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Nathan Myhrvold on NASA's lies, Theories of Everything, working with Hawking, and COVID lockdowns
January 29, 2021
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for watching.
Nathan Mirvold is one of those rare individuals who it's difficult to overstate the accomplishments of. Here is just a small sample of a list of fields that he's made extensive contributions to. It's by no means exhaustive. Nuclear power, that is, the inventing of new reactor types, one that can use uranium-238 and spent rods of other nuclear reactors. He also in his early days founded Microsoft Research, which, back then, startup software companies didn't have a research component to them.
This trend of Apple Research and Google Research
They're just adumbrations of his original creation. He founded a company based solely on inventing. He thought, well, there is no modern day equivalent of Edison. People just invent in their own specialized field. Why not have a company of a team of people like Edison? He also invented new methods of modes of delivery of treatments for malaria and other infectious diseases under the Bill Gates Foundation. He also came up with geoengineering solutions to the problem of global warming. We were scheduled to talk for just under an hour, but it went far over two hours.
And I didn't even get to half the questions that I had written down. Enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Nathan Mirvold. Okay, so why am I interested in you? Well, I'm extremely interested in you. I've been following you for about maybe 12 years.
When I was an undergrad, I remember hearing about your book on modernist cuisine and being fascinated and doing plenty of research into you. And thinking that there are few people, very few people in my life that I wish were my uncle, that I can, that I can persistently and bothersomely ask questions to.
And and so for years and years I've had this fascination with you and every once in a while I'd check in on you and I admire you you probably get this a lot but I admire you I look up to you there are very few people I say that about and so even with this podcast I Don't give people introductions because I like to just get right into the meat of it But for you, I have to tell the audience about my journey with you and some of your accolades So if you don't mind, can I just get rid of okay? Oh
I'll try not to roll my eyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just going to read some of this. So this podcast is about theories of everything, and it's also about publicizing some intellectuals that I don't think get as much credit as they deserve. Now, obviously, you're extremely successful. But I was watching your TED Talk, which I think is superior to the majority of TED Talks that I see. And many TED Talks have tens of millions of views sometimes. But yet yours only has 200,000. So if I can help that in any way.
I would love to with this minor podcast of mine.
It just astounds me. I don't know of anyone else who has the same amount. So I decided, why don't I just start to list them? And I don't think this is exhaustive in the least. I asked your team, and even they couldn't come up with all of them. I asked, is there a list online? Well, anyway, here's some. So dinosaurs slash paleontologists. You like dinosaurs. You love looking into paleontology. You like even digging. OK, great. Asteroids. You have an interest in scanning the skies and analyzing the data of NASA. Yeah. Nuclear power. OK. Eradicating malaria. Metamaterials.
Quantum gravity in your former days. Software, obviously, Microsoft. Food, modernist cuisine. Penguins. Okay, I thought it was just penguins. Apparently it's more, but I forgot what your team told me. Photography. Well, all kinds of birds. Birds in general. And all kinds of animals. Great, great, great. What am I missing? Well, I do a lot of photography. Right. So photography of
Almost all of the things that you mentioned, photography of stars and meteors and asteroids, photography of landscapes and the natural world, photography of food for the cookbooks. So that's another one. More generally, math and technology fascinate me, science.
I think of you as a convivial and quirky version of Elon Musk. A lesser-known, convivial and quirky Elon Musk. And I've never had the fascination with Elon, mainly because of perhaps personality differences. I'm more on the theoretical end. My background is in physics. And he's much more practical. You seem to have both.
For me, I'm more comfortable with QFT than I am with Bernoulli's equation. For some reason, what's practical in the engineering side is it's difficult for me to apprehend. Nathan, first of all, how do you spend your days? What does your average day look like if there's an average day? How much sleep do you get? What is the structure? I don't think there's any single typical day.
Many of the things that I do involve, you know, very different activities. Today I had some of the last meetings that we'll have on our pizza book. I just wrote a book called Modernist Pizza, which is aiming to be the definitive book on pizza. And so we had a few meetings to wrap that up today. And there'll probably be a few more, but we're getting down to the short strokes. We're almost done.
I had my picture taken for the book, because it kind of goes to the territory. I did a bunch of work on astrophotography. In December, there was a really big meteor shower, a shower called the Geminids. And usually the Geminids, at least in my experience,
Every time I remember to look to see about going to see them, what happens is it's cloudy. Or, well, the moon is up. When the moon is up, you can't see as many of them. Well, this year, or I guess last year, the very end of 2020, everything came together. And I took some great pictures of the Geminids. And now we have to process them.
And the way I do photography these days is very computationally intensive. So in the case of these meteors, I took about two and a half thousand pictures per camera times four cameras. So that's about 10,000 pictures over the course of one night while these cameras tracked a part of the sky. And then
Because you're tracking the sky, the stars are all nice little dots and most look really nice, but the meteors come down as streaks. Well, there's all kinds of processing that we have to do to get a usable picture out of all that stuff. I mean, so far the
pictures and then all of the temporary files that you create as you because sometimes you have to put it in different formats for different pieces of software is 20 terabytes. Wow. 20 terabytes for one night. What will be one image? Uh huh. Wow. Okay. I'm very anxious to see how that turned out. Uh, so how much sleep do you get on an average day? Um, you know,
I've been through periods where I'm traveling or we're working on some big deadline for something where I get very little, but usually I get enough sleep. I get eight, nine hours sleep. The reason I'm asking is that I see you as someone who's extremely productive. And when I speak to intellectuals, I find that they generally are regimented, that they eat a certain type of food at a certain time of day.
or they don't eat a certain type of food at a certain time of day, or they meditate, or they take a certain nootropic. And I'm curious, what is it that you do such that you can accomplish all that you accomplish? Different each day? Well, it is different each day. So, you know, this today was a mix of different things. And
I guess the end of February, early March, I'm going to go to Missouri. I built a special camera outfit, which looks pretty ridiculous. It lashes three cameras together, each one of the giant lens. And I did it so I could photograph two things. One is big storm waves. So I want to take some super high quality panoramas of ocean waves and also
Huge flocks of birds. Well, in Missouri, they don't have any storm waves, but they do have migrating geese. So about two million of them are due at the end of February. So when I go there, I'll probably be there for three, four days, maybe a little bit longer. And that'll all be about that. And I went to see some other migrating birds in December.
I got late November actually, late November. And that was about getting up at four every day. So that you could actually be out where the birds are well before the sun comes up. Because that's like, that's the whole thing. With the meteors, the meteor shower, besides all of this technical equipment that I brought, I also bring a lawn chair.
because you want to sit outside and see them. And it's cool to see them. Our eyes aren't good enough to see all of them. So you want to get a camera catches more, but a camera catches it from a narrow thing. Whereas if you're out there, you see them across the whole sky, which is quite remarkable. So anyway, different projects will require you to jump in with both feet and be a hundred percent on that project.
Most of the time, not. And so that's what allows me to multitask between projects. How do you choose what project? Are you just driven by your intuition, your feelings, your desires, or is there some grander plan? There's Martian beast mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sport season even more fun on prize picks whether you
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and feelings. And if I don't want to do it, I'm not going to go do it. And I would hope that my it's not just my raw passion. A lot of the things that I do are technically difficult to do. So far, they haven't been impossible. Now, I'd hate to pick an impossible one and get passionate about it, because I need to waste a lot of time. Right.
Is there something that you found to be outside of your domain of competence or outside of what you can achieve? Of course, there's problems like nuclear power. I was one of the inventors of this new type of nuclear power plant. I started the company. That company is going great at the moment. It was recently chosen by the US government to build some test reactors. But
This is not a one man or even one company thing. Nuclear power intrinsically also involves the decisions society makes. Of course, one of the reasons we've done it is because we want to have a new type of carbon-free source of energy because of our impending climate crisis, which is a crisis for everybody.
There's a bunch of things that I, so yes, I'm working on the climate crisis. I've done other things for climate, but it's not like it's up to me. Okay. Not like I have a magic wand and I can solve that problem. I can make it. That's when I make a contribution. I try and we'll see what the world does with it. Whereas if I, um, last year I, uh, created a,
the world's highest resolution microscope dedicated to photographing snowflakes. I saw that. Now, there's a lot of things you could ask like who cares or why, but that's one that was within the scope of what I thought was possible for me to do. That turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, but we got it done.
That's very different than a societal problem. Like, eliminating malaria, I've contributed, I think, a tremendous amount towards that fight. But it's a tremendous amount towards a fight that's this far along against many miles to go. And I think it's important to work on both kinds of things. You could say the climate crisis or malaria is
tilting windmills or doing things that are, you know, beyond anybody's single person's ability. And it's true, they are. To the degree you find a way to contribute, I still want to work on them. But it's also nice to do things like write a book on pizza. Again, I
I've written a couple other cookbooks. So if you ask the question, is it possible for me to write a book on pizza? The answer is sure. That was not ever a question like, will he write the book? Now you can, what that question is, is it a good book? Is it not a good book? What does the rest of the world think of it? We're publishing it not only in English, but we will publish it in Italian. Always think of it. Right.
A lot of people don't know that you did your postdoc under Stephen Hawking in Quantum Gravity. What was that like? Practically speaking, how do you communicate to Stephen Hawking? How does that process work, given his challenges? Well, back in the day that I was with Stephen, he didn't have a voice synthesizer. You know, if you've seen him on
more recent TV specials or something. He always has a voice synthesizer. He hadn't, he didn't have that. So he would speak as best he could, which didn't really sound like human speech at all. Um, and, uh, slower. What was it also slower? Well, it was, we'd have to, it was slow. It was very, very hard to understand.
And so understanding it was partially about listening and partially about guessing. And the part that was really unfortunate about that is he loved to tell jokes. Well, it turns out the punchline of a joke by definition isn't expected. Right, right, right. You can't guess ahead.
four and five, like the tension is growing with everyone like, oh my God, why don't we get we get this. So the thing about working with Stephen is, it's very hard to feel sorry for yourself. If you're working with Stephen, you know, you might get up and you think, Oh, God, am I feeling that great? And, oh, it's cold outside. And I forgot, you know, this and that the other thing and I'm
Oh my God, my wife sucks. And then you have Steven there who has these incredible physical challenges and has just an incredibly good attitude about it. And so it just, it made it impossible to feel sorry for yourself. And it's to this day, it's something that when I'm ever tempted to, I was thinking, yeah, but I can walk.
I know the bathroom by myself. You know, some people denigrate Stephen because he was heralded as the next Einstein, at least in the popular media. But then it might be a stretch to say he was the next Einstein. But what you can't fault him on at all is his diligence and persistence. And the only other person I can compare him to would be Euler, who was blind and still did math, but at least Euler had his hands. So, well, Stephen,
was driven to do the work that he wanted to do. And it wasn't a question of, oh, we had to go do it because, you know, he needed the salary because, you know, any of these other things. And he certainly worked as hard as he could, you know, through being 70. And obviously at different times, his ability to work was compromised by his condition.
But he did incredible things. Now the problem with comparing to Einstein is that Einstein was a unique combination of both brilliance and he came at a time when he could discover a tremendous amount of things.
You know, if you want to call someone the next Einstein, the first thing to ask is, well, who was it before Einstein? And you could make a case for it being Newton. But, okay, if you take those two data points, that means we should get one every 500 years. So, calm down on the who's the next Einstein.
There's a wonderful organization created by a friend who was also at Cambridge at one point, not the same time I was there. And it was the name of the organization is Nick Steinstein from Africa. And their idea was, let's improve education and so forth. And my running joke with the guy who started it is,
Okay, but there's never been an Einstein from America. So, you know, America has more PhDs in physics and has more Nobel prizes than any other country. And then if you include in America's column, people from other countries that did their work, they got the PhD in America, it's huge. And yet you can
make a strong case that there's never been an American that had the breadth of contribution that Einstein did. That doesn't mean we didn't have some awesome physicists. We did. Feynman is a terrific example. But Einstein had the unique case that he was able to make very fundamental contributions in multiple areas.
You know, we know him most in the popular realm for his theory of relativity. Amusingly, that isn't what he got his Nobel Prize for. He got it for something called the photoelectric effect, which was one of the first great proofs of quantum mechanics, which is weird because people usually think of Einstein as being anti-quantum. But the part I really love about it is that Max Planck, who was the great physicist of that era,
wrote a recommendation letter for Einstein to the Nobel Prize committee saying, look, don't effectively, don't worry about this relativity nonsense. It'll blow over. The kid is young. You got to reward him for this other thing. And yet today we think of him for that. But his
his role in statistical mechanics with what we now call Bose-Einstein statistics. It was also incredible. And he must keep going through field after field where he was able to be incredibly influential as was Newton. My favorite crazy Newton story is
that, you know, he was made the Chancellor of the British Mint. And at the time, that was done as a political favor. And it was explicitly a position that they would call a sinecure, meaning without care, like he didn't have to show up at the office, you know, he got into it. Okay. And if you have an American quarter,
The edge is ripped. The person who invented that? Sir Isaac Newton. And the reason was? They had a problem with many of the metals with the edge of the coin holding up. There was a sort of the problem of they couldn't make a clean edge and then you would also wear
And then it was harder to tell counterfeits. So that milling, and I forget the name of it now, but that milling was invented by Newton. So he did some, he also did some crazy shit. He was into alchemy. So his chemistry was terrible.
Have you thought much about what's holding physics back if you see physics as being held back in fundamental laws for the past 40 years? Some people say that it's been taken over by string theory as well as we don't have much of data when it comes to, we don't have much new data. So have you thought much about that? Oh, sure. This is the defining problem of our age.
My joke with friends from graduate school is that it all went to hell as soon as I left physics. Yeah, you gotta go back, man. I'll be with you every step of the way. I'm not the reason. It was either good choice on my part or it was a coincidence. I don't think I could have solved it. I think there's a causal arrow. Yeah, we have the situation where
You know, in the 19th century, they thought they were on the verge of figuring everything out. There was just a few pesky problems. Then in the early part of the 20th century, up through the 20s and the 30s, they realized they had no shit, basically. And this led to the development of quantum mechanics. Well, quantum mechanics was fantastically successful.
Then it ran up against fundamental physics and relativity. So they had to create relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. And all of that was pretty much in place. I went to graduate school in physics in 79, the fall of 79. And while I was
There, maybe the first year, maybe it was the second year, a guy who'd been a graduate student who'd stayed on as a postdoc, Frank Bilchak, gave a talk about asymptotic freedom, which was one of the last pieces to really be put together as part of the story of quarks and what people call quantum chromodynamics or the standard model.
Frank later got the Nobel Prize for that. Well, you could pick other moments in time, but for me, that's a good moment in time because at that point in time, we knew there were a tremendous number of questions that we couldn't answer. We had successfully integrated multiple kinds of
fundamental physics. So we had successfully integrated electromagnetism with something called the weak theory for the weak interaction and is it called electroweak theory. Then we had developed quantum chromodynamics or QCD and together these things developed what since then we call the standard model. Of course we didn't call it the standard model when it was just freshly done because it's a little arrogant to call it standard
Right off the bat. And yet, we didn't know a lot of very basic things. We didn't know the precise relationship between many of our sets of particles. Leptons, which means an electron or a variety of other particles like that. What are their relationship to the hadrons?
And we didn't know, the biggest ones, we didn't know how all of that fit with gravity. Now, by that time we knew that the Einstein's general theory of gravitation worked great and it predicted all kinds of things. Still works great. And that's the problem.
The Standard Model works great in its sphere of influence. GR works great for gravity. How the hell are they related? And they have to be related because there are many, many things that are clearly involved both quantum mechanics and
And gravity, my favorite simple one is a candle flame. Is what? A candle flame. Okay. Light the wick on a candle, it goes up. Why does it go up? Gravity. It's heating the gases, they become less dense, it goes up. That light, that light you're seeing is quantum emissions. There's clearly quantum phenomena going on in a gravitational field.
How are they related? Now, that's a very simple example, and people could probably sort of explain that or wave their hands to explain it. But when you get to black holes and the intense things that space-time does around black holes, or you get to the origin of the universe, or a variety of other things, you've got a problem.
So people set out to solve that. And the theory of everything is one of the names that people gave to that pursuit. There was a time when people called it a grand unified theory instead. But the goal, even though there was slight differences in what you would approach, the goal was very similar.
So anyway, that was the situation 40 years ago, and it's the situation today. Have you been keeping up with any of the latest theories of everything, such as Eric Weinstein's geometric unity or Stephen Wolfram's? Yes. Oh, sure.
I need to backtrack though. There's one other thing that is remarkable about this last period of time. And that goes a little bit to your question of the whole world's attention was captured by string theory. Well, starting with relativity, so really starting in 1905, you could argue,
but particularly then general relativity and quantum field theory, an enormous amount of advances were made by considering the mathematical structure of the problem, and in particular the mathematical symmetries of the problem, and that when you found a mathematical symmetry, it would, if you took that seriously, that would give you new and important physics.
So general relativity is in some sense the theory of general covariance. So if you take Einstein's extremely simple set of things of saying, you know, you have these relative observers and the inertial frames are the same, the accelerated ones, not so much.
That gives you general covariance and that gives you general relativity. And then those same thoughts about applying covariance give you a tremendous amount of what it takes for a quantum field theory. You then also take the idea of symmetries and say, hey, we have mathematical symmetries are coming and that's Murray Gell-Mann was famous for calling this the eighth fold way because there was a
group theory with an eight-fold symmetry that was involved. And so mathematics was a tremendous guide. And when you found a mathematical symmetry, it usually would have a physical interpretation. Well, until we found a mathematical symmetry called supersymmetry. And supersymmetry from a
fundamental mathematics perspective it's very attractive and it has sucked an enormous amount of brain power into saying look this is so beautiful it's got to be correct only so far as we can tell it's not correct like yeah normal energies meaning the what we've been able to observe so far with
even our best stuff, even the LHC. It predicts there should be twice as many particles as there are. Those particles are called superpartners. And fundamentally, if you have this supersymmetry, it's analogous to saying, well, if I've got charge minus one particles, I better have charge plus one particles.
And so I have supercharges. Well, then I need super partners. So then this idea was so seductive that people have gone put enormous amounts of brain power into trying to make it work. And the the big showdown that everyone expected was the LHC.
And the stated purpose of the LHC was to find the Higgs boson. But almost everyone expected this would also be where we got the new set of clues. And this is where we would be able to solve this fundamental problem. Because we've gone this 30 or 40 years
staring at the old clues and not coming up with anything. And in general, physics has progressed best when we had clues. Now, general relativity is the great exception to that. Einstein's inspiration for that is so weak. It's so simple.
It almost sounds simple minded. You know, like someone coming into you and saying, ah, I've got this guy in an elevator and this guy who's on this, and I'm going to tell you all about the structure of the universe from this. You'd say, no, no, no, no, no. You're in that case, but not Einstein. So that was a rare example of someone who had very few clues. Newton.
had very few clues. There's an apocryphal story about the apple falling and hitting him in the head. That guy did not take very much in the way of inspiration to get going. So that was another great one. But we have this problem now that we have the same clues we've looked at for 30 or 40 years. LHC found the Higgs boson.
Um, it didn't find any super partners. And so far it hasn't had any hint of that. And periodically over the last three or four years, there will be a murmur in the field. Oh, there's someone's got, you know, so and so in this two different projects. So there's Atlas and Alice. Oh, Alice is seeing something or Atlas is seeing something. Um,
But so far, that's all come to naught. And it's probably will certainly give them that outcome. If you look back at the field 20 years ago, or 25 years ago and said, Okay, we don't really know what's going on. Should we put all of our eggs in one basket? It's a no, let's
You know, we should bet on lots of different ideas, but there was an overwhelming bet on supersymmetry and string theory. And the weirder it got in chasing that direction down, it didn't dissuade people.
Now, there's friends of mine who say, oh, Nathan, you're out of it. You don't understand how wonderful and how beautiful it is. And I will stipulate to it being beautiful. And string theory has led to some interesting discoveries in mathematics. Ed Whitten, who I've known since graduate school and is a great friend, and I think the world of Ed got the Fields Medal in mathematics.
for a lot of things he worked on while trying to investigate supersymmetry and string theory. And string theory arguably has got a physical result to its name in that it helps you calculate the modes in a black hole which go to the still somewhat controversial issue of whether a black hole destroys entropy.
At this stage, we need one of two things to happen. We either need new clues or we need some damn genius who's so smart he or she does not need clues. Well, those geniuses seem to come around every 500 years. Now, maybe we have a little larger population today and we're educating a larger fraction of that population, so maybe it isn't 500,
It's not great statistics there. Or you need new clues, but LHC was ridiculously expensive. Trying to come up with something that is dramatically better than LHC, they probably can eke
some number of factors, and I'm not involved in it, so I won't speculate as to how many factors, but let's say they got a factor of 10. We don't know at the present, will a factor of 10 matter? Or will it be a factor of 100? Or will it be a factor of 1000? Or what? Right. And
As a result, that very confused story doesn't seem like it's the single best story to go take to nation states and say, please give us $500 billion that it might take to make something that was many orders of magnitude better. Or we just say, okay, we have to put on our thinking caps.
and come up with cheap ways or cheaper ways to get to that next level of power. That's also a possibility. But either way, we either need some genius on the old clues or some new clues. Now, there are people who are working on this. Peter White, who was my roommate in graduate school,
one of the most articulate critics of string theory on his blog, Not Even Wrong. Peter has recently come out with what to me look like some very intriguing ideas. And they're along a different approach than most people have taken in the past. But
They're not done yet either. They're a stab in the dark, and it will require a lot more work. Within the field of computing, there have been since the 1960s, there have been a variety of people who have tried to take the idea of computing as a metaphor seriously. So
There's a great essay, which originally was a lecture, by Edvard Wigner. Wigner was a Nobel Prize winner in physics. And the name of this essay is The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Physics. And so Wigner says,
How come it's so damn easy? You know, a lot of physical laws are first or second order equations, and most of it's linear, which means we could solve it. And then of course we know that there are other parts of physics that aren't linear, but the
If I were to give a modern version of Wigner's thing, I would say, hey, not only has it been, math has had it, it's a great run, but are we sure that it's mathematics in the same way we've done it before that we need next? And that's why people like David Deutsch, as an example, David Deutsch is a physicist. He was
the inventor of quantum computing, if you will. He had the idea that maybe you could compute with quantum systems. And David has done some very deep thinking about what it would mean to have a computable universe versus not. Where instead of relying on simple equations with
polynomials or sines and cosines, the things that we're used to in school, maybe the world is fundamentally more about computation. And computation is, in some sense, fundamentally more complex than that simple mathematics. And you can figure that out in things like the various complexity theories,
that a simple touring machine can't predict when it will land. Just as a matter of principle, it can't. Well, there's a whole pile of people besides Deutsch that have gotten excited about this. I've known Stephen Wolfram since I was at Princeton. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at the time. And he's a great friend of mine. I have huge respect for him.
