Full transcript: Dr Rachel Armstrong on London Real
4:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. Back is Mr Nick Gabriel, and joining us today is Dr Rachel Armstrong, who is the co-director of Avatar Lab, that name, which is the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research at the University of Greenwich here in London. She’s also a 2010 TED senior TED fellow, and I could go on and on and on but I won’t. Smartest woman in the world is, I think, an appropriate moniker that could be, you’re known for so many things, but the one that always sticks out to me is this concept of living architecture, and I was wondering, I’m sure you hear this all the time, but if you could tell us a bit about that concept?
5:25 I’m actually going to start by saying that I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do when I was like 5 years old, digging in the dirt in the backyard in my mom and dad’s house, and at the time it used to feel like the biggest garden in the whole wide world. You know, recently I’ve been back there for Christmas and stuff, and it’s just a, a tiny little square of grass, you know, with a little bit of crazy paving, and I just remember that place being so big. But what was so fascinating, at the time, you know, I didn’t even know what a television set was.
5:52 I just, I wasn’t interested in those kinds of things. It was actually the activity in soil, you know, I’ I’d go into the garden. It was like this magical world, and, you know, within a very small piece of land you could find centipedes and worms and ants and butterflies and grass, and I was just absolutely fascinated with this, and from a really, really early age I just wanted to work with that creativity, and so essentially really what I’ve done over the years has been to build a pathway that enables me to do that as a living, and essentially what I’m doing in terms of living architecture is literally tapping into the creative forces of the natural world as, let’s call it, a technology, as a direct technology, not as a mediated set of ideas of aesthetics or physical principles, but actually using the stuff that surrounds us to shape our environment, and we’ve been doing that for a very, very long time but I wanted to take a direct approach, as if we could stick our hands into the soil and actually see what the metabolic power, the chemical power that exists within the everyday stuff around us, can actually do.
7:09 You said we’ve been doing that for a long time. What’s the first example of humans doing that, actually, on Phys.org today, which is a site that I dedicate my time to. It’s a physics and chemistry update site. And today they were describing the oldest civilization, 7,500 years old, was actually gardening and bringing shells and seaweeds to actually create little crops, and it was a time before we historically think that people started to garden. So essentially, as humans, we’ve been manipulating our environment as long as documented history reveals.
7:49 I guess animals have done that too as well, right? But to lesser extent. Yeah. One of the, the guys I was talking to recently, his name’s, he’s a student, a PhD student at World holay. He’s actually working with howler monkeys, who design their own highways in the trees, and they have a form of horticulture, so he’s working with, with people in, on one of the islands in Lake Nicaragua, to work with the howler monkeys to create a structure that is compatible both with human life, because the howler monkeys don’t come down from the trees, and also with monkey life, so as a symbiosis that isn’t a niche career.
8:30 I don’t know what it is. Right? Wow, that’s insane. Wow, and what what are you most well known for? I mean, kind of what concept do people think of when they think of you, of you.
8:40 Well, I, I guess the future Venice project is the one that has been on TED, I guess, and that’s the idea that we could grow an artificial limestone reef underneath the city as a way of sustainably reclaiming it. It’s not supposed to be a total solution. Essentially, what it’s doing is creating a context for an environmental technology It’s really a stage in which we can start talking about the potential of programmable matter, something that we’d probably call natural computing.
9:13 Natural computing is a really neat idea. I mean, I think this is the alternative technology to machines, and it’s a term that was coined after an interest in the computational power of the natural world, and essentially it’s a whole set of unconventional computing practices that look at the ability of chemistry, for example, to make decisions, and essentially, you know, if we, if chemistry can make decisions, what kind of uses can we put that to? So future Venice became a challenge as a way of thinking, well, if we could actually give Venice the ability to fight in the struggle for survival itself.
9:52 What could it, what could it achieve? Because it’s sinking, right? It’s, it’s sinking. It’s being drowned There’s geology. It’s complex, you know.
10:01 So there are a number of different factors involved, and so that if you think of any one particular solution, it obviously is going to cause knock-on solutions, knock-on problems down the way So essentially, this is addressing one of the problems, which is to literally take the stilettos off Venice, because it stands on these wood piles. The wood piles are driven into the clay, and they go on top of, this is Venice and Italy, right? By the Adriatic Sea.
10:24 That’s right. And if, if we take those stilettos off and we put platform boots on, then it just stops it sinking so fast. Wow. Rachel, my main question for you today, which is I’m sure one you asked many times is, you speak of nature having computational power. Do you think that the systems we see, and this computational power that we see, denotes intelligence, or do you think it’s all just a random Oh, that’s, it’s a very interesting idea.
10:51 I mean, I think that the idea of intelligence as being separate from matter is one of the things that happens when we think in terms of, you know, Enlightenment thinking. In other words, you think of René Descartes, he was a philosopher who described the physical world or the human body as being separate from an ephemeral substance, a soul, a mind. You know, intelligence, I mean, anything that’s not material that we can’t measure. And so I think that this idea of whether matter possesses or does not possess this ephemeral thing comes from a traditional modernist Enlightenment way of thinking about the natural world.
11:30 So in some ways, it obviously depends what you mean by intelligence, but, and also there’s a risk of anthropomorphizing, you know, because of the current way that we think about the world. So does matter think? Well, matter can make decisions. I mean, so the droplets I work with, you put them in a dish and you add some chemicals, and those droplets can make their way towards those chemicals, you know. It’s a very simple physical process.
11:57 It’s now supposed to be a decision if it can make a decision between two different chemicals. But we’ve not demonstrated that there’s anything more sophisticated than a physical reflex, although you could answer. I mean, so some determinists, for example, neo-Darwinists, essentially say that everything you do is in your genetic program, so there is no free will, so that in some ways those people believe we don’t make any decisions, any any way. So whether a droplet is making a decision about whether to move or not also becomes, you know, philosophically quite problematic.
12:35 Protocells that you’re talking about? That’s right. Yes, these, these little, just quickly, could you describe what they do for people that don’t understand? Yeah, so, so protocells, I mean, the definition of protocells is controversial. Okay, so eminent scientists from Los Alamos, have coined a term for protocells, which is an artificial cell, in other words, one that has a container, metabolism, and information, and it can self-propagate.
13:01 I don’t use protocell in that context. For me, proto means like before or primary cell, obviously, a cell. So I think of them as being the things that happen before we have a proper biological cell. And so these smart droplets, they’re not alive because they don’t possess any DNA. They haven’t really got a centralized program that we tend to associate with biology or life.
13:25 And yet they have this general natural computing ability that allows them to work in very lifelike ways, so they can move around their environment. They can sense it. They can work with other little droplets or protocells, and they can even make substances, so you can actually get very complex interactions out of very simple things that are literally just made of oil, water, and alkali, so you’ve really got about three or four different substances involved, so that they’re incredibly simple.
13:54 They also don’t occur naturally, although it is said and the origins of life theories propose that these kinds of agents were around in, you know, the black vents in the deep sea, in the abyss, and, you know, the intense heat complexifies molecules, and so it produces, you know, the fats, and of course they also have alkali, and so the fat and the alkali makes a kind of soap. But this is essentially, the molecular relationship that’s driving all this. Essentially, they don’t need external energy like a machine does.
14:29 They have an internal energy source, which is their chemistry. Were these precursors to single-cell organisms? I think scientifically we would never say that, but they are essentially a model system that starts showing us just how dynamic and complex chemical interactions can be. You’re always specific to say that this is not have DNA and this is not biology. Is that because that’s not your field?
14:51 You want to just focus on something that’s not quote unquote living, or is that something you’re open-minded to, if it can be a solution to, say, saving Denness? Well, I think I, I don’t, black question, right? Well, I don’t think we actually need it to be biological. I mean, so so biology has, we have a very particular and culturally and scientifically defined idea of what life is, and so the ones that they’re using at Los Alamos, for example, is based on this chemoton model, which is invented by an Hungarian called Tibor Gánti, and essentially he said you need a metabolism, you need a container, and you need, need some information for it to be capable of, of, of being a life.
15:33 And biology is actually much more complex than that. I mean, that chemoton model is really like the, the simplest possible set of rules that you could have to produce a, a living thing. And biology is, is way, way, way more complex than that. It’s got DNA, it’s got protein factories, you know, it’s got, you know, regulatory mechanisms. It can reproduce, so for something to be biological, I mean, I mean, they’re obviously advantages, so things like being able to make more of itself is something that biology does well, but in terms of a technology, you know, you do, you really need something that’s that complex?
16:11 Do you actually really want something that’s going to self-replicate, or do you actually want mutate, or mutate, or do you want actually something that’s just simple enough for you to be able to guide its movement just by feeding it, you know, by, you know, taking away some resources or just adding more of the, of the, of the agent. So in some ways that these protocells exist between what we might think of as being synthetic biology, the design and engineering of things that are already alive, and that we can shape through technology, and actually exist between, you know, something like setting concrete. Setting concrete is fascinating.
16:47 It’s like a chemical garden, you know, until it sets and becomes a geometric blob. It’s full of wriggling tubes that crawl over each other and knit together. It’s a fascinating concrete. Itself, concrete is fascinating until it sets. The moment it sets, it just turns into these, now, densely packed crystals, but until that point it’s, it’s, you know, it’s squirming around like worms.
17:10 So essentially these protocells existed somewhere in between, you know, squirming tubes and a a biological system, and much more towards the squirming tubes than the biology. That’s interesting. Wow, you know, you were, you talk about these, these people talk about carbon neutral all the time, carbon neutral, and I know you’ve talked about buildings being carbon negative, which is quite a crazy concept, but your research is really popular these days because people want to hear these ideas.
17:36 I would guess 30 years ago it wouldn’t be as popular, and I was just wondering how how you’re finding that people are relating to your research these days? I, I think with the whole environmental movement, I mean, so I think I think environmentalism gave us sustainability, and sustainability doesn’t really come from environmentalism. It comes from industry, and I think that they challenge that environmentalists have is that, you know, if you look at the biggest advocates of sustainability, they’re not people who really care about plants and trees and grass and, you know, resource-based economies.
18:12 They’re industrialists keeping the capitalist model turning with enough resources to fuel the machine. That’s right. So when you’ve got, you know, big construction industries saying that they’re sustainable, and when just about every advertising agency and every business model has a word sustainability somewhere in its, you know, first sentence, then you start to realize that what we’ve actually done is mechanized nature. So in other words, we do the thing that Martin Heidegger hated, which was we turned nature into a standing resource.
18:46 We turned it into a product that we can consume, and by doing that we just, we’re just feeding an industrial machine. Now we may be more efficient at the feeding. We may have developed some different aesthetics, but we’re not changing the fundamental paradigm that’s underpinning human development, you know, in other words, a parasitic relationship with nature. Well, we’re damaging it. Yeah, we, you know, in some ways, you know, a parasite has a great interest in not damaging its host.
19:14 So essentially our paradigms, even if we’re on the slow route rather than the fast route towards environmental destruction, sustainability still feeds into, you know, the modernist idea. I mean, so, you know, that the ideas that that that machines are less damaging to the environment rather than they actually enrich qualities like fertility. I mean, you know, the soils in a city are incredibly poor. They don’t have any B. They have, you know, very few bacteria in them if you dug something into the soil, say for example when I was five, I, I dug my dad’s, back to the master, master keys down into the soil, okay, and I believed I would come up with a key tree, you know, my dad whooped my ass, and we never found the keys again, and I was disappointed not to see a little tree growing with keys all over it, but I realized, you know, years later that was actually right.
20:08 Those keys would have been denatured by the soil, the organisms in the soil. They’d have been eaten by my friends the worms and the beetles, and they would have been suck tuppers, salts, by the grass, and, you know, and some little germinating tree bean would have taken roots and is now probably the key tree that I was looking for. Mhm. but if you did that in the city and dug a little hole and put your keys in them and you know you dab whoop your ass, you’d probably find them again, and, you know, they’d be very untouched because the soil is not very rich in bacteria.
20:41 So so we’ve actually reduced the fertility of the, of the soil that we build our buildings on, and in some ways we’ve got a completely different value system. We’re just valuing geometry, you know, horizontal geometry, you know, not the creative power that’s a resource there that can, say for example, transform our waste, you know, that can produce green plants that will enrich the oxygen, and fix, you know, dirty particles that are floating around in the atmosphere. You say horizontal geometry.
21:12 You mean like the rainforest is over here and this is over here? I mean, that when we build a building, you know, we value it in terms of its square footage, okay, not what, not the whole system. No, we’re not, you know, valuing it for the amount of sunlight hitting it. You know, we’re not, you know, offering its creative potential, you know, other than in terms of a resource that we can sell as a square of geometry that we put a bit of concrete on and kill it.
21:37 You know, Rachel, I watched a movie the other day, Back to the Future 2, and I was really disappointed, because we’ve reached, I think it’s set in 2015 or maybe 2013, and we’ve pretty much reached that era, and there’s no flying cars, and there’s no hoverboards, and a bunch of things that are depicted in there. And I got to thinking, I mean, your work, it’s quite futuristic. You know, the idea of a living building that can be carbon negative, as Brian mentioned, or can repair itself, or use these these paradigms that are found in nature.
22:12 How realistic is the first question, and secondly, how far away are we from things like that? When will the day come where we’ll find these structures in our cities, and do you think that day will ever come? These structures already exist, you know, for example, you know, in societies where there is a very fertile landscape, so the living trees of Cherrapunji, you know, the native people, they knit. I mean, it’s a practice that’s handed down in between generations.
22:42 You know, they knit together these rope bridges from living roots that can span gullies that are 30 m across, and when the monsoons come and there’s torrential water, the trees stay standing, whereas a mechanistic bridge wouldn’t. What needs to change, I think, is the hardest thing is our mindset. You know, we’re living in an urban condition, and the unmediated properties of biology are not suited to the lifestyle that we expect. Also, we’re very comfortable with machines, you know, and we’re comfortable with them right now because we’re still not really suffering from the damage of a monoculture of technology.
23:28 I mean, and essentially that’s my beef. It’s not, I don’t really have a fundamental problem with machines, except that it’s the only thing that we can do, and we really need to expand our technological skill set. So what do we need to do to do that? I think first of all we need to think differently. I think that these natural computers are a 21st century technology so for the last 300 years we’ve been developing a technology, one technology, which is based on machines.
23:54 Okay, we’ve got a lot of species of them, but essentially they all eat the same thing. They all eat the fossil fuels, you know, they all work in a particular way, and they all produce the same kind of poisons, and that’s beginning to tell, particularly as we’ve amplified the damage through industrial processes. So natural computing essentially requires first of all a different way of thinking and it requires a different infrastructure, but that’s interesting, because it’s the same infrastructure that we share.
24:22 So, let’s call them elemental infrastructures. So we need environments that are rich with water, air, heat, you know, and earth, because those are the conditions in which chemistry and biology thrive. And then after these infrastructures, then we need to start thinking about which systems we can program using those kinds of things. So for example, future Venice works because Venice is situated in water. If it didn’t have a watery infrastructure, if we did it in Vienna, it would be a different challenge altogether, because we’d have to develop almost like a treelike water system to go through the building wall to try and capture water and then create a condition in which these, you know, droplets can start to deposit materials.
25:04 So, so, so, so there are a number of different things that we need to do in order to develop these technologies, but I don’t think that we need to do it in, you know, huge expanses of city. I think you could do it as details of buildings, you know, small. I think, you know, the algae technology is starting to talk about those kinds of environments. My concern with it is that it will be swallowed up as a soft component within machine thinking, so that you’re just going to fog an algae to death just because you’re looking at its, you know, the efficiency of it producing the fuel, rather than actually engaging with it to do all kinds of different things, you know, maybe like filter out light rays, you know, during a very bright times during the day, or maybe it could dance to the music on your iPod, you know, because these are, you know, little particles that exist within water.
25:52 Brian, as the resident capitalist industrialist, what is, what are your thoughts, scientist? I’m worried about Venice, to be honest, because I think Nick has a good point. I think these are fantastic ideas, and I’m sure they have some practicality, but in 50 years or 100 years Venice will be in worse shape, and also knowing the bureaucracy of the Italian government to allow them to touch such a sacred site, these are great ideas, but will they ever be practiced?
26:16 I, I think that’s, I mean, again, I think that is really to do with changing our mindset. I mean, so for example, the Italian government got the Moses gates right now. The concern with the Moses gates, I mean, essentially I think of them as being giant robotic King Canute. 78 of them to hold back the tide. This is a lot like the barrier on the Thames that kind of theory that’s right, yes, right, it’s like the plan to block off the lagoon when the flooding comes, separate it from the Adriatic Sea, and which puts all sorts of bells and whistles off environmentalists, you know, there’s, did one of our guests mention this?
26:49 There was a Dutch guy who had an alien encounter, and this alien race said where they come from their religion is efficiency, and I’m just thinking you would do very well on that planet, if you’re not already from that planet, because that’s, that’s nature, right? Nature is the most efficient thing. I think efficiency is a very odd way to judge nature. I mean, nature works in, has a different set of principles, so I think the unique things that machines don’t do, think efficiency is a very mechanical way of thinking about the way that things work I’d say robustness, flexibility, adaptability, you know, qualities that we really can’t measure very well.
27:28 So for example, the, the little droplets that I work with, you know, you can give them all kinds of assaults, and they’ll, they’ll come back, they’ll, they’ll reassemble, and, you know, that they are capable of surprising you. You know, you, there’s, you when these ecological technologies, when these natural computers reach tipping points, and we don’t understand the process, because essentially what we’ve got is a system that works in parallel, but it’s coupled to its delivery system. So unlike, say for example, a computer which needs a translator for whatever computation is going on, to then turn it into a material thing.
28:06 In a natural computer, the information and the output are coupled, and so essentially you can see these droplets all of a sudden undergoing some kind of change, because they’ve reached a tipping point in the system, and that’s something that we’ll need to study a lot more. Interesting, but in terms of the practicality, I think it’s going to depend on one, people’s, you know, general value system. I mean, how, how important does the idea of working with environmental conditions, you know, how important does that become in the, in over the next century?
28:36 You know, how successful are the Moses gates going to be? Can you talk more about the Moses gates, and what’s going on? And yeah, I mean, so they should open in 2014. That’s that’s what I’ve heard. Are they building them?
28:45 Oh yeah, you can see the sles now. You can see these, you know, I mean, it looks like Finn McCool and Benandonner just had another great big fight. They’re the two, you know, the Irish and Scottish giants that, legend says, had the big, you know, bust-up between the Irish Sea and Scotland, and they created the Giant’s Causeway. So essentially, you know, it looks like these guys have been holidaying in Venice. They’ve got these great big constructions and the great big machines, and you’re starting to see all these, you know, materials being deposited in the lagoon, and, yeah, so they’re due for opening in 2014, and I I think it’s actually going to be exciting and phenomenal.
29:22 Okay, but obviously, you know, environmentally, the idea of backlogging the outflow of the entire Po Delta, which is the river that feeds the region of Venice, is going to create some difficulties in the lagoon ecology. Now, now the lagoon ecology may be robust enough to survive that kind of assault, or it may scream, and you, we may see a lot of loss of ecological systems, and, and actually the marine wildlife around the Po Delta is actually very rich. Venice has got a very rich marine ecology.
29:57 It’s actually got its own species of nasty little mosquito, called the tiger mosquito. If you ever come across one of those, run, they’ll get through your leather jacket. Seen one of those? Oh no, you don’t. They sneak up on you in kind of swampy over there.
30:10 You know, you mentioned resource-based economy earlier, and you know, we’ve had Jacque Fresco sitting in that seat, and we had a good discussion about him, and tons of our fans wanted to know what you think of the Venus Project, because it doesn’t sound like it’s exactly what you’re talking about, but they do build their structures to kind of interact with the environment. So what are your thoughts? I, I, I agree with the value system of a resource-based economy.
30:32 Essentially, where I differ is that I wouldn’t use a modernist approach, and so essentially, you know, the Venus Project, in terms of its aesthetics and its dedication to mechanical technologies, is essentially a modernist idea. And so, you know, the, paradigm that I work with comes from ecological technologies, natural computing. It doesn’t really depend on machines. It’s actually much more about shaping the material environment that we’re in, by actually using the computational power, you know, the power of the soil, as the technology that creates the desired effects.
31:11 Rachel, let’s say, your ideas become generally accepted, and they influence the next generation of architecture and city planning. What would, how would you describe the ideal, perfect city according to your views? In 200 years’ time, what would it look like? How would it work? It wouldn’t be an aesthetic.
31:33 Okay. But I imagine the idea of soft cities, in other words, the city becomes a site for the production of soil, which increases the fertility of the land. One of the big problems we’re going to have is, you know, the ability to feed people. And if you think about the amount of waste that we produce within cities, you know, we’re just flushing it down into the oceans and creating all kinds of poisons. But what if our actual homes could, you know, produce a composting system within the walls?
32:03 You wouldn’t have to see it. We wouldn’t have to live in it, and, you know, we actually all make a product that is a kind of rich soil, because we have our own bacteria and fungi that we never really see, but they they live in a, you know, they live alongside us. They’re doing their thing. They’re producing heat from all their metabolism, so maybe they could be doing underfloor heating. You’d control that by ventilating the air underneath the floor, so if you produce a lot of oxygen, they produce a lot of heat.
32:32 If you shut off the oxygen and let them simmer, then it reduces the heat. So, so, and the other thing is, I think that with these, you know, if we can actually transform rather than just consume, we’re starting to become producers rather than consumers. So if every home is actually producing something rather than just simply being aide of consumption, we’re actually starting to, I guess, reclaiming a kind of economics, and I don’t, don’t mean a centralized economics.
32:59 I, I think again, you know, in terms of technologies, I like to see a diversity of approaches, so I’m not against machines. I’m not against modernism. I’m, I’m trying to find, you know, an alternative paradigm that can help us solve problems in different ways where it’s appropriate, but I think a diversity of forms of economies, so that whether that’s a knowledge economy, whether it’s actually being able to produce things locally, so maybe somebody is, you know, developing a community garden, and you know that if you bring your soil along, you’ve got you know, this opportunity to either grow plants, or, you, maybe it’s something that you can sell in in other ways, but essentially the idea is to produce, and also enriching the fertility of the planet.
33:46 I mean, there’s a fantastic book, if you’ve not read it. It’s, William Bryant Logan’s Dirt. I mean, it’s, it sounds like it should be a really dull read, but it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s poet, similar type topics he’s talking about. He, and he’s much more of a traditional environmentalist than than I am.
34:02 I mean, you know, I, I, I really like my technology. It’s just a very particular kind, and I guess his technology is soil itself. And so you know, he talks about, you know, the transformative properties of soil. I mean, he actually comes up with quite a lot of biblical references. One, is one, is one, is a really beautiful one about the burning bush, and he’s he’s asking, you know, why did God send a burning bush, and he comes to the conclusion that actually he’s telling him about metabolism, something that is burned but does not, is not consumed by the burning.
34:36 Oros was just really f***ing hard. Maybe I’ll, Dr, my, you talk about technology and, and everyone, and some of our fans asked you what you thought about the singularity, which can be described in a lot of ways, but from what I understand it’s kind of like us kind of merging with technology, I guess, in the future. I was wondering if you could describe singularity and how you feel about it. Yeah, I think singularity is almost the logical conclusion of Cartesian thinking, so if you extract the soul and all the ephemeral bits, you’re left with a mechanical, geometric thing.
35:05 Of us, you mean, of us? And essentially it’s, it’s almost like a wish fulfillment, therefore the perfect body is, is one that is effectively mechanical. So, it’s, it was, it was interesting. Me, I saw Ray Kurzweil’s film, you know, The Singularity Is Near, the premiere in London which was at the Science Museum. And yeah, it was, it was a very touching film.
35:29 But I, you know, you can’t help going away that the thinking that, you know, Ray Kurzweil has a vendetta against death. You know, he’s, very upset that his father passed away. And, you know, the idea of becoming, you know, more, machinelike almost seems like an emotional defense against, you know, the decay of the flesh. And so in some ways it’s a kind of denial of being made of biological matter. So God damn, how smart is this lady, man?
35:59 Wow. But, but I mean, you, I think it’s just, it’s just a model of, of a, of a way of thinking that’s, that’s being literalized, through, you know, the idea that, you know, we can upload our bodies, you know, escape our souls, some or, I mean, I believe that, you know, material and, the ephemeral are entangled. You know, you can’t extract one and just leave the other. And I mean, that’s the image of Frankenstein. That’s what Mary Shelley was saying: you can’t just take a soul out, stitch your body together, put great big electrical current, you can call it mind, you can call it you know, soul, whatever, you know, charge it up, and off it goes.
36:35 We end up, you know, thinking like necromongers, you know, we kill everything, and then we think we’re really great, ’cause we animated again with a dirty great big charge of electricity. Wo, look at that. You know, but, you know, these, these metals that, that are around us, you know, so Ruskin was really interested in how beautiful metals were before they were processed into pig iron. He talks about the greens and the browns of iron that he sees in oxides, you know, in the landscape.
37:00 And of course, you know, Ruskin is not only a hopeless romantic, but, you know, he’s, is also very anti, in, you know, in industry, but he has, has a point about, you know, the complexity of the structures that, you know, we then reduce through this, through this mechanical process. And, you know, I think it’s very, we need to be aware of the actual philosophy that we’re subscribing to. And so for me, the singularity is a kind of philosophy. It’s not really well critiqued there, you know.
37:30 There aren’t people that are critiquing the singularity, you know, in a very critical cultural way. It’s either something you believe in or you don’t. I mean, the singularity could be viewed in another way. You could say that instead of us fusing with technology at some point in the distant future, or technology becoming self-aware, which is another definition of it, we might actually fuse with nature again, or be able to, incorporate our lifestyles in our cities back into the natural world.
38:00 I mean, that might be a nicer way to look at the singularity. I think there are all kinds of different singularities. Ray Kurzweil’s made a particular one very popular. I mean, and essentially the singularity is the idea. I mean, so again, the actual idea of a singularity comes from a Cartesian way of thinking, which is it’s deterministic.
