YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Jurvetson

lines on the record: 199
first: 2018-05-31
most recent: 2018-05-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly what happened to me. I was financed by my former employer, so I had that sort of safety net. And then when I decided not to go back, I had to pay for all my tuition in one check. They don't let that one go. No, they don't let them. It's a loan, and rightly so. I didn't expect to get a free ride and not go back. But it did raise a barrier to leaving. Oh, the other thing is learning. I mean, it should go, I mean, business was not what I went to learn per se. I knew there would be some classes about business that I thought would be helpful, but I'd done so much at Bane that I kind of had a small business degree already and I taken classes back when I was an undergrad and a grad student prior in accounting and finance. So I'd really taken a lot of, again, the core courses. I placed out of every core course at business school too. And went right into the sort of the electives and the more interesting classes. But I also knew that it was an opportunity to take classes in other departments, you know, to brush up on actually molecular simulation of all things. And one of the classes I took was on modeling.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what do I want to do in my life? I had bounced around from engineering to management consulting prior to business school and thought, well, from what I know today, maybe I want to go to product marketing. I thought that's what I wanted to do. But I don't know. I don't know anyone who's done that. And, well, if I go to business school, no matter where I want to look, there's going to be plenty of students who've done that in the past and they're looking to do something new. And so you get all the consultants trying to leave consulting. You have all the iBankers trying to leave eye banking and learn about something new.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why or why not? A lot of folks who I knew and know are asking that same question. And I think it's a challenge a lot of higher ed is facing, which is, is this a vocational thing? One unusual thing about business school, it's the only educational program I know of where everyone comes in with prior work experience, even law school and med school and what have you, you just go straight in from undergrad. And so it's got a very different kind of feel to it that way. And people might ask, especially when there's something like a dot-com boom going on in the 90s, do I want to step out for a couple of years from the economy and miss maybe that window, that opportunity that might be so ripe? So the main reason I went is networking, really, to expand the sort of and to learn, frankly. But the networking came first to mind to meet a bunch of people who've come from all kinds of different backgrounds that I could learn from, not only at school, but throughout my life. And one of the sub points on that is, for example, pretty basic questions.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I shifted gears. I didn't want to leave school. I mean, like going through two and a half years, the problem is, wow, I kind of missed out on a lot of social life and living. And so basically at that point stretched out and tried to stay as long as I could. Got a balloon payment. It's kind of funny how things change. Now I want to stay. I don't want to leave, right? And I found a way to be in the freshman dorms as a grad student, which was awesome as a computer coordinator there, which meant I kept the computers running and kept the paper and the printers, but it meant I could have sort of freshman dorm life all over again as a grad student. That was fun.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It all flipped completely like total mode shift when I started my master's program and I became a research assistant because that paid for school. So the moment HPs, but no, I started a master's in electrical engineering. Right. So it was Phil at Stanford. I see. That was a research assistant professor Hennessy who went on to do amazing things there and was an entrepreneur himself at one point.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what they realized is you can sign up for a class for less units than it's listed, just not more. So the checksum on the computer algorithm was not, did you say it's a five-unit class or say it's six and it's only five, it's, you know, is it that or less? So you can just say even a zero unit class or one unit. You can make it whatever you want. So you're not taking more than 20 units a quarter. So you meet that algorithm. Yet you've got all the prerequisite classes you needed for the next one. You have to map this out early on, right? You have to start freshman year to make this work. Oh, and I had to get a physics teacher to let me take a class and a double-E teacher sort of against the prerequisite of saying, look, I really can do this. Let me try to take your class a year earlier than I should so I could get the prerec chain going. So there's all these simultaneous equations you have to solve. But the signing up for more classes was the key. There was like one winter quarter where I took the equivalent of eight classes where you'd normally take a load of four that made that possible.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting. I took it as a challenge when I started. And it felt like a simple system of equations like this plus that has to equal this. I actually boil it down to, oh, I see. They're just trying to get four-year tuition out of you. So where can I explore the corner cases? And so I came in with the maximum number of AP credits. So it actually goes back to my high school, St. Mark's in Dallas, that incredibly well prepared me for college. So I took the maximum number of AP units that I could. But of course universities limit, not surprisingly, how much that applies. I also took a couple of summer classes that I could transfer in from another school. They'd have a certain number you could do. I maxed that out one summer while I was doing summer jobs at HPS, so it took night classes. But most of all, I learned a trick from the grad students. This is the key answer, actually. By the time you get to be a grad student, you realize that you're limited to something like nine units a quarter, and that's kind of limiting. If you take five unit classes, well, shoot, you know, you're taking class and a half.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to recoup it, right? And that would be in the intellectual property question. It's almost again like the software of it. The generic manufacturers know how to make the drug, but for law around intellectual property that it costs more. So the physical manufacturing is still going to be a dollar a found. Now the question is, is it priced as such? And so in my model of this, you'd start with the generics and have this massive distribution channel. Like if you want to reach a billion people, you could sign on to this platform for the poorest of the poor and reach a billion people at some sort of reasonable cost position for a generic. But I think the cost of discovery will also come down back to the computational and quantum chemistry side so that it doesn't need to take so long and be so expensive. And right now you have an FDA regulatory system that's a bit archaic in that regard where they aren't quite set up yet and they're trying to transition, but they're slow at this into a world where you have personalized medicine and a world where my medicine is different than yours and therefore the clinical trial concept really changes.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To protect because you can imagine any current phase or even long-term, whether you call it transition phase or just this is how the new ones come to market is you have to reward, of course, that effort. And to the extent that effort is still as expensive as it is today.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that future, I think, will be incredibly enabling for changing a society to a stable one where you don't fear for the healthier children or their ability to live, then you could have almost like a renaissance where you pursue the things that are meaningful to you, whether it's poetry or science or what have you meaningful work online. People do this all the time. We spend a ridiculous amount of our time on things that aren't paid, right, but are meaningful to us. And that, I think, increasingly is what the world will look like in the future. Meaningful work and contributions, not a job in a traditional sense.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Startups that are building synthetic silk now with these old nanomachines that reproduce what the spinaret does on a spider. So across, but coming back to just this inequality point and the corporate path potentially there, or it could be like a peace corps equivalent that says, you know, if you work for X number of years, you get healthcare in theory for a longer period of time, right? And why couldn't that start to subsume the way some companies already provide lunch for free? Why couldn't in a sense basic food shelter clothing and healthcare be provided for free? And the healthcare part, by the way, right now is a huge part of the economy, but it shouldn't be, right? I think we're also, and this is something I want to invest in, we're going to find a way to make the information search of health-free. So we don't have to pay for the diagnosis. And I can't imagine a future where knowing what I need to do to make myself healthy would be something I'd pay for. The actual doing if it involves surgery, maybe. The pills, they should all be a dollar a pound. The physical thing.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're going to grow things, I think, increasingly in the future. I think we're going to grow with algae and other things, chemicals. So when we think about sheer metric tons of stuff, liquid chemicals is a big part of it. And we got almost all that 90 plus percent from oil today in the petrochemical economy. It's all going to shift to renewables. And so that sort of manufacturing stuff, like the stuff that goes into plastics, which is more and more of the physical world that we're in. Obviously metals will still come from, you know, unfortunately, metal sources, but I think we'll shift to carbon and other kinds of materials increasingly for structural stuff. This is potentially in the nanotech slash carbon economy of the future that building things out of carbon nanotube-like structures and meshes is just a much lighter material sort of effective and just efficient way of doing things. So we can look to nature and how does a spider silk thread outperform almost any other modern material like white.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bag of potatoes, dollar pound, bag of chips, dollar pound. Why car? And then what you'll pay for is the software, the intellectual property, the thing that in certain places could lock up, then yeah, maybe that Ferrari costs more because it's the design, not the materials. But it's just manufacturing methods are all converging, whether you think of it as additive manufacturing or just traditional manufacturing. That stuff is not the rare commodity you pay for intellectual content like entertainment and software. It's like, that's what all future economies will be based on. And physical stuff is all about the same.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The budget of the GDP of nations, you have projects that exceed the lifespan of any politician. And luckily, this is what these people are choosing to do rather than just show off, right? And so I'm really happy about that. I'm trying to live my life that way as well. So the question though going forward is there's a lot of debates about basic income, universal basic income, and experiments that are trying to get funded to see if it works the way people think it might. I think there could be all kinds of experiments in almost corporate health plans writ large. So right now, most companies with more than 1,000 employees will manage the health plan of their employees. It's cheaper than going to a third party. Like, I will actually pay for your healthcare because paying some third party, you know, they're just making money off that. And I've got enough critical mass with a thousand employees that that makes sense. Well, imagine food shelter, clothing, and healthcare are all equally cheap, meaning everything costs a dollar a pound in the world that's a physical thing. That's where we're heading in the end point. All physical things should be the same.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that prevents wealth from going completely crazy is that luckily, and I think maybe understandably, the wealthiest tech entrepreneurs tend not to live like rock stars or rap stars in LA. They tend to give back. And a simple explanation for me, having seen many of these people before they made billions of dollars and after, is that if you've made billions of dollars in, let's say, under five years, you don't tend to ascribe that to your incredible hard work and superior intelligence, right? It is a farce, right, to hold on to the belief that I'm better than others. That's why I'm a billionaire. And so they give back, like in droves, like incredible acts of philanthropy. And so right now the philanthropy governor is the one thing I see that's at least a positive that says, well, maybe this actually will allow people like Gates and others to take on multi-year quests, like eradicating malaria or polio right now polio and next malaria. In a way, the governments can't even take on, right? You have projects that...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is every industry go that way? Those industries will start to look more like where you see Google and Facebook, a winner-take-all kind of dynamic where between firms you have very few winners. And within firms, you have very few winners. So at every fractal scale, it's kind of like a winner-take-all. There's a few people within these firms that garner most of the wealth, and there's few companies that garner most of the wealth in each industry. Now, that's perhaps, so that trend is somewhat negative and that technology takes over more and more. It innervates more and more of the economy. It subsumes or eats the world, if you will. That, I think, will be a side effect. One other side effect that's negative is people sometimes reject modernity when they can't keep up. You sometimes subscribe to a different belief system, not science and math is the progress vector of humanity. It's like, I'm going to reject science. I'm going to reject math. And there's entire countries that are taking this stance, which is scary, because they'll fall farther, further behind, perhaps with an inability to catch up to modernity when and if they choose to. So that worries me. The only current, quote, negative feeling.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so first I was looking at like, well, does it feel like it's self-correcting? Is it self-rectifying? Is there something that's a natural governing feedback loop, a negative feedback loop that says, well, the rich get richer? Is there something that naturally makes that not continue further? And unfortunately, there's a lot of quote positive feedback loops, not in the sort of normative sense, but in just the regulatory sense of just as a runaway thing, right? Like runaway climate change. And that is you can get, well, sir, first off, as every business becomes an information business over time, what I mean by that is if the basis of competition, why is company A winning over company B? Is it the way they process information? Is it a software layer to their business? I think is rippling through every part of industry, whether it's the aerospace industry, the automotive industry, agriculture, right? It's not, oh, he works.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just literally lethal gases sweeping across the landscape that the survivors learn how to hibernate through. So in a long-winded way, the thing that both was both interesting, like maybe here's a hint of how we can induce hibernation and mammals like humans, but also a reminder that we've had climate change many times in this planet and really bad things can happen that have nothing to do with carbon or methane or all the things we're focused on. It could be the hydrogen sulfide gas that kills us, which is the rotten smell of eggs. It's nasty stuff”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Greenhouse effect. And the problem with the ice caps melting wasn't that sea levels rose. That just affects Bangladesh and Miami, but it doesn't take out humanity if sea levels rise. The thing that could take out humanity is that the ocean currents stop going. And part of that was driven by freshwater melt off the poles. So potentially long before the poles are completely gone or perhaps completely unrelated to temperature change. If the ocean stops circulating, you get this complete dead zones where organisms depend on the circulation of nutrients to survive and basically purple and brown bacteria took over and they are these hydrogen sulfide bacterias. You'd have these waves usually coupled up to two days at a time of”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see. So, inequality slash unrest, bioterrorism. Oh shoot, what is my other one? Climate change, of course. Oh my god, climate change. So, the thing about climate change that worries me is the things I didn't know. I'll give one example. Last week, I learned of a new thing that I really didn't learn to worry about until last week, which is of all places out of NASA Ames, the former director, was telling me they'd been doing these interesting studies trying to figure out how can we induce hibernation in mammals, which for interstellar travel would be great, you know, in the movies, the humans somehow all go into hibernation mode, right? And all the movies we see. And they were doing studies with rats, and they could actually get rats to hibernate for two days at a time by exposing the hydrogen sulfide. And that immediately led me to ask, well, wait, why is that adaptive? Why would we have this sort of latent pathway that really doesn't seem useful for anything that puts rats to sleep for two days at a time and they would die if it was longer than that? And it turned out back one of the major extinction events, and I'll try to be more concise here than I might otherwise be, there was a major volcanic. It led to major climate change and the polar ice caps melted. A greenhouse gas.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as time passes, I'm actually thinking there is an element of truth to that. It's not the kind of thing that a typical terrorist cell can get someone fired up about, which is there is a weird thing, even within the worst, if whatever we put in quote marks, worst parts of societal troublemakers, if you will, on the planet, where this isn't a place they tend to go, right? Flying a plane in a building is more natural vector of getting attention for your mission and getting someone to volunteer for the duty than saying, oh, I'm going to go kill a bunch of innocent people with a contagious agent. It's kind of weird. cross product of threat.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things like that. Yeah, exactly. So synthesizing smallpox, weaponizing and doing something like injecting the interlocutor gene, which makes it incredibly deadly in mousepox. A pox viruses affect all organisms that get to a certain concentration level on the planet, so ants, deer, anything that live in dense areas, chickenpox, develop a unique pox virus for that thing. It's kind of nature's way of telling you there's way too many of you people on this planet. Thin herd, they can be bioengineered like crazy. And this worried me because when I spoke to people in various government agencies who spend their time modeling and doing red team simulations of bioterrorism outbreaks, their only answer at the time was, well, we hope they wouldn't do this. Just kind of like a leap of faith that this is such a horrible thing to wield, that people would stop short. And at the time, that gave me no comfort.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Segue to bioterrorism. Yeah, bioterrorism worried me a lot post 9 11 because I realized looking into it and from investments I had made that it's increasingly becoming the case that a small number of people in fact an individual with let's say a college education in this field could build weapons of mass destruction. It used to take armies, it used to take despots and fascist leaders of countries and resources of countries to wield a weapon of mass destruction, to build weapons. Using”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you need time on your side, that it takes years for that tiny nudge to accumulate enough distance delta that you miss something as big as Earth.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Satellites up that had these infrared sensors that can detect these objects at great distances and track them. And we have enough computational power from a couple of, well, from three observation points, model out the end-body problem of what will the next hundred years of this object's orbit look like and will it hit Earth at any point in the next hundred years? So that is a computationally complex thing. We can do today. So putting up one of those satellites in a near Venus orbit, looking out to capture all the threats to Earth, we could do today with less budget than some museums have. And the key then is when you see something that will hit Earth, let's say, 50 years from now or 30 years from now, you just bump it. All you have to do is give it the slightest little delta V today and all of its orbits around the Sun by the time it eventually intersects with Earth, it's in a totally different place. And we can computationally know, yeah, just rear end it by a tiny bit or hit it head on by a tiny bit, and then you're done, right? Problem solved.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the key is just detecting them long before they hit Earth. So, unlike the movies Armageddon or Deep Impact, you don't want to wait till final approach to try to do anything about it. It's like a good breaking it apart turns a bullet into a shotgun shell. It's way too late. What you want to do, and it's actually, this is what's so interesting, is for the first time ever, we can put”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How will, let's say, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, we provide for basic human needs globally? Is it going to be normal capitalism in a democracy? Is that going to work just fine for everyone, or will there be some that are horribly left behind? And I think social unrest is something that worries me more and more, I guess, in a succinct way. There are other things I've been involved with a nonprofit looking for asteroid defense. That's an existential threat of another kind that's easily addressed for less than $400 million. You could take that one off the table. So hopefully that will happen. Pandemic flu or bioterrorism. Just to pause for a second.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very small. We'll go with humans. They're incredible creatures. They're going to last through a lot. So I worry about the way in which cultural evolution is while it's progressing. It's not progressing fast enough. And we as a society are going through more rapid and gut-wrenching change of various sorts that we may or may not be prepared to handle. So for example, we may be in the midst, I would argue, of an ever-accelerating rich poor gap that politicians and policymakers just don't have their head around and could lead to a future of abundance, as Peter Di Mandis writes about, where everything's great because physical things are so inexpensive that even the poorest of the poor can live like kings of just a few years prior. But I think the cultural, in a sense, setup for this is not necessarily right, which is we don't have a lot of people thinking about it.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's going to be very different for humans, animals, and things. Let's talk about humans. Yeah. I think there's all kinds of things we can do to hurt ourselves that nature won't have any problem with. And march right along, the cockroaches will still be out there for many years.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally, for since the beginning of the field, have been more theoretical than experimental, more theoretical than useful. And I think the potential crashing of this onto business shores is potentially upon us, where, again, when we talk about, let's say, the power of deep learning, if you could build an artificial intelligence broadly defined of any kind, a simple one that plays games or a simple one that recognizes cancer in pathology slides or recognizes anything in an x-ray in medical imaging sense. If you can do that better than anyone else on earth, that's a business opportunity. And that capability might start to lend itself to those who have the cutting edge of computation. And in the past, anyone could buy a computer and catch up with someone who has another computer. It was a commodity. I'll just go buy some more computers myself. But what if the practitioners of this sort of field are so esoteric and limited that there's only a handful of companies that”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the main takeaway that fascinated me and maybe hopefully every listener is we are just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding what these phenomena are about and taking advantage of them in any useful way, right? So usually quantum physicists”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure. My gut is not in the powerful way that the quantum computer takes advantage of it, but there is the possibility of, well, first off, I mean, just for those who don't know the experiment you're referring to, they sent two entangled photons down sort of opposing fiber optic rings. And then when they were far apart from each other, like miles apart from each other, they would observe one and notice that the other resolved its state instantaneously at the same time. So in other words, this notion of quantum indeterminacy that you don't know whether it's a one or a zero or somewhere between till you look at it. The moment you look at it, it changes the state. It's this really both strange and provocatively provocative notion of the quantum physics. And literally we look at one of them over, let's say, on the left field, you know, miles away, it'll instantaneously resolve the other one as well, as if they were a single unit. And in fact, you can't have like you can't imagine information passing between them.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can create what's called a Bose-Einstein condensate with lasers, in a sense trapping light and making it stop or doing really bizarre things. Yeah, so”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perhaps it's not surprising Google's been the primary customer of quantum computers for the last 10 years is they use deep learning everywhere.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The math. It's computationally too complex. More interesting to me personally, I mean, by the way, I first invested in quantum computing for quantum chemistry. That was the reason I got excited about this, is we'd be able to design drugs more quickly, figure out, let's give you an example, let's say you have some new H1N1 virus and you're trying to figure out how can I design a molecule that would dock to this virus at a particular place. Like if I could only attach there chemically, I could kill it. Well, that's very hard to do. Very easy to state, very hard to solve. So you can test a drug, but you can't ab initio just design it out of scratch. And that's what these hopefully you'll be able to do soon. Rapidly accelerate drug design. The other area that has enormously wide applicability is in deep learning. And we can talk more about that field later, but generally speaking, building little brains that can learn something very quickly and let's say it's pattern recognition or image recognition for any number of applications and do that much better.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What it's useful for beyond something that spooks should be interested in is we literally also in the Renaissance of software discovery. So things that really seem to be coming to the top of near term opportunities are quantum chemistry and deep learning or machine learning, both of which are very interesting. Quantum chemistry is quite simply predicting accurately what a small molecule will do. It turns out if you use a normal computer and you try to solve Schrodinger's equations and do like what's called the bottoms up ab initio model, like what does a water molecule do? What does aspirin do? How does it behave? You can't actually model this. It just computationally grinds to a halt. A quantum computer could do this almost on a one-to-one mapping. So a quantum computer of about the same complexity as H2O and all of its electrons is about the size of a computer you need to model it perfectly. Like when does it freeze? Whatever else phase transitions, all these weird properties of water that we take for granted that really don't come from the physics, right? We learn this in chemistry, but you don't learn in physics because”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the key to answering that question is, well, what are these computers good for? Right. And either good news or bad news, depending on your point of view, is they're very hard to program, at least historically speaking.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, he's a physicist. He's a physicist. Just to make sure. Yes, absolutely. No, he knows a lot about why he's signing way more than me. Yes. All right.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many photons interacting. So, the whole explanation to wave theory of light is that waves interact with each other, and that's what creates this pattern, this ripple pattern on the other side. But there's no interaction when you're a single photon at a time. It's not interacting with anything other than its sister photon in a parallel universe. And David Deutsch is like, well, that's obviously the explanation that makes all of this work other than it bends people's minds. And so the two schools of thought are that's the answer, or I don't want to talk about it.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of quantum physics or outer space in the frontiers of the unknown. And here's one of those examples that just opens your eyes to how little we know in that you'll sometimes see this maybe in an experiment. I'll give an example of one that David Deutsch also likes, that some people might remember from their high school physics. If you have two slits, two very narrow slits and you shine light through them, you get this diffraction pattern on the screen on the falling side of the table. And that's always been something we learned at the bulk statistical physics of a lot of photons, a lot of light going and interfering with each other, these interference patterns. Well, what's fascinating is if you send single photons at a time, they will shoot through, and if you just tally up the statistics, they'll end up creating a distribution pattern just as if it were.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe two or four times bigger to hit some of these thresholds. But unless something falls off the rails, we will soon, in the next couple of years, have computers that can outperform any computer on Earth. Then you give it another couple years, and it would outperform all computers that could ever be built on Earth, even if you use the entire matter of the Earth to build them. And then this is where David Deutsch started to run this thought process out, give it another couple years, you would outperform all computers that could possibly be built if you use the entire matter of the universe at your disposal to build in the best possible computer any human could ever design, and you gave it the length of the universe in time to work on a problem. It still couldn't solve these problems in the quantum computer could in due course, like in less than an hour. That's when if your head hasn't already drilled out of your ears, it just really explodes like pulp. And there's places where nature gives you a peek into its wonders, right? And as a scientist or engineer, we get these in almost any field of exploration, whether it's inner space.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's held till today, right? So that's been 16 years of doublings. The way the graph gets interesting though is as with Moore's law, it comes out of nowhere. So Moore's law, you could actually trace back hundreds of years, arguably, that our capacity to compute as a species has been doubling roughly every year since we started to compute, since we had any kind of abacus. I mean, like, it's kind of weird how this has been growing in the semiconductor industry is just the modern version of that. On a quantum computer, that doubling starts to reach thresholds where you can do things that you couldn't do with any computer on Earth. So on this graph, if you look forward, and here's where there's been a little bit of a time delay, by the way, just a full disclosure, where the power of some of these computers, there's been a bit of overhead, there's been a bit of, you know, setup and readout times. There's been a bit of noise and other things that have made the power of it not, it's still scales like the original curve, like that 43 degree angle you're painting in people's minds, but the power that that represents is, you know, imagine you have to go like a little...”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think of it as by loose analogy, like a memory array, it would be like a one bit memory array. But that's a really powerful memory array. So when you go from one to two, you're now able to explore all possibilities of two to the second power, so four memory states. If you have three qubits, you could simultaneously explore eight possible memory states. If you have four, 16, and so forth. It's a doubling. So as you add a single qubit, you've roughly with some hand waving doubled the power of your computer, roughly speaking, on the order of a 2 to the n phenomenon. If you were to add one new qubit every year, which he just stated, so coming to like where did this graph come from? He just stayed in 2002. I think we're going to double the number of qubits in a functional quantum computer every year in perpetuity. And so I had to ask, is that just because Gordon Moore said something that sounds kind of similar? And we had a conversation. I don't remember being particularly persuaded other than it's a semi-dr. process. It takes roughly a year to digest the prior generation. Yeah, why shouldn't we be able to do this?”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something I've affectionately called Rose's Law with a sort of homage to Moore's Law, because Moore's Law is actually named by Carver Meade. It wasn't Gordon Moore himself who labeled his law Moore's Law. And nor did Geordie Rose, the founder of DWAF. But when I was first speaking with him in 2002, having just read David Deutsche's book, he had produced a single qubit. They're called qubits for quantum bits. So I'll just use the acronym qubit. He had manufactured one of these and tested and characterized it and had sent to the manufacturing facility. That was the qubit the inventor.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The actual computer is just on a little silicon chip that's as small as any other silicon chip. It's just cool to literally 500 times colder than the most remote part of outer space. I mean, like a few milliKelvin above absolute zero, which is really cold.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These computers Yes. And even within scientific communities, there's some backbiting that says, well, wait, do they really exist? Is this one an example? Is that just a fast analog computer? So it is at the edge of A, what people believe is possible. And I think we're actually literally at this period of history where these computers are starting to come out. I've been on the board of directors of one for, gosh, over 15 years now. So I was a little early in thinking when this was ready for prime time. It's now at the point where, for example, Google says that their quantum computer that they bought from a company called D-Wave outperforms their entire data center on certain computational tasks and that are important to what they do. And in other tasks that are meant to really show how fast is it, they found 100 million fold speed up over the best computer they could buy from anyone else. How big is such a quantum computer? They're almost all about the same size, not because the computer is big, but because the cooling apparatus and the shielding from magnetic flux is high. So think about a refrigerator size, slightly bigger, like two refrigerators.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“simultaneously much like when you dive into how an atom actually works there isn't an electron any given point it's a cloud it's a probability function around”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A quantum computer is a device. It's usually something that is either cooled down to almost absolute zero or has some other phenomenon that it takes advantage of that is at the edge of what is the known universe. Meaning when you cool something to zero behavior of materials changes dramatically. If you have a superconductor, the way it works is dramatically different from normal conductors. And so what people have found is that rather than look at quantum mechanics as something that is spooky and bizarre, the way Albert Einstein even described it, this spooky action at a distance, this ability to entangle things, to have them, to have their fates intermingled can be not just used for things like really unbreakable cryptography and data transmission. It could also be used in a very bizarre way to build a computer. And this computer looks something like a row of, let's say, rings that are either magnetically in one direction or the other. You think of it in a traditional computer, it's a one or a zero. But actually it could be everything in between.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I may be paraphrasing because it's stuff you wrote back in 2002, 2001, at least I read the book Fabric Orality in 2002, and he's talking about the power of quantum mechanics and the potential for quantum computers. And in so doing, he and Richard Feynman both realized that a quantum computer would be fundamentally unlike anything we have in this world today. And the way that quote roughly ends is that the only way to explain the power of these computers is to invoke the notion that it is sort of engaging the resources across parallel universes. That if you just use the resources of one universe, there's so much you can do. But in this case, you actually are in the most poetic sense harnessing almost refractive echoes across parallel universes to do computation in a fundamentally different way. And that usually bends the mind of most scientists and even physicists to the point of breaking or looking the other way. And the common response to this is, I don't understand what.”
2018-05-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #317: Steve Jurvetson — The Midas Touch and Mind-Bending Futures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT