Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Part 2 of 2: David Friedberg is All-In on Science (#298)

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

Please support the podcast by taking our short listener survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/intotheimpossible David Friedberg believes that science is the best hope to save humanity. He is an American entrepreneur, businessman, and angel investor. After several years in investment banking and private equity, Friedberg joined Google in March 2004 as one of the first 1,000 employees and a founding member of Google’s Corporate Development group. As Corporate Development and Business Product Manager, Friedberg helped run Google's online advertising platform, AdWords, and negotiated acquisitions and worked with Google co-founder Larry Page. David appears each week as one of the four Besties on the @allin Podcast - one of Apple and Spotify’s Top podcasts — alongside fellow investors and pundits David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Jason Calicanis. He founded and was chief executive of The Climate Corporation, whose $1.1 billion sale to Monsanto in 2013 made it the first unicorn (finance) in the agricultural technology space. He is founder and CEO of The Production Board (TPB). He is a co-host of the All-In podcast. Spanning his career, he has contributed to 32 patents. His investment portfolio includes Afterparty, Dave, The Every Company, Soylent, Supergut, Medico and many more. In this extended discussion, the indefatigable Friedberg weighs in entrepreneurship styles, investing, how to incentivize research and the problems with commercialization of institutional research. David provides some rare insight into his strategies for his almost superhuman productivity, his venture capital philosophy for successful investments, a tutorial on the microbiome, his thoughts on AI and so much more! twitter.com/friedberg www.tpb.co https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-jason-sacks-friedberg/id1502871393 Connect with Professor Keating: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  🎧 On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB scroll down to the ratings and leave a 5 star rating and review The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast. Other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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during times of high network usage. There is this point in intelligent design where the intelligence recognizes that it is not the center. It is not, you know, that this fungus, this fungus and this bacteria that are actively changing everything on this planet. And maybe we're just a byproduct of the work that they're doing in a non-intelligent way. Come everyone to part two of this two-part episode of Into the Impossible with special guest, visionary investor and business leader David Friedberg. We're finding out firsthand why companies like Alphabet and BlackRock trust David with over

$300 million of their capital to transform agriculture and other vital industries. Be forewarned, this two-parter may feel a bit like drinking from a fire hose and part two isn't slowing down. Our host Brian Keating dives deep with David into a wide range of topics. In part two, we get existential questions about consciousness, ecosystems, and extraterrestrial intelligence and the role of science fiction has played in David's life. Find out what David thinks about the future of energy production, solar, vision, or fusion. Stay in touch with Professor Keating by signing up for his mailing list at briankeetting.com slash list.

And if you have a dot edu email, we'll send you a piece of deep space in the form of a rare meteorite fragment. While you ponder this immersive discussion, please consider investing in us with a five-star rating and sharing your thoughts in a review like this one. Air User says, incredible content, exploring the deepest questions in science in an entertaining way without compromising on rigor or a deeply scientific orientation. And now, get ready to stretch your perspective with host Brian Keating going into the impossible. with David Friedberg.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud-bay doors, please, hell. We're talking today with David Freedberg, who's a renowned thinker, investor, prolific, kind of curious person who, I see you as a ponderer, if I'd like to say. I see you as an optimistic pessimist or pessimistic optimist, and it's really delighted to speak with you. And you can, of course, follow him wherever podcasts are sold and bought. And on Twitter at At Friedberg as well, where he's sometimes active. Now, the next question comes, as I say, from one of my listeners. And he asks, is there a possibility in our lifetime that aging could

be suspended? That comes from Raynold Cherry. Can aging be suspended? Yeah, I think. It will be in our lifetime. Yeah, so we have to, so how do we measure aging and what are the drivers of aging? You know, the genome codes all the proteins that biology makes, the genome of a species or an organism. And there's long been this kind of set of theories that mutations in the genome over time, you know, entropy kind of drives the genome to kind of disorientation. And as a result, it stops producing the right proteins and cells become. dysfunctional and eventually they stop working right and then you get things like cancer, maybe Alzheimer's or they just stop working altogether. You go blind and you die. I mean,

you know, the dysfunction of gene expression, the wrong proteins expressed at the wrong time, really is kind of seems to be the core driver of aging. Now, we thought historically maybe this was driven by mutations in the DNA in cells that accumulate over time. And increasingly there's evidence as published a few weeks ago in two different papers, including one led by a team out of Harvard, that it may be dysfunction, not in the genome in the DNA, but actually dysfunctions in the epigenome, which is the molecules that sit on the DNA, and certain molecules allow the DNA to be more openly expressed because it opens up, the nucleosomes, has more space, and then the RNA copies come out more proliferately, and then more copies of that gene are expressed.

and in some cases it blocks the genome and turns off or shuts off certain genes. And that as these molecules kind of get ripped off and some get put on in the wrong way, we're seeing dysfunctional gene expression in a cell, which causes the wrong proteins to be made and the right proteins are missing. And then the cell as a whole stops working. The cell gets inflamed, eventually it dies, all this sort of bad stuff starts to happen. And that that may be at this point the likely driver of aging. So it's an accumulation of errors.

in the epigenome in cells throughout the body. Now, the exciting science is what we talked about earlier, which is the set of Yamanaka factor, these four molecules that have these transcription factors that have been proven to go in and help reset the epigeno. And if you apply enough of the Yamanaka factors into a cell, the epigenome resets in a way that that whole cell starts acting like a stem cell. It can differentiate it to any other cell in the body.

It was a more primitive version of itself. Right. And it turns out that you can actually partially reprogram a cell, which means you just make, you reset the epigenome so that that cell starts to work like it's supposed to work like for that, whether, you know, there's about 200 different cell types of the human body. So whether it's a brain cell or an eye cell or a skin cell or a heart cell, a muscle cell, you can kind of apply a small amount of those transcription factors to that cell and actually get it to act in a younger way.

And this was demonstrated in improving the lifespan of mice by applying this, this, this, first they disrupted the epigenome, then they applied these Yamanaka factors to the mice, and then the mice became young, and they lived twice as long, and they were healthier and everything was better. They were cognitive functioning went up, heart rates went up,

all the good, heart started working better, et cetera. So that's a great, you know, let's go back to pure science. Like, that's where we are. We have this kind of pure scientific, like, trajectory. Where this takes us, what's the scrum on the rugby field,

to use the analogy once again, on what this is going to look like from a therapeutic perspective, from a business model perspective, and how long will it, take us to get down the field, totally TBD. There are all these ideas that we can take, for example, eye cells and rejuvenate them and then put them back in and the eyes will work better, that we can maybe take certain immune cells out of our blood, rejuvenate them, put them back in,

and the immune cell starts functioning better, that maybe this can be used to regulate neurons and get the brain to work a little bit better. So, you know, how do you deliver the right transcription factors? And then there's all this research, by the way, that maybe it's not just those four transcription factors that were demonstrated that won the Nobel Prize by Yamanaka, but maybe there's thousands of other transcription factors and maybe there's human engineer transcription factors. And then how do we get those transcription factors in the right dose into the right cell at the right time? So that's all the work that's going to be going on or I can't possibly predict for how long. You know, there will be inklings of advances along the way,

certain businesses. Someone will come up with some therapeutic where maybe they'll do something to some cell in the body and it'll work and they'll get a product ties and, you know, But yes, I do think that this idea that, you know, cells the human body as a whole, which is kind of a, it's such a dynamic biochemical bag. Like, you know, can we control the entropy in that bag? It turns out that there may be some keys to doing that. And that's super exciting science. So you mentioned. And that, yes, I do think like, yeah, I do think we can see persistence in the human form for a lot longer than we have today into the hundreds of years.

theoretically, I mean, you could theorize any answer to that. You could say yes, certainly keep the human alive forever. Yeah, and that best part is it. Keep rejuvenating himself. If it's falsified and it doesn't occur in your lifetime, you're dead, so it doesn't matter to you. You mentioned rugby a couple times. One of my good friends, as an engineer, it's from South Africa, loves the springbacks

or whatever they're called. He's Gabi, Gavin here in San Diego. And I think he'd be curious to know your parents are from South Africa. were you born there or were you born in South Africa? Yeah, I was born there. I moved from Cape Town when I was six years old, L.A. So you can't be president, unfortunately, of America. Cannot be president, yeah.