38:18 In other words, so because we see ourselves as geometry, we can describe ourselves mathematically. We call these mathematical principles law. We use those to predict a point in the future, okay, and when we can’t see beyond that extrapolation, we say that’s a singularity, because we can’t, you know, our calculation breaks down, therefore anything can happen. So the alternative that is actually using systems theory. This is, you know, where mathematics starts to surprise you with paradoxes and things like that.
38:47 And so essentially, you know, the element of surprise is inherent to your encounters in some ways. There’s a, there’s a fantastic physicist, wish I wish I’d met him whilst he was alive, IIA pin, if you’ve not, CH theory. Yeah, so so you know, so so he says that time is actually a creative force. It’s not just this, you know, not an elemental quality. It’s actually a creative force that stops things from being reversible, and, and the, it’s the irreversibility of things that actually is where creative opportunities lie.
39:20 But, you know, so there’s a downside in that is you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. The upside is that you’re empowered, because you can actually co-construct your future by bringing things together. You’re actually empowered to do that, and it’s a creative process, so that’s the trade-off. So singularity says these things are going to happen. They’re already fixed.
39:39 Doesn’t matter what you do, it’s going to happen anyway. I prefer the other approach. It’s coming from a different set of mathematics and a different view of what the future is, and I don’t really believe in a future. I kind of believe in an unevenly distributed present, you know, that you can, you know, reappropriate resources and try and create opportunities that don’t exist in places, because you have, you know, a desire to do something new. You may not know exactly what it is, but actually attempting that impossible, attempting the unknown, is actually a creative process, and and, and again, you know, I think it’s a different way of thinking for 21st century, you know, science, technology, culture, and, and I think what we really need to, know, find ways of sharing stories that are easy to understand about these things, because we’re really going to need to believe in each other and to be able to deal with the unknown in this coming century.
40:34 You know, when we’ve got things like, you know, Katrina and Sandy and the Japanese tsunamis, you know, you H in a secular world, how do we deal with that uncertainty? Because that’s not an easy thing. There are, there are certain individuals who believe, from an environmental point of view, that we have already crossed the Rubicon, and that ecological disaster is imminent. We can’t even reverse the process, even if we wanted to. What are your thoughts on that?
41:00 We’ve had a number of ecological disasters throughout the planet. Again, Phys.org was identifying the oldest life forms, Existing about 3.5 billion years ago, that’s Shark Bay, Australia. I really want to go there, and I’m going to make sure I wear, because I think that the rocks are actually very rough, so I’m going to make sure I wear flipflops when I do that. But, you know, so, so, so these, you know, life has been extinguished many times. I mean, and you know, someone like Paul Davies, who’s a physicist, says you know that right at the origins of life, you know, the meteor bombardment, you know, killed off life many, many, many times.
41:38 Now, you know, eventually he gets to a threshold where, you know, the universe stops bombarding the hell out of planet Earth, and life has got this, this, this thing about it. It wants to survive. Now, whether, you know, so, who was it? It was, E.O. Wilson, round about the 1970s, is saying, you know, we’re in the great, you know, the age of this, the sixth great extinction.
42:00 Bad news is it’s happening. Good news is, 10 million years, it’ll be over. So what survives after, you know, 10 million years, you know, whether that’s something that’s going to be calling itself, s human and yet may, you know, superficially look very different from ourselves today, or whether humans are no longer there. I mean, I don’t, I’m not fatalistic about it. I just think that we know we are in a period of change.
42:25 We need to deal with it. I don’t think we can stop it from happening, and that’s why I think that we need a variety of strategies, not just the same old thinking processes and the same technologies, you know, to to to keep on flogging a planet that’s really suffering at the moment. I think we should get over our own extinction possibility. Well, let it go, Nick. Well, I mean, I, I want us to survive too, you know, and I think there’s also a false dichotomy between environmentalism and humanism.
42:55 I think if you do get a collapse of technology with nature, where the two things are very similar, then the human interest and the, you know, the planetary interest are, you know, very much entangled. So I, you know, I think at the moment they’re different sets of politics. But again, you know, I’d like to, you know, I’d like to see ideas, you know, working together with ideas of new technologies that are inherently, I guess, I guess the word I’m using is, you know, fertile.
43:27 You know, we want stuff that’s life promoting. We want stuff that’s regenerative. We need stuff like soil to reclaim some of the, I guess, the scattering of resources that we’ve, and the kind of negative transformations that we’ve made over the last, certainly, 150 years. It’s nice. I like to hear this optimism we got a lot of doom and gloom people here, so I call it optimism.
43:51 I mean, speaking of optimism, if you look out to the next 10 years or 20 years, what are you optimistic about, and what concerns you? You know, what, yeah, just that simply. I think the thing that concerns me most is people, you know, the hardest thing that to do is to change the way that we think. The optimism I have is in the kids, and I don’t mean that flippantly. You know, I’ve been working with some young folks, you know, doing it over the internet, with a couple of young American boys, are these 20s or teens?
44:24 Teens. They get younger every year. Fantastic, fantastic. You know, and the thing is that you know, we get these questions, you know, you’re sitting on a panel and someone says, you know, so how are we going to do this change? And I think, you know, our peer group is over, and we’re going to still do the same things, but, and it’s not and we’re not going to change even if we have a massive great disaster.
44:44 We’re still going to do the same things because that’s what we know. But what we will get are the next generations that are going to go, oh my God, you know, you have a crazy value system, your technology sucks, and we’re going to do things differently. We’re not going to live in an age of austerity, hang it. We’re going to actually, you know, reclaim our lives. You know, I think that the almost like the patronizing lines that are being said to young people by you know, well-meaning politicians and environmentalists, that you know, they’ve got to stop almost breathing before they can deserve a future.
45:21 You know, I think that’s what’s going to, you know, really ignite change. You know, young people today have to live a life, and they need to, it needs to be enriched. It needs to be creative. It needs to be fulfilling. They need to believe in it, and I don’t think that they can believe in this system, particularly as we’re so reluctant to really change anything about it.
45:44 I mean, currently, right now, you know, the biggest thing that governments are thinking is we’ve got to save business, like, you know, all our cities. The future of our cities has been handed over to God damn business, business. I mean, IBM Smarter Planet, you know, H up Packard’s notion of an Internet of Things. I mean, where’s the visionary thinking? Where’s the leadership that’s coming from government?
46:06 You know, if we’re going to hand over the future of the planet to business, we are definitely doomed. You know, and so, and I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way, because obviously businesses are a particular kind of thing, and they need to make money, but I think that we, you know, really need to find different ways of imagining and developing futures for ourselves, and one of the things I’m doing, I mean, I, I, I tend to engage in impossible pro projects, poss projects, that right now seem like a crazy idea, and I’m never going to do it, and in some ways, I, you know, the projects that I’m, I’m, I’m working on, I’ll probably not live to see whether I was right or wrong. So that’s, that’s fine by me, but I’m, I’m interested in the adventure.
46:53 And so other than the, the future Venice project, again, you know, like you say, I mean, it is going to be a challenge. It’s going to depend on an awful lot of contingencies, you know, what the people of Italy think, whether or not the Moses gates are a big success, whether or not Titin Atel is an Italian group of researchers that are thinking of reinflating Venice’s aquifers to raise the city anthropogenically over a period of 10 years. If that happens they’ll probably need the protocell technology, because actually it could coat the wooden posts and stop them rotting when they’re exposed to the air.
47:25 That would be a big problem if that goes ahead. So there are a lot of contingencies. I, I, I don’t think it’s a complete no. This is never going to happen, and I don’t think it’s, oh yeah, it’s definitely going to happen, but essentially it’s a resource. So the other project that I’m working on is called pany, and this is part of the, Icarus Interstellar group’s work with the DARPA-funded 100-year Starship project.
47:46 Now that is an initiative. What is that? I’m so glad I’m sober, so that is an initiative to construct a crude interstellar ship in 100 years. And so pany is the, des, is such thing as a crude interstellar ship? Yeah, crude, C-I-E-W-D, crude woman.
48:06 Yeah, man and woman, so within 100 years. And so pany is about designing a natural computer, in other words, another form of nature to support the interstellar crew in the 100-year Starship project, because they couldn’t bring supplies with them. It would have to be something. Well, essentially you’d need something that would respond to the changes within the, essentially, it’s a biosphere, but, you know, learning lessons from things like Biosphere 2, which pretty much got swallowed by cockroaches and internal difficulties.
48:41 This was in Arizona, right? Yeah. So, so just trying to rethink a strategy, you know, where upon, you know, everything is recycled, and not trying to work with, say for example, you know, plants, but actually what could we actually grow from, you know, the chemical components? You know, how do we start thinking about that? What infrastructures do we need?
49:03 You know, what is the kind of conditions in which such a thing may be possible? Again, you know, I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but, you know, I’m working with an incredible group of technologists, some of whom work with natural computing, so they work with chemical computing, they work with slime molds, they work with algae. You know, they work with traditional engineering technologies, but essentially it’s a mashup, and it’s a kind of blue-sky thinking.
49:29 Thinking beyond, you know, what the market actually wants, and thinking about what can be possible if we stretch our imaginations and actually just start to play with ideas and have fun about it. I think one of the problems with the way that research is funded, and the way that new ideas come about, tends to be a pot of money, you know, like X Prize money, so you have to design the spacecraft that does these particular things, so everybody goes running for a very particular kind of output, and so the output’s already set before you even engage in the adventure. And so I guess, you know, what I like to do in places like pany is bring people together who are very exciting in terms of the way that they think, you know, so it’s designers as well as technologists.
50:09 You know, so we have people like Koert van Mensvoort, who works with something called Next Nature. Dutch, the Dutch are kind of got crazy ideas. I love the Dutch. So you know, those kinds of ideas brought together with, you know, technologists who are wondering what the hell to do with these, you know, incredible strange computers, you know, put them all together in a room, and, and something happens. You may not know exactly what it is.
50:32 You’ve got a got a few principles that you want to test out, and essentially those kinds of innovation forums, I don’t like the word innovation, but I mean, they’re, they’re that it’s just having fun, really, with ideas and making stuff. So you, you like the big ideas, the one that what you’ll never actually see realized, maybe. Okay, maybe I will see them realized. I mean, and the thing is, you know, I, I take it seriously, because I think it’s serious.
50:58 But that doesn’t stop me really enjoying what I want to do, because like I say, I’m doing what I wanted to do when I’m five. What’s a typical week for you? That’s what I want to know. I mean, I can’t tell if you’re in the lab, or if you’re not, or if you’re at a TED talk, because let’s be honest, I think you’re talking is probably just as important as you researching it, isn’t it? Yeah, so, so one of the most important things I do is actually build teams of people that can work together, and it’s really important to get the right kind of person and build proper relationships with people, not just, you know, just say oh, I’ve got, you know, money here and you’ll do this, but actually get people excited about trying out new ideas, and in some ways, you know, I create an environment where people can play without losing reputations, because it’s an experiment, and all of these things are experiments.
51:46 We don’t know what the outcomes are, and we produce pictures and models and, you know, tell stories, have ideas, you know, and do it again. And so essentially it’s community building is a big thing, so I’ll spend a good part of my week making sure that I’m communicating, writing, you know, raising money for things, and just making sure that everybody’s still on board and understands where we are at certain points in different projects. And another part of the week I’ll spend teaching.
52:19 So I have students at the School of Architecture, Design and Construction at the University of Greenwich, and I really enjoy that, because again, you know, the projects that we ask the students to engage in are all the philosophy of architecture, you know. So we ask them to go beyond, you know, the production of a geometric shape and its procurement, and actually start thinking about, you know, other ideas to do with, you know, the kinds of materials that you’d use, the kinds of experiences that you’d have, you know, the kinds of clients who might be interested in these kinds of things. So you get, you know, engagement with poetry, like you know, Keats in Venice, or, you know, giant cathedrals that, you know, play with light, and, you know, astrophysics, you know, these kinds of ideas, you know, become embodied in the pro projects, simply because we want to equip the students with the tools for thinking when they come across something new in their practice.
53:18 I mean, so, okay, I mean, it may seem, you know, indulgent from the outside world, you know, why are you doing these extreme thought experiments? But essentially, if you don’t train the thought muscles, you know, you come across a project and you simply won’t know how to to deal with it. One, and secondly, you won’t really use new technologies appropriately, and particularly for young architects, you know, if if Moore’s law stays true, and we have these, you know, exponential increases in the power of mechanical technologies and digital technologies, then, you know, how do they, how do they start to understand what this actually means for their for their practice?
53:54 So that’s why we do that. And then the rest of my week I’ll probably spend writing, and I’ll take about three or four periods a year of two to 3 weeks, working in a lab in Denmark with my chemistry supervisor, Martin Hanczyc, who, you know, designed a lot of these smart droplet systems, or going to do field work in Venice, working along the canals and documenting the actual natural mineral mineralization that’s going on in the canals there. So if you actually walk along the canals, you’ll see that the biology is already doing this process, and so the idea for the droplets or the protocells is that they coordinate with the marine environment, so they co-construct an architecture that is relevant to the organisms and the city inhabitants.
54:46 So yeah, it’s varied, so you, so you like your lab work and your field work. I love it. I, I, I start starving for hands-on when I do too much. That’s good. That gives you Street crb, doesn’t it?
55:00 It’s, it’s where I think it’s where you actually, you know, you delve into a different world. I mean, I completely lose myself in experiments. You will not see me whilst I’m on the microscope at the University of Southern Denmark. I’m sure I cheese a lot of people off in the lab, ’cause I’m there, I’m camped out by the, and I’ll be there till 4:00 in the morning. I’ll be back at 8:00 in the morning.
55:20 It doesn’t matter whether there’s been a snowstorm, with, you know, 1 and a half metres of snow outside. I’m back. You want to see what’s growing? Coach. Yeah, okay, that’s awesome.
55:29 I would say much more there. While we hit these organizations, the last, I wanted to ask people, ask what you thought of the Zeitgeist Movement, and I know when you first got here we were talking about movements and how you, you like and dislike the whole concept of a movement, and so I just wonder what your thoughts are. Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m somebody who, I like free, independent thinking, and for me the thing I resist is dogma. So whether that’s a scientific dogma that says that, you know, creative opportunities and, you know, the incorporation of arts into the development of technology is a nonsense because it doesn’t fit their preconstructed ideas about the world.
56:11 I mean, so whether that’s, you know, a scientific environment, or whether it’s even an environmental movement that says things can only be done one way, I mean, I, I’m I’m, I’m, I’m up for everybody’s creative empowerment, you know, and, you know, I’m as willing as anybody to join in with a good idea. I mean, you know, in our sessions where we, you know, get excited about materials and strange things going on, you know, if somebody has a great idea, we’re all in, you know, and so it’s about, you know, pursuing things that you have a shared common interest in, and I think you need to be very flexible about, you know, what a good idea is, and not just stick to a pre-prescribed pathway, because I think that’s when you start losing touch with actually what is going on around you.
57:02 So when you identify yourself as, I’m a Zeitgeist, you think you shut down yourself from other ideas, if it allows you to think beyond a certain, I mean, if it means that you have a certain set of principles that are very flexible and can respond to changing sets of circumstances, then, I mean, everybody has a kind of internal set of principles, whether it’s your ethics and morals or, you know, cultural conditions. I mean, everybody has a set of rules, but they really need to be flexible, and if they’re not flexible, they start to constrain and damage your way of thinking. You start, you end up with all kinds of obstacles that you aren’t really necessary.
57:40 It seems to me, Brian, that a large part of Rachel’s success is cultivating open-mindedness, you know, and I think that’s something that I know you and I are trying to do. I don’t know how well we’re succeeding, but I know we’re trying to do that, and it’s really nice to see that. I mean, you’ve mentioned it and referenced it so many times in this discussion. It’s like I think she might have a point about, you know, our generation, depending on how old you are at this table, that, you know, maybe to a certain extent, you know, we aren’t capable of changing our minds, because we’ve been flooded all of our lives with all this information, that it’s hard for us to conceive new ideas, and maybe it is, as Whitney Houston would say, I believe the children are few.
58:20 You know, what, I, you sing more in the show. It’s amazing. It will change that need, that whole younger generation to step up, just as we said to our older generation, and said, what are you doing? You guys are acting like idiots. Stop doing this.
58:32 Stu, but, but I mean, I think one of the things that we are, we’re afraid, we’re afraid of what we’re going to lose. I mean, I think, you know, as you get, as you get older, you know, there are all these things that you cling to, which either give you status, they give you security, they give you, you know, some kind of social recognition, and you think, well, hang on, you know, I’ve got here by doing these particular things, and, oh my God, now I’m going to do something completely different. You know, that’s, that’s not an easy thing to do.
58:59 Again, comes back, like, on a hippie spiritual level, it’s a subjugation of the ego, right? It’s like being able to identify what, why you’re holding on to things. I, a lot of people can’t even do that well. See, again, I, I think that that’s what the 21st century kids are going to be doing. I mean, because, you know, there is no job security, there is no job for life.
59:18 You know, there are no deterministic pathways anymore. Every, you know, survival will depend on your flexibility, not just in terms of, you know, your physical ability to survive an environment, but also to think differently. Technologies are going to change all the time. You know, the environment is going to change even faster, you know, and how to, how to stay optimistic, and optimism really is the most important thing, because it means that you’re setting yourself goals and you’re going for it.
59:46 I mean, if, you know, someone said asteroid heading the way to Earth, I’d be going, right? Let’s build pany, and we’d be in the workshop, you know, who knows whether the asteroid will hit or not, but, you know, I’ll be building that spaceship. Have you seen Armageddon with Bruce Willis in p? No, it’s cppy. Yeah, I got it.
1:00:07 It’s actually interesting to talk about the austerity, and maybe the austerity is, is, is something that’s going to facilitate this whole younger generation. Maybe it will be a benefit in getting them to think out of the box, because no longer are these set pathways, what, how you do everything. No, I mean, I must say that I’ve, I’ve been, kind of, curiously surprised how unrebuilt well in some ways I’m, I’m kind of trying to figure out where conformism comes from, because I, I feel that there’s a degree of conformism too much, but maybe, yeah, you might have a point.
1:01:05 You know, who would get on like a house on fire with Rachel? Is Miles Dyer? Yeah, yeah, that’s true. No, we’ve been lucky to have, you know, 20-somethings come on this show with these huge visions, and it strikes me. I’m like, what, when I was 25 I was doing dumb s*** you know and I was never thinking about giving back.
1:01:22 You know, that never even came into my mind until the 30s, and so yeah, I’m continually impressed and optimistic. Well, again, I mean, I’m hoping that this is a reaction to, you know, the incredible conformism and, you know, I guess stability that, you know, was there, you know, late ’80s all through the ’90s, you know, and maybe, you know, I mean, the guy I was talking to about the howler monkeys and the, you know, co-creation of architectures. I mean, he’s 22, so, I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m really excited about what the future holds.
1:01:53 I can tell I am too after this conversation. It’s nice. No, it’s nice, because we get a lot of doom and gloom and a lot of “we’re doing the wrong things” and big businesses crushing us, and it’s nice that you can see it even from a big picture, like, you know, the species have been crushed before, and it might be a new iteration for the future. I don’t know, I’m positive about that. I, I have to ask you one of the thing, because you talk about nature, and obviously a lot of what you do is getting your mind to different levels, and, and, it’s something we talk about on the show, but what do you think, if you do it all that, psychedelics come into any play with the human experience with creativity with any of this stuff, or is this taboo?
