Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Nathan Myhrvold on NASA's lies, Theories of Everything, working with Hawking, and COVID lockdowns

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/YUXHLTlx9DAPatreon for conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, and God: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Help support conversations like this via PayPal: https://bit.ly/2EOR0M4 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Id3k7k7mfzahfx2fjqmw3vufb44 iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802* * * 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:08 Curt's story of becoming interested in Nathan Myhrvold 00:05:04 How does Nathan remain so productive? (daily habits?) 00:08:49 The difficulty in taking pictures of large storms, waves, birds, and meteors 00:11:54 What problems are outside Nathan's ken? (nuclear power, etc.) 00:15:22 Working with Stephen Hawking (practically, how does one do so?) 00:17:41 Comparing Hawking to Einstein 00:22:24 Newton's contribution to the minting of coins (the ridges are because of him) 00:23:46 What's holding theoretical physics back (since the 80's)? 00:28:43 General relativity and quantum mechanics combine in a candle flame 00:30:21 String theory, Weinstein's Geometric Unity, Wolfram's computational model, and Supersymmetry 00:50:04 Our ideas of "simplicity" in math is wrong 00:50:48 "Laser cooking" and modernist cuisine 00:52:50 Reasons why Curt fasts 00:53:40 About "simplicity" in math and physics, continued 00:54:49 How does Nathan learn a new domain, quickly? 01:00:16 How would Nathan "solve the problem" of COVID? 01:03:18 RNA viruses replicate haphazardly and we're lucky COVID hasn't mutated more 01:10:17 Current lockdown is worse than doing nothing 01:13:20 The WHO suggesting masks were ineffective / counter-effective 01:14:53 The scientists are at fault because... 01:17:10 Was it China's authoritarianism that curbed the numbers or another factor? 01:23:04 What was different about South Korea, in response to COVID? 01:24:30 Herd immunity 01:30:53 COVID compared to the ordinary flu 01:38:34 On the "new strain" 01:42:45 No evidence for COVID being "only seasonal" and same with the common cold 01:46:58 Why did NASA analyze their asteroid as spherical (giving abjectly incorrect data)? 01:50:38 Solutions coming from outside the academy and established institutions 01:52:18 We've underestimated the danger of asteroid collisions because of NASA's data 01:56:27 NASA violated basic physical law, unethically 01:59:20 What's the alternative to trusting mainstream science, when not everyone can investigate an issue on their own? 02:06:28 How do you know what to trust in science without looking into the research yourself? 02:11:10 Food myths: Margarine vs Butter, Olive oil vs bacon oil 02:14:10 Health food advocates have killed people 02:15:19 It's dangerous to physically take someone's temperature before allowing them to enter 02:20:25 Why don't we talk more about geo-engineering solutions to global warming? 02:27:53 Global warming has become capitalism vs. something else 02:30:15 The best solutions global warming via geo-engineering 02:32:03 Myth: You need "fresh" ingredients for the best tasting food 02:34:53 How were the pyramids built? 02:35:26 Opinions on UFO's and Bob Lazar 02:36:03 On the Hard Problem of Consciousness and materialismSubscribe if you want more conversations on Theories of Everything, Consciousness, Free Will, God, and the mathematics / physics of each.* * *I'm producing an imminent documentary Better Left Unsaid http://betterleftunsaidfilm.com on the topic of "when does the left go too far?" Visit that site if you'd like to contribute to getting the film distributed (early-2021).

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All lowercase, that's shopify.com slash theories. Nathan Myhrvold 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 Myhrvold. Okay, so why am I interested in you? Well, I'm extremely interested in you.

I've been following you for... We'll fix that! Yeah. 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 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 it? Okay. 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 doesn't seem like you need my help. You're effectively a billionaire and you have many scholarly accolades. Nathan Myhrvold is someone who has a variety of interests. And 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 paleontologies. You like dinosaurs. You love looking into paleontologies. I do. You like even digging. Okay, great.

Asteroids. You have an interest in scanning the skies and analyzing the data of NASA. Yeah. Nuclear power. Okay. Eradicating malaria. Meta materials. 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.

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. You know, more generally, math and technology fascinate me. Science. with Elon, mainly because of perhaps personality differences, I'm more on the theoretical end, that's my background is in physics, and he's much more practical. You seem to have both. Now for me, like I'm more comfortable with QFT than I am with Bernoulli's equation. Like I, for some reason, I'm serious, for some, 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? Like, what does your average day look like if there's an average day?

How much sleep do you get? What is the structure? Well, you know, I don't think there's any single typical day. I don't think there's any single typical day. Many of the things that I do involve 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, you know, 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 it'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 those 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. How much sleep do you get on an average day? 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 of 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 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. 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 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. I went to see some other migrating birds in December. I got late November, actually, late November. owl. I went to see some other migrating birds in December or late,

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. Cause that's like, that's the whole thing with the 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, is quite remarkable. So anyway, different projects will require you to jump in with both feet and be 100% on that project. But 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? Well, of course, there's intuition and feelings.

And if I don't want to do it, I'm not going to go do it. And I would hope that 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 then you'd waste a lot of time. Right. Is there something that you've found to be outside of your domain of competence or outside of what you can achieve? Of course, there's, I mean, problems like nuclear power, of what you can achieve? Of course, there's problems like nuclear power. I was one of the inventors of this new type of a 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.

government to build some test reactors. But I don't, 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. And 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. It's 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 last year,

I created 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? 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 a i think a tremendous amount towards that fight but it, a tremendous amount towards that fight. But it's a tremendous amount towards a fight that's, you know, this far along against many miles to go. So, and I think it's important to work on both kinds of things. You know, you could say the climate crisis or malaria is tilting at 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'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, what's 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. What will they think of it? Right. So anyway, it's of a very different nature than something where you don't know if it's possible. A lot of people don't know that you did your postdoc under Stephen Hawking in quantum gravity. Yeah. 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 didn't have that. So he would speak as best he could, which didn't really sound like human speech at all. And his little- And it was slower? What? Was it also slower? Well, 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. The punchline, four and five like the tension is growing with everyone like oh my god why don't we get we get this um so the thing about working

with steven is uh it's very hard to feel sorry for yourself if you're working with steven 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 and the other thing. And I'm, oh God, my wife sucks. And then you have Stephen 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. You know, I can go to the bathroom by myself.

Some people denigrate Steven 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 his 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 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 was a unique combination of both brilliance and he came at a time when he could discover a tremendous amount of things. 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. 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 Next Einstein 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 that 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. Now, 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. 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 this other thing. And yet today we think of him for that, but his role in statistical mechanics with what we now call Bose-Einstein statistics is also incredible. And you just keep going through field after field where he was able to be incredibly influential, as was Newton. But my favorite crazy Newton story is that he was made the chancellor of the British Mint.

for 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. 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 uh coin holding up there was a maintenance there's 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 uh 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 the 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 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. But you got to go back, man. No, 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. I don't think I could have solved it.

I think there's a causal arrow. Yeah, we've had the situation where 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 didn't know 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. 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 Wilczek, 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. And Frank later got the name of Bryce for that. And Frank Liddegott didn't buy a 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. It was 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? 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, clearly involve both quantum mechanics and um uh 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 gravity it's heating the gases they become less 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. or a variety of other things, you've got a problem. And so people set out to solve that. And the quote 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 Weinstein, 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. 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. 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 Eightfold Way

because there was a group theory with an eightfold 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, it, normal energies, meaning 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 a super symmetry, it's analogous to saying, well, if I've got charge minus one particles, I better have charge plus one particles. 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 brainpower into trying to make it work.

to bounce a brainpower into trying to make it work. And the big showdown that everyone expected was the LHC. And the stated purpose of the LHC 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. You're in that case, but not, not, not Einstein. So that was a rare example of someone who had very few clues. Newton had very few clues, you know,

that 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 uh inspiration to get going um so that was another great one but we've 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. It didn't find any super partners. And so far, it hasn't had any hint of that. 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 of, Oh, there's someone's got, you know, so-and-so in this, because there's two different projects. So there's Atlas and Alice. Oh,

Alice is seeing something or Atlas is seeing something. But so far that's all come to naught. And it's probably, well, certainly given that outcome, if you looked 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? You'd say, no, let's, you know, we should bet on lots of different ideas. But there was an overwhelming bet on supersymmetry and string theory.

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 Witten, who I've known since graduate school and is a great friend, 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. But 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, but it's not a great, it's not great statistics there. Or you need new clues, but LHC was ridiculously expensive. 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 um 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 a thousand or or what right 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. Right, right. 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. 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 was originally a lecture by Edvard Wigner. Wigner was a Nobel Prize winner in physics. And the name of this essay is The Unreasonable mathematics in physics. And so Wigner says, look, how come 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 if I were to give a modern version of Wigner's thing, 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'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. 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, you know, a simple Turing machine can't predict when it will end. Just as a matter of principle, it can't. Yeah. 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 way. 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 you have hunched as being the ultimate? 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 say, and, and man, 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 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. 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 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, what is it?

