Winter Olympics Deep Dive: Ice Physics, Performance Pressure, and Climate Change (EP. 26)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a Winter Olympics deep dive from first principles—physics, neuroscience, and climate science in one ride. • Why ice is slippery: the “water layer” story is incomplete—new nanoscale measurements suggest a far more viscous, thicker interfacial film than textbook intuition. • Choking under pressure: how high stakes can disrupt neural control—reward signals can push brain states out of the “optimal zone.” • Climate change vs winter sports: why artificial snow has limits, why some legacy venues may become unreliable, and what “snow farming” is trying to solve. • Rundown: AI doing physics proofs, cat vocalizations, immune epigenetics, origin-of-life genetics, and an “impossible” exoplanet system. Support the show: FFPpod.com/donate Follow: @FFPod (X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook) 00:00 Intro 00:32 Episode setup 02:15 Why is ice slippery? 33:23 Rundown + housekeeping + donate 01:09:11 Choking under pressure (neuroscience) 01:32:32 Climate change & the Winter Olympics + potpourri 01:43:47 Wrap-up + closing

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

• 0:00Krishna Choudhary?

  It's been 200 years and we still don't know why ice is slippery. We're getting close, but you know, it's

• 0:08Lester Nare?

  What?

• 0:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

• 0:11Lester Nare?

  We have to lock in for this next story because it's about the neuroscience of choking under pressure.

• 0:16Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 0:17Lester Nare?

  In this Winter Olympics, we have seen in real time.

• 0:21Krishna Choudhary?

  The future of the Winter Olympics is not looking good. Okay, climate change is coming and the Winter Olympics specifically are very much at risk.

• 0:32Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. For those watching, if you could not already tell, this week, we're going to be doing a deep dive on the Winter Olympics as we've donned our ski gear appropriately. This week, we're going to cover three scientific areas. We have a physics story, a neuroscience story, and also a climate change story, along with some other random thoughts. We're going to start off with a story about ice being slippery.

• 1:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Lester Nare?

  In the Winter Olympics, every sport depends on ice being slippery, but the science and physics specifically behind it is actually non-trivial.

• 1:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:13Lester Nare?

  We'll follow that up with a neuroscience story around the idea of choking, right? Obviously, the stakes are high, especially at the Olympics, and there is really good neuroscience around why do people choke when the stakes are so high? We'll wrap up with our climate change story and a couple of other interesting tidbits as it relates to our deep dive on the Winter Olympics. You are going to learn stuff today because we're going to break down the science from its fundamentals, because this is from First Principles.

• 2:02Lester Nare?

  My friend, we are donned and prepared for our Winter Olympics deep dive.

• 2:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 2:09Lester Nare?

  My first question for you is, what event? Cause I know what you're good at. And so what event are you going to trial for?

• 2:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I think the event that I compete in is the full send.

• 2:22Lester Nare?

  The full send.

• 2:23Krishna Choudhary?

  The full send event, which is you're at the top with your skis and then you just french fry the whole way down. No pizzaing.

• 2:29Lester Nare?

  No pizza.

• 2:30Krishna Choudhary?

  You just french fry and then you end up getting dragged out on one of those ski patrol sleds. Yeah. Who can do that the fastest with the least amount of actual injury? I compete in it all the time. It's, it's great. Mammoth knows all about it.

• 2:48Lester Nare?

  This is so good. So we're going to go ahead and get started with our physics story of the day.

• 2:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Lester Nare?

  And the physics story is starting out with this idea of ice being slippery. Why is ice slippery? It turns out it's apparently not such a simple problem. And scientists have apparently been working on this for 200 years, but we still don't have a foolproof answer.

• 3:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Lester Nare?

  So let's kind of talk, cause there's so many events in the Winter Olympics that deal with ice.

• 3:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and they're all dependent on the central physical fact.

• 3:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 3:22Krishna Choudhary?

  That ice is slippery.

• 3:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And it's been a 200 year old question. It's pretty incredible, the slipperiness of ice versus the friction on other solids, right? This is a great example that we saw in Minnesota. Our local Gestapo agents named Ice slipped on ice. This is not, this is not a political statement because this is not a political show. We are not a political show. I just think it's funny. That ice slipped on ice. Okay, I just think that's funny. I don't think that's weird to bring up in a, in a science podcast.

• 3:59Lester Nare?

  We're talking about the slipperiness of ice.

• 4:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're, we're talking about the slippery slope of ice, but I'm talking about the physics. I'm not talking about the extrajudicial powers of our federal police. No, no, no, no, no, I am talking about the physics. So don't you dare come after me in the comments. Actually, please do. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna see what, what you'll come up with. But in any case, that's the central question that I want to answer today. And in fact, I'm not going to answer it because the research is still ongoing.

• 4:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 4:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is quite incredible. It's such a simple question, right? Like, why is ice slippery? It's relevant to stuff like glaciology, like, you know, glaciers moving off continents into the oceans and then raising our sea levels. It's relevant for transportation. You don't want to slip on ice. And obviously, it's relevant for winter sports. The standard explanations are pretty bad.

• 4:52Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 4:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, they seem satisfying from like a high school physics level. Oh, okay, there's a layer of water and then the water makes it slippery. But when you just go a little bit deeper, it doesn't make any sense. And it's, it's actually quite interesting. So let's go to the 200 year old question, right? 200 years ago, there was this guy, Michael Faraday. He is the greatest of all time in terms of experimental physicists. You can come at me in the comments again. This guy is the goat, okay?

• 5:25Krishna Choudhary?

  He's also actually the founder of scientific communication. It wasn't Carl Sagan.

• 5:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 5:30Krishna Choudhary?

  People think that Carl Sagan was this first guy. No, Michael Faraday used to have Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution where he would demonstrate electricity and magnetism for the common public. And there are these very famous, you know, outreach events that happened in the 1800s in London. So, you know, this guy's an OG and I love everything about him. And one of the many things that he did, he did, you know, electricity and magnetism is what he's really famous for. But he actually did experiments all over the place. And he's the first to observe something called a regulation, which is this idea that there's a permanent liquid like layer of water around every ice block. Okay, and people sort of took that.

• 6:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Observation and said, oh, that's why ice is slippery because there's a little bit of water on top, right?

• 6:19Lester Nare?

  I just want to make a quick note. That we are not talking about the system that puts a Premier League team in England.

• 6:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Is that called regulation?

• 6:30Lester Nare?

  It's called relegation.

• 6:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh relegation. Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that. My cousins are really into Arsenal and they're like, oh.

• 6:39Lester Nare?

  They're gonna get. So for example, used in a sentence Tottenham Hotspur is potentially in the relegation zone.

• 6:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, are they really?

• 6:47Lester Nare?

  Yes. However.

• 6:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Did they have a terrible season so they're gonna, they're gonna go down?

• 6:51Lester Nare?

  They're potentially gonna go down.

• 6:52Krishna Choudhary?

  How do you feel about that? You're a Chelsea fan.

• 6:54Lester Nare?

  I am ecstatic about it.

• 6:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, yeah, okay, that's what I thought.

• 6:57Lester Nare?

  I'm ecstatic about it. It's happened again. It's happened again Tottenham Hotspur. It's happened again.

• 7:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 7:06Lester Nare?

  But we're talking about.

• 7:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Regulation.

• 7:09Lester Nare?

  Regulation, which just, just to be clear here.

• 7:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's the liquid layer of water on top of ice. And this liquid layer can be nanometers thick. It can be only like a few molecules to tens or hundreds of molecules. Right? And, and for the longest time, Michael Faraday did some experiments that showed that this is true. And for the longest time, it was like, oh, like those water molecules are what's causing the slipperiness. When we started getting into some deep thermodynamics, the Thompson brothers, the most famous of whom is Lord Kelvin, he started looking at the statistical mechanics of what happens at this interface between ice and liquid water. Liquid water is very interesting because just water in general is very interesting. It's one of these unique compounds because of the geometry of the molecule.

• 7:58Krishna Choudhary?

  It increases in volume when you freeze it. This is very strange. This is why ice floats. Ice is less dense than liquid water. The solid phase of liquid wa- of water, the solid phase of water is less dense than the liquid phase, which is why ice floats. This has everything to do with the geometry of the water molecule, the fact that it's 104 degrees between these two bonds of oxygen, hydrogen, oxygen, hydrogen.

• 8:26Krishna Choudhary?

  And for the longest time, that's been kind of the dominant explanation is because the.

• 8:33Krishna Choudhary?

  The volume increases. Suppose now I were to press down on ice, right? If I stand on ice with skates or something like that, I'm pressing down, I'm increasing the pressure. And what physics wants to do at all times is resist change. And so when I press and I compress the volume, it's going to undo the freezing part and become liquid. Does that make sense? Like, like when water freezes, it expands. I'm pushing in, so I'm going to make it unfreeze. I'm going to make the the water sort of come back as liquid instead of being in the solid form. And that's the, I mean, I've heard this explanation even from Feynman. There's a really famous interview with Feynman where a guy asks him,

• 9:18Krishna Choudhary?

  you know, why, how do magnets work? And he goes on this random tangent stream of consciousness about what do you mean? Why does it work? And the interviewer is like, I don't know, it's a simple question. Why do magnets work? And he's like, well, you know, suppose there were an alien around. And I said grandma slipped on the ice. How far deep would I have to go into the explanation to tell him what I mean? And then he talks about, oh, well, grandma slipped on the ice because ice is one of these unique compounds that is slippery when you stand on it because of the pressure and all this stuff. And he even cited this thing, right? But let's, let's just like try to hone in on this explanation. The explanation is I squish the ice.

• 10:03Krishna Choudhary?

  The ice becomes water. Okay, that works for negative temperatures, like negative two degrees Celsius, negative three degrees Celsius.

• 10:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 10:12Krishna Choudhary?

  When you're getting to something like negative 20 degrees Celsius to negative 30 degrees Celsius, I can still skate on that ice. But this explanation won't work because I'm so cold. No matter how much I press. The physics at that scale, the statistical mechanics of this bulk body, it's not going to let the water come out.

• 10:34Lester Nare?

  The idea being when temperatures are colder, simply applying pressure from your ice gate onto the ice is no longer going to change that surface layer from its solid state to its liquid.

• 10:47Krishna Choudhary?

  To its liquid state. And so you actually got it right there. The surface layer, there's some different physics happening at the surface layer.

• 10:54Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 10:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And we can't count on the big equations that we use in statistical mechanics. For example, the main one is the Clausius-Clairperon equation. And that's the one that gives us this phase diagram. We can't actually use that in this scenario. And what we need to do is think about what is actually happening at the surface level. It can't be pressure because of what I just told you, right? It's not enough to explain the slipperiness of ice at really, really cold temperatures, at negative 20, negative 30 degrees Celsius. So in 1939, Bowden and Hughes came up with an explanation. They said that actually there's heat generated by friction. And that heat is what causes melting.

• 11:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so now we've got a good way to get a layer of water in between whatever I'm standing on. Let's say skates, let's use skates for this whole example. I'm standing on skates, between my skates and the ice, there's going to be a tiny liquid of water because layer of water, because I'm going to move with the skates. That's going to cause friction and the friction is going to cause heating. And that heating is going to cause some melting and I'm going to get a layer of water.

• 12:03Lester Nare?

  What it makes me think about is when, you know, you were in kindergarten or first grade, you're running around and you're in the classroom and the classroom had a rug. And somehow you ended up sliding on your knees like Harry Maguire after scoring a header. And you'd get rug burn and it would feel hot.

• 12:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 12:19Lester Nare?

  Because your knees were moving on the surface. That was friction and it was heat and the heat burned to my flesh.

• 12:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Lester Nare?

  But similarly, the contact.

• 12:28Krishna Choudhary?

  But also if you were to measure the temperature of the carpet.

• 12:30Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 12:31Krishna Choudhary?

  It would be a tiny bit warmer.

• 12:32Lester Nare?

  It would be warmer.

• 12:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Lester Nare?

  And so the point is, you know, this contact between the bottom of the skate and the top of the ice layer. We understand intuitively as just regular people.

• 12:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Lester Nare?

  That when we rub our hands together or we slide our knees on rugs, there's heat there.

• 12:48Krishna Choudhary?

  There's heat there.

• 12:48Lester Nare?

  And that's the entry point potentially for what they're trying to say here.

• 12:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep, yep.

• 12:53Lester Nare?

  Botten in the Hughes.

• 12:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, that was Botten in Hughes in 1939 out of the Royal Society. Okay, that's all fine, except the lubricant in this case is still liquid water. Yes?

• 13:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Krishna Choudhary?

  In between the two contact surfaces, right? There's ice, there's my skates that are metal.

• 13:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And the lubricant in between is liquid water. And that's what you're saying is what's causing slipperiness, right? Liquid water is a terrible lubricant. Okay? Because it has very low viscosity. And that's kind of the point.

• 13:24Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Krishna Choudhary?

  The reason why life works, the reason why water can go up the phylum and zyllum of plants is because it's very low viscosity. So the leaf, when the leaf pulls on some water, it'll go all the way up to the roots and that force will get relegated, right?

• 13:39Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 13:39Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's, it's, it's actually a feature of water that it's very low viscosity.

• 13:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's not going to work in this case because whenever we want to lubricate metal on metal, for example, we use oil.

• 13:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Like car oil and things like that. Those things have very high viscosity. The point of high viscosity is if I have a contact between two pieces, I don't want the liquid in between to give way. Right? I want it, I want there to be a film in between such that there's no metal on metal contact or in this case, solid on solid contact. You need high viscosity such that the, the, the liquid actually resists that tension.

• 14:20Lester Nare?

  That pressure.

• 14:21Krishna Choudhary?

  The pressure, yeah. Liquid water's not going to do that.

• 14:24Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 14:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Liquid water is just going to get the hell out of the way. And so the thickness of that film, if you were to actually, the hydrodynamic thickness of that film. Is gonna be nanometers or less compared to something like a highly viscous substance like oil. That's why we use oil in our engines and not water. If we used water, the engine parts would be rubbing up against each other. It would not be a good time, right? So that's the central discrepancy now. We're at 1939.

• 14:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:53Krishna Choudhary?

  We figured out why there's liquid water.

• 14:55Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:56Krishna Choudhary?

  But we haven't quite figured out how the liquid water becomes this lubricant. It really shouldn't.

• 15:01Lester Nare?

  Right, because, because what we're saying is just by the skate blade in our analogy, contacting the ice on its own, based on what we know, it should not create that nanometer scale layer of water.

• 15:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:15Lester Nare?

  Like, how does that happen?

• 15:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, like if it's a nanometer scale, no, if we do the, if we do the physics.

• 15:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:22Krishna Choudhary?

  The, the, the scale should be nanometers.

• 15:24Lester Nare?

  It should be nanometers.

• 15:25Krishna Choudhary?

  But it needs to be a lot thicker. Nanometers is like, you know, tens of atoms.

• 15:30Lester Nare?

  I see.

• 15:30Krishna Choudhary?

  One nanometer is 10 hydrogen atoms. That's not enough to like, keep me from contacting the ice, right? You know what I mean?

• 15:38Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 15:38Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so that's the idea. How do we get a, how do we get a, a layer of water? And, and we get that layer of water to be more viscous than bulk liquid water.

• 15:48Lester Nare?

  Understood.

• 15:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's where there was this beautiful paper in 2019 in the Physical Review X by Kanale and other authors, Nanoreology of Interfacial Water During Ice Gliding. This is a paper that tried to understand why the water was slimy between my skate and my ice, okay?

• 16:10Lester Nare?

  Is slimy a technical term?

• 16:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, I believe slimy is viscosity is anything above whatever oil is. I don't actually know what the numbers or the units for viscosity are. That's something I should look up later.

• 16:22Lester Nare?

  But, but the point, it, it is meant to be a technical description.

• 16:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It, it's meant to be, it's much more slimy than normal water. Normal water is not slimy.

• 16:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 16:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, I can just like, get rid of it. It'll evaporate away. Slimy stuff doesn't evaporate. It's viscous, it's sticky, things like that.

• 16:37Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and we need that, okay? So the key challenge is that this film between the ice and where the water is sitting between my blade is an ephemeral film. It only exists during this dynamic act of sliding. Let's get into some of the chemistry behind. What ice is and and how that layer works? So you've got a solid layer. The solid layer is very high molecular order. You've got nice water molecules that are stuck in a crystal form, regularly spaced, characteristic of solids, right? So all of these water molecules are sort of, you know, interacting with each other, but they have, they make this hexagonal lattice.

• 17:17Krishna Choudhary?

  The layer in between my ice and my skate is going to be the pseudo liquid layer where there's going to be a lot of molecular disorder, right? Because if you go down, the order is really high. And if you go up, it's fully liquid. There's going to be some transition where the water molecules are behaving in a very unique way, right? That's what this paper was trying to solve. What is the chemistry and the physical properties of that interfacial layer of water molecules?

• 17:46Lester Nare?

  Where there is a high disorder?

• 17:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, where there's high disorder. And can that actually tell us something about why the viscosity is so high? Right? And what they used is something called an atomic force microscope, but with a tuning fork. So an atomic force microscope is this incredible technology. This is one of the technologies that I thought should win the Nobel Prize this year. That that I called, didn't get it, but I think it's coming. The AFM is an amazing tool. It's effectively a cantilever. So you've got a little pointy thingy that's pointed downwards, right? And if I've got a sample with molecular level irregularities, like I'm talking tens of nanometers to less. When I bring this thing up, it's going to move up and down, right? Because the literal atoms on my surface are going to resist the cantilever.

• 18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And if I have a laser that's shining on the cantilever, and then it's on a detector, as the, as the cantilever moves, the laser on that detector is going to move, right? And then I'm going to be able to sense these tiny surface level atomic irregularities. And that's what the atomic force microscope is doing. It's, it's been revolutionizing surface chemistry studies like all over the place, from biology to chemistry, everything, right?

• 19:02Lester Nare?

  I think if I remember correctly, the way we analogized it was it's like the When you have a record player.

• 19:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 19:10Lester Nare?

  And it's reading a record, but just with a laser for precision on the readings.

• 19:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Lester Nare?

  But just.

• 19:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And the records are atomic scale.

• 19:17Lester Nare?

  Atomic scale versus whatever records are currently. But just as a visual analogy for folks, that that's kind of the reference.

• 19:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And with the atomic force microscope, the problem is you're only going to read this sort of X, Y, or sorry, the Z displacement, right? The up and down displacement. What we want to know with ICE, because we're sliding, is we gotta, we gotta get this, right? So what they, what they, they made a tuning fork atomic force microscope. A tuning fork is, is if, if you're a musician, you know, these like two prongs of metal that will vibrate at a specific frequency. So if you want an A, the, the size of these prongs tells you that it's only going to vibrate at an A. And so when you bounce it, it's going to be like boom, and it's only going to be at this really clean tone. They took a tuning fork microscope and they attached it, sorry, they made, they took

• 20:08Krishna Choudhary?

  a tuning fork and they attached it to an atomic force microscope. They attached that to a bead that would interface with the ICE. So the bead is kind of like my skates.

• 20:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:18Krishna Choudhary?

  I have a tuning fork on top.

• 20:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that tuning fork is going to vibrate sideways.

• 20:23Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:24Krishna Choudhary?

  And that sideways vibration is really tapped in to whatever resonant frequency that tuning fork is at, right? If I've tuned that tuning fork to an A, it's only really going to vibrate at an A.

• 20:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 20:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 20:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And the up and down can be the atomic force part.

• 20:39Lester Nare?

  I see.

• 20:40Krishna Choudhary?

  But the sideways part can be my tuning fork vibrating out of very specific frequency.

• 20:44Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so now I can get both the up and down motion.

• 20:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:49Krishna Choudhary?

  And the side to side motion, and I get two resonance modes in this case. I've got a tangential mode, which is my stroke, and that's, that's the, you know, going parallel to the lubrication layer.

• 21:03Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:03Krishna Choudhary?

  So I can, I can characterize the little thin film of water that's created. How is it? Responding this way?

• 21:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And how is it responding this way?

• 21:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 21:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Independently?

• 21:15Lester Nare?

  So, so what we've done now with this AFM plus tuning fork is we've added an additional variable layer that we can measure. Before, we were measuring in one dimension.

• 21:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we were just doing, okay, what's the height of this thing?

• 21:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:32Krishna Choudhary?

  But now it's like, what's the mechanical response this way?

• 21:35Lester Nare?

  And so now we have two different dimensions of measurement that can be appropriately and robustly measured independently of each other, which means we can better characterize what's happening because we have more data and information.

• 21:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah. We have data in all three dimensions and we also have data in time. That's gonna be huge, right? Because with the tuning fork, I can make it resonate at a certain frequency and I can tell what the response is of my material, right? So there's gonna be two things, and this comes from, if, you know, if there's any electrical engineers out there, they must have heard of this concept of impedance, which is the idea, it's kind of like a resistance, but for AC circuits, for the alternating circuits. Because when you have direct current, the current goes through, the resistance sort of just like stops the current from happening, and then the output, the output voltage is gonna be a little bit lower because you've lost a bunch of energy inside that resistor.

• 22:32Krishna Choudhary?

  When you're doing alternating current and you put a resistor in there, the output is gonna be another alternating current, but there's gonna be a phase shift. There's gonna be a time delay because the resistor is not only reducing the amount of energy, it's also causing a time delay. And that's actually what they see with this water. This water has mechanical impedance. So there's an elastic property, which makes it sort of dissipate energy, but there's also this viscous dissipative component that is creating dissipation. So if I were to- Poke the tuning fork and the tuning fork is going in this way. My response is going to have a delay. And that delay tells us a lot about the viscosity of that layer. And it turns out that layer is highly viscous.

• 23:17Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not the viscosity of normal water.

• 23:20Lester Nare?

  And, and so this is the first indicator of the slimy water.

• 23:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 23:24Lester Nare?

  That we talked about earlier on, on its face. Uh, water is not very viscous. Uh, you know, it, it, which allows it to, in the tree example float up.

• 23:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 23:36Lester Nare?

  Because it's not introducing, uh, new friction.

• 23:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's very slippery.

• 23:39Lester Nare?

  It's very slippery, uh, which means it can move around very easily. In order for skating, ice skating to work in the way we think about it. At a minimum, the top layer of the big body of ice needs to be extremely viscous.

• 23:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 23:54Lester Nare?

  Uh, meaning not slippery. Meaning be able to, being able to catch on to, basically grab on to the blade.

• 24:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Lester Nare?

  As it's moving on top of the surface. And this is the first indication that where we can measure and see that, oh, actually that top layer is highly.

• 24:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Highly viscous. And if you were to now calculate, how thick would the film, the film be?

• 24:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:15Krishna Choudhary?

  It's now hundred to 500 nanometers.

• 24:18Lester Nare?

  Instead of just a couple.

• 24:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's like two orders of magnitude above what we thought it should be before. And so now that layer is enough.

• 24:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 24:26Krishna Choudhary?

  To, to lubricate this contact between my blade and the ice.

• 24:31Lester Nare?

  And the ice, right?

• 24:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And this was, this was in 2019. It was, it was, I thought it was a really cool experiment, just the way that they constructed an AFM, which is pretty established now, but they attached it to this tuning fork to get that XY displacement as well.

• 24:46Lester Nare?

  I, I just want to briefly note, this is a very interesting point about how when tools are built, AFM, CRISPR, et cetera, et cetera, tools are, let's say platforms, however you want to categorize it. They're not, uh, in a finite state of completion.

• 25:00Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 25:01Lester Nare?

  Right? You can add your aftermarket attachments on top of it for different use cases. And this is a perfect example of taking AFM and having a little additional attachment on there that allows you to see stuff a little bit differently. That's very cool.

• 25:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very cool. And the other thing that they could tell from this new technology is like, not only why is it viscous, they could also tell that the reason why that thing was viscous is because there's tiny little ice crystals in that layer of water that's causing the viscosity to go up.

• 25:30Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 25:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And that's what makes sense. So now, when it comes to like, you know, why do we, why do we put wax on our, on our coating? Like when we do skis and stuff like that, I mean, at the Olympics, everyone's waxing their skis, right? And the reason why you want to wax your skis is because they're hydrophobic. They, they don't like water on it, right? And that's actually enhancing this viscous property of that layer, which is, which is kind of cool. It's like, kind of, it's making that more scientifically justified. Before it was just like an observation. It's like, hey, if I wax, like, it just works.

• 26:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 26:09Krishna Choudhary?

  And people had hand wavy ideas, right? But now we're really getting into the physics of it. It's very, very cool.

• 26:14Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 26:15Krishna Choudhary?

  It hasn't stopped there because that was done at, you know, very, very low temperatures. Now, how do we bridge the gap, right? Because this is clearly happening at all, all temperature scales. And that kind of theory only really works for this very specific temperature.

• 26:30Lester Nare?

  Ah, that's interesting.

• 26:31Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's not done.

• 26:32Lester Nare?

  So it's not universally true. It just goes back to where there's a difference between what happens at negative three degrees versus negative 30. And so the AFM tuning fork solution.

• 26:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Lester Nare?

  And that how the slimy water layer was being created is true at.

• 26:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Very low temperatures.

• 26:50Lester Nare?

  At very low temperatures.

• 26:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. Not like the negative two, negative three that we see in winter sports.

• 26:54Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 26:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But it's a clue at least.

• 26:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 26:57Krishna Choudhary?

  As to, as to why that part works.

• 27:00Lester Nare?

  It's like, it's like the game Clue where we found the candleer in the kitchen. And it has some fingerprints on it, but we've not yet done the fingerprint analysis.

• 27:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then in 2024, there was another paper, Hong and others in Nature. What they did was atomic scale visualization using cryogenic AFM. So now they upped their AFM game and they were doing.

• 27:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Atomic scale resolution, all the way down to like Angstrom level.

• 27:32Lester Nare?

  Wow.

• 27:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And what they found was there's this thing called pre-melting, which initiates a kind of defective boundary because the ice is not going to be a clean hexagonal lattice, right? There's going to be defects where like there's this domain and then it's like kind of interacting with this other domain of like hexagons, but it's the hexagons don't like completely line up. And what what that does is where those things don't line up, you get this atomic defect that compounds to create that layer.

