David Hewlett on Making Learning Fun and Data Standardization

July 8, 2025

David Hewlett, founder of Tech Bandits, makes learning fun and creates an environment where children—the future generation of scientists—can feel comfortable with curiosity. With host Ari Berman, Hewlett delves into his acting career, which consists of a wide range of scientist roles, and the origins of Tech Bandits. He also shares his thoughts on how science needs to be communicated better (and why scientists need to know how to present their work to the world), what technology can help with regarding the future of life sciences and healthcare, and standardizing data.

David Hewlett, Founder, Tech Bandits 
Since the age of four, hiding behind the sofa watching Doctor Who battle the Daleks, David Hewlett dreamed of becoming a Time Lord. While he’s yet to master time travel, he did find a place for himself, bringing scientists (and the occasional genius) to life on screen.

David is best known for his iconic role as Dr. Rodney McKay in Stargate Atlantis. His numerous film and television credits include Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water; Nightmare Alley; and Cabinet of Curiosities: Graveyard Rats, directed by his longtime friend and collaborator Vincenzo Natali (with whom he also worked on cult classics CUBE and Splice). David’s other notable appearances include Roland Emmerich’s Midway; Caesar: Rise of the Planet of the Apes; and recurring roles on TV series such as MGM’s Clarice; Peacock’s Departure; Apple’s SEE (with his Stargate co-star, Jason Momoa); and currently he’s Famous Ray on Hallmark’s hit series, Mistletoe Murders.

A passionate, lifelong learner, David founded TechBandits.org to inspire the next generation of brilliant minds. He is the creator and community partner for the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Bioscience Escape Puzzle learning project. He writes the science and tech inspiring Email Of Awesome Awesomeness; hosts the podcast “I’m With (Stargate) Genius”, featuring guests from the worlds of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM); and co-hosts the lively and irreverent accessibility and disability rights podcast “Damn Dirty Abes” with activist and educator, Lance Carr.

As a YouTube Certified content creator, David engages a diverse audience of parents, educators, students, gamers, and science and sci-fi fans. He actively shares insights and sparks conversations on life-long learning, accessibility, science, technology, engineering, arts, and education on social media and at conferences and conventions around his favorite planet, Earth.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everybody. Welcome to the Trends from the Trenches podcast co-produced by BioTeam and BioIT World. I'm your host, Ari Berman, CEO of BioTeam. I'm so excited to have David Hewlett on the show today to help me kick off the new series of Trends from the Trenches, after I took it over from Stan Gloss last month.

David's a well-known actor, tech nerd, lifelong learning advocate and guy who expertly plays a genius on TV. He's acted in many TV shows and movies, including A Dog's Breakfast, rise of the Planet of the Apes, the Shape of Water Sea, guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, and is probably best known for his role as Dr Rodney McKay on Stargate SG-1, stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. Inspired by his childhood fear and fascination with Doctor who, he wanted to become a genius. Time lord. Reality led him to acting.

David created TechBandits. org, a curiosity-driven science, technology, engineering, arts and math club for kids of all ages that promotes lifelong learning via YouTube and Twitch, as well as in-person events at local schools and community centers. His enthusiasm for assistive technology led him to partner with gamer and influencer Lance Carr and Google on Game Face, an AI-powered head-tracking mouse released at Google IO 2023. David also worked with the University of Toronto on his educational escape room design learning initiative. Beyond his creative endeavors, David actively speaks at conferences and podcasts worldwide. His goal is to inspire the next generation of brilliant minds to be brave, be kind and be curious. Today, david and I will talk about his journey through learning in Hollywood, how science and technology have influenced his life and career choices, and geek out a little on health and life sciences-related technology topics. It is my great pleasure to welcome my very good friend, david, to the podcast.

Hey David. Wow, that was a fantastic lead in there. I feel like I'm never going to live up to that. I think we should just cut it off right there. That's fantastic.

Well, you know, that's how I see it, so it works out.

This is the thing I love about, I mean, I think Stargate in particular is that it allows me not only I get to play geniuses on television, but I get to talk to them now as well, Like I get to talk to people who are at the leading edge of this stuff, and this is a perfect example. It's like we just met on I think it was Twitter at the time On Twitter.

