Project Hail Mary's most dangerous idea

Let's talk about the most dangerous

phrase in politics, but they get things

done. Because we've all pretty much

watched and read Project Hail Mary by

now, right? I think it's illegal not to,

and we'll get to who made that a law in

a minute. Yes, we had a blast watching

Rocky and Ryland Grace save the universe

together. But while that was going on,

did you notice something weird going on

in the background? Like everything to do

with this woman? The consensus here is

that it would be preferable if you did

not die. Yes, that's Eva Stratt.

Spoilers for the book and the film

ahead, but who gave this woman unlimited

power over the entire planet? And was

that a good idea? Well, I can at least

answer the first question for you. We

did, of course. And I think we have some

extra footage from the special features

here of the UN voting to give her that

power. For a safe

and secure

>> [screaming]

>> society.

Nope, sorry. That's something else, but

you know, close enough. But to answer

the second question, whether this was a

good idea or the only way, well, that's

much harder. So today, let's talk about

Eva Stratt, who by the end of the book

and implicitly in the film, personally

ordered the nuclear bombing of

Antarctica, covered most of Africa in an

astrophage breeding panels, copied every

piece of intellectual property ever

made, invaded a US courtroom flanked by

armed soldiers, and again, spoilers,

drugged the protagonist into a one-way

trip to another star system. But she got

the job done, right? And the Earth was

saved, right? And that's cool, right?

Right? Yeah. So let's dive in and ruin

Project Hail Mary for everybody by

talking about annoying little quibbles

like political philosophy, morality, and

ethics, and why annoying philosophers

like me are the reason we just can't

have nice things anymore.

Now look, I want to be up front. This is

not a video about how Project Hail Mary

is secretly evil and you're a bad person

for liking it. Because I liked it, you

liked it, Andy Weir wrote a fun book,

and a lot of very smart people had a

great time reading it. I enjoyed the

movie, too. Weir said that his narrative

doesn't do politics, and well, we'll get

into that claim in a minute. But doesn't

what Stratt did to Ryland Grace bother

you a little, at least on some level?

And doesn't it seem like the exact

opposite of how Rocky and Grace, the

heroes of the film, actually treat each

other? And for me, it kind of sucks

when, in the book at least, Grace

thinks, after remembering all of the

horrible things that have been done in

the name of saving the universe, that

yeah, she was probably right. I bet many

of us thought that, too, because it

resulted in a story about friendship and

a fun adventure, plus a cool new

apartment and teaching gig for Grace.

What's not to love? Well, in political

philosophy terms, a lot. Because my

theory is that Stratt represents a

certain way of doing politics, and it's

our fault. And I mean our fault as in

philosophers' fault, because we invented

it. So, in five parts, I want to get to

this. First, how claiming not to be

doing politics is itself doing politics.

Second, to talk about states of

exception, you know, things like

emergency powers and their habit of not

ending. Third, the end justifying the

means and the reasoning behind that.

Fourth, something I'm going to call

scientism, which is absolutely not

science, and we'll get to the big

difference. And fifth, philosophers'

biggest contributions to human misery, a

thing called the philosophy king. Where

we end up is, I think, a really

interesting place, and I'm going to try

and convince you that the book actually

contains its own counterargument, and it

doesn't even notice. And by the end of

the video, that's the part that I think

is worth taking home. But first, what

happens when you try not to do politics?

>> [music]

>> So Andy Weir says that he doesn't do

politics, and Project Hail Mary is

famously not a political book. It's

definitely not a political movie,

either. There are no parties, there's no

elections, no ideologies, no tedious

arguments about planning permission

interrupting the astrophage. It's just

smart people solving a very large

problem. And that might be very

appealing to us, who are frankly

frustrated by the inability of our

political systems to solve obvious

problems. Except, I'm sorry, but except

that there is no such thing as doing

politics. I hate to say it, but where

human beings are, it's always there,

running in the background, even if you

don't notice it. And the minute we put

someone in charge, and others have to

obey them, we are doing politics. We're

just doing it without admitting it in

some cases, which itself is a political

move, and it's a pretty old one to boot.

