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The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and brilliant human beings I ve ever gotten to know.
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For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales, from the micro scale to the building scale.
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Now, she s continuing this work at a very new company, for now called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products, working with nature, not against it.
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On a personal note, let me say that Neri has for a long time been a friend and someone who, in my darker moments, has always been there with a note of kindness and support.
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I am forever grateful to her.
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She s a brilliant and a beautiful human being.
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Oh, and she also brought me a present, War and Peace by Tolstoy and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
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It doesn t get better than that.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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I ve been using Babbel to start on a long journey of learning Spanish.
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Plus, it s a really fun mental exercise and journey that you can go on in exploring different styles and ways of communication.
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Language is a way to express the music that s in your heart, that s in your mind, through compressing the incredibly complex and rich set of stuff that s going on inside your mind into a very thin stream of words.
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And obviously every single language approaches that problem as a solution to that problem, to that puzzle differently.
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As I ve talked to extensively, even recently, to Andrew Huberman and many others, talk therapy is a really, really powerful thing for exploring the depth of the human mind, the Jungian shadow, the good and the bad that lurks there in that shadow that,
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you have not really shined a light on, that you ve not brought to the surface, that not sat there face to face with the simplicity of trauma or just memories, experiences that you journeyed through earlier in life and just
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sitting there and allowing yourself to face them is somehow a really powerful way to bring inner peace.
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So I m a big supporter of talk therapy, of talking, of deep conversation in general.
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And I think talk therapy is like one of the ways you can force yourself to have deep, personal, intimate conversation.
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Podcasting, frankly, one done really well is that also.
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I do recommend that even if you don t have a podcast, you grab yourself a mic and you sit across the table from somebody who means a lot to you and you have that conversation, even if the mic is not recording.
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There s something about the microphone that forces you to really step up.
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This is it.
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This is the moment where it all has to be on the table.
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Anyway, hopefully good talk therapies like that.
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Oh, and healthy macadamia nut-based snacks, and they re delicious.
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It s all just incredible.
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And I give it to the guests, I give it to friends, I give it to people who come over.
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and they all enjoy it, and I get to share that little piece of happiness with them, and we ll sit there munching on snacks together as we gaze deeply into each other s eyes, full of joy.
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I don t think I ve ever described the process of snacking in such a dramatic fashion, but there you have it.
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That s signals that my body produces through the incredibly complex trillions of organisms, cells, and bacteria.
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And every time I say My Body, I think of My Body is a Wonderland by John Mayer, who s an incredible guitarist and probably somebody I ll talk to on this podcast.
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It s a good song, but I think his raw musicality and skill with the guitar as an instrument is just unparalleled.
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There s not many rock stars like him playing today, or at least popular today.
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a lot of really great blues musicians that I ve heard even here in Texas that are just incredible.
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I would actually say that John Mayer is a hell of a blues musician as well.
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I can t wait to talk to him, especially probably if we have guitars in hand and we ll get to mess around jam or just talk details of particular songs, of particular licks, of particular riffs, of particular ideas in music theory and so on.
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Anyway, all that to say is that I m a big fan of measuring signals that come from my body that is a wonderland.
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And Insight Tracker is one of the companies that allows you to do that.
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I ve been using it long before I had a podcast, long before they were a sponsor.
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It s a big, sexy button that you press and it turns on and you can set your geographical location.
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It does one thing and it does it incredibly well.
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Like Cat Stevens said, baby, it s a wild world.
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It s hard to get by just upon a smile.
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He later in that song, that I think was written in the 70s, also went on to recommend a VPN, which is kind of weird, because he was really ahead of his time, that guy.
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Genius musician.
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Another person that I wish I would get a chance to speak to.
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Use it on Linux, it just works.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Neri Oxman.
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Let s start with the universe.
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Do you ever think of the universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful things at multiple scales?
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I do.
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And I think of nature in that way, in general.
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In the context of design, specifically, I think of nature as
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everything that isn t anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind, the birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales.
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Do you think there s an intricate ways in which there s a connection between humans and nature?
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Yes, and we re looking for it.
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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.
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And it s ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.
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Before that, we were totally and completely connected.
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And I want to return to that world.
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but bring the tools of engineering and computation to it.
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Yes, yes.
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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 haven t, and so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and
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and finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware of before.
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Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has a kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence.
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And it s that wisdom that we re trying to tap into through technology.
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If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition of nature is everything but anthropomass.
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And I m using Ron Milo, who is an incredible
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a professor from the Weizmann Institute who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020, when he identified that 2020 was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet.
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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.
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but also asphalt and concrete all outweigh the scale of the biomass.
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Actually, that was a moment.
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You know how in life there are moments that, maybe a handful of moments that get you to course correct?
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It was a Zoom conversation with Ron, and that was a moment for me.
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when I realized that imbalance, now we ve superseded the biomass on the planet, where do we go from here?
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And you ve heard the expression more phones than bones and the anthropomass and the anthropocene and the technosphere sort of outweighing the biosphere.
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But now we are really trying to look at is there a way
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in which all things technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere.
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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?
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Where the Turing 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
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can be read and written to as or thought of or perceived of as nature grown.
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That s sort of the Turing test for the company, or at least that s how I started.
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I thought, well, grow everything.
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That s sort of the slogan.
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Let s grow everything.
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And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world
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in which there are no cars.
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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?
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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?
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And it doesn t even matter.
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Is there a good term for the intersection between biomass and anthropomass, like things that are grown?
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Yes, in 2005, I called this material ecology.
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I thought, well, what if all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human.
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And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi.
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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.
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And why don t we just simply hack into mushrooms?
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Well, first of all, yes, they re connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap.
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That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.
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And that s sort of a world that I m dreaming about.
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What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud?
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The kind of bandwidth that we re talking about, sort of think Neuralink for nature.
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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
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1 trillion times the power that we had in those times.
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We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible.
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So humankind, since the first computer, has approached and accessed such incredible bandwidth.
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And we re asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth?
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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?
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And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind?
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So nature has this inherent wisdom that you spoke to, but you re also referring to augmenting that inherent wisdom
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with something like a large language model.
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So compress human knowledge, but also maintain whatever is that intricate wisdom that allows plants, bacteria, fungi to grow incredible things at arbitrary scales, adapting to whatever environment and just surviving and thriving no matter where, no matter how.
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Exactly.
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So I think of it as large molecule models.
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And those large molecule models, of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth.
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And we don t have this data currently.
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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.
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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?
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In the company, we re constantly asking, what does
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does nature want?
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What does nature want from a compute view?
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If it knew it, what could aid it in whatever the heck it s wanting to do?
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Yeah, so we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy, right?
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So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.
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And this is true for what our work also tries to do, because we re constantly trying to
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fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things grown.
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And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y, and Z, and that s pretty much where architectural education ends and biological education begins.
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So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we re missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown.
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But in the natural environment, we re asking,
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Can we provide nature with these extra dimensions?
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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.
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But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?
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And by the way, we re talking about a company called Oxman.
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Yeah, just a few words about the team.
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Yeah, what kind of humans work at a place like this?
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They re trying to figure out what nature wants.
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You know, I think they re first like you.
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They re humanist first.
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They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds.
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And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius and a computer scientist.
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a mechanical engineer who was trained as a synthetic biologist, and now we re hiring a microbiologist and a chemist, architects, of course, and designers, roboticist.
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So it s really, it s Noah s Ark, right?
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Two of each.
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And always dancing between this line of the artificial, the synthetic, and the real.
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What s the term for, and the natural.
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Yeah, the built and the grown, nature and culture, technology and biology.
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But we re constantly seeking to ask, how can we build, design, and deploy products in three scales?
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The molecular scale, which I briefly hinted to, and their
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In the molecular scale, we re really looking to understand whether there s a universal language to nature and what that language is, and then build a tool that I think and dream of it as the iPhone for nature.
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If nature had an iPhone, what would that iPhone look like?
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Does that mean creating an interface between nature and the computational tools we have?
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Exactly, it goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans have now arrived at.
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and giving that to nature and seeing what happens there.
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Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire?
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Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud?
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Can they do this, quote unquote, automatically?
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without a kind of a top-down brute force policy-based method that s authored and deployed by humans.
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And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world.
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And then there s a second area in the company which focuses on growing products.
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And here we re focusing on a single product that starts from CO2.
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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.
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So we re talking about from CO2 to fruit.
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Yeah, it starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can like literally eat.
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So the world s first entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, biorenewable product.
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That s grown.
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Yes, either using plant matter or using bacteria, but we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or wastewater and end 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.
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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 leather out of mycelium or let s create textile out of cellulose.
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But then it stops there and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable.
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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.
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And then it s over.
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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
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recycling technology to the product, to literally how do you think about reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and putting things together and using humans to do that.
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Can that happen just using robots and microbes and that s it.
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And doing it end to end.
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I would love to see what this factory looks like.
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And the factory is great, too.
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I m very, very excited.
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In October, we ll share first renditions of some of this work, and in February, we ll invite you to the lab.
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I m there.
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I ve already applied.
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I haven t heard back.
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I don t understand.
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Okay, just before we get to number three, it d be amazing to just talk about what it takes with robotic arms.
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in general, the whole process of how to build a life form, stuff you ve done in the past, maybe stuff you re doing now, how to use bacteria, it s kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria.
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They re examples from the past.
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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, biobased design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology,
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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 N of ones.
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Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them.
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And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments.
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And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used
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Silk with silkworms and honey with bees or comb as the structural material.
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With vespers, we used synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments.
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Although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same.
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The approach was really an approach of computational templating.
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That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment where nature and technology could
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duet could dance together to create these products.
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So just a few examples with a silk pavilion.
