#433 – Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Sara Walker, her third time on this podcast. She is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and in discovering alien life on other worlds. She has written an amazing new upcoming book titled Life as No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence. This book is coming out on August 6th, so please go pre-order it now. It will blow your mind. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for Notes, Motific for LLM Deployment, Shopify for e-commerce, BetterHelp for mental health, and AG1 for delicious, delicious multivitamin drink. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me or to work with our amazing team, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
Now, on to the full ad reads. No ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. I've been using it recently for note-taking on academic papers, specifically machine learning papers, and there's a lot of machine learning papers. It's straight up just a great note-taking tool. But beyond that, it's a great collaboration tool for the note-taking process and the whole project management lifecycle. It combines note-taking, wiki, project management, and then there's an AI assistant that can summarize everything and anything, and you could ask questions across all of those things. So it's not just for a single document across all of the documents. Obviously, people are collaborating on those documents, so you can ask questions. What did this person do? What is the status of this project? So on, so forth. It's just a really nice integration of LLMs. This is the fun part of the question with LLMs. How do you leverage the obvious power that they possess to be useful to whatever tasks that we do? What is the actual product here? And so Notion leverages them extremely well, where the product is team collaboration on notes, wikis, and project management. So really well done. Love to support people that do a great job of building a great software product. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex, to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Motific. It's a SaaS platform that helps businesses deploy LLMs and in general, generative AI that are customized with RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, on organizational data sources. Obviously, these kinds of data sources are often super sensitive, and that's where Motific comes in. They help companies with security and compliance. A little background here since I had to do the deep dive myself a while back. Motific is created by Cisco, specifically Cisco's Outshift Group. And Outshift is doing cutting edge R&D stuff in Cisco. So Cisco has very, very, very long track record and reputation of working with giant businesses and helping them out in not messing stuff up. When you're dealing with sensitive data and when you're dealing with businesses that make a lot of money and already have products that bring in a lot of money, and a lot of people rely on, you don't want to mess stuff up. I think specifically this task of taking organizational data that's private to the company, that has to remain very secure, it's very sensitive data, using the power of LLMs and search via the RAG framework on that data is super, super powerful. I think companies that do this well and quickly, which is what Motific helps with, will win because the productivity gains, nobody knows, but I don't think there's a ceiling. So, it pays us off to play with LLMs, but do so in a secure way. Visit Motific AI to learn more. That's M-O-T-I-F-I-C dot A-I. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, with a great looking online store. I have a site set up, lexfridman.com/store has a few shirts on it, took a few minutes to set up, super easy. They integrate third-party apps. I did that for the on-demand printing, so I don't have to think about any of that. All you do is upload the design, the shirts are sold and shipped. It's an interesting experiment for me to understand how people look at you when you have a t-shirt with nothing on it and a t-shirt with something on it, especially if that something is recognizable. So if I have a Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd shirt or Johnny Cash or Metallica shirt, there's going to be certain people that look at me with recognition and respect, and almost like they want to start a conversation with me. When I have a t-shirt, like a black t-shirt with nothing on it, that kind of look doesn't happen. If I went out more, I would take a notebook and actually make this a little bit more rigorous. But anyway, there's definitely a noticeable social effect that happens when you have a t-shirt with a cool thing on it. So, I'm really happy with all the creators that are using Shopify to sell cool t-shirts. I wish there was a better discovery process though. I'm always in search of buying cool t-shirts. Like I just, on Instagram, I think there was a advertisement for a set of t-shirts for classic movies. And that was really badass, but I scrolled past it. And I regret it. See, that's like a piece of advertisement that actually works. But I wish there was a way to not take me from the scrolling experience, or maybe a way to bookmark it really naturally. There's already a natural sort of skepticism about advertisement, but here it worked. So like when advertisement is done well, it works. I just wish I saved it. But anyway, hopefully they use Shopify to sell shirts. If they don't, they should. And if you're thinking of selling shirts, use Shopify also. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-B, help. They figure out what you need to match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. Individuals, couples, the whole thing. One of my favorite couples therapies in film. I feel like Breaking Bad had good ones. That's a series, but I'm trying to think of it in a movie. That's a cool setting, because I've been thinking about interviewing directors and actors more and more. And the setting of a couple's therapy is really interesting. It's a really interesting dynamic between a man, a woman, and a therapist. And them trying to sort of make explicit the implicit drama that's been boiling over in their relationship. Obviously, the therapist one-on-one relationship is really interesting on film. Good Will Hunting with Robin Williams, man, what a great, great performance. I miss that guy so much. What a truly special human being. Anyway, back in the real world, therapy, even when there's no camera, is really important for shining the light on the Jungian shadow. 350 million plus messages, 34,000 licensed therapists, 4.4 million people who have gotten help through BetterHelp. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.