Available episodes
Newest first
Oldest first
Dec 18, 2022
Helium Airships (Short)
Short opinion piece about these helium airships and the need to preserve helium.
I think they're cool. But there's a real problem with trying to make a lot of hydrogen next to actual humans and somehow imagine that it's going to be safe. So since then, people have played around with things like blimps and things that don't have passengers and stuff like that. But these things don't, aren't very popular. I have seen a little bit of news lately about this group called Lighter Than Air Research, which is trying to create air ships today.
These are in part probably safer because they don't fill them with hydrogen, they fill them with helium. So this is a massive craft. They call Pathfinder one. I'm going to link to an article in IEEE Spectrum about this and I'm just going to give you, the highlights.
Pathfinder 1 is 120 meters, long, 20 meters in diameter. I think biggest Goodyear blimp right now is 75 meters. So this is like the biggest air ship ever made. I think.
The idea is to carry about four tons of cargo. It sounds like a lot, but if you're not familiar with a ton, four tons is about one Humvee. Or, maybe four tons might be a good size Amazon delivery van fully loaded. That's four tons of cargo. There's still, also a crew, there's what's called water ballast, which is, water you carry for weight. So if you have a problem, descending too fast, you could drop the water and it would slow your descent to make it safe. And then fuel, cause you still need fuel in order to propel the thing. The idea is this thing would go 65 knots. So that's about 120 kilometers an hour, which I think about 70 miles an hour. That's about as fast as these things seem to ever really be able to go, but the, average cruising speed probably maxes out at more like two-thirds of that. This is a modern Airship probably worth revisiting it to see if it can be done better. The old ones were built with, a lot of wood. They were built with a lot of aluminum which is, good strength to weight ratio, but incendiary. In the sense that it melts at a low temperature. Modern crafts could be built with carbon fiber and titanium and all these modern materials that we can coat to make them less inflammatory,
So that's the frame and then you also have this covering and the coverings gonna be made of not cotton the way we used to do it, but we're going to make that out of some modern polyvinyl from DuPont called Tedlar. So obviously those materials have advanced a lot in our lifetime. If you sense a little bit of a dubiousness in my voice, I'm going to tell you why that is in a little bit here.
That's the basic idea. There's also a lot that's advanced in weather prediction. There's a lot that's advanced in electric motors for propulsion. There's a lot that's advanced in autonomous flying and driving. And so we have lidars and we have things that can figure out how to make these things dramatically safer. I buy all that. Here's what bothers me.
The world has unlimited hydrogen on earth, more or less. We have a lot. We can make more. Hydrogen's awesome. What the world does not have on earth is very much helium. We have very little helium. We have very little helium left. We've been able to find a few new helium mines in the last decade, but there's just not much of it.
And that is a super valuable element that we really need for lots of different things. We need it for making computer chips. We need it for figuring out how to make fusion reactors and things like that. We're just running out of helium and I'm pretty disappointed in any plan that involves using a lot of helium as it's lighter than air substance.
Because of that, I'm really having a hard time getting excited about these modern airships that want to use helium. Helium is not flammable, so it won't burn up the way that hydrogen does. If you remember your periodic table, if you look at the very beginning, the reason you've probably heard of hydrogen and helium is they're numbers one and two. They are the lowest weight elements in the world.
And hydrogen is a lot lighter than helium, but it also, combined with oxygen just fucking blows up, which is great, amazing amount of energy in hydrogen. We have a lot of use for that. But what's happening with helium is, we're just letting it go. We're giving it away in party balloons which is a terrible disaster. It makes me practically cry when I see helium balloons, which is sad. I grew up with them. I love them. I want my kid to have them. They're fun, but that's a waste of good helium. We just don't have enough and we don't have a way of making more. And that's the really important thing to understand.
Until we get real good control of fusion reactors, and have extra ones to deploy at the job, we don't even have any way of making helium. When you do have a fusion reactor, it makes a little bit of helium, but not much. Maybe someday fusion reactors will be able to be designed to put out a lot of helium for balloons, but right now they don't.
They don't do anything right now, but they don't do that. So the point is. We should be really careful about how we deplete the helium that we do have here on earth. Maybe someday we'll get a highway to the moon and we'll be able to go get a lot more helium. But right now this is this is a really important resource that I think we should be careful about. I don't want to see it used on airships, which require a lot.
Okay. Second thing. I tried playing with helium before, and we do use a lot of helium for weather balloons and things like that. Please use hydrogen. It's okay if a weather balloon burns. A helium balloon that's big, it's just a really hard to manage. Putting a lot of lighter than air gas into a balloon to get it off the ground and float it up into the atmosphere. It's just unwieldy. I only have a little bit of experience with this early days at Blue Origin, we tried to make some giant helium balloons just to see what potential might be in that. It's hard cause, you gotta make the balloon out of something light and not too structural. The airships have a frame. We didn't have frames. We just had big balloons that we made. We made them really light. But, you've got to bring tanks and tanks of helium to go, then fill that up to launch it wherever you are. The process of filling it up, it wants to float away while you're filling it, and you think you could just keep loading gas into it the way that you would with a party balloon, but in practice, the more you load into it, the harder it is to tether the thing and keep the wind from blowing it away.
And maybe you could do that indoors and then have a ceiling the launches, it's pretty impractical to do. And, with travel, you want to be able to go a lot of different places, obviously with an Airship, you'd try to fill it once and then use your electric motors to move that thing around, up and down and maybe. I give up as little helium as possible, but that's the other thing about helium. It's really hard to contain. It leaks through almost everything. It is a very small molecule.
I'm putting this out there just to let you guys know how I feel about it. From what I understand to date. I have not met or talked to the folks that are working on this at Lighter Than Air Research. If you know them, please introduce me and I'm sure that they can tell me how they think about it. I'm sure they have some other perspective and if I get that in my head, I'll let you know if I change my mind.
playlist_add
Jan 23, 2022
Top Sleep Doctor’s Brain Dump – Michael Breus, Ph.D
Sleep is the most natural process that you can do other than breathing. Like breathing, we don't need technology to help us sleep. The reason many people don't sleep is because of what's between their ears – their mental stability, anguish, or stress. Do you fall asleep easily or does the slightest noise wake you up? Dr. Michael Breus, gives me a full brain dump as I try to learn everything I can about sleep in one session. He takes on taboo ideas like polyphasic sleep and the role of nutrition and the microbiome in having a good night’s rest, how melatonin, CBD, and some pharmaceutical interventions such as Zolpidem affect the sleep process, how much sleep we should have, and more.
Pablos: The thing I'm trying to go after is that at least my way of seeing the world is through all these problems that we have. This is a pile of problems that are possibly growing. We also have this other pile, which is tools and technologies, and it's also growing because of what I mentioned. The job for us is to figure out how we sit in the middle and connect to those things. If we have some optimism that it's possible and we can demystify the problems so people understand what the real problems are, we can demystify the technology so they're not terrifying and complicated.
People then can build that sense of optimism about how we could make the future better. That's how I think about things a lot. Not only the idea here is to give people some insight into how we think about things and our experiences. One of the things I'm curious about is that years ago, there was no such thing as a sleep doctor. Maybe there were some researchers or whatever, but it wasn't a legitimate career track. How did you end up being a sleep doctor? What does that mean?
