In Moderation
Providing health, nutrition and fitness advice in moderate amounts to help you live your best life.
Rob: Co-host of the podcast "In Moderation" and fitness enthusiast. Rob has a background in exercise science and is passionate about helping others achieve their health and fitness goals. He brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the show, providing valuable insights on topics such as calories, metabolism, and weight loss.
Liam: Co-host of the podcast "In Moderation" and new father. Liam has a background in nutrition and is dedicated to promoting a balanced and sustainable approach to health and wellness. With his witty and sarcastic style, Liam adds a unique flavor to the show, making it both informative and entertaining.
In Moderation
The Science Behind Everything: From Phlogiston to AI with Chem Thug
Have you ever wondered how we figured out the most basic principles of our world? Prepare for a mind-bending journey through humanity's scientific awakening as we explore the bizarre, often accidental path of discovery that brought us from magical thinking to modern science.
In this captivating discussion, we unravel how early scientists believed burning objects released a mysterious substance with negative mass called "phlogiston," and how doctors once diagnosed diabetes by tasting patients' urine. We laugh about the accidental discoveries that changed history—like the artificial sweeteners found when scientists forgot to wash their hands before eating lunch or smoking cigarettes.
The conversation takes fascinating turns through Jan-Baptiste Van Helmont's famous willow tree experiment, the evolution of medicine from willow bark to aspirin, and how public education transformed our collective understanding of the natural world. Throughout, we reflect on how much of scientific progress came through persistence, experimentation, and sometimes sheer luck rather than the orderly process many imagine.
As we pivot to examine artificial intelligence's potential to revolutionize discovery, we confront challenging questions about who benefits from technological advancement. Will AI solve humanity's biggest problems or simply widen existing inequalities? The tension between capitalism and scientific progress emerges as we consider whether innovation can truly flourish when profit is the primary motivator.
Whether you're fascinated by the history of science, curious about chemistry's strangest stories, or concerned about our technological future, this episode will transform how you think about human knowledge. Subscribe now and join the conversation about how we came to understand our world—and where we might go next.
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But you know, like, yeah, this like whole idea of this theory of phlogiston, right, and how things burn, right. So, like I said, you know, the idea was that like, oh, okay, well, when I burn something, like, say, if you take a piece of charcoal, right, you light it on fire, you grill, you burn it, like if you weighed it before, if you took the weight of the charcoal beforehand, and so it was like 100 grams, if you weigh it afterwards you're going to have I'm pretty sure the mass is going to go down a little bit at least, because you're going to lose particulate and the like. But, like, things tend to lose weight when you burn them, right. So where does the candle go, right? But metals metals are a little different because they combine with the oxygen but most of the material kind of stays there. It doesn't leave as carbon dioxide or anything like that which is part of it. We didn't quite get the whole carbon dioxide thing yet.
Speaker 1:So the solution to how to make all of this work is the idea that this phlogiston stuff is in things and when you burn it they lose this mass, except metals, which get heavier. This must mean that phlogiston, whatever it is, has negative mass. I'm just like, wait a minute. So phlogiston is dark matter, has negative mass. I'm just like, wait a minute, so phlogiston is dark matter. Like, how do you? I don't, I don't. Thankfully, we figured out how this actually works, but that's how we thought burning worked up until like the 1700s. Wow, yeah, and think about how long it all, think about how much of our history we've spent burning things for the purpose of making other things.
Speaker 2:I just assumed we always thought it was black magic and didn't look into it at all. We were just like that's sorcery.
Speaker 1:Nah, like yo dog, like for real, bro. Like the advent of public education has been like a ridiculous game changer for humanity overall. Right, Like the fact that, like because you're right, a lot of people were just like yo, it's sorcery, like this is god. It wasn't that long for no dead ass like, yeah, right, long ago that people were like yo. Insects just arise, fully formed out of the dirt. That's just where they come from. Maggots just form and meat that's been out too long. Like somebody had to do an experiment. But but yo, like, because now everybody's like, oh yeah, the fire triangle burning, that's how it works. It's like yo, no, no, no, no, I don't think you understand.
Speaker 1:So this was like knowledge reserved for, like, the monks. You know what I mean. Like this was not publicly unknown things, but it, yo, it, it. It is wildly amusing to me. There's just that as an example of like, just like, how much stuff we just did not know, we, we still don't know, but definitely definitely just like, made it. Just like stumbling through history, just like dodging, you know not even good word for it not even dodging.
Speaker 1:Like you know, like just so many people just probably died from, just like you know, just like not washing their hands or just like not knowing that you couldn't combine certain things because, like I don't know if either y'all saw the video I didn't know sulfuric acid, but like we had sulfuric acid as like a substance for years and it was just like people at a certain point people were just like yo, this stuff is great, let's just put it on everything like it was a.
Speaker 2:Frank's red hot?
Speaker 1:I'm not even joking on everything you know, and I mean we did, though we, we really kind of did dog Like that video was only 20 minutes long. It could have easily been an hour If I just like listed all the actual uses that we've had for sulfuric acid. Like I started finding other ones after I finished the video. I was like wait, what? Like just like random industrial uses, like what was it in a? In a I didn't mention it much, but like in like leather tanning, apparently dilute sulfuric acid solutions would get used for something. Or like with dyes I didn't really talk about this at all, but, like, in order to make certain, in order to make like dyes and pigments dissolve actually in the water that you're using to dye the cloth, you sometimes need to add a little acid in order to make, in order to change them into like a protonated salt situation, kind of like you know if you were to like, you know if you were to take like well, it's the same as, like you know, baking soda and vinegar soda situation where, like, when you mix the baking soda with, when you mix the vinegar into the baking soda, the vinegar loses a proton. Proton goes on to the bicarbonate from the baking soda, breaks down the carbon dioxide. But in the case of the dye, instead of the dye breaking down the carbon dioxide, it just becomes something that dissolves more easily in water and sulfuric acid is really good at giving that proton to things. So, like it just got used all over the place in dyeing fabrics, all the chemistry stuff that go into it. But the point of me bringing that up is that we didn't know what it was of sulfur, oxygen and hydrogen, bonded in this specific way with these specific properties like PKA values and heats, of enthalpy and all of that. We didn't know any of that. We just knew that if you took it and you diluted it like 10 times and then you took some cloth and put that cloth in there, the cloth will come out bleached, white and we were like, bet, we doing that. But it's crazy to me, yo, because, especially as I've learned this stuff, and we were like, bet, we doing that. But it's crazy to be yo, like, because, especially you know, it's like as I've learned this stuff and I'm like there's a meaningful degree to which, like I want to have confidence, you know, in my knowledge, and be like nah, I know that this is how this works and I've really come to realize that like, no, this is just like how we think it works. That's always what it's been. It's always just been that this is very much kind of like how we think it works. That's always what it's been. It's always just been that this is very much kind of like how we think it works. But it is, and it's just always been based off of experiment. But like, give you another example of where I'm like like experiment, like where there's like an unknown component where you're just like, I mean, like you know, we're going to do the best we can with what we got. I'm trying to make this one into a video, but I, you know, I gotta, I gotta figure it out.
Speaker 1:There was this guy, yon Baptiste Van Helmont, who's kind of I don't want to say he's important in early chemistry, but like he was a dude you know what I mean who was like out here actively trying to like prove that it's not just sorcery. You feel me, but like my man. So this was in like the mid 15, mid late 1500s, early 1600s, and my man was like yo, this was still the time when people were like fundamental elements air, earth, water, fire Although I think at this point they had moved on to like mercury sulfur and something else I forget. Those were supposed to be like the three primary elements which I'm just like. Everything is made out of mercury sulfur. Anyway, he did not believe that. He believed that everything was made of water and air.
Speaker 2:That was it okay, I mean you can start somewhere. You have to start with the yeah and it's like you know.
Speaker 1:please no for real. But here's the best part. My man had an experiment to prove that water was one of the fundamental elements that composed all of matter, at least plants and it turns out. Apparently the experiment was really important for plant biology. I'm not a plant biologist, I don't know. I guess I assume it was, but the chemistry was all fucked up. So my man took a willow tree branch and he planted it in a pot that had about 200 pounds of dirt in it, and he grew this tree in a pot that had about 200 pounds of dirt in it and he grew his tree in this pot for five years. Incidentally, I think I actually know what kind of willow he used.
Speaker 1:It's this. I think it's called a curling willow, which I don't know. If either of you are familiar with it, it's a very distinctive looking plant, but the thing that's really cool about it is that I don't know why it's like this, but the branches of this plant, even if they're dried and have been dried for a long time, if you stick them in some water or some really moist dirt, they will regenerate and just start a new tree. It's kind of wild. I've done it a couple times. Yeah, because a lot of plants will do this. I've rooted coleus, I root basil. A lot of herbs are very good at this, is famous for doing this, you know I mean. But like it's not necessarily that common for trees, I think to do it, although I might be wrong about that. Maybe it is very common, but I, in my experience, it's not been common for a tree.
Speaker 3:you just take a plant biologist I'm not.
Speaker 1:I'm not. I've gardened, I've done a lot of horticulture and landscaping work, but I'm not. I don't got that one down as a science Legit, but as far as I've ever seen, I've only ever seen one tree where I took a branch and stuck it in some dirt and I got a new tree out of it within a couple months. So I think that's the kind of tree he actually used. It is said that it was a willow tree.
Speaker 1:So he grows this tree for five years in this pot with 200 pounds of dirt and he covers the pot so that nothing but the water he's giving the tree can get in and out. That's the you know. It's the key right there. So after five years, he takes the tree out the pot, right, and he's like all right, this tree weighs like 164 pounds now approximately bet, definitely heavier than when I started Takes the dirt out the pot and he's like oh, there's still only 200 pounds of dirt in here, minus like 60 grams Bet. So therefore, the only thing I put in this pot was water. All the soil is still here. This tree is comprised entirely of water. Water is a fundamental element of all plants. I can't be that mad at him.
Speaker 2:Right, I see the logic there.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's like, yo, if you don't know that photosynthesis is a thing and you don't know that carbon dioxide is a thing, if you don't know that photosynthesis is a thing and you don't know that carbon dioxide is a thing and you don't know that plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis, then, yeah, that is a very reasonable conclusion to come to. Now, here's the funny thing about it, though, or the thing that I think is even funnier about this whole situation. Beyond the fact that my man legit did an experiment to prove that water was a fundamental element, One of the things that this Jan-Baptiste von Helmont person is kind of famous for is for being the first person to discover that carbon dioxide is a gas separate from air.
Speaker 1:He didn't know it was carbon dioxide, of course, because we didn't know that carbon was an element like that, but he was the first person to be like, hey, if I mix I think he legit did basically like mix like vinegar or like some acid with baking soda, and was like, yeah, this air that's coming out of this isn't the same as like the air that we're breathing. I don't remember I'd have to look to see exactly like how he came to that conclusion, to notice and make a record that survived through history. Important detail there that there is this gas that he called gas Sylvester or something like that. I don't know what that.
Speaker 2:I like it, though. No, I mean, that's more fun, though I like. I mean, if you tell me like carbon dioxide or gas Sylvester, I'm going with gas Sylvester.
Speaker 1:Yo, I love the old names, man. Like mean, none of them are iupac accepted anymore. I don't think I'm pretty sure like if I were to refer to sulfur, to sulfur compounds, as brimstonious compounds at a conference I would get in a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2:A few people. A few people would love it, though.
