422. Introducing “No Stupid Questions”

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In this new addition to the Freakonomics Radio Network, co-hosts Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth discuss the relationship between age and happiness. Also: does all creativity come from pain? New episodes of “No Stupid Questions” are released every Sunday evening — please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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John Paul DeJoria — From Homelessness to Building Paul Mitchell and Patrón Tequila | Brought to you by eero and LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

“Don’t limit yourself in life by your age, or what you think you’re capable of doing. You’re always as old as your mind leads you to believe.” — John Paul DeJoria

John Paul DeJoria is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist who has launched multiple global enterprises and is renowned as one of the “100 Greatest Living Business Minds” by Forbes.

John Paul DeJoria’s rags-to-riches biography is incredible and truly exemplifies the American dream. Once homeless, he has struggled against the odds to craft a unique life and many unique businesses.

In 1980, John Paul and hair stylist Paul Mitchell converted a partially borrowed $700 into 

John Paul Mitchell Systems, which is today the largest privately held salon hair care line. In 1989, he co-founded Patrón, the first ultra-premium tequila, and now the world’s number-one ultra-premium tequila, which he sold to Bacardi in 2018. John Paul went on to co-found John Paul Pet, ROKiT, and many other enterprises. 

He has signed The Giving Pledge, along with others like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, as a formal promise to continue giving back, and he has also established JP’s Peace, Love & Happiness Foundation as a hub for his charitable investments, which span the core values of his companies: sustainability, social responsibility, and animal-friendliness.

This episode was recorded in March of 2020. Due to technical issues, we moved from Skype to phone partway through the interview.

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This episode is the second in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. Part 1 focused on prospective home buyers, sellers, and existing homeowners. This episode, Part 2, addresses renters and landlords.

The conversation with host Lauren Murrow features a16z general partner Connie Chan, whose experience as a landlord herself has fueled her interest in residential real estate and technology; Richard Green, the director of USC’s Lusk Center for Real Estate, and Adena Hefets, the CEO of Divvy Homes, a company that allows people to build up equity while renting a home, with the option to eventually buy it.

We begin with the pressures on renters—and the uncertainty around federal relief measures—as well as the cascading effects on mom-and-pop landlords. Then we turn to the outlook for prices and volume in the rental market, particularly in large cities like New York and San Francisco. Finally, we discuss the opportunity for tech to solve outdated and inefficient processes for both renters and landlords.

For more a16z content on real estate and proptech, visit a16z.com/realestate.

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iJustine is became one of the Internet’s first-and most popular-“lifecasters,” inviting people around the world to watch her every move, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Within ten days of release, her “300-page iPhone bill” had garnered more than 3 million views and international media attention. These days, iJustine is a one-woman new media phenomenon: The popular techie, gamer, vlogger, and digital influencer has an army of nearly 8 million subscribers across multiple YouTube channels, with total views past one billion.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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This episode is the first in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. Part 1 focuses on prospective home buyers, sellers, and existing homeowners. Part 2 (streaming on 6/17) addresses renters and landlords.

How has social distancing shaken up the market to buy? What’s the ripple effect of eviction freezes and a record number of homes in forbearance? And how can tech streamline the inefficient process of renting, buying, and selling a home?

Led by host Lauren Murrow, the conversation features a16z general partner Alex Rampell, who has invested in a number of real estate companies; Malloy Evans, Fannie Mae’s senior vice president and single-family chief credit officer;  and Tushar Garg, CEO of Flyhomes, a company that helps buyers in competitive markets by purchasing their desired house in cash, then selling it to that buyer at the same price.

The discussion starts with the impact on home prices and volume, as well as the rumored exodus from densely populated cities. Then we shift to focus on existing homeowners. Finally, we talk about ways tech can improve the system, from hard tech to fintech.

For more a16z content on real estate and proptech, visit a16z.com/realestate.

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Proteins are molecular machines that must first assemble themselves to function. But how does a protein, which is produced as a linear string of amino acids, assume the complex three-dimensional structure needed to carry out its job? 

That’s where Folding at Home comes in. Folding at Home is a sophisticated computer program that simulates the way atoms push and pull on each other, applied to the problem of protein dynamics, aka “folding”. These simulations help researchers understand protein function and to design drugs and antibodies to target them. Folding at Home is currently studying key proteins from the virus that causes COVID-19 to help therapeutic development. 

Given the extreme complexity of these simulations, they require an astronomical amount of compute power. Folding at Hold solves this problem with a distributed computing framework: it breaks up the calculations in the smaller pieces that can be run on independent computers. Users of Folding at Home – millions of them today – donate the spare compute power on their PCs to help run these simulations. This aggregate compute power represents the largest super computer in the world: currently 2.4 exaFLOPS!

Folding at Home was launched 20 years ago this summer in the lab of Vijay Pande at Stanford. In this episode, Vijay (now a general partner at a16z) is joined by his former student and current director of Folding at Home, Greg Bowman, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and Lauren Richardson. We discuss the origins of the Folding at Home project along with its connection to SETI@Home and Napster; also the scientific and technical advances needed to solve the complex protein folding and distributed computing problems; and importantly what does understanding protein dynamics actually achieve? 

#101 – Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality

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Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.

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This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.

Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:14 – Reverse engineering Joscha Bach
10:38 – Nature of truth
18:47 – Original thinking
23:14 – Sentience vs intelligence
31:45 – Mind vs Reality
46:51 – Hard problem of consciousness
51:09 – Connection between the mind and the universe
56:29 – What is consciousness
1:02:32 – Language and concepts
1:09:02 – Meta-learning
1:16:35 – Spirit
1:18:10 – Our civilization may not exist for long
1:37:48 – Twitter and social media
1:44:52 – What systems of government might work well?
1:47:12 – The way out of self-destruction with AI
1:55:18 – AI simulating humans to understand its own nature
2:04:32 – Reinforcement learning
2:09:12 – Commonsense reasoning
2:15:47 – Would AGI need to have a body?
2:22:34 – Neuralink
2:27:01 – Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies
2:37:16 – Role of emotion
2:48:03 – Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself