The Stanford Professor Taking Down A $3 Trillion Industry

[00:00:01][music] >> Patrick, uh thank you so much for joining us here. We are in the HP Garage. This is the birthplace of Silicon Valley from back in the 1930s. You can even see some of the equipment behind us and it gets us in the mood to celebrate American innovation, which is what we're here to do today.

[00:00:22]And I would love to just kick things off by asking you, what does the American dream mean to you in the context of innovation?

[00:00:31]>> I'd say a lot of it has to do with um the freedom to explore, um recognition that uh from the innovation standpoint that you learn by trying and making mistakes.

[00:00:50]Um I think that applies across not just science and technology, but you know, a lot of systems innovation.

[00:00:59]And having uh an environment that's conducive to um collaboration.

[00:01:06]And probably something that I'm not sure whether this is like uh American aspect to it, but maybe to some extent it is actually, is trying to have fun >> Mhm.

[00:01:17]>> um by uh doing, you know, by uh like I feel like the the secret ingredient to creativity is just fun.

[00:01:29]If you're not having fun, you're not going to be creative. And I think that um in American culture there is a kind of like a real value to just having fun, exploring, tinkering in a way that uh uh less structured cultures, I think, don't.

[00:01:52]>> Yeah. But I think um you know, there's I have a favorite quote by Isaac Asimov and he said that the most important phrase for scientific discovery isn't eureka it's hey that's funny.

[00:02:03]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, I I agree. I I agree. It's like with if you're [snorts] if if it's all gold driven and about and you know uh um moving along the the production line you're just never going to you're never going to do anything cool.

[00:02:18]You're going to miss a lot of opportunities. Yeah.

[00:02:21]>> Yeah. So, um speaking of those opportunities I I'd love to just maybe we could just talk a little bit about your background. What what got you interested in in genetics and and the career that you've ended up having?

[00:02:32]>> When I was a kid I didn't particularly think about wanting to go into medicine.

[00:02:35]I was I was very un un-programmatic in my career. I went to a liberal arts school because I I just wanted to like be able to explore everything.

[00:02:46]I thought I would I would I love math. I was um kind of on a trajectory to go into math very kind of like abstract math.

[00:02:56]And and then and in college at some point I decided well it that doesn't you know that feels like solving crossword puzzles for a living even though I feel like it's incredibly important and incredibly valuable to the world and not dismissing that at all.

[00:03:09]So, I I kind of detoured into um heading toward uh medicine. I went to uh medical school. I went to actually did an MD PhD program.

[00:03:21]And when I was in uh practice in pediatrics I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I thought maybe I'll maybe that's how I'll make a career out of it. But as I was going along um I kept coming across the situation where you would have someone you're desperately trying to help um and and you don't know how to do it. Nobody knows how to do it. And I felt like okay, well, I love doing this. I love I love that job. But I could have a bigger impact by focusing on trying to solve these problems that no one knows how to solve. And so I I went and did a a post doc. At the time HIV was just starting.

[00:04:02]Uh just the like it last year in pediatrics I I saw a couple of patients HIV and I thought, "Okay, I'll work on I'll study that." I went to work with uh Harold Varmus and Mike Bishop at UCSF.

[00:04:13]Uh who um a great scientist and great people.

[00:04:17]And um and I wanted to figure out how the HIV virus does something critical for its replication which is it takes its genome, copies it, and inserts it into the genome of the cells it infects.

[00:04:28]>> Right.

[00:04:28]>> And um no one knew how that happened. So that was something I felt like, "Oh, that's cool. I'll try to figure that one out."

[00:04:35]I did that and um and then I did >> you uncover like you know in the process of that research? Like what did you What What did you find out? What was your discovery, sir?

[00:04:45]>> Well, I I I It wasn't known.

[00:04:49]>> Sure.

[00:04:49]>> Molecularly biochemically how the virus did this.

[00:04:52]>> Mhm.

[00:04:53]>> And so that's what I studied and tried to figure out and it's kind of a complicated process how you figured it out, but basically I developed an assay where if it happened in the test tube, I'd get a signal. And and and so I spent 6 months just struggling to get this assay to work. Which was fun, you know, it sounds like a drag, but I was doing stuff spending hours in the cold room and stuff like that, but when you're doing it and you know you're working on something important and challenging, these like tedious little things are fun.

