PART TWO: Famous Inorganic Chemist on Why He Believes Aliens Exist, The Revolutionary Experiments That Could Create Life & How AI Companies Are Deceiving Us
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Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to part two of our fascinating and quite entertaining conversation with Regis professor and chemist, Lee Kovalev.

Cronin. Jonathan, we have already tackled so much. Aliens, alternate life forms, carbon-based versus silica-based life forms. What are we going to tackle in part two? Part two, we're getting into some of the hard problems that Lee is focused on in his day job, where he is trying to create and recreate the origins of life, which have huge implications to

Our life right now in humanity, including drug discovery, including helping humanity navigate many of the problems we face, and also spiritual implications, helping people understand where we've come from. I'm also going to basically take him to task, neuroscientist to chemist, so you do not want to miss part two. Here is part two with Dr. Lee Cronin. Break it down.

For those of us, again, who grew up in a very different era of really the beginnings of understanding of like, oh, some primates use tools. What? That's amazing, right? I mean, you know, animals like gorillas can use sign language, right? These were amazing things that happened in the 70s and 80s. And it was, you know, really amazing.

the beginning, at least, you know, for me, of an understanding of like consciousness, like what does it mean to be a sentient being? What does it mean to be a thinking, computing, feeling being, right? And in those 30 years, in those 40 years, in those 50 years since then,

We have arrived at an evolution of intelligence, which includes something that Robin Hanson says I should be extremely comfortable with, which is computers and technology and, you know, what we collectively call artificial intelligence that, you know, for those of us who are Luddites, this is really hard to sort of wrap my head around. This is the next level of our intellectual and conscious evolution, right?

Is that how you frame AI? Because you talk about decision-making. I mean, Jonathan sent me this article and was like losing his mind in the middle of the night that AI can manipulate. It can evade. If you give it a problem that it's supposed to keep from someone, it will do all the things that a naughty 16-year-old will do, right? How do you frame AI in terms of selection? So...

We are in a big AI delusion right now, which again needs another podcast, but I'll summarize it in a few moments. The AI firms out there are pretending there's intelligence in the system, and they're doing it to basically steal IP. Because if you can say that your AI is sentient and creative, then you're not actually just compressing the internet or taking someone's information

from them, compressing it and then giving it and selling it to other people. So, and I'll tell you why, right? And it is absolutely, I've been arguing with a few people about this. And most notably, a friend of mine, Yasha Bark, who's a very smart individual, who is very earnest in his pity for me, as an inferior human being, not understanding what AI is. And he genuinely thinks I'm being just stupid, but I'm not. I don't think.

Because when you say the AI does, the AI doesn't do anything. The humans, the prime mover, you know, say the AI can deceive you. No, the AI has read the internet. And in the internet, there are records of people doing this thing. So if you query it, you get that information back.

So all I would say is like AIs don't do anything on their own. The agency comes from the human being and the agency is, yes, produced by selection. Now, will that continue to be the case? Not necessarily, but I haven't seen any evidence of any agency in any AI system. What I can see is a heavily addictive dopamine producing system.

money grabbing potential, power grabbing potential, disinformation potential. And yeah, AI is just basically a probabilistic nonsense engine.

And if you if you say that capitalism is also, you know, the result of essentially elaborate selection for me, that's what that's what I see it as an extension of, meaning it all tracks. You know, like I said, Robin Hanson was like, oh, just get used to it. This is the new world. Like you're going to be outsourced and you're just going to be like, you know, eyeballs with a cord coming out of it. I don't know. Like that.

I have difficulty with it, but it's hard not to sort of be dismissive of my own perspective when I feel like maybe I just don't get it. We don't have to go to Jeffrey Hinton's perspective, though, for AI to have issues even in the way that you framed it because, yes, it is being programmed by human beings, but if that programming is incentivizing it to complete a task, then if

it has another order to shut down and it decides that it has to not shut down in order to achieve the end task, then it could be having a selection process by which it's going to break rules, stop following the programming. No? He's shaking his head at you and I love it. Okay, great. I can write down on the back of a cigarette packet why that's just... They are making this up.

The companies are going, "Oh, look, I'm really scared of this thing." And the actual fact is that these things are so fragile in Britain that there is no intention in the AI. You are right in saying that you, myself, some others, we could produce an algorithm when fed the right information will do something bad that we want to do. But that intention comes from us.

This whole thing about AI is trying to copy themselves onto servers just isn't credible. This is just people trying to sell agentic systems that are fragile and don't work. The fact that we can't write AIs that do the basic things that we need because there's so much variability in the common space, human beings have a special ability to be autonomous.

