Transcript for #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature

I do. And I think of nature in that way, in general, in the context of design specifically. I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomas, everything that is not produced by humankind. The birds and the rocks and everything in between fungi, elephants, whales,

Yes. And we're looking for it. I think that from let's say from the beginning of mankind, going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us. Before that we were totally and completely connected. And I want to return to that world.

Yes, yes. I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged and we still have not understood and we still have. And so much of our work is designed, but a lot of it is science is unveiling and and finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware before. Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence. And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology. If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition of nature is everything but anthropomas. And I'm using Ron Milo who is an incredible Professor from the Viceman Institute who came up with this definition of Antropomass in 2020, when he identified that 2020 was the crossover year when Antropomass exceeded biomass on the planet. So all of the design goods that we have created and brought into the world now outweigh all of the biomass. including, of course, all plastics and wearables building cities, but also asphalt and concrete all outweigh the scale of the biomass and actually that was a moment. You know how in life there are moments that be a handful of moments that get you to course correct and my it was a zoom conversation with Ron and that was a moment for me. When I realized that that imbalance, now we've superseded the biomass on the planet, where do we go from here? And you've heard the expression more, more phones than bones, and the anthropomas, and the autopocene, and the technosphere, sort of outwaying the biosphere. But now we are really trying to look at, is there a way? in which all things technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere. Meaning if you could today grow instead of build everything and anything, if you could grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what would that world look like? Where the touring test for sort of this kind of, I call this material ecology approach, but this notion that everything material, everything that you design in the physical universe, can be read and written to as or thought of or perceived of as nature grown. That's sort of the during test for the company or at least that's how I started. I thought well, grow everything. That's sort of the slogan. Let's grow everything. And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars. Is it possible that a world in which you build buildings and cities that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence? Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature and humans where you cannot separate between grown and made? And it doesn't even matter.

Yes, in 2005, I called this material ecology. I thought, what if all material all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have an impact, a positive impact on the ecology where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human. And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi. Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected and why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms. Well, first of all, yes, they're connected but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree and Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana. And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about. What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud? At the kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think neural link for nature, you know, since the first computer, and you know this, by heart probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers, we today have computational power that is one trillion times the power that we had in those times. We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth. And 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible. So human kind, since the first computer, has approaching access, such incredible bandwidth. And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth? So beyond genes and evolution? If there was a way to augment nature and allow it access to the world of bits, what does nature look like now? And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind?

Exactly. So I think of it as large molecule models. And those large molecules models, of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines. And so on and so forth. And we don't have this data currently. And part of our mission is to do just that. Trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all kingdoms of life, across all five kingdoms of life. And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity. In the company we're constantly asking, what does nature want? What does nature want from a compute?

Yeah, so we keep coming back to this this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy, right? So find order, but constantly increase then information scale in. And this is true for what our work also tries to do because we're constantly trying to fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things grown, right? And as designers, we are educated to think in XYZ and that's pretty much where architectural education ends. and biological education begins. So when reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown. But in the natural environment, we're asking, can we provide nature with these extra dimensions? And again, I'm not sure what nature wants. But I'm curious as to what happens when you provide these tools to the natural environments, obviously with responsibility, obviously with control, obviously with ethics and moral code. But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?

Yeah, I'll just just a few words about the team.

You know, I think they're first like you. They're humanists first. They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds. And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius in the computer scientist and they mechanical engineer who is trained as a synthetic biologist and and now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist architects of course and designers roboticist so it's really it's no as arc right to a beach and always dancing between this line of the artificial the synthetic and the in the real was the term for in the natural Yeah, the built in the grown nature and culture, technology and biology, but we're we're we're constantly seeking to to ask how can we build design and deploy products in three scales, the molecular scale, which I've really hinted to and there And the molecular scale we're really looking to understand whether there is a universal language to nature and what that language is. And then build a tool that I think and dream of it is the iPhone for nature if nature had an iPhone. What would that iPhone look like?

Exactly. It goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans have now arrived at. and giving that to nature and seeing what happens there can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire. Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud? Can they do this quote unquote automatically without a kind of a top-down brute force policy based method that's authored and deployed by humans. And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world. And then there's a second area in the company which focuses on growing products. And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2. It becomes a product. It's consumed. It's used. It's worn by a human and then it goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant.

Yeah, it starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can literally eat. So the world's first entirely biodegradable biodegradable bioreenouble product.

Yes, either using plant matter or using bacteria, but we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or wastewater. And with this wonderful reincarnation of a thing that doesn't need to end up in a composting site, but can just be thrown into the ground and grow olive and find peace. And there's a lot of textile-based work out there that is focused on one single element in this long chain like oh let's create you know leather out of mycelium or or let's create textile out of cellulose but then it stops there and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable and you and you need a little bit of glue and you need a little bit of this material and a little bit of that material to make it water resistant and then it's over. So that's one thing that we're trying to solve for is how to create a product that is materially, computationally robotically novel and goes through all of these phases from the creation, from this carbon recycling technology to the product, to literally how do you think about, you know, reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and putting things together and using humans to do that. Can that happen just using robots and microbes? And that's it.

And the factory is great too. I'm very very excited and October will share first first renditions of some of this work in February. We'll invite you to the lab.

Yes, and just take a step back over the 10 years of the mediated matter group, which was my group at MIT, has sort of dedicated itself to biobase design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology. And we attempted to build a suite of embodiments, let's say, that they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows. And we wrote patents and papers on them, but they were still in of ones. Again, the challenges you say was to grow them. And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments. And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees and or comb as the structural material with vespers we used synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different the philosophy was always the same the approach was really an approach of computational templating that templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment where nature and technology could do it, could dance, together to create these products. So just a few examples with a silk pavilion. We've had a couple of pavilions made of silk in the second one, which was the bigger one, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend, an incredible mentor, Paul Antonelli. that pavilion was six meter tall and it was produced by silkworms and and there we had different types of templates. There were physical templates that were basically just these water soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning and then there were environmental templates which was a robot basically applying a variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm.

And that's what's happening in pharma and in biomaterials and, by the way, precision ag and food, new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is the sort of how I think of it. And the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or it's It's the mycelium. There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad and and it's cellulose or it's you know fake bananas or the the workhorse he call I, but these hero organisms are being bedded on as like the What's the one answer that solves everything?

These are sort of the 42s of the enchanted new universe. And back at MIT, we said, instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony. And let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale. And those usually were pavilions.

17,532. So each of these silkworms threads are about one mile in distance and they're beautiful and just thinking about the amount of material. It's a bit like thinking about the length of capillary vessels that grow in your belly, when you're pregnant, to feed that incredible new life form. It just nature is amazing. But back to the silkworms, I think I had three months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how we were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon over the period of 24 to 72 hours. And it builds a cocoon, basically, to protect itself. It's a beautiful form of architecture. And it uses pretty much just two materials, two chemical compounds, Sarasin and fiber in. The Sarasin is sort of the glue of the cocoon, the fiber in is the fiber base material of the cocoon, and through fibers and glue. And that's two for so many systems in nature, lots of fiber and glue. And that architecture allows them to metamorphosize. And in the process, they vary the properties of that silk thread. So it's stiffer or softer depending on where it is in the section of the cocoon. And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was 6 axis, Kuka Armone of these. Baby Coocus and we're trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large when one of my students now a brilliant industrial engineer roboticist on my team Marcus said well, you know, we were just playing with those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realized that if they're placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon only the cocoon would be flat. Because they're constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as an anchor to spin the cocoon. But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less than 21 millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches. And we say, aha. Let's work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches and a silkworm mind you is quite an egocentric creature and actually the furthest you go you move forward in evolution by natural selection the more egoism you find in creatures so when you think about termites right they the their material sophistication is is is actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and connect with each other. So if you think about the entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as like a matrix that runs across two axes. One is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites A, sound communication, but the material sophistication is crap, right? It's just saliva. feces and some soil, particles that are built to create these incredible termite mounds, the scale that when compared to human skyscrapers transcend all of buildable scales, at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the termite. But when you look at the silkworm, The silkworm has zero-connection communication across silkworms. They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other. They're sort of a human-designed species because the domesticated silkmoth creates the cocoon. We then produce the silk of it and then it dies. So it has dysfunctional wings. It cannot fly. And that's another problem that the sericulture industry has is what why did we in the first place author this organism 4,000 years ago that is unable to fly and is just there to basically live as to serve a human need which is textiles. And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of biology dimension of silkworms. But along the way, by the way, this is great. I never get to tell the full story. I'm so great. I always, I'm always like people say I always speak in Nichean paragraphs. They're way too long and this is wonderful.

but but but but really those those silkworms are not yes they're not designed to be like humans right they're not designed to connect communicate and build things that are bigger than themselves through connection and communication

That's a really great question. What happens is that at some point the templating strategies and as you said correctly, there were geometrical templating, material templating, environmental templating, chemical templating if you're using fermones to guide the movement of bees. in the absence of a queen where you have a robotic queen. But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature, right? But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational? material and immaterial, physical and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost guiding a product, almost like a gardener, to a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying, now I own the code. I get to do what I want with this code. Let me show you what this pavilion may look like or this product may look like. And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realize that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if, if I may, a kind of a collaboration and cooperation between silkworms that are not a swarm-based organism. They're not like the bees in the termites. They don't work together and they don't have, you know, social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, etc. They're all the same in a way, right? And here, what was so exciting for us is that these computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to kind of hop from the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of maybe human-like intelligence where they could connect and communicate by virtue of you know feeling or rubbing against each other in in an area that was hotter or colder and they were so the product that we got at the end the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the fiber and the transparency the product at the end seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community but of course it wasn't it's a bunch of biological agents working together to assemble this thing that's really really fascinating to us how can technology Augment or enable a swarm-like behavior and creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms.

So if you can predict it, it doesn't count as emergence, actually.

I mean, it's a bit like it's kind of... It's saturated, doesn't count. That's right, right. Speaking of emergence in empowerment because we're constantly moving between those as if they're equals on the team. And one of them Kristoff shared with me a mathematical equation for what does it mean to empower nature? And what does empowerment in nature look like? And that relates to emergency. We can go back to emergency in a few moments, but I want to, I want to say it so that I know that I've learned it.

Of course, first of all, first of all, is the master here. But really, we were thinking, again, what does nature want? Nature wants nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy. or do we want? We kind of want the same thing. We want more, but we want order, right? And this goes back to your conversation with Yoshia that stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes. His definition or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered. If the entropy of the distribution of all of its states is high, while the entropy of the distribution of a single state given a choice given an action is low, meaning it's that kind of Yeah, duality between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing. And this really, I think is analogous to human empowerment, given infinite, wide array of choices. What is the choice that you make to enable to empower, to provide you with the agency that you need.

Yeah, and the cool things it can apply to a human on an individual basis, but or a silk or more a B or a microbe, a microbe that has agency. or by virtue of a template. But it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees. And so we've done a lot of works moving from, you've asked how to grow things. So we've grown things using co-fabrication, where we're digitally fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life, and those worth silkworms, and bees, and with bees, which we've sent to outer space, and we turned healthily, and they were reproductive.

We've built what we call the synthetic apiary and the synthetic apiary was designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees of Massachusetts. They go on hibernation, of course, during the winter season and then we lose 80% of them or more during that period. We're thinking, okay, what if we created this environment where Before you template, right? Before you can design with, you have to design for, right? You have to create this space of mutualism, space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism. And with bees, it started as the synthetic apiary. And we have proven that that curated environment where we design the space with high levels of control of temperature, humidity and light, And we've proven that they were reproductive in a live and we realized, wow, this environment that we created can help augment bees in the winter season in any city around the world where bees survive and thrive in the summer and spring seasons and could this be a kind of a new urban typology, an architectural typology of symbiosis of mutualism between organisms and humans. where by the way, the synthetic cap here was in a co-op, nearby summerville. We had robots, our team slept there every day with our tools and machines, and we made it happen, and the neighbors were very happy, and they got to get a ton of honey at the end of the winter, and those bees, of course, were released into the wild at the end of the winter alive and kicking. So then in order to actually experiment with the robotic queen and idea our concept, we had to prove obviously that we can create this space for bees. And then after that, we had this amazing opportunity to send the bees to space on blue shepherd mission that is part of the origin. And we, of course, said, yes, we'll take a slot. We said, OK, can we outdo NASA? So NASA in 1982 had an experiment worth, they sent bees to order space. The bees returned, they were not reproductive. And some of them died. And we thought, well, is there a way in which we can create a life support system, almost like a small mini biolab of a queen and her retinue? that would be sent in this blue origin, new shepherd mission, in this one cell. And so that, if the synthetic APU was an architectural project, in this case, this second synthetic APU was a product. It was from an architectural controlled environment. to a product scale control environment. And this bio lab, this life support system for bees, was designed to provide the bees with all the conditions that they needed. And we looked at that time at the Nassano fairmon, that the queen uses to guide the other bees. And we looked at fairmon's that are associated with a bee. and thinking of those hormones being released inside the capsules that go to the capsule that goes to outer space. They returned back to our the media lab roof and those bees were alive and kicking and reproductive and you know and they continued to create calm and and it ended with a beautiful nature paper that the team and I published together We gave them gold nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles because we were interested if bees recycle wax it was known forever that bees do not recycle the wax and by feeding them these gold nanoparticles we were able to prove that the bees actually do recycle the wax. The reason I'm bringing this forward is because We don't view ourselves as designers of consumable products and architectural environments only, but we love that moment where these technologies and by the way, every one of these projects that we created involve the creation of a new technology, whether it be a glass printer or the spinning robot or or the life support system for the B colony, they all involved a technology that was associated with the project, and I never, ever, ever want to let that part go, because I love technology so much. But also another element of this is it always, these projects, if they're great, they reveal new knowledge about or new science, about the topic that you're investigating, be it, you know. silkworms or bees or glass. That's why I say I always tell my team, it should be at Moma and the cover of nature or science at the same time or don't separate between the art and the science. It's one of the same.

Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What have I learned? I've learned that, you know, we did, we also worked with shrimp shells with a goh, how we built this tower on the roof of Essef Mama, which by a couple of months ago, until it was on the roof, we've shown the structure completely biodegraded into them, well, not completely, but almost completely biodegraded to the soil and this notion that a product or part, an organism or Part of that organism can reincarnate is very, very moving, thought to me, because I want to believe that I believe in reincarnation.

Yeah, that's my relationship with God. I want to, I want, I like to believe in believing. Most great things in life are second derivatives of things. But let's part of another conversation.

that notion of I want you to want, or I need you to need, or that there's always something a deeper truth behind what is on the surface. And so I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and discover new truths about them through that. But what have I learned about organisms?

I like EQUALI and a lot of the work that we've done was not possible without our working on EQUALI or other workhorse organisms like sound and bacteria.

Death masks.

So we did this project called Vespers and those were basically death masks that was said as a process for designing a living product. What happens and we looked at it. I looked at it and remember looking at Beethoven's death mask and I got Memnon's death mask and just studying how they were created and really they were sort of geometrically attuned to the face of the dead. And what we wanted to do is create a death mask that was not based in the shape of the of the wear, but rather was based on their legacy and their biology and maybe we could harness a few stem cells there for future generations, or contain the last breath, Lazarus, which preceded Vespers, was a project where we designed a mask to contain a single breath, the last breath of the wear. And again, if I had access to these technologies today, I would totally incorporate my grandmother's last breath in a product. So it was like an aromamento. So with Vespers, And we actually used E. coli to create pigmented masks, masks whose pigments would be recreated at the surface of the mask. And I'm skipping over a lot of content, but basically there were 15 masks and they were created as three sets. The masks of the past, the masks of the present and the mask of the future. The masks, there were five, five and five and the masks of the past were based on ornaments and they were embedded with natural minerals like gold. Yes, yes, yes.

They look symmetrical, but they're not. This is intended for you to be tricked and think that they're all symmetrical. There's imperfections. There are imperfections by design. All of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you're looking at was entirely designed using a computational program. So none of it is manual. But long story short, the first collection is about the surface of the mask and the second collection which you're looking at is about the volume of the mask. And what happens to the mask when all the colors from the surface, yes, enter the volume of the mask inside, create pockets and channels to guide life through them. They were incorporated with pigment producing living organisms. And then those organisms were templated to recreate the patterns over the original death masks. And so life recycles and rebegins and so on and so forth. The past meets the future, the future meets the past. from the surface to the volume, from death to life to death to life. And that, again, is a recurring theme in the projects that we take on. But from a technological perspective, what was interesting is that we embedded chemical signals in the jet, in the printer, and those chemical signals basically interacted with the pigment producing bacteria in this case E. coli that were introduced on the surface of the mask and those interactions between the chemical signals inside the resins. And the bacteria at the surface of the mask, at the resolution that is native to the printer, in this case, 20 microns per voxel, allowed us to compute the exact patterns that we wanted to achieve. And we thought, well, if we can do this with pigments, can we do this with antibiotics? If we can do this with antibiotics, could we do it with melanin? And what are the implications? Again, this is a platform technology. Now that we have it, what are the actual real world implications and potential applications for this technology? And we started a new area of one of my students, Rachel, her PhD thesis was titled after this new class of materials that we created through this project Vespers, hybrid living materials, HLMs, and these hybrid living materials really paved the way towards a whole other set of products that we've designed, like the work that we did with Melonine for the Mandela Pavilion that we presented at Sifmoma, where again we're using the same principles of templating in this case, not silkworms or not bees, but we're templating bacteria at a much much much more finer resolution and now instead of templating using a robot, we're templating using a printer. But compute is very, very much part of it. And what's nice about bacteria, of course, is that from an ethical perspective, I think there is a range, right? So at the end of the silk pavilion, I got an email from Professor Injupan, who has been working on transgenic silk and said, well, if you did this, this create amazing silpavilion, why don't we create, you know, glow in the light silk dresses. And in order to create this glow in the light silk, we need to apply genes that are taken from a spider to a silkworm. This is what is known as a transgenic operation, and we said no. And that was for us a clear decision that no, we will work with these organisms as long as we know that what we are doing with them is not only better for humans, but it's also better for them. And again, just to remind you, we're I forget the exact number, but it's around 1,000 cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in India and China and were in those very culture industries that are being abused. Now, yes, this organism was designed to serve the human species and maybe it's time to to retire that, you know, that conception of organisms that are designed for a human-centric world or human-centric set of applications. I don't feel the same way about E.K.I. I'm not that I am a agnostic, organism, agnostic, but still I believe there's so much for us to do on this planet with bacteria.

A whole that's bigger than the sum of its parts.

I think you have enough of an aura. All right.

And by the way, the gray area is, you know, is where some of us like to live and like to thrive. And that's okay. And thank goodness that there's so many of us that that like the black and white and that thrive in the black and white. My husband is a good example for that.

So with silkworms, absolutely, that's not modified genetically. Let's not modify genetically. And then some, because why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road? And we should never get to a point where we evolve life for the service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the kingdom of life. I don't think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria.

I'm moving through my second cup here.

But bacteria are, yeah, for sure.

But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume and then re-incarnates or dissolved into the soil and then creates And a tree and then that tree creates more bacteria. And then that bacteria, I mean, again, that's why I like to think about not recycling but reincarnating because that assumes a kind of imparting upon nature that dimension of agency and maybe awareness. But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria. Directed evolution is one of them. We're looking at directed evolution. So high throughput, directed evolution of bacteria for the production of products. And again, those products can be a shoe, wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics.

Totally computationally, obviously, in the lab with the hero organism, the hero bacteria. And what's happening today in e-chrome microbial synthetic biology, synthetic biology, that lends itself to ecology. And again, all of these fields are coming together. It's such a wonderful time to be a designer. I can't think of a better time to be a designer in this world. But with high throughput directed evolution, and I should say that the physical space in our new lab will have these capsules, which we have designed, that there are designed like growth chambers or growth rooms. And in those growth rooms, we can basically program, top down environmental templating, or top down environmental control of lights, humidity light, et cetera. So light humidity and temperature while doing bottom up genetic regulations. So it is a wet lab, but in that wet lab, you could do at the same time genetic modulation and environmental templating. And then again, the idea is that in one of those capsules, maybe we grow transparent wood in another capsule, we would for architectural application. Another capsule, we grow a shoe. And in another capsule, we look at that large language model that we talked about. And there is a particular technology associated with that, which we're hoping to reveal to the world in February. And each of those capsules is basically a high throughput computational environment. like a breadboard that has think of sort of a physical breadboard environment that has access to oxygen and nitrogen and CO2 and nutritional dispensing. And these little capsules could be stressed. They're sort of an ecology in a box and they could be stressed to produce the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future. Food is a very interesting one, obviously because of food insecurity and the issues that we have around both in terms of food insecurity but also in terms of the future of food and what will remain after we can't eat plants and animals anymore and all we can eat is these false bananas and insects as our protein source. So there we're thinking, can we design these capsules to stress an environment and see how that environment behaves, think about a kind of an ecological, a biodiversity chamber, a kind of a time capsule that is designed as a biodiversity chamber where you can program the exact temperature humidity and light combination to emulate the environment from the past, Ohio 1981, December 31st at 5 a.m. in the morning. What did tomatoes taste like? To all the way in the future, 200 years ago, these are the environmental inputs. These are some genetic regulations that I'm testing and what might the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future. feel like tests like behave like et cetera. And so these capsules are designed as part of a lab. That's why it's been taking us such a long time to get to this point because we started designing them in 2019 and they are currently, literally as I speak to you under construction.

It's not. It's never been done before. And these capsules have never been designed before. So when we first decided, these are going to be environmental capsules people thought were crazy. What are you building? What are you making? So the answer is that we don't know. But we know that there has never been a space like this where you have basically a wet lab and a grove room at that resolution, at that granularity of control over organisms. There is a reason why there is this incredible evolution of product in the software space. The hardware space, that's a more limiting space, that because of the physical infrastructure that we have to test an experiment with things. So we really wanted to push on creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way. What could you create in it? You could create the future. You could create a, you could create an environment of plants talking to each other with a robotic referee. And the robotic referee, we, you know, and you could, you could set an objective function and let's say for, for, for, for the, Transaction, driven individuals in the world. Let's say the objective function is carbon sequestration. And all of those plants are implemented with a gaming engine and they have these reward system, right? And they're constantly needing to optimize the way in which they carbon sequest. We read out the bad guys. We leave the good guys and we end up with this like ideal ecology of carbon sequestering heroes that connect and communicate with each other. And once we have that model, this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into the field, and we see what happens in nature. And that's sort of what I'm talking about augmenting plants with that extra dimension of of bandwidth that they do not have. They're just last week I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are augmented with a pong game and and in a dish they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness which is which is wonderful like that that you could actually take these neurons from a mouse brain and you have the electrical circuits and the physiological circuits that enable these cells to connect and communicate and together arrive at sort of swarm situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be sentient, but is actually sentient. Michael Levine calls this a gentle material, until that has agency, right? So, so this this this is of interest to us because this is sort of again this is emergence post templating you template until you don't need to template anymore because Because the system has its own rules, right? We don't want to happen with AGI. We want to happen with synthetic biology. We don't want to have an online and software with language. We want for it to happen with bio-based materials. Because that will get us closer to growing things as opposed to assembly. And mechanically, putting them together with toxic materials and compounds.

The audience, you know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but it's a smell of actually it's a smell of distress that the leafs of grass are communicating to each other. So the grass when it's cut emits green leaf volatile, GLVs. And those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass. Be careful, mind you, you're about to be cut. These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours. We use language, models they use molecular models. At the moment where we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with clients. Now, of course, there is a lot of work around plant neurobiology. It's a real thing. Plants do not have nervous system, but they have something akin to a nervous system. It has a kind of a ecological intelligence that is focused on a particular timescale in the timescale is very, very slow, slow, slow timescale. So it is when we can melt these timescales and connect with these plants in terms of the content of the language. In this case, molecules, the duration of the language, and we can start having a conversation, if not simply to understand what is happening in the plant kingdom. Precision agriculture, I promise to you, will look very, very different, right? Because right now, we're using drones to take photos of crops, of corn that look bad. And when we take that photo, it's already too late. But if we understand these molecular footprints and things that they are trying to say, to stress that they are trying to communicate, then we could, of course, predict the physiological, biological behavior of these crops, both for their own self-perpetuation, but also for the foods and the pharma and the type of molecules that we're seeking to grow for the benefit of humanity. And so these languages that we are attempting now to quantify and qualify will really help us not only better nature and help nature and it's striving to surviving but also help us, you know, design better wines and better foods and better medicine and better products, again across all scales across all application domains.

Remember when we started the conversation talking about sort of definitions in the context of design and then in the context of being. That question requires, I think, a kind of a shift, a humility. That requires a kind of a humility towards nature, understanding that it operates on different scales. We recently discovered that the molecular footprint of a rose or of a plant in general during nighttime is different than its molecular footprint during daytime. So these are circadian rhythms that are associated with what kind of molecules these plants. a myth, given stress, stresses, and given, you know, there's a reason why, why the Jasmine, a Jasmine field smells so, so delicious, and for I am in the morning, and there's like there's, there's peace and rest amongst, you know, amongst the plants, and you have to sort of tune into that time dimension of the plant kingdom and that of course requires all this humility where in a single capsule to design a biodiversity chamber it will will take years not months and definitely not days and to see these products and also that humility in design comes from simply, you know, looking at how we are today as a civilization, how we use an abuse nature, like just think of all these Christmas trees, right? These Christmas trees, they take years to grow. We use them for one night, the holiest night of the year. And then we let them go and think about a nature to design a quote unquote product, an organism spends energy and time and thoughtfulness in many, many, many years. And I'm thinking about the red woods. To grow these channels, the cellulose layers and channels and reach these incredible heights, takes sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years. Am I afraid of building a company that designs products in the scale of thousands of years? No, I'm not. And the way of being in the physical world today, It is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all. And that needs to change. And that's obviously very, very hard to do in a community of human beings that is at least in the Western world that is based on capitalism. And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is how do we impart upon the capitalist movement? We know that we need to produce now products that will enter the real world and be, you know, shared and used by others and still benefit the natural world while benefiting humans. And that's a wonderful challenge to have.

You know how every company has an image, like this one single image that embodies the spirit of the company. And I think for Nuralink, it was, to me, that chimpanzee playing a video game. It was just unbelievable. But with plants, there potentially is a set of molecules that impacts or inspires. I like that word, the plant to behave or act in a certain way. And allows still the plant the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go. which is why our first product for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance. So here we're thinking about the future of fragrances and the future of fragrances and flavors. These products are in the industry as we know it today are designed for totally for a human centric use and and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury. They're used on the body for the sake of a traction and feeling good and smelling good. And we were asking ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be not a functional fragrance? Because you could claim that all fragrances are functional. But is there a world in which the fragrance becomes functionalized again? imparted upon or given agency to connect with another organism is there a world in which you and I can go down to your garden and use a perfume that will interact with the rose garden downstairs. I've just been enamored with the statements that are being made. in the media around, oh, this is completely biologically derived fragrance, and it's biobased. And between you look into the fragrance, and you understand it, in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you went through, you blew through, you know, 10,000, 10,000 bushes of rose to create five milliliters of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take, you know, water management, and And so much waste is this really what we want, the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like. And so when we did the Aguahal Pavilion on the roof of Sifmoma, we calculated that for that Pavilion, we had 40,000 calories embedded into this Pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and kaisen. and Apple skins and cellulose from three pop. And we calculated that overall the structure had 40,000 calories, interesting way to think about a structure, right, from the point of view of calories. But as you left the gallery, you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed by Felix on our team, and these clocks measured temperature and humidity, and we are connected them to weather channels so that we could directly look at how the pavilion was bi-digrating in real time and and in our calculations I say this long-winded description of the pavilion to say that in the calculation we incorporated you know how much electricity we used for our computers for the 3D printers that printed the pavilion and you know and these were called MRG calculations right energy and materials and when you think about a product and you think about you know, a shoe or a chair or a perfume or a building, you don't stop at the object. You want to go all the way to the system, instead of designing objects or singular embodiments of a the will of the designer. You're really tabbing into an entire system that is interconnected. And if you look at the energy budget that characterize the project of Gwoka, it traverses the entire planet, right? Some of these shrimp shells were brought from places in the world we haven't thought of in terms of the apples and the shrimp shells and the trip up. And so going back to, you know, going back to fragrances, it's really, really important to understand the product in the context of the ecological system from which it's sourced and how it's designed. And that is the kind of thinking that is not only desired but is required if we are to achieve synergy between humanity and nature.

Which is why it's important to have a left brain and a right brain competing for attention.

A message in a bottle.

You could if you wanted to, but maybe that is... Not trick, trick is bad word.

But it's inspire, I like. I like the idea of providing nature with a choice, which is why I love that elegant mathematical equation of empowerment and agency.

But now again, you're, again, all of this to go back to, back to that human-centric notion of romance, but maybe there's another way to do romance, right? That we haven't yet explored, and maybe there's a way to tap into what happens to the rose when it's dreaming. Assuming that plants are sentient and assuming that we can tap into that sentience, what can we discover about what does the rose want? Like what does it actually want? And what does it need? And what are the roses dreams?

I think so. I think there isn't if I did not think so. Oh my goodness, this would not be a nice world to live in. I think we all want love. I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter and was discovered Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until she reveals these letters and so she did. It's just one of the most beautiful letters I've ever read from a father to his daughter and the letter overall is imbued with a kind of a sense of remorse or maybe even feelings of sadness. And there is some kind of melancholy note in the letter where Einstein regrets not having spent enough time with his daughter having focused on the theory of general relativity and changing the world. And then he goes on to talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E equals MC Square. And he tells his daughter that he believes that love is actually the force that shapes the universe because it is like gravity, right? It attracts people. It is like light. It brings people together and connect, connect between people and it's all empowering. And so if you multiply it by the speed of light, you could really change the world for the better. And I call me a romanticist. I know you are too. which is why I so love being here. I believe in this. I totally and utterly believe in love.

But it is everything. It is everything. It is why I love that expression. And I forget who said this, but I love my daughter more than evolution required. And I feel the same way towards my other half. And I feel that when you find that connection, everything and anything is possible. And it's a very, very, very magical moment. So I believe in love and I believe in the one.

That's a beautiful question.

Everything is connected to the love question. To me, beauty is agency. To me, something that has agency, it is beautiful. There is this special quote from Buckminster Fuller, which I cannot remember word for word, that I remember the concept, which goes something like this. When I work on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I'm done solving the problem, and I look at what I've created, and it's not beautiful, I know that I was wrong. Is it kind of an agency that speaks to, according to the objective function of the creation, right? Whether for Bucky, it's useless or useful.

They connected to it. Comes back to that. Yeah.

Yes, I think empowerment is a force with direction. It has directionality to it. emergence is, I believe, multi-directional. Again, that depends on the application. Emergence is perhaps in terms of sort of a material definition, is a tropic spirit when empowerment is at the end is a tropic counterpart. I think they overlap because I think that Empowerment is a way of inspiring emergence. I think emergence does not happen without empowerment, but empowerment can happen without emergence.

I love that question because to some of us, the loss of control is control. In design, we're used to like extreme levels of control over form and the shape of a thing and how it behaves and how it functions. And that's something we've inherited from the Industrial Revolution. But with nature, there is this diversity that happens without necessarily having a reward function, right? This is good or bad. Things just happen and some of them happen to have wings and some of them happen to have scales and you end up with this incredible potential for diversity. So I think the future of design is in that soft control is in the ability to design highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control and creativity is very much part of this because creativity is all about letting go. and beginning again and beginning again and beginning again. And when you cannot let go, you cannot be creative and you can't, you can't find novelty. But I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment, agency, creativity, emergence. And they're all connected. They are sort of associate themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable. A good friend of mine shared with me elegant definition of fate which is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be. Exactly. And that sort of ends up defining you. And those tools I think when you let go, you sort of find you give peace to your will, right, to a sense of will. And so I think that's very, very important in design, but also in life.

I think so, yes, and I always think of what I do as the culmination of energy information and matter and how to direct energy information and matter in the design of a thing or in the design of a life. I think living is very much a process of channeling these energies to where they need to go. I think that the manifestation or part of that manifestation is the pointing to the moon in order to get to the moon. And that's why manifestation is also directional. It has that vector quality to it that I think of agencies.

Oh, I did say that somewhere that every decade of sort of switch.

Yeah, I did say sometime ago that you have to sort of reboot every 10 years to keep creative and keep inventive and keep fresh.

I think everything, everything, everything good I've found in my life has been found in that way of Letting go and suspending my sense of disbelief and often you will find me say to the team, suspend your disbelief. I don't care that this is impossible. Let's assume it is. Where does it take us? And that suspension of disbelief is absolutely part and parcel of the creative act. You know, I did so when I was in medical school. I was in Hadasa and in the Hebrew University. And I remember I left medical school for architecture the day my grandmother passed away. And that was a moment of relief. And that was a door that was closing that opened other opportunities. But that, of course, required letting go of the great vision of becoming a doctor and letting go of the dream of being surrounded by wonderful patients in the science of medicine and the research associated with that science and letting go of that dream to accomplish another. And it has happened throughout my life in different ways. MIT was another experience like that where people pointed at me as the designer for whom the academic currency is not necessarily the citation index. And of course, in order to get tenure at MIT, you have to look at the citation index. But for me, it was not that. It was manifesting our work in shows and writing papers and writing patents and creating a celebration around the work. And I never saw a distinction between those ways of being. I also think that another kind of way of being or a modality of being that I found helpful is Victor Franco wrote this incredible bookman search for meaning after the Holocaust and he writes different people pursue life for different reasons according to Freud, the goal of life is to find pleasure and according to Adler, to find power and for Victor Franco it was about finding meaning And when you let go of the titles and the disciplines and the boundaries and the expectations and the perception, you are elevated to this really special Yes, spiritual, but definitely very, very creative plane where you can sort of start a new look at the world through the lens of a bacterium or a robot, or look at ecology through the lens of chemistry and look at chemistry through the lens of robotics and look at robotics through the lens of, you know, My microbial ecology is so on and so forth. And I feel that kind of rebooting, not every 10 years, but every minute, every breath is very, very important for a creative life and for just maintaining this fresh mind to reboot, to begin again with every breath, begin again. And that can be confusing for some, right? For my team members, You know, I like to change my mind. It's who I am. It's how I think. It's how I operate. You know, and they'll come and we found another technique or another technology that's interesting and we thought that, you know, that we were working on this functionalized fragrance, but now there's another opportunity and let's go there. To me, I would much rather live life like if I had to pick sort of my favorite Broadway show to enter and live through it would be into the woods. It's not a specific fairy tale, it's not You know, the sleeping beauty or little red writing hood or Rapunzel, it's all of them. It's sort of moving into the forest and seeing this wander and getting close and learning about that and then moving to another wander. And life is really about tying all of these little fairy tales together in work and also in life.

On a freight to leap into the unknown.

I did. It was my destiny to start a company. And do I have mornings when I wake up and ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Yes, I have those mornings.

I embrace them and I find gratitude and I say to myself, thank goodness, I'm so lucky to have the ability to be frustrated in this way. So I really, really embrace these frustrations and I I take them, I wrap them in a bubble and I look at it, you know, on the outside of my, my, uh, uh, aware mind, and, and I laugh at them, I smile at them.

I totally agree that change is the only permanence that imperfection is there, if only to signal that we are part of a bigger thing than ourselves, that we are on a journey, that things are in movement. And if they were perfect, of course, when things are perfect, it is just so boring, we end up with stereotypes. And it's humans, but I think just in general as living beings, we're here to find meaning, and that meaning cannot be found without struggle and without seeking to not to perfect, but to build something better. When I was a child, my mother, who I love so much, always explained to me how important it is to fall and to fail and to fight and to argue. and that there is a way that there is a culture to failing and to imperfection. So I think it is necessary for something beautiful to be imperfect and it is a sign of nature. Because nothing in nature is perfect.

That's a really profound question. I think the flaws are there to The flaws are there to present a vulnerability. Those flaws are a sign of those vulnerabilities. And I think love is very, very gentle, right? With Bill, we often talk about between the two of us about what drives all human behavior and for him, it's incentive. As you might expect. And he will defeat the sentence to me, all incentive drives all human behavior. But I would say to me, it's love. very much so. And and I think flaws are part of that because flaws are a sign of that vulnerability, whether physical, whether emotional vulnerability, and those vulnerabilities, these vulnerabilities. They either tear us apart or they bring us together. The vulnerability is what is the glue? I think. I think that the vulnerability enables connection. The connection is the glue. And that connection enables accessing higher ground as a community as opposed to as an individual. So if there is a society over the mind or if there are higher levels of awareness that can be accessed in community as opposed to, again, going to the silkworm as opposed to on the individual level, I think that those occur through the flaws and the vulnerabilities and without them, we cannot find connection, community. And without community, we can't build what we have built as a civilization, you know, for the past hundreds of thousands of years. So I think not only are they beautiful, but they have a functional role in building civilizations.

And I think yes, I think A flaw? Think about it, like physically. I'm thinking about. a brick that's flawed, but in a way, I think of a flies as an increased surface area. That's a good line.

It's a good line. It's a good line. It sort of introduces this whole new dimension to a human or a brick. Because you have more surface area, you can use mortar and build a home. And yeah, I think of it as accessing this additional dimension of surface area that could be used for good or bad, right, to connect to communicate to collaborate. It makes me think of that quote from this incredible movie I've watched years ago. particle fever, I think it was called documentary about the large hydrogen collider and an incredible film where they talk about the things that are least important for our survival are the things that make us human. Like the pure romantic act or you know the notion of and Victor Franco talks about that too. He talks about feeling the sun on his arms as he's As he is working the soil in two degrees Fahrenheit without clothes. And the officer berates him and says, well, what have you done? Have you been a businessman before you came here to the camp? And he says, I was a doctor. And he said, you must have made a lot of money as a doctor. And he said, all my work I've done for free. I've been helping the poor. But he keeps his humility and he keeps his modesty and he keeps his preservation of the spirit and he says the things that actually make him able to or made him able to outlive the terrible experience in the Holocaust was the really cherishing this moment when the sun hits his kin or when he can eat a grain of rice a single grain of rice so I think Cherishing is a very important part of living a meaningful life being able to cherish those simple things to notice them and to to notice them to pay attention to them in the moment and I do this now more than ever I mean there is some the Bukowski as a poem I like called Nirvana

Yes.

Yes. And that goes back to you know to the fireplace right to the first technology what was the first technology it was fire first technology to have built community and it emerged out of a vulnerability of wanting to stay away from the cold and be warm together and and and of course that fire is associated with not only with comfort and the ability to form you know bio-relevant nutrients in our food and and provide heat and comfort but also spirits and I kind of a way to enter a spiritual moment to enter a moment that can only be experienced as in a community as a form of meditative moment. There is a lot to be said about light. Light is I think an important part of These moments of, I think, I think it's a real thing. I really, really believe that we're born with a, with an aura surface area that is measurable. I think we're, we're born into the world with a, you know, with a, with an aura. And how do we channel that is really sort of ends up defining the light in our lives?

Oh, yes. Yes, loneliness is part. Yes, I think we all have that loneliness, whether we're willing to access that loneliness and look at it in the eye or completely, you know, completely avoided or denied it.

Very, it's very, we are born into this world alone. Again, being alone and being lonely are two different things, right? And you can be together but be lonely and you can be alone but not be lonely at all. We often joke, Bill and I that he cannot be lonely. He cannot deal with being by himself. He always needs people around him. And I strive long, must have creative solitude, must find pockets of solitude and loneliness. in order to find creativity and reconnect with myself. So loneliness is a recipe for for community in my opinion. And I think those things complement each other. And they're synergetic absolutely. They end in the meang of of of of of togetherness. And they allow you I think to yeah to reset and to tune in to to that ratio we talked about of who you are and who you want to be.

I love to be able not only to lose focus, but to focus on the peripheral view and to allow different things to occur at once. So I will often, in my loneliness journeys, I will often Listen to like Leonard Bernstein anything I can find online by Lenny Bernstein. It's reading a nature paper. It's war and peace. It's really revisiting all the texts that are so timeless for me with opportunities that are very, very timely. And I think for me the creative process is really about bringing timeless problems or concepts together with timely technologies to observe them. I remember when we did the Mandela pavilion, we read Moby Dick, the whiteness of the whale, the albino, the different, the other, and that got us to work on Melanie and Melanie and also sort of an out, but from the death mass. So it's lots of things happening at the same time and really allowing them to come together to form this view about the world through the lens of a Spirit being or a living being or a material, and then focus on the world through the lens of that material. The glasswork was another project like that where we were fascinated by glass because obviously it's superb material for architecture. But we created this new glass printing technology for the first time that was shedding light on the biomechanics of fluid glass. The math and the physics of which was never done before, which was so exciting to us. But revealing new knowledge about the world through technology, that's one theme. The reincarnation between things material and immaterial, that's another theme. Lenny Bernstein, Warren P. Tolstoy.

Love, yeah, I love this quote.

Yes, and then connect them with whatever it is that we're working on, whether it's high throughput, directed evolution of bacteria, whether it's recreating that garden of Eden and the capsule and what it looks like, the food of the future. It is a little bit like directing a film, creating a new project is a bit like creating a film. You have these heroes, you have these characters, and you put them together, and there's a narrative, and there's a story. Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous complexity. It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are disciplined based or rooted must be novel. If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics with a novelty in material science with a novelty in computational design and you are bound to create something novel period and that's how I run the company and that's how I pick the people and so that's another very very important ingredient of the cutting edge across multiple disciplines that come together. And then in the background in the periphery, there is all these messages, the whispers of the ancient foldies, right? The Beethoven's and the Picasso's.

Yeah, how could one not include Beethoven in the whispers?

I play in private only.

I meant to be done privately.

I manifest and they come. Yeah. There are a few approaches to that. Please show up. You know, send your message upon the water. Those job descriptions that you saw, the first ones I wrote by myself, and you find interesting people and brilliant people when you look, and we talked about second derivative when you look under and under and if you look deep enough and specialized enough and if you allow yourself to look at the cracks at the flaws at the cracks between disciplines and between scales you find really really interesting diamonds in the rough and so I like for those job descriptions to Yeah, to be those messages on a bottle that bring those really interesting people are away. I mean, they have to have humility. They have to have a shine in their eye. They have to be hungry and foolish. This is job so famously said, A friend of mine whose dean of well-known architectural school said, you know, today architects don't want to be architects. Architects don't look up to the architects as role models. Architects are no longer role models. Architects want to build by virtue of not building, right? Architects want, she said, we're back in the 60s when we think about architecture, back in the hippie movement. I think that in a way they have to be somewhat of a hippie, somewhat of a kind of a jack of all trades master of all.

And yet, with humility, now that is hard to find. And that is why, you know, when I start an interview, I talk about childhood memories and I asked about music and I asked about connection. And through these interviews, you can learn a lot about a person's future by spending time hearing them talk about their past.

It's, you know, people who have ideally had industry experience and know what it's like to be in the corn, quote, real world. They're dreamers that are addicted to reality, as opposed to realists that are addicted to dreams. Meaning they have that innocence in them, they have the hunger, they have the idealism without being entitled and with understanding the systems that govern our world and understanding how to utilize these systems as to bring those values into the world. There are individuals who are feel comfortable in this friction between, you know, highly wondrous and dreamy and incredible fantasy renditions of what the world could be with extremely, and extremely brilliant skills in terms of their disciplinary background. So PhD within industrial experience in a certain field or a double major and two fields that make no sense whatsoever in their combination are things that really really attract me and especially that that spans the the technology biology. Yes, technology biology nature culture. I mean, The secret to one thing is through the lens of another and I always believe in that kind of translational design ability to be able to see something through the lens of another and always allows you to think again, begin again, re-establish, redefine, suspend your disbelief, revisit. And when you revisit enough times like a hundred times or like 200 times and you revisit the same question through the lens of any possible discipline and any possible scenario you get eventually you get to the truth.

I think, like, 440 million years ago, there were all these plants that the Siano Bacteria, I believe, actually, that God, that was like the first extinction, right? There were six, five extinctions. We are apparently the sixth. We are in the eye of the storm. We are in the sixth extinction. We are going to be extinct as we speak. I mean, death is upon us, whether we want to admit it or not. And actually, They found in Argentina and in various places around the world, they found these spores of the first plants that existed on the planet, and they emerged out of these cyanobacteria where the first of course, and then they found these spore-based plants. And because they didn't have seeds or only spores, the spores became sort of the fossils by which we've come to know of their existence. And because of these spores, we know that this first extinction existed. But this extinction is actually what enabled plants to resirect, right? So the death of these first plants because they clinked to the rocks and they generated a ton of phosphorus that went into the ocean by clinging to the rocks like 60 times more phosphorus than without them. And then all this phosphorus basically choked the oceans and made them super cold and a without oxygen, a oxick. And then we lost the plant kingdom. And then because of the death of these first plants, they actually enriched the soil and created nutrients for these new plants to come to that planet. And those planets had like more sophisticated vain systems, and they were moving beyond sports to seeded plants, et cetera, and flowering plants. And so in a way, you, one mass extinction sort of led in the, or division period sort of led to life as we know it, and where would we be without plants in a way? So I think that death is very much part of life, and through that definition, that kind of planetary, wide definition in the context of hundreds of millions of years life gains a completely new sort of new light and that's where that's when the particles become a wave right where humans are we are not alone. And we are here because of those plants, right? So I think death is very much part of life. So in the context of, you know, the redwood tree, perhaps, you know, life is defined as 10 generations and through the lens of a bacteria, perhaps life is defined as a millisecond and perhaps through the lens of an AGI, life is defined as all of human civilization. So I think it really is a question of, This time scale again, the time scale and the organism, the life form that's asking the question through which we can answer what is life.

Yeah. So, I'm glad you asked this question.

Both. I'm hopeful and terrified. I did watch your interview with Ellie Eznerud Kovsky and I loved it.

First of all, I was both. I was I totally scared, shamed, excited, and totally also inspired because he's just such an incredible thinker. And I can agree or disagree with what he says, but I just found his way of thinking about AGI and the perils of humanity as a result.

It is a bit like jumping into super cold water. It's sort of a kind of a fist in your face. It wakes you up. And I like these moments so much. And he was able to bring that moment to life, even though I think a mother can never think that way ever. And it's a little bit like that notion of I love her more than evolution requires on your question about AGI in nature. Look, I think we've been through a lot in terms of to get here, we sort of moved from data, right, the ability to collect information, to knowledge, the ability to use this information for utility, from knowledge to intelligence, and what is intelligence is the ability to problem solve and adapt and translate. So that sort of from data to information to knowledge, I think the next frontier is wisdom, and what is wisdom is the ability to have or find insight about the world. and from wisdom to spiritual awareness, which is sort of transcends wisdom and is able to chart the world into new territory. But I think what is interesting about AGI is that it is sort of almost like a self-recursive thing, right? Because it's like a washing machine of like a third derivative Wikipedia. It uses kind of like language to create language, to create language, to create language.

And that's so fascinating because these are not the stochastic parents. This is sort of a new form of emergence, perhaps of novelty, as you say, that exists by virtue of using old things to create new things. But it's not as if the AGI has self-awareness, right? It's not as if it has maybe, maybe it has, but as far as I can tell, It's not as if AGI has approached consciousness or sentience just yet. It's probably getting there. But the language appears to present itself as if there is sentience there. But it doesn't. But I think that's the problem. At the point where this AGI sounds like me and speaks like me and behaves like me and feels like me and reaves like me and my daughter knows the age I to be me, sort of the end of everything, right, is the end of human agency. What is the end of human agency to humans? I think is the beginning of agency to nature. Because if you take all of this agency, if you take all of these language models that can summarize all of human civilization and consciousness and then upload that to nature and have nature now deal with that world of consciousness that it never had access to. So maybe through Eliezzles lands the short lived human becomes sort of a very long lived human like sentient weeping willow maybe that's the end in the beginning and maybe on the more optimistic side for us humans It's a different form of existence where everything we create and everything we consume and everything we process is all made out of six elements and that's it. And there's only those six elements and not 118 elements and it's all the stuff of biology plus some Fair amount of bits, bits, genes and atoms.

A lot of Beethoven.

Exactly. And unlike sort of, again, I'm going back to direct the evolution. Unlike this sort of high throughput brute force approach, if there is a way to utilize this synergy for diversity and diversification, Like, yeah, what happens if you ask a chat GPT question that it takes 10,000 years to answer that question? Like, what does that look like when you completely switch the time scale and you can afford the time to answer the question? And again, I don't know, but that world to me is possibly amazing.

I've studied the calculations that point towards the verdict, that the possibility of life in an around us is very, very low. We are a chosen planet in a way, right? There's water, and there's love. What else do you need? And that's sort of very peculiar juxtaposition of conditions, the oxygen, the water, the carbon. Again, is in a way a miracle given the massive extinctions that we've been through as life forms. And that said, I cannot believe that there is no other life form. I want to believe more than I know that yes, that there are life forms in, you know, in the white fountain that is the black hole, right, that there are these life forms that are, you know, light years away from us that are that are forming other forms of life forces.

I totally agree with you. I think again, define alien, right?

Right. And Marvin Minsky used to say, intelligence is a suitcase word. Right. It's a word so big. It's a word like sustainability. And it's a word like, you know, rock and roll. And suitcase words are always very, very dangerous.

I love music. I always wondered why is it that plastic arts, meaning architecture and sculpture and painting can't get us to cry and music gets us to cry so quickly and connect so quickly. There is something about music that it is, and no wonder that plants also respond to music. But that is the top of the creative pyramid in my opinion.

A good arc, I true. And I will say, when I visited the Sagrada Familia, I had that kind of spiritual reverence towards that spatial experience and being in that space and feeling the intention and the space and appreciating every little gesture. So it's true. This is the universal language. It's the language of waves, right? It's the language of the waves, not the language of the particles. It is the universal language I believe. And that is definitely one of my, one of my loves.

Yeah. Maybe the Godfather. Godfather, okay? The Godfather is definitely up there. Francis Coppola is one of my heroes.

I have met him. Yes, yes, yes. I was very, very lucky. We were very lucky to work with him on his new film, a Galopolis, which is coming out. I hope in 2024. And think about the cities of the future in the context of new materials and the unity between nature and culture. Godfather is definitely up there. 2,000 and 1 is up there. I would watch that film again and again and again. It's incredible. The last scene in Odyssey 2001. That's Just watch the last scene of 2001, then listen to it's coffee scheme and then sort of, and then go to the garden and that's pretty much, you know. At the end of the beginning, but that scene that last scene from 2001 is everything. It says so much with so little and it leaves the embodiment I believe of ambivalence and there is opportunity to believe in the beginning of humankind, the end of humankind, the planet child star or star child of the future. Was there a death? Was there a reincarnation? You know, that final scene to me is something that I go back to and study. And every time there is a different reading of that scene that inspires me, so that that scene, just, and then the first scene, the godfather, still one of the best scenes of all times,

Yes, loyalty and the human spirit and how copeless celebrates the human spirit through the most simple gestures in language and acting. And I think in Kubrick you see this highly curated and controlled and manicured vision of creating a film. And with Francis, it's like an Italian feast, just like anything can happen at any moment in time. And just being on the set with him is an experience I'll take with me to my grave. It's very, very, very special.

Yeah, actually the Godfather. That tune.

Yeah, it's one of these tunes. I'm sure that has, you know, if you play it too, to a Jasmine, you'll get the best scent of all time. So I think like there's, but I think with that particular tune, I learned Takato. Something very, very happy and joyous. And then made into this stretched in time and became kind of the refrain of nostalgia and melancholy and loyalty and all of these values that ride on top of this one single tune.

And the Strauss melody in 2001? And when you juxtapose this melodies with the scene, you get this, again, hold it's bigger than some of its parts where you get this moment that is, I think, like, these are the moments I would send, you know, with the next Voyager to artist's face. It definitely sent the godfather in 2001. We're definitely beyond that golden record.

Look, I think there's this beautiful line in sheltering sky. How many times have you seen a full moon in your life and actually took the time to ingest and explore and reflect upon the full moon probably 20. I believe he says, I spent time with a full moon. I take my time with a full moon and I pay attention to a full moon. And I think paying attention to the seasons and taking time to appreciate the little things, the simple things is what makes a meaningful life. I was very lucky to have had, you know, to have grown up in a home that taught me this way of being my parents, my grandmother who played a very important role in my growing up. and that ability to pay attention and to be present is so, so, so I could not emphasize it enough is so crucial and be grateful and be grateful. I think gratitude and presence appreciation are really the most important things in life

She had this blanket that she would give me every time I came back from school and say, you know, do your homework here and meet with your friends here and it was always in her garden and her garden in my mind was ginormous, but when I, you know, last I went there and saw the site, which has now become the site for another Tall building was a tiny, tiny little garden that the to me seemed so large when I was growing up because it had everything. It had fig trees. It had olive trees. It had mushrooms. It had the blanket. I would do my homework there. It was everything and I needed nothing, nothing else. And that was my garden of Eden. That was my childhood being. And she taught me, you know, we would lie on the blanket and look at the clouds and reflect upon the shapes of the clouds and study the shapes of the plants and there was a lot of wonder in that childhood with her. And she taught me the importance of wonder in an eternal childhood and living adulthood as a child. And so I'm very, very grateful for that. I think it is the sense of wonder. The speaking up was always something that she adhered to to speak up your truth. to be straightforward, to be positive. These are things that I also got from my mom. And for my mom, the sense of humor. She had the best sense of humor that I could think of and was just a joy to be around. And my father taught me everything. My father taught me everything I know, my mom taught me everything I feel.

My grandma taught me everything I insight.

I did take a few leaps and they were uncomfortable. My father and I'll never forget. I think we were like listening to a rolling stone song in the kitchen and my dad was actually born in Boston, he's American. He said, I started to have sort of these second thoughts about continuing my education in Israel and I wanted to go, I was on my way to London to the architectural association to do my diploma studies there. And he looked at me and he said, get out of here, kiddo, got to get out of here. And you know, you've outgrown where you're at, you need to move forward. Another thing he had taught me, the feeling of discomfort, as you say, the feeling of loneliness and discomfort is, is, imperative to growth. Growth is painful, period. Any form of growth is difficult and painful. Birth is difficult and painful. And it is really, really important to place yourself in situations of discomfort. I like to be in a room where everyone in the room is more intelligent than me. I like to be in those in that kind of state where the people that I surround myself with are orders of magnitude, more intelligent than I am, and I can say that that is true of all of my team members, and that's the intellectual discomfort that I feed off of. The same is true for physical exertion. You've got to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations in order to grow in order to find comfort. And then on the other hand, his love is finding, finding love and finding that human, this other human that compliments you, and that makes you a better version of the one you are, and even of the one you want to be. but with gratitude and attention and love, you can go so so far to the... younger generation. I don't speak of a career. I never thought of my work as my career ever. And there was this constant entanglement between life and work and love and longing and being and mothering. It's all the same. And I appreciate that to some people that doesn't work in their, you know, in their arrangement of will versus comfort versus the reality, but for me it has always worked. So I think to the younger generation, I say don't think of your career, career is something that is imposed upon you, think of your calling, that's something that's innately and directionally moves you and it's something that transcends a career. Similarly, you can think about the difference between learning versus being educated. Being educated is something that's given to you. It's external. It's being imposed. It's top down imposed. This learning is something that comes from within. Also the difference between joy and happiness. Many times I'm sad and I'm still joyous. And it's very, very important to understand the difference between these externally perceived success. paths and internally driven value-based ways of being in the world. And we together, when we combine all of these, all of these, the broken puzzle, let's say, of substance and vulnerability, we get this bigger guestile, this wondrous world of a future that is peaceful, that is, you know, that is wholesome and that, you know, that proposes or, you know, advocates where that kind of synergy that we've been talking about throughout.

Um, and, uh, I'll say feel the same way. I'll just say this same.

Oh, you're accepted. Oh, damn.