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We ve had a couple of pavilions made of silk and the second one, which was the bigger one, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend and incredible mentor, Paola Antonelli.
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that pavilion was six meter tall and it was produced by silkworms.
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And there we had different types of templates.
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There were physical templates that were basically just these water-soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning.
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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.
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You re saying so many amazing things, and I m trying not to interrupt you, but one of the things you ve learned by observing, by doing science on these is that the environment defines the shape that they create, or contributes, or intricately plays with the shape they create, and you get to, that s one of the ways you can get to guide their work is by defining that environment.
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By the way, you said hero organism.
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which is an epic term.
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That means whatever is the biological living system that s doing the creation.
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And that s what s happening in pharma and biomaterials and, by the way, precision ag and new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is sort of how I think of it.
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And the hero organism is sometimes it s the palm oil or it s a,
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It s the mycelium.
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There s a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad, and it s cellulose or it s, you know, fake bananas or the workhorse E. coli.
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But these hero organisms are being betted on as like the
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what s the one answer that solves everything?
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Hitchhiker s Guide?
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42.
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42.
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Yeah.
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These are sort of the 42s of, you know, of the enchanted new universe.
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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.
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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.
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And those usually were pavilions.
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And then the computational templating is the way you guide the work of this, how many did you say, 17,000?
1
17,532.
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SPEAKER_00
So each of these silkworms threads are about one mile in distance, and they re beautiful.
1
SPEAKER_00
And just thinking about the amount of material, it s a bit like thinking about the length of capillary,
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vessels that grow in your belly when you re pregnant to feed that incredible new life form.
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It s just nature is amazing.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
And it builds a cocoon basically to protect itself.
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It s a beautiful form of architecture.
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And it uses pretty much just two materials, two chemical compounds, sericin and fibrin.
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The sericin is sort of the glue of the cocoon.
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The fibrin is the fiber-based material of the cocoon.
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And through fibers and glue, and that s true for so many systems in nature, lots of fiber and glue, and that architecture allows them to metamorphosize.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was a 6-axis KUKA arm, one of these.
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baby kookas.
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And we re trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large.
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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
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SPEAKER_00
or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon, only the cocoon would be flat.
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Because they re constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as an anchor to spin the cocoon.
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But in the absence of that post,
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on surfaces that are less than 21 millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches.
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And we say, aha, let s work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches.
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SPEAKER_00
And a silkworm, mind you, is quite an egocentric creature.
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And actually, the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution by natural selection, the more
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egoism you find in creatures.
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SPEAKER_00
So when you think about termites, right, their material sophistication is
1
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is actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and connect with each other.
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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 irrelevant for designers, and the other is communication.
1
SPEAKER_00
The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap, right?
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SPEAKER_00
It s just saliva.
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SPEAKER_00
feces and some soil particles that are built to create these incredible termite mounds at 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.
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But when you look at the silkworm,
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The silkworm has zero connection and communication across silkworms.
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They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other.
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They re sort of a human-designed species because the domesticated silk moth creates the cocoon.
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We then produce the silk of it, and then it dies.
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So it has dysfunctional wings.
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It cannot fly.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s another problem that the sericulture
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industry has is 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
1
SPEAKER_00
a human need, which is textiles.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m so great.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m enjoying this so much.
1
SPEAKER_00
I m always, like people say, I always speak in Nietzschean paragraphs, they re way too long, and this is wonderful, this is like heaven.
1
SPEAKER_01
Nietzschean paragraphs.
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SPEAKER_01
You re dropping so many good lines, I love it, okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
But really, those silkworms are not, yes, they re not designed to be like humans, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
They re not designed to connect, communicate, and build things that are bigger than themselves through connection and communication.
1
SPEAKER_01
So what happens when you have 17,000 of them communicating effectively?
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a really great question.
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SPEAKER_00
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 pheromones to guide the movement of bees.
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SPEAKER_00
in the absence of a queen, where you have a robotic queen.
1
SPEAKER_00
But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational
1
SPEAKER_00
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,
1
SPEAKER_00
I get to do what I want with this code.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let me show you what this pavilion may look like or this product may look like.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realized that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if I may, a kind of a collaboration and cooperation between Silkworms that are
1
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not a swarm-based organism.
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They re not like the bees and the termites.
1
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They don t work together and they don t have social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, et cetera.
1
SPEAKER_00
They re all the same in a way, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And here, what was so exciting for us is that these computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to
1
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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 feeling or rubbing against each other in an area that was hotter or colder.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the product that we got at the end, the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the fiber,
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SPEAKER_00
and the transparency, the product at the end seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community, but of course it wasn t.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a bunch of biological agents working together to assemble this thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s really, really fascinating to us.
2
SPEAKER_00
How can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior in creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms?
2
SPEAKER_01
So how do you construct a computational template from which a certain kind of thing emerges?
2
SPEAKER_01
How can you predict what emerges, I suppose?
2
SPEAKER_00
So if you can predict it, it doesn t count as emergence, actually.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a deeply poetic line.
2
SPEAKER_01
We can talk about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s a bit like if you exaggerate, it doesn t count.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, right.
2
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of emergence and empowerment, because we re constantly moving between those as if they re equals on the team.
2
SPEAKER_00
One of them, Christoph, shared with me a mathematical equation for what does it mean to empower nature and what does empowerment in nature look like?
2
SPEAKER_00
And that relates to emergence, and we can go back to emergence in a few moments, but I want to say it so that I know that I ve learned it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And if I ve learned it, I can use it later.
2
SPEAKER_01
And maybe you ll figure something out as you say it also.
2
SPEAKER_00
Of course, Christoph is the master here, but really, we were thinking, again, what does nature want?
2
SPEAKER_00
Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy.
2
SPEAKER_00
What do we want?
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SPEAKER_00
We kind of want the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
We want more, but we want order, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And this goes back to your conversation with Yosha about stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes.
2
SPEAKER_00
His definition or the definition he found was that an agent
2
SPEAKER_00
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
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, duality between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this.
2
SPEAKER_00
Opening and closing.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment.
2
SPEAKER_00
Given an 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?
2
SPEAKER_01
And how much is that making that choice actually control the trajectory of the system?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s really nice.
2
SPEAKER_01
So this applies to all the kinds of systems you re talking about.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and the cool thing is it can apply to a human on an individual basis, or a silkworm, or a bee, or a microbe.
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SPEAKER_00
a microbe that has agency or by virtue of a template, but it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so we ve done a lot of work sort of moving from, you ve asked how to grow things.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we ve grown things using
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SPEAKER_00
co-fabrication, where we re digitally fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life, and those were silkworms and bees.
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SPEAKER_00
And with bees, which we ve sent to outer space and returned healthily, and they were reproductive.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, you re gonna have to tell that story.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re gonna have to talk about the robotic queen and the pheromones, come on.
2
SPEAKER_00
So we built what we called a synthetic apiary, and the synthetic apiary was designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees of Massachusetts.
2
SPEAKER_00
They go in hibernation, of course, during the winter season, and then we lose 80% of them or more during that period.
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SPEAKER_00
We were thinking, okay, what if we created this environment where
2
SPEAKER_00
before you template, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Before you can design with, you have to design for, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
You have to create this space of mutualism, space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism.
2
SPEAKER_00
And with bees, it started as the synthetic apiary.
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SPEAKER_00
And we have proven that that curated environment where we designed the space with high levels of control of temperature, humidity, and light,
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SPEAKER_00
And we ve proven that they were reproductive and alive.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And could this be a kind of a new urban typology, an architectural typology of symbiosis, of mutualism between organisms and humans?
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SPEAKER_00
By the way, the synthetic apiary was in a co-op in nearby Somerville.
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SPEAKER_00
We had robots, our team schlepped there every day with our tools and machines, and we made it happen.
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SPEAKER_00
And the neighbors were very happy, and they got to get a ton of honey at the end of the winter.
2
SPEAKER_00
And those bees, of course, were released into the wild at the end of the winter, alive and kicking.
2
SPEAKER_00
So then in order to actually experiment with the robotic queen idea or concept, we had to prove obviously that we can create this space for bees.
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SPEAKER_00
And then after that, we had this amazing opportunity to send the bees to space on Blue Shepard mission that is part of Blue Origin.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we of course said, yes, we ll take a slot
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SPEAKER_00
We said, okay, can we outdo NASA?
2
SPEAKER_00
So NASA in 1982 had an experiment where they sent bees to outer space.
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SPEAKER_00
The bees returned, they were not reproductive.
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SPEAKER_00
And some of them died.
2
SPEAKER_00
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?
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SPEAKER_00
that would be sent in this Blue Origin New Shepard mission, in this one cell.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that, if the synthetic apiary was an architectural project, in this case, this second synthetic apiary was a product.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was, right, so from an architectural controlled environment to a product-scale controlled environment.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this bio lab, this life support system for bees, was designed to provide the bees with
2
SPEAKER_00
all the conditions that they needed.
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SPEAKER_00
And we looked at that time at the Nasonove pheromone that the queen uses to guide the other bees.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we looked at pheromones that are associated with a bee and thinking of those pheromones being released inside the capsule that goes to outer space.
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SPEAKER_00
They returned back to the Media Lab roof, and those bees were alive and kicking and reproductive, and they continued to create comb.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it ended with a beautiful nature paper that the team and I published together.
2
SPEAKER_00
We gave them gold nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles because we were interested if bees recycle wax.
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SPEAKER_00
It was known
2
SPEAKER_00
forever that bees do not recycle the wax.
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SPEAKER_00
And by feeding them these gold nanoparticles, we were able to prove that the bees actually do recycle the wax.
