The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research by Prof Darren Lipomi

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research by Prof Darren Lipomi https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGPWWPF Every year, the United States spends roughly $60 billion—about 1 percent of the federal budget—on university research. Though this research has far-reaching effects and benefits the public at large, most people are unaware of the inner workings of academic research. Who bears the risk for new discoveries? What role do graduate students play in innovation? What are the shortcomings of academic research, and can the system be fixed? In Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research, Darren J. Lipomi, PhD, a scientist and educator, offers readers an insider’s perspective of scientific discovery in academia. Drawing on two decades of experience in elite labs and universities, he reveals a system few outsiders ever see. By examining his own career trajectory—from humble beginnings to prestigious universities like Harvard and Stanford to academic leadership—Lipomi illustrates the impact that incentives, power, and politics have on knowledge production. Science Nonfiction captures both the ingenuity and absurdities of life in the lab. With this book, Lipomi hopes to shed light on the often-overlooked human side of scientific research, purporting that while the system is certainly imperfect, there is hope for a better future. Indeed, even with its immense flaws, academic research represents a significant societal investment in the future. As this investment faces greater scrutiny, limitations, and political interference, understanding the utility of academic research becomes more important than ever before. About the author Darren J. Lipomi, PhD, is chair and professor of chemical and sustainability engineering at University of Rochester. Lipomi earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in physics as a Beckman Scholar at Boston University in 2005, and in 2010, he attained his PhD in chemistry at Harvard University, working alongside Professor George M. Whitesides. His research interests include molecular engineering of electronic and electroactive polymers, particularly the mechanical properties of semiconducting polymers for flexible solar cells, biomechanical sensors, and phenomena that occur at the intersection of materials chemistry with human perception and cognition. He is the recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award, the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the NSF BRITE-Pivot award. He hosts a podcast, Molecular Podcasting with Darren Lipomi, which has an associated YouTube channel, Darren_Lipomi. These platforms serve as valuable resources to students, postdocs, and other early-career researchers.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Folks of boss here from The Christmas Show.com. Look at that lady in here. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. As always, the Chris Voss show. The fan of love you, but doesn't judge you.

At least not as harsh as the rest of the world, because you're here to learn, grow and educate yourself with all the most amazing, brilliant, non-conspiracy-minded authors on the show. We're not one of those podcasts, folks. But we are the oldest living podcast that still broadcasts one to two new shows a day. So be sure to support us. There's only a handful of us left. And his last man standing, whoever dies first on this point,

I'm trying to stay alive. But I need your love and attention because I live for it. Go to Goodrease.com, for chestchis,com, for chestchristos, YouTube. com, for chest Christvost, sounds crazy place on the internet. We have an amazing young man on the show with us today. His latest book is out called Science Nonfiction,

behind the scenes in university research by Professor Darren Lepomi. And I believe he's also a doctor or doctor. doctorate, we'll find out. And he'll tell us if my show is infected, because it's got a weird scab on it that's going green, and I don't know what that's about. But we will find out. Maybe he knows. Maybe he doesn't, but that's what we'll find out. He is the, he is a PhD, a scientist, educator, and academic whose career has taken him from undergraduate training through elite research environments at Harvard and Stanford to faculty and leadership positions of the University of California, San Diego, in the University of Rochester, where he has led a

research group and engage deeply with questions of scientific culture and reform. He's a recognized voice in conversations about the future of academic science, combining rigorous technical expertise, and with an uncommon willingness to examine the institutions he has inhabited. He is the author of 150 scientific publications and licensed patents. Thankfully, we're just doing one today. We don't have that kind of show. It's not that long. And members of his research team have founded several companies.

He has received an awards from the U.S. Air Force, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation. In 2019, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House. He's the host of the popular YouTube channel and its Associated Podcast, Molecular, let me cut that, molecular podcasting with Darren Lipomi, which together have more than two million views and downloads. He lives in Rochester, New York with his wife, daughter, two cats, and bearded dragon. We're going to have to find out about that. Darren, welcome the show, sir. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. Do you want me refer to you as doctor during the show or just Darren? Just Darren, please. Or Almighty, all powerful, whatever you want. King, Roynar and Protector of the Realm, all that, all that. There you, here you, here you. Does Darren just enter the room as such?