Michael: What's interesting about the field of sleep medicine in general is it's an incredibly small new field. The very first sleep lab in 1945, Walla Walla, Washington, built demand on narcolepsy. It wasn't even about sleep apnea. When you look at medicine and you think about Hippocrates. Thousands of years of innovations in medicine, we're literally at the sperm and egg stage of sleep medicine. That's where it was. I fell into it by accident. I was doing my residency. I was getting my PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia and I was interested in Sports Psychology. I had no interest in sleep at all. I wanted to tell athletes how to get the mental game of sports and run faster into all this cool shit with psychology.
I went to the University of Georgia, the top twenty programs. The best internship residency program, believe it or not, is the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. They had an eating disorders and athletes program that I was fascinated with. This was going to be an interesting area for me to get into and understand more about, but I couldn't get into the program. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, they all got in the program. I went to Georgia's top twenty programs, but to be fair, it wasn't Harvard.
It wasn't even top seventeen.
I'm sitting there, I'm looking through the application and they have like a specialty track for sleep medicine and a specialty track for neuropsychological testing. I didn't know anything about sleep medicine in Jackson.
You figured out, “I can't get on a program I want, but I can at least go to Jackson.”
I had an ulterior motive because when I saw this thing, I had worked my way through graduate school in the Electrophysiology department. I'm the kid who used to take the old rotary phones apart, put them back together, there would be 4 or 5 pieces on the side, and this thing would work like a gem.
I took the phone apart for different reasons and did not get it back together.
I like to tinker with stuff. I like to measure stuff. I have that kind of a brain. When I saw that there was a sleep track that used those machines, I said, “I'm going to sell myself as a sleep guy. I'm going to transfer as soon as I get there. Just because you didn't let me in the fucking place, that doesn't mean I'm not going to get in.” I get in on the sleep side. I get there and they say, “You have to start on the sleep side. If you want to transfer, you can do it later.” By the third day, I fell in love.
You haven't gotten around to transferring back. You gave up on that and sticking with sleep. This was many years ago. Tell me what research was going on there.
Back in those days, the field of sleep medicine is an interesting one because it was taken over. There are two sides, research and clinical. What's difficult about the clinical is it pretty much only treats sleep apnea.
In the world of sleep medicine, we've figured out how to treat sleep apnea. That's primarily what is going on. When you say clinical, that means we've got actual patients, we're trying to help them. On the research side, we've got people with problems and we're trying to understand them. We may or may not be able to help them. That might be a way of describing the difference.
When you look at clinical sleep medicine, we've identified 88 different sleep disorders. You can fuck up your sleep, which is amazing when you think about it. We were starting to design protocols for each one of the diagnostics to be able to start to lower the symptomatology. That's the basics of medicine.
Meaning, you are down with each of those 88 things you have.
The assessment narrows it down. What I'm talking about is the treatment side of things.
You are good at figuring out which of the 88 things you have.
We're good at that, but the problem is that I believe that there are sleep disorders and what I call disordered sleep. Sleep disorders are diagnosable apnea, narcolepsy and insomnia. Disordered sleep is I went to that room in the back of my house. I was there for 6, maybe 7 hours. My eyes were closed. I come out, I don't feel great. Why? How do I fix that? That's been my area of specialty for the last six years where I'm only focusing on how do I improve the quality of sleep. There are probably about 6,000 guys and gals out there who are board-certified sleep specialists. They treat apnea and narcolepsy. In some cases, insomnia.
We've got pros who can do that, but the things that don't fit into that rubric. Are you talking about the 89th thing?
To be fair, I don't think it's a diagnosis. It has to do with lifestyle. It has to do with intensity.
I don't have an actual physical problem that maps to my diet, but it could be better. You could have more energy or better results if you improve your diet, but I don’t necessarily have a clinical problem.
That's how I look at sleep in certain ways. I'm a high-performance sleep coach. I used to be a sleep doctor, apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia. Now, people come to me and they're like, “I know that I need eight hours to get good sleep, but I only have six. Can you do that?” The answer is, “Yes, you can.” What science has shown us is that there are certain scheduling swim lanes for your sleep schedule. This is based on something called your chronotype. Chronotype might not be a term that people are familiar with being called an early bird or a night owl. Those are chronotypes. It turns out those are genetic. There's a variation on the PER3 gene. There's a particular snip that is altered and that can make your entire body schedule go early or make your entire body schedule go late.
If I have 23andme, I can look it up and explain why I'm a night person.
That's the cool part of science, but what the fuck do you do with it? That's where I come in. I love that science and I was tinkering around with it. I was doing it all myself. I said, “What happens if I only sleep during my chronotypical sleeping hours?” I'm a night owl. That meant I had to go to bed at midnight. I decided not to have an alarm because I was going to check if my body wakes up naturally and see what happens. The first month I started this experiment…
playlist_add
Jan 16, 2022
Urban Transportation & the Truth about Garbage — Assaf Biderman
About two billion people that are going to move into cities by 2050 and with that growth, the demand for efficient transportation is going to increase dramatically. In an era where we’re already seeing inefficiencies in urban mobility having a massive impact on the economy, public health and environmental health, it’s hard to imagine a future of transportation that doesn’t border utter chaos. Cognizant of these projected problems, Assaf Biderman, is working on solutions that harness the power of artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies that are already within our reach. Assaf is founder and CEO of Superpedestrian, founder of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and an awesome guy to learn from. I'll admit, I have been dubious about the rentable scooter business, but Assaf has me convinced there's an important place for these things in our cities. If you have any interest in urban mobility, this conversation is important.
You're still at MIT, but you don't have to go anymore because no one goes to work anymore.
The whole lab has been removed since March. I'm still on the board of the lab. I spend most of my time at Superpedestrian.
Is the Senseable City Lab still going?
Yes.
What are you guys trying to do?
Senseable started in 2003, 2004, where the goal was to say, computers are becoming part of everything. They can emit data. They can act on data. You can embed them in your environment. That allows us to completely change the way we study design and impact cities. Some people call this field of smart cities and I don’t like that.
It is because there's no such thing
People are smart enough, but there is a lot that you can do. You can discover new things about how people organize themselves and about how it flows through the city, energy flows, waste, the things we consume, people, and communication. A lot of that can impact how you design them and how you manage them in real-time. It's got a lot of value. It's one of the largest lab fields. I've been doing work since 2004 in partnership with cities all over the world. Those are big city partners and a lot smaller. It was funded by corporate for the most part and more will survive by long-term brands, but most of the money came from corporate where cities volunteered themselves as a subject matter and tell us about what problems they care about. Probably they want to look at together with us. We use the bigger money from corporate, all thrown together into one pot. We basically manage the deployment of dollars into research areas that we care about and the cities care about and the consortium that the management cares about. Most of the time, technology surrounds machine learning, robotics, various types of analytics.
For example, when you think of the seventeen-year history or something, what are the things that stand out to you as examples of what that lab is doing so that I could understand?
The impact areas that we care about are the stuff that makes cities function better or worse. We look at a lot of transportation, and probably half of those are transportation, whether it is dispatch algorithms to global taxis that we’ve been working on for many years. There's quite a bit of knowledge there that’s generated this whole micro vehicle angle, which is what Superpedestrian is spun into.
How do you define micro vehicles?
These are tiny vehicles that take vertical space. The key thing is you got to take much less space on the road than a car does, but the longer answer it depends on the occupants. We want to make sure that we are able to get a lot more people on the road. There are about 2 billion people that are going to move into cities by 2050. There is no way that these people are moving. Cities are already overbooked so 1.16 people in a car, which is what we do today, like Sedan don't cut it. Think of something else where the utilization is a lot higher, either a tiny vehicle for “1.16 people” or some way to decline transit with these other modes. It's classically called multimodality. Cities have done this for over a century with subways. You walked into the subway. Now we want to extend the reach of these systems or any new modes on either end.
I have a zillion questions about this.
That's one thing about transportation. We've got a lot of work on housing. I work on energy, waste production, and communication. How do communities lay themselves out in space, which touches on the essence of why we come together probably in cities, in the first place? It is to get access the diversity to human capital. There's increasingly work on the intersection between biology and cities because you can learn so much about how we are impacted by a built environment or how it should be better designed by studying, for example, the collective microbiome of communities. It's public health that provides that like the spread of pandemics. It is quite a bit of work on that in the last several years with robots that eat your shit and tell you something about the collective gut. It's been spun off. They started doing well when COVID came around.
I've heard multiple pitches for companies that want to sample sewer systems to figure out where in the city there's COVID or whatever pandemic.
There is this company called Biobot, which we spun of Senseable from the project we called Underworlds. I'm looking at it for a while at Eric Alm’s lab. Well trying to amply signals in the sewer that relate to that.
You said you're on the board, but are you actively doing anything at the lab or you're pretty much busy with the startup?
I am, but much less than intensive. A startup is something you want to put yourself into completely.
Coming at it from a different perspective, at Intellectual Ventures Lab where I was working., we created a group called Institute for Disease Modeling. Essentially, what the team was doing was computational modeling on the spread of disease. Mostly third world stuff, but what happened was we created computational models on things primarily like malaria and big infectious diseases there. When the first Ebola outbreak happened, 12,000 lives were lost. When the second Ebola outbreak happened, twelve lives were lost. In between what happened among other things was we were able to do computational models to optimize the ring vaccination campaigns so that we could quickly contain those outbreaks. That's a two order of magnitude improvement on lives lost. With infectious disease, it could be a pandemic candidate.
A lot of the gains came because we were able to use computers to help us make better decisions. I use that in my mind as an example of how computers with these modern tools, computational models, big data, machine learning, network models, being able to help humans make better decisions about what to do with large complicated problems. Things that our intuition would fail us. That's the rough thesis I have in my head about what's possible. What I imagine is that you have a lot more experience than me with the Senseable Lab going and figuring out for cities. Exactly that because in my mind, in the future, even the near future, we should be able to use these types of tools to help us make better decisions about city planning, transportation, infrastructure like sewer systems, water, power and all those things.
We should be able to make use models to create thousands of possible futures and let us choose which one is the best from that. It seems like that's the work you've been doing for a long time, in some sense. What I want to do is figure out if you have examples from that work to help me substantiate this view, help people see the potential and how we make decisions for situations, where asking an expert isn't going to get you the best answer because we've tapped our tapped out on our potential with that type of decision-making process.
There's plenty of examples. When we started this work, it was a few groups around the world looking at this and there…
playlist_add
Jan 1, 2022
Reimagining Entertainment, Work & Education — Brent Bushnell
Brent Bushnell is one of the most positive people I know. He's created Two Bit Circus to reimagine how the newest developments in computing technology can shape the future of entertainment, work, education and human interaction. Brent grew up in the house that built Atari and has been a lifelong hands-on maker that brings a prototyping mindset to everything he does. Listen in to this candid and eclectic conversation and learn about the mass of possibilities that we can bring into fruition with just a little stretch of our imagination.
Pablos: We’re rolling.
Brent: Have you heard that term from reality shows, frankenbiting where they have a conversation for eight hours, “What do you think of Hitler? What do you think of all this stuff? What do you think of Pablos?” Later they cut those responses together and it is like, “Pablos is the worst person I've ever heard about.”
I've seen for the Joe Rogan podcast people who do that to his show. They're like, “Joe Rogan wants to eradicate Jews.” They clipped together two words snippets to make it sound like that's what he said, but it's such a popular show that people probably count it as clickbait.
It's almost like Machinima, people did with video games in order to be able to tell stories, but the AI side of that and the whole Deepfake thing has me excited from an entertainment perspective.
I was ahead of that one because my view of the entertainment industry for the last decade or so has been that the camera would get replaced with this pile of sensors. You could have a human actor, but the point would be to capture what they do because we're going to render them anyway. We're going to render them at the point of consumption like a video game. The reason for that is you don't know when you're making the film, my native language dialect, the aspect ratio of my screen, my preference for how big the boobs are or whether it's Ferrari's or Lamborghini's and product placement.
It's all going to get rendered at the point of consumption like a video game. The video game is oppression and showing the future of all entertainment and all media. It's interesting because a couple of things happened out of order. We've been making video game rendering better so that we could do real-time rendering equivalent to Pixar. We're getting pretty close to that, but then Deepfakes turbo-charged it because that gives you the ability to imagine making these high-quality renderings out of people who didn't even know. I saw somebody who's trying to make like a James Dean movie starring James Dean, “The legal parts were done with the estate of James Dean. He's going to star in a new movie.”
The guy creating it won't ever leave his room and the rendering bay.
You might still have a human actor because the toolkit for the guy in the room to make the virtual actor expressive is still limited. That's why we still use a human actor because they're a stand-in, but it could be your wife playing James Dean, get a real actor. They have to move and express themselves.
There are certain times where the expression says that the actual mouth forming the syllabus matters less. If they were across the room, all of a sudden you could do synthetic audio and James Dean is pronouncing your names.
The AI to do the synthetic audio are there. With twenty minutes of audio from you, we can make you say anything. We can make you read war and peace falsely and know the Brent Bushnell applications. That's all solved. We're not going to be aiming a camera at the actor's lips for that because we're going to render the actor in speaking whatever language the audience is watching. Get rid of the subtitles, overdubbing and stuff.
I think it's better to get the audio right than their lips matching.
I thought about this a long time for AR and VR. Everybody's fixated on those goggles, but the audio matters.
The 360 is amazing. Some of these proximity audio games, you turn your head.
I don't understand a lot about audio engineering, because one of the fundamental problems you probably run into a bunch that's been described to me in VR is it's been a difficult medium to try and use for narrative, for stories like movies. In a movie, the director controls where the camera is and controls what you see. In VR, you control the camera. The problem is if I'm trying to tell you a story and you're wearing goggles and you look away when I'm trying to, it's like, “There's an explosion. You missed the thing that you need to know. The clue was over here.” There's this problem that makes it difficult because the director in a movie can experience linearly exactly what's going to happen.
You know that they controlled your perspectives. Here's how I have thought a lot about this because we did two-bit. We did a ton of 360 audio and video production. In the early days, in 2012, we built our own 360 cameras, a bunch of GoPros in a 3D printed rig because they weren't the greatest solution. We captured content for the NFL, Olympics and all kinds of stuff. I hate 360 VR.
Is this for this reason or what?
I grew to hate it because of the exact problem you're talking about. You don't know where you're looking. It's presented to you like it's interactive but all you get is to control the camera angle. The rest of it, you're this passive observer. The better solution is much more interactive. Let's go back to the game engine. Now, instead of being the passive observer of this world, I am in the world. I am Harry Potter. Here's the frame. Here's the land that I can explore.” That's the part they missed. If 1,000 years of entertainment was passive. You read a book, watch a movie, looking in on the world, the future for me is all interactive.
What was described to me one time was that video game developers were getting clever because they have had this problem. They may have less narrative, but they still need you to get through the adventure. In video games, I remember hearing that like, “Valve would do these conniving things,” where like if you're on a street and there's a UFO coming down, you need to look up for the thing to happen. It's like waiting for you to look up, but to get you to look up, they would do these subtle things like all the streetlamps would bend and point up. You don't even see that happening, but it creates this feeling that like your eyes are drawn up, which should be out of the frame it initially. There are audio things that they're doing that I don't understand to get you to lookup. How do you make audio? I don't understand how anything could be above you in stereo, but somehow it feels that way.
The one that I wanted for Two Bit was this ambisonics where you set up individually addressable speakers in a three-dimensional grid around the whole room so that you're in there, I'm in there and Ellis is in there. We're all getting exactly how the scene should unfold from our position in the room. I loved that.
Who has that?
It's like a tech stack that is mostly open-source.
Can I set it up in my house?
You can set it up in your house. There's some Linux version, but you need some special hardware.
This became super relevant to me because in March 2020, all the events got shut down. All my jet-setting came to an end. All the things that would have been like speaking at a conference became Zoom calls. It sucked. I could play Pablo's character in front of a webcam, but it was not interactive. It was not very rewarding. I was not making new friends.
It's broadcast. All the beautiful one-on-one personalization died.
I instantly realized, “The whole point of these conferences wasn't to see me on stage after all. It was people hanging out together, having a shared experience, hanging out in the lobby, going to lunch, going to happy hour or going to the after-party.”
You were the clickbait.
I wanted to figure out how to replace that hanging out part. I played with a bunch of different technology. The one that has made the…
playlist_add
Dec 21, 2021
Kids Building Dyson Swarms — Levi Hurt
Probably whatever you were doing with your life as a kid isn't as cool as building a Dyson swarm. 12 year old Levi Hurt has already decided to devote his life to doing so.
Levi is a delightful kid. It will warm your heart to hear his curiosity and excitement about these ideas. Even with my antagonistic questioning, his sense of wonder is infectious.
playlist_add
Sep 11, 2021
Exosomes, Stem Cells, Ketamine & VR — Dr. Melissa Selinger
My friend, Dr. Melissa Selinger is a Doctor of Neuropsychopharmacology who has done actual research on using psychedelics and virtual reality for treating things like depression, anxiety, and PTSD. A huge frontier where there are all kinds of potential, and very little actual scientific research has been done here so far. It's an exciting frontier to be able to help a lot of people who we don't have any real idea how to help otherwise.
I'm super thrilled about that and the potential for it. It's great to get to talk to somebody who knows what state of the art there is. Melissa knows a lot about all kinds of things that I don't know anything about. As you guys know, part of what I love to be able to do is sit down with somebody who has a lot of knowledge and experience in something that I don't know about, pick their brain, try and break it down, see if I can understand it and take you guys along for the ride so that we can all learn.
Carcinogens, teratogens, exosomes, stem cells, cytokines, CRISPR, gene editing, all these are things that we talk about in this conversation. A lot of it is me trying to get her to explain in layman's terms what this stuff is and how it works. There is incredible potential here. If you were ever interested in what's possible in stem cell therapy, you're going to want to learn about exosomes and her experience with that. A couple of biotech startups had some ups and downs in that and learned a lot. I'm thrilled to be sharing our conversation with you. Enjoy this episode.
Pablos: I'm going to explain what I know, which is not very much, and you could tell me if I'm full of shit. Sound good?
Melissa: Yeah.
Human bodies are made up of a bunch of cells, most of which are not actually human. They're like parasites and shit, and microbiome crap and other bacteria are living on your body everywhere. To the extent that there are human cells, the cells are super complex little cities inside. I've seen these microscope photos of all the shit inside of a cell, and it's a lot. It's complex.
Most people like me have a vague notion that there's a cell wall, which makes it like a balloon or a bowl or something, and then on the inside is all these goodies, including DNA, RNA, and other stuff. That's the extent of anybody's general education on this stuff. There are different kinds of cells. There’re bone cells, blood cells, meat cells, and shit.
There's a variety of different cells that do different things. All of them started out as stem cells which were basically blank cells. The thing got written into being whatever they're going to become. You have some of those in an embryo. Over time, as your body is growing, these cells get programmed to be different things. Muscle tissue or brain cells, and then what happens is gamma rays come from space, bombard them, and you get these cell mutations. You end up with all kinds of variations and mutations, and then everybody ends up eventually getting cancer and dying. Is that pretty much the circle of life?
It's fairly accurate. There's a lot of causes of cell mutations.
There’re other causes like nicotine.
A lot of just manufacturing in our environments in general are heavily laden with carcinogenic compounds that was a byproduct of the industrial area. Look at California, for example. Everything is a possible carcinogen.
What does carcinogen mean?
It's a compound that's able to alter the cell's DNA structure in a manner that causes aberrant growth, like a malignant tumor. Essentially, the way that cells operate is they have a terminal point of senescence where they die. With cancer cells, they lose that, and they are able to live continuously.
They don't die like they're supposed to. They just hang around and replicate. I know some people like that. Carcinogen means that it's some chemical that you could ingest or come in contact with that can alter the DNA in a cell.
Also, teratogens, which are birth defect causing chemicals in unborn babies as well.
Those are chemicals that the mother could be exposed to, or that the babies get exposed to, or what?
The mothers got exposed to, and then they cross the placental barrier in vivo.
Not every carcinogen does that, but some subset of them are teratogens?
Some subset of them and then there are various prescription drugs that were used during pregnancy that over time were pulled from the market when they realized that some of them cause pretty severe birth defects.
Some people are attempting to live these carcinogen-free lifestyles.
I don't know if that's possible in America because there's such a heavy amount of it. Food in America is heavily chemical-laden and you have everything from the interior of cars and mass-produced furniture are full of anti-flammable chemicals.
If I sit on a couch, that shit's rubbing off?
It depends on the manufacturer. If you grab a Walmart couch, for example, they have questionable materials and then anything that's synthetic usually has something. If you have a synthetic vinyl couch or anything plastic, you have plasticizers that leach out over time. Water bottles, for example, the plasticizers that enable the plastic to have a bendiness or softness to them, that leaches out into the water, especially with heat or microwave food and plastic containers. The BPA alternatives are not necessarily safer than BPA.
Even with Fiji Water?
I would say pretty much anything bottled in plastic and then shipped in plastic is.
I thought these plastics were FDA approved for holding food?
FDA approval is still wishy-washy and you have FDA-approved artificial colorings, which may or may not be linked to possible disorders.
We've had so much ingestion of artificial coloring, you would think we would know by now.
They say it's something like 99% of Americans test positive for BPA in their blood at any given time.
I think aluminum cans are lined with plastic anyway.
There’s some lining and the cans. You're seeing a lot of times, the “BPA-free lining," but it's still the way that they're manufactured. There's still the joint where it's sealed as a circular cylindrical piece and there are some metals that leach out. It's in almost everything.
It's a losing game and the idea is to try to die before you get sick from ingesting all this crap.
The statistics are something like 1 in 6 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their life. It's a pretty prevalent thing at this point. It's like a when, not an if, kind of thing.
