The Physics Behind Fusion’s Biggest Problem (Season Finale) (EP. 20)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this Season Finale closes out Season 1 with a deep dive into the physics behind fusion’s biggest bottleneck: fast magnetic reconnection. We unpack why classic models predicted reconnection should be slow, why nature (and tokamaks) disagree, and how modern “plasmoid” reconnection helps explain solar flares, plasma instabilities, and the real engineering challenges fusion reactors face. Then we run a full Season 1 recap — our favorite episodes, biggest scientific moments, and the corrections and lessons we’re taking into Season 2. Summary Fusion’s biggest problem — magnetic reconnection, why the Sweet–Parker model breaks down at scale, and how plasmoid instability enables fast reconnection. From the Sun to tokamaks — how reconnection drives solar flares, space weather, and plasma confinement limits in fusion devices. Season 1 leaderboard — our top episodes and the breakthroughs that stuck: astronomy, biology, AI, quantum, and the history of science. Corrections + what’s next — what we fixed, what we learned, and how Season 2 evolves the format.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello, hola, guten tag and konichi waguan, internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We are in our recap episode for 2025, episode 20. It's been an incredible year. How are you, my friend?

• 0:24Krishna Choudhary?

  The season finale.

• 0:25Lester Nare?

  Season finale, season one.

• 0:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 0:27Lester Nare?

  There will be no cliffhangers on this episode.

• 0:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 0:31Lester Nare?

  Uh, but we are going to do a great recap of our top five. Each of us is gonna have our top five episodes, or stories, rather, of the year. And we'll do one interesting thing at the beginning, but I want to just quickly, I mean, we started this in July.

• 0:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Lester Nare?

  End of June. And I just can't believe how much people love science.

• 0:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, it's been like really nice seeing the amount of support that we've been getting, the amount of traction that we've been getting on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, Apple. I mean, on Spotify, we were making the charts according to our creator.

• 1:15Lester Nare?

  Uh, wrapped, yeah. So this is an important note. Shout out to everyone who's watched us on video or listened to us on Spotify because we got a 2025 instant hit award. Uh, which means we were one of the few shows this year on Spotify that obviously was an instant hit.

• 1:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37Lester Nare?

  Which is a huge deal.

• 1:38Krishna Choudhary?

  And we're in the top 2% of comments, top 2% of shares.

• 1:43Lester Nare?

  It's great. It's just really incredible. It's, and it all comes from the audience and we're extremely grateful. You, you all are what enable us to continue to do this.

• 1:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Lester Nare?

  What I will say is, if you haven't already, Follow from First Principles on YouTube. Hit that subscribe button, like some stuff. The algorithms that the billionaires control are what allow us to get our science content to more people. We don't make the rules, don't hate the play, I hate the game.

• 2:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Lester Nare?

  So I don't like asking for the subscribe button, but YouTube is huge. And it's where we've been struggling to get as much reach as we see on Instagram.

• 2:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 2:24Lester Nare?

  TikTok and other platforms. So if you do have a YouTube and you want to watch it there, that would be super, super helpful. But I was really surprised that Instagram has been our most popular platform.

• 2:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that one's crazy. We're reaching almost 60K right now.

• 2:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:39Krishna Choudhary?

  As of the recording of this episode.

• 2:41Lester Nare?

  We're gonna have one of our story videos is gonna hit a million in the next. By the time this episode comes out.

• 2:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Lester Nare?

  The story about the.

• 2:49Krishna Choudhary?

  The whales?

• 2:49Lester Nare?

  The whales is gonna be over a million. That'll be our first video anywhere.

• 2:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that'll be great.

• 2:55Lester Nare?

  Over a million views. So we're gonna go ahead and get started with the episode shortly. But before we get into our recap, we're gonna start with some unfortunate news that just happened.

• 3:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Lester Nare?

  I think literally yesterday.

• 3:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Lester Nare?

  The unfortunate passing of Professor Nuno Larrero, who was the director of the MIT Plasma Science Infusion Center.

• 3:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Lester Nare?

  Since 2024, is also just a giant in plasma physics generally.

• 3:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Lester Nare?

  Really bizarre. It's been a really weird week for.

• 3:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Lester Nare?

  With the Brown University issue, this one.

• 3:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And this was also a result of gun violence.

• 3:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 3:34Krishna Choudhary?

  It's just insane.

• 3:36Lester Nare?

  Right. And so we will start with a brief retrospective on Nuno. And then we'll get into our recap. And as always, we're gonna be focused on the science.

• 3:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Lester Nare?

  Because this is from First Principles.

• 4:06Krishna Choudhary?

  So Professor Nuno F. G. Lurero,

• 4:12Krishna Choudhary?

  he recently died, as recently as yesterday, according to the taping of this episode. He was the director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Very unfortunate. The entire community, the scientific community in Cambridge is reeling from this loss.

• 4:27Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And I thought the best way that we can pay homage to a scientist like that is just to focus on his scientific career and some of the great seminal work that he has done in the field of plasma physics. Right? I can't comment too much on what happened, other than really, this guy was an incredible scientist, an incredible thinker, and apart from even a science, an incredible educator, and someone that sort of cultivated students and the community to do science. So he seemed like a really incredible guy.

• 5:08Krishna Choudhary?

  He really revolutionized our understanding of plasma physics, specifically this problem of magnetic reconnection, which is what we're gonna go over. We're gonna go over his seminal paper, the one that made him famous. And then we're gonna go over the work that he was doing currently before his untimely death. Okay? And the focus is gonna be on that seminal paper, and then what he's been doing.

• 5:32Lester Nare?

  Since.

• 5:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Recently, yeah.

• 5:33Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 5:34Krishna Choudhary?

  He's been doing a lot, but we're gonna focus on really just two aspects.

• 5:37Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 5:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So it's gonna be a deep dive into plasma physics, which I'm pretty excited about.

• 5:43Lester Nare?

  Look, you know, we love, the deep dives, the comments have told us.

• 5:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they like the deep dives, and it's gonna get technical, but I'm gonna walk you through it, okay?

• 5:54Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 5:54Krishna Choudhary?

  And hopefully, we can bring everyone along. So plasma physics.

• 5:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Plasma is like more than 90% of the observable universe, the stuff that gives off light. Okay? Not on Earth. On Earth, most of the stuff is not plasma. But plasma is effectively, when you get so high temperature and so high energy, that the electrons leave the atoms.

• 6:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 6:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? You're at such an energy scale where it's just, it's fine if the electrons just go out on their own, and you get this kind of ionized gas where...

• 6:28Krishna Choudhary?

  The gas itself is charged and there's no neutral atoms anymore. Okay, that's the stuff that's inside the sun. That's the stuff that's in the interstellar medium. And again, more than 90% of the visible universe is plasma. When we look out into the night sky, we're seeing stars. Most of that stuff is plasma. Okay, when we look at the sun, most of that stuff is plasma. Okay. And it's governed by the interaction of fluid and electromagnetic fields. This is what's very interesting about plasma physics is the mathematics becomes immediately non-trivial.

• 7:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's like extremely hard because fluids by itself is a very hard thing.

• 7:17Lester Nare?

  Which we've discussed, for example, just like simulating fluid dynamics is extremely difficult.

• 7:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Is extremely difficult, like the Navier-Stokes equation with neutral atoms is a millennium problem. It's one of those seven problems, well now six, that have been unsolved, that you get a million dollars if you solve it, which is, do the Navier-Stokes equations have an analytic solution for any given geometry? Okay, nobody knows. We don't know.

• 7:43Lester Nare?

  We don't know.

• 7:44Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's for neutral atoms. Now imagine a fluid where you don't have to just worry about the particles bumping into each other and viscosity and all this stuff. You also have to worry about the fact that these particles have charge. And so they're creating electric fields because any charged particle creates electric fields. But also they're moving, so that's creating magnetic fields. And then those magnetic fields are going to affect the other charged particles around, which are going to affect the other charged particles around. So you have this entirely nonlinear process, right? That's happening and it's incredibly difficult. This is why it's very hard to make fusion happen. Fission is very easy. We have fission reactors.

• 8:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:23Krishna Choudhary?

  All of the nuclear power that we think about is from fission, which is the splitting of atoms. That's a nuclear energy that we're harnessing to create electricity.

• 8:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:33Krishna Choudhary?

  The holy grail would be fusion, right? Fusion power, because then we could just use hydrogen instead of trying to find like uranium and all this other crazy rare earth stuff. Hydrogen is just in water. We just find hydrogen, we could purify deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen. We'd combine them together and basically replicate the sun. You know, this is the dream.

• 8:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 8:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Replicate the sun in a building and that just feeds us electricity.

• 8:59Lester Nare?

  We're trying to replicate the sun locally.

• 9:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it would be dope. It would be, it would be what Dr. Octopus wanted to do.

• 9:06Lester Nare?

  Ah, Doc Ock.

• 9:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Before he went crazy.

• 9:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:08Krishna Choudhary?

  In Spider-Man 2.

• 9:10Lester Nare?

  Spider-Man 2?

• 9:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Spider-Man 2, right?

• 9:12Lester Nare?

  Great movie.

• 9:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a great movie. Those were the original, right?

• 9:15Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 9:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and this interaction between the electric fields and the fluids is what is described by magneto hydrodynamics. Okay, magneto because there's magnetism involved, the fact that charged particles are moving around. They create a magnetic field and hydrodynamics because it's a fluid of charged particles, right? So you're combining the Maxwell's equations with the Navier-Stokes equations in some sense to create this really complicated physics.

• 9:47Lester Nare?

  There's, there's so many, there are multiple layers of dynamics, dynamic things happening at the same time.

• 9:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Lester Nare?

  And to be able to have an understanding, you need to be able to model all those dynamic layers.

• 10:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Lester Nare?

  And how they change over time.

• 10:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and each little thing is affecting the other thing, right? So you can't really make, a lot of, a lot of the times in physics, we like to be like, eh, in this regime, this, we don't have to worry about this. In this regime, we don't have to worry about this. Well, in plasma, you gotta worry about everything.