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, okay, we only have we only have 10 fingers and they're kind of discreet. 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 learned 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. Then I thought, well, maybe you do. Maybe I should ask you. Is there anything that you do that approximates something like a laser cooking? Oh, sure.

We well, there's lots of things where you cook with light so a neapolitan pizza is cooked with light um broiling is about cooking light it's all about infrared light uh but for lasers specifically uh 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. We could etch your face on a piece of meat or on a slice of bread. Yeah, and eat it. It looks just like you. 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. Right? I mean, we're just, 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.

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slash everything and use the code everything. 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 from this stand is what you just told me. No, not at all. Yeah, okay, so going back to Newton. What I meant by simple 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 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 um you know you first i try to read as much as i can about it um often that means i will buy books on amazon it's 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 was 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. There are 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, oh, 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. 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 might use physics that's not in a textbook, but not mathematics that's not in a textbook. That's correct. Right, right, right, right, right. 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. don't know. 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, sometimes join on as collaborators, or be good at critiquing things. And so away you go from there. Now, in the case of asteroids, the buy every book on Amazon that's on asteroids is pretty easy. There's not very many. 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 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

If you have 85% vulnerable, you will have another wave. Okay? 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. 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 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, a lot of other places for a while thought, oh, we did it right. Most other places, a lot of other places for a while thought,

oh, we did it right. Look at us. We have low rates. And then they got another wave. They were going to get the other wave, okay? 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 up front 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, that's because we were so damn smart. There were places that were unlucky. Now, they were unlucky and they weren't doing a perfect job. But if you look back and say how many countries did a perfect job of this, we can't really tell until it's in retrospect. But China has done a very good job of containment. And arguably South Korea has, and I'm sure you could come up with a few other also rams and others.

But it's, Italy was an interesting example. Italy, 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. Because the healthcare system, it's widely believed in Italy and elsewhere that the care 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 um 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 COVID back to the north of Italy. 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 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, okay? It's not Biden, it's you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're in charge in my country,S. right now, okay? It's not Biden, it's you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no pisses me off. But, well, the only way, 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? Because of 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. 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 sight if you wear a mask. But don't go through a whole bunch of these 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. 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 gonna ban all meetings of more than 100 people oh wait wait did i say 100? 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 draft well there's lots of reasons and i I don't have a perfect answer. There's a lot of people say, oh, you're overreacting. You're overreacting. You're overreacting. Also, I heard in the beginning that who said that masks were counterproductive. example of well-meaning people saying shit that was wrong. And you can eat in some cases,

they couldn't help saying things are wrong because we didn't know. But in that case, the mask thing was horrifically stupid. They had 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 masks, wear one even just around the house for a little bit and see how filthy it gets in 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, there's a point where 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? Right?

So if we, it's clearly the case that if the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 up front. Maybe. Meaning to say we didn't have enough data about the virus or the people involved in policymaking were incompetent? No, but look, you're never going to get 100% compliance on anything, right?

Like we all have laws about speeding. Yet virtually everyone who's ever driven a car has broken one of those laws at some point in time. It's 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. Right. 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 have been able to do it, and they're a much more free society than China. They still haven't, right? Sorry 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 or the obedience of the population well how do you separate those right i mean the the 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. Right?

So, 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 know 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. He's given the star of the former sheriff that has this big dent in it due to a bullet. And the guy says, well, at least this, um, uh, at least this star, this badge saved my predecessor. And the guy giving it to him says, well, it would have 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. It's too little. And I think that that is what occurred in the COVID response of most of the countries in the world. 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, 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 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. 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 we're 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. But for a lot of things, the masks 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 U.S. and all of Europe and essentially every other country except China. Nobody has gotten... And South Korea. 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?

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 It may not be as authoritarian, but Koreans have a very strong sense of community and being gung-ho. Interesting. The 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 and, or at least stop being stopped transmitting before you reach a vulnerable person. And it's one of the ways to think about an infection, disease. Sorry. So you mean to say in 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 way of getting a vac of this, well, there's two ways. There's recovered people because for almost every disease in the world,

infectious disease, I should say, you get some amount of immunity after you've had it. 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 stage when three quarters of the population have been rendered immune, then you can start to talk about herd immunity. Now, 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. doctors, nurses, other caregivers. So once COVID got into an assisted living center, it was going to explode. And no, you know, 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 due to inoculation, we don't know. But it depends on the circles that people move in. it. You know, if, if 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. Right. Okay. 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. Now, Israel is doing a great job of giving people injections. 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. And, you know, we have somehow failed. We have the weird situation that we panic enough to do some things like close the borders, close all restaurants, close this. 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 could 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? So, well, in both cases, the world doesn't know that much, but here's the deal. There is, 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 hundreds of millions of people in 1918.

