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

The following is a conversation with Neri Oksman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and brilliant human beings of Evergarden to know. For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and build 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 Oksman, 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 the 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, worn piece by Tolstoy and meditations by Marcus Arrelius. It doesn't get better than that. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Babel for learning new languages, better help for mental health, house of mechodemias for delicious snacks, inside tracker for biological data and express VPN for your security and privacy on the internet.

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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 antropomous, 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 to 100,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. It's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us. Before that, we were totally completely connected. And I want to return to that world. But bring the tools of engineering and computation to that.

Yes. Yes. I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged and we still have not understood and we still have. And so much of our work is designed, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and 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. And 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 Millo, who is an incredible professor from the Weissmann Institute, who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020 when he identified that 2020 was the cross over 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, building cities, but also asphalt and concrete all outweigh the scale of the biomass. And actually that was a moment. You know how in life there are moments that be a handful of moments that get you to course correct and my it was a zoom conversation with Ron. And that was a moment for me when I realized that that imbalance.

Oh, now we've superseded the biomass on the planet. Where do we go from here? And you've heard the expression more, more phones than bones and the 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 are part of the biosphere.

Meaning if you could today grow instead of build everything and anything, if you could grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what would that world look like? Where the touring test for sort of this kind of, I call this material ecology approach, this notion that everything material, everything that you design in the physical universe can be red and written to as or thought of or perceived of as nature grown.

That sort of the touring test for it for the company or at least that's how I started. I thought well, grow everything, that sort of the slogan. Let's grow everything. And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars? Is it possible that a world in which you build buildings and cities, that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence?

Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature and humans? Where you cannot separate between grown and made and it doesn't even matter. Is there a good term for the intersection between biomass and anthropomass, like things that are grown? Yes, in 2005, I called this material ecology.

I thought what if all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have an impact, a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human. And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi. Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected. And why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms?

Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping alone Montana. And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about. What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud?

At the kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think, neural link for nature, you know, since the first computer, and you know this, by heart probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers. We today have computational power that is one trillion times the power that we had in those times. We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible.

So humankind, since the first computer, has approached and accessed such incredible bandwidth. And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth? And 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 and no matter how. Exactly. So I think of it as large molecule models.

And those large molecule models, of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth. And we don't have this data currently. And part of our mission is to do just that, trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all kingdoms of life, across all five kingdoms of life.

And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops to increase the level of biodiversity? In the company we're constantly asking, what does nature want? What does nature want from a compute view? If it knew it, what could aid it in whatever the heck is 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. 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. Yeah, I'll just a few words about the team. Yeah, what kind of humans work at a place like this? They're trying to figure out when nature wants. You know, I think they're first like you, they're humanists first. They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds.

And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius in 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, roboticists. So it's really, it's no as arc, right, to a beach. And always dancing between this line of the artificial, the synthetic and the real, what's the term for, and the natural.

Yeah, the built in the grown, nature and culture, technology and biology. We're constantly seeking to ask, how can we build design and deploy products in three scales, the molecular scale, which I've briefly handed to and there in the molecular scale, we're really looking to understand whether there is a universal language to nature and what that language is. And then build a tool that I think and dream of it is the iPhone for nature. If nature had an iPhone, what would that iPhone look like?

Does that mean creating an interface 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 what happens there. We can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire, can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud.

Can they do this, quote unquote automatically without a kind of a top down brute force policy-based method that's authored and deployed by humans? And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world. And then there's a second area in the company which focuses on growing products. And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2.

It becomes a product, it's consumed, it's used, it's worn by a human and then it goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant. So we're talking about from CO2 to fruit. Yeah. And it ends with something that you can literally eat. So the world's first entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, bioreneuable 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, let's create 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 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. You literally, how do you think about 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 at the end.

I would love to see what this 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 in in February. We'll invite you to the lab. I'm there. I've already applied. I can't have heard back. I don't understand. Okay. Let me just, 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 the life form.

Stuff you've done in the past, maybe stuff you're doing now, how to use bacteria. It's kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria. Is there examples from the past? Yes, and just take a step back over the 10 years. The mediated matter group, which was my group at MIT, has sort of dedicated itself to biobased design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology.

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 end of ones. Again, the challenges, you say, was to grow them. And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments.

And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees and our comb as the structural material with vaspers we used, synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments. Although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same. The approach was really an approach of computational templating.

That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment, where nature and technology could do it, could dance together to create these products. So just a few examples with silk pavilion, we've had a couple of pavilions made of silk in the second one, which was the bigger one, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend, an incredible mentor, Paul Antonelli. That pavilion was six meter tall, and it was produced by silkworms.

And there we had different types of templates. There were physical templates that were basically just these water soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning. And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically applying a variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm. You're saying so many amazing things, and I'm trying not to interrupt you.

But one of the things you've learned by observing, by doing science on these is that the environment defines the shape that they create or contributes or intricately plays with the shape they create. And so like, and you get to, 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. That means like, is whatever is the biological living system that's doing the creation.

And that's what's happening in pharma and in biomaterials. And by the way, precision ag and food design technologies, as people are betting on a hero organism, is sort of how I'm thinking of it. 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 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 to Chikers guide 42 42. These are sort of the 42s of the enchanted new universe. And back at MIT, we said instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony and let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale. And those usually were pavilions.

