Deep Future

Pablos: So what happens right now in scientific research is, if you’re going to do a research study on something, like “are M&Ms is bad for you?” It’s impossible to do that study. You have to be very specific and ask a much more fine grained questions like ” how many M&Ms does it take to, Kill a mouse?” or to cause a mouse to vomit. You just have to be very specific cause that’s something testable. You could test that, you can get multiple mice, you can feed them enough M&M’s that they eventually vomit. The whole research study can be done that way.And so when you read scientific research studies, that’s typically what you’re looking at is some very narrowly defined thing that they believe is correlated to a much more significant or bigger effect, but you can’t test the whole thing. You can’t ask questions like, “does this thing cause cancer?”You can ask questions like, ” does this amount of exposure to this thing over this much time cause this specific, type of cancer in this type of rat?” Things like that. So that’s great and all because it means, we’re structuring, tests that we can actually perform, but the downside is that for most people, what they would actually like to know is ” do M&Ms cause cancer or how many of them is too much, things like that.Getting those answers is often not straightforward from scientific literature. And so the way that we. usually try to compensate for that is to do what’s called a meta analysis. And a meta analysis is where somebody will go and dig up all of the studies on a given topic, combine them and try to say, “across a hundred studies involving M&Ms and cancer, this is kind of what happened” and, to just sort of give you a general sense of whether or not, the effect you’re interested in is happening. Good examples of this are like, chiropraction is largely, debunked.A lot of people get pissed off at me talking about it because it can be a deluxe placebo, but in clinical trials, very few clinical trials are performed. It’s hard to do them. Different practitioners have, different effectivity levels anyway. And so the problem is it’s hard to run those studies, but even if you do, you can’t find any indication that chiropraction actually cures anything. So this is a case where we don’t have good research and the only way to try and get to the bottom of it is with a meta analysis where you find the studies that have been done and you sort of combine their results and try to say whether or not chiropraction works.People, there’s no point arguing with me if you’re listening and you think chiropractic is great. Go nuts. I encourage you not to do that, but, whatever, do your own thing. But the point is the only way you could get a reasonable answer is with this kind of meta analysis. Now meta analysis is very time consuming and difficult to perform and often isn’t getting done, but what it really involves is just go read a bunch of studies. Well, it turns out that’s what an LLM is really fucking good at. So you, so right now we’re in a stunted position because one of the big problems with OpenAI and ChatGPT is they’ve crippled ChatGPT. It doesn’t read scientific literature and even if it does, it’s not really allowed to comment on it.So they’ve crippled the thing to keep you from talking to it about anything that might be health related and stuff like that. What you would really want an LLM to do, and one of the things that would be really good at is doing ad hoc meta analysis. So you could just say, “Hey, I feel like I’m getting a cold, should I take zinc?”There’s people marketing zinc for that purpose. We’ve all been told to take zinc, but I don’t fucking know if that’s an old wives tale,Ash: It’s like echinacea, zinc, doesn’t matter, it’s all those things.Pablos: I don’t have time to go read every scientific research study, but I bet you collectively we have that answer, and so if I could just ask an LLM.Ash: Wasn’t wasn’t IBM’s Watson at some point pretty good? Watson Health actually had all this.Pablos: That’s probably what they were trying to do.Ash: They were doing it and they were doing pretty well. They weren’t they weren’t using a full LLM model. That’s that was the whole breakthrough.Pablos: They were kind of in the pre LLM days. It was LM. It was just LM. It wasn’t LLM.Ash: Just language models. And they were taking huge amounts of data. But what they had is they had their own normalized structures underneath. So that was the difference, right? They didn’t let the structure form itself. But what you’re saying is true.Pablos: You’re right, and we could probably build like a Watson for health in a weekend now using, Stable Diffusion or something. It would be way better. You would just basically load it up with all the research and let it go nuts and then let people ask questions like, ” Hey, should I be taking zinc?”Ash: The problem is reliability score.Pablos: Oh no, it’d be terrible, but it’s already horrific. Right now, we’re just going off superstition. I mean, literally that question of, should I take zinc? You’re gonna get as many answers as people you ask because somebody’s Chinese grandmother said You should be, taking echinacea instead.Ash: You should listen to my first class. The first part we were talking about is what is known as “triangulation of information truth.” What is provenance for data. Then you have to figure out, how do you weigh it? LLMs are fantastic, like you said, because they can take all your source inputs.So if you go back to, to signal analysis, or analytics for like intelligence again. We’ll just lean on that for a moment. Truth is great if you’re playing with mathematics. You get QED and you call it a day for the most part. But for other things, truth, zinc, for example, like your zinc example. There’s some balance between like how much did it really? Was it an emotional support protocol? Did it help you because you were convinced that, your grandmother was right or whatever’s happening to, to actual physical actions internally, right?We can be scientific about it, but it comes back to source and information. If you pick a really, really dangerous topic and we won’t go there, but let’s just pick Gaza for one second. How do you find what’s really happening? Well, you hear a lot and someone’s like, “well, I read it in the Wall Street Journal.”I read it here. I heard it there. I took Al Jazeera. I did Briebert. Whatever you picked. The question was, did you do it in all the languages? Did you listen to a local radio station? Did you find someone’s signal data from nearby? What was happening? Did the bomb go off or did this happen?If you look at information, just like you’re looking at these scientific papers, the question becomes the weighting factor. We as humans, I think one of the things we know how to maybe do, at least a good analyst should be able to do, is try to give weighting based on time and location and stuff.And I think the large language models have to start to put in context again. I think they have to add one more dimension.Pablos: For sure. And I think that you touched on the other thing, which is that right now, all this information is like floating around without, tracking provenance, and so, interestingly, like in scientific research, you at least have citations. which is a lightweight form of provenance. It’s a start, but ultimately, the way these things all need to be built, not only , the LLMs for doing meta analysis, but really every knowledge graph needs to be built off of assertions that are tracked. You keep track of provenance, okay the sky is blue, well, who said the sky is blue?Where did you get that from? And that way, whenever you’re ingesting some knowledge, it’s coming with a track record. That’s how we’re going to solve news online, eventually.Ash: Kind of like, the Google Scholar score or whatever.I go back to my partner, to Palle, right? So Palé actually has a patent. It’s probably expiring soon, so for those of you who want to do this, we should go do it. He owns webprovenance.com. And he owns the patent on how you check provenance. One of the things that came out of the BlackDuck software stuff was that at BlackDuck, we needed to know who created something. So do you remember the Sun Microsystems, IBM, lawsuit, Java? If you’re a compiler theorist, then you know that, just because West Side Story takes place in New York, You could probably say, well, doesn’t it sound exactly like, Romeo and Juliet? So maybe you change the variables, but it’s the same stuff. And the idea was that when we were looking at, open source, with open source, the interesting thing is you’re trying to figure out, where did this little rogue piece of code, this little GPL or LGPL infection come from?You need to find it. So it’s one thing to talk about the combinatorials, but the other was to find it. And then Palle was like, well, I can do something cooler., He said, if Brewster Kahle’s Way Back Machine, remember the original Alexa project? So If you could go in and take all that data, he’s like, I could pretty much tell you like who killed JFK.You can find the provenance of almost any information. He wrote this wild algorithm for it. I’d love to see some of that incorporated into the LLM stuff because that algorithm, and again, we would happily, anyone out there if you’re willing, this has been a project we’ve been looking at for the better part of 15 years.Pablos: Well Stability might pick it up. They love that kind of stuff, that would be a huge coup for them.Ash: Well, we should, we should have this conversation offline, but it’s a, it’s interesting. It’s an incredibly cool algorithm. He was a compiler theorist anyway, an algorithmist, at Thinking Machines. So, he always wondered where the info came from.And I sat there and said, hey, we should find a way. And I remember the stunt I wanted was like, to figure out if they were aliens. And he’s like, what do you mean? It’s like, well, who started that rumor? Like, where did it happen? Right? So, imagine you could take any rumor, and I can tell you how it started.Pablos: That’s so cool.Ash: Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing ever?Pablos: So important.Ash: Yeah, and we need that.Pablos: That is super important. I’ve seen somewhere, a map that somebody made of where are all the UFO sightings reported? And like 98 percent of them are in the United States. I think the rest of the world doesn’t even have UFO as like a notion. it’s not even a, thing for them.Ash: It’s cause we have no healthcare. Look, all I know is, years ago, we just didn’t have enough data. Years ago, we couldn’t. We were like, looking at the Wayback Machine, and we were like, I was like, well, who can we go to to get all the data?Can we get the entire web? Today, large language models have already stolen all the data. They already have it. So if you have enough of the data, we could definitely help you figure out the algorithm to go backwards and it’s complicated.Pablos: That’s super exciting.Ash: He actually patented it himself because he was trying to figure out if he didn’t need a patent attorney. So that was his project, can I make a patent? And his patents on provenance. So I think it’s a big coup if they could pull it off. Can you imagine you could just type in who started, where did this first start?Pablos: Dude, that’s crazy cool.Ash: It’s super cool.Pablos: I’m kind of always on a rant about this, but we need a variety of models. Like LLM is the beginning, not It’s a thing that you need, like the way we’re doing it now actually kind of sucks and requires a lot of brute force, but there’s so many things that it’s not good for.Ash: And it’s so susceptible to the thing that, what did I do in my life? Psych warfare is all about information corruption. Dude, you corrupt a large language model, that thing is convinced that the sky is red at that point.Pablos: Exactly, well, I’ve been thinking about that. Why don’t I just..Ash: Corrupt it?.We’re bad hackers.Pablos: I can fire up, 100,000, blogs written by an LLM that all just talk about my, prowess with the ladies.Ash: Exactly.Pablos: And the next thing you know, all the future LLMs will be trained on a massive amount of data that indicates that, Pablos is the man.Why wouldn’t we do that?Ash: At the end of the day, the LLMs are basically superstition. There you go. I’ve just said it.Pablos: Right. They’re superstition.There you go.Ash: LLMs are superstition.They’re based on some concept of something that it derived because it took a whole lot of information from a lot of grandmothers.Pablos: And that’s the thing, Like what’s posted on the internet is all that they know.It’s driving me crazy.Ash: Worse, it’s only the people who have given them permission, so the quality sources are going to start cutting them off. So, all they’ve got, all you’ve got are the people who are generating rumors that they’ve seen UFOs.Pablos: Well, that’s all true for the LLMs made in America.Ash: Yeah, so the American LLMs know where the UFOs are.Pablos: Japan decided that copyright doesn’t apply to training LLMs. So the most powerful LLMs, for now, are gonna be in Japan.Sign me up.Ash: Even better, that means Japanese information…Pablos: That’s probably true, learn Japanese.Ash: Which, think of it, if I wanted to build, my 100,000 LLMs generating your prowess, I’m gonna do it all in Japanese. I’ll do kanji, hiragana, and katakana. I’ll give it to them in all three formats. You could crush it.I I would love to see any of these. I think that’s, that should be our ask for everyone.Pablos: Yeah.Ash: if someone, someone wants to run with it, go build it.Pablos: Yeah, people, build this shit.Ash: Tell us. We can help you commercialize. We will find you.Recorded on January 8, 2024The post LLMs are Superstition – ØF appeared first on .

Part of what I love about getting to create a podcast like this is sharing conversations I’ve had with some of these extraordinary people that you just never hear about otherwise or never get to meet. They’re working behind the scenes, inventing new technologies that become part of our lives.And they’re out of the spotlight. I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Richard Chuang, who’s with us today, because we both served as board members at the University of Silicon Valley, where he is still a trustee. Richard is a pioneer in computer graphics. He’s been there since the beginning, since the moment we turned pixels into images on a computer screen and turned those images into animations.What has later become, everything you see coming out of Hollywood now. He’s a real pioneer in computer graphics, having built some of the animation systems at PDI, 30 years ago, that ultimately became DreamWorks Animation, where the pioneering feature films animated on computers. Ants, Shrek, those kinds of things were first done.Look, Richard, it makes me want to cry. How humble he is, the wisdom he has in this conversation. He’s sharing so much with us and, going back to, the seventies when he first learned about computers. there’s some computer history in here. His encounters with Steve Jobs over the years, in both working in animation with computers, his experience with, some of the other pioneers in the, in the industry.Richard doesn’t take credit personally for anything, but the truth is he’s behind a lot of these things that change the world, and I’m so thrilled to be able to share him with all of you guys.Recorded on June 20, 2018The post Pioneering Computer Graphics & Animation – Richard Chuang appeared first on .

Pablos: Here’s one of the things I think is a critical area of invention that remains unsolved, but it’s definitely a part of the future. So if you’re using an iPhone anywhere in the world, cultures vary. I’ve been working with this guy in Venezuela on a project. I text him on WhatsApp and then he replies with a voice memo like every time and so his, culture and worldview is just like talking to the phone and probably because I know Venezuelans do a lot more talking or something.Whereas I never use voice memo. I’m texting, but a lot of that is like, I’m in public around other people and I don’t want to disturb them and, disturbing people is considered uncool where I come from, but in Venezuela, like everybody’s chattering all the time, probably because they’re all Latinos.Talking to your computer will become more and more common. And you can see that some people are more comfortable with it than others. I see it a lot more in people from other countries than I do in Americans. Right now, talking to Siri kind of sucks, and Alexa. These things are kind of stunted because, they’re very one shot oriented. If you take your iPhone and start using the voice interface for ChatGPT, wow, it gets pretty exciting. Because now you’re having this, two way, audible conversation that builds on itself over time.And if you haven’t done that, I think everybody should try it because that will give you a sense of where these things are going. Once you get that going and realize, oh, I can just do this while I’m driving or walking, and I don’t have to be staring at my phone. It starts to get compelling.And so it’s not hard to imagine being, a few years down the road where ChatGPT is just listening all the time and piping in when it has the answers for you . So that’s just laying the groundwork, hopefully all that makes sense.But where I think this goes is that we need to solve one really big problem that remains, which is sub vocal input.Ash: Okay.Pablos: And what that means is, right now, if I’m talking, I don’t want to talk to my phone, I don’t even want to dictate text messages or do voice memo, because there’s people around listening, I don’t want them here in my business. We’re in this situation where the eavesdropping potential, even if you’re not talking about something super secret, it could be private or whatever. I don’t want to play a message from you out loud and I want other people hearing things that I haven’t screened yet, who knows what you’re talking about.So, what sub vocal input would do is give you the ability to just essentially whisper and have your phone pick it up. People around you wouldn’t hear you, wouldn’t understand you but you would still use the same machinery that you have and we all have the ability to whisper, and and quietly. If you’re trying to whisper for someone else to hear you, maybe it gets kind of loud, but if you’re just trying to whisper to yourself, it can be super quiet.We know that this should be possible, and we know that because deaf people are able to train themselves to do lip reading pretty well. So a deaf person who’s, got nothing, bothering them audibly can sometimes, apply enough focus to the task of learning how to read lips that they can do a really good job of it.So there’s enough of a signal in what your phone could see. So you know with Face ID there’s a tiny little LiDAR sensor that’s doing depth, and it can see your face. It can see the, minute details about your face. That’s why it can tell, the difference between your face and a photo of you and your twin brother or sister, whatever.So it might be possible right now. With the hardware that’s in an iPhone, even though you probably don’t have access to the right APIs for this to work, but maybe in a equivalent Android phone or something, maybe this could be prototyped. Where you could just use that machinery, train a giant, model, just a machine learning model on, lip reading.Ash: Yeah.Pablos: And so you would be able to just look at your phone and whisper, and it would transcribe.Ash: There’s a couple of things on this. Three GSM world, before GSM, 2000 or so. So we’ll go back in time. One of the big conversations that we would have was, I was a proponent saying that we just don’t have enough bandwidth and People are like, “yeah, but we’re going to have 3G & 4G & 5G & 6G.”And I said, “no, no, you’re missing the point.” The bandwidth to your device is not the issue, it’s between the device and the human. It’s your conversation. It’s, this is where we’re stuck. We’re stuck because we type, we could try Dvorak, we could try QWERTY, we can pick the keyboard, we can have sideways keyboards, we can speak to it, but I still think all of these are terrible.Whispering, could be very interesting. There was a MIT headset, Alter Ego. So Alter Ego, if you look at this thing up, it’s a mind reading, reading device. Sub vocalization signals through EEG, brain activity.He can actually make it work.Pablos: Well, I’ve played with some of these things. I have NeuroSky headset emotive, but I think what you have to do with them…Ash: This one you wear. It’s bone conducting. It’s wild. You just put it on and say,Pablos: Oh, it’s bone conducting. So it’s picking up speech, it’s not EEG.Ash: No, no, no. The bone conducting is how it tells you things back. So it even whispers it back. Like, into your head.Pablos: Oh, but you could just do that with headphones.Ash: No, that’s how it whispers back. You think it and then it tells you things. Anyway, it’s called alter ego, we’ll link to Alter Ego. To me, it goes back to what you’re saying, which is, is there a way? Otherwise, we just look like, we’re murmuring to ourselves, right?We’ll just look completely crazy. Like sometimes I get a little bit annoyed with people on conversations with AirPods. You just have no idea what’s going on, right? There’s a little hairdryer sticking out of their head, and they’re like, just walking around, and we just are fully, we’re already like, isolating ourselves and now we’re, we’re conversing. I think what you’re saying though is that the sub vocalization stuff needs to be in a way where it’s, Almost so discreet that it is a relationship between you and a listening device, right? It’s almost like the pixie on your shoulder.Pablos: Yes.Ash: It’s like the little angel devils whatever the animated version was.Pablos: Yeah, and I think there could be other technologies. I don’t know if you could fit it in something like an AirPod. Maybe like a Compton backscatter detector, one of these terahertz imagers, like the thing at the airport that you do the HOVA signal to, and then it’s you. Without a lot of radiation, you know, those things are low impact. You could do something like that to see the tongue through theside of the mouth.Ash: My belief is closer to the way that you were trying to tackle this problem, which is, hey, it listens in and jumps in. But what if I could prompt it to jump in, right? So for example, let’s assume that instead of having to build anything new, it’s now just listening to me.Constant in real time. Imagine a natural language parsing system with a, engine underneath. We used to call these things While Aware. This was actually the name of our company from years ago. And While Aware was intercepting SMS messages in real time on the SMSC. And the idea was that, it would detect what the conversation was, but because it knows who you are, it would evoke different things at different moments, right?So let’s pick, for example, Bitcoin share price, Bitcoin’s falling as a price. And that message was coming to you or that data was somehow coming to you. It might say, do you want to open up, your trading account and you can go sell it.And for me, it might, immediately tell me, do you want to book, tickets to Belize in a non extradition country, because my capital call is too high,. Whatever it is, if I have a margin call, because it knows what’s happening. It’s contextual, understanding. And I think one of the big things that we’re missing in all of these little support things that you allude to that ChatGPT brings to the table is contextual.We fail because It doesn’t understand us. Siri doesn’t know.Pablos: This is a separate conversation. Fundamentally, you are right. The whole future of AI requires that it know you, it needs to know you, it needs to know every conversation you’ve had, not only every SMS but text message and email, it needs to have 100 percent of that so it understands you. It knows what you know, it knows what you care about, it sees what you do, it sees what you say, it has to have all that and I want the AI to have all that. We need to architect for that and right now we’re not doing that because we’re building giant centralized AI’s.Ash: That’s when you’re, different technologies, whether it’s the backscatter or it’s the, lip reader or the whisper detector. All of those become a lot easier when you have context. I don’t know if you remember Google’s evolution, 2009, 2010, Google suddenly, not as creepy as Facebook, but its searches were just better, its searches were just better.Why were they better? Oh, you’re standing in New York city. So obviously maybe it’s contextual to what’s around you. Maybe the weather is cold. So Google’s original cookie, which they’re now getting rid of, was so laden with data. If you could mine that sucker, you won.It knew all of the signals. And I used to call it, signal gathering in terms of the more signal you had, the more accurate you became. And the more you look like sort of a savant. So our AI, like you said, isn’t really smart and Siri’s terrible because it doesn’t know much. It doesn’t even know intent.So as humans, why is it that we can speak with somebody with a very heavy accent sometimes?Because we know the context of what’s happening and why we got there.It’s not just lip reading. It’s because when we’re with them, we do our own interpretive dance. I think that if you tie the two together, what you just said about, you know, these other little signal things, you could pull it off.Pablos: I assume we’re gonna get the latter for free. That’s gonna happen. AIs will be stunted until they start to have access to everything and know everything about me and my context in real time. So that’s all gonna happen anyway, and there’s such momentum around that. So I think we get that for free and even if you didn’t, having a conversation with ChatGPT right now will probably convince you that it’s, like, good enough that we’re going this direction one way or another.Ash: The reason I bring all this up is, can you imagine if, instead of having to whisper, what if all I have to do is have my phone out, and I just say yes or no, or I say more? Go back to my Starship Trooper obsession of, “would you like to know more?” What’s interesting is, imagine in your scenario, you’re having this sub vocal conversation, but instead of you having to have any conversation, ChatGPT has heard you and it’s like, ” oh, alter ego,Pablos: No, no, I get it. One of my friends, figured out that you could get through life with only four words, fuck, man, dude, and totally. If you just have those four words, you can get through life because you can express a multitude of things with just those four words.Totally.Ash: Totally.Your response, totally. Funny enough though, right? That may solve some of your problems because you could whisper a littlePablos: Yeah, yeah.Ash: And not have to do long things.Pablos: Yeah. Right. Exactly. No, you’re totally right. And that’s what you do with your friends. And the closer you are to your friends, like if you’re just hanging out with somebody you’ve known for a long time, you can have a lot of communication with very little actual content. If I watch my daughter and her best friend hanging out, they’re incomprehensible because they have like, shortcodes for memes, everything they see or talk about or discuss is related to some other thing that I wasn’t part of and like they’re foreign objects to me. I think that is kind of what you’re describing. Like at some point,Ash: So go back to your Venezuelan, right? If you go back to that conversation and they’re sending you a voice note. Now, let’s say that voice notes processed and parsed and read by our GPT friend, and it comes back and gives you a summary, five sentence. So you don’t even have to look. It just whispers it in your head. Like he wants to know, should he edit the podcast? I don’t know, whatever it is. And you could just go back and be like, just hit the yes button, right? I mean, you could go back and say, totally. You could do one of your four words.Pablos: Yeah, totally. No, you got to try it. I tried it. You can go for days without using any other words. But yeah, I think that gets more possible. Like with a human, the more shared experience you have, the more shared context, shared vocabulary, the more concise you can be in your interactions.And so it stands to reason that an AI that knows you really well could get to the point where. All you gotta do is nod or wink and you’re done, on a lot of things cause it knows how to set you up to make a quick decision.Ash: If it can formulate the outbound response in long form, and all you have to say is totally…Pablos: Mm hmm, yep.Ash: Then you’re good, right? That’s usually the problem with these voices, with getting those voices. I’ve got those too, where people, it is the Latin America thing. They just love, like, I don’t know what’s going on. It was Brazil too, just, people just go off. And they have a recording. I’m like, you do understand, if I could listen to this, I wouldn’t be texting you. That’s like, I would pick up the phone and just phone you if I can, if I could have a dialogue, I would have one. When I saw that, I was like, well, can you just tell me like what’s in the voice recording?That’s what we’re looking for. The other thing to think of, and I thought this is where you were going before, you were talking about the sub vocal thing, It’s almost like the Babelfish thing, for all the fans of Hitchhiker’s Guide. I just had this crazy problem happen, which was, I’d ordered an Uber, and I’m sending information to the Uber driver in English, and the Uber driver is replying in Spanish, but I have a little translate button, but I don’t think they had a translate button. And at some point they just simply just said, no hable ingles. I tried to give the directions to my house, finally, I had to run into the street. I sent my daughter out into the street, like someone went out and we’re trying to tell them like, go to the yellow house.And I’m like, does anyone remember the word yellow? I realized that I was getting translate and they just didn’t speak English. I think that maybe there’s this universal input concept. If someone sends you a voice message, it not just transcribes it, but maybe it automatically just dumps it into like concise format. Or to the other person, it reads it to them. So you pick your poison of consumption, like the way you like to consume it, and you just build a proxy in the sky that just It just takes care of all this.There’s like a universal proxy, like a little babble bot that sits in the world. And I think you could get pretty far with that. And then you use that to feed ChatGPT. And then you use that to go with the totally man, dude, fuck, right? That’s your sequence to that. And then you add your sort of exotic input mechanisms for your sub vocal and everything else.So I could like, you know. Whisper.Pablos: So job one is all the people making AIs need to figure out how to make them mine so that I have my own that I can love and trust and have for life.Job two is they need to make that thing know everything about me, I’m not just a lowest common denominator, I’m me and I need, I need my AI to really know me.Job three is we’ve got to come up with some clever hardware for doing sub vocal input and it could be something that you wear like a headset that just see through the side of your face and see what’s going on in your mouth and your tongue and your embouchureAsh: Well, it could be like a body cam, just clip it on.Pablos: It could be something like that, something that looks up at you. I don’t know, it’s hard to mount something that sees the front of your face very well, a phone does, though. And even if you had to just aim the phone at your face for it to work. That would be a good start. And I think you could do that today without making any hardware.Ash: Yeah, well, you could put it into your Apple watch. Just hold it up. it’s like Dick Tracy.Pablos: There’s no camera yet, but next apple Watch will.Ash: Yeah, next Apple will have a little camera, so you just hold that up. It doesn’t even have to, you just have, you don’t even have to hold it up because if you’re using your little radar or LIDAR thing, you just have to have your hand out a little bit. Gesture control on steroids.Pablos: Did you see they put like a gesture control in the new Apple Watch, but it only knows one gesture, which is you pinch your fingers together and it can detect that. I haven’t tried it yet.Ash: The other thing I was going to say is I wanted to add what you said about your daughter’s thing is that if the AI becomes your buddy, then the total bandwidth between your AI and you will start to decrease.The requirement will decrease because you’ll just be able to speak in your own code. You’ll be able to be like, yeah, that thing that we worked on last week, dude.Pablos: Mm hmm.Ash: And then it’ll just know,Pablos: Exactly. Right.Ash: the other way that it’s going to help. So it all starts with that first step, though.It’s got to twin you a little bit. Little little scary on the privacy side.Pablos: That’s where, some of these, some of these folks working on OpenAI competitors have certainly, gotten onto that notion. Allegedly Apple is trying to figure out how to make the LLM’s local, so they run on your device and presumably that’s part of the rationale beyond just, justifying you having to buy a faster device and also, make it low latency.Recorded on January 8, 2024The post Whisp Subvocal Input – ØF appeared first on .

Pablos: There’s this idea that was just published that you could produce concrete and make it stronger by adding charred coffee grounds to the mix. And this is some research out of Australia.So concrete, if it’s not obvious, is like the most used material on the entire planet, aside from oil, which we burn. Cement, is in everything, and it’s this like staggering scale problem. Partly because of its contribution to greenhouse gases, right? So when you make cement, you’re burning some shit to make a bunch of heat to make the cement and you need that heat and there are ideas to decarbonize cement by electrifying cement plants.But then there’s this chemical process going on, which is the bulk of the carbon emissions. And there’s just no way to get rid of that. So that’s kind of the lay of the land. Interestingly, about half of all the cement in the entire world is made in China. That country is basically made of cement. This is one of the major targets for trying to do reductions of carbon emissions. And these guys figured out how to use coffee grounds. It’s not totally clear to me that they’re using, uh, used coffee grounds, I presume that’s the case, because there’s 10 billion Kilograms of used coffee waste every year that mostly ends up as biomass rotting in landfills. So this is worth solving.I thought this was kind of interesting. You can’t just take the coffee and throw it in the cement because the oils and stuff in it will seep out and actually make the cement fall apart. They invented this pyrolyzing process where you basically heat up the coffee grounds to a specific, pretty high target temperature, around 500 C, I guess.That’ll get rid of the oils presumably, and makes it into an additive you can just throw into the cement mix and it makes it 30 percent stronger. So I got two things that are kind of interesting, related to this.We Have a company our fund backed called DMAT, and these guys figured out how to make cement that’s lower carbon, but the way they do it, is they solved this 2000 year old mystery in material science, which is, how did the Romans make cement?Ash: I was going to bring that up.Pablos: Yeah. Cause they made the, the Pantheon to like two millennia ago and it’s still there. It’s unreinforced concrete in a seismic zone. And then they, somehow got busy, watching Netflix or something and got bored and forgot all about how to make cement. And then nobody’s been able to figure it out ever since.Ash: They were just looking at the colosseum. They were like, Hey, I’d rather look at the lion. Maximus Aurelius or whomever. And then that’s it. They’re like, forget it.Pablos: Look at the cool lion. Oh shit. The lion ate the guy who knows how to make the cement.Ash: Literally probably what happened.Pablos: That is literally probably what happened. So anyway, I got this team at MIT that figured it out.Ash: It was self healing, right?Pablos: We figured that out a little while ago. It’s self healing because what happens with cement is it fractures, water seeps into the cracks and then destroys the cement from the inside out. And that’s what’s happening to our bridges and everything else we made. And so to make it stronger and handle that, we load it up with steel rebar.So it’s steel reinforced, and then it still only lasts 50 years. The Roman cements, apparently lasting at least 2000 years. And what happens is it just gets stronger because when it cracks, water seeps into the cracks and it activates these lime deposits that are trapped in there. And so then the lime fills the crack and seals it up and heals the cement.Presumably the colosseum is just getting stronger over time. Now we know how to do that. So we can make cement that lasts virtually forever, use less of it, use less steel, and the kicker is, it’s about 20 percent less CO2, out of the box without even trying. That’s pretty dramatic considering the, the scale of the problem and the lack of other practical ways of decarbonizing. So these might be compatible, right? You might be able to also use this coffee additive.What I like about this is that cement is such a big thing. Most people just take it for granted. They don’t know how. Intensive this is from a carbon emissions standpoint and the scale of it. this. You know like we can actually make things way, way better. with some of these ideas.Ash: And the way they were doing it, the Romans had volcanic rocks, so they had this ability to automatically have the little bubbles in it. But I think what’s interesting is that, some people are like, oh, can we put plastic? Isn’t that where we just got in trouble with microplastics?Let’s solve one problem and then really screw up something else. The idea I was thinking is maybe this is where the coffee ground becomes like the aeration, right? Cause the whole structure was that as the bubbles popped, that was how the lime.Seeped back in, right? The water combined.Pablos: I think that was one of the theories that was debunked. I’m not positive, but I think that was the, like the prevailing idea, or it was kind of a half baked idea of like how this happened. And I think that is not what actually, it’s nothing to do with the volcanic rock after all.Ash: It wasn’t the volcanic, right? They had a couple , right? One was like some guy was trying to do bacteria. five, six years ago. That was the other crazy one, which was like, we will just have a living organism inside. The other question is, during production, can you trap, can you use it to just trap the stuff? Like, if you look at, was it clean, right? If you look at those guys,Pablos: So that’s what DMAT solved. And they do it with this process called hot mixing. Which apparently was considered dumb for, I don’t know, centuries or something. And so nobody tried it. Apparently using hot mixing they can get the lime deposits optimally trapped in the cement. I don’t know all the details.Ash: I like it.Pablos: Yeah, so we’ll get them on the podcast sometime and have them explain all the all the ins and outs. But yeah, pretty cool stuff.Ash: The challenge with almost all of these carbon reduction technologies is scale. Oh, hey, we’re going to take carbon out of the sky. And it’s like, okay, what did, what was the impact?Well, it’s like half a car.Pablos: Right because the sky is like the most entropic source of carbon there is. Literally, the number 400 parts per million. Well, let’s see. If you had a haystack, and you had, 400 needles and, a million pieces of straw, good luck finding a needle.It’s literally, the hardest possible place to get carbon. If you want to, sequester carbon, the thing to do would be to just, leave the fucking coal in the ground. Where it’s, the highest density of carbon you could find. So yeah, it’s, it’s kind of idiotic.Most of these things kind of solve themselves if you solve energy. If you had like a shit ton of free energy, then yeah, you could go do carbon capture from the atmosphere, but, otherwise it’s pretty painful.Ash: The problem is, yeah, like you said, unless you can turn it back into like a diamond or something, like you said, put it back into coal.These magma guys are, are cranking. Maybe we can use those guys. You’ve heard of the magma guys?Pablos: What’s the magma guys?Ash: These guys were doing the near magma experiment.They’re like, we’re just going to go 6, 000 feet, like just a little over a mile. What’s a mile? 5,280 feet? So you just go a little bit into the mantle. Just tap into that hyper geothermal.Pablos: I don’t know what you’re talking about.Ash: Oh, so there’s a project, just came out a couple of days ago that they revealed that they have a timeline on 2025. They’re going to do two. One is an open magma bubble, it’s in Iceland and then they’re going to do another one on top of it. They’re going to build like a little station and they’re going to go straight down. This is poking the bear, I would say.Pablos: So they’re basically trying to do a man made volcano.Ash: Yes, yes, that’s the, that’s the way to think of it.Pablos: Iceland doesn’t have enough volcanoes.Ash: There’s not enough problems where you could just suddenly drill a hole and burst the pimple of God, right? I don’tPablos: People are worried about AI, and here we are trying to make a cousin for Eyjafjallajökull.Ash: I like it because someone’s like, “there’s infinite heat.” And I’m like, “yeah, but it’s kind of down there for a reason.” Didn’t work out too well for a lot of people, right?Pablos: I don’t understand, I guess if you succeeded at drilling that hole, then I think you would have basically the same thing as the makings of a volcano.Ash: Yeah, but they’re trying to contain it, right? They somehow feel like, like they could drill in a place…Pablos: You’re going to have to cycle it because if it cools, even if the magma comes up and cools, it’s just going to plug your hole.Ash: So the point is that they have to get a turbine to magma, magma rotating. It’s wild. It’s going to be interesting. just liked the idea that, that someone’s literally poking the bear.Pablos: Oh, they definitely should try.Ash: Cause you know, we talk about fusion being risky, but this one I just feel has a lot more problems.Pablos: Yeah, I think they’re just gonna, the magma is just gonna plug the hole.Ash: No, they’ve got, they’ve got, some ideas. Yeah, well, it is pressure. It’s under pressure. That’s why I keep calling it a pimple.Pablos: Yeah, that’s why volcanoes get made, right?Ash: That’s why they gotta go to Iceland. But, the interesting thing is, if you could technically, if you could maintain pressurization all the way up to the top, right, then it can stay magmatic and you could technically build some sort of, high velocity magma drive.That’s, what they’re thinking of. And that will just keep cycling. Cooling, but just spinning this turbine.Pablos: What do you do with the magma that comes up hot?Ash: It becomes like a, a river.Pablos: You run the turbine, but then where does it go?You gonna pump it back down?Ash: Yeah, it’s as if you were in a magma flow, right? So magma continues to move.It continues, it has a lot of movement, which people don’t realize. Look, the minute I heard drill 6,000 feet into a thin crust lava magma I sort of went, Hmm, this cannot end well.That’s, that’s the way I looked at it. But who knows?Pablos: But it’s just Iceland, so you know, there’s only like 130,000 people there. They’re tough though. If anybody can handle it…Ash: Don’t you remember? Didn’t, they stop all transatlantic flights? You remember right? There’s like a little Ash: cloud and, so just Iceland, but it’s, it’s literally on the jet stream. We Have a few airplanes crossing right over Iceland.No more going to Europe or vice versa.Pablos: Yeah, well, we overdid it anyway.Europe is basically just like a suburb of the U.S. now.Ash: And Brexit. So, you know,Pablos: There’s a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to decarbonize cement and it stalls out in part because there’s like four or five thousand cement plants around the world, and they all cost $100 million to build in the first place. A lot of the ideas for decarbonizing cement require building a new plant.And even if you could build one, you’re not going to build 4,000 of them. They’re Just non starters. And that’s part of why I like DMAT is that they can integrate in any cement plant with basically zero capex. You can just go in and upgrade, turn some knobs, and make a new formula. So, that’s super cool, and hopefully this coffee based additive would have that property as well.Ash: I think what’s interesting is just the coffee part of all this conversation.Pablos: If I go back to that article, it says that there’s, 10 billion kilograms, which is 22 billion pounds of coffee waste a year. I presume this is post consumer grounds.Ash: This is probably commercial coffee grounds that they can track using, like, Starbucks. It doesn’t include what we take home.Pablos: So it’s at least something like three pounds of coffee grounds per human, for every man, woman, and child on Earth. I don’t even drink coffee. So somebody else is doing double.The other one that we, got excited about and backed is this, startup called Marvel Labs. What’s exciting there is they figured out how to use the used coffee grounds as an input material for 3D printers.That sounds like kind of a cute thing, but the truth is it’s staggering implications. And it’s because 3D printers, they’re called rapid prototypers because we used them in labs and they were very expensive and impractical for a long time. And then in 2007, one of my buddies helped start MakerBot, and I was an advisor for MakerBot, which was the first consumer 3D printer. And so we thought we were gonna eventually build farms of these things like AWS, you’d just have a data center full of MakerBots and you’d wire them up to the “buy now” button, and whenever you clicked “buy now,” a MakerBot would print your stuff and then print a box around it and then print a FedEx label on it. It would show up in the mail. Obviously that didn’t happen, and here we are 15 years later, and you don’t buy anything on Amazon that’s 3D printed. There’s two big reasons. One is they’re one pixel printers, so they’re super slow, and that makes it expensive. And then the other part of it is that the input materials are expensive, so you’ve got these high quality filaments, plastic filaments and things that are expensive. At the end of the day, you’re competing with injection molding, which is like the cheapest way of making anything on Earth. And so, it hasn’t worked out.There’s a couple of exceptions. So for example, with metals, 3d printing of metals has worked out pretty well for two reasons. One, they’re higher value parts. So you’re printing, you know, jet parts and rockets and stuff. But also the technique in the printers is it’s a powder bed, so you have this bin of powder, you run over it with a binder, like glue, from an inkjet head or a laser or something to sinter it together, and then, you pick up your part and shake it off, and you’ve got this part that was printed in a bed of dust.It’s actually a very elegant way of making a 3D printer, and it’s faster, because they’re more like layer at a time instead of pixel at a time. Anyway, so what Marvel Labs did is they adapted that style of printer, which is fast, but the input material is these used coffee grounds and what the effect of that is, is now they can print stuff out of coffee.They’re making all kinds of stuff. Sinks and light fixtures and bicycles and things. And the parts come out of the machine. They’re made of coffee and then they just powder coat them with paint or metalize them so they look like metal and you can’t even tell that it’s made of coffee. And so this whole thing works awesome, but the main reason that it’s important , and the reason that we invested, is that it flips the economics.So now, these parts that Marvel Labs is making, they’ve reshored manufacturing, they manufacture stuff in the U. S., they do it fully automated. And the parts are cheaper than doing it in Asia. That’s what’s exciting to me. They’re also printing with seaweed. They’re printing with sawdust.All the technologies they invented to make it work are about, printing with biomass in general. They’re kind of the kingpin. Now we can get this whole vision together of producing things on demand in 3D printers in the U. S.Ash: It’s interesting because several things, right? One is, like you said, it’s not just, the on demand. All of our strategic risk starts to change, right? Think of what happens when, we get to a point where we’re having another pandemic or, I don’t know, they go after Taiwan.Supply chain changes if you’re suddenly local, right? As long as we can get enough coffee into the system, we have enough of our own source material.Pablos: Ha, Ha, ha, ha. As a matter of national security, Americans are being asked to drinkmore coffee.Ash: It’s a national security imperative that you get a frappuccino.Pablos: Well, I found out China just surpassed the U. S. as having the most Starbucks locations.Ash: China did.Frightening. I mean, Japan, Starbucks, whole different story. I was just looking at the botanicalStarbucks in Japan, Starbucks is its own, own different conversation. But I was going to say that when you think about all of this, the implications for logistics, and one thing I wasn’t sure on, on the way that they produced, what was their binding material?Because I know they’re, one of the things they were talking about was biodegradability.Pablos: Marvel Labs has invented a variety of different binders. One of them is entirely sugar based. They use it with seaweed and they can make these biodegradable parts. Which is really cool, and then they have some top secret binders they invented that are super cool and they’re not ready to announce them yet, but it’s awesome.Ash: I saw some of the pieces.Pablos: Yeah. Oh, that’s right.Ash: I got to actually play around with it. I, I think what’s amazing to me is that the idea that you can cut production time. I don’t know if it was an experiment or if they still do it, but remember there was Amazon Now. Where like they had little trucks going around and, and they had like USB cables or like whatever you needed, like that minute.Pablos: circulating your neighborhood With, that was loaded with the things that they predicted, were going to be bought.Ash: Yeah, 100%. That’s what it was, right? They predicted that, everyone in Palo Alto needs like an extra USB cable. And they had one and you could get it like one hour delivery.Pablos: But that truck could just have a 3D printer in the back.Ash: That’s exactly it. Right? Like imagine, how big are these things? How big are the printers?Pablos: The printers are, I’d say like 80 percent of the printer is the print bed by volume. So, if you have a printer the size of a refrigerator, 20 percent of it is gantry and other crap. And that’s pretty typical of 3D printers, I guess you could say.And at least in a powder bed style printer. And the rest of the volume is printable. So, these printers are actually quite large. And one of the nice things about a powder bed printer is that you could just print a whole bunch of parts at once. You just fill up the bed with parts because they’re just floating in powder because the powder is like the supportmaterial as well. It makes it easy to do big batches of stuff. If you’re printing coffee mugs, you can print it and you got a fridge size printer. You can print, a couple hundred mugs or whatever all at the same time. And then, they just come out of there.I’d say 3D printing’s future, over the next 10 years or so will be really focused on figuring out how to make multi material printers. There’s a little bit of work on that now, especially trying to be able to do conductive materials. It’d be great to be able to print something like a game controller or a pair of headphones or something, have some of the wires printed in it.Ash: Maybe you have the recycled aluminum just like get blasted and powderized.I know of a magma plant coming up that might be able to…Pablos: Can we make a magma, printer?Ash: You take the aluminum, you feed it into the magma god and it comes out powderized.Pablos: Well, most aluminum comes from Iceland anyway. Aluminum is essentially made of electricity and they have access to cheap, cleanelectricity,Ash: That’s the, the, secret, right? So we have infinite power and then they’re just producing the conductive dust. One of the things I was thinking is like, how do you market this, right? Because we have to get a behavioral change on consumption.It’s so easy to go with fast fAsh:ion, fast goods. We’re addicted, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Wish?Pablos: Oh, uh, I know what it is, but I’ve seen Temu. I signed up for Temu. I ordered some shit before I found out it was obviously Chinese spyware app. And I um, I, bought some shit Temu cause it was so cheap. They’re like paying you to take this stuff. And then it was like worse than infomercial products. Like I got these things and they’re the cheapest possible things. And they had used like trick photography. I bought this bottle of, a cleaning product, I have it right here. I’m looking at it. It’s this bottle called Foam Cleaner. I’m like, oh cool, I’ll use that to clean the shower. I don’t know what, kind of bug eye lens they must’ve used to photograph this thing. But when it showed up, the bottle itself is literally a 60 milliliter bottle, which is, that’s like the size of, it’s like a large bottle of nail polish,Ash: It’s like, It’s like, not even a perfume bottle.Pablos: And then it’s got the full size spray head that you’d have on a bottle of Windex or something on it. So this whole thing, it looks like a joke. Nobody would ever do this. I’ve never seen a bottle this small with this big, like the spray head by volume is bigger than the bottle.Ash: So basically you’ve got a bobblehead cleaner.That’s what you’re saying. Bobblehead but foam cleaner. That’s it. That’s it. We can market it.Pablos: Yeah. I mean, I’m afraid to spray it because you know, like if I pull that trigger more than three times, the bottle will be empty.Ash: I’m sure it’s not a neurotoxin or anything.Pablos: Okay. But anyway, the point being. Yeah, it’s Temu and Wish and all this bullshit. I don’t know about consumer behavior change. You would know more than me. What are the odds that we’re ever gonna be in a world where people buy less shit?Ash: It’s not that we buy less. I’m trying to figure out if we can shift them, right? Think about it. At one point, we were all obsessed around Gore Tex, it was like the magic, right?We had just left our class on osmosis and we were like, wow, it’s like osmosis in a fabric, we were excited.Pablos: Maybe explain how Gore Tex works.Ash: Gore Tex’s whole idea was about breathability, where the pores on the fabric were supposed to for air to go out, but water not to come in.Pablos: Which works because…Ash: It’s surface tension allows the droplets to hold more together, so they’re bigger than the water vapor molecules going out, right? So, so the molecular sizes are different. So you can create this sort of barrier. Now there’s 50 versions of this to Sunday. But, Gore Tex was, was something which became a brand name, right?I don’t know if it was before Intel Inside, but it was kind of the same concept, right?Saw a little label on Gore Tex.Pablos: It’s like the Dolby of outerwear.Ash: It is. It was the Dolby of Outerwear.So I think somehow we’ve got to build that kind of reputational or brand concept, For example, if it’s the seaweed and sugar and everything nice, right?Pablos: Okay. I see. Full circle brand where it’s like “buy as much of this shit as you want. Whenever you’re done we’re just gonna turn it into the next shit you’re gonna buy.”Ash: it’s not just recyclable…Pablos: It’s like infinitely recyclable.Recycling is a is a joke.Ash: And the amount of energy and stuff that it takes is is sort of crazy, on that as well, right? So that’s that’s one of the, the sort of big, big problems that that happens with it. And I think one of the challenges is that we’ve got to figure out a way.That, something like what we’re talking about in terms of, this new product, this new mechanism, this new process can be Gore Tex’d. Or Dolby’d, and a little bit more than like this is recyclable. I think we’re kind of over it, right? Like we’ve seen the little symbol, we don’t even know what’s going on anymore. I know that in most countries they have like, at least like five bins. I think most Americans can’t figure out like. What’s up? There’s a blue box.Pablos: You could imagine a version of this where, ultimately everything is just made of, some atoms, right? They have to come from somewhere. And then the energy it costs to, move them around and stick them together. So. You know, if you sort of just take that approach, you could say, okay, this stuff is made of this much joules and, this many atoms, like you could basically measure everything that way. Then you could say like, all right, well, the total cost of ownership in a given product could be added up that way. The cost of like mining all the shit, the cost of transporting around the world, the cost of, burning stuff to make it, whatever it takes. If you added that up for any object, it would probably be staggering.In the long run, you would, you, what you would like to do is track things that way and then be able to say, okay, this is kind of a full circle product, like an apple is probably like the closest you get maybe to a product that is low impact, it grows, we there, there’s some energy cost in transporting it from a farm to your mouth, and then you eat it, you throw out a quarter of it as biomass.Ash: When you say an Apple, not your iPhone.Pablos: Oh yeah, I’m talking about like an actual physical apple. The kind you can eat. Yeah. Not an phone. Granny Smith, not a Macintosh.Ash: But maybe that’s the score, right?Pablos: I think your Intel inside becomes…Ash: is it net negative? Is it net positive?Pablos: It’s net negative or it’s like close to the threshold of about an apple instead of being, at the threshold of like about a Tesla.Ash: That may be the interesting way to do it? So maybe a dynamic symbol is the way to think of it, right? So instead of the old Intel Inside or Dolby Atmos or whatever’s going on, or Gore Tex, maybe it’s about the level. Is there a number? Is there a score?Lasered in or 3D printed into the object itself or, or anything that you look at, it just tells you that this has a small number or a small something that people can understand that’s better or higher or whatever.Pablos: Energy star.Ash: I look at something like calories. Like years and years ago, we all started getting obsessed and that definitely the generation that grew up with cereal boxes, who had nothing better to read. And we didn’t have a iPhone to scroll. We read cereal boxes. We knew more about niacin and potassium in your cornflakes than any human should ever know.Pablos: It’s true. I read a lot of cereal boxes.Ash: That’s what you’d read. You read, you’d read the cereal box. When they changed the USDA standard for what you can see inside, the bigger format I remember that was like a big change on the packaging design. That was something where we could see the calories and then we realized, per standard serving size or whatever it was. And I think that at some point, the same thing has to happen, right? Each object that we consume or buy, can have that. There’s actually a company. That we’re looking at, called Love, like seriously called love.com. Uh, uh, I won’t go into much more about that, but they’re actually trying to change this, like specifically change this idea. They’re trying to build an Amazon. First of all, they have love.com. I sort of tossed out the idea that it’s powered by love.And that way, it can have a score, each thing you’re buying. They curate what’s allowed to be sold on there. So it’s like an Amazon, but like, we’re going to get rid ofPablos: So all you need is love. Love is all you need?Ash: It’s true. That’s their eventual goal is to go head to head with Amazon. A billionaire multi time, entrepreneur who’s kicking this off. What’s interesting, though, is I think people will start to recognize this.Pablos: Yeah, you could do some big branding campaign around, certified green or whatever, but it seems so like all these things are so gameable. I mean like calories, even like, I understand this as a kid, but now that I know what a calorie is like…Ash: It’s totally gameable.Pablos: Oh my god, that’s a totally fake thing that we made up that’s, like, barely a measure of anything.Ash: That’s why I picked it. I was going to say that with good numbers come good evil, right? Are you drinking a 12 ounce can of Coke? Was it like eight ounces? What did they do? It’s interesting how it became a complete nonsense number? It mattered. We learned later that maybe the mix matters, and it wasn’t about the sodium. And there’s a lot of little bits that didn’t matter. The question becomes, can you build something genuinely?There’s another company, we invested in, Dollar Donation Club.And what’s interesting about them is, when Seth, who’s the founder, said, “Hey, I’m going to see if we could create the world’s first super philanthropist.” The idea that if we all gave a dollar a month, technically it’s billions of dollars. You can make a lot of changes.He said,” where am I going to give the money? I don’t want to be another money place. I want to be something where I can see the impact.” So he built a giant impact map of things he wanted to do. And he said, “okay, I want to know exactly how many kilos of microplastic are removed for my donation.”Like, I don’t care that I donate $1, $2. I was like, I’m willing to go and take out a kilo. Well, it turned out he can only get to like, I forget what the number is like 11 or 20 charities. It took that long and that his professional teams, like when they vet out what the charity really does.Pablos: Yeah.Ash: Almost no one qualified. So I think this is the unfortunate thing that’s going to happen, right? So if our coffee friends bring it full circle, if Marvel can really like just crush it. Like they can demonstrate there’s an actual true cost reduction I’m talking about from Guangzhou to, Columbus. By the time it gets there, like what actually happened and then the return leg, right? Like what happens on the back if, if that’s actually a real score. That we can defend. Maybe that’s what Marvel has to do.Pablos: The way it should be done probably is kind of like, consumer reports. There ought to be, like, life cycle metrics made for, the product coming outta Marvel Labs versus its competitor that came from Guangzhou. Here’s your Samsung versus iPhone versus, Nokia or whatever and somebody does the research and figures out; this is the mining footprint; this is the shipping cost. This is how much, energy was burned. The factory is running off of a coal plant versus a nuclear reactor or whatever.Ash: Like Energy Star, but like it actually makes sense as opposed to Energy Star.Pablos: Yeah, and that could be given a score in joules that just ranks these things against each other.Ash: But we’re talking about three ideas here, right? So that one idea is to get somebody to come out there and say, look, fundamentally, product life cycle measurement is something someone should go build, like someone should, whether it’s independent of Marvel or not, somebody should do it. And then different manufacturers or, or whether it’s a 3D printer of type company or someone else should go in and say, look, let’s show you why we are the lowest score, the highest score, whatever the, whichever one’s considered the better thing.And then we have to create education and marketing on that, to say, Hey, if you’re not doing this, you, you are literally creating damage.Pablos: There must be initiatives like this that we don’t know about. An interesting thing to consider is an iPhone is made of whatever, 2000 components. Some of them are like screws that Apple sourced and didn’t manufacture. Where was the metal for the screws mined? Where’s the factory for the screws? How far are the screws traveling to get to the iPhone factory? All that kind of stuff. And so you would, eventually if this were fully played out, when you design an iPhone and CAD, it would just tell you, where your screws are coming from.We already have the environmental impact score for those screws. Pick the ones that have the lower score.Ash: So this is like an SAP thing. So go back to, Fast moving consumer goods. So in the FMCG world, one of the things that’s really interesting is something called, smart label and smart label is interesting because it said, Hey, like ingredients don’t cut it.I want to know like really what’s going on, it goes really deep, you can dive into the label, but where did you source it? Like, is it really honey from here or what was going on? I think Nestle, I think some of the biggest players all support it.Procter and Gamble, all these guys are on smart, smart label. Now that’s interesting because you’re almost already there, for those guys, you’re pretty close, but that’s for food.Hopefully that’s mostly biodegradable. Otherwise we have other problems in life.Pablos: Yeah, that’s interesting. Maybe that could be extended so that all the, the ingredients of my, headphones…Ash: Exactly. Could you extend that construct? I actually think back to another company, from years ago, it is one of my patents, from a while back.it was a company called, Black Duck Software. You were talking about, as you’re sitting there with your CAD, I was thinking of, open source. Remember it was like, “”are you using something that’s gonna infect the rest of your project?” When you’re coding in Eclipse or something and you’re like, oh, let me just grab this little…Pablos: You accidentally scoop up some GPL library…Ash: Yeah, it’s an LGPL or something. It happened to Fidelity. Their entire mortgage calculator, their entire mortgage algorithm had to be open sourced because they used a website plug in. So, they eventually invested in the company. Obviously, they invested in us.But what was good is that, when you, were able to sit down and look at the project, it would tell you immediately, like, if you put this in there, you will like, have to open source your print driver.Pablos: All that should just be in CAD. A lot of CAD software has a plug in to tell you how much it’s going to cost to machine that part that you made based on the design. And it could easily tell you how much material it’s going to take and how much material cost there’s going to be.But you could extend on that and say, you chose these screws. Here’s how much they’re going to cost. Here’s what the lead times are. All that’s in SAP already. And then it tells you, this is the environmental footprint of the screws you chose.Ash: And now you can tie that into some exchanges or B2B sourcing companies and just say, okay, give me a scenario. I want to automatically reduce my carbon or my, my total footprint. Where else could I source, right? So maybe instead of titanium screws, I have to manufacture for this new titanium iPhone from like some Russian mine where the titanium lives.Pablos: be seven Web3 companies trying to do this already.Ash: I think what they miss. And this is something that I think is an interesting part of the journey, right? That you and I also take is it sometimes great technology and great back end stuff doesn’t hit the front.The only reason calories don’t matter today because we woke up and realized that somebody paid off the cardiologists to get us to eat margarine and told us that sugar was, okay and fat was terrible.That was programming, right? That was maybe we need some good programming. I mean, we got programmed the wrong way. Maybe we need to program people. To see the right thing. And I don’t know that we could be seen as altruistic or that we’re necessarily not, not commercially motivated.I think that there’s some way that today because of information and speed of information, I think we can create some level of transparency, like you said. And then we can turn around and say, back in the day, I couldn’t tell you where my, millet was coming from for the food.Today we can, Smart Label will tell you literally where that food comes from.I think we could do something fun, fun with that. Someone should go do that.Pablos: Yeah. Someone should go do that, which is, one of the main points of doing this podcast is that hopefully we’ll come up with ideas that somebody else should go do.Recorded on January 8, 2024The post Coffee ＆ Cement – ØF appeared first on .

George Dyson, a science historian and author, shares insights from a life spent at the intersection of technology and history. He emphasizes the plight of historians in a digital age where records fade away, advocating for preserving tangible history. George reflects on his unique upbringing alongside his father, physicist Freeman Dyson, and discusses the democratization of technology. He also critiques current energy practices, contrasts SpaceX's efficiency with traditional operations, and explores innovative uses of wind power in shipping.

Here’s the dumbest thing in the world. You pull up to an intersection, the light is red, there’s no one else in sight and you have to sit there and wait for it to turn green.Traffic lights are the dumbest thing in the world. And this is insufferable because right now, if you, if you’re in a Tesla, the Tesla knows, Oh, no one’s coming from any other direction. It would totally be safe to go, but you can’t because the light is red. I think what somebody needs to do is rip the guts out of a Tesla, mount them in a traffic light and let the traffic light decide when it should be green or red.How hard is this? This is easy to do. it’s going to take years to upgrade traffic lights, but that’s at least one startup. Somebody should be able to do that. We have all the tech, it’s not that hard. We can use vision or radars or whatever.Ash: You’re not gonna believe me. So, funny enough, uh, Columbus, Ohio. Project, Pre- Razorfish, Traffic Lights.Pablos: Wait, that’s a real, that’s a real project?Ash: It’s a real thing! It’s a realPablos: Wait, so somebody did this in Columbus?Ash: No, us!Pablos: Oh, you did this?Ash: is what we were doing!Pablos: Wait,Ash: You couldn’t have possibly known that!Pablos: No, I didn’t. No, seriously, you, you, you worked on a project like this. I didn’t know.Ash: I mean, yeah, so, yeah, so what was interesting is that project was, so I keep hired to figure out traffic light optimization and it’s, you know, it’s really, really fucking complicated. Like there’s a lot of math to, to make sure that, you know, you know, like that.To get people going in one direction and all that stuff and, that problem was being solved. And one of them was, do you start going flashy? Back then they didn’t have the little Tesla thing. Right.Pablos: What year was this?Ash: Do you start flashing? It’s gotta be like 1995, 1996.How do you, how do you optimize the sequence of lights so that, the traffic keeps flowing?What do you do with intercepts? And then Palle, this is even, this is even better. So Palle Peterson, like my partner, Palle’s dad was a crazy, mad genius inventor, he was in the Western part of, of Denmark. He wasn’t even in like regular Denmark. There’s like an Island that they kept him on.He had convinced them that when ambulances go, that they could start to change the lights faster, like emergency services. Of course he had the hack, but so you would just click the lights to green.Pablos: Cause he had one of those transmitters that the ambulances have?Ash: First he invented it.Pablos: Yeah, I had, the MERT. Oh, that thing. I bought one of those and put it in my car, where I was in Seattle at the time, it only worked on the emergency corridors, only on certain roads where they had, where the ambulances knew, and I didn’t know were set up for that.It’s like an infrared transmitter you put in your car and it sends infrared signal to like a TV remote to the, traffic light and they change. I could smoke it around town on certain streets. So you’re saying this guy invented the thing?Ash: Yeah, he invented, whatever the original one. I remember Palle telling me stories like, “dad had designed this thing” and then he convince them that they should all use it and then of course, like, ” I have back door.”So Columbus, the biggest problem they had was, they just had traffic lights, like each section was on its own. It didn’t live in like a, a grid or it didn’t have any understanding. So the ripple effects were just fucking out of control.For example, you could have a place where you’re sitting there with a red light and then there’s no one around you.. then you could have another place where, because it was doing its own thing, you could just be in stop and go, it would just create its own eddies of, of hell.Pablos: Yeah, it feels like that still exists.Ash: It does because what the problem is, is that no one is running enough, you know, computational fluid dynamics, I mean, that’s the problem.Pablos: You’d do a simulation now.Ash: You would, and that’s, and, and, and the horsepower gets better now, right? We have more flops to like mess around with this stuff. But the problem is that we, we still haven’t figured out how to do your thing, which is now what happens when you build the emergency corridor.What happens if you’re like, all right, so the Tesla says no one’s coming from any side, but. You go through. Are you like a leaky pipe? Go back to like traffic theory, and pipe theory. One of the things that you have is that when you got a pipe, everyone thinks that, let’s, let’s call it. , the 405, let’s call the pipe, 405. What’s the best way to set up the 405, in terms of traffic, is it better to have six lanes, or is it better to have two sets of three lanes and a shoulder or two shoulders and it turns out, that the eddies are the problem.So,, we get these lame attempts of traffic light, traffic flow regulator, right? We have to go into the. Highway. So I was just thinking that when you, when you started talking about traffic lights, I was thinking problem is in theory, it sounds amazing, but the problem is when you’re inside a mesh.Pablos: So you need active feedback loops into whatever the thing is that’s running the simulations, right?Because you need to say, “okay, this guy wants to change the light to green because there’s no traffic around. We can give him 30 seconds to do that and then go back without messing up the synchronization.”Or, all this could get a lot more sophisticated.Ash: No, exactly. But I think that’s the key. Right. So I think it’s more like, can you get a brain that’s dynamic, and right now the brain is not.Pablos: I presume there’s not much of a brain and it’s not a very advanced area,Ash: It’s a non dynamic brain.Pablos: One cloud SaaS company could be making the brain for traffic and sell it to every city. Another company could be making the, Tesla traffic light that just knows how to see if there’s any cars around.Ash: That’s security problem,Pablos: Why is that? Oh, if it’s centralized, you mean?Ash: There’s a quote from a person that let’s just say I met. An agency called RAW. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_and_Analysis_Wing) RAW is fantastic. That said, yeah, what happens when 2 minutes before an invasion, all lights go red? An invasion or attack or whatever, all lights go red.Pablos: I don’t know, This is one of these old People have been saying, what if hackers shut down the traffic lights for, decades, and the only time it ever happened meaningfully was in the fucking movies. So, I, I don’t buy it. If all the lights go red, then people just start going the way they do in Southeast asia.Ash: Then, and suddenly we’re like in Beirut.Pablos: I kind of think that’s how they should do it anyway. I was driving in Riyadh a couple of weeks ago, in Riyadh, the lines are painted, but they’re irrelevant. Yeah. It’s a free for all. And what I realized is that it’s actually kind of better because, in the U. S. everybody’s been coddled. They got lanes for this and that, they got the turbo or not turbo lane, I wish. They have a handicap lane and HOV lane and, bus lane, all these different lanes. And then, you got to be a lawyer to read the parking signs. So everyone’s being coddled all the time.You could probably drive with your eyes closed in a lot of American cities because, everybody’s following the rules. But if someone goes out of bounds, then they’re going to cause a real problem. If you’re in Riyadh, everybody’s driving at maximum speed all the time.There are no lanes. People are swerving all the time. You got to be on the ball. You couldn’t hit somebody if you were trying. If you literally tried to hit somebody with your car, they would evade you because they’re all doing evasive driving all the time.Ash: It’s, it’s all, it’s all offensive driving.Pablos: It’s all offensive.I’d like to, I’d like to see the numbers. I don’t know if we have good data on safety.It’sAsh: interesting. So we were in Vietnam, and you go to Vietnam and it’s a sea of random mopeds. Sometimes, you have the one person in the moped, the best is when you have at least five, right? The whole family. On the moped, you have mother, father, two kids. Then the baby kind of like strapped on like a, koala bear something. That’s, that’s when, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s getting crazy. And what they were saying, it’s like, yeah, “you’re not going to get hit. Walk across the road.” I was like, “what do you mean?”“Just walk across the road.”And it’s like, it’s like you walk across. They said “we operate in a stream.” They flow around you.Pablos: Nobody wants to hit you either.Ash: Yeah, but it is also a bit slow motion.. So there is a little bit more like speed.Pablos: A few days ago, I was in Shenzhen. They have, an absurd number of electric scooters. Because they’ve outlawed gas scooters. So everything is electric scooters. You ride them on the sidewalk. So it feels a little sketchy because there’s a lot of fast moving electric scooters and not, they’re not like little Bird scooters. They look like, Honda scooters or something. They’re big, but the whole town, it’s kind of clean and quiet in that sense.Overall they still have work to do, but the scooters are mellow. It’s all quiet. It’s, it’s busy. There’s a lot of people, but it’s not noisy because today, now I’m in Bangkok and in Bangkok it’s, they got all the gas scooters that China was getting rid of. And so they’re just going full tilt on these, gas scooters with no muffler, no, no catalytic converter, nothing. And it’s just noisy as hell. It’s crazy. And I don’t know. I kind of like it. I like the entropy.Ash: I do have to say that I, if you look at it, Vietnam felt the safest. Specifically Ho Chi Minh Saigon, it was the safest of the crazy,So that, that, that felt good. I mean, Beirut was just a whole different story.Like Beirut, it definitely, and I think it was my CTO who at the time was driving me around and I was like, yeah, I’m pretty sure Antoine, this is the oncoming traffic. He goes, “yeah, that’s why there’s no one going the same way as us.” Like, “because they’re coming at us,” it was like, his logic was flawless.Right. So at that moment,I was sort of like, it’s true. We don’t have anyone going the same way as us. Cause we’re in the fucking oncoming traffic lane. He had made the fourth lane, which was go at, like, it worked, so I don’t know what to say.Yeah, I mean, they went, they went beyond lanes, the lanes were just like like you said, they’re, they’re paint on the road there.All right. So that was traffic lights for, for the last 30 minutes.Pablos: Obviously traffic lights aren’t going to work there. Okay. I have another idea, which is related. So, the fleet of deployed Teslas is massive, like in most U. S. cities anyway, maybe other places. And Teslas are driving around all the time. And they could probably figure out, like within some window of accuracy, where all the open parking spots are.Like they’re probably not looking for it now, but Teslas are just driving around. They see where the open parking spots are. And so if they were trying. They could just aggregate that data and tell you like, “Oh, you’re looking for a parking spot. Here’s the nearest one because a Tesla drove by it 12 seconds ago.”You see what I mean?Ash: Interesting.Pablos: That’d be a superpower for teslas.Ash: That’s, that’s, that’s, that would be great. I mean, that’s like, that’s like Spot Hero on crack.Pablos: Yeah. Who wouldn’t buy that car? Oh, you could buy a Kia. Or if you get a Tesla, it’ll tell you where the fucking parking spot is at.Ash: Yeah. So it’ll tell you the next, the next location. I like that. The thing that you have to figure out is how do you save it?Pablos: Well, You wouldn’t know for sure. The things could sense in any spot they have a sight line to that could see is it is it empty? Is it staying empty? Is somebody pulling into it? You could maybe make statistical probabilities for different streets. Stuff like that.Ash: It definitely helps when you’re doing the parking lot, shuffling, just going around and around and around. And then, you just hope that, that someone pulls out right.What a Tesla could do is could wait for the next Tesla.Pablos: Mm hmm. Oh, yeah. There you go. Now we’re talking. There you go. Tesla baton.They’re doing that, with their, charging stations anyway. Tesla drivers are playing a video game where they’re like, You know, waiting for a, for a charging supercharger spot so you could, you could do that.And then there’s, yeah, I like that one. I think it would be useful though, even if you just, you know, it knows where you’re trying to drive to and it could figure out like, okay, you’re going to have a real parking problem in that area. Street parking is a lost cause.Ash: But if there are four Teslas there.Pablos: It’s hard for a Tesla to know when somebody’s going to leave.Ash: It does, because the preconditions 10, 15 minutes, see, like, if you set departure time on your Tesla, because you were preconditioning orPablos: Oh, why Would you do that? My car doesn’t know when I’m going to leave.I guess you could. You could gamify it. This guy’s got a meeting. At 3 o’clock, so he’s gonna have to leave by 2. 45, so probably there’s gonna be an empty spot here. I don’t know, maybe. Might be possible.Ash: I don’t know that you’re going to synchronize with the calendar, but I mean, that could be kind of cool, but I’m just saying that there’s definitely precondition, which, which you’re supposed to do. So if you’re plugged in at home, right. Or, but like any of these chargers, there’s like a precondition so that your car is warmer and like ready and like all that crap, right?Like they’ve been doing that for some time.Pablos: Oh, I see, oh, I see what you mean, right. I get it. I get it. So, so I don’t drive a Tesla, but what, but precondition you’re saying is like, I’m going to go. So warm up the car or cool off the car.Ash: So fancy cars do that, but also when the electric cars came in, the batteries have to have like been revved or whatever.Pablos: There’s a thermal windowAsh: Or, or set them up.Pablos: I see.Ash: You got it.Right. So that’s why they want to know when you’re leaving. That way you’re not, you’re not cold driving your, your Tesla.Pablos: Yeah.Ash: So that means they know, right? So if you want maximum range, they’ve got to like do that little thermal thing inside to get the battery, like not, minus five or whatever the hell it is outside. So, so they already know. So in cold places, this would work well.Pablos: Intriguing. Okay, so there’s another idea, at least for Tesla if not a startup.Recorded on December 22, 2023The post Smart Traffic Lights – ØF appeared first on .

 This is probably the conversation I had in mind when I decided to start this podcast. Samy Kamkar is an old buddy of mine, a genius hacker. When you guys hear me praising the minds of hackers and how brilliant they can be and how they think, Samy is the example in my mind that I’m thinking of, and I always love to share him.Samy’s famous for having written a computer virus that he was using to meet girls on the internet, which is probably ill-advised. The virus he wrote took over MySpace. It was incredibly genius! What would happen is: if you looked at Samy’s page on MySpace, it would just automatically add you as his friend.MySpace is long gone, but you could imagine what that would be like on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat nowadays. So, within 24 hour period, Samy had over a million friends on his MySpace profile, because the code not only would add you as his friend, it would copy itself to your page so that whenever anybody looked at your page, it would automatically add them as Samy’s friend too, and then do one other benign thing, which would change your profile page to list Samy as your HERO!Samy is my hero. I love him so much. He’s done a lot of amazing, beautiful work and computer hacking. He has a YouTube channel that we’ll talk about on here, but you should definitely go watch his videos.I’m not going to interview Samy. that has been done and you should listen to the Tim Ferriss interview of Samy. I think of this conversation is something you could listen to with or without having heard that, but if you want to know more about Samy and his background and all the stories, then you can go listen to Tim Ferris interviewing him. This however is a conversation between friends, it is very soulful.There’s a lot in here that I’m looking forward to sharing with you guys. Also, Samy is a co-founder of a couple of company that have been very successful and he sold his most recent company called Open Path to Motorola. This is not an ad, I’m just telling you because I’m impressed with what Samy built: Open Path is a physical door access control system that’s way better than those cards you used to have to use to get into your office. Now you can just do it with your phone and walk right in. Samy has helped build that product and the company is doing very well.And I think you should all become, customers. Oh, and I almost forgot to tell you Samy, at one point decided he wanted to become a DJ and learn how to make music. And he’s the one who created the track that we use for the podcast intro that you’re going to hear next.Please listen to this conversation with me and Samy. I’m sure you’re going to get a lot out of it.Important Links:Samy is my Hero Samy on Wikipedia Samy’s Website Samy on YouTube Tim Ferriss Podcast with SamyAbout Samy KamkarSamy Kamkar is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker and entrepreneur. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school.[One year later, he co-founded Fonality, a unified communications company based on open-source software, which raised over $46 million in private funding.In 2005, he created and released the fastest spreading virus of all time, the MySpace worm Samy, and was subsequently raided by the United States Secret Service under the Patriot Act. He also created SkyJack, a custom drone which hacks into any nearby Parrot drones allowing them to be controlled by its operator and created the Evercookie, which appeared in a top-secret NSA document revealed by Edward Snowden and on the front page of The New York Times. He has also worked with The Wall Street Journal, and discovered the illicit mobile phone tracking where the Apple iPhone, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone mobile devices transmit GPS and Wi-Fi information to their parent companies. His mobile research led to a series of class-action lawsuits against the companies and a privacy hearing on Capitol Hill.Recorded on September 17, 2021The post Samy is My Hero — Samy Kamkar appeared first on .

Today we get to hang out with my buddy Nick Touran. Nick is a nuclear engineer who’s focused on the practical deployment of clean, renewable, carbon free energy. I met Nick when we were both working at the Intellectual Ventures Lab. He is on the TerraPower team, and even though we don’t discuss the TerraPower reactor, or any of that technology on this episode, Nick and I try to dig into history of nuclear a bit. trying to explain what’s possible with nuclear reactors, so people can really understand how that fits into our future and what the pros and cons are, and really try to technically, illuminate how nuclear reactors work a little bit for people who haven’t been able to dig into that so much before. I learned a lot of what I know about nuclear reactors from Nick, and so it’s a thrill for me to get to share him with you guys and this conversation in particular is a great place to start.Nick has a website called whatisnuclear.com. If you want to learn more beyond what we cover in this episode, that’s a great place to start so go and read his writing and learn as much as you can.I believe this is one of the most miraculous technologies humans have ever invented. And it’s so frustrating for me that we haven’t put it to greater use for humanity.Important Links:Nick’s awesome website, whatisnuclear.comAbout Nick TouranI’m a reactor physicist working on the design of an advanced nuclear reactor for a nuclear innovation company, where I’ve been since 2009. I have a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan based on the multiobjective optimization of fast reactors using perturbation-based equilibrium cycle methods.Recorded on June 15, 2021The post Primer on Nuclear Reactors — Nick Touran appeared first on .

Short opinion piece about these helium airships and the need to preserve helium. Back before there were memes as we know them, the meme for a disaster was the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg was this giant Zeppelin, an Airship filled with hydrogen gas that’s lighter than air. Like a helium balloon. So it would just float but it had a huge passenger compartment. This is back in. 1937, so 80 years ago, the Hindenburg famously ignited and turned into a giant flame in the sky and scared the shit out of everyone forever and these things have not gotten a lot of attention since then.I think they’re cool. But there’s a real problem with trying to make a lot of hydrogen next to actual humans and somehow imagine that it’s going to be safe. So since then, people have played around with things like blimps and things that don’t have passengers and stuff like that. But these things don’t, aren’t very popular. I have seen a little bit of news lately about this group called Lighter Than Air Research, which is trying to create air ships today.These are in part probably safer because they don’t fill them with hydrogen, they fill them with helium. So this is a massive craft. They call Pathfinder one. I’m going to link to an article in IEEE Spectrum about this and I’m just going to give you, the highlights.Pathfinder 1 is 120 meters, long, 20 meters in diameter. I think biggest Goodyear blimp right now is 75 meters. So this is like the biggest air ship ever made. I think.LTA Research staff maneuver Pathfinder 1 while the airship is under construction at the company’s Moffett Field facility, near San Francisco.  LTA RESEARCHThe idea is to carry about four tons of cargo. It sounds like a lot, but if you’re not familiar with a ton, four tons is about one Humvee. Or, maybe four tons might be a good size Amazon delivery van fully loaded. That’s four tons of cargo. There’s still, also a crew, there’s what’s called water ballast, which is, water you carry for weight. So if you have a problem, descending too fast, you could drop the water and it would slow your descent to make it safe. And then fuel, cause you still need fuel in order to propel the thing. The idea is this thing would go 65 knots. So that’s about 120 kilometers an hour, which I think about 70 miles an hour. That’s about as fast as these things seem to ever really be able to go, but the, average cruising speed probably maxes out at more like two-thirds of that. This is a modern Airship probably worth revisiting it to see if it can be done better. The old ones were built with, a lot of wood. They were built with a lot of aluminum which is, good strength to weight ratio, but incendiary. In the sense that it melts at a low temperature. Modern crafts could be built with carbon fiber and titanium and all these modern materials that we can coat to make them less inflammatory,So that’s the frame and then you also have this covering and the coverings gonna be made of not cotton the way we used to do it, but we’re going to make that out of some modern polyvinyl from DuPont called Tedlar. So obviously those materials have advanced a lot in our lifetime. If you sense a little bit of a dubiousness in my voice, I’m going to tell you why that is in a little bit here.That’s the basic idea. There’s also a lot that’s advanced in weather prediction. There’s a lot that’s advanced in electric motors for propulsion. There’s a lot that’s advanced in autonomous flying and driving. And so we have lidars and we have things that can figure out how to make these things dramatically safer. I buy all that. Here’s what bothers me.The world has unlimited hydrogen on earth, more or less. We have a lot. We can make more. Hydrogen’s awesome. What the world does not have on earth is very much helium. We have very little helium. We have very little helium left. We’ve been able to find a few new helium mines in the last decade, but there’s just not much of it.And that is a super valuable element that we really need for lots of different things. We need it for making computer chips. We need it for figuring out how to make fusion reactors and things like that. We’re just running out of helium and I’m pretty disappointed in any plan that involves using a lot of helium as it’s lighter than air substance.Because of that, I’m really having a hard time getting excited about these modern airships that want to use helium. Helium is not flammable, so it won’t burn up the way that hydrogen does. If you remember your periodic table, if you look at the very beginning, the reason you’ve probably heard of hydrogen and helium is they’re numbers one and two. They are the lowest weight elements in the world.And hydrogen is a lot lighter than helium, but it also, combined with oxygen just fucking blows up, which is great, amazing amount of energy in hydrogen. We have a lot of use for that. But what’s happening with helium is, we’re just letting it go. We’re giving it away in party balloons which is a terrible disaster. It makes me practically cry when I see helium balloons, which is sad. I grew up with them. I love them. I want my kid to have them. They’re fun, but that’s a waste of good helium. We just don’t have enough and we don’t have a way of making more. And that’s the really important thing to understand.Until we get real good control of fusion reactors, and have extra ones to deploy at the job, we don’t even have any way of making helium. When you do have a fusion reactor, it makes a little bit of helium, but not much. Maybe someday fusion reactors will be able to be designed to put out a lot of helium for balloons, but right now they don’t.They don’t do anything right now, but they don’t do that. So the point is. We should be really careful about how we deplete the helium that we do have here on earth. Maybe someday we’ll get a highway to the moon and we’ll be able to go get a lot more helium. But right now this is this is a really important resource that I think we should be careful about. I don’t want to see it used on airships, which require a lot.Okay. Second thing. I tried playing with helium before, and we do use a lot of helium for weather balloons and things like that. Please use hydrogen. It’s okay if a weather balloon burns. A helium balloon that’s big, it’s just a really hard to manage. Putting a lot of lighter than air gas into a balloon to get it off the ground and float it up into the atmosphere. It’s just unwieldy. I only have a little bit of experience with this early days at Blue Origin, we tried to make some giant helium balloons just to see what potential might be in that. It’s hard cause, you gotta make the balloon out of something light and not too structural. The airships have a frame. We didn’t have frames. We just had big balloons that we made. We made them really light. But, you’ve got to bring tanks and tanks of helium to go, then fill that up to launch it wherever you are. The process of filling it up, it wants to float away while you’re filling it, and you think you could just keep loading gas into it the way that you would with a party balloon, but in practice, the more you load into it, the harder it is to tether the thing and keep the wind from blowing it away.And maybe you could do that indoors and then have a ceiling the launches, it’s pretty impractical to do. And, with travel, you want to be able to go a lot of different places, obviously with an Airship, you’d try to fill it once and then use your electric motors to move that thing around, up and down and maybe. I give up as little helium as possible, but that’s the other thing about helium. It’s really hard to contain. It leaks through almost everything. It is a very small molecule.I’m putting this out there just to let you guys know how I feel about it. From what I understand to date. I have not met or talked to the folks that are working on this at Lighter Than Air Research. If you know them, please introduce me and I’m sure that they can tell me how they think about it. I’m sure they have some other perspective and if I get that in my head, I’ll let you know if I change my mind.Recorded on December 18, 2022The post Helium Airships (Short) appeared first on .

Sleep is the most natural process that you can do other than breathing. Like breathing, we don’t need technology to help us sleep. The reason many people don’t sleep is because of what’s between their ears – their mental stability, anguish, or stress. Do you fall asleep easily or does the slightest noise wake you up? Dr. Michael Breus, gives me a full brain dump as I try to learn everything I can about sleep in one session. He takes on taboo ideas like polyphasic sleep and the role of nutrition and the microbiome in having a good night’s rest, how melatonin, CBD, and some pharmaceutical interventions such as Zolpidem affect the sleep process, how much sleep we should have, and more.Pablos: The thing I’m trying to go after is that at least my way of seeing the world is through all these problems that we have. This is a pile of problems that are possibly growing. We also have this other pile, which is tools and technologies, and it’s also growing because of what I mentioned. The job for us is to figure out how we sit in the middle and connect to those things. If we have some optimism that it’s possible and we can demystify the problems so people understand what the real problems are, we can demystify the technology so they’re not terrifying and complicated. People then can build that sense of optimism about how we could make the future better. That’s how I think about things a lot. Not only the idea here is to give people some insight into how we think about things and our experiences. One of the things I’m curious about is that years ago, there was no such thing as a sleep doctor. Maybe there were some researchers or whatever, but it wasn’t a legitimate career track. How did you end up being a sleep doctor? What does that mean?Michael: What’s interesting about the field of sleep medicine in general is it’s an incredibly small new field. The very first sleep lab in 1945, Walla Walla, Washington, built demand on narcolepsy. It wasn’t even about sleep apnea. When you look at medicine and you think about Hippocrates. Thousands of years of innovations in medicine, we’re literally at the sperm and egg stage of sleep medicine. That’s where it was. I fell into it by accident. I was doing my residency. I was getting my PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia and I was interested in Sports Psychology. I had no interest in sleep at all. I wanted to tell athletes how to get the mental game of sports and run faster into all this cool shit with psychology.I went to the University of Georgia, the top twenty programs. The best internship residency program, believe it or not, is the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. They had an eating disorders and athletes program that I was fascinated with. This was going to be an interesting area for me to get into and understand more about, but I couldn’t get into the program. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, they all got in the program. I went to Georgia’s top twenty programs, but to be fair, it wasn’t Harvard.It wasn’t even top seventeen.I’m sitting there, I’m looking through the application and they have like a specialty track for sleep medicine and a specialty track for neuropsychological testing. I didn’t know anything about sleep medicine in Jackson.You figured out, “I can’t get on a program I want, but I can at least go to Jackson.”I had an ulterior motive because when I saw this thing, I had worked my way through graduate school in the Electrophysiology department. I’m the kid who used to take the old rotary phones apart, put them back together, there would be 4 or 5 pieces on the side, and this thing would work like a gem.I took the phone apart for different reasons and did not get it back together.  I like to tinker with stuff. I like to measure stuff. I have that kind of a brain. When I saw that there was a sleep track that used those machines, I said, “I’m going to sell myself as a sleep guy. I’m going to transfer as soon as I get there. Just because you didn’t let me in the fucking place, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to get in.” I get in on the sleep side. I get there and they say, “You have to start on the sleep side. If you want to transfer, you can do it later.” By the third day, I fell in love.You haven’t gotten around to transferring back. You gave up on that and sticking with sleep. This was many years ago. Tell me what research was going on there.  Back in those days, the field of sleep medicine is an interesting one because it was taken over. There are two sides, research and clinical. What’s difficult about the clinical is it pretty much only treats sleep apnea.In the world of sleep medicine, we’ve figured out how to treat sleep apnea. That’s primarily what is going on. When you say clinical, that means we’ve got actual patients, we’re trying to help them. On the research side, we’ve got people with problems and we’re trying to understand them. We may or may not be able to help them. That might be a way of describing the difference.  When you look at clinical sleep medicine, we’ve identified 88 different sleep disorders. You can fuck up your sleep, which is amazing when you think about it. We were starting to design protocols for each one of the diagnostics to be able to start to lower the symptomatology. That’s the basics of medicine.Meaning, you are down with each of those 88 things you have.  Sleep is recovery. You have to have something to recover from.TweetThe assessment narrows it down. What I’m talking about is the treatment side of things.You are good at figuring out which of the 88 things you have.  We’re good at that, but the problem is that I believe that there are sleep disorders and what I call disordered sleep. Sleep disorders are diagnosable apnea, narcolepsy and insomnia. Disordered sleep is I went to that room in the back of my house. I was there for 6, maybe 7 hours. My eyes were closed. I come out, I don’t feel great. Why? How do I fix that? That’s been my area of specialty for the last six years where I’m only focusing on how do I improve the quality of sleep. There are probably about 6,000 guys and gals out there who are board-certified sleep specialists. They treat apnea and narcolepsy. In some cases, insomnia.We’ve got pros who can do that, but the things that don’t fit into that rubric. Are you talking about the 89th thing?To be fair, I don’t think it’s a diagnosis. It has to do with lifestyle. It has to do with intensity.I don’t have an actual physical problem that maps to my diet, but it could be better. You could have more energy or better results if you improve your diet, but I don’t necessarily have a clinical problem.  That’s how I look at sleep in certain ways. I’m a high-performance sleep coach. I used to be a sleep doctor, apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia. Now, people come to me and they’re like, “I know that I need eight hours to get good sleep, but I only have six. Can you do that?” The answer is, “Yes, you can.” What science has shown us is that there are certain scheduling swim lanes for your sleep schedule. This is based on something called your chronotype. Chronotype might not be a term that people are familiar with being called an early bird or a night owl. Those are chronotypes. It turns out those are genetic. There’s a variation on the PER3 gene. There’s a particular snip that is altered and that can make your entire body schedule go early or make your entire body schedule go late.If I have 23andme, I can look it up and explain why I’m a night person.That’s the cool part of science, but what the fuck do you do with it? That’s where I come in. I love that science and I was tinkering around with it. I was doing it all myself. I said, “What happens if I only sleep during my chronotypical sleeping hours?” I’m a night owl. That meant I had to go to bed at midnight. I decided not to have an alarm because I was going to check if my body wakes up naturally and see what happens. The first month I started this experiment, I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 7:30. Within 40 days or so, all of a sudden, I was waking up at 7:15 on my own. I am still going to bed at midnight. All of a sudden, it was 7:00, and then it was 6:45. I get up at 6:13 every single morning now with no alarm. I could close my eyes at midnight. That midnight I wake up at 6:13 AM. The punchline is it won’t go lower. At age 52, in my shape, my body only needs 6 hours and 13 minutes of high-quality sleep because I’m sleeping in that swim lane. Here’s what happens, when I stay up until 1:00 in the morning, I still get up at 6:30.That’s what I experienced. I’m tuned for the wake-up time.  That’s what you’re supposed to be because that’s the circadian anchor. When the sun hits the melanopsin cells in your eyeballs and turns off the melatonin faucet in your brain, there’s a whole circadian side of things that has to agree with that. When it doesn’t, you got involved.I should tune my wake-up time to maybe the sun, although that moves around all year. Maybe I could do it to a grow light or whatever so I have a consistent wake-up time. I don’t seem to be able to change that one as much. That one stays the same. I can go to bed whenever I want. For fifteen years, I was dancing salsa, probably at least every other night. The better you get at salsa, the later you go. On a Tuesday night, I would show up at midnight until 2:00 in the morning. It didn’t matter. If I danced, I’d go to bed at 2:00, I would get up at 8:00. If I didn’t dance, I go to bed at 11:00 or 12:00 and get up at 8:00. I felt like what was happening was, “If I dance, I need less sleep,” but you wouldn’t diagnose it that way.Here’s what I would tell you is if you dance, you’d get higher quality sleep. One of the biggest things we now know is movement. Sleep is recovery. You have to have something to recover from. On the nights when you were salsa-ing, what I would do is I’d love to put a tracker on you on the nights when you’re dancing and the nights when you’re not. I would like to look at the different stages of sleep because we probably see a much bigger increase in stage 3 or 4 sleep, which is your physical restoration because of the salsa dancing. We then might see less mental restoration on the REM sleep side of things, but we can change those at will.If I could do anything I wanted having no sleep problem, pretend I have no constraints on when I sleep pretty much, whatever, what do you think would be the optimal thing for a guy to do? I’m not trying to solve any problems. I’ve got no issues, but I am going to get older at some point. Should I do something like you described? No alarm, see what happens, go to bed at a consistent time every day, and see where I land over the course of six months?It was less than six months. It slowly happened at first and all of a sudden, it was quick. What ended up happening was it took a grand total of 90 days. All of a sudden, my entire sleep schedule had shrunk and it was improved in quality. One thing to tell every reader is about the consistency of your wake up time. At first, you might have to set an alarm to wake up at a particular time, but then when you start waking up before the alarm, and then it starts to scoot further behind, we’re in the money here. That’s where we want to be. It all has to do with this chronotypical swim lane of a schedule that you follow.As we get older, the swim lane changes. Our circadian rhythms dial back because our body’s ability to produce melatonin begins to decline. We have two options at this point. We can rotate our schedule backwards or we can use supplemental melatonin to help us on the front end and try to keep that schedule. There are two schools of thought about how you want to do that. To be fair, if I want to wake somebody up in the mornings, I can use a blue light. They’re commercially available out there. It is easy to get your hands on to basically turn off my melatonin faucet in the morning. You can lower blue light by wearing things like blue light blocking glasses and have the red light and things like that. There’s a lot of biohackingness that can be done within the sleep universe.I like those Wi-Fi smart lights and stuff that they’ll do blue. I could have that to be my alarm instead of be obnoxious.  What a lot of people have found is those sunrise alarm clocks are cool. What you can do is put on a timer with a dimmer in it.What about this? My girlfriend needs to wake up earlier than me. Is there a product that seems like I need a vibrating watch on each person or something?There are pillow vibrating alarms. There are these little disks and you slide them in your pillow. It’s got an alarm on it and it will just vibrate. It doesn’t wake up your neighbor. Also, there’s a new product by Bose. They’re called Sleepbuds. They’re earbuds that you wear all night long. They have a private sound library. I’m helping them with it, and then there’s an alarm that only you hear in your ear.Is that available now?It’s commercially available now. You’ll love them.I have got a couple of lines of inquiry here. Go back to the phone when you were a kid. I remember disassembling rotary phones for a variety of reasons. One, I wanted to be able to make that bell go and harass people. I wanted to make it sound like I had a phone ringing in my car, which at that time didn’t exist. I mounted a rotary phone to the dash in my car in 1985, something like that. There were bag phones or car phones at that point, but they were $7,000. They were huge, but I just had a rotary phone with a windy cord on it. The thing is we had learned to trick the phone network a little bit. There were things you could accomplish by taking the phone apart and getting control of the switch hook and something like that. What I think about now is my daughter is raised in a world where you take the screws out of something and there’s nothing observable. It’s a pile of computer chips. For you and I, taking the rotary phone apart, you could see how it worked.  You can see the coils wrapped around the magnet. You could see the bells. I remember it distinctly. You could see the rotors and when they finally came out with push buttons. All these wires were coming out and you’re like, “That connects to that, and that goes to this.”It was 40 hours to assemble a touch-tone phone. I think of that as being a gift because all these devices were observable. I could take them apart, play with them, fuck with them, and then put them back together. I learned a lot from that and I feel like in the world our kids are growing up in, why would you bother to take an iPad apart? You are going to find more computer chips. It’s the same, everything is computers. Even computers, when I was a kid, the code was all observable. You learn by looking at the ones and zeros literally. That’s also obfuscated behind a pretty cartoon interface and stuff. If that’s what you described, you learned about this taking phones apart and stuff, and then that attracted you to the machines being used, can you talk about what were those machines?  The machines were things that took vital signs. I was particularly curious about how a signal could come from your body and be then translated into this idea. When I started, it was all paper. It wasn’t digital. There were pens on the paper. You had these inkwells. You would have to pump the inkwells to get the pressure to go through and then they would be squiggling along. I remember the first night I worked in the sleep lab on my residency. I went in and my dad or my mom had bought me this beautiful new white doctor’s coat. I was excited. I was on my internship. People are going to call me doctor and I go up to the thing. I’m working in and then what happened was the patient turned and the pens went fucking crazy and ink went flying.I had ink all down my thing and everybody was laughing because they knew the joke. It was fun. Back at that time, when I was learning about sleep, we would have a paper record. It would be a thousand pages long of one night, 30 seconds per page. There was an art to it. It was called throwing paper. You knew how to grab one sheet and you created the scroll yourself manually. I’m throwing paper and I’m watching EEG go by and I’m like, “Apnea.”You learned to flip a thousand pages in a couple of minutes and spot the apnea.Those machines were machines that were telling me something that wasn’t a machine and that was interesting to me.You were monitoring an analog device for humans. This is something super fascinating and snuck upon us. You’re talking about essentially a primitive monitoring device compared to now standards. In the last couple of years, I see an extraordinary explosion in sensor development. A lot of it came from MEMS because that’s where we got our IMUs with the accelerometers and the gyros delivered chips before a MEMS-based accelerometer. That was a $15,000 thing that weighed 80 pounds and was on a bench or in a cruise missile. Now, we have them in phones almost speculatively. When the first accelerometers were on the iPhone, we didn’t have an application for it. It was just there because it was cheap to do it, and might as well try it.  Many people don’t sleep because of what’s between their ears – their mental stability, their anguish, and their stress.TweetNow, they’re in everything which is cool. Beyond that, for almost every day, we get new sensors and there’s almost nothing we can’t measure with extreme precision. We have networks to bring that data back to giant supercomputers to analyze it. I feel like maybe one of the things that makes this particular point in time, the inflection point for a sleep study, is that now we have the tools to do it better. We have those sensors. We have those data science, which is a thing now too. In a way, that’s different than what it was before, many years ago.My prediction is that sleep laboratories will go away to a certain degree.Is it because we’ll learn so much?No. It is because technology is advancing quickly. When you go into a sleep laboratory, we put 27 electrodes. At first, we had to glue them onto your body with something called collodion. When we had to pull them up, it rips up hair, skin, and all that. It was terrible many years ago. Now, there’s a home study. You send it if they have a nasal cannula, they have something on their finger and they have a box on their chest, and we’re almost done. The technology advancing in the assessment is great. Unfortunately, technology in the treatment has not gone well.That’s the order of operations.When we look at technology and we look at the influx of technology into the idea of sleep, here’s part of the problem. Technology is great for sleep disorders but not great for disordered sleep.Why is that? Sleep is the most natural process that you can do other than breathing. We don’t need technology to help us breathe. The reason many people don’t sleep is because of what’s between their ears. It’s their mental stability. It’s their anguish. It’s their stress. Seventy-five percent of insomnia is either depression or anxiety. My goal is to try to help people figure out how to not just lower their anxiety in the acute state, but to help them figure out how to lower their anxiety in a chronic state, and that’s hard.That gets you back to that psychology and the same interventions people are using for anxiety in general. They need to improve their sleep with all the stuff around meditation and breathing and those things that people are taking on.  They have to be tweaked because when you do traditional meditation and traditional breathing, it doesn’t make you sleepy. It brings you to the present. It makes you relaxed. Being present, being relaxed, and being unconscious are three separate states.Does being present, relaxed, and unconscious show up differently on your monitoring devices?It does.If I have that device on when I’m meditating and it makes me feel present, that’s not getting me ready to sleep.  I would argue that there are certain meditations that you would do prior to bed and there might be ones that you do in the morning. I would say that there are breathing techniques that make more sense in the evening versus the morning. Sleep works in the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. There are two systems, sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic, I always think of as energy, and parasympathetic is relaxed. I always think of it as Sympathy for the Devil, that song from the Rolling Stones. That makes me think of going in dancing. When we’re looking at parasympathetic, that’s the relaxed situation, and relaxing is different than sleep. Relaxation primes the pump for the sleep process. It all comes down to some physiology, believe it or not. If you can get your heart rate below 60 for a period of time, the sleep process will institute.It’s literally that simple sometimes. When you’ve got people who’ve got high blood pressure, stressed, and got anxiety. What’s the thing that is up? Their heart rate. Heart rate variability becomes an interesting issue. When you start to look at heart rate, you want it to go down and get to 60 because when it’s at 60, you slip the car into third gear and the brain clicks on. That’s when things like growth hormone are emitted during a phase 3 sleep or 4 sleep, which is all that physical restoration. During REM sleep, that’s when you start to move information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. That’s where it gets interesting.People come to me sometimes and they’re like, “I’m not as concerned about the physical. Do I have Alzheimer’s, Michael? What’s going on? My memory is shot. I’m 40 years old.” I’m like, “How much do you sleep?” They say, “I sleep 5.5 to 6 hours.” I’m like, “There’s your problem. Can we extend your sleep a little bit? Give it three months and let’s see how your memory does.” What people don’t realize is REM happens in the last half of the night. If you only started the first half and you wake up after six hours, you’re missing that last two hours of REM sleep. That’s where the problem comes in.I have a couple of questions here. I have low blood pressure. I have a low heart rate. You should be sleeping all time.I sleep all the time. I lay down flat and I’m asleep. It is easy. I don’t feel like I need as much sleep as I get, but I’d take it because I can. It seems like it’s not hurting anything. There’s not a lot to do now. It might be easier for me because my heart rate and blood pressure are low in general. I don’t have a lot of anxiety or problems and things that keep me freaking out. It’s going smoothly. Michael, I want to up my quality. What would I do?We would get you again in your chronotypical swim lane. We’d start to look at what’s going on in your body. I’d look at your vitamin D, magnesium, iron, and melatonin levels. Let’s make sure that you’re not deficient. I think it’s something 80% of the US is deficient in magnesium and vitamin D. We’ve got to get you back up to par levels and see if your unit is functioning right. If you’ve got low energy, vitamin D would be a good thing for you to have every morning.I’ve been doing it, but I didn’t necessarily know to do it in the morning.  I prefer mine in the morning. It’s a fat-soluble vitamin so you have to have a little bit of food with it. If you’re an intermittent faster, that may or may not work for you.I don’t eat anything for sixteen hours. I only eat lunch and dinner.I’m the same way and my body is used to it. I would try it out with you and see. Most people take 5,000 international units every single morning.I could do that maybe with lunch.  I take it in the morning without food. You’re supposed to take it with food for absorption, but you can get higher absorbing stuff.What about magnesium? I started taking magnesium because I figured it will be good for my muscles.It will be good for your muscles, but you’re deficient in it because most people are. Unfortunately, our soil has been over tilled. Magnesium doesn’t appear to be coming up through the roots and getting into the stocks for our fruits, vegetables, and things like that. I do supplemental magnesium. I had a cardiac event years ago. We think that the reason that I had it was because of low magnesium in my cardiac muscle. When you have marathoners who dropped dead in the middle of a marathon and you autopsy them, it turns out that they have low magnesium in their cardiac. We wanted to avoid that. I take 250 milligrams of magnesium with vitamin B12. That helps catalyze it in. It helps absorption, but it also helps with the rapidity of metabolism. It speeds up overall metabolism, which is interesting. I take them together in the mornings and it’s been highly effective for me. Once I’ve checked you out and decided what’s going on with you, and you’re at par level, then you say to me, “Michael, now I want to up my game,” I’m going to look at your alcohol and caffeine and try to understand where do those play a role in your 24-hour cycle.I never had a drink.What about caffeine?Melatonin is the key that starts the engine for sleep.TweetI have caffeine every afternoon. What time?Between 1:00 and 2:00, after lunch.  Do you feel like you need caffeine in the mornings?No. I feel like if I don’t take it by 2:00 or 3:00, I’m going to have a headache. I’m feeling like I need a nap.Do you get a headache from not having caffeine? How much do you take at night or in the afternoon?Probably 250. You are at 2.5 cups of coffee.I never had a cup of coffee, but I drink either Red Bull or an energy shot or something.  There are two things I would do with that. It’s not a bad practice if that’s what helps you get there, but I’d rather find more natural sources of caffeine for you than a Red Bull because you get a ton of sugar.No, I take the sugar out. I’m on a sugar-free energy shot.  That’s better, but there are some better like green coffee, green tea extracts if that’s what your goal was, I’d rather see you taking that long-term. When we look at caffeine, here’s the thing to remember. Depending upon how quick of a metabolizer you are, caffeine has a half-life between 6 and 8 hours for half of it to be out of your system. When we’re talking about refining our sleep, caffeine is a stimulant. It doesn’t matter how you slice it. I’ve got lots of people who say to me, “Fuck, Michael. I can have a cup of coffee at 8:00 at night and still fall right to sleep. Caffeine doesn’t affect me.” Let’s be clear, caffeine is a stimulant and affects everybody. People have different sensitivities and amounts and metabolism is which changes the variability of the effect.Somebody who’s lean like you and takes 250 milligrams of caffeine, you’re at the upper dose of what a human should have in a day. I would look at the timing of that. If I could, I might start to dial it back a little bit. Maybe you don’t need 250. Maybe we’d start with 200 and see how you feel. Maybe we go to 150. The goal then is to start to look at how much what’s called alpha intrusion that we see into your EEG. What caffeine does is it makes your brain waves go a little fast. When we’re sleeping, we want our brainwaves to go slow. What happens is it’s hard to get that. Sometimes the fast brainwaves lay over the slow brain waves, or they push out the slow brainwaves and all we have is fast brainwaves. When all we have is fast brainwaves, we don’t get stage 3 or 4 sleep, which means we don’t get that physical restoration. We then wake up in the morning and feel like shit, and we want to drink more caffeine.Caffeine is a way to speed up the brainwaves. Is melatonin a way to slow them down? Can you think of them as the opposite of caffeine in some sense? Is that what you use to slow down your brain waves?With melatonin, it’s a circadian pacemaker. Melatonin has an effect on certain neurotransmitters that cause a cascade of reactions to start the sleep process. Melatonin is the key that starts the engine for sleep. You still have to have oil and all these other things when you have an electric car, maybe not. It does seem mild, but remember it’s a hormone. It’s not supposed to act like a sleeping pill. It’s not a drug. It’s supposed to act like a hormone. It is supposed to be subtle and be able to have an overarching and reaching effect across the body. The biggest thing about melatonin is understanding when you take it.The moment of ingestion, it begins to be absorbed, it’s going to be sending signals to different parts of your brain to say, “We’re going to change that internal schedule.” Caffeine is the opposite. What I would say the opposing from caffeine is something called adenosine. As you go throughout your day, your brain accumulates adenosine. When a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out of the backend. One of those things is adenosine. It works its way through the system. It goes to a specific area in your brain. As it accumulates, you get sleepier. If I was looking for the opposite of caffeine, it would be that.Why don’t people take that? When you look at the molecular structure of adenosine and caffeine, it dropped by one molecule. Caffeine fits right into the adenosine receptor sites. That’s why caffeine blocks sleep. That’s biology, which is interesting. I haven’t ever seen anybody make.You’ve explained to me before with melatonin, people are doing it wrong. They’re taking a bunch when they’re tired or when they want to go to sleep. You’ve said that they should start earlier in the night to take it.It’s like 90 minutes beforehand. It takes about 90 minutes for the plasma concentration levels. If you’re taking it in a pill form, you’re looking at 90 minutes for you to reach plasma concentration. If you’re taking it in a tincture or liquid form that you put under your tongue or sublingual, it would be 30 to 40 minutes for better absorption.I’ve never done melatonin, but you’ve said that 1.5 hours before taking one pill and an hour before taking another and a half hour before you want to be asleep. Is that right?No, take it one time an hour and a half before.I misunderstood. What are the other things that are meaningfully effective for people if they want to take a pill to affect their sleep and what’s up with Ambien?There are a lot of different ways we can walk down that path. There’s a pharmaceutical intervention. When we look at something like Ambien or what’s called zolpidem, it’s a particular compound that was built to affect the benzodiazepine, alpha 1 and alpha 2 receptor sites. The compound has a molecule that can fit into that receptor site and turn it on. By turning that benzodiazepine receptor site on, it lowers anxiety. In this specific 1 and 2, it increases the possibility of sleep. When you look at benzodiazepine receptors as a whole, it’s an anti-anxiety thing. The first sleeping pills were anti-anxiety drugs. What happens if people get so chill that they fall asleep and then people are like, “Maybe there’s a second use for that. Let’s do sleeping pills.” That was what was all the benzodiazepine universe. Now we get an Ambien called a non-benzodiazepine hypnotic. The difference between the old benzos and the new non-benzos is the addictive potential. It’s better technology. It is cleaner. It’s the right receptors that move through. The next question becomes, when are we going to get to the drugs that improve sleep, not just put us to sleep? I call those the Frankenstein drugs.Why?I’m not convinced that our brain isn’t the best regulator of how much sleep we should have.Do you think your brain could do the job? It just needs a little training sometimes. My concern is, what if you’re not supposed to have more stage 3 or 4 sleep than your body has? You’re not supposed to have REM sleep than your body has. Mother Nature is good at shit. When I look at those types of structures, I want to go forward but with mild, healthy trepidation and concern. One of the things that happen is when you start to improve on a natural process, you end up with a supernatural result. Sometimes supernatural results are positive and sometimes they are not. That’s when we have real problems.When you say you’re less optimistic about technology helping with the sleep issues that you’re attacking, which are less clinical problems and more life habits and patterns that people have established, resolving anxiety and things like that. Maybe it’s true that you would not look to pharmaceutical innovations necessarily.  There are holistic technologies that are coming up that are interesting to look at. I started working with this company and it was all of it. I’ve learned a lot. Let’s say you get into a car accident, your head cracks open, you go into the ER. One of the first things they do is they wrap your head nice. The reason they wrap your head nice is to slow down all of the blood flow and all of the fluid that’s going on because they’ve got to figure out what’s the problem. They’ve got to fix it up. That’s how that works. It’s called the neuroprotective effect of cold. It’s important.The question becomes, when are we going to get the drugs that improve sleep, not just put us to sleep?TweetThere’s a sleep researcher, Dr. Eric Nofsinger, who has been doing this for many years. His main interest was what we call ruminative thought. “I can’t turn off my brain before I go to bed.” It’s the number one complaint I ever hear in my office. We call that ruminative thought. It was like, “My brain is going. I can’t slow it down. I can’t get to sleep.” We know what that’s doing is it’s causing a lot of autonomic arousals. That sympathetic nervous system is kicking into gear because you’re in bed. Nobody is talking to you. Nobody is asking you to do anything. Thoughts come flooding out like, “What am I going to do with this problem?” It’s anxious. We want that blood. He did MRIs on these people while they’re trying to fall asleep. He discovered massive blood flow in the frontal cortex. He said, “I used to work in the ER and they had this thing called the neuroprotective effect of cold. What happens if I cool their head?” He did and it worked.They fall asleep with their head freezing.Ten years’ worth of research, they’ve had 12 or 15 publications in real journals, real science. Here’s what they discovered. It was almost like a headband that goes around your head. There was a string that came down and it came down here and there’s a unit here. It would throw liquid in this thing that goes around your head and it would make your head cooler throughout the night. It’s a little bulky, cumbersome, whatnot. They discovered that people who could turn off the brain, turned off the brain and went to sleep. What they’ve done is they’ve miniaturized it and they’ve got it into a traveler pack.This is a product now. I don’t just need an ice pack on my forehead. That wouldn’t even work.Why?It is because you have to have a particular temperature and it changes throughout the night based on your circadian rhythm. There’s real science.What’s that product called?It’s called Ebb therapeutics. They came to me and they’re like, “Michael, we want you to test our device.” I said, “I don’t have ruminative thought.” They said, “We just want you to wear it and tell us what your experience is.” I put this thing on and to be fair, it looks damn goofy. It’s like 2 inches off my forehead, a big black thing. It’s got a cord, it’s battery operated and I have to click the button, but it’s not as bad as the first one was. I’m like, “This is going to be ridiculous. How am I going to sleep with this thing on my head all night long? My wife is looking at me like I’m crazy,” because I test out all this shit all the time. I put it on, I turned it on, and I closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes, it was 6:13.It’s a luck. People are going to love that thing.  I said, “I’m not going to wear it the next night.” The next night didn’t work the same. I woke up multiple times, and that stuff. I tried it again.You put it on people with bigger problems than you?Yep. It takes about three weeks. We discovered that over the course of time, it helps keep people’s foreheads cool.Does it train them to do a better job on their own or do they need to keep with it as a habit?  What’s great about this product is there’s counseling that comes along with it. You use the product and use the counseling, and then eventually you come off the product.It sounds harmless to do. It’s super harmless. It has no side effects.Most people seem to have their brains have frozen already.They found out it’s working well for migraines and they started using it for menopausal women. They’re reducing hot flashes in the middle of the night.This is incredible.  It was cold, but that’s it. I love the technology aspect that I think is interesting for sleep. We’re going to come up with better drugs. By the way, I think we should, because most people think insomnia has just one flavor. There are like 30 flavors of insomnia. If we can dial in, if there’s insomnia associated with pain, if we had a special pharmaceutical that could break that cycle, then we can teach people how to deal with their pain and get them off that drug. That would be a fucking miracle. Why can’t we have more sleep drugs that are more personalized to people’s problems? That’s great in the pharmaceutical universe, but that’s fifteen years and $15 billion to get down that path. I’m also interested in some of these more holistic things like cold, breathwork, meditation, circadian timing, things like that.What are the quack things that you see people are trying?CBD. One of the biggest things that drive me crazy is I had a company come to me and they said, “Michael, we want you to endorse this product. It’s a CBD pillow.” I said, “What? I don’t get it.” They said, “What we’ve done is we’ve soaked the pillow in CBD. When you turn it on your head, this break open, and then you breathe in the CBD.” I said, “That is the biggest crap of shit I’ve ever heard. Tell me, how much CBD did you put in the whole pillow?” They said, “You’re going to love it, 300 milligrams in the whole pillow.” I said, “That’s a dose for one night.” They’re like, “What?” I’m like, “Did you read the literature? I haven’t seen CBD effects in sleep in anything less than 200 to 250 milligrams of CBD. That’s like a whole bottle.”Have you seen it have an effect on people if there’s no THC content?I have. I’ll tell you where I’ve seen it the best is in pain patients because it helps lower inflammation. A lot of people in pain got three problems when it comes to sleep. Number one, they’re anxious that they’re not going to be able to get comfortable. Number two, they’re anxious that they’re going to have a painful event in the middle of the night, which is going to wake them up and there’s a lot of anxiety associated with that. The third aspect that’s for sleep with them, usually has to do with what a pain medication that they’re taking that can have a side effect or an effect on their abilities. We’re always trying to look for things, and CBD might not be a bad idea but have the right dose, and they don’t need a pillow to get it.What other ridiculous stuff? Maybe another way of thinking about it is, what old wives’ tales or urban myths do people have internalized about sleep that are counterproductive or not working?  One of my favorites is when people tell me that they need to eat a turkey sandwich or drink more milk before bed. Those are based on the idea that there’s a trip to bed in each one of these. I calculated it out. You’d have to eat a 42-pound turkey to get enough trip to bed in your system.What about milk?One gallon and a half of milk to drink to get enough trip to bed.It’s freeing because I grew up in Alaska, where we were the highest per capita consumers of ice cream. We drink a lot of milk. It was normal. I would drink milk as a beverage. One day someone told me, “The lactose in milk makes you tired.” From that day on, whenever I drink milk or eat ice cream, I feel tired. It fucking programmed me and I stopped. I have this impressionable psychosomatic response or something from people telling me that milk makes me tired. I stopped drinking it, which is probably fine, but it also keeps me from eating ice cream when I want to because I don’t want to get tired.Don’t go to bed hungry because if you have an empty stomach, you’re going to be thinking about your stomach going to sleep.TweetTo be fair, you can eat as much ice cream.My brain will accept that and believe you and I’ll be fine now.  When we look at foods before bed, it’s interesting. I worked with this company called Nightfood and we create snacks prior to bed, which is sleep-friendly. We don’t want people to go to bed hungry because if you had an empty stomach, you’re going to be thinking about your stomach going to sleep. There are also some data to suggest that we want to keep the microbiome happy as we’re going to bed as well. I worked with this company, we had bars, but your favorite thing is about to happen. We have an ice cream.What’s different about your ice cream?It’s not like melatonin flavored ice cream. It’s got an ingredient profile that’s very pro sleep. I mean that it’s about 75% carbohydrate and 25% protein. You keep the calorie profile down to about 150 calories for the pint use. Most people seem to like the pint, but what’s interesting is carbohydrates make you sleepy. The reason that they do is that they promote serotonin. What’s interesting is when you’re sleep-deprived, what do you crave?I don’t know.I’m high calorie, like donut, muffin, that kind of stuff.Deep-fried stuff. What your brain is doing is sleep deprive. For whatever reason, you’re sleep-deprived, which has caused your cortisol levels to jack up. The cortisol levels stay high and your brain doesn’t like how a lot of cortisol is all in it for long periods of time. That’s when you get things like adrenal fatigue and real long-term stress, acute stress disorders and things like that. It wants to calm it down. Your brain tells you to eat a Snickers bar because when you eat that Snickers bar, it causes serotonin to be produced, which quells cortisol. The reason that when you’re tired, that you want to reach for a Snickers is because of cortisol.You’re not going to get energy from that. You’re going to get sleepier from that. You get a small sugar boost and then you crash. It’s terrible. If you get sleepy in the middle of the day, you’re better off walking outside, getting fresh air and sunshine because between 1:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon, your core body temperature has a bi-modal distribution. At 10:30 at night, your core body temperature drops. That’s a signal for the brain to release melatonin. There’s a secondary drop between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, but it’s smaller. That’s why everybody gets tired because it is 1:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Don’t go and eat a bucket of muffin. Go outside and get some sunlight, reduce that melatonin production and you’re good to go. I bet you could try that and reduce your caffeine.What about modafinil?  It’s an interesting compound. When you look at modafinil, which is also called Provigil, this was a medication it’s called. It was an orphan drug when it was first brought over. The idea was to bring it over to treat people with narcolepsy. I believe it’s an orexin agonist. I’m pretty sure what it does is it goes for these particular receptor sites that are your sleep center and it turns those off. We did this for narcoleptics because initially, we thought the narcolepsy was where the brain was switching on to sleep in the middle of the day. People were having nap attacks and sleep fits and all these different things. We’re like, “Let’s stimulate the hell out of them and see what happens.” Later on, modafinil comes on board and says, “We don’t have to stimulate the whole body. We can focus more on the brain and the sleep centers. Let’s go there first.” That’s what Provigil does. We call it a non-stimulating stimulant.Here’s the thing. Narcolepsy only makes about 50% of the population. It’s tiny. There are more Provigil prescriptions out there. There are north of 5% of the population, ten times in the US. The question is, why? People use it as a performance-enhancing drug or nootropic. What’s interesting about it from an nootropic standpoint is all it’s designed to do is focus on the sleep centers and be able to calm them down, make it so that you’re not sleeping. It turns out over the course of time, we realized that narcolepsy isn’t that problem. Narcolepsy turns out to be a nighttime problem, not a daytime. Narcoleptics get shitty sleep at night. We now give narcoleptics sleeping pills, which seems completely counterintuitive. We give them sleeping aids to make them sleep deeper, and then they’re not as tired during the day. We use the Provigil to maybe stave off a little residual daytime sleepiness. What’s nice about Provigil is it’s not a full-on stimulant. If you took Adderall, caffeine or cocaine, it’s going to jack and there are side effects and problems. Provigil has less of that, generally speaking.My understanding is there’s not a lot of negative side effects.  I’ve taken it personally before to try it out. It’s a clarity that seems to come with it and the level of alertness, but it’s not like you’re jittery.I learned about it from fighter pilots who were using it when they got up flying for sixteen hours.  The military has these things called the go pills and no go pills. Go pills are Provigil, no-go pills are Ambien. That’s how it works.I’ve seen people using it in the early introduction to Provigil. It was like, “At midnight, when you normally go to sleep, take one of these and you’ll get another four hours.” That worked. After that, you could have another one and get another four hours. We could do it all week long and not sleep. That’s a bad idea, why?We can’t replace the natural process of sleep. There are consequences. For example, if you continue to take Provigil, what occurs over the course of time is that it isn’t changing that adenosine buildup that’s still going on inside your brain. The body will eventually crash. The good news here is nobody has ever died of sleep deprivation. The longest person that’s ever been awake is a guy named Rudy Gardner, 11 days and 25 minutes. He used tons of caffeine and he was playing pinball. It was in the ‘70s. He played pinball for a week or some crazy shit like that. He had some significant side effects and consequences for it. By day 5 or 6, he was hallucinating badly. When you look at deprivation, it’s going to take a toll. I tell people all the time, “You can’t fool Mother Nature. She’s a bitch.” If you take sleep out of the equation, she’s going to put it back and it’s going to hurt.You’re not going to like this one either. Years ago, I read this firsthand account by these girls who were in college and decided to try this alternative sleep schedule. The polyphasic sleep schedule.They were doing what’s called Uberman schedule.Uberman contacted me.Is there an organization?There’s actually a person, I think.Uberman schedule is a twenty-minute nap every four hours of being awake, and you do that six times a day. There is no core sleep in Uberman. In Uberman, you do twenty-minutes, every four hours. You sleep six times a day. Your total sleep investment is two hours a day. That was the state of the art many years ago. Then a couple of years ago, people started to play with what they call Everyman’s schedule, where you have a core sleep of usually three hours at night and then you take three twenty-minute naps during the day.I know a lot about this part. With Uberman, the problem people were having was the naps had to be precise. You had to take it every four hours. Skipping one of those naps was like skipping a full night for you and I. The schedule is wildly inflexible and these people were up 22 hours a day. I read a hundred firsthand accounts by people who did them at that time. The patterns I saw were transitioning to it was painful. Sleep deprivation is horrible for a couple of weeks. Once they got transitioned to it, if they could stick to the schedule, they loved it. These girls, they finished their degree. They worked three jobs. They partied more than anyone. They had a great time. What happened to almost everybody is the successful people who get into it and stick with it for a year or more rarely lasts longer than that. Almost always, the reason is their partner makes them quit because you can’t make that schedule work with a real-life or any normal societal thing.You are awake 22 hours a day. I found YouTube videos of these people online because they’re up in the middle of the night with nothing to do. They’re talking to YouTube and they would tell you like, “It’s 4:00 in the morning. Nobody is up. There’s nothing to do. I wanted to share my ideas for ways to kill time.” They burned through their to-do list. The first two weeks, they’ve got nothing to do. They’re up in the middle of the night trying to trade ideas for ways to kill time until the world wakes up. It was fascinating.  Not much has changed. We have the core of the three-hour night in Everyman. We’ve got these twenty-minute ones that are particular times you can cycle down to about 3 hours to 3.5 hours. Here’s what happens in my experience. I’ve had multiple CEOs come to me and want to do the Everyman. Almost nobody wants to do the Uberman. It’s too difficult to try to accomplish. There are three problems there. Number one, you’re 100% correct. You didn’t say the actual word that I was looking for you to say, but I’ll tell you what I want. People get lonely and loneliness leads to a lot of major problems. When people start experimenting with things like drugs or alcohol, you have to be almost completely no drugs, no marijuana, none of that. That’s one problem is people get lonely.Number two, what I’ve discovered and I’ve only had one person do it successfully is that by the third week, if you have any proclivity for depression, it pops and you end up with a major depressive episode. Some people are suicidal. For any single person that asks me about this, my first thing is, “Do you have any depression in your personal thoughts or do you have any in your family history? If you do, this is probably not a good idea.” You are right, there are certain fragilities out there that don’t withstand this system. The final thing is there’s loneliness, depression, and it’s the sheer boredom of it. How many times can you watch Netflix?We can’t replace the natural process of sleep. There are consequences to that over the course of time.TweetThe other thing to screen is, do you have something to do? Some people do.If you want to write a book, then that might be good for you.I haven’t looked into this for years now, but I remember at the time, sleep scientists didn’t want to touch it. You’re talking pure heresy. You’ve got to remember something, I’m a heretic. People don’t like the stuff that I do because I look into the science and I want to push and innovate the science, but 99.9% of sleep specialists would never consider in a million years.They’re not recommending your books. Maybe it was certainly true then, apparently still true now, but one of the theories of why Uberman worked is because there were people who got on it and did it for years and were fucking prolific. I remember reading, the theory at the time was that you’ve got these different sleep cycles. You’ve got your deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, and is there a fourth one?There are two phases of six, 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and then there’s REM.The theory was, once you train yourself to take the twenty-minute nap, people under Uberman lay down and sleep for exactly eighteen minutes. They then wake up. I got the Zeo Headband.I was on their scientific advisory. The first sleep tracker company in history.I got the sleep tracker. I put it on my head and went to sleep and I watch in the morning. In the morning, you get a graph that shows you all your sleep cycles. I would get spread over 3 or 4 sessions in the night, about 1.5 hours of REM. What I think I saw if I remember correctly with the people on Uberman who used EEG or whatever to see their sleep cycles was they would lay down, get eighteen minutes of REM and wake up. They’re still getting about 1.5 hours of REM in a day. They’ve trained themselves to do it specifically in those naps. The lay theory at the time was maybe the REM is an important part of sleep and this deep sleep is some evolutionary artifact that we can forgo, which I thought was an interesting way of interpreting that as like, “That’s why the people on Uberman are fine.” They’re getting all the REM. They’re getting as much as me. I’m wasting a bunch of time in between my REM cycles in the middle of the night to get that 1.5 doing deep sleep.You are almost there. I would say yes for REM sleep, but you’ve left out arguably the most important component, which is stage 3 and 4.Why is that important?It’s all physical restoration. The body isn’t going to work without stage 3 and 4 sleep. If all you got was 1.5 hours of REM, your brain might be swimming, but you are not going to be able to move.It describes a lot of people. There’s the opposite. Maybe a lot of other people are getting a lot at stage 3 or 4 with no REM. That’s why their brains are useless.  We can say about the Uberman system is it takes out a lot of the noise. That’s the goal. What I do with my high-performance people is I do the same thing, but I don’t have to use Uberman. I don’t have to use Everyman because if I put you in your chronotypical bedtime swim lane, it automatically shrinks. If I shrink you to six hours a night of super high-quality sleep versus four hours, and you have to do this crazy rotation desk schedule, what would you rather do? I’m doing the same idea but in a healthier and more genetic way. I’m looking at your genetics. I’m matching your schedule to your genetics as opposed to somebody saying, “I’m going to do this Uberman schedule, and I’m going to arbitrarily pick this time to sleep.” I would argue that what I’m doing is a little bit safer.That helps a lot. I’ve seen you work on and other people work on a variety of different kinds of dietary supplements, things that look to me like deluxe placebos. I’m curious about, what supplements might be meaningful to take and then, how do we substantiate that? What I see with this is not just sleep-related necessarily, but with a lot of these supplements is a shit ton of total bullshit like the CBD pillow. It looks like that to me. I can’t seem to map their claims.We have two problems with the supplement. One is almost no clinical testing. That’s what you’re starting to talk about. We have a secondary problem that’s bigger than the nonclinical testing. The secondary problem is whatever testing that’s been done on a single ingredient, then people would use that to substantiate what I call kitchen sink products. They’ll take twelve ingredients, mix it up. They’ll take twelve different studies to say that this thing was effective. This one study and one ingredient profile, as opposed to what are the interaction effects and what was your population? There’s no real research. What happens is people go out there and they say, “I’ve got a supplement. That’s going to be good for sleep. It’s got valerian in it, which has got a research study behind it.” They can say it’s scientifically proven, but it’s not. It’s a big farce for everybody out there. My goal in the supplement world is to number one, not give anybody anything that they don’t need. Step number one is what vitamins, minerals, nutrients are in your body, in a lower state, in a deficient state that we need to bring up to par levels. That’s when we were having a discussion about PER3, magnesium, iron and melatonin.For all those, we need to do blood work. Although you can do saliva for melatonin, but remember for melatonin, you want to look at what time of day you take it. It’s going to be different levels at different times of the day because it’s circadian. Once we get past that, then there are two questions, “Do I want to give you an herb that helps you fall asleep or do I want to give you an herb that accentuates a particular aspect of your sleep?” Those are two different animals. I’ve been playing around with some mushrooms, not like psilocybin mushrooms, but general mushrooms, and starting to learn more. Lion’s mane, it turns out, appears to help with REM sleep.I have heard that before. Do you know Paul Stamets? This guy has been doing mushroom research, like renegade shit for a long time. You’ve got to beat this guy. I don’t know him. I’ve listened to some interviews with him and he was also a computer nerd way back. I knew that, but there are some good interviews online with him. I’ll find him. That guy knows a shit ton about what’s possible with mushrooms aspects of it.For me, I’m not trying to create something that’s not in nature. All I want to do is I want to get you back to a functioning level. By the way, your generalized nutrition has a lot to do with it as well. There’s a lot of data servicing about something called your microbiome. We now know that your microbiome is the nerve center and send signals all over your body to tell your body to do different things.A lot of people know what the microbiome is by now, but it’s fascinating because it was not part of anyone’s conversation many years ago. We’re at the beginning of understanding it and the way I always describe it, you’ve got all these bacteria that live in your gut and what you eat, it feeds them. What they spit out feeds you. That layer of indirection is in everyone, but it’s different for both of us and everyone else. Since we don’t have a way to measure it, this is why a lot of these diet concepts that work for one person don’t work for someone else.  We’re starting to see more personalization in the diet side of things because what we can do is you can measure your microbiome and you can get stool samples and things like that. It’s a little bit more sophisticated and you can get a nutrient profile of like, “What do you need? What do you not have?”What I’d be interested to learn is what your view is on how understanding the microbiome is going to play out?We now know that microbiome has an influence on our circadian rhythms and the microbiome itself has a circadian rhythm. If we tune up our microbiome, by understanding our nutrition, getting rid of things like high fructose corn syrup, lowering our processed sugar, things like that are generalized good recommendations in any way, what we will find is our microbiome, the biology of it will get better, which will allow our entire human unit to work better, which makes us sleep better.A recommendation like that is more true for some people than other people because of the makeup of the gut.It has a lot to do with your dietary lifestyle. I started to learn not that long ago, I love McDonald’s French fries. They do not work well for me and that’s something that I have to accept. There are food consequences.My doctor prescribed French fries because my blood pressure is low.  I would say salt it up, brother. You need more fried food, I don’t, but that brings to your point, the personalization of it all. My prediction is that we’re going to see more personalized medicine, diet and sleep, moving into the future. I’m excited about the technology that’s starting to come out in pharma, in holistic, and what’s coming out in lifestyle. I’m learning about things that I never would have thought about before like breathwork like, “I know how to breathe. Why would I need breathwork to help me sleep?” It helps you sleep. We need to be more exploratory in the sleep unit. These ideas, let’s fucking go and try them out. Let’s test them. Let’s put it through a scientific methodology so we can see if it works and let’s advance the field. That’s what I want to do. Unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues are stuck in the clinical side of it. They just treat apnea.It’s true outside of sleep science and a lot of areas in science. We have this problem where people are getting narrowly focused. A lot of the incentives are screwy to keep people from wanting to do these new things. What’s the thing that you wish you had that could advance sleep science?Do you want the truth of it? I am working on it, cannabis. I think cannabis is where the revolution is going to start. Historically, unfortunately, something like insomnia has been what we call door handle diagnosis. When I am in the room with the patient and I am about to leave, I will have my hand on the door and they will say, “By the way, doc, I am not sleeping well.” Here is what the doctors generally do. They reach in their pocket, they pull out the prescription pad, write the prescription for Ambien and say, “Try this for 30 days and you should be fine.” Nothing can prove that true. When the person got hooked on this drug, they have to ask for this gamekeeper. If you are a drug addict for trying to go to sleep, it is not like I am saying, “I’m smacking heroin here.” Ambien doesn’t even have a street value but we have to beg doctors to give us something to help us have a natural process. It’s like there is something wrong with that.If we tune up our microbiome, it will allow our entire human unit to work better, making us sleep better.TweetI believe that cannabis has the ability to lower pre-sleep anxiety. In our conversation, we were talking about how 75% of insomnia is related to depression. If we can find the right constituents within cannabis, I am not talking about getting people stoned. I am talking about helping people to sleep. A lower level of THC can lower anxiety. Here is the most fascinating part and many people haven’t seen this research, the pathways of melatonin and THC are almost identical. They use similar neuro pathways. There is a mixing that’s going on there somewhere. It gets interesting. My goal is I want to be the tip of that sphere. I want to be the guy that’s right on their front and doing the research and saying, “Let’s fucking figure this out.” It is one of the oldest plants there is. People have been using this for thousands of years. We are now in the state at least here in the US.It’s where we could finally start to learn how it works and what works.Thirty-five states have proven it for medicinal use, it is 15% to 18% for recreational. The horses left the barn and let’s wrap some fucking science now.I see extraordinary results for people but not, unfortunately, the science we need to understand what is happening. Do you have any other cool things you are working on? Don’t you have at least a couple of books? Are they any good?I do. I like my books. I am working on my fourth book. It is going to be all about energy and humans. My first book is called Good Night. That is a do it yourself 30 days make yourself better.Is it obsolete now or is it still useful?It is useful all the time. My second book is The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan, lose weight for better sleep. There is all about the relationship between the metabolic process and sleeping, how those two influence each other. I give an interesting recommendation of how to sleep better to help your body be prime to losing weight. My third book is called The Power of When. It is all about the chronotype and the circadian rhythmicity. I was looking at that aspect and starting to learn how my bodily hormones are on a particular schedule. If I can predict it, I can choose what time of day to do something when my hormone levels are going to help me. That was my third book which I thought is fucking awesome. My fourth book is moving into taking all of that and saying, “Why do we sleep? We sleep to live. We sleep to spend time with our family, for our career, to innovate, and all of these things. I want energy from sleep.” I am combining with an expert on movement. We have created a way to identify your chronotype and body type. We have a series of sleep aspects and movement aspects to give you energy throughout the day without having to use caffeine and stimulants. That’s going to be the next one.How long before that’s out?It will be out in December 2021.You were working on a couple of other products.I work in the supplement arena, non-cannabis supplement because a lot of people are interested in that. I am also learning a lot more about counseling and scaled counseling people. When you look at the mental health aspect, we are finally getting technology like texting, it is a form of therapy. Michael Phelps is working with the company where they’ve got a whole platform and people can text therapy sessions. We are starting to see that this is moving. I want to see it happen for sleep counseling because there are many people that need a little attention. They need to learn from a trusted source that they can get their hands on and they need to scale.That does not exist yet but you want to work on that.I do.Do you need help? What kind of help do you need?I need to better understand the landscape to see if I can build it or buy it.The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype–and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and MoreThe state of the artists, we have chatbots that you can train by having them watch or read a zillion conversations. It could be audio or text these days, but it learns from reading a zillion other conversations. When someone is conversing with it, it knows what to ask next. It can train the chatbot to lead them to a logical progression. You can make a decision tree and a flowchart. You can program that ahead of time. That’s how these things work. There are a number of off the shelf framework for doing that. A lot of reuse for customer support. There are better ones that can be used for healthcare. You can specifically train them despite what you have read in the thousands of conversations that don’t even recommend CBD pillows so they can be used as a way of scaling and counseling. Some of those tools are accessible. You can spend your weekend playing with it and bake your own chatbot. People can do that. You can bake a rudimentary one. What would be cool is for somebody that spends a little time with you, make your first draft one so you have your head around that process. Using machine learning, if you’ve got data that shows what you want, for the progression you want a patient to go through, these days are trivial for the computer to learn from all that data how to take a new person through that in the conversation.Most of my stuff is protocolized.If that’s true then, computers fucking love that. What machine learning gets you is pass that part is like, “What do we do in the situation where we don’t have the decision tree?” The easy way to think is for our lives, computers have been able to do anything that you can define in a series of logical steps. What machine learning brings us is the ability to have computers do things when we don’t understand what the logical steps are. That’s the difference. That is why it powerful, fascinating, scary, and difficult to get your head around because it can do things that we don’t understand. That might be something for you to play with, but you could start the old school decision tree style chatbot systems because they are powerful. They need to be applied to a problem. If you know what direction to take somebody in, like the chatbot can take care of doing that, 24/7 on text whenever somebody wants. I don’t think it is going to be that hard for you to make something like that. Show me the flowchart and maybe they can reach out to you.I thought of one for a couple sleeping. I created this quiz that would be a chatbot thing that would have compatibility. Wouldn’t it be great if Match.com has it before you hit?It’s like, “You are a morning person, she’s not. No chance.”There is a lot. By the time you are sleeping with somebody, it’s too late. I would like to create something that would be fun.That’s part of the screening process. Can you imagine how well that will be?I did have some experience in dating women that were not compatible in bed for sleeping. It is like, “You run too hot, if I can’t cuddle you, forget it. It is not going to work.”Somebody might want to cuddle, but there is this temperature. By the way, a chatbot or an app like that has a lot of utility, not just from a fun and interesting standpoint but it is going to catch people’s interest. They start to think about those things, and then I can teach them about body temperature, circadian rhythmicity, melatonin. Let’s figure this out in a scientific way. That’s the goal.You can use the chatbot for intakes screening like, “Chat with this bot for a while. If we have a good recommendation for you, we will let you know.” That’s a way to scale it. Are there any other products that people can get that you worked on?I made my own line of blue light blocking glasses, which I like quite a bit.Do you wear those at night?Wear that 90 minutes before going to bed to help lower the amount of blue light exposure if you have a problem sleeping. If you don’t have a problem sleeping, you don’t need one. Those are interesting products. Also, I worked with different companies to help them learn more about the science of their products. Part of what I am working on now, which is interesting, is the Mattress Universe. I believe that sleep is a performance activity. I am a runner. If I go running, I can run in my flip-flops, cut-offs, my torn t-shirt, and my Boombox.I think you should do it though.There is a relationship between the metabolic process and sleeping; the two influence each other.TweetIf I’ve got my Asics on, my Dri-FIT wear, and my iTunes going, I can run. It is a performance. Sleep is the same way. If you’ve got the right equipment, you will sleep better. I will argue that between 20% to 25% of sleep is environment influence for someone. Especially for the people who have got insomnia, believe it or not, there is now a way to look at people’s sleep genetics even it has 23andMe. I’ve got a company that I work, I can run your genetic in 74 different sleep markers. I can look if you have genetics for poor sleep quality or for lower amount of sleep total time.Is that something you do or something that people can sign up for?There is a group online that helps you with it but they just give you the data. They don’t interpret it. What I do for my client is I get data and I will do a full-on interpretation. I’ll say, “These four snips are variations for obstructive sleep apnea. Let’s take a look at each one of these studies and see what identifies for you and let’s take a look at the data.” It is a little painstaking at first. I have to get it down a bit more refined. It is possible. That becomes a roadmap in walking that path.Are you available for people who need a sleep coach?One of the things I’m trying to do is scale because there is only one Michael. I have a small practice. I see 68 patients and I do see people like Paris Hilton. At the end of the day, I want the best in the world so I can focus on interesting problems and then take that information and spread it.For everybody else, they can read your books. Do you have a podcast? I have a podcast called Sleep Success with Dr. Michael Breus. In my website, I’ve got over 800 blogs on these topics.People can dig in there. Any question you have about sleep, I have written 1,000 to 15,000 words exposé, all reference and full documented on anything that you want to know.Do you have any questions for me?I don’t but I want you to know that I enjoy our friendship, our talks, and our time of innovation. You are the most innovative and interesting person I know. I enjoyed our time.Hopefully, we can come up with more good ideas. I think we will.Important Links:Michael Breus Sleepbuds Ebb Nightfood Paul Stamets Good Night The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan The Power of When Match.com Sleep SuccessAbout Michael J. Breus, Ph.D.Michael J. Breus, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and both a Diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a Fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world to have passed the Sleep Medical Speciality board without going to Medical School. Dr. Breus was recently named the Top Sleep Specialist in California by Reader’s Digest, and one of the 10 most influential people in sleep.Dr. Breus is the author of The Power of When, (September 2016) a #1 at Amazon for Time Management and Happiness, #28 overall) a bio-hacking guide book proving that there is a perfect time to do everything, based on your genetic biological chronotype. Dr. Breus gives the reader the exact perfect time to have sex, run, a mile, eat a cheeseburger, ask your boss for a raise and much more.His second book The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan: Lose Weight Through Better Sleep,  discusses the science and relationship between quality sleep and metabolism.  His first book, GOOD NIGHT: The Sleep Doctor’s 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health (Dutton/Penguin), an Amazon Top 100 Best Seller, is a do-it-yourself guide to better sleep.Dr. Breus has supplied his expertise with both consulting and as a sleep educator (spokesperson) to brands such as Hastens Beds, Ebb Therapeutics (FDA approved insomnia treatment),  Princess Cruise lines, Six Senses Hotel and Spa, Lighting Science Group,  Advil PM, Breathe Rite, Crowne Plaza Hotels, Dong Energy (Denmark), Merck (Belsomra), iHome, and many more.Dr. Breus lectures all over the world for organizations such as YPO (Young Presidents Organization) 20+ times in 2018-19,  AT&T (10 times), on stage for Tony Robbins (Unleash the Power), hospitals, and medical centers, financial organizations, product companies and many more.For over 14 years Dr. Breus served as the Sleep Expert for WebMD. Dr. Breus also writes The Insomnia Blog and can be found regularly on Psychology Today, and Sharecare.Dr. Breus has been interviewed on CNN, Oprah, The View, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Ray, Fox and Friends, The Doctors, Joy Behar, The CBS Early Show, The Today Show, and Kelly and Michael.He is an expert resource for most major publications doing more than 250 interviews per year (WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, and more).Recorded on November 12, 2020The post Top Sleep Doctor’s Brain Dump – Michael Breus, Ph.D appeared first on .