What is special about inventors, How do we search for and support creative people? And what does this have to do with skateboarding tricks or silent drones or self driving ships, or solar panels in space or shooting mosquitoes with lasers and our future as a species. Welcome to Innercosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we seek to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
episode is about invention. I've always been fascinated by invention, not just new products and tech, but fresh ideas and new frameworks and science and ways of seeing the world that didn't exist before. The key thing about invention is that it requires more than just absorbing information to invent. You have to recombine what you know in new ways, and you have to spot connections that others miss, and sometimes you need to ask what if everything we assume
is wrong now? The human capacity to do all this, to invent is thanks largely to a part of the brain just behind your forehead, the prefronnel cortex. We have more of this than any of our cousins in the animal kingdom, And this is the part of our brain that allows us to break away from the here and now and to imagine counter factuals. In other words, things that don't exist but could. We can imagine those things, and we can simulate out their consequences.
And this is what allows us to step outside.
Our current moment and picture alternative futures. As I mentioned in episode seventy two, I'm not certain that AI as we make it now can do that. It's great at piecing things together, but at least with the current architectures, it cannot say, you know what, I'm going to scrap everything that I've learned and think about this in a completely new way, because AI is not wired to reject
what it has learned. But that kind of creative leap is something that humans do all the time, often unconsciously. It's what happens when a person cranks up the prefrontal cortex and looks at the world as.
It could be.
Invention starts not just in the raw data, but it's the decision to look beyond that. So without the neural architecture that allowed for of human creativity, we would be doing the same thing that we did millions of years ago, just like every other species were surrounded with we wouldn't have electrification of the planet and the Internet and commercial flight and spaceflight and desalination and vaccines and quantum computers and satellites and encryption techniques and self driving cars and
all the rest. And so today's conversation is about invention, how we can spot it and value it and fund it. And to this end, I'm pleased to welcome a friend of mine, Pablos Holman, who's on a mission to change the trajectory for inventors. He is a hacker and an inventor and a venture capitalist, and what I really appreciate about him is that in that latter role as a VC, he's not just chasing consumer software trends, but he hunts
instead for hidden geniuses. He and his partner Michael Reid run a firm called Deep Future, and the people they, as they describe it on their website, are quote mad scientists, rogue inventors, crazy hackers, and maverick entrepreneurs implementing science fiction, solving big problems, and helping our species become better ancestors. In other words, they're looking for the people who seek to do a lot more than the incremental improvement of the tools around us, but instead the.
People who leap into entirely new categories of possibility.
So Pablos has just written a book called Deep Future, which comes out next week, and his take in the book is that invention is humanity's most important creative force, but it's also the one we've neglected the most. Inventors are often misunderstood and underfunded because there's often not a good system to support them. So even while we romanticize
starving artists, we typically forget about starving inventors. His position is that we are missing out, and he always wants to position himself at the edge of what is possible.
Here's our conversation.
So if you think about the creative classes of people, you know, how many like I don't know musicians?
Can you name.
Dozens like it loves without even actors, dozens painters? How about inventors that aren't dead? Yeah, I can name about five, maybe.
Five, And probably none of them have a business card that says like inventor as their title, right, because it's not a legitimate career choice.
And so there's this kind of weird gap in the world.
I think where you know, we celebrate our most creative people, our people they you know that are easy to identify their celebrities for you know, specially music artists and actors and stuff. But you know, you could probably live without, you know, the next Marvel movie. You could probably live without the next Beyonce album. But if it wasn't for inventors, you wouldn't be alive at all.
Generally that would include biologists making discoveries.
Sure, yeah, maybe, okay, right.
I think of scientific research as very important. That's critical. That's kind of the early stages of figuring out how the world works. That's the goal in basic research. And then in our world we always need more for that, more resources, more money, more scientists. But we have a system for that. And then on the other end, you have a system for like entrepreneurs and making businesses and
things like that. But those people are making businesses out of whatever they can invent, and they don't tend to be very creative. This is why, you know, of our best businesses are like an app to have a stranger pick you up in their car. You know, we're we're not honoring I think the creative class in the middle that is inventors, and we don't even recognize them as
a creative class. Like it's crazy hair and a DeLorean in the garage, Like it's not even a It's just people don't relate to it and understand, and it doesn't have the same maybe emotional connection that you know, a musician can evoke or a singer or something. But I think it's like kind of important to step back and recognize, like, wow, this is our most important creative class.
They don't have a place in society.
So let me step back to something you said.
I'm curious what you were thinking of when you said, we wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for inventors.
Give me an example of what you're talking about there.
You know, whoever generate is yes, vaccine. Edward Jenner made the first vaccine for smallpox. Four hundred million people died of smallpox in the last century. Right, that's more of people than I think we have in this country. Maybe, Like it's a lot of people died of one disease, regardless of what you know. I know people are wound up about vaccines these days, but at least in the case of smallpox, this is like one of the reasons you and I exist.
I might even be here if it wasn't for that type of it.
And that's like a really interesting invention story where he figured out that these milk maids who were milking cows contracted cow pox, which is not as life threatening, not really as big of a deal disease, but then.