But why did your parents leave? And would there be any sort of, you know, thing that would bring you back? We have a lot of South Africans here in San Diego. It's a huge part of our community here. I think we're rumored to live here in La Jolla and San Diego because of the weather and the climate and the topography. It's just like Cape Town. Yeah. Why did they leave?

And would you ever, could you ever see a scenario where you would go back permanently or temporarily sabbatical or something like that? No, I mean, apartheid was ending in the early to mid-80s. It was evident that it was going to end and the country was going to change over quite a bit, which meant that there was a lot of kind of geopolitical risk and uncertainty about the economic and physical climate. And so that's when a lot of people left. So we left. And my parents, most of my family moved to London on both sides of my family. And then my parents are documentary filmmakers.

They wanted to go to L.A. So we went to LA and they worked in, I, I, yeah, there's nothing that motivates me to go to South Africa except to visit and take my kids and show them and check it out and hang out. So I do remember Cape Town being beautiful. I went back once since I left. But yeah, there's no reason I would kind of go back there. Obviously, so much of my work and friends and family are all here at this point. Absolutely. There is, you know, obviously a lot of scientific collaborations that flourish.

We have collaborators there in South Africa, UCT, and other places. So shout out to them, my friend Amanda Veltman, professor down there. Next up, I am the associate director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for human imagination here at UC San Diego. And I'm always interested, you know, Sir Arthur was very, very, of course, conversant with science fact and is, you know, purportedly responsible for, you know, concepts like geostationary satellites, although, you know, some people debate that. But nevertheless, he presaged many things in his works, including things like the iPad and permanent habituation on the space station. Science fiction, though, play any role in your life? Are you attracted to any particular science fiction authors? And if so, do you think science fiction has a role to play in science nonfiction?

In other words, is a way to kind of pregame or kind of think out things for science. actual in practice. Yeah, look, I mean, I think one of the extraordinarily important role science fiction plays is thinking in first principles. Take away where we are today and the comparatives and the comparables of the world today and try and everyone tries to extend those comparatives and those comparables. Srip it all away and just say, what do the first principles of X tell me and what's possible based on those first principles? And based on that, I can kind of theorize this incredibly different universe. And then I can think about all the paths. that get us from here to there.

And, you know, I'll give one example, and then I'll talk about Archie C. Clark. Star Trek, the next generation, my favorite show of all time, right? And, you know, like the universe is just matter and energy. And if we can kind of harness energy to reorient matter, I mean, so much of what goes on in biology, in humans moving our physical bodies around,

it's like, it's so crazy because it's just like moving molecules from one place to another. And then we kind of absorb this information in the form of photons. And those photons ultimately resolve some biochemical change in our neural network, which is a bunch of molecules. And so those photons are just influencing the physical structure of our molecules in what we call our body, which, by the way, our body will be a whole different set of molecules in a couple of years anyway. If you're tracking a molecule all the way through, it's kind of lifetime. So, yeah, I think Star Trek The Next Generation did a great job. One of the things about Star Trek the next generation, I always appreciated it, was the replicator, this idea that if we can actually fully harness energy and just reallel.

orient molecules locally instead of running through all these physical, you know, humans started with mechanical engineering, you know, and then we did like chemical engineering and now we do biochemical engineering, which is actually changing these really complex biomolecules to do more crazy chemical manipulations for us. Yeah, machining molecules for us. And, you know, there's elements of physics where we're kind of doing interesting manipulation now on an atomic scale, right, atomic layer deposition. It could be called chemical engineering, but it may be a little different. So much of that, I think paints a picture that this trajectory maybe is reasonable, which is that in the future, we can kind of take carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and maybe a few other kind of heavier

elements and just reorient them locally using some set of technologies to instantaneously make the things we want and that the only cost is energy. And then if the cost of energy is free, well, holy shit, now humans live in this extraordinarily abundant universe and we can make anything we want and go nuts and live our kind of abundant lifestyles. Star Trek had all these really great theories around what happens in that. world, which is like the economy collapses. Does society collapse? Turns out of Star Trek, it doesn't.

I'm not sure if that would really happen here. Yeah. But I do think my orientation and my level of interest in the work I do is how do we get to a point where the economy does go to zero, where the cost of everything does go to zero, where every human can have everything they want because the technology is sufficiently advanced that we can kind of just reorient molecules locally using, you know, infinitely abundant energy to have the physical experiences we want all the time and give ourselves kind of extraordinary like adventure and exploration potential and so on. That's, I think, the right kind of

north star for, you know, human civilization, kind of socially engineering, you know, our long-term outcome. Now, that brings me to Arthur C. Clark. And in 2001, there was a treatment written by Arthur C. Clark before the script. And then the book was written after the script. And I don't know if you've ever read the treatment. The Sentinel or something, right? No, the Sentinel was an old story. The treatment for the movie, I'll send it to you. I've got some copies of it. But it came in the art, it came in that there was a Tasha book series on the making of 2001, and they actually included it in the Tasha book series. I've got it. It's an incredible read. Oh yeah. Because he highlights how, like, at the beginning, if you think about a sufficiently advanced civilization, this is also

leads into my point of view on like extraterrestrials and UFOs and so on, which I think are very naive thoughts. Because a sufficiently advanced civilization looks a lot more like what I just described, which is the ability to harness energy to make any molecule into anything locally. And then the universe is simply about information transmittal. So transmission. So the transmission of photons from one point to another provide you everything you need to accumulate more knowledge and more understanding of the universe. And maybe gravitational waves too or whatever other kind of insights we can gather from the universe around us. But everything from you and I staring at a screen today is photons flowing into our eyes,

DNA sequencers, are photons being scanned on an optical scanner. A lot of the work you do in cosmolo or the experimental physics is some sort of sensor gathering of photons. So if the universe, if ultimately the universe is just about photons providing information about where and what other molecules in the universe are doing, and we can sufficiently gather those photons, and then we sufficiently can move molecules. around using energy to make anything we want locally. What is the purpose of interstellar travel? It suddenly doesn't make sense. Why would I take my physical body to go to another planet?

If I could gather the information from that planet and recreate and take whatever I need from that planet and make it locally. Also, humans' ability to kind of do things like, you know, kind of transmutation of elements. Like if I could make heavy elements, I don't need to go mine heavy elements from an asteroid or something. I can just use energy. Can do that for me, as you know. So if I can capture enough energy, I can manipulate molecules any way I want, and I can gather the photons from around the universe to figure out what's going on. I don't need to go anywhere as an intelligent species. And so that was the premise defined and described better than I just did in the treatment

that Arthur C. Clark wrote for 2001, which is the universe is, the galaxy is just like a network with a bunch of nodes on it. And those nodes were the monoliths. And they were transmitting and accumulating information because you don't need to have a physical body go out there to transmit and gather information and you don't need to physically gather molecules anymore because you have the technical ability to do that all locally. And then the, you know, the transmission and collection of information is the role of intelligent species at that point. And you don't need to kind of move around and do stuff. So it kind of, in a sufficiently advanced

civilization, you don't need to move things around with UFOs and, you know, so on and so forth. So that was a really kind of profound thought. And then I think that there's another really important profound thought, which is that species at some point realizes my individual interest as an information gathering entity or body, you kind of get at some point a little bit selfless sufficiently advanced. And you realize that it is the aggregation of bodies or the aggregation of molecules, perhaps, that are the creators and absorbers and transmitters of information. And it is not the individual body itself.

