like something to be a human or to be a

machine do you agree that that's going

to matter in terms of goal orientation

in terms of quote unquote wanting to do

something as we think about our AI you

know is it going to take over are we

going to be dealing with Killer Robots

or am I totally off base with that my

group put out

um paper just in the last couple of

months

and we propose a theory that that may uh

that is anchored in how brains compute

so the theory has to do with the

dynamical nature of the brain in other

words you know you have a

uh 80 billion neurons and their activity

is changing over time

the trajectory that your brain goes

through is all these neurons change

their activity

tends to converge towards some

configuration when you're becoming

conscious that convergence has

mathematical implications that

would suggest that what we store in our

short-term memory are these thoughts

that are discrete but compositional in

other words like think like a short

sentence and it's also something

ineffable which means

it's very hard to translate in words and

there are good reasons for that it's

just the

uh it would take a huge number of words

to be able to translate the the

trajectory that state of your brain

which is a very very high dimensional

object into words it's just impossible

essentially

so even though we may communicate with

language we may have a different

interpretation of what this means and

especially in particular a different

subjective experience because of our ex

or our life has been different right so

we've learned different ways of

interpreting the world okay if if

Consciousness is a byproduct of the

feeling I get when my particular brain

is honing in on a thought that there is

a neural pattern that becomes

recognizable

um the the thing I think that becomes

important and the reason that I think

this is important as we think about

artificial intelligence potentially

becoming Killer Robots is my big thing

with AI has always been AI has to want

something it has to want an outcome not

necessarily interesting let me finish

that sentence and then we'll pick that

apart but if I'm right and AI has to

want something and that's certainly how

humans behave then I understand the

utility of this ineffable feeling that

you're talking about that we call

consciousness because

for humans to make a decision and know

what direction to go in we must have

emotion if you selectively damage the

region of the brain that controls

emotion people cannot make decisions

they can tell you all the rational

reasons why they should eat fish instead

of beef or beef instead of fish but they

can't then actually decide and do it so

we need that feeling that where this

thing is more desirable than that thing

and so my thinking has always been as it

relates to AI that

if AI doesn't want something it will

never be from an emotional standpoint if

it doesn't feel like anything to be a

robot they will never have the final

decision making capability to care

enough to take over the world

and so that's where it's like if it

becomes conscious and it suddenly feels

like something to be a robot then

they're going to be motivated in a

direction that direction could be bad it

could be good whatever but they're going

to be motivated in a direction now if

they are like humans

but if they never become conscious or it

never feels like anything I would think

they would be much like they are now

where it's like well it could be this it

could be that if you've ever talked to

Chachi petite which of course you have

but that feels like it would sort of be

a Perpetual State of Affairs what might

I be getting wrong

my belief is that you're talking about

two things that are actually quite

separate as if there are one so wanting

something having goals and getting some

kind of internal or external reward for

achieving those goals is something that

we already do in machine learning you

know reinforcement learning is all based

on this and you don't need subjective

experience for that

so these are like really distinct

abilities

subjective experience is related to

thoughts that we discussed earlier we

could have machines that have something

like thoughts and potentially if we

implement it similarly to how it is in

our brain they might have subjective

experience it doesn't mean that they

need to have goals I think we can build

machines that that have these

capabilities in other words they can

help us solve problems by telling us how

you know what is the problem what is the

a good scientific understanding of what

is going on and what might be better

Solutions and but they're not trying to

achieve anything except be as truthful

to the data what they know whether you

have observed what then is the disaster

scenario of something that can pass the

touring test that you're worried enough

that you're saying look we need to treat

this the way that we would treat

anything else dangerous whether that's

the environment whether that's or sorry

climate change or whether that's nuclear

weapons like to to put it on that level

just at the touring test level give me

give me the disaster scenario we already

have trolls right that are trying to

influence people on the internet social

media

but there are humans and you can't scale

the number of trolls very easily this

would be too expensive and maybe people

would not want to do it even if you bait

them

but you can scale AI with just more

compute power

so you could have ai trolls

that

I mean I think there already exists AI

Trolls but they are stupid it's easy to

you know interact with them a little bit

and you see they're not human I mean

they've been repetitive and and so on

and so now we get to the point where

you're going to have ai trolls that

essentially invade are

social media invade or even our email

and in fact they can do they could do

better than that it could be

personalized so right now

it's a little bit difficult for a human

troll to have a good personal

understanding of every person that they

hit on

that to know their history I mean it

would just take too much time for them

to study you

and multiplied by a billion people

but an AI system that could just have

access to all of the interactions that

you've had the videos where you spoke

the texts that's available on the

internet

they could know you a lot better right

so how could that be used

well

it could be used to hit on the right

buttons for you to change your political

opinion on something

it could be used to even fool you into

thinking your

in a conversation with someone you know

because they can know you and they can

know your friend

and they can impersonate your friend at

least text other text up

so I don't think we have these things

but just they're just like one small

step away from having these capabilities

as I was thinking through the same

problem

I was thinking here is a terrifying

example dear parents AI is going to

reach out to you mimicking your child

asking for money and so it's not a

Nigerian prince anymore it's Mom uh I

something happened at school whatever

they talk in their language they

reference things that you you don't

think that they could have possibly put

out there but of course if it's if the

AI is good at image recognition and it

knows that you guys were on a beach

seven years ago like it could it could

replicate things in in the form of a

memory that you would never believe that

anybody else could possibly know but we

leak especially kids leak so much data

out into social media that to your point

that AI would be able to have so much

context so at my last company we got

socially engineered and they convinced

us to wire 50 Grand and when we went

back and looked at the emails back and

forth between our

finance department and the the CEO

it was so believable it wrote like it

was obviously a person but it was

writing like they would write to each

other and

I was just I was really flabbergasted

and so to think that a human could do

that to your point it's very hard for

them to get the amount of contextures to

take so much time but when AI is doing

it and it can churn through everything

that those two people had ever said to

each other

ever online uh that gets really scary

really fast okay so if if we were if we

did this pause the the letter that you

guys wrote and we paused for six months

and we were gonna hold the convention in

that time and all governments were there

Yoshua and you're up on stage and your

job isn't to tell us what to do but it's

to open the conversation in the right

place

where would you open that conversation

what do you want us focused on in term

I'm guessing it's like we need to limit

this or something along those lines

where do you begin

I don't know for sure exactly how these

Technologies could be used you and I can

like make up things maybe some are going

to be easier than we thought something

could be harder

but there's so much uncertainty about

how bad it can turn that we need to be

put it so Prudence here

is something that we need to bring in

our decision making uh

individually because we're gonna be

facing potentially these attacks

uh as as Nations at the planet level

yeah that that's that's that would be my

main message that that the technology

has reached a point where it can be very

damaging and there's too much unknown of

how this can happen when it will happen

and even the strongest expert even the

people who built the latest systems

can't tell you

it means

that we have to get our act together and

mostly is going to come from governments

so we need those people to get quickly

educated and we need to uh

also have Scholars experts not just AI

experts but like you know social

scientists legal Scholars

um psychologists because you know this

is the psychology of how this could be

used how to exploit people's weaknesses

um

in order to

do the the work the research also like

what sort of precautions do we need so

there are very simple things that we can

do very quickly for example

um watermarks and

content

um origin display so watermarks just

means that one accompanies say like open

AI what's up their software they could

easily put out

um another software that anybody could

run that can test with

99.99 confidence where they're uh a text

came from their system or not so he was

wouldn't see the difference

but for a machine that has the right

code it's very easy

if if if if their system is instrumented

properly in other words the kind of

sneak in some bits of information that

are not

you can't notice statistically there is

no difference but

the chances of having this particular

sequence of of words would be very very

unlikely and and would go to zero

quickly is the length of the message

increases so watermarks are easy to put

in technically speaking

and they would say this texts

comes from this company this version

whatever okay so a piece of software

running on your computer would be able

to say oh by the way the text that you

gave me to read is this company blah

blah blah

and then we need that information to be

displayed because of course you know

being able to detect the it's coming

from an AI system is one thing and but

when you have a user interface it should

also be mandatory like if I if I'm a on

a social media in particular and I'm

getting

uh you know I'm interfacing I mean I'm

interacting with some some character out

there online I need to know that that

character is not a human

and so that must be displayed if I get

uh a picture or a video or a text in an

email

I need my

email uh you know uh software to tell me

warning this is coming from you know

open AI GPT 5.6 okay so I'm going to

push back with the obvious thing and I

think I won't even have to play devil's

advocate here I I maybe I'm not more

pessimistic than you but I am in the the

toothpaste is out of the tube and

there's no getting it back in so I as as

a way to move all this forward lets you

and I actually debate the reality of all

this so uh I'm at the governmental

meeting you start saying that my

immediate reaction is Yoshua China is

going to develop this if we don't if we

put the brakes on this they're not going

to and this is a winner take all

scenario we cannot allow ourselves to

get behind

what say you

it's a good it's a good concern

um

and that's why we have to get China

around the table as well and Russia and

all the countries that may have the

capability to to do this but Russia

right now feels hemmed into a corner

they are Putin is literally intimating

that he's going to use nuclear weapons

there's no Universe like we've already

tried Financial sanctions that's caused

them to you know start trading in

non-dollar denominations uh they're

grouping up with China Brazil South

Africa

um they India they don't care like

they're going to use that to their

advantage they're in fact even bluffing

would be a way smarter play for him to

say no no we're going to keep doing it

even if he wasn't even if they're like

backwaters it would be wise of him to

say no in in fact if you don't NATO if

you don't immediately back off we're

going to unleash a troll Farm the likes

of which you've never seen we're going

to completely destroy democracy in the

western world

yeah so first of all uh

we can protect ourselves without

necessarily hampering the research so I

think people misunderstood a letter it

never said stop the eye research

it's mostly about these very large

systems

that can be deployed in the public and

then used potentially in the various

ways that we have to be careful with

it's a tiny tiny sliver of the whole

thing that we're doing

um

second

and and second in the short term we do

have to protect the public in our

societies with things like

like trolls and cyber attacks and and uh

that can exploit AI

um third I I don't know I'm not a note

I don't my comfort zone here in terms of

diplomacy and then you know

you and me both but it's fun

um but but my

my guess is that

um the authoritarian governments are

probably as scared of this technology

but for different reasons

so why are they scared because

the same AI systems that could perturb

our democracies could also challenge

their power

in other words

imagine

AI trolls you know being able to defeat

the

protections of the uh

Chinese firewall and and interacting

with people and you know putting

Democratic ideas in their heads in China

um well that would not be something that

this governments probably would like to

see

um and in fact I think China has been

the fastest moving on regulation

not for the same reasons as we are

so they are afraid of this

so I think they will come to the table

but again like it's not my specialty

with anything but at least we

there's a chance that they they might be

willing to talk and remember

um the nuclear treaties were uh

worked on and signed right in the middle

of the Cold War

so

so long as each party recognizes that

they might have something worse to lose

by not entering those discussions I

think there's a chance we can

have a global coordination and we have

to work even if it's hard we have to

work on it yeah I don't I'm not so

worried about the hard part as I am what

is the natural reaction when you have a

very difficult dangerous thing and

history tells me that we don't come to

the table to sign the non-proliferation

agreement until we have proliferated so

far and we have so many missiles pointed

at each other that we finally go okay

let's not let this go beyond any more

and let's not let it go out to other

countries like we're perfectly fine

being in a stalemate with each other and

I worry that a similar kind of reaction

will be had here but I take your point

that this is not an area where either of

us are an expert as much as I find it

utterly fascinating to pursue that line

of thought but I I want to now go back

to what would we do to actually begin to

limit this stuff so we need to get

people thinking hey this is dangerous

that's clear but then the watermark

thing to me works only for people that

agree that they're going to do it

but is there a way so taking the instead

of trying to get people to not do things

how do we build defensive things that

even when somebody's trying to hack the

system so I doubt you know this about me

but we're building a video game and so

one of the things you have to think

about is this game people will attempt

to hack it like that that is just it

goes without saying so rather than me

trying to ask everybody hey please don't

hack video games like literally it's the

dumbest thing ever for the gamers to

hack the games is stupid you end up

ruining the fun that game will die out

and then people will try to invent a

whole new game far better for everybody

to just let's all agree that we're not

going to hack it but it human nature is

is what it is and that's never going to

work so what they do is they create an

adversarial approach where it's like I

find the best hackers in the world to

come in to try to hack this game and

then I figure out what I would have to

do to defeat that so what would an

adversarial setup look like an AI when

someone's trying not to Watermark but I

can still figure out who that came from

or it had you know is there a signature

or something like that that we could

identify you can reboot your life your

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watermarks are the easy thing and and

