Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #394
- Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients
of simultaneous complexity. It has to be novel in terms
of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering. All of these elements that are discipline-based
or rooted must be novel. If you can combine novelty
in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create something novel. (curtain whooshes) - 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. 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. 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. 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. I am forever grateful to her. She's a brilliant and a
beautiful human being. Oh, and she also brought me a present, "War and Peace" by Tolstoy, and "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. It doesn't get better than that. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Neri Oxman. Let's start with the universe. Do you ever think of the
universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful
things at multiple scales? - I do, and I think of nature
in that way in general, in the context of design, specifically, I think of nature as everything
that isn't Anthropomass, everything that is not
produced by humankind, the birds and the rocks
and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales. - Do you think there's an intricate ways in which there's a connection
between humans and nature? - Yes, and we're looking for it. I think that from, let's say,
from the beginning of mankind, going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the
things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the
things that separated us. Before that we were to totally
and completely connected. And I want to return to that world. - But bring the tools of engineering and computation to it?
- Yes. Yes. I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we
still have not leveraged, and we still have not understood,
and we still haven't... And so much of our work is designed, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and finding new truths about the natural world that
we were not aware before. Everybody talks about
intelligence these days, but I like to think that
nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence
or above intelligence. And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap
into through technology. If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context
of definition of nature, is everything but Anthropomass. And I'm using Ron Milo, who is an incredible 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. 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,
buildings, cities, but also asphalt and concrete, all outweigh the scale of the biomass. And actually, that was a moment, you know how in life
there are moments that (Lex laughs)
(laughs) maybe a handful of moments that get you to course correct. And my, it was a Zoom
conversation with Ron, and that was a moment for me when I realized that imbalance, ugh, now we've superseded the
biomass on the planet. Where do we go from here? And you've heard the expression
more phones than bones and the Anthropomass and the Anthropocene and the technosphere sort of
outweighing the biosphere. But now we are really trying
to look at is there a way in which all things
technosphere are designed as if they're part of the biosphere. Meaning if you could today
grow instead of build everything and anything, if
you could grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what
would that world look like? Where the 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 can be read and written to as, or thought of or perceived
of, as nature-grown. That's sort of the Turing
test for the company, or at least that's how I started. I thought, well grow everything. That's sort of the slogan.
Let's grow everything. And if we grow everything,
is there a world in which driving a car
is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars? Is it possible that a world in which you build buildings in cities, that those buildings in
cities actually augment and heal nature, as
opposed to their absence? Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy
between nature and humans, where you cannot separate
between grown and made, and it doesn't even matter? - Is there a good term
for the intersection between biomass and Anthropomass, like things that are grown? - Yeah, so in 2005, I called
this material ecology. I thought, what if all material, all things materials,
would be considered part of the ecology and would have an impact, a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other? All things nature, all things human. And again, you can say that wisdom in nature exists in fungi. Many mushroom lovers always
contest my thesis here saying, "Well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees,
and they're all connected. And why don't we just
simply hack into mushrooms?" Well, first of all,
yes, they're connected, but that network stops when
there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping
willow in Montana. And that's sort of a world
that I'm dreaming about. What what does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud? The kind of bandwidth
that we're talking about, sort of think Neuralink
for nature, you know, since the first computer, and you know this by heart
probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers. We today have computational
power that is 1 trillion times the power that we had in those times. We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible. So humankind, since the first computer, has approached and accessed
such incredible bandwidth, and we're asking, well, what
if nature had that bandwidth? So beyond genes and
evolution, if there was a way to augment nature and allow it
access to the world of bits, what does nature look like now? And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind? - So nature has this inherent
wisdom that you spoke to, but you're also referring to
augmenting that inherent wisdom with something like a
large language model. - Exactly.
- 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. - Exactly. So I think of it as large molecule models and those large molecule models- - (laughs) Love that.
- Of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth, and we don't have this data currently. And part of our mission
is to do just that, trying to quantify and understand
the language that exists across all kingdoms of life, across all five kingdoms of life, and if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to
first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity? In the company, we're constantly asking, what does nature want? Like, what does nature
want from a compute view? - If it knew it, what could
aid it in whatever the heck it's wanting to do?
- Yeah. So we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information but decrease entropy, right? So find order, but constantly increase
the information scale. And this is true for what
our work also tries to do, because we're constantly trying to fight against the dimensional
mismatch between things made and things grown, right? And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y, and Z, and that's pretty much where
architectural education ends and biological education begins. So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown. But in the natural environment, we're asking, can we provide nature with these extra dimensions? And again, I'm not sure what nature wants, but I'm curious as to what
happens when you provide these tools to the natural environments. Obviously with responsibility,
obviously with control, obviously with ethics and moral code. But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools? - And by the way, we're talking about a company called Oxman. - [Neri] Yeah, just a
few words about the team. - Yeah, what kind of humans
work at a place like this that are trying to figure
out what nature wants? - You know, I think
they're first like you, they're humanist first. They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds. And just as an example, we
have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius and a computer scientist
and a mechanical engineer who is trained as a synthetic biologist. And now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist, architects of course, and designers, roboticist. So it's really, it's Noah's
Ark, right? Two of each. - And always dancing between
this line of the artificial, the synthetic and the real, what's the term for, and the natural. - Yeah, the built and the
grown, nature and culture. - Yeah.
- Technology and biology. But we're constantly seeking
to ask how can we build, design and deploy
products in three scales, the molecular scale,
which I briefly hinted to. And there 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 is the iPhone for nature. If nature had an iPhone, what
would that iPhone look like? - Does that mean creating an interface? - Yeah.
- Between nature and the computational tools we have? - Exactly, it goes back to
that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans
have now arrived at. And giving that to nature and seeing, you know, what happens there? Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need
to run away from fire? Can plants use this interface
to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the
presence of a smoke cloud? Can they do this, quote
unquote, automatically without a kind of a top-down
brute-force policy-based method that's authored and deployed by humans? And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world. And then there's a second
area in the company which focuses on growing products. And here we're focusing
on a single product that starts from CO2.
- Mm-hmm. - 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. - So we're talking
about from CO2 to fruit. - Yeah, it starts from CO2
and it ends with something that you can like literally eat. - Yes. - So the world's first
entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, bio renewable product. - That's grown?
- 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. And there's a lot of textile-based work out there that is focused
on one single element in this long chain, like,
oh, let's create, you know, leather out of mycelium or let's create textile out of cellulose. But then it stops there and
you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable and you, and
you need a little bit of glue and you need a little bit of this material and a little bit of that material to make it water-resistant,
and then it's over. So that's one thing that
we're trying to solve for, is how to create a product
that is materially, computationally, robotically novel, and goes through all of these
phases from the creation, from this carbon recycling
technology to the product, to literally how do you
think about, you know, reinventing an industry
that is focused on assembly and putting things together
and using humans to do that. Can that happen just
using robots and microbes and that's it?
- And doing it end-to-end. I would love to see what this- - It looks cool. (laughs)
- Factory looks like. - And the factory is great
too. I'm very, very excited. In October, we'll share first renditions of some of this work. And in February we'll
invite you to the lab. - I'm there.
(Neri laughs) - I've already applied.
I haven't hear back. I don't understand.
(Neri laughs) Okay, let me, just before
we get to number three, it'd be amazing to just
talk about what it takes with robotic arms, or 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, this
kind of synthetic biology. - Yeah.
- How to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria. Is there examples from the past and- - 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, bio-based design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture,
biology and technology. And we attempted to build
a suite of embodiments, let's say, that they ended
up in amazing museums and amazing shows and we wrote patents and papers on them, but
they were still n of 1s. - Mm-hmm.
- Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them. And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments. And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees and or comb as the structural material. With vespers, we used
synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments. Although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same. The approach was really an approach of computational templating. That templating allowed
us to create templates for the natural environment, where nature and technology could duet, could dance together to
create these products. So just, just as a few
examples with silk pavilion, 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, an incredible mentor, Paola Antonelli, that pavilion was six meter tall and it was produced by silkworms. And there we had different
types of templates. There were physical templates
that were basically just these water soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning. And then there were
environmental templates, which was a robot basically
applying variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the
movement of the silkworm. - You're saying so many amazing things, and I'm trying not to interrupt you, but like 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 so like, and that's one of the ways you can get to guide their work is by defining that environment. By the way you said hero
organism, which is an epic term. (Neri laughs)
So that means like is whatever is the
biological living system that's doing the creation. - And that's what's happening
in pharma and biomaterials. And by the way, precision ag and food, new food design technologies
as people are betting on a hero organism is the
sort of how I think of it. (Lex speaks indistinctly)
And the hero organism is, sometimes it's the palm
oil or it's the mycelium. 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. But these hero organisms are
being betted on as like the, what's the one answer
that solves everything? Hitchhiker's Guide, 42.
