Shawn Ryan

Maybe it's not even the right thing to do.

Can you do that now without like begging for things to have been different in the past and just like, you know, there's opportunity to now go for it and do it right.

Don't just...

Care about papers, care about some of the infrastructure.

I mean, that's what they say.

I hope I don't get all the facts wrong.

But yeah, they have a lot of data, and they're wanting to serve it to different places.

And I think DARPA gets a lot of credit, too, there for actually what you think of as the internet.

And this was the type of thing that bugged me a lot, because I think I had these heroes in...

in tech that thought like, oh, if the physicists maybe just did things differently, they'd have like all these, whatever, cool thing.

And then you walk into the door of where I worked and there'd be a thing on the side, cause it was funded by a tech person of like saying how quantum mechanics like leads to like the transistor technology and like understanding general relativity helps with like timing of satellites and GPS.

like imagine if you had quantum gravity or like the blue sky research you do now might lead to something cool in the future.

And I believe in blue sky research and it's great.

But I think the thing is like, normally it's still, there's a reason for it, you know?

And

Like, how do you, like, it's a weird pitch to try to say, oh, it's worked before, so keep giving me money now.

I don't, it doesn't feel honest.

I mean, it's, in some sense, yes, but, like, I didn't like that.

I think the cooler thing would be, again, to try to see, like, how do you align things that are valuable with the thing that you want to do as a physicist?

and like go from there because there's anything that you want to be able to do if you can't do it already there's something missing and it probably if you're human interacting with it it's an engineering thing it's a product you could build and not like an equation you're trying to solve so i think that's a fun thing that's kind of opening up probably because of the way that like funding is weird in academia right now like