Dwarkesh (host)

And I think, one, this is the thing I was telling you earlier, that it fills a niche of books, which unfortunately, there's just very few of.

So there's textbooks, which, yeah, you can spend 2,000 pages learning about molecular biology, but a layperson just as practically, who's curious, is just practically not going to get a chance to do that.

On the other end, there's what are basically just anecdotes about scientists or anecdotes about the history of science.

And this one discoverer was really mercurial, and here's how he ran his lab, and here's what his parents were like.

But it never really talks about the actual relevant science.

And a book like this actually does fill the explanatory middle.

Yeah.

By the way, the fact that LLMs exist has made the process of reading a book like this much more feasible and productive.

So I had a book club with a

you know, we're just, we're not biologists.

We're sort of lay people to this audience.

And so it was, I do encourage people for a book like this to see if you can like form a book club or something because, and just like talk to LLMs a bunch because there's just a bunch of extremely basic remedial chemistry and biology that we were able to recapitulate with the help of

the LLMs.

And so, you know, this whole thing of why is the CO2 and H2 reaction incentivized when one side is alkaline and one side is acidic in this early environment?

You just go through the remedial chemistry with the LLM.

Well, Nick, this has been great.

And yeah, thank you for the guide through both the remedial biology and chemistry, but also through many of the most interesting questions that you could ask about life.

Been great fun.

Thanks a lot.

Hey, everybody.