5,000-Year-Old Bacteria, Solar Storms, Dogs, and Meta’s AI War (EP. 32)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this is our first standalone rundown episode — a faster, looser format where we hit several stories we didn’t have room to turn into full deep dives. This week: bacteria revived from a Romanian ice cave after 5,000 years, a speculative but fascinating theory linking solar storms to earthquakes, new evidence that dogs and humans share genetic roots for personality traits, and the increasingly dramatic fight over the future of AI after Yann LeCun leaves Meta to build a new billion-dollar company focused on world models. Summary Ancient bacteria, modern resistance — a microbe revived from a 5,000-year-old Romanian ice cave resists modern antibiotics and may even contain compounds useful against present-day superbugs. Solar storms and earthquakes? — a Kyoto University theoretical paper suggests space weather could perturb electric fields in Earth’s crust enough to influence faults already near critical stress. Dogs and humans, genetically — a Cambridge / Morris Animal Foundation study finds shared gene pathways that map to personality-like traits in both golden retrievers and humans. The Meta AI split — Yann LeCun leaves Meta to pursue AI systems that model the physical world, arguing that simple scaling of LLMs may never reach real general intelligence. Support the showDonate: FFPod.com/donateFollow: @FFPod (X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook) Show Notes Story 1 — Ancient bacteria in Romanian ice cave (Frontiers in Microbiology) Story 2 — Solar storms and earthquakes (Kyoto University / International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and Technology) Story 4 — Dog and human personality genes (PNAS) Story 5 — Yann LeCun leaves Meta / world-model AI (Wired)

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Frozen for 5,000 years, this ice cave bacterium resists modern antibiotics, which sounds a little bit scary.

• 0:08Krishna Choudhary?

  It's very speculative, but even even the fact that the sun could affect earthquakes is a very interesting.

• 0:14Lester Nare?

  That is Jan LaKoon, who has recently left Facebook or Meta in early 2026 and has now raised a billion dollars to build AI that understands the physical world. Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary. We are in our first standalone rundown episode. We're going to cover several stories just at a high level, have a fun conversation. These are stories we didn't get to to do a deep dive this week, but we still want to talk about it and get you guys into your weekend with some fun, exciting talking points

• 0:55Lester Nare?

  with a special segment in the middle, which is going to be a surprise for our resident PhD. Today, we're going to cover microbiology on bacteria that was found in frozen caves 5,000 years ago, solar storms and earthquakes and how they may be related, some of the shared genetic roots between us and dogs, and we will wrap up with an AI story about how the battle for control at Meta AI has now led to the start of a new billion-dollar AI company coming at a different angle than large language models as we know it. We will be learning about the science, not quite from the ground up, but at least from the top of the surface, because this is from first principles.

• 1:55Lester Nare?

  Our first story for the rundown today is out of the Institute of Biology in Bucharest of the Romanian Academy, and it was in the frontiers in microbiology. Frozen for 5,000 years, this ice cave bacterium resists modern antibiotics, which sounds a little bit scary.

• 2:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, this one was pretty, pretty weird. There is a cave in Romania.

• 2:20Krishna Choudhary?

  It is called the Skari Soara Cave.

• 2:23Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:24Krishna Choudhary?

  It's got this giant glacier that's about the size of forty Olympic swimming pools. And that glacier began to form about thirteen thousand years ago. And what you can do is you can drill cores into that ice and then extract those samples. And there's bacteria that are preserved in that ice. And bacteria are notorious for surviving being frozen for thousands of years. So we can bring back to life bacteria that have been frozen for thousands of years. This particular sample is from the five thousand year old layer of that glacier. They took it out, they revived it, and they tested it on modern antibiotics.

• 3:07Krishna Choudhary?

  They tested twenty eight and this bacteria was resistant to ten.

• 3:11Lester Nare?

  Not great.

• 3:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's really quite strange on the face of it.

• 3:16Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 3:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Because modern antibiotics are by definition modern, right? So we've developed these,

• 3:24Krishna Choudhary?

  you know, antibacterial medication such that it kills bacteria. And these bacteria that are five thousand years old still have a kind of defense to stuff that we made today. This is in line with a lot of the antibacterial like resistance that we're faced with as humanity, right? We've been using antibiotics for hundreds of years now. The first real big one was penicillin by Alexander Fleming before World War One. And because we've been going at it, bacteria has evolved to fight against

• 3:58Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 3:58Krishna Choudhary?

  these antibiotics, right? They've figured out ways to get around it. And the fact that ten of these twenty eight

• 4:07Krishna Choudhary?

  did not work on bacteria that were five thousand years old.