Like there's a book called Parasite Rex, which talks about, about microbes and parasites that infect organisms and then control those organisms. And that, you know, we talked a little bit about the gut biome earlier, but humans' mood and behavior is so dramatically driven by their gut microbiome. There's tens of trillions of organisms. Are we controlling our body or the organisms controlling our body? If the words I'm saying and the feelings I'm having are driven by some set of organisms in my gut, or, you know, there's some really good examples of like a bacteria that infects an ant and then the ant gets eaten by a sheep. The ant, when it gets infected, the ant climbs to the top of a blade of grass. The sheep, the

Sheep eats the blade of grass. So the ant goes in the sheep's gut, and then the bacteria proliferates in that gut gets pooped out again and infects the next ant. And that's the way that this gut bacteria drives itself. It actually forces ants to go crazy and climb up the blade of grass. And that's where they get eaten. And just to interrupt, there's a research by a friend. We mentioned her earlier in the context of COVID, but this is Kim Praher.

There's a chemistry and national academy. I think of science and engineering. She has this, you know, done research in the role. that microbes play in the atmospheric rivers phenomenon of, you know, that we just experienced recently in California. So that's where microbes are somehow seeding and providing, you know, seeds and nucleation sites for droplets, which then proliferate and cause these huge deluges, which then causes the curing of droughts, which had stressed a microbial colony. So in other words, microbes are not only affecting, you know, us and may be more than us, as, you know, Ed Young wrote

and I contain multitudes and everything. You know, as you said earlier, we're more microbe than human, whatever that means. But they may actually be geoengineering the planet, which is really remarkable. How do they know how to do this? But anyway, sorry to interrupt, but continue. Well, no, I mean, that's my point. I think humans have a very human-centric point if you are the universe. Yeah, like, you know, we, we, it is.

It really is. I think that there is this point in, in intelligent design where the intelligence recognizes that it is not the center. It is not, you know, that this fungus, there's fungus and this bacteria that are actively changing everything on this planet. And maybe we're just a byproduct of the work that they're doing in a non-intelligent way. And the aggregation of all this biomass and the effect that's having on the planet, you know, is kind of the center of what's going on here. And again, step out. It's predicted maybe by thermodynamics.

And maybe there's a system of what's the better kind of energy absorber and dissipator that's kind of driving. all that change in this particular system. So I think that there, then you reach this evolutionary point where maybe civilization or intelligence realizes it's not, it's not the thing. And that the thing maybe is kind of the bigger picture, right? Maybe it is the bigger system that these molecules are all apart of. Yeah. I often say.

And then I think the most likely thing that ends up happening is stuff that we have absolutely no concept of today. That really is the transcendence of intelligence that we just keep. can't see you today. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the

day. Right. So yeah, speaking on that, you know, people always say, oh, you know, I want to live forever. Actually, I see two different camps. People that don't want to live forever and people that do want to live forever. But people that want to live forever, I say it's possible to do that right now. It just won't be you and your physical body. It'll either be in some avatar of you or, you know, try having children or

biological or ideological. And we'll get to that when we hit my existential question, you know, format at the end of this episode coming up. But, but the point being, you know, people are kind of greedy. want to take their body and their house and their jet ski, you know, and live forever with it. But really, you can sustain things with your values or, you know, you could have some avatar, right, that encapsulates and codes every state of your mind if you're a materialist. But then that begs a question for you, David, are they already here? In other words, I agree with you. It's much more,

you know, kind of prudent for advanced intelligence to be here, but in the avatar form or artificial form and not their physical form, you know, swapping, you know, sending their DNA or QNA or whatever they have here to Earth. But why wouldn't that kind of presuppose as, you know, recently canceled former past guest on the podcast, Nick Bostrom has suggested, you know, the superintelligence that will proliferate. And we almost have to have the burden to falsify that such an intelligence isn't already here, you know, creating us in a simulation. So as you know, in all podcasts have to talk about aliens, Bitcoin, and simulation hypothesis, at least in the science. What do you think about that? Could we actually be visited by extraterrestrial intelligences, but in the form of something

digital, traveling at the speed of light, collecting information from sentinels and monument throughout the galaxy? I mean, I would say that humans are probably more programmed by the collective internet than we are individually programming the collective internet ourselves today. The internet is like some meta-intelligence or the actual internet? You could, look, I mean, you could take a set of people or a set, you could kind of just take your human hat off for a second. There's some way to draw a circle around things. And I would say like if you take the, all these computing resources that are connected together, just call that the internet. And then the output is a bunch of photons and maybe the movement of speakers to make sound.

What's coming out of that collective system into your body is probably affecting your emotional conditioning a lot more than you're changing the way that that collective internet thing is operating. Many people stare at their phones all day and they're browsing and scrolling and photons are just being pushed into their eyes and sounds being pushed into their ears. And as they're browsing and scrolling, they're having dopamine reactions. They're having emotional reactions. They're going to change their behavior. They're quote learning things. They're going to quote, do things. This little device that you're holding is programming you. And it's telling you what to feel and what to do all day long on a first principles basis.

So I don't know if there's this idea of like some higher dimensional order of simulation needed as much as the simple observation that, you know, we as humans and our concept of kind of centralized intelligence being like the human body and that's it versus recognizing that there is kind of a collective experience or a collective intelligence that is perhaps we're the edge of the node. We're the edge of the network now. And we're being kind of pushed stuff to feel and say and do. You know, we sit in front of our TVs. We sit in our iPhones. We're told a bunch of stuff. The way we as humans interpret what's going on is there are other humans in that machine and they know stuff and they're telling me stuff.

You and I are talking to each other through a computer right now. But really, the reality is I'm sitting in a frigging room, staring at a piece of electronics, using my mouth to talk to it and changing how I am behaving because of how this piece of electronics is kind of flooding me with photons and sound. And so I do think that we need to kind of just have this higher order point of view, absent the human brain intelligence concept, that there is a collective thing going on. I'm just like all about like let's just not be human-centric when we think about things. You very quickly kind of have a different point of view on the world and the universe. We're talking about human-to-human, how these little black mirrors are changing our lives.

Some ways for the better. Some ways it's a challenge. So you're a father. I'm a father. I've had the experience. I don't know if you've had this yet with your kids, but when I'm talking to one of them, they'll try to swipe my face to change the channel, so to speak, or change this. They're so used to interacting with things they can swipe. How do you react to technology and with your children? And, you know, what do you see as sort of, practical ways? Do you put limits on this? Or, you know, how do you handle this?

Whatever I say is going to be wrong. I mean, like, I mean, we all, I think all, parents are so critical of the limits that they allow their kids to kind of have with technology. I mean, I see my kids watching junk shows. I turn it off. I limit the stuff they're allowed to show. We try and do 30 minute max on iPad or something like that. But it's brutal to see how quickly captivated you are. But then I think back to my childhood, I mean, I was on frigging cable TV for six hours of the 10 year old watching shows in front of the TV for hours on end. I don't know. I think I felt was able to function later and was still able to have kind of learning capacity later. So I can't be too judgmental.

