In this episode, Pablos Holman joins me to talk about how he got his start in science and technology, and why he thinks he's better than most at solving the world's biggest problems than most people in the world.
00:05:16.480I hope the people in Alaska are not offended by that, you know, because there's a couple of engineers up there that are going to say, wait a minute, we're trying to be the next Silicon Valley.
00:05:24.720People in Alaska are not easily offended, and that's one of the beautiful things about them.
00:05:29.360It's one of our favorite places we go to.
00:05:31.360When I take my family there, my oldest son has got that personality of curiosity.
00:05:35.760He's the quiet guy who worries himself and everybody thinks he's weird a little bit.
00:05:39.200He loves when we took him there, so it is what it is.
00:05:41.920So, you know, we got a lot of problems in the world today.
00:05:47.280You have a TEDx talk, I think, with, I don't know, 25 million views or 23 million views that people want to know this stuff about hacking.
00:05:54.320And today, you know, what the coronavirus did to a lot of people, obviously, a lot of threats came about that we didn't think about before.
00:06:03.200You know, we didn't think about what if all of a sudden we have to shut down.
00:06:07.600I mean, I've been in the States since 1990, and I lived in Iran 10 years prior to that, and a couple years in Germany.
00:06:13.680We're not used to, you cannot go out, you know, social distance, don't go close to people.
00:06:19.120It's some weird times in the last six months, but it's made us think about a lot of different kind of threats that we could face in the future.
00:06:25.680From the world you're in, you know, and what you've experienced, what do you think is the biggest threat we may face in the future?
00:06:33.120I mean, at the lab, we did a lot of work on epidemiology, which is, you know, the spread of disease,
00:06:41.440because we're trying to figure out how to eradicate some of these diseases that are still plaguing us in the world.
00:06:49.120And, you know, we built giant computational models for that.
00:06:54.000So for the first time in human history, it's been, you know, possible for us to create these computer simulations of how a disease spreads.
00:07:03.040And that gives us a superpower, which is that we can now test interventions in software thousands of times before we do it in the real world.
00:07:11.760And that helps us to plot optimized eradication campaigns.
00:07:15.760And that type of technology is unprecedented.
00:07:19.280You know, we've never been able to do that, but one of the things that allowed us to do was also create simulations of pandemics.
00:07:25.920And it's the only thing that scares us.
00:07:29.600Like, I don't worry about, you know, artificial intelligence turning us into gray goo or, you know, I don't worry about nuclear war.
00:07:38.640The pandemics are uniquely advanced because of especially modern air travel, right?
00:07:47.520So, you know, pandemics in the past, something like coronavirus, the way we're experiencing it now, you know, that's something that might have taken over a city over the course of months.
00:08:01.200And it would take a couple more months to get to the next, you know, country or state over, you know, to take a while.
00:08:07.760And so you could sort of get a sense of what was going on.
00:08:12.520We have people flying from everywhere to everywhere every day.
00:08:15.640And so, you know, that's really changed the dynamics.
00:08:19.600And in our simulations, we're able to show that, you know, these pandemics go global almost overnight.
00:08:25.280So we tried to raise the alarm about this five or six years ago.
00:08:33.000I think at that time, one of the things since, you know, Bill Gates funds all that work, we have a group called Institute for Disease Modeling.
00:08:43.480And so he did a TED Talk about pandemics five years ago and showing some of that work and trying to show people how serious this was and how important it would be for us to prepare for that.
00:08:57.800And to try and invest in things like diagnostics, invest in vaccine development, invest in, you know, preparedness response so that we don't do dumb things when there's a pandemic.
00:09:10.440And I think I looked in like February or March and I think that that TED Talk had like five or six million views after five years.
00:09:21.840I mean, we probably should have got a Kardashian to do it instead of Bill, but, you know, this is the kind of thing humans just really don't want to pay any attention to until until it's too late.
00:09:42.440It's probably the single biggest thing that we're unprepared for as humans.
00:09:46.640For the audience that doesn't know, who hasn't read up much on you or hasn't watched many of your videos, can you talk about some of the projects you've worked on?
00:09:54.480Like you've created some wild inventions, you and your team, and you've worked on a lot of different things.
00:10:01.360Well, probably the most, basically what we did is we built a lab to try and invest in invention and really to, you know, find a way to fund inventors and take on developing new technologies that wouldn't get done in, you know, in businesses.
00:10:20.120And you see a lot of what we call technology today is really just iPhone apps and enterprise software.
00:10:42.540And so probably our most famous invention is a machine we invented that can find mosquitoes and shoot them down with laser beams as a malaria intervention.
00:10:51.960And again, you know, we're living with COVID right now, which might take a million lives globally this year.