I use Mathematica almost every day, his great contribution to software. He's got an approach where he has been able to replicate the classical, this is perhaps slightly unfair, but he's able to replicate some of the classical features of
quantum field theory. So if you think about all of these fields have got a quantization component, but they also have a classical component, electromagnetism being the simplest example of that, but there is effectively a classical component of these other things. And Stephen has shown that you can use very simple computational systems like cellular automata or other simple
things that will have many of the same symmetries as these more complicated theories. Now, there's two ways to view that. One way to view that is to say, yes, that's great, but now tie them into a real quantum theory.
And Stephen would, I think, be the first to say, well, that's hard. He hasn't quite done that yet, but he has done this intriguing first part. My friend Peter has in a different way done that first part. Computation as well, or completely different? Is it also computation? This is much more about traditional, very, very obtuse mathematics.
And so maybe there is an approach like that will work, but maybe not. So you're agnostic. You don't have a preference to which one of these theories as being the ultimate. I mean, part of the tragedy of supersymmetry is that hunches based on a mathematical idea for the first time didn't work.
Right, makes you pessimistic. And so once that's occurred, then you said, and then that one had all the IQ in the world, trying to desperately resuscitate it and revive it and make it work. And yet it doesn't seem to be the way nature operates. At the same time, I have a basic faith in the idea of physics, which is
that we can figure out how the universe works. And if you think about what we've achieved so far, general relativity, quantum field theory, boy oh boy, we have understood the universe around us vastly better than, in some sense, we have any right to. And
You know, whether you think that's luck, or that's because there's some metric that the simplest things actually work, or I mean, you can go all round and round on that. You know, the counter example of simple things working out simply is number theory, where
You know, I can explain to a child in a few minutes what integers are. And you can easily show how factoring works and multiplication works. And then you can state something like the gold box conjecture. And we have no clue how to prove it, even though it's obviously true for any example you try.
And that's an extraordinarily simple system. So maybe it's that our idea of simplicity isn't right. Anyway, I still think it's worth people trying to figure out the fundamental laws. I think it's well worth it. But we have gone through a very difficult period in that.
What do you mean when you say that our idea of simplicity may be wrong? What could it be? First of all, we are highly biased towards things which we can explain with simple continuum model stuff. So Newton's great invention was the calculus, which was to say, okay, let's reason about a continuum
of things, starting off with the fact, well guys, we only have 10 fingers and they're kind of discrete. It looks like you almost have nine. Yeah, I cut myself in the kitchen.
So just as an aside, I would always say when I learn about modernist cuisine, I would always joke to people and say, yeah, he's a scientist and he's using his physics background in his lab to transform food. It's essentially like laser cooking a chicken to perfection. And then I always said that laser cooking chicken. But then I thought, well, I don't see anything that you do as laser cooking. And then I thought, well, maybe you do. Maybe I should ask you, is there anything you do that approximates something like a laser cooking? Oh, sure.
Well, there's lots of things where you cook with light. So a Neapolitan pizza is cooked with light. Broiling is about cooking with light. It's all about infrared light. But for lasers specifically, we've done a bunch of stuff that I think is cool. I'm not sure it's very fundamental. Using laser cutters or laser engravers to do cool things.
know, we could etch your face on them. Hear that sound?
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There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,
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Piece of meat or on a slice of bread because it looks just like you or cut impossibly complicated or otherwise impossibly complicated patterns out of a layer of sugar. It sounds more like presentation then. Well, for a laser cutter, yes.
Lasers by themselves don't do a lot of things that we would want to do with cooking. We would rather cook with a broad source and continuous source of infrared than a pulsed laser that would either burn a hole or be too diffuse.
So in general, lasers are not the be-all and end-all, but they're useful for some things. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.
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That's another reason why I wanted you as an uncle, because I love food tremendously.
And when I read that you made the perfect fry with bathing in an ultrasonic oil, is that correct? Yeah. I'm like, man, I wish I knew this guy because just so you know, before each interview I fast. So right now I'm at a 48 hour fast. And one of the reasons is because I try to research as much as possible about the interviewee. And one of the ways that I productively do that is just by not eating. So I can just focus on work until I sleep. Okay. But another reason is because I'm so avaricious.
that when I do eat, I eat like mad. And then I have to just, I'm like, okay, I must fast now. Glad for this to end is what you just told me. Yeah. So going back, going back to new is we've had a strong bias in physics for things that can be solved by simple equations.
ideally linear, if they're nonlinear, well, not too nonlinear. And that's worked super well for lots of things. But, you know, the discoveries that people had of chaos and dynamical systems, and more generally fractals,
out, whether there's fractals in the real world or fractals in solutions of equations, are such that the parts of the world that can be totally modeled by very simple models might be quite limited and we might have already slipped them all up.
You have, like we mentioned, we have variegated fields that you're pretty much an expert in. How, practically speaking, do you do the research when you're interested in, let's say, some new field, field X? What do you start out with? Do you interview? Do you call experts? Do you just go on Wikipedia? Do you go on Google Scholar? What does the journey from knowing nothing to becoming moderately ensconced in it to becoming an expert in it look like? Well, it's got all of those steps.
First, I try to read as much as I can about it. Often that means I will buy books on Amazon as the first step. Do you mind taking us through a specific example? You can pick photography, you can pick paleontology, asteroids. Well, sure, I'll pick out. Let me start with asteroids. With asteroids, some people came to me with
actually a request to donate money to a project to build a satellite to go look at asteroids. And we spent some time discussing the physics of it and I wasn't very satisfied and so they sent me a white paper about this and then I was really dissatisfied because I just figured this has to be wrong.
And so I reached out to some folks and I got some data and it took me a few months, but I showed there's a whole bunch of stuff that was wrong with their approach. You wrote a 100 page paper. Well, I've had a couple of them actually. So I don't know if the first one was a hundred. It might've been. I've written a bunch of papers on it and
Along the way, yes, I contacted experts. Contacting experts is always tricky. Experts are busy people, and if you contact them and say, hi, I'm some guy you've never heard of, and I have got a question about X.
you better make sure that question is a sensible question, otherwise they're just never going to respond to you. Right. Or they'll respond and say, well, that's nice kid. You know, clearly you don't understand a thing. And it's both a very natural human response to being busy and to, you know, not wasting your time on crackpots and Canada things. On the other hand,
science isn't about that. But usually you can find some scientist who is willing to answer some questions if you've got good questions about their work. Yeah. And I love Google Scholar. I use Google Scholar not every day, but certainly every week looking something up. And that's useful because you can get
an idea of what the world thinks and for a lot of um a lot of stuff it's way more current than you would find in textbooks now it's i mean typically a physics paper doesn't use mathematics that isn't in a textbook
It may use physics as not in a textbook, but not mathematics that's not in a textbook. And so sometimes you have to go to the math literature to then define new math for things and that going in a field to the literature is both super important, but it's also a little challenging for an outsider because
people will have their own, a field will develop its own vocabulary, its own things that are sort of obviously everyone knows X versus no, they don't know X. But in general, I have found that there are enough scientists, enough experts who I can talk to, who will
help me guide me in the right way. Um, sometimes joining on as collaborators, um, or be good at critiquing things. And so away you go from there. Um, now in the case of asteroids, the, by every book on Amazon that's on asteroids is pretty easy. There's not very many.
But in that case, well, then you also need to make sure that you've got everything understood about radiative heat transfer and conductive heat transfer and the mechanics of engineering aspects of telescopes and optical aspects and IR telescopes in particular. And, you know, eventually draws in a lot of stuff.
So it doesn't seem like you're going completely out of field because when you mention telescopes and conductive heat, it sounds like that's building on some of your previous knowledge. Is there an example of where you've gone completely out of left field? I don't recall what the saying is. Well, depends on what you mean by completely.
Okay. How about this? How about this? Let's take, why don't you take me through your, how you would sort out this problem. Let's say there is the issue of when do we go back to quote unquote normal from COVID? Okay. So there are quite a few variables to think about. Obviously there's politics as well, but let's say, okay, well what's the infection rate and how effective are vaccines? How effective are the masks? And so, so how would you go about solving the problem?
Obviously, we mentioned, you mentioned, it doesn't just depend on you, but how would you go about thinking about it? I have spent a lot of time working on computer models of infectious disease. So I'm very familiar with the state of the art there. In fact, my company created a whole unit of the company called the Institute for Disease Modeling. So in that case, I know all about it, but
You don't need to have the details to get the big picture. Okay, so the big picture on COVID is very simple that right now, most people don't have it. Okay, which means most people are vulnerable. And by most, it's like 80%, 85% most places.
Well, if you have 85% vulnerable, you will have another wave. Unless you're extraordinarily lucky and you're able to plug every gap and do every other thing. But that's an extraordinarily special state of affairs. The problem with diseases is they grow exponentially.
If you get sick, you can infect some number of people. There's practical limits on how many you can infect, but no conceptual limit. Well, each of those can go out and do a whole bunch of people, and each of those can do, and so it grows exponentially. And to get rid of a disease, you have to make sure that its growth factor is negative, so it dies exponentially.
But there's a tremendous amount of evidence that most countries in the world are unable to have a locked down enough society for that to occur. So it was, it's a little annoying to me when you see people
Do a very normal human thing, which is to criticize folks that did it poorly. But in fact, it's extremely hard to do your reopening right. Oh my God, we're shocked. There's a second wave. Hello. Of course there was going to be a second wave. Oh my God, there's a new strain. Well, you're lucky it took this long. Viruses, particularly RNA viruses,
are messy replicators. They mutate like crazy. So we have been lucky that COVID hasn't mutated more than it does. Right, right, right. And, okay, China, maybe South Korea, you can say there's a couple people that, you know, did it right. Most other places, there's a lot of other places who for a while thought
Oh, we did it right. Look at us. We have low rates. And then they got another wave as they were going to get the other way. Okay. Um, that's the other thing that is hard for people to accept about something that's so important is that luck makes a lot of difference. Okay. So we know about a variety of super spreader events.
Early in the epidemic, there was some birthday party in Connecticut, I think that 30 or 40 people got infected and went all over the place, even to different countries. And, okay, that specific thing is bad luck. You couldn't have predicted upfront, this will happen in Connecticut.
You could predict that it'll happen somewhere. And there were places who, for a variety of reasons, have been lucky. And yet they pat themselves on their back and they go, yeah, it's because we were so damn smart. Then there were places that were unlucky. No, they were unlucky and they weren't doing the perfect job. But if you look back and say, how many countries did a perfect job of this? Um,
We can't really tell until it's in retrospect, but China has done a very good job of containment. Arguably, South Korea has, and I'm sure you could come up with a few other also rams and others. Italy was an interesting example.
The worst part of the first wave of the epidemic was all in the north of Italy, which is not what most people would guess. Why? Because the healthcare system, it's widely believed in Italy and elsewhere that the healthcare system in the south is not as good. And that's a quantifiable thing. It's number of hospital beds and so on and so forth.
So, oddly, Italy got sickest where their health care was the strongest. Now, in a way, that's really good, because at least they had some hope. And you're saying that's based on luck in that example? Well, it's probably based on the other thing the north is known for, which is the north of Italy, is the industrial part of Italy.
and they have the largest exports. And it's very likely that it was people in China on business that brought it back to the north of Italy. And then from Italy to New York because the current
understanding is that the New York epidemic really was gotten from Western Europe and Italy in particular, unlike in Seattle, where it was directly directly people from China. So, you know, I wouldn't, you might not say it was luck, pure luck, because there might be a factor like, oh, if you have
Lots of industry and that industry manufactures things in China. You're going to have a lot of engineers and product managers and other people going back and forth. So maybe calling that luck is too strong a word, but it's not got anything to do with your medical system. It's not got anything to do with your hygiene. It's nothing to do with that. What about government? Well,
Government, certainly you can find lots of instances where the governments have done a better job or a worse job. Nathan, you're in charge of the U.S. right now. It's not Biden, it's you. You're in charge in my country, Canada. So what do you advise Canada and the U.S. to do?
I really want to take more snowflake pictures and I can't go to Canada. I doubt I'll be allowed to go this winter. So that pisses me off. But well, the only way that all of the kinds of shutdowns and things we've done up to this point have mostly been
Well, it's a fascinating question that would require lots of detail analysis to say, was it worth it? There certainly is a point of view that says, if you could have walked the talk and really buckled down like the Chinese did, great. But if you can't do that, doing a half-assed job is probably worse than doing nothing. Interesting.
Or it gives you a double dose of bad things. Why is it worse? Because of its effect on the economy or what? Because you have a huge effect on the economy. And the huge effect on the economy also affects health outcomes and people's lives. So you can't really separate the two super cleanly. Because I hear some people say, yeah, you're prioritizing the economy over people's lives. But what you're saying is that they're inextricably linked.
Many parts of the world they are. And it's an interesting question that we'll have to answer after the fact. Would we have been better off doing a simpler protocol, but really meaning it? Like, okay, you are arrested or I don't want to say shot on sight, but you don't want to say it.
tased on site if you wear a mask, but don't go through a whole bunch of the other silly things. And here in Washington state, we had a, I think a very well-meaning government, but you have the problem that policymakers don't really know what to do because they haven't been in this situation before. Epidemiologists
have not always given great advice or they have allowed themselves to be talked down in weird ways. So for example, when the thing first came out, oh, we're going to ban all meetings of more than a hundred people. Oh, wait, wait, did I say a hundred? I meant 10. Oh, did I say 10? I meant bullshit about somebody with lots of well-meaning intentions.
saying oh wait do we really have to scrap you know groups of 10 people and the answer epidemiologically was always two don't allow two if everyone's alone they can't transmit and then okay people are going to live with their families and we're not going to fix that so don't expand it that was the right answer but you go through this thing of
saying something and changing it and changing it. And each one of those things was a damn lie. You go through another thing where people... And they're lying because they don't feel like people will listen if you say, keep your social circle to two or because of some other reason. I think it sounded too drab. Well, there's lots of reasons and I don't have a perfect answer to every question. There's a lot of people say, oh, you're overreacting. You're overreacting. You're overreacting.
This was a great example of well-meaning people saying shit that was wrong. In some cases, they couldn't help saying things were wrong because we didn't know.
But in that case, the mask thing was horrifically stupid. They had people saying literally, Oh, it doesn't matter because viruses are so tiny. They'll go through any hole, but you're not spewing pure viruses. So who the fuck thought that was a good thing? You're spitting. Okay. And if you have, if you wear one of those face masks, plastic face mask,
Wear one even just around the house for a little bit and see how filthy it gets near your mouth. It's gross, but you're spitting all the time. That's how we speak. I see. I see. Then there was a whole set of other weird political in, uh, there's a point where, uh, in Washington state, it was okay to go golfing, but you couldn't go fishing.
Well, that was some political bullshit. I'm sorry. There was no science that says, oh, there's this. Then you also have the scientists, I have to say, are also at fault because there wasn't enough thinking about, okay, is something worth doing at the level we could actually do it?
It's clearly the case that if the US and Canada could have done what China did, it would be way better for both the economy and for the number of people killed. The US has vastly more people killed for our size than China.
But the fact is, we couldn't do that. And given that you can't do it, and you could argue, well, we didn't know how incompetent we were upfront. Maybe. You mean to say we didn't have enough data about the virus or the people involved in policy making were incompetent? Well, no, but look, you're never going to get 100% compliance in anything, right?
Like we all have laws about speeding. You know, virtually everyone who's ever driven a car has broken one of those laws at some point in time. Almost none of us get caught. Right. And we use those laws to try to get the average speed down to a reasonable level. But if we had something that depended critically on us following traffic laws,
We would be fucked. We cannot bring ourselves to obey traffic laws. It's just a damn fact. Maybe someone could come up with some way to make that occur. So China was able to go do it. South Korea seems to be able to do it. And they're a much more free society than China. They still have a right
It's hard to interrupt. Was China able to quote unquote do it because they have a larger enforcement mechanism such as they will shoot you or they will tase you in your previous example? Or is it something else? Well, the obedience of the population? Well, how do you separate those? Right? I mean, the way we have a law abiding society is through a combination of
catching the people who break the laws, but mostly providing an incentive to everyone else to follow them. Is it because the Chinese were conditioned to do what they're told?
or because there was threat of punishment. But wasn't that threat of punishment? I mean, I don't even separate those two things. There was a... I can't totally remember the name of the movie, but it was a sort of a comedic Western movie where this guy is given the... is made sheriff and he's given the star of the former sheriff that has this big dent in it due to a bullet.
I says, well, at least this, at least this star, this badge saved my predecessor. And the guy giving it to him says, well, what if it wasn't for all the other bullets? Right? I mean, if you, if you sent the police out or you sent the soldiers out with something the size of my cell phone,
that was completely bulletproof, it wouldn't be worth doing. Even if it was perfect where it was, there's too many other holes in the armor. It's pointless. It's not worth anything. And I think that that is what occurred in the COVID response of most of the countries in the world. They
either enacted half steps that could never could have worked, or the enacted ones that should have worked, but they couldn't walk the talk, they couldn't actually have enough compliance, or they waited until it was too late to do that. And exactly, and you probably come up with five other reasons. So I don't claim I know all of the exact mistakes. Yeah. But
When you have an exponentially growing thing, it requires a fanatical approach to try to eliminate the disease. And we know that that's true from cases where they eliminated a malaria within a region. We've never done it for the whole earth, but we've done it in regions. We know that that was the case with smallpox.
But in smallpox, we had a vaccine. So anyway, it was very clear to me early on that we're just basically fucked until we get a vaccine. And it is worth going through the various things. Some certainly it's worth wearing masks. I believe that all along. The current belief is it's true. But we went through a phase of denying that it was good for masks or saying, oh, masks aren't good for you.
They're just good for everyone else. Now, what about that? Is there any truth to that? That's not what the latest research shows. Because fundamentally, I don't want to breathe your spit, and you don't want to breathe my spit. And the whole point of these masks is to reduce the amount of spit transfer. Now, it's not
cutting it to zero, but reducing it. And statistically, that means that there are people who, if in fact you were locked in an elevator with someone for 48 hours, unless you had scuba tanks with separate air systems, I don't know how you're going to avoid some contagion.
For a lot of things, the mask would have worked, but it also undermined mask making. You have people think it'd be much better from a compliance perspective to tell people, oh, this is all for you, buddy. Do it for yourself. If your friends don't want to do it, fine. You can cry at their funeral rather than the other way around. So anyway,
I think that the vaccine is the only thing that given our general lack of ability to control it with lockdowns and mask wearing and all the other things we've tried in Canada and the US and all of Europe and essentially every other country except China, nobody has gotten- And South Korea.
Nobody has gotten a line on this. So obviously it's the vaccine that's our next hope. You mentioned South Korea, but they don't have the same authoritarian government as China. So what was the deciding factor there? Well, I don't know. I have friends who are Korean or of Korean background who would say, Oh, actually,
It may not be as authoritarian, but Koreans have a very strong sense of community and being gung-ho. Interesting. Cultural difference. And that there was a cultural difference that they were more likely to follow the rules. Now, they also tested up the wazoo. We didn't do shit for testing here.
and still barely don't. Well, how the hell are you going to stop this exponential spread thing if you can't identify who the hell has it? Anyway, so at this stage, our only hope is the vaccine. And we have to get it rolled out to essentially everybody as soon as possible. Now, there's a
word that's been bandied about called herd immunity. And herd immunity is a real feature of a mathematical model of a disease, which basically states if enough people get it and your contact rate is low enough, then it's hard for the disease to spread. Because if you have it,
But almost everyone you run into is immune, then you will resolve, as doctors say, that means either get better or die. You will resolve or at least stop transmitting before you reach a vulnerable person.
And it's one of the ways to think about infection disease. So you mean to say in the herd immunity that if enough healthy people get it so that they survive and then they become immune to it. Well, you need to have immune people. Okay. Now the simple way of getting a vac of this. Well, there's two ways there's recovered people because we're almost every disease in the world and infectious disease, I should say.
you get some amount of immunity after you've had it. Malaria has the least immunity after you get it, but you still have some. Or you don't get it as strongly or there's a variety of other things. So basically, once you have society either recover from that or get vaccinated,
Then you can stop it. But people started talking about herd immunity when 5% of the country was infected or 2% was infected. And that was just absurd. And it was somebody working really hard to try to find hope and say, well, maybe, maybe, maybe we could, it's like, be serious. In most any model, you don't get to herd immunity until you get well over half.
And usually it's more like three quarters. So at the stage when three quarters of the population have been rendered immune, then you can start to talk about herd immunity. And I say start because the way you typically model diseases is as if
Every one of us might have some random possibility of meeting some other one of us any fine day. That's how the world works. Okay, COVID was devastating around the world when it got into assisted living centers and nursing homes. Because you have a set of people that can't get away. And they see the same people every day.