the

I agree they will only be done by the

like

legit actress

um people have already been working on

um machine learning

trained to detect

text or images that come from other

machine learning systems but these

systems are not nearly as good but yes

we we this is already being developed

and uh you know presumably there's going

to be a lot more effort in that

direction and we need that as Plan B

right the plan a is already to reduce

the like right now it's just too easy to

you can have an API and just

right on top of uh chat GPT

um

so yeah we should do all these things uh

by the way the kind of adversarial

approach that you're talking about is

from what I hear and read is also what

openai has been doing and and companies

like like Google have been doing the

um they hire people to try to break

their system as much as they can that's

exactly what they're doing like uh you

know red teams

um

and and that's good we need to continue

doing that

um but maybe we need to make sure

um the the the guidelines for doing that

are shared across the board and people

can uh we ensure all companies have have

that sort of uh re-test thing before

it's released to the public for example

yeah

um about because you asked like what we

can we do in the short term at the

beginning of your question

so Canada has a law a bill that is going

to pass into law probably in the spring

that uh maybe the first one

um around the world on on uh Ai and it

has a nice feature

which hopefully other countries will

imitate which is that the law itself

is fairly

you know uh

simple it it states a number of

principles

um

and then it leaves the details of what

exactly needs to be enforced to

regulation

and the reason this is good is because

it's much easier for governments to

change regulation regulation could be

changed like this

uh you don't need to go back to the

parliament

and so you could have much more adaptive

legislative System including the law and

the regulation and that's going to be

super important because

the the the the nefarious uses that we

didn't think about like they're going to

come up and we need to wrap quickly if

we have to go back to Parliament it's

going to take two years no this is not

going to work right we need to have a

system that's very adaptive in terms of

legislation

yeah that that is inevitable uh that

brings me back to we're in this

situation because I think people are

surprised at how rapidly AI is advancing

what how did we get caught off guard

like someone like you has been in this

for so long you knew the rate of change

um what happened is is it just we we

just could not anticipate as we scaled

the data up how fast the machine would

learn or is there what what is the X we

were surprised that the machine did X

quickly what was X ask acid training

tests in other words manipulate language

well enough I can fool us

uh the experience I had of so sorry what

what I'm asking is what allowed it to do

that in a way that caught us off guard

well that's interesting right it didn't

require any new science it it's

essentially scale that did it

do you think Consciousness is a function

of scale no right no

I don't think so uh I mean some people

think so but there are theories around

that uh I

think scale is probably useful but that

there are some very specific

qualitative features of how we become

conscious that would work even at

smaller scales

um

so yeah scale is important simply

because

the job that we're asking these

computers to do when they answer

questions

is computationally

very demanding

and this comes from so I have these I

have a blog post where I talk about the

large language models and some of their

limitations
um the issue here is that if you take

almost any problem in computer science

that you can write down formally like

try to optimize this or that or to find

the answer to this and that question

almost all of these questions

the optimal solution is intractable

meaning it would take an exponential

amount of computation compared with how

big the question is

and so the it's like if you want the

optimal neural net that can answer your

questions about that they can reason

properly and so on is exponentially big

which means it's we can't have it but

the bigger our neural net the better it

approximates this

so there's a sense in which bigger is

better because of that even with

problems that look simple so as an

example to illustrate what I mean

consider the problem of playing the game

of goat

the rules of the game are fairly simple

you can write a few lines of code that

check the rules and tell you how many

points you get and so on

the neural net that can play goal and

like really
win like in other words go by the rules

and exploit them in order to figure out

how you know what is the optimal move

and so on that neural net

the neural Nets we have now that play

really better than humans they are huge

also okay and

um it's just a property of many computer

science problems that are like that like

the the knowledge needed to describe the

problem maybe even when the knowledge is

small the size of the machine that's

necessary to

answer questions take decisions that are

optimal is very big

so I think that's the reason why we need

big neural Nets that's why we have a big

brain even if the amount of knowledge

that's involved is small now in addition

the amount of knowledge that's necessary

to understand the world around us is

also big

so so but but I I think the biggest part

of what our brain does is inference is

this is the technical term to mean given

knowledge how do you answer questions

properly like optimize or take decisions

that are that are good given that

knowledge

okay is inference the ability to apply a

pattern that I saw in the past to a new

novel problem

that's yes that's part of inference

um In classical AI

uh things were very clear between

um knowledge and inference

so knowledge was people having typed a

bunch of rules and facts

and so the knowledge was not launched it

was handcrafted

and inference was well you have some

search procedure that looks how to

combine these pieces of knowledge these

facts and rules in order to answer your

question and we know that's NP hard

that's like exponentially hard and so we

use approximations it's never perfect

and so on but people didn't use neural

Nets in those days they use like

classical computer science algorithms

that try to approximate this like a star

now we have neural Nets

and neural Nets can

do this approximate difference it can be

trained to do a really good job at

searching for

good answers to questions given that

piece of knowledge how does it Define

good is I always assume that what AI was

doing was trying to guess effectively

the next letter or the next word So

based on all the patterns that it had

seen so it's like I've seen questions

like this before and here are the

answers that have been rewarded in that

a human has told me that it likes this

answer better than this answer and that

the the pattern recognition of the

machine combined with the human ranking

those responses from the machine gives

us the way that the AI approaches that

question to this answer

am I missing something

yeah I think I mean what you're saying

makes sense but

there's also a lot of knowledge we have

that can be distilled for example

through

How We Do It For Education

uh we do it through books encyclopedia

so it's it's not old not old knowledge

we have but but you can see that so let

me try to put it in this way Wikipedia

is way smaller than your brain

smaller than my brain yeah smaller is a

number of bits that are needed to encode

it whereas the number of bits that are

needed to encode all the synaptic

weights in your brain got it yep yep

huge orders of magnitudes Greater

um so

if we were just talking about these

kinds of knowledge which is not

everything obviously like

physical intuitions and so on is another

kind that we can't put in Wikipedia But

if we just talk about that kind of

knowledge

uh

you would want a very big brain just the

people to answer questions that are

consistent without knowledge

that's that's that's what I meant

okay right now that's not the way we

train uh

uh our large language models by the way

the way we trade them is we look at

texts that presumably is more or less

consistent without because that's not

even the case there is like people are

not truthful and they say all kinds of

things but even if it were and then by

imitating that text like predicting the

next word and so on

uh we implicitly encapsulate

the underlying knowledge which let's say

is Wikipedia

um
but uh yeah uh so so again the argument

is

scale

is important because many problems

require doing

computation that is intractable if you

want to really get the right answer

and so we need these really large neural

Nets to do a good job of approximating

how to compute the answer

okay so now I'm gonna have to get into

the nitty-gritty a little bit this will

be really 101 for you but might be

certainly will be instructive for me and

hopefully many others

to say that a neural network is large

what do we mean are we just daisy

chaining gpus CPUs

um are they so when I think about the

brain the brain is is broken into these

hyper specialized regions so for

instance vision is comprised of this

part of vision tracks motion and I can

selectively damage the motion Center of

your brain and now you see everything in

a snapshot uh there's uh things to deal

with corners and so you can selectively

damage the part of your brain that that

detects Corners there sayings it detects

straight lines curved lines it's it's

all these like

hyper-specific little bits and pieces

and

I don't my understanding of a neural

network is it isn't that hyper

specialized it's a lot of the same thing

over and over and over and over and over

and over and over

um

help me understand what it means to be a

large neural network

okay so you write that the brain

seems to have very specialized and

modular structure

as in different parts of Cortex

especially uh when when we look at what

neurons do in different parts we see

that they're they're rather specialized

it's it's not

perfectly easy to like identify what

this neuron does but but we we get a

sense of what it's about

and it's also true of our large neural

Nets but to a lesser extent so people

have been

trying to

uh give a name to what each particular

unit in a large neural net is doing

and we can do that by checking when does

it turn on what kind of input was

present

so if we look a lot of the things that

make this particular Unit on

and we ask humans so you know what

what's the what's the category that this

belongs to then we're

often able to

um

to give a name and at least that has

been done a lot for

um image processing neural Nets because

that's easy sometimes you could say well

it's this part of the image and this

kind of object

for text I know there's some papers

doing that

um

now I do think that our brain is is more

modular you know more with more

specialization than what we're currently

uh see by the way cortex is

a uniform architecture

like the the part of your brain that is

cortex which is thought to be the part

that's more modern in evolution and

really uh essential for like Advanced

connect abilities

um

is all the same texture it's all the

same kind of units repeated all over the

place and depending on your experience

or the kinds of uh brain accidents that

you may have a different part of Cortex

will latch on a different job so uh

these are more or less replaceable

pieces of Hardware like like our neural

Nets

um there are other pieces in the brain

that are not cortex that seem to be much

more specialized like hippocampus and

and

hypothalamus and so on I I'm at the

edges now that was certainly useful

information but I want to push a little

bit farther so

when I'm what I'm trying to wrap my head

around is I have a vague understanding

of how the brain works very specialized

I do not understand how we scale a

neural network unless you're saying that

each okay let me uh I was going to say

each node and then I realized to me a

node is either a GPU or a CPU but I

actually don't know if that's true uh so

first is I would need to understand what

is a node inside of a neural net and

then how are the different parts of the

neural net program to do a specialized

thing

we'll start there okay okay all right

um I'm going to start with the end

they're not programmed to do a

specialized thing that emerges through

learning whoa whoa whoa

that's true of the brain and that's true

of neural Nets you don't tell this part

of the neural net you'd be responsible

for vision and this part you'll be

responsible for language but that

happens

yes you get specialization that happens

whoa because they collaborate to solve

the problem they're different pieces

as how learning this like even like a a

simple neural net from 1990 does that

how complex is that underlying code is

that really basic but somehow has these

incredibly complex emergent Properties

or is that incredibly sophisticated of

course whoa very simple

uh what the complexity emerges because

you you have all of these degrees of

freedom and you have a powerful way to

train each of the these degrees of

freedom these synaptic weights so that

collectively they optimize what you want

which is like predicting the piece of

text that comes next properly

um but let me go back to the hardware

question

the hardware we use currently to train

our artificial neural Nets is very

different from the brain they're very

very very different

um we don't know how to build Hardware

that would be as efficient as the brain

in terms of energy

and all uh compute that we can squeeze

into a few Watts right and we wish we

would so lots of people are trying to

figure out how to build circus that

would be as efficient computationally as

the brain

um

another difference is that

the brain has highly decentralized like

at the level of neurons and we got like

80 billions of them decentralized memory

and computation

the traditional uh

CPU

has

memory completely separated from compute

and you have bus that transfers

information from one to the other to do

the computation in the little uh little

CPU
that's very different from how the brain

is organized where every neuron has a

bit of memory and a bit of compute

now people doing Hardware have been

working to build chips that would have

something that's more decentralized and

more like the brain and there are

several companies doing this sort of

things

um they haven't yet

you know reached a point where it can be

a GPU so a GPU is a kind of hybrid thing

where

it's really the same CPU pattern but

instead of having one CPU you've got

5 000.

and they each have their little memory

but there's also some shared memory and

it was designed initially for graphics

I'm going to Graphics but it turned out

that

or many of the kinds of neural Nets that

we we wanted to do it was a pretty good

computational architecture but it has

its own limitation it's it's

energy wise it's like a huge waste

compared to the brain as I said earlier

and a large part of that waste is

because you have all that traffic still

between memory you know places that

contain memory and and places that do

compute

so it's much more parallel than the good

old CPU

but much less parallel than the brain

hmm

you're so deep in this it probably

doesn't freak you out as much as it

freaks me out but this is uh like as I

really start to try to wrap my head

around what is happening this feels

deeply mysterious now I've heard

um people say that one of the things is

freaking them out and this is people

deep deep in AI one of the things that

they find unnerving is that they don't

understand what the neural network is

doing they don't understand how it came

up with a given answer

is

how is that possible

it's it's just a fundamental property of

systems that learn

um and that learn not

like a set of uh simple recipes like you

would learn how to do a a recipe in your

kitchen but learn

something very complicated

that cannot be reduced to a few formulas

uh like how to walk or how to speak or

how to translate or how you go from

speech Acoustics to sequence of words

these tasks

cannot be easily

uh

done by traditional programming

but if you put a machine that has that

can like approximate any function to

some degree of precision so big a big

neural net

and you tweak each of the parameters of

that machine

billions of times

it can learn to do what you want it can

change its but then

you don't really understand how it does

it you understand

why it you know uh you know you

understand the code that specifies how

this machine computes but the actual

computation it does depends on what it

has learned which is based on less and

lots of experience

so maybe a good analogy is like our own

intuition these machines are like

intuition machines so what I mean is

this you know

how to act in different contexts like

for example how to climb stairs

but you can't explain it to a machine

you can't write a program people have

tried robot assists have tried you can't

write a program that does that

one reason is

it's you know it's all happening in the

unconscious right but but there's a more

friend the reason it's all happening in

their countries it's just too big it's a

very very complicated program that's

running in your brain

and the only way that you can acquire

that skill that's reasonable is by trial

and error and practice and you know

maybe some of evolutionary you know uh

pressure that

initializes your weights close to

something that's needed to to learn to

walk

um

so things that we do intuitively that

need a lot of practice

are exactly like what those machines are

learning they they you

they can't explain it we can't explain

our own intuition

uh we just know this is how we should do

it

um and it's knowledge that's so complex

that we can't put it in for We cannot

put it in a few formulas or a few

sentences it's just

that's that's a major of things that

that there are very complicated things

that can't be easily put into

verbalizable form but they can still be

discovered acquired through learning

through practice through repetition of

doing the exercise again and again

I have a grandson who's been learning to

walk in the last few months

you know he was stumbling a lot and and

going again and again and again and

after a few months now he's pretty good

he's not like us yet

but it's months and months of practice

and

getting better gradually

through lots and lots of practice that's

how we train those neural Nets and

that's why we can't explain why they

give this particular answer they're just

like well I know this is the answer but

I can't explain to you because it's too

complicated I have like

500 billion weights that really are the

explanation do you want those 500

billion whites what are you going to do

with that
okay let's start teasing this apart so

one of the more interesting things in

what you just said is going to highlight

the difference between what humans do

and what machines do and why

um until there is a breakthrough and I

always love saying this stuff in front

of experts so you can strike me down if

you think I'm crazy but I think one of

the reasons that a breakthrough is going

to be required and that we're not just

going to be able to scale our way to

artificial general intelligence and I've

completely heard you that AI passing a

Turing test opens up a Pandora's box

that is utterly terrifying in terms of

its ability to disregulate

the human's ability to function well as

a hive

heard but now

the reason I think there's going to need

to be a breakthrough is that the reason

that your grandson is able to get better

over time

isn't just the calculus of balance it's

that by doing it he's building

stabilizing muscles and so his muscles

are getting stronger in areas that they

didn't need to be strong in when he was

crawling so you get this biological

feedback loop of oh I see what I'm going

to have to do part of the repetition

isn't just locking it into my brain part

of the repetition is that I'm going to

need to develop the muscle fibers and

the strength now how much of that is

mediated by the brain in a part of the

brain that's subconscious is a huge

question and certainly gets to the

complexity in your 50 billion parameters

and all that the other part is that his

brain is reconfiguring neuronal

connections and it's making some of

those connections more efficient through

a process called myelination so it's

wrapping the fatty tissue to sheath

different connections just like an

electrician would do and now it's it's

got this incredible biological feedback

loop of I have a desire I'm goal

oriented I want to do this thing this

thing is walk now

how the interplay of I want to walk

because I see my parents walk I see

Grandpa walking I want to do that thing

or I have something in me tells me being

over there is better than being here and

so I actually want a locomote to get

there and I would figure this out even

if I never saw anybody move which is

probably more likely given the baby

start crawling and they don't see people

crawl

they just have a desire to locomote

somewhere

again going back to my initial thing

about I think machines are going to need

to have desire they have a reason that

they want to cross the road if we want

to get to human level intelligence but

let's just let me not fractal too much

here so okay we have this biological

feedback loop

you're not going to get that with a

neural network no matter how much you

scale it up it doesn't have a biological

it doesn't have the ability to change

itself yet now maybe it will and maybe

it could architect a new chip or

something once it has the ability to

manipulate 3D printers or what have you

but for now it's stuck with a physical

configuration of chips unlike a human

which can morph from muscles to brain

matter it's stuck with a configuration

but and this feels like the very

interesting thing that we've gotten

right so far which is I have figured out

the pieces that I need so whether that's

gpus or the code or both but I figured

out the pieces that I need for that

configuration to learn in a very

emergent way so I set up the pieces and

then I give it

a thing I wanted to learn and a quote

unquote reward for doing so and then a

massive amount of emergent Behavior

comes out of that but it's always going

to be limited in a way that human

intelligence is not because of the

biological feedback loop okay now that

I've set that stage do you agree that

machines will need something that

imitates that biological feedback loop

meaning I need efficiency here that I

did not have a moment ago for me to

continue to get good at this thing

and that without that we're sort of

stuck at the the

highly potentially destructive ability

to manipulate language and and images

but that's it

so actually current neural Nets already

do what you say I mean they don't have

the biological framework but they they

do learn from practice and mistakes but

can they Recon re can they reconfigure

their architecture to get better at it

you don't need to change the chips they

just need to change the content of the

memory in those chips that contains that

says so why is the biological Loop

different

Y is different

um it's different because it you know it

it has been designed by Evolution

whereas we are designing these things

using our means and but but

fundamentally let me let me step back

here a little bit

to State something important as a kind

of

uh starting point

bodies

are

machines

they are biological machines cells are

machines there are biological machines

we don't fully understand them we know

it's full of feedback loops we know a

lot I mean we know a lot of biology but

we don't understand the full thing but

we know it's just matter interacting and

exchanging information

so yeah it's just a different kind of

machine now

the question some people think that uh

in particular when people were

discussing Consciousness because

Consciousness looks mysterious some

people think that well

it's got to be something that's based on

biology otherwise how could it ever like

be in machines well it's I I completely

with that

um

because it's just it it it's just

information processing

um now the kind of information

processing going on in our bodies and

our brains and so on uh may have some

particular attributes that we still

don't have in in our current machines

but the

the the specific Hardware just that

needs to have enough power so you know

one of the Great

uh

uh starting points of computer science

by people like Turing and Von Neumann in

in the early days of computing is the

realization

with for example the turing machine that

you can decouple the hardware

from the software that and the same

outward facing Behavior

can be achieved by just changing the

software parts so long as the hardware

is sufficiently complex and trains show

that you need very very simple Hardware

and then you can do any computation

that's like computer science 101

so

that would suggest that there is no

reason why we couldn't in the future

build machines that have the same

capabilities as we do now we are still

the current systems are missing a bunch

of things

um you talked you know we talked about

walking and why is it that we don't have

robots that can walk I mean they can

walk as well as humans have you seen

Boston Dynamics that sucks freakish it

can parkour they're not as good as

humans by you know a big gap

but yeah I've seen I've seen them

um but but I think

the issue is simply that we have tons

more data available to train language

models than we have for training robots

it's hard to create the training data

for a robot because it's in the physical

world you can't just replicate a million

robots and then but eventually people

will do it
uh or be able to do good enough job with

simulation there's a lot of work going

in that direction

but um

but yeah so

I I I kind of disagree with your

conclusions so go back to the the reason

that we don't have robots that can walk

is because it's just not it's not able

to to

use some sort of model to see enough

okay but there's you're saying the point

of that is there's nothing fundamentally

missing from the architecture that the

AI is running on it's just a modeling

problem

it yes the software part we're we're

still far up for example you know one of

the clues I mentioned earlier is that

the amount of training data that that a

large language model needs like you know

gptx

uh compared to what a human needs in

terms of amount of text to kind of

understand language

is is hugely different so that tells me

we're missing something important but I

don't think it's because we're missing

something in the low level Hardware of

biology
uh although I you know I'm a big fan of

listening to biology and and

understanding what brains are doing and

so on so they can serve as inspiration

but I don't think it's a hardware

problem now Hardware is important for

efficiency

so

current gpus are not efficient compared

to our brains and and but but it doesn't

mean that in in the next few years we

will not be able to to build uh

specialized Hardware that will be a

thousand times more efficient than

current ones

um and now there's a much bigger

incentive for companies to actually

invest in this because the these AI

systems are going to be more and more

everywhere and it's going to become much

more profitable to do these Investments

yeah man proliferation to AIS is crazy

uh before we derail on that though I

want to ask you so

we're comparing the way that machines

are evolving the way the AI is evolving

to human evolution

um

I've always thought of evolution as uh

to use Richard Dawkins quote the blind

watchmaker

it's not trying to make a watch

but the watch emerges out of

um up what we could probably refer to as

a few simple lines of code it's like uh

replication and the way that it

replicates plus uh a desire to survive

on a long enough time scale

there's not even a need for a desire to

survive it's simply the selection of

those who survive

yeah interesting that that's is that a

important distinction because I worry

well actually I don't worry this this

would then

um maybe what you're trying to get me to

understand about why machines don't need

a desire they just there needs to be a

selection criteria for the one that does

the thing better and that will be enough

to Boom to have the the exponential

um and that's the way we train those

systems so the way we train them is that

we if you want we throw away all the

configurations of parameters that don't

work and we focus more and more on ones

that do that's that's how training

proceeds it it changes things

in small steps just like Evolution does

except Evolution does it in parallel

with you know billions of uh individuals

uh uh kind of

searching the space of genetic

configurations that can be useful

whereas we're doing it the learning way

so we have like one individual big

neural net and we're like making one

small change at a time

um but it's both our processes of search

in a very high dimensional space of

computations

okay so let me this was something that I

heard you say in an interview at one

point I wasn't sure if I was going to

ask it but it's now as you were saying

that I realize that the entire universe

is born of a simple set of physical

laws for lack of a better word

and everything that we see from because

I was trying to think what is the origin

of evolution because you said that it

you you don't need it to desire it just

needs to get selected and then I was

like well what's selecting it the laws

of physics just dictate that certain

things will continue to hold their form

and function and others will

disintegrate uh okay so then everything

is born out of these laws of physics

which we don't fully understand yet but

do you think there will be similar laws

of intelligence that we realize oh here

are the very simple subset and all of

the struggle that we have right now is

because much like we don't yet fully

understand the laws of physics but yet

we can still build a nuclear bomb

nuclear power GPS all of that we know

enough to do amazing things but we don't

know everything

do you think we have the same thing

happening in intelligence

that's what drove me into the field

that hope that there may be some

principles that we can understand as

humans verbally like write about them

explain them to each other and so on

maybe write math that formalizes them

that are sufficient to explain our

intelligence now obviously for this to

work it has to be that it explains how

we learn because the content of what we

learned the knowledge that has been

acquired by Evolution and then by our

you know in our individual life

is too big to be put in a few uh you

know lines of math

um
so whether this is true or not obviously

we don't know but everything we have

seen with the progress of neural Nets in

the last few decades suggests that yes

because if you look

inside these systems like what are the

mathematical principles behind those

large language models very few

it's it's something you can describe

that you can you can you can explain you

know when we when I teach uh we explain

these to students and so on

um it's not that complicated it's just

like physics is not that complicated

what is complicated is

the consequence so I think there's a

good analogy here to also understand the

story about

intuition and very complicated things

that are difficult to put in formula

um

the laws of physics

um are very simple you can write them

down but what's complicated is well if

you put

a huge number of atoms together that

obey these laws

and you get something very complicated

like
an ice storm

it's very difficult to predict

um because we don't have the

computational power to like uh emulate

that it's it's

out of very simple things like simple

laws of physics you get something

extremely complicated that comes out

that emerges

and it's similar with neuralness a few

simple

lines of code a few simple mathematical

equations

plus you know basically that at scale

and with enough data in this case and

you get something that emerges that's

very powerful and very complicated and

and not easy to reduce to those initial

principles

okay so now I wanna I wanna bring back

in uh the idea of alignment

of Desire

um so if if physics runs off the back of

a set of simple rules that does not need

to want any outcome

but humans

manifest desire and so we rapidly become

the most complicated thing that we know

of

is there do you think about the problem

of alignment are AI researchers trying

to give

the intelligence a level of Desire

because that would make it more profound

or

is that am am I just barking at the

wrong tree I I keep coming back to

AI without desire

mildly potent AI with desire uh

dangerous beyond all measure and reason

um

yes and no

so

yes with desires

and a lot of

and the right you know uh computational

and the right algorithms could be very

potent and very dangerous

and potentially very difficult to align

to our needs our values and so on

and lots of people are working on this

like how do we design the algorithms so

that even though we give goals to the

machines

and they will not end up doing things

that are against

what we want

so that's the alignment problem

but where I disagree with you

is that I think we could have ai systems

that have no goals

no wants

but they're just trained

to do good inference to do to learn as

as well as possible about the world from

the data they have

and to recapitulate to us

in order good

answers to the questions we are asking

so let me explain why this would be very

useful

in science typically we do experiments

and then we try to make sense of that

data

we come up with theories and there could

be multiple theories that are consistent

with the data and so different people

may have different opinions on them or

they recognize that all of these

theories are possible and at this point

we can't

there's a big weight between those

theories then what they do is

based on the fact that we have these

competing theories they will Design

another batch of experiments to try to

figure out which you know to eliminate

some of those theories and then the

cycle goes back because more experiments

more data more analysis more theories

and and eventually we hopefully zoom in

on fewer interior theories

so this is the experimental process of

science we come up with an understanding

of the world but it's not one

understanding there's always some

ambiguity

uh in some cases we're very sure but

yeah uh a scientist whose honest is

never never sure except maybe for math

right

so why am I telling you all this because

that whole process which is at the heart

of all the progress we've seen in

humanity which would be needed to cure

disease to fight climate change even to

understand how Society works and people

interact with each other better so all

of the things that scientists do to make

sense of the world and come up with

proposals of things we could do to

achieve goals

all of that process could be done by

very powerful AI systems

that don't have any goals

their only job is to make sense of the

data

represent all the theories that are

compatible with it and suggest the best

choice of experiments we should do next

in order to get the answers to the

questions we want

and that can all be done without any

wants just by obeying some laws of

probability

uh that we know that there are known and

we just need the computational scale to

Implement that

uh and algorithms you know that people

will discover but but I think we already

have the basis for that

so what I'm trying to say is we could

have machines that are extremely

powerful more powerful even than a human

brain like we have scientists doing that

job right now

but but I'm looking for example in

biology because of the progress of uh

biotech we are now generating data sets

that no human brain can can visualize

can can absorb

we are we have robots that do

experiments again in biotechnology where

the number of experiments is in the

millions the human cannot like specify a

million different things to try

by hand

a machine can
a machine with the right codes and that

machine doesn't need to have any wants

it just needs to do

Beijing inference if you want the

technical term like and just needs to do

Beijing reference

um so

yeah bottom line is

we can have hugely useful machines that

are incredibly smart that have no ones

whatsoever

okay so I'm I it's becoming clearer to

me now what our what our base

assumptions are so your base assumption

is that I think AI is already does all

the amazing things you want it to do is

as dangerous as you could hope it to be

uh as a tool for humans to use

and the thing that I'm focused on is

in your scenario I can just tell it to

stop and it will stop the paperclip

problem in my estimation isn't a real

problem if I can just tell it stop stop

making paper clips and then it shuts

down where it becomes a problem is when

it's like no I want to make paper clips

and I'm going to keep making paper clips

and there's nothing you can do to stop

me and I'm going to go around you this

way and that way and I'm not nearly as

concerned I get humans have so many

weapons at their disposal I already know

what the world looks like when people

have just unbelievable Lee powerful

weapons at their disposal it's

manageable but when the weapon gets to

be a million times smarter than I am and

decide what it wants to aim at and

decide when it wants to go off and

nobody gets to tell it otherwise that's

a world that freaks me out

and so when you think about the

alignment problem

do you think it's a problem like because

in in your world where the AI doesn't

have its own wants and desires coming

from an emotional place where one thing

feels better than the other and so it

has the same type of human desire to go

in a given direction that we have and we

know what that's like people kill for

their [ __ ] kids man they will do

crazy things when the thing feels good

enough

so in your world can't we just tell it

to stop

Okay so

there are two kinds of machines we could

build with the current state of our

technology today there's a choice

what kind of machine is more like us

and has wants and goals and it could

decide to do something we did not

anticipate

and that could be very dangerous

and

people are trying to see how we could

program them in a way that would be

safer that's the alignment AI alignment

problem

but we have a choice we don't have to go

that route we could build machines that

are not like us we don't try to make

them like humans we don't give them

feelings we don't give them once we see

the thing is once we understand those

principles of intelligence we can choose

how we

apply them if we're wise we're going to

choose a safe it doesn't do anything it

doesn't want anything it just it's

training objective is

truth

okay so might I suggests when you're

we've gathered all the uh the Nations

together you're about to go on stage

what I'm gonna try to then get you to

convince people is that that becomes the

most important thing do not give AI

desire period like

inference only truth only that's it

that's it that's it

and actually that I think that's the

safest route

the problem now the problem is we need

to have all these people around the

table and to agree

and honestly I'm not sure it's gonna

work

um there might be some crazy guy

somewhere who says yes but then goes a

different route

because he wants to have fun with those

machines that look like humans and he's

a [ __ ] and doesn't realize how

dangerous it is

people are crazy people have emotions

people

um

are unconscious of the consequences they

think oh it's going to be fine

but I'm going to make a lot more money

than the other guy because I'm going to

use this thing that

is more like humans there's going to be

a temptation to build systems that are

like us

would it be more powerful if it was more

like us

I don't know if it would be well there

would be more powerful in the sense of

being able to act in the world

but that's also more dangerous right

um act in the world uh based on their

goals right that that's that's the place

which is a slippery slope

and or maybe we can make progress but

even if we make progress with progress

with uh the AI life and techniques are

trying to design uh cp1 rules and

algorithms such that even if they have

goals it's going to be safe

but but even that is not a sufficient

protection because somebody could just

decide to not use those guidelines

so having algorithms that make AI

alignment work is not enough we have a

social problem we have a

a problem of collective wisdom how do we

change our society

so that we avoid

somebody doing a catastrophic thing with

a very powerful tool that can

potentially

destroy yourself it's not something for

tomorrow it's not going to happen

tomorrow it's not going to happen next

year it's not gonna happen in five years

but

we are on that path and it's going to

take a lot of time for society to adapt

and probably reinvent itself deeply

for us to find a way to be happy and

and safe

when was the last time we had to

reinvent ourselves like that

ah

we we reinvented ourselves many times

over

um but not like that of course this this

challenge is completely new

but we did so think about major cultural

changes that have happened in the story

in the history of humanity

um I think about like religions

um the invention of nation states

um

you know uh invention of central banks

and money and I'm I'm almost quoting

Harare here so we've created all kinds

of fictions as he calls them

that driver society and and people

and in ways that kind of work

um but are not adequate for the next

challenge by the way

dealing with this challenge also helps

us deal with things like climate change

and nuclear dangers and so on because

it's all about how do we coordinate

the billions of people on Earth so that

we all behave in a way that's not

dangerous to the rests

I don't know how to do that but we need

our best Minds to start thinking about

it

you're really starting to to pull

together some very interesting threads

here so

um you've all know a harari's idea of a

a collective fiction I've heard other

people refer to it as a useful fiction

um that's very interesting now my

concern is that that works when people

don't understand so I'll go to the most

recent one Central Banking so

people don't understand it and you know

you've got the whole idea of what's it

called the beast from Jekyll Island or

something from Jekyll Island where they

they go and to your point it was very

much a decision they a a cabal of people

went and decided we're gonna do it like

this and we're gonna present it to the

world like that and they did it and hey

it it just quote unquote Works

um there's very few things though more

unnerving than peeling back that and

realizing what it actually is

um and so I wonder how we present a

useful fiction to the world about AI

that will get us all unified in a way

that will be useful

um but isn't

manipulative

I think that's the essence of what

democracy should be

that we rationally

accept

the collective rules

or our

individual and Collective well-being

so that actually has worked quite well

in many countries

um but we need to go like one step

further in that direction it can

absolutely be truthful and not

manipulative

salonist principles

of you know Justice and fairness and

equity and so on are respected

people will go with that

but here I think we need to

we need to go beyond even beyond the the

kind of democratic system so in a

democratic system if it works well right

we don't need to lie to people to get

them to accept to go in a particular

direction to vote for you know a

referendum or something for a particular

decision

they should be in fact

as

conscious and

well understanding of of the decisions

that they're collectively taking

yeah yeah getting them getting everybody

on the same page that that is the tricky

part that's why I when you first said it

in the context of religion

it immediately felt like oh if we could

pull that off if we had a collective

narrative about what this meant it might

work the problem is it's not my

preferred way of solving the problem

obviously I'd much rather go with like

an Uber democracy that really goes to

these principles uh even further

yeah that's where I think I begin to I

get it regulation works and on the

countries that come up to the table

regulation is amazing we should regulate

this I think people we have to you have

to do something to your point just

because it's hard doesn't mean you

should stand still

but at the same time that's one where

I'm like yeah well all the countries

that regulated does not account for the

person like you were talking about

that's like oh I'm gonna go build this

thing they don't recognize second third

order consequences or more terrifyingly

they do recognize the second and third

order consequences and they do it anyway

or even like because that that gets into

the the crazy man hypothesis but having

read about Robert Oppenheimer when they

were building the bomb and how you just

become convinced that look the Nazis are

building a bomb we need to do it we have

to do it faster uh we'll sort of worry

about the bigger problems later down the

road and I very much worry that that's

where we are with AI okay I'm going to

set that aside for a second because it's

terrifying and I so as I said at the

beginning I worry too yeah I rightly so

how we solve the problem is a completely

different thing let me let me ask you do

you think as AI continues to come on

board and let's say that we it we're

thoughtful about it we've got good

regulation in place will it be like

dealing with a hyper-intelligent human

or will it feel completely alien to us

it depends how we choose to design it

so

if we

build systems that have ones that have a

personality that that that have emotions

we could because the more we understand

these things from humans the more we'll

be able to do it

um

personally I don't think that's the wise

choice

and so if we go the other route of

systems that are useful to us

not necessarily

[Music]

acting like humans

um I think it'll be much easier uh

collectively because we won't be

expecting those things to interact with

us like like humans do

um they they will be just assistance

basically that help us sort out problems

and find Solutions

yeah the alien idea I as you were

answering that question I had a wave of

I don't I don't see how we're gonna

loneliness unto itself

is going to lead people to play with

making it emotional
even even as I think about the way that

we want to use AI in our in my company

it's to generate very realistic

characters in a video game and I can

just see that to make them more and more

realistic you're gonna want them you can

mimic emotion for sure and if we pass

regulations that's probably where we

stop is you create things that mimic

emotion but don't actually have them

but to create something that is

um

that is more realistic we will so I want

to go back to go for a second so in go

they said that the it was like

playing an alien it just it made moves

that were so different so given that now

already you have people saying that it

comes at something so counter-intuitive

that it feels completely foreign you

don't think that even without wants and

desires that it's gonna feel

just just I think it's completely

different the reason it

it it it it looks foreign to uh current

players might be the same as

the currently uplingo

uh at the master level

I might look for into somebody 100 years

ago
because we've made progress in our

understanding of how to play well and

and the strategies we use now maybe very

surprising to somebody 100 years ago

so it's just that these machines have

now trained on someone so many games

that they're like

you know 100 years into the future if

you want in the evolution go if we had

let things

uh go so they discovered basically it's

like it's like science right looks like

magic until you understand it so if if

uh if if somebody from 100 years ago

comes today and looks at our cell phones

it's gonna look like magic it's gonna

look very unintuitive what

how could that possibly be right

and we are just used to that and so I

yeah I I don't think it's uh because

there's something fundamentally

different I mean there are fundamental

differences but but that is just being

uh

systems that are more competent because

they've been trained on more data and

trained longer and focusing on this

particular problem in case of both

evolution is one of the big themes that

has come out today if people want to

keep up Yoshua with you and the

ever-evolving science that is AI where

should they go

well I have a website

it's easy to find uh and a Blog where I

I write some of my ideas

and of course I also write a lot of

scientific papers my group does Mila The

Institute that I founded uh with couple

of universities and universities here in

Montreal has about a thousand AI

researchers working on many of these

problems but also uh thinking hard about

responsible AI aspect and and these

questions and there are many people

around the world who are thinking hard

about this and it as it should the truth

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description alright my friend and back

to today's episode this is literally a

direct quote from the book towards the

end

but and I quote we are headed for

collapse civilization is becoming

incoherent around us

I'd love to know what you guys mean by

that and if that to you is a big part of

the thread through the book because it

was for me

well the first thing to say is that you

skipped the warning in the front of the

book that it should only be read while

sitting down so fall over and injure

themselves

um yeah well we are headed for collapse

that's really not even an extraordinary

claim if you just simply extrapolate out

from where we are we are outstripping

the planet's capacity to house us and we

don't appear to have a plan for shifting

gears so it's it's really a factual

statement now the question really is why

and the the bitter pill is that the very

thing that made us so successful as a

species

is Now setting us up for disaster that

is to say our evolutionary capacity to

solve problems has uh outstripped our

capacity to adapt to the new world that

we have created for ourselves and so

we've become psychologically and

socially and physiologically and

politically unhealthy and our

civilization isn't any better

that said if any species could get us

out of this mess it's us like you know

it's exactly as Brett said we are the

most labile the most adaptable the most

generalist species on the planet and

born with the most potential to become

anything else previously unimagined so I

do feel like in the end the message of

the book which is explicitly and

consistently evolutionary in all of its

different instantiations is hopeful and

yes that that quote that you read is

ominous and I think as Brett said you

know a factual statement but we can do

this we we have we have to do it and uh

we need to try and in fact in

evolutionary biology we recognize

something we call adaptive Peaks and

adaptive valleys and it would have to be

true that to shift gears to something

much better something that that uh gave

humans more of what it is that we all

value we would have to go through an

Adaptive Valley and it would look

frightening and in fact they are

dangerous places to be but it's part and

parcel of shifting from one mode of

existence to another

all right I think an idea that's going

to be really important to get across and

this is something as a guy that only

ever thought I would talk about business

and then in trying to explain how to get

good at business I kept having to come

back to mindset and then trying to

explain mindset I keep having to go to

Evolution it's like that we're having a

biological experience that your brain is

an organ it comes uh you guys said that

we are not a blank slate but we are the

blankest of slates which I think is a

phenomenal way to put this idea and I

want to tie that to the title and get

you guys take so it's a

hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st

century and so the way that I take that

is that notion you have to understand

that you're a product of evolution that

your brain is a product of evolution and

then once you understand the forces of

evolution and how we got here then maybe

just maybe we can find our way out of it

so what are the key elements to being a

product of evolution that you think

people miss that we must understand if

we're going to navigate our way well out

of this Valley of evolution let me say

first that the the title

hunter-gatherer's Guide to the 21st

century

evokes that sort of romanticized

hunter-gatherer on the African Savannah

of the Paleolithic which of course is a

part of our human history and does have

many lessons in it to teach us about who

we are now and who we can become but as

we say in the book we are all parts of

our history like we are not just

hunter-gatherers we are also right now

post-industrialists and there are

evolutionary implications of that go a

little farther back a lot farther back

depending on your Framing and we are

agriculturalists go farther back where

hunter-gatherers go farther back we're

primates where mammals we're fish all of

these moments of our evolutionary

history

have left their Mark in us and have

something to teach us about both what

our capacities are and what our

weaknesses are and what we can do going

forward

and I would add the Lessons From

Evolution uh are both good and bad here

one thing that we realized that our

students over the course of many years

of teaching this material realized was

that everything about our experience as

human beings is shaped by our

evolutionary nature and that has a very

disturbing upshot because we are

fantastic creatures with an utterly

mundane Mission the very same mission

that every other evolved creature has to

Lodge its genes in the future

um and that this actually

explains the nature not only of our

physical beings but of our culture and

our perception of the world so

understanding that all of that marvelous

architecture is built for an utterly

mind-numbing purpose is an important

first step in seeing where to go but the

other thing to realize and you

referenced our our assertion that we are

the blankest Slate that has ever existed

or has ever been produced by evolution

and what this means is that we actually

have an arbitrary map of what we can

change that to the extent that our

genomes have offloaded much of the

evolutionary adaptive work to the

software layer that means we are

actually capable of changing that layer

because that layer is built for change

but not everything exists in that layer

so some things about what we are are

very difficult to change some things are

actually trivial easily changed and

knowing which is which is a matter of

sorting out where the information is

housed but it's all there for the same

reason it's exactly it's all there for

the same reason it's all evolutionary be

it genetic or cultural or anything else

can you guys give us an example of and I

found this very provocative in the book

and it certainly Rings true to me but

that to say that we are in some ways

fish from an evolutionary standpoint

that we are you know in some ways

primates from an evolutionary standpoint

what does that mean exactly again it's a

factual plan one that once you've seen

the picture standing from the right

place is uncontroversial when we say you

know is a platypus warm-blooded we are

not asking a question about its

phylogeny right we're asking about how

it works right when we ask is a whale a

mammal we are asking a question about

phylogeny so when we ask the question

are humans fish if we're asking a

functional question then maybe not but

if we're actually asking a question akin

to is a mouse a mammal right then we are

asking a question about the evolutionary

relatedness of that creature to

everything else and the key thing you

need to understand is that a group a

good evolutionary group like mammal or

primate or ape is a group that if you

imagine the Tree of Life

falls from the Tree of Life with a

single clip right if you clip the Tree

of Life at a particular place all of the

Apes fall together if you clip it lower

down all of the primates fall together

and the claim that we are fish is a

simple matter of if we agree that a

shark is a fish and we agree that a

guppy is a fish if you clip the tree of

life such that you capture those two

species you will inherently capture all

the tetrapods which is to say creatures

like us so we are fish as a factual

matter if the question is one of

evolutionary relatedness so it'll be um

if I may just say um say that in in

slightly different words

there are at least two main ways to be

similar right you can be similar because

you have shared history and you can be

similar because you've converged on some

solution and so dragonflies and swans

both fly not because the most recent

common ancestor of dragonflies and swans

flew but because in each of their uh

environments flight was an Adaptive

response and that means that flying

flyingness is not a phylogenetic it's

not a historical representation of what

those two things are whereas if you say

well both both whales and humans lactate

in order to feed their babies that is a

description of of something that they

both inherited from a shared ancestor

right so the earliest mammal lactated to

Fiats yet if any any organism on the

planet today that is descendant of that

first mammal that lactated to to feed

its young is a mammal even if some

future mammal went a different way and

lost the ability to delect it it would

still be a mammal so you know Brett

mentioned tetrapods uh tetrapods came

you know with the fish that came out

onto land with you know four feet and

started moving around and its amphibians

and the reptiles and the birds and the

mammals

but snakes are tetrapods not because

they still have four feet because they

don't but because they're a member of

those that group so it's it's a

historical description of group

membership as opposed to like an

ecological description of what we're

doing so we're not aquatic like most

fish are but we're fish because we

belong to a group that includes all the

fish I'm gonna say why I think that

matters and why I think you guys put

that at the beginning of a book that

sort of has this punch line of like Hey

we're really headed towards disaster and

we have to be very thoughtful and here

are some solutions so the reason why in

business you end up having to talk about

evolution is because I need a business

owner to understand you cannot trust

your impulses because your impulses may

not have the growth of your business in

mind it may not reflect an understanding

of consumer Behavior it may simply be

something from our evolutionary past

that was like

um akin to it's better to jump away from

the garden hose thinking that it might

be a snake than it is to think that it

might be a garden hose and it really is

a snake and once you understand okay my

mind is structured in a certain way it

has these insane biases it tends me

towards certain things like the one that

bothers me the absolute most is that

when people have a feeling it feels so

real it and you never translate it into

logic so you're like that thing makes me

angry therefore it is bad and it must be

attacked assailed whatever and if you

run a business like that if you cannot

Divorce Yourself from I have an Impulse

stop that insert conscious control and

then figure out sort of what the first

principles logical buildup IS you can't

solve a novel problem and until you can

solve a novel problem in an environment

that changes as rapidly as our current

world you guys call it hyper novelty if

I remember correctly

you you get into these crazy making

scenarios and so while

it seems almost absurd to say that in

some way we are fish the the key point

that I take away from your book and that

just seems so powerful to recognize to

me is that you have to understand that

you it wasn't a perfect construction at

least not towards modern goals does that

make sense to you guys absolutely

absolutely now there are um there are

really two upshots to this claim that

you are a fish right it's very hard for

people to wrap their minds around it the

first time but once you realize that

this is what we mean when we say uh you

know a whale is a mammal that we are

making a claim about the tree of life

then you can actually teach yourself how

adaptive Evolution works just by simply

recognizing that snakes are the most uh

species clade of legless lizards snakes

are lizards right you don't think of it

that way but they are seals are bears

that have returned to the Sea right so

once you understand that all you have to

do is say actually this is a that it's

unambiguous and that means that adaptive

evolution is the kind of process that

can turn a bear into an aquatic creature

like a seal right so that's foreign

the other thing that you mentioned and

you're right on the money which is that

if you use your intuitive honed Instinct

in order to sort through novel problems

you will constantly upend yourself

because those instincts aren't built

with those problems in mind now the

thing that's special for us humans is

that we have an alternative and the

alternative we argue in the second to

last chapter of the book

is consciousness that the correct tool

for approaching novel problems is to

promote whatever the underlying issue is

to Consciousness to share it between

individuals who likely have different

experience will see different components

of it clearly and to come to an emergent

understanding of what the meaning of the

problem is and what the most likely

useful solution may be so in some sense

really what you're saying is in this

context you're trying to get people to

get into their conscious mind and

process this as a team activity rather

than go with their gut which is very

likely wrong absolutely and you know our

capacity as humans but that includes as

a modern human who is you know trying to

engage in business with people to

oscillate between this conscious State

and a cultural state which is one in

which actually maybe change isn't

happening so rapidly maybe the rules

that we've got are good for the current

situation let's just do this let's do a

set and forget on this set of things

over here and not not constantly

renegotiate whereas in this other part

of the landscape we actually do need to

stay in our conscious minds and yes we

need to Tamp down the emotion and Tamp

down the you know the quick gut response

but engage with one another and

recognize that you know it's not Satan

on the other side of the interaction

it's another human being with all the

same kinds of strengths and weaknesses

as each of us has

yeah there's a really interesting thing

that happens when you have

um a team around you whether they're

employees or otherwise where

um the just literally just the other day

I said something to my team and several

of them misconstrued it and I could see

they were having a big emotional

response and I said okay tell me your

objection in a single sentence with no

commas no run-ons no parentheticals and

what you find is that old Einstein quote

of if you can't explain it simply you

probably don't understand it very well

and so people have this emotional

reaction but they and they then enact

out in the world that emotional reaction

but they don't actually stop to take the

time to be able to say it in a single

sentence and so you end up in what my my

wife and business partner and I call you

end up having to chase them because

you'll solve the they'll say here's my

problem you'll solve and say cool so if

I do something that addresses that and

they'll be like well it's not quite that

it's it's this and then you solve that

and they're like well it's not and it's

like when you force people to say

something really simply it forces them

to interpret that emotion to bring it

into the conscious mind and then to

actually deal with it

um which I find utterly fascinating do

you guys have a method by which you do

that in your own lives or that you've

taught other people to do it

yeah I would say there's a first go-to

move which is let's figure out what we

actually disagree about and very

frequently

um you can cover half the distance or

more just simply by separating an issue

into two different ones so for example

if I talk to a conservative audience I

know we're going to disagree about

climate change but I also know from

experience

that I can get a conservative audience

to agree that if they believed that

human activity was causing substantial

change to the climate and that that was

going to destabilize systems on which we

were dependent that they would be

enthusiastic about doing something about

it and so what we really disagree about

is whether or not we are causing

something sufficient that we need to

take that action right that's half the

distance covered in a matter of just

simply dividing it into two puzzles and

you'd be amazed almost everything that

we have Fierce disagreements about look

like this where you just sort of assume

the other side has every defect rather

than realizing we agree to a point at

which point we we differ yeah no and

this is um this is different from what

we were just talking about right with

regard to you know you're having an

emotional or an analytical response this

is a question of okay we think we're

talking about the same thing but

probably we are using the same words for

different categories yes

and can we can we figure out how many

subcategories there are and you know say

I've got five in my thing and you've got

five but maybe there's only two that

overlap so maybe we focus on those two

but maybe there's also maybe the you

know the devil in the details is in one

of those one of those other six that is

only in one of the people's Brands and

when it's revealed to be like actually

you think I believe that thing and I

don't like that's not something we share

between us so yeah having the capability

to go in and like zoom in and out on

problems and say actually the problem

can be smaller than you think and and

also it is larger than you think and

then I think and let's constantly

re-revaluate the the framing and the

scale at which we're doing analysis

you guys talk in the book about theory

of mind and Heather I know you've uh

either started writing have written or

have threatened to write a science

fiction novel which you know I

desperately want you to do and publish

um but I've started doing a game when I

find myself in that situation where and

I learned this in my previous company

where both of my partners were really

smart guys but every now and then we'd

get in an argument and

I'd be like I think they're an idiot but

I know they're not an idiot and they

think I'm an idiot but I'm not an idiot

and so I started approaching it as a

writer and saying okay if I were writing

this character in this scene what would

have to be true for them to be acting

this way what would they have to believe

be thinking whatever and in my marriage

this has become an extraordinary tool of

saying for you to be reacting this way

you would have to think that I believe

XYZ is that the issue and then by

getting to that what I call Base

assumptions

you can really begin to facilitate that

you guys must have encountered this a

bazillion times with students how do you

unearth that like what's the process of

of uncovering that especially in fact

it is so weird to me that you two have

become like the most attacked people on

planet Earth I I will never quite

understand how this has happened but how

do you guys

tease out and not just go ah they're

evil how do you find those underlying

issues well first of all I think we're

we're attacked because we we look like

villains sure yes so much so right

exactly um well you you hinted an

important issue here that I think is

actually quite modern so if you lived

any sort of normal existence from an

ancestor you know even just a couple

hundred years before the present you

would find that they pretty much grew up

around the people that they ended up

interacting with as adults they didn't

stray very far from home everything

would be incredibly familiar and the

language that they used to interact with

everybody they were encountering would

have been shared because it would have

been picked up from an immediate group

of ancestors that they both knew right