[00:05:28]Yeah, and then I and then suddenly I realized it worked. I got a tiny little signal. And uh and and once you have it figured So now actually that's the main drug target um for treating HIV.

[00:05:41]But you could start start studying it biochemically and start, you know, even like yeah, testing drugs and stuff like that. Then when I went to Stanford I I I was continuing to study viral or all retrovirology, but um I was interested in lots of stuff.

[00:05:55]Like I'd always just anytime I'd go to a seminar >> Mhm.

[00:05:59]>> my natural mindset was, okay, what would I do next? What would I do if I were had this problem? So one thing that I I was on the horizon was um genome sequencing had been sort of >> Right.

[00:06:11]>> massively accelerated. We didn't have any whole genome sequences not even bacteria, but it was clear that was coming.

[00:06:17]And and we also at that time the vast majority of genes nobody had any idea what they did.

[00:06:25]>> Mhm.

[00:06:25]>> Um and uh and so um well, I had a thought about like how you could systematically study the whole genome in terms of you know uh um relationships between genotype and function and phenotype and so forth or how things were expressed or even what interacted with what.

[00:06:50]And the idea was that if you >> being for the benefit of our audience like the DNA and and and the genes in your body and and things like that. So you know, please continue. You're good.

[00:06:59]So just >> I mean, basically here here's the way you can think about the genome. This is kind of hokey, but I think it's it's it's it's the kind of the way I thought about it and and is sort of relevant, which is that that um the genome is is basically genome as a organization not just the DNA, but the the the system is constantly writing a script for your cell for every cell, okay? And it's writing and rewriting the next scene all the time.

[00:07:31]>> Mhm.

[00:07:31]>> And um and the words that it uses are the genes.

[00:07:35]>> Right.

[00:07:36]>> But but at the time we didn't know what most of those words meant, okay? And we didn't know anything you know, didn't know how they were put together to direct the cell to do what it was going to do next and so forth.

[00:07:48]And um And so that was kind of the big challenge, but but you couldn't infer that directly from the sequence. You had to look at the living genome basically and and watch it in operation in a in a sense and make those connections. And in fact it it was it was you could think of this as as kind of like how a kid learns to to talk. How kids learn language. They learn language by observing how language is used by everybody in their environment. Anyway, um So had the I had the idea that basically you could build this very simple tool by taking um uh DNA sequences that correspond to all the genes or all the elements that you care about. And it just so happens without getting too technical that that um a DNA sequence will pull essentially the equivalent DNA sequence out of a complex mixture. So if you organize all those sorts of things, you can effectively measure what's happening with every single gene.

[00:08:46]>> Sure.

[00:08:46]>> So I designed a system for creating what we call a micro DNA microarray, which is just a tiny little spots corresponding to individual genes printed on glass.

[00:08:58]And then we could use it and it was incredibly it was really important in the design. We wanted to be incredibly cheap, okay? It had to be cheap because you want people to be fearless about doing experiments. You can't have this is an part about just in general for discovery. You know, if you're too precious about the things you're studying, you know, you're just going to be too timid. So we were focused on trying to be able to make make a really really cheap easy to use tool that could let us look at all sorts of ways but in all sorts of ways how the genome is behaving. I thought of it as like a a new kind of microscope that that you could suddenly use to see something you hadn't been able to see before, which is sort of the genome in action.

[00:09:43]>> Mhm.

[00:09:43]>> And um that and and so well, this is how I backed into to genetics, basically. So >> Uh-huh. So so kind of almost to extend your metaphor, if the if the words on the script, you're letting people see almost like the scenes.

[00:09:56]>> Yeah.

[00:09:56]>> Like so not just the the words on paper, but how the actors interpreting it, how they directed it. Just just trying to get an understanding of >> Well, it's kind of like you you're connecting the words to behavior.

[00:10:09]>> Right.

[00:10:09]>> This is how kids learn to speak. They're not just looking at patterns of word use. That's part of it, but also um when they hear the word dog, what what's the context there? Well, you're pointing at this blob that has legs and and a tail, you know.

[00:10:23]>> Right.

[00:10:24]>> And um well, it was sort of the same thing. The way we approached it was we wanted to look at how the pattern differed between one cell and other, how it changed when a cell was responding to any kind of stimulus or a circumstance and so forth. Cuz it's literally like a kid watching people talk and figuring out what >> Yeah.

