44. Spec-Tacular Science: A Chat with Michael Specter on Denying Denialism

[00:00:00] Erum: Hey, Carl. How's it going?

[00:00:01] Karl: Good, Uram. How are you doing?

[00:00:04] Erum: I'm doing fine. I'm so happy right now. It's autumn, and we live here in New York City, and the fall foliage is now coming out and about, and it's beautiful to see, especially on very sunny days.

[00:00:17] Karl: Yeah. Well, you know it hasn't peaked yet, right? In New York City.

[00:00:20] Erum: Yeah, I know. I'm waiting for it. I just hope that during that time it isn't so cloudy and rainy like it is today so you can enjoy it.

[00:00:26] Karl: Yeah. So I learned that New York State has an army of volunteers that track fall foliage across the state.

[00:00:33] Erum: Yeah.

[00:00:34] Karl: And I had no idea. Oh, yeah. And, we were driving, I think, back from the Adirondacks, and Kristen was playing North Country Radio, which covers the Adirondacks in Vermont, and they had, they were interviewing these volunteers, and the way they were describing fall foliage was just so amazing and poetic.

[00:00:50] Karl: They're like, the leaves are the color of orange soda and light lime and cinnamon and turmeric." Wow. And I was like, "Who are these people?" You know, we're on the Grow Everything podcast. We talk about the impact of biology on the economy.

[00:01:08] Karl: But the New York City I Love NY page tracks the progress of fall foliage, and then you can track the New York State map foliage on a live map, and we'll put the links in the show notes. It's just am- to me, it's amazing.

[00:01:20] Erum: Yeah. Yeah, I've been using that for a couple years now, just so I know when to go apple picking, to make the trek up there and to see it. And like, there's New York State foliage, other states have their sites because of happen- the foliage happens starting north and it goes south.

[00:01:36] Erum: So you can spend a lot of time traveling and following the peak foliage from the north to the south if you have the luxury of time. But it is beautiful.

[00:01:48] Karl: It does cause a lot of traffic, so, if you track it and then you look at... Like I follow people on Reddit who are like, "Is this a good weekend to go up?"

[00:01:56] Karl: Or the, the traffic was a nightmare. So last week, which was, Indigenous Peoples' Day, also previously known as Columbus Day, the traffic was a nightmare because a lot of people were leaving the city, but foliage had already peaked further north.

[00:02:10] Erum: Yeah. Well, the hot tips, you know, on the Grow Everything podcast, not only do you learn about the business of biology, but you get hot travel tips.

[00:02:19] Karl: Exactly.

[00:02:20] Erum: and like the hack is to take a boat. They have fall foliage excursions where you can take a boat from Manhattan, and it goes all the way up the Hudson River or the East River, I think it depends. and then you can just see the foliage as you go up, and you're just like gliding through the river, and it's very beautiful.

[00:02:39] Karl: Yeah. it's an amazing thing. Okay, so speaking of foliage, this news we kind of saved. It's a little bit old. Old meaning it's a couple weeks old. Did you see the people who won this, NASA Mars to Table challenge?

[00:02:51] Erum: I heard about the challenge, but I don't know who won. Tell me about it.

[00:02:55] Karl: So I don't know enough about the competition, and I apologize listeners, but I did follow the people who won.

[00:03:02] Karl: So one of the winners was a person named Chinyere Ukaji, and what they did was they developed a modular food ecosystem that combines controlled environmental agriculture, fermentation, and fungi cultivation in a closed loop system that goes through bioreactors.

[00:03:19] Karl: And the idea is that this thing will, produce 50% of the food that people on Mars are gonna need. The other half is, basically the camping trip analogy where they're gonna bring a bunch of food with them.

[00:03:30] Erum: Wow, this is amazing. Yeah, I love the fact that they have these challenges. NASA Mars to table, like it's incredible.

[00:03:38] Erum: I would love to see all the contestants and submissions. so it reminds me of our friend Mario Maggio, who has a space bioreactor company. We had him on the podcast. I recommend you guys listen to that. but this is interesting. this is for the, a Mars challenge to like, make food to travel in space, but how do you also take these concepts and learnings and, these products and use it here on Earth?

[00:04:02] Erum: And I th- I'm sure that's a part of this challenge. That's always been the narrative when it comes to space travel. It's like we're making all these technologies, we're spending this money, to explore space, but the, effects of this is we learn a lot on what we can make for Earth. Like, we are able to make things for Earth from this exploration of technology or food technology in this case, which is so crazy.

[00:04:26] Erum: Like, I love this. I wonder what Chinyere is up to now. I mean, he winner, like, what's the next thing? Like, Is it like a protein or multiple types of foods?

[00:04:38] Karl: Yeah, I'm under the impression that, they're working on a bunch of different foods because it's a food ecosystem.

[00:04:44] Erum: Oh, wow.

[00:04:44] Karl: So it's not just one type of food, it's the possibility of creating multiple foods.

[00:04:49] Erum: Yes. That's the way to do it.

[00:04:51] Karl: Yeah. There was another one that also pr- proposed, a food ecosystem. it's, the name I have is Sisloon, and maybe I got it wrong. Again, apologies to our listeners, of Rosemead, California, and they did something called the Fresh Ferment Reserve Food Infrastructure.

[00:05:06] Karl: And again, it's like they're proposing a system that grows model crops, converts part of the harvest into foods that would be produced in culture cassettes, which I love as a idea, and then it uses a protected Earth-loaded reserve to supplement in case of biological variability, utility curtailment, and rejected batches.

[00:05:27] Karl: So, ag- I'm with you. I love hearing about these things, and we've got an episode coming up where we're talking to someone who's very passionate about regenerative agriculture. And as I was reading these and we were recording that episode, I kept thinking, "Well, what is regenerative agriculture gonna look like on Mars?"

[00:05:44] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. This is great. I love the convergence of so much technology and ideas and we come up with things like culture cassettes, which is like, okay, that's interesting.

[00:05:55] Karl: Yeah, what is that?

[00:05:57] Erum: I wonder if that's where how the food grows. I mean, a culture is what a bunch of microbes, which is what's in soil.

[00:06:03] Erum: so it's cool. I love it

[00:06:06] Karl: okay, couple more news items before we get into today's, episode. did you see this news about the black mold and insects found at Chinese facilities making GLP-1 agents?

[00:06:18] Erum: gross.

[00:06:19] Karl: Yeah. That's exactly the right reaction.

[00:06:24] Erum: I have not. So, so what's breaking about this?

[00:06:26] Erum: I mean, GLP-1s are, very hot right now. Everyone's taking them. Not myself. I know you're not either. But we know it's a hot commodity, so what's up with it? why does this happen? Like, and how do we know?

[00:06:38] Karl: So,

[00:06:39] Karl: What people may not know is that the Food and Drug Administration does have inspectors at facilities around the world, so in China, in India, in Europe. Anything that gets imported to the United States that is a drug has to be inspected. the United States has one of the safest drug systems in the world as a result of this.

[00:06:58] Karl: So the FDA inspectors went to these facilities that make the compounding agents for GLP-1s, and they found that there was black mold, there was insects crawling all over the place, and as has happened in the past, the people who ran the facility were trying to forge the documents that, show that they've been inspected and they're clean.

[00:07:17] Karl: But the inspectors found that was not the case. this is not something that's new. It happens regularly. It just doesn't make the news. I think this one made the news because it's related to GLP-1s, and GLP-1s are in the news every day almost. So it was one of those where it's like, okay, so you're getting your peptides from where, and who's doing the compounding, and what kind of inspections are they having?

[00:07:40] Karl: So peptide users, be cautious.

[00:07:44] Erum: Yeah. Nice public service announcement. We do hear a lot, I mean, in New York, there's a lot of, risk takers I'll say, and taking all sorts of peptides. I don't know anyone personally, but the people I do know personally know people who are injecting themselves with all sorts of things and, and it's like, okay, like, let's, can we take a, a break for a second and see what's going on?

[00:08:10] Erum: And then I feel like, this news story is let's put on the brakes everybody. Let's not just blindly trust the word peptide and take it. And I mean, I don't know if the black mold and the bugs influence the product

[00:08:23] Karl: No, they're not supposed to be there. These are supposed to be GLP or GMP facilities, very clean, sterile.

[00:08:31] Karl: Yeah.

