Full transcript: Melissa Sterry on London Real
7:21 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My co-pilot today is Mr Alexander Ward.
7:33 He is an IASA filmmaker whose short video Tira Vita caught my very first being featured on the Graham Hancock channel. We subsequently invited Alex to be on the show about a year ago and we call the episode the chosen one, obviously, because he is. And he is guest-hosted a few times before, most recently with Dr Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College. He’s doing some studies on the effect of psilocybin on the brain. So thank you for being here.
8:02 Thank you for having me again. I appreciate it, Alex. And I have a special project we’re working on that will be quite controversial. Don’t you think? We can’t say anything.
8:10 Yeah, we can’t say anything, but we’ll be releasing something too, soon, that Alex and I have done. And keep an eye out for that. Our guest today is Melissa Sterry, and she is a design scientist and futurist, and the director and head of technology for Earth 2 Hub. That’s pretty good, right? That’s spot on.
8:30 Spot on. Okay. You’re also a strategist, a speaker. You’ve written for The Guardian. You received your PhD, I think, from the University of Greenwich.
8:38 I haven’t finished it yet. You haven’t finished it. Okay, you’re working on it. It’s at the same Avatar group of our former guest Rachel Armstrong who we had on, I think, a few months ago. Great show.
8:48 We called, I think, Earth’s bright future. Melissa also, unbeknownst to most people, is a highly accomplished karaoke singer. Is that so? Yes, who I’ve seen perform myself at the ICAP charity day many years ago. That’s going to be the end of the show.
9:04 You haven’t got over the air trauma. I haven’t. Do you have anything to say about that? First of all, welcome to London Real, and thank you for being here. Thank you.
9:11 It’s a real pleasure. Okay, and yeah, I’ve been a fan of the shows for a while. Love what you do. So it’s great to join the team here. Fantastic.
9:19 Nice having you here. I guess we can talk about the karaoke sometime later. We can talk about that sometime later. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.
9:26 Yeah I don’t remember you specifically, but I think I remember you maybe being there. But anyways, lots of people saying lots of celebrities. It’s pretty standard. So I just wanted to start off and just say, I mean, you know, the word futurist is something most people probably never meet. Many futurists, you know, we’ve had maybe one on the show or two.
9:45 I’m not quite sure, but I was wondering if you could tell us, what is a futurist, and what is your number one concern for the future of our planet and our species? Futurists come in different shapes and sizes, but basically they are people who look at the various different scenarios that might unfold in the future, and some do that through more of a sci-fi medium, and others through more sort of corporate work, through consulting to client companies. I kind of sit in the middle.
10:12 I have almost my own genre in that I don’t get involved in really writing weighty corporate reports and that sort of thing. But I do give presentations, and I do write for industry, for trade, and I write for science journals, but I prefer to align really with the more creative side of things. So the work that I’m doing in the pipeline is more to do with visualizing these different scenarios, and that’s because I think there’s a real shortage at the moment.
10:42 So if you think back, you know, to the 1950s and ’60s, lots of people were thinking about the future, but they were also visualizing it. So you saw lots of fantastic imagery and film, and so on and so forth. We do have, obviously, sci-fi today, but I think there really is a window where we could do a lot more, and stuff that is not necessarily about, you know, if you watch a science fiction movie, you’re looking at a story on several levels. You’re looking at usually a human story, maybe a love relationship, and then you’ve got the world ending, or some other scenario, and how we respond to that.
11:16 And, you know, script writers obviously have to keep your attention for quite a long time. I think we could create shorts and much shorter pieces of content that are just as creative, but are literally about showing you these different scenarios, and so that we can visualize it, because it’s very hard for people to relate to some of the things they hear about what might happen in the future. And I think the creative arts is a great way to show them. You know, I was in Disneyland a couple months ago, and I went to Tomorrowland, and it hadn’t changed since I was there 30 years ago and it looked really dated.
11:49 It just was like, wow, Tomorrowland. And I guess you’re right. A lot of these futurist visions from the past were, like you said, sci-fi. Very hard to relate to them in a practical way, and they’re quite comical now as well. Some of the best ones are what outer space creatures might look like.
12:05 Those are always good value. But I think, you know, people often focus on what didn’t happen. Like, they say, oh, you know, we didn’t get flying cars, or we didn’t get this or that, but actually a lot of futurists were spot on, and particularly people like Arthur C. Clarke. And, you know, futurists are not always people who necessarily deal with techy stuff.
12:24 I mean you know, if you think of Leonardo da Vinci, he was essentially a futurist, and that he was thinking really radical ideas and his ideas were far ahead of their time. Obviously he didn’t come with that title, and he’s not someone who classically would be thought of as a futurist, but that’s absolutely what he was doing, and he had no credit for his research at the time, right? No, no. Most of it was done in private, because he was basically breaking the law, and you see that in science today.
12:46 You see kind of maverick communities that are underground, because what they’re doing is not acceptable to the mainstream genre. Did you call him a body hacker? I did. Yeah, yeah. He was, well, you know, he was cutting up bodies in private because he wanted to get to know anatomy, and you know, he wasn’t allowed to do what he was doing, but of course through that process he learned a great deal more about anatomy than, you know, that the medical community did, for not just decades but for centuries in some cases.
13:13 So he had to do that stealthily. Whereas, obviously, some of the things he did were a little bit more acceptable, but in a sense, you know, I relate to Leonardo da Vinci because he also had to make money. You know, he was somebody who was, you know, like everyone else, had to pay the rent. So he designed events, and he did some more frivolous stuff. I even saw a handbag that he designed.
13:34 You think this great man working on handbag but you know he had to pay the rent like everyone else. So, given his prolific output, just imagine what he could have, you know, created and maybe manifested had he not had such a precarious existence financially. Yeah. Bill Gates just bought a bunch of his old papers, and there was an interview with him on 60 Minutes, and he was showing them, and all these fluid flow diagrams and stuff. I have a mechanical engineering degree, and I was just like, Jesus you know, he’s really monitoring, like, you know, pillars in a river and like the different fluid flows.
14:07 And man, he was really thinking a lot. It’s not just good, though, cuz some of the stuff he designed, a lot of weapons as well I sort lot of intricate and futuristic dangerous looking items, actually. Absolutely. And scuba gear, and all sorts of stuff. He was constantly, must have been constantly, thinking of new inventions.
14:24 And at that time it must have been fascinating, because he was genuinely great things that no one else had. Today, you know, even if you have an original idea, there’s thought, oh, c is someone else designed that? And then you got to search for the patents and so on it must have been a really exciting period to be in. I think, if you were someone like da Vinci, so how does a futurist make a living? That’s always the good question.
14:46 Yeah. Is that why there’s so few of them? Well, do you know, it’s kind of niche, and it’s very regional in the sense that there are quite a few futurists in the States, but that’s mainly because of, obviously, the state’s got a very big technology industry, and futurists of that particular sector tend to like working with futurists and future thinkers. Obviously, if you think about Apple or Microsoft or any of those big tech companies, they obviously need to be not just a step ahead of the game but they need to be a very big step ahead of the game, because you know, it’s not just about thinking of a new technology but putting in the whole ecosystem behind it, and working out the whole, you know, engineering process to get that idea off the paper.
15:25 So there’s quite a big community. Also Japan is very future obsessed in a sense, and there’s a lot of funding in projects that maybe would not get off the ground elsewhere. Britain is in some ways frustratingly disinterested, in a sense, in that we’ve got a great legacy of futurism. Obviously, you know, Arthur C. Clarke was British.