You have a clear understanding of cell biology. Can you explain what a stem cell is?
With stem cells, if you want to start as far back as the fertilized ova, it gets fertilized with sperm, you get the zygote, which becomes this rapidly dividing mass of cells.
That’s what a zygote is?
Yeah.
It's just, “Let's make a bunch of cells.”
At this point, these cells are pluripotent, meaning they can transdifferentiate into all the types of cells in the body. It depends on how far along they're within.
In the beginning, they could be anything.
That's the appeal of using fetal cells for stem cells, but obviously, there are ethical concerns with that. It’s not really used anymore.
We used to harvest fetal stem cells.
There was a period where they were using aborted fetal tissue. Some people are very opposed to that. They passed a law that legalized the use of fetal tissue with the exception of a couple of established lines. There’re few countries where everything is fine. Possibly, you can get away with a lot of stuff in China.
Do you think that there's some important stuff that we're missing in the US by not allowing that?
For sure, but we've turned to other types of tissue. With mass manufacturing, as the regenerative medicine industry is starting to, they've found a way to start to scale up to levels that are able to produce pharmaceutical quantities. In some of the tissues that they're looking at now, they can isolate stem cells from bone marrow, from adipo…
playlist_add
Jul 6, 2021
Sex on Demand for Women — Saundra Pelletier
There's this kind of pattern you can see sometimes, when you dig behind very successful projects, a lot of times there is some woman who is dead set on making it happen. And for a lot of them, she's working behind the scenes and you don't find out until you get real close, what's really going on.
But occasionally you meet these women who are badass leaders that are so dogged that they're going to make something happen by force of will. And I'm always honored to get to meet them. Today we get to spend some time with Saundra Pelletier, the CEO of Evofem Biosciences.
This is a super fascinating company that is dedicated to creating medical and healthcare products for women. You don't find a lot of companies focused on that, which is sad because women are the ones who drive a lot of the healthcare decisions for their entire families. So I don't understand why the market hasn't picked up on that one.
I think you're going to love Saundra. She's created a product at her company called Phexxi. It is the first and only FDA approved, non-hormonal contraceptive gel for women. They can use it anytime on demand whenever they want. This is the kind of product that is really important to change the balance of power and determining who ends up procreating and when. We want that control to be in the hands of everyone, but in the past, a lot of the responsibility has landed on women and, they've been given, in some sense, relatively crude tools to do it. Most women in America at least are using a hormonal contraceptive, which has a lot of additional health side effects.
As Saundra will tell you, she developed late stage breast cancer. She survived through a double mastectomy but the doctors told her the only real reason that she probably had cancer, in the first this place was being on a hormonal birth control for 20 years. Lots of stories like that, that you probably know and have heard with your own friends and family.
So I think this is a very important project. This type of advancement in a technology that changes what humans can do, when they can do it, who has the decision-making power is important. We have a lot of options here where I'm at, but when you look globally at what's happening with contraception in other countries especially in the developing world, there's a lot of social stigmas that affect what women can get away with when they're trying to find contraceptive choices.
Giving them some options is paramount, not just because I would like to see population managed in a more thoughtful fashion. And hopefully create a few less humans that we don't have a plan for, but also to give them the ability to choose when the time is right, who the right partner is, what they want to do, and not have to subject themselves to the entire weight of society's idea about what they should do with their lives. That's important, I believe for humanity as a whole. And so I'm really excited about Phexxi getting some support. Evofem Biosciences is publicly listed. So I certainly don't want to give anybody investment advice, but these are some folks who could really use some help. And if they can get enough support for this company, they'll be able to take Phexxi around the world and that's gonna make a big difference for a lot of people.
I hope that you guys love this very soulful conversation I got to have with Saundra, and I'm thrilled to be sharing her with you.
Pablos: What I'm really excited about here is that I think the things that matter in the world for humans to do is how we're gonna evolve as a species. How we are going to keep going? How are we going to make it possible for more lives to exist? And but also for those lives to thrive in some sense, right? And when you look at what has worked so far in all of human history, it's humans inventing a new technology, bringing it into the world, solving a problem at a bigger scale, and being able to advance the species. That's really how we got where we are and we're not done...we might be done. But we might also be able to effect our fate go forward. And so it is super exciting to me because, one of the biggest problems in the world in some sense is that we went from millions of people on this planet just a couple hundred years ago to billions of people in the last 200 years. 7 billion in 200 years. And we're making a lot of extra people. It's not totally clear that we need them all, but I'm not going to tell you which people are extra. I just think that it might be smart for the species as a whole to figure out if we want to course correct on that a little bit and maybe in the future make a few less. And maybe less but better people would be a goal. But anyway so I know Evofem is...I don't know if you are fixated on contraception. Is that the only thing guys trying to do or want to do, or is that just the main thing where you started?
Saundra: That's the main thing where we started. I will say this to your comment. I just want to tell you this, that not only do I find your opening statement provocative but I actually believe that one of the biggest levers to poverty elimination, as we evolve is for women being able to choose when and if, and how often they have children. Access to contraception that they'll use is a huge poverty eliminator. So yes, contraception is our beginning. But we also are in late stage phase three development for the prevention of chlamydia and the prevention of gonorrhea with the same product. Which by the way, the CDC has said they are on the rise for the sixth year in a row. And gonorrhea, it's an epidemic because it's antibiotic resistant. So we're really leaning into innovation. And that's why it's so cool.
We'll pick this all apart, but just to get the audience up to speed, why don't you describe the product you have
Okay. So the company Evofem Biosciences, the whole platform is innovation for women. And that might sound like great words, but we are delivering. So there has not been innovation in the contraceptive category in two decades. So our product is called Phexxi, not just because it rhymes with sexy which is a nice attribute. So here's it works: it is a gel that comes in a pre-filled applicator. And I know your audience is hearing us, but I'm going to show you. A prescription is a box of 12 pre-filled applicators, and you put it in right before sex or up to an hour before sex. Now women have used tampons.
It's scary to guys.
It might be scary to guys, although I will tell you...
But the guys will get to use it.
Not only that but guys really love the fact that this is very lubricating. So if any woman has vaginal dryness or pain with intercourse. But here's how you see. So 5 mLs in each applicator.
Is that the whole dose?
That's the whole dose.
Okay. So what I'm seeing is like a size of three or four jelly beans worth of gel.
Yep. And you can feel it.
And it just feels like Vaseline or something.
Yeah. And the gel is just so you know, it's lactic acid, it's citric acid and potassium bitartrate. And here's how it works. So a normal vaginal pH is 3.5 to 4.5. When semen enters the pH goes to seven or eight, and a woman gets pregnant. When chlamydia enters and when gonorrhea enters, the pH goes up to seven or eight and a woman gets a sexually transmitted infection.
So what Phexxi does is it is acid buffering. So it helps the vagina just maintain normal vaginal pH inhospitable to semen and inhospitable to STIs.
It keeps it low.
Correct, so there you have Phexxi. So just like men who have had condoms forever. So for example, you could go out with a condom in your pocket and can have safe sex, but women have had to use a hormone every day, every week, every month, year after year. And the side effects...
Doesn't it seem like a lottery winner for the few women who take the pill and don't have a problem?