You know, I recently got my kids playing a PS5. Like there's this game that comes to the PS5 called Astros Playroom. And my kids saw me playing and they wanted to play.

And so I taught them out of playing. It's incredible how quickly they learned and how good they got at it, how fast they got at it. And I'm like, holy shit. Like this is actually really cool seeing them advance. And then they're thinking really critically

and like physically like what's the the spatially I think is the answer is the word. Thinking like spatially like where do I go and how quickly and we started doing races on it and they got better and better. And then they started like really thinking about it as a puzzle. And I'm watching them actually puzzle solve and respond quickly to stuff. And I was like, this isn't bad. I started reading some stuff on video games at an early age and like a lot of kids that are engineers and software engineers and did really well.

Like you learn critical thinking through some of that experience set. So, you know, I think those sort of things are kind of actually cool. I try and limit how much we do. We usually do like 30 minutes after dinner and then we're done. Yeah. But it's hard, man. I, there's, there's no black and white on. I'm not like a, all technology is bad guy.

I also hate them watching these shows where it's like cheeky people. I care more about the values than I do about them just watching shows. So if there's a show where the kids are like being mean or there's violence or there's cheekiness, that's the stuff I don't want to have around because that's not the values I want them to learn. If it's playing video games and doing puzzle strategy stuff, I'm fine with it up to a limit. Like with everything, it's got to be up to a limit. So, yeah, that's just my orientation. I think just making sure that there's always the layer of values

and the translation layer of values needed with this stuff. And that if they have the right value system, they can kind of interpret things in any context, whether it's watching a show or interacting with a kid on the playground in the right way. Yeah, absolutely. So getting back to the physics and one of the topics we've already mentioned is the potential for energy and, you know, limitless energy, too cheap to meter and that, of course, is fusion,

You know, which obviously people were very excited about last December when an announcement came out of, out of Berkeley Labs, Livermore, that they had achieved. Livermore, yeah. Yeah, net ignition. And that this had, you know, in the culmination of billions of years and decades of work. And, you know, the amount of energy, it did produce net energy after taking everything into account, you know, the actual Q factor was positive. But that's only, again, you know, superimposing on it that, you know, billions.

and trillions of extra megajoules that they had to put this thing together, and resulting in the energy required to boil, you know, to make a Starbucks Ventil latte. It's important. But as you also mentioned, there's, you know, another approach, which is perhaps more scalable called ETAR, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which is a European instrument in France.

You know, the joke is, of course, David, nuclear effusions, the energy source of the future. it always will be. I can point out, you know, we've had fusion for a very long time. It just hasn't been controlled or sustainable. And I wonder how you react to Elon's, you know, claim that, you know, why do you need, you know, to generate fusion? We've got this fusion reactor in the sky, and it's, it never goes on strike like my graduate students did. It never, you know, calls in sick like I often do or it never catches COVID. So, you know, why not just go all in on solar or hydrogen or, you know, something else, or even nuclear fission, why are we spending any money on

this versus, you know, going all in on what we know already works? And we have, you know, like you have three nuclear power plants within a, you know, 20 mile radius if you have a Navy shipyard nearby, as we do here in San Diego. So you got five nuclear powered aircraft carriers in the harbor right now. So tell me, why should we spend any money on fusion? Yeah. And we have a perfectly working one overhead that I like the study. And we have many, many fission and other sources of energy. I've never seen technology investors or technologists become Luddites as quickly as they do

than when you start talking about fusion. It's really profound. And I think the reason is so many people are so what a poker term I'll use, POT committed. They put so much money into this concept that like renewables are the kind of next transition phase for energy production on Earth. And as a result, guys like Elon who's got this massive solar and battery business wants to see that become proliferant and a trillion dollars and so on. And that's all very noble and useful and great. Fission is very noble and useful and great. And fission should be everywhere. We have a massive

social and kind of regulatory regime problem that limits the proliferation of fission. As you know, getting approvals 30 plus years and, you know, no one, NIMBY stuff can't have it in my backyard. In China, they just, you know, started the progress on building 450, I think, half to gigawatt scale system. So they'll have half a terawatt of production coming online over the next whatever period of time here as they build out these fission reactors. And so I'm fully in support of fission, but it is completely burdened by this kind of regulatory social problem.

Voyager, V-O-Y-G-R has been approved. The Nuclear regulatory commission, it's a small-scale, reactor. I'll send you some. Yeah, at 76 feet. It produces 77 megawatts of electricity. And then, and then thorium is, you know, basically not really employed, but it's much safer than uranium. No, traditional power. Totally. So, yeah, look, I, by the way, so, so the bigger picture point is it's not an either-or. So, yeah, I do think, I, you know, we can go through the kind of first principles in the macroeconomics on renewable. Like, there's a limitation on where they can go. The, there's a massive carbon deficit to produce them, right? You have to mine materials to make them,

make all these renewable production systems. Yeah. You have to spend a bunch of money to build and install them. They're almost completely unrecyclable in the solar plants. They're unrecyclable and they're not controllable. You have to have as a result of kind of renewable capacity achieving baseload. You then also have to get batteries and then you have to mine a bunch of lithium and there's a big carbon deficit to all the work that needs to go into making renewables, you know, truly proliferate. I think we've just got a generally increase energy production on Earth. So we've increased energy production by about 20 fold in the last hundred years on Earth. I think in the next hundred years, we can and should increase energy

production by over 100 fold. So we can't just kind of replace old systems and get some renewables. This doesn't solve the core driver. The core driver is human consumption and consumption needs. We're replacing labor with machines. You know, we're moving around stuff more. There's so much about the evolution of humans that's driven, as we talked about earlier, by this notion of desire, I have to consume more this year than I did last year to feel happy. If I don't consume more next year, I'm not going to feel like I'm getting happier or I'm happy anymore. I'm unhappy when I'm consuming less this year than I did last year. I have less. So I'm consuming less and I'm unhappy. So the core driver of human civilization is this kind of consumptive pattern

which ultimately drives up energy consumption, which means we need to make more energy to make things more abundant, make them more affordable, make them more accessible. Keep the heat down and treadmill going, yeah. Yeah, so I don't, like, I think renewables are great to kind of do some decarbonization in the near term, great, but like they're not going to kind of replace everything. Fission has this regulatory. So we have to have a portfolio of stuff. Fusion from a first principles perspective, as you know, works.

Because we see it working in the sky. So we know that this physics is real. We know, yeah, I mean, we, we, we know that. the energy production capacity. We know what needs to go into it. We know what needs to happen. And ultimately, there's nothing that kind of limits. I'd love your point of view on this.

But like I say this and people get really like upset. Because there's no reason that you can't have fusion ultimately reduced in scale to fit in a watch. There's nothing about physics that says you can't have a magnetic containment field and have the necessary kind of fuel source and the control system in a watch. There's nothing that says physics has to be huge. All technology starts out really big. Mainframes are in a basement. They cost $15 million.

They got cheaper. We all have a computer in our pocket now that cost $600. That is probably 100 billion times more memory and compute capacity than that mainframe. And so they get cheaper. They get faster. They get better. They get smaller. Fusion is in the like, you know, pre-eniac phase right now.