Anyway, give us dot com, so we want people to find you on the interwebs. Sure. You can find my research group at Lapomi group.org. I also have an Amazon author page. That's just my name, Darren LaPoomy. I have a YouTube channel that's just Darren Lepomi, too, and my podcast. You can also find that under Darren Lopomi, but the title is molecular podcasting. Now, what's this bearded dragon about? You've got to take care of that. My daughter, my daughter, who's seven years old last year, wanted a snake, and we didn't want to feed a snake. dead frozen mice. So we got a bearded dragon who eats cockroaches and that is a fine compromise. Yeah. And then if you move into some low-income housing, you'll, you don't have to buy food for that thing. That's right. That's right. It does the job of like a mouse or cat, but for cockroaches. It's cute. It looks like a Muppet. It looks like Ernie from Sesame Street,

but green. That's wild. Okay. Well, that's our day and usual pets, folks. Thanks, We covered that segment of the show. So let's get into your book. Science, nonfiction. Tell us 30,000 over you. What's inside? Sure. About a year ago, I became frustrated with what I was hearing about my field in the media and from politicians about scientific researches, woke and DEI and a waste of money.

And I was thinking this is not the life that I'm living. This is not what I'm seeing with my eyes on the ground every day. And I wrote a book as an antidote to what I was seeing in popular and political culture about science. And I have been in a lot of the places that are in the news. I did my PhD at Harvard. I did a postdoctoral position at Stanford in the chemical engineering department. And I wanted to write a corrective to what was happening. And I'm also a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and Kitchen Confidential and how,

What he did with that book in about 2000 opened up everybody's eyes to how professional kitchens and the restaurant industry works. And so the tone I tried to adopt was one in which I poke fun, but with love at the enterprise that is scientific research and the people involved in it, where the money goes, who does the work, and how it impacts people's lives. So would the summation be that scientific research through universities isn't all woke or isn't woke at all? Some of it is woke. Some of it is DEI adjacent. Some of that is very good. Some of that is maybe not so good. But we don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. So the U.S. spends about $60 billion a year in basic research that happens in university labs. But in return, the American taxpayer gets a lot back. So some estimates say that since World War II, basic research, funded by the government is responsible for 50% of all economic growth. That is hundreds of billions of dollars. Look at how much growth has occurred since World War. And you can see that it's big, right? If you look at applications like energy infrastructure, so like hydraulic fracturing, something from chemical engineering, my own field, you know, that was

funded by university research. But then something, I think this is also like left-coded, like MRNA vaccines. That was funded by university research. And so this is, if you had a venture capital firm that was making a 15% ROI for their, for their, their investors, that would be considered pretty good. And so the federal government is getting much, much of a higher ROI in terms of economic value along, with the skills creation that's occurring when you put smart people in a university lab, you teach them how to create knowledge and invent things. Many of them start companies. Many of those inventions are licensed by big companies and become big parts of existing industries.

It's really a win-win-win. Are there some studies that sound silly when they're brought up in a congressional hearing? Like you studied what? The the gonads of a sea horse or whatever and stuff that's taken out of context the vast majority of times. But, you know, you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. In the case where that even is the bathwater, and oftentimes it's not because you never know what's going to come out of that research. I'm doing a study right now in bathwater. Oh, okay. Yeah.

You need a transparent, bottomed rubber ducky to see what's living down. there, yeah. Yeah, it's got like one of those go pros on the bottom of it. And yeah, I'm actually just trying to figure out why my one-year-old Husky loves to sleep in the bathtub because most Huskies don't know anything to do with showers or bathtubs

or anything with clean water. I have a scientist, I have a chemical engineering theory. I would be willing to bet that the bathtub has a high thermal conductivity and pulls heat away from a husky who has thick fur, so maybe that's it. Any shitting right now, so you are correct, sir.

I believe your theory is, what's that called where you validate your theory through other people? Also coming to the same conclusion? I forget what's that. Confirmation bias? Yeah, or just, yeah. They basically go, yeah, we tested what he, his theory, and yeah, we got the same results. I forget what it's called. But yeah, so not everyone's running around the research departments with both septum piercings and pink, really bad pink hair.

Is that what you're telling us? We have some of those people and we love and we love them. Yeah, yeah. But not everyone. Not everyone. And the other things too is, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, like, I'm probably part of the most conservative discipline in academia.

