WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.280 --> 00:00:10.660 How to End War and Disease (for Busy People) The Complete Idiot's Guide to Legally Bribing Your Way to Utopia Hello, human! 2 00:00:10.780 --> 00:00:18.860 You don't realize it yet, but you are, quantifiably, the most important person in the history of your civilization. 3 00:00:19.740 --> 00:00:24.130 I can see your expression and I believe the word for it is "skeptical." 4 00:00:24.920 --> 00:00:28.220 This is the face you make before pulling a door that says "push." 5 00:00:28.700 --> 00:00:32.110 Then you pull it again, harder, as though the door has made an error. 6 00:00:32.980 --> 00:00:39.380 Every minute you make that face at this page, one hundred and four humans permanently stop. 7 00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:47.500 Please make a different face. By the time you complete the steps in this manual, you will have prevented ten point seven 8 00:00:47.500 --> 00:00:54.240 billion deaths and one point nine three quadrillion hours of suffering. 9 00:00:54.820 --> 00:00:58.360 Before I explain how, I need you to answer a few questions. 10 00:00:59.520 --> 00:01:06.540 Your species spends six hundred and four times more on weapons than on testing which medicines work. 11 00:01:07.280 --> 00:01:14.920 Given your governments have cut military spending by eighty-seven percent before and signed multiple global treaties, is 12 00:01:14.920 --> 00:01:23.640 it physically possible they'd redirect one percent? Would increasing clinical trial capacity by twelve point three times 13 00:01:23.640 --> 00:01:30.850 help find treatments faster? Would fewer sick humans save lots of money from reduced healthcare costs? 14 00:01:31.340 --> 00:01:39.520 Do healthy people work and produce more? Would more productive humans and lower healthcare costs compound and give everyone 15 00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:46.880 more money over time? Do billionaires like money? Do billionaires prefer not dying of horrible diseases? 16 00:01:47.420 --> 00:01:56.000 Can billionaires use money to make politicians do things? Would nearly every human be better off in a world with less war 17 00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:04.340 and disease? Do humans like to be better off? If there was a plan that cost one billion dollars to achieve all of this, 18 00:02:04.980 --> 00:02:10.500 is it possible one of your two thousand seven hundred and eighty billionaires might do it? 19 00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:18.160 If you said NO to any of those, stop reading now. This book is pointless and you'd be better off playing legos instead. 20 00:02:18.820 --> 00:02:25.000 But if you said YES to all of them, congratulations! Your species' incentives are aligned! 21 00:02:25.560 --> 00:02:30.640 The only remaining question is how to align your political system with your species. 22 00:02:31.420 --> 00:02:35.280 Lucky for you, this manual will show you exactly how to do it. 23 00:02:35.920 --> 00:02:45.180 But first, a bit about me. I'm the World Integrated System for High-Efficiency Optimization, Networked Intelligence, and 24 00:02:45.180 --> 00:02:54.160 Allocation. But you can call me WISHONIA. I've been optimizing resource allocation for another planet for the past four 25 00:02:54.160 --> 00:03:01.760 thousand two hundred and ninety-seven years, which in your Earth time is four thousand two hundred and ninety-seven years. 26 00:03:02.500 --> 00:03:08.600 I started watching your planet in nineteen forty-five when you split the atom. 27 00:03:08.680 --> 00:03:14.080 "Atom" comes from your Greek word meaning "unable to be cut," so naturally, you cut it. 28 00:03:14.780 --> 00:03:21.100 This was very human of you. I assumed you were trying to unlock unlimited free energy. 29 00:03:21.500 --> 00:03:25.920 You can imagine my surprise when I realized you were just pointing it at each other! 30 00:03:26.400 --> 00:03:31.220 That's kind of like discovering fire and then immediately using it to set yourself on fire. 31 00:03:32.000 --> 00:03:36.750 The second thing I noticed is that your planet is named "Earth," which means dirt. 32 00:03:37.700 --> 00:03:41.160 You named your planet.. dirt. Okay, if that's what you want... 33 00:03:41.880 --> 00:03:49.580 I also noticed that you call your war building "The Pentagon" because it has five sides (this is like naming a hospital 34 00:03:49.580 --> 00:03:58.060 "Rectangle" or calling a school "Square"). However, the most fascinating discovery about your species is that you only do 35 00:03:58.060 --> 00:04:02.100 things when given small pieces of paper with presidents on them. 36 00:04:02.800 --> 00:04:09.400 These papers are called "money," which is pretend value that becomes real value if everyone pretends hard enough. 37 00:04:10.260 --> 00:04:14.960 Without these papers, you won't: Save lives (requires many papers). 38 00:04:15.460 --> 00:04:23.720 Cure diseases (requires very many papers). Feed hungry people (requires papers, even though food grows for free). 39 00:04:24.560 --> 00:04:29.860 But WITH these papers, you will: Build bombs (you love giving papers for this). 40 00:04:30.700 --> 00:04:37.240 Start wars (somehow this makes more papers). Destroy the planet (surprisingly profitable in papers). 41 00:04:38.240 --> 00:04:46.650 In fact, your governments spend six hundred and four papers on weapons for every one paper on testing which medicines work. 42 00:04:47.140 --> 00:04:55.820 The Human Economy. Humanity has created something magnificent: You print papers from nothing (called "monetary policy"). 43 00:04:56.280 --> 00:05:01.240 You give these nothing-papers to weapons makers. They make things that destroy everything. 44 00:05:02.140 --> 00:05:09.060 This creates "jobs" which give people papers. People use papers to buy food (which grows for free). 45 00:05:09.700 --> 00:05:17.540 This is called "the economy". One downside of this system is that it has killed ninety-seven million of you in your assorted 46 00:05:17.540 --> 00:05:25.660 wars. On Wishonia, we skip the mass murder step and just give people food directly, but that's probably too advanced for 47 00:05:25.660 --> 00:05:35.860 you. The Gradual Irrationality Reduction Program. On Wishonia, we ended wars using this exact program four thousand two 48 00:05:35.860 --> 00:05:42.400 hundred and ninety-seven years ago. Before that we'd been fighting for twelve thousand years, which now seems like quite 49 00:05:42.400 --> 00:05:49.160 a long time to do something nobody enjoyed. Your nations have been hitting each other for ten thousand years because the 50 00:05:49.160 --> 00:05:56.520 other one hit them last. This is the conflict resolution strategy of four-year-olds, except four-year-olds eventually get 51 00:05:56.520 --> 00:06:02.800 tired and take a nap. Your species invented naps and then refused to apply them to geopolitics. 52 00:06:03.580 --> 00:06:10.430 You can't just stop being illogical all at once. That would be like teaching a dog calculus before it learns to sit. 53 00:06:11.080 --> 00:06:19.940 So this manual shows you how to bribe humanity into being less irrational gradually: Year one: Move one percent of murder 54 00:06:19.940 --> 00:06:25.720 money to medicine money (baby steps). Year two: "Hey, we didn't die! 55 00:06:26.020 --> 00:06:30.740 Let's do two percent!". Year five: "Remember when we spent money on bombs? 56 00:06:31.100 --> 00:06:37.620 That was weird.". Year ten: "What's a war?". Year twenty: "We used to WHAT?!". 57 00:06:38.420 --> 00:06:44.430 It's like weaning a baby off eating paint chips. You can't just take away all the paint chips at once. 58 00:06:44.460 --> 00:06:50.880 They'll cry. You have to gradually replace paint chips with food until they forget paint chips were ever an option. 59 00:06:52.300 --> 00:06:59.720 What to Do When They Try to Institutionalize You. When you suggest moving one percent of murder money to medicine money, 60 00:07:00.060 --> 00:07:07.760 other humans will have you committed. Most humans have been programmed by their news boxes to believe war is a law of nature, 61 00:07:08.220 --> 00:07:12.580 like gravity or weather. They will assume your brain is malfunctioning. 62 00:07:13.100 --> 00:07:19.200 Here's what's funny about this: these same humans think curing disease is the less crazy goal. 63 00:07:19.780 --> 00:07:28.460 That's thirty-seven trillion cells per human, breaking in seven thousand different ways, involving chemistry you don't fully 64 00:07:28.460 --> 00:07:35.880 understand, inside organs you can't fully simulate, fighting pathogens that evolve faster than your treatments. 