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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:28 - The most entertaining outcome is the most likely
8:47 - Meme theory
12:07 - Writing process
18:54 - Engineered viruses as a threat to human civilization
26:40 - Gain-of-function research on viruses
38:50 - Did COVID leak from a lab?
46:10 - Virus detection
53:59 - Failure of institutions
1:01:43 - Using AI to engineer viruses
1:06:02 - Evil and competence
1:15:21 - Where are the aliens?
1:19:14 - Backing up human consciousness by colonizing space
1:28:43 - Superintelligence and consciousness
1:40:07 - Meditation
1:48:15 - Fasting
1:54:15 - Greatest song of all time
1:59:41 - Early days of music streaming
2:11:34 - Startup advice
2:24:45 - Podcasting
2:40:07 - Advice for young people
2:49:10 - Mortality
2:54:36 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Rob Reed, entrepreneur, author, and host of the After On podcast.

Sam Harris recommended that I absolutely must talk to Rob about his recent work on the future of engineer pandemics.

I then listened to the 4 hour special episode of Sam's Making Sense podcast with Rob titled Engineering the Apocalypse.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Athletic Greens, Belcampo, Fundrise, and NetSuite.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say a few words about the lab leak hypothesis, which proposes that COVID-19 is a product of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was then accidentally leaked due to human error.

For context, this lab is biosafety level 4, BSL-4, and it investigates coronaviruses.

BSL-4 is the highest level of safety, But if you look at all the human in the loop pieces required to achieve this level of safety, it becomes clear that even BSL-4 labs are highly susceptible to human error.

To me, whether the virus leaked from the lab or not, getting to the bottom of what happened is about much more than this particular catastrophic case.

It is a test for our scientific, political, journalistic and social institutions of how well we can prepare and respond to threats that can cripple or destroy human civilization.

If we continue to gain a function of research on viruses, eventually these viruses will leak and they will be more deadly and more contagious.

We can pretend that won't happen, or we can openly and honestly talk about the risks involved.

This research can both save and destroy human life on earth as we know it.

If YouTube and other platforms censor conversations about this, if scientists self-censor conversations about this, we'll become merely victims of our brief homo sapien story, not its heroes.

As I said before, too carelessly labeling ideas as misinformation and dismissing them because of that will eventually destroy our ability to discover the truth.

And without truth, we don't have a fighting chance against the great filter before us.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Rob Reed.

I have seen evidence on the internet that you have a sense of humor, allegedly.

But you also talk and think about the destruction of human civilization.

What do you think of the Elon Musk hypothesis that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely?

And he, I think, followed on to say a scene from an external observer.

Like if somebody was watching us, it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing our civilization that's fun to watch.

He said from the standpoint of the observer, not the participant, I think.

And so what's interesting about that, those were, I think, just a couple of freestanding tweets and delivered without a whole lot of wrapper of context.

So it's left to the mind of the reader of the tweets to infer what he was talking about.

So that's kind of like, it provokes some interesting thoughts.

Like first of all, it presupposes the existence of an observer.

And it also presupposes that the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire to be entertained.

And to me that suggests particularly coming from Elon that it's a reference to simulation theory.

That somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability to let's say peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and either a happy or tragic ending.

Or they have an incredible meta-view and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and full of plot twists and surprises and a happy or unhappy ending.

So, okay, so we're presupposing an observer.

Then on top of that, when you think about it, you're also presupposing a producer because the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and other developments that you weren't foreseeing.

I have reread my own novels and that's fun because it's something that I worked hard on and I slaved over and I love, but there aren't a lot of surprises in there.

So now I'm thinking we need a producer and an observer for that to be true.

And on top of that, it's gotta be a very competent producer because Elon said the most entertaining outcome is the most likely 1.

So there's lots of layers for thinking about that.

And when you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining, it makes me think of there was a South Park episode in which Earth turned out to be a reality show.

And somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to, so the Earth show was going to get canceled, etc.

So taking all that together, and I'm obviously being a little bit playful in laying this out, what is the evidence that we have that we are in a reality that is intended to be most entertaining.

Now, you could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc of civilization, other lives, levels as well, I'm sure.

But just looking from my own life, I think I'd make a pretty lousy show.