So chemical engineering, I'm, put my carts on the table. I'm somewhere left of center, but I'm a chemical engineer. And chemical engineers screwed up this planet with the microplastics and the carbon dioxide emissions and so on. But we're also the ones that have the ability to fix it. And so I've been part of the energy production, military, academic, industrial complex having awards, having grants. from the Department of Defense or Department of War, whatever we're calling it now, and as well as activities within, let's say, the DEI industrial complex as well. So I've seen academia from all sides.

I want some university research in how we can finally ban and get rid of septum rings. Anyway, I just want to go up and door knock on those people. Anyway, old jokes from ditching dot, what was that called when your kids, knock and ditch or ditching dodge or, I don't know, anyway. Dippin' Dots? You knock on the door and run off. Anyway, anytime I see one of those nose rings, I just want to use it like one of those old door knockers. So anyway, now you guys, there's a lot of health things that you guys have done, like cancer. You mentioned the MRNA vaccines.

Those have turned out to be stupendous and just, I guess, versatile, a lot of different things. But a lot of health things you guys have done that have made it so people can live longer, I think. Yeah, so about half of all research experiments. from the federal government, actually more than half, is awarded by the National Institutes of Health, which is all health research. It's quite, when you propose something to the National Institutes of Health, it has to be one or two steps from clinical relevance. These proposals that we submit are judged on the basis of significance, innovation, approach,

investigators, quality, and the quality of the environment you're in. Those are the five scoring criteria. And if you don't have health significance, you're not going to get the grant. So it would be very difficult to get an NIH grant, which is, again, more than half of all federal spending to sound silly in a congressional hearing. It's very relevant to health. I've had grants from the NIH myself in the area of implantable biomaterials for sensing. We've had some applications in devices to assist throat cancer to rehabilitate their swallowing function. And we've been in clinics.

It's still considered basic research, but it's very applied. It's very close to the clinic. Yeah. And so what you do is with two decades of experience in elite labs, you reveal the system's how it works. Politicians love to slap their shit against anything and be like, oh, point fingers, oh, they're up to that over there. There's been a really war on academia and education from the right for since Nixon. And part of it was because it was Kent State and the rebellions that were taking place at

colleges over the Vietnam War. And they saw those as bad places. Ronald Reagan sent the military into one of the colleges. That backfired, if I recall rightly. And there's just been a war. universities and education because the people that they want working in red states, they don't want them working technical jobs. They want them in coal mines. They want them in blue collar jobs. And so there's been this war on education for a long time that I've watched. My mom's a teacher for 20 years. And in a

Republican state, I watch, she's like, well, they double the class sizes. Well, they double the class sizes again. Well, they cut more of our funding. And you can look across the spectrum since Nixon. And, and see this war that's gone on. And it's almost like we've entered with this latest regime, war on education 2.0. In fact, it's really gone much farther than I thought it would, especially with the recent revelation here in 20, 26 folks, if you're watching this 20 years from now on YouTube, like you do. They just revealed that they cut the scientific funding for universities that are in states that didn't vote for Donald Trump's regime. And I remember during the Bush administration, one of the things I was actually a

at the time and I wasn't well educated on the world and and our place in it and why we held that place in the world. I was just a businessman who's made a lot of money and figured this is the party for me. And I remember one of the things I had a real problem with was when George Bush or I'm sorry, President Dick Cheney cut off, that's really what's going on, cut off fetal tissue. Stem cells. And I remember reading about the science behind that and I'm like, holy, shit. He's just cut 10 years off of the potential lifespan that we would live. We're now living longer ages. He's probably cut 10 to 20 years. People are going to die. This is insane. And that was

one of the proponents that made me leave on top of 9-11. But yeah, I just looked at it and I went, this is so insane that we can't, we can't test this stuff. I'm an atheist. I have no, if you want to do whatever you want to do to babies and whatever, whether you're a mother or whether you're a as long as it's legal and everybody's, I don't know, whatever. And but yeah, I just looked at it and I went, Jesus, I'm probably not going to live as long as I would have because they've cut off that science for that time being. Yeah, yeah. That's a totally defensible.

That's how I'm feeling right now, too. Yeah. Yeah, scientists have had enemies on both sides of the political spectrum for hundreds of years. You look at Galileo and he was killed for. Looking at the stars and the planets and saying some things that turned out to be correct. And then, but you also have, so there are religious objections to some of the findings of science, but you also have objections from the political left that are of the flavor, science is deterministic and sciences, crypto, social Darwinist.