15:46 But of late, I don’t think there’s, until very recently, been enough interest in it, but that’s picking up because, of course, people are looking at, you know, things like not only climate change but biodiversity loss and all these big events going on and realizing, hang on a minute, business as usual is not working now, let alone you know, going to work in the future. So people are more future-minded, I think, now. And interest really for me was greater, because for, you know, I wasn’t a futurist until I was about 35, when I’d worked in a lot of future-oriented industries, and for example in digital, whereas working with new technologies and essentially trend forecasting and doing a lot of the sort of things I do as a futurist, and I thought, hey, some of the things I’m doing I don’t really want to do, and if I don’t change, you know, my portfolio soon, I might get stuck in a rut.
16:39 So I thought, what do I really, really want to do? And I M out a couple of things, but I thought, yeah, futurist. I’ve always admired futurists and I’ve always related to them, and for me it, you know, brings together my interest, and also I felt there was an opportunity not only to bring in a more creative angle, but there aren’t that many women futurists, to be honest. So I thought, let’s go for this, and to my amazement I actually got some clients, and you know, got some interest.
17:06 So it was a pleasant surprise. I was ready to crash and burn if need be, but it picked up. How many years does the UK lag behind, say, San Francisco, when it comes to tech? I mean, earlier we were talking about podcasting, Kickstarter. I guess broadband isn’t a good example, but you know, it really feels like there’s a lag.
17:23 I know from doing this show, I mean, there’s, in LA, there’s you know, 50 of these, maybe not the same quality, but I mean, everyone is embracing the technology. People are downloading podcasts on their iPhones, but here it seems there’s just a bit of a lag, and how many years do you think it is, and do you think it’ll last? I think it really depends. I think it’s deeper than the technology. I think it’s a cultural thing.
17:44 I mean, for example, I’ve noticed that, you know, if I launch a new project, the response of my peers in the States is, it’s not just, you know, oh, that’s great. It’s how can I help. What it’s a very proactive attitude. Whereas here I find people are a little bit more cynical, and even if they do help there’s a lot of armchair entrepreneurs in Britain who are just like football, armchair football managers. They’ve never ever done it.
18:10 They’ve never put anything on the line, but they know all about it, and they’ll tell you all about it, even if you don’t want to hear about it. There’s a lot of that here. And I think you’ve got to be very resilient to get anything you off the ground in England, not just a new business, if you’re a scientist or, you know, any kind of pioneer, you got to have quite a thick skin and be prepared to just keep on battling away, and I don’t know if that is going to change.
18:35 I mean, a lot of innovators leave the UK. You know, I’ve just seen a couple of friends head off to San Francisco because they’re second and tired of the situation here. Yeah. Alexander, you’ve just been traveling in the States. You’ve been traveling South America.
18:49 What’s your read on, you’re British? Yeah, yeah. I technically am too, by the way. Well, I was just going to ask you, is it more of an idea that it’s the state that’s interfering? Is it the UK state, or is it just the public mind, you know?
19:02 Here, I think people do feel a bit beaten down. It’s probably partly to do with our media. The media, I think, do have a very big play in people’s perspective of the world about them, and can manipulate what people think. Um we don’t really see our media getting behind great ideas. We see a lot of really miserable media.
19:24 We read about all the really bad stuff, but how often do you see a great success? And you also find in Britain, again, the media is very easy to knock people down. You know, it’s one thing wrong, and they’re all speculating, you know, why you went wrong and how you went wrong. And I think, yeah, I mean, if we could challenge that a little bit, it might start to change people’s opinions. Yeah, people do love to do.
19:47 I mean, that’s one thing you notice as an American come over here, that you’re like, Jesus, they’re pretty rough on the CBS, just like they do like to kind of rip it down. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, but the media is so used to that, and maybe people are used to consuming that. Um, yeah. We stopped listening to news on this show a long time ago. And I even feel bad if I ever look at a Metro.
20:08 And it’s, I’m always like don’t look at it, don’t look at it, it’s bad, block it out, as you can say. Do you think it’s also something to do with the fact that America is a much younger country, and they have this history of rapid change, whereas Britain has this really long history, and it’s a lot harder to get these cultural changes. We kind of, I think, a lot of Brits wallow in the past, and they think about all the great things our great-grandparents and all these people you know, years ago did.
20:34 And I think a lot of people really don’t realize the speed at which things are happening elsewhere, and not just in the States, but in the developing world. If you look at what’s going on in Brazil or in Asia, right now, and China. People are all too ready to criticize, but actually I’m very inspired by some of the things that are happening there. I think there’s real go-getting attitude, embracing new ideas, allowing creativity. You know, in Brazil you’ve got a scenario people can actually embrace more creative built environment scenarios.
21:01 Here there are a lot of paper pushers, so you might have a pioneering new building material or concept, but there are all sorts of people who think it’s their job to stop that coming to market. And for example there was somebody built this little dwelling in a forest. It was one of these, a homemade project made with sustainable local materials, you know, and then you read that oh, the local council want to knock it down because they didn’t file for some or other permission.
21:29 It’s just ridiculous. you just think, haven’t you got better things to do? Is my attitude. Um, there are some parts of the world where that wouldn’t happen, and people are a little bit more just accepting, and, you know, less, consumed with monitoring every facet of what we’re doing. So yeah, the States has a very, it’s strange because I’ve lived here for 10 years now, and so I can look back in my home country and try to analyze it, but it’s weird because the States has always had the West for the last 100, 50 years, so there was always this go West, and you can basically make it as an entrepreneur.
22:04 You can farm, you can ranch, we’ll give you the land for free, access all these resources, and so my concept of my grandparents was always like, you are how hard you work, you’re not limited by title, status, not even limited by land, as Britain has been for the last thousand years, ’cause it’s been here for a while. So I think that just spirit goes on, and there’s a lot of bad things about it too. In the US, we like our guns and all that stuff, but I think it’s just that possibility that you, if you work hard, you can get something whether it’s true or not.
22:31 I don’t know, but I think that’s placed in the mentality of the country. Absolutely. You know, somehow. So I’m really jealous, because you were seeing in a video, powing around with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I got really jealous today. I don’t get that jealous when people come on this show, even famous people.
22:46 I’m like, yeah, whatever, but he seems like a really cool guy. He is. He is an absolute gent, very funny and really smart. He’s really on it, and what’s nice about him is he’s not arrogant about it. You know, he’s somebody who’s very comfortable in his own skin, and I’m very excited, because he obviously stepped into the shoes of Carl Sagan to present the next Cosmos series, which I believe is coming on in 2014, and I really do think he’s going to, you know, inspire and open up people’s minds, and, you know, he’s very human.
23:18 I mean, he rips away all the cliches of what a scientist is. He’s none of the cliches, you know. you find out all these, like, he’s a great dancer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Footage of that, all karaoke.
23:30 I think he was a wrestler as well, something like that. Wow, I, it’s strange how much a personality can drive you, you know, something like that because he’s such a personable, cool guy that the random person will start listening to him to talk about whatever moon landings or the, you know, a lot of things he talks about, and you’re just captivated with him. I guess, like Carl Sagan back in the day. I mean, millions and millions and millions of stars, right?
23:52 Mean, my mom loved Carl Sagan when I was growing up, I was like, what? So it’s amazing how personality can really, yeah. He doesn’t try to alienate people, and one of the things I try to do is not blind people with science. If there’s, you know, a short, succinct word to describe something, I go with that every time. Um, you know, I don’t like pretend.
