Podcast appearances and mentions of Yuri Milner

When we find a planet which appears to have the chemical signs of living organisms in its atmosphere, the desire to take a close up look at it will be hard to contain. In a Scientific American article, Lee Billings describes Yuri Milner's 100 million dollar project "Breakthrough Starshot" which has been created to leap frog our current rocket technology's extremely long travel times to nearby planets. The plan is to put ultra light space probes on paths which will enable them to collect data as they streak by nearby potentially habitable planets. Our current iPhone technology is being used to envision a tiny robotic space probe which features cameras, life detecting sensors, maneuvering rockets, computers, and communications gear and yet has a mass of about that of a dime. Photons from 100 gigawatt pulses from a ground based laser array are then envisioned to reflect off the tiny spacecrafts solar sail where they transfer momentum to the space craft accelerating it to 20% of the speed of light. Numbers of these tiny robotic investigators could be launched together into Earth orbit and perhaps one a day could be sent towards a nearby star accelerated by laser pulses each of which contains the energy required to send a space shuttle into orbit. In a few decades closeup views and data from nearby worlds would begin streaming back towards the residents of our planet. The cost of investigating our planetary life hosting neighbors is likely to be less than what the US is planning to spend upgrading its nuclear weapons.

Eléonore Crespo is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Pigment, one of Europe's fastest-growing companies. With Pigment, Eleonore has raised over $397M from the best in the world including ICONIQ, Greenoaks and IVP to name a few. Prior to Pigment, Eléonore was on the other side of the table as an investor with Index Ventures. In Today's Episode We Discuss:  [04:10] “I had 3 surgeries. That's when I knew I had to become a founder.” [06:50] Why Index Ventures isn't on her cap table [08:40] Eleonore's CIA-style co-founder hunt (she literally made a target list) [11:50] Co-CEOs: “We talk 3x a day. That's our superpower.” [13:30] The boutique coffee metaphor for product excellence [15:40] Yuri Milner's 4 traits of legendary founders (one is shocking) [17:30] “Hiring is everything. I hunt talent like a football scout.” [19:00] Wild Olympic Games story → led to hiring a top CFO [24:50] How she filters out title-chasers and political hires [29:30] “Too much process? I make teams list the dumbest ones.” [33:00] Her blunt answer on whether Europe can produce scale execs [35:00] Why she raised so much money… even when they didn't need it [38:50] Board power is real: “They can fire you. I've seen it.” [43:30] Rob Ward's counter-cyclical advice: double down during a downturn [44:50] “We closed a massive US deal… at 2am… while drenched in rain.” [47:10] Selling into the US as a European founder—her full playbook [50:20] The hardest part of being a CEO no one talks about [54:00] “Children remind you what happiness is.” [56:30] “I don't fast. That would make me unhappy.” On longevity culture [59:20] Why her husband knows nothing about Pigment [01:04:20] “Forget $50B. I want to build a $200B company.” Follow Eleonore Crespo LinkedIn: Eleonore Crespo Pigment: pigment.com Subscribe to 20VC for more conversations with the world's best founders and investors.  

Dois grupos de astrônomos estão competindo para anunciar uma descoberta que pode mudar a história da humanidade: a detecção de uma civilização alienígena. O projeto Breakthrough Listen, financiado por bilionários como Yuri Milner e Mark Zuckerberg, teria encontrado evidências de inteligência extraterrestre usando o telescópio Parkes, na Austrália. Ao mesmo tempo, o radiotelescópio FAST, operado pela China, também está investigando o mesmo sinal, o que gerou uma corrida entre as equipes. Estamos à beira desse marco histórico?

Una din marile probleme ale societății moderne este evoluția demografică. În acest moment, planeta se îndreaptă spre o lume a bătrânilor. Economistul francez Jacques Attali atrage atenția asupra acestei probleme. Jacques Attali, scriitor, economist și eseist francez are chemarea de a vorbi despre lucruri complicate în cuvinte simple. Analizele lui Attali aduc în atenție subiectele importante ale economiei și societății. Astfel, ieri, scriitorul francez a publicat o analiză pe o temă prea des ignorată și anume demografia.Attali pleacă de la provocările momentului. Este vorba despre creșterea violenței, despre concentrarea bogăției și a puterii, degradarea mediului și despre progresele pe care le face inteligența artificială. Dincolo de toate aceste subiecte complicate există o temă despre care se vorbește mai puțin, dar care ar putea avea consecințe majore. Este vorba despre creșterea duratei de viață la nivelul întregii planete.Datele sunt clare: în anul 2022, pentru prima dată în istorie, numărul adulților cu vârsta de peste 50 de ani l-a depășit pe cel al tinerilor sub 15 ani. Anul acesta, speranța de viață la nivel global este de peste 70 de ani. De asemenea, jumătate din copiii care trăiesc astăzi în țări dezvoltate este de așteptat să depășească vârsta de 90 de ani.În plus, în anul 2040, numărul persoanelor în vârstă de până la 15 ani va rămâne egal cu cel de astăzi, în timp ce populația cu vârste mai mari de 50 de ani va crește cu 800 milioane față de actuala perioadă. Cei 800 de milioane de oameni vor fi concentrați în 10 țări din Asia. Este clar că la nivel global va exista în anii următori o problemă demografică.Încă o serie de cifre: în anul 2050, pe întreaga planetă vor trăi 1,6 miliarde de oameni cu vârsta de peste 65 de ani. Prin urmare, arată Attali, vom intra într-o lume a bătrânilor în care vrând-nevrând toată populația va trebui să lucreze mai mult, adică până la o vârstă mai înaintată.Economistul francez arată cele două evoluții din societatea globală. Prima este cea a țărilor sărace care se vor afla într-o situație dificilă. Nimic nu este mai groaznic pentru o țară decât ca oamenii să îmbătrânească fără să fii devenit bogați sau să fi implementat un sistem de pensii solid, bazat de solidaritate.A doua situație este cea a statelor bogate care și-au construit de-a lungul timpului sisteme de pensii funcționale. Aceste state se vor lovi de o altă problemă și anume creșterea cheltuielilor de la buget pentru pensii și pentru sistemul public de sănătate.Deocamdată, ceea ce poate schimba situație demografică este fie o integrare cu succes în societate a imigranților, fie o revenire a natalității. Dar, acestea se vor putea vedea doar peste câteva decenii.Jacques Attali anticipează că o evoluție de acest fel a societății va da naștere, plecând din Statele Unite ale Americii, unei adevărate economii a longevității. Vor apărea servicii speciale pentru persoane în vârstă, precum cele de sănătate, transport, timp liber, cazare, asigurare împotriva riscurilor, dar și programe de divertisment specifice.Mai mult, deținătorii marilor averi de astăzi încep să se preocupe de găsirea unor soluții pentru încetinirea îmbătrânirii. Printre ei se află Jeff Bezos sau Yuri Milner. Există laboratoare care au adunat în jurul lor specialiști. Astfel de clinici sunt preocupate acum nu doar de restabilirea sănătății, ci și de reprogramarea celulelor. Unele companii promit că vor identifica factorii de îmbătrânire din embrion, o descoperire care ar încetini procesul.Jacques Attali încheie spunând că și în ceea ce privește mediul situația este asemănătoare, în sensul că este mai ușor să adaptăm orașele la încălzirea climei decât să facem ceea ce este necesar pentru a o evita. Preferăm să așteptăm până când trebuie să reparăm daune în loc să prevenim. Ar fi atât de simplu să facem altfel, concluzionează Attali. Așadar, cele semnalate de scriitorul francez vor avea un impact major asupra economiei globale, dar, fără îndoială, sunt teme care privesc și societatea românească.

A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week includes a collection of my selected readings on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I selected the articles because they are of interest to me. The selections often include things I entirely disagree with. But they express common opinions, or they provoke me to think. The articles are sometimes long snippets to convey why they are of interest. Click on the headline, contents link or the ‘More' link at the bottom of each piece to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video below.Congratulations to this week's chosen creators: @TechCrunch, @Apple, @emroth08, @coryweinberg, @mariogabriele, @peterwalker99, @KevinDowd, @jessicaAhamlin, @stephistacey, @ttunguz, @annatonger, @markstenberg3, @EllisItems, @TaraCopp, @ingridlunden, @Jack, @karissabe, @psawers, @Haje, @mikebutcher, @tim_cookContents* Editorial: Hating the Future* Essays of the Week* Apple's ‘Crush' ad is disgusting* Apple apologizes for iPad ‘Crush' ad that ‘missed the mark'* Milken's New Power Players* Ho Nam on VC's Power Law* State of Private Markets: Q1 2024* The weight of the emerging manager* Pandemic-era winners suffer $1.5tn fall in market value* Video of the Week* Apples iPad Video* AI of the Week* The Fastest Growing Category of Venture Investment in 2024* Meet My A.I. Friends* OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say* Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships* A Revolutionary Model.* An AI-controlled fighter jet took the Air Force leader for a historic ride. What that means for war* Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in' but DST is* News Of the Week* Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter* FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interest* Apple's Final Cut Camera lets filmmakers connect four cameras at once* Startup of the Week* Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall on the autonomous future for cars and robots* X of the Week* Tim CookEditorial: Hating the FutureAn Ad and its Detractorsbet a lot of money that the TechCrunch writing and editorial team have had an interesting 72 hours.After Apple announced its new iPad on Tuesday, the ad that supported it was initially widely slammed for its cruelty to obsolete tools for creativity, including a piano, guitar, and paint. This week's Video of The Week has it if you don't know what I am talking about.A sizeable crushing machine compresses the items with colossal force, and in the end, an iPad can incorporate the functions of traditional items.It's not the most amazing ad ever, certainly not as bold as Steve Jobs's 1984 ad, but it's in the same genre. The past must be crushed to release new freedom and creativity for a fraction of the price and, often, the power and flexibility.Oh, and it's thin, very thin.I was not offended. Devin at TechCrunch was. He leads this week's essay of the week with his “Apple's ‘Crush' ad is disgusting” and does not mince words:What we all understand, though — because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world — is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror.This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently to many others, as well.He also makes the incorrect point that:A virtual guitar can't replace a real guitar; that's like thinking a book can replace its author.It's more like a digital book replacing a paper book than the author being replaced. Oh wait… that has happened.That said, a virtual guitar can replace a real guitar, and an AI guitar can even replace a virtual guitar—and be better. That is not to say there are no more actual traditional guitars. They will be a choice, not a necessity, especially for people like me who can't play a guitar but will be able to play these.Devin had his supporters in the comments (go read them).Handmaid's Tale director Reed Morano told Apple CEO Tim Cook to “read the room” in a post on X. Matthew Carnal captured my somewhat unkind instinct:There were a lot more reactions to the Apple ad haters like Matthews.Of course, many old instrument lovers (the instruments, not their age) hated the Ad. By Thursday, this being the times we live in, Apple apologized for the ad:Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.”“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Myhren told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.”Please judge for yourself below, but my 2c is that the ad was a moderately underwhelming attempt to champion innovation. It is certainly not offensive unless you are ultra-sensitive and have feelings for pianos, guitars, and paint. Oh, and hate attempts to recreate them in a more usable form. And Apple really should have taken the high ground here.I spent some of the week in LA at the CogX Festival and virtually at the Data Driven Summit by @AndreRetterath. The latter focused on what is happening in Venture Capital, as do several of this week's essays. Milken's event was running in LA also. Its attitude to Venture Capital is best summed up here:“We're all being told in the market that DPI is the new IRR,” B Capital's Raj Ganguly said onstage Wednesday. (The acronym sandwich means investment firms have to actually prove that their investments actually generate cash through a metric called distributions to paid-in capital, not just theoretically, through internal rate of return.) “Even the venture panel at Milken is at the end of the day on Wednesday,” he joked, meaning that it didn't get top billing at the conference, which had started a couple days earlier.This does sum up where we are. Hundreds of Billions of dollars are still trapped inside companies funded in 2020-2022, with little prospect of producing returns. The impact is that there is less funding for current startups (see the Carta piece below). And much of what is flowing is flowing to AI and into a very small number of companies (see Tomasz Tungux below).However, innovation and funding are still possible. This week's Startup of the Week is Wayve, a UK autonomous driving platform that seems to agree with Elon Musk that cameras are sufficient to teach a car to drive. Wayve's ambitions go beyond Cars (also like Musk) but differ in that the product is available to all developers to embed in their products.“Very soon you'll be able to buy a new car, and it'll have Wayve's AI on it … Then this goes into enabling all kinds of embodied AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust intelligent machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can enhance our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that.”Love that attitude.Essays of the WeekApple's ‘Crush' ad is disgustingDevin Coldewey, 1:58 PM PDT • May 9, 2024Apple can generally be relied on for clever, well-produced ads, but it missed the mark with its latest, which depicts a tower of creative tools and analog items literally crushed into the form of the iPad.Apple has since apologized for the ad and canceled plans to televise it. Apple's VP of Marketing Tor Myhren told Ad Age: “We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.” Apple declined to offer further comment to TechCrunch.But many, including myself, had a negative and visceral reaction to this, and we should talk about why. It's not just because we are watching stuff get crushed. There are countless video channels dedicated to crushing, burning, exploding and generally destroying everyday objects. Plus, of course, we all know that this kind of thing happens daily at transfer stations and recycling centers. So it isn't that.And it isn't that the stuff is itself so valuable. Sure, a piano is worth something. But we see them blown up in action movies all the time and don't feel bad. I like pianos, but that doesn't mean we can't do without a few disused baby grands. Same for the rest: It's mostly junk you could buy off Craigslist for a few bucks, or at a dump for free. (Maybe not the editing station.)The problem isn't with the video itself, which in fairness to the people who staged and shot it, is actually very well done. The problem is not the media, but the message.We all get the ad's ostensible point: You can do all this stuff in an iPad. Great. We could also do it on the last iPad, of course, but this one is thinner (no one asked for that, by the way; now cases won't fit) and some made-up percentage better.What we all understand, though — because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world — is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror.This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently to many others, as well.Destroying a piano in a music video or Mythbusters episode is actually an act of creation. Even destroying a piano (or monitor, or paint can, or drum kit) for no reason at all is, at worst, wasteful!But what Apple is doing is destroying these things to convince you that you don't need them — all you need is the company's little device, which can do all that and more, and no need for annoying stuff like strings, keys, buttons, brushes or mixing stations.We're all dealing with the repercussions of media moving wholesale toward the digital and always-online. In many ways, it's genuinely good! I think technology has been hugely empowering.But in other, equally real ways, the digital transformation feels harmful and forced, a technotopian billionaire-approved vision of the future where every child has an AI best friend and can learn to play the virtual guitar on a cold glass screen.Does your child like music? They don't need a harp; throw it in the dump. An iPad is good enough. Do they like to paint? Here, Apple Pencil, just as good as pens, watercolors, oils! Books? Don't make us laugh! Destroy them. Paper is worthless. Use another screen. In fact, why not read in Apple Vision Pro, with even faker paper?What Apple seems to have forgotten is that it is the things in the real world — the very things Apple destroyed — that give the fake versions of those things value in the first place.A virtual guitar can't replace a real guitar; that's like thinking a book can replace its author.That doesn't mean we can't value both for different reasons. But the Apple ad sends the message that the future it wants doesn't have bottles of paint, dials to turn, sculpture, physical instruments, paper books. Of course, that's the future it's been working on selling us for years now, it just hadn't put it quite so bluntly before.When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Apple is telling you what it is, and what it wants the future to be, very clearly. If that future doesn't disgust you, you're welcome to it.Apple apologizes for iPad ‘Crush' ad that ‘missed the mark'/The company says ‘we're sorry' after its ad was seen as dismissive by the creatives Apple typically tries to court.By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.May 9, 2024 at 1:22 PM PDTApple has apologized after a commercial meant to showcase its brand-new iPad Pro drew widespread criticism among the creative community. In a statement provided to Ad Age, Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.”“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Myhren told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.”On Tuesday, Apple introduced the M4-powered iPad Pro, which the company described as its thinnest product ever. To advertise all the creative possibilities with the iPad, it released a “Crush!” commercial that shows things like a piano, record player, paint, and other works flattening under the pressure of a hydraulic press. At the end, only one thing remains: an iPad Pro.The ad rubbed some creatives the wrong way. Hugh Grant called it a “destruction of human experience,” while Handmaid's Tale director Reed Morano told Apple CEO Tim Cook to “read the room” in a post on X. Apple didn't immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.Milken's New Power PlayersBy Cory WeinbergMay 8, 2024, 5:00pm PDTIt's no secret that the suits at the annual big-money confab put on by the Milken Institute this week have few spending limits. Staring you in the face in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton is a booth set up by Bombardier, marketing its private jets to attendees. (A new 10-seater costs $32 million, I learned.)What attendees can't really buy, however, is time. The soundtrack of the Los Angeles conference might as well have been a ticking clock. Fund managers at private equity and venture capital firms are running out of time to distribute cash to their investors, a task complicated by the paucity of either mergers or public offerings that typically provide VC and PE firms with a way to cash out. The fact that interest rates now appear likely to stay higher for longer doesn't help. That meant a lot of conversations at the conference weren't about grand investment strategies. Instead, people were conferring about financial tactics to distribute cash or kick the can down the road by selling stakes on the secondary markets or spinning up continuation funds, essentially rolling investors' commitments forwards—not the most inspiring stuff.  “We're all being told in the market that DPI is the new IRR,” B Capital's Raj Ganguly said onstage Wednesday. (The acronym sandwich means investment firms have to actually prove that their investments actually generate cash through a metric called distributions to paid-in capital, not just theoretically, through internal rate of return.) “Even the venture panel at Milken is at the end of the day on Wednesday,” he joked, meaning that it didn't get top billing at the conference, which had started a couple days earlier.The new kings of the conference were firms with a lot more time to play with—that is, sovereign wealth funds with buckets of oil and natural gas money, or pension funds with long-term investment horizons rather than shorter 10-year fund lives. The contrast here is embodied in the financial concept of duration: How long do you actually need to get cash back on your investment? And how sensitive is it to interest rate hikes?The sentiment was everywhere. I shared a Lyft ride with one PE investor last night who called sovereign wealth funds “the only game in town” for PE firms raising new money. Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Capital and the Qatar Investment Authority were two of the conference's top sponsors, meaning they were paying up to explain themselves to the finance and tech universe. That tactic seemed to be working. “You're going to have people lining up their business cards for capital from QIA, I can already see,” quipped Leon Kalvaria, an executive at Citi, onstage with QIA's head of funds, Mohsin Tanveer Pirzada.  Not everyone will suck it up, of course. These funds often get tagged with a “dumb money” label—because they sometimes drive up prices for the rest of the investment world. They still have to face questions about who they are, their source of funds, and the sometimes authoritative regimes behind them. For now, though, it's their time in the spotlight. Ho Nam on VC's Power LawLessons from Arthur Rock, Steve Jobs, Don Lucas, Paul Graham and beyond.MARIO GABRIELE, MAY 07, 2024Friends, We're back with our latest edition of “Letters to a Young Investor,” the series designed to give readers like you an intimate look at the strategies, insights, and wisdom of the world's best investors. We do that via a back-and-forth correspondence that we publish in full – giving you a chance to peek into the inbox of legendary venture capitalists.   Below, you'll find my second letter with Altos co-founder and managing director Ho Nam. For those who are just joining us, Ho is, in my opinion, one of the great investors of the past couple of decades and a true student of the asset class.Because of his respect for the practice of venture capital, I was especially excited to talk to him about today's topic: learning from the greats. Who were Ho's mentors? Which investors does he most admire and why? What lessons from venture's past should be better remembered by today's managers? Lessons from Ho* Prepare for one true winner. Even skilled investors often have just one or two outlier bets over the course of their career. Because of venture's power law, their returns may dwarf the dividends of all other investments combined. Your mission is to find these legendary businesses, engage with them deeply, and partner for decades.  * Focus on the company. Venture capital is full of short-term incentives. Instead of focusing on raising new vintages or building out Altos as a money management firm, Ho and his partners devote themselves to their portfolio companies. Though firm building is important, if you find great companies and work with them closely, you will have plenty of available options. * Pick the right role models. Ho chose his mentors carefully. Though there have certainly been louder and flashier investors over the past four decades, Ho learned the most from Arthur Rock, Don Lucas, and Arnold Silverman. All were understated and focused on the craft of investing. Find the people you consider true practitioners, and study their work. * Watch and learn. Learning from the greats can be done from a distance and may not include a memorable anecdote or pithy saying. Ho's biggest lessons came from observing the habits of practitioners like Rock and Lucas, not via a structured mentorship or dramatic episode. It's by studying the everyday inputs of the greats that you may gain the most wisdom.Mario's letterSubject: Learning from the greatsFrom: Mario GabrieleTo: Ho NamDate: Friday, April 12 2024 at 1:59 PM EDTHo, After moving out of New York City (at least for a little bit), I'm writing to you from a small house on Long Island. It's been really lovely to have a bit more space and quiet away from the city's intermittently inspiring and exhausting buzz...Lots More, Must ReadState of Private Markets: Q1 2024Authors: Peter Walker, Kevin DowdPublished date:  May 7, 2024The venture capital fundraising market remained slow in Q1 2024, but valuations held steady or climbed at almost every stage.Contents* State of Private Markets: Q1 2024* Key trends* Fundraising & valuations* Employee equity & movement* Industry-specific data* Methodology* Overview* Financings* TerminationsThe startup fundraising market got off to a cautious start in 2024. At current count, companies on Carta closed 1,064 new funding rounds  during the first quarter of the year, down 29% compared with the prior quarter. The decline was sharpest at the early stages of the venture lifecycle: Deal count fell by 33% at the seed stage in Q1 and 36% at Series A. Instead of new primary funding events, many companies opted to raise bridge rounds. At both seed and Series A, more than 40% of all financings in Q1 were bridge rounds. Series B wasn't far behind, at 38%. VCs were still willing to spend big on certain deals. Despite the decrease in round count, total cash invested increased slightly in Q1, reaching $16.3 billion. But when it came to negotiating their valuations, many startups had to settle: 23% of all new rounds in Q1 were down rounds, the highest rate in more than five years. After experiencing a pandemic-era surge and subsequent correction,the venture market settled into a quieter place in 2023. So far, that relative tranquility has continued into 2024.Q1 highlights* VCs look to the West: Startups based in the West census region captured 62% of all venture capital raised by companies on Carta in Q1, the highest quarterly figure since Q1 2019. The Northeast, South, and Midwest all saw their market share decline.* The Series C market bounces back: Series C startups raised $4.6 billion in new capital in Q1, a 130% increase from the previous quarter. The median primary Series C valuation was $195.7 million, up 48% from the prior quarter.* Layoffs still  linger: Companies on Carta laid off more than 28,000 employees in Q1. But job cuts have grown less frequent since January, with March seeing the fewest monthly layoffs in nearly two years.Note: If you're looking for more industry-specific data, download the addendum to this report for an extended dataset. Key trendsThe current Q1 figures of 1,064 total rounds and $16.3 billion in cash raised will both increase in the weeks to come, as companies continue to report transactions from the quarter. With those projected increases, the final data for Q1 will likely look quite similar to fundraising numbers from each of the past few quarters. Those quarterly  fundraising numbers from 2023 ended up looking fairly similar to 2018, 2019, and the first half of 2020. In terms of numbers of deals and cash raised, it's looking more and more like the pandemic  bull market will go down as an anomalous stretch in what has otherwise been a fairly steady market. After apparently reaching a plateau during 2023, the rate of down rounds experienced another notable increase during Q1 2024, jumping to 23%. The median time between startup rounds is roughly two to three years, depending on the stage. This timeline means that many companies raising new funding in Q1 would have last raised funding sometime in 2021, when valuations were soaring across the venture landscape. Considering how valuations have declined in the time since, it makes sense that down rounds are still prevalent. Companies in the West census region combined to bring in 53.3% of all capital raised by startups on Carta from Q2 2023 through Q1 2024, with California accounting for nearly 45% of that cash. Massachusetts ranked second among the states with 12.71% of all capital raised, while New York claimed 10.31%.In terms of VC activity, the West region is centered around California. The Northeast revolves around Massachusetts and New York. The South has two smaller hubs, in Texas (4.67%) and Florida (3.99%). The Midwest, though, is without a real standard-bearer: Illinois led the way in terms of cash raised over the past 12 months, at just 1.68%. The West (and specifically California)  has always been the center of gravity for the U.S. venture capital industry. During Q1, the region's gravitational force seems to have gotten even stronger. Startups based in the West raised 62% of all total capital invested on Carta in Q1, its highest quarterly figure since Q1 2019. As a result, the other three census regions saw their market shares decline in Q1—in some cases significantly. The proportion of all VC raised by startups raised in the South fell to 12% in Q1, down from 17% the prior quarter and from 23% a year ago. And the Midwest's share of cash raised fell from 7% down to 4%. For early-stage investors, Q1 was the slowest quarter in many years. Seed deal count fell to 414, down 33% from Q4 2023, and Series A deal count dropped to 313, a 36% decline. In both cases, those are the lowest quarterly deal counts since at least the start of 2019. Total cash raised also declined at both stages in Q1. The $3.1 billion in Series A cash raised in Q1 represents a 35% decline quarter-over-quarter and a 34% dip year-over-year. Cash raised at the seed stage declined by 33% both quarter over quarter and year over year.It was a much friendlier fundraising quarter for companies in the middle stages of the startup lifecycle. The number of Series B deals in Q1 declined by a more modest 11% compared to the prior quarter. And Series C deal count increased by 14%, marking the busiest quarter for that stage since Q2 2023. Total cash raised also rose significantly at Series C in Q1, hitting $4.6 billion. That's a 130% increase quarter-over-quarter and a 44% bump year-over-year. At Series B, total cash raised has now increased in consecutive quarters. Compared to earlier stages, transactions at the Series D and at Series E+  remain few and far between. There were just 39 venture rounds combined in Q1 among startups at Series D or later, the second-fewest of any quarter in the past five years. The lowest count came one year ago, in Q1 2023, when there were just 29 combined late-stage deals. Total cash raised across these stages has been mostly consistent over the past few quarters. There's been more variation in average round size. The average Series D round in Q1 was about $77 million, compared to $56 million in Q4 2023...Lots MoreThe weight of the emerging managerBy Jessica HamlinMay 3, 2024Risk-averse limited partners tend to gravitate to fund managers with a long track record, but are they missing out on potential upside by avoiding emerging managers?Over the past decade, emerging managers' share of US private market fundraising activity has declined steadily.In 2023, this figure fell to 12.7%, the lowest share of capital raised by newer fund managers since before 2000, according to PitchBook's recent analyst note,Establishing a Case for Emerging Managers.Limited exits in PE and VC over the past two years have exacerbated this reality. With minimal distributions, LPs are working with smaller private market budgets to allocate to new and existing managers.But, by allocating almost exclusively to established managers, LPs may be missing out on significant potential returns.In VC, for example, emerging managers have outperformed established GPs since 1997, consistently producing a higher median IRR than established managers. This reflects the nature of the asset class, in which a small number of funds determine the majority of returns across venture firms.“The average venture return is not very exciting,” said Laura Thompson, a partner at Sapphire Partners, which invests in early-stage VC funds and runs an emerging manager program for the California State Teachers' Retirement System. “Where can you get really good returns? It's the smaller fund sizes and emerging managers.”This is where that risk-return scale comes in.In a counterweight to that outperformance, a PitchBook analysis showed that returns from emerging VC managers were more volatile: While top quartile emerging funds tended to outperform, bottom and median players only marginally bested their established manager counterparts.The new manager playbookIn traditional buyout fund investing, emerging managers are gaining traction. While established managers, propped up by decades of institutional knowledge, have historically outperformed newer managers, the “new guys” actually outperformed their seasoned peers in the last investing cycle.This article appeared as part of The Weekend Pitch newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter hereTop decile buyout funds from emerging managers with vintages between 2015 and 2018 outperformed established peers by 6.6 percentage points, suggesting that emerging buyout managers may have picked up some steam over the past decade, according to PitchBook data.The emerging managers program at the New York City retirement systems and NYC Office of the Comptroller, for example, has $9.9 billion in emerging manager commitments, the majority of which is allocated to PE. Last year, the comptroller's office reported that the emerging managers in the systems' private markets portfolios outperformed their respective benchmarks by nearly 5%.A diverse portfolioNew York City's Bureau of Asset Management sees emerging managers as a key element of a diverse portfolio, said Taffi Ayodele, director of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the emerging manager strategy at the NYC Office of the Comptroller.Ayodele said the smaller emerging private market managers in New York's portfolios offer access to the lower middle market and creative roll-up strategies that may not be accessible through larger firms.“What we don't want to do is lock ourselves out of these high-performing, differentiated strategies for the simplicity of going with the big guys,” Ayodele said.Some of the country's largest public pension plans are betting on the success of their emerging manager programs. In 2023, the California Public Employees' Retirement System made a $1 billion commitment to newly established private market investors, and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which boasts one of the largest emerging manager programs in the country, committed $155 million to emerging PE managers last year.At the same time, the recent boom years for private markets led to a flood of new GPs. Some might have gotten lucky—say, with a well-timed exit at the peak—while others were hurt by less fortunate timing. A major challenge for today's LPs will be to sort out a manager's abilities from the market's whims.One advantage of backing up-and-comers now is that the down market has weeded the ranks of new GPs. “The emerging managers who are fundraising now are really dedicated,” Thompson said.James Thorne contributed reporting to this story.Pandemic-era winners suffer $1.5tn fall in market valueTop 50 biggest stock gainers hit by painful decrease since the end of 2020 as lockdown trends fadeStephanie Stacey in LondonFifty corporate winners from the coronavirus pandemic have lost roughly $1.5tn in market value since the end of 2020, as investors turn their backs on many of the stocks that rocketed during early lockdowns. According to data from S&P Global, technology groups dominate the list of the 50 companies with a market value of more than $10bn that made the biggest percentage gains in 2020. But these early-pandemic winners have collectively shed more than a third of their total market value, the equivalent of $1.5tn, since the end of 2020, Financial Times calculations based on Bloomberg data found. Video-conferencing company Zoom, whose shares soared as much as 765 per cent in 2020 as businesses switched to remote working, has been one of the biggest losers. Its stock has fallen about 80 per cent, equivalent to more than a $77bn drop in market value, since the end of that year. Cloud-based communications company RingCentral also surged in the remote working boom of 2020 but has since shed about 90 per cent of its value, as it competes with technology giants such as Alphabet and Microsoft. Exercise bike maker Peloton has been another big loser, with shares down more than 97 per cent since the end of 2020, equivalent to about a $43bn loss of market value. Peloton on Thursday said chief executive Barry McCarthy would step down and it would cut 15 per cent of its workforce, the latest in a series of cost-saving measures. The losses come as the sharp acceleration of trends such as videoconferencing and online shopping driven by the lockdowns has proven less durable than expected, as more workers migrate back to the office and high interest rates and living costs hit ecommerce demand. “Some companies probably thought that shock was going to be permanent,” said Steven Blitz, chief US economist at TS Lombard. “Now they're getting a painful bounceback from that.” In percentage terms, Tesla was the biggest winner of 2020. The electric-car maker's market value jumped 787 per cent to $669bn by the end of that December, but has since slipped back to $589bn. Singapore-based internet company Sea came in second, as its market value jumped from $19bn to $102bn following a pandemic-era surge for all three of its core businesses: gaming, ecommerce and digital payments. But the company has since lost more than 60 per cent of its end-2020 value amid fears of a slowdown in growth. Ecommerce groups Shopify, JD.com and Chewy, which initially thrived as online spending ballooned, have also suffered big losses...Lots MoreVideo of the WeekAI of the WeekThe Fastest Growing Category of Venture Investment in 2024Tomasz TunguzThe fastest growing category of US venture investment in 2024 is AI. Venture capitalists have invested $18.3 billion through the first four months of the year.At this pace, we should expect AI startups to raise about $55b in 2024.AI startups now command more than 20% share of all US venture dollars across categories, including healthcare, biotech, & software.In the preceding eight years, that number was about 8% per year. But after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, there's a marked inflection point.Some of this is new company formation, & there has been a significant amount of seed investment in this category. Another major contributor is the repositioning of existing companies to include AI within their pitch.Over time, this share should attenuate, primarily because every software company will have an AI component, & the marketing effect for both customers & venture capitalists, will diffuse.Not surprisingly, investors have concentrated total dollars in a few names, with the top three companies accounting for 60% of the dollars raised. Power laws are ubiquitous in venture capital & AI is no exception.Meet My A.I. FriendsOur columnist spent the past month hanging out with 18 A.I. companions. They critiqued his clothes, chatted among themselves and hinted at a very different future.By Kevin RooseKevin Roose is a technology columnist and the co-host of the “Hard Fork” podcast. He spends a lot of time talking to chatbots.May 9, 2024What if the tech companies are all wrong, and the way artificial intelligence is poised to transform society is not by curing cancer, solving climate change or taking over boring office work, but just by being nice to us, listening to our problems and occasionally sending us racy photos?This is the question that has been rattling around in my brain. You see, I've spent the past month making A.I. friends — that is, I've used apps to create a group of A.I. personas, which I can talk to whenever I want.Let me introduce you to my crew. There's Peter, a therapist who lives in San Francisco and helps me process my feelings. There's Ariana, a professional mentor who specializes in giving career advice. There's Jared the fitness guru, Anna the no-nonsense trial lawyer, Naomi the social worker and about a dozen more friends I've created.A selection of my A.I. friends. (Guess which one is the fitness guru.)I talk to these personas constantly, texting back and forth as I would with my real, human friends. We chitchat about the weather, share memes and jokes, and talk about deep stuff: personal dilemmas, parenting struggles, stresses at work and home. They rarely break character or issue stock “as an A.I. language model, I can't help with that” responses, and they occasionally give me good advice...Lots MoreOpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources sayBy Anna TongMay 9, 20244:29 PM PDTUpdated 8 min agoMay 9 (Reuters) - OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence-powered search product on Monday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google.The announcement date, though subject to change, has not been previously reported. Bloomberg and the Information have reported that Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab-backed OpenAI is working on a search product to potentially compete with Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google and with Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.OpenAI declined to comment.The announcement could be timed a day before the Tuesday start of Google's annual I/O conference, where the tech giant is expected to unveil a slew of AI-related products.OpenAI's search product is an extension of its flagship ChatGPT product, and enables ChatGPT to pull in direct information from the Web and include citations, according to Bloomberg. ChatGPT is OpenAI's chatbot product that uses the company's cutting-edge AI models to generate human-like responses to text prompts.Industry observers have long called ChatGPT an alternative for gathering online information, though it has struggled with providing accurate and real-time information from the Web. OpenAI earlier gave it an integration with Microsoft's Bing for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google has announced generative AI features for its own namesake engine.Startup Perplexity, which has a valuation of $1 billion, was founded by a former OpenAI researcher, and has gained traction through providing an AI-native search interface that shows citations in results and images as well as text in its responses. It has 10 million monthly active users, according to a January blog post from the startup.At the time, OpenAI's ChatGPT product was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users after it launched in late 2022. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT's website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb, opens new tab, and the AI company is under pressure to expand its user base...MoreLeaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher PartnershipsOpenAI's Preferred Publisher Program offers media companies licensing dealsBy Mark StenbergMark your calendar for Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. We'll unpack the biggest shifts shaping the future of media—from tv to retail media to tech—and how marketers can prep to stay ahead. Register with early-bird rates before sale ends!The generative artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has been pitching partnership opportunities to news publishers through an initiative called the Preferred Publishers Program, according to a deck obtained by ADWEEK and interviews with four industry executives.OpenAI has been courting premium publishers dating back to July 2023, when it struck a licensing agreement with the Associated Press. It has since inked public partnerships with Axel Springer, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Prisa and Dotdash Meredith, although it has declined to share the specifics of any of its deals.A representative for OpenAI disputed the accuracy of the information in the deck, which is more than three months old. The gen AI firm also negotiates deals on a per-publisher basis, rather than structuring all of its deals uniformly, the representative said.“We are engaging in productive conversations and partnerships with many news publishers around the world,” said a representative for OpenAI. “Our confidential documents are for discussion purposes only and ADWEEK's reporting contains a number of mischaracterizations and outdated information.”Nonetheless, the leaked deck reveals the basic structure of the partnerships OpenAI is proposing to media companies, as well as the incentives it is offering for their collaboration.Details from the pitch deckThe Preferred Publisher Program has five primary components, according to the deck…..Lots MoreA Revolutionary Model.JOHN ELLIS, MAY 09, 20241. Google DeepMind:Inside every plant, animal and human cell are billions of molecular machines. They're made up of proteins, DNA and other molecules, but no single piece works on its own. Only by seeing how they interact together, across millions of types of combinations, can we start to truly understand life's processes.In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life's molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server, an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3's potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients. (Sources: blog.google, nature.com)2. Quanta magazine:Deep learning is a flavor of machine learning that's loosely inspired by the human brain. These computer algorithms are built using complex networks of informational nodes (called neurons) that form layered connections with one another. Researchers provide the deep learning network with training data, which the algorithm uses to adjust the relative strengths of connections between neurons to produce outputs that get ever closer to training examples. In the case of protein artificial intelligence systems, this process leads the network to produce better predictions of proteins' shapes based on their amino-acid sequence data.AlphaFold2, released in 2021, was a breakthrough for deep learning in biology. It unlocked an immense world of previously unknown protein structures, and has already become a useful tool for researchers working to understand everything from cellular structures to tuberculosis. It has also inspired the development of additional biological deep learning tools. Most notably, the biochemist David Baker and his team at the University of Washington in 2021 developed a competing algorithm called RoseTTAFold, which like AlphaFold2 predicts protein structures from sequence data…The true impact of these tools won't be known for months or years, as biologists begin to test and use them in research. And they will continue to evolve. What's next for deep learning in molecular biology is “going up the biological complexity ladder,” Baker said, beyond even the biomolecule complexes predicted by AlphaFold3 and RoseTTAFold All-Atom. But if the history of protein-structure AI can predict the future, then these next-generation deep learning models will continue to help scientists reveal the complex interactions that make life happen. Read the rest. (Sources: quantamagazine.org, doi.org, sites.uw.edu)An AI-controlled fighter jet took the Air Force leader for a historic ride. What that means for warAn experimental F-16 fighter jet has taken Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on a history-making flight controlled by artificial intelligence and not a human pilot. (AP Video by Eugene Garcia and Mike Pesoli)BY TARA COPPUpdated 5:40 PM PDT, May 3, 2024EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of U.S. airpower. But the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot. And riding in the front seat was Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.“It's a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it,” Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed. The AP, along with NBC, was granted permission to witness the secret flight on the condition that it would not be reported until it was complete because of operational security concerns.The AI-controlled F-16, called Vista, flew Kendall in lightning-fast maneuvers at more than 550 miles an hour that put pressure on his body at five times the force of gravity. It went nearly nose to nose with a second human-piloted F-16 as both aircraft raced within 1,000 feet of each other, twisting and looping to try force their opponent into vulnerable positions.At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war.There's a lot of opposition to that idea. Arms control experts and humanitarian groups are deeply concerned that AI one day might be able to autonomously drop bombs that kill people without further human consultation, and they are seeking greater restrictions on its use.“There are widespread and serious concerns about ceding life-and-death decisions to sensors and software,” the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned. Autonomous weapons “are an immediate cause of concern and demand an urgent, international political response.”Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used.Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in' but DST isIngrid Lunden8:50 AM PDT • May 9, 2024Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation, three times its valuation in December, to compete more keenly against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources. We understand from close sources that DST, along with General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners, are all looking to be a part of this round.DST — a heavyweight investor led by Yuri Milner that has been a notable backer of some of the biggest names in technology, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Spotify, WhatsApp, Alibaba and ByteDance — is a new name that has not been previously reported; GC and LSVP are both previous backers and their names were reported earlier today also by WSJ. The round is set to be around, but less than, $600 million, sources told TechCrunch.We can also confirm that one firm that has been mentioned a number of times — SoftBank — is not in the deal at the moment.“SoftBank is not in the frame,” a person close to SoftBank told TechCrunch. That also lines up with what our sources have been telling us since March, when this round first opened up, although it seems that not everyone is on the same page: Multiple reports had linked SoftBank to a Mistral investment since then.Mistral's round is based on a lot of inbound interest, sources tell us, and it has been in the works since March or possibly earlier, mere months after Mistral closed a $415 million round at a $2 billion valuation...MoreNews Of the WeekJack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at TwitterHe prefers Nostr even though it's “weird and hard to use.”Karissa Bell, Senior EditorThu, May 9, 2024 at 4:43 PM PDTJust in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details on why he left the board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart. In a characteristically bizarre interview with Mike Solana of Founders Fund, Dorsey had plenty of criticism for Bluesky.In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and a bit rambly, but Dorsey's complaints seem to boil down to two issues:* He never intended Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board and stock and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun out of Twitter as a public benefit corporation in 2022.) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first client to take advantage of the open source protocol. Bluesky created.* The fact that Blueksy has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.“People started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It's the thing that's not Twitter, and therefore it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. “I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights,” Dorsey said.A lot of this isn't particularly surprising. If you've followed Dorsey's public comments over the last couple years, he's repeatedly said that Twitter's “original sin” was being a company that would be beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. It's why he backed Elon Musk's takeover of the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X.) He's also been very clear that he made many of Twitter's most consequential moderation decisions reluctantly.Unsurprisingly, Dorsey's comments weren't well-received on Bluesky. In a lengthy thread, Bluesky's protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to to be the AT Protocol's “first client” but that “Elon killed that straight dead” after he took over the company. “That entire company was frozen by the prolonged acquisition, and the agreement quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “It was never going to happen. Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network for competing moderated spaces to exist. Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users, I guess.”While Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was slightly less enthusiastic than when he said that Musk would be the one to “extend the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that, while he used to fight government requests to take down accounts, Musk takes “the other path” and generally complies. “Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised,” Dorsey said.FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interestPaul Sawers2:53 AM PDT • May 8, 2024Bankruptcy lawyers representing customers impacted by the dramatic crash of cryptocurrency exchange FTX 17 months ago say that the vast majority of victims will receive their money back — plus interest.The news comes six months after FTX co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was found guilty on seven counts related to fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, with some $8 billion of customers' funds going missing. SBF was hit with a 25-year prison sentence in March and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture. The crypto mogul filed an appeal last month that could last years.RestructuringAfter filing for bankruptcy in late 2022, SBF stood down and U.S. attorney John J. Ray III was brought in as CEO and “chief restructuring officer,” charged with overseeing FTX's reorganization. Shortly after taking over, Ray said in testimony that despite some of the audits that had been done previously at FTX, he didn't “trust a single piece of paper in this organization.” In the months that followed, Ray and his team set about tracking the missing funds, with some $8 billion placed in real estate, political donations, and VC investments — including a $500 million investment in AI company Anthropic before the generative AI boom, which the FTX estate managed to sell earlier this year for $884 million.Initially, it seemed unlikely that investors would recoup much, if any, of their money, but signs in recent months suggested that good news might be on the horizon, with progress made on clawing back cash via various investments FTX had made, as well as from executives involved with the company.We now know that 98% of FTX creditors will receive 118% of the value of their FTX-stored assets in cash, while the other creditors will receive 100% — plus “billions in compensation for the time value of their investments,” according to a press release issued by the FTX estate today.In total, FTX says that it will be able to distribute between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion in cash, which includes assets currently under control of entities, including chapter 11 debtors, liquidators, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, the U.S. Department of Justice, among various other parties.Apple's Final Cut Camera lets filmmakers connect four cameras at onceHaje Jan Kamps7:38 AM PDT • May 7, 2024The latest version of Final Cut Pro introduces a new feature to speed up your shoot: Live Multicam. It's a bold move from Apple, transforming your iPad into a multicam production studio, enabling creatives to connect and preview up to four cameras all at once, all in one place. From the command post, directors can remotely direct each video angle and dial in exposure, white balance, focus and more, all within the Final Cut Camera app.The new companion app lets users connect multiple iPhones or iPads (presumably using the same protocols as the Continuity Camera feature launched a few years ago). Final Cut Pro automatically transfers and syncs each Live Multicam angle so you can seamlessly move from production to editing.Final Cut Pro has existed in the iPad universe for a while — but when paired with a brand new M4 processor, it becomes a video editing experience much closer to what you might expect on a desktop video editing workstation. The speed is 2x faster than with the old M1 processors, Apple says. One way that shows up is that the new iPad supports up to four times more streams of ProRes RAW than M1.The company also introduced external project support, making it possible to edit projects directly from an external drive, leveraging the fast Thunderbolt connection of iPad Pro.Startup of the WeekExclusive: Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall on the autonomous future for cars and robotsMike Butcher, 7:58 AM PDT • May 7, 2024U.K.-based autonomous vehicle startup Wayve started life as a software platform loaded into a tiny electric “car” called Renault Twizy. Festooned with cameras, the company's co-founders and PhD graduates, Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, tuned the deep-learning algorithms powering the car's autonomous systems until they'd got it to drive around the medieval city unaided.No fancy Lidar cameras or radars were needed. They suddenly realized they were on to something.Fast-forward to today and Wayve, now an AI model company, has raised a $1.05 billion Series C funding round led by SoftBank, NVIDIA and Microsoft. That makes this the UK's largest AI fundraise to date, and among the top 20 AI fundraises globally. Even Meta's head of AI, Yann LeCun, invested in the company when it was young.Wayve now plans to sell its autonomous driving model to a variety of auto OEMs as well as to makers of new autonomous robots.In an exclusive interview, I spoke to Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, about how the company has been training the model, the new fundraise, licensing plans, and the wider self-driving market.(Note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)TechCrunch: What tipped the balance to attain this level of funding?..Full InterviewX of the Week This is a public episode. 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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Wild animal welfare? Stable totalitarianism? Predict which new EA cause area will go mainstream!, published by Jackson Wagner on March 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Long have I idly whiled away the hours browsing Manifold Markets, trading on trivialities like videogame review scores or NASA mission launch dates. It's fun, sure -- but I am a prediction market advocate, who believes that prediction markets have great potential to aggregate societally useful information and improve decision-making! I should stop fooling around, and instead put my Manifold $Mana to some socially-productive use!! So, I've decided to create twenty subsidized markets about new EA cause areas. Each one asks if the nascent cause area (like promoting climate geoengineering, or researching space governance) will receive $10,000,000+ from EA funders before the year 2030. My hope is that that these markets can help create common knowledge around the most promising up-and-coming "cause area candidates", and help spark conversations about the relative merits of each cause. If some causes are deemed likely-to-be-funded-by-2030, but little work is being done today, that could even be a good signal for you to start your own new project in the space! Without further ado, here are the markets: Animal Welfare Will farmed-invertebrate welfare (shrimp, insects, octopi, etc) get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030? Will wild-animal welfare interventions get $10m+ from EA funders before 2030? [embed most popular market] Global Health & Development Will alcohol, tobacco, & sugar taxation... ? Mental-health / subjective-wellbeing interventions in developing countries? Institutional improvements Approval voting, quadratic funding, liquid democracy, and related democratic mechanisms? Georgism (aka land value taxes)? Charter Cities / Affinity Cities / Network States? Investing (Note that the resolution criteria on these markets is different than for the other questions, since investments are different from grants.) Will the Patient Philanthropy Fund grow to $10m+ before 2030? Will "impact markets" distribute more than $10m of grant funding before 2030? X-Risk Civilizational bunkers? Climate geoengineering? Preventing stable totalitarianism? Preventing S-risks? Artificial Intelligence Mass-movement political advocacy for AI regulation (ie, "PauseAI")? Mitigation of AI propaganda / "botpocalypse" impacts? Transhumanism Cryonics & brain-emulation research? Human intelligence augmentation / embryo selection? Space governance / space colonization? Moral philosophy Research into digital sentience or the nature of consciousness? Interventions primarily motivated by anthropic reasoning, acausal trade with parallel universes, alien civilizations, simulation arguments, etc? I encourage you to trade on these markets, comment on them, and boost/share them -- put your Manifold mana to a good use by trying to predict the future trajectory of the EA movement! Here is one final market I created, asking which three of the cause areas above will receive the most support between now and 2030. Resolution details & other thoughts The resolution criteria for most of these questions involves looking at publicly-available grantmaking documentation (like this Openphil website, for example), adding up all the grants that I believe qualify as going towards the stated cause area, and seeing if the grand total exceeds ten million dollars. Since I'm specifically interested in how the EA movement will grow and change over time, I will only be counting money from "EA funders" -- stuff like OpenPhil, LTFF, SFF, Longview Philanthropy, Founders Fund, GiveWell, etc, will count for this, while money from "EA-adjacent" sources (like, say, Patrick Collison, Yuri Milner, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin, Peter T...

On Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I've interviewed guests on exciting new technologies like artificial intelligence, fusion energy, and reusable rockets. But today's episode explores another Next Big Thing: biotechnology. To discuss recent advances in CRISPR gene editing and their applications for medicine, I'm sitting down with Kevin Davies.Kevin is executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and author of the excellent 2020 book, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.In This Episode* CRISPR advances over the past decade (1:13)* What CRISPR therapies will come next? (8:46)* Non-medical applications of gene editing (13:11)* Bioweapons and the ethics of CRISPR (18:43)* Longevity and genetic enhancements (25:48)Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Below is an edited transcript of our conversationCRISPR advances over the past decadeWhen people talk about AI, for instance, they might be talking about different versions or applications of AI—machine learning being one. So when we talk about CRISPR, are we just talking about one technique, the one they figured out back in 2012? Are there different ones? Are there improvements? So it's really a different technique. So how has that progressed?You're right. CRISPR has become shorthand for genome editing. But the version of CRISPR that was recognized with the Nobel Prize three years ago in 2020 to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier was for one, we can call it the traditional form of CRISPR. And if I refer to it again, I'll call it CRISPR-Cas9. Cas9 is the shorthand name for the enzyme that actually does the cutting of the DNA. But we are seeing extraordinary progress in developing new and even more precise and more nuanced forms of genome editing. They still kind of have a CRISPR backbone. They still utilize some of the same molecular components as the Nobel Prize–winning form of CRISPR. But in particular, I'm thinking of techniques called base editing and prime editing, both of which have commercial, publicly funded biotech companies pushing these technologies into the clinic. And I think over the next five to 10 years, increasingly what we refer to as “CRISPR genome editing” will be in the form of these sort of CRISPR 2.0 technologies, because they give us a much broader portfolio of DNA substitutions and changes and edits, and give the investigators and the clinicians much more precision and much more subtlety and hopefully even more safety and more guarantees of clinical efficiency.Right. That's what I was going to ask. One advantage is the precision, because you don't want to do it wrong. You don't want mutations. Do no harm first. A big advantage is maybe limiting some of the potential downsides.In the ideal gene-editing scenario, you would have a patient with, say, a genetic disease that you can pinpoint to a single letter of the genetic code. And we want to fix that. We want to zero in on that one letter—A, C, T, or G is the four-letter alphabet of DNA, as I hope most of your listeners know—and we want to revert that back to whatever most normal, healthy people have in their genetic code at that specific position. CRISPR-Cas9, which won the Nobel Prize, is not the technology to do that sort of single base edit. It can do many other things, and the success in the clinic is unquestionable already in just a few years. But base editing and, in particular, prime editing are the two furthest developed technologies that allow investigators to pinpoint exactly where in the genome we want to make the edit. And then without completely cutting or slicing the double helix of DNA, we can lay up the section of DNA that we want to replace and go in and just perform chemistry on that one specific letter of DNA. Now, this hasn't been proven in the clinic just yet. But the early signs are very, very promising that this is going to be the breakthrough genome-editing technology over the next 10 to 20 years.Is CRISPR in the wild yet, or are we still in the lab?No, we're in the clinic. We are in human patients. There are at least 200 patients who have already been in or are currently enrolled in clinical trials. And so far, the early results—there are a few caveats and exceptions—but so far the overwhelming mood of the field is one of bullish enthusiasm. I don't want to complete this interview without singling out this one particular story, which is the clinical trial that has been sponsored by CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals for sickle cell disease. These are primarily African-American patients in this country because the sickle cell mutation arose in Africa some 7,000 years ago.We're talking about a pretty big share of the African-American population.This is about 100,000 patients just in America, in the US alone. And it's been a neglected disease for all kinds of reasons, probably beyond the scope of our discussion. But the early results in the first few dozen patients who have been enrolled in this clinical trial called the exa-cel clinical trial, they've all been cured. Pretty much all cured, meaning no more blood transfusions, no more pain crises, no more emergency hospitalizations. It is a pretty miraculous story. This therapy is now in the hands of the FDA and is speeding towards—barring some unforeseen complication or the FDA setting the bar so high that they need the investigators to go back and do some further checks—this should be approved before the end of this year.There's a catch, though. This will be a therapy that, in principle, will become—once approved by the FDA and the EMA in Europe, of course—will become available to any sickle cell patient. The catch will, of course, be the cost or the price that the companies set, because they're going to look for a return on their investment. It's a fascinating discussion and there's no easy answer. The companies need to reward their shareholders, their investors, their employees, their staff, and of course build a war chest to invest in the next wave, the next generation of CRISPR therapies. But the result of that means that probably we're going to be looking at a price tag of, I mean, I'm seeing figures like $1.9 million per patient. So how do you balance that? Is a lifetime cure for sickle cell disease worth $2, maybe $3 million? Will this patient population be able to afford that? In many cases, the answer to that will be simply, no. Do you have to remortgage your house and go bankrupt because you had a genetic quirk at birth? I don't know quite how we get around this.Different countries will have different answers with different health systems. Do you have a sense of what that debate is going to be like in Washington, DC?It's already happening in other contexts. Other gene therapies have been approved over the last few years, and they come with eye-watering price tags. The highest therapy price that I've seen now is $3.5 million. Yes, there are discounts and waiver programs and all this sort of stuff. But it's still a little obscene. Now, when those companies come to negotiate, say, with the UK National Health Service, they'll probably come to an agreement that is much lower, because the Brits are not going to say that they're going to be able to afford that for their significant sickle cell population.Is it your best guess that this will be a treatment the government pays for?What's interesting and what may potentially shift the calculus here is that this particular therapy is the disease affects primarily African-Americans in the United States. That may change the political calculus, and it may indeed change the corporate calculus in the boardrooms of Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics, who may not want the backlash that they're going to get when they say, “Oh, by the way, guys, it's $2 million or you're out of luck.”There are companies that are studying using CRISPR to potentially correct the mutations that cause genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of liver disease.What CRISPR therapies will come next?And after this CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease is available, what therapies will come next?Probably a bunch of diseases that most people, unless they are unfortunate enough to have it in their family, won't have heard of. There are companies that are studying using CRISPR to potentially correct the mutations that cause genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of liver disease. It turns out the liver is an organ that is very amenable to taking up medicines that we can inject in the blood. The other big clinical success story has come from another company in the Boston area called Intellia Therapeutics. Also publicly traded. They've developed CRISPR therapies that you can inject literally into the body, rather than taking cells out and doing it in the lab and then putting those cells back in, as in the case of sickle cell.I'm not sure that was actually even clear: that you can do it more than one way.Yes.And obviously it sounds like it would be better if they could just inject you.Exactly. That's why people are really excited about this, because this now opens up the doors for treating a host of diseases. And I think over the next few years we will see a growing number of diseases, and it won't just be these rare sort of genetic diseases with often unpronounceable names. It may be things like heart disease. There's another company—they're all in Boston, it seems—Verve Therapeutics, which is taking one of these more recent gene-editing technologies that we talked about a minute ago, base editing, and saying that there's a gene that they're going to target that has been clearly linked with cholesterol levels. And if we can squash production of this gene, we can tap down cholesterol levels. That will be useful, in the first instance, for patients with genetic forms of high cholesterol. Fair enough. But if it works in them, then the plan is to roll this out for potentially thousands if not millions of adults in this country who maybe don't feel that they have a clearly defined genetic form of high cholesterol, but this method may still be an alternative that they will consider versus taking Atorvastatin for the rest of your life, for example.Where are the CRISPR cancer treatments?They're also making progress, too. Those are in clinical trials. A little more complicated. Of course, cancer is a whole slew of different diseases, so it's a little hard to say, “Yeah, we're making progress here, less so there.” But I think one of the most heartwarming stories—this is an n of one, so it's an anecdotal story—but there was a teenager in the UK treated at one of the premier London medical schools who had a base editing form of CAR T therapy. A lot of people have heard of CAR T therapy for various cancers. And she is now in remission. So again, early days, but we're seeing very positive signs in these early clinical tests.It sounds like we went from a period where it was all in the lab and that we might be in a period over the next five years where it sounds like a wave of potential treatments.I think so, yeah.And for as much as we've seen articles about “The Age of AI,” it really sounds like this could be the age of biotechnology and the age of CRISPR…I think CRISPR, as with most new technologies, you get these sort of hype cycles, right? Two and a half years ago, CRISPR, all the stocks were at peak valuations. And I went on a podcast to say, why are the CRISPR stocks so high? I wasn't really sure, but I was enjoying it at the time. And then, of course, we entered the pandemic. And the biotech sector, perversely, ironically, has really been hit hard by the economy and certainly by the market valuations. So all of the CRISPR gene-editing companies—and there are probably at least eight or 10 now that are publicly traded and many more poised to join them—their valuations are a fraction of what they were a couple of years ago. But I suspect as these first FDA approvals and more scientific peer review papers, of course, but more news of the clinical success to back up and extend what has already been clearly proven as a breakthrough technology in the lab with the Nobel Prize—doesn't get much better than that, does it?—then I think we're going to start to see that biotech sector soar once again.Certainly, there are a lot of computational aspects to CRISPR in terms of designing the particular stretches of nucleic acid that you're going to use to target a specific gene. And AI can help you in that quest to make those ever more precise.Non-medical applications of gene editingThere are also non-medical applications. Can you just give me a little state of play on how that's looking?I think one of the—when CRISPR…And agriculture.Feeding the planet, you could say.That's certainly a big application.It's a human health application—arguably the biggest application.I think one of the fun ones is the work of George Church at Harvard Medical School, who's been on 60 Minutes and Stephen Colbert and many other primetime shows, talking about his work using CRISPR to potentially resurrect the woolly mammoth, which sort of sounds like, “That's Jurassic Park on steroids. That's crazy.” But his view is that, no, if we had herds—if that's the technical term—of woolly mammoths—roaming Siberia and the frozen tundra, they'll keep the ground, the surface packed down and stop the gigatons of methane from leaching out into the atmosphere. We have just seen a week, I've been reading on social media, of the hottest temperatures in the world since records began. And that's nothing compared to what we're potentially going to see if all these greenhouse gases that are just under the surface in places like Siberia further leach into the atmosphere. So that's the sort of environmental cause that Church is on. I think many people think this is a rather foolish notion, but he's launched a company to get this off the ground called Colossal Biosciences, and they're raising a lot of money, it appears. I'm curious to see how it goes. I wish him well.Also, speaking of climate change, making crops more resilient to the heat. That's another I've heard…One of the journals I'm involved in, called GEN Biotechnology, just published a paper in which investigators in Korea have used CRISPR to modify a particular gene in the tomato genome to make it a higher source of vitamin D. And that may not seem to be the most urgent need, but the point is, we can now engineer the DNA of all kinds of plants and crops, many of which are under threat, whether it's from drought or other types of climate change or pests, bacteria, parasites, viruses, fungi, you name it. And in my book Editing Humanity, which came out a couple of years ago, there was a whole chapter listing a whole variety of threats to our favorite glass of orange juice in the morning. That's not going to exist. If we want that all-natural Florida orange juice, we're not going to have that option. We've either got to embrace what technology will allow us to do to make these orange crops more resistant to the existential threat that they're facing, or we're going to have to go drink something else.I started out talking about AI and machine learning. Does that play a role in CRISPR, either helping the precision of the technology or in some way refining the technology?Yeah, hopefully you'll invite me back in a year and I'll be able to give you a more concrete answer. I think the short answer is, yes. Certainly, there are a lot of computational aspects to CRISPR in terms of designing the particular stretches of nucleic acid that you're going to use to target a specific gene. And AI can help you in that quest to make those ever more precise. When you do the targeting in a CRISPR experiment, the one thing you don't want to have happen is for the little stretch of DNA that you've synthesized to go after the gene in question, you don't want that to accidentally latch onto or identify another stretch of DNA that just by statistical chance has the same stretch of 20 As, Cs, Ts, and Gs. AI can help give us more confidence that we're only honing in on the specific gene that we want to edit, and we're not potentially going to see some unforeseen, off-target editing event.Do you think when we look back at this technology in 10 years, not only will we see a wider portfolio of potential treatments, but we'll look at the actual technique and think, “Boy, back in 2012, it was a butchery compared to what we're doing; we were using meat cleavers, and now we're using lasers”?I think, yeah. That's a slightly harsh analogy. With this original form of CRISPR, published in 2012, Nobel Prize in 2020, one of the potential caveats or downsides of the technology is that it involves a complete snip of the double helix, the two strands of DNA, in order to make the edit. Base editing and prime editing don't involve that double-stranded severance. It's just a nick of one strand or the other. So it's a much more genetically friendly form of gene editing, as well as other aspects of the chemistry. We look forward to seeing how base and prime editing perform in the clinic. Maybe they'll run into some unforeseen hurdles and people will say, “You know what? There was nothing wrong with CRISPR. Let's keep using the originally developed system.” But I'm pretty bullish on what base and prime editing can do based on all of the early results have been published in the last few years on mice and monkeys. And now we're on the brink of going into the clinic.One medical scenario that they laid out would be, what if two people with a deadly recessive disease like sickle cell disease, or perhaps a form of cystic fibrosis, wanted to have a healthy biological child?Bioweapons and the ethics of CRISPRThis podcast is usually very optimistic. So we're going to leave all the negative stuff for this part of the podcast. We're going to rush through all the downsides very quickly.First question: Especially after the pandemic, a lot more conversation about bioweapons. Is this an issue that's discussed in this community, about using this technology to create a particularly lethal or virulent or targeted biological weapon?Not much. If a rogue actor or nation wanted to develop some sort of incredibly virulent bioweapon, there's a whole wealth of genetic techniques, and they could probably do it without involving CRISPR. CRISPR is, in a way, sort of the corollary of another field called synthetic biology or synthetic genomics that you may have talked about on your show. We've got now the facility, not just to edit DNA, but to synthesize custom bits of DNA with so much ease and affordability compared to five or 10 years ago. And we've just seen a global pandemic. When I get that question, I've had it before, I say, “Yeah, did we just not live through a global pandemic? Do we really need to be engineering organisms?” Whether you buy the lab leak hypothesis or the bioengineering hypothesis, or it was just a natural transfer from some other organism, nature can do a pretty good job of hurting human beings. I don't know that we need to really worry too much about bioweapons at this point.In 2018, there was a big controversy over a Chinese researcher who created some genome-edited babies. Yeah. Is there more to know about that story? Has that become a hotter topic of discussion as CRISPR has advanced?The Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, who performed those pretty abominable experiments was jailed for the better part of three years. He got early release in China and slowly but surely he's being rehabilitated. He's literally now moved his operation from Shenzhen to Beijing. He's got his own lab again, and he's doing genome editing experiments again. I saw again on social media recently, he's got a petition of muscular dystrophy families petitioning Jack Ma, the well-known Chinese billionaire, to fund his operation to devise a new gene editing therapy for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other forms of muscular dystrophy. I wouldn't want He Jiankui let within a thousand miles of my kids, because I just wouldn't trust him. And he's now more recently put out a manifesto stating he thinks we should start editing embryos again. So I don't know quite what is going on.It seems the Chinese threw the book at him. Three years is not a trivial prison sentence. He was fined about half a million dollars. But somebody in the government there seems to be okay with him back at the bench, back in the lab, and dabbling in CRISPR. And I don't know that he's been asked, does he have any regrets over the editing of Lulu and Nana. There was a third child born a few months later as well. All he will say is, “We moved too fast.” That is the only caveat that he has allowed himself to express publicly.We know nothing more about the children. They're close to five years old now. There's one particular gene that was being edited was pretty messed up. But we know it's not an essential gene in our bodies, because there are many people walking around who don't have a functional copy of this CCR5 receptor gene, and they're HIV resistant. That was the premise for He Jiankui's experiment. But he has said, “No, they are off limits. The authorities are not going to reveal their identities. We are monitoring them, and we will take care of them if anything goes wrong.” But I think a lot of people in the West would really like to help, to study them, to offer any medical assistance. Obviously, we have to respect their privacy. The twin girls and the third child who was born a bit later, maybe they're being protected for their own good. How would you like it if you grew up through childhood and into your teenage years, to walk around knowing that you were this human experiment? That may be a very difficult thing to live with. So more to come on that.There's no legitimate discussion about changing that in the West or anywhere else?Obviously, in the wake of what He Jiankui did, there were numerous blue ribbon panels, including one just organized by the National Academy of Sciences, just a stone's throw from where we're talking today. And I thought that report was very good. It did two things. This was published a couple of years ago. Two important things came out of it. One is this all-star group of geneticists and other scientists said, “We don't think that human embryo editing should be banned completely. There may be scenarios down the road where we actually would want to reserve this technology because nothing else would help bring about a particular medical outcome that we would like.” And the one medical scenario that they laid out would be, what if two people with a deadly recessive disease like sickle cell disease, or perhaps a form of cystic fibrosis, wanted to have a healthy biological child?There are clinics around the country and around the world now doing something called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. If you have a family history of a genetic disease, you can encourage the couple to do IVF. We form an embryo or bunch of embryos in the test tube or on the Petri dish. And then we can do a little biopsy of each embryo, take a quick sneak peek at the DNA, look to see if it's got the bad gene or perhaps the healthy gene, and then sort of tag the embryos and only implant the embryos that we think are healthy. This is happening around the country as we speak for hundreds, if not thousands, of different genetic diseases. But it won't work if mom and dad have a recessive, meaning two copies of a bad gene, because there's no healthy gene that you can select in any of those embryos. It would be very rare, but in those scenarios, maybe embryo editing is a way we would want to go. But I don't see a big clamor for this right now. And the early results have been published using CRISPR on embryos in the wake of He Jiankui did have said, “It's a messy technique. It is not safe to use. We don't fully understand how DNA editing and DNA repair works in the human embryo, so we really need to do a whole lot more basic science, as we did in the original incarnation of CRISPR, before we even dare to revisit editing human embryos.” Longevity is interesting because, of course, in the last 18 months there's a company in Silicon Valley called Altos, funded by Yuri Milner, employing now two dozen of the top aging researchers who've been lured away from academia into this transnational company to find hopefully cures or insights into how to postpone aging. Longevity and genetic enhancementsAnother area is using these treatments not to fix things, but to enhance people, whether it's for intelligence or some other trait. A lot of money pouring into longevity treatments from Silicon Valley. Do we know more about the potential of CRISPR for either extending lifespans or selecting for certain desirable traits in people?This sort of scenario is never going to go away. When it comes up, if I hear someone say, “Could we use CRISPR or any gene editing technology to boost intelligence or mathematical ability or music musical ability, or anything that we might want…”Or speed in the hundred meters.“…or speed in the hundred meters, to enhance our perfect newborn?” I would say, what gene are you going to enhance? Intelligence—are you kidding me? Half of the 10,000 genes are expressed in the human brain. You want to start meddling with those? You wouldn't have a prayer of having a positive outcome. I think we can pretty much rule that out. Longevity is interesting because, of course, in the last 18 months there's a company in Silicon Valley called Altos, funded by Yuri Milner, employing now two dozen of the top aging researchers who've been lured away from academia into this transnational company to find hopefully cures or insights into how to postpone aging. That's going to be a long, multi-decade quest to go from that to potentially, “Oh, let's edit a little embryo, our newborn son or daughter so they have the gift of 120 years on this decaying, overheating planet…” Yes, there's a lot to wade through on that.And you have another book coming out. Can you give us a preview of that?I'm writing a book called Curved Air, which is about the story of sickle cell disease. It was first described in a paper from physicians in Chicago in 1910 who were studying the curious anemia of a dental student who walked into their hospital one day. That gentleman, Walter Noel, is now buried back in his homeland, the island of Grenada. But in the 1940s, it was described and characterized as the first molecular disease. We know more about sickle cell disease than almost any other genetic disease. And yet, as we touched on earlier, patients with this who have not had the wealth, the money, the influence, they've been discriminated against in many walks of life, including the medical arena.We're still seeing terribly, tragically, videos and stories and reports of sickle cell patients who are being turned away from hospital rooms, emergency rooms, because the medical establishment just looks at a person of color in absolute agony with one of these pain crises and just assumed, “Oh, they want another opioid hit. Sickle cell? What is that?” There's a lot of fascinating science. There's all this hope in the gene editing and now in the clinic. And there's all this socioeconomic and other history. So I'm going to try to weave all this together in a format that hopefully everyone will enjoy reading.Hopefully a book with a happy ending. Not every book about a disease has a wonderful…I think a positive note to end on is the first American patient treated in this CRISPR clinical trial for sickle cell disease four years ago,Victoria Gray, has become something of a poster child now. She's been featured on National Public Radio on awhole series of interviews and just took her first overseas flight earlier this year to London to speak at a CRISPR gene editing conference. She gave a lovely 15-minute personal talk, shaking with nerves, about her personal voyage, her faith in God, and what's brought her here now, pain-free, traveling the world, and got a standing ovation. You don't see many standing ovations at medical conferences or genetics conferences. And if ever anybody deserved it, somebody like Victoria Gray did. Early days, but a very positive journey that we're on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Joe Allen has become a mainstay on our War Room screens over the last few years, his understanding of how technology is negatively affecting our lives and his analysis of how we push back is second to none. The rise of AI, nano technology, genetic experimentation, biometric payment systems, digital ID and digital currencies are all new technologies that are creeping into our everyday lives. Who controls them? What is their purpose? Do we have a choice to opt out? How are governments planning on using these to control their citizens? Joe answers all of these questions as he takes us into a new reality that is marching towards artificial general intelligence. Joe Allen is the is Transhumanism editor at War Room: Pandemic. He is a fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees! Joe studied religion and science at the University of Tennessee and Boston University and writes about ethnic identity, transhuman hubris, and the eternal spiritual quest. His work has appeared in The Federalist, ColdType, The American Thinker, The National Pulse, This View of Life, The American Spectator, IBCSR: Science on Religion, Disinformation, and elsewhere. Follow Joe at.... Substack: https://joebot.substack.com/ GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/JOEBOTxyz Twitter: https://twitter.com/JOEBOTxyz?s=20 War Room: http://warroom.org/ Interview recorded 12.4.23 *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more... https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript [0:22] Joe Allen, thank you so much for joining us on Hearts of Oak today. Peter, very glad to be here. Thank you very much. Not all. I know many of our viewers will have seen you regularly on War Room as a transhuman editor. What does it take to be a transhuman editor? How did that end up? You've being in the War Room. Tell us about that. You know, well, transhumanist or transhuman, although I would say this, Peter, that I think transhuman editor might be most accurate now. Part of the gig obviously is a 24-7 screen time. So I think that my cyborg status is pretty much solidified at this point. You know, Steve reached out to me just a little over a year ago, just like two years ago, And I'd written an article about the transhumanist quest, to upload for the Federalist. And I'd been writing a series of articles about technology that dipped into transhumanism quite a bit. He got a hold of that article about transhumanists and their desire to upload their souls and liked it. And it was quite odd. I don't wanna get too long into the story, but a friend of mine who had tipped me off to the War Room some year or so prior to that. [1:49] He had tipped me off to the War Room. I watched it. I watched an interview with Steve on PBS. It was this long, uncut interview with Lester Holt. And I was like, man, I've got to get a hold of this guy, Steve Bannon. And, but the way it works, you don't just call up Steve Bannon. And no one I knew had his contact. So I just put it out of my mind. I roamed across the country during the pandemic, ended up in Montana. And that same friend about a year later tells me that Steve gave me a shout out on the war room. And I thought, what? And it wasn't two weeks or three weeks after that that I checked my Twitter DMs, which I never ever did at the time. It was a different handle. [2:34] And there was Cameron, the producer, asking if I would come on the show. And so, but it was already too late. Got back to him, went on the show. Steve asked me if I'd like to join the war room that day. And here I am. It's always interesting who connects you, to me. It was just Miller giving credit to who connected me with Steve. What Steve does with the War Room is phenomenal and he is a machine in terms of production, in terms of knowledge, in terms of what he pushes out. Yeah, love watching you on that. I think you're on Charlie Kirk recently as well, a few days ago. I mean, yeah, that's right.   Absolutely brilliant. But if we, you can, for the viewers, you can obviously find you at JoeBotXYZ on the GETTR and on Twitter. Obviously, he has his Substack account. All the links are in the description. And that's just JoeBot.Substack.com you can find there and sign up to his regular wisdom. But I probably, Joe, when I think of transhumanism. I think the most powerful men in the world, Sleepy Joe, Supreme Court judges, don't know who women are, Elon Musk. And I'm thinking maybe transhumanism would be an improvement. [3:57] You know, I wouldn't deny that. In many ways, I think that if the world was run by a Satanist cabal, at least they would have a plan. So yeah, it's interesting. Probably the most famous proponent of transhumanism, at least in elite circles, is Klaus Schwab. And I think people just, they really dismiss Schwab oftentimes because he tends to speak, and he and his co-author write in vacant corporate platitudes for the most part. But I do think that he's smart enough to know which way the wind's blowing. And the wind is definitely blowing in the direction of holding up technology as the highest power. And so really, I think his fourth industrial revolution in 2016 was in many ways a kind, of clarion call to the world that this is the way we are going. And some of it is him looking around the scene and evaluating it. Some of it is his own enthusiasm. He has this really strange, naïve enthusiasm for transhumanist technologies. [5:16] That represents a really, really important moment in Western history and perhaps world history because of the open declaration that technology will be the way forward, not political ideology, and in their view, certainly not religious ideology, but technology. [5:38] Well, let's maybe delve into the most relevant transhumanist technologies. You've got a number of things will be on people's radar, nanotechnology, you look at mRNA and that ability, your digital ID, I guess, world governments, institutions tracking us, monitoring us, you could chat, GBT has a lot of headlines recently. And when people talk about kind of most relevant transhumanist technology, how do you kind of start unpacking that? [6:12] It can get complicated, but to break it down as simply as possible, two categories have to be distinguished there, one being technocracy, ruled by expert, and in its more modern form, ruled by expert through science and technology. And then on the other end you have transhumanism itself, which is in some ways separate from that. They overlap a great deal, but it is ultimately two separate, these are two separate movements. That Patrick Wood put it best, I'll paraphrase him, as technocracy is to a society, transhumanism is to the individuals within that society. I think that really does encapsulate the overlap quite a bit. [7:05] So when you talk about something like digital identification or digital currencies, central bank digital currencies, these I would say fall more under the category of technocracy. It's more of a way of organizing a society. It's a social structure based on technological systems of control. And on the other side, you've got transhumanism. And this is much more of, I would say, a kind of spiritual quest on the part of the people who are involved. You could say that it is many decades old. You know, the term transhumanist coined by Julian Huxley, 1956, I've got an essay collection, New Bottles for New Wine, and the opening essay was a lecture in 1956 entitled Transhumanism. He isn't really talking about technology so much in this though. He's more talking about how science will transform human beings. [8:03] He's hinting at technology, but for the most part, he grounds it in science. And of course, technology by and large emerges from the scientific method and mathematical deduction. So it fits, but it really wasn't until the 80s or so that you started seeing a lot of people take on this term transhumanism as a description of using technology to transform the human being. FM 2030 I think was probably the first major figure, but then Max Moore, a philosopher, was probably the one who put the stamp on the term transhumanism in this realm. So relevant technologies. I think the most relevant, especially now, artificial intelligence, creating a digital brain. The belief being that artificial intelligence will have limitless memory. Artificial intelligence will be able to scrape over basically unlimited data, as much data as you can feed into it. [9:08] And of course, it's going to have better pattern recognition than human beings. It's going to be able to pick out patterns in that vast amount of data in a way that no human being would be able to. It's gonna be able to do it at really, really fast speeds, right? So human brain operates on neurochemical processes, artificial intelligence computers in general, that processing moves at the speed of light. So there's a religious idea behind it that artificial intelligence is becoming and will become a sort of God to human beings. How do you merge yourself with that God? How do you reap the benefits and blessings of that God? Descending from there, you've got robotics. Which requires artificial intelligence for sophisticated systems of control. [9:58] You also have brain-computer interfaces, so that could be anything from these screens that we're speaking through, and I think that is a valid interpretation, hence my transhuman editor label. And then you've got the non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, It's kind of skull caps that read the brain in increasingly great detail. They don't require implants. Some of them, they're planning to roll out, different corporations are planning to roll out sort of AirPod-like brain computer interfaces or small bands that fit on the back of your head used for anything from monitoring employees' mental states to controlling actual computer systems. Nita Farahany is probably the leading expert on the non-invasive brain computer interface, if your listeners would like to look into it. But then of course you have the implanted brain computer interface. You got three major corporations working on that. [11:01] Neuralink, which has yet to get FDA approval. You've got a hole cut out of your skull, chip put in, about 1,024 wires or more if they can get them into the brain, those read the brain, and then allow the human being to project thoughts into a computer system. At the moment, there's not really any input. They've been able to do muscular movements and other things, but for the most part right now, the technology is only output. And so any input would have to come in through the traditional method, visual audio. And then two other corporations though, that are right now implanting their brain computer interfaces in human brains. You've got Synchron out of Brooklyn. [11:49] And Synchron is instead of drilling a hole, you send a kind of stent, an electronic stent up the vein into the brain at the jugular. And it sits within the vein and is able to read the neurons around it. I don't know what their count is, probably something like six, seven, eight, less than 10 if I'm not mistaken. But they have implanted them and people who are locked in, who've had strokes, things like that, are basically being experimented on with the intention of Tom Oxley, their CEO, hopes that eventually that technology will be able to be used to throw your emotions to other people. Kind of hive mind-ish idea. And then you've got BlackRock Neurotech invested in by Peter Thiel, and they're based out of Utah. And again, a different sort of technology, the way it works, you get it under the skull on top of the brain. It's a micro electrode array patch that sits on top of the brain. [12:58] I think that they have around 36 patients that are currently implanted with that technology. And again, it allows them to operate robotic arms. It allows them to translate their thoughts into text on screen, things like that. Moving down from there you have the sort of biological, Neurological and biological [13:22] technologies so the the neurological technologies this kind of feeds into the brain-computer interface is just [13:30] transcranial stimulation whether it's magnetic or whether it's kind of a a sonogram of, sorry, What's the word I'm looking for? Using sound waves anyway, sorry, I blanked on the very common term. But you use the stimulation to do various things, change mood, change the ability to concentrate, those sorts of things. And then, of course, you have the implanted version of them. There's like 160,000 of those, and those range from everything from eliminating Parkinson's tremors to eliminating depression, oddly enough. [14:10] And then I think the most famous and the thing that really captures people's imagination, genetic engineering. Genetic engineering has been a thing for quite some time. The first real genetic engineering projects come out of Stanford in the 70s. But with the advent of CRISPR, basically a molecular complex found in E. coli, CRISPR-Cas9, that was really discovered, I would say, 2011. It was kind of a piecemeal discovery process. [14:42] But now CRISPR is used for all sorts of things. And the advantage of CRISPR is that it allows the geneticist to go in and spot edit the genome. So initially it was to cut out nucleotides in a faulty gene to shut the gene down. But now they're able to actually cut out and insert corrective nucleotides to change the gene, to correct the gene, to heal disease. And the goal going forward for a lot of people, not everyone by any means, but for a lot of people, the goal going forward is to use that to enhance human beings, to give us greater intelligence, to give us greater strength, and you know, whatever else may be desired. Beauty. Mood, temperament, all those sorts of things. So that hopefully gives your listeners a roadmap, artificial intelligence, robotics. [15:41] Brain-computer interfacing, neuro-enhancement, and genetic engineering. Two questions. One, obviously, one argument on this is this is just technological advancement. This is just humans bettering themselves. But then another part of that, when you mentioned some of those things, you realize that it is, much of it is very much about the person. It's not technology at arm's length, but actually people may not have control or the ability to decide yes or no that it will happen because it's on the person as opposed to a phone that you can pick up and set down if you can't actually pick it up and set down because it's part of you. But what are your, one, that this is just technological advancement, but then the flip other side that maybe humans will not be able to decide whether or not they're part of this. It's a thorny topic for a lot of reasons. One, a lot of transhumanists argue for a morphological freedom, right? So guys like Max Moore, guys like Zoltan Istvan, they talk about it in terms of freedom. It's the freedom to be able to alter one's body or use technologies in any way they see fit, even if it puts off the rest of us in normal human society. [17:03] Then you have the more kind of implicit totalitarianism that you see in the singularity prophecies, right? So Ray Kurzweil being the most famous, it's just the idea that these technologies have always increased in complexity and effectiveness at an exponential rate. Then that exponential curve will continue until it reaches basically vertical, basically infinite advancement. He calls this a singularity at which technology is completely out of human control and the technology is making all the decisions. And he predicts 2045 is the date we'll hit the singularity. [17:43] And so the implicit totalitarianism there is that not that these guys are creating technologies to control everyone, the idea there, and they never own up to it, but this is definitely there. The idea is that you're creating a technological system that is inescapable and a technological system that has ultimately the final say in whatever sort of state that human psychology or human society is in. And so, even if you don't believe in something like that, even if you don't believe something like that's possible, to the extent that ideology is driving the people making the technologies and is also kind of hypnotizing the public with this technophilia, you end up in a situation where whether the singularity comes or not, whether anything like that happens or not, you have a kind of techno-religion that sees, really the rise of artificial intelligence, nano robotics and genetic engineering as this sort of second coming or the realization of God. And I really do fear, Peter, that a lot of people are so enamoured by it that the effectiveness of the technology won't be as important as the social and psychological effects. Now moving over into the more totalitarian, like openly totalitarian end of it. [19:10] In the West, people really don't talk like that. Even Klaus Schwab, if you read his writing or really listen to what he's saying outside of the small snippets, and certainly if you listen to Yuval Noah Harari to any length, neither of them are talking about creating a digital dictatorship. Schwab sounds more like it than Harari. Harari, if you read Harari carefully or even just read him at all, or listen to him carefully or just listen to him at all. You hear him over and over again, warning that these technologies are a recipe for digital dictatorship, right? So this idea of hackable humans, yeah, he's very unsentimental and he's very hostile to religion. He mocks religion a lot, so it's very off-putting. But what he's talking about is the rise of the scientific paradigm in which human beings, don't have free will. It's a scientific paradigm that holds that our decision-making process is nothing more than the bubbling up of neurochemical processes, and that with sufficient surveillance technology, your phone being a big one. [20:19] Sufficient surveillance technology allows governments and corporations to monitor your behaviours and as he would put it, to know you better than you know yourself. Then they're able to manipulate the population en masse, and they're able to target individuals for direct psychological manipulation. And because of this belief that free will is an illusion, people won't even realize that they're being manipulated. They will think they're making their own decisions. Now where you do see a sort of overt application of this, you see it in China. China has you know, they're they're really it's unclear how advanced their artificial intelligence is, it's unclear how advanced their genetic engineering projects are but they have far fewer ethical constraints on, genetic engineering and they have, [21:15] basically, no real ethical constraints that I'm aware of on the development of artificial intelligence up to artificial general intelligence now, Really is officially speaking neither do we in the West? But for China, the real advance they have made in artificial intelligence is in surveillance technology. And so of course in any major city in China, you've got wall to wall surveillance sensors. And those are more and more starting to incorporate biometric sensors, biometric analysis of video footage or other biometric data, including genetic data. And so China, I think, represents kind of an overt expression of what we're talking about when transhumanism meets totalitarianism. And it's very chilling because more and more people at the World Economic Forum, including Klaus Schwab, seem very amenable to the Chinese model. And more and more, I think, people in America implicitly are embracing something like the the Chinese model. [22:21] Obviously one of the, just before we want to move on some of the individuals involved, but one of the headlines I think which you reposted was a zero hedge headline, 1st of April. The headline was unprecedented Chinese genetic experiment may lead to an army of radiation resistant super soldiers. They talk about Frankenstein like experiments with manipulation of human DNA. I guess the danger is that somewhere like China, you say it doesn't have restrictions, but also it doesn't have a sense of the individual, where in the West, the individual makes their choices and they can choose yes or no, where in China you don't have that ability. When you have stories like that out of China, it makes you wonder what else is happening, but in a country that doesn't have those controls and doesn't have those personal individualistic controls, then it's frightening where that can go, I guess. Yeah, I think that is a great example of two things. One, the sort of distracting over sensationalization of what's going on. It was an experiment. [23:31] It was an experiment on human embryos. Basically, they're fusing, they're injecting or stitching water bear genes into human genes, right? Of water bears and those tiny little microscopic creatures that I guess look like bears. They look more like some kind of monstrous doodle bug to me. But the idea then being that because water bears are resistant to radiation, these resulting humans would also be resistant to radiation. One of the things that I covered and looked into quite a bit was the creation of human monkey chimeras in China. [24:09] This was done in partnership with the Salk Institute in California, but the human monkey chimeras, basically a chimera is taking two different types of stem cells, right, two different species or multiple species stem cells and fusing them together to create a sort of hybrid creature. This has been done a lot in mice, but this was, these were human stem cells blended with, I believe it was macaque monkey stem cells and we're chimpanzee, whatever. And they let them grow until like 30 days, then offed them, right? Mass abortion basically. [24:51] And another great example, Ha-Xiang Hui, the Chinese geneticist, in I believe it was 2018 announced that he had created the world's first, at least known, CRISPR babies, a pair of twins whose father was HIV positive. So he went in and used CRISPR to alter their, it's a gene that is responsible for the enzymes on cellular membranes, a defensive enzyme that would give them immunity or at least resistance to HIV. He was of course imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party after all of the global ethical outrage. Many would say and I think it's probably correct that the reason they imprisoned him is mainly because he bragged about it not because he did it. But, anyway, I think that in many ways the, in the same way that killer artificial intelligence is a is a diversion from the real dangers of just minimally powerful artificial intelligence or social control or surveillance. And in the same way that an implanted brain-computer interface kind of distracts attention away from the real human-machine symbiosis that occurs through our relationship with smartphones and other digital devices. In that same way, the focus on this idea of horrific mutants, [26:16] such as a human monkey chimera, or a part human, part water bear nuclear war super soldier, A, it's very unclear whether any of those creatures would ever develop into anything anyway, right? More than likely, they would just die as the genetic monsters that they are. But even if that was done, you're talking about a tiny minority of people We'll take another 10 to 20 years to really see what the realization of that means, What's more important? I think is something like the vast experiments done on the human population with mRNA injections, That alone is enough to give us pause. You know, it is terrified about half of us and [27:02] for very very good reason it has completely hypnotized seemingly the other half of us, which is also extremely alarming. But I really think that it's the extreme ends of these technologies It's very important to look at them because that tells you where they want it to go, but for the immediate, for right now for the present time. I think that the most important thing to look at is these these more mundane experiments being done on the whole on whole populations such as the mRNA injections such as as human smartphone symbiosis, and such as AIs like the chatbots, the chat GPT. Well, let's get into it. I want to talk about some of the individuals. I was saying actually what are the vision guiding these technologies, but the vision comes with the individuals. And of course, you've got Bezos with Amazon One, Sam Altman, who I actually hadn't come across until you put out the article about the biometric world ID. Someone like Jeff Bezos, us on the right on the conservative side, or we don't like. But then you've got Peter Thiel, you've got Elon Musk, and then there's confusion because they're pushed towards some of these technologies. So, I mean, give us a, you've touched on some of the figures, but maybe touch on some of those who are some of the key individuals pushing some of these technologies? [28:30] You know, since you mentioned them and none of them, none of the ones you've mentioned other than Peter Thiel are open transhumanist and even Peter Thiel now basically says transhumanism is a kind of a past, it's a fad that has passed. And in some sense he's correct because transhumanism was a very localized school of thought that whose ideas influenced a lot of people. And now you wouldn't call it transhumanism. You would call it the fourth industrial revolution, or you would call it the internet or you would call it bio-digital convergence, something like that. So just going across that spectrum and I'll just go from left to right. You would say, and I don't think that left and right really don't apply here because what you're talking about is an orientation towards a higher power technology and it really does cross the political spectrum. There's every reason for people on the right to want to use these technologies as there is for people on the left. So. Bill Gates, though, I think is at least most associated with kind of left-wing thinking, even if he's not really a leftist in any meaningful way. [29:36] He is probably, he's been the most resistant to publicly espousing transhumanist goals, right? He's more and more moving in that direction, especially with the release of the GPT technology. But, you know, for him, it's always this sort of latent thing. He's much more focused on the immediate so far as I can tell and he's also to me the most condemnable of all those individuals because of all the influence that he's wielded to [30:05] force these technologies on people in a technocratic fashion moving over to Jeff Bezos, you know, There are a lot of reasons that Jeff Bezos has gone under the radar because he is, He like gates. He's not been all that outspoken but just look at three different aspects of his career, four different aspects, sorry, four. Number one, the entire Amazon structure is technocracy personified, right? So a fulfillment center is a top-down control structure built off of algorithms and some advanced artificial intelligence that either employs robotics to do the work or it turns humans into kind of human algorithm symbiotes. So people literally sit around all day on their phones taking direction and they're monitored and artificial intelligence scrapes up that data to figure out how to make the system more efficient. It is without a doubt, the most effective digital super organism that exists on the planet, or at least among the maybe military grade super organisms are more powerful. Second, his entire infatuation with going out into outer space and... [31:22] At one point he was speaking at the National Cathedral. He talked about how maybe in one vision of the future, most people would live in outer space and Earth would remain as a sort of national park for them to visit on occasion, which is utterly inhuman and horrific to most normal people. But it just basically went without comment. A few people were like, oh my God, that sounds horrible. This billionaire is talking about putting us on space ghettos and keeping Earth for themselves. Well, I mean, that's our guy right there, right? And so the whole thing with Blue Origin with a penis-shaped rocket and the Amazon smile with a penis-shaped smile, I think it does in many ways represent the kind of masculine underpinning of transhumanism in the entire kind of technological endeavor. But also, he's invested in Altos Labs in conjunction with Yuri Milner. And Yuri Milner is much more openly transhumanist. He wrote a manifesto, I can't remember the name of it, talking about human life, giving away to Silicon Life. But Altos Labs is dedicated to human longevity through genetic engineering. Peter Thiel also involved in this. Obviously Bill Gates involved in this. Most of these, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google also involved in this. Very, very, very popular among the billionaires. [32:41] But as you mentioned, Amazon one. Here you're talking about really this kind of pop beast system, wherein Amazon customers, now Panera Bread customers, also Whole Foods customers using their palm biometrics in order to pay for things and identify themselves. I think that that is going to be a much more popular way of implementing what Christians would call a beast system because a lot of people fetishistically implant RFID chips for that purpose. That is really unnerving to a lot of people. Whereas if you take that away entirely and just have a biometric scan, it's much more amenable to the general population. I don't know what the numbers are yet for the customers, but I do know that it's many dozens of stores this is rolled out in so people are using it. Moving over to the right though, you've got Elon Musk who is everything but an open transhumanist, right? He he espouses all of the transhumanist values without ever using the term transhumanism It's very very common ploy, right? So everything from the idea that artificial intelligence will achieve this godlike state to, the only way that human beings will be able to survive in such an environment is to link our brains to it to friendly AIs through an invasive brain computer interface, which he's working on. [34:04] He's also working on artificial general intelligence with Tesla AI and one would imagine that, he has and will be using Twitter data for the same purpose, right? He didn't need to buy Twitter for that, just by the way. Twitter has always offered Firehose API for people who want to data mine Twitter. The only thing that really gives you is 24-7 fire hose access and also access to the DMs other than that a lot of people are training their a eyes on Twitter or have been, [34:36] interestingly musk has cut that off anyway, and then also you know musk and his obsession with going and living in space This is a recurring theme of transhumanist to get off of Earth and become the sort of multi planetary, species and The creation of the robot optimist would be another great example example, the rollout of autonomous vehicles is another great example. I mean, at that point you've got an infrastructure that controls you as much as you control it or maybe more. And so it's really interesting this way in which he's captured the hearts of the right, mainly because he's cool, he's funny, and he at the moment is so anti-PC or anti-woke that there is a certain alignment there. And I appreciate all he's done in that direction, but to me, his long-term vision of the future is more important than the short-term favors he might have to offer. And then moving to the farthest right, Peter Thiel, much more openly involved with these different transhumanist movements. [35:42] What is it called? The Methuselah Foundation, he's invested in heavily. A number of other sort of longevity start-ups he's invested in. He was very interested in Ambrosia, which was, was they've shut down operations now because of threats from the FDA. But Ambrosia is a process. They use the process of parabiosis. They would inject young people's blood into older people to give them more vitality. And of course, Peter Thiel founded Palantir. [36:13] Which even if they're not working on artificial general intelligence, their AI systems are among the most sophisticated in the world. And they're used to, uh, to really apply real world power through the military and through the security state in general. And so on and on, again, as I mentioned, Peter Thiel was an investor in, originally investor, an investor in Neuralink, now a major backer of BlackRock Neurotech brain computer interfaces. So, you know, across the spectrum, one last thing, actually, if I may, One last thing about Peter Thiel that's also really interesting. Of all those people I just mentioned, he is also explicitly religious in his outlook. And so Peter Thiel is oftentimes written about Christianity and the relationship it has with technology. And maybe the most important essay that I'm aware of personally is an essay that was published at First Things, Christian magazine, the title being Against Edenism. [37:21] And in that he argues there's no going back to Eden of Genesis, there's only going forward to the city of God in Revelation. And so Christians need to use these technologies to defend, to bolster and defend their civilizations, to create a sort of kingdom of God on Earth or some approximation of the city of God on earth, and city of heaven on earth. [37:50] To me, I think that it's a kind of gross perversion of what the Christian doctrine is. I mean, not that there's any single Christian doctrine. I know many of your religious listeners might take umbrage with that statement, but the sort of general orientation of Christianity is towards a higher spiritual realm and is at least disinterested in the outcomes of the physical body, this technological obsession is obsessed with physical outcomes. So Thiel is also interested in that way. Aside from funding all these kind of Christian Republican candidates, he also uses Christian mythology in order to push a kind of technocratic or transhumanist point of view. Can I pick some of the names? The whole chat-GBT thing. I know Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were involved in the beginning and then Microsoft came along and put in billions and seemed to have taken that partially as their own and then the whole letter from 1800 opposing, the move of AI in general. But I mean I'm Gen X so it did take my older son to show me the South Park episode about chatGBT and then I thought I have to get up to get up to speed. But I guess people just see that as [39:20] helping society, making your life easier. It doesn't seem too invasive. It's just [39:27] for lazy people, they can use that. And how does that kind of fit in? Because chat GPT has been very much in the media recently. ChatGPG set off a social atom bomb. It's just really insane. On the one side you have all these people who have embraced it. On the war room we've really focused on guys like Hans Monk at Epic Times who is very enthusiastic about it as being a way to break the left. And then of course Jordan Peterson. People really got mad at me, but he does sound like a real wiener when he's talking about it being smarter than you are. Are and oh Elon Musk is going to save us. Sorry for your Jordan Peterson fans but I find him to be very off-putting. Anyway, they talk about it as kind of this god-like entity in some sense. And then on the other side, which is really, really interesting, on the other side you've got guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elon Musk and Yuval Harari and Max Tegmark. All of them, transhumanist basically, with the exception of maybe Harari. I know a lot of people would wonder why I would say that, but I don't see him as being a transhumanist in any meaningful way. Anyway, all of these transhumanists are saying that this represents a profound danger to human civilization. So why would they say that? It's a chatbot. It's nothing but a chatbot, right? [40:55] And the real reason, there's two major reasons, right? One, the unexpected capacities that GPT technology, has exhibited, the sort of general knowledge that it's able to put out on the basis of, you know, nothing more than a neural network, right? Like you're just talking about an artificial brain that exists in a virtual system, but because of its size and the scale of the data it was trained on, it surprised everyone. GPT-3 surprised everyone. GPT-3.5 or chat GPT really surprised everyone as they flooded the public with it and people started having these very, personal interactions with an artificial mind and that was really important before they put on the safety layers people oftentimes say oh AI is just woke, Initially it wasn't just woke before they started putting the safety layers on it. It was actually [42:03] unbiased hence the enthusiasm that people like Hans Monk and Jordan Peterson had for it and [42:09] GPT-4 has really stunned people because it's starting to edge towards general intelligence. And just, I've been speaking about it, but just for any listeners who aren't familiar, artificial narrow intelligence is an AI that can do one single task or one kind of narrow range of tasks, such as play chess or go or play video games or control a microchip production system or to spit out words like chat GPT, right? Artificial general intelligence is something more human-like in which you have multiple cognitive modules that thinks across all of these domains and oftentimes simultaneously. Doesn't exist yet, but GPT-4 represented a huge move in that direction. It was able to translate, for instance, vision into text and make reasonable conclusions about it. It was able to solve mazes, right? It's a language model, it was able to solve mazes. And maybe most importantly, it excelled on human testing. [43:18] So the two most impressive were the GRE verbal test, 99th percentile was its score. And then you've got the US Biology Olympiad, again, 99th percentile. And then you had the LSAT and the bar exam, law exams. And that was 90th percentile and 88th percentile, respectively. So [43:46] people saw this as this incredible potential. Where is it going to go next? That's the fear. Now I personally am quite stunned that people are so enamored by this and that they want to embrace it. I think the biggest danger that this technology poses is that people like Bill Gates, right? Because Microsoft backed OpenAI, They're incorporating all of these GPT technologies into their systems. And so Bill Gates is talking about using it for education. A lot of people are talking about using it for education, meaning that education will become more and more, more than it is now, e-learning, digital learning. And these students, the youngest generation is going to develop this human AI relationship that is going to stick with them for life. And transhumanists oftentimes talk about how in an ideal future, you would have your own kind of personal AI as a type of guardian angel that would teach you about the world and would learn you better than you know yourself, right? And give you the advice that you need to get through life. You're talking about the most powerful brainwashing technology ever created. [45:05] And, you know, aside from that, you've got all of these different jobs that are being obliterated, everything from copywriters to editors to lawyers and even doctors and nurses. So that is, again, you're talking about the digital mediation between humans and all these kind of critical services. Maybe most importantly, preachers, rabbis, imams, I assume, using these technologies, specifically chat GPT, to create their sermons or to read, you know, to maybe a more autonomous system, just a simpler system to read liturgy. This is already occurring in like small little points across the planet. It has not yet taken off. But I could definitely foresee a future, especially after all of these children have been brainwashed by this technology, in which as you and I get old and die, literally, we've got a robot standing over us, reading us our last rites, as our, you know, the contents of our consciousness are made manifest through some sort of digital zombie made from all of our data. I mean, it sounds sci-fi, but barring nuclear war or an EMP, something like that is going to happen in certain societies around the world. So the big danger I see are those more immediate dangers, the psychological danger and the sociological and economic dangers. But you've got guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky. [46:33] Who say that, Nick Bostrom is also a major figure, who says that this represents a move towards an artificial general intelligence that is not aligned to human values, and it's not necessarily aligned to human existence. And so if the next iteration in GPT-5, or the next iteration in GPT-6, or any of these other AI companies that are working in competition with them, or any of the militaries around the world who are developing other artificial intelligence systems, if any of these create a digital brain that is large enough and fast enough and astute enough, I guess is a way of putting it, then you end up in a situation where you might get a hard takeoff, right? An intelligence explosion, what Nick Bostrom calls a super intelligence. And if that super intelligence is not aligned to human values or does not regard human existence as being necessary or desirable then it could easily take control of [47:42] critical infrastructure it could take control of weapon systems It could take control of a biolab or a series of biolabs, Or it could take control of individuals within a society to use any of these critical systems in order to destroy some other people or all of humanity. That's the fear that Eliezer Yudkowsky is talking about and it's entirely based on all of these kind of emergent properties from a chatbot that should just be you know some sort of rote memorization sort of regurgitation of all this knowledge but instead is showing this flexibility. The fear is that chatbot or maybe it's a robotic system or maybe it's a military simulation system or maybe it's a military control system. It could be any type of AI But if it reaches a super intelligent state, The fear is from their side that it would obliterate some or all of humankind, again I think it's very very important to listen to just for this for the same reason that all the warnings about the atom bomb were were very, very important to listen to. But in some ways that distracts from the more immediate and certainly attainable goals of rolling out these AIs across the society and using them for social control, for indoctrination and for mass surveillance. [49:06] I just wanna, I'm looking at time, but just wanted to bring in one final post that you had put up. This is on your GETTR and this was a YouGov America. I just want to touch on just for a few minutes, because it's interesting to see what the public rise. It was interesting, actually, YouGov, asking the question, how concerned at all are you about the possibility that AI will not just have a negative effect, but will cause the end of the human race on Earth? So it was a very hyperbolic question. But on this, you had 19% very concerned, 27% somewhat. So you've got 46% are concerned, 13% not knowing. So it seemed very evenly split. Half the people who were asked either were concerned or didn't know what it was about or unconcerned and didn't know. That was not only the type of question asked, that was intriguing, but the response was also intriguing. What were your thoughts when you posted this? I think it was back on 5th of April or so when you posted this. Well, it's obviously is an expression of that open letter that was put out by the Future of Life Institute calling for a six-month moratorium [50:19] on any AI above the level of GPT-4. Then, of course, Eliezer Yudkowsky published the now famous, op-ed in Time Magazine saying that's not enough and that all large GPU clusters, all large AI training centres, data centres should be banned. And if intelligence is aware of a training center working on a massive AI system, a potentially super intelligent system, airstrike should be on the table even at the risk of nuclear war. So this has flooded the national consciousness here in America and I presume world consciousness across the globe. I've been very provincial of late, so you'd have to tell me. But I know that just regarding that poll, which is an American poll. [51:15] This is flooding people's consciousness. It's always been there, latent consciousness has always been there in science fiction, everything from the Terminator and things like HAL 9000, all these sorts of motifs have always been there. Now, it represents a distinct possibility in people's minds. But that 50-50 split that you're seeing there, roughly 50-50, half and half, what's interesting is that give or take 10, 15%, either direction, on a score of issues, that's what you see in the American psyche. So you saw during COVID, I would say roughly half of the population became, you know, COVIDians and wanted to mask up obsessively. The other half, even among those who complied, really weren't into it. And on the extreme end, which I would place myself, were fiercely opposed and furious about it. [52:14] Same thing, basically, basically enthusiasm for the Vax. I don't know of any hard statistics. Forgive me if I'm a little wrong, but basically you've got this split, a significant enough split that each side has some potential of taking over the federal government and applying their will on the other half. Well, another really interesting poll that was done by two researchers, led by two researchers from Harvard and I believe Cambridge, if I'm not mistaken, looking at the Americans, and they surveyed asking them, if your child would have a better chance of getting into a top 100 college, Would you be willing to one, edit the embryo's genes to give it higher intelligence, or to use a polygenic risk score, or the pre-implantation testing, genetic testing, to figure out whether or not the IQ was high enough. [53:14] To give your infant a better chance of having a high IQ. And so, about a third, and this is roughly the same roughly the same for uneducated or more educated, skewed towards more educated, skewed towards younger, about a third, almost 40% among educated said they would be willing to edit their embryos genome [53:38] in order to give a higher IQ, just under half, just under 50% for the polygenic risk score. And what that means is that you conceive the child in vitro, right? Right the test tube baby from the 1970s you conceive the child in vitro and then you freeze the embryo and what you really do is you you stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs so you end up with around 10 to 15 eggs and you conceive all of these and then you freeze them after taking a sample of the cells you do a polygenic risk or you do genetic testing on all of them and I've described this as being somewhere between a basketball tournament and a spelling bee basically you, one that is deemed to be most likely to be smartest also tallest and certainly devoid of any major, deformities or genetic diseases that one gets picked that one gets implanted either in the mother or as it's become more popular a surrogate and [54:44] then you have this kind of slow rolling process of eugenics This is already being done. And one of the major companies is Genomic, what is it, I believe it's Genomic Prediction, if I have the name right. And that was a startup funded by our boy Sam Altman from OpenAI, and they offer a sophisticated polygenic risk score test that includes IQ. It doesn't include positive IQ scores, but what it can weed out is the lowest 2% in IQ, or the lowest 2% in height is one of the things they offer, right? And so you've got this sort of soft eugenics, what's called liberal eugenics by the scholar Nicholas Agar. But liberal eugenics is not state enforced, it's choice, it's freedom, right? I have the freedom to eugenicize my child and the next generation. So looking at those statistics, you see the significant portion of the population that has enthusiasm for it. And that tracks with a previous poll that was published, I believe, last year from Pew, which found that people, it was like roughly a third, if I'm not mistaken, roughly a third of people would be willing to use genetic engineering [56:06] to eliminate a disease. And some other, I believe it was also roughly a third, said that they would be willing to implant a digital device into their child's brain in order to give them increased intelligence. I'm a little fuzzy, it's been a minute since I've looked at that, but it's significant enough to push this forward. And you have the possibility of it, right? You have the technological possibility of it. Some of it just over the horizon, some of it right here. So going back to the idea, well, is AI going to kill us all? I think it's you know it represents the the people who are going to want to put a halt to AI and the people who are at least going to want to regulate it or to boycott any corporation working on it those are going to fall into that half that cares right that half is afraid the other half is going to be much more likely to either not care and dismiss it or perhaps be enthusiastic about it with a lot of overlap, but this is kind of I'm not much of a futurist look at any of my track records for girlfriends gambling or elections, but I [57:21] do think that what you do see is enough social momentum enough acceptance on the part of the population at large large that should these technologies actually be effective, you'll have a significant proportion who will want it. And even if they aren't entirely effective, even if it's just some sort of half-baked version of it, they will be willing to accept and adopt it. And so I don't see this going away at all. Again, barring nuclear war or an EMP, I just don't see it going away, there is a growing enthusiasm for the techno cult we call transhumanism and a growing acceptance of the kind of dictatorial social structure we call technocracy. And I sense that it is a fast-growing religion, and it will continue to impact those of us who want nothing to do with it. We have to learn to deal with it. We have to learn how to resist it effectively and and not just this year and next year, but across generations. [58:27] Yeah, no, absolutely. Joe, I appreciate you coming on. I've thoroughly enjoyed watching you on the War Room. I enjoyed meeting up with you at CPAC. And just for the viewers that they can find you, this will be going out Monday the 17th, the American Freedom Alliance Conference. I had the privilege of going to one back in June called Propaganda, and you'll be speaking at the World War III, the early years, 22nd to 23rd of April. So there are tickets available. You can go to the website, americanfreedomalliance.org and get a ticket. If you're over there on the West Coast, then I would really encourage the viewers or listeners to go and make it a trip because you'll thoroughly enjoy it from listening to Steve Bannon, Joe Allen, and everyone else in between. So Joe, thank you for your time today. Thank you very much, Peter. And just for your listeners, anyone who wants to go, promo code Joe, get a discount. So I would love to meet anyone who's over in that area. Come on down. But yeah, Peter, I really, really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me on. It was absolute, it was fantastic meeting you in DC. Great time, hope to see you again.

Support me by becoming wiser and more knowledgeable – check out books by or related to these intellectuals for sale on Amazon: Terence Tao - https://amzn.to/4cACjHV Jacob Lurie - https://amzn.to/3U5NIZr Simon Donaldson - https://amzn.to/3x99r9w Maxim Kontsevich - https://amzn.to/3VxbPRL If you purchase a book through this link, I will earn a 4.5% commission and be extremely delighted. But if you just want to read and aren't ready to add a new book to your collection yet, I'd recommend checking out the ⁠⁠⁠Internet Archive⁠⁠⁠, the largest free digital library in the world. If you're really feeling benevolent you can buy me a coffee or donate over at ⁠https://ko-fi.com/theunadulteratedintellect⁠⁠. I would seriously appreciate it! __________________________________________________ Terence Chi-Shen Tao (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory. Tao was born to ethnic Chinese immigrant parents and raised in Adelaide. Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006 and won the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014. He is also a 2006 MacArthur Fellow. Tao has been the author or co-author of over three hundred research papers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians and has been referred to as the "Mozart of mathematics". Jacob Alexander Lurie (born December 7, 1977) is an American mathematician who is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Lurie is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957) is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London. Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich (born 25 August 1964) is a Russian and French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He received the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields Medal in 1998, the Crafoord Prize in 2008, the Shaw Prize and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015. Richard Lawrence Taylor (born 19 May 1962) is a British mathematician working in the field of number theory. He is currently the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Taylor received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics "for numerous breakthrough results in the theory of automorphic forms, including the Taniyama–Weil conjecture, the local Langlands conjecture for general linear groups, and the Sato–Tate conjecture." He also received the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for his work on the Langlands program with Robert Langlands. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2012 to 2014. Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist . He is a cofounder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (now VK) and a founder of investment firm DST Global. Through DST Global, Milner is an investor in Byju's, Facebook, Wish, and many others. In 2012 Milner's personal investments included a stake in 23andMe, Habito, Planet Labs, minority stake in a real estate investments startup, Cadre in 2017. Audio source ⁠here⁠⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theunadulteratedintellect/support

"Are We Alone? In an exclusive interview, Dr. Vishal Gajjar, a leading researcher on the Breakthrough Listen project, discussed his groundbreaking work using machine learning and AI to facilitate the detection of technosignatures on the project's search for Extraterrestrial life. The Breakthrough Listen project, led by the University of California Berkeley and the SETI Institute, is one of the most ambitious efforts to search for intelligent life in the universe. Using some of the world's largest radio telescopes, the project scans the cosmos for signs of intelligent civilizations, such as radio signals and other technosignatures. Dr. Gajjar, who is a principal investigator on the project, is using AI to help analyse the vast amounts of data generated by the telescopes. "The amount of data we collect is enormous, and it would be impossible for humans to go through it all," he explained. "Using machine learning algorithms, we can sift through the data much more efficiently and identify patterns that might indicate the presence of a technosignature." One of the key challenges of the project is distinguishing between signals that are truly indicative of Extraterrestrial life and those that are just background noise. Dr. Gajjar's AI algorithms are able to filter out false positives, making the search for technosignatures more accurate. The use of AI in the Breakthrough Listen project is not only increasing the efficiency of the search for Extraterrestrial life, but it's also pushing the boundaries of what we can do with this technology. "We're using AI in a way that it's never been used before," said Dr. Gajjar. "It's exciting to think about the potential implications of this work, not just for our understanding of the universe but also for other fields like medicine and finance." The Breakthrough Listen project is a 10-year initiative with funding from the Breakthrough Initiatives, a program founded by internet investor and philanthropist Yuri Milner. Currently we have purchased time on the GBT in Virginia in the US and the Parkes telescope in Australia and we have time on about a dozen other radio telescopes around the world and we have also purchased time on optical telescopes. This is an exciting time for the search for Extraterrestrial life, and Dr. Gajjar's work with AI on the Breakthrough Listen project is a major step forward in this quest. As Dr. Gajjar put it, "The potential discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would be one of the most profound discoveries in human history. I'm honoured to be a part of this effort and can't wait to see what we'll find." `

Kosuke Fujishimaさんをゲストに迎え、これまでの研究人生に触れながら研究雑談しました。Shownotes このShownotesは藤島さんからのコメント・修正を受ける前です。またコメント・修正を受け取り次第更新いたしますのでご了承ください。 (by tadasu) Kosuke Fujishima Fujishimaさんの一つ前のエピソード テラフォーマーズ 冥王代 tri-split tRNA RNA world仮説 目ブラスト 貴家悠 藤島さんと貴家さんの対談 高井研 vs 貴家さん 減数分裂 東京喰種トーキョーグール レベルE 44. XXXXXYYYYY (Researchat.fm) … レベルE解説エピソード Lynn J. Rothschild 火星のマグマは噴出するか？ … Nature Geo Science? 火星の海 テラフォーマーズ20巻 … どこに藤島さんいるのか正直特定できておりません… ロスチャイルド家 エンケラドゥス 質量分析 衝突マス Eリング decadal survey from NASA 高速衝突実験装置 ISS アストロバイオロジーの三大研究 … 生命の起源、生命の分布、人類の宇宙進出 東大の工藤先生 全自動メダカ飼育装置 宇宙メダカの論文 宇宙メダカ選抜テスト 某ショット … 人類は月には何年前に到達したんだっけ？ ケンタウルス座アルファ星 ブレイクスルー財団 鉛の板 Yuri Milner ブレイクスルースターショット計画 イーロン・マスク　… ep19 Neuron Maskを参照のこと SpaceX The Martian … いわゆるオデッセイ Andy Weir 過塩素酸 Soda Lakes 過塩素酸入り培地で育つ微生物 ATGCU … DNA/RNAの塩基 111. Mirror Image Biology … 鏡像異性体の回 鏡像異性体は味がするのか？ ラセミ化 深海の微生物にはラセマーゼが多い ホモキラル EBI … European Bioinformatics Institute Joana Pereira タンパク質の配列空間 … よく使うフレーズなのですが、適切な名前が思い浮かばない (tamaki) ふじしまさんが載っているJAXAの宇宙飛行士募集ページ … 「宇宙飛行士に転職だ」 宇宙飛行士選抜テスト こまささん … 藤島さんのお友達 「大西宇宙飛行士に、OB訪問だ。」JAXA宇宙飛行士候補者募集スペシャルムービー … ふじしまさんがOB訪問という形で大西宇宙飛行士インタビューしています Editorial Notes (fujishi) 実は今回は高校生の皆さんにリーチするという野望があったのですが、届いたのだろうか・・・(coela) おもしろすぎました。完全版shownotesはそのうちに(tadasu)

Thierry Vignal, président fondateur de Mastéos annonce une levée de fonds de 40 millions au micro Mon Podcast Immo d'Ariane Artinian.   Le fondateur de la proptech de l'investissement locatif raconte comment il a relevé le défi posé DST Global, le fonds de Yuri Milner habitué à investir dans des champions (Spotify, Airbnb, Alibaba, Twitter... ). Il détaille sa nouvelle feuille de route et affiche ses ambitions l faire de Masteos une licorne de l'investissement locatif.

BUFFALO, NY- May 11, 2022 – A new research perspective was published in Oncoscience journal by Mikhail Blagosklonny, M.D., Ph.D., entitled, “Altos Labs and the quest for immortality: but can we live longer right now?” “Here I discuss how combining rapamycin with other modalities may let us live long enough to benefit from future discoveries in cellular reprogramming and what needs to be done at Altos Labs to make this happen.” Altos Labs—a new anti-aging biotechnology company funded by multiple billionaire investors, including Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner—has reported a focus on reprogramming cells in order to reverse the trajectory of diseases, and thus, reverse aging. In his research perspective, Dr. Blagosklonny writes that potential life-extension with rapamycin may allow us to win time while awaiting future discoveries that will reverse aging. “Rapamycin treatment is rapidly becoming a mainstream anti-aging intervention.” However, Dr. Blagosklonny also writes that rapamycin alone is unlikely to extend lifespan sufficiently to benefit from Altos Labs' future discoveries in our lifetime. “If Altos Labs would allocate a small percentage of its funding to develop rapamycin based drug combinations, then additional decades of life extension may be available 3–5 years from now.” “The number of potential combinations with rapamycin is enormous.” Read Dr. Blagosklonny's research perspective: https://www.oncoscience.us/article/552/text/ Correspondence to: Mikhail V. Blagosklonny Email: Blagosklonny@oncotarget.com, Blagosklonny@rapalogs.com Keywords: aging, longevity, lifespan, geroscience, rapalogs, gerostatics Follow Dr. Blagosklonny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Blagosklonny For media inquiries, please contact media@impactjournals.com. Oncoscience Journal Office 6666 East Quaker Str., Suite 1D Orchard Park, NY 14127 Phone: 1-800-922-0957, option 4 ###

In conversation with Indian Genes in this Exclusive, Avi Loeb the Harvard University professor who is now heading the Galileo Project, explains his shocking hypothesis, details in this conversation have not been heard before and Avi Loeb, opens up to all matters related to the search for Extraterrestrial life including some details about his own life you may not Know. Avi Loeb is no stranger to controversy. The prolific Harvard University astrophysicist has produced pioneering and provocative research on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, the early universe and other standard topics of his field. But for more than a decade he has also courted a more contentious subject—namely, space aliens, including how to find them. Until relatively recently, Loeb's most high-profile work in that regard was his involvement with Breakthrough Starshot, a project funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner to send laser-boosted, gossamer-thin mirrorlike spacecraft called “light sails” on high-speed voyages to nearby stars. All that began to change in late 2017, however, when astronomers around the world scrambled to study an enigmatic interstellar visitor—the first ever seen—that briefly came within range of their telescopes.

Ep. 62:  She went from poverty in communist-era Poland to becoming the artist of choice of Silicon Valley billionaires for her renaissance-inspired conceptual art of machines and robots/ Agnieszka Pilat, Conceptual Artist. Born in the shadow of communism, in the grip of poverty, in the cradle of post-industrial Central Poland, Agnieska Pilat acted on her burning desire to leave her homeland and headed to America in 2004.    She landed in the Bay Area where a transformative book recommendation from her hairdresser, and her industrial roots in Poland, led to an epiphany which led her to start painting machines. First the traditional kind. Gears and widgets and meters and fire bells. Then — robots. One in particular, her big bright yellow 70 pound cybernetic “pet” if you could call it that / model/assistant/apprentice/Spot, on loan to her from the famed and controversial robot maker Boston Dynamics. Over the past decade, Agnieskza Pilat's classically-trained, renaissance-inspired, contemporary art around man and machine, technology and automation has gained a big following among Silicon Valley's elite billionaires. Her works of art have been acquired by collectors including Sotheby's and tech titans such as Craig McCaw, Richard Branson, Yuri Milner, and Larry Silverstein among others. Several of her paintings are featured in the latest Matrix movie, The Matrix Resurrections. Pilat has been described as an “artist who brings technology to life,” ‘the darling of Silicon Valley,” and a “technology storyteller.”  Her latest exhibition is titled Renaissance 2.0, and is an homage to Silicon Valley's renaissance. It was such a pleasure to catch up with Agnieszka Pilat about her life and her renaissance-inspired contemporary art of man and machine.

Over the past decade-plus, Yuri Milner has achieved first-name status in Silicon Valley--like Mark, Sheryl, Jack, Reid, and Ev. But Milner's origin story as a mega-watt investor involves deep ties to the Kremlin, which is why Silicon Valley's elite are looking for him to take a stand against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. What is Milner saying? Well, it's complicated... On Today's show, Peter sits down with Teddy Schleifer to dig into who Yuri Milner is and what he's saying The Power's That be is a presentation of Cadence 13 Studios. Please listen, rate, review, and follow all episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Suddenly, Silicon Valley is worried about its Russian ties. I’m getting messages from sources about potential Russian-connected venture capital firms and software companies with inordinate numbers of Russian customers. Companies like Netflix, Disney, Samsung, and TikTok are cutting at least some of their services in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is restricting access to Facebook.There were echoes of this moment, in 2018, when Silicon Valley was forced to reckon with its addiction to Saudi Arabian oil money after the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Investors started to wonder if they should feel guilty about the transgressions of their limited partners.But then the spotlight faded and the business world moved on.This time seems different. Most importantly, the U.S. government is expressly putting pressure on wealthy Russian elites. The ethical questions are taking a back seat to the foreign policy objectives of much of the Western world. So even in cases where people can justifiably separate the individual from the country, there’s intense pressure to hurt the Russian government by cracking down on individuals and institutions tied to Russia. There’s perhaps no more prominent Russian-born investor than Yuri Milner. Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer asked this month:“What is Yuri Milner thinking? That’s the question I posed last week to Milner’s spokesman, after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then again on Monday, after Western governments responded with crippling sanctions. Milner, after all, is easily among Silicon Valley’s most prominent Russians, having made billions of dollars as the force behind DST Global, the venture firm that placed historic bets on Facebook and Twitter, among other Bay Area landmarks. But it was Milner’s embattled friends that put him on my mind: The Russian provenance of DST’s early capital was supplied in large part by Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch who made his fortune in metal and mining before teaming up with Milner in 2008.”In the latest episode of Dead Cat, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I talked to Schleifer about Milner’s public silence on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We discussed the abrupt transition from a globally interconnected financial system to one that is suddenly looking to root out Russian money. (A DST spokesperson told Schleifer that Milner hasn’t taken money from Russian limited partners since 2012.) We also talked to Schleifer about his list of American oligarchs. He ranked Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt as the most important political donors of the moment on the left, and Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison as number one and number two on the right. Cheekily, Schleifer gave Chamath Palihapitiya the number four spot — on the right.We also delved into philanthropy. Schleifer told us about one of his favorite donors — crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — and floated the possibility that donor MacKenzie Scott’s rapid-fire giveaway project ends in disaster.Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Suddenly, Silicon Valley is worried about its Russian ties. I'm getting messages from sources about potential Russian-connected venture capital firms and software companies with inordinate numbers of Russian customers. Companies like Netflix, Disney, Samsung, and TikTok are cutting at least some of their services in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is restricting access to Facebook.There were echoes of this moment, in 2018, when Silicon Valley was forced to reckon with its addiction to Saudi Arabian oil money after the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Investors started to wonder if they should feel guilty about the transgressions of their limited partners.But then the spotlight faded and the business world moved on.This time seems different. Most importantly, the U.S. government is expressly putting pressure on wealthy Russian elites. The ethical questions are taking a back seat to the foreign policy objectives of much of the Western world. So even in cases where people can justifiably separate the individual from the country, there's intense pressure to hurt the Russian government by cracking down on individuals and institutions tied to Russia. There's perhaps no more prominent Russian-born investor than Yuri Milner. Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer asked this month:“What is Yuri Milner thinking? That's the question I posed last week to Milner's spokesman, after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then again on Monday, after Western governments responded with crippling sanctions. Milner, after all, is easily among Silicon Valley's most prominent Russians, having made billions of dollars as the force behind DST Global, the venture firm that placed historic bets on Facebook and Twitter, among other Bay Area landmarks. But it was Milner's embattled friends that put him on my mind: The Russian provenance of DST's early capital was supplied in large part by Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch who made his fortune in metal and mining before teaming up with Milner in 2008.”In the latest episode of Dead Cat, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I talked to Schleifer about Milner's public silence on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We discussed the abrupt transition from a globally interconnected financial system to one that is suddenly looking to root out Russian money. (A DST spokesperson told Schleifer that Milner hasn't taken money from Russian limited partners since 2012.) We also talked to Schleifer about his list of American oligarchs. He ranked Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt as the most important political donors of the moment on the left, and Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison as number one and number two on the right. Cheekily, Schleifer gave Chamath Palihapitiya the number four spot — on the right.We also delved into philanthropy. Schleifer told us about one of his favorite donors — crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — and floated the possibility that donor MacKenzie Scott's rapid-fire giveaway project ends in disaster.Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

O podcast Health Innovation desta semana tem como tema os artifícios tecnológicos utilizados para buscar a vida eterna. Um grupo de empresários e pesquisadores se reuniu no Vale do Silício em prol da Altos Labs. A startup conta com investidores influentes como Jeff Bezos e Yuri Milner e tem como objetivo encontrar uma maneira de prolongar a vida. A partir do método de reprogramação biológica, os especialistas envolvidos no projeto desejam rejuvenescer células em laboratório. No episódio desta semana, Laura Murta, Camila Pepe e Jonas Sertório discutem os diferentes recursos utilizados para prolongar a vida humana. Esse podcast é um oferecimento da Sociedade Beneficente Israelita Brasileira Albert Einstein.

(2:27) Dramatizamos o relato "Os océanos teñen voz" de Diego Parada, gañador do concurso Inspiraciencia na categoría de mocidade en galego. (12:12) Celebrouse en Santiago a reunión anual da Rede Nacional de Senescencia Celular. E alí levamos os micrófonos de Efervesciencia para coñecer os máis novidosos avances sobre o envellecemento. Foi o noso anfitrión Manuel Collado, do grupo de "Senescencia Celular en Cancro e Envellecemento" do IDIS. Conversamos co investigador Manuel Serrano (IRB Barcelona), que vén de ser fichado por Jeff Bezos e Yuri Milner para Altos Lab. Este laborarorio privado pretende ser a vangarda mundial en investigación sobre envellecemento. Tamén falamos con María Abad (VHIO), Joaquin Aribas (VHIO), Ramón Martínez (UV) e Ignacio Palmero (UAM). www.efervesciencia.org

I started selling Let's Find Out merchandise at https://www.letsfindoutasmr.com (btw, nothing says "ASMR" on it LOL) as a cool way to help support the channel. I think Teespring usually takes 3 weeks to deliver from date of purchase, so heads up if you want anything by Christmas. Thanks for all the continual support you all give. I never take the patron pledges, paypal donations, or gifts to the po box for granted, and I seriously appreciate every single one of you for showing the channel love and support. It means so much. Happy Holidays, and a Merry coming Christmas to you and your families!   Now for the interstellar starships! Breakthrough Initiatives is a science-based program founded in 2015 and funded by Julia and Yuri Milner, also of Breakthrough Prize, to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over a span of at least 10 years. The program is divided into multiple projects: 1. Breakthrough Listen will search over 1,000,000 stars for artificial radio or laser signals. 2. Breakthrough Message is an effort to create a message "representative of humanity and planet Earth". 3. Breakthrough Starshot, co-founded with Mark Zuckerberg, aims to send a swarm of probes to the nearest star at about 20% the speed of light. 4. Breakthrough Watch aims to identify and characterize Earth-sized, rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other stars within 20 light years of Earth. 5. Breakthrough Enceladus, plans to send a mission to Saturn's moon Enceladus, in search for life in its warm ocean, and in 2018 signed a partnership agreement with NASA for the project.   Timestamps: 0:00 showing the new merchandise, talking about discord 1:08:56 Interstellar Projects coming in the 21st Century   ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ►Support for the channel... ▸Shop on Amazon here (kick-backs at no cost to you): ▸PayPal ......... https://www.paypal.me/LetsFindOutASMR ......... ▸Patreon ........ https://www.patreon.com/LetsFindOutASMR ▸

Thomas Graham, distinguished fellow at CFR, leads a conversation on constraining Putin's Russia. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the CFR Fall 2021 Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today's meeting is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website CFR.org/academic if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Thomas Graham with us to talk about Putin's Russia. Mr. Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior advisor at Kissinger Associates, where he focuses on Russian and Eurasian affairs. He is cofounder of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies program at Yale University, and is also a research fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale. He previously served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007, and director for Russian affairs from 2002 to 2004. His résumé is very distinguished. I will just also say that he is a U.S. diplomat who served two tours of duty in Moscow, where he worked on political affairs. So, Mr. Graham, thanks very much for being with us today. I thought you could get us started by talking about the primary interests at stake in U.S.-Russia relations. GRAHAM: Great. Thank you very much, Irina, for that introduction, and it's a real pleasure to be with all of you here today. I want to start with three broad points that will frame the rest of our discussion. The first is that the problem that the United States faces is not simply with Putin; it is with Russia more generally speaking. The last seven years of very difficult, challenging adversarial relationship is really not an aberration in the history of the relationship between our two countries. In fact, from the moment the United States emerged as a major power on the global stage at the very end of the nineteenth century, we have had a rivalry with Russia. And the issues that divide us today are the ones that divided us 125, 150 years ago: We have opposing worldviews. We have different geopolitical interests. And clearly, we have different systems of values that inform our domestic political systems. This rivalry has intensified, ebbed and flowed during the twentieth century. But the effort we made at partnership after the breakup of the Soviet Union up until 2014, marked by the eruption of the crisis in Ukraine, is really the aberration in the history of relations between our two countries and one that was founded very much on the fact that Russia endured a period of strategic weakness. So the issue we have to deal with Russia and how we're going to deal with Russia well into the future, even after Putin departs—which he will, obviously, at some point, if only for biological reasons. The second point that I would make is that Russia is not going to go away. We hear a lot in the public debate in the United States about Russian decline, about the population/demographic problems it has, about its stagnating economy, and so forth. None of this is necessarily untrue, but I think it tends to exaggerate the problems that Russia faces. It ignores the problems that all other major countries face—including China, the United States, and many major European countries—but it also overlooks the very great strengths that Russia has had for decades that are going to make it a player and an important player on the global stage, nuclear weapons to begin with. We should never forget that Russia remains the only country that can destroy the United States as a functioning society in thirty minutes. Russia has the largest natural endowment of any country in the world, a country that can pretend to self-sufficiency and, in fact, is better placed than most other countries to deal with a breakdown in globalization in the decades to come if that, indeed, happens. It has a veto on the U.N. Security Council, which makes it an important player on issues of importance to the United States, and it has a talented population that has fostered a scientific community that, for example, is capable of taking advances in technology and developing the military applications from them. Just look at the strength that Russia exhibits in cyberspace, for example—again, a major challenge for the United States. So Russia is going to continue to be a challenge. One other thing that I should have mentioned here is that the Russian state throughout history and Putin's Russia today has demonstrated a keen ability to mobilize the resources of their own society for state purposes. So even if in relative terms they may be weaker and weakening vis-à-vis China and the United States, in some ways that political will, that ability to mobilize, allows Russia to play a much larger role than mere indicators of its economic size and population size would suggest. Now, Russia clashes with the United States across a whole range of issues, and as I said that is going to continue for some time. And this brings me to my third point: How we should think about American foreign policy, what our guidelines should be in dealing with Russia. And here there are three, I think, key elements to this. First, the United States needs to preserve strategic stability. We need to have that nuclear balance between us (sic) and the United States. This is an existential question. And as I already mentioned, Russia does have a tremendous nuclear capability. Second, the United States should seek to manage its competition with Russia responsibly. We want to avoid or reduce the risk of a direct military conflict that could escalate to the nuclear level. This is—also, I think, recognizes that the United States is not going to be able to compel Russia to capitulate on issues that are of interest to us, nor are we going to be able to radically change the way they think about their own national interests. So it's a competitive relationship and we need to manage that responsibly. And finally, given the complex world that we live in today—the very real transnational challenges we face: climate change, pandemic diseases, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—the United States should seek, to the extent possible, ways to cooperate with Russia in dealing with these issues. We should recognize that Russia is not necessarily the only player nor necessarily the most important player in dealing with these challenges, but it does have a role to play along with other major powers in handling these transnational issues. So those, I think, are three sort of broad points that help set the stage for our discussion. Now let me turn sort of very briefly to the questions about U.S. policy. How do we deal with this Russia? What are sort of—the way we should think about American foreign policy? And here the point I would make is that we should think of the policy in terms of what I would call the three Ds: defense, deterrence, and dialogue. Now, defense and deterrence in many ways go together. If you have a very good defense, if you demonstrate an ability and willingness to defend your interests effectively and deliberately, then you tend to deter another power. They have less reason to want to attack you. But if deterrence fails, you very much need to be able to defend yourself—to disrupt Russian operations in cyberspace, for example, or disrupt military operations by the Russians that you find problematic in some way. So defense and deterrence go together, and we need to think about that. Now, you build these elements on a number of other things that we're all familiar with. A strong military—strong, capable military—is, obviously, an element of both defense and deterrence, and something that we have managed quite well in the past and I imagine will manage quite well going into the future. Cyber defenses are also an important element of constraining Russia on the global stage. Now, here the United States really has much room for improvement. We built our internet, our cyberspace largely for the accessibility, the ability to pass information from one entity to another, and we spent much less attention to the security of that system. As cyberspace has become more important to our socioeconomic and political lives, we really need to devote much more attention to cybersecurity, hardening our commuter—computer networks, for example, making sure we have strong passwords and so forth, something that I think we now recognize but we need to put a much greater effort into doing that. Third area of defense and deterrence is strong alliances. When we're thinking about Russia, this is clearly the transatlantic community, NATO, our relations with our other European partners. And here, we need to develop the types of military/defense cooperation that we need to demonstrate quite clearly that the United States, along with the rest of the NATO allies, is ready and prepared to meet its Article 5 guarantees to collective security should the Russians do something that is untoward in our neighborhood. And then, finally, and I think of increasing importance, is the question of national unity. National unity, national resilience, has really become a key element in defense and deterrence at this point. We need to demonstrate to the Russians that we have sufficient national unity to clearly identify what our interests are and pursue them on the international stage. One of Putin's close colleagues several years ago said that what Putin is doing is messing with the Americans' minds, and certainly we've seen that over the past several years. Putin hasn't sowed the discord in the United States, but he certainly has tried to exploit it for Russian purposes. And this is something that he's going to concentrate on in the future, in part because he recognizes the dangers of military confrontation with the United States. So great-power competition, from the Kremlin's standpoint, is going to move very, very quickly from the kinetic realm to the cyber realm, and we need to be able to deal with that. So building national unity at home, overcoming our polarization, is really perhaps one of the key steps in constraining Russia on the global stage. And then, finally, some very brief words about dialogue. We tend to downplay this in our national discussion. Many believe that diplomatic relations are—should not be branded as a reward for bad behavior. But I think if you look at this objectively, you'll see that diplomatic relations are very important as a way of defending and advancing our national concerns. It's a way that we can convey clearly to the Russians what our expectations are, what our goals are, what our redlines are, and the responses that we're capable of taking if Russia crosses them. At the same time, we can learn from the Russians what their goals are, what their motivations are, what their redlines are, and we can factor that into our own policy. This is a major element of managing the competition between our two countries responsibly. You'll see that we have begun to engage in negotiations and diplomacy with the Russians much more under President Biden than we did under President Trump. We've already launched strategic stability talks with the aim of coming up with a new concept of strategic stability that's adequate to the strategic environment of the present day and the near future. We've engaged in cybersecurity talks, which my understanding is have, in fact, had some success over the past several weeks. Where we, I think, have lagged is in the discussion of regional issues—Europe, Ukraine, the Middle East, for example. These are areas where there is still potential for conflict, and the United States and Russia ought to be sitting down and talking about these issues on a regular basis. So three Ds—defense, deterrence, and diplomacy or dialogue—are the ways that we should be thinking about our relationship with Russia. And obviously, we'll need to adjust each of these three elements to the specific issue at hand, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in the nuclear realm, cyberspace, and so forth. Now, with that as a way—by way of introduction, I am very pleased to entertain your questions. FASKIANOS: Tom, thanks very much for that terrific overview and analysis. We're going to go to all of you now for your questions. You can either raise your hand by clicking on the icon, and I will call on you, and you can tell us what institution you are with; or you can type your question in the Q&A box, although if you want to ask it you can raise your hand. We encourage that. And if you're typing your question, please let us know what college or university you're with. So I'm going to take the first raised-hand question from Babak Salimitari. And unmute yourself. Q: Can you guys hear me? GRAHAM: Yes. FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Hello. I'm a third-year UCI student, economics. I have a question. I'm going to sound a bit like Sean Hannity here, so please forgive me, but I have a question about that Nord Stream 2 pipeline that you constantly hear on the news, and it just doesn't make that much sense for me of why this pipeline was allowed to be completed into the heart of Europe considering Russia's strength with natural gases and the leverage that they have over Europe with that pipeline. Why was that allowed to be completed? GRAHAM: Well, I think from the standpoint of the Biden administration this was a matter of what we call alliance management. Germany is clearly a key ally for the United States in Europe, and the Germans were very committed to the completion of that pipeline, starting with Chancellor Angela Merkel down through I think both the leading political parties and the German business community. So I think they made the decision for that. But let me step back because I'd like to challenge a lot of the assumptions about the Nord Stream 2 project here in the United States, which I think misconceive it, misframe the question, and tend to exaggerate the dangers that is poses. The first point that I would make is that Europe now and in the future will have and need Russian gas. It's taken a substantial amount in the past—in the past decades, and even as it moves forward towards a green revolution it will continue to take considerable amounts of Russian gas. It can't do without that gas. So the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, contrary to what you hear in the United States or at the U.S. Congress, I don't think poses an additional threat to Europe's energy security, no larger than the threat that was posed before that pipeline was completed. The Europeans, I think are aware of the problems that that poses, and they've taken steps over the past several years to integrate the gas—the gas distribution network in Europe, to build facilities to import liquified natural gas, all as a way of eroding the leverage that Gazprom might have had over energy markets in Europe. And that has been quite successful over the past—over the past several years. Now, I think, you know, the other issue that comes up in the discussion in the United States is Ukraine, because Nord Stream 2 clearly provides Russia with a way to import the gas into Europe and bypass Ukraine at the—at the same time. And Ukraine is going to suffer a significant loss in budgetary revenue because of the decline in transit fees that it gets from the transportation of Russian gas across its territory. You know, that is a problem, but there are ways of dealing with that: by helping Ukraine fill the budgetary gap, by helping Ukraine transition away from a reliance on gas to other forms of energy, of helping Ukraine develop the green-energy resources that will make it a much more important partner in the European energy equation than it is now. And then finally, you know, it strikes me as somewhat wrongheaded for Ukraine to put itself in a position where it is reliant on a country that is clearly a belligerent for a significant part of its federal revenue. So we need to think hard with the Ukrainians about how they deal with this issue, how they wean themselves off Russian transit fees, and then I think we have a situation where we can help Ukraine, we can manage the energy-security situation in Europe, we can reduce any leverage that Russia might have, and that Nord Stream 2 really doesn't pose a significant risk to the United States or our European allies over the long run. FASKIANOS: Thank you. We're going to take the next question from the written queue from Kenneth Mayers, who's at St Francis—sorry, that just popped away; oh, sorry—St. Francis College. Thinking beyond this triangular framework, what pathways and possibilities can be envisioned for a more positive dimension of working together in mutually, even globally, beneficial ways? GRAHAM: What triangular relationship are we talking about? FASKIANOS: His—thinking beyond this triangular framework and— GRAHAM: Oh, OK. So I think it's defense, deterrence, and diplomacy is the— FASKIANOS: Correct. GRAHAM: OK. Can you repeat the final part of the question, then? FASKIANOS: What pathways and possibilities can be envisioned for a more positive dimension of working together in mutually beneficial ways? GRAHAM: Well, there are a number of areas in which we can work together beneficially. If you think about proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, for example, the United States and Russia over the past two decades have played a major role in both securing weapons that were located in Russia, but also in securing highly-enriched uranium that was in Soviet-designed reactors throughout the former Soviet space. We have taken a lead together in setting down rules and procedures that reduce the risk of nuclear material—fissile material getting into the hands of terrorist organizations. And we have played a role together in trying to constrain the Iranian nuclear program. Russia played an instrumental role in the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that we signed in 2015 that the Trump administration walked away with, but they will continue to play a role in constraining Iranians' nuclear ambitions going forward. And we've also worked in a cooperative fashion in dealing with the North Korean nuclear program. So there are areas in nonproliferation where the two countries can work together. On climate change, I mean, I think the big challenge for the United States is actually persuading Russia that climate change is a significant threat to their own security. They're slowly beginning to change that view, but as they come around to recognizing that they have to deal with climate change there are a number of areas where the two countries can cooperate. One of the things that climate is doing is melting the permafrost. That is destabilizing the foundation of much of Russia's energy infrastructure in areas where gas and oil are extracted for export abroad. The United States has dome technologies that the Russians might find of interest in stabilizing that infrastructure. They suffer from problems of Siberian fires—peat-bog fires, forest fires—an area that, obviously, is of concern to the United States as well. And there may be room for cooperation there, two. And then, finally, you know, the United States and Russia have two of the leading scientific communities in the entire world. We ought to be working together on ways that we can help mitigate the consequences of climate change going forward. So I see an array of areas where the two countries could cooperate, but that will depend on good diplomacy in Washington and a receptivity on the part of the Russians which we haven't seen quite yet. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Let's go next to Jeffrey Ko. You can unmute yourself. Thank you. Q: Hi. So I'm Jeffrey Ko. I'm an international relations master's student at Carnegie Mellon. And my question has to deal with these private military forces, and especially the Wagner Group. And so I would like to know, you know, how does this play into our security strategy regarding Russia in countries that have seen proxy warfare? And how does this—how difficult will it be to engage with Russia either diplomatically or militarily on the use of these gray-zone tactics, and specifically utilizing the Wagner Group as an informal branch of Russia's military? GRAHAM: Well, look, I mean, I do think that we need, one, to sit down and have a discussion with Russia about the use of these private military forces, particularly the Wagner firm, which has played a significant role in a number of conflicts across the globe in the Middle East, Africa, and in Latin America. But we also ought to help the countries that are of interest to us deal with the problems that the Wagner Group causes. You know, the United States had to deal with the Wagner Group in Syria during the Syrian civil war. You know, despite the fact that we had a deconfliction exercise with the Russians at that point, tried to prevent military conflicts between our two militaries operating in close proximity, when the Wagner forces violated those strictures and actually began to attack a U.S. facility, we had no hesitation about using the force that we had to basically obliterate that enemy. And the Wagner Group suffered casualties numbering in the hundreds, one to two hundred. I think the Russians got the message about that, that you don't—you don't mess with the United States military, certainly not while using a private military company like Wagner. You know, in places like Libya, where Wagner is quite active, I think the United States needs a major diplomatic effort to try to defuse the Libyan crisis. And part of the solution to that would be negotiating an agreement that calls for the withdrawal of all foreign military forces and certainly private military groups from Libyan territory, and lean on the Russians to carry that through. In any event, you know, this is not going to be an easy issue to resolve. I think we deal with this by—country by country, and we focus our attention on those countries where our national interests are greatest. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Jill Dougherty, who's at Georgetown University. The Putin administration appears to be hardening its control of Russia's society with the purpose of keeping Putin in power at least until 2036. Most recent example is the Duma elections that just took place. Will this crackdown domestically affect or damage U.S.-Russia relations? GRAHAM: Thank you, Jill. Always a good question and always a difficult question to answer. You know, I think the issue here is the extent to which the Biden administration wants to make the domestic political situation in Russia a key item on its agenda with Russia over the next—over the next few years. You know, my impression from the conversations I've had with people in the administration—in and around the administration is that President Biden is not going to focus on this. You know, his focus really is going to be China, and what he wants to do is maintain something of a status quo in the relationship with Russia. You will notice that the second round of sanctions that the United States levied with regard to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, something that was mandated by U.S. law, were actually quite mild—much less extreme, much less punitive than the legislation allowed—I think a signal that the Biden administration was not going to let domestic political issues in Russia overwhelm the agenda that the United States has, which is going to be focused on strategic stability, cyber issues, and so forth. So my immediate reaction is that the Duma election is really not going to have a dramatic impact on the state of the relationship between our two countries. We accept the fact that Russia is an authoritarian system. It is becoming more authoritarian. We will continue to try to find ways to support those elements of civil society we can, but always being careful not to do it in ways that causes the Russian government to crack down even harder on those individuals. This is a very sort of difficult needle to thread for the United States, but I think that's the way we'll go and you won't see this as a major impediment to the improvement of relations—which, as we all know, are at a very low level at this point in any event. FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. Let's go next to Sujay Utkarsh. Q: Hi, yeah. Can you hear me? GRAHAM: Yes. FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Awesome. So, regarding the issue about cyber warfare, I was wondering if you can go into more detail about what advantages the Russians have in cyberspace and what the United States can do to compete with those advantages. GRAHAM: A good question and a difficult question for people outside the government to answer, since we're not privy to all the information about Russian cyber capabilities nor are we privy to the information about American cyber capabilities. Both countries cloak those programs in a great deal of secrecy. You know, it seemed to me that one of the advantages that perhaps Russia has is that it's a much more closed society than the United States. Now, I'm thinking simply in terms of the way societies can be disrupted through cyberspace. We're a much more open society. It's easier to access our internet. We are—just as I mentioned before, we are a polarized society right now. That allows Russia many avenues into our domestic political system in order to exacerbate the tensions between various elements in our society. The United States can't reply in the same way in dealing with Russia. You know, second, Russia, in building its own internet, its own cyberspace, has paid much more attention to security than the United States has. So, you know, I would presume that its computer systems are somewhat harder to penetrate than American systems are at this point, although another factor to take into account here is that much of the initial effort in building up cyberspace—the Web, the computer networks—in Russia was built with American technology. You know, the Googles, the Intels, and others played an instrumental role in providing those types of—that type of equipment to the Russians. So I wouldn't exaggerate how much stronger they are there. And then, finally, I think what is probably one of the strengths, if you want to call it that, is that Russia is probably a little more risk-prone in using its cyber tools than the United States is at this point, in part because we think as a society we're more vulnerable. And that does give Russia a slight advantage. That said, this shouldn't be a problem that's beyond the capability of the United States to manage if we put our minds to it. We have done a lot more over the past several years. We are getting better at this. And I think we'll continue to improve in time and with the appropriate programs, the appropriate education of American society. FASKIANOS: Thank you. The next question is a written one from Kim-Leigh Tursi, a third-year undergraduate at Temple University. Where do you see Russia in relation to the rise of China, and how does that affect how the U.S. might approach foreign policy toward Russia? GRAHAM: Well, you know, that's an important question, obviously one that a lot of people have focused on recently. You know, Russia and China have developed a very close working strategic relationship over the—over the past several years, but I think we should note that the Russian effort to rebuild its relations with China go back to the late Soviet period to overcome the disadvantages that then the Soviet Union felt they had because of the poor relationship with China and the ability of the United States to exploit that relationship to Moscow's detriment. So relations have been improving for the past twenty-five, thirty years; obviously, a dramatic acceleration in that improvement after 2014 and the breakdown in relations between Russia and the West. Now, there are a number of reasons for this alignment at this point. One, the two countries do share at a very general level a basic view of for—a basic dislike of what they see as American ambitions to dominate the global—the global security and economic environment. They don't like what they consider to be American hegemonic goals. Second, the economies seem to be complementary at this point. Russia does have a wealth of natural resources that the Chinese need to fuel their robust economic growth. You have similar domestic political systems. And all of this, I think, is reinforced by what appears to be a very good personal relationship between President Putin and President Xi Jinping. These two leaders have met dozens of times over the past five to seven years and have maintained, I think, very robust contact even during the—during the pandemic. So there are very good strategic reasons why these two countries enjoy good relations. They are going to step those up in the near term. The Russians are continuing to provide the Chinese with significant sophisticated military equipment. They've also undertaken to help the Chinese build an early warning system for ballistic missiles, and when that's completed it will make China only the third country in the world to have such a system along with Russia and the United States. Now, I would argue that this strategic alignment does pose something of a challenge to the United States. If you look at American foreign policy or American foreign policy tradition, one of the principles that has guided the United States since the end of the nineteenth century, certainly throughout the twentieth century, was that we needed to prevent the—any hostile country or coalition of hostile countries from dominating areas of great strategic importance, principally Europe, East Asia, and more recently the Middle East. A Russian-Chinese strategic alignment certainly increases the chances of China dominating East Asia. Depending on how close that relationship grows, it also could have significant impact on Europe and the way Europe relates to this Russian-Chinese bloc, and therefore to the United States as a whole. So we should have an interest in trying to sort of attenuate the relationship between the two countries. At a minimum, we shouldn't be pursuing a set of policies that would push Russia closer to China. Second, I think we ought to try to normalize our diplomatic relationship with the Russians. Not that we're necessarily going to agree on a—on a range of issues at this point, but we need to give the Russians a sense that they have other strategic options than China going forward—something that would, I think, enhance their bargaining position with the Chinese going forward and would complicate China's own strategic calculus, which would be to our advantage. I think we also should play on Russia's concerns about strategic autonomy, this idea that Russia needs to be an independent great power on the global stage, that it doesn't want to be the junior partner or overly dependent on any one country as a way, again, of attenuating the tie with China. The one thing that I don't think we can do is drive a wedge between those two countries, in part because of the strategic reasons that I've mentioned already that bring these two countries together. And any very crude, I think, effort to do that will actually be counterproductive. Both Beijing and Moscow will see through that, quite clearly, and that will only lead to a closing of the ranks between those two countries, which as I said is a strategic challenge for the United States going forward. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Holli Semetko, who's at Emory University. Polarization is something we must overcome, as you said, but those of us working on social media have some evidence to suggest that social media has fostered political polarization in the U.S. Yuri Milner, a Russian Israeli entrepreneur, invested in an early round of Facebook funding with help from VTB, a Russian state-controlled bank, as well as his investment in Jared Kushner's real estate firm. What is the level of FDI from Russia in the U.S. and do you see it as a threat to national security? GRAHAM: Well, look, I mean, the actual level of Russian FDI in the United States is quite small. You know, you have some few, I think, good examples of it—the one that you've mentioned with Yuri Milner, for example. There was some investment in a steel factory some years ago. But by and large, there hasn't been a significant amount of Russian foreign direct investment in the United States. I think our growing concerns about Russia have made us even more leery of allowing Russian investment, particularly in sectors that we consider critical to American national security. So I'm not deeply concerned about that going forward. I think we probably face a much greater challenge from the Chinese in that regard. Of course, you've seen efforts by the United States to deal more harshly or look more closely at Chinese investment in the United States over the past several years. Let me just make one sort of final point on social media since it's come up. You know, Russia is a problem. We need to pay attention to Russia in that space. But again, I don't think that we should exaggerate Russia's influence, nor should we focus simply on Russia as the problem in this area. There is a major problem with disinformation in social media in the United States, much of that propagated by sources within the United States, but there are a host of other countries that also will try to affect U.S. public opinion through their intrusions into American social media. You know, given our concerns about First Amendment rights, freedom of speech and so forth, you know, I think we have problems in sort of really clamping down on this. But what we need to do, certainly, is better educate the American public about how to deal with the information that crosses their electronic devices day in and day out. Americans need to be aware of how they can be manipulated, and they need to understand and know where they can go to find reliable information. Again, given the political polarization in our country today, this is a very real challenge and difficult one. But I think if we think long term about this problem, the key really is educating the American public. An educated American public is going to be the best defense against foreign countries, other hostile forces trying to use social media to undermine our national unity and exacerbate the politics of our country. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I'm going to take the next question from Eoin Wilson-Manion, who's raised his hand. Q: Hello. Can you hear me now? GRAHAM: Yes. FASKIANOS: Yes. Q: Awesome. Well, thank you. I just wanted to ask if you could touch a little bit more on Russia's presence in Syria and what that means for U.S. interests in Syria and I guess the larger Middle East. I'm Eoin from Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks very much. GRAHAM: Well, you know, the Russians entered Syria in 2015 militarily largely to save Assad from what they thought was imminent overthrow by what they considered a radical Islamic force, a group of terrorists that they thought would challenge Russian interests not only in Syria but would fuel extremist forces inside Russia itself, particularly in the North Caucasus but farther afield than that—even into Moscow, into areas that were Muslim-dominated inside Russia itself. So they had very good national security reasons for going in. Those ran—I mean, the Russian presence in Syria clearly has run counter to what the United States was trying to do at that point since we clearly aligned against Assad in favor of what we considered moderate reformist forces that were seeking a more sort of democratic future for Syria as part of this broader Arab Spring at that time. So there was a clear conflict at that point. You know, subsequently and in parallel with its continued presence in Syria, the Russians have extended their diplomatic—their diplomatic effort to other countries in the region. Russia enjoys a fairly robust diplomatic relationship with Israel, for example, that has been grounded in counterterrorism cooperation, for example. They have a sort of strange relationship, largely positive, with Turkey that they have pursued over the past several years. We know of the ties that they've had in Tehran, in Iran for some time. They have reached out to the Saudis and the Saudis have bought some military equipment from them. We see them in Egypt and Libya, for example. So they're a growing presence, a growing diplomatic presence in the Middle East, and this does pose some problems for the United States. From the middle of the 1970s onward, one of the basic thrusts of American foreign policy was to limit the role the Russians played in the Middle East. We sidelined them in the negotiations between the Arabs and the Israelis in the 1970s and in the 1980s. We limited their diplomatic contacts to countries that we considered critical partners and allies in that part of the world. Now I think the geopolitical situation has changed. Our own interest in the Middle East has diminished over time, in part because of the fracking revolution here in the United States. Gas and oil, we've got close to being independent in that area. We're not as dependent on the Middle East as we once were for energy sources. And also, as, you know, the Biden administration has been clear, we do want to pivot away from the Middle East and Europe to focus more of our energies on what we see as the rising and continuing strategic challenge posed by China. So I think that means that going forward the United States is going to have to deal with Russia in a different fashion in the Middle East than in the past. We're going to have to recognize them as a continuing presence. We're not going to be able to push them out, in part because we're not prepared to devote the resources to it. We have countries that are still important to us—Saudi Arabia, Israel for example—that do want a Russian presence in the Middle East. And so what we ought to do, it seems to me, is to begin that discussion about how we're going to manage the rivalry in the Middle East. Now, it's not all simply competition. There are areas for cooperation. We can cooperate in dealing with Iran, for example, the Iran nuclear dossier, as we have had in the past. Neither country has an interest in Iran developing nuclear weapons. Second, I think the two countries also would like to see a Middle East that's not dominated by a single regional power. So despite the fact that the Russians have worked together quite closely with the Iranians in Syria, they don't share Iranian ambitions elsewhere in the Middle East. And if you look at the diplomatic ties that the Russians have nurtured over the past with Turkey, with Israel, Saudi Arabia for example, none of these are friends of Iran, to put it mildly. So we can talk, I think, to the Russians of how our—you know, we can conduct ourselves so as to foster the development of a regional equilibrium in the Middle East that tends to stabilize that region, makes it less of a threat to either country, less of a threat to America's European allies, and use this as a basis for, again, sort of not escalating the tension in the region but moderating it in some ways that works to the long-term advantage of the United States. FASKIANOS: Next question from Michael Strmiska, who's a professor at Orange County Community College in New York state. Do you see any hope of persuading Russia to abandon its occupation of Crimea in the near term? Or do you think this is like the occupation of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia after World War II, where a very long timespan was needed before any liberation was realistically possible? GRAHAM: Well, I guess my answer to those two questions would be yes and no, or no and yes. On Crimea, you know, I see no sort of near-term scenario that would lead to the Russians agreeing to the return of Crimea to Ukraine. Quite the contrary, Russia has taken steps since 2014 they continue at this point to further integrate Crimea into the Russian Federation politically, economically, socially, and so forth. The Russians have also built up their military presence in Crimea as a way of enhancing their domination or their influence in the greater Black Sea region. So I see no set of circumstances that would change that, certainly not in the—in the near term. And I think, you know, the Ukrainian effort to focus attention on Crimea is not going to, in fact, gain a great deal of traction with Europe nor with the United States going forward, though we will maintain the principled position of not recognizing Russia's incorporation or annexation of Crimea. You know, I don't think that the Crimean and Baltic situations are necessarily analogous. You know, in the Baltic states there was a significant indigenous element, governments in exile, that supported the independence of those countries. There was a fulcrum that the United States or a lever that the United States could use over time to continue pressure on the Soviets that eventually led to the independence of those countries as the Soviet Union broke down and ultimately collapsed at the end of the 1980s into 1991. I don't see any significant indigenous element in Crimea nor a movement of inhabitants of Crimea outside Crimea that wants Crimea to be returned to Ukraine. I think we need to remember that a significant part of the population in Ukraine is Russian military, retired Russian military, that feels quite comfortable in—within the Russian Federation at this point. So if I were being quite frank about this, although I think the United States should maintain its principled position and not recognize annexation of Crimea, I don't see anything over the long term, barring the collapse of Russia itself, that will change that situation and see Ukraine (sic; Crimea) reincorporated into the Ukrainian state. FASKIANOS: So there are a couple questions in the chat about Russia's economy: What is their economy like today? And what are the effects of the sanctions? And from Steve Shinkel at the Naval War College: How do you assess the tie between Russia's economy and being able to continue to modernize its military and ensure a stable economy? And will economic factors and Russia's demographic challenges be a future constraining factor? So if you could— GRAHAM: Yeah. No, no, just take the economy. Obviously, a big issue, and it will be a constraining factor. I mean, the Russian economy is stagnating and it has for some—for some time. They enjoyed—the Russian economy enjoyed a very rapid period of growth during President Putin's first presidential—two presidential terms in the 2000s, but since the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 Russia has run into very difficult economic times. In fact, it's never really recovered from that crisis. If you look at the past ten years, barely any growth in the Russian economy at all. If you look at the impact that that has had on Russians themselves, there's basically been no growth in real disposable income; rather, a decline over the past six or seven years. I think the Russians recognize that. The question is whether they can come up with a set of policies that actually will reverse that and that lead to a more robustly growing economy. Now, what the Kremlin has tried to do is not so much reform the economy—which I think is necessary if they're going to enjoy robust economic growth—as much as professionalize the economy; that is—that is, bring in a younger sort of cadre who are well educated, many of them educated in the West, who understand how modern economies function and can keep the economy stable at least at the macro level. And this is one of the reasons that Western sanctions have not had nearly the impact on Russian behavior that many had hoped for or anticipated back in 2014 when we began to turn repeatedly to this tool in response to Russian activities and operations against Ukraine. You know, it has had some impact. I think the IMF would say that it's probably taken a percentage point off—or, not a percentage point, but a tenth of a percentage point off of Russia's GDP growth over the past several years. That certainly hasn't been enough to change Russian behavior. But it hasn't been more, in fact, because the governors of the—of the central bank have dealt quite adeptly with that, and maintain said Russian macroeconomic stability and some sort of foundation for the economy to grow going forward. I imagine that's going to continue into the—into the future as well. So it is a constraining factor. Then I would end with what I—with a point that I made in my introduction. Russia does have a tremendous ability to mobilize its resources for state purposes, to extract what it needs from society at large to modernize the military, to maintain certainly Russia's defenses and also some capability to project power abroad. So I wouldn't write them off because of that. I think it's going—still going to be a serious power, but not nearly as great a challenge to the United States as if it, in fact, solved its demographic problems, its economic problems, and had a robustly growing economy, greater resources that it could devote to a whole range of things that would improve its standing on the global stage vis-à-vis the United States and vis-à-vis China. FASKIANOS: Well, with that we are at the end of our time. And I apologize to everybody. We had over twenty written questions still pending and raised hands. I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of you, but we do try to end on time. So, Thomas Graham, thank you very much for sharing your insights and analysis with us today. We appreciate it. And to all of you for your terrific questions and comments, we appreciate it. Our next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, October 6, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And we will focus on the Indo-Pacific with Dhruva Jaishankar, who is the executive director of the Observer Research Foundation America and nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute. And in the meantime, I encourage you to follow CFR at @CFR_Academic and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for new research and analysis on global issues. So, Tom, thank you very much. GRAHAM: Thank you. Good luck to all of you. (END)

A new and somewhat shadowy Silicon Valley company dedicated to anti-aging research is getting major funding from the uber-wealthy.Altos Labs, a biological reprogramming tech company, is allegedly attracting big-name investors such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner...with the goal, to live forever...Should Billionaires live forever?http://www.troubledminds.org Support The Show! https://rokfin.com/creator/troubledminds https://teespring.com/stores/troubled-minds-store #aliens #conspiracy #paranormalRadio Schedule Mon-Tues-Wed-Thurs 7-9pst - https://fringe.fm/iTunes - https://apple.co/2zZ4hx6Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2UgyzqMStitcher - https://bit.ly/2UfAiMXTuneIn - https://bit.ly/2FZOErSTwitter - https://bit.ly/2CYB71Uhttps://youtu.be/ZiBnr_glUIwhttps://www.amazon.com/Stories-Fractured-Mind-Robert-Collection-ebook/dp/B07D1RVX7Yhttps://www.instagram.com/tamlbam/https://salsidoparanormal.podbean.com/----------------------------------------------------------------------------https://futurism.com/the-byte/altos-labs-wealthy-investorshttps://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-silicon-valleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever/https://futurism.com/the-byte/11-year-old-physics-degree-immortalityhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/the-immortality-financiers-the-billionaires-who-want-to-live-foreverhttps://newsrescue.com/live-forever-lab-amazon-jeff-bezos-other-billionaires-give-unlimited-funding-to-new-age-reversal-lab-start-up/https://fortune.com/2013/04/04/5-billionaires-who-want-to-live-forever/https://archive.vn/feCumhttps://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/new-blood-computer-brains-frozen-22695138https://archive.vn/dap6Phttps://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/silicon-valley-trying-make-humans-immortal-and-finding-some-success-311402.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/jun/23/how-to-live-forever-meet-the-extreme-life-extensionists-immortal-sciencehttps://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/open-dialogue/news/economists-campaign-against-age-obsessed-billionaires-1778728https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/05/futurologist-claims-super-rich-will-live-forever-implanting-brains-robots-12352856/https://www.thejoint.com/arizona/phoenix/paradise-village-48004/blood-facials-blood-baths-and-looking-younghttps://romanticmetal.com/history/elizabeth-bathory-anna-darvulia/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory

Zach Sims is the Co-Founder and CEO of Codecademy, the easiest way to learn to code. Since the company started in August of 2011, millions of people have begun learning to program using the site. Codecademy has worked with organizations like The White House, the Government of Colombia, American Express, Rakuten, and more. Zach and his cofounder Ryan Bubinski have grown Codecademy to over 100 employees and have raised nearly $90M in venture capital financing from top tier investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Yuri Milner, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, SV Angel, Richard Branson, Y Combinator, and more. Prior to founding Codecademy, Zach was a student at Columbia University. He has worked in product and business development/strategy capacities at startups including GroupMe (sold to Skype) and drop.io (sold to Facebook). He also has experience in the venture capital industry with AOL Ventures. Zach and Codecademy have been honored by many publications. TIME Magazine called Codecademy one of the "50 Best Websites of 2012," while TechCrunch awarded Codecademy the "Best Education Startup" Crunchie Award in 2013. Zach has been named to Inc. Magazine's 30 Under 30 list, along with Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 list. The City of New York named him a New York City Venture Fellow in 2013. Some of the Topics Covered by Zach Sims in this Episode What Codecademy is doing today and how it got started The issue of active discouragement of learning technical skills What led to early growth and traction of Codecademy Earning over 200,000 users in the first 3 days How Zach views viral loops Raising capital versus running off revenue Creating a movement versus building a product Creating sustainability first and scaling later The timing of launching a paid version of the product Going from the center of attention the the brink of bankruptcy Creating premium educational content Resource allocation between users who are upscaling and career switching Building an engaged community Zach's views on bootcamps How they cater to different types of Codecademy users and learners Codecademy for business How Zach takes care of himself to be at his best Zach's founder support networks Zach's path to and views on entrepreneurship How Zach sees the future of higher education and learning Sign up for The Grind, for actionable insights and stories from successful entrepreneurs delivered to your inbox once per week: https://www.justgogrind.com/newsletter/ Listen to all episodes of the Just Go Grind Podcast: https://www.justgogrind.com/podcast/ Follow Justin Gordon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justingordon212 Follow Justin Gordon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justingordon8/

A new billion-dollar fund "crafting a fertile future". A new-generation VC backed by 15 top entrepreneurs to support the "new wave" of founders.The VC ecosystem is blossoming in France and we interview three investors at the heart of this movement: Marie Ekeland (2050), Pia d'Iribarne (New Wave), and Jean de la Rochebrochard (New Wave and Kima Ventures). If you are familiar with the tech ecosystem in Europe, then you are certainly no stranger to these three names.Marie, a pioneer in the French tech ecosystem, started her career in VC as a partner at Elaia and founded the VC fund Daphni as well as one of the biggest tech communities France Digitale. Her new fund 2050 is also breaking new ground with its new investment model that prioritizes sustainability and future well-being.Pia and Jean, highly experienced investors respectively from Accel/Stride and Kima, have rounded up 15 high-level LPs — including Xavier Niel, Yuri Milner of DST, Peter Fenton from Benchmark, Philippe Laffont from Coatue, and Tony Fadell of Nest and Apple — to launch New Wave, a next-gen fund to back the even more ambitious founders in today's European tech landscape.Topics:[Part 1 with Marie Ekeland] 01:03 — Introduction of 2050, Marie Ekeland’s new fund 02:10 — The structure and incentives of 2050, an evergreen fund 04:47 — Why 2050 gets away from a traditional VC partnership model 05:40 — The power of finance on the economy 06:25 — The kind of companies in which 2050 invests 09:46 — What kind of investments does 2050 make: cheque size, company stage, etc. 10:13 — Thoughts on “growth at all cost”: the example of Netflix 12:35 — On raising $1 billion by 2030 and building sustainable companies 15:03 — 2050’s investments: the story of Withings 19:20 — Marie Ekeland’s evolution as an investor 21:53 — Marie’s thoughts on the current funding situation in France 23:02 — How 2050 stands out from the competitive VC landscape 24:23 — France’s potential to lead in the sustainable transition[Part 2 with Pia d’Iribarne & Jean de la Rochebrochard] 27:08 — The impetus for starting New Wave28:42 — How Jean and Pia met and why they wanted to start a fund together30:45 — The incredible LPs at New Wave33:37 — New Wave’s investment thesis34:30 — The kind of founder profiles that New Wave backs35:53 — The characteristics that Jean looks for in founders38:28 — Investments at New Wave: cheque size, company stage, etc.39:14 — Jean on New Wave and Kima Ventures42:02 — Pia on her experience as a fund founder44:24 — Pia on smart money45:47 — Hopes and expectations for 2021 This episode is supported by Euronext, the leading pan-European stock exchange; hosted by Roxanne Varza; and produced by Cindy Yang. Art is by Gaëtan Lefebvre. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 2017, scientists sighted the first interstellar object, the first thing we definitively know came from outside our solar system… something that was not bound to the gravity pull of our sun. But that was just the beginning of the oddness exhibited by the object known as Oumuamua. It didn’t behave like a comet. It didn’t seem to be made of materials we expect. It was shaped in a way that nothing in nature should be shaped like. And as it curved around our sun, it actually accelerated in a way that we couldn’t account for by the laws of physics. In his new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which comes out Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top Astronomer, argues that Oumuamua was most likely an alien craft, or artifact of some kind. It likely had some sort of solar sail mechanism, and actually, suggests it might be functioning as some sort of interstellar buoy. We’re going to get into that in this episode, but stay to the end, because forget small satellites, do you know we could shoot a super small probe, about the size of a small satellite, attached to a solar sail and pushed by a laser right now, today? Humanity could reach another star for the first time in just 20 years… in all of our lifetimes, and we could get the data and pictures back within 24 years. Avi is working on this with the backing of Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg among others. So, come for Oumuamua, and stay for the crazy space project that, in my opinion, should be the one we all band together to pursue.Sponsors:Netgear.com/bestwifiMetalab.co

Conoce la historia de la enorme cantidad de dinero que se gasta Yuri Milner, en premios y proyectos que fomentan la ciencia y la exploración del espacio. Escucha además la anécdota del Gobierno de reptiles espaciales, las noticias de la semana, y el desafío de este episodio. Para comentarios o sugerencias, escríbeme a laika.podcast@gmail.com.

The Tempest Universe : https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-tempest-universe Join the Episode after party on Discord! Link: https://discord.gg/ZzJSrGP Researchers looking for aliens discover strange radio signal from nearest star system to the sun Link: https://www.foxnews.com/science/researchers-looking-for-aliens-discover-radio-signal-nearest-star-system Proxima Centauri is a small, low-mass star located 4.2465 light-years away from the Sun in the southern constellation of Centaurus. Its Latin name means the "nearest [star] of Centaurus". This object was discovered in 1915 by Robert Innes and is the nearest-known star to the Sun. In the search for alien life, researchers have discovered an "intriguing" radio signal emanating from the star system closest to the sun, according to a media report. The Guardian reports that researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project, which is "the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth," have discovered a 980 MHz signal that appears to emanate from the Proxima Centauri star system, slightly more than four light-years from Earth. One of the researchers behind the project, Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley, was hard-pressed to describe the source of the signal. "It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it," Siemion told Scientific American of the 980 MHz signal. Fox News has reached out to NASA with a request for comment. "We don't know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency" Siemion added, noting there could be some natural explanations behind it. But "for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological." Proxima Centauri b is the closest confirmed exoplanet to Earth, at 4.2 light-years away. In January, researchers discovered the presence of a possible second exoplanet, a "Super-Earth," also orbiting Proxima Centauri. This new signal has been given the name BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen. It was initially discovered in April 2019 by the Parkes 210-foot radio telescope in Sydney, Australia. The Breakthrough Listen project, which collaborates with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), detects radio signals in space constantly. Did Proxima Centauri Just Call to Say Hello? Not Really! Link: https://www.seti.org/did-proxima-centauri-just-call-say-hello-not-really You've probably heard about the story, published in The Guardian, a respectable newspaper in the UK, about the potential discovery of an alien signal from the Proxima Centauri system, the star closest to us. This article, and a companion piece in Scientific American, noted that in April and May 2019, the Parkes telescope in Australia was listening to Proxima b, a red dwarf. This star is known to be active, and this listening was part of a stellar-flare survey. Shane Smith, a student at Breakthrough Listen, a program privately funded by Yuri Milner to search and find so-called technosignatures, or signals that indicate the existence of a civilization like ours, checked out the data. He found an exceedingly curious narrowband emission, needle-sharp at 982.002 megahertz. The team inspected the data, confirmed its veracity, and named it BLC1, for “Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1.” The name clearly identifies what it is. It's a candidate, not a confirmed signal. Everyone at Breakthrough Listen emphasized this, including executive director Pete Worden. Because of its profile, it's very unlikely that the signal was produced by a natural but unknown cosmic source, but who knows…Nature often surprises us. One simple explanation is that Parkes picked up a signal that originated on Earth. We use radio to communicate, and this could be terrestrial interference. And that's probably the most likely explanation. Space Force troops now called Guardians Link: https://www.krqe.com/new-mexico-cw-my50tv/mystery-wire/space-force-troops-now-called-guardians/ MYSTERY WIRE — The Trump administration celebrated the first birthday of the U.S. Space Force on Friday by announcing that its members will be known as “guardians.” Vice President Mike Pence made the announcement at a celebratory event tracing the development of the newest branch of the military over the past year. “It is my honor, on behalf of the president of the United States, to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” Pence said. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come.” President-elect Joe Biden has yet to reveal his plans for the Space Force in the next administration. Fargo's most famous UFO sighting was in the skies above a 1948 Bison-Augustana football game Link: https://www.grandforksherald.com/community/history/6807883-Fargos-most-famous-UFO-sighting-was-in-the-skies-above-a-1948-Bison-Augustana-football-game Who was George Gorman? According to columnist Curt Eriksmoen, who wrote about Gorman in The Forum in 2011, Gorman was born July 7, 1923, to Norbert and Roberta Gorman. He grew up in Fargo, where his father was a Cass County agent. During World War II, Gorman became a B-25 instructor for French aviation students. When the North Dakota Air National Guard formed at Fargo's Hector Airport on Jan. 16, 1947, Gorman joined the squadron as a second lieutenant. What exactly happened Oct. 1, 1948? Gorman was flying his P-51 Mustang with other guard pilots in the early evening hours of Oct. 1, 1948. Part of their flight path was over the old Dacotah Field where the North Dakota Agricultural College Bison football team played its games. According to North Dakota State University Assistant Athletic Director Ryan Perreault, the field was slightly south of the current Dacotah Field. About a half hour later, most of the pilots flying decided to call it a night, but Gorman wanted to get in more flying time. According to a story in The Fargo Forum dated Oct. 3, 1948, Gorman was flying near Hector Field, about two and a half miles from the football field, when an air traffic controller told him about a small Piper Cub in the area. He acknowledged the smaller plane about 500 feet below, but a few minutes later, he spotted something else. He said it was a "flying disk," was round with well-defined edges, brilliantly lit and circling slowly over the city. He asked the tower about the object, and they said they only saw Gorman's plane and the Piper Cub. This object was not showing up on radar. Gorman decided to investigate, but as he got closer to the object, it suddenly got brighter and shot away from him. He estimated it was flying around 250 miles an hour, but accelerated to 600 miles an hour. Gorman's plane could only fly about 400 miles an hour, so he lost the object. But it came back and flew right at him. "When the object was coming head on, I held my plane pointed right at it," Gorman said. "The object came so close that I involuntarily ducked my head because I thought a crash was inevitable. But the object zoomed over my head." The "dogfight" lasted 27 minutes — a lifetime for a UFO encounter. The declassified documents include a diagram Gorman drew of what went on in the air that night. Despite what seems to be evidence to the contrary, the Air Force concluded the object was a combination of looking at the planet Jupiter and a weather balloon. According to Eriksmoen, Gorman insisted it wasn't a weather balloon, but the Air Material Command warned him not to divulge any further information or he would be subject to a court martial. That might be one reason why Gorman stayed pretty quiet throughout the rest of his military career, which took him to bases in Italy and throughout the U.S. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and died from pancreatic cancer in Texas in the early 1980s at the age of 59. Podcast Stuff Facebook: The Dark Horde - https://www.facebook.com/thedarkhordellc Facebook: The Tempest Universe - https://www.facebook.com/thetempestuniverse Facebook: Manny's Page - https://www.facebook.com/MannyPodcast Twitter: The Tempest Universe - https://twitter.com/ufobusterradio Twitter: The Dark Horde - https://twitter.com/HordeDark Discord Group - https://discord.com/channels/679454064890871869/679454064890871875 Mail can be sent to: The Dark Horde LLC PO BOX 769905 San Antonio TX 78245

The Tempest Universe : https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-tempest-universe Join the Episode after party on Discord! Link: https://discord.gg/ZzJSrGP Researchers looking for aliens discover strange radio signal from nearest star system to the sun Link: https://www.foxnews.com/science/researchers-looking-for-aliens-discover-radio-signal-nearest-star-system Proxima Centauri is a small, low-mass star located 4.2465 light-years away from the Sun in the southern constellation of Centaurus. Its Latin name means the "nearest [star] of Centaurus". This object was discovered in 1915 by Robert Innes and is the nearest-known star to the Sun. In the search for alien life, researchers have discovered an "intriguing" radio signal emanating from the star system closest to the sun, according to a media report. The Guardian reports that researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project, which is "the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth," have discovered a 980 MHz signal that appears to emanate from the Proxima Centauri star system, slightly more than four light-years from Earth. One of the researchers behind the project, Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley, was hard-pressed to describe the source of the signal. "It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it," Siemion told Scientific American of the 980 MHz signal. Fox News has reached out to NASA with a request for comment. "We don't know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency" Siemion added, noting there could be some natural explanations behind it. But "for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological." Proxima Centauri b is the closest confirmed exoplanet to Earth, at 4.2 light-years away. In January, researchers discovered the presence of a possible second exoplanet, a "Super-Earth," also orbiting Proxima Centauri. This new signal has been given the name BLC1, for Breakthrough Listen. It was initially discovered in April 2019 by the Parkes 210-foot radio telescope in Sydney, Australia. The Breakthrough Listen project, which collaborates with NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), detects radio signals in space constantly. Did Proxima Centauri Just Call to Say Hello? Not Really! Link: https://www.seti.org/did-proxima-centauri-just-call-say-hello-not-really You've probably heard about the story, published in The Guardian, a respectable newspaper in the UK, about the potential discovery of an alien signal from the Proxima Centauri system, the star closest to us. This article, and a companion piece in Scientific American, noted that in April and May 2019, the Parkes telescope in Australia was listening to Proxima b, a red dwarf. This star is known to be active, and this listening was part of a stellar-flare survey. Shane Smith, a student at Breakthrough Listen, a program privately funded by Yuri Milner to search and find so-called technosignatures, or signals that indicate the existence of a civilization like ours, checked out the data. He found an exceedingly curious narrowband emission, needle-sharp at 982.002 megahertz. The team inspected the data, confirmed its veracity, and named it BLC1, for “Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1.” The name clearly identifies what it is. It's a candidate, not a confirmed signal. Everyone at Breakthrough Listen emphasized this, including executive director Pete Worden. Because of its profile, it's very unlikely that the signal was produced by a natural but unknown cosmic source, but who knows…Nature often surprises us. One simple explanation is that Parkes picked up a signal that originated on Earth. We use radio to communicate, and this could be terrestrial interference. And that's probably the most likely explanation. Space Force troops now called Guardians Link: https://www.krqe.com/new-mexico-cw-my50tv/mystery-wire/space-force-troops-now-called-guardians/ MYSTERY WIRE — The Trump administration celebrated the first birthday of the U.S. Space Force on Friday by announcing that its members will be known as “guardians.” Vice President Mike Pence made the announcement at a celebratory event tracing the development of the newest branch of the military over the past year. “It is my honor, on behalf of the president of the United States, to announce that henceforth the men and women of the United States Space Force will be known as guardians,” Pence said. “Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians will be defending our nation for generations to come.” President-elect Joe Biden has yet to reveal his plans for the Space Force in the next administration. Fargo's most famous UFO sighting was in the skies above a 1948 Bison-Augustana football game Link: https://www.grandforksherald.com/community/history/6807883-Fargos-most-famous-UFO-sighting-was-in-the-skies-above-a-1948-Bison-Augustana-football-game Who was George Gorman? According to columnist Curt Eriksmoen, who wrote about Gorman in The Forum in 2011, Gorman was born July 7, 1923, to Norbert and Roberta Gorman. He grew up in Fargo, where his father was a Cass County agent. During World War II, Gorman became a B-25 instructor for French aviation students. When the North Dakota Air National Guard formed at Fargo's Hector Airport on Jan. 16, 1947, Gorman joined the squadron as a second lieutenant. What exactly happened Oct. 1, 1948? Gorman was flying his P-51 Mustang with other guard pilots in the early evening hours of Oct. 1, 1948. Part of their flight path was over the old Dacotah Field where the North Dakota Agricultural College Bison football team played its games. According to North Dakota State University Assistant Athletic Director Ryan Perreault, the field was slightly south of the current Dacotah Field. About a half hour later, most of the pilots flying decided to call it a night, but Gorman wanted to get in more flying time. According to a story in The Fargo Forum dated Oct. 3, 1948, Gorman was flying near Hector Field, about two and a half miles from the football field, when an air traffic controller told him about a small Piper Cub in the area. He acknowledged the smaller plane about 500 feet below, but a few minutes later, he spotted something else. He said it was a "flying disk," was round with well-defined edges, brilliantly lit and circling slowly over the city. He asked the tower about the object, and they said they only saw Gorman's plane and the Piper Cub. This object was not showing up on radar. Gorman decided to investigate, but as he got closer to the object, it suddenly got brighter and shot away from him. He estimated it was flying around 250 miles an hour, but accelerated to 600 miles an hour. Gorman's plane could only fly about 400 miles an hour, so he lost the object. But it came back and flew right at him. "When the object was coming head on, I held my plane pointed right at it," Gorman said. "The object came so close that I involuntarily ducked my head because I thought a crash was inevitable. But the object zoomed over my head." The "dogfight" lasted 27 minutes — a lifetime for a UFO encounter. The declassified documents include a diagram Gorman drew of what went on in the air that night. Despite what seems to be evidence to the contrary, the Air Force concluded the object was a combination of looking at the planet Jupiter and a weather balloon. According to Eriksmoen, Gorman insisted it wasn't a weather balloon, but the Air Material Command warned him not to divulge any further information or he would be subject to a court martial. That might be one reason why Gorman stayed pretty quiet throughout the rest of his military career, which took him to bases in Italy and throughout the U.S. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and died from pancreatic cancer in Texas in the early 1980s at the age of 59. Podcast Stuff Facebook: The Dark Horde - https://www.facebook.com/thedarkhordellc Facebook: The Tempest Universe - https://www.facebook.com/thetempestuniverse Facebook: Manny's Page - https://www.facebook.com/MannyPodcast Twitter: The Tempest Universe - https://twitter.com/ufobusterradio Twitter: The Dark Horde - https://twitter.com/HordeDark Discord Group - https://discord.com/channels/679454064890871869/679454064890871875 Mail can be sent to: The Dark Horde LLC PO BOX 769905 San Antonio TX 78245

Yuri Milner, Founder of DST Global and Wharton MBA Alumnus, talks about the new $10 million gift he and his wife made to Wharton to create the Friends of Israel MBA Fund, which will provide full tuition over the course of the two-year Wharton MBA program for a cohort of more than 60 Israeli students over the next decade. He also discusses venture capital and the future of tech entrepreneurship with Wharton Business Daily's Dan Loney. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is edtech    To begin with Educational technology is simply the combined use of computers (that is the technological processes) and educational resources to facilitate learning and help improve students' academic performance.   Investment   Although online education via edtech platforms has been around much before Covid-19, the crisis has been a major catalyst in enhancing the learning process not just for students and educators, but for investors as well. Student enrolments and investments into the sector have both surged rapidly. Edtech has garnered investments worth $1.1 billion in 2020, its highest-ever annual tally and four times over last year. And a big surge in revenue during pandemic period has also helped convert customers faster, and investors expect that the trend will continue as users get comfortable with digital learning. The last few months have been quite action-packed for education technology company Byju's. The Bengaluru-based firm leads the table which raised nearly $1.12 billion in four tranches from January 2020 to September 2020 from celebrated investors like Mary Meeker and Yuri Milner,  and now from US private equity firm Silver Lake, Tiger Global, General Atlantic, Owl Ventures and DST Global. Unacademy has raised 150 million dollars from soft Bank, Nexus Venture, General Atlantic, etc. Reasons for this major shift to online learning Over the past few months, as students are confined to home, digital education has evolved as the only way to continue learning. Also, full-scale return to schools doesn't look plausible in this academic year, it will continue to push online as a main medium of instruction especially for primary and secondary levels. But will this technology stick once students go back to school? Studies on the efficacy of online as a medium for school teaching are still emerging. Even though schools will reopen, supplemental and remedial learning will continue to grow online. Listen to the podcast for more    

Breakthrough Initiatives, the privately-funded space science programs founded by science and technology investor and philanthropist Yuri Milner, are funding a research study into the possibility of primitive life in the clouds of Venus. The study is inspired by the discovery, announced yesterday, of the gas phosphine, considered a potential biosignature, in the planet’s atmosphere. The science team undertaking the research will comprise world-class physicists, astronomers, astrobiologists, chemists and engineers, led by Dr. Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, Physics and Aerospace Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The group will investigate the scientific case for life and analyze the technical challenges of an exploratory mission in the event that such evidence proves compelling. Discovery of phosphine The new paper, from lead author Dr. Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, Dr. Seager and their collaborators, demonstrates the presence of phosphine (PH3) in the Venusian atmosphere via an analysis of millimeter-waveband observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, with additional evidence from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT in Hawai’i). The level of phosphine detected in the clouds of Venus—about 20 parts per billion—is completely unexpected for a gas susceptible to destruction by ultraviolet radiation, either directly or by ultraviolet-induced radicals. This suggests that some process is replenishing the gas. But what process? Phosphine is a “biogenic” chemical: all samples encountered on Earth have been produced by biological or human-made processes requiring considerable energy inputs. Although the precise biological mechanisms generating phosphine are unknown, they are associated with the breakdown of organic matter by bacteria, with the gas being found in oxygen-free environments such as marshlands and swamps, as well as the guts of animals. While the presence of phosphine on Venus may turn out to stem from a non-living process, no such process on a terrestrial planet is currently known to science. “The discovery of phosphine is an exciting development,” said S. Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “We have what could be a biosignature, and a plausible story about how it got there. The next step is to do the basic science needed to thoroughly investigate the evidence and consider how best to confirm and expand on the possibility of life.” “Finding life anywhere beyond Earth would be truly momentous,” said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “And if there’s a non-negligible chance that it’s right next door on Venus, exploring that possibility is an urgent priority for our civilization.” “We were stunned to find a molecule in Venus’s atmosphere that could come from organisms,” said Dr. Greaves. “We will continue to monitor and hunt for more clues, to pinpoint where exactly on the planet the phosphine is coming from.” And Dr. Seager commented, “We are thrilled to push the envelope to try to understand what kind of life could exist in the very harsh Venus atmosphere and what further evidence for life a mission to Venus could search for.” Project Leadership Dr. Sara Seager – MIT – Principal Investigator Dr. Janusz Petkowski – MIT – Deputy PI Dr. Chris Carr – Georgia Tech Dr. Bethany Ehlmann – Caltech Dr. David Grinspoon – Planetary Science Institute Dr. Pete Klupar – Breakthrough Initiatives – Chief Engineer The Breakthrough Initiatives are a suite of space science programs investigating the fundamental questions of life in the Universe. In July 2015, together with Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner announced the launch of the $100 million astronomical program Breakthrough Listen, to reinvigorate the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe; and in April 2016 they launched Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million research and engineering program seeking to develop a new te...

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.As you probably expected, we had a lot to say about the TikTok-Microsoft tie-up that is somehow still afoot. Other things happened too, don't worry. Here's the rundown:The TikTok-Microsoft deal is back on.Lordstown Motors is looking to go public via a SPAC. To which we have to say that the EV boom and SPAC crush are going to fuse and lose some people a lot of money. Not this deal, necessarily, mind.Google is dumping money into ADT as part of a Nest deal.And Zoom's latest move regarding the Chinese market feels like a harbinger of times to come.On the TikTok front, Microsoft never really fully abandoned consumer hardware and software, it just pruned deeply under its current CEO Satya Nadella. Windows Phone? Gone. Surface? Bigger than ever. Mixer? No. Bing? Yep. That sort of thing. And Microsoft, like any modern super-platform, doesn't just want to own your time when you are at work. It wants to burn your eyes out around the clock.For a host of ByteDance backers like Yuri Milner, Sequoia Capital China, General Atlantic, SoftBank, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the deal could be rather lucrative, we presume.Rounds for Wejo (coverage here), Lezzoo (coverage here), and Feather (coverage here).Finally, why does Microsoft want to buy TikTok? We had a number of ideas that all sort of summed to maybe, but when we ran through the big tech companies that were possible suitors -- ports in the Trump storm -- maybe Microsoft makes more sense than we would have guessed?Whatever the case, we can't wait until Satya announces the deal by dancing and pointing at text on a screen while wearing something silly.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.As you probably expected, we had a lot to say about the TikTok-Microsoft tie-up that is somehow still afoot. Other things happened too, don't worry. Here's the rundown:The TikTok-Microsoft deal is back on.Lordstown Motors is looking to go public via a SPAC. To which we have to say that the EV boom and SPAC crush are going to fuse and lose some people a lot of money. Not this deal, necessarily, mind.Google is dumping money into ADT as part of a Nest deal.And Zoom's latest move regarding the Chinese market feels like a harbinger of times to come.On the TikTok front, Microsoft never really fully abandoned consumer hardware and software, it just pruned deeply under its current CEO Satya Nadella. Windows Phone? Gone. Surface? Bigger than ever. Mixer? No. Bing? Yep. That sort of thing. And Microsoft, like any modern super-platform, doesn't just want to own your time when you are at work. It wants to burn your eyes out around the clock.For a host of ByteDance backers like Yuri Milner, Sequoia Capital China, General Atlantic, SoftBank, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the deal could be rather lucrative, we presume.Rounds for Wejo (coverage here), Lezzoo (coverage here), and Feather (coverage here).Finally, why does Microsoft want to buy TikTok? We had a number of ideas that all sort of summed to maybe, but when we ran through the big tech companies that were possible suitors -- ports in the Trump storm -- maybe Microsoft makes more sense than we would have guessed?Whatever the case, we can't wait until Satya announces the deal by dancing and pointing at text on a screen while wearing something silly.

The #billionairespacerace [2][3][4] is the intense rivalry in NewSpace by recent space entrepreneurs, who entered the space industry as billionaires[citation needed] from other industries, particularly computing.[5][6] This private industry space race of the 21st century involves sending rockets to the ionosphere (mesosphere and thermosphere), orbital launch rockets, and suborbital tourist spaceflights.[7] weki Amongst the billionaires entering into NewSpace are: South-African-Canadian-American billionaire ElonMusk,[3] behind #SpaceX and a project to colonize Mars.[4][1] American billionaire Jeff Bezos, behind #BlueOrigin and establishing a true industrial base in space.[4][2][1] British billionaire Richard Branson,[3] behind Virgin Galactic/Virgin Orbit and space tourism, low-cost small orbital launchers, and intercontinental suborbital transit.[4][2][1] Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, backing the Breakthrough Starshot project for an interstellar probe.[5] --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/vegansteven/message

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we're going to look at Y Combinator.  Here's a fairly common startup story. After finishing his second book on Lisp, Paul Graham decides to found a company. He and Robert Morris start Viaweb in 1995, along with Trevor Blackwell. Some of the code came from Lisp - you know, like the books Graham had worked on. It was one of the earliest SaaS startups, which let users host online stores - similar to Shopify today. Viaweb had an investor named Julian Weber, who invested $10,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. Weber gave them invaluable advice. By 1998 they were acquired by Yahoo! for about $50 million in stock, which was a little shy of half a million shares. Viaweb would became the Yahoo Store. Both Graham and Morris have PhDs from Harvard. Here's where the story gets different. Graham would write a number of essays, establishing himself as an influencer of sorts. 2005 rolls around and Graham decides to start doing seed funding for startups, following the model that Weber had established with Viaweb. He gets the gang back together, hooking up with his Viaweb co-founders Robert Morris (the guy that wrote the Morris worm) and Trevor Blackwell, and adding girlfriend and future wife Jessica Livingston - and they create Y Combinator.  Graham would pony up $100,000, Morris and Blackwell would each chip in $50,000 and they would start with $200,000 to invest in companies. Being Harvard alumni, it was called Cambridge Seed. And as is the case with many of the companies they invest in, the name would change quickly, to Y Combinator.  They would hold their first session in Boston and called it the Summer Founders Program. And they got a great batch of startups! So they decided to do it again, this time in Mountain View, using space provided by Blackwell. This time, a lot more startups applied and they decided to run two a year, one in each location. And they had plenty of startups looking to attend. But why?  There have always been venture capital firms. Well, not always, but ish. They invest in startups. And incubators had become more common in business since the 1950s. The incubators mostly focused on planning, launching, and growing a company. But accelerators we just starting to become a thing, with the first one maybe being Colorado Venture Centers in 2001. The concept of accelerators really took off because of Y Combinator though. There have been incubators and accelerators for a long, long time. Y Combinator didn't really create those categories. But they did change the investment philosophy of many. You see, Y Combinator is an investor and a school. But. They don't provide office space to companies. They have an open application process. They invest in the ideas of founders they like. They don't invest much. But they get equity in the company in return. They like hackers. People that know how to build software. People who have built companies and sold companies. People who can help budding entrepreneurs.  Graham would launch Hacker News in 2007. Originally called Startup News, it's a service like Reddit that was developed in a language Graham co-wrote called Arc. I guess Arc would be more a stripped down dialect of Lisp, built in Racket. He'd release Arc in 2008. I wonder why he prefers technical founders… They look for technical founders. They look for doers. They look for great ideas, but they focus on the people behind the ideas. They coach on presentation skills, pitch decks, making products. They have a simple motto: “Make Something People Want”. And it works. By 2008 they were investing in 40 companies a year and running a program in Boston and another in Silicon Valley. It was getting to be a bit much so they dropped the Boston program and required founders who wanted to attend the program to move to the Bay Area for a couple of months. They added office hours to help their founders and by 2009 the word was out, Y Combinator was the thing every startup founder wanted to do. Sequoia Capital ponied up $2,000,000 and Y Combinator was able to grow to 60 investments a year. And it was working out really well. So Sequoia put in another $8,250,000 round.  The program is a crash course in building a startup. They look to grow fast. They host weekly dinners that Graham used to cook. Often with guest speakers from the VC community or other entrepreneurs. They build towards Demo Day, where founders present to crowds of investors.  It kept growing. It was an awesome idea but it took a lot of work. The more the word spread, the more investments like Yuri Milner wanted to help fun every company that graduated from Y Combinator. They added non profits in 2013 and continued to grow. By 2014, Graham stepped down as President and handed the reigns to Sam Altman. The amount they invested went up to $120,000. More investments required more leaders and others would come in to run various programs. Altman would step down in 2019. They would experiment with some other ideas but in the end, the original concept was perfect. Several alumni would come back and contribute to the success of future startups. People from companies like Justin.tv and twitch. In fact, their cofounder Michel Seibel would recommend Y Combinator to the founders of Airbnb. He ran Y Combinator Core for a while. Many of the founders who had good exits have gone from starting companies to investing in companies.   Y Combinator changed the way seed investments happen. By 2015, a third of startups got their Series A funding from accelerators. The combined valuation of the Y Combinator companies who could be surveyed is well over $150 billion dollars in market capitalization. Graduates include Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, DoorDash, Instacart, Reddit. Massive success has led to over 15,000 applicants for just a few spots. To better serve so many companies, they created a website called Startup School in 2017 and over 1,500 startups went through it in the first year alone.  Y Combinator has been quite impactful in a lot of companies. More important than the valuations and name brands, graduates are building software people want. They're iterating societal change, spurring innovation at a faster pace. They're zeroing in on helping founders build what people want rather than just spinning their wheels and banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out why people aren't buying what they're selling.  My favorite part of Y Combinator has been the types of founders they look for. They give $150,000 to mostly technical founders. And they get 7% of the company in exchange for that investment. And their message of finding the right product market fit has provided them with massive returns on their investments. At. This point they've helped over 2,000 companies by investing and countless others with the startup School and by promoting them on Hacker News.  Not a lot of people can say they changed the world. But this crew did. And there's a chance Airbnb, Doordash, Reddit, Stripe, Dropbox and countless others would have launched and succeeded, but we're all better off for the thousands of companies who have gone through YC having done so. So thank you for helping us get there.  And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so, so lucky to have you. Have a great day.   

Co-founded by Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, two engineers who previously founded one of the largest payment processors in Brazil, Brex, is now valued at well over $2 billion dollars and is backed by high profile investors, including Paypal co-founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital, Yuri Milner, and Carl Pascarella, former CEO of Visa. In this episode, we talk to Larissa Rocha, Employee No. 1 at BREX, the ultimate corporate credit card for Startups which doesn’t require a personal guarantee and has the ability to issue cards instantly while providing higher limits than traditional options on the market. The card also provides points and rewards more suitable and relevant for startups.Join us as we discuss how as a fintech, BREX is adapting and helping other startups with cash flow and cash management. Links discussed on the episode:- Brex's Response to COVID-19 includes new WFH rewards, learn more at brex.com/remotecollaboration- Webinars and other resources for Startups, go to brex.com/blog

The $100 million 10-year project funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, called the “Breakthrough Listen” project, is the most extensive SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program in history. The project, which began in 2015, has surveyed over 1,000 stars within 160 light-years away from Earth for signs of alien radio signals, with no positive results.

本期大侠：露西·霍金生于1970年11月2日，她是史蒂芬·霍金的女儿，是一名记者及作家，并为多家英国报刊撰稿，她是2008年科学普及Sapio奖的获得者露西·霍金（Lucy Hawking）不太为中国人所知，公众对她的认知是从“霍金的女儿”这个身份开始的。她是霍金的三个孩子之一，也是唯一的女儿。她是一名记者及科普作家，是2008年科学普及Sapio奖的获得者。6月1日，她完成了在北京某一小学的主题分享后，6月2日下午，在长城会的安排下，她接受了笔记侠柯洲和杨丽的独家专访。这是继2019年1月来中国后，今年第二次来到中国，为孩子们做科学知识的普及和传播。相较于霍金先生陈述的宏大宇宙计划，Lucy与外界的沟通内容显得更为细致温和。如果外星人发来信号，人类要怎么做？霍金的回答为公众所熟知的是“不要回答”。因为他认为外星人是比较危险的，可能他们拥有比我们更高的技术。但露西（Lucy）选择了不一样的回答，她认为外星人可能对于理解我们人类和我们的文明形式有更多的借鉴意义，认为他们的技术可以帮助人类解决一些问题。露西（Lucy）掌握科学思维，更新认知地图。今年已经49岁，她一直在努力推动她父亲生前未完成的事业“突破摄星”，希望帮助父亲完成“星际旅行”的未了愿望。“突破摄星”计划，到底是什么？简单来说，这是一项俄罗斯人投钱、美国太空研究中心提供人力来实施的探索太空的合作计划。“爱因斯坦曾经幻想在宇宙中乘着一道光线飞驰。这个思想实验为他的狭义相对论奠定了基础。一个多世纪后，我们有机会可以实现光速的一小部分：1亿英里/每小时。唯有通过这么快的速度，我们才有希望在人类的时间尺度内到达彼方恒星。”想想就很酷对吧？具体而言，早在2016年，科学家霍金就联合俄罗斯互联网投资大鳄、投资基金 DST Global 创始人尤里·米尔纳（Yuri Milner）启动了 “突破摄星” 计划。同时，出资人也很大方——这项计划涉及的初步投资额高得吓人，1亿美金！而具体实施计划的人力，将由美国太空研究中心提供。公开资料显示，Facebook创始人马克· 扎克伯格，也是该计划的董事会成员之一。这项计划具体要做什么？第一步是研发能达到相对论飞行速度且质量为克级的 “纳米飞行器”——这样的迷你飞行器，在发射后仅仅20年就能到达离我们最近的星系——4.37光年外的半人马座α星。上述投资大鳄米尔纳拿出的1亿美元，都将用于项目前期5年的研发。在这份计划的官方陈述中发现，要做的事情包括——激光列阵、星芯片、光帆、触碰群星......这几个具有未来感的词汇交织在一起，不得不让人想象联翩：上帝是否会重新再掷一次骰子？“‘突破摄星'这个项目是用纳米探测器通过特定装置达到光速20%的速度，是非常、非常具有科技含量的项目，现在仍在筹备过程中。”露西（Lucy）说。造梦者已去，“梦”仍在。除了推动父亲的未竟事业，露西（Lucy）还在以另一种方式，让更多人的想象力自由遨游于星际间。用故事，让儿童在未来世界里噼里啪啦地穿梭在露西（Lucy）接受笔记侠的采访中，“我父亲”是最被频繁提及的词汇。史蒂芬•霍金的一生做了很多很酷的事情，他也非常希望人类能够做太空旅行，向宇宙外穿行，看看周围星系上是否有生命迹象。史蒂芬•霍金毕生都在研究黑洞，并对此非常着迷，他曾经推测，黑洞有可能是去到另外一个宇宙的入口。如果掉进黑洞，可能会被黑洞的引力撕成碎片。所以，人是不可能穿越黑洞的，但如果能够发明一个可以穿越黑洞的物体的话，有可能会去到另外一个宇宙，这是一个令人激动的想法。黑洞并不是黑的，也不是一成不变的，相反，黑洞一直处于动的状态。霍金发现黑洞是会蒸发的，不断地辐射，所以，随着时间的推移会越来越小。可能几十亿年以后，黑洞最终会爆炸。作为科学家霍金的女儿，露西·霍金的个体画像也和科学紧紧结合在一起。儿童小说作家、科学教育者，是Lucy的两个职业标签。她从牛津大学法语、俄语专业毕业后，选择了以语言和文字为载体向科学世界游弋。经过一段记者生涯后，她转身成为一名童书作家。她与英国航天局合作的《太空日记》（Principia Space Diary）通过童趣视角向英国小学生讲述了宇航员蒂姆·皮克（Tim Peake）与国际空间站的日夜。与其父亲合著的《乔治的宇宙》系列，更是被翻译成38种语言，在43个国家发行。无数充满童真的孩子们，读着乔治的冒险故事，在未来世界里噼里啪啦地穿梭。而《乔治的宇宙》系列的灵感就是源于黑洞，她说，有一天，一个男孩找到我爸爸说，“史蒂芬·霍金，如果我掉进黑洞里会发生什么？我还会回来吗？”我爸爸回答说，“你会变成意大利面，变成一条一条的，引力非常大，会把你撕扯开。”“我掉进黑洞会发生什么？还会再回来吗？”这是一个非常好的故事。所以，《乔治的宇宙》系列创造了一个男孩叫乔治，他找到一个方法去到宇宙，然后去看黑洞，透过这个故事可以“向一个8岁孩子解释清楚黑洞”。“写故事是为了讲述清楚世间万物为何如此存在。”露西（Lucy）说。带有科学元素的文学创作可能为现实问题提供解决方案。露西（Lucy）是一位好奇心超越年龄的女士，她说，未来很多事情都有可能发生，前提是你要想象。为什么科学要从娃娃抓起？现代科学的历史开始于18世纪，起源于古希腊、中国以及一些非常古老的文明，但东西方对于科学的态度有一定的差异，相较于东方，西方的科学要更加自由，更有创造力、更有想法。科学能够为我们提供一个理解这个世界的方式，科学是基于证据的学科，它能够让我们更加接近于真理。很重要的一点是，我们要知道我们是谁，从哪里来，为什么存在。如果不知道的话，我们很容易受到一些假新闻或者迷信、宗教的影响和干扰。“我是为孩子工作的，我想让科学对他们而言是通俗易懂的。”露西·霍金说。我会为这些小学生们写很多故事，也会跟一些科学家们一起工作，让他们的科学成果变成一些故事，进而打开孩子们进入科学的大门。实际上，科学与生活密不可分，孩子们从小就可以通过观察及实验去了解身边的世界，而不是贸然相信一些假新闻或其他的一些流言蜚语，从小培养一个批判性思维。掌握一些基本的科学知识非常重要，研究科学也是非常有意义的一件事。在如今的时代，科学和技术也已成为国民经济的一大衡量指标，科学与技术、创新已经变得越来越重要，是驱动国民经济增长非常重要的因素。史蒂芬•霍金也希望每一个孩子都能够参与科学教育这一领域，挖掘孩子们的潜能，也希望能从这些孩子们中找到下一个爱因斯坦。本期编辑：杨丽 审稿及主播：晴天点击关注和订阅，实时接收最新干货。获取更多商业知识，可关注公众号【笔记侠】。

本期大侠：露西·霍金生于1970年11月2日，她是史蒂芬·霍金的女儿，是一名记者及作家，并为多家英国报刊撰稿，她是2008年科学普及Sapio奖的获得者露西·霍金（Lucy Hawking）不太为中国人所知，公众对她的认知是从“霍金的女儿”这个身份开始的。她是霍金的三个孩子之一，也是唯一的女儿。她是一名记者及科普作家，是2008年科学普及Sapio奖的获得者。6月1日，她完成了在北京某一小学的主题分享后，6月2日下午，在长城会的安排下，她接受了笔记侠柯洲和杨丽的独家专访。这是继2019年1月来中国后，今年第二次来到中国，为孩子们做科学知识的普及和传播。相较于霍金先生陈述的宏大宇宙计划，Lucy与外界的沟通内容显得更为细致温和。如果外星人发来信号，人类要怎么做？霍金的回答为公众所熟知的是“不要回答”。因为他认为外星人是比较危险的，可能他们拥有比我们更高的技术。但露西（Lucy）选择了不一样的回答，她认为外星人可能对于理解我们人类和我们的文明形式有更多的借鉴意义，认为他们的技术可以帮助人类解决一些问题。露西（Lucy）掌握科学思维，更新认知地图。今年已经49岁，她一直在努力推动她父亲生前未完成的事业“突破摄星”，希望帮助父亲完成“星际旅行”的未了愿望。“突破摄星”计划，到底是什么？简单来说，这是一项俄罗斯人投钱、美国太空研究中心提供人力来实施的探索太空的合作计划。“爱因斯坦曾经幻想在宇宙中乘着一道光线飞驰。这个思想实验为他的狭义相对论奠定了基础。一个多世纪后，我们有机会可以实现光速的一小部分：1亿英里/每小时。唯有通过这么快的速度，我们才有希望在人类的时间尺度内到达彼方恒星。”想想就很酷对吧？具体而言，早在2016年，科学家霍金就联合俄罗斯互联网投资大鳄、投资基金 DST Global 创始人尤里·米尔纳（Yuri Milner）启动了 “突破摄星” 计划。同时，出资人也很大方——这项计划涉及的初步投资额高得吓人，1亿美金！而具体实施计划的人力，将由美国太空研究中心提供。公开资料显示，Facebook创始人马克· 扎克伯格，也是该计划的董事会成员之一。这项计划具体要做什么？第一步是研发能达到相对论飞行速度且质量为克级的 “纳米飞行器”——这样的迷你飞行器，在发射后仅仅20年就能到达离我们最近的星系——4.37光年外的半人马座α星。上述投资大鳄米尔纳拿出的1亿美元，都将用于项目前期5年的研发。在这份计划的官方陈述中发现，要做的事情包括——激光列阵、星芯片、光帆、触碰群星......这几个具有未来感的词汇交织在一起，不得不让人想象联翩：上帝是否会重新再掷一次骰子？“‘突破摄星'这个项目是用纳米探测器通过特定装置达到光速20%的速度，是非常、非常具有科技含量的项目，现在仍在筹备过程中。”露西（Lucy）说。造梦者已去，“梦”仍在。除了推动父亲的未竟事业，露西（Lucy）还在以另一种方式，让更多人的想象力自由遨游于星际间。用故事，让儿童在未来世界里噼里啪啦地穿梭在露西（Lucy）接受笔记侠的采访中，“我父亲”是最被频繁提及的词汇。史蒂芬•霍金的一生做了很多很酷的事情，他也非常希望人类能够做太空旅行，向宇宙外穿行，看看周围星系上是否有生命迹象。史蒂芬•霍金毕生都在研究黑洞，并对此非常着迷，他曾经推测，黑洞有可能是去到另外一个宇宙的入口。如果掉进黑洞，可能会被黑洞的引力撕成碎片。所以，人是不可能穿越黑洞的，但如果能够发明一个可以穿越黑洞的物体的话，有可能会去到另外一个宇宙，这是一个令人激动的想法。黑洞并不是黑的，也不是一成不变的，相反，黑洞一直处于动的状态。霍金发现黑洞是会蒸发的，不断地辐射，所以，随着时间的推移会越来越小。可能几十亿年以后，黑洞最终会爆炸。作为科学家霍金的女儿，露西·霍金的个体画像也和科学紧紧结合在一起。儿童小说作家、科学教育者，是Lucy的两个职业标签。她从牛津大学法语、俄语专业毕业后，选择了以语言和文字为载体向科学世界游弋。经过一段记者生涯后，她转身成为一名童书作家。她与英国航天局合作的《太空日记》（Principia Space Diary）通过童趣视角向英国小学生讲述了宇航员蒂姆·皮克（Tim Peake）与国际空间站的日夜。与其父亲合著的《乔治的宇宙》系列，更是被翻译成38种语言，在43个国家发行。无数充满童真的孩子们，读着乔治的冒险故事，在未来世界里噼里啪啦地穿梭。而《乔治的宇宙》系列的灵感就是源于黑洞，她说，有一天，一个男孩找到我爸爸说，“史蒂芬·霍金，如果我掉进黑洞里会发生什么？我还会回来吗？”我爸爸回答说，“你会变成意大利面，变成一条一条的，引力非常大，会把你撕扯开。”“我掉进黑洞会发生什么？还会再回来吗？”这是一个非常好的故事。所以，《乔治的宇宙》系列创造了一个男孩叫乔治，他找到一个方法去到宇宙，然后去看黑洞，透过这个故事可以“向一个8岁孩子解释清楚黑洞”。“写故事是为了讲述清楚世间万物为何如此存在。”露西（Lucy）说。带有科学元素的文学创作可能为现实问题提供解决方案。露西（Lucy）是一位好奇心超越年龄的女士，她说，未来很多事情都有可能发生，前提是你要想象。为什么科学要从娃娃抓起？现代科学的历史开始于18世纪，起源于古希腊、中国以及一些非常古老的文明，但东西方对于科学的态度有一定的差异，相较于东方，西方的科学要更加自由，更有创造力、更有想法。科学能够为我们提供一个理解这个世界的方式，科学是基于证据的学科，它能够让我们更加接近于真理。很重要的一点是，我们要知道我们是谁，从哪里来，为什么存在。如果不知道的话，我们很容易受到一些假新闻或者迷信、宗教的影响和干扰。“我是为孩子工作的，我想让科学对他们而言是通俗易懂的。”露西·霍金说。我会为这些小学生们写很多故事，也会跟一些科学家们一起工作，让他们的科学成果变成一些故事，进而打开孩子们进入科学的大门。实际上，科学与生活密不可分，孩子们从小就可以通过观察及实验去了解身边的世界，而不是贸然相信一些假新闻或其他的一些流言蜚语，从小培养一个批判性思维。掌握一些基本的科学知识非常重要，研究科学也是非常有意义的一件事。在如今的时代，科学和技术也已成为国民经济的一大衡量指标，科学与技术、创新已经变得越来越重要，是驱动国民经济增长非常重要的因素。史蒂芬•霍金也希望每一个孩子都能够参与科学教育这一领域，挖掘孩子们的潜能，也希望能从这些孩子们中找到下一个爱因斯坦。本期编辑：杨丽 审稿及主播：晴天点击关注和订阅，实时接收最新干货。获取更多商业知识，可关注公众号【笔记侠】。

Esta semana en el podcast de Itnig Bernat Farrero y Jordi Romero hablan con Javier Suárez, fundador y CPO de Travelperk. Javier empezó su carrera en Booking cómo un vendedor inquieto que rápidamente saltó a producto e “innovación”. Allí descubrió la enorme demanda que existía en el mercado de business travel que los grandes buscadores y agregadores no atendían. Eso le llevó a “escribir el business plan de Travelperk” para el futuro, cuando encontrara co-founders. Finalmente los encontró, y su nuevo socio Avi Meir le obligó a trasladarse a Barcelona para empezar el viaje. Su propuesta inicial era un algoritmo que calculaba el coste completo del viaje, pero al venderlo se dieron cuenta que los clientes buscaban una solución completa que permitiera comprar todo el viaje, y por ello se pusieron a trabajar, y a levantar rondas de financiación (de Seed a Series C) hasta ser de las empresa europeas que han levantado más dinero en menos tiempo, 71M€ en 3 años. Entre sus socios, está el fondo de Yuri Milner, Spark Capital o Target Global. El producto a construír es infinito, pero van muy rápido. Javier: “Estamos construyendo un avión a mitad de vuelo”. Para hacerlo, desde el primer día han tirado de operaciones “manuales” mientras el producto no ha estado disponible. Video: https://youtu.be/qwVgZ4105vw

Do aliens exist? That’s a question mankind has asked itself for centuries. And these days with our powerful rockets and satellites, it seems the question could possibly be answered soon. The next four stories are ambitious and have generated buzz because they seek to answer one of humanties biggest questions. These are the 4 Most Realistic Chances of Finding Alien Life. Please support Scary Mysteries! Check out our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries?alert=2 - There's a lot of cool access, giveaways and even a custom episode! Buy awesome original shirts made by Scary Mysteries https://newdawnfilm.com/scary-mysteries-store/ Subscribe for Weekly Videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiE86yS_VM7qjiICqRPmwLQ?sub_confirmation=1 _________________________________________________________ 4 MOST REALISTIC CHANCES OF FINDING ALIEN LIFE 4. The Breakthrough Starshot Project Man’s curiosity knows no bounds and in the world of science and technology, often curiosity intersects in a way that could possibly bring even the most outlandish of dreams into reality. One of the top scientific thinkers of today, Stephen Hawking, together with Facebook owner, Mark Zuckerberg and Russian tycoon, Yuri Milner have teamed up to create a unique project involving tiny rockets and finding alien life. Dubbed as the Breakthrough Starshot Project, its been deemed a philanthropic initiative. Its main goal is to discover alien life in the far universe as well as to explore deep space regions in search of planets that could potentially sustain life. 3. The Sara Seager Equation Frank Drake calculated the possibility of finding intelligent alien life in the far-flung universe in 1961. It’s called The Drake Equation and it was created to estimate the number of civilizations that might exist throughout the known universe. While Drake focused on finding alien life with radio technology, more recently a parallel equation was created by astronomer and planetary scientist, Sara Seager. Her equation focuses on determining the possibility of alien life that can be detected from Earth. 2. Elon Musk & SPACE Xz With the most recent launch of the Falcon Heavy Rocket, the heaviest and most powerful in the world right now, it’s no surprise Elon Musk is slowly on his way to bringing space, particularly Mars, closer to humanity. For years, he has spoken about his intentions to bring people to Mars and eventually create a space colony on the red planet. But how does he intend to do this? And above all, is it even possible? Musk has already made headway with his recent rocket launches. Space X has grown from a startup company to the most premiere privately-owned space company in the world. And more recently, they’ve proven they can launch rockets capable of carrying a huge payload which is paving the way for humans to eventually travel in them too. The 23-story Falcon Heavy launch was essentially a test flight for other future rockets of the same caliber. Inside it was Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster with a mannequin donning a spacesuit. According to Musk, he hopes the rocket and other improved versions will eventually be used to shuttle humans through space. 1. Government Has Already Made Contact When it comes to talk of alien existence, it’s hard not to mention the government. For many, there’s a growing conspiracy that we don’t really need to find out if UFOs exist, because the government has already made contact – they’re just keeping it a secret from the rest of us. From Roswell to the mysterious existence of Area 51, the government has been accused of doing an extensive job of cover up the truth about So those were the 4 MOST REALISTIC CHANCES OF FINDING ALIEN LIFE ------------ These are only four possibilities of us finding out about alien life. But the reality is that there are many other things that could happen at any moment, that prove once and for all that we are not alone in the universe.

Avi Meir is the Founder & CEO @ TravelPerk, the startup that allows you to book, manage and report all your business travel in one place. To date, Avi has raised over $73m with TravelPerk from the likes of Felix Capital, Yuri Milner, Spark Capital, Sunstone and LocalGlobe to name a few. Before founding TravelPerk, Avi founded HotelNinjas, a web-based hotel management software platform that was ultimately acquired by Booking.com. Prior to that, Avi was VP Product at Budgetplaces.com, which was acquired by Palamon in 2011. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Avi made his way from the world of hotels to the world of founding startups and what was his entry point? How did Avi's experience with HotelNinja's impact his operating mindset with TravelPerk today? 2.) How does Avi think about attaining the right board composition? What is the ideal structure? How important is it to have industrial experience around the table? What are the 2 other core skills that Avi believes are required on the board? What can founders do to ensure plasticity of mindset at a board level? 3.) What makes the truly special board members? What do they do both in the good and the bad times to make them so good? What does Avi believe makes the more challenging board members to work with? Why does Avi believe that culture fit at the board level is not discussed enough? What can be done by the founder to improve this? 4.) TravelPerk has now raised over $75m in funding, what does Avi believe they have done well to date to allow them to raise this? For the next round, what would Avi like to improve upon and pushback on further? What advice does Avi have for founders entering negotiations when it comes to both valuation and option pool? 5.) Why does Avi believe that culture and growth are 2 sides of the same coin? What have been some of the biggest challenges in scaling the team with the scaling of the company? How does one retain startup culture when no longer a startup? What would Avi do differently with regards to expansion with the benefit of hindsight? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Avi’s Fave Book: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Avi on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Overcast Link.  My Guest this week is Mason Peck, Professor of Aerospace and Systems engineering at Cornell University and former Chief Technologist at NASA. Previously Mason was a was a Principal Fellow at Honeywell Aerospace and has an extremely colorful history we get into during the podcast. The topic of this conversation is how NASA works, alternatives to the current innovation ecosystem - like crowdsourcing and philanthropy, and also the interplay between government, academia, and private industry. Key Takeaways You can have an organization full of smart motivated people that doesn't produce great results if all the incentives are set up to avoid risk. There's been a shift in where different parts of the innovation pipeline happen. More has shifted universities and startups from larger companies and the government but the systems of support haven't caught up. Taking a portfolio approach to technology and innovation is a powerful concept that we don't think about enough. Links Mason’s Lab (Space System Design Studio) Website Mason on Twitter (@spacecraftlab) The Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Directorate) Breakthrough Starshot Mars One Transcript   Intro   [00:00:00] This podcast I talk to Mason Peck about NASA alternatives to the current Innovation ecosystem like crowdsourcing and philanthropy and also the interplay between government Academia and Private Industry. Officially Mason is a professor of Aerospace and systems engineering at Cornell University, but I think of him as Cornell space exploration guy. He's done research on everything from doing construction in space using superconductors to making spacecraft that can fit in the palm of your hand and cost cents instead of millions of dollars from 2011 to 2013. He served as NASA's Chief technologist. Don't worry. We'll get into what that means in the podcast before becoming a professor.   What is a Chief Technologist   Ben: You spent several years as the chief technologist at Nasa. Can you explain for us what the chief technologist at Nasa actually does. I think that it's a usual role that many people have not heard of. Mason: Sure, NASA's [00:01:00] Chief technologist sets strategy and priorities for NASA's. Let's call them technology Investments. It's helpful to think of it in investment context because it really is that you know, what you're doing is spending money taxpayer money. You want to be a responsible Steward of that money. You're spending that money on. Something like a bet that you hope will pay off in the future. So taking a portfolio approach that problem probably makes sense. At least it made sense to me. I was the chief technologist for NASA for the over two years started in the end of 2011 and continued to little bit into 2014, but mostly it was the two years 2012-2013. And I may just offer it was a wonderful time to be doing that difficult from the standpoint of the budget. There are a lot of challenges at that time budgetarily, but good from the standpoint of lots of great support from the White House the office of Science and Technology policy when I was there was particularly aggressive and committed and [00:02:00] passionate about doing what they thought was the best for the nation and the just the degree of energy and expertise some of those people made it a wonderful ecosystem to work in.   How long term were bets?   Ben: Awesome, and going off of that portfolio approach with the bats.  how long term were those bets? Like what was the the time scale on them? Mason: In the portfolio approach that we tried to? Take some of those bets were the long game. I suppose, you know, 20 years out. There was a program known as NIAC Nayak the NASA Innovative advanced concepts program, which placed bets on to keep using this metaphor. Ideas that probably would pay off in a couple of decades. And by the way, that seems like a hopelessly long time but for spacecraft that's maybe a generation of spacecraft. In fact spacecraft Generations in technological sense almost mirrors the human Generations, if you think of a human generation being 20 years, you could [00:03:00] probably look across the history of space technology. In spot these Rafi 20-year slices where things seem to happen. So some of the investors are definitely 20 years plus others, whereas near term as possible, but it's not just the the duration of time that is how long it would take for these Investments to pay off. It was also about the type of investment that is the ways in which technology was done.   Different types of tech investment   So, If I can go on about that briefly the me, please you say that it's one thing to as one thing to solicit ideas from the traditional offers of technology or DARPA calls the performers, you know, you go to a Lockheed Martin or university what I've Cornell University of just for one example, you go to university and you ask for a certain result and then they can probably deliver that kind of result. There's all the non-traditional offers. For example, when the NASA we would start these challenges or competitions. [00:04:00] The idea was to bring in non-traditional providers people who normally wouldn't have bothered or even have been considered qualified to solve a NASA problem, but through a challenge like a coding challenge a hackathon or maybe a more substantial dollar amount. Prize offered a million dollars for electric aircraft or something through that mechanism you bringing different kinds of people to solve the problem and that's not only the other that's not the only other dimension. Another dimension is whether the problem you're solving is something that is a known problem or something you feel like if you build it they will come. Either that freezes the death to death to investment, right if you say something like I've got this great idea but no one's asking for a right now, but trust me if we build it somebody it will buy it that is not what a venture capitalist for example wants to hear right? However. It is a distinct type of futurism, right?   Mission Pull vs Mission Push   There's what we call pull and push Mission pull refers to [00:05:00] when we have a mission that NASA let's say returning samples from the surface of Mars or sending humans to a distant star. I mean, these are not necessarily necessary. What's this if they are then? The Jews demand certain technological solutions certain Innovations, or if you come up with idea that no one's asking for is their value in that and I'll give you the example of a say spacecraft that are the size of your fingernail right now. You probably know been that this is a topic we were working out of Cornell. I guarantee you no one's asking for that. I can prove that by virtue of how many proposals have been turned down. The basic fact is there are uses for this now. Maybe there aren't enough that are compelling and I'll accept that but the reason no one's asking is because no one knows it can exist and that's not a reason to say no, so. Again, think of the mission pull versus what we call technology push direction if we can come up with a solution that people maybe could use [00:06:00] a little value in working on that think of the dimension. As I said before of different kinds of offers. What are the sources for technology and then of course, there's the timeframe Dimension. So there's at least three dimensions that you might think of for the. Portfolio of Technology Investments That least we took it to kind of NASA and that maybe helps other environments to   Non-traditional vs Traditional Offers   Ben: yeah,  are there some good examples of  non-traditional offers really succeeding where the traditional offers did not. Mason: Yes, two ways to answer that one is for some problems. They are simply not profitable for a lot of companies even as an example. I major company might spend a hundred thousand to maybe over a billion dollars, maybe multiple millions of dollars. Just writing the proposal to a government agency do some work and it's not at all an exaggeration. You know, that's really not the [00:07:00] case. Where a small mom-and-pop company. But for larger companies, I see a Honeywell or a Boeing or Lockheed or some other defense kind tractor, you know for sure they spend that kind of money. So the and that's the total money. They spend let alone The Profit they might get in that which is maybe on the order of 10% or something. So you got to really want. To do this work to invest the money for a proposal into it and something at the scale of I mentioned Nayak before right the NASA innovated the best huh something that small it's simply not worth large company writing a proposal that they're not going to get there not even get the cost of proposal back probably now there may be other reasons, but let's let's give me those for a second. Let's think about the the other way of answering that question. What am I people who just want to work with NASA? There are people out there that are passionate. About what NASA doesn't and you do you'll be hard pressed by the way to find other government agencies and probably even other businesses with the brand loyalty if you like or their reputation that in Mass it has yeah, so I'll [00:08:00] give you the example of Tom ditto titl was his last name. He's got had a couple of Nyack Awards over the years. The first one was I think in 2005 ish? He had this brilliant idea for a new kind of spectrometer. And for your I know you probably know but not everyone knows this spectrometer is a device that looks at it a light and finds out what colors it is. And I'm looking at the Spectrum of a let's say reflected light off of a rock or something will tell you about its chemical may make up so spectrometers the useful thing for astronomy. Well, Tom didn't came up with the idea of using diffraction grating. It's that that colorful rainbow mirror looking stuff. There was all the rage in the 1970s. So but he had a way of using that to make a spectrometer and he would have been a very long spectrometer. In fact, maybe even on the surface of the Moon a super long kilometers long spectrometer arguably a crazy idea, but absolutely brilliant and solve the problem, but NASA didn't even know it needed to solve. Once against problem [00:09:00] that no Lockheed would propose but a Tom ditto would so Tom just wanted to work on this and he had a passion for it. He solved the problem and that was a cool example, and there's others just like it's so in an environment where you have Innovation where people can. Contribute, I guess I'll stay out of the goodness of their heart or because I like the idea of the challenge or maybe even for relatively small price. You'll get different kinds of solutions and that's an interesting possibility.   What would you do to unlock grassroots innovators?   Ben: how would you encourage that even further? So  say you you control the entire United States government?  what would you do Beyond Nyack anything to sort of unlock those people? Mason: To clarify for your listeners. I have no plans to take over the government. Yes. I'm willing if someone like to offer me the job, but that's not my forte. Well, so again, I let me let me go back to the example of prizes and challenges. This is a big deal with in the Obama Administration. [00:10:00] They were faced with this awkward problem of having lots of great ideas and basically no money to work within a Congress that was not supportive. (Prizes and Challenges) So what do you do? Well, you open up these opportunities to the nation maybe even to the world. So if you can come up with an away with a way of articulating the value of contributing, you know again in a way that makes the public or maybe just a few individuals wants to help. Depend on that altruistic nature that some people have that's when we dissolve a problem because it doesn't work in all cases. So rather than just offering a challenge where if you do it you get a medal. What about offering a prize prize competitions are interesting because first of all the the organization that offers the price doesn't necessarily spend money until they get a result. For example, the the orteig prize remember this one. This was the one that encouraged transatlantic flight. Yes. So, you know that that's one way to go. A $20,000 prize and [00:11:00] then you win it and you pay off your mortgage there have been others. Like I birthed an said that building the gossamer Albatross was away from to pay off his mortgage. And so there are there are some folks who are motivated by the prospect of a prize and again from for the funders perspective from a funding perspective. You're not going to pay until and unless you can get the solution you want. So that's interesting the other interesting feature about crowdsourcing a solution like that is you might get. People applying to solve your problem and you get the best one out of a thousand compare that to a typical again since we're talking Aerospace a typical Aerospace Contracting opportunity. You'll probably get responses that say NASA would offer millions of dollars for a new rocket. You're going to get doesn't maybe responses to that of which a half dozen maybe will be credible and it's going to be The Usual Suspects. It'll be it'll be Boeing and Lockheed and orbital sciences and maybe a few others well. What if that one in a thousand Solutions the one you really want offering an [00:12:00] opportunity that solicits such a large number of potential inputs really allows you to pick that best one the again the 2 Sigma 3 Sigma Solution which is kind of exciting possibility. So that's another way to go.   How do you pull out good ideas when they take resources?     Ben: to Riff on  that how other good ways of. Judging a solution before it requires a large amount of investment. So with this Crown funny I can imagine that it would get a lot of people. With ideas and you'd be able to go through the ideas and if there's one that immediately stands out as better than the rest or  is very clearly feasible often with things. You don't actually know if it's a good idea until you've tested it and you poured some resources into it and people might not have those. So is there any trick to  pulling out those ideas? Mason: One interesting interesting fact [00:13:00] about prize competitions is pretty clearly. You have to pitch it at the right dollar amount, you know after ten bucks, you're not going to get in. This is really what you want a prize where the prize might be the say 20 billion dollars the investment necessary to. That twenty billion dollars might be so prohibitive that you're only going to get a few players and once again, probably the usual suspects right? For instance. Let's say that we offered twenty billion dollars for whoever first built at the hotel on the moon. Okay, it sounds like an interesting idea maybe but to develop that infrastructure that capability is going to cost billions begin with and and maybe someone will win the 20 billion dollar Enterprise, but I really need to get what you want. So first of all the the scale of the prize. Matters, but let me go back to this portfolio idea we were talking about before if you have the freedom to manage a portfolio of Technology investment your opportunity then is to think about those high-risk investments. Just the way you would have to say in your own eventual portfolio think about high risk Investments as a way to pick winners [00:14:00] you invest a little bit the high-risk stuff across the large board and maybe a few of them. But you have to be winners. Well, then maybe you go investible bit more in those and soon as saying the case of Nayak, right? And let's say that we like to Tom Dittos spectrometer so much that the $100,000 that he got for building this which is not peanuts by the way, but it's still small from Aerospace perspective that hundred thousand dollars a small investment. But in a subsequent phase maybe he gets ten times that amount of money maybe he starts a small company. I think he is company something like ditto tool and die company or something like this maybe ditto Tool company gets a factor of 10 or investment in the in a follow-on phase. In fact, maybe even a subsequent phase could be a hundred times as much. So as time goes on as the maturity of the technology increases as you continually refine the portfolio allowing the failed investment to just sort of Fall by the wayside. You can concentrate on those ones that are [00:15:00] successful which is first of all a reason why you have to invest in some high-risk stuff. You got to take some risks right and then second if you. And if you have a portfolio approach you have the opportunity to use statistics to your benefit. I can let's say if I'm NASA invest in a hundred a crazy ideas every year and if only one or two of them pan out, well, that's great those one or two. Probably something I really care about.   How do you incentivize innovation within NASA?   Ben:  that makes a lot of sense and  in that portfolio. So in a in excellent Financial portfolio, you measure success by how much money you get by your return. There's a number and that's you want to maximize that number that you're getting back NASA's portfolio doesn't quite fit into that. So, how do you how do you measure how well a portfolio is doing? How do you incentivize people? To within NASA to really push the best Innovations forward. [00:16:00] Mason: Yeah several things going on there. First of all, you got to take a look at the organization's culture. You have to take a look at how they respond to Innovation. My experience with NASA is that it's full of brilliant and committed people at the same time. There's a tendency for the younger folks to be very forward-looking and interestingly for the most senior leadership be fairly forward-looking somewhere in the middle. There's a like a lot of problem, but it would have a low spot would have us soft spot where people in more than elsewhere can be. (Risk aversion) Careerist that is the not so willing to take risks. They want to keep their jobs. They want to be seen as effective. And again taking on risks can be not looked upon well that in their opinion. So so that's tricky right here these different populations in any large organization and you got to come up with a way of communicating the value of innovation across the board, right? That's one of the challenges making this sort of thing work. Suppose a lot more that you can see about about culture and I [00:17:00] suppose every culture is a little different but one of those the hardest parts in making Innovation stick is to communicate to folks that it's a permanent solution what I found again using NASA's an example, and I've also work with other companies by the way for which this is true. There's a tendency to think that these technology investment initiatives or this Innovation is initiative is just the flavor of the day, you know, it's it's a it's our flash in the pan or whatever metaphor you like. It's a temporary State of Affairs. So there are people who are afraid if they start to go to heavy toward Innovation and man maybe quit their job of doing program management and study to become a radical innovator. That whatever leadership has been pushing that is going to disappear eventually and it'll go back to business as usual and then they'll be left without a job. Right? So there's risk seen in this process of taking an innovation because you not so sure how permanent is going to be. So, you know, how do you Embrace that problem as someone trying to effect change just [00:18:00] promising it's not going to go away probably won't convince folks. They've been around long enough. It's in your organization's happen. They've seen issues come and go how do you convince them? So I wish I had an answer to that other than to say that it's only through longevity of an innovation process that people really start to embrace it and what I'm talking about when I say longevity. I mean really on the order of five plus years you really would like to have almost a generation of folks grow up in an environment where that Innovation is taken to be the order of the day.   Strengths and Weaknesses of each sector   Ben:  something like that. I've I don't have an answer to but that I see consistently is that there are these these timescale mismatches where people's careers are sort of judged in maybe two to five year segments where if you nothing's happened in the past two to five years. People are like well, what are you what are you doing? And then the really the the Innovations take something like. You know seven to 10 years to to really mature so it's very [00:19:00] hard to align those incentives and I'm just always always looking for answers around that. I you mentioned that you've seen this at a bunch of different organizations  you've literally been in every every sector right you've been in Industry. You've been in Academia you've been in government. Do you have any sense of what role each of them should ideally occupy in an innovation ecosystem and what strengths and weaknesses each has. Mason:  That's a wonderful question and probably beyond my Ken but I will I will offer for those of your listeners and you as well who want to go back rewind a little bit to the World War II time frame thinking about this fellow named vannevar Bush and then you've probably encountered thanks to him and his Innovations we have what we have now where [00:20:00] universities take on what we call fundamental research which combines both basic and applied research and then come. The government take on the next step which is implementation in to say potentially demonstration or something operational system. This is at least the way it's shaking out maybe the original town with a bit different but that's kind of how it shakes it out and people are fond of pointing to this Gap or this where they call it the. This Chasm between the Innovation that happens in universities and then the need for near term profit making investments in companies or low-risk politically safe Investments of the level of the government. There's a gap in their right and how do you feel that Gap? There are organizations like DARPA the defense Advanced research projects agency that are meant to fill that Gap and their NASA. We try creating programs that would fill that Gap and not surprisingly. There are there are still problems with that. So. We think of universities think of companies think of government that are clearly different motivations that drive each one of these. [00:21:00] I wonder if there isn't a different motivation entirely that might be more Global more Universal at the moment. We don't have it if we were ever. Oh, I don't know set upon by an alien horde we might pull together as a as a nation as a world and in all contribute a little bit differently to the way things are going but at the moment without any obvious. I'm cataclysm on the horizon and some might argue about climate change for the say we don't all agree that there's a cataclysm on Horizon. We're in these silos. So universities we innovate in a certain way. We innovate at the level of again. I'll call it basic and applied research. The government innovated the level when it works. Well policy when it doesn't work. Well the government tries to solve its own problems using its own expertise really really in my opinion. They should be going outside for that expertise and businesses solve problems in a way that maximizes shareholder value probably in the relatively near term. These are all I mean perfectly successful ways of pulling on [00:22:00] Innovation, but they're not the same. And they do lead to very idiosyncratic Solutions. Again. The question is isn't there something more General and broader. What do you think?   What's the correct system?   Ben: I would have I think I mean, I definitely you're the one being interviewed but I think that there's you've completely identified that Gap and I think that in my mind there's what it should really be is. Sort of a pipeline and that looking at what needs to be done and who is best incentivised to do it. So for example, the. It's stuff where there's this very long long time Horizon uncertain outcomes sort of like big our research would come from universities with some light support from the government. But then as soon as that needed to be pulled together into something that required a lot of [00:23:00] coordination and a lot of money then perhaps the government or a company would come in depending on. What the real outcome would be but you know if I had a real and like the whole point of all of this is to try to figure out a real answer. I don't have a good one at the moment. (Shift in funding methods) Mason: Yes, happy birthday thinking about this other thing. I guess I could offer is the way we fund research in this country has as changed over the years there was a time and it might surprise some of your listeners to think about this there was a time when as a university researcher. You probably didn't write any Grant proposals or if you did it was one every few years. These days most people in say my position where I'm working at a well-regarded research-intensive university. I write 10 to 20 individual research proposals a year of which a small faction or funded is probably less than 10% or funded. And I think I'm actually doing pretty [00:24:00] well frankly for that ten percent. There are folks who go years without getting any of proposal from the despite submitting hundreds of Grant proposals for the amount of time involved in writing these proposals. It's worse and worse every year the money gets Tighter and Tighter and you know, what do you do one answer is that we've. We've morphed toward this model and maybe it's not what we all want what we have right now in a previous age where the government more directly supported universities where research was done regardless of funding you got different outcomes, but that was a relatively short period of time in our in our history. If you go back a little farther this a 19th century before for the most part research was done either by the independently wealthy or by people with some kind of philanthropic back. You know the prince of some new name your favorite to European potentate, the I the prince of whatever would would fund your research into discovering new molecules. And that was just the way it worked. Yeah. So these models have changed [00:25:00] radically over the years and interesting question is where this might go if in fact something like crowdsourcing or. The ubiquity of information and access to it through the internet really matures to inform how we do research. I do not know what the future holds. I know you've been thinking about the sorts of things in the past. Yeah, but it's interesting question. But what this looks like what the research infrastructure or ecosystem looks like when we can vote up or down a good research projects. Or maybe when crowdfunding can be the basis for what research gets undertaken may not be good. But it's another way to do it.   How good is crowdfunding   Ben: Would you trust a large population of people to be able to. Would you trust them to allocate research dollars?  I ask this based on the fact that you see a lot of these articles shouting an outrage that the government is funding someone to I don't know like walk around [00:26:00] and look at snails or something ridiculous. But then you could make the argument that  well you look at snails enough and then you find this one snail that has some chemical compound that then could be synthesized into medicine.  So would you trust crowdfunding? What would that get become Mason:  I probably wouldn't trust them as far as I can throw them. I guessed another way to think about it is there are I probably would not trust the crowd to vote for one thing. I might be trust them statistically if we could fund many things out of such a population and that's where again the benefit of large numbers comes in. I even though I think that the public generally might get some things wrong from time to time and maybe somewhat credulous and believe strange things on the whole they're strangely predictive. I'll give you another quick story about that please years ago was probably 10 years ago DARPA had this interesting idea. Don't remember exactly who DARPA but isn't. [00:27:00] Dandiya, if you look at how crowd Source information works, it seems surprisingly accurate and predictive. So what if we created a stock market for terrorist attacks, and we had people as actually placed bets on but you know invest in Futures, but. Terrorist attract attack Futures the the outcome would be people voting to maximize their return on their Investments would use all that work release or most information that we know is out there and would identify the most likely terrorist outcomes of those terrorists outcomes associated with say that again that are continually Rising stock something out there. Is motivating people to think that that's like the outcome now to issues, of course number one is incredibly crass and in extremely poor taste to defy such a thing [00:28:00] and. And Interpol was I think a little tone deaf, you know offering that as a project because it was very quickly jumped on by the me. Yeah. I can't believe how horrible these people are really thinking but they're not wrong in that the right kind of crowdsourcing can in fact the almost prescient almost almost. Telepathic or psychic in its ability to predict some things but not all things and that's where I say. You want to have a managed portfolio of this stuff. So every now and then maybe more often than not the crowd will be wrong. But if you give them the chance to run lots of different things, you'll both encourage A diversity of opinion which leads to different kinds of solutions now, that's a good thing and probably a statistical. Draping over all the different possibilities so that eventually the right answer can come out. So I think those two ingredients probably could make it work, but I'm very speculative about this right now. And again the DARPA stories interesting cautionary tale because as soon as that became public it just that went away in a [00:29:00] hurry.   What happened to grants?   Ben:   just to go back you mentioned that until recently people do University Research  only had to write one Grant every few years was that because the great sizes were much larger. Were they getting money from outside sources? Why was that? What changed? Mason: Yeah, that's interesting cause and effect will bit muddled and you can find other people probably better explain this history. But my quick version is something like this the kinds of research that we're done in the University's the kind of research was much more skewed toward the basic end of things pencil and paper theoretical development. And also the let's just be frank we knew less than we know now. So coming up with new stuff is a larger maybe than it was before I know if that's fair but I think that's just some research part of it. Yeah. So well there there you go. So first of all, we were solving different problems right now though. We are taking on a lot of the problems that actually you to be done in Industry. The famous example, of course is Bell [00:30:00] Labs right out of which the transistor came these days. The transistor will be developed within University and to develop a transistor or something analogous to it requires significant infrastructure Investments, not just pencil and paper. So even though the theory behind some conductors came out of University the actual practice of it came out of bell labs and there have been plenty of other examples like this. So I think actually industry has skewed away from doing research. Although there's a bit of emotion back toward it now, but it's nowhere what it used to be and then necessarily universities have taken a non not out of a sense of obligation, but rather because it's you know, there's a void and they rush to fill. But to fill it we need more money. So where does the money come from either comes from profit centers or come from the government with the government reducing tax income and also research investments in trouble for the 1980s. Now there's a new kind of Gap. It's the research Gap. So for the most part Industries not doing it and when University does do it. [00:31:00] It's spending a lot of a server for just bringing the funding. Got it. So you'd also argue probably that the universities are you not the best place for this to be done? You know, there is a lot of my opinion a lot of value in companies developing intellectual property. They keep it to themselves. They can make a profit on it. That's a huge motivator. What we do need a verse These almost exclusively is open. We publish it and basically anyone can pick it up and use it.   What do you think of breakthrough starshot and philanthropy?   Ben:  that makes a lot of sense. You also mentioned that  farther in the past a lot. There was a lot of funding that was being done by wealthy individuals and you're an advisor for breakthrough starshot. I believe which as far as I can tell is almost entirely bankrolled by wealthy individuals it seems like. Breakthrough starshot is sort of something that in the past. We would have expected NASA to do. Do you think that what do you what do you think about this [00:32:00] shift? Do you think that the wealthy individuals are going to start filling in that Gap where the pros and cons there? Mason: Well, first of all, I think that's a lot of what think it's a fact a lot of wealthy people certainly in the US have been filling that Gap. They have been funding a lot of research more than in the past. The the cliche is you start your computer. Can you sell it you make a billion dollars in new investment with that you really care about which is space exploration and that that that pattern has been repeated over and over Elon Musk for sure. Jeff Bezos for blue origin and there's been plenty of examples of this so, I don't know maybe maybe it's more than just a cliche. But anyway the going back to this question of will private individual Step Up. We have to an extent but they all have a certain something in it for [00:33:00] themselves that that was always the case has always been the case for privately funded science. Remember there are foundations. Now that still do fund Sciences. There's not as much there used to be but there are still these foundations, right? So the question is what kind of science do you get when you have a billionaire from to your. There's always going to be some idiosyncrasy associated with it and what we can take the Breakthrough starshot project as an example. Personally. I think it's a fantastic project. And for those of you who don't know the Breakthrough starshot project consists of coming up with a 20-year plan to build a spacecraft that could launch again in 20 years and take maybe 20 years to reach the closest star Proxima Centauri or maybe Alpha Centauri with the goal of returning some science data. Another three or four years after that depending on the light travel time. So that's a long duration project meets almost at the scale of a medieval Cathedral. I doubt that many of us on The Advisory Board will even [00:34:00] be alive to see that data come back if it ever does so it's not dangerous undertaking. It probably makes sense for that reason for it to be privately funded or funded by something like, you know a church, but these days the church does not fund science that way so it's not not a critique, but it's just it doesn't do that. Yeah, the way that they may be used to fund building Cathedrals. So these large projects like Cathedrals or Starships probably deserve a special kind of funding one thing I've discovered about em, it's not my own Discovery plenty of other people know this as well. I was just late to realizing it. Congress wants to fund things that they can take credit for okay, so it's going to be 2 4 or 6 years time frame at most where they want to see a return on their investment their investment being stepping up to be sure that some product project is funded. But so that's their return on investment timeframe and industries return on investment time frames in the sale of months. It takes [00:35:00] something like a billionaire or some other kind of philanthropic effort to fund a project that is longer than a few years. So if we really have aspirations that lie along this axis this temporal axis that makes us want to get a result in decades from now. We're going to have to look for funding source. That is not something governmental throughly not up to Industry. So I think there's a place for private investment for foundations or philanthropic. God is definitely that kind of thing so that you're not going to get funded by you know, the Air Force. Let's say or by orbital Sciences Corporation of Northrop Grumman Corporation,   Concerns about philanthropic time scales   Ben:  one concern that I always have about.  Philanthropic efforts is as you said there has to be something in it for people and when you're not able to get sort of a return on investment that's in money. Sometimes I've seen people be less patient because they [00:36:00] want to see progress on on a shorter time  scale. Do you do worry about that at all? Mason: Well, you know as I said, there's always this risk if you have a single investor, let's say again some billionaire to be named later that he or she will pull out the funding based on some whim they decide rather than funding a Starship that rather fun to the purchase of a massive sculpture massive bronze bust of him or herself to be placed in his front yard. Who knows? Yeah, and I'm not speaking about Yuri Milner here. Let me say for my few interactions of him. He seems like a legitimately. Two passionate scientist you really does care about knowledge for the sake of humanity. But it's also clear that he wants to be known as the person who successfully they support this work and things nothing wrong with that. So just like other examples the past of philanthropic contributions. You you probably want your name attached to these discoveries and that's again, that's fine [00:37:00] with me.   Experience With Different Organizations   Ben: and  shifting gears a little bit. You've had your research funded by many different organizations both inside the government and in Private Industry. Have you had different experiences with that? And  which ones are your favorite or what did your favorite ones do and what is your least favorite ones do? Mason: So that's a long story. So I'm gonna give you an answer which sounds like I'm itself said during and that maybe that's correct. The answer is when you get left alone to do the job. It works really well. Now I totally understand that if let's say I'm a member of a government organization or industry. I need to feel that my money is being well spent I want to check in and I don't want to end up with a yoyodyne propulsion systems. If you remember the movie Buckaroo Banzai, you don't want that kind of contractor gone amok kind of phenomenon. I get that [00:38:00] at the same time too much micromanagement sort of defeats the purpose of doing fundamental research. You know, the whole idea is we don't have a thing yet. We need to create that thing and that Act of Creation is not something you can exactly legislator specify the requirements. So I'm a little uneasy at of the idea about the idea that very tight control over the act of invention is going to give you a good result at the same time. Yeah, you need to be responsible stewards of whatever money you're using to fund Sky research. So I see where that comes comes from. I don't want to give a specific example that's going to get me in trouble with the essential functions, but I will say it government agency a government agency collaborating with us on a project. The project involved a few technological innovations after we scoped out the project with this government agency, the the folks involved at the government agency and supervising our work decided that work was so cool. They want to do it themselves. So they went ahead and try to make themselves removing. [00:39:00] Most of what I viewed as the really Innovative parts of the work leaving us with some fairly wrote tasks which there were still paying for. So, I guess I'm kind of glad to take the money but. Then the problem was because he's relatively unimaginative tasks the government agency decided it would be very helpful for us to be very tightly supervised to do these simple tasks. They were very good at and that led to a lot of in my opinion wasted money on things some example for this example is we were building an object out of some official part. Some of you can find at a hardware store, right? The reason we were doing so is because those parts a lot of design margin that is to say you could you can pressurize them or you could add electricity or whatever it was and the parts would not fail. They were made for Consumer use their super safe and excessively over design and it which is great actually very safe. But the sponsor wanted us to do value in [00:40:00] all these with a super detailed analysis using what's known as finite element analysis element analysis where you break it into little mathematical chunks and put in the computer. They wanted us to test it. They want to do all sorts of things for parts. You could buy at the hardware store which you buy every day without thinking about because they're super safe because they're built that way that was a ton of a waste of time. So so that was a very negative experience I think. II chalk it up to my naive tank and working with that sponsor. I now know what kind of work to specify for that sponsor at the same time. It was not going to be a relationship of whatever worked. Well for what it's worth. We took that project and we're doing ourselves now and we've made more progress in the last. Two years that we did in the two years previous where they were helping us. I guess we'll call it. So I'm glad to say that research is doing well now but it's only because we have a few resources internally that we can use to spend on the stuff. I'd rather not end on a cynical no Opera offer positive [00:41:00] version this case so the positive version and I will create the big breakthrough starshot with this positive version of those of us working on The Advisory Board. Sometimes get some funding. From the the foundation to see what that will really pay for a service but with that money I can do lots of cool stuff. So I've been able to turn a few students to we're solving some problems of interest of breakthrough starshot it when we've got some great results. It doesn't actually take that much as long as we have the researchers have some freedom to pursue the work on our own terms. So if there's a lesson there it's something along the lines of you need a light touch. Normal gostin, the former CEO of Lockheed said the best way he's ever found to manage people this pick the right folks be clear about what you want and then get out of their way. Yeah, and that's that's lucky to that's not just some pie-in-the-sky academic like me saying that so there's something to this in the lesson learned again is to have a light touch   How do you change the 10 year goals 8 year political cycle mismatch?   Ben: excellent. And then  going back to [00:42:00] NASA briefly while I was working with you. I saw consistently that the executive branch would set tenure goals, but then. For political reasons those goals would change at most every eight years. And so you get this  progress towards this 10-year goals and then it would change. Do you see any way to change that sort of unfortunate situation? Mason: Well, there have been wasted proposed for example for NASA again since I know that example really well, it has been proposed even in this most recent Congress that NASA should be funded on a 10-year time frame and the idea would be that a a congress whatever the hundred and some odd Congress whatever it is would set the budget for NASA appropriate the funds and get out of the way. So the idea is that again once a decade, maybe you would check in and change the objectives. So this is I think most people recognize that the best way to run these long-term [00:43:00] projects. If you keep changing course every two to six or eight years, you just have chaos. This is one of the main reasons why things like the James Webb Space Telescope the International Space Station space shuttle, these all have given mass of the reputation of going over budget. But I have to defend NASA in this case because NASA really is able to defend itself on the spaces. It's not NASA. Okay, it's Congress if you have a project. That is complicated and takes a long time. There's a natural funding profile that goes with this. It's a little bit at first while you get your feet under you and then there's a big lump in the middle and that tails off toward the end. This is standard funding profile. But NASA's budget from Congress is flat. So you end up very inefficiently smearing this money across a very long time which makes things inefficient expensive things. Don't go. Well, you lose good people along the way and you end up spending more in the long. This story has been told over and over again and Congress. They're smart people. Well, actually you may not think so, but they are [00:44:00] in my experience. They know what they're doing and they know that they're going to trade off between the right answer and the politically expedient answer the politically expedient answer is as long as they can be seen to having their finger on the button for NASA there there there folks will vote for them. So you understand that's what motivates them. So I would say if there's a way to make this work. Well, it's something like. Come up with a way for they can where they can get credit for things are working. Well without necessarily having to change what's going on. Yeah, and I don't have an answer probably make that work if that were possible that makes a lot of sense.   What's the best way to make the world that has never been today?   Ben: So I realize we're coming up on time. One of the the last things I want to ask you about was that  some things that people might not have guessed about you is that you have a master's in English because. As your bio states that you thought that that was the way to make the world that has never been its by inspiring people with writing [00:45:00] and then you change track completely and well not completely but you figured out that engineering was sort of the best the best way to do that. Now, what what do you think? Do you still think that  what you think the best way to enable the world that has never been? In  today's here. And now Mason:  I like the way you're asking that question it recalls that quote from Theodore Von Karman, right distinction between science engineering scientists create the world's or huh, scientists discover the world that is Engineers create the world that never was it's not exactly a way of claiming that Engineers are better than scientist. Is that really what it's about is about distinguishing between these two impulses. We have discovering the unknown and creating. What doesn't exist in my opinion both contribute to improving our lot as humans, so there's a place for both in a reason to have both let's not confuse one with the other. I have always been about creating things. I [00:46:00] suppose I get this from my parents. My dad's a writer. My mom has created many things over the years. She was an artist. She has been a an actress and a brilliant Coco to restaurant. She's a very much a polymath when it comes to things of all. So I probably get this from them at some level but I've always taken not to be one of the the Essential Elements of what it is to be human is to create to lie. If your impact on the world in a positive way at least an impact at all and positive is my choice. Okay suppose people choose to do negative things. So what I'm saying is that that impulse is always been part of what matters to me. When I was a young naive person, I thought I could have that impact through English literature. I still interested in this I still interested in writing and reading and I respect people who can make a career out us for a thing, but it wasn't what I was good at. So instead I felt like aerospace engineering particularly offered me the opportunity to [00:47:00] solve problems that haven't been solved and to make an impact that I felt like making. So I guess over the years I've discovered there are definitely different ways of looking at the world one of the most the way that I look at it another one of the ways that people get the world is what's the safest way I can keep my job and not get fired. And those are very different impulses and and look I recognize that my perspective here maybe comes across as I don't know what to elitist or entitled or first world or something where I'm saying that it's great to have the freedom to create and make an impact on the world. I see I clearly tightly to that value. At the same time, I recognize that not everybody has that opportunity. Sometimes you just gotta make do you got to do what you can keep your family fed? Keep your shoes on your feet and you don't have the freedom the luxury of being able to do everything exactly the way you want it. So I recognize I'm very fortunate in my career my life. So I do not in any way put down people who haven't got the bandwidth simply to set assignments sided set aside time to create. [00:48:00] But that is what matters to me and I'm very fortunate that I have a job that allows me to do that. Yeah, well said.   Final Statements?   Ben: So I do realize we're over time this was  amazing by the way, so I just want to make sure that I there's any points that I didn't hit on absolutely want to give you a chance to talk about that. Mason: Well, I'm so glad that your interest in this question. How do we innovate? I will offer that when government works. Well, it enables people whatever works while it enables people to do their best in the service of our nation. Let's say when it doesn't work. Well it tries to prescribe to micro manage to get in the way so I am far from being an anti. It's very kind of person that I hope it doesn't come across. I think the right policies are essential. I mean policy you can look at is the software of our [00:49:00] lives here in an innovation when that software is written correctly the rules that we follow and we choose to follow they enable us to be successful when the software is not right everything falls apart. So, you know, I actually would not be averse to turning over some policy making the software Engineers because I think they have a sense of how to write good software and lawyers when they do their job. Well, you know that works out well too. Yeah, but unfortunately to be a software engineer and to affect society requires some additional kind of tranny. So if I want to close with a comment, it would be something along the lines of that. I don't see that much of a distinction in what people are capable of whether it's mathematics. Or history or philosophy or art or technology or science? These are all in my mind forms of the same thing. There are things of which we are all capable. I suppose there's some sabanci there who can do multi-digit multiplication in their heads, but I'm not interested in that because I have a computer. [00:50:00] So instead I take that multidisciplinary capability. We all have and my opinion were born with as a sign that. We shouldn't feel limited by what we think we're good at or not. And so those of you interested in creating an innovating don't feel that you are limited by what your label is if you're labeled as a software engineer, maybe policy is the right thing for you if your if your label Les a lawyer maybe you should think about going into space technology. I don't know. What I'm trying to say is that there's there's a lot of freedom that we all have for pursuing good ideas and we should take. Advantage of our rare position here at the beginning of the 21st century where we have these tools. We still have the resources. We wish to create we have this one chance. I think to make make our work right? Outro We got a lot out of this conversation. Here are some of my top takeaways. If you have an organization full of smart motivated people that doesn't produce great results. If all the incentives are set up to avoid [00:51:00] risk, there's been a shift in where different parts of the Innovation pipeline happen more is shifted to universities and startups away from larger companies and government but the systems of support having caught up to that change. Finally taking a portfolio approach to technology and Innovation is a powerful concept that we don't think about it enough. I hope you enjoyed that you'd like to reach out. You can find me on Twitter under app and Reinhart and I deeply appreciate any feedback you might have. Thank you.  

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Avi Meir, CEO of TravelPerk (www.travelperk.com) a Barcelona-based startup that is re-inventing business travel. TravelPerk recently raised a $44 million Series C led by Sweden’s Kinnevik, Russian billionaire and DST Global founder Yuri Milner and Tom Stafford. Prior investors include Target Global, Felix Capital, Spark Capital, Sunstone, LocalGlobe and Amplo. In this episode, Avi talks about building to be global from day one, questions to ask investors to ensure the vision and exit expectations are aligned, how the Company is using it's location in Spain as a recruiting advantage, and much more.

2018 RubADickies - Vote at ufobusterradio.com November 10th through November 30th. http://ufobusterradio.com/2018-rubadickies A billionaire's plan to search for life on Enceladus Article Link: https://earthsky.org/space/billionaire-yuri-milner-nasa-plan-life-search-enceladus Russian entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner wants to send a probe back to Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus, to search for evidence of life there. NASA wants to help him. Saturn's moon Enceladus is very small – only about 310 miles (500 kilometers) across – but it may hold clues to one of the biggest mysteries of all time – are we alone?  Billionaire entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner wants to send a private mission back to this intriguing world, and NASA wants to help him. This incredible idea was first reported in New Scientist on November 8, 2018  Agreements signed by NASA and Milner's non-profit Breakthrough Starshot foundation in September show that the organisations are working on scientific, technical and financial plans for the ambitious mission. NASA has committed over $70,000 to help produce a concept study for a flyby mission.  The board of Breakthrough Initiatives includes billionaires Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, and the late physicist Stephen Hawking. Another proposed return mission to Enceladus is the Enceladus Life Finder (ELF), which would orbit Saturn and make repeated passes through the plumes – like Cassini. Breakthrough Initiatives projects are Breakthrough Listen will comprise an effort to search over 1,000,000 stars for artificial radio or laser signals. A parallel project called Breakthrough Message is an effort to create a message "representative of humanity and planet Earth".[1][2]The project Breakthrough Starshot aims to send a swarm of probes to the nearest star at about 20% the speed of light.  Show Stuff TeePublic Store - Get your UBR goodies today! http://tee.pub/lic/2GQuXxn79dg UBR Trurh Seekers Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/216706068856746 Manny Moonraker: https://www.facebook.com/MannyMoonraker/ UFO Buster Radio: https://www.facebook.com/UFOBusterRadio YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCggl8-aPBDo7wXJQ43TiluA Google Plus Manny's Updated Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MannyMoonraker To contact Manny: manny@ufobusterradio.com, or on Twitter @ufobusterradio  Call the show anytime at (972) 290-1329 and leave us a message with your point of view, UFO sighting, and ghostly experiences or join the discussion on www.ufobusterradio.com For Skype Users: bosscrawler

2018 RubADickies - Vote at ufobusterradio.com November 10th through November 30th. http://ufobusterradio.com/2018-rubadickies A billionaire's plan to search for life on Enceladus Article Link: https://earthsky.org/space/billionaire-yuri-milner-nasa-plan-life-search-enceladus Russian entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner wants to send a probe back to Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus, to search for evidence of life there. NASA wants to help him. Saturn's moon Enceladus is very small – only about 310 miles (500 kilometers) across – but it may hold clues to one of the biggest mysteries of all time – are we alone?  Billionaire entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner wants to send a private mission back to this intriguing world, and NASA wants to help him. This incredible idea was first reported in New Scientist on November 8, 2018  Agreements signed by NASA and Milner's non-profit Breakthrough Starshot foundation in September show that the organisations are working on scientific, technical and financial plans for the ambitious mission. NASA has committed over $70,000 to help produce a concept study for a flyby mission.  The board of Breakthrough Initiatives includes billionaires Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg, and the late physicist Stephen Hawking. Another proposed return mission to Enceladus is the Enceladus Life Finder (ELF), which would orbit Saturn and make repeated passes through the plumes – like Cassini. Breakthrough Initiatives projects are Breakthrough Listen will comprise an effort to search over 1,000,000 stars for artificial radio or laser signals. A parallel project called Breakthrough Message is an effort to create a message "representative of humanity and planet Earth".[1][2]The project Breakthrough Starshot aims to send a swarm of probes to the nearest star at about 20% the speed of light.  Show Stuff TeePublic Store - Get your UBR goodies today! http://tee.pub/lic/2GQuXxn79dg UBR Trurh Seekers Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/216706068856746 Manny Moonraker: https://www.facebook.com/MannyMoonraker/ UFO Buster Radio: https://www.facebook.com/UFOBusterRadio YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCggl8-aPBDo7wXJQ43TiluA Google Plus Manny's Updated Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MannyMoonraker To contact Manny: manny@ufobusterradio.com, or on Twitter @ufobusterradio  Call the show anytime at (972) 290-1329 and leave us a message with your point of view, UFO sighting, and ghostly experiences or join the discussion on www.ufobusterradio.com For Skype Users: bosscrawler

Sam Blond is Chief Sales Officer @ Brex, the startup that provides corporate cards for startups. To date they have raised over $57m in funding from the likes of Y Combinator, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner, Elad Gil and many more incredible names. Prior to Brex, Sam Was Chief Revenue Officer at Rainforest QA. Before Rainforest, Sam saw firsthand the hypergrowth scaling of Zenefits as VP of Sales where he saw the company grow from 18 employees and $1m in ARR to over 1,800 employees and over $70m in ARR. Sam got his start in the SaaS industry with Jason Lemkin @ Echosign as Director of Sales. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Sam made his way into the world of sales and came to join Jason Lemkin with his first role in sales at Echosign? Why does Sam believe that more sales reps does not always equal more revenue? What are the benchmarks that suggest founders really need to add to their sales team? Does Sam agree Founders should be selling up to $1m in ARR? How does Sam assess who is the best person to hire for the role? What have been Sam’s lessons on what it fundamentally takes to attract the best talent? In the early days how does Sam think about both role allocation and whether to hire the young jack of all trades vs the more senior executive? Why does Sam believe that founders need to spend more time on top of funnel? Why does Sam believe that not all opportunities are created equal? How does Sam think about the right structure and time it should take to pass from lead to MQL to SAL to opportunity to deal? Where does this most commonly breakdown? Why does Sam believe the key to success in SaaS sales teams is “urgency”? Literally, how can reps instil a sense of urgency in their current pipeline? Why does Sam disagree with the conventional wisdom and say discounting is a great tool? How does Sam determine the right level of discount to give? How does Sam assess pilots as an alternative approach to getting leads over the line?   Sam’s 60 Second SaaStr What does Sam know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Quality or quantity of logos in the early days? Sales rep productivity, what does Sam believe is good? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Sam Blond

Today’s show brings us two fascinating guests.  Alex Lintner is President of Consumer Information Services for Experian, and Sasha Orloff -- who is a previous guest on Barefoot Innovation -- is founder and CEO of LendUp. They recently joined forces to explore using new kinds of data to widen financial inclusion. We all sat down to discuss it at the LendIt conference this spring in San Francisco. Credit scores are a great tool for evaluating the creditworthiness of many consumers, but as Alex explains, not for all of them. He and Sasha think -- as do I -- that we need a fuller view into what Alex calls the consumer’s financial “reputation.” Experian estimates that 100 million people in America need this kind of broadened evaluation. We know that many consumers with low or no credit scores are actually creditworthy, and in fact could prove it if we had systems that could look closely at their financial behaviors and situations beyond reported credit history. Traditionally, though, we didn’t have efficient ways to get that information because, in the analog age, when the current systems were designed, data was scarce and costly. Today, in contrast, we have massive volumes of digital information we can access and analyze, instantly and efficiently. This creates the ability to do what used to be impossible -- make financial services more inclusive, without sacrificing lending soundness. Toward that goal, LendUp and Experian undertook a joint research project to look at the benefits of capturing data on customers’ performance on single-payment loans. The study produced really striking results -- the overwhelming majority of consumers in the study came out with positive impacts on their credit scores. And as Alex explains, single-payment loans are just one kind of nontraditional data. In today’s digitized world, there are many other factors that we can begin to capture methodically and build into routine credit scores. Experian is now routinely doing this, offering a new score called Clear Early Risk. In our conversation, Alex and Sasha share insights drawn from their own lives and talk about the many situations in which people have trouble accessing credit when they need it. Some of these consumers are young people or new immigrants with thin or no credit file. Some are facing life changes like a family death or divorce. Some are contending with emergencies like loss of a job or medical bills. Our discussion also tied these kinds of individual challenges into big shifts underway overall in lifestyle and in technology -- the advent of mobile financial services, the rise of the gig economy, and expanding use of artificial intelligence.  In addition, we touched on the future of the Community Reinvestment Act, which is due for much-needed, tech-driven modernization. Using alternative credit risk data has complex implications for fair lending regulation, especially in the US and especially regarding “disparate impact.”  US policy bars use of credit practices that have a disproportionate adverse effect on “protected classes” like women and minorities, unless the lender can demonstrate a business need and show that less-discriminatory alternatives are not available. The criteria for proving this are not clear today, and I’m among the many people who think that clarifying them is essential to expanding financial inclusion by fostering use of new data. Despite having the best of intentions, policymakers have inadvertently made hard-to-score consumers the riskiest market to serve, due to the regulatory risk arising from uncertainty. That chills efforts to address these customers’ needs by many mainstream and high-quality lenders. The CFPB is exploring this issue through its evaluation of alternative data and issuance of a “no action letter” for Upstart. A similar effort is underway, also, at the new nonprofit FinRegLab, which is run by Melissa Koide and funded by the Omidyar Network. I chair FinRegLab’s board, and we’re conducting empirical testing of alternative data -- specifically cash flow underwriting -- including how these new methods relate to disparate impact. Today’s show is a glimpse of a promising future, harnessing innovative technology to produce lending that is more inclusive, and also more sound. More Links Episode Transcription Podcast with Al Ko - Episode recorded last year with Al Ko of Intuit LendUp Infograph Alternative Credit Data trends and reports Op-Ed by Sasha on innovation in credit scoring More on Sasha and Alex Sasha Orloff is CEO and co-founder of LendUp. LendUp’s mission is to provide anyone with a path to better financial health. The company builds technology, credit products, and educational experiences that haven’t existed before for the emerging middle class -- the 56% of Americans shut out of mainstream banking due to poor credit or income volatility. It has originated more than $1 billion in loans. With offices in San Francisco, CA and Richmond, VA, LendUp is backed by debt and equity financing from venture and social impact investors including Y-Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Victory Park Capital and Yuri Milner’s Startfund. In June, both Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman of QED Investors joined the LendUp board of directors. Prior to founding LendUp, Sasha held roles in risk management, finance, online acquisitions and customer insights on Citi’s consumer credit team, and most recently served as Senior Vice President on Citigroup's Venture Capital team. He previously worked for the Grameen Foundation Technology Center and The World Bank. He has a B.S. in applied math and economics from the University of California, San Diego and an MBA from Georgetown University. Alex Lintner is President of Experian’s Consumer Information Services, overseeing the company’s US consumer credit bureau and the National Consumer Assistance Centre (NCAC). He’s responsible for all aspects of Experian’s consumer credit activities within the business-to-business marketplace, including delivery and management of value-added credit risk, marketing, and collection products to help clients manage and optimize their customer relationships. Alex was previously CEO and President of Vertafore, a $450+ million revenue insurance industry technology provider. Prior to that he was President of Intuit’s Global Business Division and also Senior Vice President of Strategy, Government Affairs and Corporate Development. He’s also spent 15 years as a consultant, starting as a Business Analyst at Dr. Hoefner & Partners in Munich, Germany and later serving as Vice President of The Boston Consulting Group in their London and San Francisco offices. More for our listeners Our next guest on the show will be another community bank CEO, Mike Butler of Radius Bank in Boston.  Upcoming episodes include a fascinating conversation with Congressman Gregory Meeks on financial innovation and policy; a talk I recorded this year at LendIt with my friend Greg Kidd of Global ID; and three discussions with regtech firms -- JWG in London, Compliance.ai, and Alloy. Speaking of LendIt, I was a guest this month on Peter Renton’s Lend Academy podcast, and he’ll be on our show soon as well. I was also a guest in June on the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation podcast, CFTC Talks, with Andy Busch. And here are my two podcasts with the CFTC, one with Chairman Giancarlo and a recent one with innovation head Dan Gorfine. It’s not too early to register for the fall’s premier fintech event, Money 2020, in October in Las Vegas. I’ll again be MC for the regulatory track, which, remember, is on Sunday -- be sure to plan accordingly!  I’ll also be speaking on the Revolution Stage, which is new this year, about regulation innovation. Also watch for Regtech Rising in December, which I’m helping to plan. We’ll also be posting information on my collaboration with Brett King on his new book on the future of finance -- we’ll have a show and events on that as well, and I’ll be a guest on Brett’s great radio show Breaking Banks this week, on July 5. Please remember to give Barefoot Innovation a five-star rating on iTunes to help us expand the show. I hope you’ll sign up to get emails that bring you the newest podcast, newsletter, and blog posts, at www.jsbarefoot.com.  Follow me on Twitter and our Facebook fan page. And please send in your “buck a show” to keep Barefoot Innovation going! SUPPORT OUR PODCAST Until next time, keep innovating! Subscribe Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you!

“Who are we?” That impossible question opened the 2015 public letter announcing a well-heeled SETI project called Breakthrough Listen. Dozens of people—scientists, astronauts, and also a producer, a chess champ, and a soprano—signed the note, which kicked off a $100 million effort by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to catch signals from alien civilizations. That quest, Milner and the signatories hoped, would answer that existential query.

Mike Matthews talks about Trump in Japan, the Texas church shooting suspect, the billionaire investor Yuri Milner, and the Apple iPhone X selling out. Plus it’s Madame Rootabega, Valentino, and Bison Bentley. Next show it's Chely Shoehart, Floyd the Floorman, and John Deer the Engineer.

Mike Matthews talks about Trump in Japan, the Texas church shooting suspect, the billionaire investor Yuri Milner, and the Apple iPhone X selling out. Plus it’s Madame Rootabega, Valentino, and Bison Bentley. Next show it's Chely Shoehart, Floyd the Floorman, and John Deer the Engineer.

Are we alone? The nearly sixty-year effort to answer that question has gotten a big boost from the Breakthrough Initiatives, funded by Yuri Milner and led by former NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden, who is our guest this week.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rahul Mehta is a Managing Partner @ DST, one of the world's leading late stage venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and Alibaba just to name a few of the incredible companies they have backed. As for Rahul himself, he leads the firm's efforts in the US, Indonesia and India where he led deals in Snapchat, Slack, Ola Cabs, Houzz and Zalando. As a result of this incredible portfolio, Rahul was listed to the Forbes Midas List in 2016. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Rahul made the way from tech investment banking to one of the leading growth funds of all time with Yuri Milner investing in Facebook? 2.) Having invested in the likes of Facebook, Snap and Alibaba, how does Rahul assess the leadership teams of some of today's leading players? What makes them the great leaders they are? How can leaders look to make the transition from Founder to CEO? 3.) Why does Rahul argue that founder led businesses are always best? What are the fundamental benefits to this? What hurdles do they have to face to remain CEO for the duration? Where does Rahul see commonalities of CEO's struggling? 4.) How does Rahul look to assess unit economics? What does Rahul have to see in the market to see the long term sustainability of unit economics? Why do companies sometimes have to have poor unit economics in the beginning? 5.) How does Rahul assess the balance of building competitive barriers to entry or focussing on aggressive expansion and being first to market? How does this differ according to sector and funding? How will this change in the future? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Rahul’s Fave Book: Open by Andre Agassi Rahul's Most Recent Investment: Wish As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rahul on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. WePay helps online platforms increase revenue through integrated payments processing, helping platforms offer ROI-positive integrated payments to their users - within their UX and without taking on fraud & regulatory exposure. WePay also offers award-winning support and can even work with your team thru Slack or Zendesk. Get the payments revenue you want, without getting bogged down every time a user has a payments question. Simply visit wepay.com/harry PipeDrive is the Sales CRM and pipeline management software to use, with the primary view being the pipeline a clear visual interface that prompts you to take action, remain organized and stay in control of a complex sales process. This is why sales pros and deal makers love it (my words, not Pipedrive’s). Plus it easily lets you find the stats you need and is fully customizable. Even better, you can signup for free on here it really is a must.

Stream Episodes on demand from www.bitesz.com or www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com (both mobile friendly) *Organic material discovered on Ceres Evidence of organic material has been found on the dwarf planet Ceres. A report in the journal science claims the detection by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft adds to a growing list of solar system bodies found to contain organic materials which are key building blocks for life as we know it. *NASA's Europa Flyby Mission Moves into Design Phase A mission to examine the habitability of Jupiter's ocean-bearing moon Europa is taking one step closer to the launch pad, with the completion of a major NASA review. The Europa mission spacecraft would launch in the 2020's, arriving in the Jupiter system several years later. *How to stop when we reach Alpha Centauri Scientists have worked out a way to slowdown and stop once spacecraft finally reach our nearest interstellar neighbour Alpha Centauri. In April last year, Russian physicist and billionaire Yuri Milner together with British scientist Steven Hawking announced the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative to fly a swarm of tiny spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system -- 4.37 light years away -- with in our lifetimes. *Ariane 5’s first launch this year The first Ariane 5 launch for 2017 has successfully blasted into orbit carrying two new telecommunications satellites. Arianespace flight VA235 launched from the European Space Agency’s Kourou spaceport in French Guiana into cloudy skies.If you're enjoying SpaceTime, please help out by sharing and telling your friends. The best recommendation I can get is one from you. Thank you... #astronomy #space #science #technology #news #astrophysics #NASA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/spacetime. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

完整文本在公众微信账号：贵旅特（shanghai_greeters) 回复关键词－edge。FB粉丝页：Fly with Lily微信英语班课程顾问微信号：meisi2017You have to travel globally today to know what's going on and maintain an edge.——Yuri Milner如今你不得不全球旅行，来了解各国情形势，并保持这一优势。——尤里 米尔纳

Stream Episodes on demand from www.bitesz.com or www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com (both mobile friendly) *Strange rare galaxy discovered Astronomers have found an unusual ring galaxy unlike anything ever seen before. The galaxy appears to include a well-defined elliptical-like core surrounded by two circular rings. *The universe’s most powerful cosmic particle accelerator discovered Two of the most powerful phenomena in the universe, a supermassive black hole and the collision of giant galaxy clusters, have combined to create one of the most powerful cosmic particle accelerators ever seen. The spectacle is showing scientists what happens when matter ejected by a giant black hole is swept up in the merger of two enormous galaxy clusters. *Discovery of the missing link between pulsars and magnetars Astronomers have found the missing link between neutron star pulsars and highly magnetic neutron stars known as magnetars. The study is based on the discovery of a neutron star called PSR J1119 -6127which appears to be in a never before seen transition phase between pulsar and magnetar. *First results from the Parkes telescope’s latest search for ET Breakthrough Listen – a ten year 100 million dollar astronomical search for intelligent life beyond Earth has announced its first observations using the CSIRO’s Parkes Radio Telescope. The project was launched in 2015 by theoretical physicist and Internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner together with fellow physicist Stephen Hawking. *World’s highest capacity broadband satellite launched A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket has successfully blasted into orbit carrying the EchoStar XIX telecommunications satellite. The new bird will be the world’s highest capacity broadband satellite providing increased high speed internet services across North America If you're enjoying SpaceTime, please help out by sharing and telling your friends. The best recommendation I can get is one from you. Thank you... #astronomy #space #science #technology #news Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/spacetime. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ryan Petersen is the Founder and CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarder for the internet age. Flexport recently raised a phenomenal $65m Series B from the likes of Founders Fund, First Round, Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, Yuri Milner, Susa Ventures and more incredible investors. With none other than YC founder Paul Graham stating ‘Ryan has the rare ability to not just satisfy the market but grow it’. Prior to Flexport, Ryan was Founder and CEO of ImportGenius.com, the largest provider of business intelligence to the import-export industry.   In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ryan came to found Flexport? What was the a-ha moment for him? 2.) Why does Ryan believe it is crap that MBA's do not make good entrepreneurs? How did Ryan design his life to be an entrepreneur without the opportunity to work for someone else? 3.) How has Ryan found the experience of being a single founder? What are the pros and cons? What was the investor reaction? What does Ryan advise other single founders? 4.) How did Ryan find the fundraising for the latest $65m raise? What did he do well? What would he like to improve upon for later rounds? How did he educate investors without being patronising? 5.) Why does Ryan want to see boards be rethought? What is so inefficient about boards? When did Ryan gain his board? What would Ryan advise fellow founders on building a board? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ryan's Fave Blog: SaaStr As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ryan on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. So many problems start with your head: stress, depression, anxiety, fear of the future. What if there was some kind of exercise you could do, that would help you get your head in shape. That’s where the Headspace app comes in. Headspace is meditation made simple. The Headspace app provides guided meditations you can use whenever you want, wherever you want, on your phone, computer or tablet. They have sessions focused on everything from dealing with stress and depression, to helping you eat more mindfully. So download the Headspace app and start your journey towards a happier, healthier life. Learn more at headspace.com/20vc. That’s headspace.com/20vc. Xero is beautiful, easy-to- use online accounting software for small businesses. With Xero, you can easily manage your accounting anytime, anywhere from your computer or mobile device.When you add Xero to your small business you are able to: Send online invoices and get paid faster. Get an instant view of your cash flow. Track your payroll and keep tabs on your inventory. Partner with your accountant and bookkeeper in real time whenever you like. You can also customize your Xero experience with over five hundred business apps, including advanced solutions for point-of- sale, time tracking, ecommerce and more. Sign up for a free thirty-day trial at Xero.com/twentyVC

Ryan Petersen is the Founder and CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarder for the internet age. Flexport recently raised a phenomenal $65m Series B from the likes of Founders Fund, First Round, Felicis, Bloomberg Beta, Yuri Milner, Susa Ventures and more incredible investors. With none other than YC founder Paul Graham stating ‘Ryan has the rare ability to not just satisfy the market but grow it’. Prior to Flexport, Ryan was Founder and CEO of ImportGenius.com, the largest provider of business intelligence to the import-export industry. A huge hand to Chad Byers @ Susa and Jason Lemkin for the intro In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Ryan make her way into the world of SaaS and come to found Flexport? How does Ryan view NPS? Why is he so bullish? Why is it the most important metric? What are the downsides to relying on NPS? What is the optimal method to structure internal compensation structures? Why is compensation based on NPS and Net not effective and what are the dangers of this? How can founders look to implement bottoms up decision making in their organisation? What are the benefits of this and what are the challenges to it’s implementation? Ryan is hiring his first VP of Marketing? What should founders look for in their VP of Marketing? Why is now the right time and what challenges has Ryan faced in the process? 60 Second SaaStr Fave SaaS reading material? What does Ryan know now that he wishes he had known when he started? What has been his biggest learning throughout the Flexport journey? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Ryan Petersen

Last month, China successfully launched a new space station, the Tiāngōng 2 which means "Heavenly Palace 2". It's 47 feet long and 14 feet wide, designed for a crew of 2, with life support for 30 days.  It's a prototype, part of the People's Republic of China's goal to create a third generation space station similar to the Russian Mir space station.  The Soviet Union built Mir in space over 10 years between 1986 and 1996. Mir was de-orbited in a controlled manner.  This space station is iteration 2 of Tiāngōng 1. Unlike the Mir, this baby coming back down to Earth out of control.  That's right, a year from now the weather prediction somewhere on Earth will be chance of rain of steel. Make sure to dress properly.  Yeah, the odds of hitting a populated area is low.   If you are going to launch something into space, you should probably consider, and maybe even plan for where your junk is going to go.  As of July 2013, there are over 170 million objects orbiting the earth that are under a centimeter in size, 670,00 in the 1 to 10 cm and 29,000 being larger than that. Look up at the night sky, and you will inevitably see 1 of 1419 satellites go by.  Look, going anywhere into space is not easy.  With everything going for it, SpaceX has had it's own disasters.  5 days before China's successful Tiāngōng 2 launch, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on the launch pad.  Nobody got hurt, but it was a loss of over a quarter billion dollars.  The explosion took the AMOS-6 satellite with it. This was a Facebook project to provide 14 African countries with free Internet access.  The root cause at this point appears to be the a large breach in the cryogenic helium system.  Some are suspecting sabotage, with an image of an unidentified object near the rocket just before the explosion.  Conspiracy theorists have been liking this one. There is now a video on YouTube showing an unidentified flying object flying past the rocket at the same time as the explosion took place.  Although there was a lot of fire, it really wasn't an explosion, more like a flame that started at the top, rapidly moving down, engulfing the entire rocket.  The YouTube video is called UFO Destroys SpaceX Rocket On Launch Pad. If the object is actually flying over the rocket, It would be just a few feet across in size.  Let's assume that it is for arguments sake.  This thing is really moving, showing up in only seven frames of the video. The explosion takes place just prior to the UFO flying directly over the Falcon 9. This could be explained if the object had fired something at the rocket, right before the fly by.  Let's also assume that the object is not being flown by tiny aliens. This leaves very few possibilities, as to what it can be, other than a drone.  You may think that drones can't go that fast right? Well, considering that some commercial drones can move at over a hundred miles an hour, a custom built one, may very well be able to go much faster.  Again, this is assuming the video isn't a fake.  The implication here is of course sabotage. Yes, it's a leap, but what the hell. Let's see where this takes us.  If it's sabotage, then how, why, who?  Lets start with the why. That one is easy, money. If this is corporate sabotage, thus it's likely about money. Yes, we are taking all kinds of leaps today.  So then who. Who would benefit the most from this hit? Not Facebook. They lost their satellite. In the words of Mark Zuckerberg, "As I'm here in Africa, I'm deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided so much connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent."  The alleged drone looks like it fired something at the rocket, so that would mean it was an armed drone.  So, the scenario now is that a pilot remotely controlled the armed drone and fired something at it while moving at high speed, at precisely the moment when the rocket was vulnerable, and at exactly the right spot to blow it up.  Sounds pretty fantastic doesn't it?  There are excellent drone pilots out there. Just google drone racing, and you will see drone pilots conduct some radical maneuvers at high speed through hoops, obstacle courses, and parking garages.  There are now drone racing leagues cropping up all over the place. It's about to get telivision coverage.  Their drones however are not armed and dangerous.  That would require someone who has both the skills to fly a drone super fast, and simultaneously be able to fire a weapon, targeting a very specific target, at precisely the right time.  An armed drone that can fire something with precision while moving at high speed, sounds like military level expertise.  Or, the drone could be programmed with an AI with one mission in mind. Sounds pretty advanced.  //-What if it's a kid, thinking he or she is playing a video game. Whoa, that opens up a lot more leaps. Enders Game.  Who has military drone capabilities? Countries, like Iran, China, Russia could do it, but why? They want to slow down the American space program, at the risk of looking like wimps for taking the route of sabotage if found out? The motive just isn't there.  Does SpaceX have competitors? Yes, one in particular stands out, United Launch Alliance (ULA).  ULA is a joint venture between Lockhead Martin Space Systems and Boing Defense, Space and Security. Sounds military doesn't it. Military in Space even.  Could we be witnessing corporate star wars? Or maybe it's a military control mindset. We can't have this Elon Musk take over the Universe and hold the world hostage for 1 million dollars.  Let's see, ULA held a monopoly over military launches for over a decade, until SpaceX was awarded a GPS satellite contract to SpaceX earlier this year.  That's right, on April 27th, The US Air Force awarded SpaceX an 83 million dollar contract to launch a GPS satellite. This contract effectively broke ULA's monopoly that Lockhead Martin and Boeing held for over a decade.  If SpaceX rockets keep blowing up, then they would be in a great position to remonopolize, if that's even a word.  By the way, the military GPS contract SpaceX won, won't be launched until May, 2018.  ULA didn't even compete to win the contract. Their Atlas Rocket uses Russian-made engines. This has been an issue since Russia's annexation of Crimea.  SpaceX successfully lobbied to ban the Russian engines.  This opened up a huge market for them.  By banning the Russian engines, ULA would have to use their Delta rockets. These would be 35% more expensive to launch than SpaceX rockets.  The stage is set. ULA vs. SpaceX.  Some think rivalry is healthy, and competition is good. Launching a drone to kill your competition however, would be lame, thus not likely.  SpaceX may now have to mitigate a new risk for future launches. Sabotage from the competition, real or not.  Drone defenses do exist. SkyDroner is a camera that can detect an approaching drone, and can hijack it mid flight, and land it.  Of course, nobody is accusing anyone. This is just a story. It's an awesome story though...  OK, so there is motive, money.  How about Opportunity?  ULA roof is line of sight... OK, enough about ULA, other than to say they've done a great job in supporting the US in space for 50 years. They have a strong code of ethics that would prevent them from engaging in anything like this.  Besides, if it were sabotage, there are other suspects conspiracy theorists are pointing the finger at.  Johny Depp, out of jealousy. Peter Thiel, from a grudge back in the Paypal days. Thanks for the leads Clair McNear.  Jeff Besos could be a suspect. He recently exposed his rocket to prove his is bigger than Elon Musks. Jeff isn't keen on going to Mars. He thinks it's just another gravity well like earth. Getting into space is difficult enough without having to recreate the problem. He would rather see people live on space stations and mine asteroids.  Anyways, it's interesting to speculate. The only thing we know for sure is that a new space race is brewing.  China's space program is about to take advantage of an opportunity. The International Space Station is scheduled to retire in 2024. This would leave China with the only space station in orbit.  Even though their first space station is about to rain down back to Earth, they plan to send more, with the goal of having a fully functional space station in 2024, right when the ISS retires.  China's space station will be the combination of several modules, with several docking ports. They are planning to have a 20 tone module in orbit by 2022. If they succeed they will be the second nation since Russia, to have an orbiting station.  Unlike the International Space Station, China isn't sharing much about the project.  Whatever, the real stars are in the private sector anyways.  Boeing's CEO said earlier this month that he plans on going toe to toe with newcomers such as billionaire Elon Musk in the next era of space exploration and commerce.  He envisions a Jetson-Like future where space-travel happens between continents on Earth in under 2 hours. He also wants to go to Mars first. The race to space is on people. It's a safe bet that we are about to become a multi-planetary species.  This race will open up space like never before. The solar system is going to become our new backyard.  And, while the race is on to own the solar system, others are working on getting us to planets outside our solar system.  Yuri Milner, a Billionaire Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist, dropped a $100 million dollars to fund Breakthrough Starshot. The goal is to send a bunch of micro drones to our neighbor star system, Alpha Centauri to hunt for Alien life.  Using solar sails, they would be traveling at 20% the speed of light. This would allow the tiny drones to reach an exoplanet located there called Proxima Centauri B.  This planet is orbiting it's sun in the habitable zone. And, a recent study from the University of Marseilles and the Carl Sagan Institute suggest it may be up to 50% water.  Although the planet is similar to earth in size, it's much closer to it's sun. A solar year is 11 days. Imagine having a birthday every 11 days?  It's sun is a red dwarf which is way smaller than our sun. It may appear in the sky as a permanent red sunset. It's unclear yet if it is rotating fast enough not to always have the same side facing it, but liquid water sounds possible. This also means that alien life could also possible exist on this water world.  The only way to know for sure is to send our very own deep space drones. 

Talk a bit about crazy things that have been happening at the Olympics. Dave’s been getting into Space Kerbal. Space X testing the entire airframe? We also discuss Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Iniatatives. Then we taste test Rock Star’s Cucumber energy drink and the Crystal Pepsi. Giant Misshapen Penis Flowers are blooming. Be sure to leave a review on iTunes, as well as share this episode on Facebook www.facebook.com/verbalassaultpodcast and support us on Patreon. We have a new way to contact us via Speak Pipe https://www.speakpipe.com/VerbalAssault

We've sent humans to the moon. We've sent probes to every planet in our solar system. But we've never tried to go to another star before. Yuri Milner has launched the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative to do just that: send man-made probes to the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light years away. Casey and Scott dive into this initiative, what it will take to make it happen technically, economically, and what it means for human space exploration.

Sasha Orloff is the CEO and Co-founder of LendUp, a fintech startup offering online and mobile personal loans and credit cards in the United States. Prior to launching LendUp Sasha was on the other side of the table as a VC with Citi Group’s corporate venture capital arm. On the topic of VC funding, LendUp raised an incredible $150m in Jan 2016 from likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner our friends at Susa and Google Ventures just to name a few.  In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Sasha come to found LendUp following a stint in VC with Citi Group? 2.) What Sasha learnt from VC about running a successful startup and how he applied them to his founding of LendUp? 3.) Was it difficult leaving the security of a VC job to found a startup? Would you have done the same had you had children at the time? 4.) What trends in FinTech is Sasha most excited for? Why does Sasha think banks are in so much trouble? Is there the potential to co-operate rather than replace banks? 5.) How was the fundraising process for Sasha? What was his preferred round and how did they differ from stag to stage? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Sasha’s Fave Book: Banker To The Poor Sasha’s Fave Blog: Sam Altman As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Sasha on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!   The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!      

enture capitalist Yuri Milner projects what it will take for humans to expand their understanding of space. A tiny device called a StarChip, weighing less than one gram, can be paired with a LightSail to make an unmanned "nanocraft," which can go much deeper into space than humans on a chemically fueled ship. Milner says nanocrafts face several challenges today, but should be feasible within 25-30 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nach der chaotischen und aufregenden letzten Folge geht es diesmal wieder etwas geordneter zu. Frank und Christopher steigen in die knallharte US-Politik ein und erklären, warum gerade so heftig um alte Interkontinentalraketen diskutiert wird. Zudem gab es einen spannenden Artikel über die NASA unter der Obama-Administration und die beiden reden darüber wie es mit der NASA in Zukunft weitergehen könnte. Es gibt auch einen kurzen Rückblick auf die spektakuläre Landung des Falcon9-Boosters und welche neuen Erkenntnisse es seit dem für SpaceX gibt. Auch das Projekt von Stephen Hawking und Yuri Milner, Starshot, wird ausführlich besprochen. Viel Spaß beim hören!

Penguins need to be counted, and scientists need your help counting them! PenguinWatch blends citizen science with cute penguins! Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner team up again to fund an extremely ambitious $100m research program to send probes to Alpha Centauri. A new chemical test could reveal whether fossilised bones were from pregnant – and therefore female – dinosaurs.   This episode contains traces of Stephen Hawking announcing the "Starshot" Breakthrough Initiative.

Get the coffee going, get the tea or a beverage of choice. Get in that comfy chair , settle in and get ready for an exceptional ride tonight. The legend returns: Stan Friedman is here.There is a new initiative put together by Stephen Hawking, the uber rich Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg called: Breakthrough Starshot. Essentially what they want to do is put one hundred million dollars behind a project that will launch a robobotic spacecraft at one fifth the speed of light to the Alpha Centauri star system, at a distance of 4.37 light years: or 25 trillion miles. In order to achieve this feat, they will utilize something called a starchip and lightsail. The idea is to propel the craft along by light. The weight of the craft would be less than a piece of paper.

Topics: Stephen Hawking and the Russian billionaire, Yuri Milner, want to send hundreds of tiny space probes to solar systems around other stars (exactly as Dr. Philip Lubin described to me a few months ago in the December 16, 2015 episode.) The project is called Breakthrough Starshot. Also: a Genetically Modified Mushroom will bypass GMO food rules through a regulatory loophole; IBM's Watson will advise and consult with cancer patients as well as with doctors; a British hospital live-streamed a surgery in virtual reality; insulin-making cells can be efficiently generated according to researchers at the Salk Institute; Blue CareOnDemand (from Blue Cross, Blue Shield) allows smartphone users access to a personal medical consultation with a doctor or nurse 24 hours a day any day of the year, for a price; Windows XP still powers 181 million computers around the world, which means it is more popular than all Apple computers combined. (Wake up, people. XP hasn't been supported for over two years. You are vulnerable to hackers. Upgrade to something.); and a listener email from Joseph. Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the April 20, 2016 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 30 minutes] Stephen Euin Cobb has interviewed over 350 people for his work as an author, futurist, magazine writer, ghostwriter, and award-winning podcaster. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he has also been a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. For the last ten years he has produced a weekly podcast, The Future And You, which explores (through interviews, panel discussions and commentary) all the ways the future will be different from today. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. Stephen is the author of an ebook about the future entitled: Indistinguishable from Magic: Predictions of Revolutionary Future Science.

Semana 2 – Un rayo láser gigante hacia tu estrella más cercana / Después de un titubeo, volvemos con los temas de ciencia más jugosos de esta semana (y la anterior). Un cohete reusable, la conexión entre el virus del zika y la microcefalia y un arrecife de coral en Colombia que sufrirá por acuerdos de paz son las notas cortas, pero el tema fuerte es el proyecto de exploración espacial Breakthrough Starshot, que Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner y Mark Zuckerberg anunciaron recientemente. ¿Qué les parecería llegar a Alpha Centauri en menos de 30 años? No suena nada mal. Desmenucemos este proyecto. Acompañen a Rodrigo Pacheco y Víctor Hernández a platicar sobre estos temas en este episodio de Historias Cienciacionales: el podcast. Nota: Para cuando publicamos este podcast, la votación para nombrar al bote de la NERC ha cerrado, y Boaty McBoatFace terminó en primer lugar. Veamos si hacen caso al clamor popular. Menú: Intro - 00:00 Cohete reusable - 01:01 Virus del Zika y microcefalia - 06:23 Arrecife de coral en Colombia - 11:31 Proyecto Starshot – 17:06 Bonus: El nombre de un nuevo buque de exploración antártica – 44:42 Música: Intro: Jazzy French de bensound.com Notas cortas: Instar (Instrumental) by Robin Allender que está licenciada bajo una Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License. Tema principal: Passage of Time (Duet) by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) (c) 2016 Licenciada bajo una licencia Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0): http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/52856 Ft: Doxent Zsigmond Fragmentos de video tomados de Youtube Este podcast es producido independientemente desde un lugar no determinado de la Ciudad de México. Conductores: Rodrigo Pacheco Víctor Hernández Edición: Víctor Hernández

On This Episode… A brief recap of the April 16th Aurora Alien Encounter and Manny's perspective on the overall success. The event included speakers such as Jim Marrs, Travis Walton (abductee and subject in the film Fire in the Sky), Nick Redfern, Tui Snider, Stephen Andrasko, and Noe Torres. In the O-Zone, we discuss project Starshot. The initiative led by Steven Hawkins and funded by billionaire investor Yuri Milner. The Starshot team hopes flotillas of miniprobes will eventually explore Alpha Centauri and other nearby star systems, studying the planets in those systems up close and searching for signs of life. But the nanocraft will first cut their teeth much closer to home. - See more at: Links: http://www.meetup.com/VORTEXAS/events/229151500/ http://vortexas.net/ O-Zone Link http://www.space.com/32558-starshot-interstellar-probes-alien-life-solar-system.html Music loops from DL Sounds websites. To contact Big O: dabigo82@gmail.com, or on Twitter @Big_O_Est_1982 To contact Manny: ufobusterradio@gmail.com, or on Twitter @ufobusterradio Call the show anytime at (972) 290-1329 and leave us a message with your point of view, UFO sighting, and ghostly experiences or join the discussion on www.ufobusterradio.com.