When it was Twitter.

Yeah, twitter when it was Twitter, and we've just been friends ever since because we're both giant nerds.

Giant nerds and we geek out for hours and lose time and it's great. Yeah, exactly, that's really fun. Well, I know I just sort of introduced all the things, but let's start out about talking how you ended up in so many scientist roles, both very well intentions and some shockingly evil ones, like in C Dude. I didn't know you could be that evil. That was awesome.

That was some pretty evil stuff, wasn't it? Yeah, that was awesome. That was some pretty evil stuff, wasn't it? Yeah, that was evil. The makeup helps, I think. The makeup, you know, the fact that you've got, you know, like two and a half hours of people putting things on your face to make you look that evil, is also pretty great. It's funny, isn't it? The scientist thing was, I think I've always like you so beautifully put.

I mean, Doctor who was my inspiration and I thanks to the way that it's done up. It was done up here in Canada. They, in order to have Dr who on the PBS channel that we had up here, which was kind of a, which is our TVO, TV Ontario. They had to A make up for a chunk of time at the end of it because of the British, British or real half hours, whereas we have commercials and things, and also they needed an educational mandate.

So they would bring in these scientists and science fiction speakers. There was Dr Dater and the undoctor was this wonderful Judith who was the science fiction writer, and they would talk about the potential. You know, just things to think about that were brought up in the show and I loved that as much, if not as much, yeah, certainly as much as the show, and so the science and the science fiction became sort of bound together for me. So I just always loved those science, the way people could, you know, answer these questions, these massive questions, by just, you know, sitting down and thinking hard about it and you know, bringing in other brains, and yeah, so I think that's where that the love of that comes from. And when you love doing something, when you love doing something, the nice side effect of that is that people like you doing it and hire you to do it more. So, yeah, the science stuff has really been a nice niche, I must say.

Yeah, it really is, and we've talked before about the rather extensive and rapid dialogue you had to learn for Stargate.

Yeah, yeah, for some reason I got a reputation for that. There's a great story I have about RDA. So this is MacGyver. So I'm sitting on a plane beside MacGyver and I'm going in to do our first episode of Atlantis. I mean, I'd done SG-1 before the original show and I'd met him there, but so I sort of knew him. But he looked like he was busy.

I didn't want to talk to him and and so I I bring out this giant script for the double episode pilot and I start going through and I'm highlighting my lines and I'm jotting little notes down and stuff, and he sort of looks over and then he reaches into his bag and pulls out like one little fact sheet and he puts it down and it's his lines and he crosses the first one out, circles the second one, crosses out the second one, the third one turns to me and says you know, if you get them wrong, they stop giving them to you. And like an idiot I didn't take his advice, I got them right. So they kept giving more and more and they got to the point where the writers would joke about the fact that they just kind of wanted to see how much I could say. So I was like oh great, I'm like a little mouse in your Stargate experiments until David's head explodes, you know. But a wonderful show to work on.

And, like I say, I think one of the great pleasures I got was people coming up to me after and saying like, oh, because of your crazy Rodney McKay guy, I'm now doing physics or I'm doing, or I'm in biotech or I'm. I would, of course, go like oh great, tell me about it. And that's sort of how I got onto this whole. I managed to sort of turn it into a learning, a learning adventure, lifelong learning adventure for myself, you know, in the process.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. You know, I told you that. You know your role in Stargate and other things like that sort of inspired me to bring tech and science together more. You know, because I watched that show. I'm like we can do that. I think, yeah, we can do that.

You know they were very smart writers as well. Like the writers were definitely nerds and they knew what was going on and they kept track of that stuff. And you know they definitely I feel like they're almost, they were almost, you know frustrated scientists, I think you know.

Right. I mean, I think one of the things about it was that so a lot of sci-fi has a hard time balancing the human and the technology and all that stuff together. You know, stargate did it brilliantly Like there was just a lot of human, a lot of character development, a lot of interactions and also a lot of non-human and, you know, and a lot of like really believable compelling, both ancient history and far-flung future stuff all thrown in together. You know.