when we use English to talk to someone

else we have an incredibly blunt tool

because the ancestor from which we

picked up that shared language is quite

distant and what this does you know you

really have two kinds of people in the

world you've got people who more or less

use the tool like English as it was

handed to them and they don't question

it and you have people who are trying to

break new ground and what is true for

everybody who breaks new ground is that

they end up building a personal tool kit

they will redefine words so that they

become sharper and more refined and more

useful and then when you put two such

people together they will talk right

past each other because they don't

remember that they redefined things so

one thing that is essential if you're

going to team up with someone else who's

generative and done their own work and

arrived at some interesting conclusion

you need time it's weeks of talking to

each other before you even understand

how they use language once you do that

you can have an incredible conversation

but if you think you're going to sit

down with them and immediately pool what

you know and get somewhere you got

another thing coming because at first

they're going to sound like they don't

know what they're talking about right

you've got to find those definitions and

figure out what they mean and it's

actually if once you realize that this

is the job it's very pleasurable and

it's it's really an honor when somebody

lets you look through their eyes you say

oh that's how you see the world and now

I get a chance to see it that way and

then let me show you what I'm seeing and

you really can get somewhere but there's

no shortcut about the time necessary to

learn each other's language that's right

and that that really is a parallel for

what we're doing in the classroom as

well you know we didn't

you know if we were teaching 18 year

olds we were teaching freshmen we didn't

assume that they all came in as experts

obviously

um and yet the same logic applies that

everyone has you know I I wouldn't say

actually I don't think I really agree

that you know regardless of what

language you're speaking you either you

know take it on on faith as as you have

received it or you act

um decisively to change it I think

teenagers tend to be modifying language

pretty actively and so especially when

you

um you know find yourself in a room full

of you know relatively young people in a

college classroom you have a lot of

people here using language differently

um than you the professor does and then

you're also in the business of

introducing to them

um you know a set of tools some of which

has specialized language associated with

it

um associated with you know whatever it

is that you're teaching and finding the

Common Ground between these like okay

actually all of us modify language some

and and let's figure out how to use

language that we can all agree on and

understand and

um you know for for the purposes of

communication as opposed to for the

purposes of displaying group membership

yeah I think that's because that's what

jargon is often is about group

membership displays and that's what um

you know memes and especially

um well a lot of them a lot of the very

rapidly changing language um that

doesn't happen in technical Space is

really about demonstrating that you're

on the inside of some some joke

well actually this is a perfect case uh

of a personal definition that must be

shared otherwise you can't talk right

because uh I at least distinguish

between terms of Art and jargon most

people will use the term jargon for both

things but the point is terms of art are

a necessary evil right you have to add

some special term because the language

that you're handed the general language

doesn't cover it and so you need a

special term to describe something and

that means that somebody walking into

the conversation isn't necessarily aware

of what's being said until they've

learned that term jargon is the

pathological version of this jargon is

the use of these specially defined terms

to exclude people from a conversation

that they probably could understand and

that they might even realize you didn't

know what you were talking about if they

could understand the words that you were

using so you use those words to protect

yourself and

um until somebody gets that when you say

jargon you're not talking about

specialist language you're talking about

a competitive strategy

they won't know what you're saying so uh

and you know the difference as Heather

points out is in a room full of 18 year

olds especially when you're the

professor at some level you can say look

here are the terms that we need in order

to have this conversation and more or

less people will adopt them because

that's the natural state of things

rather than two peers getting together

where you have to you know my my rule is

I don't care whether the definition ends

up being the one that I came up with or

your set of definitions it doesn't

matter to me what I need is a term for

everything that needs to be

distinguished and we both need to know

what those terms are in order to have

the conversation but whose terms they

are doesn't matter well and yet

um you know as as I think we say in the

book our undergraduate advisor Bob

trivers an extraordinary evolutionary

biologist when we were leaving college

and applying to grad school he gave us a

piece of advice about what kinds of jobs

we might ultimately uh want if we were

to stay in Academia and he said do not

accept a job in which you are not

exposed to undergraduates because

teaching undergraduates means exposing

yourself and the thinking that you are

presenting to to naive Minds who will

throw curveballs at you and some of

those curveballs are going to be

nuisances and maybe they'll waste your

time but some of them are likely to

reveal to you the Frailty in your own

thinking or in the thinking of the field

and that is the way that progress is

made and so you know whom we call peers

is up for discussion and recognizing

that we can we can all learn from almost

every person that we interact with is a

remarkable Way Forward

yeah and the corollary to that is uh

there's a lot of pressure not to reveal

what you don't know by asking questions

that will establish the the boundaries

of your knowledge and being Courageous

about actually acknowledging what you

don't know often leads to the best

conversations right yeah you guys do

talk about that in the book and I think

that this is such an important idea I'd

love to tie to something else you talk

about which is

what is science like you guys have a

pretty unique take on what science is

that it could be done with a machete and

a pair of boots out in the jungle it can

be done in a Laboratory

um yeah what is science

science is a method for correcting for

bias

and that method is pretty well known it

has had a few updates along the way but

the the basic idea is it is a slightly

cumbersome mechanism for correcting for

human bias and the result is that it

produces a set of models and a a scope

of knowledge that improves over time and

what improves means is

it explains more while assuming less and

and fits with all of the other things

that we think are true maximally right

ultimately uh all true narratives must

reconcile and that includes the

scientific narratives that we tell at

different scales right the nanoscale has

to fit with the macroscopic scale even

if we don't understand how they fit

together yet so ultimately we're sort of

filling in from both sides what we

understand and what we expect is that

they will meet in the middle like a

bridge and um if they don't it means we

got something wrong somewhere yeah so

science is not the methods of science

it's not the glassware and the expensive

instrumentation and it's not the

um indicators uh that you're a

scientists because you're wearing these

things you know it's not the lab coat

and it's not the conclusions of science

it's not the things that we think we

know many of which things are actually

true and some of which aren't science is

the process

and all those other things are sort of

Hallmarks that may or may not be

accurate proxies uh when you're trying

to figure out is that person doing

science is this science over here but

what science is is actually the process

and it's worth saying that you don't

need it for Realms that are not

counterintuitive right you don't need to

do science in order to figure out where

the death chair is before you sit down

right it is apparent to you where the

deaf chair is because you're built to

perceive it directly now every so often

we all have the experience of looking at

something and not being able to figure

out what we're seeing there's some

optical illusion the way we are sitting

where we are in relation to the object

we're looking at and then you will go

through a scientific process you know if

that is a so and so that also suggests

this and I can see that that's not true

so what could it be right that that

process is scientific but by and large

the direct perception of objects around

you because it is intuitive because it's

built to be intuitive your system is

built to understand it in a way that

makes it intuitive doesn't require this

so we need science where things are

sufficiently difficult to observe or

counter-intuitive so you need a process

to correct for your expectations

what drives all this to me and that gets

missed even though it's sitting in plain

sight is to make progress you must

hunger to know where you are wrong and

if you can derive and again I come at

everything from a business lens in

business if you can derive tremendous

pleasure and quite frankly self-esteem

from your willingness to seek out the

imperfections in your thinking you'll

actually make it if you don't and it's

an ego protective game for you and your

ego is built around being right then

you're you're going under and to your

point about exposing yourself to

undergrads some of the most phenomenal

like

incisive questions challenging my

leadership have come from like interns

who just they've never had a job before

and so they're like oh why are we doing

XYZ and you're like why are we doing

that and if in that moment you're like I

must you know present myself and have a

reason for why we are doing that you

actually talk yourself into something

and because of the market much like

Evolution or reality which is something

I want definitely want to talk about how

there's a weirdness that we're living

through now where people feel like if

they can convince you through language

of something that it actually somehow

affects the underlying truth but in

business the market does not care like

you can convince your team that you're

right but if the market doesn't embrace

it you're gonna fail and there's

something wonderful about that

well I want to I want to push back

slightly uh admittedly this is not an

area of expertise but

it seems to me that there are two things

that business needs to be divided into

two things in order to really understand

what you're getting at the business

where the market is actually uh in a

position to test your understanding of

what is true and what will work and what

people want and things like that is one

thing that's real business and then

there's a kind of rent seeking in which

it may be about

uh you know a company that

does not have a functional product that

is selling the idea that it will have a

product that no one else will have and

its stock price Rises uh as a matter of

speculation that may well be a realm in

which it is uh it is deception and in

fact this this is beyond the scope of

the book but wherever perception is the

mediator of success you have deception

as an important evolutionary Force where

physics dictates whether you've

succeeded or failed you don't have that

problem you can't fool physics so I

don't know what the two words for the

two kinds of business are but the rent

seeking part of business and the actual

production of superior Goods or the same

Goods at a cheaper price that's a

different kind of of business structure

well here's what's interesting uh really

fast on that point I think that they do

fall under the same category so when I

say that the market decides so if your

pitches hey boys and girls we have to

deceive the market and we have to you

know game it and here's how we game it

and so everything is a function of your

goal so if your goal is to deceive and

to you know create a pump in your stock

price there is a way to do that that

will work and there is a way to do that

that won't work and now getting into

honorable goals versus you know

dishonorable goals that that is really

fascinating

um but I think that they they do fall

into the same category of either the

thing you do moves you towards your

goals or it does not

yep I mean I still think there's room

for a division because there is uh you

know the mythology of the market is that

it pays for value and rent seeking

violates that rent seeking effectively

is a failure of the market and so I

don't know I don't know where the

definition of split needs to be but it

does seem to me that although you're

right the the you know whether whether

what you are doing is uh assessing what

you believe the psychology of the market

to be or whether you are assessing what

might be physically possible in terms of

a product those are both real systems

that you're either correct about or not

um but there there does seem to me to be

a distinction between rent seeking and

and uh the production of actual value

and there's a Perfect Analogy to be made

um to academic science of course and so

in Academia if you are a scientist you

are supposed to be seeking an

understanding of reality

um but the way that modern science is

done uh involves a lot of requesting of

Grants from most of the federal

government and just as I imagine in

business although definitely not my area

of expertise the bigger you are the

harder it is to change course and in

Academia in part that means the later in

your career you are the harder it is to

change course and therefore the harder

it's going to be to do something like

Embrace that you were wrong and you know

actual honorable good scientists will

always will always fess up and talk

publicly about when they were wrong but

if your entire lab is contingent on a

model of the universe that is turning

out to look ever less likely it's going

to be much more difficult for you to do

that for you to embrace the wrongness of

you know what might be the livelihoods

of not just you but many of the people

who are working under you how would you

handle it

well you have to restructure things so

that uh what actually matters is being

right in the long term what we have is

an epidemic of corruption inside of

science which has more or less been

spotted first with respect to psychology

and psychology is difficult to do

because you're inherently looking into

the mind and you don't have a direct

ability to measure most of what's there

but the P hacking crisis basically the

abuse of Statistics to create the

impression of discovery which then

resulted in the inability to reproduce a

large fraction of the results in

Psychology is actually the tip of a much

larger iceberg that basically science as

a process is

excellent but science as a social

environment is defective and especially

defective where we have plugged it very

directly into Market incentives and

we've put a scientists at an unnatural

level of competition for a tiny number

of jobs we produce huge numbers of

applicants which means that the

incentive to cheat

is tremendous and those who stick to the

rules probably don't succeed very well

so basically what we have is a uh a race

to discover who is best at appearing

scientific and delivering those things

that um that the field wants to believe

rather than those things that the field

needs to know so the short answer to

your question which isn't especially

operationalizable is you need to put a

firewall between Market forces and the

scientific Endeavor because although

science is an incredibly powerful

process it is also a fragile process

that needs insulation for Market forces

or it cannot work so I would say just in

brief again not particularly

operationalizable but um reward public

error correction right um you know no

matter no matter what stage you are and

what the nature of the error was

um unless there was intentional fraud

which of course does exist

um public error Corrections should be

rewarded uh without shaming uh without

you know loss of of priority in other

things and the ability to do science

because not only do we need people to be

able to see that they've made mistakes

and and actually course correct but we

need people to be taking enough risks

early on that they are likely to

sometimes make errors and so in the

current environment where any error it

can be considered like the death nail

for a career we have ever more timid

scientists and that is making us less

good at science as a society and in fact

it almost seems implausible that people

would go around acknowledging their

errors but it wasn't so long ago that

this was fairly common in fact I used to

study bats and there's a famous example

of this not so long ago a guy named

Pettigrew had Advanced a radical

hypothesis that suggested that the old

world fruit bats the so-called flying

foxes were in fact not part of the same

evolutionary history as the bats that we

see here in the new world for example

the microbats he argued that they were

in fact flying primates

which was a fascinating argument it was

based on their neurobiology looking more

like uh monkey neurobiology than it does

like bat neurobiology which turned out

to be the result of the fact that they

used their eyes rather than echolocation

um so it was wrong and what he said at

the point that it was revealed by the

genes that he had been wrong was

if it is a wrong hypothesis it has been

a most fruitful wrong hypothesis which

was absolutely right the work that was

done to sort that out was tremendously

valuable and so anyway nobody who has

had to course correct and admit an error

finds it pleasant but we have to restore

the rules of the game where the longer

you wait the worse it is so that the

incentive is as soon as you know you're

wrong owning up to it so that you are on

the right side of the puzzle as quickly

as possible that that has to be the

objective

as you guys look at society and where

we're at now so one problem you've

obviously just very eloquently laid out

you've got incentives around admitting

that you're wrong is uh it could be the

death knell of your career what else is

going on that makes you guys have that

um quote that we started the the episode

with around you know sort of the you

didn't use the word disintegrating but

that there's to put my own words to it

there's a crazy making that's happening

at the societal level what

has led to that like what are three or

four factors that are causing that

breakdown

well

part you know

you know the bias that we have is

evolutionary biologists is that we see a

failure to understand what we are as uh

producing short-term reductionist metric

heavy pseudo-quantitative answers to

questions that uh warrant a much more

holistic and emergent approach and so