And Eva Stratt walks into the story and

takes over Grace's life almost like an

act of God. When he asks her, "Hey,

where did you get this authority to do

this?" She just says, "Uh, secret vote

at the UN." Oh, and I think we actually

finally have the clip of that. Let's

roll it. So this is how liberty dies.

With thunderous applause. Sorry, I keep

getting those two mixed up for some

reason. Anyway, Grace does try to ask a

follow-up question, but he's told,

almost by the voice of the author

himself, "Hey, let it go. Just don't

worry about it." Which is what Stratt,

and Weir through her, is telling us to

do, too. Just have fun. Just trust the

process. To quote Alan Partridge, it

just works. And that's the move I really

want us to pay attention to, because it

keeps happening, both in the story and

frankly often in real life. You know,

when a political figure takes an extreme

action that you might think violates

some sort of important principle, and

the supporters say, "Hey, shut up. He

just gets stuff done. Just go with it."

And we go along with it in Project Hail

Mary, because the science problem is

interesting, and the politics problem,

well, they're complicated. Now imagine

if an actual government tried to do

this. Imagine if they interrupted that

episode of Grand Designs that I was

almost certainly watching and said, "Hi

everyone. We had a secret unanimous vote

of every nation on Earth at the UN the

other day, and we've decided to give

Diane from procurement the absolute

authority over the planet." I would have

questions, like an astronomical amount

of questions. And sorry, did you say

secret vote at the UN? But Project Hail

Mary does not have time for these

questions. Project Hail Mary has a sun

to fix. And it's a big thing to skip

over. And there's danger, I think, in

accepting, even in a fictional setting,

that an enlightened dictator is

something that we can just, you know,

yada yada yada past. But then Weir

writes a courtroom scene with Stratt on

trial, representing herself, which,

seriously, you have hundreds of

scientists, thousands of troops, and not

one lawyer? I mean, I I I understand the

impulse, it just seems implausible.

Anyway, Stratt has copied every

intellectual piece of property ever

digitized onto the ship's computer, and

the entire IP industry is suing her. She

walks into the courtroom, she listens to

about 10 seconds of an opening

statement, and then she interrupts, she

moves to dismiss the case. Asked why,

she says, "Because I don't have time for

this bullshit." She produces a treaty

granting her personal immunity for any

crime anywhere on Earth, which, I don't

think that's a thing. And then she

produces a presidential pardon. And the

bailiff moves to restrain her, and then

armed soldiers walk into the courtroom,

and she says, "I have the US Army." And

that's a damn fine army. I suppose I'd

find it charming if it was Dale Cooper

saying it. And then she leaves. And Andy

Weir certainly loved writing the scene.

I mean, finally, revenge on those

high-played, useless lawyers that he

went to school with. The IP lawyers are

bad guys. They're petty, they're

small-minded, they're worried about

their stuff while the world is ending.

Stratt is saving us all in the

narrative. It's played for laughs. But

sorry, I can't help but be an annoying

philosopher here. Because that scene is

bananas. It's a civil suit, so a

presidential pardon just doesn't really

apply, and they'd be suing the

organization, not Stratt personally. And

sending soldiers into a courtroom would

cause an immediate constitutional

crisis, and possibly collapse the US

government. And there's a bunch of other

mistakes, too. Don't get me started on

it. But it's the quote that I really

have difficulty with. "I have the US

Army, and that's a damn fine army." It

really kills me, because it's a mashup

kind of of two separate quotes that

might be lurking around in the back of

your mind. The first one is Andrew

Jackson defying the Supreme Court back

ages ago when white settlers were

stealing Native American land. And the

second one is probably like Stalin

dismissing the Pope, because the Pope

didn't have an army after World War II.