• 4:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:11Krishna Choudhary?

  suggests that these bacteria were already resistant in the first place, right? Okay, fine, eighteen worked, but still the ten is kind of weird.

• 4:18Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's it kind of dovetails with the the story we just talked about. As it relates to bringing back samples from space.

• 4:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Lester Nare?

  Uh, and the, the concern that arises because we don't know what will happen.

• 4:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Lester Nare?

  If there happens to be, again, that's a little bit, this is real world. We know that it's there.

• 4:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Lester Nare?

  We've tested it and they're basically pre, they have pre-immunity, like they were never our current antibiotic.

• 4:45Krishna Choudhary?

  They were never exposed to the current antibiotics and yet they're still already immune.

• 4:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 4:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's quite weird. Um, I don't think we should be too worried about these glacial, glacial bacteria, because these are called cycrobacter, cycrobacteria, which means they're cold-loving. They're not going to survive in the ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit environment.

• 5:08Lester Nare?

  Of the body.

• 5:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the body, right? But it's still quite a nice, um, you know, little problem in molecular biology that like, how could this even happen?

• 5:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 5:20Krishna Choudhary?

  And when, when you look at like how bacteria actually evolve, they evolve together. Bacteria are incredibly dynamic with their genomes. They swap genes from one to another all the time. That's actually how we transform bacteria. A lot of times, you know, in an undergrad lab, if you want to like make a bacteria glow in the dark or something with a GFP, which is this fluorescent molecule, what you can do is put in a plasmid, which is a circular piece of DNA that has the GFP code. You put that in and then you heat shock the bacteria. There's something that we've talked about a lot.

• 5:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Where you just take the bacteria and you put it in hot water.

• 5:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And then the bacteria kind of freak out and they're like, what are we doing? They ingest all sorts of DNA in there from their environment and they try to transcribe that and see if that'll work. So bacteria are swapping DNA between themselves and the environment all the time. And perhaps through the swapping, you get this kind of drug resistance. What's really cool about this, this story is that it actually, the existence of this reveals how antibiotic resistance evolves naturally. So that's one thing. The other thing is that this ancient strain also showed the inability, so this ancient strain showed the ability to inhibit the growth. Of other modern superbugs.

• 6:35Krishna Choudhary?

  So kind of like in penicillin, when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, it was because it was a natural antibiotic. That he had seen there was a mold that was growing in his Petri dish. And around that mold, there was no bacteria. And he was like, the mold is creating something that is killing the bacteria. Well, in this case, this ancient strain is able to create compounds that will kill modern superbugs. Right? So it possesses some kind of enzymatic gene that can hold existing biochemical potential, right? Existing pharmaceutical potential.

• 7:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And so it tells us that maybe like we need to look at these kinds of natural places. At isolated populations of bacteria to figure out how to beat modern day superbugs that are now resistant to our back antibacterial.

• 7:25Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Compounds, antibiotic compounds, but maybe these guys have something.

• 7:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:31Krishna Choudhary?

  That we can use to defeat them. You know, it's like that Thor, um, I can't defeat you, but she can. Thing like, but the she can thing is like these like 5,000 year old bacteria.

• 7:43Lester Nare?

  Right. What's um, it, there is a, we can look to the past. To help inform us about how to fight in the present and in the future in a way that was maybe somewhat unexpected. In that these bacterium that are 5,000 years old contain sort of an active ingredient.

• 8:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Lester Nare?

  That is relevant to sort of a pharmacological pharmaceutical application today.

• 8:08Krishna Choudhary?

  And, and historically, most antibiotics are developed from bacteria and fungi that live in the soil.

• 8:15Lester Nare?

  I see.

• 8:15Krishna Choudhary?

  And like they produce natural compounds because over there, down there, it's like, it's like D day every day, right? It's just world war all the time. Everyone is trying to eat everyone. And in recent times, those pathogens that we found from existing soil bacteria no longer work. Well, we can, you know, go back in time.

• 8:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Krishna Choudhary?

  I think it's, it's a pretty cool, uh, story at, at the heart of it.

• 8:36Lester Nare?

  And for, it gives a new meaning to the phrase, uh, natural immunity.

• 8:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Lester Nare?

  And, um, if, uh, if we can scale up the same process that allows you to freeze bacterium, reanimate them 5,000 years later. Maybe Walt Disney has a chance because if I recall correctly, he's currently cryofrozen somewhere deep underneath. Burbank's headquarters.

• 8:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 8:59Lester Nare?

  That is rumor.

• 9:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That's rumor, of course.

• 9:01Lester Nare?

  I don't know.

• 9:01Krishna Choudhary?

  We don't know anything about it.

• 9:03Lester Nare?

  Don't know that to be true. But this is, again, a new research paper out of the Institute of Biology in Bucharest of the Romanian Academy. It was in frontiers in microbiology. Fun little microbiology story to get us started on our rundown. Number two on our rundown today is can solar storms trigger earthquakes?

• 9:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 9:27Lester Nare?

  And scientists propose a surprising link. This is, was actually covered by Science Daily. It was out of Kyoto University. And there's a huge solar storm monitoring community on a variety of social media channels. Every time there is a, I guess, a coronal mass ejection or similar, there's this like ranking system.

• 9:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Lester Nare?

  The Richter scale and everyone's like, this one is over 9,000, you know, hunkered down, proper. But, but there's a, there's a potential link here to actually like geological activity.

• 10:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and that one, I was pretty surprised that there is even a theoretical argument that you can make here. And this is mostly a theoretical argument. This is a theoretical paper. What they're doing is showing a surprising theoretical connection between space weather and earthquakes, geological activity on Earth. Now, how does that even, what is the mechanism there?

• 10:22Lester Nare?

  Right?

• 10:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Is what I always wonder. So here's the idea. Faults on the Earth are poised at a kind of critical spot where there's a lot of stress on them and they're ready to snap. Okay? Because they've, they've been pushed to their brink and like, the faults on the Earth are these, you know, plates on the Earth's surface that are contiguous blocks of the Earth's crust that are moving around because magma underneath is like flowing in a liquid motion. And so, you know, you move around, just like how ice on a frozen lake sort of moves around based on currents underneath. So. Why would, why would that be affected by solar

• 11:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 11:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Activity is the idea. Well, solar activity is effectively a bunch of charged particles coming at us. That's effectively what it is, right? There's a bunch of electrons, let's say, that come at us. And those electrons are going to create a massive change in the ionosphere. The ionosphere being the outside ions around the Earth's atmosphere that are built by the magnetic field that sort of, you know, shield us from space weather. Now, that ionosphere is going to get changed up a lot because there's going to be a huge influx of charged particles from the sun. That's going to change the electric field on the Earth.

• 11:45Krishna Choudhary?

  The Earth's crust, on the other hand, has all of these plates that are sort of at this critical point. And in between all these plates, inside the Earth's crust, there's a lot of water that is in a supercritical state because it's under high pressure, it's under high stress. And that water has a bunch of ions. So the electric field on the outside is going to move around the electric field inside these cracks in the Earth's crust. And that could potentially create enough of a force to actually snap and create high earthquakes, you know, high damage earthquakes.

• 12:19Lester Nare?

  The, the idea is that there is these fields that are all around us all the time and interacting have impacts in the physical nature in which we see and we interact, the tangible things we can touch and feel. And at the scale of the sun

• 12:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 12:39Lester Nare?

  And the scale of these solar storms.

• 12:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Lester Nare?

  The amount of the change in fields in the ionosphere can potentially have a subsequent impact on plate tectonics.

• 12:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Lester Nare?

  And, and how they move, which again, big enough solar storm means it would not only trigger things like frying electronics and all that other stuff.

• 12:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Lester Nare?

  But could actually physically impact the Earth, the Earth itself.

• 13:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And there's like weak correlation between solar activity and geological activity. If you go to 2.5, there's a weak correlation that was out in scientific reports, um, nature, scientific reports in 2020. Again, it's not that big and this paper is not claiming, this current paper out in 2026 is not claiming that, you know, solar flares directly cause all quakes, but the research provides this like kind of new mechanism to explain maybe unusual ionospheric activity and that connection with major quakes. Because in 2024, there was the Noto Peninsula quake and that was preceded by a really large solar storm.

• 13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And so there's these coincident sort of, we don't have enough data to like, you know, the sigma isn't down to five.

• 13:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:50Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's there and this is exploring some of the mechanisms. I think that's, I think that was like pretty cool.

• 13:57Lester Nare?

  That, that, no, that is.

• 13:57Krishna Choudhary?

  It's very speculative, but even, even the fact that the sun could affect earthquakes is, is a very interesting.

• 14:03Lester Nare?

  That is, and I think the plot of a future upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer produced.

• 14:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Easy.

• 14:09Lester Nare?

  Disaster movie.

• 14:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:11Lester Nare?

  Jerry, if you want a scientific advisor, I think I know someone I can suggest.

• 14:15Krishna Choudhary?

  I've done it before, so.

• 14:20Lester Nare?

  Great. So this is again out of Kyoto University, which is fine. I mean, not funny. It's interesting. Obviously Japan has had very dramatic earthquakes.

• 14:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Lester Nare?

  If you think of Fukushima, et cetera.

• 14:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. So they have a very concerted effort to try to figure it out. And this was in the International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and Technology.

• 14:36Lester Nare?

  Yes. Yes. Makes sense. Makes sense. Um, this is going to be fun.

• 14:41Krishna Choudhary?

  All right. Here we go.

• 14:42Lester Nare?

  And we're going to try this. And if it doesn't work, you're not going to hear this on the final episode. Uh, but we are going to start a new game show segment called, Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, our resident PhD Krishna Choudhary, who will be our scientist of the day. And we will have one question, Family Feud style for you to answer. And today's segment question for Are You Smarter Than a Scientist is, can you name the 10 most abundant elements in the human body? We have 10 on this list.

• 15:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay. All right, okay, so I'm not sure if when you mean abundant, if you mean by number or by mass. So let's test it out and start with hydrogen.

• 15:34Lester Nare?

  Okay, so we have you on the board with hydrogen.

• 15:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so hydrogen is number three, which means that you are going for by mass and not by number.

• 15:46Lester Nare?

  Maybe.

• 15:47Krishna Choudhary?

  So let's go with oxygen, that should be number one.

• 15:50Lester Nare?

  Is it number one, ladies and gentlemen, and?

• 15:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 15:54Lester Nare?

  Oxygen is number one.

• 15:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Seventy percent of the body is H2O, so that tracks. Let's go with carbon.

• 16:02Lester Nare?

  Okay, carbon, is carbon on the board? You got the top three.

• 16:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and then nitrogen, that should round out four.

• 16:10Lester Nare?

  Okay, so you think that nitrogen is gonna be number four, is nitrogen number four? You are on a roll, we have our top four.

• 16:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so we got our top four, all right.

• 16:20Lester Nare?

  That was the easy stuff, I expected you to get that.

• 16:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so now let's do, now I don't know if this is gonna be number five, but I know it should be phosphorus, because nucleic acids, ATP.

• 16:31Lester Nare?

  Okay, so phosphorus.

• 16:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Phospholipids of our cell membrane.

• 16:37Lester Nare?

  Not number five, but still on the board at number six.

• 16:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Number six, so there's something in between nitrogen and phosphorus. Only thing I can think of is sulfur.

• 16:49Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's go with sulfur.

• 16:51Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 16:52Krishna Choudhary?

  That's in proteins.

• 16:53Lester Nare?

  We, we may have sulfur on the board, but it's gonna be at the number eight spot.

• 16:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, what am I doing wrong?

• 17:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Wow, what is number five? Nitrogen.

• 17:06Lester Nare?

  So, so right now we have oxygen number one, carbon two, hydrogen three, nitrogen four, phosphorus six, and sulfur eight. We are missing five, seven, nine, and 10. No cheating.

• 17:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's do, um, so sulfur's already in there. Wow. Um, oh, calcium for marbones.

• 17:31Lester Nare?

  We have number five on the board with calcium.

• 17:35Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, there we go. Um, all right, now let's do.

• 17:38Lester Nare?

  Reminder, you have three strikes.

• 17:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, I do have three strikes. Okay. I don't want to use any though. You know me. Um, okay, so I think now we should get into ions. So I'm gonna go with, you know, the bread and butter of our nervous system and ions in general. So let's go with sodium first. That's why we like salt.

• 18:00Lester Nare?

  Sodium is on the board at number nine. We have two left, number seven and number 10.

• 18:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Let's do potassium.

• 18:09Lester Nare?

  Is potassium on the board?

• 18:14Lester Nare?

  It is at number seven.

• 18:15Krishna Choudhary?

  So we got sodium, potassium, that's our N A K channels.

• 18:19Lester Nare?

  So you just have.

• 18:20Krishna Choudhary?

  For the neuroscientists out there.

• 18:21Lester Nare?

  One left are number 10. This might be a tough one.

• 18:25Krishna Choudhary?

  This one's a tough one.

• 18:26Lester Nare?

