Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Here Be Dragons - Exploring the Unknown with NASA Ames Chief Scientist for Innovation Dr. John Stock

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Here Be Dragons - Exploring the Unknown with NASA Ames Chief Scientist for Innovation Dr. John Stock · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um my long lost, my long lost friend, Chris.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well hi.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, hi.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: We just spent some time together, man.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been a little bit.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's been it has.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I missed you.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: I told you that.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad to see your background.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Not much has changed.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad to see you haven't like torn through the code.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: What has changed?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm hoping that you didn't, you know, take down all your system and your setup, and I'm glad to see it's still like, you know, normal back there.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: I am in a remodel state, though.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you that right now.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like waiting.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: So this area behind me is the only clean area in this room right now.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because I have so much stuff.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Chris and Jenny get uh a B in their bonnet, they don't spend any time waiting around.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: They get after it.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd imagine it's it's an interesting place.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: My tractor broke down, by the way.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, I sorry to hear that.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: With a whole bunch of other because I'm handy.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're handy.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm handy.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course you are.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a handy guy.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Chris, okay, I I I want to know, okay, Dr.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Stock, Chief Scientist for Innovation at NASA Intelligence Systems Division.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Probably one of the, maybe not the fanciest, but one of the fancier titles that we've had, and one of the more um thought-provoking conversations we've had on Planet U.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's my takeaway.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: What did you?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very curious to hear your take of our conversation, though.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is your knee-jerk reaction?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: What are you most excited about after that?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: 100% agree with everything you said.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think that I guess my takeaway is that he so he's in Silicon Valley and he is surrounded by people that think differently than you and I.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so when he gets people in a room, or I think the rooms that he's in, those are not rooms we're in.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like we don't know at least I don't find myself in a room like that a lot.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're not but I found that you know your quantum mapping of gravity fields uh every day.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh interesting.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was just I was stunned by all right, you you know, you got a geoscientist in a room, um, and that person knows what they're talking about, they identify a problem, they have no idea how to solve the problem, right?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think like his his ability to bring people together that can look at it in a different way and say, Well, I have an idea about that.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think to me that was exciting in in terms of what is exciting to you personally, Jesse, which is entrepreneurship in the geoscience field.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it opened up a new avenue for thought for me in that regard that I haven't had before.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I agree that I think there's some really interesting I I think his his outlook uh is sort of I think is bullish about the geosciences, like very positive in the future for the value of geosciences, geosciences and geoscientists in a bunch of different avenues.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, the thought-provoking aspect of like, you know, why was the United States Geological Survey founded?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: What's the value add here?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we how does that change?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Has NASA taken over some of that that sort of mission in you know in the modern era?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And and if so, how do we rethink the the previous institutions?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like how it's a really I I don't know.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: I love this kind of high-level sort of um philosophizing about the point of it all in some way, shape, or form, right?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in this time where there's so many geoscience problems we have as society, uh, from critical minerals to to prediction and landscapes, and he I he touched on on several of them.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um I just left.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had another thought too, Jesse.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: I want to can I ask you a question?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: You you know, you you ask a lot, you asked John about it, you you think a lot about it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why is geoscience lagging with uh entrepreneurship and and problem solving in this way?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like I today, I I don't know, I guess like I had the thought of I it's newness, you know.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: These like all right, you go back to your education, even in your postdoc and all this stuff, right?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Resources and and these needs, these problems that that we have, that wasn't what we were thinking about 15 years ago.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and we've been thinking about cancer for a long time.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's true.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: No, you're totally right.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good point, too, Chris, because you know, the field of let's say biology and molecular biology is pretty old compared to the the paradigm of plate tectonics that kind of revolutionized geoscience, you know, uh a couple not too many decades ago, let's say.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a pretty young scientific discipline in that regard as well, and the problems are young too.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so the solutions are maybe in um in preparation or in progress.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think it's I just I don't know, I can't wait.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's just an exciting conversation.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's a clearly a brilliant guy, lots of interesting thoughts.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some of them maybe contrarian views, or or maybe some that that not everybody would agree with necessarily, but they're thought-provoking uh at the very least.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just excited, I'm excited to see, you know, what what is uh role at NASA and and what the the innovation and and sort of planter exploration leadership he brings, you know, what what the fruits of that labor will be over the next several years, um, and how innovation is kind of the the through line here.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'd imagine there's gonna be all sorts of really interesting technologies and data sets that that come out of work uh that him and others are doing at places like uh NASA.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it's exciting.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, one thing can be guaranteed, this is an interesting discussion.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Dr.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Stock coming at you.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if you want to know more about the geosciences, head over to our Camp Geo Mobile app.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: First link in your show notes.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of visual podcast series there, archived episodes with images, audiobooks for sale.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you can also follow us on all the social medias at Planet GeoCast.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Send us an email.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: There's a contact us link at our website, Plantgeocast.com, and uh you can follow us on our YouTube channel as well now.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So Planet GeoCast at YouTube.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Looks like a shirt brecha on uh over Air War, but I can't tell for sure.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: You got them pinned, don't you?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Look at you.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, over here.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, this is Pine Point Lead zinc ore.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's a breca.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: A uh Mississippi Valley type.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um Mississippi Valley type, all right.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the it's the iron ore deposit that uh up in Canada, up in the Northwest Territories, that supplied most of the iron for I think the World War II production of airplanes and things like that.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, it's a huge deposit.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, first year grad school, uh, we went up there, so it's beautiful galena crystals and sphaler and all this you know, beautiful stuff.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So carbonate hosting things.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's a it's a carbonate breccia with uh with uh uh mineralization in it.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's better.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's blurry, but I can see it.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, look at that.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: So what one of the things that impressed me most uh about um reading the summary of ores is that they represent the most improbable geologic places, right?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: They're like a palum cest of improbabilities focused in one place.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: The remarkable things.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just ore deposits in general.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right, because you think about like, okay, what's the definition of an ore?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's the most concentrated form that you can find of the thing you want.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: And and so it's inherently an end member, and it's inherently improbable, right?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I I I think okay, well, let's get let let's start the let's start the podcast on that, because this is a really interesting thing.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, Dr.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Stock to Bun and Geo.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll we'll gotta dive in from this.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, well, first of all, we've got to back up a little bit, but I love this org conversation thing because geoscience is full of these uh anomalies, I think maybe.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: But what what got you into geoscience?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: What what got you down this path?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Was there an aha moment?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Chris and I both have aha moments.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Chris was my aha moment in many ways.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But how what was your early introduction to geoscience like?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I'll I'll answer that question by uh telling you a brief story and then I'll actually answer the question.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: So perfect.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: I work at NASA now, right?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm surrounded by people who who got into NASA because their parents took them out under the night sky and there was a light moving across it.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: It might have been Sputnik, maybe it was one of the Gemini.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: And they they asked, like, what is what's that?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that their parents would say, That's the world changing, right?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so for me, that equivalent moment for geology was when my dad took me out to a place in Nevada called Berlin Ichthyosaur, uh, which is not surprisingly where you find ichthyosaur bones.