Dreaming Against the Machine - October 13, 2026


Episode 27： Eugenics, with Brandon Ogbunu

Episode 26： Space Ain't the Place (solo episode)

Episode Stats


Length

52 minutes

Words per minute

176.55

Word count

9,223

Sentence count

311

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

13

sentences flagged

Hate speech

25

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. Before we get
00:00:07.620 to introducing this week's guest, I just want to point out that documentary about Elon Musk
00:00:12.720 that I mentioned in last week's podcast, the one that I am somehow amazingly in the trailer
00:00:18.860 for, that is going into wide release around the US this Friday, October 16th. Also, there's
00:00:26.680 another documentary that I'm in that's also really fantastic called Ghost in the Machine
00:00:30.860 that is already available on PBS and YouTube. It is actually tightly related to the subject
00:00:38.900 of this week's episode. So yeah, if you like this week's episode, you may want to go check
00:00:44.620 out Ghost in the Machine as well. It's a good one. And with that, this week's guest is Brandon
00:00:51.580 Brandon Agbunu. Brandon is a professor of biology at Yale University and a friend. And he's also
00:00:59.100 someone who I knew I wanted to have on this podcast from the minute I came up with the idea
00:01:04.120 for the show. Like one of the first things I did was I wrote down a list of names of people who I
00:01:08.720 thought would make good guests to see how long it would be and how many ideas I had. And his was one
00:01:13.560 of the first names that I wrote down. And there's a few reasons for that. First, he's just the
00:01:18.880 perfect guest he's brilliant he's funny he's got a really great energy and we just have a lot of
00:01:25.900 fun talking and he also talks a lot which is you know great quality and a guest but because of all
00:01:33.300 of those wonderful qualities about brandon he also has a very rare ability to talk interestingly
00:01:40.480 and entertainingly about unpleasant things and so i brought him on this week to talk about one of the 0.99
00:01:48.480 most unpleasant things that there is as far as I'm concerned, which is eugenics. And I realize 1.00
00:01:54.340 that sounds incredibly dark and heavy, but I promise you, you are going to realize within a
00:02:01.000 minute or two of getting to, you know, hear Brandon talk that this week's episode is actually
00:02:08.440 going to be especially fun. So I don't want to keep you waiting any longer. Here's Brandon.
00:02:13.320 it. Brandon, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.
00:02:21.040 Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to it for a while and
00:02:26.480 loving what you're doing. Thank you, man. It's good to see you.
00:02:29.940 So for our listeners, I would introduce you. I would say you are a professor of biology at Yale
00:02:41.720 and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.
00:02:44.660 But why don't you tell her this
00:02:45.980 and there's a little more about, you know,
00:02:47.560 what that means and what you do.
00:02:49.140 So the way I describe my life,
00:02:51.040 it began as a joke,
00:02:52.140 but it's become somewhat closer
00:02:54.660 to a formal description the way I describe.
00:02:57.040 I think I have a day job and a night job.
00:03:00.060 And I think the day job,
00:03:01.280 I think the reason why I describe it that way is,
00:03:03.680 you know, the day job,
00:03:04.480 I'm a regular academic faculty member
00:03:06.500 who runs a lab and does all of the stuff.
00:03:09.420 And I run a group in the department
00:03:11.520 of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale.
00:03:13.920 I'm a computational biologist who studies
00:03:16.700 kind of the forces that shape epidemics
00:03:19.140 at the level of everything from the molecular
00:03:21.940 all the way up to kind of the social scale.
00:03:24.560 And that's kind of the crux of my research.
00:03:26.760 I think in the night job, the evening job
00:03:30.360 is increasingly fused to the day job,
00:03:33.480 but I think it is a different dimension to my identity.
00:03:36.160 And I think deeply about the interface
00:03:38.000 between science, society, and culture.
00:03:40.180 and how do those forces interact with each other?
00:03:43.800 And I think that takes on many forms, you know,
00:03:46.640 in terms of the products that I produce.
00:03:48.940 But I think it is increasingly becoming a formal part
00:03:51.360 of my scholarly identity, if you will.
00:03:54.500 And I think I do many different sorts of things in that space.
00:03:58.120 And I think my relationship with the Santa Fe Institute
00:04:00.020 has helped kind of bridge these two.
00:04:02.740 And there I conduct, you know, complexity research
00:04:05.220 on complex biological and social systems and epidemics
00:04:08.240 and social inequality and what have you with a lot of colleagues.
00:04:12.740 And I think it's grown my identity to the point where I, you know,
00:04:16.020 I began as an external professor several years ago,
00:04:19.000 and now I'm a member of the resident faculty.
00:04:21.580 So actually, you know, it really is a part, essentially, of who I am.
00:04:25.220 Senefe Institute, for those of you who don't know,
00:04:28.420 is the original Complex Systems Research Institute has been for, what,
00:04:34.260 I guess 40-ish years now.
00:04:35.960 Yeah.
00:04:36.440 and brandon has his affiliation there i did a journalism fellowship there what i guess
00:04:43.380 two years ago now that's actually how we met uh during that summer summer 2024
00:04:48.440 tell me a little bit more about what you see going on at the interface of science and society there
00:04:55.220 tell me more about that work the night job well i mean you know how i got into that is a mix of
00:05:00.860 just kind of personality traits and and things that i've encountered you know in my research
00:05:08.100 and i think as you know um i think the question of right you know how is it that we do our jobs
00:05:16.020 and why yeah i think there's just two kinds of people i don't really know how else to say it
00:05:20.920 and you know we're going to talk about how i don't like categories but this is one that i believe in
00:05:26.020 it's like there are people that walk in a room and are like you know high achieving people and
00:05:30.260 people who work hard you know it's like how can i do the thing to get ahead and there's people
00:05:34.860 who walk in a room who are like okay i want to do the thing to get ahead but why the hell are
00:05:39.660 we doing this yeah and they really are different kinds of people yeah and i think higher ed in
00:05:45.860 particular uh selects on the former and that is a select on the former i think those are the people
00:05:51.620 that make all the decisions kind of like that right it's that that kind of behavior is encouraged
00:05:55.660 I think for me from very early, it was like, I love learning.
00:05:59.220 I love publishing the manuscript.
00:06:01.660 I love all the standard things you're supposed to love about the job.
00:06:05.200 Yeah.
00:06:05.900 But I'm going to raise my hand or even internally raise my hand and say,
00:06:11.680 why is the entire field thinking about this problem this way?