- 42, yeah. - These are sort of the 42s of, you know, of the enchanted new universe. And back at MIT we
said, instead of betting on all of these organisms,
let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony. And let's kind of lean
into what we can learn from each of these
organisms in the context of building a project in
an architectural scale. And those usually were pavilions. - And then the computational templating is the way you guide the work of this. How many did you say, 17,000? - 17,532. So each of these silkworms
threads are about, you know, one mile in distance
and they're beautiful. And when, and just
thinking about the amount of material, you know,
it's a bit like thinking about you know, the length
of capillary vessels that grow in your belly
when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form. It is just, nature is amazing. But back to the silkworms,
I think I had three months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how
we were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its
incredible architecture. This cocoon over the
period of 24 to 72 hours, and it builds a cocoon
basically to protect itself. It's a beautiful form of architecture and it uses pretty much
just two materials, two chemical compounds,
sericin and fibroin. The sericin is sort of
the glue of the cocoon. The fibroin is the fiber-based
material of the cocoon 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. And in the process, they vary the properties
of that silk thread. So it's stiffer or softer depending on where it is in the
section of the cocoon. And so we were trying to
emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that
was 6-axis KUKA arm, one of these baby KUKAs, and we're trying to emulate
that process computationally and build something very large. When one of my students, now an a brilliant industrial
engineer roboticist on my team, Marcus, said, "Well, you know, we were just
playing with those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realized that if
they're placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon. Only the cocoon would be flat, because they're constantly
looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as
an anchor to spin the cocoon. But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less
than 21 millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches and we say, aha, let's work with
them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches
and a silkworm mind you, is quite an egocentric creature. And actually the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution
by natural selection, the more egoism you find in creatures. So when you think about termites, right? Their material sophistication
is actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and
connect with each other. So if you think about the
entire, all of nature, let's say, all of living systems as like a matrix that runs across two axes. One is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material
sophistication is crap, right? It's just saliva and feces
and some soil particles that are built to create these
incredible termite mounds. The scale that when compared
to human skyscrapers transcend all of buildable scales, at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just in relative to the
size of the termite. But when you look at the silkworm, the silkworm has zero connection and communication across silkworms. They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other. They're sort of a human design species because the domesticated silk moth creates the cocoon, we then produce the silk
of it, and then it dies. So it has dysfunctional
wings. It cannot fly. So, and that's another problem that the sericulture 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 a human need, which is textiles. And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of
biology dimension of silkworms. But along the way, by
the way, this is great. I never get to tell the full story. This is so great.
- I'm enjoying this so much. (Lex laughs)
- I'm always, like people say I speak in Nietzschean paragraphs They're way too long. And this is wonderful.
This is like heaven. - Nietzschean paragraphs.
(Neri laughs) You drop us so many good
lines. I love it, okay. - But really, those
silkworms are not, yes, they're not designed to
be like humans, right? They're not designed to
connect, communicate, and build things that are
bigger than themselves through connection and communication. - So what happens when you add 17,000 of them communicating if that- - That's a really great question. What happens is that at some point, the templating strategies,
and as you said correctly, there were geometrical
templating, material templating, environmental templating,
chemical templating, if you're using pheromones
to guide the movement of bees in the absence of a queen.
- This is so cool. - Where you have a robotic queen. - Uh-huh. Robotic queen?
- But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control
over nature, right? But the question is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these
computational material and immaterial physical
and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost
like guiding a product, almost like a gardener, to
a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that
biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the
robotic code and saying, now I own the code. I get to do what I want with this code. Let me show you what this
pavilion may look like or this product may look like. And I think one of the
exciting moments for us is when we 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 not a swarm-based organism. They're not like the
bees and the termites. They don't work together and
they don't have, you know, social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, et cetera. They're all the same in a way, right? And here, what was so exciting for us is that these computational
and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to
kind of hop (laughs) from the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of
maybe human-like intelligence where they could connect and communicate by virtue of, you know, feeling or rubbing against each other in an area
that was hotter or colder. And they were, so the product
that we got at the end, the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the
fiber and the transparency. The product at the end seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community, but of course it wasn't. It's a bunch of biological
agents working together to assemble this thing that's really, really fascinating to us. How can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior in creatures that have not been
designed to work as swarms? - So how do you construct
a computational template from which a certain
kind of thing emerges? So how can you predict
what emerges, I suppose? - So if you can predict it
doesn't count as emergence. Actually, I think. (laughs)
(Lex laughs) - That's a deeply poetic line.
- We can talk about it. - I mean, it just kind of-
- It's a bit like if you measure it, it
doesn't count. (laughs) - (laughs) Right Right. - Speaking of emergence, an empowerment, because we're constantly
moving between those as if they're equals on
the team, and 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? And that relates to emergence, and we can go back to
emergence in a few moments, but I want to, I want to say it so that I know that I've
learned it. (laughs) (Lex laughs) And if I've learned
it, I can use it later. - Yeah. And maybe you'll figure something
out as you say it, also. - Of course Christoph is the master here, but really we were thinking again, what does nature want? Nature wants to increase
the information dimension and reduce entropy. What do we want? We kind of want the same thing, we want more, but we want order, right? And this goes back to your conversation with Joscha about stochastic versus deterministic
languages or processes. His definition, or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered if the entropy of the
distribution of all of its states, it's high, while the entropy of the distribution of a
single state given a choice, given an action is low. Meaning it's that kind of, yeah, duality between opportunity,
like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing. And this really, I think is
analogous to human empowerment. Given infinite wide array of choices, what is the choice that you
make to, you know, to enable, to empower, to provide you
with the agency that you need? - And how much does that making
that choice actually control the trajectory of the system? That's really nice. So this applies to all
the kinds of systems you're talking about?
- 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. A microbe that has agency,
or by virtue of a template. But it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees. And so we've done a lot of
work sort of moving from, you've asked how to grow things. So we've grown things using co-fabrication where we're digitally
fabricating with other organisms that live across the
various kingdoms of life. And those were silkworms and bees. And with bees, which
we've sent to outer space and returned healthily and
they were reproductive. - Okay, you're gonna
have to tell that story. (Neri laughs)
You're gonna have to talk about the robotic queen and
the pheromones, come on. All right.
- So we've 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. They go on hibernation, of
course, during the winter season, and then we lose 80% of them
or more during that period. We were thinking, okay, what if we created this
environment where... Before you template, right
before you can design with, you have to design for, right? You have to create this
space of mutualism, space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism. And with bees, it started
as the synthetic apiary. And we have proven that
curated environment where we designed the space
with high levels of control, of temperature, humidity, and light. And we've proven that they
were reproductive and alive. And we realized, wow, this
environment that we created can help augment bees in the winter season in any city around the world
where bees survive and thrive in the summer and spring seasons. And could this be a kind
of a new urban typology, an architectural typology
of symbiosis of mutualism between organisms and humans? Where these, by the way, the synthetic apiary was in a co-op, you know, nearby Somerville
- Mm-hmm. - We had, you know, we had
robots, our team, you know, schlepped there every day
with our tools and machines and we made it happen, and
the neighbors were very happy. And they got to get a ton of
honey at the end of the winter. And those bees, of course
were released into the wild at the end of the winter,
alive and kicking. So then in order to actually experiment with the robotic queen,
an idea, a concept, we had to prove obviously
that we can create this space for bees. And then after that we had
this amazing opportunity to send the bees to space
on Blue Shepherd mission that is part of Blue Origin. And we of course said,
yes, we'll take a slot. We said, okay, can we outdo NASA? So NASA in 1982 had an experiment where they sent bees to outer space. The bees returned, they
were not reproductive, and some of them died. And we thought, well, is there a way in which we can create
a life support system, almost like a small mini-biolab
of a queen and her retinue that would be sent in this Blue
Origin Blue Shepherd mission in this one cell. And so if the synthetic apiary
was an architectural project, in this case, this second
synthetic apiary was a product. It was, right, so from an architectural
controlled environment to a product-scale controlled environment. And this biolab, this life
support system for bees was designed to provide the bees with all the conditions that they needed, and we looked at that time
at the Nasonov pheromone that the queen uses to
guide the other bees, and we looked at pheromones
that are associated with a bee. And thinking of those
pheromones being released inside that capsule that
goes to outer space. They returned back to the media lab roof, and those bees were alive
and kicking and reproductive, and, you know, and they
continued to create comb. And it ended with a beautiful nature paper that the team and I published together. We gave them gold nanoparticles
and silver nanoparticles because we were interested
if bees recycle wax. It was known forever that
bees do not recycle the wax. And by feeding them
these gold nanoparticles, we were able to prove that the bees actually do recycle the wax. The reason I'm bringing this forward is because we don't view
ourselves as designers of consumable products and
architectural environments only, but we love that moment
where these technologies, and by the way, every one of
these projects that we created involved the creation of a new technology, whether it be a glass printer
or the spinning robot, or the life support
system for the bee colony. They all involved a technology that was associated with the project. And I never ever, ever, ever
want to let that part go. 'cause I love, love technology so much. 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, silkworms
or bees or glass. That's why I say, I always tell
my team it should be at MoMA and the cover of Nature or
Science at the same time, or we don't separate between
the art and the science. It's one of the same. - So as you're creating the art, you're going to learn
something about these organisms or something about these materials. I mean, is there something
that stands out to you about these hero organisms
like bees, silkworms? You mentioned E. coli has its
pros and cons, this bacteria. What have you learned, that small or big, that's interesting about these organisms? - Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What have I learned? I've learned that, you know, we also worked with shrimp
shells, with Aguahoja. We built this tower on
the roof of the SFMOMA, which by a couple of months ago and 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. And this notion that a product or part, an organism or part of that
organism can reincarnate is very, very moving thought to me, because I want to believe that
I believe in reincarnation. - I want to believe that I believe. - Yeah that's my relationship-
- I want to believe. - With God, I like to
believe in believing. Most great things in life are
second derivatives of things. But (laughs) that's part
of another conversation. - I feel like that's a quote
that's gonna take weeks to really internalize that. - That notion of I want you to want, or I need you to need, or that there's always something, a deeper truth behind
what is on the surface. And so I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and discover new truths
about them through that. But what have I learned about organisms? - And why don't you like E. coli? - 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. - How are bacteria used?
