Lex Fridman Podcast #373 - #373 – Manolis Kellis: Evolution of Human Civilization and Superintelligent AI Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Manolis Kalis, his fifth time on this podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. He's one of the greatest living scientists in the world, but he's also a humble, kind, caring human being that I have the greatest of honors and pleasures of being able to call a friend. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Eight Sleep for naps, NetSuite for business management software, ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs, and InsideTracker for biological data. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfreeman dot com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting. I often fail, but I try. And if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod Three mattress, which I think of as a teleportation device, into a land of dreams, a place where the mind goes to escape. The spacetime physics of this reality of the waking world. Anything is possible in the place of dreams. The darkness that lurks in the Jungian shadow is possible. The hope, the triumph, symbolized as the light at the end of the tunnel is possible. All of it is possible. It's all up to you. I'm kind of somebody that likes both the the good and the bad of dreaming. There's a cleansing aspect of a bad dream. You wake up freaking out a little bit, but then you realize how awesome this life is. That whatever happened in the dream world is not real. 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I need so much help because running a business any kind of business whether it's a creative business or robotics factory or any kind of AI software company anything you do has so many components and I would say many of them don't involve any of the kind of cutting edge engineering and design and brainstorming and innovation and research and all that kind of stuff you have to do all the basic minutia the glue that ties together people and makes the whole thing run and I think you should use the best tools for that job and NetSuite is something I can definitely recommend as a great tool you can start now with no payment or interest for six months go to netsuite dot com slash lex to access their one of a kind financing program that's netsuite dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN, my comrade, my friend, the piece of software that has accompanied me through darkness and light for many years, way before I had a podcast, way before I have found my way, though I am still forever lost, and you if you too are forever lost perhaps it will also warm your heart as a dead mind first of all practically speaking let's put the romantic stuff aside you should be using a VPN on the internet and ExpressVPN is the VPN I've used and can highly highly highly recommend by the way I apologize for the coarseness of my voice I've been feeling a little bit under the weather whatever the heck that expression actually means there's always ChatGPT that can ask the question but I'm not going to I'm just going to go with it going to wing it going to wing it is another funny expression right wing it what does that mean probably has to do with birds and the fact that bird flight is a kind of chaotic process that's not amenable to clear dynamical 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anything you know but basically health stuff medicine I think and that's the obvious way you should be figuring out what to do with your body is at least in large part based on the data that comes from your body and not just once but many times over and over and over and over InsideTracker pioneering the data collection sort of the blood test then then can extract all kinds of information give you advice I highly recommend them get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker dot com slash lex this is a lex Freeman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Manolis Kalis good to see you first of all Lex I've missed you I think you've changed the lives of so many people that I know and it's truly like such a pleasure to be back such a pleasure to see you grow to sort of reach so many different aspects of your own personality thank you for the love you always give me so much support and love I just can't I I I'm forever grateful for that it's lovely to see a fellow human being who has that love who basically does not judge people and there's so many judgmental people out there and it's just so nice to see this beacon of openness so what makes me one instantiation of human irreplaceable do you think as we enter this increasingly capable age of increasingly capable AI I have to ask what do you think makes humans irreplaceable so humans are you replaceable because of the baggage that we talked about so we talked about baggage we talked about the fact that every one of us has effectively relearned all of human civilization in their own way so every single human has a unique set of genetic variants that they've inherited some common some rare and some make us think differently some make us have different personalities they say that a a parent with one child believes in genetics a parent with multiple children understands genetics just how different kids are and and my three kids have dramatically different personalities ever since the beginning so one thing that makes us unique is that every one of us has a different hardware the second thing that makes us unique is that every one of us has a different software uploading of all of human society all of human civilization all of human knowledge we don't we're not born knowing it we're not like I don't know birds that learn how to make a nest through genetics and will make a nest even if they've never seen one we are constantly relearning all of human civilization so that's the second thing and the third one that actually makes humans very different from AI is that the baggage we carry is not experiential baggage it's also evolutionary baggage so we have evolved through rounds of complexity so just like ogres have layers and shrek has layers humans have layers there's the cognitive layer which is sort of the outer you know most the the latest evolutionary innovation this enormous neocortex that we have evolved and then there's the emotional baggage underneath that and then there's all of the fear and fright and flight and all of these kinds of behaviors so AI only has a neocortex AI doesn't have a lymbic system it doesn't have this complexity of human emotions which make us so I think beautifully complex so beautifully intertwined with our emotions with our instincts with our you know sort of gut reactions and all of that so I think when humans are trying to suppress that aspect the sort of quote unquote more human aspect towards a more cerebral aspect I think we lose a lot of the creativity we lose a lot of the you know freshness of humans and I think that's quite irreplaceable so we can look at the entirety of people that are alive today maybe all humans who have ever lived and map them in this high dimensional space and there's probably a center a center of mass for that mapping and a lot of us deviate in different directions so the the variety of directions in which we all deviate from that center is vast I would like to think that the center is actually empty yes that basically humans are just so diverse from each other that there's no such thing as an average human that every one of us has some kind of complex baggage of emotions intellectual you know motivational behavioral traits that it's not just one sort of normal distribution we deviate from it there's so many dimensions that we're kind of hitting the sort of sparseness the the curse of dimensionality where it's actually quite sparsely populated and I don't think you have an average human being so what makes us unique in part is the diversity and the capacity for diversity and the capacity of the diversity comes from the entire evolutionary history so there's just so many ways we can vary from each other yeah I would say not just the capacity but the inevitability of diversity basically it's in our hardware we are wired differently from each other my siblings and I are completely different my kids from each other are completely different my my wife has she's like number two of six siblings from from a distance they look the same but then you get to you know you get to know them every one of them is completely different but sufficiently the same that the differences interplay with each other so that's the interesting thing where the diversity is functional it's useful so it's like we're close enough to where we notice the diversity and it doesn't completely destroy the possibility of like effective communication and interaction so we're still the same kind of thing so what I said in one of our earlier podcasts is that if humans realize that we're 99 point nine percent identical we would basically stop fighting with each other like we are really one human species and we are so so similar to each other and if you look at the alternative if you look at the next thing outside humans like it's been six million years that we haven't had a relative so it's it's truly extraordinary that that we're we're kind of like this dot in outer space compared to the rest of life on Earth when you think about evolving through rounds of complexity can you maybe elaborate such a beautiful phrase beautiful thought that there's layers of complexity that make so so with software sometimes you're like oh let's like build version two from scratch but this doesn't happen in evolution in evolution you layer in additional features on top of old features so basically when I like every single time my cells divide I'm a yeast like I'm a unicellular organism and then cell division is basically identical every time I breathe in and my lungs expand I'm basically you know like every time my heart beats I'm a fish so basically that I still have the same heart like very very little has changed the blood going through my veins the oxygen the you know our immune system we're basically primates our social behavior we're basically neural monkeys and all neural monkeys we're basically this this concept that every single one of these behaviors can be traced somewhere in evolution and that all of that continues to live within us is also a testament to not just not killing other humans for God's sake but like not killing other species either like just to realize just how united we are with nature and that all of these biological processes have never ceased to exist they're continuing to live within us and then just the neocortex and all of the reasoning capabilities of humans are built on top of all of these other species that continue to live breathe divide metabolize fight off pathogens all continue inside us so you think the neocortex the whatever reasoning is that's the the latest feature in the in the latest version of this journey it's it's extraordinary that humans have evolved so much in so little time again if you look at the the timeline of evolution you basically have billions of years to even get to a dividing cell and then a multicellular organism and then a complex body plan and then these incredible senses that we have for perceiving the world the fact that bats can