Yeah. Without question. Want to hear something crazier? I say the worst trick played on women is that most hormones lower your libido. So they'r…
playlist_add
Mar 24, 2021
Diving Deep Into The World Of Computer Hacking & Becoming A Hacker — Riley Eller
One of the things I get asked the most about is questions about how to be a hacker and how to learn hacking skills. And I think there's a few people I know who really epitomized what that's all about, and we've had pretty deep journeys and in their lives and their careers about about computer hacking.
We talk a lot about the mindset of hackers, which is one of the things I'm super interested in and attracted to. I find to be very helpful way of thinking about things. But you know, when we're talking about the technicalities of computer hacking, what that means, it really appeals to a certain kind of person and I think a lot of people just don't know where to start. And so I wanted to share one of the folks that I find inspiring and who I've known for a long time. I think his life and his career sort of epitomizes what a lot of folks are thinking about when they're asking about computer hacking.
And so his name's Riley Eller and Riley's sort of a famous in the hacker community because he used to run the most popular party for hackers called Caesar's challenge. And we'd have this party once a year at DEF CON and only the league got in. Riley has done a great job over the years of figuring out how to get hackers partying, and get us all connecting to each other and making friends with each other.
I think that's a really important and valuable thing for a community of folks who maybe having focused on social skills so much previously. And so Riley's also known for being a member of the ghetto hackers, which was the first team of hackers to win the DEF CON Capture the Flag contest three years in a row.
Then they took it over and ran that contest for a few years and really up the game. This was the notorious, you know hacking contest, cause it was the first big hacking contest. It was the place where that got started. And now of course you have hacking contests all over the world, but capture the flag at Def CON is where it started.
The ghetto hackers were one of the first real teams to take that on and they advanced the game and really turned it into a spectator sport at DEF CON. And it's, it's gone on and evolved since then. We talk about that a bit in this conversation. We go deep into a little bit deep into talking about a wifi mesh networking at a company called CoCo Communications where Riley worked another one of our upcoming guests on the podcast, Jeremy Bruestle who was the founder of that company.
You can listen to that to learn a little more about CoCo, but a lot of those inventions and those technologies are just coming of age now. And so I think it's actually pretty relevant and interesting because mesh networking is one of these things that keeps coming up again and again, and the problems are hard and interesting.
So that's a cool conversation. And then later on, we talk about Caesar's experience as a hacker growing up, how he got into it, what he's learned, what he values about it as well as his ideas for how you can become a hacker. I am really excited to share Riley with you guys. He's made a big impression on me and my life, so I hope you enjoy it.
Pablos: This has been one of the conversations I've had in my mind as being important for the podcast and what I want to do. I've known you for more than twenty years. We have similar progression or timelines in our lives of getting interested in computers, hacking, and ending up in the social dynamic of the hacker community in those days. There's a lot to learn from that. What I want to do with you is talk about some of those experiences early on and how we got into it.
First, let's talk a little bit about what you've been working on professionally because you spent a lot of time on the last company you were at. It was a company started by Jeremy, who was one of the founders, so it was started by hackers. I remember talking to him before he started the company about the ideas for trying to create mesh networks that were ad hoc mesh networks. That was, in those days, one of the hard problems with networking to solve. I'd seen lots of trial and error and lots of difficult problems in that. Jeremy was amazing because he was able to get further than anybody, as far as I could tell, technically. I was always interested in that company, and you and a bunch of other friends end up working there, so can you tell me a little bit about what the progression of that was like?
Riley: Originally, we were doing a Business 2.0 article. Jeremy was explaining on the whiteboard in the Ghetto Hacker workspace how that all worked and I was trying to repeat it back to him to see if I understood his ideas, because it was difficult to grasp with what I knew at the time. There's a photo of him and I talking over that particular moment right before the company was taking off. It was a pivotal moment in my life.
Maybe the first thing to do is describe what the point of that was at that moment because this must have been about 2005, 2006 or something.
No. The company was started in 2002 and I joined in 2003. They had about a year to go around, raise funding, talk about it and get their hands around what the problem was that they were trying to solve. What happened was a whole bunch of families who are proud of the country in Seattle, people with some money to invest, saw the communication failure on 911 as a critical infrastructure defense problem that could be solved commercially. It should be available so people who are busy doing things, running toward emergencies and disasters, will know that they're not going to get cut off from the lifeline and the lifeline for those people is always information. Having that access to information or failing to have that access to information was responsible for about 10% of the deaths that day.
It's not solving all of the world's problems they thought, but it was something that they could focus on, it was narrow. This was about a year after the dot-com crash, so they'd all been gotten used to investing in technology. They saw this problem and they decided to try to get somebody smart and they knew Mark Tucker, who was the CEO. Mark and Jeremy had worked together on a project before, so they brought Jeremy in and he took some initial ideas out of IEEE and what was available at the time and said, “We're going to build the stack of these existing technologies.”
He went around and talked to people who were in the upper echelons of communications, telecommunications, first responder communications, and military comms. He found that there was huge resistance on cost because centralized networks are much cheaper to operate than networks where all the smarts have to be in every device. The more decentralized a network, the more expensive it is, period, because like a smartphone, the phone part of it is low power, tiny little chip. Most of what we call phone now is a lot of other stuff. Adding anything, even communication technology that is constantly running, trying to help other people on demand, all those things that the first responder would need if the central communications went down, each of them is a real challenge.
Jeremy kept pushing on invention after the invention and built a four-tier stack of pieces that would be needed. At the bottom layer, you need to be able to defend against denial of service attacks because that's an easy way to knock down a network like this. It’s to send crappy messages, so we had to have link security and link identity but we needed to provide application communication concerns like police and firefighters have common missions. You may have police and firefighters on the same scene at the same time but they have distinct missions. You can't get the communications crossed up. A firefighter can't misunderstand that shoot comes from a police officer or firefighter. They need to know what their lingo is and their jargon is. They need to use their words their way and not have to double-check who's talking.
We needed to have a sep…
playlist_add
Mar 17, 2021
Into The World Of Genomics And Entrepreneurship — Adina Mangubat
Today we get to hang out with Adina Mangubat, a friend of mine that I know from a salsa dancing, and also hanging out with computer hackers. She's probably the youngest founder that I know. And she's been running her company for almost a decade since starting it in college at age 22 called Spiral Genetics.
It could be considered probably the most advanced bioinformatics technology for population genomics. And what that means is DNA sequencing, massive populations, hundreds of thousands of people, if you can, and then correlating that data to see what can be learned about it. And it's a huge frontier there's so much that can be learned from doing this kind of work.
And Adina is really at the forefront of that. And so it's a really fascinating conversation where she breaks down all that stuff: What it means, what DNA sequencing is about, the potential for bioinformatics, the potential for population genomics etc. So, this is the perfect episode for you. If you don't know anything about it, because I'm asking Adina, a lots of dumb questions, you're going to love it.
She's also a super entrepreneurial and hustler which is very inspiring. Adina has built this company. She actually sold it to a large biotech company and then spun it back out on. And so she's been through a lot as an entrepreneur and we'd talk about that a bunch.
And the other thing about Adina that's super interesting to me is that she's really committed to figuring out how you can create these transparent, high integrity, mission driven cultures in startups and small companies, and that's pioneering work. It is really important and difficult work.
It's unproven. We don't know if it's even going to work, but it's so necessary to figure out how we make better companies. Some people have to be the ones to try that. And so we talk about that and I think there's a lot to learn at the end of this episode. Adina and I talk a little bit about adoption and parenting and I am kind of deep into that, having adopted a child and raised her to age 14, so far seemingly successfully. Adina is kind of early in that cycle. And so if you're interested in that sort of thing at the end, there's a conversation about that. I hope you guys liked this episode and get a lot out of it.
Pablos: You seem to be possibly the youngest Founder/CEO that I know. I know other people who are young. You might not be the youngest now, but when you started, you were the youngest.
Adina: 22? I know some people that are younger.
It's not common. I know people who started younger but they did not succeed at keeping it going for very long. You started at 22 and you're still at it, which means you're tenacious.
Maybe also stupid or crazy or all three.
I'm curious about that. First, I want to know how that happened for you. I don’t know if the track you're on now is what you had planned. When you were a child, were your parents trying to convince you to be an entrepreneur?
No, definitely not. My family had planned on helping me out with grad school if I wanted to do that. I was like, “I don't want to do that. I want to start this company instead.” My dad wrote me a tiny check and he slid it across the table. He's like, “This is going to be the hardest and most educational year of your life.” I was like, “Really?” He was like, “Yes.” My mom was supportive but worried. She would call me every couple of weeks and be like, “How's it going? Are you thinking about applying for a normal job?” After a while, she figured out this was clearly not a phase and that I was going to be okay.
I gathered later that the reason why she kept on asking is because she had started a company when she was young. She ran up a CPR business, a training business, and trained a bunch of the Secret Service. Back then, she had connections and you could roll up to the White House at midnight and be like, “Can I get a tour?” They would be like, “Yes.” She'd had to go through the entire process of starting a company back then. She knew that it was going to be hard.
Were they right?
Yes, it's hard.
Do you think that you believe them or you didn't believe them?
I didn't. The blessing and the curse of being a newbie is that you're so naive that you don't know what you don't know. If I knew everything that I know now if I were given the option of starting this particular company, I don't know. I wonder about if I move on to another company someday...
If you'd have the guts to take it on?
It's a big one. I'm clear that I have a reasonable business acumen. There are a lot of other companies that I could start that would be easy by comparison like stuff that is not this complicated. I have fantasies about easy companies. The reality is that I get bored after running a festival earrings company or something like that. That's an idea that has been sitting around for a long time.
One of the things that's missing in our vernacular is a way of describing the difference between entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship because you could start a Taco Wagon or a festival earrings company or something that will be entrepreneurship but it's something that's been done before.
There might even be more fine-grain definitions because I think that we have something to describe that there are “lifestyle businesses,” which is the Taco Wagon or the festival earrings company or whatever where the intention is to build a company that is going to feed your lifestyle and be fun generally. There's then tech entrepreneurship, and it's tech entrepreneurship of stuff that is hard but not bonkers hard. If you want to make enterprise software or a Fitbit device but for your animals or your pets, things like that. Things where you're basically you're taking off the shelf technology and you're retooling it to a particular vertical or something. You're doing some innovation but it's not hard and never ever been seen before innovation.
I call the hard stuff deep tech now. All that other stuff, I call it shallow tech. If it's iPhone apps or enterprise software or modified Fitbit's, shallow tech. I don't know if that's going to stick but that's how I'm thinking about it.
It's unlikely because a lot of people feel like, “My tech isn't shallow.”
It's revolutionary and it's sprinkled with blockchain. You went to college and you finished college.
It’s nothing related to this. I got my degree in Psychology with a focus on Bio Psych.
Do you feel like you know about the brains of people?
I do. At the time people were like, “What on earth are you going to do with that?” It turns out that a lot of things in life have a lot to do with humans that have brains. Understanding how humans work and how they tick and all of that stuff is ridiculously useful.
That's why I like computers. I just reboot them if things go wrong. They mystify me. You finished college for your parents. Was that here?
Yes, at UDub.
The plan was like, “I’ve got to find something to do and I don't want a job.” How did you end up deciding to start a company?
I'd been involved in two companies while I was in college as an intern. One was a smart grid company that was looking at like, “How can you optimize the usage of energy that come from green sources like wind energy.” Essentially, it was how can we use big buildings as batteries? If you know that the wind energy is spiking at a particular moment, you can overheat or over-cool your building a little bit. If it's a large enough building so you can use that.
Did it seem it would work?
It seemed it would work. They had a good run but didn't end up making it in the end. It turns out that the tech for building control is ancient and terrible. When you're trying to integrate with that, that's more complicated and there were a variety of reasons. I was involved in that company. I did a bunch of marketing related stuff for them, initial business strategy sales.
How big was the company at the time?
Seven people, maybe.…
playlist_add
Mar 10, 2021
Video Games: Optimized Learning Environments — David Edery
David Edery is a buddy of mine who I think you guys are really going to love. Dave is one of the co-founders he's the CEO of Spry Fox, which is a unique game development studio here. They're based here in Seattle, but they have people spread out. They made Alphabear, Steambirds, Triple Town, and Realm of the Mad God.
These are games that all together have 50 to a hundred million people playing them worldwide. Dave is a very successful game developer making really delightful games. They're trying to make the world a happier place. You should definitely play their games on your phone. Dave used to work at Microsoft and and he wrote a book about transforming business with what can be learned from video games. The book is called Changing the Game. I think even now a lot of those lessons can be super relevant.
I think of games as like the future of almost every industry. Video games are an industry where there's a lot of competitive dynamics. Unlike almost everything else, no one's paying you to play a game. If you get bored, you'll quit. And nobody wants to read a manual to play a game or take a class to play a game.
So the games have to teach you how to interact with them. And there's so many things that can be done with video games. I've seen so many other industries learn from games. We also talk about the capacity of games to be used for education and learning.
I'm really interested in that topic and have thought a lot about it over the years. Dave is a guy that you would want to talk to about that. He also has a really unique culture in his company that he's tried to create. As well as a really unique view of developing culture in online communities. He has a lot of experience with this.
I think anybody in the game industry knows Dave by now because he's also involved in creating a community out of game developers. There's a lot to learn here and I'm hoping that you guys really enjoy this episode.
Pablos: I have a zillion questions for you. This is going to be fun for me. At this point, you had a super interesting and maybe not extremely long but long career in building video game companies. Video games are the glue or something that connects a whole bunch of people to computers, computation, coding and all this stuff. People don't realize how responsible they are for scaling the interest in personal computers. That's important because it attracted a lot of people, money, investment and even things we take for granted, especially like the obvious ones like GPU's are almost entirely made possible by the demand from the video game industry.
To some extent, ramping up the scale, reducing costs on hardware, all the things that exist in the CAD industry, for example, for making 3D models and designing stuff on computers, that industry can pay $10,000 or $20,000 for a workstation that's top of the line and super-fast to render models. They don't have economies of scale. They're never going to get the custom hardware they would want. They're never going to get the price down to the point where a lot of people could use it, but video games did that for everybody. The industry itself is the first entertainment-related industry that got computers connected up to real people.
David: I don't think it's a coincidence that when you look at systems that are being put in place to teach kids how to program, a lot of them have a big focus on, “You can make a game this way.”
Even when I was a kid, we didn't quite have video games or the ability to make them, but we had things like logos, which was like, “You can make this thing move on screen like a video game.” It’s trying to make it accessible. Now that is how kids learn. The starter drug for coding is Minecraft mods or making a game from scratch. It's an important part of the history of personal computers. You probably know better than me, but my understanding is that the scale of the video game industry is bigger than movies, TV, music and books combined.