And then the competition 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 one mile in distance and they're beautiful. And just thinking about the amount of material, it's a bit like thinking about the length of capillary vessels that grow in your belly when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form. It's 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. It uses pretty much just two materials, two chemical compounds, serison and fiber in. The serison is sort of the glue of the cocoon.

The fiber is the fiber-based material of the cocoon 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 metamorphose size. 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 six-axis cuca arm, one of these baby cucas.

And we were trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large when one of my students now, an industrial engineer, roboticist on my team, Marcus said, well, 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 the silkworm mind you is quite an ego-centric 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, 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 at the scale that when compared to human skyscrapers, transcend all of the buildable skills, at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the termite. But when you look at the silkworm, the silkworm has zero connection communication across silk worms. They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other.

They're sort of a human-designed species because the domesticated silkmouth creates the cocoon. We then produce the silk of it and then it dies. So it has dysfunctional wings. It cannot fly. It's not. 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.

So here we were fascinated by the computational biology dimension of silkworms, but along the way, by the way, this is great. I never get to tell the full story. I'm enjoying this so much. I always, I'm always like people say, I always speak in Nietzschean paragraphs. They're way too long and this is wonderful. This is like heaven. Nietzschean paragraphs. You're driving so many good lines. 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 had 17,000 of them communicating effectively? 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 where you have a robotic queen. But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature, right?

The question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational material and immaterial, physical and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost guiding a product, almost like a gardener, to a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying, now I own the code, I get to do what I want with this code.

Let me show you what this pavilion may look like or this product may look like. And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realized that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if I may, a kind of collaboration and cooperation between silkworms that are not a swarm based organism. They're not like the bees in the termites. They don't work together and they don't have social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, etc.

They're all the same in a way, right? And here, what was so exciting for us is that these computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to sort of, to kind of hop from the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of maybe human-like intelligence where they could connect and communicate by virtue of, you know, feeling or rubbing against each other in 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. It's really, really fascinating to us how can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior and creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms?

So 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, it doesn't count as emergence. Actually. That's a deeply poetic line. We can talk about it. It's a bit like it's as competitive as it doesn't count. That's right, right. Speaking of emergence, an empowerment because we're constantly moving between those as if they're equals on the team.

of them, Christoph shared with me a mathematically 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 say it so that I know that I've learned it. And if I've learned it, I can use it later. Yeah. And maybe you figure something out, as you say, 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 Yosha 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 duality between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing. And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment given infinite wide array of choices. What is the choice that you make to enable to empower to provide you with the agency that you need?

How much is 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, but 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, likely 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 going to have to tell that story. You're going to have to talk about the robotic queen and the farmhouse. Come on. So we've built what we call a synthetic

APRE. And the synthetic APRE 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 APRE. And we have proven that curated environment where we design the space with high levels of control, of temperature, humidity, and light. And we've proven that they were reproductive 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 APRE was in a co-op in nearby Somerville. We had robots, our team, 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 and idea or 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 worth, 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, New Shepherd Mission, in this one cell. And so that's, if the synthetic APRE

was an architectural project, in this case, this second synthetic APRE 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 National Fairmon

that the queen uses to guide the other bees. And we looked at Fairmon's that are associated with a bee and thinking of those Fairmon's being released inside the capsules that go, the capsule that goes to outer space. They returned back to our the media lab roof. And those bees were alive and kicking and reproductive. And, you know, and they continued to create 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 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 or the life support system for 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 because I love

love technology so much. And but but also another element of this is it always these projects. If they're great, they reveal new knowledge about or new science about the topic that that you're investigating. Be it, you know, silkworms or or bees or 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. We don't separate between the art and the science. It's it's 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 cure organisms like bees, silkworms? You mentioned E. coli has its pros and cons, its bacteria. What have you learned that smaller big, that's interesting about these organisms? Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What have I learned?

I've learned that, you know, we did we also worked with Shim Shels with Aguah, how we built this tower on the roof of SF MoMA, which by a couple of months ago until it was on the roof, we've shown the structure completely biodegrade into then well, not completely, but almost completely biodegrade to the soil and and this notion that a product or part on organism or part of that organism can re-incarnate 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 with God. I want to I want I I like to believe in believing. Most great things in life are second derivatives of

things, but that's part of another conversation. I feel like that's a quote that's going to take weeks to really internalize that notion of I want you to want or I need you to need or that 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 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 and a lot of the work that we've done was not possible without our our working on E. coli or other workhorse organisms like cyanobacteria how are bacteria used death masks the death masks so what are death masks? So we did this project called Vespers and those were basically death masks

that was said as a process for designing a living product. What happens and we looked at bit I looked at it and remember looking at Beethoven's death mask and I go memnon's death mask and just studying how they were created and really they were sort of geometrically attuned to the face

of the dead and what we wanted to do is create a death mask that not was not based in the wish and was not based on the shape of the of the where but rather was based on their legacy and their biology and maybe we could harness a few stem cells there for future generations or contain

the last breath Lazarus which preceded Vespers was a project where we designed a mask to contain a single breath the last breath of the where and again if I had access to these technologies today I would totally re incorporate my grandmother's last breath in in in in in in a in a in a

product so it was like an air memento so with Vespers we we actually used E. coli to to 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 mask of the present in 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

in our gorgeous yes extremely delicate and interesting fractal patterns that are symmetrical they look symmetrical but they're not this is intent this is we intended for you to be tricked and think that they're all symmetrical but there's imperfections there are imperfections

by design all of these all of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you're looking at was 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 and 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 rebegins and so on and so forth the past meets the future the future meets the past from the surface to the volume from death to life to death to life to