what are some of the the things that

modern humans have embraced or have been

told to embrace and some of us have and

some of us haven't

um that have helped produce uh problems

for for modern people uh this is not

this is not new with us but

um the ubiquity of screens the change in

parenting styles to protect children

from risk and unstructured play and the

drugging of children legally with

anti-anxiety and anti-depression meds

more likely if they're girls of the

speed if they're boys those three things

in combination all of which were sort of

on the rise in the 90s and hit fever

pitch in the in the odds and early teens

helps reduce a generation that became in

body adults but with vines that had not

had a chance yet to actually learn what

it is to be human and some of that is

reversible and you know really we just

by by chance we were College professors

we were College professors for basically

the entire period of time during which

Millennials were in college so we taught

Millennials from from beginning to end

and almost to a person our students were

amazing and receptive and creative and

and capable and if you you know when

when we talk about the generation of

Millennials it's those people who were

drugged and screened and helicopter and

snowplow parented right so with

individual attention people can be

pulled out of the tailspin but as a

societal level that's exactly what we're

in as a tailspin what is the tailspin

exactly though what is it about those

things that what does it create in

people

I want to address that as part of a a

slight reorientation of the question

so one of the things that is causing the

dysfunction is you know it's not just

the fact of the screens but it's what

they imply that virtually everything

that people know is coming through a

social channel right so it is all open

to manipulation augmentation Distortion

and

what people generally do not pick up in

the normal course of an education even

what we consider to be a high quality

education is interaction with systems

that allow you to check whether or not

that which sounds right actually

comports with logic

so for example

if you interact with an engine you can't

fool an engine into starting you either

figure out why it isn't starting or you

don't and so we advocated for students

that they dedicate some large fraction

of their education to systems that are

not socially mediated in which success

or failure is dictated by a physical

system that tells you whether or not

you've understood or failed to

understand and I mean this can be

mechanics or carpentry but it also can

be you know baking frankly or learning

to play the guitar right or or parkour

anything where success or failure is

non-arbitrary what you don't want is an

education built entirely of I succeeded

when the person at the front of the room

told me I got it because if the person

at the front of the room is a dope which

unfortunately happens too often you may

pick up wrong ideas and feel rewarded

for believing in them and that can

result in tremendous confusion

I would just finally say

that the book really is about what we

have informally called an evolutionary

toolkit and that evolutionary toolkit

the beauty of it what we saw and what

students reported to us in their picking

it up that toolkit allows with a very

small set of assumptions the

understanding of a large fraction of the

phenomena that we care about almost

everything we care about as humans is

evolutionarily impacted and the ability

to go through what you are told about

your psychology or your teeth or

anything like that and say does that

make sense given the highest quality

Darwinism that we've got does it make

sense to be told that our genomes

suddenly went haywire and that's why an

ever increasing fraction of young people

need orthodontia nope not for a moment

does it make sense that we have a piece

of our intestine called the appendix

that is no longer of any value and yet a

huge number of people have uh this thing

become inflamed and burst so that their

lives are placed in Jeopardy nope it

does not the ability to check what

you're being told against a set of law a

a toolkit for logic that is so robust

that you can instantly spot nonsense is

a very powerful enhancement and it does

not involve knowing more it involves

knowing less and having that little bit

that you know be really robust that's

terrific I would just say it doesn't

necessarily involve you knowing less but

being certain of less

it requires that you rest what you know

on less the foundation is more robust

and uh less elaborate we're just about

to ask what it means to know less so

thank you for that

um yeah that is

very interesting when I think about uh I

forget the exact quote but as the island

of your knowledge grows the shore of

your ignorance grows too you know

whatever the the famous quote but it's a

really interesting dichotomy so all

right we've got this generation that's

growing up they're looking at screens

you guys make a pretty interesting

assertion in the book about what screens

do in terms of you're getting emotional

cues from a non-human entity and that it

may play a part in the rise in autism I

found that incredibly interesting

um what I want to better understand is

what's going on

in our brains that so helicopter

parenting or snowplow parenting for

instance like why does that trap us in a

Perpetual childhood you guys talk about

Rites of Passage in the book I'd be very

curious to to hear like how do we begin

to deal with some of these things

whether it's screens whether it's snow

Pub parenting you know if I find myself

a 19 year old and I realize I've been

done dirty I've been on drugs for ages I

was raised essentially by a screen I'm

you know having trouble connecting

having trouble relating and my parents

have taken care of everything for me

what are the symptoms I need to look out

for and then how do I push forward

well uh in terms of symptoms this is

more or less a uh

it's a self-diagnosing problem you

either none of us feel perfectly at home

in modernity because in fact we are not

at home we can't be even you know the

the world that we live in is not the

world of our grandparents it's not even

the world that we were born into we live

as adults in a world that uh just

literally didn't exist when we were born

and without the world even that our

children are born into unless they were

literally born yesterday right exactly

it's changing so fast it can't be but

that said you either are feeling

constantly confused about what you're

seeing and hearing and you don't know

what to think or you've found something

that allows you to move forward and even

if you can't fully manage what it is

you're confronting it should surprise

you less and less and so we provide a

couple of tools in the book we talk

about the precautionary principle and we

talk about chesterton's fence which are

really two sides of the same coin and if

you're your life has been built around

the idea that whatever the newest thing

is the you know the latest wisdom is

what you uh were brought up on then in

all likelihood you are you know taking

various drugs to correct for various

things which may very well be the

symptoms of the last drugs you you took

uh you you know you may be engaging in

all kinds of behaviors uh to fix

mysterious problems maybe you can't

sleep and you know so you're you're

taking some aggressive mechanism to deal

with that the basic point is back away

from that which is novel and untested

and in the direction of that which is

time tested and it will result in a

decrease in anxiety and increase in your

control over your own life and the way

you'll tell is that you will feel less

confused more of the time can you guys

Define chesterton's fence I thought that

was a really great part of the book

yeah

um so gkk Chesterton was a 20th century

political philosopher maybe I'm not sure

exactly how he would have defined

himself but um of of the many

contributions that he made

um to you know I think he was a

conservative

um but of one of the many contributions

that he made was imagining two people on

a walk together and coming across a

fence that appeared to be in their way

and person a says let's get rid of the

fence and person B says well what's it

here for person a says I don't care it

doesn't matter I just want it gone

and person b or Chesterton I suppose uh

in My Telling here says there's no way

that I should let you get rid of the

fence until and unless you can tell me

what its function is if you can tell me

what its function is or was originally

here for then maybe we can talk about

whether or not it's time for it to go

but until you can explain to me what the

function is or was then there's no way

that I should allow you to get rid of it

simply because you see it as an

inconvenience

so um you know the appendix that Brett

already mentioned

um is is a perfect example of this and

we talk about in the book things like

you know chesterton's breast milk you

know we should you know we should we

should be abandoning breastfeeding

um you know we are abandoning

breastfeeding to the degree that we're

doing so at our Peril uh chesterton's

play not letting children have long

periods of unstructured play in which

adults are not monitoring them and are

not telling them not to bully each other

even though bullying is bad yes but

allowing children to figure out for

themselves in mixed age groups how it is

to navigate risk themselves that is how

those children will grow into competent

young people and you know if you do

arrive at 19 having been drugged into

submission and having had your parents

clear all of the hazards out of the way

for you the thing you can do is start

exposing yourself to risk and risk is

risky you know um this is you know this

is both a tautology and also shocking to

people because you know wait you're

telling me I need to to expose my

children to risk well if you want to

guarantee that your child will make it

to their 18th birthday alive then sure

put them in a cocoon right that's the

way to make sure that their body will

get to 18 is to reduce all risk from

their lives and protect them from

everything but will they have the mind

of an 18 year old at that point no they

will not so you trade a little bit of

security that your child will survive

and you know every time I say anything

like that I get chills you know we have

children that are teenagers now and the

idea that one of them would die and that

they would die taking a risk that we had

implicitly or explicitly encouraged I

don't know how you go on right and you

know parents do but I don't know how you

go on but the bigger risk is that they

get to 18 and they're incompetent they

can't think and they don't know how to

navigate the world especially now where

the world and the future will look

nothing like it did in the past they

need to be able to problem solve and the

way to do that is to be exposed to as

many situations in which they are

navigating on their own as early as

possible selection has really given

parents a the job of both managing risk

and not fully managing risk in other

words it's not that you don't protect

your children but you want to protect

them at a level where they do make

mistakes and those mistakes do come back

to haunt them and it causes them to be

wise adults who are capable of managing

risk when the risks when the stakes are

much higher and that's really the

question it's not do you want your child

to be safe of course you do but you want

them to be safe across their entire life

and if you protect them too much when

they are young they will not be able to

do it when they are older and the risks

are frankly much larger

yeah one of the things that I find most

intoxicating about you guys your book

your podcast is Nuance complexity like

recognizing that by being reductionist

by boiling things down to you know make

them simple but no no further whatever

the quote is that there is a point at

which you can reduce something so far

that you lose what's really going on

um

and finding our way through all of this

complexity though is incredibly

difficult

so as it comes to your own parenting

style how have you guys

employed this the idea that I'm most

interested of yours is is the idea that

the magic happens in the friction so

whether it's male female whether it's

right left it's understanding or safety

and risk it's understanding that it's

either side is problematic how have you

guys navigated that complexity

but we

gambled with neither of us knew

particularly much about rearing children

at the point where we ended up with them

and we more or less gambled on them too

much of a surprise to me at the point

that we ended up with them no no

certainly we knew they were coming for

many months but

um but from the point of view of what

one does to raise children well we

hadn't had a lot of experience with

young kids they just hadn't been in our

lives and we gambled on an idea that I

still think it's not entirely obvious

why it works at all

but if you treat your children

more or less at least cognitively you

just shoot way over their heads right

you talk to them like like adults from

very early on and they cannot respond in

kind but they get much more than you

would think based on what they can say

in response and so we have been

extremely open with our children about

the hazards in the world that they face

and the hazards in our family have been

frankly greater than than most children

would be confronted with at least in the

weird world yeah

um we have been honest with them we you

know we have an explicit rule in our

household and the children could recite

it uh without thought right you are

allowed to break your arm or your leg

you are not allowed to damage your eyes

you're not allowed to damage your skull

you're not allowed to damage your neck

or your back right now when you say that

to a kid and they realize actually it's

not that I'm being told no no no no no

no I'm being told I am actually allowed

to break my arm and nobody is going to

necessarily you know be concerned you

know yes we'll take care of you no

matter what and if you damage your eyes

we'll take care of you then too but the

basic point is there's just a

fundamental distinction between damaging

things which repair pretty well and

damaging things which don't and that

ought to exist in your mind you know

every time you leave the house

understanding that there are certain

things you know that it's not that you

want to avoid bad things and uh go

towards good things and that there's a

whole spectrum of bad and uh you may

need in an instant to navigate you know

if you're driving down the highway

yes the first job is don't crash right

don't crash is a good rule but you can't

always not crash and sometimes you've

got a choice about what you crash into

or how you crash and you know if you've

just got everything filed as a binary

then you're you're in much more danger

so being clear with kids about the

subtleties and the nuance and frankly

about the bind that you're in our

children know that we have made a

conscious decision that in order that

they can manage risk as adults they have

to face risks as children that could

potentially cost them their lives you

know we took our kids into the Amazon

for example that's not a safe place to

be but they're also the kind of kids who

can handle it now so one of the things

that was very important to us was that

our children literally learn how to fall

that when they were climbing up on

things on trees or in jungle gyms that

they would launch themselves

intentionally so they would learn how to

fall safely but metaphorically learning

how to fall is the other thing that you

learn once you are engaged and literally

learning how to fall and maybe maybe

that is the kind of risk that we are in

fact trying to prepare our children for

and that we are arguing that parents

everywhere should be preparing their

children for how to fall safely so that

you get up and can live to maybe not

fall again but if you do Fall Again live

to get up again another day yeah

actually it occurs to me right now the

engineers know this backwards and

forwards right

fail safe that's what you want a system

that fails safely and building that into

your kids is is an essential an

essential skill

so one of the things you talked about in

the book that I was like whoa was when

your son broke his arm I think he was

older because I know when the ones broke

it going down the stairs that one

required immediate medical attention uh

but there was a time where he broke his

arm and it was like a couple days I

think before you actually went and had

it looked at

um

and there's like an actual principle

behind strengthening the bone that you

guys go through and I was very impressed

um talk about that including the notion

that as this is like you guys have

overcome one of the reasons that I

didn't become a father was it seemed so

self-evident to me that you had to do

things like let your kids take risks you

know within confines that you had to

make things hard for them within

confines uh and I wasn't sure that I

would enjoy that process so it was

obvious I would have to do it and not

obvious that I would enjoy it and when

you guys talked about like how we sort

of over coddle things which I could

immediately empathize with I get why

people do it why you want to wrap a

broken arm in the thickest cast you can

possibly find but that even that isn't

always the right answer yeah no it's

it's really not that we our brains are

anti-fragile and our bones are

anti-fragile and they they become

stronger with stressors and Society

seems to be imagining that what we all

are is fragile and by imagine that we're

Fragile by creating conditions that

imagine that we're fragile that becomes

the reality we become more and more

fragile and less anti-fragile so uh in

the case of our our older son or it was

our younger son but when he was older uh

who broke his arm in the last day of

camp we did get him to

um to an emergency room that day it was

several hours but it was that day and

they told us that at the point that we

got back home to Portland which was um

several several hour drive and it was

going to be many days before we got

there that we should go see an

orthopedist and to have a cast put on to

have a cast put on so we spent several

days

um splinted he splint he spent several

days splinted and with some uh with some

pain medication

um before we ended up going home to to

Portland and where we did not get a cast

but the important thing is this is not

an experiment we ran on our child before

I had to learn it on myself right so

um evolutionarily speaking uh there is a

logic to what one does with broken bones

and it's a very different logic lots of

creatures don't heal so well horses

famously don't heal very well and the

reason for this is fairly obvious a

horse a wild ancestral horse that had a

broken limb wasn't going to recover that

is to say once an animal was hobbled by

a broken limb it was going to be picked

off by a predator so the selection that

creates the capacity to repair wasn't

there on the other hand

sloths which fall out of trees fairly

regularly but don't depend on their

ability to get away from predators

through speed actually survive very

frequently and when we look at sloth