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 died 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, 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. 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 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. What are those goldback conjecture problems? Well, but that's one of the thresholds and I'm not over 65 where it gets even worse, but I also have 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 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 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 And saying, oh, it's just as bad as the other stuff is 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. If you introduced a new thing and said, oh, but 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 has 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.

Mainly, 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. one of those coronaviruses, maybe you're immune to it. We don't know. Now, 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 kids 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 some it's the very old and the middle part of the stack and older 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. 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, or as 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 he 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. So 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 certainly 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 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 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 on 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 bet. And, you know, in the case of flu, flu famously mutates enough that every year we need a different

vaccine. 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 early in the epidemic, you'll say, oh, it'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,

they'd say, what, do you want drugs? There's no evidence of that. You're hoping it's true. But most respiratory viruses are. What do you mean by most? Once you subtract out flu, we really don't know squat about other viruses. What about the cold?

you subtract out flu, we really don't know squat about the cold. 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, 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, well, the common cold is certainly not entirely seasonal. The 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 that 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 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 they're sort of little fables for children.

Yes, it's true that we congregate and 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, 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 whatever, 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. I see. 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 when'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 easy? Yeah. 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 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, so you're supposed to be deriving the diameter of these asteroids.

And instead, the way you tell if you did a good job is you have about 100 asteroids that you know the diameter of from a different method. So you say, right. know the diameter of from a different method so you say right the way i determine my accuracy is i predict it over here and i compare it to the known results and if my predictions match and i pat myself on the back and said i did something that was accurate yeah um these people just copied all the answers and the consequence of that is what? Well, it, 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, 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 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. 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 criticize it. So it turned out a bunch of... They needed someone like you who's independent to say... Yes, that's right. This was, you know, people would sometimes ask me, why are you doing this? And the answer is because paradoxically, I'm the only one who could.

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. Well, I don't think it's super common. You know, the string theory is so complicated that generally it's very hard to compute any answer out of it um that that's why uh my friend peter named his blog uh 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 underdetermined? Well, yes. 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 2 by four and nails and all this other stuff. And 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 plant 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.

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 um it that at 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, 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, no. This might tell you what thing is going to plunk down in the middle of Kansas next week. And so we really need to know it. Yeah. And it's a 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, 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. So, and that goes for both. Now, there's lots of other people at JPL that are great.

There's not everyone at JPL, but there's one group at JPL. There's one person. One professor at UCLA that really screwed up. And had a giant amount of arrogance about that screw up. And so didn't admit it and has fought it tooth and nail. Hasn't fought you? I recall that they put on oh yeah no yeah no they they did a smear campaign on me trying to attack me um they it's been very hard for me i have published several papers including one over 100 pages but it's been much more difficult for me to do that because I'm the guy who's saying that people in the field are totally wrong. And some people in the field agree with me, but say, well, why don't you just like be a little quieter about it?

with me but say well why don't you just like be a little quieter about it it's like no that's unethical to be quieter about something that's this bad um are you driven by ethics or were you always disagreeable and you'll point out what's wrong when you see it well 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. And they, even the professor didn't understand freshman physics. Yep. Just know, they, there's something called Kirchhoff's Law of Radiation. It's in all early physics classes, it's part of understanding what's called black body radiation, which is fundamental to all of the modeling they do. They didn't understand it at all.

When you say they didn't understand it, do you mean to say that they didn't understand it at all um when you say they didn't understand it do you mean to say that they didn't incorporate it okay they their approach to modeling totally violates it so they're they tried to apply a method which violates physical law which that's a bad thing to do 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, not ethics. It was after 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 and uh 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 um which is weird because in all of his interactions with me he's nothing he says makes any sense at all but he says it are you able to say his name abruptly um and uh aggressively oh you don't understand it because of this theory. And it's only if you both know all those theories and this, you say, wait a minute, that is a bunch of bullshit. 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. Here's what's interesting is that there's seems to me from the outside let's say i'm investigating an issue like global warming now obviously some people say it exists some people say it doesn't exist and you have your your own you 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, these large institutions all agree on a single narrative and they might be colluding or they might be just ignorant or whatever it may be. So what are we to do as individuals just investigate on our own? I don't have a good answer for you. You know, we,

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 or die, and that's why. That's why. And 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. I'm just referring to- Well, okay, but here's the deal. Every one of us will get it. And for almost every one of us,

like 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 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, associated with the Trump administration or the this or that. But it also means small P politics like, oh, let's say it's OK 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, yep, I had my mind made up and nothing I can see will ever change my mind. You 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, who don't believe 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, you know,

on one hand, in a free society, you want to allow people to have a certain set of freedoms. 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. Which that comes up in the cases where, for example, they're refusing a medical procedure for religious grounds. And 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 the 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 is wrong about his God. Ah, let him. But when it comes to things like not taking a vaccine,

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 we'll 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. or have proof that you had COVID. But that'll cause a whole bunch of people to get all worked up and say, oh, it's civil liberties and we have to allow people that. When it comes to things that truly only affect them,

it's a very different issue than when it affects others. 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 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 or 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 this 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. 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. 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, the obesity rate has gone up, the rate of ingestion of, I mean, all the bad things they said would go down have gone up. Right, right.

And in that case, it's probably based on And in that case, it's probably based on just some fundamental bad work in the 1950s and 60s that got propagated. 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. Right. So we have this huge movement against gluten. we have this huge movement against gluten. And 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, become oh read a couple of websites and then self-diagnose that you need this and then uh eat a whole a diet that has all kinds of other shit in it that is much less tested than gluten. 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 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 there's bad cholesterol and then it turns out oops dietary cholesterol probably has no factor at all um 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. Now that is such, 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. Nope. We were wrong. We fucked up. We were wrong. We're sorry. Most of this. So most people still think cholesterol is bad for you. And 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 longterm, really good studies, something called the Nurses Study, over 25 years, they, more than 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 that 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 fact, trans fats actually are bad. Literally dead wrong. Literally dead wrong. It literally killed lots of people. And so when you have situations like that or some of the other absurd things to bring it back to go for it, the people taking your temperature, that was an absurd thing.

Telling people who have a fever to stay inside makes tons of sense. Yeah. What's absurd about taking someone's temperature as you enter a store? The 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. Now, I don't know if that's really true. Right. I'm going to be talking to Robert at some point. I don't, I have some issues with that, but we can talk about that after. Well, the idea that you would empower the nation's waitresses and sales clerks to all go and take your temperature and, Oh, what are you supposed to do if the person has the fever? Are you in a hazmat suit when you're doing this? No.

And it's well-meaning, but it's something that I think if you looked at the amount of effort that it caused versus the cost benefit, basically, how much harm did it cause or how much benefit? So like at our company, I 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 yep why should we do that yeah 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 can 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. 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 does it. 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, okay, what is really better? Picking some set of people to be the poor person at the door with the temperature gun. And how many people did you really turn away? And therefore, if you know how many people you turned 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.

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 came 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 run the flight with them or whatever even then it i don't think the japanese have fully thought it through because if that person really is the um start of a terrible epidemic as whenever you detected a fever you'd have to like stop the everything you know have know, little tubes come down from the ceiling and seal everyone off separately. It would be really very difficult. When I first heard about you, I remember you were

talking about, as could have been on 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 an extremely inventive and simple idea. Why don't I hear much talk about geoengineering 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 yes it's political it's well first of all it's political within the scientific community the scientific community itself has become very polarized

um that the people who study global warming got very tired. 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 their friends will chastise it as being some form of accommodation to the other side okay and when you say other side stupid when you say it's stupid and it's counterproductive. Well, then there's a lot of global warming activists, climate 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'll this problem be solved and 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 tell 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 I say in response, I say, okay, show me how much progress we've made. okay, show me how much progress we've made. Well, we haven't 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 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, okay, 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. It's like, 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.

Right. 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. 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 significant for sure because different models will say different things but okay it 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. Number one. And number two, if you think it's bad, if your proposition is that three 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 are like that. 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, they'll say, what, you mean we can actually avoid destroying Earth? Fuck, that's great.

Tell me more. 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. And make it better with more 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 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 it goes on the rubric of solar radiation management this means you reflect a tiny amount of light from the sun way in the upper atmosphere um way less light than i mean you could never visually determine exactly exactly it's imperceptible but it would be enough to stop global warming and it would be with sulfur dioxide or some other method? Well, then you go down into the weeds of 100 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. 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 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? Can you take unfresh 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 um you know aged beef 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, a 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. No, I mean that, man. I wanted to even ask you like how to wear the pyramids made. Cause 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. Okay.

An Egyptologist friend of mine has really figured out how they built the pyramids. You can just reference the name so I can search it unless you want to explain it. I know you got to go. Well, it's in a bunch of Nova videos. I'll email you the stuff. What's his name, though? I'm blanking on it, which is weird. Okay, I'll post the name. All right, man. 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 U 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? 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 number of species have a concept of self, have mirror neurons which model what others think, and so forth. While these traits may not rise to the level of full human consciousness, I think it's likely that they are precursors. 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.