death to life and that again is a recurring theme in in in the project set that we take on but there what 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 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 why 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 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 entitled 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 like the work that we did with melanin for for the mandela pavilion that we presented at sifmoma

where again we're using the same principles of templating in this case not cell quirms and not bees but we're templating bacteria at a much much much more finer resolution and now instead of templating using using using a robot word 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 cell can said well if you did this this create amazing

silk pavilion why don't we create you know glow in the light silk dresses and and in order to create this glow in the light silk we need to you know to to to to apply genes that are taken from a spider to a silkworm 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 and again just to remind you where I forget the exact number but it's around a thousand

cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in in indian china nor in those sericulture industries that are being abused now yes this organism this organism was was designed to serve the human species and maybe we should maybe it's time you know to to to retire that you know

that conception of of organisms that are designed for a human centric world or human centric set of applications I don't feel the same way about ecoli I'm not that I'm agnostic organism agnostic but but still I believe there's so much for us to do on this planet with with with bacteria

and so in general your design principle is to grow cool stuff as a byproduct of the organism flourishing so not not using the organism the win win the synergy a whole that's bigger than the some of its parts it's interesting I mean it's it's just feels like a gray area where genetic

modification of an organism it just feels like I don't know if you if you genetically modified me to make me glow in the light kind of like you have enough of an aura all right thank you that was just fishing for compliments thank you I appreciate so much and by the way the gray

area is you know is where some of us like to live and like to thrive and and that's okay and and thank goodness that there's so many of us that that like the black and white and that thrive in the black and white my husband is a good example for that well but just to clarify in this case you're

also trying to thrive in the black and white in that you're saying like the silkworm is a beautiful wonderful creature let us not modify it 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 genetically let's not modify genetically and then some because why did we why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in the silk road and 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 take take two this thing's again serious now bacteria are yeah for sure

let's get bacteria all the love they deserve we wouldn't be here without them they 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 and then re reincarnates or

dissolves into the soil and then creates a tree and then that tree creates more bacteria and then that bacteria I mean again 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 and maybe

awareness but yeah lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria and directed evolution is one of them we're looking we're looking at directed evolution so high throughput directed evolution of of bacteria for the production of products and again those products can be a shoe

wearables biomaterials therapeutic therapeutics and doing that direction computationally totally computationally obviously in in the lab with with with the hero organism the hero bacteria and what's happening today in in eco microbial synthetic biology synthetic biology that lends

itself to ecology and again all of these fields are coming together it's such a wonderful time to be a designer I can't think of a better time to be a designer in this world but with high throughput directed evolution and I should say that the physical space in our new lab will have these capsules

which which we have designed that are that they're designed like growth chambers or grow rooms and in those grow rooms we can basically program top down environmental templating where top down environmental control of lights humidity light etc. light humidity and temperature while

doing bottom up genetic regulation so it is a wet lab but in that wet lab you could do it the same time you know genetic genetic modulation regulation and 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 can 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 talked talked about and there's a particular technology associated with that which we're hoping to reveal

to the world in February and in 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 food is a very interesting one obviously because of food insecurity and and and the issues that we have

around both in terms of food insecurity but also in terms of the future of food and what what will remain after we can't eat plants and animals anymore and all we can eat is these false bananas and 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 bi 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 a.m. in the morning what it tomatoes taste like to all the way in the future 200 years ago these are the the the environmental inputs these are some genetic regulations that I'm testing and what might

the the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future feel like test like behave like etc 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

I you know when when when we first decided these are going to be environmental capsules people thought we're 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 of of of of control over organisms.

There's a reason why there is this incredible evolution of products in the software space and the hardware space that's a more limiting space that 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 a you could create an environment of plants talking to each other with a robotic referee and the robotic referee we you know and you could you could

set an objective function and let's say for for for for the transaction driven individuals in the world let's say the objective function is carbon sequestration and and all of those plants are are implemented with a gaming engine and they have this reward system right and they're constantly

needing to optimize the way in which they carbon sequest we read out the bad guys we leave the good guys and we end up with this like ideal ecology of carbon sequestering heroes that connect and communicate with each other and once we have that model this biodiversity chamber we send it

out into the field and we see what happens in nature and that that's sort of what I'm talking about augmenting plants with that extra dimension of bandwidth that they do not have and they're they're they're just just last week I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are

that are augmented with a pong game and and in a dish they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness which is which is wonderful like that that you could actually take these neurons from a mouse brain and 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 a situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be sentient but is actually sentience um Michael Levine calls this a gentle material material that has agency right so

it so so so this this this is of interest to us because this is sort of again this is emergence post templating you template until you don't need to template anymore because because the system has its own rules right what we don't want to happen with a GI we want to happen with

synthetic biology what we don't want to have an online and software with language we want for it to happen with with bi-based materials because that will get us closer to growing things as opposed to assembly and and mechanically yeah putting them together with toxic materials and

compounds if I can ask a pothead question for a second so you mentioned just like the silkworms the individualists silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate 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 with a plant the already is you know that when we cut freshly cut grass I love the smell

but it's a smell of actually it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other so the grass when it's cut emits green leaf volatile GLVs and those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass be careful mind you you're about to be cut

these incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours we use language models they use molecular models at the moment where we can parse we can 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 time scale and the time scale is very very slow slow slow slow time scale

so it is when we can melt these time scales and and 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 for their own self perpetuation but also for the the foods and 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 and better foods and and and better medicine and better