Yeah, it's fun because there was sort of pseudoscience stuff but there was also the real science and yeah, they definitely had a lot of fun and I had just a ton of fun doing it as well. So that's my yeah, they definitely had a lot of fun and I had just a ton of fun doing it as well. So sci-fi is my world. I mean I just love, you know, ever since, say, doctor who, star Wars, all that stuff. That was all I mean. Star Wars is more fantasy. I tend to prefer the Star Trek type of stuff myself because, just because I like them, it's the science that really gets my, you know, gets me excited when they have actual science advisors on the show.

Right, which they then ignore. But that's not, you know. No, actually no, star Trek doesn't. But I know that one of the big issues you get with film and TV is that it's all very good and well that we want it to be real, Like really how much? Okay, it doesn't have to be that real. Let's, you know, like there's a lot of that going on, a bit like the science world, I suppose, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean most scientific hypotheses, you know, start completely as what can I make up today? You know, and can I answer that question that no one's ever thought to ask and you know people think scientists are crazy because it's essentially 99% abject failure.

So Well, that's it, though, isn't it? Yeah, it's that classic. Was it the Ford, or was it Edison who said he had 10,000 failures that brought him to the light bulb, or whatever it was? That was Edison, yeah. Yeah, I think that's just. That's the beauty of it. I mean, I remember seeing the Tech Bandits kids at one point, and when something went right and I was like, ah, damn it, it worked. We didn't learn anything. You know what I mean.

So that's a great segue actually. So you know, tell me a little bit about Tech Bandits. I've always liked, loved that and you know, watched you a bit on it. You know, before we connected up and then after also.

It's a weird kind of like myself a little bit. It's, you know, unfocused and changes weekly. But I but during the pandemic, specifically before the pandemic, I was doing some live stuff with a local school and I would bring old computers in and we'd pull them apart old printers they love pulling apart old printers and then we started putting them together into different things and I just used it as a great excuse to just not teach anyone anything, because I'm not a teacher, I'm teacher, I'm a, I'm more about, I'm almost like more like a science marketing. I like to think of myself in that I, just I. They've got the collective knowledge of the human race available to them. All we have to do is inspire them to look, and so that I felt like that was my job, that I was noticing that the kids come in and they're.

There's a wonderful sort of like when I I would wheel in this, this giant orange cart of technology, whether it was 3D printers, or I brought in some biotech stuff. We had spiders one time that were laser vibrometers I would wheel them in and while I waited to go up because I was coming in at the same time every day this class of kindergarten kids would come out of their pool time and they would just beeline straight to this thing and they'd be like what's that, what does this do and what's this? And I'm like, oh, it's fantastic, it's this and that we talked about all sorts of stuff. And then you go take the stuff up to the class and by grade four they're like what are you trying to teach us? Like what, you know what I mean, Like it's, you know what I mean, Like it's. Like they already think of learning as a bad word and that was really frustrating to me. So one of the things I tried to get across very quickly was I'm not teaching you anything Like this is. You know, literally, this is a computer. Other than stabbing the screen, which is the first thing one of the kids did, you know. I was like take it apart, You're not allowed to cut anything. You have to use this. There's always another screw and they would tricked them into learning something. I could trick them into learning stuff. So.

But then the pandemic hit. We tried it online and we tried like a Zoom thing and it was a disaster. Like it was just because you could hear them playing video games in the background, their screens would disappear and I was like this is awful. So my son said, well, we're not on Zoom, we use Discord. So I started using Discord because that was the gaming platform. I stopped trying to get their attention because I knew that you can't compete with the World Wide Web and every video game known to man, so I just let them play. And so for like an hour or so we would sit around and I would talk about stuff that I found interesting and you'd see it, You'd hear the clicking of video games and then it would stop and they'd go whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, what was that? What's that part, what's that? And then you go ah, dinosaur fan. Okay, great, so that's, and that's sort of how we progressed.

