Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Remember when we started the conversation talking about definitions in the context of design and then in the context of being? That question requires, I think a kind of a shift, a humility. That requires a humility towards nature, understanding that it operates on different scales. We recently discovered that the molecular footprint of a rose, or of a plant in general during nighttime, is different than its molecular footprint during daytime. So these are circadian rhythms that are associated with what kind of molecules these plants emit given stresses, and given there’s a reason why a jasmine field smells so, so delicious and 4:00 AM in the morning. There’s peace and rest amongst the plants. And you have to tune into that time dimension of the plant kingdom, and that of course requires all this humility, where in a single capsule, to design a biodiversity chamber, it will take years, not months, and definitely not days to see these products. And also, that humility in design comes from simply looking at how we are today as a civilization, how we use and abuse nature. Just think of all these Christmas trees. These Christmas trees, they take years to grow. We use them for one night, the holiest night of the year, and then we let them go. And think about in nature to design a “product,” an organism spends energy and time and thoughtfulness and many, many, many years, and I’m thinking about the redwoods, to grow these channels, these cellulose layers and channels and reach these incredible heights. Takes sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years. Am I afraid of building a company that designs products in the scale of thousands of years? No, I’m not. And the way of being in the physical world today is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all, and that needs to change. And that’s obviously very, very hard to do in a community of human beings that is, at least in the Western world, that is based on capitalism. And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is, how do we impart upon the capitalist movement? We know that we need to produce now products that will enter the real world and be shared and used by others, and still benefit the natural world while benefiting humans? And that’s a wonderful challenge to have. So, integrate technology with nature, and that’s a really difficult problem. I see parallels here with another company of Neuralink, which is basically like, I think you mentioned, Neuralink for nature. That there are short-term products you can come up with, but it’s ultimately a long-term challenge of how do you integrate the machine with this creation of nature, this intricate, complex creation of nature, which is the human brain. And then you’re speaking more generally, nature. You know how every company has an image? Like this one single image that embodies the spirit of the company? And I think for Neuralink it was, to me, that chimpanzee playing a video game. It was just unbelievable. But with plants, there potentially is a set of molecules that impacts or inspires, I like that word, the plant to behave or act in a certain way, and allows still the plan the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go. Which is why our first product for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance. So here we’re thinking about the future of fragrances and the future of fragrances and flavors. These products in the industry as we know it today, are designed totally for a human-centric use and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury. They’re used on the body for the sake of, I don’t know, attraction and feeling good and smelling good. And we were asking ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be not a functional fragrance? Because you could claim that all fragrances are functional. But is there a world in which the fragrance becomes functionalized, is, again, imparted upon or given agency to connect with another organism? Is there a world in which you and I can go down to your garden and use a perfume that will interact with the rose garden downstairs? I’ve just been enamored with the statements that are being made in the media around, “Oh, this is completely biologically-derived fragrance and it’s bio-based.” But when you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you blew through 10,000 bushes of rose to create 5 mL of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take water management, and so much waste. Is this really what we want the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like? And so when we did the Aguahoja pavilion on the roof of SF MoMa, we calculated that for that pavilion we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and chitosan and apple skins and cellulose from tree pulp. And we calculated that overall the structure had 40,000 calories. Interesting way to think about a structure, from the point of view of calories. But as you left the gallery, you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed by Felix on our team, and these clocks measured temperature and humidity, and we connected them to a weather channel so that we could directly look at how the pavilion was biodegrading in real-time.…

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