And you have caregivers that work at more than one facility, doctors, nurses, other caregivers. So once COVID got into an assisted living center, it was going to explode. And no, if you had the last people on earth to be vaccinated,
We're all in the same nursing home. There's no herd immunity that's going to save them. If COVID lands there, they're all going to get it, or a large fraction will get it and die, and it'll be terrible. So the actual number of people that we need to achieve some slowing of infection
do to inoculation. We don't know, but it depends on the circles that people move in. You know, if, if in fact,
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In fact, you had kids that go to a particular school. If COVID gets to one of the parents and then gets to the kids and then they spread it at school, then you have a much tighter connection to the other parents of that school.
than you might have to some other group of folks on the other side of town, like maybe a nursing home. On the other hand, once it gets in the nursing home, the nursing home has very strong connectivity to each other. So it's a complicated thing. Israel is doing a great job of giving people injections, but of the people that are in their
priority groups for the first wave. In like the first week, they've done a third of them. Okay, it's a smaller country. It doesn't have a problem that Canada and the United States both have of a huge rural population. But still our cities aren't doing that well. Right. And that, you know, we have
We have somehow failed. We have the weird situation that we panic enough to do some things like close the borders, you know, close all restaurants, close this, but we don't seem to be panic enough to say, okay, this is a fucking public health emergency. We're calling out the national guard. We're putting people or just put them at every damn Walgreens and CVS or
There's a hundred ways you can roll out a vaccine. Way more effectively, but instead it's sort of like, oh, yeah, each state will decide and if a state does a good job, well, that's good. If they do a bad job, well, those people are a little fucked.
Okay, I don't want to keep talking about COVID. I wanted to ask you some physics questions, but I don't get to speak to someone who studies infectious diseases much, and I haven't been keeping up with the COVID news. And I hear that some people say COVID isn't much more dangerous than the flu. So first of all, I want to know, what do you say to that? And then second, what is the deal with this new strain? Is it more viral? Is it more potent in some way?
Well, in both cases, the world doesn't know that much, but here's the deal. We have a very strange situation in our lives in general where we get used to old risks and we worry endlessly about new risks. So yeah, influenza killed, you know,
hundreds of millions of people in 1918. Since 1918, every year, it's killed a shitload of people. Now, why are we okay with that? Well, we're okay with that because we tried as hard as we could to make vaccines. We did come up with a vaccine that usually in most years sort of kind of helps.
But it's also true that the number of people who have died in the annual flu epidemic from, say, 1918 to today, 100 years worth, that's about the same as dying in 1918. Now, you have a new thing like COVID. And COVID, I should say in 1918, it had a very weird pattern of mortality.
So it was terrible on 18 to 24 year old men. And yet it was very few fatalities and little infectiousness in people I think at over the age of 65 or 60 something like that. And it's believed the reason why is that there was another flu epidemic not as severe
that was like 50 years earlier. And so the people who got that influenza were pretty much spared the new one. Interesting. Anyway, even if it's quote, only as bad as it's a few percent death risk for many parts of the population, but I'll just take me I'm
I'm 61, so I'm over 60. I've had some respiratory infections in the past. I like that difficult number theory problem you just said. I'm 61, so I'm over 60. Yeah. It's one of those go back conjecture problems. Well, but that's one of the thresholds. I'm not over 65 where it gets even worse, but I also had a bunch of sinus infections chronically. I'm arguably high risk.
And then, Oh, besides it killing you, it can also put you in a, in a permanent brain fog. There's a whole bunch of evidence for that. It can take away your sense of taste. Now that would fuck up my cookbook career if I couldn't taste anything. Yeah, for sure. So it, and it, it will kill lots and lots of people. And it is a, because it's a new thing.
We arguably should do everything we can within reason to stop it. And say, oh, it's just as bad as the other stuff. It's like, well, yeah, but you don't want to multiply that by something. I mean, car deaths are horrendous in the United States and in Canada and all over the world. There are many more people killed
by cars in the United States than there are by people. It's like twice the murder rate. And our murder rate is way too high for a developed country. It's a shame. It should be much lower. Well, if you introduce a new thing as an open justice, it's only as bad as cars. Well, cars all over again takes a large mortality factor and doubles down
You don't want to do that. And is it only as bad as the flu or is it more viral? Is it more spreadable? Well, it turns out people don't really know both sides of that equation. We certainly know that it is got the mortality in some age groups appears to be way worse than we would
than you'd say for a typical annual flu, that it's more like the epidemic flu of 1918. But then somebody else says, but oh, do we really know how many people have had it? And the answer is we don't. So there are people who are living in close proximity with others who had it, who didn't seem to get it.
Now, did those people get it and repel it and beat it? Did they have some pre-existing immunity? There's a thought that there are two coronaviruses that are implicated in the common cold. Maybe if you had a cold last year and it was one of those coronaviruses, maybe you're immune to it. We don't know.
It was weird in the 1918 flu that it mostly killed young adults. This one is weird in that it doesn't seem to kill young children. It can kill young children. It's not zero. But the mortality rate is way, way lower. Now that's A, it's a little surprising because
very small children don't have a developed immune system. Number one. Number two, it's just usually it's a new disease hits the very old and the very young and it's the people in the middle that are okay. This one's not like that. It's the very old and the middle part of the stack and older that
that seem to be most at risk. But a lot of this we don't know because it would require a level of research that either is difficult to do or hasn't been done yet. Now with regard to the new strain. Yeah, well the new strain appears to be this is kind of the same thing. It's
Viruses are messy when they replicate. You almost always see some replication errors. And that allows, for example, the conclusion that the Seattle epidemic started with people from China, whereas the New York epidemic started with people from Europe.
That conclusion is precisely because the strains are always mutating a little bit. And the first New York strains were more similar to the Western European ones than to the Chinese ones. Are you okay? Do you have one of them? Every year I get this allergic cough, but it does have everyone around me thinking, oh my God, this is it.
He's in the final death. You're causing fear to all your loved ones. Anyway, this strain has been or some strain that appears to have popped up from nowhere in the UK and also in South Africa and it's been found all over the world now. It's definitely a new strain.
By itself, that's not a big surprise. It might be more infectious or more transmissible. That does occur with viruses. We don't know right now? I don't think there is enough. There's only people that have said yes and people who have said no. And out of an abundance of caution, we have to act like, oh, it's
It's yes. At the same time, it's probably already everywhere. So locking the doors probably doesn't do that much. What it really ought to do is make you want to get the vaccine out there. Right. Wait, I'm sorry. And this vaccine would also prevent a new strain from infecting you? Well, we don't actually know that either. See, here's one of the problems. In physics, we
are able to use abstractions to say, here's a very general theory and we can calculate it in a very simplified situation, but it also works in a more complicated one. So for example, we say conservation of mass, conservation of momentum, conservation of energy. Well, you can use those principles
in lots of very otherwise complicated circumstances. The problem here is the effect that a vaccine has, we know in theory what a vaccine does, is it stimulates your immune system to be in the lookout for this pathogen. And that allows your immune system to mount a response and overwhelm the pathogen vastly sooner than it would otherwise.
But we don't know exactly whether this is going to work with the others because we haven't tested it. Now, this is one where if they have enough vaccination going on and enough transmission of this new strain, they'll be able to figure this one out relatively quickly. And my bet would be it does.
But it's a bat. And, you know, in the case of flu, flu famously mutates enough that every year we need a different vaccine. Now, because that's true for flu, you get this whole bunch of silly things, statements by scientists where
You know, early in the epidemic, we'll say, oh, we'll all go away in the summer because it's a seasonal thing just like flu. And people would say, scientists would say this to me, what do you want, drugs? There's no evidence of that. You're hoping it's true. Oh, but most respiratory viruses are. What do you mean by most? Once you subtract out flu, we really don't know
Well, common colds do propagate during the summer. And in fact, there's a fascinating thing that no one knows why we seem to associate colds more with the winter. I see. Okay. Also, even though flu is seasonal, no one knows why. Cold is not seasonal then. Or is it only somewhat seasonal? I don't believe that the common cold is not entirely seasonal.
annual epidemic of influenza is strongly seasonal. So if you take 50 years of data between France and the United States, this is what I happen to know the statistics, the day on which the peak epidemic occurs as recorded by say number of hospital admissions or pick your metric, it's only a few days different.
every year in France and the United States. Now, that means it's got to have some very powerful synchronizing feature. Well, so obviously we figured that out, right? We haven't. There's multiple theories. The theories, of course, contradict each other, and the theories also, frankly, contradict common sense mostly.
As far as I know, one of the theories is that in the cold, we congregate more such as in buses. So what about that? In the common cold, there's that. And that's certainly one of the great questions. That is part of what Rudyard Kipling would call a just-so story. He had these just-so stories of how the leopard got its spots and there's sort of little fables for children.
Yes, it's true that we congregate in, we ride the bus more, whereas we might walk or ride bicycles. Right. Is that why though? Excuse me. What timing, huh? Yeah, exactly. Give me one minute, I'll be right back. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
You know, the number of things we don't know is frighteningly large. But at the moment, I think, look, our best bet is the vaccines. And let's hope that the vaccines do provide protection against this other strain. And one thing that's terrible about having a large epidemic is that
In a very crude way, the size of the epidemic determines the rate of evolution of the virus. Because every time it gets transmitted to a new person, you're running a new evolutionary experiment and you could have new mutations. Hence why you're surprised that there's only one new strain. Well, there isn't one. There's hundreds of strains, but there are little teeny, teeny differences.
This is one that seems to be a larger macro difference. Okay. Okay. Let's get back to some of your asteroid research. I remember you said that in, I believe it was NASA's data, they analyzed some of the asteroids as circular, I mean, sorry, spherical when they're oblong, when they're elongated.
Please let me know if you recall what I'm saying. But to me, and to virtually anyone listening, that seems like an obvious mistake. So why would these experts model them spherically just because it's easier? Well, it's true that the model that they used is a model which assumes that the asteroid is a sphere. Now, if you have enough measurements of it,
you can show that that's okay, it'll compensate. They typically didn't have enough measurements of it. But the using a spherical model is not the worst thing they did. They also just made data up and just cheated. Yeah. When you say they made data up, they copied data. Is that what you mean when you say they made them up? Yeah. Yeah. So you're supposed to be deriving
the diameter of these asteroids. The way you tell if you did a good job is you have about a hundred asteroids that you know the diameter of from a different method. So you say, right, the way I determine my accuracy is I predicted over here and I can bear it to the known results.
The consequence of that is what? Well, it's deeply unethical, number one. Number two, they did this and then they claimed that they had the most accurate diameters and they criticized everyone else who had done
other data sets in the past, even though they had no idea of what their accuracy was. And because they took the only cases that where we know the answer and they copied those, you can't now tell what the accuracy of any of their things are. So they built in on a shaky foundation. Yeah, and I think it was just a
rush to try to get their project done and also to make their project look like it was a success. And we're talking about NASA here? We're talking about JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So it's a laboratory managed by Caltech, but it's effectively part of NASA. And some of the scientists who were involved in this weren't at JPL, they were at various universities. So it's the kind of thing that
If you or I had done as an undergraduate and we'd been found out, we would have been expelled. And, you know, we'd be talking about how our lives took this big turn. We couldn't become physicists. We were expelled for cheating. But because NASA is very influential and gives out lots of money, other scientists really didn't want to
This is interesting. This brings me to a larger, a thought occurs to me. How much of
Let's say problems in science in general, there's a variety, I'm sure, but I'm thinking specifically right now about theoretical physics and string theory, but problems in general are due to the dependence on funding from a certain agency versus someone like you who can be independent and say, well, here's what I think and I can stand up to you. I don't think it's super common. Um, you know, the,
The string theory is so complicated that generally it's very hard to compute any answer out of it. That's why my friend Peter named his blog after a saying of Wolfgang Paulus, who was a great German physicist. It's not even wrong. So it's wrong would be it makes a prediction.
and it doesn't match the world but in most cases in string theory it's so mathematically difficult to make a actual prediction from it that you're not even at that level okay okay now the ramifications of the asteroids does it have something to do with the threat of asteroids being under determined yes it the threat
The size of the asteroids is important for two reasons. One is as a part of understanding how the solar system was built. Asteroids are a very critical part of that. Asteroids are a little bit like the junk you see at a construction site. If you go to a construction site where they're building a house, you'll see sawed off pieces of two by four and nails and all this other stuff.
That's a great analogy by the way. This is the material that was left over from building the solar system and it never really got into a planet or another thing and so it's kind of the junk left over but it's super interesting to understand that junk to understand the conditions under which the solar system formed. The other reason is practical that we want to know the threat that asteroids pose
They were kind of tough on the dinosaurs. Right, right. We now know. And you were there at one of the first lectures where that was proposed. Yes. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it was. That was a great example of a theory coming from outside a field. It first sounded totally outlandish, but in fact has stood the test of time. So
There are a few people who still say there were other factors that were important or even critical with the dinosaurs. But the idea that mass extinctions could be caused by an impact has now been traced to lots of other mass extinctions, not just that one. Going back to the threat.
Yeah, so it's very important to know for the threat particularly because the way Some of these this asteroid work is funded is by telling Congress. Oh, this is important for the threat Yes, you tell Congress look this isn't just a bunch of scientists having fun with the originally Solar system no this might tell you What thing is gonna plunk down in the middle of Kansas next week?
And so we really need to know it. Yep. And it's compelling argument. So they have an incentive to overplay the threat of asteroids or did you find in your research that we're actually underplaying it? Well, it's they're using that threat as a way to ask for more funding. And I say you shouldn't give those people more funding until they learn math or ethics and ethics.
Uh, so, um, and that goes for both. No, there's lots of other people at JPL that are great. There's not everyone at JPL, but there's one group of JPL. There's one person, one professor at, uh, UCLA, uh, that really screwed up. Um, uh, and had a giant amount of arrogance about that screw up and so didn't admit it and has fought it tooth and nail.
Has it fought you? I recall that they put out an article. Oh yeah, they did a smear campaign on me trying to attack me. It's been very hard for me. I have published several papers, including one over a hundred pages, but it's been much more difficult for me to do that because I'm the guy who's saying that
Are you driven by ethics or were you always disagreeable and you'll point out what's wrong when you see it?
I certainly noticed that they had done some things very seriously wrong. And initially it wasn't this copying. Initially what I noticed is that they didn't understand freshman physics. Even the professor didn't understand freshman physics? Yep. There's something called Kirchhoff's law of radiation.
When you say they didn't understand it, do you mean to say that they didn't incorporate it? Their approach to modeling totally violates it.
They tried to apply a method which violates physical law. Hear that sound?
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not ethics. It was after you, I found the ethical things that in some sense made it even worse. And the ethical things you're talking about, the copying of data. Okay. Unethical things. The science exists because we trust it and we can only trust it if we're vigilant to it. And
You could get lots of scientists to say, oh, yes, that's true. But the ones in general, they don't apply that uniformly. In this case, the professor at UCLA is kind of a loudmouth jerk who likes to one-up people and has a reputation for being really smart, which is weird because in all of his interactions with me, nothing he says makes any sense at all.
This brings me to a larger problem that you mentioned with regard to COVID and now NASA and a general cultural movement to distrust mainstream science.
Well, here's what's interesting is that there's seems to me from outside, let's say I'm investigating an issue like global warming.
Obviously some people say it exists, some people say it doesn't exist, and you seem to know the answer to that because you've investigated it. But to me from the outside, okay, how does one go about researching a contentious issue when it seems like there are incentive structures on each side to either say that global warming exists or doesn't exist, or whatever the issue, whether it's global warming or not? Given that, as you mentioned, sometimes these large institutions all agree on a single
I don't have a good answer for you. You know, we have this situation that for a variety of reasons, there are folks that don't want to take the vaccine because they don't trust some element of
this whole thing. They either say, I don't trust big drug companies, or I don't trust that we develop this under record time. Why don't they go back and do it more slowly? You don't fuck people are dying. That's why. It turns out that the argument that they ought to be made to them is very straightforward, which is current course of speed, you will get COVID.
Every one of us will. I'm not referring to COVID in specific. Well, here's the deal. Every one of us will get it. And for almost every one of us, but probably every one of us, getting COVID has a higher risk threshold than the worst vaccine anyone ever made in history.
So these vaccines actually seem like they're the best vaccines anyone made in history as it turns out just out by accident. But even if it was the worst, give it a break. This is like people driving to the airport who are afraid about a plane crash because a plane they're going to get on. But them driving to the airport is vastly more dangerous. I see. Okay. Now how you get people to internalize those things and believe them
I don't know. It certainly doesn't help that COVID has been politicized. And I mean that with both capital P politics, you know, as those with the Trump administration or the this or that, but I also mean small p politics like, oh, let's say it's okay to golf, but not to go fishing.
You know, these golf courses are going to be really mad at us. And so you have a situation where people, also the scientists, have been groping their way. Now, the fact that they've changed their minds ought to make them more believable. If you say, yup, I had my mind made up and nothing I can see will ever change my mind,
should not trust that man because you need to have someone who's constantly weighing evidence and new evidence of new things can change your mind but we've had the unfortunate situation that there are a lot of people who um who don't believe and and will refuse the vaccine now the rude thing to say is that's just evolution in action those people will suffer
a higher rate of consequences from COVID than from the vaccine. And to a certain percentage, we can tolerate that in society. I say a certain percentage because of that herd immunity thing, because you don't have to get to every last person. However,
I think when it comes to stuff like the anti-vaxxers that don't want their children immunized, it is a real danger to other kids in the school and to below school age children of families that have someone, a kid in the school and so on and so forth, to have those kids not be vaccinated. And it's really bad for them.
So on one hand, in a free society, you want to allow people to have a certain set of freedoms. On the other hand, you don't typically allow those freedoms to allow a parent to kill a child, for example. That comes up in the cases where, for example, they're refusing a medical procedure for religious grounds.
The United States, Canada, as far as I know, Europe, they say no, at a certain point the state will intervene and they will try to say the kids get saved because we do protect children even if their parents aren't, just like we take children away from people who are bad parents. So what do you do with people who are
passionately convinced about something that is demonstrably wrong. Well, when that demonstrably wrong thing has concept, if it's a religious matter, I say, leave it alone. People can have different ideas about religion. They can each say, well, my God is right and that other guy's is wrong about his God. Let him.
But when it comes to things like not taking a vaccine, there will be a period this spring where people start needing to go back to work and will have enough people vaccinated. And I think it's very reasonable to say you shouldn't go back to work if you're not vaccinated or have proof that you had COVID.
Let me restate the question a bit more clearly. Some of the many of the audience members, almost all of them, I think are extremely, extremely intelligent people. So for them,
They're listening. Forget about COVID. Forget about COVID. Like you mentioned, you're also extremely, extremely, extremely bright. And probably if you didn't look into the research on asteroids, you would have, maybe you would have accepted what NASA has said. Maybe you wouldn't have regardless. How do you sort out? I was going to say signal from the noise, but it's almost like signal from anti-signal or from contrived signal. When you like, what do you do as a, as an intelligent person? Do you just have to dive into the field? Do you just have to trust it?
Because you can't just doubt everything, you have to live your life. Okay, but living in a society is something that involves a lot of trust. Right? So to live in a civil society, you have to have a certain degree of trust that everyone else is going to live up to their obligations, more or less. And you know that if they don't, you have some recourse, you can
Call the police so you can complain in some fashion. But you have to trust, in the case of physics, you have to trust what generations of physicists have produced. And that the scientific method and the people looking at things and re-looking at things and being critical of them, including publishing my paper saying other stuff is shit,
that that process will get us to the right answer most of the time. And I think most of the time it does. You know, there certainly are examples of fields that are particularly politicized fields that I think it is much more difficult. You know, certainly
Global warming has gotten that way. It is a politicized field in that lots of politicians or people on the street will have very strong opinions that have nothing to do with actual science. They will have to do with, you know, the consequences on that on their industry or their ideology or some other set
of stuff. That makes it more difficult. You find the same thing is true with nutrition. You know, nutritional science has unfortunately failed us broadly. It went on a jihad against fat, we should get rid of fat, we should have everything be low fat. And during the decades that we went on the low fat
approach. Yeah, the obesity rate has gone up the rate of ingestion of I mean, all the bad things they said we go down have gone up. Right, right. And in that case, it's probably based on just some fundamental bad work in the 1950s and 60s that got propagated. And
The fact that there are people who make their money either as commercial food sellers or sellers of junk foods and so forth, or people who are health food advocates on the other side, helps to politicize with a small p this issue. We have this huge movement against gluten.
There is no good science in support of it. There are people who shouldn't eat gluten because they have a very specific thing, but the overwhelming majority don't. Well, the trend has become, oh, read a couple of websites and then self-diagnose that you need this. And then
One of the beautiful aspects of your book, Modernist Cuisine, when I first read it, and by the way, I think I went to the U of T library the first day that it ordered it because I was so excited to read it, but it was a huge book and I couldn't afford it at the time.
was in the first chapter, I believe you dispel some of the myths, some extremely ingrained myths. So for example, with butter versus margarine, and I didn't know that at the time, okay, that butter is much healthier for you. It seems to be something that we all seem to take for granted now, but for 50 years or so, that wasn't the case. Yeah. Also, I think you mentioned that bacon has oleic acid is oleic acid or oleic acid compared to all much at a higher percentage. This funny thing where
It got to be trendy for people to say that there were protective features in olive oil based on very skimpy amounts of studies. A huge problem with nutritional epidemiology is that it's extremely difficult and expensive to do the kind of study you need to do where you study people and outcomes over a 20 or 25 year period.
So instead people would fixate on a proxy measurement. So they said, Oh, cholesterol is bad for you. So we'll measure cholesterol. If your cholesterol goes up, then we know that's bad for you. Well, then it later turns out, well, actually there's good cholesterol and there's bad cholesterol. And then it turns out, oops, dietary cholesterol probably has no factor at all.