Like, you know, we're kind of, it's in the coat hanger gum phase. of transistor circuitry being demonstrated. And the first principles of physics say this is possible, this should happen. So a couple of years ago, three years ago, there was about seven venture-funded fusion companies. As of the end of the last year, or two, three of last year, the count was 47. And I was speaking with an investor last week who told me that the count is now up to 70. So there are 70 fusion companies that are pursuing different models of fusion energy production. As you know, there's kind of the tocomac systems, there's a distillator systems, and now there's these kind of pulse plasma systems like Helion and others, all of which have different physics underlying kind of how they're supposed to get the plasma to hot enough and dense enough state to trigger kind of a sustainable or sustaining kind of fusion reaction regime.

In terms of like the tocomax, it feels to me like so much of what's driving the advances here and enabling them is similar to what I talked about with DNA sequencing. There's all these underlying digital technologies that in aggregate are enabling a cost down where suddenly the potential goes up and the possibilities or the probability of success goes up. So as you know, like so much of like experimental like beam physics, I used to work in a center for beam physics at Lawrence Berkeley Labs for two years when I was an undergrad. And they had like this was back in 1999, the, this plasma wakefield accelerator. And, you know, they were kind of trying to build, I think, GEV scale particle accelerators on a bench top and a meter by, you know, creating a plasma. And it's like a femtosecond scale high energy laser pulse that kind of triggers a wave that kicks off the electron proton accelerates. So in a short period of physical space, you can create what would otherwise take a giant cyclotron in terms of energy to get these particles moving. and then use them for kind of experimental application, research application.

And what's happened over the years, I think, is that the ability to kind of generate, you know, femtosecond scale or sub-fempto-second scale sensing technology and control technology and responsiveness. And then the compute infrastructure needed to actually quickly compute and respond and drive what the sensor is telling you and drive an action in the chamber has changed profoundly. And so much of the science is not science, it's engineering. It's about the electronic componentry that can very rapidly and accurately and precisely sense and then very accurately and precisely control a strong enough magnetic field. And one kind of analogy I use when talking to people about fusion is it's like a giant balloon. And if you put a pin prick in the balloon, all the air gets out. That's what happens with a fusion, with a plasma.

if you cannot control it, the plasma will just kind of, you know, go away. It'll evaporate. It'll all the energy will push it out and it will kind of go into the walls. Not in a dangerous, explosive way, FYI, everybody. So it's just, you know, it's very low mass. And so you have to kind of get the magnetic field. Now, the problem is that the magnetic field closes on the plasma, right? The plasma pushes back.

And it's actually dynamic how that happens. And that dynamic nature causes everything to kind of fall apart very often and very frequently. So you have to change it very quickly. So the componentry, the electronic componentry, the software, the digital tooling, all of these kind of underlying elements, new semiconductor, new superconducting materials are allowing us to create much stronger, much more precise and much more responsive systems that actually make this concept this concept than it was 50 or 60 years ago when it was kind of first theorized as being kind of this industrial concept. And as we've kind of stepped into trying it out, we're like, oh, wow, I got to, I got to respond at femtosecond scale to magnetic field. And then I've got to do it with this level of a magnetic field. And if it's even slightly off, it's, it's going to, the plasma's going to break.

And so all of this ended up becoming kind of a series of builds that were enabled by new technologies. And I think now we're seeing this proliferation of plasma fusion technology concepts that are actually experimentally realizable that weren't 10 years ago or 50. years or 20 years ago. And that's the moment. It's like when DNA sequencing, we're like in the Human Genome project stage right now where it's $100 million to sequence the genome. You know, 20 years later, it's $100. I'm hopeful that's where we end up with with these systems in plasma fusion. And obviously, the systems that require tritium as a fuel source are kind of currently, you know, rate limited and we got to go get tritium and it's super expensive and hard to source and so on. You know, there's theories on how you can kind of resolve that. Then there's other systems that don't

use Cridium and they're more attractive. So what I tell investors that call me on this and ask me about this, there's a portfolio of 70 projects. And, you know, the European project, the great one of the big bets in that portfolio. I'm not going to bet on any project in that portfolio today. I have no frigging clue which one's going to get there, when they're going to get there, how they're going to get there. And you could be right, you know, like a VHS beta, you could be right.

Beta was better than VHS, but VHS proliferated and, you know, Facebook and MySpace. Right. So you could be right, be early and be totally off. off out of the money. Tokamak, Stellarator, pulse plasma with lasers. I don't know, but I'll tell you that across this portfolio of Beth and looking at things from a first principles perspective, the money is going in, the physics says it's going to happen, the first principles make sense.

All the underlying technology trends are supporting the probability of success. And I would guess that this portfolio is going to yield a 95% likely outcome of us having sustainable, low-cost fusion-driven energy in our lifetime. And so I'm very optimistic about where things are headed because of first principles, underlying technology, and there's a ton of different bets. And it's great when there's a ton of bets. It's great when there's tons of companies all working on different ways of addressing the problem. And they'll be winning things at the end.

Going back to the real first principles, I'd like to submit, you know, it's Oscar season, right? Your parents are probably getting mailers and DVDs in the mail. So for your consideration, David, with humility requisite of a big fan of yours, for consideration for Science Corner. Scientists and astronomers have recently detected what they claim to be the first stars ever to evolve in the universe, creating nuclear fusion. So staying on that topic. And that was using the James Webb Space Telescope data. They claimed to have observed a signature, which would be the hallmark of what are called population.

3 stars. So for the audience members who may not be familiar with this, astronomers believe we are currently in what's called population 1, confusingly, and the very first star that ever existed, population 3. And those were primordial gas clouds of basically hydrogen that then coalesced under gravity and immense pressure, causing an ignition of the primordial hydrogen, which is the relic of the Big Bang, which is what I study, the cosmic microwave background, the formation of a molecular or hydrogen or atomic hydrogen, just H, hydrogen,

with an electron, that recombination process, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, released the CMB that I study and looking for its telltale signs of earlier epochs, like the synthesis of gravitational

waves and nuclei. But anyway, these stars, you know, have this basic, you know, the simplest recipe possible, you know, take hydrogen, add gravity, and you get helium, which is exactly where the sun, you know, the sun gets its name from.

But by the way, did you know that helium was discovered on the sun, David? A helium was discovered on the sun? Yeah, it was not discovered on Earth. He was discovered from the sun. And actually, astronomers had to go there. I must have known that at some point. Yeah. Yeah.

It was really heroic. Yeah. Astronomers had to go to the sun at night to study it. You know, it's too dangerous otherwise. No, they discovered it from its spectrum, obviously. And that's how we knew the new fingerprint. Now, the same thing is happening with the very first stars, David, in the early universe. I'll send you a link to this paper.

which is, you know, tentative right now, but the signature has been long known, that if you saw singly ionized helium, so helium has two protons, ordinary non-isotopic helium three, helium four has two protons, two protons, and the hallmark so-called population three, the very first stars, would be the observation of the spectral characteristics of a singly ionized helium atoms in the early universe. And astronomers claim that they've seen this, and there have been claims before, But this one is now using basically the one of the two main goals of the James Jones Space Telescope was to really illuminate, no pun intended, the era of reionization and the first stars to ever ignite by this process. So that would be population three. And it's really quite fascinating to me that this could be really the first light in the universe, not from the primordial realm, but of ordinary objects that then provide the seed capital to then create the stars that created the, the, supernova that existed in our solar system and that caused our solar system to create, of which here's a fragment here. I'm going to send you one of these, David, as I do to all my

listeners who have a dot edu email address and sign up for my mailing list at briankeating.com slash list, but these are fragments of the of the nuclear explosion of population two that then provided the seed capital, as I say, for population one. So it's an extremely inspiring thing that we're living in, you know, this recently was released last week, basically, the claim of these data. So I want to ask you, unless you have any thoughts on that as a possible contender for a future science corner, where you, you know, kind of would go now. If you were, if you could go back and talk to the David of 2001, you graduated from Cal, you could talk, what would you advise sort of, you know, similarly or differently? We're getting into the phase I call the,

the existential question phase. But the name of the podcast is Into the Impossible. And the It's from an Arthur C. Clark quote, which says the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. And I use that as a springboard to kind of get advice to their former selves of my guest. And I'm going to ask you, if you go back to that 21, 22 year old David, Friedberg 2001, graduate of Cal, what would you tell him to do similarly differently to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? Advice to your former self. Yeah, it's hard. I'm sorry, but it's really hard to rewrite. My meandering path like everyone's got us to where we are today.

And, you know, there's nothing about today that I would say I would want to have be different in terms of my outlook for tomorrow, which is all I can really do with today. And so it's hard to say. I will tell people that I've had extraordinary diversity in experiences in my career and in my, my kind of life and, you know, the integration of those experiences, the synthesis of them has been really important. Steve Jobs did such a good job with that commencement speech that he gave where he said, you know, take a, he took a calligraphy class, and the calligraphy class led him to having a point of view that they should have fonts on the original Macintosh, which was one of the kind of

defining features of the graphical user interface and the original Macintosh and really kind of revolutionized the personal computing industry. And it was because he explored this kind of unrelated interest at the moment that got him into that. My infrared astronomy lab as an undergrad gave me exposure to cooling down the CCD camera and getting the data out of it, manipulating the data and kind of connecting everything from how are we collecting photons on this device all the way through to the data and computation, computation of the data that comes off that device

and the interpretation of it, it gave me a perspective that wasn't applicable in my personal endeavors to go in research using infrared telescopes, but gave me a set of tools and understandings that informed my ability to kind of do programming later because I used IDL at the time or to understand how these sensors worked,

to understand how DNA sequencing work, to understand how much of, how data and information, kind of manipulation with matrices worked that was super useful to me later on in my career when working in software. And I can give kind of

a lot of different examples, but I just encourage everyone to not be kind of linear and unit track in their work, in their research, in their exploration of interests, but to really kind of be intellectually curious and explore and try and do

and learn in lots of different ways, you never know how things are going to kind of fit together later. That's always the big surprise. Yeah. And that's been the case for me time and time again in my life is my ability to kind of take the next step often has been driven from some insight I drew from some experience I had that was totally unrelated to any track I'm on today in the past and then realize some outcome. So, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, yeah, I would probably. spend more time in, you know, bioengineering, programming, computer science programming later. But honestly, like, you know, in 2003, I was kind of working at this job that I worked at for under a year. And I taught myself programming in PHP, MySQL, setting up a Linux server, Apache server. Like, I built the whole stack on JavaScript,

and I built this kind of web service, this app called Kodongo, which is like a question and answer research service. And it was like, I was working until four in the more every night and then at 8 a.m. I'd be in the office again. And I would get home and I would work on it all night. And I, you know, and I kept, I read all the books on computer programming, wrote the whole thing myself, built a payment gateway integration, set up an AdWords account, bought ads. This was back in 2000, early 2003, advertised, got all these people using it, made money from it. The whole kind of stack of the experience got me a job at Google. And I would have never gotten a job at Google with the experience that I had had without having done that on my own

and having kind of explored that work on my own. And so I think, like, yeah, that's sort of like exploration of interest and just trying new things was so important in kind of charting my path forward. Yeah, I always love the quote by Sarin Kirkegaard who said, you know, life can only be understood looking backwards, but you have to live it going forwards, obviously. Did you know Andy Friedman, who was a Cal grad, I think either a year before you or perhaps two years before you? He worked with Alex, too. He was a strong in.

Don't know him. Yeah, unfortunately, yeah, he passed away about two years ago from a rare form of Hodgkin's lymphoma. So pivoting to another existential question, if he's got a couple more minutes, I always love to ask. It's really prompted by a quote that you almost preceding. sage earlier today, which is one from Arthur C. Clark, the namesake of the institution that I associate lead direct, I guess you'd say, which is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you had to put on a monolith, like in 2001, you know, kind of the summary of the greatest achievements of the human brain, what would you put on it,

you know, sort of a time capsule to have a little bit of bravado, swagger for the human race in terms of an intellectual or technological or even artistic triumph that human beings have been able to make. That would last maybe for a billion years. The one or the many things? You could do as many as you like. Man, that's a tough one. I don't know the answer to that. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot of principles in mathematics and physics. Feynman said it was the atomic hypothesis that he,

He wasn't a guest on the show, unfortunately. But if I've said, you know, the thing that encapsulates the most amazing amount of detail in the shortest amount of words is that everything is made of atoms. And these atoms have, you know, structures or substructures being on them that are governed by forces and fields. I always turn into cosmology and so forth. But I've had people turn it to, you know, philosophy and theology even and answer, you know, Andrewian, who is Carl Sagan's widow. She said, you know, she'd put on the monolith, you know, basically, you know,

act humbly, walk justly, walk humbly without your God. She doesn't believe in God. But quote from Mika in the Old Testament. So, yeah, the kind of magical technology, there's something about, obviously, that infatuates you with technology. I mean, I don't know what could be more profound that humans have kind of come across. All things related to physics, we can kind of, in mathematics, we can kind of resolve through, I don't want to say rudimentary, but like. or elementary, but like, yeah, elementary experimentation and demonstration.

Quantum mechanics is just, and remains to be the mind-blowing transition of, like, all of physics, like, you know, the, and the demonstrations in, in experimental quantum physics, probably have created the greatest transition for, you know, our interaction with the physical universe.

And it continues to be not just profound, but staggeringly challenging to kind of understand and connect. And extensions into quantum field theory, there's this kind of like, I don't want to say, well, I can be appropriate term as human uncertainty or physical uncertainty about our ability to fully grasp and conceptualize that, within which we are

which we are within and are fitting with it. And yeah, I was thinking the other day, what was I watching? I was watching some movie. And I was like, this guy, if he relived this day, he could have done it better. And then I was thinking about Groundhog Day,

happy Groundhog Day again. And then I was like, but every day that the individual arrive, if you could reboot a day over and over again and optimize and improve it, would all the conditions be the same in that day? And the idea being like, look, you could always kind of, if you could capture the location and the motion or the velocity, the vector of every particle in the universe, could you be perfectly predictive about what's going to happen in the universe? And then there's ways you can kind of disprove that to be the case using quantum mechanics.

And then I was thinking, if I got dropped into the same day over and over again, would everything happen the same way that day every time I lived through it? Because my presence in it with new knowledge or new information changes the quantum field of that universe. And so that universe, maybe the formula of or the parameters of that quantum field is the state of the universe encompassing both space and time. And the observer. And the observer. And the observer. And as a result, the fact that I've observed a day, means that I cannot maybe observe the same set of conditions happening in day two

because I've already observed them in day one. So can I really go relive the same day over and over again? And it really kind of struck me like that that higher order concept that maybe there is a dimensionality that, you know, it's very hard for a human brain to fully grok. And I think, you know, quantum mechanics and the outputs of certain experiments maybe give us a sliver of an insight into how profound that is, you know. I don't know.

Yeah, no, that's that. That is, of course, the most mysterious thing. And then the question of whether or not, you know, we could have a truly have a gut, not the super gut kind, but the grand unified theory, you know, remains a mystery. If we can actually unify the three lower, four, or higher energy forces, strong weak and electromagnetic forces with gravity is a theory of everything. That's even possible. Next, I want to ask you to look into your crystal ball, not necessarily a billion years into the future.

But just to the biblical age of 120. when Moses, our rabbi Moses, failed to reach the promised land, hopefully we'll reach the promise land. But I want to ask you, he wrote what's called a Zavaah, ethical will, which is an encapsulation of wisdom, not as monetary, you know, munificence that he's going to bestow. But I want to ask you, what would be sort of something that you'd put in an ethical will when you reach that 80 years hence from now? What sort of wisdom or learnings and experiential philosophy, have you developed so far that you could see being of value, not just to your biological children, but to your ideological children, of which there are many

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Priced invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Yeah, unfortunately, I think a lot of the sage wisdom is lost when it's just transcribed into a single sentence or statement. And it's so much more importantly learned through experience or through meditation. And it really is predominantly driven by the loss of ego. And the loss of ego in the sense of space and time and selflessness and so on is, you know, the ultimate kind of ethical pursuit, I believe, of a conscious, intelligent body or could or should be.

It manifests in lots of ways like being giving, you know, being selfless, helping others, having empathy, recognizing that one's own contributions to the world are going to come and are going to go very quickly, you know, not getting. torn up and broken up by certain things. And there is no one that fully, you know, encompasses the loss of ego. And, you know, the ability to kind of get there can be written and has been written in many different ways. You know, it's, it is, I think, ultimately the thing that has made humans, as we kind of view these biological masses, we call humans, like the quote, you know, best energy absorbers, although we could argue that maybe we're not, you know, but we think we are on this planet, but so proliferate is our sense of ego or desire to consume and to find our place in the world and the universe and has allowed us to manifest knowledge and the form of engineering and

so on and change the universe around us and get things we want. So it's very powerful. It's also very destructive and it leads to unhappiness and it leads to hurt and war and despair and so on. And so it's very hard to say if all humans abandon their ego, abandoned ego, that we as a species would not lose out on the ability to continue to accumulate knowledge and engineer things around us to improve. And so perhaps there's a balance of ego destruction or having some perspective there on having empathy and being tearing and having a sense of ethics around selflessness that can perhaps be used to better motivate us to do the things we intend to do. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, it's a famous co-vary rabbi. I think his name is Haim Barditscha,

who said that a man should carry around in his pockets, pieces of paper. In one pocket, it says the universe was made for me, which is a quote from Genesis. And the other one is another quote from Genesis. I am nothing but dust and ashes. Now, balancing that, the balance is always so hard, right? David, it's easy to be polarized. And I love the fact that you on your show, you're a radical moderate in that you're not interested in the political polarization so much. You're interested in the talk list, the core facts, and the heart of the issue. But it's very difficult to be in the middle, right?

There's a Yiddish proverb that he who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by traffic from both sides of the street. But I want to commend you for that. And what other, besides the Into the Impossible podcast, what else is on your daily driving rotation? What do you listen to besides your own show and hopefully the Into the Impossible podcast? I've been a fan of Lex Friedman for a while. He's great. We got to hang out a couple months ago. So, you know, he obviously goes deep and, you know, spends quite a bit of time with his, with his guests, I enjoy it.

I actually just do a lot of audible books. So my biggest thing is I find it, I have issues with my vision. So I have a hard time reading physical books lately. So I listen to a lot of audible books. So I'll take long walk through while I'm driving listed audible books and try and crank through them. A mix of fiction and nonfiction. So I'm kind of all over the place. Believe it or not, I'm in my, my.

Bravo TV Real Housewives moment right now. I'm listening to the Prince Harry book Spare. Oh, yeah. I, yeah, it's audible promoted it to me and I'm like, okay, I'll give it a shot. I put it on. I have no interest whatsoever in the Royals or anything. I put it on in the car the other day. I was thinking I'd give it five minutes because it was like a free promotion. And then I'm just like listening to the guy. I'm like, this is basically like eighth grade writing, but it's super like it's super addictive and compelling. It is. Yeah, my wife caught me watching her Netflix show. I was like, oh, I'm watching a Fowder. I'm watching Fowder.

No, honey, don't. I'm going to put in the chat. I have zero palace intrigue. I've zero interest. I don't know any of the cultural references. Yeah. No, it's it. It's cotton candy.

You know, sometimes you need to drink an actual sugar-filled coke. I'm putting in the chat a link to a book that I know you're going to love called The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chitko, who's a researcher, I think, in Europe. But he kind of presents from, you know, it's the classic Nagel, you know, can you, what does it like to be a bat? But it's written from the perspective of perhaps the ingestation of new sensory kind of perceptions that we could develop as human beings, you know, like not just neuralink or whatever, but what if we are kind of like a blind man in the forest or, you know, holding the elephant? We don't have these, we don't have these tools that a bee has. And yet,

you know, bees have co-evolved with humans for, you know, literally 50,000 years. They found with Neanderthals and Denisovins, they found like honey and it's the most calorically rich substance that's natural available in the world before, you know, Coca-Cola and high-fructose corn syrup. And so how do their brains actually react? And it's a model for how humans can be and also, you know, you know, collective hive mind network. I know you're going to love, the audio book is awesome. My kids, even, my 12-year-old loves it. Okay. Last question before we break in our bladder burst from this three-hour almost interview. Really?

That's good. Well, yeah, it's been 232. 2.32. Okay. Hopefully we can get, we can keep, we can keep going for a few more minutes. The final question I like to ask is also pertinent, and it comes from Sir Arthur C. Clark. I got mine of a B lined up, by the way.

All good. Yeah. You're going to love it. If you don't, your money, I'll pay you back for it. I'm going to hope to have them on the podcast because he's just a great writer. So Arthur C. Clark said another thing. He said a lot of cool things. He said, you know, for every expert, there's an equal and

opposite expert, you know, which kind of reminds me of Feynman, Feynman said science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, not in the wisdom. You know, if Newton had been the final word, he would never have been questioned by Einstein, right? And we'd be stuck with, you know, with, you know, instantaneous gravitational transport. But anyway, another thing that that Sir Arthur said was when an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is very probably right. But when an elderly, you know, an elderly, but distinguished scientists as something is impossible, he is most likely wrong. I'm not calling you elderly or, you know, about a decade younger than me. But what have you changed your mind about? What

have you been wrong about? Is there anything that you've, you know, come, maybe been a little bit humbled by, which I always find if you search in Google, which you know, you work with Larry a while back, but you search in like the following phrase, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, David. The most likely words to appear before that, I did this once are, I got fired or, you know, she broke up with me or, you know, something something that would in the moment seem, seem negative. I know it's true for me. I got fired from Stanford University as a postdoc, ended up now I'm talking to you, and then the through line is completely clear in retrospect. But have you been wrong or have you had something that you've learned about that in the moment maybe you were convinced you couldn't

be wrong about, but you actually, you know, in retrospect, have learned from this situation where perhaps you were, you know, had a lot of cognitive bias towards believing you were correct. I'm trying to think about what specific. I generally totally agree with the sentiment that, you know, we have to hold both views in our mind. This is also why I'm very boring. If I had a podcast on my own, no one would listen to it because I'm not stimulating with a strong prediction or an extreme statement one way or the other. And I think stepping up a level and viewing the bigger picture is more important to thinking about the reality of things. Again, going back to dualism, it's not one or the other.

