Speaker 1: What is special about inventors, How do we search for
Speaker 1: and support creative people? And what does this have to
Speaker 1: do with skateboarding tricks or silent drones or self driving ships,
Speaker 1: or solar panels in space or shooting mosquitoes with lasers
Speaker 1: and our future as a species. Welcome to Innercosmos with
Speaker 1: me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at
Speaker 1: Stanford and in these episodes we seek to understand why
Speaker 1: and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is about invention. I've always been fascinated by invention,
Speaker 1: not just new products and tech, but fresh ideas and
Speaker 1: new frameworks and science and ways of seeing the world
Speaker 1: that didn't exist before. The key thing about invention is
Speaker 1: that it requires more than just absorbing information to invent.
Speaker 1: You have to recombine what you know in new ways,
Speaker 1: and you have to spot connections that others miss, and
Speaker 1: sometimes you need to ask what if everything we assume
Speaker 1: is wrong now? The human capacity to do all this,
Speaker 1: to invent is thanks largely to a part of the
Speaker 1: brain just behind your forehead, the prefronnel cortex. We have
Speaker 1: more of this than any of our cousins in the
Speaker 1: animal kingdom, And this is the part of our brain
Speaker 1: that allows us to break away from the here and
Speaker 1: now and to imagine counter factuals. In other words, things
Speaker 1: that don't exist but could. We can imagine those things,
Speaker 1: and we can simulate out their consequences.
Speaker 2: And this is what allows us to step outside.
Speaker 1: Our current moment and picture alternative futures. As I mentioned
Speaker 1: in episode seventy two, I'm not certain that AI as
Speaker 1: we make it now can do that. It's great at
Speaker 1: piecing things together, but at least with the current architectures,
Speaker 1: it cannot say, you know what, I'm going to scrap
Speaker 1: everything that I've learned and think about this in a
Speaker 1: completely new way, because AI is not wired to reject
Speaker 1: what it has learned. But that kind of creative leap
Speaker 1: is something that humans do all the time, often unconsciously.
Speaker 1: It's what happens when a person cranks up the prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex and looks at the world as.
Speaker 2: It could be.
Speaker 1: Invention starts not just in the raw data, but it's
Speaker 1: the decision to look beyond that. So without the neural
Speaker 1: architecture that allowed for of human creativity, we would be
Speaker 1: doing the same thing that we did millions of years ago,
Speaker 1: just like every other species were surrounded with we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have electrification of the planet and the Internet and commercial
Speaker 1: flight and spaceflight and desalination and vaccines and quantum computers
Speaker 1: and satellites and encryption techniques and self driving cars and
Speaker 1: all the rest. And so today's conversation is about invention,
Speaker 1: how we can spot it and value it and fund it.
Speaker 1: And to this end, I'm pleased to welcome a friend
Speaker 1: of mine, Pablos Holman, who's on a mission to change
Speaker 1: the trajectory for inventors. He is a hacker and an
Speaker 1: inventor and a venture capitalist, and what I really appreciate
Speaker 1: about him is that in that latter role as a VC,
Speaker 1: he's not just chasing consumer software trends, but he hunts
Speaker 1: instead for hidden geniuses. He and his partner Michael Reid
Speaker 1: run a firm called Deep Future, and the people they,
Speaker 1: as they describe it on their website, are quote mad scientists,
Speaker 1: rogue inventors, crazy hackers, and maverick entrepreneurs implementing science fiction,
Speaker 1: solving big problems, and helping our species become better ancestors.
Speaker 1: In other words, they're looking for the people who seek
Speaker 1: to do a lot more than the incremental improvement of
Speaker 1: the tools around us, but instead the.
Speaker 2: People who leap into entirely new categories of possibility.
Speaker 1: So Pablos has just written a book called Deep Future,
Speaker 1: which comes out next week, and his take in the
Speaker 1: book is that invention is humanity's most important creative force,
Speaker 1: but it's also the one we've neglected the most. Inventors
Speaker 1: are often misunderstood and underfunded because there's often not a
Speaker 1: good system to support them. So even while we romanticize
Speaker 1: starving artists, we typically forget about starving inventors. His position
Speaker 1: is that we are missing out, and he always wants
Speaker 1: to position himself at the edge of what is possible.
Speaker 2: Here's our conversation.
Speaker 3: So if you think about the creative classes of people,
Speaker 3: you know, how many like I don't know musicians?
Speaker 4: Can you name.
Speaker 5: Dozens like it loves without even actors, dozens painters? How
Speaker 5: about inventors that aren't dead? Yeah, I can name about five, maybe.
Speaker 3: Five, And probably none of them have a business card
Speaker 3: that says like inventor as their title, right, because it's
Speaker 3: not a legitimate career choice.
Speaker 4: And so there's this kind of weird gap in the world.
Speaker 3: I think where you know, we celebrate our most creative people,
Speaker 3: our people they you know that are easy to identify
Speaker 3: their celebrities for you know, specially music artists and actors
Speaker 3: and stuff. But you know, you could probably live without,
Speaker 3: you know, the next Marvel movie. You could probably live
Speaker 3: without the next Beyonce album. But if it wasn't for inventors,
Speaker 3: you wouldn't be alive at all.
Speaker 1: Generally that would include biologists making discoveries.
Speaker 4: Sure, yeah, maybe, okay, right.
Speaker 3: I think of scientific research as very important. That's critical.
Speaker 3: That's kind of the early stages of figuring out how
Speaker 3: the world works. That's the goal in basic research. And
Speaker 3: then in our world we always need more for that,
Speaker 3: more resources, more money, more scientists. But we have a
Speaker 3: system for that. And then on the other end, you
Speaker 3: have a system for like entrepreneurs and making businesses and
Speaker 3: things like that. But those people are making businesses out
Speaker 3: of whatever they can invent, and they don't tend to
Speaker 3: be very creative. This is why, you know, of our
Speaker 3: best businesses are like an app to have a stranger
Speaker 3: pick you up in their car. You know, we're we're
Speaker 3: not honoring I think the creative class in the middle
Speaker 3: that is inventors, and we don't even recognize them as
Speaker 3: a creative class. Like it's crazy hair and a DeLorean
Speaker 3: in the garage, Like it's not even a It's just
Speaker 3: people don't relate to it and understand, and it doesn't
Speaker 3: have the same maybe emotional connection that you know, a
Speaker 3: musician can evoke or a singer or something. But I
Speaker 3: think it's like kind of important to step back and recognize, like, wow,
Speaker 3: this is our most important creative class.
Speaker 4: They don't have a place in society.
Speaker 2: So let me step back to something you said.
Speaker 1: I'm curious what you were thinking of when you said,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for inventors.
Speaker 2: Give me an example of what you're talking about there.
Speaker 3: You know, whoever generate is yes, vaccine. Edward Jenner made
Speaker 3: the first vaccine for smallpox. Four hundred million people died
Speaker 3: of smallpox in the last century. Right, that's more of
Speaker 3: people than I think we have in this country. Maybe,
Speaker 3: Like it's a lot of people died of one disease,
Speaker 3: regardless of what you know. I know people are wound
Speaker 3: up about vaccines these days, but at least in the
Speaker 3: case of smallpox, this is like one of the reasons
Speaker 3: you and I exist.
Speaker 4: I might even be here if it wasn't for that
Speaker 4: type of it.
Speaker 3: And that's like a really interesting invention story where he
Speaker 3: figured out that these milk maids who were milking cows
Speaker 3: contracted cow pox, which is not as life threatening, not
Speaker 3: really as big of a deal disease, but then.