00:10:59.140Malaria takes almost a million lives every single year and has for our entire lifetime.
00:11:05.900Most of them are kids under five years old.
00:11:09.340You know, coronavirus is impacting us because it finally is a disease that managed to catch rich people in America.
00:11:17.640But the truth is, you know, for most of the sub-Sahara, sub-equatorial countries, you know, they've been living with a lot of infectious disease, you know, for our entire life.
00:11:33.040And what it really means is that we figured out how to solve some of those problems in the West.
00:11:39.780We figured out how to solve those problems for rich people, and then the job wasn't finished.
00:11:44.540We didn't figure out how to go solve that problem for everyone else.
00:11:48.000And so that's why I fixate on disease eradication, because it's the kind of thing where we know the kinds of things we could do to make a dent in the spread of malaria and some of these other diseases.
00:12:06.080But we haven't done a great job of doing it for the whole world.
00:12:10.140And so I think the, you know, the potential in our lab was to try to invent technologies that would help us scale up how we could do it.
00:12:18.980Now, shooting mosquitoes with lasers isn't the solution to malaria.
00:12:24.440But we also invented diagnostics using artificial intelligence that are, you know, way faster, cheaper, more accessible, more scalable, so that in diagnostics are important because if you can test somebody and figure out that they have the disease, maybe we can treat them before it takes their life or before they spread it to other people, you know, that kind of thing.
00:12:47.520And that's a lot of what people are just learning about in America for the first time with COVID, because, you know, we've been lucky not to have to deal with it.
00:12:56.780But we also invented a machine that can suppress hurricanes as a kind of way of ameliorating some of the effects of global warming.
00:13:06.740We invented a new type of nuclear reactor that's powered by nuclear waste that's a modern, safe reactor design, and a lot of people don't even know that's possible.
00:13:19.160And so there's a lot of really cool inventions, intellectual ventures from that, and, you know, those are things that take a long time to commercialize, you know.
00:13:27.800So, you know, when you're inventing, you're a lot of times 10 or 20 years before a product.
00:13:33.460What process do you guys use to solve problems?
00:13:36.820Like, is there a step-by-step process, like standard operating procedures?
00:13:43.620What steps do you guys take to go through it?
00:13:46.360You know, I think there's a good Malcolm Gladwell article about our invention process, but essentially what we would do is start with the biggest problems that we could find.
00:14:09.840But the truth is in Silicon Valley, you know, we're kind of running out of problems.
00:14:14.880You know, the biggest problems, you know, entrepreneurs seem to be able to find is having drones deliver weed to their dorm room or something.
00:14:23.740You know, we're running out of real problems, whereas if you look outside of your world, you can find much bigger problems and bigger opportunities to make a difference.
00:14:32.680So for us, it doesn't make sense to go after little problems.
00:14:37.640So we would start with big ones and we'd take on things like energy or global warming or malaria.
00:14:42.440And then what we do is we get, we have a kind of a stable of maybe 150 prolific inventors from all over the world who, who have real inventive minds and a lot of experience.
00:15:00.440And the truth is a lot of them have an expertise.
00:15:02.300So we'd sit, we'd get maybe half a dozen or a dozen folks in the room.
00:15:10.780You know, it could be a laser expert, a chemist, a physicist from the nuclear team.
00:15:19.640Collectively, we know the cutting edge in every area in science and technology.
00:15:24.860And so we're able to find inventions at the borders.
00:15:27.760And that's really where a lot of the open territory for invention is, is when you can cross pollinate what's happening in machine learning with a new discovery and photonics and start putting those together and come up with solutions.
00:15:45.220We think everybody should do it and it's highly repeatable.
00:15:48.640But unfortunately, there's just not a lot of context where you get to do that.
00:15:53.640And so, so that process worked out pretty well for us.
00:15:58.420We, we file about five or 600 patents a year that way.
00:16:03.060And it was a way to really come up with a lot of, a lot of inventions that, that could make a difference.
00:16:10.200So are, are there any problems you guys sit around together and say, listen, these three problems, no one can solve human, human cannot solve.
00:16:17.600Do you guys think about certain problems that there's no way we can solve?
00:16:20.200Uh, well, we would, I would typically put problems into two separate piles over here.
00:16:27.220You got technical problems that technologies might help with over here.
00:16:32.380You've got problems between people or groups of people.
00:16:37.880So I can't, I don't have any optimism about being able to solve problems with human decision-making.
00:16:43.420They, they seem to be unsolvable to me.
00:16:45.880And I think it's actually, it's important to think that way.
00:16:49.600Like, you know, a lot of the problems that we have are created by humans.
00:16:54.820They're created by humans decisions and by their lifestyles and their, and their patterns and, and, um, and their politics and this kind of stuff.
00:17:04.800And, and so no technology is going to solve that.
00:17:26.880I don't know if we can control a bio or a cyber attack, or I don't know how we can solve it.
00:17:32.100You know, is there anything that for you guys is the impossible?
00:17:35.500You know, there's there, if you take that pile, you can sort of break it down into, uh, problems that require a miracle and problems that do not require a miracle.
00:18:21.500We're still a long ways from having a quantum computer, from understanding how it would work and what we would do with it.
00:18:26.840So we need a miracle or two, um, in that, uh, another big one is cold fusion.
00:18:34.200The way fusion reactors work is they make energy the way the sun makes energy.
00:18:39.000And there's extraordinary power available that's, that would be clean and cheap and free almost, but we've needed a miraculous breakthrough in cold fusion in order to be able to do that here on earth.
00:18:51.840Um, and that's, and that's something that, you know, you can often spot these as, you know, things that are just 20 years from now.
00:18:59.720So if somebody says it's just 20 years from now, that means, well, they're hoping to get a breakthrough in the next 20 years, but the breakthroughs like that don't happen on a schedule.
00:19:07.240Interestingly with fusion, I think we might've just got there.
00:19:12.040By miraculous, by, by miracle or by no miracle required.
00:19:16.160Actually by, um, by figuring out how to take the technologies we have and, and do it with them.
00:19:23.700Um, and so I, for the first time in my life, I, I've been convinced that I think that fusion might be imminent and that would be amazing for us because solving energy is the most important problem ever.
00:19:37.700If you solve energy, you kind of solve every other technical problem for free, not all of them, but a lot of them, you, cause if you have cheap, clean, abundant energy, things like recycling could work.
00:19:49.780Um, you know, things like, uh, cleaning, you know, we could desalinate water, we could make water, you could solve water.
00:19:57.260Um, if you had energy, you could solve sanitation, like a lot of things like that, that were held back by.
00:20:02.860And if you, in a way to think about this is the truth is the reason Americans are rich is because we have access to energy that's reliable and cheap, right?
00:20:13.740That's really the main difference between America and every other country on earth, right?
00:20:18.300Americans on average get about nine times as much energy as the median human on earth, right?
00:20:26.920We, so much more energy is invested in us and that just, that's why we are rich.
00:20:32.820And so, you know, we like to think we're rich cause we're, you know, smart geniuses.
00:24:40.180Well, the closed doors you're talking about, I mean, I presume I wasn't invited.
00:24:47.880But I also think the, you know, people, you just got to look at incentives, like who's incentivized to really work on that problem.
00:24:58.280And the truth is, you know, it's a kind of problem that really doesn't, that's the whole reason we have a government, is to take on problems that are bigger than people can really do individually or that companies could do.
00:25:12.280And so, but unfortunately, you know, we haven't incentivized our governments to take on those problems.
00:25:20.680And again, you're kind of out of my jurisdiction.
00:25:22.860I don't think it's a, I mean, it's not a technical problem in the sense that, you know, we know what to do to prevent those types of fires, right?
00:25:34.760But you have to be proactive about it.
00:25:40.440No, we prevent them from happening in the first place by, and we, by doing, you know, forestry management and the kinds of things that you do to, you have to have some fires is the truth.
00:25:51.740Like, you know, the, these forests were, you know, sort of evolved to get burned occasionally.
00:25:57.580So, you know, you got to do it, but you could do it in a managed way, which is important when you have human lives at stake.
00:26:04.100So I'm making stuff up here, but I think really the right answer is, you know, humans have to look and say, okay, we chose to live in these dangerous zones.
00:26:14.160We tried to make it so there was never a fire.
00:26:19.080So we need to manage it and do it proactively.
00:26:21.380And that's just hasn't been happening in California.
00:26:23.580It's certainly happening in lots of other places where we're doing proper forestry management and things like that.
00:26:28.800It's interesting what you said that you said that the proper incentive needs to be in there for somebody to want to work on it.
00:26:33.620We don't have that right now in place.
00:26:35.060When you say incentive, do you mean incentives for entrepreneurs and innovators to do it or incentives on the government side?
00:26:41.040I mean, you know, it would be really great.
00:26:43.480So for instance, I know inventors who've come up with ways of combating forest fires, you know, rapid response where they can go in and do much better than we can right now, you know, deploying water and things to dampen the spread of fires.
00:26:57.240But there's not really a market for that.
00:28:15.440So plan B is probably also like move away from the coast.
00:28:19.020Plan C or D should be like, well, let's try and reduce the the impact that these hurricanes have and the loss of life and the property damage and everything that comes from that.
00:29:14.840What if the entrepreneur had the business model?
00:29:16.680A guy like yourself who says you can fix it and through government grants of cities and states that are affected by it, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, let's just say Galveston, Louisiana, you know, Florida, that whole area gets hit every year.
00:29:30.120How about if they were to fund it with a program like that for an entrepreneur, an innovator like yourself or an inventor like yourself?
00:29:37.460That would be great, except that humans are only good at doing things they've seen done before.
00:29:43.340So a government especially is like a think of a government is like being a very, very poorly performing human, like the slowest, dumbest guy, you know, that's a government.
00:30:05.080And even if it's very simple and the reason I use like the hurricane sink example is it's the simplest invention ever.
00:30:12.620All it is is a giant tube you put in the ocean and it brings the surface temperature down so it can't heat up and irradiate energy to fuel hurricanes.
00:30:22.680So there's not even a computer chip involved.
00:31:05.920The problem is, you know, like that's actually a really interesting one because people always say, well, what about the unintended consequences and what side effects?
00:31:15.960Well, the invention is the simplest thing we've ever come up with.
00:31:21.100It's made of recycled truck tires and polyethylene trash bag plastic.
00:31:26.320You put one of those in the ocean and waves crash into the top of it.
00:31:31.280So you're using wave energy, which is free and available everywhere you have this problem.
00:31:35.960So the waves push the hot water into the top that creates hydraulic head pumps the water down below where it mixes up with cold water below.
00:31:43.760Now, this thing will bring the surface temperature down on the surface of the ocean by about one or two degrees for about a square kilometer or so.
00:32:04.820Just that two degree difference in surface temperature, because the way a hurricane is fueled is by the sun shining on the surface of the ocean and then that heat re irradiating in the infrared spectrum that that fuels hurricanes.
00:32:19.300So if we just bring down the surface temperature, if hurricanes don't get the fuel they need and they don't get up to speed and they can't cause all that damage.
00:32:27.460So you might need a bunch of these in the Gulf, right, to cover this area because it's huge.
00:32:33.360But you could most certainly ameliorate the problem.
00:32:37.080Now, I'm not saying this is the best solution.
00:32:40.720The better solution would be to deploy nuclear reactors, use wind and solar, stop trying to, you know, heat up the the, you know, the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
00:33:02.740So you basically want to, you know, you want to reduce the amount of damage you're doing to the atmosphere that's causing things to heat up and become more volatile.
00:33:35.920I'm wondering, like, can we make a hurricane?
00:33:39.180Aim it at California to put the fires out?
00:33:41.380Yeah, no, but all I'm asking is, like, if somebody wanted to make a hurricane, do we, because, you know, there's, you read articles, like, there's technology to be able to make hurricanes today.
00:33:53.660You know, there's a number of different things you could do.
00:33:56.560These are fundamentally just physics questions.
00:34:00.240And it's about whether or not you can manage pressure and heat in the context.
00:34:05.780So, you know, if you wanted to make a hurricane, then what you would do is, I guess, the easiest way would be, you know, put a bunch of coal on barges and stick it out in the Gulf and burn it.
00:34:17.280And you would, and you would make a hurricane.
00:34:21.960I mean, you know, directing it and steering it might require a little more nuance, but, you know, you could do it.
00:34:29.120But it's amazing how to you, to your mind, it's so, you wouldn't put that as a miracle required.
00:34:34.240That wouldn't be a miracle required type of a invention.
00:34:49.780Another one has no business model, you know.
00:34:52.380But, you know, I think to get through this period where we've, you know, we've burned a lot of coal and gas, we've really made an atmosphere that's not as good at insulating us as we would like.
00:35:06.480And so, we're going to have to do something crazy.
00:35:09.800And it means probably build some of these geoengineering concepts.
00:35:14.420You're saying that the global warming, there's no business model, but you got these countries that are committing to, you know, there's the world.
00:35:21.340You can have all these countries that are committed to, I think, a big number, not a small number, committed to specifically global warming.
00:35:30.040You think there's still not a way to fund it?
00:35:34.400I don't know if those things are effective to you.
00:35:37.100I mean, if you go to the, you know, if you go to some United Nations summit and sign a memorandum of understanding saying that your country is going to reduce emissions,
00:35:46.720you think that that's what's happening?
00:35:48.540There's no evidence that that's happening.
00:35:53.420I mean, I don't pay attention to it, but I presume that it's not working because if I look at the numbers for emissions, you know, and energy, they're going up.
00:36:01.860You know, we burn more coal and gas every year.
00:36:20.740So, let's go back to when I asked you what are some of the biggest problems in the world, you know, that you, you know, what's the biggest one?
00:36:26.800And you said having to do with viruses, you know, another virus that could go in, you know, like the coronavirus that we have.
00:36:35.920The challenge with the coronavirus is it doesn't have that high of an R0 score that some of the other ones do.
00:36:41.220But what do we do if we do get a virus that has a very high R0 score that's contagious, that's deadly, how do you prevent that?
00:36:48.820How do you, how do you go up against something like that?
00:36:51.000Actually, the way you do it is exactly the same.
00:36:53.780So, I'm going to give you another story.
00:36:55.140So, you know, remember hearing about Ebola?
00:37:31.000The second Ebola outbreak, only 12 lives were lost.
00:37:35.380The three order of magnitude improvement, right?
00:37:39.440And the reason for that is, you know, we learned what to do, right?
00:37:44.980We learned about Ebola and we prepared for the response.
00:37:48.780And I know about this because our team at the lab helped use that computational modeling I talked about to plot or optimize vaccination campaigns and what are called ring vaccination campaigns.
00:38:02.120So, as soon as you find somebody who's contracted Ebola, you grab them, you isolate them, you treat them, but then you go find everybody who they came in contact with, you vaccinate them, and you can stop the spread of the disease before it gets out of hand, right?
00:40:19.280You know, we're doing a lot of this vaccine development in computers, in computer simulations, right?
00:40:24.400We design the vaccines in computers before we make them and test them in the real world.
00:40:29.940Like there's amazing ability to do that.
00:40:32.120So we can get better at creating vaccines.
00:40:34.520But we're always going to have that lag when we have to test it on humans and make sure that it's fine before we deploy it at a large scale.
00:40:41.900And then that's the last part of it, which is we need to be able to ramp up production.
00:40:47.880So what should have happened with this, with COVID-19 is, you know, we should have gotten better at all of these things over the last decade.
00:40:57.080We should have been investing in that.
00:40:58.920As soon as a new novel coronavirus is found, we should have responded the way I just described.
00:41:03.440And that's hopefully what we're going to be ready to do next time.
00:41:06.300So there's three parts I got questions for you for.
00:41:09.380So let's go through a couple of them here.
00:41:11.620So one, I've heard that from the experts, Fauci, Gates, a lot of these guys, it's 12 to 18 months to have a vaccine.
00:41:21.660That's 12 to 18 months is a timeline they keep hearing from everybody.
00:41:24.320Some say 24 months, but the timeline is 12 to 18 months.
00:41:28.520Well, my understanding is, I mean, it's pretty rare.
00:41:32.040I don't know if anyone's ever done it in 12, but the reason is, you know, you got to give somebody some time to just come up with a candidate.
00:41:43.080So give them six months for that, let's say.
00:41:58.180Or do we want to give it two months and wait and see if, oh, well, you know, he didn't, you know, we cured him of COVID or kept, you know, he's immune to COVID, but it turns out we've, you know, ramped up his, you know, susceptibility to Alzheimer's.
00:42:40.680So we have a bigger problem in America, which is people, going back to what I said earlier about human decision-making, you know, even once we have a vaccine that's tested, a lot of people are dubious and don't want to take it.
00:42:53.560And that's really bad because the way vaccines work, you really need to get to as close as you can to 100% vaccination for it to work.
00:43:02.480And the reason is that a lot of people can't take a vaccine, right?
00:43:07.500So if you have an immunocompromised body, you're not like other people.
00:44:21.560And that's why you and I exist today, right?
00:44:25.700We exist because of the miraculous discovery of vaccination.
00:44:30.840So I think it's a little disingenuous to say proactively that you're unwilling to take a vaccine or trust one that hasn't even, you know, you haven't even looked at yet.
00:44:56.440All I'm saying is the argument on the other side.
00:44:58.700Like, I vaccinated all my kids, but the argument on the other side is like, hey, you know, it's naive for you to say because you're a scientist and you can say this to us.
00:45:09.840But you don't even know if this vaccine is going to work in the effects of, look, what's going on with autistic kids that now one in 52.
00:46:03.300There's a lot of things that are improving with COVID.
00:46:05.800But, you know, it does seem to be very high risk, especially for elderly and immunocompromised people.
00:46:11.420So to the extent that you want to take care of those people, you probably want to take the risk on a vaccine that has not been tested for years and years and years.
00:46:22.880Because, you know, you're solving at least one problem.
00:46:27.380The worst case scenario is you're creating another problem that's as bad or worse.
00:48:40.820So, then I said, then I said, okay, we can't control if we allow flights from China to anywhere else where it's, let's just say, from Wuhan to anywhere else.
00:48:50.300And once it comes out, U.S. has some of the biggest airports that you can pretty much fly into any country from here if you wanted to, right?
00:49:05.520I mean, a vaccine, at least if you had a vaccine, if you had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 now, then you would be able to go anywhere and not catch it.
00:49:20.360But, you know, we're not really there yet.
00:49:23.120I mean, with, look, you could make, if you have healthy people who don't have any COVID, which could be your family, could be your neighborhood, could be an entire city, you know, you look at now how, you know, some cities, some European cities are doing a pretty good job now, like Berlin, you know, you come to Berlin, you get tested, PCR tested on the way in within 24 hours.
00:49:47.740They tell you, if you have any COVID signs, and if you, if they find somebody who's got COVID, then they immediately swarm them, treat them, isolate them, go find all the people they had contact with, test them.
00:50:03.460And so they're pretty, and so you're able to live a pretty normal life in places like Berlin, you know, people are out on the street having a good time.
00:50:14.040But, so to the extent that you can, you know, contain your population, manage your population, and that could be at any scale, even a family, right?
00:50:27.120It's just that when you're going to be promiscuous and have, you know, interaction, close interaction with people from, you know, mysterious places, then you could have a problem.
00:50:37.640So, so I think that, you know, humans are resilient, they're going to figure out ways of, you know, changing our behavior a little bit, so that we can, we can get by and do a better job.
00:50:49.680But, you know, it's sad that it got to this point, and I certainly hope that we learn from this, because it is preventable.
00:51:01.600I don't know if that's a, you prevent modern air travel, then you're preventing business, then you're preventing commerce, then you're preventing connection, then you're preventing, there's a lot of things that's being prevented.
00:51:12.060That's a very difficult one to stomach.
00:51:14.880I mean, I don't know that we're going to get to that point.
00:51:19.120But we might be able to reduce the amount of, you know, air, you know, like, we were getting a little carried away, you know, when I was a kid in the 80s.
00:51:29.020I think I went out of the country, like one time, my entire childhood, you know, my daughter's been out of the country, dozen times, probably, you know, like, we've gotten a little carried away with this.
00:51:43.260Travel as a human right thing, you know, not for good reasons.
00:51:48.120We were just going somewhere for Christmas, for vacation, you know, we didn't have to do that.
00:51:52.620So, I think, you know, if you look at COVID now, it's caused that to be reduced or eliminated.
00:51:57.540So, for me, when I'm listening to somebody like you, that you're intellectual, you're in this world where to you, invention, like, we talk about invention, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, look at these inventors.
00:52:08.620You're like, dude, it's not a big deal.
00:52:09.740You know, this is what we do, we sit here and we just kind of go through the process and the way you just kind of broke it down.
00:52:14.220The guys in Facebook, I saw you give a talk.
00:52:16.620You're like, oh, you know, you guys think Facebook, Uber, Airbnb is an invention.
00:52:44.860You said, yeah, we can create a hurricane.
00:52:47.020It's not going to be that tough to create a hurricane.
00:52:48.620So, to me, it's like, if the wrong person learns how to create a hurricane, what can you do to abuse it, right?
00:52:53.380So, then you go and you say, can we prevent a virus, a SARS, COVID, you know, SARS, you know, you're going through it yourself with Ebola, first one.
00:53:02.720The second one, first one outbreak was 12,000.
00:53:58.440And, you know, that's a little scary because we're not at the point where we have as good of an understanding yet of, you know, of these things that we can tune them.
00:54:08.440But it is technically possible that on the trajectory we're on, you know, we're learning a lot about genomics.
00:54:17.360We're learning a lot about, you know, proteomics, how that interacts with your actual, you know, with your body.
00:54:24.600And we're learning a lot about, you know, virology now and these things, how they spread.
00:54:30.820So, if you put all those puzzle pieces together and got good control of them, you could start to weaponize a virus.
00:54:39.260And you could even, I mean, I'm not suggesting this, but, you know, you could, I'll let you come up with a target population.
00:54:46.000But you could find a genetic marker for a population and tune a virus to just go after them, right?
00:54:53.740But that technology is probably imminent with the track we're on.
00:54:59.740And it's not something that's going to be, you know, it's not like, you know, like nuclear bombs are hard because you got to figure out how to get a hold of a bunch of, you know, enriched uranium.
00:57:49.020And in security, we have this maxim, which is, you know, if you're being chased by a bear, you don't actually have to be able to run faster than the bear.
00:57:58.960You just have to be able to run faster than your friends.
00:58:05.480So, I highly recommend use LastPass or one of the password managers.
00:58:11.980And if you can get through that and you feel like you got under control, then I really highly recommend use two-factor authentication, especially for your email and your bank accounts.
00:58:24.280And I would caution you if you're going to do that, try to use the two-factor authentication app, not your phone number.
00:58:31.780Your phone number is a terrible second factor because it's pretty easy to take over phone numbers.
00:58:39.820If, like, look, I have, I actually don't know if I have your phone number, you're basically trusting that nobody who works for Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile is going to take a call from me saying,
00:58:58.920I want to port my phone number to somewhere else, right?
00:59:03.720So, you know, I wouldn't trust your average telecom employee any further than I could throw them.
00:59:10.700And so I think, and we have a lot of cases where phone numbers are being hijacked all the time.
00:59:28.820And what that does is that works as your second factor.
00:59:32.020So a factor is something you know, something you have, or something you are.
00:59:37.100Your password is something you know, your iPhone is something you have, and, you know, your fingerprint or face ID is something you are, right?
00:59:47.960So you want at least two of those things to be required in order to get into your crown jewels because passwords are, you know, I collect them for fun.
00:59:59.600That's a scary thought when you say that to the average person that, you know, to you may not be a big deal.
01:00:07.100How about let's talk about a little bit with AI before we wrap up here.
01:00:10.020So, you know, you got two schools of thought, okay?
01:00:13.300On one hand, you got people that are saying AI is going to automate everything, and these robots are going to replace us, and we're not going to have jobs, and our jobs are going to be taken away, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:00:23.460And then I heard you say in a talk that, you know, humans have created somewhere around 3 billion jobs in the last 200 years, right?
01:00:30.200As you said, humans have created 3 billion jobs in the last 200 years, but, you know, AI is going to take over everybody's job, and we're going to be screwed.
01:00:40.920I mean, I think there's a, you know, there's a lot of sort of philosophical questions here, but, but look, you know, what we refer to as AI doesn't exist right now.
01:00:55.360What we have is machine learning, and machine learning is giving us the ability with our computers to do a bunch of cool new things that we didn't think computers could do before, and the way to think about that is, you know, before computers could really only do things that you could describe in a logical progression.
01:01:18.200You know, if you could give it clear instructions, it could go do those over and over, and that's why computers have gotten really fast at things they do.
01:01:26.120Machine learning gives us the ability to have our computers take on and understand things that we can't, like we can't understand or describe what's going on in all of the web pages on the internet, but with machine learning, our computers can.
01:01:42.280And so now you're getting a lot of cool machine learning party tricks, which is things like deep fakes and, you know, GPT-3, which is extraordinary, is giving us the ability to have computers write stories that sound a lot like stories humans would write, but it still doesn't understand, you know, a lot of things.
01:02:03.240So, what I think about it is, look, you know, we hold precious these certain things that humans are good at.
01:02:10.020A hundred years ago, we would have thought, you know, humans were really good at, you know, telling horses what to do, right?
01:02:17.700And a hundred years before that, we would have thought, well, humans are really good at digging holes with their muscles in the ground and chopping trees with axes, but we don't do that anymore.
01:02:27.140You know, we don't even do the farming, like robots do all the farming to feed us, like you are fed by robots right now, you're basically a pet being babysat by robots that do farming, which is fine, you know, it's freed you up to do a lot of things.
01:02:44.780And what I think you're seeing is the struggle that people have when they realize, you know, that they were taking some self-esteem from doing things that we don't actually need you to do, right?
01:02:59.040So, the goal of, you know, or at least the goal of a lot of people applying technology and making products and businesses and things is to give you some freedom, right?
01:03:10.500You don't have to mine coal anymore, you don't have to, you know, grow all your food or hunt all your food, you don't have to do all those things to survive, you actually get some free time.
01:03:19.960And free time is a totally new thing for humans.
01:03:23.020Humans did not have free time before the Industrial Revolution.
01:03:26.600Everybody just had to work to keep us all going, more or less, I'm generalizing a bit.
01:03:32.040But you and your kids have a shit ton of free time.
01:03:35.900And we didn't squander it, you know, we invented the entertainment industry.
01:03:41.540That's your books, your music, your video games, news, elections, all these things that we're doing to try and fill our free time, right?
01:03:51.440Because we don't actually need you to work.
01:03:53.900Now, what I'm saying now is that, you know, people are going to go through this, you know, sometimes difficult question of, you know, well, you know, I don't need to be at work anymore because computers can do my job.
01:04:10.240The truth is, it usually takes about a generation.
01:04:12.600Like, that's accelerated, but very few people get put out of their career overnight.
01:04:18.440Like, right now, we don't need more lawyers.
01:06:10.780We need nurses to take care of you because you don't have any kids that care about you and you're getting old.
01:06:15.840Like, there are a lot of things for humans to do and we're squandering our attention on Netflix when we should be aiming our attention at taking care of humans.
01:06:26.920So, until that gets solved, I don't want to hear people complaining about robots taking their jobs.
01:06:32.520We often use examples like truck drivers.
01:06:34.740In America, there are currently 50,000 open truck driver positions that pay $50,000 a year or more.
01:06:57.980Those trucks don't know how to unload.
01:07:00.520They don't know how to – there's all kinds of things they can't do.
01:07:03.220So, there's a job there probably for at least the next decade.
01:07:06.860Yeah, when it does work, then we'll stop hiring more.
01:07:10.700But in the meantime, you know, I think people are overreacting about these things.
01:07:15.360And the point I tried to make in that video you're talking about is, you know, the population growth curve for planet Earth goes like a hockey stick.
01:07:25.600You know, we didn't have billions and billions of people the way we do now until the last couple hundred years.
01:08:16.540So, yeah, that's why I work on technology.
01:08:20.560Because I see it as, you know, the greatest potential that we have to take on these big problems, to make a big difference, and help make it better for humans.
01:08:30.880Let me tell you, you come across as such a true believer.
01:08:38.080And quite frankly, your messaging is very different than what you're hearing from the media because the media is end of the world.
01:08:44.920You know, send everybody a couple thousand dollars a month because everyone's going to be like, oh, my gosh, I'm about to lose my job next week.
01:09:41.820Some people already are having a hard time.
01:09:45.440I'm not in any way trying to, you know, make things harder by telling them they deserve it or something.
01:09:50.840What I'm saying is, you know, when you look at these problems, we're looking at them on a scale of like days to weeks.
01:09:58.780You've got to look at them on a scale of like years or decades.
01:10:03.560And, you know, some of these transitions, you know, like the reason I use the truck driver example, it's the one that press is always using about, you know, robots.
01:10:12.580We've seen Teslas drive themselves, so therefore, a quarter million truck drivers must be about to be put out of business.
01:10:19.680Look, you don't mess with truck drivers.
01:10:22.200That's where labor unions come from, right?
01:10:27.700I don't know any teenagers who want to be a truck driver, right?
01:10:31.480If you do know a teenager looking for something to do, tell them much better to be a truck driver than a lawyer because we need truck drivers.
01:10:39.860But look, I mean, I think there's the easiest way to think about it.
01:10:45.280Anything that's menial or repetitive, anything you can define in a clear set of repeatable steps, we're going to have computers and robots do that, right?
01:11:16.300I'm trying to recruit humans to do these important things, right?
01:11:19.560So do that, and you could figure out how to, you know, there's lots of different ways that could break down and different jobs it could be.
01:11:27.320But look, you know, there's a lot of things that we had invested in knowledge workers, right?
01:11:33.620So we have a lot of people who are doing things, a lot of times with computers, it's just fundamentally shoving paperwork around.
01:11:40.420If you have that type of job, yeah, we probably don't need you and we don't want you doing it.
01:11:44.940So look for something more creative to do.
01:11:46.740Human creativity, so far, in my view, and I argue with a lot of other people commenting about AI on this, human creativity is something special.
01:11:59.360It is something unique, and AI isn't getting there.
01:12:33.840And that's what, in some fundamental way, humans are going for.
01:12:36.980And so we have to get to a point where we recognize that even if I had a robot here talking to you, just like I am, and, you know, or two robots talking to each other, it doesn't suffice.
01:12:50.540And maybe I'm saying there's a soul in there somewhere that I can't make with an AI.
01:12:58.180That's very heartfelt, man, what you just said right there.
01:13:03.120By the way, I read somewhere you didn't go to college.
01:14:47.140I mean, I didn't, personally, I never had much appreciation for Microsoft, but I love Bill, you know.
01:14:54.940But what's the difference between the two personality-wise, biggest difference?
01:14:58.640I mean, I never worked at Microsoft, oh, between those two guys.
01:15:03.420Actually, you know, it's funny, like I don't, I, Jeff is much more sociable.
01:15:11.120Like Jeff is really accessible and fun to hang out with.
01:15:14.380Bill is really smart, has a great sense of humor, but his life is super prescribed.
01:15:20.700You know, like, you know, he has an army of people, you know, making sure that, like, the president's day isn't planned as tight as Bill's.
01:15:30.700Like he's very, his, every minute of his day is planned.
01:15:34.940And so you don't get a spontaneity vibe out of Bill too much, but you do with Jeff, so, yeah.