- Death masks. (Lex laughs)
The death masks. - So what are death masks? - So we did this project called Vespers, and those were basically death masks that was set as a process for
designing a living product. What happen, and I looked at, I remember looking at
Beethoven's death mask and Agamemnon's death mask, and just studying how they were created. And really they were sort
of geometrically attuned to the face of the dead. And what we wanted to do
is create a death mask that was not based on the shape of the wearer, but rather was based on their
legacy and their biology. And maybe we could harness
a few stem cells there for future generations or
contain the last breath. Lazarus, which preceded Vespers, was a project where we designed a mask to contain a single breath,
a last breath of the wearer. And again, if I had access
to these technologies today, I would totally reincorporate my grandmother's last breath in a product. So it was like an air memento. So with Vespers, we actually used E. coli to create pigmented masks. Masks whose pigments would be recreated at the surface of the mask. And I'm skipping over a lot of content, but basically there were 15 masks and they were created as three sets. The masks of the past,
the masks of the present and the mask of the future. The masks, there were five, five and five, and the masks of the past
were based on ornaments and they were embedded with
natural minerals, like gold. Yes, yes, yes.
- And we're looking at pictures of these and are gorgeous. - Yes, yes.
- Extremely delicate and interesting fractal
patterns that are symmetrical. - They look symmetrical, but they're not. This is intent. We intended for you to be tricked and think that they're
all symmetrical, but- - [Lex] There's imperfections. - There are imperfections by design. All of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you're looking at
was entirely designed using a computational program,
so none of it is manual. But long story short, the first collection is about the surface of the mask. And the second collection,
which you're looking at, is about the volume of the mask and what happens to the
mask when all the colors from the surface, yes, enter
the volume of the mask inside, create pockets and channels
to guide life through them. They were incorporated with pigment-producing living organisms. And then those organisms
were templated to recreate the patterns of the original death masks. And so life recycles and re-begins, and so on and so forth. The past meets the future.
The future meets the past. From the surface to the volume, from death to life, to death
to life, to death to life. And that again, is a recurring theme in the projects that we take on. But there, from a
technological perspective, what was interesting is that
we embedded chemical signals in the jet, in the printer,
and those chemical signals basically interacted with the pigment-producing bacteria, in this case E. Coli, that were introduced on
the surface of the mask. And those interactions
between the chemical signals inside the resins and the
bacteria at the surface of the mask at the resolution
that is native to the printer, in this case 20 microns per voxel, allowed us to compute the exact patterns that we wanted to achieve. And we thought, wow, well if
we can do this with pigments, can we do this with antibiotics? If we can do this with antibiotics, could we do it with melanin? And what are the implications? Again, this is a platform technology. Now that we have it, what are the actual
real-world implications and potential applications
for this technology? And we started a new area
of, one of my students, Rachel, her PhD thesis was titled after this new class of materials that we created through
this project, Vespers, "Hybrid Living Materials," HLMs, and these hybrid living
materials really paved the way towards a whole other set of
products that we've designed, like the work that we did with melanin for the Mandela Pavilion
that we presented at SFMOMA, where again, we're using the
same principles of templating, in this case not silkworms and not bees, but we're templating bacteria at a much, much, much
more finer resolution. And now instead of
templating using a robot, we're templating using a printer. But compute is very, very much part of it. And the what's nice about
bacteria, of course, is that from an ethical perspective, I think there's a range, right? So at the end of the silk pavilion, I got an email from professor
in Japan who has been working on transgenic silk and said, "Well, if you did this
great, amazing silk pavilion, why don't we create, you know, glow-in-the-light silk dresses?" And in order to create this
glow-in-the-light silk, we need to, you know, to apply genes that are taken from a
spider to a silk worm. And this is what is known
as a transgenic operation. And we said no. And that was for us, a
clear decision that no, we will work with these organisms as long as we know that
what we are doing with them is not only better for humans, but it's also better for them. And again, just to remind you, I forget the exact number, but it's around 1,000
cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in India and China, and in those sericulture
industries that are being abused. Now, yes, this organism was designed to serve the human species. And maybe we should, maybe it's time, you know, to retire that, you
know, that conception (laughs) of organisms that are designed
for a human-centric world or human-centric set of applications. I don't feel the same way about E. coli, not that I'm agnostic, organism agnostic. But still, I believe
there's so much for us to do on this planet with bacteria. - And so in general, your design principle is to grow cool stuff as a byproduct of the organism flourishing? So not using the organism.
- Yes. - The win-win, the synergy.
- Win-win. - A whole that's bigger
than the sum of its parts. - It's interesting. I mean, it just feels like a gray area where genetic modification of an organism, it just feels like, I don't know, if you genetically modified me to make me glow in the light, I kind of kind of like it.
- I think you have enough of an aura. (laughs)
- All right, thank you. I was just fishing for
compliments. Thank you. I appreciate it though.
- But you're absolutely right. (Lex laughing)
And by the way, the gray area is, you know, is
where some of us like to live and like to thrive, and that's okay. And thank goodness that
there's so many of us that like the black and white and that thrive in the black and white. My husband is a good
example for that. (laughs) - But just to clarify, in this case, you are also trying to thrive
in the black and white, in that you're saying like-
- Yes. - The silk warm is a
beautiful, wonderful creature. Let us not modify it. 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? - So with silkworms, absolutely, let's not modify it genetically.
- Okay. - Let's not modify it
genetically, and then some. Because why did we get there
to begin with 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road? And we should never get to
a point where we evolve life for the service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the kingdoms,
across the kingdom of life. I don't think about the
same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria. - Nevertheless, bacteria are
pretty wonderful organisms. - I'm moving to my
second cup here. (laughs) - [Lex] Yes, take tea two. As things are getting serious now. - Bacteria are, yeah, for sure. - Let's give bacteria all
the love they deserve. We wouldn't be here without them. They were here for, I
don't know what it is, like a billion years before
anything else showed up? - But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume, and then reincarnate or
dissolved into the soil, and then creates a tree, and then that tree creates more bacteria, and then that bacteria could... I mean, again, that's why I like to think about not recycling, but reincarnating, because that assumes a kind
of imparting upon nature, that dimension of agency
and maybe awareness. But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria. Directed evolution is one of them. We're looking at directed evolution, so high-throughput directed evolution of bacteria for the
production of products. And again, those products
can be a shoe, wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics. - And doing that
direction computationally? - Totally computationally, obviously, in the lab with the hero
organism, the hero bacteria. And what's happening today in ecomicrobial synthetic biology, synthetic biology that
lends itself to ecology, and again, all of these
fields are coming together. It's such a wonderful
time to be a designer. I can't think of a better time to be a designer in this world, but with high-throughput
directed evolution, and I should say that the
physical space in our new lab will have these capsules,
which we have designed. They're designed like growth
chambers or grow rooms. And in those grow rooms,
we can basically program top-down environmental templating, or top-down environmental
control of lights, humidity, light, et cetera, sorry, light,
humidity and temperature, while doing bottom-up genetic regulation. 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. And then again, the idea is
that in one of those capsules, maybe we grow transparent wood and in another capsule we, you know, we transparent wood for
architectural application, another capsule, we grow a shoe. And in another capsule we look
at that language, you know, large language model that
we talk talked about. And there's a particular
technology associated with that, which we're hoping to reveal
to the world in February. And each of those capsules is basically a high-throughput
computational environment, like a breadboard that has, think of sort of a physical
breadboard environment that has access to oxygen
and nitrogen and CO2 and nutritional dispensing. And these little capsules
could be stressed. They're sort of an ecology in a box, and they could be stressed to
produce the food of the future or the products of the future, or the construction
materials of the future. Food is a very interesting one, obviously because of food insecurity and the issues that we have around both in terms of food insecurity, but also in terms of the future of food and what will remain after we can't eat plants and animals anymore, and all we can eat is these
false bananas and, you know, and insects as our protein source. So there we're thinking, you know, can we design these capsules
to stress an environment and see how that environment behaves? Think about a kind of an ecological, a biodiversity chamber, right? A kind of a time capsule
that is designed as a biodiversity chamber
where you can program the exact temperature,
humidity, and light combination to emulate the environment from the past. So Ohio, 1981, December 31st
at 5:00 AM in the morning, what did tomatoes taste like? To all the way in the
future, 200 years ago? These are the environmental inputs. These are some genetic
regulations that I'm testing and what might the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction
materials of the future feel like, taste like,
behave, like, et cetera. And so these capsules are
designed as part of a lab. That's why it's been
taking us such a long time to get to this point, because we started designing them in 2019, and they're currently,
literally as I speak to you, under construction.
- How well is it understood how to do this dance of controlling these different variables
in order for various kinds of growth to happen? - It's not. It's never been done before, and these capsules have
never been designed before. So you know, when we first decided these are going to be
environmental capsules, people thought were crazy. "What are you building?
What are you making?" So the answer is that we don't know, but we know that there has
never been a space like this where you have basically a wet lab and a grow room at that
resolution, at that granularity of control over organisms. There is a reason why there
is this incredible evolution of products in the software space. The hardware space, that's
a more limiting space, because of the physical
infrastructure that we have to test and experiment with things. So we really wanted to
push on creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way. What could you create in it?