24:09 I mean, you know, if I read a science paper, there are times when I think, K, you know, you’ve really made this hard work. Uh, you know, you’ve used several words instead of, you know, one or two. Um, I think, you know, knowledge doesn’t have to be something you know, or rather, the knowledge shouldn’t be something that is ring-fenced, and that there’s perception that you’ve got to be a certain kind of person to access it, or to participate, or that you’ve got to behave in a certain way.
24:35 And deGrasse Tyson, I think, breaks all the cliches, and, you know, again, Rachel, my Parir Avatar, that’s what she does. Um, you know, you read these silly things in the press about, oh, there’s a certain dress code at, um, Oxford and women don’t feel that they can wear makeup or dress glamorously, because they’re going to be considered as being you know, less credible, as someone who doesn’t spend time on that sort of thing. And, you know, Rachel gets out of there and, you know, she’s a complete babe, and several of my male friends openly admit they fancy her.
25:01 And I think, yeah, you know, you just be yourself, because you don’t have to be that. You don’t have to be the cliche, and anyone who tells you that you’ve got to dress a certain way, or act a certain way, or speak a certain way, just blow them out of your, you know, surroundings, because they’re really, they’re talking nonsense. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you have to be yourself, because you can’t keep this act up for your whole career, and I agree. It’s good, because a lot of people in your field tend to quote esoteric sources.
25:29 They drop a few words in there. I mean, you know, even the word singularity, I find, alienates a lot of people, ’cause they’re like, what is that exactly? And I mean, and I listen to all the Jason Silva things, and I’m still not quite sure what it means, so I think that’s important, not to alienate people. What is Earth 2 Hub? Can you explain the whole concept behind it?
25:48 The concept is, it is essentially bringing together the skills from science fiction, so the creative skills, the narrative, the storytelling, and apply it, applying it to science fact, or what is emerging to be science fact. So we’re not just looking at what’s right at the leading edge now, but what the possible scenarios in the nearish future are. We’re focused on technology for good, so it’s really stuff that is going to, hopefully, make the planet a better place.
26:14 And more specifically, we’re focused on nature to try and reconnect humanity to nature, to try and illustrate that, you know, it’s not something you can put a price tag on. You get things like the TEEB report, where they’re saying, oh, you know, the value of x acre of land is so and so. I find that preposterous. You know, my view on this, and the team’s view is, you know, took 65 million years to evolve some of the life forms on Earth today, and if you go back before that last mass extinction, you know, life’s been evolving for 3.8 billion years.
26:44 How can you in value that, and how can you value something you don’t even know, you know? We know a very small amount about the biodiversity on Earth. We know a bit about the microorganisms, very scant information about the microorganisms, and even less about how ecosystems work as a whole. Um, so it’s about opening people’s minds up to some of these things, and changing their perceptions. So yes, looking at, you know, things like conservation projects and how new technology can potentially help us to conserve nature.
27:14 Also, looking at our relationship with nature, so you know how it might integrate with our built environment, and beyond that, doing exactly what Leonardo da Vinci did, taking inspiration for new technologies and new science from nature being humble enough to admit that, you know, we humans don’t have all the answers, and that sometimes, you know, an insect has actually got a more sophisticated engineering system than, you know, NASA has yet evolved. And so that’s, that was rather long and not very succinct. My apologies, but those are the spaces that we work across.
27:51 This is part of the biomimicry movement, isn’t it? When they study the engines in nature and try and mimic that in ins pretty cool when you look at them. I still have a hard time. It’s just this amazing organic technology, you know. Have these leaves, which are biodegradable solar panels, essentially, and people are amazed by solar panels that man makes, but you have this amazing stuff that Nature’s already created.
28:13 Just a leaf, let alone an insect, which gets even crazier. What if 5 years from now, Earth 2 is a success. What will have happened? Like for you, what is success with this project, what it’s like creatively at the moment? Um, we’ve done a number of creative projects, so we’ve created a number of short films.
28:31 We’ve built a website. We’ve got quite a lot of imagery. We’ve started to build up our content, but we’re very, very resource-limited at the moment, so having brought together a really fantastic team that we’re expanding on and partners who have world-class skill in things like animation and storyboarding and script writing, and so on and so forth. We would have outp, our output would be a great deal more than it is now. So we would have done more films and been very experimental with those, because although there are certain styles that we like, we haven’t, we’re not at, you know, closed shop.
29:07 We’re looking at what’s going on and how things are evolving. Our website would be a more sophisticated platform than it is at the moment. So we would, for example, you know, we’ve just got a couple of categories at the moment. We’d expand on that and obviously feedback the learning of the last few years, and we would also be working with apps and within interactive events, and just really, some people treat media as if you’ve got to, you know, work with one medium or another.
29:34 Our view is that the whole thing is becoming more integrated, and the best way to work out really what you’re about is to just carry on exploring, carry on trying new things. you know, 5 years from now we might have HED in on a couple of areas, because that might work out to be what’s best. But, you know, when at the moment we’re keeping fingers in different pies, and yeah, we would be proud of our creative portfolio is what success would look like. Okay, and you’ve got an app that you’re working on right now, and you’re kickstarting.
30:06 I just want to get all the details of that out there. What will that do, and what is that? That has two primary purposes. First and foremost, it is to extract, if you like, nugget-sized information, nugget-sized new science and technology, and basically inspiration, so for when you’re on the go, because obviously if you’re sat down at a desk and you’re looking at your PC, you can look at much lengthier content, but you know, if you’re on a bus or you haven’t got much time, you want something that’s pretty small and bite-sized.
30:34 So we’ll get that bite-sized content, but more than anything else, it’s a conversation tool. So we’re integrating a number of the social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, so that, say, you were at an event, or say we had an online event happening, and you on the go through that platform, you can converse with us, you can chat to us, you can send us media, you can participate in that, and you know, you can do so in a way that’s convenient for the environment that you’re in. Okay, and you’re doing a Kickstarter for that app right now?
31:04 Yes. Look at you guys, kickstarting, kickstarting these days. And to find out more about that, they go to the Earth 2, they can either go to earth2hub.com, and there’s a couple of things they can click on there. Or if you go to Kickstarter, you have to put Earth 2 space hub, man, and it pops up, but if you put it as one word, it won’t pop up. And how much you guys trying to raise?
31:28 We are trying to raise £28,000, and that’s to build the app. Yep. And it’s also, we’ve all the pledge bundles. We have. Obviously, we’ve really worked hard on creating some nice design work, but we’ve also made sure that they’re all sustainable and ethical, so it’s all fair trade.
31:45 It’s all, you know, organic cotton, etc. So that’s why our t-shirts are going to be a little bit more, but they’re going to be great quality, and you’re going to know that no one was harmed, or no creatures were harmed in their creation. So that’s why there’s a bit more of a margin, which is why our pledge target is a little bit higher. But I felt, you know, as a team I felt, and the team felt, we’d rather have a little bit of a higher margin and walk our talk, and create products that, you know, have our values within them, rather than say, well, whatever, we’re just chuck in a cheap t-shirt, or so you get a t-shirt, stick, or whatever.
32:19 If you make a certain amount of a donation, you get a t-shirt, or, yeah, well, if you pledge a pound you get the app, you get digital wallpapers, you get updates, you pledge £5, you get all that, and you get downloadable designs to upcycle your own t-shirt so basically we’ve created a bunch of designs, and you can download those, take them, take that in an old t-shirt to your local printer and say, can you print it up? And do that. We’re hoping to throw a few more of those into, and you get a name check in the movie at £5, and at £40 you get the T-shirt, or we’ve got digital books, the best of Earth 2, digital art.
32:54 We’ve got, in one of the books, it’s an ebook, and in that we’ve got step-by-step how we created stuff. So if you’re a bit of a geek or a techie, and you want to know what kind of wireframes or, you know, what other technical processes were involved in the creation of certain works. It’s going to be in there. So it’s very, very creative-focused. It’s very much about getting your hands on.
33:14 So, as I said, there is, you know, print it yourself. There’s for kids, there’s even color it yourself stuff. And yeah, £40 is a, sorry, £40 is a really cool. Well, we think it’s a really cool t-shirt, all this other stuff in there too, and this keeps you from having to go to a corporation and try to, you know, get sponsorship and stuff. This potentially is a really easy.
33:36 Absolutely. It’s, if we went to a corporate sponsor, creatively, we might find that we were compromised, and that the sponsor might say, well, you know, I’ll give you this money if you do this or that. We want to serve our community, not the corporate sponsor. And obviously the moment that you go to an investor and you say, you know, can you actx some money into this? You got to give the investor a return, and you know, we would rather reinvest into the community that we’re building, and into the products that we’re actually making, rather than hand over, you know, profit to someone else.
34:06 So that’s what we’re trying to do. That’s really the logic behind going the crowdfunding route. It’s tricky. Yeah. It’s tricky.
34:13 The whole subscription advertisement stuff for your films. Have you considered kickstarting, or have you not needed to? I’ve not really needed to for now. I’ve just been kind of funding it myself, and it’s been very low budget. It’s been, well, pretty much zero budget at the moment, and yeah, just very much guerrilla filmmaking.
34:31 There’s a really good manual called the Guerrilla Filmmakers Handbook, and that book, right? It’s very old, yeah, but it’s very much invaluable information on just how to do it just on very little budgets. And one of your Shaman films has been picked up for a couple festivals, or yeah, a couple of festivals, and it looks like it’s going to be shown at the Breaking Convention, which is the psychedelic one in July in London. Yeah, that’s awesome. What’s the film called?
34:53 Uh, The Shaman’s Last Apprentice. Okay, and they can find that on Wy World. The film’s not online yet. I’m going to try and do screen the film festivals, they don’t like that it has to be. Yeah, I mean, I did all the whole online thing previously, and it kind of, I think the online market is quite limited, and with especially, like, the content I’m trying to push, everyone’s sort of stuck in the rut, and they can’t get out to the more mainstream audiences, and so I guess with festivals and this type of thing, it’s trying to reach that other audience.
35:21 Excellent. You know, in the article that you wrote for The Guardian you talked about, this guy at MIT’s biomechatronics group. Is it Hugh Herr? It’s a marful, yeah Hugh Herr, yeah. You know, when I was at MIT, the Media Lab was like just getting started.
35:35 It wasn’t anywhere near as cool, because I don’t think anyone thought of media being important to technology. Okay, this is like ’93, when I graduate But he said there’s no such thing as a disability, just bad technology. Yeah, that’s a pretty bold statement. Yeah I’m at Hugh Herr when he, I was speaking at an event. It was actually last spring, and he came to London and said he was interested in the Bionic City, and obviously being in bionic as well, and we had dinner and we’re talking about his work and my work and what might be possible, and it really blew me away, because I suddenly realized, hang on a minute, you know, he’s able to put communications kit into these bionics, and you know, so it’s not just going to help you walk or run or do whatever.
36:22 It can actually communicate with the environment and so that, you know, if you were walking to a building it knows you’re there, and you all sorts of it it was just mind-blowing. And then, of course, after that I started to think, hang on a minute, if you can, I mean, he said he’s got, I think, something like 17 pairs of bionic legs, all for different things. Double amputee is that, but below the knee, or do we know? I think it’s above the knee. I’m pretty sure it’s above the knee.
36:47 So he has, he really walks the walk. I mean, I don’t mean that in a bad way, but I mean, like, he’s doing research on his own legs, basically. Absolutely, and that’s how he got into it, because he lost both his legs, and then he was given some, you know, the prostheses of, I guess, it would have been the the early ’80s, and they were really lousy, and so he started tinkering. I mean, he was breaking the rules. He started adapting his prostheses, you know, tinkering in the workshop, and made some better stuff, and eventually got, you know, into Harvard and then ended up running a research department at MIT, and, you know, so he said, you know, my legs don’t wear out.
37:26 I just upgrade them. Then you start thinking, well, hang on, you know, at some stage we all start to wear out, don’t we? And you know, bits and pieces don’t work as well, and if you could replace certain things and upgrade them. And you know, one of the things that really annoys me about the conversation around sustainability in the future is when people frame an aging population as a problem. Think, you know, my perspective is, think of all that knowledge, think of all that wisdom.
37:52 It’s not the aging population that’s the problem. It’s the fact that we’re not necessarily endowing that population with the kind of technology and the kind of medicine, in order for those people to really live to the full. That wave of technology is coming through now, so you know, I’m quite looking forward to getting older, because I’m thinking, well, I could, you know, I could bionically upgrade, and I could be parachuting or something. I’m in my 90s, you know what I mean?
38:18 The limits of what aging might look like have been blown apart. So what bionics are going to be a reality? Well, you’re a futurist, so ask you things that are already really very advanced, and where there’s rapid advancement is obviously things like bionic limbs, legs, arms. Bionic organs are now really coming, speeding up if you like. So bionic hearts, and obviously the issue with bionic organs is one of the problems, if you need an organ replacement is, firstly, sourcing it, secondly, the rejection aspect.
38:52 So that’s really one of the advantages of a bionic organ is, you know, you’re not having to match blood type and things like that. Also, one of the most exciting areas is neuro-bionics, and what that is, if you think about your body, is basically an electronic circuit. Your nerves are sending information to your brain via electrical signals, and that’s an area where there’s a lot more research and understanding, and so for example, when you read about somebody that has moved, who’s paralyzed, but has moved an object with their mind through the senses that are, that’s all through what’s called a brain-computer interface that area is really exploding, and you know, some of the sort of predictions we’re seeing in that area is the concept that, you know, within, well, I mean, it was within 50.
39:37 Now it’s kind of accelerated, with possibly in 20 people not actually needing something like an exoskeleton, but actually being able to have neuro-prostheses, where the nerves can be, you know, the signals can be sent, and so they can use the original limb, and obviously there might be some sort of trauma to the limb, in which case there may need to be some other sort of addition, but some of the, I think, the most exciting things are the possibility that people who are presently disabled, and for example reliant on a wheelchair may not need to be within our lifetime, kind of rewire those same pathways. Yeah, isn’t there a slight financial problem with this? I mean, we can hardly afford to take care of all our old people, let alone give them all bionic limbs and all this sort of, yeah.
40:23 I, you know, I had a few conversations about this, and I think it’s, as with anything, the cost of keeping, basically, the cost of keeping somebody, if you like, disabled by preventing access to this, for example. You know, somebody who is unable because they can’t get access to a decent bionic limb. The economic impact of that over time really stacks up, and not only that, but you know, the fact that it’s probably not that person on their own who’s impacted, but their family members.
