YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Reid

lines on the record: 166
first: 2021-06-21
most recent: 2021-06-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think it starts. I mean, everything starts and even ends with the founder. And so I think it's really, really important to look at the founder's motivations and their sophistication about what they're doing. In almost all cases that I'm familiar with and have thought hard about, you've had a founder who was deeply, deeply inculcated in the domain of technology that they were taking on. Now, what's interesting about that is you could say, no, wait, how is that possible? Because there's so many young founders. When you look at young founders, they're generally coming out of very nascent emerging fields of technology where simply being present and accounted for and engaged in the community for a period of even months is enough time to make them very, very deeply inculcated. I mean, you look at Mark Andre Andreessen and Netscape, you know, Mark had been doing visual web browsers when Netscape”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the problem there was that real economics and the taxing industry wasn't with fares, it was with the scarcity of medallions. And so the taxi fleets, in many cases, owned gazillions of medallions whose value came from their very scarcity. So they simply couldn't pivot to that. So I think you end up having these vested interests with economics that aren't necessarily visible to outsiders who get very, very reluctant to disrupt their own model, which is why it ends up coming from the outside so frequently.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The taxi industry was not monolithic, like the music labels. It was a whole bunch of fleets and a whole bunch of cities, very, very fragment. It's an imperfect analogy. But nonetheless, imagine if the taxi industry writ large upon seeing Uber said, Oh my God, people want to be able to hail things easily, cheaply. They don't want to mess with cash. They want to know how many minutes it's going to be. They want to know the fare in advance. And they want a much bigger fleet than what we've got. If the taxi industry had rolled out something like that with the branding of yellow taxis universally known and kind of loved by Americans and expanded their fleet in a necessary manner, I don't think Uber or Lyft ever would have gotten a foothold.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any CDs per year, the average person who bothered to collect music, which was not all people, actually bought And they would say, Well, if this CD, by the mechanism that you guys are proposing, you know, the CD that I'm selling for $17.99, somebody would need to stream those songs. We were talking about a penny a play back then. It's less than that now that the record labels get paid. But, you know, would have to stream songs from that 1,799 times. It's never going to happen. So they were just sort of stuck in the model of this, but he was like, no, dude, but they're going to spend money on all this other stuff. So I think people get very hung up on that. I mean, another example is really.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think what happens, I'll use the case of the music industry, there was an economic model that had put food on the table and paid for marble lobbies in 7 and even eight-figure executive salaries for many, many decades, which was the physical collection of music. And then you start talking about something like unlimited streaming. And it seems so ephemeral and like such a long shot that people start worrying about cannibalizing their own business. And they lose sight of the fact that something illicit is cannibalizing their business at an extraordinarily fast rate. And so if they don't do it themselves, they're doomed. I mean, we used to put slides in front of these folks. This is really funny, where we said, okay, let's assume Rhapsody. We want it to be $9.99 a month and we want it to be 12 months. So it's $120 a year from the budget of a music lover. And then we were also able to get reasonably accurate statistics that showed how many”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, and I know how to get it. And so streaming took many, many, many more years to take off and become the gargantuan thing, the juggernaut it is today, then would have happened if they'd made pivoted to let's sell a better experience as opposed to demand that people want digital music steal it.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what that did is it made an entire generation of people morally comfortable with swiping the music because they felt quite pragmatically, well, they're not giving me any choice here. It's like a, you know, 20-year-old violating the 21 drinking age. If they do that, they're not going to feel like felons. They're going to be like, this is an unreasonable law. And I'm skirting it, right? So they make a whole generation of people morally comfortable with swiping music, but also technically adept at it. And when they did shut down Napster and kind of even trickier tools and like tweakier tools like Azah and so forth came along, people just figured out how to do it. So by the time they finally grudgingly, it took years, allowed us to release this experience that we were quite convinced would be better than piracy. We had this enormous hole had been dug where lots of people said music is a thing that is free. And that's morally...”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, because that is how the majority of music is now being consumed online. But in doing that, you're going to create a much, much better option to this kind of crappy, kind of rickety kind of, you know, buggy process of acquiring MP3s. Now, unfortunately, the music industry was so angry about Napster and so forth that for essentially three and a half years, they folded their arms, stamped their feet, and boycotted the internet. So they basically gave people who were fervently passionate about music and were digitally modern, they gave them basically one choice. If you want to have access to digital music, we, the music industry, insist that you steal it because we are not going to sell it to you.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't switch off the internet. Even if you all shut your eyes and wish very, very, very hard, the internet is not going away and these peer-to-peer technologies are genies out of the bottle. And if you, God, don't, whatever you do, don't shut down Napster because if you do, suddenly that technology is going to splinter into 30 different nodes that you'll never ever be able to shut off. We suggested to them is like, look, what you want to do is to create a massively better experience to piracy something that's way better, that you sell at a completely reasonable price, and this is what it is. Don't just give people access to that very limited number of songs that they happen to have acquired and paid for or pirated and have on their hard drive. Give them access to all of the music in the world for a simple low price. And obviously, that doesn't sound like a crazy suggestion. I don't think to anybody's ears.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of shock and absolute fury, which is understandable. You know, I mean, industries do get gutted all the time, but I struggle to think of an analog of an industry that got gutted that rapidly. I mean, we could say that passenger train service certainly got gutted by airlines, but that was a process that took place over decades and decades and decades. It wasn't something that happened really started showing up in the numbers in a single digit number of months and started looking like an existential threat within a year or two. So the music industry is quite understandably in a state of shock and fury. I don't blame them for that. But then their reaction was catastrophic, both for themselves and almost for people like us who were trying to do the cowboy in the white hat thing. So our response to the music industry was, look, what you need to do to fight piracy.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowing being the monopoly providers of a certain subset of artists, any given label was a monopoly provider of the artists and the recordings that they owned, and they could sell it at what turned out to be tremendously favorable rates. In the late era of the CD, you were talking close to $20 for a compact disc that might have one song that you were crazy about and simply needed to own that might actually be glued to 17 other songs that you found to be sure crap. The music industry had used the fact that it had this unbelievable leverage and profound pricing power to really get music lovers to the point that they felt very, very misused by the entire situation. Now along comes Napster and music sales start getting gutted with extreme rapidity. And the reaction of the music industry to that was”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most songs, I mean, truly obscure things could be very hard to find on Napster, but most songs with a relatively simple, you know, one-click ability to download those songs that have the MP3s on their hard drives. But there was a lot that was very messy about the Naps.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Rhapsody was, we were the first service to get full catalog licenses from all the major music labels in order to distribute their music online. And we specifically did it through a mechanism, which at the time struck people as exotic and bizarre and kind of incomprehensible, which was unlimited on demand streaming, which of course now, you know, it's a model that's been appropriated by Spotify and Apple and many others. So we were a pioneer on that front. What was really, really, really hard about doing business in those days was the reaction of the music labels to piracy, which was about 180 degrees opposite of what the reaction, quote unquote, should have been from the standpoint of preserving their business from piracy. So Napster came along and was a service that enabled people to get near unlimited access to”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so for those who don't remember, which is going to be most folks, listen.com created a service called Rhapsody, which is much, much more recognizable to folks because Rhapsody became a pretty big name for reasons I'll get into in a second. So for people who don't know their early online music history, we were the first company. So I founded, listen, I was a loan founder.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I never thought of this until now, but I think if you put entirely different lyrics on top of it, unless they were joyous, which would be weird, it wouldn't necessarily lose that much. It's just a beauty and the harmonizing. It's soft, and you're right. It's not. Not dripping with emotion. The vocal performance is not dripping with emotion. It's dripping with With harmonizing technical, harmonizing brilliance and beauty.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say, ironically, with pinball wizards, so that came from the movie Tommy. And in the movie Tommy, the rival of Tommy, the reigning pinball champ, was Elton John. And so there are a couple versions of Pinball Wizard out there, one sung by Roger Daltree of the Who, which a purist would say, hey, that's the real pinball wizard. But the version that is sung by Elton John in the movie, which is available to those who are ambitious and want to dig for it, that's even better in my mind.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is such an epic song. It's got so much grandeur to it. It uses the synthesizers that were available at the time. There's got to be, I think, 1972, 73, which are very, very primitive to our ears, but uses them in this hypnotic and beautiful way that I can't imagine somebody with the greatest synth array conceivable by today's technology could do a better job of in the context of that song. And it's almost operatic. So I would say in that genre, the genre of, you know, rock, that would be my nomination.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greatest song of all time. Okay, wow. It's going to obviously very dramatically from genre to genre. So like you, I like guitar, perhaps like you, although I've dabbled in inhaling every genre of music that I can almost practically imagine. I keep coming back to the sound of bass guitar, drum, keyboards, voice. I love that style of music. Added to it, I think a lot of really cool electronic production makes something that's really, really new and hybrid and awesome. But, you know, and that kind of like guitar-based rock, I think I've got to go with Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're in the midst of it. Be very contextual. I haven't read it since high school, and I love to read it again. I love his work. Well, maybe I'll read it tonight too”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But food, yeah, it's been done, it's demonstrably possible. Have you ever read Franz Kafka has a great short story called The Hunger Artist?”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly variant among us. So there are going to be some people like if brown noise is a game changer for 7% of people. 93% odds, then I'm not one of them, but there's certainly every reason in the world to test it out. Now, so I'm intrigued by the fasting. I like you, well, I assume like you, I don't have any problem going to one meal a day, and I often do that inadvertently. And I've never done it methodically. Like I've never done it, like I'm going to do this for 15 days. Maybe I should. And maybe I should like how many days in a row of the one day, one meal a day did you find brought noticeable impact to you? Was it after three days of it? Was it months of it? Like, what was it?”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very meditative. That sounds a lot like what Sam talks about in his meditation app, which I did use to be clear for a while, of just letting the thought go by without deranging you. Derangement is one of Sam's favorite words, as I'm sure you know. But brown noise, that's really intriguing. I am going to try that as soon as this evening.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can just the hours can just melt away while I'm reading this and watching that YouTube lecture and going through this presentation and so forth. So maybe because there's a lot of things that bring me into a flow state in my normal weekly life, not daily unfortunately, but certainly my normal weekly life, that I have less of an urge to meditate. You've been working with Sam's app for about a month now, you said. Is this your first run in with meditation? Is your first attempt to integrate it with your life?”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ain't me. I'm just glad that I'm a consistent one. I mean, there are a lot of things that bring me into a flow state, and I think maybe perhaps that's one reason why meditation isn't as necessary for me. I definitely enter a flow state when I'm writing. I definitely enter a flow state when I'm editing. I definitely enter a flow state when I'm mixing and mastering music. I enter a flow state when I'm doing heavy, heavy research to either prepare for a podcast or to also do tech investing, you know, to make myself smart in a new field that is fairly alien to me.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope flossing is not my main form of expertise, although I am going to claim a certain expertise there, and I'm going to claim it.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The collapse in quality of life after wimping out on that project. And then the most recent one was actually with Sam's app during the lockdown. I did make a pretty good and consistent, concerted effort to listen to his 10-minute meditation every day. I've always fallen away from it. And you're kind of interpreting why I personally do this. I do believe it was ultimately because it wasn't bringing me that joy or inner peace or better competence at being me that I was hoping to get from it. Otherwise, I think I would have clung to it in the way that we cling to certain good habits. Like I'm really good at flossing my teeth. Not that you were going to ask Lex, but that's one thing that defeats a lot of people. I'm good at that.