You could create the future. You could create an environment of plants talking to each
other with a robotic referee, and the robotic referee, you know, and you could set an objective
function, and let's say for the transaction-driven
individuals in the world, let's say the objective function
is carbon sequestration. And all of those plants are implemented with a gaming engine, and they have these reward system, right, and they're constantly
needing to optimize the way in which they carbon-sequest. We 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. And once we have that model,
this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into the field, and we see what happens in nature. And that's sort of what I'm talking about, augmenting plants with
that extra dimension of bandwidth that they do not have. They're just, just last week I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are augmented with a pong game, and in a dish they
basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness, which is wonderful.
- Yeah. - 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
situation that allows them to act as a system that
is not only perceived to be sentient, but is actually sentient. Michael Levin calls agential material, material that has agency, right? So this is of interest to us
because this is sort of, again, this is emergence post-templating. You template until you don't
need to template anymore because the system has
its own rules, right? What we don't want to happen with AGI we want to happen with synthetic biology. 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. - If I can ask a pothead
question for a second. (Neri laughs)
So you mentioned, just like the silkworms,
the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate. - Yes, yes, yes.
- Or actually to collaborate, like in a swarm-like way. you're talking about getting
plants to communicate in some interesting way based
on an objective function. Is it possible to have
some kind of interface between another kind of
organisms, humans and nature? So like a human to have a
conversation with a plant? - There already is. You know that when we
cut freshly cut grass? I love the smell.
- Mm-hmm. - But it's a smell of, actually, it's a smell of distress
that the leafs of grass are communicating to each other. So the grass, when it's cut, emits green leaf 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. (Lex laughs)
These incredible life forms are communicating using a
different language than ours. We use language models,
they use molecular models. At the moment where we can parse, we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having
a conversation with plants. Now, of course there is a lot of work around plant neurobiology. It's a real thing. Plants do not have nervous system, but they have something
akin to a nervous system. It has a kind of a ecological
intelligence that is focused on a particular timescale,
and the timescale is very, very slow, slow,
slow, slow timescale. So it is when we can melt these timescales and connect with these plants in terms of the content of the language, in this case molecules, the
duration of the language, and we can start having a conversation, if not simply to understand what is happening in the plant kingdom. Precision agriculture, I promise to you, will look very, very different, right? Because right now we're using
drones to take photos of crops of corn that look bad. And when we take that photo,
it's already too late. But if we understand
these molecular footprints and things that they are trying to say, 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. 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, you
know, design better wines and, you know, and better
foods and better medicine and better products. Again, across all scales,
across all application domains. - Is there intricacies to
understand the timescales, like you mentioned, at
which these communications, these languages, like, operate? Is there something different between the way humans communicate and the way plants
communicate in terms of time? - Remember when we
started the conversation talking about sort of definitions
in the context of design, and then in the context of being? That question requires, I think, a kind of shift, a humility. That requires a kind of a
humility towards nature, understanding that it
operates on different scales. We recently discovered that, you know, that the molecular footprint of a rose, or of a plant in general, during nighttime is different than its molecular
footprint during daytime. So these are circadian
rhythms that are associated with what kind of molecules these plants emit given
stresses and given, you know, there's a
reason why the jasmine, a jasmine field smells so delicious in 4:00 AM in the morning, and then there's like, there's
peace and rest amongst, you know, amongst the plants. And you have to sort of tune
into that time dimension of the plant kingdom. And that of course
requires all this humility where in a single capsule to
design a biodiversity chamber, it will take years, not months,
and definitely not days. And to see these products, and
also that humility in design comes from simply, you know,
looking at how we are today as a civilization, how
we use and abuse nature. Like just think of all these
Christmas trees, right? These Christmas trees,
they take years to grow. We use them for one night,
the holiest night of the year, and then we let them go and think about, in nature to design a,
quote unquote, product. An organism spends energy and time and thoughtfulness in
many, many, many years, and I'm thinking about the
redwoods, to grow these channels, these, you know, this cellulose layers and channels and reach
these incredible heights takes sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years. Am I afraid of building a
company that designs products in the scale of thousands of years? No, I'm not. And the way of being in
the physical world today is really not in tune
with a time dimension of the natural world at all. And that needs to change. And that's obviously very,
very hard to do in a community of human beings that is, at
least in the western world, that is based on capitalism. And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is how do we impart upon
the capitalist movement? We know that we need
to produce now products that will enter the real
world and be, you know, shared and used by
others and still benefit the natural world while benefiting humans, and that's a wonderful challenge to have. - So integrate technology with nature, and that's a really difficult problem. I see parallels here with
another company of Neuralink, which is basically like,
I think you mentioned, Neuralink for nature, that 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. - You know how every company has an image. Like, this one single image that embodies the spirit of the company. - Mm-hmm.
- And I think for Neuralink, it was to me that chimpanzee
playing a video game. - (laughs) Mm-hmm.
- It was just unbelievable. But with plants, there potentially is a set of molecules that
impacts or inspires, I like that word, the plant to behave or act in a certain way
and allows still the plant the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go, which is why our first product
for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance. So here we're thinking about
the future of fragrances, and the future of fragrances
and flavors, you know, these products are in the
industry as we know it today, are designed totally
for a human-centric use and an enjoyment, an
indulgence and luxury. They're used on the body for the sake of, I dunno, attraction and
feeling good and smelling good. And we were asking
ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be
not a functional fragrance? 'Cause you could claim that
all fragrances are functional, but is there a world
in which the fragrance becomes functionalized? Is, again, imparted upon or given agency to connect with another organism. Is there a world in which
you and I can go down to your garden and use a
perfume that will interact with the rose garden downstairs? I've just been enamored
with the statements that are being made in the media around, oh, this is completely
biologically derived fragrance and it's bio-based, but when
you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you went through, you
blew through, you know, 10,000 bushes of rose to create five milliliters of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take, you know, water management and so much waste. Is this really what we want
the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like? And so when we did Aguahoja
pavilion on the roof of SFMOMA We calculated that for that pavilion, we had 40,000 calories
embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells
and chitosan and apple skins and cellulose from tree pulp. And we calculated that overall, the structure had 40,000 calories. Interesting way to think
about a structure, right? From the point of view of calories. But as you left the gallery,
you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully
designed by Felix on our team. And these clocks measured
temperature and humidity. And we are connected
them to weather channels so that we could directly
look at how the pavilion was biodegrading in real time. And in our calculations, I say
this long-winded description of the pavilion to say
that in the calculation, we incorporated, you know, how much electricity we
used for our computers, for the 3D printers that
printed the pavilion. And, you know, and these were called
emergy calculations, right? Energy and materials. And when you think about a product and you think about, you
know, a shoe or a chair or a perfume or a building,
you don't stop at the object. You want to go all the way to the system, again, instead of designing objects or singular embodiments of
the will of the designer, you're really tapping
into an entire system that is interconnected. And if you look at the energy budget that characterized the project Aguahoja, it traverses the entire planet, right? Some of these shrimp shells were brought from places in the world
we haven't thought of, in terms of the apples
and the shrimp shells and the tree pulp. 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
in how it's designed. And that is the kind of thinking
that is not only desired, but is required if we
are to achieve synergy between humanity and nature. - And it's interesting, 'cause the system level
thinking is almost always gonna take you to the entire Earth, to considering the entire Earth ecosystem. - Which is why it's important
to have a left brain and a right brain competing
for attention. (laughs) And intimacy. (laughs)
- Sometimes in the same head. Yeah.
- Yes. - You you mentioned a fragrance
that kind of sends out a message to the environment, essentially. - A message in a bottle. Yeah.
- A message in a bottle. So like, so you can go to a rose garden and trick the rose garden to think it's 4:00 AM, essentially? - You could, if you wanted to, but maybe that is...
- Not trick. Trick is such a bad word.
- Right. Right. - Inspire. (laughs)
- Inspire, I like. I like the idea of providing
nature with a choice, which is why I love that
elegant mathematical equation of empowerment and agency. - Empower the rose garden
to create a romantic moment for the wearer of the fragrance. - But now again, all of
this to go back to back to that human-centric notion of romance, but maybe there's another
way to do romance, right? That we haven't yet explored. And maybe, you know, there's
a way to tap into what happens to the rose when it's dreaming. Assuming that plants are sentient, and assuming that we can
tap into that sentience, what can we discover about
what does the rose want? Like what does it actually
want? And what does it need? And what are the rose's, you know, dreams? - But do you think
there's some correlation in terms of romance, in terms of the word you
sometimes use, magic? Is there some similarities
in what humans want and what roses want and what nature wants? - I think so. I think there is. And if I did not think so, oh my goodness, this would not be a nice world to live in. I think we all want love. (laughs) I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by
Einstein to his daughter, and was discovered,
Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until
she reveals these letters. And so she did. It's just one of the most
beautiful letters I've ever read from a father to his daughter. And the letter overall
is imbued with a kind of a sense of remorse, or maybe even feelings of sadness. And there is some kind of
melancholy note in the letter where Einstein regrets not
having spent enough time with his daughter, having
focused on, you know, the theory of general relativity
and changing the world. And then he goes on to
talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E = mc squared, and he tells his daughter
that he believes that love is actually the force
that shapes the universe because it is like gravity,
right, it attracts people. It is like light. It brings people together
and connects between people, and it's all-empowering. And so if you multiply
it by the speed of light, you could really change
the world for the better. And call me a romanticist. I know you are too, which
is why I so love being here. I believe in this. I totally and utterly believe in- - In love. By the way, let me just,
excerpts from Einstein's letter. "There's an extremely
powerful force that, so far, science is not found a
formal explanation to. 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. This universal force is LOVE." 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. Maybe it's too late to apologize, but as time is relative,"
that jokester Einstein, "I need to tell you that I love you, and thanks to you I have
reached the ultimate answer. Your father, Albert Einstein." - Yeah.