Just for the people listening, that means you can ingest cholesterol such as in eggs and it doesn't raise your blood cholesterol. Well, in particular, there are the the kind of cholesterol that you would worry about in a cardiac situation is manufactured by your body. And so the dietary thing isn't really a factor. I see. I see. I see. That is such an
And of course, when these things came out, did people come and say, oh, you know something? We were wrong. We fucked up. We were wrong. We're sorry. Oop. Most of this, so most people still think cholesterol is bad for you when your cholesterol counts. They kind of know there's a good and a bad kind now, but
The butter thing you mentioned, in one of the few really long-term, really good studies, something called the nurses study, over 25 years, they boarded that now, they followed the health of 25,000 nurses. They found that the people who ate margarine had double the cardiac problem rate and death rate of people who ate butter, which means there's a whole lot of health food advocates.
killed people. Straight up, they went out there recommending margarine. Margarine, it turns out, margarine at the time was, was what we now call a trans fat. But they had it so in their heads that saturated fats were bad. And this was a polyunsaturated fat, so it must be better. And that little surmise
was dead wrong. In fact, trans fats actually are bad. Literally dead wrong, right? Literally dead wrong and literally killed lots of people. And so when you have situations like that or some of the other absurd things to come bring it back to go fit, you know, the people taking your temperature, that was an absurd thing.
Telling people who have a fever to stay inside makes tons of sense. Yep. What's absurd about taking someone's temperature as you enter the door? Well, for likelihood, there's a set of things that you often find in this sort of situation that I call purification rituals. So lots of religions
have a thing on purification, that stuff gets to be dirty in God's eyes somehow, and then you have to purify it with a ritual. And there's a controversial theory by an anthropologist named Robert Sapolsky that says the reason religions all have purification rituals
is that eventually they get a priest who has OCD. And that priest's OCD winds up being manifest in them writing lots of purification rituals. I don't know if that's really true. Right. I'm going to be talking to Robert at some point. I have some issues with that, but we can talk about that after.
The idea that you
that it caused versus the cost benefit, basically. How much harm did it cause or how much benefit? So like at our company said, Bullshit, we're not going to have some poor employee who has to go up and down a line and do this and expose themselves. They're the ones that'll get it. Why should we do that?
You know, another thing is they said, Oh, you have to have everyone enter in the same entrance so that you can, you know, count them all. And you would know exactly how many people are in the building. Why? Well, what if we have to contact Trace? And I said, well, we'll ask the people. I mean, it turns out at my company, and I think almost every company,
You don't act every minute of the day like you can't trust the people there to do even the simplest thing. You know, if in fact they came into the office on a particular day, well, you'd know that regardless of which entrance they came into, because the card key system doesn't. So you can email everyone who was in the building. So if there was a contagion event, you can email them. Then you can ask them, hey,
Were you near George that day? Because it turns out George came down with COVID. But there's always this, oh, let's lock everything down. And it would be a difficult calculation to do. But if you said, OK, what is really better, picking some set of people to be the poor person at the door with the
with the temperature gun. And how many people did you really turn away? And therefore, if you know how to turn away, what did this really do for the epidemic overall? Now, in a perfect world, I don't doubt you should stop those people from coming in. And in Japan, when you go into customs,
Man, they have all of these signs and monitors up, and it's zeroing in and automatically taking your temperature for everybody in the room. And okay, that makes some sense. If you found somebody coming in with a horrible fever, you could then decide to do something, quarantine them for a little bit. But of course, what are you going to do with all the people that happen to be standing next to them or were on the flight with them or were whatever?
Even then, I don't think the Japanese have fully thought it through. Because if that person really is the start of a terrible epidemic, whenever you detected a fever, you'd have to stop everything.
When I first heard about you, I remember you were talking about as could have been a Freakonomics, you were talking about a way of solving global warming with geoengineering. And I remember being intrigued because you said it requires something like a few million dollars or maybe a few billion, but that's still relatively low. And you raise some balloons and you have a tube that emits sulfur dioxide, I believe. Okay, that sounds like a
extremely inventive and simple idea. Why don't I hear much talk about geo engineering solutions to the problem of global warming? What are the problems with them in general? Oh, let me explain where I'm coming from. Because I see that we should get to zero emissions in carbon. But then even if the carbon that's in our atmosphere stays there, that's still going to cause a certain amount of problems over time. Which means that
Something else needs to be done anyway. Of course. Of course, it's. Is it political? Like what's going on? It's political. It's well, first of all, it's political within the scientific community. The scientific community itself has become very polarized that the people who study global warming got very
They kept saying, oh, this is a problem. Why, look here, thinking, wow, here's the thing. If I show you this evidence, society will immediately start listening to us. And no matter what they showed, society didn't listen to them. Well, that's caused a thing where there are lots of scientists in the field
who are very leery about publishing anything or doing any research on global warming, because their fear, their friends will chastise it as being some form of accommodation to the other side. Okay, and when do you say other side? Stupid. Stupid and it's counterproductive. Well, then there's a lot of global warming activists
And they think that the global warming problem is very much like a children's book that I read as a little kid. It's called The Little Engine That Could. There's this little steam engine, and it needs to take this stuff over the mountain, and all the big engines are scared to do it. And the little engine says, I'll try.
And then it says, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, a lot of people in the global warming world are like that. They think, look, we know exactly what to do. We have the technology. It's easy. We're just a bunch of, you know, fat fucks that are addicted to our SUVs and
is as soon as we just all do the right thing, this problem will be solved. And then if you come up with global warming, then those very people will then say to you, shut up. We're trying to convince society. We're trying to kill society. I think we can. I think we can. We're trying to be positive here.
And the minute you say you have a different solution, it lets the air out of the balloon. We need to threaten these people that there's no other way to save Earth, otherwise they won't listen to us. So then I say in response, I say, okay, show me how much progress we've made. Well, we have made any progress.
Well, okay, suppose we did the full Paris Accords. Well, everyone knows that is bullshit. And of course, then I did the calculations for myself. If there was no more emission tomorrow, we stopped it, which there's no way we can do. Right, right, right. But the temperature would continue to rise for about 100 years.
Then it would start to slowly decrease, and depending on which model, in 145 years, the temperature would be less than it is today. So now I ask you, is global warming a serious problem or not? And it's very funny to me because if you
If you talk to people who deny the existence of global warming, there's a set of people that say, listen to the science. But then if you say, OK, tell me a credible plan for actually getting to zero emissions and not having a disaster according to you. Well, they can't. But they also don't want you to let that cat out of the bag.
Hey, shut up. We'll get some level of compliance now, and then we'll get a little more in the future. And if we told people the truth, the ones that are honest will say if we told people the truth, they would be too afraid. Well, that's bullshit. And lying to people just doesn't help the situation. That's why no one has believed this.
So anyway, so to those people, I say, well, listen to the science. Because the science is actually very, very clear that we don't have any natural way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere quickly. And the science is very clear that at any point in time, we have another 100 years of warming that's already baked in the cake.
So if you think that 100 years of warming... And sorry, that 100 years, how much of an increment is it? A couple degrees. And that's significant. No one knows for sure because different models will say different things, but you'll get people to say, we can't possibly allow another one more degree C. What is going to happen regardless? Three degrees C no matter what. Yes, yes, yes. Number one. And number two, if you think it's bad,
If your proposition is that 3 degrees C will unleash hell on earth, well, let's start working on it because it's coming no matter what we do.
Okay, so this seems to me like people who are on the side that say, well, let's just get to zero emissions, and that should solve it, that they don't actually care about the saving of the earth, because if they did, they would pursue some of the geoengineering solutions as well. So what is it that they care about? Do they just dislike capitalism? They dislike the fact that we in the West... Okay. There's definitely people like that. And then there's definitely people who are not like that. You know, to people who are true environmentalists or conservationists,
The people who are the ones that are most against it, I think are the ones that view this mostly as a political struggle, and as something of a struggle of capitalism versus something, they don't really propose an alternative. But
For those people, they would say, hey, you capitalist greedy bastards sinned against the environment. This is your fire and brimstone just cause. And don't go telling people you can make it better. I'm trying to make it better with my inventions. But then I say, look, are you saying it's going to destroy the environment? Well, why don't we try not to destroy it? What do you say to that?
Oh, it's going to kill millions of people. How about this? Let's try not to kill millions of people. Why is that not a good idea? We don't know how bad global warming will be. We have a bunch of models. The models predict different amounts of temperature increase in different timescales. At some point, it'll be very bad. We don't know exactly which point.
And we also don't know exactly which point that temperature will occur. So if people say, I don't want to start doing geoengineering today, I say, fine, don't start it today, but let's research the hell out of it. Nathan, what in your eyes are the most efficacious geoengineering prospects? Well, currently, the one I like best is something that
goes into the rubric of solar radiation management. This means you reflect a tiny amount of light from the sun way in the upper atmosphere, way less light than, I mean, you could never visually determine. It's imperceptible, but it would be enough to stop global warming. And it would be sulfur dioxide or some other method. Well, then you can get in, then you go down into the weeds of a hundred different engineering trade-offs.
And people should study all those different trade-offs. Sulfur dioxide has the advantage that we know it works because volcanoes do it. And we know that although sulfur dioxide is not something we want enormous amounts of in our world, we know that we're tolerant. The environment is currently tolerant of quite a bit that comes from volcanoes.
And the extra amount we would need is a very small fraction above what's coming from volcanoes. So there's a plausible argument that it's the safest. There's lots of people who immediately try as hard as they can to see a problem with that. And hey, fair enough. They should do that research and publish those papers. But other people should also be saying, let's try to figure out how to make this work.
Because current, course, and speed, we're not doing shit for the problem.
Nathan, thank you so much for being extremely generous with your time. Please, hopefully you recover from your COVID. I wrote down that other, because they're classically trained chefs like Gordon Ramsay and so on. I watch plenty of his shows and he says that the most important aspect of any recipe is the ingredients being fresh. I always wondered, is that true? Or is there something else? Like, can you take on fresh ingredients from Walmart, let's say, and create a wonderful meal with some of your technologies? Tell me your position on cheese.
Exactly. Yeah, right. Cheese is very old milk. Wine. Well, that's kind of old spoiled grape. You know, aged beef. So I agree with him that you want high quality ingredients. High quality does not mean necessarily mean that it's all got to be
absolutely fresh. There's enormous numbers of dishes made with dried pulses or beans or lentils or grains and that stuff is dried and it doesn't have to be fresh. So there are some foods where the freshness of the ingredients is absolutely paramount. There's other foods where
aging the ingredient is absolutely paramount. And most things are somewhere in the middle. And it's also, you know, the chef who is cooking for other people ought to do the best they can. But not every little restaurant in the middle of the country can get access to
diver caught scallops. And so then you have this dilemma. Does that mean you never serve scallops? And some people would say, yes, they never serve scallops and good for them. But I think it's a little bit elitist to say, oh, no, you can never serve a frozen piece of fish because, you know, the fact is the middle of continents have a very hard time getting fresh ocean fish.
They can get it sometimes at huge expense, but is it always required? Thank you. Thank you so much. You got to go. I appreciate your time, man. Thank you. You're one of my idols. Have a great one. No, I mean that, man. I wanted to even ask you, like, how do the pyramids make? Because I feel like you have an answer for everything. And apparently there's a mystery there. No, actually a friend of mine has figured that out. An Egyptologist friend of mine has really figured out how they built the pyramids.
There were a panoply of questions that I had written down that I didn't get a chance to bring up during the interview, but I emailed him, so here are two extra questions.
One, I wanted to know what is his opinion on the latest news regarding UFOs and even Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked on spacecraft. He said, I think it's arrogant to believe we are the only intelligent beings in the universe. That said, I don't think that the hard evidence for UFOs is currently sufficient to say that UFOs are in fact aliens visiting the planet. The you in the UFOs is unidentified and that remains the case. I don't know about Mr. Lazar's claims, so I can't comment.
Okay, the other question I had was about consciousness. Do you think consciousness emerges from a physical basis, that is a physical substrate like the materialists might say, or not? And why? In other words, what's your opinion on the hard problem of consciousness? Nathan says our brains are physical. So yes, I think that consciousness originates in a physical organ. I think that a lot of consciousness discussion goes away with an obsession on human exceptionalism, animal experiments to show that a
Okay, I hope you enjoyed this podcast.
if you enjoyed it please consider donating to the patreon supporting this channel because right now i'm pretty much doing it pro bono it takes up almost all of my time and it would be great if i could somehow manage to keep up the level of sophistication detail and quality thank you thank you so much
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " Nathan Mirvold is one of those rare individuals who it's difficult to overstate the accomplishments of. Here is just a small sample of a list of fields that he's made extensive contributions to. It's by no means exhaustive. Nuclear power, that is, the inventing of new reactor types, one that can use uranium-238 and spent rods of other nuclear reactors. He also in his early days founded Microsoft Research, which, back then, startup software companies didn't have a research component to them."
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"text": " This trend of Apple Research and Google Research"
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"text": " They're just adumbrations of his original creation. He founded a company based solely on inventing. He thought, well, there is no modern day equivalent of Edison. People just invent in their own specialized field. Why not have a company of a team of people like Edison? He also invented new methods of modes of delivery of treatments for malaria and other infectious diseases under the Bill Gates Foundation. He also came up with geoengineering solutions to the problem of global warming. We were scheduled to talk for just under an hour, but it went far over two hours."
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"text": " And I didn't even get to half the questions that I had written down. Enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Nathan Mirvold. Okay, so why am I interested in you? Well, I'm extremely interested in you. I've been following you for about maybe 12 years."
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"text": " When I was an undergrad, I remember hearing about your book on modernist cuisine and being fascinated and doing plenty of research into you. And thinking that there are few people, very few people in my life that I wish were my uncle, that I can, that I can persistently and bothersomely ask questions to."
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"text": " And and so for years and years I've had this fascination with you and every once in a while I'd check in on you and I admire you you probably get this a lot but I admire you I look up to you there are very few people I say that about and so even with this podcast I Don't give people introductions because I like to just get right into the meat of it But for you, I have to tell the audience about my journey with you and some of your accolades So if you don't mind, can I just get rid of okay? Oh"
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"text": " I'll try not to roll my eyes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just going to read some of this. So this podcast is about theories of everything, and it's also about publicizing some intellectuals that I don't think get as much credit as they deserve. Now, obviously, you're extremely successful. But I was watching your TED Talk, which I think is superior to the majority of TED Talks that I see. And many TED Talks have tens of millions of views sometimes. But yet yours only has 200,000. So if I can help that in any way."
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"text": " I would love to with this minor podcast of mine."
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"text": " It just astounds me. I don't know of anyone else who has the same amount. So I decided, why don't I just start to list them? And I don't think this is exhaustive in the least. I asked your team, and even they couldn't come up with all of them. I asked, is there a list online? Well, anyway, here's some. So dinosaurs slash paleontologists. You like dinosaurs. You love looking into paleontology. You like even digging. OK, great. Asteroids. You have an interest in scanning the skies and analyzing the data of NASA. Yeah. Nuclear power. OK. Eradicating malaria. Metamaterials."
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"text": " Quantum gravity in your former days. Software, obviously, Microsoft. Food, modernist cuisine. Penguins. Okay, I thought it was just penguins. Apparently it's more, but I forgot what your team told me. Photography. Well, all kinds of birds. Birds in general. And all kinds of animals. Great, great, great. What am I missing? Well, I do a lot of photography. Right. So photography of"
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"text": " Almost all of the things that you mentioned, photography of stars and meteors and asteroids, photography of landscapes and the natural world, photography of food for the cookbooks. So that's another one. More generally, math and technology fascinate me, science."
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"text": " I think of you as a convivial and quirky version of Elon Musk. A lesser-known, convivial and quirky Elon Musk. And I've never had the fascination with Elon, mainly because of perhaps personality differences. I'm more on the theoretical end. My background is in physics. And he's much more practical. You seem to have both."
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"text": " For me, I'm more comfortable with QFT than I am with Bernoulli's equation. For some reason, what's practical in the engineering side is it's difficult for me to apprehend. Nathan, first of all, how do you spend your days? What does your average day look like if there's an average day? How much sleep do you get? What is the structure? I don't think there's any single typical day."
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"text": " Many of the things that I do involve, you know, very different activities. Today I had some of the last meetings that we'll have on our pizza book. I just wrote a book called Modernist Pizza, which is aiming to be the definitive book on pizza. And so we had a few meetings to wrap that up today. And there'll probably be a few more, but we're getting down to the short strokes. We're almost done."
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"text": " I had my picture taken for the book, because it kind of goes to the territory. I did a bunch of work on astrophotography. In December, there was a really big meteor shower, a shower called the Geminids. And usually the Geminids, at least in my experience,"
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"text": " Every time I remember to look to see about going to see them, what happens is it's cloudy. Or, well, the moon is up. When the moon is up, you can't see as many of them. Well, this year, or I guess last year, the very end of 2020, everything came together. And I took some great pictures of the Geminids. And now we have to process them."
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"text": " And the way I do photography these days is very computationally intensive. So in the case of these meteors, I took about two and a half thousand pictures per camera times four cameras. So that's about 10,000 pictures over the course of one night while these cameras tracked a part of the sky. And then"
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"text": " Because you're tracking the sky, the stars are all nice little dots and most look really nice, but the meteors come down as streaks. Well, there's all kinds of processing that we have to do to get a usable picture out of all that stuff. I mean, so far the"
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"text": " pictures and then all of the temporary files that you create as you because sometimes you have to put it in different formats for different pieces of software is 20 terabytes. Wow. 20 terabytes for one night. What will be one image? Uh huh. Wow. Okay. I'm very anxious to see how that turned out. Uh, so how much sleep do you get on an average day? Um, you know,"
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"text": " I've been through periods where I'm traveling or we're working on some big deadline for something where I get very little, but usually I get enough sleep. I get eight, nine hours sleep. The reason I'm asking is that I see you as someone who's extremely productive. And when I speak to intellectuals, I find that they generally are regimented, that they eat a certain type of food at a certain time of day."
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"text": " or they don't eat a certain type of food at a certain time of day, or they meditate, or they take a certain nootropic. And I'm curious, what is it that you do such that you can accomplish all that you accomplish? Different each day? Well, it is different each day. So, you know, this today was a mix of different things. And"
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"text": " I guess the end of February, early March, I'm going to go to Missouri. I built a special camera outfit, which looks pretty ridiculous. It lashes three cameras together, each one of the giant lens. And I did it so I could photograph two things. One is big storm waves. So I want to take some super high quality panoramas of ocean waves and also"
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"text": " Huge flocks of birds. Well, in Missouri, they don't have any storm waves, but they do have migrating geese. So about two million of them are due at the end of February. So when I go there, I'll probably be there for three, four days, maybe a little bit longer. And that'll all be about that. And I went to see some other migrating birds in December."
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"text": " I got late November actually, late November. And that was about getting up at four every day. So that you could actually be out where the birds are well before the sun comes up. Because that's like, that's the whole thing. With the meteors, the meteor shower, besides all of this technical equipment that I brought, I also bring a lawn chair."
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"text": " because you want to sit outside and see them. And it's cool to see them. Our eyes aren't good enough to see all of them. So you want to get a camera catches more, but a camera catches it from a narrow thing. Whereas if you're out there, you see them across the whole sky, which is quite remarkable. So anyway, different projects will require you to jump in with both feet and be a hundred percent on that project."
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"text": " Most of the time, not. And so that's what allows me to multitask between projects. How do you choose what project? Are you just driven by your intuition, your feelings, your desires, or is there some grander plan? There's Martian beast mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sport season even more fun on prize picks whether you"
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"text": " Football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections."
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"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe, and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix, it's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit pricepix.com for restrictions and details. Well, it's, of course there's intuition."
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"text": " and feelings. And if I don't want to do it, I'm not going to go do it. And I would hope that my it's not just my raw passion. A lot of the things that I do are technically difficult to do. So far, they haven't been impossible. Now, I'd hate to pick an impossible one and get passionate about it, because I need to waste a lot of time. Right."
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"text": " Is there something that you found to be outside of your domain of competence or outside of what you can achieve? Of course, there's problems like nuclear power. I was one of the inventors of this new type of nuclear power plant. I started the company. That company is going great at the moment. It was recently chosen by the US government to build some test reactors. But"
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"end_time": 992.005,
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"text": " This is not a one man or even one company thing. Nuclear power intrinsically also involves the decisions society makes. Of course, one of the reasons we've done it is because we want to have a new type of carbon-free source of energy because of our impending climate crisis, which is a crisis for everybody."
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"text": " There's a bunch of things that I, so yes, I'm working on the climate crisis. I've done other things for climate, but it's not like it's up to me. Okay. Not like I have a magic wand and I can solve that problem. I can make it. That's when I make a contribution. I try and we'll see what the world does with it. Whereas if I, um, last year I, uh, created a,"
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"text": " the world's highest resolution microscope dedicated to photographing snowflakes. I saw that. Now, there's a lot of things you could ask like who cares or why, but that's one that was within the scope of what I thought was possible for me to do. That turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, but we got it done."
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"text": " That's very different than a societal problem. Like, eliminating malaria, I've contributed, I think, a tremendous amount towards that fight. But it's a tremendous amount towards a fight that's this far along against many miles to go. And I think it's important to work on both kinds of things. You could say the climate crisis or malaria is"
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"text": " tilting windmills or doing things that are, you know, beyond anybody's single person's ability. And it's true, they are. To the degree you find a way to contribute, I still want to work on them. But it's also nice to do things like write a book on pizza. Again, I"
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"text": " I've written a couple other cookbooks. So if you ask the question, is it possible for me to write a book on pizza? The answer is sure. That was not ever a question like, will he write the book? Now you can, what that question is, is it a good book? Is it not a good book? What does the rest of the world think of it? We're publishing it not only in English, but we will publish it in Italian. Always think of it. Right."
},
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"text": " A lot of people don't know that you did your postdoc under Stephen Hawking in Quantum Gravity. What was that like? Practically speaking, how do you communicate to Stephen Hawking? How does that process work, given his challenges? Well, back in the day that I was with Stephen, he didn't have a voice synthesizer. You know, if you've seen him on"
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"text": " more recent TV specials or something. He always has a voice synthesizer. He hadn't, he didn't have that. So he would speak as best he could, which didn't really sound like human speech at all. Um, and, uh, slower. What was it also slower? Well, it was, we'd have to, it was slow. It was very, very hard to understand."
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"text": " And so understanding it was partially about listening and partially about guessing. And the part that was really unfortunate about that is he loved to tell jokes. Well, it turns out the punchline of a joke by definition isn't expected. Right, right, right. You can't guess ahead."