fly and they evolved flight the evolved sonar in the span of a few million years I mean it's just extraordinary how much evolution has kind of sped up and all of that comes through this evolvability the fact that we took a while to get good at evolving and then once you get good at evolving you can sort of you have modularity built in you have hierarchical organizations built in you have all of these constructs that allow meaningful changes to occur without breaking the system completely if you look at a traditional genetic algorithm the way that humans designed them in the 60s you can only evolve so much and as you evolve a certain amount of complexity the number of mutations that move you away from something functional exponentially increases and the number of mutations that move you to something better exponentially decreases so the probability of evolving something so complex becomes infinitesimally small as you get more complex but with evolution it's almost the opposite almost the exact opposite that it appears that it's speeding up exactly as complex complexity is increasing and I think that's just the system getting good at evolving where do you think it's all headed do you ever think about where try to visualize the entirety of the evolutionary system and see if there's an arrow to it and a destination to it so the best way to understand the future is to look at the past if you look at the trajectory then you can kind of learn something about the direction in which we're heading and if you look at the trajectory of life on Earth it's really about information processing so the the concept of the senses evolving one after the other you know being like bacteria are able to do chemotaxis basically means moving towards a chemical gradient and that's the first thing that you need to sort of hunt down food the next step after that is being able to actually perceive light so all life on this planet and all life that we know about evolved on this rotating rock every 24 hours you get sunlight and dark sunlight and dark and light is a source of energy light is also information about where is up light is all kinds of you know things so you can you can basically now start perceiving light and then perceiving shapes beyond just the sort of single photoreceptor you can now have complex eyes or multiple eyes and then start perceiving motion or perceiving direction perceiving shapes and then you start building infrastructure on the cognitive apparatus to start processing this information and making sense of the environment building more complex models of the environment so if you look at that trajectory of evolution what we're experiencing now and humans are basically according to this sort of information theoretic view of evolution humans are basically the next natural step and it's perhaps no surprise that we became the dominant species of the planet because yes there's so many dimensions in which some animals are way better than we are but at least on the cognitive dimension we're just simply unsurpassed on this planet and and perhaps the universe but the the concept that if you now trace this forward we talked a little bit about evolvability and how things get better at evolving one possibility is that the next layer of evolution builds the next layer of evolution and what we're looking at now with humans and AI is that having mastered this information capability that humans have from this quote unquote old hardware this basically you know biological evolved system that kind of you know somehow in the environment of Africa and then in subsequent environments of sort of dispersing through the globe was evolutionarily advantageous that has now created technology which now has a capability of solving many of these cognitive tasks it doesn't have all the baggage of the previous evolutionary layers but maybe the next round of evolution on Earth is self replicating AI where we're actually using our current smarts to build better programming languages and the programming languages to build you know ChatGPT and that to then build the next layer of software that will then sort of help AI speed up and it's lovely that we're coexisting with this AI that sort of the creators of this next layer of evolution in this next stage are still around to help guide it and hopefully will be for the rest of eternity as partners but it's also nice to think about it as just simply the next stage of evolution where you've kind of extracted away the biological needs like if you look at animals most of them spend 80 of their waking hours hunting for food or building shelter humans maybe one percent of that time and then the rest is left to creative endeavors and AI doesn't have to worry about shelter etc so basically it's all living in the cognitive space so in a way it might just be a very natural sort of next step to think about evolution and that's that's on the on the sort of purely cognitive side if you now think about humans themselves the ability to understand comprehend our own genome again the ultimate layer of introspection. Gives us now the ability to even mess with this hardware, not just augment our capabilities through interacting and collaborating with AI, but also perhaps understand the neural pathways that are necessary for you know empathetic thinking for for justice for this and this and that and sort of help augment human capabilities through you know neuronal interventions through chemical interventions through electrical interventions to basically help steer the human you know bag of hardware that we kind of evolved with into greater capabilities, and then ultimately by understanding not just the wiring of neurons and the function of neurons but even the genetic code we could even at one point in the future start thinking about well can we get rid of psychiatric disease can we get rid of neurodegeneration can we get rid of dementia and start perhaps even augmenting human capabilities not just getting rid of disease can we tinker with the genome with the hardware or getting closer to the hardware without having to deeply understand the baggage in the way we've disposed of the baggage in our software systems with AI to some degree not fully but to some degree can we do the same with the genome or is the genome deeply integrated into this bag I wouldn't want to get rid of the the baggage the baggage would make us awesome so the fact that I'm sometimes angry and sometimes hungry and sometimes hungry is perhaps contributing to my creativity I don't want to be dispassionate I don't want to be another like you know Robert I you know I want to get in trouble and I want to sort of say the wrong thing and I want to sort of you know make an awkward comment and sort of push myself into you know reactions and responses and things that can get just people thinking differently and I think our society is moving towards a humorless space where everybody's so afraid to say the wrong thing that people kind of start quitting on mass and start like not liking their jobs and stuff like that maybe we should be kind of embracing that human aspect a little bit more in all of that baggage aspect and not necessarily thinking about replacing it on the contrary like embracing it and sort of this coexistence of the cognitive and the emotional hardware so embracing and celebrating the diversity that springs from the baggage versus kind of pushing towards and empowering this kind of pull towards conformity yeah and in fact with the advent of AI I would say and these seemingly extremely intelligent systems that sort of can perform can perform tasks that we thought of as extremely intelligent at the blink of an eye this might democratize intellectual pursuits instead of just simply wanting the same type of brains that you know carry out specific ways of thinking we can like instead of just always only wanting say the mathematically extraordinary to go to the same universities what you could see simply say like who needs that anymore you know we now have AI maybe what we should really be thinking about is the diversity and the power that comes with the diversity where AI can do the math and then we should be getting a bunch of humans that sort of think extremely differently from each other and maybe that's the true cradle of innovation but AI can also these large language models can also be with just a few prompts essentially fine tuned to be diverse from the center so the prompts can really take you away into unique territory you can ask the model to act in a certain way and it will start to act in that way is that possible that the language models could also have some of the magical diversity that makes us so damn interesting so I would say humans are the same way so basically when you when you sort of prompt humans to basically you know you know give an environment to act a particular way they change their own behaviors and you know the old saying is show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are more like show me your friends and I'll tell you who you'll become so it's not necessarily that you choose friends that are like you but I mean that's the first step but then the second step is that you know the kind of behaviors that you find normal in your circles are the behaviors that you'll start espousing and that type of met evolution where every action we take not only shapes our current action and the result of this action but also shapes our future actions by shaping the environment in which their future actions will be taken every time you carry out a particular behavior it's not just a consequence for today but it's also a consequence for tomorrow because you're reinforcing that neural pathway so in a way self discipline is a self fulfilling prophecy and by behaving the way that you want to behave and choosing people that are like you and sort of exhibiting those behaviors that are sort of desirable you end up creating that that environment as well so it is a kind of life itself is a kind of prompting mechanism super complex the friends you choose the environments you choose the way you modify the environment that you choose yes but that seems like that process is much less efficient than a large language model you can literally get a large language model through a couple of prompts to be a mix of Shakespeare and David Bowie right you can very aggressively change in a way that's stable and convincing you really transform through a couple of prompts the the behavior of the model into something very different from the original so well before ChatGPT I would tell my students just ask you know what would Manoli say right now and you you guys all have a pretty good emulator of me right now yes and I don't know if you know the programming paradigm of the Robert Ducklin where you basically explain to the Robert Ducklin that's just sitting there exactly what you did with your code and why you have a bug and just by the act of explaining you'll kind of figure it out I woke up one morning from a dream where I was giving a lecture in the San Fy theater and one of my friends was basically giving me some deep evolutionary insight on how cancer genomes and cancer cells evolve and I woke up with a very elaborate discussion that I was giving and a very elaborate set of insights that he had that I was projecting onto my friend in my sleep and obviously this was my dream so my own neurons were capable of doing that but they only did that under the prompt of you are now Pusgupta you are a professor in cancer genomics you're an expert in that field what do you say so I feel that we all have that inside us that we have that capability of basically saying I don't know what the right thing is but let me ask my virtual legs what would you do and virtual legs would say be kind I'm like oh yes or something like that and even though I myself might not be able to do it unprompted and the my favorite prompt is think step by step and I'm like you know this also works on my ten year old when he tries to solve a math equation all in one step I know exactly what mistake you'll make but if I prompt it with oh please think step by step then he sort of gets you know mindset and I think it's also part of the way that ChatGPT was actually trained this whole sort of human in the loop reinforcement learning has probably reinforced a set of behaviors whereby having this feedback loop you kind of aligned AI better to the prompting opportunities by humans yeah prompting human like reasoning steps the step by step kind of thinking yeah but it does seem to be I suppose it just puts a mirror to our own capabilities and so we can be truly impressed by our own cognitive capabilities because the variety of what you can try because we don't usually have this kind of we can play with our own mind rigorously through Python code right yeah so this allows us to really play with all all of human wisdom and knowledge or at least knowledge at our fingertips and then mess with that little mind that can think and speak in all kinds of ways what's unique is that as I mentioned earlier every one of us was trained by different subset of human culture and ChatGPT was trained on all of it yeah and the difference there is that it probably has the ability to emulate almost any every one of us the fact that you can figure out where that is in cognitive behavioral space just by a few prompts is pretty impressive but the fact that that exists somewhere is you know absolutely beautiful and the fact that it's encoded in an orthogonal way from the knowledge I think is also beautiful the fact that somehow through this extreme overparameterization of AI models it was able to somehow figure out that context knowledge and form are separable and that you can sort of describe scientific knowledge in a haiku in the form of I don't know Shakespeare or something that tells you something about the the decoupling and the decouplability of these types of aspects of human psyche and that's part of the science of this whole thing so these large language models are you know days old in terms of this kind of leap that they've taken and it would be interesting to do this kind of analysis on them of context of the separation of context form and knowledge where exactly does that happen there's already sort of initial investigations but it's very hard to figure out where is there a particular parameter set of parameters that are responsible for a particular piece of knowledge or particular context or particular style speaking so with convolutional neural networks interpretability had many good advances because we can kind of understand them there's a structure to them there's a locality to them and we can kind of understand that different layers have different sort of ranges that they're looking at so we can look at activation features and basically see where you know where does that correspond to with large language models it's perhaps a little more complicated in but I think it's still achievable in the sense that we could kind of ask well what kind of prompts does this generate if I sort of drop out this part of the network then what happens and sort of start getting at a language to even describe these types of aspects of human behavioral psychology if you wish from the spoken part in the language part and the advantage of that is that it might actually teach us something about humans as well like you you know we might not have words to describe these types of aspects right now but when somebody speaks in particular way it might remind us of a friend that we know from here or there and if we had better language for describing that these concepts might become more apparent in our own human psyche and then we might be able to encode them better in machines themselves I well probably you and I would have certain interest with the base model with OpenAI is the base model which is before the the alignment of the reinforcement learning with human feedback and and before the AI safety based kind of censorship of the model it would be fascinating to explore to investigate the ways that the model can generate hate speech the kind of hate that humans are capable of it would be fascinating or the kind of of course like sexual language or the kind of romantic language or the all kinds of ideologies can I get it to be a communist can I get it to be a fascist can I get it to be a capitalist can I get it to be all these kinds of things and see which parts get activated and not because it would be fascinating to sort of explore at the individual mind level and at a societal level where do these ideas take hold what is the fundamental core of those ideas maybe the communism fascism capitalism democracy are all actually connected by the fact that the human heart the human mind is drawn to ideology to to a centralizing idea and maybe we need a neural network to remind us of that I like the concept that the human mind is somehow tied to ideology and I think that goes back to the the promptability of ChatGPT the fact that you can kind of say well think in this particular way now and the fact that humans have invented words for encapsulating these types of behaviors and it's hard to know how much of that is innate and how much of that was like passed on from language to language but basically if you look at the evolution of language you can kind of see how young are these words in the history of language evolution that describe these types of behaviors like you know kindness and anger and jealousy et cetera if these words are very similar from language to language it might suggest that they're very ancient if they're very different it might suggest that this concept may have emerged independently in each different language and so on so forth so looking at the phylogeny the history the evolutionary traces of language at the same time as people moving around that we can now trace thanks to genetics is a fascinating way of understanding the human psyche and also understanding sort of how these types of behaviors emerge and to go back to your idea about sort of exploring the system unfiltered I mean in a way the psychiatric hospitals are full of those full of those people so basically people whose mind is uncontrollable who have kind of gone adrift in specific locations of their psyche and I I do find this fascinating basically you know watching movies that are trying to capture the essence of troubled minds I think is teaching us so much about our everyday selves because many of us are able to sort of control our minds and are able to somehow somehow hide these emotions and but every time I see somebody who's troubled I I see versions of myself maybe not as extreme but I can sort of empathize with these behaviors and you know I see bipolar I see schizophrenia I see depression I see autism I see so many different aspects that we kind of have names for and crystallize in specific individuals and I think all of us have that all of us have sort of just this multidimensional brain and genetic variations that push us in these directions environmental exposures and traumas that push us in these directions environmental behaviors that are reinforced by the kind of friends that we chose or friends that we were stuck with because of the environment that we grew up in so in a way a lot of these types of behaviors are within the vector span of every human it's just that the magnitude of those vectors is generally smaller for most people because they haven't inherited that particular set of genetic variants or because they haven't been exposed to those environments basically or something about the mechanism of reinforcement learning with human feedback didn't quite work for them so it's fascinating to think about that's what we do we have this capacity to have all these psychiatric psychiatric or behaviors associated with psychiatric disorders but we through the alignment process as we grow up with parents we kind of we notice suppress them yeah we know how to control every human that grows up in this in this world spends several decades being shaped into place and without that you know maybe we would have the unfiltered ChatGPT for every baby is basically a raging narcissist not all of them not all of them believe it or not it's it's remarkable like I remember like watching my kids grow up and again like yes part of their personality has stays the same but also in different phases through their life they've gone through these dramatically different types of behaviors and you know my daughter basically saying you know basically one one kid saying oh I want the bigger piece the other one saying oh everything must be exactly equal and the third one saying I'm okay you you know I might have to have the smaller part don't worry about me even in the early days in the early days of development yeah it's just extraordinary to sort of see these dramatically different like I mean my wife and I you know are are very different from each other but we also have you know six million variants six million low side each if you wish if you just look at common variants we also have a bunch of rare variants that are inherited in a more Mendelian fashion and now you have you know an infinite number of possibilities for each of the kids so basically it's due to the six million just from the common variants and then if you like layering the the rare variants so let me talk a little bit about common variants and rare variants so if you look at just common variants they're generally weak effect because selection selects against strong effect variants so if something like has a big risk for schizophrenia it won't rise to high frequency so the ones that are common are by definition by selection only the ones that had relatively weak effect and if all of the variants associated with personality with cognition and all aspects of human behavior were weak effect variants then kid would basically be just averages of their parents if it was like thousands of low side just by low of large numbers the average of two large numbers would be you know very robustly close to that middle but what we see is that kids are dramatically different from each other so that basically means that in the context of that common variation you basically have rare variants that are inherited in a more Mendelian fashion that basically then sort of govern likely many different aspects of human behavior human biology and human psychology and that's again if like if you look at sort of a person with schizophrenia their identical twin has only 50 chance of actually being diagnosed with schizophrenia so that basically means there's probably developmental exposures environmental exposures trauma all kinds of other aspects that can shape that and if you look at siblings for the common variants it kind of drops off exponentially as you would expect with you know sharing 50 of your genome 25 of your genome You know, twelve point five percent of your genome et cetera, with more and more distant cousins. But the fact that siblings can differ so much in their personalities that we observe every day, it can't all be nurture. Basically, you know, we we've like again as parents we we spend enormous amount of energy. Trying to fix quote unquote the nurture part, trying to you know get them to share, get them to be kind, get them to be open, get them to trust each other, like you know like overcome the prisoner's dilemma. Of you know if if everyone fends from themselves, we're all going to live in a horrible place, but if we're a little more altruistic, then we're all going to be in a better place. And I think it's not like we treat our kids differently, but but they're they're just born differently. So in a way, as a geneticist, I have to admit that there's only so much I can do with nurture. That nature definitely played a big component. The the selection of variants we have the common variants and the rare variants. What what can we say about the landscape of possibility they create? If you can just linger on that, so the the selection of rare variants is divine. How how do we get the ones that we get? Is it just laden in that giant evolutionary baggage? So I'm going to talk about regression. Why do we call it regression? And the concept of regression to the mean. The fact that when fighter pilots in a dog fight did amazingly well, they would give them rewards, and then the next time they're in dog fight they would do worse. So then you know the navy basically realized that wow, or at least interpreted that as wow, we're ruining them by praising them, and then they're going to perform worse. The statistical interpretation of that is regression to the mean. The fact that you're an extraordinary pilot, you've been trained in an extraordinary fashion. That pushes your mean further and further to extraordinary achievement, and then in some dog fights you'll just do extraordinarily well. The probability that the next one will be just as good is almost nil, because this is the peak of your performance. And just by statistical odds, the next one will be another sample from the same underlying distribution, which is going to be a little closer to the mean. So regression analysis takes its name from this type of realization in the statistical world. Now if you now take humans, you basically have people who have achieved extraordinary achievements. Einstein, for example, you know you would call him for example the epitome of human intellect. Does that mean that all of his children and grandchildren will be extraordinary geniuses? It probably means that they're sampled from the same underlying distribution, but he was probably a rare combination of extremes in addition to these common variants. So you can basically interpret your kid's variation for example as well. Of course, they're going to be some kind of sampled from the average of the parents, with some kind of deviation according to the specific combination of rare variants that they have that they have inherited. So you know, given all that, the you know the possibilities are endless as to where you should be, but you should always interpret that with well, it's probably an alignment of nature. And nurture, and then nature has both the common variants that are acting kind of like the law of large numbers and the rare variants that are acting more in a Mendelian fashion, and then you layer in the nurture, which again in everyday action we make, we shape our future environment. But the genetics we inherit are shaping the future environment of not only us but also our children. So there's this weird nature nurture interplay and self reinforcement, where you're kind of shaping your own environment, but you're also shaping the environment of your kids. And your kids are going to be born in the context of your environment that you've shaped, but also with a bag of genetic variants that they have inherited. And there's just so much complexity associated with that. When we start blaming something on nature, it might just be nurture. It might just be that well, yes, they inherited the genes from the parents, but they also you know were shaped by the same environment. So it's very very hard to untangle the two, and you should always always realize that nature can influence nurture, nurture can influence nature. Or at least be correlated with and predictive of and so on and so forth. So I love thinking about that distribution that you mentioned, and here's where I can be my usual ridiculous self. And I sometimes think about that army of sperm cells, however many hundreds of thousands there are, and I kind of think of all the possibilities there. Because there's a lot of variation, and one gets to win. Is is that not a random one? Is it a totally ridiculous way to think about? No, not at all. So I would say evolutionarily we are a very slow evolving species. Basically, the generations of humans are a terrible way to do selection. What you need is processes that allow you to do selection in a smaller tighter loop. And part of what. If you look at our immune system for example, it evolves at a much faster pace than humans evolve, because there is actually an evolutionary process that happens within our immune cells. As they're dividing, there's basically VDJ recombination that basically creates this extraordinary wealth of antibodies and antigens against the the