But what they miss is that science is, everybody's doing science when they behave in a rational evidence-based way around their day-to-day life. Let's say you buy a toaster, and it's a new toaster, and you put it on three, and the bread is still frozen, and then you put it on five, and it's burnt to a crisp. Well, then you're going to hypothesize that putting it on four is maybe the sweet spot. And what you've done is you've made some guesses about how the world works and you you triangulate and you find the right way. What we're doing in science is, and many scientists that I respect will disagree with me on this, but I really don't think it's any more complicated than that.

It's just that to do science, you need tools because your senses are not attuned to things that are the size of a molecule or a virus or even a bacterial cell. And so you need access to tools that require training to use, training to interpret the data. Sometimes if you're in archaeology or something, you need access to sites that are far away or you need digging. I'm not an archaeologist, obviously. But you need this extra level of knowledge and capability and financial backing in order to do this stuff to prove that you need to put it on number four to get the toast the way you needed to come out. And that's what science and engineering is. It's not like some just some other way of thinking, just how it's sometimes painted by the political left, the cultural relativistic, your way of thinking. is as good as this other is as good as this other and so on, science is being one of many ways.

What's kind of different about now in the current administration is that this is really an internal, what looks like sabotage of the system that built all of the greatness that we are now experiencing in terms of cures and treatments for preventable. diseases, the ability to breathe clean air and drink clean water, the ability to have basically unlimited energy. We can talk about global warming in a different conversation, but these are all the products of this investment. And it was fine when it was just this right-wing commentator, this left-wing academic yelling at us, but it didn't affect the funding agencies, except for a few cases like the stem cell, uh, stem cell band that you, that you referred to in the, in the early

odds. But that's why this is categorically a different, a different headwind than we've faced before. Yeah. It's very interesting. And people don't realize this is shortens life span everybody. We're living now longer than ever before, but we're having so many challenges at that level, dementia, Alzheimer's, you know, you name it. And my, my, my, My scary thing that I worry about in my lifetime is that I live a long life and that I lose my ability to remember my life. I'm 58 now. I'm really happy.

I like to be able to look at my life and enjoy the great memories I have. And even at this age, I try and make great memories. So I'm like, this will be great to think about someday and live, go to concerts and stuff. And sometimes you get old and you just reach a point where you're like, maybe I won't go to the concert. I'll remember the great concerts I had because I have to pee and I don't want to be the crowd when I got to pee. Yeah. Sometimes your memory of the event was actually even a little bit more pleasurable than the event itself. Sounds like my first 10 marriages. I don't know what that means. Marriage jokes, folks. But yeah, you're right. And I don't, I don't know, man.

Do you imagine you're hoping people read this book that are maybe laymen people and people, citizens out there in the populace that vote. And maybe we'll read this and go, oh, There's definitely more complexity and context to this thing than just, I don't know, Sina frogs are gay, if I can quote that idiot off of whatever that show was. Sure. What I'm hoping people will do, number one, is be entertained by the book. And the vehicle for the entertainment is new facts that the media and reader might not have been aware of. I don't think anyone outside of the field or the program managers who dole out the funds,

know where that $60 billion a year goes. I don't think they know the mechanism for how it creates jobs and medicines and energy technologies and information technologies. I don't think the median person has the first clue. And I don't blame them because I don't have the first clue about anything else other than this area. So what I'm trying to do is peel back the curtain and give the, the, the, the, the reader, the ammunition that they need to have a good conversation with people at the dinner table, people at the bar, people on a on a radio interview, and and and and in an add more signal to the noise.

And to try to have a good time doing it, it's a short book. It's only 150 pages. Can read it in a couple hours. I did the audio book myself. If you're a Spotify subscriber, you can just listen to it free because you already subscribed to Spotify. It's on there, in North America at least for free. And I had fun writing it, the people that I've, who have, have reviewed it, have enjoyed it. And I think it will, I think it's going to be a positive contribution to the, to the, to the conversation. Yeah, I'll throw it at everybody on Facebook who says bat shittery and be like, you read a book. And they'll be like, what's reading? Anyway, what are words? Anyway, but no, I was just thinking as you were talking,

can you imagine what COVID would have been like if we had not had the MRNA vaccine, if I pronounce that right? And that was developed for something else, and it was in the can. I don't think it was fully approved and they erased the approval on it, but it was designed for something else, but it was there on the shelf. Can you imagine what if we had to somehow create that out of whole cloth

and the time it'd take to do that during COVID crisis, if MNRA hadn't been pre-made for us? Yeah, probably multiple times more deaths. Yeah, we already lost more than a million Americans. Oh, yeah. It could have been one or two. I don't have a... We'd probably still be in lockdown.