- But that regret, "I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart." Maybe that's a universal regret, of filling your days with busyness. - Yeah.
- And silly pursuits and not sitting down and expressing that. - But it is everything. It is everything. It is why I love that expression. And I forget who said this,
but I love my daughter more than evolution required, right? And I feel the same way
towards my other half. And I feel that when you
find that connection, everything and anything is possible, and it's a very, very, very magical, a magical moment. So I believe in love,
and I believe in the one. - It might be the same thing,
it might be a different thing, but let me ask you a ridiculously
big philosophical question about beauty. Dostoyevski said, "Beauty
will save the world" in "The Idiot," one of
my favorite books of his. What is beauty to you? You've created, through this intersection
of engineering and nature, you have created some
incredibly beautiful things. What do you think is beauty? - That's a beautiful question. (laughs) - (laughs) Maybe it is
connected to the love question. I don't know.
- It is connected to the love question, of course. Everything is connected
to the love question. - [Lex] (laughs) Okay. - To me, beauty is agency. To me, something that has
agency, it is beautiful. There is this special quote
from Buckminster Fuller, which I cannot remember word-for-word, but I remember the concept,
which goes something like this, "When I work on a problem,
I never think about beauty. But when I'm done solving the problem and I look at what I've created, and it's not beautiful,
I know that I was wrong." - (laughs) Okay. Yeah.
- It is kind of an agency that speaks to, quote unquote, the objective function
of the creation, right? Whether for Bucky, it's useless or useful. - So this idea of empowerment
that you talked about. - Yes.
- It's fundamentally connected to it.
- Comes back to that, yeah. - What's the difference that you hinted at between empowerment and emergence? Is emergence completely lacks control? Is it, and empowerment is more controlled? There's an agent making decisions? Is there an interesting distinction there? - Yes. I think empowerment is
a force with direction. It has directionality to it. Emergence is, I believe,
multi-directional. Again, that depends on the application. Emergence is perhaps, in terms of sort of a material definition, is a tropic spirit, when empowerment is, the
end is a tropic counterpart. I think they overlap, because I think that empowerment is a way
of inspiring emergence. I think emergence does not
happen without empowerment, but empowerment can
happen without emergence. - Do you think of emergence
as the loss of control? Like when you're thinking
about these capsules and then the things they create, is emergence of things that
is not a desirable conclusion? - I love that question
because, to some of us, the loss of control is control. In design, we're used to like
extreme levels of control over form and the shape of a thing and how it behaves and how it functions. And that's something we've inherited from the industrial revolution. But with nature, there's this diversity that happens without necessarily having
a reward function, right? This is good or bad. Things just happen. And some of them happen to have wings and some of them happen to have scales and, you know, you end up with this incredible
potential for diversity. So I think the future of
design is in that soft control, is in the ability to design
highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control. And creativity is very much part of this, because creativity is
all about letting go, and beginning again, and beginning again, and beginning again. And when you cannot let
go, you cannot be creative, and you can't find novelty. But I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment,
agency, creativity, emergence, and they're all connected. They're sort of associate
themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable. A good friend of mine shared with me, elegant definition of fate, which is the ratio of who you
are and who you want to be. - Ratio of who you are and
who you want to be. (laughs) - Exactly, and that sort
of ends up defining you. - Yeah.
- And those tools, I think, when you let
go, you sort of find, you give peace to your will,
right, to a sense of will. And so I think that's very, very important in design, but also in life. - She said this: Fate is the ratio of-
- Who you are, and who you want to be.
- Who you want to be. 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, like Paolo Coelho said in "The Alchemist," "When you want something,
all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it"? Is there something to that?
- I think so, yes. And I always think of, you
know, what I do as this, the culmination of energy,
information and matter and how to direct energy,
information and matter in the design of a thing
or in the design of a life. I think living is very much
a process of channeling these energies to where they need to go. I think that the manifestation, or part of that manifestation, is the pointing to the moon
in order to get to the moon. And that's why manifestation
is also directional. It has that vector quality to
it that I think of agency as. - Have you, in your own life, has there been things you've done where you kind of direct that
energy, information and matter in a way that opens up-
- New possibilities? - Yeah. I mean, you've also said
somewhere, I'm probably misquoting, that you're many things, you, Neri are many things, and you become new things
every 10 years or so. - Oh, I did say that somewhere. - Somewhere.
- That every decade you sort of switch.
- That was an old, that was a previous Neri
that said that. (laughs) - Yeah, I did say
sometime ago that you have to sort of reboot every 10 years to keep creative and keep
inventive and keep fresh. - Is there things you've done in your life where just kinda doors opened? - I think everything, everything. Everything good I've found in my life has been found in that way of letting go and suspending my sense of disbelief. And often you will find
me say to the team, "Suspend your disbelief." I don't care that this is impossible. Let's assume it is. Where does it take us? And that suspension of disbelief is absolutely part and
parcel of the creative act. You know, I did so when I was in medical school, I was in Hadassah and in
the Hebrew University, and I remember I left medical school for architecture the day
my grandmother passed away, and that was a moment of relief. And that was a door that was closing that opened other opportunities. But that of course required letting go of the great vision of becoming a doctor, and letting go of the dream
of, you know, being surrounded by wonderful patients and
the science of medicine and the research associated
with that science, and letting go of that
dream to accomplish another. And it has happened throughout
my life in different ways. MIT was another experience like that where people pointed at me as, you know, the designer for whom
the academic currency is not necessarily the citation index. And of course, in order
to get tenure at MIT, you have to look at the citation index. But for me, it was not that,
it was manifesting our work in shows and writing
papers and writing patents and creating a celebration
around the work. And I never saw a distinction, you know, between those ways of being. I also think that another
kind of way of being or a modality of being
that I found helpful is Viktor Frankl wrote
this incredible book, "Man's Search for Meaning"
after the Holocaust. And he writes, "Different people pursue
life for different reasons." According to Freud, the goal
of life is to find pleasure, and according to Adler it's,
you know, to find power. And for Viktor Frankl, it was about finding meaning. And when you let go of the
titles and the disciplines and the boundaries and the
expectations and the perception, you are elevated to this really special, yes, spiritual, but definitely
very, very creative plane where you can sort of start anew, look at the world through
the lens of a bacterium or a robot, or you know, 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, microbial ecologies,
and so on and so forth. And I feel that kind of
rebooting, not every 10 years, but every minute, every breath is very, very important
for a creative life and for just maintaining this fresh mind. To reboot, reboot, to begin again with every
breath, begin again. And that can be confusing for some, right? For my team members, you know,
I like to change my mind. It's who I am. It's how I think, it's how I operate.
(bell rings) - Mm-hmm.
- Do you want to... (laughs) You know, and they'll come, and we found another technique or another technology that's interesting and we thought that, you know, that we were working on this
functionalized fragrance, but now there's another
opportunity and let's go there. To me, I would much rather,
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." It's not a specific fairytale. It's not, you know, the Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding Hood or Rapunzel. It's all of them. 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. And life is really about tying all of these little fairytales together in work and also in life. - Unafraid to leap into the unknown? - Unafraid to leap into the unknown. - Speaking of MIT, you
got a tenure at MIT, and then you leaped (laughs) to New York and started a new company with a vision that doesn't
span a couple of years, but centuries. (laughs) - I did. It was my destiny to start a company. - Yeah.
- And do I have mornings when I wake up and I ask myself,
what the hell am I doing? - Yeah.
- Yes. I have those mornings. - [Lex] What do you do with
those mornings, by the way? - I embrace them and I find gratitude, and I say to myself, "Thank goodness. I'm so lucky to, you
know, to have the ability to be frustrated in this way."
- Mm-hmm. (laughs) So I really, really
embrace these frustrations. And I take them, I wrap them in a bubble, and I look at it, you know, on the outside of my aware mind, and I laugh at them. I smile at them. (laughs)
(Lex laughs) - If I could return, actually
to the question of beauty for a second, I forgot
to ask you something. You mentioned imperfection
in the death masks. - Mm-hmm. - What role does imperfection play in our conception of beauty? What role does imperfection
play in nature? There's this Japanese
aesthetics concept of wabi-sabi, which basically embraces imperfection. Nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect.
- Yeah. - What do you think of that? - I totally agree that change
is the only permanence. That imperfection is there, if only to signal that we are part of a bigger thing than ourselves, that we are on a journey, that things are in movement. And if they were perfect, of
course when things are perfect, it is just so boring. We end up with stereotypes. And as humans, but I
think just in general, as living beings, we're
here to find meaning, and that meaning cannot be
find found without struggle and without seeking, not to perfect, but to build towards something better. When I was a child, my
mother, who I love so much, always explained to me how
important it is to fall and to fail and to fight and to argue, and that there is a way, that there's a culture to failing and to imperfection. So I think it is necessary for something beautiful to be imperfect. (Lex laughs) And it is a sign that
it is a sign of nature, because nothing in nature is perfect. - What about human relations?