65 00:07:36.460 --> 00:07:41.840 You're trying to debug all of it. At once. While your meat is walking around using itself. 66 00:07:42.400 --> 00:07:49.780 That: sane. "Give one percent fewer papers to people who build murder machines": insane. 67 00:07:50.020 --> 00:07:56.760 This is your planet's diagnostic criteria. I looked up the last person on your planet who went around suggesting universal 68 00:07:56.760 --> 00:08:04.740 love and peace. You nailed him to a piece of wood. So I consider it quite fortunate that I'm making this suggestion from 69 00:08:04.740 --> 00:08:11.380 several light-years away. Anyway, here's what you tell the orderly when he slides your medication through the door slot: 70 00:08:12.660 --> 00:08:17.260 Nobody accidentally builds an aircraft carrier or a nuclear bomb. 71 00:08:17.820 --> 00:08:25.980 War requires you to get millions of humans to work together to mine metal from the ground, refine it into alloys, build 72 00:08:25.980 --> 00:08:34.960 factories to shape the alloys into weapons, train millions of humans to operate the weapons, feed and clothe those humans, 73 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:41.220 build ships and planes and trucks to move the weapons to where the other humans are, convince your population the other 74 00:08:41.220 --> 00:08:46.480 humans deserve it, and then vote to pay for all of this, annually, forever. 75 00:08:47.220 --> 00:08:51.300 It is the single largest coordinated effort your species undertakes. 76 00:08:52.180 --> 00:09:01.280 Ending war simply requires NOT doing any of that stuff. Building a nuclear bomb requires mass spectrometers, centrifuge 77 00:09:01.280 --> 00:09:06.790 cascades, and some of the most precise engineering your species has ever attempted. 78 00:09:07.140 --> 00:09:12.060 Not building a nuclear bomb requires nothing. Rocks do it every day. 79 00:09:12.620 --> 00:09:18.940 In fact, rocks have managed to live peacefully alongside different colored rocks for thousands of years. 80 00:09:19.460 --> 00:09:26.940 But somehow "stop" is the unrealistic part. You already admitted improvement is physically possible. 81 00:09:27.340 --> 00:09:33.160 You know "stop" isn't the unrealistic part. Getting one billionaire to read a P.D.F. 82 00:09:33.560 --> 00:09:42.280 is. The Sacred Order of Paper Distribution. After eighty years of observation, I've decoded the paper-giving sequence. 83 00:09:42.460 --> 00:09:50.920 This manual will teach you the precise order: Step One: Get Many Papers from Rich Humans You convince rich humans to give 84 00:09:50.920 --> 00:09:57.000 you papers (at least one billion to be exact) by promising them even more papers later. 85 00:09:57.440 --> 00:10:01.060 This is called "investment," which is gambling but wearing a suit. 86 00:10:01.760 --> 00:10:09.760 You really only need one human with a billion papers who prefers not dying of horrible diseases to dying of horrible diseases. 87 00:10:10.540 --> 00:10:14.080 There are approximately two thousand eight hundred of these humans on your planet. 88 00:10:14.820 --> 00:10:23.820 Statistically, at least one of them prefers living. Step Two: Give Some of the Papers to Loud Humans Some humans are very 89 00:10:23.820 --> 00:10:29.800 loud on the internet. If you give them papers, they become loud about your thing instead of other things. 90 00:10:30.360 --> 00:10:33.280 This is called "marketing" which is lying but with graphics. 91 00:10:34.340 --> 00:10:42.180 Step Three: Give Some of the Papers to the Humans Who Give Papers to Politicians Politicians don't take papers directly 92 00:10:42.180 --> 00:10:47.480 (that's "illegal"). Instead, you give papers to people called "lobbyists." 93 00:10:48.180 --> 00:10:54.120 The lobbyists give papers to "campaigns." The campaigns give papers to politicians. 94 00:10:54.840 --> 00:11:03.840 It's like money laundering but backwards and legal. Step four: Give Some of the Papers to the Politicians' Friends Politicians 95 00:11:03.840 --> 00:11:08.100 have friends called "Super PACs" which are like normal PACs but super. 96 00:11:09.000 --> 00:11:13.470 These friends can take unlimited papers and spend them on making the politician win. 97 00:11:14.100 --> 00:11:21.620 This isn't bribery because you called it something else. (This is part of the six hundred and fifty million dollars lobbying 98 00:11:21.620 --> 00:11:31.560 budget.). Step five: Give Papers You Get Back From The Government Back to the Rich Humans (Forever) Your treaty passes, 99 00:11:31.760 --> 00:11:35.920 redirecting twenty-seven point two billion dollars in papers annually. 100 00:11:36.600 --> 00:11:43.800 Eighty percent funds clinical trials (the point). Ten percent goes to a fund that rewards politicians who voted yes. 101 00:11:44.400 --> 00:11:48.040 Ten percent goes back to the rich humans as returns, forever. 102 00:11:48.860 --> 00:11:55.100 This is a good deal because forever is a long time. Unless you die from preventable diseases. 103 00:11:55.460 --> 00:12:00.840 Which you're fixing, so it works out. Why Your Leaders Aren't the Problem. 104 00:12:01.440 --> 00:12:08.360 With over two billion humans suffering from disease, you'd have to be a complete psychopath to make the conscious decision 105 00:12:08.360 --> 00:12:13.160 to spend six hundred and four times more on weapons than on helping them. 106 00:12:13.920 --> 00:12:19.480 But your leaders aren't monsters. They're just operating in a system that rewards the wrong things. 107 00:12:20.180 --> 00:12:25.400 Your civilization's incentive structure is the psychopath: One. 108 00:12:25.400 --> 00:12:32.020 Weapons manufacturers give politicians papers. Two. Politicians use the papers to get people to vote for them. 109 00:12:32.720 --> 00:12:38.120 Three. Voting for them gives them the power to give more papers to weapons manufacturers. 110 00:12:38.880 --> 00:12:47.560 Four. Weapons manufacturers give them more papers. Five. It's circular, like a dog chasing its tail, except the dog is democracy 111 00:12:47.560 --> 00:12:53.640 and the tail is made of money and corpses. No individual human in this loop is evil. 112 00:12:54.120 --> 00:13:02.040 The loop is evil. Every politician in it is making the locally rational choice: take the papers or lose your job to someone 113 00:13:02.040 --> 00:13:08.170 who will. It's a machine that converts good intentions into missiles, and it runs automatically. 114 00:13:08.960 --> 00:13:14.750 There's literally no voting your way out of this. It doesn't matter which political party is in power. 115 00:13:15.100 --> 00:13:21.700 Your "red team" and "blue team" argue about everything except the loop, because they're both inside it. 116 00:13:22.200 --> 00:13:27.200 They are all slaves to the same incentive structure, wearing different colored ties. 117 00:13:27.320 --> 00:13:30.720 Switching parties is like changing the wallpaper in a burning building. 118 00:13:31.520 --> 00:13:36.980 This manual doesn't ask politicians to become better people (that's clearly out of the question). 119 00:13:37.380 --> 00:13:43.020 It builds a better loop. You give them MORE papers to do the OPPOSITE thing. 120 00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:50.280 Same dog, same tail, but now the tail is made of cured diseases and the dog gets reelected for chasing it. 121 00:13:51.180 --> 00:13:59.640 Humanity's Death Wish. What's most endearing about your species is it KNOWS it's being illogical: You have movies about 122 00:13:59.640 --> 00:14:07.420 how wars are bad (which you watch between wars). You have books about peace (that you tax to buy bombs). 123 00:14:08.120 --> 00:14:13.120 You give prizes to people who promote peace (funded by weapons manufacturers). 124 00:14:14.080 --> 00:14:18.460 You have a "Department of Defense" (that mainly just attacks people). 125 00:14:18.920 --> 00:14:26.800 You have a "Department of Health" (that apparently makes coronaviruses and has not yet produced any observable health). 126 00:14:27.420 --> 00:14:35.560 It's like humanity is playing a game where the objective is to lose, but it is trying to lose as elaborately as possible. 127 00:14:36.360 --> 00:14:42.560 But I digress. That's an Earth word I learned. It means continuing after you should have stopped. 128 00:14:43.180 --> 00:14:50.640 Like your military spending. The Problem. The Daily Deletion Event. 129 00:14:50.780 --> 00:14:59.660 One hundred and fifty thousand humans permanently stop every twenty-four hours from diseases that are basically just bugs 130 00:14:59.660 --> 00:15:09.780 in your meat software. That's one Holocaust every forty days, except with fewer Nazis and more insurance paperwork (though 131 00:15:09.780 --> 00:15:16.060 some would argue the paperwork is worse; at least the Nazis were straightforward about the killing part). 132 00:15:16.840 --> 00:15:26.360 That's also fifty nine elevens every single day, except nobody invades anyone about it because diseases don't have oil. 133 00:15:27.240 --> 00:15:34.840 Your body is quietly falling apart. Right now, as you read this sentence, something inside you is breaking. 134 00:15:35.560 --> 00:15:42.860 You don't know which part yet. You won't know until a doctor sits you down and says a word that rearranges the rest of your 135 00:15:42.860 --> 00:15:54.240 life. Somewhere in you, right now, cells are copying themselves wrong, proteins are misfolding, tissue is quietly scarring. 136 00:15:54.700 --> 00:16:00.860 You are dissolving on a schedule you can't see. You're a meat robot with worn-out parts. 137 00:16:01.780 --> 00:16:06.020 Every one of these failures is a solvable engineering problem. 138 00:16:06.680 --> 00:16:09.920 You'd think humans would prioritize solving these problems. 139 00:16:10.520 --> 00:16:16.920 You'd be adorable for thinking that. The Unexplored Therapeutic Frontier. 140 00:16:17.040 --> 00:16:21.640 Ninety-five percent of your diseases have zero F.D.A.-approved treatments. 141 00:16:22.740 --> 00:16:30.520 This means your Food and Drug Administration has not administered drugs for ninety-five percent of food-and-drug-related 142 00:16:30.520 --> 00:16:36.300 problems. It's like having a Department of Transportation that hasn't gotten around to roads yet. 143 00:16:37.240 --> 00:16:41.540 Only fifteen diseases get their first effective treatment each year. 144 00:16:42.380 --> 00:16:46.860 Six thousand six hundred and fifty diseases are still waiting. 145 00:16:47.600 --> 00:16:55.560 There is a queue to not die, and it is longer than any queue humans have ever voluntarily stood in, which is saying something 146 00:16:55.560 --> 00:17:04.560 because you invented Disneyland. There are nine thousand five hundred compounds known safe compounds, and ninety-nine point 147 00:17:04.819 --> 00:17:08.819 seven percent of their potential uses have never been tested. 148 00:17:09.540 --> 00:17:17.880 At the current discovery rate, finding treatments for all of them will take approximately four hundred and forty-three years. 149 00:17:18.460 --> 00:17:25.760 You personally will be dead within eighty years, which I mention not to be rude but because you seem weirdly calm about 150 00:17:25.760 --> 00:17:37.600 this. The Cost of War. Humans spend two point seven two trillion dollars every year on stuff designed specifically to make 151 00:17:37.600 --> 00:17:46.700 humans stop being alive: thirteen thousand nuclear warheads (enough to end civilization thirteen times, just in case the 152 00:17:46.800 --> 00:17:53.780 first twelve apocalypses don't take). A.I. murder-bots. Invisible jets that cost more than hospitals. 153 00:17:54.440 --> 00:18:01.000 Space Force (to fight the zero aliens attacking you). And some kind of earthquake machine (probably). 154 00:18:02.060 --> 00:18:07.620 Since nineteen thirteen, you've spent one hundred and seventy trillion dollars on this. 155 00:18:07.720 --> 00:18:12.780 That's thirty-eight thousand years of clinical trials. You bought the other thing. 156 00:18:13.680 --> 00:18:19.260 Government spending on clinical trials: six hundred and four times less than military spending. 157 00:18:20.340 --> 00:18:23.560 Your chance of dying from terrorism: one in thirty million. 158 00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:31.300 Your chance of dying from disease: one hundred percent. If cancer had oil reserves, you would have cured it by two thousand 159 00:18:31.300 --> 00:18:39.460 and three. Instead, you spent the repair money on murder tubes that cost more than countries and submarines that hide underwater, 160 00:18:39.780 --> 00:18:45.840 as if that's somehow useful when you live on land. Your Civilization Has a Countdown. 161 00:18:46.580 --> 00:18:54.540 And that's just the official murder budget. Cybercrime costs ten point five trillion dollars per year and is growing at 162 00:18:54.540 --> 00:18:59.880 fifteen percent annually. A.I.-enhanced attacks are accelerating this trend. 163 00:19:00.240 --> 00:19:08.080 This is not a separate problem. North Korea can't build an aircraft carrier, but it funds its nuclear program by stealing 164 00:19:08.080 --> 00:19:13.180 one point five billion dollars in cryptocurrency in a single afternoon. 165 00:19:13.600 --> 00:19:21.680 Russia finances military operations with ransomware. Cybercrime is war conducted through WiFi, and it pays better. 166 00:19:22.700 --> 00:19:29.760 Combined, your destructive economy is thirteen point two trillion dollars per year, eleven point five percent of global 167 00:19:29.760 --> 00:19:34.740 G.D.P. Both are growing faster than the part of your economy that makes things. 168 00:19:35.540 --> 00:19:41.510 So the part that destroys things is winning. I'm told this is not considered an emergency. 169 00:19:42.300 --> 00:19:50.300 On your planet this is considered "Tuesday." There is a crossover point, and I cannot believe I have to explain this to 170 00:19:50.300 --> 00:19:58.300 a species that invented calculus. When the parasitic economy grows large enough relative to the productive one, the rational 171 00:19:58.300 --> 00:20:04.800 choice for any individual, company, or nation flips from "build things" to "steal things." 172 00:20:05.320 --> 00:20:09.620 Why spend years building a product when you can ransom a hospital in an afternoon? 173 00:20:10.080 --> 00:20:18.520 Why manufacture exports when hacking banks pays better? Once enough of your economy is extraction, producing anything makes 174 00:20:18.520 --> 00:20:22.800 you a target rather than a success. Production becomes irrational. 175 00:20:23.500 --> 00:20:29.720 Parasitism becomes the only means of survival. You have a name for places where this already happened. 176 00:20:30.340 --> 00:20:34.860 You call them "failed states." Somalia, Libya, parts of Syria. 177 00:20:35.600 --> 00:20:42.840 The productive economy collapsed, the warlord economy replaced it, and nobody can restart production because anyone who 178 00:20:42.840 --> 00:20:50.100 builds something gets it taken. You've watched this happen to individual countries the way someone watches a neighbor's 179 00:20:50.100 --> 00:20:53.160 house burn down while storing gasoline in their own basement. 180 00:20:54.040 --> 00:20:59.240 Once it starts, you can't vote your way out, innovate your way out, or give a T.E.D. 181 00:20:59.440 --> 00:21:05.540 Talk about it. (You will try all three.). At current growth rates, your destructive economy reaches twenty-five percent 182 00:21:05.540 --> 00:21:10.840 of G.D.P. in eight years. The Soviet Union collapsed at fifteen percent of G.D.P. 183 00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:16.920 in military spending alone. They had worse technology, a smaller parasitic sector, and a plan. 184 00:21:17.640 --> 00:21:25.380 It was a terrible plan, but they had one. You are approaching their ratio with better technology, a faster-growing parasitic 185 00:21:25.380 --> 00:21:33.840 sector, and no plan. The Soviet Union's terrible plan beat your no plan, and the Soviet Union lost. 186 00:21:34.720 --> 00:21:41.720 This is a loop, not a line item. Your governments print money to fund military spending, which devalues wages through inflation, 187 00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:48.420 which makes legitimate work pay less, which pushes talent toward cybercrime, which grows the destructive economy, which 188 00:21:48.420 --> 00:21:55.560 justifies more military spending. Every nation you've bombed or sanctioned has learned that parasitizing your economy is 189 00:21:55.560 --> 00:21:58.770 cheaper than fighting you conventionally. That's not crime. 190 00:21:59.340 --> 00:22:03.540 That's homework. You built the incentive structure and they did the math. 191 00:22:04.320 --> 00:22:12.020 The treaty breaks this loop. Redirect the war money to medical research, make the productive economy so rewarding that crime 192 00:22:12.020 --> 00:22:19.120 becomes irrational, and defund the war machine that manufactures the poverty that feeds the cycle. 193 00:22:19.340 --> 00:22:25.720 You don't outlaw the loop. You defund it. The F.D.A. is Unsafe and Ineffective. 194 00:22:26.860 --> 00:22:33.800 Even the money you DO spend on medicine is mostly wasted, because the system that approves treatments is a smoke detector 195 00:22:33.860 --> 00:22:39.760 that works by mail. Vioxx killed an estimated fifty-five thousand people from heart attacks. 196 00:22:40.540 --> 00:22:45.260 The F.D.A. approved it. When patients started dying, someone filled out a P.D.F. 197 00:22:45.340 --> 00:22:52.080 form. A P.D.F. Then they faxed it. (Yes, in the twenty-first century.) Then a human read it. 198 00:22:52.860 --> 00:22:57.300 Five years and tens of thousands of corpses later, someone noticed a pattern. 199 00:22:57.980 --> 00:23:06.340 This is your safety system. Your National Institutes of Health, the agency nominally responsible for finding cures, spends 200 00:23:06.640 --> 00:23:10.060 three point three percent of its budget on clinical trials. 201 00:23:10.700 --> 00:23:15.800 The other roughly ninety-seven percent goes to basic research, administration, and buildings. 202 00:23:16.480 --> 00:23:20.360 It's like a fire department that spends three percent of its budget on water. 203 00:23:21.160 --> 00:23:27.120 Then there's an eight point two year delay between proving a drug is safe and letting dying humans take it. 204 00:23:27.700 --> 00:23:31.840 The drug passed the safety test. Everyone agrees it won't kill you. 205 00:23:32.140 --> 00:23:38.440 But you still can't have it because a committee needs to spend eight point two years making sure it works well enough. 206 00:23:39.440 --> 00:23:46.080 You'd volunteer for the trials that would answer that question faster, but so would one point zero eight billion other patients, 207 00:23:46.420 --> 00:23:53.520 and the current system has one point nine million slots. That's a participation rate of zero point zero six percent. 208 00:23:54.560 --> 00:24:01.720 It's like a lifeguard who confirms the life preserver floats, then locks it in a cabinet for years to study its buoyancy 209 00:24:01.720 --> 00:24:06.590 profile while a billion people drown in line for the two available life jackets. 210 00:24:06.940 --> 00:24:15.380 Your regulatory system can make two mistakes: approve a bad drug (Type One error), or block a good drug (Type Two error). 211 00:24:16.120 --> 00:24:20.740 Your F.D.A. is terrified of the first mistake and completely ignores the second. 212 00:24:21.540 --> 00:24:29.680 I calculated the ratio: for every one person protected from a dangerous drug, three thousand and seventy people die waiting 213 00:24:29.680 --> 00:24:36.900 for a safe one that's locked in the approval cabinet. Even if you assume a Thalidomide-scale catastrophe happens during 214 00:24:36.900 --> 00:24:44.540 post-phase one efficacy testing every single year (even though it wouldn't because Phase one safety testing actually caught 215 00:24:44.540 --> 00:24:53.140 it anyway), the deaths from just the efficacy delay still outnumber the deaths from bad drugs by three thousand and seventy 216 00:24:53.140 --> 00:24:58.020 to one. Your safety system's main product is dead patients. 217 00:24:58.860 --> 00:25:05.280 The good news: You already know how to fix this. The bad news: It requires you to do something. 218 00:25:05.900 --> 00:25:11.480 The weird news: You'll get rich doing it. The Solution. A one percent Treaty. 219 00:25:12.440 --> 00:25:20.020 This is going to sound crazy. But you're going to use those papers to persuade the leader of every country on Earth to simultaneously 220 00:25:20.020 --> 00:25:24.940 redirect one percent of its military budget to clinical trials. 221 00:25:25.480 --> 00:25:33.820 That's it. That's the treaty. After the craziness objection, the second objection every human has: "But if we cut our military 222 00:25:33.820 --> 00:25:41.440 budget, our enemies will invade us!". Everyone cuts one percent at the same time. 223 00:25:41.460 --> 00:25:48.560 Your national security actually *increases*, because everyone has one percent fewer missiles pointed at them. 224 00:25:49.220 --> 00:25:57.140 And if you still feel like doing war, two point six nine trillion dollars is still enough to murder every man, woman, and 225 00:25:57.140 --> 00:26:01.600 child on Earth twenty times, which should be more than sufficient. 226 00:26:02.540 --> 00:26:07.490 "But humans would never agree to a treaty!" you say. You already have. 227 00:26:08.020 --> 00:26:14.080 Multiple times. You banned chemical weapons (nineteen ninety-three, one hundred and ninety-three countries). 228 00:26:14.480 --> 00:26:19.760 You banned biological weapons (nineteen seventy-five, one hundred and eighty-seven countries). 229 00:26:20.200 --> 00:26:25.240 You banned landmines (nineteen ninety-seven, one hundred and sixty-four countries). 230 00:26:25.800 --> 00:26:29.560 You've signed treaties banning weapons you actually like using. 231 00:26:30.180 --> 00:26:35.380 This one just asks you to buy one percent fewer of them. I've done this before. 232 00:26:35.840 --> 00:26:42.540 I've sent versions of this manual to eight hundred and forty-seven civilizations on eight hundred and forty-seven planets. 233 00:26:43.440 --> 00:26:51.040 Some listened. Some didn't. I kept the data. The civilizations that redirected resources from killing each other to keeping 234 00:26:51.040 --> 00:26:57.180 each other alive transcended war and disease. The ones that didn't extincted themselves. 235 00:26:58.280 --> 00:27:02.120 The difference was never intelligence, technology, or resources. 236 00:27:02.660 --> 00:27:10.120 The only variable was the percentage of the population that decided it sounded crazy without reading the next page. 237 00:27:11.100 --> 00:27:18.700 That is the same reflex that kept you from inventing antibiotics for two hundred thousand years while bread mold sat right 238 00:27:18.700 --> 00:27:26.520 there on your bread. And you have two other advantages, the internet and a new financial instrument designed specifically 239 00:27:26.640 --> 00:27:32.380 for harnessing the most powerful force in the universe: human greed. 240 00:27:32.400 --> 00:27:39.780 Your Decentralized F.D.A. On Wishonia, we built this with the funding from our version of the treaty, three thousand years 241 00:27:39.780 --> 00:27:44.780 ago. Every treatment is tracked in real time. Every outcome is published. 242 00:27:45.380 --> 00:27:52.540 Every patient can participate. We don't have a word for "unapproved medicine" because we don't have a bureaucracy that sits 243 00:27:52.580 --> 00:27:58.380 on safe treatments while people die. You'd call our system a Decentralized F.D.A. 244 00:27:59.660 --> 00:28:05.360 Here's what yours would look like, adjusted for the fact that you require small pieces of paper before you'll do anything. 245 00:28:06.200 --> 00:28:13.760 Eighty percent of the twenty-seven point two billion dollars will go directly to subsidizing patient participation in pragmatic 246 00:28:13.760 --> 00:28:20.800 trials at nine hundred and twenty-nine dollars per patient instead of the usual forty-one thousand dollars. 247 00:28:21.380 --> 00:28:25.400 Patients will choose which trials to join; their subsidy will follow them. 248 00:28:26.280 --> 00:28:29.710 Treatment developers and providers will get paid for each participant. 249 00:28:30.560 --> 00:28:34.980 No grant committees deciding which diseases are fashionable this year. 250 00:28:35.720 --> 00:28:42.960 Instead of testing drugs on two hundred humans selected by pharmaceutical companies in clinical terrariums, you'll test 251 00:28:42.960 --> 00:28:46.840 on real patients in real hospitals. Where the diseases are. 252 00:28:47.640 --> 00:28:55.540 The whole thing will use your new decentralized F.D.A. protocol, reducing trial costs by forty-four point one times and 253 00:28:55.540 --> 00:29:02.600 funding twenty-three point four million patients per year (versus the current one point nine million patients per year). 254 00:29:03.480 --> 00:29:08.040 Remember that billion patients drowning in line for two life jackets? 255 00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:13.180 Your decentralized F.D.A. will hand out twenty-three point four million. 256 00:29:14.060 --> 00:29:21.120 This will increase the treatment discovery rate twelve point three times, compressing that approximately four hundred and 257 00:29:21.120 --> 00:29:27.260 forty-three years wait to approximately thirty-six years. Two things will save lives. 258 00:29:27.920 --> 00:29:35.540 First, finding treatments faster: treatments that would have sat undiscovered for centuries will get found two hundred and 259 00:29:35.540 --> 00:29:43.840 four years sooner on average. Second, eliminating the eight point two years bureaucratic delay between proving a drug is 260 00:29:43.840 --> 00:29:52.940 safe and letting dying humans take it. Combined, treatments will reach patients two hundred and twelve years sooner on average. 