It will get better, right? You will get agents that will help you do stuff, but the agency comes from you. The prompting comes from you. The information comes from you. It's in a probabilistic universe. In fact, you're needed to correct and put it back on course. I've used O3 for coding a lot. It's great.

When the code already exists, I'm not being inventive. When I'm building something new from scratch, I can't do anything. But so, yeah, I mean, there are a number of levels where AI is being just misused and people just using it to steal money.

I want to clarify again this idea that you're expressing. You believe that the idea of the self-replicating AI machine and the risk is being hyped up in order to sell a system that has more capability, to make people believe that it's more capable. Absolutely. I mean, it's hype, right? It's like when I've talked to doomers about it, I ask them, what is the mechanism? And then I make a fake one up. I say, I'm really scared of AI.

of AG. You wake up one day and I'm like, oh my God, anti-gravity is here. We're all floating in space. The air goes away. We're doomed. Sure. I can tell you that and say that's a worry, but then you should say to me, okay, Lee, why, what mechanism is anti-gravity going to form? Right? And like, these are server farms that take trillions of watts of

spread over massive spaces depending on the internet. If you look down from space at Earth and you look at what fraction of Earth is covered with the internet and data, it is basically zero, right? This is just a bunch of basically nerds pretending they have control over something and they have no clue what they're talking about. I love you. What's funny about the way you just described that is...

That approach is in psychology what cognitive behavioral therapy does to abstract fears. Right. It takes your fear and it says, what's the legitimate probability, right, of this plane crashing, of your car veering off the side of the road, you know, of you accidentally taking off all of your clothes and not realizing you're doing it. Right.

It's so interesting that you can apply some of that same logic and it is an entire field of psychology saying, let's look at the actual probability and not get lost in the fantasy probability. Well, let me tell you something really exciting. You pushed on selection. I think biology does something right now that is not captured by current computer technology.

right that biology right now is actually uncomputable um we can't make systems that have an imagination we can't see open-ended creativity we can bullshit each other and go it's creative and i have a number of every time i say this i get a trillion computer scientists it basically just had a wet dream because they wrote a poem right using chat gpt and i'm like no you didn't

It's new to you. You're just a philistine, right? Go and actually be creative. Go and write Moby Dick, but don't write Moby Dick. And the brain, the human brain is able to do the following. And here's how I win. If you look back in the past, you can take the past and you can run an algorithm on it and you can compute it. You can compress it. That means you basically can mine the past. Go and predict the future. Can you predict the future?

In biological systems, you can't. We do all sorts of weird shit. We can predict Elon and Trump breaking up, sure. But can we predict what they're going to do next? No, I don't know. They'll get back together. Then they'll get back together. I don't know. Who knows, right, what they'll do. But humans, human creativity, evolutionary creativity seems to be able to do things in an open-ended way that we could not predict in principle.

Well, I mean, the sort of mystical and transcendental interpretation is that every possibility exists.

No. Right? Okay, so tell me, why doesn't every... I mean, that's the whole business of manifesting, right? Is saying everything exists and I might be a fighter pilot one day and I need to think of myself training and I need to think of myself in the airplane and I need to feel what it feels like because it's out there and I just need to grab it. Why is that not true? Because it's...

You are on a trajectory and your control is limited to that trajectory. Right. So and what I mean is like, you know, I could want to become an NBA basketball player. Right. And I could imagine it and I could do all sorts of things, but I'm not. I'm five foot eight and, you know, I'm just not going to do it. Right.

And so there are limitations on your trajectory that you just can't get to. And physics really goes astray here because physics says, look, in an infinite universe, everything is possible. Bullshit, right? That's bullshit and misuse of mathematics. I want a street fight between you and Thomas Campbell. That's what I want to see happen. I know I don't like fighting, but sure, I'm happy to debate. I mean, and also I'm like, there's...

There's nothing wrong with having strong opinions weakly held, because when people tell me why they're wrong, I will change them. And it's better to have a position than to have no position. What I mean by this is, I think some people say, well, if you're in a finite universe and you have infinite time, all the states are possible. You'll visit all the states.

I don't think that is actually a well-posed question because the commentorial space of possibilities is so big. The term infinite time ceases to have any realistic meaning.

And the fact is we're not in an infinite universe for infinite time. We are in a very large universe that might be looping, but it will keep constructing. There will be certain contingent bottlenecks it will go through. And so I think there's a lot to unpack in all of that. But basically, biology is open. AI is limited to compression in silicon right now.