Yeah. Yeah, it was crazy. And then we'd probably all take an Ivervectin and bleach, and we all know how that story went. And you could do so much more with MRNA technology, just vaccines. The ability to synthesize, to get, your own biological machinery to synthesize pretty much any protein on a dime. It's like an enormously

powerful tool in health. And I believe the final studies have come out that have said that the MRNA, am I pronouncing that right? MRNA vaccine actually helps in a lot of different variants. They find they have, I believe, better health. And I think at one point they were talking about maybe trying to see if they could target it to give the body a blueprint to fight cancer and different ailments. And so you think of the potential of that, but the people that took the vaccine ended up way far and up healthier and better than the people who didn't. Yeah, I was proud to be a clinical trial participant for the Oxford Asterozenica vaccine, which was a different technology. It was an older technology, but still very interesting based on

the adenovirus that was reprogrammed with the spike protein genetic information. And that was fun. I recorded some YouTube videos about that. If I'm executing clinical trials, executing was a bad word in the context of clinical trials. But if I'm going to be writing proposals for clinical trials in my NIH applications, I wanted to know what it was like on the other side. So that was speaking of pleasant memories. It sucked to give COVID eventually, but it was interesting having a breakthrough infection to go through the different tests and to see how my immunity was triggered with the vaccine and so on.

Yeah. And I am so glad that, well, I'm glad for a lot of things during COVID that I could stay home, that I've worked from home since 2004. And so I was really glad because I didn't have to go out and meet anybody. And I don't have a wife and kids because I can't afford the divorces and the adoption. He's putting them up for adoption. Anyway, when they become teenagers, that's my plan. So I was able to avoid a lot of stuff and stay, keep my head down. And but I took four, I think I took four of the vaccines.

I don't think I got the fifth one. And then I got COVID a year or two ago. I can't remember when exactly, folks. But so I basically got about four. years after it launched. That shit about killed me. And I swear to God, if it hadn't been for having those four vaccines and if I would have been an early picker-upper, I'd have been dead.

Because that shit was trying to drown me. I had a whole bed covered in tissues, used tissues. And it was just for, what was it, 14 days, it tried to drown my ass. It was relentless. And I took all the stuff, too, you're supposed to take. That thing was out from my blood. and I fortunately have enough colds in this sixth state of Utah that I know you can't get that stuff in your lungs, man. Once it gets in your lungs, you're cooked.

So I literally, I remember looking out my bed one day rolling over and it was literally covered and used tissues from the night before. And that's how hard I was fighting to keep that shit out of my lungs. But it was just like a faucet running. Oh, yeah. And thank God I had four of the. The vaccines, I imagine that helps somewhat, but I remember getting very panicky about how difficult it was to breathe. Oh, yeah. We heard that, well, kids didn't have bad reactions, so on.

My daughter was two, and she got it unvaccinated. Oh, wow. And she was like a rag doll. And I don't know if she had like one of the top 1% of worst bad cases. But, yeah, that was the most. harrowing period of my life now with regard to my health, but certainly with regard to hers. Yeah. It's a big war that's been going on between religion and science. We've tried to move into a science age. Religion is faded, and now you can see the hard clawback. You see that a lot

in fascism and authoritarian. There's always the clawback to the church, and it's a violent clawback. It's a power clawback. And when you study fascism regimes and authoritarianism, this is a pretty standard operating procedure, the right wing takes power back and pushes them into, they kill all the scientists, they kill all the professors, anybody who's scientific or knowledge or knows things, they get rid of those people, they just want the dumbest idiocacy people ever. And that's the moment that we're at right now, if you really understand what's going on. There's so many of these fascist authors and speakers and historians that have left the country because they go, yeah, we know how this ends.

You know how I see it? I see it like a tug of war in like fifth grade. And there are like 20 kids on either side of the rope. And like I want to be, of course I want to be on the winning and the righteous side. But alone, I'm not going to do that much. But I'll apply a few Newton's of force to move the rope. And so that's a role. I hope the book filled.

