 This is me in 30 years. I've done well. That would have been a pretty unique experience putting this black shell through the coffee press and it coming out bright pink. Yeah, that was pretty cool about it. One of those very rare Eureka moments. T-Rex. T-Rex. I want to see T-Rex. There's no question about it. Today we're conducting an interview of my future self. He's getting into a time machine going 30-something years into the future, finds himself and asks whether the choice is for the right ones. Exactly. So this is me 30 years in the future. Still the same hairdo. Yeah. My name is Seb Bland. I'm a student at ANU studying earth science. And in the future, I would like to be a... potentially like to be a researcher looking and investigating into early life and how that can contribute to society in general today. I'm Jochen Brooks. I'm a professor of Geobiology at the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University. As a geologist, I think a nice interim ice-breaking question is, what is your favourite rock Jochen? My favourite rock. I mean, mineralogical type. Yeah. I think for my profession, it would be a deep black shell. Full of organic matter. 30%. Absolutely love it. One of those rocks that you actually can light with a light and actually do burn. Flammable rocks. Love it. Wow. So 1.1 billion years old. We extracted this, my favourite rock, the black shell. And you wouldn't believe it, but out of this black shell extracted with a solvent called dichromethane, the extract was actually bright purple pink. No way. That's amazing. Unbelievable. Yes. That would have been a pretty unique experience putting this black shell through the coffee press and coming out bright pink. Were you surprised? Yeah. So my experience was a different one because I was sitting in my office and opposite of my office is my laboratory. You always have all doors open so if something happens, you can hear it. Like a scream. Yeah. And I did hear a scream. Yeah. It was my PhD student, Norgunili, from Germany. And she screamed. And I ran into the lab and I walked there. She's sitting there staring at the thing and I look at it and I see this purple band running down that Sitica column. And yeah, that was a pretty cool moment. One of those very rare Eureka moments. If you are sitting at a dinner party and you got the big shots around the table, Brian Schmidt's there, everyone, how do you explain what you do to them? Oh, I've done that a thousand times to actually quite some hot shots. Not to Brian though yet, but for example to the treasure of the United States, the present one of Harvard University. And I usually start explaining, you know, what is geological time and I usually do this in stacks of time. So I think in time from the bottom to the top. So here's the present. Here's the bottom. Earth is 4.6 billion years old and I'm working somewhere in this period of time when life was just microscopic. We can't see anything with our eyes and we use chemical traces to find out what happened. So that's what I do. What do you think when you look back on your entire career, it's been illustrious. What is, if you have made any, a misstep, do you think? Has there been any points that you've looked back and gone, maybe I should have done something else here? You learn a lot from mistakes. Hopefully you do. It's very important. And it's usually interpersonal things. Things that you do to or with other people. For example, one thing I definitely learned is if you make a discovery that disproves someone else's discovery, in a way that makes that person maybe even look stupid because I really have overlooked something quite obvious, tell them in advance, invite them to be part of that discovery, put them on that paper. I published one paper where I didn't do that. It didn't even occur to me. And then years later I visited that person and I had dinner with him and he told me back then that was pretty painful and I went, wow, I hadn't even thought about it. And so that was definitely a big mistake. Science is done by people. And sometimes you think, hey, science has nothing to do with people. It's all objective. It's pretty wrong. Yeah, of course. So you were telling me that you found these all fossils and all started your collection back when you were around my age a bit younger. So back in that point in time, if you could, let's say, bend the laws of physics and take a time machine to any point in the geological past. Where would you go? And looking back now on the 30 years experience you've had, would that change? Oh, wow. It definitely would have changed a lot through time. Back then when I found this fossil, I would definitely would have gone back into the Middle Triassic to see what, you know, Germany looked like doing a cold, muscle calc seed that existed. I think I would have better goals now. But just having one point to go back to, that's bloody cruel. I don't think I could. I saw many things, I saw many burning questions and things I would like to see. The first one, of course, from my age of four, we had on our calox pecs every week a dinosaur. T-Rex. T-Rex. I want to see T-Rex. There's no question about it. Not for scientific curiosity. I just want to know whether that thing looked like in the 1970s when I first got to know about T-Rex, which was back then really looking like Elizabeth, raised a sharp, long teeth and was gray in color with warts and it had this red glowing eyes, or whether it looked like a big pink yellow chicken with a cockatoo crest, right? Which is now, you know, probably actually more likely. It probably looked pretty funny. I want to see T-Rex. So I need a tank or at least a big cage. I don't want to be eaten. But T-Rex is, yeah, being 20. I actually do not really recall where I would have gone. So where would I have gone? I think my interest been peaked through geobiology and stuff like that. Definitely into the early time, the rise of algae and that sort of period of time. I know it's the boring part, but it'd be cool to just see what life is like. The planet would like nothing living. The carboniferous would be pretty cool. The rainforests everywhere, just warm. Well, bring me one of those dragonflies. Yeah. Dragonflies. Or there was big spiders or there's three meter long millipedes. Okay, I'm not going back there anymore. Has it become more difficult in this day and age with the changing climate in the field that you're looking at, especially with these hydrocarbons? Because I'm not interested in the commercial part and what I do with these very ancient molecules is still very, very exciting. It hasn't become too difficult. It has generally become more difficult because the Australian Research Council has less money, wants to spend the money for more applied industrial research. So the total pool of money is shrinking, but the number of people asking for money is not. The success rates are dropping. So is it tougher if finding that as a... I'm pretty sure you will at some point ask the question about what's the things that are not so fun. Yes. And I can tell you that writing grant proposals will be for most scientists the most horrible part of the year. Either one thing I'm not interested about is writing about people and definitely not about myself. And then if you have to write about yourself how absolutely great you are and what you've achieved in the past and what you will achieve in the future in the next 10 years, you will make all these discoveries. It's nauseating. It's totally nauseating but you just got to do it. Okay, so you came into the future to talk to your future self. See how it's going. Science is fun. Science is super fun. Not we're getting one second. But will you change your decisions? Have you learned something where you think, oh, I'm going to do some things differently now? Well, it's been a pleasure to come and talk to my future self. I've learned lots of things, especially the process, the behind the scenes process that isn't really like portrayed to students, the writing, the grants to get the money and how that process goes. But I don't think so. I think the good and the interest of trying to find new things and increase the knowledge bank of the human race vastly outweighs the negative downside of having to find the time to put into writing these grants. And definitely you've broadened my horizon on the areas of science which you are into and which sound vastly amazingly interesting, which I would absolutely love to go in and look at. Following your footsteps, my future footsteps. Next to you? Yeah, awesome.