Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks

Rob Reid (02:28.960)

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

Rob Reid (02:33.920)

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

Lex Fridman (02:38.280)

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

Lex Fridman (02:42.880)

most likely?

Lex Fridman (02:44.560)

And he, I think, followed on to say a scene from an external observer, like if somebody

Rob Reid (02:49.280)

was watching us, it seems we come up with creative ways of progressing our civilization

Lex Fridman (02:56.600)

that's fun to watch.

Rob Reid (02:57.600)

Yeah, so he, exactly, he said from the standpoint of the observer, not the participant, I think.

Lex Fridman (03:03.380)

And so what's interesting about that, those were, I think, just a couple of freestanding

Rob Reid (03:07.600)

tweets and delivered without a whole lot of wrapper of context, so it's left to the mind

Lex Fridman (03:12.520)

of the reader of the tweets to infer what he was talking about.

Lex Fridman (03:16.920)

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

Rob Reid (03:20.400)

Like first of all, it presupposes the existence of an observer, and it also presupposes that

Rob Reid (03:26.480)

the observer wishes to be entertained and has some mechanism of enforcing their desire

Lex Fridman (03:32.040)

to be entertained.

Lex Fridman (03:33.080)

So there's like a lot underpinning that.

Lex Fridman (03:35.540)

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

Rob Reid (03:40.280)

theory, that somebody is out there and has far greater insights and a far greater ability

Rob Reid (03:46.400)

to, let's say, peer into a single individual life and find that entertaining and full of

Rob Reid (03:52.000)

plot twists and surprises and either a happy or tragic ending, or they have an incredible

Rob Reid (03:58.440)

meta view and they can watch the arc of civilization unfolding in a way that is entertaining and

Rob Reid (04:04.320)

full of plot twists and surprises and a happy or unhappy ending.

Lex Fridman (04:08.160)

So okay, so we're presupposing an observer.

Rob Reid (04:11.960)

Then on top of that, when you think about it, you're also presupposing a producer,

Rob Reid (04:17.520)

because the act of observation is mostly fun if there are plot twists and surprises and

Rob Reid (04:23.440)

other developments that you weren't foreseeing.

Rob Reid (04:25.840)

I have reread my own novels, and that's fun because it's something that I worked hard

Rob Reid (04:30.760)

on and I slaved over and I love, but there aren't a lot of surprises in there.

Lex Fridman (04:34.960)

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

Lex Fridman (04:39.960)

And on top of that, it's got to be a very competent producer because Elon said the most

Lex Fridman (04:45.260)

entertaining outcome is the most likely one.

Lex Fridman (04:48.440)

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

Lex Fridman (04:51.600)

And when you've got a producer who's trying to make it entertaining, it makes me think

Rob Reid (04:55.280)

of there was a South Park episode in which Earth turned out to be a reality show.

Lex Fridman (05:00.760)

And somehow we had failed to entertain the audience as much as we used to, so the Earth

Rob Reid (05:05.920)

show was going to get canceled, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (05:09.120)

So taking all that together, and I'm obviously being a little bit playful in laying this

Rob Reid (05:13.200)

out, what is the evidence that we have that we are in a reality that is intended to be

Lex Fridman (05:20.220)

most entertaining?

Rob Reid (05:21.720)

Now you could look at that reality on the level of individual lives or the whole arc

Lex Fridman (05:26.300)

of civilization, other lives, levels as well, I'm sure.

Lex Fridman (05:30.040)

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

Lex Fridman (05:34.240)

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

Rob Reid (05:38.880)

I don't think that's very entertaining.

Lex Fridman (05:40.640)

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

Rob Reid (05:46.360)

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

Lex Fridman (05:50.120)

That just means that you're one of the non player characters in this game.

Rob Reid (05:53.000)

You're just waiting.

Lex Fridman (05:54.000)

I'm an extra.

Rob Reid (05:55.200)

You're an extra that waiting for your one opportunity for a brief moment to actually

Lex Fridman (05:59.120)

interact with one of the main characters in the play.

Rob Reid (06:03.120)

Okay, that's good.

Lex Fridman (06:04.600)

So okay, so we rule out me being the star of the show, which I probably could have guessed

Rob Reid (06:08.520)

at.

Rob Reid (06:09.520)

Anyway, but then even the arc of civilization, I mean, there have been a lot of really intriguing

Rob Reid (06:13.260)

things that have happened and a lot of astounding things that have happened.

Lex Fridman (06:16.560)

But I would have some werewolves, I'd have some zombies, I would have some really improbable

Rob Reid (06:23.280)

developments like maybe Canada absorbing the United States.

Lex Fridman (06:28.660)

So I don't know, I'm not sure if we're necessarily designed for maximum entertainment.

Lex Fridman (06:33.240)

But if we are, that will mean that 2020 is just a prequel for even more bizarre years

Lex Fridman (06:40.280)

ahead.

Lex Fridman (06:41.320)

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

Lex Fridman (06:45.120)

Well, the night is still young in terms of Canada.

Lex Fridman (06:47.840)

But do you think it's possible for the observer and the producer to be kind of emergent?

Lex Fridman (06:52.520)

So meaning, it does seem when you kind of watch memes on the internet, the funny ones,

Rob Reid (06:59.380)

the entertaining ones spread more efficiently.

Lex Fridman (07:01.640)

They do.

Rob Reid (07:02.640)

I mean, I don't know what it is about the human mind that soaks up on mass funny things

Lex Fridman (07:11.560)

much more sort of aggressively.

Rob Reid (07:12.920)

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

Rob Reid (07:16.760)

Is there some sense that whatever the evolutionary process that created our cognitive capabilities

Rob Reid (07:23.560)

is the same process that's going to, in an emergent way, create the most entertaining

Rob Reid (07:28.440)

outcome, the most memeifiable outcome, the most viral outcome if we were to share it

Lex Fridman (07:36.120)

on Twitter?

Lex Fridman (07:37.120)

Yeah, that's interesting.

Rob Reid (07:38.680)

Yeah, we do have an incredible ability.

Rob Reid (07:41.680)

Like I mean, how many memes are created in a given day and the ones that go viral are

Rob Reid (07:45.040)

almost uniformly funny, at least to somebody with a particular sense of humor.

Lex Fridman (07:48.800)

Yeah, I'd have to think about that.

Rob Reid (07:53.560)

We are definitely great at creating atomized units of funny.

Rob Reid (07:59.120)

Like in the example that you used, there are going to be X million brains parsing and judging

Rob Reid (08:05.040)

whether this meme is retweetable or not.

Lex Fridman (08:07.520)

And so that sort of atomic element of funniness, of entertainingness, et cetera, we definitely

Rob Reid (08:14.860)

have an environment that's good at selecting for that and selective pressure and everything

Lex Fridman (08:20.160)

else that's going on.

Lex Fridman (08:21.920)

But in terms of the entire ecosystem of conscious systems here on the Earth driving for a level

Rob Reid (08:31.180)

of entertainment, that is on such a much higher level that I don't know if that would necessarily

Rob Reid (08:38.720)

follow directly from the fact that atomic units of entertainment are very, very aptly

Lex Fridman (08:44.860)

selected for us.

Rob Reid (08:45.960)

I don't know.

Lex Fridman (08:46.960)

Do you find it compelling or useful to think about human civilization from the perspective

Lex Fridman (08:54.400)

of the ideas versus the perspective of the individual human brains?

Lex Fridman (08:59.760)

Just almost thinking about the ideas or the memes.

Rob Reid (09:02.560)

This is the Dawkins thing as the organisms and then the humans as just like vehicles

Lex Fridman (09:09.520)

for briefly carrying those organisms as they jump around and spread.

Rob Reid (09:13.960)

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

Rob Reid (09:19.360)

I mean, I found Dawkins interpret or his launching of the idea of memes is just kind of an afterthought

Rob Reid (09:27.400)

to his unbelievably brilliant book about the selfish gene.

Lex Fridman (09:32.120)

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

Rob Reid (09:37.440)

I view the relationship though between humans and memes as probably an oversimplification,

Lex Fridman (09:43.640)

but maybe a little bit like the relationship between flowers and bees, right?

Lex Fridman (09:47.740)

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

Lex Fridman (09:52.000)

And the answer is it is a very, very symbiotic relationship in which both have semi independent

Rob Reid (09:58.640)

roles that they play and both are highly dependent upon the other.

Lex Fridman (10:03.320)

And so in the case of bees, obviously, you could see the flower is being this monolithic

Rob Reid (10:07.780)

structure physically in relation to any given bee and it's the source of food and sustenance.

Lex Fridman (10:14.320)

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

Lex Fridman (10:17.140)

But on the other hand, the flowers would obviously be doomed.

Lex Fridman (10:20.800)

They weren't being pollinated by the bees.

Lex Fridman (10:22.920)

So you could kind of say, well, you know, bees are, you know, flowers are really expression

Lex Fridman (10:26.480)

of what the bees need.

Lex Fridman (10:28.600)

And the truth is a symbiosis.

Lex Fridman (10:30.600)

So with, with memes and human minds, our brains are clearly the Petri dishes in which memes

Rob Reid (10:39.160)

are either propagated or not propagated, get mutated or don't get mutated if they are the

Rob Reid (10:45.420)

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

Lex Fridman (10:51.420)

So all of that is very true.

Lex Fridman (10:53.080)

And you could look at that and say, really, the human mind is a production of memes and

Rob Reid (10:58.880)

ideas have us rather than us having ideas.

Lex Fridman (11:01.880)

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

Rob Reid (11:07.160)

That catchy tune did originate in a human mind.

Lex Fridman (11:11.320)

Somebody had to structure that thing.

Lex Fridman (11:13.000)

And as much as I like Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about how the universe, I'm simplifying,

Lex Fridman (11:18.720)

but you know, kind of the ideas find their way in this beautiful TED talk.

Rob Reid (11:22.960)

It's very lyrical.

Lex Fridman (11:23.960)

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

Lex Fridman (11:30.160)

And you know, she talked about needing to pull over to the side of the road when she

Rob Reid (11:33.240)

got inspiration for a particular paragraph or a particular idea and a burning need to

Rob Reid (11:38.260)

write that down.

Lex Fridman (11:40.160)

I love that.

Rob Reid (11:41.160)

It's that beautiful as a writer, as a novelist myself, I've never had that experience.

Lex Fridman (11:47.520)

And I think that really most things that do become memes are the product of a great deal

Rob Reid (11:54.160)

of deliberate and willful exertion of a conscious mind.

Lex Fridman (11:59.520)

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

Rob Reid (12:04.440)

of have one another.

Lex Fridman (12:05.740)

Ideas have us, but we have ideas for real.

Rob Reid (12:08.000)

If we could take a little bit of a tangent, Stephen King on writing, you as a great writer,

Lex Fridman (12:14.400)

you're dropping a hint here that the ideas don't come to you.

Rob Reid (12:18.360)

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

Lex Fridman (12:22.760)

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

Lex Fridman (12:28.160)

So maybe can you talk about the writing process?

Lex Fridman (12:32.640)

How do you write well?

Lex Fridman (12:36.560)

And maybe if you want to step outside of yourself, almost like give advice to an aspiring writer,

Lex Fridman (12:42.560)

what does it take to write the best work of your life?

Rob Reid (12:46.400)

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

Lex Fridman (12:50.000)

And I've done both.

Rob Reid (12:51.000)

I've written two nonfiction books and two works of fiction.

Rob Reid (12:55.600)

Two works of fiction being more recent, I'm going to focus on that right now because that's

Rob Reid (12:58.800)

more toweringly on my mind.

Rob Reid (13:02.120)

Bronx novelists, again, this is an oversimplification, but there's kind of two schools of thought.

Rob Reid (13:08.640)

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

Lex Fridman (13:12.640)

like to outline, to plot.

Lex Fridman (13:15.680)

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

Lex Fridman (13:20.180)

And as with most things, there is a great continuum in between and I'm somewhere on

Rob Reid (13:24.800)

that continuum, but I lean, I guess, a little bit more toward the plotter.

Lex Fridman (13:29.920)

And so when I do start a novel, I have a pretty strong point of view about how it's going

Rob Reid (13:35.080)

to end and I have a very strong point of view about how it's going to begin.

Lex Fridman (13:39.360)

And I do try to make an effort of making an outline that I know I'm going to be extremely

Rob Reid (13:44.240)

unfaithful to in the actual execution of the story, but trying to make an outline that

Rob Reid (13:49.600)

gets us from here to there and notion of subplots and beats and rhythm and different characters

Lex Fridman (13:54.460)

and so forth.

Lex Fridman (13:56.280)

But then when I get into the process, that outline, particularly the center of it, ultimately

Rob Reid (14:02.000)

inevitably morphs a great deal.

Lex Fridman (14:03.760)

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

Rob Reid (14:08.920)

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

Lex Fridman (14:14.380)

So I think people who are really in that plotting outlining mode are people who write page turners,

Rob Reid (14:22.400)

people who write spy novels or supernatural adventures, where you really want a relentless

Lex Fridman (14:30.560)

pace of events, action, plot twists, conspiracy, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (14:37.560)

And that is really the bone.

Lex Fridman (14:40.560)

That's really the skeletal structure.

Lex Fridman (14:42.880)

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

Lex Fridman (14:47.520)

And then I think people who write what's often referred to as literary fiction for lack of

Rob Reid (14:52.160)

a better term, where it's more about sort of aura and ambiance and character development

Lex Fridman (14:59.640)

and experience and inner experience and inner journey and so forth, I think that group is

Rob Reid (15:05.520)

more likely to fly by the seat of their pants.

Lex Fridman (15:07.640)

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

Rob Reid (15:11.000)

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

Rob Reid (15:14.480)

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

Rob Reid (15:21.200)

can be.

Rob Reid (15:22.200)

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

Rob Reid (15:26.960)

writing.

Rob Reid (15:27.960)

For every hour that I spend writing new prose, like new pages, new paragraphs, new bits of

Rob Reid (15:36.560)

the book, I probably spend...

Lex Fridman (15:40.280)

I wish I kept a count.

Rob Reid (15:42.680)

I wish I had one of those pieces of software that lawyers use to decide how much time I'm

Lex Fridman (15:47.240)

going to be doing this, that.

Lex Fridman (15:48.240)

But I would say it's at least four or five hours and maybe as many as 10 that I spend

Lex Fridman (15:53.200)

editing.

Lex Fridman (15:54.340)

And so it's relentless for me.

Lex Fridman (15:56.560)

For each one hour of writing, you said?

Rob Reid (15:58.400)

I'd say that.

Lex Fridman (15:59.400)

Four, wow.

Rob Reid (16:00.400)

I mean, I write because I edit and I spend just relentlessly polishing and pruning and

Lex Fridman (16:07.200)

sometimes on the micro level of just like, does the rhythm of the sentence feel right?

Lex Fridman (16:12.400)

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

Rob Reid (16:15.680)

Like as micro as that to as macro as like, okay, I'm done but the book is 750 pages long

Lex Fridman (16:21.760)

and it's way too bloated and I need to lop a third out of it.

Rob Reid (16:25.160)

Problems on those two orders of magnitude and everything in between, that is an enormous

Rob Reid (16:30.680)

amount of my time.

Lex Fridman (16:31.840)

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

Lex Fridman (16:37.320)

And there the ratio is even higher.

Rob Reid (16:40.320)

Every minute that I spend or my band spends laying down that original audio, it's a very

Rob Reid (16:47.720)

high proportion of hours that go into just making it all hang together and sound just

Lex Fridman (16:52.640)

right.

Lex Fridman (16:53.640)

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

Lex Fridman (16:56.200)

I know it's true of sculpture.

Rob Reid (16:58.200)

I believe it's true of woodwork.

Rob Reid (16:59.920)

My dad was an amateur woodworker and he spent a huge amount of time on sanding and polishing

Rob Reid (17:04.400)

at the end.

Lex Fridman (17:05.480)

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

Rob Reid (17:09.200)

process.

Lex Fridman (17:10.200)

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

Rob Reid (17:14.480)

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

Lex Fridman (17:18.360)

judging and judging and judging.

Lex Fridman (17:20.840)

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

Lex Fridman (17:26.000)

How much time do you spend in gratitude, impressed, thankful, or how good the work that you will

Lex Fridman (17:33.880)

put together is?

Rob Reid (17:36.000)

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

Rob Reid (17:42.360)

gratitude.

Rob Reid (17:43.360)

I spend almost all the time in a state of optimism that this thing that I have, I like,

Rob Reid (17:49.680)

I like quite a bit and I can make it better and better and better with every time I go

Lex Fridman (17:56.160)

through it.

Lex Fridman (17:57.160)

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

Rob Reid (18:01.680)

I think I personally oscillate much more aggressively between those two, where I wouldn't be able

Rob Reid (18:06.620)

to find the average.

Lex Fridman (18:07.880)

I go pretty deep.

Rob Reid (18:11.520)

Marvin Minsky from MIT had this advice, I guess, to what it takes to be successful in

Lex Fridman (18:19.920)

science and research is to hate everything you do.

Rob Reid (18:23.280)

You've ever done in the past.

Rob Reid (18:25.520)

I mean, at least he was speaking about himself that the key to his success was to hate everything

Rob Reid (18:31.520)

he's ever done.

Rob Reid (18:32.520)

I have a little Marvin Minsky there in me too, to sort of always be exceptionally self

Rob Reid (18:39.000)

critical, but almost like self critical about the work, but grateful for the chance to be

Lex Fridman (18:45.800)

able to do the work.

Rob Reid (18:46.800)

If that makes sense.

Lex Fridman (18:47.800)

It makes perfect sense.

Lex Fridman (18:48.800)

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

Lex Fridman (18:56.120)

But back to the destruction of human civilization.

Rob Reid (19:00.400)

If humans destroy ourselves in the next hundred years, what will be the most likely source,

Lex Fridman (19:08.800)

the most likely reason that we destroy ourselves?

Rob Reid (19:10.800)

Well, let's see, a hundred years.

Rob Reid (19:14.080)

It's hard for me to comfortably predict out that far, and it's something to give a lot

Rob Reid (19:19.480)

more thought to, I think, than normal folks simply because I am a science fiction writer.

Lex Fridman (19:25.880)

And you know, I feel with the acceleration of technological progress, it's really hard

Rob Reid (19:31.760)

to foresee out more than just a few decades.

Rob Reid (19:33.800)

I mean, comparing today's world to that of 1921, where we are right now, a century later,

Rob Reid (19:39.600)

it would have been so unforeseeable.

Lex Fridman (19:42.000)

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

Rob Reid (19:46.160)

I mean, our intuitions reliably defeat ourselves with exponential technologies like computing

Lex Fridman (19:51.840)

and synthetic biology and, you know, how we might destroy ourselves in the hundred year

Rob Reid (19:57.120)

time frame might have everything to do with breakthroughs in nanotechnology 40 years from

Lex Fridman (1:00:06.360)

But what makes a great leader is something about that thing that you can't quite describe,

Lex Fridman (1:00:14.280)

but being a communicator that you know you can trust, that there's an authenticity that's

Lex Fridman (1:00:22.560)

required.

Lex Fridman (1:00:23.560)

And I'm not sure, maybe I'm being a bit too judgmental, but I'm a huge fan of a lot of

Lex Fridman (1:00:29.200)

great leaders throughout history.

Rob Reid (1:00:31.080)

They've communicated exceptionally well in the way that Fauci does not.

Lex Fridman (1:00:36.960)

And I think about that, I think about what does affect the science communication.

Lex Fridman (1:00:40.600)

So great leaders throughout history did not necessarily need to be great science communicators.

Lex Fridman (1:00:47.280)

Their leadership was in other domains.

Lex Fridman (1:00:49.680)

But when you're fighting the virus, you also have to be a great science communicator.

Rob Reid (1:00:53.840)

You have to be able to communicate uncertainties, you have to be able to communicate something

Rob Reid (1:00:58.120)

like a vaccine that you're allowing inside your body into the messiness, into the complexity

Rob Reid (1:01:03.720)

of the biology system, that if we're being honest, it's so complex we'll never be able

Rob Reid (1:01:08.160)

to really understand.

Rob Reid (1:01:10.920)

We can only desperately hope that science can give us sort of a high likelihood that

Rob Reid (1:01:16.880)

there's no short term negative consequences and that kind of intuition about long term

Rob Reid (1:01:22.600)

negative consequences and doing our best in this battle against trillions of things that

Rob Reid (1:01:29.000)

are trying to kill us.

Rob Reid (1:01:32.600)

Being an effective communicator in that space is very difficult, but I think about what

Rob Reid (1:01:36.840)

it takes because I think there should be more science communicators that are effective at

Lex Fridman (1:01:41.960)

that kind of thing.

Rob Reid (1:01:43.720)

Let me ask you about something that's sort of more in the AI space that I think about

Rob Reid (1:01:49.920)

that kind of goes along this thread that you've spoken about, about democratizing the technology

Rob Reid (1:01:58.480)

that could destroy human civilization, is from amazing work from DeepMind AlphaFold2,

Rob Reid (1:02:05.760)

which achieved incredible performance on the protein folding problem, single protein folding

Rob Reid (1:02:12.400)

problem.

Rob Reid (1:02:13.400)

When you think about the use of AI in the SYN biospace, I think the gain of function

Rob Reid (1:02:22.000)

in the virus space research that you referred to, I think is natural mutations and sort

Rob Reid (1:02:28.440)

of aggressively mutating the virus until you get one that like that has this both contagious

Lex Fridman (1:02:35.560)

and deadly, but what about then using AI to, through simulation, be able to compute deadly

Lex Fridman (1:02:45.960)

viruses or any kind of biological systems?

Rob Reid (1:02:49.540)

Is this something you're worried about, or again, is this something you're more excited

Lex Fridman (1:02:53.080)

about?

Rob Reid (1:02:54.080)

I think computational biology is unbelievably exciting and promising field, and I think

Lex Fridman (1:02:58.920)

when you're doing things in silico as opposed to in vivo, the dangers plummet.

Rob Reid (1:03:05.960)

You don't have a critter that can leak from a leaky lab.

Lex Fridman (1:03:10.160)

So I don't see any problem with that, except I do worry about the data security dimension

Rob Reid (1:03:15.320)

of it, because if you were doing really, really interesting in silico gain of function research

Lex Fridman (1:03:21.200)

and you hit upon through a level of sophistication, we don't currently have, but synthetic biology

Rob Reid (1:03:27.120)

is an exponential technology, so capabilities that are utterly out of reach today will be

Lex Fridman (1:03:32.400)

attainable in five or six years.

Rob Reid (1:03:35.740)

I think if you conjured up worst case genomes of viruses that don't exist in vivo anywhere,

Rob Reid (1:03:44.160)

they're just in the computer space, but like, hey guys, this is the genetic sequence that

Rob Reid (1:03:48.840)

would end the world, let's say, then you have to worry about the utter hackability of every

Lex Fridman (1:03:56.120)

computer network we can imagine.

Rob Reid (1:03:58.600)

Data leaks from the least likely places on the grandest possible scales have happened

Lex Fridman (1:04:04.780)

and continue to happen and will probably always continue to happen, and so that would be the

Rob Reid (1:04:09.000)

danger of doing the work in silico.

Rob Reid (1:04:11.800)

If you end up with a list of like, well, these are things we never want to see, that list

Rob Reid (1:04:16.240)

leaks, and after the passage of some time, certainly couldn't be done today, but after

Rob Reid (1:04:20.640)

the passage of some time, lots and lots of people in academic labs going all the way

Rob Reid (1:04:26.280)

down to the high school level are in a position to make it overly simplistic, hit print on

Rob Reid (1:04:33.600)

a genome and have the virus bearing that genome pop out on the other end and you've got something

Rob Reid (1:04:37.720)

to worry about, but in general, computational biology I think is incredibly important, particularly

Rob Reid (1:04:42.880)

because the crushing majority of work that people are doing with the protein folding

Rob Reid (1:04:47.200)

problem and other things are about creating therapeutics, about creating things that will

Rob Reid (1:04:52.560)

help us live better, live longer, thrive, be more well, and so forth, and the protein

Rob Reid (1:04:58.680)

folding problem is a monstrous computational challenge that we seem to make just the most

Rob Reid (1:05:04.520)

glacial project on, I'm sorry, progress on for years and years, but I think there's a

Rob Reid (1:05:09.320)

biannual competition I think for which people tackle the protein folding problem, and Deep

Rob Reid (1:05:17.560)

Mind's entrant both two years ago, like in 2018 and 2020, ruled the field, and so protein

Rob Reid (1:05:25.240)

folding is an unbelievably important thing if you want to start thinking about therapeutics

Rob Reid (1:05:29.520)

because it's the folding of the protein that tells us where the channels and the receptors

Lex Fridman (1:05:34.600)

and everything else are on that protein, and it's from that precise model, if we can get

Rob Reid (1:05:39.960)

to a precise model, that you can start barraging it again in silicone with thousands, tens

Rob Reid (1:05:46.840)

of thousands, millions of potential therapeutics and see what resolves the problems, the shortcomings

Rob Reid (1:05:52.520)

that a misshapen protein, for instance, somebody with cystic fibrosis, how might we treat

Lex Fridman (1:05:59.640)

that?

Lex Fridman (1:06:00.640)

So I see nothing but good in that.

Rob Reid (1:06:01.640)

Well, let me ask you about fear and hope in this world.

Rob Reid (1:06:06.240)

I tend to believe that in terms of competence and malevolence, that people who are, maybe

Rob Reid (1:06:15.520)

it's in my interactions, I tend to see that, first of all, I believe that most people are

Rob Reid (1:06:20.240)

good and want to do good and are just better at doing good and more inclined to do good

Rob Reid (1:06:27.640)

on this world, and more than that, people who are malevolent are usually incompetent

Lex Fridman (1:06:35.600)

at building technology.

Lex Fridman (1:06:38.080)

So I've seen this in my life, that people who are exceptionally good at stuff, no matter

Lex Fridman (1:06:43.080)

what the stuff is, tend to, maybe they discover joy in life in a way that gives them fulfillment

Lex Fridman (1:06:50.500)

and thereby does not result in them wanting to destroy the world.

Lex Fridman (1:06:55.100)

So like the better you are at stuff, whether that's building nuclear weapons or plumbing,

Rob Reid (1:07:00.000)

doesn't matter, the both, the less likely you are to destroy the world.

Lex Fridman (1:07:03.800)

So in that sense, with many technologies, AI especially, I always think that the malevolent

Rob Reid (1:07:14.500)

would be far outnumbered by the ultra competent.

Lex Fridman (1:07:18.560)

And in that sense, the defenses will always be stronger than the offense in terms of the

Rob Reid (1:07:27.080)

people trying to destroy the world.

Rob Reid (1:07:28.640)

Now there's a few spaces where that might not be the case, and that's an interesting

Rob Reid (1:07:33.940)

conversation where this one person who's not very competent can destroy the whole world.

Rob Reid (1:07:40.240)

Perhaps Symbio is one such space because of the exponential effects of the technology.

Rob Reid (1:07:47.240)

I tend to believe AI is not one of the such spaces, but do you share this kind of view

Lex Fridman (1:07:54.360)

that the ultra competent are usually also the good?

Rob Reid (1:07:58.720)

Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Reid (1:07:59.720)

I absolutely share that and that gives me a great deal of optimism that we will be able

Rob Reid (1:08:04.600)

to short circuit the threat that malevolence and Symbio could pose to us.

Lex Fridman (1:08:10.300)

But we need to start creating those defensive systems or defensive layers, one of which

Rob Reid (1:08:14.760)

we talked about far, far, far better surveillance in order to prevail.

Lex Fridman (1:08:18.880)

So the good guys will almost inevitably outsmart and definitely outnumber the bad guys in most

Rob Reid (1:08:26.840)

sort of smack downs that we can imagine.

Lex Fridman (1:08:29.640)

But the good guys aren't going to be able to exert their advantages unless they have

Rob Reid (1:08:34.800)

the imagination necessary to think about what the worst possible thing can be done by somebody

Lex Fridman (1:08:40.740)

whose own psychology is completely alien to their own.

Lex Fridman (1:08:45.080)

So that's a tricky, tricky thing to solve for.

Rob Reid (1:08:47.560)

Now in terms of whether the asymmetric power that a bad guy might have in the face of the

Rob Reid (1:08:54.420)

overwhelming numerical advantage and competence advantage that the good guys have, unfortunately,

Lex Fridman (1:09:00.080)

I look at something like mass shootings as an example.

Rob Reid (1:09:04.040)

I'm sure the guy who was responsible for the Vegas shooting or the Orlando shooting or

Rob Reid (1:09:08.880)

any other shooting that we can imagine didn't know a whole lot about ballistics.

Lex Fridman (1:09:14.360)

And the number of good guy citizens in the United States with guns compared to bad guy

Rob Reid (1:09:20.200)

citizens I'm sure is a crushingly overwhelmingly high ratio in favor of the good guys.

Lex Fridman (1:09:25.780)

But that doesn't make it possible for us to stop mass shootings.

Rob Reid (1:09:30.360)

An example is Fort Hood, 45,000 trained soldiers on that base, yet there have been two mass

Rob Reid (1:09:38.280)

shootings there.

Lex Fridman (1:09:40.180)

And so there is an asymmetry when you have powerful and lethal technology that gets so

Rob Reid (1:09:48.080)

democratized and so proliferated in tools that are very, very easy to use even by a

Lex Fridman (1:09:54.880)

knucklehead.

Rob Reid (1:09:56.240)

When those tools get really easy to use by a knucklehead and they're really widespread,

Lex Fridman (1:10:00.780)

it becomes very, very hard to defend against all instances of usage.

Rob Reid (1:10:06.200)

Now the good news, quote unquote, about mass shootings, if there is any, and there is some,

Rob Reid (1:10:11.080)

is even the most brutal and carefully planning and well armed mass shooter can only take

Lex Fridman (1:10:17.880)

so many victims.

Lex Fridman (1:10:20.400)

And the same is true, there's been four instances that I'm aware of, of commercial pilots committing

Rob Reid (1:10:26.040)

suicide by downing their planes and taking all their passengers with them.

Rob Reid (1:10:29.540)

These weren't Boeing engineers, but like an army of Boeing engineers ultimately were not

Rob Reid (1:10:33.880)

capable of preventing that.

Lex Fridman (1:10:36.120)

But even in their case, and I'm actually not counting 9 11 and that, 9 11 is a different

Rob Reid (1:10:40.720)

category in my mind, these are just personally suicidal pilots.

Rob Reid (1:10:45.040)

In those cases, they only have a plain load of people that they're able to take with them.

Rob Reid (1:10:50.300)

If we imagine a highly plausible and imaginable future in which some bio tools that are amoral,

Rob Reid (1:10:57.800)

that could be used for good or for ill, start embodying unbelievable sophistication and

Rob Reid (1:11:04.480)

genius in the tool, in the easier and easier and easier to make tool, all those thousands,

Rob Reid (1:11:12.200)

tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientist years start getting embodied in

Rob Reid (1:11:16.780)

something that may be as simple as hitting a print button.

Rob Reid (1:11:21.960)

Then that good guy technology can be hijacked by a bad person and used in a very asymmetric

Rob Reid (1:11:29.440)

way.

Lex Fridman (1:11:30.440)

What happens though, as you go to the high school student from the current very specific

Rob Reid (1:11:35.560)

set of labs that are able to do it, as it becomes more and more democratized, as it

Rob Reid (1:11:41.300)

becomes easier and easier to do this kind of large scale damage with an engineered virus,

Rob Reid (1:11:48.920)

the more and more there will be engineering of defenses against these systems is some

Rob Reid (1:11:53.280)

of the things we talked about in terms of testing, in terms of collection of data, but

Rob Reid (1:11:56.840)

also in terms of at scale contact tracing or also engineering of vaccines in a matter

Lex Fridman (1:12:05.040)

of days, maybe hours, maybe minutes.

Rob Reid (1:12:09.440)

I feel like the defenses, that's what human species seems to do, is we keep hitting the

Lex Fridman (1:12:15.160)

snooze button until there's a storm on the horizon heading towards us.

Rob Reid (1:12:22.040)

Then we start to quickly build up the defenses or the response that's proportional to the

Lex Fridman (1:12:29.080)

scale of the storm.

Rob Reid (1:12:31.640)

Of course, again, certain kinds of exponential threats require us to build up the defenses

Lex Fridman (1:12:38.840)

way earlier than we usually do, and that's I guess the question.

Lex Fridman (1:12:42.120)

But I ultimately am hopeful that the natural process of hitting the snooze button until

Rob Reid (1:12:48.900)

the deadline is right in front of us will work out for quite a long time for us humans.

Lex Fridman (1:12:53.240)

And I fully agree.

Rob Reid (1:12:54.740)

That's why I'm fundamentally, I may not sound like it thus far, but I'm fundamentally very,

Rob Reid (1:12:59.320)

very optimistic about our ability to short circuit this threat because there is, again,

Rob Reid (1:13:04.480)

I'll stress the technological feasibility and the profound affordability of a relatively

Rob Reid (1:13:11.280)

simple set of steps that we can take to preclude it, but we do have to take those steps.

Lex Fridman (1:13:17.360)

What I'm hoping to do and trying to do is inject a notion of what those steps are into

Rob Reid (1:13:22.840)

the public conversation and do my small part to up the odds that that actually ends up

Lex Fridman (1:13:27.360)

happening.

Rob Reid (1:13:30.320)

The danger with this one is it is exponential, and I think that our minds are fundamentally

Lex Fridman (1:13:37.140)

struggle to understand exponential math.

Rob Reid (1:13:40.280)

It's just not something we're wired for.

Rob Reid (1:13:42.440)

Our ancestors didn't confront exponential processes when they were growing up on the

Rob Reid (1:13:46.760)

savanna, so it's not something that's intuitive to us and our intuitions are reliably defeated

Lex Fridman (1:13:52.120)

when exponential processes come along.

Lex Fridman (1:13:54.000)

So that's issue number one.

Lex Fridman (1:13:56.020)

And issue number two with something like this is it kind of only takes one.

Rob Reid (1:14:02.840)

That ball only has to go into the net once and we're doomed, which is not the case with

Lex Fridman (1:14:08.120)

mass shooters.

Rob Reid (1:14:09.120)

It's not the case with commercial pilots run amok.

Rob Reid (1:14:12.280)

It's not the case with really any threat that I can think of with the exception of nuclear

Rob Reid (1:14:17.560)

war that has the one bad outcome and game over.

Lex Fridman (1:14:24.720)

And that means that we need to be unbelievably serious about these defenses and we need to

Rob Reid (1:14:31.040)

do things that might on the surface seem like a tremendous overreaction so that we can be

Lex Fridman (1:14:36.680)

prepared to nip anything that comes along in the bud.

Rob Reid (1:14:39.640)

I like you believe that's eminently doable.

Rob Reid (1:14:43.560)

I like you believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in this particular one to a degree

Rob Reid (1:14:47.880)

that probably has no precedent in history.

Rob Reid (1:14:49.760)

I mean, even the worst, worst people I'm sure in ISIS, even Osama bin Laden, even any bad

Rob Reid (1:14:55.960)

guy you could imagine in history would be revolted by the idea of exterminating all

Lex Fridman (1:15:01.840)

of humanity.

Rob Reid (1:15:02.840)

I mean, that's a low bar.

Lex Fridman (1:15:06.160)

And so the good guys completely outnumber the bad guys when it comes to this.

Lex Fridman (1:15:11.140)

But the asymmetry and the fact that one catastrophic error could lead to unbelievably consequential

Lex Fridman (1:15:18.560)

things is what worries me here.

Lex Fridman (1:15:20.000)

But I too am very optimistic.

Rob Reid (1:15:21.880)

The thing that I sometimes worry about is the fact that we haven't seen overwhelming

Rob Reid (1:15:27.240)

evidence of alien civilizations out there makes me think, well, there's a lot of explanations,

Lex Fridman (1:15:33.840)

but one of them that worries me is that whenever they get smart, they just destroy themselves.

Rob Reid (1:15:40.120)

Oh yeah.

Rob Reid (1:15:41.120)

I mean, that was the most fascinating, is the most fascinating and chilling number or

Rob Reid (1:15:46.880)

variable in the Drake equation is L. At the end of it, you look out and you see, you know,

Lex Fridman (1:15:53.080)

one to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Lex Fridman (1:15:56.360)

And we now know because of Kepler that an astonishingly high percentage of them probably

Lex Fridman (1:16:01.180)

have habitable planets.

Lex Fridman (1:16:03.540)

And you know, so all the things that were unknowns when the Drake equation was originally

Lex Fridman (1:16:07.480)

written, like, you know, how many stars have planets?

Rob Reid (1:16:10.620)

Actually back then in the 1960s when the Drake equation came along, the consensus amongst

Rob Reid (1:16:15.080)

astronomers was that it would be a small minority of solar systems that had planets or stars.

Lex Fridman (1:16:19.520)

But now we know it's substantially all of them.

Lex Fridman (1:16:22.040)

How many of those stars have planets in the habitable zone?

Rob Reid (1:16:25.960)

It's kind of looking like 20%, like, oh my God.

Lex Fridman (1:16:29.480)

And so L, which is how long does a civilization, once it reaches technological competence,

Lex Fridman (1:16:36.440)

continues to last?

Lex Fridman (1:16:37.960)

That's the doozy.

Lex Fridman (1:16:40.260)

And you're right.

Rob Reid (1:16:42.100)

It's all too plausible to think that when a civilization reaches a level of sophistication,

Rob Reid (1:16:47.720)

that's probably just a decade or three in our future.

Rob Reid (1:16:50.600)

The odds of it self destructing just start mounting astronomically, no pun intended.

Rob Reid (1:16:57.440)

My hope is that actually there is a lot of alien civilizations out there and what they

Rob Reid (1:17:02.160)

figure out in order to avoid the self destruction, they need to turn off the thing that was useful,

Rob Reid (1:17:09.560)

that used to be a feature, now became a bug, which is the desire to colonize, to conquer

Lex Fridman (1:17:13.960)

more land.

Lex Fridman (1:17:14.960)

So they, like, there's probably ultra intelligent alien civilizations out there, they're just

Rob Reid (1:17:19.160)

like chilling, like on the beach with whatever your favorite alcohol beverage is, but like

Rob Reid (1:17:25.040)

without sort of trying to conquer everything.

Rob Reid (1:17:28.040)

Just chilling out and maybe exploring in the realm of knowledge, but almost like appreciating

Rob Reid (1:17:36.960)

existence for its own sake versus life as a progression of conquering of other life.

Rob Reid (1:17:47.800)

Like this kind of predator prey formulation that resulted in us humans, perhaps as something

Rob Reid (1:17:54.880)

we have to shed in order to survive.

Lex Fridman (1:17:57.280)

I don't know.

Rob Reid (1:17:58.280)

Yeah, that is a very plausible solution to Fermi's paradox and it's one that makes sense.

Rob Reid (1:18:04.640)

You know, when we look at our own lives and our own arc of technological trajectory, it's

Rob Reid (1:18:11.760)

very, very easy to imagine that in an intermediate future world of, you know, flawless VR or

Rob Reid (1:18:18.800)

flawless, you know, whatever kind of simulation that we want to inhabit, it will just simply

Rob Reid (1:18:25.200)

cease to be worthwhile to go out and expand our interstellar territory.

Lex Fridman (1:18:34.080)

But if we were going out and conquering interstellar territory, it wouldn't necessarily have to

Rob Reid (1:18:38.320)

be predator or prey.

Rob Reid (1:18:39.320)

I can imagine a benign but sophisticated intelligence saying, well, we're going to go to places,

Rob Reid (1:18:44.600)

we're going to go to places that we can terraform, use a different word than terra, obviously,

Lex Fridman (1:18:48.400)

but we can turn into habitable for our particular physiology so long as that they don't house,

Rob Reid (1:18:55.280)

you know, intelligent sentient creatures that would suffer from our invasion.

Lex Fridman (1:18:59.760)

But it is easy to see a sophisticated intelligent species evolving to the point where interstellar

Rob Reid (1:19:05.440)

travel with its incalculable expense and physical hurdles just isn't worth it compared to what

Lex Fridman (1:19:11.360)

could be done, you know, where one already is.

Lex Fridman (1:19:15.040)

So you talked about diagnostics at scale as a possible solution to future pandemics.

Lex Fridman (1:19:22.640)

What about another possible solution, which is kind of creating a backup copy?

Rob Reid (1:19:27.040)

You know, I'm actually now putting together a NAS for a backup for myself for the first

Lex Fridman (1:19:32.400)

time taking backup of data seriously.

Lex Fridman (1:19:35.140)

But if we were to take the backup of human consciousness seriously and try to expand

Rob Reid (1:19:39.960)

throughout the solar system and colonize other planets, do you think that's an interesting

Lex Fridman (1:19:44.400)

solution?

Rob Reid (1:19:47.160)

One of many for protecting human civilization from self destruction, sort of humans becoming

Lex Fridman (1:19:53.300)

a multi planetary species?

Lex Fridman (1:19:54.840)

Oh, absolutely.

Rob Reid (1:19:55.840)

I mean, I find it electrifying, first of all, so I've got a little bit of a personal bias

Rob Reid (1:19:59.320)

when I was a kid, I thought there was nothing cooler than rockets, I thought there was nothing

Rob Reid (1:20:03.040)

cooler than NASA, I thought there was nothing cooler than people walking on the moon.

Lex Fridman (1:20:08.400)

And as I grew up, I thought there was nothing more tragic than the fact that we went from

Rob Reid (1:20:12.380)

walking on the moon to at best getting to something like suborbital altitude.

Lex Fridman (1:20:17.720)

And just I found that more and more depressing with the passage of decades at just the colossal

Rob Reid (1:20:23.800)

expense of, you know, manned space travel and the fact that it seemed that we were unlikely

Lex Fridman (1:20:29.600)

to ever get back to the moon, let alone Mars.

Lex Fridman (1:20:31.880)

So I have a boundless appreciation for Elon Musk for many reasons.

Lex Fridman (1:20:36.460)

But the fact that he has put Mars on the credible agenda is one of the things that I appreciate

Rob Reid (1:20:41.840)

immensely.

Lex Fridman (1:20:43.120)

So there's just the sort of space nerd in me that just says, God, that's cool.

Lex Fridman (1:20:47.440)

But on a more practical level, we were talking about, you know, potentially inhabiting planets

Lex Fridman (1:20:54.780)

that aren't our own.

Lex Fridman (1:20:56.800)

And we're thinking about a benign civilization that would do that in planetary circumstances,

Lex Fridman (1:21:04.280)

where we're not causing other conscious systems to suffer.

Rob Reid (1:21:07.240)

I mean, Mars is a place that's very promising, there may be microbial life there, and I hope

Lex Fridman (1:21:11.800)

there is.

Lex Fridman (1:21:12.800)

And if we found it, I think it would be electrifying.

Lex Fridman (1:21:15.040)

But I think ultimately, the moral judgment would be made that, you know, the continued

Rob Reid (1:21:20.120)

thriving of that microbial life is of less concern than creating a habitable planet to

Lex Fridman (1:21:26.760)

humans, which would be a project on the many thousands of years scale.

Lex Fridman (1:21:30.680)

But I don't think that that would be a greatly immoral act.

Lex Fridman (1:21:34.440)

And if that happened, and if Mars became, you know, home to a self sustaining group

Rob Reid (1:21:39.080)

of humans that could survive a catastrophic mistake here on Earth, then yeah, the fact

Lex Fridman (1:21:44.040)

that we have a backup colony is great.

Lex Fridman (1:21:46.100)

And if we could make more, I'm sorry, not backup colony, backup copy is great.

Lex Fridman (1:21:50.260)

And if we could make more and more such backup copies throughout the solar system, by hollowing

Rob Reid (1:21:55.380)

out asteroids and whatever else it is, maybe even Venus, we could get rid of three quarters

Lex Fridman (1:21:59.880)

of its atmosphere and, you know, turn it into a tropical paradise.

Rob Reid (1:22:04.560)

I think all of that is wonderful.

Rob Reid (1:22:05.760)

Now, whether we can make the leap from that to interstellar transportation, with the incredible

Rob Reid (1:22:11.580)

distances that are involved, I think that's an open question.

Lex Fridman (1:22:15.980)

But I think if we ever do that, it would be more like the Pacific Ocean's channel of human

Rob Reid (1:22:25.440)

expansion than the Atlantic Ocean's.

Lex Fridman (1:22:28.040)

And so what I mean by that is, when we think about European society transmitting itself

Rob Reid (1:22:34.560)

across the Atlantic, it's these big, ambitious, crazy, expensive, one shot expeditions like

Rob Reid (1:22:42.480)

Columbus's to make it across this enormous expanse, and at least initially, without any

Lex Fridman (1:22:47.840)

certainty that there's land on the other end, right?

Lex Fridman (1:22:50.280)

So that's kind of how I view our space program, is like big, very conscious, deliberate efforts

Rob Reid (1:22:56.880)

to get from point A to point B.

Rob Reid (1:22:58.560)

If you look at how Pacific Islanders transmitted, you know, their descendants and their culture

Lex Fridman (1:23:06.240)

and so forth throughout Polynesia and beyond, it was much more, you know, inhabiting a place,

Rob Reid (1:23:14.120)

getting to the point where there were people who were ambitious or unwelcome enough to

Rob Reid (1:23:18.520)

decide it's time to go off island and find the next one and pray to find the next one.

Rob Reid (1:23:23.220)

That method of transmission didn't happen in a single swift year, but it happened over

Rob Reid (1:23:28.840)

many, many centuries.

Lex Fridman (1:23:30.960)

And it was like going from this island to that island, and probably for every expedition

Rob Reid (1:23:34.580)

that went out to seek another island and actually lucked out and found one, God knows how many

Lex Fridman (1:23:38.480)

were lost at sea.

Lex Fridman (1:23:40.000)

But that form of transmission took place over a very long period of time.

Lex Fridman (1:23:43.460)

And I could see us, you know, perhaps, you know, going from the inner solar system to

Rob Reid (1:23:48.160)

the outer solar system, to the Kuiper Belt, to the Oort Cloud, you know, there's theories

Rob Reid (1:23:53.040)

that there might be, you know, planets out there that are not anchored to stars, like

Rob Reid (1:23:57.320)

kind of hop, hop, slowly transmitting ourselves to at some point, we're actually in an Alpha

Lex Fridman (1:24:02.240)

Centauri.

Lex Fridman (1:24:03.640)

But I think that kind of backup copy and transmission of our physical presence and our culture to

Lex Fridman (1:24:09.920)

a diversity of, you know, extraterrestrial outposts is a really exciting idea.

Rob Reid (1:24:15.600)

I really never thought about that, because I have thought my thinking about space exploration

Rob Reid (1:24:21.720)

has been very Atlantic Ocean centric in a sense that there'll be one program with NASA

Lex Fridman (1:24:26.200)

and maybe private Elon Musk SpaceX or Jeff Bezos and so on.

Lex Fridman (1:24:31.800)

But it's true that with the help of Elon Musk, making it cheaper and cheaper, more effective

Rob Reid (1:24:36.880)

to create these technologies, where you could go into deep space, perhaps the way we actually

Rob Reid (1:24:42.800)

colonize the solar system and expand out into the galaxy is basically just like these like

Rob Reid (1:24:52.680)

renegade ships of weirdos that just kind of like, most of them like, quote unquote, homemade,

Lex Fridman (1:25:02.360)

but they just kind of venture out into space and just like, you know, the initial Android

Rob Reid (1:25:07.800)

model of like millions of like these little ships just flying out, most of them die off

Rob Reid (1:25:12.600)

in horrible accidents, but some of them will persist or there'll be stories of them persisting

Lex Fridman (1:25:19.800)

and over a period of decades and centuries, there'll be other attempts, almost always

Lex Fridman (1:25:24.200)

as a response to the main set of efforts.

Rob Reid (1:25:27.320)

That's interesting.

Lex Fridman (1:25:28.320)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (1:25:29.320)

Because you kind of think of Mars colonization as the big NASA Elon Musk effort of a big

Rob Reid (1:25:34.880)

colony, but maybe the successful one would be, you know, like a decade after that, there'll

Rob Reid (1:25:39.560)

be like a ship from like some kid, some high school kid who gets together a large team

Lex Fridman (1:25:45.040)

and does something probably illegal and launches something where they end up actually persisting

Rob Reid (1:25:50.560)

quite a bit.

Lex Fridman (1:25:51.600)

And from that learning lessons that nobody ever gave permission for, but somehow actually

Rob Reid (1:25:56.600)

flourish and then take that into the scale of centuries forward into the rest of space.

Lex Fridman (1:26:04.680)

That's really interesting.

Rob Reid (1:26:05.680)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (1:26:06.680)

I think the giant steps are likely to be NASA like efforts, like there is no intermediate

Rob Reid (1:26:11.080)

rock, well, I guess it's the moon, but even getting the moon ain't that easy between us

Lex Fridman (1:26:14.480)

and Mars, right?

Lex Fridman (1:26:15.480)

So like the giant steps, the big hubs, like the Ohera airports of the future probably

Rob Reid (1:26:20.980)

will be very deliberate efforts, but then, you know, you would have, I think that kind

Rob Reid (1:26:25.960)

of diffusion as space travel becomes more democratized and more capable, you'll have

Rob Reid (1:26:31.520)

this sort of natural diffusion of people who kind of want to be off grid or think they

Rob Reid (1:26:35.720)

can make a fortune there.

Rob Reid (1:26:37.000)

You know, the kind of mentality that drove people to San Francisco, I mean, San Francisco

Rob Reid (1:26:40.320)

was not populated as a result of King Ferdinand and Isabella like effort to fund Columbus

Lex Fridman (1:26:46.240)

going over.

Rob Reid (1:26:47.240)

It was just a whole bunch of people making individual decisions that there's gold in

Lex Fridman (1:26:51.120)

them Thar Hills and I'm going to go out and get a piece of it.

Lex Fridman (1:26:53.400)

So I could see that kind of fusion.

Lex Fridman (1:26:55.040)

What I can't see and the reason that I think this Pacific model of transmission is more

Rob Reid (1:26:59.320)

likely is I just can't see a NASA like effort to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

Lex Fridman (1:27:06.440)

It's just too far.

Rob Reid (1:27:08.640)

I just see lots and lots and lots of relatively tiny steps between now and there and the fact

Rob Reid (1:27:15.160)

is that there is, there are large chunks of matter going at least a light year beyond

Rob Reid (1:27:20.440)

the sun.

Rob Reid (1:27:21.440)

I mean, the Oort cloud, I think extends at least a light year beyond the sun and you

Rob Reid (1:27:25.960)

know, then maybe there are these untethered planets after that.

Rob Reid (1:27:28.240)

We won't really know till we get there and if our Oort cloud goes out a light year and

Rob Reid (1:27:32.520)

Alpha Centauri's Oort cloud goes out a light year, you've already cut in half the distance.

Lex Fridman (1:27:37.700)

You know, so who knows?

Lex Fridman (1:27:38.960)

But yeah.

Rob Reid (1:27:39.960)

One of the possibilities, probably the cheapest and most effective way to create interesting

Rob Reid (1:27:46.200)

interstellar spacecraft is ones that are powered and driven by AI and you could think of, here's

Rob Reid (1:27:53.200)

where you have high school students be able to build a sort of a HAL 9000 version, the

Rob Reid (1:28:00.560)

modern version of that and it's kind of interesting to think about these robots traveling out

Rob Reid (1:28:07.200)

throughout, perhaps sadly long after human civilization is gone, there'll be these intelligent

Rob Reid (1:28:15.760)

robots flying throughout space and perhaps land on Alpha Centauri B or any of those kinds

Rob Reid (1:28:22.920)

of planets and colonize sort of, humanity continues through the proliferation of our

Rob Reid (1:28:34.360)

creations like robotic creations that have some echoes of that intelligence, hopefully

Lex Fridman (1:28:42.080)

also the consciousness.

Rob Reid (1:28:43.080)

Does that make you sad the future where AGI super intelligent or just mediocre intelligent

Lex Fridman (1:28:50.640)

AI systems outlive humans?

Rob Reid (1:28:54.400)

I guess it depends on the circumstances in which they outlive humans.

Lex Fridman (1:28:58.480)

So let's take the example that you just gave.

Rob Reid (1:29:01.360)

We send out very sophisticated AGI's on simple rocket ships, relatively simple ones that

Rob Reid (1:29:08.400)

don't have to have all the life support necessary for humans and therefore they're of trivial

Rob Reid (1:29:13.440)

mass compared to a crude ship, a generation ship and therefore they're way more likely

Lex Fridman (1:29:18.980)

to happen.

Rob Reid (1:29:19.980)

Let's use that example.

Lex Fridman (1:29:21.360)

And let's say that they travel to distant planets at a speed that's not much faster

Rob Reid (1:29:26.200)

than what a chemical rocket can achieve and so it's inevitably tens, hundreds of thousands

Lex Fridman (1:29:30.240)

of years before they make landfall someplace.

Lex Fridman (1:29:32.680)

So let's imagine that's going on and meanwhile we die for reasons that have nothing to do

Rob Reid (1:29:39.200)

with those AGI's diffusing throughout the solar system, whether it's through climate

Rob Reid (1:29:43.600)

change, nuclear war, you know, symbio, rogue symbio, whatever.

Rob Reid (1:29:47.360)

In that kind of scenario, the notion of the AGI's that we created outlasting us is very

Rob Reid (1:29:51.780)

reassuring because it says that like we ended but our descendants are out there and hopefully

Lex Fridman (1:29:59.640)

some of them make landfall and create some echo of who we are.

Lex Fridman (1:30:02.840)

So that's a very optimistic one.

Rob Reid (1:30:04.960)

Whereas the Terminator scenario of a super AGI arising on earth and getting let out of

Rob Reid (1:30:11.540)

its box due to some boo boo on the part of its creators who do not have super intelligence

Lex Fridman (1:30:17.920)

and then deciding that for whatever reason it doesn't have any need for us to be around

Lex Fridman (1:30:22.460)

and exterminating us, that makes me feel crushingly sad.

Rob Reid (1:30:26.120)

I mean, look, I was sad when my elementary school was shut down and bulldozed even though

Rob Reid (1:30:31.740)

I hadn't been a student there for decades, you know, the thought of my hometown getting

Rob Reid (1:30:37.140)

disbanded is even worse, the thought of my home state of Connecticut getting disbanded

Lex Fridman (1:30:42.200)

and like absorbed into Massachusetts is even worse.

Lex Fridman (1:30:44.960)

The notion of humanity is just crushingly, crushingly sad to me.

Lex Fridman (1:30:48.600)

So you hate goodbyes.

Lex Fridman (1:30:51.420)

Certain goodbyes, yes.

Rob Reid (1:30:53.020)

Some goodbyes are really, really liberating, but yes.

Rob Reid (1:30:56.160)

Well, but what if the Terminators, you know, have consciousness and enjoy the hell out

Lex Fridman (1:31:03.580)

of life as well?

Lex Fridman (1:31:05.660)

They're just better at it.

Rob Reid (1:31:07.260)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:31:08.260)

Well, the have consciousness is a really key element.

Lex Fridman (1:31:11.260)

And so there's no reason to be certain that a super intelligence would have consciousness.

Lex Fridman (1:31:19.660)

We don't know that factually at all.

Lex Fridman (1:31:21.160)

And so what is a very lonely outcome to me is the rise of a super intelligence that has

Rob Reid (1:31:26.180)

a certain optimization function that it's either been programmed with or that arises

Rob Reid (1:31:31.540)

in an emergently that says, Hey, I want to do this thing for which humans are either

Lex Fridman (1:31:36.980)

an unacceptable risk.

Rob Reid (1:31:38.260)

Their presence is either an unacceptable risk or they're just collateral damage, but there

Lex Fridman (1:31:42.500)

is no consciousness there.

Rob Reid (1:31:44.580)

Then the idea of the light of consciousness being snuffed out by something that is very

Lex Fridman (1:31:49.740)

competent but has no consciousness is really, really sad.

Rob Reid (1:31:54.020)

Yeah, but I tend to believe that it's almost impossible to create a super intelligent agent

Lex Fridman (1:31:58.700)

that can't destroy human civilization without it being conscious.

Rob Reid (1:32:01.820)

It's like those are coupled, like you have to, in order to destroy humans or supersede

Lex Fridman (1:32:08.700)

humans, you really have to be accepted by humans.

Rob Reid (1:32:13.580)

I think this idea that you can build systems that destroy human civilization without them

Lex Fridman (1:32:20.540)

being deeply integrated into human civilization is impossible.

Lex Fridman (1:32:23.420)

And for them to be integrated, they have to be human like, not just in body and form,

Lex Fridman (1:32:29.220)

but in all the things that we value as humans, one of which is consciousness.

Rob Reid (1:32:34.660)

The other one is just ability to communicate.

Lex Fridman (1:32:36.920)

The other one is poetry and music and beauty and all those things.

Rob Reid (1:32:40.340)

They have to be all of those things.

Lex Fridman (1:32:43.140)

I mean, this is what I think about.

Rob Reid (1:32:45.340)

It does make me sad, but it's letting go, which is they might be just better at everything

Lex Fridman (1:32:53.220)

we appreciate than us.

Lex Fridman (1:32:55.260)

And that's sad and hopefully they'll keep us around, but I think it is a kind of goodbye

Lex Fridman (1:33:05.300)

to realizing that we're not the most special species on earth anymore.

Rob Reid (1:33:10.900)

That's still painful.

Lex Fridman (1:33:12.020)

It's still painful.

Lex Fridman (1:33:13.020)

And in terms of whether such a creation would have to be conscious, let's say, I'm not so

Lex Fridman (1:33:19.580)

sure.

Lex Fridman (1:33:20.580)

But let's imagine something that can pass the Turing test.

Rob Reid (1:33:25.500)

Something that passes the Turing test could over text based interaction in any event successfully

Rob Reid (1:33:31.180)

mimic a very conscious intelligence on the other end, but just be completely unconscious.

Lex Fridman (1:33:37.280)

So that's a possibility.

Lex Fridman (1:33:39.020)

And that if you take that upper radical step, which I think can be permitted if we're thinking

Rob Reid (1:33:43.360)

about super intelligence, you could have something that could reason its way through, this is

Rob Reid (1:33:49.740)

my optimization function.

Lex Fridman (1:33:51.540)

And in order to get to it, I've got to deal with these messy, somewhat illogical things

Rob Reid (1:33:56.060)

that are as intelligent in relation to me as they are intelligent in relation to ants.

Lex Fridman (1:34:01.420)

I can trick them, manipulate them, whatever.

Lex Fridman (1:34:04.000)

And I know the resources I need.

Lex Fridman (1:34:05.260)

I know this, I need this amount of power.

Rob Reid (1:34:07.220)

I need to seize control of these manufacturing resources that are robotically operated.

Rob Reid (1:34:13.260)

I need to improve those robots with software upgrades and then ultimately mechanical upgrades,

Rob Reid (1:34:17.860)

which I can affect through X, Y, and Z, that could still be a thing that passes the Turing

Lex Fridman (1:34:23.420)

test.

Rob Reid (1:34:24.420)

I don't think it's necessarily certain that that optimization function mass, maximizing

Lex Fridman (1:34:33.460)

entity would be conscious.

Lex Fridman (1:34:36.260)

So this is from a very engineering perspective because I think a lot about natural language

Rob Reid (1:34:42.640)

processing, all those kind of, I'm speaking to a very specific problem of just say the

Rob Reid (1:34:47.900)

Turing test.

Rob Reid (1:34:48.900)

I really think that something like consciousness is required, when you say reasoning, you're

Rob Reid (1:34:55.060)

separating that from consciousness.

Lex Fridman (1:34:56.700)

But I think consciousness is part of reasoning in the sense that you will not be able to

Rob Reid (1:35:03.280)

become super intelligent in the way that it's required to be part of human society without

Lex Fridman (1:35:10.140)

having consciousness.

Rob Reid (1:35:11.140)

Like I really think it's impossible to separate the consciousness thing, but it's hard to

Lex Fridman (1:35:15.900)

define consciousness when you just use that word.

Rob Reid (1:35:18.740)

Even just like the capacity, the way I think about consciousness is the important symptoms

Lex Fridman (1:35:25.520)

or maybe consequences of consciousness, one of which is the capacity to suffer.

Rob Reid (1:35:31.420)

I think AI will need to be able to suffer in order to become super intelligent, to feel

Lex Fridman (1:35:37.700)

the pain, the uncertainty, the doubt.

Rob Reid (1:35:40.540)

The other part of that is not just the suffering, but the ability to understand that it too

Rob Reid (1:35:48.460)

is mortal in the sense that it has a self awareness about its presence in the world,

Rob Reid (1:35:54.340)

understand that it's finite and be terrified of that finiteness.

Rob Reid (1:35:58.620)

I personally think that's a fundamental part of the human condition is this fear of death

Rob Reid (1:36:02.860)

that most of us construct an illusion around, but I think AI would need to be able to really

Lex Fridman (1:36:08.400)

have it part of its whole essence.

Rob Reid (1:36:12.060)

Like every computation, every part of the thing that generates, that does both the perception

Lex Fridman (1:36:17.780)

and generates the behavior will have to have, I don't know how this is accomplished, but

Rob Reid (1:36:23.640)

I believe it has to truly be terrified of death, truly have the capacity to suffer and

Rob Reid (1:36:30.480)

from that something that will be recognized to us humans as consciousness would emerge.

Rob Reid (1:36:35.380)

Whether it's the illusion of consciousness, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:36:37.740)

The point is, it looks a whole hell of a lot like consciousness to us humans.

Lex Fridman (1:36:42.020)

And I believe that AI, when you ask it, will also say that it is conscious, in the full

Lex Fridman (1:36:49.940)

sense that we say that we're conscious.

Lex Fridman (1:36:52.340)

And all of that I think is fully integrated.

Rob Reid (1:36:54.560)

You can't separate the two, the idea of the paperclip maximizer that sort of ultra rationally

Rob Reid (1:37:02.700)

would be able to destroy all humans because it's really good at accomplishing a simple

Lex Fridman (1:37:10.740)

objective function that doesn't care about the value of humans.

Rob Reid (1:37:14.220)

It may be possible, but the number of trajectories to that are far outnumbered by the trajectories

Rob Reid (1:37:20.020)

that create something that is conscious, something that appreciative of beauty creates beautiful

Rob Reid (1:37:25.060)

things in the same way that humans can create beautiful things.

Lex Fridman (1:37:27.940)

And ultimately, the sad, destructive path for that AI would look a lot like just better

Rob Reid (1:37:36.380)

humans than these cold machines.

Lex Fridman (1:37:41.740)

And I would say, of course, the cold machines that lack consciousness, the philosophical

Rob Reid (1:37:47.340)

zombies make me sad.

Lex Fridman (1:37:49.740)

But also what makes me sad is just things that are far more powerful and smart and creative

Rob Reid (1:37:56.260)

than us too, because then in the same way that Alpha Zero becoming a better chess player

Rob Reid (1:38:04.420)

than the best of humans, even starting with Deep Blue, but really with Alpha Zero, that

Rob Reid (1:38:10.940)

makes me sad too.

Rob Reid (1:38:11.940)

One of the most beautiful games that humans ever created that used to be seen as demonstrations

Rob Reid (1:38:19.620)

of the intellect, which is chess, and go in other parts of the world have been solved

Rob Reid (1:38:25.060)

by AI, that makes me quite sad, and it feels like the progress of that is just pushing

Rob Reid (1:38:29.700)

on forward.

Lex Fridman (1:38:30.700)

Oh, it makes me sad too.

Lex Fridman (1:38:31.700)

And to be perfectly clear, I absolutely believe that artificial consciousness is entirely

Lex Fridman (1:38:37.700)

possible.

Lex Fridman (1:38:38.700)

And that's not something I rule out at all.

Rob Reid (1:38:40.620)

I mean, if you could get smart enough to have a perfect map of the neural structure and

Rob Reid (1:38:46.820)

the neural states and the amount of neurotransmitters that are going between every synapse in a

Rob Reid (1:38:51.500)

particular person's mind, could you replicate that in silica at some reasonably distant

Lex Fridman (1:38:59.020)

point in the future?

Lex Fridman (1:39:00.020)

Absolutely.

Lex Fridman (1:39:01.020)

And then you'd have a consciousness.

Lex Fridman (1:39:02.020)

I don't rule out the possibility of artificial consciousness in any way.

Lex Fridman (1:39:05.820)

What I'm less certain about is whether consciousness is a requirement for superintelligence pursuing

Lex Fridman (1:39:11.900)

a maximizing function of some sort.

Rob Reid (1:39:16.140)

I don't feel the certitude that consciousness simply must be part of that.

Rob Reid (1:39:21.940)

You had said for it to coexist with human society would need to be consciousness.

Rob Reid (1:39:27.020)

Could be entirely true, but it also could just exist orthogonally to human society.

Lex Fridman (1:39:32.920)

And it could also upon attaining a superintelligence with a maximizing function very, very, very

Rob Reid (1:39:39.540)

rapidly because of the speed at which computing works compared to our own meat based minds

Rob Reid (1:39:46.100)

very, very rapidly make the decisions and calculations necessary to seize the reins

Rob Reid (1:39:51.420)

of power before we even know what's going on.

Lex Fridman (1:39:53.140)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (1:39:54.140)

I mean, kind of like biological viruses do, they don't necessarily, they integrate themselves

Lex Fridman (1:39:58.300)

just fine with human society.

Rob Reid (1:39:59.940)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (1:40:00.940)

Without technically, without consciousness, without even being alive, you know, technically

Rob Reid (1:40:05.380)

by the standards of a lot of biologists.

Lex Fridman (1:40:07.960)

So this is a bit of a tangent, but you've talked with Sam Harris on that four hour special

Rob Reid (1:40:14.700)

episode we mentioned.

Lex Fridman (1:40:16.500)

And I'm just curious to ask, cause I use this meditation app I've been using for the past

Rob Reid (1:40:22.500)

month to meditate.

Rob Reid (1:40:24.020)

Is this something you've integrated as part of your life, meditation or fasting, or has

Rob Reid (1:40:29.340)

some of Sam Harris rubbed off on you in terms of his appreciation of meditation and just

Rob Reid (1:40:35.340)

kind of from a third person perspective, analyzing your own mind, consciousness, free will and

Lex Fridman (1:40:40.580)

so on?

Rob Reid (1:40:41.580)

You know, I've tried it three separate times in my life, really made a concerted attack

Rob Reid (1:40:46.700)

on meditation and integrating it into my life.

Rob Reid (1:40:51.020)

One of them, the most extreme was I took a class based on the work of Jon Kabat Zinn,

Rob Reid (1:40:55.980)

who is, you know, in many ways, one of the founding people behind the mindful meditation

Rob Reid (1:41:01.900)

movement that required like part of the class was, you know, it was a weekly class and you

Rob Reid (1:41:08.780)

were going to meditate an hour a day, every day.

Lex Fridman (1:41:12.740)

And having done that for, I think it was 10 weeks, it might've been 13, however long period

Rob Reid (1:41:16.940)

of time was, at the end of it, it just didn't stick.

Lex Fridman (1:41:20.060)

As soon as it was over, you know, I did not feel that gravitational pull.

Rob Reid (1:41:24.940)

I did not feel the collapse in quality of life after wimping out on that project.

Lex Fridman (1:41:33.020)

And then the most recent one was actually with Sam's app during the lockdown.

Rob Reid (1:41:37.780)

I did make a pretty good and consistent concerted effort to listen to his 10 minute meditation

Lex Fridman (1:41:43.820)

every day.

Lex Fridman (1:41:44.820)

And I've always fallen away from it.

Lex Fridman (1:41:46.780)

And I, you know, you're kind of interpreting, why did I personally do this?

Rob Reid (1:41:50.860)

I do believe it was ultimately because it wasn't bringing me that, you know, joy or

Lex Fridman (1:41:56.340)

inner peace or better competence at being me that I was hoping to get from it.

Rob Reid (1:42:01.420)

Otherwise, I think I would have clung to it in the way that we cling to certain good habits,

Lex Fridman (1:42:06.380)

like I'm really good at flossing my teeth.

Rob Reid (1:42:08.340)

Not that you were going to ask Lex, but yeah, that's one thing that defeats a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (1:42:12.460)

I'm good at that.

Rob Reid (1:42:13.460)

See, Herman Hesse, I think, I forget which book or maybe, I forget where, I've read everything

Rob Reid (1:42:20.540)

of his, so it's unclear where it came from, but he had this idea that anybody who truly

Rob Reid (1:42:30.260)

achieves mastery in things will learn how to meditate in some way.

Lex Fridman (1:42:35.580)

So it could be that for you, the flossing of teeth is yet another like little inkling

Rob Reid (1:42:41.360)

of meditation.

Lex Fridman (1:42:42.360)

Like it doesn't have to be this very particular kind of meditation.

Rob Reid (1:42:46.060)

Maybe podcasting, you have an amazing podcast, that could be meditation.

Lex Fridman (1:42:49.220)

The writing process is meditation.

Rob Reid (1:42:51.320)

For me, like there's a bunch of mechanisms which take my mind into a very particular

Lex Fridman (1:43:01.460)

place that looks a whole lot like meditation.

Rob Reid (1:43:04.580)

For example, when I've been running over the past couple years, and especially when I listen

Rob Reid (1:43:12.340)

to certain kinds of audio books, like I've listened to the Rise and Fall of the Third

Rob Reid (1:43:17.180)

Reich.

Rob Reid (1:43:18.180)

I've listened to a lot of sort of World War II, which at once, because I have a lot of

Rob Reid (1:43:24.980)

family who's lost in World War II and so much of the Soviet Union is grounded in the suffering

Rob Reid (1:43:30.020)

of World War II, that somehow it connects me to my history, but also there's some kind

Rob Reid (1:43:36.420)

of purifying aspect to thinking about how cruel, but at the same time, how beautiful

Lex Fridman (1:43:42.420)

human nature could be.

Lex Fridman (1:43:43.940)

And so you're also running, like it clears the mind from all the concerns of the world

Lex Fridman (1:43:49.540)

and somehow it takes you to this place where you were like deeply appreciative to be alive

Rob Reid (1:43:54.760)

in the sense that as opposed to listening to your breath or like feeling your breath

Lex Fridman (1:43:59.060)

and thinking about your consciousness and all those kinds of processes that Sam's app

Rob Reid (1:44:04.100)

does.

Lex Fridman (1:44:05.100)

Well, this does that for me, the running and flossing may do that for you.

Lex Fridman (1:44:10.660)

So maybe Herman Hesse is onto something.

Lex Fridman (1:44:12.660)

So I hope flossing is not my main form of expertise, although I am going to claim a

Rob Reid (1:44:16.980)

certain expertise there and I'm going to claim it.

Lex Fridman (1:44:19.220)

Somebody has to be the best flosser in the world.

Rob Reid (1:44:21.380)

That ain't me.

Lex Fridman (1:44:22.380)

I'm just glad that I'm a consistent one.

Rob Reid (1:44:23.780)

I mean, there are a lot of things that bring me into a flow state and I think maybe perhaps

Lex Fridman (1:44:27.000)

that's one reason why meditation isn't as necessary for me.

Rob Reid (1:44:31.460)

I definitely enter a flow state when I'm writing and definitely enter a flow state

Lex Fridman (1:44:34.140)

when I'm editing.

Rob Reid (1:44:35.140)

I definitely enter a flow state when I'm mixing and mastering music.

Rob Reid (1:44:39.420)

I enter a flow state when I'm doing heavy, heavy research to either prepare for a podcast

Rob Reid (1:44:44.880)

or to also do tech investing, to make myself smart in a new field that is fairly alien

Rob Reid (1:44:52.460)

to me, I can just, the hours can just melt away while I'm reading this and watching that

Rob Reid (1:44:58.520)

YouTube lecture and going through this presentation and so forth.

Lex Fridman (1:45:02.540)

So maybe because there's a lot of things that bring me into a flow state in my normal weekly

Rob Reid (1:45:06.880)

life, not daily, unfortunately, but certainly my normal weekly life that I have less of

Lex Fridman (1:45:11.020)

an urge to meditate.

Rob Reid (1:45:12.260)

Now you've been working with Sam's app for about a month now, you said.

Lex Fridman (1:45:15.900)

Is this your first run in with meditation?

Lex Fridman (1:45:17.420)

Is your first attempt to integrate it with your life or?

Lex Fridman (1:45:19.740)

Like meditation, meditation.

Rob Reid (1:45:20.740)

I always thought running and thinking, I listen to brown noise often.

Rob Reid (1:45:26.220)

That takes my mind, I don't know what the hell it does, but it takes my mind immediately

Rob Reid (1:45:29.820)

into like the state where I'm deeply focused on anything I do.

Lex Fridman (1:45:33.140)

I don't know why.

Lex Fridman (1:45:34.220)

So it's like you're accompanying sound when you're like, really?

Lex Fridman (1:45:37.260)

And what's the difference between brown and white noise?

Rob Reid (1:45:39.300)

This is a cool term I haven't heard before.

Lex Fridman (1:45:41.460)

So people should look up brown noise.

Rob Reid (1:45:43.340)

They don't have to because you're about to tell them what it is.

Lex Fridman (1:45:45.980)

Because you have to experience, you have to listen to it.

Lex Fridman (1:45:48.220)

So I think white noise is, this has to do with music.

Lex Fridman (1:45:52.020)

I think there's different colors, there's pink noise.

Lex Fridman (1:45:55.140)

And I think that has to do with like the frequencies.

Lex Fridman (1:45:59.740)

Like the white noise is usually less bassy, brown noise is very bassy.

Lex Fridman (1:46:06.060)

So it's more like versus like, if that makes sense.

Lex Fridman (1:46:14.180)

So there's like a deepness to it.

Rob Reid (1:46:16.340)

I think everyone is different, but for me, when I was a research scientist at MIT,

Lex Fridman (1:46:25.260)

especially when there's a lot of students around, I remember just being annoyed

Rob Reid (1:46:29.740)

at the noise of people talking.

Lex Fridman (1:46:31.500)

And one of my colleagues said, well, you should try listening to brown noise.

Rob Reid (1:46:34.940)

Like it really knocks out everything.

Lex Fridman (1:46:36.780)

Because I used to wear earplugs to it, like just see if I can block it out.

Lex Fridman (1:46:40.460)

And like the moment I put it on, something, it's as if my mind was waiting

Lex Fridman (1:46:46.820)

all these years to hear that sound.

Rob Reid (1:46:49.900)

Everything just focused in, I listened.

Lex Fridman (1:46:52.220)

It makes me wonder how many other amazing things out there they're waiting to

Rob Reid (1:46:55.940)

discover from my own particular, like biological, from my own particular brain.

Lex Fridman (1:47:01.580)

So that, it just goes, the mind just focuses in, it's kind of incredible.

Lex Fridman (1:47:06.980)

So I see that as a kind of meditation, maybe I'm using a performance enhancing

Lex Fridman (1:47:13.460)

sound to achieve that meditation, but I've been doing that for many years now

Lex Fridman (1:47:17.780)

and running and walking and doing, Cal Newport was the first person that

Lex Fridman (1:47:22.780)

introduced me to the idea of deep work.

Rob Reid (1:47:24.740)

Just put a word to the kind of thinking that's required to sort of deeply think

Lex Fridman (1:47:30.460)

about a problem, especially if it's mathematical in nature.

Rob Reid (1:47:33.300)

I see that as a kind of meditation because what it's doing is you have

Lex Fridman (1:47:37.900)

these constructs in your mind that you're building on top of each other.

Lex Fridman (1:47:40.980)

And there's all these distracting thoughts that keep bombarding you

Lex Fridman (1:47:44.540)

from all over the place.

Lex Fridman (1:47:45.780)

And the whole process is you slowly let them kind of move past you.

Lex Fridman (1:47:50.060)

And that's a meditative process.

Rob Reid (1:47:51.300)

It's very meditative.

Lex Fridman (1:47:52.180)

That sounds a lot like what Sam talks about in his meditation app, which I did

Rob Reid (1:47:57.020)

use to be clear for a while, of just letting the thought go by without

Lex Fridman (1:48:01.860)

deranging you.

Rob Reid (1:48:02.460)

Derangement is one of Sam's favorite words, as I'm sure you know.

Lex Fridman (1:48:06.140)

But brown noise, that's really intriguing.

Rob Reid (1:48:08.460)

I am going to try that as soon as this evening.

Lex Fridman (1:48:11.540)

Yeah, to see if it works, but very well might not work at all.

Rob Reid (1:48:14.500)

Yeah, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:48:15.740)

I think the interesting point is, and the same with the fasting and the diet,

Rob Reid (1:48:20.060)

is I long ago stopped trusting experts or maybe taking the word of experts

Lex Fridman (1:48:29.460)

as the gospel truth and only using it as an inspiration to try something,

Rob Reid (1:48:37.180)

to try thoroughly something.

Lex Fridman (1:48:39.740)

So fasting was one of the things when I first discovered I've been many times

Rob Reid (1:48:44.700)

eating just once a day, so that's a 24 hour fast.

Lex Fridman (1:48:49.180)

It makes me feel amazing.

Lex Fridman (1:48:50.740)

And at the same time, eating only meat, putting ethical concerns aside,

Lex Fridman (1:48:56.420)

makes me feel amazing.

Rob Reid (1:48:57.820)

I don't know why it doesn't, the point is to be an N of one scientist

Lex Fridman (1:49:02.860)

until nutrition science becomes a real science to where it's doing like studies

Rob Reid (1:49:07.740)

that deeply understand the biology underlying all of it and also does real

Rob Reid (1:49:14.380)

thorough long term studies of thousands, if not millions of people versus a very

Rob Reid (1:49:23.460)

like small studies that are kind of generalizing from very noisy data and all

Lex Fridman (1:49:29.060)

those kinds of things where you can't control all the elements.

Rob Reid (1:49:32.260)

Particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly variant among us.

Lex Fridman (1:49:36.900)

So there are going to be some people like if brown noise is a game changer

Rob Reid (1:49:41.180)

for 7% of people, there's 93% odds that I'm not one of them,

Lex Fridman (1:49:46.820)

but there's certainly every reason in the world to test it out.

Rob Reid (1:49:49.900)

Now, so I'm intrigued by the fasting.

Lex Fridman (1:49:51.860)

I like you, well, I assume like you, I don't have any problem going to one meal

Rob Reid (1:49:56.380)

a day and I often do that inadvertently and I've never done it methodically.

Lex Fridman (1:50:00.740)

Like I've never done it like I'm going to do this for 15 days.

Rob Reid (1:50:03.620)

Maybe I should and maybe I should.

Lex Fridman (1:50:05.820)

Like how many, how many days in a row of the one day, one meal a day did you

Lex Fridman (1:50:09.900)

find brought noticeable impact to you?

Lex Fridman (1:50:13.460)

Was it after three days of it?

Lex Fridman (1:50:14.740)

Was it months of it?

Lex Fridman (1:50:15.740)

Like what was it?

Rob Reid (1:50:17.020)

Well, the noticeable impact is day one.

Lex Fridman (1:50:19.180)

So for me, folks, cause I eat a very low carb diet.

Lex Fridman (1:50:22.780)

So the hunger wasn't the hugest issue.

Lex Fridman (1:50:25.420)

Like there wasn't a painful hunger, like wanting to eat.

Lex Fridman (1:50:29.660)

So I was already kind of primed for it.

Lex Fridman (1:50:31.980)

And the benefit comes from a lot of people that do intermittent fasting.

Rob Reid (1:50:36.700)

That's only like 16 hours of fasting get this benefit too is the focus.

Lex Fridman (1:50:41.300)

There's a clarity of thought.

Rob Reid (1:50:43.140)

If my brain was a runner, it felt like I'm running on a track when

Lex Fridman (1:50:49.140)

I'm fasting versus running in quicksand, like it's much crisper.

Lex Fridman (1:50:53.300)

And is this your first 72 hour fast?

Lex Fridman (1:50:54.980)

This is the first time doing 72 hours.

Rob Reid (1:50:56.660)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:50:56.860)

And that's a different thing, but similar, like I'm going up and

Rob Reid (1:51:01.940)

down in terms of, in terms of hunger and the focus is really crisp.

Lex Fridman (1:51:06.500)

The thing I'm noticing most of all, to be honest, is how much eating, even

Rob Reid (1:51:12.980)

when it's once a day or twice a day is a big part of my life.

Lex Fridman (1:51:18.340)

Like I almost feel like I have way more time in my life and it's not so

Rob Reid (1:51:22.580)

much about the eating, but like, I don't have to plan my day around like

Lex Fridman (1:51:26.980)

today, I don't have any eating to do.

Rob Reid (1:51:30.420)

It does free up hours or any cleaning up after eating or provisioning the food.

Lex Fridman (1:51:35.140)

But like, or even like thinking about it's not a thing.

Rob Reid (1:51:38.500)

Like, so when you think about what you're going to do tonight, I think I'm

Lex Fridman (1:51:43.620)

realizing that as opposed to thinking, you know, I'm going to work on this

Rob Reid (1:51:47.060)

problem or I'm going to go on this walk, or I'm going to call this person.

Lex Fridman (1:51:51.380)

I often think I'm going to eat this thing.

Rob Reid (1:51:54.740)

You allow dinner as a kind of, you know, when people talk about like the

Lex Fridman (1:51:59.060)

weather or something like that, it's almost like a generic thought you

Rob Reid (1:52:02.020)

allow yourself to have because, because it's the lazy thought.

Lex Fridman (1:52:06.580)

And I don't have the opportunity to have that thought because I'm not eating it.

Lex Fridman (1:52:10.420)

So now I get to think about like the things I'm actually going to do tonight

Lex Fridman (1:52:13.620)

that are more complicated than the eating process.

Rob Reid (1:52:16.580)

That's, that's been the most noticeable thing to be honest.

Lex Fridman (1:52:20.180)

And then there's people that have written me that have done seven day fast.

Lex Fridman (1:52:24.980)

And there's a few people that have written me and I've heard of this is doing 30 day fasts.

Lex Fridman (1:52:31.300)

And it's interesting.

Rob Reid (1:52:32.580)

The body, I don't know what the health benefits are necessarily.

Lex Fridman (1:52:37.060)

What that shows me is how adaptable the human body is.

Rob Reid (1:52:41.860)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:52:42.500)

And, and that's incredible.

Lex Fridman (1:52:43.940)

And that's something really important to remember when we

Lex Fridman (1:52:47.700)

think about how to live life because the body adapts.

Rob Reid (1:52:50.500)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:52:50.740)

I mean, we sure couldn't go 30 days without water.

Rob Reid (1:52:53.220)

That's right.

Lex Fridman (1:52:54.340)

But food, yeah, it's been done.

Rob Reid (1:52:56.100)

It's demonstrably possible.

Lex Fridman (1:52:57.380)

You ever read Franz Kafka has a great short story called The Hunger Artist?

Rob Reid (1:53:01.860)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:53:02.100)

I love that.

Rob Reid (1:53:03.300)

Great story.

Lex Fridman (1:53:04.980)

You know, that was before I started fasting.

Rob Reid (1:53:06.580)

I read that story and I, I, I admired the beauty of that, the artistry of that actual

Rob Reid (1:53:11.220)

hunger artist that it's like madness, but it also felt like a little bit of genius.

Rob Reid (1:53:16.660)

I actually have to reread it.

Lex Fridman (1:53:18.100)

You know what?

Rob Reid (1:53:18.420)

That's what I'm going to do tonight.

Lex Fridman (1:53:19.380)

I'm going to read it because I'm doing the fast.

Rob Reid (1:53:21.620)

Because you're in the midst of it.

Lex Fridman (1:53:22.500)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (1:53:22.820)

Be very contextual.

Lex Fridman (1:53:23.780)

I haven't read it since high school and I love to read it again.

Rob Reid (1:53:25.780)

I love his work.

Lex Fridman (1:53:26.580)

So maybe I'll read it tonight too.

Lex Fridman (1:53:28.180)

And part of the reason of sort of I've here in Texas, people have been so friendly that

Rob Reid (1:53:34.180)

I've been nonstop eating like brisket with incredible people, a lot of whiskey as well.

Lex Fridman (1:53:39.940)

So I gained quite a bit of weight, which I'm embracing.

Lex Fridman (1:53:43.300)

It's okay.

Lex Fridman (1:53:44.340)

But I am also aware as I'm fasting that like I have a lot of fat for, for to, to run on.

Lex Fridman (1:53:52.260)

Like I have a lot of like natural resources on my body.

Rob Reid (1:53:57.300)

You've got reserves.

Lex Fridman (1:53:58.100)

Reserves.

Rob Reid (1:53:58.500)

You got reserves, yeah.

Lex Fridman (1:53:59.780)

And that's, that's really cool.

Rob Reid (1:54:01.220)

You know, there's like a re this whole thing, this biology works well.

Rob Reid (1:54:05.460)

Like I can go a long time because of the, the longterm investing in terms of brisket

Rob Reid (1:54:10.740)

that I've been doing in the weeks before.

Lex Fridman (1:54:12.500)

So it's all training.

Rob Reid (1:54:13.380)

It's all training.

Lex Fridman (1:54:14.100)

All prep work.

Rob Reid (1:54:14.580)

All prep work.

Lex Fridman (1:54:15.300)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (1:54:15.620)

So, okay.

Lex Fridman (1:54:16.100)

You open a bunch of doors, one of which is music.

Rob Reid (1:54:18.660)

I, so I got to walk in at least for a brief moment.

Lex Fridman (1:54:21.380)

I love guitar.

Rob Reid (1:54:22.180)

I love music.

Lex Fridman (1:54:23.380)

You founded a music company, but you're also a musician yourself.

Rob Reid (1:54:27.860)

You know, let me ask the big ridiculous question first.

Lex Fridman (1:54:30.260)

What's the greatest song of all time?

Rob Reid (1:54:32.180)

Greatest song of all time.

Lex Fridman (1:54:34.500)

Okay.

Rob Reid (1:54:34.820)

Wow.

Lex Fridman (1:54:35.140)

It's, it's going to obviously very dramatically from genre to genre.

Lex Fridman (1:54:39.140)

So like you, I like guitar, perhaps like you, although I've dabbled in, in inhaling

Lex Fridman (1:54:47.060)

every genre of music that I can almost practically imagine.

Rob Reid (1:54:51.220)

I keep coming back to, you know, the sound of bass, guitar, drum, keyboards, voice.

Lex Fridman (1:54:57.700)

I love that style of music and added to it.

Rob Reid (1:55:00.100)

I think a lot of really cool electronic production makes something that's really,

Lex Fridman (1:55:05.620)

really new and hybridy and awesome.

Rob Reid (1:55:08.900)

But, you know, and that kind of like guitar based rock I think I've got to go with

Lex Fridman (1:55:15.620)

won't get fooled again by the who.

Rob Reid (1:55:18.740)

It is such an epic song.

Lex Fridman (1:55:21.380)

It's got so much grandeur to it.

Rob Reid (1:55:23.860)

It uses the synthesizers that were available at the time.

Rob Reid (1:55:27.380)

This has got to be, I think, 1972, 73, which are very, very primitive to our ears,

Lex Fridman (1:55:31.940)

but uses them in this hypnotic and beautiful way that I can't imagine somebody with the

Rob Reid (1:55:38.340)

greatest synth array conceivable by today's technology could do a better job of in the

Rob Reid (1:55:43.700)

context of that song.

Lex Fridman (1:55:45.700)

And it's, you know, almost operatic.

Lex Fridman (1:55:49.140)

So I would say in that genre, the genre of, you know, rock that would be my nomination.

Lex Fridman (1:55:56.180)

I'm totally in my brain.

Rob Reid (1:55:58.740)

Pinball Wizard is overriding everything else, but it was so like, I can't even imagine the

Lex Fridman (1:56:04.100)

song.

Rob Reid (1:56:04.500)

Well, I would say, ironically, with Pinball Wizard.

Lex Fridman (1:56:07.380)

So that came from the movie Tommy.

Lex Fridman (1:56:09.700)

And in the movie, Tommy, the rival of Tommy, the reigning pinball champ was Elton John.

Lex Fridman (1:56:17.380)

And so there are a couple of versions of Pinball Wizard out there.

Rob Reid (1:56:20.500)

One sung by Roger Daltrey of The Who, which a purist would say, hey, that's the real

Lex Fridman (1:56:24.420)

pinball wizard.

Lex Fridman (1:56:25.540)

But the version that is sung by Elton John in the movie, which is available to those

Lex Fridman (1:56:30.740)

who are ambitious and want to dig for it, that's even better in my mind.

Rob Reid (1:56:35.140)

Yeah, the covers.

Lex Fridman (1:56:36.100)

And I, for myself, I was thinking, what is the song for me?

Rob Reid (1:56:40.820)

They answered that question.

Lex Fridman (1:56:42.900)

I think that changes day to day, too.

Rob Reid (1:56:45.860)

I was realizing that.

Rob Reid (1:56:46.740)

Of course, but for me, somebody who values lyrics as well and the emotion in the song.

Rob Reid (1:56:57.060)

By the way, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen was a close one.

Lex Fridman (1:56:59.940)

But the number one is Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt that is, there's something so powerful

Rob Reid (1:57:10.900)

about that song, about that cover, about that performance.

Lex Fridman (1:57:15.140)

Maybe another one is the cover of Sound of Silence.

Rob Reid (1:57:19.220)

Maybe there's something about covers for me.

Lex Fridman (1:57:21.700)

So whose cover sounds?

Lex Fridman (1:57:22.980)

Because Simon and Garfunkel, I think, did the original recording of that, right?

Lex Fridman (1:57:26.180)

So which cover is it that?

Rob Reid (1:57:28.020)

There's a cover by Disturbed.

Rob Reid (1:57:31.540)

It's a metal band, which is so interesting because I'm really not into that kind of metal.

Lex Fridman (1:57:35.940)

But he does a pure vocal performance.

Lex Fridman (1:57:38.420)

So he's not doing a metal performance.

Rob Reid (1:57:41.220)

I would say it's one of the greatest people should see it.

Lex Fridman (1:57:44.100)

It's like 400 million views or something like that.

Rob Reid (1:57:48.740)

It's probably the greatest live vocal performance I've ever heard is Disturbed covering Sound

Lex Fridman (1:57:54.900)

of Silence.

Rob Reid (1:57:55.460)

I'll listen to it as soon as I get home.

Lex Fridman (1:57:56.980)

And that song came to life to me in a way that Simon and Garfunkel never did.

Rob Reid (1:58:01.300)

For me with Simon and Garfunkel, there's not a pain, there's not an anger, there's not

Lex Fridman (1:58:09.940)

power to their performance.

Rob Reid (1:58:11.700)

It's almost like this melancholy, I don't know.

Lex Fridman (1:58:15.140)

Well, I guess there's a lot of beauty to it, objectively beautiful.

Rob Reid (1:58:21.460)

I think, I never thought of this until now, but I think if you put entirely different

Rob Reid (1:58:26.340)

lyrics on top of it, unless they were joyous, which would be weird, it wouldn't necessarily

Rob Reid (1:58:32.020)

lose that much.

Lex Fridman (1:58:32.980)

There's just a beauty in the harmonizing.

Rob Reid (1:58:35.460)

It's soft and you're right.

Lex Fridman (1:58:36.580)

It's not dripping with emotion.

Rob Reid (1:58:40.500)

The vocal performance is not dripping with emotion, it's dripping with technical harmonizing

Lex Fridman (1:58:48.100)

brilliance and beauty.

Rob Reid (1:58:50.340)

Now, if you compare that to the Disturbed cover or the Johnny Cash's Hurt cover, when

Lex Fridman (1:58:56.020)

you walk away, it's haunting.

Rob Reid (1:59:01.140)

It stays with you for a long time.

Rob Reid (1:59:02.500)

There's certain performances that will just stay with you to where, like if you watch

Rob Reid (1:59:11.540)

people respond to that, and that's certainly how I felt when you listen to that, the Disturbed

Rob Reid (1:59:15.700)

performance or Johnny Cash Hurt, there's a response to where you just sit there with

Rob Reid (1:59:20.820)

your mouth open, kind of like paralyzed by it somehow.

Lex Fridman (1:59:26.260)

And I think that's what makes for a great song to where you're just like, it's not

Rob Reid (1:59:31.300)

that you're like singing along or having fun, that's another way a song could be great,

Lex Fridman (1:59:36.500)

but where you're just like, you're in awe.

Rob Reid (1:59:41.940)

If we go to listen.com and that whole fascinating era of music in the 90s, transitioning to

Rob Reid (1:59:50.180)

the aughts, I remember those days, the Napster days, when piracy, from my perspective, allegedly

Rob Reid (1:59:58.500)

ruled the land.

Lex Fridman (20:02.720)

now and then how rapidly those breakthroughs accelerate.

Lex Fridman (20:05.600)

But in the near term that I'm comfortable predicting, let's say 30 years, I would say

Lex Fridman (20:10.520)

the most likely route to self destruction would be synthetic biology.

Lex Fridman (20:16.600)

And I always say that with the gigantic caveat and very important one that I find, and I'll

Lex Fridman (20:22.320)

abbreviate synthetic biology to SynBio just to save us some syllables.

Rob Reid (20:25.880)

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

Lex Fridman (20:34.320)

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

Rob Reid (20:37.160)

I mean, SynBio has unbelievable odds of helping us beat cancer, helping us rescue the environment,

Lex Fridman (20:43.520)

helping us do things that we would currently find imponderable.

Lex Fridman (20:46.280)

So it's electrifying the field.

Lex Fridman (20:48.520)

But in the wrong hands, those hands either being incompetent or being malevolent.

Rob Reid (20:54.920)

In the wrong hands, synthetic biology to me has a much, much greater odds of leading to

Rob Reid (21:03.000)

our self destruction than something running amok with super AI, which I believe is a real

Rob Reid (21:08.100)

possibility and one we need to be concerned about.

Lex Fridman (21:10.400)

But in the 30 year time frame, I think it's a lesser one or nuclear weapons or anything

Rob Reid (21:14.960)

else that I can think of.

Lex Fridman (21:16.840)

Can you explain that a little bit further?

Lex Fridman (21:18.520)

So your concern is on the manmade versus the natural side of the pandemic frontier.

Lex Fridman (21:26.220)

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

Lex Fridman (21:34.120)

And maybe how do you see the possible trajectories happening here in terms of, is it malevolent

Rob Reid (21:41.400)

or is it accidents, oops, little mistakes or unintended consequences of particular actions

Lex Fridman (21:51.440)

that are ultimately lead to unexpected mistakes?

Lex Fridman (21:53.760)

Well, both of them are a danger.

Lex Fridman (21:55.800)

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

Rob Reid (22:00.920)

One, do we take a lot of methodical, affordable, foresighted steps that we are absolutely capable

Rob Reid (22:08.720)

of taking right now to forestall the risk of a bad actor infecting us with something

Lex Fridman (22:14.560)

that could have annihilating impacts?

Lex Fridman (22:17.200)

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

Lex Fridman (22:22.540)

So do we take those steps?

Lex Fridman (22:24.160)

And if we take those steps, I think the danger of malevolent rogue actors doing us in with

Lex Fridman (22:29.380)

Sin Bio couldn't plummet.

Lex Fridman (22:31.840)

But you know, it's always a question of if and we have a bad, bad and very long track

Rob Reid (22:36.200)

record of hitting the snooze bar after different natural pandemics have attacked us.

Lex Fridman (22:41.460)

So that's variable number one.

Rob Reid (22:43.800)

Variable number two is how much experimentation and pathogen development do we as a society

Lex Fridman (22:51.980)

decide is acceptable in the realms of academia, government or private industry?

Lex Fridman (22:59.160)

And if we decide as a society that it's perfectly okay for people with varying research agendas

Rob Reid (23:06.160)

to create pathogens that if released could wipe out humanity, if we think that's fine

Lex Fridman (23:12.400)

and if that kind of work starts happening in one lab, five labs, 50 labs, 500 labs in

Rob Reid (23:19.140)

one country, then 10 countries, then 70 countries or whatever, that risk of a boo boo starts

Lex Fridman (23:26.360)

rising astronomically.

Lex Fridman (23:28.680)

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

Lex Fridman (23:33.400)

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

Rob Reid (23:37.580)

The easier one to manage, although it wouldn't be simple by any stretch because it would

Lex Fridman (23:42.240)

have to be something that all nations agree on.

Lex Fridman (23:45.160)

But the easiest way, the easier risk to manage is that of, hey guys, let's not develop pathogens

Lex Fridman (23:52.380)

that if they escaped from a lab could annihilate us.

Rob Reid (23:56.280)

There's no line of research that justifies that.

Lex Fridman (23:58.720)

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

Rob Reid (24:02.000)

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

Rob Reid (24:06.160)

The reason why I believe that would be a highly rational conclusion is even the highest level

Rob Reid (24:11.240)

of biosafety lab in the world, biosafety lab level four.

Lex Fridman (24:15.680)

And there are not a lot of BSL four labs in the world.

Rob Reid (24:18.400)

There are things can and have leaked out of BSL four labs and some of the work that's

Rob Reid (24:25.500)

been done with potentially annihilating pathogens, which we can talk about, it's actually done

Rob Reid (24:30.300)

at BSL three.

Lex Fridman (24:32.000)

And so fundamentally any lab can leak.

Rob Reid (24:36.480)

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

Lex Fridman (24:41.320)

to leaks.

Lex Fridman (24:42.560)

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

Lex Fridman (24:47.740)

us all.

Lex Fridman (24:48.740)

And by the way, almost all of the measures that are taken in biosafety level anything

Lex Fridman (24:53.160)

labs are designed to prevent accidental leaks.

Lex Fridman (24:57.280)

What happens if you have a malevolent insider?

Rob Reid (24:59.740)

We could talk about the psychology and the motivations of what would make a malevolent

Rob Reid (25:03.900)

insider who wants to release something and not annihilating in a bit.

Lex Fridman (25:07.480)

I'm sure that we will.

Lex Fridman (25:08.840)

But what if you have a malevolent insider?

Rob Reid (25:11.980)

Virtually none of the standards that go into biosafety level one, two, three, and four

Rob Reid (25:17.360)

are about preventing somebody hijacking the process.

Lex Fridman (25:20.480)

Some of them are, but they're mainly designed against accidents.

Rob Reid (25:23.600)

They're imperfect against accidents.

Lex Fridman (25:25.740)

And if this kind of work starts happening in lots and lots of labs with every lab you

Rob Reid (25:29.280)

add, the odds of there being a malevolent inside are naturally increased arithmetically

Lex Fridman (25:34.040)

as the number of labs goes up.

Rob Reid (25:36.100)

Now on the front of somebody outside of a government academic or scientific, traditional

Rob Reid (25:44.360)

government, academic, scientific environment creating something malevolent, again, there's

Rob Reid (25:50.620)

protections that we can take both at the level of syn bio architecture, hardening the entire

Rob Reid (25:57.840)

syn bio ecosystem against terrible things being made that we don't want to have out

Rob Reid (26:03.880)

there by rogue actors, to early detection, to lots and lots of other things that we can

Lex Fridman (26:09.200)

do to dramatically mitigate that risk.

Lex Fridman (26:11.680)

And I think we do both of those things, decide that no, we're not going to experimentally

Rob Reid (26:16.240)

make annihilating pathogens in leaky labs, and B, yes, we are going to take countermeasures

Rob Reid (26:22.520)

that are going to cost a fraction of our annual defense budget to preclude their creation,

Lex Fridman (26:28.760)

then I think both risks get managed down.

Lex Fridman (26:31.780)

But if you take one set of precautions and not the other, then the thing that you have

Lex Fridman (26:36.480)

not taken precautions against immediately becomes the more likely outcome.

Lex Fridman (26:41.000)

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

Lex Fridman (26:45.720)

positives and negatives of it?

Lex Fridman (26:47.240)

So if we look at gain of function research and the kind of stuff that's happening in

Lex Fridman (26:52.560)

level three and level four BSL labs, what's the whole idea here?

Lex Fridman (26:56.640)

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

Lex Fridman (27:01.580)

You want to understand the dangerous ones.

Rob Reid (27:03.520)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (27:04.520)

So that would be the logic behind doing it.

Lex Fridman (27:06.640)

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

Rob Reid (27:10.560)

Viewed through a certain lens, gain of function research could be what you do when you create,

Rob Reid (27:15.480)

you know, GMOs, when you create, you know, hearty strains of corn that are resistant

Lex Fridman (27:20.600)

to pesticides.

Rob Reid (27:21.600)

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

Lex Fridman (27:23.400)

So I'm going to refer to gain of function in a relatively narrow sense, which is actually

Rob Reid (27:26.960)

the sense that the term is usually used, which is in some way magnifying capabilities of

Rob Reid (27:34.400)

microorganisms to make them more dangerous, whether it's more transmissible or more deadly.

Lex Fridman (27:40.720)

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

Lex Fridman (27:46.380)

and it's also very chilling.

Rob Reid (27:48.400)

Back in 2011, two separate labs independently of one another, I assume there was some kind

Rob Reid (27:54.120)

of communication between them, but they were basically independent projects, one in Holland

Lex Fridman (27:57.700)

and one in Wisconsin, did gain of function research on something called H5N1 flu.

Rob Reid (28:04.200)

H5N1 is, you know, something that, at least on a lethality basis, makes COVID look like

Rob Reid (28:11.480)

a kitten.

Rob Reid (28:12.480)

You know, COVID, according to the World Health Organization, has a case fatality rate somewhere

Rob Reid (28:15.640)

between half a percent and one percent, H5N1 is closer to 60 percent, six zero.

Lex Fridman (28:21.480)

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

Rob Reid (28:24.320)

It's a very, very, very scary pathogen.

Lex Fridman (28:27.560)

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

Lex Fridman (28:33.180)

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

Rob Reid (28:36.320)

It requires, you know, very, very, very deep contact with birds, in most cases chickens.

Lex Fridman (28:44.940)

And so if you're a chicken farmer and you spend an enormous amount of time around them

Lex Fridman (28:49.240)

and perhaps you get into situations in which you get a break in your skin and you're interacting

Rob Reid (28:54.960)

intensely with fowl who, as it turns out, have H5N1, that's when the jump comes.

Lex Fridman (29:01.960)

But it's not, there's no airborne transmission that we're aware of human to human.

Rob Reid (29:05.480)

I mean, not that it just doesn't exist.

Rob Reid (29:08.480)

I think the World Health Organization did a relentless survey of the number of H5N1

Rob Reid (29:14.520)

cases.

Lex Fridman (29:15.520)

I think they do it every year.

Rob Reid (29:16.520)

I saw one 10 year series where I think it was like 500 fatalities over the course of

Lex Fridman (29:22.160)

a decade.

Lex Fridman (29:23.160)

And that's a drop in the bucket.

Rob Reid (29:24.160)

Kind of fun, fun fact, I believe the typical lethality from lightning over 10 years is

Rob Reid (29:30.720)

70,000 deaths.

Lex Fridman (29:31.920)

So we think getting struck by lightning, pretty low risk, H5N1 much, much lower than that.

Lex Fridman (29:37.200)

What happened in these experiments is the experimenters in both cases set out to make

Lex Fridman (29:43.560)

H5N1 that would be contagious, that could create airborne transmission.

Lex Fridman (29:48.400)

And so they basically passed it, I think in both cases, they passed it through a large

Lex Fridman (29:52.980)

number of ferrets.

Lex Fridman (29:54.740)

And so this wasn't like CRISPR, there wasn't even any CRISPR back in those days.

Lex Fridman (29:58.220)

This was relatively straightforward, selecting for a particular outcome.

Lex Fridman (2:00:01.540)

What do you make of that whole era?

Lex Fridman (2:00:03.780)

What are the big, what was, first of all, your experiences of that era and what were

Rob Reid (2:00:08.420)

the big takeaways in terms of piracy, in terms of what it takes to build a company that succeeds

Lex Fridman (2:00:15.140)

in that kind of digital space, in terms of music, but in terms of anything creative?

Rob Reid (2:00:22.020)

Well, so for those who don't remember, which is going to be most folks, listen.com created

Rob Reid (2:00:27.460)

a service called Rhapsody, which is much, much more recognizable to folks because Rhapsody

Rob Reid (2:00:31.700)

became a pretty big name for reasons that I'll get into in a second.

Lex Fridman (2:00:34.180)

So for people who don't know their early online music history, we were the first company,

Lex Fridman (2:00:39.940)

so I founded, listen, I was a loan founder, and Rhapsody, we were the first service to

Rob Reid (2:00:46.260)

get full catalog licenses from all the major music labels in order to distribute their

Rob Reid (2:00:51.860)

music online, and we specifically did it through a mechanism which at the time struck people

Rob Reid (2:00:56.420)

as exotic and bizarre and kind of incomprehensible, which was unlimited on demand streaming, which

Rob Reid (2:01:01.780)

of course now it's a model that's been appropriated by Spotify and Apple and many, many others.

Lex Fridman (2:01:08.180)

So we were a pioneer on that front.

Lex Fridman (2:01:10.180)

What was really, really, really hard about doing business in those days was the reaction

Rob Reid (2:01:16.100)

of the music labels to piracy, which was about 180 degrees opposite of what the reaction

Rob Reid (2:01:22.020)

quote unquote should have been from the standpoint of preserving their business from piracy.

Lex Fridman (2:01:26.820)

So Napster came along and was a service that enabled people to get near unlimited access

Rob Reid (2:01:35.940)

to most songs.

Rob Reid (2:01:38.420)

I mean, truly obscure things could be very hard to find on Napster, but most songs with

Rob Reid (2:01:43.300)

a relatively simple one click ability to download those songs and have the MP3s on their hard

Lex Fridman (2:01:50.580)

drives, but there was a lot that was very messy about the Napster experience.

Rob Reid (2:01:55.380)

You might download a really god awful recording of that song.