They never got smallpox.
Yeah, and it's like this incredible insight, this amazing discovery, and like that guy figured out, oh, I know how to go I could go test that, and he did, and he figured out that we could now save people from dying of smallpox.
Too quick historical that's of course where we get the story vaccine from Cowska, right, But also it turns out Edward Generous about the eighth person to invent the vaccine.
That's right, Yeah, oh wait, right, So there's also this you know, this kind of you know lore that we have. I would say that, oh, inventors aren't actually that important. It was inevitable somebody was going to figure it out, so like, but there are lots of these cases where somebody didn't figure it out, or the person who figured it out didn't get the word out. I mean, this happened like with scurvy, even not all these people trying
to cross oceans dying. You'd just load up a ship full of people expecting have of them to die of scurvy, and some of them might make it to the other side before we figured.
Out all they need is oranges.
Yeah, and like that was figured out and then like shelved for I forgot seventy five years or something. But I think it is a way of diminishing the value of an inventor or an invention by saying, well, you know, he just was able to do that because of the you know, people who came before them, and standing on the shoulders of giants. And there's certainly a truth to that. Of course, we all start with what we you know,
learned from our our predecessors. But it still takes a creative mind to do something the first time.
In fact, so the basis of creativity is your brain goes through the world, absorbs all everything in your world and your culture, your moment history, and then what it's doing is remixing. It's bending, breaking, blending, putting these things together in new ways. And so you're exactly right. There's two ways you can look at creativity. One is Okay, Well, it's just a remix based on the data that you happen to have, and so it was inevitable that would
come up. But you're exactly right that to be the inventor the creator is something really special because because not everybody's doing it. Most people have all that data right in front of them and don't care to get off their butts and do something about it.
And like, you know, Edward Jenner didn't invent the transistor or something. You know, he had cows and milkmaids in front of him, So yeah, it makes sense that he would invent in that area. But it still is this different. It's a completely different thing. I would contend the second time you do it to the nth time you do it,
that's a totally different that's craft. You might be better at doing something than the inventor, but does it completely different thing than figuring out what's possible the very first time.
Yeah, okay, so there's something super special about inventors. And I know this is a big part of what you do and what you really care about is finding inventors who are making incredible things.
I want to find the inventors and I want to figure out how we help them out, because it is kind of a lonely fate in a way. Most inventors are working in relative isolation, and they might be obsessed and they might be going deep. And the people I know a lot of them are very focused on their thing. They don't even know how to get the story out. They wouldn't know how to make a company, how to raise money for it, how to get the help they need.
I mean, it's very it's a very tough thing. And also they're mostly doomed because with an invention, you know, you might get even Let's say you were a good inventor and you could have a good invention once a year, Well what are you going to do with it?
Like, how are you going to get paid for that? Where's it going to go? And most inventors fail to ever figure that stuff out in one lifetime.
It's pretty sad. You think, you think artists. Starving artists have a hard time. Starving inventors have an even worse time.
So give us some examples of some really cool inventions that you're seeing currently.
One comes to mind.
A couple of years ago, I went to visit this buddy of mine who is one of the top researchers on warp drive. So warp drive is like bending space time to do faster than light travel, straight out of Star Trek.
Nobody thinks we're ever really going.
To be able to do it, but these guys research it and try and and no one's been able to prove that it can't be done. So I went to visit my buddy Sonny at his lab in Houston, and Sonny starts showing me around his lab. He's telling me about warp drive and UFOs and stuff, and then he's like, well, hey, there's an atomic force microscope in the back.
You want to see it.
So he's very excited to show me this because it's an exotic microscope, but I have one, so I care on the way. So we're like walking over to back Sonny's lab and he's like, oh, this is he gets distracted. He picks up this little circuit board. It's like, this is kind of neat. Sonny has like a Southern drawl that I can't emulate, but he's most delightful, friendly human
you'll ever find. So he shows me the circuit board, hooks up a couple of alligator clips to a meter and there's a current coming off it and all that's on the board is a chip and I'm like, what is it, Sonny. He's like, oh, well, we made that chip and it puts out energy like a battery. I'm like, Sonny, you made a battery that never.
Needs to be charged.
He's like, yeah, we're it just runs forever you have to charge. That's exactly right, Mike, Sonny, what the hell are you doing with warp drive? We need that battery. And so that was a couple of years ago, and we weren't, you know. So he got started working on patents and kind of you know, making different versions of it to try and make it better. And then like a few weeks ago he called me and said, hey, Pablos. So I'm I just did the interview on the Joe Rogan Show.
And I'm like, Sonny, I thought we were keeping this quiet because it's work to do.
And so it was in stealth mode for years, and he said, well, I decided to I decided to go for it, and so I listened to the show and this is the biggest podcast in the world, and so, you know, for two hours, Sonny's talking about warp Drive and UFOs and aliens and all the stuff that Joe Rogan likes. And then he's like, oh, Joe, I made this thing. Look at this and he explains it to Joe. I think it went right over Joe. I don't think he realized a miracle was announced on his podcast because
Sonny buried the lead so deep. So these are you know, he just doesn't have the kind of brain that's like about getting the story out, you know, But it's a but what would you do with a battery that never needs to be charged?