It's like lifting a piano onto a stage too. Yeah. I don't know who's ever done that, but one person, not really doing that much, but all combined together, we can make a dent. And the smartest people, the smartest universities, Stanford, Yale, all these universities, they're probably doing the highest quality research. And, of course, they attract the highest quality humans, I think, or most I don't know about maybe quality is too part of word. For all I know, they're partying too much on the side. But the highest quality, the highest, I don't know, a ranking or. educated scientists and yeah the grad students they come from all over the world like PhD students and postdoctoral students researchers they come from all over the world to study here with the best university system in in the world yeah and

now that money shifted to I don't know some college in Alabama where they're studying whether deliverance to is a documentary or not that's a joke book I'm sure there's wonderful colleges in what I say Alabama well you notice that that the economic boom to college towns and red states is so significant that their congresspeople are lobby to keep the funding levels that the way that they've always been. Really? Because that money flows into the economy. So despite the executive branches, Donkey Kong barrels that they've thrown in the path

of progress, scientific progress. The NIH and NSF budgets have actually stayed flat. What they're doing is administratively making it more difficult for the money to get paid out. They're also diverting it. They're also having grants undergo political review that is outside of the scientific peer review mechanism. We just had a grant that on the National Science Foundation website said, recommended for funding. And then a couple days later, we're sorry, this is not going to be funded after all. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, this is quite routine. I don't know if it's a red state,

blue state thing, or because we use the word diverse elements of the periodic table, and then they flagged that. How dare you? So it's also ironic. I've gotten an award from President Trump In my university office, I have his, I have a certificate for the presidential award hanging in my office with his signature on it. And then at the same time, a couple of years later, the same style of research got flags because it had diversity somewhere. Wow. In the description zone. In the description. And I'm not going to be totally disingenuous and say that in that case, it was not diversity of elements in the periodic

table, what we're saying is we're trying to diversify the workforce and include more like populations that don't normally go into science for one reason or another. I think we're going to be a stronger country if we if we have more women and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds get into science and say, yeah, what other word are you going to, what other word are you going to use? You've got to go through this SARS and try and find some non-world word. That's the game. That's the game. And even though the outcome is pretty much the same, you want to get poor kids a chance to work in labs, I think.

If somebody, look at Einstein, he was a, I think he grew up poured in he. It was that bright of it. Or people didn't think he was that bright. Let's put that way. Right. Yeah. Working in some minimum wage job at some telegraph office or some crap. Yeah, Patent Office.

What is that guy doing over there? He's got some weird ass hair and funny-looking dude. And yet, here we are. He's an amazing thing. He's never one where the great ideas is going to come from. One year, 1906 discovered relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. Three Nobel Prize worthy discoveries. Yeah.

I think he also invented pocket protectors for scientists. No, yeah. That way nerds can always be identifiable. You never noticed that blue stain on the chest. That's right. You probably had one of those. I watched Revenge in there too much times.

I'm sorry. Yeah, it's funny. I'm a comedian, so I think of shit I can pull. And I was sitting there thinking about what you're talking about. And I'm like,

I wish I was a scientist because I'd just start submitting weird-ass projects. Like, we're going to figure out how to put a dial on a diaper so we can figure out how full it is. And then we're also going to do a study on how much of the worm eat

someone's brain. And I just troll, basically. with three project promotions. I just, I just, I just troll.

How small is he and is Stormy? Daniel's correct? I don't know what I'm talking about, clearly. Anyway, put them in the MRI. Yeah.

Or just watch their behavior. Or the microscope. Yeah. Electron microscope. Do they make this ones that can go that small? I don't know. One nanometer might be more

on the Angstrom level. Yeah. Thanks Stormy for taking one for the team. Anyway, that's okay. She couldn't feel it anyway. Let's tell us about your YouTube channel. Let's get a promotion here for that and your podcast, too. Sure, about 10 years ago, I decided to put all of my course lectures on YouTube. I figured that it would be a good recruiting tool for UC San Diego and for students to join my research lab.

And also, there was this fad in academia at the time called the flipped classroom, where you give the student the lecture at home, and then you come in and do problems and projects in class. And the teacher goes around and answers questions. It sounds innovative, but it's really just the Socratic method like Socrates. It's the way that law and business classes are taught. It was never the way that science, engineering, and math courses were taught until the concept of the flip classroom. So I'm like, okay, if I record an entire year's worth of lectures, I recorded about 90 of them, I recorded a whole year's worth of lectures.

I can assign those as the homework and then do the homework at class, and then I don't have to repeat myself every single semester. And so that worked out really well. I started to get people viewing from all over the world. And at the around the same time, I was invited to give these professional development seminars to PhD students and postdocs. And I would get about 80 students in the room live, but I would record it online. my own equipment, put it on YouTube, and some of those videos have now 20,000 or more hits.

Some have 50 or 60,000 views each. And then the podcast, I started around the same time. I just took the audio from the episodes that didn't need the video component, turn that into the podcast, and that was the birth of molecular podcasting. So we're around 20 plus thousand subscribers on YouTube, about 2.5 million hits overall. And the podcast doesn't have the volume, but it has a, you know this working in both formats, that the retention is much higher on the audio format. Yeah. Because people can listen on the drive and brushing their teeth,

We're not getting bombarded with, you like this video. Two seconds later, you might like this one better. And so they click away. Do you find that YouTube has a shame challenge for you that we've always had for 20 years? We've been on it. Is anything that's brilliant and intelligent and thoughtful and has science and brains is the most discarded. Ignatible on YouTube? Yes.

That's why I try to have my, like, one of my cats. on the thumbnail and then those two better. What I'll do is I'll scrub through my editing software and I'll find where I'm making like a goofy expression by accident and then those do better. Yeah. So it's just it's it's, we're talking brain surgery surgery. But yes, that is that is absolutely true. I'm like, that's the best episode.

60 views. And that one, I just used some total clickbait thumbnail title and 10,000 views. Now you just need to put on only fans. Yeah, it's tough. YouTube, I think still predominantly is 10 to 15 year olds who are watching, I don't know, women's videos or gaming or both. I have a very niche audience. So I might have hit the ceiling.

I provide tools for students. early career scientists. Like the smart end of YouTube. You want to know how to write a grant or apply for a faculty job or how to get an internship and an industry. I'm the channel for that. How to write a good introductory section to your peer-reviewed publication that five people are going to read.

I'm not criticizing because most of my papers have only five citations. But, yeah, that's the niche that I occupy. Yeah, you need to add some idiocy, like some self-harm. or something. Like, I'm going to talk about getting a PhD from Harvard while I jump off this roof onto a wrestling table and full of nails. How about self-deprecation? I do a lot of that.

That's one of... It's good for comedy. It's good for comedy. All my jokes are self-deprecation, I think, aren't they? I don't know. I'm stupid. Anyway, anything more we want to plug out? I know you've got a website with a dot org.

Do we want to do a plug on that? Yeah, Lapomigroup.org. That's more for the technically minded person who wants to... wants to learn more about my work in haptics. That's materials that interface with Descentive Touch. Trying to make the holodeck from Star Treker reality here. We work a lot in new materials for solar panels, trying to recycle materials. And yeah, we do a lot of cool stuff.

I don't do any boring research. That's the good part of being tenured. As I get to, as long as I can write a good proposal or get a student and get a student to work on it, I'm in good shape. Well, folks, we're living longer than ever. You've got to fight for science, man. There's too many discussions we have on the show about Alzheimer's, dementia, my sister with MS, and her dementia, we talk about. There's other aging ailments that take place that, God, if we can get science to solve some of these things,

and now we've got AI, and if AI could assist scientists at academia, top academia, colleges, you know, can help us speed this up and move faster, solve cancer. And we've shut it all down with what's going on. And it's very anti-science. I'm shutting down the wave things out of the ocean where they measure the waves and the currents. And if things about that, like the temperature of the water, I believe the temperature of the water or the wave currents or something, if those change, they can like France or some European country. I don't remember which one it was. Yeah.

It's the Gulf Stream. Yeah. Or the, yeah, the Gulf Stream that keeps Northern Europe warm, even though London is on the same latitude as Labrador, which is practically uninhabitable. Yeah. And France is really dying right now with the heat. We just in Utah had a whole winter with like three snows in the valley. And pretty much you just skied on mud up in the mountains.

It was the most sane thing ever. It was like, hey, we're skiing on mud. And some is going on, folks. And the more we can know about science, they shut down the, I believe they shut down that Colorado facility that was, I think, doing national renewable energy lab. Yeah. And it's like, we need these things to survive, man. Like I said, I've never really thought about what if we didn't have the MRI vaccines. But now when you look back on it, you're like, God, it was a good thing.