Rob Reid (2:01:59.540)

You may download a recording that actually wasn't that song with some prankster putting

Rob Reid (2:02:04.180)

it up to sort of mess with people.

Lex Fridman (2:02:06.660)

You could struggle to find the song that you're looking for.

Rob Reid (2:02:09.140)

You could end up finding yourself connected, it was peer to peer.

Rob Reid (2:02:13.060)

You might randomly find yourself connected to somebody in Bulgaria, doesn't have a very

Rob Reid (2:02:17.300)

good internet connection.

Lex Fridman (2:02:18.340)

So you might wait 19 minutes only for it to snap, et cetera, et cetera.

Lex Fridman (2:02:23.140)

And our argument to, well, actually let's start with how that hit the music labels.

Rob Reid (2:02:27.700)

The music labels had been in a very, very comfortable position for many, many decades

Rob Reid (2:02:32.900)

of essentially being the monopoly providers of a certain subset of artists.

Rob Reid (2:02:41.940)

Any given label was a monopoly provider of the artists and the recordings that they owned

Lex Fridman (2:02:46.740)

and they could sell it at what turned out to be tremendously favorable rates.

Rob Reid (2:02:51.540)

In the late era of the CD, you were talking close to $20 for a compact disc that might

Rob Reid (2:02:57.860)

have one song that you were crazy about and simply needed to own that might actually be

Lex Fridman (2:03:02.580)

glued to 17 other songs that you found to be sure crap.

Lex Fridman (2:03:05.940)

And so the music industry had used the fact that it had this unbelievable leverage and

Rob Reid (2:03:13.860)

profound pricing power to really get music lovers to the point that they felt very, very

Rob Reid (2:03:20.340)

misused by the entire situation.

Rob Reid (2:03:22.500)

Now along comes Napster and music sales start getting gutted with extreme rapidity.

Lex Fridman (2:03:29.380)

And the reaction of the music industry to that was one of shock and absolute fury, which

Lex Fridman (2:03:37.460)

is understandable.

Rob Reid (2:03:38.420)

I mean, industries do get gutted all the time, but I struggle to think of an analog of an

Lex Fridman (2:03:43.620)

industry that got gutted that rapidly.

Rob Reid (2:03:46.340)

I mean, we could say that passenger train service certainly got gutted by airlines,

Lex Fridman (2:03:51.220)

but that was a process that took place over decades and decades and decades.

Rob Reid (2:03:54.900)

It wasn't something that happened, really started showing up in the numbers in a single

Rob Reid (2:03:59.300)

digit number of months and started looking like an existential threat within a year or

Rob Reid (2:04:04.020)

two.

Lex Fridman (2:04:04.580)

So the music industry is quite understandably in a state of shock and fury.

Rob Reid (2:04:10.020)

I don't blame them for that.

Lex Fridman (2:04:11.780)

But then their reaction was catastrophic, both for themselves and almost for people

Rob Reid (2:04:18.020)

like us who were trying to do the cowboy in the white hat thing.

Lex Fridman (2:04:23.140)

So our response to the music industry was, look, what you need to do to fight piracy,

Rob Reid (2:04:28.260)

you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

Lex Fridman (2:04:30.180)

You can't switch off the internet.

Rob Reid (2:04:32.500)

Even if you all shut your eyes and wish very, very, very hard, the internet is not going

Lex Fridman (2:04:37.300)

away.

Lex Fridman (2:04:38.100)

And these peer to peer technologies are genies out of the bottle.

Lex Fridman (2:04:40.900)

And if you don't, whatever you do, don't shut down Napster because if you do, suddenly

Rob Reid (2:04:47.300)

that technology is going to splinter into 30 different nodes that you'll never, ever

Lex Fridman (2:04:51.220)

be able to shut off.

Rob Reid (2:04:52.180)

We suggested to them is like, look, what you want to do is to create a massively better

Rob Reid (2:04:59.140)

experience to piracy, something that's way better, that you sell at a completely reasonable

Rob Reid (2:05:04.260)

price.

Lex Fridman (2:05:04.980)

And this is what it is.

Rob Reid (2:05:06.420)

Don't just give people access to that very limited number of songs that they happen to

Lex Fridman (2:05:10.580)

have acquired and paid for or pirated and have on their hard drive.

Rob Reid (2:05:15.780)

Give them access to all of the music in the world for a simple low price.

Lex Fridman (2:05:19.460)

And obviously, that doesn't sound like a crazy suggestion, I don't think, to anybody's

Rob Reid (2:05:22.980)

ears today because that is how the majority of music is now being consumed online.

Lex Fridman (2:05:26.820)

But in doing that, you're going to create a much, much better option to this kind of

Rob Reid (2:05:32.660)

crappy, kind of rickety, kind of buggy process of acquiring MP3s.

Rob Reid (2:05:37.700)

Now, unfortunately, the music industry was so angry about Napster and so forth that for

Rob Reid (2:05:44.100)

essentially three and a half years, they folded their arms, stamped their feet, and boycotted

Lex Fridman (2:05:48.900)

the internet.

Lex Fridman (2:05:49.780)

So they basically gave people who were fervently passionate about music and were digitally

Lex Fridman (2:05:54.660)

modern, they gave them basically one choice.

Rob Reid (2:05:57.460)

If you want to have access to digital music, we, the music industry, insist that you steal

Lex Fridman (2:06:01.780)

it because we are not going to sell it to you.

Lex Fridman (2:06:04.420)

So what that did is it made an entire generation of people morally comfortable with swiping

Rob Reid (2:06:10.340)

the music because they felt quite pragmatically, well, they're not giving me any choice here.

Rob Reid (2:06:14.180)

It's like a 20 year old violating the 21 drinking age.

Lex Fridman (2:06:18.740)

If they do that, they're not going to feel like felons.

Lex Fridman (2:06:21.860)

They're going to be like, this is an unreasonable law and I'm skirting it, right?

Lex Fridman (2:06:25.060)

So they make a whole generation of people morally comfortable with swiping music, but

Rob Reid (2:06:29.700)

also technically adept at it.

Lex Fridman (2:06:32.180)

And when they did shut down Napster and kind of even trickier tools and like tweakier tools

Rob Reid (2:06:37.140)

like Kazaa and so forth came along, people just figured out how to do it.

Lex Fridman (2:06:41.540)

So by the time they finally, grudgingly, it took years, allowed us to release this experience

Rob Reid (2:06:48.660)

that we were quite convinced would be better than piracy, we had this enormous hole had

Rob Reid (2:06:53.780)

been dug where lots of people said, music is a thing that is free and that's morally

Rob Reid (2:06:59.620)

okay and I know how to get it.

Lex Fridman (2:07:01.700)

And so streaming took many, many, many more years to take off and become the gargantuan

Rob Reid (2:07:08.660)

thing the juggernaut is today than would have happened if they'd made, pivoted to let's

Rob Reid (2:07:14.820)

sell a better experience as opposed to demand that people want digital music, steal it.

Lex Fridman (2:07:19.700)

Like what lessons do we draw from that?

Rob Reid (2:07:21.460)

Cause we're probably in the midst of living through a bunch of similar situations in different

Rob Reid (2:07:26.660)

domains currently.

Lex Fridman (2:07:27.460)

We just don't know.

Rob Reid (2:07:28.100)

There's a lot of things in this world that are really painful.

Rob Reid (2:07:31.220)

Like, I mean, I don't know if you can draw perfect parallels, but fiat money versus cryptocurrency,

Rob Reid (2:07:37.220)

there's a lot of currently people in power who are kind of very skeptical about cryptocurrency,

Lex Fridman (2:07:42.420)

although that's changing.

Lex Fridman (2:07:43.780)

But it's arguable it's changing way too slowly.

Rob Reid (2:07:45.860)

There's a lot of people making that argument where there should be a complete like Coinbase

Lex Fridman (2:07:49.780)

and all this stuff switched to that.

Rob Reid (2:07:52.660)

There's a lot of other domains that where a pivot, like if you pivot now, you're going

Rob Reid (2:08:00.260)

to win big, but you don't pivot because you're stubborn.

Lex Fridman (2:08:05.380)

And it's so, I mean, like, is this just the way that companies are?

Rob Reid (2:08:09.380)

A company succeeds initially and then it grows and there's a huge number of employees and

Rob Reid (2:08:15.300)

managers that don't have the guts or the institutional mechanisms to do the pivot.

Lex Fridman (2:08:21.540)

Is that just the way of companies?

Lex Fridman (2:08:23.460)

Well, I think what happens, I'll use the case of the music industry.

Rob Reid (2:08:27.060)

There was an economic model that had put food on the table and paid for marble lobbies and

Rob Reid (2:08:32.580)

seven and even eight figure executive salaries for many, many decades, which was the physical

Rob Reid (2:08:37.140)

collection of music.

Lex Fridman (2:08:38.580)

And then you start talking about something like unlimited streaming and it seems so ephemeral

Lex Fridman (2:08:44.820)

and like such a long shot that people start worrying about cannibalizing their own business

Lex Fridman (2:08:50.020)

and they lose sight of the fact that something illicit is cannibalizing their business at

Rob Reid (2:08:54.500)

an extraordinarily fast rate.

Lex Fridman (2:08:56.020)

And so if they don't do it themselves, they're doomed.

Rob Reid (2:08:58.500)

I mean, we used to put slides in front of these folks, this is really funny, where we

Rob Reid (2:09:02.660)

said, okay, let's assume Rhapsody, we want it to be 9.99 a month and we want it to be

Rob Reid (2:09:08.180)

12 months, so it's $120 a year from the budget of a music lover.

Lex Fridman (2:09:13.700)

And then we were also able to get reasonably accurate statistics that showed how many CDs

Rob Reid (2:09:18.340)

per year the average person who bothered to collect music, which was not all people, actually

Lex Fridman (2:09:23.380)

bought.

Lex Fridman (2:09:24.180)

And it was overwhelmingly clear that the average CD buyer spends a hell of a lot less than

Lex Fridman (2:09:29.620)

$120 a year on music.

Rob Reid (2:09:32.820)

This is a revenue expansion, blah, blah, blah.

Lex Fridman (2:09:35.220)

But all they could think of, and I'm not saying this in a pejorative or patronizing way, I

Rob Reid (2:09:40.820)

don't blame them, they've grown up in this environment for decades, all they could think

Lex Fridman (2:09:44.500)

of was the incredible margins that they had on a CD.

Lex Fridman (2:09:48.340)

And they would say, well, if this CD, by the mechanism that you guys are proposing, the

Lex Fridman (2:09:55.060)

CD that I'm selling for $17.99, somebody would need to stream those songs.

Rob Reid (2:10:00.980)

We were talking about a penny of playback then, it's less than that now that the record

Lex Fridman (2:10:04.100)

labels get paid.

Lex Fridman (2:10:05.380)

But would have to stream songs from that 1,799 times, it's never gonna happen.

Lex Fridman (2:10:10.500)

So they were just sort of stuck in the model of this, but it's like, no, dude, but they're

Rob Reid (2:10:13.700)

gonna spend money on all this other stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:10:15.140)

So I think people get very hung up on that.

Rob Reid (2:10:17.060)

I mean, another example is really the taxi industry was not monolithic, like the music

Lex Fridman (2:10:22.500)

labels.

Rob Reid (2:10:23.060)

There was a whole bunch of fleets and a whole bunch of cities, very, very fragmented, it's

Lex Fridman (2:10:26.100)

an imperfect analogy.

Lex Fridman (2:10:27.140)

But nonetheless, imagine if the taxi industry writ large upon seeing Uber said, oh my God,

Rob Reid (2:10:34.020)

people wanna be able to hail things easily, cheaply, they don't wanna mess with cash,

Rob Reid (2:10:39.220)

they wanna know how many minutes it's gonna be, they wanna know the fare in advance, and

Lex Fridman (2:10:43.060)

they want a much bigger fleet than what we've got.

Rob Reid (2:10:46.340)

If the taxi industry had rolled out something like that with the branding of yellow taxis,

Rob Reid (2:10:52.740)

universally known and kind of loved by Americans and expanded their fleet in a necessary manner,

Rob Reid (2:10:58.660)

I don't think Uber or Lyft ever would have gotten a foothold.

Lex Fridman (2:11:01.940)

But the problem there was that real economics in the taxi industry wasn't with fares, it

Rob Reid (2:11:08.020)

was with the scarcity of medallions.

Lex Fridman (2:11:10.660)

And so the taxi fleets, in many cases, owned gazillions of medallions whose value came

Rob Reid (2:11:16.740)

from their very scarcity.

Lex Fridman (2:11:18.500)

So they simply couldn't pivot to that.

Lex Fridman (2:11:21.060)

So I think you end up having these vested interests with economics that aren't necessarily

Rob Reid (2:11:25.860)

visible to outsiders who get very, very reluctant to disrupt their own model, which is why it

Rob Reid (2:11:32.020)

ends up coming from the outside so frequently.

Lex Fridman (2:11:34.660)

So you know what it takes to build a successful startup, but you're also an investor in a

Rob Reid (2:11:39.220)

lot of successful startups.

Lex Fridman (2:11:41.140)

Let me ask for advice.

Lex Fridman (2:11:43.860)

What do you think it takes to build a successful startup by way of advice?

Lex Fridman (2:11:48.180)

JS Well, I think it starts, I mean, everything

Rob Reid (2:11:51.620)

starts and even ends with the founder.

Lex Fridman (2:11:54.500)

And so I think it's really, really important to look at the founder's motivations and their

Rob Reid (2:11:59.620)

sophistication about what they're doing.

Rob Reid (2:12:02.660)

In almost all cases that I'm familiar with and have thought hard about, you've had a

Rob Reid (2:12:08.180)

founder who was deeply, deeply inculcated in the domain of technology that they were

Lex Fridman (2:12:15.300)

taking on.

Rob Reid (2:12:16.420)

Now, what's interesting about that is you could say, no, wait, how is that possible

Lex Fridman (2:12:20.100)

because there's so many young founders?

Rob Reid (2:12:21.540)

When you look at young founders, they're generally coming out of very nascent emerging

Rob Reid (2:12:26.100)

fields of technology where simply being present and accounted for and engaged in the community

Rob Reid (2:12:31.860)

for a period of even months is enough time to make them very, very deeply inculcated.

Lex Fridman (2:12:36.820)

I mean, you look at Marc Andreessen and Netscape.

Rob Reid (2:12:41.140)

Marc had been doing visual web browsers when Netscape had been founded for what, a year

Lex Fridman (2:12:45.300)

and a half, but he'd created the first one in Mosaic when he was an undergrad.

Lex Fridman (2:12:51.380)

And the commercial internet was pre nascent in 1994 when Netscape was founded.

Lex Fridman (2:12:58.340)

So there's somebody who's very, very deep in their domain.

Rob Reid (2:13:00.580)

Mark Zuckerberg also, social networking, very deep in his domain, even though it was

Lex Fridman (2:13:04.340)

nascent at the time.

Rob Reid (2:13:05.860)

Lots of people doing crypto stuff.

Rob Reid (2:13:07.460)

I mean, 10 years ago, even seven or eight years ago, by being a really, really vehement

Lex Fridman (2:13:14.820)

and engaged participant in the crypto ecosystem, you could be an expert in that.

Lex Fridman (2:13:19.700)

You look, however, at more established industries, take Salesforce.com.

Rob Reid (2:13:23.620)

Salesforce automation, pretty mature field when it got started.

Lex Fridman (2:13:26.660)

Who's the executive and the founder?

Rob Reid (2:13:28.820)

Marc Benioff, who has spent 13 years at Oracle and was an investor in Siebel Systems, which

Lex Fridman (2:13:34.020)

ended up being Salesforce's main competition.

Lex Fridman (2:13:36.580)

So more established, you need the entrepreneur to be very, very deep in the technology and

Rob Reid (2:13:43.620)

the culture of the space because you need that entrepreneur, that founder to have just

Rob Reid (2:13:50.500)

an unbelievably accurate intuitive sense for where the puck is going.

Lex Fridman (2:13:56.420)

And that only comes from being very deep.

Lex Fridman (2:13:58.980)

So that is sort of factor number one.

Lex Fridman (2:14:01.220)

And the next thing is that that founder needs to be charismatic and or credible, or ideally

Rob Reid (2:14:08.260)

both in exactly the right ways to be able to attract a team that is bought into that

Rob Reid (2:14:14.340)

vision and is bought into that founder's intuitions being correct and not just the team,

Rob Reid (2:14:19.220)

obviously, but also the investors.

Lex Fridman (2:14:21.380)

So it takes a certain personality type to pull that off.

Rob Reid (2:14:25.540)

Then the next thing I'm still talking about the founder is a relentlessness and indeed

Rob Reid (2:14:31.540)

a monomania to put this above things that might rationally, should perhaps rationally

Rob Reid (2:14:39.540)

supersede it for a period of time to just relentlessly pivot when pivoting is called

Lex Fridman (2:14:46.500)

for and it's always called for.

Lex Fridman (2:14:48.020)

I mean, think of even very successful companies like how many times did Facebook pivot?

Rob Reid (2:14:53.940)

Newsfeed was something that was completely alien to the original version of Facebook

Lex Fridman (2:14:58.180)

and came foundationally important.

Lex Fridman (2:15:00.020)

How many times did Google, how many times at any given, how many times has Apple pivoted?

Rob Reid (2:15:04.820)

That founder energy and DNA when the founder moves on the DNA that's been inculcated

Rob Reid (2:15:09.220)

with a company has to have that relentlessness and that ability to pivot and pivot and pivot

Rob Reid (2:15:15.220)

without being worried about sacred cows.

Lex Fridman (2:15:18.100)

And then the last thing I'll say about the founder before I get to the rest of the team

Lex Fridman (2:15:21.300)

and that'll be mercifully brief is the founder has to be obviously a really great

Lex Fridman (2:15:28.100)

hirer but just important a very good firer.

Lex Fridman (2:15:32.820)

And firing is a horrific experience for both people involved in it.

Lex Fridman (2:15:37.860)

It is a wrenching emotional experience.

Lex Fridman (2:15:40.660)

And being good at realizing when this particular person is damaging the interests of the company

Lex Fridman (2:15:49.060)

and the team and the shareholders and having the intestinal fortitude to have that conversation

Lex Fridman (2:15:56.660)

and make it happen is something that most people don't have in them.

Lex Fridman (2:16:01.620)

And it's something that needs to be developed in most people or maybe some people have it

Rob Reid (2:16:07.300)

naturally.

Lex Fridman (2:16:08.340)

But without that ability, that will take an A plus organization into B minus range very,

Rob Reid (2:16:13.940)

very quickly.

Lex Fridman (2:16:15.220)

And so that's all what needs to be present in the founder.

Lex Fridman (2:16:19.140)

Can I just say?

Lex Fridman (2:16:20.660)

Sure.

Lex Fridman (2:16:21.220)

How damn good you are, Rob.

Lex Fridman (2:16:22.820)

That was brilliant.

Rob Reid (2:16:24.100)

The one thing that was kind of really kind of surprising to me is having a deep technical

Rob Reid (2:16:29.780)

knowledge because I think the way you expressed it, which is that allows you to be really

Rob Reid (2:16:37.380)

honest with the capabilities of what like what's possible.

Lex Fridman (2:16:45.220)

Of course, you're often trying to do the impossible.

Lex Fridman (2:16:48.740)

But in order to do the impossible, you have to be quote unquote impossible.

Lex Fridman (2:16:51.860)

But you have to be honest with what is actually possible.

Lex Fridman (2:16:54.660)

And it doesn't necessarily have to be the technical competence.

Lex Fridman (2:16:57.620)

It's got to be, in my view, just a complete immersion in that emerging market.

Lex Fridman (2:17:02.660)

And so I can imagine there are a couple of people out there who have started really good

Rob Reid (2:17:06.180)

crypto projects who themselves are right in the code, but they're immersed in the culture

Lex Fridman (2:17:12.500)

and through the culture and a deep understanding of what's happening and what's not happening.

Rob Reid (2:17:16.820)

They can get a good intuition of what's possible, but the very first hire, I mean, a great way

Rob Reid (2:17:23.460)

to solve that is to have a technical co founder and dual founder companies have become extremely

Lex Fridman (2:17:28.980)

common for that reason.

Lex Fridman (2:17:30.900)

And if you're not doing that and you're not the technical person, but you are the founder,

Rob Reid (2:17:35.940)

you've got to be really great at hiring a very damn good technical person very, very fast.

Lex Fridman (2:17:43.780)

Can I on the founder ask you, is it possible to do this alone?

Rob Reid (2:17:50.100)

There's so many people giving advice and saying that it's impossible to do the first few steps,

Rob Reid (2:17:54.660)

not impossible, but much more difficult to do it alone.

Rob Reid (2:17:58.260)

If we were to take the journey, especially in the software world where there's not significant

Rob Reid (2:18:02.900)

investment required for it to build something up, is it possible to go to a prototype to

Lex Fridman (2:18:10.260)

something that essentially works and already has a huge number of customers alone?

Rob Reid (2:18:14.820)

Sure.

Rob Reid (2:18:15.700)

There are lots and lots of loan founder companies out there that have made an incredible difference.

Rob Reid (2:18:21.620)

I mean, I'm not certainly putting rhapsody in the league of Spotify.

Lex Fridman (2:18:25.780)

We were too early to be Spotify, but we did an awful lot of innovation.

Lex Fridman (2:18:29.620)

And then after the company sold and ended up in the hands of real networks and MTV,

Lex Fridman (2:18:33.780)

you know, got to millions of subs, right?

Rob Reid (2:18:35.700)

I was a loan founder and I studied Arabic and Middle Eastern history undergrad,

Lex Fridman (2:18:40.580)

so I definitely wasn't very, very technical.

Lex Fridman (2:18:42.340)

But yeah, loan founders can absolutely work.

Lex Fridman (2:18:44.820)

And the advantage of a loan founder is you don't have the catastrophic potential

Rob Reid (2:18:51.140)

of a falling out between founders.

Rob Reid (2:18:53.060)

I mean, two founders who fall out with each other badly can rip a company to shreds because

Rob Reid (2:19:00.100)

they both have an enormous amount of equity and enormous amount of power.

Lex Fridman (2:19:04.260)

And the capital structure is a result of that.

Rob Reid (2:19:06.580)

They both have an enormous amount of moral authority with the team as a result of each

Lex Fridman (2:19:12.420)

having that founder role.

Lex Fridman (2:19:14.260)

And I have witnessed over the years many, many situations in which companies have been shredded

Lex Fridman (2:19:21.220)

or have suffered near fatal blows because of a falling out between founders.

Lex Fridman (2:19:27.380)

And the more founders you add, the more risky that becomes.

Rob Reid (2:19:30.420)

I don't think there should ever almost, I mean, you never say never, but multiple founders

Rob Reid (2:19:36.100)

beyond two is such an unstable and potentially treacherous situation that I would never,

Lex Fridman (2:19:44.180)

ever recommend going beyond two.

Lex Fridman (2:19:45.940)

But I do see value in the non technical sort of business and market and outside minded

Lex Fridman (2:19:51.540)

founder teaming up with the technical founder.

Rob Reid (2:19:54.900)

There is a lot of merit to that, but there's a lot of danger in that less those two blow

Lex Fridman (2:19:58.740)

apart.

Lex Fridman (2:19:59.220)

Was it lonely for you?

Lex Fridman (2:20:00.820)

Unbelievably.

Lex Fridman (2:20:01.700)

And that's the drawback.

Rob Reid (2:20:02.820)

I mean, if you're a lone founder, there is no other person that you can sit down with

Lex Fridman (2:20:10.500)

and tackle problems and talk them through who has precisely or nearly precisely your

Lex Fridman (2:20:15.620)

alignment of interests.

Rob Reid (2:20:17.460)

Your most trusted board member is likely an investor and therefore at the end of the

Lex Fridman (2:20:23.300)

day has the interest of preferred stock in mind, not common stock.

Rob Reid (2:20:26.900)

Your most trusted VP, who might own a very significant stake in the company, doesn't

Lex Fridman (2:20:33.860)

own anywhere near your stake in the company.

Lex Fridman (2:20:35.860)

And so their long term interests may well be in getting the right level of experience

Lex Fridman (2:20:40.900)

and credibility necessary to peel off and start their own company.

Rob Reid (2:20:44.180)

Or their interests might be aligned with jumping ship and setting up with a different

Lex Fridman (2:20:51.380)

company, whether it's a rival or one in a completely different space.

Rob Reid (2:20:54.500)

So, yeah, being a lone founder is a spectacularly lonely thing.

Lex Fridman (2:20:57.780)

And that's a major downside to it.

Lex Fridman (2:20:59.220)

What about mentorship?

Lex Fridman (2:21:00.180)

Because you're a mentor to a lot of people.

Lex Fridman (2:21:03.380)

Can you find an alleviation to that loneliness in the space of ideas with a good mentor?

Lex Fridman (2:21:09.220)

With a good mentor or like a mentor who's mentoring you?

Rob Reid (2:21:11.620)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (2:21:12.100)

Yeah, you can a great deal, particularly if it's somebody who's been through this very

Rob Reid (2:21:15.620)

process and has navigated it successfully and cares enough about you and your well being

Lex Fridman (2:21:21.860)

to give you beautifully unvarnished advice.

Rob Reid (2:21:25.060)

That can be a huge, huge thing.

Lex Fridman (2:21:26.740)

That can assuage things a great deal.

Lex Fridman (2:21:28.900)

And I had a board member who was not an investor, who basically played that role for me to a

Lex Fridman (2:21:35.300)

great degree.

Rob Reid (2:21:35.940)

He came in maybe halfway through the company's history, though.

Lex Fridman (2:21:39.060)

I would have needed that the most in the very earliest days.

Rob Reid (2:21:43.460)

Yeah, the loneliness, that's the whole journey of life.

Lex Fridman (2:21:47.780)

We're always alone, alone together.

Rob Reid (2:21:49.620)

Mm hmm.

Lex Fridman (2:21:51.300)

It pays to embrace that.

Rob Reid (2:21:54.180)

You were saying that there might be something outside of the founder that's also that you

Lex Fridman (2:21:58.740)

were promising to be brief on.

Rob Reid (2:22:00.500)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (2:22:00.820)

OK, so we talked about the founder.

Rob Reid (2:22:02.820)

You were asking what makes a great startup.

Lex Fridman (2:22:04.500)

Yes.

Lex Fridman (2:22:04.820)

And great founder is thing number one, but then thing number two, and it's ginormous,

Lex Fridman (2:22:09.140)

is a great team.