40:52 So if you think about it over the duration, if you take a long-term approach, it’s far better to have somebody enabled and with that upfront cost, and actually, you know, there are a lot of things coming through that mean that this stuff doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. So for example, one of the most exciting areas is DIY bionics, and that’s where people are basically 3D printing the parts to make their own replacement hands or whatever it might be. Now, at the moment, it’s quite crude, but my vision, in fact, I’ve just written a chapter for a journal on this, is that within the coming years it’s not going to be the case that, you know, you necessarily have to either spend an absolute fortune and get, you know, the state-of-the-art bit, a kit that’s all W up to, you know, as I was talking about, you know, wide up to the environment, and it’s the kind of Star Trek of bionic limbs, or have some really crude piece of kit.
41:42 I think that we’ll end up somewhere in the middle, where if you’re a manufacturer or prosthetic limbs you’ll realize that it’s to your advantage to integrate the community into the design process, to get them really as hands-on, and doing as much as they can. So for example, it might be the case that if you’ve got a bionic limb, you might print some of the replacement parts at home, but nonetheless you would need the design experts to help design that. It’s basically a bespoke p a kit that is going to, you know, work for you personally.
42:12 So kind of a compromise, so I think the costs are going to come down, and I think it’s part of a much more radical, sorry, much bigger manufacturing revolution that is just starting now with the likes of 3D printing, and you know, people getting into DIY tech culture. That’s weird. Someone printing out their own hand, though. 3D printing is weird for me. I mean, everyone’s talking about it It’s something that you mentioned in your Guardian articles, is like five of the things that you’re looking at.
42:39 People are like talking about, you could 3D print up a gun and all these other crazy stuff, but I mean, how, far away, or what are the limits of the technology? I mean, it’s obviously, you can dream really big about it, but yeah, what’s going to be happening with 3D printing over the next 5 to 50 years? 5 to 50 years. The areas where I think we’ll see the most enablement through the technology is in the developing world. You know, if you think if let’s say you were in a remote village somewhere that was cut off that had very, you know, little in the way of supply chain, and somebody gave you a 3D printer, will enable you to access a whole range of products that you know were you to try to access those, now you’d have to maybe travel for several hours to get to the nearest city.
43:21 You know, if you could actually, in your own home or, you know, in a community center, actually print off, and these are, you know, I’m talking. I’m not talking about necessarily anything particularly sophisticated. I’m talking about a plug or just something really basic. What we’ve actually, in some of the trial projects, people have actually started recycling their own materials. So you can now get shredders so that you can recycle your own plastic.
43:44 I think that’s a much more exciting model than where presently people recycle by basically segregating all their trash, and then someone else somewhere really remote will process that. It’s still quite an energy-intensive, cuz obviously, you know, the lorry’s got to come and pick it up, and there’s all this going on. You know, if you could just take some of your old plastic, or it might be any kind. You know, 3D printers obviously don’t just work with plastics.
44:07 They work with a range of items, recycle the materials at home, and you know, it might be. I mean, there are obviously advantages to creating practical items. A plug is, you know, a really good obvious example, but people are doing incredibly creative stuff. So obviously there, you know, making diverse items of clothing, and some is very, very, very beautiful. They’re creating works of art.
44:30 I got off Shapeways three beautiful pieces of 3D printed art that, essentially, they’re mass-produced because, obviously, the designer just, you know, pumping out, you know, replications of these, rapid prototyping them, but gorgeous. But the great thing is, you know, if you could actually, if you got bored of something and you thought, hey, I’m just going to recycle it, I just put it through my filament maker, make something else with it. Yeah, make something else with it, and you could just carry on that, and then it all comes down to the Torrance and the design, right?
44:59 I mean, this is where something will have real copyright value. Yeah, is the thing that builds that or the software that tells it how to build it. Right. Yeah. And the other wonderful thing is that, you know, if you’re making it yourself and you’re involved in that DIY culture, you appreciate what’s gone into it.
45:15 You know, people, when we saw the Bangladesh clothing factory collapse, many people will have been buying clothing, not actually thinking about those workers. Yeah. Gap. Anybody? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
45:28 And you know, not thinking about it. But imagine, you know, if you’ve actually owned, you know, if you own a sewing machine, if you’ve made clothes, you think, KY, there’s some skill in making a t-shirt, you know, getting your seam straight, and the right stitch length and all the rest of it. It is a very skilled job, and it has an inherent value. And so, you know, I’m when that got as much coverage as it did, I was really glad because it showed the kind of conditions people are working in.
45:56 You know, it showed just how little they’re earning, and I hope that’s made people think. But the more people are involved in making stuff at home, it doesn’t matter if it’s technology or anything, clothing, even food, the more they appreciate the work involved in other people doing that, and the value and this whole in the UK we have this whole value. You know, it’s all good value, because a loaf of bread is 40p, or whatever. It’s no, it’s not good value.
46:24 That just means that somewhere somebody has been squeezed, and you know, somewhere corners have been cut. So I, you know, I really love not just the 3D printing, but anything that gets people making and doing stuff again, even if they don’t continue with it. At least it gives them appreciation of what’s involved in that process. I never thought of that aspect. Even the $5 chicken you buy at the store, it’d be good if we worked on making those ourselves.
46:48 Yeah, absolutely. In the garden. Yeah. Are we at the stage where people have these in their own homes? Just regular working-class people.
46:53 They have these 3D printers, but they can. We’re nearly there. I mean, if you look at the price, we’re coming towards getting sort of, you know, $500 for a 3D printer now. the moment, I think, the main issue is the quality of the stuff that you print. It’s all right, you know, if you’re a real geek and you want to, you know, print out Yoda or something just to stick on your mantle piece, but in real terms, if you want to print something that’s beautiful quality that you would probably use time and again.
47:18 You’d have to pay a bit more, but you know, we are now at the stage where the popularity is such that I do think the major manufacturers, you know, it’s been startups kind of really doing this sort of thing. I think we’ll see the major manufacturers start to step in, and if we don’t, they’re really stupid. They’re really missing a massive market opportunity. Is it plastic? It uses plastics, or yeah, mainly at the moment, but I mean, um, in research labs people are printing with all sorts of, all sorts of things, metals, even food.
47:45 You know, people are 3D printing food. My personal take on food is it’s probably going to be a bit of a gimmick. You know, if you got a birthday or something special coming up, you might 3D print something amazing, but I can’t say I personally would really want to you know, 3D print food that came out looking like in the Silent Running scene, where the little machine kind of delivers this kind of rather plasticky looking food, and the main character says, oh, you know, but don’t you appreciate what it’s like to eat the fruits of nature, and you know, vegetables and so on and so forth, and the other guys kind of look, what are you talking about?
48:21 Why, why would we want that when we, you know, we’ve got this kind of 3D printed stuff. I can’t really see 3D printing food being a massive kind of day-to-day thing that we do in the kitchen, but I can’t see it being a kind of novelty thing. Okay. You, you saying earlier about Hollywood, like you don’t like the way that we consume the future, because when you do it through Hollywood, then you have to have Will Smith there and his damn kid and, uh, you know, some love story or something and you’re saying that kind of the message, um, I don’t know, are you saying the message gets lost, and some people say that to educate people, you have to do it through another medium, like we had comedian Lee Camp on here a couple weeks ago, and he puts his like challenge the world Zeitgeist ideas into his comedy so people kind of laugh, but then they get it, but they’re not being forced down their throat to do this.
49:10 Yeah, so is there is there no benefit in having a storyline, you know, to see these future scenarios? No, I’m, I’m not against Hollywood in that it’s a very, for entertainment value, it’s fantastic, and sometimes when a story is very well told, absolutely um, and you, I think the greats like Spielberg and Cameron and so on, you know, those guys know her not only to bring you into the emotive aspect of the story, but to show you other possible realities, but I do think that there is space for an alternative to that, where you’re, you know, in order to see what the future might look like, you don’t have to, you know, sit and watch a film for that period of time and have all those different layers of complexity. I think, you know, given the new media that we have, in the 50s and 60s people would generally sketch the ideas, and you’d kind of get magazines and books that showed all these weird and magical images of the future.
50:07 Today we’ve obviously got, you know, animated graphics and CGI, and so on and so forth, and this stuff is, you know, the kind of price to entry is a lot lower, and there are a lot more people trained in it, so you know, my view is let’s use that to show people the future, which is, you know, that’s where the kind of Earth 2 sits. I think it’s crazy to sort of either not use creative media or to use something that’s, you know, centuries old, or all the most pioneering and most groundbreaking people they always look at what is there now, and they experiment, and they tinker with that, and we don’t really even know what this stuff might look like, because very few people are out there even trying it. But, you know, Hollywood is great.
50:45 I love a blockbuster movie as much as anybody, particularly if it’s got spaceships in it. The only thing I found is many of the fictional Future Visions, they tend to be quite bleak and dystopian. They do, you know, started with, like, 1984, and then there’s so many these days. Um, do you have quite a positive outlook on it? Well, I think part of that, I see it as almost fables.
51:09 It’s a warning, and that’s what science fiction is really, really good at. I mean, actually, I think better than a lot of futurists. It’s really good at showing you what might happen if we go up a certain route, and that that is one of the reasons it is so important as well as you know, it’s more gripping if you are reading a like dystopian or traumatic story. Hey, everybody’s happy from the beginning you know, they’re going to end up living a wonderful life.
51:34 That would be quite boring. We like a little bit of suspense. But as a futurist, you’re one of the few to say, well, not one of the few, but you’re one of the ones that say, look, not everything’s rosy. I’m not looking to ship in the singularity. Bring all this bionics and everything’s going to be great.
51:50 Yeah. You, what in what way are you pessimistic about the future or cautious? cautious. I do think we are genuinely facing a biodiversity catastrophe, and I’m personally very worried about the extinction rates and not of the extinction rates of particular species but of whole areas, whole habitats. Um, and I think we could be heading towards a tipping point.
52:13 You people talking about climate change, I think we are really on the edge, and I think we really need to up the ante. But what excites me is the potential of new technology, the likes of drones and crowd engagement, for example. You know, we see horrendous rates of poaching of rhino and elephants for the ivory trade. Get drones out there, and get the public, get the crowd, monitoring those areas, get, you know, harness this stuff for good. There will be people.
52:40 Obviously, there are people who are harnessing new tech for bad. I mean, you were talking about 3D printed guns. My view on that is, although I, I don’t like the idea of people 3D printing guns, if you want to harm somebody, if it’s not a gun, it’s going to be something else. It’s just a new medium. It’s not the printed gun itself that is the problem, but it’s the reasons why somebody might want to harm somebody and do that in the first place.
53:04 You know, some people would disagree with you, would they? But no, that’s a good point. That’s a good point to me. Um, but I do think that there’s a tremendous amount of good that we can do with this new tech and with mobilizing the crowd. I think, in all sorts of different ways, people at a societal level, possibly even for the first time in history, are realizing that they are more powerful than they previously perceived and they don’t have to be suppressed in some of the ways that they have been.
53:33 So, biodiversity crisis, yeah. you know, you have to be cautious with some new technologies. You know, you’d be very naive if you didn’t think about the problems, but also really, really work hard to see the good, because that might counteract the bad stuff. Yeah, I guess with all new technology we see misuses of it, and you know, you don’t want to necessarily start telling people what they can and can’t 3D print. You know, I don’t know.
54:03 I guess they could hold things back. A gun is more dangerous, obviously, than, let’s say, a knife or somebody’s. I mean, you’re a martial artist, don’t you? I believe a little bit. A little bit.
54:14 I dabble in that as well, so I’m aware that the body can be used as a weapon. So you know, I do think if you want to hurt someone, that you’re probably going to do it with whatever is at your disposal. But, um, what are you training kickboxing in with a little bit of karate and a little bit of Kung Fu, but mainly kickboxing. I like the freestyle, wow, aspect. Yeah, are you a fan of uh mixed martial arts or the UFC?
54:38 Yeah yeah, I like, I guess you know, I’m not someone who’s very good at the whole kind of regimented aspect. I like to kind of let go, and yeah, obviously you’re thinking, you’re really thinking when you’re in that space, but karate is quite regimented, and I’m not always in that mood, but it’s a lot of fun, and I think it’s like with all crowd sports, you know, if you’ve got a good team of people around you you can let off some steam. And you know, women’s MMA is getting really big in the States.
55:07 I don’t know if you ever heard of a Woman by the name of Ronda Rousey, but she’s kind of like the latest. Um, the first time they’ve really had a women’s division in MMA, and she’s like, she’s selling out tickets, she’s selling out headline events more than the dudes. And, um, I love watching girls fight, cuz they bring it every time I mean, I really do. It’s just like the girls, that they’re like, they know that they’re, it’s, it’s not maybe not special, but like they’re like, wow, you know, the girl fighters really want to fight.
55:36 A lot of the guys maybe get into it for the wrong reason, or maybe because we have aggression, but these girl fights, man, you know, they deliver yeah, and you surprise yourself. My trainer, um, she’s like, my God, where did that power come from? She was really shocked, because I hadn’t, I’m not naturally an aggressive person, but it shows you with the right technique, and it is a great challenge. I think it’s one of those things that you might think you may not be able to do, but if you give it a go and you work hard enough, then you start to get the results in, and that’s a good thing.
56:06 Technique is everything. So, bionic City, is that something you talked about? Um, yeah, bionic City I mentioned when I was 35. I thought, right, I’m going to look at my life and start doing the things I really want to do. Um, and I worked in sustainability a long time.
56:24 I first really got switched on to what was happening in that space at 11: there were various things going on in my life that made me realize, about extinction and deforestation and so on and so forth, and for a long time it was something that was in a past. You know, it was, I would give money to charity or do something in a nonprofessional context, and then I kind of stumbled into the area. Um, and then worked in sustainability, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on there you know, a lot of people doing good things, but really what changed my perspective, 2007 was quite a pivotal year, and I met a number of scientists and folks that were looking at the very worst case scenario, worst case scenario of climate change, worst case scenario of biodiversity loss.
57:10 None of this stuff was in the media. No one was talking about it, and it was sobering, really, really sobering information. And I thought, good God, if it’s as bad as it looks like it could be, how can I best apply myself? What should I be doing right now? And I, so that was the point at which I cut out a lot of things I was doing.
57:31 I really kind of whittled it down. I thought, well, okay, I’ve been involved in sustainable fashion, and that’s important, and lots of people are doing it, you know, great. I’m wearing a sustainable fashion dress at the moment, so it’s still, you know, that’s cool. Yeah, that’s something that’s still very much in my life, but I thought, you know, what can I do? And I thought, well, I’m pretty pretty ballsy, and I thought the worst case scenario is some of the geological and meteorological possibilities, and I thought, what’s the biggest challenge I can take on, because I’ve got a very low boredom threshold.
58:00 I thought, well, how about a city that was resilient to some of this stuff, and what’s the most fantastical thing that we could create? And I started to think about this sort of superhero city. This, you know, that had all these kind of superpowers enabled by new thinking and new technologies, and so the idea, it was dealing with bio, biomedics, by, um, bi-mimicry, but I thought, well, if we use the term bionic, that kind of renders, you know, that brings up imagery of the $6 Million Man and the $6 million woman.
58:31 Love that show as a kid. That was big, big. Steve Austin, right? Oh yeah, yeah. So cool.
58:38 So I started to think about that, and I decided to start a PhD in 2010, so that I could explore the formal side, but very early on I started to think about the creative side. Um, and in 2011, I actually split the project, and so that the formal side of the research, um, went through the PhD, and that’s obviously the more serious stuff that you have to write papers and speak at science conferences and so on. Um, but the bionic City took on a life of its own, and that was more than anything else, because I found people engaging with it and finding it interesting.
59:08 And I thought, well, hell, you know, rather than just think about my own ideas, what about looking at how other people’s ideas might be involved in this, thinking about how material scientists work might impact upon this, and how other, you know, architects and engineers, and so on and so forth. And so now I’ve got a collection of people who I’m in touch with. I’ve already started to render some drawings with a creative crew to show how it might look. That’s not saying it will look like this, but it’s more as talking about the visioning showing people some of these alternative scenarios, but the thing I’m aiming at is, after I publish my PhD, to bring out a book where I’ve got these collective works, and, um, yeah, we just show some of the more out there stuff, you know, adaptive buildings, and systems that, like an ecosystem, can sense what’s going on and can respond to that environment.
1:00:04 And some of the kind of things that I’ve seen in nature that are very influential. The PhD itself is focused on evolving a system that is embedded in the city that presents this resilience, but some of the things I’ve seen in nature. For example, when a wildfire comes along, you know, when we watch wildfires on the television, it’s all we think of it as disaster. If you were talking about Australia or any of the areas where wildfires are inherent, those ecosystems are adapted to them.
1:00:37 So when that, you know, if you take the eucalyptus tree, it is designed and so that, yeah, you know, it’s the bark flares up, it basically combusts, but it’s, it’s releasing the energy, then it will grow. If you look at the banks here, the national flower of Australia, there are a couple of species that work in different ways, but one of them actually seeds populate the area once the wildfire has passed. And obviously that means that, you know, there, the soil is fertile, space has been cleared, so these seeds can grow with plenty of light and it’s a, it’s a different philosophy.
1:01:10 So that’s really embedded in the work, and it’s quite radical, but when you look at the incredible innovations that are coming to the for, not least at MIT and the Media Lab, you realize well, actually it’s not so out there. It’s really not so out there. Kind of get those ideas out there and present the possibilities to people. Yeah, yeah. And do you know, if you look back at past movements, if you look back at Archigram in the 1960s, they created what at the time would have seen completely wacky ideas, the idea of plug-in City or instant City or walking City.
1:01:41 Those were cities basically. They foresaw, along with a couple of others of their generation, the Smart City. They got that. They realized, hang on a minute, information communications technology that’s going to become embedded in the city. We can have buildings that are endowed with this, and that adapt to information that is coming in, whether it’s meteorological or it’s social, whatever.
1:02:03 They got all of that. They even created a walking city, which you might think, well, isn’t that crazy? A migratory city, right? But now we’re doing that. Yeah, right?
1:02:12 We’re closing down roads and stuff, and yeah, doing that everywhere. Alexander, I want to get your read on the kind of the future, and biodiversity, and I mean, I know through you work with IASA, and even some of my work with IASA, you know, living with nature is like a big thing that gets drilled into your head, and I just wonder what your thoughts are on the future, if we’re doing enough or not? Well, kind of one of the things that kind of piqued my interest is, obviously these problems come from an incorrect relationship to nature.
1:02:41 We treated it terribly in order to mine all these resources, and that’s why I kind of sometimes find it slightly conflicting to say that, in order to get a right relationship to nature, we need to develop all this new technology, but to develop all this new technology, we need to mine more resources in the earth, that creates a kind of, unless there’s some kind of technology that actually does help sustain some of the biosphere itself. Well, if you look at, for example, biomimetic energy. The thing about, obviously, you know, the world today is principally run off fossil fuels.
1:03:13 The next generation, obviously, you’ve got, if you like, the first generation of renewable energy is still very technological, and its build and construction, and some of that even requires energy in, or, you know, that’s presently sourced from fossil fuels in order to create, like, solar panels. In the natural world, you know, you mentioned the tree, and the fact that, you know, the tree, obviously, or let’s say deciduous tree for sake of argument, harvests light. It, you know, turns that into energy once the, you know, the season has changed, and the lighting levels change, the leaves fall back into the ground.
1:03:53 That energy is re-released, and so have this cycle going on that is very, very influential concept to biomimetic energy researchers, for sake of argument. So when it comes to biomimicry, although some of the stuff you see is still quite technological in its operation, there is a whole new wave coming through that operates very differently, and you can see that in computing. You know, if you think about things like biological computing, the kind of things that Rachel Armstrong is very interested in, we’re actually a biological computer.
1:04:24 So we know that the concept works, because we are living prototypes of that. We just haven’t worked out how to do it. You know, in nature, obviously, makes things with basically, you know, if you think about how a spider makes silk, dirt and water, and, you know, it’s obviously relying on sunlight, but basically dirt and water, and yet it makes this incredibly strong filament, or, you know, textile, if you like. So I think that, um, yeah, it’s, it’s important not to reduce nature to, um, its, its value in terms of what it can practically do, but I think there’s, you know, there are so many vast improvements that we could make to society if we did that.
1:05:10 But absolutely, you know, there isn’t, I think, enough appreciation of nature, and how do we tackle that? You know, I, I don’t think creative media is the only thing, because if you think about the UK, we have some of the lowest donation rates for environmental charities, really, really low. I mean, I hopefully it’s gone up of late but historically very low, and yet we’ve got one of the finest portfolios of natural history television shows in the world.
1:05:38 We’ve got David Attenborough, for sake. So why is it people watch that, you know? They watch a beautiful living planet, or whatever it might be, and they feel inspired, and they think nature’s wonderful, and then they go and do something that harms nature. You know, where’s the, where’s the disconnect? I think, especially when you go to these jungle communities and you relate it back to cultures here in England, there is this big disconnect with the consequences of the things they’re consuming when you live in the jungle, you source everything locally.
1:06:07 So if you live in a bad way to nature, it’s going to really negatively impact where you live. Of course, everything is just piped into places in the modern cultures like we live so there, there, I think that creates a bigger amount of their disconnection from nature. So it’s interesting, part, I guess, like in the jungle, if you throw it away, you’re going to see there is no, there’s no way, there’s no way. I saw a recent documentary on Vice where they’re in Mumbai and the slums in Mumbai.
1:06:30 I was thinking about this a lot when you were talking, that recycling the plastics in the back, and you can see all their waterways have everything they put in them, and it’s, it’s a quite a reminder that, yeah, we are kind of what we produce and what we throw away. Um, I’ve got a personal question for you. It’s a very London Real question, but, um, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Melissa and give her a bit of advice, and it can’t be, you go girl, keep going, the cliché, can’t be that, what would it be?
1:07:00 Um, I think firstly, not to take things too personally. I’m, I’m quite a sensitive person, so in the past I have taken some things very personally, um, criticism about your work or professionally, professionally, yeah, not so much criticism, but things that have happened, you know, if, if a certain thing hasn’t worked out, I took that upon myself and thought, oh, you know, I failed in some way. Or my perspective now is that, um, a lot of the things that happen to you are, are not, I mean, yes, you engineer your own fate in a sense, but a lot of the things that happen, not your fault as such.
1:07:35 I mean, for example, when you’re dealing with other people, people might have their own problems going on, you know, you might just kind of rock into them, and they might not, in some scenario, treat you very well. Don’t take it personally, unless of course, I mean, if that keeps on happening, then yeah, you might have a personality issue, but, um, don’t take things too personally, and try always to see the bigger perspective on everything, and, you know, that might be understanding a person or a situation, and obviously if you’re in quite a pioneering space, classically in enterprise, people fail, and they fail, and they fail again, and you know, that’s almost like, um, a badge of honor in Silicon Valley. You’re expected to have some failures, and you’ve learned from them, and again, here we don’t have that so much.
1:08:19 You know, here if you fail, my goodness, it’s the end of the world, and you’ve done a terrible thing. You know, in some places, not just the state’s experience is valued so yeah, just be a bit more chilled out about stuff. And okay, on that same note, what would you say to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us right now, be it a boy or a girl or man or woman, and as far as what advice you would get them to, if they want to grow up and be like Melissa someday, be resilient.
1:08:49 Yeah, just keep on trying, and don’t be, don’t be what other people want you to be lots and lots of people will have ideas about what you should be on all sorts of levels. Be what you be, what you want to be. Be, be true to yourself. Admittedly, there are some scenarios when you have to kind of edit certain aspects of your personality. I think we all do that, but just be true to yourself, and some people won’t like that, but hey, that’s their problem, not yours.
1:09:22 Yeah. I mean, we were talking earlier about Rachel Armstrong or I mean, you guys live in men’s circles mainly. I mean, right? Jesus. I mean, it must be you guys must be 5% when you go to these conferences, right?
1:09:33 10%, yeah. Usually it’s a ratio of about 14 men to every woman as a standard. That’s what I figured. So you girls are used to being tough, it seems. Yeah, it’s good advice.
1:09:42 I mean, I think it is good advice to be yourself, because ultimately people will see through anything else, and you won’t be genuine. So you know, I think that’s one of the things that Neil has going for him is he’s just like, this is my personality, it’s big. I like to do lots of things. You know, so that’s absolutely, that’s really good. I’m going to wrap this up unless you got any more questions?
1:10:06 There, yeah, there’s one thing I quite like to ask. You know, obviously it’s about like the scientific mindset, and you know how we came back from that very rigid Christian mindset where scientific thought can really get its foothold in it, and I just wanted to know if you thought the pendulum had swung maybe too far in the other direction, now that maybe not like the scientific method itself, but the certain mind that the scientists come from, that it’s slightly stuck in a rut and quite rigid. Cuz I know we had the TED talks of Rupert Sheldrake, whose talk actually addressed that very idea and it was sort of taken off the TED talks.
1:10:41 I think it’s a big issue. We see, I think, a lot of polarization at the moment. And there is, relating to Rupert Sheldrake’s talk, there is a materialist scientist, attitude not just in science but in business, and a lot of, a lot of spaces. And on the other side, you know, we have the spiritual, and you know, when Rupert Sheldrake was talking about morphogenic fields and his concept, which basically, I guess, in that you’re throwing in sixth sense, and the idea that there’s another dimension.
1:11:13 I think it’s absolutely valid to research that. Also, it’s as plausible as quantum mechanics, and in many ways very similar, because obviously quantum mechanics is exploring another physical dimension, but it’s a dimension that’s quite weird compared to that which we’re familiar with. If there is a spiritual world, I think there is. I’ve seen a few things that I think there is no material science explanation for that event therefore there’s got to be something else going on here.
1:11:44 I think it’s absolutely rational to research that, and I don’t think it really serves anybody to try and polarize these areas. And, you know, we are one of, not the first generation, but if you go back not so long ago, so 100 years, it was absolutely normal to investigate material science and to believe in a spiritual dimension, and what’s so scary about it? That’s the thing, and you know, when you see things like singularity discussed, and people say, you know, well, maybe we could be living forever.
1:12:17 Of course in some cultures we do already live forever. We recycled, and in many ways that’s a more romantic and poetic concept. I love the idea of being recycled and growing up somewhere else and doing something else, and then again just popping up at some other point in time. Really, really, you know, lovely notion. So yeah, I, it’s gone too far the other way.
1:12:40 I was personally very sad to see that, you know, TED took a couple of talks down, and I hope in not too long a period of time people realize that, actually, you know, to do that you’re being a little bit like the skeptics when Charles Darwin was alive. Yeah, yeah. Or I guess quantum physics itself was a theory for so long, but it’s a good point. You raise, Alex, because I mean, I was classically trained in an engineering school, and I was, and when Rupert was sitting there talking, he starts talking about these morphic fields and the rats in Australia learning, and then the rats in England, I’m taught to think that that’s b******t, you know, I’m taught to be, you’re taught to be physically repulsed by anyone that goes against these theories.
1:13:24 You’ve been taught and as these new things come up, like you said, the singularity and all these weird ideas, I think it’s very important that we try to stay open-minded, otherwise we’re just going to be the church all over again, banning telescopes and St, yeah, I think, yeah. But anyway, really good question. Really good answer. There you go. Melissa, thanks so much for coming on.
1:13:46 Pleasure. It’s always nice to have someone in here, you know, with a breath of fresh air and someone who comes from a different place, and you know, I just think it’s nice to have people that think about things that aren’t always for profit. I think it helps to have people like that in here. So, because I think a lot of us are always like, okay, you know, how do we make the next business, or how do we pay the bills, and that. So for that, it’s good.
1:14:08 Let’s get this Kickstarter thing financed. How do people find that? Is it earth2hub.com. It’s Earth number two two Hub Hub. If you put it in the Kickstarter search engine, but the website to get to there, how do they do that?
1:14:23 That’s, that’s earth2hub, one word.com Okay, cool. And they can click on the Kickstarter below it, and then, yeah, you should have the link to the Kickstarter on the site there, yeah, and we would massively appreciate the help. Okay, fantastic. I mean, 28k pounds, we can do that, right? And are you on Twitter?
1:14:41 Absolutely, Melissa Sterry, s r y. Okay, fantastic. Excellent, wish you all the best in the future. Stay in touch, let us know what you’re doing. Alexander, how do people get in touch with you?
1:14:54 Search for Wy Works. Okay, Google W R Gotes, Twitter, YouTube, and do check it out. His work is amazing. Yeah, he does all sorts of animation stuff too, on top of his filmmaking. We’re still waiting for the London Real animation.
1:15:08 Yeah, we’re still waiting for that. It’ll come. And congrats on the Breaking Convention film. That’s huge. I don’t know if I’m attending, but we will be interviewing some people from the Breaking Convention, you and me of course.
1:15:19 And yeah, we’ll be doing that. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe, if you want to see the extremely good-looking Melissa Sterry on YouTube. I was setting up the camera, and I was like, wow. come see us on YouTube. It’s Channel London Real TV.
1:15:35 We’re on Twitter, we’re on Facebook, if you want to intern for us. There’s like 15 people around the world doing it. We love it. Send me an email at [email protected]. and until then it is about the journey.
1:15:45 Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, bye-bye. Space, you change the outer verse, you change the inner. So he’s talking about just planes.
1:15:57 Airplanes have the capacity to help us transcend time, space and distance when you’re on an airplane you get to cross of sky, and so one of his meditations is this wonderful thing that he says. He’s talking about being in flight, right? Says there is not much talk about the
