Today's book introduces a groundbreaking new way of thinking about life society and the future of our species that bridges science and human history could humans unknowingly be part of a larger super organism. One with its own motivations and goals. One that is alive and conscious and has the power to shape the future of our species.
Our guest calls that theory, Agora he starts by asking the question what is life and how to form we then move to how multi setter life came about and how consciousness emerges and how other super organisms in nature have formed. Then he poses big questions based on his agora theory including, if ants have colonies bees have hives and we have our bodies how does agora manifest itself. Does it have a body?
Can Agora explain things that happen that are both under our control and near universally undesirable, such as war? In a later part will discuss how can Agora theory explain long term progress we've made in our world, it is a great pleasure to welcome friend of the show author of these books behind me on the shelf and his latest book, We are agora how humanity functions as a single super organism that shapes our world and our future byron reese welcome back to the show.
Thank you, Aiden, for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Always great to have you on the show man i was telling you off air i write a weekly article and the way i think about it is it's inspired somewhat by something i guess we'll write something they'll say during a show something i've read in a widely different area and i bring it together and just create a new recipe and i've had this article in draft for about twelve months called, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar so think about that for a moment and,
It jumped to mind as I read how we could miss the fact that if we are a human organism a human super organism the agora we can miss that we are a collection of billions of cells but also part of that super organism itself i thought we're so busy doing, we're so busy surviving that we can miss that. We're part of something bigger because we haven't been able to zoom out. I thought that was a nice starting point to give context to the concept of Agora.
Thank you for having me, and I think that's a great introduction and a great summation. I mean, I guess the conversation begins with this idea of what is a superorganism. And it's a, it's a real thing. It is not it's not pseudoscience. It's what we call an organism that's made up of other organisms. And oftentimes people use a bees for the example. And Everybody knows a bee is an animal. It's a creature, right? And what people don't necessarily know is that the beehive itself is another animal.
And it doesn't look that way but it has all these different properties. For instance, it's a warm blooded creature. The hive holds its temperature at 97 degrees even though bees are cold blooded. It has a memory that's years long, even though bees only live a few weeks, it reproduces at its level. Hives split into two hives. It has a lifespan very different than the bees. And most importantly, it knows how to do things that no bee knows how to do, like find a new home.
So these things exist, superorganisms exist, but the bees couldn't really perceive that the hive exists as a separate entity. And so I wanted to ask the question as a beekeeper, is it possible that a group of people form another animal and that animal can think. And I approach it, it's not a metaphysical question, it's not philosophy at all. I approach it as a biological question and I put forth falsifiable hypotheses that would be true if we are a creature and false if we are not.
Thank you for the context let's jump into the start of the book which is the origin of life and, even a step before that which is to understand a single cell and explore the question not a not a simple question what force animates cells and, bear with us here cause you're gonna come on a journey as you do on the book as well and hopefully you're reading along with us. And maybe you've already read the first section and now you're gonna read it or vice versa.
It's really helpful the way this story builds. So we build from all the way from questions like what is life, what's a single cell, what's multicellular life,, all the way up to the Agora itself. But let's start at that. The origin of life and what force animates cells. You kind of have to start there with just a simple idea that you're made of cells and those cells are alive.
And if I took you apart a cell at a time with tiny little tweezers, one of those cells could continue to live in like a petri dish. They would go on. when I was done taking you apart, you would have vanished. But there's no less matter, right? There's still, it all still weighs the same and those cells are still living. But you vanished. So were you ever even there? What are you? If you just started there, unfortunately, you're like in the realm of philosophy.
So it has to start, to your point, way back at the beginning, which is, well, is a cell alive? And maybe it's made up of little cells, you know, of other things, but the cell is the primary unit of life. We call it primary for two reasons. One because nothing in a cell is alive. cell is made up of. Essentially chemicals. It's a bag of rocks basically. So nothing in it's alive and yet it is alive. So that's where life begins.
The other reason we think of it as primary is all of life is based on cells. All of life. We don't have examples otherwise. that becomes the first problem which is like what, what makes these little bags of, Organic, inorganic things somehow magically alive. And then the big question, I mean, the exciting question is the earth was formed. It's really hot and it was molten and then it started to cool and almost immediately life formed and it only formed once. Don't you think that's interesting?
It only formed once or more precisely, it only persisted once, right? Because, and you say, well, how do we know that? Well, we know that because All life is related. There's a reason you can take a gene from a slug and put it in a, in a person and you can make the person glow in the dark. It's because there's only one kind of life on this planet.
And it's very complicated, and it's encoded in DNA using four letter alphabet, and it's very complicated, and yet it seems to have appeared immediately on planet Earth. And it , appears to have only appeared once. So, all of this life stuff is really wrapped up in a bunch of mystery. But I think the reason it began, by the way, so quickly, and it was so complex, and it only began once, as it didn't actually begin here.
I think it had to have come here from some other place just drifting through space, long extinct planet or something. It just happened to land here as that might just be fundamentally how life reproduces. I don't know. the bottom line is something really strange happened, happened once. It happened at the beginning of time basically for us and all of us are Beneficiaries of it. And so you say well, what is is life?
and We don't have an answer to that question and it would seem like if you're a biologist, you know His name means the study of life study of living things. They're probably very vexing that we don't actually an agreement on what that word means. And, and yet it's like the most core thing to us, but it is our place to begin. And the thing to remember is your cells are alive. They are not made of living things.
And it's unclear what you are because if cells are alive, on what basis do you say you're alive? Because you're thing. If I took you apart a piece at a time, you would vanish, but you also add no weight. no volume to the life form in your body. that's where, why we begin there. I was, I was thinking about that.
I wrote a few years ago and I wrote in my own book, About the idea of the ship of thesis so this story people notice people this side of the pond in the UK for example, there was a show called only fools and horses and there was a thing called triggers broom so trigger was a character, i need he said i i've got this room so a brush and he said i've had this thing for twenty years i've replaced the handle fifty times on the head ten and the question is, Is it the same room so
this is the ship of thesis hypothesis but i thought about that when you were saying this here but during reading the book as well, for example right where we're constantly cells are constantly dying regenerating, every seven years i believe we're constantly you've regrown a new organ you know it's totally different from what it was cellular, but you can still hold sickness or muscle memory.
Or purpose or your personality or sense of humor where the heck does that come from because these are the question when you read through this in the in the slow build that you've done.
Towards the ground reveal these are the questions that come to mind Yeah, you have to tackle all of those things because when we're talking about is there a potentially a different kind of life, this creature, Agora, it would be a giant creature where merely cells in it, and it thinks, and it breathes, and it has wants and desires. It is a memory. It reproduces maybe all of that.
And you say, how does a mere creature like us contemplate that do it in a responsible scientific way where we're not just like, you know, speculating and we're, we're asking questions. So we have to look at the precious few instances of life that we actually have, and we only really have one. And I find that really, telling about what we don't even know in people is kind of what the important parts are. If I were to ask you a hard math problem, like, 54 times 25.
Do that in your, do that writing anything down. And then after you did it, I would say, where did it feel like you were thinking? You would say, it felt like I was thinking in my head. In fact, I just had to stop myself from doing it in your head. thing to realize is that is not a biological feeling. That's a cultural feeling that you've learned. But it's not biological. And the reason we know that is because for the vast majority of human history, we didn't think it was in your brain.
The Egyptians who saved everything threw the brain away because they thought it was just there to cool the blood. We used to think it was in the heart. That's why you learn things by heart, or. Or in the gut, I can feel it in my gut in the liver, all these different places. It wasn't in the head. So, the question then becomes, are you just your brain, if you took your brain out? But you're really not that either, because your body has memory in it.
your immune system is a kind of body wide memory, right? lives in your brain. It remembers that these things and your body actually operates largely independently of your brain much of it If you cut your fingers, it isn't the brain that says send the platelets to clot it They do their thing without the brain being there at all So that's what I was trying to do is say, you know, what exactly do we become are we? Are we just what's in the head or are we the whole body?
And then there are these really interesting things and this borders on pseudoscience where they take the heart out of somebody in a heart transplant and they put it in somebody else and then they become a vegetarian or whatever and it turns out the other person was a vegetarian all their life. there's certainly memory distributed in your cells and we don't know the extent of that but it's all there and it all comes into this question that we're building to which is what is you?
What are you fundamentally? And then we're going to go a step higher and ask is it possible that a bunch of yous can come together and form another animal. i don't know if you saw the movie men in black i think it was i think it was either the opening sequence or closing sequence and it zooms out from earth and then it seems on to like a galaxy view.
Cosmos view and then it turns out that it's a bunch of aliens playing pinball and we're inside the pinball game and we're just basically bacteria and i gotta share that in the show notes or share that link for that opening sequence cause actually that's what i'm getting at where. If you're, if you're so busy and so preoccupied with survival, essentially on your own level, you never take the time to zoom out and see the larger ecosystem you're part of.
And for me, Byron, one of the great benefits of reading this book and the depth of research that you've done for it is, if you use it as a metaphor for organizations or business people are so myopic with their view they don't see shifts in the larger ecosystem and the busier you are, executing strategy the less you can see from the outside and the reason i brought that up i mentioned.
Your book to a series just coming to the end of it i've got well by the time we are we've released it the emergent approach to strategy by peter compa when i mentioned quoted your book in it, what in particular that was one line that i thought was really important message and it was more in a scientific field but it's the same question, measurement and how organizations are treated scientifically.
Particularly when it comes to strategy and i have a quote here that i'd love you to riff on you wrote that "science demands that we ignore our senses which are only way to gather primary data about the world and instead rely on measurements made by standardized instruments this is not criticism you say first person experience is both unreliable and unreproducible if we let that in.
Well then you better find a place for big foot on the tree of life because a bunch of people saw or thought they saw it once, yes in rejecting first person subjective experience it does seem like a whole lot of baby is being thrown out with the bath water i thought that was a really important point out before we build on this and get into dna, The question becomes what is scientific? And there are a lot of questions in the world that people pose. And science has this knee jerk reaction.