Somebody had that kind of on the shelf. And you'll never know what we didn't have, right? In 10 years, there could be a crisis. Exactly. Just look at it from the political right. What if we never had hydraulic fracturing? Gas would be, gas, oil and natural gas would be way, way, way more expensive and way less, way more sensitive to price fluctuations due to wars in the Middle East. Yeah, we'd still be probably more reliant on Middle East oil.

That was the thing that really freed us because I grew up in the 70s during the, Oil embargo crisis. I think it was not fun. And even then, back then, I remember when looking at a gas station and the price wasn't a dollar for gas, get these cool stamps when you went in there too. What are they called them blue ribbon stamps? Something like that.

You might not be as old as I. Yeah, you go in there, they had like stamps. I don't know what the fuck they were for, some sort of value stamps. But, no, I remember that. I remember people pushing their cars because we were in California. So we were, it was ugly. And it was nasty.

And, yes, seeing that we're free of that and we're a big energy provider, it gives us a lot of opportunities. And it just makes life better. But to God, if we've caught up, they're basically slitting our own throats, really, in our own future. And, yeah, it's getting weird out there with these viruses and them crossing over. And there's all sorts of weird. I remember the World Health Organization, like, I think it was 20, 25 years ago. They said, hey, man, sometime in the next decade, something's going to come. and it's going to be one of those things that might take us out like Ebola or something.

And I was like, wow, that's something to think about. And sure enough, that COVID was something else. And it sure wouldn't take much to have something like that happen again, I think. Yeah. If it were just a little bit, if it were, if it had been a bit worse, we'd be screwed. Yeah, I remember initially thinking, I remember seeing that film was a contagion with, it was the one that where everyone would get the virus just by breathing. Like, I think it starts out where people are in a movie theater and they're all breathing.

There's that one. There's 28 days later. Yeah. But yeah, that was a disappointment about COVID. People had turned into zombies. That might have been made it more fun. Brendan Gleason. It's a nice run around with a shotgun. All right. Well, so give people a pitch out to pick up your book and your dot coms as we go out. Yeah, you can find the book is science nonfiction behind the scenes in university research. You can get it on Amazon Barnes & Noble.com.

Find it on my Amazon author page. That's Darren Lapomi. Find out all about me on my YouTube channel, which is just Darren Lapomi, my research group website, Lapomi group. I'm the only Darren Lapomi out there. And this is the only one of my two books that you're going to want to read. The other one's a textbook. So it'll be easy to find.

Science Nonfictionbook.com is another route to get there. Huh. Well, get the word out. Read the books, people. We need more reading. We need more education. We need more support for science because I want to live a long time. I don't want Alzheimer's. I don't want dementia. I don't want cancer. Cancer is so ugly. And I'm at that age now where everybody around me is getting cancer. A friend recently got cancer. And man, he's in Texas, of all places. And they've got some amazing cutting edge cancer treatments they've done down there. Oh, yeah. Texas Medical Center. So I think he's in Houston or Texas. He's somewhere in. Texas. But yeah, the stuff they're doing with him is just, he couldn't get an Indiana. And it was, it was just amazing to read about. And it looks like he's going to pull through, knock on wood.

And so, yeah, but it's kind of scary when so many friends are getting cancer, they're getting other ailments. And one of my friend got some sort of nerve issue thing that's really ultra-unique, ultra-rear. And he's been getting some sort of treatment IV for that that's really costly and crazy, but it saved his life and it's brought him back to where he can function in life again and do stuff. I believe it. And geez, without science behind that, where would be? And I think we're just going to keep living older and discovering new ailments that we can do. There's that. Anyway, thank you very much, Professor for coming the show. We really appreciate, Darren. Yeah, thank you, Chris. I appreciate you. I appreciate the conversations that you're having.

And let's see if we can get some of that worm brain studied. I don't know what that's about. Let's do it. Yeah, I don't know. And don't eat pork. It hasn't been frozen for two weeks, folks. I have to do that with my dogs. But dead or don't swim in the worst water ever. Wonderful. Advice for the ages, sir. Advice for the ages, sir.

So thank you very much, Darren. Thanks, for tuning in. Order up his book where refined books are sold. Science nonfiction. Behind the scenes in university research, the more you read, the more you know, the more you won't be stupid and get played by people who just want to play you. And then pick your pocket.

Thanks for much for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Forteous, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortresschusch, Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortresschusch, and all those crazy places they net. Begoo to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next. You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy.

Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult the doctor for any resulting brain lead. Thank you.