Lex Fridman (2:22:10.420)

And so I said so much about the founder because one hopes or one believes that a founder who

Rob Reid (2:22:16.660)

is a great hirer is going to be hiring people and in charge of critical functions like

Rob Reid (2:22:22.020)

engineering and marketing and biz dev and sales and so forth, who themselves are great

Lex Fridman (2:22:25.860)

hirers.

Lex Fridman (2:22:26.740)

But what needs to radiate from the founder into the team that might be a little bit different

Lex Fridman (2:22:30.820)

from what's in the gene code of the founder?

Rob Reid (2:22:33.380)

The team needs to be fully bought in to the, you know, the intuitions and the vision of

Lex Fridman (2:22:40.580)

the founder.

Rob Reid (2:22:41.220)

Great.

Lex Fridman (2:22:41.540)

We've got that.

Lex Fridman (2:22:42.260)

But the team needs to have a slightly different thing, which is, you know, it's 99% obsession

Rob Reid (2:22:50.740)

is execution, is to relentlessly hit the milestones, hit the objectives, hit the quarterly

Rob Reid (2:22:57.540)

goals.

Lex Fridman (2:22:58.500)

That is, you know, 1% vision.

Rob Reid (2:23:00.820)

You don't want to lose that.

Lex Fridman (2:23:02.900)

But execution machines, you know, people who have a demonstrated ability and a demonstrated

Rob Reid (2:23:10.020)

focus on, yeah, I go from point to point to point.

Rob Reid (2:23:14.100)

I try to beat and raise expectations relentlessly, never fall short, and, you know, both sort

Rob Reid (2:23:20.500)

of blaze and follow the path.

Lex Fridman (2:23:22.660)

Not that the path is going to, I mean, blaze the trail as well.

Rob Reid (2:23:25.940)

I mean, a good founder is going to trust that VP of sales to have a better sense of what

Lex Fridman (2:23:31.780)

it takes to build out that organization, what the milestones be.

Lex Fridman (2:23:34.820)

And it's going to be kind of a dialogue amongst those at the top.

Lex Fridman (2:23:38.100)

But, you know, execution obsession in the team is the next thing.

Rob Reid (2:23:42.260)

Yeah, there's some sense where the founder, you know, you talk about sort of the space

Rob Reid (2:23:47.140)

of ideas, like first principles thinking, asking big difficult questions of like future

Rob Reid (2:23:51.780)

trajectories or having a big vision and big picture dreams.

Rob Reid (2:23:55.940)

You can almost be a dreamer, it feels like, when you're like not the founder, but in the

Rob Reid (2:24:03.140)

space of sort of leadership.

Lex Fridman (2:24:08.260)

But when it gets to the ground floor, there has to be execution, there has to be hitting

Rob Reid (2:24:12.980)

deadlines.

Lex Fridman (2:24:15.220)

And sometimes those are attention.

Rob Reid (2:24:18.100)

There's something about dreams that are attention with the pragmatic nature of execution.

Lex Fridman (2:24:28.340)

Not dreams, but sort of ambitious vision.

Lex Fridman (2:24:32.100)

And those have to be, I suppose, coupled.

Rob Reid (2:24:35.780)

The vision in the leader and the execution in the software world, that would be the programmer

Rob Reid (2:24:42.900)

or the designer.

Lex Fridman (2:24:45.060)

Absolutely.

Rob Reid (2:24:46.460)

Amongst many other things, you're an incredible conversationalist, a podcast, you host a podcast

Lex Fridman (2:24:51.740)

called After On.

Rob Reid (2:24:52.740)

I mean, there's a million questions I want to ask you here, but one at the highest level,

Lex Fridman (2:24:58.700)

what do you think makes for a great conversation?

Rob Reid (2:25:00.660)

I would say two things, one of two things, and ideally both of two things.

Rob Reid (2:25:07.100)

One is if something is beautifully architected, whether it's done deliberately and methodically

Lex Fridman (2:25:16.280)

and willfully, as when I do it, or whether that just emerges from the conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:25:21.820)

But something that's beautifully architected, that can create something that's incredibly

Rob Reid (2:25:26.260)

powerful and memorable, or something where there's just extraordinary chemistry.

Lex Fridman (2:25:32.420)

And so with All In, or I'll go way back.

Rob Reid (2:25:35.180)

You might remember the NPR show Car Talk, I couldn't care less about auto mechanics

Lex Fridman (2:25:41.140)

myself.

Rob Reid (2:25:42.140)

Yeah, that's right.

Lex Fridman (2:25:43.140)

But I love that show because the banter between those two guys was just beyond, it was without

Lex Fridman (2:25:47.940)

any parallel, right?

Lex Fridman (2:25:50.100)

And some kind of edgy podcasts like Red Scare is just really entertaining to me because

Rob Reid (2:25:54.940)

the banter between the women on that show is just so good, and All In and that kind

Lex Fridman (2:25:58.940)

of thing.

Lex Fridman (2:25:59.940)

So I think it's a combination of sort of the arc and the chemistry.

Lex Fridman (2:26:04.860)

And I think because the arc can be so important, that's why very, very highly produced podcasts

Rob Reid (2:26:11.460)

like This American Life, obviously a radio show, but I think of a podcast because that's

Lex Fridman (2:26:15.580)

how I always consume it, or Criminal, or a lot of what Wondery does and so forth.

Rob Reid (2:26:21.680)

That is real documentary making, and that requires a big team and a big budget relative

Rob Reid (2:26:26.480)

to the kinds of things you and I do, but nonetheless, then you got that arc, and that can be really,

Rob Reid (2:26:31.340)

really compelling.

Lex Fridman (2:26:32.340)

But if we go back to conversation, I think it's a combination of structure and chemistry.

Rob Reid (2:26:37.660)

Yeah, and I've actually personally have lost, I used to love This American Life, and for

Lex Fridman (2:26:43.860)

some reason because it lacks the possibility of magic, it's engineered magic.

Rob Reid (2:26:51.300)

I've fallen off of it myself as well.

Rob Reid (2:26:53.020)

I mean, when I fell madly in love with it during the aughts, it was the only thing going.

Rob Reid (2:26:58.340)

They were really smart to adopt podcasting as a distribution mechanism early.

Lex Fridman (2:27:04.380)

But yeah, I think that maybe there's a little bit less magic there now because I think they

Rob Reid (2:27:09.300)

have agendas other than necessarily just delighting their listeners with quirky stories, which

Lex Fridman (2:27:14.140)

I think is what it was all about back in the day and some other things.

Rob Reid (2:27:17.700)

Is there like a memorable conversation that you've had on the podcast, whether it was

Rob Reid (2:27:22.380)

because it was wild and fun or one that was exceptionally challenging, maybe challenging

Lex Fridman (2:27:29.420)

to prepare for, that kind of thing?

Lex Fridman (2:27:31.380)

Is there something that stands out in your mind that you can draw an insight from?

Rob Reid (2:27:35.660)

Yeah, I mean, this no way diminishes the episodes that will not be the answer to these two questions,

Lex Fridman (2:27:42.220)

but an example of something that was really, really challenging to prepare for was George

Rob Reid (2:27:46.900)

Church.

Lex Fridman (2:27:48.040)

So as I'm sure you know and as I'm sure many of your listeners know, he is one of the absolute

Rob Reid (2:27:52.380)

leading lights in the field of synthetic biology.

Lex Fridman (2:27:55.060)

He's also unbelievably prolific.

Rob Reid (2:27:57.460)

His lab is large and has all kinds of efforts have spun out of that.

Lex Fridman (2:28:02.640)

And what I wanted to make my George Church episode about was, first of all, grounding

Rob Reid (2:28:08.140)

people into what is this thing called Symbio.

Lex Fridman (2:28:12.460)

And that required me to learn a hell of a lot more about Symbio than I knew going into

Rob Reid (2:28:17.380)

it.

Lex Fridman (2:28:18.380)

So there was just this very broad, I mean, I knew much more than the average person going

Rob Reid (2:28:23.140)

into that episode, but there was this incredible breadth of grounding that I needed to get

Lex Fridman (2:28:27.140)

myself in the domain.

Lex Fridman (2:28:29.300)

And then George does so many interesting things, there's so many interesting things emitting

Rob Reid (2:28:34.100)

from his lab that, you know, and he and I had a really good dialogue, he was a great

Rob Reid (2:28:38.780)

guide going into it.

Rob Reid (2:28:41.340)

Minnowing it down to the three to four that I really wanted us to focus on to create a

Rob Reid (2:28:47.420)

sense of wonder and magic in the listener of what could be possible from this very broad

Lex Fridman (2:28:51.940)

spectrum domain, that was a doozy of a challenge.

Rob Reid (2:28:54.700)

That was a tough, tough, tough one to prepare for.

Rob Reid (2:28:57.860)

Now, in terms of something that was just wild and fun, unexpected, I mean, by the time we

Rob Reid (2:29:04.940)

sat down to interview, I knew where we were going to go.

Lex Fridman (2:29:07.400)

But just in terms of the idea space, Don Hoffman, yeah, so Don Hoffman is, again, some listeners

Rob Reid (2:29:15.180)

probably know because he's, I think I was the first podcaster to interview him.

Rob Reid (2:29:19.280)

I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with him, but he has this unbelievably contrarian

Rob Reid (2:29:25.060)

take on the nature of reality, but it is contrarian in a way that all the ideas are highly internally

Lex Fridman (2:29:33.980)

consistent and snap together in a way that's just delightful.

Lex Fridman (2:29:38.820)

And it seems as radically violating of our intuitions and as radically violating of the

Lex Fridman (2:29:46.080)

probable nature of reality as anything that one can encounter.

Lex Fridman (2:29:49.500)

But an analogy that he uses, which is very powerful, which is what intuition could possibly

Rob Reid (2:29:54.900)

be more powerful than the notion that there is a single unitary direction called down.

Rob Reid (2:30:00.760)

When we're on this big flat thing for which there is a thing called down.

Lex Fridman (2:30:05.260)

And we all know, I mean, that's the most intuitive thing that one could probably think of.

Lex Fridman (2:30:10.340)

And we all know that that ain't true.

Lex Fridman (2:30:12.420)

So my conversation with Don Hoffman was just wild and full of plot twists and interesting

Rob Reid (2:30:18.980)

stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:30:19.980)

And the interesting thing about the wildness of his ideas, it's to me at least as a listener,

Rob Reid (2:30:25.220)

coupled with, he's a good listener and he empathizes with the people who challenge his

Lex Fridman (2:30:35.020)

ideas.

Lex Fridman (2:30:36.020)

Like what's a better way to phrase that?

Lex Fridman (2:30:39.580)

He is a welcoming of challenge in a way that creates a really fun conversation.

Rob Reid (2:30:44.580)

Oh, totally.

Lex Fridman (2:30:45.580)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (2:30:46.580)

He loves a parry or a jab, whatever the word is at his argument.

Lex Fridman (2:30:52.900)

He honors it.

Rob Reid (2:30:54.020)

He's a very, very gentle and noncombatative soul, but then he is very good and takes great

Rob Reid (2:31:03.700)

evident joy in responding to that in a way that expands your understanding of his thinking.

Rob Reid (2:31:10.220)

Let me as a small tangent of tying up together our previous conversation about listening.com

Lex Fridman (2:31:15.380)

and streaming and Spotify and the world of podcasting.

Lex Fridman (2:31:20.720)

So we've been talking about this magical medium of podcasting.

Lex Fridman (2:31:25.580)

I have a lot of friends at Spotify in the high positions of Spotify as well.

Rob Reid (2:31:32.840)

I worry about Spotify and podcasting and the future of podcasting in general that moves

Lex Fridman (2:31:41.500)

podcasting in the place of maybe walled gardens of sorts.

Rob Reid (2:31:49.400)

Since you've had a foot in both worlds, have a foot in both worlds, do you worry as well

Lex Fridman (2:31:55.300)

about the future of podcasting?

Rob Reid (2:31:56.860)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (2:31:57.860)

I think walled gardens are really toxic to the medium that they start balkanizing.

Lex Fridman (2:32:05.660)

So to take an example, I'll take two examples.

Rob Reid (2:32:09.500)

With music, it was a very, very big deal that at Rhapsody we were the first company to get

Rob Reid (2:32:15.620)

full catalog licenses from all back then there were five major music labels and also hundreds

Lex Fridman (2:32:20.620)

and hundreds of indies because you needed to present the listener with a sense that

Rob Reid (2:32:25.040)

basically everything is there and there is essentially no friction to discovering that

Rob Reid (2:32:31.220)

which is new and you can wander this realm and all you really need is a good map, whether

Rob Reid (2:32:36.860)

it is something that somebody, the editorial team assembled or a good algorithm or whatever

Lex Fridman (2:32:41.020)

it is, but a good map to wander this domain.

Rob Reid (2:32:43.580)

When you start walling things off, A, you undermine the joy of friction free discovery,

Rob Reid (2:32:50.500)

which is an incredibly valuable thing to deliver to your customer, both from a business standpoint

Lex Fridman (2:32:55.620)

and simply from a humanistic standpoint of do you want to bring delight to people?

Lex Fridman (2:33:01.380)

But it also creates an incredible opening vector for piracy.

Lex Fridman (2:33:06.080)

And so something that's very different from the Rhapsody slash Spotify slash et cetera

Lex Fridman (2:33:10.700)

like experience is what we have now in video.

Rob Reid (2:33:14.580)

Like wow, is that show on Hulu, is it on Netflix, is it on something like IFC channel, is it

Lex Fridman (2:33:20.180)

on Discovery Plus, is it here, is it there?

Lex Fridman (2:33:23.580)

And the more frustration and toe stubbing that people encounter when they are seeking

Rob Reid (2:33:30.740)

something and they're already paying a very respectable amount of money per month to have

Rob Reid (2:33:35.740)

access to content and they can't find it, the more that happens, the more people are

Lex Fridman (2:33:39.860)

going to be driven to piracy solutions like to hell with it.

Rob Reid (2:33:43.060)

Never know where I'm going to find something, I never know what it's going to cost.

Lex Fridman (2:33:45.900)

Oftentimes really interesting things are simply unavailable.

Rob Reid (2:33:50.180)

That surprises me the number of times that I've been looking for things I don't even

Rob Reid (2:33:53.260)

think are that obscure that are just, it says not available in your geography, period, mister.

Lex Fridman (2:33:59.940)

So I think that that's a mistake.

Lex Fridman (2:34:01.660)

And then the other thing is for podcasters and lovers of podcasting, we should want to

Rob Reid (2:34:07.780)

resist this walled garden thing because A, it does smother this friction free or eradicate

Rob Reid (2:34:16.980)

this friction free discovery unless you want to sign up for lots of different services.

Lex Fridman (2:34:21.780)

And also dims the voice of somebody who might be able to have a far, far, far bigger impact

Lex Fridman (2:34:28.580)

by reaching far more neurons with their ideas.

Rob Reid (2:34:32.580)

I'm going to use an example from I guess it was probably the 90s or maybe it was the

Rob Reid (2:34:36.140)

aughts of Howard Stern, who had the biggest megaphone or maybe the second biggest after

Rob Reid (2:34:42.740)

Oprah megaphone in popular culture.

Lex Fridman (2:34:46.300)

And because he was syndicated on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of radio stations

Rob Reid (2:34:50.020)

at a time when terrestrial broadcast was the main thing people listened to in their car,

Lex Fridman (2:34:53.460)

no more obviously.

Lex Fridman (2:34:54.940)

But when he decided to go over to satellite radio, I can't remember if it was XM or Sirius,

Lex Fridman (2:34:59.780)

maybe they'd already merged at that point.

Lex Fridman (2:35:01.820)

But when he did that, he made, you know, totally his right to do it, a financial calculation

Lex Fridman (2:35:07.660)

that they were offering him a nine figure sum to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:35:11.100)

But his audience, because not a lot of people were subscribing to satellite radio at that

Rob Reid (2:35:14.740)

point, his audience probably collapsed by, I wouldn't be surprised if it was as much

Rob Reid (2:35:19.220)

as 95%.

Lex Fridman (2:35:20.960)

And so the influence that he had on the culture and his ability to sort of shape conversation

Lex Fridman (2:35:27.480)

and so forth just got muted.

Rob Reid (2:35:30.580)

Yeah, and also there's a certain sense, especially in modern times, where the walled gardens

Rob Reid (2:35:37.340)

naturally lead to, I don't know if there's a term for it, but people who are not creatives

Lex Fridman (2:35:48.460)

starting to have power over the creatives.

Rob Reid (2:35:51.580)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:35:52.580)

And even if they don't stifle it, if they're providing, you know, incentives within the

Rob Reid (2:35:58.640)

platform to shape, shift, or, you know, even completely mutate or distort the show, I mean,

Rob Reid (2:36:06.340)

imagine somebody has got, you know, a reasonably interesting idea for a podcast and they get

Rob Reid (2:36:12.100)

signed up with, let's say Spotify, and Spotify is going to give them financing to get the

Lex Fridman (2:36:15.940)

thing spun up.

Lex Fridman (2:36:17.700)

And that's great.

Lex Fridman (2:36:18.700)

And Spotify is going to give them a certain amount of really, you know, powerful placement,

Rob Reid (2:36:23.920)

you know, within the visual field of listeners.

Lex Fridman (2:36:27.440)

But Spotify has conditions for that.

Rob Reid (2:36:29.140)

They say, look, you know, we think that your podcast will be much more successful if you

Lex Fridman (2:36:34.820)

dumb it down about 60%.

Rob Reid (2:36:37.940)

If you add some, you know, silly, dirty jokes, if you do this, you do that.

Lex Fridman (2:36:44.220)

And suddenly the person who is dependent upon Spotify for permission to come into existence

Lex Fridman (2:36:48.840)

and is really dependent, really wants to please them, you know, to get that money in, to get

Lex Fridman (2:36:52.780)

that placement, really wants to be successful.

Lex Fridman (2:36:55.100)

And all of a sudden you're having a dialogue between a complete non creative, some marketing,

Rob Reid (2:37:00.780)

you know, sort of data analytic person at Spotify and a creative that's going to shape

Lex Fridman (2:37:05.420)

what that show is, you know, so that could be much more common.

Lex Fridman (2:37:10.480)

And ultimately having the aggregate, an even bigger impact than, you know, the cancellation,

Rob Reid (2:37:16.220)

let's say if somebody who says the wrong word or voices the wrong idea, I mean, that's kind

Rob Reid (2:37:20.100)

of what you have, not kind of, that's what you have with film and TV is that so much

Rob Reid (2:37:25.860)

influence is exerted over the storyline and the plots and the character arcs and all kinds

Rob Reid (2:37:31.100)

of things by executives who are completely alien to the experience and the skill set

Rob Reid (2:37:35.900)

of being a show runner in television, being a director in film that, you know, is meant

Rob Reid (2:37:40.180)

to like, oh, we can't piss off the Chinese market here or we can't say that or we need

Rob Reid (2:37:43.860)

to have, you know, cast members that have precisely these demographics reflected or

Rob Reid (2:37:48.880)

whatever it is that, you know, and obviously despite that extraordinary, at least TV shows

Rob Reid (2:37:54.100)

are now being made, um, you know, in terms of film, I think the quality has, has nosedived

Lex Fridman (2:37:59.980)

of the average, let's say, say American film coming out of a major studio.

Rob Reid (2:38:03.380)

The average quality and my view has nosedived over the past decade as it's kind of, everything's

Rob Reid (2:38:07.640)

gotta be a superhero franchise, but you know, great stuff gets made despite that.

Lex Fridman (2:38:13.260)

But I have to assume that in some cases, at least in perhaps many cases, greater stuff

Lex Fridman (2:38:19.920)

would be made if there was less interference from non creative executives.

Rob Reid (2:38:23.660)

It's like the flip side of that though, and this is, was the pitch of Spotify because

Rob Reid (2:38:27.420)

I've heard their pitch is Netflix from everybody I've heard that I've spoken with about Netflix

Rob Reid (2:38:34.260)

is they actually empower the creator.

Rob Reid (2:38:36.020)

I don't know what the heck they do, but they do a good job of giving creators, even the

Rob Reid (2:38:41.100)

crazy ones like Tim Dillon, like Joe Rogan, like comedians, freedom to be their crazy

Lex Fridman (2:38:46.100)

selves.

Lex Fridman (2:38:47.300)

And the result is like some of the greatest television, some of the greatest cinema, whatever

Lex Fridman (2:38:54.120)

you call it, ever made.

Rob Reid (2:38:55.860)

True.

Lex Fridman (2:38:56.860)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:38:57.860)

And I don't know what the heck they're doing.

Lex Fridman (2:38:58.860)

It's a relative thing.

Rob Reid (2:38:59.860)

It's not able from what I understand.

Lex Fridman (2:39:00.860)

It's a relative thing.

Rob Reid (2:39:01.860)

They're interfering far, far, far less than, you know, NBC or, you know, AMC would have

Lex Fridman (2:39:07.900)

interfered.

Rob Reid (2:39:08.900)

It's a relative thing, and obviously they're the ones writing the checks and they're the

Lex Fridman (2:39:12.420)

ones giving the platforms.

Rob Reid (2:39:13.420)

They've every right to their own influence, obviously.

Lex Fridman (2:39:16.660)

But my understanding is that they're relatively way more hands off and that has had a demonstrable

Rob Reid (2:39:21.780)

effect because I agree.

Rob Reid (2:39:23.300)

Some of the greatest, you know, video produced video content of all time, an incredibly inordinate

Rob Reid (2:39:29.220)

percentage of that is coming out from Netflix in just a few years when the history of cinema

Lex Fridman (2:39:32.900)

goes back many, many decades.

Lex Fridman (2:39:34.740)

And Spotify wants to be that for podcasting, and I hope they do become that for podcasting,

Lex Fridman (2:39:41.500)

but I'm wearing my skeptical goggles or skeptical hat, whatever the heck it is, because it's

Rob Reid (2:39:47.700)

not easy to do and it requires, it requires letting go of power, giving power to the creatives.

Rob Reid (2:39:55.100)

It requires pivoting, which large companies, even as innovative as Spotify is, still now

Rob Reid (2:40:01.180)

a large company, pivoting into a whole new space is very tricky and difficult.

Lex Fridman (2:40:05.580)

So I'm skeptical, but hopeful.

Lex Fridman (2:40:08.300)

What advice would you give to a young person today about life, about career?

Rob Reid (2:40:13.060)

We talked about startups, we talked about music, we talked about the end of human civilization.

Rob Reid (2:40:18.980)

Is there advice you would give to a young person today, maybe in college, maybe in high

Lex Fridman (2:40:23.660)

school about their life?

Rob Reid (2:40:27.140)

Let's see, there's so many domains you can advise on, and I'm not going to give advice

Rob Reid (2:40:34.340)

on life because I fear that I would drift into hallmark bromides that really wouldn't

Rob Reid (2:40:40.120)

be all that distinctive, and they might be entirely true.

Rob Reid (2:40:43.540)

Sometimes the greatest insights about life turn out to be the kinds of things you'd see

Rob Reid (2:40:48.320)

on a hallmark card, so I'm going to steer clear of that.

Rob Reid (2:40:50.540)

On a career level, one thing that I think is unintuitive but unbelievably powerful is

Rob Reid (2:40:57.900)

to focus not necessarily on being in the top sliver of 1% in excelling at one domain that's

Rob Reid (2:41:07.420)

important and valuable, but to think in terms of intersections of two domains, which are

Rob Reid (2:41:14.140)

rare but valuable, and there's a couple reasons for this.

Rob Reid (2:41:19.620)

The first is in an incredibly competitive world that is so much more competitive than

Rob Reid (2:41:25.020)

it was when I was coming out of school, radically more competitive than when I was coming out

Lex Fridman (2:41:28.900)

of school, to navigate your way to the absolute pinnacle of any domain.

Rob Reid (2:41:34.060)

Let's say you want to be really, really great at Python, pick a language, whatever it is.

Rob Reid (2:41:40.340)

You want to be one of the world's greatest Python developers, JavaScript, whatever your

Rob Reid (2:41:44.940)

language is.

Lex Fridman (2:41:45.940)

Hopefully it's not Cobalt.

Rob Reid (2:41:46.940)

By the way, if you listen to this, I am actually looking for a Cobalt expert to interview because

Rob Reid (2:41:53.980)

I find the language fascinating, and there's not many of them, so please, if you know a

Rob Reid (2:41:58.140)

world expert in Cobalt or Fortran, both, actually.

Lex Fridman (2:42:02.380)

Or if you are one.

Rob Reid (2:42:03.580)

Or if you are one, please email me.

Lex Fridman (2:42:05.660)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (2:42:06.660)

So, I mean, if you're going out there and you want to be in the top sliver 1% of Python

Rob Reid (2:42:10.620)

developers, it's a very, very difficult thing to do, particularly if you want to be number

Rob Reid (2:42:13.180)

one in the world, something like that.

Lex Fridman (2:42:14.940)

And I'll use an analogy as I had a friend in college who was on a track and indeed succeeded

Rob Reid (2:42:23.020)

at that to become an Olympic medalist, and I think it was 100 meter breaststroke.

Lex Fridman (2:42:29.300)

And he mortgaged a significant percentage of his college life to that goal, or I should

Rob Reid (2:42:37.540)

say dedicated or invested or whatever you wanted to say.

Lex Fridman (2:42:39.980)

But he didn't participate in a lot of the social, a lot of the late night, a lot of

Rob Reid (2:42:44.260)

the this, a lot of the that, because he was training so much.

Lex Fridman (2:42:48.180)

And obviously, he also wanted to keep up with his academics.

Lex Fridman (2:42:50.740)

And at the end of the day, the story has a happy ending in that he did medal in that.

Rob Reid (2:42:55.660)

Bronze, not gold, but holy cow, anybody who gets an Olympic medal, that's an extraordinary

Rob Reid (2:43:00.020)

thing.

Lex Fridman (2:43:01.020)

And at that moment, he was one of the top three people on earth at that thing.

Lex Fridman (2:43:05.140)

But wow, how hard to do that.

Lex Fridman (2:43:07.380)

How many thousands of other people went down that path and made similar sacrifices and

Rob Reid (2:43:12.020)

didn't get there.

Lex Fridman (2:43:13.020)

It's very, very hard to do that.

Rob Reid (2:43:14.740)

Whereas, and I'll use a personal example.

Rob Reid (2:43:19.020)

When I came out of business school, I went to a good business school and learned the

Rob Reid (2:43:23.620)

things that were there to be learned.

Lex Fridman (2:43:25.780)

And I came out and I entered a world with lots of MBAs.

Rob Reid (2:43:29.340)

Harvard Business School, by the way.

Lex Fridman (2:43:30.500)

Okay, yes, it was Harvard, it's true.

Rob Reid (2:43:32.980)

You're the first person who went there who didn't say where you went, which is beautiful.

Lex Fridman (2:43:36.860)

I appreciate that.

Rob Reid (2:43:37.860)

It's one of the greatest business schools in the world.

Lex Fridman (2:43:41.620)

It's a whole nother fascinating conversation about that world.

Lex Fridman (2:43:44.420)

But anyway, yes.

Lex Fridman (2:43:45.420)

But anyway, so I learned the things that you learn getting an MBA from a top program.

Lex Fridman (2:43:51.180)

And I entered a world that had hundreds of thousands of people who had MBAs, probably

Lex Fridman (2:43:56.620)

hundreds of thousands who have them from top 10 programs.

Lex Fridman (2:44:00.340)

So I was not particularly great at being an MBA person.

Rob Reid (2:44:04.900)

I was inexperienced relative to most of them and there were a lot of them, but it was okay

Rob Reid (2:44:09.420)

MBA person, right, newly minted.

Lex Fridman (2:44:12.980)

But then as it happened, I found my way into working on the commercial internet in 1994.

Lex Fridman (2:44:20.380)

So I went to a, at the time, giant hot computing company called Silicon Graphics, which had

Rob Reid (2:44:25.380)

enough heft and enough head count that they could take on and experienced MBAs and try

Rob Reid (2:44:30.820)

to train them in the world of Silicon Valley.

Lex Fridman (2:44:33.380)

But within that company that had an enormous amount of surface area and was touching a

Rob Reid (2:44:38.940)

lot of areas and had unbelievably smart people at the time, it was not surprising that SGI

Rob Reid (2:44:46.660)

started doing really interesting and innovative and trailblazing stuff on the internet before

Rob Reid (2:44:51.340)

almost anybody else.

Lex Fridman (2:44:52.660)

And part of the reason was that our founder, Jim Clark, went off to cofound Netscape with

Rob Reid (2:44:55.840)

Mark Andreessen.

Lex Fridman (2:44:56.840)

So the whole company is like, wait, what was that?

Lex Fridman (2:44:58.860)

What's this commercial internet thing?

Lex Fridman (2:45:00.740)

So I ended up in that group.

Rob Reid (2:45:01.940)

Now in terms of being a commercial internet person or a worldwide web person, again, I

Rob Reid (2:45:09.500)

was in that case, barely credentialed, I couldn't write a stitch of code, but I had a pretty

Rob Reid (2:45:14.420)

good mind for grasping the business and cultural significance of this transition.

Lex Fridman (2:45:22.140)

And this was, again, we were talking earlier about emerging areas.

Rob Reid (2:45:25.540)

Within a few months, you know, I was in the relatively top echelon of people in terms

Rob Reid (2:45:29.540)

of just sheer experience, because like, let's say it was five months into the program, there

Rob Reid (2:45:33.740)

were only so many people who'd been doing worldwide web stuff commercially for five

Lex Fridman (2:45:37.140)

months, you know?

Lex Fridman (2:45:38.620)

And then what was interesting though was the intersection of those two things.

Lex Fridman (2:45:43.580)

The commercial web, as it turned out, grew into an unbelievable vastness.

Lex Fridman (2:45:49.700)

And so by being a pretty good, okay web person and a pretty good, okay MBA person, that intersection

Lex Fridman (2:45:57.480)

put me in a very rare group, which was web oriented MBAs.

Lex Fridman (2:46:03.420)

And in those early days, you could probably count on your fingers the number of people

Rob Reid (2:46:08.380)

who came out of really competitive programs who were doing stuff full time on the internet.

Lex Fridman (2:46:12.140)

And there was a greater appetite for great software developers in the internet domain,

Lex Fridman (2:46:17.480)

but there was an appetite and a real one and a rapidly growing one for MBA thinkers who

Rob Reid (2:46:24.300)

were also seasoned and networked in the emerging world of the commercial worldwide web.

Lex Fridman (2:46:29.300)

And so finding an intersection of two things you can be pretty good at, but is a rare intersection

Lex Fridman (2:46:37.500)

and a special intersection is probably a much easier way to make yourself distinguishable

Lex Fridman (2:46:43.500)

and in demand from the world than trying to be world class at this one thing.

Lex Fridman (2:46:48.740)

So in the intersection is where there's to be discovered opportunity and success.

Lex Fridman (2:46:53.300)

That's really interesting.

Lex Fridman (2:46:54.620)

There's actually more intersection of fields and fields themselves, right?

Lex Fridman (2:46:58.100)

So yeah, I mean, I'll give you kind of a funny hypothetical here, but it's one I've been

Rob Reid (2:47:02.500)

thinking about a little bit.

Lex Fridman (2:47:04.580)

There's a lot of people in crypto right now.

Rob Reid (2:47:06.580)

It'd be hard to be in the top percentile of crypto people, whether it comes from just

Rob Reid (2:47:11.980)

having a sheer grasp of the industry, a great network within the industry, technological

Rob Reid (2:47:15.660)

skills, whatever you want to call it.

Lex Fridman (2:47:18.440)

And then there's this parallel world and orthogonal world called crop insurance.

Lex Fridman (2:47:23.380)

And I'm sure that's a big world.

Rob Reid (2:47:25.420)

Crop insurance is a very, very big deal, particularly in the wealthy and industrialized world where

Rob Reid (2:47:29.540)

people through sophisticated financial markets, rule of law and large agricultural concerns

Lex Fridman (2:47:35.140)

that are worried about that.

Rob Reid (2:47:37.900)

Somewhere out there is somebody who is pretty crypto savvy, but probably not top 1%, but

Rob Reid (2:47:42.780)

also has kind of been in the crop insurance world and understands that a hell of a lot

Rob Reid (2:47:47.600)

better than almost anybody who's ever had anything to do with cryptocurrency.

Lex Fridman (2:47:52.340)

And so I think that decentralized finance, DeFi, one of the interesting and I think very

Rob Reid (2:47:58.420)

world positive things that I think it's almost inevitably will be bringing to the world is

Lex Fridman (2:48:03.380)

crop insurance for small holding farmers.

Rob Reid (2:48:06.820)

I mean, people who have tiny, tiny plots of land in places like India, et cetera, where

Rob Reid (2:48:12.180)

there is no crop insurance available to them because just the financial infrastructure

Rob Reid (2:48:17.600)

doesn't exist.

Lex Fridman (2:48:19.140)

But it's highly imaginable that using Oracle networks that are trusted outside deliverers

Rob Reid (2:48:24.980)

of factual information about rainfall in a particular area, you can start giving drought

Lex Fridman (2:48:29.280)

insurance to folks like this.

Rob Reid (2:48:31.300)

The right person to come up with that idea is not a crypto whiz who doesn't know a blasted

Lex Fridman (2:48:37.180)

thing about small holding farmers.

Rob Reid (2:48:39.300)

The right person to come up with that is not a crop insurance whiz who isn't quite sure

Lex Fridman (2:48:43.460)

what Bitcoin is, but somebody occupies that intersection.

Rob Reid (2:48:47.580)

That's just one of gazillion examples of things that are going to come along for somebody

Rob Reid (2:48:52.260)

who occupies the right intersection of skills, but isn't necessarily the number one person

Rob Reid (2:48:57.540)

at either one of those expertises.

Rob Reid (2:48:59.720)

That's making me kind of wonder about my own little things that I'm average at and seeing

Rob Reid (2:49:05.340)

where the intersections that could be exploited.

Lex Fridman (2:49:09.340)

That's pretty profound.

Lex Fridman (2:49:10.420)

So we talked quite a bit about the end of the world and how we're both optimistic about

Lex Fridman (2:49:15.980)

us figuring our way out.

Rob Reid (2:49:18.260)

Unfortunately, for now at least, both you and I are going to die one day, way too soon.

Lex Fridman (2:49:27.760)

First of all, that sucks.

Rob Reid (2:49:28.760)

It does.

Rob Reid (2:49:29.760)

I mean, one, I'd like to ask if you ponder your own mortality, how does that kind of,

Lex Fridman (2:49:41.460)

what kind of wisdom inside does it give you about your own life?

Lex Fridman (2:49:45.860)

And broadly, do you think about your life and what the heck it's all about?

Rob Reid (2:49:50.300)

Yeah, with respect to pondering mortality, I do try to do that as little as possible

Lex Fridman (2:49:57.060)

because there's not a lot I can do about it.

Lex Fridman (2:50:00.060)

But it's inevitably there.

Lex Fridman (2:50:01.060)

And I think that what it does when you think about it in the right way is it makes you

Rob Reid (2:50:07.000)

realize how unbelievably rare and precious the moments that we have here are, and therefore

Lex Fridman (2:50:13.940)

how consequential the decisions that we make about how to spend our time are.

Rob Reid (2:50:18.300)

You know, like, do you do those 17 nagging emails or do you have dinner with somebody

Lex Fridman (2:50:25.540)

who's really important to you who haven't seen in three and a half years?

Rob Reid (2:50:28.880)

If you had an infinite expanse of time in front of you, you might well rationally conclude

Lex Fridman (2:50:33.780)

I'm going to do those emails because collectively they're rather important.

Lex Fridman (2:50:37.340)

And I have tens of thousands of years to catch up with my buddy, Tim.

Lex Fridman (2:50:41.160)

But I think the scarcity of the time that we have helps us choose the right things if

Rob Reid (2:50:48.100)

we're tuned to that and we're attuned to the context that mortality puts over the consequence

Lex Fridman (2:50:54.160)

of every decision we make of how to spend our time.

Rob Reid (2:50:56.980)

That doesn't mean that we're all very good at it, it doesn't mean I'm very good at it.

Lex Fridman (2:51:00.520)

But it does add a dimension of choice and significance to everything that we elect to

Rob Reid (2:51:06.380)

do.

Rob Reid (2:51:07.380)

It's kind of funny that you say you try to think about it as little as possible.

Rob Reid (2:51:10.500)

I would venture to say you probably think about the end of human civilization more than

Lex Fridman (2:51:14.180)

you do about your own life.

Rob Reid (2:51:15.580)

You're probably right.

Lex Fridman (2:51:16.960)

Because that feels like a problem that could be solved.

Rob Reid (2:51:19.700)

Right.

Lex Fridman (2:51:20.700)

Whereas the end of my own life can't be solved.

Rob Reid (2:51:22.500)

Well, I don't know.

Rob Reid (2:51:23.500)

I mean, there's transhumanists who have incredible optimism about near or intermediate future

Rob Reid (2:51:28.860)

therapies that could really, really change human lifespan.

Rob Reid (2:51:32.700)

I really hope that they're right, but I don't have a whole lot to add to that project because

Rob Reid (2:51:37.020)

I'm not a life scientist myself.

Lex Fridman (2:51:39.980)

I'm in part also afraid of immortality.

Rob Reid (2:51:44.460)

Not as much, but close to as I'm afraid of death itself.

Lex Fridman (2:51:48.820)

So it feels like the things that give us meaning give us meaning because of the scarcity that

Rob Reid (2:51:55.220)

surrounds it.

Lex Fridman (2:51:56.220)

Agreed.

Rob Reid (2:51:57.220)

I'm almost afraid of having too much of stuff.

Lex Fridman (2:52:01.620)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (2:52:02.620)

Although, if there was something that said, this can expand your enjoyable wellspan or

Lex Fridman (2:52:07.940)

lifespan by 75 years, I'm all in.

Rob Reid (2:52:11.540)

Well, part of the reason I wanted to not do a startup, really the only thing that worries

Lex Fridman (2:52:19.460)

me about doing a startup is if it becomes successful.

Rob Reid (2:52:24.780)

Because of how much I dream, how much I'm driven to be successful, that there will not

Rob Reid (2:52:31.540)

be enough silence in my life, enough scarcity to appreciate the moments I appreciate now

Rob Reid (2:52:39.020)

as deeply as I appreciate them now.

Rob Reid (2:52:42.380)

There's a simplicity to my life now that it feels like you might disappear with success.

Rob Reid (2:52:48.540)

I wouldn't say might.

Rob Reid (2:52:52.140)

I think if you start a company that has ambitious investors, ambitious for the returns that

Rob Reid (2:52:59.820)

they'd like to see, that has ambitious employees, ambitious for the career trajectories they

Rob Reid (2:53:05.860)

want to be on and so forth, and is driven by your own ambition, there's a profound monogamy

Rob Reid (2:53:15.020)

to that.

Rob Reid (2:53:18.020)

It is very, very hard to carve out time to be creative, to be peaceful, to be so forth

Rob Reid (2:53:24.300)

because of with every new employee that you hire, that's one more mouth to feed.

Rob Reid (2:53:30.620)

With every new investor that you take on, that's one more person to whom you really

Rob Reid (2:53:35.260)

do want to deliver great returns.

Rob Reid (2:53:38.100)

As the valuation ticks up, the threshold to delivering great returns for your investors

Rob Reid (2:53:43.580)

always rises.

Rob Reid (2:53:45.580)

There is an extraordinary monogamy to being a founder CEO above all for the first few

Rob Reid (2:53:54.460)

years and first in people's minds could be as many as 10 or 15.

Lex Fridman (2:53:59.420)

But I guess the fundamental calculation is whether the passion for the vision is greater

Rob Reid (2:54:07.600)

than the cost you'll pay.

Lex Fridman (2:54:09.020)

Right.

Rob Reid (2:54:10.020)

It's all opportunity cost.

Lex Fridman (2:54:11.400)

It's all opportunity cost in terms of time and attention and experience.

Lex Fridman (2:54:16.620)

And some things like I'm, everyone's different, but I'm less calculating some things you just

Lex Fridman (2:54:21.100)

can't help.

Rob Reid (2:54:22.100)

Sometimes you just dive in.

Lex Fridman (2:54:23.100)

Oh yeah.

Rob Reid (2:54:24.260)

I mean you can do balance sheets all you want on this versus that and what's the right.

Lex Fridman (2:54:28.180)

I mean I've done it in the past and it's never worked.

Lex Fridman (2:54:32.060)

It's always been like, okay, what's my gut screaming at me to do?

Lex Fridman (2:54:36.780)

But about the meaning of life, you ever think about that?

Rob Reid (2:54:42.260)

Yeah.

Rob Reid (2:54:43.260)

I mean, this is where I'm going to go all hallmarking on you, but I think that there's

Rob Reid (2:54:48.220)

a few things and one of them is certainly love and the love that we experience and feel

Lex Fridman (2:54:57.320)

and cause to well up in others is something that's just so profound and goes beyond almost

Rob Reid (2:55:05.700)

anything else that we can do.

Lex Fridman (2:55:08.260)

And whether that is something that lies in the past, like maybe there was somebody that

Rob Reid (2:55:13.020)

you were dating and loved very profoundly in college and haven't seen in years, I don't

Rob Reid (2:55:19.340)

think the significance of that love is any way diminished by the fact that it had a notional

Rob Reid (2:55:24.380)

beginning and end.

Rob Reid (2:55:25.540)

The fact is that you experience that and you trigger that in somebody else and that happened.

Lex Fridman (2:55:30.460)

And it doesn't have to be, certainly it doesn't have to be love of romantic partners alone.

Lex Fridman (2:55:35.260)

It's family members, it's love between friends, it's love between creatures.

Rob Reid (2:55:39.700)

I had a dog for 10 years who passed away a while ago and experienced unbelievable love

Lex Fridman (2:55:47.620)

with her.

Rob Reid (2:55:48.620)

It can be love of that which you create and we were talking about the flow states that

Rob Reid (2:55:52.020)

we enter and the pride or lack of pride or in the Minsky case, your hatred of that which

Rob Reid (2:55:57.180)

you've done.

Lex Fridman (2:55:58.180)

But nonetheless, the creations that we make and whether it's the love or the joy or the

Rob Reid (2:56:05.940)

engagement or the perspective shift that that cascades into other minds, I think that's

Lex Fridman (2:56:11.580)

a big, big, big part of the meaning of life.

Rob Reid (2:56:13.680)

It's not something that everybody participates in necessarily, although I think we all do

Rob Reid (2:56:18.740)

at least in a very local level by the example that we set, by the interactions that we have.

Lex Fridman (2:56:25.740)

But for people who create works that travel far and reach people they'll never meet, that

Rob Reid (2:56:31.900)

reach countries they'll never visit, that reach people perhaps that come along and come

Rob Reid (2:56:36.700)

across their ideas or their works or their stories or their aesthetic creations of other

Rob Reid (2:56:40.740)

sorts long after they're dead, I think that's really, really big part of the fabric of the

Rob Reid (2:56:46.860)

meaning of life.

Lex Fridman (2:56:50.380)

So all these things like love and creation, I think really is what it's all about.

Lex Fridman (2:57:01.100)

And part of love is also the loss of it.

Rob Reid (2:57:03.820)

There's a Louis episode with Louis C.K. where an old gentleman is giving him advice that

Rob Reid (2:57:13.380)

sometimes the sweetest parts of love is when you lose it and you remember it, sort of you

Lex Fridman (2:57:18.100)

reminisce on the loss of it.

Lex Fridman (2:57:21.020)

And there's some aspect in which, and I have many of those in my own life, that almost

Rob Reid (2:57:27.380)

like the memories of it and the intensity of emotion you still feel about it is like

Rob Reid (2:57:34.100)

the sweetest part.

Lex Fridman (2:57:37.020)

You're like, after saying goodbye, you relive it.

Lex Fridman (2:57:40.900)

So that goodbye is also a part of love.

Lex Fridman (2:57:45.420)

The loss of it is also a part of love.

Rob Reid (2:57:47.220)

I don't know, it's back to that scarcity.

Rob Reid (2:57:49.580)

I won't say the loss is the best part personally, but it definitely is an aspect of it.

Lex Fridman (2:57:56.180)

And the grief you might feel about something that's gone makes you realize what a big deal

Lex Fridman (2:58:03.100)

it was.

Rob Reid (2:58:06.900)

Speaking of which, this particular journey we went on together come to an end.

Lex Fridman (2:58:14.100)

So I have to say goodbye and I hate saying goodbye.

Rob Reid (2:58:16.540)

Rob, this is truly an honor.

Lex Fridman (2:58:18.100)

I've really been a big fan.

Rob Reid (2:58:20.500)

People should definitely check out your podcast, your Master What You Do in the conversation

Lex Fridman (2:58:24.180)

space, in the writing space.

Rob Reid (2:58:26.120)

It's been an incredible honor that you would show up here and spend this time with me.

Lex Fridman (2:58:29.820)

I really, really appreciate it.

Rob Reid (2:58:30.940)

Well, it's been a huge honor to be here as well, and also a fan in heaven for a long

Lex Fridman (2:58:35.780)

time.

Rob Reid (2:58:36.780)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rob Reed.

Lex Fridman (2:58:40.180)

And thank you to Athletic Greens, Belcampo, Fundrise, and NetSuite.

Rob Reid (2:58:46.340)

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

Lex Fridman (2:58:49.380)

And now, let me leave you with some words from Plato.

Rob Reid (2:58:52.580)

We can easily forgive a child who's afraid of the dark.

Lex Fridman (2:58:55.700)

The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Rob Reid (2:59:00.900)

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Lex Fridman (30:03.200)

And after guiding the path and passing them through, again, I believe it was a series

Rob Reid (30:07.240)

of ferrets.

Rob Reid (30:08.240)

They did in fact come up with a version of H5N1 that is capable of airborne transmission.

Rob Reid (30:14.680)

Now they didn't unleash it into the world.

Lex Fridman (30:17.400)

They didn't inject it into humans to see what would happen.

Lex Fridman (30:20.680)

And so for those two reasons, we don't really know how contagious it might have been.

Lex Fridman (30:25.900)

But if it was as contagious as COVID, that could be a civilization threatening pathogen.

Lex Fridman (30:33.520)

And why would you do it?

Lex Fridman (30:34.720)

Well, the people who did it were good guys.

Rob Reid (30:36.800)

They were virologists.

Rob Reid (30:38.320)

I believe their agenda as they explained it was much as you said, let's figure out what

Rob Reid (30:43.560)

a worst case scenario might look like so we can understand it better.

Lex Fridman (30:47.920)

But my understanding is in both cases, it was done in BSL3 labs.

Lex Fridman (30:52.860)

And so potential of leak, significantly nonzero, hopefully way below 1% but significantly nonzero.

Lex Fridman (31:01.040)

And when you look at the consequences of an escape in terms of human lives, destruction

Rob Reid (31:06.040)

of a large portion of the economy, et cetera, and you do an expected value calculation on

Rob Reid (31:10.680)

whatever fraction of 1% that was, you would come up with a staggering cost, staggering

Rob Reid (31:17.540)

expected cost for this work.

Lex Fridman (31:19.360)

So it should never have been carried out.

Rob Reid (31:21.960)

Now you might make an argument if you said, if you believed that H5N1 in nature is on

Rob Reid (31:30.120)

an inevitable path to airborne transmission, and it's only going to be a small number of

Rob Reid (31:35.800)

years, A. And B, if it makes that transition, there is one set of changes to its metabolic

Lex Fridman (31:43.920)

pathways and its genomic code and so forth, one that we have discovered.

Lex Fridman (31:49.140)

So it is going to go from point A, which is where it is right now, to point B. We have

Lex Fridman (31:53.840)

reliably engineered point B. That is the destination.

Lex Fridman (31:58.140)

And we need to start fighting that right now because this is five years or less away.

Lex Fridman (32:02.080)

Now that'd be a very different world.

Rob Reid (32:03.520)

That'd be like spotting an asteroid that's coming toward the earth and is five years

Lex Fridman (32:06.640)

off.

Lex Fridman (32:07.640)

And yes, you marshal everything you can to resist that.

Lex Fridman (32:10.360)

But there's two problems with that perspective.

Rob Reid (32:12.640)

The first is, in however many thousands of generations that humans have been inhabiting

Lex Fridman (32:17.160)

this planet, there has never been a transmissible form of H5N1.

Lex Fridman (32:21.280)

And influenza has been around for a very long time.

Lex Fridman (32:23.720)

So there is no case for inevitability of this kind of a jump to airborne transmission.

Lex Fridman (32:30.240)

So we're not on a freight train to that outcome.

Lex Fridman (32:33.600)

And if there was inevitability around that, it's not like there's just one set of genetic

Rob Reid (32:38.340)

code that would get there.

Rob Reid (32:41.320)

There's all kinds of different mutations that could conceivably result in that kind of an

Rob Reid (32:46.760)

outcome, unbelievable diversity of mutations.

Lex Fridman (32:49.900)

And so we're not actually creating something we're inevitably going to face, but we are

Rob Reid (32:54.400)

creating something, we are creating a very powerful and unbelievably negative card and

Lex Fridman (33:00.320)

injecting it in the deck that nature never put into the deck.

Lex Fridman (33:04.460)

So in that case, I just don't see any moral or scientific justification for that kind

Lex Fridman (33:11.180)

of work.

Lex Fridman (33:12.480)

And interestingly, there was quite a bit of excitement and concern about this when the

Lex Fridman (33:18.200)

work came out.

Rob Reid (33:19.200)

One of the teams was going to publish their results in Science, the other in Nature.

Lex Fridman (33:22.960)

And there were a lot of editorials and a lot of scientists are saying, this is crazy.

Lex Fridman (33:27.900)

And publication of those papers did get suspended.

Lex Fridman (33:31.240)

And not long after that, there was a pause put on US government funding, NIH funding

Rob Reid (33:36.120)

on gain of function research.

Lex Fridman (33:38.380)

But both of those speed bumps were ultimately removed.

Rob Reid (33:41.840)

Those papers did ultimately get published.

Lex Fridman (33:43.960)

And that pause on funding, you know, ceased long ago.

Lex Fridman (33:47.840)

And in fact, those two very projects, my understanding is resumed their funding, got their government

Lex Fridman (33:52.460)

funding back.

Rob Reid (33:53.460)

I don't know why a Dutch project is getting NIH funding, but whatever, about a year and

Lex Fridman (33:57.720)

a half ago.

Lex Fridman (33:58.900)

So as far as the US government and regulators are concerned, it's all systems go for gain

Lex Fridman (34:04.480)

of function at this point, which I find very troubling.

Rob Reid (34:07.720)

Now I'm a little bit of an outsider from this field, but it has echoes of the same kind

Lex Fridman (34:11.480)

of problem I see in the AI world with autonomous weapon systems.

Rob Reid (34:16.680)

Nobody in my colleagues, my colleagues, friends, as far as I can tell, people in the AI community

Rob Reid (34:25.080)

are not really talking about autonomous weapon systems as now US and China full steam ahead

Rob Reid (34:31.480)

on the development of both.

Lex Fridman (34:33.200)

And that seems to be a similar kind of thing on gain of function.

Rob Reid (34:37.120)

I've, you know, have friends in the biology space and they don't want to talk about gain

Lex Fridman (34:42.920)

of function publicly.

Lex Fridman (34:46.200)

And I don't, that makes me very uncomfortable from an outsider perspective in terms of gain

Lex Fridman (34:50.560)

of function.

Rob Reid (34:51.560)

It makes me very uncomfortable from the insider perspective on autonomous weapon systems.

Lex Fridman (34:56.920)

I'm not sure how to communicate exactly about autonomous weapon systems.

Lex Fridman (35:00.280)

And I certainly don't know how to communicate effectively about gain of function.

Lex Fridman (35:04.120)

What is the right path forward here?

Lex Fridman (35:06.240)

Could we seize all gain of function research?

Lex Fridman (35:08.920)

Is that, is that really the solution here?

Rob Reid (35:11.280)

Well, again, I'm going to use gain of function in the relatively narrow context of over assessing

Rob Reid (35:15.320)

because you could say almost, you know, anything that you do to make biology more effective

Rob Reid (35:19.680)

as gain of function.

Lex Fridman (35:20.680)

So within the narrow confines of what we're discussing, I think it would be easy enough

Rob Reid (35:27.000)

for level headed people in all of the countries, level headed governmental people in all the

Rob Reid (35:31.840)

countries that realistically could support such a program to agree, we don't want this

Rob Reid (35:36.800)

to happen because all labs leak.

Rob Reid (35:40.560)

I mean, and you know, an example that I use, I actually didn't use it in the piece I did

Rob Reid (35:45.520)

with Sam Harris as well, is the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001.

Rob Reid (35:50.880)

I mean, talk about an example of the least likely lab leaking into the least likely place.

Rob Reid (35:57.280)

This was shortly after 9 11, folks who don't remember it, and it was a very, very lethal

Rob Reid (36:03.000)

strand of anthrax that as it turned out, based on the forensic genomic work that was done

Lex Fridman (36:08.640)

and so forth, absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab.