I spend an inordinate amount of time just looking at a computer.

And there's just a completely inadequate level of shootouts and card chases in my life.

I mean, I'll go weeks, even months, without a single shootout or

That just means that you're 1 of the non-player characters in this game, you're just waiting.

You're an extra that, waiting for your 1 opportunity for a brief moment to actually interact with 1 of the main characters in the play.

So, okay, so we'll rule out me being the star of the show, which I probably could have guessed at anyway.

I mean, there have been a lot of really intriguing things that have happened and a lot of astounding things that have happened.

But I would have some werewolves, I'd have some zombies, I would have some really improbable developments like maybe Canada absorbing the United States.

I'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment, but if we are, that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years ahead.

So I kind of hope that we're not designed for maximum entertainment.

Well, the night is still young in terms of Canada, but do you think it's possible for the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent?

So meaning it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the internet, the funny ones, the entertaining ones spread more efficiently.

I mean, I don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up en masse funny things much more sort of aggressively.

It's more viral in the full sense of that word.

Is there some sense that whatever this evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities is the same process that's going to, in an emergent way, create the most entertaining outcome, the most meme-ifiable outcome, the most viral outcome, if we were to share it on Twitter?

Like, I mean, how many memes are created in a given day?

And the ones that go viral are almost uniformly funny, at least to somebody with a particular sense of humor.

We are definitely great at creating atomized units of funny.

Like in the example that you used, there are going to be X million brains parsing and judging whether this meme is retweetable or not.

And so that sort of atomic element of funniness, of entertainingness, et cetera, we definitely have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything else that's going on.

But in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the Earth driving for a level of entertainment, that is on such a much higher level that I don't know if that would necessarily follow directly from the fact that atomic units of entertainment are very, very aptly selected for us.

Do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains?

So I'm almost thinking about the ideas or the memes, this is the Dawkins thing as the organisms.

And then the humans as just like vehicles for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around and spread.

Yeah, for propagating them, mutating them, putting selective pressure on them, et cetera.

I mean, I found Dawkins interpret, or his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene.

Like what a PS to put at the end of a long chunk of writing, profoundly interesting.

I view the relationship though between humans and memes is probably an oversimplification, but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees, right?

Do flowers have bees or do bees in a sense have flowers?

And the answer is it is a very, very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi-independent roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other.

And so in the case of bees, obviously, you could see the flower as being this monolithic structure physically in relation to any given bee, and it's the source of food and sustenance.

So you could kind of say, well, flowers have bees.

But on the other hand, the flowers would obviously be doomed, they weren't being pollinated by the bees, so you could kind of say, well, you know, bees, you know, flowers are really expression of what the bees need.

So with memes in human minds, our brains are clearly the Petri dishes in which memes are either propagated or not propagated, get mutated or don't get mutated.

They are the venue in which competition, selective competition, plays out between different memes.

And you could look at that and say, really the human mind is a production of memes and ideas have us rather than us having ideas.

But at the same time, let's take a catchy tune as an example of a meme.

That catchy tune did originate in a human mind.

And as much as I like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk about how the universe, I'm simplifying, but kind of the ideas find their way in this beautiful TED Talk.

She talked about ideas and prose kind of beaming into our minds.

And she talked about needing to pull over to the side of the road when she got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to write that down.

As a writer, as a novelist myself, I've never had that experience.

And I think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind.

And so like the bees and the flowers, I think there's a great symbiosis.

Ideas have us, but we have ideas for real.

If we could take a little bit of a tangent, Stephen King on writing, you as a great writer, you're dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you.

It's a grind of sort of, it's almost like you're mining for gold.

It's more of a very deliberate, rigorous, daily process.

So maybe, can you talk about the writing process?

And maybe if you want to step outside of yourself, almost like give advice to an aspiring writer, what does it take to write the best work of your life?

Well, it would be very different if it's fiction versus nonfiction.

I've written 2 works of non, 2 nonfiction books and 2 works of fiction.

2 works of fiction being more recent, I'm going to focus on that right now because that's more toweringly on my mind.

There are Amongst novelists, again, this is an oversimplification, but there's kind of 2 schools of thought.

Some people really like to fly by the seat of their pants, and some people really, really like to outline, to plot.