},
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"text": " four and five, like the tension is growing with everyone like, oh my God, why don't we get we get this. So the thing about working with Stephen is, it's very hard to feel sorry for yourself. If you're working with Stephen, you know, you might get up and you think, Oh, God, am I feeling that great? And, oh, it's cold outside. And I forgot, you know, this and that the other thing and I'm"
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"text": " Oh my God, my wife sucks. And then you have Steven there who has these incredible physical challenges and has just an incredibly good attitude about it. And so it just, it made it impossible to feel sorry for yourself. And it's to this day, it's something that when I'm ever tempted to, I was thinking, yeah, but I can walk."
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"text": " I know the bathroom by myself. You know, some people denigrate Stephen because he was heralded as the next Einstein, at least in the popular media. But then it might be a stretch to say he was the next Einstein. But what you can't fault him on at all is his diligence and persistence. And the only other person I can compare him to would be Euler, who was blind and still did math, but at least Euler had his hands. So, well, Stephen,"
},
{
"end_time": 1340.742,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1310.896,
"text": " was driven to do the work that he wanted to do. And it wasn't a question of, oh, we had to go do it because, you know, he needed the salary because, you know, any of these other things. And he certainly worked as hard as he could, you know, through being 70. And obviously at different times, his ability to work was compromised by his condition."
},
{
"end_time": 1371.391,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1341.51,
"text": " But he did incredible things. Now the problem with comparing to Einstein is that Einstein was a unique combination of both brilliance and he came at a time when he could discover a tremendous amount of things."
},
{
"end_time": 1399.701,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1372.637,
"text": " You know, if you want to call someone the next Einstein, the first thing to ask is, well, who was it before Einstein? And you could make a case for it being Newton. But, okay, if you take those two data points, that means we should get one every 500 years. So, calm down on the who's the next Einstein."
},
{
"end_time": 1430.265,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1400.794,
"text": " There's a wonderful organization created by a friend who was also at Cambridge at one point, not the same time I was there. And it was the name of the organization is Nick Steinstein from Africa. And their idea was, let's improve education and so forth. And my running joke with the guy who started it is,"
},
{
"end_time": 1459.974,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1431.049,
"text": " Okay, but there's never been an Einstein from America. So, you know, America has more PhDs in physics and has more Nobel prizes than any other country. And then if you include in America's column, people from other countries that did their work, they got the PhD in America, it's huge. And yet you can"
},
{
"end_time": 1487.244,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1460.128,
"text": " make a strong case that there's never been an American that had the breadth of contribution that Einstein did. That doesn't mean we didn't have some awesome physicists. We did. Feynman is a terrific example. But Einstein had the unique case that he was able to make very fundamental contributions in multiple areas."
},
{
"end_time": 1517.961,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1488.439,
"text": " You know, we know him most in the popular realm for his theory of relativity. Amusingly, that isn't what he got his Nobel Prize for. He got it for something called the photoelectric effect, which was one of the first great proofs of quantum mechanics, which is weird because people usually think of Einstein as being anti-quantum. But the part I really love about it is that Max Planck, who was the great physicist of that era,"
},
{
"end_time": 1545.674,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1519.138,
"text": " wrote a recommendation letter for Einstein to the Nobel Prize committee saying, look, don't effectively, don't worry about this relativity nonsense. It'll blow over. The kid is young. You got to reward him for this other thing. And yet today we think of him for that. But his"
},
{
"end_time": 1572.756,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1546.101,
"text": " his role in statistical mechanics with what we now call Bose-Einstein statistics. It was also incredible. And he must keep going through field after field where he was able to be incredibly influential as was Newton. My favorite crazy Newton story is"
},
{
"end_time": 1601.015,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1573.49,
"text": " that, you know, he was made the Chancellor of the British Mint. And at the time, that was done as a political favor. And it was explicitly a position that they would call a sinecure, meaning without care, like he didn't have to show up at the office, you know, he got into it. Okay. And if you have an American quarter,"
},
{
"end_time": 1631.152,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1602.961,
"text": " The edge is ripped. The person who invented that? Sir Isaac Newton. And the reason was? They had a problem with many of the metals with the edge of the coin holding up. There was a sort of the problem of they couldn't make a clean edge and then you would also wear"
},
{
"end_time": 1648.558,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1631.374,
"text": " And then it was harder to tell counterfeits. So that milling, and I forget the name of it now, but that milling was invented by Newton. So he did some, he also did some crazy shit. He was into alchemy. So his chemistry was terrible."
},
{
"end_time": 1676.374,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1649.667,
"text": " Have you thought much about what's holding physics back if you see physics as being held back in fundamental laws for the past 40 years? Some people say that it's been taken over by string theory as well as we don't have much of data when it comes to, we don't have much new data. So have you thought much about that? Oh, sure. This is the defining problem of our age."
},
{
"end_time": 1705.486,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1677.278,
"text": " My joke with friends from graduate school is that it all went to hell as soon as I left physics. Yeah, you gotta go back, man. I'll be with you every step of the way. I'm not the reason. It was either good choice on my part or it was a coincidence. I don't think I could have solved it. I think there's a causal arrow. Yeah, we have the situation where"
},
{
"end_time": 1735.043,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1706.493,
"text": " You know, in the 19th century, they thought they were on the verge of figuring everything out. There was just a few pesky problems. Then in the early part of the 20th century, up through the 20s and the 30s, they realized they had no shit, basically. And this led to the development of quantum mechanics. Well, quantum mechanics was fantastically successful."
},
{
"end_time": 1765.213,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1736.135,
"text": " Then it ran up against fundamental physics and relativity. So they had to create relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. And all of that was pretty much in place. I went to graduate school in physics in 79, the fall of 79. And while I was"
},
{
"end_time": 1794.036,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1765.862,
"text": " There, maybe the first year, maybe it was the second year, a guy who'd been a graduate student who'd stayed on as a postdoc, Frank Bilchak, gave a talk about asymptotic freedom, which was one of the last pieces to really be put together as part of the story of quarks and what people call quantum chromodynamics or the standard model."
},
{
"end_time": 1823.677,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1795.845,
"text": " Frank later got the Nobel Prize for that. Well, you could pick other moments in time, but for me, that's a good moment in time because at that point in time, we knew there were a tremendous number of questions that we couldn't answer. We had successfully integrated multiple kinds of"
},
{
"end_time": 1853.029,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1824.497,
"text": " fundamental physics. So we had successfully integrated electromagnetism with something called the weak theory for the weak interaction and is it called electroweak theory. Then we had developed quantum chromodynamics or QCD and together these things developed what since then we call the standard model. Of course we didn't call it the standard model when it was just freshly done because it's a little arrogant to call it standard"
},
{
"end_time": 1882.892,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1853.456,
"text": " Right off the bat. And yet, we didn't know a lot of very basic things. We didn't know the precise relationship between many of our sets of particles. Leptons, which means an electron or a variety of other particles like that. What are their relationship to the hadrons?"
},
{
"end_time": 1912.927,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1883.558,
"text": " And we didn't know, the biggest ones, we didn't know how all of that fit with gravity. Now, by that time we knew that the Einstein's general theory of gravitation worked great and it predicted all kinds of things. Still works great. And that's the problem."
},
{
"end_time": 1942.927,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1913.507,
"text": " The Standard Model works great in its sphere of influence. GR works great for gravity. How the hell are they related? And they have to be related because there are many, many things that are clearly involved both quantum mechanics and"
},
{
"end_time": 1973.336,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1944.258,
"text": " And gravity, my favorite simple one is a candle flame. Is what? A candle flame. Okay. Light the wick on a candle, it goes up. Why does it go up? Gravity. It's heating the gases, they become less dense, it goes up. That light, that light you're seeing is quantum emissions. There's clearly quantum phenomena going on in a gravitational field."
},
{
"end_time": 2001.886,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1973.643,
"text": " How are they related? Now, that's a very simple example, and people could probably sort of explain that or wave their hands to explain it. But when you get to black holes and the intense things that space-time does around black holes, or you get to the origin of the universe, or a variety of other things, you've got a problem."
},
{
"end_time": 2032.432,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 2004.155,
"text": " So people set out to solve that. And the theory of everything is one of the names that people gave to that pursuit. There was a time when people called it a grand unified theory instead. But the goal, even though there was slight differences in what you would approach, the goal was very similar."
},
{
"end_time": 2056.459,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 2033.746,
"text": " So anyway, that was the situation 40 years ago, and it's the situation today. Have you been keeping up with any of the latest theories of everything, such as Eric Weinstein's geometric unity or Stephen Wolfram's? Yes. Oh, sure."
},
{
"end_time": 2083.251,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2057.551,
"text": " I need to backtrack though. There's one other thing that is remarkable about this last period of time. And that goes a little bit to your question of the whole world's attention was captured by string theory. Well, starting with relativity, so really starting in 1905, you could argue,"
},
{
"end_time": 2112.773,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2083.643,
"text": " but particularly then general relativity and quantum field theory, an enormous amount of advances were made by considering the mathematical structure of the problem, and in particular the mathematical symmetries of the problem, and that when you found a mathematical symmetry, it would, if you took that seriously, that would give you new and important physics."
},
{
"end_time": 2138.814,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2114.531,
"text": " So general relativity is in some sense the theory of general covariance. So if you take Einstein's extremely simple set of things of saying, you know, you have these relative observers and the inertial frames are the same, the accelerated ones, not so much."
},
{
"end_time": 2167.142,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2139.309,
"text": " That gives you general covariance and that gives you general relativity. And then those same thoughts about applying covariance give you a tremendous amount of what it takes for a quantum field theory. You then also take the idea of symmetries and say, hey, we have mathematical symmetries are coming and that's Murray Gell-Mann was famous for calling this the eighth fold way because there was a"
},
{
"end_time": 2196.186,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2168.985,
"text": " group theory with an eight-fold symmetry that was involved. And so mathematics was a tremendous guide. And when you found a mathematical symmetry, it usually would have a physical interpretation. Well, until we found a mathematical symmetry called supersymmetry. And supersymmetry from a"
},
{
"end_time": 2227.722,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2197.79,
"text": " fundamental mathematics perspective it's very attractive and it has sucked an enormous amount of brain power into saying look this is so beautiful it's got to be correct only so far as we can tell it's not correct like yeah normal energies meaning the what we've been able to observe so far with"
},
{
"end_time": 2257.756,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2228.029,
"text": " even our best stuff, even the LHC. It predicts there should be twice as many particles as there are. Those particles are called superpartners. And fundamentally, if you have this supersymmetry, it's analogous to saying, well, if I've got charge minus one particles, I better have charge plus one particles."
},
{
"end_time": 2287.415,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2258.012,
"text": " And so I have supercharges. Well, then I need super partners. So then this idea was so seductive that people have gone put enormous amounts of brain power into trying to make it work. And the the big showdown that everyone expected was the LHC."
},
{
"end_time": 2318.251,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2288.951,
"text": " And the stated purpose of the LHC was to find the Higgs boson. But almost everyone expected this would also be where we got the new set of clues. And this is where we would be able to solve this fundamental problem. Because we've gone this 30 or 40 years"
},
{
"end_time": 2348.729,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2319.326,
"text": " staring at the old clues and not coming up with anything. And in general, physics has progressed best when we had clues. Now, general relativity is the great exception to that. Einstein's inspiration for that is so weak. It's so simple."
},
{
"end_time": 2378.302,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2349.872,
"text": " It almost sounds simple minded. You know, like someone coming into you and saying, ah, I've got this guy in an elevator and this guy who's on this, and I'm going to tell you all about the structure of the universe from this. You'd say, no, no, no, no, no. You're in that case, but not Einstein. So that was a rare example of someone who had very few clues. Newton."
},
{
"end_time": 2409.036,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2379.326,
"text": " had very few clues. There's an apocryphal story about the apple falling and hitting him in the head. That guy did not take very much in the way of inspiration to get going. So that was another great one. But we have this problem now that we have the same clues we've looked at for 30 or 40 years. LHC found the Higgs boson."
},
{
"end_time": 2439.428,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2411.067,
"text": " Um, it didn't find any super partners. And so far it hasn't had any hint of that. And periodically over the last three or four years, there will be a murmur in the field. Oh, there's someone's got, you know, so and so in this two different projects. So there's Atlas and Alice. Oh, Alice is seeing something or Atlas is seeing something. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2470.282,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2441.92,
"text": " But so far, that's all come to naught. And it's probably will certainly give them that outcome. If you look back at the field 20 years ago, or 25 years ago and said, Okay, we don't really know what's going on. Should we put all of our eggs in one basket? It's a no, let's"
},
{
"end_time": 2494.77,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2470.964,
"text": " You know, we should bet on lots of different ideas, but there was an overwhelming bet on supersymmetry and string theory. And the weirder it got in chasing that direction down, it didn't dissuade people."
},
{
"end_time": 2525.486,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2495.725,
"text": " Now, there's friends of mine who say, oh, Nathan, you're out of it. You don't understand how wonderful and how beautiful it is. And I will stipulate to it being beautiful. And string theory has led to some interesting discoveries in mathematics. Ed Whitten, who I've known since graduate school and is a great friend, and I think the world of Ed got the Fields Medal in mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 2554.155,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2525.93,
"text": " for a lot of things he worked on while trying to investigate supersymmetry and string theory. And string theory arguably has got a physical result to its name in that it helps you calculate the modes in a black hole which go to the still somewhat controversial issue of whether a black hole destroys entropy."
},
{
"end_time": 2584.428,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2555.401,
"text": " At this stage, we need one of two things to happen. We either need new clues or we need some damn genius who's so smart he or she does not need clues. Well, those geniuses seem to come around every 500 years. Now, maybe we have a little larger population today and we're educating a larger fraction of that population, so maybe it isn't 500,"
},
{
"end_time": 2612.841,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2585.333,
"text": " It's not great statistics there. Or you need new clues, but LHC was ridiculously expensive. Trying to come up with something that is dramatically better than LHC, they probably can eke"
},
{
"end_time": 2642.602,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2613.507,
"text": " some number of factors, and I'm not involved in it, so I won't speculate as to how many factors, but let's say they got a factor of 10. We don't know at the present, will a factor of 10 matter? Or will it be a factor of 100? Or will it be a factor of 1000? Or what? Right. And"
},
{
"end_time": 2670.913,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2643.251,
"text": " As a result, that very confused story doesn't seem like it's the single best story to go take to nation states and say, please give us $500 billion that it might take to make something that was many orders of magnitude better. Or we just say, okay, we have to put on our thinking caps."
},
{
"end_time": 2698.439,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2671.544,
"text": " and come up with cheap ways or cheaper ways to get to that next level of power. That's also a possibility. But either way, we either need some genius on the old clues or some new clues. Now, there are people who are working on this. Peter White, who was my roommate in graduate school,"
},
{
"end_time": 2727.705,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2700.043,
"text": " one of the most articulate critics of string theory on his blog, Not Even Wrong. Peter has recently come out with what to me look like some very intriguing ideas. And they're along a different approach than most people have taken in the past. But"
},
{
"end_time": 2757.261,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2727.858,
"text": " They're not done yet either. They're a stab in the dark, and it will require a lot more work. Within the field of computing, there have been since the 1960s, there have been a variety of people who have tried to take the idea of computing as a metaphor seriously. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2785.862,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2757.688,
"text": " There's a great essay, which originally was a lecture, by Edvard Wigner. Wigner was a Nobel Prize winner in physics. And the name of this essay is The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Physics. And so Wigner says,"
},
{
"end_time": 2815.708,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2787.005,
"text": " How come it's so damn easy? You know, a lot of physical laws are first or second order equations, and most of it's linear, which means we could solve it. And then of course we know that there are other parts of physics that aren't linear, but the"
},
{
"end_time": 2846.186,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2816.425,
"text": " If I were to give a modern version of Wigner's thing, I would say, hey, not only has it been, math has had it, it's a great run, but are we sure that it's mathematics in the same way we've done it before that we need next? And that's why people like David Deutsch, as an example, David Deutsch is a physicist. He was"
},
{
"end_time": 2875.913,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2846.647,
"text": " the inventor of quantum computing, if you will. He had the idea that maybe you could compute with quantum systems. And David has done some very deep thinking about what it would mean to have a computable universe versus not. Where instead of relying on simple equations with"
},
{
"end_time": 2906.493,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2876.527,
"text": " polynomials or sines and cosines, the things that we're used to in school, maybe the world is fundamentally more about computation. And computation is, in some sense, fundamentally more complex than that simple mathematics. And you can figure that out in things like the various complexity theories,"
},
{
"end_time": 2936.596,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2907.227,
"text": " that a simple touring machine can't predict when it will land. Just as a matter of principle, it can't. Well, there's a whole pile of people besides Deutsch that have gotten excited about this. I've known Stephen Wolfram since I was at Princeton. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at the time. And he's a great friend of mine. I have huge respect for him."
},
{
"end_time": 2966.374,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2937.073,
"text": " I use Mathematica almost every day, his great contribution to software. He's got an approach where he has been able to replicate the classical, this is perhaps slightly unfair, but he's able to replicate some of the classical features of"
},
{
"end_time": 2995.947,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2966.834,
"text": " quantum field theory. So if you think about all of these fields have got a quantization component, but they also have a classical component, electromagnetism being the simplest example of that, but there is effectively a classical component of these other things. And Stephen has shown that you can use very simple computational systems like cellular automata or other simple"
},
{
"end_time": 3025.043,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2996.323,
"text": " things that will have many of the same symmetries as these more complicated theories. Now, there's two ways to view that. One way to view that is to say, yes, that's great, but now tie them into a real quantum theory."
},
{
"end_time": 3054.189,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 3026.459,
"text": " And Stephen would, I think, be the first to say, well, that's hard. He hasn't quite done that yet, but he has done this intriguing first part. My friend Peter has in a different way done that first part. Computation as well, or completely different? Is it also computation? This is much more about traditional, very, very obtuse mathematics."
},
{
"end_time": 3086.237,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 3056.937,
"text": " And so maybe there is an approach like that will work, but maybe not. So you're agnostic. You don't have a preference to which one of these theories as being the ultimate. I mean, part of the tragedy of supersymmetry is that hunches based on a mathematical idea for the first time didn't work."
},
{
"end_time": 3114.957,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 3086.732,
"text": " Right, makes you pessimistic. And so once that's occurred, then you said, and then that one had all the IQ in the world, trying to desperately resuscitate it and revive it and make it work. And yet it doesn't seem to be the way nature operates. At the same time, I have a basic faith in the idea of physics, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 3144.445,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 3116.493,
"text": " that we can figure out how the universe works. And if you think about what we've achieved so far, general relativity, quantum field theory, boy oh boy, we have understood the universe around us vastly better than, in some sense, we have any right to. And"
},
{
"end_time": 3174.821,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3146.596,
"text": " You know, whether you think that's luck, or that's because there's some metric that the simplest things actually work, or I mean, you can go all round and round on that. You know, the counter example of simple things working out simply is number theory, where"
},
{
"end_time": 3204.155,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3175.572,
"text": " You know, I can explain to a child in a few minutes what integers are. And you can easily show how factoring works and multiplication works. And then you can state something like the gold box conjecture. And we have no clue how to prove it, even though it's obviously true for any example you try."
},
{
"end_time": 3228.183,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3205.691,
"text": " And that's an extraordinarily simple system. So maybe it's that our idea of simplicity isn't right. Anyway, I still think it's worth people trying to figure out the fundamental laws. I think it's well worth it. But we have gone through a very difficult period in that."
},
{
"end_time": 3257.585,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3228.575,
"text": " What do you mean when you say that our idea of simplicity may be wrong? What could it be? First of all, we are highly biased towards things which we can explain with simple continuum model stuff. So Newton's great invention was the calculus, which was to say, okay, let's reason about a continuum"
},
{
"end_time": 3270.64,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3257.961,
"text": " of things, starting off with the fact, well guys, we only have 10 fingers and they're kind of discrete. It looks like you almost have nine. Yeah, I cut myself in the kitchen."
},
{
"end_time": 3300.401,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3271.664,
"text": " So just as an aside, I would always say when I learn about modernist cuisine, I would always joke to people and say, yeah, he's a scientist and he's using his physics background in his lab to transform food. It's essentially like laser cooking a chicken to perfection. And then I always said that laser cooking chicken. But then I thought, well, I don't see anything that you do as laser cooking. And then I thought, well, maybe you do. Maybe I should ask you, is there anything you do that approximates something like a laser cooking? Oh, sure."
},
{
"end_time": 3328.695,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3300.862,
"text": " Well, there's lots of things where you cook with light. So a Neapolitan pizza is cooked with light. Broiling is about cooking with light. It's all about infrared light. But for lasers specifically, we've done a bunch of stuff that I think is cool. I'm not sure it's very fundamental. Using laser cutters or laser engravers to do cool things."
},
{
"end_time": 3332.995,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3329.019,
"text": " know, we could etch your face on them. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 3360.043,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3333.951,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 3388.575,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3360.043,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way,"
},
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"start_time": 3388.575,
"text": " powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in."
},
{
"end_time": 3445.247,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3417.688,
"text": " Piece of meat or on a slice of bread because it looks just like you or cut impossibly complicated or otherwise impossibly complicated patterns out of a layer of sugar. It sounds more like presentation then. Well, for a laser cutter, yes."
},
{
"end_time": 3475.418,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3445.555,
"text": " Lasers by themselves don't do a lot of things that we would want to do with cooking. We would rather cook with a broad source and continuous source of infrared than a pulsed laser that would either burn a hole or be too diffuse."
},
{
"end_time": 3504.206,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3476.34,
"text": " So in general, lasers are not the be-all and end-all, but they're useful for some things. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 3532.671,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3504.206,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 3549.036,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3532.671,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 3573.814,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3549.036,
"text": " That's another reason why I wanted you as an uncle, because I love food tremendously."
