Interstellar Visitor 3I/Atlas, Human Longevity Plateau, New No-Sort Plastic & Analog AI (EP. 7)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, Episode 7 of From First Principles covers four stories at the frontier of science and technology. This week, we dive into new telescope data on the interstellar visitor 3i Atlas, explore a major longevity study that suggests life expectancy may have plateaued, unpack a breakthrough nickel catalyst that could enable no-sort plastic recycling, and look at Microsoft’s analog AI computer — a potential game-changer for energy efficiency and medical applications. Summary • Interstellar comet 3i Atlas imaged by Hubble, JWST, TESS, and ESA orbiters • Longevity study shows human life expectancy may have plateaued post-1939 births • Northwestern researchers develop a nickel catalyst for no-sort plastic recycling • Microsoft unveils an analog optical AI computer with 100x GPU efficiency Show Notes Space.com — 3I/Atlas Coverage PNAS — Longevity Plateau Study Nature Chemistry — No-Sort Plastic Catalyst Nature — Analog AI

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

• 0:00Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. This is from First Principles. We have some great stories for you lined up this week, starting with an update on the interstellar visitor 3I Atlas, as we've seen four new instruments capture images as it makes its way towards Earth, followed up by a story about longevity. If you were born after 1939, you may not live to see 100 years of age. We'll talk about that and Brian Johnson, aka "The Man Who Wants to Live Forever." Our third story is about a new, no sort, plastic that will allow us to recycle more efficiently, and we will end today with an interesting analog

• 0:44Lester Nare?

  AI story coming out of Microsoft. This is FFP. Let's get after it.

• 1:04Lester Nare?

  My friend.

• 1:04Krishna Choudhary?

  How's it going?

• 1:06Lester Nare?

  We're back again.

• 1:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Lester Nare?

  Another one. I think we have a little something here. People seem to be excited about talking about science.

• 1:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, dude.

• 1:14Lester Nare?

  In the weeds.

• 1:15Krishna Choudhary?

  I'm really enjoying seeing all the feedback that we're getting.

• 1:17Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:19Lester Nare?

  We're going to start with a very popular science story that has been all over the headlines.

• 1:23Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:24Lester Nare?

  About 3I Atlas. The headline this week, "Four Powerful Telescopes Agree: Interstellar Comet 3I Atlas Really Is Bizarre." This is from a variety of outlets, but from Space.com is where we sorted it. And the new information here is both NASA and ESA, the sort of North American and European space agencies, have used their instruments, Hubble, SpheroX, JWST, and TESS, to capture images of the object as it makes its way towards our Sun.

• 1:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:50Lester Nare?

  So what's new here?

• 1:51Krishna Choudhary?

  So what's new here is we've actually gotten really nice data from the James Webb Space Telescope, from Hubble, and from the VLT, and from a lot of these things, and they're converging on trying to identify really what this object is actually like.

• 2:09Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And some of the, you know, nitty-gritty characteristics. So, just to recap our viewers.

• 2:15Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 2:15Krishna Choudhary?

  About what 3I Atlas is, right? It was discovered on the first of July of this year by the ATLAS program, which is the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System. Okay, and this is a system that is part of University of Hawaii's like Institute of Astronomy. There's basically a bunch of telescopes all around the globe. There's like two in Hawaii, there's one on Maui, one on the Big Island. Then there's one in South Africa, Chile, um, and Spain in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This particular one was discovered in the one in Chile.

• 2:51Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 2:53Krishna Choudhary?

  The whole point of this guy is just to peruse the sky, looking for transient objects and objects that move around. Okay, so it was discovered there and then it turns out that, you know, other telescopes had already seen it, but hadn't identified it as this thing. We talked about this Wiki transient facility in Palomar Mountain near San Diego, right?

• 3:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:12Krishna Choudhary?

  That thing actually had already found it in May, but hadn't like pinpointed it as like a thingy that we should be worried about.

• 3:18Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 3:18Krishna Choudhary?

  So, um, once we identified it with the ATLAS program, everybody all over the globe was like, oh, let's just peruse the data because we know where it is, right, and where it would have been. And so from that, we could then, um, get the trajectory of this thing.

• 3:32Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 3:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And once we calculated that trajectory, it was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay? It's moving really fast, sixty-one kilometers per second, um, all the way out in Jupiter.

• 3:44Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 3:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and if it's moving that fast all the way out there, that means it's not gonna stay inside the solar system.

• 3:49Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 3:50Krishna Choudhary?

  You can do the Newton's laws and do the calculation. It'll go right past the sun and then on its way. Then we got into these things about people who had these really blurry images. They're like, is it aliens? It's never aliens.

• 4:03Lester Nare?

  Much to my chagrin.

• 4:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we always hope, right? One can always hope, but, um, time always tells that it's not aliens. And, um, it turns out to be the third interstellar object, right? Which is, um, an object that is not part of our solar system, that is literally going from star system to star system around the galaxy of the Milky Way, right?

• 4:24Lester Nare?

  Because the idea is there are these large gaps of void space in between, you know, star systems. And so it's, it's from a probabilities perspective to, because of the vastness of space.

• 4:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Lester Nare?

  And our ability to detect.

• 4:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Lester Nare?

  Both of those reasons. We haven't seen a lot of these.

• 4:40Krishna Choudhary?

  We haven't, yeah, we haven't seen a lot, yeah. We haven't seen a lot. Now we will be able to because of things like the Vera Rubin coming online and things like that, right?

• 4:47Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 4:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, this is our third one. That's why it's called three I. The I is actually for interstellar.

• 4:51Lester Nare?

  Ah, there you go.

• 4:52Krishna Choudhary?

  And three I Atlas is because Atlas was the program that discovered it, right?

• 4:56Lester Nare?

  Very, very.

• 4:57Krishna Choudhary?

  The first one is one I Oumuamua. Um, that was the really weird elongated thingy.

• 5:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 5:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, and that one we caught on the way out, so we couldn't really get good data on it. Um, the second one was two I Borisov, which turned out to be an interstellar comet. Um, and then now this was three I Atlas.

• 5:13Lester Nare?

  And so a key difference between Oumuamua, let's say, and Atlas.

• 5:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:18Lester Nare?

  Is that we are, we were able to catch Atlas on its way in.

• 5:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Lester Nare?

  When it was on its way out, which gives more time to capture more data.

• 5:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Lester Nare?

  Uh, as well as being able to see how it behaves over a longer time period. Is that fair?

• 5:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like that scene from Office when I was like, don't panic. I said, stay calm. Like, okay, now it's like it's happening, right?

• 5:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 5:39Krishna Choudhary?

  So now everyone's like scrambling to figure out how to image this thing. Because once we've got it, like every astronomer who's a planetary astronomer, who is a, you know, or planetary origins or an exoplanets astronomer, trying to understand how solar systems form.

• 5:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 5:53Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a very big deal.

• 5:54Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, because the other thing is if you turn back the clock, this thing came from above the Milky Way, which is where there's an old population of stars that are much older than our sun.

• 6:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 6:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So this thing could be something like seven billion years old.

• 6:07Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Our solar system is tops four point six, four point seven.

• 6:10Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:10Krishna Choudhary?

  So this thing is older than, you know, anything that we've really had a close encounter with.

• 6:14Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 6:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Now, the, um, the, the problem is when this thing gets close to us, we're gonna be on the other side of the sun.

• 6:22Lester Nare?

  Right, because it's coming in, we're on, you know, like to the front side of the sun right now.

• 6:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Lester Nare?

  And it's coming in towards us, but we're gonna be orbiting.

• 6:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Lester Nare?

  And we'll be here, it'll still be coming this direction and we'll be blocked by the sun.

• 6:33Krishna Choudhary?

  By the sun, right? It's like during, like, if you wanted to see it, it would be during daytime behind the sun.

• 6:38Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 6:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 6:39Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 6:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Because of the atmosphere. We're not gonna see anything, right? The sky is gonna be blue and the air glows more than any stars or this three eye atlas.

• 6:49Lester Nare?

  This is why Vera Rubin is doing a survey, sky survey at night.

• 6:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Lester Nare?

  And not during the day.

• 6:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And furthermore, we can't really point the James Webb Space Telescope towards it either. Because like then the sun, the whole point of the James Webb Telescope, the reason why it's so nice and like sensitive is because it's got this giant shade that shades it from the sun so that the instruments can be kept at like four Kelvin.

• 7:15Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Like colder than, like, actually, no, even less than, like, there's like a literal, like, dilution refrigerator on that thing that is like keeping it colder than outer space.

• 7:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Because then you get these instruments that are super cold, the instruments, the atoms aren't jiggling.

• 7:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:30Krishna Choudhary?

  So then the only signal you're getting is not from the instrument itself.

• 7:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 7:34Krishna Choudhary?

  But from like the starlight.

• 7:35Lester Nare?

  There's less or no noise.

• 7:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yes. But if you wanted to like point it towards that thing, like that defeats the whole purpose.

• 7:42Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 7:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So you can't really do that.

• 7:44Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 7:45Krishna Choudhary?

  So what we like to do is to observe it right now.

• 7:50Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:50Krishna Choudhary?

  With our terrestrial based telescopes like the James Webb.

• 7:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Right now, when it's like, you know, sort of away from the sun.

• 7:56Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Get as much data as possible.

• 7:58Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 7:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And then as it goes through the solar system and it reaches Mars.

• 8:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:02Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna be on the other side of the sun. It's gonna be near Mars's orbit.

• 8:05Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 8:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, we can have all of our orbiters that are orbiting Mars.

• 8:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Sort of, and then point towards this thing and try to get as much data as possible.

• 8:16Lester Nare?

  So the idea is we have orbiters around Mars that have a certain mission right now, right? A Mars based mission.

• 8:22Krishna Choudhary?

  They can take a break.

• 8:24Lester Nare?

  This is one of those like, not that many, that often in the lifetime opportunity. And it's like, we can take a couple hours a day, reorient, use some of our fuel to do so, to capture, to provide that data when we on Earth, as well as JWST, don't have the capability or the angle of viewing.

• 8:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Lester Nare?

  To be able to actually properly capture it as it gets closer.

• 8:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Lester Nare?

  Uh, to our orbit.

• 8:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and exactly. And with comets, you really. wanna look at the thing when it's close to the sun.

• 8:54Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 8:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Cause that's when it's doing.

• 8:55Lester Nare?

  The most.

• 8:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Cool, crazy stuff.

• 8:57Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 8:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, when the comet is far away, it's just a chunk of ice. But as it gets closer to the sun, it's gonna start interacting with the solar wind. It's gonna start interacting with the photons that the sun is giving out. So then there's gonna be chemical reactions and physical reactions happening on top of the comet.

• 9:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 9:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what we wanna see, right? In the very like. Way, way out there, when, when, when we tried to look at three I atlas.

• 9:20Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, it was like really bright for how far away it was. And that's what gave rise to a lot of these alternative theories about like it's like artificial and all this.