But Andy Weir doesn't do politics, I

guess. Anyway, it's not the plot holes

that matter. I'm not bringing them up to

be comic book guy in the comments. I'm

bringing them up because it's the

sloppiness that is the tell. Weir didn't

really bother researching American civil

courts, because in this book, the law

isn't a real thing. It's a narrative

fiction. It's the thing standing between

Stratt and the science. So of course,

she walks out of it. But here's the

question I want to put to you. What if

Stratt were doing this in 2026? What if

there was a super advanced AI solving

the astrophage problem, and to make it

work, Stratt needed to feed every piece

of human creativity, every book, every

film, every YouTube video like this one,

like and subscribe, every line of code,

every painting, every song, everything,

every part of human endeavor into that

AI without paying anyone or asking

permission? And the entire creative

industry banded together to sue her. And

if she walked in and said, "Well, I

don't have time for this bullshit."

Would we still be cheering when the

soldiers walked in? Because basically,

this is what the AI industry is telling

us now, that they're working on

fundamental existential problems, and

we're all just friction in the way. So

yeah, the argument's less fun when it's

our stuff being absorbed into the

machine, when we're the petty IP lawyer

worried about our work while the smart

people save the world. This is what

people online have started calling the

face-eating leopards problem because we

vote for the face-eating leopards party

because they're going to eat all of the

other faces and then one day the

leopards are eating our faces and we're

shocked. Project Hail Mary is a

face-eating leopards story and we don't

really notice it until it's too late.

The book is teaching us to enjoy Strat

cutting through institutional friction.

We cheer her in the courtroom. We cheer

her conscripting the Norwegian

scientists. We cheer her at the prison

wanting to take in her gun, which is

weird. And we cheer her bullying foreign

ministers. And then she drugs Ryland

Grace and puts him on a one-way trip to

another star system. And we're supposed

to be cool with that, too, because, you

know, she got things done. The leopards

eat protagonists, too, even the ones we

like. Now, fairness break here. There's

a real argument on Strat's side.

Sometimes in genuine emergencies, normal

process really is too slow. Churchill in

1940 made decisions without full cabinet

approval at the height of World War II,

that most historians now think were

correct. Those weren't necessarily

democratic decisions, but they do seem

to be the right ones. So, when Strat

says there's no time for any of that

stuff, she isn't making an argument

without precedent. She is making one

that has, in specific historical

moments, been retrospectively

vindicated. That's true. But,

Churchill's decisions could be

contested, debated, prosecuted,

apologized for. That record survived.

The people that were affected knew what

had happened. And we'll come back to

this because Strat's burgeon of

emergency authority does something that

Churchill's didn't.

>> [music]

[music]

>> So, we've established that Andy Weir is

in fact doing politics. He's just doing

the kind that pretends to not be

politics at all, where the right person

is in charge and the rest of us just get

out of their way. But, there's a name

for what Strat is operating inside and

it's worth thinking about. It's called a

state of exception. It's otherwise known

as being a dictator, basically, but

we'll get to that, too. Now, a state of

exception is what happens when normal

law gets suspended to deal with a

crisis. The usual processes are too

slow, so someone has to be able to act

and act fast without waiting for the

committee to convene or the court to

rule. The classic movie is, "We'll

restore normal order once the emergency

passes. Trust us. We've got this." And

sometimes that works. But, a lot of the

time, states of exception have a nasty

habit of not ending. They start as an

emergency measure, as a war on terror or

drugs or something else, and then they

become the operating system. By the time

anyone notices, the people who were

exceptions to the rule have become the

rule itself. Now, Project Hail Mary

stages a state of exception as the

natural and obvious response to the

astrophage crisis. And the book often

plays to Strat's no-nonsense, get things

done approach for laughs. But, there's a

scene late in the novel that I want to

walk through carefully because it's a

moment where the state of exception

lands on a single person and we get to

watch what it actually does. It happens

in a flashback. Grace recovers his

memory in fragments. He's been working

on the project for months. He knows the

science. He knows the stakes. He knows

the mission is one-way. And he has

decided that he is not going. I'm not an

astronaut.