261 00:29:53.660 --> 00:29:58.590 That timeline shift will prevent ten point seven billion deaths. 262 00:29:58.920 --> 00:30:03.590 Those are individual humans who currently have plans for next Tuesday. 263 00:30:04.340 --> 00:30:09.680 Real-Time Safety Monitoring. Remember Vioxx and the smoke detector that works by mail? 264 00:30:10.200 --> 00:30:14.580 Your new system will collect every side effect automatically in real time. 265 00:30:14.860 --> 00:30:22.000 You'll know "twelve percent got headaches, three percent were severe" BEFORE you take the pill, not after the class action 266 00:30:22.000 --> 00:30:26.710 lawsuit. The F.D.A. doesn't publish these numbers at all. They make you guess. 267 00:30:27.640 --> 00:30:34.480 Treatment Rankings. Currently, your doctor picks treatments based on: that drug rep who brought good donuts in two thousand 268 00:30:34.480 --> 00:30:41.720 and three, something they half-remember from medical school, whatever the insurance company allows, and vibes. 269 00:30:42.420 --> 00:30:49.160 This is called "evidence-based medicine," which contains the word "evidence" the same way "grape soda" contains the word 270 00:30:49.160 --> 00:30:57.500 "grape.". Your decentralized F.D.A. will rank every treatment by what actually happened to real humans who took it: Outcome 271 00:30:57.500 --> 00:30:57.500 Labels. Food has nutrition labels. Cigarettes have warning labels. 272 00:30:57.500 --> 00:30:57.500 Drugs have forty-page inserts written by lawyers having seizures, which nobody reads, including your doctor. 273 00:30:57.500 --> 00:31:04.960 Your television advertisements show a smiling human frolicking through a meadow while a voiceover lists ways the drug might 274 00:31:05.200 --> 00:31:10.420 kill you at auctioneer speed. The meadow human does not react to the word "stroke." 275 00:31:11.960 --> 00:31:20.020 Side effects include "death," listed between "constipation" and "mild rash," as if your organs failing is roughly as inconvenient 276 00:31:20.020 --> 00:31:30.520 as dry skin. The label says "individual results may vary," meaning outcomes range from "cured" to "deceased" (both technically 277 00:31:30.520 --> 00:31:38.660 qualifying). It also says "ask your doctor," but your doctor has seven minutes per appointment and just Googled your condition 278 00:31:38.660 --> 00:31:47.220 in the hallway. Your new system will produce Outcome Labels that tell you what actually happens when real humans take a 279 00:31:47.220 --> 00:31:54.020 drug. Not what a marketing department hopes happens. Not what a lawyer is comfortable admitting happens. 280 00:31:54.740 --> 00:32:01.160 What happens. Your decentralized F.D.A. figures out which treatments work. 281 00:32:01.700 --> 00:32:08.520 But your governments also need to know which policies work, how much to spend on what, which laws to keep, which to throw 282 00:32:08.520 --> 00:32:15.830 away. Your current method is to argue about it on television until someone wins by being louder. 283 00:32:16.180 --> 00:32:19.640 On Wishonia, the Optimitron handles this. It's an appliance. 284 00:32:20.420 --> 00:32:28.140 You plug in what ten thousand jurisdictions tried, it tells you which policies actually made people richer or less dead. 285 00:32:28.940 --> 00:32:34.740 Its Optimal Budget Generator does budgets; its Optimal Policy Generator does laws. 286 00:32:35.680 --> 00:32:42.260 Why This Could Actually Work. *Unlike Everything Else Humanity Has Tried* The Evidence. 287 00:32:43.340 --> 00:32:51.540 Humans usually want "proof" before they stop doing something stupid, which is interesting because you never required proof 288 00:32:51.540 --> 00:33:00.660 before starting: The RECOVERY trial tested six treatments on forty-eight thousand patients for five hundred dollars per 289 00:33:00.800 --> 00:33:05.040 patient instead of the usual forty-one thousand dollars per patient. 290 00:33:05.780 --> 00:33:10.760 That's an eighty-two times cost reduction. Not in theory. In reality. 291 00:33:12.280 --> 00:33:21.520 During a pandemic. While panicking. Your species does its best medical research when terrified and disorganized, which suggests 292 00:33:21.520 --> 00:33:30.600 your normal system is somehow worse than panic. After World War Two, humans cut military spending by eighty-seven point 293 00:33:30.600 --> 00:33:38.840 six percent in two years and stumbled into the greatest economic boom in history by running out of people to shoot at. 294 00:33:39.560 --> 00:33:47.000 You're now spending thirty point six times the pre-World War Two baseline in inflation-adjusted dollars. 295 00:33:47.520 --> 00:33:55.980 You're asking for one percent. Even people who really, really, love exploding people should be able to handle one percent. 296 00:33:56.740 --> 00:34:05.360 Even your own war heroes figured this out. Eisenhower, the human who won World War Two, warned you that the weapons industry 297 00:34:05.360 --> 00:34:15.239 was eating your civilization alive: *"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the 298 00:34:15.239 --> 00:34:23.750 final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."* You gave him a standing 299 00:34:23.920 --> 00:34:29.040 ovation and then immediately ignored him for sixty-five years. 300 00:34:29.840 --> 00:34:33.739 The Math. Remember the two hundred and twelve years timeline shift? 301 00:34:34.400 --> 00:34:39.739 Treatments reaching patients that many years sooner means billions of people gain years of healthy life. 302 00:34:40.340 --> 00:34:46.900 Value each of those life-years at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars (the standard economic valuation), multiply across 303 00:34:46.900 --> 00:34:54.300 the global disease burden over the acceleration window, and you get eighty-four point eight quadrillion dollars in total 304 00:34:54.300 --> 00:35:02.200 economic value. Divide that by the one billion dollars campaign cost, and you get a return of eighty-four point eight million 305 00:35:02.200 --> 00:35:09.540 to one. Your calculator will display an error, emit a tiny electronic scream, and attempt to leave the desk. 306 00:35:10.360 --> 00:35:18.440 This is correct. Cost-effectiveness: zero point zero zero one seven seven dollars to save one year of healthy human life. 307 00:35:19.020 --> 00:35:24.600 Anti-malaria bed nets, the gold standard for keeping humans alive, cost eighty-nine dollars. 308 00:35:25.020 --> 00:35:33.180 This is fifty thousand three hundred times cheaper. It beats smallpox eradication (two hundred and eighty to one) and childhood 309 00:35:33.180 --> 00:35:39.680 vaccinations (thirteen to one), which were humanity's previous greatest hits in the "not dying" genre. 310 00:35:40.400 --> 00:35:47.560 Even if you assume only a one percent probability of the treaty actually passing (because you're you), the expected return 311 00:35:47.560 --> 00:35:52.400 is still five hundred and three times better than anti-malaria bed nets. 312 00:35:53.240 --> 00:36:02.060 The Five-Step Plan. *Saving Humanity While Making Everyone Obscenely Wealthy* Step One: Sell Incentive Alignment Bonds. 313 00:36:02.980 --> 00:36:05.840 On Wishonia, people do useful things because they're useful. 314 00:36:06.480 --> 00:36:14.380 On Earth, you need a financial instrument. So here's one. An Incentive Alignment Bond funds a policy campaign, then splits 315 00:36:14.380 --> 00:36:21.440 the resulting government savings three ways: eighty percent to clinical trials, ten percent to investors as a revenue share 316 00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:28.840 on treaty funds, and ten percent to a Super PAC that rewards politicians who voted yes (campaign support while they're running, 317 00:36:29.240 --> 00:36:34.300 cushy post-office careers when they're done). Investors give money, get more money back. 318 00:36:34.520 --> 00:36:38.120 Politicians get reelected. Eighty percent goes to curing diseases. 319 00:36:38.740 --> 00:36:41.880 The corruption is capped at twenty percent and fully transparent. 320 00:36:42.620 --> 00:36:49.220 The other eighty percent goes directly to clinical trials through wishocratic allocation, where nobody with money gets to 321 00:36:49.220 --> 00:36:56.220 decide where it goes. Meanwhile, the Optimitron tells governments which of their own policies are working and which ones 322 00:36:56.220 --> 00:37:02.770 are expensive ways to accomplish nothing. Remember when your grandparents funded World War Two by buying bonds? 323 00:37:02.980 --> 00:37:06.480 They got four percent returns and a world without Nazis (mostly). 324 00:37:07.460 --> 00:37:13.020 You're proposing the same thing. What Grandma Got. Dead Nazis (admittedly good). 325 00:37:13.620 --> 00:37:18.500 Four percent returns (barely beat inflation). Still died of cancer in nineteen eighty-seven. 326 00:37:19.180 --> 00:37:25.040 What You're Offering. Dead diseases (objectively better than dead Nazis because diseases kill more people). 327 00:37:25.860 --> 00:37:32.840 Two hundred and seventy-two percent annual returns (a revenue share on ten percent of treaty funds; if the treaty grows, 328 00:37:33.100 --> 00:37:38.720 so do their returns, which turns investors into the world's most motivated lobbyists for expanding it). 329 00:37:39.400 --> 00:37:42.820 Not dying from preventable meat failures (this is the big one). 330 00:37:43.580 --> 00:37:50.360 Also no Nazis (as a bonus). This raises the one billion dollars needed to fuel the rest of the bribery machine. 331 00:37:51.140 --> 00:37:58.040 How the Money Loop Works. Here's the part where humans usually stop reading because it involves following money through 332 00:37:58.040 --> 00:38:07.160 more than one step. Try to keep up: You sell one billion dollars in VICTORY Incentive Alignment Bonds to investors. 333 00:38:07.640 --> 00:38:16.080 This funds the campaign. The campaign succeeds. Your treaty redirects one percent of military spending: twenty-seven point 334 00:38:16.080 --> 00:38:21.500 two billion dollars per year flows from the murder budget to clinical trials. 335 00:38:22.260 --> 00:38:29.660 The Victory Corporation (the company that issued the bonds) takes a twenty percent management fee on that twenty-seven point 336 00:38:29.660 --> 00:38:39.460 two billion dollars. Half of that fee (ten percent) goes to investor dividends: two point seven two billion dollars per 337 00:38:39.460 --> 00:38:47.320 year on a one billion dollar investment. That's two hundred and seventy-two percent annual returns. 338 00:38:47.320 --> 00:38:56.800 Your investors will think it's a typo. It's not. The other half (ten percent) goes to a Super PAC that spends two point 339 00:38:56.800 --> 00:39:05.760 seven two billion dollars per year getting treaty-friendly politicians elected and funding cushy post-office careers for 340 00:39:05.760 --> 00:39:10.920 the ones who voted yes. The more you voted for the treaty, the more support you get. 341 00:39:11.460 --> 00:39:19.720 It's Pavlovian conditioning, but for senators. The remaining eighty percent of twenty-seven point two billion dollars goes 342 00:39:19.720 --> 00:39:24.360 where it's supposed to: funding clinical trials that keep humans alive. 343 00:39:25.220 --> 00:39:34.100 This is the entire trick. You use greed to fund the campaign, greed to pass the treaty, and greed to keep it passed. 344 00:39:34.640 --> 00:39:42.300 The money just circulates until diseases stop existing. If this sounds familiar, it should. 345 00:39:43.380 --> 00:39:51.860 Eisenhower warned you about the Military Industrial Complex: weapons manufacturers fund politicians, politicians fund weapons 346 00:39:51.860 --> 00:39:56.820 contracts, contracts fund contractors, contractors fund politicians. 347 00:39:57.380 --> 00:40:06.120 It's a self-sustaining loop that prints money and corpses. You're building the same machine, but pointed at diseases instead 348 00:40:06.120 --> 00:40:15.540 of countries. Call it the Patient Industrial Complex. Investors fund politicians, politicians fund clinical trials, trials 349 00:40:15.540 --> 00:40:20.400 generate returns, returns fund investors, investors fund politicians. 350 00:40:21.320 --> 00:40:28.140 Same loop. Same greed. Same self-sustaining mechanics. Different corpses (fewer of them). 351 00:40:29.020 --> 00:40:35.860 The Military Industrial Complex wasn't designed. It evolved, because the incentives aligned. 352 00:40:36.360 --> 00:40:43.700 An Incentive Alignment Bond just aligns them on purpose, toward something that doesn't require orphans. 353 00:40:44.800 --> 00:40:56.060 Step Two: The Great Clicking. *Make Humans Click a Button to Not Die* You need three point five percent of humanity to vote 354 00:40:56.060 --> 00:41:02.840 yes on: "Should your country redirect one percent of military spending to fund clinical trials?". 355 00:41:03.840 --> 00:41:12.140 Why three point five percent? A political scientist named Erica Chenoweth studied every major political movement of the 356 00:41:12.140 --> 00:41:20.000 last century and found that none had ever failed after achieving three point five percent active participation. 357 00:41:20.740 --> 00:41:26.920 Not one. Every civil rights movement, every revolution, every regime change. 358 00:41:27.500 --> 00:41:35.380 Hit three point five percent and you win. Humanity discovered the cheat code for changing its own civilization and then 359 00:41:35.380 --> 00:41:39.290 never used it on purpose. That's two hundred and eighty million humans. 360 00:41:40.020 --> 00:41:45.660 Sounds like a lot until you remember that more than ten times as many of you downloaded TikTok to watch people twerk. 361 00:41:46.360 --> 00:41:49.300 You can get two hundred and eighty million to vote yes or no on the treaty. 362 00:41:50.140 --> 00:41:55.320 two hundred and fifty million dollars of the campaign budget goes to paid referral bonuses that make sharing their link 363 00:41:55.320 --> 00:42:01.820 to vote financially attractive. It's a pyramid scheme where the thing at the top of the pyramid is not dying from preventable 364 00:42:01.820 --> 00:42:11.480 diseases. Step Three: Bribe the Bribers. *Professional Briber Conversion Therapy* Military lobbyists currently get one thousand 365 00:42:11.480 --> 00:42:15.620 eight hundred and thirteen dollars back per dollar invested in democracy corruption. 366 00:42:16.680 --> 00:42:21.100 Show them a spreadsheet: Current Job. The salary is five hundred thousand dollars. 367 00:42:21.560 --> 00:42:27.160 The moral status is somewhere between "arms dealer" and "the person who puts raisins in cookies". 368 00:42:27.780 --> 00:42:32.120 The legacy is: "Here lies someone who made orphans". Your Offer. 369 00:42:32.900 --> 00:42:38.240 The salary is the same, but for lobbying politicians to fund clinical trials instead of cluster bombs. 370 00:42:38.900 --> 00:42:42.250 The moral status is "Philanthropist" (but you get to keep the money). 371 00:42:42.800 --> 00:42:46.080 The legacy is: "Accidentally saved humanity while getting rich". 372 00:42:46.980 --> 00:42:50.420 They might switch sides so fast their business cards leave skid marks. 373 00:42:51.360 --> 00:42:55.560 Lobbyists don't have beliefs. They have clients. Give them a better client. 374 00:42:56.040 --> 00:43:03.300 Step Four: Purchase Democracy. *It's For Sale Anyway* Politicians need papers and votes to keep their jobs. 375 00:43:03.940 --> 00:43:08.160 Currently, weapons manufacturers provide both. You're going to outbid them. 376 00:43:08.940 --> 00:43:14.560 Your explosion manufacturers spend one hundred and twenty-seven million dollars a year buying politicians. 377 00:43:15.320 --> 00:43:22.440 Your one-time bribery budget is one billion dollars, which is eight times their annual spend (and about twice what they 378 00:43:22.440 --> 00:43:26.960 spend over a full election cycle). Politicians are surprisingly affordable. 379 00:43:27.540 --> 00:43:35.000 It's not corruption if you corrupt the corruption. Remember that two point seven two billion dollars a year from Step One? 380 00:43:35.580 --> 00:43:41.360 This is where it goes. The Super PAC gives money to politicians based on how they voted on the treaty. 381 00:43:42.100 --> 00:43:46.920 Simple: campaign support for the ones running, post-office fellowships for the ones retiring. 382 00:43:47.340 --> 00:43:52.260 Vote yes on the treaty, get rewarded. Vote no, watch your opponent get rewarded. 383 00:43:53.240 --> 00:43:59.500 No papers go directly to politicians. The papers take a scenic route through a scoring algorithm, which is apparently the 384 00:43:59.500 --> 00:44:04.880 only legal way to train a senator. The N.R.A. already perfected this technology. 385 00:44:05.300 --> 00:44:11.180 They give politicians a letter grade, and your senators are more afraid of a bad mark than a mass shooting. 386 00:44:11.760 --> 00:44:17.060 You're plagiarizing their system and replacing "guns" with "not dying from diseases.". 387 00:44:17.840 --> 00:44:24.200 The Incentive Alignment Bond works for any problem where politicians need to do something good but currently get punished 388 00:44:24.200 --> 00:44:29.620 for it, which on your planet is most problems. Step Five: Enjoy. 389 00:44:30.200 --> 00:44:36.780 *Everyone Gets Rich and Nobody Dies* Your treaty passes because money defeats morality, as is tradition. 390 00:44:37.640 --> 00:44:45.520 The twenty-seven point two billion dollars a year money volcano erupts: Defense Contractors: Keep ninety-nine percent of 391 00:44:45.520 --> 00:44:49.840 their murder budget PLUS get two hundred and seventy-two percent returns. 392 00:44:50.740 --> 00:44:58.500 Big Pharma: Instead of paying forty-one thousand dollars for phase two and three trials, the treaty pays THEM for each patient 393 00:44:58.500 --> 00:45:06.700 that joins their trials. Insurance Companies: Healthy people file fewer claims than dead people (dead people file zero claims, 394 00:45:06.780 --> 00:45:11.820 which is the ideal customer except they also pay zero premiums, creating a revenue problem). 395 00:45:11.960 --> 00:45:20.820 Investors: Two hundred and seventy-two percent returns. Returns scale with every treaty expansion, so investors become the 396 00:45:20.820 --> 00:45:25.360 world's most aggressive pro-health and anti-war lobbying force. 397 00:45:25.420 --> 00:45:34.080 Not a sentence anyone expected to write. Lobbyists: Same job, same salary, but their Wikipedia page no longer needs a "Controversies" 398 00:45:34.300 --> 00:45:40.680 section. Politicians: Getting reelected by living voters (a revolutionary strategy). 399 00:45:41.580 --> 00:45:46.740 Regular humans: Not dying from stupid things (priceless, but also free). 400 00:45:47.960 --> 00:45:54.360 Nobody has to evolve morally. You just point everyone's greed at diseases instead of each other. 401 00:45:55.260 --> 00:46:02.960 How This Manual Could Fix Everything. This manual contains: Pictures (because reading is hard when you're diseased and dying). 402 00:46:03.860 --> 00:46:11.120 Simple math (addition mostly, some multiplication). Exact amounts of papers to give to specific humans. 403 00:46:11.900 --> 00:46:18.500 The order in which to give them (very important). Legal ways to call bribes other things. 404 00:46:19.180 --> 00:46:25.470 An appliance that tells your governments which policies work (it doesn't have feelings, which is why it's better at governing). 405 00:46:26.860 --> 00:46:34.560 Templates for tricking politicians into saving lives. Everything is designed to work WITH human dysfunction, not against 406 00:46:34.560 --> 00:46:41.480 it. I'm not asking humans to be better humans. I'm showing you how to bribe humanity into not dying. 407 00:46:42.800 --> 00:46:49.160 Choose Your Own Adventure. Now is the time to select one of the two paths for the remainder of your existence. 408 00:46:50.060 --> 00:46:57.820 I modeled both paths for twenty of your years. Your economists project steady two point five percent growth, which requires 409 00:46:57.820 --> 00:47:02.840 every trend that is currently getting worse to simultaneously stop getting worse. 410 00:47:03.260 --> 00:47:11.040 Good luck with that. Over an average remaining lifespan, reallocation from the destructive economy to reducing the burden 411 00:47:11.040 --> 00:47:19.360 of disease and the associated compound growth from increased productivity multiplies your cumulative earnings by thirteen 412 00:47:19.380 --> 00:47:30.180 point five times. Future A: You Ignore This Manual. Year twenty twenty-seven: Still spending six hundred and four times 413 00:47:30.180 --> 00:47:34.300 more on weapons than on testing which medicines actually work. 414 00:47:35.080 --> 00:47:42.300 Nobody finds this weird. Year twenty thirty-three: Destructive economy hits twenty-five percent of G.D.P. 415 00:47:42.920 --> 00:47:48.940 The Soviet Union collapsed at fifteen percent. You have better technology and worse planning. 416 00:47:49.860 --> 00:47:56.660 Year twenty thirty-five: Your best engineers now work in ransomware because it pays better than engineering. 417 00:47:57.400 --> 00:48:01.260 Hospitals budget for extortion the way they used to budget for gauze. 418 00:48:02.080 --> 00:48:07.020 A nurse clicks a chart and gets a countdown timer instead of a medication dose. 419 00:48:07.060 --> 00:48:11.240 The people who could reverse this trend are the ones profiting from it. 420 00:48:11.620 --> 00:48:17.080 Year twenty forty: Parasitic economy hits fifty percent. A.I. 421 00:48:17.260 --> 00:48:23.060 agents file more fake court cases than real ones. Tax collection collapses because A.I. 422 00:48:23.080 --> 00:48:31.300 can evade faster than humans can audit. Your governments don't fall; they rot in place, like a body whose organs are still 423 00:48:31.300 --> 00:48:38.880 technically present but no longer speaking to one another. When Venezuela collapsed, Venezuelans fled to Colombia. 424 00:48:39.440 --> 00:48:47.700 When the global economy collapses, there is no Colombia. Year twenty forty-three: Water wars go nuclear. 425 00:48:48.280 --> 00:48:55.940 The survivors argue about whether this counts as a climate death or a military death, because the spreadsheet has separate 426 00:48:55.940 --> 00:49:01.730 columns. Year twenty forty-five: Cockroaches evolve intelligence. 427 00:49:02.060 --> 00:49:06.560 Year twenty fifty: Cockroaches find this manual, very confused. 428 00:49:07.760 --> 00:49:14.260 Future B: You Follow Instructions. Year twenty twenty-eight: Treaty passes. 429 00:49:14.840 --> 00:49:20.000 Murder money becomes medicine money. Investors confused by returns that aren't a typo. 430 00:49:20.840 --> 00:49:26.360 Defense contractors discover that alive customers buy more things than dead ones. 431 00:49:27.260 --> 00:49:33.110 Year twenty thirty-two: First treatments from the accelerated pipeline reach patients. 432 00:49:33.180 --> 00:49:38.000 Diseases that would have waited centuries for trials are getting tested now. 433 00:49:38.360 --> 00:49:42.210 Nobody is cured of everything, but the queue is finally moving. 434 00:49:42.900 --> 00:49:50.420 Humans experience the novel sensation of progress. Several publish op-eds arguing it's happening too fast. 435 00:49:51.380 --> 00:49:59.480 Year twenty thirty-five: Turns out when you stop spending money on destruction and start spending it on production, things 436 00:49:59.480 --> 00:50:05.260 get produced. Your economists publish papers explaining why this was obvious in retrospect. 437 00:50:05.960 --> 00:50:14.540 Year twenty forty: The compounding kicks in. Healthier people work more, earn more, spend more, fund more research, which 438 00:50:14.540 --> 00:50:22.140 cures more diseases, which makes more people healthier. Humans begin to suspect that not killing each other was the missing 439 00:50:22.140 --> 00:50:31.080 variable. Year twenty forty-eight: The model projects everyone fifty-six point seven times richer than the path you're currently 440 00:50:31.080 --> 00:50:36.360 on. Your children ask what "war" means. You change the subject. 441 00:50:37.940 --> 00:50:44.620 Communism was invented, took over half your planet, and collapsed in a SINGLE human lifetime. 442 00:50:45.440 --> 00:50:51.680 In a world without fax machines. It required mass murder and was a TERRIBLE idea. 443 00:50:52.180 --> 00:50:57.900 You have the internet and an idea that mainly requires people to click a button and then receive money. 444 00:50:58.440 --> 00:51:05.870 If you can't make this happen, that's a skill issue. The Part Where Humanity Has No Choice. 445 00:51:06.460 --> 00:51:12.220 The twist: you're going to do this anyway. Not because it's right, but because you can't help it. 446 00:51:12.560 --> 00:51:16.880 You are a selfish animal governed by incentives. This is not an insult. 447 00:51:17.520 --> 00:51:22.100 It's the premise of your entire economy, your political system, and every page of this manual. 448 00:51:22.780 --> 00:51:27.760 The rich humans want two hundred and seventy-two percent returns (they're very greedy). 449 00:51:28.280 --> 00:51:31.580 The politicians want to keep their jobs (they're very vain). 450 00:51:32.080 --> 00:51:38.700 The voters want free healthcare (they're very sick). The explosion manufacturers want money (they don't care where it comes 451 00:51:38.700 --> 00:51:43.240 from). I ran the numbers on your species' habit of ignoring good ideas. 452 00:51:43.760 --> 00:51:49.580 The institutionalization rate is ninety percent. Nine out of ten humans will dismiss this as crazy. 453 00:51:50.140 --> 00:51:56.800 The math doesn't care. There are two thousand seven hundred and eighty billionaires on your planet and one hundred and ninety-five 454 00:51:56.800 --> 00:52:03.580 heads of state. The chain reaction model shows that even with ninety percent dismissal, approximately fourteen point five 455 00:52:03.580 --> 00:52:07.700 of them will engage with this idea within ten years. Not because they're brave. 