So there's plotters and pantsers, I guess, is 1 way that people look at it.

And as with most things, there is a great continuum in between, and I'm somewhere on that continuum, but I lean, I guess, a little bit more toward the plotter.

And so when I do start a novel, I have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going to end, and I have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin.

And I do try to make an effort of making an outline that I know I'm going to be extremely unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story, but I'm trying to make an outline that gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters and so forth.

But then when I get into the process, that outline, particularly the center of it, ultimately, inevitably morphs a great deal.

And I think if I were personally a rigorous outliner, I would not allow that to happen.

I also would make a much more vigorous skeleton before I start.

So I think people who are really in that plotting, outlining mode are people who write page turners, people who write spy novels or supernatural adventures where you really want a relentless pace of events, action, plot twists, conspiracy, et cetera.

And that is really the bone, that's really the skeletal structure.

So I think folks who write that kind of book are really very much on the outlining side.

And I think people who write what's often referred to as literary fiction for lack of a better term, where it's more about sort of aura and ambiance and character development and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth, I think that group is more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.

And I know people who start with a blank page and just see where it's going to go.

I'm a little bit more on the plotting side.

Now you asked what makes something, at least in the mind of the writer, as great as it can be.

For me, it's an astonishingly high percentage of it is editing as opposed to the initial writing.

For every hour that I spend writing new prose, like new pages, new paragraphs, stuff that, new bits of the book.

I probably spend, I mean, I wish I kept a count.

I wish I had 1 of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time I've been doing this, that.

But I would say it's at least 4 or 5 hours and maybe as many as 10 that I spend editing.

I mean, I write because I edit and I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning and sometimes on the micro level of just like, does the rhythm of the sentence feel right?

Do I need to carve a syllable or something so it can land?

Like as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done, but the book is 750 pages long and it's way too bloated and I need to lop a third out of it.

Problems on those 2 orders of magnitude and everything in between, that is an enormous amount of my time.

And I also write music, write and record and produce music.

Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just right.

So I think that's true of a lot of creative processes.

My Dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing at the end.

So I think a great deal of the sparkle comes from that part of the process, any creative process.

Can I ask about the psychological, the demon side of that picture?

In the editing process, you're ultimately judging the initial piece of work and you're judging and judging and judging.

How much of your time do you spend hating your work?

How much time do you spend in gratitude, impressed, thankful for how good the work that you will put together is?

I spend almost all the time in a place that's intermediate between those, but leaning toward gratitude.

I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism, that this thing that I have, I like, I like quite a bit, and I can make it better and better and better with every time I go through it.

So I spend most of my time in a state of optimism.

I think I personally oscillate much more aggressively between those 2, the way I wouldn't be able to find the average.

Marvin Minsky from MIT had this advice, I guess, to what it takes to be successful in science and research is to hate everything you do, you've ever done in the past.

I mean, at least he was speaking about himself that the key to his success was to hate everything he's ever done.

I have a little Marvin Minsky there in me too, just sort of always be exceptionally self-critical, but almost like self-critical about the work, but grateful for the chance to be able to do the work, if that makes sense.

But that, you know, each 1 of us have to strike a certain kind of balance.

But back to the destruction of human civilization.

If humans destroy ourselves in the next 100 years, what will be the most likely source, the most likely reason that we destroy ourselves?

Well, let's see, 100 years, it's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far, And it's something to give a lot more thought to, I think, than normal folks, simply because I am a science fiction writer.

And I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard to foresee out more than just a few decades.

I mean, comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now a century later, it would have been so unforeseeable.

And I just don't know what's gonna happen, particularly with exponential technologies.

I mean, our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing and synthetic biology and, you know, how we might destroy ourselves in the 100 year timeframe might have everything to do with breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years from now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate.

But in the nearer term that I'm comfortable predicting, let's say 30 years, I would say the most likely route to self-destruction would be synthetic biology.

And I always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important 1 that I find, and I'll abbreviate synthetic biology to SynBio just to save us some syllables.

I believe SynBio offers us simply stunning promise that we would be fools to deny ourselves.

So I'm not an anti-SynBio person by any stretch.

I mean, SynBio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment, helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable.

