Rich and Paul discuss superconductors! This groundbreaking technology is finally becoming a reality, with the potential to benefit both the common good and economic prosperity. This podcast is sponsored by Aboard.

Richard!

Paul!

Ah, oh my god, you're gonna be able to take a train.

It's gonna levitate and it's gonna go 14, 000 miles an hour.

I'm gonna make it to L.

A.

in 20 minutes.

I just want to make it to Queens in 40 minutes.

this is actually a fair

I'm okay with that modest goal.

I got one word for you, man.

Superconductors

Superconductors!

are really muscular people who drive the train?

They're pretty cool, man.

They can, they can, they help you with your dog, they pick

up the train and throw it.

Now, alright, so, let me take a step back.

Okay.

Let me take two steps back.

You're excited about

Well, I'm excited about anything that isn't

climate change right now.

It's, uh, so, so, in a surreal and extremely online way.

News of a low probability, but not zero probability Room

temperature superconductor has emerged on the internet.

All right.

So you're going to have to pick that one apart for

Okay, so first let's start.

A superconductor is a material that can transmit electricity with no resistance.

Okay.

Or, I guess, close to no.

I'm sure it's all wiggle room down there,

Mm hmm.

And typically, they use them in MRI machines and so on.

And typically, they require extreme cold.

to operate.

So they're hard to, they're hard to use, but they have certain

applications when they're MRIs.

Uh, they're very, very good sensors.

So, so by making it really cold and you know, the materials that are in

MRIs that do the sensing get activated and they can see inside your brain.

It's pretty cool.

Okay.

So, um, And they can reduce the friction, or not the friction, but the

resistance in transmitting electricity.

So, good stuff for climate change.

And there's some levitating going on, they'll actually kind of, they,

they, they, it's, it like gets rid of all the magnetism, so that's

like the old futuristic trope train.

Yeah, so this is some Holy Grail stuff.

It's flat out Holy Grail, and, and the goal is can we make something

that, you know, kind of, can we do it off the shelf, you know, can we have a...

Okay, so to recap, and I'm not, I'm not a physicist or a scientist.

Well, I'm guess I'm a computer scientist.

call myself that.

Go for it, but yes.

PHP.

me too.

Um, I guess what you're saying is today, to, to tease out the advantages

and activate the value of superconductors, you, it has extreme environmental

requirements, which make it just

Expensive and difficult.

to really scale out and take advantage of.

But in the 70s when they thought this stuff was going to work

out, you have the Rand Corporation saying that you'll be able to make a

train go 14, 000 miles an hour between

That sounds uncomfortable.

not good.

Like the people get out of the train in LA and they're basically a slurry.

Like it's not like

if I go in there with a hot cup of Dunkin,

oh, no, it's not good.

It's you literally come

sound like it's going to go well.

lost about 270 pounds by the time you've gone out here.

You're just a thin layer so so but it's it's a it's a

promise.

And now,

would be less let's just be clear like I'm sure

there'd be Bad consequences.

But in general, this is one of those things where if we could get to it,

it's kind of cure for cancer level.

Like it's just a magical thing to contemplate.

And so just to throw it back at you in layman's terms, Someone

has put forward that they're able to activate superconductors without those

brutal environmental requirements of extremely low temperatures, etc.

Essentially room temperature?

have formulated

in Phoenix or room temperature in Montreal?

I'm not a scientist.

No, but, but a Korean research group claims to have formulated

North Korean or South preprint?

Korean.

Yeah, claims to have formulated a room temperature superconductor.

Okay.

So, of course, this happened in an extremely online way where pre

prints of papers were submitted by the, what appear to be overlapping

groups of the same researchers.

Um, so if I send a paper to Nature and it has to be peer reviewed and so

on and so forth, then it gets printed in Nature, right, in the magazine.

preprint means it hasn't been confirmed and validated by other peers

have up, I have uploaded it to the ARXiv, the archive server.

Google

Yeah, exactly.

And it's a preprint.

Yeah, no, what is a preprint?

It is a PDF.

Right.

That has not been confirmed and validated by

so two PDFs appear claiming to be two.

Well, but it's the same people, but one of them apparently is a researcher

who kind of wanted to, like, get the scoop on the other researcher.

So, look.

