Shawn Ryan

And then you get over it or whatever and you realize how there's a lot of value to being able to get other people on board with the same vision because then you can really push for it.

And as long as that push is to something that's possible, then you're good.

If it's a push towards something that's impossible, that's scary.

And I think that that was something where, again, before...

before the AI stuff, I was very disillusioned in being like, man, they're like taking buzzwords and concatenating them with like quantum computing and what else was I disillusioned by?

Like,

you'd see things that as a physicist, you know, like there's certain no-goes and they're still getting funded.

And you're like, ah, like, you know, like we don't have like this lack of vision.

We wish we were doing cool stuff, but like somehow we can't, you know, now I think that's changing.

And the same time, these people are just overselling things kind of adjacent to what we do and acting like they're going to be better because they're entrepreneurs and like, and we don't know what we're doing.

And I was very, almost resentful of that at some time.

But I think the coolest thing now is like, damn, like the products they're building with like cloud code or whatnot are super useful in the sense of, you know, as a physicist, not many people in theory know how to do much more than like pen and paper or use Mathematica or whatnot.

If I wanted to like think about questions that are more like systematic, like you just want to like compute all of these different things numerically or whatnot, those are not valued because their field is so small that one person doing it would be considered a waste of time because they're not going to have a chance of getting a breakthrough.

But

When you have tools that open up your ability to basically, instead of hiring a dev team, you don't need the resources for that.

You can still just do it yourself.

That's really cool.

So I'm super grateful that maybe some of that hype led to technology that's actually useful for my job, or at least the things that I wish my job were.

So I think my opinions clearly oscillate a lot about some of these folks.

So I think he could make it to Mars, depending on his definition, right?