Bret Weinstein is and evolutionary biologist, author, and co-host of the DarkHorse Podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EDIT NOTE: I edited this episode quickly and made a couple of mistakes in how rough the cut looks. One weird cut is after the 2 hour mark, where it sounds like Bret is about to make a point, but I actually interrupt him for clarification and then go of on a tangent and never return. I edited out the interruption which made the cut look weird. I failed here both as an interviewer and editor. I'm trying to get better at both, and hire help for the latter, since I still do it all alone. Please be patient with me.

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:14 - Why biology is beautiful
10:47 - Boston Dynamics
14:11 - Being self-critical
24:19 - Theory of close calls
32:56 - Lab leak hypothesis
1:06:50 - Joe Rogan
1:16:00 - Censorship
1:52:49 - Vaccines
2:06:35 - The paper on mice with long telomeres
2:34:18 - Martyrdom
2:43:03 - Eric Weinstein
2:52:23 - Monogamy
3:04:41 - Advice for young people
3:11:25 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologist, author, co-host of the Dark Horse podcast, and as he says, reluctant radical.

Even though we've never met or spoken before this, we both felt like we've been friends for a long time.

I don't agree on everything with Brett, but I'm sure as hell happy he exists in this weird and wonderful world of ours.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Jordan Harbinger Show, ExpressVPN, Magic Spoon, and 4 Sigmatic.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say a few words about COVID-19 and about science broadly.

I think science is beautiful and powerful.

It is the striving of the human mind to understand and to solve the problems of the world.

But as an institution, it is susceptible to the flaws of human nature, to fear, to greed, power, and ego.

2020 is a story of all of these that has both scientific triumph and tragedy.

We needed great leaders and we didn't get them.

What we needed is leaders who communicate in an honest, transparent, and authentic way about the uncertainty of what we know and the large-scale scientific efforts to reduce that uncertainty and to develop solutions.

I believe there are several candidates for solutions that could have all saved hundreds of billions of dollars and lessened or eliminated the suffering of millions of people.

Let me mention 5 of the categories of solutions.

Masks, at-home testing, anonymized contact tracing, antiviral drugs, and vaccines.

Within each of these categories, institutional leaders should have constantly asked and answered publicly, honestly, the following 3 questions.

1, what data do we have on the solution and what studies are we running to get more and better data?

2, given the current data and uncertainty, how effective and how safe is the solution?

3, what is the timeline and cost involved with mass manufacturing distribution of the solution?

In the service of these questions, no voices should have been silenced.

Open data, open science, Open, honest scientific communication and debate was the way, not censorship.

There are a lot of ideas out there that are bad, wrong, dangerous.

But the moment we have the hubris to say we know which ideas those are is the moment we'll lose our ability to find the truth, to find solutions, the very things that make science beautiful and powerful in the face of all the dangers that threaten the wellbeing and the existence of humans on earth.

This conversation with Brett is less about the ideas we talk about.

It is much more about the very freedom to talk, to think, to share ideas.

I asked Brett to do this podcast to show solidarity and to show that I have hope for science and for humanity.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here's my conversation with Brett Weinstein.

What to you is beautiful about the study of biology?

The science, the engineering, the philosophy of it?

I must say, at 1 level, it's not a conscious thing.

I can say a lot about why, as an adult, I find biology compelling, but as a kid I was completely fascinated with animals.

I loved to watch them and think about why they did what they did and that developed into a very conscious passion as an adult, but I think in the same way that 1 is drawn to a person, I was drawn to the never-ending series of near miracles that exist across biological nature.

When you see a living organism, do you see it from an evolutionary biology perspective of like this entire thing that moves around in this world?

Or do you see like from an engineering perspective that like first principles almost down to the physics, like the little components that build up hierarchies, that you have cells, first proteins and cells and organs and all that kind of stuff.

So do you see low level or do you see high level?

Well, the human mind is a strange thing, and I think it's probably a bit like a time-sharing machine in which I have different modules.

We don't know enough about biology for them to connect, right, so they exist in isolation, and I'm always aware that they do connect, but I basically have to step into a module in order to see the evolutionary dynamics of the creature and the lineage that it belongs to.

I have to step into a different module to think of that lineage over a very long time scale, a different module still, to understand what the mechanisms inside would have to look like to account for what we can see from the outside.

And I think that probably sounds really complicated, but 1 of the things about being involved in a topic like biology and doing so for 1 you know really not even just my adult life for my whole life is that it becomes second nature and you know when we see somebody do an amazing parkour routine or something like that, we think about what they must be doing in order to accomplish that.

But of course, what they are doing is tapping into some kind of zone, right?

They are in a zone in which they are in such command of their center of gravity, for example, that they know how to hurl it around a landscape so that they always land on their feet.

And I would just say, for anyone who hasn't found a topic on which they can develop that kind of facility, it is absolutely worthwhile.

It's really something that human beings are capable of doing across a wide range of topics, many things our ancestors didn't even have access to.

And that flexibility of humans, that ability to repurpose our machinery for topics that are novel means really the world is your oyster.

You can figure out what your passion is and then figure out all of the angles that 1 would have to pursue to really deeply understand it and it is well worth having at least 1 topic like that.

You mean embracing the full adaptability of both the body and the mind?

So like, I don't know what to attribute the parkour to, like biomechanics of how our bodies can move, or is it the mind?

Is it the entirety of the hierarchies of biology that we've been talking about, or is it just all the mind?

The way to think about creatures is that every creature is 2 things simultaneously.

It's not a machine in the, you know, I call it an aqueous machine, right?

And it's run by an aqueous computer, right?

So it's not identical to our technological machines.

But Every creature is both a machine that does things in the world sufficient to accumulate enough resources to continue surviving to reproduce It is also a potential so each creature is potentially For example the most recent common ancestor of some future clade of creatures that will look very different from it.

And if a creature is very, very good at being a creature, but not very good in terms of the potential it has going forward, then that lineage will not last very long into the future because change will throw at challenges that its descendants will not be able to meet.

So the thing about humans is we are a generalist platform and we have the ability to swap out our software to exist in many, many different niches.

And I was once watching an interview with this British group of parkour experts who were being, you know, they were discussing what it is they do and how it works.

And what they essentially said is, look, you're tapping into deep monkey stuff, right?

And you know, anybody who is proficient at something like skiing or skateboarding, you know, has the experience of flying down the hill on skis, for example, bouncing from the top of 1 mogul to the next, And if you really pay attention, you will discover that your conscious mind is actually a spectator.

It's there, it's involved in the experience, but it's not driving.

Some part of you knows how to ski, and it's not the part of you that knows how to think.

And I would just say that what accounts for this flexibility in humans is the ability to bootstrap a new software program and then drive it into the unconscious layer where it can be applied very rapidly.

And I will be shocked if the exact thing doesn't exist in robotics.

If you programmed a robot to deal with circumstances that were novel to it, how would you do it?

It would have to look something like this.

There's a certain kind of magic, you're right, with the consciousness being an observer.

When you play guitar, for example, or piano for me, music, when you get truly lost in it, I don't know what the heck is responsible for the flow of the music, the kind of the loudness of the music going up and down, the timing, the intricate, like even the mistakes, all those things, that doesn't seem to be the conscious mind, it is just observing.

And yet it's somehow intricately involved.

More like, because you mentioned parkour, dance is like that too.

When you start up in tango dancing, if when you truly lose yourself in it, then it's just like you're an observer and how the hell is the body able to do that?

And not only that, it's the physical motion is also creating the emotion, like that damn is good to be alive feeling.

So, but then that's also intricately connected to the full biology stack that we're operating in.

I don't know how difficult it is to replicate that.

We're talking offline about Boston Dynamics robots.

They've recently been, they did both parkour, they did flips, they've also done some dancing.

And it's something I think a lot about because what most people don't realize because they don't look deep enough is those robots are hard-coded to do those things.

The robots didn't figure it out by themselves And yet the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human is that process of figuring out, of making mistakes.

And then there's something about overcoming those challenges and the mistakes and like figuring out how to lose yourself in the magic of the dancing or just movement is what it means to be human.

So that's what I wanna do with the, almost as a fun side thing with the Boston Dynamics robots is to have them learn and see what they figure out.

I wanna let spot make mistakes and in so doing discover what it means to be alive, discover beauty, because I think that's the essential aspect of mistakes.

Boston Dynamics folks want Spot to be perfect, because they don't want Spot to ever make mistakes because it wants to operate in the factories, it wants to be very safe and so on.

For me, if you construct the environment, if you construct a safe space for robots and allow them to make mistakes, something beautiful might be discovered.

So spot is currently very dumb and I'm gonna give it a brain.

So first make it see, currently can't see, meaning computer vision.

It has to understand its environment, it has to see all the humans, but then also has to be able to learn.

Learn about its movement, learn how to use its body to communicate with others, all those kinds of things.

The dogs know how to do well, humans know how to do somewhat well.

I think that's a beautiful challenge, but first you have to allow the robot to make mistakes.

Well, I think your objective is laudable, but you're gonna realize that the Boston Dynamics folks are right the first time spot poops on your rug.

I hear the same thing about kids and so on.

So let me step back into what you said in a couple of different places.

1, I have always believed that the missing element in robotics and artificial intelligence is a proper development, right?

It is no accident, it is no mere coincidence that human beings are the most dominant species on planet Earth and that we have the longest childhoods of any creature on Earth by far.

Development is the key to the flexibility.

And so the capability of a human at adulthood is the mirror image, it's the flip side of our helplessness at birth.

So I'll be very interested to see what happens in your robot project if you do not end up reinventing childhood for robots, which of course is foreshadowed in 2001 quite brilliantly.

But I also wanna point out, you can see this issue of your conscious mind becoming a spectator very well if you compare tennis to table tennis.

Right, if you watch a tennis game, you could imagine that the players are highly conscious as they play.

You cannot imagine that if you've ever played ping-pong decently.

A volley in ping-pong is so fast that your conscious mind, if it had, if your reactions had to go through your conscious mind, you wouldn't be able to play.

So you can detect that your conscious mind, while very much present, isn't there.

And you can also detect where consciousness does usefully intrude.

If you go up against an opponent in table tennis that knows a trick that you don't know how to respond to, you will suddenly detect that something about your game is not effective, and you will start thinking about what might be.

How do you position yourself so that move that puts the ball just in that corner of the table or something like that doesn't catch you off guard?

And this, I believe, is, we highly conscious folks, those of us who try to think through things very deliberately and carefully, mistake consciousness for like the highest kind of thinking.

And I really think that this is an error.

Consciousness is an intermediate level of thinking.

What it does is it allows you, it's basically like uncompiled code.

And it doesn't run very fast, it is capable of being adapted to new circumstances.

But once the code is roughed in, right, it gets driven into the unconscious layer and you become highly effective at whatever it is.

And from that point, your conscious mind basically remains there to detect things that aren't anticipated by the code you've already written.

And so I don't exactly know how 1 would establish this, how 1 would demonstrate it, but it must be the case that the human mind contains sandboxes in which things are tested, right?

Maybe you can build a piece of code and run it in parallel next to your active code so you can see how it would have done comparatively.

But there's gotta be some way of writing new code and then swapping it in.

And frankly, I think this has a lot to do with things like sleep cycles.

Very often, when I get good at something, I often don't get better at it while I'm doing it.

I get better at it when I'm not doing it, especially if there's time to sleep and think on it.

So there's some sort of, you know, new program swapping in for old program phenomenon, which, you know, will be a lot easier to see in machines.

I like, I mean, it is true, because somebody that played, I played tennis for many years.

I do still think the highest form of excellence in tennis is when the conscious mind is a spectator.

So the compiled code is the highest form of being human.

And then consciousness is just some specific compiler.

You have to have like Borland C++ compiler.

You could just have different kind of compilers.

Ultimately, the thing that by which we measure the power of life, the intelligence of life is the compiled code.

And you can probably do that compilation all kinds of ways.

Yeah, I'm not saying that tennis is played consciously and table tennis isn't.

I'm saying that because tennis is slowed down by just the space on the court, you could imagine that it was your conscious mind playing.

It becomes obvious that your conscious mind is just present rather than knowing where to put the paddle.

And weirdly for me, I would say this probably isn't true in a podcast situation, but if I have to give a presentation, especially if I have not overly prepared, I often find the same phenomenon when I'm giving the presentation, my conscious mind is there watching some other part of me present, which is a little jarring, I have to say.

Well, that means you've gotten good at it.

And that's the highest form of podcasting, too.

I mean, that's what I have, That's what it looks like when a podcast is really in the pocket, like Joe Rogan, just having fun and just losing themselves.

And that's something I aspire to as well, just losing yourself in conversation.

Somebody that has a lot of anxiety with people, like I'm such an introvert.

I'm scared, I was scared before you showed up, I'm scared right now.

There's just anxiety, there's just, it's a giant mess.

It's hard to lose yourself, it's hard to just get out of the way of your own mind.

Yeah, actually, trust is a big component of that.

Your conscious mind retains control if you are very uncertain.

But when you do get into that zone when you're speaking, I realize it's different for you with English as a second language, although maybe you present in Russian and it happens.

But do you ever hear yourself say something and you think, oh, that's really good.

You didn't come up with it, some other part of you that you don't exactly know

I don't think I've ever heard myself in that way because I have a much louder voice that's constantly yelling in my head at, why the hell did you say that?

There's a very self-critical voice that's much louder.

So I'm very, maybe I need to deal with that voice, but it's been like with a, what is it called?

So I can't hear the voice that says, good job.

So I'm kind of focused right now on the megaphone person in the audience versus the positive, but that's definitely something to think about.

It's been productive, but the place where I find gratitude and beauty and appreciation of life is in the quiet moments when I don't talk.

When I listen to the world around me, when I listen to others, when I talk, I'm extremely self-critical in my mind.

When I produce anything out into the world that originated with me, like any kind of creation, extremely self-critical.

It's good for productivity, for like always striving to improve and so on.

It might be bad for like just appreciating the things you've created.

I'm a little bit with Marvin Minsky on this where he says the key to a productive life is to hate everything you've ever done in the past.

And you know, I, unfortunately my life currently has me putting a lot of stuff into the world and I effectively watch almost none of it.

I just recently, I just yesterday read Metamorphosis by, re-read Metamorphosis by Kafka where he turns into a giant bug because of the stress that the world puts on him.

And I think that you have to find the balance because if you allow the self-critical voice to become too heavy, the burden of the world, the pressure that the world puts on you to be the best version of yourself and so on to strive, then you become a bug and that's a big problem.

And then the world turns against you because you're a bug.

You become some kind of caricature of yourself.

I don't know, become the worst version of yourself and then thereby end up destroying yourself and then the world moves on.

I do think this is 1 of these places and frankly you could map this onto all of modern human experience, but this is 1 of these places where our ancestral programming does not serve our modern selves.

So I used to talk to students about the question of dwelling on things.

Dwelling on things is famously understood to be bad, and it can't possibly be bad.

It wouldn't exist, a tendency toward it wouldn't exist if it was bad.

So what is bad is dwelling on things past the point of utility.

And that's obviously easier to say than to operationalize, but if you realize that your dwelling is the key, in fact, to upgrading your program for future well-being, and that there's a point, presumably, from diminishing returns, if not counter-productivity, there is a point at which you should stop because that is what is in your best interest, then knowing that you're looking for that point is useful.

This is the point at which it is no longer useful for me to dwell on this error I have made.

If some part of you feels like it's punishing you rather than searching, then that also has a point at which it's no longer valuable and there's some liberty in realizing, yep, even the part of me that was punishing me knows it's time to stop.

So if we map that onto compiled code discussion, as a computer science person, I find that very compelling.

You know, there's a, When you compile code, you get warnings sometimes.

And usually, if you're a good software engineer, you're going to make sure there's no, you know, you treat warnings as errors.

So you make sure that the compilation produces no warnings.

But at a certain point, when you have a large enough system, you just let the warnings go.

Like, I don't know where that warning came from, but, you know, it's just, ultimately you need to compile the code and run with it, and hope nothing terrible happens.

Well, I think what you will find, and believe me, I think what you're talking about with respect to robots and learning is gonna end up having to go to a deep developmental state and a helplessness that evolves into hyper-competence and all of that.

But I live, I noticed that I live by something that I, for lack of a better descriptor, call the theory of close calls.

And the theory of close calls says that people typically miscategorize the events in their life where something almost went wrong.

And, you know, for example, if you, I have a friend who, I was walking down the street with my college friends and 1 of my friends stepped into the street thinking it was clear and was nearly hit by a car going 45 miles an hour.

Would have been an absolute disaster, might have killed her, certainly would have permanently injured her.

But she didn't, you know, the car didn't touch her, right?

Now you could walk away from that and think nothing of it because, well, what is there to think?

Or you could think, well, what is the difference between what did happen and my death.

I never want the difference between what did happen and my death to be luck.

Therefore, I should count this as very close to death.

And I should prioritize coding so it doesn't happen again at a very high level.

Anyway, my basic point is the accidents and disasters and misfortune describe a distribution that tells you what's really likely to get you in the end.

And so, personally, you can use them to figure out where the dangers are so that you can afford to take great risks because you have a really good sense of how they're gonna go wrong.

But I would also point out civilization has this problem.

Civilization is now producing these events that are major disasters, but they're not existential scale yet.

They're very serious errors that we can see, and I would argue that the pattern is, you discover that we are involved in some industrial process at the point it has gone wrong, right?

So I'm now always asking the question, okay, in light of the Fukushima triple meltdown, the financial collapse of 2008, the Deepwater Horizon blowout, COVID-19 and its probable origins in the Wuhan lab.

What processes do I not know the name of yet that I will discover at the point that some gigantic accident has happened.

And can we talk about the wisdom or lack thereof of engaging in that process before the accident, right?

That's what a wise civilization would be doing.

I just wanna mention something that happened a couple of days ago.

I don't know if you know who JB Straubel is, he's the co-founder of Tesla, CTO of Tesla for many, many years.

And in the same thin line between death and life that many of us have been in, where you walk into an intersection and there's this close call.

Every once in a while, you get the short straw.

I wonder how much of our own individual lives and the entirety of the human civilization rests on this little roll of the dice.

Well, this is sort of my point about the close calls is that there's a level at which we can't control it, right?

The gigantic asteroid that comes from deep space that you don't have time to do anything about.

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Bret Weinstein: Truth, Science, and Censorship in the Time of a Pandemic | Lex Fridman Podcast #194