it's all, it's both. And in some cases, it's a probability, going back to quantum mechanics, it's a probability distribution function of things that may happen. And, you know, I often kind of think this way about the things that may happen, you know, being a likelihood of happening. We used to do these, you know, when you build like a software-based model, you're predicting an output, you're predicting an event. And when you train a model, you build a reliability plot if you want to visualize how accurate the model is. And the reliability plot on the x-axis is, you know, how frequently does the model say something is likely to happen? And the y-axis is how frequently did those events actually happen? So each one goes from zero to 100%. And all of these models

follow an S-curve. The reliability plot of nearly any predictive model at some point, at some point in the history of the universe will resolve to some S-curve. And it will resolve to an S-curve because the things that the model says will never happen, happen with some degree of frequency. And the things that the model says will always happen will happen with some degree of frequency. There is no such thing as 100% or 0% you know kind of predictive power so so so so that that's I think like a really important general kind of orientation I try and make sure I remind myself of as often as I can so I don't get in trouble being 100% convinced or 0% convinced of things um and now in in my particular life I'm not I'm not fully sure um there's a lot I've learned about um how much humans can be

convinced of things and polarized into things that I did not really appreciate when I was younger. And there's a binary nature. Here's a good one. Probably kind of the idea that there is, and I know most people hold this belief in some realm, that there is some nefarious central force or power that is influencing and doing things in a negative way that is oriented around evil, that these people are bad and they know they're being bad and they're doing it to be bad. And I think the thing that I've really been convinced of is that so many people make decisions that are really in their mind decisions for good. Decisions that may in some cases be adverse for some groups and maybe viewed that way and for some groups maybe are being viewed another way. But the core motivation of nearly everyone is that they're doing good things for good reasons.

Like that's just that we have this narrative. Yeah. No, I love what you said earlier. know, that we have this narrative and we can backfill in and you can talk about what your wealth is going to do. But it's this, it's survivability by, it's survivor by. I mean, yeah, you're at this point, but you're going to backfill the narrative because that's what we do and you're going to make yourself portrayed in the best life. That's so I like to ask the question because, you know, part of being a scientist is, is being wrong all the time. And I imagine as an investor, as an entrepreneur,

you know, you're going to be wrong. It's a power law. You're like your best, your best possible, you know, ideas are going to result in the 10x return, but there's going to be 10x fewer of them, right? So we're going to be wrong. And to say, well, you know, I don't, you know, to not learn from your mistakes is, you know, I think it's the sign of someone can't get to where you are, or, you know, hopefully where I am,

without having made way more mistakes than, some evil person out there doing bad things. I think there's something about the human mind in a social system that orientes around there is some element in control that is keeping me from having things I want. And then so much of politics and social engineering and business is all about wrestling control away from that which is in power. And it is the ever kind of evolutionary cycle of social systems between humans.

And again, going back to this point about individual desire, I want things I don't have today. And I rationalize that there is someone or something that is keeping me from having those things because I don't have them today. If I don't have them today, something's wrong. Something's unfair. Something's unjust. Someone is holding it that someone else has the thing I want.

And there's some reason that the system, that the social system that I have to be a part of, has made that the case. So what happens in politics is there's often a manipulation around identifying the things that people think they don't have or that they want that they don't have. And then rationalizing that the reason you don't have it is X. And then manifesting a political platform around, I'm going to get you X. Now vote for me and I'll go be the person that will get you. get it for you. And that's so much of politics. And it's also so much of human behavior. It's like,

I want to build this business because I want to have more wealth because I want to do this thing. And I have to go wrestle that money away from the big evil corporation or the food system is controlled by X or the banking system is controlled by X. There's some reason I don't have X. And that reason is some, you know, kind of system or person or entity that has control and power over me. And that is so much of like the human dynamic. And again, it relates to ego because your ego is challenged because there's something bigger and more powerful than you. And so your ego is threatened into you. Your ego wants to kind of flash out and attack and go after it.

Right. It's the anti-authoritarian influence. It's like we are losing agency, which the only thing we control are these chemicals that we call our brain, you know, people always not mock me or, you know, often mock me because I, I am a, you know, practicing Jew. I may not be, you know, the most devout Jew. but, you know, why do you study this, you know, this thing written by Bronze Age peasants and what can you learn about, you know, cosmology from? I'm like, well, first of all, there's only like 35 sentences out of 35,000 total verses in the Torah and the Old Testament have anything plausibly to do with the creation of the universe. And it's obviously not a science book. If that's the

case, if you had a book and, you know, if this book of the mind of the bee, you know, has one page out of a thousand about the mind of a bee and the rest of it's about like the Oliver North trial or something, you know, you're going to be, what the hell is this? It's not accurate advertisement. But there's one scene, as you, as you just mentioned, made me think about, there's a rebellion by Korok, who is one of Moses's cousins, basically, a fellow Levite. And he says exactly what you say. He's like, it's too much for you.

You want this control. And like, who said, you know, who puts you in charge? God, literally. And then he organizes this whole, like, test. And how can you find out, you know, if people should follow me? And most people were going to follow Korok, who is the rebellious, the rebel against Moses. And it took a miracle for God to show that, you know, whether or not you believe that. But it's deeply ingrained in human nature to rebel against this notion of I am not an agent over my own control.

And I think that's what gives meditation, you know, such, such a benefit. I'm horrible at it. You know, I like, you know, have an app that screams at me if I start thinking about something that's not my mantra. You know, I actually have the honor of having Deepak Chopra gave me a mantra. And it's actually a nice one, it's Shalom. but I thought he was going to tell me it's schmuck and I should just use that as a mantra. But at any rate, yeah, surrendering the ego

is the hardest thing to do because you need a little bit of swagger to be a good scientist, to be a good inventor, to be a good father, but it's that basis, it's standing in the middle of the road and not getting hit by traffic. And I just want to thank you so much, David,

for sharing so much of your valuable time. You'll send me a bill for it later, I hope. But it's a great joy and I hope we can meet in person someday. They're up there, down here, wherever in the middle that we can meet. But I want to thank you. Anything you, that I wanted to ask you one last question, which is what, I'm sure there's

millions of questions that you get asked that you're sick of asking, getting asked about. Is there anything that no one's ever asked you about that you're like really interested to talk about? Not just me. I mean, I probably failed numerously throughout this conversation. But any things that you like are really interested in that people don't know? I mean, I didn't know how meditation impacted your life, you know, as it's clear that it does. and I can recommend some colleagues and friends in that space too if you're interested.

But are there any things that most people don't think to ask you? Well, I mean, the stuff we talked about today is stuff we never talk about. I never like human consciousness and the impracticality of aliens physically visiting, you know, other planets and solar systems and so on within a galaxy or other galaxies. So much of the stuff today is stuff, you know, it's never a great forum to talk about. It's actually kind of fun stuff I think about a lot or geek out on a lot. So, no, that was the sort of stuff that I would always be like more interested in having conversations, these kind of deeper, more interesting things about, you know, where are we, what are we, where are we headed? Yeah, it's the reason, you know, that makes us really human, right, that we can think about the meaning.

We're the only species. That's what Homo sapien means and stuff. one who has knowledge that he is going to die. And I think, yeah, we get so lost in the, like, the materialism and the, you know, wealth creation or scientific creation and so forth. Yeah, we don't have as much time. And it's almost shunned upon to think about, like, the meaning of life or theology or philosophy, even, and physics is derided often. So, yeah, I love it. I always say a podcast is an excuse for me to talk to people I want to talk to, rather than people I have to talk to some contractor in Chile at 17,000 people. All right. My friend. Well, great talking to you.

Bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to Part 2 of this two-part episode of Into the Impossible. And don't forget, listen to the equally compelling part one. Please subscribe, rate, and review us. We love hearing from listeners. For a chance to win your very own bit of space dust in the form of a meteorite fragment, subscribe to Brian's mailing list.

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