  This might be a tough one.

• 18:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so, um.

• 18:33Lester Nare?

  Okay, we oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur and sodium. We are looking for the 10 most abundant elements in the human body. If you at home have gotten this before Krishna, you may be smarter than a scientist.

• 18:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I don't know. Okay, I'm gonna guess on this one.

• 18:53Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 18:54Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm gonna go with iron.

• 18:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 18:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of our blood, hemoglobin.

• 18:58Lester Nare?

  Iron, is it on the board?

• 19:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Iron is not. Okay.

• 19:03Lester Nare?

  Not on the board, strike number one.

• 19:08Lester Nare?

  Got two more strikes in the chamber.

• 19:13Lester Nare?

  We do not have phone a friend. We do not have any escape routes.

• 19:19Krishna Choudhary?

  We already got calcium.

• 19:22Lester Nare?

  Put you on the spot today, I know.

• 19:23Krishna Choudhary?

  This one's a hard one. Let's go with zinc. Zinc is heavy and I know that we need it.

• 19:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 19:30Krishna Choudhary?

  I just don't know for what. I'm gonna go with zinc.

• 19:32Lester Nare?

  Number 10.

• 19:34Krishna Choudhary?

  So even if we don't need a lot.

• 19:35Lester Nare?

  Is it zinc?

• 19:37Krishna Choudhary?

  No. Oh, my gosh.

• 19:40Lester Nare?

  It is not zinc.

• 19:42Krishna Choudhary?

  All right.

• 19:43Lester Nare?

  One more strike left for the 10 most abundant elements in the human body.

• 19:51Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, let's, so I'm thinking it's either iodine, because I know we need iodine. That's why we need iodized salt, or magnesium. I know a lot of people take supplements of magnesium, but people also take iron supplements, and that wasn't on it. Let's go with magnesium.

• 20:07Lester Nare?

  Final answer?

• 20:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 20:09Lester Nare?

  Final answer for the number 10 spot. 10 most abundance elements in the body. Is it?

• 20:18Krishna Choudhary?

  No. All right, what is it?

• 20:20Lester Nare?

  It is not our number 10 spot. If you're at home, plug in your guesses now. For our number 10 spot, the answer was.

• 20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Chlorine. How did I, how did I? Oh, my God, I even said salt. Sodium chloride. Wow. So that's ridiculous.

• 20:41Lester Nare?

  This was our first rendition of Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? If you got all 10, you may have one out on this week one. So this was our first go around doing this. I think it was pretty.

• 20:59Lester Nare?

  But that's just, that's just my personal opinion. I now have also access to a soundboard, so this can get very outrageous very quickly. I will be sure to hold it in as much as possible. But it looks like, for the most part, everything went smoothly on the board itself. I think this could be super fun.

• 21:19Krishna Choudhary?

  That would be really fun.

• 21:20Lester Nare?

  So again, let us know in the comments if you are intrigued by Are You Smarter Than a Scientist? And would like to see us bring that segment into the rundown episode on a regular basis. We are going to now go into our third story of the day, which was the one about the link, the shared genetic link between humans and dogs.

• 21:45Lester Nare?

  And this is about golden retriever genes linked to anxiety, aggression, and intelligence in humans out of the University of Cambridge and the Morris Animal Foundation in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• 22:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, this was a really cool one. They studied 1,300 golden retrievers, and it turns out that not all golden retrievers have the same personality. I mean, anyone who has multiple golden retrievers or has seen multiple golden retrievers knows this. They're not like a one-brand type dog. There's dogs that are shy, there are dogs that are, you know, a little timid. There's dogs that are very, very social. So there's enough genetic variation within golden retrievers where, when the scientists studied 1,300 golden retrievers, they could figure out genes that were related to certain traits. Each of these 1,300 golden retrievers, the owners of those dogs got like a little questionnaire about like, you know, personality traits for your dog.

• 22:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they could correlate, using the genetic data, certain genes with certain traits. And then when they went and looked at humans and those human traits, the same genes mapped to the similar human traits.

• 22:57Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 22:58Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the idea.

• 22:58Lester Nare?

  Interesting. So there's two kind of points of data. There's sort of a quantitative data, which is the genetic piece, and there's like a qualitative data point, which is the survey.

• 23:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 23:10Lester Nare?

  And there was a survey, there was a reference point both for dogs and the personality traits on the qualitative side.

• 23:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Lester Nare?

  And humans. And when they looked at the genes that were being expressed that mapped to the personalities in dogs.