00:06:15.740 Did God hand down the proper set of questions for field X or Y to think about?
00:06:21.760 Or is that a historical path dependence because somebody's advisor said that half a century ago?
00:06:27.260 Or why are we using this method to think about this question?
00:06:31.500 The weird thing is being in a very, very kind of card carrying member of this establishment, which I don't pretend that I'm not, by the way.
00:06:41.460 Yeah.
00:06:42.120 The weird thing is most of the people ask these kind of questions of people I don't like.
00:06:46.920 Right.
00:06:47.300 Like it's people who are right or are science skeptics.
00:06:51.180 Right.
00:06:51.760 and i'm like no that's not what i'm saying right and so this has put me in the awkward somewhat
00:06:57.560 awkward position of it's kind of like you better listen to me ask these kinds of questions or you
00:07:03.260 gonna have to ask you're gonna have them answer these questions so do you want it for me who's
00:07:09.000 one of you or do you want to answer this question from somebody who has a tinfoil hat and is talking
00:07:14.520 about right you know they don't believe in gravity right which is a real thing as you know yeah so
00:07:19.900 so i think that's the awkward it's not like it's led to a problem it's not like this has caused me
00:07:25.900 real real challenges i mean it's fine so i do a lot of writing in this space yeah how can we think
00:07:32.480 about more creatively about how to construct this scientific endeavor and i think it's something
00:07:37.540 that i've enjoyed thinking about and it's affected the type of work we're doing the laboratory give
00:07:41.780 me some examples of that and then uh and then we're gonna take this conversation to uncomfortable
00:07:47.080 places no no no this is remember you're talking to here this ain't uncomfortable for me you know
00:07:53.220 for me this is this is called a i think it's a thursday but i call it a tuesday this is what i
00:07:58.060 do yeah so when i'm thinking about examples of how i'm able to animate this identity at the
00:08:04.220 interface between science society culture like we'll start with something very vanilla which is
00:08:09.220 the conversation around multidisciplinarity right let's start something very basic right
00:08:14.120 that I think most people would agree on is that, you know,
00:08:17.280 discipline should interact and, and we need kind of to, you know,
00:08:21.640 sit down and talk across different disciplines, borrow methods.
00:08:24.640 I think at this point that's pretty widely accepted.
00:08:28.380 I think you're going to,
00:08:29.020 you're hard pressed to find anybody who would disagree with that at face
00:08:33.180 value. Yeah.
00:08:34.100 I think the challenge is or the opportunity is when you actually dig deeper
00:08:38.540 on that. And the question is kind of like, all right, well,
00:08:41.780 now do we need to think about writing?
00:08:44.120 talking to other people we didn't think about the disciplines themselves how they were constructed
00:08:48.500 like again god didn't strike down and create a department of biology and the department of
00:08:53.820 chemistry and the department of physics and like that's not those are those are historical things
00:08:58.580 some of them i'll defend and i'll certainly defend them administratively right right but
00:09:04.380 intellectually that's not how the world works yep the world is not discretized into understandings
00:09:10.860 that way and that's not just me being a gadfly or a contrarian i think this causes problems so
00:09:16.680 you know as a physicist you'll appreciate this it's like if you think about photosynthesis
00:09:21.220 this example i always use it's one of the the dopest things in the universe yes in terms of
00:09:27.740 just kind of what it's constructed its evolutionary trajectory how it happened what it does
00:09:32.160 thermodynamically and right and what have you in biochemically as you know there's quantum
00:09:37.820 mechanics yeah in photosynthesis absolutely so i need somebody to look me in the eye and tell me
00:09:44.000 if i'm a photosynthesis expert why i should be in a botany department and not a physics one
00:09:48.980 yeah there's no i mean like now the only answer you can give me is that historically people who
00:09:55.200 studied photosynthesis were in department x that's not an intellectual reason no so i'm not about
00:10:00.440 blowing things up for the sake of blowing them up what i'm you know i'm not one of those yeah
00:10:04.560 Again, administratively, I'll defend the way we've structured things.
00:10:08.540 And I think when you think that way, you can walk that towards the thinking into everything we do.
00:10:13.260 Everything we do with the sciences.
00:10:15.120 How a committee is constructed.
00:10:16.580 Why we give seminars the way we do.
00:10:18.100 The construction of the manuscript.
00:10:19.920 I love writing manuscripts.
00:10:21.600 I just got one accepted the other day.
00:10:23.100 I'm happy.
00:10:23.900 Nice.
00:10:24.360 But why do we write them that way?
00:10:25.660 To me, I could justify 15 other permutations.
00:10:29.540 So part of what I advocate in this space is just some experimentation.
00:10:36.140 And, you know, can we can we actually insert some style and some in some individuality?
00:10:41.700 And I think we're afraid that if we do that, then maybe we'll lose the reproducibility and the consistency, which I understand.
00:10:48.440 Yeah. But guess what? We got a reproducibility problem anyway.
00:10:52.320 OK, so that's where I'm at.
00:10:54.520 I think a much more experimentation in the fundamental manner that we do the science.
00:11:00.720 Speaking as a scientist who then became like a full-time writer, the like enforcement of
00:11:05.900 the dry style of academic papers never made very much sense to me.
00:11:12.240 You know, like I never liked it.
00:11:13.760 Yeah, it had something to do with reproducibility, but it also had something to do with like,
00:11:17.280 this is the way we do it because it's the way we've always done it.
00:11:20.240 And that's never going to be satisfying to me.
00:11:23.980 Yeah, I mean, I remember an old, you know, hip-hop executive was talking about his problems with the way a lot of artists behave or became in hip-hop.
00:11:33.480 And he was basically like, rock stars aren't supposed to be company people.
00:11:38.240 They're supposed to be against the system, right?
00:11:40.320 Yes.
00:11:40.740 Like, that's what a rock star is.
00:11:42.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:43.680 And I feel that way about scientists.
00:11:45.580 Yes.
00:11:46.240 You're supposed to be asking.
00:11:47.720 Yes.
00:11:48.160 if you're just going to do what everybody does
00:11:50.540 because that's deeply
00:11:52.440 that's more like religion to me
00:11:54.800 you know what I'm saying and I get it 0.91
00:11:56.980 it keeps you in line
00:11:58.220 trust me I understand
00:12:00.660 I'm saying all that right now and I'm going to edit it out of journal
00:12:03.160 I'm going to do the same things I've been doing
00:12:04.840 my whole career so I'm not
00:12:06.240 but you know don't look at me
00:12:08.800 like I'm crazy for asking the basic question
00:12:11.140 which is what I've done all of my
00:12:13.040 career I think now post tenure
