The Chemistry of Creativity, Light, and High-Energy Molecules | Noah Burns

What does it actually mean to create a molecule that has never existed before?

In this episode of No Reason to Get Excited (NRTGE), Dr. Aaron Winkler sits down with Stanford organic chemist Noah Burns for a wide-ranging conversation about chemistry, creativity, photochemistry, molecular design, and the strange beauty hidden inside organic reactions.

What begins as a discussion about bromination and halogenation quickly expands into something much bigger: the relationship between science and imagination, the role of intuition in research, and how chemists develop entirely new reaction pathways capable of creating highly strained molecular structures.

Noah explains how his lab designs reactions that selectively create one molecular “handedness” over another, why chirality matters in medicine and biology, and how light can be used to drive reactions that would otherwise be energetically impossible. Along the way, Aaron connects chemistry to psychology, creativity, consciousness, traffic systems, human relationships, and even the metaphorical power of molecules like porphyrin.

This is not a technical lecture disguised as a podcast. It’s an intellectually playful conversation about discovery, emergence, energy, and the deeply human side of scientific work.

About the Guest
Noah Burns is an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University specializing in synthetic organic chemistry. His research focuses on developing new chemical reactions, photochemistry, halogenation strategies, strained molecular systems, and the total synthesis of complex natural products. His lab explores how novel molecular transformations can enable discoveries in biology, medicine, and materials science.

Connect with Noah

Website: https://chemistry.stanford.edu/people/noah-burns

Chapters 

00:00 – Introduction to Noah Burns and Organic Chemistry
01:20 – Columbia, New York City, and Academic Training
03:00 – Teaching, Curiosity, and Scientific Enthusiasm
04:30 – What Synthetic Organic Chemists Actually Do
06:00 – Primary vs. Secondary Metabolites
08:30 – Natural Products and Drug Discovery
10:00 – Halogenation, Bromination, and Chemical Reactivity
12:30 – Why Bromine Is Both Beautiful and Dangerous
14:00 – Chirality and Why Molecular Handedness Matters
16:00 – Enantioselective Catalysis Explained
18:30 – Nobel Prize-Winning Chemistry and Selective Reactions
21:00 – Designing New Reaction Pathways
24:00 – Titanium Catalysts and Chiral Ligands
28:00 – The Creativity and Trial-and-Error of Organic Chemistry
32:30 – Building Four-Membered Carbon Rings
34:30 – Using Light and Copper to Create Cyclobutanes
38:00 – Photochemistry and High-Energy Molecular States
40:00 – Porphyrins, Photosynthesis, and Human Systems
44:30 – Redox Reactions and the “Vital Spark” of Life
46:00 – Why Life Is Controlled Oxidation
48:00 – Evolution, Energy, and Reactive Systems
51:00 – Translating Ideas Into Physical Reality
54:00 – Traffic Theory, Systems Thinking, and Flow States
57:00 – DARPA, High-Energy Molecules, and Closing Thoughts

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Connect with Dr. Aaron Winkler

• Website: www.aaronwinklermd.com
• LinkedIn: @NRTGEPOD
• Instagram @NRTGEPOD

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

So I mean that the the halogenation is one of that. Like, I mean, they're not sort of disparate, you know, separate research areas. New ways to control halogenation, I s I should say. I mean, this is just one thing we did a while ago.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Like, tell me what are you talking about? Like, come on, man. Like, putting out a chlorine is like not a new thing. No, not a new thing. So what is it you're doing?

SPEAKER_03 0:24

So this this is what it is.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

So this is Noah Burns. He's uh Are you full professor?

SPEAKER_04 0:39

Associate professor. I know. On the way. Yeah, yeah, hopefully.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Um just chemistry or chemistry, straight chemistry.

SPEAKER_04 0:48

Although, you know, you know, my specialty is very much organic chemistry. Yeah, that's what I know.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

So Okay. Yeah. At Stanford University. Yeah. Where'd you train?

SPEAKER_04 0:57

Um I did my undergrad at Columbia. Uh I grew up in Maine, um, but went to Columbia as an undergrad in big New York City and then. Yeah, morning side heights. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

That's where I did my postback.

SPEAKER_04 1:10

Oh, really? Oh, no way. No way, no way.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

At Columbia or yeah. Yeah, and I live in Hell's Kitchen.

SPEAKER_04 1:15

Oh man.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

I could I could I could beat the express on my bicycle going from 125th and um and Broadway down to 42nd and 11th. I could beat the express A. Yeah. Just fly down those roads. Man, man. Yeah, yeah. You ever seen that? There's a bike messenger movie in New York? Yeah, we with with Joseph Gordon Levin. You've seen it.

SPEAKER_04 1:38

Well, he he was he was a classmate of mine. Stop. Really? Yeah, he was there. It was my year at him and Anna Pakquin and Julius Styles were like the you know famous people in my that's how he knew it.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

I was wondering how he knew it because there are all these shots in that movie that were my actual routes. Yeah, yeah, is that true? Very specific things. And there was like one, there's one, it's right up by Columbia. It's like 120, it's like 120th in Broadway, and you're and the train's going, and it's like goes down, right? And there's this place where there's like a police car chasing him, and he has to like stop, and there's a light at the bottom. Okay, and he has to time the light so that he can go as fast as possible. And like, and I like I was like, that's exactly. You did that same thing. That's funny. That's how that detection works. It's like I was very impressed. But again, that makes sense. So he because he wrote it himself. Oh, he did? Oh, I didn't know that. I don't know if he did. I mean, I'm I don't know if he like had a stunt guy for some of the, but I mean like around Columbia. He must have like, you know. Yeah. Um yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. So you did undergrad there?

SPEAKER_04 2:31

Yep, undergrad there, and then uh I did my PhD at a place called the Scripps Research Institute. So it's not the Scripps Ocean Institute for Oceanography, that's part of UCSD, but it's its own, you know, graduate program essentially. I mean, it's a research institute, so it's a lot of postdocs and researchers. But it's not attached to university. It's not attached to university at all.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

Yeah, that's wild that they were able to build that.

SPEAKER_04 2:53

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

That's also La Jolla, right?

SPEAKER_04 2:56

Yep. Exactly. I mean, it's very close. And um, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a super cool place. Uh, you know, very, very research focused. And it's, you know, it doesn't appeal to all grad students. Um, it's, I don't know, it's a certain kind of person, but I mean it you're in there, it's the same as any department. You know, it feels like you're in a chemistry department at any school. And, you know, top, top, top. I mean, the people there are just awesome, and I had a fantastic, fantastic time there.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Just no teaching.

SPEAKER_04 3:26

No teaching. Which I was kind of bummed about at the time, but um now that you do teaching. Now that I do teaching gay with the teaching, yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. I mean, and you know, my my postdoc advisor I tried to get some experience when I was a postdoc, and he was like, there's plenty of great teachers that have come through scripts, and he's like, you'll be fine.

SPEAKER_05 3:46

And it true.

SPEAKER_04 3:47

I mean, you you know, you learn so much on the fly in any job, right? And so teaching just falls into that, I think.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Yeah. And if you like it. Yeah. If you like it, teaching is fundamentally just being excited about the material. Yeah, no, exactly. And then they feed off that. Then they like they can tell that you're excited and they're like, why is this exciting? And then you're like, this is why.

SPEAKER_04 4:08

No, totally. I mean, that that was definitely one of the things I like realized early on, one of the many things I realized early on, which was that, you know, I was all all worried that like, oh, like they're gonna call me out because I don't know this thing, or I'm you know, I gotta know everything and be able to answer everything. And it's like, no man, what is worth way more is enthusiasm. Yeah, like that's what yeah gets people. And that's cool.

SPEAKER_02 4:29

And then if you don't know the answer to your question, you just say, like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 4:31

Let's go back to you. It's a great question, you know. I love it. Makes me think explore and figure that out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:37

Let's be scientists. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Um so what do you do? So my you know, I I I often say like I'm I'm really like a card-carrying synthetic organic chemist, which means that you know, we're in the business of making small organic molecules. Okay. And sort of half of what we do is related to natural products. So, you know, molecules people find in nature from all sorts of sources, you know, from a lot come from the ocean, from marine organisms. I mean, the number one has got to be tac polymerase. Well, that so we're we're we're small molecules, so not proteins.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 5:22

So, you know, things that are typically less than one kilodalton, you know, a thousand molecular weight versus a protein, which is, you know, tens, hundreds, something.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

How many atoms is a thousand molecular weight?

SPEAKER_04 5:35

Oh, I mean, we're talking maybe, you know, twenty, thirty atoms, something like that. I mean, maybe, you know, I mean a lot of hydrogen, obviously, but yeah. Um not big molecules. You know, they're they're like just you know, they're drug-like molecules. Yeah, things like neurotransmitters and stuff like that. Totally, totally, totally.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

I mean they're they're uh they're information carriers as opposed to as opposed to machines. Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 6:01

Yes. I mean, I would say information carriers, but you know part of it is like when when the sort of classic, which is not all that what we've done, but like the sort of classic natural product synthesis is basically so-called secondary metabolites. So they're not necessarily things that are I mean, definition of secondary metabolite is something that's not essential for survival, not fully essential. So, you know, things so things like that's the definition of secondary metabolite. Secondary secondary metabolite. That's not the what? Well, I mean, a primary metabolite is something that you'd need. You know what I mean? Like a signaling molecule or or uh We use those words completely differently. Is that true?

SPEAKER_02 6:46

So what do you what do you think secondary metabolite is just like the second layer of metabolism? Right, right, right, right. It has nothing to do with its relevance, right? Like that's a lot, a lot of times the secondary metabolite will be the thing that the body's gonna use. Right. But it's like it comes in, liver's gonna do this, kidney's gonna do that, right? We're gonna have like so uh a really good one is um you know buproprion, while butrigen. So uh that has uh one of the secondary metabolites, there's like there's the primary metabolites, right, um, right, and then there's the secondary metabolites, and one of the secondary metabolites is a methamphetamine, uh uh which is why it's good for ADHD, right? Like it's uh although it isn't really.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

Um but that's why it's that's that's why it's thought to anyway. Um I mean, I guess I mean the I guess the reason people talk like it's not a Yeah I think the reason people use that term in these terms in natural products is because yeah, I mean it is a product of their metabolism, right? Right. I mean, it's not a primary thing they're making.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

But it has nothing to do with like the order of how many steps of metabolism primary. It's primary is just you need this for life, and secondary is you probably don't.

SPEAKER_04 7:45

That's that's how we use it. That's not true. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's not like as reasonable a way to use those terms. So it is like a correct way to do that. You know, I I I mean, even though they're not necessary for survival, like completely necessary, they I mean, I I don't think nature does things just for fun. Like the molecules that nature makes, I think have some, you know, I mean, evolution is a powerful force and energy is you know worth a lot, right? And so putting energy into using ATP to make a molecule, it doesn't make sense that it would do that for n nature does that for zero reason, you know. I don't know, there's exceptions. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, I mean there's a lot of things. You gotta excrete things and get rid of things, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

But um so you make secondary metabolites.

SPEAKER_04 8:42

Well, mostly. I mean, again, that's the sort of classic like natural product synthesis. And the the idea is that again, these do have some benefit. And when people talk about like chemical warfare in nature, I mean that's you know, these molecules have some, they do have some benefit. So, you know, killing off other bacteria, I mean, it's usually some cytotoxic activity. Okay. And these molecules, I mean, historically, these molecules, these, you know, natural secondary metabolites, have been the source of, you know, it's close to 50% of all the drugs that are out there on the market, you know, that are not necessarily themselves, like the structure exactly the same or slightly modified, but people also discovered a lot of inhibitory pathways by studying, discovering a natural product that had some certain activity. I mean, basically the way this happens is people go, they get some organism, they grind it up or something, and then they just test the extracts against a lot of different cell lines. And if they see some activity, then they want to go in and find okay, what is the exact molecule that's doing that? That's not what we do. People report these things, and then we, people like us, then they go and they try to you know make these molecules from scratch so that we can further test them, produce more of them and test them.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Um what's your favorite molecule you make or have made?

SPEAKER_04 10:13

Ooh, what's my favorite molecule?

SPEAKER_02 10:15

It's okay to do top three.

SPEAKER_04 10:16

I'm not gonna we're not gonna like we in the secondary metabolite realm, we made we made it's gonna be hard to pick one, but we made some really cool halogenated molecules. So we were very interested early on in chlorinating and brominating stuff stuff and finding ways to do that, like and then you know, the end goal was to actually make some of these molecules that come from nature. So there's just some really cool halogenated structures.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

Brominating stuff is like that's what snake oil is.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

Right? People, I mean, what I I don't I don't uh uh it's so it was all the rage like 120 years ago, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Somebody figured out how to brominate, right? Like in the 1880s or something like that. And that's why you get like the that's why you'll see if you if you look at the um you're like you know like an old timey medicine cabinet, somebody's always got like something like a bromine. Is that true? Right? It's like we end like the you know, the snake oil salesman who's he's gonna be like, I've got this bromine, it'll fix your like it's always like a, you know.

SPEAKER_04 11:21

Yeah, they're very strong oxidizers, you know. I mean, I mean, bromine itself or sort of related reagents. I mean, they're they are powerful oxidants, you know, they destroy molecules really well, which could be the stuff you want to destroy, but it's equally gonna destroy the things that you need. I mean, well, that's it, yeah. You know, BR2 is a very toxic, you know, it's a it's a fiery red liquid, volatile.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Actually, like red.

SPEAKER_04 11:48

It's red. It's deep red, it's super cool. It's I mean, it is very beautiful. But anything. Just BR2. Bromine bromine bonded to itself. Yeah. Like oxygen. Just those probably hard to even sustain it.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

BR2 you can buy. How do you how do you make it then if it if it reacts with everything?

SPEAKER_04 12:16

How do people make it industrially? I think it's I honestly don't know.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Is it a gas?

SPEAKER_04 12:22

Is it the same as No, but it's very volatile. I mean, if you have a solution of it, you know, or I'll just say like you have pure BR2, you can see red fumes, like orange red fumes going off. Yeah, it's wild. Chlorine, Cl2 is it volatilizes like at room temperature. Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You only use that stuff in a hood, like that in a fume hood, you know what I mean? It's pretty toxic. It's pretty toxic.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

Wow, that's cool.

SPEAKER_04 12:48

But so, I mean, one of the things we did we did early on was to sort of tame it down. I mean, there's, you know, classically, there's many reagents, chemicals that people use that are less reactive to BR2, but can do similar things. And we designed some systems to really selectively introduce bromine and chlorine atoms into molecules.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Why?

SPEAKER_04 13:10

So that we could target these brominated and chlorinated natural products. Why because they have had interesting biological activity, I mean cytotoxic activity, anti-cancer activity. And I mean, one of the things we really wanted to try to study, I mean, this is beyond our area of expertise, and we wanted to sort of enable it, was just figuring out how these molecules interact with biological systems. You know, again, nature has made these, they clearly are, I mean, likely are killing things that might eat the organism, so they're killing cells. How are they doing that? How are they selective at killing certain types of cancer cells than other types of cells? Um Yeah, I mean, it was an interesting, it was an interesting question, an interesting sort of reason to do it. I mean, uh, you know, I will uh is a spoiler alert, I guess, like we are very fundamental organic chemists. So like just developing the reactions themselves and making these molecules is kind of what we have focused on, you know what I mean? Versus like we don't do the biology. That's not it's not a bad thing. I I I shouldn't say it's a no like I guess.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

What I'm trying to figure out is like, is like where is this like where does this get interesting for you, right? Like where does it where does this like so I think of Orgo. Yeah. And I think of, you know, there's only so many reaction types, right? It was for me, it was incredible to learn it. You know, um the shapes and the changing and the and the shifting and aromaticity and all this stuff was like, whoa, but like I can't imagine devoting my entire career to that because eventually I'd be like, it's just not like, okay, so I guess we can get this chlorine onto this one.

SPEAKER_04 14:54

Yeah, but that's the cool thing, is like what's cool is developing actual like new reactions or new ways to control reactions. I mean, you said it, like there's tons of reactions. We know tons of reactions now, but you know, are we at the point where like anybody can decide to make a molecule, just go in the lab, mix some things together, and boom, do it. Like we're very we're still very far from that place in the field.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

So it's it's developing reaction pathways.

SPEAKER_04 15:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a big that's a big part of it. I would say that's sort of half of what my research has the group's research. I mean, I I I'm I'm I'm really sort of putting you know natural products to focus on making natural products as like half, and the other half is really like the fundamental, okay, can we develop some new organic transformations, new ways to put molecules together.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Oh, what do you got, man?

SPEAKER_04 15:51

So I mean that the the halogenation is one of that. Like, I mean, they're not sort of disparate, you know, separate research areas.

SPEAKER_05 15:58

There's a lot of ways to halogenate.

SPEAKER_04 16:01

New ways to control halogenation, I should say. I mean, this is just one thing we did a while ago.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Like, tell me what are you talking about? Like, come on, man. So I'm like, putting on a chlorine is like not a new thing. No, not at all. So what is it you're doing? It's like, what are you doing?

SPEAKER_04 16:16

So this this is what it is. So you remember chirality. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

And so when that's like ADHD meds.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

Yeah, you know, like like levo index, levo index amphetamine is like it's everything. Exactly. Because that's what I do is like I do, I'm a psychiatrist, I treat adults with ADHD. So like the chirality of like left and right amphetamine is like immediately relevant.

SPEAKER_04 16:37

Very different, right? So when you halogenate a molecule, when you brominate or chlorinate a molecule, you can create two enantiomers, right? Two mirror image forms. And so one of the things we really focused on was okay, how do we selectively just make one? And that was actually something people had struggled to do. So how do you do it? There's a gap. So basically how we did it was I mean, I mentioned there's don't be basic, man.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Okay, okay. How'd you do it?

SPEAKER_04 17:04

So do you remember how how bromination bromination works? Um you have BR2, you have an alkene, a carbon-carbon double bond. Yeah. BR2 reacts with that alkene, it makes this three-membered so-called bromonium species. Okay. It's a positively charged, it's very electrophilic.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Oh, it's coming back.

SPEAKER_04 17:21

And then the BR minus comes and opens.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Backside attack.

SPEAKER_04 17:24

Right, exactly. Yeah. And so you can brominate from the top or the bottom of the alkene to make the three-membered bromonium, either going up or down. And you can open that bromonium from either of the carbons on the alkene. Okay. And that will lead to two different enantiomers, two different mirror image forms. So there's a lot of mechanistic pathways the way we are.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

So all of those can shape. Right. Because you could so you can get to either shape from either side.

SPEAKER_04 17:51

So you can go here, and if you open on the right or the left, you get two enantiomers. Yeah. You can go here, and then if you open from right or left, you get two different enemies. Two different enantiomers. But two of those, the pair of those are the same. Right. Right?

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 18:03

Now it it gets more it gets more interesting when you start mixing bromine and chlorine. So instead of adding two bromine atoms or two chlorine atoms, you add a bromine and a chlorine. Because then things are different. Then those four pathways lead to four distinct products. Right. I mean, it's just basically. Okay, so what we wanted to do. What we wanted to do was just to make one of those four. I mean, that's the key to doing it.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

And it wasn't good enough to make to do half.

SPEAKER_04 18:37

Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

To like do it with both the bromines and and we'll and we can, right?

SPEAKER_04 18:42

Right, right. I mean, our very first paper was m making, you know, high, predominantly one in antihumor of a BR2, a brominated molecule.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Oh man, because if you can do this, the amount of industrial scale production that is wasted on you have to just make it and then throw away half the product.

SPEAKER_04 19:05

I mean that's that's one of the big justifications.

SPEAKER_02 19:08

I mean that is massive in scale.

SPEAKER_04 19:10

Yeah, yeah. And and that, you know, my my post in my postdoc, I I mean in my PhD, I focused on making natural products. In my postdoc, I focused on I learned how to do an antioselective reaction. And so well, uh you know, I combined the two.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

I shouldn't interrupt you, I shouldn't let you finish. I mean, the way you said it, you were like an antioselective catalysis.

SPEAKER_04 19:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's that's a field field in in in and of itself. I mean, that's a Nobel Prize. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. An antioselective catalysis. And it's just for what you said, you know, the idea is we we can make two enantiomers if we're if we're making both of them, we have to separate them. We're wasting half our material. Can we have reactions that just make one? You know, lots of drugs on the market are chiral molecules. Yeah, right, right. And we are chiral, nature's chiral, so you you know, one enantiomer is gonna interact differently with the system than the other.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Like there's a whole thing. There's a Nobel Prize for this.

SPEAKER_04 20:12

Mm-hmm. 2001 Nobel Prize.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

What did they do?

SPEAKER_04 20:15

They developed dye dihydroxylation, so adding two OH groups, two alcohols, making epoxide, so three members rings with an oxygen and hydrogenation. So that's you know, one of the most important reactions is adding H2 across an alkene, right? Saturating an alkene. Um, and yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of people have been thinking about again, huge field, historically huge field, but people the sort of, you know, it's always an argument the people that got it, are they the most important ones? I mean, I think in this case is probably true, but um yeah, they they you know, it really emerged as a field partly because of these guys.

SPEAKER_02 21:00

So how'd you do it when you're a postdoc?

SPEAKER_04 21:02

So in my in my postdoc, I was looking at a totally different reaction. I mean, you know, in in chemistry, unlike biology or some other fields, what you do in your PhD in postdoc, it's you you're not you can't just take that and then the postdoc wasn't the chloridation bromination?

SPEAKER_02 21:21

No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_04 21:21

No, that's that was when that that was my independent career here. So that's my lab.

SPEAKER_02 21:28

That's like brand new.

SPEAKER_04 21:29

I it's uh I feel old at this point. I mean, I started in 2012 and we worked on that this stuff for maybe seven years. I mean, we're not doing a lot of it anymore, but that was a big early area of research that we focused on.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

What was like what was a moment while you're where you're doing that where you see a result and you're like Whoa. Or like you are you like some insight where you're like, oh what if I like Mix these things and do this and then I'll get it to go this right. Like what's uh where you're like, oh I got it.

SPEAKER_04 22:08

When we when we started to see selectivity, meaning we weren't just getting a fifty-fifty-fifty mix of enantiomers. When we started to see, I don't remember the first hit we got, maybe 30%. That's like a real, you know, 30% excess of one of the enantomers, like then it was like, okay, we're on to something here. You know what I mean? And and then it becomes a, you know, very hard process of optimizing that. So you're getting, you know, hopefully 90 plus percent of you know, excess of one of the enantomers.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

What'd you do to get to 30% excess?

SPEAKER_04 22:46

Well, it uh and you know, I th this is, you know, I gotta be very clear, right? I mean, I'm just the sort of coach here, you know, it was my students working in the lab and coming up with ideas and trying them and getting them to work. And my very first student, one of my very first students, Dennis Who, fantastically talented person. I mean, he, you know, it was his hands in the hood.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

And yeah, but what's the what's the but like what's the actual reaction?

SPEAKER_04 23:15

Yeah, what's the actual thing? So the key was, and we really did take inspiration.

SPEAKER_02 23:20

He's a strong leader, he cares about his okay. But what didn't Daniel did?

SPEAKER_04 23:24

Um Dennis, Dennis. No, it's okay. Um so he there was a really there was a lot of inspiration from actually that Nobel Prize winning work of forming epoxides that utilize titanium. So titanium was kind of the key to it. The idea being, okay, we can have titanium with a halogen on it.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 23:51

And then we can have some other reagent that also has a halogen on it. So instead of, you know, Br2 where the bromines are attached to each other, we have one bromine on one species and another bromine on the other species. So one acts as the electrophile and one acts as the nucleophile.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 24:11

And the idea was, well, the titanium can have this nucleophile on it. And titanium can also support chiral ligands. So, you know, the way that you select for one enantiomer in one of these reactions, you know, any reaction in the absence of that kind of chiral information is just going to give you 50-50.

SPEAKER_02 24:32

That's why this doesn't, yeah, this the whole thing.

SPEAKER_04 24:34

So there has to be chiral information coming in somewhere. And I mean, this is how, you know, proteins are chiral, right? And they make a single enaner product because that the whole machine is chiral. So you have to develop a machine that's chiral. And again, you know, work we're working on very small molecule.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Yeah, so there's it's very hard to even get a lot of things.

SPEAKER_04 24:52

Well, it I mean, it can be at first, but again, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of ligand and classes and catalyst classes that are chiral. I mean, again, the information all comes from somewhere.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Aaron Powell, What about what is it about titanium that it can support chiral ligands? Like why is that?

SPEAKER_04 25:11

Yeah, titanium's I mean, titanium is great because it it it can undergo ligand exchange very readily. So you can like bring a substrate molecule on and off very, very easily.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

These bonds are not that strong, or they're very exchangeable.

SPEAKER_04 25:25

I mean, i it it has to do with titanium-oxygen bonds, which actually are very strong, but it can support a number of coordination chemistries. So it can coordinate to four things, six things, eight things. And so things can add and add on and come off very sort of readily.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

Aaron Powell This is where you start to lose is like it's the coordination, right? That that now you get into these large scale, like right where there's like one metal and it's bonded, like a whole bunch of things. Aaron Powell Yeah. And the I feel like this is this is then this is when you get to inorganic, right? Well, no, it is true. I mean I do not have to do that. No, I mean get to inorganic inorganic. This is where I'm like mad I didn't take more classes.

SPEAKER_04 26:05

I mean titanium also it doesn't it in in this case, in many cases, like you you're not actually doing any redox chemistry on titanium. So it's like titanium four, that's the oxidation state. Okay. So four anionic ligands will neutralize it, right? Yeah. But it can still support, as I said, eight, you know, large number of ligands on there, but you know, only four of them are anionic. Again, you know, there's titanium-three, titanium two, you know, you can have different oxidation states of titanium, but titanium-4 is very stable. I mean titanium dioxide, you know, it's like paint. Yeah, it's a thing. Yeah, it's like it is. It's a lot of paint. That's titanium four. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But you can have, again, you know, you can have four different alcohols that come in corneal titanium.

SPEAKER_02 27:01

You can have nitrogens, because it's four that now you've got something chiral?

SPEAKER_04 27:05

It's not because it's four, it's just because it can support things. So you can have some other chiral organic molecule that comes and sticks on the phone.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

And is one of the things. Yep, right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 27:15

And if you make it a ligand.

SPEAKER_02 27:17

And if it's bromine, right, then you can make it your whole thing.

SPEAKER_04 27:20

So the bromine on there is like the reactive species.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

But that can be then brominated to your whole whatever you want to work with. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 27:27

So you have the titanium with this chiral species on it, chiral ligand. And then you can have your substrate, which has the alkene come and plop onto it.

SPEAKER_02 27:36

Oh man.

SPEAKER_04 27:37

And then the reaction occurs. Okay, so now I start to get the product.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

I start to get it. Because the complexity of how do you get how do you get something on there when you've got four, maybe up to eight different spots, and and how are you going to get it like attached in a certain way and attached next to some, right? Like now it starts to get because when I think of Orgo, it's like especially these small products, it's like so simple, fundamentally. Like it's not that, right? It doesn't get into the complex. I mean, compared to what I do, where it's like, well, where's the boundary of conscious and unconscious? Like, you know? Like where the where's the interplay of biological, psychological, and social in like the struggles of an individual human? Like, good luck with that one, right? This is like, but then you get into stuff like that, and it's like, oh, okay, I see it really opens up a lot.

SPEAKER_04 28:18

It does. Yeah. It does. You know, all this being said, like it it's still very challenging to figure out what is going on. And what we do is incredibly empirical, you know. And sure, you I mean, just like any science, you have hypotheses, you have some idea based on previous work people have done. But in the end, you know, I mean, this is one of the things I love about organic chemistry is that it's not just theory. Like, and you can have a great idea of a reaction, how it might occur, but it doesn't mean anything unless it actually produces what you want. Yeah. So, I mean, we're in the business of making molecules. And that's what I really fell in love with is I mean, uh, like you, I I loved Orgo, you know, the ideas, the shapes, you know, thinking in three dimensions, the reactions, the arrow pushing.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

I used to love uh uh dog fighting uh video games. They were my favorite. Yeah, because it's thinking in three dimensions. No, I because you have to like you see, you have to like this, all it's like it's all about thinking about it.

SPEAKER_04 29:18

I'm a huge I I am a huge video game fan. Like I love video games. Um but sorry, interruption. No, no, no, no. But it's like it's the thinking in three dimensional components of it. Yeah, I know I love it. I love it. But what really clicked was then when I went and started getting some research experience where all these ideas, these cool things, it's like it actually translates into real stuff. You know, you're actually making molecules with your bare hands, which you know is really fun. The glassware is fun. I mean, I love cooking and it's that it's all that that's the way I get my kicks now is through cooking because I don't unfortunately do work in the lab anymore. You know what I mean? Yeah. Um, but that's the cool thing. And and again, that's the challenge of it. So, you know, in reality, you go in my lab, it looks pretty boring. I mean, there's flasks, there's things stirring, people have syringes, they're weighing out solids, right? Yeah, you know, throw things in and you hope you get out what you want. And it takes a lot of, lot of, lot of trial and error, you know, um to get something to work.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

And there's a lot of imagination in it too.

SPEAKER_04 30:19

100%. Because you don't create a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

You don't get to like, it's not like, you know, I pour the thing in the thing and it goes poof and like or boom or something. It doesn't do that. It's just like it's not like lighting, you know, magnesium strip on fire, right? It's not as fun as that is. Right. It's not the stuff you get in. Right. Um it's like, well, now it's a different clear liquid, yeah. And now we're gonna have to like put it through the mass spec or something to like figure out what we're like it's not, it's a lot of like guessing and reading, and like it's all happening invisibly. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:50

Yeah. And it, you know, it's very, it's hard work because it's very monotonous. You're doing the same things over and over, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, you know, again, it's you know, it's the build test cycle, like all, you know, like a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

What's a what's a pathway you've made that was that like surprised you? Or that was like that was like you're just like proud of how creative it was or different it was. Because that's what you're doing now, right, is pathways.

SPEAKER_04 31:19

I mean, we you know, when we make a when we make one of these natural products, a lot of it has to do with the the sort of strategy and how you string a reaction sequence together, right? I mean, you look at one of these natural products and again, you know, beautiful structure. Okay, how do you make it from scratch in the lab? Well, there's you know an infinite number of ways you can do it, right? And there's a lot of creativity and and expert knowledge, right, of what reactions are known that goes into trying to plan that. And again, it's you know, a lot of sort of trial and error. And so, you know, one of the things there is really like, okay, what what strategically how are we gonna put this molecule together? You know what I mean? Um and I I don't know, I mean, a number of natural products that we've made are are I mean, I'm really I'm really proud of the students and the ideas that you know they and we had together to put these things together.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Um It's okay to say students' names. Yeah, no, like you don't when I say like that you've come up with I don't mean right, like it's a team.

SPEAKER_04 32:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 32:34

I'm just I'm just curious, like, is there a pathway that's awesome that you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_04 32:41

I you know, I I don't I I mean I'm j I'm trying to think sort of you know, maybe a fast forward a little bit and think a little more recently. I mean, we we developed a a really cool and very like easy way to make four-membered rings. So that an another thing that has sort of fascinated us over the years is four-membered carbon rings, yeah. So-called cyclobutanes. Okay, you know, they're strained because carbon does not like to adopt a 90 or 88 degree bond angle. Um, but you know, they're stable and they show up, they show up in nature, they they show up in drugs, and you know, they they've been of interest a little more to the pharmaceutical industry in the last five, 10 years, too. But I I don't know. I mean, I've always been fascinated, and this does go back to some of my PhD work, but I've always been fascinated by strained organic molecules, you know. I mean, they're kinetically stable, but you know, there's a lot of potential energy in there. Um and you know, it's just a it's a challenge to make them because they are strained. It's like, how do you put these things together? Um and that just like a lot of what we've done, I mean, the the thinking there, the reason we got into looking at a lot of four-membered rings was because of uh natural product that uh has a very cool structure. And so again, you know, we we started thinking sort of more broadly about how do we make four-membered rings, what are new useful, efficient ways to make four-membered rings. Um and one of my students came up, my student Carl Manson came up with a really easy way to make four-membered rings that basically involves taking some amine that has alkenes on it, dumping it into acidic water, throwing in copper sulfate, so super common, you know, most common copper salt is beautiful blue salt, and then shining light on it, and then you make this four-membered ring. And it just is it's a very elegant, elegant, simple, sort of green way to make these strained species. How does that work? Yeah, it's a very it's a very cool reaction. It's it's very cool.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

Basically walk me through that reaction.

SPEAKER_04 35:07

Yeah, it's cool. It you so it actually it so copper sulfate is copper two, but it supposedly it actually involves copper one, and copper one is so-called pi acidic. So basically, copper one likes to coordinate two alkenes, to carbon-carbon double bonds, and copper in solution can coordinate to two alkenes, and then that that species, the alkene by itself, the copper one by itself, do not absorb light. But that species, that coordinated species, will absorb light. Yeah, it can absorb light, and then wait, it's there's electron transfers that happen.

SPEAKER_02 35:53

Wait, so there's the I I I started to go to aromaticity, right? Okay. Because I like how does so is it just two, are they just two C2H4s or something like that?

SPEAKER_04 36:04

They're I mean, they they they're attached to other there's other spinach off of them, you know, because w we're not just trying to make cycobutane itself. We're trying to make cycobutanes within other molecules. Okay. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 36:18

Um wow. Okay, but you gotta get the copper to like associate to those two specific things.

SPEAKER_04 36:23

And it it's a fairly efficient. I mean, copper one, like the catalysis, you need a very small amount of copper one to do this. And that's why we think that adding, you know, co copper II salt may uh is makes it possible because you only really need a tiny bit of copper one. So somehow it's a little bit of copper one is generated in the reaction.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

And yeah, and then it absorbs, it absorbs light.

SPEAKER_04 36:47

It absorbs light, yeah. It's what's uh it's low, you you know, it's higher energy UV light, it's like 254 nanometers. That's so good. Yeah, exactly. It's it's gotta be higher, a little higher energy, but absorbs light. The metal, supposedly, you do a metal to ligand charge transfer, so an electron goes from the copper to the alkene, forms some radicals. Some imaging action.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

Now you're just like guessing. I mean what do we think is that you can do that?

SPEAKER_04 37:18

You know, it takes it takes some pretty serious physical chemistry studies and measurements to really get an idea of what's going on, and it that's beyond our expertise. I mean, yeah, you know, again, we're oh, there's so much art in it. There's there's it's a lot of I again, you know, there's a lot of knowledge, you know, using a lot of knowledge of what is out there and literature knowledge, and then taking that leap of well, could it be used to do that? And then and then, you know, that's 10% of it, and then 90% is just luck. Well, no, luck's a huge yes, absolutely. I I was gonna say, I was gonna say just, you know, kind of tr brute force empirical empirical work, you know, because it it it it never happens. So you have some idea and you go in the hood and it works like that, and you're done.

SPEAKER_02 38:11

So this is really beautiful. There's that it it absorbs like high purple, right? That is that's that's outside the visible spectrum. Yeah. It's like you mean kind of like sunlight, right?

SPEAKER_04 38:24

Yeah. I mean, you you know, the the 254 is in, I mean it, you know, it contributes to DNA damage. Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

Um and somehow that somehow that shifts things around. I mean it's it's photosynthesis.

SPEAKER_04 38:37

Photochemistry is incredible, and we've done we've utilized photochemistry a fair amount. I mean, you know, making four-membered rings in particular, but um photochemistry allows you to do some really cool things. Really, really cool things.

SPEAKER_02 38:50

Oh man, let's talk because because for me, like photosynthesis is is almost seems like magic.

SPEAKER_04 38:55

Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. It's wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.

SPEAKER_02 39:01

What's the like oh what like okay, what else can you do with photochemistry?

SPEAKER_04 39:06

Well, I mean again, you know, making these I should ask what time it is. Four numbered rings, I I can look at my phone's being used uh 9 54.

SPEAKER_02 39:16

Oh, perfect. Yeah, over five okay. There you go. Yeah, I'm yeah, I'm I I'm good till 1030. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 39:22

Um but if but we can also start like Well, I mean the cool the cool thing about photochemistry is that you know you use light to promote some molecule to a very high energy state, right? And I mean normally when you think of a reaction, you know, it needs to be thermodynamically favorable. So you need to put in stuff and you gotta go to a lower energy state. Yeah, that's not true. You're not going uphill. But if you have some starting material and you want to get to a higher energy, you know, product, one way to do it is to add light, which is energy, and you photo excite something, so then it is higher energy than that desired product, and then it falls, you know, it undergoes a transformation to get to that species. So overall, you know, it looks like oh, you're thermodynamically uphill, but you're not because the light is your source of energy promoting it to an excess.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

Or you just have to like add that to your to your you just have to add that to the initial state. Like that can that's part of the initial state of energy. So it is downhill. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But to be able to achieve that, the molecule, whatever you're working with has to be able to absorb the light. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:32

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 40:32

That's uh that's uh fundamental requirement. There's so much there, like what absorbs light and what doesn't. Yeah. And that's like that aromaticity is so much of that. Yeah. Because it's because it changes all the different wavelengths that you can pull in. I mean, that's the like so for me, that's that's my like the thing that ties me to a lot of this is um is uh my favorite molecule is porphyry. Okay. Good one. Yeah, yeah. Just like the most incredible molecule. Yeah. Um and it and it and it's a it's a metaphor for human systems, right? Um you read does that make sense? Tell me what you tell me what you tell me, tell me what you what you it's uh it's uh like the like so you look at a porphyry, right? It's 20, I think it's 20 carbons. Um pretty sure it's 20 carbons. Uh and you can't, it's so strong once it's been made that it can't be broken down, right? Like you can't break it all the way down, right? So you so that's how you get um yellow in your urid, right? Is like that's as far as the body can break it down, right? But it's still pretty strong. Um you put the iron in the middle, right? This incredibly reactive species, yeah, right? Like an unbonded Fe2. Yeah. Right. Um and then you got a couple of nitrogens in there that are like sort of holding on to it for dear life, right? Um, which is all stabilized by a ton of stable carbons, right? But that's just a, I don't know, rock star. That's like a rock star. Yeah. They're two in like like their manager, yeah, and they're and they're um, you know, whatever the like and their whatever the other like, you know, their booker or something, right? Or their manager and their like, you know, whatever. These still, like their PR person, the people who are like closest to them, like dealing with stuff, right? And then you've got all the people, and they're they're like dealing with a lot of the waves of of of what's coming off of that. And that all gets then sort of like pushed down on their on their staffs, right? Yeah. And that's just how human systems work. Yeah. Um, it's also really interesting that um Deezeroth and a whole bunch of people did this really cool study of what um how many neurons do you have to excite in order to get um action potential initiation? Right. Like how many um actual dendritic uh like excitements do you have to do? Um and surprise, surprise, it's right around 20. Right? Um, right. So it just like it becomes this very interesting thing of like the the muse comes and the muse is unstable, right? And if somebody happens to catch it in a way that like sort of works, that other people see well enough like are into it well enough that they're willing to like figure out how to manage the waves of this, right? Yeah. That's how you end up with this like a circle of people around somebody that are all managing the like intensity of their energy that they alone can like write. Yeah. Um would just would just write. Yeah. And then the thing about the whole thing that blows my mind more than anything is that it's exactly the same molecule as photosynthesis. Right. That it's like that the thing that carries oxygen in our block is exactly the same thing that captures light and makes sugar in. All you have to do is swap it one spot on the periodic table just. From copper to manganese, right? I'm sorry, from iron to manganese.

SPEAKER_04 44:03

Um and evolution is incredible. I mean, it is incredible.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

You know, well once you figure out that too, like it's such a like and so because so fundamentally what it does is it captured it can it can tolerate like the muse there, right? I mean it goes, but man, it goes to it goes to um Paracelsus, you know? Right? It goes all the way back to the foundation of your field, right? Yeah. The very beginning.

SPEAKER_05 44:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:25

We caught the vital spark, right? Yeah. And everybody laughs at them, yeah. Like silly, foolish whatever. But they did.

SPEAKER_01 44:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:31

They actually did catch the vital spark.

SPEAKER_01 44:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:33

Like what's the thing that they've got at the very beginning, right? And like, what is it, like the eighth century or something, like the 10th century? Like it was redox. That's what they, that's what they first figured out. They like they saw redox. They figured that out. Um and like that is actually very concretely like our vital spark. Like that is how mitochondria function. Like it's a redox reaction. Like it's like really well controlled stepwise, but it's but it's just redox, right? It is they actually like the original alchemists, like they did actually was like, it's the vital spark, right? But like, and it was, you know.

SPEAKER_04 45:07

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_02 45:08

A lot of engineering to figure out like how that, right? But sure.

SPEAKER_04 45:11

Well, like, you know, all of a lot, you can say all of life is basically just, you know, controlling, uh, slowing down oxidation right now. I mean, I guess our, you know, I I could say less. All of life I love it. You know, I mean, I shouldn't say all for because you know, you know, plant I mean, things create oxygen, but all all, you know, oxygen consuming and oxygen, you know, you know, um But it's mice, is it still redoxed?

SPEAKER_00 45:37

I mean, is it still like play like even things that aren't you know oxidizing things is everything else reducing stuff?

SPEAKER_02 45:43

I is that like really all life is?

SPEAKER_04 45:46

Well, I mean, you know, we I mean it's it's a cycle now, right? But I mean, we're all slowly oxidizing, right? Right. I mean, we're essentially bur, you know, burning us is thermodynamically very favorable, right? Yeah, yeah. And obviously there's a barrier to that, but you know, we're all just slowly oxidizing in the presence of O2, which is incredibly reactive. You know what I mean? But we've found ways to tame it and do it in a very controlled fashion. Right.

SPEAKER_02 46:16

Well, that's that's why the fundamental image is the burning bush. The fire that burns but doesn't consume. There you go. You know, there you go. Because that's that's what life is. It's like a fire that burns but doesn't consume. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

That's good. I like it. Yeah. Um, tell me more about photochemistry, man.

SPEAKER_04 46:32

No, I mean, photo, yeah, photochemistry is just it's so it is incredible.

SPEAKER_02 46:37

I want to take a class on photochemistry.

SPEAKER_04 46:39

Oh, is that a thing? Oh, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, I I I I don't teach a class on photochemistry, but in you know, one of my grad classes, I mean, we spend some time talking about photochemistry for sure. I mean, it's very fundamental. And again, you know, the things that types of things you can do with it are just what can you do? You can, I mean, again, you know, you can make you can make four-membered rings, you can do rearrangement reactions. I mean, you again, you know, you can make a lot of bonds and you can make a lot of strained things, which is why I find it strained things.

SPEAKER_02 47:13

I mean, you know, specifically about photochemistry that makes it possible to make strained things.

SPEAKER_04 47:18

Well, because you make very reactive, highly reactive intermediates. And certain highly reactive intermediates, you know, things are orchestrated in a certain way, you are you can end up making bonds in places that you wouldn't normally do because it's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:38

See now that now I like start to now what I do for a living starts to show up. And I'm like, well, that's right. That's how you get like the most, the best rock stars, right? The best, you know, like it's people who've like there was an incredibly high, like very a very reactive initial state, right? And and uh that like many, many couldn't have like that didn't work for a lot of people, right? But like for the one that it works for, they become like a strained species that is like able to do an incredible amount.

SPEAKER_04 48:09

Yeah, no, I uh that's that I've I've never thought about it in that way. But I, you know, I think of like some of the very successful people I know, and you know, they were pushed in some way or another to I guess you could say a higher energy state.

SPEAKER_02 48:24

Yeah, it's literally literally what yeah, yeah. But they can somehow, but it's somehow stable. Like you do it a thousand times, 95, 95% of them aren't gonna be stable. Yeah, right. But you get a couple that are. Yeah. And those ones, right? Yeah. Um, which is just like honestly, like you wonder how there's how life has the energy to do it that way. But but that's I mean, what's the percentage of DNA that's actually um transcribed? What is it like two percent? I mean, it's very small. It's something like two percent of DNA is transcribed. Okay. Um the vast majority of maybe it's four percent, it's like the vast majority of the DNA in all your cells. And think about the energy it takes to make that. No, but that's right. To actually like to actually build all like when you're building life um and all the DNA in all your cells, like the vast majority of it is not transcribed, which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't doing anything. It's entirely possible it's doing something we don't yet understand. Yeah, right. Yeah. Um but it's also possible that it's just like really hard to update the memo without breaking it in ways he didn't mean to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 49:22

No, I mean it is true. It is true. I mean, evolution followed a path. It's uh it didn't, it didn't do a Monte Carlo, you know, search of the whole landscape. Yeah. There's a path to it.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

So it seems to me that there's that there's enough energy around to support creating of uh like a large number of like non-operative versions in order to achieve one that like apparently there's enough energy for that.

SPEAKER_04 49:49

Well, it helps that we have this highly reactive oxygen that you know is the source of a lot of where'd the oxygen come from?

SPEAKER_02 49:57

Well, uh, I mean I know the O2 gets maybe more glimpsed.

SPEAKER_04 50:00

I mean, I mean, but it was all you know microorganisms way, you know, billions of years ago, right? That started pumping out oxygen. I mean, I why did that start? How did that start? I don't know. I mean, I'm not an evolutionary biologist or it's photosynthesis, right? Eventually, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But um I don't know. I mean, origins of life is such a cool, it's a very cool area of chemistry. That's I again that's not my field, but I've always been very fascinated with that.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

But it's but it's photoorganic chemistry, right? Like we get right back to like so, so how could you how could you have a system that is creating O2 when it's so reactive, right? How can you have that be pumping out of a living system? I know.

SPEAKER_04 50:44

Well why, why would it do that? I I don't know other people would have better answer.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

It's exactly what you already said. It's strained. It can capture it, right? It's like that, it's the outcome of photosynthesis, right? Is you can is you can capture the light, you can you can take the hydrogen and the carbon, make the sugar, right? And and the the and O2 is your strained species. I mean, not and it's not like it's not um geometrically strained. No. But it's but it's energetically, yeah. Like it's energetically like waiting weighting. Yeah. That oxygen oxygen bond is yeah, super.

SPEAKER_04 51:21

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:23

What what do you like? What like I'm getting so excited.

SPEAKER_04 51:26

Cool.

SPEAKER_02 51:26

What excites you about this stuff?

SPEAKER_04 51:28

What excites me? I I I mean, I I I think probably fundamentally it's this idea of translating thoughts and ideas into physical things, which you know that I I you know, I think that's I I imagine a lot of people in a lot of fields would say the same thing, you know, engineers, inventors, you know, designers, right? I mean, the idea of having some idea and it translating to a real physical object, you know, in our case it's molecules, which you know, I would argue are the most powerful of things, you know what I mean? I'm biased, but you know, that that's a very satisfying endeavor, you know. I I would totally say too, I mean, I I I'm an I'm a scientist, a res a researcher, but uh, you know, I'm maybe number one and I think of myself as an educator, you know, and getting people excited about it, you know, helping them see that spark, make make that accomplishment of translating the idea into physical reality or a solution to something like that, that's really satisfying, you know, at this point. I mean, you know, my training, sure, it was I, you know, I get to do that myself. And I wish I could still do that. And I think I'm probably better at that than I am at the role that I'm in now. But um but that's really cool, you know. You know, it's really cool to I mean, like this, you know, talk to people and get really excited about the science and again see the see something click in them or I don't know. I mean, it's it's very in the end, it's very, you know, it's human, right? Right? It's human connection and and I don't know, mutual excitement, you know.

SPEAKER_02 53:20

Um man, the like number of like chemistry reacts, like it's like the the metaphors are so you know yeah, no, it is mutual excitation, like okay, and then what are we gonna what Kyro like like yeah, what an anti-murror are we gonna come out with?

SPEAKER_00 53:34

That's so fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 53:35

Yeah. Mutual excitation until it becomes an FE3 plus. Then we gotta get rid of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um I'm gonna have to get are there books on photochemistry?

SPEAKER_04 53:49

Oh, too many, probably. Okay. But uh well, there's a good one. I'd be able to point you in the interesting. I mean, you want to learn it from the real fundamental sort of physical principles.

SPEAKER_02 54:01

I haven't had a good textbook in a while. The last one was a traffic textbook that I bought just for kids.

SPEAKER_04 54:05

I've always been curious about traffic.

SPEAKER_02 54:07

Amazing. I have all yeah. Okay, okay. Maybe you give me how many recommendations are curious. You go, so so traffic jams. Yeah, yeah. They move forward in time and backward in space.

unknown 54:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 54:23

It's like tenant. Because because as cars leave the front, they enter the back. So like it moves backwards in physics in space, right? There's only one situation where where a traffic jam moves forwards in physical space. Can you guess what it is? Oh yeah. I didn't figure this out, I read this in the book, so it's not like I where it moves forward in space.

SPEAKER_04 54:50

I don't know, like uh, like a like a um police chase or something. I don't know. I don't know what a truck going uphill.

SPEAKER_02 55:00

So so if a semi, a heavy semi, gets stuck in a traffic jam, right, then they don't have the forward momentum to go up the next hill because they're slow. So now as they're going up the hill, they are like stuck in a low gear and like have to and like so people in front of them will end up actually, even in the traffic jam, will end up going faster than your truck and it'll clear out the front, and then the whole way up the up however big the hill is, which sometimes is like, you know, could be miles and miles, then the traffic jam follows the truck up the hill.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

Right.

SPEAKER_02 55:32

But it's all the stuff about like how you measure time headways and distance headways, and and you know, it's like something the the maximum number of cars on a highway per lane per hour is about, I think it's like 15 to 1800. And it's not that's why we get to like 55 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_04 55:48

Because maximum number of cars per lane per hour.

SPEAKER_02 55:51

Right. Because if you cause it, because you'd think it's like, let's just have them all go faster. But the problem is um once they if you get enough cars on the road and they're going 70 or 80, then the distance between them sh has to shrink. And then the moment one person has to tap on the brakes, somebody else taps and it becomes just like and then wave that goes, yeah. That then becomes a trap, like at some point a number a number of people all all like accordion in and it becomes a traffic jam and the whole thing slows down, right? Interesting. So the most the the most efficient way to transmit cars like at high speed in volume is something like 1500, 15 to 1800 per lane per hour. Um, but it's but it's right about 60 miles an hour. Right. Like, don't quote me because I read this a while ago. But it's something, but it's like it's stuff like that. It's fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 56:38

I'm always thought about this. I mean, I I you know it's hard not to when you're it's super fast. You can just get a textbook, man.

SPEAKER_02 56:44

I've never I was drive it was like a part of my life where I was driving a ton. Yeah, and I was just thinking about like thinking about it so much, and I just gotta and like when you when you're not actually in the class, there's no grade, and they're like, there's like now there's a problem set, and you're like, No, I don't think I will.

SPEAKER_04 56:56

Yeah, I'm gonna get I'm just gonna get in that we'll see what's in what's what's interesting stuff here.

SPEAKER_02 57:02

I think I'll skip over that part. It's so fun. It's so fun. Super cool, super cool. Oh man, I'd love to learn more from you. Um, thanks for doing this. Of course, man. My pleasure. This is a jam.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

Fun to talk people that are as excited about things as you know, I can be. So cyclobutane.

SPEAKER_02 57:17

Photo photochemically created cyclobutane. It's just like pulsing with energy trying not to like, I'm gonna, you know, like we made some higher high energy.

SPEAKER_04 57:24

We got we got involved with the Department of Defense a little bit and DARPA making some high energy materials at one point, you know, things like half a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 57:31

But you can't talk at the you can't say anymore.

SPEAKER_04 57:33

Well, no, I I I at the time maybe not, but at this point, I I don't know. I mean they you know they gave us money, we made we made some things, and then they went off and who knows what they did. And yeah, they don't report back. So I I like whatever. But I like maybe conversation for another time.

SPEAKER_02 57:46

We're all uh we're all into inhabit our role on the team. Yeah. But but but but knowing we're knowing the bigger picture is bumper pig, right?

SPEAKER_04 57:54

Cool. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 57:57

We're just yeah, we're just the nerds. Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah. Thanks again for doing this. Of course, of course.

SPEAKER_04 58:02

Yeah, yeah, my pleasure.