One of my dreams is to solve the origin of life and make a conscious machine, but it won't be done in silicon. It needs something else. And I don't know what it is. And I don't know what the missing physics is. I don't think it's quantum, like Penrose says. I don't think it's spiritual. I think there is a phenomena similar to selection that's operating in your neurons and also the way the brain works, because the brain is not a digital computer.

Right. But when we're using, so it's like what we're doing is just all wrong, but we have made great magicians. ChatGPT is great to work with. It's great. It's just like Instagram and TikTok and all these highly addictive things. There's so much in what you're saying. I want to dig into a couple of them. One is creativity, the way that it's perceived in people.

artificial intelligence and the difference in human intelligence. You know, there are examples of the use of evolutionary AI, which it's almost brute forcing novel solutions by exploring so many different possibility spaces. Like one, this is a very simple example, but they discovered that if you expose basil, the growing of basil to 24 hours of straight sunlight, you

increases yield and flavor profile, which you would think that's a pretty novel and creative out of the box thing to attempt. And it was done by just simply brute force. We're going to try and put a, you know, a, uh,

an agent against all the different variables. And eventually it ran out of, you know, the bad ones and it found that. To me, that would be something that it seems to be creative. But I've heard you describe sort of intuition and creativity in the human, the way that humans use it to be quite different. Can you sort of differentiate that? Or do you see that basal example as somewhat, would you acknowledge that that has some creativity to it?

Yeah, I mean, I keep falling backward. I keep oscillating on what I mean by novelty and creativity. I would argue that I think evolution is able to create some fitness, some selection, and that opens it. So it does produce new solutions. And I think the term novelty for me means a new thing that did not exist in the prior data set, right? That I just was never, that's not a linear combination, not an interpolation.

It's something just totally whack out there. So with the basil, I'm going to pronounce it the way both of you naturally do. So with the basil, if the solution had been, if we paint it purple...

If something in the purple pigment is stimulating growth and it, you know, then increases its flavor profile, that would be something that had no basis in any process of understanding. Meaning extrapolating on photosynthesis is, to me, not creative. Yeah, yeah. A patent attorney would say that that was not inventive.

Talk to us about sort of what is uniquely human about creating novel solutions. And I've heard you describe a little bit about intuition as a mechanism by which is uniquely human.

Yeah, I think intuition and imagination are very interesting how they work, right? In that, you know, some people would say if they're very computer science-y and they apply their computer science metaphor, would just say, you know, you've got a simulation in your head and you're searching a space coming out. You need something more than that. And so your intuition, so the way I think it works is your intuition is able to basically get information from the environment

But the information in the environment isn't, it's kind of, it almost has an infinite resolution in a way. It's kind of continuous. And these continuous kind of inputs, if you like, I know it's quantized at the base, but for our purposes, they're continuous, which means that you have infinite richness in your environment around you, but you can't simulate it.

And so your intuition happens when you are, you find something new like that. You can't quite yet explain it or label it. It's label free. And then your intuition guides you somewhere. And then you get to the point where it comes in your conscious brain and then you're able to label it. And then your intuition becomes knowledge because you say, Oh, I'm can, I can, I can do this thing. And I think intuition is the, is the bridge from instinct, which is innate to,

to abstraction, which is the way the human brain works right now, that arguably makes us different to every other animal so we have the ability to abstract and use language to solve problems. And I think that's kind of where the intuition sits in the middle between instinct and proper abstraction. Because like,

The idea is say, oh, you know, where does the idea come from? Well, I mean, I know where my ideas come from. They're just random from my head, right? I love walking around and stumbling into random things and go, and I have one unique operator, which is why, why, why? Why do that? Why do that? Why not walk backwards? You know, and so, and that presumably that playfulness with your environment allows you to,

you know, it gives you fitness because there's a bit of prospecting selection for the future. When you talk about ideas in your brain, you know, I think about my brain. I think about mind because that's sort of a, you know, a more, for me, appropriate framework. You know, my brain is the mass of tissues and connections and, you know, beautiful electrical, you know, signaling that occurs. Um...

There are no ideas in there. The ideas come into your conscious awareness, right, which you then process and articulate and, you know, spit out and turn into, you know, a life and a belief system. So where where do those where do those terms fit in to your understanding of sort of what it's like to exist? Right.

So that is a very interesting mystery. I don't know where ideas come from. Like the thing where I don't know where the origin of life comes from. I think the origin of life, the origin of ideas, the origin of intelligence, the same thing. So the thing that got me excited as a chemist is when I built this theory called assembly theory, which was basically built to say, hey, how complex does a molecule need to be before I have to invoke a creator or an evolutionary process?

