Ep113 "What's special about inventors?" (with Pablos Holman)

Why do some people jump into entirely new categories of possibility? And what does this have to do with self-driving ships, solar panels in space, shooting mosquitoes with lasers, skateboarding tricks, silent drones, and our future as a species? Join Eagleman with guest Pablos Holman, a venture capitalist, author, and connoisseur of invention.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
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

(00:29):
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

(00:58):
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.

(01:21):
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

(01:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
And this is what allows us to step outside.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
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

(02:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
It could be.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
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

(03:13):
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

(03:36):
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,

(04:00):
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

(04:23):
the tools around us, but instead the.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
People who leap into entirely new categories of possibility.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
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

(04:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Here's our conversation.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
So if you think about the creative classes of people,
you know, how many like I don't know musicians?

Speaker 4 (05:19):
Can you name.

Speaker 5 (05:21):
Dozens like it loves without even actors, dozens painters? How
about inventors that aren't dead? Yeah, I can name about five, maybe.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
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.

Speaker 4 (05:47):
And so there's this kind of weird gap in the world.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
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

(06:11):
without the next Beyonce album. But if it wasn't for inventors,
you wouldn't be alive at all.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Generally that would include biologists making discoveries.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
Sure, yeah, maybe, okay, right.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
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

(06:45):
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

(07:06):
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

(07:29):
think it's like kind of important to step back and recognize, like, wow,
this is our most important creative class.

Speaker 4 (07:37):
They don't have a place in society.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
So let me step back to something you said.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
I'm curious what you were thinking of when you said,
we wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for inventors.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Give me an example of what you're talking about there.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
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,

(08:09):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:17):
I might even be here if it wasn't for that
type of it.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
They never got smallpox.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
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

(09:19):
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.

Speaker 4 (09:32):
Out all they need is oranges.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
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.

(09:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
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

(10:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:49):
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

(11:11):
at doing something than the inventor, but does it completely
different thing than figuring out what's possible the very first time.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
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.

(11:53):
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?

Speaker 4 (12:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
It's pretty sad. You think, you think artists. Starving artists
have a hard time. Starving inventors have an even worse time.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
So give us some examples of some really cool inventions
that you're seeing currently.

Speaker 4 (12:33):
One comes to mind.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
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.

Speaker 4 (12:47):
Nobody thinks we're ever really going.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
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,

(13:10):
there's an atomic force microscope in the back.

Speaker 4 (13:13):
You want to see it.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
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

(13:34):
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.

Speaker 4 (13:55):
Needs to be charged.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
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.

(14:19):
So I'm I just did the interview on the Joe
Rogan Show.

Speaker 4 (14:23):
And I'm like, Sonny, I thought we were keeping this
quiet because it's work to do.

Speaker 3 (14:27):
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

(14:48):
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?

Speaker 2 (15:07):
As in, how would one start a company and make sure?

Speaker 3 (15:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
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,

(15:39):
oh for sure, in terms of taking a good idea
and turning it into something.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
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.

Speaker 4 (16:06):
That doesn't scale.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah, So returning the issue of creativity.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
So you began your career as a hacker, right, Yeah,
So tell us about that.

Speaker 3 (16:37):
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

(16:57):
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.

Speaker 4 (17:14):
And it was kind of like a jeep.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
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

(17:36):
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

(18:00):
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

(18:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (18:34):
So like if.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
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

(18:55):
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.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
There are none.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
It's a logical impossibility. And so those kinds of minds
that people who think.

Speaker 4 (19:23):
That way are super valuable.

Speaker 3 (19:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
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

(20:15):
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?

Speaker 2 (20:27):
With these pieces and parts.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
And so there's a now parallel here between.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
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

(21:08):
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

(21:29):
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

(21:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
What they do is they interpolate. They don't extrapolate.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
They're just not architected to do that.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
The skateboarding the skateboarder.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
Yeah, and people he's famous for skateboarding because he invented
almost everything you've ever seen a kid do on a skateboard.

Speaker 2 (22:51):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (22:52):
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

(23:13):
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.

Speaker 4 (23:26):
You could say skateboarding.

Speaker 3 (23:28):
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.

(23:51):
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

(24:11):
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,

(24:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
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.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
Yeah, and you could. It's not a it's not a
binary thing.

Speaker 3 (25:03):
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.

Speaker 4 (25:12):
A lot as you know.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
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.

Speaker 4 (25:25):
And that's really important and cool, and that's how.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
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.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
And so you know, we've been.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Fortunate to be attracting some of these inventors and you
know guys like honey.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Oh that's great.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
You know.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Of one thing. The Internet.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
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

(26:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
Dies out because there's no way to catch that information.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
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,

(26:59):
which was very dangerous.

Speaker 4 (27:01):
He's the one that.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Figured out how to use cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox.

Speaker 4 (27:05):
So but anyway, he was.

Speaker 1 (27:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
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

(27:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Yeah, exactly, and we have the compound interest of all
the inventions that have come before.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
So now invention is going faster than ever.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
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

(28:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (29:14):
And so there's this.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
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

(29:39):
of like text and photos.

Speaker 4 (29:40):
You know, amazing.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
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,

(30:06):
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

(30:26):
going to get that from the creative people who invent
those ten x or one hundred x multipliers.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
So that's what you look for. You look for them.

Speaker 4 (30:34):
We call that deep tech.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
Deep tech. You look for that, and so give us
some other examples of things you've found.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
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.

Speaker 4 (30:52):
Hope you get some metal and then you just to
create insane emissions.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
Send it back to us.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
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,

(31:31):
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

(31:51):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:00):
What are we doing.

Speaker 3 (32:00):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
Instead we could remind them here.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
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

(32:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
Excellent, how does it actually work?

Speaker 5 (32:48):
There?

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Give us this per.

Speaker 4 (32:49):
Called molten sulfide electrolysis.

Speaker 3 (32:52):
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.

Speaker 4 (33:15):
That's how smelter works.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
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

(33:36):
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

(33:57):
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

(34:17):
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

(34:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Oh that's a good one. What else, what?

Speaker 3 (34:53):
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.

Speaker 4 (35:10):
We have no idea what to do about it.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
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

(35:33):
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

(35:54):
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.

Speaker 4 (36:11):
Like that's where we're at.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
I know it sounds crazy, but that's why something like
space solar is possible.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Oh that's terrific.

Speaker 6 (36:18):
Yeah, what fraction of our energy do you think we'll

(36:38):
get from space solar in a decade from there?

Speaker 3 (36:41):
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,

(37:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Oh it's beautiful, it is.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
And give us another example.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
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.

(37:56):
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

(38:19):
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

(38:42):
it because they don't do it until they're out of sight. Yeah,
so that's an industry where.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
But how does self navigating solve that problem?

Speaker 3 (38:51):
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,

(39:11):
you know, you could put a guy and they're steering
it if you want, but you don't need them.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
I see.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
But let me just let me just make sure I
got this straight. So you literally mean a tesla.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
So you got to ship a sail boat.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
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.

Speaker 4 (39:42):
Than it really have access to, really good at that?

Speaker 3 (39:45):
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.

(40:08):
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.

Speaker 4 (40:27):
It's all they're doing. It's insanity and we could do
so much better.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, give us another one company.

Speaker 3 (40:35):
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

(40:56):
called a turbofan, which is a jet engine to make
thrust to push the plane.

Speaker 4 (41:01):
Okay, you got that.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (41:15):
One of my favorite names is electro gravitics. That was
one of the early names.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
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

(41:40):
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.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
Well, well, I got this team that figured it out.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
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

(42:16):
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

(42:39):
getting thrust the.

Speaker 4 (42:43):
Early stages, so.

Speaker 3 (42:43):
They have to build more prototypes, but basically they're able
to do thrust that's equivalent to a turbo fan.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
They'll get there and it'll be totally silent.

Speaker 4 (42:53):
Yeah, I have a silent airplane.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Oh my god. What's the name of this company.

Speaker 4 (42:57):
That's called Daion.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
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

(43:42):
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

(44:03):
we one of the things we did we just bought
one of every.

Speaker 4 (44:06):
Tool in the world, and.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
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

(44:29):
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?

Speaker 4 (44:43):
Can you design that?

Speaker 3 (44:44):
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

(45:05):
this point, and so find.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Them So so tell us more about invention as a
team sport.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
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

(45:32):
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,

(45:56):
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

(46:17):
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.

Speaker 4 (46:31):
And so that's invention. And in the invention sessions.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
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

(46:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (47:15):
So we thought, okay, well maybe we could.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
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.

Speaker 4 (47:26):
But you know, we're, oh, here we can use lasers.

Speaker 3 (47:28):
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.

Speaker 4 (47:43):
Loull prolific inventor.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
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.

Speaker 4 (48:02):
You could shoot them down with a laser.

Speaker 3 (48:05):
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,

(48:26):
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

(48:47):
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

(49:08):
the smartest people you can find and try it, like like,
that's totally possible.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
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.

Speaker 4 (49:23):
So our first rule.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
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.

Speaker 4 (49:40):
But you got to come up with once better. So
it was and look, this doesn't work for everybody.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
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,

(50:08):
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,

(50:30):
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?

Speaker 1 (50:47):
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.

Speaker 4 (50:59):
Need that would love? That would be awesome?

Speaker 3 (51:01):
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

(51:22):
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

(51:47):
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

(52:11):
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,

(52:33):
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

(52:55):
to be competing against all the other people are trying
to make something else successful, and we want to find
those winners.

Speaker 4 (52:59):
And then we find the winners.

Speaker 3 (53:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (53:23):
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

(53:45):
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

(54:07):
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

(54:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
That's why so.

Speaker 1 (54:49):
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

(55:11):
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

(55:32):
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

(55:56):
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

(56:19):
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

(56:41):
incredible inherited neural.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Networks to look at the world not as it is,
but as it could be.

Speaker 1 (56:52):
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.