Dwarkesh

Yeah.

What do you think about the potential that with synthetic biology people can make diseases that have the transmissibility of measles but also the deadliness of something like Ebola?

Is that – given your understanding of biology and whatever, is that – how plausible is that?

So can I ask a question about that?

Why is it the case – because there's diseases that hijack the flea's mind or ants' minds or something.

Are there –

Like, why isn't there a disease that makes humans zombies?

Is it just the human brain is, like, so complicated that it's, like— Let me come back to this.

Let me come back to this.

And then what is the reason that you have these 1,000-year cycles, basically, where

Why is it not 500 years?

Why is it not 10 years?

Why is it like – what causes it to go dormant?

What causes it to reemerge?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, just a couple more rapid-fire questions for you.

Have you found tools like deep research useful for especially your kind of work where you just have to compile insights for many different fields?

If you throw in a question, the kinds of questions you honestly investigate, and now maybe they can rely on you as a citation for those particular questions about what effect did climate have on the fate of Rome or something.

But if you just had a different question, which maybe you'd write a book about in the future, how well do they do at synthesizing this kind of literature and coming up with a thesis the way you do?

Oh, really?