And then, once the pandemic was over, I started trying to keep it. I tried to sort of keep it going. It dwindled with the number of people who were involved and then I suddenly went wait a second, don't want to be online. So again went back to trying to make more real world stuff, which is where the escape puzzle stuff came into play. And that's been amazing. They just a U of T just got a grant to do to study the effects of using using escape puzzle learning as a way of learning, as a learning tool for for biology, for the biology department up there. And you know, and that's because that is all because of a tech bandits we did where I invited a guy who made escape rooms in and we talked about stuff and I suddenly went wait a second, this should be every. The kids loved it. I loved it. I was like why are we? Why isn't this my final exam instead of a piece of paper? So I'm babbling, but there but that's it's.

I mean, that's sort of the way it's worked is, is I've just I'm always a bit like the acting, it's just reacting Right. It's just like what do they? What do they got? What do you know? What do you? Just the ability to be able to, to, to listen to what they're and see what they're doing and then and then and then respond to that, I think, is just it's just been amazing. It's so much fun.

That's really cool. There's a important part in, you know, sparking and maintaining curiosity, because learning can be fun. We've managed to standardize it into being horrible, right, yeah, but learning is.

It's fun, but it's. I think the thing that people seem to forget is that it's uncomfortable. Learning is uncomfortable. It's not, you know, if it's all going, you're not learning anything. If you're just sitting there and it's washing over you, it's when you have to stop and go. Ah, I don't get that. It's the finishing of that learning process. That is the part, that's the learning, and I worry that we're getting rid of that, that we're trying to make it as easy as possible, as easy as possible, and I think we're losing part of the learning in the process.

Well, there's a great book I think I have over here somewhere called the Scientist in the Crib, oh yeah, and it's sort of about how play is science. It's kids teaching themselves about the world. It's why they like to stab a screen. Yeah, what happens? I've never been able to do that. Yeah, no one's, let me do that before I don't have to do that again.

And I never let them do it again.

Yeah right, Exactly Well, because we discovered the glass goes everywhere, it's very hard to find where the glass is, and yeah, so, yeah, exactly, anyway, yeah. So I think we can go a lot further. I think people who choose to go into science-related fields are people who enjoy self-learning, because, while there is a lot of school learning, especially in life sciences, laboratory science and other applied sciences, getting a PhD is about doing stuff. You sit down and you have to learn how to do a whole thing that no one's ever done before, and then you have to write it down and someone else can do it.

Right, exactly, yeah, and then, and the whole point of people trying to disprove other people's stuff or prove it or, you know, recreate it is, is a, it's just a. The whole scientific process is wonderful that way. The issue you have with biology I've discovered, and the reason why we focused on that with the escape puzzle stuff, the reason why I wanted to focus on that was because biology requires a huge amount of background. You need to know so many words and so many concepts before you can get into the actual creating of this stuff, and so I thought how do we make that more fun? If do we? You know, if you're trying to solve puzzles, it's very similar to looking things up and trying to figure out how they work. You know, is there a way that that stuff could be sort of facilitated through this process instead of just sitting down and looking at a book?

Because one of my biggest frustrations with biology was, you know, when I was in school. You know, you've got a terrible photocopy of a cell that you're supposed to label the parts on and you can barely make out what they are, and it's just a, it's just an illustration. I was very frustrated to see my son doing the same thing in his biology class, you know, a thousand years later. So you know, I was like what do we got out there? We've got 4k video of this stuff happening. Why are we, why are we pointing at at static drawn images in a textbook? It seems crazy to me Because it's affordable.

Yeah, yeah, and it's always worked. Why not keep doing it? Yeah, exactly yeah.

Well, and the other problem with education that we find is that is that you know a lot of it becomes focused by what, what your kid, where your kid is at in the process. So you've got problems in grade four. You do your best to sort out grade four, but then you're on to grade five so nothing gets fixed, it's just get through that. It's very rare that people go back and look at the problems that their kids have had. They're constantly looking ahead.

Yeah, standards-based learning is like that. Right, it's about checking boxes and getting funding versus actually fixing memories in the brain and science is messy.

Science doesn't click, but it's about little boxes.