products again across all scales across all application domains is there intricacies to understanding the time scales 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 just a 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 a shift um a humility that requires a a kind of a humility towards nature understanding that it

operates on different scales we we recently discovered that uh you know that the molecular footprint of a rose or of a plant in general during nighttime is different than a molecular footprint during daytime so these are circadian rhythms that are associated with um what kind of molecules

these plants emit um given stress stresses and given um you know there's a reason why why the jasmine a jasmine field smells so so delicious and for i am in the morning and then there's like there's there's peace and rest amongst you know amongst the plants and you have to

sort of tune into that time dimension of of the plant kingdom and that of course requires all this humility or 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 an abused 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 and many many many years and i'm thinking about the red woods um to grow these channels these you know the cellulose layers

and channels and reach these incredible heights takes sometimes hundreds of years sometimes thousands of years 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 and and that needs to change and that's obviously very very hard to do in a community in a of 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 perilous here with another company of neural link which is uh it's basically like you i think you mentioned neural link for nature uh that there's 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 and i think for neural link it was to me that chimpanzee playing a video game um it was just unbelievable but with plants there potentially is a set of molecules that um impacts or inspires i like that word the plant to um behave or act in a certain way

um and allows still the plant the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go uh which is why our 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 fragrances and flavors

um you know these these products are in the industry as we know it today are designed for totally for a human centric use and and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury um they're used on the body for the sake of don't know attraction and and feeling good um and smelling good and we were

asking ourselves is there a world in which um in which a fragrance can be not a functional fragrance because you could claim that all fragrances are functional but is there a world in which the the fragrance becomes functionalized is again imparted upon or given agency to connect with

another organism is there a world in which um you and i can go down to your garden and use a perfume that will interact with the rose garden downstairs um i've just been enamored with the statements that are being made in the media around oh this is completely biologically derived

fragrance and it's biobased and but when you look into the fragrance and you understand it in order to get to this biode-arrived fragrance fragrance you went through you blew through you know 10,000 10,000 bushes of rose to create five milliliters of of a rose fragrance and all these 10,000

bushes of rose they take space they take you know water management and and so much waste um is this really what we want the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like and so when we did the agohaqa pavilion on the roof of asif mama we calculated that for that pavilion

we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and kitesin and and um apple skins and and salilos from tree uh tree pop and we calculated that overall the structure had 40,000 calories interesting way to think about a structure right from the from the

point of view of of calories but as you left the gallery you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed by philix on our team and these clocks measured temperature and humidity and we were connected them to a weather channel so that we could directly um look at how the pavilion

was biodegrading in real time and and and in our calculations i say this long-winded uh description of the pavilion to say that in the calculation we incorporated um 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 energy 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 a the will of the designer you're really tabbing into an entire system that is interconnected and if you look at the energy budget that characterized the project agorja 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 and the shrimp shells and the tree pop and so going back to you know going back to to fragrances um it's really really important to understand the product in the context of the ecological system from which it's sourced and

how it's designed and that is the kind of thinking um that is not only desired but is required if we are to achieve synergy between humanity and nature and it's interesting because the system level thinking is almost always going to take you to the entire earth to consider in the

entire earth ecosystem which is why it's important to have a left brain and a right brain competing for attention and into the same head yes uh you mentioned 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 a.m essentially you could if you wanted to but maybe that is not trick trick is a bad word right right inspire but 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 uh the rose garden to uh to create a romantic moment for the for the wearer of the fragrance but now again you're you're again all of this to go back to back to that human centric notion of romance but maybe there's another

way to do romance right that that we haven't yet you know that we haven't yet explored and 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

what does the rose want like what is what does it actually want and and and what does it need and what other what what are the roses um 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 my goodness this would not be a nice world to live in I think we all want love I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter um 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 equals

mc square and he tells his daughter that he believes that love is actually the force that shapes universe because it is like gravity right it attracts people it is like light it brings people together and connect connects between people um and it's all empowering and and so if you

multiply it by the speed of light you could really change the world for the better and I call me a romanticist I know you are too um which is why I so love being here I believe in this I I totally and utterly um believe in in in love but let me just excerpt 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 jokes to Einstein I need to tell you that I love you and uh thanks to

you I reached the ultimate answer your father Albert Einstein yeah for that regret I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart maybe that's the universal regret feeling your days with busyness and silly pursuits and not sitting down and uh expressing that

but it is everything it is everything it is why I love that expression and I forget who said this but I I love my daughter more than um evolution required right and um I feel the same way towards my other half and and I feel that when you find that connection um everything and anything is

possible um and it's a very very very magical um a magical moment so I I 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 ridiculously big philosophical uh question about beauty does the afsky said beauty will save the world

in the idiot one of my favorite books of his uh what is beauty to you you've created through this intersection of engineering and nature you've created some incredibly beautiful things what do you think is beauty that's a beautiful question maybe it is connected to the love question

it is connected to the love question of course everything is connected to the love question okay um 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 fast I remember the

concept which goes something like this um 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 okay yeah is it kind of a an agency that speaks to court and court 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 they connected to it comes back to that yeah what's the difference that you hinted at between empowerment and emergence is uh emergence completely lacks control

is it and empowerment is more uh is more controlled there's an agent making decisions is 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 the is a tropic spirit when empowerment is at the end is a tropic counterpart um I think they overlap because I think that empowerment is a way of um inspiring emergence I think emergence does not happen without

empowerment but empowerment can happen without emergence do you think of emergence is the loss of control like when you're thinking about these capsules and then the things they create is emergence of things that is uh 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 is this um 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 um for for diversity so I think the future of of design is in that

soft control is in the ability to design highly controlled systems that enable um that enable the loss of control and creativity is very much part of this because creativity is all about letting go and beginning again and beginning again and beginning again and when you cannot let go you

cannot be creative and you can't you can't you can't find novelty but I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment agency creativity emergence and they're all connected they are sort of associate themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable a good friend of mine shared

with me elegant definition of fate which is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be ratio for who you are who you want to be exactly and that sort of ends up defining you and those tools I think when when when when you let go you sort of find you you give peace to your

will right to a sense of will and and 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 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 in that focusing you manifest it like Paul O'Cole said in the alchemists when you want something all the universe conspires and helping you to achieve it is there something to do that I think so yes and I always think of you know what I do is 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 and and that's why manifestation is also directional it has that vector quality to it that that I think of agency as have you in your own life is there been things you've done where you kind of direct that

energy information and matter in a way that opens up new possibility yeah I mean you've also said somewhere I'm probably misscoding that you're you're many things you're not many things and you become new things every 10 years or so oh I did say that somewhere somewhere that every decade

you've sort of switched that was an old that was a previous nary that said that yeah I did say some time ago that you have to sort of reboot reboot every 10 years to to keep creative and keep inventive and and keep fresh there are things you've done in your life we're just kind of

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 and 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 moment 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 patience and the science

of medicine and the research associated with that science and letting go of that dream to accomplish another and and 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 Victor Frankl wrote this incredible book man cert for meaning after the Holocaust and he writes different people

pursue life for for for different reasons according to Freud the the the goal of of life is to find pleasure and and according to Adler it's you know to find power and and for Victor 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 you are elevated to this really special yes spiritual but definitely very very creative plane where you you can sort of start a new look at the world through the lens of a bacterium or a robot or it or you know or look at ecology

through the lens of chemistry and look at chemistry the lens of robotics and look at robotics through the lens of you know my microbial ecologies and so on and so forth and 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 for just maintaining this fresh mind to reboot reboot to begin again with every breath begin again and and that can be confusing for some right for my team members you know I I like to change my mind to I am it's how I think it's how I operate you know and and 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 and 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 fairy tale it's not you know the sleeping beauty or or little red riding hood or Rapunzel it's all of them it's sort of moving into the forest and seeing this wander and getting close and learning

about that and then moving to another wander and life is really about tying all of these little fairy tales together in work and and also in life on a freight to leap into the unknown and afraid to leap into the unknown speaking of MIT you got a tenure in MIT and then you leaped

to New York and started a new company that with a vision that doesn't span a couple of years but centuries I did it was my destiny to start a company and and do I have mornings when I wake up and I ask myself what the hell am I doing yes I have those mornings what do you do those mornings by

the way I embrace them and I I find gratitude and I say to myself thank goodness I I'm so lucky to you know to have the the the ability to be frustrated in this way so I really really embrace these frustrations and I and I I take them I wrap them in a bubble and I look at it you know on the outside of my my uh uh aware mind and and and I laugh at them I smile at them 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 um our conception of beauty what role does imperfection play in um in nature there's uh there's this japanese aesthetics concept of wabi sabi which basically embraces imperfection nothing lasts nothing is finished and nothing is

perfect what do you what do you think of that I totally agree that changes the only permanence that imperfection is there if only to to signal that we are part of a bigger thing than ourselves that that we are on a journey um that that we're uh that things are in movement um and if they were

perfect I 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 found without struggle and without seeking to not to perfect but to build to

to to build towards something better um when I was a child my mother who who I 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 um and that there is a way that there's a culture to to to to failing and and and to imperfection

um so I I think it is it is uh necessary for something beautiful to be imperfect 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 perfection in humans a component of love like what role do you think the the flaws play?

It's a that's a really profound question I think the flaws are there uh to the flaws are there to present a vulnerability and those flaws are um are um 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 as you might expect and he will repeat this sentence to me all incentive drives all human behavior but I I would say to me it's love love very much so um and

and and I think flaws are part of that because flaws are a sign of that vulnerability whether physical whether emotional vulnerability and those vulnerabilities these vulnerabilities they either terrace apart or they bring us together um the vulnerability is what is the glue I think I think

that the vulnerability enables connection the connection is the glue and that connection enables accessing higher ground as a community as opposed to as an individual so if there is a society over the mind or if there are higher levels of awareness that can be accessed in community as

opposed to again going to the silkworm as opposed to on the individual level I think that those occur through the flaws and the vulnerabilities and without them we 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 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 the the I think of a flaw is it is an increased surface area that's a good line that's a good line a surface area that like physically it's a good line

