Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Biggest Inventions of the 2020s: Cancer Vaccines, Flying Cars, Space Travel, and More

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Let’s kick off the new year with a bit of techno-optimism! After a miserable start to this decade, we can still have a Roaring Twenties. In this episode, ‘Plain English’ presents a tour of the frontier of science and technology with Derek’s favorite innovation writer, the economist Eli Dourado. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Eli Dourado Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The press box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out the press box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to plain English. In a good year, January's can be kind of rough. You are a little tired, you're not fully motivated to get back to work, wherever that is. Your post-holiday body mass is 20% cake, ice cream, and apple brandy cocktails.

No, wait, that's just me. But it is especially rough in 2022 with Omicron. I did a pod with Bill Simmons last week about Amicron. I'm not going to recapitulate the whole thing here. We will have an Omicron episode next week. The upshot for now is that, yes, it's milder, especially for the vaccinated and boosted. So get your vaccines and booster shots.

That's the good news. It's also everywhere. Absolutely everywhere, which is not good news. So many people are infected that schools are canceled. Hospital staff is strung out. Sports are a mess. The NBA is basically handing out 10-day contracts to anybody who's played 2K on PlayStation in the last decade. The point is, things are total cluster shit.

And this is going to be, even if you are optimistic about the trajectory of this virus in the next month, which I am, this is going to be a very, very rough month. So I thought for the first episode of 2022, let's zag. Let's zag a bit. Plain English has mostly been a news podcast analyzing what just happened. What about inverting the telescope and taking the long view? What about a pod about the most interesting and most exciting and most important tech and science breakthroughs of the 2020s? So looking back a little bit, over the last few decades, we are coming out of a long period that is sometimes called the Great Stagnation.

There's a couple measures of productivity growth that are down, a couple measures of technological growth that are down. For some reason, we don't seem to be making progress toward human welfare. as fast as we used to be. But I think the great stagnation might be over. I think we could be on the cusp of a roaring 20s, from transportation tech to biotech, to energy tech, to nanotech. I think the next 10 years could be one of the most exciting decades for scientific discovery ever.

So I want to do a podcast on all the coolest stuff that is coming down the pike with someone who has the most masterful understanding of that whole frontier. And that man is Eli Dorado. He is an economist, a writer, and a researcher, and his command of our science and tech frontier is just beyond compare. He is, for the purposes of this episode, our guide to the universe of the future. Now, this episode is a beast.

There is a lot of technical detail that I will do my best to make plane. But I think it's also a feast. If you dream of jetting to Europe or Singapore for dinner at twice the speed of sound, lucky for you, we discuss the future of supersonic travel. If you dream of interstellar human civilization, lucky for you, we discuss the future of space innovation. If you dream more earthbound dreams of using mRNA technology, the tech in our COVID vaccines to cure certain kinds of cancer,

we discuss the future of cancer vaccines. And if you believe, as I do, that maybe the most important technology on this planet is our ability to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and reverse climate change, we discuss the frontier of carbon removal technology, which could at scale basically vacuum the skies for carbon. If you can't tell, I am an optimist at heart about technology. I think a lot of tech has screwed us over because technology. is people, and a lot of people are bad. But I also think technology is our ticket to abundance. Abundance of clean energy, abundance of health, and abundance of wealth. And with some determination and some luck, I think the projects we discuss in this episode have a chance of moving us from science fiction to science fact,

from a world of scarcity to a better world of abundance. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Eli, welcome to the podcast. Great to be on, Derek. Happy to see you. Great to see you too. So I brought you on to talk about all the coolest stuff we're inventing in science and technology.

But before we feast on that buffet of invention, I wanted to set the table a bit. We are in an era, or maybe just coming out of an era, that some people call the great stagnation, a period whereby some measures progress has slowed down. Eli, what is the great stagnation and how do we know we're in it? Yeah. So as you said, the great stagnation is this period where it seems that output is not growing as fast. So economists usually think about output in terms of GDP, in terms of what the economy produces. You know, the inputs to that are, you can think of them as labor, capital, and everything else.

right? And so we know we can produce more output if we all work longer hours, if we apply more labor, right? We know that we can produce more output if we don't consume as much, we save more, we apply more capital to production, right? Those are kind of ways that are not fun ways of producing more output, right? We work harder, we don't get to consume as much. Those aren't good. Sometimes they're necessary, but they're not the pure joy of more output. The better way to increase output is by leveraging the everything else factor, right? And the everything else factor is what's called total factor productivity. You know, how do we combine labor and capital?