I put the not in astronaut. I've never

done anything I've never done a space I

can't even moonwalk. I'm not heroic in

any way. I get sick on the on the

elevator. Oh, perfect. There's no

elevator on the ship. I cannot do this.

So, he sits down with Strat at 5:00 in

her trailer on the launch side. A

Russian soldier stands in the corner.

Grace explains himself. He should stay

on Earth, he says, for the children.

He's a teacher. The next generation will

need and Strat cuts him off. She's not

entirely wrong about him, but what

happens next isn't an argument because

he says no and Strat drugs him and

forces him to do it anyway.

Now, I want to be really clear about

what just happened here because it's

easy to file this under dark but

necessary and move on, which is exactly

what the book and the film kind of

invite you to do. But, four things have

happened simultaneously. One is Grace

has been physically coerced. A soldier

prevented him from leaving the room.

That alone is a serious violation, but

that's the smallest part. The second one

is his crewmates are about to be

deceived. They're going to be recruited

into a lie about why their colleague is

unconscious. They never agreed to any of

that. And three, Grace's memory of the

coercion will be chemically erased, or

at least that's the theory. Not

suppressed, but erased. He won't wake up

knowing immediately that he was wronged

and carry on regardless. I think what

Strat's plan here is that he'll wake up

not knowing that he was wronged at all.

Fourth, and I think this is the one that

matters the most, Grace's own values,

the children, the teaching, the kids he

keeps saying he wants to stay for have

been turned into an instrument of his

violation. "Just think of the kids,"

Strat says. She isn't appealing to his

conscience, she's colonizing it. And

that's the move that I think we really

should remember from this, which is not

conscription. Conscription, whatever its

problems, is at least visible. You know

you were drafted. You can resent it. You

can refuse it. You can build a legal

case against it. What Strat does to

Grace is something very different. She

removes his standing to know and act on

the fact that he was wronged. The

violation is designed to be invisible to

the person it was committed against.

There is a sentence in the history of

post-war ethics that addresses this

directly. It's the Nuremberg Code. It

was drafted in 1947 in response to the

medical experiments conducted in Nazi

concentration camps. These are

experiments that were justified at the

time, by the way, by the argument that

the knowledge gained would benefit

humanity. And it begins with this,

quote, "The voluntary consent of the

human subject is absolutely essential."

Not important. Not required where

possible. Not strongly preferred.

Absolutely essential. The word

absolutely was chosen deliberately and

it was debated at length because the

people who drafted it wanted to

foreclose exactly the kind of reasoning

that Strat deploys. Absolutely. Project

Hail Mary stages this whole machinery

and asks you to find it charming. "Just

think of the kids." And we did. Which

raises the next question that we have to

deal with because the book doesn't just

stage the state of exception, it makes

us agree with it in a way. And the way

it makes us agree with it is the oldest

moral argument that we have, that the

ends justify the means.

>> [music]

>> So, we have Strat. We have a state of

exception. We have a man who said no and

was then drugged and then woke up

halfway across the galaxy. And the

question is, was she right to do it?

Because the book, and to a certain

extent the film, thinks that she was.

Andy Weir thinks that she was, too. He

said in an interview very plainly that,

quote, "The ends justify the means in

this case because the species is at

stake." And that is the whole moral

framework in one sentence. Now, I want

to be fair because this is not a stupid

argument. If the alternative really is

the extinction of humanity, not just

suffering, not just hardship, but the

very end of life that has ever been or

ever will be, then ordinary moral rules

start to look small. Derek Parfit spent

much of his philosophical career arguing

that extinction is incomparably worse

than any other catastrophe that merely

kills most of us because extinction

forecloses every possible future. Place

Grace's autonomy on that scale against

that and, yeah, it does look a bit

small. So, the argument has weight. It

has about the most weight that an

argument can really have. But, the ends

justify the means is also the oldest

atrocity justification we have. It's the

sentence underneath every gulag, every

famine engineered for the greater good,

every show trial. "We had to do it. The

cause demanded it. History will

vindicate us." The species being at

stake is the highest form of this

argument, but it is the same argument.