1:02:30 If you’re someone in, in the academia, it’s not something that I’m experienced with, put it that way, but I, I I understand the, you know, the doors of perception, and, I saw Timothy Leary speak once at the, I, yeah, he had a, had a, had a collection of disciples that was, a theater deep around him. I think by, by that time he was, he was. It was kind of old. It’s interesting, because we had, we’ve had Simon Powell on here, who, who’s the, the author of the Sosin Solution.
1:03:01 We’ve had Graham Hancock, who talks a lot about his ayahuasca experiences. I think both of them work with you on Earth 2.0, and when they went down to the Venus Project, I think and even a little mention of the whole possibility of psychedelics had Jock and the crew just shut down completely, because they’re restricted by their own dogmas. I don’t know. That’s what I want to know. Do you think these, some of these things are restricted by, yeah, by their own dogmas?
1:03:22 I mean, so you’re talking about that. You know, do, do, do chemicals change perception? I think, I mean, we know that, we know they do, but I’m, is there a place for them? Do you think in this whole path, in this whole that they were talking about, or is that really a completely different issue in your mind? I, I, I think in some ways it’s a different issue.
1:03:41 It’s not something that I would personally do. But I think people reach creativity in many different ways, you know, and I would not be prescriptive one way or the other. I mean, if it’s something that works for people, and you know, obviously, you know, many creatives have have experimented with mind-altering substances. I don’t think you need it by any, it’s interesting, you know, because when it comes to ayahuasca and psilocybin, they also seem to, to give the, the user, when they use these medicines like this whole, this real in-touch sense with nature and the environment.
1:04:16 It almost seems, and since these are naturally occurring substances, it almost seems like this feedback, but there’s also lots of naturally occurring poisons as well. So, so the idea that things are naturally occurring isn’t necessarily, I see your point, an endorsement, but there is a, I mean, but, but I guess these these things do, for some reason, tend to remind humans of a lot of the things that they, I’d be terrified to see what would happen if Rachel took ayahuasca. I mean, she would probably take over the world.
1:04:43 You know, I know what that means. I, I got a couple questions, Rachel, and then we’ll, we’ll wrap up. If you can make a phone call to the 22-year-old, Rachel Armstrong, what advice would you give her? Oh, just keep on going, keep believing in yourself. Okay, that’s a common, that’s a common one, a common one.
1:05:00 And you kind of said it earlier, but what advice do you have to, to people now listening to this in their teens or in their early 20s, they’re thinking about going into academia or not, don’t know what to do with their lives? What do you, what would you say to them? Just enjoy the journey of discovery. Nothing’s fixed. You can change everything.
1:05:16 That’s awesome, and it sounds like also you just not even think outside the box, but sounds like you’re encouraging people just to, just completely, I don’t know, immerse yourself in in something that you really care about, and get really good at it. There is no spare time. Okay, wow, that’s good advice. How do people get a hold of you? Twitter, living architect, living architect.
1:05:42 And what is your history with TED? Will you be giving more talks for TED? TED seems to love you. I love TED. How, how is that relationship formed?
1:05:53 How many TED talks have you given? I’ve given, ooh, four, officially. Only one’s online, only the ones online, but two of them were three-minute talks on main stage, and one was at the TED Salon recently, which was about the metaphysical chicken, about how we would design a chicken. Wow, and what’s up for you this year and next year? This year I’m going to be talking at LIFT, which is LIFT, a technology conference in Geneva, which is in February, and I’ll be finishing my PhD thesis, which should be number one thing.
1:06:35 So right now you’re a phys, are you a, are you a physical doctor? That’s, I’m, I’m a medical doctor. Medical doctor. Wow, I didn’t even know that. Yeah, you know, in time.
1:06:44 And so now you, you want to get, my thesis will be in architecture. Okay, in architecture. Yeah. So I also hope this year to you develop a couple of ideas about ecological human, about the infrastructure, the kind of, the philosophy of of, of, people in the 21st century that are not ma, based on machines, but are based on these ecologies of dynamic chemistries. So essentially we’re our bacteria, we’re our environment.
1:07:13 You know, a plant is as much of our breathing system as our lungs are. So how, how do we actually start to imagine that, and what does that mean then? How, how do we then think about ourselves and our world if our body changes the way that it relates to the environment, and, you know, the way we think about it. It’s interesting. Way I, it, it seems to me that Rachel thinks about things because so many people that invent things are like, okay, we got to build something that does this.
1:07:40 We got to build something that does this, and with you, it’s almost like your time one hand behind the back, because you can’t build anything. You kind of have to simulate an environment and let it kind of build itself. Yes, and, and I think the, the first thing to build is one, the integrity of the ideas, so because what happens is that, I mean, I think for me storytelling is using these different ideas is really key, and then that binds a community, and, and really for me, I’m, I’m interested in people in their, you know, teens and 20s, you know, people my age, you know, they’re doing their thing.
1:08:13 I’m, I’m happy with that over them, over the hill, but, you know, to actually, try and equip, you know, young people with tool set for thinking, as, as an alternative strategy. I want to see what happens with that. I’d like to see how they run with that, and, but to actually develop a very clear set of ideas and tools, and possibilities, and, and literally, you know, open up the future, you know, not just bring it down to this set of austere conditions that just going to evolve more machines.
1:08:45 Wow, what do you do for fun? This is fun. Yeah, enough sad. I don’t know what else to say. Thank you so much for coming, coming in.
1:08:54 You really, yeah, I felt like we were all on some kind of, what’s the name of that ship going out to outer space? Oh, the 100-year Starship. Yeah, I felt like we were all on a Starship honestly. Rachel, you are without question the most intelligent woman I’ve ever interacted with. What happened to, person?
1:09:09 How do you have to qualify it that way? No, that was just absolutely phenomenal. I feel like I’m a slightly smarter or slightly less stupid monkey after having spent an hour chatting to, oh, we’ve got to introduce you to some howler monkeys. I don’t know if that was a best backhanded compliment? Not sure.
1:09:29 No, that was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. I get a much better feel for you with an hour. I mean, it’s great to see you on TED, but it’s, it’s only 7 minutes or 9 minutes or 3 minutes. It’s hard.
1:09:37 So, no, thank you so much. Thank everyone’s going to love this. Thank you so much. Thank you. It was a huge amount of fun.
1:09:43 All right, well, until then it’s about the journey. All right, thank you both, and we, the energy became very dark, like so there was a thick negative energy in that room that you remember this? Yes, I remember that. I left it out of it. It was before, it was around the time of the infinite loop, infinite mental loop I had entered into.
1:10:09 Okay, I can’t