They include hardware sales in that. I'm pretty sure that includes the sales of the console themselves and stuff, but still it's a lot.
You wouldn't count the cost of your television and the cost of the TV industry.
We're not including that either. We're all sharing the TV. They're including the stats for the Xbox and the PS4. Even if you take that stuff out at this point, I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if we're beating movie revenue even with the hardware taken out.
That seems pretty easy to substantiate. It’s a massive industry and super influential, and has gotten past high school nerds.
Something like 99% of kids under the age of eighteen play games.
A lot of middle American housewives.
They don't count themselves as gamers, but then you ask them, “Have you ever played Candy Crush?” They’d be like, “I play it all the time.” There you go.
Apparently, that's a significant market too, casual games, all the PopCap stuff.
Unfortunately, PopCap is not a big player anymore, but there are various Saga S games. It's a huge market.
Maybe another way of thinking about is like who's least likely to be interested in any video games?
The least likely will be someone like the elderly. The older you are, the less likely you are, to some extent. There are plenty of older people who are playing solitaire or whatever, it's how they pass the time. Even for them, it's an unfair generalization. First of all, people who didn't grow up with games tend to be less interested. It's not a thing. They're like, “This game thing, what's that?” That's a stereotype, but that applies to a bunch of people.
Additionally, even if you did grow up with games, and this is funny, it's even happening to me. I loved the damn things. As people get busy with work, children and stuff like that, they start to be like, “I don't have time for this.” They'll push most games aside. What's interesting is they don't push them all aside. They'll still have that one game on their phone that they pull out of their pocket when they're stuck in a line.
It's different contexts. The point I was trying to get my head around the industry because there's a lot of other industries related to computers that are not nearly as fun, accessible, compelling or something to people in general, but video games are the biggest that go everywhere. It'd be interesting to know how you found your way into this industry.
I grew up playing games. I loved them.
Your parents didn't suggest, “You should be a doctor, a lawyer or a video game developer.”
I got into medical school and then decided not to go and break my dad's heart.
You have parents that want you to be a doctor. Why is that? My parents aren't doctors and they didn't specifically try to get me to be a doctor. I have no interest in it whatsoever. The doctors I know are some of the most abused people on earth. I don’t know why anybody would want that job, but people who have it seemed all want their kids to be doctors. What's going on there?
I can't speak to anyone else's experience. For mine, it was very simple. My dad has this very strong belief that is based in part from growing up without very much. He used to say it all the time. He'd say, “They can't take away your degree.” Doctors will always make money. They will always be in demand. He would hammer that into me over and over again.
You grew up at a time where employment options were slammed and you had to dedicate yourself to being employable.
Bear in mind, he didn't grow up in the United States. He grew up in Colombia, South America so even more so.
It's a higher reliability career.
Shortly after graduating from medical school, there was a requirement at the time that you would have to travel around the country doing national service. He has stories of like, “I was riding a donkey to this isolated town or whatever.” He would tell me. He'd be like, “Everyone is happy to see the doctor.” You’d have instant respect an…
playlist_add
Jan 22, 2021
Building the Right Thing at the Right Time – Jeremy Bornstein
One of the things I really like to be able to do is go track down some of the friends that I've made over the years who have grown up with technology and grew up with computers as kids hackers, computer programmers, people who eventually became engineers and just pick apart their experience.
A lot of us had similar experiences and I think there's a lot that can be learned from that. And sometimes it's just learning that there are parallel experiences that led us into very technical careers. But but also I think it is important to look for the things that worked like what were the things in our backgrounds that got us good at something? And what is it that turned us into hackers and what is it that made us learn to think differently? And so anyway, today we have Jeremy Bornstein who is one of my all time favorite people. I had the good fortune of meeting Jeremy training Aikido back in the nineties.
We were training with with Frank Doran, who at the time, was one of the senior Aikido…
playlist_add
Jan 22, 2021
Unboxing the Crypto Toolkit – Ben Laurie
Hey guys, today we get to hang out with Ben Laurie who is one of my all time favorite geeks. You're running code right now that Ben wrote. He built ApacheSSL, which is probably like half of the web servers on the internet that are secure running that code. He maintains OpenSSL, which is in everything else.
Ben is one of the few folks who's a true coder and cryptographer. And there are very few people who really understand both sides of that and what it really means to write secure code and how hard that is. So if you're interested in hacking, if you're interested in computer security, if you're just a coder of any description this episode is absolutely for you.
Beyond that, our conversation goes deep into the philosophy behind cryptocurrency. Ben has pretty counter views on Bitcoin to all the currency speculators out there. There are super interesting to hear. And if you want to learn about how to think about the crypto toolkit and what's possible there I highly recommend spending ti…
playlist_add
Jan 22, 2021
The Future of Modern Photography – Steven Sebring
Steven Sebring is an artist, photographer & inventor. This is a guy who's invented new technology and advanced the art of photography with the tools that he's built in a world-class fashion. By his own admission, he is not a technical guy, but when you see what he's built, you're going to be blown away.
There's nothing else in the world like it. There's a lot of work going on to develop new kinds of capture systems for virtual reality that work in 360° environments.
Steven came at it from a completely different angle and came up with a completely different solution. He is putting out the most incredible content that works in 3D and in virtual reality on the planet. No one's paralleled what he's doing as far as I've seen. You really want to understand Steven and his thought process, and that's really what we're getting into in this episode.
I want you to be able to see how an inventor thinks when they're trying to solve a problem that they understand. We have a lot of situations…
playlist_add
Jan 22, 2021
Can Robots be Artists? — Hod Lipson
Today, I spent some time with Hod Lipson who is a professor at Columbia University. In fact, we recorded this episode right out in front of the university with crying babies going by and kids playing in the park. So it's a little noisy, but I've been inspired by Hod for a long time, because he's another inventor that worked on 3D printing early on. He is at the forefront of what we've been able to do with computers. That's the kind of thing I'm always really interested in.
He was actually inventing 3D printing at the same time I was, a long time ago. We get to have a conversation about that...both of us were probably the two people who worked on inventing 3D printers for food. And Hod has since gone on to do a really cool side project trying to create a robot artist and it's called Pix18. It's not like any other creative robot that you've seen or heard about. Honestly, this is a difficult thing to get your head around: can a robot be creative? And that's hard for humans to accept.…
playlist_add
Jan 22, 2021
Hot Seat: Pablos Interviewed by Bill Scannell
This is an unusual episode where my old buddy Bill Scannell actually interviews me. Mostly this is a way for people who don't know me very well to get a sense of who I am and how I think and where I come from. A lot of it's really about my philosophy and what informs that. Bill does a lot to try and tie that back to how I grew up in Alaska, which may or may not be as relevant as it seems. We don't really talk too much about projects I've worked on, this is just a conversation between friends about, you know, the background, behind a lot of a lot of what I've worked on and the things that matter to me, so I hope you really like it.
Bill Scannell is actually one of the most interesting people I know. I met him probably almost 20 years ago at at Cypherpunks meetings. Bill was a spook in the Cold War. He was stationed in Army Intelligence in Eastern Europe doing surveillance and then after that, ended up becoming a war zone journalist and has lived through like seven civil wars with bul…
playlist_add