And I'll just pick a random one. Ghosts. If you ask scientists, what about ghosts? Say, ah, ridiculous. You can't reproduce it. You can't do this. You can't do that. Don't exist. And really, what science should be doing on a lot of issues is being like, Beats me! I got no idea. Science is is a, is actually a tool set, a very narrow group of things we do to certain kinds of truths. The first most interesting thing about science is it isn't actually a mechanism for discovery.
It's a mechanism for proving. And that's really kind of cool to me because there isn't a kind of laboratory method for the discovery itself. That's still a stroke of human intuition, human genius, human guess. I'm going to put forth a hypothesis. And that's when science kicks in and says, okay, figure out how we're going to establish that as being true. it has, there are all these criteria. It has to be something that's measurable, independently verifiable, and forth.
And the reason we insist on those is because that's a for somebody else to take that and be able to reproduce it. And then they can build on that and it becomes this accumulated truth that we add to little bits at a time and over time that becomes progress. And it has worked enormously well. Everything you look around in the modern world comes about because we have this method for improving improving things and then testing other assumptions around them.
But only about, I don't know, 10 percent all the knowable stuff can be proven that way. The majority of, of what people know. Can't be scientifically proven. I have in the book that the old reporters, there's an old reporter's adage. If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out. Well, that's funny because you can't check it out, but you can know it. So you can know something that you cannot scientifically prove.
Unfortunately, in writing this book, I have to deal with measurable things that people can prove, which makes it a lot longer of a course. Consciousness, which we'll come to in a moment, is of course the big one. Consciousness is how you experience the world, but nobody else can have that same experience of it as you can. But I'm sure we will come to that in a moment. where we're at is figuring out what this tool set is. And I even use a Hemingway quote about how he talks about fishing.
And you capture this fish you put it in a lab, a full of formaldehyde, and he said you have preserved many true things about that fish, you have preserved its length, its weight, and you know, all these other attributes of it, but you've also frozen it. untruths about it. It doesn't smell like that. It doesn't feel like that. It's not that temperature. And you've lost truths like how it fought and what it tastes like and all of that are gone.
And so you just have to be very of, of what the limits of science are when you're, I think, doing these. i use that steinbeck quote that you mentioned i used that in the episode with peter combo as well so i love this.
Because , that problem of capturing that that's the way you do things doesn't, and it can be wrong, it can be right for that moment in time and the reason i shared it was an organization with a consultant the consultant comes in or comes up with a strategy that's right for that moment in time for that, that coordination of that team but doesn't mean that that's the way to do it from now on and that's an unfortunate way that organizations get stuck so i don't wanna go down
that rabbit hole but just to say how. The cross pollination happens with this of reading two books at the same time but i thought about that about what you're saying about the, your mother loves you you know it can be hard to articulate sometimes so if somebody said for example why do you love your partner.
And you can put it into words doesn't mean that you don't you know or an example i'm having right now byron is running an event i'll just tell the audience in dublin twenty nine and thirty of april next year called the reinvention summit trying to encapsulate.
The authenticity of that event and how we're going to run it is so hard that I have to hire a copywriter to be able to put it into language that others will understand because you know it implicitly it's so difficult and i'm sure as a writer you you go through this yourself all the time but that that is such a difficult thing and.
What let's get into let's go back into this because we're trying to get as much into this episode as possible we're on dna so before we jump back in and a bit deeper into the original life you take a chapter in the book to unravel some of the mysteries.
Which are important in the narrative building towards the agora for two reasons in particular you say the first is the essential characteristic of DNA that it stores information so for example the heart transplant etc maybe that's the DNA doing the job maybe not, the second is if it exists then it must have some type of DNA, add a global level some mechanism that allows information to both accumulate and then perpetuate in the future i'd love you to share that.
But both of those are the salient points, without a doubt. The first instance, so DNA isn't alive. just a book of information. It's three billion characters long and written in a four letter alphabet. That's all it is, just information. there's one way to look at DNA. History of life on earth is just our ability to store information. You could say for three and a half billion years, we only had one place to store it. That was DNA. And 500 million years ago, Cambrian happened and we got brains.
Second place to store information. So now you can store it in DNA, where you wrote it very slowly, or in where you can write it very quickly. especially through a process called learning. And then we made a third place you could store information. You could externalize it with, with writing. And that was a whole different one. So there's actually a way to tell our story that way.
And I actually think it's really profound because eventually you're externalizing information, but then you're building it up in libraries and there, there's no good way to get at it because you just have a card catalog and it's this like tiny little filter for this giant thing.
So, so the library becomes like the warehouse in the first Raiders of the Lost Ark movie that they put the Ark in, you know, the, the, That's where books go to die and vanish, and then we digitized it, but even digitizing it didn't help. It only helped to search it better, but didn't bring it together. Why? When you do a search on Google and you say, What's the blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. It says, I've got 30 billion answers to that question. Here's the first one.
It's still all siloed and these LLMs we have now, like ChatGPT and the like, are our first planet wide attempt to consolidate information to a single knowledge base. That's what's profound about it. Is it's not a way to search across a lot of data. It's actually a way to reduce the amount of data that there is. By consolidating it. And I think that's a planetary that we've never had as a species and all that. So, that is the first big point of it.
But, the other thing that you said, which is, Life, what does life need information for? I mean, that's the primary thing that DNA is. It's, it's, it's a formula for making you. It's the recipe for creating Ryu and running your body. That's what it is. It's just data. It's a recipe. so you not only have to have that recipe and it's great long depth. But you have to have ways to read to it and to write to it. And if you write to it too quickly and too much, if it can mutate too easily, it breaks.
And if it can't mutate at all, it never learns. And so it's gotta be like this Goldilocks zone. There's a lot of these Goldilocks zones that come up here. And I think there's a good reason for that. And so that really becomes what DNA is now. What happens is you realize that the act of living is just one of those things. It's like a chapter. The act of living is a, is a way of writing.
And from If you've seen a what's known as a desire path, you go to a university and there's two buildings that aren't connected by a sidewalk, but the kids have taken a shortcut across the quad and made a path there, right? So that path is stored information. It's information about how people have crossed. that field before. The exact route they've taken. The data points are all lost. You don't know when Jill crossed it and when John crossed it and all that, but you do know that that's it.
here's the interesting thing. When you walk across it, that is a form of cognition. It's a kind of thinking that you're accessing a memory and that's hard to kind of internalize when, except when you come back to things like the bees. So when the bees swarm every spring, there's some bees that go off and try to look for a better home, And it's very complicated. It has to have an entry hole that's so big, but not so big. It has to be shielded from the rain. It has to be not near other ones.
It has to have ants that are not near it. It has to have a certain amount of volume compared to the opening. All the complicated stuff, but no bee knows any of that. I think about that. No bee has ever done that before. Bees, they only swarm once a year and a bee only lives six or eight weeks. So they don't have any memory of it. They don't know what volume is. Their brain is half the size of a grain of salt. so you say, how do they do these incredibly smart things?
Well, evidently information is encoded in them and in their DNA in ways that Just by walking across the path, they access the information. Ant colonies are the same way when ants walk through them They're accessing information about how to store stuff. I think I even use an example in the book in the United States in California There are these highways where they have cut grooves in them So if you drive at the speed limit across them, they play music Overture.
They'll go When you're driving So what you have to say at that point is that the highway has information encoded in it, and car is accessing it. The car is performing cognition. It's playing the song, but you don't think your car is smart, and it isn't. And that becomes very much of Agora, the fact of our daily lives are us doing things that are a form of cognition.
Because if you go into a city where that city has, the city has grown up a certain way because of a thousand, a million factors about rain and the gutters and the, I mean, all these things go into how the city organically forms. And when you live in that city, you're accessing those memories as a kind of thinking. It's such a big topic. I love it, man. I love the references to nature which, which is. Mushrooms and there are elders on this planet. They're here longer than us.
They've survived more catastrophes and more crises than we ever have. And I always think there's so much wisdom in that, but one of the really interesting ones you mentioned was the butterflies.
Migrating around the world i'm interviewing brian diaz who's the guy who did all the research on epigenetics and rats for example passing on memories from generation to generation, i thought that was an interesting one to share because that for me is the most remarkable of all the stories you shared, I live in Texas and what happens is on clear days, you can go out and look up in the sky and see monarch butterflies migrating overhead. Sometimes it's beautiful.
You see hundreds and thousands of them and you'll find trees. They've just all decided to settle on and pull a branch down and it's just beautiful. It's just beautiful color. They all head to this one place in Mexico. they all overwinter there. Now, the crazy thing is no butterfly, no monarch makes that trip. In fact, it takes four generations of monarchs to make the trip and then, and to get back. So there's no, monarch who's going, yeah, it's just like last year that they, they don't.
And then what's even crazier, Hey, stop here. I love this bar. This bar does great tequila in text. Let's stop for one drink. I know this from last time. exactly, none of that going on. so what's even craziest is that the fourth generation lives months. They actually do the overwintering. So the three other generations die very quickly, but there's this one generation that lives all over the winter and then starts to trip back.
And nobody knows how like that happens, how don't know that there's no monarchy. They only have some little part of it. And then, so we think, there's all these cues that they're getting by the elevation of the side and all the other strange things that we don't know that the DNA is picking up on. that is telling them like brrp brrp brrp brrp brrp. It's just they're accessing these memories that are long gone.
There's even, I don't know if I put it in the book, there's even a story about the migration path goes circular at one point and it's around a mountain that no longer exists. Yeah, Wow. a mountain range they would use to have to fly around millions of years Wow, wow. Now you didn't mention that DNA somewhere which, and it's all distributed throughout the body. It's probably not all in your brain. You're probably not just a brain into that. And all of a sudden you can start.
And then to me, let's just keep going. Okay. Multicellular life. Everybody kind of knows, I think what that is, cellular life is, you know, like single cell, like a bacteria, single cell. And then there's multicellular life, like everything like you and I and everything else. the thing about us is nobody's quite sure how Multicellular life formed it. Isn. A no brainer because for three and a half billion years, you didn't ever have it.
You just had single celled life, and it took forever before it decided to multicell you. And so there are all these people who have these mental models on what happened. Like these two cells, they get to be bides and they hang out. One's really good at doing this, and one's really good at doing that. they kind of specialize a little bit and then they are slightly more successful than their brethren who don't buddy up.