Everybody thinks, obviously what's going on is people think this is a big deal

and they wanted to get out there and make sure their name was on the paper.

And then other people were like, wait a minute, why isn't my name on the paper?

My name, so I'm going to write another

so it sounds like this went right to the internet without the peer

oh, and with typos, like it's a bit like in the title, like it,

it didn't look good.

And

so it didn't look good.

And everybody's like, Ooh, wow, what an amazing claim, but this looks bananas.

And, um, and so it's, so, okay, so the internet is doing its internet thing.

And so two things are happening.

One is the, the material that they're throwing out.

It's not that hard to fabricate if you're like, one guy is like, I,

Wired just wrote an article about him.

He's like, I don't know.

I work at a rocket lab here in California.

And I, I, I have all the right vacuum based equipment to make this thing with.

I just.

I just got to find some red phosphorus, which I didn't personally

I thought that was something you could get a calisteans in the city

Like I don't I that big a deal.

So Okay,

so it's, so okay, doodled.

Etsy,

let's see, yes, that's right four stars And then

you get a little embroidered

Okay, so this guy who has nothing to do with the papers that were

put out is trying to replicate what they

Him and many other scientists around the world.

are trying to do this like live,

some labs, what,

stream to pull

guy live streamed a furnace, which is like, can

we make Minecraft more boring?

Yes, we can do it in real

worst Twitch ever.

it didn't, yeah, no, it just smoked.

Okay.

So this is exciting.

Is it?

I mean, it's probably too soon to say if it's legit.

It sounds like nonsense.

uh, it is being treated with, look, how does science work, right?

It's, the people who are at risk here are the people who have made

this claim and said they've solved one of science's great puzzles.

Um, so here are the things that are happening, but I'm really loving

watching this process, because it's a mix of internet and science and

culture, and it's just all slam

Well, I think what's interesting is like, I've read

a couple of articles about it.

I kind of played the Luddite here just so we could, we could reveal it.

Um, and I'm learning about something I had knew nothing about, right?

And, and, and

have, I'm an absolute ignoramus about physics.

Like, I know a little tiny, tiny

And so this is fascinating to hear.

Like, I didn't know that this was something that people

have been chasing for years,

Yes.

Well, I just thought it was kind of, it's one of those things like

nuclear, uh, nuclear fusion where it's kind of on the back burner.

And every now and then, like, every two years, the New York Times will have an

article, be like, promising developments.

too.

Some similar kind of moonshot ideas.

the thing with those, all those categories actually fit together.

Like nuclear fission and, or fusion and quantum computing become

much simpler with supercomputing.

So it's this sort of like big key in the lock.

Fine.

But is this...

Real.

I don't know, that's not my job.

I'm just having a good time.

Now, now, here's, there are things pointing to it being more real,

but we're in this wacky zone.

So traditionally, right, you'd have a couple months.

You'd go peer review, and apparently the paper was already submitted.

And, you know, scientists like to, they like to turn, turn the screw very, very

calmly so you don't cause any fr Get a little, little tiny pens and little

notebooks and just organize the worms.

That's what scientists do.

And so now you've got the internet going, I'll make it in my furnace like Minecraft.

Like I'm an elf mage.

Like, just like, and then you have research groups in China, uh, research

groups in America, individuals, um, people in Russia, all trying to make the thing.

And then, of course,

that Canada's laying low.

we'll see.

We'll see what happens.

They're good at furnaces.

So then you have, um, video showing up.

Uh, where, you know, as a lay, as a lay person, you're just

like, it is like a tiny squiggle.

If they told me this is the future of like, we have created, we've

cloned a nematode, you know, or just, I'd be like, Oh, okay.

That's what it looks like.

I don't know what the hell I'm looking at.

I'm seeing a little squiggle

yeah.

of flop around.

Now they, they did show a.

This is what they said could be a levitating little bit of

rock and levitation is a big sign of superconductivity.

be the magnetic properties

I'm, I mean, here we are, right?

Here we are.

So I, I don't even want to believe I'm just watching this happen and

I'll tell you what's happening to me.

So first of all, okay, I mean, I'd be really cool if this happened.

what's interesting is, you know, it's been feeling real gloomy.

What has?

The world.

Climate change, wars,

the fact that we're just not getting it together.

And first of all, there is just, there's a beautiful fantasy here of a little

bit of a get out of jail free card.

I mean, everybody loves that

I mean, just that, that, and it made me think, you know, at some level.

This won't change humanity.

Everybody thinks it will.

They'll be like, oh my god, the trains will be so

No, it won't.

It could be a band aid for certain problems that

we've created for ourselves.

It won't fix climate.

It could take, let's say if it was, even if it worked perfectly, you're still

looking at years, decades, before you can have all the new technologies come online.

Yeah,

right now you have a blob of

look, it's important to be hopeful, no matter what's happening.

So there is that

I, I

where we're optimistic.

In fact, probably a little too optimistic.

I got a lot of people react to climate change with like, yeah, it's bad.

But you know, humans have had to wriggle their way out of these jams before,

man, I mean, we do get ourselves into pickles, but then

there's also that is why we heal from bad things, because like any species

worth its salt would be, Hey, I saw a world war two and I just think

we probably should eat ourselves into the sun because that was bad.

Like we shouldn't be around.

We should give the squirrels a chance.

Yeah.

So, so I think like we do compress the past and we do sort of

move on and that's good for us.

I think for me what's been really really fun is to See something and

it's not even that I am hopeful because who knows maybe it's like

maybe it could work But I don't know.

It's just it does seem they are doing some Validation of the basic theory and

science behind it and saying like okay these properties of these materials

could be super conductive We're not it's not completely in whack a doodle zone,

but who knows what could really come

I think what most people don't know is that a lot of physics

is theoretical and not proven out.

And there's like, we don't know everything like, and, and so when

they're, when they're, you're seeing weird reactions occur, we have.

Like theories about why they occur, but we don't have all the theories like

we have not discovered everything yet

extremely smart humans, are a lot dumber than you think.

And often a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for.

We kind of always get it wrong, right?

don't know a lot You know when I when I read about like I read

an old You know history book about how like, you know, some famous figure

like half their siblings died from like

Cholera.

like basic cold Yeah, and it tells you like back then

they probably viewed It's like modern medical science as a miracle,

had a high school teacher who was like, he always would refer to

what he referred to as, uh, food heroes.

The first guy who was like, I wonder how that mushroom tastes.

Okay, the last ten guys died.

But then this guy was like, that one actually is amazing!

And he's sitting there in a pot, standing there, caveman in

a pile of corpses, holding one mushroom, going, this one's good!

So, you know, we don't know and we're exploring

and there's optimism and it's the Internet and and it's also it's it's

And I will say, re...

got a little bit of the like, you know Be a scientist

kit for like 13 year olds vibe

the best, and it's, it's just sort of like, so there's absolute

chaos on Twitter and people are like, writing what they're, they're

saying, like, well, I'm going to just fictionalize this whole thing, and then

people are screaming at themselves, and then you go to the Wikipedia page,

and it's very good, you know, like

long live wikipedia

And so, like, go to the Wikipedia page for, uh, LK99N,

Yeah

which is the name of the material.

But I'll tell you what this does for me, looking at this thing.

It gives me, it reminds me of the original optimism and connection

I feel around technology.

I feel that...

Alright.

That sense

That sense of hope.

Remember the first time you booted up the computer, and it was your computer.

And you saw that screen, and you're like, I'm going to get

to do anything I want here.

I have to learn it.

Yeah.

But I get to do things I never could do before.

draw in BASIC.

My BASIC code would draw up airplanes.

too.

Stuff like that, right?

And I'm going to build, somehow you get a sense that you're going to build

a better person and a better world.

And you're going to figure it out from there.

And look, life goes on.

Things happen.

The people run into the capital wearing Viking hats.

Like, it is what it is.

We're humans.

But...

I, and I think there is a zone right now that we're in where we go, well that

didn't work out and therefore all optimism and all excitement about technology

is unfounded and really we should only interrogate things and kind of slow

progress down as much as we can because it just gets so bad and it's You know,

we're burning a lot of fossil fuels, we're making the world worse, and it's really

nice to be reminded of the fact that as tool using humans, uh, we get stuff

done, we do accomplish things, we make

I like your attitude about this.

It's an optimistic attitude.

A lot of technology.

And when I think about technology, I think about like how we.

Uh, how we use it at scale to treat each other terribly.

It's how I think of technology.

Like, it used to be more about knowledge and information and, and, uh, additive.

And, and now a lot of it is just, you know, just bad, bad stuff.

Listen, this stuff, they're gonna make super railguns and

shoot, you know, 500 ton lead bullets into other people's houses, right?

Like, I mean, it's all,

Yeah.

I mean, uh, Here's what this is all making me think of.

It's a little less optimistic than you.

Do you remember we recorded a podcast a couple months ago?

I don't remember anything that happened more than five minutes

ago, but I'm assuming, assuming we did.

Let me sum it up for you.

Uh.

The truth is a slog and really, really boring.

Oh God, is it?

And there are no shortcuts.

especially when it comes to physics.

has shades of convenient conspiracy theory.

It has shades of, um, side road around COVID.

It has shades of a lot of that.

Why?

to

triggers the, like, salt, fat, and sugar mechanisms of the internet.

It's the same, same taste buds, right?

same, same taste buds.

I feel bad for this

I feel bad for the guy who has the draft that has been revised

for the last three years and is nervous about putting it in front of his peers.

And then he's watching all this go on.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

He just keeps moving!

Move in the little box.

literally everyone is going to be, if, let's say it

does work, small chance, but let's say like magic happens, right?

Everyone's going to be like, just like that overnight, everything changed.

God for Twitter threads.

Twitter thread.

Wow, I learned about this on Twitter.

I guess it finally

Exactly.

So, you know, right now, and you know what worries me about, first off,

what worries me about that kind of environment, is it kind of takes all

the oxygen out of the room for the people who actually need to patiently

pick away at the thing for five years.

Like, no one pays attention to them.

Number one.

Number two, These things, like with COVID, it was the most awful outcome,

which is it killed a bunch of people.

All this nonsense killed a bunch of people.

That's not, hopefully won't happen

Oh, like the fast twitch, like, you know, drink some chlorine, you know,

Or just pure, like pure denial, because

it's going to kill you, right?

If you take the virus, it's going to make you, you know, infertile or something.

Sorry, the vaccine will make you infertile.

So that killed people.

That was the worst possible outcome.

But a lot of it is frankly, just so noisy and nonsensical that like, there's no

room for the, frankly, It is boring as all

Oh, well, it's you spend your time essentially what it all reverts to

is a kind of conspiracy narrative like a kind of ironic conspiracy narrative

and you're like, you know, this

this just validates, first off, how so forward looking.

We are futurists.

The fact that we had this podcast two months ago, and now it's being

validated by little magnets popping up

look, but not popping up fully, just

Okay, you're not popping up fully, exactly.

There's another topic we talked about that is what's kind of ringing in my

head now as well, which is the sort of Uncertified expertise that comes

with being a user on the internet

It is.

Well, and it's, it's also we've lost the Meaningful blue check

and gone for the for pay Blue check . So I don't know who's who.

Like there's one guy on there who's, you know, he says

he's a high energy physicist.

That's

a lot of people telling you they have PhDs on Twitter right

I got to tell you though, man, I, yes, the, the pharma

industry, et cetera, et cetera.

And there's all these things that are wrong and bad in the world, but

boy, do I take a shot every week that helps me keep my body under control.

Well, tell me what that some people are listening

this podcast for the very

No, no one's listening for the first time.

Uh, it's called Manjaro and it's, it's one of those, um, semi glutide, um, uh, for,

of many many many years of science and

and FDA approval and peer review.

And now, you know, I saw my endocrinologist, I'm diabetic

type two, but I'm fully treated.

Like everything, my, my.

I'm losing lots of weight.

I'm exercising more.

A lot is going really well for me and all, all my, uh, core sort of

indicators are just like right there.

He's like, you're right there in the blue.

And then he said, he said something amazing, which was, there's never been

a better time to be morbidly obese.

So that's, thanks Doc.

Um, but he's like, Oh, next year.

And he named it.

And it was like, Sperflakaflied.

He's like, Oh, that one, man, that's, you're going

There's another drug

He's like another 5%.

Here we go.

Yeah.

He's, they're just going to keep this.

We're on this incremental path where we're going to be able to say, I can

get you to a healthy body with these,

Right and it's worth noting these innovations didn't happen On

Twitch, or on Twitter, and they take years and years to break through.

They represent,

boring and cynical here, I hope this is like, I hope

this is like, you know, antibiotic.

Like, they left the petri dish out, yeah, they left the penicillin,

the petri dish out, and it's like, wait a second, it can happen.

It can happen.

Um, and I hope it happens because I think maybe we can use it.

Hopefully we won't use it to make bombs, but we might make bombs with it.

There's that too.

Put

no, no, it's not, it's not bombs.

It's like rail guns.

Like you can just accelerate enormous amounts of stuff.

Very, no,

but great.

no, right there.

Absolutely.

Right there.

Right there.

Um, okay.

So I hope it comes together because we're going to need some invention

to get out of the mess a little bit.

it'd be, it'd be nice to get, but the, yeah, it does raise the

question like, what if we got that, then what's the next get outta jail free.

We need, 'cause it's, it's, it just gets, like, it's not, we don't, we

don't not gonna fix society with this.

We'll just make a much faster, more hectic society and then

we'll need like mega conductivity.

Uh, and, but you know, no, I'm with you.

Look, I don't.

Nothing is,

Here's the thing.

It seems like there's more smoke than there was a week ago, right?

It's not being identified as a complete fraud just yet.

Some labs I've never heard of are saying they validate it.

Let's say it is real.

Now you have the like, can we mass produce this?

Does it really work consistently?

does it get?

How does it become useful?

then it really, and it's like, cool, now we can have levitating trains.

We'll try to dig a tunnel in America for less than 36 billion,

Yeah.

And so let's end it with, there are no shortcuts,

are no shortcuts.

Here's what I would say.

If this is real and that's a huge if,

Yeah.

and we could be in a position to have an enlightened

policy, what is exciting about this?

This is going to both sound cynical, but I think you'll

actually see why it's optimistic.

This is a thing, a new technology like this, and this is also

true of the internet, it's true of the medication I'm taking.

It aligns the common good with greed.

that good?

It's good because I don't know of a more fundamental

force in humans than fundamental...

Humans will...

of the most pro capitalist things you've ever

Or not, look, a human will hold on to a piece of gold

while you punch them in the face.

They will, you know, and then they'll die.

I completely

They'll die, right?

And

For better or worse, like, and there is worse, because

greed can sometimes lead to terrible suffering around the world.

You look, Eli Lilly's shareholders want me to lose weight

Yeah.

and be healthy.

Um, the internet early days as it became commercialized, people wanted me to

communicate more and more with the people in my community as much as possible.

And so in this case, I think you have a, you know.

Lower cost transportation that emits less fossil fuel exhaust,

and you know, things like that.

mad run to monetize innovation means that often good outcomes can happen.

Sometimes they, they, when, when steam engines came together and the rail

lines were laid down, everybody's like, the world's a better place.

Like now, they didn't look that far out to say, wait a minute, we're

putting all this smoke in the air, it probably is going to be bad later.

can't get

But for now, I can see my cousin Louise In three

hours and she's in Cleveland

then the phone.

and the phone, all of it.

Right.

And so near term, we tend to find the, the like pat, the good path.

Right.

And then later the invoice shows up and it's like, Hmm, woof.

That was, I didn't expect that.

why government exists to,

that bill.

government exists to pay that bill, right?

It

why we have a government in a capitalist society.

No, so that's, that's the way I see it.

I think that what I'm optimistic about is if there's anything real here, it's

exciting because it's really aligned with immense amounts of human greed

and that, and like that, then it

agree with you, and that could be good for the world.

I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm a believer in that because I think fundamentally,

human aspiration and human ambition is where, what, what brings people, uh,

what takes people forward, frankly.

nice.

We like to take care of our families and then we go out and we fight for it.

Right?

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,

look, that's, it's an exciting and interesting thing that happened by

the time people listen to this podcast.

It may be disproven, but you know, but, uh, go out, check out the Wikipedia page.

Um, everybody's having a good time thinking about a better future and, you

know, dip in because there's going to be weeks where we're not looking at a

better future and it's good to remember.

Yeah.

Um, this podcast is sponsored by Aboard at aboard.

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Couldn't have said it better myself.

All right, Richard.