What are the different ways that we as a society combined labor and capital to produce output? Right. And so if you look at just sort of this residual term, total factor productivity and its trend across time, you see a sharp slowdown starting in the early 1970s, you know, a little pickup. up in the mid-90s for sort of a brief decade-long sort of spasm of two percent growth again. And then since about 2005, it's really just fallen off a cliff. And we're growing, you know, total factor productivity at about 0.3 percent per year. So sort of making it sort of like a kind of a zero-sum economy in a way, right? Rounding down to zero anyway. Right. So total factor productivity,

TFP, is basically a measure for efficiency. Like in 1800, if you spent 100 out of hours out in the fields. You might produce, you know, 10 years of corn. But today, if you spend 100 hours out in the fields with tractors and all this equipment that we have, you might produce 1,000 ears of corn. What's the difference? It's not how much you work. It's efficiency, technology, knowledge. And the way we measure that growth of tech and knowledge is TFP. And what you're saying is that for most of the last 200 years, TFP has just gone up and up and up. But in the last generation or so, economists have seen that it's slowing down in a really visible way. That is our progress problem in a nutshell.

But if the great stagnation is real, if progress and growth are slowing down today, why is it happening? And this gives me a great excuse to share my favorite period of American history, which is the last 25 years of the 1800s, a period of, you know, TFP was going up, up, up, like crazy. It seemed like we invented everything all at once. I mean, last 25 years of the 1800s, all the following things were invented. The Edison light bulb. Cars, sneakers, aspirin, skyscrapers, bicycles, the cardboard box, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Kellogg's Cornflakes, the American hamburger, the Kodak camera, recorded music, the first machine for capturing motion pictures, basketball, and volleyball.

Like, the late 19th century was an invention bonanza. And there are some economists, like Robert Gordon at Northwestern, who are very famous for look, if it seems like we're in a great stagnation now, that's because we picked all this low-hanging fruit in the late 19th century. You can't reinvent the cardboard box. You can't reinvent the light bulb. We solved all these easy problems,

and now we're stuck with all these hard problems. So, Eli, how do you feel about this explanation for the great stagnation? We picked all the low-hanging fruit explanation. So I think of this as Robert Gordon is a great historian. And he's not a great futurist, right? So I totally buy the idea of, like, there was a great flourishing, as you say, the late 1900s. It sort of picked up and actually really hit the economy in about 1920 and sort of lasted about 50 years.

I totally buy, like, that part of Gordon's story. Like, the question is, like, is it really that we don't have any more inventions to be had right now, or is it something about us that is causing us to slow down, right? And so I'm much more convinced by Tyler Cowan's argument in the complacent class that there's something. This is the George Mason economist Tyler Cowan, very famous economist and writer, and he was also, I believe, your Ph.D. Yes.

He was my PhD advisor, yes. And so his argument is that it's actually something about us, right? It's something about our society that has changed, you know, sort of, beginning in the 1970s and maybe compounding since the 1970s, that has made it harder to do stuff, to actually make progress in the real world. And I think that that makes sense. Also, I mean, if you think about the one area where we have had progress,

it's computing by far, right? And computing is a great tool for making progress in a whole bunch of other areas. So, like, even if the problems themselves are getting harder, like, we have better tools than ever before. So we should be making progress exponentially faster because our computing tools are so much better. So I don't, I don't. And then if you survey sort of the landscape of possible inventions coming in the future, like that's, that to me is like the clincher, right?

There actually is a lot of stuff that is on the horizon that we could get to. And that's what sort of excites me and motivates me to figure out how do we, how do we end this stagnation period? Right. Right. I'm sure there's some people listening to this podcast who are like, wait, what are you talking about great stagnation? I am listening to essentially mobile radio on a device to smartphone that was basically invented, at least as this sort of class of product in 2007 with the iPhone. I'm doing it with Internet, which didn't really exist 30 years ago, walking around with my pocketful

of apps, which didn't exist maybe five or ten years ago. What are you talking about decline of progress? This, to a certain extent, I think, what you're talking about, even as we have been sensationally successful at innovating in bits, innovating in communications technology, we have not been nearly as successful. We've been actually falling backward when it comes with innovating in atoms, innovating in the physical world. You look at the early 20th century, we built the Empire State building in 410 days. It took 2,500 days to build the new Freedom Tower. You look at subways. We built the first 28 stations of the New York subway in less than five years.

at the end of the 1800s. In the 21st century, it took almost 20 years to build three stations along the Second Avenue subway. So it's not just that we're getting worse at building new physical world inventions. We're getting worse at building using old technology, like metal and dirt. Just quickly before we show off the full buffet

of incredible exciting stuff that you think is coming forward, maybe just put a pin in this and explain to me why you think this is happening, why you think physical world innovation seems to have slowed down so much? You know, I don't think, I think it's cultural. I think it's overdetermined.