Speaker 4: They never got smallpox.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's like this incredible insight, this amazing discovery,
Speaker 3: and like that guy figured out, oh, I know how
Speaker 3: to go I could go test that, and he did,
Speaker 3: and he figured out that we could now save people
Speaker 3: from dying of smallpox.
Speaker 1: Too quick historical that's of course where we get the
Speaker 1: story vaccine from Cowska, right, But also it turns out
Speaker 1: Edward Generous about the eighth person to invent the vaccine.
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, oh wait, right, So there's also this
Speaker 3: you know, this kind of you know lore that we have.
Speaker 3: I would say that, oh, inventors aren't actually that important.
Speaker 3: It was inevitable somebody was going to figure it out,
Speaker 3: so like, but there are lots of these cases where
Speaker 3: somebody didn't figure it out, or the person who figured
Speaker 3: it out didn't get the word out. I mean, this
Speaker 3: happened like with scurvy, even not all these people trying
Speaker 3: to cross oceans dying. You'd just load up a ship
Speaker 3: full of people expecting have of them to die of scurvy,
Speaker 3: and some of them might make it to the other
Speaker 3: side before we figured.
Speaker 4: Out all they need is oranges.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like that was figured out and then like
Speaker 3: shelved for I forgot seventy five years or something. But
Speaker 3: I think it is a way of diminishing the value
Speaker 3: of an inventor or an invention by saying, well, you know,
Speaker 3: he just was able to do that because of the
Speaker 3: you know, people who came before them, and standing on
Speaker 3: the shoulders of giants. And there's certainly a truth to that.
Speaker 3: Of course, we all start with what we you know,
Speaker 3: learned from our our predecessors. But it still takes a
Speaker 3: creative mind to do something the first time.
Speaker 1: In fact, so the basis of creativity is your brain
Speaker 1: goes through the world, absorbs all everything in your world
Speaker 1: and your culture, your moment history, and then what it's
Speaker 1: doing is remixing. It's bending, breaking, blending, putting these things
Speaker 1: together in new ways. And so you're exactly right. There's
Speaker 1: two ways you can look at creativity. One is Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: it's just a remix based on the data that you
Speaker 1: happen to have, and so it was inevitable that would
Speaker 1: come up. But you're exactly right that to be the
Speaker 1: inventor the creator is something really special because because not
Speaker 1: everybody's doing it. Most people have all that data right
Speaker 1: in front of them and don't care to get off
Speaker 1: their butts and do something about it.
Speaker 3: And like, you know, Edward Jenner didn't invent the transistor
Speaker 3: or something. You know, he had cows and milkmaids in
Speaker 3: front of him, So yeah, it makes sense that he
Speaker 3: would invent in that area. But it still is this different.
Speaker 3: It's a completely different thing. I would contend the second
Speaker 3: time you do it to the nth time you do it,
Speaker 3: that's a totally different that's craft. You might be better
Speaker 3: at doing something than the inventor, but does it completely
Speaker 3: different thing than figuring out what's possible the very first time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so there's something super special about inventors. And
Speaker 1: I know this is a big part of what you
Speaker 1: do and what you really care about is finding inventors
Speaker 1: who are making incredible things.
Speaker 3: I want to find the inventors and I want to
Speaker 3: figure out how we help them out, because it is
Speaker 3: kind of a lonely fate in a way. Most inventors
Speaker 3: are working in relative isolation, and they might be obsessed
Speaker 3: and they might be going deep. And the people I
Speaker 3: know a lot of them are very focused on their thing.
Speaker 3: They don't even know how to get the story out.
Speaker 3: They wouldn't know how to make a company, how to
Speaker 3: raise money for it, how to get the help they need.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's very it's a very tough thing. And
Speaker 3: also they're mostly doomed because with an invention, you know,
Speaker 3: you might get even Let's say you were a good
Speaker 3: inventor and you could have a good invention once a year,
Speaker 3: Well what are you going to do with it?
Speaker 4: Like, how are you going to get paid for that?
Speaker 4: Where's it going to go? And most inventors fail to
Speaker 4: ever figure that stuff out in one lifetime.
Speaker 3: It's pretty sad. You think, you think artists. Starving artists
Speaker 3: have a hard time. Starving inventors have an even worse time.
Speaker 1: So give us some examples of some really cool inventions
Speaker 1: that you're seeing currently.
Speaker 4: One comes to mind.
Speaker 3: A couple of years ago, I went to visit this
Speaker 3: buddy of mine who is one of the top researchers
Speaker 3: on warp drive. So warp drive is like bending space
Speaker 3: time to do faster than light travel, straight out of
Speaker 3: Star Trek.
Speaker 4: Nobody thinks we're ever really going.
Speaker 3: To be able to do it, but these guys research
Speaker 3: it and try and and no one's been able to
Speaker 3: prove that it can't be done. So I went to
Speaker 3: visit my buddy Sonny at his lab in Houston, and
Speaker 3: Sonny starts showing me around his lab. He's telling me
Speaker 3: about warp drive and UFOs and stuff, and then he's like, well, hey,
Speaker 3: there's an atomic force microscope in the back.
Speaker 4: You want to see it.
Speaker 3: So he's very excited to show me this because it's
Speaker 3: an exotic microscope, but I have one, so I care
Speaker 3: on the way. So we're like walking over to back
Speaker 3: Sonny's lab and he's like, oh, this is he gets distracted.
Speaker 3: He picks up this little circuit board. It's like, this
Speaker 3: is kind of neat. Sonny has like a Southern drawl
Speaker 3: that I can't emulate, but he's most delightful, friendly human
Speaker 3: you'll ever find. So he shows me the circuit board,
Speaker 3: hooks up a couple of alligator clips to a meter
Speaker 3: and there's a current coming off it and all that's
Speaker 3: on the board is a chip and I'm like, what
Speaker 3: is it, Sonny. He's like, oh, well, we made that
Speaker 3: chip and it puts out energy like a battery. I'm like, Sonny,
Speaker 3: you made a battery that never.
Speaker 4: Needs to be charged.
Speaker 3: He's like, yeah, we're it just runs forever you have
Speaker 3: to charge. That's exactly right, Mike, Sonny, what the hell
Speaker 3: are you doing with warp drive? We need that battery.
Speaker 3: And so that was a couple of years ago, and
Speaker 3: we weren't, you know. So he got started working on
Speaker 3: patents and kind of you know, making different versions of
Speaker 3: it to try and make it better. And then like
Speaker 3: a few weeks ago he called me and said, hey, Pablos.
Speaker 3: So I'm I just did the interview on the Joe
Speaker 3: Rogan Show.
Speaker 4: And I'm like, Sonny, I thought we were keeping this
Speaker 4: quiet because it's work to do.
Speaker 3: And so it was in stealth mode for years, and
Speaker 3: he said, well, I decided to I decided to go
Speaker 3: for it, and so I listened to the show and
Speaker 3: this is the biggest podcast in the world, and so,
Speaker 3: you know, for two hours, Sonny's talking about warp Drive
Speaker 3: and UFOs and aliens and all the stuff that Joe
Speaker 3: Rogan likes. And then he's like, oh, Joe, I made
Speaker 3: this thing. Look at this and he explains it to Joe.
Speaker 3: I think it went right over Joe. I don't think
Speaker 3: he realized a miracle was announced on his podcast because
Speaker 3: Sonny buried the lead so deep. So these are you know,
Speaker 3: he just doesn't have the kind of brain that's like
Speaker 3: about getting the story out, you know, But it's a
Speaker 3: but what would you do with a battery that never
Speaker 3: needs to be charged?
