Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature

00:00:00.000 | Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous

00:00:05.520 | complexity.

00:00:06.200 | It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science,

00:00:10.020 | robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline based or

00:00:14.760 | rooted must be novel.

00:00:16.640 | If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with

00:00:22.220 | a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are

00:00:26.100 | bound to create something novel.

00:00:28.120 | The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist,

00:00:35.360 | designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and

00:00:39.680 | brilliant human beings I've ever gotten to know.

00:00:41.880 | For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and

00:00:47.640 | built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital

00:00:51.720 | fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales,

00:00:57.560 | from the micro scale to the building scale.

00:00:59.760 | Now she's continuing this work at a very new company for now called Oxman,

00:01:05.180 | looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products, working

00:01:10.160 | with nature, not against it.

00:01:12.200 | On a personal note, let me say that Neri has for a long time been a friend and

00:01:17.360 | someone who in my darker moments has always been there with a note of

00:01:21.320 | kindness and support.

00:01:22.600 | I am forever grateful to her.

00:01:25.600 | She's a brilliant and a beautiful human being.

00:01:28.160 | Oh, and she also brought me a present, War and Peace by Tolstoy and

00:01:35.120 | Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

00:01:37.240 | It doesn't get better than that.

00:01:39.120 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:41.680 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:44.840 | And now, dear friends, here's Neri Oxman.

00:01:48.520 | Let's start with the universe.

00:01:50.920 | You ever think of the universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful

00:01:54.640 | things at multiple scales?

00:01:56.280 | I do.

00:01:57.440 | And I think of nature in that way, in general, in the context of design

00:02:05.120 | specifically, I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomass,

00:02:12.040 | everything that is not produced by humankind, the birds and the rocks and

00:02:16.200 | everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales.

00:02:19.480 | Do you think there's an intricate ways in which there's a connection

00:02:22.520 | between humans and nature?

00:02:23.800 | Yes.

00:02:24.720 | And we're looking for it.

00:02:26.280 | I think that from, let's say, from the beginning of mankind, going back 200,000

00:02:33.280 | years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature.

00:02:39.160 | And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind,

00:02:44.200 | those are exactly the things that separated us.

00:02:46.800 | Before that, we were totally and completely connected.

00:02:50.880 | And I want to return to that world.

00:02:54.360 | But bring the tools of engineering and computation to it.

00:02:57.040 | Yes.

00:02:57.600 | Yes.

00:02:58.160 | I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not

00:03:04.680 | leveraged and we still have not understood.

00:03:07.400 | And so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and

00:03:13.800 | finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware of before.

00:03:22.120 | Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature

00:03:26.680 | has a kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence.

00:03:32.640 | And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.

00:03:37.680 | If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the

00:03:42.800 | context of definition of nature is everything but anthropomass, and I'm

00:03:49.720 | using Ron Milo, who is an incredible professor from the Weizmann Institute

00:03:54.200 | who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020, when he identified

00:04:00.240 | that 2020 was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet.

00:04:07.000 | So all of the design goods that we have created and brought into the world now

00:04:12.800 | outweigh all of the biomass, including of course, all plastics and wearables,

00:04:18.400 | building cities, but also asphalt and concrete, all outweigh the scale of the

00:04:24.920 | biomass, and actually that was a moment.

00:04:26.680 | You know how in life there are moments that, maybe a handful of moments that

00:04:31.520 | get you to course correct, and it was a Zoom conversation with Ron, and that

00:04:38.440 | was a moment for me when I realized that that imbalance, now we've superseded

00:04:46.640 | the biomass on the planet, where do we go from here?

00:04:49.560 | And you've heard the expression more phones than bones and the anthropomass

00:04:54.200 | and the anthropocene and the technosphere sort of outweighing the biosphere.

00:05:00.240 | But now we are really trying to look at is there a way in which all things

00:05:08.560 | technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere, meaning if you

00:05:14.520 | could today grow instead of build everything and anything, if you could

00:05:19.560 | grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what would that world look like?

00:05:24.640 | Where the Turing test for sort of this, this kind of, I call this material

00:05:29.920 | ecology approach, but this notion that everything material, everything that

00:05:34.000 | you design in the physical universe can be read and written to as, or thought

00:05:43.720 | of, or perceived of as nature grown.

00:05:45.680 | That's sort of the Turing test for the company, or at least that's how I started.

00:05:50.080 | I thought, well, grow everything.

00:05:51.880 | That's sort of the slogan.

00:05:52.840 | Let's grow everything.

00:05:54.320 | And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better

00:06:00.880 | for nature than a world in which there are no cars?

00:06:04.720 | Is there, is it possible that a world in which you build buildings and cities,

00:06:12.240 | that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature

00:06:15.880 | as opposed to their absence?

00:06:17.360 | Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature

00:06:23.640 | and humans, where you cannot separate between grown and made and it doesn't even matter?

00:06:29.560 | Is there a good term for the intersection between biomass and

00:06:34.080 | entropomass, like things that are grown?

00:06:36.040 | Yes.

00:06:36.760 | So in 2005, I called this material ecology.

00:06:40.000 | I thought, well, what if all things materials would be considered part of the

00:06:45.320 | ecology and would have an impact, a positive impact on the ecology, where we

00:06:50.480 | work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human.

00:06:54.000 | And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi.

00:06:58.000 | Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here saying, well, we have the

00:07:03.880 | mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected.

00:07:08.560 | And why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms?

00:07:11.920 | Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops

00:07:16.640 | when there is a physical gap.

00:07:18.080 | That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect

00:07:25.280 | with an olive tree in Israel, to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.

00:07:28.200 | And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about.

00:07:31.040 | What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud?

00:07:36.640 | The kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think Neuralink for

00:07:40.040 | nature, you know, since the first computer, and you know this by heart

00:07:48.240 | probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers, we today have computational

00:07:54.440 | power that is 1 trillion times the power that we had in those times.

00:07:59.720 | We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times

00:08:11.080 | the memory, which is incredible.

00:08:13.480 | So humankind, since the first computer has approached and accessed

00:08:19.680 | such incredible bandwidth.

00:08:21.280 | And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth?

00:08:24.760 | So beyond genes and evolution, if there was a way to augment nature and allow

00:08:31.240 | it access to the world of bits, what does nature look like now?

00:08:35.320 | And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided

00:08:41.480 | and guarded and abused by humankind?

00:08:45.120 | So nature has this inherent wisdom that you spoke to, but you're also

00:08:50.200 | referring to augmenting that inherent wisdom with something

00:08:54.480 | like a large language model.

00:08:55.800 | Exactly.

00:08:56.800 | So compress human knowledge, but also maintain whatever is that intricate

00:09:02.040 | wisdom that allows plants, bacteria, fungi to grow incredible things at

00:09:07.840 | arbitrary scales, adapting to whatever environment and just surviving and

00:09:12.280 | thriving no matter where, no matter how.

00:09:14.360 | Exactly.

00:09:15.000 | So I think of it as large molecule models and those large molecule models,

00:09:19.960 | of course, large language models are based on Google and search

00:09:25.080 | engines and so on and so forth.

00:09:26.680 | And we don't have this data currently.

00:09:30.120 | And part of our mission is to do just that.

00:09:32.960 | Trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all

00:09:41.480 | kingdoms of life, across all five kingdoms of life.

00:09:43.840 | And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make

00:09:49.640 | sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools

00:09:54.440 | that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity.

00:10:01.720 | In the company, we're constantly asking, what does nature want?

00:10:05.680 | Like, what does nature want from a compute view?

00:10:11.720 | If it knew it, what could aid it in whatever the heck it's wanting to do?

00:10:15.520 | Yeah.

00:10:16.080 | So we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase

00:10:22.200 | information, but decrease entropy, right?

00:10:26.600 | So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.

00:10:30.520 | And this is true for what our work also tries to do, because we're constantly

00:10:35.640 | trying to fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things

00:10:40.560 | grown, right?

00:10:41.600 | And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y, and Z, and that's pretty

00:10:45.680 | much where architectural education ends and biological education begins.

00:10:50.560 | So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities

00:10:54.600 | to create things made as if grown.

00:10:56.120 | But in the natural environment, we're asking, can we provide nature

00:11:01.120 | with these extra dimensions?

00:11:02.960 | And again, I'm not sure what nature wants, but I'm curious as to what happens

00:11:10.120 | when you provide these tools to the natural environments, obviously with

00:11:13.520 | responsibility, obviously with control, obviously with ethics and moral code.

00:11:18.560 | But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?

00:11:25.840 | And by the way, we're talking about a company called Oxman.

00:11:29.960 | Yeah.

00:11:30.480 | I'll just, just a few words about the team.

00:11:32.720 | Yeah.

00:11:33.080 | What kind of humans work at a place like this that are trying to

00:11:36.200 | figure out what nature wants?

00:11:37.160 | You know, I think they're first like you.

00:11:38.960 | They're, they're humanists first.

00:11:40.640 | They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds.

00:11:45.920 | And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a

00:11:50.800 | mathematical genius and a computer scientist and a mechanical engineer

00:11:55.000 | who is trained as a synthetic biologist.

00:11:59.120 | And, and now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist, architects, of course,

00:12:06.320 | and designers, a roboticist.

00:12:08.840 | So it's really, it's Noah's Ark, right?

00:12:12.280 | Two of each.

00:12:12.920 | And always dancing between this line of the artificial, the

00:12:16.760 | synthetic and the, and the real.

00:12:18.520 | What's the term for, and the natural.

00:12:20.720 | Yeah.

00:12:21.120 | The built and the grown, nature and culture, technology and biology.

00:12:25.000 | But we're, we're, we're constantly seeking to, to ask how can we build,

00:12:30.120 | design and deploy products in three scales, the molecular scale, which

00:12:36.080 | I briefly hinted to, and there, and the molecular scale, we're really

00:12:41.640 | looking to understand whether there is a universal language to nature

00:12:46.480 | and what that language is, and then build, build a tool that I think and

00:12:52.760 | dream of it as the iPhone for nature.

00:12:54.480 | If nature had an iPhone, what would that iPhone look like?

00:12:59.440 | Does that mean creating an interface?

00:13:02.760 | Yeah.

00:13:04.000 | Between nature and the computational tools we have.

00:13:06.920 | Exactly.

00:13:07.520 | It goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that, that humans

00:13:12.200 | have, have, have now arrived at and, and giving that to nature and seeing

00:13:16.880 | what, you know, what, what happens there.

00:13:18.600 | Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire?

00:13:25.160 | Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis

00:13:29.040 | in the presence of a smoke cloud?

00:13:31.600 | Can they do this quote unquote automatically without a kind of a top

00:13:35.240 | down brute force policy based method that's authored and deployed by humans?

00:13:42.040 | And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world.

00:13:45.440 | And then there's a second area in the company, which focuses on growing products.

00:13:50.760 | And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2.

00:13:56.880 | It becomes a product it's consumed, it's used, it's worn.

00:14:01.800 | By a human.

00:14:02.920 | And then it, goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant.

00:14:09.920 | So we're talking about from CO2 to fruit.

00:14:12.480 | Yeah.

00:14:13.160 | It starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can like literally eat.

00:14:16.960 | So, so the world's first, entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, biorenewable product.

00:14:23.920 | That's grown.

00:14:24.960 | Yes.

00:14:25.960 | Either using plant matter or using bacteria.

00:14:29.240 | But we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or

00:14:34.320 | wastewater.

00:14:35.240 | And end with this wonderful reincarnation of a, a thing that doesn't need to end up in a

00:14:43.600 | composting site, but can just be thrown into the ground and grow olive and find peace.

00:14:49.040 | And there's a lot of textile based work out there that is focused on one single element in

00:14:54.560 | this long chain, like, oh, let's create, you know, leather out of mycelium or, or let's

00:15:00.920 | create textile out of cellulose.

00:15:03.200 | But then it stops there and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable and you,

00:15:08.000 | and you, you need a little bit of glue and you need a little bit of this material and a

00:15:11.760 | little bit of that material to, to make it water resistant.

00:15:14.960 | And then it's over.

00:15:15.800 | So that's one thing that we're trying to solve for is how to create a product that is

00:15:21.520 | materially, computationally, robotically novel and goes through all of these phases from

00:15:27.920 | the creation, from this carbon recycling technology to, to the product to literally

00:15:34.640 | how do you think about, you know, reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and

00:15:40.920 | putting things together and using humans to do that.

00:15:44.160 | Can that, you know, can that happen just using robots and microbes and that's it.

00:15:48.760 | And doing it end to end.

00:15:50.040 | I would love to see what this factory looks like.

00:15:53.160 | And the factory is great too.

00:15:55.560 | I'm, I'm very, very excited.

00:15:57.000 | In October, we'll, we'll share first, first renditions of, of, of some of this work.

00:16:02.840 | And in February, we'll, we'll invite you to the lab.

00:16:05.240 | I'm there.

00:16:06.120 | I've already applied.

00:16:08.440 | I can't, I haven't heard back.

00:16:09.440 | I don't understand.

00:16:10.160 | Okay.

00:16:11.160 | I mean, it's just before we get to number three, it'd be amazing to just talk about

00:16:16.160 | what it takes with robotic arms or in general, the whole process of how to build the life

00:16:21.920 | form, stuff you've done in the past, maybe stuff you're doing now, how to use bacteria,

00:16:25.800 | it's kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria.

00:16:30.440 | Is there examples from the past?

00:16:31.720 | Yes.

00:16:32.520 | And just take a step back over the 10 years, the Mediated Matter Group, which was my

00:16:37.000 | group at MIT, has sort of dedicated itself to, bio-based design would be a suitcase

00:16:44.800 | word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology

00:16:49.600 | and technology, and we attempted to build a suite of embodiments, let's say, that

00:16:55.200 | they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows and, and we wrote patents

00:17:00.400 | and papers on them, but they were still N of ones.

00:17:03.840 | Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them and we classified them into

00:17:09.000 | fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments.

00:17:13.280 | And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used

00:17:16.760 | fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees and, or comb

00:17:21.120 | as the structural material, with vespers we used synthetically engineered bacteria

00:17:26.320 | to produce pigments, although the materials were different and the hero organisms

00:17:30.720 | were different, the philosophy was always the same.

00:17:32.640 | The approach was really an approach of computational templating.

00:17:36.520 | That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment

00:17:41.720 | where nature and technology could duet, could dance together to create these

00:17:48.320 | products.

00:17:48.680 | So just as a few examples with a silk pavilion, we've had a couple of pavilions

00:17:54.080 | made of silk and the second one, which was the bigger one, which ended up at the

00:17:59.000 | Museum of Modern Art with my friend and incredible mentor, Paolo Antonelli, that

00:18:04.320 | pavilion was six meter tall and it was produced by silkworms.

00:18:08.960 | And there we had different types of templates.

00:18:12.600 | There were physical templates that were basically just these water soluble meshes

00:18:16.720 | upon which the silkworms were spinning.

00:18:19.080 | And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically

00:18:22.920 | applying a variation of environmental conditions, such as heat and light to

00:18:27.880 | guide the movement of the silkworm.

00:18:29.240 | - You're saying so many amazing things and I'm trying not to interrupt you, but

00:18:32.360 | like one of the things you've learned by observing, by doing science on these is

00:18:37.800 | that the environment defines the shape that they create or contributes or

00:18:43.240 | intricately plays with the shape they create.

00:18:44.960 | And so like, and you get to, that's one of the ways you can get to guide their

00:18:48.800 | work is by defining that environment.

00:18:51.680 | By the way, you said hero organism, which is an epic term.

00:18:54.800 | That means like, is whatever is the biological living system that's doing the

00:19:00.160 | creation.

00:19:00.760 | - And that's what's happening in pharma and biomaterials.

00:19:03.760 | And by the way, precision ag and food, new food design technologies as people are

00:19:08.760 | betting on a hero organism is the sort of how I think of it.

00:19:12.680 | And the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or it's the mycelium.

00:19:19.920 | There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad and it's cellulose or it's,

00:19:26.160 | you know, fake bananas or the workhorse E.coli.

00:19:29.840 | But these hero organisms are being betted on as like the, what's the one answer

00:19:36.480 | that solves everything?

00:19:37.440 | Hitchhiker's Guide?

00:19:38.600 | - 42.

00:19:39.200 | - 42.

00:19:39.720 | - Yeah.

00:19:40.040 | - These are sort of the 42s of, you know, of the enchanted new universe.

00:19:44.440 | And back at MIT, we said, instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's

00:19:51.640 | approach them as almost like movement in a symphony.

00:19:54.280 | And let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the

00:19:59.400 | context of building a project in an architectural scale.

00:20:03.280 | And those usually were pavilions.

00:20:04.960 | - And then the computational templating is the way you guide the work of this.

00:20:10.880 | How many did you say?

00:20:11.880 | 17,000?

00:20:12.720 | - 17,532.

00:20:15.040 | So each of these silkworms threads are about, you know, one mile in distance.

00:20:20.880 | And they're beautiful.

00:20:22.680 | And just thinking about the amount of material, you know, it's a bit like

00:20:28.080 | thinking about the, you know, the length of capillary vessels that grow in your

00:20:34.400 | belly when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form.

00:20:38.160 | It's just, nature is amazing.

00:20:40.720 | But back to the silkworms, I think I had three months to build this incredible

00:20:46.080 | pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how, we were thinking of emulating the process

00:20:52.200 | of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon over

00:20:56.400 | the period of 24 to 72 hours.

00:20:58.840 | And it builds a cocoon basically to protect itself.

00:21:03.000 | It's a beautiful form of architecture and it uses pretty much just two materials, two

00:21:08.920 | chemical compounds, sericin and fibrin.

00:21:11.760 | The sericin is sort of the glue of the cocoon.

00:21:14.760 | The fibrin is the fiber-based material of the cocoon and through fibers and glue,

00:21:19.040 | and that's true for so many systems in nature, lots of fiber and glue.

00:21:23.080 | And that architecture allows them to metamorphosize.

00:21:26.840 | And in the process, they vary the properties of that silk thread.

00:21:31.320 | So it's stiffer or softer depending on where it is in the section of the cocoon.

00:21:36.480 | And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was a

00:21:42.560 | six-axis kooka arm, one of these baby kookas.

00:21:45.800 | And we're trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very

00:21:49.000 | large when one of my students now, a brilliant industrial engineer, a

00:21:53.840 | roboticist on my team, Marcus, said, "Well, you know, we were just playing with

00:21:58.800 | those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realized that if they're

00:22:04.040 | placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon.

00:22:11.600 | Only the cocoon would be flat."

00:22:15.560 | Because they're constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that

00:22:20.280 | post as an anchor to spin the cocoon.

00:22:23.160 | But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less than 21

00:22:29.200 | millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches.

00:22:33.240 | And we say, "Aha, let's work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat

00:22:41.480 | patches." And a silkworm, mind you, is quite an egocentric creature.

00:22:47.000 | And actually, the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution by natural

00:22:52.240 | selection, the more egoism you find in creatures.

00:22:57.720 | So when you think about termites, right, their material sophistication is

00:23:04.400 | actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and

00:23:08.960 | connect with each other.

00:23:09.720 | So if you think about the entire, all of nature, let's say all of living

00:23:14.000 | systems as like a matrix that runs across two axes, one is material

00:23:19.240 | sophistication, which is terribly irrelevant for designers, and the other

00:23:22.960 | is communication.

00:23:23.920 | The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap,

00:23:30.840 | right?

00:23:31.120 | It's just saliva and feces and some soil particles that are built to create

00:23:36.040 | these incredible termite mounds at the scale that, when compared to human

00:23:40.200 | skyscrapers, transcend all of buildable scales, at least in terms of what we

00:23:46.280 | have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the

00:23:49.440 | termite.

00:23:49.880 | But when you look at the silkworm, the silkworm has zero connection and

00:23:54.520 | communication across silkworms.

00:23:56.400 | They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other.

00:23:59.040 | They're sort of a human-designed species because the domesticated silk

00:24:05.560 | moth creates the cocoon.

00:24:07.680 | We then produce the silk of it and then it dies.

00:24:11.400 | So it has dysfunctional wings.

00:24:14.320 | It cannot fly.

00:24:15.160 | It's not, so, and that's another problem that the sericulture industry has is

00:24:22.600 | why did we in the first place author this organism 4,000 years ago that is

00:24:27.720 | unable to fly and is just there to basically live as, to serve a human

00:24:35.520 | need, which is textiles.

00:24:36.760 | And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of biology

00:24:41.680 | dimension of silkworms, but along the way, by the way, this is great.

00:24:45.880 | I never get to tell the full story.

00:24:47.360 | I'm so great.

00:24:48.000 | I'm enjoying this so much.

00:24:49.360 | I always, I'm always, like people say, I always speak in Nietzschean

00:24:53.440 | paragraphs, they're way too long and this is wonderful.

00:24:56.000 | This is like heaven.

00:24:56.760 | Nietzschean paragraphs.

00:24:57.760 | You drop me so many good lines.

00:25:00.480 | I love it.

00:25:00.840 | Okay.

00:25:01.280 | But, but, but really those, those silkworms are not, yes, they're not

00:25:05.480 | designed to be like humans, right?

00:25:07.680 | They're not designed to connect, communicate and build things that are

00:25:10.360 | bigger than themselves through connection and communication.

00:25:13.320 | So what happens when you had 17,000 of them communicating effectively?

00:25:16.640 | That's a really great question.

00:25:18.320 | What happens is that at some point the templating strategies, and as you said

00:25:25.080 | correctly, there were geometrical templating, material templating,

00:25:28.840 | environmental templating, chemical templating, if you're using pheromones

00:25:32.160 | to guide the movement of bees in the absence of a queen, where you have a

00:25:36.520 | robotic queen, but whenever you have these templating strategies, you have

00:25:42.680 | sort of control over nature, right?

00:25:44.960 | But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating,

00:25:48.680 | from providing these computational material and immaterial, physical and

00:25:54.080 | molecular platforms that guide nature, almost guiding a product, almost like a

00:25:59.200 | gardener, to a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that biological

00:26:04.800 | organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying,

00:26:11.440 | now I own the code, I get to do what I want with this code.

00:26:14.880 | Let me show you what this pavilion may look like, or this product may look like.

00:26:18.280 | And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realized that these

00:26:23.040 | robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired,

00:26:28.960 | if I may, a kind of a collaboration and cooperation between silkworms that

00:26:35.720 | are not a swarm-based organism.

00:26:38.760 | They're not like the bees and the termites.

00:26:40.480 | They don't work together and they don't have, you know, social orders amongst

00:26:45.320 | them, the queen and the drones, et cetera.

00:26:47.240 | They're all the same in a way, right?

00:26:51.160 | And here, what was so exciting for us is that these computational and

00:26:56.000 | fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to sort of, to kind of hop from

00:27:03.600 | the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of maybe human-like

00:27:09.440 | intelligence, where they could connect and communicate by virtue of, you know,

00:27:14.600 | feeling or rubbing against each other in an area that was hotter or colder.

00:27:19.320 | And they were, so the product that we got at the end, the variation of density of

00:27:23.560 | fiber and the distribution of the fiber and the transparency, the product at the

00:27:29.120 | end seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community, but of course it wasn't.

00:27:35.280 | It's a bunch of biological agents working together to assemble this thing.

00:27:38.960 | That's really, really fascinating to us.

00:27:40.960 | How can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior in creatures that

00:27:50.120 | have not been designed to work as swarms?

00:27:53.600 | So how do you construct a computational template from which a certain kind of

00:28:00.960 | thing emerges?

00:28:01.760 | So how can you predict what emerges, I suppose?

00:28:04.840 | So if you can predict it, it doesn't count as emergence.

00:28:09.360 | Actually, I think...

00:28:11.000 | That's a deeply poetic line.

00:28:13.480 | We can talk about it.

00:28:14.720 | I mean...

00:28:15.480 | It's a bit like if you measure it, it doesn't count.

00:28:17.800 | Right, right.

00:28:19.080 | Speaking of emergence and empowerment, because we're constantly moving between

00:28:26.880 | those as if they're equals on the team.

00:28:29.640 | And one of them, Christoph, shared with me a mathematical equation for what does it

00:28:35.200 | mean to empower nature and what does empowerment in nature look like?

00:28:39.440 | And that relates to emergence and we can go back to emergence in a few moments,

00:28:44.920 | but I want to say it so that I know that I've learned it.

00:28:48.800 | And if I've learned it, I can use it later.

00:28:53.400 | Yeah.

00:28:53.720 | And maybe you'll figure something out as you say it also.

00:28:56.760 | Of course Christoph is the master here, but really we were thinking, again,

00:29:03.080 | what does nature want?

00:29:04.000 | Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy.

00:29:10.480 | What do we want?

00:29:12.480 | We kind of want the same thing.

00:29:14.400 | We want more, but we want order, right?

00:29:18.560 | And this goes back to your conversation with Yosha about stochastic versus

00:29:23.720 | deterministic languages or processes.

00:29:26.400 | His definition or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered if the

00:29:36.520 | entropy of the distribution of all of its states is high, while the entropy of the

00:29:43.560 | distribution of a single state given a choice, given an action is low.

00:29:49.920 | Meaning it's that kind of duality between opportunity, like starting like this and

00:29:57.800 | going like this, opening and closing.

00:29:59.840 | And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment.

00:30:04.080 | Given an infinite, wide array of choices, what is the choice that you make to enable,

00:30:14.200 | to empower, to provide you with the agency that you need?

00:30:18.960 | - And how much does that, making that choice actually control the trajectory

00:30:23.120 | of the system?

00:30:23.720 | That's really nice.

00:30:24.480 | So this applies to all the kinds of systems you're talking about.

00:30:27.840 | - Yeah.

00:30:28.400 | And the cool thing is it can apply to a human on an individual basis, but, or a

00:30:34.240 | silkworm or a bee or a microbe, a microbe that has agency or by virtue of a template.

00:30:41.880 | But it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees.

00:30:46.520 | And so we've done a lot of work sort of moving from, you've asked how to grow

00:30:50.520 | things, so we've grown things using co-fabrication where we're digitally

00:30:57.880 | fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life.

00:31:03.360 | And those were silkworms and bees.

00:31:06.480 | And with bees, which we've sent to outer space and returned healthily

00:31:12.800 | and they were reproductive.

00:31:14.640 | - Okay, you're going to have to tell that story.

00:31:16.040 | You're going to have to talk about the robotic queen and the pheromones.

00:31:18.640 | Come on.

00:31:19.040 | - So we've built what we call a synthetic apiary and the synthetic apiary was

00:31:24.880 | designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees

00:31:31.440 | of Massachusetts.

00:31:32.400 | They go in hibernation, of course, during the winter season.

00:31:35.640 | And then we lose 80% of them or more during that period.

00:31:39.560 | We're thinking, okay, what if we created this environment where before you

00:31:45.120 | template, right, before you can design with, you have to design for, right?

00:31:49.680 | You have to create this space of mutualism, space of sort of shared

00:31:55.080 | connection between you and the organism.

00:31:57.840 | And with bees, it started as the synthetic apiary.

00:32:00.200 | And we have proven that that curated environment where we designed the space

00:32:06.520 | with high levels of control of temperature, humidity, and light, and we've

00:32:11.920 | proven that they were reproductive and alive and we realized, wow, this

00:32:16.280 | environment that we created can help augment bees in the winter season in any

00:32:22.960 | city around the world where bees survive and thrive in the summer and spring

00:32:28.560 | seasons, and could this be a kind of a new urban typology, an architectural

00:32:32.840 | typology of symbiosis, of mutualism between organisms and humans where these

00:32:37.640 | By the way, the synthetic apiary was in a co-op in, you know, nearby Somerville.

00:32:42.200 | We had, you know, we had robots, our team, you know, schlepped there every day

00:32:47.400 | with our, with our tools and machines and we made it happen and the neighbors

00:32:51.320 | were very happy and they got to get a ton of honey at the end of the winter.

00:32:54.880 | And those bees, of course, were released into the wild at the end

00:32:59.160 | of the winter, alive and kicking.

00:33:00.920 | So then in order to actually experiment with the robotic queen idea or concept,

00:33:08.160 | we had to prove obviously that we can create this space for bees.

00:33:13.640 | And then after that, we had this amazing opportunity to send the bees to space

00:33:18.320 | on Blue Shepard mission that is part of Blue Origin and we of course said,

00:33:23.120 | yes, we'll take a slot.

00:33:24.320 | We said, okay, can we outdo NASA?

00:33:26.440 | So NASA in 1982 had an experiment where they sent bees to outer space.

00:33:32.040 | The bees returned, they were not reproductive and some of them died.

00:33:38.720 | And we thought, well, is there a way in which we can create a life support

00:33:43.600 | system, almost like a small mini biolab of a queen and her retinue that would be

00:33:49.880 | sent in this Blue Origin New Shepard mission in this one cell and so that's,

00:33:56.000 | if the synthetic apiary was an architectural project, in this case,

00:33:59.440 | this second synthetic apiary was a product.

00:34:02.120 | It was right.

00:34:03.000 | So from an architectural controlled environment to a product scale

00:34:07.840 | controlled environment.

00:34:08.560 | And this biolab, this life support system for bees was designed to provide the bees

00:34:15.160 | with all the conditions that they needed.

00:34:17.760 | And we looked at that time at the Nassanove pheromone that the queen uses

00:34:24.280 | to guide the other bees and we looked at pheromones that are associated with a bee

00:34:29.000 | and thinking of those pheromones being released inside the capsules that go,

00:34:33.320 | the capsule that goes to outer space.

00:34:35.000 | They returned back to our, the Media Lab roof and those bees were alive and

00:34:42.240 | kicking and reproductive and, you know, and they continued to create comb and it

00:34:48.760 | ended with a beautiful nature paper that the team and I published together.

00:34:54.360 | We gave them gold nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles because we were

00:34:58.640 | interested if bees recycle wax.

00:35:01.240 | It was known forever that bees do not recycle the wax and by feeding them these

00:35:07.680 | gold nanoparticles, we were able to prove that the bees actually do recycle the wax.

00:35:14.400 | The reason I'm bringing this forward is because we don't view ourselves as

00:35:20.640 | designers of consumable products and architectural environments only, but we

00:35:26.360 | love that moment where these technologies and by the way, every one of these

00:35:30.480 | projects that we created involved the creation of a new technology, whether it

00:35:35.640 | be a glass printer or the spinning robot or the life support system for the bee

00:35:43.040 | colony, they all involved a technology that was associated with the project.

00:35:47.720 | And I never, ever, ever, ever want to let that part go because I love, love

00:35:51.600 | technology so much.

00:35:52.680 | But also another element of this is it always, these projects, if they're great,

00:35:59.480 | they reveal new knowledge about, or new science about the topic that you're

00:36:05.960 | investigating, be it, you know, silkworms or bees or glass.

00:36:11.400 | That's why I say, I always tell my team, it should be at MoMA and the cover of

00:36:15.360 | Nature or Science at the same time.

00:36:16.920 | We don't separate between the art and the science.

00:36:19.040 | It's, it's, it's, it's one of the same.

00:36:20.760 | So as you're creating the art, you're going to learn something about these

00:36:24.600 | organisms or something about these materials.

00:36:26.600 | I mean, is there something that stands out to you about these hero organisms

00:36:30.040 | like bees, silkworms, you mentioned E.

00:36:32.440 | coli has its pros and cons, this bacteria.

00:36:35.480 | What have you learned that small or big that's interesting about these organisms?

00:36:41.040 | Yeah, that's a beautiful question.

00:36:43.680 | What have I learned?

00:36:45.200 | I've learned that, you know, we did, we also worked with shrimp shells with

00:36:51.320 | Agroxa, we built this tower on the roof of SF MoMA, which by a couple of months

00:36:56.680 | ago, and until it was on the roof, we we've shown the structure completely

00:37:01.240 | biodegrade into then, well, not completely, but almost completely

00:37:04.560 | biodegrade to the soil.

00:37:06.680 | And, and this notion that a product or part, an organism or part of that

00:37:14.320 | organism can reincarnate is very, very moving thought to me, because I want

00:37:21.400 | to believe that I believe in reincarnation.

00:37:23.400 | I want to believe that I believe.

00:37:25.720 | Yeah, that's my relationship with God.

00:37:28.120 | I want to, I want, I like to believe in believing.

00:37:30.880 | Most great things in life are second derivatives of things, but that's

00:37:37.080 | part of another conversation.

00:37:38.720 | I feel like that's a quote that's going to take weeks to really internalize.

00:37:43.080 | That notion of, "I want you to want," or "I need you to need," or that there's

00:37:50.120 | always something, a deeper truth behind what is on the surface.

00:37:53.960 | And so I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and

00:37:59.880 | discover new truths about them through that.

00:38:02.040 | But what have I learned about organisms?

00:38:04.720 | And why don't you like E. coli?

00:38:07.080 | I like E. coli, and a lot of the work that we've done was not possible without

00:38:13.520 | our working on E. coli or other workhorse organisms like cyanobacteria.

00:38:19.200 | How are bacteria used?

00:38:20.440 | Death masks, the death masks.

00:38:22.920 | So what are death masks?

00:38:24.200 | So we did this project called Vespers, and those were basically death masks

00:38:29.560 | that was set as a process for designing a living product.

00:38:34.720 | What happens, and we looked at, I looked at, I remember looking at Beethoven's

00:38:39.400 | death mask and Agamemnon's death mask and just studying how they were created.

00:38:44.240 | And really they were sort of geometrically attuned to the face of the dead.

00:38:49.160 | And what we wanted to do is create a death mask that was not based on the

00:38:55.600 | shape of the wearer, but rather was based on their legacy and their biology.

00:39:02.600 | And maybe we could harness a few stem cells there for future generations

00:39:08.360 | or contain the last breath.

00:39:10.640 | Lazarus, which preceded Vespers, was a project where we designed a mask to

00:39:15.440 | contain a single breath, the last breath of the wearer.

00:39:18.840 | And again, if I had access to these technologies today, I would totally

00:39:23.760 | reincorporate my grandmother's last breath in a product.

00:39:29.600 | So it was like an air memento.

00:39:31.400 | So with Vespers, we actually used E. coli to create pigmented masks, masks

00:39:41.280 | whose pigments would be recreated at the surface of the mask.

00:39:45.960 | And I'm skipping over a lot of content, but basically there were 15 masks and

00:39:53.080 | they were created as three sets, the masks of the past, the mask of the

00:39:57.160 | present and the mask of the future.

00:40:00.120 | The masks, there were five, five and five and the masks of the past were based on

00:40:04.120 | ornaments and they were embedded with natural minerals like gold.

00:40:12.280 | Yes, yes, yes.

00:40:13.560 | And we're looking at pictures of these and they're gorgeous.

00:40:15.720 | Yes.

00:40:16.440 | Extremely delicate and interesting fractal patterns that are symmetrical.

00:40:23.440 | They look symmetrical, but they're not.

00:40:26.000 | This is, we intended for you to be tricked and think that they're all symmetrical.

00:40:31.800 | But there's imperfections.

00:40:32.960 | There are imperfections by design.

00:40:35.040 | All of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you're

00:40:43.200 | looking at was entirely designed using a computational program.

00:40:47.960 | So none of it is manual.

00:40:49.520 | But long story short, the first collection is about the surface of

00:40:55.880 | the mask and the second collection, which you're looking at, is about

00:40:58.960 | the volume of the mask and what happens to the mask when all the colors from

00:41:03.760 | the surface, yes, enter the volume of the mask inside, create pockets and

00:41:09.080 | channels to guide life through them.

00:41:11.320 | They were incorporated with pigment producing living organisms.

00:41:15.760 | And then those organisms were templated to recreate the patterns

00:41:20.840 | of the original death masks.

00:41:22.800 | And so life recycles and rebegins and so on and so forth.

00:41:26.760 | The past meets the future, the future meets the past.

00:41:29.240 | From the surface to the volume, from death to life, to death, to life, to

00:41:34.080 | death, to life, and that again is a recurring theme in the projects that we

00:41:38.880 | take on, but there, from a technological perspective, what was interesting is

00:41:44.040 | that we embedded chemical signals in the jet, in the printer, and those chemical

00:41:49.120 | signals basically interacted with the pigment producing bacteria, in this

00:41:58.160 | case E. coli, that were introduced on the surface of the mask and those

00:42:02.680 | interactions between the chemical signals inside the resins and the

00:42:08.200 | bacteria at the surface of the mask at the resolution that is native to the

00:42:12.800 | printer, in this case 20 microns per voxel, allowed us to compute the exact

00:42:19.320 | patterns that we wanted to achieve.

00:42:21.040 | And we thought, well, if we can do this with pigments, can we do this with

00:42:24.760 | antibiotics?

00:42:25.520 | If we can do this with antibiotics, could we do it with melanin?

00:42:28.240 | And what are the implications?

00:42:29.880 | Again, this is a platform technology.

00:42:31.840 | Now that we have it, what are the actual real world implications and potential

00:42:37.600 | applications for this technology?

00:42:41.280 | And we started a new area.

00:42:43.400 | One of my students, Rachel, her PhD thesis was titled after this new class of

00:42:51.760 | materials that we created through this project Vespers, hybrid living materials,

00:42:56.000 | HLMs, and these hybrid living materials really paved the way towards a whole

00:43:03.640 | other set of products that we've designed, like the work that we did with

00:43:09.000 | melanin for the Mandela pavilion that we presented at SFMOMA, where again, we're

00:43:14.360 | using the same principles of templating, in this case, not silkworms and not bees,

00:43:19.120 | but we're templating bacteria at a much, much, much more finer resolution.

00:43:26.920 | And now instead of templating using a robot, we're templating using a printer.

00:43:32.240 | But compute is very, very much part of it.

00:43:35.000 | And what's nice about bacteria, of course, is that from an ethical

00:43:40.760 | perspective, I think there's a range, right?

00:43:43.440 | So at the end of the silk pavilion, I got an email from a professor in Japan who

00:43:48.000 | has been working on transgenic silk and said, well, if you did this, this

00:43:52.400 | create amazing silk pavilion, why don't we create glow in the light silk dresses?

00:43:59.440 | And in order to create this glow in the light silk, we need to apply genes that

00:44:09.200 | are taken from a spider to a silkworm.

00:44:11.480 | And this is what is known as a transgenic operation.

00:44:15.040 | And we said, no.

00:44:16.240 | And that was for us a clear decision that no, we will work with these organisms

00:44:22.960 | as long as we know that what we are doing with them is not only better for

00:44:28.640 | humans, but it's also better for them.

00:44:31.040 | And again, just to remind you where, I forget the exact number, but it's around

00:44:37.480 | a thousand cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in India and China and

00:44:43.600 | we're in those sericulture industries that are being abused.

00:44:48.720 | Now, yes, this organism was designed to serve the human species and maybe we

00:44:58.360 | should, maybe it's time to retire that conception of organisms that are designed

00:45:07.720 | for a human centric world or human centric set of applications.

00:45:11.240 | I don't feel the same way about E.

00:45:13.520 | coli.

00:45:14.040 | Not that I'm agnostic, organism agnostic, but still I believe there's so much for

00:45:21.800 | us to do on this planet with bacteria.

00:45:26.080 | And so in general, your design principle is to grow cool stuff as a byproduct of

00:45:32.600 | the organism flourishing.

00:45:34.080 | So not using the organism.

00:45:36.480 | The win-win, the synergy.

00:45:37.880 | A whole that's bigger than the sum of its parts.

00:45:39.760 | It's interesting.

00:45:40.720 | I mean, it just feels like a gray area where genetic modification of an organism.

00:45:46.960 | It just feels like, I don't know, if you genetically modified me to make me glow

00:45:55.880 | in the light, I kind of like it.

00:45:59.240 | I think you have enough of an aura.

00:46:00.640 | Aura, thank you.

00:46:01.600 | That was, I was just fishing for compliments.

00:46:03.680 | Thank you.

00:46:04.160 | I appreciate it so much.

00:46:05.000 | But you're absolutely right.

00:46:05.760 | And by the way, the gray area is where some of us like to live and like to thrive.

00:46:11.480 | And that's okay.

00:46:12.640 | And thank goodness that there's so many of us that like the black and white

00:46:17.280 | and that thrive in the black and white.

00:46:19.120 | My husband is a good example for that.

00:46:21.400 | Well, but just to clarify, in this case, you're also trying to thrive in the

00:46:25.480 | black and white in that you're saying like the silkworm is a beautiful,

00:46:30.680 | wonderful creature, let us not modify it.

00:46:33.440 | Is that the idea or is it okay to modify a little bit as long as we can see that

00:46:38.440 | it benefits the organism as well as the final creation?

00:46:41.400 | So with silkworms, absolutely, let's not modify it genetically.

00:46:45.440 | Let's not modify it genetically.

00:46:47.680 | And then some, because why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in

00:46:54.760 | the Silk Road and we should never get to a point where we evolve life for the

00:47:00.640 | service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the kingdom

00:47:08.360 | of life, I don't think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about

00:47:15.040 | bacteria.

00:47:15.640 | Nevertheless, bacteria are pretty wonderful organisms.

00:47:18.560 | I'm moving to my second cup here.

00:47:20.040 | Take two.

00:47:21.560 | Things are getting serious now.

00:47:23.560 | Bacteria are, yeah, for sure.

00:47:25.560 | Let's give bacteria all the love they deserve.

00:47:27.600 | We wouldn't be here without them.

00:47:28.760 | They were here for, I don't know what it is, like a billion years before anything

00:47:32.200 | else showed up?

00:47:32.600 | But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume and

00:47:37.120 | then reincarnates or dissolves into the soil and then creates a tree and then

00:47:45.280 | that tree creates more bacteria.

00:47:46.760 | And then that bacteria, I mean, again, that's why I like to think about not

00:47:52.000 | recycling, but reincarnating because that assumes a kind of imparting upon nature

00:47:58.360 | that dimension of agency and maybe awareness.

00:48:03.200 | But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria.

00:48:07.000 | Directed evolution is one of them.

00:48:10.560 | We're looking at directed evolution, so high throughput directed evolution of

00:48:16.880 | bacteria for the production of products.

00:48:19.600 | And again, those products can be a shoe, wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics.

00:48:25.120 | And doing that direction computationally.

00:48:27.360 | Totally computationally, obviously in the lab with the hero organism, the hero

00:48:32.960 | bacteria.

00:48:33.400 | And what's happening today in ecromicrobial synthetic biology, synthetic

00:48:41.120 | biology that lends itself to ecology.

00:48:43.120 | And again, all of these fields are coming together.

00:48:45.320 | It's such a wonderful time to be a designer.

00:48:48.160 | I can't think of a better time to be a designer in this world.

00:48:50.960 | But with high throughput directed evolution, and I should say that the

00:48:58.040 | physical space in our new lab will have these capsules, which we have designed,

00:49:05.400 | that are designed like growth chambers or grow rooms.

00:49:12.360 | And in those grow rooms, we can basically program top down environmental

00:49:19.680 | templating, top down environmental control of lights, humidity, light, etc.

00:49:23.640 | So light, humidity, and temperature while doing a bottom up genetic regulation.

00:49:28.680 | So it is a wet lab, but in that wet lab, you could do at the same time, genetic

00:49:34.480 | modulation, regulation, and environmental templating.

00:49:39.160 | And then again, the idea is that in one of those capsules, maybe we grow transparent

00:49:43.000 | wood, and in another capsule, we, you know, we, transparent wood for architectural

00:49:46.720 | application, another capsule, we grow a shoe.

00:49:49.360 | And in another capsule, we look at that language, you know, large language model

00:49:54.080 | that we talked about.

00:49:55.360 | And there is a particular technology associated with that, which we're hoping

00:49:58.960 | to reveal to the world in February.

00:50:00.840 | And in each of those capsules is basically a high throughput computational

00:50:07.240 | environment, like a breadboard that has, think of sort of physical breadboard

00:50:12.360 | environment that has access to oxygen and nitrogen and CO2 and nutritional

00:50:18.240 | dispensing.

00:50:19.080 | And these little capsules could be stressed.

00:50:23.360 | They're sort of an ecology in a box.

00:50:25.960 | And they could be stressed to produce the food of the future or the products of the

00:50:30.760 | future or the construction materials of the future.

00:50:34.680 | Food is a very interesting one, obviously because of food insecurity and the issues

00:50:39.520 | that we have around both in terms of food insecurity, but also in terms of the future

00:50:44.960 | of food and what will remain after we can't eat plants and animals anymore and all we

00:50:49.640 | can eat is these false bananas and, you know, and insects as our protein source.

00:50:56.240 | So there we're thinking, you know, can we design these capsules to stress an

00:51:00.680 | environment and see how that environment behaves?

00:51:03.960 | Think about a kind of a, an ecological, a biodiversity chamber, right?

00:51:10.000 | A kind of a time capsule that is designed as a biodiversity chamber where you can

00:51:15.800 | program the exact temperature, humidity, and light combination to emulate the

00:51:23.080 | environment from the past.

00:51:24.280 | So Ohio, 1981, December 31st at 5am in the morning, what did tomatoes taste like?

00:51:31.400 | To all the way in the future, 200 years ago, these are the environmental inputs.

00:51:36.840 | These are some genetic regulations that I'm testing and what might the food of the

00:51:41.800 | future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future feel

00:51:47.160 | like, test like, behave like, et cetera.

00:51:48.840 | And so these capsules are designed as part of a lab.

00:51:50.880 | That's why it's been taking us such a long time to get to this point because we

00:51:55.680 | started designing them in 2019 and they're currently, literally as I speak to you,

00:52:00.800 | under construction.

00:52:01.760 | - How well is it understood how to do this dance of controlling these different

00:52:06.400 | variables in order for various kinds of growth to happen?

00:52:09.760 | - It's not.

00:52:10.560 | It's never been done before and these capsules have never been designed before.

00:52:14.080 | So I, you know, when, when, when we first decided these are going to be

00:52:17.360 | environmental capsules, people thought we're crazy.

00:52:19.200 | What are you building?

00:52:19.920 | What are you making?

00:52:20.560 | So the answer is that we don't know, but we know that there has never been a space

00:52:25.280 | like this where you have basically a wet lab and a grow room at that resolution,

00:52:31.360 | at that granularity of, of, of, of, of control over organisms.

00:52:38.400 | There was a reason why there is this incredible evolution of products in the

00:52:45.520 | software space.

00:52:46.480 | The hardware space, that's a more limiting space that because of the physical

00:52:52.800 | infrastructure that we have to test and experiment with things.

00:52:55.920 | So we really wanted to push on creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way.

00:53:02.560 | What could you create in it?

00:53:04.000 | You could create the future.

00:53:05.200 | You could create a, you could create an environment of plants talking to each

00:53:12.160 | other with a robotic referee and the robotic referee, we, you know, and you

00:53:18.000 | could set an objective function and let's say for, for, for, for the transaction

00:53:26.960 | driven individuals in the world, let's say the objective function is carbon

00:53:31.680 | sequestration and, and all of those plants are, are implemented with a gaming

00:53:40.560 | engine and they have these reward system, right?

00:53:43.120 | And they're constantly needing to optimize the way in which they carbon

00:53:48.080 | sequest.

00:53:48.720 | We weed out the bad guys, we leave the good guys and we end up with this like

00:53:53.680 | ideal ecology of carbon sequestering heroes that connect and communicate with

00:53:58.480 | each other.

00:53:59.120 | And once we have that model, this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into

00:54:03.200 | the field and we see what happens in nature.

00:54:06.240 | And that, that's sort of what I'm talking about.

00:54:09.120 | Augmenting plants with that extra dimension of, of bandwidth that they do

00:54:16.880 | not have.

00:54:17.440 | There, there just, just last week I came across a paper that discusses the

00:54:26.800 | in vivo neurons that are, that are augmented with a pong game and, and in a

00:54:33.680 | dish, they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness, which is,

00:54:38.480 | which is wonderful.

00:54:39.920 | Like that, that you could actually take these neurons from a mouse brain and,

00:54:44.320 | and you have the electrical circuits and the physiological circuits that enable

00:54:49.040 | these cells to connect and communicate and together arrive at sort of swarm

00:54:55.040 | situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be

00:55:00.880 | sentient, but is actually sentient.

00:55:02.960 | Michael Levine calls this agential material, material that has agency, right?

00:55:08.080 | So, so, so this, this, this is of interest to us because this is sort of, again,

00:55:13.920 | this is emergence post-templating.

00:55:15.680 | You template until you don't need to template anymore because, because the

00:55:19.840 | system has its own rules, right?

00:55:21.520 | What we don't want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology.

00:55:25.680 | What we don't want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to

00:55:30.240 | happen with, with bio-based materials, because that will get us closer to growing

00:55:34.720 | things as opposed to assembly and, and mechanically, yeah, putting them together

00:55:39.840 | with toxic materials and compounds.

00:55:42.320 | If I can ask a pothead question for a second.

00:55:44.960 | So you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to

00:55:51.360 | actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm like way.

00:55:55.360 | You're talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based

00:55:59.840 | on an objective function.

00:56:01.520 | Is it possible to have some kind of interface between another kind of

00:56:06.880 | organisms, humans and nature?

00:56:10.960 | So like a human to have a conversation with, with a plant.

00:56:14.080 | There already is.

00:56:15.680 | You know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but it's a smell

00:56:22.080 | of, actually it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to

00:56:26.560 | each other.

00:56:26.960 | So the grass when it's cut emits green leaf volatiles, GLVs, and those GLVs are

00:56:34.160 | basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass.

00:56:37.600 | Be careful, mind you, you're about to be cut.

00:56:40.400 | These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than

00:56:44.800 | ours.

00:56:45.040 | We use language models, they use molecular models.

00:56:48.080 | At the moment where we can parse, we can, we can decode these molecular moments is

00:56:54.960 | when we can start having a conversation with plants.

00:56:57.520 | Now, of course, there is a lot of work around plant neurobiology.

00:57:01.040 | It's a real thing.

00:57:02.400 | Plants do not have a nervous system, but they have something akin to a nervous

00:57:08.720 | system.

00:57:09.600 | It has a kind of a ecological intelligence that is focused on a particular time

00:57:14.720 | scale, and the time scale is very, very slow, slow, slow, slow time scale.

00:57:19.120 | So it is when we can melt these time scales and, and, and, and connect with these

00:57:26.640 | plants in terms of the content of the language, in this case, molecules, the

00:57:31.200 | duration of the language, and we can start having a conversation, if not simply to

00:57:35.840 | understand what is happening in the plant kingdom.

00:57:37.840 | Precision agriculture, I promise to you, will look very, very different, right?

00:57:42.560 | Because right now we're using drones to take photos of crops of corn that look bad.

00:57:48.000 | And when we take that photo, it's already too late.

00:57:51.040 | But if we understand these molecular footprints and things that they are trying

00:57:55.200 | to say, the stress that they are trying to communicate, then we could, of course,

00:57:59.040 | predict the physiological, biological behavior of these crops, both for their own

00:58:05.440 | self-perpetuation, but also for the foods and the pharma and the type of molecules

00:58:11.920 | that we're seeking to grow for the benefit of humanity.

00:58:14.800 | And so these languages that we are attempting now to quantify and qualify will

00:58:20.800 | really help us not only better nature and help nature in its striving to surviving,

00:58:27.520 | but also help us, you know, design better wines and, you know, and, and better

00:58:34.160 | foods and, and, and better medicine and better products, again, across all

00:58:38.640 | scales, across all application domains.

00:58:41.440 | Is there intricacies to understanding the time scales, like you mentioned, at which

00:58:45.920 | these communications, these languages, like operate?

00:58:49.920 | Is there something different between the way humans communicate and the way plants

00:58:54.320 | communicate in terms of time?

00:58:55.600 | Remember when we started the conversation talking about sort of definitions in the

00:59:01.200 | context of design and then in the context of being?

00:59:03.760 | That question requires, I think, a kind of a shift, a humility.

00:59:11.040 | That requires a kind of a humility towards nature, understanding that it

00:59:15.600 | operates on different scales.

00:59:17.360 | We recently discovered that, you know, that the molecular footprint of a rose or of a

00:59:24.000 | plant in general during nighttime is different than its molecular footprint during

00:59:28.160 | daytime.

00:59:28.720 | So these are circadian rhythms that are associated with what kind of molecules these

00:59:34.240 | plants emit, given stress, stresses and given, you know, there's a reason why, why

00:59:43.840 | the jasmine, a jasmine field smells so, so delicious at 4 a.m.

00:59:48.880 | in the morning.

00:59:49.600 | And there's like, there's, there's peace and rest amongst, you know, amongst the

00:59:54.160 | plants.

00:59:54.960 | And you have to sort of tune into that time dimension of, of the plant kingdom.

01:00:01.120 | And that, of course, requires all this humility where in a single capsule to design a

01:00:06.160 | biodiversity chamber, it will take years, not months and definitely not days, and to

01:00:12.320 | see these products.

01:00:13.520 | And also that humility in design comes from simply, you know, looking at how we are

01:00:20.720 | today as a civilization, how we use and abuse nature.

01:00:24.240 | Like, just think of all these Christmas trees, right?

01:00:26.720 | These Christmas trees, they take years to grow.

01:00:29.600 | We use them for one night, the holiest night of the year.

01:00:32.240 | And then we let them go.

01:00:34.320 | And think about in nature to design a quote unquote product, an organism spends energy

01:00:41.600 | and time and thoughtfulness and many, many, many years.

01:00:45.440 | And I'm thinking about the redwoods.

01:00:46.880 | To grow these channels, these, you know, the cellulose layers and channels and reach

01:00:54.880 | these incredible heights takes sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years.

01:01:00.080 | Am I afraid of building a company that designs products in the scale of thousands of years?

01:01:06.400 | No, I'm not.

01:01:07.520 | And the way of being in the physical world today is really not in tune with the time

01:01:16.480 | dimension of the natural world at all.

01:01:18.800 | And, and that needs to change.

01:01:22.800 | And that's obviously very, very hard to do in a community of human beings that is, at

01:01:31.360 | least in the Western world, that is based on capitalism.

01:01:34.320 | And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is how do we impart upon

01:01:40.720 | the capitalist movement?

01:01:42.160 | We know that we need to produce now products that will enter the real world and be, you

01:01:46.720 | know, shared and used by others and still benefit the natural world while benefiting

01:01:53.520 | humans.

01:01:53.920 | And that's a wonderful challenge to have.

01:01:55.680 | - So integrate technology with nature, and that's a really difficult problem.

01:02:00.400 | I see parallels here with another company of Neuralink, which is, is basically like

01:02:06.240 | you, I think you mentioned Neuralink for nature, that there are short-term products you can

01:02:13.040 | come up with, but it's ultimately a long-term challenge of how do you integrate the machine

01:02:19.120 | with this creation of nature, this intricate, complex creation of nature, which is the human

01:02:25.600 | brain, and then you're speaking more generally, nature.

01:02:28.960 | - You know how every company has an image, like this one single image that embodies the

01:02:37.920 | spirit of the company.

01:02:40.000 | And I think for Neuralink, it was to me that chimpanzee playing a video game.

01:02:46.320 | It was just unbelievable.

01:02:49.040 | But with plants, there potentially is a set of molecules that impacts or inspires, I like

01:02:56.480 | that word, the plant to behave or act in a certain way and allows still the plant the

01:03:03.920 | possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go.

01:03:09.840 | Which is why our first product for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance.

01:03:15.120 | So here, we're thinking about the future of fragrances and the future of fragrances and

01:03:20.480 | flavors.

01:03:21.040 | You know, these products are in the industry as we know it today, are designed for totally

01:03:30.080 | for a human-centric use and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury.

01:03:38.240 | They're used on the body for the sake of, I don't know, attraction and feeling good

01:03:44.800 | and smelling good.

01:03:46.160 | And we were asking ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be not a functional

01:03:53.760 | fragrance, because you could claim that all fragrances are functional, but is there a

01:03:57.280 | world in which the fragrance becomes functionalized, is again, imparted upon or given agency to

01:04:04.240 | connect with another organism?

01:04:06.400 | Is there a world in which you and I can go down to your garden and use a perfume that

01:04:12.160 | will interact with the rose garden downstairs?

01:04:15.040 | I've just been enamored with the statements that are being made in the media around, "Oh,

01:04:23.120 | this is completely biologically derived fragrance and it's bio-based."

01:04:27.840 | And, but when you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to

01:04:31.440 | this bio-derived fragrance, you went through, you blew through, you know, 10,000 bushes

01:04:39.360 | of rose to create five milliliters of a rose fragrance.

01:04:43.280 | And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take, you know, water management

01:04:48.480 | and so much waste.

01:04:50.400 | Is this really what we want the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look

01:04:56.800 | like?

01:04:57.120 | And so, when we did the Aguajo pavilion on the roof of SF MoMA, we calculated that for

01:05:03.440 | that pavilion, we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp

01:05:07.760 | shells and chitosan and apple skins and cellulose from tree pulp.

01:05:13.840 | And we calculated that overall, the structure had 40,000 calories.

01:05:18.800 | Interesting way to think about a structure, right?

01:05:21.360 | From the point of view of calories.

01:05:23.760 | But as you left the gallery, you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed

01:05:28.880 | by Felix on our team, and these clocks measured temperature and humidity and we connected

01:05:33.760 | them to a weather channel so that we could directly look at how the pavilion was biodegrading

01:05:39.600 | in real time.

01:05:40.400 | And in our calculations, I say this long-winded description of the pavilion to say that in

01:05:48.240 | the calculation, we incorporated how much electricity we used for our computers, for

01:05:55.360 | the 3D printers that printed the pavilion.

01:05:57.520 | And these were called energy calculations, right?

01:06:00.960 | Energy and materials.

01:06:02.480 | And when you think about a product, and you think about a shoe or a chair or a perfume

01:06:08.720 | or a building, you don't stop at the object.

01:06:12.240 | You want to go all the way to the system.

01:06:14.880 | Again, instead of designing objects or singular embodiments of the will of the designer, you're

01:06:22.240 | really tabbing into an entire system that is interconnected.

01:06:26.720 | And if you look at the energy budget that characterized the Project Agroha, it traverses

01:06:32.240 | the entire planet, right?

01:06:33.520 | Some of these shrimp shells were brought from places in the world we haven't thought of

01:06:38.640 | in terms of the apples and the shrimp shells and the tree pop.

01:06:42.080 | And so going back to fragrances, it's really, really important to understand the product

01:06:51.760 | in the context of the ecological system from which it's sourced and how it's designed.

01:06:56.400 | And that is the kind of thinking that is not only desired, but is required if we are to

01:07:03.760 | achieve synergy between humanity and nature.

01:07:06.240 | - And it's interesting 'cause the system level thinking is almost always gonna take

01:07:09.360 | you to the entire Earth, to considering the entire Earth ecosystem.

01:07:12.800 | - Which is why it's important to have a left brain and a right brain competing for attention.

01:07:16.400 | (laughing)

01:07:18.000 | - Sometimes you're the same.

01:07:18.560 | - And intimacy, I mean, yes.

01:07:19.680 | - You mentioned a fragrance that kind of sends out a message to the environment, essentially.

01:07:27.520 | - A message in a bottle, yeah.

01:07:28.960 | - A message in a bottle.

01:07:30.160 | So like, so you can go to a rose garden and trick the rose garden to think it's 4 a.m.,

01:07:34.640 | essentially.

01:07:35.760 | - You could if you wanted to, but maybe that is--

01:07:38.400 | - Not trick, trick is such a bad word.

01:07:40.320 | - Right, right.

01:07:40.800 | - Inspire.

01:07:41.680 | - But inspire I like.

01:07:44.240 | I like the idea of providing nature with a choice, which is why I love that elegant mathematical

01:07:49.920 | equation of empowerment and agency.

01:07:52.880 | - Empower the rose garden to create a romantic moment for the wearer of the fragrance.

01:08:00.000 | - But now again, you're, again, all of this to go back to that human-centric notion of

01:08:07.600 | romance, but maybe there's another way to do romance, right, that we haven't yet explored.

01:08:15.520 | And maybe there is a way to tap into what happens to the rose when it's dreaming.

01:08:22.240 | Assuming that plants are sentient and assuming that we can tap into that sentience, what

01:08:28.160 | can we discover about what does the rose want?

01:08:31.600 | Like what does it actually want and what does it need and what are the rose's dreams?

01:08:41.440 | - But do you think there's some correlation in terms of romance, in terms of the word

01:08:45.520 | you sometimes use, magic?

01:08:46.800 | Is there some similarities in what humans want and what roses want and what nature wants?

01:08:53.440 | - I think so.

01:08:54.640 | I think there is, and if I did not think so, oh my goodness, this would not be a nice world

01:08:59.360 | to live in.

01:08:59.920 | I think we all want love.

01:09:03.440 | I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter and

01:09:12.800 | was discovered, Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until she reveals these letters,

01:09:18.080 | and so she did.

01:09:18.880 | It's just one of the most beautiful letters I've ever read from a father to his daughter.

01:09:24.480 | And the letter overall is imbued with a kind of a sense of remorse or maybe even feelings

01:09:34.960 | of sadness.

01:09:36.240 | And there is some kind of melancholy note in the letter where Einstein regrets not having

01:09:42.480 | spent enough time with his daughter, having focused on the theory of general relativity

01:09:47.680 | and changing the world.

01:09:49.120 | And then he goes on to talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E equals mc2, and

01:09:55.520 | he tells his daughter that he believes that love is actually the force that shapes the

01:10:02.160 | universe because it is like gravity, right?

01:10:04.400 | It attracts people.

01:10:05.440 | It is like light.

01:10:06.880 | It brings people together and connects between people, and it's all empowering.

01:10:12.080 | And so if you multiply it by the speed of light, you could really change the world for

01:10:18.720 | the better.

01:10:19.280 | And call me a romanticist.

01:10:21.760 | I know you are too, which is why I so love being here.

01:10:26.640 | I believe in this.

01:10:28.560 | I totally and utterly believe in this.

01:10:34.400 | - In love.

01:10:35.200 | By the way, let me just excerpt from Einstein's letter.

01:10:38.720 | "There's an extremely powerful force that so far science has not found a formal explanation

01:10:44.080 | to.

01:10:44.880 | It is a force that includes and governs all others and is even behind any phenomena operating

01:10:49.920 | in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

01:10:53.120 | This universal force is love."

01:10:56.000 | He also, the last paragraph in the letter, as you've mentioned, "I deeply regret not

01:11:01.520 | having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all

01:11:07.600 | my life.

01:11:08.320 | Maybe it's too late to apologize, but as time is relative."

01:11:13.200 | That joke's to Einstein.

01:11:14.960 | "I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you, I have reached the ultimate

01:11:20.720 | answer.

01:11:21.280 | Your father, Albert Einstein."

01:11:22.960 | "But that regret, I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart."

01:11:29.040 | Maybe that's a universal regret.

01:11:33.440 | Filling your days with busyness and silly pursuits and not sitting down and expressing

01:11:42.720 | that.

01:11:43.440 | But it is everything.

01:11:46.320 | It is everything.

01:11:47.280 | It is why I love that expression.

01:11:49.680 | And I forget who said this, but I love my daughter more than evolution required, right?

01:11:59.760 | And I feel the same way towards my other half.

01:12:05.600 | And I feel that when you find that connection, everything and anything is possible.

01:12:12.720 | And it's a very, very, very magical moment.

01:12:19.760 | So I believe in love and I believe in the one.

01:12:24.720 | It might be the same thing.

01:12:28.720 | It might be a different thing.

01:12:29.760 | But let me ask you a ridiculously big philosophical question about beauty.

01:12:34.640 | Dostoevsky said, "Beauty will save the world" in "The Idiot," one of my favorite books

01:12:39.440 | of his.

01:12:40.800 | What is beauty to you?

01:12:42.320 | You've created through this intersection of engineering and nature, you've created

01:12:49.360 | some incredibly beautiful things.

01:12:50.880 | What do you think is beauty?

01:12:52.800 | That's a beautiful question.

01:12:56.240 | Maybe it is connected to the love question.

01:12:59.440 | It is connected to the love question.

01:13:01.040 | Of course, everything is connected to the love question.

01:13:03.200 | Okay.

01:13:03.520 | To me, beauty is agency.

01:13:10.000 | To me, something that has agency, it is beautiful.

01:13:14.560 | There is this special quote from Buckminster Fuller, which I cannot remember word for word,

01:13:20.480 | but I remember the concept, which goes something like this.

01:13:24.320 | "When I work on a problem, I never think about beauty.

01:13:28.640 | But when I'm done solving the problem and I look at what I've created and it's not

01:13:33.920 | beautiful, I know that I was wrong."

01:13:35.600 | Okay.

01:13:38.080 | Yeah.

01:13:38.400 | It's kind of an agency that speaks to, quote unquote, "the objective function of the

01:13:45.040 | creation," right?

01:13:46.160 | Whether for Bucky, it's useless or useful.

01:13:48.880 | So this idea of empowerment that you talked about is fundamentally connected to it.

01:13:52.320 | Yes, comes back to that, yeah.

01:13:53.920 | What's the difference that you hinted at between empowerment and emergence?

01:13:59.520 | Is emergence completely lacks control?

01:14:05.200 | And empowerment is more controlled?

01:14:10.400 | There's an agent making decisions?

01:14:14.720 | Is there an interesting distinction there?

01:14:16.720 | Yes.

01:14:17.280 | I think empowerment is a force with direction.

01:14:20.400 | It has directionality to it.

01:14:22.960 | Emergence is, I believe, multidirectional.

01:14:28.560 | Again, that depends on the application.

01:14:31.040 | Emergence is perhaps, in terms of a material definition, is the isotropic spirit.

01:14:37.120 | When empowerment is the anisotropic counterpart, I think they overlap because I think that

01:14:48.560 | empowerment is a way of inspiring emergence.

01:14:58.160 | I think emergence does not happen without empowerment, but empowerment can happen without

01:15:04.240 | emergence.

01:15:04.800 | Do you think of emergence as the loss of control?

01:15:07.680 | Like when you're thinking about these capsules and then the things they create, is emergence

01:15:12.720 | a thing that is not a desirable conclusion?

01:15:18.960 | I love that question because to some of us, the loss of control is control.

01:15:26.400 | In design, we're used to extreme levels of control over form and the shape of a thing

01:15:32.400 | and how it behaves and how it functions.

01:15:34.320 | That's something we've inherited from the Industrial Revolution.

01:15:38.480 | But with nature, there is this diversity that happens without necessarily having a

01:15:48.400 | reward function, right?

01:15:49.680 | This is good or bad.

01:15:51.120 | Things just happen, and some of them happen to have wings and some of them happen to have

01:15:55.280 | scales, and you end up with this incredible potential for diversity.

01:16:02.720 | So I think the future of design is in that soft control, is in the ability to design

01:16:08.960 | highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control.

01:16:14.720 | And creativity is very much part of this because creativity is all about letting go and beginning

01:16:24.000 | again and beginning again, beginning again.

01:16:25.920 | And when you cannot let go, you cannot be creative and you can't find novelty.

01:16:33.200 | But I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment, agency, creativity, emergence.

01:16:41.280 | And they're all connected.

01:16:43.360 | They sort of associate themselves with the definition of destiny or the inevitable.

01:16:49.440 | A good friend of mine shared with me elegant definition of fate, which is the ratio of

01:16:57.840 | who you are and who you want to be.

01:16:59.920 | Ratio of who you are, who you want to be.

01:17:03.200 | Exactly.

01:17:04.720 | And that sort of ends up defining you.

01:17:07.600 | Yeah.

01:17:08.160 | And those tools, I think, when you let go, you sort of find, you give peace to your will,

01:17:15.360 | right, to a sense of will.

01:17:18.480 | And so I think that's very, very important in design, but also in life.

01:17:22.720 | She said this fate is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be.

01:17:30.000 | Do you think there's something to this whole manifestation thing, like focusing on a vision

01:17:34.640 | of what you want the world to become and in that focusing, you manifest it?

01:17:41.120 | Like Paulo Coelho said in "The Alchemist," when you want something, all the universe

01:17:44.800 | conspires in helping you to achieve it.

01:17:46.640 | Is there something to that?

01:17:48.560 | I think so, yes.

01:17:50.080 | And I always think of what I do as the culmination of energy, information, and matter, and how

01:17:58.320 | to direct energy, information, and matter in the design of a thing or in the design

01:18:03.680 | of a life.

01:18:04.240 | I think living is very much a process of channeling these energies to where they need to go.

01:18:13.280 | I think that the manifestation or part of that manifestation is the pointing to the

01:18:19.520 | moon in order to get to the moon.

01:18:21.600 | And that's why manifestation is also directional.

01:18:25.040 | It has that vector quality to it that I think of agency as.

01:18:30.080 | Have you, in your own life, has there been things you've done where you kind of direct

01:18:36.240 | that energy, information, and matter in a way that opens up?

01:18:40.560 | New possibilities.

01:18:42.000 | Yeah. I mean, you've also said somewhere, I'm probably misquoting, that you're many

01:18:50.320 | things, you, Neri, are many things, and you become new things every 10 years or so.

01:18:55.760 | Oh, I did say that somewhere.

01:18:57.440 | Somewhere.

01:18:58.160 | That every decade you've sort of switched.

01:18:59.920 | That was an old, that was a previous Neri that said that.

01:19:02.960 | Yeah, I did say some time ago that you have to sort of reboot every 10 years to keep creative

01:19:10.080 | and keep inventive and keep fresh.

01:19:12.720 | Is there things you've done in your life where just kind of doors opened?

01:19:16.960 | I think everything, everything.

01:19:22.800 | Everything good I've found in my life has been found in that way of

01:19:29.840 | letting go and suspending my sense of disbelief.

01:19:37.200 | And often you will find me say to the team, "Suspend your disbelief.

01:19:41.200 | I don't care that this is impossible.

01:19:44.160 | Let's assume it is.

01:19:45.440 | Where does it take us?"

01:19:46.880 | And that suspension of disbelief is absolutely part and parcel of the creative act.

01:19:51.200 | You know, I did so when I was in medical school.

01:20:01.440 | I was in Hadassah and in the Hebrew University.

01:20:05.280 | And I remember I left medical school for architecture the day my grandmother passed away.

01:20:13.200 | And that was a moment of relief.

01:20:15.760 | And that was a moment, a door that was closing that opened other opportunities.

01:20:19.840 | But that, of course, required letting go of the great vision of becoming a doctor and

01:20:26.400 | letting go of the dream of being surrounded by wonderful patients and the science of medicine

01:20:34.320 | and the research associated with that science and letting go of that dream to accomplish another.

01:20:40.560 | And it has happened throughout my life in different ways.

01:20:46.960 | MIT was another experience like that where people pointed at me as, you know, the designer

01:20:54.480 | for whom the academic currency is not necessarily the citation index.

01:21:01.040 | And of course, in order to get tenure at MIT, you have to look at the citation index.

01:21:06.160 | But for me, it was not that.

01:21:09.360 | It was manifesting our work in shows and writing papers and writing patents and creating a

01:21:16.480 | celebration around the work.

01:21:17.920 | And I never saw a distinction between those ways of being.

01:21:25.040 | I also think that another kind of way of being or a modality of being that I found helpful

01:21:32.640 | is, Victor Frankl wrote this incredible book, "Man's Search for Meaning After the Holocaust."

01:21:38.880 | And he writes different people pursue life for different reasons.

01:21:45.760 | According to Freud, the goal of life is to find pleasure.

01:21:50.080 | And according to Adler, it's to find power.

01:21:53.920 | And for Victor Frankl, it was about finding meaning.

01:21:58.400 | And when you let go of the titles and the disciplines and the boundaries and the expectations

01:22:06.000 | and the perception, you are elevated to this really special, yes, spiritual, but definitely

01:22:15.360 | very, very creative plane where you can sort of start anew and look at the world through

01:22:23.520 | the lens of a bacterium or a robot or look at ecology through the lens of chemistry and

01:22:30.800 | look at chemistry through the lens of robotics and look at robotics through the lens of

01:22:34.000 | microbial ecologies and so on and so forth.

01:22:38.720 | And I feel that kind of rebooting, not every 10 years, but every minute, every breath,

01:22:44.320 | is very, very important for a creative life and for just maintaining this fresh mind.

01:22:52.640 | To reboot, to begin again with every breath, begin again.

01:22:56.880 | And that can be confusing for some, right?

01:22:59.680 | For my team members, I like to change my mind.

01:23:04.160 | It's who I am.

01:23:04.960 | It's how I think.

01:23:05.760 | It's how I operate.

01:23:06.720 | You don't know.

01:23:08.000 | And they'll come and we found another technique or another technology that's interesting.

01:23:15.600 | And we thought that we were working on dysfunctionalized fragrance, but now there's

01:23:19.760 | another opportunity and let's go there.

01:23:21.440 | And to me, I would much rather live life, like if I had to pick sort of my favorite

01:23:30.320 | Broadway show to enter and live through, it would be "Into the Woods."

01:23:36.640 | It's not a specific fairy tale.

01:23:39.040 | It's not "The Sleeping Beauty" or "Little Red Riding Hood" or "Rapunzel."

01:23:46.400 | It's all of them.

01:23:47.280 | It's sort of moving into the forest and seeing this wonder and getting close and learning

01:23:52.400 | about that and then moving to another wonder.

01:23:54.400 | And life is really about tying all of these little fairy tales together in work and also

01:24:03.280 | in life.

01:24:04.000 | Unafraid to leap into the unknown.

01:24:06.160 | Unafraid to leap into the unknown.

01:24:08.640 | Speaking of MIT, you got a tenure at MIT and then you leaped to New York and started a

01:24:15.200 | new company with a vision that doesn't span a couple of years, but centuries.

01:24:20.000 | I did.

01:24:22.240 | It was my destiny to start a company.

01:24:24.800 | And do I have mornings when I wake up and I ask myself, "What the hell am I doing?"

01:24:29.120 | Yes, I have those mornings.

01:24:31.200 | What do you do with those mornings, by the way?

01:24:32.640 | I embrace them and I find gratitude and I say to myself, "Thank goodness.

01:24:40.240 | I'm so lucky to have the ability to be frustrated in this way."

01:24:46.560 | So I really, really embrace these frustrations.

01:24:52.640 | And I take them, I wrap them in a bubble and I look at it on the outside of my aware mind

01:25:05.120 | and I laugh at them.

01:25:07.840 | I smile at them.

01:25:08.960 | (laughing)

01:25:11.040 | If I could return actually to the question of beauty for a second, I forgot to ask you

01:25:15.440 | something.

01:25:15.840 | You mentioned imperfection in the death masks.

01:25:19.280 | Mm-hmm.

01:25:20.240 | What role does imperfection play in our conception of beauty?

01:25:26.640 | What role does imperfection play in nature?

01:25:31.280 | There's this Japanese aesthetics concept of wabi-sabi, which basically embraces imperfection.

01:25:40.560 | Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.

01:25:43.200 | What do you think of that?

01:25:44.720 | I totally agree that change is the only permanence, that imperfection is there if only to signal

01:25:54.880 | that we are part of a bigger thing than ourselves, that we are on a journey.

01:26:00.720 | Mm-hmm.

01:26:01.220 | That things are in movement.

01:26:06.400 | And if they were perfect, of course when things are perfect it is just so boring, we end up

01:26:13.920 | with stereotypes.

01:26:14.880 | And as humans, but I think just in general as living beings, we're here to find meaning.

01:26:21.280 | And that meaning cannot be found without struggle and without seeking to, not to perfect, but

01:26:27.200 | to build towards something better.

01:26:30.400 | And when I was a child, my mother, who I love so much, always explained to me how important

01:26:39.120 | it is to fall and to fail and to fight and to argue, and that there is a way, that there

01:26:47.040 | is a culture to failing and to imperfection.

01:26:53.920 | So I think it is necessary for something beautiful to be imperfect, and it is a sign of nature,

01:27:06.400 | because nothing in nature is perfect.

01:27:08.320 | What about human relations?

01:27:10.640 | You mentioned finding love.

01:27:12.080 | Are the flaws in humans, the imperfection in humans a component of love?

01:27:17.360 | What role do you think the flaws play?

01:27:23.040 | That's a really profound question.

01:27:25.920 | I think the flaws are there to present a vulnerability.

01:27:42.720 | And those flaws are a sign of those vulnerabilities.

01:27:52.480 | And I think love is very, very gentle.

01:27:56.960 | Love ... With Bill we often talk about, between the two of us, about what drives all human

01:28:05.040 | behavior, and for him it's incentive, as you might expect.

01:28:08.880 | And he will repeat this sentence to me, "Incentive drives all human behavior."

01:28:13.840 | But I would say to me it's love, very much so.

01:28:20.080 | And I think flaws are part of that, because flaws are a sign of that vulnerability, whether

01:28:28.160 | physical, whether emotional vulnerability.

01:28:29.920 | And these vulnerabilities, they either tear us apart or they bring us together.

01:28:35.120 | The vulnerability is what is the glue, I think.

01:28:40.800 | I think that the vulnerability enables connection.

01:28:45.520 | The connection is the glue.

01:28:47.200 | And that connection enables accessing a higher ground as a community as opposed to as an

01:28:53.040 | individual.

01:28:53.680 | So if there is a society of the mind, or if there are higher levels of awareness that

01:28:58.960 | can be accessed in community as opposed to, again, going to the silkworm, as opposed to

01:29:06.160 | on the individual level, I think that those occur through the flaws and the vulnerabilities.

01:29:11.760 | And without them, we cannot find connection, community.

01:29:17.200 | And without community, we can't build what we have built as a civilization, you know,

01:29:22.640 | for the past hundreds of thousands of years.

01:29:24.960 | So I think not only are they beautiful, but they have a functional role in building civilizations.

01:29:31.760 | Yeah, there's a sense in which love requires vulnerability, and maybe love is the leap

01:29:38.320 | into that vulnerability.

01:29:40.000 | And I think, yes, I think a flaw, think about it, like physically, I'm thinking about a

01:29:49.440 | brick that's flawed, but in a way, I think of a flaw as an increased surface area.

01:29:56.080 | God, that's a good line.

01:30:01.200 | That's a good line.

01:30:02.720 | Right?

01:30:02.960 | A surface area that physically or emotionally, right?

01:30:06.880 | It sort of introduces this whole new dimension to a human or a brick.

01:30:11.600 | And because you have more surface area, you can, you know, use mortar and build a home.

01:30:17.120 | And yeah, I think of it as accessing this additional dimension of surface area that

01:30:23.440 | could be used for good or bad, right?

01:30:25.840 | To connect, to communicate, to collaborate.

01:30:31.440 | It makes me think of that quote from this incredible movie I've watched years ago,

01:30:37.120 | "Particle Fever," I think it was called, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider,

01:30:43.440 | an incredible film, where they talk about the things that are least important for our survival

01:30:49.360 | are the things that make us human.

01:30:50.880 | Like the pure romantic act or, you know, the notion of, and Viktor Frankl talks about that

01:31:00.480 | too, he talks about feeling the sun on his arms as he is working the soil in two degrees

01:31:13.840 | Fahrenheit without clothes.

01:31:15.680 | And the officer berates him and says, "What have you done?

01:31:22.960 | Have you been a businessman before you came here to the camp?"

01:31:27.600 | And he says, "I was a doctor."

01:31:28.960 | And he said, "You must have made a lot of money as a doctor."

01:31:31.600 | And he said, "All my work I've done for free, I've been helping the poor."

01:31:35.920 | But he keeps his humility and he keeps his modesty and he keeps his preservation of the

01:31:53.200 | spirit, and he says the things that actually made him able to outlive the terrible experience

01:32:05.840 | in the Holocaust was really cherishing this moment when the sun hits his skin or when

01:32:12.160 | he can eat a grain of rice, a single grain of rice.

01:32:17.920 | So I think cherishing is a very important part of living a meaningful life, being able

01:32:27.440 | to cherish those simple things.

01:32:29.280 | Like to notice them and to--

01:32:31.840 | To notice them, to pay attention to them in the moment.

01:32:35.600 | And I do this now more than ever.

01:32:39.920 | I mean, there is some, Bukowski has this poem I like called "Nirvana," where it tells

01:32:47.200 | the story of a young man on a bus going through like North Carolina or something like this,

01:32:51.840 | and they stop off in a cafe and he has this, there's a waitress, and just, he talks about

01:32:58.800 | that he notices the magic, something indescribable, he just notices the magic of it.

01:33:04.560 | And he gets back on the bus with the rest of the passengers and none of them seem to

01:33:08.320 | have noticed the magic.

01:33:10.800 | And I think if you just allow yourself to pause and just to feel whatever that is, maybe

01:33:18.960 | ultimately it's a kind of gratitude for, I don't know what it is.

01:33:24.880 | It's just, I'm sure it's just chemicals in the brain, but it's just so incredible to

01:33:31.840 | be alive and noticing that and appreciating that and being one in that with others.

01:33:38.160 | Yes, yes.

01:33:39.600 | And that goes back to, you know, to the fireplace, right?

01:33:46.160 | To the first technology.

01:33:47.680 | What was the first technology?

01:33:49.040 | It was fire.

01:33:50.080 | First technology to have built community, and it emerged out of a vulnerability of wanting

01:33:57.200 | to stay away from the cold and be warm together.

01:34:02.080 | And of course that fire is associated with not only with comfort and the ability to form

01:34:09.040 | bio-relevant nutrients in our food and provide heat and comfort, but also spirits and a kind

01:34:24.080 | of a way to enter a spiritual moment, to enter a moment that can only be experienced in a

01:34:35.280 | community as a form of a meditative moment.

01:34:38.400 | There is a lot to be said about light.

01:34:41.200 | Light is, I think, an important part of these moments of, I think it's a real thing.

01:34:52.880 | I really truly believe that we're born with an aura, surface area that is measurable.

01:35:00.800 | I think we're born into the world with an aura.

01:35:09.680 | And how do we channel that is really sort of ends, I mean, ends up sort of defining

01:35:18.000 | the light in our lives.

01:35:21.840 | Do you think we're all lonely?

01:35:24.560 | Do you think there's loneliness in us humans?

01:35:26.720 | Oh, yes.

01:35:27.360 | Yes, loneliness is part, yes, I think we all have that loneliness, whether we're willing

01:35:33.200 | to access that loneliness and look at it in the eye or completely avoid it or deny it.

01:35:44.080 | It's like, it feels like it's some kind of foundation for longing, and longing leads to

01:35:51.280 | this combination of vulnerability and connection with others.

01:35:54.960 | Yes.

01:35:55.920 | And it feels like that's a really important part of being human, is being lonely.

01:35:59.440 | Very, it's very ... we are born into this world alone.

01:36:02.880 | Again, being alone and being lonely are two different things, right?

01:36:09.120 | You can be together but be lonely, and you can be alone but not be lonely at all.

01:36:13.760 | We often joke, Bill and I, that he cannot be lonely.

01:36:18.800 | He cannot deal with being by himself.

01:36:21.440 | He always needs people around him.

01:36:22.800 | And I strive long, must have creative solitude, must find pockets of solitude and loneliness

01:36:32.400 | in order to find creativity and reconnect with myself.

01:36:36.400 | So, loneliness is a recipe for community, in my opinion, and I think those things complement

01:36:45.200 | each other, and they're synergetic, absolutely.

01:36:48.640 | The yin and yang of togetherness, and they allow you, I think, to reset and to tune in

01:36:58.880 | to that ratio we talked about of who you are and who you want to be.

01:37:05.680 | If you go to this place of creative solitude, what's your creative process?

01:37:11.680 | Is there something you've noticed about what you do that leads to good work?

01:37:18.720 | I love to be able, not only to lose focus, but kind of to focus on the peripheral view.

01:37:25.920 | And to allow different things to occur at once.

01:37:30.880 | So, I will often, in my loneliness journeys, I will often listen to, like, Leonard Bernstein,

01:37:37.680 | anything I can find online by Lenny Bernstein.

01:37:41.040 | It's reading a nature paper.

01:37:43.600 | It's war and peace.

01:37:44.880 | It's really revisiting all the texts that are so timeless for me with opportunities

01:37:50.480 | that are very, very timely.

01:37:52.000 | And I think for me, the creative process is really about bringing timeless problems or

01:37:59.840 | concepts together with timely technologies to observe them.

01:38:05.760 | I remember when we did the Mandela Pavilion, we read Moby Dick, The Whiteness of the Whale,

01:38:11.280 | The Albino, The Different, The Other.

01:38:14.240 | And that got us to work on Melanin.

01:38:17.360 | And Melanin also is sort of an output from the Death Mass.

01:38:20.160 | So, it's lots of things happening at the same time and really allowing them to come

01:38:26.720 | together to form this view about the world through the lens of a spirit being or a living

01:38:35.520 | being or a material, and then focus on the world through the lens of that material.

01:38:41.200 | The glass work was another project like that, where we were fascinated by glass because

01:38:46.640 | obviously it's superb material for architecture.

01:38:49.760 | But we created this new glass printing technology for the first time that was shedding light

01:38:55.680 | on the biomechanics of fluid glass, the math and the physics of which was never done before,

01:39:01.200 | which was so exciting to us.

01:39:02.640 | But revealing new knowledge about the world through technology, that's one theme.

01:39:09.360 | The reincarnation between things, material and immaterial, that's another theme.

01:39:14.240 | Lenny Bernstein, War and Peace, Tolstoy.

01:39:17.840 | You've tweeted a Tolstoy quote from War and Peace, as of course you would.

01:39:24.240 | "Everything I know, I know because of love."

01:39:26.800 | Love, yeah, I love this quote.

01:39:28.560 | So, you use these kind of inspirations to focus you and then find the actual idea in

01:39:37.840 | the periphery.

01:39:39.360 | Yes, and then connect them with whatever it is that we're working on, whether it's

01:39:44.880 | high throughput, directed evolution of bacteria, whether it's recreating that Garden of Eden

01:39:52.720 | in the capsule and what it looks like, the food of the future.

01:39:55.360 | It is a little bit like directing a film.

01:39:58.240 | Creating a new project is a bit like creating a film.

01:40:04.240 | And you have these heroes, you have these characters, and you put them together, and

01:40:10.080 | there is a narrative, and there is a story.

01:40:13.040 | Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous

01:40:19.760 | complexity.

01:40:20.480 | It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics,

01:40:24.960 | engineering.

01:40:25.680 | All of these elements that are discipline-based or rooted must be novel.

01:40:31.440 | If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty

01:40:37.360 | in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create

01:40:42.400 | something novel, period.

01:40:44.320 | And that's how I run the company, and that's how I pick the people.

01:40:47.920 | And so that's another very, very important ingredient of the cutting edge across multiple

01:40:54.160 | disciplines that come together.

01:40:56.160 | And then in the background, in the periphery, there's all these messages, the whispers of

01:41:00.560 | the ancient oldies, right?

01:41:02.800 | The Beethovens and the Picassos.

01:41:05.520 | So Beethoven's always whispering to you?

01:41:07.200 | Yeah.

01:41:08.160 | How could one not include Beethoven in the whispers?

01:41:11.280 | I'm going to ask you about Beethoven and the Evgeny Kislyny you've mentioned, because

01:41:15.360 | I've played piano my whole life.

01:41:16.720 | I obviously know a lot of Beethoven.

01:41:18.560 | And it's one of the private things for me, I suppose, because I don't think I've ever

01:41:23.760 | publicly played piano.

01:41:24.880 | By the way, me too.

01:41:26.080 | I mean, not everything.

01:41:29.200 | I play in private only.

01:41:30.880 | Yeah, people sometimes, even with guitar, people ask me, "Can you play something?"

01:41:36.000 | And it just feels like certain things are...

01:41:37.920 | Are meant to be done...

01:41:39.280 | Privately.

01:41:39.760 | Yeah.

01:41:40.400 | It's weird.

01:41:41.040 | I mean, it's a difficult...

01:41:42.320 | And some of the times I have performed publicly, it is an ultimate leap in vulnerability.

01:41:49.760 | It's very, very, very difficult for me.

01:41:51.760 | And I'm sure it's...

01:41:52.640 | I know it's not for a lot of people, but it is for me.

01:41:55.120 | Anyway, we'll return to that.

01:41:56.240 | But since you've mentioned combination of knowledge across multiple disciplines, that's

01:42:01.680 | what you seek when you build teams or pick people you work with.

01:42:08.080 | I just wanted to kind of linger on this idea of what kind of humans are you looking for

01:42:16.560 | in this endeavor that you're taking on, this fascinating thing that you've been talking

01:42:20.800 | about?

01:42:21.360 | I want to think somewhere else, a previous version, version 5.7 of Neri said somewhere

01:42:28.320 | that there's four fields that are combined to create this intersection of biology and

01:42:33.600 | engineering work in.

01:42:34.800 | It's computational design, additive manufacturing, material engineering, synthetic biology.

01:42:39.600 | I'm sure there's others.

01:42:40.720 | But how do you find these humans?

01:42:42.800 | Machine learning is in the mix.

01:42:44.000 | I manifest and they come.

01:42:47.120 | Yeah.

01:42:48.260 | There are a few approaches.

01:42:49.520 | Manifest.

01:42:50.980 | They show up.

01:42:53.540 | You know, "send your message upon the water," those job descriptions that you saw, the first

01:42:59.700 | ones I wrote by myself.

01:43:01.300 | And you find interesting people and brilliant people when you look—we talked about second

01:43:08.260 | derivative—when you look under and under and under.

01:43:10.580 | And if you look deep enough and specialized enough, and if you allow yourself to look

01:43:17.140 | at the cracks, at the flaws, at the cracks between disciplines and between skills, you

01:43:23.860 | find really, really interesting diamonds in the rough.

01:43:27.380 | And so I like for those job descriptions to be those messages in a bottle that bring those

01:43:36.740 | really interesting people our way.

01:43:38.340 | I mean, they have to have humility.

01:43:42.100 | They have to have a shine in their eye.

01:43:44.820 | They have to be hungry and foolish.

01:43:46.420 | As Job so famously said, a friend of mine who's a dean of a well-known architectural

01:43:53.780 | school said, "Today, architects don't want to be architects.

01:43:57.380 | Architects don't look up to the star architects as role models.

01:44:02.020 | Star architects are no longer role models.

01:44:04.020 | Architects want to build by virtue of not building."

01:44:07.620 | She said, "We're back in the '60s when we think about architecture, back in the

01:44:13.060 | hippie movement."

01:44:15.140 | I think that in a way, they have to be somewhat of a hippie, somewhat of a kind of a jack

01:44:23.860 | of all trades, master of all.

01:44:25.220 | And yet with humility.

01:44:27.540 | And yet with humility.

01:44:29.940 | Now, that is hard to find.

01:44:31.620 | And that is why, you know, when I start an interview, I talk about childhood memories,

01:44:36.900 | and I asked about music, and I ask about connection.

01:44:41.380 | And through these interviews, you can learn a lot about a person's future by spending

01:44:48.900 | time hearing them talk about their past.

01:44:51.940 | Do you find that educational, like PhDs versus, like, what's the life trajectory?

01:44:57.860 | Yours is an interesting life trajectory, too.

01:44:59.540 | Like, what's the life trajectory that leads to the kind of person that would work with

01:45:04.900 | you?

01:45:06.020 | It's, you know, people who have ideally had industry experience and know what it's

01:45:13.140 | like to be in the quote-unquote "real world."

01:45:15.300 | They're dreamers that are addicted to reality, as opposed to realists that are addicted to

01:45:20.020 | dreams.

01:45:20.520 | Meaning they have that innocence in them.

01:45:23.380 | They have the hunger.

01:45:24.500 | They have the idealism without being entitled and with understanding the systems that govern

01:45:34.660 | our world.

01:45:35.700 | And understanding how to utilize these systems as Torjan horses to bring those values into

01:45:41.460 | the world.

01:45:41.960 | There are individuals who feel comfortable in this friction between, you know, highly

01:45:51.780 | wondrous and dreamy and incredible fantasy renditions of what the world could be with

01:46:01.940 | an extremely brilliant skills in terms of their disciplinary background.

01:46:05.540 | So PhD with industrial experience in a certain field or a double major in two fields that

01:46:13.460 | make no sense whatsoever in their combination are things that really, really attract me.

01:46:19.300 | And especially that span the technology-biology gap.

01:46:24.180 | Yes.

01:46:24.680 | Technology, biology, nature, culture.

01:46:26.900 | I mean, the secret to one thing is through the lens of another.

01:46:29.700 | And I always believe in that kind of translational design ability to be able to see something

01:46:34.500 | through the lens of another.

01:46:35.620 | And always allows you to think again, begin again, reestablish, redefine, suspend your

01:46:41.140 | disbelief, revisit.

01:46:42.980 | And when you revisit enough times, like a hundred times or like 200 times, and you revisit

01:46:49.700 | the same question through the lens of any possible discipline and any possible scenario,

01:46:55.700 | eventually you get to the truth.

01:46:58.900 | I have to ask you, because you work at the interplay of the machine and the natural world,

01:47:08.020 | is there a good definition for you of what is life?

01:47:11.380 | What is a living organism?

01:47:14.100 | I think like 440 million years ago, there were all these plants that the cyanobacteria,

01:47:24.500 | I believe actually that was like the first extinction, right?

01:47:29.620 | There were five extinctions.

01:47:31.380 | We are apparently the sixth.

01:47:34.100 | We are in the eye of the storm.

01:47:35.460 | We are in the sixth extinction.

01:47:36.740 | We are going to be extinct as we speak.

01:47:39.060 | I mean, death is upon us, whether we want to admit it or not.

01:47:42.260 | And actually, they found in Argentina and in various places around the world, they found

01:47:50.820 | these spores of the first plants that existed on the planet, and they emerged out of these

01:47:58.660 | cyanobacteria were the first, of course, and then they found these spore-based plants.

01:48:03.300 | And because they didn't have seeds, they're only spores, the spores became sort of the

01:48:08.980 | fossils by which we've come to know of their existence.

01:48:12.340 | And because of these spores, we know that this first extinction existed.

01:48:18.020 | But this extinction is actually what enabled plants to resurrect, right?

01:48:23.940 | So the death of these first plants, because they clinked to the rocks and they generated

01:48:32.020 | a ton of phosphorus that went into the ocean by clinking to the rocks, like 60 times more

01:48:40.020 | phosphorus than without them.

01:48:41.460 | And then all this phosphorus basically choked the oceans and made them super cold.

01:48:46.580 | And without oxygen, aoxic.

01:48:49.860 | And then we lost the plant kingdom.

01:48:53.700 | And then because of the death of these first plants, they actually enriched the soil and

01:49:00.100 | created nutrients for these new plants to come to the planet.

01:49:04.500 | And those planets had like more sophisticated vein systems, and they were moving beyond

01:49:12.340 | spores to seeded plants, et cetera, and flowering plants.

01:49:16.580 | And so in a way, one mass extinction sort of led in the Ordovician period, sort of led

01:49:25.540 | to life as we know it.

01:49:27.620 | And where would we be without plants in a way?

01:49:30.900 | So I think that death is very much part of life.

01:49:34.820 | And through that definition, that kind of planetary wide definition in the context of

01:49:42.180 | hundreds of millions of years, life gains a completely new, sort of a new light.

01:49:48.740 | And that's when the particles become a wave, right?

01:49:52.980 | Where humans are, we are not alone.

01:49:55.220 | And we are here because of those plants, right?

01:49:57.780 | So I think death is very much part of life.

01:50:00.740 | So in the context of the redwood tree, perhaps life is defined as 10 generations.

01:50:10.500 | And through the lens of a bacteria, perhaps life is defined as a millisecond.

01:50:15.460 | And perhaps through the lens of an AGI, life is defined as all of human civilization.

01:50:22.180 | So I think it really is a question of this time scale again, the time scale and the organism,

01:50:31.460 | the life form that's asking the question, through which we can answer what is life?

01:50:35.620 | - What do you think about this since you're, if we think of ourselves as in the eye of

01:50:40.900 | the storm of another extinction, the natural question to ask here is you have all of nature,

01:50:48.500 | and then you have this new human creation that is currently being termed artificial intelligence.

01:50:55.860 | How does your work play with the possibility of a future superintelligent ecosystem

01:51:05.620 | and AGI that either joins or supersedes humans?

01:51:09.780 | - Yeah.

01:51:10.660 | So I'm glad you asked this question.

01:51:14.820 | - And are you hopeful or terrified?

01:51:17.140 | - Both.

01:51:18.100 | I'm hopeful and terrified.

01:51:19.860 | I did watch your interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky, and I loved it.

01:51:25.060 | - Because you were scared or because you were excited or because there was a profound fear?

01:51:28.340 | - First of all, I was both.

01:51:30.020 | I was, I totally scared, shamed, excited, and totally also inspired because he's just

01:51:40.500 | such an incredible thinker.

01:51:42.100 | And I can agree or disagree with what he says, but I just found his way of thinking about AGI

01:51:48.980 | and the perils of humanity as a result.

01:51:52.900 | - There's an inevitability to what he's saying.

01:51:56.020 | His advice to young people is that prepare for a short life.

01:51:59.780 | - Yeah.

01:52:00.660 | - He thinks it's very almost simple.

01:52:06.340 | It's almost common sense that AGI would get rid of humans, that he can't imagine a trajectory

01:52:15.060 | eventually that leads to a place that doesn't have AGI kill all humans.

01:52:21.460 | There's just too many trajectories where a superintelligent systems gets rid of humans

01:52:26.980 | and in the near term.

01:52:30.100 | And so that clarity of thinking is very sobering to me.

01:52:35.140 | It's, maybe it is to you as well.

01:52:38.500 | It's super inspiring because I think he's wrong, but it's like, you almost want to prove him wrong.

01:52:44.020 | It's like, no, we humans are clever bunch.

01:52:46.900 | We're going to find a way.

01:52:48.180 | - It is a bit like jumping into super cold water.

01:52:50.820 | It's sort of a kind of a fist in your face.

01:52:53.700 | It wakes you up.

01:52:54.660 | And I like these moments so much.

01:52:56.420 | And he was able to bring that moment to life, even though I think a mother can never think that way

01:53:06.260 | ever.

01:53:06.760 | And it's a little bit like that notion of, I love her more than evolution requires.

01:53:14.660 | On your question about AGI and nature, look, I think we've been through a lot in terms of,

01:53:20.900 | to get here, we sort of moved from data, right?

01:53:25.060 | The ability to collect information, to knowledge, the ability to use this information for utility,

01:53:29.620 | from knowledge to intelligence.

01:53:31.620 | And what is intelligence?

01:53:32.660 | It's the ability to problem solve and adapt and translate.

01:53:35.940 | So that sort of from data to information, to knowledge, I think the next frontier is wisdom.

01:53:41.060 | And what is wisdom?

01:53:43.060 | Wisdom is the ability to have or find insight about the world and from wisdom to spiritual

01:53:51.460 | awareness, which is sort of transcends wisdom and is able to chart the world into new territory.

01:53:58.500 | But I think what is interesting about AGI is that it is sort of almost like a self-recursive

01:54:04.340 | thing, right?

01:54:04.900 | Because it's like a washing machine of like a third derivative Wikipedia.

01:54:09.220 | It uses kind of like language to create language, to create language, to create language.

01:54:14.980 | It feels like novelty is being constantly created.

01:54:17.060 | I don't, it doesn't feel like it's regurgitating.

01:54:20.180 | And that's so fascinating because, you know, these are not the stochastic parrots.

01:54:24.020 | This is sort of a new form of emergence, perhaps of novelty, as you say, that exists by virtue of

01:54:32.340 | using old things to create new things.

01:54:38.500 | But it's not as if the AGI has self-awareness, right?

01:54:42.580 | It's not as if it has, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe it has, but as far as I can tell, it's

01:54:50.020 | not as if AGI has approached consciousness or sentience just yet.

01:54:55.220 | It's probably getting there, but the language appears to present itself as if there is sentience

01:55:03.780 | there, but it doesn't.

01:55:04.900 | But I think that's the problem at the point where this AGI sounds like me and speaks like

01:55:10.180 | me and behaves like me and feels like me and breathes like me.

01:55:14.420 | And my daughter knows the AGI to be me as sort of the end of everything, right?

01:55:20.900 | As the end of human agency.

01:55:22.660 | But what is the end of human agency to humans, I think is the beginning of agency to nature.

01:55:30.420 | Because if you take all of this agency, if you take all of these language models that

01:55:34.980 | can summarize all of human civilization and consciousness and then upload that to nature

01:55:42.020 | and have nature now deal with that world of consciousness that it never had access to.

01:55:48.180 | So maybe through Eliezer's lens, the sort of short-lived human becomes sort of a very

01:55:54.660 | long-lived human-like sentient weeping willow, maybe?

01:56:00.340 | Maybe that's the end and the beginning.

01:56:02.260 | And maybe on the more optimistic side for us humans, it's a different form of existence

01:56:13.060 | where everything we create and everything we consume and everything we process is all

01:56:20.580 | made up of six elements and that's it.

01:56:26.900 | And there's only those six elements and not 118 elements.

01:56:31.300 | And it's all the stuff of biology plus some fair amount of bits, genes and atoms.

01:56:41.540 | Well, I think the idea--

01:56:42.740 | A lot of Beethoven.

01:56:43.860 | A lot of Beethoven.

01:56:45.060 | I think the idea of connecting AGI to nature through your work is really fascinating.

01:56:51.540 | Sort of unlocking this incredible machinery of intelligence that is AGI and connecting

01:57:02.420 | it to the incredible machinery of wisdom that is nature as evolved through billions of years.

01:57:09.380 | Yeah.

01:57:10.180 | A pretty crazy, intense evolution.

01:57:15.380 | Exactly.

01:57:15.940 | And unlike--again, I'm going back to directed evolution--unlike this sort of high-throughput,

01:57:26.420 | brute-force approach, if there is a way to utilize this synergy for diversity and diversification,

01:57:39.620 | what happens if you ask a ChatGPT question, but it takes 10,000 years to answer that question?

01:57:47.220 | What does that look like when you completely switch the time scale

01:57:52.980 | and you can afford the time to answer the question?

01:57:58.420 | And again, I don't know, but that world to me is possibly amazing.

01:58:06.340 | Do you think there's--because when we start to think about time scales like this,

01:58:12.340 | just looking at Earth, all the possible trajectories it might take of this living

01:58:17.460 | organism that is Earth, do you think there's others like it?

01:58:21.140 | Do you think there's other planets with life forms on them that are just

01:58:24.580 | doing their thing in this kind of way?

01:58:27.220 | Because in what you're doing, you're directly playing with what's possible with life.

01:58:36.340 | Life-like things.

01:58:37.780 | That kind of maps the question of, well, what kind of other things are possible elsewhere?

01:58:42.420 | Do you think there's other worlds full of life, full of alien life out there?

01:58:49.540 | I've studied the calculations that point towards the verdict that the possibility of life in

01:59:01.300 | and around us is very, very low.

01:59:03.780 | We are a chosen planet in a way, right?

01:59:06.820 | There's water and there's love.

01:59:08.260 | What else do you need?

01:59:09.060 | And that sort of very peculiar juxtaposition of conditions, the oxygen, the water, the carbon,

01:59:20.580 | again, is in a way a miracle given the massive extinctions that we've been through.

01:59:31.140 | As life forms, and that said, I cannot believe that there is no other life form.

01:59:38.420 | I want to believe more than I know that yes, that there are life forms in the white fountain

01:59:50.740 | that is the black hole, right?

01:59:53.220 | That there are these life forms that are light years away from us that are forming other

02:00:02.500 | forms of life forces.

02:00:03.940 | - Yeah, I'm much more worried about probably the thing that you're working on, which is

02:00:10.420 | that there's all kinds of life out around us that we're not communicating with.

02:00:17.220 | - Yes.

02:00:17.860 | - There's aliens in a sense all around us that we're not seeing, that we're not talking

02:00:23.860 | to, that we're not communicating.

02:00:25.300 | - Yeah.

02:00:26.020 | - Because that to me just seems the more likely situation.

02:00:30.100 | - That they're here.

02:00:31.220 | - That they're here, they're all around us in different forms, that there is a connection.

02:00:36.500 | There's a thing that connects all of us, all of living beings across the universe.

02:00:43.140 | And we're just beginning to understand any of it.

02:00:47.060 | And I feel like that's the important problem is I feel like you can get there with the

02:00:51.620 | tools of science today by just studying life on earth.

02:00:54.740 | Unlock some really fundamental things that maybe you can start to answer questions about

02:01:00.020 | what is consciousness?

02:01:01.060 | Maybe this thing that we've been saying about love, but honestly in a serious way.

02:01:08.820 | And then you'll start to understand that there is alien life all out there.

02:01:13.860 | And it's much more complicated and interesting that we kind of realize as opposed to looking

02:01:21.540 | to human-like, exactly human-like things.

02:01:24.500 | It's the variety of life that's possible is just almost endless.

02:01:27.780 | - I totally agree with you.

02:01:29.620 | I think again define alien, right?

02:01:35.060 | - Yeah, define intelligence, define life.

02:01:38.420 | - Right, right.

02:01:39.780 | And Marvin Minsky used to say intelligence is a suitcase word.

02:01:43.780 | Right, it's a word so big.

02:01:45.300 | It's a word like sustainability and it's a word like rock and roll.

02:01:49.860 | And suitcase words are always very, very dangerous.

02:01:54.660 | - Speaking of rock and roll, you've mentioned music and you mentioned Beethoven a bunch

02:01:58.420 | of times.

02:01:58.900 | You've also tweeted about Evgeny Kisin performance and so on.

02:02:04.980 | What can you say about the role of music in your life?

02:02:08.900 | - I love music.

02:02:12.340 | I always wondered why is it that plastic arts, meaning architecture and sculpture and painting

02:02:16.900 | can't get us to cry and music gets us to cry so quickly and connect so quickly.

02:02:23.060 | There is something about music that it is, and no wonder that plants also respond to

02:02:28.260 | music.

02:02:28.900 | But that is the top of the creative pyramid in my opinion.

02:02:33.380 | - It's a weird mystery that we're so connected to music.

02:02:36.340 | Well, by the way, to push back, a good bridge will make me cry.

02:02:39.620 | - A good arch, it's true.

02:02:41.380 | And I will say when I visited the Sagrada Familia, I had that kind of spiritual reverence

02:02:49.300 | towards that spatial experience and being in that space and feeling the intention in

02:02:55.300 | the space and appreciating every little gesture.

02:02:58.580 | So it's true.

02:02:59.620 | It is the universal language.

02:03:02.100 | It's the language of waves, right?

02:03:05.700 | It's the language of the waves, not the language of the particles.

02:03:09.300 | It is the universal language, I believe.

02:03:11.220 | And that is definitely one of my loves.

02:03:16.020 | - And you said that if you weren't doing what you were doing now, perhaps you would be a

02:03:22.180 | film director.

02:03:22.900 | So I have to ask, what do you think is the best film of all time?

02:03:26.900 | Maybe top three.

02:03:28.980 | - Yeah, maybe "The Godfather."

02:03:32.260 | - "Godfather," okay.

02:03:33.780 | - "The Godfather" is definitely up there.

02:03:36.580 | Francis Coppola is one of my heroes.

02:03:38.420 | - Have you met him?

02:03:39.780 | - I have met him.

02:03:41.140 | Yes, yes, yes.

02:03:42.580 | I was very, very lucky.

02:03:44.340 | We were very lucky to work with him on his new film, "Ogallapolis," which is coming out,

02:03:49.300 | I hope, in 2024.

02:03:50.660 | And think about the cities of the future in the context of new materials and the unity

02:03:56.980 | between nature and culture.

02:03:58.340 | "Godfather" is definitely up there.

02:04:00.660 | "2001" is up there.

02:04:03.780 | I would watch that film again and again and again.

02:04:08.260 | It's incredible.

02:04:09.140 | The last scene in "Odyssey 2001," that's...

02:04:14.500 | Just watch the last scene of "2001," then listen to Yudkowsky, and then go to the garden,

02:04:23.620 | and that's pretty much the end and the beginning.

02:04:27.860 | But that scene, that last scene from "2001" is everything.

02:04:31.700 | It says so much with so little.

02:04:34.820 | And it leaves...

02:04:35.620 | It's sort of the embodiment, I believe, of ambivalence.

02:04:42.180 | And there's opportunity to believe in the beginning of humankind, the end of humankind,

02:04:48.820 | the planet, child, star, or star child of the future.

02:04:53.860 | Was there a death?

02:04:56.180 | Was there a reincarnation?

02:05:00.180 | That final scene, to me, is something that I go back to and study.

02:05:06.820 | And every time there is a different reading of that scene that inspires me.

02:05:10.980 | So that scene, it's just...

02:05:13.380 | And then the first scene in "The Godfather," still one of the best scenes of all times.

02:05:17.140 | Sort of a portrait of America, the ideals and values that are brought from Italy.

02:05:22.580 | A family of loyalty, of values, of how different values are constructed.

02:05:29.700 | Yes, loyalty and the human spirit and how Coppola celebrates the human spirit through

02:05:36.260 | the most simple gestures in language and acting.

02:05:40.580 | And I think in Kubrick, you see this highly curated and controlled and manicured vision

02:05:49.460 | of creating a film.

02:05:50.660 | And with Francis, it's like an Italian feast.

02:05:54.820 | It's like anything can happen at any moment in time.

02:05:59.060 | And just being on the set with him is an experience I'll take with me to my grave.

02:06:06.980 | It's very, very, very special.

02:06:09.140 | And you said music is also part of that, of creating a feeling in the movies.

02:06:12.980 | Yeah.

02:06:13.780 | Actually, the "Godfather," that tune...

02:06:20.820 | That makes me emotional every time on some weird level.

02:06:24.900 | Yeah, it's one of these tunes I'm sure that has...

02:06:29.140 | If you play it to a jazzman, you'll get the best scent of all time.

02:06:37.940 | But I think with that particular tune, I learned staccato.

02:06:43.940 | As something very, very happy and joyous.

02:06:49.460 | And then made into this stretched in time and became kind of the refrain of

02:06:56.260 | nostalgia and melancholy and loyalty and all of these values that ride on top of this one

02:07:04.100 | single tune.

02:07:04.820 | You can play it in all kinds of different ways.

02:07:07.300 | I've played on guitar in all kinds of different ways.

02:07:09.620 | And I think in "Godfather III," the son plays it on guitar to the father.

02:07:14.340 | I think this happens in movies.

02:07:17.700 | But sometimes a melody, and that's a simple melody, can just like...

02:07:21.700 | And the Strauss melody in 2001.

02:07:24.980 | Yeah.

02:07:25.540 | And when you juxtapose these melodies with the scene, you get this, again,

02:07:34.740 | whole that's bigger than some of its parts where you get this moment that is, I think...

02:07:40.260 | Like these are the moments I would send with the next Voyager to outer space.

02:07:46.260 | I definitely sent "The Godfather" in 2001 would definitely be on that golden record.

02:07:54.180 | You are an incredibly successful scientist, engineer, architect, artist, designer.

02:08:00.340 | You've mentored a lot of successful people.

02:08:03.220 | Can you give advice to young people listening to this, how to have a successful career

02:08:09.780 | and how to have a successful life?

02:08:14.340 | Look, I think there's this beautiful line in "Sheltering Sky."

02:08:19.300 | How many times have you seen a full moon in your life and actually took the time to

02:08:25.940 | ingest and explore and reflect upon the full moon?

02:08:30.580 | Probably 20, I believe he says.

02:08:32.420 | I spend time with a full moon.

02:08:36.340 | I take my time with a full moon.

02:08:40.180 | And I pay attention to a full moon.

02:08:44.420 | And I think paying attention to the seasons and taking time to appreciate

02:08:53.460 | the little things, the simple things is what makes a meaningful life.

02:09:00.740 | I was very lucky to have had, you know, to have grown up in a home that

02:09:11.780 | taught me this way of being.

02:09:13.060 | My parents, my grandmother, who played a very important role in my growing up.

02:09:19.700 | And that ability to pay attention and to be present is so, so, so, so.

02:09:32.820 | I could not emphasize it enough.

02:09:35.860 | It's so crucial.

02:09:36.980 | And be grateful.

02:09:40.020 | And be grateful.

02:09:42.180 | I think gratitude and presence, appreciation are really the most important things in life.

02:09:53.060 | If you could take a short tangent about your grandmother,

02:09:56.580 | who's played a big role in your life, what do you remember?

02:10:01.700 | What lessons have you learned from her?

02:10:04.020 | She had this blanket that she would give me every time I came back from school and say,

02:10:09.140 | you know, "Do your homework here and meet with your friends here."

02:10:12.660 | And it was always in her garden.

02:10:14.020 | And her garden, in my mind, was ginormous.

02:10:16.740 | But when I, you know, last I went there and saw the site, which has now become the site for another

02:10:23.380 | tall building, it was a tiny, tiny little garden that to me seemed so large when I was

02:10:32.420 | growing up, because it had everything.

02:10:35.540 | It had fig trees, it had olive trees, it had mushrooms, it had the blanket.

02:10:42.980 | I would do my homework there.

02:10:44.420 | It was everything.

02:10:45.460 | And I needed nothing, nothing else.

02:10:47.620 | And that was my Garden of Eden.

02:10:51.860 | That was my childhood.

02:10:53.860 | And she taught me, you know, we would lie on the blanket and look at the clouds and

02:11:00.100 | reflect upon the shapes of the clouds and study the shapes of the plants.

02:11:03.460 | And there was a lot of wonder in that childhood with her.

02:11:08.580 | And she taught me the importance of wonder in sort of, in an eternal childhood and living

02:11:19.380 | adulthood as a child.

02:11:22.340 | And so I'm very, very grateful for that.

02:11:25.220 | I think it is the sense of wonder.

02:11:31.780 | Speaking up was always something that she adhered to, to speak up your truth, to be

02:11:38.100 | straightforward, to be positive.

02:11:42.100 | These are things that I also got from my mom.

02:11:44.100 | And from my mom, the sense of humor.

02:11:47.940 | She had the best sense of humor that I could think of and was just a joy to be around.

02:11:56.740 | And my father taught me everything.

02:12:00.180 | My father taught me everything I know.

02:12:01.620 | My mom taught me everything I feel.

02:12:03.300 | - That's a good way to put it.

02:12:05.060 | - My grandma taught me everything I incite.

02:12:07.540 | - Well, I see the sense of wonder that just carries through everything you do.

02:12:11.780 | So I think you would, you make your grandmother proud.

02:12:15.700 | Well, what about advice for how to have a career?

02:12:20.500 | So you've had a very interesting career and a successful career, but not an easy one.

02:12:27.700 | You took a few leaps.

02:12:29.380 | I did take a few leaps and they were uncomfortable.

02:12:32.020 | My father, and I'll never forget, I think we were like listening to a Rolling Stones song

02:12:42.020 | in the kitchen and my dad, who was actually born in Boston, he's American, he said,

02:12:49.620 | I started to have sort of these second thoughts about continuing my education in Israel.

02:12:58.180 | And I wanted to go, I was on my way to London to the architectural association to do my diploma

02:13:04.260 | studies there.

02:13:04.900 | And he looked at me and he said, get out of here, kiddo.

02:13:09.380 | You got to get out of here.

02:13:10.740 | And you've outgrown where you're at.

02:13:14.340 | You need to move forward.

02:13:16.580 | Another thing he had taught me, the feeling of discomfort, as you say, the feeling of

02:13:22.420 | loneliness and discomfort is imperative to growth.

02:13:28.660 | Growth is painful, period.

02:13:31.300 | Any form of growth is difficult and painful.

02:13:35.140 | Birth is difficult and painful.

02:13:37.300 | And it is really, really important to place yourself in situations of discomfort.

02:13:43.380 | I like to be in a room where everyone in the room is more intelligent than me.

02:13:47.060 | I like to be in that kind of state where the people that I surround myself with are orders

02:13:55.540 | of magnitude more intelligent than I am.

02:13:58.580 | And I can say that that is true of all of my team members.

02:14:01.780 | And that's the intellectual discomfort that I feed off of.

02:14:05.540 | The same is true for physical exertion.

02:14:10.340 | You got to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations in order to grow, in order to find

02:14:17.540 | comfort.

02:14:18.040 | And then, on the other hand, is love, is finding love and finding that human, this other human

02:14:33.300 | that complements you and that makes you a better version of the one you are and even

02:14:41.140 | of the one you want to be.

02:14:43.060 | But with gratitude and attention and love, you can go so, so far.

02:14:50.580 | To the younger generation, I don't speak of a career.

02:14:55.220 | I never thought of my work as my career ever.

02:15:01.220 | And there was this constant entanglement between life and work and love and longing and being

02:15:09.140 | and mothering.

02:15:09.860 | It's all the same.

02:15:10.660 | And I appreciate that to some people that doesn't work in their arrangement of will

02:15:21.780 | versus comfort versus the reality.

02:15:26.580 | But for me, it has always worked.

02:15:28.580 | So I think to the younger generation, I say, don't think of your career.

02:15:35.140 | A career is something that is imposed upon you.

02:15:37.380 | Think of your calling.

02:15:38.340 | That's something that's innately and directionally moves you.

02:15:44.660 | And it's something that transcends a career.

02:15:46.660 | Similarly, you can think about the difference between, you know, learning versus being

02:15:52.900 | educated.

02:15:53.380 | Being educated is something that's given to you.

02:15:55.300 | That's external.

02:15:56.180 | That's being imposed.

02:15:56.980 | That's top-down imposed.

02:15:58.500 | This learning is something that comes from within.

02:16:00.340 | It's also the difference between joy and happiness.

02:16:03.380 | Many times I'm sad and I'm still joyous.

02:16:06.340 | And it's very, very important to understand the difference between these externally perceived

02:16:13.940 | success paths and internally driven, value-based, you know, ways of being in the world.

02:16:22.340 | And we, together, when we combine all of these, you know, all of these, the broken puzzle,

02:16:30.740 | let's say, of substance and vulnerability, we get this bigger gestalt, this wondrous

02:16:40.820 | world of a future that is peaceful, that is, you know, that is wholesome, and that, you

02:16:52.340 | know, that proposes or, you know, advocates for that kind of synergy that we've been talking

02:16:57.140 | about throughout.

02:16:57.940 | But it's all fun.

02:16:59.700 | >> AJ: Well, thank you for this incredible conversation.

02:17:03.940 | Thank you for all the work you're doing.

02:17:05.780 | And I just have to say that thank you for noticing me and listening to me.

02:17:11.380 | You're somebody from just today and from our exchanges before this, like there's a

02:17:17.780 | sense where you care about me as a human being, which I could tell you care about other humans.

02:17:23.380 | Thank you for doing that.

02:17:24.980 | Thank you for having empathy and just like, yeah, really listening and noticing me, that

02:17:31.460 | I exist.

02:17:32.180 | So thank you for that.

02:17:33.620 | I've been a huge fan of your work, been a huge fan of who you are as a human being.

02:17:38.260 | It's just an honor that you would sit with me.

02:17:40.260 | Thank you.

02:17:40.740 | >> NERI: Thank you so much, Lex.

02:17:42.660 | I feel the same way.

02:17:43.700 | I'll just say the same.

02:17:45.700 | >> LEX: And I look forward to hearing the response to my job application that I've

02:17:49.380 | submitted.

02:17:49.700 | >> NERI: Oh, you're accepted.

02:17:51.220 | >> LEX: Oh, damn.

02:17:52.180 | All right.

02:17:52.580 | Excellent.

02:17:52.820 | >> NERI: We all speak of you all the time.

02:17:54.340 | >> LEX: Thank you so much.

02:17:55.540 | Thank you, Neri.

02:17:56.180 | >> NERI: Thank you, Lex.

02:17:56.500 | Thank you.

02:17:56.980 | >> AJ: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neri Aksman.

02:18:00.660 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:18:04.020 | And now let me leave you with some words from Leo Tolstoy.

02:18:07.860 | "Everything I know, I know because of love."

02:18:12.180 | Thank you for listening.

02:18:14.500 | I hope to see you next time.

02:18:16.500 | [END]

02:18:17.540 | Leo Tolstoy - www.leo.com/podcast

02:18:19.140 | [END]

02:18:20.180 | Leo Tolstoy - www.leo.com/podcast

02:18:22.180 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #394

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