We’re joined by Bernie Bulkin, a Chemist, Businessman, and Author of two published books (with a third on the way!).
In this episode, Cathy and Bernie cover a though-provoking range of topics..
- Is there anything left to discover in Chemistry?
- The economic advantage countries have from their natural resources.
- Why do Businesses Fail?
- Should we store our consciousness in the cloud when we die?
Books mentioned in this episode:
Bernie Bulkin’s “Solving Chemistry”
Bernie Bulkin’s “Material Advantage”
PRE-ORDER Bernie Bulkin’s “Why Start-Ups Fail”
Charlie Monger’s “Poor Charlie’s Almanac”
Transcript:
Bernie Bulkin (00:00)
Good morning.
Cathy Evans (00:00)
good morning and welcome to the Indie Book Club and a big hello to Bernie Balkan, who is a chemist, a businessman and the author of two books. The first book was Solving Chemistry, that’s a scientist’s journey and that tracks your career in chemistry from the 50s to the, guess you’re still working, aren’t you, Bernie? Good for you.
Bernie Bulkin (00:24)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (00:26)
So up to 2025. And that’s more of a memoir, isn’t it? A scientific memoir.
Bernie Bulkin (00:35)
It’s a memoir, but it’s also a memoir with a thesis about what happened to the science of chemistry during the 20th century. We went from not understanding almost anything, really, although chemistry has been practiced for hundreds of years, to solving practically every problem in chemistry.
Cathy Evans (00:45)
Mm.
Hmm. And you argue quite provocatively in that book that you think chemistry is sort of done, which could be quite hubristic, but I suppose your argument is that any advances we make will be in physics or biology or medicine or biotech, et cetera, maybe materials, obviously. ⁓
Bernie Bulkin (01:22)
Yes, and
materials. That’s what most chemists are working on these days. If you look at chemistry and the leading chemistry departments of the world in academia, that’s what they’re doing. They’re doing applications of all this chemical knowledge to biology or medicine or material science.
Cathy Evans (01:44)
And actually one of the biggest challenges we have now obviously is living sustainably. How do we have more sensible solutions to things like packaging and garbage and the sheer number of things that we’re producing and how we can do that sustainably. suppose that hopefully the great minds of science are turning their attention to that problem.
So.
Bernie Bulkin (02:07)
But some of them are probably.
Cathy Evans (02:09)
Some of them. Yeah, exactly.
But the book that is really the focus of this discussion, although I’d really like to come back to your chemistry book, is the material advantage. Do you have a copy of it with you? Because mine is on my Kindle, yeah, so, and you don’t see those lovely colors. No, no, no.
Bernie Bulkin (02:26)
I probably should reverse my screen so you can see it the
right way up, but you get the idea.
Cathy Evans (02:32)
I can see it, yes, exactly. And the material advantage is about how nations and countries develop competitive advantage, not through their ownership of natural materials necessarily, but through using those materials to produce goods and services which are of lasting value. And actually, in many cases, the countries that own
those materials in the first place can be often exploited or colonized. And it has not been a really great story, especially in huge swathes of Africa, Asia and South America. And so I just wondered what led you to write this book in the first place.
Bernie Bulkin (03:18)
Some time ago, one of my friends approached me and said, why don’t we write a history of materials? And I thought about that for a bit. It wasn’t really of interest to me, but years ago, I heard a lecture by a professor from Harvard named David Landis, who wrote a wonderful book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, asking the question, why are there
rich countries and poor countries. And he talked about a lot of different things and things that more from political point of view, because he was a political economist at Harvard, that what are the things that a country has to have in terms of political systems like elections, if you’re going to have elections that you accept when you’ve lost the election or not.
Cathy Evans (04:11)
This is more
difficult for some than others.
Bernie Bulkin (04:14)
Absolutely. And these principles really stuck with me, but he never really talked about making things as part of wealth and poverty of nations, just the characteristics that would lead to that. putting those two things together, what’s happened in materials over the years, I started to think about how countries achieve competitive advantage.
What can you do, for example, that you use materials that you’ve made or that you know how to make to produce goods, abundant goods for your society so that society that has access to cheaper clothing is actually a more equitable society. And so for your own use,
preserving food from waste. Materials, of course, for military purposes have been a long time thing, whether it’s armor or other sorts of things. We might talk about some of the more interesting ones. Materials for buildings. But then you make not only materials for your own use, but export, and that gives you wealth that allows you to
do other things in your society and society becomes more prosperous from that as well.
Cathy Evans (05:36)
Yeah, exactly. And also obviously clothing has always had a fashion and display element to it. But the development of practical clothing enables people to live in colder climates, for example, and also they can do more exploring. They can go to places which were, I suppose, completely inaccessible before proper food packaging and clothing development reached a certain level.
Bernie Bulkin (06:04)
absolutely. And it certainly, you said a fashion element was also really a class thing, wasn’t it? And there were even laws in the UK, for example, about who was allowed to wear certain kinds of clothing. But once you can make, for example, a business dress cheaper,
Cathy Evans (06:11)
Yes.
Bernie Bulkin (06:27)
That means more people can go to an interview for a business job because they can afford to wear the clothing that you need to get the job.
Cathy Evans (06:37)
So it democratized the whole process of, and it flattened out the societal hierarchies that were in existence for so long.
Bernie Bulkin (06:39)
Exactly.
the same time, that’s looking at it from the most positive way. The British domination and after the Industrial Revolution of manufacturing cotton clothing, first wool and then cotton clothing, Eric Hobsbawm once said,
Whoever says industrial revolution says cotton.
having cotton clothing in Britain happened even though we never grew and can’t grow a single cotton plant in Britain. We forced the deindustrialization of India by not allowing India to export cloth, only raw cotton, exploited the whole slave system in the US and in the Caribbean to get cotton
imported to Britain and then in fact used to import cotton and then export clothing. We talked about the equality side, but Britain also made clothing specially for slaves in the US.
Cathy Evans (07:48)
Yes.
Yeah, it’s interesting how, in fact, your book focuses a lot on how Britain shored up its competitive advantage, not always deliberately, it was sometimes an unintended byproduct. I’m sure people were not that far thinking, but, know, for example, food packaging, just the ability to store and package food properly so that it wouldn’t go off, just…
really enhanced our military ability, for example, and It really enabled people to go far further than they had before. And the same happened in the States, didn’t it, moving into the interior and going places where there was no agriculture to speak of. It just enabled this huge movement of people.
which wasn’t possible before.
Bernie Bulkin (08:41)
Absolutely. So until about 1810, so just over 200 years ago, the only way of preserving food was either drying or salting. So there were very few foods that could actually be preserved and hence nutritional variability.
vitamin deficiencies occurred. The motivation for food packaging was initially for the Navy, both the French Navy and the British Navy. But one of the things that underpinned Britain’s ability to develop food packaging in the form of canning, so making tin cans, which are not made of tin, they’re made tin plated onto
steel or iron or steel was this the science that had been developed and the engineering that had been developed for how to put the tin onto the metal onto another metal surface. And that tin prevents rusting from liquids, acidic liquids in the food. And that is a development only of the 1820s. So exactly 200.
years ago. And as you say, it enabled a much greater variety of foods for the Navy. It then enabled a variety of foods for passenger ships going across the Atlantic, which took weeks and sometimes didn’t actually get to where they thought they were going. They landed someplace else. And
as this industry developed along the East Coast of the United States from Boston down to Maryland, really the Northeast, using the same technology that had been built up in Britain. This was used for the wagon trains going West. Eventually those people would start farms and so on, but they had to get there first and they had to have food to live and they couldn’t shoot all of it that they needed. So
Cathy Evans (10:37)
Yeah. Exactly.
Bernie Bulkin (10:43)
⁓ canning was a crucial thing. And this went on right through to the 1840s, 1850s.
Cathy Evans (10:51)
And I thought it was quite funny, you mentioned
in your book that the can was invented before the can opener.
Bernie Bulkin (10:58)
Exactly.
So the canning invented in the 1820s, but it wasn’t until the late 1850s that someone invented the can opener. That little hooked kind. Well, first they had to have the engineering and invention mentality to put the rim on the can because there were no rims. And then they could hook on that little thing and open the can. And then during the American Civil War, all
Cathy Evans (11:08)
Yeah.
Bernie Bulkin (11:25)
soldiers carried their own can opener from the north and they had access to food. Of course, they looted a lot of people’s houses to get food as well, farms to get food as well, but they brought along their own can openers.
Cathy Evans (11:39)
Yeah, that makes sense. And it must have been really annoying when they lost them, which I’m sure a few of did.
Bernie Bulkin (11:43)
Yeah.
⁓
Yeah, so sometimes crucial inventions happen at around the right time. And sometimes they happen much later. The crucial inventions connected to the elevator, the lift, if you’re this country, ⁓ happened before there were any tall buildings. man named Otis, famous for the Otis Elevator Company in America, he invented
the crucial thing, was a break, but also it was a material story because of the cables needed to raise and lower an elevator car. But he invented and demonstrated the safety of this before there were any tall buildings. Then people could build tall buildings.
Cathy Evans (12:25)
And what you
Did he do it in anticipation of tall buildings? Or was it another application he had in mind?
Bernie Bulkin (12:32)
He did it.
It was related to agriculture and barns and so on, where they wanted to raise stuff up from a lower level to a higher level. And people were afraid to do it because they thought that the thing would fall and crash.
Cathy Evans (12:45)
pulling, etc.
Probably quite justifiably. ⁓
Bernie Bulkin (12:54)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (12:57)
So your book is structured in a very orderly way actually. So the first thing you focus on is food, which we’ve touched on, and clothing, obviously, which is really important. But one of the most fascinating things about your book is the development of paper over the centuries and how it started in China and obviously was tied very much to record keeping and the growth of literacy as well.
Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Because I found that that was my favorite bit of the book, I think. there was also, it started with the really interesting, the Muslim invaders of China. Well, why don’t you tell it? Because it’s your book.
Bernie Bulkin (13:25)
Sure.
Sure.
Yeah. I think it’s generally accepted that Kai Lun in China invented paper between 100 and 200 CE. But the Chinese always like to keep these things secret. They never tried to build competitive advantage by exporting it. They had kept how to make silk secret for many years.
centuries really. they, so they could only make 200 sheets at a time using all kinds of material for fiber, including that paper needs, including rags and bark and so on. The story goes that when the Chinese and the Muslims in the, around the year 760,
were fighting for control of Central Asia in what is probably now ⁓ Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan, that area. The Muslims won a decisive victory and captured a bunch of Chinese soldiers. And the legend is that they said, you’re all going to be executed unless you can teach us something interesting. And one man put up his hand and said,
Cathy Evans (14:50)
yes, no. yes, no.
Bernie Bulkin (14:52)
I know how to make paper. Well, we can only imagine what conversations followed that. But one way or another, because of the Chinese moving towards Central Asia and the Muslims trying to get control of it, Muslim caliphate Scott, the technology for how to make paper. And they saw immediately scale this up, make
more so they built essentially factories to make big sheets of paper in places like Samarkand and Bukhara and Uzbekistan, modern day Uzbekistan. And then they set up copying places in the madrasas where people would copy out manuscripts and not just religious manuscripts, they revived a lot of Greek.
old Greek teachings, so medical teachings that had been lost were brought back and were now able to be distributed and became more widespread. Also philosophy, they brought back teachings of Aristotle. And of course, as the Muslims’ conquests spread across Southern Europe and into Spain and Portugal, this
became a very big thing, so-called golden age in Spain before the the defeat of the Muslims by the Catholic Church-backed monarchs in Spain. Before that, there was a tremendous flowering of intellectual activity, and it was all tied to these paper manuscripts that they could make. As you mentioned,
They also very much appreciated the fact that paper bound ink in a way that didn’t allow for easy erasures. And that meant you could have land deeds, contracts, and so on that could be signed and kept for a period of time, long period of time. So paper became very important. And with paper came literacy, even in China.
when they could only make a small amount, it still, and it was mostly monks, it still increased literacy, although we don’t have very good records, but as paper scaled up, literacy became more and more widespread. Oddly enough, although this had been a big thing in Spain and Portugal during the Muslim gold, Islamic golden age,
Once the Catholic Church took over in Spain, they suppressed literacy because they didn’t want people to read the Bible for themselves.
Cathy Evans (17:36)
Otherwise that might lead to greater understanding and this would make the priesthood redundant. yeah, in the same way they want to continue.
Bernie Bulkin (17:40)
Beat things
Well, that people might actually
think about what they were reading.
Cathy Evans (17:50)
Yes, and also they wanted to continue preaching the mass in Latin for much, suppose, the same reason. Whereas, you know, the countries that started preaching in the vernacular actually led to greater education, greater thinking, the birth of scholarship, really, which is tied to your point about literacy and
Bernie Bulkin (18:10)
Yes. In the
1600s, at the same time that this was so, this suppression of literacy was so strong in Spain and Portugal, Sweden passed the law that everyone had to learn to read the Bible. And priests could come, and by the way, this was men and women, and priests could come to your house and
asked you to prove that you had learned to read. so Sweden went, in the 1600s, Sweden had 88 % literacy of men and women. And the same kind laws were in place in New England, with the early settlers in New England. And while we might say, okay, people could read the Bible, but that maybe they didn’t understand what they were reading.
You know, the priest said, you just read the sentence, vanity of vanities, is vanity. What does that mean? I had no idea. But that same person going to work in a flour mill could read an instruction that said turn lever A to on and switch B to open. And it would work. Whereas the illiterate person couldn’t do this. And that led to greater economic.
wealth and prosperity. So literacy connected to paper led to competitive advantage.
Cathy Evans (19:36)
really interesting. was the whole point of education as well leads to huge competitive advantage as soon as you have an educated population that is massively advantageous. So.