But in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent, in the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much, much greater odds of leading to our self-destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real possibility and 1 we need to be concerned about.

But in the 30-year timeframe, I think it's a lesser 1, or nuclear weapons or anything else that I can think of.

Can you explain that a little bit further?

So your concern is on the man-made versus the natural side of the pandemic front here.

So we humans engineering pathogens, engineering viruses is the concern here.

And maybe how do you see the possible trajectories happening here in terms of, is it malevolent or is it accidents, oops, little mistakes or unintended consequences of a particular actions that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes?

And I think the question of which is more likely has to do with 2 things.

1, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable, four-sided steps that we are absolutely capable of taking right now to first stall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something that could have annihilating impacts?

And in the episode you referenced with Sam, we talked a great deal about that.

And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing us in with Sin Bio can plummet.

But it's always a question of if, and we have a bad, bad and very long track record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us.

Variable number 2 is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society decide is acceptable in the realms of academia, government, or private industry?

And if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity.

If we think that's fine, and if that kind of work starts happening in 1 lab, 5 labs, 50 labs, 500 labs in 1 country, then 10 countries, then 70 countries or whatever, that risk of a boo-boo starts rising astronomically.

And this won't be a spoiler alert based on the way that I presented those 2 things.

But I think it's unbelievably important to manage both of those risks.

The easier 1 to manage, although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would have to be something that all nations agree on.

But the easiest way, the easier risk to manage is that of, hey guys, let's not develop pathogens that if they escape from a lab could annihilate us.

There's no line of research that justifies that.

And in my view, I mean, that's the point of perspective we need to have.

We'd have to collectively agree that there's no line of research that justifies that.

The reason why I believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level of biosafety lab in the world, biosafety lab level 4, and there are not a lot of BSL-4 labs in the world, there are things can and have leaked out of BSL-4 labs.

And some of the work that's been done with potentially annihilating pathogens, which we can talk about, is actually done at BSL-3.

We have proven ourselves to be incapable of creating a lab that is utterly impervious to leaks.

So why in the world would we create something where if, God forbid, it leaked could annihilate us all?

And by the way, almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks.

What happens if you have a malevolent insider?

And we could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent insider who wants to release something and not annihilating in a bit.

But what if you have a malevolent insider?

Virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level 123, and 4 are about preventing somebody hijacking the process.

I mean, some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents.

And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs, with every lab you add, the odds of there being a malevolent inside are naturally increased arithmetically as the number of labs goes up.

Now on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific, traditional government academic scientific environment creating something malevolent, again there's protections that we can take both at the level of syn-bio architecture, the hardening the entire syn-bio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't wanna have out there by rogue actors, to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can do to dramatically mitigate that risk.

think we do both of those things, decide that no, we're not going to experimentally make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs, and B, yes, we are gonna take countermeasures that are gonna cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation, then I think both risks get managed down.

But if you take 1 set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome.

So can we talk about this kind of research and what's actually done and what are the positives and negatives of it?

So if we look at gain-of-function research and the kind of stuff that's happening in level 3 and level 4 BSL labs, what's the whole idea here?

Is it trying to engineer viruses to understand how they behave?

You want to understand the dangerous ones.

Yeah, so that would be the logic behind doing it.

And so gain of function can mean a lot of different things.

Viewed through a certain lens, gain of function research could be what you do when you create GMOs, when you create hearty strains of corn that are resistant to pesticides.

I mean, you could view that as gain of function.

So I'm gonna refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly.

And in that line of research, I'll use an example from 2011, because It's very illustrative and it's also very chilling.

Back in 2011, 2 separate labs, independently of 1 another, I assume there was some kind of communication between them, but they were basically independent projects, 1 in Holland and 1 in Wisconsin, did gain a function research on something called H5N1 flu.

H5N1 is something that at least on a lethality basis makes COVID look like a kitten.

COVID according to the World Health Organization has a case fatality rate somewhere between half a percent and 1%, H5N1 is closer to 60%, 6 0.

And so that's actually even slightly more lethal than Ebola.

The good news about H5N1, it is that it is barely, barely contagious.

And I believe it is in no way contagious human to human.

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Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks | Lex Fridman Podcast #193