• 9:29Lester Nare?

  The light's not reflecting from the sun.

• 9:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Lester Nare?

  Generating its own light.

• 9:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Generating its own light, cause it's so bright, like, how's that possible? Now, as it got closer, actually, so August sixth is when Ja- James Webb looked at it.

• 9:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:41Krishna Choudhary?

  And the preprint came out on August twenty fifth.

• 9:43Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 9:43Krishna Choudhary?

  They were fast about this because they know that like people want it, right? So, um, the preprint came out like literally, they, they had like what, like twenty days?

• 9:51Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Krishna Choudhary?

  To do all of the.

• 9:52Lester Nare?

  People were upset about how long it took.

• 9:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, but dude, like twenty days to like massage data is, is kind of, and like create a story, right? It's not just like you're analyzing the data, you have to like interpret the data.

• 10:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Try to create a story about like what you're trying to say, right?

• 10:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Science is all about stories at the end of the day, it's not just numbers.

• 10:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:10Krishna Choudhary?

  You have to have some kind of narrative.

• 10:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So, they, they, um, they analyzed the data from James Webb Space Telescope. It used, um, one of the instruments that is a spectrograph. So it can tell us things like the composition of this thing.

• 10:23Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 10:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And what they found was a really high mixing ratio for carbon dioxide and water. Okay, so usually the mixing ratio is quite low, here it's eight to one.

• 10:34Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 10:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, there's eight times as much CO2 as water.

• 10:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 10:37Krishna Choudhary?

  That's like a lot.

• 10:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 10:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and that's very unusual for comets in our solar system.

• 10:43Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 10:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so that means that this thing, there, there's two possibilities, okay? One is that when this thing was born. It had a very different birth environment than the comets in our solar system. It could be that this thing was born in something called the CO2 ice line. Okay, you can imagine when a star is forming and the solar system is forming around it. The star starts making um light and thermal energy. That starts going out, right? There's gonna be, the the disk is gonna have a mixture of, you know, silicon, hydrogen, um CO2, water and all this other, all the dust from that primordial nebula that sort of Yes. became the star, right? So all of this stuff is gonna be in the disk.

• 11:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, there's gonna be a line where inside that line, close to the star, there's gonna be enough radiation to um put CO2 in a gaseous form.

• 11:38Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 11:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, but afterwards, there's not gonna be enough radiation, not gonna be enough heat, and that CO2 is gonna become dry ice.

• 11:45Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so there's gonna be this ice line where after a certain distance away from the star, you just have dry ice and before you have gaseous ice.

• 11:53Lester Nare?

  Because also.

• 11:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Gaseous CO2.

• 11:54Lester Nare?

  Carbon dioxide does not have, it does, there's no liquid form.

• 11:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 11:58Lester Nare?

  It goes straight from gas to solid.

• 11:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, there, there is a liquid form, but at like very peculiar pressures, right?

• 12:04Lester Nare?

  That's fair.

• 12:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Like if, like in the, in the low pressure of the, of, of the, of space and even at like one atmosphere, there's, like at one atmosphere, it'll go directly from dry ice to CO2, right? If you put in high enough pressure, you can liquefy CO2.

• 12:17Lester Nare?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 12:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, but like, out here, it's just gonna go ice to, ice to gaseous form.

• 12:22Lester Nare?

  Back and forth.

• 12:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, back and forth, so um you have this like dry ice line. Now, it could be that like the comet was forming in this, right past that ice line, right? So it's like gathering up a lot of CO2, not a lot of, a lot of water, right? Because water, the water line is elsewhere.

• 12:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 12:40Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 12:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, so.

• 12:43Krishna Choudhary?

  That could be one reason.

• 12:44Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 12:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Why Three Eye Atlas has a lot of CO2 versus water. The other thing could be that it formed, or it was um subjected to a really harsh radiative environment.

• 12:57Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 12:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and then what can happen is you can have you can have these reactions between carbon monoxide, which is also fairly common.

• 13:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 13:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, carbon monoxide and water with this high energy radiation to create CO2.

• 13:10Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 13:10Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what happened, right?

• 13:11Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 13:12Krishna Choudhary?

  So there's these two possible scenarios, but in any case, it's still very, very different from any comet that we've seen.

• 13:18Lester Nare?

  Which is, I I think, and what's interesting is there there's this leap, you know, that folks like me who are not as educated always make where it's like, oh, we have no reference point, so that must mean it's aliens. And I think kind of what the through line you're drawing here is we do know that it was birthed in an environment that is different than the environment where we have these data sets.

• 13:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:42Lester Nare?

  And so those initial conditions matter.

• 13:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and and the and the data sets, to your point, the data sets that we have on what is normal.

• 13:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Is like from our solar system.

• 13:53Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 13:53Krishna Choudhary?

  As you say, right, there's millions and millions of solar systems out there with different types of stars, different galactic environments. Like, we are, we are a tiny little sample size.

• 14:05Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and one of the great things and why everyone is so excited about interstellar objects is because it gives us a sample, a sampling of what's out there.

• 14:14Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 14:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and so that's why everyone is like scrambling to try to get as much data as possible on this guy.

• 14:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 14:20Lester Nare?

  Because from that data, like we kind of talked about at the beginning of the story, there are multiple insights that can be gleaned, not only at time of capture.

• 14:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:29Lester Nare?

  But also afterwards, when we learn other things, and it's like, oh, let's go look back at the Atlas data.

• 14:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:35Lester Nare?

  Now that we have some different context about how these highly radiative, highly radiative environments work.

• 14:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Lester Nare?

  Or any number of other.

• 14:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Lester Nare?

  Options.

• 14:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. We can like start, I mean, you know, we we're we're kind of scrambling because like this thing's gonna be out by September.

• 14:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so right now, we're. Just in the observe phase.

• 14:55Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 14:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, after this thing gets out and we get all the data, then I'm pretty sure there's gonna be a big cohort of people that are gonna gonna go into the modeling phase.

• 15:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right of trying to understand, okay theoretically, how is something like this possible?

• 15:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, if I were to model it this way, would it match the data? No, well, then that's not, that's probably not what what happened.

• 15:13Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  And and so, yeah, at this point, it's just like everyone's just like, just point it at the thing and get as much light as you can.

• 15:20Lester Nare?

  What what's what's so funny about this is, um, as I mentioned in a previous episode, I get the pleasure of being able to work with, um, Dr. Avi Loeb.

• 15:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Lester Nare?

  Regular basis, who, uh, is a professor of astrophysics at Harvard. And, you know, one of the things we'd reached out to him to do was to do a white paper, uh, on this new update.

• 15:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Hmm.

• 15:40Lester Nare?

  Three I Atlas and to go with what you're just saying, his response was almost a a more, uh, expanded version of what you just said is which is like, we need to wait for the dust to settle.

• 15:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:50Lester Nare?

  Uh, right now, it's just an observational stage. We need to focus on capturing as much data and information as possible. Once it's gone.

• 15:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Lester Nare?

  And that opportunity has left, then there's gonna be time to actually settle in. And and do analysis on what it is that we just captured. So I think there's an important distinction to identify here, which is like, even if it was aliens, right, we don't have any real baseline to reference for it.

• 16:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Lester Nare?

  Identify it as such. If it doesn't land on the White House lawn, there's gonna be this two-stage data capture and observation, which is where we are now, and then sort of analysis and modeling, which happens after.

• 16:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 16:28Lester Nare?

  Well, we will get more clarity, generally speaking, once the observation period is over. And we move into this analysis and modeling.

• 16:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Lester Nare?

  Timeframe, which is again how science works.

• 16:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:38Lester Nare?

  Um, but but that that's, there's, there's a, there's a big public desire for answers, which is understandable.

• 16:47Lester Nare?

  And like many things, it's just a process. So it's interesting you say that because it makes me think of that.

• 16:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Lester Nare?

  That that letter we got.

• 16:54Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, and you know, you, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely not aliens at this point. But it's still like one of the coolest objects that's ever visited us, right? And so, I mean, I don't think people should be disappointed, right? It's kind of like a cop out. I, I, I mean, you know, as the Buddhists say, like, don't have these expectations. Because the world itself is a wonderful place.

• 17:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 17:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Imagine, imagine this thing like going through the Milky Way for seven billion years. Visiting like who knows what, right? It, this isn't, we're not the first star system that it's seen. Imagine from its point of view, it's gone from one star system to the next. The fact that it's going so fast means that it's had a pretty close encounter.

• 17:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 17:38Krishna Choudhary?

  With something pretty massive.

• 17:40Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 17:40Krishna Choudhary?

  To like be zooming through like this, right? The sun is not really gonna change its velocity that much.

• 17:46Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 17:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? It's just, it's sort of like redirecting it in one direction.

• 17:50Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 17:50Krishna Choudhary?

  But like this thing had a very close encounter, like this, you know, like ima- imagine from its perspective. It's been around for like half the age of the universe, right?

• 18:02Lester Nare?

  Long time.

• 18:02Krishna Choudhary?

  That's a long time. We've only been around for a third. So I think, I think, I think it's um, an incredible like story, right? And, and to get back to the idea of, uh, we're, we're trying to observe this thing as much as possible, right? So that's where the European Space Agency and, and this new stuff is coming in, right? Where the, the European Space Agency has a bunch of orbiters. Around uh, Mars. That they're like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna repurpose for this. One of them is um, the Mars Express. And the other one is the Exo Mars Trace Gas Orbiter. Both of these, both of these things have cameras that are pretty good. This thing is still gonna be pretty far away from Mars, but you know, getting any sort of.

• 18:37Lester Nare?

  Anything.

• 18:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Getting anything when it's on the other side of the sun and we can't put anything there. And it's gonna be the most volatile when it's on the other side of the sun. So getting any data at that point of its orbit, of its tra- trajectory, I should say, not orbit, because it's not orbiting.

• 18:51Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 18:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, is gonna be incredibly valuable. And the guys at the ESA are definitely tempering everyone's expectations. It's like, guys, it's gonna be far away, like, our stuff wasn't designed for this. It's like, okay, dude, like, no one's gonna blame you if you get shit data. Like, just get whatever you can, right? And then the other thing is, so we also talked about the Europa Clipper in one of the previous episodes.

• 19:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:13Krishna Choudhary?

  So on its way back to Earth.

• 19:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, it's actually gonna cross through where the comet was, right? So, so as a comet goes across the solar system.

• 19:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 19:24Krishna Choudhary?

  It leaves behind a trail of, of particles.

• 19:28Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Of debris in its wake.

• 19:30Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 19:30Krishna Choudhary?

  That's actually how we get meteor showers. Meteor showers are literally just the Earth moving through cometary, um, paths.

• 19:37Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 19:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that have these like particles, like, and just like, just like planets, the particles are gonna be going through the, the sun, like, they're, they're orbiting the sun as well, right? So like, as the Earth goes through these, these cometary paths, any sort of particles that get trapped in the Earth's gravity, fall down to Earth, and then that's how you get the Perseids and all of these meteor showers, right? But you can now imagine, um, the Europa Clipper probe.

• 20:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Is going to be going through this thing, right?

• 20:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 20:07Krishna Choudhary?

  So we could be getting observations about the particulate matter.

• 20:12Lester Nare?

  Matter that was a part of this.

• 20:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's not just the Europa Clipper, I think there's other places like Hira and Lucy, they may fly through the cometary tail, they're all NASA.

• 20:20Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 20:21Krishna Choudhary?

  So that's gonna be super exciting to get like actual, like.

• 20:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 20:25Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, data.

• 20:25Lester Nare?

  Yeah, it's gonna be both optical, like imagery.

• 20:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Lester Nare?

  Capture as well as like physical matter analysis.

• 20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:31Lester Nare?

  And, and I think this sort of, you know, this, this brings up the, when we build these really expensive, highly precise instruments for observation and data capture, they're not necessarily single purpose. Um, in this exact context.

• 20:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:47Lester Nare?

  It's like, we send a bunch of stuff to look at Mars. But we can still use those same instruments for other use cases.

• 20:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Lester Nare?

  Such as, hey, go just look at this thing that's coming through and let's see what we can get.

• 20:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and yeah, it's pretty crazy because like, I'm pretty sure when the ESA and when NASA like made these things. We didn't, you know, I, uh, Awu Muu wasn't even a thing.

• 21:08Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? They, when they were planning like.

• 21:10Lester Nare?

  These were made well before.

• 21:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, before we even, and then now it's like, now it's, it's kind of nice that humanity has a solar system wide presence.

• 21:18Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:18Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 21:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 21:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Where even though Earth is in a crappy part of its orbit and we're kind of handcuffed in that way.

• 21:24Lester Nare?

  We can still.

• 21:25Krishna Choudhary?

  We can still get that data from other parts because, because we have this presence that's so big.

• 21:31Lester Nare?

  This is.

• 21:31Krishna Choudhary?

  That's kind of cool.

• 21:32Lester Nare?

  It's really cool. It's why both near and deep space matter quite a bit. And while it may be the case, based on our second article, that we may not live past a hundred.

• 21:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Lester Nare?

  Uh, let's hope that these tools and instruments maybe one day do capture alien life in our local neighborhood.

• 21:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Oh, that would be dope.

• 21:54Lester Nare?

  That'd be fantastic.

• 21:54Krishna Choudhary?

  That'd be fantastic.

• 21:56Lester Nare?

  But our, our second story is an interesting, an, uh, similarly interesting one, uh, about longevity no longer increasing. Headline, studies finds generations born after nineteen thirty-nine unlikely to reach age one hundred. This is covered in the Independent, uh, but the research was out of, it was a international collaboration between the Max Planck Institute of Demographic, Demographic Research, the Institute National d'Etudes Démographiques, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uh, who we've mentioned on this podcast a couple of times now. And they published their paper in a PNAS, which is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And so people are probably most familiar with longevity as a concept or studies either

• 22:40Lester Nare?

  from the Netflix documentary, The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever, which is about this hundred millionaire Brian Johnson.

• 22:46Krishna Choudhary?

  What is he doing?

• 22:46Lester Nare?

  So he's doing all, he's getting the best doctors in the world.

• 22:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 22:50Lester Nare?

  To like, give him a regiment. So he's now allegedly like decreased his actual age from his mid forties, where he's like in his forties, to the bodily age of a twenty something year old, right? That's, that's the like, and so his whole thing is unless I die in a freak accident, like my body is literally.

• 23:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Is, is he one of these guys who like gets blood transfusions?

• 23:13Lester Nare?

  So I don't want to say specifically.

• 23:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, okay.

• 23:15Lester Nare?

  But the only two angles are either the Brian Johnson story or the idea that all these billionaires are vampires. Yeah. Young employees to give them blood.

• 23:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, cuz, cuz that's like a real thing. I, I saw like news stories about that.

• 23:26Lester Nare?

  I'm not sure with Brian specifically.

• 23:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Maybe Brian Johnson isn't doing that, okay?

• 23:29Lester Nare?

  But this is, this is how in the.

• 23:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Everyone's obsessed with it.

• 23:32Lester Nare?

  Right, like we, people want to live longer, all this stuff. It's always been the case over the course of humanity that like as generations go by, we get older. We like are able to live longer.

• 23:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Lester Nare?

  This study is sort of suggesting not anymore.

• 23:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Not anymore. We've, yeah, we might've come to the end of the road with the low hanging fruits. That's what this thing is suggesting.

• 23:50Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 23:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so longevity, there's been this thing called the longevity revolution over the, over the past century, right? Life expectancy has been increasing like crazy over the last century. And that has everything to do with advancements in science.

• 24:03Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 24:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Um, we've like figured out biology at a nitty gritty level. We figured out, hey, like, um, sickness actually comes from little tiny pathogens. And we figured out ways to advance public health with vaccines, with, um, antibiotics, with all kinds of like revolutionary technology, uh, medical innovations. We've also had a lot of socioeconomic development, so, you know, in sanitation, in like the eradication of infectious diseases, smallpox is no longer a thing.

• 24:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 24:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is an incredible thing to think about, dude. Like, smallpox doesn't exist.

• 24:40Lester Nare?

  This is, which is controversial.

• 24:42Krishna Choudhary?

  In the world.

• 24:42Lester Nare?

  To like bring up the fact that that's an incredible feat for humanity.

• 24:46Krishna Choudhary?

  For humanity and science and everything. Dude, like, I mean, and, and, you know, I, I can't imagine it happening today, which is so sad.

• 24:54Lester Nare?

  Which is sad.

• 24:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is so sad because like back when in the, I think it was in the nineteen eighties, when. You know, we were at the last stages of eradicating smallpox and there was just a tiny little bit of smallpox in Africa. Okay, and in the middle of a civil war, both sides decided to have a ceasefire so that health workers could go in and because there had been a small, smallpox outbreak there. And health workers could go in and vaccinate everyone there. And then, and then they started fighting each other. It's like, it's like, just stop fighting for like, for like a few days, give us the time here. And then everyone's like, probably like, planning how to get, how to restart the fighting. But then, but, but even in the civil war, they respected the fact that, okay, nobody wants smallpox.

• 25:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:40Krishna Choudhary?

  All right, like, I want to win the civil war.

• 25:42Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 25:42Krishna Choudhary?

  But not at the cost of a, a nation with smallpox. I can't imagine that happening today.

• 25:49Lester Nare?

  There's no, there's no, I mean, a funny story that, that someone always brings up to me about this is the former senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

• 25:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay.

• 25:57Lester Nare?

  I think when he was younger, had smallpox.

• 26:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That's crazy.

• 26:00Lester Nare?

  And, you know, leader of the Republican Party in the United States for a long period of time. He's been very vocal about the defense of like, science in this particular isolated use case.

• 26:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Lester Nare?

  Um, and to your point, imagining any of the current global conflicts going on, pausing to do a public health intervention. It's hard, it's hard to envision.

• 26:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it really is.

• 26:24Lester Nare?

  It's hard to envision, which is sad.

• 26:26Krishna Choudhary?

  It really is sad. But like, those are the advancements that got us this longevity revolution, right? Where we had an insanely increasing, um, lifespan, average lifespan, okay? And one of the, one of the things that happened as a consequence was policymakers just took it for granted.

• 26:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 26:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, where, yeah, of course, we're gonna just keep living longer. Right? You look at the, um, you look at the, the trend of like, how average life expectancy is increasing and it looks like a line.

• 26:57Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 26:58Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, like, any good, uh, high school student, they get three data points, they're like, oh, he's just gonna, he's just gonna go that way. Right? And so, and, and this, this paper is really, um, putting that claim to rest.

• 27:14Lester Nare?

  Interesting.

• 27:14Krishna Choudhary?

  A lot of people have been sounding the alarm, though. Okay. Cause any, anyone who's reasonable is like, okay, just cause it's linear for now, doesn't mean it's gonna keep staying linear.

• 27:23Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 27:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, there's plenty of systems that go linear and then they plateau off.

• 27:27Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 27:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Um, but there's been sort of two camps. One camp has been there, there is kind of an inherent limitation to how long humans can live.

• 27:37Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 27:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Based on just evolution, um, mutation rates, the ability of our cells and our organs to keep up.

• 27:45Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 27:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And then there's another camp that's like, well, you know, we could have enough science to circumnavigate.

• 27:52Lester Nare?

  Science.

• 27:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Like inherent evolution, right? And, and just like replace bad cells and do all of this bioengineering to just make us live forever. Right? So those are the two camps.

• 28:04Lester Nare?

  This is sort of adjacent to the transhumanism kind of movement where they're like, there's, there's gonna be the symbiosis between all of our science.

• 28:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Lester Nare?

  And stuff. And then that way we'll be able to be beyond, we'll be this next thing that is.

• 28:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll merge with AI or some, or some nonsense, right? And it's like, okay, yeah, maybe, maybe in like a hundred years, right? But not me. I, I ain't doing that. No, ain't no way, boy.

• 28:29Lester Nare?

  But these are, but these are the two camps.

• 28:30Krishna Choudhary?

  But those are the two camps, right? And, and it's, and it's been hard to sort of, um, justify one or the other.

• 28:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 28:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Without hard data. And that's what this group is doing from Max Plank, right? The, the, the paper that's come out in PNAS, um, it's sort of taking a very rigorous approach to this problem. Okay? Because this problem is a hard problem to get good data and good analysis on.

• 28:55Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 28:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? There's, let me, let me give you a sense of why it's hard. So there's two approaches to how we quantify life expectancy. Okay? There's the period life expectancy and then there's the cohort life expectancy. Okay? The period life expectancy is the easier one to, um, quantify. It's basically the idea that reflects the average mortality risk in a given year.

• 29:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So it's kind of like saying like, okay, like if a newborn is born now and you say the life expectancy is 80 years, but that's a period life expectancy. What you mean is that like, given the climate right now.

• 29:33Krishna Choudhary?

  This newborn, given the mortality climate right now, this newborn would be expected to live eighty years, right? Given the chances of dying on a random person.

• 29:41Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 29:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But that is a very local, a local in time measure.

• 29:45Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Because um if the covid pandemic happens, that period life expectancy goes down.

• 29:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 29:51Krishna Choudhary?

  If um the Spanish flu happens in nineteen eighteen, the period life expectancy goes down. But like, it's kind of a live metric of life expectancy, okay? Then there's something called a cohort life expectancy, which is like saying, okay, the people born in nineteen fifty in that birth cohort, the average lifespan of that individual is eighty years.

• 30:12Lester Nare?

  Hmm.

• 30:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 30:13Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That's different because that is taking into account this giant time span.

• 30:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Of eighty, like nineteen fifty plus whatever eighty years.

• 30:21Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 30:22Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 30:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And in principle, that's really hard to quantify unless everyone has died.

• 30:28Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:28Krishna Choudhary?

  From nineteen fifty.

• 30:29Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 30:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Then you take everyone who died from nineteen fifty, you average it out, and you say that was the cohort life expectancy.

• 30:35Lester Nare?

  It's so it's, it can be useful in a retrospective context when you have a generation or cohort that's already.

• 30:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, that's already done, that's already done.

• 30:42Lester Nare?

  But you, it's not predicted, it's hard, you can't play it forward as like a, well, we have a generation that's like halfway.

• 30:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:49Lester Nare?

  And like, let's like maybe predict.

• 30:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:52Lester Nare?

  These unknowns about the future.

• 30:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So, so you see now the struggle, right? That like scientists have in, in defining a cohort life expectancy of a generation that's still alive.

• 31:02Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 31:02Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what these guys are trying to forecast.

• 31:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 31:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? And so the way they did it was, was really cool. They, they got six different types of models.

• 31:10Lester Nare?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:10Krishna Choudhary?

  So you, you know, in social science, you, you, i-if you just do like a single model, lots of compounds, you wanna do a bunch. That's why I like this paper, right? They, they were pretty rigorous about it. They, you do six different, different approaches, and you see if they all give the same answer. If they do, then it's a pretty robust finding.

• 31:28Lester Nare?

  Got it.

• 31:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? On the other hand, if it's a giant spread, that means that the nitty gritties of the model and the initial data that you put in, that's what's messing it up, right?

• 31:35Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 31:36Krishna Choudhary?

  So they did six different models, um like the Lee-Carter model, the cohort segmented transformation, age at death model. All of these like different kinds of models, they're basically like fancy data analysis techniques. Where what you do is you take a time series of data of different age groups. And how they're doing in terms of mortality. And then from that you project forward.

• 31:57Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 31:57Krishna Choudhary?

  And try to get like a sense of, okay, when is the time series gonna end?

• 32:01Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 32:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, you try to do this for six different things. And what they came up with the same, they came up with the same.

• 32:07Lester Nare?

  Endpoint.

• 32:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Endpoint, which is that this life expectancy is going up, but it's not gonna get to a hundred, it's gonna plateau. Okay, to validate it, you might be thinking, okay, well, these are just models, right?

• 32:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah, sure.

• 32:17Krishna Choudhary?

  It's nice. To validate it, they they forecasted life expectancy for people from nineteen nineteen to nineteen thirty eight. Who are all dead. Okay, everyone born in that time period are all dead. So you can take that data, right, as your test data.

• 32:31Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:31Krishna Choudhary?

  In some sense, right? And be like, okay, I'm gonna do the same analysis for this data.

• 32:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 32:35Krishna Choudhary?

  From nineteen nine, people born in nineteen nineteen to nineteen thirty eight, and then try to project.

• 32:40Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 32:40Krishna Choudhary?

  When they're gonna die.

• 32:41Lester Nare?

  And it worked. And we have the answer for that.

• 32:43Krishna Choudhary?

  And we have the answer for that, because we have the data about when they died.

• 32:46Lester Nare?

  So we built a sort of predictive model to be able to work for current cohorts that are still alive.

• 32:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:51Lester Nare?

  And we validated it's even, and it worked across six models. And then we used a historical cohort who, where everyone's dead. To put it in to see if it mapped onto the actual results we see, saw from that.

• 33:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Lester Nare?

  Cohort that's now all.

• 33:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and it was a little bit off, but not enough to justify what they were seeing.

• 33:09Lester Nare?

  That makes sense.

• 33:10Krishna Choudhary?

  With the present cohort. And it might be a little bit off because like, you know, when you, when you're trying to do like, obviously, the, the. The environment of the data back then is different from the environment now, right? But then you can make arguments about how off the results should be. And the results should not be that off compared to what we're finding now, which is that this thing is definitely plateauing. Okay?

• 33:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 33:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, yes. The cooler part of this is they actually did a kind of causation.

• 33:36Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 33:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Of what is causing this plateau.

• 33:38Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 33:39Krishna Choudhary?

  And what's causing this plateau is the fact that we have exhausted all the low hanging fruits. When it comes to longevity of human lifespan.

• 33:48Lester Nare?

  We, we've, we've taken all the low branches on the tree for extending life. And we've.

• 33:53Krishna Choudhary?

  We've actualized them all because young people are now living longer, right? No one's, I mean, people, obviously, people are dying before the age of five, but much less. Infant mortality is way down, okay? People dying before the age of twenty is way down because infectious diseases are way down, right? Like, the problems that you have as a young person are no longer the kinds of problems that you used to have before. Okay, like, because of vaccinations, because of fundamental science, because of all of the advancement that we've been doing over the past century.

• 34:26Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 34:27Krishna Choudhary?

  The hard stuff is now the actual aging, okay? That's the cancer.

• 34:33Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 34:34Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the Alzheimer's, that's the, that's the, that's these higher order things that are notoriously hard because they're no longer, they're no longer agents that are trying to kill you, okay? They're yourself, that's just like sort of at a cellular, cellular level giving up in some sense, right? Like, the neurons are sort of dying and the nervous system in the brain is in some sense deteriorating just because of, like, time.

• 35:03Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And in cancer cells, it's like the mechanisms that control the growth of cells is sort of giving up. And then now you have these tumors growths, right? So, so it's a much more complicated problem now.

• 35:17Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 35:17Krishna Choudhary?

  That we haven't really had the kind of progress that we have had in cases like polio and smallpox and all of these other sort of, you know, quote, easier problems. They weren't easy at the time, but now that we've looked in hindsight, it's like, okay, they're all like agents. And now we have these like modular mechanisms to like solve that, right? Oh, just make a vaccine, coronavirus, like within six months, we had a vaccine, easy.

• 35:43Lester Nare?

  Now we have to solve for our own body trying to kill us.

• 35:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Lester Nare?

  Over time, and, and, and the open-ended issue with this is it's not clear that in the short or midterm that we're gonna actually make this.

• 36:00Lester Nare?

  Sufficient or or significant progress that would lead to outcomes that were at the rate of progress.

• 36:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't seem that like it's not gonna. We're not making progress at the speed that would like temper this plateau.

• 36:16Lester Nare?

  You know what this reminds me of funny enough is in technology, there's this, you know, markets and and cycles are defined by this S curve. Right?

• 36:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Lester Nare?

  Where you start, you know, with a low rate of change and then you have this explosive growth. And with every technology cycle, eventually it tapers off. Mobile phones is the perfect example. Right? We went through years of Apple innovating and doing new things and combining all this stuff. And then all of a sudden, everyone catches up and then we kind of get to the place where we are now where is a foldable versus?

• 36:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Lester Nare?

  Is that really?

• 36:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Lester Nare?

  You know, or are we now just kind of making things for marketing?

• 36:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Lester Nare?

  And so the similar idea of sort of the S curves that you see in technology cycles.

• 36:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's happening in fundamental science when it comes to biology.

• 36:58Lester Nare?

  When it comes to this longevity issue, it's like we kind of have reached the end of the first S curve.

• 37:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 37:02Lester Nare?

  And so in technology, the idea is S curves move, right? So it's like you first have like vacuum tubes, all this stuff. Then you get to microprocessors, then you move to mobile, PC, mobile, etc. The open question is arguably, we just went through the first, let's say longevity cycle.

• 37:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 37:16Lester Nare?

  S curve cycle.

• 37:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 37:17Lester Nare?

  And it's not clear what the second S curve cycle may or may not look like.

• 37:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 37:23Lester Nare?

  And whether we can traverse it or not.

• 37:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And like if we if we get to that S curve, what is the real upper limit, right? Because right now, the upper limit, I think the record is one hundred and twenty two years for someone to live. Okay, and um, is that the real limit?

• 37:39Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Is it at that point, the body is just like nah?

• 37:42Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 37:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Evolution has literally programmed us to be like, no, no, no, we're still evolving, right? The human genome has a really high mutation rate compared to like, like, for example, sharks, right? Sharks have like a insanely low mutation mutation rate, which is why their fossils three hundred, three hundred million years ago look exactly the same.

• 38:01Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:01Krishna Choudhary?

  There's no humans like even ten million years ago.

• 38:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:04Krishna Choudhary?

  That look like us.

• 38:05Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:05Krishna Choudhary?

  So the the mutation rate is really high. On top of that, like. You know, we're we're incredibly like agile creatures, you know, we're mammals at a high body temperature. So high metabolism, so all of these things sort of like start contributing to tempering.

• 38:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:23Krishna Choudhary?

  An infinite lifespan.

• 38:24Lester Nare?

  Right, the limits, we we have these limits that exist that are fundamental to our the the existence of our being.

• 38:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Lester Nare?

  And it is not clear that they are necessarily surmountable by a human manufactured solution.

• 38:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:36Lester Nare?

  Uh, in in human time spans.

• 38:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah. And what I liked, I mean, I guess not what I like about this story, but what concerns me about this story is that I think we need to, again, start taking this very seriously as a policymaking substrate.

• 38:54Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 38:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? As like, as like now, a scientific fact that we have learned.

• 38:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:00Krishna Choudhary?

  And urgently need to act on, okay?

• 39:04Lester Nare?

  Because from a policy perspective, I mean, there's, to extrapolate this, there there's huge arguments right now over the the debt in the US.

• 39:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Lester Nare?

  Becoming, being at untenable levels. And one of the biggest line items in that is social security.

• 39:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Lester Nare?

  Right? And it makes assumptions about retirement age and who gets Medicare.

• 39:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right.

• 39:23Lester Nare?

  And what happens if you're the line of average life expectancy shifts or moves?

• 39:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's no longer, I mean, everybody has made this policy based on an increasing life expectancy forever.

• 39:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 39:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And now this paper is saying that actually, no, life expectancy has plateaued. We're at the end of the road when it comes to like how old we can get, right? Like all these like, you know, with with pension funds, with social security systems. There there was a riot in France, right, the other year, when like, um, the government tried to raise the retirement age.

• 39:57Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 39:57Krishna Choudhary?

  The reason why they're raising the retirement age is a pretty like simple logic, right? Which is like, if people are living longer.

• 40:04Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Then they can work longer.

• 40:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 40:06Krishna Choudhary?

  And if they can work longer, we should make them work longer before they get their retirement. Well, this isn't the case anymore. People aren't actually living longer. They're living the same as they were like 10 years ago.

• 40:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? We're not actually, we're not actually making it. Better.

• 40:21Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:22Krishna Choudhary?

  And the worst part about these kinds of policies that sort of raise the retirement age is,

• 40:28Krishna Choudhary?

  it actually impacts those of worse socioeconomic background, right? Because the rich people, rich people can just retire.

• 40:34Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:34Krishna Choudhary?

  You could retire at fifty. You probably already did.

• 40:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:37Krishna Choudhary?

  It's the poor people that are still gonna have to work until like seventy now. And, and then what, die at like seventy-two?

• 40:44Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 40:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you know?

• 40:45Lester Nare?

  Hundred, no, it's a really, it's a really important point about how a lot of this very fundamental science research, historically, especially in the United States, has both informed like military and intelligence posture as well as policymaking posture.

• 41:00Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right, yeah.

• 41:01Lester Nare?

  And there's just been this disconnect where, for whatever reason, there's no longer the through lines from fundamental research and the insights that are gleaned from that into bleeding into these areas of that are in the control of nation-states.

• 41:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Lester Nare?

  Uh, in terms of how do you sort of organize society around it?

• 41:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude.

• 41:22Lester Nare?

  And this is, this is like a meaningful, uh, and important point because people do still, generally, do still think like, oh yeah, we're just gonna live longer than our parents. Much like every other aspect, at least in the US, of life, right? We are less, like, the millennials and younger.

• 41:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Lester Nare?

  We're less well off financially than our parents.

• 41:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Lester Nare?

  Everything is less affordable than it has been for our parents. And we're the first generation, um, to be less well off than our parents. And so the idea that we're gonna also

• 41:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Now live just as long.

• 41:50Lester Nare?

  Makes, like, you can kind of see, like, all these things are, like, aligning.

• 41:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then, and then when they, when, when, you know, our parents' generation retires, the, the, the, the population pyramid is now basically inverted for all of these developing countries.

• 42:04Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Where this is true, right?

• 42:06Lester Nare?

  It's the Japan problem.

• 42:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, like, it's, it's, now there's fewer and fewer young people to support this older population for social security.

• 42:13Lester Nare?

  Exactly.

• 42:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Turns out, given that population pyramid and the mathematics of just two plus two equals four, and it's never five.

• 42:19Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, this might just be a scam. Compound on top of that.

• 42:24Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 42:24Krishna Choudhary?

  This idea that, like, actually, the fundamental premise that, like, the younger generation is gonna live longer. And so can contribute more to the social security pile is now no longer correct. And we need to start asking questions like, is this like it's there's a fundamental shift now, I think in my mind from is this a tenable strategy? To is this even a correct way to do business in a developed society? Right? I don't want to sound communist because I swear I am not a communist. Okay, but like at some point you gotta start asking questions about fundamental things like the social construct. Like is social contract, sorry.

• 43:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, you know, is this true? Like this is the social contract of the post-war era still applicable today?

• 43:16Lester Nare?

  Right. And the fundamental variables in that equation have changed so drastically. And we're still saying the outcomes are going to be the same, even though all the variables on the other side of the equation. Are fundamentally very, very different.

• 43:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, like this is a reality now and it's like gonna catch up with us as we grow older.

• 43:33Lester Nare?

  This is a really, really important story. I'm sure we're gonna come back to the subject of longevity because I think you're the nexus you brought up from longevity studies to policy is a really important note, especially when we're seeing not only in, you know, Western, let's say quote unquote, Western developed nations, but any developed nation. The this similar issue of of generational friction. That arises from fifty year old to eighty year old policy conceptions that are based on fundamentals that are now statistically, data wise and scientifically are proving to not necessarily be the same. And yet we've not changed any of our posture.

• 44:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:18Lester Nare?

  And then we're just gonna run into a brick wall at some point and this is it's it's a problem.

• 44:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:27Lester Nare?

  This it's it's it's interesting because it does dovetail somewhat to our our third story. One aspect we didn't talk about the factors of longevity that change is, you know, climate is

• 44:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Lester Nare?

  a big part of that.

• 44:38Krishna Choudhary?

  It's getting bad.

• 44:39Lester Nare?

  And our our next story is about a new no sort plastic recycling being near. The headline, new nickel catalyst enables no sort mixed plastic recycling. This is a new, brand new breaking research coming out of Northwestern University. They put their paper out in Nature Chemistry.

• 44:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Lester Nare?

  I just went to Japan earlier this year and one of the interesting things about in Japan, unlike in the US, is they have different recycling bins for different types of recycling, glass, cardboard, etc. In the US, we just put it all in the same thing. So my assumption is this no sort plastic is making me saying like that there's no need to X, Y, Z. Like this, this seems like it's on the on the sort of like pollution and our need to be more effective with our resources. This might have impact, but tell me, tell me what we need to know about this story.

• 45:29Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, um, plastic, we love it.

• 45:31Lester Nare?

  Yes, we do love it.

• 45:32Krishna Choudhary?

  We do love it. As humans, we are cheap and we want things. We want things to be easy. We want them to be cheap and so we love plastic. Okay, plastic is really bad for the environment. It can, it it sticks around for like millions of years or something like that, right? And we are producing a lot of it, something like 400 million tons a year. Something like like 11 million tons go into the ocean, which, you know, I am, I am, I'm very, I really don't like that. Okay, but I'm also a lazy selfish American. And I like my things, right?

• 46:17Krishna Choudhary?

  I like, I like my mustard and ketchup bottles in plastic and my milk jug that comes in a gallon in plastic, you know? I don't want to go with a glass bottle and refill the same milk jug. It's just so convenient.

• 46:30Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 46:30Krishna Choudhary?

  To just, to just go to the store and grab a new thing and then throw away the old one and just not worry about what the old one is doing, right? So as as Americans, we are very selfish and we're very lazy. And, um, you know, it's not just something that Americans are, it's something that the whole world is. This is a world problem and. You know, everyone who says that like we need to start using less. It's just simply not a practical way to save the planet, okay? Like, we love our planet, but we love ourselves and our comfort way more. And that is just not gonna change, okay? Even the developing, especially the developing countries, right?

• 47:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Like China and India and the continent of Africa. That are also contributing immensely to this chaos of of plastic and consumables and all this stuff. They're looking at the developed countries being like, no, you guys did that.

• 47:26Lester Nare?

  Well, you guys just had fifty years of doing that and now we're just starting.

• 47:30Krishna Choudhary?

  And now it's like, oh, I'm sorry, I can't use coal. Like, you know? When that's the one resource that's super cheap to use to make electricity, which is something I need so I can like educate my kids. So, so this idea that like, you know, using humans doing less to save the planet is not gonna work. Okay? The solution that is gonna work is scientific innovation to make our current lifestyle better for the planet.

• 47:57Lester Nare?

  And more sustainable.

• 47:57Krishna Choudhary?

  More sustainable for the planet. Yeah, I know this is a hot take.

• 48:00Lester Nare?

  I know.

• 48:01Krishna Choudhary?

  About like how we need to deal with human directed climate change because it is real, right? Humans are changing the planet.

• 48:07Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 48:08Krishna Choudhary?

  But my my fundamental take is like, we're not gonna stop.

• 48:11Lester Nare?

  I I mean, at at the end of the day, the the idea that, you know, people using paper straws instead of plastic. But then all every corporation and manufacturing and entity and these large. People who are actually producing the largest volume of the problem. Uh, is really like where the problem is.

• 48:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:30Lester Nare?

  You know, in terms of having the most impact for our efforts.

• 48:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, yes, it's we need, we need, we need a bulk strategy.

• 48:36Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 48:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Because even if you made every human, like individual human like feel bad. Corporations who are apparently also people, they're not gonna feel bad because the mob is crazy, right?

• 48:49Lester Nare?

  No, exactly.

• 48:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And so, and so, no, they're gonna be like, oh, yeah, just dump it right there, it's fine, you know? So, so we need a strategy from fundamental science perspective that helps us recycle efficiently and in a better. Way, okay, plastic recycling is a key problem that we as humans, I think we need to solve.

• 49:06Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 49:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and this is a really big step in that direction.

• 49:09Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 49:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so let's talk about plastic. Plastic is really bad. I just told you like something like eleven million tons going to the ocean every year. It's gonna just stay there for thousands of years. It's not gonna decompose. Plastic is essentially chemically, it's just um polymer chains of hydrocarbons. So um carbon, hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, carbon, hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen. Just chains of carbon and hydrogen, okay? Like that's all plastic is. It comes from from like petroleum.

• 49:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 49:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is also hydrocarbons.

• 49:39Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 49:39Krishna Choudhary?

  So another like, you know, it just, it's another use of petroleum in that case. Um, and in order to recycle it, there's basically like a few ways that we do it right now, and they're all pretty bad. Okay, one of them is the thermo mechanical method, which is what you gotta do is you gotta basically materially degrade this thing. Um, you've gotta like heat it up, you've gotta make it into like lower worse plastic and then use that plastic somehow for some other purpose, okay? It's a pretty bad way of doing things. Um, but we do it nine percent, nine percent of the plastic globally is done this way. Um, it's really expensive. Nobody really wants to do it because you gotta sort all these plastics.

• 50:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:23Krishna Choudhary?

  For for all their different like types of plastic, right?

• 50:26Lester Nare?

  Because they break down to different fundamental components and you don't necessarily want those mixed.

• 50:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and then if they mix, then they make even worse.

• 50:33Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Like stuff and then and then they just go to the landfill. It's like, okay, what did you even do? You just, yeah. Um, so so that's that's one way. The other way is pyrolysis, which is just just heat it up. Heat it up, degrade this thing, and then you you get some kind of low value type of um GHG, which is like some kind of like low value fuel, right? The problem with that is, okay, fine, like, how much energy did you use to like heat this thing up? Like to get a low value fuel. You're you're getting, it's like, it's like nuclear fusion, right? It's like, why, why are you even doing that? You're putting more energy in to actually get like some kind of fuel out.

• 51:11Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 51:12Krishna Choudhary?

  On top of that, if oil prices are super cheap, then like, why would you even do this?

• 51:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 51:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 51:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 51:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, so.

• 51:19Krishna Choudhary?

  The, and whenever you're doing anything like this, there's also all of these contaminations that happen, right? Because plastic has like food products, sometimes they have PVC, which is polyvinyl chloride. And if that gets in here, and as it's degrading, so this polyvinyl chloride, it's found in like pipes, flooring, and if that gets in there, even in a batch, a small thing in a huge batch, that whole batch is done because you get this hydrochloric acid, um, all the equipment is done, and at the end of the day, you're dumping it into the landfill. Anyway. Okay, so, so it's like, it's really like, kind of, kind of bad. We have a lot of bad options. We have a really a lot of bad options. Like, the only good option is to take the

• 52:02Krishna Choudhary?

  plastic, usually it's in this thing called polyolefin, um, which is a CH2, carbon two hydrogens, attached to the, to a C and a H, and then some other thing, an R group, a residual group. Um, those are the things that are basically two thirds of the global plastic chain. This is like, you know, your milk cartons and, um, plastic spoons and all, like, plastic wrap, and all this other kind of stuff. Um, single use, really short lifespan. Right. Just gets used, gets thrown. Yep. Okay? That's what we're trying to, at the end, ultimately, we're trying to, we're trying to recycle this stuff. We're trying to repeal and replace it. Yeah, yes, exactly. And the, what, what I just told you, right? The, the options

• 52:47Krishna Choudhary?

  are pretty bad. Right. Okay? There's one option that has a little bit of hope. Okay? And that is this thing called, um, hydrogenolysis. Okay. Hydrogenolysis, okay? It's basically breaking it down in the presence of hydrogen. And what it does is, the hydrogen sort of comes in, along with some kind of catalyst, like, that helps this reaction. And that hydrogen comes in, and with the carbons and the hydrogens there, it creates hydrocarbons. Okay. That can then be used for either fuel, or like waxes, or like these higher sort of, um, lubricants, things like that, that you can recycle them to, right?

• 53:27Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so that's one way of doing things. That's like kind of a promising way of like recycling this plastic. And make, putting it back into simple hydrocarbons, right? And, and that's something that's like much less worse for the environment, right? Like animals aren't choking on it and shit like that. So, so that's what we want to do. Now, usually this hydrogenolysis takes catalysts. And those catalysts have, um, are require like higher order elements, rare earth elements like platinum, palladium. We don't got, we don't got, like the amount of plastic we got compared to the amount of platinum and palladium. Like this is the stuff that Iron Man used to make his like new element. Okay. So that's how rare it was that Marvel was using it in a movie.

• 54:11Krishna Choudhary?

  So, uh, we, we can't be dependent on platinum and palladium to, to like recycle the tons and tons of plastic, right? How many mines we gonna get? So, so the idea is you want, you want to have a catalyst that is not that rare. That's what this team is doing.

• 54:29Lester Nare?

  This, okay.

• 54:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Fundamentally, okay? Fundamentally, they're, they, they found a way to catalyze hydrogenolysis. Using a catalyst made out of nickel, which is very abundant. Furthermore, this catalysis only targets a specific type of this polyolefin. Okay. Because as I said, this is the CH2, CH2, right? And then there's R group. That R group can be sometimes H, which makes it polyethylene. Or it can be sometimes polypropylene, which is the, the, the, the other group is another complex, complex thing, like another CH2. So you get these like, you get, um, with polyethylene, you just get this chain of carbons with hydrogens attached.

• 55:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Like a caterpillar.

• 55:12Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 55:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Or you get for, um, polypropylene, you get, um, the chain of carbons with carbon sticking out. Okay? And so what you want to do is you don't want to recycle these together. And usually that requires separation. And that's really, really. Just a pain.

• 55:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Alright, nobody wants to do this.

• 55:33Lester Nare?

  Both time and cost prohibitive.

• 55:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Both time and cost prohibitive. And more importantly, it's cost prohibitive, right? And the consumer's not gonna do it, cuz again, we're lazy.

• 55:41Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:41Krishna Choudhary?

  We don't wanna do that.

• 55:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, I love the earth, but I don't want to check under the bottle what kind of plastic it is before I throw it in the garbage.

• 55:49Lester Nare?

  Because this goes back to the sorting issue, which is like, ideally, this is why you wanna have the humans who have the products, put it into different buckets, so that when it gets to the facility to recycle, it is pre-sorted.

• 56:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but yeah, and it's like, even even if you got the humans to do it, though, do you really trust that human?

• 56:08Lester Nare?

  That's the point.

• 56:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, I don't know if this human can read.

• 56:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 56:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So it's like, it's like, I don't know, right?

• 56:14Lester Nare?

  Quality control's hard.

• 56:15Krishna Choudhary?

  So you would rather have a way of doing it within the chemical reaction, right? That targets one type of plastic and not the other, right? And that's what this thing is doing. So they developed a catalyst out of nickel. It's got aluminum, nickel, the usual carbon and all this other kinda stuff. And one of the cool things they did was, this catalyst, you can imagine it as, again, a Lego block, okay? But this Lego block has only a single piece of, like, active site, okay?

• 56:46Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 56:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Whenever you have a catalyst, you have something called an active site, which is the part that does the locking and the

• 56:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 56:53Krishna Choudhary?

  moving around of the atoms, okay? This thing has a single active site, okay? And what that gives it is the benefit of being extremely specific to what shape it wants to

• 57:05Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Krishna Choudhary?

  actually

• 57:06Lester Nare?

  Attached to.

• 57:07Krishna Choudhary?

  attached to, right? A lot of catalysts have different shapes, which means that when you try to put it into something like polypropylene or polyethylene, they're gonna attack every single carbon-carbon bond, okay? And then you're gonna get a bunch of methane, which is fine, I guess, but like, it's not like, great.

• 57:21Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:22Krishna Choudhary?

  Methane is like, super cheap, it's like, this low. What you'd like to do is with polypropylene, I told you, right, there's these carbon, and then there's these carbons that are sticking out? You wanna just take out the carbon that's sticking out, okay? And then, and then, and then, this thing just becomes like, polyethylene.

• 57:35Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you can like, then do those two together in some other sort of.

• 57:39Lester Nare?

  Well, the industrial.

• 57:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Process, right? Um, so you want to take those out and then and then only target specific bonds.

• 57:46Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 57:46Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's what this new catalyst does.

• 57:48Lester Nare?

  Very, very clever.

• 57:49Krishna Choudhary?

  So it's doing the sorting within the chemistry.

• 57:51Lester Nare?

  Within, within the, at the facility where they're going to be doing the recycling.

• 57:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 57:55Lester Nare?

  Regardless of the input, the chemical process itself is doing the job of separation.

• 58:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 58:04Lester Nare?

  That we otherwise are in some cases, in some places, depending on humans, to put things in different buckets.

• 58:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, exactly. And, and the, the results are, they speak for themselves. So they had, um, they, they tested this catalyst with isotactic propo- polypropylene, which is this thing that I was telling you about with the branches coming out. And ninety nine point five percent conversion into lighter, lighter compounds in twenty minutes. And then when they did the same thing, they did the same thing with, um, the, uh, polyethylene.

• 58:34Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Nothing happened.

• 58:36Lester Nare?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 58:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:37Krishna Choudhary?

  It's like, and it took four hours.

• 58:39Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:40Krishna Choudhary?

  And then they finally got a little bit of signal.

• 58:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Krishna Choudhary?

  So what you can do is you can have a mixture of this stuff. You can apply this catalyst.

• 58:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:45Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you can just let it run.

• 58:48Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 58:48Krishna Choudhary?

  And then within, like, within a short amount of time, all the polypropylene will be decomposed, but the polyethylene will be in this native state. And then you can, like, go forward.

• 58:56Lester Nare?

  And now you have these two buckets of, of distilled compounds.

• 59:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Lester Nare?

  That you then have functional use for in any number of other downstream or upstream, depending on what way you want to look at it, industrial process.

• 59:07Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right, yeah. And then the, the best part was that, you know, that PVC that I was talking about?

• 59:11Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:11Krishna Choudhary?

  The, um, polyvinyl chloride.

• 59:13Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is a contaminant for all of these plastics.

• 59:16Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:16Krishna Choudhary?

  That basically makes plastic unrecyclable.

• 59:19Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 59:19Krishna Choudhary?

  In these previous strategies. Somehow, and I don't think they fully understand how this works.

• 59:25Lester Nare?

  We love that.

• 59:25Krishna Choudhary?

  This made it better.

• 59:27Lester Nare?

  Really?

• 59:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the, the, the introduction of PVC made the catalysis reaction better.

• 59:32Lester Nare?

  No.

• 59:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so then they were like, oh, that's that's free. That's great.

• 59:38Lester Nare?

  Just like free upside. It's like, oh, it's great.

• 59:40Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Lester Nare?

  Which then removes the cross contamination issue.

• 59:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Lester Nare?

  Which goes back to this no sort like.

• 59:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so then so then we don't have to sort it. We don't even have to worry about the PVC. The PVC could be in there.

• 59:50Lester Nare?

  And it's just gonna make it better.

• 59:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's just like, fine. So I think this is a really cool um use of like fundamental chemistry to try to like tackle a very, very real problem.

• 1:00:01Lester Nare?

  This is really good. That that's actually, and that's a great explanation. Um, because I actually had no context for how the recycling process really worked.

• 1:00:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I didn't either until I started researching this.

• 1:00:11Lester Nare?

  And this is like a clear, like, it's a clear problem set. We don't have good solutions currently implemented at scale.

• 1:00:17Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:00:17Lester Nare?

  Um, and we.

• 1:00:19Krishna Choudhary?

  But it's something that I really do care about.

• 1:00:20Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:00:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Just, you know.

• 1:00:22Lester Nare?

  Right, but do it at the factory.

• 1:00:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm I'm lazy. I'm sorry.

• 1:00:27Lester Nare?

  As as are the major, like, again, it's also should not be incumbent on, we all, there's the commons as a concept. We all should invest in in the commons and trying to upkeep. But at the end of the day, the biggest kind of issue is the industrial grade, industrial level.

• 1:00:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. It's hard for me to, yeah.

• 1:00:44Lester Nare?

  Like, the impact is.

• 1:00:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Do anything.

• 1:00:46Lester Nare?

  There. And we have to address it at that level. And one of the ways you can do so is like when they get bring the stuff to facility, it can actually repurpose it in a way that creates functional, valuable uh output that is not the current state of affairs where it's either the output sucks and we wasted a bunch of energy, time and money.

• 1:01:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it just it just went to the landfill.

• 1:01:06Lester Nare?

  Went to landfill anyway. Or the output is not really is not as like, doesn't have real value in terms of the concept of recycling it back into society.

• 1:01:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah. And and your point about the commons, I think, is important, right? There is a commons that I am heavily invested in.

• 1:01:21Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:01:22Krishna Choudhary?

  I pay taxes.

• 1:01:23Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:01:23Krishna Choudhary?

  And I want those commons, my tax dollars, to go into this kind of research.

• 1:01:27Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Because that is the future of saving this planet.

• 1:01:30Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:01:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Saving the planet is not making humans somehow be less comfortable.

• 1:01:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, that's not gonna work.

• 1:01:37Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:38Krishna Choudhary?

  I know humans. I know several humans. They're all like me. Okay? You know, and what we want is solutions that actually make sense.

• 1:01:48Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, that don't compromise my state of life.

• 1:01:50Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:01:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And like, yeah, we, we need, we need fundamental science research to do this.

• 1:01:56Lester Nare?

  I think we've had enough innovation on our mobile phones.

• 1:01:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I'm totally fine.

• 1:02:00Lester Nare?

  Yeah, with the current state of my iPhone.

• 1:02:02Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, dude.

• 1:02:03Lester Nare?

  Uh, maybe let's like not try to iterate on an incremental version for next year and spend that brain power, time and energy on things that will create a better commons environment, which then drives the consumerism that capitalism loves. Great, great story.

• 1:02:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I like the story.

• 1:02:19Lester Nare?

  Um, speaking of the private sector and, uh, multi-trillion dollar companies, we're going to end today with a story about analog AI coming out of Microsoft. We almost cannot avoid AI every week.

• 1:02:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Nope.

• 1:02:32Lester Nare?

  Headline on this story, Microsoft's Analog Optical Computer Cracks Two Practical Problems and Shows AI Promise. This was published on Microsoft News's blog, but they did put out a research paper associated with this in nature.

• 1:02:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Lester Nare?

  So it's not just.

• 1:02:47Krishna Choudhary?

  This is a big deal.

• 1:02:48Lester Nare?

  It's not just marketing. Uh, they did sort of go through the peer review. And so I don't really actually even understand what they mean when they say analog optical computer.

• 1:02:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Lester Nare?

  And there's several problems to crack, but they cracked two of them. So let me know, what, what are we talking about here?

• 1:03:02Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right. Um, it's an analog computer instead of a digital one, which is very cool to me. Um, digital, you got your zeros and ones, right? Um, and we talked a lot about digital computers in the past and some of their problems, right?

• 1:03:17Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, the fact that Moore's law is slowing down because we're sort of reaching this limit of how small we can go.

• 1:03:24Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Before the capacitors and the transistors that we're using start leaking off so much power that we just have to constantly keep powering it in order for the data to actually stay alive. We also talked about the, um, von Neumann gap, right? The von Neumann bottleneck.

• 1:03:41Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is the separation between your processor and the memory there, which is your RAM, and your hard disk or your actual memory.

• 1:03:52Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And the where you're storing stuff is different from where you are doing the computation.

• 1:03:59Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:03:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? This is a thing that plagues CPUs, but it also plagues GPUs. Okay? And, um, as AI becomes increasingly big.

• 1:04:11Krishna Choudhary?

  There's gonna come a point where we're gonna really have to start having the conversation of, again, you know, what we were talking about last, in the last story. Is this worth the environmental impact?

• 1:04:22Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:04:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? And of course, the corporations are gonna be like, yes. And they're gonna make bigger and bigger data centers. For example, the energy usage has tripled from 2014 to 2023. And it's projected to be 20% of global electricity by 2030. Okay, the data centers and the AI, all that AI computations for you making a cat that wears a hat or whatever. Like, that's 20% of global electricity. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be using AI, like, because I use AI. AI is great.

• 1:04:56Krishna Choudhary?

  But I think all of these companies, including Microsoft, are starting to realize that it's no longer gonna become tenable, right?

• 1:05:04Lester Nare?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:05:05Krishna Choudhary?

  There needs to be an alternative way to do the computation that they are seeking.

• 1:05:11Lester Nare?

  I'll just make a brief note here, which is that every single one of the, either frontier model builders or sort of hyperscaler cloud computing platforms, Google Cloud Product, AWS.

• 1:05:28Lester Nare?

  They're all spending a ton of their capital on directly investing into power infrastructure.

• 1:05:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, because they know that that's gonna be a bottleneck.

• 1:05:40Lester Nare?

  Every single hyperscaler or frontier model company is investing, if not hundreds of millions, billions of dollars into partnerships with these mini nuclear reactor companies. They're literally returning on the big power facility that's just north of us in California. The nuclear one, Facebook has a little alcove there. So they all know the story.

• 1:06:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Lester Nare?

  Like, it's not.

• 1:06:04Krishna Choudhary?

  They see it. They see the writing on the wall.

• 1:06:05Lester Nare?

  It's not controversial for any of them.

• 1:06:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and and on top of that, there's a bunch of these companies that are investing in alternative computing technology, right? Like we were talking about Spintronics the other day. Yes. Um, this is an analog computer. It's doing sort of the same type of deal. Not the same physics, but the same sense of let's go away from transistors. Yes. And um, physical stuff, and let's try to find a different, completely different way to store data and manipulate data. Okay. Okay, um, if we go back to the Von Neumann bottleneck, right, from John Von Neumann. He um, championed this idea of that early computer where there was going to be a separation between the processor. Yes. And memory, right? That's become sort of the bedrock for modern computation.

• 1:06:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. But it's really become a huge handicap for AI. Okay, because when we want to do AI, there's two core operations that we have to do, okay? One is matrix multiplication, right? Where we take the weights of your neural network and you multiply it by some vector and then you multiply by another matrix and another matrix. And all of these are weights that you've stored. Um, and the other thing that you have to do is you have to do a non-linearity. Which is this idea that if if my input is above a certain threshold, only then do I let it through. If it's below a certain threshold, then it's a zero, okay? That's one of the types of non-linearity that you have to do.

• 1:07:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Those are the two fundamental things that you have to do as someone who wants to implement a neural network, okay? Then there's other things like momentum and annealing and all this other stuff that you have to do. But fundamentally, if you really want to do neural network stuff, it's matrix multiplication and implementing a non-linearity. Okay, so now in order to do these things in a traditional computer, what you have to do is you have to store your weights in a certain spot. Mm hmm. Okay, and then you got to load them up in your processor. Right. And then you gotta, you gotta multiply the weights to this thing. And then you gotta load up new weights and then you gotta multiply to this thing. And you know, now we've gotten clever where maybe we can load up all of the weights to this thing and, you know, do a forward pass and things like that.

• 1:08:18Krishna Choudhary?

  But fundamentally, a lot of the source of latency that comes from like you waiting while you you've typed something into ChatGPT and it's like thinking. Yeah. Is doing this, right? It's like loading up and then there's like copper wires and whatever server that is like transferring data.

• 1:08:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And the latency is a huge part of it too, right? So there's a lot of power that's being dissipated for no reason. And then there's also a lot of latency. This thing is solving both of those.

• 1:08:45Lester Nare?

  That's very interesting.

• 1:08:46Krishna Choudhary?

  This thing is solving both of those by creating a computer out of light, lenses and filters.

• 1:08:54Lester Nare?

  Very interesting.

• 1:08:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, it's very cool to me. Because it's like fundamental physics in used in a whole new way.

• 1:09:00Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:09:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So to to understand this, let's let's look at the two things that we need to do in order to do a neural network implementation. Okay, the first one I talked about was matrix multiplication. That's this idea of you take a vector of numbers, which is let's say a row of numbers. And then you apply a matrix to it. So this this number gets applied, gets multiplied to all of these. This number gets multiplied to all of these. And then you sum it up and you get a new vector, kind of like things like that, right? Um, what these guys figured is

• 1:09:33Krishna Choudhary?

  we could do that with like light and filters.

• 1:09:37Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:09:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So the vector is an array of numbers, right? We could represent that with the brightness of LEDs.

• 1:09:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Do you see where I'm going now with the whole thing?

• 1:09:50Lester Nare?

  I already see where you're going.

• 1:09:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, I could represent that with the brightness of LEDs. Okay. Then I've got a matrix that I need to multiply it with, right? I could represent that with a bunch of filters.

• 1:10:01Lester Nare?

  No, I just.

• 1:10:03Krishna Choudhary?

  That each light goes through.

• 1:10:04Lester Nare?

  I'm so mad.

• 1:10:05Krishna Choudhary?

  It's so nice.

• 1:10:06Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Krishna Choudhary?

  It's so nice, right? And then I've got an output vector, right? The output vector could be a CCD that senses how much light went through.

• 1:10:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? So completely analog.

• 1:10:22Lester Nare?

  Right, right.

• 1:10:23Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, there's no zeros and ones. It's like something it's there's a continuous value here of the brightness. There's a continuous value of the filters. And then there's a CCD that captures whatever comes out, right? And then now, okay, the second thing I have to do is implement a nonlinearity, right? In order to implement the nonlinearity, they've got like a bunch of filters that they can use, like the bipolar difference filter. So they've got so now they've got these CCDs, right? That converts it into current. The current now goes through analog. It's still analog. A lot of these implementations, what they've done is they've done a hybrid approach of digital and analog. This is all analog. Pure analog, it's wonderful. You got these, you got the you got the light that's coming out like this. It is now gonna go through this sort of filter block, okay?

• 1:11:06Krishna Choudhary?

  It's gonna go through a bipolar differential pair, which is going to do the non-linearity. So if the light, if the current is below a certain amount, it's gonna give a zero. But if it's above a certain amount, then it's gonna let through a bunch of current. Um, you also wanna do this thing called annealing, which is this idea of like, taking the, the, the current representation and sort of changing it a tiny bit so that you don't get stuck in like a state of the neural network, where you're not like moving and you're getting the wrong answer, so to speak. So, so you can do that using these things called variable gain amplifiers, which are VGAs, used a lot, all over tech. Um, you can also do this thing called momentum, which is something that you use in neural networks if you're like, converging on an answer. Yes.

• 1:11:51Krishna Choudhary?

  You wanna keep going in that direction. That's something that you can implement with VGAs, which is again, something that everybody uses. Right. And then you can feed it back into the thing and have this loop. Yes. Okay? Now, this is a fundamentally different architecture, not just for the physics of it, right? Because we're not using GPUs, we're using light and matrices in the form of filters and things like that. But also, you can imagine it as like, there's a single sort of neural network that we're like passing over and over again, right? So, what these things are implementing is something called deep equilibrium models. There are different type of neural network, where you've got a neural network and instead of a forward pass that gives you a right answer. Yeah. What these models do is they call the model over and over again,

• 1:12:37Krishna Choudhary?

  until the model doesn't change its output. Mm-hmm. Okay? Mm-hmm. So what it's doing is, it's in the space, and it's going down, kind of like a gradient descent algorithm, where it's going down this sort of energy landscape, Yes. until it gets to this minima, where as it moves, it's not really moving anywhere, right? Before it was moving here, then it's moving here, it's trying to find the answer. But when it, once it gets to the answer, the more you apply it, all the way to infinity, it's not really gonna move. Right. Right? That's what this thing is doing. The problem with deep equilibrium models on GPUs was, it was like extremely, I don't know, like how many times am I gonna? Right. But this, the architect, the, the physics itself is geared towards these deep equilibrium models. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And so you've got this, you've got this entire, like,

• 1:13:23Krishna Choudhary?

  system. That is a digital analog. I mean, sorry, it's an analog computer.

• 1:13:30Lester Nare?

  You're right.

• 1:13:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:13:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:13:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Which is, which is I think very cool.

• 1:13:33Lester Nare?

  And, and because part of the, this goes back to like the energy and cost issue with, you know, GPUs are both expensive on their face to produce at the scale we need to, to do these like chain of thought reasoning level models, these frontier models. Um, and then the power usage to, not only to acquire the physical hardware.

• 1:13:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Lester Nare?

  Cost prohibitive, but then to run them.

• 1:13:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Lester Nare?

  Uh, to be able to get to that level of, is also cost prohibitive.

• 1:13:57Krishna Choudhary?

  That's right.

• 1:13:58Lester Nare?

  And this sort of solves both issues.

• 1:14:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Lester Nare?

  Both on, again, uh, counting for the fact that this is obviously not an industrial manufacturing scale.

• 1:14:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but

• 1:14:08Krishna Choudhary?

  this is not industrial manufacturing, but they're not using like crazy tech.

• 1:14:12Lester Nare?

  That, that's, that's.

• 1:14:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, they're using LEDs. They're using the, the matrix that they use for the multiplication. That's just like the filter in your projector.

• 1:14:20Lester Nare?

  That's very interesting.

• 1:14:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, and then the CCD is like the, the, the sensor in your phone.

• 1:14:25Lester Nare?

  So this.

• 1:14:25Krishna Choudhary?

  And then you got VGAs, which everybody knows how to, like, everybody has. We know how to make it super cheap at this point. You don't need like an insane fab to do any of this stuff.

• 1:14:34Lester Nare?

  Which this becomes very interesting because of the, I mean, there's so many implications here, not only, uh, from a, just from the fundamental perspective, but if you extrapolate both like geopolitically and economically. You know, one of the issues with the, so whole AI debate is Nvidia has now become a trillion dollar company in record speed. Because they're the only ones that can build these chips, these GPUs, sorry, these GPUs.

• 1:14:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:58Lester Nare?

  Uh, that can really run the frontier models effectively.

• 1:15:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Lester Nare?

  Um, and to be able to get to Nvidia's scale because of the complexity of the manufacturing process and the amount of proprietary knowledge necessary, there's like no, IBM has tried, they can't.

• 1:15:11Krishna Choudhary?

  No.

• 1:15:12Lester Nare?

  Like, and there's no, there's no one else, right?

• 1:15:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, because they've done, they've done 20 years of work to get to where they are.

• 1:15:16Lester Nare?

  Right, right. And, and this, what's interesting is this sort of upsets the apple cart in the sense of if there is a low cost, high efficacy.

• 1:15:26Lester Nare?

  You know, hardware substrate that you can utilize to do the same type of work that you're seeing out of a

• 1:15:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Faster.

• 1:15:33Lester Nare?

  Faster, cheaper.

• 1:15:34Krishna Choudhary?

  With less power.

• 1:15:35Lester Nare?

  Less power.

• 1:15:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, one caveat is this thing is only gonna work for inference.

• 1:15:40Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:40Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not for training.

• 1:15:41Lester Nare?

  Which is, which is.

• 1:15:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Because in training, you'd have to change the weights and things like that, right? So in order to train, what they did was they created a digital twin.

• 1:15:48Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:15:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Which they then trained.

• 1:15:50Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:15:50Krishna Choudhary?

  And the digital twin matched the hardware's.

• 1:15:53Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:15:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Performance. So then when the digital twin said, okay, you wanna set your filters this way, and you wanna set your nonlinearities this way, they could go in, implement that with the hardware, and then they could like, do the inference time stuff.

• 1:16:05Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:16:05Krishna Choudhary?

  On this. But, to be fair, like, all of the, like, the reason why all of these companies are building all of these data centers is not to train.

• 1:16:15Lester Nare?

  It's for inference.

• 1:16:16Krishna Choudhary?

  It's for inference, right? The training happens in like, San Francisco.

• 1:16:19Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Krishna Choudhary?

  In their facility, or, you know, whatever, in like, some like, tiny, like, the hundreds of millions of users of ChatGPT and Gemini are just using it for inference.

• 1:16:29Lester Nare?

  It's all inference. I was gonna say, like, where the usage is going, as more.

• 1:16:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Like, the power is going for inference.

• 1:16:33Lester Nare?

  Correct.

• 1:16:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Lester Nare?

  As more users start using, you know, LLMs and other versions of AI in everyday life, and we get to the order of billions, billions, billions of users doing so, they, what they're using is the inference.

• 1:16:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Lester Nare?

  And so this can be a whole, you can still have your proprietary training stacks with all these fancy GPUs and all that stuff. But now you don't need to have that high-cost infrastructure in order to serve the end user

• 1:16:59Krishna Choudhary?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:59Lester Nare?

  of the models.

• 1:17:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and if you can miniaturize this thing, then you're good to go.

• 1:17:04Lester Nare?

  Well, you could, I mean, again, we're extrapolating here, but you could imagine I have my own little analog.

• 1:17:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's just, and, and the great thing is, this uses LEDs, it's not using lasers, right? So I don't need coherent light, this is just like, normal LEDs, bro.

• 1:17:17Lester Nare?

  That's so incre- that's so clever.

• 1:17:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Lester Nare?

  That's so, I love.

• 1:17:20Krishna Choudhary?

  I love that, yeah, I think, I think they did a really good job, I quite like it.

• 1:17:24Lester Nare?

  Creativity is alive and well.

• 1:17:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Lester Nare?

  Fundamental science research. One of the ways you get breakthroughs is by being creative, not dogmatic.

• 1:17:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Lester Nare?

  Um, that is really, really.

• 1:17:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Lester Nare?

  I, coming from the tech space, this obviously, like, ideally, my light bulbs are going off.

• 1:17:39Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, dude, and it's like, it's like, you know, twenty nanoseconds per search. Per um iteration of this thing, the the the idea is called a fixed point search because you're searching for a fixed point to get to the answer, right? What I was telling you earlier about.

• 1:17:53Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:17:54Krishna Choudhary?

  So, yeah, twenty nanoseconds per fixed point search and this thing is projected to be a hundred times more efficient than leading GPUs, going at four point five tera operations per second per watt, right? That's a hundred times more efficient than GPUs.

• 1:18:10Lester Nare?

  That's actually crazy.

• 1:18:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Lester Nare?

  No, that's actually crazy.

• 1:18:12Krishna Choudhary?

  It's a lot. Um, like in terms of per watt, like the, yeah.

• 1:18:17Lester Nare?

  Having having a hundred X decrease in watt, watt, like watt, like usage.

• 1:18:21Krishna Choudhary?

  That's, that's, that's.

• 1:18:22Lester Nare?

  I mean, like.

• 1:18:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:26Lester Nare?

  That's so sick, actually.

• 1:18:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, and and they proved it, um, you know, with their validation, obviously, you make something like this, okay, what do you, how are you validating that something like this works? So they got their digital digital twin to train on the MNIST dataset, which is the classic handwritten date, handwritten digits dataset to identify like two, three, four.

• 1:18:45Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:18:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Um, did really well on that, trained it on the MNIST fashion dataset, did really well on that. The other thing they did was, um, they can really do, so this, this was AI inference. The other thing they can really do is um combinatorial optimization, which is this, like this class of NP hard problems, like the traveling salesman problem and things like that, that they can efficiently, they're not solving P equals NP, but they can efficiently solve NP hard problems using this technique. And one of the things that they were saying was, um, as I was reading was like, you know, in MRI scans, the way the MRI scans work is like the patient has to go in and be there for like half hour to an hour.

• 1:19:24Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 1:19:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Because what you gotta do is you gotta take a bunch of different little puzzle pieces of, effectively what you're doing is you're, you're taking like scans in um frequency space because of the way that the physics of the MRI works, you're, you're trying to look at the procession of hydrogen nuclei in the patient as you like disturb it and then there's a magnetic field, so then the, the proton is going to relax and as it relaxes, it releases light and you. We're trying to gather this light and that'll tell you some, it'll give you like a frequency map of the patient and then from that frequency map you go into like a positional map, right? So in order to do that, it takes a lot of scans

• 1:20:07Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:20:07Krishna Choudhary?

  in this Fourier space to then reconstruct the actual thing.

• 1:20:10Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:20:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? But there's a way to do it with something called sensing, right? Like, and what you can do is you can very selectively probe this frequency space. Okay? And do it in a very smart way with this compressed sensing. It's like a zip file

• 1:20:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Krishna Choudhary?

  for sensing.

• 1:20:32Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Krishna Choudhary?

  And you can then, you can then reconstruct the image.

• 1:20:37Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:20:38Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So they could do that. That's a, that's an optimization problem.

• 1:20:42Lester Nare?

  Yeah, I get what you're saying.

• 1:20:42Krishna Choudhary?

  At the end of the day, right?

• 1:20:43Lester Nare?

  I get what you're saying.

• 1:20:44Krishna Choudhary?

  And the compressed sensing is an optimization problem that they could then figure out. And they projected that, you know, instead of a 30 minute to an hour long MRI, it'll take a patient five minutes. And then this thing can just like reconstruct it pretty quickly.

• 1:20:57Lester Nare?

  What, what's an important point here is that the, the analog infrastructure, the analog computer infrastructure that they've built has this application as sort of a replacement for GPUs at inference time in the AI use case. Because it's, it's good at one aspect, but it's also good at this combinatorial piece, which gives it implications in the medical field, for example, in decreasing MRI times.

• 1:21:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Lester Nare?

  Because it's fundamentally so much faster and better at this very specific function that is a part of the MRI process that currently is using digital computers. And if you just swap out the hardware infrastructure and a variety of other details to get it integrated into the MRI workflow, you're now just able to actually just do more with less.

• 1:21:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's like super huge, right?

• 1:21:47Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Like now I can do like 12 patients instead of one.

• 1:21:51Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:21:51Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:21:52Lester Nare?

  That's so great. I love.

• 1:21:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so innovation is innovation is happening.

• 1:21:58Lester Nare?

  For everyone who said innovation is dead, uh, watch from first principles because we will dispel that rumor quickly. We touched on four very, very fascinating stories this week. We started with three I Atlas.

• 1:22:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:22:11Lester Nare?

  It's a new imagery. Uh, it's not aliens. It's still very interesting. Uh, we may not live to a hundred. Uh, so Brian Johnson, watch out, but longevity studies are showing that there is a real plateau being reached in this sort of increase in life expectancy. There's huge implications for policy and economics related to how we shift the zeitgeist opinion about that to be connected to the fundamental frontier research in that area. We don't have to sort plastic anymore.

• 1:22:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yep.

• 1:22:41Lester Nare?

  We talked about this new nickel catalyst that enables this. That was a fascinating one.

• 1:22:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Lester Nare?

  And last but not least, analog AI from Microsoft, uh, which has potential to solve for the energy issue with AI.

• 1:22:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Lester Nare?

  Also has other applications.

• 1:22:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we want to make AI better.

• 1:22:59Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:23:00Krishna Choudhary?

  It's good.

• 1:23:01Lester Nare?

  And cheaper, cheaper, faster, better for the environment.

• 1:23:04Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, who knows? Maybe it'll solve like our, the problems.

• 1:23:08Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:23:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:23:09Lester Nare?

  If it also solves the MP probably it might solve other problem types that we didn't, we didn't have the tools for before. This is what we love to do here at from first principles. Talk about this breaking science research. Break it down so you don't need a PhD to understand it. The implications here are crazy. My name is Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We will see you all next week.