And what makes it dangerous is exactly

what makes it compelling. It is always

available. There is always a

sufficiently large emergency. There's

always a future generation whose

interests outweigh your own. Just ask

the effective altruists. Once you accept

that logic, it doesn't have an off

switch. Now, Strat herself sees this

coming. She has an answer. It's a very

old one. She tells Grace, quote, "Once

the Hail Mary launches, my authority

ends. I'll probably be put on trial by a

bunch of pissed-off governments for

abuse of power. Might spend the rest of

my life in jail." And she shrugs. She's

prepared to pay the price. To me, this

read as the Cincinnatus move.

Cincinnatus was the Roman dictator who

took absolute authority in an emergency,

defeated the enemy in 15 days, and then

resigned and went back to his farm. It's

the gold standard. It's designed to look

like accountability. But, here's the

problem. Accepting your own punishment

is, in the end, a transaction you make

with yourself. It leaves everyone else

outside of it. Strat agrees to be tried

by the governments. Oh, most fine. But,

the populations who lived under the

Antarctic strikes or the impaneling of

the Sahara or a dozen other huge

sacrifices, they didn't vote on them.

The scientists conscripted didn't

consent. Grace didn't choose. They

aren't parties to the trial Strat is so

nobly willing to face. Their grievance

has no plaintiff. And I think this is

the core of the whole problem here

because we already conceded that

emergency authority sometimes works.

Churchill was right to act without his

cabinet. There are real cases where

leaders made unilateral calls under

impossible pressure and history said,

"Yeah, fair enough." So, the question

isn't really was Strat right to override

Grace? That argument is winnable. The

species was at stake. Of course, she was

right on some accounts. The question is,

what's the difference between Stratt and

Churchill? Churchill's accusers could

hold him to account. The records

survived. The people affected knew what

had happened. But Grace cannot. He's

without memory, potentially, in another

star system. The story just quietly

gives up on justice. It's another

casualty of the ends justifying the

means. And there's a philosopher called

Michael Walzer who wrote about exactly

this kind of situation. He called it

dirty hands. You do what you have to do

and you carry it. The wrong remains

wrong. Necessity doesn't cancel the

cost.

And there is exactly one character in

Project Hail Mary who has dirty hands

and knows it. It isn't Stratt. It's in

the book, a French climatologist called

Leclerc, who finds himself ordering the

detonation of 241 nuclear weapons in

Antarctica. He says, quote, I became a

climatologist to help save the world, to

stop the nightmarish environmental

catastrophe we were sinking ourselves

into. And now I'm ordering a nuclear

strike on Antarctica. That is a man with

dirty hands. The cost that doesn't get

canceled by the outcome. Stratt's

response is, well, you did what you had

to do. Words that close the wound before

it can teach us anything. And that's to

me the move that the book keeps making

every single time. And the film

sometimes, too. Every moral injury gets

sutured before the next chapter begins.

You did what you had to do. We're saving

the world. Let's get back to the

science. A book actually wrestling with

these questions would let the wound stay

open a little. It would not having shown

you a man chemically conscripted against

his will arrange events so that he

concludes within a few chapters that the

woman who drugged him was right. But

that's exactly what the book does. Which

means that there's something underneath

the politics. Not a politics, exactly,

but a worldview. A worldview that thinks

the values question can be answered in

the first place by the right person with

enough data, the way you'd answer a

scientific problem. And there's a name

for that worldview, and it isn't

science.

>> [music]

>> Yes, there's a very specific name for

the worldview underneath Project Hail

Mary. It's called scientism. And before

anyone starts furiously typing in the

comments, scientism is not science.

Science is great. Science is one of the

best things we ever did as a species.

Five stars from me. Scientism is

something different. It's the belief

that science can answer questions that

science actually can't. Specifically,

it's the belief that with enough data,

enough expertise, and enough computing

power, you can settle questions that are

actually moral and political, that

values can be derived from facts, that

if you just measure hard enough, the

right answer will fall out. The

philosopher David Hume identified this

confusion all the way back in the 1700s,

and it still really hasn't been fixed in

our discourse. No matter how many true

things you know about the world, you

cannot derive from them by logic alone a

single statement about what ought to

happen. In other words, facts don't

generate values. You have to bring the

values with you. You have to have

already decided what matters. And Stratt

has already decided. Humanity must

survive. That's her dictum. Everything

else follows. Once you accept that

premise, every action that she takes is

just engineering. The Antarctic strike

is logistics conscription is logistics.

The amnesia drug is logistics. But

humanity must survive isn't a scientific

conclusion. It's a value judgment. And

it's the kind of value judgment that if

you get to make it on behalf of 8

billion people, the 8 billion people

might want to have a say in but they

don't get one. Project Hail Mary doesn't

even pretend to ask them. Scientism is

everywhere once you look. The cleanest

example of this that I can think of and

that you've probably definitely seen is

signs like, in this house, we believe in

science. But here it doesn't just mean

the laws of thermodynamics or the

Schrodinger wave equation. It means a

whole host of other stuff. We can feel

it in that moralistic statement. It

means political stuff. It came to mean a

whole host of ideological positions and

public health decisions and governmental

choices that involve not just questions

of science, but questions of values, of

what is most important and which

interests matter and the best

governmental means to achieve that end.

And I'm not trying to say that it's good

or bad. I'm just trying to say that it

is more than a question of science. And

that is exactly the move that Stratt

makes. It's exactly the move the whole

book makes. The empirical claim that the

sun is dying, that we need to act, is

true. Science. No argument. But every

other claim that gets bundled with it,

therefore Stratt should be in charge,

therefore consent doesn't matter,

therefore the Antarctic strike is fine,

therefore drugging Grace is fine, those

aren't scientific claims. They're moral

and political claims riding the

authority of the science underneath

them. And once you spot that move, you

start seeing it everywhere. Trust the

experts. Sure, but on what? Experts at

deciding the empirical question or

experts at deciding what we owe each

other? Because those are not the same

kind of expertise. Now, one more example

because this is a video about a

chemistry teacher told that his

expertise gives him the authority to

remake the world. And we've all seen

that story before. We've watched it for

quite a few seasons, in fact. I'm

talking about Walter White. No.

I am the one who knocks. Walter White is

a chemistry teacher. He is, by any

measure, very good at chemistry. Vince

Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad,

said that the entire show was about

turning Mr. Chips into Scarface and

watching the audience cheer for it. And

we did cheer. For many seasons, Walter

cooks meth, kills people, builds an

empire, and we rooted for him. And a lot

of us only realized what we were doing

somewhere around maybe season four. Why

did we cheer?

Because he was good at it. Because he

was competent. Because the technical

mastery on display, the chemistry, the

planning, the cleverness, we read as a

kind of moral authority or at least a

right to win. The man who knows what

he's doing must be the man who deserves

to win. That cheer is a kind of

scientism in your living room. That

assumption that competence at the

technical thing translates into

authority over the moral thing. Walter

is great at chemistry, therefore Walter

gets to decide who lives and who dies.

The show was, in part, asking the

audience to notice that they've made

that translation without realizing it.

And Stratt is what happens when the show

never makes you notice. When the whole

structure of the story has decided in

advance that being right about the

science is the same thing as being

right. And it isn't. The decisions that

look technical are almost always the

moral ones in disguise. Who pays the

cost? Whose consent matters? Whose does

it? These are not engineering questions.

And no amount of experience about the

astrophage tells you the answer. So for

me, the most dangerous thing about

Project Hail Mary isn't that it gets the

politics wrong. It's that it's teaching

us, gently and pleasurably, that

politics is a thing you don't have to do

at all. That with the right person in

charge and enough urgency in the air,

values can take care of themselves.

Maybe even a super enlightened AI might

do it all for us one day. Wouldn't that

be great? No, that wouldn't be great

because it's a Cincinnatus, an

enlightened dictator who never resides.

That's the state of exception without

end. But here's where I want to stop

pointing fingers at the scientists.

Because the truth is, scientism didn't

actually start with the scientists. It

started somewhere a lot more

embarrassing. It started with us.

So look, I've spent four parts of this

video giving scientists a pretty hard

time, pointing at chemistry teachers and

the engineers and the rationalist

fantasy of just letting the smart people

fix it. You know, letting the nerds run

Springfield. And that's a little unfair

because scientism didn't actually start

with scientists. In fact, it started

with philosophers. The whole let the

cleverest person rule and everyone else

stay the hell out of the way idea is, I

am afraid, a philosophy original. It's

the oldest fantasy in political

philosophy, and we've been pushing it

for about two and a half thousand years

now. It's called the philosopher king.

All the kids are doing it. And Plato

came up with it. In the Republic, he

argues that the ideal society would be

ruled by philosophers, people whose

superior wisdom and grasp of the truth

qualified them to make decisions for

everyone else. The rest of you would be

assigned to your proper roles. Everyone

was supposed to be happier this way

because the people in charge would

actually know what they were doing. And

reading it now, you can almost see Plato

writing himself into the role. Yes, I

think the philosophers should be in

charge. Funny coincidence that I just

happen to be one myself. Anyway, here's

2,000 pages of explaining why. The

philosopher king has had an unbelievable

run. Every authoritarian intellectual in

history has, at some point, dusted off

this idea and given it a fresh coat of

paint. The enlightened monarch, the

vanguard party, the technocrat, the CEO

king, the benevolent AI, the competent

woman with a presidential pardon and a

damn fine army. Same fantasy, different

costume. And it has never worked. Not

once. Not because we keep failing to

find the right philosopher, although we

keep doing that, but because the fantasy

itself is wrong. Competence at running a

project is not the same thing as

competence at deciding whose rights are

expendable. Competence at solving a

scientific problem is not the same thing

as competence at deciding what counts as

a solution. Knowing how to do something,

in other words, is not the same as

having the right to decide whether it

should be done. Those cannot be

converted into technical questions, no

matter how big the emergency. Especially

not when the emergency is big. Stratt is

excellent at her job. She may be the

best person who has ever existed at her

job. But her job, as the book defines

it, is to save humanity. And what saving

humanity means, what it costs, who it

pays, what it survives, what gets

sacrificed, what the saved version of

humanity is even allowed to look like,

that's not Stratt's job to define. It

belongs to the people who it's being

done to. And they were never asked. The

philosophic king always thinks this is

just a little detail. It's an

inefficiency, a luxury the situation

cannot afford.

That belief, though, that one is a

fantasy. And unlike the Astrophage, it

is not fictional. It's on the news every

night. And here's the thing. Project

Hail Mary itself contains the answer to

its own fantasy. It just kind of doesn't

notice.

Because there is one relationship in the

novel that works completely differently

from how Stratt's works. One

relationship built on a totally

different logic of authority. And it is

by a wide margin the part of the book

that everyone actually loves. And I'm

talking, of course, about Grace and

Rocky. Look at how they actually

function. Neither has authority over the

other. When they disagree, they

negotiate. When one doesn't understand

something, the other teaches patiently,

creatively, with genuine respect for how

hard it is to think across the gap.

Their breakthroughs come from both of

them being willing to be wrong, to

rebuild their models of reality

together, and to listen. It is

structurally the exact opposite of how

Stratt operates. And it works in the

novel and on us, because it doesn't ask

you to suppress the question of whether

the relationship is legitimate. The

legitimacy is visible in every scene

because it is continuously being earned.