Speaker 2: As in, how would one start a company and make sure?
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you know, it's a scientist, so you know,
Speaker 3: all those other pieces have to be figured out, and
Speaker 3: we try to help people like that out.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great, Yeah, you know change the world right,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I agreed. You know, I spent the first
Speaker 1: part of my career running a lab as a professor,
Speaker 1: and I ran a lab, and I spent half my
Speaker 1: time running grants to the government and so on. And
Speaker 1: then about ten years ago I shifted into being an
Speaker 1: entrepreneur and I moved at Silicon Valley and I've been
Speaker 1: starting companies and it is a very different skill set,
Speaker 1: oh for sure, in terms of taking a good idea
Speaker 1: and turning it into something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, most people wouldn't be good at both.
Speaker 3: So I think one of the things we are mythology
Speaker 3: in Silicon Valley is a little screwed up. We think
Speaker 3: that like a scientist is going to invent something and
Speaker 3: then become an entrepreneur and then become a patent lawyer
Speaker 3: and then become a business development guy and sell it
Speaker 3: and then become a CEO and figure out the HR policy,
Speaker 3: Like those people are extraordinary and rare.
Speaker 4: That doesn't scale.
Speaker 3: Like the winning story is actually teams, And so I
Speaker 3: think one of the things we have to learn very
Speaker 3: early is figure out how do you build these teams early,
Speaker 3: compensate for the things that the founder, who might be
Speaker 3: a scientist or an inventor might suck at, and surround
Speaker 3: them with all the other things that we figured out
Speaker 3: how to do well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So returning the issue of creativity.
Speaker 1: So you began your career as a hacker, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So tell us about that.
Speaker 3: I sort of grew up with one of the first
Speaker 3: computers you could have at home, which was that this
Speaker 3: Apple two. I had one of the first couple of
Speaker 3: thousand Apple two's ever made and with that thing, you know,
Speaker 3: it wasn't like a computer we know today, like it's
Speaker 3: just you boot it up or his command line, and
Speaker 3: you got to figure out what to do. And I
Speaker 3: was in Alaska where I grew up, so nobody for
Speaker 3: like a thousand miles had any idea what a computer was,
Speaker 3: and no one had seen one, you know, So to
Speaker 3: learn how to use that thing, I basically just had
Speaker 3: to like crash it and reboot it.
Speaker 4: And it was kind of like a jeep.
Speaker 3: You could sort of, you know, made of sheet metal,
Speaker 3: you could sort of you know, take it apart and
Speaker 3: you could open up and see the inside and stare
Speaker 3: at it, and if you stare at it long enough,
Speaker 3: you can kind of figure out how it works. So
Speaker 3: that's so I sort of learned the hard way and
Speaker 3: then and that's not common now because your computer hides
Speaker 3: all the insides. You know, it's not like a jeep.
Speaker 3: It's like a tesla or something with a hood wel
Speaker 3: that's shot. You can't see how it works. And so
Speaker 3: you know, by the time I, you know, got to
Speaker 3: say out of high school or something, I was, you know,
Speaker 3: I knew a lot about computer's relative to the rest
Speaker 3: of the world. And so then we started putting people
Speaker 3: on the Internet, like not just not nerds, but muggles,
Speaker 3: you know, And so muggle muggles is like a term
Speaker 3: co opted from Harry Potter to describe what you might
Speaker 3: call NPCs or you know, just normal people wandering around.
Speaker 3: We put these people who are not wizards on the Internet,
Speaker 3: and they cause problems or they're vulnerable to problems, let's say.
Speaker 3: And so we try to figure out how to make
Speaker 3: things more secure. But the way that you do that
Speaker 3: is by breaking them first. And so what's amazing about
Speaker 3: hackers is they just have these different kinds of minds.
Speaker 3: Like we all learn by reverse engineering, we learn by
Speaker 3: taking things apart.
Speaker 4: So like if.
Speaker 3: You, you know, if you get a new gadget and
Speaker 3: give it to your mom, she might ask you what
Speaker 3: does this do? And you can explain it's a phone, mom, iPhone,
Speaker 3: says on the box. But if you give a gadget
Speaker 3: like that to a hacker, then the question is different.
Speaker 3: The question is what can I make this do? And
Speaker 3: hackers will flip it over and take out all the
Speaker 3: screws and break it into a lot of little pieces,
Speaker 3: but then figure out what you can build from the rubble,
Speaker 3: and that's that discovery process. That's where you get all
Speaker 3: of your new technologies. Nobody ever invented a new technology
Speaker 3: by reading the directions.
Speaker 4: There are none.
Speaker 3: It's a logical impossibility. And so those kinds of minds
Speaker 3: that people who think.
Speaker 4: That way are super valuable.
Speaker 3: We need them and like you might not want to
Speaker 3: hire them, but you know, one way or another, we
Speaker 3: need to party with them and have a relationship with
Speaker 3: the people who are the source of all of our
Speaker 3: new superpowers.
Speaker 1: So let me do you an analogy here, because I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about this a lot about whether large language models,
Speaker 1: the current common flavor of our AI can do scientific discovery.
Speaker 1: And the reason they're not any good at the moment
Speaker 1: of real new scientific discovery is because what they are
Speaker 1: good at doing is taking everything that's come before them
Speaker 1: and putting it together into ways. And that's got value
Speaker 1: in a lot of aspects. But what it doesn't have
Speaker 1: value in is saying, hey, what if all this is
Speaker 1: wrong and there's a totally new way to do this.
Speaker 1: It's the equivalent of taking the thing apart and saying,
Speaker 1: what can I do that wasn't thought of before?
Speaker 2: With these pieces and parts.
Speaker 1: And you know, a big part of really making scientific
Speaker 1: progress is to assume that some fraction of everything you've learned,
Speaker 1: all the models you've learned before you is incorrect, some
Speaker 1: fraction and and and there's a different way of doing
Speaker 1: the whole thing.
Speaker 2: And so there's a now parallel here between.
Speaker 3: What a hacker question every day for a week, it's
Speaker 3: going to give you slight variations of the same answer,
Speaker 3: and that's because by design they have thrown in a
Speaker 3: random number ten just to make it, you know, feel
Speaker 3: like it's you know, like more of human, because humans
Speaker 3: would kind of give you a slightly different answer every
Speaker 3: day too. And there might be a version of this
Speaker 3: where you throw enough computation at something then you just say, look,
Speaker 3: just try everything. And certainly in a focused domain you
Speaker 3: can do that, and we do that, you know, that's
Speaker 3: what we're doing with drug discovery and molecules and protein
Speaker 3: folding and stuff. And you can't try every possible way
Speaker 3: a protein can fold without it being very computational expensive.
Speaker 3: But you know, we add in some heuristics to say, well,
Speaker 3: probably it's this, and here's a bunch of other ones,
Speaker 3: so maybe copy those and try one variation at a time,
Speaker 3: and we just run every possibility. And so there is
Speaker 3: a kind of discovery that I think is possible there.
Speaker 3: I don't know what the bounds on it are, and
Speaker 3: so I don't want to say like computational models will
Speaker 3: never do scientific discovery or invention. They might, we might
Speaker 3: be able to make models that do that. I don't
Speaker 3: think the lms as we know them are the right
Speaker 3: kind of model to do that right now, because they
Speaker 3: are so heavily trained on just what humans did.