Speaker 1:Right Like if you were like you know what.
Speaker 2:That fucking kicks ass.
Speaker 1:Oh man, maybe you know, if, if, if my life, if my life takes, takes the appropriate path, maybe one day I'll be enough of a chemist to suggest to the international union of pure and applied chemistry that we go back to refer to sulfur as brimstone. Just that one, just that one.
Speaker 2:Just that one, just that one, just that one. Yeah, I would start with one. You could go on from there after that you might, if you could get the first one and get the ball rolling Right.
Speaker 1:You could start with one. Yeah, you know, just like it brings some of the whimsy back.
Speaker 2:Bring up Shrek, because then Shrek-y brings up brimstone and be like it's in, you know, like the, the common lingo, like we it's even in movies like I, I.
Speaker 1:I think you could do it no, legit also, just like you know, for like helping to engage people more with you, know the sciences in general. It's just like, oh, brimstone is a real thing what is wait I?
Speaker 2:hear about this all the time?
Speaker 1:isn't that in the bible? Wait a minute, you know yes, I like it.
Speaker 1:oh man, no, yeah, no, yeah. The history of us figuring out our world is so wild. Admittedly, it is easier for me to appreciate it because I have a degree in chemistry, so I see the nuanced differences and all of that. But beyond that, just remembering that, like it could happen tomorrow Probably not, but it could happen tomorrow that, like chemistry is just turned on its head. This has happened at least. Well, it happened majorly once with like Lavoisier and like the death of that Phlogiston theory. Actually, Like the dude Lavoisier, if you've't know, you may have heard, you may have heard the name, because that's one of the names that gets thrown around a lot, even outside of chemistry but, um, he was the dude who was like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this, this, he was an asshole about it.
Speaker 2:apparently, like he was, he wasn't a bad dude, but when it came to like science and research, apparently he was like very, very much like, kind of a kind of like arrogant I feel like it makes sense for me, sir, to those type of people to be that way because, like, they're so much smarter than everyone else that, like, when other people come up, they're like listen, just, you're fucking stupid. Just stop being so stupid. Let me just tell you to be less stupid, like no, so apparently not.
Speaker 1:Apparently he was kind of. He was kind of about that life, like when he, when he published this, when he published this paper, where he was like, yeah, flocus did his bullshit. Like he was like, oh wait, I got, I want to see if I can find I might just happen to have a tab open because he says he like he had words, dog, he was like nah, this he was like it's a veritable phantom that shifts in form from iteration to iteration, changing its nature to fit the whims of whatever researcher is using it. And I was like, geez dog, like all right, dog, just let us know what you think, bruh, none of us knew. And it was another one that I read about recently I'm not going to get too much into it because this one's a little more technical what was once known as the radical theory of chemistry, which is very specific to my subdiscipline of like making molecules this is before we actually understood, like how atoms come together to make molecules, like the whole idea of bonding and like I'm sure you've heard the whole, like you know, carbon can only have four bonds and all that good stuff. Like we didn't know that for a while, for a good while, for like mad long and that was straight up a guess. That was just straight up a guess from people being like all right. So look, this is what we're going to like.
Speaker 1:Once we figured out that there were elements and we figured out that we could identify those elements in some way and quantify it, the easiest way to do this frequently was just like take a bunch of whatever it is that you're trying to figure it out and like burn it you know what I mean and then collect all the stuff that comes off the water, the carbon dioxide, everything that comes off all the residues, weigh them and then figure out how much of each of those things. So, like you know, it's like all right, I got this much carbon dioxide, I got this much water. Carbon dioxide is, you know, two thirds oxygen, one third carbon. So I know that that's what this weight is. Two thirds of its weight is oxygen, one third is carbon. Do the same thing with water. I, you know two thirds is going to be hydrogen, or you know, as as it goes. And then, like you kind of add up the rest and you're like all right, so this is the elemental composition, right, and this is the relative amount of each element to each other. You know what I mean. So it's like all right. So you know, I got this much carbon dioxide. That means that there's like this many carbons and this many oxygens relative to the rest of this.
Speaker 1:After you do all of that, then you literally just kind of got to sit down and like figure out how these can all fit together mathematically. Basically, it's like all right, carbon can only attach to four things, roman can only attach to one thing, oxygen can attach to two things, except we didn't know a lot of that at the time. So this is just like. I think this is how it works. Like yo, we had at one point there was like 17 different structures for acetic acid, one of the simplest fucking molecules out there, because we just yo dog, like we just did not know so much shit. And yet, and and fucking yet we still made wild amounts of things. You know what I mean Some of our early medicines, early materials, alloys and metalworking, like that. That in and of itself.
Speaker 2:So listen, you do an intervention and you're like okay, did this work? No, all right, so let's not do that again, let's try something. Did this work? Okay, it kind of worked. Okay, can we refine that? Let's try it, but with a little bit of this as well, and eventually it just kind of works, and you don't know why. But as long as it works, that's all that matters.
Speaker 1:I'll never forget. I feel like I want to say it was one of my professors in undergrad. It wasn't an Orgo professor, it was. It was one of my non-orgo professors, because I can't imagine an orgo professor saying something like this to an undergrad. But they were like you know, mechanisms for reactions are cool and all, but don't nobody care about the mechanism if the reaction works.
Speaker 2:If the reaction works, nobody cares. Now, when you buy a house and they build it, you're like, well, we're going to do this and we're going to put up these floorboards and we're going to put up this drywall. They're like, no, we're going to do this and we're going to put up these floorboards and we're going to put up this drywall. They're like, no, no, no, is it done? Is the house, is it built? Is it sturdy? It's done.
Speaker 1:I do want to know a little bit about how they do it, what they're doing. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:I want to know it's done and it's sturdy and I'm set. I don't care about no, I definitely want to know that.
Speaker 1:It's up to code. You know what I?
Speaker 2:mean, I'm snuffing all of that. It's like you did it right, right, but you wanted the end result it's up to it's done. It's good.
Speaker 3:But you don't need to know exactly how they put it together, why you're a doctor now, just because you wanted to know.
Speaker 2:I guess so. But I mean like hey, burning things shit, and it worked, like that's how we figure out how many calories are in food. We put them in a calorimeter which we fucking burn the thing and we check it out and we go okay, yeah, that's how many calories are in this food, we burned it I mean incidentally.
Speaker 1:Incidentally, this might be interesting. Hopefully this is interesting. I think it's interesting. So part of how we figured out that, like you know how combustion works and all of that was realizing that like, oh, so like when, when you burn something, if you burn a certain amount of carbon with the right amount of oxygen, you get X amount of energy. If I put this guinea pig in an enclosure and I give it X amount of oxygen or it produces the same amount of carbon dioxide that I got from burning a certain amount of carbon, I get the same amount of energy out. And that was kind of how we figured out that, like, respiration and combustion are kind of essentially the same amount of energy out. And that was kind of how we figured out that, like, respiration and combustion are kind of essentially the same process.
Speaker 1:It's just funny that you happen to mention it that way. And it was like yeah, no, like yeah, it's like that's kind of yeah. When you burn your body, like oftentimes, you know the, the phrases we'll use to describe something will be like you know, so you, you will not necessarily be accurate, but it's actually not that inaccurate to say your body's burning calories because it is in a lot of it's a very similar process, it's just. But yeah, no, like bro, like I am almost always amazed and shocked at, like the ways in which we just like literally stumbled into something that worked throughout history.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. Like literally stumbled into something that worked throughout history, you know I mean. And and then somewhere, somebody, somewhere along, was like oh, let's see what happens if we like tweak this a little bit more, like yeah, like I don't know if either y'all in anime like that. But uh, I know, you know I'm about to bring up dr stone, right, you know, you know that's where this is going, right I, I I'm along for the ride, but I don't know where it's going.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, oh, oh, wait. Are neither of you familiar with the anime Dr Stone?
Speaker 2:I watch a little anime, but I'm not a big anime person.
Speaker 1:I would say so I'm actually a pretty big anime head, or at least I used to be. I haven't watched a lot lately. I'm trying to get back up. I'm trying to get back on it it but uh, you're only on episode 806 of one piece no, actually, and I might, I might guess I might get some flack for this, but I, I really don't like one piece personally. I don't know what it is, it's not for me. I got really into death note.
Speaker 2:That was the only anime I got really into. I was like I love the, the theory, I love just the idea behind this.
Speaker 1:This is interesting have either of you watched full metal alchemist brotherhood? Yes I hear that's really good, but I haven't watched it. It's you watch it, watch it, it's good, it's good, I promise, I promise you, I promise you it's, it's really good. It's one of the few animes that I've like watched through from beginning to end more than like three times. Um, what do you call? But just to be clear, watch full metal alchemist brotherhood, that's that's right.
Speaker 2:I hear no. I know there's a. I've heard there's a difference between those two but no.
Speaker 1:So dr stone, is this anime that recently I guess recently came out, although I'm sure the manga is rather old, as mangas tend to be. Um, but it's about, you know, without giving too many spoilers, it's essentially like a post world kind of ending event, sort of situation where, like humanity's kind of reverted back to the Stone Age, if you will, for reasons, that lab, as you know, like he was these, that kind of character, like man, like like mandark from that shit, from from that show, he's, like you know, he's super chemistry genius, knows, has all of chemistry memorized, essentially, which I'm like he's rick and morty like this excuse me kind of, but only with chemistry, like only with, and I guess in physics too, because you know, and also biology, because at some point they all kind of become the same science.
Speaker 1:But I digress, the show is all about him, with the help of some other survivors from this event, basically reestablishing technology within the world. And so, like the first episode is him, like you know, discovering, or one of the first episodes is him like discovering the ability to like reverse this thing that's happened and all of that, and I mean um to one of his friends, uh, uh, and like it's. It's just like the whole thing is like chemistry, it's just like the chemistry of how I can do this and how I can. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, uh, I can't really talk about it too much without giving like, just go watch it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is. If you're into chemistry, if you think chemistry and science are interesting and, in particular, if you find it interesting to think about how we got to the point that we have gotten to, technologically at the very least, it's a very interesting and good anime to watch. Thus far, I've only come across one thing that they did that I'm like this isn't accurate. But or not even that it's not accurate, it's a bit of a stretch. But they literally, like they, they kind of cover it in the name that they give it in the show. So I'm like, all right, I'll let it slide. Then, like you know, they, they kind of admit within the show, just like writing, that like this is very unlikely to happen. But you know, but no, I mostly became aware of dr stone because after I did, after I posted that video on sulfuric acid, apparently that's like a huge part of, like the plot of one, one part of the show is him being like, all right, well, I need to get some sulfuric acid, um, and so, like I've been, I've been thinking about doing a thing where I like I just like pick out certain specific scenes and aspects from the show and just be like, yeah, so I'm just going to explain, like, how this is actually legit. Nah, this is, they didn't hand wave this one. This is, this is real, is real science. But I love it. I love it specifically for that. And then, as I was saying, like this, this idea that because I feel like a lot of people look at science and I feel like the two of you probably come across this more than I do with, when, when, when, interacting with, with, with your communities and that, like a lot of people, I feel like just look at science as though it's like nah, we just like came up with these rules, right, like we just decided that this is the case, and they're like I don't want to believe it, and it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:We, what we talk about in science is our way to explain the things that we see happening, regardless of whether or not you understand why it's happening. You know, I mean, like that's what science is. It's not us being like this is this and this is this and this is this. Necessarily, it is more a matter of things are happening in our world around us and we want to know why those things happen the way they do, but I don't think that enough people quite get that. Like we had to develop this understanding over time.
Speaker 1:It's not like, like, like one of my favorite things about reading about these old theories of chemistry that are wrong is that a lot of the greats, the like big celebrity names or whatever in chemistry believed them. You know what I mean. Like they were straight wrong. They were just straight up wrong, but they were the giants at the time. You know what I mean. Like what's his name? This dude? I think Leibish, justice von Leibish, one of the. He came after Lavoisier.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like that Flogiston one where like it's almost right, it's very close to being right, but like it's missing certain key elements that you couldn't know without us having a better understanding of the world to begin with. You know what I mean and that's why I go back to what I was saying, what I was saying earlier, where it's like, you know, I feel like a lot of people don't get that this is, this has been a process, it continues to be a process, but I don't even just mean like, I also mean people who practice science is like this is all a process. We are actively learning this, but most of what we've learned at this point and figured out at this point is accurate, based on the fact that it's reproducible, and that's the key. That's really what it is. It's like yo, it doesn't.
Speaker 1:It's like people say facts don't care about your feelings. It's like not. It's not that facts don't care about your feelings, it's that things are going to happen, whether or not you understand or know why they're happening, and that is a fact. The sun is going to rise. It doesn't matter how you feel or what you think about how the sun's. You know the sun rising. It's going to rise. That's going to happen. So understanding why it happens also kind of helps to understand other things. Potentially, but ultimately, it's going to happen regardless of whether or not you understand it you know, I think it's more.
Speaker 2:People just have, like a distrust in science. I think that it's less that they think people just came up with this willy-nilly, it's more. They're just they think there is an entity or something that is controlling it and giving us information to, for some reason, whatever they, whatever that person, that person thinks Like Big Pharma, big Pharma, whatever.
Speaker 1:You can name it all sorts of different things. My feelings say, accurate though they may not be, that a large portion of that mistrust is born out of the capitalist, for-profit nature of research. Also, that has a lot to do. That has so much to do with it, for sure, but also kind of to your point right. People are like oh well, you're just handing down these edicts from on high telling us that this is how we have to think, handing down these edicts from on high, telling us that this is how we have to think and this is what we have to do and this is what we have to believe. And I do imagine that at least there are some people within the populace who are skeptical about, in part because they just don't understand how those rules get developed. I don't think enough people really get that.
Speaker 1:It's not like a scientist just goes into a room, reads a bunch of books and comes out and is like this is the answer. Sometimes that kind of happens, but most of the time, if they did, that, what was written in those books came from years of people for lack of a better term putting their hands into fires and being like is this fire hot? How hot is this fire? Can I make the fire less hot? Can I make my hand more able to withstand the fire? You know what I mean. People actively poking at things, like you said, just like does this work? No, does this work. No, does this work. It kind of worked. Okay, let's try doing that, but let's change this one thing. That didn't work. Let's change the next thing. Change the next thing. Oh, oh, we got it. We got it.
Speaker 2:You know I mean, we don't know why it works. But hey look, this fungus. We put this, we grew this fungus and now, like it helps us with well, they didn't even know bacteria there's. Just like it helps people make people less sick, there we go. Oh yeah, we'll name it penicillin. Perfect, doesn't? It doesn't matter how we, if we know how it works. It just saves lives yo aspirin, aspirin, aspirin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a wild one. That's kind of a wild one like so straight up, um, like we didn't actually figure out how, like the full picture of how and why aspirin has so broad an effect on the body in terms of like health and wellness or whatever as a medication until like the 70s. We've been selling it as like a drug since like the 19th, since the turn of the 1900s, but it wasn't.
Speaker 2:People have been using it for longer than that because it comes from what? Which tree?
Speaker 1:oh, oh, oh, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no so real quick, yeah, because I don't want to spoil anything.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine oh, I am working on uh, I'm working on a long-term project with acs reactions youtube channel that involves aspirin. Um, just plug that, I guess I don't know what it's got. I got to wait till the weather gets warm because I got to do some stuff outside because I don't have a fume hood. I try to do things safely and I'll be where I can, but no to that point. So willow bark does not have aspirin in it, nor does it have salicylic acid, which is the precursor to aspirin. Willow bark has something called beta salicin, which is a glucose molecule attached to something that looks like salicylic acid, but it's an alcohol instead of the carboxylic acid. That part's not that important. What is more important is that, yes, willow bark does still have those medicinal properties. It will still act very similarly to aspirin if you were to make a tea of it and drink it.
Speaker 1:This is how we figured out that we cared about the bark in the first place. Incidentally, the reason why, the reason why the, the I forget, I forget the name of the, of the, of the he was like a pastor or something that like first figured it out, but like he tasted the bark from a willow tree and was like, oh man, this is really bitter. Wait, the bark from that quinine tree in South America is also or I guess it wasn't South America at that point but, like you know, the bark from that quinine tree that we found that, like you know, cures malaria, is also bitter. So maybe I can get the same compound from this willow bark. Again, entirely fucking wrong, like completely incorrect. That's so.
Speaker 1:Many things taste bitter, like most plants taste bitter. Dog, what are you doing? But? But my man was like let me make a tea of this willow bark and give it to the people of my parish to see if it helps. He was his. His account of making tea of this willow bark to treat, I think like 50 of his parishioners from like for for a fever, was one of the first, if not the first, accounts that like, yeah, willow bark is willow bark is medicinally useful. We should investigate willow bark for its medicinal uses. Like it's high, because my man was wrong. He just had. He was wrong that it was. He was wrong that it had quinine in it, but he just happened to be lucky that it had this other, completely different molecule in it that happens to be medicinal.
Speaker 2:But yeah, like you said, that happens all the time where they're like what am I just trying to say?
Speaker 1:It's mostly, you know it's not. It's honestly. It's mostly like there's a lot of things that we just basically figured out by accident, like conducting polymers, for example. That's a popular story from relatively recently. I forget exactly when this happened, but the long and short of it is that the graduate student who was working in the research lab where these conduct oh, just real quick, conducting polymers, Sorry, I just probably defined that.
Speaker 1:So you got molecules that are like single molecules. They got maybe like 10, 20, 30 atoms in them or whatever and then you got things like plastics, which are made of long, long, long chains of molecules, right, Polymers. These don't usually conduct electricity. One of the holy grails of chemistry and sustain it in like new materials has been making like really good quality conducting polymers, essentially plastic that can conduct electricity. This is something we have not really been able to do super well just yet, but developments have been made. One of the first developments that was made in this field, though, was when a graduate student who was working in a lab misunderstood what he was told to do in a reaction and added like a hundred to a thousand times more of the catalyst he was supposed to use in a reaction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's um.
Speaker 2:That's quite a significant difference there so what you're saying is, people should start doing that to see if we can come up with new things.
Speaker 1:Well, you know? Honestly, honestly, dude, I don't know if you knew this, but like sticky notes were invented by a dude in his house I've heard the sticky notes thing yeah, like there's. There's not an insignificant amount of stuff.
Speaker 2:You're talking about creating things by accident. I wanted to bring up the one thing. I saw a video of yours that I'm like I want to talk about because it's near and dear to my heart.
Speaker 1:Oh boy, all right. All right, what I do? What did I do?
Speaker 2:no, no, it's a good thing, I want you to talk about it. It's artificial sweeteners. Talk about discovering things by accident.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's a man. I cringe.
Speaker 2:How did the? Because I heard the story vaguely before I saw your video, but it was kind of interesting listening to the process, was it? Sakharin was the first artificial sweetener, I think is like a long time ago. Yeah, saccharin was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, saccharin was one of the earliest ones.
Speaker 2:But how did that? What's his name? I forget his name, but how did he, you know, come about discovering this artificial?
Speaker 1:sweetener. I mean like it's interesting. Actually it's really interesting to me when I think about it, because back it wasn't until maybe like the mid-1800s, late, mid mid to late 1800s that that chemists finally kind of stopped tasting the things that they made. I guess I mean, I know, when I say it like that, it's like what, bro?
Speaker 2:of course you wouldn't take no back. Then they're like no, put it on your tongue. That's how we knew people had diabetes. Right, you just tasted their urine Diabetes. Is that true? That is true, wait for real. People have diabetes. Their sugar is in their urine. So doctors would drink their urine would taste it they wouldn't chug it, but they would taste it.
Speaker 1:I bet you. There was at least one doctor who was like, who volunteered, who was weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like. It was like no, I'll do it again. And they're always like oh fucking Jeff wants to taste the urine every time.
Speaker 1:No, I'm sure there was. It'll just be Jeff's job.
Speaker 2:It's fine he likes it but like what is there was like something that came from that Like doesn't. What is. Like. The term diabetes comes from something.
Speaker 1:I'm going to tell the thing about artificial sweeteners, because, yeah, about tasting this is interesting, though, because I feel like maybe I'd also heard that and I just assumed that it was like apocryphal. So I was like that can't be right. Like no, there's no way that that's true. But it is true that like could be, mostly because, like you know, how else are we going to be able to describe it? You have to be able to describe the compound that you made in as many ways as possible. What does it smell like, what does it look like? And they don't really make a sound. Most of them have the same texture if it's a crystalline solid. So what you got left?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. And so basically, there was an English physician, there was an English physician. The term mellitus was added by an English physician, thomas Willis, in the 17th century to describe the sweet taste of urine due to the high sugar levels. Therefore, the term diabetes mellitus translates to sweet passing through. So yeah, it's, it literally comes from the sweet taste.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta tell everybody.
Speaker 2:I know this now, like you see, I had no idea that that was accurate. We were like, what if we just drink their urine? Hey, that's sweet, so that's something.
Speaker 1:Yo, but like I mean that's what we had. But anyway to artificial sweeteners that don't come from you know, urine, I suppose. Like it's kind of interesting to me and at the same time not that we didn't find like artificial sweeteners sooner, maybe we, I guess technically we did. There was sugar of lead. People have known about sugar for a while acetate yeah, but people also knew that lead was toxic for a while. So you know, it's like, ah, maybe not, maybe I'll just use some honey, I'll just use somebody I know there are like they say, there's people who have used things like stevia or like monk.
Speaker 2:These things are more natural, though. They come from plants and stuff, so I guess that's kind of different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I didn't talk about those kinds of sweeteners in that short video and if I were to make a longer one, I probably, if I mentioned them, I would make a distinction, just for my own mind. Because when I think about artificial sweeteners, like, yeah, I'm thinking about like molecules that were intentionally synthesized in a lab, yeah, uh, that were found to have a sweet taste right, um, that doesn't necessarily now and I don't know. Now, just to be clear, as clear as nuanced as I can, I don't want to suggest or assume that saccharin, sucralose, aspartame or any of these acyclomate any of them don't occur in nature. But our first brush with them as compounds was when somebody made them in a lab. So that's kind of my. That's kind of my because, yeah, like stevia is a thing, monk's fruit is a thing you know what I mean Like are those artificial sweeteners at that point?
Speaker 1:They're just zero artificial sweeteners at that point. They're just zero calorie sweeteners at that point. And there's also arguments to suggest that these sweeteners aren't necessarily zero calorie. So much as they are zero calorie at the levels that we would normally be adjusting, they're just so much sweeter.
Speaker 2:So you use a little bit of them yeah yeah, exactly, you know.
Speaker 1:Just you know to give the nuance, to give the little details and all that. I feel like, at least for some people, that helps. But no, it surprises me that we didn't find any sooner from like lab experiments, because, yeah, it wasn't uncommon for people to be like, oh I made this new thing, let's see what it tastes like. Oh, okay, you know, so fortunate. I guess that the first, that the first one we found saccharin was like right around the end of people being like it's cool to just like eat what you made. Like did I mean, you made it in the lab, don't make it? Um, but my man, like my man, went in, though, apparently, wasn't he working with like coal tar or something?
Speaker 1:yeah, you know, like it's like coal tar derivative, you know, it's basically like you know, it's like it's kind of the equivalent of it's not exactly the same as crude oil, but it's a very similar sort of situation. It's just like a like a dense mixture of hydrocarbon compounds with few some of them have, like you know, some of them have like sulfurs in them and some of them have nitrogens in them, like you can get aniline from coal tar and things like that. But yeah, it's just like a mixture of like there's a lot of benzene in there, probably too, like you know, stuff that you probably don't actually want to be ingesting. So my man's like you know he makes this thing and like, first and foremost, as far as I understand, he didn't actually taste it when he made it.
Speaker 2:He just like had some on his hands when he went to eat his lunch, which I'm like yeah, I'm pretty sure his wife called him to like dinner or something and he was just like rushing, he's like, all right, I'm still working with this coal tar, I gotta do this quick. And I think he was eating bread or something and his hands were kind of sweet he's like why is his bread so sweet?
Speaker 1:let me go. Here's the thing, though here's my thing. I want to know how many things he had to taste before he figured out which one it was yeah, oh god, go back up there.
Speaker 2:He's just like licking his whole lab, yeah I'm just like.
Speaker 1:So. I mean, I'd like to imagine that my man, like, took a pipette, dipped it into each thing.
Speaker 2:All right, no, no I really hope it out afterwards just kind of taste like oh gross, or if he's like actually just swallowed it, because that's just like problematic oh man, I'm pretty.
Speaker 1:Oh man, oh, and I think about it, I'm just like yeah, there's definitely a couple things I imagine. He probably tastes like you. Definitely, if he tasted the aniline he'd have been like ah no, it wasn't that that burns oh man, but like you know, it's just like.
Speaker 1:I mean the dedication, I suppose you know I was like I don't and I wondered to what extent in his head he was like I can make money off this, or he was just like fascinated by the idea. But I genuinely like I, just I, just I just the idea of me having to go into, like my graduate school lab, right Like my fume hood where I worked as a grad student, and being like yeah, there was something in here that was an artifact, that could probably be an artificial sweet, or I had a sweet taste and I got to figure out what it was, and I have to taste things to figure it out. I don't know, fam, I don't, I don't think, I don't. We might not have those artificial sweeteners. If it was me, it straightened me down, especially because I don't like with the way most of them taste. But like beyond that like, even if I did, like there might have been like ah no, we never would have had diet soda.
Speaker 1:That's why I don't drink diet soda no, no, I'm.
Speaker 1:I'm being very selfish there I need coke zero, I need my coke zero no, I feel you, I know, I just like I, yeah, I it's, it's kind of funny to me, uh, in in that way that like, had I been like how subjective it is, like there are some chemists I imagine that like had like the dude who figured out aspartame, right, like he, he, uh. Or the dude who figured out cyclamate, which we don't use anymore because I think it's actually, I think that one actually like gave rats bladder cancer and they were like, yeah, maybe not, but he figured that one out because my man went out to have a cigarette while in the lab and again didn't wash his hands. It was like, why is this cigarette so sweet? What's going on here? And I don't know what the story behind that one is, but I'm just like, how did you? Because that was in the early mid-1900s, like 1930s, 40s or so, I think. So I don't actually know. I have trouble calling to mind what techniques there would have been at the time to try and identify the various things that he had made. But even today, if we want to make artificial sweeteners, I think Neotame was one of the first ones that was made without somebody having to like taste things. Because we at this, because at this point it's we we understand enough about, like what structures of types of molecules will tend to give you something that's going to have a sweet response on the tongue. And, incidentally, neotame is is aspartame, just with like an extra little like bit of carbon attached to it, basically you know. So it kind of tracks.
Speaker 1:But as far as I understand the way they did, that one was a little, was pretty slick actually. So they effectively did like they. They basically made an artificial tongue. They took a bunch of what are called like well plates, which are essentially what they sound like a little plastic tray that has a bunch of little holes and it referred to little bowls or cups in it, referred to as wells, and each of these wells is filled with.
Speaker 1:I might have the details of this a little off. Definitely feel free to double check this, but effectively, in each of these wells they had different enzymes that would respond to certain molecules and, based off of their response to known sweeteners, they used that to then test out like a bunch of different molecules to see if they would get a similar response and after mapping, like I don't know, it might've been a hundred, it might've been a thousand, I'm not sure how many, but after mapping a lot of different molecules in this way, with this quote unquote, artificial tongue situation, they came to the conclusion that this one, neotame, is something to like 13, like 7,000 to 13,000 times sweeter than sugar, which I'm like. Who needs that?
Speaker 2:Well, when you can, only when you know you use a, a milligram of something you know like.
Speaker 1:It's like yo, dog, like you, better never yo. If anyone anyone's ever shipping that overseas, you better never spill that shit in the ocean. So it's a wrap. It's a wrap, but yeah so that's kind of.
Speaker 2:I think that's kind of interesting because I could see how people would think like oh, natural sweeteners are like, oh, stevia is better because it's like oh, how are the artificial ones made? Uh, coal tar and like tasting cigarettes and stuff. Okay, I mean like well, how did?
Speaker 1:how did you, bro? The first antibiotics were made from coal tar. What you want?
Speaker 2:no, I get it but like, think of the layman who doesn't know like this one came from a leaf or this one came from coal tar, like I can see how people might be like well, I'm a little concerned about the one that comes from coal tar.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, and I mean, but, to be fair, the thing that know and I kind of go back to what I said what I said, what I said very much earlier on the advent of public education has done so much to help alleviate a lot of this. You know what I mean, cause a lot of that, a lot that whole idea. I might be this this is a little bit more my opinion, I think, than anything, but I do think it's a well-founded opinion. A lot of that ideology, I think, is rooted in the concept of vitalism, still this idea that things that come from plants and nature and organic systems or whatever are somehow different and better and cleaner or whatever for you, than things that come from petrochemical feedstocks.
Speaker 1:Basically, I don't think most people who ascribe to this idea think of it in this nuanced way. I think most of them think of it more in the way that you just described, liam, where it's like well, it comes from a plant. I eat fresh vegetables. Therefore, things that come from plants are probably better, because I can't eat rocks, except you can. I was about to say yo, what do you think table salt is, dog? It's a rock. It's just a tiny, tiny rock that dissolves in your mouth, like you know. But you know, I get it, I do get it. People like I come from gasoline can't drink gasoline.
Speaker 2:But a lot of that petroleum. That's what we see.
Speaker 1:I'll hear a lot with, like you know, food dyes or whatever it's like, and it's derived from petroleum and that's that, like I, as a chemist, will scream to the ether that that's perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with the. But there is nuance, of course, to every discussion. That is to say that there are things you would derive from plants that can have all kinds of other things left over in them, depending upon how good of a job you did extracting the stuff from the plant and also what you used. You know. Similarly, there are processes that you can use to make something from petrochemical feedstocks that are going to be much cleaner, much safer and much easier than if you were to try to get it from plants. You know, I mean aspirin is a perfect example of this.
Speaker 1:Actually, you know, a big part of why we moved away from using willow bark tea was in part because somebody isolated salicylic acid and recognized that. You know, as I said, that salicin, that beta salicin, is like essentially salicylic acid precursor attached to a sugar molecule. So if you think about that and this is kind of if you think about that only half of this molecule is the actual medicine. The other half is literal sugar. So when you take it, but if you can separate that sugar bit right and you just get the salicylic, what's called salicyl alcohol and you turn it into salicylic acid, which just happens in your body. But if you have just the pure salicylic acid, now all of that is the medicine. You know what I mean? It's not this. So that helped a lot. But, like, the other thing that helped with developing aspirin as like a medication that could be widely administered around the world was the fact that we figured out a way to make it from guess what Coal tar Like dead ass.
Speaker 1:I actually did a little short video about it where I made a slight mistake with the directions that I pushed some arrows. Most of the mechanism is accurate, but I accidentally drew arrows going in the wrong direction. It still haunts me. Yeah, for real, I kind of feel bad about that. My point the reaction is called the Colby-Schmidt carboxylation. You take this stuff called phenol and you heat it in the presence of a base and some carbon dioxide and when you do this, a reaction takes place wherein the carbon dioxide attaches to the phenol ring and that gives you salicylic acid. Can make so much more of it in this way than you can. If you were to try and harvest the necessary amount of willow bark, I can tell you for a fact, I have tried to extract up to 500 grams of willow bark at this point and have yet to been able to get a single gram of beta salicin. Like, yeah, if you drink it as a tea it'll work, because you don't necessarily need that high a level of it in your body for it to do something.
Speaker 1:But if you want to actually isolate it and then try to, like you know, use it to do things, you know, and it also, like you know, it's like people like oh, get it from plants, get it from plants, get it from plants Like yo, what plants, what plants.
Speaker 3:We ain't got them.
Speaker 2:She was like have you ever, you know, looked into the whole?
Speaker 1:like you know belgium harvesting rubber trees in the congo, and you know africa and stuff like all that's not so great a lot of you know that's not sustainable bad yeah, sorry and like I shouldn't say what plants like that that is. That is not nuanced of me, but that is my. That is the point I'm making. It's like yo. Okay, so you want to get this all from, like, green natural plant sources? That's fine. Where are we going to get, where are we going to grow all those plants?
Speaker 2:yeah, and who's going to harvest them and what kind of slave labor might go?
Speaker 1:in.
Speaker 2:I mean like yo and like we can make a whole lot more from hey, whatever this other thing we have in a lab. Oh no, it's in a lab now.
Speaker 1:It's terrible yeah, it's like and but but again, like I said, I think a lot of that really just has to do with the fact that people have this understandable knee-jerk idea. It's like well, I eat plants, I don't eat gasoline. Therefore, things that come from plants are probably more likely systems. That's different from the things that come from non-living systems. And you know, there's an argument to be made for the fact that, like, the whole planet is a living system. So really, this is a meaningless distinction. I personally don't think that we as humans are separate from nature in that way. I don't like capitalism, but capitalism has become part of the nature of humanity, and I mean just like slavery was part of the nature of humanity, just like great, great bouts of, you know, pro-social and what do you call it and altruistic behavior are also parts of the nature of humanity. I digress A lot of people don't get that. There isn't actually a difference. The water in our bodies is water that's been on this planet likely for billions of years. There is a good chance that there's a water molecule in your body that was dinosaur pee at some point, at least one probably. There's a good chance that there's some carbon atoms in your body that were once part of, like pterodactyl poop. I shit you not pun fully intended. Like you know, but like you know, but people don't.
Speaker 1:Without an appropriate amount of like, prior knowledge, and like developed understanding, and and and and the and drawing the full line, that still doesn't quite get the home to get, get the point across. You know. Drive the point home. Stop mixing my metaphors. It doesn't quite drive the point home. You know, and the way that, if you understand, you know, if you've, if you've learned it, if you've had the privilege or the ability to learn it, you know what, the way that, if you understand, you know, if you, if you've learned it, if you've had the privilege or the ability to learn it, you know. I mean like, then then a lot of these things just stop being scary because you understand that there is actually no difference between, like vitamin b that was made in the lab, what, what's, what's, what's the what's? The one that most people are like afraid out of is by, is b12 right, that's the one everybody's like, yes, 12 of it's.
Speaker 2:B12, right, that's the one that everybody's like. Yes.
Speaker 1:B12? Cyanocobalamin right.
Speaker 2:Cyanocobalamin yes.
Speaker 1:Which is like yo, I don't understand. Not that I don't understand, I get where it comes from. Like you said, people are like ah, we made it in the lab. It's different, we got to do things differently. And that's not untrue.
Speaker 1:If you do make things synthetically, you do have to make, you do have to do it in such a way or at least you should try, you should endeavor to do it in such a way that the process doesn't end up leaving behind a bunch of gross, fucked up, toxic shit that you're not actually supposed to be ingesting. Right, like you know, you got to purify it, right, and it's like I don't know why, like and this is where, like that fear of big pharma, I think, really really is able to take hold, because people don't understand that that's a whole process. It's like it's not just that, like somebody goes into a room and like poops in a cup and is like here's your medicine. You know what I mean. Like it takes months, it takes years, it takes decades of people like actively doing research and like asking the question and changing like a little small thing to be like, did this make a difference?
Speaker 3:No, Did this make a difference.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, actually no, if you work in like flavors and food chemistry, it's not uncommon for you to taste some of the things that you make after you, you know, do appropriate analysis to make sure that, like, everything is Gucci, you know, but I mean like they sell food grade sulfuric acid, which was shocking to me. So you know, I mean like and like really that's where a lot of that comes from is like not tasting things that are in the lab. It's just a matter of like you, unless you can be a hundred percent sure that nothing harmful came in contact with whatever it is that you're using. So there's a way that you can do that right. Like if you take all the glassware you're going to use and you give it like a base bath overnight and then a nitric acid or nitric or sulfuric acid bath overnight, you're going to destroy pretty much anything that was on that glassware and etch a layer of it off. So at that point it should be pretty food safe, especially if you use food grade sulfuric acid and food grade sodium hydroxide, right, and then you just make sure you use all food grade materials. At that point you can be relatively confident that these materials were prepared in such a way that they are free of things that are free of contaminants that are going to be particularly harmful to people. Right, and you can even go a little further if you want. The solids, you can try to recrystallize them to get them a little cleaner. The liquids you can distill them to get them a little cleaner. If you're feeling real froggy, you can do some chromatography if you really want to. I don't recommend it. Nobody should do chromatography at home. It's a pain, not unless you got one of auto columns, but you can do these things.
Speaker 1:But people just hear what they hear and without having that broader understanding that can come from publicly available educational resources, you know what I mean they jump to these conclusions that our brains are designed to jump to to make our lives easier to live, right, but I mean therein lies kind of the problem is that, like, people are able to jump to these incorrect conclusions because there isn't enough access to information regarding this stuff and we don't do, we don't prioritize teaching it. You know what I mean. Like I don't know how I, like I feel like the only reason like I got into science early on in life was because, like, my parents noticed that, like I was very interested in it and we had some resources available at home like textbooks and encyclopedias, and my parents got me some things but I didn't start learning. I didn't start learning science in school until, like I feel like middle school, which is ridiculous to me. Why would you wait that long? The best time to introduce somebody to science is when they're young, when their brains are flexible, when they can still participate in magical thinking and they can still look at the world in abstract ways and see those crazy connections. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Like one of the things I hate is when people is like oh, I hate for my childhood a little bit. I don't say I hate, but I was severely dislike in hindsight when I would ask my parents sometimes why something happened. They would give me some kind of like fanciful like you know. Like I'm going to ask them like why does it rain when the sun's out sometimes, and I think my my mom's is the one who was like oh, it's because God's going bowling or something like that. In hindsight I hate that.
Speaker 1:I don't hate a lot of things, but I really kind of hated that now in hindsight because that primes me to think that things don't have mechanistic explanations. That primes me to think that the world is this magical, chaotic place that cannot be understood, and that's incorrect. We don't necessarily know all the rules, but we've spent literal thousands of years and people's lives in some cases tweezing out some of these rules, clawing this truth from the ether for the benefit of everybody right Fundamentally, and it pains me that we wait so long to start teaching this stuff to people when, in a lot of ways, advances in technology are a big part of just how humanity as a species was able to advance. Advances in nautical technology and astrology allowing us to navigate and travel the world Granted not necessarily to the greatest of ends, but at least people got around, I guess. But things like that.
Speaker 1:Advances in medicine. Advances in medicine allowing for people to finally realize that no, it's not the dirty other people over there that are causing the sickness. It is the fact that there are these microorganisms that we can just take medicines to stop or just wash our hands. You know what I mean? Advances in fertilizers allowing us to grow enough food that we don't necessarily need to have wars over food anymore. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1:Advances in our understanding of, like just the physical world around us, allowing us to figure out how to make water clean and potable. You know what I mean. Like then people don't have to fight wars over water, child mortality goes down. You know what I mean? Like all of this really came from the fact or not all of it, but a lot of it really is rooted in the fact that we learned something. You know what I mean. Somebody went out and was like yo, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. There's this fire over here. Is it hot? Is it really hot? Let's go see, let's go, let's go. Let me't shock me, because we exist in a capitalist world and there are reasons why this would be the way it would be right. Let me be fair. I understand what capitalism is about, but that aside, the fact that we don't spend more time and effort earlier on for people in childhood actively teaching science in some way- and maybe this has changed since I was a kid True, real talk.
Speaker 1:I don't have kids. Maybe this has changed. I don't think it has, though I've spoken to some of my nieces and nephews and as far as I know they, you know, they're still in grade school, they're still like in before middle school and they're like science I don't know and I'm like Rainbows are God farts? I'm like yo, can we not? Because that's the sort of thing that prompts people to not try to dig in. You know what I mean. That's the sort of thing that prompts people to be like oh well, the leaves are good for me and the oil is bad for me. So you know, I'm just going to go with that.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean, because if you don't teach systematic critical thinking, if you don't teach people that you can understand something you know what I mean Then people aren't going to try to. That's just the way it works. People will not do things that they're not taught to do. Fundamentally, you will never walk if you are not taught to walk and you don't learn to do it. You know what I mean. Some things you can learn on your own, but a lot of things you can't. When I think about the hundreds and thousands of years that we've spent as a species like, like I said, clawing truth from the ether, trying to understand this world around us, and I watch us squander it today and I'm like what you know. That's why I'm came out here.
Speaker 2:I think it depends on the way also, like the way we teach in schools oh yeah, it has a whole lot to do with it, that's. I don't want to get really too much into that, because you could spend an infinite amount of time talking about it. I was going to say it could be a whole nother hour you basically try and teach kids to pass a test. That's the main goal is being able to answer these questions.
Speaker 1:That's capitalism for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean right. Instead of we trying to foster their desire to learn and that sort of of thing. I went to a school like first through eighth grade. I went to a school that had no designated tests, like at all. The whole idea was just to try and teach kids to want to learn like, hey, what are you interested in?
Speaker 3:this.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's find somebody who teaches that, who likes that and you can talk about you know that sort of thing. So, and I think it also right, like it depends on the person being able to take a child who's like really interested. No, I want to know why it fucking rains, I want to understand and being able to take them, and while other people might not be interested in that at all, they're like, I just want to be able to dance or draw or whatever, which is fine, like that's fucking. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Like that's great. No, the arts are so important, the arts are so insanely important. No, I feel like I need to say that because I'm the one who's like, I'm the one who's spent the last hour being like chemistry, chemistry, science, science. No, the arts are incredibly important, probably as important as technological advancement. Because you know what, if people can't communicate, if people can't express themselves, if people don't have language and a medium through which to share ideas that from somebody taught them?
Speaker 1:The humanities, as they're broadly called, are largely an effort and an endeavor of our species to be able to communicate with each other on levels and in ways. I mean, it's a many of many things, but that is one of the major, major things about the arts and the humanities that I think that a lot of people don't really appreciate is that it has been a big part of how we as a species have been able to not only communicate with each other contemporarily but communicate with our past even. You know, because there's way, like you know, it's like a painting will speak to 10 different people in 10 different ways, but there'll still be something central to it. You know what I mean. Like 20 different people can read a poem and they'll all have a slightly different interpretation, but they're all probably going to still be focused around the same emotional ideas. You know what I mean Like, and that that, to me, is also of incredible value, and I don't, like I understand, I guess, how and why it gets so sidelined.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, because nobody wants to pay people to be artists, especially now in the world of chat, gpt, making art, which please, don't do that. People, please, just you know, pay your artists and all of that. Just do that, please, please. But yeah, like I just it kills me. It's like oh, you know, draw. You want to draw Timmy? Oh no, I don't know, timmy, you're not going to be able to get a job with them. Doodles, bro, you might need to pick up a calculator and figure out some accountant or something.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:And you bring up AI. That's just going to be a very interesting tool. I'm scared yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think humanity is in a good place for that. I don't think we're in a very good place for something like AI. I know that's very arrogant to say and that, like you know, I don't think humanity, but like I don't think that it will be used by most people in a way that is ultimately beneficial.
Speaker 2:I see why you're saying that. I think that's definitely possible, but at the same time, I think it can be used by the people who know how to use it in a very beneficial way, by a small percentage of people who will be able to use it to solve complex problems like plastics in the ocean or whatever it is.
Speaker 3:Oh for sure you know those artificial tongues to try things.
Speaker 1:Exactly we need better artificial sweeteners.
Speaker 2:Those are the main problems we have.
Speaker 1:My problem, though, is or not my problem, but I want that. That is what I want this technology to be used for, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:But instead we're using it to rip off artists.
Speaker 2:It's going to be used for things like that, which sucks the problem is capitalism.
Speaker 1:Let me just be clear about it. I don't like AI under capitalism. That's what it is. I don't like AI under capitalism because, just like every other productivity tool that got developed in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, it was supposed to mean that fewer people had to do as much work and we would all just be kind of chiller and anything would be cool. But no, as with every other bit of productivity gain that we get, what's going to happen is that the corporate owners, those who sign the checks the capitalist class, will just reap as much of the benefit as they can from it by not hiring as many people and making a single individual do even more work because they now have this AI tool Meanwhile. This is going to lead to a further deterioration of quality of output for all sorts of things Like yo. What's going on with Boeing right now? What's going on with Boeing?
Speaker 2:The planes? Yeah, I don't really know what's going on with Boeing. I've heard some things, but I don't.
Speaker 1:The quality controls. The quality controls have gone out of the window. There have even been whistleblowing engineers talking about it. It's like yo, we bring stuff up and they're like, whatever, we just got to get this plane out because they coast, they're coasting, they're coasting on the Boeing reputation. Right, this is vaguely speculative on my part. Just to be clear, I have heard and read about whistleblowers from Boeing. You know what I mean and their planes have not been living up to snuff. But a lot of this corner cutting, a lot of this like oh well, you know, I think KitchenAid is another one where, like, kitchenaid's mixers apparently are just not what they used to be. People used to be able to inherit their grandmother's KitchenAid mixer and it would still work, but now apparently people's KitchenAids are just breaking down. And it's this quality creep where it's like companies are like oh well, you know what? Look, people are going to buy my brand because they're going to buy my brand and it's my brand and that's what they want.
Speaker 2:Do you think AI will affect that and just make it more intense? I think it'll make it more intense.
Speaker 1:I think you'll see more of this sort of thing happening, as more companies lean on their employees to use more AI tools to do things in an overworked capacity and while trying to save as much cost as they can. It just sounds so because AI has such potential to improve things.
Speaker 2:You know what? I'm saying Like I think AI can be our greatest savior. I really think, like, used correctly, it can reduce errors by, you know, drastic margins. It can solve problems that we haven't even thought of. Have you looked into like the Majorana one from like I was looking for it? I haven't thought of it at all. No, okay, I'll send it. I'm going to send it to you after, but basically they've created like a new state of matter with this fucking thing and it's oh I read about that.
Speaker 1:I want to, I want to, I don't know, new state of matter. That's saying a lot, it is listen, I listen I'm not an expert on all this but like listening to the experts talk about this.
Speaker 2:It's wild and I think it has a lot of potential. Totally, they have to store it at negative 200 degrees. I don't remember they have to store it so low because it creates so much energy. It's wild, it's absolutely wild.
Speaker 1:You know like here's. But you know here's, here's like company X develops. Why, wonder drug that can save, you know, literally 90% of the population from a disease that nobody knew existed? What's going to happen to that drug?
Speaker 1:Right, I get 10% of the population that doesn't have the disease is going to be able to get it because they have the money Right. That's my problem, dog. Like I feel you, I'm right there with you. This is an amazing tool. It has amazing potential, even though it still needs a lot of work, but it already has a lot of potential. But, as somebody who was teaching around when ChatGPT dropped and I was teaching an organic chemistry class, dog, dog, I still had students turning in work that was chat GPT. Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. Yeah, that's what most of it ends up being and that's the part that I'm like, right.
Speaker 2:I get most of it's gonna be used for creating images for people's dnd group and their.
Speaker 1:No, that's fine, that's fine like whatever, because you know the gig you want to. You want to that. I don't mind that, I mind when you use it. I mind when you use it to write your essay, you know I mean.
Speaker 2:And then the overworked adjunct professor who teaches your class but doesn't have the time or ability to be like, listen it created the problem, but you could also use it as the solution to detect if students are using AI right Like you could. It still could be used for that, which I understand. It's creating the problem to make the solution. Listen, I get it. I get it. I feel like that doesn't work. I think it's like capitalism. With capitalism you have to fight fire with fire. Sometimes that is the only option.
Speaker 1:No, I feel you, it's just, it's it. It it frustrates me. I agree with you pretty much wholesale. I I more or less agree with you wholesale. I think where our opinions differ here is entirely in just the like, in potentially our outlooks for where this might go, mostly just because, as much as I really want there to be like amazing innovations and wild developments that are enabled by these AI tools and I've used a couple of them on.
Speaker 1:I've used a couple of them on occasion to like, help me work, work through something you know like, come work through an idea that I have about something, or, you know, come up with some information about something. Like, although you gotta be careful. You gotta be careful, though, cause they they do just straight up a lot of you. They do just, they do just straight a lot like I. I was looking up when I was, when I was trying to finish my thesis, I was trying to, uh, I was trying to find references related to some of the molecules that I was making and their use as, uh and and like detecting metal ions and like I thought I'd done like my due diligence with searching and all of that. You know, I found a few, so I was like, oh, you know, I'll give ChatGPT a try. Let's see if ChatGPT can come up with something, can find some papers for me that I didn't know was a thing.
Speaker 1:So I asked it for some papers and it gives me these five paper titles that I'm like what the fuck? This is exactly what I need. How did I not find this with my search terms? So I start trying to dig for these papers. I dig for the first one. I'm like I can't find this paper. What's going on with this paper? So I go back to ChatGPT. I'm like, can you give me DOIs for these papers? And it's like, oh no, I can't give you DOIs. And I was like, why can't you give me DOIs? It's like I don't have access to the DOIs. And I was like, yeah, sure, and here's the, here's the shit that fuck with me. I told it to give me some real papers and it still gave me papers that weren't real.
Speaker 1:I did not ask it for dois the second time around, but when it gave me those papers the second time around, it gave them to me with doi numbers, which I assume y'all know what the doi numbers are. Yeah, yeah, okay, um, and those were fake. Those are also fake. One of them, no one of them. One of them happened to be the doi number for a completely different paper, right. The rest of them were fake. That's great. So you know this. Like this, there's a lot one one I feel. I feel like I feel like most people are. You know. People say like you know, humanities attention span is like going down the toilet. I think most people have just become obsessed with destinations rather than the journeys that get them there. You know what I mean. Trying to sound as deep as I can.
Speaker 2:But also like AI is created for shortcuts, Like it's supposed to be that's like that's my problem.
Speaker 1:Shortcuts are fine sometimes, but the value of most things, the value of raw materials, is in A what they can be used for and B the labor needed to extract them from the earth. That's the Karl Marx idea of value, and that first one might not actually even be in there. It's mostly just like the value of like. How hard is it to get this stuff? You know what I mean. Like the value of things largely or in my mind at least should arise from what it took to get it Right. So if you consider that the journey right, getting the thing, and then the thing that you got is the destination, I feel like a lot of people at this point are like I don't care about the journey, I don't want the journey, I don't need the journey, I just need the destination. But without that journey those destinations are meaningless in most cases.
Speaker 3:If you don't stick your hand in the fire and you read that fire is hot, you don't have a reference for what hot is to that degree.
Speaker 1:Sure, you know the fire is hot and you know to some degree that you probably shouldn't touch it, but you don't necessarily know how hot, you don't know the nuances of the hot and that matters. That matters for things like that matters for things like uh, for, like, uh, like like we were saying, going back to it was like, oh well, if it comes from plants is good, if it comes from oil is bad. It's like no, no, no, no. There's a ton of fucking nuance in that, bro.
Speaker 2:But if you don't care about the journey, all you care about is the destination, you're gonna miss all that shit and the destination becomes way less useful and way less meaningful but the thing is like ai is just a giant flamethrower right that just throws shit out there, but for some things like that could be good creating it's like when we created, you know, before we fucking sew shit, and then we have sewing machines and then we have these giant fucking factories that can pump shit out. That would take, you know, a 10,000 people working every day and they do it in a minute. That creates more stuff, more downtime for humans, which I think is a good thing, and AI can do that in other ways.
Speaker 1:Sure, but what do you end up doing with that downtime, if you even get the down first of?
Speaker 1:all if, even if you get the downtime, let's, let's be clear because that kind of goes back to what I was saying before about like how productivity gains and productivity technology oftentimes end up just hurting the working class more. You know what I mean, but like you're not wrong, you know, I absolutely don't mind the fact that, like I can just go to a store and buy a shirt if I need a new shirt and I don't have to, like you know, contract with somebody nearby who makes shirts and have them. Like, take my measurements and make sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, but it might be a nicer shirt. Honestly, I probably keep it longer and, frankly, I'd probably just do things differently at that point, and I don't necessarily know that that's that has to be. Like they're like, like, you're not wrong. It is nice that, like, you can have this centralized manufacturing location where you no longer need 20 people to do a thing. In fact, I was on my way back from the grocery store earlier and I was watching this dude use a forklift to take these like large steel tubes off of a off of a flatbread truck and bring them into their warehouse.
Speaker 1:And I was thinking to myself I was like man, that forklift is great. You got one person doing the job of like, maybe like seven to 10 people. But then I thought about I was like but what about those other nine people who need jobs? Now, you know what I mean. Like, that's like, and also, but also, but also, how many shirts do you really need? You know what I mean. Like, yes, we have a factory that can pump out a million shirts in a week Great, do we need a million shirts? You know what I mean. Like sure, cool, I don't need a hundred people making clothes anymore. But like cool, I don't need a hundred people making clothes anymore, but like I also don't need all of these clothes that are being made now and that's like one of the things.
Speaker 3:Part of the reason we need the million shirts being made is because they're lower quality, so they're they last. They don't pass this one, yeah you know, but there's.
Speaker 1:And you know there's. But, as with all things right like there's, there's multiple aspects and multiple angles to it. Right, and to kind of like bring it back to the AI thing, there are absolutely going to be some people who do some absolutely amazing things using AI and I'm excited for that. But I do feel that the ubiquity it's not even just that it exists, but the ubiquity of these AI tools is part of the issue, because it is encouraging people to not seek the journey. I think I think that's my feelings. I ain't got no evidence for that. You can at me about it if you want. It's fine. I think that tools like these, like ChatGPT you know what I mean do a lot to encourage people to not do things the quote unquote hard way. Sometimes it is worth it to do things the hard way, even just a little bit, every once in a while, just to remind yourself of why the shortcut is valuable in the first place. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:I think the like, but also like I think people said that when Google came around, right Like, people are like what? Now kids are going to the library and looking it up. Well, the shit's all on Google now, so I can just look it up and I can find it. Yeah, so like in the same sense, chat, GPT can take it and make it even more accessible and more you know it's, it's.
Speaker 1:If it's accurate, if it's not lying to you, sure, but people dog, you're not wrong. I got like three tabs open right now to like various organic chemistry resources, cause I teach an online, I do an online office. I would check on Thursdays and I still got this Orgo textbook open right here behind me Cause I still go to the book because at the end of the day, it's just google as an example.
Speaker 3:We know the people who rely entirely on google.
Speaker 1:A lot of them don't know how to reference things properly, and so they'll put the wrong thing into google there's also that you know, I mean I I admit I'm not necessarily the I've never been amazing at using google and that, like I, I have to sit there for a while and like use a whole bunch of different search terms, which maybe that's just the way you're supposed to. I don't know, I feel like that's the way it's supposed to be.
Speaker 2:I mean it just takes a while to find, you know whatever it is you're looking for, depending on how the task you're doing, but it still makes it, still has more information out there. Yes, some of it's going to be wrong.
Speaker 1:Well, so I think there's. There's also a slight difference, I think, with regard to Google, now that I think about it. Maybe I'm wrong about this, maybe I'm just, I just thought it just occurred to me, but like because I can only have so many books, right, excuse me. So it's like Google, I feel like is a little. Or the ability to search the internet for information, as as in with regard to it being like development that improved our ability to do things akin to AI, is perhaps a little different in that internet searching was kind of like a big global library that opened up.
Speaker 1:You still have to go and do it right. You do still have to go and search things and then read things and evaluate them critically on your own. There is still a journey there, you know, and so there's a degree to which, like you know, for you know, for the sake of that being like misinformation and things that are incorrect, you know there are books that are incorrect for sure. Believe me, I've. I got this healing crystals book on my shelf behind me. I don't know if you can see that blue one right there at the top, and I'm excited to make some videos about that one, but maybe not, I don't know, I don't want to disparage anybody or make anybody feel bad, but I was flipping through that book, man, there was this one chapter they were talking about like legit inorganic chemistry, like legit symmetry groups and the different types, arrangements of crystal structures and all of that. And then, like the next chapter, they were like and now we talk about how this is magic?
Speaker 2:And I was like, ah, but magic's fun, like, come on. Sometimes we want to believe in magic. I love Harry.
Speaker 1:Potter, chemistry is magic. Chemistry is magic. I don't care if I know how it works. I don't care if I know how these reactions happen. It is still magic.
Speaker 1:Dog Like yo, have you ever seen an ester hydrolysis happen? I haven't. We just think that that's how it works. It's a pretty good explanation. It holds pretty much every time, based on all of our investigations. But at the end of the day, don't nobody know for sure if we do mix some lye with some grease, if there are little like fairies that pop out of the atoms and like shuttle them each over, all over the place. I have no idea. We just don't have evidence that that is the case.
Speaker 1:And that's what I think a lot of people miss with science in general. Is that, like yo, the things that we say are a thing? We say they're a thing because there is actual measurable you can observe it yourself evidence, something that says this actually works, and this evidence has held for multiple people trying it in multiple different places. You know what I mean. Like that's what the whole idea behind reproducibility is and that's why people get like they feel some type of way. They're like oh, my anecdotal evidence doesn't count, and it's like I mean it can, but you need like literally hundreds of thousands of anecdotal accounts that line up before somebody is going to be like, okay, this feels like empirical evidence. You know what I mean? Like because there's just too many variables. This kind of goes back to what I'm saying, like we don't know if there are fairies involved.
Speaker 2:We just don't have evidence for the fairies, okay so here's the thing, though, with ai though like we're talking about. Ai is in like chat gpt, where you just I don't know how I got there, my bad yeah, no, I'm bringing it back to that just because, like we talk, when people talk about ai, they often talk about chat, gpt, where you're like and then and that that's the answer. But like, ai is a lot more than that no, like there was this other.
Speaker 2:Oh sorry, my bad, they're about basically what I'm just gonna say. It's like ai has the potential to do what humans have been doing for the past 10 000 years and do it all at once, in a few minutes, and go through as many as many calculations, as many experiments as we've gone through, and they can just do it in in an instant, in seconds one day has the what One day. What I'm saying is how fast it's growing, how fast the technology is advancing.
Speaker 1:But who gets to use that? But who gets to use that, and to what?
Speaker 3:end and what's going to be done with it.
Speaker 1:But I mean, you can't escape that dog, I mean yo.
Speaker 2:But we can't escape that no matter what, so we might as well have something else.
Speaker 1:No, no, no. No. Well, hold on, wait, you know what like let me, let me pull that back. I don't want to, I don't want to get any of us in trouble, but we, we can't escape capitalism, we can't just just theoretically it's.
Speaker 2:In theory, it's possible, but this is where we're at, and so, like we, I, we have to work within the confines of what we have, and at least with with. Ai we have the potential to cure diseases, to solve problems. And like yeah, will the benefits from that go to the rich, but wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, but wait but wait, wait.
Speaker 1:Just like philosophical question, Like if you develop a cure for a disease that no one can access, did you really develop a cure for this disease? If you develop a cure for a disease that literally less than 1% of the people who actually have the disease can access it?
Speaker 2:not that those are real statistics, just to be clear, I don't know that those are real statistics. I think the chances of that happening where the cure becomes a thing that we find is a thing that only like a tiny percentage of people can access I think we'll be able. I think through AI, through modern medicine, we'll be able to cure things on a bigger level than that, than just like 1%.
Speaker 3:I think John Green might disagree with you.
Speaker 2:Listen, nobody knows right now.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, I mean like no dog like Liam, liam again, just to be 100% clear dog. I don nobody knows right now. No, yeah, you know, I mean like no dog like Liam, liam. I again, just to be a hundred percent clear dog. I don't disagree with you. I am very excited for the potential of AI, of artificial intelligence tools, and the developments that can be made using them. What I'm not excited for is how this is going to play out under capitalism. That's just I, I, I, I want to be optimistic about it, dog, but I've I've read, and I've read too much in the history of how, like, the phone changed things, how the facts changed things, how the internet changed things I lived through how the internet changed and it goes to making small percentage of us richer and like yo and I'm like I'm not excited for this supercharged version of that, you know.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the part it's like, as good as it can be, it can also be really bad and I'm not excited for that really bad aspect and I'm not gonna. I can't ignore that. But I do agree with you. 100 there are amazing things that we can potentially do we have an example.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately. I mentioned john green, because tuberculosis wait. It's only the rich countries that have been able to vaccinate for it. We have the potential to eliminate tuberculosis, but because of rich people, vaccines aren't getting to poor areas.
Speaker 1:You know and I, I don't. I don't know that that's the only example of that, but like I can't imagine it is you know, like, or even just like you know. So it's like I, yo, I want, I want so bad, I want so bad for ai to be the thing that brings about the death of capitalism. That's what I want yeah, I I, yeah, I know, I, yeah, I know, I know that's. That's what I saw.
Speaker 2:You said I have optimistic views, but you know, let's calm down a little here. Don't be that ecstatic on me, bro.
Speaker 1:What are you on? No, I feel you, I mean, but, like you know, it's like I look. I would love for it to happen that, like you know, more people use AI tools to enrich themselves mentally and intellectually, not necessarily monetarily, Although you know, if you can't do it monetarily without hurting somebody, cool, no problem. You know, but like and I'll go back to what I was saying it's like I feel like we've gotten to this point where, as a species, as a society at least in the U S we've lost the plot. Everybody's out to get a dollar, Nobody really cares about how they do it, and so everybody's looking for that shortcut, that I got listen.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing, I think, that has been going on for a long time like railroad tycoons and they're just like fuck everybody else no, no, no, no, no but at this point, it's like it's super charged now, like now, like so I think about.
Speaker 1:I think about it like this I remember when I was in undergrad there were a lot of people who were just like pure actual chemistry majors, right, who were just like I just want to learn chemistry, I want to be a chemist, I want to go do chemistry. Now a lot of universities are actually cutting their chemistry programs because you don't have a lot of students who are coming in wanting to be chemists. They're coming in wanting to be dental hygienists. They they're coming in wanting to be dental hygienists. They're coming in wanting to be, you know, a very specific and technical professional nurse. You know nurses aid very specific and technical professions that will get them a job that will make them some money. It's not about the pursuit of learning.
Speaker 2:It's about the pursuit of a degree that will get them a paycheck, which, I mean, makes sense, right? You got to pay bills, Like you know, like okay, we'll do something yeah.
Speaker 1:Sure For sure, absolutely. That totally does make sense. But that's not dissimilar from teaching to a test at a certain point, right At that point. Is college any different from just more expensive high school? I mean, but I would argue that it shouldn't be Put it like that. I guess, I mean, but I would argue that it shouldn't be like.
Speaker 1:But like you know, like I, you know, I studied chemistry, in large part because I love chemistry and I think it's fascinating. I also studied creative writing because I wanted to study creative writing. You know, I went to college for the sake of just and I was, I was very fortunate. I busted my ass as hard as I possibly could. I went to school like six days a week in high school so that I could get into like a decent college what do you call it? And I just wanted to learn. You know what I mean. I won't pretend like I didn't study chemistry, banking that I'd be able to find some form of employment, although quite frankly I don't see that clearly has not served me very well. I've yet to be able to find a job in my field. So you know, bollocks to that, I guess. But you know.
Speaker 1:But I find it kind of almost concerning, that people seem to be less interested in again like the raw pursuit of something rather than just the end goal of money. And it should like it never. It never should have gotten to this point right, like the point of the money was to be able to, was to be able to quantify our ability to exchange things. It wasn't really supposed to be about the money. It was supposed to be about what the money will get you. Now I feel like for a lot of people, it's just gotten about the money. That's why you see more people scamming now and like you see that, and also just a greater ability of people to do it you know, but it's, yeah, it gives us an ability, more people, the ability to scam like that's yeah, you know for sure I was.
Speaker 1:I wasn't even thinking about that way with regard to ai, but, like you know, I I just I feel like I feel like fewer people have an interest in things for the sake of themselves, beyond this thing's ability to provide them money.
Speaker 3:You know what I mean and unfortunately the people that do is particularly in the arts have trouble finding money, yeah.
Speaker 2:Cause it's like well, you know, I'm not trying to just do anything, you generally don't go to college for philosophy Cause you think you're going to make it big and get rich and all that. But people should go to college for philosophy because you think you're gonna make it big and get rich and all that. But people should go to college for philosophy and they should be able to. If I quote by socrates on my tattooed on my body like I love philosophy, it's great, but like yeah, it doesn't really pay the bills very well but it should.
Speaker 1:You know, I mean like that, or like, or, or do we, or do we need to rethink the bills, you know, I mean like, you know, like, but again, again, honestly, dog, like, I feel like half these podcasts chats really just center around like us being like. So this is why capitalism is the problem I get like, I get it.
Speaker 1:I won't argue about that you know, because it's like, yeah, like I mean, half of this, half of this is me just in some weird way kind of playing devil's advocate because I ain't going front layup.
Speaker 1:I feel very similar to you about like, yeah, yo, there's so many crazy, wild things that we could potentially do with with these even just like hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up because consider this right, like with this, with that relatively recent breakthrough and like the potential for quantum computing, that completely changes the game for what we could potentially do with ai tools, because one of the big issues with ai tools right now is like the heat generated and, like you know, the greenhouse that's the thing I was talking about, myrona one.
Speaker 2:It's like quantum could be. Yeah, it's, it's you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, you know. So it's like I I am. I mean we'll see quantum computers. I don't know they they may. Still I don't know. I don't know enough enough to know how legitimately possible it is to make a quantum computer. I've heard arguments from both sides saying that it's just like it defies the laws of physics and you can't do it. And other sides are being like we just haven't figured it out yet. But assuming that we get there, yeah, dog. Like there's an insane, there's like a ridiculous future that we could live in. That is akin to star trek, almost. But like we won't get there if we can't move past capitalism. I can't, we just won't we won't just just.
Speaker 2:I just want to bring it down to like a base thing here. Listen, would you? I, if you ask me, would I rather be a poor person now or a rich person in the year 1200,? I'd rather be a poor person now with the technology that we have.
Speaker 1:I think it depends. I think it depends on where you are in the world.
Speaker 2:But no, I mean like yeah, no, no, no, I'm not going to die, hopefully less likely I should say less likely to die of, like you know, of a random disease or just some bacteria I picked up. I have access to many things.
Speaker 1:I'm definitely being facetious. There is no world where I will make an argument that the quality of life for the average person on this planet has improved since we made the switch from feudalism and monarchies to a cap, to a more capitalist framework rich people used to eat pineapples on their tables because it was so expensive to get.
Speaker 2:They'd be able to get this pineapple and everyone's like what the fuck mine's blown? What is that? And now you pull up a fucking. You pull up a pineapple, dancing on chat bt. If you want to like it, doesn't matter, like I. So I think technology, you know, does improve lives. It fucks us in a lot of ways. No, it absolutely does.
Speaker 1:No, no, no no, no, technology improves lives. Not understanding that technology, how we got to it, why it improved the life and what things were like before it is part of the problem. Like capitalism or any other system that's mostly focused on like the results, the destination and making as little journey as possible because that costs money, then you start to run into that problem, you know I mean, then you start to run into the problem of like well, now it's too, though right, because the results are what get you further, right so?
Speaker 2:you need the results so capitalism does push these things like. It does push to people to invent more and to create things so that they can enrich themselves, so they can make money, so that they can make more money than everybody else.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting discussion, that's actually a whole you stumbled into a little bit of a can of worms there, dog, because that's actually one of those. That's, that's a. That's one of those things that gets debated somewhat fiercely the idea that capitalism actually pushes innovation In its early days, for sure, when we were first kind of working out the system and industrialization was kind of first happening and there was still a lot of wild, wild west and open commons and lots of resources available. Sure, yeah, capitalism did a whole lot to push people to figure out well, you know, what can we do with this, now that I don't have to get the king's permission to go into the woods and mine these rocks that I think are interesting rocks that I could turn into something else and make a profit out of, or not even turn into something else and make a profit out of, but turn into something else that people need that I can then sell them and, you know, be able to live my life Right. That is accurate. That's not what happens anymore, though. What happens now is that and to kind of go back to the pharmaceutical company example is that a company will, rather than really develop a new medication, we'll just use interesting chemistry, synthesis tricks to extend their patent. You know I mean like you know, and just make more money that way. Or or you know, I mean like, like considering how much, uh, considering how much, uh like, just like general, like commons, public, public resources have to get used in the development and testing of a lot of these drugs.
Speaker 1:It is wild to me that there isn't that, that, yeah, that we don't have like medicaid for all you know. I I mean, but no, that's that's, that's, that's not a thing Like companies like, oh well, you know, we gotta, we gotta recoup our investment from, like you know, making this equipment and, like you know, doing all this testing and all that it's like. But but how much of that investment do you really need to recoup when you're going to be selling this drug for the rest of time? Basically, you know what I mean. It's like, yo, how much money has Bayer made off aspirin? How much money did Bayer make off heroin before they were like, ah, maybe not, maybe not. You know what I mean, but that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Without money do you think so? Say you eliminate capitalism. Do you think there's just as much of a drive to invent and create? Oh yeah, say you eliminate capitalism. Do you think there's just as much of a drive?
Speaker 3:to invent and create and, oh yeah, dude, what do you? What do you most? Can I say that most of the stuff that I've created I I went to learn. I learned music, music, guitar, stuff like that that wasn't for profit. I learned, uh, modding, writing, game mods and stuff that wasn't for profit. All these other things. None of it was driven by profit.
Speaker 1:I am committed to the idea that people get the best results for things when it's not actually for profit, when you're actually inspired to do it, because you are inspired to do it inherently. That, to me, is the best. Like I, that's not to say that people don't do a good job when they're getting paid. Trust me, somebody is paying me to do something. I'm going to do my best.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously, in this day and age, if you're getting paid for something, if you get paid to create something, that would be a driver to create that said thing.
Speaker 1:But I, but to you, to, to your, to, to your, uh, to your question regarding like would people still innovate? I mean, like people invented, like there was all of the history of humanity before.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, I'm not saying there would be no, we'd all be like fuck it.
Speaker 1:We're going out to down to the local bar because because there would still be problems that need to be solved, but the goal of solving those, but the solution to those problems wouldn't have to center around whether or not you can make money in the solution.
Speaker 2:Oh it sucks ass, Like I'm not saying it doesn't suck ass.
Speaker 1:I'm with you on that, but I will entirely concede it's not happening in my lifetime. I've given up. I don't think we will. We will, hopefully with this administration in the US at least we will be a little bit more humbled and maybe we will figure it the fuck out if we survive this. But capitalism is going to be here until probably well after I'm dead, 30 years of my life. There is a broader global shift towards a less capitalist framework of social organization. I don't know what it's going to be, called.
Speaker 1:I don't want to throw out any words that might trigger somebody.
Speaker 2:It sounds nice. I like the idea. I love the idea.
Speaker 1:I just want us to start moving away. I just want us to stop commodifying so many things I want us to.
Speaker 3:We have, um, a bill for universal basic income. That's been floating around for a year or two now and it hasn't been shot down, but it also hasn't, as I said, I am hoping that you know, within my lifetime that will pass, because that gives people who want to look into art, look into uh, just doing their passions universal basic income is a really interesting one, like I've looked into it before, where they've tried it in some places and had maybe some success, some less success like that.
Speaker 2:So it's a very interesting idea and I don't think anyone truly knows how it would go on a broad scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very, I feel like it, I feel like it is, I feel like it is very socially and societally dependent and that was the same word is very societally dependent, right, like you know, in some places you can probably do something like that and it'll work out.
Speaker 1:Some places, like, I don't know how well that will work in the U? S, I know it would. No, let me let me pull that back. I know for a fact that in the US it would ameliorate the situations of a lot of people in a meaningful way. However, on average, it probably wouldn't do that much, just because in the US at least, companies are allowed to just charge whatever the fuck they want for shit, including basic needs, including basic goods that everybody needs, because price controls are communism or whatever, even though it's not true. But whatever, the US government has absolutely put price controls on goods in the past for a good reason, and it was more or less fine. But to be perfectly honest and I got to be careful, when I say things like this, I lose my anti-capitalist card. When I say things like this, there are aspects of a capitalist exchange model that are not terrible.
Speaker 2:Right. That's basically where I'm at.
Speaker 1:The problem is when you commodify the basic needs for existence. Yeah, if housing were not commodified, if medicine were not commodified, if food and water were not commodified and maybe some clothing stuff weren't commodified, I don't think I think I would. I know, I know for a fact, I would have significantly fewer issues with the concept of capitalism. Commodify yacht trips, that's fine. Commodify space flight? No, actually no, don't commodify space flight don't commodify that one?
Speaker 2:no, no don't do that like some luxuries.
Speaker 1:I mean like yeah, you can have some luxury commodity situations, you know I mean. But like housing, nah, everybody gets a house roughly the same size, you know I mean. Or whatever, or you get a house that you need, you know I mean. You get a house that's roughly the size you need for the family you got. I don't know what the rules would be.
Speaker 2:We can figure it out if we really wanted to figure it out, but I do guarantee you that is not happening in your life.
Speaker 3:Oh, hell no I feel, confident.
Speaker 2:No matter how much AI takes off, it will enrich the rich.
Speaker 1:And this I would love to, if either of you know how true this is, because I feel like I looked into this years ago and I don't remember now. I just kind of remember the headlines. So you know, just full context for that, full context for that. But my understanding has been for a while that there are enough vacant properties and at least most major cities to house those who are homeless in those cities, or at least like average. Yeah, I don't know how true that is, or that like the cost to feed, the cost to house every homeless person in the U? S at at a basic level, is less than the cost of imprisoning all the people that we have imprisoned in the US, or something like that. I feel like I've heard that that's true.
Speaker 1:But part of the reason why you'll never see that is because people are inculcated into this hyper-individualistic idea that is the heart of capitalism, this idea that it's about me, anybody else is out to get me and I got to make sure I get mine and fuck anybody else. You know what I mean and like that, the only way you move away from that. I think Lennon was the one who said you need a generation, really two, two would be better. But you need a generation of children who are all raised to not believe that, to not think that way actually, and then having that reinforced throughout their early childhood, you know. I mean, or at least when it's not reinforced, having it made very clear and plain that this is bad and we don't like to do this and we don't, we don't want to do this, but we don't do that. We don't do that we have ads.
Speaker 2:You put the focus on the individual right, like the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps, even though that's a created from a thing that's impossible literally impossible.
Speaker 3:It was literally how it started.
Speaker 2:Pull yourself up by your bootstraps was something people said when you couldn't do something, because it's literally impossible.
Speaker 1:Now they say it as a real thing, which is kind of shitty, but like, hey, it's the world we live in you know, I mean it's, you know it's where we got to us, how you know, you know it's and we got here, how we got here, and that's you know. This is where we're at, you know. But, yeah, you know, like I, I am very like I said, you know I'm, I'm right there with, I'm right there with you, Liam, and also Rob, like I, I do think that there's a whole lot of really amazing things to uh take advantage of, like the nuanced controls and things that you can do with it.
Speaker 1:But I'm not excited, for mostly I get it and I'm just, and I'm just not excited for the way that this, that this sort of thing, tends to play out in our society as it is. What's the famous quote?
Speaker 2:uh, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. I've heard that one, I forget who said that I've not heard that, but I like that.
Speaker 1:That's like, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I gotta look up who said that that's a great one, because like yeah, get that tattooed on the other arm I'm gonna be covered in quotes by the end of I already got two, like I got two tattoos and both of them have quotes like so it's, I've been.
Speaker 1:I've been wanting to get a tattoo like here on this part of my arm that just says, uh, is your ego? Sorry, I've been wanting to get a tattoo with this part of it. This is like the inside of my arm that just says is your ego at stake? I remember I was helping a friend move in college once with his pops and me and my friend kind of got into. We were trying to figure out how we were going to get this couch into the apartment and so he wanted to do it one way and I was like, nah, I really think we need to do it this way, and both ways ultimately would have worked. But his pop like we were kind of like going back and forth over it for like a good like two, three minutes, and his pops was like, hey, is your ego at stake here? And I was like, no, it's not, let's just do it your way.
Speaker 1:Dog is fine, but like I like I appreciate that phrase so much it has wafted into my head or more than one occasion when I've been like discussing things with people in a relatively heated manner, I'm like, yeah, it's fine, I might not be right here, that's okay. You know, what does it matter? Does my, is my, is my ego at stake here? Like, am I going to stop being a person if I don't get my? You know it's like, hmm, yeah, I kind of want to get that one tattooed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the first article I found was here's why you should stop using William Gibson's the Future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, so maybe I'm using it wrong?
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 2:But I still like it.
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess you could get it and then like put like you could get it, but like with a strikethrough. Do you know what I mean? Oh shit.
Speaker 2:I messed up. Maybe I'm not using that right, I don't know, but anyway, well, I, I got my my, I gotta take care of my daughter.
Speaker 1:I was going to say, like I feel like we've been, we've been here about spicy you should probably tell people who you are and why.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I never did that this entire time where you have been listening to hello kitty and where to find you and that sort of stuff. Just throw it at the end. We'll throw it maybe at the beginning, who knows, whatever word.
Speaker 1:I appreciate, at some point I gotta get good at doing this. But yeah, what up y'all? It's your boy, dr kim thug, newly minted phd. Synthetic organic chemistry. You know I mean, I'm out here with your boys, rob and liam, solving the world's problems in armchairs as you do. You know I mean. But uh, if you're interested in some actual chemistry and like science content, you know, including things between, like the history of sulfuric acid and how atoms make molecules, or even just like whether or not you want to buy one of them hydrogen water bottles, check me out YouTube, tiktok, instagram at Kim Thug. Kim C-H-E-M dot T-H-U-G. Yes, thug, like that, like Thug, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we didn't even get to alpha water. Damn Fuck, we were going to bring that back.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I forgot about that Next time, next time.
Speaker 1:Although I'm going to leave you with this, though. I'm going to leave you with this, though, specifically the one about the MP effect, that idea that, like, hot water freezes faster than cold water. Oh okay, tldr, it may not necessarily be true. Watch the video, but one of the things that was interesting is that, like the host mentioned some research that shows that if you take water and you put it in like a Silicon based nanotube, the water will, in fact, it will confine the water to the point where the water actually has to orient itself in specific ways in order to be able to efficiently occupy the space, and this has consequences for that water's ability to then conduct heat and things like that. I have not read the paper, this was just a thing that she mentioned, but she showed the paper and I'm going to go find it, but I thought that was fascinating. I thought that was really cool and, yeah, I just kind of wanted to share that because I thought that was cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody, go ask ChatGPT about it and prepare to be lied to. We'll lie to you, I promise.