You mentioned finding love. Are the flaws in humans,
the imperfection in humans, a component of love? Like what role do you
think the flaws play? - That's a really profound question. I think the flaws are there to, the flaws are there to
present a vulnerability. And those flaws are a sign of those vulnerabilities. And I think love is
very, very gentle, right? Love... With Bill, we often talk
about, between the two of us, about what drives all human behavior, and for him it's incentive, (laughs) as you might expect,
(Lex laughs) and he will repeat this sentence to me, "Oh, incentive drives all human behavior." - Mm-hmm.
- But I would say, to me it's love, very much so, and I think flaws are part of that, because flaws are a sign
of that vulnerability, whether physical, whether
emotional vulnerability. And these vulnerabilities, they either tear us apart
or they bring us together. The vulnerability is what is the glue. I think, I think that the
vulnerability enables connection. The connection is the glue, and that connection enables
accessing a higher ground as a community as opposed
to as an individual. 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, we cannot
find connection, community. And without community, we can't build what we have
built as a civilization, you know, for the past
hundreds of thousands of years. So I think not only are they beautiful, but they have a functional
role in building civilizations. - Yeah. There's a sense in which
love requires vulnerability, and maybe love is the leap
into that vulnerability. - And I think yes, I think a flaw, think about it, like physically, I'm thinking about a brick
that's flawed, but in a way, I think of a flaw as an
increased surface area. (laughs) (Lex slaps) (Neri laughing)
- That is a good line. That is a good line.
- Right? A surface area that-
- Hoo, that is a good line. - Like physically or emotionally, right? It sort of introduces
this whole new dimension to a human or a brick, and because you have more
surface area, you can- - Yeah. (laughs)
- You know, use mortar, and build a home, and yeah,
I think of it as accessing this additional dimension of surface area that could be used for good or bad, right? To connect, to communicate,
to collaborate. It makes me think of that quote
from this incredible movie I've watched years ago, "Particle Fever," I think it was called. Documentary, about the
Large Hadron Collider, an incredible film where
they talk about the things that are least important for our survival are the things that make us human, like the pure romantic act
or you know, the notion of... And Viktor Frankl talks about that, too. He talks about feeling the sun on his arms as he is working the soil in two degrees Fahrenheit without clothes. And the officer berates him and says, "Well, what have you done? Have you been a businessman before you came here to the camp?" And he says, "I was a doctor." And he said, "You must have made a lot
of money as a doctor." And he said, "All my
work I've done for free, I've been helping the poor." But he keeps his humility and he keeps his modesty, and he keeps his
preservation of the spirit. And he says the things that
actually make him able to, or made him able to outlive
the terrible experience in the Holocaust was the
really cherishing this moment when the sun hits his skin or when he can eat a grain of rice, a single grain of rice. So I think cherishing
is a very important part of living a meaningful life, being able to cherish those simple things. - Like to notice them and to-
- To notice them, to pay attention to them in the moment. And I do this now more than ever. - I mean, there is some, Bukowski has this poem
like called "Nirvana," 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, something indescribable,
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. And I think if you just
allow yourself to pause and just to feel whatever that is, maybe ultimately it's a kind of gratitude. - Yes.
- For... I don't know what it is. It's just, I'm sure it's
just chemicals in the brain, but it is just so incredible to be alive. - Yes.
- And noticing that. - Yes.
- And appreciating that, and being one in that with others. - Yes. Yes. And that goes back to, you know, to the fireplace, right,
to the first technology. What was the first
technology? It was fire. First technology to have built community. And it emerged out of a vulnerability, of wanting to stay away from
the cold and be warm together. And, of course, that
fire is associated with, not only with comfort and the
ability to form, you know, bio-relevant nutrients in our food and provide heat and
comfort, but also spirits and a kind of a way to enter a, you know, to enter a spiritual moment, to enter a moment that
can only be experienced in a community, as a form
of a meditative moment. There is a lot to be said about light. Light is, I think, an important part of these moments of... I think it's a real thing. I really truly believe that we're born with an aura surface
area that is measurable. I think we're born into the world with an aura. And how do we channel that is really, sort of, I mean, ends up sort of defining, you know, defining the light in our lives. - Do you think we're all lonely? Do you think there's
loneliness in us humans? - Oh yes, yes. Loneliness is part, yes. I think we all have that loneliness, whether we're willing to
access that loneliness and look at it in the eye, or completely, you know, completely avoid it or deny it. - It's like, it feels like it's this some kind of foundation for longing, and longing leads to this combination of vulnerability and
connection with others. - Yes.
- And it feels like that's a really important
part of being human, is being lonely.
- Very. We are born into this world alone. Again, being alone and being lonely are two different things, right? And you can be together, but be lonely, and you can be alone,
but not be lonely at all. We often joke, Bill and I,
that he cannot be lonely. He cannot deal with being by himself. He always needs people around him, and I strive, long, must have creative solitude, must find pockets of
solitude and loneliness in order to find creativity
and reconnect with myself. So loneliness is a recipe
for community, in my opinion. And I think those things
compliment each other. And they're synergetic, absolutely. The yin and yang of togetherness. And they allow you, I think, yeah, to reset and to tune in to that ratio we talked about, of who you are and who you want to be. - If you go to this place
of creative solitude, what's your creative process? Is there something you've
noticed about what you do that leads to your, to good work? - 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. So I will often, in my
loneliness journeys, I will often listen to
like Leonard Bernstein, anything I can find
online by Lenny Bernstein. It's reading a Nature
paper, it's "War and Peace." It's really revisiting all the texts that are so timeless for me with opportunities that
are very, very timely. And I think for me, the
creative process is really about bringing timeless
problems or concepts together with timely technologies, to observe them. I remember when we did
the Mandela Pavilion, we read "Moby Dick," the whiteness of the whale, the albino, the different, the other. And that got us to work on melanin. And melanin also is sort of
an output from the death mask. So it's lots of things
happening at the same time. And really allowing them,
allowing them to come together to form this view about
the world through the lens of a spirit being, or a
living being, or a material, and then focus on the world through the lens of that material. The glasswork was another
project like that, where we were fascinated by glass, because obviously it's superb
material for architecture. But we created this new
glass printing technology for the first time that was shedding light on the biomechanics of fluid glass, the math and the physics of
which was never done before, which was so exciting to us,
but revealing new knowledge about the world through
technology, that's one theme. The reincarnation between
things, material and immaterial, that's another theme. Lenny Bernstein, "War and Peace," Tolstoy. - You tweeted a Tolstoy
quote from "War and Peace," as of course you would: "Everything I know, I
know because of love." - Love, yeah. I love this quote. - So you use these kind of inspirations to focus you and then find the
actual idea in the periphery? - Yes, and then connect them with whatever it is that we're working on. Whether it's, you know, high-throughput directed
evolution of bacteria, you know, whether it's, you know, recreating that Garden
of Eden in the capsule and what it looks like,
the food of the future. It is a little bit like directing a film, creating a new project is a bit like creating a film. And you have these heroes, you have these characters
and you put them together, and there is a narrative,
and there's a story. Whenever we start a new
project, it has to have these ingredients of
simultaneous complexity. It has to be novel in terms
of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline-based
or rooted must be novel. If you can combine novelty
in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create
something novel, period. And that's how I run the company, and that's how I pick the people. And so that's another very,
very important ingredient of the cutting edge across
multiple disciplines that come together. And then in the background,
in the periphery, there's all these messages, the whispers of the ancient oldies, right? The Beethoven's and the Picassos and- - So Beethoven's always whispering to you? - Yeah.
(Lex laughs) How could one not include
Beethoven in the whispers? - I'm gonna ask you about
Beethoven and the Evgeny Kissin that you've mentioned, 'cause I've played piano my whole life. I obviously know a lot of Beethoven, and it's one of the private
things for me, I suppose, 'cause I don't think I've
ever publicly played piano. - By the way, me too.
(both laugh) - I mean that-
- I play in private only. (Neri laughs)
- Yeah, people sometimes, even with guitar, people ask me, "Well, can you play something?" And it just feels like certain things are- - Are meant to be done-
- Privately. - Yeah.
- It's weird. I mean it's a difficult... and some of the times I
have performed publicly, it is it ultimate leap in vulnerability. It's very, very, very difficult, for me. And I'm sure it's, I know
it's not for a lot of people, but it is for me. Anyway, we'll return to that, but since you've mentioned
combination of novelty across multiple disciplines
and that's what you seek when you build teams or pick people you work with.
- Yeah. Yeah. - I just wanted to kind
of linger on this idea of (laughs) 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? One of the things 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 and it's computational design,
additive manufacturing, material engineering, synthetic biology. I'm sure there's others, but
how do you find these humans? Machine learning's in the mix? - I manifest and they come.
- Yeah? - There are a few approaches.
- You manifest? (laughs) - (laughs) They show up.
- Okay. - You know, send your
message upon the water. I mean, those job
descriptions that you saw, the first ones I wrote by myself, and you find interesting people and brilliant people when you look, we talked about second derivative. When you look under and under and under. And if you look deep enough
and specialized enough, and if you allow yourself to look at the cracks, at the flaws, at the cracks between disciplines and between skills, you find really, really
interesting diamonds in the rough. And so I like for those
job descriptions to, yeah, to be those messages in a bottle that bring those really
interesting people our way. I mean, they have to have humility. They have to have a shine in their eye. They have to be hungry and foolish. As Jobs so famously said, a friend of mine who's a dean of well-known
architectural school said, you know, "Today architects
don't wanna be architects. Architects don't look up to the starchitects as role models. Starchitects are no longer role models. Architects want to build by
virtue of not building," right? Architects want, she said, "We're back in the 60s when
we think about architecture, back in the hippie movement." I think that, in a way, they have to be somewhat of a hippie, somewhat of a kind of
jack-of-all-trades, master of all. - And yet with humility.
- And yet with humility. Now, that is hard to find. And that is why, you know,
when I start an interview, I talk about childhood memories, and I ask about music and
I ask about connection. And through these interviews you can learn a lot about a person's
future by spending time hearing them talk about their past. - Do you find that educational,
like PhDs versus... Like what's the life trajectory? Yours is an interesting life
trajectory, too. (laughs) Like what's the life trajectory that leads to the kind of person
that would work with you? - It's, you know, people who have, ideally had industry experience
and know what it's like to be in the, quote unquote, real world. They're dreamers that
are addicted to reality, as opposed to realists that
are addicted to dreams. Meaning they have that innocence in them. They have the hunger. They have the idealism without being entitled and with understanding the
systems that govern our world and understanding how
to utilize these systems as Trojan horses to bring
those values into the world. There are individuals who feel comfortable in this friction between, you know, highly wondrous and dreamy and incredible fantasy renditions
of what the world could be with extremely brilliant skills in terms of their disciplinary background. So PhD with industrial
experience in a certain field, or a double major in two fields that make no sense whatsoever in their combination.
- I love it. Yeah. - Are things that really,
really attract me. - And especially that span this, the technology biology gap.
- Yes. The technology, biology, nature, culture. I mean, the secret to one thing is through the lens of
another, and I always believe in that kind of
translational design ability, to be able to see something
through the lens of another and always allows you to
think again, begin again, reestablish, redefine, suspend
your disbelief, revisit. And when you revisit enough
times, like 100 times or like 200 times, and you
revisit the same question through the lens of
any possible discipline and any possible scenario you find, eventually you get to the truth. - 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? What is a living organism?
- Mm-hmm. 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? There were six five extinctions. We are apparently the sixth, that we are in the eye of the storm, we are in the sixth extinction. We are going to be extinct as we speak. I mean, death is upon us, whether we want to admit it or not. And actually they found in
Argentina and in, you know, 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. And because they didn't have
seeds there, only spores, the spores became sort of the fossils by which we've come to
known of their existence. And because of these spores, we know that this first
extinction existed. But this extinction is actually what enabled
plants to redirect, right? So the death of these first plants, because they clinged to the rocks and they generated a ton of phosphorus that went into the ocean
by clinging to the rocks, like 60 times more
phosphorus than without them. And then all this pho phosphorus
basically choked the oceans and made them super cold
and without oxygen, anoxic, and then we lost the plant kingdom. And then because of the
death of these first plants, they actually enriched the soil and created nutrients for these new plants to come to the planet. And those plants had, like,
more sophisticated vein systems, and they were moving beyond
spores to seeded plants, et cetera, and flowering plants. And so in a way, one mass
extinction sort of led, in the Ordovician period sort
of led to life as we know it. And where would we be
without plants, in a way? So I think that death is
very much part of life, and through that definition, that kind of planetary-wide definition in the context of hundreds
of millions of years, life gains a completely
new sort of a new light. And that's when the particles
become a wave, right? Where humans are, we are not alone, and we are here because
of those plants, right? So I think death is
very much part of life. So in the context of, you know,
the redwood tree, perhaps, you know, life is defined
as 10 generations, and through the lens of a bacteria, perhaps life is defined as a millisecond, and perhaps through the lens of an AGI, life is defined as all
of human civilization. And so I think it really is a question of this timescale again, the timescale and the organism, the life form that's asking the question through which we can answer, what is life? - What do you think about this? Since, if we think of ourselves
as in the eye of the storm of an another extinction, 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. How does your work play
with the possibility of a future super-intelligent
ecosystem and AGI, that either joins or supersedes humans. - Yeah, so I'm glad you
asked this question. - And are you hopeful or terrified? - Both. I'm hopeful and terrified. I did watch your interview
with Eliezer Yudkowsky, and I loved it. - Because you were scared? Or because you were excited? Or because there was a
(drowned out by Neri) - First of all, I was both. I was totally scared, ashamed, excited, and totally also inspired, because he's just such
an incredible thinker. And I can agree or
disagree with what he says, but I just found his way
of thinking about AGI and the perils of humanity as a result. - There's an inevitability
to what he's saying. His advice to young people is
that prepare for a short life. - Yeah.
- 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 eventually that leads to a place that
doesn't have AGI kill all humans. There's just too many trajectories where superintelligent
systems gets rid of humans, and in the near term.
- Yeah. - And so that clarity of
thinking is very sobering. To me, maybe it is to you as
well, it's super inspiring. 'cause I think he's wrong, but it's like you almost
wanna prove him wrong. It's like, no, we humans
are a clever bunch. We're gonna find a way.
- It is a bit like jumping into super cold water. It's sort of a kind of
a fist in your face. It wakes you up.
- Yeah. Yeah. - And I like these moments so much. - Yes, yes, yes.
- And he was able to bring that moment to
life, even though, I think, a mother can never think that way. Ever.
- Yeah. - And it's a little bit
like that notion of, I love her more than evolution requires. On your question about AGI and nature, look, I think we've been
through a lot in terms of, to get here, we sort of
moved from data, right? The ability to collect
information to knowledge, the ability to use this
information for utility, from knowledge to intelligence. And what is intelligence? It's the ability to problem
solve and adapt and translate. So that sort of from data
to information to knowledge. I think the next frontier is wisdom. And what is wisdom? Wisdom is the ability
to have or find insight about the world, and from wisdom to spiritual awareness, which is sort of transcends wisdom and is able and to chart the
world into new territory. But I think what is interesting about AGI is that it is sort of almost like a self-recursive thing, right? Because it's like a washing machine of like a third derivative Wikipedia. It uses kind of like
language to create language, to create language, to create language. - It feels like novelty's
being constantly created. It doesn't feel like it's regurgitating. - And that's so fascinating
because, you know, these are not the stochastic parrots. This is sort of a new form
of emergence, perhaps, of novelty as you say,
that exist by virtue of using old things to create new things. But it's not as if the AGI
has self-awareness, right? It's not as if it has,
maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe it has. But as far as I can tell, it's not as if AGI has
approached consciousness or sentience just yet. It's probably getting there, but the language appears to present itself as if there is sentience
there, but it doesn't. But I think that's the problem. At the point where this
AGI sounds like me, and speaks like me, and behaves like me, and feels like me, and breathes like me, and my
daughter knows the AGI to be me as sort of the end of everything, right, is the end of human agency. But what is the end of
human agency to humans, I think, is the beginning
of agency to nature. Because if you take all of this agency, if you take all of these language models that can summarize all
of human civilization and consciousness and then
upload that to nature, and have nature now deal with
that world of consciousness that it never had access to. So maybe through Eliezer's lens, the sort of short-lived human becomes sort of a very
long-lived human-like, sentient weeping willow, maybe?
- Yeah. - Maybe that's the end and the beginning? And maybe on the more optimistic side, for us humans, it's a
different form of existence, where everything we create
and everything we consume and everything we process is all made out of six, you know, six elements and that's it. And there's only those six
elements, and not 118 elements. And it's all the stuff
of biology plus some, you know, fair amount of bits, bits, genes and atoms. - Well, I think the idea-
- A lot of Beethoven. - A lot of Beethoven.
(Neri laughs) I think the idea of
connecting AGI to nature through your work is really fascinating. Sort of unlocking this
incredible machinery of intelligence, that is AGI, and connecting it to the incredible machinery
of wisdom, that is nature, as evolved through billions of years of pretty crazy intense evolution. - Exactly, 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 diversity and diversification, like yeah. Like, what happens if you ask a ChatGPT question and it takes 10,000 years
to answer that question? Like, what does that look like, right, when you like completely
switch the timescale and you can afford the time
to answer the question. And again, I don't know, but that world, to me, is possibly amazing. - Do you think there's... (laughs) Because when we start to think
about timescales 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? Do you think there's other-
- Planets. - Planets with life forms on them that are just doing their thing in this kind of way? 'Cause in what you're doing, you're directly playing with what's possible with
life, lifelike things. That kind of maps the question of, well, what kind of other
things are possible elsewhere? Do you think there's
other worlds full of life, full of alien life out there? - I've studied the calculations
that point, you know, towards the verdict that
the possibility of life in, you know, in and around
us is very, very low. We are a chosen planet in a way, right? There's water and there's
love. What else do you need? (both laugh) And that sort of (laughs) very peculiar juxtaposition of conditions,
the oxygen, the water, the carbon, again, is in a way, a miracle given the massive extinctions that we've been through as life forms. And that said, I cannot believe that there is no other life form. I want to believe more than I know that, yes, that there are
life forms in, you know, in the white fountain
that is the black hole, (laughs) right?
(Lex laughs) That there are these life
forms that are, you know, light years away from us that are forming other forms of life forces. - 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. - Yes.
- So 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. - Yeah.
- Because that to me just seems the more likely situation. - That they're here.
- That they're here, they're all around us.
- Yeah. In different forms. That there is a connection, like, there's a thing that connects all of us, all of living beings across the universe, and like we're just beginning
to understand any of it. - Yeah.
- 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. Unlock some really fundamental things that maybe you can start
to answer questions about what is consciousness? Maybe this thing that we've
been saying about love, but in, honestly in a serious way, and then you'll start to understand that there is alien life all out there, and it's much more
complicated and interesting than we kind of realize.