Speaker 2: What they do is they interpolate. They don't extrapolate.
Speaker 1: They don't say, hey, what if, what if all this
Speaker 1: that I learned that I digested is incorrect and there's
Speaker 1: a different way of looking at it. And then here's
Speaker 1: a new idea, and I'm going to simulate that forward
Speaker 1: and think about, Oh, that would explain the data in
Speaker 1: a better way.
Speaker 2: They're just not architected to do that.
Speaker 3: I had in the book have a story about one
Speaker 3: of my friends who I think of as one of
Speaker 3: the best living inventors. But his name is Rodney Mullen
Speaker 3: and Rodney.
Speaker 2: The skateboarding the skateboarder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and people he's famous for skateboarding because he invented
Speaker 3: almost everything you've ever seen a kid do on a skateboard.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: Rodney grew up in rural Florida, kind of like I
Speaker 3: grew up in grural Alaska. No computer, just the Apple two.
Speaker 3: He was in roll Foy. He didn't get appletude. He
Speaker 3: got a skateboard. And so Rodney was stuck by himself
Speaker 3: at a time when there was no one around him
Speaker 3: who's skateboarded. He didn't ever see anybody else do tricks
Speaker 3: on a skateboard. He had nothing, no one to inspire him.
Speaker 3: He just had to figure all this shut out himself,
Speaker 3: in his driveway, by himself, and so he became the
Speaker 3: most prolific inventor of things you could do on skateboarding.
Speaker 4: You could say skateboarding.
Speaker 3: Isn't important, but kind of like country music or something
Speaker 3: like a lot of people are actually quite inspired about skateboarding,
Speaker 3: and so Rodney is an inspiration to them. But what's
Speaker 3: amazing is Rodney will have an idea for a thing
Speaker 3: that's never been done on a skateboard. He'll spend a
Speaker 3: year just trying to make it work. He'll get it.
Speaker 3: YouTube video goes up two weeks later. Kids in Kazakh
Speaker 3: stand are doing better than him. Yeah, that's the moment
Speaker 3: of creation. The word creativity. You create something. The world
Speaker 3: didn't have it before you created something. And even if
Speaker 3: it's just a skateboard trick, that's creativity. And you could
Speaker 3: see it in Jimi Hendrix. You could see it, and
Speaker 3: you know, I don't know, like Jonah Salk, you could
Speaker 3: see it in these people. And I think that we
Speaker 3: need to find a way to have a better, more
Speaker 3: mature relationship with that. Celebrate that search for these people,
Speaker 3: you know, support them, help them. I mean, what happened
Speaker 3: to we used to have patrons for artists. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, like like like let's just like send Doc
Speaker 3: Brown ten bucks a month on Patreon. I guess that's
Speaker 3: what patreons were, their inventors on Patreon. Like that seems
Speaker 3: like something we should try anyway.
Speaker 1: No, that's a really it's a really good point because
Speaker 1: one can write grants off to the government and so on,
Speaker 1: but there there are a very limited number of people
Speaker 1: looking for inventors to fund them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you could. It's not a it's not a
Speaker 4: binary thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's obviously a lot of invention at the
Speaker 3: borders of science. There's obviously lot a lot of invention
Speaker 3: and engineering and products and companies and stuff.
Speaker 4: A lot as you know.
Speaker 3: Very very iterative, and it is important. You know, if
Speaker 3: you're at He'll at Packard, you're probably going to figure
Speaker 3: out how to make like a better inkjet printer that's
Speaker 3: like one percent better every year.
Speaker 4: And that's really important and cool, and that's how.
Speaker 3: We got to where we are. But where's the guy
Speaker 3: who's inventing what comes after inkjet? He's not He'll at Packard.
Speaker 3: But you get the idea, right, there's a there's a
Speaker 3: there's something better out there.
Speaker 4: And so you know, we've been.
Speaker 3: Fortunate to be attracting some of these inventors and you
Speaker 3: know guys like honey.
Speaker 2: Oh that's great.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things that is always fascinating me is
Speaker 1: the spread of invention. So Rodney Mullen comes up with
Speaker 1: some new skateboarding technique, the kids in kazakh Standard doing
Speaker 1: it two weeks later because.
Speaker 2: Of one thing. The Internet.
Speaker 1: The Internet, I think is the most important event we've
Speaker 1: ever had as a species, in large part because it
Speaker 1: allows the instant and global dissemination of information. The reason
Speaker 1: that Edward Jenner was the eighth person to invent vaccination.
Speaker 1: This was invented in India, it was invented in Africa
Speaker 1: and in different places. But there was no way to
Speaker 1: disseminate the information. That's why it had to be reinvented
Speaker 1: the way. The way I picture this is like totally
Speaker 1: the globe and there's some fire that starts where people
Speaker 1: know this thing, and then the fire.
Speaker 2: Dies out because there's no way to catch that information.
Speaker 3: Of a lot of historical examples of that, I think
Speaker 3: Edward Jenner's actual innovation was that he had a way
Speaker 3: which the others didn't. He had a way of testing
Speaker 3: and proving the correlation and making it repeatable, which other
Speaker 3: people had. Other people had used smallpox to vaccinate against smallpox,
Speaker 3: which was very dangerous.
Speaker 4: He's the one that.
Speaker 3: Figured out how to use cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox.
Speaker 4: So but anyway, he was.
Speaker 1: Also growing up in a culture in England where where
Speaker 1: there was a royal academy and people wrote down things,
Speaker 1: and they got presentations on these things, and then they
Speaker 1: made sure that other people.
Speaker 3: And the output of that was staggering, partly because you know,
Speaker 3: so much was available to discover at the time. But
Speaker 3: if you look at what's the scale of the Royal Academy.
Speaker 3: I mean it was probably like, you know, a few
Speaker 3: hundred people involved over the course of you know, decades.
Speaker 3: It's not actually like we have you know, I don't
Speaker 3: know you could have like a soccer team that was
Speaker 3: had more people involved in high school. You know, like
Speaker 3: it's just so yeah, I mean, great time to be alive.
Speaker 3: I think as far as scientific discovery, because you know,
Speaker 3: nobody had written anything down before you. But now now
Speaker 3: we have the compound interest of the entry the way
Speaker 3: you describe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and we have the compound interest of all
Speaker 1: the inventions that have come before.
Speaker 2: So now invention is going faster than ever.
Speaker 1: Also, you have so much more of the planet getting
Speaker 1: an education than ever before. So instead of one hundred
Speaker 1: guys sitting around that have boys and girls all over
Speaker 1: the world, Yeah, working on things and watching YouTube video
Speaker 1: and putting that together with this and that and putting
Speaker 1: things together and inventing.
Speaker 3: And what's wild about it is, you know the things
Speaker 3: I'm talking about, these inventions, you typically don't see them
Speaker 3: in iPhone apps.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know, if you look at if you look at
Speaker 3: the world we live in, we think We have this
Speaker 3: huge tech industry that's supposed to be bringing these inventions
Speaker 3: to life, but what are they doing. They're bringing iPhone apps,
Speaker 3: there are software do have tech industry? We have software industry.
Speaker 3: And so we live in this world where even though
Speaker 3: we've accelerated on scientific research and discovery, we've accelerated on
Speaker 3: invention in spite of you know, my complaints about the support.
Speaker 3: But what we really did is we indexed on entrepreneurs
Speaker 3: and we support them, we fund them, we celebrate them,
Speaker 3: Like whose YouTube video gets all the views? The guy
Speaker 3: who made the most money, right, it's not the guy
Speaker 3: who made the biggest difference.
Speaker 4: And so there's this.
Speaker 3: Weird situation where our big tech industry is supposed to
Speaker 3: be helping us bring these inventions to life, is distracted.
Speaker 3: They're making you know, zoom and Slack and snapchat, and
Speaker 3: those things might be amazing, but what technology did Airbnb invent?
Speaker 3: You know, what new superpower did Instagram bring to the world?
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's an app for sharing photos instead
Speaker 3: of like text and photos.
Speaker 4: You know, amazing.
Speaker 3: You know, So I think there's this this we're in
Speaker 3: this moment now where a lot of the easy shit's
Speaker 3: been done. Like everything you know we made it had
Speaker 3: to reinvent everything is a website and then reinvented as
Speaker 3: a mobile app. Now I have to reinvent it his ai.
Speaker 3: But basically it's just apply software everything. But when you
Speaker 3: look at the big problem in the world food, water, waste, sanitation, construction, energy,
Speaker 3: and manufacturing, those are not things you're going to improve
Speaker 3: with software. I mean, you could improve them a little
Speaker 3: bit one or two percent, you're not going to reinvent them.
Speaker 3: You're going to make them ten times better with software. Mining,
Speaker 3: you know, these are things that require real inventions, real
Speaker 3: technologies that could make the world massively better. And you're
Speaker 3: going to get that from the creative people who invent
Speaker 3: those ten x or one hundred x multipliers.
Speaker 2: So that's what you look for. You look for them.
Speaker 4: We call that deep tech.
Speaker 2: Deep tech. You look for that, and so give us
Speaker 2: some other examples of things you've found.
Speaker 3: So like in mining, that's one where you know, in
Speaker 3: the US we basically outlawed mining because we want to
Speaker 3: save the world, and mining involves a lot of nasty emissions.
Speaker 3: You have to you basically take a bunch of rock
Speaker 3: and burn it and.
Speaker 4: Hope you get some metal and then you just to
Speaker 4: create insane emissions.
Speaker 3: So that's in a smelter. We we outlawed smelters. So
Speaker 3: now we take the rock that we mine and we
Speaker 3: ship it to other countries and they run it through
Speaker 3: a smelter and to get the metal out and then.
Speaker 4: Send it back to us.
Speaker 3: So we haven't exactly solved a problem, but we definitely
Speaker 3: got out of our backyard. So March nineteenth, I've found
Speaker 3: this little team that invented a way of doing zero
Speaker 3: emissions refining for metals like copper. We need copper for everything,
Speaker 3: but we don't mine it here because we're not allowed to,
Speaker 3: and so this team can refine copper kind of the
Speaker 3: way we refine aluminum. It's mostly electricity, so you could
Speaker 3: power that with a solar farm or something clean. And
Speaker 3: so that was on March nineteenth, and on March twentieth,
Speaker 3: the President signed an executive order to free up mining
Speaker 3: in this country, which is very important because we have
Speaker 3: all the medals you could need for hundreds of years
Speaker 3: in this country, all those rarest medals.
Speaker 4: What are we doing.
Speaker 3: We're engaged in geopolitical machinations to get them from Ukraine
Speaker 3: or China or places that really don't want to give
Speaker 3: them to us.
Speaker 4: Instead we could remind them here.
Speaker 3: And I think it's a very important example because, like
Speaker 3: on something like that, you would want we should be
Speaker 3: setting an example for the rest of the world. If
Speaker 3: we're the country that's good at doing new things, and
Speaker 3: we are, then we should figure out, okay, smelter suck,
Speaker 3: what's the best way to refine metal. We're going to
Speaker 3: prototype that, we're going to build that, We're going to
Speaker 3: deplay first, We're going to show that it's actually five
Speaker 3: times cheaper to build, ten times cheaper to operate, and
Speaker 3: then the rest of the world can copy that instead
Speaker 3: of copying what we did a century ago. So we
Speaker 3: need to set an example on these things that if
Speaker 3: we want to have a big impact on saving the world.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what's possible with a lot of
Speaker 3: these technologies.
Speaker 2: Excellent, how does it actually work?
Speaker 5: There?
Speaker 2: Give us this per.
Speaker 4: Called molten sulfide electrolysis.
Speaker 3: And so if you look at like just to keep
Speaker 3: a simple like aluminum for example, is a mostly made electricity.
Speaker 3: You know your popca are as metal, but it's mostly electricity.
Speaker 3: Is what is involved in making aluminium? And with a smelter,
Speaker 3: you just burn coal or you burn gas to heat,
Speaker 3: get a lot of heat to essentially melter burn rock.
Speaker 4: That's how smelter works.
Speaker 3: So with the electrolysis, what's happening is used in an
Speaker 3: electrochemical process to separate the metals from the rock and
Speaker 3: you can get much better yields this way. Now, so yeah,
Speaker 3: it's the early stages. So we have things like that.
Speaker 3: There's I mean, we have a nuclear reactor. That's one
Speaker 3: of our teams invented a nuclear reactor. I mean, I
Speaker 3: found these inventors that figured out that they could make
Speaker 3: a nuclear reactor that will fit through a manhole and
Speaker 3: it just uses all existing technology, no crazy new you know,
Speaker 3: gen fore reactor technology, just regular reactor. But it's this
Speaker 3: big around and they bury it a mile deep in
Speaker 3: a borehole. So there's the thing is unquestionably safe. There's
Speaker 3: ten billion tons of rock between the reactor and anyone's
Speaker 3: backyard and nothing could go wrong. But if it did,
Speaker 3: there'd be no radioactivity at the surface. Just fill a
Speaker 3: hole with dirt and forget about it. Yeah, okay, And
Speaker 3: we can make them in a factory like toyotas, like
Speaker 3: we can make thousands of them. You know, all of
Speaker 3: our reactors that we have in this country are like
Speaker 3: bespoke art projects. They're like Frank Geary buildings. They build
Speaker 3: one of one. Yeah, and these things, you know, don't
Speaker 3: like anything else. The first one is always expensive. So
Speaker 3: we did ninety two number one reactors. None of them
Speaker 3: have any interchangeable parts. They all have their own engineering team.
Speaker 3: It's crazy. So let's build them in a factory like
Speaker 3: the toyotas. They're not even more complicated than a Toyota.
Speaker 3: They're not bigger than a Toyota. Anyway, that's the kind
Speaker 3: of stuff that's possible.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a good one. What else, what?
Speaker 3: Well, man, we got a team putting taking So the
Speaker 3: problem with like solar panels. We have solar farms we've
Speaker 3: been building, but they suck for two big reasons, clouds
Speaker 3: and nighttime. So the relentless onslaught of night has been
Speaker 3: screwing with our solar panels.
Speaker 4: We have no idea what to do about it.
Speaker 3: But I get this team that figured out they can
Speaker 3: take the solar farm and just put on a rocket
Speaker 3: lunch into space. Oh, so a solar farm in space
Speaker 3: will get sun twenty four hours a day. It looks
Speaker 3: like nighttime because we just have a bad angle on it.