00:12:14.760 and all that
00:12:15.460 i mean that really has nothing to do with it because i was doing this my whole career to be
00:12:19.880 honest with you but what i'm saying is definitely it's at a point where i'm empowered um to do this
00:12:25.180 at a greater scale okay so let's let's uh let's dive into one of these particular things that
00:12:34.700 shows up in science it shows up in technology it showed up in earlier episodes of this podcast
00:12:39.200 i know that you have spent a fair amount of time thinking about eugenics and like the history of
00:12:46.000 this and how it shows up in the history of your field and related fields talk to me a little bit
00:12:51.700 about that because like i i would love to have our listeners understand that a little bit better
00:12:57.840 yeah oh how much time we got and i'm just playing um the way i would describe i think i'll give a
00:13:05.340 whole thing is that i think eugenics is it's a term and an idea and a concept we hear invoked
00:13:11.640 a lot and a lot of different paradigms i think for reasons good and bad smart and not or reasons
00:13:18.580 i agree or rather the reasons i agree with or maybe agree with less but i think it refers to
00:13:23.820 a very particular you know intellectual tradition yeah so we can just kind of go through the history
00:13:31.900 But I think part of what makes eugenics so powerful is the conversation about the manner that it does or does not create the fundamental way we think about humans and who we are and what improvement is.
00:13:47.820 what makes this history so interesting is that it's so fused to the development of modern biology
00:13:57.940 right like fused it's not like a tertiary thing it's not an orthotic it is central yeah because
00:14:05.100 i mean it doesn't get any better you have charles darwin who you know is one of my people right and
00:14:11.700 i think there's a complicated history there as well and i've written about that yeah it's his
00:14:16.880 cousin second cousin yep right francis gordon that that came up with the term and i think
00:14:22.080 what's fascinating about that is in these two individuals you had this dichotomy whatever you
00:14:26.860 know there's a lot of great scholarship on darwin but darwin's career is defined by
00:14:31.640 this kind of modesty about how he felt about the outside of like evolution by nigel selection and
00:14:37.780 even in the origin of species we see him kind of like jocelyn with things he doesn't know how he
00:14:42.960 feels about a lot of things yeah and and he explores them and of course this sentiment is
00:14:48.620 the one where a lot of the more well ideas we find problematic manifested most clearly with
00:14:54.300 regards to race and gender francis gordon was like the complete opposite person and in terms
00:15:01.420 of skills and in terms of temperament darwin famously had no mathematical background as he
00:15:09.080 would describe it and he kind of right which kind of wished he had even though you know obviously
00:15:14.140 he didn't miss a beat given the skills that he did galton was kind of profoundly gifted in these
00:15:23.020 this ability or this proclivity to measure things yeah and measured everything and had this deep
00:15:30.000 kind of commitment to the notion that human beings were a species like any other which in many ways
00:15:36.780 true and because of
00:15:38.860 that we could use the standard
00:15:40.720 tools that we used to understand
00:15:42.560 natural systems at the time
00:15:44.800 to understand
00:15:46.180 the performance
00:15:48.640 of the hierarchy
00:15:50.500 of and potentially
00:15:52.440 means to which we could improve
00:15:54.580 the human species
00:15:55.860 and kind of had this
00:15:57.740 recorded and had these extremely
00:16:00.780 strongly deterministic views
00:16:02.640 on what human progress meant
00:16:04.980 yeah now
00:16:06.780 The important thing to recognize here, and I think this is a theme for a lot of the most problematic ideas, some of these you've articulated in your excellent book, is that it was based on some theory that was sound in another context.
00:16:24.460 So a lot of the modern population genetic canon, as we understand it, comes out of agricultural genetics.
00:16:32.640 Yep.
00:16:32.920 and the breeder and not just agriculture i mean even domestication of plants and animals
00:16:37.200 the notion that human beings can pick kind of types breed them and breed them and breed them
00:16:43.080 is more i put it up there with the wheel if not greater in terms of the thing that transformed
00:16:49.040 the way homo sapiens live so that fundamental idea that there are phenotypic differences that
00:16:55.600 are the product of underlying genetic differences and that you can identify what those are and
00:17:01.320 improve them via breeding is true yeah like i said it's a pattern the most broken ideas in the world 0.91
00:17:07.400 are not the ones that are wholly stupid they are the ones that are correct in context a 0.96
00:17:14.880 and the stupidity is taking it and walking it into context b now between kind of the right the 1.00
00:17:23.620 agriculture genetics and this evidence here and then you have the rise of mendel and mendel's my 1.00
00:17:29.260 guy like you know i'm saying so again yeah mendel didn't you know mendel was just doing what mendel
00:17:34.060 did you know this is this is pun and squares this is p-pen this is what we all learned at various
00:17:38.380 points in our education yeah mendel comes up with some fundamental rules for how genetics and
00:17:44.660 inheritance work gives us a vocabulary yeah now this creates the field of genetics as we know it
00:17:54.460 Meaning the notion that we can understand underlying genetic diversity, that this diversity explains what's happening at the observable level and that we can select on this is this is the foundation of kind of evolutionary genetics as we understand it.
00:18:12.440 So then, you know, what happens is you have something this era called the modern evolutionary synthesis in the early 20th century, the windows debated.
00:18:20.580 And that's where you get another cast of characters.
00:18:23.240 Yeah.
00:18:23.860 Right.
00:18:24.460 And that's where you get Ronald Fisher.
00:18:26.700 And I'm going to tell you right now, the way I talk about this and the way I write about this is,
00:18:30.820 and I think this is where some of the imprecision, even from my friends, come in.
00:18:35.460 You have to deal with, if you want to deconstruct these ideas,
00:18:39.700 and scholars like Adam Rutherford and scholars like Angela Saini and scholars like Evelyn Hammond
00:18:44.540 and people have thought about this deeply and carefully in their own work,
00:18:49.140 you have to deal with the whole shape of the problem.
00:18:52.180 If you can't break one off, meaning if you want to deal with eugenics and understand it properly, you have to understand the ideas that it was built on, ones that were correct.
00:19:02.520 If you want to deal with Ronald Fisher, I'm going to tell you right now, I hate to break it to y'all, and you'll hear me say this a hundred times.
00:19:09.780 Anybody who's done any empirical research in the last century is a student of Fisher.
00:19:15.200 Yep.
00:19:16.220 So let's get that out the way.
