The Replication of a Recipe for a Starship Grid Fin

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Dalian: This has been an absolutely wild ride. It started about, like you said, just reading a paper in my spare time the evening. And here we are a week later and it's absolutely blown up into probably the most wholesome trend on Twitter or X that we've seen in years. Dalian: Andrew is always working on sort of crazy stuff at night. I think he's shot off some tweets. He made this massive Doge Starship grid fin and was trying to convince Elon to fly that as his first payload on Starship.

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Today’s show:

Varda CEO Delian Asparouhov and R&D head Andrew McCalip join Jason to break down their recent experiment in replicating the LK-99 room-temp superconductor (4:19), the current state of material science (18;52), what the world would look like if this works (26:34), and more. Then, Krepling’s Liam Gerada joins Jason for an update on his business! (40:46)

Time stamps:

(00:00) Varda CEO Delian Asparouhov and R&D head Andrew McCalip join Jason

(1:21) The LK-99 superconductor and how Varda is involved

(4:19) Varda’s latest achievements in replicating the LK-99 superconductor

(8:05) Is this the real deal or just a strong diamagnetic effect

(11:00) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://openphone.com/twist

(12:30) Securing the material needed to run these experiments

(14:06) The increased interest in Varda and feedback from the community

(18:52) The culture shift in the tech industry

(25:06) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist

(26:34) Brute force science: How innovation emerges and receives funding

(30:17) How the venture model has continued to evolve