This is what I meant in the cold open

when I said that the book contains its

own counter-argument, and it doesn't

even notice. Because the best parts of

Project Hail Mary are an implicit

critique of its own political logic. The

things that readers love most about the

book, the friendship that everyone walks

away talking about, is structurally

everything that Stratt is not. There's

no coercion, there's no deception, no

drugs, no memory erasure, there's no

appeal to the species being at stake.

Just two creatures, completely

different, working out how to trust each

other from scratch. And on that trust,

and all of the philosophy behind it, I

did a whole video on it if you want to

go check it out. And the book contains a

working demonstration of what genuine

cooperation across radical difference

looks like. Then fails to notice that it

is sitting on the answer to the question

it spent 400 pages avoiding. Because

here's the question the philosophic king

fantasy can never answer. Who taught

you? Stratt didn't teach Grace, she

drugged him. Walter White didn't teach

Jesse, he used him. The expert at the

top of the technocratic pyramid doesn't

teach the people below. They instruct,

they command, they override. But Rocky

teaches Grace and Grace teaches Rocky.

They build between them a shared

language out of nothing, with no shared

past, no common authority, no overlap in

evolutionary history. And they do it the

way that it has always actually been

done. Slowly, patiently, with humility,

by taking one another seriously, even in

the face of a time crunch and a crisis.

That's the model. It's been right in

front of us all along. So where does

this leave us? I do want to be honest

about it all because I've spent a long

time giving this book a hard time, and I

don't want to dodge the obvious

objection. Stratt did save two worlds in

the novel. It's true. By the end of

Project Hail Mary, Eva Stratt has saved

humanity and Rocky's species. The

Astrophage problem is solved. The

mission worked. The kids that she kept

telling Grace to think about do get to

grow up. That's not nothing. That's the

opposite of nothing. Any version of this

video that pretends otherwise is being

dishonest. But here's the thing.

A politics organized around hoping for a

Stratt is not politics. That's a wager.

It's a bet that when the moment comes,

the right person, competent, ruthless,

lucky, willing to do the awful thing,

will appear, take charge, will do the

awful thing successfully, and will hand

the power back when it's over. So Stratt

won her wager. The book is a story about

the version where that wager pays off.

But the 20th century is a record of all

of the times that it did not. When

competent, ruthless people took charge

and either failed or succeeded at

something other than they promised, or

succeeded but never gave the power back

when worse stuff happened. There is no

shortage of people in the history books

who thought that they were Cincinnatus,

but most of them weren't. And every time

we tell ourselves the version where it

works, we do make it slightly easier for

the next person to convince us that

it'll work with them, and that they're

the ones, that it is the emergency, that

now is the moment when the rules don't

apply. So here's what I think Project

Hail Mary actually has to teach us in

terms of political philosophy. Saving

humanity isn't just about humanity

surviving. It's about what survives. If

the version that makes it through is the

one where we drugged each other into

compliance and called it engineering, we

didn't save humanity. We saved a body,

and we lost the thing inside it that was

worth saving.

The book, I think, already knew this on

some level. The part of the book that

knew it wasn't Stratt, it was Grace, and

it was Rocky, the thing worth saving.

Two creatures with nothing in common

figuring it out anyway, by teaching and

by being taught. That part's not a

fantasy. That's just how it actually

works every time it has actually worked,

between people, between strangers,

between species, even. It's how the next

crisis will get solved, too, if it gets

solved. Not by the right person showing

up and dictating to the rest, but by the

rest of us taking each other seriously

enough to do the work together, to

compromise, and to get on with it. So

Project Hail Mary, a genuinely beautiful

book about friendship wrapped around a

deeply weird book about politics and

authority. You should read it, you

should watch it, you should enjoy Rocky.

He really does make the jazz hands in

the film, it's great. Just don't take

home the wrong lesson. So until next

time, be wise and be kind, and try not

to drug your colleagues, even to save

the species. Ryland

Bird, he's a

walking brain. His heart's a capacitor,

immune to pain. But when he met Sartre,

[music] he nearly froze. Existence

precede essence? Well, I suppose.