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was young and I discovered that I liked being outside searching for things, which is what fossil hunters are.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, it wasn't a light in the sky, it was a thing on the ground.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: I was looking down, not up.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: As many of us were.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that was it.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is that was your like, okay, I'm hooked, and then you're into dinosaurs as a lot of young kids are, and then you're like, is there an Indiana Jones kind of hook there too at some stage?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Or was it uh Well, I I by the time I'd gotten to high school, I loved the idea of being able to combine being outdoors in some remote area uh with technology, right?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: And and in the late 80s and early 90s, that was the beginning of large-scale, uh, let's call it digital economy and digital world.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so that into that ecosystem, uh, you could take some of the earth science challenges that we had and very slowly and inefficiently um take them into that digital ecosystem, right?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that is so cool.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: John, I uh did you ever lose that moment that you had as an early kid looking at an ichthyosaur?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: Did you ever l uh question that later on uh no, I I don't think I did because the the fundamental value proposition there is that it's a big world and and you're searching for things, right?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: That explorer's urge is a common denominator to a whole bunch of sciences, right?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's a common denominator for astronomers, uh for physicists, for chemists, for geologists.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: The common denominator of I am searching for something.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think I've ever lost that uh that common denominator because as you guys know, you go outside and all of a sudden uh you're confronted with reality and it's way different than you idealized it, and you always are surprised if if you are looking.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: And and so you guys know this better than I do.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: If you go any field trip you go on, if it's a good field trip, there's always a couple people there with you who are going, yeah.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know about your interpretation of that.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: I have a different one.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Totally, totally, and the uh the uncertainty is is uh both disconcerting and exciting at the same time.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh crap, you know, there's a lot we gotta figure out here yet.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is unexplored uh fog land, which is just exciting, you know, for for those with the minds of the case.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Not to keep you humble because uh if your eyes are open, you know that you know almost nothing.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: So okay, on that note, when when did you hit that?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because that for me, that that what you just said, that recognition of for me it was like the oh crap, the textbook is wrong in a whole bunch of really important ways.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: That recognition was for me like first, second year of graduate school, and I was probably a little slower than your average person at this recognition.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not that Jesse.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's not true.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's not well, but like when was it for you that kind of recognition that like um you know what you taught in under I mean, I'm assuming you have an undergrad geo undergrad degree in geoscience of some type?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is that is that right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so and then in graduate school, was it where you're at Berkeley that you're like, oh wait, this is really exciting because there's all this stuff we don't know, or is it scary at that point?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for me it was kind of a combination of both.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I would say it came for me when I was doing a senior thesis at UC Santa Cruz or Denver undergrad, and um, there was an encouragement there by the faculty to explore.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I made my own thin sections, which I love doing.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like that was such a great way to, if you had a if you're puzzled about a rock, making a thin section.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I was taught by this old uh Marine Corps veteran, uh Eugene Gonzalez, and we say he could make a thin section out of a cigarette, but like that's how good Eugenio was.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: He taught me a craftsman of thin sections, of cutting slices of rocks.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was making thin sections, large format thin sections, like big glass plates, not the we small kind, but the big kind.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I was trying to understand how uh churks, and particularly the Monterey Formation church that host a bunch of California's oil uh formed.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it turned out that um we had a UV microscope, a microscope that you could essentially get biologic material to fluoresce with.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so when I put those thin sections under that UV, it was a whole different world.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: There was all different structures because the biologic material revealed multiple different generations that you couldn't see in plain light or cross-nickers.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: Meaning that's when I discovered that if you can observe something in a new way, it will completely change the story.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, that's science done right.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Is the and and that's when I I would say the ha aha moment for me, uh, which has informed the rest of my career is if you can see something differently, it allows you to ask different questions.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's really I love the way you put that because you know it's new types of data, new instruments come online, new I mean, geo, I'm a geochemist, so new mass spectrometers, and all of a sudden it's like, oh wow, we have this completely new insight into the world um that we did not have before because the data is just kind of better or different, right?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's super interesting.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can you can tell a different story, and and stories are of course are how we instantiate value, right?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're um if you have new sensors, new ways of seeing things, you can tell a much richer story about a rock, its insection, a landscape, and then into that comes the the value uh that you um uh that you give to it.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's really interesting.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Jesse looking like you have a question.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: I do I have a question, Jesse.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is actually for you.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: I want to know.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh, okay.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I want to know, Jesse, when did you reach that point where you realized Bullheist taught me all this bullshit?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't, you know, like it was all wrong.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when did you get to that point?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was um yeah, it's a good question.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was early on in graduate school, and I think there was this huge textbook at some point that like the I mean it's a huge volume, and it was it was written as like a special paper.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I'm making it up, 25 different papers embedded in this special volume, and it was all about like mantle plumes, and a huge branch of the the work was a huge, yeah.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Mantles, well uh plumes, mantles, and paradigms, right?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what you're talking about?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's that one.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, and it was edited by somebody who was uh not on the it was on in the mantle plumes don't exist, these sort of style thinking.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was reading this, I'm like, oh, wait, hold on.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Mantle plumes don't exist?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute, this is completely different than everything I learned up until this point in time.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: But then I took it to grad school, and then one of our uh one of the the uh we had this um professor who started there, he was very senior at the time, but he'd been recruited to to University of Alberta and was on my PhD supervisory committee, and he was like, Oh, wait, here's the backstory of that whole huge volume, Jesse, is that this is a in his view, a kind of a biased look because it was edited by this one person who's kind of an outlier like view of of mantle plumes, and it gave me a window into like this huge textbook, first of all, presented me with a a model that was very different than what I learned in the intro level.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: But then in the counter to that is there's this huge volume of rent writ very fancy, very professionally written stuff that could be completely wrong.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so it was this kind of back and forth that I felt very uh buffeted against the winds a little bit of the scientific conversation.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: That that that's that instantiating value in stories, right?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So they were trying to tell a story about these observations that was inconsistent with the mantle hypothesis.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, but the plug my sorry the plue my lots, exactly.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we're in a we're in a historical science, it's storytelling, right?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: At this most base level, it can be a data-rich story, but it is storytelling.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's a really exciting place to be.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we we we I can tell already, John, we have the we have the capacity to spend way too long talking to you, um, much longer than we have.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna kind of keep moving along.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: But how did you go?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: So you were for NASA now, you're just mentioning this.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Tie that thread from from PhD at Berkeley to NASA innovation scientists or innovation, I'm forgetting the title, innovation officer.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: What's the thread there?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: What's the through line?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so uh undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, um in quantitative gym morphology, uh, master's degree at University of Washington, and and uh more quantitative gym morphology, PhD at UC Berkeley, and even more.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um spent way too long in graduate school.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: If I could go back and give myself advice, it would be like, get out.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Get out.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I feel you.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yep.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there's uh we need to come back to that, I think, Jesse, at the end.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that whole thing.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um seriously, I think we do.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Agreed.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then um the uh advantage that when I came out, I had lots of published papers and I'd done I would I would say some seminal work on a couple of different topics bedrock river incision, pay of AO relief, um uh debris flow uh uh formation of Earth Catholics.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: Quick question, John.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: Can you can you uh what does the qualifier quantitative geomorphology mean for for you know students that in my case, what it what it meant was that we were measuring landforms with LIDAR and with surveys, and we were constructing mathematical laws that we were attempting to connect to that shape.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that the classic story of that, of course, is Gilbert, GK Gilbert's convex hill slope and his soil flux is proportional to gradient uh proposition, right?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so distill that down, distill that down for those of us who like metamorphic rocks.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, uh but I like metamorphic rocks.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm very happy looking at re revects lock of fame.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: But anyway, so that's the story there is what Gilbert did, and he was one of the early U.S.