},
{
"end_time": 3602.807,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3574.241,
"text": " And when I read that you made the perfect fry with bathing in an ultrasonic oil, is that correct? Yeah. I'm like, man, I wish I knew this guy because just so you know, before each interview I fast. So right now I'm at a 48 hour fast. And one of the reasons is because I try to research as much as possible about the interviewee. And one of the ways that I productively do that is just by not eating. So I can just focus on work until I sleep. Okay. But another reason is because I'm so avaricious."
},
{
"end_time": 3633.302,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3603.422,
"text": " that when I do eat, I eat like mad. And then I have to just, I'm like, okay, I must fast now. Glad for this to end is what you just told me. Yeah. So going back, going back to new is we've had a strong bias in physics for things that can be solved by simple equations."
},
{
"end_time": 3659.787,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3634.138,
"text": " ideally linear, if they're nonlinear, well, not too nonlinear. And that's worked super well for lots of things. But, you know, the discoveries that people had of chaos and dynamical systems, and more generally fractals,"
},
{
"end_time": 3685.606,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3660.503,
"text": " out, whether there's fractals in the real world or fractals in solutions of equations, are such that the parts of the world that can be totally modeled by very simple models might be quite limited and we might have already slipped them all up."
},
{
"end_time": 3712.534,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3685.964,
"text": " You have, like we mentioned, we have variegated fields that you're pretty much an expert in. How, practically speaking, do you do the research when you're interested in, let's say, some new field, field X? What do you start out with? Do you interview? Do you call experts? Do you just go on Wikipedia? Do you go on Google Scholar? What does the journey from knowing nothing to becoming moderately ensconced in it to becoming an expert in it look like? Well, it's got all of those steps."
},
{
"end_time": 3738.763,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3712.807,
"text": " First, I try to read as much as I can about it. Often that means I will buy books on Amazon as the first step. Do you mind taking us through a specific example? You can pick photography, you can pick paleontology, asteroids. Well, sure, I'll pick out. Let me start with asteroids. With asteroids, some people came to me with"
},
{
"end_time": 3766.34,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3740.452,
"text": " actually a request to donate money to a project to build a satellite to go look at asteroids. And we spent some time discussing the physics of it and I wasn't very satisfied and so they sent me a white paper about this and then I was really dissatisfied because I just figured this has to be wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 3794.138,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3767.381,
"text": " And so I reached out to some folks and I got some data and it took me a few months, but I showed there's a whole bunch of stuff that was wrong with their approach. You wrote a 100 page paper. Well, I've had a couple of them actually. So I don't know if the first one was a hundred. It might've been. I've written a bunch of papers on it and"
},
{
"end_time": 3823.933,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3795.247,
"text": " Along the way, yes, I contacted experts. Contacting experts is always tricky. Experts are busy people, and if you contact them and say, hi, I'm some guy you've never heard of, and I have got a question about X."
},
{
"end_time": 3852.875,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3824.172,
"text": " you better make sure that question is a sensible question, otherwise they're just never going to respond to you. Right. Or they'll respond and say, well, that's nice kid. You know, clearly you don't understand a thing. And it's both a very natural human response to being busy and to, you know, not wasting your time on crackpots and Canada things. On the other hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 3880.776,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3853.353,
"text": " science isn't about that. But usually you can find some scientist who is willing to answer some questions if you've got good questions about their work. Yeah. And I love Google Scholar. I use Google Scholar not every day, but certainly every week looking something up. And that's useful because you can get"
},
{
"end_time": 3904.838,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3881.271,
"text": " an idea of what the world thinks and for a lot of um a lot of stuff it's way more current than you would find in textbooks now it's i mean typically a physics paper doesn't use mathematics that isn't in a textbook"
},
{
"end_time": 3933.66,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3906.22,
"text": " It may use physics as not in a textbook, but not mathematics that's not in a textbook. And so sometimes you have to go to the math literature to then define new math for things and that going in a field to the literature is both super important, but it's also a little challenging for an outsider because"
},
{
"end_time": 3962.944,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3934.923,
"text": " people will have their own, a field will develop its own vocabulary, its own things that are sort of obviously everyone knows X versus no, they don't know X. But in general, I have found that there are enough scientists, enough experts who I can talk to, who will"
},
{
"end_time": 3991.63,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3964.821,
"text": " help me guide me in the right way. Um, sometimes joining on as collaborators, um, or be good at critiquing things. And so away you go from there. Um, now in the case of asteroids, the, by every book on Amazon that's on asteroids is pretty easy. There's not very many."
},
{
"end_time": 4019.77,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3992.09,
"text": " But in that case, well, then you also need to make sure that you've got everything understood about radiative heat transfer and conductive heat transfer and the mechanics of engineering aspects of telescopes and optical aspects and IR telescopes in particular. And, you know, eventually draws in a lot of stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 4040.026,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 4020.316,
"text": " So it doesn't seem like you're going completely out of field because when you mention telescopes and conductive heat, it sounds like that's building on some of your previous knowledge. Is there an example of where you've gone completely out of left field? I don't recall what the saying is. Well, depends on what you mean by completely."
},
{
"end_time": 4066.442,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 4040.282,
"text": " Okay. How about this? How about this? Let's take, why don't you take me through your, how you would sort out this problem. Let's say there is the issue of when do we go back to quote unquote normal from COVID? Okay. So there are quite a few variables to think about. Obviously there's politics as well, but let's say, okay, well what's the infection rate and how effective are vaccines? How effective are the masks? And so, so how would you go about solving the problem?"
},
{
"end_time": 4094.565,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 4067.381,
"text": " Obviously, we mentioned, you mentioned, it doesn't just depend on you, but how would you go about thinking about it? I have spent a lot of time working on computer models of infectious disease. So I'm very familiar with the state of the art there. In fact, my company created a whole unit of the company called the Institute for Disease Modeling. So in that case, I know all about it, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4124.309,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 4095.469,
"text": " You don't need to have the details to get the big picture. Okay, so the big picture on COVID is very simple that right now, most people don't have it. Okay, which means most people are vulnerable. And by most, it's like 80%, 85% most places."
},
{
"end_time": 4153.729,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4126.92,
"text": " Well, if you have 85% vulnerable, you will have another wave. Unless you're extraordinarily lucky and you're able to plug every gap and do every other thing. But that's an extraordinarily special state of affairs. The problem with diseases is they grow exponentially."
},
{
"end_time": 4184.206,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4154.497,
"text": " If you get sick, you can infect some number of people. There's practical limits on how many you can infect, but no conceptual limit. Well, each of those can go out and do a whole bunch of people, and each of those can do, and so it grows exponentially. And to get rid of a disease, you have to make sure that its growth factor is negative, so it dies exponentially."
},
{
"end_time": 4212.346,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4185.623,
"text": " But there's a tremendous amount of evidence that most countries in the world are unable to have a locked down enough society for that to occur. So it was, it's a little annoying to me when you see people"
},
{
"end_time": 4244.582,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4214.753,
"text": " Do a very normal human thing, which is to criticize folks that did it poorly. But in fact, it's extremely hard to do your reopening right. Oh my God, we're shocked. There's a second wave. Hello. Of course there was going to be a second wave. Oh my God, there's a new strain. Well, you're lucky it took this long. Viruses, particularly RNA viruses,"
},
{
"end_time": 4275.043,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4245.265,
"text": " are messy replicators. They mutate like crazy. So we have been lucky that COVID hasn't mutated more than it does. Right, right, right. And, okay, China, maybe South Korea, you can say there's a couple people that, you know, did it right. Most other places, there's a lot of other places who for a while thought"
},
{
"end_time": 4304.189,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4275.589,
"text": " Oh, we did it right. Look at us. We have low rates. And then they got another wave as they were going to get the other way. Okay. Um, that's the other thing that is hard for people to accept about something that's so important is that luck makes a lot of difference. Okay. So we know about a variety of super spreader events."
},
{
"end_time": 4334.087,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4305.179,
"text": " Early in the epidemic, there was some birthday party in Connecticut, I think that 30 or 40 people got infected and went all over the place, even to different countries. And, okay, that specific thing is bad luck. You couldn't have predicted upfront, this will happen in Connecticut."
},
{
"end_time": 4364.753,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4335.009,
"text": " You could predict that it'll happen somewhere. And there were places who, for a variety of reasons, have been lucky. And yet they pat themselves on their back and they go, yeah, it's because we were so damn smart. Then there were places that were unlucky. No, they were unlucky and they weren't doing the perfect job. But if you look back and say, how many countries did a perfect job of this? Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 4391.527,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4366.135,
"text": " We can't really tell until it's in retrospect, but China has done a very good job of containment. Arguably, South Korea has, and I'm sure you could come up with a few other also rams and others. Italy was an interesting example."
},
{
"end_time": 4421.664,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4392.483,
"text": " The worst part of the first wave of the epidemic was all in the north of Italy, which is not what most people would guess. Why? Because the healthcare system, it's widely believed in Italy and elsewhere that the healthcare system in the south is not as good. And that's a quantifiable thing. It's number of hospital beds and so on and so forth."
},
{
"end_time": 4451.852,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4422.927,
"text": " So, oddly, Italy got sickest where their health care was the strongest. Now, in a way, that's really good, because at least they had some hope. And you're saying that's based on luck in that example? Well, it's probably based on the other thing the north is known for, which is the north of Italy, is the industrial part of Italy."
},
{
"end_time": 4478.592,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4452.534,
"text": " and they have the largest exports. And it's very likely that it was people in China on business that brought it back to the north of Italy. And then from Italy to New York because the current"
},
{
"end_time": 4506.561,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4479.326,
"text": " understanding is that the New York epidemic really was gotten from Western Europe and Italy in particular, unlike in Seattle, where it was directly directly people from China. So, you know, I wouldn't, you might not say it was luck, pure luck, because there might be a factor like, oh, if you have"
},
{
"end_time": 4535.111,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4507.227,
"text": " Lots of industry and that industry manufactures things in China. You're going to have a lot of engineers and product managers and other people going back and forth. So maybe calling that luck is too strong a word, but it's not got anything to do with your medical system. It's not got anything to do with your hygiene. It's nothing to do with that. What about government? Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 4561.237,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4536.049,
"text": " Government, certainly you can find lots of instances where the governments have done a better job or a worse job. Nathan, you're in charge of the U.S. right now. It's not Biden, it's you. You're in charge in my country, Canada. So what do you advise Canada and the U.S. to do?"
},
{
"end_time": 4586.749,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4562.739,
"text": " I really want to take more snowflake pictures and I can't go to Canada. I doubt I'll be allowed to go this winter. So that pisses me off. But well, the only way that all of the kinds of shutdowns and things we've done up to this point have mostly been"
},
{
"end_time": 4616.698,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4589.565,
"text": " Well, it's a fascinating question that would require lots of detail analysis to say, was it worth it? There certainly is a point of view that says, if you could have walked the talk and really buckled down like the Chinese did, great. But if you can't do that, doing a half-assed job is probably worse than doing nothing. Interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 4647.21,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4617.244,
"text": " Or it gives you a double dose of bad things. Why is it worse? Because of its effect on the economy or what? Because you have a huge effect on the economy. And the huge effect on the economy also affects health outcomes and people's lives. So you can't really separate the two super cleanly. Because I hear some people say, yeah, you're prioritizing the economy over people's lives. But what you're saying is that they're inextricably linked."
},
{
"end_time": 4677.568,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4648.507,
"text": " Many parts of the world they are. And it's an interesting question that we'll have to answer after the fact. Would we have been better off doing a simpler protocol, but really meaning it? Like, okay, you are arrested or I don't want to say shot on sight, but you don't want to say it."
},
{
"end_time": 4707.142,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4677.944,
"text": " tased on site if you wear a mask, but don't go through a whole bunch of the other silly things. And here in Washington state, we had a, I think a very well-meaning government, but you have the problem that policymakers don't really know what to do because they haven't been in this situation before. Epidemiologists"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.077,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4711.305,
"text": " have not always given great advice or they have allowed themselves to be talked down in weird ways. So for example, when the thing first came out, oh, we're going to ban all meetings of more than a hundred people. Oh, wait, wait, did I say a hundred? I meant 10. Oh, did I say 10? I meant bullshit about somebody with lots of well-meaning intentions."
},
{
"end_time": 4768.456,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4740.998,
"text": " saying oh wait do we really have to scrap you know groups of 10 people and the answer epidemiologically was always two don't allow two if everyone's alone they can't transmit and then okay people are going to live with their families and we're not going to fix that so don't expand it that was the right answer but you go through this thing of"
},
{
"end_time": 4798.558,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4770.111,
"text": " saying something and changing it and changing it. And each one of those things was a damn lie. You go through another thing where people... And they're lying because they don't feel like people will listen if you say, keep your social circle to two or because of some other reason. I think it sounded too drab. Well, there's lots of reasons and I don't have a perfect answer to every question. There's a lot of people say, oh, you're overreacting. You're overreacting. You're overreacting."
},
{
"end_time": 4825.862,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4798.712,
"text": " This was a great example of well-meaning people saying shit that was wrong. In some cases, they couldn't help saying things were wrong because we didn't know."
},
{
"end_time": 4854.684,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4826.647,
"text": " But in that case, the mask thing was horrifically stupid. They had people saying literally, Oh, it doesn't matter because viruses are so tiny. They'll go through any hole, but you're not spewing pure viruses. So who the fuck thought that was a good thing? You're spitting. Okay. And if you have, if you wear one of those face masks, plastic face mask,"
},
{
"end_time": 4881.783,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4855.538,
"text": " Wear one even just around the house for a little bit and see how filthy it gets near your mouth. It's gross, but you're spitting all the time. That's how we speak. I see. I see. Then there was a whole set of other weird political in, uh, there's a point where, uh, in Washington state, it was okay to go golfing, but you couldn't go fishing."
},
{
"end_time": 4912.995,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4883.763,
"text": " Well, that was some political bullshit. I'm sorry. There was no science that says, oh, there's this. Then you also have the scientists, I have to say, are also at fault because there wasn't enough thinking about, okay, is something worth doing at the level we could actually do it?"
},
{
"end_time": 4941.118,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4914.889,
"text": " It's clearly the case that if the US and Canada could have done what China did, it would be way better for both the economy and for the number of people killed. The US has vastly more people killed for our size than China."
},
{
"end_time": 4972.381,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4943.933,
"text": " But the fact is, we couldn't do that. And given that you can't do it, and you could argue, well, we didn't know how incompetent we were upfront. Maybe. You mean to say we didn't have enough data about the virus or the people involved in policy making were incompetent? Well, no, but look, you're never going to get 100% compliance in anything, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5001.766,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4973.746,
"text": " Like we all have laws about speeding. You know, virtually everyone who's ever driven a car has broken one of those laws at some point in time. Almost none of us get caught. Right. And we use those laws to try to get the average speed down to a reasonable level. But if we had something that depended critically on us following traffic laws,"
},
{
"end_time": 5029.582,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 5002.927,
"text": " We would be fucked. We cannot bring ourselves to obey traffic laws. It's just a damn fact. Maybe someone could come up with some way to make that occur. So China was able to go do it. South Korea seems to be able to do it. And they're a much more free society than China. They still have a right"
},
{
"end_time": 5057.995,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 5029.872,
"text": " It's hard to interrupt. Was China able to quote unquote do it because they have a larger enforcement mechanism such as they will shoot you or they will tase you in your previous example? Or is it something else? Well, the obedience of the population? Well, how do you separate those? Right? I mean, the way we have a law abiding society is through a combination of"
},
{
"end_time": 5079.241,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 5058.746,
"text": " catching the people who break the laws, but mostly providing an incentive to everyone else to follow them. Is it because the Chinese were conditioned to do what they're told?"
},
{
"end_time": 5107.944,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 5080.555,
"text": " or because there was threat of punishment. But wasn't that threat of punishment? I mean, I don't even separate those two things. There was a... I can't totally remember the name of the movie, but it was a sort of a comedic Western movie where this guy is given the... is made sheriff and he's given the star of the former sheriff that has this big dent in it due to a bullet."
},
{
"end_time": 5137.773,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 5109.258,
"text": " I says, well, at least this, at least this star, this badge saved my predecessor. And the guy giving it to him says, well, what if it wasn't for all the other bullets? Right? I mean, if you, if you sent the police out or you sent the soldiers out with something the size of my cell phone,"
},
{
"end_time": 5167.329,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 5138.131,
"text": " that was completely bulletproof, it wouldn't be worth doing. Even if it was perfect where it was, there's too many other holes in the armor. It's pointless. It's not worth anything. And I think that that is what occurred in the COVID response of most of the countries in the world. They"
},
{
"end_time": 5197.21,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 5168.114,
"text": " either enacted half steps that could never could have worked, or the enacted ones that should have worked, but they couldn't walk the talk, they couldn't actually have enough compliance, or they waited until it was too late to do that. And exactly, and you probably come up with five other reasons. So I don't claim I know all of the exact mistakes. Yeah. But"
},
{
"end_time": 5226.63,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 5198.609,
"text": " When you have an exponentially growing thing, it requires a fanatical approach to try to eliminate the disease. And we know that that's true from cases where they eliminated a malaria within a region. We've never done it for the whole earth, but we've done it in regions. We know that that was the case with smallpox."
},
{
"end_time": 5257.688,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 5228.592,
"text": " But in smallpox, we had a vaccine. So anyway, it was very clear to me early on that we're just basically fucked until we get a vaccine. And it is worth going through the various things. Some certainly it's worth wearing masks. I believe that all along. The current belief is it's true. But we went through a phase of denying that it was good for masks or saying, oh, masks aren't good for you."
},
{
"end_time": 5286.817,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 5258.114,
"text": " They're just good for everyone else. Now, what about that? Is there any truth to that? That's not what the latest research shows. Because fundamentally, I don't want to breathe your spit, and you don't want to breathe my spit. And the whole point of these masks is to reduce the amount of spit transfer. Now, it's not"
},
{
"end_time": 5316.049,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 5287.09,
"text": " cutting it to zero, but reducing it. And statistically, that means that there are people who, if in fact you were locked in an elevator with someone for 48 hours, unless you had scuba tanks with separate air systems, I don't know how you're going to avoid some contagion."
},
{
"end_time": 5346.22,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 5316.596,
"text": " For a lot of things, the mask would have worked, but it also undermined mask making. You have people think it'd be much better from a compliance perspective to tell people, oh, this is all for you, buddy. Do it for yourself. If your friends don't want to do it, fine. You can cry at their funeral rather than the other way around. So anyway,"
},
{
"end_time": 5376.186,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5346.647,
"text": " I think that the vaccine is the only thing that given our general lack of ability to control it with lockdowns and mask wearing and all the other things we've tried in Canada and the US and all of Europe and essentially every other country except China, nobody has gotten- And South Korea."
},
{
"end_time": 5407.056,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5377.159,
"text": " Nobody has gotten a line on this. So obviously it's the vaccine that's our next hope. You mentioned South Korea, but they don't have the same authoritarian government as China. So what was the deciding factor there? Well, I don't know. I have friends who are Korean or of Korean background who would say, Oh, actually,"
},
{
"end_time": 5434.855,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5407.722,
"text": " It may not be as authoritarian, but Koreans have a very strong sense of community and being gung-ho. Interesting. Cultural difference. And that there was a cultural difference that they were more likely to follow the rules. Now, they also tested up the wazoo. We didn't do shit for testing here."
},
{
"end_time": 5464.889,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5436.101,
"text": " and still barely don't. Well, how the hell are you going to stop this exponential spread thing if you can't identify who the hell has it? Anyway, so at this stage, our only hope is the vaccine. And we have to get it rolled out to essentially everybody as soon as possible. Now, there's a"
},
{
"end_time": 5493.865,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5465.401,
"text": " word that's been bandied about called herd immunity. And herd immunity is a real feature of a mathematical model of a disease, which basically states if enough people get it and your contact rate is low enough, then it's hard for the disease to spread. Because if you have it,"
},
{
"end_time": 5517.159,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5494.275,
"text": " But almost everyone you run into is immune, then you will resolve, as doctors say, that means either get better or die. You will resolve or at least stop transmitting before you reach a vulnerable person."
},
{
"end_time": 5546.34,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5517.807,
"text": " And it's one of the ways to think about infection disease. So you mean to say in the herd immunity that if enough healthy people get it so that they survive and then they become immune to it. Well, you need to have immune people. Okay. Now the simple way of getting a vac of this. Well, there's two ways there's recovered people because we're almost every disease in the world and infectious disease, I should say."
},
{
"end_time": 5574.735,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5547.295,
"text": " you get some amount of immunity after you've had it. Malaria has the least immunity after you get it, but you still have some. Or you don't get it as strongly or there's a variety of other things. So basically, once you have society either recover from that or get vaccinated,"
},
{
"end_time": 5604.582,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5575.913,
"text": " Then you can stop it. But people started talking about herd immunity when 5% of the country was infected or 2% was infected. And that was just absurd. And it was somebody working really hard to try to find hope and say, well, maybe, maybe, maybe we could, it's like, be serious. In most any model, you don't get to herd immunity until you get well over half."
},
{
"end_time": 5633.353,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5605.572,
"text": " And usually it's more like three quarters. So at the stage when three quarters of the population have been rendered immune, then you can start to talk about herd immunity. And I say start because the way you typically model diseases is as if"
},
{
"end_time": 5660.316,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5633.66,
"text": " Every one of us might have some random possibility of meeting some other one of us any fine day. That's how the world works. Okay, COVID was devastating around the world when it got into assisted living centers and nursing homes. Because you have a set of people that can't get away. And they see the same people every day."
},
{
"end_time": 5690.077,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5662.466,
"text": " And you have caregivers that work at more than one facility, doctors, nurses, other caregivers. So once COVID got into an assisted living center, it was going to explode. And no, if you had the last people on earth to be vaccinated,"
},
{
"end_time": 5719.872,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5690.333,
"text": " We're all in the same nursing home. There's no herd immunity that's going to save them. If COVID lands there, they're all going to get it, or a large fraction will get it and die, and it'll be terrible. So the actual number of people that we need to achieve some slowing of infection"
},
{
"end_time": 5734.155,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5720.435,
"text": " do to inoculation. We don't know, but it depends on the circles that people move in. You know, if, if in fact,"
},
{
"end_time": 5761.288,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5735.162,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 5787.312,
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"start_time": 5761.288,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 5810.725,
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"start_time": 5787.312,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 5839.428,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5810.725,
"text": " In fact, you had kids that go to a particular school. If COVID gets to one of the parents and then gets to the kids and then they spread it at school, then you have a much tighter connection to the other parents of that school."