00:19:17.460 Yeah, I use Fisher stuff in my PhD thesis.
00:19:19.960 I use Fisher matrices.
00:19:20.920 everybody who does empirical research does meaning yeah and frankly that's true for galton with
00:19:27.200 regression yeah so my point being you have to deal with that fact when we're thinking about eugenics
00:19:34.300 these are not cartoon characters cartoon villains these are people who are dead right
00:19:41.740 About a lot of stuff
00:19:44.320 And were profoundly gifted
00:19:46.860 Yep
00:19:47.700 But again
00:19:49.040 That does not make their
00:19:50.860 In Gould's case 0.97
00:19:51.960 The invention of eugenics 0.85
00:19:53.320 And in Fisher's case 1.00
00:19:56.220 The empowering of it
00:19:57.740 Yeah
00:19:58.320 With this new suite
00:19:59.540 Of statistical instruments
00:20:00.680 That don't make it
00:20:01.860 Any more acceptable
00:20:03.000 What understanding
00:20:04.920 Fisher's powers does
00:20:06.960 And Fisher
00:20:07.440 Not only was a believed 0.83
00:20:08.800 In eugenics 0.97
00:20:09.180 He was a 1.00
00:20:09.700 He was a formal member 0.98
00:20:11.340 of the eugenics movement 0.82
00:20:13.160 globally. And for those 1.00
00:20:15.620 who don't know, right, what this is, is
00:20:17.100 Eugenics was an idea in Galton's
00:20:19.220 era, and it became a movement
00:20:21.440 to alter
00:20:22.960 the trajectory of the 0.91
00:20:25.420 human species and select for
00:20:27.400 desirable traits.
00:20:30.420 Not unlike
00:20:31.360 we did with the banana
00:20:32.880 and the apple and the
00:20:35.560 and the poodle.
00:20:37.500 Right? I mean,
00:20:38.860 this was the logic.
00:20:40.540 yeah it started with class in the united kingdom which has kind of been their hierarchical
00:20:47.100 tradition and remains so in many ways yep and i think race be right kind of emerged you know
00:20:52.880 pretty much right away i think the conversation around race race and racism and the ranking of
00:20:56.960 races had been around for quite a bit a time then and so it was somewhat a natural extension the
00:21:01.920 notion is that um you know homo sapiens is organized into a discrete hierarchy this is
00:21:10.160 related to their level of sophistication evolutionarily and more generally that we can
00:21:19.640 improve and select for a more optimum species through selective breeding and and that means
00:21:26.860 the prevention of breeding right between individuals deemed to be unfit which of course
00:21:34.300 Most lamentably, most regrettably
00:21:36.340 And most violently 1.00
00:21:37.400 Involved the harm of women's 1.00
00:21:40.820 Bodies 1.00
00:21:41.520 Many, many, many thousands across the world
00:21:45.100 Which is
00:21:47.240 That's the most
00:21:48.760 Direct bodily
00:21:50.700 Consequence, but I think the
00:21:52.620 Indirect ones 0.70
00:21:53.840 Messegnation laws
00:21:55.940 And basically a suite
00:21:58.820 Of social policies that persist to this
00:22:00.780 Day about the notion
00:22:02.700 that homo sapiens of a certain social class or race are fixed in their life trajectory and so
00:22:09.900 therefore why should you implement social policy we need to be doing is just making better people
00:22:15.940 and i think that is one that is permeated through time and does manifest you know i'm gonna take it
00:22:22.940 modern right so it manifests in our love affair with genetics as a kind of a destiny
00:22:31.600 bro i'm a population genesis yo okay yeah i believe and you heard me say this i believe
00:22:38.800 dna is the most powerful piece of information in the universe yep full stop so you'll never
00:22:44.000 get me to say nothing bad about genetics as a right a an informational interesting kind of
00:22:49.780 object to study the problem is because of this eugenic half dependence we begin to equate that
00:22:57.680 with destiny here's the rub without that fervency without that enthusiasm without that giddiness
00:23:03.500 we don't have a human genome project yeah that's where that came from we don't have james watson
00:23:10.480 and you know yeah talk about another character right who's kind of flagrantly in the eugenic
00:23:17.080 tradition and thinking about people was like frankly worse i think than a lot of those other
00:23:23.060 cats yeah right i would if i had to rank people i don't like which is hard right i think he's worse
00:23:29.360 ideologically right than a lot of these cats but what i would say about him is he was such a believer
00:23:35.900 in the power of genetic he's one of the great kind of kind of scientific jingoists we've ever had he
00:23:44.000 met he he's the reason why we all love the gene as a thing which i can confess has had benefits
00:23:52.240 Across the scientific world
00:23:53.800 But it happens to be
00:23:56.580 And this is kind of what we get today
00:23:58.020 A imprecise
00:24:00.680 Charitably
00:24:02.840 A wrong picture
00:24:04.420 Of how life
00:24:06.640 Is constructed
00:24:07.700 In Homo sapiens
00:24:09.740 Which is a profoundly complex species
00:24:12.020 So
00:24:13.020 A little bit of a word salad
00:24:15.340 But I gave you a brief history
00:24:16.540 And kind of how it relates to today
00:24:17.720 But it manifests in a lot
00:24:19.540 Of contemporary endeavors
00:24:22.120 But say more about that last thing,
00:24:23.760 the very last thing you said about, like, you know,
00:24:26.240 this is a profound misunderstanding
00:24:27.420 of how things work in Homo sapiens.
00:24:30.100 Say more about that,
00:24:31.400 because, like, I think I know where you're going,
00:24:33.000 but, like, this is something that I really want to hammer home.
00:24:36.460 So let's go back to Mendel, right?
00:24:38.040 Yeah.
00:24:38.700 And I think Mendel, again, that's my guy.
00:24:42.440 You know, Mendel's rules of inheritance are beautiful.
00:24:45.640 And the notion of pointed squares,
00:24:48.180 that is true.
00:24:50.300 Yep.
00:24:51.120 The problem is, it's almost like beginner's luck, in a sense, where you stumble on a fundamental kind of thing that works.
00:24:59.940 And the problem with beginner's luck, be that when you're at the casino, right?
00:25:03.700 You hit.
00:25:05.740 It's not that it was luck, but I think there's an analogy here.
00:25:08.160 It's not that it was luck, but if you hit on something early, you think it's your day.
00:25:12.820 You'd be like, oh, word?
00:25:14.140 I got this?
00:25:14.800 Okay, cool.
00:25:15.300 And what happened was, we stumbled on this really important and profound understanding of how true.
00:25:21.120 traits and inheritance works and a right but that is true for a vanishingly small number of human
00:25:28.940 traits vanishing most famously sickle cell right and sickle cell anemia and several others of that
00:25:36.300 are very important to understand the problem is the vast majority of traits we care about
00:25:42.600 disease behavioral morphological do not work the way the ones in mendel's experiments work
00:25:51.120 i mean that's just not how it works yeah that's not ideological that's not taking a shot at
00:25:56.240 mendel again that's my guy yeah that was a beautiful set of experiments but that doesn't
00:26:01.640 explain height or skin color let alone depression risk or who's gonna be a physicist or who's gonna
00:26:10.960 be LeBron James yeah that's just not how it works and what I and the reason why I marched that