carcasses they very regularly have

breaks that have healed so creatures

that can heal have that capacity our

arms and humans are such creatures we

are such creatures so one wants to be

very careful right if a bone is

misaligned you then want to utilize

medicine in order to get the healing

process to work correctly so it doesn't

heal in a misaligned way but if you've

got a fracture and you haven't

misaligned something there's a whole

other logic that takes over immobilizing

the arm isn't what we're built for in

fact what you're built for is to have

pain and inflammation do the job and the

result when I broke my arm and I just

said you know what I've thought for my

whole life why is it that we rush to get

a doctor to

um to immobilize this and then we

atrophy and have it removed and we have

to rebuild our strength maybe that's not

how it's supposed to be logically

Evolution has prepared us for this let's

see what happens when I broke my arm and

I was certain that it was not misaligned

and I let it go

what I found out was a one has to be

very careful for the first day or two

until you learn what it is that you're

capable of doing but your capacity

begins to return very very quickly and

the degree to which I was better off the

time that I broke my arm that I

fractured my arm and did nothing medical

than the time that I fractured my arm

and did the standard medical thing and

had the cast was night and day different

and the fact is we talked to Toby our

younger son when he broke his arm and we

told him what we were thinking and he

had watched me go through the experiment

and he elected to go through it himself

and lo and behold the same logic applied

in his case

yeah that's really interesting and feels

like there's a lot that we can

extrapolate from that in terms of our

real lives one idea that I find really

enticing and I'm sad that I didn't go

through it when I was a kid are Rites of

Passage do you guys think about that

all the time uh we have dispensed so

this is a classic chesterton's fence

issue where it used to be that there

were these you know Hallmarks of having

passed through a certain developmental

State and at some point I think people

started to feel that these things were

primitive and they dispensed with all of

them and much to our Peril because it

you know what you are is a creature

that starts out utterly helpless and

ends up incredibly capable but there are

moments at which you take on new

responsibility right now it's arbitrary

is an 18 year old really an adult in

many ways yes in some ways no it's not

really a moment at which you become an

adult but you do need a moment at which

we say actually at this point these

responsibilities are ones we believe you

can handle and going forward that's what

they are and the ceremony itself

instantiates it the ceremony helps make

it real and maybe it's at 18 maybe it's

at 15 maybe it's at 13 depending on the

tradition maybe it's counting in a

different way in cases

um where perhaps adherence to the

calendar is not the thing but you know

the moment now you are a man now you are

a woman is

has got to be an empowering one and it's

one of the things that is almost

universally lost for us us weird people

and you know it may well be the case

just as is the case with something like

follow through in sport what you do

after you hit the ball actually does not

matter but it is very important that you

intend to follow through and in that

same way going through your life knowing

that at this moment I'm going to be

expected to do this thing whether it's a

Vision Quest or or whatever it may be

knowing that that moment is coming and

that on the far side of it you will be a

different person is a developmental

process in and of itself so it's very

likely the thing that happens as you

anticipate this uh rite of passage that

is really the important developmental

thing but we've just dispensed with them

all

so we've talked a lot about uh Evolution

and all the different things and ways

that it manifests in our life and I want

to bring now people back to where we

started in the book that

you know we're we're at if if instead of

a nuclear clock coming towards 12 you

guys would say that from just a societal

uh standpoint we're edging up somewhere

in there

um talk to us about the fourth Frontier

but to understand the fourth Frontier I

think we have to understand the first

three Frontiers uh so if you can walk us

through that it was a really interesting

idea it was the part of your book that I

had to read twice because I was like

whoa there's really something

fascinating here and it it hints at a

very complex answer to a very complex

problem uh was entirely novel for me

I've never heard this idea explored

before and I think that it'll be really

helpful for people to see that you've

thought not just through the problem but

through potential Solutions

well the first thing to realize is that

all evolved creatures are effectively in

a search for opportunity and that

opportunity looks like for an average

creature under average circumstances if

it's a sexually reproducing creature the

average number of offspring that it will

produce that reaches reproductive

maturity themselves will be two doesn't

matter if they produce a hundred babies

or three the average that will reach

that number is two and the reason is

because the population isn't growing or

Contracting so two parents will end up

replacing themselves and know better at

least on average

when you have succeeded evolutionarily

you find some opportunity that allows

that rule to be broken right a creature

that passes over a mountain pass and

ends up in a valley in which it has no

competitors may leave a hundred times as

many offspring as it would have if it

had remained in its initial habitat and

so these places where creatures discover

an unexploited or underexploited

opportunity and their population can

grow are Frontiers and the feeling of

growth is the feeling of evolutionary

success the problem is all of these

things are limited right no matter what

opportunity you've found

the population will grow until that

opportunity is no longer under exploited

at which point the zero-sum Dynamics

will be restored but let's just lay out

the the first three types of Frontier

before perhaps you um you expand on what

the fourth Frontier is so

um the the first type of Frontier being

the one that most people think of when

you hear the word when they hear the

word frontier which is a geographic

Frontier so we begin the book by talking

about the beringians the first Americans

who came over

um from through boringia across what is

now the Bering Strait from Asia into the

new world something between 10 and 25

000 years ago they were coming into two

continents that had never before been

inhabited by humans and that was a vast

Geographic Frontier

the second type of Frontier might be

called a technological Frontier in which

you innovate something that allows you

to make use of resource that you

heretofore had not had access to so for

instance the terracing of hillsides to

allow water to be held and agricultural

systems to be to be done where

previously all the water would have run

off taking the nutrients in the water

with it that would be an example of a

technological Frontier and then the

third type of Frontier which is

ubiquitous throughout human history is a

transfer of resource Frontier and this

is really not a frontier it's it's just

it's theft right and so the beringians

coming into the new world for the first

time again 10 to 25 000 years ago we're

experiencing a geographic Frontier

thousands of years later when Europeans

came into the new world from the other

direction from from the East they landed

in a space that already had tens of

millions of people in it and basically

took over and that was a transfer of

resource moment and a transfer resource

Frontier basically theft so Geographic

Frontiers and technological Frontiers

are not inherently theft transfer

resource is and so we are proposing a

fourth Frontier so I'll just say a

transfer of resource is the explanation

for almost all wars and genocide from

the point of view of some population the

resources of some other population that

cannot be defended are as if a frontier

but the idea of the overarching idea is

that all creatures are seeking these

non-zero-sum opportunities that they are

experienced as growth that they are

inherently

self-destablizing that they

cause the growth of populations that

then restores the zero-sum Dynamics

restores the austerity which doesn't

feel so good and the population is then

in the search for the next non-zero-sum

growth Frontier

the problem is we can't keep doing that

right that process made us what we are

and we've been tremendously successful

at it but there are no more Tech uh

Geographic Frontiers on Earth we've

found it all technologically we've done

an excellent job of figuring out how to

exploit the world in fact over exploit

the world transfer resource is a world

destabilizing not only is it a

Despicable process but it is a lethal

process from the point of view of the

danger it puts us at we simply have

Weaponry that is too powerful we are too

interconnected and so in a sense our

Fates are all now linked and we have to

agree to put that uh competition aside

and then the question is well what do we

do do we face

do we accept the zero-sum Dynamics and

live with austerity that doesn't sound

like a a very good sales pitch even even

if it was what we had to do so what we

propose in the book is that there's

actually an alternative to this

that one can produce a steady state that

feels like growth to the people who

experience it without having to discover

new resource and that may sound

Preposterous it may sound utopian we are

not utopians we regard Utopia as the

worst idea human beings ever had or at

least very close to the top of that list

but there's nothing uh undoable about a

system that feels like Perpetual growth

in the same way there is nothing utopian

about the idea that it's always

Springtime inside your house right it's

always Pleasant inside your house that's

not a violation of any physical law it's

just a simple matter of the fact that we

can use energy to modulate the

temperature with the negative feedback

system and we can keep it very pleasant

in your house all the time and the point

is can that be done in our larger

environment such that human beings are

liberated to do the things that we are

uniquely positioned to do to generate

right

Beauty to experience love to feel

compassion to enhance our understanding

of the world all of those things are the

kinds of things that are worthy of us as

an objective

and what we need in order for more

people to spend their time pursuing

those things is a system in which we are

freed from competing one lineage against

the others uh for a limited amount of

resources and and the uh uh so that you

know we are condemned to violence

against each other in order to pursue

these things so in essence the fourth

Frontier is a steady state designed to

liberate people we should say it is not

something we believe we can blueprint

from here we know enough to navigate our

way in that direction but we cannot

blueprint it is something we will have

to prototype and navigate to but the

good news is

although we here probably would not live

to see the final product

things would start getting better

immediately Upon Our recognition that

pursuing the fourth Frontier was the

right thing to do suddenly there would

be a tremendous amount of useful work to

be done in discovering what the various

mechanisms of that new way of being are

all right you guys are gonna have to

give me a little more than that in the

book you talk about you give an example

and it was the thing that really allowed

me to begin to understand how we could

achieve a steady state that gave us

those things

um

I don't know if you remember the example

that you gave in the book I do so if you

don't let me know and I will refresh

your memory but I'm talking about the

Mayans is that right in the book you

specifically talk about craftsmanship

but if you've got something for me on

the mines I'll take it yeah well I mean

we I think we do we do both right

um and

uh let's see well maybe maybe remind us

of exactly what we say about

craftsmanship I remember that we talk

about it but I'm not sure exactly what

the context is here the idea was

basically that so we have this inherent

desire for growth but it isn't

necessarily growth itself it's sort of

an now I'm using my own words it's the

neurochemical state of feeling this deep

sense of satisfaction at having

something of import is probably the the

easiest way to think of it and that gave

me something to grasp onto because I so

I often get asked the question I've had

financial success in my life and the

irony of my life is that I'm constantly

going around trying to convince people

that money is not going to do for you

what you think it will it's very

powerful but it isn't what most people

think they think it will make them feel

better about themselves and money is

just absolutely incapable of doing that

and so when you realize the only thing

that matters is how you feel about

yourself you start playing a game of

neurochemistry and so this idea of

craftsmanship felt like that to me yeah

so you know recognizing

the long-term hormonal glow that you get

from producing something of lasting

value and beauty and meaning in the

world as opposed to only being exposed

to short-term stuff you know the

difference between buying something at

Ikea and putting it together with Allen

wrenches on your floor and of either

making yourself or coming to know a

Craftsman who really builds things with

care and knowledge with the intention

that you will be able to pass this on to

your children or your friends or you

know whomever later on this is a piece

with with lasting Beauty lasting

function that was built with someone who

knew something about the wood or the

metals or whatever the materials are

this is a way into finding the kinds of

meaning that a fourth Frontier mentality

can provide yeah I think the distinction

is one between

um the satisfaction of Life coming from

consuming which is inherently empty

versus uh producing and producing

doesn't necessarily have to mean stuff

it can be meaning or Insider or any one

of a number of other things but what we

say about the the Maya in the book what

we argue is that they very conspicuously

this is an extremely long-lived

civilization

um thousands of years of remarkable

success and they had as one of the

things that they produced in all of

their city-states they produced these

incredible monuments which are actually

not what they appear to be we have spent

a lot of time in uh in Mayan territory

and these things look like pyramids in

the sense that the Egyptians produced

them but they are not they are in fact

growing structures so these things got

bigger and bigger over time the longer a

city-state existed in the same place and

then there's the hidden version of this

which are an incredible network of Roads

Stone roads that exist between the

city-states called sock base

in any case the point is the Maya were

producing things that stood in for

population growth they were taking some

fraction of their productivity and they

were dedicating it to these massive

Public Works projects and the thing

about a massive Public Works project is

that it brings a kind of reality and

cohesion to the people involved I mean

imagine yourself

living in one of these amazing cities

and the public monuments made of stone

that speak to the power and the

durability of your people are you know

part of this uh this public space

these things allow the following process

if it's not just the pyramid that you

you know you it's a line item on a

budget you build the Pyramid it's done

but in fact what you do is you augment

it well then in good years

you will have that to augment and you

will take some fraction of the

productivity that might be turned into

more people which would then result in

more austerity you can invest it in

these Public Works projects and then in

a lean year instead of having not enough

to go and feed all of the mouths that

have been created you can just simply

not augment the Public Works project

that is a natural damper for the kind of

ebb and flow the boom and bust that we

have suffered so mightily under under

our modern economic systems so

the production of meaning the production

of uh

shared space that actually augments the

ability of people to interact with each

other these things are models of what we

should probably be seeking as a society

A system that tamps down the

fluctuations that provides Liberty to

people that's really the key thing right

we want realized Liberty for individuals

so that they can pursue what is

Meaningful rather than satisfying

themselves with consumption that's sort

of a rough outline of what a fourth

Frontier would look like

nice I love it

um in the book I can't remember if it

was Liberty that you were talking about

specifically but you talk about it's an

emergent property I assume you mean the

same with Liberty

how do we create the bed from which

Liberty will emerge

well we argue in the book is that

Liberty is a special value and the

reason that is a special value is

they're really two ways to to delineate

it you can be technically free but not

really free right if you're concerned

about being wiped out by a health care

crisis or you're concerned that you you

may lose your job and have to find

another in a different industry you're

not really free even if technically you

could go out and start an oil company

it's not going to happen so what we

argue Is that real Liberty realized

Liberty is Liberty you can act on and in

order for a person to be liberated

they're more mundane concerns their

safety uh their sustenance all those

things have to be taken care of and

therefore we can know that we have

succeeded when somebody has real Liberty

that they are capable of acting on it's

a proxy and what we argue is that the

objective ought to be to provide real

Liberty for as many people as possible

hopefully ultimately everyone would be

liberated to do something truly

remarkable rather than only Elites

having that freedom

I guess I would just say um

as as high a fraction of the population

as possible uh if we say as many people

as possible it might sound like we're

also interested in maximizing population

growth and of course you know of course

we're not you know I think we will we

will Peak hopefully at some point soon

and then population may start going down

through attrition but then at every

moment in uh in human history going

forward

um the vast number of the greatest

number of people possible who have

maximum Liberty uh will be a success

and let me just uh

refine that slightly

the objective is the maximum number of

liberated people but not living

simultaneously ultimately the way to

Grant The Marvelous liberated life to

the maximum number of people is to get

sustainable at the level that humans can

live indefinitely on the planet rather

than having a clock ticking where we

just simply don't have the resources to

continue doing what we're doing with so

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