Speaker 3: Space is actually noon all the time. So a solar
Speaker 3: farm in space will get sun twenty four hours a
Speaker 3: day all year long, and then it can beam the
Speaker 3: energy down to Earth using radio waves. They go right
Speaker 3: through clouds and it sounds crazy. I know, it sounds
Speaker 3: like science fiction, but we have all the tech to
Speaker 3: do this. It's not even that hard. The only real
Speaker 3: problem was launch cost and launch cost, Like in a
Speaker 3: space shuttle, it would have cost forty thousand dollars to
Speaker 3: put your iPad in space. Now thanks to SpaceX is
Speaker 3: down to fifteen hundred. Their target for starship is ten
Speaker 3: ten dollars. Yeah, it'll be cheaper to store your old
Speaker 3: sports ball equipment in space than your garage before the
Speaker 3: end of the decade.
Speaker 4: Like that's where we're at.
Speaker 3: I know it sounds crazy, but that's why something like
Speaker 3: space solar is possible.
Speaker 2: Oh that's terrific.
Speaker 6: Yeah, what fraction of our energy do you think we'll
Speaker 6: get from space solar in a decade from there?
Speaker 3: So it's one of these things where you get et
Speaker 3: Connie's to scale very quickly, so you know, solar panels.
Speaker 3: You've already scaled up manufacturing those. That's very cheap. They're light,
Speaker 3: they're flat. You can put a lot of them in
Speaker 3: a starship. I think we could get something like one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty megawatts out of a single starship launch.
Speaker 3: So imagine do that a couple of times a week,
Speaker 3: and everyone you put up pays for itself, immediately serving
Speaker 3: the biggest market on Earth. You beam power to the
Speaker 3: poles or to the middle of Africa. You don't need storage,
Speaker 3: you don't need transmission lines, and so it's just clean
Speaker 3: energy that goes everywhere.
Speaker 2: Oh it's beautiful, it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I want to do taro watts, but yeah,
Speaker 3: it's wild to'll launch enough panels to do that. But
Speaker 3: you know, it's called space for a reason, Like there's
Speaker 3: totally room for huge solar farms space.
Speaker 2: And give us another example.
Speaker 3: So one I love that is actually not even that
Speaker 3: high tech, but it's just genius. Is I got this
Speaker 3: team that is making cargo ships that sail themselves, so
Speaker 3: no crew, no fuel, no emissions, it's not even that
Speaker 3: high tech. You duct tape a Tesla to the front
Speaker 3: of the ship and it drives itself across the ocean.
Speaker 3: There's nothing to hit out there. It's easier than self
Speaker 3: driving cars. And then there's like one documented pedestrian and
Speaker 3: all of human history. So we're just gonna make that.
Speaker 3: And the sailing part has been working for centuries. That's
Speaker 3: how people got to this country in the first place.
Speaker 3: But now to get happy meal toys from China to
Speaker 3: Los Angeles, we're burning this nasty bunk oil. People don't
Speaker 3: realize it, but cargo ships have two guess tanks. One
Speaker 3: is burning refined fuel like your car that it doesn't
Speaker 3: burn clean, but it burns invisibly. And then the other,
Speaker 3: as soon as they get off over the horizon out
Speaker 3: of sight, they switch to burning bunker oil, which is
Speaker 3: the cheapest crap you can get. It's basically optimized for
Speaker 3: carbon emissions and it's just black smoke. You never see
Speaker 3: it because they don't do it until they're out of sight. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's an industry where.
Speaker 2: But how does self navigating solve that problem?
Speaker 3: Well, because there's two classes of issues. One is you
Speaker 3: don't need fuel because of the sailing, because oh it's sailing,
Speaker 3: got it, Yeah, right, there's no fuel cost. We don't
Speaker 3: burn anything. Five out of six dollars in the shipping
Speaker 3: industry is burned as fuel. We just do the self
Speaker 3: sailing with the with the automation because we can. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, you could put a guy and they're steering
Speaker 3: it if you want, but you don't need them.
Speaker 2: I see.
Speaker 1: But let me just let me just make sure I
Speaker 1: got this straight. So you literally mean a tesla.
Speaker 3: I'm not literally Okay, we have self driving tech that's
Speaker 3: good enough that you could put it on a ship,
Speaker 3: got it, So let me understand.
Speaker 2: So you got to ship a sail boat.
Speaker 1: Okay, And and it self navigates and burns no fuel
Speaker 1: that way, And can I assume that it's taking wind
Speaker 1: data from a much larger area.
Speaker 4: Than it really have access to, really good at that?
Speaker 3: Amazing Yeah, And and you know it has batteries for
Speaker 3: back up and to get out of it, and you
Speaker 3: need dead zones because you don't want to get stuck
Speaker 3: in the middle of the ocean for a week. And
Speaker 3: it has batteries for docking, so you do that with electric.
Speaker 3: But but mostly it's sailing, and that's like a really
Speaker 3: smart thing to do with wind power. It's right where
Speaker 3: you need it. It's mechanical energy, which is what you need.
Speaker 3: That's something that could make a huge difference. It's a
Speaker 3: huge amount of CO two emissions gone, it's a huge
Speaker 3: amount of expense gone. You know, half of if you
Speaker 3: look up the ships on the ocean right now, half
Speaker 3: of them are just moving fuel around. Half of the
Speaker 3: ships on the ocean are moving gas and oil around.
Speaker 4: It's all they're doing. It's insanity and we could do
Speaker 4: so much better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, give us another one company.
Speaker 3: So here's one that we just announced today. No one
Speaker 3: has ever heard about this. So if you are in
Speaker 3: an airplane, a jet, you burn the gas, it expands
Speaker 3: really fast, creates you know, there's a lot of heat,
Speaker 3: but it's mainly the expansion goes into it what it's
Speaker 3: called a turbofan, which is a jet engine to make
Speaker 3: thrust to push the plane.
Speaker 4: Okay, you got that.
Speaker 3: So for a long time people have been trying to
Speaker 3: figure out how do you is there a way to
Speaker 3: make thrust just from electricity, And there have been different
Speaker 3: ideas for this, different names for it.
Speaker 4: One of my favorite names is electro gravitics. That was
Speaker 4: one of the early names.
Speaker 3: And then now like MIT worked on a little while
Speaker 3: ago they called the ionic wind. And so the idea
Speaker 3: is you're basically making a kind of an electrostatic generator
Speaker 3: to charge ions to get them moving, and then get
Speaker 3: enough of a moving that you know you're moving air.
Speaker 3: And people have done this, but you can only get
Speaker 3: just like a faint amount of They could barely get
Speaker 3: a paper airplane to fly this way. But the phenomenon
Speaker 3: wasn't well understood. Nobody was really sure what was how
Speaker 3: it was working, and so they weren't able to optimize
Speaker 3: it to make it work.
Speaker 4: Well, well, I got this team that figured it out.
Speaker 3: And so now they can. They made they could, They've
Speaker 3: made a drone they have all pre working that can fly.
Speaker 3: It has no moving parts, it's all electric, it's completely silent,
Speaker 3: and it just flies. Their breakthrough as they've figured out
Speaker 3: how to get accelerate the air going through it. Everybody
Speaker 3: else was only able to get it like every time
Speaker 3: they made a stage to accelerate the air, that had
Speaker 3: to make that stage like bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 3: So we've solved that, so now we can make multiple stages.
Speaker 3: We can get that thrust going boom, so silent, all electric.
Speaker 3: I mean, drones are all electric anyway, but silent drones
Speaker 3: and no moving parts and eventually airplanes same thing. They're
Speaker 3: getting thrust the.
Speaker 4: Early stages, so.
Speaker 3: They have to build more prototypes, but basically they're able
Speaker 3: to do thrust that's equivalent to a turbo fan.
Speaker 2: They'll get there and it'll be totally silent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have a silent airplane.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. What's the name of this company.