• 28:02Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 28:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Of like weird water. Okay. So that was in 2024. 2025, there was another paper with Attila and Musser. They proposed something called cold self lubrication at very low temperature. So now they're going to negative 40 degrees and they're trying to say that there's some mechanical shear stress. So when you have a lattice, the shear is like how much you like sort of warp it this way, like contort it. And when you have that shear stress, that creates the disordered amorphous solid like layer that then becomes this viscous lubricant between our stuff. So as you can see, like it's, it's still a very ongoing

• 28:43Krishna Choudhary?

  field of research. 2025 was that last paper. 2024 was the paper right after. 2019 was this AFM paper that we were talking about with the tuning board.

• 28:51Lester Nare?

  Really initial, like an initial, the initial clue that has led us down a, like a path to a solution. It's just six years ago.

• 29:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and people are still investigating it. I mean, it's got incredible importance for our society, right? If we just talk about climate modeling and climate change, which we're going to get to later on in the, in the episode. If water is a hundred times higher viscosity. Right in between interfaces of ice and other solids, then that completely changes the current models about how glaciers slide off continents.

• 29:30Lester Nare?

  Oh, interesting.

• 29:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 29:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Because before we had this number.

• 29:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And we're like trying to model, okay, the glaciers are going, this is the friction.

• 29:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Krishna Choudhary?

  But now we've got a completely different number and the number is two orders of magnitude different, about 100 times different. So now the the sliding rate is going to change. It's going to get a lot higher.

• 29:47Lester Nare?

  Just to be clear, your your note about the difference is, we initially talked about how the assumption was it's, you know, two to three nanometers or a couple of nanometers.

• 29:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Lester Nare?

  Is the slimy water layer that enables the ability to skate.

• 29:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:59Lester Nare?

  Quote unquote.

• 29:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Lester Nare?

  We've now with AFM tuning fork and follow on research, we've identified that that's in the hundreds of nanometers.

• 30:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. What we what we've clearly done, the the layer depends on how much pressure you put in, right?

• 30:12Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 30:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, if there's a human body weight on a on a bit of tiny skate, I mean, there's a lot of pressure on that tiny little like, you know, millimeter thick blade, but with a glacier, glaciers like like kilometers thick worth of.

• 30:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Worth of stuff. So there's going to be a lot more pressure. So the the layer is going to scale that way. What we've done is confirm that viscosity is a lot higher.

• 30:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And that viscosity number is what we're going to put into our models.

• 30:37Lester Nare?

  Right, because now, because the viscosity is a lot higher, it's a variable when we look at large scale glacier, glacier, glaciology. It's a variable in a larger equation that has meaningful impact.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 30:48Lester Nare?

  On modeling.

• 30:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes. And one of the one of the things that you can think about is like these shear thinning events that happen all of a sudden that lead to a catastrophic flow and acceleration. There's this glacier called the Thwaites Glacier, I think that's how you pronounce it, in Antarctica. This single glacier contributes to 4% of the global sea level rise. Okay, it's massive. It's the size of like states in America and it is moving extremely flat fast, something like two kilometers per year. That's really fast for a glacier.

• 31:21Lester Nare?

  The surface of glaciers moving on the underlying.

• 31:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:24Lester Nare?

  Landmass.

• 31:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and you know. In this century, it's projected to raise the sea levels by several centimeters. If the whole thing went, which I think people are projecting it's going to go in the next three centuries, that's two feet of ocean level rise from a single glacier.

• 31:42Lester Nare?

  It's crazy.

• 31:42Krishna Choudhary?

  It's crazy, right? And now with these new models, it's like, maybe this is even faster.

• 31:47Lester Nare?

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 31:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It's crazy.

• 31:48Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right. But this is actually an interesting note on how what seems to be a totally unrelated issue with the question, the entry question of why is ice slippery?

• 31:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:58Lester Nare?

  Uh, has all of the second, third and fourth order consequences on things like, how do we model, uh, sea level rise based off of glacial ice, uh, evaporation, et cetera?

• 32:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:11Lester Nare?

  Uh, which, which makes sense when we talk through it.

• 32:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Lester Nare?

  But it's not, you don't immediately make the connection.

• 32:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, you don't, I mean, you, you could be like, oh, it's such a, why do we care? Well, in science, there's always other consequences.

• 32:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:23Krishna Choudhary?

  That deal with these fundamentals, right? Fundamentally, why are water molecules so weird? Has so many consequences. It's so, um, I thought that was like pretty exciting because it is such a simple question. It's been 200 years that we've been asking it. All of our best scientists have worked on it and, you know, we're still, the closer you look, the more interesting things are.

• 32:47Lester Nare?

  This is, this is so, and I think what's so fascinating about this is the Winter Olympics have been going on now for, I think it's 25 years is what they were saying on the broadcast. It's like relatively new as compared to the Olympics. It's been around for a very long time.

• 33:01Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it's, it's been around longer, no? 25 years.

• 33:04Lester Nare?

  So we could, we can do a look, the way that NBC is announcing.

• 33:07Krishna Choudhary?

  No, 1924 was the first one.

• 33:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 33:09Krishna Choudhary?

  In Chamonix.

• 33:10Lester Nare?

  So.

• 33:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Chamonix, sorry.

• 33:11Lester Nare?

  Chamonix. So they must be talking about the like, in the way that Premier League talks about the Premier League era versus the like, you know, there's like eras that are.

• 33:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 33:20Lester Nare?

  Legit or not legit, whatever, what have you. It, it, it is still fascinating to me that we don't understand the fundamentals of this thing, that we have a massive global event going on that's been around for a hundred years.

• 33:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and industry.

• 33:32Lester Nare?

  And industry, billion dollar industry. And we actually don't know why.

• 33:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, just straight up, why is ice slippery?

• 33:39Lester Nare?

  For, for some of the key events. Uh, great physics story to, to start off with. We're going to move now into the rundown where we're going to, again, with the rundown, we can't cover every story every week. There's so much breaking and frontier research, science happening. We do our best to cover the stories that we're most interested in and can cover. But the rundown gives us an opportunity to share what else is happening in the world of science at a slightly higher level. Before we jump in, I do want to talk about a couple of housekeeping notes. For those who are listening to the pod, whether that's on Spotify as audio only,

• 34:22Lester Nare?

  on Apple Podcasts as audio only, we are a video podcast. This is funny. People say, well, if you have a video, aren't you a show? We're not syndicated on an actual network or streaming platform. So in my view, definitionally, we are not a show. But we are a video podcast. And so many of the things we talk about on the show, we accompany with a lot of visuals. I think in every episode, we almost have 40 to 60 overlays that we display. So if you're listening to the show, audio only, and you're having a hard time visualizing the concepts we're talking about, you can always check out the video version directly on Spotify and/or on YouTube for the full explanations where we have the overlays.

• 35:04Lester Nare?

  It really is helpful to understand the concepts with that visual reference point. So if you haven't already transitioned to the video version, please do. And on top of that, if you are watching on any of those platforms, whether it's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, we need to rise through the ranks of the billionaire algorithms. And the best way we can do so is with likes, with shares, with comments. And for Spotify and Apple Podcasts specifically, to give us that five star, it helps us get our science pod out to more people. We love talking about science. We love to reach a bigger audience.

• 35:44Lester Nare?

  And last note on housekeeping here is for folks who are looking to support the show. One of the things that's really key for us is that the show is available as freely and as on many platforms as possible. No subscriber bonus episodes, no exclusive access subscriber content. But if you want to donate to support the show, we now have a new donation portal set up at the website, ffppod.com backslash donate and join one of our three supporter tiers, listener, supporter, or producer, as well as sending over a custom one-time donation of an amount of your choosing.

• 36:25Lester Nare?

  It is through this support that we are able to run this podcast with just the two of us.

• 36:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Lester Nare?

  No big, big, bad, evil platform or network.

• 36:34Krishna Choudhary?

  It's literally just the two of us.

• 36:36Lester Nare?

  Just the two, just the two of us.

• 36:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Lester Nare?

  We can make it. I don't know how it goes.

• 36:41Krishna Choudhary?

  We can make it if we try.

• 36:43Lester Nare?

  Oh, you can tell who's the singer of the two of us. No, but seriously, the engagement's been super fantastic. We're excited to grow and expand the show and your support will do a lot to enable us to do so, including some of our onsite episodes.

• 36:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Lester Nare?

  One of which we have already shot and we are in the edit process for, which we are super excited about. Now, with all of that housekeeping out of the way, let's go to our first story of the rundown. And this one is about AI doing physics.

• 37:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 37:15Lester Nare?

  So Sam Altman, unclear if he's a human or a non-human, non-human intelligence himself. But Sam Altman and OpenAI are claiming that ChatGPT is now doing research-grade, high-energy physics research. What is your take on this recent OpenAI story? Which I think was in tandem with a couple of other institutions, maybe namely MIT, if I'm remembering correctly.

• 37:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty interesting story and it's a pretty big claim. I first heard about it on their Twitter. The idea is in particle physics. We are worried about calculating something called the scattering cross-section of stuff. Okay, imagine you're at the LHC or any collider.

• 38:05Lester Nare?

  Large Hadron Collider.

• 38:06Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. Right, you've got jets of particles that are interacting with each other. And then they have a certain energy. And then you've got a bunch of detectors around. And what the particles are going to do is because they're at such high energy, there's going to be interactions of different fields at this quantum level. There's going to be a Higgs boson coming, going to be electrons, protons, like all sorts of random stuff happening. And then they're going to scatter off, right? And then different particles are going to scatter off. And we're going to collect all that data in our detectors from that collision. Right? What we want to do is calculate what the scattering amplitude and the probability is going to be in each of these directions. Right?

• 38:50Lester Nare?

  Because the point is after the collision, these things are scattering in all kinds of.

• 38:54Krishna Choudhary?

  All kinds of different directions. Directions depending on whatever physics is going on at the point. Right? And so fundamentally in particle physics, all these guys are doing is calculating these scattering cross-sections. Okay? Because that tells us intimately how the fields interact with each other.

• 39:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:10Krishna Choudhary?

  How does the electron interact with quarks? How do quarks interact with each other? And in this case, they're wondering how do gluons interact with each other? Gluons are the mediators of the strong nuclear force. We went over this in a previous episode, but just to briefly reiterate, the strong nuclear force is what keeps the nucleus together. Okay? Nucleus is full of protons, which are all positively charged. According to electromagnetism, they don't want to sit right next to each other. They want to blow apart. But the strong nuclear force between the quarks inside of these protons is what's gluing the nucleus together inside of an atom. And that glue comes from gluons, which are the mediating force between all of these quarks. That's how the quarks kind of talk to each other.

• 39:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Now gluons can interact with themselves. A gluon here can interact with another gluon here. And the focus of this particular paper. Is about how those gluons interact. There's a certain type of diagram. We use Feynman diagrams, which are, which is this sort of tool. It's a mathematical tool, really, but also a visual tool that Feynman came up with that helps us understand how these fields interact with each other with like virtual particles, a gluon interacting with another gluon and so on and so forth. And usually when we calculate these scattering cross sections, we want to figure out all the different ways that a gluon can interact with other gluons and so on and so forth. There's a particular way that they interact, which we thought would never happen.

• 40:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Because if you were to calculate through the whole integrals of all of the Feynman diagrams, this tree level diagram, which had no loops, the answer came out to be zero, meaning the amplitude was zero, which means the probability that this particular process happens is zero. That's what it was thought.

• 40:54Lester Nare?

  So the math was saying that there's an outcome that should not happen.

• 40:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That should never happen.

• 40:58Lester Nare?

  And we feel very confident about the math. And so the math was like, this is solid. This has been proved true in other use cases. And so we should safely assume that in this use case where N equals zero, that nothing will happen.

• 41:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right? The amplitude should be zero. The probability should be zero. Then about a year ago, the authors of the study from IAS, Princeton, Cambridge, Harvard, they decided that actually it might not be totally the case. Okay? They went all the way up to N equals six, which is six gluons interacting with one another. And they tried to write out by hand the formula for how probable this outcome would be. It's a ridiculously bad formula in terms of just like for a human being to write out all the combinatoric possibilities of this gluon going here and going there. What's the probability of this and keeping track of all those integrals? They do it by hand all the way up to N equals six. Okay? But what they, what they're getting an inkling of is maybe this is not zero.

• 41:57Krishna Choudhary?

  This answer is not all going to cancel out. Okay? So that's when they employed ChatGPT. ChatGPT took those expressions, simplified it, and then conjectured a simple formula that was a general case for all N, not just N equals all the way up to six, but N equals seven. You just plug in a number, you get the thing out. And then very, this was kind of interesting. Then an internal OpenAI model spent 12 hours reasoning behind this thing, came up with the formula on its own and came up with the proof for that formula. That was then corroborated by the authors. The proof was verified and it was correct.

• 42:34Lester Nare?

  So let me make sure I'm getting this right. So they initially fed this thing to ChatGPT and it created a simple, a simple formula.

• 42:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Lester Nare?