• 10:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so it's incredibly difficult to make sense of what is going on, which is why the problem of fusion containment in these reactors is so hard, right?

• 10:29Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 10:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and the governing equation for the magnetic field in a plasma is this, which is a pretty, a pretty daunting equation, okay? On the left-hand side, you have db dt, which is the time change, how, how the magnetic field changes with time. And then you've got two terms. You've got del cross v cross b, which is, that's, that's what we would call the advection term, okay? It's basically velocity.

• 10:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Velocity perpendicular with magnetic field is going to give you some kind of force. And then the, the, how that force curls around is going to tell you how the magnetic field. So there's like all these vectors that are going in, right? And then, so, but, but at the end of the day, that magnetic field is actually going parallel with the velocity of those particles because there's two cross products. This is something that people would, um, vector calculus knowledge would know, right? If you have two cross products, then actually you're just going in the same direction. Um, and then the second term there, nu over mu naught, del squared B, that looks like a heat equation. Okay. And that is your diffusion term.

• 11:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Basically, you know, if you have a hot, if you have a metal rod and you heat up one part of the metal rod, the heat is going to diffuse

• 11:45Lester Nare?

  Across.

• 11:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Across that metal rod, right? And the magnetic field in these plasmas does the same thing. If you've got a lot of magnetic field here, it's going to sort of diffuse and the magnetic field lines are going to diffuse out.

• 11:56Lester Nare?

  So the, the propagation of the magnetic field kind of looks similar to the propagation of heat.

• 12:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Of heat.

• 12:01Lester Nare?

  From a mathematical.

• 12:03Krishna Choudhary?

  From a mathematical perspective, but there's those two terms, right? There's the diffusion term, which is that heat kind of term.

• 12:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 12:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And then there's the, um, advection term, which is the magnetic field moving in line with the charged particles. Because you've got that double dot, um, cross product. So when a plasma is a perfect conductor, in that equation, there was this nu, right? Which is the conductivity.

• 12:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 12:29Krishna Choudhary?

  If, if a plasma is perfect, then the, the, the conductivity is just like amazing. There's no resistance.

• 12:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And in that case, we don't have to worry about that, that second term.

• 12:42Lester Nare?

  The, the, the, the heat looking thing.

• 12:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. The heat looking thing is because it's just going to like go.

• 12:46Lester Nare?

  Go. Yeah.

• 12:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Yeah. So, so we don't have to worry about that. And then we get something called the flow frozen influx theorem. Basically what this means is that the magnetic field lines don't actually like diffuse out. They get locked in place in with these plasma particles. So on the left, you see straight lines.

• 13:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:04Krishna Choudhary?

  And then as the plasma particles move around, the magnetic field lines move around with them.

• 13:09Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 13:09Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 13:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And. The the field lines don't break, they don't cross, they don't like change their connectivity. And in in some sense, like topologically, they're they're preserving this mathematics across those scales.

• 13:24Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 13:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so that would be really great.

• 13:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:27Krishna Choudhary?

  If that's what plasma did.

• 13:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And we didn't have to worry about one of the terms in the equation. It's still difficult, but you know, at least there's.

• 13:34Lester Nare?

  It's incrementally less difficult.

• 13:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's incrementally less difficult, right? Like, at least the the flux is frozen into the plasma, right?

• 13:41Lester Nare?

  Okay, so that's that's that frozen flux theorem.

• 13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Lester Nare?

  As a means by which to try to

• 13:49Lester Nare?

  calculate and understand magnetohydrodynamics.

• 13:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, it would be like it likes a great approximation if we could do it.

• 13:57Lester Nare?

  Not dissimilar to the approximation we do with the the Stokes equation.

• 14:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah, like like in terms of we can't really model.

• 14:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 14:04Lester Nare?

  Exactly, and so we need some kind of approximation.

• 14:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yeah, so so maybe maybe like certain geometries we can like, you know, and obviously it works.

• 14:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, like Formula One teams use the Navier-Stokes equation to figure out how their car is going to.

• 14:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Do on a certain track, right? So obviously it works, but then you get to really high magnetic fields like near the sun.

• 14:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Or inside of a Tokamak.

• 14:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you're like.

• 14:31Lester Nare?

  Ah, doesn't quite work.

• 14:32Krishna Choudhary?

  It doesn't quite work.

• 14:33Lester Nare?

  I I will, what's funny, I the two videos, two movies I watched on my flight back from North Carolina.

• 14:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Lester Nare?

  Two days ago was the F1 movie, which he had recommended. Quite good, could have done without the love story, but that's.

• 14:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 14:47Lester Nare?

  And then Tenet, which talked about Tokamaks and nuclear, because they're basically, long story short.

• 14:54Krishna Choudhary?

  I haven't seen that one.

• 14:55Lester Nare?

  There was a there was a nuclear nexus, so it's funny that both things.

• 14:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Are are now being applied here to this one, yeah. So, real plasmas.

• 15:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:06Krishna Choudhary?

  We've got finite resistivity, because obviously like zero resistivity is not a thing.

• 15:11Lester Nare?

  It's not a thing.

• 15:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, unless you're a superconductor, but at this heat, you're not gonna be a superconductor, right?

• 15:17Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so the resistivity means that this magnetic field, that second term, you're gonna have this diffusion of the magnetic field, right? And that violation of the ideal magnetohydrodynamics is no longer something that we're gonna do. And what you end up getting is something called current sheets. Because wherever you have these magnetic fields and they crisscross, and you go from, let's say, magnetic field going one way to magnetic field going the other way, you're gonna get these current sheets. Over here, what you're seeing is the magnetic, the current sheets around the sun. So in the center there, that's the sun. And then you can see the orbits of the inner planets and the orbit of Jupiter on the outside there.

• 15:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:55Krishna Choudhary?

  That sheet, it looks kind of like a flamingo dancer when, when, when they twirl, right? And the skirt like moves around in a certain way.

• 16:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That sheet is the border between where the magnetic field points towards the sun and where the magnetic field points away from the sun.

• 16:11Lester Nare?

  Interesting, okay.

• 16:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 16:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Because imagine, if you have a magnetic field going this way and a magnetic field going this way, you gotta pass through zero.

• 16:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 16:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Because you gotta, you gotta do this.

• 16:20Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:21Krishna Choudhary?

  And if it's in a small enough space, you have a very high gradient. You have a very high change in the magnetic field. And so the current is gonna sort of collapse in that, in that plane.

• 16:32Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so you get these current sheets. This is just a direct consequence of Maxwell's equations.

• 16:37Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 16:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So this is, again, just fundamental electrodynamics. So, so that's the heliocentric current sheet. And, you know, at, at, where the earth is, that current sheet is like very small.

• 16:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Very small in magnitude, unless you get like these mag, massive coronal mass ejections and then, and then it destroys our electricity grid.

• 16:55Lester Nare?

  Every time I log on, onto Twitter, AKA X.

• 17:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Lester Nare?

  Someone is, oh, the, the, the, this is the one.

• 17:04Krishna Choudhary?

  It's happening.

• 17:04Lester Nare?

  This is the one that's gonna wipe everything out on me.

• 17:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, it never has. I mean, no, we've had some pretty bad ones.

• 17:11Lester Nare?

  Yeah, and look, let's knock on wood. It's a thing.

• 17:15Krishna Choudhary?

  It is a thing. Yeah. So with this current sheet, right?

• 17:18Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 17:18Krishna Choudhary?

  That, what's happening is that diffusive term is competing with that heat convective term, right? And what ends up happening is, in the mathematics, what you really care about is the ratio between these two competing forces.

• 17:34Lester Nare?

  Which is the first part of that equation with the double cross.

• 17:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Lester Nare?

  And then the thing that looked like.

• 17:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Looked like the heat equation. Yes, exactly. And what you want to do is look at the ratio between these two, okay? This is called a Lundquist number.

• 17:47Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 17:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And at low Lundquist number, you're gonna get a place where resistivity dominates. And at high Lundquist number, you get that frozen in, you only care about that first term. And these are the different typical Lundquist numbers. So for lab plasmas or something inside of Talkamac, you're looking at 10 to the 3 to 10 to the 10. But something like the solar corona, where you have massive scales, you're looking at like 10 to the 12, 10 to the 14, right? So you have this massive scale difference that you want your physics to work at.

• 18:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:19Krishna Choudhary?

  And this is always tough.

• 18:21Lester Nare?

  I get you.

• 18:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 18:22Lester Nare?

  The point is, the map that we're trying to fill in is really large.

• 18:28Krishna Choudhary?

  It's really large. You're going from 10 to the 3 to 10 to the 13. 10 orders of magnitude, right?

• 18:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Krishna Choudhary?

  You're going 10 orders of magnitude, and you're trying to say that the same physics works for everything.

• 18:39Lester Nare?

  Right. And the point is that obviously that's.

• 18:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Obviously, that's not the case.

• 18:43Lester Nare?

  Especially if you watched our hypersonics episode, where we talked about how supersonic and hypersonic,

• 18:51Lester Nare?

  which is much smaller scales.

• 18:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Lester Nare?

  It doesn't.

• 18:54Krishna Choudhary?

  It doesn't work.

• 18:55Lester Nare?

  It doesn't work.

• 18:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Because then you gotta, you gotta worry about random stuff.

• 18:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 18:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that's what ends up happening here. So before Nuno came along, okay?

• 19:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Before he came along, there was something called the Sweet Parker model. This was in the late 1950s. And what they wanted to do was model how these current sheets work. What ended up happening was if you've got, you know, a magnetic field going in one direction and a magnetic field going in the other direction, you've got this massive magnetic field gradient.

• 19:25Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:26Krishna Choudhary?

  What's going to end up happening is there's going to be current that goes into that interface and then it's going to get shot out because of the continuity equation.

• 19:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Continuity equation being stuff that comes in needs to go out, right? And so if the stuff is coming in in this direction, it needs to shoot out in that direction, right? And the idea was that this was a kind of way of figuring out how plasma works at all of the scales. Okay? It was something that they made a bunch of assumptions, but they created an analytic solution of it in the 19, late 1950s. And that reconnection of the magnetic field going in one direction and the other direction, the lines are going to crisscross and they could actually calculate a time scale that that would happen.