As in, how would one start a company and make sure?
Yeah, if you know, it's a scientist, so you know, all those other pieces have to be figured out, and we try to help people like that out.
Oh that's great, Yeah, you know change the world right, Oh yeah, I agreed. You know, I spent the first part of my career running a lab as a professor, and I ran a lab, and I spent half my time running grants to the government and so on. And then about ten years ago I shifted into being an entrepreneur and I moved at Silicon Valley and I've been starting companies and it is a very different skill set, oh for sure, in terms of taking a good idea and turning it into something.
Yeah, you know, most people wouldn't be good at both. So I think one of the things we are mythology in Silicon Valley is a little screwed up. We think that like a scientist is going to invent something and then become an entrepreneur and then become a patent lawyer and then become a business development guy and sell it and then become a CEO and figure out the HR policy, Like those people are extraordinary and rare.
That doesn't scale.
Like the winning story is actually teams, And so I think one of the things we have to learn very early is figure out how do you build these teams early, compensate for the things that the founder, who might be a scientist or an inventor might suck at, and surround them with all the other things that we figured out how to do well.
Yeah, So returning the issue of creativity.
So you began your career as a hacker, right, Yeah, So tell us about that.
I sort of grew up with one of the first computers you could have at home, which was that this Apple two. I had one of the first couple of thousand Apple two's ever made and with that thing, you know, it wasn't like a computer we know today, like it's just you boot it up or his command line, and
you got to figure out what to do. And I was in Alaska where I grew up, so nobody for like a thousand miles had any idea what a computer was, and no one had seen one, you know, So to learn how to use that thing, I basically just had to like crash it and reboot it.
And it was kind of like a jeep.
You could sort of, you know, made of sheet metal, you could sort of you know, take it apart and you could open up and see the inside and stare at it, and if you stare at it long enough, you can kind of figure out how it works. So that's so I sort of learned the hard way and then and that's not common now because your computer hides all the insides. You know, it's not like a jeep. It's like a tesla or something with a hood wel
that's shot. You can't see how it works. And so you know, by the time I, you know, got to say out of high school or something, I was, you know, I knew a lot about computer's relative to the rest of the world. And so then we started putting people on the Internet, like not just not nerds, but muggles, you know, And so muggle muggles is like a term co opted from Harry Potter to describe what you might call NPCs or you know, just normal people wandering around.
We put these people who are not wizards on the Internet, and they cause problems or they're vulnerable to problems, let's say. And so we try to figure out how to make things more secure. But the way that you do that is by breaking them first. And so what's amazing about hackers is they just have these different kinds of minds. Like we all learn by reverse engineering, we learn by taking things apart.
So like if.
You, you know, if you get a new gadget and give it to your mom, she might ask you what does this do? And you can explain it's a phone, mom, iPhone, says on the box. But if you give a gadget like that to a hacker, then the question is different. The question is what can I make this do? And hackers will flip it over and take out all the screws and break it into a lot of little pieces, but then figure out what you can build from the rubble,
and that's that discovery process. That's where you get all of your new technologies. Nobody ever invented a new technology by reading the directions.
There are none.
It's a logical impossibility. And so those kinds of minds that people who think.
That way are super valuable.
We need them and like you might not want to hire them, but you know, one way or another, we need to party with them and have a relationship with the people who are the source of all of our new superpowers.
So let me do you an analogy here, because I've been thinking about this a lot about whether large language models, the current common flavor of our AI can do scientific discovery. And the reason they're not any good at the moment of real new scientific discovery is because what they are good at doing is taking everything that's come before them and putting it together into ways. And that's got value
in a lot of aspects. But what it doesn't have value in is saying, hey, what if all this is wrong and there's a totally new way to do this. It's the equivalent of taking the thing apart and saying, what can I do that wasn't thought of before?
With these pieces and parts.
And you know, a big part of really making scientific progress is to assume that some fraction of everything you've learned, all the models you've learned before you is incorrect, some fraction and and and there's a different way of doing the whole thing.
And so there's a now parallel here between.
What a hacker question every day for a week, it's going to give you slight variations of the same answer, and that's because by design they have thrown in a random number ten just to make it, you know, feel like it's you know, like more of human, because humans would kind of give you a slightly different answer every day too. And there might be a version of this where you throw enough computation at something then you just say, look,
just try everything. And certainly in a focused domain you can do that, and we do that, you know, that's what we're doing with drug discovery and molecules and protein folding and stuff. And you can't try every possible way a protein can fold without it being very computational expensive. But you know, we add in some heuristics to say, well, probably it's this, and here's a bunch of other ones, so maybe copy those and try one variation at a time,
and we just run every possibility. And so there is a kind of discovery that I think is possible there. I don't know what the bounds on it are, and so I don't want to say like computational models will never do scientific discovery or invention. They might, we might be able to make models that do that. I don't think the lms as we know them are the right kind of model to do that right now, because they are so heavily trained on just what humans did.
What they do is they interpolate. They don't extrapolate.
They don't say, hey, what if, what if all this that I learned that I digested is incorrect and there's a different way of looking at it. And then here's a new idea, and I'm going to simulate that forward and think about, Oh, that would explain the data in a better way.
They're just not architected to do that.
I had in the book have a story about one of my friends who I think of as one of the best living inventors. But his name is Rodney Mullen and Rodney.
The skateboarding the skateboarder.
Yeah, and people he's famous for skateboarding because he invented almost everything you've ever seen a kid do on a skateboard.
That's right.
Rodney grew up in rural Florida, kind of like I grew up in grural Alaska. No computer, just the Apple two. He was in roll Foy. He didn't get appletude. He got a skateboard. And so Rodney was stuck by himself at a time when there was no one around him who's skateboarded. He didn't ever see anybody else do tricks on a skateboard. He had nothing, no one to inspire him.
He just had to figure all this shut out himself, in his driveway, by himself, and so he became the most prolific inventor of things you could do on skateboarding.
You could say skateboarding.
Isn't important, but kind of like country music or something like a lot of people are actually quite inspired about skateboarding, and so Rodney is an inspiration to them. But what's amazing is Rodney will have an idea for a thing that's never been done on a skateboard. He'll spend a year just trying to make it work. He'll get it. YouTube video goes up two weeks later. Kids in Kazakh stand are doing better than him. Yeah, that's the moment
of creation. The word creativity. You create something. The world didn't have it before you created something. And even if it's just a skateboard trick, that's creativity. And you could see it in Jimi Hendrix. You could see it, and you know, I don't know, like Jonah Salk, you could see it in these people. And I think that we need to find a way to have a better, more mature relationship with that. Celebrate that search for these people, you know, support them, help them. I mean, what happened
to we used to have patrons for artists. Oh yeah, you know, like like like let's just like send Doc Brown ten bucks a month on Patreon. I guess that's what patreons were, their inventors on Patreon. Like that seems like something we should try anyway.
No, that's a really it's a really good point because one can write grants off to the government and so on, but there there are a very limited number of people looking for inventors to fund them.
Yeah, and you could. It's not a it's not a binary thing.
I mean, there's obviously a lot of invention at the borders of science. There's obviously lot a lot of invention and engineering and products and companies and stuff.
A lot as you know.
Very very iterative, and it is important. You know, if you're at He'll at Packard, you're probably going to figure out how to make like a better inkjet printer that's like one percent better every year.
And that's really important and cool, and that's how.
We got to where we are. But where's the guy who's inventing what comes after inkjet? He's not He'll at Packard. But you get the idea, right, there's a there's a there's something better out there.
And so you know, we've been.
Fortunate to be attracting some of these inventors and you know guys like honey.
Oh that's great.
You know.
One of the things that is always fascinating me is the spread of invention. So Rodney Mullen comes up with some new skateboarding technique, the kids in kazakh Standard doing it two weeks later because.
Of one thing. The Internet.
The Internet, I think is the most important event we've ever had as a species, in large part because it allows the instant and global dissemination of information. The reason that Edward Jenner was the eighth person to invent vaccination. This was invented in India, it was invented in Africa and in different places. But there was no way to disseminate the information. That's why it had to be reinvented
the way. The way I picture this is like totally the globe and there's some fire that starts where people know this thing, and then the fire.
Dies out because there's no way to catch that information.
Of a lot of historical examples of that, I think Edward Jenner's actual innovation was that he had a way which the others didn't. He had a way of testing and proving the correlation and making it repeatable, which other people had. Other people had used smallpox to vaccinate against smallpox, which was very dangerous.
He's the one that.
Figured out how to use cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox.
So but anyway, he was.
Also growing up in a culture in England where where there was a royal academy and people wrote down things, and they got presentations on these things, and then they made sure that other people.
And the output of that was staggering, partly because you know, so much was available to discover at the time. But if you look at what's the scale of the Royal Academy. I mean it was probably like, you know, a few hundred people involved over the course of you know, decades. It's not actually like we have you know, I don't know you could have like a soccer team that was had more people involved in high school. You know, like it's just so yeah, I mean, great time to be alive.
I think as far as scientific discovery, because you know, nobody had written anything down before you. But now now we have the compound interest of the entry the way you describe.
Yeah, exactly, and we have the compound interest of all the inventions that have come before.
So now invention is going faster than ever.
Also, you have so much more of the planet getting an education than ever before. So instead of one hundred guys sitting around that have boys and girls all over the world, Yeah, working on things and watching YouTube video and putting that together with this and that and putting things together and inventing.
And what's wild about it is, you know the things I'm talking about, these inventions, you typically don't see them in iPhone apps.
Yeah.
You know, if you look at if you look at the world we live in, we think We have this huge tech industry that's supposed to be bringing these inventions to life, but what are they doing. They're bringing iPhone apps, there are software do have tech industry? We have software industry. And so we live in this world where even though we've accelerated on scientific research and discovery, we've accelerated on invention in spite of you know, my complaints about the support.
But what we really did is we indexed on entrepreneurs and we support them, we fund them, we celebrate them, Like whose YouTube video gets all the views? The guy who made the most money, right, it's not the guy who made the biggest difference.
And so there's this.
Weird situation where our big tech industry is supposed to be helping us bring these inventions to life, is distracted. They're making you know, zoom and Slack and snapchat, and those things might be amazing, but what technology did Airbnb invent? You know, what new superpower did Instagram bring to the world? You know, it's it's an app for sharing photos instead of like text and photos.
You know, amazing.
You know, So I think there's this this we're in this moment now where a lot of the easy shit's been done. Like everything you know we made it had to reinvent everything is a website and then reinvented as a mobile app. Now I have to reinvent it his ai. But basically it's just apply software everything. But when you look at the big problem in the world food, water, waste, sanitation, construction, energy, and manufacturing, those are not things you're going to improve
with software. I mean, you could improve them a little bit one or two percent, you're not going to reinvent them. You're going to make them ten times better with software. Mining, you know, these are things that require real inventions, real technologies that could make the world massively better. And you're going to get that from the creative people who invent those ten x or one hundred x multipliers.
So that's what you look for. You look for them.
We call that deep tech.
Deep tech. You look for that, and so give us some other examples of things you've found.
So like in mining, that's one where you know, in the US we basically outlawed mining because we want to save the world, and mining involves a lot of nasty emissions. You have to you basically take a bunch of rock and burn it and.
Hope you get some metal and then you just to create insane emissions.
So that's in a smelter. We we outlawed smelters. So now we take the rock that we mine and we ship it to other countries and they run it through a smelter and to get the metal out and then.
Send it back to us.
So we haven't exactly solved a problem, but we definitely got out of our backyard. So March nineteenth, I've found this little team that invented a way of doing zero emissions refining for metals like copper. We need copper for everything, but we don't mine it here because we're not allowed to, and so this team can refine copper kind of the way we refine aluminum. It's mostly electricity, so you could
power that with a solar farm or something clean. And so that was on March nineteenth, and on March twentieth, the President signed an executive order to free up mining in this country, which is very important because we have all the medals you could need for hundreds of years in this country, all those rarest medals.
What are we doing.
We're engaged in geopolitical machinations to get them from Ukraine or China or places that really don't want to give them to us.
Instead we could remind them here.
And I think it's a very important example because, like on something like that, you would want we should be setting an example for the rest of the world. If we're the country that's good at doing new things, and we are, then we should figure out, okay, smelter suck,
what's the best way to refine metal. We're going to prototype that, we're going to build that, We're going to deplay first, We're going to show that it's actually five times cheaper to build, ten times cheaper to operate, and then the rest of the world can copy that instead of copying what we did a century ago. So we need to set an example on these things that if we want to have a big impact on saving the world. And I think that's what's possible with a lot of these technologies.
Excellent, how does it actually work?
There?
Give us this per.
Called molten sulfide electrolysis.
And so if you look at like just to keep a simple like aluminum for example, is a mostly made electricity. You know your popca are as metal, but it's mostly electricity. Is what is involved in making aluminium? And with a smelter, you just burn coal or you burn gas to heat, get a lot of heat to essentially melter burn rock.
That's how smelter works.
So with the electrolysis, what's happening is used in an electrochemical process to separate the metals from the rock and you can get much better yields this way. Now, so yeah, it's the early stages. So we have things like that. There's I mean, we have a nuclear reactor. That's one
of our teams invented a nuclear reactor. I mean, I found these inventors that figured out that they could make a nuclear reactor that will fit through a manhole and it just uses all existing technology, no crazy new you know, gen fore reactor technology, just regular reactor. But it's this big around and they bury it a mile deep in a borehole. So there's the thing is unquestionably safe. There's ten billion tons of rock between the reactor and anyone's
backyard and nothing could go wrong. But if it did, there'd be no radioactivity at the surface. Just fill a hole with dirt and forget about it. Yeah, okay, And we can make them in a factory like toyotas, like we can make thousands of them. You know, all of our reactors that we have in this country are like bespoke art projects. They're like Frank Geary buildings. They build one of one. Yeah, and these things, you know, don't like anything else. The first one is always expensive. So
we did ninety two number one reactors. None of them have any interchangeable parts. They all have their own engineering team. It's crazy. So let's build them in a factory like the toyotas. They're not even more complicated than a Toyota. They're not bigger than a Toyota. Anyway, that's the kind of stuff that's possible.
Oh that's a good one. What else, what?
Well, man, we got a team putting taking So the problem with like solar panels. We have solar farms we've been building, but they suck for two big reasons, clouds and nighttime. So the relentless onslaught of night has been screwing with our solar panels.
We have no idea what to do about it.
But I get this team that figured out they can take the solar farm and just put on a rocket lunch into space. Oh, so a solar farm in space will get sun twenty four hours a day. It looks like nighttime because we just have a bad angle on it. Space is actually noon all the time. So a solar farm in space will get sun twenty four hours a day all year long, and then it can beam the energy down to Earth using radio waves. They go right
through clouds and it sounds crazy. I know, it sounds like science fiction, but we have all the tech to do this. It's not even that hard. The only real problem was launch cost and launch cost, Like in a space shuttle, it would have cost forty thousand dollars to put your iPad in space. Now thanks to SpaceX is down to fifteen hundred. Their target for starship is ten ten dollars. Yeah, it'll be cheaper to store your old sports ball equipment in space than your garage before the end of the decade.
Like that's where we're at.
I know it sounds crazy, but that's why something like space solar is possible.
Oh that's terrific.
Yeah, what fraction of our energy do you think we'll get from space solar in a decade from there?
So it's one of these things where you get et Connie's to scale very quickly, so you know, solar panels. You've already scaled up manufacturing those. That's very cheap. They're light, they're flat. You can put a lot of them in a starship. I think we could get something like one hundred and fifty megawatts out of a single starship launch. So imagine do that a couple of times a week, and everyone you put up pays for itself, immediately serving the biggest market on Earth. You beam power to the
poles or to the middle of Africa. You don't need storage, you don't need transmission lines, and so it's just clean energy that goes everywhere.
Oh it's beautiful, it is.
Yeah, and so I want to do taro watts, but yeah, it's wild to'll launch enough panels to do that. But you know, it's called space for a reason, Like there's totally room for huge solar farms space.
And give us another example.
So one I love that is actually not even that high tech, but it's just genius. Is I got this team that is making cargo ships that sail themselves, so no crew, no fuel, no emissions, it's not even that high tech. You duct tape a Tesla to the front of the ship and it drives itself across the ocean. There's nothing to hit out there. It's easier than self driving cars. And then there's like one documented pedestrian and all of human history. So we're just gonna make that.
And the sailing part has been working for centuries. That's how people got to this country in the first place. But now to get happy meal toys from China to Los Angeles, we're burning this nasty bunk oil. People don't realize it, but cargo ships have two guess tanks. One is burning refined fuel like your car that it doesn't burn clean, but it burns invisibly. And then the other, as soon as they get off over the horizon out of sight, they switch to burning bunker oil, which is
the cheapest crap you can get. It's basically optimized for carbon emissions and it's just black smoke. You never see it because they don't do it until they're out of sight. Yeah, so that's an industry where.
But how does self navigating solve that problem?
Well, because there's two classes of issues. One is you don't need fuel because of the sailing, because oh it's sailing, got it, Yeah, right, there's no fuel cost. We don't burn anything. Five out of six dollars in the shipping industry is burned as fuel. We just do the self sailing with the with the automation because we can. I mean, you know, you could put a guy and they're steering it if you want, but you don't need them.
I see.
But let me just let me just make sure I got this straight. So you literally mean a tesla.
I'm not literally Okay, we have self driving tech that's good enough that you could put it on a ship, got it, So let me understand.
So you got to ship a sail boat.
Okay, And and it self navigates and burns no fuel that way, And can I assume that it's taking wind data from a much larger area.
Than it really have access to, really good at that?
Amazing Yeah, And and you know it has batteries for back up and to get out of it, and you need dead zones because you don't want to get stuck in the middle of the ocean for a week. And it has batteries for docking, so you do that with electric. But but mostly it's sailing, and that's like a really smart thing to do with wind power. It's right where you need it. It's mechanical energy, which is what you need.
That's something that could make a huge difference. It's a huge amount of CO two emissions gone, it's a huge amount of expense gone. You know, half of if you look up the ships on the ocean right now, half of them are just moving fuel around. Half of the ships on the ocean are moving gas and oil around.
It's all they're doing. It's insanity and we could do so much better.
Yeah, give us another one company.
So here's one that we just announced today. No one has ever heard about this. So if you are in an airplane, a jet, you burn the gas, it expands really fast, creates you know, there's a lot of heat, but it's mainly the expansion goes into it what it's called a turbofan, which is a jet engine to make thrust to push the plane.
Okay, you got that.
So for a long time people have been trying to figure out how do you is there a way to make thrust just from electricity, And there have been different ideas for this, different names for it.
One of my favorite names is electro gravitics. That was one of the early names.
And then now like MIT worked on a little while ago they called the ionic wind. And so the idea is you're basically making a kind of an electrostatic generator to charge ions to get them moving, and then get enough of a moving that you know you're moving air. And people have done this, but you can only get just like a faint amount of They could barely get a paper airplane to fly this way. But the phenomenon
wasn't well understood. Nobody was really sure what was how it was working, and so they weren't able to optimize it to make it work.
Well, well, I got this team that figured it out.
And so now they can. They made they could, They've made a drone they have all pre working that can fly. It has no moving parts, it's all electric, it's completely silent, and it just flies. Their breakthrough as they've figured out how to get accelerate the air going through it. Everybody else was only able to get it like every time they made a stage to accelerate the air, that had to make that stage like bigger and bigger and bigger. So we've solved that, so now we can make multiple stages.
We can get that thrust going boom, so silent, all electric. I mean, drones are all electric anyway, but silent drones and no moving parts and eventually airplanes same thing. They're getting thrust the.
Early stages, so.
They have to build more prototypes, but basically they're able to do thrust that's equivalent to a turbo fan.
They'll get there and it'll be totally silent.
Yeah, I have a silent airplane.
Oh my god. What's the name of this company.
That's called Daion.
Yes, yeah, Literally, this is the very first time I've ever talked about it until they just got their patent today and told me, and so I just put it on our website today, first time ever.
So so you're here's the personal question. So you're really interested in all these inventions and so on. So what got you onto the business side of this as opposed to being an inventor yourself.
Well, I got I got to do a lot of the things that these people need to do, the inventors and the entrepreneurs. You know, I got to invent a lot of things, got to start a lot of companies. I got to you know, go through the experience of having them be decimated. I've gotten to you know, raise money for them. I've had to do hire people and fire people. I just had to do all those things. And then for an inventor, like one of the things I went through was this, you always are trying to
get access to tools. You're always trying to figure out, like where do I get the tools to try this idea and get the money and stuff. And then eventually I started the Intellectual Ventures Lab with Nathan Mirvold, and we one of the things we did we just bought one of every.
Tool in the world, and.
So then I kind of got it out of my and then we worked on every kind of invention project. We got six thousand patents on our own inventions there, so it was a very large scale invention operation. But because I had every tool, I could build a protype
anything I wanted. And I pretty quickly learned that, like there's always somebody better than me at operating the tool, and so like I want to understand them and what they can do and how to do it, but I always learned, somebody's better than me at this, so let's get them on the job. And so once I, you know, that kind of changed my working mode to where like I you know, I did almost everything via email, just like can you build this can you print this?
Can you design that?
And then I think, you know, so that's a pretty weird experience, Like I kind of just got it out of my system. If I wanted to invent anything, I got to do it already. And I and then you also, you know, like we built a big team of inventors and we turned invention into kind of it team sport. And now i'd do is I try to help other inventors because they have better inventions than me anyway at this point, and so find.
Them So so tell us more about invention as a team sport.
Yeah, that was one of the really great things we got to do at that lab. So you know, Nathan had built Microsoft Research before he was CTO at Microsoft back in their heyday, and you know, at Microsoft Research, he hired a lot of smart people and met all the other smart people that he couldn't hire. So when we started the lab, he was able to just round up a lot of the you know, really prolific inventors, polymaths, people who you know, had a high probability of being
useful in invention. And then what we did is we'd have these like invention sessions where we'd find somebody with a problem and sit them down, surround them with a nuclear physicist, a laser expert, a chemist, computer hacker. You know, collectively we know the cutting edge and every area in
science and technology. Between us, we're probably reading every paper that comes out or you know, something like that, learning about every new algorithm, every new sensor, every new chip, things that could help you out with the output of research, you know, the output of science. And we would just take that and kind of ask ourselves, well, does this change anything humans have ever done? Can we do it faster, cheap, or better, maybe in a more humane fashion. Those are
the kinds of questions we'd be asking. There's like a Rubik's cube in your brain, just matching up problems to to the to the technologies.
And so that's invention. And in the invention sessions.
The person with the problem is very important because we would invent stuff no matter what, lots of useless stuff. But if the other person with a problem to kind of focus everybody, then what you would do is, you know, find inventions at the borders. You know, a lot of times the invention, like our most famous invention is a
machine that can find mosquitoes and shoot them down. With laser beams and people love it because everyone hates mosquitoes, and so we did it as like a you know, we had actually in that case, Bill Gates was the guy with the problem because he brought us malaria to work on. So we're trying to find malaria interventions in the malarias spread by the mosquitos.
So we thought, okay, well maybe we could.
We were just joking around because you always try lasers first because the lasers are cool, So every invention starts with lasers, and if that doesn't work, then you try something else.
But you know, we're, oh, here we can use lasers.
Awesome, And so the thing what happened is we were just joking about it, but one of the inventors in the room, Loull, would he's actually the has more patents than Thomas Edison, is the record for in America for pattents.
Loull prolific inventor.
But lull Hood worked on UH Star Wars for Reagan, which was and the idea with that was to have giant lasers in space that would shoot down missiles, you know, right, so these missiles you see on YouTube right now, we could actually well, at least the intercontinental ones.
You could shoot them down with a laser.
And that sounds crazy, but we spent like fifty billion dollars on this back in the eighties, and Lowell said, you know, we already proved this would work. And the mosquito is a bigger, easier target in this context than a missile would be from space, right, because the missiles are much further and laser here we have a smaller laser, but the mosquitos are only in one hundred meters away
or is less. And so anyway, even an invention like that, you had to have like people kind of on the border of machine vision, because this is this is fifteen years ago now, but at the times like well, using motion detection algorithms, could we find the mosquito in real time and aim a laser in real time? And then we had the like kind of right people for lasers and machine vision, So you could come up with inventions that often were at the borders of different areas and
science and technology. That way, this process, I contend is totally repeatable, like other organizations could do it, other people could do it. You know, Yeah, we cheated by getting the smartest people we could find, but you know, get the smartest people you can find and try it, like like, that's totally possible.