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 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 to 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 hydron 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 the notion of and Victor Frankl talks about that too he talks about feeling the sun on his arms as he's as he is working the soil in two degrees Fahrenheit without close and the officer

berates him and says 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 you must have made a lot of money as a doctor and he said I all all my work I've done for free I've been helping the poor

but he keeps his he keeps his humility and he keeps his modesty and he keeps his preservation of the spirit and 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 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 Victor notice them and to to notice them to pay attention to them in the moment and I do this

now more than ever I mean there is some the Bukowski has this poem I like called Nirvana or it tells a story of a young man out of 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 knows it's 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 maybe

ultimately it's a kind of gratitude yes for I don't know what it is it's just that I'm sure it's just chemicals in the brain but it's just so incredible to be alive yes and noticing that yes appreciating that and being one in that with others yes yes and and that goes back to

you know to the fireplace right to the first technology what was the first technology it was fire first technology to have built community and it emerged out of a vulnerability of wanting to stay away from the cold and be warm together and and and of course that fire is associated with not

only with comfort and the ability to form you know bio relevant nutrients in our food and and and and and provide heat and comfort but also spirits and and I kind of a way to enter out you know to enter a spiritual moment to enter a moment that can only be experienced as as

in a community as a as a form of meditative moment there is a lot to be said about light light is I think an important part of these moments of I think I think it's a real thing I really truly believe that we're born with and with a with an aura surface area that is measurable I think

we're we're born into the world with that you know with a with an aura and and how do we channel that is really is sort of ends I mean ends up sort of defining you know defining the light in our in our lives do you think we're all do you think we're all lonely there's loneliness in us

humans oh yes yes loneliness is part yes I think we we all have that loneliness whether we're willing to access that loneliness and look at it in the eye or completely um you know completely avoided or deny it it's like it feels like it's a some kind of foundation for longing and longing

leads to this this combination of vulnerability and and connection with others yes it feels like that's a really important part of being human is being lonely very it's very we are born into this world alone again being alone and being lonely are two different things right and you can be

together but be lonely and you can be alone but not be lonely at all we often joke villainy that um he he cannot be lonely he cannot deal with being by himself he always needs people around him and I strive long and 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 um for community in my opinion and I think those things complement each other and they're synergetic absolutely the in and yang of of of of of of togetherness and they allow you I think to yeah to

reset and to tune in to to that ratio we talked about of who you are and who you want to be if you if you go to this place of creative solitude what's your 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 um different things to occur at once so I will often in my loneliness journeys I will often uh listen to like Leonard Bernstein anything I can find online by Lenny Bernstein it's reading a

nature paper it's warrant 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 Moabidic the whiteness of the whale the Elbino the different the other and that got us to work on Melanine and and Melanine also sort of an output from the death mess 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 glass work was another project like that where we were fascinated by glass because obviously it's super 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 with 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 um the reincarnation between things material and immaterial that's another theme Lenny Bernstein Warren P. Tolstoy you've tweeted a Tolstoy quote from Warren P. 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 finally actually 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 um you know whether it's you know recreating that garden of Eden and the capsule and what it looks like the food of the future it is a little bit like directing a film creating a new

project is a bit like creating a film 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 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 and you are

bound to create something novel period and that's how I run the company and that's how I pick the people and so that's another very very important ingredient of the cutting edge across multiple disciplines that come together and then in the background in the periphery there is all these

messages the whispers of the ancient oldies right the Beethoven's and the Picasso's and Beethoven's those whispering to you yeah how could one not include Beethoven and the whispers I'm going to ask you about Beethoven and the organic history you've mentioned because I'm a I've played piano my

whole life of obviously know a lot of Beethoven um and it's it's one of the private things for me I suppose because I don't think I've ever publiced paper piano by the way me too I mean that I play in private only yeah yeah people sometimes even with guitar people ask me can you play something

and it just feels like certain things are meant to be done privately yeah it's weird I mean it's a it's a difficult and and some of the times I have performed publicly it is an 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've returned to that but since you've mentioned combination of novelty cost multiple disciplines and what that's what you seek when you when you build teams or pick people you work with yeah I just wanted to kind of linger on this um

idea of what kind of humans are you looking for in this endeavor that you're taking on this fascinating thing that you've been uh talking about want one of things somewhere else a previous version version 5.7 of nary said somewhere that there's four fields that are combined to create

this intersection of biology and engineering work in his computational design additive manufacturing material engineering synthetic biology I'm sure there's others but how do you how do you find these humans machine learnings in the mix I manifest and they come um yeah there are

few approaches to manifest okay um you know send your message upon the water I mean with those job descriptions that you saw the first ones I wrote by myself and you find interesting people and brilliant people when you look what 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 the cracks between disciplines and between scales you find really really interesting diamonds in the rough and so I I I I like for that those job descriptions to

yeah to be those messages in a bottle that bring those really interesting people our way um I mean they have to have humility they have to have a shine in their eye they have to be hungry and foolish this is this job so famously said a friend of mine um who's a dean of well-known architectural

school said you know today architects don't want to be architects architects don't look up to the starki attacks as role models starki attacks are no longer role models architects want to build by virtue of not building right architects want it's she said it's we're back in the 60s when we think about architecture back in the hippie movement I think I think that in a way um they have to be somewhat of a hippie somewhat of a it kind of a um jack of all trades master of all um 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 asked 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 you find that educational back like PhDs versus like what's the life trajectory yours is an interesting life trajectory too like uh what's the life trajectory that leads to the kind of person that would work with you um it's

you know people who have um ideally had industry experience and know what it's like to be in the quote unquote real world their 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 um being entitled and with understanding the systems that govern our world and understanding how to utilize these systems as torgian horses to bring those values into the world there are individuals who are feel comfortable in this friction between between you know

highly wondrous and dreamy and incredible fantasy renditions of what the world could be with extremely um and 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 yeah are things that really really attract me in especially that that span this the technology biology yes technology biology nature culture i mean the secret to one thing is through the lens of another and i always believe in that kind of

translational design ability to be able to see something through the lens of another and always allows you to think again begin again reestablish redefine suspend your disbelief revisit um and when you revisit enough times like a hundred times or like two hundred times and you

revisit the same question through the lens of any possible discipline and any possible scenario you you fought you get eventually you get to the truth i have to ask you because you work at the interplay of uh the machine and the natural world is there a good definition for you of what is

life what what is the living organism mm-hmm i think like four hundred and forty million years ago there were all these plants that um the sanabukhtir i believe actually that that god that that that was like the first extinction right there were six five extinctions

we are apparently the six that we are in the eye of the storm we are in the six 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 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 sanabukhtir 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 know of their existence and because of these spores we know that this first extinction existed but this extinction is actually what enabled plants to resirect right so the death of these first plants because they clinked to the rocks and they they generated a ton of phosphorus that

went into the ocean by clinging to the rocks like 60 times more phosphorus than without them and then all this phosphorus basically choked the oceans and made them super cold and a without oxygen a oxic and then um 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 um and those planets had like more sophisticated vein systems and they were moving beyond spores to seeded plants etc and flowering plants

and so in a way you one mass extinction sort of led in the the or division periods sort of led to life as we know it and where would we be without plants in a way so I 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 um life gains a completely new sort of a new light and that's where that's when the particles become a wave right where humans are we are not alone and we are here because of those plants right so I think death is is very much part of life so in the context of

you know the redwood tree perhaps you know life is defined as uh ten generations and through the lens of a bacteria perhaps life is defined as a millisecond and perhaps through the lens of of an agi life is defined as all of human civilization and so I think it really is a question of

um this time scale again the time scale and the organism life form that's asking the question through which we can answer what is life what do you think about this since you're if we think of ourselves as in the eye of the storm of another extinction the natural question to ask here is

you have all 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 um so I'm glad you ask

this question and I hope for a terrified both I'm hopeful and terrified I did watch your interview with Elias Ryudkovsky and I loved it because you were scared or because you were excited or because there was a first of all I was both I was I was totally scared shamed excited and totally also

inspired because he's just such an incredible thinker and and I can agree or disagree with what he says but I just found his way of thinking about agi and 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 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 a super intelligent systems gets rid of

humans and in the near term and so the the the clarity of thinking is very sobering to me it's maybe it is to you as well it's super inspiring because I think he's wrong but it's like you well you almost want to prove him wrong it's like no we humans are clever bunch we're going to find

the 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 and I like these moments so much and and he was able to bring that moment to life even though I think a mother can never think that way ever and and it's a little bit like that

that notion of I 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 to get here we sort of moved from data right the ability to collect information to knowledge the ability to use this information for

utility from knowledge to intelligence and what is intelligence is the ability to problem solve and adapt and translate so that sort of from 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 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 is being constantly created I don't I don't 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 of of novelty as you say that exists by virtue of using all the 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 maybe it 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 it's it's probably getting there but the language appears to present itself as if 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 sort of the end of end 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 Elias Elzans the short lived human

becomes sort of a very long lived human like sentient weeping willow maybe maybe that's the end and the beginning and and and 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 up of six you know six elements and that's it and there's only those six elements and not 118 elements and and 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 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 a pretty crazy intense evolution

exactly and unlike sort of again I'm going back to directed evolution unlike this sort of high-food put brute force approach if there is a way to utilize this synergy for diversity and diversification like like yeah how like what happens if you ask a chat GPT question

but it takes 10,000 years to answer that question like what does that look like right when you like completely switch the time scale and you can afford the time to answer the question and again I don't know but but that world to me is possibly amazing do you think there's um

because when you start to think about time scales like this just looking at earth all the possible trajectories might take of this living organism that is earth do you think there's others like it do you think there's other planets with life forms on them that are just

doing their thing in this kind of way because you're in what you're doing you're you're directly playing with what's possible with life life like 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 in around us is is very very low we are a chosen planet in a way right there's water and there's love what else do you need

and and and and that sort of very peculiar juxtaposition of conditions the oxygen the water the carbon again is is 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 I I want to believe

more than I know that that yes that there are life forms in you know in the white fountain that is the black hole right that there are these life forms that are um you know light years away from us and that are that are forming other forms of life forces that 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 there's aliens in a sense all around us that we're not seeing that we're not talking to they were 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 in different forms that that there is a connection like there's a thing that connects all of us all of living beings uh across the universe and like we're not we're just beginning to understand any of it 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 dieting life on earth unlock some really fundamental things that maybe you can start to answer questions about what is consciousness uh maybe this thing that we've been saying about

uh love but in a honestly in a serious way and then you'll start to understand that uh that there is alien life all out there and it's much more complicated and interesting that we kind of realize as we're still looking to human like exactly human like things it's the variety of life that's

possible is just almost endless I totally agree with you I think again um define alien right yeah define intelligence define life right and Marvin Minsk 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 words are always very very dangerous speaking rock and roll you've mentioned music and you mentioned Beethoven a bunch of times um you've also tweeted about um you've got any kiss and performance and and so on what um what can you say about

the role of music in your life I love music um 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 in my opinion and it's a weird mystery that we're so connected to music but by the way to push back a good bridge will make me cry a good arc I true and I I will say uh 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 the intention and the space and appreciating every little gesture so it's it's true it is the universal language it's 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 and that is definitely one of my 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 I have to ask what uh what do you think is the best film of all time maybe top top three

yeah maybe the godfather godfather okay the godfather is 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 uh to work with him on his new film agalopolis which is coming out I hope

in 2024 and think about the cities of the future in in the context of new materials and the unity between nature and culture godfather is definitely up there um 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

um just watch the last scene of 2001 then listen to it cove scheme and sort of and then go to 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 it's sort of the embodiment I

believe of ambivalence and um there's opportunity to believe in the beginning of humankind the end of humankind the planet child star or star child of the future um was there a death was there an reincarnation um you know that that final scene to me is something that I go back to and and study

and every time there is a different reading of that scene that inspires me so that that scene just and then the first scene 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 uh yes of values of how how different values are constructed yes loyalty and and the human spirit and how copula celebrates the human spirit through the most simple gestures uh in language and acting and I think in in Kubrick you see this highly curated and controlled

and manicured um vision of of creating a film and with with Francis it's it's like an Italian feast it's like anything anything can happen at any moment in time and just being on the set with him um is um is an experience I'll take with me to my grave it's 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 the godfather um that that that that that that that that that that makes me like emotional every time at some weird level yeah it's one of these tunes I'm sure that has um you know if you play it to

to a jasmine you'll get the best scent of all times I think like there's but I think with that particular tune I learned staccato that that that that that that that that is something very very happy and joyous that that that that that that that that 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 of of play down guitar and all kinds of different ways and uh I think in godfather three the sun plays it on guitar to the

father I think this happens in movies but sometimes a melody and that's a simple melody it can just like and the Strauss melody in 2001 yeah and when you juxtapose this um this melodies with the scene you get this again hold it's bigger than some of its parts where you get this moment

that is I think like these are the moments I would send you know with the next voyager to artist face I definitely sent the godfather in in 2001 would definitely be beyond that um 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 and um in your life and actually took the time to ingest and explore and reflect upon the full moon probably 20 I believe he says um I 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 um the little things the simple things is what makes a meaningful life I I was very lucky to have had you know to have grown up in a home that taught me this way of being my my my parents my grandmother who played a very important role in in my growing up um and and that ability to pay attention and to be present is so so so so I could not emphasize it enough is so crucial um and be grateful

yeah I think gratitude and presence um appreciation are really um the the 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 uh what do you remember what 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 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 uh and saw the site which has now become the site for another tall building it was a tiny tiny little got garden um that the to me seemed so large when when I was um growing up because it it had everything it had um it had fig trees it had olive trees

it had mushrooms it had the blanket I would do my homework there it it was everything and I needed nothing nothing else and um and and that was my garden of Eden that was my childhood being and she taught me you know 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 um with her and and she taught me the the importance of wonder uh in in sort of in an eternal childhood and and living uh adulthood as as a child and and so I I'm very very

grateful for that I think it it is the sense of wonder um the uh um speaking up was always something that she adhered to to speak up your truth uh to be straightforward um to be positive that these are things that I also got from my mom um and from my mom the sense of humor she she had the best

sense of humor of uh that I could think of and and was just um just a joy to be around and and and my father taught me everything my father taught me everything I know my mom taught me everything I feel that's a good way to put it my grandma taught me everything I insight why

I see the sense of wonder that just carries to everything you do so I I think you would you make your grandmother proud uh well what about advice for how to have a career so you've had a very interesting career mm-hmm and a successful career but not not an easy one took you took a few leaps

I did take a few leaps and they were uncomfortable my father and I'll never um forget uh I think we were like listening to a rolling stone song in the kitchen and my dad um was actually born in Boston he's American um he said uh I I started to have sort of these second thoughts about

continuing my education in Israel and I wanted to you know go I 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 where you're at you need

to you need to move forward another thing he had taught me um the feeling of discomfort as you as you say the feeling of loneliness and discomfort is is is imperative to growth uh growth is painful period any form of growth is difficult and painful birth is difficult and painful

um and and it is really really important to place yourself in situations of discomfort I like to be in a room where everyone in the room is more intelligent than me I like to be in those in that kind of state where the people that I surround myself with are orders of magnitude um more intelligent

than I am and I can say that that is true of all of my team members and that's the intellectual discomfort that I feed off of the same is true for for physical exertion um you you gotta put yourself in these uncomfortable um situations in order to grow in order to find comfort um and then

on the other hand is is love um is finding finding love uh and finding that um you know that human this other human that complements you and it makes you a better version of the one you are and even of the one you want to be but with gratitude and and attention and love you can go so so

far to the younger generation I don't speak of a career I never thought of um my work as my career ever and there was this constant entanglements between life and work and love and longing and being and mothering it's all the same and uh I appreciate that to some people that doesn't work

in their you know in in their arrangement of of will versus um comfort uh versus the reality but for me it has always worked so I think to the younger generation I say don't think of your career career is something that is imposed upon you think of your calling that's something that's

innately and directionally um uh 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 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 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 when we combine all of these you know all of these uh uh the broken puzzle let's say of of of substance and um vulnerability we get this bigger gush taut this wondrous world of a future that is is is is peaceful that is uh um

um and then you know that is wholesome and that 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 uh well thank you for this incredible conversation thank you for all the work you're doing and

I just have to say that thank you for um noticing me and listening to me you you're somebody from from just today and from our exchanges before this like there's a sense where you care about me is a human being which is which I could tell you care about other humans thank you for doing that

thank you for having empathy and just like um yeah really listening and noticing me that I exist so thank you for that when a huge fan of your work uh been a huge fan of who you are as a human being it's just an honor to us it was me thank you um thank you so much let's say feel the same way

I'll just say the same and I look forward to hearing the response to my job application that I've submitted oh you're you're accepted oh yeah mario we all speak of you all the time thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thanks for listening to this conversation and area oxman the support

this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from Leo Tolstoy everything I know I know because of love thank you for listening I hope to see you next time