• 20:14Lester Nare?

  Uh, yeah.

• 20:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. So now we've got an observable. You've done a theory, but a theory is only good as long as you've got an observable.

• 20:21Lester Nare?

  Cause then you can go into experiment, into experiments, create experimental designs that then would show that that theory is reproducible.

• 20:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 20:30Lester Nare?

  You know, in an observable context.

• 20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Right? And so we've got, we've got these observables, right? And these sheets, these Sweet Parker sheets, what they're saying is, you know, at something like the sun, near the sun.

• 20:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Where you've got a magnetic field line going in one direction and then it comes back in the other direction. So you do have these crisscrosses.

• 20:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:48Krishna Choudhary?

  I can see that happening.

• 20:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Those sheets are happening at a certain Lundquist number. And so I can calculate how long it would take for that sheet to stay alive in some sense. Okay? And what they calculate is it should stay alive for a few months.

• 21:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 21:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Maybe a few years.

• 21:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 21:10Krishna Choudhary?

  That is very wrong.

• 21:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. Observations show that it doesn't take months or years. It takes hours, minutes for a solar flare. In Tokamak, it'll take milliseconds.

• 21:25Lester Nare?

  I was gonna say, because if it's so at a solar flare.

• 21:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Solar flare, we've seen those things, right? We can observe them now with our solar telescopes. And you can just see the solar flare forming. And within hours and minutes, it'll just shoot out.

• 21:36Lester Nare?

  Right, which is incredible because that means anything we're doing locally on the planet. It was like the Tokamak system for like nuclear power production.

• 21:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, where we're trying to concentrate it into such a small.

• 21:46Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Volume.

• 21:47Lester Nare?

  Means that.

• 21:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna be even faster.

• 21:49Lester Nare?

  Faster, the time scales faster.

• 21:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and the time scale on Tokamak is something like milliseconds.

• 21:53Lester Nare?

  Right, that makes sense, that makes sense.

• 21:55Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so, so now we've got, you said it was gonna be months to years.

• 21:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and we're, we're, we're seeing hours to minutes.

• 22:03Lester Nare?

  So we're orders of magnitude off.

• 22:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not even a factor of two. It's a factor of like 10 to the six.

• 22:09Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 22:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, there's something really wrong.

• 22:12Lester Nare?

  The sweet Parker model is not correct.

• 22:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Is not correct, right? And, and I have to say, Parker there, he, he's a great plasma physicist. He's the guy who actually showed that the, the solar atmosphere is unstable. And we should have something like the solar wind. So he literally predicted the solar wind from first principles, right? So, all the credit to him.

• 22:34Lester Nare?

  Kudos.

• 22:34Krishna Choudhary?

  This guy was, this guy was, this guy was someone who could have won the Nobel Prize. Had he lived long enough, right? But, you know, you win some, you lose some.

• 22:42Lester Nare?

  Look, that's the next life.

• 22:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, this is where our hero, Nuno Lurario, comes in.

• 22:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 22:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, he is in Princeton Plasma Physics Lab at the time.

• 22:57Lester Nare?

  Go Tigers.

• 22:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Krishna Choudhary?

  So he's at Princeton Plasma Physics at the time. He actually did his earlier training at UCL.

• 23:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:05Krishna Choudhary?

  And. What he notices is that this doesn't work, guys. And it was, it was a known problem for like 50 years, right? But in 2005, he actually showed that these current sheets are violently unstable. And this is a, this is a slide that I got from one of his talks.

• 23:24Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Where in the, in the beginning, he's like, does the sweet Parker model work? Sure, for this regime.

• 23:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And then he's like, uh, maybe it doesn't. This guy was cheeky, dude. Yeah, it's kind of funny, right? So in 2005, he's doing numerical simulations to show exactly what would happen. And, and notice that there's this bubble that's forming.

• 23:43Lester Nare?

  On, on this, on the graphic that's to the right of these three examples where it says, maybe it doesn't.

• 23:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, maybe it doesn't. And, and there's a sheet. And as the sheet is getting sort of stretched, there's a bubble that's forming. Okay? That is going to be the main contribution that he makes in 2007 with a paper in the Physics of Plasmas with Lorario, Shekochin and Cowley.

• 24:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:10Krishna Choudhary?

  This is the paper that makes him famous.

• 24:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 24:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, this is the one that has the most citations. It's got like 800 citations, which in plasma physics is like unreal.

• 24:18Lester Nare?

  Instability of current sheets and formation of plasma chains.

• 24:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is the, he, so he was at PPL at the time, Person Plasma Physics Lab.

• 24:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, PPPL at the time. And this is the one that puts him on the map of plasma physics. Cause he solves this 50 year old problem.

• 24:37Lester Nare?

  Not bad.

• 24:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Not bad.

• 24:39Lester Nare?

  Not bad.

• 24:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Not bad.

• 24:40Lester Nare?

  And, and for those who might not know, a lot of people tried to solve this problem.

• 24:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, yes. This was like a known, this was like a known problem. And he does it using just like good old fashioned theoretical physics analytical theory. And it's like, it's a technique that we've actually learned in grad school. But he applies it to this in a very ingenious way. And I don't, I, I, I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty detail.

• 25:07Lester Nare?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 25:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Effectively, what he's doing is this, okay? He says, okay, I've got a thin current sheet, right? Got this thin current sheet. And what's happening is When I, when I turn up the length scale of this guy and when I turn up the magnetic field of this guy, what's gonna happen is that current sheet, which is the interface between the magnetic field going this way and this way.

• 25:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 25:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, I wanna, I wanna be able to reconnect it.

• 25:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 25:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And the problem is that that reconnection is happening way faster than I want it to.

• 25:34Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 25:36Krishna Choudhary?

  What, what he shows is, the, the aspect ratio of that current sheet gets really small.

• 25:43Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, at really high magnetic fields, the, the width of this guy is really small compared to the length of this guy.

• 25:50Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 25:50Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And then what he says is-

• 25:52Lester Nare?

  Meaning, meaning it's like, it's like a Twizzler.

• 25:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:55Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And I'm like, stretching it.

• 25:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 25:57Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm stretching it.

• 25:58Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 25:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's a Twizzler and I'm stretching it.

• 26:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 26:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 26:01Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And then what he does is, he, he, he does something called perturbation.

• 26:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 26:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is, he says, okay, suppose I have this Twizzler and there's a tiny little bump.

• 26:09Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Tiny little instability, for whatever reason.

• 26:11Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 26:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, can I trace what happens to that instability?

• 26:15Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 26:16Krishna Choudhary?

  If that instability goes down.

• 26:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:19Krishna Choudhary?

  If there's a restorative force.

• 26:20Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Then that instability is gonna go up and down and it's gonna become a kinda like a harmonic oscillator. This is a very useful tool in graduate school physics, is to understand perturbations and how those perturbations grow with time.

• 26:33Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 26:34Krishna Choudhary?

  But, if there's an instability, then that tiny little fluctuation is gonna magnify.

• 26:39Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 26:40Krishna Choudhary?

  And create some kind of bigger instability, which will create a bigger instability.

• 26:44Lester Nare?

  For, for layman who might have seen the Aston Kutcher movie, it sounds a lot like the butterfly effect.

• 26:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Right? Are we in this sort of chaotic regime where, where it's gonna break free and start doing some, some random stuff?

• 26:56Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 26:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 26:57Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 26:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And what ends up happening is, he shows that when you have this long sheet of stuff.

• 27:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:03Krishna Choudhary?

  It breaks into chains of smaller little plasmoids.

• 27:07Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Is what he calls it.

• 27:08Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 27:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And there are these secondary sheets, and we've got a, we've got a, um, a photo from exactly that, which is, you've got this rubber band that you're stretching, right?

• 27:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:19Krishna Choudhary?

  And as you stretch that Twizzler, as you were saying, that Twizzler, as you stretch it.

• 27:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:23Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna create little beads to maintain, like, it's- Structure.

• 27:27Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:28Krishna Choudhary?

  In some sense.

• 27:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah, okay.

• 27:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 27:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And all of that stuff means that the time scale is going to be reduced by orders of magnitude.

• 27:35Lester Nare?

  Becau- okay, got it.

• 27:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because now you're making the the system smaller.

• 27:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 27:40Krishna Choudhary?

  In some sense.

• 27:40Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 27:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? You're like, the system used to be this massive thing with a really large B field and a really large length scale. Now you're you're collapsing it into smaller and smaller length scales.

• 27:50Lester Nare?

  So so as in this image, what we're seeing is at the top, there is a again, a long twizzler. And this example with small beads throughout it.

• 27:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Lester Nare?

  At at very varying sizes.

• 28:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:01Lester Nare?

  And then as we go down, we see that those perturbations actually shorten the length.

• 28:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Lester Nare?

  Of what we're seeing. And then there's these those beads become more concentrated and larger.

• 28:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Lester Nare?

  Almost in their amplitude.

• 28:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Lester Nare?

  Right? Because we're basically moving it from.

• 28:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Like this big, a system that's this big to becoming smaller and smaller.

• 28:22Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 28:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And and so now we're making like smaller and smaller systems with smaller Lundquist numbers.

• 28:28Lester Nare?

  Yes, got it.

• 28:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And and now the what he what he effectively showed is that the scaling that happens at this physics.

• 28:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 28:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Is no longer like one over the square root of the Lundquist number, but instead like the number to the power of something. So it's not like a diminishing, it's actually a growing thing, right?

• 28:46Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 28:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And this was just from first principles. It's a beautiful paper.

• 28:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 28:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? That that he showed this. And so now he he can he can resolve that giant discrepancy.

• 28:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Between time scales that we see.

• 28:58Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 28:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Because actually, the thing that we're worried about, this is no longer a stable thing.

• 29:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:03Krishna Choudhary?

  As we make this thing bigger, it's gonna it's gonna sort of collapse into smaller things. And as those smaller things become bigger, it's gonna collapse into into even smaller things. It's like this weird fractally kind of self similar thing where like the more you stretch, the smaller the beads become and then and then you're gonna make more beads, the more you stretch.

• 29:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And and you have this like fractally self similar effect.

• 29:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:26Krishna Choudhary?

  That's happening.

• 29:27Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 29:27Krishna Choudhary?

  And this explains a bunch of stuff.

• 29:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 29:29Krishna Choudhary?

  That we've noticed.

• 29:30Lester Nare?

  Like that insight in and of itself.

• 29:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Lester Nare?

  Right?

• 29:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And and the rigorous way in which he showed it in that. Two thousand seven paper.

• 29:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It was very rigorous because he realized that one of the assumptions that Sweet and Parker had made is no longer true, right? If I actually put in the dependence, he realized that there's this one term in the equation that they assume to be constant. But that term is actually dependent on the number itself, right? And when I put that in and I, and I go through this perturbation analysis, it doesn't quite work.

• 30:01Lester Nare?

  So a previously static variable was proven to be dynamic.

• 30:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 30:05Lester Nare?

  And obviously, because it was not static, but was dynamic, that was the key, it was a key unlock to then actually understanding the effects.

• 30:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And it mattered for these big scales. Right?

• 30:18Lester Nare?

  Similar to our hypersonic thing, it's like, it didn't matter when you were at small scale, and so you could ignore it.

• 30:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Lester Nare?

  But as soon as you start to go to larger scales, things that we label as constant for constants for simplicity in order to be able to just keep the math simple.

• 30:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Lester Nare?

  No longer, no longer can be applied and have consistent observable effects.

• 30:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a very cool paper. Again, cited multiple times. And it, and it applies to astrophysical plasma.

• 30:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:45Krishna Choudhary?

  For example, this is a picture of the Venus toroid. So this is what happens when the solar wind goes and impacts Venus, which has its own magnetic field. And what you can see is you've got the stretching of the magnetic field because of the solar wind. And on the top, you've got a magnetic field going this way. And on the bottom, you've got a magnetic field going this way. So what's going to happen? You're going to get a little plasmoid. You know, because, because those magnetic field lines want to sort of mesh together. They don't, they don't want to fight.

• 31:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so you get the little plasmoid that we were talking about. And you can see when, when we talk about the Venus Express, which is the probe that took measurements close to Venus.

• 31:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Versus the Pioneer Venus Express, which took measurements all the way out.

• 31:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Krishna Choudhary?

  It matches. The fact that there's a strong magnetic field here and a weaker magnetic field there.

• 31:39Lester Nare?

  Farther away.

• 31:40Krishna Choudhary?

  And the mathematics works out, right?

• 31:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Krishna Choudhary?

  So it shows that in astrophysical plasma, this hypothesis by Nuno is true.

• 31:49Lester Nare?

  Just to double click on that, the, the point being. Nuno's theory on paper that can be proven mathematically on paper had matching observable data from two different Mars, Venus, excuse me, probes from different distances of where they measured. And that was important in being able to show that it actually worked because we had two reference points of distance.

• 32:15Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 32:16Lester Nare?

  Where the measurements were coming in from. And then so we could use the math that Nuno sort of established and say, does the math match it? Farther distance from the PVO, this closer distance from VAEX.

• 32:26Krishna Choudhary?

  And it, and it did. And it was great. And crucially, this is like on top of the fact that his theory reproduces the time scales that we see on the sun, right?

• 32:39Lester Nare?

  Yeah, the solar measurements also track.

• 32:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the solar measurements, the fact that it takes hours to minutes for this reconnection to happen on the surface of the sun and the solar corona and things like that. That's already taken care of.

• 32:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And on top of that, he's now, he's now talking about the magnetic field around planets. And also in Takamak's, we've like literally seen this. So in Takamak's, which is, a Takamak is like a donut shaped thing where we try to confine plasma.

• 33:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And in those Takamak's, you can see little plasmoids that form, right? And they format the, the, the scale.

• 33:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That he suggests with this theory. And, and it lasts as long as what he suggests in the theory. And this becomes extremely useful when we are trying to replicate the sun on Earth for fusion research.

• 33:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 33:28Lester Nare?

  Right, because, because while we have figured out with nuclear weapons, how to create fission bombs, which I was just listening to something the other day. So correct me if I'm wrong, with a fission bomb, it's like, you actually have, the fission process is actually in like the ignition to then create a fusion reaction after the fact.

• 33:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Lester Nare?

  And, but because of that two-step fission fusion combination, that's where you get radioactive, like the fallout as a result of that.

• 33:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because you need a fusion bomb in order to spark the, I mean, sorry, you need a fission bomb in order to spark the fusion bomb.

• 34:06Lester Nare?

  But if you were able to master fusion and have a pure fusion nuclear weapon.

• 34:13Lester Nare?

  There would be no fallout.

• 34:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there'd be no fallout.

• 34:15Lester Nare?

  Which would allow you militarily, the strategery would be now you can drop a nuke somewhere and have troops right nearby.

• 34:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Lester Nare?

  To be able to then go in post the fusion explosion because there'd be no.

• 34:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they'd have to wear sunscreen.

• 34:30Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 34:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Because like you don't want like the photons. Yeah, the photons are the main, you know, but at least you don't have to worry about like ionizing radiation. But like, yeah, the other main thing is like with with fusion, right? Fusion nuclear reactors, for example, those are like relatively easy to control.

• 34:46Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 34:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because you've got these rods of uranium.

• 34:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:49Krishna Choudhary?

  That are spitting out neutrons.

• 34:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And then in between, you can have rods of graphite.

• 34:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:55Krishna Choudhary?

  That slow down the neutrons.

• 34:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 34:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so you can have this sort of static nuclear reactor that is creating heat, creating energy. That causes steam from water and then that steam turns a turbine.

• 35:09Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 35:10Krishna Choudhary?

  The heat creates motion, which turns a turbine.

• 35:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 35:14Krishna Choudhary?

  With fusion, isolating fusion, right? Fusion is happening in plasma. It's not happening in solid materials. With fission, you have a rod of uranium. That thing is fissioning.

• 35:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:27Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's creating energy. In order to create energy from fusion, you need this plasma, which is super hard to control. It's super hard to contain. And then, and then, once we have that, we need, we need to have it self sustaining. And then create a heat source that then powers the turbine. It's a whole thing, right? And if we don't understand the mathematics fundamentally, then there's no hope.

• 35:50Lester Nare?

  I will just note, we've talked about this off camera previously. But if you work in a classified program in plasma research and you've maybe figured out how to better control plasma for other use cases, declassify part of it so we can use it for fusion reactors.

• 36:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 36:10Lester Nare?

  Please and thank you.

• 36:11Krishna Choudhary?

  That'd be great. But so, so that was his 2007 paper.

• 36:16Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 36:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Very big deal.

• 36:17Lester Nare?

  Huge, yeah.

• 36:18Krishna Choudhary?

  He won a bunch of awards for it. Well deserved.

• 36:20Lester Nare?

  Yes. Can't win a Nobel.

• 36:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, not anymore.

• 36:24Lester Nare?

  Which is really crazy.

• 36:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, he, he probably would have on the, been on the shortlist because, um, in, in the future of his life. So that was at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. He was kind of a postdoc. Then he became a professor at MIT, became full professor. And in 2004, he was the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT. And that MIT PSFC.

• 36:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 36:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Spun out and created Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is designing something called Spark. It is a small fusion reactor. I mean, this, it looks kind of big. Mate, compared to, like, compared to fusion reactors, that is small. Okay, that's, that, that is, that is quite small. The goal is to be the first device to achieve a Q factor greater than one. A Q factor is basically net energy gain.

• 37:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is how much energy you put in, how much do you get out, the ratio of that. If you have greater than one, then whatever is that greater than one, you can use to power a turbine, which creates electricity.

• 37:28Lester Nare?

  There was actually, wasn't there an announcement in the last two or three years that one of the national labs achieves net energy gain for some small period of time?

• 37:39Krishna Choudhary?

  It was, it was very small.

• 37:40Lester Nare?

  Very, but, but that was a first of some kind.

• 37:43Krishna Choudhary?

  It was a first of some kind because, um, so I don't remember the details. But what ended up happening was they had a diamond anvil cell with, so two diamonds attached to each other. We've covered this actually.

• 37:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah, we actually covered this.

• 37:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And, um, and inside was a hydrogen deuterium mixture. And then they put lasers.

• 38:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 38:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That created fusion inside of that diamond anvil cell. And they said that, yeah, the, the amount of energy of the lasers was less than the amount of energy that came out of the fusion. But like to, to make the lasers, you know, it's, it's, look, they're not, I don't think their, their end goal is to create.

• 38:19Lester Nare?

  For sure.

• 38:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, fusion, electric power.

• 38:23Krishna Choudhary?

  From that, okay, because like, what, you're just gonna keep shooting lasers in this and then, and then how do I get the energy out of that to come out and like do a turbine? There's a lot of question marks, okay?

• 38:34Lester Nare?

  Sure.

• 38:34Krishna Choudhary?

  It's probably weapons.

• 38:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Krishna Choudhary?

  If I'm honest, but it was still very cool. It was, I believe Lawrence Livermore.

• 38:41Lester Nare?

  That, that, that tracks to me.

• 38:43Krishna Choudhary?

  California again.

• 38:45Lester Nare?

  California forever, goodbye.

• 38:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So, so Talk Max, like the spark is, the, the spark is something that is trying to contain plasma. And it's trying to create fusion in the plasma and then it's trying to then offload that energy to create, to create electricity, right?

• 39:02Lester Nare?

  Makes sense.

• 39:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's designed to have this Q factor of greater than one.

• 39:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It's using actually high temperature superconducting magnets.

• 39:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 39:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Which means at about 20 Kelvin, which is actually quite hot.

• 39:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:15Krishna Choudhary?

  For superconductors, they're using these rare earth barium copper oxide Rebco magnets. And effectively what they're trying to do is have these magnets go at 12 Tesla. 12 Tesla is insanely strong.

• 39:29Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 39:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 39:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Several orders of magnitude above the magnetic field of the earth. And what they're doing is using these magnets to confine the plasma into a donut. Spin it around really fast.

• 39:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:42Krishna Choudhary?

  And then, and then have that plasma in that spinning, do the fusion.

• 39:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:47Krishna Choudhary?

  So the hydrogen is gonna combine to make helium.

• 39:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Release a bunch of energy.

• 39:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And then that energy is gonna be used to create electricity.

• 39:54Lester Nare?

  They're gonna try to capture it. And the point is you need that 12 Tesla because you need to be able to confine.

• 39:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Confine it.

• 39:59Lester Nare?

  Plasma.

• 39:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 39:59Lester Nare?

  And that's, that's the reason for that scale.

• 40:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And at that scale, all of a sudden, um, Larrero's legacy matters. Right? All of the theories that he's, he's posited at these like high Luntquist numbers.

• 40:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:14Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what matters. So any, any code that you have to contain the plasma needs to rely on his theory. So there's gonna be a bunch of plasmoids that are dominant in that, in that Talk Mac.

• 40:25Lester Nare?

  Is that the point is you could not use this, if you were trying to do fusion energy and you are focused on how do we contain the plasma?

• 40:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Lester Nare?

  You cannot use the. Sweet Parker model.

• 40:34Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 40:34Lester Nare?

  Um, and if.

• 40:35Krishna Choudhary?

  No, you'd be, you'd be completely wrecked.

• 40:37Lester Nare?

  But for Nuno, you wouldn't necessarily have a framework for how to even do the math.

• 40:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Lester Nare?

  To, to do the containment of the plasma at that scale.

• 40:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 40:45Lester Nare?

  So when all these AI billion, all these billionaires and hyperscalers and frontier model companies are saying, we need more energy and they're now investing in the small fusion reactor. It's like now a buzz term in Silicon Valley and everyone's investing all these like new companies trying to do it.

• 41:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Lester Nare?

  All of them have to bend the knee.

• 41:04Krishna Choudhary?

  All of them.

• 41:04Lester Nare?

  And be grateful that Nuno did this work because that math is now enabling the innovation.

• 41:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 41:11Lester Nare?

  For a small form factor fusion nuclear reactors.

• 41:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And exactly.

• 41:16Lester Nare?

  You've got it right. With the Tokamak kind of design framework.

• 41:19Krishna Choudhary?

  You got it. You got it. Exactly. Right. Yeah. I mean, it, it's a fundamental science thing.

• 41:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 41:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. Like, why does the solar corona work the way it does?

• 41:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 41:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, that's how it started.

• 41:28Lester Nare?

  That's how it starts.

• 41:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And then how it's going is we've got now maybe a path.

• 41:32Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 41:32Krishna Choudhary?

  To create actual fusion.

• 41:34Lester Nare?

  Uh, on earth, uh, which again, like fusion changes everything.

• 41:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:41Lester Nare?

  No, no. Oh, my God.

• 41:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, it changes everything.

• 41:43Lester Nare?

  It would be, it would be ridiculous. It would be ridiculous if we could get this going.

• 41:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 41:47Lester Nare?

  Right?

• 41:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and we're now, people, people are so on my, all the advertisements and stuff I see in the exegesis. They're, they're now passing simulation tests, right? With different design types and they're now transitioning into, uh, like real world, uh, scaled versions of this, which means like this is now, like this is not theoretical in terms of application anymore.

• 42:13Lester Nare?

  Like these guys at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, they're actually doing it.

• 42:16Krishna Choudhary?

  They're like, they're like making it.

• 42:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:18Krishna Choudhary?

  You know? It's, it's crazy. We might be close.

• 42:22Lester Nare?

  We might be.

• 42:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Knock on, let's knock on some wood. Yeah, but, um, it was, you know, Nuno Larrero's work really underpins that fundamental science really underpins all of the stuff that these guys are doing, you know, that could truly change the world.

• 42:37Lester Nare?

  This is why, again, academia and grants for foundational.

• 42:43Lester Nare?

  Science is hugely meaningful. And now the the time scales of going from research lab to end product are shortening greatly.

• 42:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Lester Nare?

  For all the reasons we've talked about all season.

• 42:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Lester Nare?

  Right? Like, it's no longer a thirty, forty, fifty year cycle.

• 42:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 42:58Lester Nare?

  In between fundamental discovery. That's two thousand and seven.

• 43:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:01Lester Nare?

  Twenty years. We're it's already it's that's crazy.

• 43:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's crazy. Yeah.

• 43:06Lester Nare?

  Crazy.

• 43:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. I think I think I think it's amazing. And, you know, the the stuff that he did at PPP L, that's probably a DOE contract.

• 43:14Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 43:15Krishna Choudhary?

  It's it's I guarantee you there was no private funding when all these people say, oh, like, you know, maybe the private funders could like do fundamental science research. No. He was he was trying to figure out like, why is this fifty year old model of plasma wrong?

• 43:30Krishna Choudhary?

  No one was no one.

• 43:30Lester Nare?

  No, no one care.

• 43:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:31Lester Nare?

  No one care.

• 43:32Krishna Choudhary?

  No, because it was so far away.

• 43:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:34Krishna Choudhary?

  That no, no VC would be like, I'm gonna see this fruitful at the end of my life.

• 43:42Lester Nare?

  There was this interesting thing that Demis Sabas, who's the who runs Google Deep Mind, was kind of talking about where he's like, they were talking about hallucinations in AI models.

• 43:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Lester Nare?

  And his whole thing was like, some hallucinations are actually kind of good because there's this whole like, like, sort of, you know, phrase, like phrasing where it's like, inventions, all inventions didn't come from explicitly knowing that you you wanted the outcome of the invention when you were going through the discovery process. Right? Like, a lot of times inventions come from curiosity and just explore exploration that then leads to an insight that then get converts converts into an invention. But you don't always start saying, I want to create a light bulb.

• 44:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Lester Nare?

  And then create a light bulb.

• 44:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:27Lester Nare?

  Right? And so you kind of need this like, surface area of exploration.

• 44:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Lester Nare?

  That is not tied to shareholder value or an already known end product.

• 44:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Just how does it work?

• 44:38Lester Nare?

  How does it work? And then once you know how it works, then all of a sudden, it's like, wait, wait.

• 44:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, I could, yeah, now all of a sudden, maybe.

• 44:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Maybe a small fusion containment thing could actually work.

• 44:50Lester Nare?

  Could work.

• 44:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause now we know everything, right?

• 44:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 44:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And now we have high frequency computing and we have AI and we have means to control a plasma really effectively, right? So it's all of this stuff compounding that really gives a lot of these startups room to breathe.

• 45:06Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right.

• 45:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so it's, it's really quite an amazing story. Nuno Larrario, MIT professor, very unfortunate death.

• 45:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Krishna Choudhary?

  And also the way that it happened through gun violence, like in his apartment in Boston. Like that just sucks.

• 45:24Lester Nare?

  It's, it's, it's the American story in the modern era.

• 45:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and apparently all, all, all we can do is thoughts and prayers.

• 45:31Lester Nare?

  Look, yeah.

• 45:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, and I guess, yeah, thoughts and prayers to his family and I wish we could do more.

• 45:36Lester Nare?

  And thank you, thank you, Nuno, for what you've provided to humanity.

• 45:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, which is amazing, amazing legacy.

• 45:43Lester Nare?

  If we figure out fusion.

• 45:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, no. And if, no, if the Nobel Prize was given to posthumous.

• 45:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 45:49Krishna Choudhary?

  People, people, he'd, he'd be one of them.

• 45:51Lester Nare?

  He'd be one of them.

• 45:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Lester Nare?

  We wanted to make sure we covered this again, there's no, there's literally no information about what happened.

• 45:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, it's super unclear, actually.

• 45:59Lester Nare?

  So it's, it's, you know, there's a lot of weird, you know, it is.

• 46:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Lester Nare?

  You know, we'll, we'll see what happens and, um, you know, the best to those who knew him, his colleagues and his family who, you know.

• 46:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And his mentors.

• 46:13Lester Nare?

  Mentors.

• 46:14Krishna Choudhary?

  I bet there's a bunch of students that are just.

• 46:15Lester Nare?

  Who are just struggling and please, you know, uh, we hope that those around him at the lab, um, you know, once grieving has passed, you know, continue to aggressively pursue his vision.

• 46:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Lester Nare?

  Uh, and, and, and the work that he's already done because it's, it's a huge foundation.

• 46:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, it's amazing, you know, and it could change the world.

• 46:39Lester Nare?

  It could, it could literally change.

• 46:41Krishna Choudhary?

  It could be one of the biggest things.

• 46:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Krishna Choudhary?

  That happens in the 21st century.

• 46:45Lester Nare?

  Especially if you're a climate change person, like you should be all over this.

• 46:48Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, this is big.

• 46:49Lester Nare?

  This is, this is a big deal. We're going to now transition into our season one recap.

• 46:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Lester Nare?

  19 episodes.

• 46:58Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable, just, we covered, there's so many interesting things that happened this year.

• 47:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Lester Nare?

  And it was really hard to choose.

• 47:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it really was.

• 47:08Lester Nare?

  It was hard to choose. It looks like we're gonna start with my five.

• 47:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're gonna start with your five.

• 47:13Lester Nare?

  And again, I loved all of them. I think we did forty-eight total stories.

• 47:18Krishna Choudhary?

  No, I mean, you know what's interesting is like, I learned so much with each of the ones that I had to research.

• 47:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, really get into it.

• 47:28Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, cuz we're not in the business of, of just talking.

• 47:33Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 47:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, I was like, what is this figure?

• 47:38Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 47:39Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, but I learned so much and I just love that we started this, this, this podcast.

• 47:44Lester Nare?

  And again, every single one of the forty-eight stories we covered this year are incredible, literally on their own.

• 47:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Lester Nare?

  And so just because it's not included in the top ten doesn't mean it's not good. However.