And what were the things that worked When you've got the nuclear physicist and the computer hacker and everyone in the room, how do you do the interactions so that everyone's not flipping their own rooms cube, but they're flipping a community room recube.
So our first rule.
So a lot of people in brainstorming mode would say, there's no bad ideas, let's get them all out there. Ours was a little different. Ours was, there are definitely bad ideas, and if you think my idea is bad, you should totally shoot it down.
But you got to come up with once better. So it was and look, this doesn't work for everybody.
When you're in a context like that, your north star is what's technically true. So feelings don't matter. It's about what's true, and we're all trying to find the truth. So if I say something it sounds like bullshit and you think, no, you're full of shit. You could tell me I'm full of shit, but then tell me, like, what's actually true? Do you have better data or newer data, or is there some reason why you think that, or do you know something I don't know. All that's totally fine.
So nobody takes it personally. That's very honest, intellectual discourse. And I love that. I mean people, I think most people don't understand what that would be like. But when you're able to be collaborating with people where you don't have to sugarcoat things, worry about their feelings, dumb things down, simplify things, any of that is just we're trying to find what's true, then it takes the personal aspect out
of it. You know, I have to shout down Bill Gates sometimes, you know, yeah, And so you know it doesn't work for psycho fans or people who are you know, worried about how what people think of them?
Right, So, how would you see replicating this more widely getting this sort of thing set up? Could you implement this in schools you have invention clubs where people sit around and take on problems.
Need that would love? That would be awesome?
Yeeah, I don't know. I mean, I think we were very fortunate in that we had the you know, the the mindset to do that, the will to do it, the resources to do it. You know, Bill Gates funded a lot of our humanitarian projects, all the stuff with malaria and disease eradication and other things as well, and energy and different things. So we're lucky to have that kind of support. What I found is, most of the time the incentive structure and other organizations doesn't lend itself
to invention. And here's why. I can actually explain that too. If you are a successful institution of any type that could be a business or university, or just the healthcare system or a government, part of what happens is as it evolves and is successful, it evolves an immune system. And the immune system's job is to suppress risk. And what looks like risk is change. And so this is one of the big reasons why you don't see innovation
in bigger, older, more successful institutions of any kind. It's because anything that looks like change, we have a system to squash it or keep it out or you know, slow it down whatever. And so that's why like Silicon Valley is thousands of million dollar experiments. That's what startups are, and that's why we we were cool with them dying right, We're really cool with them dying fast. Would much rather
kill these things fast. So a startups job is to try out, really you know, a new idea, hopefully a new invention. If you're working on a cool startup, there's a new invention, the new invention, or a new idea or a new product. We want to find out real quick if we can make this successful, and we're going to be competing against all the other people are trying to make something else successful, and we want to find those winners.
And then we find the winners.
Solici Velli got real good and just pouring fuel on the fire, and you can see that it just seems crazy to everyone else in the world. But when we find a winner, then we try to take it global as fast as we can and win the value out of it so we can make enough money to go fund a bunch more things that aren't gonna work.
That was my interview with Pablos Holman, and that gives us a glimpse into the frontier of deep tech and the people who are building it and one investor who's made it his mission to support them. Every time I speak with someone like Pablos, I walk away feeling that the future is closer than we think, and also with a sense of how easy it is to miss it because invention doesn't announce itself in pitch decks or quarterly reports.
Sometimes it looks like a piece of circuit board and a back lab, and unless people are really listening, ideas can go unnoticed, just like the way that inoculation was invented over and over again before it took root. So one lesson from today is that inventing is not the same as running a business or engineering or scaling. Invention is the rare act of using the prefroederal cortex to imagine a world that didn't exist five minutes ago, and
then bending reality to bring that into being. We also learned that this kind of thinking doesn't usually emerge inside institutions that are optimized for predictability and control. As publists put it, institutions develop immune systems against change, against risk, against anything that smells like uncertainty, which unfortunately includes just about every great idea in its early days.
That's why so.
Many of the stories we heard today have a similar theme. Breakthroughs buried in obscurity. A silent electric propulsion system, a nuclear reactor the size of a trash can, a self sailing cargo ship, a space based solar farm, a battery that might never need charging. A lot of inventions like this exist, but they have to wait for attention and belief and funding. And we're probably not going to solve our global scale problems like energy and water and food
and climate transportation with branding or software tweaks. We're going to solve them with hard technology and with brave experiments. And that means we need to get better at finding and funding and supporting inventors, not just business types. And that probably means we're going to need to change the culture a little bit. It would be great to teach kids that inventor is a real job title. We need to create more spaces where creative risk taking is safe
and even celebrated. We need to stop culturally pretending that invention is just science and a lab or engineering in a workshop up because invention is curiosity and it's often a mess, but it's also the source of almost everything that we value. And this is our moment to make cultural change, because there are more people with ideas today than at any other point in human history. So I'll
leave you with this challenge. Be an inventor big or small, because invention is for anyone who's willing to ask what if, or just be a supporter or encourager of the inventors around you. The future never comes from more of the same. It comes from the minds that take advantage of these incredible inherited neural.
Networks to look at the world not as it is, but as it could be.
Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substance and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.