},
{
"end_time": 5869.241,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5840.811,
"text": " than you might have to some other group of folks on the other side of town, like maybe a nursing home. On the other hand, once it gets in the nursing home, the nursing home has very strong connectivity to each other. So it's a complicated thing. Israel is doing a great job of giving people injections, but of the people that are in their"
},
{
"end_time": 5896.869,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5869.991,
"text": " priority groups for the first wave. In like the first week, they've done a third of them. Okay, it's a smaller country. It doesn't have a problem that Canada and the United States both have of a huge rural population. But still our cities aren't doing that well. Right. And that, you know, we have"
},
{
"end_time": 5928.541,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5899.019,
"text": " We have somehow failed. We have the weird situation that we panic enough to do some things like close the borders, you know, close all restaurants, close this, but we don't seem to be panic enough to say, okay, this is a fucking public health emergency. We're calling out the national guard. We're putting people or just put them at every damn Walgreens and CVS or"
},
{
"end_time": 5944.923,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5929.138,
"text": " There's a hundred ways you can roll out a vaccine. Way more effectively, but instead it's sort of like, oh, yeah, each state will decide and if a state does a good job, well, that's good. If they do a bad job, well, those people are a little fucked."
},
{
"end_time": 5969.445,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5945.384,
"text": " Okay, I don't want to keep talking about COVID. I wanted to ask you some physics questions, but I don't get to speak to someone who studies infectious diseases much, and I haven't been keeping up with the COVID news. And I hear that some people say COVID isn't much more dangerous than the flu. So first of all, I want to know, what do you say to that? And then second, what is the deal with this new strain? Is it more viral? Is it more potent in some way?"
},
{
"end_time": 5998.336,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5972.227,
"text": " Well, in both cases, the world doesn't know that much, but here's the deal. We have a very strange situation in our lives in general where we get used to old risks and we worry endlessly about new risks. So yeah, influenza killed, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 6027.176,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5998.848,
"text": " hundreds of millions of people in 1918. Since 1918, every year, it's killed a shitload of people. Now, why are we okay with that? Well, we're okay with that because we tried as hard as we could to make vaccines. We did come up with a vaccine that usually in most years sort of kind of helps."
},
{
"end_time": 6057.449,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 6028.865,
"text": " But it's also true that the number of people who have died in the annual flu epidemic from, say, 1918 to today, 100 years worth, that's about the same as dying in 1918. Now, you have a new thing like COVID. And COVID, I should say in 1918, it had a very weird pattern of mortality."
},
{
"end_time": 6084.991,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 6058.217,
"text": " So it was terrible on 18 to 24 year old men. And yet it was very few fatalities and little infectiousness in people I think at over the age of 65 or 60 something like that. And it's believed the reason why is that there was another flu epidemic not as severe"
},
{
"end_time": 6114.77,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 6086.271,
"text": " that was like 50 years earlier. And so the people who got that influenza were pretty much spared the new one. Interesting. Anyway, even if it's quote, only as bad as it's a few percent death risk for many parts of the population, but I'll just take me I'm"
},
{
"end_time": 6143.712,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 6115.213,
"text": " I'm 61, so I'm over 60. I've had some respiratory infections in the past. I like that difficult number theory problem you just said. I'm 61, so I'm over 60. Yeah. It's one of those go back conjecture problems. Well, but that's one of the thresholds. I'm not over 65 where it gets even worse, but I also had a bunch of sinus infections chronically. I'm arguably high risk."
},
{
"end_time": 6174.633,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 6145.043,
"text": " And then, Oh, besides it killing you, it can also put you in a, in a permanent brain fog. There's a whole bunch of evidence for that. It can take away your sense of taste. Now that would fuck up my cookbook career if I couldn't taste anything. Yeah, for sure. So it, and it, it will kill lots and lots of people. And it is a, because it's a new thing."
},
{
"end_time": 6203.848,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 6176.51,
"text": " We arguably should do everything we can within reason to stop it. And say, oh, it's just as bad as the other stuff. It's like, well, yeah, but you don't want to multiply that by something. I mean, car deaths are horrendous in the United States and in Canada and all over the world. There are many more people killed"
},
{
"end_time": 6234.48,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 6204.718,
"text": " by cars in the United States than there are by people. It's like twice the murder rate. And our murder rate is way too high for a developed country. It's a shame. It should be much lower. Well, if you introduce a new thing as an open justice, it's only as bad as cars. Well, cars all over again takes a large mortality factor and doubles down"
},
{
"end_time": 6263.37,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 6234.667,
"text": " You don't want to do that. And is it only as bad as the flu or is it more viral? Is it more spreadable? Well, it turns out people don't really know both sides of that equation. We certainly know that it is got the mortality in some age groups appears to be way worse than we would"
},
{
"end_time": 6293.746,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 6264.053,
"text": " than you'd say for a typical annual flu, that it's more like the epidemic flu of 1918. But then somebody else says, but oh, do we really know how many people have had it? And the answer is we don't. So there are people who are living in close proximity with others who had it, who didn't seem to get it."
},
{
"end_time": 6324.77,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 6295.674,
"text": " Now, did those people get it and repel it and beat it? Did they have some pre-existing immunity? There's a thought that there are two coronaviruses that are implicated in the common cold. Maybe if you had a cold last year and it was one of those coronaviruses, maybe you're immune to it. We don't know."
},
{
"end_time": 6354.906,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 6325.452,
"text": " It was weird in the 1918 flu that it mostly killed young adults. This one is weird in that it doesn't seem to kill young children. It can kill young children. It's not zero. But the mortality rate is way, way lower. Now that's A, it's a little surprising because"
},
{
"end_time": 6384.906,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 6355.367,
"text": " very small children don't have a developed immune system. Number one. Number two, it's just usually it's a new disease hits the very old and the very young and it's the people in the middle that are okay. This one's not like that. It's the very old and the middle part of the stack and older that"
},
{
"end_time": 6415.435,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 6385.52,
"text": " that seem to be most at risk. But a lot of this we don't know because it would require a level of research that either is difficult to do or hasn't been done yet. Now with regard to the new strain. Yeah, well the new strain appears to be this is kind of the same thing. It's"
},
{
"end_time": 6440.589,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 6415.896,
"text": " Viruses are messy when they replicate. You almost always see some replication errors. And that allows, for example, the conclusion that the Seattle epidemic started with people from China, whereas the New York epidemic started with people from Europe."
},
{
"end_time": 6469.343,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 6441.152,
"text": " That conclusion is precisely because the strains are always mutating a little bit. And the first New York strains were more similar to the Western European ones than to the Chinese ones. Are you okay? Do you have one of them? Every year I get this allergic cough, but it does have everyone around me thinking, oh my God, this is it."
},
{
"end_time": 6499.582,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6470.06,
"text": " He's in the final death. You're causing fear to all your loved ones. Anyway, this strain has been or some strain that appears to have popped up from nowhere in the UK and also in South Africa and it's been found all over the world now. It's definitely a new strain."
},
{
"end_time": 6529.258,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6500.247,
"text": " By itself, that's not a big surprise. It might be more infectious or more transmissible. That does occur with viruses. We don't know right now? I don't think there is enough. There's only people that have said yes and people who have said no. And out of an abundance of caution, we have to act like, oh, it's"
},
{
"end_time": 6557.568,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6529.48,
"text": " It's yes. At the same time, it's probably already everywhere. So locking the doors probably doesn't do that much. What it really ought to do is make you want to get the vaccine out there. Right. Wait, I'm sorry. And this vaccine would also prevent a new strain from infecting you? Well, we don't actually know that either. See, here's one of the problems. In physics, we"
},
{
"end_time": 6586.493,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6558.063,
"text": " are able to use abstractions to say, here's a very general theory and we can calculate it in a very simplified situation, but it also works in a more complicated one. So for example, we say conservation of mass, conservation of momentum, conservation of energy. Well, you can use those principles"
},
{
"end_time": 6616.613,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6587.585,
"text": " in lots of very otherwise complicated circumstances. The problem here is the effect that a vaccine has, we know in theory what a vaccine does, is it stimulates your immune system to be in the lookout for this pathogen. And that allows your immune system to mount a response and overwhelm the pathogen vastly sooner than it would otherwise."
},
{
"end_time": 6648.063,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6618.2,
"text": " But we don't know exactly whether this is going to work with the others because we haven't tested it. Now, this is one where if they have enough vaccination going on and enough transmission of this new strain, they'll be able to figure this one out relatively quickly. And my bet would be it does."
},
{
"end_time": 6673.285,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6649.633,
"text": " But it's a bat. And, you know, in the case of flu, flu famously mutates enough that every year we need a different vaccine. Now, because that's true for flu, you get this whole bunch of silly things, statements by scientists where"
},
{
"end_time": 6701.92,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6674.07,
"text": " You know, early in the epidemic, we'll say, oh, we'll all go away in the summer because it's a seasonal thing just like flu. And people would say, scientists would say this to me, what do you want, drugs? There's no evidence of that. You're hoping it's true. Oh, but most respiratory viruses are. What do you mean by most? Once you subtract out flu, we really don't know"
},
{
"end_time": 6734.036,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6704.838,
"text": " Well, common colds do propagate during the summer. And in fact, there's a fascinating thing that no one knows why we seem to associate colds more with the winter. I see. Okay. Also, even though flu is seasonal, no one knows why. Cold is not seasonal then. Or is it only somewhat seasonal? I don't believe that the common cold is not entirely seasonal."
},
{
"end_time": 6762.841,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6734.565,
"text": " annual epidemic of influenza is strongly seasonal. So if you take 50 years of data between France and the United States, this is what I happen to know the statistics, the day on which the peak epidemic occurs as recorded by say number of hospital admissions or pick your metric, it's only a few days different."
},
{
"end_time": 6788.865,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6763.268,
"text": " every year in France and the United States. Now, that means it's got to have some very powerful synchronizing feature. Well, so obviously we figured that out, right? We haven't. There's multiple theories. The theories, of course, contradict each other, and the theories also, frankly, contradict common sense mostly."
},
{
"end_time": 6817.602,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6790.623,
"text": " As far as I know, one of the theories is that in the cold, we congregate more such as in buses. So what about that? In the common cold, there's that. And that's certainly one of the great questions. That is part of what Rudyard Kipling would call a just-so story. He had these just-so stories of how the leopard got its spots and there's sort of little fables for children."
},
{
"end_time": 6844.292,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6818.183,
"text": " Yes, it's true that we congregate in, we ride the bus more, whereas we might walk or ride bicycles. Right. Is that why though? Excuse me. What timing, huh? Yeah, exactly. Give me one minute, I'll be right back. Yeah, sure, sure, sure."
},
{
"end_time": 6875.247,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6847.09,
"text": " You know, the number of things we don't know is frighteningly large. But at the moment, I think, look, our best bet is the vaccines. And let's hope that the vaccines do provide protection against this other strain. And one thing that's terrible about having a large epidemic is that"
},
{
"end_time": 6903.592,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6876.578,
"text": " In a very crude way, the size of the epidemic determines the rate of evolution of the virus. Because every time it gets transmitted to a new person, you're running a new evolutionary experiment and you could have new mutations. Hence why you're surprised that there's only one new strain. Well, there isn't one. There's hundreds of strains, but there are little teeny, teeny differences."
},
{
"end_time": 6922.858,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6903.677,
"text": " This is one that seems to be a larger macro difference. Okay. Okay. Let's get back to some of your asteroid research. I remember you said that in, I believe it was NASA's data, they analyzed some of the asteroids as circular, I mean, sorry, spherical when they're oblong, when they're elongated."
},
{
"end_time": 6953.285,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6924.36,
"text": " Please let me know if you recall what I'm saying. But to me, and to virtually anyone listening, that seems like an obvious mistake. So why would these experts model them spherically just because it's easier? Well, it's true that the model that they used is a model which assumes that the asteroid is a sphere. Now, if you have enough measurements of it,"
},
{
"end_time": 6983.404,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6954.053,
"text": " you can show that that's okay, it'll compensate. They typically didn't have enough measurements of it. But the using a spherical model is not the worst thing they did. They also just made data up and just cheated. Yeah. When you say they made data up, they copied data. Is that what you mean when you say they made them up? Yeah. Yeah. So you're supposed to be deriving"
},
{
"end_time": 7009.77,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6984.155,
"text": " the diameter of these asteroids. The way you tell if you did a good job is you have about a hundred asteroids that you know the diameter of from a different method. So you say, right, the way I determine my accuracy is I predicted over here and I can bear it to the known results."
},
{
"end_time": 7039.77,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 7010.503,
"text": " The consequence of that is what? Well, it's deeply unethical, number one. Number two, they did this and then they claimed that they had the most accurate diameters and they criticized everyone else who had done"
},
{
"end_time": 7069.411,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 7040.384,
"text": " other data sets in the past, even though they had no idea of what their accuracy was. And because they took the only cases that where we know the answer and they copied those, you can't now tell what the accuracy of any of their things are. So they built in on a shaky foundation. Yeah, and I think it was just a"
},
{
"end_time": 7099.224,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 7070.265,
"text": " rush to try to get their project done and also to make their project look like it was a success. And we're talking about NASA here? We're talking about JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So it's a laboratory managed by Caltech, but it's effectively part of NASA. And some of the scientists who were involved in this weren't at JPL, they were at various universities. So it's the kind of thing that"
},
{
"end_time": 7128.114,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 7099.565,
"text": " If you or I had done as an undergraduate and we'd been found out, we would have been expelled. And, you know, we'd be talking about how our lives took this big turn. We couldn't become physicists. We were expelled for cheating. But because NASA is very influential and gives out lots of money, other scientists really didn't want to"
},
{
"end_time": 7154.292,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 7128.524,
"text": " This is interesting. This brings me to a larger, a thought occurs to me. How much of"
},
{
"end_time": 7180.367,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 7154.514,
"text": " Let's say problems in science in general, there's a variety, I'm sure, but I'm thinking specifically right now about theoretical physics and string theory, but problems in general are due to the dependence on funding from a certain agency versus someone like you who can be independent and say, well, here's what I think and I can stand up to you. I don't think it's super common. Um, you know, the,"
},
{
"end_time": 7210.128,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 7181.852,
"text": " The string theory is so complicated that generally it's very hard to compute any answer out of it. That's why my friend Peter named his blog after a saying of Wolfgang Paulus, who was a great German physicist. It's not even wrong. So it's wrong would be it makes a prediction."
},
{
"end_time": 7237.91,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 7210.469,
"text": " and it doesn't match the world but in most cases in string theory it's so mathematically difficult to make a actual prediction from it that you're not even at that level okay okay now the ramifications of the asteroids does it have something to do with the threat of asteroids being under determined yes it the threat"
},
{
"end_time": 7268.114,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 7238.336,
"text": " The size of the asteroids is important for two reasons. One is as a part of understanding how the solar system was built. Asteroids are a very critical part of that. Asteroids are a little bit like the junk you see at a construction site. If you go to a construction site where they're building a house, you'll see sawed off pieces of two by four and nails and all this other stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 7297.295,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 7269.07,
"text": " That's a great analogy by the way. This is the material that was left over from building the solar system and it never really got into a planet or another thing and so it's kind of the junk left over but it's super interesting to understand that junk to understand the conditions under which the solar system formed. The other reason is practical that we want to know the threat that asteroids pose"
},
{
"end_time": 7327.585,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 7297.773,
"text": " They were kind of tough on the dinosaurs. Right, right. We now know. And you were there at one of the first lectures where that was proposed. Yes. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it was. That was a great example of a theory coming from outside a field. It first sounded totally outlandish, but in fact has stood the test of time. So"
},
{
"end_time": 7352.739,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 7327.79,
"text": " There are a few people who still say there were other factors that were important or even critical with the dinosaurs. But the idea that mass extinctions could be caused by an impact has now been traced to lots of other mass extinctions, not just that one. Going back to the threat."
},
{
"end_time": 7383.712,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 7354.48,
"text": " Yeah, so it's very important to know for the threat particularly because the way Some of these this asteroid work is funded is by telling Congress. Oh, this is important for the threat Yes, you tell Congress look this isn't just a bunch of scientists having fun with the originally Solar system no this might tell you What thing is gonna plunk down in the middle of Kansas next week?"
},
{
"end_time": 7414.735,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 7385.589,
"text": " And so we really need to know it. Yep. And it's compelling argument. So they have an incentive to overplay the threat of asteroids or did you find in your research that we're actually underplaying it? Well, it's they're using that threat as a way to ask for more funding. And I say you shouldn't give those people more funding until they learn math or ethics and ethics."
},
{
"end_time": 7443.046,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 7415.503,
"text": " Uh, so, um, and that goes for both. No, there's lots of other people at JPL that are great. There's not everyone at JPL, but there's one group of JPL. There's one person, one professor at, uh, UCLA, uh, that really screwed up. Um, uh, and had a giant amount of arrogance about that screw up and so didn't admit it and has fought it tooth and nail."
},
{
"end_time": 7470.93,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 7443.643,
"text": " Has it fought you? I recall that they put out an article. Oh yeah, they did a smear campaign on me trying to attack me. It's been very hard for me. I have published several papers, including one over a hundred pages, but it's been much more difficult for me to do that because I'm the guy who's saying that"
},
{
"end_time": 7496.118,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 7471.459,
"text": " Are you driven by ethics or were you always disagreeable and you'll point out what's wrong when you see it?"
},
{
"end_time": 7529.036,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 7502.381,
"text": " I certainly noticed that they had done some things very seriously wrong. And initially it wasn't this copying. Initially what I noticed is that they didn't understand freshman physics. Even the professor didn't understand freshman physics? Yep. There's something called Kirchhoff's law of radiation."
},
{
"end_time": 7555.93,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7530.009,
"text": " When you say they didn't understand it, do you mean to say that they didn't incorporate it? Their approach to modeling totally violates it."
},
{
"end_time": 7562.961,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7557.09,
"text": " They tried to apply a method which violates physical law. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 7589.974,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7563.865,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 7608.951,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7589.974,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the"
},
{
"end_time": 7634.787,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7608.951,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story?"
},
{
"end_time": 7664.394,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7634.787,
"text": " Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories. Which that's a bad thing to do. Now it's a bad thing to do that most people would generally ascribe to ignorance or maybe ignorance backed up with arrogance."
},
{
"end_time": 7694.292,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7665.043,
"text": " not ethics. It was after you, I found the ethical things that in some sense made it even worse. And the ethical things you're talking about, the copying of data. Okay. Unethical things. The science exists because we trust it and we can only trust it if we're vigilant to it. And"
},
{
"end_time": 7722.927,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7695.128,
"text": " You could get lots of scientists to say, oh, yes, that's true. But the ones in general, they don't apply that uniformly. In this case, the professor at UCLA is kind of a loudmouth jerk who likes to one-up people and has a reputation for being really smart, which is weird because in all of his interactions with me, nothing he says makes any sense at all."
},
{
"end_time": 7752.944,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7723.336,
"text": " This brings me to a larger problem that you mentioned with regard to COVID and now NASA and a general cultural movement to distrust mainstream science."
},
{
"end_time": 7760.23,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7754.036,
"text": " Well, here's what's interesting is that there's seems to me from outside, let's say I'm investigating an issue like global warming."
},
{
"end_time": 7786.852,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7760.725,
"text": " Obviously some people say it exists, some people say it doesn't exist, and you seem to know the answer to that because you've investigated it. But to me from the outside, okay, how does one go about researching a contentious issue when it seems like there are incentive structures on each side to either say that global warming exists or doesn't exist, or whatever the issue, whether it's global warming or not? Given that, as you mentioned, sometimes these large institutions all agree on a single"
},
{
"end_time": 7816.613,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7786.852,
"text": " I don't have a good answer for you. You know, we have this situation that for a variety of reasons, there are folks that don't want to take the vaccine because they don't trust some element of"
},
{
"end_time": 7846.493,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7816.886,
"text": " this whole thing. They either say, I don't trust big drug companies, or I don't trust that we develop this under record time. Why don't they go back and do it more slowly? You don't fuck people are dying. That's why. It turns out that the argument that they ought to be made to them is very straightforward, which is current course of speed, you will get COVID."
},
{
"end_time": 7867.705,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7847.346,
"text": " Every one of us will. I'm not referring to COVID in specific. Well, here's the deal. Every one of us will get it. And for almost every one of us, but probably every one of us, getting COVID has a higher risk threshold than the worst vaccine anyone ever made in history."
},
{
"end_time": 7897.022,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7870.009,
"text": " So these vaccines actually seem like they're the best vaccines anyone made in history as it turns out just out by accident. But even if it was the worst, give it a break. This is like people driving to the airport who are afraid about a plane crash because a plane they're going to get on. But them driving to the airport is vastly more dangerous. I see. Okay. Now how you get people to internalize those things and believe them"
},
{
"end_time": 7924.514,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7897.466,
"text": " I don't know. It certainly doesn't help that COVID has been politicized. And I mean that with both capital P politics, you know, as those with the Trump administration or the this or that, but I also mean small p politics like, oh, let's say it's okay to golf, but not to go fishing."
},
{
"end_time": 7954.667,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7924.906,
"text": " You know, these golf courses are going to be really mad at us. And so you have a situation where people, also the scientists, have been groping their way. Now, the fact that they've changed their minds ought to make them more believable. If you say, yup, I had my mind made up and nothing I can see will ever change my mind,"
},
{
"end_time": 7985.435,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7955.435,
"text": " should not trust that man because you need to have someone who's constantly weighing evidence and new evidence of new things can change your mind but we've had the unfortunate situation that there are a lot of people who um who don't believe and and will refuse the vaccine now the rude thing to say is that's just evolution in action those people will suffer"
},
{
"end_time": 8012.995,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7985.776,
"text": " a higher rate of consequences from COVID than from the vaccine. And to a certain percentage, we can tolerate that in society. I say a certain percentage because of that herd immunity thing, because you don't have to get to every last person. However,"
},
{
"end_time": 8043.217,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 8013.558,
"text": " I think when it comes to stuff like the anti-vaxxers that don't want their children immunized, it is a real danger to other kids in the school and to below school age children of families that have someone, a kid in the school and so on and so forth, to have those kids not be vaccinated. And it's really bad for them."
},
{
"end_time": 8073.114,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 8044.974,
"text": " So on one hand, in a free society, you want to allow people to have a certain set of freedoms. On the other hand, you don't typically allow those freedoms to allow a parent to kill a child, for example. That comes up in the cases where, for example, they're refusing a medical procedure for religious grounds."
},
{
"end_time": 8100.162,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 8073.848,
"text": " The United States, Canada, as far as I know, Europe, they say no, at a certain point the state will intervene and they will try to say the kids get saved because we do protect children even if their parents aren't, just like we take children away from people who are bad parents. So what do you do with people who are"
},
{
"end_time": 8127.671,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 8100.691,
"text": " passionately convinced about something that is demonstrably wrong. Well, when that demonstrably wrong thing has concept, if it's a religious matter, I say, leave it alone. People can have different ideas about religion. They can each say, well, my God is right and that other guy's is wrong about his God. Let him."
},
{
"end_time": 8153.183,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 8129.121,
"text": " But when it comes to things like not taking a vaccine, there will be a period this spring where people start needing to go back to work and will have enough people vaccinated. And I think it's very reasonable to say you shouldn't go back to work if you're not vaccinated or have proof that you had COVID."
},
{
"end_time": 8183.268,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 8155.418,
"text": " Let me restate the question a bit more clearly. Some of the many of the audience members, almost all of them, I think are extremely, extremely intelligent people. So for them,"
},
{
"end_time": 8213.097,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 8183.695,
"text": " They're listening. Forget about COVID. Forget about COVID. Like you mentioned, you're also extremely, extremely, extremely bright. And probably if you didn't look into the research on asteroids, you would have, maybe you would have accepted what NASA has said. Maybe you wouldn't have regardless. How do you sort out? I was going to say signal from the noise, but it's almost like signal from anti-signal or from contrived signal. When you like, what do you do as a, as an intelligent person? Do you just have to dive into the field? Do you just have to trust it?"
},
{
"end_time": 8241.51,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 8213.592,
"text": " Because you can't just doubt everything, you have to live your life. Okay, but living in a society is something that involves a lot of trust. Right? So to live in a civil society, you have to have a certain degree of trust that everyone else is going to live up to their obligations, more or less. And you know that if they don't, you have some recourse, you can"
},
{
"end_time": 8270.128,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 8241.954,
"text": " Call the police so you can complain in some fashion. But you have to trust, in the case of physics, you have to trust what generations of physicists have produced. And that the scientific method and the people looking at things and re-looking at things and being critical of them, including publishing my paper saying other stuff is shit,"
},
{
"end_time": 8295.776,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 8270.947,
"text": " that that process will get us to the right answer most of the time. And I think most of the time it does. You know, there certainly are examples of fields that are particularly politicized fields that I think it is much more difficult. You know, certainly"
},
{
"end_time": 8324.94,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 8296.442,
"text": " Global warming has gotten that way. It is a politicized field in that lots of politicians or people on the street will have very strong opinions that have nothing to do with actual science. They will have to do with, you know, the consequences on that on their industry or their ideology or some other set"
},
{
"end_time": 8355.452,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 8325.811,
"text": " of stuff. That makes it more difficult. You find the same thing is true with nutrition. You know, nutritional science has unfortunately failed us broadly. It went on a jihad against fat, we should get rid of fat, we should have everything be low fat. And during the decades that we went on the low fat"
},
{
"end_time": 8385.265,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 8356.032,
"text": " approach. Yeah, the obesity rate has gone up the rate of ingestion of I mean, all the bad things they said we go down have gone up. Right, right. And in that case, it's probably based on just some fundamental bad work in the 1950s and 60s that got propagated. And"
},
{
"end_time": 8415.538,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 8385.657,
"text": " The fact that there are people who make their money either as commercial food sellers or sellers of junk foods and so forth, or people who are health food advocates on the other side, helps to politicize with a small p this issue. We have this huge movement against gluten."
},
{
"end_time": 8446.425,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 8416.51,
"text": " There is no good science in support of it. There are people who shouldn't eat gluten because they have a very specific thing, but the overwhelming majority don't. Well, the trend has become, oh, read a couple of websites and then self-diagnose that you need this. And then"
},
{
"end_time": 8465.435,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 8447.295,
"text": " One of the beautiful aspects of your book, Modernist Cuisine, when I first read it, and by the way, I think I went to the U of T library the first day that it ordered it because I was so excited to read it, but it was a huge book and I couldn't afford it at the time."
},
{
"end_time": 8493.302,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 8465.981,
"text": " was in the first chapter, I believe you dispel some of the myths, some extremely ingrained myths. So for example, with butter versus margarine, and I didn't know that at the time, okay, that butter is much healthier for you. It seems to be something that we all seem to take for granted now, but for 50 years or so, that wasn't the case. Yeah. Also, I think you mentioned that bacon has oleic acid is oleic acid or oleic acid compared to all much at a higher percentage. This funny thing where"
},
{
"end_time": 8522.363,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 8494.633,
"text": " It got to be trendy for people to say that there were protective features in olive oil based on very skimpy amounts of studies. A huge problem with nutritional epidemiology is that it's extremely difficult and expensive to do the kind of study you need to do where you study people and outcomes over a 20 or 25 year period."
},
{
"end_time": 8549.565,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 8523.899,
"text": " So instead people would fixate on a proxy measurement. So they said, Oh, cholesterol is bad for you. So we'll measure cholesterol. If your cholesterol goes up, then we know that's bad for you. Well, then it later turns out, well, actually there's good cholesterol and there's bad cholesterol. And then it turns out, oops, dietary cholesterol probably has no factor at all."
},
{
"end_time": 8581.135,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8551.937,
"text": " Just for the people listening, that means you can ingest cholesterol such as in eggs and it doesn't raise your blood cholesterol. Well, in particular, there are the the kind of cholesterol that you would worry about in a cardiac situation is manufactured by your body. And so the dietary thing isn't really a factor. I see. I see. I see. That is such an"
},
{
"end_time": 8607.978,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8581.51,
"text": " And of course, when these things came out, did people come and say, oh, you know something? We were wrong. We fucked up. We were wrong. We're sorry. Oop. Most of this, so most people still think cholesterol is bad for you when your cholesterol counts. They kind of know there's a good and a bad kind now, but"
},
{
"end_time": 8638.592,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8609.582,
"text": " The butter thing you mentioned, in one of the few really long-term, really good studies, something called the nurses study, over 25 years, they boarded that now, they followed the health of 25,000 nurses. They found that the people who ate margarine had double the cardiac problem rate and death rate of people who ate butter, which means there's a whole lot of health food advocates."
},
{
"end_time": 8669.445,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8639.445,
"text": " killed people. Straight up, they went out there recommending margarine. Margarine, it turns out, margarine at the time was, was what we now call a trans fat. But they had it so in their heads that saturated fats were bad. And this was a polyunsaturated fat, so it must be better. And that little surmise"
},
{
"end_time": 8696.237,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8670.333,
"text": " was dead wrong. In fact, trans fats actually are bad. Literally dead wrong, right? Literally dead wrong and literally killed lots of people. And so when you have situations like that or some of the other absurd things to come bring it back to go fit, you know, the people taking your temperature, that was an absurd thing."
},
{
"end_time": 8727.159,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8698.183,
"text": " Telling people who have a fever to stay inside makes tons of sense. Yep. What's absurd about taking someone's temperature as you enter the door? Well, for likelihood, there's a set of things that you often find in this sort of situation that I call purification rituals. So lots of religions"
},
{
"end_time": 8755.145,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8727.637,
"text": " have a thing on purification, that stuff gets to be dirty in God's eyes somehow, and then you have to purify it with a ritual. And there's a controversial theory by an anthropologist named Robert Sapolsky that says the reason religions all have purification rituals"
},
{
"end_time": 8780.606,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8755.708,
"text": " is that eventually they get a priest who has OCD. And that priest's OCD winds up being manifest in them writing lots of purification rituals. I don't know if that's really true. Right. I'm going to be talking to Robert at some point. I have some issues with that, but we can talk about that after."
},
{
"end_time": 8812.995,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8782.995,
"text": " The idea that you"
},
{
"end_time": 8842.005,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8813.2,
"text": " that it caused versus the cost benefit, basically. How much harm did it cause or how much benefit? So like at our company said, Bullshit, we're not going to have some poor employee who has to go up and down a line and do this and expose themselves. They're the ones that'll get it. Why should we do that?"
},
{
"end_time": 8872.022,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8842.739,
"text": " You know, another thing is they said, Oh, you have to have everyone enter in the same entrance so that you can, you know, count them all. And you would know exactly how many people are in the building. Why? Well, what if we have to contact Trace? And I said, well, we'll ask the people. I mean, it turns out at my company, and I think almost every company,"
},
{
"end_time": 8902.278,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8872.449,
"text": " You don't act every minute of the day like you can't trust the people there to do even the simplest thing. You know, if in fact they came into the office on a particular day, well, you'd know that regardless of which entrance they came into, because the card key system doesn't. So you can email everyone who was in the building. So if there was a contagion event, you can email them. Then you can ask them, hey,"
},
{
"end_time": 8931.186,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8902.824,
"text": " Were you near George that day? Because it turns out George came down with COVID. But there's always this, oh, let's lock everything down. And it would be a difficult calculation to do. But if you said, OK, what is really better, picking some set of people to be the poor person at the door with the"
},
{
"end_time": 8960.503,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8932.705,
"text": " with the temperature gun. And how many people did you really turn away? And therefore, if you know how to turn away, what did this really do for the epidemic overall? Now, in a perfect world, I don't doubt you should stop those people from coming in. And in Japan, when you go into customs,"
},
{
"end_time": 8989.906,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8960.879,
"text": " Man, they have all of these signs and monitors up, and it's zeroing in and automatically taking your temperature for everybody in the room. And okay, that makes some sense. If you found somebody coming in with a horrible fever, you could then decide to do something, quarantine them for a little bit. But of course, what are you going to do with all the people that happen to be standing next to them or were on the flight with them or were whatever?"
},
{
"end_time": 9012.073,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8990.145,
"text": " Even then, I don't think the Japanese have fully thought it through. Because if that person really is the start of a terrible epidemic, whenever you detected a fever, you'd have to stop everything."
},
{
"end_time": 9041.886,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 9013.012,
"text": " When I first heard about you, I remember you were talking about as could have been a Freakonomics, you were talking about a way of solving global warming with geoengineering. And I remember being intrigued because you said it requires something like a few million dollars or maybe a few billion, but that's still relatively low. And you raise some balloons and you have a tube that emits sulfur dioxide, I believe. Okay, that sounds like a"
},
{
"end_time": 9071.613,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 9043.183,
"text": " extremely inventive and simple idea. Why don't I hear much talk about geo engineering solutions to the problem of global warming? What are the problems with them in general? Oh, let me explain where I'm coming from. Because I see that we should get to zero emissions in carbon. But then even if the carbon that's in our atmosphere stays there, that's still going to cause a certain amount of problems over time. Which means that"
},
{
"end_time": 9100.862,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 9072.892,
"text": " Something else needs to be done anyway. Of course. Of course, it's. Is it political? Like what's going on? It's political. It's well, first of all, it's political within the scientific community. The scientific community itself has become very polarized that the people who study global warming got very"
},
{
"end_time": 9130.708,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 9101.817,
"text": " They kept saying, oh, this is a problem. Why, look here, thinking, wow, here's the thing. If I show you this evidence, society will immediately start listening to us. And no matter what they showed, society didn't listen to them. Well, that's caused a thing where there are lots of scientists in the field"
},
{
"end_time": 9161.186,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 9131.425,
"text": " who are very leery about publishing anything or doing any research on global warming, because their fear, their friends will chastise it as being some form of accommodation to the other side. Okay, and when do you say other side? Stupid. Stupid and it's counterproductive. Well, then there's a lot of global warming activists"
},
{
"end_time": 9191.442,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 9161.732,
"text": " And they think that the global warming problem is very much like a children's book that I read as a little kid. It's called The Little Engine That Could. There's this little steam engine, and it needs to take this stuff over the mountain, and all the big engines are scared to do it. And the little engine says, I'll try."
},
{
"end_time": 9220.862,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 9192.159,
"text": " And then it says, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Well, a lot of people in the global warming world are like that. They think, look, we know exactly what to do. We have the technology. It's easy. We're just a bunch of, you know, fat fucks that are addicted to our SUVs and"
},
{
"end_time": 9250.384,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 9221.237,
"text": " is as soon as we just all do the right thing, this problem will be solved. And then if you come up with global warming, then those very people will then say to you, shut up. We're trying to convince society. We're trying to kill society. I think we can. I think we can. We're trying to be positive here."
},
{
"end_time": 9277.483,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 9251.254,
"text": " And the minute you say you have a different solution, it lets the air out of the balloon. We need to threaten these people that there's no other way to save Earth, otherwise they won't listen to us. So then I say in response, I say, okay, show me how much progress we've made. Well, we have made any progress."
},
{
"end_time": 9306.817,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 9278.985,
"text": " Well, okay, suppose we did the full Paris Accords. Well, everyone knows that is bullshit. And of course, then I did the calculations for myself. If there was no more emission tomorrow, we stopped it, which there's no way we can do. Right, right, right. But the temperature would continue to rise for about 100 years."
},
{
"end_time": 9334.718,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 9308.985,
"text": " Then it would start to slowly decrease, and depending on which model, in 145 years, the temperature would be less than it is today. So now I ask you, is global warming a serious problem or not? And it's very funny to me because if you"
},
{
"end_time": 9365.862,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 9336.578,
"text": " If you talk to people who deny the existence of global warming, there's a set of people that say, listen to the science. But then if you say, OK, tell me a credible plan for actually getting to zero emissions and not having a disaster according to you. Well, they can't. But they also don't want you to let that cat out of the bag."
},
{
"end_time": 9394.889,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 9366.613,
"text": " Hey, shut up. We'll get some level of compliance now, and then we'll get a little more in the future. And if we told people the truth, the ones that are honest will say if we told people the truth, they would be too afraid. Well, that's bullshit. And lying to people just doesn't help the situation. That's why no one has believed this."
},
{
"end_time": 9421.869,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 9397.005,
"text": " So anyway, so to those people, I say, well, listen to the science. Because the science is actually very, very clear that we don't have any natural way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere quickly. And the science is very clear that at any point in time, we have another 100 years of warming that's already baked in the cake."
},
{
"end_time": 9453.729,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 9424.292,
"text": " So if you think that 100 years of warming... And sorry, that 100 years, how much of an increment is it? A couple degrees. And that's significant. No one knows for sure because different models will say different things, but you'll get people to say, we can't possibly allow another one more degree C. What is going to happen regardless? Three degrees C no matter what. Yes, yes, yes. Number one. And number two, if you think it's bad,"
},
{
"end_time": 9466.903,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 9454.019,
"text": " If your proposition is that 3 degrees C will unleash hell on earth, well, let's start working on it because it's coming no matter what we do."
},
{
"end_time": 9495.947,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 9467.5,
"text": " Okay, so this seems to me like people who are on the side that say, well, let's just get to zero emissions, and that should solve it, that they don't actually care about the saving of the earth, because if they did, they would pursue some of the geoengineering solutions as well. So what is it that they care about? Do they just dislike capitalism? They dislike the fact that we in the West... Okay. There's definitely people like that. And then there's definitely people who are not like that. You know, to people who are true environmentalists or conservationists,"
},
{
"end_time": 9525.555,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 9497.398,
"text": " The people who are the ones that are most against it, I think are the ones that view this mostly as a political struggle, and as something of a struggle of capitalism versus something, they don't really propose an alternative. But"
},
{
"end_time": 9555.606,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 9525.896,
"text": " For those people, they would say, hey, you capitalist greedy bastards sinned against the environment. This is your fire and brimstone just cause. And don't go telling people you can make it better. I'm trying to make it better with my inventions. But then I say, look, are you saying it's going to destroy the environment? Well, why don't we try not to destroy it? What do you say to that?"
},
{
"end_time": 9584.053,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 9556.578,
"text": " Oh, it's going to kill millions of people. How about this? Let's try not to kill millions of people. Why is that not a good idea? We don't know how bad global warming will be. We have a bunch of models. The models predict different amounts of temperature increase in different timescales. At some point, it'll be very bad. We don't know exactly which point."
},
{
"end_time": 9611.732,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 9584.701,
"text": " And we also don't know exactly which point that temperature will occur. So if people say, I don't want to start doing geoengineering today, I say, fine, don't start it today, but let's research the hell out of it. Nathan, what in your eyes are the most efficacious geoengineering prospects? Well, currently, the one I like best is something that"
},
{
"end_time": 9641.493,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9612.056,
"text": " goes into the rubric of solar radiation management. This means you reflect a tiny amount of light from the sun way in the upper atmosphere, way less light than, I mean, you could never visually determine. It's imperceptible, but it would be enough to stop global warming. And it would be sulfur dioxide or some other method. Well, then you can get in, then you go down into the weeds of a hundred different engineering trade-offs."
},
{
"end_time": 9667.961,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9642.278,
"text": " And people should study all those different trade-offs. Sulfur dioxide has the advantage that we know it works because volcanoes do it. And we know that although sulfur dioxide is not something we want enormous amounts of in our world, we know that we're tolerant. The environment is currently tolerant of quite a bit that comes from volcanoes."
},
{
"end_time": 9698.865,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9669.275,
"text": " And the extra amount we would need is a very small fraction above what's coming from volcanoes. So there's a plausible argument that it's the safest. There's lots of people who immediately try as hard as they can to see a problem with that. And hey, fair enough. They should do that research and publish those papers. But other people should also be saying, let's try to figure out how to make this work."
},
{
"end_time": 9706.015,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9701.357,
"text": " Because current, course, and speed, we're not doing shit for the problem."
},
{
"end_time": 9737.637,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9709.309,
"text": " Nathan, thank you so much for being extremely generous with your time. Please, hopefully you recover from your COVID. I wrote down that other, because they're classically trained chefs like Gordon Ramsay and so on. I watch plenty of his shows and he says that the most important aspect of any recipe is the ingredients being fresh. I always wondered, is that true? Or is there something else? Like, can you take on fresh ingredients from Walmart, let's say, and create a wonderful meal with some of your technologies? Tell me your position on cheese."
},
{
"end_time": 9767.807,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9739.07,
"text": " Exactly. Yeah, right. Cheese is very old milk. Wine. Well, that's kind of old spoiled grape. You know, aged beef. So I agree with him that you want high quality ingredients. High quality does not mean necessarily mean that it's all got to be"
},
{
"end_time": 9796.869,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9768.148,
"text": " absolutely fresh. There's enormous numbers of dishes made with dried pulses or beans or lentils or grains and that stuff is dried and it doesn't have to be fresh. So there are some foods where the freshness of the ingredients is absolutely paramount. There's other foods where"
},
{
"end_time": 9826.237,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9797.91,
"text": " aging the ingredient is absolutely paramount. And most things are somewhere in the middle. And it's also, you know, the chef who is cooking for other people ought to do the best they can. But not every little restaurant in the middle of the country can get access to"
},
{
"end_time": 9853.268,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9826.544,
"text": " diver caught scallops. And so then you have this dilemma. Does that mean you never serve scallops? And some people would say, yes, they never serve scallops and good for them. But I think it's a little bit elitist to say, oh, no, you can never serve a frozen piece of fish because, you know, the fact is the middle of continents have a very hard time getting fresh ocean fish."
},
{
"end_time": 9884.701,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9854.735,
"text": " They can get it sometimes at huge expense, but is it always required? Thank you. Thank you so much. You got to go. I appreciate your time, man. Thank you. You're one of my idols. Have a great one. No, I mean that, man. I wanted to even ask you, like, how do the pyramids make? Because I feel like you have an answer for everything. And apparently there's a mystery there. No, actually a friend of mine has figured that out. An Egyptologist friend of mine has really figured out how they built the pyramids."
},
{
"end_time": 9909.94,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9884.804,
"text": " There were a panoply of questions that I had written down that I didn't get a chance to bring up during the interview, but I emailed him, so here are two extra questions."
},
{
"end_time": 9939.787,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9911.732,
"text": " One, I wanted to know what is his opinion on the latest news regarding UFOs and even Bob Lazar, who claims to have worked on spacecraft. He said, I think it's arrogant to believe we are the only intelligent beings in the universe. That said, I don't think that the hard evidence for UFOs is currently sufficient to say that UFOs are in fact aliens visiting the planet. The you in the UFOs is unidentified and that remains the case. I don't know about Mr. Lazar's claims, so I can't comment."
},
{
"end_time": 9969.019,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9940.367,
"text": " Okay, the other question I had was about consciousness. Do you think consciousness emerges from a physical basis, that is a physical substrate like the materialists might say, or not? And why? In other words, what's your opinion on the hard problem of consciousness? Nathan says our brains are physical. So yes, I think that consciousness originates in a physical organ. I think that a lot of consciousness discussion goes away with an obsession on human exceptionalism, animal experiments to show that a"
},
{
"end_time": 9990.282,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9969.309,
"text": " Okay, I hope you enjoyed this podcast."
},
{
"end_time": 10007.449,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9990.555,
"text": " if you enjoyed it please consider donating to the patreon supporting this channel because right now i'm pretty much doing it pro bono it takes up almost all of my time and it would be great if i could somehow manage to keep up the level of sophistication detail and quality thank you thank you so much"
}
]
}No transcript available.