2
SPEAKER_00
The reason I m bringing this forward is because
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SPEAKER_00
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 involved the creation of a new technology, whether it be a glass printer or the spinning robot or
2
SPEAKER_00
or the life support system for the bee colony, they all involved a technology that was associated with the project.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I never, ever, ever, ever want to let that part go, because I love technology so much.
2
SPEAKER_00
But also another element of this is that 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,
2
SPEAKER_00
silkworms or bees or glass.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Don t separate between the art and the science.
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SPEAKER_00
It s one of the same.
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SPEAKER_01
So as you re creating the art, you re going to learn something about these organisms or something about these materials.
2
SPEAKER_01
Is there something that stands out to you about these hero organisms like bees, silkworms?
2
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned E. coli has its pros and cons, this bacteria.
2
SPEAKER_01
What have you learned?
2
SPEAKER_01
that small or big that s interesting about these organisms?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s a beautiful question.
2
SPEAKER_00
What have I learned?
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve learned that, you know, we also worked with shrimp shells, with Agroha, we built this tower on the roof of Esif Momah, which by a couple of months ago, until it was on the roof, we ve shown the structure completely biodegrade into the, well, not completely, but almost completely biodegrade to the soil.
2
SPEAKER_00
And this notion that a product or part, an organism or
2
SPEAKER_00
part of that organism can reincarnate is very, very moving thought to me, because I want to believe that I believe in reincarnation.
2
SPEAKER_01
I want to believe that I believe.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s my relationship with God.
2
SPEAKER_00
I like to believe in believing.
2
SPEAKER_00
Most great things in life are second derivatives of things.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that s part of another conversation.
2
SPEAKER_01
I feel like that s a quote that s gonna take weeks to really internalize.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and discover new truths about them through that.
2
SPEAKER_00
But what have I learned about organisms?
2
SPEAKER_01
And why don t you like E. coli?
2
SPEAKER_00
I like E. coli and a lot of the work that we ve done was not possible without our working on E. coli or other workhorse organisms like cyanobacteria.
2
SPEAKER_01
How are bacteria used?
2
SPEAKER_00
Death masks, the death masks.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what are death masks?
2
SPEAKER_00
So we did this project called Vespers, and those were basically death masks that were set as a process for designing a living product.
2
SPEAKER_00
What happens, and we looked at, I looked at, I remember looking at Beethoven s death mask and Agamemnon s death mask and just studying
2
SPEAKER_00
how they were created, and really they were sort of geometrically attuned to the face of the dead.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what we wanted to do is create a death mass that was not based on the shape of the wearer, but rather was based on their legacy and their biology, and maybe we could
2
SPEAKER_00
harness a few stem cells there for future generations or contain the last breath.
2
SPEAKER_00
Lazarus, which preceded Vespers, was a project where we designed a mask to contain a single breath, the last breath of the ware.
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SPEAKER_00
And again, if I had access to these technologies today, I would
2
SPEAKER_00
totally reincorporate my grandmother s last breath in a product.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it was like an air memento.
2
SPEAKER_00
So with Vespers, we actually used E. coli to create pigmented masks, masks whose pigments would be recreated at the surface of the mask.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m skipping over a lot of content, but basically there were 15 masks, and they were created as three sets.
2
SPEAKER_00
The masks of the past, the masks of the present, and the masks of the future.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we re looking at pictures of these, and they re gorgeous.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes.
2
SPEAKER_01
extremely delicate and interesting fractal patterns that are symmetrical.
2
SPEAKER_00
They look symmetrical, but they re not.
2
SPEAKER_00
We intended for you to be tricked and think that they re all symmetrical.
2
SPEAKER_01
But there s imperfections.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are imperfections by design.
2
SPEAKER_00
All of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you re looking at was entirely designed using a computational program.
2
SPEAKER_00
So none of it is manual.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
They were incorporated with pigment-producing living organisms, and then those organisms were templated to recreate the patterns of the original death masks.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so life recycles and rebegins and so on and so forth.
2
SPEAKER_00
The past meets the future, the future meets the past.
2
SPEAKER_00
from the surface to the volume, from death to life to death to life to death to life.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that, again, is a recurring theme in the projects that we take on.
2
SPEAKER_00
But there, from a technological perspective, what was interesting is that we embedded chemical signals in the printer, and those chemical signals
2
SPEAKER_00
basically interacted with the pigment-producing bacteria, in this case E. coli, that were introduced on the surface of the mask.
2
SPEAKER_00
And those interactions between the chemical signals inside the resins
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And we thought, well, if we can do this with pigments, can we do this with antibiotics?
2
SPEAKER_00
If we can do this with antibiotics, could we do it with melanin?
2
SPEAKER_00
And what are the implications?
2
SPEAKER_00
Again, this is a platform technology.
2
SPEAKER_00
Now that we have it, what are the actual real world implications and potential applications for this technology?
2
SPEAKER_00
And we started a new area.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And these hybrid living materials
2
SPEAKER_00
really paved the way towards a whole other set of products that we ve designed, like the work that we did with Melanin for the Mandela Pavilion that we presented at SFMOMA, where, again, we re using the same principles of
2
SPEAKER_00
templating, in this case, not silkworms and not bees, but we re templating bacteria at a much, much, much more finer resolution.
2
SPEAKER_00
And now instead of templating using a robot, we re templating using a printer.
2
SPEAKER_00
But compute is very, very much part of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what s nice about bacteria, of course, is that from an ethical perspective, I think there s a range, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So at the end of the Silk Pavilion, I got an email from a professor in Japan who
2
SPEAKER_00
has been working on transgenic silk and said, well, if you did this amazing silk pavilion, why don t we create glow-in-the-light silk dresses?
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
and this is what is known as a transgenic operation, and we said no.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And again, just to remind you, we re
2
SPEAKER_00
I forget the exact number, but it s around a thousand cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in India and China and those sericulture industries that are being abused.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, this organism was designed to serve the human species and maybe we should, maybe it s time to retire that conception of organisms that are designed for a human-centric world or human-centric set of applications.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t feel the same way about E. coli.
3
SPEAKER_00
Not that I m agnostic, organism agnostic, but still I believe there s so much for us to do on this planet with bacteria.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so in general, your design principle is to grow cool stuff as a byproduct of the organism flourishing.
3
SPEAKER_01
So not using the organism.
3
SPEAKER_00
The win-win, the synergy.
3
SPEAKER_00
A whole that s bigger than the sum of its parts.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s interesting, I mean, it just feels like a gray area where genetic modification of an organism
3
SPEAKER_01
It just feels like, I don t know, if you genetically modified me to make me glow in the light, I kinda like it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think you have enough of an aura.
3
SPEAKER_01
All right, thank you.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was just fishing for compliments.
3
SPEAKER_01
Thank you, I appreciate it so much.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you re absolutely right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, the gray area is where some of us like to live and like to thrive.
3
SPEAKER_00
and that s okay, and thank goodness that there s so many of us that like the black and white, and that thrive in the black and white.
3
SPEAKER_00
My husband is a good example for that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, but just to clarify, in this case, you re also trying to thrive in the black and white, in that you re saying, like, the silkworm is a beautiful, wonderful creature, let us not modify it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is that the idea, or is it okay to modify a little bit, as long as we can see that it benefits the organism as well as the final creation?
3
SPEAKER_00
So with silkworms, absolutely, let s not modify it genetically.
3
SPEAKER_00
Let s not modify it genetically.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then some, because why did we?
3
SPEAKER_00
Why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road?
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nevertheless, bacteria are pretty wonderful organisms.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m moving to my second cup here.
3
SPEAKER_01
Take two.
3
SPEAKER_01
Things are getting serious now.
3
SPEAKER_00
Bacteria are, yeah, for sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s give bacteria all the love they deserve.
3
SPEAKER_01
We wouldn t be here without them.
3
SPEAKER_01
They were here for, I don t know what it is, like a billion years before anything else showed up.
3
SPEAKER_00
But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume and then reincarnates or dissolves into the soil and then creates a tree, and then that tree creates more bacteria.
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SPEAKER_00
And then that bacteria, I mean, again,
3
SPEAKER_00
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
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SPEAKER_00
and maybe awareness.
3
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria.
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Directed evolution is one of them.
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SPEAKER_00
We re looking at directed evolution, so high-throughput directed evolution of bacteria for the production of products.
3
SPEAKER_00
And again, those products can be a shoe, wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics.
3
SPEAKER_01
And doing that direction computationally.
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SPEAKER_00
totally computationally obviously in the lab with the hero organism, the hero bacteria.
3
SPEAKER_00
And what s happening today in ecromicrobial synthetic biology, synthetic biology that lends itself to ecology.
3
SPEAKER_00
And again, all of these fields are coming together.
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SPEAKER_00
It s such a wonderful time to be a designer.
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SPEAKER_00
I can t think of a better time to be a designer in this world.
3
SPEAKER_00
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 are designed like growth chambers or grow rooms.
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SPEAKER_00
And in those grow rooms, we can basically
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SPEAKER_00
program, top-down environmental templating, right, top-down environmental control of lights, humidity, light, etc., so light, humidity, and temperature, while doing bottom-up genetic regulation.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it is a wet lab, but in that wet lab, you could do at the same time, you know, genetic modulation, regulation, and environmental templating.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then, again, the idea is that in one of those capsules, maybe we grow transparent wood, and in another capsule, transparent wood for architectural application.
3
SPEAKER_00
In another capsule, we grow a shoe.
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SPEAKER_00
And in another capsule, we look at that large language model that we talked about.
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SPEAKER_00
And there is a particular technology associated with that, which
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SPEAKER_00
we re hoping to reveal to the world in February.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And these little capsules could be stressed.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
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
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
So there we re thinking, can we design these capsules to stress an environment and see how that environment behaves?
3
SPEAKER_00
Think about a kind of an ecological, a biodiversity chamber, right?
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SPEAKER_00
A kind of a time capsule
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
So Ohio 1981, December 31st at 5am in the morning, what did tomatoes taste like?
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SPEAKER_00
to all the way in the future, 200 years ago.
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SPEAKER_00
These are the environmental inputs.
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SPEAKER_00
These are some genetic regulations that I m testing and what might be the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future.
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SPEAKER_00
feel like, test like, behave like, et cetera.
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SPEAKER_00
And so these capsules are designed as part of a lab.
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SPEAKER_00
That s why it s been taking us such a long time to get to this point, because we started designing them in 2019.
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SPEAKER_00
And they re currently, literally as I speak to you, under construction.
3
SPEAKER_01
How well is it understood how to do this dance of controlling these different variables in order for various kinds of growth to happen?
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SPEAKER_00
It s not.
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SPEAKER_00
It s never been done before.
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SPEAKER_00
And these capsules have never been designed before.
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SPEAKER_00
So when we first decided these are going to be environmental capsules, people thought we re crazy.
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SPEAKER_00
What are you building?
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SPEAKER_00
What are you making?
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SPEAKER_00
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 grow room at that resolution, at that granularity of control over organisms.
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SPEAKER_00
There was a reason why there is this incredible evolution of products in the software space.
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SPEAKER_00
The hardware space, that s a more limiting space, that because of the physical infrastructure that we have to test and experiment with things.
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SPEAKER_00
So we really wanted to push on.
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SPEAKER_00
creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way.
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SPEAKER_00
What could you create in it?
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SPEAKER_00
You could create the future.
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SPEAKER_00
You could create an environment of plants talking to each other with a robotic referee.
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SPEAKER_00
And the robotic referee, you know, and you could set an objective function and let s say for
3
SPEAKER_00
For the transaction-driven individuals in the world, let s say the objective function is carbon sequestration.
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SPEAKER_00
And all of those plants are implemented with a gaming engine and they have this reward system, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
And they re constantly needing to optimize the way in which they carbon sequest.
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SPEAKER_00
We weed 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.
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SPEAKER_00
And once we have that model, this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into the field and we see what happens in nature.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s sort of what I m talking about, augmenting plants with that extra dimension of
3
SPEAKER_00
of bandwidth that they do not have.
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SPEAKER_00
Just last week, I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are augmented with a pong game and
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SPEAKER_00
and in a dish they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness, which is wonderful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like 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
3
SPEAKER_00
a situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be sentient, but is actually sentient.
3
SPEAKER_00
Michael Levine calls this agential material, material that has agency, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
So this is of interest to us because this is sort of, again, this is emergence post-templating.
3
SPEAKER_00
You template until you don t need to template anymore because
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SPEAKER_00
because the system has its own rules, right?
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SPEAKER_00
What we don t want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology.
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SPEAKER_00
What we don t want to happen 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, yeah, putting them together with toxic materials and compounds.
3
SPEAKER_01
if I can ask a pothead question for a second.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm-like way.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based on an objective function.
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SPEAKER_01
Is it possible
3
SPEAKER_01
to have some kind of interface between another kind of organisms, humans, and nature.
3
SPEAKER_01
So like a human to have a conversation with a plant.
3
SPEAKER_00
There already is.
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SPEAKER_00
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 leaves of grass are communicating to each other.
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SPEAKER_00
So the grass, when it s cut, emits green leaf volatiles, 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.
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SPEAKER_00
These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours.
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SPEAKER_00
We use language models, they use molecular models.
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SPEAKER_00
At the moment where we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants.
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SPEAKER_00
Now, of course, there is a lot of work around
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SPEAKER_00
plant neurobiology, it s a real thing.
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Plants do not have a nervous system, but they have something akin to a nervous system.
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SPEAKER_00
It has a kind of ecological intelligence that is focused on a particular timescale, and the timescale is very, very slow, slow, slow, slow timescale.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it is when we can
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SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
Precision agriculture, I promise to you, will look very, very different, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because right now we re using drones to take photos of crops, of corn that look bad.
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SPEAKER_00
And when we take that photo, it s already too late.
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SPEAKER_00
But if we understand these molecular footprints and things that they are trying to say, the 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.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so these languages that we are attempting now to quantify and qualify will really help us not only better nature and help nature in its striving to surviving, but also help us design better wines and better foods and better medicine and better products, again, across all scales, across all application domains.
3
SPEAKER_01
Is there intricacies to understanding the time scales, like you mentioned, at which these communications, these languages, like, operate?
3
SPEAKER_01
Is there something different between the way humans communicate and the way plants communicate in terms of time?
3
SPEAKER_00
Remember when we started the conversation talking about
3
SPEAKER_00
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.
3
SPEAKER_00
That requires a kind of a humility towards nature, understanding that it operates on different scales.
3
SPEAKER_00
We recently discovered that, you know, that the molecular footprint of a rose or of a plant in general during nighttime
3
SPEAKER_00
is different than its molecular footprint during daytime.
3
SPEAKER_00
So these are circadian rhythms that are associated with
3
SPEAKER_00
what kind of molecules these plants emit, given stresses and given, you know, there s a reason why the jasmine, a jasmine field smells so, so delicious at 4 a.m.
3
SPEAKER_00
in the morning, and there s peace and rest amongst the plants.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you have to sort of tune into that
3
SPEAKER_00
time dimension of the plant kingdom.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that, of course, requires all this humility where in a single capsule to design a biodiversity chamber, it will take years, not months, and definitely not days to see these products.
3
SPEAKER_00
And also that humility in design comes from simply
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, looking at how we are today as a civilization, how we use and abuse nature.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, just think of all these Christmas trees, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
These Christmas trees, they take years to grow.
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SPEAKER_00
We use them for one night, the holiest night of the year.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then we let them go and think about in nature to design a quote unquote product, an organism spends energy and time and thoughtfulness and many, many, many years.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m thinking about the Redwoods.
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SPEAKER_00
To grow these channels, these, you know, the cellulose layers and channels and reach these incredible heights takes sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years.
3
SPEAKER_00
Am I afraid of building a company that designs products in the scale of thousands of years?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, I m not.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the way of being in the physical world today.
3
SPEAKER_00
is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that needs to change.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s obviously very, very hard to do in a community of human beings that is
3
SPEAKER_00
at least in the Western world, that is based on capitalism.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is how do we impart upon the capitalist movement?
3
SPEAKER_00
We know that we need to produce now products that will enter the real world and be shared and used by others and still benefit the natural world while benefiting humans.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s a wonderful challenge to have.
3
SPEAKER_01
So integrate technology with nature, and that s a really difficult problem.
3
SPEAKER_01
I see parallels here with another company of Neuralink, which is, is basically like, I think you mentioned Neuralink for nature, that, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
There are short-term products you can come up with, but it s ultimately a long-term challenge of how do you integrate the machine with this creation of nature, this intricate, complex creation of nature, which is the human brain, and then you re speaking more generally, nature.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know how every company has an image, like this one single image that embodies the spirit of the company,
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think for Neuralink it was, to me, that chimpanzee playing a video game.
4
SPEAKER_00
It was just unbelievable.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
which is why our first product for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance.
4
SPEAKER_00
So here we re thinking about the future of fragrances and the future of fragrances and flavors.
4
SPEAKER_00
These products are in the industry, as we know it today, are designed totally for a human-centric use.
4
SPEAKER_00
and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury.
4
SPEAKER_00
They re used on the body for the sake of, I don t know, attraction and feeling good and smelling good.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we were asking ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be not a functional fragrance?
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SPEAKER_00
Because you could claim that all fragrances are functional.
4
SPEAKER_00
But is there a world in which the fragrance becomes functionalized?
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SPEAKER_00
imparted upon or given agency to connect with another organism?
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SPEAKER_00
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?
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SPEAKER_00
I ve just been enamored with the statements that are being made.
4
SPEAKER_00
in the media around, oh, this is completely biologically derived fragrance and it s bio-based.
4
SPEAKER_00
But when you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you blew through 10,000 bushes of rose to create five milliliters of a rose fragrance.
4
SPEAKER_00
And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take water management and so much waste.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is this really what we want the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like?
4
SPEAKER_00
And so when we did the Aguajo pavilion on the roof of SF MoMA, we calculated that for that pavilion, we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and chitosan.
4
SPEAKER_00
and apple skins and cellulose from tree pulp.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we calculated that overall the structure had 40,000 calories.
4
SPEAKER_00
Interesting way to think about a structure, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
From the point of view of calories.
4
SPEAKER_00
But as you left the gallery, you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed by Felix on our team.
4
SPEAKER_00
And these clocks measured temperature and humidity, and we connected them to a weather channel so that we could directly
4
SPEAKER_00
look at how the pavilion was biodegrading in real time.
4
SPEAKER_00
And in our calculations, I say this long-winded description of the pavilion to say that in the calculation, we incorporated how much electricity we used for our computers, for the 3D printers that printed the pavilion.
4
SPEAKER_00
And these were called energy calculations, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Energy and materials.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when you think about a product and you think about
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, a shoe or a chair or a perfume or a building, you don t stop at the object.
4
SPEAKER_00
You want to go all the way to the system.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, instead of designing objects or singular embodiments of a
4
SPEAKER_00
the will of the designer, you re really tabbing into an entire system that is interconnected.
4
SPEAKER_00
And if you look at the energy budget that characterized the Project Agroha, it traverses the entire planet, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Some of these shrimp shells were brought from
4
SPEAKER_00
places in the world we haven t thought of in terms of the apples and the shrimp shells and the tree pulp.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s interesting, because the system level thinking is almost always gonna take you to the entire earth, to considering the entire earth ecosystem.
4
SPEAKER_00
Which is why it s important to have a left brain and a right brain competing for attention.
4
SPEAKER_00
And intimacy, I mean, yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned a fragrance that kind of sends out a message to the environment, essentially.
4
SPEAKER_00
A message in a bottle, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
A message in a bottle.
4
SPEAKER_01
So like, so you can go to a rose garden and trick the rose garden to think it s 4 a.m.
4
SPEAKER_00
You could if you wanted to, but maybe that is... Not trick.
4
SPEAKER_01
Trick is a bad word.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
Inspire.
4
SPEAKER_00
But inspire I like.
4
SPEAKER_00
I like the idea of providing nature with a choice, which is why I love that elegant mathematical equation of empowerment and agency.
4
SPEAKER_01
Empower the rose garden to create a romantic moment for the wearer of the fragrance.
4
SPEAKER_00
But now again, all of this to go back to that human-centric notion of romance.
4
SPEAKER_00
But maybe there s another way to do romance, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That we haven t yet explored.
4
SPEAKER_00
And maybe there s a way to tap into what happens to the rose when it s dreaming.
4
SPEAKER_00
Assuming that plants are sentient and assuming that we can tap into that sentience, what can we discover about what does the rose want?
4
SPEAKER_00
What does it actually want?
4
SPEAKER_00
And what does it need?
4
SPEAKER_00
And what are the rose s dreams?
4
SPEAKER_01
But do you think there s some correlation in terms of romance, in terms of the word you sometimes use, magic?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is there some similarities in what humans want and what roses want and what nature wants?
4
SPEAKER_00
I think so.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think there is, and if I did not think so, oh my goodness, this would not be a nice world to live in.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think we all want love.
4
SPEAKER_00
I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter and was discovered.
4
SPEAKER_00
Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until she reveals these letters.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so she did.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s just one of the most beautiful letters I ve ever read from a father to his daughter.
4
SPEAKER_00
And the letter overall is imbued with a kind of a sense of remorse or
4
SPEAKER_00
maybe even feelings of sadness.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then he goes on to talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E equals MC squared.
4
SPEAKER_00
And he tells his daughter that he believes that love is actually the force that shapes the universe because it is like gravity, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
It attracts people.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is like light.
4
SPEAKER_00
It brings people together and connects between people.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s all empowering.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so if you multiply it by the speed of light, you could really
4
SPEAKER_00
change the world for the better.
4
SPEAKER_00
And call me a romanticist, I know you are too, which is why I so love being here.
4
SPEAKER_00
I believe in this.
4
SPEAKER_00
I totally and utterly believe in this.
4
SPEAKER_01
In love.
4
SPEAKER_01
By the way, let me just excerpt from Einstein s letter.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s an extremely powerful force that so far science has not found a formal explanation to.
4
SPEAKER_01
It is a force that includes and governs all others and is even behind any phenomena operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.
4
SPEAKER_01
This universal force is love.
4
SPEAKER_01
He also, the last paragraph in the letter, as you ve mentioned, I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, that joke s to Einstein, I need to tell you that I love you, and thanks to you, I ve reached the ultimate answer.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your father, Albert Einstein.
4
SPEAKER_01
But that regret, I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe that s a universal regret.
4
SPEAKER_01
Filling your days with busyness and silly pursuits and not sitting down and expressing that.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it is everything.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is everything.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is why I love that expression.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I forget who said this, but I love my daughter more than evolution required, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
And I feel the same way towards my other half.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I feel that when you find that connection, everything and anything is possible.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it s a very, very, very magical moment.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I believe in love and I believe in the one.
4
SPEAKER_01
It might be the same thing, it might be a different thing, but let me ask you a ridiculously big philosophical question about beauty.
4
SPEAKER_01
Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world in The Idiot, one of my favorite books of his.
4
SPEAKER_01
What is beauty to you?
4
SPEAKER_01
You ve created through this intersection of engineering and nature, you ve created some incredibly beautiful things.
4
SPEAKER_01
What do you think is beauty?
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a beautiful question.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it is connected to the love question.
4
SPEAKER_00
It is connected to the love question.
4
SPEAKER_00
Of course, everything is connected to the love question.
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
4
SPEAKER_00
To me, beauty is agency.
4
SPEAKER_00
To me, something that has agency, it is beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_00
There is this special quote from Buckminster Fuller, which I cannot remember word for word, but I remember the concept, which goes something like this.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
So he s kind of an agency that speaks to, quote unquote, the objective function of the creation, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Whether for Bucky, it s useless or useful.
4
SPEAKER_01
So this idea of empowerment that you talked about is connected to it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Comes back to that, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
What s the difference that you hinted at between empowerment and emergence?
4
SPEAKER_01
Is emergence completely lacks control?
4
SPEAKER_01
And empowerment is more controlled?
4
SPEAKER_01
There s an agent making decisions.
4
SPEAKER_01
Is there an interesting distinction there?
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I think empowerment is a force with direction.
4
SPEAKER_00
It has directionality to it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Emergence.
4
SPEAKER_00
is I believe multi-directional.
4
SPEAKER_00
Again, that depends on the application.
4
SPEAKER_00
Emergence is perhaps in terms of sort of a material definition is the isotropic spirit when empowerment is the anisotropic counterpart.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think they overlap because I think that
4
SPEAKER_00
Empowerment is a way of inspiring emergence.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think emergence does not happen without empowerment, but empowerment can happen without emergence.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you think of emergence as the loss of control?
4
SPEAKER_01
Like when you re thinking about these capsules and the things they create, is emergence a thing that is not a desirable conclusion?
4
SPEAKER_00
I love that question because to some of us, the loss of control is control.
4
SPEAKER_00
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.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s something we ve inherited from the Industrial Revolution.
4
SPEAKER_00
But with nature, there is this diversity that happens without necessarily having a reward function, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
This is good or bad.
4
SPEAKER_00
Things just happen, and some of them happen to have wings and some of them happen to have scales.
4
SPEAKER_00
you know, you end up with this incredible potential for diversity.
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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.
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And creativity is very much part of this because creativity is all about letting go.
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and beginning again and beginning again, beginning again.
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And when you cannot let go, you cannot be creative and you can t find novelty.
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But I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment, agency, creativity, emergence, and they re all connected.
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They are sort of associate themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable.
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A good friend of mine shared with me an elegant definition of fate, which is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be.
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Ratio of who you are and who you want to be.
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Exactly.
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And that sort of ends up defining you.
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And those tools, I think, when you let go, you sort of find, you give peace to your will, right?
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To a sense of will.
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And so I think that s very, very important in design, but also in life.
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She said this fate is the ratio of... Who you are and who you want to be.
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Who you want to be.
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Do you think there s something to this whole manifestation thing, like focusing on a vision of what you want the world to become, and in that focusing, you manifest it?
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Like Paulo Coelho said in The Alchemist, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
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Is there something to that?
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I think so, yes.
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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.
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I think living is very much a process of channeling these energies to where they need to go.
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I think that the manifestation or part of that manifestation is the pointing to the moon in order to get to the moon.
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And that s why manifestation is also directional.
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It has that vector quality to it that I think of agency as.
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Have you, in your own life, has there been things you ve done where you kind of direct that energy and formation of matter in a way that opens up?
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New possibilities.
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Yeah.
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I mean, you ve also said somewhere, I m probably misquoting, that you re many things, you and Arya are many things, and you become new things every 10 years or so.
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Oh, I did say that somewhere.
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Somewhere.
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That every decade you sort of switch.
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That was an old, that was a previous scenario that said that.
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Yeah, I did say some time ago that you have to sort of reboot every 10 years to keep creative and keep inventive and keep fresh.
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Is there things you ve done in your life where just kind of doors opened?
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I think everything, everything, everything good I ve found in my life has been found in that way.
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letting go and suspending my sense of disbelief.
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And often you will find me say to the team, suspend your disbelief.
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I don t care that this is impossible.
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Let s assume it is, where does it take us?
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And that suspension of disbelief is absolutely part and parcel of the creative act.
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You know,
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I did so when I was in medical school.
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I was in Hadassah and in the Hebrew University.
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And I remember I left medical school for architecture the day my grandmother passed away.
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And that was a moment of relief.
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And that was a moment, a door that was closing that opened other opportunities.
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But that, of course, required letting go of the great vision of becoming a doctor and letting go of the dream of, you know, being surrounded by
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wonderful patients and the science of medicine and the research associated with that science and letting go of that dream to accomplish another.
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And it has happened throughout my life in different ways.
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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.
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And of course, in order to get tenure at MIT, you have to look at the citation index.
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But for me, it was not that.
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It was manifesting our work in shows and writing papers and writing patents and creating a celebration around the work.
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And I never saw a distinction between those ways of being.
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I also think that another kind of
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way of being or a modality of being that I found helpful is Viktor Frankl wrote this incredible book, Man s Search for Meaning After the Holocaust.
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And he writes different people pursue life for different reasons.
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According to Freud, the goal of life is to find pleasure.
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And according to Adler, it s to find power.
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And for Viktor Frankl, it was about finding meaning.
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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
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Yes, spiritual, but definitely a very, very creative plane where you can sort of start anew and 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,
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microbial ecologies, and so on and so forth.
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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.
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And that can be confusing for some, right?
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For my team members,
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I like to change my mind, it s who I am, it s how I think, it s how I operate.
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And they ll come and we found another technique or another technology that s interesting and we thought that we were working on this functionalized fragrance but now there s another opportunity and let s go there and to me,
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I would much rather, you know, 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.
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It s not a specific fairy tale.
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you know, the Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding Hood or Rapunzel, it s all of them.
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It s sort of moving into the forest and seeing this wonder and getting close and learning about that and then moving to another wonder.
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And life is really about tying all of these little fairy tales together in work and also in life.
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Unafraid to leap into the unknown?
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Unafraid to leap into the unknown.
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Speaking of MIT, you got a tenure at MIT and then you leaped to New York and started a new company with a vision that doesn t span a couple of years, but centuries.
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I did.
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It was my destiny to start a company.
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And do I have mornings when I wake up and I ask myself, what the hell am I doing?
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Yes, I have those mornings.
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What do you do with those mornings, by the way?
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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.
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So I really, really embrace these frustrations.
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I take them, I wrap them in a bubble and I look at it on the outside of my aware mind and I laugh at them, I smile at them.
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If I could return actually to the question of beauty for a second, I forgot to ask you something.
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You mentioned imperfection in the death masks.
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What role does imperfection play in our conception of beauty?
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What role does imperfection play in our perception of beauty?
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in nature.
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There s this Japanese aesthetics concept of wabi-sabi, which basically embraces imperfection.
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Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
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What do you think of that?
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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.
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And if they were perfect, of course, when things are perfect, it is just so boring.
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We end up with stereotypes.
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And as 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 towards something better.
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When I was a child, my mother, who
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who I love so much, always explain to me how important it is to fall and to fail and to fight and to argue.
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And that there is a way, that there is a culture to failing and to imperfection.
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So I think it is,
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necessary for something beautiful to be imperfect, and it is a sign of nature, because nothing in nature is perfect.
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What about human relations?
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You mentioned finding love.
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Are the flaws in humans, the imperfection in humans, a component of love?
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What role do you think the flaws play?
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That s a really profound question.
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I think
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the flaws are there to present a vulnerability.
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And those flaws are a sign of those vulnerabilities.
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And I think love is very, very gentle, right?
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With Bill we often talk about, between the two of us, about what drives all human behavior.
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And for him it s incentive, as you might expect.
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And he will repeat this sentence to me, incentive drives all human behavior.
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But I would say to me it s love.
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Very much so.
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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
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They either tear us apart or they bring us together.
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The vulnerability is what is the glue, I think.
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I think that the vulnerability enables connection.
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The connection is the glue, and that connection enables accessing higher ground as a community as opposed to as an individual.
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So if there is a society of 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,
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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.
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So I think not only are they beautiful, but they have a functional role in building civilizations.
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Yeah, there s a sense in which love requires vulnerability, and maybe love is the leap into that vulnerability.
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And I think, yes, I think
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A flaw, think about it, like physically, I m thinking about a brick that s flawed, but in a way, I think of a flaw as an increased surface area.
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God, that s a good line.
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That s a good line.
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A surface area that like physically or emotionally, right?
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It sort of introduces this whole new dimension to a human or a brick.
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And because you have more surface area, you can, you know, use mortar and build a home.
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And yeah, I think of it as accessing this additional dimension of surface area that could be used for good or bad, right?
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To connect, to communicate, to collaborate.
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It makes me think of that quote from this incredible movie I ve watched years ago.
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Particle Fever, I think it was called, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider.
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It s 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 the notion of... And Viktor Frankl talks about that too.
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He talks about feeling the sun on his arms as he is working the soil in two degrees Fahrenheit without clothes.
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The officer berates him and says, what have you done?
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Have you been a businessman before you came here to the camp?
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And he says, I was a doctor.
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And he said, you must have made a lot of money as a doctor.
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And he said, all my work I ve done for free.
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I ve been helping the poor.
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But he keeps his humility, and he keeps his modesty, and he keeps his
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preservation of the spirit.
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And he says the things that actually made him able to outlive the terrible experience in the Holocaust was really cherishing this moment when the sun hits his skin or when he can eat a grain of rice, a single grain of rice.
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So I think
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Cherishing is a very important part of living a meaningful life, being able to cherish those simple things.
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Like to notice them and to- To notice them, to pay attention to them in the moment.
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And I do this now more than ever.
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I mean, there is some, Bukowski has this poem I like called Nirvana.
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where it tells a story of a young man on a bus going through like North Carolina or something like this, and they stop off in a cafe, and he has this, there s a waitress, and just, he talks about that he notices the magic.
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Something indescribable, he just notices the magic of it, and he gets back on the bus with the rest of the passengers, and none of them seem to have noticed the magic.
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And I think if you just allow yourself to pause just to feel whatever that is, maybe ultimately it s a kind of gratitude.
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Yes.
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for, I don t know what it is.
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It s just, I m sure it s just chemicals in the brain, but it s just so incredible to be alive and noticing that and appreciating that and being one in that with others.
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Yes, yes, and that goes back to,
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you know, to the fireplace, right?
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To the first technology.
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What was the first technology?
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It was fire.
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First technology to have built community.
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And it emerged out of a vulnerability of wanting to stay away from the cold and be warm together.
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And of course that fire is associated with not only with comfort and the ability to form, you know,
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bio-relevant nutrients in our food and.
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and provide heat and comfort, but also spirits and a kind of a way to enter a spiritual moment, to enter a moment that can only be experienced in a community as a form of a meditative moment.
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There is a lot to be said about light.
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Light is, I think, an important part of
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these moments of, I think it s a real thing.
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I really truly believe that we re born with an aura, surface area that is measurable.
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I think we re born into the world with a, you know, with a,
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with an aura, and how do we channel that is really sort of ends, I mean, ends up sort of defining the light in our lives.
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Do you think we re all lonely?
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Do you think there s loneliness in us humans?
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Oh yes, yes, loneliness is part.
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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 avoid it or deny it.
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It feels like it s some kind of foundation for longing, and longing leads to this combination of vulnerability and connection with others.
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It feels like that s a really important part of being human is being lonely.
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Very, it s very, we are born into this world alone.
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Again, being alone and being lonely are two different things, right?
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You can be together but be lonely, and you can be alone but not be lonely at all.
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We often joke, Bill and I, that he cannot be lonely.
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He cannot deal with being by himself.
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He always needs people around him.
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And I strive long, must have creative solitude, must find pockets of solitude and loneliness.
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in order to find creativity and reconnect with myself.
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So loneliness is a recipe for community, in my opinion, and I think those things complement each other.
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And they re synergetic, absolutely.
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The yin and yang of togetherness.
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And they allow
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allow you, I think, to, yeah, to reset and to tune in to that ratio we talked about of who you are and who you want to be.
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If you go to this place of creative solitude, what s your creative process?
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Is there something you ve noticed about what you do that leads to good work?
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I love to be able not only to lose focus, but kind of to focus on the peripheral view and to allow different things to occur at once.
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So I will often in my loneliness journeys, I will often...
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I listen to like Leonard Bernstein, anything I can find online by Lenny Bernstein.
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It s reading a nature paper.
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It s war and peace.
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It s really revisiting all the texts that are so timeless for me with opportunities that are very, very timely.
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And I think for me, the creative process is really about bringing timeless
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problems or concepts together with timely technologies to observe them.
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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 melanin.
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And melanin also is sort of an output from the death mass.
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So it s lots of things happening at the same time and really allowing them to come together to form
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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.
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The glass work was another project like that where we were fascinated by glass because obviously it s superb material for architecture.
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But we created this new glass printing technology for the first time that was shedding light on
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the biomechanics of fluid glass, the math and the physics of which was never done before, which was so exciting to us.
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But revealing new knowledge about the world through technology, that s one theme.
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The reincarnation between things, material and immaterial, that s another theme.
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Lenny Bernstein, War and Peace, Tolstoy,
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You tweeted a Tolstoy quote from War and Peace, as of course you would.
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Everything I know, I know because of love.
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Love, yeah, I love this quote.
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So you use these kind of inspirations to focus you and then find the actual idea in the periphery.
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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 in the capsule and what it looks like, the food of the future.
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It is a little bit like directing a film.
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Creating a new project is a bit like creating a film.
6
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You have these heroes, you have these characters, and you put them together, and there is a narrative, and there is a story.
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Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous complexity.
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It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline-based or rooted must be novel.
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If you can combine novelty in
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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.
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And that s how I run the company and that s how I pick the people.
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And so that s another very, very important ingredient of the cutting edge
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across multiple disciplines that come together.
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And then in the background, in the periphery, there s all these messages, the whispers of the ancient oldies, right?
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The Beethovens and the Picassos.
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So Beethoven s always whispering to you.
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Yeah, how could one not include Beethoven in The Whisperers?
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I m going to ask you about Beethoven and the Evgeny Kissiny you ve mentioned, because I ve played piano my whole life.
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I obviously know a lot of Beethoven.
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And it s one of the private things for me, I suppose, because I don t think I ve ever publicly played piano.
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By the way, me too.
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I play in private only.
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Yeah, people sometimes, even with guitar, people ask me, well, can you play something?
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And it just feels like certain things are meant to be done privately.
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It s weird.
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I mean, it s a difficult, and some of the times I have performed publicly,
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It is an ultimate leap in vulnerability.
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It s very, very, very difficult for me.
6
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And I m sure it s, I know it s not for a lot of people, but it is for me.
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Anyway, we will return to that.
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But since you ve mentioned combination of novelty across multiple disciplines, that s what you seek when you
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when you build teams or pick people you work with.
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I just wanted to kind of linger on this idea of what kind of humans are you looking for in this endeavor that you re taking on, this fascinating thing that you ve been talking about.
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I want to think somewhere else, a previous version, version 5.7 of Neri said somewhere that there s four fields that are combined to create this intersection of biology and engineering work in.
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It s computational design, additive manufacturing, material engineering, synthetic biology.
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I m sure there s others, but how do you find these humans?
6
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Machine learning s in the mix.
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I manifest and they come.
6
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There are a few approaches.
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Manifest.
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They show up.
6
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You know, send your message upon the water.
6
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Those job descriptions that you saw, the first ones I wrote by myself.
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And you find interesting people and brilliant people when you look—we talked about second derivative—when you look under and under and under.
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And if you look deep enough and specialized enough, and if you allow yourself to
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look at the cracks, at the flaws, at the cracks between disciplines and between skills, you find really, really interesting diamonds in the rough.
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And so I like for those job descriptions to
6
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Yeah, to be those messages in a bottle that bring those really interesting people our way.
6
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I mean, they have to have humility.
6
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They have to have a shine in their eye.
6
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They have to be hungry and foolish, as Job so famously said.
6
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A friend of mine who s a dean of a well-known architectural school said, you know, today architects don t want to be architects.
6
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Architects don t look up to the star architects as role models.
6
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Star architects are no longer role models.
6
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Architects want to build by virtue of not building, right?
6
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Architects want, she said, we re back in the 60s when we think about architecture, back in the hippie movement.
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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.
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And yet with humility.
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And yet with humility.
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Now that is hard to find.
6
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And that is why, you know, when I start an interview, I talk about childhood memories and I asked about music and I ask about connection.
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And through these interviews, you can learn a lot about a person s future by spending time hearing them talk about their past.
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Do you find that educational, like PhDs versus like, what s the life trajectory?
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Yours is an interesting life trajectory, too.
6
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Like what s the life trajectory that leads to the kind of person that would work with you?
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It s people who have ideally had industry experience and know what it s like to be in the quote-unquote real world.
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They re dreamers that are addicted to reality as opposed to realists that are addicted to dreams.
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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 torsion horses to bring those values into the world.
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there are individuals who feel comfortable in this friction between highly wondrous and dreamy and incredible fantasy renditions of what the world could be with extremely brilliant skills in terms of their disciplinary background.
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So PhD with industrial experience in a certain field or
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a double major in two fields that make no sense whatsoever in their combination are things that really, really attract me.
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Especially that span the technology-biology gap.
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Yes.
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Technology, biology, nature, culture.
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I mean,
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The secret to one thing is through the lens of another.
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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, reestablish, redefine, suspend your disbelief, revisit.
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And when you revisit enough times, like a hundred times, or a
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like 200 times and you revisit the same question through the lens of any possible discipline and any possible scenario, eventually you get to the truth.
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I have to ask you, because you work at the interplay of the machine and the natural world, is there a good definition for you of what is life?
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What is a living organism?
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I think like 440 million years ago there were all these plants that the cyanobacteria, I believe actually, that was like the first extinction, right?
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There were five extinctions.
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We are apparently the sixth.
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We are in the eye of the storm.
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We are in the sixth extinction.
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We are going to be extinct as we speak.
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I mean, death is upon us, whether we want to admit it or not, and actually,
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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 were the first, of course, and then they found these spore-based plants.
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And because they didn t have seeds, they re only spores, the spores became sort of the fossils by which we ve come to know of their existence.
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And because of these spores, we know that this first extinction existed.
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But this extinction is actually what enabled plants to
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to resurrect, right?
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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 clinking to the rocks, like 60 times more phosphorus than without them.
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And then all this phosphorus basically choked the oceans and made them super cold and A, without oxygen, aoxic.
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And then we lost the plant kingdom.
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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 the planet.
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And those planets had like more sophisticated
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vein systems and they were moving beyond spores to seeded plants, et cetera, and flowering plants.
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And so in a way, one mass extinction sort of led in the Ordovician period sort of led to life as we know it.
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And where would we be without plants in a way?
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So I think that death is very much part of life.
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And through that definition, that kind of planetary
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wide definition in the context of hundreds of millions of years, life gains a completely new, sort of a new light.
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And that s where, that s when the particles become a wave, right?
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Where humans are, we are not alone.
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And we are here because of those plants, right?
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So I think death is very much part of life.
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So in the context of the redwood tree, perhaps life is defined as 10 generations.
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And through the lens of a bacteria, perhaps life is defined as a millisecond.
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And perhaps through the lens of an AGI, life is defined as all of human civilization.
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So I think it really is a question of
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this timescale again, the timescale and the organism, the life form that s asking the question through which we can answer what is life.
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What do you think about this since you re, if we think of ourselves as in the eye of the storm of another extinction,
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The natural question to ask here is, you have all of nature, and then you have this new human creation that is currently being termed artificial intelligence.
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How does your work play with the possibility of a future superintelligent ecosystem, an AGI, that either joins or supersedes humans?
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Yeah, so I m glad you asked this question.
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And are you hopeful or terrified?
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Both, I m hopeful and terrified.
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I did watch your interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky and I loved it.
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Because you were scared or because you were excited or because there was a profound fear?
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First of all, I was both.
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I m totally scared, shamed, excited, and totally also inspired because he s just such an incredible thinker.
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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.
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There s an inevitability to what he s saying.
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His advice to young people is that prepare for a short life.
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He thinks it s very almost simple, it s almost common sense that AGI would get rid of humans, that he can t imagine a trajectory
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eventually that leads to a place that doesn t have AGI kill all humans.
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There s just too many trajectories where a superintelligence systems gets rid of humans.
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and in the near term.
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And so that clarity of thinking is very sobering to me.
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Maybe it is to you as well.
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It s super inspiring, because I think he s wrong, but it s like you almost want to prove him wrong.
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It s like, no, we humans are a clever bunch.
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We re gonna find a way.
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It is a bit like jumping into super cold water.
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It s sort of a kind of a fist in your face.
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It wakes you up.
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And I like these moments so much.
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And he was able to bring that moment to life, even though I think
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a mother can never think that way, ever.
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And it s a little bit like that notion of, I love her more than evolution requires.
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On your question about AGI and nature, look, I think we ve been through a lot in terms of
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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.
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And what is intelligence?
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It s the ability to problem solve and adapt and translate.
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So that sort of from data to information to knowledge, I think the next frontier is wisdom.
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And what is wisdom?
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Wisdom is the ability to have or find insight about the world.
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and from wisdom to spiritual awareness, which is sort of transcends wisdom and is able to chart the world into new territory.
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But I think what is interesting about AGI is that it is sort of almost like a self-recursive thing, right?
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Because it s like a washing machine of like a third derivative Wikipedia.
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It uses kind of like language to create language, to create language, to create language.
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It feels like novelty is being constantly created.
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It doesn t feel like it s regurgitating.
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And that s so fascinating because these are not the stochastic parrots.
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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.
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But it s not as if the AGI has self-awareness, right?
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It s not as if it has, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe it has, but as far as I can tell,
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It s not as if AGI has approached consciousness or sentience just yet.
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It s probably getting there, but the language appears to present itself as if there is sentience there, but it doesn t.
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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 breathes like me and my daughter
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knows the AGI to be me is sort of the end of everything, right?
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It s the end of human agency.
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But what is the end of human agency to humans, I think is the beginning of agency to nature.
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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,
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So maybe through Eliezer s lens, the sort of short-lived human becomes sort of a very long-lived human-like sentient weeping willow.
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Maybe, maybe that s the end and the beginning.
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And maybe on the more optimistic side for us humans,
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It s a different form of existence where everything we create and everything we consume and everything we process is all made up of six elements and that s it.
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And there s only those six elements and not 118 elements.
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And it s all the stuff of biology plus some, you know,
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a fair amount of bits, bits, genes and atoms.
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A lot of Beethoven.
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A lot of Beethoven.
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I think the idea of connecting AGI to nature through your work is really fascinating.
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Sort of unlocking this incredible machinery of intelligence that is AGI and connecting it to the incredible machinery of wisdom that is
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as evolved through billions of years.
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A pretty crazy, intense evolution.
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Exactly.
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And unlike sort of, again I m going back to directed evolution, unlike this sort of high throughput, brute force approach, if there is a way to utilize this synergy for
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diversity and diversification like.
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Like, yeah, how, like what happens if you ask a chat GPT question, but it takes 10,000 years to answer that question.
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Like, what does that look like, right?
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When you like completely switch the timescale and you can afford the time to answer the question.
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And again, I don t know, but that world to me is possibly amazing.
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Do you think there s, because when we start to think about time scales like this, just looking at Earth, all the possible trajectories it might take of this living organism that is Earth, do you think there s others like it?
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Do you think there s other planets with life forms on them that are just doing their thing in this kind of way?
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Because in what you re doing,
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you re directly playing with what s possible with life, life-like things.
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That kind of maps the question of well, what kind of other things are possible elsewhere?
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Do you think there s other worlds full of life, full of alien life out there?
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I ve studied the calculations that point towards the verdict that the possibility of life in and around us is very, very low.
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We are a chosen planet in a way, right?
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There s water and there s love.
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What else do you need?
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And that sort of very peculiar juxtaposition of conditions, the oxygen, the water, the carbon, again is in a way a miracle given the
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massive extinctions that we ve been through as lifeforms.
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And that said, I cannot believe that there is no other lifeform.
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I want to believe more than I know that yes, that there are lifeforms in, you know, in the white fountain that is the black hole, right?
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That there are these lifeforms that are, you know,
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light years away from us that are forming other forms of life forces.
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I m much more worried about probably the thing that you re working on, which is that there s all kinds of life around us that we re not communicating with.
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that there s aliens, in a sense, all around us that we re not seeing, that we re not talking to, that we re not communicating.
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Because that, to me, just seems the more likely situation.
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That they re here.
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That they re here, they re all around us in different forms.
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that there is a connection, there s a thing that connects all of us, all of living beings across the universe.
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And we re just beginning to understand any of it.
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And I feel like that s the important problem is, I feel like you can get there with the tools of science today by just studying life on Earth.
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unlock some really fundamental things that maybe you can start to answer questions about, what is consciousness?
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Maybe this thing that we ve been saying about love, but honestly in a serious way.
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And then you ll start to understand that there is alien life all out there, and it s much more
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complicated and interesting that we kind of realize as opposed to looking to human-like, exactly human-like things.
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It s the variety of life that s possible is just almost endless.
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I totally agree with you.
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I think again, define alien, right?
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Yeah, define intelligence, define life.
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Right, and Marvin Minsky used to say, intelligence is a suitcase word.
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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.
7
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of rock and roll, you ve mentioned music, and you mentioned Bejo a bunch of times.
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You ve also tweeted about, you ve gained a kiss in performance, and so on.
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What can you say about the role of music in your life?
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I love music.
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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.
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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, and- That s a weird mystery that we re so connected to music.
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Well, by the way, to push back,
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A good bridge will make me cry.
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A good arch, it s true.
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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 in the space and appreciating every little gesture.
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So it s true.
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This is the universal language.
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It s the language of waves, right?
7
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It s the language of the waves, not the language of the particles.
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It is the universal language, I believe.
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And that is definitely one of my loves.
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SPEAKER_00
And you said that if you weren t doing what you were doing now, perhaps you would be a film director.
7
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So I ll have to ask, what do you think is the best film of all time?
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe top three.
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Yeah, maybe the Godfather.
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Godfather, okay.
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The Godfather is definitely up there.
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Francis Coppola is one of my heroes.
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Have you met him?
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SPEAKER_01
I have met him, yes, yes, yes.
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I was very, very lucky.
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We were very lucky to work with him on his new film, Megalopolis, which is coming out, I hope, in 2024.
7
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And think about the cities of the future in the context of new materials and the unity between nature and culture.
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Godfather is definitely up there.
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2001 is up there.
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I would watch that film again and again and again.
7
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It s incredible.
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The last scene in Odyssey 2001, that s, just watch the last scene of 2001, then listen to Yudkowsky, and then sort of, and then go to the garden, and that s pretty much, you know, the end and the beginning.
7
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But that scene, that last scene from 2001 is everything.
7
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It says so much with so little, and it s sort of the embodiment, I believe, of ambivalence, and there s opportunity to believe in the beginning of humankind, the end of humankind, the planet,
7
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child star or star child of the future.
7
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Was there a death?
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Was there a reincarnation?
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You know, that final scene to me is something that I go back to and study.
7
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And every time there is a different reading of that scene that inspires me.
7
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So that scene, it s just... And then the first scene in the Godfather, still one of the best scenes of all times.
7
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sort of a portrait of America, the ideals and values that are brought from Italy.
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A family of loyalty, of values, of how different values are constructed.
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Yes, loyalty and the human spirit and how Coppola celebrates the human spirit through the most simple gestures.
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in language and acting.
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And I think in Kubrick, you see this highly curated and controlled and manicured vision of creating a film.
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And with Francis, it s like an Italian feast.
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It s like anything can happen at any moment in time.
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And just being on the set with him is an experience I ll take with me to my grave.
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It s very, very, very special.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you said music is also part of that, of creating a feeling in the movies.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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Actually, the Godfather, that tune,
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SPEAKER_00
That makes me emotional every time on some weird level.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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It s one of these tunes I m sure that has, if you play it to a jasmine, you ll get the best scent of all time.
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But I think with that particular tune, I learned staccato.
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as something very, very happy and joyous.
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Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
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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.
7
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You can play it in all kinds of different ways.
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I ve played it on guitar in all kinds of different ways.
7
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And I think in Godfather III, the son plays it on guitar to the father.
7
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I think this happens in movies, but sometimes a melody, and that s a simple melody, can just like... And the Strauss melody in 2001.
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And when you juxtapose these melodies with the scene, you get this, again, whole that s bigger than some of its parts where you get this moment.
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SPEAKER_01
That is, I think, like these are the moments I would send with the next Voyager to outer space.
7
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I definitely sent the Godfather in 2001, would definitely be on that golden record.
7
SPEAKER_00
You are an incredibly successful scientist, engineer, architect, artist, designer.
7
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You ve mentored a lot of successful people.
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Can you give advice to young people listening to this how to have a successful career and how to have a successful life?
7
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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?
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Probably 20, I believe he says.
7
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I spend time with a full moon.
7
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I take my time with a full moon.
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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.
7
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I was very lucky to have had, you know, to have grown up in a home that
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taught me this way of being.
7
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My parents, my grandmother, who played a very important role in my growing up, and
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And that ability to pay attention and to be present is so, so, so, so, I could not emphasize it enough.
7
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It s so crucial.
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And be grateful.
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And be grateful.
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Yeah.
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I think gratitude and presence, appreciation, are really the most important things in life.
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SPEAKER_00
If you could take a short tangent about your grandmother, who s played a big role in your life, what do you remember?
7
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What lessons have you learned from her?
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SPEAKER_01
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.
7
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And it was always in her garden.
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And her garden, in my mind, was ginormous.
7
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But when I, you know, last I went there and saw the site, which has now become the site for another
7
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tall building.
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It was a tiny, tiny little garden that to me seemed so large when I was growing up because it had everything.
7
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It had fig trees.
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It had olive trees.
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It had mushrooms.
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It had the blanket.
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I would do my homework there.
7
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It was everything and I needed nothing, nothing else.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that was my Garden of Eden, that was my childhood.
7
SPEAKER_01
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.
7
SPEAKER_01
And she taught me the...
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importance of wonder in an eternal childhood and living adulthood as a child.
7
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And so I m very, very grateful for that.
7
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I think it is the sense of wonder.
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SPEAKER_01
The speaking up was always something that she adhered to, to speak up your truth, to be straightforward.
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SPEAKER_00
to be positive that these are things that I also got from my mom.
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And from my mom, the sense of humor.
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SPEAKER_00
She had the best sense of humor that I could think of and was just a joy to be around.
8
SPEAKER_00
And my father taught me everything.
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SPEAKER_00
My father taught me everything I know.
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SPEAKER_00
My mom taught me everything I feel.
8
SPEAKER_01
That s a good way to put it.
8
SPEAKER_00
My grandma taught me everything I incite.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, I see the sense of wonder that just carries through everything you do, so I think you make your grandmother proud.
8
SPEAKER_01
Well, what about advice for how to have a career?
8
SPEAKER_01
So you ve had a very interesting career, and a successful career, but not an easy one.
8
SPEAKER_01
You took a few leaps.
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SPEAKER_00
I did take a few leaps and they were uncomfortable.
8
SPEAKER_00
My father, and I ll never forget, I think we were listening to a Rolling Stones song in the kitchen and my dad, who was actually born in Boston, he s American, he said,
8
SPEAKER_00
I started to have sort of these second thoughts about continuing my education in Israel and I wanted to, you know, go, I was on my way to London to the Architectural Association to do my diploma studies there.
8
SPEAKER_00
And he looked at me and he said, get out of here, kiddo.
8
SPEAKER_00
You got to get out of here.
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SPEAKER_00
And, you know, you ve outgrown where you re at.
8
SPEAKER_00
You need to, you know, you need to move forward.
8
SPEAKER_00
Another thing he had taught me, the feeling of discomfort, as you say, the feeling of loneliness and discomfort is,
8
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imperative to growth.
8
SPEAKER_00
Growth is painful, period.
8
SPEAKER_00
Any form of growth is difficult and painful.
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SPEAKER_00
Birth is difficult and painful.
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And it is really, really important to place yourself in situations of discomfort.
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I like to be in a room where everyone in the room is more intelligent than me.
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I like to be in that kind of state where the people that I surround myself with are
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orders of magnitude more intelligent than I am.
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And I can say that that is true of all of my team members.
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And that s the intellectual discomfort that I feed off of.
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The same is true for physical exertion.
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You got to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations in order to grow, in order to find comfort.
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And then
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On the other hand is love, is finding love and finding that, you know, that human, this other human that complements you and that makes you a better version of the one you are and even of the one you want to be.
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But with gratitude and attention and love, you can go so, so far.
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To the younger generation, I don t speak of a career.
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I never thought of my work as my career ever.
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And there was this constant entanglement between life and work and love and longing and being and mothering.
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It s all the same.
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And I appreciate that to some people that doesn t work in their arrangement of will versus comfort versus the reality.
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But for me, it has always worked.
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the younger generation, I say, don t think of your career.
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A career is something that is imposed upon you.
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Think of your calling.
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That s something that s innately and directionally
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moves you and it s something that transcends a career.
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Similarly, you can think about the difference between, you know, learning versus being educated.
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Being educated is something that s given to you, that s external, that s being imposed, that s top-down imposed.
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Learning is something that comes from within.
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It s also the difference between joy and happiness.
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Many times I m sad and I m still joyous.
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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.
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together, when we combine all of these, the broken puzzle, let s say, of substance and vulnerability, we get this bigger gestalt, this wondrous world of a future that is
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peaceful, that is wholesome, and that proposes or advocates for that kind of synergy that we ve been talking about throughout.
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But it s all fun.
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Well, thank you for this incredible conversation.
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Thank you for all the work you re doing.
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And I just have to say that thank you for noticing me and listening to me.
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You re somebody from just today and from our exchanges before this, like there s a sense where you care about me as a human being, which I could tell you care about other humans.
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Thank you for doing that.
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Thank you for having empathy and just like,
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Yeah, really listening and noticing me, that I exist.
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So thank you for that.
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I ve been a huge fan of your work.
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I ve been a huge fan of who you are as a human being.
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It s just an honor that you would sit with me.
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Thank you.
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Thank you so much, Lex.
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I feel the same way.
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I ll just say the same.
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And I look forward to hearing the response to my job application that I ve submitted.
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Oh, you re accepted.
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Oh damn, all right, excellent.
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We all speak of you all the time.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you, Lex.
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Thank you.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Neri Oxman.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Leo Tolstoy.
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Everything I know, I know because of love.
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Thank you for listening.
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I hope to see you next time.