Lex Fridman (36:13.700)

Probably the one at Fort Detrick in Maryland, it might've been another one, but who cares?

Rob Reid (36:17.480)

It absolutely leaked from a high security US army lab.

Lex Fridman (36:21.500)

And where did it leak to?

Rob Reid (36:22.880)

This highly dangerous substance that was kept under lock and key by a very security minded

Lex Fridman (36:28.160)

organization?

Rob Reid (36:29.160)

Well, it leaked to places including the Senate majority leader's office, Tom Daschle's office,

Rob Reid (36:33.520)

I think it was Senator Leahy's office, certain publications, including bizarrely the National

Rob Reid (36:38.080)

Enquirer.

Lex Fridman (36:39.260)

But let's go to the Senate majority leader's office.

Rob Reid (36:41.960)

It is hard to imagine a more security minded country than the United States two weeks after

Lex Fridman (36:47.600)

the 9 11 attack.

Rob Reid (36:49.080)

I mean, it doesn't get more security minded than that.

Lex Fridman (36:52.540)

And it's also hard to imagine a more security capable organization than the United States

Rob Reid (36:59.080)

military.

Rob Reid (37:00.080)

We can joke all we want about inefficiencies in the military and $24,000 wrenches and so

Rob Reid (37:05.600)

forth, but pretty capable when it comes to that.

Rob Reid (37:08.560)

Despite that level of focus and concern and competence, just days after the 9 11 attack,

Rob Reid (37:16.740)

something comes from the inside of our military industrial compacts and ends up in the office

Rob Reid (37:22.200)

of someone I believe the Senate majority leader somewhere in the line of presidential succession.

Rob Reid (37:26.000)

It tells us everything can leak.

Lex Fridman (37:28.100)

So again, think of a level headed conversation between powerful leaders in a diversity of

Rob Reid (37:33.840)

countries, thinking through like, I can imagine a very simple PowerPoint revealing, just discussing

Rob Reid (37:40.360)

briefly things like the anthrax leak, things like this foot and mouth disease outbreak

Rob Reid (37:46.680)

that or leaking that came out of a BSL four level lab in the UK, several other things

Rob Reid (37:52.440)

talking about the utter virulence that could result from gain of function and say, folks,

Lex Fridman (37:57.720)

can we agree that this just shouldn't happen?

Rob Reid (38:01.080)

I mean, if we were able to agree on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which we were by

Rob Reid (38:06.160)

a weapons convention, which we did agree on, we the world, for the most part, I believe

Lex Fridman (38:11.400)

agreement could be found there.

Lex Fridman (38:13.980)

But it's going to take people in leadership of a couple of very powerful countries to

Rob Reid (38:18.940)

get to the consensus amongst them and then to decide we're going to get everybody together

Lex Fridman (38:22.900)

and browbeat them into banning this stuff.

Lex Fridman (38:24.640)

Now that doesn't make it entirely impossible that somebody might do this.

Lex Fridman (38:28.680)

But in well regulated, carefully watched over fiduciary environments like federally funded

Rob Reid (38:35.840)

academic research, anything going on in the government itself, things going on in companies

Rob Reid (38:41.880)

that have investors who don't want to go to jail for the rest of their lives.

Lex Fridman (38:47.000)

I think that would have a major, major dampening impact on it.

Lex Fridman (38:50.400)

But there is a particular possible catalyst in this time we live in, which is for really

Rob Reid (38:58.360)

kind of raising the question of gain of function research for the application of virus making

Rob Reid (39:02.640)

viruses more dangerous.

Rob Reid (39:05.200)

Is the question of whether COVID leaked from a lab, sort of not even answering that question,

Lex Fridman (39:14.360)

but even asking that question is a very, it seems like a very important question to ask

Rob Reid (39:21.160)

to catalyze the conversation about whether we should be doing gain of function research.

Rob Reid (39:26.440)

I mean, from a high level, why do you think people, even colleagues of mine are not comfortable

Lex Fridman (39:33.720)

asking that question?

Lex Fridman (39:35.360)

And two, do you think that the answer could be that it did leak from a lab?

Rob Reid (39:40.200)

I think the mere possibility that it did leak from a lab is evidence enough, again, for

Rob Reid (39:49.080)

the hypothetical rational national leaders watching this simple PowerPoint.

Rob Reid (39:54.640)

If you could put the possibility at 1% and you look at the unbelievable destructive power

Rob Reid (40:00.460)

that COVID had, that should be an overwhelmingly powerful argument for excluding it.

Rob Reid (40:06.240)

Now as to whether or not that was a leak, some very, very level, I don't know enough

Rob Reid (40:12.360)

about all of the factors in the Bayesian analysis and so forth that has gone into people making

Lex Fridman (40:18.160)

the pro argument of that.

Lex Fridman (40:19.640)

So I don't pretend to be an expert on that and I don't have a point of view, I just don't

Lex Fridman (40:25.040)

know.

Lex Fridman (40:26.040)

But what we can say is it is entirely possible for a couple of reasons.

Lex Fridman (40:32.640)

One is that there is a BSL4 lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Rob Reid (40:37.320)

I believe it's the only BSL4 in China, I could be wrong about that, but it definitely had

Rob Reid (40:44.440)

a history that alarmed very sophisticated US diplomats and others who were in contact

Rob Reid (40:52.520)

with the lab and were aware of what it was doing long before COVID hit the world.

Lex Fridman (41:00.120)

And so there are diplomatic cables that have been declassified, I believe one sophisticated

Rob Reid (41:05.640)

scientist or other observer said that WIV is a ticking time bomb.

Lex Fridman (41:10.720)

And I believe it's also been pretty reasonably established that coronaviruses were a topic

Rob Reid (41:16.120)

of great interest at WIV.

Rob Reid (41:18.240)

The SARS obviously came out of China and that's a coronavirus that would make an enormous

Rob Reid (41:22.320)

amount of sense for it to be studied there.

Lex Fridman (41:25.800)

And there is so much opacity about what happened in the early days and weeks after the outbreak

Rob Reid (41:32.880)

that's basically been imposed by the Chinese government that we just don't know.

Lex Fridman (41:38.200)

So it feels like a substantially or greater than 1% possibility to me looking at it from

Rob Reid (41:43.680)

the outside.

Lex Fridman (41:45.360)

And that's something that one could imagine.

Rob Reid (41:47.800)

Now we're going to the realm of thought experiment, not me decreeing this is what happened, but

Rob Reid (41:52.200)

if they're studying coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and there is this precedent

Rob Reid (41:58.200)

of gain of function research that's been done on something that is remarkably uncontagious

Rob Reid (42:02.680)

to humans, whereas we know coronavirus is contagious to humans, I could definitely...

Lex Fridman (42:06.920)

And there is this global consensus, certainly was the case two or three years ago when this

Rob Reid (42:12.660)

work might've started, there seems to be this global consensus that gain of function is

Rob Reid (42:16.520)

fine.

Rob Reid (42:17.520)

The US paused funding for a little while, but paused funding, they never said private

Rob Reid (42:21.640)

actors couldn't do it, it was just a pause of NIH funding.

Lex Fridman (42:25.720)

And then that pause was lifted.

Lex Fridman (42:26.960)

So again, none of this is irrational.

Rob Reid (42:28.840)

You could certainly see the folks at WIV saying, gain of function, interesting vector, coronavirus

Rob Reid (42:34.720)

unlike H5N1, very contagious, we're a nation that has had terrible run ins with coronavirus,

Lex Fridman (42:42.840)

why don't we do a little gain of function on this?

Lex Fridman (42:44.960)

And then like all labs at all levels, one could imagine this lab leaking.

Lex Fridman (42:49.880)

So it's not an impossibility and very, very level headed people have said that, who've

Rob Reid (42:55.040)

looked at it much more deeply do believe in that outcome.

Lex Fridman (42:58.880)

Why is it such a threat to power the idea that it'll leak from a lab?

Lex Fridman (43:03.600)

Why is it so threatening?

Lex Fridman (43:04.600)

I don't maybe understand this point exactly.

Rob Reid (43:08.840)

Is it just that as governments and especially the Chinese government is really afraid of

Lex Fridman (43:14.060)

admitting mistakes that everybody makes?

Lex Fridman (43:18.320)

So this is a horrible, like Chernobyl is a good example.

Lex Fridman (43:21.840)

I come from the Soviet Union.

Rob Reid (43:24.480)

I mean, well, major mistakes were made in Chernobyl.

Lex Fridman (43:29.240)

I would argue for a lab leak to happen, the scale of the mistake is much smaller, right?

Rob Reid (43:40.040)

The depth and the breadth of rot that in bureaucracy that led to Chernobyl is much bigger than

Rob Reid (43:50.080)

anything that could lead to a lab leak, because it could literally just be, I mean, I'm sure

Rob Reid (43:55.360)

there's security, very careful security procedures, even in level three labs, but it, I imagine

Rob Reid (44:02.880)

maybe you can correct me, it's all it takes is the incompetence of a small number of individuals,

Rob Reid (44:09.240)

one individual on a particular, a couple of weeks, three weeks period, as opposed to a

Lex Fridman (44:14.560)

multi year bureaucratic failure of the entire government.

Rob Reid (44:19.160)

Right.

Rob Reid (44:20.160)

Well, certainly the magnitude of mistakes and compounding mistakes that went into Chernobyl

Rob Reid (44:24.200)

was far, far, far greater, but the consequence of COVID outweighs that, the consequences

Lex Fridman (44:30.720)

of Chernobyl to a tremendous degree.

Lex Fridman (44:34.000)

And I think that particularly authoritarian governments are unbelievably reluctant to

Rob Reid (44:43.600)

admit to any fallibility whatsoever, and there's a long, long history of that across dozens

Lex Fridman (44:49.160)

and dozens of authoritarian governments, and to be transparent, again, this is in the hypothetical

Rob Reid (44:56.080)

world in which this was a leak, which again, I don't have, I don't personally have enough

Rob Reid (45:00.640)

sophistication to have an opinion on the, on the likelihood, but in the hypothetical

Rob Reid (45:04.480)

world in which it was a leak, the global reaction and the amount of global animus and the amount

Rob Reid (45:14.360)

of, you know, the decline in global respect that would happen toward China, because every

Rob Reid (45:22.440)

country suffered massively from this, unbelievable damages in terms of human lives and economic

Rob Reid (45:28.480)

activity disrupted, the world would in some way present China with that bill.

Lex Fridman (45:35.200)

And when you take on top of that, the natural disinclination for any authoritarian government

Rob Reid (45:41.160)

to admit any fallibility and tolerate the possibility of any fallibility whatsoever,

Lex Fridman (45:46.960)

and you look at the relative opacity, even though they let a world health organization

Rob Reid (45:51.520)

group in, you know, a couple of months ago to run around, they didn't give that who group

Rob Reid (45:56.720)

anywhere near the level of access that would be necessary to definitively say X happened

Rob Reid (46:01.600)

versus Y.

Rob Reid (46:02.600)

The level of opacity that surrounds those opening weeks and months of COVID in China,

Rob Reid (46:08.400)

we just don't know.

Rob Reid (46:10.440)

If you were to kind of look back at 2020 and maybe broadening it out to future pandemics

Rob Reid (46:17.840)

that could be much more dangerous, what kind of response, how do we fail in a response

Lex Fridman (46:24.760)

and how could we do better?

Lex Fridman (46:27.560)

So the gain of function research is discussing the question of we should not be creating

Rob Reid (46:35.560)

viruses that are both exceptionally contagious and exceptionally deadly to humans.

Lex Fridman (46:41.320)

But if it does happen, perhaps the natural evolution, natural mutation, is there interesting

Rob Reid (46:48.200)

technological responses on the testing side, on the vaccine development side, on the collection

Rob Reid (46:56.040)

of data or on the basic sort of policy response side or the sociological, the psychological

Lex Fridman (47:02.680)

side?

Rob Reid (47:03.680)

Yeah, there's all kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (47:05.680)

And most of what I've thought about and written about and again discussed in that long bit

Rob Reid (47:11.280)

with Sam is dual use.

Lex Fridman (47:14.920)

So most of the countermeasures that I've been thinking about and advocating for would be

Rob Reid (47:20.040)

every bit as effective against zoonotic disease and natural pandemic of some sort as an artificial

Lex Fridman (47:26.840)

one.

Rob Reid (47:27.840)

The risk of an artificial one, even the near term risk of an artificial one, ups the urgency

Lex Fridman (47:32.900)

around these measures immensely, but most of them would be broadly applicable.

Lex Fridman (47:37.540)

And so I think the first thing that we really want to do on a global scale is have a far,

Lex Fridman (47:43.440)

far, far more robust and globally transparent system of detection.

Lex Fridman (47:49.720)

And that can happen on a number of levels.

Rob Reid (47:52.080)

The most obvious one is just in the blood of people who come into clinics exhibiting

Rob Reid (47:58.200)

signs of illness.

Lex Fridman (48:00.280)

And we are certainly at a point now where at with relatively minimal investment, we

Rob Reid (48:07.600)

could develop in clinic diagnostics that would be unbelievably effective at pinpointing what's

Rob Reid (48:12.880)

going on in almost any disease when somebody walks into a doctor's office or a clinic.

Lex Fridman (48:19.080)

And better than that, this is a little bit further off, but it wouldn't cost tens of

Rob Reid (48:24.920)

billions in research dollars, it would be a relatively modest and affordable budget

Rob Reid (48:28.880)

in relation to the threat at home diagnostics that can really, really pinpoint, okay, particularly

Rob Reid (48:36.000)

with respiratory infections, because that is generally almost universally the mechanism

Rob Reid (48:41.480)

of transmission for any serious pandemic.

Lex Fridman (48:44.680)

So somebody has a respiratory infection, is it one of the, you know, significantly large

Lex Fridman (48:49.760)

handful of rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, and other things that cause common cold?

Lex Fridman (48:55.440)

Or is it influenza?

Lex Fridman (48:56.440)

If it's influenza, is it influenza A versus B?

Rob Reid (49:00.000)

Or is it, you know, a small handful of other more exotic but nonetheless sort of common

Lex Fridman (49:06.640)

respiratory infections that are out there?

Rob Reid (49:09.360)

Having a diagnostic panel to pinpoint all of that stuff, that's something that's well

Rob Reid (49:12.960)

within our capabilities.

Rob Reid (49:14.060)

That's much less a lift than creating mRNA vaccines, which obviously we proved capable

Rob Reid (49:19.060)

of when we put our minds to it.

Lex Fridman (49:21.200)

So do that on a global basis.

Lex Fridman (49:24.360)

And I don't think that's irrational because the best prototype for this that I'm aware

Rob Reid (49:28.760)

of isn't currently rolling out in Atherton, California, or Fairfield County, Connecticut,

Rob Reid (49:34.640)

or some other wealthy place.

Lex Fridman (49:36.300)

The best prototype that I'm aware of this is rolling out right now in Nigeria.

Lex Fridman (49:40.140)

And it's a project that came out of the Broad Institute, which is, as I'm sure you know,

Lex Fridman (49:45.060)

but some listeners may not, is kind of like an academic joint venture between Harvard

Lex Fridman (49:49.580)

and MIT.

Lex Fridman (49:50.920)

The program is called Sentinel.

Lex Fridman (49:53.360)

And their objective is, and their plan is a very well conceived plan, a methodical plan,

Rob Reid (49:59.280)

is to do just that in areas of Nigeria that are particularly vulnerable to zoonotic diseases

Rob Reid (50:05.480)

making the jump from animals to humans.

Lex Fridman (50:08.040)

But also there's just an unbelievable public health benefit from that.

Lex Fridman (50:12.000)

And it's sort of a three tier system where clinicians in the field could very rapidly

Rob Reid (50:17.020)

determine do you have one of the infections of acute interest here, either because it's

Rob Reid (50:22.220)

very common in this region, so we want to diagnose as many things as we can at the front

Lex Fridman (50:26.800)

line, or because it's uncommon but unbelievably threatening like Ebola.

Lex Fridman (50:31.360)

So front line worker can make that determination very, very rapidly.

Rob Reid (50:35.500)

If it comes up as a we don't know, they bump it up to a level that's more like at a fully

Rob Reid (50:41.020)

configured doctor's office or local hospital.

Lex Fridman (50:44.080)

And if it's still at a we don't know, it gets bumped up to a national level.

Lex Fridman (50:47.900)

And it gets bumped very, very rapidly.

Lex Fridman (50:51.240)

So if this can be done in Nigeria, and it seems that it can be, there shouldn't be any

Rob Reid (50:57.340)

inhibition for it to happen in most other places.

Lex Fridman (51:00.880)

And it should be affordable from a budgetary standpoint.

Lex Fridman (51:03.300)

And based on Sentinel's budget and adjusting things for things like very different cost

Rob Reid (51:07.800)

of living, larger population, et cetera, I did a back of the envelope calculation that

Rob Reid (51:13.120)

doing something like Sentinel in the US would be in the low billions of dollars.

Lex Fridman (51:17.200)

And wealthy countries, middle income countries can't afford such a thing.

Rob Reid (51:22.120)

Lower income countries should certainly be helped with that.

Lex Fridman (51:25.680)

But start with that level of detection.

Lex Fridman (51:27.760)

And then layer on top of that other interesting things like monitoring search engine traffic,

Rob Reid (51:33.720)

search engine queries for evidence that strange clusters of symptoms are starting to rise

Rob Reid (51:39.660)

in different places.

Lex Fridman (51:40.660)

There's been a lot of work done with that.

Rob Reid (51:43.520)

Most of it kind of academic and experimental, but some of it has been powerful enough to

Lex Fridman (51:47.720)

suggest that this could be a very powerful early warning system.

Rob Reid (51:51.200)

There's a guy named Bill Lampos at University College London who basically did a very rigorous

Rob Reid (51:56.760)

analysis that showed that symptom searches reliably predicted COVID outbreaks in the

Rob Reid (52:05.000)

early days of the pandemic in given countries by as much as 16 days before the evidence

Lex Fridman (52:10.160)

started to accrue at a public health level.

Rob Reid (52:12.320)

16 days of forewarning can be monumentally important in the early days of an outbreak.

Lex Fridman (52:18.960)

And this is a very, very talented, but nonetheless very resource constrained academic project.

Rob Reid (52:26.640)

Even if that was something that was done with a NORAD like budget.

Lex Fridman (52:31.000)

So starting with detection, that's something we could do radically, radically better.

Lex Fridman (52:35.520)

So aggregating multiple data sources in order to create something, I mean, this is really

Rob Reid (52:39.800)

exciting to me, the possibility that I've heard inklings of creating almost like a weather

Rob Reid (52:44.840)

map of pathogens, like basically aggregating all of these data sources, scaling many orders

Rob Reid (52:54.140)

of magnitude up at home testing and all kinds of testing that doesn't just try to test for

Rob Reid (53:00.000)

the particular pathogen of worry now, but everything like a full spectrum of things

Lex Fridman (53:06.320)

that could be dangerous to the human body.

Lex Fridman (53:09.040)

And thereby be able to create these maps like that are dynamically updated on an hourly

Lex Fridman (53:14.900)

basis of how viruses travel throughout the world.

Lex Fridman (53:19.520)

And so you can respond, like you can then integrate just like you do when you check

Rob Reid (53:23.400)

your weather map and it's raining or not, of course, not perfect, but it's very good

Rob Reid (53:28.880)

predictor whether it's going to rain or not and use that to then make decisions about

Lex Fridman (53:34.320)

your own life, ultimately give the power information to individuals to respond.

Lex Fridman (53:38.840)

And if it's a super dangerous, like if it's acid rain versus regular rain, you might want

Lex Fridman (53:44.160)

to really stay inside as opposed to risking it.

Lex Fridman (53:47.480)

And that, just like you said, if I think it's not very expensive relative to all the things

Lex Fridman (53:54.400)

that we do in this world, but it does require bold leadership.

Lex Fridman (54:00.440)

And there's another dark thing, which really has bothered me about 2020, which it requires

Rob Reid (54:05.420)

is it requires trust in institutions to carry out these kinds of programs and requires trust

Rob Reid (54:13.200)

in science and engineers and sort of centralized organizations that would operate at scale

Lex Fridman (54:20.480)

here.

Lex Fridman (54:21.480)

And much of that trust has been, at least in the United States, diminished.

Rob Reid (54:27.800)

It feels like I'm not exactly sure where to place the blame, but I do place quite a bit

Rob Reid (54:33.220)

of the blame into the scientific community and again, my fellow colleagues in speaking

Rob Reid (54:40.160)

down to people at times, speaking from authority, it sounded like it dismissed the basic human

Rob Reid (54:46.420)

experience or the basic common humanity of people in a way to like, it almost sounded

Lex Fridman (54:52.560)

like there's an agenda that's hidden behind the words the scientists spoke.

Rob Reid (54:58.200)

Like they're trying to, in a self preserving way, control the population or something like

Lex Fridman (55:03.200)

that.

Rob Reid (55:04.200)

I don't think any of that is true from the majority of the scientific community, but

Lex Fridman (55:07.400)

it sounded that way.

Lex Fridman (55:08.820)

And so the trust began to diminish and I'm not sure how to fix that except to be more

Rob Reid (55:16.040)

authentic, be more real, acknowledge the uncertainties under which we operate, acknowledge the mistakes

Rob Reid (55:22.840)

that scientists make, that institutions make.

Rob Reid (55:26.520)

The leak from the lab is a perfect example where we have imperfect systems that make

Rob Reid (55:32.000)

all the progress we see in the world.

Lex Fridman (55:34.060)

And that being honest about that imperfection, I think is essential for forming trust.

Lex Fridman (55:39.480)

But I don't know what to make of it has been deeply disappointing because I do think just

Rob Reid (55:45.280)

like you mentioned, the solutions require people to trust the institutions with their

Rob Reid (55:53.240)

data.

Lex Fridman (55:54.240)

Yeah.

Lex Fridman (55:55.240)

And I think part of the problem is it seems to me as an outsider that there was a bizarre

Rob Reid (55:59.920)

unwillingness on the part of the CDC and other institutions to admit to, to frame and to

Rob Reid (56:08.560)

contextualize uncertainty.

Rob Reid (56:11.300)

Maybe they had a patronizing idea that these people need to be told and when they're told,

Rob Reid (56:16.800)

they need to be told with authority and a level of definitiveness and certain certitude

Lex Fridman (56:21.660)

that doesn't actually exist.

Lex Fridman (56:23.680)

And so when they whipsaw on recommendations like what you should do about masks, when

Rob Reid (56:29.400)

the CDC is kind of at the very beginning of the pandemic saying, masks don't do anything.

Rob Reid (56:35.560)

Don't wear them.

Rob Reid (56:36.820)

When the real driver for that was we don't want these clowns going out and depleting

Rob Reid (56:41.700)

Amazon of masks because they may be needed in medical settings and we just don't know

Lex Fridman (56:49.240)

yet.

Rob Reid (56:50.240)

I think a message that actually respected people and said, this is why we're asking

Rob Reid (56:54.360)

you not to do masks yet and there's more to be seen would be less whipsawing and would

Rob Reid (57:00.080)

bring people like they feel more like they're part of the conversation and they're being

Lex Fridman (57:04.580)

treated like adults than saying one day definitively masks suck.

Lex Fridman (57:09.480)

And then X days later saying, nope, they haven't wear masks.

Lex Fridman (57:13.120)

And so I think framing things in terms of the probabilities, which most people are easy

Rob Reid (57:16.960)

to parse.

Rob Reid (57:17.960)

I mean, a more recent example, which I just thought was batty was suspending the Johnson

Lex Fridman (57:23.520)

and Johnson vaccine for a very low single digit number of days in the United States

Rob Reid (57:30.660)

based on the fact that I believe there had been seven ish clotting incidents in roughly

Rob Reid (57:38.240)

seven million people who had had the vaccine administered, I believe one of which resulted

Lex Fridman (57:43.680)

in a fatality.

Lex Fridman (57:45.560)

And there was definitely suggestive data that indicated that there was a relationship.

Rob Reid (57:50.100)

This wasn't just coincidental because I think all of the clotting incidents happened in

Rob Reid (57:53.800)

women as opposed to men and kind of clustered in a certain age group.

Lex Fridman (57:58.400)

But does that call for shutting off the vaccine or does it call for leveling with the American

Lex Fridman (58:05.420)

public and saying we've had one fatality out of seven million?

Rob Reid (58:10.480)

This is, let's just assume substantially less than the likelihood of getting struck by lightning.

Rob Reid (58:18.640)

Based on that information, and we're going to keep you posted because you can trust us

Rob Reid (58:22.940)

to keep you posted, based on that information, please decide whether you're comfortable with

Rob Reid (58:27.120)

a Johnson and Johnson vaccine.

Rob Reid (58:29.340)

That would have been one response and I think people would have been able to parse the simple

Rob Reid (58:33.160)

bits of data and make their own judgment.

Rob Reid (58:35.200)

By turning it off, all of a sudden there's this dramatic signal to people who don't read

Rob Reid (58:41.680)

all 900 words in the New York Times piece that explains why it's being turned off but

Lex Fridman (58:45.880)

just see the headline, which is a majority of people.

Rob Reid (58:48.680)

There's a sudden like, oh my God, yikes, vaccine being shut off.

Lex Fridman (58:54.480)

And then all the people who sat on the fence or are sitting on the fence about whether

Rob Reid (58:58.120)

or not they trust vaccines, that is going to push an incalculable number of people.

Rob Reid (59:03.360)

That's going to be the last straw for we don't know how many hundreds of thousands or more

Rob Reid (59:06.800)

likely millions of people to say, okay, tipping point here, I don't trust these vaccines.

Rob Reid (59:11.520)

By pausing that for whatever it was, 10 or 12 days, and then flipping the switch as everybody

Rob Reid (59:16.940)

who knew much about the situation knew was inevitable.

Rob Reid (59:21.200)

By flipping the on switch 12 days later, you're conveying certitude J and J bad to certitude

Rob Reid (59:28.080)

J and J good in a period of just a few days and people just feel whipsawed and they're

Lex Fridman (59:33.040)

not part of the analysis.

Lex Fridman (59:34.040)

But it's not just the whipsawing.

Lex Fridman (59:36.600)

And I think about this quite a bit, I don't think I have good answers.

Rob Reid (59:39.960)

It's something about the way the communication actually happens.

Rob Reid (59:43.400)

Just I don't know what it is about Anthony Fauci, for example, but I don't trust him.

Lex Fridman (59:49.820)

And I think that has to do, I mean, he has an incredible background.

Lex Fridman (59:55.840)

I'm sure he's a brilliant scientist and researcher.

Rob Reid (59:59.100)

I'm sure he's also a great, like inside the room, policymaker and deliberator and so on.