Like, there's more than one reason that's sufficient to make it happen. It's just this confluence of changes in material wealth. So we're just so comfortable now that we're not, like, hustling enough. We have different priorities. We're not trying to drive material progress forward. I think that there's a, there's, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's sort of like, what I call like the ugly parts of the environmental movement, although I support, you know, clean stuff. I think that there, you know, there's, I think there's also, like, this era of, like, mass media has sort of, like, poured, and with the internet, especially, like, pouring gasoline on the fire of the culture war, right?

So, like, we no longer, we no longer sort of fight for status among, like, our local neighborhood. And then, like, that's kind of like a small culture war. And then, like, we, for the rest of our efforts, like, we pour them all into material progress. Right. Instead, it's like this, this national or even global status war that we're sort of, like, absorbed in and not really thinking very much about cultural progress or economic progress. Yeah, my summary of this viewpoint is that this is an age of venting rather than inventing, that we have taken a lot of our mental energy, which is scarce, and we have funneled it into screens where we spend a lot of time venting and pointing out all the things that are wrong

with the world, and we don't spend enough of our scarce and finite mental energy thinking about how to build in the physical world and solve physical world problems. So let's use that venting versus inventing inflection point and move into the inventing stage of this interview and talk about some of the glimmers of hope and excitement that you see on the horizon. So one summary of the great stagnation is from the famous entrepreneur investor, Peter Thiel, who said, we were promised flying cars, but all we got is 140 characters. So starting right there with flying, we used to have a plane that could travel around twice the speed of sound, more than 1,000 miles per hour. It was called the Concord. Now we don't have the Concord. But when it comes to airplane speeds, in a way, what we're seeing is like worse in stagnation.

It's like we're moving backward. All right. So what happened to the Concord and why are you so interested in the next generation of supersonic travel? Yeah. So this is an area that's near and dear to my heart. So what happened with the Concord is that the market never got big enough for it to operate sustainably and profitably. So only 14 concordes ever saw service. They were, you know, it was a aircraft program that was not really designed for economic reasons.

It was designed for sort of national greatness reasons. It was actually forged from a treaty that was signed between the French and the British. And with only 14 airliners in service, right, that means maintenance costs are high because like spare parts can't be mass produced, right? It means that you, that means that you have to charge high ticket prices. And so what that, what ended up happening for Concord is that it would fly half empty a lot of the time. And it would be like, you know, in today's dollars, something like $15,000 round trip across the Atlantic. And so it was, and it was just, it was the market just wasn't big enough in terms of people who would pay that money. And I think the other part of the story is, you know, the technologies just weren't quite there.

It was quite literally like ahead of its time. It was totally ahead of its time. So we had the Concord in the second half of the 20th century. It was cool. It was very expensive. It was totally impractical. It was, I think you've made this point on another podcast, made of aluminum, which gets a little soggy when it travels at high speed.

So the plane literally stretched and contracted over the course of the journey like you were flying across the Atlantic and a little accordion. But now we have a new dawn for supersonic travel. There are a lot of companies working on airplanes that can go several times faster than the speed of sound. You worked at one of these companies called Boom. Tell me what Boom is up to. Okay. So Boom is flying a prototype airplane this year.

So in a matter of months, they're flying their demonstrator aircraft. So that would be kind of a low-mock airplane, but still very exciting. So that's very exciting progress. And I think they're going to be entering service with a mock 1.7 airliner. You know, the plan is by 2029. So that's, so that's what they're going for. There's a company. So that is, that is what?

That's like 1,200, 1,300 miles per hour? 1.7 is a little less than that. But still, I mean, like 1,000 miles an hour, maybe faster. Yeah, something like that. And how fast is the typical sort of, you know, 777? fly today? It'll fly around 550 is the airspeed, cruise airspeed. So almost twice as fast as the typical

777. Yeah, about twice as fast. Maybe a little less. And so there's a company called Hermius that is developing a Mach 5 airliner. And so they are basically, you know, that's the point at which you call it hypersonic. So there's a lot of defense

interest in that capability. And so they're really pursuing it as sort of like a dual-use technology. The military can use their sort of hypersonic engines for various drone programs and stuff. And then they can also translate that to an airliner. And so that would get you across the Atlantic in like 90 minutes. So New York to London in 90 minutes.

That's unbelievable. You said Mach 5. Mach 5 is 3,800 miles per hour. That is so fast it makes me a little bit afraid. That is six times faster than a 777. typically flies at top speed. But it's out there. You mentioned a startup

that's working on a Mach 5 airliner. Boeing has announced an aircraft concept, just a concept, but they've announced it that would travel also at Mach 5. This is a speed at which you would cross the Pacific in a matter of hours, two, three hours.

Eli, what is the limit here? How fast can we go? I think there are limits to, if you're trying to build truly a plane, the way the planes operate today, like out of you know, out of normal airports, say, with runways and all that stuff,

there's kind of a limit, an economic limit, because you have to spend enough time at the sort of subsonic, in the subsonic regime, like, near the airport, right? You have to, you know, there's only so much gain you get from going a little bit faster, right? So, so Mach 5 is kind of the limit if you're limiting yourself to like the plane model, right? If you're, if you're, if you're willing to do like more of a rocket launch model, right? Then we're going to get there. We're going to get there.

Then you can do it. Yeah. Before we move on to rockets in space, you know, in keeping with the Peter Thiel quote, I do want to make sure that I ask you about flying cars. What is the outlook for flying cars in the 2020? I mean, is this going to be like the dip and dots of transportation? Like, it's always the ice cream of the future. It's never the ice cream of the present.

Or can we conceivably see. flying cars become a part of the urban or suburban landscape in the next decade or two. Yeah. So I think there's a ton of money going into the space. So I think something will come out of it. But it might not be like the flying car, the way people are thinking about it. Right. The original vision of like the Uber Elevate white paper was something like you could take across town through the air that would help you to avoid traffic. And I don't, I think we're still like a long way away from that. So it's probably not a replacement for like your daily car ride. But I think that these vehicles, they're coming. They're electric, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And you should really think about them as like a new kind of regional aircraft. So think about a trip that is like 200 miles, like takes you like three to four hours to drive it. So I live in the DC area every summer. I go up to the Jersey Shore for a couple times with my family. What if instead of like packing four people into a car and driving for four hours, you could summon one of these personal aircraft to take you like very close to your destination. So maybe now it takes you like an hour to get there, right? And The view is stunning, right? Because you're flying, which is always great. And you can relax because there's no stop and go and no traffic.

And there's no rest stops along the way. So it's just like a better experience. And so I think of it as like, you know, bringing the experience of a private jet to like many more people, as long as your range is only a few hundred miles. I was going to say it sounds like to the extent we're going to get flying cars the next decade, it's not going to be something that really competes with a job of an urban or even suburban car. It sounds like it's going to compete a little bit more with a helicopter or private jet. That's interesting. So a couple of years ago, 2019, 2018, Uber, Boeing, UPS, all these companies announced these plans to develop flying cars.

And I wrote an article about these plans and talked to some experts about them. And they said there are at least three fundamental flaws with most flying car plans. Number one, people aren't good drivers on Earth. So why would we trust them in the sky? Cities aren't going to be pumped about ordinary citizens flying thousand-pound machines around tall buildings filled with people. Number two, the alternative, which is to have robots drive the flying car, is also hard. We can't solve autonomy here on Earth. How are we going to solve it in the sky faster than we solve it on the road? And then third, there still are some tech issues with making these machines viable and affordable.

So, Eli, what do you see as the biggest remaining challenges to making flying cars a reality? Yeah, I think the economics are still pretty tough from, you know, like, for one, like autonomy is really hard from a regulatory perspective. It's actually easier in planes than it is in cars. But to really make it work, to really make the economics of this work, you know, you kind of need to get the pilot out of, out of the aircraft and not have to pay for that. And there's a lot of opposition to that and a lot of challenges. You know, batteries is another thing. Like, how do we get the battery efficiency? up and specifically like the specific energy, right?

The amount of energy per weight, right? Like it's like such a huge role. And then I think the third challenge is like all the operating support that you need for for flying these vehicles. Like you need a bunch of new infrastructure. If you want this to be like in your city and taking you around your city, you need like landing pads, charging stations, maintenance capabilities, essentially mini airports.

And then you, unlike today's airports, which are all built out in the boonies, you know, you've got to put them in. Convenient locations. Right. This is why it's like a helicopter. Yeah, yeah. And so with NIMBYism being what it is, like, that could be really tough, right? So I think it's a lot of challenges to making it work as, like, your daily car.

But I think, like, it would be shocking to me if, like, with all the money going in, if we didn't get, like, really great regional aircraft coming out of this. So moving from zooming around the world to zooming around space, let's talk about SpaceX and the new space race. First, I want you to make the argument for space because I feel like I have a lot of close smart friends who just do not care about space and are rather militantly anti-space innovation. And so I want to sort of adopt the position of anti-space dude here

and put their argument to you. Poverty, hunger, climate change. we have so many problems right here on Earth. Why are we, and why especially, are the world's richest people, spending one millisecond of their time and attention, worrying about space? Yeah, so I don't think that space,

like the resources going into space, first of all, they're tiny, right? Like, in the grand perspective, like, NASA's budget is like 20 billion a year. It's just like a rounding error for the U.S. federal budget. So it is, it is minuscule, the amount of resource. And then the other point I would make is, this is a R&D

heavy sector, right? And like so much has come out, you know, NASA has this whole, like, web page. You can go like spinoffs.nassad.org or something like that. I think something like that is the URL. And all of the technologies that came out of the

Apollo program and beyond, So a lot of R&D gets done that provides value, and then space itself provides value, right? So think about what is the economic value today of GPS? Right? It's like massive, right? And it's like, it probably exceeds like the entire value of like what we've put into space. So the ability to do positioning anywhere on the planet.