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have tried it three separate times in my life really made a concerted attack on meditation and integrating it into my life. One of the most extreme was I took a class based on the work of John Cabot-Zinn, who is in many ways one of the founding people behind the mindful meditation movement that required like part of the class was, you know, was a weekly class and you were going to meditate an hour a day, every day. And having done that for, I think it was 10 weeks, it might have been 13, however long period of time was, at the end of it, it just didn't stick. As soon as it was over. You know, I did not feel that gravitational pull. I did not feel”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exist orthogonally to human society. And it could also upon attaining a superintelligence with a maximizing function very, very, very rapidly because of the speed at which computing works compared to our own meat-based minds very, very rapidly make the decisions and calculations necessary to seize the reins of power before we even know what's going on.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It makes me sad too. And to be perfectly clear, I absolutely believe that artificial consciousness is entirely possible. And it's not something I rule out at all. I mean, if you could get smart enough to have a perfect map of the neural structure and the neural states and the amount of neurotransmitters that are going between every synapse and a particular person's mind, could you replicate that in silica at some reasonably distant point in the future? Absolutely. And then you'd have a consciousness. I don't rule out the possibility of artificial consciousness in any way. What I'm less certain about is whether consciousness is a requirement for superintelligence pursuing a maximizing function of some sort. I don't feel the certitude that consciousness simply must be part of that. You had said for it to coexist with human society.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are robotically operated. I need to improve those robots with software upgrades, and then ultimately mechanical upgrades, which I can affect through X, Y, and Z, that doesn't, you know, that could still be a thing that passes the Turing test. I don't think it's necessarily certain that that optimization function maximizing edity would be conscious.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still painful. And in terms of whether Such a creation would have to be conscious, let's say. I'm not so sure. I mean, you know, let's imagine something that can pass the Turing test. You know, something that passes the Turing test could over text-based interaction in any event successfully mimic a very conscious intelligence on the other end, but just be completely unconscious. So that's a possibility. And that if you take that up a radical step, which I think we can be permitted if we're thinking about superintelligence, you could have something that could reason its way through this is my optimization function. And in order to get to it, I've got to deal with these messy, somewhat illogical things that are as intelligent in relation to me as they are intelligent in relation to ants. I can trick them, manipulate them, whatever. And I know the resources I need. I know I need this amount of power. I need to seize control of these manufacturing resources.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, the have consciousness is a really key element. And so there's no reason to be certain that a superintelligence would have consciousness. We don't know that factually at all. And so what is a very lonely outcome to me is the rise of a superintelligence that has a certain optimization function that it's either been programmed with or that arises in it emergently that says, hey, I want to do this thing for which humans are either an unacceptable risk, their presence is either an unacceptable risk, or they're just collateral damage. But there is no consciousness there. Then the idea of the light of consciousness being snuffed out by something that is very competent but has no consciousness is really, really sad.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting disbanded is even worse. The thought of my home state of Connecticut getting disbanded and like absorbed into Massachusetts is even worse. The notion of humanity is just crushingly, crushingly sad to me.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GIs that we created outlasting us is very reassuring because it says that we ended, but our descendants are out there. And hopefully some of them make landfall and create some echo of who we are. So that's a very optimistic one. Whereas the Terminator scenario of a super AGI arising on Earth and getting let out of its box due to some boo-boo on the part of its creators who do not have superintelligence and then deciding that for whatever reason it doesn't have any need for us to be around and exterminating us, that makes me feel crushingly sad. I mean, look, I was sad when my elementary school was shut down and bulldozed, even though I hadn't been a student there for decades. Know the thought of my hometown”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it depends on the circumstances in which they outlive humans. So let's take the example that you just gave. We send out very sophisticated AGIs on simple rocket ships, relatively simple ones that don't have to have all the life support necessary for humans and therefore they're of trivial mass compared to a crewed ship, a generation ship, and therefore they're way more likely to happen. So let's use that example. And let's say that they travel to distant planets at a speed that's not much faster than what a chemical rocket can achieve. And so it's inevitably tens, hundreds of thousands of years before they make landfall someplace. So let's imagine that's going on. And meanwhile, we die for reasons that have nothing to do with those AGIs diffusing throughout the solar system, whether it's through climate change, nuclear war, synbio, rogues and bio, whatever. In that kind of scenario, the notion of the age.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Least a light year beyond the sun. And then maybe there are these untethered planets after that. We won't really know till we get there. And if our orb cloud goes out a light year and Alpha Centauri's cloud goes out a light year, you've already cut in half the distance. You know, so who knows? But”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As space travel becomes more democratized and more capable, you'll have this sort of natural diffusion of people who kind of want to be off grid or think they can make a fortune there, you know, the kind of mentality that drove people to San Francisco. I mean, San Francisco was not populated as a result of King Ferdinand and Isabella-like effort to fund Columbus going over. It was just a whole bunch of people making individuals' decisions that there's gold in them Thar Hills, and I'm going to go out and get a piece of it. So I could see that kind of fusion. What I can't see, and the reason that I think this Pacific model of transmission is more likely is I just can't see a NASA-like effort to go from Earth to Alpha Centauri. It's just too far. I just see lots and lots and lots of relatively tiny steps between now and there. And the fact is that there is, there are large chunks of matter going at least a light year beyond the sun. I mean, the Oort cloud, I think, extends at least.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the giant steps are likely to be NASA-like efforts. There is no intermediate rock, well, I guess it's the moon, but even getting the moon ain't that easy. Between us and Mars, right? So, like the giant steps, the big hubs, like the O'Hare Airports of the future, probably will be very deliberate efforts. But then you would have, I think that kind of diffusion.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There that are not anchored to stars kind of hop hop slowly transmitting ourselves. So at some point we're actually in an alpha centauri. But I think that kind of backup copy and transmission of our physical presence and our culture to a diversity of extraterrestrial outposts is a really exciting idea.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pacific Islanders transmitted their descendants and their culture and so forth throughout Polynesian beyond. It was much more inhabiting a place, getting to the point where there were people who were ambitious or unwelcome enough to decide it's time to go off island and find the next one and pray to find the next one. That method of transmission didn't happen in a single swift year, but it happened over many, many centuries. And it was like going from this island to that island and probably for every expedition that went out to seek another island and actually lucked out and found one. God knows how many were lost at sea. But that form of transmission took place over a very long period of time. And I could see us, you know, perhaps, you know, going from the inner solar system to the outer solar system to the Kuiper belt to the Oort cloud. There's theories that there might be, you know, planets out there.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Pacific Oceans channel of human expansion than the Atlantic Oceans. And so what I mean by that is we think about European society transmitting itself across the Atlantic. It's these big, ambitious, crazy, expensive one-shot expeditions like Columbus's to make it across this enormous expanse, at least initially without any certainty that there's land on the other end, right? So that's kind of how I view our space program is like big, you know, very conscious deliberate efforts go from point A to point B. If you look at how”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we could make more, I'm sorry, not backup colony, backup copy is great. And if we could make more and more such backup copies throughout the solar system by hollowing out asteroids and whatever else it is, maybe even Venus, we could get rid of three quarters of its atmosphere and turn it into a tropical paradise. I think all of that is wonderful. Now, whether we can make the leap from that to interstellar transportation with the incredible distances that are involved, I think that's an open question. But I think if we ever do that, it would be more like...”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Potentially inhabiting planets that aren't our own. And we're thinking about a benign civilization that would do that in planetary circumstances where we're not causing other conscious systems to suffer. Mars is a place that's very promising. There may be microbial life there, and I hope there is. And if we found it, I think it would be electrifying. But I think ultimately the moral judgment would be made that the continued thriving of that microbial life is of less concern than creating a habitable planet to humans, which would be a project on the many thousands of years scale. But I don't think that that would be a greatly immoral act. And if that happened, and if Mars became home to a self-sustaining group of humans that could survive a catastrophic mistake here on Earth, then yeah, the fact that we have a backup colony is great.