• 47:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and let us know in the comments if we missed one of your.

• 47:58Lester Nare?

  Favorites.

• 47:59Krishna Choudhary?

  One of your favorites.

• 48:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah. But I think, um, these are quite good. These are all quite good. Again, based on what they, what they are.

• 48:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Lester Nare?

  About.

• 48:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And in no particular order.

• 48:09Lester Nare?

  No, but yeah, these are not ranked. These are not ranked.

• 48:12Krishna Choudhary?

  It's just top ten.

• 48:12Lester Nare?

  So, okay, so from, from my list of five, I, you know, the first one we're gonna cover or touch, touch on is the, the Vera Rubin Observatory.

• 48:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 48:21Lester Nare?

  Episode four.

• 48:22Krishna Choudhary?

  This, this was amazing.

• 48:24Lester Nare?

  This was really good. So for those who know, I'm the UFO guy on the pod.

• 48:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Lester Nare?

  And so, you know, obviously anything that's gonna help us better understand the universe around us, I'm all for. But I think the thing that really got me going about this episode was, was the, there was a couple of things. It's, it's the scale. The way you described it, I think in the episode was, we're moving from photo to video.

• 48:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Lester Nare?

  In astronomy.

• 48:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Lester Nare?

  And that resonated.

• 48:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the entire southern night sky.

• 48:52Lester Nare?

  Right. Like, the scale difference between what we knew before and what we will now know, and also the daily data dumps and accessibility. There's so many great aspects to the story.

• 49:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Lester Nare?

  Uh, I love this one.

• 49:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this one, you know, so I was looking up like, you know, what, what they've been doing. They've just been doing what they normally do, which is just data dumps. And now there's just so much data and astronomers are wrangling with how do we, how do we? Interpret all of this data. Yes. Right? But one of the few things that I wanted to highlight, so there's one photo of the galaxy M61, Messier Object M61. You see that thread? Yes. That's coming out of the bottom right galaxy? Yes. We didn't know that existed before. That's just a thread of stars. Yeah. That's just getting ejected by that galaxy. That's unbelievable. And that's crazy. Yeah, yeah. Because first of all, uh, what? Yeah.

• 49:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Why is there, why is there just a, uh, it's like a water, it's like a water gun of stars. Just getting shot out. Getting shot out by a galaxy. And stars. Yeah, stars. Yeah. Across many light years, hundreds and thousands of light years, just getting shot out for who knows how long, because the, the, the, the, the trail is quite long, right? So it's just been doing it in one direction for a very long time. We've never seen that before. That's crazy. Never seen that before. Yes. So that's, um, Messier Object 61, which by the way, the fact that it has a name M61. Yeah. Means that it's been, like, it's been studied since Messier created that catalog.

• 50:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And, and we didn't know that that existed. Okay? So this is new, brand new. Yes. Which is crazy. Yes. And the second one is a photo of the Virgo Cluster. Yes. Beautiful photo, and you can see how diffuse those galaxies are, okay? The key thing is, this is an average of about a thousand images. Yes. They probably have tens of thousands now, but this is an average of a thousand images. And when you average a thousand images, the signal to noise ratio goes up. Yes. Right? The noise goes down because you're averaging. Yes. And you see how those diffuse? Yes. Like clouds of just stars? Yes. That's not something we've seen before. Like, on the right-hand side, you've just got this random cloud. Yeah. With no real structure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're seeing like a bunch of those. Yeah, yeah. In the Vera Rubin, right?

• 51:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Those are galaxies that we've never seen before. Because usually we're like, oh, spiral galaxies are like concentrated. Now we've just got a cloud of like stars.

• 51:22Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right, right, right. But we can now identify.

• 51:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, you know, because, because we're doing, we're taking so many photos of the exact same patch of sky over and over again that we can average and the signal to noise ratio goes like squared of N. So the more we take photos of, the, the lower that noise becomes and we can really start seeing this incredible detail. Right?

• 51:44Lester Nare?

  We're turning the light, like we, we, I, I can't emphasize enough how little we've actually looked like if Earth, if like our, if our solar system is like a house.

• 51:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? No, no, we've, we've barely looked out of one of the windows of the. No, we've seen Zillow photos.

• 52:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what it is, dude.

• 52:04Lester Nare?

  Like we.

• 52:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Like if, yeah, if our, if our universe is a house, we've seen Zillow photos.

• 52:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. Like we, we've not.

• 52:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And now we're like putting in like Ring cameras, you know?

• 52:14Lester Nare?

  Really see in different room, like the, the, and the volume of data that it's producing.

• 52:21Krishna Choudhary?

  It's insane.

• 52:22Lester Nare?

  Such that like, you know, so.

• 52:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And it's just, and, and now it's up to the astronomers to really.

• 52:28Lester Nare?

  To really.

• 52:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Try to, try to crunch through. We've identified like thousands of asteroids.

• 52:32Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 52:33Krishna Choudhary?

  We've identified thousands of, um, transient objects. It's, it's gonna be great, dude. And, and the more sophisticated the algorithms get, the better it'll be.

• 52:41Lester Nare?

  And it's open source.

• 52:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:42Lester Nare?

  Open science.

• 52:43Krishna Choudhary?

  That's what's great about it. That's, that's your US taxpayer funding.

• 52:47Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 52:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Going into just like, we got a Ring camera on the universe now. That's a great way to spend taxpayer money, dude.

• 52:55Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 52:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 52:56Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 52:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Lester Nare?

  Uh, aliens coming soon. Story number two, K two, 18B DMS dimethyl sulfide?

• 53:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Dimethyl sulfide.

• 53:05Lester Nare?

  Look at me, I'm learning something this season, y'all. Um, episode eight.

• 53:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That was episode eight.

• 53:10Lester Nare?

  This was, this was the, the, the.

• 53:12Krishna Choudhary?

  This was the drama.

• 53:13Lester Nare?

  This was, um, the, uh, uh, best evidence yet.

• 53:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, best evidence yet on BBC.

• 53:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah, of, of life.

• 53:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And then a week later.

• 53:21Lester Nare?

  Later, immediately. And so I think the reason I like this story is because it really, we really covered how. The peer review process works.

• 53:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Lester Nare?

  When the the delta between the news headline and where the science is.

• 53:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Lester Nare?

  And how each of these universities or labs is competing.

• 53:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Lester Nare?

  And and and why the process of science works because of reproducibility. Because but also just you explaining to me how we do the atmospheric.

• 53:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 53:47Lester Nare?

  Uh, understanding.

• 53:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh huh. Yeah, their atmospheric retrieval and how we do that transit method to figure out the.

• 53:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 53:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And what I loved about this story was how the the postdoc who put out the paper a week after.

• 53:59Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:59Krishna Choudhary?

  That like he actually met, he re, he re, um, I guess he re-Instagrammed.

• 54:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Krishna Choudhary?

  He didn't retweet, but on Instagram, he reposted.

• 54:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Our reel.

• 54:09Lester Nare?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 54:09Krishna Choudhary?

  About that. And he was like, am I the drama? Because we were literally talking about how a week later.

• 54:14Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Krishna Choudhary?

  He's like.

• 54:15Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Like that was that Oxford Cambridge beef.

• 54:20Lester Nare?

  Oh, God.

• 54:21Krishna Choudhary?

  That was great. Yeah. And it was shout out to Tyler for, um.

• 54:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 54:24Krishna Choudhary?

  For for posting that. That was dope.

• 54:26Lester Nare?

  That was great. Uh, great story. So again, as you can see, I have a real space, a real, uh, space rotation to the first two. The third one that, uh, was really fascinating to me was the story we covered on OncoGAN.

• 54:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Lester Nare?

  Uh, the AI genome, uh, project.

• 54:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 54:42Lester Nare?

  Episode 15.

• 54:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Lester Nare?

  And I actually just talked to my my mom about this, who works in clinical trials and is focused on the future of precision medicine. And it was just the the experimental, like what they, all of the different pieces they put together.

• 54:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Lester Nare?

  And and the redundancy and really how well thought out it was, was incredible to me.

• 55:03Krishna Choudhary?

  To make sure that the genomes that they were generating with this AI was not linked to anything personal.

• 55:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:10Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 55:11Lester Nare?

  No HIPAA violations.

• 55:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Truly was no HIPAA violations, but we're creating this data set that is gonna be used to train AI models to detect cancer.

• 55:20Lester Nare?

  Cancer. And the fact that when they goes with using those newly generated AI genomes, using existing tools like DeepTumor, they were actually able to increase the efficacy of detection in edge cases.

• 55:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Lester Nare?

  Uh, basically proving.

• 55:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 55:36Lester Nare?

  That. That the genomes were not just junk data.

• 55:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Lester Nare?

  Right? Like it had.

• 55:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Like an existing tool was better off.

• 55:43Lester Nare?

  Was better off.

• 55:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 55:44Lester Nare?

  Having it as a part of its data set. That was a great.

• 55:48Krishna Choudhary?

  That was a great one. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, that was originally because it was from the University of Toronto. And Toronto lost the World Series.

• 55:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah. Yeah. Look.

• 55:58Krishna Choudhary?

  The LA Dodgers won.

• 55:59Lester Nare?

  We're from LA.

• 56:00Krishna Choudhary?

  May I, may I just repeat what is already known that the LA Dodgers are back to back world champions.

• 56:06Lester Nare?

  We did give Toronto its love though. You know, we made sure we gave you guys.

• 56:09Krishna Choudhary?

  That was an incredible scientific achievement from the University of Toronto.

• 56:13Lester Nare?

  And, and the implications are just gonna be.

• 56:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Lester Nare?

  Um, and again, this is another, we've covered a lot of AI stories. And for me, what this was was like, AI gets talked about as like, oh, image generation and AI slop.

• 56:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And like AI girlfriends.

• 56:28Lester Nare?

  Right. But this is not, this is gonna save lives.

• 56:31Krishna Choudhary?

  No, straight up.

• 56:32Lester Nare?

  Literally.

• 56:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:33Lester Nare?