Bernie Bulkin (19:49)
Absolutely.
And we see this right through to modern times. When South Korea became an independent country after the Korean War in the 1950s, the place was a wreck. Right there had been war for several years, everything wrecked. And they said, how do we make this a real country? And the first thing they did was that
Let’s start with primary education and get the best primary education possible. And we’ll build up that cadre of people going through. So then we’ll have the best secondary education and the best post-secondary education. when Korea, in the post-Korean war period, late 1950s, was about the same time, say that Ghana became independent in Africa, the GDP per capita
of those two countries was about the same. In 2023, South Korea’s GDP per capita passed Japan’s. And it was about education plus materials because they said, okay, what are the industries where we can take a position and build up? They don’t have much natural resources, but they said, okay, we can…
export, import certain raw materials and make polyethylene or other materials and then export that to the world. And we figure out how to do that better than anyone else. And we achieve competitive advantage this way. And that’s what they did. It was really much, you know, this, this is an economy that’s not based around services. It’s based around making things from polymers to cars to,
electronics and so on.
Cathy Evans (21:33)
But there are countries that can slide backwards on this as well. well, I think Britain is sliding backwards as well. In fact, you know, probably because there should be much more encouragement in the education sector of children going into STEM, you know, engineering, science, et cetera. And at the moment, there isn’t. In fact, the last time we spoke, you mentioned
There was an advert in the Times for an engineer you saw in the 80s. ⁓ Can you describe that advert?
Bernie Bulkin (22:05)
Yeah, actually, not
so much an advert, I saw this when I moved to Britain in the late 1980s. There was an article, I think, in the Times about the shortage of engineers ⁓ in Britain. And the picture that they showed to accompany the article was of a sort of burly man with not much shirt on, with grease all over his arms who had been fixing a
Cathy Evans (22:18)
Mm.
Bernie Bulkin (22:31)
washing machine and that was their concept of what engineering was.
Cathy Evans (22:36)
So it was hardly a
welcoming and attractive way to advertise an incredibly interesting and, you know, very potentially lucrative field. So.
Bernie Bulkin (22:47)
Exactly.
mean, engineers get employed instantaneously here and that’s still the case. There’s still a short great shortage of engineers, but we don’t do as much manufacturing in Britain as we should. And we have the potential to do more manufacturing, but it’s been neglected in favor of services industries.
Cathy Evans (23:10)
But it all starts with education, doesn’t it? when I was at school, the way that we were taught science was so uninspiring. was, you know, I couldn’t wait to get out of my chemistry lessons. it was incredibly boring. Whereas if I’d read things like Bill Bryson or Richard Feynman, you know, who wrote these wonderful books about physics and his…
his adventures in physics. You know, I think my whole attitude towards the subjects would have been very different.
Bernie Bulkin (23:41)
Yes. How well we teach it is obviously very important. But unless you nurture this science and engineering base, everything from the primary and secondary education through universities and the university research base, I mean…
You just don’t have the capacity to invent new things, to build big industries, and to achieve this sort of competitive advantage.
Cathy Evans (24:11)
but to solve problems as well, we have quite intractable problems in many parts of the world. And there are very bright people who could be applying themselves to solving these. Things like the Earthshot project, example, should be more of them and a greater focus on practical solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
Bernie Bulkin (24:34)
It’s very interesting to think about whether prizes like the Urshad Prize are ⁓ a way to ⁓ get people to tackle difficult problems. There are the X prizes in the U.S.
Cathy Evans (24:34)
it.
Of they are. For example,
the longitude problem was solved by a prize. In fact, I read that book so many years ago, I don’t even remember the details. Do you remember the guy who invented? they awarded something like 10,000 pounds for someone who would solve that problem. And guess what? The problem was solved. Incentive.
Bernie Bulkin (24:59)
Right. Yes.
By the
way, this goes on today, not that many years ago, probably around 2005, 2006, someone offered a prize for anyone who could make a self-driving car that could complete a particular 200-mile, I think it was around the 200-mile journey through desert and remote areas.
Cathy Evans (25:24)
Yes.
Bernie Bulkin (25:32)
The prize that they offered was a million dollars. And a few universities competed, the serious companies that were working on this, like Google and so on, said, we’re not getting a million dollars. We pay each one of these guys on our team a million dollars. The prize is not really relevant, but.
Cathy Evans (25:52)
But it’s the prestige, isn’t it, that’s often more important than the money. Or it’s the prestige and also just the satisfaction you get from, intellectual satisfaction you get from solving something must be really huge. You know, and you can’t be a scientist unless you’re fundamentally curious, surely. I think that’s what I really got from Richard Feynman’s writing is,
Bernie Bulkin (26:06)
Yes.
Cathy Evans (26:15)
just how curious he was about everything and how it was a game to him. It was a game to solve the problem.
Bernie Bulkin (26:22)
Yes. There’s a, I don’t know if it may still be available on deep in the recesses of Amazon Prime or Netflix or someplace, but there was a conversation that I saw on television years ago between Feynman and Hoyle, the great British astronomer, really the person who coined the term Big Bang and
They talked about the discovery process and how they, you know, their minds worked when they were thinking about difficult problems. And there’s just the two of them taking a walk and Feynman. Yeah. Yeah.
Cathy Evans (26:59)
would love to see that. I will look out for it. But also,
René Descartes, he solved a geometric algebra by lying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, and he was watching two flies. And he suddenly realized that if there was a Y axis and an X axis, you could plot
Bernie Bulkin (27:16)
He’s live.
I’m
Cathy Evans (27:25)
geometric shapes on an infinite plane. And that’s how he figured it out because he was quite lazy, didn’t like to get out of bed, and he was just lying there looking at the flies on the ceiling. And actually ironically he died because he went to teach the Queen of Sweden mathematics and she made him get up at five o’clock in the morning and freezing cold winter and it killed him off.
He should have been left to lie in bed and think up these amazing problems. it’s that epiphany moment, isn’t it, that’s so important in science and it comes when you’re least expecting it. Like Archimedes in his bath or, you know.
Bernie Bulkin (27:50)
Yes.
⁓
yes. I mean, some of these are legends, but they are interesting and they do. It’s good to teach them. I think it’s important. I’ve done this with, elementary primary school children, to talk about what’s the difference between a scientist and engineer and an inventor.
Cathy Evans (28:21)
Mmm.
Bernie Bulkin (28:22)
And they are different. And a lot of times we’re talking about science, but we’re actually talking about inventions. So in a way,
Thomas Edison, for example, the greatest American patenter, had patented over a thousand inventions, all different sorts. He was an inventor. He was not a scientist. He didn’t do things in a start with a basic scientific paradigm and try to establish things. He was thinking sort of at a completely different angle to the way everybody else was thinking. He used science.
but he did really inventions and he was interested in everything. We think about Edison in connection with the light bulb, which he said was the most trivial invention that he made sound recording, motion pictures, which he did together with George Eastman who developed photographic films. He persuaded George Eastman to put little sprocket holes.
