E140: LK-99, Sclerotic establishments, Fitch downgrades US debt, Trump indicted... again

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sacks found the gel.

**David Friedberg** (0:02)
Oh my god.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:04)
Look at this guy, he's running for office. If he shows up with a red tie next week, we're fucked.
That's the end of the show. He shows up with a red tie, a blue shirt. Are you coming out of your law retirement? Are you gonna be an active lawyer defending Trump?

**David Friedberg** (0:16)
Sacks, you look really good, I gotta say, with the gel. That's a really good look.

**David Sacks** (0:20)
Let's go to the shower, use the comb.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:22)
Oh, the weekly shower in Italy?

**David Sacks** (0:24)
Good look, right?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:25)
Yeah, it's not a bad look.

**David Friedberg** (0:26)
Did you use soap? Did you, did you use soap or not?

**Jason Calacanis** (0:30)
Oh, no.

**David Sacks** (0:31)
I didn't have time.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:32)
Didn't have 90 seconds?

**David Sacks** (0:33)
Yeah, I didn't wanna keep you guys waiting another two minutes.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:52)
All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of The All-In Podcast. It is August and we just might have had the most consequential week in terms of politics and science in a long time. Could be the week of the year. Friedberg's been going nuts inside the group chat because everyone is trying to replicate this LK99 room temperature semiconductor experiment.

**David Friedberg** (1:19)
Superconductor.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:21)
Superconductor, yes.
So, God, I mean, this has been, what has it been, like 10 days and now everybody is on Twitter trying to recreate this. Maybe I should just let you cue this up, Friedberg, since this is the first time, perhaps the last, that we're gonna start the show at Science Corner. So Science Corner takeover week.
Tell us, is this legit? Could you flip from this is a fraud to this is changing the world? Like every day you seem to have a new piece of evidence. Where are you today with this? Is this the real deal?

**David Friedberg** (1:53)
I mean, it's probably somewhere in the middle, but it leads to a path that could get us to the Holy Grail, which is room temperature superconducting material, which we've talked about twice on the show before. And I encourage folks to go look at the episode we did a couple ago after the original claim was made a few months ago that turned out to not be true. But the description in the paper that came out on how to make this material was chased by hundreds of labs around the world over the last few days. Folks have been live streaming it on these Chinese websites, Bilibili and Twitter and Twitch.
Everyone from Russian scientists to Chinese to Korean to American to European. I will say one thing that I think is really profound, which it is, this is the first time in a very long time that I've seen so many people share a unified voice about optimism, about an abundant future, optimism about a big breakthrough rather than get on social media to share a voice about fear and anger at someone or something. And to hear everyone around the world get together and be excited about the potential of this discovery and its applications. It's really profound to see and it's really amazing and wonderful to see. Now, where we are, a bunch of labs took the described chemical structure of this material, LK99, which has lead and phosphorus, oxygen and some copper in it and put it into these modeling systems, these computer modeling systems to try and understand where do the electrons flow, where do the electrons sit in this material if this material is made the way it's described. And five different labs have now published papers that show that the way that this material is supposedly produced, it should create these pathways or these energy states with the electrons that theoretically could enable superconductivity at a very high temperature. And so that's a very confirmatory signal that computer modeling of the electron clouds, because remember electrons, even though they move around the nucleus of an atom, we only kind of have a probability statement of where they are. So if you look at all the probability statements of all the atoms stuck together, and you try and figure out what's the aggregate probability of where electrons are, it indicates that there are these pathways that theoretically could allow for electrons to move freely through the material and be completely void of any sort of resistance, which is superconductivity.
And so that's what's really profound about the modeling outputs from five very separate independent labs.

**Jason Calacanis** (4:32)
Just so we're clear, when electricity normally moves down and electric wire or in computers and CPUs, GPUs, whatever, there's resistance. That resistance results in loss. It results in heat.