00:26:16.260 forward is we had this falsely deterministic and simple view of how in the last half a cent more
00:26:24.940 than half a century has been like I bet it works this simple oops wrong I bet it works this that's
00:26:30.760 what you can describe pretty much since 1960 you can describe the entire post Watson and Crick
00:26:37.160 you can describe that entire era as i bet it works this way wait what i bet it works this way wait
00:26:44.260 what i bet it works this way wait what there was an era i'm this is this is i'm and i'm being
00:26:50.280 charitable i'm not being you know i'm saying so absolutely yeah we've marched through oh it works
00:26:56.460 this way there was an era in population genetic evolutionary genetics in the early 2000s called
00:27:02.060 the candidate gene era the candidate gene era was a large window of time where i mean you know
00:27:08.840 volumes there's a volume of work where people were like we can identify singular genes yeah that
00:27:15.640 explain these really important human phenotypes including disease who the hell don't want to get
00:27:22.060 wet a disease of course we do so what i'm saying is the search for those things i think i can defend
00:27:28.900 I'm not mad at anybody for being curious about what the genetic underpinnings are.
00:27:33.540 Yeah.
00:27:33.940 What we learned is that era, gazillions of dollars later, gazillions of citations later, gazillions of faculty jobs later.
00:27:43.500 It's not the way it works.
00:27:44.580 That does not explain the traits.
00:27:47.240 So then we move into a new era, right, which was the writers of the genome wide association study.
00:27:53.360 And I think we're very much still in this era.
00:27:56.460 Now, there's two parallel genetic traditions for thinking about this.
00:27:59.960 I think there's the behavioral genetics tradition, which is about twin studies, right?
00:28:03.820 The idea is, you know, twins are twins.
00:28:05.480 They're genetically identical.
00:28:06.460 There's these natural experiments.
00:28:08.220 And those showed us, again, to the credit of my training and my friend's training,
00:28:13.920 those have demonstrated that there's a powerful genetic role in many phenotypes we care about.
00:28:20.960 Role, right?
00:28:22.340 So I'll tell you all, you're much more likely to be the same size.
00:28:26.060 and similar interests and similar kind of likelihood
00:28:30.220 of getting an ailment as an identical twin.
00:28:34.680 No way around that.
00:28:36.080 I think the problem is when genome-wide,
00:28:38.980 what a genome-wide association studies did
00:28:41.120 is they started to scan the genomes of tens of thousands
00:28:44.720 and now hundreds of thousands and now millions of people
00:28:47.160 and say, all right, if all y'all got type 2 diabetes,
00:28:50.580 we should be able to shake out some genes
00:28:53.260 that are associated with type 2 diabetes there was an article i think it was like 2012 somebody
00:29:00.400 wrote the title of the article was the genetics of type 2 diabetes are a mess that was the name
00:29:06.260 of the article what does that mean of course there are genetic underpinnings associated with type 2
00:29:12.020 diabetes nobody's gonna deny that but the notion that we're gonna identify single things that
00:29:18.680 explain that in a reproducible way it's so wacky that there are certain diseases where there are
00:29:24.660 genetic underpinnings but they differ from person to person so there's not it's not kind of the
00:29:30.060 point is to identify right things that are consistent and we we for many many phenotypes
00:29:35.480 of inches we already finding that so what we now have emerged from this is the era of the
00:29:40.060 polygenic risk score polygenic risk score says all right cool we can't understand singular genes
00:29:46.120 But we can actually kind of, you know, we can create a compound metric based on likelihoods of which you have that you're going to be six foot eight or that you're going to have disease X or Y or that you're going to be depressed or you're going to score high on, you know, you have educational attainment, which is a big country.
00:30:05.600 So I'm saying this to say we're at a point now where we are, the complexity underlying what it means to be a person, the way genetic contributes to who we are, we continue to grapple with that.
00:30:18.080 And I think we're, and a lot of smart people, even in the GWAS and polygenic world, understand this.
00:30:23.320 But we are nonetheless still on this trajectory that started with Galton
00:30:28.620 Where we expect to find this, you know
00:30:32.940 We expect to find this river of gold
00:30:36.200 Genetically, right?
00:30:38.860 Where we're just going to look under a rock 0.99
00:30:41.220 And we're going to find out
00:30:42.980 And the science is telling us that ain't the way it works
00:30:45.920 The way life is constructed is that it's this profound interaction
00:30:51.000 That is non-linear
00:30:52.600 and noisy and context dependent between the genes we have
00:30:57.260 and all of the gazillions of permutations of things we call environment.
00:31:03.460 And that is the reality of biology.
00:31:06.600 And I think we're at a moment now where we're grasping that.
00:31:08.420 Now, where that becomes a problem, I mean, there's a million ways that becomes a problem, right?
00:31:12.900 There's proposals for genetic discrimination.
00:31:15.860 There's a proposal of screening kids when they're babies and saying,
00:31:18.760 oh, well, you're likely to be not good at math.
00:31:22.600 we're going to put you in the not good math class it's like under the notion of compassion well this
00:31:27.180 right you're going to have kids that are going to have special needs we might as well identify
00:31:30.600 those special needs earlier i'm like that's not the way it works so there's that there's that
00:31:34.580 problematic dimension but i think much more consequential is genome modification yeah and
00:31:41.280 this is the one that in fact it faces directly kind of think which you're with the things that
00:31:45.280 you've written about if we can't tell or the it's all probabilistic and there's error bars
00:31:51.160 over this suite of mutations that you have to make you smart how the hell am i gonna now take
00:31:59.120 that blueprint from adam becker and walk that into my baby and wire that in at the genome and
00:32:06.020 be like yeah i'm gonna get an adam becker that level of of prediction it's it's so irresponsible
00:32:15.840 statistically the only reason that exists is because of a deeply eugenic wish that we can
00:32:24.900 fix things right with simple engineering solutions and that is doomed to fail that's
00:32:32.240 doomed to harm and again in part because it just happens to be not the way nature works
00:32:38.060 unfortunately we still live in capitalism and that means we need to talk about our partners
00:32:44.440 and sponsors. But fortunately, our partners and sponsors are great. And if you want to support
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00:33:31.660 I love this and it's also incredibly depressing and fascinating all at the same time. But I think
00:33:37.600 you know that i mean you know i mean this is yeah it's the experience of being a person you know 0.97
00:33:42.720 what i'm saying like this is what we do and we're gonna win this shit it's part of my french am i 0.92
00:33:46.620 allowed to say that yeah you know uh we're gonna win this yeah yeah we can we we swear on this 0.96
00:33:52.200 podcast it's very allowed yeah yeah we're good you know just want to make sure i don't know if
00:33:56.340 it was day job or night job brandon that was working no i mean what i mean by that is you
00:34:02.920 know despite that there's like look i'm a little bit of a gaff lie not by not intentionally but
00:34:09.920 i'm not with the reflexive doomsdaying of everything i'm one of these people where
00:34:14.880 when you doomsday things you make them easier to happen yep it's self-fulfilling i'm one of
00:34:19.420 them people like once you say oh god like you know oh this new paper came out oh eugenics is
00:34:23.380 back i'm like well it's gonna be back if you keep saying that and i think that discredits the work
00:34:28.540 of a lot of really smart people and caring people who are in these fields. And I don't agree with
00:34:33.180 everything they do. Like you take people in behavioral genetics. There's a scientist named
00:34:38.040 Robert Plowman, one of the towering people in behavioral genetics, is very genetic determinist.
00:34:46.120 He believes that polygenic risk is the key to unlocking our understanding of what humans are
00:34:52.860 how we work but i'll tell you right now robert plowman ain't a eugenicist i don't know him you
00:34:59.460 know maybe i'll meet him one day but i've read a lot of his work i don't agree with him but i don't
00:35:06.100 think that i don't i fundamentally do not believe his intent is harm and again that intent doesn't
00:35:10.860 doesn't mean anything sometimes sure sure you know but sometimes it does meaning i think we
00:35:15.960 have improved the conversation and i think there's a route through which we can as a
00:35:22.080 broader scientific community come up with a more responsible understanding of this.
00:35:28.060 That brings me to the, maybe a tougher question then. What do we do about this? We have this
00:35:34.960 entire field genetics that you were calling it path dependence. And of course, you know,
00:35:39.480 as a physicist, I love that term, but another way of looking at it is, you know, it's,
00:35:43.680 it's something that inherited something from its founders, right? You know,
00:35:50.700 and these founders had ideas that are inextricably tied up with eugenics.
00:35:56.440 And, you know, we're talking about Fisher and we're talking about Galton.
00:36:00.460 This also shows up in, as you were saying, experimental design.
00:36:04.500 It shows up in statistics.
00:36:06.120 It shows up everywhere.
00:36:07.700 How do we grapple with that, right?
00:36:10.940 Obviously, like you were saying at the beginning, like, you know, you don't,
00:36:15.300 you're not like one of these people that shows up in my crackpot folder in my email
00:36:19.100 who's saying that, you know, gravity's not real
00:36:20.820 or Einstein was wrong about everything.
00:36:22.820 And, or, you know, like, I don't know,
00:36:25.560 the current head of the Department of Health
00:36:27.520 and Human Services.
00:36:28.780 So we don't want to throw out everything that we've got,
00:36:32.780 but we got to find a way to grapple with this.
00:36:36.000 How do you square that circle?
00:36:37.100 How do you think about that?
00:36:38.400 You know, when I'm being a grumpy, old,
00:36:40.680 joking, conservative professor, right?
00:36:44.580 One of the questions I get,
00:36:47.400 I mean, I got this question.
00:36:48.320 And it was like, is it all just encourageably broken so we should just pick it up and go home?
00:36:54.280 You know what I'm saying?
00:36:55.120 Like, you know, is it all just encourageably broke because of this path dependence, because of this contingency on a deeply broken past?
00:37:03.520 And what I would say to that is, number one, again, that does not properly acknowledge the large number of people who have been smart about this problem for a long time and have done responsible work to clarify for us.
00:37:24.660 For all the eugenic stuff, I can't tell you the status quo of population genetics is like that.
00:37:31.740 It's not.
00:37:32.600 You know what I'm saying? I think they're people who differ. But it's not like, you know, it's not. No, those people are fringe. Now, there's still too many of them. And those and those too many people still have too much influence. Yeah. But I have to properly assess if I'm in a war, I have to assess who I'm fighting. This is right. And they still cause too much bodily harm, as we learn in the Buffalo and the South Carolina masochists, race masochists and several others. So there's too many problems being caused by.
00:38:00.080 But I think that there has been a triumph of the side.
00:38:03.980 There is a triumph.
00:38:05.420 I'm not trying to say we've won, but a growing triumph in the notion that this is not the way the biology works.
00:38:11.600 Yeah.
00:38:12.020 And that's not ideological.
00:38:13.660 It's just that is not the way it buys.
00:38:15.060 So my point is, I think it's the battle still going on.
00:38:17.960 But we got a lot of people.
00:38:19.840 So that's number one.
00:38:20.880 I think we have to acknowledge kind of where we are in the debate.
00:38:23.380 Still too many nonsense people, you know, bigots in the world. 0.83
00:38:27.880 Way too many. 0.99
00:38:28.640 Yep.
00:38:28.840 Okay.
00:38:29.400 But what I'm saying, we got to acknowledge the people who have helped us empower us where we are.
00:38:34.040 So that's number one.
00:38:35.220 Number two, I think most importantly, because we are on the right side for the black women, we're on the right side of the science. 0.89
00:38:44.580 That stuff that, right, that thinks we're going to solve complex human diseases and depression with genome modification, it's not going to work.
00:38:56.640 Yeah.
00:38:56.740 it's just flatly wrong now what i don't want is to have to go half a century of getting it wrong
00:39:03.240 to learn yeah you know what i'm saying i don't want that so hopefully we can i think that's
00:39:09.760 where dialogue and doing working hard at this level can help but it is not going to work and
00:39:14.280 for all the problems i have with science when it comes to the big stuff right for the big big big
00:39:22.260 stuff there actually is a marketplace of ideas for the big stuff you know what i'm saying that
00:39:26.840 stuff wins i think what's happening in infectious disease is like terrible now for a thousand
00:39:31.820 reasons the reason why it won and it got to a point of success vaccinology and these sorts of
00:39:38.060 sciences is because you had it worked and you had people who had epidemics and outbreaks in their
00:39:43.820 childhood had children and grandchildren who didn't experience that and it was like yo this works
00:39:49.080 i think part of what's happened in epidemiology we've gotten away from an era where people kids
00:39:54.720 got sick and died right yep so you hope that we don't and we're actually experiencing that
00:39:58.200 with measles now right in fact even rfks walk things back yep even he's been like yo actually