[00:10:46]>> what that means and which genes are used together and which patterns and stuff like that. So it just it became a very useful tool for very quickly learning and there were lots of mathematical tools we could learn itself very well to kind of like uh computational analysis and so forth to to figure that out. But then it also uh um um besides from a pure discovery standpoint, um the the pattern um effectively this the script that the genome is writing >> Mhm.

[00:11:15]>> for, let's say, a cancer cell >> Right.

[00:11:18]>> um is in a uh tells you a lot about um what that cancer cell cares about and what it's doing and stuff like that. And it also um uh is very different even among cancers that look the same under a microscope, the the um gene expression patterns can vary a lot. And this is a a problem at at the time that, you know, at the time when we were starting this, like a breast cancer is a breast cancer, you know? And and but some of them take a very dire course, some of them have uh uh you know, much uh they're relatively easy to cure, some of them respond to one thing, some of them respond to another, but you don't know just by looking under your a microscope at the cells. But when you look in inside at at what the the the script the genome is writing for those cells is, you can see they're very very different. And those differences turn out to be quite predictive of how they behave and so forth. So anyway, it was just a very it was a useful kind of way to leverage a a resource, which is genome sequences, to to to build a tool that that that could let you learn sort of the language of the genome basically.

[00:12:30]>> Yeah. People are using, you know, your your invention, this technology, these microarrays for a wide variety of things. What are the ones that are like the most exciting or maybe even surprising to you where like I wouldn't have even thought to do that, how cool it is this person did that.

[00:12:45]>> Okay. Well, there's the thing is that the thing is there's there's so much information in the behavior of the genome. Um and and this sort of gives you a really a handle on it for all sorts of things. So, for example, you can look at, okay, a lot of a lot of how how the genome orchestrates things has to do with things that interact with the genome, okay? Proteins interacting with specific parts of the genome at specific times, specific ways, or RNA molecules interacting with it, or even different parts of the genome interacting with one another and so forth. And and you can use it for that. Another thing you can do is you could actually use it to to kind of look at the the three-dimensional structure of the genome by looking at which pieces tend to have together. Another one that kind of a weird thing that my lab did because it was partly because I was a pediatrician but also a parent. Kind of thing you wonder about. A newborn baby is born with a completely sterile genome, okay?

[00:13:45]And it's kind of like Mount You could say Mount Saint Helens. It's just barren, no life. And then and then over time a whole ecosystem develops. And it's very very analogous thing happens with how the ecosystem develops in the human gut.

[00:13:59]And it turns out it's there's a lot of There's a lot of patterns to it.

[00:14:06]Anyway, so one I I did a project way back back in the day but a student of mine was was leading this project and basically she got all her friends who were pregnant to agree to participate in the project. And they gave them little freezer to put in their dorm room or whatever. And uh And every time their baby pooped, they'd put the diaper in the in the freezer.

[00:14:36]And so we collected samples from the mom, you know, stool samples, vaginal flora, stuff like that before they had a baby and then at birth and then every day for a few weeks and then every week for a year and and just mapped out what the process looked like. And it was so interesting because there were it was a lot like how an ecosystem is born. Initially it's just like whatever seeds land there, you know, get their chance. And and over time you know the the things that really thrive there are But also there was inter-individual variation. So you could recognize from just the pattern of bacteria that live in a baby's gut how it looked at year one, you'd know that same baby a year later cuz they it they had their own distinctive pattern.

[00:15:27]Anyway, >> That's really interesting. I didn't actually know. So So the the patterns of bacteria in my gut might be different from my brother and sister even though we all grew up in the same house and together.

[00:15:39]>> And it and it it's it's not only extremely interesting and still barely, you know, really in the early days of exploring that, but it it has very important effect on physiology because after all, these to you know, to these bacteria, their their goal is to try to control you to make you the best possible environment for them. And they have and they they have lots of chemical tools and so forth to do that. And so it has quite significant effects on your physiology and so forth. Anyway, it was interesting. And basically it was easy to do because we just we just got little DNA sequences that correspond to the the different species, thousands of different species.

[00:16:21]And by just pulling out the DNA and looking at what's there, you get a quantitative picture of what what was living in that gut as well. Anyway, there's a whole bunch of it was just kind of a very general sort of tool that you could just use your imagination how to use it.

[00:16:35]>> You were also involved in developing this kind of new trend of plant-based foods. So in Impossible Meats and I would love to know a little bit more about the science of that. And what like I've had the burgers. I'd had veggie burgers in the past. I was not enthusiastic about them. Really enjoyed the Impossible Burger. Like what was the difference? Like what did you discover to to apply all these discoveries you did that are cool in medicine, but how did you do it for something people do every day, which is eat food?

[00:17:03]>> Well, it was a completely different set of problems, okay? And and what what happened was So I had the best job in the world, okay? As you can imagine, I I'm I'm at Stanford, a great environment, great students, great colleagues. I had Howard Hughes Medical Institute was funding me and literally my mandate was discover and invent things. Follow your curiosity wherever it takes you and so forth. I was not looking for anything new. I had no interest in the No no disrespect to the business world. I had no interest in the business world and I had not much interest in food. But I was thinking about the kind of dire states dire state the dire trajectory of the global environment. Not just global heating, which was obviously a big concern, but even more critically and much less well recognized uh um the the ecosystems that made this planet hospitable to human, you know, the bios- biosphere.

[00:18:05]This is it's what we kind of disparagingly call nature >> Right.

[00:18:09]>> and take for granted just like for decoration. But actually that's what's responsible for having made a planet that we could survive on.

[00:18:16]And um and it was being destroyed at a rapid rate.

[00:18:22]Um and in fact, you know, there've been studies that have shown that that biodiversity the average populations of a very representative sample of of vertebrate species are less than a third what they were 50 years ago. There is absolutely a crash and it represents ecosystem collapse. Okay.

[00:18:41]So these were I felt like, okay, these are unsolved problems.

[00:18:46]And I should start thinking about it. Is there anything I can do to contribute to them? And I realized that um uh you know, the use of animals as a food technology is to first approximation the cause of the biodiversity collapse because of its huge land footprint. 80% of the land footprint of humanity. It's 45% of our surface is being used to raise animals for food where where that system has replaced the native ecosystem and you know, the the total mass of cows on earth is 15 times greater than the total mass of every terrestrial mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian. It's just it's it's absolutely nuts and it's it's people don't pay attention to because we just take for Oh, you know, the planet is hospitable to human life and there it is and it's nice that we have giraffes and forests and stuff like that, but you know, whatever. Anyway, that was actually a concern. So, I thought, okay, what And and for climate change it turns out that well, animal agriculture is second only to the fossil fuel industry and in terms of its potential to solve the problem, it actually is it is for reasons I probably don't have time to get into, but it's basically the best and fastest way for us to unlock negative emissions in a fast enough to put the brakes on global heating and and change the trajectory.

[00:20:08]And nobody was working on it. I just thought like, okay, everybody's working on renewable energy and this is an even more important problem in terms in future of the world and the only way we're going to solve it, we're not going to solve it by trying to tell people what to eat. Never worked, never will.

[00:20:25]Um governments can't tell people what to eat, they'll be out the next day.

[00:20:28]>> Right.

[00:20:29]>> Um uh but if you realize that the problem isn't that that people love these foods and billions of people love these foods and they're never going to stop wanting to eat them, but they were making them a ridiculous way using this prehistoric technology that is fundamentally unimproved in millennia, which is, you know, using animals to turn plants into meat, fish and dairy foods.

[00:20:51]The The only way you're going to solve the problem is is as long as there's demand, as long as there's an economic incentive for people to keep covering the planet with cows and >> Right.

[00:21:00]>> and start mining the oceans and so forth, you're uh um you know, you're not going to be able to make it go away. And it is by far the most destructive technology on Earth.

[00:21:10]There is a way to make the demand go away, and it kind of plays right into Forbes kind of sweet spot, which is the market. If you can if you can successfully compete against that industry with better technology, you know, think of it the 200 years ago many aspects of the economy, the the core technology was animals.

[00:21:34]Ground-based transportation, the state of the art of mobile communications 200 years ago and even 150 years ago, a backpack full of carrier pigeons.

[00:21:44]But but we got better at mobile communication technology, we got better at ground transportation. It was a technology problem, and the cow is just this prehistoric incredibly inefficient and destructive technology for making beef. And when you think about it as sort of a biochemist or sort of a biologist, this is meat is much simpler than muscle. Okay? It's a very very dumbed-down version of it. And I thought, okay, this is understandable.

[00:22:16]We can figure out how to make something that from a sensory standpoint, nutritional standpoint, etc. etc. delivers what consumers want. And since we control the knobs, we can, you know, turn it to 11, so to speak. We can optimize in a way that, you know, the incumbent technology can't.

[00:22:35]And if we can do that and compete in the marketplace, we should be able to eliminate the economic incentive for this industry. So at that point, like I said, I was not interested in really in food.

[00:22:48]I'm not a foodie at all. I was not interested in in the business world, but I felt like this is the vehicle for solving the problem. And so I basically quit my dream job and and threw myself into it.

[00:23:04]And the way that we approached the problem, once I found the company, I raised money, you know, from you know, if you live in if you're on Stanford campus, you're literally a 10-minute bike ride away from half the venture capital on the planet. Okay.

[00:23:19]>> Sure.

[00:23:20]>> So, you cannot walk down the street in Palo Alto without tripping over a venture capitalist. So, it was easy to find you know, investors who were willing to bet on sort of the the the notion. The way I pitched this was like, we got to do this. This is so important for the world. And here's a bunch of ideas of how I might do it. And then kind of like at the very end I said, "Oh, by the way, this is a $3 billion global market that's just waiting to be taken down." Which was the only slide I needed, but uh >> Yeah, this is what we call burying the lead.

[00:23:51]>> Burying the lead. But But for me, it wasn't the lead, but I realized, you know, and then as subsequently when I was raising money, that slide moved closer to the front of the deck. But anyway, but it was a very, you know, it made a lot of sense as as a investment. And the way I wanted to approach was, this is a technology problem.

[00:24:12]The the The mission of the company, at least internally, was we're going to build a technology platform to replace animals in the food system by 2035.

[00:24:22]>> Right.

[00:24:22]>> That was the goal. It still is the goal, but I think we're a little behind schedule. But um >> think that key step, I think what I'm personally curious to know is, how how did you get it to taste right? Cuz when I have an Impossible burger, literally the first time I got it, I thought the chef had sent me the wrong burger.

[00:24:39]>> I love that.

[00:24:40]>> Yeah.

[00:24:40]>> No, that happens all the time and and it's funny, actually, one thing that I found out about chef culture is the first time that they tried, their next move is to try to prank their fellow chefs. Um but but anyway, the way we approached it was we we want to understand in molecular terms how it produces the sensory features that that that you care about, okay?

[00:25:04]Nutrition is easy, but but the the sensory aspects were were the the hard part. And um and there are many of them, but but the first one we focused on was, okay, meat as a flavor system is cat- categorically different from the plant world. Um if you, you know, if you cook broccoli, it gets warm and mushy. If you cook a a a steak, it it very quickly produces this explosion of flavor and aroma, and it transforms texturally and flavor-wise, you know, in dramatic ways. And so, that how do you how do you how do you produce something that does that? Because if you don't do that, forget about it, you're not going to win. And and that's part of the if the probably the single most distinctive magical thing about meat as a food is that kind of magical chemical transformation and so forth.

[00:26:01]Well, um you know, being a biochemist, I I I felt like, okay, this that kind of behavior says there's a catalyst, okay? That that that something is something is causing chemical reactions to happen in a very fast pace.

[00:26:15]And what what would be the candidate in meat? If you look at every living sys- every living cell on Earth has a molecule in it called heme. Every It's required for life. It's part of It's essential lots of basic biological processes. Heme is familiar to most people as it who who who've ever heard of it as the iron-containing molecule that makes your blood red, that carries oxygen in your blood.

[00:26:44]Um it turns out that um if you're a biochemist, you know that it's one of the best catalysts in nature. It It It's the the enzymes in your liver that metabolize caffeine use heme as the critical catalytic component. The enzymes in your liver a lot of the enzymes in your liver they're involved in synthesizing steroid hormones, testosterone, cortisol, estrogen, stuff like that, use heme as a catalytic element. So, the the animal tissues that that, you know, we call meat have a huge amount of one of the best catalysts in nature. So, um so very early on we suspected that and we started as we were trying to deconstruct the you know, we're doing all kinds of chemical analyses of the aromas and flavors and stuff like that, but we but but we had this hypothesis that that the magic ingredient was going to be heme. It turns out it is. In fact, here's how you can understand the role it plays. You could take vegetable broth, okay, which is basically just juice from plant cells.

[00:27:45]Or or basically any kind of a broth that's sort of juice from from cells.

[00:27:51]And it it's kind of mildly savory and and, you know, it's got a flavor, but there's nothing magical about it. And you just throw in heme as a catalyst when you heat it and instead of being this mildly aromatic thing, you get explosion of aroma and it tastes like meat, okay? So, in a sense we were lucky that that, you know, a big part of the answer to why meat tastes like meat flavor-wise not like anything else is that it's got this molecule heme. All the other kind of chemical ingredients to first approximation are just incredibly abundant normal biomolecules, amino acids, sugars, fats, nucleotides, vitamins, stuff like that that every cell has. Um so, it's kind of like you do this one little trick and you get uh you're 90% of the way there.

[00:28:40]But then there are a lot of other things that are that are important. The texture is important, you You and very and the texture is not a simple thing. It's not just is it squishy or is it hard? It's It's the very specific ways in which it's squishy and whether it's strong in this direction, anisotropic, or and and tough in this direction, and all that kind of stuff is also stuff you need to figure out if you're going to really deliver what consumers love. But But the thing to realize is that all of these are are are very solvable scientific problems. In fact, like the the the trick for a lot of hard problems it's been true for a lot of problems I've worked at is you take something that's like a big unsolved problem and it turns out it you can break it down.

[00:29:28]>> Mhm.

[00:29:28]>> And if you just look at the big problem it's just like, "How are we going to get rid of animal agriculture?" It's just like, "Oh, I mean, no, you know."

[00:29:35]But if you break it down into individual components, there are a bunch of solvable components that you can just solve. And And And that was sort of the the the approach to you know, making meat from plant ingredients is that well, there are all these pieces you have to solve, but each one of them you can you can study and understand what's involved and then start start to put together the pieces to solve it.

[00:30:00]But that was the gist of it is And we're still a long way from having achieved the goal and having solved the problem.

[00:30:06]There's you know, there's tons of more to do, but the thing that we've done successfully is we've proven objectively, there's scientific papers about this, that it's possible to make meat entirely from plant ingredients, which have vastly lower environmental footprint, better nutritional profile, that a hardcore meat eater can't distinguish from the animal product and in a blind taste test prefers over the animal product. We have beef, chicken, and pork products that in blind taste test meat hardcore meat consumers prefer to the corresponding animal product.

[00:30:40]And unlike the cow, we can keep making them better.

[00:30:45]>> Right.

[00:30:45]>> And um so I I although we're not where we wanted to be at this point, I feel like the end game is clear and inevitable.

[00:30:56]And that it's the technology of the future for making meat and fish and dairy foods and stuff like that uh is not going to use animals as the core technology and and we'll be vastly better off for that.

[00:31:10]>> I will I will I am looking forward to having guilt-free steak. I can assure you that. So, uh we're almost out of time. I'd love to get one final thought from you as we you know, we kind of kicked off with this idea of what the American dream of innovation means to you. And what I'm curious about is we're celebrating 250 years of America. Uh love to get as a final thought, what do we need to do to preserve that American spirit of innovation and have fun and explore, as you said, for the next 250 years?

[00:31:38]>> I think you need to have um obviously a high degree of freedom to express yourself, to discover things uh um to explore um to try and fail and um I think that, you know, the societies that that don't have that tend to be much less innovative. In fact, I just as just a random rabbit hole I'll go down. I was I was in in a not to be mentioned uh Asian country and meeting with a person who was a head of education just happened to be on on a trip there. And he was saying, "You know, we have like some of the the our students score higher than practically anyone on pretty much every standardized test, but we have very low performance in terms of innovation. Um how do you teach creativity in America?"

[00:32:28]And my answer was which was completely spontaneous, but I feel like it was true is that, "Oh yeah, we have a class for that and it's called recess.

[00:32:37]And um and I do think that part of it is also just recognizing the importance of that kind of just uh unstructured uh you know, where where there's no like control of what you're doing, there's no um just short-term pre-programmed set of steps and so forth. But you're just you know, uh and having fun is basically just exploring, trying new things hard things. I think that uh yeah, well, part of what you need is to have is to keep that spirit of fun. And I feel like if if people are are feeling oppressed, if people are feeling overcontrolled or or um disempowered or something like that, that >> [music] >> that takes some of that away. But anyway, I'm not I'm not I'm I'm done.

[00:33:29]I'm not I'm not a philosopher, but I feel like freedom, [music] fun >> Great. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. We really do appreciate your time, and uh appreciated your insight. Thank you so much.

[00:33:48]>> [music]