And over time the two different ones become very different and then somehow they join with others and those become more differentiated until eventually you get a multicellular thing. You have about 300 different kinds of cells in you. That's the number of different kinds of parts you have. Somebody bought a part to build a at Radio Shack. They would have 300 different pieces. They'd have a lot of them, but it only had 300 different parts, 300 different Legos in the box.
And we don't know why that multicellular life form deserves to be called alive. I know why the cells do. They metabolize, they reproduce, two cells divide, I get all that, but it's unclear what makes a multicellular creature, a new life form. Are you saying like your ships of that the cells are no longer alive? Well, no, they are. They're clearly still alive.
So you're saying there's a second life form that happens to, to overlay the first one and it's exact same matter, but it's organized differently. Probably that's what you're saying. So, whereas your cells, Aiden's cells are just put it under a microscope. You can see it. You can poke it with a pen. You can see what everything does. Aiden. something quite different. is a pattern, pattern of relationships between things that change over time.
And that's what he was talking about over seven years is all new matter there, but it's largely the same pattern, except when it isn't. And then there are these crazy things, like all these memories you have, like who was your second grade teacher? What color was your first bicycle? These things you haven't thought about for ages that are in there, that you can recall for the first time in 20 years right away.
But all of a sudden we get this image that the multicellular creature, the Aden in this example, is something very different a cell which has a metabolism and you can see how it takes in food and all of it. is something else. Aden is a kind of order that's superimposed on that. And the question I was trying to ask is, is there any reason that that would be the last step? There are a bunch of Aden's in turn a creature and are a bunch of those in turn another creature.
There's no philosophical reason it would break. There, there are other reasons it might. The universe is only so old, and the universe is only so big, and the universe only has so many, atoms in it. So there are, there are boundaries. But conceptually, if cells can come together and form Aiden, then Aiden's can come together and form another creature. I, I really caught onto that piece and I was, I even thought about how.
You know, say, say what your wife or your partner or somebody who's even living together.
Oftentimes you have the same thoughts at the same time it's the other person saying you can i was just thinking that you know i actually when you read this book, those are the type of things that come to mind like you were talking about how, the origins of multi seller life like you know byron and aiden cuddling down at night for body warmth and then one day we wake up we're stuck together and you know what you gotta go this just happened or else.
I, I eat, you know, one animal eats the other animal and the animal stays inside and goes, you know what, it's actually safer in here. I'm not now having to deal with predation out there and I can then the relationship becomes symbiotic because I create ATP then and I give energy towards this being and this being actually gains from that.
So we work together because when we think of symbiosis, I think we think often about those, you know, the, the bird that eats the meat out of the crocodile's teeth or whatever it might be. Maybe you'll share a bit on that because. I'd love to share that the origins of those because this is how deep byron goes into the researcher you must read so much money know your reference a lot of books.
In the book, but also you read so widely to get to this level because you do it in a very whistle stops tour to do that. I know how difficult that is and how much research you would have have to done. Maybe you want to share a couple of highlights of the, the origins or the theories of origin of multicellular life. Well, you touched on them really well. And then it is right to call them theories of the origin of multicellular life, because nobody really knows.
Because again, you have to come up with the question, why didn't it happen so much earlier? And then there's the big one that you mentioned, which is, what point does the creature start reproducing as a multicellular creature and not the individual pieces? So, one example you gave, which is the large thing eats the small one, and for the first time it doesn't die. and it decides he's happier inside here and starts giving off energy.
That mentally is how people think of this, and it could very well be true, but of course it never tells you at what point that creature reproduced with that other creature inside it, that it, that its kid had one of those offspring in it, and we don't really we don't, we don't, we don't know that, and But obviously at some point it happens.
We can see that the oldest cells we have, it's really interesting when you look at the oldest villages of humans, like 8000 BC in Turkey, it's a bunch of like round houses that don't quite touch each other. Maybe they butt each other a little bit and all of that. And they're not the rigid with you know, crisscrossing streets and city blocks. Life actually looks that way too. When you look at the oldest. multicellular life.
It looks like a bunch of round cells that are kind of loosely in something else, and maybe they're doing a little bit of specialization, and then eventually they look like what you would see when you look at a piece of wood or something under a microscope, and it's all very tight and together. And so we don't really know how that transition was made, but, biologically. But we do know, we think, Well, I shouldn't say it that way.
we believe happens, of course, is that multicellular life form therefore takes on new capabilities, which we call emergent, and those give it the ability, better survival ability. It isn't so overwhelming that it makes a singular cell life go away. It's still the dominant kind of life on this planet, and we're the anomaly. And it surely isn't solely with the purpose of getting intelligence, because Virtually no intelligent, no multicellular life is intelligent, only really we are.
But it does seem to be like the way it's, it's all going right now. Huh. know, the, the thoughts that go through my head, my head, and it's probably from reading and having, like, I actually think of these conversations as not transactional, like the, the conversation's better for you.
You know it just so happens i always think of the show is learning with witnesses when it's emergent it's emergent the conversations emergent because because i've read other stuff and i've read your previous stuff this is what i like to actually read the book deeply is cuz then.
You can have emergent thoughts that come out of this like even there the idea that the organisms was another organism multicellular creates energy, you know you go to sci fi movies like the matrix and the whole idea that all these humans are actually creating energy for some other higher being etc. You can i go well that's possible because again you can't see the label on the jar when you're inside the jar because you're living there you could
you could be doing this we just don't know, i'm saying that to take a little step back to the origin of life itself because you mentioned this your belief, about you know the great cataclysmic event where there was an event, The, some spillage maybe of some life that it was existing in space for a long time. Like you give the example of the, the, the, the telescope cap that still has living bacteria on it that's living in space.
'cause it can live there forever because it's kind of frozen in time almost. So maybe we'll give a couple of, just a couple of, and, and Byron gives loads in the book of these theories of the origin of life. The Abi genesis is one. The great cataclysmic event is the other etc The interesting thing is that the universe seems to be 12 billion years old. Earth seems to be 4 billion. Our sun seems to be 4 billion. Our sun is a third generation star. That's a crazy idea.
There was a star there and it lived billions of years and then it died out. And then another one formed and lived and died out. That's the third one. And you say, how could you know something like that? And the way they do it, very simple actually. It blows my mind. They take a spectrometer and they look at the sun through it. And depending on the bands of light they see, they can tell what's burning in it. And what's burning in ice then are a lot of heavy elements.
And we know the early stars were only made of hydrogen helium. And that over time fusion creates these other elements. And they can actually tell by how many are in there. that's going through this for a while. So you get a different view of, of it that we're kind of the grandchildren and our planet is and our sun is and all these things are, are are relatively new compared to the span of the universe. Now, it is very interesting that the element you're made up of 30 different elements.
It's about what it takes to make you. Is made of 60 by the way, so you're a lot simpler than a smartphone. Those 30 elements are in you in a proportion that is, to some degree, mirrors a lot of the earth. You have a lot of carbon in you. You have a lot of, you're mostly oxygen. And that's really, you know, because you made a water and that's hydrogen and oxygen. So when you look at, when you break you down into your core elements a lot of them match the earth, but some of them don't.
Some of them actually look like you came from other, another planet that had elements in different combinations. And that could well be right. Like some life is this crazy, complex thing with DNA. and somehow reproducing and yet it only happened once on this planet. Why this, why Mildew and you can have 50 percent overlap in your DNA. Y'all are the same thing. One thing has happened. You went one way, Mildew went another way and everybody's, you know, fine with their choices.
you say, how did that happen so quickly and only once? And maybe it didn't, maybe it happened a long time ago on another planet. The planet got hit by a rock. scattered into the winds and went everywhere for millions of years, billions of years. It floated around until it landed in a nice warm puddle somewhere and then it grew up again. Now, I think this is huge because I wrote an entire book on why there only, why only one intelligent species evolved on this planet.
Like why weren't there a thousand? Or more likely, why weren't there none? If intelligence like ours is so rare. Why would there be any? it could be rare because it's a very volatile substance. It blows things up. very, very, you know, that's a theory that what happens is when you're intelligent, you master your environment too well and you consume all the resources until there's resource scarcity. And then you battle the few remaining to get what little is left. And then you blow everything up.
That's a narrative on what intelligence is. But planets that don't evolve it end up getting hit by rocks or celestial events happen to them that they can't defend themselves against. So it might be that life that occasionally produces an intelligent species like us, occasionally, occasionally lives a long time and occasionally the rocks hit the planet, blow it up. It drifts around the cosmos and lands someplace else and evolves again and maybe evolves one intelligent species.
I have a falsifiable prediction. That is that we're going to find alien life. We're going to find evidence of alien life and it's going to be our DNA. It's going to be GTCA DNA, just like what we have now. You can take cells of that and put it in humans and it would work because I think it's just happened probably one time, at least in this neighborhood of the universe and it's spreading around slowly over the course of billions of years.
which is why you watch i said about the whole idea telescope cap because junk flies out into space all the time so naturally you know there was an episode showing my. childishness of family guy one day. And it was about the origin of Reese's pieces. One guy was driving eating peanut butter and other guy was eating a chocolate bar and they crashed into each other. And Officer Reese's comes along and he tastes . He tastes a chocolate bar, and then he shoots both of them.
So the backstory on that though that for my whole childhood all Reese's peanut butter cup commercials were that. They were one person with a chocolate bar walking around a corner and somebody else eating peanut butter with a spoon and they bump into each other and two great tastes that taste great together. Your chocolate's in my peanut butter. No, your peanut butter's in my chocolate. Mmm, tastes great. And so they both loved it. And then, Reese's Rift on that for 20 years.
So that's why Family Guy would then take it and I missed, I absolutely missed that. That story of it, that makes it even better. All right. I I, I'm gonna capture onto a couple of things. One was, you mentioned there the alphabet. Of DNA. That's, that's an important thing. And then, so I'm going to grab onto that.
If you explain that it's really important thing for people to know and a real nice nugget of knowledge to know the other was something that is from, I suppose, the origins of your work, including the businesses you built and the fourth age is Moore's law and that's two scientists Sharov and Gordon published a proactively called life before earth. And it showed that.
moore's law actually applies to dna which blew my mind so maybe you'll share these two things I mentioned earlier that DNA is not alive. It's just information. And really the best way to think of it is actually like a flash drive. That's all it is. It's information. And it it's encoded chemically. And it's encoded redundantly. And that's the double helix you've heard about for DNA. It's actually two copies It's a mirrored copy. the way DNA copies itself is very interesting.
It just takes one of those and splits it down the middle. And gives half of it to one guy and half of it to another. And they, because they have a perfect half of it, they make the other half again. And that's how it copies itself. Quite accurately. Billions upon billions of times. Every now and then there's a mutation and things get interesting. So, it's information. Now, we know how many base pairs there are. They're in single digit billions, how many rows there are.
the number of chemicals makes it a four letter alphabet. the four letters, the way we call them, are G, T, C, and A. The way to think about that is the movie Gattaca is about genetically modifying humans. And the word Gattaca is not in the movie anywhere. Just one of those things like Blade Runner, you know, they're never called blades or anything. Just this word happens to be the name of the movie. But if you remember Gattaca, then you know the four letters.
Now, what's fascinating about it is because it's just information. Every one of those spaces can hold one of four letters. So unlike English, which is one of 26 letters, or binary, which is one of two, one of four. And we can actually work out how much it can store. And human DNA can store about 600 Meg. very small. Not even a movie. But that's not even the interesting part. The interesting part is most of that is what we call junk DNA. People resist that term.
It's DNA that appears to have no function. It was used millions of years ago, got written onto that getting copied forever. And maybe 90 percent of your DNA is that. So maybe you're at a 60 meg, which is like, a raw image file. That's about what you are, but you're not even that because to humans, Aiden and I, have a bunch of overlapping, you know, our eyes are here, our ears are here, our mouth is here and the amount that he and I are different.
is a few K, just a few K, is all it takes to send him. And even things that are closely related to us like chimps. you know, you know, they're 99. 9 percent or whatever, radically different creature than us. have nothing that would be remotely human. They're not creative. They don't write music. They don't all of that. They don't have anything that looks like our intelligence. And yet. They're twice as strong as we are. They're much bigger. They, their lifespans are half the length of ours.
It suggests there's probably some tweak to human DNA that could make our, our life twice as long. Like there's that much juice in it to play around with. So it's incredibly volatile stuff. Like you hit the right thing and switch it from G to C or C to A, and you change everything.
And A lot of people think because of that, I happen to be one of them, that things like human speech didn't actually evolve over long periods of time, but were some little mutation that happened in one person, one time, that gave them all these human abilities. And that was such an overwhelming advantage that they went on to be the parents of us all. And people look at things like why did modern cave art appear.
So suddenly everywhere so beautiful like and why did representative art all began at that exact same moment and they think maybe it's because it just happened to one person one time. And the other half of that you wanted me to elaborate on was that was DNA being information. the moore's law of dna, i yes, a big deal. So Moore's law is this mystery that we don't understand that. So it started with Gordon Moore saying that computers double in power every two years.
that nobody thought would last as long as it did. And then Ray Kurzweil comes on and says, man, it went back in time hundreds of years too. It's been going on with computation, even though the technology, it's a very mysterious thing. Nobody understands it. If you figure it out, tell me the secret and we'll split the Nobel money and they'll have the time of our life. But what we noticed is that other technologies seem to behave that same way. Not just.
computers, but everything seemed to double on a periodic basis. Maybe every 30 years, every four years, or every six months, it would double and double and double. And then to your point, it was revealed that multicellular life seems to, it seems to double in complexity every 76 million years.
And if you go back in time, it means that complex life began about six or 7 billion years ago, which actually is in line with my hypothetical, you know, Gets started on planets and they get blown up and then that drifts around and it lands on other ones and some of those. I love it, by the way, that plants and planets might reproduce the same exact way. They throw this pollen into the, into the cosmic winds and it lands.
Most of it doesn't, but every now and then some little bit of it lands and the story continues and we are that story. love it man i love it the one thing i wanted to just share as well as the bottleneck events because again people don't people forget that at one stage. We were very, very close to extinction. we're almost extinct species. And this is the importance of understanding a bottleneck event. So we. That's exactly right. We infer them from genetic diversity.
If you have two human, if all humans are almost identically related, then at some point you got down to very few humans. We think 80, 000 years ago. Maybe got down to 800 mating pairs. Cheetahs, by the way, we think got down to 30 mating pairs in the last ice age and every cheetah is essentially a clone of every other cheetah. And you could bone graph skin, you could skin graph from any cheetah to any other one because their bodies all think they're the same cheetah.
Now, we didn't get that bad off, but we got down to 800 mating pairs. And if you think about it, odds were not great for us at that time because we weren't, we didn't have at this point, we didn't have technology, we didn't have walls, we didn't have cities, we didn't have writing, we didn't have language, maybe. We didn't have knowledge of the world. We were not masters of it in any sense of the world.
And I only talked about this in the last chapter of the book because what it tells us is when you look at the archeological remains of how we managed to survive through that, these are darkest times when we hung by a thread. How did we do it? Were we like rash, authoritarian? Were we like utilitarians and we only the strongest survived? Just the opposite. What it looks like is we took care of everybody. The weak and the strong back then.
We find people, we find examples of old people who couldn't care for themselves, who were clearly cared for. We find people who had injuries that were clearly nursed through their injuries. So even when times were tough, even at our lowest as a species, we were still a social species that cared for each other. And I think that's actually still our core, as I argue later in the book. I don't know if you ever heard of it.
There's a, this event, a bottleneck event in a Pacific Island called Ping Lap, which was a 18th century, a typhoon hit it. There was 20 survivors. Amongst them was a man who had a rare genetic variation that caused color blindness and today on the island ten percent of the entire population is now colorblind because of that bottleneck That is fascinating. I don't know that one. It's amazing but i love the way you know speaking to you and having done the series we've done before.
you know you refer to the stuff i know you know stuff that you mentioned in the other books i love that's why i like do these deep dives into these books i thought one thing was really important, which was in the book you give the origin of life dna and then you build to go well why would you ever die and i thought that again, thinking in metaphors the way i do it's important metaphor for actually organizational death or even death of generations one very practical
thing is to, When you have more people living you mentioned about intelligence i'm getting to this scarcer and scarcer resources will also because you become more intelligent keep people alive, there's more people on the planet there's less resources pension pots, sandwich generations where the young have to look after their own children and their parents and sometimes their grandparents maybe even still and then they have to be cared for to your point about caring.
And then equally thinking, and I was thinking about this, how the max plank quote in his autobiography in 1950, he wrote an important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. It rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out. The growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning. Another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. I thought that was.
Actually encapsulates why death is actually important or regeneration is important I love that. I love that. I mean, all life is young. Isn't that interesting? We're, we're an unending series of living things that date back to a creature called Luca, the last universal common ancestor to us all. And so there's an unbroken line of, we think we know how many generations back, but regardless, this unbroken line, but at the same time, every living thing is very young.
And I think the one quote in that that and what I said is it looks very inefficient that, you know, I've like worked my whole life and I've learned all this stuff and then you're going to kill me now, like when I'm actually useful. I think that one line I write in there about, you could just imagine the US if the, the generation that thought the Civil War was still alive and in charge. That that old ideas would become ever more entrenched and unfortunately. It is young, new ideas that have to.
So in other words, death is a feature, not a bug, unfortunately. and a nice way to finish i thought was just to finish on emergence and the way i'm gonna say wait to that was just as you said there, fascinating thing i found out i don't know if you saw this when you're in your studies of ants but, change roles through life and an older ant actually becomes a forager.
And the thinking is perhaps because actually it's more expendable because it's already reproduced, but also it has a body of knowledge to understand where opportunities might lie, where threats might come from, et cetera. And I thought about how. We don't treat our elderly that way.
In fact, in organizations, we usually have an ageism in organizations and don't treat that organizational knowledge the way we should, because oftentimes they're not the people in innovation and they have a lot to offer in innovation as well, but I thought that was a nice way to, to land the ship today on emergence because ants are just a beautiful example of emergence. Emergence is a biological thing whereby the whole of something takes on characteristics that the parts don't have.
know it's a lot of definitional words, but basically why a clock can keep time, even though none of the gears can keep time. Keeping time is an emergent property. You're an emergent, you have all these emergent properties like. you have a sense of humor and none of your cells have a sense of humor. And the thing about is very mysterious. How do these new features, sometimes very complex things come about? And that's section two of the book. And it's also a sign that something is happening.
You see, when we went from single celled life to multicellular life, there were abilities that gave that creature better survival and that if, if there is a Agora, there is this creature, will have abilities that no human has. I think, I think it does. And I think it can deflect an asteroid, but no human can. think it can do all kinds of things that people can't do.
And that is one of the proof points is that collectively can humans do things that no individual can, but we'll come to those next time we talk. We'll talk about that. the falsifiable things that if, if there is a superorganism, it would demand conformity and we would be cut off from it if we didn't conform to it. We wouldn't be able to survive apart from it. All these other, things that would indicate we are part of a larger animal. then, I will ask the question, what does that animal want?
What does that mean to us? Does it put pressure on us? Does it take pressure off of us? What, what does it, what does it mean for us? Beautiful. Looking forward to that. I pulled a beautiful quote that i'd never seen from your book and i'm gonna share it as a final message for me before i do, where can people find a bar and to find out more about your work more about your books etc. Thank you for asking. I'm Byron Reese everywhere. I'm still Byron Reese on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on YouTube.
My email is even ByronReese at gmail. com. I look forward to hearing from anybody. I'm reese's and reese's pieces spelling with an s that is Exactly. The quote i pulled that you shared with me that i haven't heard it's actually a character called who she from the movie the forty seven ronin.
None of us knows how long we shall live or when our time will come but soon all that will be left of our brief lives is the pride our children will feel when they speak our names absolutely love that man thank you for sharing that thanks for joining us author of we are a gora byron reese thanks for joining us