Speaker 4: That's called Daion.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, Literally, this is the very first time I've
Speaker 3: ever talked about it until they just got their patent
Speaker 3: today and told me, and so I just put it
Speaker 3: on our website today, first time ever.
Speaker 1: So so you're here's the personal question. So you're really
Speaker 1: interested in all these inventions and so on. So what
Speaker 1: got you onto the business side of this as opposed
Speaker 1: to being an inventor yourself.
Speaker 3: Well, I got I got to do a lot of
Speaker 3: the things that these people need to do, the inventors
Speaker 3: and the entrepreneurs. You know, I got to invent a
Speaker 3: lot of things, got to start a lot of companies.
Speaker 3: I got to you know, go through the experience of
Speaker 3: having them be decimated. I've gotten to you know, raise
Speaker 3: money for them. I've had to do hire people and
Speaker 3: fire people. I just had to do all those things.
Speaker 3: And then for an inventor, like one of the things
Speaker 3: I went through was this, you always are trying to
Speaker 3: get access to tools. You're always trying to figure out,
Speaker 3: like where do I get the tools to try this
Speaker 3: idea and get the money and stuff. And then eventually
Speaker 3: I started the Intellectual Ventures Lab with Nathan Mirvold, and
Speaker 3: we one of the things we did we just bought
Speaker 3: one of every.
Speaker 4: Tool in the world, and.
Speaker 3: So then I kind of got it out of my
Speaker 3: and then we worked on every kind of invention project.
Speaker 3: We got six thousand patents on our own inventions there,
Speaker 3: so it was a very large scale invention operation. But
Speaker 3: because I had every tool, I could build a protype
Speaker 3: anything I wanted. And I pretty quickly learned that, like
Speaker 3: there's always somebody better than me at operating the tool,
Speaker 3: and so like I want to understand them and what
Speaker 3: they can do and how to do it, but I
Speaker 3: always learned, somebody's better than me at this, so let's
Speaker 3: get them on the job. And so once I, you know,
Speaker 3: that kind of changed my working mode to where like
Speaker 3: I you know, I did almost everything via email, just
Speaker 3: like can you build this can you print this?
Speaker 4: Can you design that?
Speaker 3: And then I think, you know, so that's a pretty
Speaker 3: weird experience, Like I kind of just got it out
Speaker 3: of my system. If I wanted to invent anything, I
Speaker 3: got to do it already. And I and then you also,
Speaker 3: you know, like we built a big team of inventors
Speaker 3: and we turned invention into kind of it team sport.
Speaker 3: And now i'd do is I try to help other
Speaker 3: inventors because they have better inventions than me anyway at
Speaker 3: this point, and so find.
Speaker 1: Them So so tell us more about invention as a
Speaker 1: team sport.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was one of the really great things we
Speaker 3: got to do at that lab. So you know, Nathan
Speaker 3: had built Microsoft Research before he was CTO at Microsoft
Speaker 3: back in their heyday, and you know, at Microsoft Research,
Speaker 3: he hired a lot of smart people and met all
Speaker 3: the other smart people that he couldn't hire. So when
Speaker 3: we started the lab, he was able to just round
Speaker 3: up a lot of the you know, really prolific inventors, polymaths,
Speaker 3: people who you know, had a high probability of being
Speaker 3: useful in invention. And then what we did is we'd
Speaker 3: have these like invention sessions where we'd find somebody with
Speaker 3: a problem and sit them down, surround them with a
Speaker 3: nuclear physicist, a laser expert, a chemist, computer hacker. You know,
Speaker 3: collectively we know the cutting edge and every area in
Speaker 3: science and technology. Between us, we're probably reading every paper
Speaker 3: that comes out or you know, something like that, learning
Speaker 3: about every new algorithm, every new sensor, every new chip,
Speaker 3: things that could help you out with the output of research,
Speaker 3: you know, the output of science. And we would just
Speaker 3: take that and kind of ask ourselves, well, does this
Speaker 3: change anything humans have ever done? Can we do it faster, cheap,
Speaker 3: or better, maybe in a more humane fashion. Those are
Speaker 3: the kinds of questions we'd be asking. There's like a
Speaker 3: Rubik's cube in your brain, just matching up problems to
Speaker 3: to the to the technologies.
Speaker 4: And so that's invention. And in the invention sessions.
Speaker 3: The person with the problem is very important because we
Speaker 3: would invent stuff no matter what, lots of useless stuff.
Speaker 3: But if the other person with a problem to kind
Speaker 3: of focus everybody, then what you would do is, you know,
Speaker 3: find inventions at the borders. You know, a lot of
Speaker 3: times the invention, like our most famous invention is a
Speaker 3: machine that can find mosquitoes and shoot them down. With
Speaker 3: laser beams and people love it because everyone hates mosquitoes,
Speaker 3: and so we did it as like a you know,
Speaker 3: we had actually in that case, Bill Gates was the
Speaker 3: guy with the problem because he brought us malaria to
Speaker 3: work on. So we're trying to find malaria interventions in
Speaker 3: the malarias spread by the mosquitos.
Speaker 4: So we thought, okay, well maybe we could.
Speaker 3: We were just joking around because you always try lasers
Speaker 3: first because the lasers are cool, So every invention starts
Speaker 3: with lasers, and if that doesn't work, then you try
Speaker 3: something else.
Speaker 4: But you know, we're, oh, here we can use lasers.
Speaker 3: Awesome, And so the thing what happened is we were
Speaker 3: just joking about it, but one of the inventors in
Speaker 3: the room, Loull, would he's actually the has more patents
Speaker 3: than Thomas Edison, is the record for in America for pattents.
Speaker 4: Loull prolific inventor.
Speaker 3: But lull Hood worked on UH Star Wars for Reagan,
Speaker 3: which was and the idea with that was to have
Speaker 3: giant lasers in space that would shoot down missiles, you know, right,
Speaker 3: so these missiles you see on YouTube right now, we
Speaker 3: could actually well, at least the intercontinental ones.
Speaker 4: You could shoot them down with a laser.
Speaker 3: And that sounds crazy, but we spent like fifty billion
Speaker 3: dollars on this back in the eighties, and Lowell said,
Speaker 3: you know, we already proved this would work. And the
Speaker 3: mosquito is a bigger, easier target in this context than
Speaker 3: a missile would be from space, right, because the missiles
Speaker 3: are much further and laser here we have a smaller laser,
Speaker 3: but the mosquitos are only in one hundred meters away
Speaker 3: or is less. And so anyway, even an invention like that,
Speaker 3: you had to have like people kind of on the
Speaker 3: border of machine vision, because this is this is fifteen
Speaker 3: years ago now, but at the times like well, using
Speaker 3: motion detection algorithms, could we find the mosquito in real
Speaker 3: time and aim a laser in real time? And then
Speaker 3: we had the like kind of right people for lasers
Speaker 3: and machine vision, So you could come up with inventions
Speaker 3: that often were at the borders of different areas and
Speaker 3: science and technology. That way, this process, I contend is
Speaker 3: totally repeatable, like other organizations could do it, other people
Speaker 3: could do it. You know, Yeah, we cheated by getting
Speaker 3: the smartest people we could find, but you know, get
Speaker 3: the smartest people you can find and try it, like like,
Speaker 3: that's totally possible.
Speaker 1: And what were the things that worked When you've got
Speaker 1: the nuclear physicist and the computer hacker and everyone in
Speaker 1: the room, how do you do the interactions so that
Speaker 1: everyone's not flipping their own rooms cube, but they're flipping
Speaker 1: a community room recube.
Speaker 4: So our first rule.
Speaker 3: So a lot of people in brainstorming mode would say,
Speaker 3: there's no bad ideas, let's get them all out there.
Speaker 3: Ours was a little different. Ours was, there are definitely
Speaker 3: bad ideas, and if you think my idea is bad,
Speaker 3: you should totally shoot it down.
Speaker 4: But you got to come up with once better. So
Speaker 4: it was and look, this doesn't work for everybody.
Speaker 3: When you're in a context like that, your north star
Speaker 3: is what's technically true. So feelings don't matter. It's about
Speaker 3: what's true, and we're all trying to find the truth.
Speaker 3: So if I say something it sounds like bullshit and
Speaker 3: you think, no, you're full of shit. You could tell
Speaker 3: me I'm full of shit, but then tell me, like,
Speaker 3: what's actually true? Do you have better data or newer data,
Speaker 3: or is there some reason why you think that, or
Speaker 3: do you know something I don't know. All that's totally fine.
Speaker 3: So nobody takes it personally. That's very honest, intellectual discourse.
Speaker 3: And I love that. I mean people, I think most
Speaker 3: people don't understand what that would be like. But when
Speaker 3: you're able to be collaborating with people where you don't
Speaker 3: have to sugarcoat things, worry about their feelings, dumb things down,
Speaker 3: simplify things, any of that is just we're trying to
Speaker 3: find what's true, then it takes the personal aspect out
Speaker 3: of it. You know, I have to shout down Bill
Speaker 3: Gates sometimes, you know, yeah, And so you know it
Speaker 3: doesn't work for psycho fans or people who are you know,
Speaker 3: worried about how what people think of them?
Speaker 1: Right, So, how would you see replicating this more widely
Speaker 1: getting this sort of thing set up? Could you implement
Speaker 1: this in schools you have invention clubs where people sit
Speaker 1: around and take on problems.
Speaker 4: Need that would love? That would be awesome?
Speaker 3: Yeeah, I don't know. I mean, I think we were
Speaker 3: very fortunate in that we had the you know, the
Speaker 3: the mindset to do that, the will to do it,
Speaker 3: the resources to do it. You know, Bill Gates funded
Speaker 3: a lot of our humanitarian projects, all the stuff with
Speaker 3: malaria and disease eradication and other things as well, and
Speaker 3: energy and different things. So we're lucky to have that
Speaker 3: kind of support. What I found is, most of the
Speaker 3: time the incentive structure and other organizations doesn't lend itself
Speaker 3: to invention. And here's why. I can actually explain that too.
Speaker 3: If you are a successful institution of any type that
Speaker 3: could be a business or university, or just the healthcare
Speaker 3: system or a government, part of what happens is as
Speaker 3: it evolves and is successful, it evolves an immune system.
Speaker 3: And the immune system's job is to suppress risk. And
Speaker 3: what looks like risk is change. And so this is
Speaker 3: one of the big reasons why you don't see innovation
Speaker 3: in bigger, older, more successful institutions of any kind. It's
Speaker 3: because anything that looks like change, we have a system
Speaker 3: to squash it or keep it out or you know,
Speaker 3: slow it down whatever. And so that's why like Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley is thousands of million dollar experiments. That's what startups are,
Speaker 3: and that's why we we were cool with them dying right,
Speaker 3: We're really cool with them dying fast. Would much rather
Speaker 3: kill these things fast. So a startups job is to
Speaker 3: try out, really you know, a new idea, hopefully a
Speaker 3: new invention. If you're working on a cool startup, there's
Speaker 3: a new invention, the new invention, or a new idea
Speaker 3: or a new product. We want to find out real
Speaker 3: quick if we can make this successful, and we're going
Speaker 3: to be competing against all the other people are trying
Speaker 3: to make something else successful, and we want to find
Speaker 3: those winners.
Speaker 4: And then we find the winners.
Speaker 3: Solici Velli got real good and just pouring fuel on
Speaker 3: the fire, and you can see that it just seems
Speaker 3: crazy to everyone else in the world. But when we
Speaker 3: find a winner, then we try to take it global
Speaker 3: as fast as we can and win the value out
Speaker 3: of it so we can make enough money to go
Speaker 3: fund a bunch more things that aren't gonna work.
Speaker 1: That was my interview with Pablos Holman, and that gives
Speaker 1: us a glimpse into the frontier of deep tech and
Speaker 1: the people who are building it and one investor who's
Speaker 1: made it his mission to support them. Every time I
Speaker 1: speak with someone like Pablos, I walk away feeling that
Speaker 1: the future is closer than we think, and also with
Speaker 1: a sense of how easy it is to miss it
Speaker 1: because invention doesn't announce itself in pitch decks or quarterly reports.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it looks like a piece of circuit board and
Speaker 1: a back lab, and unless people are really listening, ideas
Speaker 1: can go unnoticed, just like the way that inoculation was
Speaker 1: invented over and over again before it took root. So
Speaker 1: one lesson from today is that inventing is not the
Speaker 1: same as running a business or engineering or scaling. Invention
Speaker 1: is the rare act of using the prefroederal cortex to
Speaker 1: imagine a world that didn't exist five minutes ago, and
Speaker 1: then bending reality to bring that into being. We also
Speaker 1: learned that this kind of thinking doesn't usually emerge inside
Speaker 1: institutions that are optimized for predictability and control. As publists
Speaker 1: put it, institutions develop immune systems against change, against risk,
Speaker 1: against anything that smells like uncertainty, which unfortunately includes just
Speaker 1: about every great idea in its early days.
Speaker 2: That's why so.
Speaker 1: Many of the stories we heard today have a similar theme.
Speaker 1: Breakthroughs buried in obscurity. A silent electric propulsion system, a
Speaker 1: nuclear reactor the size of a trash can, a self
Speaker 1: sailing cargo ship, a space based solar farm, a battery
Speaker 1: that might never need charging. A lot of inventions like
Speaker 1: this exist, but they have to wait for attention and
Speaker 1: belief and funding. And we're probably not going to solve
Speaker 1: our global scale problems like energy and water and food
Speaker 1: and climate transportation with branding or software tweaks. We're going
Speaker 1: to solve them with hard technology and with brave experiments.
Speaker 1: And that means we need to get better at finding
Speaker 1: and funding and supporting inventors, not just business types. And
Speaker 1: that probably means we're going to need to change the
Speaker 1: culture a little bit. It would be great to teach
Speaker 1: kids that inventor is a real job title. We need
Speaker 1: to create more spaces where creative risk taking is safe
Speaker 1: and even celebrated. We need to stop culturally pretending that
Speaker 1: invention is just science and a lab or engineering in
Speaker 1: a workshop up because invention is curiosity and it's often
Speaker 1: a mess, but it's also the source of almost everything
Speaker 1: that we value. And this is our moment to make
Speaker 1: cultural change, because there are more people with ideas today
Speaker 1: than at any other point in human history. So I'll
Speaker 1: leave you with this challenge. Be an inventor big or small,
Speaker 1: because invention is for anyone who's willing to ask what if,
Speaker 1: or just be a supporter or encourager of the inventors
Speaker 1: around you. The future never comes from more of the same.
Speaker 1: It comes from the minds that take advantage of these
Speaker 1: incredible inherited neural.
Speaker 2: Networks to look at the world not as it is,
Speaker 2: but as it could be.
Speaker 1: Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on
Speaker 1: my substance and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave
Speaker 1: comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos.