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Nick Lane
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- 2022-09-07
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- 2022-09-07
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“Because I think there's some level of inevitability that a wet rocky planet will give rise through the same processes to something very occlusive. I think this is not something I'd have thought a few years ago, but working with a PhD student at mine Stuart Harrison, he's been thinking about the genetic code. And we've just been publishing on that. There are patterns that you can discern in the code, or he has discerned in the code, that if you think about them in terms of we start with CO2 and hydrogen, and these are the first steps of biochemistry, you come up with a code which is very similar to the code that we see. So it wouldn't surprise me any longer if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code that was not very different to the genetic code that we have here without it just being.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at the level of bacteria not much variety. I think we would get how many times you say you want to run it a million times. I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you need a living planet. You need a planet which is capable of turning over its surface. It needs to be a planet with water. Needs to be capable of bringing those electrons from inside to the outside. It needs to turn over its surface. It needs to make that water work and turn it into hydrogen. So I think you need a living planet. But once you've got the living planet, I think the rest of it is kind of thermodynamics all the way.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn't like to say it's impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water is extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. So those things, and carbon is everywhere. So those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found a thousand life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's an inevitability in what happens in water, the chemistry that happens in water. Some will be immiscible with water and will form membranes and will form insoluble structures. And water's, nobody really understands water very well. And it's another big question. For experiments on the origin of life, what do you put it in? What kind of structure do we want to induce in this water? Because the last thing is likely to be is just kind of bulk water.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe millions of nanoseconds or picoseconds. We're talking about chemistry, which is happening quickly. But we still need to constrain those steps, but we've got a planet doing similar chemistry. You asked about a trajectory. The trajectory is the planetary trajectory. The planet has properties. It's basically, it's got a lot of iron at the center of it. It's got a lot of electrons at the center of it. It's more oxidized on the outside, partly because of the sun, and partly because the heat of volcanoes puts out oxidized gases. So the planet is a battery. It's a giant battery. And we have a float of electrons going from inside to outside in these hydrothermal vents. And that's the same topology that a cell has. A cell is basically just a micro version of the planet. And there is a trajectory in all of that. And there's an inevitability that certain types of chemical reaction are going to be favored over others.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like that view because I think that in a sense that's not very far away from what a hypothesis needs to do to be a testable hypothesis for the origin of life. You need to spell out here's each step and here's the experiment to do for each step. The idea that we can do it in the lab, some people say, oh, well, we'll have created life within five years, but ask them what they mean by life. We have a planet four billion years ago with these vent systems across the entire surface of the planet, and we have millions of years if we want it. I have a feeling that we're not talking about millions of years. I have a feeling we're talking about”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can really test it. So, the likelihood would be lost, but there will be some occasions where it survives. And yes, the idea that we can have sudden fairly abrupt changes in evolution, I think it's time for a rebirth.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the second thing is it gives rise to a completely different morphology. Does it work? And if it works, that can easily be a shift. But for it to be a speciation, for it to continue, for it to give rise to a different morphology over time, then it has to be perpetuated. So that shift, that change in that one gene has to work well enough that it is selected and it goes on.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Michael Levin is doing amazing work basically about the way in which electrical fields control development. And he's done some work with planarian worms, so flatworms, where he'll tell you all about this, so I won't say any more than the minimum, but basically you can cut their head off and they'll redevelop a different new head. But the head that they develop depends if you knock out just one iron pump in a membrane. So you change the electrical circuitry just a little bit, you can come up with a completely different head. It can be a head which is similar to those that diverge to 150 million years ago, or it can be a head which no one's ever seen before, a different kind of head. Now that is really, you might say, a hopeful monster. This is a kind of leap into a different direction. The only question for natural selection is, does it work? Is the change itself feasible as a single change? And the answer is yes, it's just a small change to a single gene.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's called a hopeful monster. It doesn't work Principle it can. Actually, it turns out I would say that this is due a reemergence. There's some amazing work from Michael Levin. I don't know if you came across him, but if you haven't interviewed him, you should interview him. About, yeah.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's about as close. This is not a definition, but this is a kind of a description of life to parasitize the environment, and that goes for plants as well as animals and bacteria and viruses to make a relatively exact copy of themselves, informationally exact copy of themselves.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I immediately have a problem with the word self sustaining because it's sustained by the environment and I know what they're getting at. I know what they're trying to say, but I pick a hole in that. And there's always Wags who say, but by that definition, a rabbit is not alive, only a pair of rabbits would be alive because a single rabbit is incapable of copying itself. There are all kinds of pedantic silly but also important objections to any hypothesis. The real question is what is, you know, We can argue all day or people do argue all day about is a virus alive or not? And it depends on the content. Most biologists could not agree about that. So then what about a jumping gene, a retro element or something like that? It's even simpler than a virus, but it's capable of... Converting its environment into a copy of itself.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously bad in one way or another. I can never remember the exact words that people use, but there's a NASA working definition of life, which more or less says a system which is capable of self-sustaining system capable of evolution or something along those lines.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the question's kind of both impossible to answer and trivial at the same time, and I don't like to answer it because I don't think there is an answer. I think we're trying to describe”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing happened for two billion years And after two billion years, we see another single event, origin, if you like, of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cells, so cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside. Another singular origin. It only happened once in the history of life on Earth. Maybe it happened multiple times and there's no evidence everything just disappeared. But we have to at least take it seriously that there's something that stops bacteria from becoming more complex because they didn't. You know, that's a fact that they emerged four billion years ago and something happened two billion years ago, but the bacteria themselves didn't change. They remain bacterial. So there is no trajectory necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It's very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that a planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you think about the world from the point of view of bacteria, and bacteria are the first things to emerge. Whatever environment they came from, and they dominated the planet very, very quickly, and they haven't really changed. Four billion years later, they look exactly the same.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things happened, which is not a bad thing because it means that you have to go out and do some experiments and try and demonstrate that it's possible or not possible.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we know? Unless we've got an intellectual framework that says this is a stepping stone and that's not a step, you know, we'd never know. We wouldn't know which environment to go to, what to look for, how to say this. So all we can ever hope for, because we're never going to build that time machine, is to have an intellectual framework that can explain step-by-step, experiment by experiment, how we go from a sterile, inorganic planet to living cells as we know them. And in that framework, every time you have a choice, it could be this way or it could be that way. Or, you know, there's lots of possible forks down that road. Did it have to be that way? Could it have been the other way? And would that have given you life with very different properties? And so if you come up with, it's a long hypothesis because as I say, we're going from really simple prebiotic chemistry all the way through to genes and molecular machines. That's a long, long pathway. And nobody in the field would agree on the order in which these”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is precisely the question. I like to, when I'm talking in schools, I like to start out with the idea of we can make a time machine. We go back four billion years and we go to these environments that people talk about. We go to a deep sea hydrothermal vent. We go to a kind of Yellowstone park type place environment. And we find some slime that looks like we can test it. It's made of organic molecules. It's got a structure which is not obviously cells, but is this a stepping stone on the way to life or not?”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Properly, that just pushes the question somewhere else. Even if it's true, maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia. So what are the principles that govern the emergence of life on any planet? It's an assumption that life started here. And it's an assumption that it started in a hydrothermal vent or it started in a terrestrial geothermal system. The question is, can we work out a testable sequence of events that would lead from one? The other one, and then test it and see if there's any truth in it or not. With panspermia, you can't do any of that.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are directions to processes, yeah. And if you're starting with CO2 and you've got two reactive fluids being brought together and they react, what are they going to make? Well, they make carboxylic acids, which include the fatty acids that make up the cell membranes, and they form directly into bilayer membranes. They form like soap bubbles. It's spontaneous organization caused by the nature of the molecules. And those things are capable of growing and are capable, in effect, of being selected even before there are genes. So we have a lot of order, and that order is coming from thermodynamics and the thermodynamics is always about increasing the entropy of the universe. But if you have oil and water and they're separating, you're increasing the entropy of the universe, even though you've got some order, which is the soap and the water are not miscible. To come back to your first question about panspermia.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how did they do that? You may as well say then a miracle happened. I don't believe in soup. I think what we have in an event is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it's a small bit. So you've got a kind of continuous self-organization and growth from the very beginning. You never have that in a soup.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't find them helpful. That's not to say they're wrong. So pseudotranspermia, the idea that the chemicals, the amino acids, the nucleotides are being delivered from space. Well, we know that happens. It's unequivocal. They're delivered on meteorites, comets, and so on. So what do they do next? That's to me the question. What do they do is they stock a soup. Presumably they land in a pond or in an ocean or wherever they land, and then you end up with a best possible case scenario is you end up with a supranucleotide and amino acids. And then you have to say, so now what happens? And the answer is, oh, well, they have to go become alive.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's no sense in which they're trying to do anything. They're just kind of an outgrowth of the earth, you might say.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You power up your own membrane? And the answer is well, you need to pump. You need to pump ions to give an electrical charge on the membrane. So what do the pumps look like? Well, the pumps look different in these two groups. It says they both emerge from a common ancestor as soon as you've got that ancestor, things move very quickly and divergently. Why does the DNA replication look different? Well, it's joined to the membrane. The membranes are different. The DNA replication is different because it's joined to a different kind of membrane. So there's interesting, this is detail, you may say, but it's also fundamental because it's about the two big divergent groups of life on Earth that seem to have diverged really early on.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep in the ocean somewhere. But actually, two cells got out and they appear to have got out from the same vent because they both share the same code and everything else. So unless all the, you know, we've got a million different common ancestors in all these different vents. So either they all have the same code and two cells spontaneously merge from different places or two different cells fundamentally different cells came from the same place. So either way What are the constraints that say not just one came out or not half a million came out, but two came out that's kind of a bit strange so how did they come out? Well they come out because what you're doing inside event is you're relying on the electrical chargers down there to power this reaction between hydrogen and CO2 to make yourself grow and when you leave the vent you've got to do that yourself you've got to power up your own membrane and so the question is well how do you”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, yes. It's the unit of selection as a single cell. But selection operates over generations and changes over generations in populations of cells. So it would be impossible to say that a cell is the unit of selection in the sense that unless you have a population, you can't evolve, you can't change.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. From one source. If it was, if you'd got, as I imagine it, you have a common ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent, let's say there are millions of vents and millions of potential common ancestors living in all of those vents, but only one of them makes it out first, then you could imagine that that cell is then going to kind of take over the world and wipe out everything else. And so what you would see would be a single common ancestor for all of life. But with lots of different vent systems all kind of vying to create the first life forms, you might say.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They both have DNA. The genetic code is identical in them both. The way in which it's transcribed into RNA, into the copy of a gene, and the way that that's then translated into a protein, that's all basically the same in both these groups. So they clearly share a common ancestor. It's just that they're different in fundamental ways as well. And if you think about, well, what kind of processes could drive that divergence very early on? I can think about it in terms of membranes, in terms of the electrical charges on membranes. And it's that that makes me think that there were probably many unsuccessful attempts and only one really successful attempt.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're different in their membranes primarily. They're different in things like DNA replication. They use completely different enzymes and the genes behind it for replicating DNA.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's possible it started multiple occasions. There's two provisos to that. One of them is. Oxygen makes it impossible, really, for life to start. So as soon as we've got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn't going to keep starting over. So I often get asked by people, you know, why can't we have life starting? If it's so easy, why can't life start in these vents now? And the answer is, if you want hydrogen to react with CO2 and there's oxygen there, hydrogen reacts with oxygen instead. It's just, you know, you get an explosive reaction that way. It's rocket fuel. So it's never going to happen. But for the origin of life earlier than that, all we know is that there's a single common ancestor for all of life. There could have been multiple origins and they all just disappeared. But there's a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they're not quite as diverse, but nearly. And they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to occur.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say as soon as we introduce Jean's information into systems that are growing anyway, so I would talk about growing protocells. As soon as we introduce even random bits of information into there, I'm thinking about RNA molecules, for example, doesn't have to have any information. It can be completely random sequence. But if it's introduced into a system which is in any case growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself, then any changes in that sequence that allow it to do so better or worse are now selected by perfectly normal natural selection.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and amazingly, most of these reactions are hexagonic, which is to say they release energy. If you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's going to happen. But thermodynamically, that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. So why doesn't that happen? It's because of the kinetic barriers. That's where you need the spark.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a charge at least, but yes. I mean, a spark in that sense is we tend to think of in terms of Frankenstein. We tend to think in terms of electricity and one moment you zap something and it comes alive. And what does that really mean? It's come alive. And now what's sustaining it? Well, we are sustained by oxygen, by this continuous chemical reaction. And if you put a plastic bag on your head, then you've got a minute or something before it's all over.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There isn't a spark. There is a continuous chemical reaction. And there is kind of a spark, but it's a continuous electrical charge which helps drive that reaction.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I actually just came straight here from a conference where I was chairing a session on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life. Of course it matters. But it matters most of the origin of life to be not there. As I see it, we have this, I mean, life is made of carbon, basically, primarily organic molecules with carbon-carbon bonds. And the building block, the Lego brick that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans is carbon dioxide. And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules, we need to strap on hydrogen. And so we need, and then, and this is basically what life is doing. It's hydrogenating carbon dioxide. It's taking the hydrogen and the bubbles out of the earth in these hydrothermal vents, and it sticks it on CO2. And it's kind of really as simple as that. And actually thermodynamically thing that I find most troubling is that if you do these experiments in the lab, the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry, in the heart of life.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a sensible direction, and I think then you have these other. Interesting dilemmas. I mean, I'm often accused of being. Too focused on life on Earth, two kind of narrow-minded and inward-looking, you might say. I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me, ah, yeah, but life can be anything. I have no imagination. Maybe they're right. But unless we can say why life here is this way and if those reasons are fundamental reasons or if they're just trivial reasons, then we can't answer that question. So I think they're fundamental reasons and I think we need to worry about them.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's all these interesting questions about cells that if you then look to see, well, is there an environment on Earth on the early Earth four billion years ago that that kind of matches the requirements of cells? Well, there is one. There's a very obvious one. It's basically created by whenever you have a wet rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents, which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads and electrical charges on kind of cell-like pores that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does. So it seems so beautiful and so obvious that I've spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments. It turns out to be difficult, of course. Everything's more difficult than you ever thought it was going to be. But it looks, I would say, more true rather than less true over that 10-year period. I think I have to take a step back every now and then and think, hang on a minute, where's this going? I'm happy it's going.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious, the most interesting question that we little humans can ask of ourselves. How did life originate on Earth? You could ask anybody working on the subject, and you'll get a different answer from all of them. They will be pretty passionately held opinions. And their opinions grounded in science, but they're still really at this point their opinions because there's so much stuff to know that all we can ever do is get a kind of a small slice of it. And it's the context which matters. So I can give you my answer. My answer is from a biologist's point of view, that has been missing from the equation over decades, which is, well, what does life do on Earth? Why is it this way? Why is it made of cells? Why is it made of carbon? Why is it powered by electrical charges on memory?”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about actually reviewing something powerful about a nonfiction book that you may otherwise miss. So I think even if you read the book, it's just a good supplement to the book reading experience before, after, to remind yourself, to preview it, to select which books you want to read in full, all that kind of stuff. You can claim a special offer now for savings at blinkist.com slash lex. This is Alex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great for you. It's good to do talk therapy to help a little bit at least bring the beautiful puzzle of it to the light. Check them out at better help dot com slash Lex and save on your first month. This show is also brought to you by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things they got, nonfiction books, thousands of them, and they condensed them down into fifteen minute chunks you can read or listen to. By the way, this isn't to save time. I guess you save time. There's this obsession in this world of being in a hurry. A lot of people listen to podcasts at incredibly high speeds. I admire those people. I give them props, but I'm just not that person. I like to sit on a sentence, on a word, sometimes on a silence for a long time and think. And in that way, Blinkist isn't about at least to me, about saving time.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This episode is also brought to you by Better Help, spelled H-E-L-P-Help. I think they're a sponsor on a lot of my favorite podcasts, which is awesome because it makes me feel like we're in this together. So it's great that BetterHelp is supporting all of these amazing podcasts. Anyway, I'm a huge fan of talk therapy, which is what they do. You can connect online with a licensed professional therapist in under forty-eight hours. The conversation is a great way of opening up your mind without resistance and just seeing what comes out. And it's fun to see whatever lurks there in your shadow, in the darkness of your shadow, in the subconscious, the unconscious mind.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Backbone control is attached to our smartphones, not making any eye contact. Just kidding. I love eye contact. That's like a running joke, but people are beautiful. Why not look at them? This show is also brought to you by Notion, a note taking in team collaboration tool. I use Notion a lot for a lot of things because it's the most awesome, advanced, featureful. If you go to those productivity forums or on Stack Exchange, the note-taking app they recommend, the cool kids recommend, the cutting edge productivity gurus recommend is Notion. They also want you to know that it's great for team stuff. especially in the business setting for startups they provide a full-on operating system for running every aspect of your company”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This show is brought to you by a new sponsor called Backbone. It's a controller for the ultimate gaming experience on your phone. They just released an officially licensed controller for PlayStation, the backbone One PlayStation Edition. They collaborated with the PlayStation design team, materials, colors, and finishes are all inspired by the PS5 dual sense controller by the way. I now also have a PlayStation. If you want to be a little bit more mobile while maintaining the incredible haptic interface that we love about gaming, I mean, especially console gaming backbone is the way to go. Check them out. Go to playback.com slash lex to order your controller. And for a limited time, you can get free access to over 350 console games and perks. And maybe friends, we can play each other. Just two introverts sitting at a park bench with...”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written, including his two most recent titled Transformer The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death and The Vital Question Why is Life the Way It Is Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Backbone for Gaming, new sponsored, by the way, new amazing sponsor. Notion for startups, better help for mental health, and Blinkus for nonfiction. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads, as always, no ads in the middle, I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.”
2022-09-07 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source