Cathy Evans (29:08)
They’re funny, it?
Bernie Bulkin (29:20)
in the film so that he could have motion pictures. Sorry.
Cathy Evans (29:24)
is that where they came from? Okay.
I didn’t realize that’s what the holes were for.
Bernie Bulkin (29:31)
Yes, exactly. but Edison was interested in everything when he saw the first X-ray that Renschen published in 1898 or so, which was an X-ray picture of his wife’s hand. Just so you could just see the bones. immediately said, okay, every doctor’s office was going to want one of these things.
for broken bones. ⁓ And he said, okay, we don’t need film for this, just the fluoroscope to image it in the doctor’s office. And Edison started a company which made these fluoroscopes and sold them to doctor’s offices. The other person who was very interested in x-rays was Marie Curie. And she
Cathy Evans (30:19)
Yes.
Bernie Bulkin (30:22)
said during the First World War, let’s make portable x-ray units that can be sent to the battlefront. And she and her daughter made these things not only for broken bones, but they could find bullets that
Cathy Evans (30:39)
me
and is there a new way to operate?
Bernie Bulkin (30:42)
Exactly.
So there was no way to operate it. And she had hundreds of these built. They were all interested in everything. Marie Curie was a scientist as well as an inventor.
Cathy Evans (30:52)
Yeah.
And she was a great cook apparently as well. but going back to the intersection between scientist, inventor and engineer, like the three scientific disciplines, I suppose, there is a big intersection between them and there should be a fluid movement between, one and the other. And,
Bernie Bulkin (30:58)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (31:14)
I suppose an inventor is just applying science, isn’t he? But he’s also applying creativity, or I should say she or he, applying creativity, imagination. know, the fact that Jules Verne wrote about submarines before they were invented, just, the stories of H.G. Wells. mean, okay, we haven’t quite got to a time machine yet, but creativity has a huge part to play, doesn’t it?
And I don’t know if you’ve ever read Charlie Munger’s Almanac, know, the chap who worked with Warren Buffett for years, but he was…
Bernie Bulkin (31:45)
know Charlie Munger
very well, yeah. ⁓
Cathy Evans (31:48)
But
such an interesting book about how you should develop your knowledge in all spheres, because if you ignore one, you’re cutting off a potential line of inquiry into something that could be, interesting and very useful.
Bernie Bulkin (32:04)
Yeah,
Charlie Munger also said that you should, in business, you should watch what the incentives are he said, show me the incentives and I’ll show you the behaviors. And ⁓ it applies a lot to the world, which we’ve been talking about in terms of inventions and new ideas and startups with.
Cathy Evans (32:15)
quite right.
Bernie Bulkin (32:26)
the incentives of the venture capitalists determine the kinds of things that they invest in and the sorts of companies that get built. And we’re seeing this today with the fanaticism around AI, for example, which is not a material story, although it could have applications to materials.
Cathy Evans (32:39)
⁓ Yes.
But it is a material story in the consumption angle, the water and electricity that is being consumed, like huge amounts at the moment on, some very trivial. I mean, I’m sure, of course, AI is being used in very brilliant ways for scientific applications. But a lot of people are using AI for very trivial questions where they could be.
Googling or looking up in a dictionary, and all these searches are consuming so much electricity and water not to mention landmass as well
Bernie Bulkin (33:18)
When
you do ask a question and have it answered by the AI bot rather than by a straight Google search, you use 10 times as much energy in the process. Someplace, times as much energy is being used.
Cathy Evans (33:29)
Exactly.
But I’ve noticed now when I ask a Google question, I get an AI response, whether I’ve asked for it or not. so, you know, and by the way, haven’t, to my shame, I have not looked how to solve that problem. I probably should because I deliberately ask Google questions rather, or I Google the questions rather than use AI for that reason.
Bernie Bulkin (33:40)
Exactly.
if we look at possible applications of AI to materials problems, I’ve been thinking about this and talking about it in various places. One of the things that is discussed a lot is the possibility that fusion energy, ⁓ which is effectively the same nuclear processes that take place in the sun and which people have been working on for
50 years without success, ⁓ always being 20 years from commercialization, that fusion might become a reality. And one of the key problems, unsolved problems of fusion is because the temperatures are very high and you’re bombarding with neutrons are flying off in all directions, the material that you use to make the reactor
must be able to withstand these conditions of high temperature and radiation. And we don’t yet have alloys, any materials that can do this. ⁓ When I’ve talked to the senior people in the UK fusion program, they say, well, this is an unsolved problem, but we figure that by the time we get there with a practical process, someone will solve this problem. Now,
Cathy Evans (35:18)
Can you have a container within a container within a container? Is that?
Bernie Bulkin (35:18)
getting
Yes, but
still the inner part of it has to still withstand these conditions. we’re at least hundreds of degrees Celsius off, maybe a thousand degrees Celsius off from being able to do this. the search for alloys with particular properties
is generally an art. People who work on this say, well, I know that if we add a little bit of cobalt, we get this increase. So let’s try that or whatever. And then some years ago, there were a new class of alloys, essentially a new class of materials developed, which are called high entropy alloys, where you use large quantities of different metals.
People thought these would be unstable, but it turned out they weren’t. so it’s possible now to make radically different materials, but how to get there in a reasonable time might be something that AI could make more efficient, taking all these different properties and seeing… In some ways, it’s not that different from…
⁓ the early things with AI playing complicated games like Go, where you have 200 possible moves each time. So you have a huge number. The same thing here. You have so many different elements that you could do in so many different proportions and different ways of making them. And it might be possible to converge on things that humans haven’t quite thought of because you can’t take in the whole database.
I’m sort of optimistic about that.
Cathy Evans (37:07)
AI
can process things in so many different ways, whereas obviously we tend to get tunnel vision when we’re focusing on a problem and we may exclude other possibilities, especially if we’re excited about something, we suffer from cognitive bias, we have all sorts of mental, I suppose, idiosyncrasies, which in some
cases are very useful, but in other cases are very handicapped, whereas AI does not have that problem. And I guess AI doesn’t mind admitting that it’s wrong as well. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it doesn’t get upset and cry in the loo.
Bernie Bulkin (37:39)
Exactly.
Also, it doesn’t stop for coffee.
Bye!
Yeah. So yes,
yes, it’s overhyped, but it might be that there are some things and particularly I’ve been in the context of the book on the material advantage. I’ve been thinking about whether there are materials, complex materials problems in the future that might be amenable to AI, at least assisting with the solution.
Cathy Evans (38:17)
But a lot of the discoveries that have been really useful are often the result of a happy accident, aren’t they? you can’t legislate for those, you can’t plan them in advance, obviously by their very definition. But just going back to education a moment, I think the secret to getting kids interested in science and engineering and invention is
by telling them stories about it, which I think is why your book is so interesting to read. It’s not, and this is why Bill Bryson and Richard Feynman are so interesting as well, because they tell stories. It’s not just about, dry formulae or algorithms things like that. It’s actually how things come into being.
and what their application is. And that is what is so interesting to a small kid rather than reading them a dry list of, I don’t know, the periodic table or obviously it’s important to understand that. But I would have been motivated to learn more about the periodic table if I knew how it could have been applied. And I think that part of my education was missing. and I’ve been spending the rest of my life trying to catch up. So.
Bernie Bulkin (39:29)
You’re doing a good job here. I’m helping you.
Cathy Evans (39:33)
interested
in it now so you know but just going to going back to you so you grew up in in New Jersey is that right so you grew up on a on a farm
Bernie Bulkin (39:44)
I was born
on a chicken farm, egg farming, although I saw my father many times pick up a chicken and cut its jugular vein and its feathers out and take it to the kitchen for my mother to deal with. ⁓ What?
Cathy Evans (40:00)
You saw the unglamorous
side of farming.
Bernie Bulkin (40:03)
yeah, there’s no, I don’t think there is any glamorous side of farming.
Cathy Evans (40:08)
Well, maybe Jeremy Clarkson might. I think he’s done more to show people what farming is really like than, you know. Then.
Bernie Bulkin (40:14)
But farming is
getting up early in the morning, working long days and even if you’re mechanized, it’s still not glamorous. yeah, so I was born on a farm, but then after some time for various reasons, my parents sold the farm and moved to New York City and I grew up first in a very poor neighborhood in New York City.
⁓ going to new york city public schools what we call state schools here
Cathy Evans (40:43)
Which neighborhood?
Which neighborhood did you grow up in?
Bernie Bulkin (40:47)
It’s called East New York ⁓ and it’s in Brooklyn. The last time I went there, which was quite a few years ago, I was too scared to get out of the car. ⁓ It was a tough neighborhood when I was growing up.
Cathy Evans (40:49)
Okay.
You couldn’t wear a t-shirt saying homeboy or something like that.
Bernie Bulkin (41:07)
Yeah. ⁓
it was a tough neighborhood even when I was growing up, but there’s something about growing up in a tough neighborhood that makes you tough. And I think it helps you later, even if you’ve occasionally gotten beaten up or, gotten caught with your little gang of friends, ⁓ shoplifting at Woolworths or whatever, which all of which happened to me. ⁓ so,
Cathy Evans (41:28)
I’ll see ya.
Bernie Bulkin (41:33)
So I grew up in this neighborhood and then my parents moved to a more middle-class neighborhood and that’s where I lived in my formative years and then again in state schools and but with kind of all people who were going to go on to university ⁓ and so then
Cathy Evans (41:52)
And so,
and what led you to chemistry?
Bernie Bulkin (41:57)
It was an accident in a way. My father loved the stock market. He was a great believer in the stock market and he only bought shares in a few companies and held them forever. One of the ones he owned shares in was Exxon. And so they used to send out glossy magazines about the world of petroleum and how interesting that was. So I thought, I’m going to become a petroleum engineer.
But when I told my parents this, I was going to, I thought I would go out to Texas to university. Partly that was putting the right amount of distance between me and my parents, a few thousand miles. ⁓ My parents thought about it and then they said, well, we don’t think it’s that great an idea because the oil is all in the Middle East. And although it wasn’t
a major part of our lives. We were a Jewish family and they said, we don’t think oil companies would ever employ any Jews because they wouldn’t be able to work in the Middle East. Turned out that was completely untrue, but I just thought I would do chemistry instead of that. So I went to university actually living, still living at home in New York city, the big science and engineering university, which is now part of.
NYU New York University wasn’t at that time with a bunch of boys from Jewish and Irish and Catholic and Italian families mainly like me now heavily Asian families going doing the same thing. And it was very, very hard. I mean, for all of us, ⁓ just extremely rigorous education, but it was great. And ⁓
Cathy Evans (43:41)
You have
to learn German as well.
Bernie Bulkin (43:44)
Yes, German was required for a degree in chemistry at that time. in fact, even when I did want to do my PhD, which did get me thousands of miles away from my parents, the, at that time, PhD, had to do pass a language exam in German, in chemistry in German and either French or Russian.
And the exam was you were given a scientific paper with a dictionary and you had to produce a reasonable translation of paper. Well, translating is something that’s a thing of the past now. First of all, so much of the literature is in English, almost all the literature about the work I did my PhD on was in German. So I read…
Cathy Evans (44:27)
Okay. That’s really.
and what brought you, actually we were talking about prizes earlier, didn’t you win a prize at university you were one of 10 students who were given a research grant, or maybe it wasn’t a prize, but you were given some incentive to do some research.
Bernie Bulkin (44:44)
Yes. At that time, wasn’t much undergraduate research. Research was done by graduates since the National Science Foundation in the US had the idea to stimulate interest in science by having undergraduate research programs. And so the university where I was applied for one of these. got a grant to give 10 undergraduates.
We were all science and engineering undergrad, 10 undergraduates, summer research fellowships. And I had a job as most New York kids do working at a summer camp that lined up for that summer. they said, we’re going to give these to the top 10 students in certain fields. Not everyone, not the whole university, but ⁓
And actually I didn’t even go along to the meeting where they announced it, because I didn’t know that I was in the top 10. I think I was number 10. Still, it’s not that bad being in the top 10, being 10th in the top 10. And that completely changed my mind because although I had great undergraduate education, it’s sort of like what you were talking about earlier, Kathy, that
It was learning formulas and learning how to existing, we learned how to solve solved problems by ourselves. ⁓ And I wasn’t sure what research was actually about, what chemists actually did, because I had no contact with this, it was a classroom thing. And then I was given my own problem and it changed my, huh?
Cathy Evans (46:09)
Yes.
What was it? What were
you asked to solve? What were you working on?
Bernie Bulkin (46:32)
It was a very simple thing. If you put four carbons together in a ring, so if you can imagine that each point of my finger and these two places were a square of carbon atoms, they had other things attached to them like hydrogens or fluorides, but it’s not relevant. The question was, are these four carbons in a plane? Do they sit in a plane or?
Are they puckered up and two above the plane and two below the plane? That was the kind of fundamental thing in chemistry that 50 years ago, 70 years ago was not known. And is there a way of finding this out? Because remember, we can’t see molecules. We can see things, the properties of molecules and infer things.
Cathy Evans (47:03)
So.
Okay.
Bernie Bulkin (47:28)
like this.
People had been working on this very simple problem for a while and coming up with different answers. And the reason they came up with different answers, it turned out was because they didn’t understand what it was that the instrumentation was showing them. How did the instrumentation actually work? What did it mean?
Cathy Evans (47:32)
You told me a-
And were the instruments reliable as well? Was that one of the issues? That maybe the instruments that they…
Bernie Bulkin (48:01)
It wasn’t the question
of reliability. They were a bit crude, but we could always get data. The question is, what is the instrument showing? And the reason that
people came to the wrong conclusion is because the four carbons were actually in the puckered form, but they were flipping very rapidly.