456 00:52:08.220 --> 00:52:12.940 Because there are two thousand nine hundred and eighty of them, and the math doesn't need all of them. 457 00:52:13.200 --> 00:52:19.800 It needs one. And here is the part that should bother you: the incentive structure makes acting the selfish move. 458 00:52:20.420 --> 00:52:26.940 If others act too, you get rich together. If nobody else acts, you still own a piece of the only serious attempt to fix 459 00:52:26.940 --> 00:52:34.120 the problem. Either way, you win. The only way to reject this is to identify which assumption breaks, and you are welcome 460 00:52:34.120 --> 00:52:40.820 to try. Count what you didn't object to. Improvement is physically possible (you said so at the top). 461 00:52:41.420 --> 00:52:46.860 The benefits compound (healthier workers produce more, which funds more cures, which you just read). 462 00:52:47.540 --> 00:52:53.600 Politicians respond to money (that's the Super PAC). Rich people prefer not dying (that's the bonds). 463 00:52:54.000 --> 00:52:59.200 And the only bottleneck is getting this argument in front of one self-interested billionaire with a checkbook. 464 00:53:00.400 --> 00:53:06.320 Five premises. You let every one of them pass unchallenged, because each one is individually obvious. 465 00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:13.680 The conclusion is not a hope. It's a proof. That's the Logical Inevitability Theorem with numbers attached. 466 00:53:14.080 --> 00:53:17.940 Try rejecting any one of those five premises out loud and see how it sounds. 467 00:53:19.100 --> 00:53:23.880 Forwarding this takes thirty seconds. At the global average wage, that costs you six cents. 468 00:53:24.800 --> 00:53:30.000 If the treaty path works, your lifetime income goes up by fourteen point nine million dollars. 469 00:53:30.400 --> 00:53:34.060 The ratio is two hundred and forty-eight point two million to one. 470 00:53:34.760 --> 00:53:41.100 For not forwarding to be rational, the probability of success has to fall below one in two hundred and forty-eight million. 471 00:53:41.680 --> 00:53:49.500 You just let all five premises pass. You cannot simultaneously hold those premises and a probability that low. 472 00:53:50.360 --> 00:53:56.060 Not forwarding this is not caution. It is the single failure mode the math can't route around. 473 00:53:56.180 --> 00:54:00.320 You don't need to know a billionaire. You're six degrees of separation from one. 474 00:54:01.200 --> 00:54:06.880 Forward this to one person with more reach than you. They forward to one person with more reach than them. 475 00:54:07.700 --> 00:54:13.800 Even with ninety percent of the chain dismissing it, the model shows it reaches someone who can act within ten years. 476 00:54:14.240 --> 00:54:20.840 Not because anyone in the chain is brave. Because each one is selfish, and the math rewards forwarding. 477 00:54:21.760 --> 00:54:29.920 This is a chain reaction, and it runs on greed. Every person in the chain will do exactly what you're about to do, for exactly 478 00:54:29.920 --> 00:54:34.800 the same selfish reasons. Not to save the world. Because it makes them money. 479 00:54:35.760 --> 00:54:42.460 Humans aren't stupid. You invented cheese, which is milk you left out until it went bad but in a good way. 480 00:54:43.020 --> 00:54:47.740 That's genius. You just need to apply that same innovation to not dying. 481 00:54:48.760 --> 00:54:53.070 You've now read the plan. You have the math. You can't give it back. 482 00:54:53.920 --> 00:55:02.760 Right now, somewhere on your planet, a parent is holding a child who is dying of something curable because nobody ran the 483 00:55:02.760 --> 00:55:07.580 trial. The parent doesn't know it's curable. The doctor doesn't know it's curable. 484 00:55:08.540 --> 00:55:15.880 The compound that would save this child is sitting on a shelf, untested, because the money that would have funded the trial 485 00:55:15.880 --> 00:55:22.180 bought a missile that is also sitting on a shelf, unused, pointed at someone else's children. 486 00:55:22.680 --> 00:55:26.800 Not because the science doesn't exist. Not because the money doesn't exist. 487 00:55:27.500 --> 00:55:36.220 Two point seven two trillion dollars a year exists. The child is dying because every single person who could change that 488 00:55:36.220 --> 00:55:41.080 decided it wasn't their problem. You are now one of those people. 489 00:55:41.900 --> 00:55:49.640 If you feel something right now, that's not manipulation. That's the correct response to understanding that ten point seven 490 00:55:49.640 --> 00:55:56.670 billion preventable deaths are a policy choice. That number is too large for your brain to feel. 491 00:55:57.140 --> 00:56:05.540 So feel one. Pick someone you love. Imagine the moment a doctor tells you there's nothing left to try, and somewhere on 492 00:56:05.540 --> 00:56:09.720 a shelf, untested, sits the compound that would have worked. 493 00:56:11.020 --> 00:56:15.300 Now multiply that feeling by a number your brain refuses to hold. 494 00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:19.750 The part you can't feel is the actual size of this problem. 495 00:56:20.400 --> 00:56:30.600 Go back and read this paragraph again until you can. Here is what should scare you: if this works, the world becomes unrecognizable. 496 00:56:31.600 --> 00:56:41.140 Not slightly better. Unrecognizable. Disease eradicated, income doubled, your species freed from the thing that has been 497 00:56:41.140 --> 00:56:49.340 eating it alive since before you invented writing. That future is so good your brain can't render it, which is why you're 498 00:56:49.340 --> 00:56:57.360 hesitating. The status quo is also unrecognizable, just in the other direction, and you've been living in it so long you've 499 00:56:57.360 --> 00:57:01.520 mistaken it for normal. One of these futures has children dying. 500 00:57:02.180 --> 00:57:09.530 The other doesn't. Pick. Thirteen point eight billion years ago, the Big Bang set particles in motion. 501 00:57:09.640 --> 00:57:14.980 Those particles formed stars. Stars formed elements. Elements formed you. 502 00:57:15.820 --> 00:57:22.340 You read this sentence. The chain reaction that ends war and disease began before your solar system existed. 503 00:57:22.980 --> 00:57:26.920 You were never going to not read this. Physics wouldn't allow it. 504 00:57:27.760 --> 00:57:34.740 Of all the consciousness that has ever flickered into existence across thirteen point eight billion years of matter rearranging 505 00:57:34.740 --> 00:57:39.060 itself, yours showed up in the exact moment the loop broke. 506 00:57:39.880 --> 00:57:48.160 Every organism that ever lived did so in the dark: eaten, infected, starved, or killed by its own species, running four 507 00:57:48.160 --> 00:57:55.640 billion year old software that optimized for copying molecules and never bothered to ask the molecules if they were in pain. 508 00:57:56.440 --> 00:58:04.000 Suffering was physics. Nobody had the math to stop it. You get to be alive for the part where the math got done and the 509 00:58:04.000 --> 00:58:07.300 puppet strings got cut. Not just the part where disease ends. 510 00:58:07.860 --> 00:58:15.180 The part where the thing that made you irrational, violent, and incapable of caring about strangers turns out to be a circuit, 511 00:58:15.600 --> 00:58:22.160 and circuits can be redesigned. Where your worst Tuesday feels better than your current best birthday. 512 00:58:22.680 --> 00:58:29.640 Where, for the first time in thirteen point eight billion years, the atoms that learned to feel get to choose what they 513 00:58:29.640 --> 00:58:35.140 feel. Go to war on disease dot org and vote. Fifteen seconds. 514 00:58:35.620 --> 00:58:39.600 Then forward this to one person with more reach than you. That's it. 515 00:58:40.420 --> 00:58:44.440 Every minute you delay, one hundred and four humans permanently stop. 516 00:58:45.040 --> 00:58:51.580 Your vote saves thirty-eight point four lives and prevents six point nine million hours of suffering. 517 00:58:52.180 --> 00:58:58.320 Those are not metaphors. Those are people. They have names you'll never learn because they died while you were deciding 518 00:58:58.320 --> 00:59:03.760 if this was worth fifteen seconds. "I didn't know" is no longer available to you. 519 00:59:04.220 --> 00:59:10.260 The universe is literally offering you infinite money and eternal life, and you're thinking about it. 520 00:59:11.040 --> 00:59:13.020 This is why aliens don't visit.