Like communications is like a multi-trillion dollar industry and, and satellites, you know, play a key role in communications. You know, I think in the longer run, I just think, like, there being a frontier is important for humanity. So, like, you know, talk about complacency, right? Like, the lack of a frontier, I think, is potentially an ingredient in complacency.

Right? And so having, you know, having some, having a human colony on Mars where they're not going to be complacent. They're going to be struggling to survive. Like, that's actually good for, for the amount of invention that we can do. Yeah, that's a very good start. I think of space as one of the great bank shots

in human innovation history. Like, if you don't care about Mars, you don't care about the moon, you're bored by Hubble's pictures of stars. Just look at the NASA spin-off publication list. Look at what we accidentally invented on our way to space. Yes, it's PR.

This is a little bit PR. They're exaggerating the degree to which they're responsible for inventing this stuff, but they clearly pushed a lot of it forward. Okay, this is a list that includes LASIC technology, cochlear implants, artificial limbs, 3D food printing, aircraft anti-icing systems, temper foam for your mattress, enriched baby food. Like, you are sleeping on space technology. You are eating space technology.

You are feeding space technology to your baby. You are having space technology pushed inside of your face if your eyes and ears can't do the thing that they're supposed to do. the amount of work that has to be overcome to get a human being into space is so large that we can't help but learning a ton of stuff along the way. Another argument, and this goes with what SpaceX is doing, is we derive a lot of benefit from space in terms of Starlink, the satellite program that Elon Musk has, which beams down internet that we can get from space. If we build space manufacturing, which would be absolutely fantastic, we can make a lot of

stuff that we can't necessarily produce in high-gravity environments on Earth. Anyway, I could go on. I think this stuff is very interesting. Tell me, Eli, what do you think Elon Musk wants? What is his grand strategy? Yeah, so Elon is 100% focused on making humanity a multi-planetary species, you know, to basically to solve, you know, the problem of, you know, if there's a disastrous, catastrophic comet strike or asteroid strike on Earth, you know, we don't, humanity, the light of humanity is not extinguished from the universe. that we have a backup plan on Mars or maybe on other bodies, and we can sort of reboot human civilization.

And it's striking to me, like, how much everything Elon does is in furtherance of that vision. I think, like, insofar as you can even think of Tesla as a bet on Mars, right? Like, what will we need to have vehicles on Mars? Well, probably electric drive trains, right? We'll need solar panels, right? boring company, right? We're going to need underground habitats.

So I think almost everything Elon does is really geared towards this vision of Mars colonization. And what is the most important thing that SpaceX is building right now to achieve that vision? Without a doubt, it's Starship, right? It's their super heavy lift rocket, biggest rocket ever ever as rivaling. Saturn 5, which launched the Apollo missions. They're building it right now, or, you know, have been building prototypes in the southern tip of Texas. And they are ready to go to orbit as soon as FAA approves their environmental

assessment. So they're just waiting, waiting on an FAA review, and then they're going to do the first orbital flight. So this is a vehicle. So Falcon 9 was already revolutionary for the for the launch industry, drop costs by like a factor of four relative to like the other like sort of medium left American rockets, right? Starship, like they're targeting like another like two orders

of magnitude in sort of cost reduction in terms of like price per kilogram to get cargo to orbit. And so it's just so to go from like four X cost reduction to like another 100 X cost reduction. It is just massive. So how are they doing it? They're there, instead of just the booster stage being

reusable and landing, like they're making the whole vehicle, right? The booster stage plus the vehicle itself is going to be reusable. They're using like dirt cheap materials. They're using stainless steel instead of like advanced aerospace composites and stuff like that. So they're planning to turn these things out at like $5 million a pop for the vehicle, right? And just to give us some comparison. How cheap is that compared to a typical rocket from the 1990s, 2000s? Well, the typical rocket, you know, would be like,

$150 million and you fly it once and throw it in the ocean. So this is 30 times cheaper? Like something like that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a lot cheaper. And why does cheapness matter? Like when we're trying to go to space, I think this is actually a really important part when it comes to space innovation.

Why is price so important? So the ultimate, like the cost of like getting stuff to space, it affects what you send, right? So it affects how you engineer the pay. mode. That's like, I think, the biggest point. So one, it directly, like, if you think, again, about the gravity model of trade, it directly affects how much you send. So you're going to send more if it's, if it's cheaper. But then it also changes what you send. Because when you're paying, you know, 100 million plus for a launch on, on sort of like the pre-Space

X rockets. You need to over-engineer the thing that you're launching, the satellite, the spacecraft, whatever it is. You need to over-engineer it so that you know it's not going to fail. So you spend whatever it takes to make sure it's not going to fail. You're going to buy the most, the fanciest hardware. You're going to make higher engineers to triple-check, quadruple-check, quintuple-check, the work, right? When launch comes down by, you know, a couple orders of magnitude, you buy your hardware at Home Depot, right? And you assemble it, and then you send it up. And if it doesn't work, you send another one.