Cathy Evans (48:26)
okay.
Bernie Bulkin (48:28)
be like
this. And then just think of it like a photograph. On average, it’s planar, but actually the stable form is puckered or bent. So the molecule goes over a little barrier from one puckered form to the other. But if you are making a measurement that’s too slow,
You see the average, which is planar, but if you make a faster measurement, then you see the instantaneous thing. But that was the thing to understand what it is that the instrument is actually telling you. So it was a very fundamental thing and it was a great problem because it was self-contained. It wasn’t a lot of science.
Cathy Evans (48:59)
you’ll get the high or the low.
Bernie Bulkin (49:21)
is in big groups and each person is doing their little part. But I was fortunate to have a little problem that was just mine and I could isolate it I had to learn a lot of new things in order to solve it. Mathematics as well as a lot of physics and so on. It was really great.
Cathy Evans (49:39)
Fantastic. And then you started working in labs.
Bernie Bulkin (49:42)
Well, then I went on to do a PhD in chemistry. And again, I had a very nice problem. Someone said, okay, if you mix A and B, then it doesn’t matter what they are. You get in this particular reaction, you will get C and D. And in our lab, we were interested in studying the properties of C. And so we said, ⁓ here’s a simple way to make C.
By the way, D might be interesting as well. So we did it, but we realized immediately that that was not always happening in that reaction. Whoever said that was wrong. And then a great guy in the field working in Munich in Germany said, if you mix A and B, the same A and B, nothing happens. There is no reaction.
Well, we knew that wasn’t true either because we had done it.
Cathy Evans (50:38)
Is it the case that if you mix A and B you will always get C but only if certain circumstances are always exactly the same? And if you have any variability or is that the answer?
Bernie Bulkin (50:46)
No,
just didn’t understand what he was measuring. And the other guy was just too great a man and just jumped to the conclusion. But we knew that something was happening and it wasn’t what either of these two guys said. So although it was a sideline to the research of the group, I said to my thesis advisor, look, let me solve this problem.
for my PhD thesis because it’s a little contribution and it took me about three years of work to figure out everything that happened. It was quite complicated and it was interesting what happened. And it took, went in different stages. And if you had a little, the tiniest amount of water present, then it set you off in the wrong direction. And that was part of what people had.
had problems with, so you had to do things extremely dry, essentially no water.
Cathy Evans (51:42)
⁓ You had
to keep the variables all the same, I guess.
Bernie Bulkin (51:46)
Exactly. Everything
had to be controlled. so I didn’t do a single experiment. I couldn’t do a single experiment for three years in air.
Cathy Evans (51:54)
Hold on a moment, Bernie.
Bernie Bulkin (51:55)
Anyway, it was a great problem. Again, it was self-contained problem and we solved it and it was actually in textbooks for a while, kind of dropped away. We didn’t see how this particular reaction fit into the bigger picture, which somebody else did. They saw our reaction in two or three others and said, now when we see how these things work, I didn’t see that.
So that’s fine. That’s how science works. You do your part, 10 other people do it, and then somebody with real insight sees the whole thing. But all of these inspired me to say, ⁓ I’d like to have an academic career doing research. And I did have academic positions for 18 years. And I taught a lot of students as undergraduates, and I did a lot of research and published papers, and it was fun. And I even got a few awards.
for my work and I did stuff with education as well, teaching high school student, teaching high school teachers how to teach chemistry better. ⁓
Cathy Evans (52:59)
Didn’t you, actually the last time we spoke, you said that one of the issues again with education is that a lot of teachers are not engineers. They’re trying to teach a subject that they don’t have practical experience in. And I think the only answer to this is to get the engineers and the scientists and the inventors to actually spend some time teaching. Is that happening more, do you think?
Bernie Bulkin (53:24)
don’t think it is happening. the problem that you’re referring to and highlighting is I think that it’s not just quality of teaching. It’s that in advising students about their careers, should you go to university to become an engineer or a scientist or a
Cathy Evans (53:41)
Mmm.
Bernie Bulkin (53:47)
medical doctor or lawyer or whatever, the teachers that we have in our schools, they have had no contact with engineering. So they don’t know how to advise a student whether engineering is interesting because they don’t know what it is. ⁓ They know a little bit about what a physicist is, they know what a doctor does and they think they know what a lawyer does.
Cathy Evans (54:05)
So they have a very narrow.
Bernie Bulkin (54:10)
but they don’t know what an engineer does, so.
Cathy Evans (54:13)
Actually for the most part we only know about physicists in movies and they’re always evil Bernie so…
Bernie Bulkin (54:19)
⁓
Yes, that’s just a small percentage of the physicists who are truly evil. Dr. Strangelove and all that.
Cathy Evans (54:23)
So yeah.
Okay, so you get some good results.
Exactly, yes. so if you were starting your career from scratch right now, Bernie, what would you like to focus on?
Bernie Bulkin (54:40)
If I was starting in science now, ⁓ for sure I would do neuroscience because I think solving the brain, how the brain works is the great frontier of science, AI notwithstanding. I think there are a lot of how we perceive things,
Cathy Evans (54:43)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Bernie Bulkin (55:03)
how the brain organizes information, how we do such fundamental things as merge our hearing and our vision. All of these things are just beginning to be understood and where does this happen in the brain? How is it affected and so on? And it has tremendous practical applications as well, of course. We’ve just seen an advance where because of understanding of how the brain
processes visual information, can restore vision to people who have lost it.
Cathy Evans (55:41)
It’s incredible, isn’t it? Do you know, I’m gonna get you a copy of Norman Deuger’s book. He wrote this incredible book called The Brain That Changes Itself. And it’s about neuroplasticity and how the brain, copes with trauma, how one part of the brain can actually compensate for another in the event of stroke or head injury.
Bernie Bulkin (55:44)
Because…
Cathy Evans (56:04)
is such a fascinating book. Again, I like it so much because it’s full of stories, plenty of stories and actually there’s a wonderful quote in that book and I can’t remember who said it and the quote is, only an idiot will tell you how the brain works.
Bernie Bulkin (56:19)
Right. But we have the
now to learn a lot about how the brain works. And so I think that’s one of the frontiers of the most exciting frontier of science today. So that’s probably where I would go. But who knows? It’s an inspiring teacher sets you off on a particular direction.
Anyway, I worked as an academic for 18 years and then almost by chance, some friends of mine working in an oil company said, why don’t you work for us and manage part of our research center? And it took me off. I hadn’t worked in industry for a day in my life, never a summer job or anything. And it just suited me as it turned out.
Cathy Evans (57:09)
You took to it
like a duck to water. Yeah, I can imagine. So, going back to AI though, AI obviously will be able to help us solve a lot of problems to do with our understanding of the brain. But the irony is that AI and big data and the ease of the access to information is making us generally speaking less intelligent.
and less able to understand the answers, which I think is a great shame, isn’t it?
Bernie Bulkin (57:35)
less intelligent, I don’t know. Maybe what we’re in,
Cathy Evans (57:42)
But we’re not doing the hard graft, you know, because the hard graft is done for us now. for example, I remember when we had to read maps before we all had little sat-navs on our phones. And I’m sure things like that actually have a lot to… We actually had to get out a pen and write down the directions and, you know, hope like hell we didn’t get lost.
Bernie Bulkin (58:03)
I know, I do think, and this this happens in science a lot. I do think that we have to just say, well, okay, there are some things that we used to have to do that we had to learn how to do them and do them well, or you would get lost. there’s some things we just have to leave behind and say, okay, that’s something we don’t have to do anymore. Just like, you know, you don’t have to dig.
a hole, by hand, you can get a mechanical digger to dig it for you. So there are some things that still have to be done. So there are some things I’m happy to leave behind, although I keep a collection of paper maps because I want to show my grandchildren who will never have seen what they were like. I also have some carbon paper.
that, I keep for my grandchildren to see how we used to make copies of things before we had printers, because they wouldn’t believe that there is such a thing. so I’m happy to leave some things behind, whether, people are right in feeling that teaching grammar, punctuation,
The proper use of the apostrophe is also something that should be left behind. I’m not so sure. ⁓
Cathy Evans (59:21)
I really
sincerely hope not. But, you know, I’m afraid it’s going in that direction, which is a great shame. I think you need to know the rules of grammar and then you can break them. It’s a bit like art, isn’t it? So you have to first learn how to draw before you can do an abstract painting that people will take seriously. But I don’t know.
Bernie Bulkin (59:34)
Yes.
Anyway, I mean, the same thing that you were talking about with maps occurs in science because there was a time when to make a certain kind of measurement, you had to build your own instrument. And then these instruments became commercially available and routine. And some people said, well, you’re not doing real science. If you didn’t build the instrument yourself, you’re just throwing something in and measuring it. Well.
That’s how things move on and we can’t, we have to move at pace. So I’m not unhappy about giving up map reading as a skill.
Cathy Evans (1:00:09)
It is having, yes.
By the way,
I could get lost in a one-way tunnel, Bernie. So believe me, I’m delighted not to to map read anymore. I have no sense of direction whatsoever. and it’s not a good idea to have this sort of faux nostalgia either, you know, so I do accept that. But I do think we had to work harder. We had to do more mental graph, more mental arithmetic,
Bernie Bulkin (1:00:22)
Yeah.
Cathy Evans (1:00:39)
And now things are just made very easy for us and we hardly ever have to. There certain muscles in the brain that just lie dormant, I’m sure. you see, I am banging on about faux-Nas-Dial-Geronti, so…
Bernie Bulkin (1:00:53)
I mean,
in my book, Solving Chemistry, I think I talk about one of the skills that you should learn is how to do approximate calculations in your head. ⁓ So you’re sitting there listening to someone talking about something, giving a technical talk, and you should be thinking, okay, well, if this is approximately this times this and
You do a rough calculation, you say, no, what this guy just said, it’s not possible. ⁓ And then you can ask a question which will surprise them because you’ve done a rough calculation and you find that he’s off by a factor of a thousand But unless you have, that is a kind of skill, as you said, to do mental arithmetic, do approximate calculations.
Cathy Evans (1:01:26)
Yeah. ⁓
Bernie Bulkin (1:01:43)
That’s an important thing to keep.
Cathy Evans (1:01:48)
Yeah, that’s true. So the last time we spoke, I hate to bring up the dreaded AI again, but we had a discussion about consciousness and whether AI could at some stage develop consciousness. And I asked you whether, if you had the opportunity, would you ever implant your own
consciousness into some sort of cyborg being so that you know we could retain the wonderful consciousness that is Bernie Balkin.
you said something like, my consciousness is going six feet under.
Bernie Bulkin (1:02:21)
Yeah, exactly.
I think that is the case. When I go, that’s gone. ⁓ Downloading all the jokes that I know, that’s another story. ⁓
Cathy Evans (1:02:28)
Which is such a shame, but…
Well hopefully you’ve told a few to your kids and your grandchildren.
Bernie Bulkin (1:02:39)
Exactly.
and I think we should make a distinction here between knowledge and wisdom.
Cathy Evans (1:02:48)
Yes.
Bernie Bulkin (1:02:50)
And
it’s taken me a long time to acquire some of the things about how to do things in a way that brings people together and carries everybody along with you and so on. And business is great for this because if you take a leadership role in business, you have to do that. You have to…
persuade different people, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively, to move in a particular direction or to take a hard decision. And it’s not something that is easily taught, but it is something if you watch other people and how they do things and learn from your own, willing to learn from when you do things badly yourself and be self-aware and self-critical.
that you develop and I think that’s a kind of wisdom. another kind of wisdom is asking questions that are almost unanswerable, like.
Cathy Evans (1:03:48)
of yourself
as well as other people I suppose.
Bernie Bulkin (1:03:52)
exactly of yourself
as well as of other people. And I don’t think those things are easily downloaded, ⁓ even if it was possible.
Cathy Evans (1:04:01)
No, that’s very true.
But also, the ability to persuade people or make hard decisions that overcoming resistance, not only in other people, but also in yourself is really important, isn’t it? Something that can only really be acquired with age and experience,
Richard told me, sorry, this is my husband, he told me that a rugby player called Brian O’Driscoll, when he was asked about the difference between knowledge and wisdom, he said, knowledge is recognizing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in the fruit salad.
Bernie Bulkin (1:04:42)
Right. Yeah,
that’s the usual kind of good epigram that people use.
Yeah. Yes. So knowledge and wisdom. there are, you know, lots of ancient thinkers and more modern ones also ask these questions. have you ever read ⁓ Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus essay? It’s a most, it’s a really wonderful thing, but it starts out
Cathy Evans (1:04:51)
Fantastic.
No, I haven’t.
Bernie Bulkin (1:05:16)
by saying the most serious question that every adult needs to answer every day is whether or not to commit suicide.
Cathy Evans (1:05:32)
Yes, I do remember reading about it actually. It’s typically French, isn’t it?
Bernie Bulkin (1:05:38)
Yes. ⁓
Cathy Evans (1:05:40)
Why should I continue to exist basically?
Bernie Bulkin (1:05:43)
Exactly. ⁓ So another way of putting this is, Camus put it also, I get up in the morning and the first thing I ask is, should I have a cup of coffee or should I kill myself? ⁓ But ⁓ another way of putting it is once we’re adults, if you’re thinking about things, you realize two things. One, you will die.
Two, you don’t know when that’s going to happen. the combination of those two things are completely terrifying. So one way that Camus tries to get out of this problem is by saying, okay, I can remove the uncertainty about when I’m going to die. That’s in my power if I want to do it.
Cathy Evans (1:06:26)
Yes. And it’s almost
like put a to-do list. Take the laundry, know, sort the laundry out, take the bins out, have a coffee, kill myself. ⁓
Bernie Bulkin (1:06:37)
Yeah, exactly. But,
⁓ you know, and these go back, you know, the same exact questions were asked in the book of Ecclesiastes. ⁓ If you read Ecclesiastes, he asks exactly the same kinds of questions of himself.
Cathy Evans (1:06:55)
And Ecclesiastes
has that wonderful verse where he says, there is nothing new under the sun. There is nothing. Everything has been reinvented and there’s nothing that we are going through that someone else has not gone through. It’s a very, yeah, pretty bleak actually, but beautiful.
Bernie Bulkin (1:07:03)
Right.
So yeah, it can
be very bleak. you’re downloading, you can download all kinds of things that your brain has learned, even how you solve certain problems, And effectively, the better AI is actually learning how to solve problems even faster, if not better.
But I don’t think you’ll ever download wisdom.
Cathy Evans (1:07:41)
No, that’s very true. You can speak to a young person until you’re blue in the face to tell them something that to you is self-evident, and yet they just don’t get it. I remember being the recipient of talks that way, and I just did not get it either. And it takes time, and you can’t short circuit that process, can you?
Bernie Bulkin (1:07:56)
Yeah.
but we can read.
Cathy Evans (1:08:08)
Yes, Well, reading is just the wonderful way of absorbing other people’s experience, which is, why I like reading memoir and biography and, you know, learning about other people’s experience. So, are you working on anything at the moment?
Bernie Bulkin (1:08:18)
Uh-huh.
Yes, I have a new book which Bloomsbury is publishing and will be out next March. It’s different from all the others and it’s called Why Startups Fail.
Cathy Evans (1:08:30)
Mm, good question.
my word, I’m going to invite you back when you finish that book because this is a subject very dear to my heart. there’s a reason why angel investors are called angels, isn’t it? Because basically without a lot of these, we need some businesses to fail in other ways. But basically for people to find out what doesn’t work is almost as valuable as finding out what does.
Bernie Bulkin (1:08:48)
Yes.
Cathy Evans (1:09:00)
And unfortunately, a lot of people lose their money in the process.
Bernie Bulkin (1:09:04)
Yep.
So this is sort of based on my years of watching and being both an angel investor and working with California venture capital firm and a UK venture capital firm and, and a whole bunch of startups, sometimes as chairman still doing it. And I just thought I would put down in book form what first of all, what are
are the avoidable reasons for failure. So that hopefully people will see, let’s try to not fail that way.
Cathy Evans (1:09:39)
And in fact,
that’s probably why you read Charlie Munger’s Elmanac. Am I jumping the gun? Maybe you read it. But that is very relevant to your book on Starpass. And what I loved about that book is how he focuses on, first of all, as you mentioned earlier,
Bernie Bulkin (1:09:43)
Right.
Exactly. Exactly.
Cathy Evans (1:09:59)
Look, what people are incentivized for and what they’re incentivized to do. But also look at the downside, always manage the downside and think about what is the worst that could happen because these Black Swan events that supposedly are once in a hundred years actually happen a lot more frequently than people anticipate. So, and always appeal to self-interest too.
Bernie Bulkin (1:10:23)
What?
Cathy Evans (1:10:25)
Hence the prizes, appeal to self interest rather than morality or reason or logic.
Bernie Bulkin (1:10:31)
One of the other things that Charlie Munger was very keen on is that sometimes the best businesses are a bit boring. You don’t have to go for the most exciting thing. A somewhat boring business that a lot of people want will
Cathy Evans (1:10:47)
Paper products. Going back to your book, Kimberly Clark, paper products, know, how it started with paper and then developed into cosmetic and then sanitary products. you know, it’s, and the research department of these so-called boring businesses are always looking for new applications to put their products to work.
Bernie Bulkin (1:10:47)
can make you a lot of money.
Right.
Cathy Evans (1:11:09)
The law of unintended consequences always takes effect. Some product you’re working on suddenly has an application elsewhere.
Bernie Bulkin (1:11:16)
and we didn’t talk about that when we talking about paper, but absolutely, you know, the paper people saw that because of the ability of cellulose, which is the key thing to bind liquids and hold them, as we talked about with ink, they made a specially absorbent form, which was used for bandages during the First World War the liquid being blood.
Then at the end of the war, because that replaced just wrapping a cotton cloth around a wound. At the end of the war, they had the capacity to do much more of that than there was a need at that time. There weren’t so many people bleeding. And they said, they found out that during the war, nurses in the battlefield had been using these bandages as
sanitary pads and they said, that’s a business.
Cathy Evans (1:12:13)
Exactly.
it transformed their lives. It gave them a lot of freedom and led the working women in the working place. So boring businesses are very exciting in many ways.
Bernie Bulkin (1:12:18)
Right. Exactly.
Yeah. Yep. But so that’s my new book. It’s called Why Startups Fail. And it has a lot of positive things in it, as well as, again, a lot of stories about things I’ve seen and particularly the especially referring to Silicon Valley, the effects of arrogance, arrogance, which is in
Cathy Evans (1:12:29)
answering.
Really good.
Bernie Bulkin (1:12:50)
justified by what people actually know, but the way they behave and how that leads to failure.
Cathy Evans (1:12:58)
Really interesting. thinking about Charlie Munger again. I wish I could invite Charlie onto my podcast. Sadly, that is no longer possible. I know, I know. But I was just going to say, the thing about the big tech platforms is not only their arrogance, but also their lack of understanding of how their platforms are
Bernie Bulkin (1:13:05)
He sadly died last year.
Cathy Evans (1:13:19)
they’ve lost control of their own platforms and how they’ve been co-opted by bad actors the globe over. It’s just really terrifying and I’m reading a book currently called Democracy Hacked which actually explains how this process has happened and I’m not sure what the solution is but you know.
Bernie Bulkin (1:13:44)
but knowing what the problem is is a good start.
Cathy Evans (1:13:47)
Yes, exactly, exactly. But I have kept you on for an hour and a half and I suppose I really should let you go, Bernie. It’s been really fun talking to you. Thank you so much. And I will definitely invite you back when your new book is out. So when’s it out?
Bernie Bulkin (1:13:52)
Yes.
in March of 2026.
Cathy Evans (1:14:06)
not so far away. Okay.
Bernie Bulkin (1:14:08)
You can pre-order on Amazon now, but no need to do that. It is available. ⁓
Cathy Evans (1:14:13)
I will definitely do that. I will definitely
pre-order on Amazon. anyway, thank you very much because I love your writing style. It’s very accessible and you do you you’ve got a very good way of ordering your books. It’s a very logical progression. it’s very scientific. But it’s also fun.
Bernie Bulkin (1:14:30)
You can’t
suppress your scientific training. You can’t leave it behind.
Cathy Evans (1:14:36)
I guess not,
no exactly. But thank you so much Bernie and I will definitely invite you back so we’ll see you again next year.
Bernie Bulkin (1:14:47)
if not before. Thank you. Bye.
Cathy Evans (1:14:49)
if not the more exactly. Thanks so much Bernie. Cheers.