• 23:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Lester Nare?

  Based on the feedback from the owners. What's interesting is that if you point to those same genes in humans, the same qualitative data.

• 23:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 23:32Lester Nare?

  Matches up.

• 23:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And you can map the genes together because even though, obviously, the golden retriever gene and the human gene are not going to be identical. They're dogs, we're humans.

• 23:42Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 23:43Krishna Choudhary?

  But you can look at the sequence of nucleotides, the ATGC, ATGC, and you can find overlap where like this gene is like, there's only very few mutations, right? So it's definitely the same gene.

• 23:53Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And then from that, they Can figure out these genes that are actually related. There's one gene, for example, PTPN1. This was linked to aggression towards other dogs in golden retrievers. And it's associated with intelligence and depression in humans. So not same same.

• 24:10Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:10Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's really kind of this meta behavioral state.

• 24:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 24:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Or personality type.

• 24:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 24:16Krishna Choudhary?

  That these genes are controlling. That's what they were very careful about, like making that distinction. That this is not like, you know, a one to one mapping. But it's rather like a shared biological root for overarching personality.

• 24:32Lester Nare?

  It's it's more meant to be a framework versus like a purely like, for lack of a better term, like diagnostic.

• 24:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 24:38Lester Nare?

  Discrete diagnostic tool.

• 24:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Lester Nare?

  And it helps create a scaffolding by which to kind of architect the structures. And then you can swap out the variables within those structures as a sense.

• 24:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And it also like leads to like insights and training dogs, for example. Because like certain dogs might just be a certain way because of the genetic makeup. Right? And it has nothing to do with like their history or like so on and so forth. Here's a quote from one of the lead researchers. If your golden retriever cowers behind the sofa every time the doorbell rings. Perhaps you might have a bit more empathy if you know they're genetically driven to feel sensitive and anxious. Love that from this researcher from the University of Cambridge, Ana Morris Nuevo.

• 25:27Lester Nare?

  It's it's funny, as a

• 25:32Lester Nare?

  someone who has three dogs, who have very, very, very distinct and different personalities. It it's an interesting just to think about. And also, as we continue to sort of, in a right, because we've touched a lot of genetic stories.

• 25:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Lester Nare?

  Especially in the last couple of weeks. And just the breadth and depth of the increase in our in our understanding of like this fundamental, like, you know, the instruction manual for how our bodies and all like living beings like create the stuff, the factories.

• 26:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:07Lester Nare?

  Right? And the the the IP that generates it's. As we continue to learn more, it it it's not only the understanding piece, which is the first step, but that understanding is also an already being applied. Because there's a whole variety of things we can now do because we actually know the map.

• 26:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 26:29Lester Nare?

  We actually have that baseline reference point. And we always love a dog story.

• 26:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, always. Whenever I see dog stories in science news, I'm like, yep, we're gonna cover it.

• 26:39Lester Nare?

  The the corgi story continues to be, I think, our most popular dog story.

• 26:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 26:43Lester Nare?

  And then the the whale, the pods attacking the that's our biggest animal. It's actually our biggest story ever, which I still can't. It's still so surprising to me. We're gonna wrap up the rundown today. Again, super casual Friday, almost summer Fridays. Here it's 92 degrees in Los Angeles, California.

• 27:01Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 27:01Lester Nare?

  Currently, which is.

• 27:04Krishna Choudhary?

  That's an average March Friday, so.

• 27:09Lester Nare?

  We're finally over the rain, I think, apparently, which is great. And our last story is is, you know, interesting because it dovetails with a lot of the AI stories we've talked about. And there's both a human personality side to the story and sort of like an actual science part to the story. And this is related to Jan LaKoon, who has recently left Facebook or Meta in early 2026, and has now raised a billion dollars to build AI that understands the physical world. And this is related to, this was covered by Wired, and there's there's a lot of background to this story.

• 27:51Lester Nare?

  I'll kind of just quickly paint a picture before we kind of get into the physical world AI piece. You know, in terms of, if you've listened to any of the frontier model CEOs over the last 12 months. So this is Sardemis Hassabis at Google DeepMind, who runs all of Google's AI products, Gemini, everything that's integrated with Google Workspace. You have Dario Amadei at CEO of Anthropic, who has the Claude and Claude Code and CoWork.

• 28:22Lester Nare?

  They've been very much in the zeitgeist and in the mainstream because of their ongoing kerfuffle with the Pentagon over usage of Claude within military applications, specifically autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, primarily focused on civilian, but you could argue generally. And particularly with Davos, the Davos speeches that just happened, all of them were there. And talking about, all the journalists are like, where is this going? And when are we going to get to, quote, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, or ASI, Artificial Superintelligence? And can simply scaling the current architectures, meaning putting more compute and more data into it, get us there?

• 29:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Lester Nare?

  Or are we missing a fundamental architecture or concept that needs to be included in order to actually make that jump? And Jan Le Cun has been very vocal about his perspective that the scaling laws are not going to get you to AGI.

• 29:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, he's been very vocal about that. And he's had some really nice little analogies about why he thinks that is. He equates it to, you know, the models of Ptolemy on the epicycles. And how, you know, before Copernicus, everyone was trying to fit the Earth as the center of the universe, and so they came up with orbits around Earth. But obviously Mars does this weird retrograde motion where it goes backwards. And so Ptolemy decided, okay, I'm going to put an epicycle, which is Mars has a big circle around the Earth, but then around that circle, there's a little circle that Mars goes around. So every once in a while, on that little circle, it's going to go back. But then as you get closer and closer and the data gets harder and harder, you just start adding more and more epicycles.

• 30:12Krishna Choudhary?

  And it turns out, because of something called Fourier transforms in mathematics. For infinitely, the more, the more epicycles you add, the closer and closer you'll get to the ground truth. And you'll never discover Kepler's ellipses if you don't have a fundamental change, right? And, and Jan Leclun is saying that basically our scaling hypothesis, which is just make the parameters more and more.

• 30:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:34Krishna Choudhary?

  We're just adding epicycles.

• 30:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And fitting data.

• 30:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:38Krishna Choudhary?

  But the underlying parameter of Newtonian gravity and the one over R squared dependence were missing that entirely. I like that little.

• 30:48Lester Nare?

  That's a great, that's a, that's a great, and now like reference point.

• 30:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  And just to briefly kind of touch on, so you know, people talk about chat GPT and Claude and all this. And, and the fundamental architecture that is undergirding them is this idea of large language models. And you know, so the idea is you're optimizing language as a, as a, an abstract or as a construct. And both Demis Hassabis and Jan Leclun in the last six to 12 months have discussed the importance of world models. This idea that language models are not actually having this fundamental understanding of the physics of reality, which is what has maybe made it a little bit more difficult to get image generation and video generation

• 31:35Lester Nare?

  that out of the box feels real. What seems to have happened is these L L Ms have sort of created their, this, this like abstraction of what they, like what they understand physics to be.

• 31:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Lester Nare?

  But it is not actually grounded to like the real fundamentals.

• 31:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Lester Nare?

  And so this has now become the new hot topic is world models. I actually believe Google has already introduced for public consumption, a version of their world model.

• 32:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:03Lester Nare?

  Where you can go into the interface and it's procedurally generating a 3D environment.

• 32:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 32:09Lester Nare?

  In real time as you move around it. And you can choose the POV of like a cat or you know, a bird flying through the air.

• 32:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Lester Nare?

  And so it's not like a video game where all the levels have been explicitly coded by developers already. And then when you get to the edge, you can't walk deeper into the forest because there's an invisible fence in the Pokemon forest.

• 32:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Lester Nare?

  It just continually will procedurally generate, generate on the fly as you move around. So as far as I'm aware, that's the first. World model kind of thing at scale that's launched. But it seems like Jan agrees with this viewpoint and is trying to push forth.

• 32:49Lester Nare?

  And with his new company, Advanced Machine Intelligence, they're trying to focus on this idea of building AI world models to actually understand like physical 3D spaces, which becomes much more valuable in applications like having any kind of humanoid robotics do anything in a physical environment.

• 33:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Lester Nare?

  Whether that's in a manufacturing context, in a residential context.

• 33:15Lester Nare?

  Driving's maybe a little bit different because it's such a rules-based system.

• 33:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:21Lester Nare?

  Whereas having a humanoid robot at home where you want to be able to have it fold your laundry, do the dishes, pick up stuff off the floor. It's like unstructured tasks.

• 33:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and I think just in general too, even for language, right? And like producing text that makes sense or producing recommendations that make sense. Having a world model is a huge deal, right? It'll give you recommendations that actually make sense because it understands how fundamental physics works and so on and so forth, right?

• 33:48Lester Nare?

  There's one other sort of interesting palace intrigue, corporate drama.

• 33:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, all right.

• 33:54Lester Nare?

  Aspect to this story, which is Meta ended up acquiring, so Mark Zuckerberg ended up acquiring this sort of AI infrastructure company, Scale AI, which was led by this 20-something, you know, super genius Alexander Wang, not that Alexander Wang, a different one. And, you know, with no E between the D and the R at the end.

• 34:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Got it.

• 34:16Lester Nare?

  Which is interesting. And they acquired, Meta acquired their Scale AI for $14.3 billion.

• 34:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 34:23Lester Nare?

  And the idea was it was, they were building like a tagging and training kind of pipeline system that was supposed to accelerate, you know, Olama and all of Meta's AI work. Now, He, Alexander Wang was brought in and became Meta's like first chief of AI, right? Or our head of AI, right? And you already have the legend Yann LeCun there, right? And so-

• 34:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and Yann LeCun is not your head of AI.

• 34:48Lester Nare?

  Right. And what seems to have been, from the outside looking in, part of the drama here is, you know, Yann is more on the researcher, uh, kind of viewpoint. So you could probably categorize like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg in the scorched earth philosophy.

• 35:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Lester Nare?

  Just spend money, get to the scale fastest because whoever gets there first wins.

• 35:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:09Lester Nare?

  And then the Yann LeCun and Demis Hassabis are more on the, if we have the deepest research bench, we will be the ones who win.

• 35:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Lester Nare?

  And research is the driver of product, not product being the driver of research.

• 35:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:21Lester Nare?

  Uh, or product being the driver of implementation. And Dario at Anthropic is like kind of somewhere in between those two. So it seems to be the case that he was sidelined because he wasn't moving quick enough, or Zuckerberg was worried about losing. And one of the reasons that Mark Zuckerberg is so motivated to not lose the AI battle against everybody else, and why he was one of the first movers to really expect, like, do a huge amount of capital expenditure to build out Meta's infrastructure is, when we were going through the transition from desktop to mobile in the early 20-teens, Facebook missed the opportunity to build the hardware device for mobile.

• 36:02Lester Nare?

  And what ended up happening is they became victim to Apple and Android as related to getting distribution to their end customers. So there was a famous battle between Facebook and Apple, where they were like, if you want to keep stealing users' data, uh, we're going to kick you out of the App Store.

• 36:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 36:20Lester Nare?

  And Zuckerberg never again, he vowed never again to allow someone to be able to control his distribution in that way. That's why he went big on VR and Oculus, because he's like, if that's the next medium, no one's going to beat me. That's why he went big on AI and all this, because if that's the next medium, no one is going to beat me.

• 36:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Lester Nare?

  However, all Apple has to do to kind of really kill a lot of these, and this is kind of the, the bear case for a lot of the foundational models. If Apple finally decides to do something good and do a local-only,

• 36:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:49Lester Nare?

  relatively high-quality model on-device-

• 36:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Lester Nare?

  -that no longer needs you to have a ChatGPT subscription or any of these other things. And they have all, they have billions of devices everywhere.

• 37:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Lester Nare?

  And become the first AI of choice. It is going to become very sticky for some of these model providers. So we'll see. Um, but, but Jan LeCoon is out at Meta. He's starting his new thing. I think he's going to need more than a billion dollars.

• 37:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, he has a billion dollars already from the likes of Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt.

• 37:21Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 37:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And it values at 3.5 billion already.

• 37:27Lester Nare?

  Already.

• 37:27Krishna Choudhary?

  In like six months of starting.

• 37:29Lester Nare?

  And it's, it's gonna say, and this is just the, the valuations of these AI companies. It's just outrageous. But again, people are viewing it as, you know, end game technology. So, uh, with that, we are going to wrap up our rundown for this Friday. Touched on a nice, fun microbiology story, although it's not that fun if it ends up killing us all.

• 37:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 37:49Lester Nare?

  Solar storms and earthquakes. Maybe this was not so happy and dandy, but we had our, are you smarter than a scientist? We got nine out of 10. Shared genetics between us and dogs. And the battle for AI continues as people throw money everywhere. We are, we are going to ask again for feedback. This is going to be the third episode that comes out this week. We're splitting it out so that they're shorter, more bite sized, easier to consume and digest on your commute, during your workout, and it just becomes easier to share with friends if you want them to listen to a specific section. So let us know if you do like that structure and that setup. We will continue on accordingly. I am your host, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD,

• 38:32Lester Nare?

  who may be as smart as a scientist, Christian and Choudhary. We will see you all next week.