  Simplified way of doing the, a simple calculator to do the math.

• 42:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Lester Nare?

  For N equals any number, anything.

• 42:48Krishna Choudhary?

  It, it figured out some sort of patterns.

• 42:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 42:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Within like N equals one, two, three, four, five, six, and maybe figured out a pattern that was going on. And I was like, actually it's, in physics, we do this all the time. It's called an ansatz.

• 43:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 43:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It's our best guess.

• 43:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  For what do you think the general formula should look like?

• 43:05Lester Nare?

  So, so it created its own version of this simplified expression. It says a simplified formula. And then they fed it to an internal OpenAI model that had a bunch of scaffolding that's specific to scientific research stuff. It let it run for 12 hours. And this is like an important note, like, you know, the state of the art.

• 43:23Krishna Choudhary?

  There was a different model that let it run for 12 hours.

• 43:26Lester Nare?

  Correct, correct.

• 43:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. I do want to be, this is not like 5.2.

• 43:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 43:29Krishna Choudhary?

  They had an internal model that ran for 12 hours.

• 43:32Lester Nare?

  And so just conceptually for context here, because I think this is interesting. You can take these base models and then what they call, they put scaffolding around it, which is this technical term to mean these additional weights and processes.

• 43:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Lester Nare?

  That are hyper-specific to a particular task.

• 43:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Lester Nare?

  Or use case. So this is not just, you could go into ChatGPT today and you could then get this result.

• 43:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Lester Nare?

  But the underlying model intelligence is being amplified with this sort of, sort of bespoke use case. Anyway, they let it run for 12 hours.

• 44:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Lester Nare?

  And I think this is important because a year ago, you could not have long-running agent-based.

• 44:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Lester Nare?

  Autonomous processes. And just actually recently in the same time period as this is coming out, the now the maximum time, last year, the maximum time was about three hours, a couple of hours.

• 44:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Uh huh.

• 44:23Lester Nare?

  Just about a week ago, the max running time, this was for Claude Opus 4.6, was two weeks straight. And it built a C compiler of 100,000 lines of code from scratch that worked with no human intervention. So I just, I want to.

• 44:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard about this. That was crazy.

• 44:40Lester Nare?

  It's a really, these, being able to run these things for longer enables stuff like this. So they ran it for 12 hours and then it came up with a proof.

• 44:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:51Lester Nare?

  Which then meant the human scientists could then go through that proof.

• 44:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And verify.

• 44:55Lester Nare?

  And, and validate that it's true.

• 44:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep. Yeah.

• 44:58Lester Nare?

  And it was true.

• 44:59Krishna Choudhary?

  And it was true. So it is quite fascinating, right? And. I think it is a big deal.

• 45:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 45:06Krishna Choudhary?

  From, from where I'm standing, I think it is a big deal, but there are caveats. Okay, there are nuances because I want to understand what is actually happening. I do hate these black boxes.

• 45:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 45:16Krishna Choudhary?

  But, you know, we're in the age of AI black boxes. Is it actually understanding stuff? Or my hypothesis is, well, let's go through, is it actually understanding stuff? Is 5.2 understanding something? Friend of the show, he's going to be in the acknowledgement section. Alan Southworth, he sent me a screenshot of something that he asked ChatGPT. And that's in the next photo, I want, I want you to show that. Okay, so he asked ChatGPT 5.2, okay? I want to wash my car and the car wash is 50 meters from my house. Do you think I should walk there or do you think I should drive there?

• 45:52Krishna Choudhary?

  You should drive there because it's your car.

• 45:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah, right.

• 45:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, ChatGPT answers at 50 meters. You are officially in the put on sandals and stroll territory. Right, because it's, in all of its LLM knowledge, it's like, oh, 50 meters, you can walk. Because there's probably so many blog posts out there about when is it okay to walk? And why to not, you know, use gasoline and all this other stuff. What's hilarious about that is at the end of the whole thing. You know, ChatGPT always asks a follow up question because OpenAI wants you to keep engaging. The follow up question is, so are you going to get a full detail? Or, so it knows that you're doing the car wash the whole time.

• 46:36Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 46:37Krishna Choudhary?

  But in the middle, it's like you should walk. And then at the end it asks, are you going to do a full detail? Or like, what are you getting about your car?

• 46:44Lester Nare?

  Yes, yes.

• 46:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Do you understand?

• 46:46Lester Nare?

  And the point being, it means it doesn't actually have an understanding

• 46:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:50Lester Nare?

  of the question and the variables inside the question. Because for any, you could ask a five year old that question. And they'd be like, you should drive the car.

• 47:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 47:00Lester Nare?

  Because you need the car to wash it.

• 47:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, they've associated some type of meaning behind the task that you're trying to do and accomplish, which is get my car washed. And the mode of transportation you would need to get there. You would have to take your mode of transportation because the task is related to that mode of transportation. That's ChatGPT 5.2 that's not able to actually make that connection.

• 47:22Lester Nare?

  I actually would be curious, is it, does he have, I'd be curious if he had thinking on or off?

• 47:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Interesting, okay.

• 47:27Lester Nare?

  Because you can have reasoning on or off with 5.2.

• 47:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:32Lester Nare?

  I'm not saying that it would have made a difference.

• 47:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, but no, that's a valid question.

• 47:35Lester Nare?

  I think it is because that's the argument that those on the inside are making. It's like, oh, when you just use the base models without reasoning as this additional layer to basically in theory check for this kind of stuff.

• 47:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Lester Nare?

  Then yes, you will get these quote unquote hallucinations. But the argument is, oh, reasoning with 5.2 and OPUS 4.6 covers most of these use cases. I'm not saying that's true. That is the argument then.

• 48:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That is the argument that's so.

• 48:01Lester Nare?

  So Alan, it would be good to know if you use thinking on or off.

• 48:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Lester Nare?

  Because if thinking is on, it really does, I think, expose a huge with even within the reasoning pathway. It is really not actually.

• 48:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Understanding.

• 48:15Lester Nare?

  Understanding.

• 48:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and from there, I wanted to ask like, okay, like how, if it's not understanding, how is it able to do this physics?

• 48:23Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 48:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, I have a hypothesis. I don't know if it's correct and, you know, perhaps someone can tell me I'm wrong. My hypothesis is that, you know, ChatGPT in all of its wisdom and all of its research

• 48:37Krishna Choudhary?

  in pre-training found a piece of mathematics that was very similar to this physics problem. Right? It's reducing a bunch of integrals that are sequential and all of these processes and it's trying to find some like generalized formula. Perhaps in all of its reading of the world's mathematical literature, it saw and made a connection to someone else who had done something similar to find a general use case. Right? Pulled that bit from its

• 49:05Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 49:05Krishna Choudhary?

  latent space and then and then injected it here. I'm wondering if that's what happened.

• 49:10Lester Nare?

  And that would make sense, given the structure that we are currently told is what these large language models are framed as because your point, what you're saying is there is a pattern that the model found

• 49:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 49:21Lester Nare?

  in other, in mathematics applied to another use case that for whatever reason, we as humans have not yet made the connection to.

• 49:29Krishna Choudhary?

  And the model just made the connection. Maybe the physicists who are working on this are just not aware of like some fringe

• 49:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 49:34Krishna Choudhary?

  mathematical aspect.

• 49:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 49:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And and so perhaps it made that pattern recognition, right? Regardless, I think this does show the utility of these large language models to do frontier theoretical research now.

• 49:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 49:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 49:51Lester Nare?

  One of the things, I know we've spent a long time on this story, but I think this is such an

• 49:55Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it was cool.

• 49:56Lester Nare?

  This is really cool. And I think it's very important because this is like a zero or one face state change kind of issue. Either these models are not able to discover new science or they are.

• 50:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:12Lester Nare?

  And the difference between a world in which they are not and in which they are are is an order of magnitude in terms of the implications.

• 50:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's something that we should cover. And, you know, I'm not quite convinced that they can do really new science, right? But they can fill in gaps.

• 50:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:31Krishna Choudhary?

  And I think that's what they're doing here.

• 50:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 50:33Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 50:33Krishna Choudhary?

  And even that is itself a very good thing.

• 50:36Lester Nare?

  I want to remind people that ChatGPT, which is the first like consumer version of the modern era of LLMs, came out three years ago.

• 50:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Lester Nare?

  And so I think keeping the time scale of progress in mind is very important.

• 50:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Lester Nare?

  You don't even graduate college in three years.

• 50:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Lester Nare?

  And we've gone from it can do absolutely jack.

• 50:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Lester Nare?

  To getting to the fringes of some of these fundamental science concepts. I think it's very unwise to underestimate.

• 51:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 51:08Lester Nare?

  This, I get that there's a whole variety of social, economic, political implications.

• 51:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Lester Nare?

  That are all very important to talk about. That is 100% true. But saying this is a stochastic parrot that can't do anything of real value.

• 51:23Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 51:23Lester Nare?

  I think is a gross underestimation of what is currently happening.

• 51:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And we, and we need to like, as a society, start grappling with the true potential of this technology.

• 51:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 51:34Krishna Choudhary?

  And how we're going to get around it.

• 51:36Lester Nare?

  Because if it doesn't get there, great.

• 51:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Lester Nare?

  But if it does get there, we don't want to be getting there with our pants down.

• 51:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 51:42Lester Nare?

  Great first story. Again, water, potential watershed moment as this moves into scientific discovery. We've talked about several previous episodes where AI is already having other tangential impacts within breakthrough in frontier science research.

• 51:58Lester Nare?

  A long story number one will be quicker for the stories. Story number two that we have here, this is out of the Universita D'Aglia Studi di Napoli Federico II in Napoli, Italy, and the universities in Berlin in a paper in Scientific Reports. This is about feline behavior. A new study has shown that a cat's purr reveals much more about its individual identity than a meow, the cat's meow.

• 52:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so a meow is different from a purr, is the point.

• 52:32Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, cats were domesticated probably like 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. And what they found using 27 different cats and the vocalizations of all these different cats is that cats do not meow to each other. The meow of the cat has specifically evolved to interact with their humans.

• 52:53Lester Nare?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's the point of the story. The purr is actually something that is like very unique to a cat. So one cat's purr is going to be just a foundationally different sound signature than another cat's purr. But the meows have a very high variance. And the meows are basically used to interact with human beings. Cats only meow at each other when they're like in a fight, effectively. Otherwise, they're like communicating like, hey, this is me using a purr. And what they did was they also compared the vocalization of these 27 domesticated cats with the cats in the wild. Okay, again, that's what they found. The meows are more variable, but the purrs are actually much more related to these

• 53:39Krishna Choudhary?

  wild cats. So the purr has kind of been around since domestication and before domestication around 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. But the meow has actively evolved to communicate with human beings. Like, I need more food. I want to go outside. I hate you. I don't know what cats are like, but I think that's what's going on in their head.

• 53:58Lester Nare?

  So we've identified that a cat's purr is like their fingerprint, the idea that every individual's fingerprint is different. But the meow is the way for them to.

• 54:09Lester Nare?

  Interface with the meat suits that are human beings.

• 54:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 54:14Lester Nare?

  That they get to boss around.

• 54:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Lester Nare?

  As they like to.

• 54:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Lester Nare?

  Another follow up to our lion roar story.

• 54:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Lester Nare?

  That we did last week in the rundown, a lot of great animal, animal science stories. We're now going to talk about immunology and the debate of nature versus nurture. As scientists discover how life experiences rewrite the immune system. It's like we have a molecular diary of our past.

• 54:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this is an incredible story out of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Right out of, right outside of UC San Diego. It answers this question of variability, which is something that is very familiar to us. Having gone through the COVID-19 pandemic. Some people got completely wrecked by COVID-19 when they got it. Other people were fine, you know, even with the vaccine on both ends, right? Even if you control for those who are vaccinated and not. The variability between responses from one individual to the other is extremely different. Okay, and this particular paper is trying to answer that question. Why, why is stuff so different? They focus on something called the epigenome. The epigenome is how the DNA gets expressed.

• 55:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Everybody has the same DNA effectively, but like how each DNA strand, how the genes in that DNA get expressed is part of the epigenome. And that's a very dynamic thing that can change as we age and has as we have life experiences.

• 55:41Krishna Choudhary?

  The genetic patterns can be changed through two ways. Either it's genetic thing, right? Like there's part of our epigenetics where the cells pick which genes to express and which genes to not, based on the genetics themselves. And then there's another one where our life experiences actually change genetic expression. Right? And those competing factors are very much in play when it comes to immune cells. Because, because immune cells have to learn throughout the experience of an individual. Right? I get some disease. My immune cell has to now remember what that disease looked like mechanistically, so that we don't get that disease in the future. Right? So immune cells are this really great lab to try and figure out what are these competing effects like?

• 56:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, what they focused on was something called differentially methylated regions. Basically, you've got your DNA strand. Your body, your cells put tags on the DNA with these things called methyl groups. Okay. And that sort of gives them a distinction between, hey, this is a methylated piece of DNA. This is not a methylated piece of DNA. So structurally, from a molecular level, they can tell two bits of DNA apart. Okay. What they looked for is how these differentially methylated regions were tied to things like genetics and life experiences. And what they found was there's actually two different types of markers in our genetics.