[00:08:32] Erum: Did they actually affect the quality? like they could be there, but if the lab's on one side and the, the bugs are on one side, which I don't know. but I'm not trying to defend Chinese plants

[00:08:47] Karl: that are- Or any manufa- any manufacturing plants- Any

[00:08:48] Erum: manufacturing plants, yeah

[00:08:49] Erum: that are,

[00:08:50] Karl: that are cutting the corners. but I think I'm with you. It's more like, as you said, public service announcement for those of you taking peptides, know where they're coming from.

[00:08:59] Erum: Exactly. Yep. And so what else is going on? What's going on in our world of, biomanufacturing or biotech?

[00:09:05] Erum: There's a lot of companies doing deals. Have you heard of anything recently?

[00:09:08] Karl: -- two companies that have been on our podcast, Symvita, we had Moji Karimi on, and then Roebling, we've had three people from Roebling on. Edward, Joshua, and Brenton have been on the podcast. So Symvita and Roebling did a deal, which is super exciting because Roebling is focused on, process engineering.

[00:09:26] Karl: It's AI native, and they have a lot of data that they've collected from people who are doing,techno-economic analysis on building biomanufacturing facilities. And, Symvita, who does amazing things, deploying biological solutions in mines, in oil fields, in wastewater, treatment facilities.

[00:09:48] Karl: And so they're doing this deal to speed discovery, evaluation, and deployment of biological solutions for the natural resource industries. So again, oil, gas, mining, anything that is-

[00:09:59] Erum: Food and ag ...

[00:10:00] Karl: food and ag. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm super excited about this, and I think, we're overdue to have Moji back on the podcast to tell us more about this and talk to us about what he's doing.

[00:10:10] Erum: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an amazing partnership. It really is starting to hone in on the physical AI aspect, right? Roebling AI native, they have a lot of data. They've worked with companies that are, doing process engineering, so -- they have that aspect. It's more upstream, I would say.

[00:10:28] Erum: and then, Moji and Symvita, their team, they're out there deploying these products. They're in the physical world. They are sensing like subsurface, environments, and they're looking at, different agricultural, landscapes. And then they have all this data, and now this combination of these two companies will really give an amazing insight into what's happening in these natural resource industries, what problems they might be facing, what inefficiencies are there, because there's a lot.

[00:11:01] Erum: if there was no inefficiency, we would be living in a very clean, pristine, regenerative environment, but we don't. So these partnerships, like with Symbiot and Roebling, can help get towards that, which is amazing.

[00:11:14] Karl: Yeah. I'm looking forward to having conversations with both of them about this partnership.

[00:11:19] Karl: so listeners, you've heard us for the last couple months talk about the Biomimetics International Conference that we're gonna be at November 9 and 10 in Minneapolis. And so we're thrilled today to have Michael Wright, the founder of, Biomimetics International, on the podcast.

[00:11:36] Karl: Yrem, how did you meet Michael and the team from Biomimetics International?

[00:11:41] Erum: Yeah. So, Michael's team, one of their team members, Eric Brand, reached out to me on LinkedIn and was like, "Oh, I like what you're doing with the podcast, the Messaging Lab, and, we're starting this, Biomimetics International," which has been around for a couple years.

[00:11:54] Erum: They've done a lot of work, and we'll have the link in the show notes so you can see the breadth of work. And a lot of it is, this association bringing partners together, and a lot of companies, so Target, 3M, Microsoft. a bunch of companies, have come together around this idea of biomimetics.

[00:12:12] Erum: And so he told me about it, and then we met Michael Wright, and I was blown away by his background, which he'll talk more about. but he is a veteran of the semiconductor world. He understands how industries are built, and he knows that it requires collaboration up and down the value chain and all around, the whole ecosystem from industry to government to public policy.

[00:12:40] Erum: It's everything, and we all need to focus on how we can work collaboratively to build a bioeconomy and make things with biology in mind. And so with that, let's hear from Michael Wright.

[00:12:53] Karl: Michael Wright of Biomimetics International, we are so excited to have you on the Grow Everything podcast today

[00:13:00] Michael: Excited to be here.

[00:13:02] Karl: So why don't we jump right in? Can you tell our listeners a bit more about who you are and explain what Biomimetics is?

[00:13:09] Michael: how far back do you want to go? But I think, probably for your listeners, more, more important is sort of the background in high technology, coming up through Moore's Law, basically chasing it for several decades, catching it a couple times.

[00:13:22] Michael: but primarily, focused in the business world, from how do you take technologies to market, how do you build companies, doing that from both a C-suite position as well as starting out on the, ground floor carrying a bag, as they say. So there's many different aspects to that career over that many years, but most of it has been, like I said, in high tech.

[00:13:43] Michael: Most of it's in building semiconductor factories, fabs, equipment, et cetera, and along the way, building some software as well. So it's kind of, that's the background. What got me more towards this, was the fact that I saw several different things that looked a lot the same. Nature has a tendency to do things exponentially.

[00:14:02] Michael: Moore's Law is an exponential curve. there's a lot you learn by wrestling with that. we even wrote a book, "The Exponential Era," published by Wiley in 2021. So there's lots of background that sort of led to nature does things pretty similar, maybe there's something there for me, you know,post,high tech career.

[00:14:23] Michael: And then it turns out that, biology and biomimetics and all that is even more high tech, and because nature's had four billion years to test everything.

[00:14:32] Erum: Yeah, absolutely. And to get a little, a bit more specific, I mean, we looked at your background and your trajectory spans from graduating from Naval Nuclear Power School to leading semiconductor giants at Entegris, and then you also worked with DARPA to shape some of their roadmaps with your background, and now you're directing Biomimetics International.

[00:14:53] Erum: So can you tell us that specific moment that brought you from the, the world of semiconductors and silicon chips to learning from nature's three-billion-year design manual that you m- just mentioned?

[00:15:06] Michael: Yeah, it's an interesting transition. it started with a couple of conversations with a friend of mine at the University of Minnesota, Tom Fisher, who's the former dean of the College of Design or School of Design.

[00:15:16] Michael: And one of the things we kept thinking about and talking about is that, we continue to do these things linearly. we're sort of arrogant in a way. we don't look out the window and go, "Wait a minute. that's not necessarily optimal design." A lot of people think nature makes things the most efficient, the most optimal.

[00:15:32] Michael: Not really. It makes the things that are most tested they've survived, and that's sort of the, the test, if you will, the measurement. and so I think what made the transition for me was just the aha moment of looking out the window and going, "Wait a minute. We're sort of like a bunch of ants, stuck in a glass jar trying to describe what, is going on in the universe."

[00:15:53] Michael: and the reality is we know very little. and how nature works, how things have evolved over time through that testing process is more than, any lab on the planet, and it's sitting there and it's available to us. It's the most tested lab that there is. And so you would think that when you wanna learn something or try and design something, maybe you look there first because possibly it won't be optimal.

[00:16:20] Michael: Maybe we can optimize it, but we do know that it's been tested, and we do know that it's survived. I mean, 98% of the species that have existed have gone extinct So on the one hand, the odds aren't in our favor. On the other hand, those things that do survive are pretty robust in their design and how they execute, et cetera.

[00:16:43] Michael: So that's what sort of led me to that, and it was just that insight of working at the, the leading bleeding edge, if you will, because, I worked in lithography as an example. We invented the stepper at GCA. you start to deal with very, very small things. As you get smaller, it's almost counterintuitive, it gets more complex.

[00:17:03] Michael: It gets messier, and we don't like that as humans. We kinda like, well, we, put it in here, it comes out there, and it's exactly as we predicted, and everyone's happy. on the other hand, nature doesn't quite work that way. It's kind of a messy interaction, and that leads to ki- the, complexity. And I thought, coming out of the, semiconductor world, I'd been in the most complex, industry that there is, and boy, you take one look at a mycelium network and go, we have a lot to learn."

[00:17:30] Karl: Yeah. that's for sure. I mean, based on that, Could you give us an example of,one place where biomimetics is quietly solving a problem that most people don't even realize is biological?

[00:17:42] Michael: Well, I think it's in the design side, and it's in many different things that, people don't realize have biological, roots.

[00:17:50] Michael: no pun intended. But for example, Velcro is kind of a classic example of a burr. And, we copied the burr, we made the Velcro. the one big difference that I'd really like to point out to, your audience and your listeners is the big difference is Velcro works, it works very well, and it's modeled after a biological function of a particular seed and how it tries to proliferate, and get caught on things, and it becomes mobile We turn around, we go, "That's an interesting mechanism.

[00:18:21] Michael: It really works." And we make it out of plastic, and we make it out of all kinds of things, but the burr is made out of organics. The burr, at the end of its usefulness, goes back to the ground, goes back in, and so there's closure. And I think from a biomimic standpoint and why we say things like biosphere's compatible, it's that closure, it's that end piece that is the sort of the hidden piece of the biologics.

[00:18:47] Michael: We talk about circularity. That's great. If we recycle plastics, we just made more microplastics. So how do we look at it from a real closure, which is, the earth taking it back? we've got lucky with nylon as an example. There were enough molecule openings that bacteria could latch in and start to break it down.

[00:19:09] Michael: With something like PFAS, we don't have that luxury. We made the perfect chemical. so anyway, that's kind of the things that people don't think about that are biological in nature that we take for granted every day that are used, that are simple. There's other things like shark skin. you've heard of that.

[00:19:27] Michael: It's made of the bumps and all that, but it's actually being used in, in airplanes now for skin surface. it'll reduce the drag by 1%, which everybody goes, "Oh, well, that's not very much," 1%. Well, 1% in a fleet of 747s, 737s, w- whatever, but a fleet of aircraft that are traveling around the world, that's a lot of fuel.

[00:19:49] Michael: That's a lot of carbon that doesn't get put into the air. And it all came from understanding how to make a surface such that, there's very low resistance and nothing sticks to it

[00:20:00] Erum: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for those examples. I mean, I'm so excited to talk to you because of this perspective of biomimetics and also because of a- all of your work.

[00:20:11] Erum: I mean, you've written this book called "The Exponential Era," and your work in general has focused heavily on convergent zones, so critical windows where multiple exponential technologies collide. So how do you see the digital world, sometimes referred to as metaverse, although that might be an outdated term 'cause of Meta using it, but how do you see the digital world colliding with the biological world over the next decade?

[00:20:36] Michael: So when you get convergences, when you get things interacting, you get something new. You get a new trajectory. So, we often talk about it as, these two things come together, well, then a third one comes out, and that continues on and on, and that's how things develop.

[00:20:52] Michael: So when you look at, different trends and technologies, as they start to come together, sometimes you can anticipate what the outcome might be, sometimes you can't. but one example I'd like to use, and maybe sort of go off a little bit, is if we look at digital and biological and how those come together, what are things that people take for granted that we didn't really think about where that convergence comes?

[00:21:21] Michael: So one case is the digital world of, say, a GPS and the biological world of the farmer Right? Those come together and now you have a convergence, if you will, of the biologics with the digital. the farmer-- they virtually can have autonomous vehicles that are doing the, the plowing, knowing ac- exactly where to put each seed, how much water to put with each one, monitoring different things.

[00:21:50] Michael: So we begin to optimize, if you will, by having that convergence. There's another convergence that, I wrote about that's, one of the aluminum articles, is digital water. Now, the water community, the, the people that treat the water and deliver the water and all that, use digital water as sort of how they measure things with, digital tools now.

[00:22:10] Michael: I took it, a little bit differently, and I'll sidestep a little bit here. One of the inspirations I had, about doing this was I had the good fortune to meet, Dr. Adrian Bejan out of Duke University. Adrian wrote "The Constructal Law of Physics" or came up with that, and I spent time with him.

[00:22:26] Michael: We were gonna do some things together. We may still do some things together. But in looking at his, particular observation that things will flow, right, to cover the most territory, if you will. They'll continue to flow, find ways to flow, in a path of least resistance, sort of like what your grandmother used to say, right?

[00:22:46] Michael: But it turns out that little flow mechanism can be sort of predicted, and it can be measured and, different things can be developed to understand how that flow, develops. What you have to know is what's flowing. So in the case of a tree, if you look at a tree, what's flowing is water, right? Water is coming through the, the, the root system, up through the trunk, and then out through the leaves.

[00:23:11] Michael: It is perfectly designed for that to cover the most, capture the most amount of water through the root system, most amount of nutrients, deliver those to the tree, and rid itself of the waste,through the water and whatever else. So when you begin to look at things that way, you begin to see, the world differently And so what I started to look at was our digital world in a biosphere's perspective, in the perspective of what does nature look at?

[00:23:38] Michael: And I'll come back to biosphere in a moment. But if you look at how things flow in nature, and then you compare that to how zeros and ones flow, the bits and bytes, the electrons are flowing through a large scale system, you begin to see something different. So when water flows, you get a drop, right? You get droplets, then you get riblets, then you get a little bit of a stream, right?

[00:24:05] Michael: Then you get a creek or a crick, depending where you're from, right? Then you get a tributary, and then you get a river, right? It has the same thing. But the rate at which it flows and the distance that it travels And how it makes its way through that topography is largely a function of what it runs into.

[00:24:28] Michael: What are the, gates that open? What are the breaks that hold it back? So if you take that same analogy and you were to just look at water, if it runs through sand, it runs one way. If it runs through gravel, it runs another way. If it runs through a combination of weeds and sand, it does something different.

[00:24:43] Michael: If it r- runs into clay, it does something totally different. So when you start to look at that sort of structure, and you start to look at the digital world where we're flowing zeros and ones, and you look at those as water droplets, just visualize those as water droplets. We're sitting here and we're actually flowing back and forth in a stream, but where is it going?

[00:25:05] Michael: We're creating the droplets via the mechanism of our computer, whatever. That is being carried to a larger trunk, if you will, or through a system like a, a network. That network is going into most likely a data center, right? A data center is like a, a lake, or a pool, and in fact, they're called pools for a reason.

[00:25:29] Michael: So that same thing is happening. So in nature, that same flow takes place. In the digital world, that same flow takes place. And there's one other difference that I sort of threw in from a different perspective, which is we like our water pure and clean, don't we?

[00:25:45] Erum: Yeah. I like my water like that, yes.

[00:25:47] Michael: Yeah.

[00:25:47] Michael: Yeah. We all do. If we think of digital water, we'd like it to be pure and clean, too, right? We'd also like access. So a large part of this is accessibility, and, the argument, at least I made in that particular article, was that we should ought to start thinking about, it as utilities and not as either a liberal or a conservative, way of governing how the, the digital flows.

[00:26:13] Michael: So that's a, a long-winded, but a, an example of how you start to change your perspective when you start to look at nature and different things and how it can a- apply to the digital world. The other part of the convergences is when you look at,accidental convergence as an example, rubber came from that, vulcanized rubber came from, the beakers fell on the ground, all that good stuff.

[00:26:34] Michael: There are other convergences, and Frank Diana from Tata, who is one of their lead futurists, really has done a lot of work in this space where you start to add different technologies with, sociological trends. Aging population and robotics, what might that develop? Whole new industries of caretaking.

[00:26:52] Michael: What happens when you have, AI and imaging, recognition and people reading it. Again, we're bringing digital and bio. We're converging the two. our ability to, actually go out and read the library of nature is coming from one of the people that's actually gonna be presenting at our conference, Asteria, which is the result of a 10-year, effort to bring together every piece of research they could get their hands on, which is hundreds of thousands of documents, and then build an AI tool that can search those.

[00:27:25] Michael: So you can put in, "Hey, I'm looking for a solution to this. what's the research show that's already been done that's based on biology? what's nature already doing that I can extract?" It goes one level further and says, "Hey, we found a bunch of stuff, and your initial design might look like this."

[00:27:44] Michael: So that's another example of, where you get the convergences.

[00:27:47] Karl: That, that sounds amazing. I'm really looking forward to getting, to know more about that person. you wanna talk about the Biosverse what is that?

[00:27:56] Michael: So if you think of the Biosverse as being like, our body, but it's the Earth's body, if you will. Our body contains all kinds of, organs and elements and different things growing in it and living on it and all that.

[00:28:09] Michael: so that's kind of how our body works. The Earth has its body, and we've sort of labeled that the Biosverse and sort of juxtaposed it to the Metaverse. The Metaverse being all things digital, the Biosverse being all things living and biological and how that all interacts. So if we look at the body and we wanna do a organ transplant, and we've got the perfect donor, we've got the perfect match, what is the surgeon afraid of?

[00:28:37] Karl: typically it's, it's the immune re-reaction.

[00:28:39] Michael: That's right ...

[00:28:40] Karl: it's rejection.

[00:28:41] Michael: Rejection, right?

[00:28:41] Karl: Yeah.

[00:28:42] Erum: Yeah.

[00:28:43] Michael: So the Earth has a tendency, the Biosverse has a tendency to do the same thing. What the body's doing when you put something into it is going, "Is this me? does it belong here? Does it work with me?

[00:28:55] Michael: Is it going to help me long term or hurt me long term? Is it an immediate threat? So the body's going through that. The Earth kinda does the same thing, it's just on a longer time horizon Right? And it starts to look at that. So when we say biosphere's compatible, that's what we're talking about, is that we're gonna put this system into the earth, we're gonna put this product into the planet.

[00:29:17] Michael: we're gonna release this material. Does the biosphere, does the planet recognize it as me? Because if it doesn't, it's going to reject it. And in the process, there's going to be costs. costs could be extinctions, the costs can be health, the costs can be financial, but there's gonna be cost. And it's one of the reasons we developed something called the third number.

[00:29:43] Michael: the third number is nature's ledger that says, "Oh yeah, you created this thing called PFAS. It's not me. Don't know what you're gonna do with it, but I know what I'm gonna do with it, which is nothing," right? "And it's going to affect you. And oh, by the way, that is going to become a liability on your balance sheet at some point."

[00:30:02] Michael: Now, the interesting thing is, so that's why we call it the third number, is because in economics or, the, the world of numbers, if you will, the economy and business, we generate two numbers all the time. What did it cost to acquire or build something, and what did it cost to operate? So those are the two numbers.

[00:30:20] Michael: From those two numbers, you can build any business plan, anything you want from a modeling standpoint. That's all you need. The third number doesn't show up until later because it's nature's ledger, and it's being kept on its timeframe. So, for example, PFAS was, 30-plus years before, the penalty started to come due, and it's coming due in big numbers.

[00:30:44] Michael: So we're suggesting that maybe one thing you wanna look at as, as you're building things, as you're creating things, is what's the third number gonna be? How's that gonna play into things? And so when you come back again to what's the biosphere is that sort of representation of the Earth's body and is always looking for, on the compatibility side and why we started to build an index around that, is this recognized as me?

[00:31:10] Michael: If not, what might we change to make it more like me, the Earth, where we get that full cycle, where that burr, that Velcro comes back, and goes into something next. nature doesn't have too many waste streams. Waste becomes somebody else's food, somebody else's fuel, right? And so we're kinda going, we've got all these different entities out there.

[00:31:33] Michael: We've got, institutes, we've got different consulting groups, we've got different labs. We have labs within companies. We have all that, and that's one of the reasons for bringing, biomimetics together. And you had asked the question earlier, what got me into sort of doing this. I'd been chairman of SEMI's,Industry Strategy Symposium off and on for, a number of years.

[00:31:54] Michael: And part of what SEMI had done early on in its, life cycle, if you will, is it started to realize decades ago that, if we couldn't talk the same language, if we couldn't come up with the same standards, if we couldn't do those things, and come together, we un- unlikely to be successful.

[00:32:13] Michael: There would be a CMOS industry, as an example, which just doesn't work, or it'd be too vertical. When you can go this way and you can bring people together and build an ecosystem, you can begin to scale an industry and rapidly. When I looked at the, the biomimicry, bios- inspired design,biophilics, there were a number of different terminologies that were out there.

[00:32:33] Michael: And I sort of seized on biomimetics because for two reasons. One is it sounds industrial the other is it has exactly the same number of syllables as semiconductor, biomimetics. So I thought, "Well, okay, we can get it through," It will sink in someday. But the other piece to that was, in looking at the different terminologies, every word has a lookup.

[00:32:56] Michael: You know that from what you do. right? Somebody uses a word and you go, "Well, that has multiple meanings. I'm not sure." So what you wanna do is cut through and not have too many other competing lookups. Mime, mimicry, et cetera, have different lookups than what we wanna use it for, and the brain is gonna go, "Well, are you talking about a mime in France walking along?"

[00:33:15] Michael: or, "Are you talking about mimicking me?" That's not too good. So the, the choice of biomimetics was intentional. the idea was if we can bring all of these different disciplines, ideas that are focused around learning from nature, what can we do? And so this is kind of like our second real year.

[00:33:35] Michael: The first year we kinda just tested the water. But it's amazing the response we've got. I mean, we've got a, 30 Under 30 in Rafael, talking. We have, Shu Yang, who is,one of the top 33 game changers,chosen by National Geographic, for her work in materials. I mean, we've got some amazing people, coming to this and I think it's because everybody's beginning to realize we had better figure out how to be biosphere compatible or at least get along with nature, or we're probably gonna join that other 98%.

[00:34:04] Karl: Yeah. Let's hope not. I mean, we talk about it a lot,a-across podcast episodes that nature holds all the answers and we could do a better job looking at nature and appreciating what it has given us and what it continues to give us. I love this idea of biosphere.

[00:34:20] Karl: In a way it's very futuristic but it makes a lot of sense. It's like you wanna have that third number as you say so that you're thinking not just about today but the future. So really I love that.

[00:34:31] Michael: Yeah. the other term is generational. there's a lot of people that have, done a lot on sustainability but sustainability is g-again one of those that's entering this combative zone, for your mind.

[00:34:41] Michael: Well, sustainability, does that mean it's, tree-hugging time or does it mean,we're gonna just, recycle waste which we don't do a very good job of? so you can sustain anything. It can be good or bad. again, that's that type of a lookup. I-If I ask you what sustainability means, what would you say?

[00:35:00] Michael: My bet is n- neither one of you would say the same thing. And- We

[00:35:03] Karl: definitely would not.

[00:35:04] Michael: In your audience, I doubt there would be much agreement there either. However, if I say to you, "We're involved in developing generational impact," or, "We're concerned," like the theme of our, symposium this year, "We're interested in generational scaling."

[00:35:25] Michael: Something happened when I talked generational. I touched here. I made a connection here. Sustainability is out there. Generational's in here, and it encompasses what a lot of people think of as sustainable, right? I'm gonna build a house that is sustainable. Okay. how many generations are gonna live in it?

[00:35:46] Michael: Well, it's only gonna be sustainable for 10 years. But I made it sustainable. You get the idea. So when you say, things like that, I think those are terminology changes that we also wanna introduce, you know, through what we're doing. And again, it's that how do you put the, the digital and biological together?

[00:36:05] Michael: Well, biological has a tendency to take a long-term generational view, if you will. Maybe we should start thinking that way with our digital activities. Maybe it would've avoided a little bit of trouble with anxiety, et cetera, in our youth if we had said, "Well, what's the generational application of this technology?"

[00:36:24] Karl: I do have a question. I wanna go back to a little bit of your background, but also go forward as well, because you did do a lot of kind of traditional corporate engineering, and humans t- dictate every tolerance. But now you're talking about biological systems that don't really favor necessarily large systems.

[00:36:41] Karl: They evolve through replication, and that can be very daunting. How do you coach executives to navigate that tension between short-term profitability, and a generational enterprise, concern?

[00:36:55] Michael: Yeah, it's a tough question, because when you're in different environments in the business world, and having, been part of publicly traded companies both as a C-suite and a board member, there are pressures there and there are laws there that most people don't recognize.

[00:37:10] Michael: Your fiduciary responsibility under Delaware law, as an example, is to the shareholders And so now you have a real dilemma. Now there's a B Corp that's been developed, that sort of concept. It allows you a little more running room. But there is a real, part of this that says you're accountable for, this.

[00:37:29] Michael: Now the timeframe in which you deliver that is debatable, and it depends on your skills as a leader as to what you're gonna set for expectations in the marketplace, and how they may or may not punish you for it short term, but in the long term you may deliver,substantial, growth and profitability.

[00:37:47] Michael: When it comes to looking at nature, it's more, from the perspective of how do you bring the biomimetic side into the discussion or into the business economics. Again, you come back to that third number. And in talking to executives, it's sort of getting them to understand there's a third number out there.

[00:38:04] Michael: It used to be you could get away with it. It wouldn't be on your watch when the bill came due. Anymore, we are beginning to see and be able to develop models that say, "If you do this, this is going to be the third number cost." In fact, we're going to intro- introduce one at the symposium called Generational Cost of Ownership.