I mean, you know it's. It's one of the things I love about it is that it, it, it demands, uh, you know it, it. We're trying to put order to the, to the wonderful chaos that's. That's that, that is the planet around the world, around us, and and I, I that we, you know. This is why I find what you do so fascinating, because you are trying to quantify some of this stuff. You are trying to take these massive amounts of data and that scientists can produce. But you know, we've got scientists sitting there watching things happen and documenting things and I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa. There's like AI that can you know. There's machine learning models and such that we can use that can help process all this amount of data and we can speed things up. And yeah, I mean I just I love the idea of like speeding up science. I think is a wonderful, it's just a wonderful mission to have.

Yeah, it keeps us going for sure. I mean, you know, not to bring up a potential bad word here, but you know, COVID, the world watched science unfold in real time and a lot, and the understanding of science was obviously not well penetrated into the world, because you know, there was all this. Well, make up your mind, what is it?

Right, right, because they'd say, unfortunately, definitively oh, it's this, this. And then, a week later, it's this. And they're like well, which is it? It was like well, we learned something, it's this, but that's not how they communicated it. So everyone's like they can't make up their mind, they don't know what they're doing and it's you know, but that was, that was science unfolding in real time, and why science, communication is so important.

I mean, is that? You know what I mean? I think that's the the biggest thing. I think scientists tend to live in their. They get their little bubbles, like we all do, you know, and there's a tendency whenever I talk to scientists, the first thing they always say is like oh, what I do is boring. I'm like, no, no, what I do is boring. I sit around on set waiting with a cup of coffee, waiting to say my lines that I already. It's, in a way, that's almost as important as the science itself.

I think it might be more important in some ways. Right that science is really important, but and you and I have talked about this a lot right that being able to effectively communicate science to a broad audience reduces the amount of ignorance, and so much of science communication is just done wrong by not scientists. And I think you, through our random chats, I think we identified that you actually enjoy science communication. I love it.

Absolutely love it.

Actors, essentially, are communicators, right, expert communicators and so you and I talked about that, and that led to you doing a keynote at BioIT World. Yeah, yeah.

How wild is that? I had a few friends' eyebrows raised on that one. I was like because the funny thing which I haven't mentioned is I'm a high school dropout. I hated school in every possible way. I absolutely hated it. I would read the books and then not do the essays, but I've always loved learning.

So it's just kind of a certain irony of being at a bio IT conference talking, but I think you know, having spoken to you, I mean a huge part of obviously is talking to you and seeing how you work and what your company was doing and stuff, how what your company was doing and stuff and and seeing the the sort of the pain points that you have, which is which is about, I think you see, a lot of regulation issue stuff.

You see a lot of people pushing back on something.

The first question I had on the radio show that we did an interview for radio show while bio IT was going on and they're like, okay, so you know, are we, are, you know should, should we be concerned that you're going to grow something horrible in the lab type thing?

As always, we go straight to Hollywood and these ridiculous stories of it, whereas if you can take control of the story and I think the story tends to be with scientists, tends to be about the technology, and I think what they're missing is that we need to know the people who are making this stuff, because you trust a company because of their actions and what they do, if you don't know the story behind them, if you don't know the genesis of this. You had an uncle who had cancer so I was very interested in cancer research. I think understanding the people and the story behind these inventions you know will turn CRISPR into the potential you know, world-changing technology that it is, as opposed to this ridiculous backlash from people who don't understand what's going on, and I think Hollywood's got a huge responsibility with that. We tend to go for the good story. The good story is not a lab experiment gone well.

Although you all did that quite a lot on Stargate, which I think was one of the cool things, is that occasionally things went wrong and I know you love people bringing this up like you know, destroying a solar system Partial, Partial Right, exactly, Not the whole thing. That was something gone horribly wrong and I know you love people bringing this up, like you know, destroying a solar system, but partial, partial, partial right. Exactly, that was something gone horribly wrong, but you know. But often it was about things going right, right.

And it's also. It's it's what is the human response to this stuff too. I think that's what I loved about about Stargate was it was like it was like it's the here and now, at the time, now, 20 years ago. But, and you know what, with our own current understanding of the world and science, do we bring to this and we make mistakes. And I think that you know, one of the beautiful parts of science fiction is the speculative aspect of it.

There's a wonderful YouTuber called Isaac Arthur who does this wonderful spec. He's a physicist by training, I guess, guess, but he's gone off and started just doing speculative science fiction. Basically, it's not, it's not about people, it's all about the technologies and like how do we build these ships, how do we maintain ourselves on these, in these, in these, um, on longer joy voyages and such? So it's that speculative side of the stuff that is really fascinating to me. And also, again and we're part of it like I think we keep sort of separating ourselves from the technology and the stuff that is really fascinating to me and also, again, we're part of it Like I think we keep sort of separating ourselves from the technology and the stuff that we're building. We are a part of this. You know, when we go to another planet, we're a part of the planet. It's not, you know, humankind going to another planet. It's a green tendril from Earth reaching out. You know, we can't separate ourselves from the, from the environment and the and the planet we live on.

So yeah, for sure, and I think one of the things that overwhelms people is the breadth of information that's out there.

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Yeah, we've talked before. You know these lovely devices. You now have the entire world's knowledge in the palm of your hand and a lot of not knowledge in the palm of your hand, yeah, and so it's hard to sort through. You know, and you know. That's where science communication comes in. It's too complex for most people to follow.

It's difficult because, unfortunately, to make stuff up and put out garbage takes no thought and can be done at an incredible pace, as we can see by many of the sort of country or state-based misinformation things. But the real stuff takes time and I think, unfortunately, the way social media has gone, it's reduced a lot of our attention spans and I think we want quantum mechanics explained in a 30-second video. It's just not going to happen, nope. But the hope is that you can at least get someone excited enough about it with that 30 seconds that they will dig deeper, but unfortunately, a lot of people. It's funny.

I stopped getting a lot of science stories from social media and I started just going to newsletters because I felt that I was just. I felt like I was. I'm already a little scattered, so picking things up, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that, and not knowing anything, whereas if I could just find I could get a newsletter interesting story, I could dig in and I could cover that with my email of awesome, awesomeness every week. Just cover a few topics that I think are interesting. Whether they're particularly current or not, it almost doesn't matter. Yeah, and those are really good. I mean they're they're approachable.

It brings up Certainly approachable, I don't know. I mean you know, like I read the one this week and you know, you know you brought up this, you know neurosensor sheet, which was really interesting. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean this, this stuff is, is. This is what I love. I love the bleeding edge of technology. I love, you know, I love this stuff. But just basically, they've come up with a system that can grow with an organism.

So, while you know, while the brain of an axolotl is, is, is of a custard consistency, they can, they can layer in these, these, these, this sort of this intelligent not an intelligent mesh, but a mesh that allows them to interact with this brain matter that then folds with it and becomes the brain and they can track this whole process. It's like going from a static image of every here's it at one week, at two weeks, at three weeks. Now you're basically watching a 4K video of this thing forming, which, of course, is going to inform us about how brains develop and stuff. And this wonderful.

I've always been fascinated, I think probably since Neuromancer, the wonderful William Gibson book, this idea of the brain-computer interface, stuff. I'm just I'm fascinated by that because I feel like if we can hack All of these things, these headphones and screens and glasses and everything, all it is is an awkward way of trying to sort of trick our brain. I can't wait to get into that brain and go like okay, you want to see a movie, let's show you the dream I had last night.

You know, like hacking, the actual wetware is very interesting to me.

And that's going to take some time. I mean, there's a whole area of neuroscience for brain-machine interfaces that they've been working on for a long time. Two of the big areas that they've made the most progress are blind people being able to see transistor-based CCD materials that are connected directly into the occipital lobe and can do that occipital lobe and can do that. And then the other one is for paraplegics, where they're using technology to sort of bridge lack of sensory input and being able to control your muscles straight into your spinal cord.

Yeah, it's amazing stuff, it's the assistive stuff is something I'm fascinated to buy as well. I think it's part of the brain-computer interface stuff that I love so much. So I have a weird sort of it's a fascination with accessibility. It's one of the reasons why I ended up um, so partnering up with with lance carr, because lance uh, lance has a form of muscular dystrophy and we should you know, you should have him on one day because he absolutely yeah, that'd be great talking about his, about the accessibility stuff. But he was interested in in what sort of like home diy stuff he could be playing with and I and I and so we, we sort of bonded on that and then discovered we're like the same age, with the same interest in science fiction and stuff although he's a little too star wars for me and and we started doing a podcast about, about really disability rights and accessibility, um, and accessible tech as well. I I'm more the tech, he's more the rights, but honestly, right now there's just so much going on to talk about from that aspect.

Yeah, that's awesome. All right, In our last few minutes I want to say ask you, you know, what would you like to see in the future in life sciences and healthcare? Like, what do you think technology can really help with?

Well, you got me dreaming way back when one of the first conversations we had, when you talked about trying to standardize the data that's coming out, and when I go and visit these university profs and go to the labs and talk to these various different companies doing all these wonderful experiences I've been having talking to people for this time with Genius, the chat chats that I do do was that it's a mess. No one's doing things the same way. How do we, how do we organize all this stuff? So I just and I don't know what it is I'm a, you know like, I love, I love collecting, you know, collector cards and stuff like that. The organizing is part. So the idea that we could somehow start pulling down these separate pillars of knowledge that we have about these different special areas of expertise and then sort of have that open up to other, where you suddenly go wait a second, oh, you've got that, we've got this that just blew my mind because I thought so. I think one of the biggest things for me is how do we process this massive amount of data and not just in one little area, because once we've sucked up that and figured out how to work with that and allowing it to talk to other databases just seems absolutely extraordinary to me. Yeah, that's certainly one of the areas that I'm most excited about.

And then, you know, as we talked about with the recent email of awesome awesomeness, there's this lab, a company called Cortical Labs, that's now put out this they call it the CL1. And it's something like 800,000 human neurons on a chip, 800,000 human neurons on a chip and we can, and we can use it to to read and write and and and figure out how our, how our brains work. I am, you know, that that stuff is just, it's just extraordinary. But, again, you can't do any of that unless you've got the data. And so it all.

To me, it just, it's always, it just comes down to data for me. I took a Google analytics course because I you know this high school dropout took a Google analytics course for fun, because I realized data is that's data's king, like that's what we got to figure out what to do with this stuff, you know, and a good reason to protect it as well. We want to make sure that stuff stays around, because even data I talk to scientists now who are working in areas that are going back and going like whoa, there's all this data we've got from before, the computer stuff. Could we use that as? Oh, we can, you know. So it's new technology allowing us to process old data. You know you sort of think about it like, oh, that's out of date, but no, it's fantastic for looking back at stuff.

Yeah, especially for big longitudinal studies that can last for hundreds of years, where the data before 30 years ago are encoded into scanned pdfs from papers that were published in. How do you get all that? That's one thing that ai can help with. Fine, um, it's either that or a whole lot of graduate students you know um typing things into databases well, that's it, that was the.

That was the wonderful like. Look, while I was taking the google analytics course, it changed. Like I was using, I was using perplexity and and going back and forth with some of the stuff to to, you know, as a, as a sort of a search engine for how to write the right commands for python or whatever, to do the, the homework, and then suddenly up popped another module called ai and ai and, and, and, uh, and and, analytics, and, and basically started telling me all the things that I was doing was what we're going to be doing. And I was like, well, wow, this is like. I'm literally we're right on that ride, in that wave right now. You know it's the. The tools that are available, I think, are just extraordinary, and I worry very much about, about again, the story behind this stuff, because if we we keep thinking of, of, as you put in your talks, if we think, terminator and Skynet, how are we going to convince anyone to use these tools?

You know, like, yeah, and you know, ai made a big break onto the public stage, into the public consciousness, with OpenAI's ChatGPT coming out and everyone was like, oh, that's AI, it's like, eh, kind of it's part of it, it's a cool tool. There's a lot of cool tools.

We've been using it for years. I mean, google's been using it in the background for stuff autocorrect, for God's sake.

Autocorrect is AI. Voice recognition is AI. You talk to Siri. Talk to Siri, or you know Google or whatever. That's all AI.

Noise cancellation, I mean all that stuff.

Which, by the way, was just a simple regression algorithm before, and now it can adapt, and the adaptive part is the AI Right.

Of course.

And you know, some people say, machine learning basically is just linear, nonlinear regression.

You know, it's just really a complicated version of it. But yeah, it's, it's fascinating. And the data thing, you're right, I mean that's that's a big tear that we've been on forever, and you know, because there's power in that data if you can pull it together and with so many different formats and people. You know the description of the data, the metadata, is not being, you know, consistent. You just can't do it and you know. I think I've described this before. But data is king, as you said, but as data it's just data. To gather knowledge from it, you have to interpret it Right. Data doesn't turn into knowledge without interpretation and if it's all super siloed, we lose power in that.

It just gathers dust rather than gathering data.

Yeah, that's right. It gathers cosmic rays and loses bits and degrades over time. Well, this is the.

I mean, every so often I have these little panics about the fact that, you know, everything we do is digital, like what happened. I mean, you know, is there going to be at some point? Are we going to be a civilization that, if we lose that, there's no trace of like, there's no art, there's no music, there's no, you know, there's no science, because it's all digital. But, that said, the advantage of the digital side of stuff is just. I mean, I feel so lucky because I've grown up as one has viewed to some extent and watched the world go from a very analog world to a very computerized world and then a network world, and now, with the next, I really feel like AI. I don't want to be too sort of Pollyanna, but I understand there are issues, but I think that a lot of these issues can be combated by just people understanding it better.

You know, I love my mom. My mom is like I don't know she'll kill me for saying this, but she's like 80 or something, but she, I think this is where I got my lifelong learning stuff. She went back to school when she was 30 to do history. Well, the other week she goes oh, I can't come to coffee. I'm doing an AI course and she's listening to the University of Toronto. The guy who literally just won a Nobel Prize has a talk and she's there. She goes. Oh, I don't understand it, but I you know, but I you know, but the fact that she's still trying to understand this stuff is, I think, just I don't understand why everyone isn't always. I don't feel like there's enough hours in the day, there's too much to learn.

Lead with curiosity, not judgment.

That's it, yeah.

Right.

You know the way I'm good at judgment too. I got to say that's the act.

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's that petty nature to humans, of course. Yeah, I embraced it, just do it. Uh, david man, this has been great. I always love talking to you. I'm sure we could go on for hours, as we usually do, but uh, thank you so much for doing this.

I, I, I, I really appreciate you being the kickoff of a new series here I am so, so flattered and I am so excited to to see what you do with this, because I, I, you, you're up to and, like myself, I love how many things you can get into doing. It's amazing that one company can be involved in so many different aspects of this stuff, and I can't wait. I really really enjoy it. I've enjoyed what Stan was doing before, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens now.

Awesome. Well, david, as always. Thank you so much. I'm sure we'll catch up sometime soon. A pleasure indeed. We shall indeed Take care I won't hold you up from your filming any longer before they knock your door down.

I've got to be whisked away now.

Awesome. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Thanks everyone.

Host Bio

Ari Berman

Ari received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology with a focus on Neuroscience in 2005 from the University of Texas at Austin (UT). His graduate work focused on studying the effects of genetics on addictive behaviors such as alcoholism. His postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging focused on improving our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases of aging (specifically, Parkinson’s and Alzheimers Disease) by utilizing a combination of laboratory science and animal models, as well as bioinformatics and computational biology. Ari is also an expert in Scientific Computing specializing in high performance computing (HPC), high-performance networks, data centers, storage, cloud, general IT infrastructure, and bioinformatics and data analytics. He has been designing, building, and operating scientific computing environments for 26 years and strives to advocate for science and empower researchers to make discoveries from their complex datasets. His ultimate goal is to help create a dynamic enough abstraction of flexible infrastructure from research end-users to enable anyone to analyze and gain knowledge from very complex datasets. 

A life science IT consulting firm at the intersection of science, data, and technology, BioTeam builds innovative scientific data ecosystems that close the gap between what scientists want to do with data—and what they can do. Learn more at www.bioteam.net.