David Olson
speaker
61 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
David Olson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
How long have we had tunnels then? Oh, so the tunnels were dug in the 80s.
Yeah, this was designed to be a nuclear test location originally, and now we do only subcritical experiments in this location.
We do this because it is secure, right, so we can control the environment. And we also are concerned about a potential breach of the vessel, and so we want to do it in an environment that's controlled and we don't lose any of the plutonium into the environment. If something goes wrong. If something goes wrong, yeah.
So this is where the Scorpius machine is going to reside.
And the reason is we need higher energy x-rays to be able to look through plutonium.
When a coffee bean is harvested, you know, in the jungles of Costa Rica or Colombia or wherever it might be, those berries, which look like little tiny cherries or almost like crab apples, they get hauled into baskets or trucks and then like thrown onto the ground. And there's either like dry or wet fermentations.
But in both cases, just whatever endemic microbes are in the jungle, on the fruit, start to acidify and metabolize all of the fruit flesh. And all those metabolites, all the acids that are produced, all the organic molecules seep into the actual coffee bean itself and change its flavor.
If you took a fresh coffee bean and completely stripped it of the fruit and dried it immediately and went through the same roasting process, you would end up with the most like... flat, cardboardy, acrid coffee compared to what happens post-fermentation. So fermentation is an incredibly important step in coffee production.
Yeah. Complex.
Fermentation is the transformation of one food into another with the help of microbes.
You, as the fermenter, take the role of the bouncer. You have a velvet rope at your disposal. You stand at the door. And a great ferment is the club inside where it's full of beautiful people making great conversations, sipping on champagne, and it's a fantastic party.
And it's your job at the door to turn away all the bad actors, all the people that are going to go inside and start a fight, you know, just ruin the vibe. You just want to let in the good microbes.
Yeah, so I was I was in grade school and I was like at home alone in the morning. I was just eating honey nut Cheerios like any other North American kid watching Transformers on Fox Kids. Yeah. And I don't finish my breakfast. I just throw the bowl up on the counter and then like jet off to school. And this is like end of the school year. It's summer.
It's hot in our little cramped apartment in Toronto. And I come back to my mom, who's already like setting up for dinner. And she's like, clean up after yourself. Your breakfast is on the counter. And then I go like, sorry, mom, pick up the bowl. And the milk is set. It's like jelly. I'm like, mom, what has happened? She's like, you made yogurt. Now, please clean it up.
We have we have stuff to do. And I was like, no. How can I make yogurt? That is something you buy. I can't just leave the house one day and make Lego when I come back. That's something you buy from a toy store. Yogurt is something you buy from the grocery store.
But yeah, I was doing research and I was like, oh wait, all these microbes that live in your mouth are the same microbes that people have used for fermentation for thousands of years. Like the reason you have to brush your teeth is because lactic acid bacteria eat all the food that doesn't make it down your esophagus.
And turn all those scraps into lactic acid, which then rots urine out and corrodes it.
And that is the same action.
Exactly. And if you're lucky, they're there in the right amounts to do what they do in yogurt. And acidify the milk, coagulate the milk proteins, and make this gel.
You need food. You need food that you would want to eat that hopefully also the microbes will want to eat. So to start any fermentation process, you need the food you're looking to ferment. Then you need to find the microbes. There's a couple ways of going about that. One, they're everywhere. That's good. It's good that they are everywhere. They're on you. They're on our skin.
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