• 57:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. The part that's more genetic is actually particularly in long-lived immune cells, like the T cells and the B cells. These are the ones that have memory of our past immune attacks and things like that. And all of these methylated regions are found in the stable regions of our genome. On the other hand, if you have things like, um, you know, the killer T cells, these are the ones that are rapid response. Those are the ones that have this methylated region in more flexible regulatory regions. Okay. So you've got these two different effects. And so what this kind of self-specific database can tell you is new insight into how immune responses form.

• 57:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And also later on, we can do, you know, future treatments that are tailored to each person's unique biology, right? Because their particular immune system is going to respond in a different way to somebody else based on their past treatment. So if we can read the epigenome, we can then forecast, how is someone going to respond to a certain treatment? How is their immune system going to respond? That's the idea.

• 58:14Lester Nare?

  This is very fascinating. The, the, the concept here being there are, uh, you know, our genome has both these like genetically inherited from long, the long history of evolution that then formulate into these long-lived T cells and B cells, which kind of makes sense. It's like, oh, these are things that for millennia, for generations have been helpful. So we can kind of memorialize it in our long-term memory. And then there's the short, the sort of like epigenetic layer, which is more about. The lived experience of the individual or its most recent.

• 58:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Lester Nare?

  Predecessors impact the killer T cells and these sort of aspects that might need to be more reactive to real time.

• 58:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Real time stuff, yeah.

• 58:59Lester Nare?

  In the environment. And so the.

• 59:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And we're able to now in the molecules, see.

• 59:05Lester Nare?

  See.

• 59:05Krishna Choudhary?

  The difference.

• 59:06Lester Nare?

  The difference, how they're tagged between coming from this long history versus a short, short history. And again, I mean, this goes to the importance of like genetic diversity in clinical trials as an example, which is and a space that my mom works in because you will have different responses.

• 59:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:24Lester Nare?

  Based not only on, you know, someone's African versus African American. But even that, even if they're both black.

• 59:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:32Lester Nare?

  The epigenetic layer of the experiences are going to be fundamentally different.

• 59:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Different, yeah.

• 59:37Lester Nare?

  Between those who are part of the African, African slave trade versus Africans who are not. Just as a use case example.

• 59:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Lester Nare?

  Um, and so these kind of details are important because it, especially if someone is black, like the medical system and us being able to get treatment. It's a very complex issue.

• 59:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Lester Nare?

  Because just like photos and film was initially created for only white people. Right?

• 1:00:00Krishna Choudhary?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:00:00Lester Nare?

  There's fundamental things about the way that film, like actual film.

• 1:00:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:05Lester Nare?

  Works because of light. If you think about how light.

• 1:00:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's, that makes sense.

• 1:00:09Lester Nare?

  White people's skin versus dark people's skin. So until we got later into digital, like it was never really made for black people. Medicine kind of has a similar issue where a lot of the genetic profiles are, have been, or the way in which we've operated is for a particular group set. And I think as we continue to do this type of research, it will allow us to expand the efficacy of medicine across a larger swath of genetic profiles. So fascinating story. Again, there on talking about immunology, which has been an issue we've talked, a subject we've talked about quite a bit on the pod. We're going to move on to origin of life.

• 1:00:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Lester Nare?

  For our last rundown story.

• 1:00:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Or second to last.

• 1:00:48Lester Nare?

  Sorry, second to last.

• 1:00:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Sorry, I want to do, I want to do five this time.

• 1:00:51Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay, okay. Uh, so for our second to last, which is going to be this, um, scientists finding genes that existed before life on Earth.

• 1:01:02Lester Nare?

  What does that even, what does that mean?

• 1:01:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that doesn't, that doesn't mean anything to me, right?

• 1:01:08Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Genes before life? What are you talking about? Is exactly what I thought when I was, when I was reading this. I mean, because like, it's like life is genes.

• 1:01:17Lester Nare?

  Right, so how does it before?

• 1:01:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's what's going on. There might be some genes that are in nearly every single organism today that were duplicated before life shared a common ancestor.

• 1:01:31Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:01:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because let's think about all of life on Earth, right? It came from a single common ancestor. That's what we think.

• 1:01:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:01:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Because we all have DNA and there's all these different markers, right? Now, that's single common ancestor. There must have been stuff before the common ancestor that were building blocks to make that last common ancestor, right?

• 1:01:52Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And these guys are saying they have a way now to find genes that were there before that last common ancestor was even alive.

• 1:01:58Lester Nare?

  Fascinating.

• 1:01:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the building blocks of that last common ancestor. It's pretty insane. So when we think about the lost common ancestor, right? These are cells that already had membranes. They've got an inside and an outside. And they've got DNA to store genetic information, right? To store some information for self-replication. Now, these are essential traits and they've already been established. So what happened before that? And how can we tell?

• 1:02:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:02:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, they look for something called paralogs, okay? Paralogs are groups of related genes that appear multiple times within a single genome. A good example is for us, hemoglobin. We have eight copies of hemoglobin in our DNA, okay? And that hemoglobin came about about 800 million years ago. That's the thing, that's the protein that carries oxygen in our blood. We've got eight different copies. All of us have eight different copies. A lot of mammals have eight different copies. The fact that all of us have that means that hemoglobin is a really old, old protein, okay? So. The idea is if there's repeated copying and extra versions of this gene,

• 1:03:05Krishna Choudhary?

  then the copying must have happened way early because all of us have that, right? So now let's look for universal paralogs, which are genes that are repeated, like they have this repeated tendency and these copies across everyone, bacteria, us, fungi, literally everyone. What they're looking for is gene families that appear at least two times in at least two copies in the genomes across life.

• 1:03:35Lester Nare?

  And so to be clear, you're saying hemoglobin, there's eight copies.

• 1:03:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Eight copies, but it only happened 800 million years ago.

• 1:03:41Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:03:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Like bacteria don't have hemoglobin.

• 1:03:43Lester Nare?

  Right. And so, so we're

• 1:03:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Plants also.

• 1:03:45Lester Nare?

  We're looking for things that have multiple copies like hemoglobin, but hemoglobin, we only see in humans and mammals.

• 1:03:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Lester Nare?

  And so we're saying, what else has these N number of multiple copies, but in other?

• 1:03:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Everywhere.

• 1:03:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Krishna Choudhary?

  But literally everywhere. That's the other thing.

• 1:04:01Lester Nare?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:01Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gotta be literally everywhere because then you can make the argument, it happened way back even before the universal ancestor, right?

• 1:04:09Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And they found a few.

• 1:04:11Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:04:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And all of these, all of these genes have to do with two things, either building proteins or managing the membrane, how to get in and out of the membrane. And that kind of makes sense.

• 1:04:26Lester Nare?

  We've talked about this, you've brought this up several times about the membrane. And it's like, how did that happen?

• 1:04:31Krishna Choudhary?

  How did that happen?

• 1:04:33Krishna Choudhary?

  It turns out these cell membranes and managing transport across the cell membrane is something that might have happened even before our last common ancestor, just in like random molecular processes and like proteins at a molecular level, not even a cell, trying to self replicate, but like molecules

• 1:04:49Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:50Krishna Choudhary?

  trying to get across.

• 1:04:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:04:51Krishna Choudhary?

  And if a molecule got across, it had an advantage to like do more of itself, right? And I think that's, that's really fascinating. What they could also do is reconstruct the protein and produce this ancient ancestral protein that could then go across molecules.

• 1:05:09Lester Nare?

  It's molecular Jurassic Park.

• 1:05:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes. And what's crazy is that molecule that's, you know, billions of years old now.

• 1:05:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:05:16Krishna Choudhary?

  It can traverse the same molecular, the same membranes that we have.

• 1:05:20Lester Nare?

  And so

• 1:05:21Krishna Choudhary?

  So that, that old, you know, use case is, it can still do it.

• 1:05:28Lester Nare?

  It's it's like we've found, we've like re burned a CD copy of Now That's What I Call Music, Volume Four, and we're on Now That's What I Call Music, Volume Two Hundred.

• 1:05:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Lester Nare?

  But it's like it's

• 1:05:39Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's like we found the old.

• 1:05:40Lester Nare?

  Old, yeah. And it got the same intro.

• 1:05:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:43Lester Nare?

  And it works, it plays in the same player. That's kind of a rough analogy, but but that's actually

• 1:05:49Krishna Choudhary?

  I thought that was really crazy.

• 1:05:51Lester Nare?

  Very cool, because again, what this means is we can continue to log and continue to look for these paralogs across everything that would create, that would allow us to identify these ancestors before the currently accepted universal common ancestor.

• 1:06:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Lester Nare?

  In terms of traversing the path of evolution from like, single cell to multicellular organisms.

• 1:06:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable. This is out of Oberlin College, MIT. I misstated MIT earlier. This was the MIT story. And our Midwest companions, UW Madison.

• 1:06:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Of course.

• 1:06:24Lester Nare?

  In cell genomics. We're going to move to our last rundown story, which is about astrophysics and exoplanets, which astronomers have discovered a solar system that should not be possible. Four planets orbiting a red dwarf.

• 1:06:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:06:42Lester Nare?

  A hundred and sixteen light years away from Earth.

• 1:06:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Lester Nare?

  So what is happening here? And why should this solar system not be possible?

• 1:06:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. So we used to think that every solar system should kind of look like ours for very good reasons. The way it looks like ours is the inner planets are rocky, the outer planets are gas giants, right? That makes sense, because when solar systems form, the star is going to be very volatile. So it's gonna, the radiation from that protostar is going to basically shoo away all of these lighter elements like helium and hydrogen and ice and things like that. The rocky elements like iron and other nickel, that's going to stick around the star and create rocky planets. And then the outside is going to be gas giants. That's how our solar system is. The physics makes sense.

• 1:07:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:29Krishna Choudhary?

  They have found an inside out solar system. This solar system goes rocky, gas giant, gas giant, rocky.

• 1:07:36Lester Nare?

  Oh.

• 1:07:37Krishna Choudhary?

  And that really doesn't make sense.

• 1:07:38Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that doesn't make any sense.

• 1:07:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, just from the physics argument that I gave you.

• 1:07:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:07:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And they're trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

• 1:07:45Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:07:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, this rocky planet that's on the outside is 1.7 times the mass of the Earth. It's what astronomers would call a super Earth. They tried to figure out like ways that it could have formed. Like suppose maybe it was a gas giant, but then the atmosphere got ripped apart. Right? And so now we're seeing it as a rocky planet. They did a bunch of simulations, didn't work.

• 1:08:06Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:08:07Krishna Choudhary?

  So what they think is happening is that this outer rocky planet actually just formed later in the history. Because suppose the inner planets formed early. So you got the rocky planet on the inside. You got two gas giants. Those gas giants have hoarded all of the gas. And now when this outside one formed, there was no gas around to really like nucleate on the outside. Right? And which is why it's now rocky.

• 1:08:33Lester Nare?

  So the, the, the, the idea, the hypothesis here is that there was, the difference is because of a time delay, a formation time.

• 1:08:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, a formation.

• 1:08:41Lester Nare?

  They did, they started forming at different times. And by the time that fourth planet started forming after the rocky gas giant, gas giant, all of the materials to make it a gas giant were not available. And so it became a rocky.

• 1:08:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:54Lester Nare?

  Rocky planet.

• 1:08:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Lester Nare?

  This is a good one out of University of Warwick.

• 1:08:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Lester Nare?

  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, plus several others in science.

• 1:09:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Lester Nare?

  We went long on the rundown today, but we love this stuff. So sometimes we get.

• 1:09:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Sometimes we get, yeah.

• 1:09:08Lester Nare?

  Sometimes we get a little carried away. We'll try to keep it tighter, but we know you all like the details. And so we will always go with the details. But we are now moving back to our theme of the week, which is the Winter Olympics. We talked about why is ice slippery first? We are now moving on to our second main story, which is going to be a neuroscience story.

• 1:09:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:09:34Lester Nare?

  And this story is about choking under pressure. Not literal pressure like in our first story.

• 1:09:40Krishna Choudhary?

  No. And not literal choking.

• 1:09:42Lester Nare?

  And not literal choking, but the figure of speech, what happens in sports all the time. There's a sequence, you've done it a thousand times. You've got a down pat, you train for four years. And then when it comes down to the moment, you just can't lock in.

• 1:09:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Lester Nare?

  And there's actually really good neuroscience basis for these.

• 1:10:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, and I wanted to talk about this because of the recent events that have happened in Cortina and Milan. This Winter Olympics, there was a man named Ilya Malinin. He was purported as the quad god. This is a Scientific American article talking about the physics of how he can pull off these impossible jumps. He's a two-time reigning world champion. Pre-event odds before he went for the free skate portion, the individual free skate portion, negative 10,000, which is implying a probability of 99% at gold. That tells me two things. One, this guy is incredibly good and everyone is thinking he's gonna get gold.

• 1:10:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And two, the bookkeepers have really terrible models. Because how do you not include the variability of the Olympics? The Olympics is like no other event in sports, especially for these types of sports. There's the world championships. Okay, he's a two-time world champion. The Olympics is different. I don't watch the world championships. Okay, people who are into ice skating will watch the world championships. But everybody is watching the Olympics, right?

• 1:11:20Lester Nare?

  I think I just saw this chart the other day where the Winter Olympics is like the number five most watched sporting event, only behind the Cricket World Cup, the Summer Olympics and the World Cup. And one other event that's escaping me. But it is, and it's in the billion, like it's a massive, it's like, it's like 10x the Super Bowl. Like it's very, very watched.

• 1:11:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. He was the quad god. He was gonna get gold, 99% chance. He gets on the ice and he completely chokes. Okay, he, he was gonna make this quad axle, which was gonna be the first time anyone's ever done it in competition. Everyone was looking forward to it. This was crazy. I was watching it live, dude. He goes for his first jump, which is the quad flip. Does it very well. The commentators say it's an effortless start. The next one is gonna be this quad axle and the commentators say if he's gonna go for the quad axle, it's gonna be this next one. He think, I think he goes for it. In the middle of the jump, he abandons it. He only does one turn. And from there, it just unravels.

• 1:12:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Like mentally, he just like completely collapsed.

• 1:12:28Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:12:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And I just thought that was so fascinating. Because this is a guy who's done that routine probably thousands of times. He's prepared for it, right? And the Olympic ice is just different, right? The, it's still water, it's still H2O, but there's something that is different about that moment.

• 1:12:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:12:48Krishna Choudhary?

  That just completely, the house of cards just completely collapsed.

• 1:12:52Lester Nare?

  And it's not a physics issue.

• 1:12:55Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:12:56Lester Nare?

  Like we talked about earlier.

• 1:12:57Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:12:57Lester Nare?

  It is a pretend, it's a neuroscience.

• 1:13:00Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a neuroscience issue. And afterwards, he said, it's the Olympics and I think people only realize the pressure and the nerves that actually happen when you're on the ice, right? And it was something that just overwhelmed me and I felt like I had no control. This is a quote from Ilya. And from there, I wanted to talk about sort of what that means. What is going on in an athlete's brain when something like that happens?

• 1:13:24Lester Nare?

  And before we jump in, I just wanna be clear here. Especially as someone who is a former athlete at a high level. This is not meant to be disparaging to Ilya.

• 1:13:33Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:13:34Lester Nare?

  Sports is extremely difficult.

• 1:13:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Lester Nare?

  And the stakes are very high. There's a lot of money involved. It is just the topic that is, it's there for us to discuss.

• 1:13:47Krishna Choudhary?

  And I think it's interesting.

• 1:13:49Lester Nare?

  There's an interesting science angle here. And so we're trying to like understand the neuroscience of this. This is not about, oh my God, I can't believe he failed or didn't fail.

• 1:13:59Krishna Choudhary?

  No, yeah, no, we're gonna, we're gonna be talking smack, but it's gonna be later and it's not gonna be about Ilya. Don't you worry. This is an Olympics podcast. But you know, Ilya is very young and he's gonna be back. So he's gonna be back in the next Olympics and you know, one of the things that we're gonna uncover. About the neuroscience of choking is the more experience you have, the better these pathways get to prevent you from doing that. That's why LeBron is still like incredible at like just shooting, even under pressure, right?

• 1:14:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:14:28Krishna Choudhary?

  So let's get into some of the theoretical frameworks before we dive into the neuroscience. Okay, there are several theories behind why this happens. One is called the distraction theory. What it says is basically working memory, which is like your memory of like events that are happening now and what you need to do in a while. That has a finite capacity and it's flooded with task irrelevant stressors like there's fear about failing, there's the crowd, there's the cameras on you. And so you get this sort of loss of goal directed control of attention. Okay, that's the distraction theory. Then there's the explicit monitoring theory, which is actually the opposite, which says that, okay, athletes actually consciously

• 1:15:09Krishna Choudhary?

  control some automated practice skill. And if you overthink, that's when it hurts you. Okay, if you if you start consciously thinking about what you're trying to do, that's actually what's bad. And then there's another one, this which is this over arousal or over motivation theory. And that's the idea that there's actually an optimal amount of arousal when it comes to doing difficult and easy tasks. And if you want to do difficult tasks, you should be aroused less than if you're doing easy tasks, which is kind of incredible to think about. When you're doing an easy task, you want to be more in it. But when you're

• 1:15:48Krishna Choudhary?

  doing a really hard task, it's, it's kind of better to, to be a little bit out of it.

• 1:15:55Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of probably what people describe as that flow state.

• 1:15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. It's the flow state versus the intense attentional control that you're putting on something, right?

• 1:16:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:16:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And so in the context of these theories, I wanted to talk about the brain regions. The main brain regions we're going to talk about is the prefrontal cortex, the motor cortex, and the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex is this sort of advanced mammalian part of our cortex, right up here. This is something that is very big in humans. It's also there in primates. It's not so much there in lower order mammals. Okay, this is where you have executive control, working memory. You delegate micro mechanics to the other sub cortical structures. So this is kind of like our control center in some sense. I mean, I remember there was this guy, he's still there, Professor Bujaki at NYU.

• 1:16:47Krishna Choudhary?

  He hates when people say this. He used to call it the prefrontal cortex, the trash can of the brain. Because whenever someone, I was like, oh, this, this is probably the prefrontal cortex. But the reason is because it's such a highly evolved part of our brain that it seems that a lot of these higher functions are happening here, right? If that makes sense. Yep. So there was an experiment that was done

• 1:17:11Krishna Choudhary?

  about the prefrontal cortex and how the prefrontal cortex functionally disconnects with the other cortex, with the other cortices during high stress. It was a pretty incredible paper called "Out of Control Diminished Prefrontal Activity Coincides With Impaired Motor Performance." Here's what it was doing, okay? They use fMRI data and they have this bimanual visual motor tasks where people, like human beings, are playing snake, okay? And every once in a while, whenever they get the snake game right, they get like 10 bucks. Every once in a while, they'll get a jackpot of like 50 bucks. And they wanna, they wanna see how the, how the participants do.

• 1:17:55Krishna Choudhary?

  They actually performed less on the jackpot tasks. It's the same game. Right. But when there's this pressure of, oh, I could just win like 50 bucks instead of 10, the performance dropped. And then when they look at the prefrontal cortex and the motor cortex connectivity during these jackpot trials, it was inversely related to choking susceptibility. Meaning, the less it was connected, the more you were going to choke. Okay? So there's literally a connectivity issue between your prefrontal cortex and your motor cortex. The motor cortex is the thing that's actually doing the gameplay. And when that connection goes down.

• 1:18:34Krishna Choudhary?

  You're likely to choke more. Now, the question is, why is this connection going down?

• 1:18:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:18:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Because during these high-stress scenarios.

• 1:18:42Lester Nare?

  So the initial intuitive thought process is, okay, the high-stress scenario is what is directly correlated to the decreased connection between the prefrontal cortex and the motor cortex.

• 1:18:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Lester Nare?

  Theoretically.

• 1:18:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Theoretically, right? But in your sense, we always want something more mechanistic.

• 1:18:56Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:18:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:18:58Krishna Choudhary?

  At least I do. And so now, let's go to this next paper that this was from Smolder and other authors in 2024. This was in Neuron, "A Neural Basis of Choking Under Pressure." And what a title for a paper, can I just say? Here's what they did. They used 96-channel Utah arrays in Rhes macaques. So macaques have a prefrontal cortex, kind of like we do. This was in the motor cortex and in another brain region called PMD. And they had the similar behavioral paradigm of choking under pressure. Basically, there were these jackpot scenarios where the monkey knew that if it

• 1:19:41Krishna Choudhary?

  succeeded, it was going to get a really high reward. And again, the same thing happens. You get this increase in performance, but when you get an incredibly high reward anticipation, your performance decreases.

• 1:19:54Lester Nare?

  So what we're looking at here is three charts of monkey E, P, and R with six sessions, nine sessions, and 12 sessions. And on the Y-axis is success rate, and on the X-axis is sort of jackpot size, going from small going to large. And you can basically see this like top of a trapezoid.

• 1:20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Lester Nare?

  Where we have at small to medium.

• 1:20:16Krishna Choudhary?

  There's an increase.

• 1:20:17Lester Nare?

  There's a huge increase. And then medium to large, it kind of maintains at that higher level success rate. And you see a very drastic decrease in performance when you move from large to jackpot, across all these session lengths and all of these different subjects.

• 1:20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:31Lester Nare?

  And so regardless of number of repeats, et cetera, et cetera, there's a clear decrease in performance efficacy when the jackpot gets sufficiently high.

• 1:20:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And the jackpot is way higher than the large. Large, is the other big thing. It's like small, medium, large are like successively higher, but jackpot is like an actual jackpot. And that's kind of what the Olympics are, in some sense, right? Like, the stress is so high, and that gold medal that's like sitting there could be yours. It's incredible, right? And so, how do we manage that? And so, okay, we saw the behavioral paradigm, which is the same as we have in humans. The trick is now we want to find a neural paradigm, something in the neurons themselves that correlates to that behavioral paradigm. Because then we found a neural signature for what is happening, right? They use something called dimensionality reduction. This is something that we've been through in neuroscience.

• 1:21:26Krishna Choudhary?

  The idea is, your brain lives in a very high dimensional subspace, right? If you're listening to 10,000 neurons, that's 10,000 different dimensions in your mathematical subspace of where your brain is. Your brain doesn't actually live in that subspace, that's just how we're describing it. There might be lower dimensions that we can move along that tell us something about, oh, how much does the brain care about reward in this scenario? How much does the brain care about the target, getting to the target and getting that reward in this scenario, right? We can decompose the brain activity into independent metrics and see what happens.

• 1:22:07Krishna Choudhary?

  So, what they found was in the reward axis, there was an axis that like basically correlated with reward. Okay, so, when it was jackpot, it was really high. There were a bunch of neurons that were firing when it was a jackpot. And that was like, those neurons care about, it's like kind of telling the rest of the brain, hey, there's gonna be a jackpot, like, we gotta lock in, okay? Then there's another one, which is the target preparation axis, okay? This is the dimension within the target plane that is critical to the reach, which is part of the, which is part of the task. Like, how far am I gonna reach for the macaques to get this reward, right? And that target axis has the same behavior as what we saw in behavior, meaning...

• 1:22:50Krishna Choudhary?

  For low reward, I'm not that high on the target axis. But as I go to jackpot reward, again, I come back. Okay, so these neurons, these specific neurons that care about the target axis, the geometry of the brain has changed to where this target axis is actually the thing that is causing that choking under pressure.

• 1:23:09Lester Nare?

  The point being that there is now a neurological signature that maps onto the behavioral experimental data around this idea of there being sort of this diminishing as the jackpot gets sufficiently high in task completion.

• 1:23:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, exactly. And now we can actually think about a mechanism, right? And what they came up with is something called the expansion then collapse mechanism. Here's the idea, okay? For small reward, I'm influenced by reward a lot. Okay, but as I move in this trajectory, there is some optimal space that I want my brain to be in. Okay, there's like an optimal location in all of my neurons, in all of my neural space that I want to be in. Okay, but when I get this massive motivational signal from the jackpot trials, what that's gonna do is put my system into overdrive. And it's gonna push my system away from this optimal setting.

• 1:24:11Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:24:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:24:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:24:12Krishna Choudhary?

  To where now my neural states abruptly like collapse on top of each other. And I can't actually discern between like what to do when I have the task in front of me. Because like all of my neurons are in overdrive. I've got stress neurons coming in. I've got like the future planning neurons coming in of like, oh, what am I gonna do when I get, you know, like what's gonna happen in the future? All of the past mistakes that I've done, that stuff's coming in, the memories coming in. All of the stress is like trying to like get into this. Fly or fight response and it's putting your brain into overdrive and then you get a physical failure because now you can no longer actually do the task as well as you once could.

• 1:24:53Lester Nare?

  Just, just, I want to bring up this chart again, which is this neural bias. Why do animals choke? And we're looking at an X, Y, and Z axis. Neuron one is, let's say, X, neuron two is Y, neuron N is, is Z. And we sort of see the influence of the reward, small, large, and jackpot. Like, you know, in a 2D image meant to represent its 3D positioning on this X, Y, and Z axis. And the point is sort of saying, I'm sorry, the large, the little circle with the dots around it.

• 1:25:25Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the optimal, that's your target region where you want to be at.

• 1:25:28Lester Nare?

  That's where you want to be because that's where all the balance of all of the inputs and everything is like.

• 1:25:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Is just right.

• 1:25:34Lester Nare?

  Is just right for you to execute.

• 1:25:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Lester Nare?

  And what we're sort of saying here is, is the introduction of a jackpot reward moves you beyond that optimal.

• 1:25:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:44Lester Nare?

  Positioning.

• 1:25:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Because there's so much other stimulus coming in.

• 1:25:47Lester Nare?

  Coming in and going on, which sort of, it makes sense because if you just think about athletes, right? Some of the athletes in every sport who we mentioned as being the GOAT, when you look at them playing, almost if you talk about people like Messi, Wayne Gretzky, Usain Bolt, et cetera, visually, when you're looking at them with the human eye test, it almost appears as if they are totally unperturbed, disturbed, unfazed by anything going on around them.