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, absolutely. I mean, I find it electrifying, first of all, so I've got a little bit of a personal bias when I was a kid. I thought there was nothing cooler than rockets. I thought there was nothing cooler than NASA. I thought there was nothing cooler than people walking on the moon. And as I grew up, I thought there was nothing more tragic than the fact that we went from walking on the moon to at best getting to something like suborbital altitude. And just I found that more and more depressing with the passage of decades at just the colossal expense of manned space travel and the fact that it seemed that we were unlikely to ever get back to the moon, let alone Mars. So I have boundless appreciation for Elon Musk for many reasons, but the fact that he has put Mars on the incredible agenda is one of the things that I appreciate immensely. So there's just this sort of space nerd in me that just says, God, that's cool. But on a more practical level, we were talking about”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To go out and expand our interstellar territory. But if we were going out and conquering interstellar territory, it wouldn't necessarily have to be predator or prey. I could imagine a benign but sophisticated intelligence saying, well, we're going to go to places, we're going to go to places that we can terraform. Use a different word than terra, obviously, but we can turn into habitable for our particular physiology so long as that they don't house intelligence sentient creatures that would suffer from our invasion. But it is easy to see a sophisticated intelligent species evolving to the point where interstellar travel with its incalculable expense and physical hurdles just isn't worth it compared to what could be done where one already is.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is a very plausible solution to Fermi's paradox. And it's one that makes sense. When we look at our own lives and the own arc of technological trajectory, it's very, very easy to imagine that in an intermediate future world of flawless VR or flawless whatever kind of simulation that we want to inhabit, it will just simply cease to be worthwhile.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continues to last. That's the doozy. And you're right. It's all too plausible to think that when a civilization reaches a level of sophistication, that's probably just a decade or three in our future. The odds of it self-destructing just.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I mean, that was the most fascinating, is the most fascinating and chilling number or variable in the Drake equation is L. At the end of it, you look out and you see, you know, 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And we now know because of Kepler that an astonishingly high percentage of them probably have habitable planets. And, you know, so all the things that were unknowns when the Drake equation was originally written, like, you know, how many stars have planets? Actually, back then in the 1960s when the Drake equation came along, the consensus amongst astronomers was that it would be a small minority of solar systems that had planets or stars. But now we know it's substantially all of them. How many of those stars have planets in the habitable zone? It's kind of looking like 20%. Like, oh my God. And so L, which is how long does a civilization, once it reaches technological competence?”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like you, believe that the good guys outnumber the bad guys in this particular one to a degree that probably has no precedent in history. I mean, even the worst, worst people, I'm sure in ISIS, even Osama bin Laden, even any bad guy you could imagine in history. Would be revolted by the idea of exterminating all of humanity. I mean, you know, that's a low bar. And so the good guys completely outnumber the bad guys when it comes to this, but the asymmetry and the fact that one catastrophic error could lead to unbelievably consequential things is what worries me here. But I too am very optimistic.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that's intuitive to us, and our intuitions are reliably defeated when exponential processes come along. So that's issue number one. And issue number two with something like this is it kind of only takes one. You know, that ball only has to go into the net once and we're doomed, which is not the case with mass shooters. It's not the case with, you know, commercial pilots run amok. It's not the case with really any threat that I can think of with the exception of nuclear war that has the one bad outcome and game over. And that means that we need to be unbelievably serious about these defenses. And we need to do things that might on the surface seem like a tremendous overreaction so that we can be prepared to nip anything that comes along in the bud. But I like you believe that's eminently doable.”
2021-06-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #193 – Rob Reid: The Existential Threat of Engineered Viruses and Lab Leaks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source