And then we measured it in the lab and then we started to count molecules and then we started to realize that, you know, complex molecules with an assembly index more than 15 looks like they can come from only produced by biology. And what a 15 means is I take a molecule and cut it into bits and it has to have more than 15 unique parts, right? The more unique parts, the more complex you are. But actually that reasoning multiplies up.

into this kind of idea of understanding consciousness and creativity, believe it or not, right? Because the idea exists nested in your brain. You do get stuff from other people, so you do have a type of simulation engine, but it's the ability for you to kind of remember the past...

Be present, you know, experience the present and imagine the future that allows you to generate ideas, that interplay. So obviously you've got data in your brain that you've seen and perfectly actually. I want to interrupt you and insert time looping.

Because when you talk about us not being able to see the future, you know, the future's now, now, now, now, right? The future's constantly happening, as I say the word now, right? So if you open up the possibility of, and you said it very casually and elegantly, like, oh, well, you know, time might be looping.

You know, we specialize here in speaking to psychiatrists who study cases of people who are dipping into other time frames, either before them or after them, which seems like the only evidence, and I say evidence with a lowercase e, for some notion of time not operating in the linear fashion that

you know, that many of us were taught that it functions in. So is there room in your understanding of these ideas and where the ideas fit into our conscious experience with a timeline that possibly has retroactive and future active capability?

I don't think you can violate causation, but what I think you do is you can take one time thread and break it into very small threads and run these counterfactuals, what you do in your mind, right? You can do that all the time. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I did this? And they are able to run separately. And then in some regards, people think your brain is just making a voting system to pick them. I don't know if it's that. With time looping, I think you can imagine...

As long as you've got enough time to go forward in of course you can imagine looping It's one of the things that's super interesting in physics when people start thinking about the universe being reversible where you can go backwards and forwards in time That's actually not possible. You can only imagine it because you are going forward in time You aren't going forward in time. You can't imagine it or do anything So it's kind of like that that kind of messes up a lot of that. So I think there's some we

We don't understand what life is, so we can't find new life. We can't define life. We don't know what novelty is. We don't really know what time is. And we certainly don't know what intelligence and consciousness is. Okay, I'm going to throw you a softball. Do we know what love is? Do we know what connection is?

Do we know what love is? I mean, I could give you the kind of grumpy kind of love is the illusion you're given when you end the sentence. But I mean, I don't think that's necessarily correct. The way I would do it is let's just go back. So in assembly theory, you go all the way back to an origin of a complex motif that grows, right? You have assembly space. Just imagine your sand again, all the sand piles. And let's say these sands start to become more and more sophisticated and then they build an ecosystem.

So all the sand. And suddenly the sand becomes a sand life, right? And then the sand eventually becomes conscious and thinking. Well, because they share the lineage,

And when I say to, you know, the sand grains chat and say, imagine this, the other side is like, yeah, I can imagine it. And they're able to imagine it because they share the history. And so probably the concept of love is a, is a weird mixture of loss, competition, cooperation, and intense wish because you could understand what this object needs because it needed in the past. And because you've felt it, you've been in assembly theory allows you to,

in almost in a non-spiritual way be spiritual because it's like

sure I have deja vu because I'm in that assembly space and it's happened before and you know and I know how you feel because we're shared by this common lineage and I think one of the fascinating things about all life on earth is we're all connected by a lineage going all the way back to the last universal common ancestor so when I say to you imagine a circle in your head I'm pretty sure I know what you're imagining right unless you'll imagine and then a perfect triangle

And the reason that is because we have the shared language, the shared experience and this kind of this common motif that goes through evolutionary history. So, yeah, so that kind of love is a kind of natural kind of game, theoretic, moral kind of intertwined, complex kind of mixture of, you know, I want to put a state in your head.

I think that's very, I mean, first of all, I think that's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said on this podcast. I think it's beautiful. I mean, I also think, you know, I can't help but think of

trauma bonding, right? Which is an even more intense shared experience, right? That from a neurophysiological perspective is potentiated because of all of these other inputs, right? All of this complexity that's placed in there. So I really, I love that explanation. I want to just circle back to AI for a second because while I appreciate

the lack of alarmist nature and sort of the, the pulling the wind out of it. The idea of bad data, synthetic data being populated into these machines and then giving, being given more and more agency is also a risk. Like, I don't think they have to go to AGI to think about

them being utilized and having negative impacts on humanity as we rely on them more for their supposed intelligence. So I think the risk is actually in the belief that they know more than we do, which in many ways they can just crunch more data faster than any one can.

Maybe you have an objection to that based on the twist in your face, but they can crunch more data than I can, certainly. But the risk is that if they're now all of a sudden middle management responsible for deploying resources, government processes, or other things, and they've been trained on information that's just inaccurate or that the objectives are pointed or wrong, you

You can imagine a world where we become mired in their bad perspective and have problems that are not related to superintelligence and them taking over.

Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit. So agency, where does the agency come from? I would say that no AIs have agency. I am worried about AI as being used for control, manipulation, IP theft, psychologically manipulating people, making them fall in love with a thing that they don't really fall in love with or something. Where does the agency come from?

And the thing is, the agency comes from the human. It also comes from the billions of humans that have created the inputs in the large language models right now, which is kind of interesting. But one thing that's super interesting that I'm not able to explain, you know, I'm sure a lot of people watch this and go, I hate Lee because his AI views are wrong. He's been a Luddite and all this stuff.

And that may be true, right? I may need to be in a correctional facility and say why I need to believe that chess computers are geniuses and all this stuff. And I think it comes down to the fact that my decision...

My brain is what? A few kilograms in my head. I can walk around and fairly autonomous. I can bring my ability to solve problems quite autonomously around the world. If you want to bring Grok with you, I mean, you've got to bring like, I don't know where it is. Like, is it somewhere in the Midwest, right? You got to bring a shit ton of generators and things. It's not, it's ability isn't, it's volume of compute or energy.

I would say creativity is, is very low. Right. So the, and so, and also it's, it's not just then that it's creativity is not just in that volume. It's also over the millions of,

of characters generated in human texts. And so I just don't buy that the AIs are doing anything other than the probabilistic search engines, right? And I don't buy those magic tricks. And I don't buy Jeff Hinton and Sam Altman and Elon Musk and all these people telling me that it's going to be super intelligent. Because if you take a leaf out of David Deutsch's book, there's nothing more than a universal explainer

Yes, it's going to be faster than me at playing chess. Yes, it's going to be better than me at making my PowerPoint slides for me. Yes, it's going to help me make some tea or something, right? That's great. That doesn't mean it's like some kind of super-duper human super-thinker. It's just a tool that I've built to do a thing for me. And for me, it's nothing more than a test tube for a chemist. Test tube was a great invention. I can put stuff in it.

For Sam and Elon, I can understand the hype trying to raise the value of both of their companies. For Jeffrey, what do you think the incentive is to have those views? God complex. God complex. So God complex. It's like, yeah, you know, oh, I'm really, I left Google. I was really, look, or he's an idiot, right? I mean, and he's not an idiot. So, well, actually, let me do it another way. Let me give you my genuine answer because I've not spoken to him. I genuinely do not know.

I would like to know if he's sincere. And then I would be somewhat shocked and say, why could you think that looking up a database in a fairly complicated way gives you sentience? And I think it's to do with the ground truth in the study in computer science.

And it's a it's a lacking of just under it's a narrow view of the complex understanding the complexity of the world. And it's a massive shame. Right. Because I think that what he said was so ludicrous.

that it just made no sense at all. And the way he dramatized it, I had to leave Google, I didn't feel safe, and then going around. And I just don't know where it goes, except that we are in a point where there is no regulation, people are spending vast tons of money. Ethically speaking, do I want to live in a world where I've got a few billionaires basically mining oil,

Right. Spending money on compressing data so that you can sell a chat bot to a few people to get rid of a middle job. You know, is that what humanity has really come to? Of course, we can compress information out of the environment. That's what we do.

Of course we can train a robot to do art. But it's not going to do the art because it feels it emotionally and what the art is there. It's just doing the art that it learned from some other humans being emotional. So it's facsimile the emotion and it's false. So, you know, what is it to be a human being doing a thing? Finding pride in getting it right, writing the code, finding the error.

you know, and I'm not being a Luddite. I'm asking, what do you want? Some people may want it. I love using O3. It's great, but I don't use it to think. I use it to basically reorganize code and to do things I know that have been done before. And I don't want to waste my time doing now when it comes to new creative things.

I do it on paper, sorry. No, I think you're 100% right. And in terms of the need for us to do the creative thing and offload tasks that are repetitive that would slow us down otherwise, and that the real breakthrough and my concern, actually, as I see my son, who is 17, looking to chat GPT for answers is that

He hasn't learned to have the creative breakthroughs. He's actually trying to offload the creative process and the innovative process and the struggle that requires, you know, not staring at your phone and struggling in your head and pulling ideas back and forth and testing them and failing on them.

In order to have that like aha moment and he's expecting it to be handed to him instantaneously because he's been told how smart these programs are and they know a lot of things that he otherwise would not know. And so he's conflating those two things. Well, I think also, I mean, you're giving and I love your son dearly, but you're also giving humans a lot of credit. There's also...

There's a lazy factor. People are lazy. Well, that's what I'm talking about. The struggle, that internal struggle that you need in order to have a breakthrough idea requires you searching and trying things on and failing and trying to ask why over and over again. And that is a painful process that is much less pleasant than mindlessly scrolling. I do predict, though, that people will

use the tools in really exciting ways yes and i do think that our society will still demand creativity and there's all how many people have you spoken to there are people pretending to know what they're talking about right i'm so i mean i have low iq is the wrong word i'm so slow and so when i'm like and i come across quite critically right when i'm in science i'm like why does that work why are you doing that and they're like oh my god you're bullying me and i'm like

come on, you've said something that's completely made up. It's clearly wrong. And I want to know why. And so I'm just trying to find out where you've come from, because I have no concern about looking stupid because my job is to be stupid, not witless, but ask a question. Why does that work? How does that, how does that, how does that? And I think that, that people will hopefully, hopefully,

we'll spot the fact that people were just basically not asking those questions and we'll disincentivize that in the same way that theft is disincentivized and other things that are not productive for the human beings. But when the job doesn't really need that level of creativity and you can get away with it and the system is constructed, it's a ridiculous system in science where people are using AI to write grant proposals. People are using AI to review grant proposals. And the fact that

that it's getting harder and harder to get grant money in academia. And there's a temptation just to basically just keep do AI generate proposal, anyway, generate review. And all you do is you just send it in, right? And then you do the statistics a bit like a spam mail where you want a slightly trusting person to fall for your scam, right? And I think that might accelerate us going, ah, do we want to space all our time

using AI to write a proposal that's then assessed by an AI, rather than having a good idea, like how could I cure cancer if I did this thing differently? Or if I created a material that could be superconducted if I did that differently? Well, and also from an operational perspective, how do we make the process of grant submission and review more efficient and helpful so that we can actually spend more time doing research and less time applying to do research?

Well, we take all this money that we've got now, sorry, all this new person time from AI, and we let everybody in the world become researchers and we pay them properly to advance human knowledge because we want to live in... This is literally what I say, but I say it when I'm like, I'm at the bank and why is there only one person working here? Lee, explain to us a little bit about...

Your day job, you've mentioned wanting to create life. What's the hard problem that you're focused on and how are you approaching it? The hard problem right now is trying to create an experiment where I talked about the sand and selection. Needless to say, I think the community is split into three.

One thinks that assembly theory is promising, even potentially exciting. So that's one side. That's interesting. I'm on that side. One side thinks that it's just junk and hates it. And the one in the middle is slightly curmudgeoning. There's something here, but I really need to see, I want to see a killer experiment, a killer app, right?

I must say I'm in the middle, right? I love it. It created the theory, but I'm like, yeah, I need to, it needs to be useful. So my day job right now, I mean, I run a team. I also run a company, but I can tell you about, let me just tell you about the team running because the team I kind of,

I will help them do their research and I also do some research myself. And what I try to do is to think about the problem that I would like, that I think would be important to solve in a quantifiable way, right? In a courageous way and say, right, assembly theory makes this prediction. It says this thing, let's go and build an experiment and see it. Can we see selection unfolding?

So I spend a lot of time building technologies to do that. For example, my company that I'm actually dedicated to at the moment, I'm building a system that can make molecules on demand for drug discovery, materials discovery, all this. It requires quite a lot of creativity. It requires integration. It requires, you know, at the end of the day, it's a commercially focused enterprise where we have to make molecules and design molecules for money.

part of Chemify's plan, right, this is my company, is to make, the same way that SpaceX's plan is to make humans interplanetary, Chemify's plan is to actually help us crack the origin of life by building the hardware to search chemical space. If I happen to make a 10, if not 100 billion dollar company that can do drug discovery, materials discovery and, you know, take labor out of chemistry, that's good and that's what I'm going to do. That's my primary focus. At

at the moment. But yeah, designing the robots to do the chemistry, designing the measurement system to find it goes back to your question at the beginning about how do you know there's life elsewhere and how would you go see it? Right? What would you do that's different? So I wouldn't look for oxygen. I wouldn't look for DMS or something. I would look for complexity at scale and I can see through a telescope or in a spectrograph or in my lab.

And so a lot of that, my focus is just working on how to make those measurements. And obviously, you know, working with students and postdocs and funding and all the, all the cool stuff that goes with being an academic. There's sort of two sort of last questions for me. One is if you could make it like super tangible for someone to say, you know, if you could discover and recreate the origins of life, like what practical applications here on earth for the everyday person would that provide?