• 1:26:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Lester Nare?

  And it's like they're floating.

• 1:26:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Lester Nare?

  And people always describe GOAT, Michael Phelps, they're like, they are operating at a plane that is different than anybody else.

• 1:26:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because they've somehow disconnected that input drive that's coming in. And I think that comes a lot with experience.

• 1:26:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:26:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:26:29Lester Nare?

  Which is fair, which is fair.

• 1:26:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, when it's your first time at the Olympics, like Ilya's. Mate, like, I don't know what that's like. That's gotta be insane.

• 1:26:38Lester Nare?

  It's gotta be.

• 1:26:38Krishna Choudhary?

  You've been working, you've been dreaming about this moment for the past, like, God knows how many years. He's probably started, you know, ice skating very, very young.

• 1:26:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:26:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, since he could walk, probably, or something, you know? And then you think about the gold medal opportunity, everyone is there. The NBC is calling you the quad god, right? Like, there's so much hype, 99% on, on polymarket.

• 1:27:00Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:27:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, that's gotta be so much pressure.

• 1:27:03Lester Nare?

  I would love to see the same group do research on Laminya Mall. Because this kid is 19 now, and he's dominating grown men.

• 1:27:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:14Lester Nare?

  In every, in every level of competition in, in soccer, football, globally. And it doesn't make any sense.

• 1:27:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Lester Nare?

  And it, there has to be something upstairs that is blocking going to the jackpot.

• 1:27:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Lester Nare?

  Space in the, in the gradient descent.

• 1:27:33Krishna Choudhary?

  How is he with, like, free kicks and penalties?

• 1:27:35Lester Nare?

  Um, he's unbelievable.

• 1:27:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause that's, that's sort of where I would expect choking to happen, right? Cause that's the individual kind of thing.

• 1:27:40Lester Nare?

  This kid.

• 1:27:41Krishna Choudhary?

  With team sports, I can, I don't, you know.

• 1:27:43Lester Nare?

  Fair.

• 1:27:43Krishna Choudhary?

  I wonder if we can take these.

• 1:27:45Lester Nare?

  Fair. No, no, that's fair. Cause it's a little bit different.

• 1:27:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Lester Nare?

  It's a little bit Tiger Woods.

• 1:27:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause also Ilya in the team, in the team event, although that was a free skate that he did individual and he, he crushed it. So, like, over 200.

• 1:27:56Lester Nare?

  No, that's a good point.

• 1:27:56Krishna Choudhary?

  But then when it came to his individual, which was only a few days later, he followed the same procedure and it, like.

• 1:28:02Lester Nare?

  That's a very good point.

• 1:28:03Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:28:03Lester Nare?

  I only bring it up because he's young.

• 1:28:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Lester Nare?

  And I, like, as a counter, a counter thesis to the experience point. But you, you correct, team sports and individual sports, very different context.

• 1:28:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, um, I just want to end with, you know, Ilya now, he's, he, I mean, he's like beside himself. And one, one of the. Articles was just about, you know, it's kind of the point that winning Olympic gold isn't supposed to be easy. And I don't know who thought it was a 99% because with sports at the highest level, anything can happen.

• 1:28:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:28:41Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:28:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:28:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And one of the things he added was, I just felt like all the traumatic moments of my life really just started flooding in my head. And there was just too many negative thoughts that just flooded in there. And I just did not handle it. This is a quote from him afterwards, which is, I mean, it's incredible that such a young man has the vocabulary and mental fortitude after such a traumatic event to even speak to the press. I think I would like give the middle finger and just like leave.

• 1:29:08Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, but you know, I think he's gonna be back. I have seen him do the, I've seen like videos of him practicing that quad, like axle thing. And it's like incredible. So.

• 1:29:18Lester Nare?

  And it's also the, when he's doing it in the practice, it looks effortless.

• 1:29:22Krishna Choudhary?

  It looks effortless.

• 1:29:23Lester Nare?

  Which is crazy.

• 1:29:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:25Lester Nare?

  Cause it's so ridiculous.

• 1:29:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's so ridiculous. How many turns? He's like four and a half turns, landing backwards. It's crazy.

• 1:29:31Lester Nare?

  On that thin millimeter blade with the 100 nanometers of slimy water.

• 1:29:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Balance, like, it's crazy. Yeah. So he'll, he'll probably be back, be back. But um, I just took that opportunity as a quick deep dive into neuroscience because I always loved that stuff.

• 1:29:45Lester Nare?

  No, it's, it's fascinating. Again, I think, you know, sports, as we move into the era of infinite social media and infinite content and TV and movies are sort of losing their luster of all of us watching them for the first time at the same time with binging and all this stuff. Sports as a medium and the importance of sports as being a connective tissue that's real time. It's, it's the only appointment uh, media left.

• 1:30:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Lester Nare?

  You, you gotta, you gotta be there when it happens.

• 1:30:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:15Lester Nare?

  Uh, both in person or digitally.

• 1:30:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:30:18Lester Nare?

  And it is, you know, we see these kind of situations. This, this was not meant to focus on it. It happens in all sports.

• 1:30:25Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:30:25Lester Nare?

  All of the time. Why is it that Zion Williamson in the NBA was one of the most lauded NBA draft recruits that everyone was super excited for him to be the next big thing in the NBA? Totally flopped. But now Cooper Flag, 19 year old, comes in, same kind of pathway, people like, he's absolutely dominating. And it's, it's very interesting to see this play out across different sports and across different contexts.

• 1:30:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:30:52Lester Nare?

  We are gonna wrap up the day with our sort of final main section, which is a little bit of a potpourri.

• 1:30:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's a hodgepodge.

• 1:30:59Lester Nare?

  It's a little miscellaneous. There will be a climate science aspect to this, but we're gonna cover a lot of different areas. I think you did have some other random thoughts about the Olympics. Given our Olympics focus here, so why don't we start with some of this potpourri that you got for us?

• 1:31:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so the first thing I want to talk about is climate change. It is real and it's going to hurt Winter Olympics a lot more than Summer Olympics, as you can imagine, right? With the earth warming, the first Olympic Winter Games were held in Schmonics, France in 1924. All 16 events took place outdoors. Look at these fine gentlemen in suits.

• 1:31:38Lester Nare?

  Suits.

• 1:31:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Like they're ready to, you know, I think this is the skate race. The 1000 meter skating race. The athletes relied on natural snow for all the ski runs and the freezing temperatures on the ice rings. Now we get to 2022 in Beijing, all artificial snow.

• 1:31:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:31:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Not a single snowflake there was made by like the actual weather. It was all artificial snow in 2022. Okay, and in a recent study, scientists have looked at the past 19 venues on the Winter Olympics to see how each one might hold up, given the climate scenarios that we can forecast into the future. They found that by mid-century, four of the former host cities, including Schmonics, Sochi, Grenoble, and somewhere in Germany, Garmisch Partenkirchen.

• 1:32:30Lester Nare?

  That's pretty, that's pretty good.

• 1:32:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, German I can do.

• 1:32:32Lester Nare?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:32:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Those would no longer be able to host reliably, given the climate that we're coming in, even under the best case scenario.

• 1:32:39Lester Nare?

  That's actually crazy.

• 1:32:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and if we do the current fossil fuel rate of burning, then places like Squaw Valley and Vancouver are also not going to be able to do it, right? This is getting pretty bad.

• 1:32:52Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And. Especially when we have something like the Paralympics, which happened, you know, a month or two after the real Olympics. Snow making requirement is going to keep on increasing because we're going to have to keep making snow in March. And the amount of snow that we'll have to make is going to increase all the way from zero to now like 80%. If you want to do it in Eastern Europe and things like that, right?

• 1:33:16Lester Nare?

  I mean, we're already seeing this. I talked about this, but at Big Bear.

• 1:33:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Lester Nare?

  They have the only thing, the only reason you can ski on three or four of the runs right now is because of artificial.

• 1:33:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Snow, period. And, you know, we think that, okay, maybe this can be fixed by snow making, right? Maybe we could just artificially make all the snow that we ever need. That's not even going to work either because even snow making works at an ideal temperature, right? You need to be lower than the dew point, which is when the snow that you're putting out is not going to condense into water droplets.

• 1:33:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:33:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And so it's, you've got to be below negative two degrees Celsius, 28 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, depending on the pressure, but usual and the humidity. But usually that's about the temperature. Now that's really bad because we've covered a story on this podcast before about how the world mountains are warming up faster than the plains.

• 1:34:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:34:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Because hot air rises and so on and so forth. So we have that, um, we have that little tidbit that the mountains are actually warming up.

• 1:34:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:34:14Krishna Choudhary?

  So all of these factors are combining to make it really, really quite problematic to do Winter Olympics in the same places that we used to be able to do. Right? People are suggesting that they can do something called snow farming, which is a new thing. I don't know if you've heard about this. I didn't even know this was possible.

• 1:34:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. You, you get a bunch of snow and you pile it up with massive piles of sawdust, tarps and wood chips, and that retains 60 to 75% of the snow.

• 1:34:43Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 1:34:44Krishna Choudhary?

  I need to look into how the physics of that works because like over the summer, you're telling me it doesn't melt.

• 1:34:49Lester Nare?

  Yeah, I'm not, that one.

• 1:34:50Krishna Choudhary?

  That's crazy, but it's like working. It like works and people are doing it.

• 1:34:54Lester Nare?

  If you guys want us to cover the snow farming story, let us know in the comments.

• 1:34:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Lester Nare?

  Cause I am also.

• 1:35:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That doesn't make any sense.

• 1:35:00Lester Nare?

  That doesn't make any sense.

• 1:35:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Like you put sawdust, shouldn't it be warmer on? Under the sawdust? I don't know. Um, in any case, I'm just saying that like, you know, people are gonna have to come up with interesting strategies now to keep the Winter Olympics going.

• 1:35:12Lester Nare?

  I will say, I do, I do find sometimes a little bit frustrating where the answer to the problem is always, oh, we'll just find a way to innovate our way out of the problem.

• 1:35:20Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:35:20Lester Nare?

  Without actually giving a specific answer.

• 1:35:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22Lester Nare?

  Like, you can't just be hand wavy about it.

• 1:35:24Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:35:24Lester Nare?

  Like, like, how?

• 1:35:25Krishna Choudhary?

  How? Yeah.

• 1:35:26Lester Nare?

  Like, okay, well, yeah, we'll just, we'll just, like, but no, like, what, like, why does that actually work?

• 1:35:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like fundamentally, the physics wise, you can't just make snow. Right? That still depends on weather.

• 1:35:38Lester Nare?

  Right. And so, anyway.

• 1:35:40Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. The next thing I want to talk about was curling.

• 1:35:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:35:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Curling is an amazing sport.

• 1:35:44Lester Nare?

  The most electrifying sport in the Olympics.

• 1:35:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. And all of the curling stones come from a single island.

• 1:35:50Lester Nare?

  Wait, really?

• 1:35:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is crazy. Oh, okay, there's two places. There's a little island in Scotland called Alyssa Craig. I think that's this one.

• 1:35:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And then there's the Trefford Granite Quarry in Wales.

• 1:36:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:36:00Krishna Choudhary?

  All of the curling stones come from this island. Each stone is 40 pounds. And the reason why is because somehow these places have very specific types of granite. Okay? In a curling stone, there's two surfaces. There's the part that comes into contact with the ice, which is the running band.

• 1:36:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:17Krishna Choudhary?

  And then there's a part that comes into contact with other stones.

• 1:36:20Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And like knocks them over.

• 1:36:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's the striking band. And you need two different types of physics for each of them. Okay?

• 1:36:26Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:36:27Krishna Choudhary?

  The running band, which is the thing that's on the ice.

• 1:36:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:36:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Needs to be smooth.

• 1:36:31Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:36:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because you want, you don't want like grainy texture there because it's gonna be moving along the, the ice and you want it to be, you know, as slippery as possible.

• 1:36:39Lester Nare?

  Low friction.

• 1:36:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Low friction, exactly. Um, the

• 1:36:44Lester Nare?

  striking.

• 1:36:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Striking band, that striking surface, you actually want a, a more granular structure in that granite. Because as it hits one another, if it's a really nice crystal. There's gonna be cracks. Right? So what you want is the two different things, the two different parts of the stone to have different

• 1:37:08Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:37:08Krishna Choudhary?

  sort of chemistry.

• 1:37:09Lester Nare?

  Yes, because they they have two different functional areas where they're relevant.

• 1:37:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:13Lester Nare?

  One for making sure it gets down the ice quickly and sufficiently.

• 1:37:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Lester Nare?

  And the other to make sure when it contacts other stones, it does so in the most.

• 1:37:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, it's like a really nice elastic collision that we read about in physics textbooks.

• 1:37:26Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:37:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Momentum is conserved. There's no like, nothing lost to heat and things like that. Right? Okay, so somehow there's only two places.

• 1:37:35Lester Nare?

  That's crazy.

• 1:37:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Good stones. I am convinced this is a racket.

• 1:37:39Lester Nare?

  It's a racket.

• 1:37:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Like.

• 1:37:41Lester Nare?

  Racket.

• 1:37:42Krishna Choudhary?

  There's no way, dude. But look, okay, so people tried to make an effort in Canada in the 1950s. They tried to use the very black igneous rock called anorthosite.

• 1:37:54Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:37:54Krishna Choudhary?

  To make these. And then those things just started chipping way too quickly.

• 1:37:58Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Like the the stones would get damaged. And speaking of the Canadians.

• 1:38:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:38:02Krishna Choudhary?

  They are now cheating in the Winter Olympics.

• 1:38:05Lester Nare?

  Typical.

• 1:38:05Krishna Choudhary?

  I don't know if you guys saw this.

• 1:38:06Lester Nare?

  Typical.

• 1:38:06Krishna Choudhary?

  But dude, this guy, so so you know, you're only allowed to, you're only allowed to grab the handle.

• 1:38:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:38:14Krishna Choudhary?

  And then let it go before that line.

• 1:38:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:38:16Krishna Choudhary?

  This guy was grabbing the handle, letting it go, and then pushing it with his finger.

• 1:38:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Krishna Choudhary?

  And then when the Swedes called him out.

• 1:38:21Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:38:21Krishna Choudhary?

  He like literally started yelling at them and told them to F off. And then the Swedish NBC, these guys are, these guys are the OGs. They placed their own camera because the the Olympic cameras are placed like here and and behind.

• 1:38:36Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Krishna Choudhary?

  So the guys could have gotten away with that.

• 1:38:39Lester Nare?

  Also, what you're saying, the initial comment of the initial complaint was prior to the video.

• 1:38:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because this is a known thing that this Canadian dude does.

• 1:38:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:38:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. And so the Swedish guys for the Canada versus Sweden match.

• 1:38:51Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:38:51Krishna Choudhary?

  The Swedish NBC, their television.

• 1:38:54Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:38:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Put a specific camera at that spot and caught this guy red.

• 1:38:59Lester Nare?

  Red handed.

• 1:39:00Krishna Choudhary?

  He did it again against the Swiss, and I think now he's facing penalties.

• 1:39:03Lester Nare?

  After all that bluster.

• 1:39:04Krishna Choudhary?

  The judges were just like not doing anything.

• 1:39:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Because they were like, well, I don't know if he did it or not. Well, now it's like, we got a specific camera. That's showing that he did it.

• 1:39:13Lester Nare?

  I guess it must be the case that no one was dumb enough to do it, which is why there's no like goal line technology for this currently.

• 1:39:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Lester Nare?

  But it seems obviously true to me that like, if that's the rule.

• 1:39:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:22Lester Nare?

  What, and there's an advantage you can get from breaking that rule.

• 1:39:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Because you, you, you give an initial momentum.

• 1:39:28Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:39:28Krishna Choudhary?

  And then a tiny, a tiny nudge will like.

• 1:39:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Because the, the, you know, the, the, the target is meters away.

• 1:39:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:39:35Krishna Choudhary?

  So even a tiny bit of nudge in that angle is going to cause a huge deflection later on, right? It's not nothing.

• 1:39:41Lester Nare?

  Very, very, very sad. Look.

• 1:39:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Very sad.

• 1:39:44Lester Nare?

  We're trying to continue to establish and repair our North American relationships with the Canadians. There's several things to be upset at us about, but we are now upset at you guys about this cheating.

• 1:39:56Krishna Choudhary?

  That's, that's BS.

• 1:39:56Lester Nare?

  Let's not, this member, it's the, as Bad Bunny said, it's America and then listed everybody.

• 1:40:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:01Lester Nare?

  So we gotta be on the same page here. No cheating in the Olympics.

• 1:40:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to beat Sweden as much as anyone. Okay, but like.

• 1:40:08Lester Nare?

  We're on the same team on this one, okay?

• 1:40:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and the next thing about cheating, I don't know if you saw this.

• 1:40:13Lester Nare?

  No, I did not.

• 1:40:14Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a family friendly podcast. And so when I say these words, I am using the biological terminology. This is penis gate.

• 1:40:22Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:40:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, ski jumping penis gate. Allegedly, some competitive ski jumpers may have artificially enlarged their crotch area by injecting their genitals with engorging chemicals or stuffing their underwear to make a bigger bulge. I'm not kidding.

• 1:40:41Lester Nare?

  What is the, what is the athletic advantage of this?

• 1:40:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so that's exactly like, cause that's a lot.

• 1:40:47Lester Nare?

  You're like, what?

• 1:40:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Injecting stuff down there.

• 1:40:49Lester Nare?

  What?

• 1:40:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Mate, what are you doing? Okay, so here's, here's the idea, right? Um, ski jumpers, ski jumpers, they get laser.

• 1:41:00Krishna Choudhary?

  What you call it?

• 1:41:01Lester Nare?

  Hair removal?

• 1:41:02Krishna Choudhary?

  No, no, no, no. It's like, it's like they get las- their body gets laser scanned.

• 1:41:06Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:41:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they, the, the suit that they put on has to be exactly fitting to their body.

• 1:41:12Lester Nare?

  Oh, it's like, uh, Frozone's, "Where is my super suit?"

• 1:41:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, it's exactly that. Okay? And the reason for that is their, um, their sport has everything to do with aerodynamics. Okay, so here's how the physics of that works, right? You go down this giant ski hill, and I think we've got a visual for it.

• 1:41:29Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:41:29Krishna Choudhary?

  This is for the 13.

• 1:41:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:41:30Krishna Choudhary?

  We go down the giant ski hill, right? During that downhill, you want to reduce drag as much as possible to get as much velocity.

• 1:41:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:41:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, when you lift off.

• 1:41:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:41:39Krishna Choudhary?

  You want to increase the amount of drag because that is going to increase the amount of lift.

• 1:41:44Lester Nare?

  No way, dude.

• 1:41:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And, and what these guys are saying is that if I have a slightly bigger, like, crotch area, that is going to increase my lift. And so it's gonna make me go farther, and that's why they're injecting stuff down there, dude.

• 1:42:00Lester Nare?

  This is so insane.

• 1:42:02Krishna Choudhary?

  What is going on?

• 1:42:03Lester Nare?

  The surface area of the bulge increases your lift.

• 1:42:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:07Lester Nare?

  It's gonna get you a farther distance.

• 1:42:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09Lester Nare?

  And this is the ski jumping thing where they go up and they're just like swanning.

• 1:42:13Krishna Choudhary?

  They do like a V so that they can, yeah, and, and they, they have to hold this position. But like, just a, I guess, a few inches down there.

• 1:42:23Lester Nare?

  Look, a few, a few inches has never been more impactful.

• 1:42:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, right. It's a gold medal versus not meddling.

• 1:42:30Lester Nare?

  Don't try this at home.

• 1:42:31Krishna Choudhary?

  No, not at all.

• 1:42:32Lester Nare?

  This is for the Olympics.

• 1:42:34Krishna Choudhary?

  The Olympics. What are you guys doing?

• 1:42:35Lester Nare?

  This is not for your at-home Olympics. There's no medals in that sport. It's a losing game.

• 1:42:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude. Anyways, that was my last story. That was sort of my stream of consciousness of all the things I was researching. This is the V, and you see, like, if you make the crotch area just a tiny bit bigger, maybe you get like two more meters over the other guy.

• 1:42:55Lester Nare?

  I, I don't know what the, the judicial system is for sports. I think CAS, the central something for sports.

• 1:43:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Lester Nare?

  I think you're gonna have to look at this issue.

• 1:43:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. This is ridiculous, guys.

• 1:43:06Lester Nare?

  That's, uh...

• 1:43:07Krishna Choudhary?

  I mean, okay, look, I think steroids are is more reasonable than whatever this is.

• 1:43:12Lester Nare?

  Yeah, let's not, let's not do that.

• 1:43:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:16Lester Nare?

  That's, I'm gonna keep it PG and I'm gonna leave it there.

• 1:43:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:20Lester Nare?

  This is a family friendly show.

• 1:43:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Lester Nare?

  But this is a real thing.

• 1:43:23Krishna Choudhary?

  But that's a real thing.

• 1:43:24Lester Nare?

  It's happening.

• 1:43:25Krishna Choudhary?

  It's happening. I think you guys should know about it. Cause, cause I was alarmed.

• 1:43:29Lester Nare?

  That, that is, that is quite.

• 1:43:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Lester Nare?

  That is quite curious. And this also speaks to again, the, what we talked about earlier, the stakes as it relates to these high level events like the Olympics, where the stakes are that high that people will literally physically do anything to their bodies to win. It's never worth it.

• 1:43:49Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:43:49Lester Nare?

  It's never worth it. We want to keep human, sports, human, no robotic Olympics when they start, don't support them. Um, so we have gotten to the conclusion.

• 1:44:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 1:44:02Lester Nare?

  Of our fantastic Winter Olympics episode. I am starting to get some beads of sweat on my nose here because.

• 1:44:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause we are in LA.

• 1:44:11Lester Nare?

  We are in LA.

• 1:44:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And it's not that cold.

• 1:44:13Lester Nare?

  Although it is raining, it is not snowing.

• 1:44:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:15Lester Nare?

  And so these ski jackets are quite warm.

• 1:44:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Quite warm, actually.

• 1:44:19Lester Nare?

  But we, we did, we did a lot of fun stories today. Again, science is all around us. We talked about the physics of slippery ice. We talked about the neuroscience of choking. We looked at how climate, science, climate change, anthropogenic climate change is going to impact the ability to have future Winter Olympics. So if you have kids right now that you're trying to get on the US Olympic team for the 2042 speed skate, or I guess any of these outdoor related events, it's going to be relevant to you living vicariously through that future Olympic child. And our rundown was super fun today. We had a ton of good stories. The AI doing physics thing, I think is a.

• 1:45:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's an interesting one.

• 1:45:01Lester Nare?

  I think, let's not sleep on this issue. I understand, again, I have similar feelings about where the money is coming from for all these billionaire frontier models, why it's bad to replace all human labor with LLMs and software, AI and robots. And also, we have no plan for distribution. And yes, there are some cases where hype is happening. But this is happening and it is moving very, very, very quickly. And if the last time you tried any of these things was the free version of ChatGPT, even six weeks ago, even two weeks ago,

• 1:45:43Lester Nare?

  the where the frontier is, is exponentially better than it was two to six weeks ago.

• 1:45:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:49Lester Nare?

  It is unbelievable and I just really encourage people to remove their prior biases about AI. Not because we're saying it's amazing and brilliant and all this stuff, but because we're saying it's growing at a rate that no other phase shift in technology in our lived lifetime has changed. And the implications of that are so enormous. It's like hard to really articulate and it is not just we're software engineers and everyone else is going to be fine.

• 1:46:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Lester Nare?

  I just, this is something I'm just going to keep beating the drum on because I think it's very important. But we had other great stories today. We talked another animal behavior study story on, on cats meows versus purrs. We did immunology, talking about us discovering how we rewrite the immune system and the epigenetic versus long, long form genetics that informs that. The origin of life beyond our common ancestor. That's a really fantastic one. And then the astrophysics and exoplanet stories about us discovering a solar system that should not be possible. I mean, where else, everybody, can you get the absolute best breakdown of breaking and frontier science across physics,

• 1:47:01Lester Nare?

  chemistry, biology, all the stuff in between? It's only here at FFP, the Fundamentally Flawed Podcast.

• 1:47:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:10Lester Nare?

  Which is a funny name that we got out of one of the little thingies we use. But it is from First Principles. We are so grateful for our audience. Last two things, comment.

• 1:47:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. What should it be?

• 1:47:22Lester Nare?

  Thoughts?

• 1:47:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, what are your thoughts on the controversies that we encountered? Whether it's the Canada or the ski jump, crotch?

• 1:47:33Lester Nare?

  Or the gate, the X gate. Free, this is a free form one. Some of you guys have had some really good comments, so we really appreciate you. Again, if you love the show, if you've gotten to this point in the show, if this is not your first episode, you're one of the key members of our community. We appreciate you listening to the pod. We have now opened up our donations flow. This is going to be hugely helpful for us to be able to continue to produce and expand the team and ability for us to do more shows with more content all the time with the pod. So any support we can get from you all is really appreciated. And I will also mention, we are building out our community portal, which is going to have some exciting features.

• 1:48:15Lester Nare?

  We have a signup form on the homepage at FFP pod.com. So sign up for email updates. If you are interested in donating, go to FFP pod.com backslash donate. You can find us on all of the socials, X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, any ones I forgot to mention. The main full form video podcast is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube. We're also on Overcast, iHeart Radio, effectively anywhere you can listen or watch stuff, you will find us. If you watch our clips, our clips will not be in context of the almost two hour episode that we did today.

• 1:48:56Lester Nare?

  And so, yes, you might have a clever comment that is true in the context of the clip, but it is untrue in the context of the full episode. So we appreciate the feedback, but so you know, we always email all of the authors of the papers we cover to get their feedback and provide corrections from them. And if we don't get corrections from them, then the clip gets to live on in perpetuity with no corrections. I am your host, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary with another wonderful deep dive here on the Winter Olympics. We will see you all next week.

• 1:49:41Lester Nare?

  Because this is from First Principles.

• 1:49:42Krishna Choudhary?

  (laughing)