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_02: geological survey uh scientists and early quantitative um geologists, uh, Gilbert showed that if you if you came up with a fairly simple flux law, a law that said that the quantity of the mass of soil per unit of width of a hill slope was if the rate of movement of that was proportional to the local gradient, that that ultimately resulted in a convex hill shape.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: And you can imagine why.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: If you start a bucket brigade at the top, you just have to move a little bit of soil that you've made from the underlying bedrock and not much from upslope.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't need a big slope to do that.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: The further you get on the hill slope, the more buckets you're trying to move.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore the steeper the slope has to be to move those buckets.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that that flux proposition then turns into a shape.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so the quantitative geomorphology at its at its core should be asking the question what is the relationship between the flux of material and the shape of the landform, right?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now there are other um uh that's a very simplistic and reductionist definition of it.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: And there are it's much more broad than that, but I'm feeling simplistic today.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh or as Gary Gary Parker worked that I'm up.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Chris is always feeling simplistic, so you're in good company.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for that, Jesse.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate that.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no problem.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate that.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh all right.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: So then just to finish that uh train, which uh got derailed there, we'll put it back on the track.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: And uh thank you.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: I got out of the uh I got out of UC Berkeley uh my hands and knees after a far too long at PhD.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: I'd I'd done really good work, and I went to the U.S.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey as a as a postdoctoral fellow.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: I was lucky enough to be that Mendenhall there.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh great.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, awesome.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: Worked on alluvial fans and again a uh uh a theory for alluvial fan formation.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then from there, um, about 2010 or so, uh, I was sitting here at Men uh Menlo Park, uh, which is in the center of Silicon Valley.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh the valley is known worldwide as an innovation hub, a hotspot where both money and opportunity come together to make new technology.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I felt, rightly or wrongly at the time, that the U.S.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey outpost there, our Western regional headquarters, was a monastery in this sense.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: We were doing great science, but we were inside the walls of uh that monastery writing illuminated manuscripts, doing great reports, and outside there was this burgeoning ecosystem of new technology that we were not engaged with.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: This was what what what year did you say?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: 2010?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you said?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh roughly 2010.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was really 2012 by the time things came together.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I so this is the advent of mobile devices and smartphones and things like that is is the revolution a little bit.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: So the world is information is now beginning to be connected throughout the world, right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like the printing press, we are now in this disruptive technological world where information is way more mobile than it used to be, way more accessible, all kinds of information, the true stuff and the untrue stuff, right?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: Good luck sorting that out.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: So we were in this explosion and we weren't connected to it.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so I went to our uh director at the time along with uh some other folks and said, gosh, we should have a national innovation center at the survey whose job would be to identify national challenges that we have a stake in and then work with outside technology providers and industry, academia, and other government agencies to solve it.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I became the director of uh the USGS National Innovation Center.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: That was a great job while it lasted.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: At some point, our executive leadership team had other priorities.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just put that gently.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: It was time for me to um to go to NASA and essentially do the same thing on a much larger stage.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I've been lucky to be at NASA as the chief scientist for innovation at NASA Ames's intelligence systems division, uh, which is the home for autonomy and a lot of other things.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the job now is very much like it was at the survey in the sense that identify national challenges and then work with technology partners, everyone from Google, NVIDIA, and SpaceX and all, you know, to all them, right?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's pretty interesting.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry for the long disquisition.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: That that's that's an excellent, I think, through line.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, what it you we got, you and I got introduced to to one another through through uh somebody who's started a company that we've both we both know, a mutual acquaintance.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I this was the cent centered our conversation.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a great time talking to you offline, and it was all about centered on this innovation thing.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I could take up so much of your time talking about the future of geoscience and this innovation stuff, but I don't want to dominate it.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: So Chris, like I think maybe way in or forever hold your peace.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: It would be so Chris, way in or forever hold your peace here because like we might make it in the weeds.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um but before Jesse, before you do that, John, can I just ask?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you left the USGS and you went to NASA.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, has the USGS evolved though, since then in the right direction?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you can answer that.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so that might be a loaded question.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's I know.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, here's how I'll answer that.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: It it was fairly clear to me that the my priorities, the things that I thought a National Geological Survey should be doing, were not the priorities of our executive leadership team.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: And they made that fairly clear to me because you know, ultimately there wasn't a lot of support for the innovation center.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that meant that I was at odds with leadership.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: And the right thing for me to do is hang up my hat there and move on because they're the ones that have the responsibility for leading the agency, not me, right?
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so what are those?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, though you, you know, the view, the views of the value, because this is one thing that really stood out to me when our in our offline conversation was the value to the nation of a geological survey, and how what's your historical take on that?
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what is your forward-looking take on that?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: What what what it what you what was it and what is it now, and what should it be in the future?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And this this is all personal opinion.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: We can caveat that all the time if you if you want.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: But uh a view, I would say this is a view of the uh of the reason the US Geological Survey came to be informed by the fact that I've read much of the early writing from the survey from the 1870s all the way to 1900 in its formative year, is that it was created to fill in the blank spaces on the map of the West, right?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Think about a blank space in a map, right?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: It dragons be there, right?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's a place that you don't know what the risks are.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you're sitting back in Washington, DC, and you've got some money that you want to invest, whether it's in agriculture, building a railroad, uh, water resources, whatever it is, the blank spot is a threat to you, right?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: So the survey was invented, uh, and you can find this in the early descriptions.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: The survey was invented to find uh mineral resources of the West.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_02: And interestingly, the Hayden surveys, which were one of the four predecessors, if you go and look, they were initially um chartered to find coal for heating because uh the pioneers were literally Oh, I did not know that.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: So uh these were blank spaces, and the blank spaces carried risk and they carried um opportunity, right?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so this the survey's job was in essence fill in the blank spaces with maps, make them topographic maps, make them geologic maps, tell us where the resources are, and tell us where the hazards are, right?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: And those are the things that we need to do.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this is this is like de-risk the rest of the country that's unexplored, basically.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: De-risk that area for us and find opportunities.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just pure exploration.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually like in complete exploratory institution.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_02: So so that that was, and by the way, there were state surveys doing the same thing, right?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the the early on there was a tension, and some of the state surveys uh predate the U.S.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: Geological Survey, right?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the USGS was put together in part because Congress was looking at these four different surveys: the Wheeler, the Powell, the Hayden and the King surveys, and saying, like, gosh, we've got all these um alpha alphas out there running around the West.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, maybe we need to prioritize things.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and these are famous names.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is Hayden of Hayden Valley and Yellowstone, I'm guessing, and and Powell or John Wesley Powell of Grand Canyon, geology, grand staircase, all that stuff.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting thing, Jesse, because uh like uh to be honest with you, if I had to guess, I don't think Hayden, I don't think he personally was that interested in that.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like I I think he just wanted to know things.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't know, just uh I don't think it's a public really out.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Hayden was uh uh if you read uh the surveys or you read his own sense, it's far less organized to the point where he had to go to Powell in later years when Powell ran the USGS and asked for help getting his publications out.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, really?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: And Al said, yeah, we can do it.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, so El was very generous to uh to Hayden and helped Hayden get his la uh the all the publications out.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at the breadth of Hayden's publications, they're far broader than any of the others because he was like, Yeah, if it's out there, I'm interested, right?
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: Powell shared that that sort of passion.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: King and Wheeler were far more focused.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: Wheeler on the military side, uh King for other reasons, but he's very focused on resources.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: So those were more focused um explorations, and both Powell and Hayden were far more uh what's the word I'm looking for?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um they were more broad, right?
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: Everything from the Smithsonian Institute to antiquities and uh and resources, water.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so very different flavors of exploration.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: No, okay.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: So so John, um I think that's a good segue into my next question, then.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess let us I want to know what's the future.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's what it was constructed for.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: What's it value now and what's the forward-looking potential?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: So this the survey ran into the problem that it eventually did fill in in large part the map uh for the existing technologies.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: It completed the topographic mapping of the nation at you know in the 50s and 60s, it completed that, in essence.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Alaska is all was always a frontier, and so there's always some Alaska stuff left to do.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then as with all organizations, at some point you its mission is essentially fulfilled, and you have to ask, like, okay, what is your new mission?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that is what the debate has been for you know uh about over half a century with the survey.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, great, what's our new mission?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so different elements within the survey, uh known as programs, have now come to represent different answers to that question.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_02: The earthquake hazards program is an answer to that, right?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: We want to tell you probabilistic earthquake hazards, right?
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because we can't predict when they're gonna happen, but maybe we can leverage geologic knowledge.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: Same thing for volcano hazards program, um, the water resources program.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: So each of these are answers to that question of what happens after we filled in the map, right?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: So um my uh my proposition was that um we've gotten to the point where each of those programs, I think, had become comfortable with the technologies it was using and the rate of progress and scientific knowledge had slowed down, right?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so as they went back to Congress repeatedly, they were increasingly having to struggle for uh a small amount of resources, frankly, given our national scope.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I always, you know, I always thought we should be able to go to the hill and basically have a case that both sides of the aisle will be like, oh yeah, we got to do that, right?
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the one of the big questions, uh, Hawaii was thinking about setting up a geological survey.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't think they did, but I thought that was a great opportunity to explore how would we make a modern geological survey, one of the attributes of which would be you could go to an authorizing legislature, the folks that provide you with the money, and have an easy time making your case.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to be in the position where we could do that.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that was my starting premise like, what kind of case could we make to the nation that would have both sides going, oh yeah, yeah, we should do that.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's not right.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: My proposition was given the fact we have all these great state geological agencies that do handle lots of local things, I thought the survey should be a technology leader.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: I thought we should be exploring how technology reduces the cost of uh making the kinds of observations we need to make and allows us to make new observations, and that that technology we should then flow out to industry and to the state surveys.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that that would be a compelling case for a national geological survey, as well as some, you know, some off-world roles that I think are appropriate.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: That was the case I was trying to make with the National Innovation Center, but it was, you know, I think in I think the um our executive leadership team at the time basically disagree with that case.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, they're they were the leadership, they get to decide that.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: I what is the well, okay, Chris.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I think you probably have uh interrupted you a little bit there.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: No, you didn't interrupt me.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: But but John, actually, I don't want to ask the question I wanted to originally ask.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do you I have a different question now?
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh um.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: So no, it's um so with what you just said, do you do you have a clear vision of what that looks like?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Of uh 100%.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: Can you describe that or do you sure we we should um we should be able to collect um high resolution LIDAR topographic data at a tenth the cost we're currently collecting with new uh either from orbit or from the stratosphere?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: We should be able to fuse that with high-resolution airborne data that would image the nation.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: And all of those, um, you know, all of those assets would reduce cost to industry and increase access um for these kinds of things.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: I need to plug my excuse me for one minute here.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no problem.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_02: Right in the middle of my Juremiad, my power uh cord goes, right?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: All right, there we go.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so um I think there's a ton of ways in which we could uh reduce the cost of acquiring data, improve its quality, um, and therefore increase access to it.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh another one that I almost, this is probably one of the ones that um got uh that got me, shall we say, um, a bad reputation to survey was I was a fan of using INSAR to create a readily accessible database of land level changes that could be used to detect problems before they happened.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now it turns out that NASA has gone ahead and essentially done that, which is great, but it doesn't have the reach it should into infrastructure.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: You can chart out a whole series of ways in which investments in technology can improve our observation capability and reduce costs in our science.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's what a national agency should be pioneering, and the return on that investment should be to then transition that to industry for execution at scale and move on to the next hard thing.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I on that kind of on that note, is there so what you're describing is is is sort of you know geophysical mapping for lack of a better word, probably, or geophysical observations, maybe.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is that dynamic that you're describing of maybe uh hesitancy or resistance, perhaps, do you think that's changing at the moment?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because we I I feel like we're in an environment right now where there's a few things that are unified uh uh at the congressional level, at the hill, maybe.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And things like critical minerals are one of them that a lot of people are on board with.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: And and to me, you know, the you pick up the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the Washington Post, like there's geology, honest to God, geology on the front page.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: We just people know what gallium is for Christ's sake.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is and this is new.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is not this has not happened in the last 50 40 years, maybe.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: So is that inciting some changing perceptions, maybe, and and maybe moving people in a mindset that's a little bit more like like what you're describing?
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Or or is that not accurate, do you think?
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, I I think that uh you're right that the uh supply chain disruption from People's Republic of China and their their um sort of hammer lock on a whole element a set of critical minerals that impact our national security has changed a lot of minds.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: The um the dynamic I was talking about, which is that you use technology to reduce the cost of doing something and then improve capability.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: What that also does is it creates a whole bunch of new observations that you need trained geologists to interpret, right?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the value propositions for the NSAR data set was gee, do you think if we find a whole place, a bunch of places that are subsiding where we didn't think they were, we're going to need some engineering geologists and other kinds of geologists to go in and explore them.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_02: Remember, we started off with talking about how if you see the earth in a new way through a thin section, it changes your narrative.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: That new technology has the ability to enrich our understanding and our vision of the earth.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're not getting rid of geologists.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: We still need guys and gals who are gonna go out and do the thing.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: But what we are doing is we're reducing the cost of getting the data that then is gonna direct them so they spend their time way more impactfully on the thing.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the thing might be, hey, where's the next sinkhole gonna happen?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, the NSAR gave us some lead indicators, and we're going to go and do a detailed survey with GPR to you know illuminate exactly what the dimensions are likely to be.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: So it would have led to more uh geologic involvement rather than less.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but if we we yeah, go ahead.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I I mean, no, I I think you're you're you're I I I mean you're you're there's a bit we're in an echo chamber here, you and I.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because I I feel similarly about this sort of innovation and the future of and the the the the potential for geoscience to become more than what it is from an innovation in company creation and a sort of value GDP value add perspective, let's say, and geologists specifically.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: But you work at NASA now, and I'm guessing uh NASA is full of a lot of engineers, whereas the USGS is a fun a bunch of geologists and some engineers, and I think that's probably you're dominated by engineering space.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a big mindset difference between geologists and engineers with regard to entrepreneurship and innovation?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm guessing there is, and so then the answer is why is that?
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why do you think that is?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what what can we do in the geological education system culture to shift that that mindset, I guess?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's a great question because the question I started asking myself when I was running our National Innovation Center is how do I bring engineers, technologists, and scientists into the same room and get them to come out with something that's progress, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the way I handled that with the um I used to run a series of National Innovation Center workshops.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: We choose a theme like water one year or, you know, earthquakes another year.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd ask the scientists to get up and talk about something they couldn't measure or see or a capability they needed, right?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: Don't tell us how you solved the problem.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us what you wish you could do that would really bring this new vision right back to the UV fluorescence of the church.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: How can we see the problem in a different way with new sensor?