  And it is, and it, and it's important to understand that in a lot, in multiple research environments,

• 56:41Lester Nare?

  folks are finally finding ways to get practical, uh, effects.

• 56:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Lester Nare?

  And outputs from, from a variety of use cases.

• 56:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's a great.

• 56:50Lester Nare?

  ML, RL, AI, whatever you wanna label it as. Uh, number four was time crystals.

• 56:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Time crystals.

• 56:57Lester Nare?

  Time crystals.

• 56:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Time crystals.

• 56:59Lester Nare?

  Episode nine.

• 57:00Krishna Choudhary?

  University of Colorado Boulder.

• 57:01Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes.

• 57:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. The OGs of solid state physics.

• 57:06Lester Nare?

  Yes. And I, I just liked that one because I never heard about a time crystal.

• 57:10Krishna Choudhary?

  That was crazy.

• 57:11Lester Nare?

  Scopic room temperature time crystal.

• 57:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was pretty cool because we gotta go through the whole, you know, from Frank Wilczek.

• 57:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Talking about the theoretical time crystal. And then somebody saying, eh, that's probably not possible. And then somebody else saying, yeah, but you could do it this way. And then, and then now to where we've got this repertoire of time crystals. And this is the first one that's macroscopic. You can see with the naked eye. It's at room temperature. It's crazy.

• 57:38Lester Nare?

  Such a good one.

• 57:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Lester Nare?

  Um, and then the, the last one for me was just our, our Nobel Week episode, macroscopic quantum tunneling, especially.

• 57:49Krishna Choudhary?

  That was amazing.

• 57:50Lester Nare?

  Nobel Prize Week was really incredible. Uh, this year's awards were all great, but I think that the structure of it and how we did the journey of like, because what it really I like, I think showed and represented was how science is an iterative process that spans decades and generations.

• 58:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Lester Nare?

  And, you know, everything that we want, that it gives us modern life is on the basis of scientific progress over generations.

• 58:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Lester Nare?

  And, and the awards this year were incredibly complex. And I think those episodes did a great job for a layman or anyone who doesn't, has no basis for any of the understanding can really kind of get why this award matters.

• 58:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And it, and what I remember from it is like waking up at 2am to watch the, to watch the things with you and then be like, okay, now I gotta.

• 58:47Lester Nare?

  Now I gotta do it. Cause we dropped it, those, we dropped it live.

• 58:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we dropped it. Yeah, dude. And it was, it was a great experience. It was like the commitment that we had to this podcast and like to really getting and doing it right. I loved that. It was great. Uh, and, and it worked, you know, it blew up.

• 59:04Lester Nare?

  Some of our biggest episodes were the Nobel episodes. A lot of you discovered us during that week. Um, and we will be doing it next year.

• 59:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Lester Nare?

  Uh, we're looking to hopefully get, uh, either a university or the Nobel Committee to allow us to, uh, be a participant in the process to help elevate this beyond what they already do, uh, and make it accessible to the new gen.

• 59:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Lester Nare?

  So those were, those are my five, uh, not exclusive, but those are good.

• 59:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, okay, now let me start with mine. My first one is the programmable synthetic proteins. This was episode three. This one just like blew my mind. It was out of Yale University. Um, effectively, yeah, boo, but also wow.

• 59:48Lester Nare?

  Wow.

• 59:50Krishna Choudhary?

  They they effectively like, you know, we're used to 20 building blocks when we create proteins. And they're like, what if we could have 60?

• 59:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:58Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 59:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Because the it takes three codons, three, sorry, it takes three nucleotides to create a codon. So three ATGCs, that's four choices in three bins. So four to the three is 64. You need a few of them to tell your protein machinery to start creating a protein and stop creating a protein. But the question is, all of that others.

• 1:00:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:22Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, all of those, the rest of the 60 are getting mapped on to 20. What if I could map them on to 60? And this was the first step in that, right? They they they made a fully like bacteria. They made a full bacteria that incorporated a new amino acid into a protein. I thought that was absolutely insane.

• 1:00:44Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:00:45Krishna Choudhary?

  That they could do this.

• 1:00:46Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:00:46Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:00:46Lester Nare?

  Um, that was a really good one.

• 1:00:48Krishna Choudhary?

  That was, that was, that was, it like blew my mind when I was researching it. That was, that was episode three. And then the rest of them are all about science history because I love science history.

• 1:00:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:57Krishna Choudhary?

  So we've got the DNA episode.

• 1:00:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:00:59Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't have to talk too much about that because that was just our last episode.

• 1:01:03Lester Nare?

  Um, people loved that episode. Watson is not the guy.

• 1:01:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Watson is not the guy. Um, turns out he was a racist piece of mm and.

• 1:01:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but the human story is fascinating. You know, the way that there was the competition between England and Caltech and all that. I I just loved looking that up. The LIGO episode, which was episode 10.

• 1:01:24Lester Nare?

  Yes, that was a great one.

• 1:01:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That was a great one. Um, that little story about how the postdocs were like running around, you know, just an hour before the actual signal came in. And they were just like driving their Jeeps.

• 1:01:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Along the along the instrument. And then people were like just freaking out because they didn't know if it was a psyop.

• 1:01:42Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:01:43Krishna Choudhary?

  They didn't know if it was a conspiracy or something. I I loved that.

• 1:01:46Lester Nare?

  Also, the actual engineering that went into LIGO is unbelievable to me.

• 1:01:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Lester Nare?

  Well, it is, it is unreal.

• 1:01:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Being sensitive to 10 to the minus 21 in stress.

• 1:01:56Lester Nare?

  And then we're replicating that in three locations now globally?

• 1:01:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. Um, the Heisenberg episode, which is episode five.

• 1:02:04Lester Nare?

  Very popular.

• 1:02:05Krishna Choudhary?

  That one was very popular.

• 1:02:06Lester Nare?

  Very popular.

• 1:02:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Yeah. I love like going through his original paper that, you know,

• 1:02:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Set it all up.

• 1:02:14Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:02:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And that, and that whole non-commutation.

• 1:02:17Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:02:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Lester Nare?

  And A, A, B, uh,

• 1:02:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Does not equal.

• 1:02:21Lester Nare?

  B, A.

• 1:02:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Lester Nare?

  Uh, when we're talking about vector.

• 1:02:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Lester Nare?

  Multiplication.

• 1:02:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Matrix multiplication on vectors.

• 1:02:27Lester Nare?

  Uh, matrix multiplication on vectors.

• 1:02:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:29Lester Nare?

  Uh, and there's a lot of debate in the comments on that one because people would saw the graphic but didn't listen.

• 1:02:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Lester Nare?

  And so they thought we were not, anyway.

• 1:02:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And then, and then finally, the Channing Young episode, which is episode 14. And that one where we had the discussion about symmetry.

• 1:02:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:02:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And how the fundamental laws of symmetry govern the universe. And we can, we can overturn the whole idea of how we do physics by asking a fundamental question like, what are the symmetries of the universe? Okay. I do an experiment here and I do an experiment over there. The laws of the physics are the same.

• 1:03:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:00Krishna Choudhary?

  What does that mean?

• 1:03:01Lester Nare?

  What does that mean?

• 1:03:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, yeah, it's just so beautiful to think about.

• 1:03:05Lester Nare?

  Was that the episode with the, the left hand, right hand, left chiral?

• 1:03:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Left hand, right, their chiralities.

• 1:03:11Lester Nare?

  Chiralities of stuff. Um, that was really, all of the, the history episodes and the deep dives were really popular. I know there's someone on YouTube, I, I, we see the comments, not all of them, it's tough to keep up. But someone was like, I want more.

• 1:03:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Lester Nare?

  Deep dive, single subject history, go through all the details episodes. Um, and so, you know, as we go into season two, we have some interesting ideas. And so the core format will be there. We'll do almost exactly like we did this year. Some episodes will have multiple stories. Some will be the deep dives. Uh, maybe we might even be going directly into some labs.

• 1:03:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Lester Nare?

  To do some onsite episodes.

• 1:03:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Twenty six.

• 1:03:51Lester Nare?

  You know, uh, we've got some, some interesting things planned. Uh, I'm going to quickly honorable mention, uh, from, from the wife.

• 1:04:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Lester Nare?

  About her favorite episodes. She said, if you don't include me, you're in trouble. So I'm including her, her three, which were the double slit MIT replication, episode three, the diamond.

• 1:04:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Lester Nare?

  Uh, the, the harder than diamond, episode five episode, and also a double tap on the Rosalind Franklin. Uh, she said, women in STEM.

• 1:04:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Lester Nare?

  We love it.

• 1:04:21Krishna Choudhary?

  We love it.

• 1:04:21Lester Nare?

  So we're going to wrap up with, uh, a corrections section.

• 1:04:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:04:25Lester Nare?

  And so one of the things I love about this pod is that There's a surprising amount of comments from folks, whether you're doing your PhD currently, whether you're in a research lab, or just are into science generally, for folks who had some comments about how we framed things, and we want to give an opportunity to do a couple of key corrections from our past episodes.

• 1:04:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Lester Nare?

  And we'll maybe do something to incorporate this better into season two.

• 1:04:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Lester Nare?

  And so we're now going to talk about some of these corrections.

• 1:04:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and I wanted, I wanted to piggyback off what you said. It's really a testament to our audience.

• 1:04:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That we're getting corrections at such a fine level.

• 1:05:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah, very detailed. And look, I would much rather the, you're scrolling on Instagram, and you're commenting about science versus nonsense.

• 1:05:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Lester Nare?

  So we love it, and please continue to pop in your viewpoints, your thoughts.

• 1:05:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Lester Nare?

  Because that's the whole point, is we're trying to have a conversation.

• 1:05:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. So the first one is kind of a general one, which was during the whale episode.

• 1:05:30Lester Nare?

  Our one video that's gonna reach a million on Instagram by the time we drop this.

• 1:05:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there, there were a lot of corrections about the fact that, you know, when you're in a sailboat, you can actually go against the wind. The correction is, you can't actually go directly against the wind. You have to tack at an angle that's offset from the wind. I actually know this because during my grad school at UCLA, UCLA has a marina.