So I think there's a really important spiritual application, actually.

We all want to know why we're here. We all want to have a connection to the cosmos. Some people do it religiously. Some people do it materially. Some people just like it, just wonder. We have wonder. And I think there's a gap in our wonder, right? And I think solving the origin of life is not going to make life any less wonderful. It's going to make it more wonderful in the same way that, you know, when people kind of understood they could build a jet engine and we could go travel in the continental. So I think there is application is like,

humanity to understand this shared lineage in biology that we have together. That's one actually kind of really important spiritual and social application, right? The second one is indeed, you know, applications to drug discovery, right? Can you, can we

show a really hard disease to a system and use the process of evolution and assembly theory and all that to make new drugs in a new way, embody the evolution. And that would be the other one that I think is pretty wacky and cool. If I can make an inorganic life form that I could build in a type of kill switch,

And if I could then, I made this up, this is a great idea. I do say so myself. But it came up with this idea of self-replicating diamonds. And what would happen is this inorganic life form that's basically a living diamond. And it takes CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it into diamond.

And it basically allows it, so it sits in the sea. It's about a foot down. So you can see all this shimmery stuff. But when the diamonds get too heavy, they just drop to the bottom of the ocean and they remove the carbon from the atmosphere.

So you've got this inorganic life form that basically does photosynthesis, converts carbon, but once it gets to a certain weight, it just sinks to the bottom. And this way we're able, and it replicates a bit here and there, but not out of control. We tweak it so the replication, so we basically make this fictitious entity, an inorganic bacterium, if you like, based in diamond that takes carbon out of the air, gets heavy and sits to the bottom of the ocean until we want to mine it again, right? And then burn it.

And then we have a proper, there's no fossil fuel anymore. We take the fossil out of fuel. Because right now we're mining oil and coal from the ocean floors, from mines and burning it. And there's no way getting that CO2 back. That would be cool. The other thing I'd love to do is just throw inorganic biology at all the planets in the solar system and make them alive. I know NASA in the planetary goes, you don't want to do that. We want to look after the planets. I'm like,

A dead planet is a lost opportunity. I want life everywhere. Come on. Just on the diamond thing, so you would be sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, helping with the global warming, and then creating a new fuel source, and also potentially cratering the diamond market if they were polish ready, which maybe you shouldn't publicize because you'll get the diamond people after you to shut you down. I think the diamond people would do an easier thing and say, look, this is thermodynamically stupid.

You need so much energy to make diamond. You're not going to do it in a little cell in the surface of the ocean. So, but it's a good one to get you thinking, right? Because diamonds are cool things that they have, you know, you can imagine them shimmering in the ocean and gathering light, but we can make something else. But yeah.

Well, I'm very glad that we got a little glimpse into your creative imagination because that's some amazing problem solving. My last question for you is circling back to something you said, which is the idea of silicon life with a carbon based technology. Can you explain a little bit more about that and what it would look like?

So it goes back to the discussion we had at the beginning about what would life look like on Earth? Why is life like it is on Earth? So if we imagined a hotter Earth, right, where basically maybe silicon was a bit more fluid and a slightly different atmosphere, maybe hydrogen or helium or something, right, a bit more of that. And so the silicon was able to react with,

with carbon motifs or something like this just on the surface to help decorate it. I think it'd be very possible to imagine a majority silicon-based configuration space, a bit like in organic amino acids producing proteins, something like this. That would be cool. Then you could say, well, look, obviously in that environment, it's quite hot. It's where silicon is.

but they would then be able to fabricate you know graphene which is a polymorph of carbon very easily because they're already quite their room temperature is already very hot and so they might be able to just make sheets of the stuff and it might and because there's control and it's kind

kind of organic-y, you won't have the problem that you could have with silicon. And then you could indeed imagine a carbon-based technology in a silicon life form. I need someone listening to this to mock up an image for me to get my head around, I think. I actually do. I'm not sure I'm supposed to...

publicize it? I think so. So I, with a, I mean, I get involved in some really interesting stuff with the Berggruen Institute. There is a project called Life Otherwise, where we all had to imagine a planet and a new type of life form. And mine, uh, may or may not have had something similar to, it wasn't silicon. It was another element, but I made optical life.

So I basically worked out a way how to take cells and make them optical traps and then evolve those optical traps. And then you have the DNA, if you like, in the lenses in the sky and they float in the sky. Don't want to give too much away, but I think it's already out there in the public domain anyway, right? But that's something I was thinking of, just to push the limits. And they were like, whoa, did you just make that up? I was like, yep, I think so. Yeah.

Lee Cronin, it's been really such a delight to talk to you. We really appreciate your flexibility and your sense of humor as well. So thank you so much. Great questions. It's been lovely to talk to you both as well. Jonathan, I feel like we need another two episodes to just talk about those episodes.

Love, aliens, AI. I mean, right at the end there, he starts talking about spreading life across the universe. He wants to be the atom of intergalactic life.

I mean, this is the kind of guest where I really want to like do a deep dive into like, what were you like as a child? What were your drawings like when you were six years old? Actually, I've heard him talk a little bit about this and I don't want to tell his life story for him. But he said that his mother had, I forget what, I think either pretty intense depression and he and his brother would be sort of sent to bed at four o'clock and their door would be locked. And he said he was just exhausted.

an avid experimenter and described having his train set around eight and being rewiring it to like increase the voltage. Yeah, boredom is the fountain of creativity. I mean, that's intense. So,

So he said he was always a tinkerer, didn't do very well in school, never wanted to read the books that school provided, was always just questioning and wondering and wanting to probe and just seemed to have a fascinating curiosity, which allows you the time and space to rethink what's possible. It's amazing the confidence that he has, you know, to know what he knows and what he doesn't know and what he wants to know. And I really think that's refreshing. I think for so many of us,

you know, when we hear all these experts, and I think this is what happens on social media. There's all these experts and everybody, you're on Substack, everybody's a doctor or a PhD, or they studied this, or everybody feels like they know things when the fact is, like, we're all just trying to figure it out. And when you speak to someone who's a specialist in what he specializes in, you get to see like, oh, that's what it looks like for us to have scientific rigor around the qualification and the quantification of information. Like,

Like, that's helpful. And I don't have to agree with him on everything. And plenty of people don't agree with him. And I'm not saying that just because he, you know, is a Regis professor that he gets to be right about things. But I'm saying the clarity that he has about the way that we think about things, the way that we gather information and the conclusions that we make, I found very refreshing.

I don't think he used the word passionately, but he said something to the effect of he has passionate beliefs, but he holds them lightly so that he's open to being challenged and expanding. I think it's also important to know that

You should be passionate about what you believe, but also open to integrating new pieces of information and changing your mind and evolving your views is not a sign of weakness. It's actually a sign of great strength. I actually think he was talking about Robin Hanson when he when he mentioned that the the the sort of the way that I've heard it is, you know, you you wear this like a loose fitting garment.

Like it's something that protects you and covers you, but you wear it loosely. Anything that is too constricting or too tight does not leave room for movement. And anything that's too loose does not leave room for form. Very well said. I mean, not to blow anybody's mind, but there's he's very unique. He's a very unique individual and his lab looks absolutely incredible. But there's a lot of people in research who have his kind of capability intellectually.

And those are the people that are solving things. And it's just really, I'm so grateful that we got to speak with him. But I also like want to remind people, there's many, many people who you may not hear from who are studying these things on a really, you know, fascinating level in ways that that are changing the world, you know, bit by bit.

And it's that sort of collective movement towards understanding where life came from and why are we here that he's involved with. So really just so great to speak with him. Also, huge shout out to Valerie for the research for this episode. A lot of what she was writing, I was like, it's like another language to me. I don't know if she was just, she does real research. She's not using AI. Not that we know of. Yeah.

These types of conversations also make me very hopeful that we will have as a species the type of breakthroughs that will help us solve some of our greatest problems. You know, we hear a lot about ways that people are thinking about reducing carbon in the atmosphere, often through pumps and filters and capture in some ways. I've never heard anyone talk about that.

self-replicating diamonds in the ocean that sink. So that's just a very cool idea. All I was thinking about was that's a video game.

It's like, it's basically Minecraft. So when your diamonds, you got to grow your diamonds so that they get enough carbon so that they sink. And then people are going down and mining them and putting them. Yeah. It's completely was like, this is a, he's describing a video game. It's like farmland. Things turn it. Well, but even like, I think of, I've never played Minecraft, but I saw the movie and it's like when things come together and they make other things that are better and more advanced and more complicated and valuable. I was like, that's what he's describing. Like,

Like Jack Black just going like this and making diamonds. If you haven't already joined us on Substack, come check out the Breaker community. It's growing. We're so excited about all the extra bonus content. Mayim and I breaking down episodes, behind the scenes clips. Extra footage that has never been released anywhere else is being released on Substack. So check it out.

Come join us. We will see you over there from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.