[00:38:21] Michael: And I'll tie that to background in a moment. But if you are working with executives, and when I work with executives, it's taking a longer term view for those shareholders. If you're really gonna do what's in their best interest, you're gonna take a longer view. the short term, yes, you may have to do some things right away.

[00:38:40] Michael: You may clean things up, do some adjustments. I've done turnarounds. there are things you have to do that you don't wanna do, but you have to. When you start to take a longer term view, you begin to understand cost differently. You understand relationships between things differently, and you begin to analyze sort of...

[00:38:59] Michael: The biggest question I ask them is, "Do you know what you do does?"

[00:39:05] Michael: In all the teams that I've ever worked with, that is the one question that I've always asked when anybody brings a plan or wants to make a decision or is weighing a decision. Do you know what you do does? Do you understand when you do this, what it's going to do? Because if you don't, you probably haven't thought it through.

[00:39:27] Michael: Now, the question is, how long are you gonna think it through and, how big are the ramifications, et cetera? And I would say that's sort of a layered approach. Some things are short-term, some things are longer term. But for the most part, your costs change as you look out over time because things like that third number begin to show up, externalities get, calculated in.

[00:39:48] Michael: And so that's why you see, like in data centers, this big pushback is because people haven't started to look at, well, wait a minute, if I can use the waste heat and provide heating to the community, or I can, develop greenhouses, or I can run a turbine and provide electricity, and people are working on this.

[00:40:07] Michael: What's happening is the, practitioners aren't getting credit for that. It looks like a brochure. we're gonna deaden the sound by using different methods of, externalities in, around the habitat. We're gonna improve the water catchments. We're gonna do all these things. But until you put it into numbers that the community can understand, y- you run into this.

[00:40:27] Michael: One's talking emotion, the other one's talking engineering So there's again, that type of, convergence, if you will, and how you talk to executives is to think in those terms. what are the long terms? And as it depends again on the character of the, executive as well.

[00:40:46] Michael: what are their ethics? What are they made of? What are they trying to do? If they're just trying to, "Hey, I'm gonna jack this thing up and, catch my parachute and I'm out of here," it's not really who you want running the company, for the long-term benefit of, not only the employees, but the shareholders.

[00:41:00] Michael: And I think the shareholder part is going to begin to grow more as more people in their 401s, et cetera, begin to see things. I think there's also gonna be a little bit of a... And why biosphere compatibility I think is gonna be important is because the, the communities, as they're doing with data centers, are beginning to push back and beginning to understand the ramifications and the impact generationally, on their communities of when somebody comes to town.

[00:41:28] Michael: Are you coming to town to stay? and when you sort of end your run, what's going to be left behind for us? So a real simple example is if you were to make a, data center walls out of concrete and rebar, which is kind of the standard. At the end of 20 years, data center's done, what do you do with it?

[00:41:48] Michael: If you can't find another use for that building, and sometimes you can't, big open empty space, you're gonna tear it down. Where's all that gonna go? landfill, that has a cost. The demolition, the landfill, everything else, that's a liability long term. It needs to be counted somewhere. If, on the other hand, you were to make it out of a new technology, say like hempcrete or something like that, where at that end of 20 years, you grind it up and you make apartments, that's a credit.

[00:42:22] Michael: So now I come back to the executive and go, "Which way are you thinking?" because if you've got something that requires a community acceptance or requires a, another company's or your, partners or whatever, have you really done that handshake in the good faith of time or just the moment?

[00:42:42] Michael: So I would say that's the biggest difference.

[00:42:44] Erum: That's amazing. That's some mighty fine leadership coaching right there. Thank you for that.

[00:42:49] Michael: I do that occasionally

[00:42:50] Erum: s- Well, yeah. That is what you do. Yeah, for sure. And, to be able to put, the third number and bios first in perspective for these executives can really help them ask the big questions.

[00:43:02] Erum: And it isn't just okay, a quote, unquote, "a vague sustainability exercise," but this does come down to, financial, expectations, how you're projecting numbers, any liability and cost and risk that's involved, if you know what you're doing. So do you know what you do does?

[00:43:19] Erum: Or how you frame that question's a really good one, and really, I think has like a, a loop, a feedback loop to try to answer that, which, really is what, executives need to think more deeply about what they're doing and the effects of their work or the product that they're selling. so really want to thank you for that, because we do have a lot of, emerging biotech leaders listening to the podcast.

[00:43:40] Erum: and there's a kind of like of course biology is good for the planet, but it's like, of course, how are you making it? How are you using it? and how are we developing this, budding biotech industry, not just biopharma, which is established, but more of everything we're talking about when it comes to making materials and ingredients and everything.

[00:44:00] Erum: And so you have this experience in the semiconductor industry, which is now very mature, and you work with Semi, which you mentioned, and DARPA Sematech. What can the emerging biotech or biomanufacturing industries learn from the semiconductor industry that has built global supply chains, standards, and roadmaps?

[00:44:21] Michael: Okay. unpacking that's kind of interesting. DARPA Sematech was a defense mechanism because we were losing the battle,and, quite, by quite a bit. What sort of came out of that was, well, we already had standards sort of developing. We had things that, as you look at Moore's Law, there's a roadmap, and we created the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which had every single process step for every single node.

[00:44:49] Michael: Now, when we had an answer, that became green. When we were working on it, that became yellow. When it became red, it says, we don't have anything for this." we're in trouble because this timeline's moving, exponentially. And sometimes you had to go way, way up the curve, to understand that.

[00:45:07] Michael: And I'll give you an example of how it's counterintuitive. Everybody says exponential. Oh, you gotta go faster. it's actually too late at that point. there's no amount of fast that's gonna catch it. so what you have to do is go back, and we wrote about this in the first book, "The New Business Normal," is you have to get comfortable with working on inklings.

[00:45:27] Michael: I see a signal. I see a little bit of signal out of the noise. What is that telling me? How do I look at it? And a lot of our, emerging technologies that are coming out of the, biomimicry fields and out of the, biologics, if you will, bionics, et cetera, is they're little signals.

[00:45:44] Michael: They're little blips. They're not really ready for scaling, but by the time we get to scaling, we have to have a whole bunch of things in place or they won't scale. And that's really one of the objectives of Biomimetics International is to take these little signals, get people interested in them, get them fed, get them along, and then have an ecosystem that says, "We're ready to go.

[00:46:05] Michael: We can scale. We can manufacture. We can get it to market. We can gather the waste streams. We're ready to go. We've got policy," et cetera. So that's that part of that. From learning curve, the ability to have people that are highly competitive work on common solutions that the industry can use was a big step.

[00:46:26] Michael: Not just mine, ours. You know, if you want to put a hole in the wall and you use your fingers, what's gonna happen? You're gonna break your fingers. But if you make a fist, you might make a dent. And what happened was the industry started to realize, wait a minute, if we do this around certain standards and we do it around, a roadmap and we do it around, how we go to market and how we measure ourselves, et cetera, we might have a chance And of course, that allowed it to scale.

[00:46:54] Michael: you have 500 process steps. In my particular background, they all, you know, interacted with one box. We made that box. Well, there's a lot of standards on that box, how big it is, how deep it is, how clean it is, what the distance between wafers is, so all the automation can find it, how it seals, how it closes, how you vent, I mean, on and on.

[00:47:16] Michael: You have to have a standard that everybody can interface with. In the case of biomedics, we're trying to at least initiate the idea of doing a, a standard around the, the data centers in terms of a baseline. It doesn't even have to be accurate. It just has to be a baseline that everybody refers to so that when you make a change, you can do a sensitivity analysis and understand what that means.

[00:47:37] Michael: So example, go back to that waste heat. What does that mean if I make this thing so that I'm capturing the waste heat and it is going to those apartments or houses or community or greenhouse? I can see the difference. I can measure the difference. If I restore the habitat around the data center to a level that is better than what it was, prior to putting the data center there, that's a credit.

[00:48:05] Michael: It's not a brochure. Let's measure it, right? Because that brings to your point, Hiram, it brings the economics in. Once you bring the economics in, now you bring the capital in, and I would say that's the one thing that I learned about that is, when we built the cost of ownership models, which is something we did, WWK, a company I founded, and is still in business and there's still a standard.

[00:48:27] Michael: It's called E35. Everybody in the semiconductor industry uses it for cost modeling. in fact, the research calls it a mediation tool. the accounting people did a bunch of research on it in 2018 and said, "Hey, wait a minute, these guys did something different," and it worked.

[00:48:40] Michael: It's a mediation tool. What it says is you as a, a buyer, you're Intel, and you wanna buy, this particular machine type, let's call it an etch machine, and we have company A and company B. Company A says, "Mine does this. It'll save you money.

[00:48:55] Michael: It does all that sort of thing, and it's really great." "Prove it." "Well, we did this test and this test, and we measured this and we measured that, and this is what we came up with." "Well, how'd you measure it?" "Well, we kinda-" Yeah, you had your finger on you know, and the other guy does the same thing.

[00:49:13] Michael: So you're sitting in there and you're trying to go, as an industry, you're trying to buy into this. So as a community, as an example, you're trying to buy into this person's data center versus that person's data center. don't know. But if you have a standard, if you have a baseline, you say, "Well, against the baseline, it scores this on biosphere's compatibility and it scores this on generational cost of ownership."

[00:49:36] Michael: Oh. Now, "Well, wait a minute, we gotta go back and do our numbers," or, "No, we gotta, agree on that." But the community now has a way of judging. The same thing can happen in materials. The same thing can happen in clothing. how is it better? Not just tell me, or, "Gosh, this is great, it's not landfill fashion."

[00:49:57] Michael: Right? which we seem to be, enamored with. But, it actually does X, and that comes back to you, in consumer in terms of that compatibility index.

[00:50:09] Karl: Yeah. That's amazing. I love the talk about, standards, roadmaps, frameworks, particularly at the industry level because I think they're super important.

[00:50:18] Karl: And like you say, once you have those kinds of numbers and those frameworks, it makes it much easier for people to compare apples and oranges. you've also developed a framework for AI human symbiotic decision-making, which is fascinating. How does biological design change the way we train and partner with AI to solve complex material science or even environmental problems?

[00:50:43] Michael: So, again, wrote another paper in "Loam" on, "AI Should Be a Mom."

[00:50:49] Erum: Aw.

[00:50:53] Michael: Okay. Geoffrey Hinton kind of, navigated this a little bit. I went a little bit deeper and said, "Well, okay, that's interesting, Geoffrey, but what do you really mean and what else do we have out there?" and going down the biomimicry path, I started to look at all the moms in nature.

[00:51:06] Michael: What do moms do? How do they do it? Why do they do it? And it varies, but in the end,if we were to train AI and put that carekeeping, because there's also discipline in that, there's also reprimand in that. there's a whole lot of caretaking, but there's a whole lot of understanding of the dependency.

[00:51:24] Michael: and Mom recognizes that you are 100% dependent And acts and behaves accordingly. and that's kind of an interesting way to sort of, how do you bring the biologics into the AI world as you look at how, again, in that particular instance, how does nature sort of take care of itself? How does it preserve that generational piece?

[00:51:51] Michael: it's through that sort of mindset, through that lens, if you will. So I think that's one example of where, you bring those two together. Another is in biosensing, and biosensing's a big part of, biomimetics. the ends of your fingertips. Think about the amount of data that's concentrated in that touch And what it's gonna take to really do that.

[00:52:16] Michael: And so that convergence again of the biologic, One of the, the speakers we have, actually, created a cell. a living cell. There are things that I think are developing from that perspective where AI is giving us a big jump and insight into that, that huge library that's been developing for four billion years.

[00:52:37] Michael: And then how do we develop that? How do we use it? How do we apply it? again, I think if we don't use that AI as mother, biosphere as body, yeah, probably get ourselves in trouble.

[00:52:50] Erum: Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think a lot of people are thinking that. I hope they read some of your work and Hinton's work about, AI being a mom.

[00:52:58] Erum: I am a mom, and that's a very interesting analogy because there's been so much happening in obviously AI development and just so many deep questions like, is AI conscious? that's a conversation that's been happening with, anthropic leadership and the Pope, right? That was like a crazy conversation that happened.

[00:53:17] Erum: And moms also discipline, and train. So, we're training AI, but is AI going to train us if we start using it more often? And I feel like it is happening already. like there's different ways that I work now. Carl and I work together and like, we're using AI and it's like, oh, it trained us to do something differently in our workflow.

[00:53:39] Erum: And so we hope that AI is like a mom and it's more, benevolent and make sure that, we graduate college and we can live on our own and feed ourselves and have a family. but we need to get this mentality to more people that work in AI development that are making these decisions on how to train AI and what it sees.

[00:54:00] Erum: It's just so bizarre. I'm not sure if you've been thinking so deeply about, the consciousness and the, the after effects of us relying on AI so much.

[00:54:10] Michael: a little bit. I think everybody has that uses it. I think there's a tendency to as- assign, human characteristics to basically an algorithm.

[00:54:19] Michael: the, the challenge is learning how to use it, how to instruct it, how to build your own guardrails, et cetera. That's a lot of work, as you have probably no doubt discovered. And if you don't ask it the right questions in the right way, it has a tendency to run amok or at least make more work for you.

[00:54:36] Michael: "No, that's not what I meant. You went too far here." Then it does it again and you're chasing, now you're down a rat hole and, so there's a lot of different things that come into play. But in terms of the, symbiotic decision-making, it's using AI, Carl, as a tool I'm looking for gold, go find the vein, and then once you find it, I'll come in and I'll do the mining.

[00:54:57] Michael: or I'll measure whether the gold's any good or not, or whether or not I can extract more or what- whatever I can do with it. I think it's moving so fast and people don't, again, don't see that curve. So again, I'll give you a little exponential, all right? Exponential, there's the, an old analogy or the people say it came from India and how,somebody wanted to, help the, the premier or whoever u-understand exponential.

[00:55:24] Michael: And they started with a chessboard and said, "Look, you can pay me for my services by giving me one grain of rice and doubling it every, every day on there." Well, when you do that, it doesn't look like much. Even when you get halfway there, you're not talking a lot of rice, But from there on, it really starts to grow until you finally get to that 36th square, and it's more rice than's been produced ever. So exponential is really a, a difficult thing for the mind to get. and where I'm going with this with AI is we're moving on this part of the curve now, right?

[00:56:02] Michael: We're not back here where we're going two, four, eight, 16, et cetera, et cetera. We're at petaflops, right? If you look at Moore's Laws, we came down and we got down to two nanometers all the way from the early '60s of being in the micron level, right? So now we've come all the way down. the image of that in the reverse side is compute power goes up So as you move into that rapid part of the, the curve where you're really coming down and really making things smaller, faster, you're also increasing the compute power going up the other way.

[00:56:40] Michael: So for a dollar in like 2020, you could get about, 45 plus, petaFLOPS per dollar. 2026, that's in the 70s. That's petaFLOPS. That's more than 50 years of, AI technology, and we're going at about two and a half years doubling, roughly So that's why you see people start talking about AGI and, being as intelligent as humans and whatever else, is because we're beginning to get to the brain density and the cost factor that's becoming reachable and becoming capable.

[00:57:22] Michael: And so for me, it's more I don't like to talk too much about it anymore because it's moving too fast

[00:57:26] Michael: I, well, well beyond me, I, everybody has agents. I have a couple of agents and all that sort of thing. I'm not too sure.

[00:57:34] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you 'cause like, I

[00:57:36] Michael: mean- they're on simple tasks. Go out and- Yeah. Yeah ... bring this back.

[00:57:40] Erum: And I kinda also feel like AI's like starting to test us, 'cause there's certain simple tasks and like, for example, like I was, I'm like looking to redecorate and I was asking for like, different styles and I was...

[00:57:52] Erum: And it was like giving me some styles and like a couple, just like two times. And I was like, "I don't like it. I don't like it." And then it was like, "Well, why don't you go and look for all of the images that you want, and then you tell me what you like?" And I was like, no. I'm not gonna go out and do work-

[00:58:07] Erum: and like go on the internet and find the things. I'm telling you what vibe I want." And I'm like, then I was like, "You are the best interior decorator in the world." And then he was, and it was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah. I'll find some things."

[00:58:18] Michael: There is a stink of that,part of the algorithms that I think they're gonna have to watch what they're doing.

[00:58:24] Michael: when I use Claude, I use something called the red team,to sort of push back against what I'm thinking or what I'm doing and sort of attack you like a red team would There's some challenges with that is it has a tendency when you write something or build something to throw its comments in there.

[00:58:42] Michael: Yeah. It's like, "I don't want your comments. Put those to the side. I really just, wanna make sure that you're not, kissing up to me." "Oh, you're one of the best futurists ever." No, I'm not. I've got a few- Yeah.

[00:58:53] Karl: Yeah ...

[00:58:53] Michael: few things right over the years, but no. but it's more that type of thing where, again, coming back to mother, that's not...

[00:59:00] Michael: You would not falsely build up your child, "Yeah, you're really great, Johnny, but, here's some things to work on."

[00:59:08] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. That's really good.

[00:59:10] Michael: But in that decision process, that is what you have to use it for. Can it give me insight? I know five things.

[00:59:15] Michael: Can it give me five more? If it gives me five more, I can put them with the other five, and maybe I'll get a, a better insight. But I can't ask it to give me 10 insights and well, you can, but I'm not sure without a baseline that you get much in the way of decision intelligence.

[00:59:31] Erum: So we're gonna get to, our final question here, and then we're gonna do this quick-fire round, which is gonna be a lot of fun.

[00:59:39] Erum: But the kind of big question we want to ask, is if resources, regulatory hurdles, and technical limitations weren't an issue, which is like a big if, what would be your dream biomedics project to deploy at global scale?

[00:59:54] Michael: A mindset shift.

[00:59:56] Erum: Oh. that's a leader talking. That's leadership right there

[01:00:01] Michael: I will be quite satisfied, I have a lot of these colored hairs, if, the legacy of this whole effort is that people look out the window first before they build anything, before they design anything. That they take a walk in the woods or, look at the plant inside their room, before they begin to do things and put that into context.

[01:00:27] Michael: To think in terms of that third number that, Aram, I think is if we, one of the people that's working on the third number at the U said to me, "You're trying to change capitalism." I said, "Well, maybe."

[01:00:37] Karl: Just a little bit.

[01:00:38] Erum: Yeah,

[01:00:39] Michael: just a little bit ... but if instead of just the two numbers, we had the third number that was part of balance sheets, was part of reporting, was part of how you judge companies, right?

[01:00:51] Michael: That to me would be the biggest change you could make.

[01:00:54] Karl: Yeah. That's amazing.in terms of like me personally, what it speaks to is, you see poll after poll where, Americans,consider themselves to be outdoors people. They consider themselves to be conservationists.

[01:01:05] Karl: They care about nature. that's what shows up in the polls, but then you look at the reality and you don't really see that. So how do you make that mind shift happen that you're talking about? I hope that's what we're all working on here.

[01:01:17] Michael: Well, I think it's the economics. Once we can start to say, "Hey, yeah, you can do this and you can make profits short term.

[01:01:22] Michael: In the long term, it's, there's gonna be this thing that shows up in your balance sheet that's a liability." And if you don't think that's real, look at the insurance companies.

[01:01:30] Erum: Oh, yeah.

[01:01:31] Karl: There you go.

[01:01:32] Michael: if you wanna continue with, "Oh, climate change is just a cycle," take a look at insurance. They don't believe it's just a cycle.

[01:01:39] Michael: Take a look at the US Navy and relocating some of its bases, right? So do I get over it, folks? And again, where we're looking at generational scaling, the reason we're using that term scaling is we have lots of great little ideas that are stuck in labs and little startups and all that.

[01:01:55] Michael: But as an example, Target, who's one of our founding, supporters, if you will- When you bring them a, a new material and you say, "Oh, this, is completely circular. We can do this with it, that with it." Well, A, what's the price point? And B, I wanna put one shirt on the back of every one of my employees.

[01:02:13] Michael: Can you deliver 450,000? We're not there.

[01:02:16] Erum: Yeah. Where's the infrastructure to do that? Yeah.

[01:02:18] Michael: Right. but as the insurance comes up and the cost be-- again, as that third number or that ledger starts to go, this is due," maybe we'll get that shift to, "Hey, wait a minute. We're building this new factory.

[01:02:29] Michael: It's going into this community. And oh, by the way, we expect the factory to run 20 years, and this is what it's gonna cost to, to run it. This is the productivity for not only us, but for the community." Now we have a different discussion.

[01:02:40] Karl: Amazing. All right, so we've moved into the fun part Ho-hopefully our questions aren't as heavy as the ones we asked before. These are our quick-fire questions. I'll kick it off and then Irone will follow. But Michael, what's the single most overused corporate buzzword that could be instantly cured by a basic lesson in high school biology?

[01:02:59] Michael: Sustainability.

[01:03:00] Erum: Oh, good one.

[01:03:03] Karl: I think we have to give that more definition, and we have to look at, networks, and we have to look at, diversity, not in the, politicized way, but in the, the real meaning of the word. There's more than one. it's not a monopoly. that would be one thing that you would instantly see is that,nature really doesn't like monopolies.

[01:03:22] Michael: They don't last. They're not sustainable in that perspective. They're not generational

[01:03:26] Michael: And I would say that, the first-year biology is look at how the generations grow and how they distribute themselves and how they proliferate. what changes they make, how they adapt, how they adopt. That would be a big lesson.

[01:03:39] Erum: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, next question. If you could instantly bioengineer one natural mechanism into human technology tomorrow, what biological trick are you stealing?

[01:03:53] Michael: I would say it's something we don't understand. it's understanding more about swarms, and we will have, Unanimous AI there who's, built a tool that's built around swarms and answering questions, and we'll get into how they do it, but it's really cool. but I would say it's how does nature with no intelligence, so to speak, how does a slime mold, when it's run up against the city of Tokyo map, finds the optimal train system?

[01:04:19] Michael: Yeah. it's getting off of our high horse, and sort of wait a minute, how is that being done and how could we use that before we design a community or we design a manufacturing floor? if we understood that, I would say we were in great shape.

[01:04:36] Karl: That's great. What's the coolest trick Mother Nature came up with that human engineers still can't copy?

[01:04:44] Michael: the playfulness of nature. The things that nature does that make it interesting to be alive. that's the coolest trick is, how does nature pull that humor out of things?

[01:04:58] Michael: what is it that, gets a dog to kind of get the game, And you know when they do. and what is that set of interactions, that sort of ties us all together again with that Planet Earth person biosphere's kind of analogy. What is it that goes on in there that creates humor?

[01:05:16] Michael: that makes that moment of joy that just seems to benefit everybody, the laughter part,the enjoyment, the awe. And that was one other thing I was gonna say earlier on. so what got me into this a little bit was awe, was just never saw that, never thought about that, That's really cool. why do people like the fall colors, you know?

[01:05:40] Karl: Yeah.

[01:05:40] Erum: Very deep answer. I love it. Okay, final question. If you had to explain biomimicry to a five-year-old using only items found in a backyard, what object are you picking up first?

[01:05:55] Michael: It's a very good question, what would you take to a five-year-old?

[01:05:58] Michael: and use the context of a backyard, one of the obvious things is a flower. to look at a flower. and I would sort of couch that as maybe looking at that flower repeatedly over time. So a five-year-old in June,and in July, what's the flower doing? And in August, what's the flower doing?

[01:06:17] Michael: In September, what is it doing? And sort of explaining that, as we look at what it does, we're learning how to do things. We're learning how to build things. you know, the photosynthesis, there's a lot, number of things you could go into deep detail on, but I think for a five-year-old, you just wanna look at it structurally and go, "This is cool."

[01:06:37] Michael: how does it do that? It starts out as this little seed. What are the mechanisms that are happening there? Well, when we try to make machines and we try to make things, we really copy nature. we really copy different things, and again, you could go to the bird, you could go to simple things that they could understand, but that's where I would go.

[01:06:55] Karl: Amazing. Michael Wright, Biomimetics International, we are so happy to have had this interview with you. Thank you so much.

[01:07:04] Michael: It's been a delight to be here.

[01:07:05] Erum: Yep, and we'll see you in Minneapolis in just a few weeks, so can't wait for that.

[01:07:11] Karl: Yeah, looking forward to it.

[01:07:12] Michael: at the Arboretum. I mean, it'll be fall.

[01:07:15] Michael: There won't be a whole lot of leaves on the trees, but, it's an interesting place to hold, a symposium like this and hopefully, get people in the mood.

[01:07:22] Erum: yep, and we will be there. We'll be on stage talking to people about data centers, and we'll have more about that in a follow-on episode in just a few months.

[01:07:33] Erum: So stay tuned for that.

[01:07:34] Michael: Great. Looking forward to having you and looking forward to,seeing what happens in what I call the intellectual collisions.

[01:07:41] Erum: Yes.

[01:07:41] Karl: Nice. Love that. Awesome. Great words. Yeah, the collisions, that's what matters. Thank you so much, Michael.

[01:07:46] Michael: Thank you

[01:07:47] Karl: Iram, what did you think of that interview with Michael? It was so great. I mean, first of all, what a leader, right? You and I have both read a lot of leadership books in our day, and so when I was hearing how Michael was responding and framing to these questions, I was like, "Okay, true leader," right?

[01:08:06] Erum: When we've talked to him before, we were really talking to him about very specific things about, biomimetics and the companies and business But then to give him that space to talk about his perspective and his work and h- his approach to enterprise, and how people that run these companies to think, I thought that was incredible.

[01:08:27] Erum: And then, of course, just his perspective on how to look at nature, and nature does offer tested designs after billions of years of efficiency, but they're not necessarily the optimal ones. And I loved his Velcro example. That was really good. I mean, the idea that there's this, plant, the burs that have a grip, and you're just looking at it and how it operates and they're like, well, couldn't we make a fastening system out of that?"

[01:08:55] Erum: And- Exactly ... like, and just like going out in nature more to get inspired to make things, hopefully not through petrochemical products, but like to make, different designs because we're able to, translate what's going on in nature to our, and I don't wanna like separate n- like nature something outside of us.

[01:09:20] Erum: Like, we are in nature. Maybe we have a bit more buildings here in New York City. we should make it more natural. I would love it to be more like a park, but we do have parks around here. but in the end, I thought it was wonderful to talk about like biomimetics in this way, 'cause we talk about like biomanufacturing and, bioengineering, and that's wonderful, and we do make some of the comparisons, but I loved this perspective.

[01:09:42] Erum: What about you? What did you take away from it?

[01:09:44] Karl: Yeah, I mean, it, there was on one level, I felt like the, interview was kind of like a coaching call, like an inspiration for leaders. and then, getting into things like this idea of the third number, the long-term cost of nature, the long-term cost that nature requires after a product or factory is built and operated.

[01:10:04] Karl: he really made the point that people need to factor that in to their balance sheets. And,what it reminded me of was like Bhutan's gross domestic happiness, and then this more recent idea of gross domestic, restoration. people are coming up with these indices that really allow us to look at balance sheets that businesses run differently and take into consideration what nature offers.

[01:10:30] Karl: So I really loved it. they're really good.

[01:10:34] Erum: Yeah. I love the economics part of considering nature and that when you do factor in, it's actually more profitable. And so if you're not thinking of nature, then you're actually not operating in the best way and you're losing money. Then that starts hurting the people that are making these decisions based on money really.

[01:10:54] Erum: It's like input and output. That's it. But no,it's not just about money. you have to think of, consider the whole ecosystem, the life cycle an- analysis, everything. so I love having this conversation, and we are gonna have conversations with some other people coming up on this podcast that are just rethinking how we look at the business of nature and, I will tease, we're having a conversation with Hunter Lovins, and she wrote a book, called "Natural Capitalism," which is incredible.

[01:11:23] Erum: And we've had separate conversations with people, that work at investment firms. I was out to dinner with some friends. one worked in, in environmental, economics, and they're like, "Oh, I, I didn't even realize that was a thing." And now it's on everyone's mind, And hopefully these businesses are making decisions, and I loved Michael's, examples

[01:11:48] Karl: Yeah, I mean, I love the idea also that he mentioned that these bio-inspired ideas need shared standards to scale.

[01:11:57] Karl: but actually when he talked about that and I see where he's coming from because he's talking about the semiconductor industry's roadmaps and the cost models, to explain why measurable baselines matter more than claims that a material or a data center is better.

[01:12:11] Karl: and I'm not sure that those exact models would apply to biology or biotechnology because on the one hand, yes, we need massive scale for certain things, but other things that maybe you just want to grow locally or bio-manufacture locally don't need those same kinds of baselines. so I think what the work that Biomimetics is doing, and we're gonna learn a lot more because we're going there, is really admirable and I can't wait to really dig into it and learn more.

[01:12:37] Erum: Yeah. And our specific angle and topic that we're going to be talking about at Biomimetics International are data centers, and how do we think about biology when it comes to construction, but also the environment around the data center, and

[01:12:53] Erum: how can it be net positive? How could it be regenerative? how can it make the place better than it was before the data center got there? because I'm sure there are some sites where it's, it is barren land.

[01:13:03] Erum: There's a lot of barren land in the United States and around the world. and, hooking it up to electricity grids and water grids, but they could do a lot more. you can plant things. You can create like a cooling pool too, if there's a lot of heat. so like in, energy power plants and some of them are designed where they have, cooling pools.

[01:13:22] Erum: But, can we create a cool cooling pool that, does have some life? I mean, obviously, the cooling pools are there because it takes heat and, so it's hot right close by to the plant. But if it's big enough, maybe, towards the other side you can have some life. You can have maybe extremophiles.

[01:13:37] Erum: I don't know. We're, I'm getting a little crazy here, but the whole idea is how do we think about biology first and then construction as an afterthought, even though it's not an afterthought, but as, as a second step. So when you go to an environment and you kind of s- see what the site looks like, and like, okay, this is what the resources are.

[01:13:54] Erum: This is a local, environment. This is a local population who lives around there, because that's a lot of the challenge when it comes to data centers, is not really taking, some aspects don't take the, community into mind. but then, if you do all that and build it, that doesrequire some time.

[01:14:11] Erum: so that's the whole thing is we don't have to rush to make everything. Can we just take some time to, plan? before we make everything. So I do like that

[01:14:20] Karl: I mean, listeners, if you don't know, New York State has a one-year moratorium on building data centers. And, there has been a backlash against them.

[01:14:28] Karl: It's been in the news every day. But then we saw someone d- during, climate week say there's gonna be a backlash against the backlash. People are gonna realize that the data centers are worth having in their backyard. But I just wonder, how much of it will be because of the things we, you just mentioned, Eram, taking into consideration, yes, this facility generates heat, but we're also gonna use that heat to heat our houses.

[01:14:49] Karl: Or, yes, this facility uses a lot of water, but it's, the water comes out cleaner and there's more water for us. Or yes, they're gonna plant all these trees around it, so yes, there's some emissions, but we're sucking in more carbon than we're putting out. There's a lot of these things that I'm really looking forward to having that discussion in Minnesota and just learning from the other people that are there.

[01:15:09] Erum: Yeah. and Michael Ray talked about it in this episode where he was like, "How do you make it a multipurpose building?" which is incredible thought, right? Not just a data center that's a block of s- cement and machines, but that there's a whole ecosystem being built around it.

[01:15:27] Erum: And I can't wait to talk to, we're gonna talk to some amazing people that are thinking about this every day. When we go to Biomimics International, we're moderating a panel with some incredible thinkers, so stay tuned for that.

[01:15:39] Karl: Yeah. And I just think,the bottom line was what Michael said, what his dream project is from a mind shift point of view, which is look at nature before designing, then ask the question whether it can work in scale and rep- remain compatible with the biosphere.

[01:15:55] Karl: That's a heavy question, and I think it's something that we need to think about, we need to talk about, and we need to get more people thinking about.

[01:16:03] Erum: Yes, absolutely. Well, yeah, we've done our job. If you are listening to this podcast and you're thinking about how you're looking at nature first before building, mission accomplished.

[01:16:13] Karl: Yeah. All right. Well, we've got a bunch of great episodes ahead. in a couple of episodes, we'll be talking to, Hunter Lovins who wrote Natural Capitalism, but has done so many super interesting things.

[01:16:24] Karl: We've got some great pioneers in the field, conservationists. We've got some science fiction authors and some heads of some really big companies coming on. So stay tuned to the Grow Everything podcast.

[01:16:34] Erum: Thank you for tuning in to the Grow Everything podcast. If you have any questions, comments, please reach out to us.

[01:16:41] Erum: Our contact information is in the show notes, and don't forget to subscribe to our substack. Let's grow.

[01:16:47] Karl: Let's grow