00:40:03.660 this vaccine's i it's this one and this one and this one so my point is we're even seeing the
00:40:08.780 triumph of things that work play out amongst clowns yep meaning the way i square that circle
00:40:16.480 is look there's some things bro we talking about dark matter and all that i don't know i don't know
00:40:21.340 what the stakes are i've read a little bit of the uh the string theory debate that's you have that
00:40:26.760 with your friends i'm not involved i'm not doing that one meaning i know there's a lot of debates
00:40:32.320 in science part of the problem with some of them even if they are very right and wrong part of the
00:40:37.940 problem is that the stakes of getting them wrong are not clear right they're not immediate this one
00:40:44.400 it's like Alan Turing.
00:40:46.980 You could think that was a cute little paper or,
00:40:49.680 you know,
00:40:49.820 those foundational papers,
00:40:51.000 it was immediately clear what it led to.
00:40:54.860 And so what I'm saying is the way I square that with the historical path,
00:40:58.460 the dependence of this broken idea,
00:41:00.140 the cast of evil characters,
00:41:01.980 the harm caused to women in particular directly and indirectly to many
00:41:06.220 different communities.
00:41:07.260 I mean,
00:41:07.440 you,
00:41:07.600 you,
00:41:08.080 you,
00:41:08.100 I mean, 0.98
00:41:08.540 eugenics is at the core of the Holocaust, 0.97
00:41:10.740 man. 0.98
00:41:11.220 Yeah.
00:41:11.620 So,
00:41:11.840 I mean,
00:41:12.060 so,
00:41:12.420 you know what I'm saying?
00:41:12.900 So that's,
00:41:13.500 that's direct.
00:41:14.400 So what I'm saying is, and other kind of bodily violence.
00:41:17.720 It is such a pernicious, sneaky idea.
00:41:21.060 It crawls in in informal spaces into the ways we treat each other.
00:41:25.180 So my point is, we didn't need eugenics to justify racism. 0.59
00:41:28.180 That would have happened anyway. 0.95
00:41:29.460 Yep.
00:41:30.300 Human beings got no problem mistreating each other.
00:41:32.280 But providing our scientific rationale aided those people that want to do harm.
00:41:37.420 So my point is, you have all that damage, but at the end of the day, it's wrong.
00:41:41.400 Yep.
00:41:42.040 Don't work.
00:41:42.480 and I think science is now like
00:41:44.320 well, but it could be this, well, but it could be this
00:41:46.060 and what is emerging is a more
00:41:48.200 capacious population
00:41:50.240 genetics. I don't think we've said that
00:41:52.380 formally yet, but if you look
00:41:54.220 at it, it's much more capacious
00:41:56.260 even Robert Plowman
00:41:57.500 Robert Plowman, the biggest, most famous
00:42:00.400 genetic determinist of his era
00:42:02.200 is like, yeah, polygenic scores don't
00:42:04.240 really work when you're comparing
00:42:05.980 different ethnic groups
00:42:06.940 so he's like, I'm out of
00:42:10.260 the race thing, y'all can do that on your own
00:42:12.480 you see you know you see what i'm saying so even him who's a big genetic determinants is like nah
00:42:18.600 i'm not and who knows maybe he does believe things but he doesn't want to touch it for public reasons
00:42:23.260 but reading him i think he's just like yeah i i think there's too many confounders when you're
00:42:28.780 looking across populations i'm not prepared to say that what happens here applies here so i'm
00:42:34.660 saying we have emerged at a new level where we're ready to have a much more rich capacious dialogue
00:42:39.620 on what genetics is yeah no i so don't be depressed no this is good i'm not depressed
00:42:46.780 this is good i mean this is this podcast is about finding ways to be hopeful about the future and
00:42:51.940 you've just made me much more hopeful about the future genetics this is good it's just like
00:42:56.240 anything bro i mean what was it uh you know look at all the drugs that get recalled yeah human
00:43:01.900 beings make mistakes and the the hope is the hope of like drug trials the reason why you have
00:43:08.340 bioethics is we want to minimize
00:43:10.280 the harm
00:43:11.540 prior to
00:43:14.020 the harm happening to people.
00:43:16.480 That's what clinical trials are
00:43:18.360 about. Let's actually march this
00:43:20.460 thing through and make sure we know what the hell we're doing.
00:43:23.160 And that's another triumph, right?
00:43:24.500 I had a colleague just
00:43:26.360 tell me something crazy.
00:43:28.500 He was like, the fundamental study
00:43:30.440 that linked sugar to
00:43:32.500 cavities wouldn't
00:43:34.680 have been approved ethically today. That joint
00:43:36.420 was on individual yeah it was for individuals we might deem special needs meaning like bro like we
00:43:42.460 like a lot it's a real real bad past when it comes to the way across the board the way we've
00:43:48.900 treated people when it comes to science and in particular biology yeah we've come a long way we
00:43:54.920 have a real rich uh ethical framework we can have a dialogue about things and of course we need to
00:44:01.300 protect them but we are in a place because people sacrificed and gave a lot for us to be able to
00:44:07.100 have what we have now so we need to protect it and improve it i love that this is no this is great
00:44:14.040 this is why i wanted you on the podcast man i knew that i knew that you were going to be perfect for
00:44:17.720 this okay so we only have a few minutes left so i want to wrap up with some lighter questions for
00:44:24.020 you here i think you know this but like i mean you know it shows up in my book which by the way
00:44:30.440 i don't remember if i told you this last time i saw you but thank you for the review that you
00:44:35.080 wrote of it it was a lovely review brandon thank you for writing it i mean you know just being
00:44:39.540 honest and if i didn't love it i wouldn't have said that you know i'm saying so no but i think
00:44:44.140 the timing i can't get you i i can harshly give you credit for you saw some of it but you couldn't
00:44:49.960 have seen how perfect the timing was no started that but part of that is taste and you that's
00:44:55.420 what a good writer has is taste but i think the way you i think the way your technical expertise
00:45:01.040 allowed us to understand and get to the bottom of a lot of this stuff i think is where the magic
00:45:06.220 lives there so no thank you for that thank you yeah well look um we'll have to have you back
00:45:12.920 on just to say more nice things about my book but uh okay so one of the questions that i like to
00:45:23.760 to close out interviews with on this show or conversations on this show with, is I like
00:45:28.700 to ask about what science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, whatever term you want
00:45:34.760 to use, people have been into lately or what's been influential on them and their lives.
00:45:39.080 Because, you know, it shows up a lot in the book, shows up a lot in the podcast.
00:45:42.780 You know, science fiction is not a manual for the future, but it does affect how we
00:45:46.280 think about the future.
00:45:47.580 Woo!
00:45:48.160 And I also know that you ran, you helped run, and you and I are going to try to run
00:45:53.040 again uh at sci-fi workshop at santa fe yeah yeah yeah no no no i mean i can't take credit for that
00:45:59.500 that's my colleagues uh christopher kempis and ted chang um at sfi who ran this exceptional work
00:46:06.920 workshop called thought experience thought experiments in science and fiction and this
00:46:13.420 reason why i kind of you know gave that response uh is because that gathering i'm gonna tell you
00:46:19.480 Right now, science fiction writers are, like, the smartest people I've ever been in a room with.
00:46:23.940 Like, I'm sitting in this conference, like, yo, they read everything.
00:46:26.500 And they understand things at a level of granularity that's just, like, it don't even make any sense, you know?
00:46:32.880 And it's just so impressive.
00:46:34.600 So, there's many, many, many traditions that have influenced me, you know?
00:46:38.840 I think where I go with it, let's start with, because we've been talking about genetics.
00:46:47.460 Yeah.
00:46:47.780 And because we've been talking about genetic determinism, right, I think, I think there's a couple of traditions. I think, you know, Dune is one, right, that has a deep, deep, that's in the news, that has a deep, deep kind of bioethical and ecological dimension that I think is profound. In the comic book realm, you know, I'm watching X-Men 97, I hope you are, you know what I'm saying?
00:47:08.860 yeah yeah yeah i mean and you know and just the way that it manages kind of bioethical concerns
00:47:16.100 you know the kind of the consequences of a type of genetic discrimination is really what that
00:47:21.200 the entire conflict the next minute is about i think is deeply profound the way it kind of
00:47:25.980 manages the two different sorts of ways that this is negotiated with you know with magneto's camp
00:47:31.780 and and professor x's camp yeah i think marching upward i wrote a article a technical article
00:47:37.660 about Gattaca, which I think profoundly captured
00:47:43.660 ominous things that we should be careful about.
00:47:46.920 What's profound about Gattaca is there's a quote
00:47:49.560 at the end of the introduction where, you know,
00:47:52.080 he basically says, things like race don't even matter no more.
00:47:55.640 We've now got discrimination down to a science.
00:47:58.180 And that caused me a lot of conflict because I'm like, 0.98
00:48:00.500 damn, there's no racism in this world. 0.97
00:48:02.840 That seems cool. 1.00
00:48:04.460 but if you get a level of genetic granularity you now can just go right down to the dna level
00:48:12.620 and decide who belongs and who doesn't so the idea there is that discrimination is kind of
00:48:17.380 universal and it's not about any particular sort of discrimination and that very well might be
00:48:23.160 but lastly is an article i'm writing that's about to hit press any day now where i wrote about
00:48:28.740 Jurassic Park
00:48:29.800 and I re-read all
00:48:32.720 I re-read the novels and I did
00:48:34.860 this to write this article and
00:48:36.760 what's profound about this
00:48:38.940 in terms of another technological
00:48:40.540 frontier is
00:48:43.100 how kind of
00:48:45.120 you know
00:48:45.780 clairvoyant he was about
00:48:49.080 the technology of de-extinction
00:48:51.440 which has been in the news
00:48:53.500 you know with colossal biosciences
00:48:55.420 and the de-extinction of the direwolf
00:48:57.660 and that's a whole nother show yeah it is but what you bring me back to talk about that but
00:49:03.700 what i'll say is this i think the pr for it started off very good and it kind of hasn't
00:49:08.640 aged very well because it was not a de-extinction event what they did is they took it took gray
00:49:12.520 wolves and dropped a bunch of jeans in there and made it look like a direwolf that's really what
00:49:15.680 they did and that's an accurate summary and i'm not suggesting that great genetics wasn't done 0.54
00:49:21.320 i'm not suggesting that technology wasn't cool but you did not make no damn direwolf yeah so
00:49:25.260 i'm saying is to say i think jurassic park deals with not right not only kind of in a clairvoyant
00:49:31.540 way some of the technology it introduces these conversations about what human beings should and
00:49:39.020 shouldn't be doing what does it mean to bring a kind of a species back from the dead why that's
00:49:44.320 a bad idea and of course it catches it in this horror context but i think if you read it today
00:49:50.180 it speaks to the moment in ways that i feel like are really germane to what we're thinking about
00:49:55.740 so i just gave you a smattering and i gave you obvious ones we could go into d we can go into
00:50:00.600 piers anthony we can go into larry niven you know i'm saying we can go to my man you know i'm saying
00:50:05.660 we can go and we could we could do all that of course you know my man sam delaney we could do
00:50:09.700 that yeah yeah yeah we could um but like but i like to give people you don't gotta be
00:50:15.200 all into that
00:50:17.000 to have access
00:50:19.100 to very, very sophisticated.
00:50:21.600 So start there
00:50:22.500 and then, you know,
00:50:23.980 and then, you know,
00:50:24.980 follow other authors
00:50:26.060 and readers from there.
00:50:27.260 I love that answer.
00:50:28.300 Well, I think that's a great place
00:50:30.000 to end it.
00:50:30.720 So, yeah, Brandon,
00:50:32.220 thank you so much
00:50:33.180 for making the time
00:50:33.840 to come in on the show.
00:50:35.120 Oh, what a pleasure.
00:50:36.240 What a pleasure.
00:50:36.860 I love what you're doing.
00:50:38.160 Thanks.
00:50:38.460 I love the conversations
00:50:39.200 being had, the guests,
00:50:41.420 and congratulations
00:50:42.420 on all the successes
00:50:43.860 and with this as well.
00:50:45.900 And no, let me know how I can support you
00:50:48.100 in the future, my man.
00:50:49.360 Thank you, Brandon.
00:50:50.180 That means a lot.
00:50:51.000 And I'll see you soon.
00:50:52.760 All right.
00:50:54.240 Thanks again to this week's guest, Brandon Agbunu.
00:50:56.980 Next week, we were going to have another normal episode
00:51:00.440 with a guest and a conversation,
00:51:02.440 but there has been a lot going on
00:51:04.520 with this AI Doom narrative
00:51:05.740 that you all know I think is nonsense.
00:51:09.080 And there's also been a lot of talk
00:51:10.780 about who has been pushing it,
00:51:13.120 the AI doomers, and whether or not they're in a cult.
00:51:17.460 And I think we got to talk about that.
00:51:20.400 So next week, it's going to be a solo episode.
00:51:23.540 And we're going to talk about what's going on with these guys.
00:51:27.120 See you then.
00:51:28.800 To submit questions for future guests and to suggest other guests,
00:51:33.260 and to see more pictures of Babka, join the conversation on Patreon.
00:51:38.540 You can also find us on YouTube, on Instagram at DATMPod,
00:51:42.480 on the web and on Blue Sky at dreamingagainstthemachine.com
00:51:46.780 or just find us wherever you get your podcasts.
00:51:50.240 Dreaming Against the Machine is a proud member of Multitude Productions.
00:51:54.240 Our executive producer is Nick Karisimi.
00:51:57.060 Our theme music is by Jared Emerson Johnson.
00:52:00.060 Our show logo is by Nick James.
00:52:02.800 And our fearless leader is Babka, the greatest cat in the observable universe.
00:52:07.620 I'm Adam Becker, and I'll see you next week.
00:52:12.480 Amen.