• 1:05:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:54Krishna Choudhary?

  In Marina Del Rey, and they offer.

• 1:05:56Lester Nare?

  Marina Del Rey?

• 1:05:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, Marina Del Rey. And they actually offer sailing classes. And so I, I got a sailing license at the UCLA Marina, and they taught us how to tack.

• 1:06:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:06:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And go against the wind, and effectively use Bernoulli's principle to go against the wind at an angle.

• 1:06:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:06:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can, you can sort of go like this, right? At the end of the day, though, Pythagorean theorem, you're not going to be going directly against the wind. So if you're a whale in the ocean.

• 1:06:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:06:26Krishna Choudhary?

  You can still outrun a boat. So the, the, the main point was.

• 1:06:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:06:30Krishna Choudhary?

  The whales learned how to go directly against the wind and outrun boats.

• 1:06:34Lester Nare?

  Right, right. Regardless of the fact that, yes, sailboats can, using tacking.

• 1:06:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Lester Nare?

  Go not directly against the wind, but in the direction where.

• 1:06:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Lester Nare?

  The point is, you, the whales will be able to outrun.

• 1:06:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like, imagine you're a whaler, and like, you see them, you're not gonna be like, I'm gonna go get them. You're gonna be like, no, that's a lost cause. They're going literally against the wind.

• 1:06:53Lester Nare?

  So we get it.

• 1:06:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we get it.

• 1:06:55Lester Nare?

  But that wasn't the. Context.

• 1:06:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Lester Nare?

  Watch the full episodes, okay? The clips are not always the full context.

• 1:07:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. The other one, so during the DNA episode, I talked about how Chargaff

• 1:07:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:10Krishna Choudhary?

  at Columbia University used human sperm to establish the ratio between AT, G and C. And he showed that A and T are exactly the same and G and C are exactly the same. And I made the statement that sperm is mostly DNA. Yes, that's not true. Okay, and that's a fair point. Sperm is mostly, again, proteins and a bunch of other random stuff. But my point was that there's more DNA per volume in sperm than there are in other cells. And so if you want the greatest bang for your buck in terms of trying to analyze DNA per volume, sperm is a great, you know, sort of sample to get.

• 1:07:54Lester Nare?

  It's not all DNA.

• 1:07:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Lester Nare?

  But the DNA per volume is the most functional and beneficial for the use case.

• 1:08:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:08:02Lester Nare?

  Of doing the.

• 1:08:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. So yeah, that was fair play. That's a good one.

• 1:08:05Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:08:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Whenever I talk about transcription and translation, whenever I get excited, I mix up the two.

• 1:08:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:08:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but I do know what they mean. Transcription is DNA to RNA.

• 1:08:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's in the word, right? Transcribe from the same language to the same language. There's a little bit of difference because instead of T, you're using U, but instead of ATGC, you use AUGC. But it's the same nucleotide to nucleotide.

• 1:08:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:08:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Translation is going from nucleotide to amino acid. Right? So it's a different language altogether. And that's why you're translating. And, you know, when I get excited, sometimes I say the wrong thing.

• 1:08:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:08:47Krishna Choudhary?

  But. Hopefully you guys know what I mean. Duly noted. Yeah. Um, the fourth one, sodium batteries. Sodium batteries are actually a thing. And, um, we, we made it seem like sodium batteries weren't a thing. Sodium batteries are a thing. There's active companies that are, that are actually trying it. Solid state sodium batteries are not a thing. Right. Right. And that's sort of the holy grail that the Chicago UCSD paper was trying to solve. Right. Right. They're trying to get closer to that solid state sodium battery because then we could start using it for EVs and long-term storage and all this other kind of stuff. Yes. Um, so, so they made a real leap forward in that solid state. Solid state. Where there's no liquid electrolyte. Right. That's going around. Right.

• 1:09:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Which if you listen to the full episode is, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, we, we did make it a thing, but okay, fine. We'll take it. Fair play. Um, and then finally airplane speed. The hypersonics. This, this, this one I got a lot of, a lot of, uh, poo poo for. It is not 250 miles per hour. It is in fact 500 miles per hour. And I should have, I should have like known this because you know, from here to New York is like 3,000 miles. It takes six hours, like five hours, like 500 miles per hour. That kind of makes sense, but, um, what really incensed me about this is because, um, one of my friends, good friends from college told me that he recommended it to one of his friends. Yes. Justin Honigstein, Justin, if you're, if you're listening. If you're listening.

• 1:10:16Krishna Choudhary?

  I understand that you, you don't want to listen to any of our podcasts because, because we made that one error and we're not acknowledging it. Well, here I am acknowledging it. Here I am. This guy, by the way, the, the, I, I've interacted with him a few times. I think he's just jealous. Yeah. Because, because we beat him in beer pong in 2011, Thanksgiving 2011. I don't forget. We beat you, me and Alan, we beat you in beer pong in 2011, and then we sang a Jason Derulo song. And we sang it really well. He was harmonizing and, and we sang it really well. Maybe he's jealous. And now he doesn't want to listen to our podcast. Yes. Well, Justin.

• 1:10:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Now I've admitted that I said 250 when I should have said 500.

• 1:11:00Lester Nare?

  And so for those still watching at the end, you know, our trend where now at the end of the show, it's helpful for us to know that people actually reach the end. And so for those still listening, whether it's a podcast or you're watching the video in the comment thread, if you want to go ahead and put Justin, they apologized, or Justin, we're waiting for you.

• 1:11:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Or any, or any funny Justin.

• 1:11:26Lester Nare?

  Justin, you know, if you have a bit that you want to put, put it in the comments. We want to get Justin back on the train, listening for not only our season one episodes, but moving forward to season two. And again, we're not above reproach here.

• 1:11:42Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, that was fair play, Justin.

• 1:11:44Lester Nare?

  A hundred percent. And, and we are willing, again, because the whole point here, like the fundamental concept of science we talk about every day is it's an iterative process. This was our first season. We literally started it in my garage. That's now converted into this unbelievable studio.

• 1:12:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Amazing.

• 1:12:01Lester Nare?

  And we are very excited for what we're going to be able to do next season. We do know, just a couple of notes before we wrap up. We've heard the comments about all the sound and the angles and the colors, all the production people, all that's been solved. So now the color matching is good.

• 1:12:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Lester Nare?

  If I bang on the table, it doesn't get picked up as much anymore. I also don't bang on the table as much. So we hear you. We're listening. As we go into next season, a lot of folks have asked us about whether we're going to do interviews. The focus of this show is not to be an interview show. There are plenty of science podcasts that are interview shows. That being said, we do have plans to do some interesting.

• 1:12:50Lester Nare?

  Focus or featurettes that will both be virtual and in person with labs or research teams in what they're working on. So we will be incorporating interview style content next year, but this is not the core focus of the show. The show is really meant to look at what is breaking research in the verticals and industries we're interested in and talking about those from first principles. That is still the fundamental DNA of the show and we want to stick and focus on making sure that that is our core entry point. However, we only had six months this year.

• 1:13:31Lester Nare?

  Next year, we have a full year and so we can splice in a couple of interviews and we have some good ones that I think you guys will enjoy quite a bit. Not least of which will be my, I've finally convinced my dad, at a minimum, who's a parasitologist, Harvard postdoc, has had some incredible things he's done in his life to come on and talk about one of the things he discovered almost two decades, maybe even three decades ago, that is now actually going to be going into production by a pharma company. And so that'll be at least one of them. And we have a couple more that are exciting. And if you are on a research team, if you're

• 1:14:14Lester Nare?

  a fan of the pod and you're a PhD, a postdoc, the principal investigator, and you would like us to talk about what you're researching, please email us. Our email is available on the social platforms. It'll be available on the website or shoot us a DM on any of the social platforms and let us know what you're doing. We'd be happy to explore potentially having you guys on the pod and talking about your research. Again, this is not an invite for people who have created their own research paper on the site. Unfortunately, we have to keep it pegged to published or research institutions that are associated with either a university or a mainstream lab. That's just where our box is and what we're focused on.

• 1:14:59Lester Nare?

  And so maybe some point in the future, we can take folks not associated with that, but that is currently our focus. So if you have sent us papers that you've created on your own, we appreciate it. This is just not the platform for those.

• 1:15:15Lester Nare?

  And I'll wrap up with our new website will go out for season two. Our new leaderboards will also go out for season two. And we will have a new way to support the show via direct donation. Because again, there's only two people on the FFP team.

• 1:15:31Krishna Choudhary?

  It's literally just the two of us.

• 1:15:33Lester Nare?

  It's just us. There's no production assistant. There's no editor. There's no social media person. There's no assistant. It's just us.

• 1:15:40Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a lot of work.

• 1:15:41Lester Nare?

  And so we, you know, doing a weekly show at this scale, video and audio, also with the social distribution is quite a bit. And so all of the engagement, the best way you can support currently, share it with your lab. If you're in a lab meeting, a research team meeting, talk about the show.

• 1:15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:15:59Lester Nare?

  Please.

• 1:16:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Would love that.

• 1:16:00Lester Nare?

  If you're on socials, share it in your DMs, repost it to your story. Every little piece of engagement helps us battle the billionaire algorithm. We are trying to make science sexy. We're trying to make it popular and hip and expand it to more people. And all of you have been a huge help in helping get this show to reach. I mean, we're doing 3 million views on Instagram a month. We're doing a million on TikTok. It's just unbelievable. Again, the fastest growing, we are one of the fastest growing science pods in the world. And that's all because of you, the audience. And we're incredibly grateful that the random chemistry that this friendship has around this

• 1:16:43Lester Nare?

  has really resonated with so many of you. It's been an incredible year.

• 1:16:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it really has.

• 1:16:49Lester Nare?

  And we're excited for next year. As always, I'm your host, Lester Nare, joined by the smartest and the best science communicator on the planet and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We'll see y'all next year. Happy holidays. And with that, the 2025 season has come to an end.

• 1:17:14Lester Nare?

  It's from First Principles.