- Yeah. - As opposed to look into human-like, exactly human-like things. It's the variety of life that's possible. It's just almost endless.
- I totally agree with you. I think again, define
alien, right? (laughs) - (laughs) Yeah. Define
intelligence, define life. - Right. And Marvin Minsky used to say, "Intelligence is a suitcase word," right? It's a word so big, it's a
word like sustainability, and it's a word like,
you know, rock and roll, and suitcase words are
always very, very dangerous. - Speaking of rock and
roll, you've mentioned music and you mentioned
Beethoven a bunch of times. You've also tweeted about you getting Kissin
performance and so on. What can you say about the
role of music in your life? - I love music. I always wondered why
is it that plastic arts, meaning architecture and
sculpture and painting, can't get us to cry and music
gets us to cry so quickly and connect so quickly? There is something about music that it is, and no wonder that plants
also respond to music, but that is the top of the
creative pyramid in my opinion. - And it's a weird mystery that
we're so connected to music. Well, by the way, to push back, a good bridge will make me cry. - A good arch. It's true.
(Lex laughs) 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. So it's true. It is
the universal language. It's the language of waves, right? It's the language of the waves, not the language of the particles. It is the universal language, I believe. And that is definitely one of my loves. - And you said that if you weren't doing what you were doing now, perhaps you would be a film director. So have to ask, what do you think is the
best film of all time? Maybe top three? - Yeah. Maybe "The Godfather." - Godfather, okay.
- "The Godfather" is definitely up there. Francis Coppola is one of my heroes. - Have you met him?
- I have met him. Yes, yes, yes. I was very, very lucky. We were very lucky to work
with him on his new film, "Megalopolis," which is
coming out, I hope, in 2024. And think about the cities of the future in the context of new materials and the unity between nature and culture. Godfather is definitely up
there, "2001" is up there. I would watch that film
again and again and again. It's incredible. The last scene in Odyssey 2001, that's, just watch the
last scene of "2001," then listen to (indistinct)
and then sort of, and then go the garden,
and that's pretty much, you know, the end in the beginning. But that scene, that last
scene from 2001 is everything. It says so much with so
little, and it leaves... 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's child star or
star child of the future. Was there a death? Was
there an reincarnation? You know, that final scene, to me, is something that I go back to and study. And every time there
is a different reading of that scene that inspires me. So that scene just... And then the first scene
in "The Godfather," still one of the best scenes of all times. Sort of a portrait of
America, the ideals and values that are brought from Italy and- - A family of loyalty of-
- Yes. - Of values, of how different
values are constructed? - Yes, loyalty, and the human spirit. And how Coppola celebrates
the human spirit through the most simple
gestures in language and acting. And I think in Kubrick you
see this highly curated and controlled and manicured vision of creating a film. And with Francis, it's
like an Italian feast. (Lex laughs)
Just like anything. - Yeah.
- Anything can happen at any moment in time, and
just being on the set with him is an experience I'll take
with me (laughs) to my grave. It's very, very, very special. - And you said music is also part of that, of creating a feeling in the movies? - Yeah, actually "The Godfather," (sings) that tune.
- Yeah. That makes me like emotional every time on some weird level.
- Yeah. It's one of these tunes, I'm
sure, that has, you know, if you play it to a jasmine, you'll get the best scent of all time. (Lex laughs)
I think, like, there's, but I think with that particular
tune I learned staccato. (Neri sings) Something very, very happy and joyous. (Neri sings) 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. - You can play in all
kinds of different ways. I've played it on guitar in
all kinds of different ways. And I think in "Godfather III," the son plays it on guitar to the father. 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." - Yeah.
- And when you juxtapose these melodies with the scene, you get this, again, whole that's bigger than
the sum of its parts, where you get this
moment that is, I think, like these are the moments I would send, you know, with the next
Voyager to outer space. I definitely sent The
Godfather" and "2001" would definitely be be
on that Golden Record. - You are an incredibly
successful scientist, engineer, architect, artist, designer. You've mentored a lot
of successful people. Can you give advice to young
people listening to this, how to have a successful career and how to have a successful life? - 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 (laughs) and explore and reflect upon the full moon? Probably 20, I believe he says. I spend time with a full moon. I take my time with a full moon, and I pay attention to a full moon. And I think paying attention to the seasons, and taking time to appreciate the little things, the simple things is what
makes a meaningful life. I was very lucky to have had, you know, to have grown up in a home that taught me this way of being. My parents, my grandmother, who played a very important
role in my growing up, and that ability to pay attention and to be present is so, so, so, so, I could not emphasize it
enough, is so crucial. - And be grateful.
- And be grateful. - Yeah.
- I think gratitude and presence, appreciation, are really the most important things in life. - If you could take a short
tangent about your grandmother, who's played a big role in your
life, what do you remember? What lessons have you learned from her? - She had this blanket
that she would give me every time I came back from
school and say, you know, do your homework here and
meet with your friends here, and it was always in her garden. And her garden in my mind was ginormous, but when I, you know, last I
went there and saw the site, which has now become the site
for another tall building. It was a tiny, tiny little garden that, to me, seemed so
large when I was growing up, because it had everything. It had fig trees. it had olive trees. It had mushrooms. It had the blanket. I would do my homework there. It was everything, and
I needed nothing else. And that was my Garden of Eden.
That was my childhood being. And she taught me, you know, we would lie on the blanket
and look at the clouds and reflect upon the shapes of the clouds and study the shapes of the plants, and there was a lot of wonder
in that childhood with her. And she taught me the importance of wonder in sort of in an eternal childhood and living adulthood as a child. And so I'm very, very grateful for that. I think it is the sense of wonder. The speaking up was always
something that she adhered to, to speak up your truth, to be straightforward, to be positive. These are things that
I also got from my mom. And from my mom, the sense of humor. She had the best sense of humor that I could think of and was just, just a joy to be around, and
my father taught me everything. My father taught me everything I know. My mom taught me
everything I feel. (laughs) - [Lex] (laughs) That's
a good way to put it. - My grandma taught me
everything I insight. - Well, I see the sense of wonder that just carries through
everything you do. So I think you would, you
make your grandmother proud. Well, what about advice
for how to have a career? So you've had a very interesting career and a successful career,
but not an easy one. You took a few leaps. - I did take a few leaps,
and they were uncomfortable. My father, and I'll never forget, (laughs) I think we were like listening to a Rolling
Stones song in the kitchen, and my dad, who was actually
born in Boston, he's American, he said... I started to have sort
of these second thoughts about continuing my education in Israel, and I wanted to, you know,
go, I was on my way to London, to the Architectural Association to do my diploma studies there. And he looked at me and he
said, "Get out of here kiddo. You gotta get out of here." And you know, "You've
outgrown where you're at. You know, you need to move forward." Another thing he had taught
me, the feeling of discomfort, as you, as you say, the feeling
of loneliness and discomfort is imperative to growth. Growth is painful, period. Any form of growth is
difficult and painful. Birth is difficult and painful. And it is really, really
important to place yourself in situations of discomfort. I like to be in a room
where everyone in the room is more intelligent than me. I like to be in that kind of state where the people that
I surround myself with are orders of magnitude
more intelligent than I am, and I can say that is true
of all of my team members. And that's the intellectual
discomfort that I feed off of. The same is true for physical exertion. You gotta put yourself in
these uncomfortable situations in order to grow, in
order to find comfort. And then 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. But with gratitude and attention and love, you can go so far. To the younger generation,
I don't speak of a career. I never thought of my
work as my career, ever. And there was this constant entanglement between life and work and love and longing and being and mothering. It's all the same. And I appreciate that to
some people that doesn't work you know, in their arrangement of will versus comfort versus the reality. But for me, it has always worked. So I think to the younger generation, I say, don't think of your career. A career is something
that is imposed upon you. Think of your calling. That's something that's innately and directionally moves you. And it's something that
transcends a career. Similarly, you can think
about the difference between, you know, learning versus being educated. Being educated is something
that's given to you, that's external, that's being imposed, that's top-down imposed. This learning is something
that comes from within. It's also the difference
between joy and happiness. Many times I'm sad and I'm still joyous. And it's very, very important
to understand the difference between these externally
perceived success paths and internally driven, value-based, you know, ways of being in the world. And we together, when
we combine all of these, you know, all of these,
the broken puzzle, (laughs) let's say of substance and vulnerability, we get this bigger gestalt, this wondrous world of a future that is peaceful, you know, that is wholesome
and that, you know, that proposes or, you know, advocates for that kind of synergy that we've been talking about throughout. But it's all fun. (laughs)
(Lex laughs) - Well, thank you for this
incredible conversation. Thank you for all the work you're doing. - Thank you, Lex.
- And I just have to say that thank you for noticing
me and listening to me. 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. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for having
empathy and just like, yeah, really listening and
noticing me, that I exist. So thank you for that. Been a huge fan of your work, been a huge fan of who
you are as a human being. It's just an honor that
you would sit with me. Thank you.
- Thank you so much, Lex. I feel the same way.
I'll just say the same. - And I look forward to hearing the response to my job
application I've submitted. (Lex laughs)
- Oh, you're accepted. - Oh, damn, all right. Excellent. - We all speak of you all the time. - (laughs) Thank you so much. - Thank you, Lex.
- Thank you, Neri. - Thank you.
- Thank you. Thanks for listening to this
conversation with Neri Oxman. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with
some words from Leo Tolstoy, "Everything I know, I
know because of love." Thank you for listening. I
hope to see you next time.