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we would get the scientists up there to say that.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: And once you ask a scientist to dream about a new way of seeing something, any creative scientist is going to have about half a dozen ways where they would love to see something, right?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: Then you've got a bunch of motivated engineers and technologists in the audience.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: What do those folks want?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: They want a demand signal.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: They want to know I need something.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: So the scientist goes, I really need this thing.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: Here's why, here's why it's important.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the engineer goes, Yeah, I think I can do that, right?
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: That is the way in which those two communities can be right, reconcile natural polarities.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's a Jim Mattis quote.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's a way, that's not the only one, a way to reconcile those communities because each one then is given the thing that it wants.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: The scientists want to observe more richly the phenomenon to so they can explain it and uh and have a richer story about it.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: The engineers and technologists want an important problem that they can be creative in their own sense, right?
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because the best engineers and technologists are deeply creative people.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: The problem right now, in my opinion, uh, and this is another Jim Mattis quote, I seem to be full of them tonight, is that organizations get the behavior they reward for, right?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: So now ask yourself, what have we set up the reward system to do in organizations, right?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think we are rewarding Earth scientists who are trying to be innovative.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: What do you mean by innovative?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think you know, innovative in a research sense, that you know, my job is very incentivized for me to be creative in research, less so in technology adoption by industry, less so on company creation.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: That so what do you mean by innovative?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: I adopted this definition for the purposes of uh the National Innovation Center at the Survey when it existed, which innovation is the serendipitous repurposing of existing technology to solve an observation or capability gap.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay so what say that again, say that again serendipitous repurposing of existing technology to solve an observation or capability gap.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, I can't do something I wish I could.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, I can't see something I wish I could.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, let's look around and find.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're not gonna reinvent lasers or you know, you know, we're we're looking for existing technology that we can then turn to our use.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's she wants to measure something, and this guy has a device on the shelf that if we tweak it this way, can do that measurement.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: We just need to get them in the room together talking.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_02: Great example.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: I can't resist sharing it.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you may recall that the the space shuttles had issues with their heat tiles where they would have damage to them, and that of course led to a very unfortunate explosion.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: NASA invented a handheld scanner that you could put up and scan the tile, and you could essentially determine down to a fraction of a millimeter any damage that had been done, right?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I wound up working with some folks, repurposed that to be the highest accuracy bulk density scanner uh that one can imagine, right?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: So we we could re repurpose that so we could we could do you know less than um 50 or 100 uh kilograms per cubic meter uncertainty in our bulk density for granular material, which is incredible, right?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's a serendipitous repurposing of existing technology to solve the challenge of which earth materials will dilate when they shear and therefore come to a stop, and which ones um will essentially not be able to dilate.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so then they build up poor water pressure and go turn into runaway debris flows.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, interesting.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you could just map the potential, okay.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, amazing.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Potentially, right?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: So there's this, there's an example of innovation.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you go and try and get NSF to fund something like that, uh at least when I was trying to do it, like good luck.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's half a dozen skeptics out there that will be like, this will never work.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: So we are not, we have not created the situation which like you know, venture capital is quite content to take risks on stuff like that if they think it'll go to scale.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: In the earth science community, I don't think we're doing that.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think we are using proven old school technology that we're not rewarding.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: There's no reward incentive or very small one for um developing new technology to view things differently.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, John, that's that that's the answer to your earlier question.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry, it took me a while to get there.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, but that's awesome.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's incredible.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, uh I have a question, I have so much to ask, actually, after you said that, it was a long thing, and I had my mind went in a million different directions.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: But John, your description of getting a geoscientist into a room with a diverse set of other minds that can support that, that you identify a problem, and then you you have these people around that can say, Well, I have a different way of looking at that.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's an amazing thing.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: But I think to Jesse's like what's burning at him is this seems to be different with geoscientists as opposed to like biomedical people or chemists or these other the other fields of science that seem to have more maybe credibility and they have this more of an entrepreneurship mentality that geoscientists don't have.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's award.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: And why is that?
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I've always kind of framed it in my head as and I've seen some people have sort of written about this that that uh with regards specifically to entrepreneurship, but is that um in geoscience we're we're kind of we we come, you know, like your story of the aha moment, you come into geoscience with like an appreciation for nature and a want and want to study natural systems, and our industries that employ geologists in industry are often extractive and you know, perhaps quote unquote bad oil and gas or something are kind of quote unquote dirty industries, whereas science research, the academia, for instance, is like the sort of pure version of geology.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I'm I'm I'm painting.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're making the straw man argument.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, making the straw man argument as like maybe that's one reason why the intra entrepreneurial connections are not there because in biotech, people are trying to solve cancer at universities and in companies, and everybody's on board for solving cancer, right?
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's a good goal.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I'm wondering if that cross-pollination is not there for some reason.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's that goes that I go back to the reward signal part.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: You get the behavior reward for.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: So in the industries you just mentioned, if you come up with a technological innovation way of doing something new, you get rewarded, right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: What's the equivalent that we're making in the earth science community right now?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: What's the equivalent?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: What what is the equivalent we could be making?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: What couldn't we be doing how we're not doing that?
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: What's the answer to that?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, so the yeah.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um NSF were to were to want to do this, and it's had several stabs at it, right?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: But in my opinion, they've been I don't think they've been successful stabs.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: The NSF folks know more, and they can probably prove me wrong.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: Fair enough.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't see the culture in our science changing.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where your mind is headed.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: How do we change the culture?
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: And and I I think that part of it that you're right that there's been a disconnection from the national need.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'll put it that way.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like that the surveys of the West didn't get paid for scientific curiosity alone, right?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: There was some of that, right?
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: So the other, the other reason we went into the West, which I didn't talk about, but it's almost equally important, is that we wanted to understand our origin.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at the USGS books of the 1880s and 90s, they are full of paleontology.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: We were trying to understand where we came from and whether Darwin, well, was on the right track.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was it was fill in the blank spaces and tell us where we came from.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: So there was a there was a resource and hazard perspective that was economic.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was almost a um you know almost a religious uh exploration of well, where do we come from, right?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: What are our ancestors look like?
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: What do fossils mean?
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, I realized NASA has now inherited those two missions, right?
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: Fill in the blank space in the solar system and tell us where life came from.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the sort of Star Trek frontier exploration, that's that's NASA now in our mind.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like so they've inherited the survey's old missions, maybe appropriately so.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't answer your question though, which is like, you know, how do we change the culture so that innovation that you see succeeding and enhancing our ability to understand the micro world uh in biology so that we bring that into instantiation in the earth science world.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I took a shot at solving that with the Innovation Center and I wanted to create a reward signal.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_02: I I created like a two-page proposal for 100k.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: And if you show that you could do the work in a year with your industry partner, then there was more money at the other end.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that started to go someplace.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: But people didn't want it because it's disruptive, it disrupted what was there.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we are run by a bunch of folks that are afraid of change, in my opinion.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wait a minute.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: When so when you say people didn't want it, what who are you referring to?
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm referring to I'm I told you earlier, like the my view of the survey and the executive leadership's view was different, and they're the leaders, so they eventually said, time for you to go stock.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they didn't say it in you know, they didn't say it in those words, but you know, it became clear that um this was not a priority for them.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: And fair enough, they're running the they were running the agency.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: But where I was going with that is we need leadership who is going to protect Mavericks, yet another manus quote.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: And we need leadership who is going to create reward signals for the kind of risk taking that um geoscientists would do with new sensors and instrumentation.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: Until we get that leadership, we will put in in place the reward signal, we're going to have the culture we have right now.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that, you know, this is one of my uh at least initial in many people's initial frustrations with the the sort of academic research side is there is great incentive incentive for for taking risks later on in your career after tenure.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the first like critical you know seven years, I just got tenure last year.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so the first critical seven years, you actually can't do risky stuff, right?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like because you need prod, you need published stuff at the end of it to kind of establish your credibility, and so you're actually deincentivized from doing risky.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: The coolest stuff I wanted to do would have taken three years and probably would not have worked out.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if it did work out, it would have been transformational, right?
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I just didn't do it, and now it's too late, you know.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna do that anymore.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, why is it too late?
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it too late?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Thing things have shifted, you know, interests have shifted.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's I think there's more, maybe there's different there's more interesting stuff to you now.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: That makes sense.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I I think the answer to your question is that you need a leadership that understands how to reward the behavior that you're describing.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: We currently do not have that leadership.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that industry and all of these startups, it feels to me, and I I I this is a qualitative statement, but it feels to me that the geoscience startup environment is very vibrant right now and has been for the last five years in a way that it wasn't before.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think they are doing a good job of it?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: And at a personal level, would have you considered working for any of the any number of these really interesting startups that I'm sure you've had opportunities to I'm very impressed with some of the startups.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen probably some of the similar ones.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_02: I'll mention an Australian one that I've just um uh been just very delighted with, a company called Datarock that's essentially dedicated to in- situacation of war bodies and then the use of AI to look for patterns that coincide with ore bodies, or as my uh good friend Andrew Scott at BHP used to call it, um, find the usual suspects or guilt by association.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: He described AI as guilt by association, which is the most distinct definition of it I've ever heard, and I I love it.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_02: I like that a lot.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_02: Multidimensional pattern matching.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and so Andrew was like, Yeah, guilt by association.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: So John, do you do you see this this changing this whole um entrepreneurship and so on?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look, what's the incentive now?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, resources is on the front of everybody's tongue.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, this has got to change the game, right?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_02: And yet we still have a discovery gap for some elements, don't we?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we do that.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: But this is so new though, right?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, why do we have a discovery gap?
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: Describe that and sp you can be more specific what you mean there.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I'll take the one that's on everyone's mind right now, which is copper, right?
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: So you guys know that it takes depending on where you are, the US is amongst the worst.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: It can take anywhere from three to twenty years or more sometimes to go from let's call it an ore body characterization to opening up a mine, right?
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: So you know you've got something that's at the current market value is worth, is an ore, is worth taking out.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then three to twenty years later, maybe you have the infrastructure you need to take it out.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: So that means that if you want to look at where copper is going to come from 20 years from now in the US, or you know, let's call it 10 to 20 years, um, you have to look and see where the discoveries are, right?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so we have we don't have enough discoveries right now to fuel our future copper demand.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's got a lot of people sort of running around, right?
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_02: Copper's not the only thing we have a discovery gap on.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_02: You could argue that um like you know, the rare earths, as you guys well know, are typically byproducts of processing large amounts of other things, typically coal, but sometimes others.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_02: We have a discovery gap there, too, in a sense, right?
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um are there rare earth deposits that don't require us to mine or process mountains of coal?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, there are, but we've been very slow in finding them.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we have all these discovery gaps.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_02: The majors have outsourced, have been comfortable throughout the last century outsourcing the risk to uh crazy people in hats that run around the landscape and you know, 49 of them die, and the 50th one finds the, you know, finds the thing and then solves its industry.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the way exploration's been working.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard exploration geologists described as guys who want someone to fund their their cool fieldwork.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they so they go raise money from doctors and lawyers in a pure speculative play, and then they go fly around on float planes looking for shit.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what they do, right?
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then that's their life.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: And every once in a while somebody finds something, and that and that's the life of exploration geologists.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: And many of them are very competent and um and are using new technology, but but the technology they're using is not optimized to do the thing they want.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_02: We the the subsurface remains an undiscovered country for the most part, more undiscovered than the surface of other planets.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so touch on that.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: Touch on that because the thing I love about geology, and I'm extremely excited to be a geoscience geoscientist at this moment in time, is because exactly what you said, the third dimension going down in depth, we know very little about, and we have very we're very incapable of predicting what's down there.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: And also time, we have this time aspect that is you know is what makes geologists special.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we're kind of specially qualified to do to answer this question, but is that the the final frontier uh of geoscience?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh like or is it prediction, you know, like landscape is there is it forward looking or is it downward looking?
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: That is kind of the future hurt frontier in your mind.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I so both are frontiers.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: Forecasting is will always be a frontier.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's just a question of improving forecasting, right?
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: You never get to it's like Xeno's paradox, like you always take half a step towards the uh destination, right?
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: You never get there, but as the engineer would say, You got close enough, yeah.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's a goat there, but I'm not gonna repeat it.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um so yes, forecasting's frontier, the subsurface is a frontier.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and um, right now, uh the my focus, at least at NASA, uh amongst some other focuses there, is in the notion that if the space community and the mining community come together, there are common denominator technologies that they both need to succeed, right?
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_02: Technologies that broadly could be classified as sensors, platforms, and enabling technologies.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, an example of a sensor would be a quantum gravity gradiometer, which is a fancy word for a very fancy machine.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: Physics.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that essentially can measure absolute gravity gradient.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: So you drop two clouds of cold atoms separated by a distance, you measure how fast each is falling, gives you a gradient, right?
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_02: Because you have a distance and the difference in rate.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's yeah, that is unbelievable.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_02: The AMO folks have done like just incredible uh science and engineering to get there.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_02: Those now are going out into the field, right?
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's companies like uh Q Control, AO Sense, Vectoratomics, and others that are entering that market who are now making uh gravity sensors that are incredibly sensitive, right?
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that can measure tiny differences in gravity that impact how we navigate over the earth with IMUs that allow us to detect at far distances uh dense objects.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's a game-changing sensor, right?
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_02: And there's also quantum magnetometers.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's uh you know a lot of photonics work that we can discuss, but those are game-changing sensors.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: Just like the UV light was for me early on with the monterey formation thin sections, those sensors can change our view of the subsurface.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um a platform, well, we've got lots of different platforms.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: So one of our challenges is big, expensive platforms are big and expensive.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, how can we take sensors like that and deploy them to measure the places that have the most impact?
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: That would be called payload directed flight.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, by analogy to the lawn, if I want to uh take my um uncrewed aerial system with my quantum gravity gradiometer on it, I don't want to fly it everywhere.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: I want to fly it where there's a gradient.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like if there's no gradient, I don't want to fly there, right?
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's a waste of time.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I tell the onboard algorithm, hey, I'd like you to go find all the gradients and fly them and ignore the places with no gradients.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: Off it goes.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_02: So now you've got a platform, the UAS in this case, the uncreed aerial system, a sensor, the quantum gravity gradiometer, and the enabling technology, which is that payload directed flight.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's the brain on board that says, don't bother um spending a lot of time in the areas with no gradient.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_02: Now you can do it at scale, right?
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because you've taken humans out of the loop.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_02: So now you take five or ten of them and you go fly them over an area and you have an incredibly detailed gravitational map of the subsurface that allows you to improve on your subsurface block model.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe it helps you with your ore body definition.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it helps you to find an offset that uh delineates a fault that you didn't know about.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a I mean, I I I the argument I've heard that makes a some bit of sense to me is that you know, we we're doing describing is a you know a taxpayer funded entity doing this type of work, which ultimately is hugely beneficial to business.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the argument would be why isn't business doing this?
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why why aren't exploration companies funding this thing?
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so what make the counter argument is Yeah, you and you guys, you guys know this answer already, but I'll say it out loud, is because most of the major mining companies don't want to disrupt their workflow, it's making money for them.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_02: And if they disrupt that workflow, then then they're in danger of losing money, and then none of them have a huge margin.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: They don't have huge sacks of cash like Google does that they can just go, oh well, we blew a couple hundred million, oh well, right?
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, if you're a BHP or Rio Tinto and you blow a couple hundred million, like you better go find a kind uh a non-aligned country to hide in.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yes, yes.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: And starting a mine is an incredibly risk-averse process.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's baked, it's debt financed, right?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the the exploration is pure speculation.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: So there's huge the Lason curve, right?
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: This this valley of death in funding, which I've been excited to see kind of hedge funds and venture funds get into that space, people who have 20-year money that they can put into exploration and see for 20 years or something, right?
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, patient capital.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it seems like that's kind of flowing into it, which might shift it too.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that's a good okay, I like you know good counter argument.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that so that the you know the mining companies don't have a strong incentive right now to change the workflow um because because there's a lot of risk to doing that.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so what the role of governments is to buy down that risk, in my opinion, because ultimately what governments want to do is be in the position of providing high quality raw resources at the least possible cost while not destroying the environment.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you do that, if you reduce the cost of energy and raw materials, then all of a sudden all of the downstream benefits of that mean you can grow middle class, right?
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: So everything gets better if energy is cheaper.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_02: If you energy and raw materials, if you can reduce the cost of energy and raw materials, then you can grow economies that you can't.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: And we're currently in a position where affordability is going to be one of, if not the, major issue in the upcoming midterms.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's for for a good reason.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_02: Things have gotten way less affordable.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think there was over 20% inflation over the uh 2020 to like 2023 or four.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember what the time span is, but things got like incredibly expensive and our salaries didn't go up.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, yeah, everyone's feeling a little grumpy about that.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_02: We lost a fifth of our purchasing power.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: So that ties back into power and raw materials in sustainable ways.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_02: Sustainable means you don't create a bigger problem downstream that you've got to spend more money to solve afterwards.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: I I saw an economic analysis, I forget who published it.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been the AGI or something like that, which was about the sort of economic uh benefit of geological mapping.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this was mapping in a very traditional sense, I'm sure they got to like you know, and and the return on the investment was massive.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was way bigger than I was thinking.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at the minimum, it was like 7x return on the investment and up to 35x return on the cost of creating a geological map at some scale at the state, state or federal level.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it just blew me away and it made me think that you know, mapping as you're describing these these frontiers, the the you know, at depth, getting down at depth is gonna have an exponentially bigger return on investment.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to see a renaissance in geological mapping where gals and guys maintain the role that they play.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_02: I am not a person who believes that AI is going to replace geologic mappers, just not that person.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there's a lot of reasons why.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that doesn't mean AI can't be a useful tool in the pursuit of geologic mapping, and it should be, but its role should not be to replace people with history behind their brains, right?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because everybody knows that no two people map make the same geologic map.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: Why is that?
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_02: Why do no two people make the same geologic map?
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's for you guys.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good question.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was thinking about it.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: Why do no two people make the same geologic map?
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because they have different past experiences and in and recognition patterns of rocks previously.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe because it wouldn't be the same map.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's cheaty, but I but it it's a story.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_02: You're telling a story in map form, right?
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_02: And none of us can tell exactly the same story because Exactly.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: It wouldn't be the same.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I I would love to see a renaissance in geologic mapping.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_02: It goes back to my premise that if we can improve the quality of our data coming in to inform that mapping, subsurface and surface, and reduce its cost, then we'll create more opportunities for geologic mappers to play impactful roles.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: I I I think that's right.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to hear you you say that about AI because that I think that geological intuition, that sort of experience, the sort of shots on goal of seeing the world and the creativity required to do this in a complex, three-dimensional, four-dimensional space at scales that our computer simulations cannot achieve, uh, is really powerful sort of mindset.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's let's let's go back to where we started our conversation earlier with you know to answer the AI question, which is what where are ore bodies formed?
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_02: The world's least geologically probable places.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_02: What does AI depend on?
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_02: Training data.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of numbers.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of, yeah, how do you train to find an improbable place?
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually that's kind of funny.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's funny because it's kind of the inverse of what economic geology has historically been.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: Economic geology, the fraction of economic geology studies who focus on the world's biggest X deposit is huge, right, compared to the average Joe Blow deposit, right?
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: That that that people don't study because it's not the big one.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's kind of inverted.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's an interesting point.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta think through that one a little bit, uh, to be honest with you.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I I you know it doesn't mean that AI isn't useful, and there are mineral deposits where it's like if you find the signature of that particular mineral deposit, particularly if it's geophysical signature, like you know, we've been exploring the USGS mineral resources program, shared with me some interesting data on um they'd gotten what looked like noise in their gamma ray um uh survey, and then when they went and looked at the noise in more detail, it turned out to be an unusual deposit that was uh an ore.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're like, well, can we take that signature, the noise signature, and then examine the rest of our course data for it and use that as a tip and cue so that we, oh, let's let's go cue some assets to look at that in in more detail.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: So that the harmonious union of machine and human is the efficient factor we need to reduce our discovery gap, not one or the other.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, I think that's right.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I I like I like your now the the geophysics uh example is a good one as a as a very useful approach, but the geologist still has to be in there.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: We don't like fundamentally there's ideas, but we don't know what the difference is between why why the Andes have so much copper and Japan doesn't, right?
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's broadly similar.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like what's the difference here, right?
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh those basic fundamental things are still sort of missing in our understanding of the Earth system, um, which is to me exciting.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it shouldn't be.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I I yeah, a couple softballs for you, John.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-oh.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, they no, they really are.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: They actually are.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: So um you're in Silicon Valley.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is way so far away from Jesse and and and my realm.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: What's it like to be a geoscientist in Silicon Valley?
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um well now I'm somewhat conflated because like, am I still a geoscientist?
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even know if I can still carry my card now that I've let the USGS and gone to it.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: You're a quantitative geomorphologist.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: Of course you're clearly a geoscientist.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can carry that card for the rest of your life.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: Come on.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll take it.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: I'll take it.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_02: What's it like?
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_02: You're surrounded by new ways of seeing things.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a constant excitement.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the challenge is to prioritize because otherwise it's sort of like the retriever in up.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: You're just like there's a squirrel around every corner, right?
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_02: So you go over to Nvidia and you look at their incredible SIM environment, and you're like, wow, you mean I could, if I could instantiate geology into the sim environment, I could train AI agents to go and find the things I want using that payload directed flight we talked about earlier.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_02: But then like, oh, but I or I could go over to the quantum folks and you know, uh improve on our ability to map the subsurface with gravity gradiometers.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're it's it's it's a squirrel around every corner.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the challenge uh is which of those squirrels is aligned with a national challenge that um that that there's a demand signal for right now, right?
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: So examples of national challenges reduce the discovery gap for critical minerals, or reduce supply chain uncertainties in critical minerals, or tell us how we can improve our prospectivity maps um for the moon or Mars for volatiles that will uh represent the rocket fuel that SpaceX might need to get the ship back, right?
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you have this diversity that maybe we don't have, right?
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: In Silicon Valley, of thought of mentality, of thought, of of attacking problems and solutions.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's a larger ecosystem.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always reticent to say that there isn't diversity in smaller ones because some of the best ideas often come from uh places where people actually are can really focus on something.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm reticent to say that.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it is a larger ecosystem.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_02: And because it's a larger ecosystem, there are more opportunities to collide with like-minded people, I think.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_00: How are uh how are uh you as a geologist, whether you carry that card around uh actively or not, how are you perceived?
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh, you know, I I think as a uh in our experience as geologists, you're you're kind of always perceived as like, oh, that's weird, or oh, that's really interesting.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's neither it's either one of those, not like anything in the middle.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's either, oh, that's weird, I don't want to talk to you anymore, or hey, that's interesting, I want to talk to you all night.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so what is there uh do you get that reaction?
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: People reacting to you or not?
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_02: I kind of want to follow up by asking Jesse some more questions.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I do too.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_01: I have so much I want to ask about this, Jesse.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, well, I have a lot to say about this.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think Jesse.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: See, it's actually your personality.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you think it's a me problem?
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, fair enough.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: That could be true.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: It could be true.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I'm not sure.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so what what my answer would be is that I usually find people are really interested um because it's it's a little bit of a rarity to find a geologist out talking to engineers and technologists.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like we we tend to stay in the monastery where we're comfortable.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_02: And again, that's a culture thing that's like, what's the reward signal?
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you don't get rewarded for going outside the monastery like it's dangerous out there, right?
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, I get a positive reception from people.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_02: And then if if I don't understand what they're talking about, I'd say I'm a I'm just a simple country geologist.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: I can you can always fall back on that.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not following, I just look at rocks all day.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know what you're talking about.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: Help me out.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a great that that's a good one.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh what is your I mean, we've talked a lot about some really interesting sort of future forward-looking things.
• 1:06:56
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean, do you have advice if you had sort of one thing that current students, whether undergrad or graduate students, the one thing that you they should be thinking about that you that they're not?
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_00: What what was that?
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have something that well uh first of all I would not claim to be an authority because I'm uh you guys are more tightly coupled in that ecosystem than I am, you know more than I do.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm I'm somewhat removed from what the current academic sort of environment is.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're asking me, like if I were to give uh unfounded, uh foolish and naive advice to young people.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's the best kind.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think I would really be focused on common denominator technologies that will allow you to be flexible in your career choices, right?
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a truism, I think, for many young folks now, because uh there's so much disruption going on in the workplace.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's really challenging to figure out what the right road ahead is.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's you know, there's people telling you that AI is gonna replace all your jobs, so you know, you might as well hang up your rights, not true, but it will disrupt things.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so I tend to think that the it that if you're an undergrad, for instance, that you should really make sure that you think carefully about some technologies that you can uh uh take some courses in and get some competency in that allow you to work in fields outside of necessarily your own, because you may need that later on.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're a graduate student, you should definitely be thinking about some unusual skill that you can acquire that differentiates you from someone else.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_02: When I was um back when I was coming of age in the 90s at uh Berkeley, I got really good at processing LiDAR data, right?
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't gonna process LIDAR data forever, but it did allow me to see the world in a different way and to have a differentiating skill that someone went, oh yeah, that's great.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_02: So having a differentiating skill that um you can you say, and having some common denominator technology, either courses or some achievement you can point to gives you flexibility in in your future career because you never know where you're gonna wind up.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_02: Lord knows you could wind up at NASA.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you you never thought you were gonna wind up here, huh?
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: This was not your career plan, this wasn't your on your flight plan.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I thought I'd be good.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_02: I thought I'd just uh carry out my time in the survey, yeah.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, John, so first of all, I have to say you you need to carry your card with more pride.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you you are a geoscientist.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm a little offended.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you need to be a little bit more like out there.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, represent.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so um, John, so thank you so much for your time.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_01: With uh, you know, you've been so generous with it.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: We'd like to end with the question we always end with, which is what has been your favorite best day, best experience, best memory as a geoscientist?
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's such a great question.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_02: I have can I do two?
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, you may.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: Please do.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_02: So the the time when I have felt the most awe as a geoscientist was in the um near the Toroko Gorge in Taiwan.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_02: We were there after the Chi Chi earthquake with the UC Berkeley folks.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_02: We had walked up this huge valley and there was like rock slides, kilometer scale rock slides everywhere.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_02: We got to the head of the valley and we were expecting just another like big taluscone.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_02: And instead, there was this hundred-meter high, three-meter wide, like bedrock canyon that curved over on itself.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_02: In the interior, like theater-headed, like, you know, section where you could walk just in and the lights were shining down from above, reflected off all the glinching rocks.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_02: I remember just falling down on my knees in awe at that place.
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because I don't know, you know, it it was off the beaten track.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know who sees it, but it was it was awe at that place because I don't know, you know, it it was off the beaten track.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have a picture of this?
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Hold hold on, Jesse.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a picture of this?
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_02: So, Chris, I I wish I I'm sure I have a uh a slide because I used to take slides back then, if anyone knows what those are.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm all I do well, I do, I do, of course.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then also justice to that moment because as you guys know, like you and anyone who's been out in the wild knows, you spend a day hiking through the back 40, and there's this you know, there's the emotions of discovering things, the the um the physical exertion, and then all of a sudden you're confronted with something completely unexpected.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's an emotional state that explorers have, and and you know, anyone who goes for a hike and is potentially an explorer.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_02: So impossible to recreate, but it lives as a neural map.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good one.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what's the second one?
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the second one is I spent a number of years um on Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the smaller islands.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the challenge there was that uh people spend a billion dollars a month coming to Hawaii to go to blue waters, right?
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's why they come to Hawaii.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it drives Hawaii's economy along with the military, which is about another billion.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um, a number of disturbances on Hawaii's islands have been driving uh essentially terrestrial erosion that was polluting the reefs.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I was there to uh map the source of the uh reef pollution, the fines that were politting the reef, estimate the rates at which they were eroding, and then make a sediment budget, which is a way of prioritizing which areas are the worst, therefore uh the most uh impactful for mitigation.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so it was the end of like we we would spend like, you know, seven in the morning till seven at night days installing instruments.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember at the end of one particularly long day, we hiked down and all of a sudden the clouds parted, and there was the Molokai channel, and everything, the reefs were shining, and it was like the God wink, right?
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_02: It was like um it was like Leviathan coming up from the deep, they would wink at you and go, their powers beyond yours and and understanding beyond yours.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_02: And here's a brief glimpse of what that might feel like.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that is so spectacular.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the things we get to see as as geoscientists and going out, as you said, that that sort of explorer mindset.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: I like you how you said that.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you I'm gonna I'm gonna steal that one.
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody who goes on a hike is an explorer in some way.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's great.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: I love that's that's spectacular.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're 100% right.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're 100% right.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh Dr.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Jonathan Stock, thank you so much, Chief Scientist for Innovation at NASA.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_00: This has been a super compelling conversation.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I I love uh hearing about all the innovation stuff.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I love your perspective, um, and I'm excited to see how it goes over at NASA.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd love to pick, I'm gonna I'm gonna send you a follow-up email and pick your brain about uh some innovation entrepreneurship stuff here soon.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_00: So expect a follow-up email.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you guys for the gracious reception.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_02: I I loved your questions uh and I just enjoyed the conversation.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like we go on for a lot longer, but we definitely could.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_00: We'll we'll hit up for a part two here sometime soon, maybe in the future here.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So uh thanks, John.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_00: We appreciate it.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you so much, John.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Jen.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right, take care of it.