Right. To build on that, if we can bring down the cost of sending stuff up to space by a factor of 30, that means that all else equal. We can increase, by a factor of 30, the amount of stuff that we send into space to build cool shit. Like, it's a force multiplier in our ability to build satellites and telescopes and space stations, underground cities on Mars, reflector shields, and Venus. Like, you name it. When costs come down, our potential to become a space-oriented civilization goes up. So, okay, descending from space to Earth, let's talk about biotech.

2020, 2021, we're clearly a coming out party for MRNA, messenger RNA technology. If you got a vaccine shot from Pfizer, Moderna, you got a shot of MRNA technology. And MRNA, as you see it has a big future beyond the coronavirus vaccines. Tell me a little bit about why you're so excited when it comes to MRNA tech. Yeah, so MRNA is the language that the cell uses as instructions for making proteins, right? So now that we've figured... And actually quickly, Eli, what are proteins? Because honestly, like, sometimes, like, I think a lot of people and myself included before I had to sort of become a COVID reporter thought proteins were like, you know, something you put in shakes and something that you find in like, you know, rib eye and New York strip.

What do proteins do? Why are they important here? So proteins are not just a macronutrient, right? They are, I don't know, like the one thing I remember from like ninth grade biology. I don't know if you had this experience is that amino acids are the building blocks of life. Right. I had to like remember that, right? And so, no, amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, right? And proteins are basically what life is all about, right? So all of the processes that make you a living person are carried out by proteins.

In contrast with an inert steak that you're eating because it's protein, right? Like these proteins are very dynamic. They move around. They have mechanisms. And it's all encoded in this. It becomes like this messy, like 3D thing. And the structure of the protein determines its function. And that structure is all just.

determined by the sequence. It's a linear chain of amino acids that all like kind of folds up into this 3D structure. It's very complicated to predict what it will be. But that is what a protein is. Right. So proteins are these little microscopic machines that basically do everything in our bodies. Yeah. Okay.

Now, backtrack, MRNA, synthetic MRNA, what does this technology do and why is it important? So this is what the – there's a part of the cell called the ribosome. And what the ribosome does is it reads MRNA. and spits out a protein that's encoded for by the MRNA. So it links together to the amino acids and that's your protein. And so what we figured out with these vaccines is we figured out how to deliver custom RNA to our cells, right, so that we can make the cell make any protein we want. In the case of the vaccines, we decided we wanted to make that the human cell produce a

virus protein. It's actually a slightly modified from the virus protein. So it's actually a completely unique protein. in a way. And so we can make it make any protein we want. Right. And so I think of this, an MRNA technology has long been thought of as a way to potentially address cancer. So we could train, just like we trained the immune system to beat up on coronavirus spike proteins, we could train the immune system to beat up on markers of cancer.

So if you have a protein that's expressed in a cancer cell, but not in a healthy cell, we could train your body to attack the cells that have the bad protein. Right. And so if we train your immune system to attack that, like, your cancer could go away. Right. It would be amazing. The founders of Beyond Tech, yeah, the founders of Beyond Tech who made what we now call the Pfizer vaccine, they said, you know, we think of our technology is essentially holding up a wanted poster to the immune system, right? So we have a wanted poster of the coronavirus or the spike protein on the coronavirus. We say this is the bad guy. And then we teach our immune system to recognize the criminal in the wanted poster so that when he tries to walk into the saloon, our bodies, we beat him up at the doorway or something. And their point is it's not just coronaviruses that can have their picture put on the wanted poster. We can put all sorts of stuff on that wanted poster.

We could put, as you just said, cancer markers on the wanted poster. I interviewed the founders a few months ago, and they said they have found in their early trials, and this is definitely, it's going to take the, longer, I think, to develop cancer vaccines that are really effective than it did for them to create a coronavirus vaccine for COVID. But they say essentially what we found is that if you have cancer and it is taken out from surgery, we can basically do a study on that cancer that looks at the proteins that are identifiable on that cancer. And we can develop a personalized vaccine that we give to you that has that cancer's markers in the wanted poster such that when that cancer might start to grow back, aha, you are vaccinated against it. You are beating up that cancer and its

markers right at the door of the saloon. Does that more or less jive with what you've understood to be how the science works in sort of a metaphorical way? Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly right. And I think also like the speed with which we were able to make these vaccines, to bring it back to what we were talking about earlier, like that is. is evidence for the complacency theory. Because the pandemic was, like, the one thing we were not complacent about was we're going to get these vaccines going. We're going to have Operation Warp Speed and so on.

And so when we try, we can get progress going really fast. That's a good point. And a good callback to the theory that I think, you know, it's, I think a lot of these problems are hard. I think, you know, curing cancer, look, cancer is not one thing. Cancer is like 3,000 different things, 30,000 different things. So curing cancer is not one problem, like inventing A1 lightbulb.

That said, I think you're totally right that there is a certain kind of focusing mechanism that a crisis can deliver to a society that forces them to do one thing, that forces them to do a thing. And clearly, COVID forced us to accelerate MRA technology and all sorts of technologies to inoculate against COVID. And we can similarly adopt a focusing mechanism

in the absence of a pandemic by just choosing to focus on things. I think I'm with you there. I want to move from MRNA technology to another part of the protein space, which is that in late 2020, there was a huge breakthrough at Google's AI Project DeepMind,

which basically launched us several years into the future in terms of our ability to look at what proteins actually look like. Tell us a little bit about Google's, breakthrough and walk us through how it might translate into medicine in the next 10 or 20 years. Yeah, so this is a problem that has been around since the 1970s. It was actually brought up in a Nobel Prize address in the 1970s, was we know that proteins have a linear amino acid sequence, and we know that there are 3D structures. If we know, it's pretty easy to determine what the, what the linear arrangement of amino acids is. Like, should we be able to predict based on

that linear sequence, you know, what the 3D structure is and what the function therefore is. Right. And, and so that has actually, like, you know, in the 1970s, when this was proposed, it was thought like, okay, this isn't going to be like that hard to do. And it's just, we tried and tried and tried. And no matter the amount of compute that we threw at it, it was, it was really hard. And what, what this alphabet lab called Deep Mind was able to do is They put a ton of machine learning into sort of the algorithm for figuring out how these things fold. And they basically solved the problem. I mean, like, came very, very close anyway to, like, perfect solution of how you solve the problem of predicting the 3D structure of a protein based on its linear sequence.

Yeah, so what does that mean? Right. Okay, so we have a machine learning algorithm owned by Google that can predict essentially the structure of every protein that exists. So what? What do we do with that? So what it means, I mean, so the simplest thing is like, well, we can, we can now target drugs at those proteins, right? So actually, like, we have some, I think about a quarter of the sort of proteins that are relevant to humans have been sort of, the shape has been determined experimentally, right? And so being able, like, knowing their shapes can help us, like, target using, using, using drugs.

You can figure out which drugs might be good targets for those to inhibit or activate those proteins. Right. So, so that's, like, one simple and, like, sort of drug design, drug discovery. And pharmaceutical companies have their own databases of some of these, but they're all, like, private, right? And so, like, this would enable us to maybe, like, create, like, an open source database of, like, all of the proteins. and what their shapes are. Can I try another metaphor, and you tell me how far you think this metaphor is from reality.

I'm sure it's a certain distance from reality, but I want you to tell me how far. So, like, understanding the shape of proteins in a way that is perfect, and we're not there yet, but understanding the shape of all proteins in a way that is perfect, is kind of like understanding what every lock looks like on the inside,

if we want to break into every house in the world. If we somehow had like x-ray vision into the shape of every single lock and we had a key master, okay, then we now have access to every single door and every single vault and every single house in the world.

And if we understand the shape of proteins, and we understand how using synthetic mRNA and other RNA technology can be used to essentially lock with or lock onto or recreate these proteins, it's a little bit like we can break into all sorts of bodily functions. So if we recognize that there are proteins related to cancer, we can begin to cure those cancers. If you recognize that there are proteins related to schizophrenia or Alzheimer's,

we can develop biological keys to solve those problems. That essentially this technology, optimistically could be this kind of X-ray vision into all the biological locks

that exist? How completely nuts is that? That's not too far off, right? I think the one thing that's a little different is that

like we, I think even if we could do this perfectly, like we can, at best, we can activate and inhibit any protein we want,

right? Which is huge. We still don't know how all the, how all the protein, like, other whole system interacts. Right? So it's like a little bit more complicated. It's like, okay, if you open this lock, then another lock, something else happens, right? So it's all, there's so many interdependencies in the human body. But it is like a huge piece of it, right. We're going to, I think we're going to discover a ton of drugs in the next, you know, decade.

You're right. I actually, I mean, I just, I just streamed all of the, all of the Harry Potter movies over my holiday break. And I'm trying to imagine a room where every single time you open one door, five other doors closed. Like, you're right. That's more how the human body operates. Like, nothing is. there's very few important things that are just one protein or just one gene. Almost everything is a sort of complex dance between different proteins, different genetic expressions. I think that's good. And thank you for reminding me of my Harry Potter binge. I wanted to move to what I think is one of the most important technologies in the world. And some people are going to be like, well, you talked about a lot of important technologies,

but I honestly think this might be, this is arguably the most important of the next decade. And it's carbon capture. the ability to build facilities, build plants that act like super trees, that do the work of a million tree forest, suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and somehow store it. Talk to me a little bit about where you think we are with carbon capture technology and what it will take to scale it. Yeah, so I think it's an extremely promising technology. I think it will work. I think we've, you know, basically where we are right now is like we can reliably

take carbon out of the atmosphere for like hundreds of dollars a ton, you know, it's sort of like small scales. And basically what we need to do is get it down to like a cost like below like $50 a ton. And at the gigatone scale or maybe even the 10 gigatons scale, right? So that's like how you solve, you know, the last, the really hard bits of decarbonization that we're probably not going to be able to directly solve. You need 10 gigatons scale carbon capture to be able to do that.

I think actually carbon removal is maybe the better term, right? Because you don't always need to capture the CO2. So I think actually, to my mind, the most promising methods are either mineralization or ocean acidification or deacet alkalinization. And those are... You're definitely going to have to unpack those isations because I'm not exactly sure what they are, yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, those are the most promising ways. And those are forms where you don't actually capture the carbon. But you remove carbon from the atmosphere, but you don't actually hold on to the carbon atom. So in carbon mineralization, what you do is you take an abundant rock that's already in the...

in the earth's crust on the surface. Usually, sometimes in the mantle is actually where it is. And so there's only a few places where it's raised up to the surface. So the most common one that's talked about is called Ollivine, and it makes up 50% of the upper mantle. So it's like huge and abundant. And if you expose it to air and water, it will capture the CO2 out of the atmosphere.

And it will take that carbon atom and fix it into a bicarbonate ion, or a carbonate or a bicarbonate ion, right? Which is a lower energy state than CO2. So once it gets there, it's safe. It's not ever going back into the atmosphere, you know, for hundreds of millions of years. And it's a super simple reaction, right? It was like rock, air, water.

That's it. That's all you need. Now, there are some challenges around like a crust that builds up over the rock. But this process has been happening for, you know, billions of years. Volcanoes, right, emit greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, when they erupt. And if this process weren't already at play at a small scale, like Earth would have already turned into Venus. So this is already happening. We just need to like accelerate it.

And so this is called enhanced weathering if you accelerate the process. And so figuring out how to how to accelerate that process to me is a really promising way for carbon dioxide removal. And then the other way is just changing the acidity level of the ocean. So if you could take acid out of the ocean, right, or dump a base into the ocean at a small scale, right? Not enough to kill anything. If you could do that, that changes the atmospheric to ocean concentration gradient of carbon dioxide. So carbon dioxide, if you make it more,

if you make the ocean more alkaline, less acidic, like carbon dioxide will flow from the atmosphere to the ocean, to the ocean. And it will, you know, we'll get in there and it will become carbonic acid, and it will sort of be in equilibrium again. So you can remove CO2 out of the atmosphere that way. So I can imagine some people listen to this. They're like, okay, taking acid out of the ocean, sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky, this sounds a little, this sounds rather futuristic. It sounds rather science fictiony. How close are we to doing these things at any sort of

meaningful scale? I think this is all still like in the experimental phase, but I think one thing that I like about these technologies is that there's no technological barrier. There's nothing we have to really invent to make this work. Like cheap energy

helps a lot in terms of we might want to use some electrical process to separate the acid from the ocean water, right? So, so, like, getting the electricity costs down helps. Getting other energy costs for transporting this rock, right? Like, like, the, that we might want to crush up and contact with water and air, right? Getting those energy costs down.

Like, that's important. Getting anything to scale. That's going to be super hard. But I don't think that there's any new technology that you need to do these things. It's just, again, it's like we just need to kind of choose to do it. Right. Very last question. We talked about, God, flying cars, supersonic planes, synthetic MRI, machine learning protein design, carbon capture, detalinization. What is the technology that I have not asked you about that you are most excited about for the next 10 to 20 years?

The thing I've been looking into more and more is atomically precise manufacturing. So this is what was originally referred to as nanotechnology before the term got co-opted. So if you think about all the advances that we've had in society from like increasing levels of precision in manufacturing, they've been huge, right? You couldn't have had the steam engine without improvements in precision, right? What if we take that to like the logical extreme, right? What if we get ever more precise in the way we manufacture? Like what new things can we invent there? So that's like kind of what what I've been noodling on for the last couple months. Can you tell me one new thing that we might be able to invent

with extreme sort of nanotechnology? I think like super efficient engines. Like what if we could turn, you know, a fuel into useful work with like 90% efficiency instead of like 30% efficiency? Awesome stuff. Eli Dorado, thank you so so much. I appreciate it. Great to be with you. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us.

New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.