 All right, thank you all for coming tonight. This group is BioCaptivate. We are putting ourselves together as a nonprofit think tank type entity that will start hosting some salons and gatherings. And we really want people to imagine what science could be. We want people to know what science is and what it could be, because so much of our future is based upon scientific discoveries. Engineering of those discoveries for practical uses by society, if the last century featured the industrial revolution and then the silicon revolution, probably a biology revolution is going to be what creates so much of what humanity uses and enjoys and eats and thrives with in the next 50 or 100 years. So we firmly believe that, but we also think that there hasn't been enough attention given to the culture that drives the training and development of scientists and the selective pressures that help determine who goes into science and who stays in it. And we want, first of all, everyone to become aware of these selective pressures. And then think about how maybe we can change the narrative and how we can educate and train scientists differently and how scientists can interact with the public differently. And above all, that the public can begin to conceive of itself as a group of scientists, because every day, even when we cook things, we're testing hypotheses. So we are all scientists, and we're going to be called upon to make public policy decisions as a group. It is more important than ever that we all conceive of ourselves as scientists, but then also think about what does it mean to be a professional scientist and what are the selective pressures and how can we address and change these narratives? And so today, we have a great panel of people whose life and work touches upon science and all its forms, philosophy, education, art. And everyone here is a scientist and or an educator and or an artist and or a philosopher. And we want to have them talk a little bit about the issues that I just mentioned. And they're unique and interesting experiences and perspectives. So I'd like to introduce the panelists, and we can go ahead and get started. So I myself, I'm Louis Metzger. I formerly worked in Big Pharma. I now am the CSO of a startup. I'm a biochemist, a lipid biochemist, and a bacteriologist by training and have done other things. But I really support BioCaptivate's mission. And it's my pleasure to help moderate this panel and introduce our guests. So Nick of the Long Now Foundation is a director of a longtime director at the Long Now and is a systems engineer by training but is also a deep thinker and philosopher by self-guided education and through his work, which involves interaction with, you know, sort of the most cutting edge thinkers of our times, I would say. And speaking of the culture of science, the Long Now Foundation really cares about thinking and planning for deep time. So what if the world isn't going to end at our own hands in the next 50 or 100 years and we have to think about what 10,000 years of humanity's future looks like? That is a large part of what the Long Now is encouraging us to think about. Robin is here with us. She's the chief experience officer of the Minerva project. And the Minerva project is a four-year undergraduate university now also a graduate, has a graduate program in data science, I believe. And Minerva is radically different than a lot of four-year educational programs that probably we've all been through. And it's focused on first principle thinking, the training of students first and foremost, how to use logic and how to use statistics and how to think and be very questioning of the data that they receive and how they interpret it. And because of a great talk that Robin gave maybe three years ago, I became aware of the Minerva project and so it's great to have you here. Fatna is, how do I see your company's name? Faranem? Faranem, Faranem, yeah, Faranem, not Faranime. Fatna is a PhD biochemist whose work in founding her startup is really interesting because it looks at how small organisms, nematodes communicate with each other and interact with the soil microbiome, and yes, soil does have a microbiome, not just the human gut, and with all sorts of implications for agriculture and how we feed the world with the coming climate change and so many other selective pressures. And talk to her in the happy hour afterward about her company's collaboration with NASA. They are about to do experiments in space. June is an investor and science director here at IndieBio, who we'd like to thank for letting us host this event here. And June has a really interesting career arc. She did her PhD at Scripps. She's a medicinal biochemist by training. You're a chemical biologist. Well, they sort of, that Venn diagram overlaps. And June has founded two companies, and she's also sort of the scientific mover and shaker in this site of IndieBio's incubator, and IndieBio incubates startups in health tech and food tech and many other interesting techs that all in one way or the other touch upon biology, hence the name. A little known fact about June is that she also has a clothing line, which I was not aware of. And in the happy hour, you should talk to her about that. And last but not least, Laura Tendeski. Laura has been a protein biochemist at Novartis, most recently and presently, but at its predecessor companies for, dare I ask, 30-ish years. And Laura knows the guy who invented PCR, polymerase chain reaction. And she was involved in the project to first characterize the Hep C virus. She's on patents and has been involved in the development of multiple successful oncology drugs. And yet the other thing she is, that's half her life. The other half of her life that she does in parallel is she's a mosaicist and an embroiderer and a painter. And her art informs her science and her science informs her art. And so someone with great perspective. So let me consult my notes here. So we have a number of questions that we wanted to delve into, but first I was going to just mention and lay out groundwork for the first question, which is a discussion of austerity in science. So in the history of science, it's been done by different people and different cultures in different ways historically. Much of I think what academic science looks like today still has echoes of the medieval European universities. So where the researchers, the doctors of philosophy were actually minor clerics of the church. And it was interesting because they also were judged by the church laws, not by the secular laws. So there was this historic privilege given to universities in the Western tradition. And I think we still see echoes of clerical state in science today. That's certainly how I felt about my personal life when I was a grad student. But there is this culture of austerity. But what does it look like? It looks like in many ways a discussion of how scientists should just be happy to do science and they should be slaving away at the lab. And if you think of pop cultural images of like the mad scientist, their monomaniacal, they're looking at one thing obsessively. But in truth, it's nothing like that. However, the culture of scientific training and the pressures within science to become a professor were to go a standard route, actually select against people like this group here who've all taken creative different routes and selects four people that want to check boxes and follow a certain linear path. And I'd like to start off by discussing where you all have seen that and what to you, and I'll start with June maybe because she's holding the microphone. What to you is an example of scientific austerity that's like baked into the culture? Absolutely, I would say a lot of it through my entire grad school program and then seeing a lot of that happening ongoing is it is in some ways compared to a Ponzi scheme these days that like you have professors that need workers to do all of the tasks and having a person pipette is cheaper than buying a robot that pipettes and the robot still breaks down a lot so hopefully your person doesn't break down. But in essence what they do is they yeah and you're holding like a PhD in front of dangling in front of them and they of course themselves are interested in contributing to science. They got into science for a reason to begin with. But even in my own PhD, I felt that I was thinking about like less than 5% of the time and just doing very generic grunt work 95% of the time taking care of mice is the worst. Like I did that for two years and it was awful. And like it's, you know, there's a little bit of like set up as like a rite of passage like you have to go through this in order to be a scientist and I really don't think that's true and I think how you actually really become a scientist is to close that iteration cycle, right? The design test build cycle and the faster you can go through those cycles the faster you can learn and then build on top of that. So, but I think the way we currently train scientists is not that and it's a little bit more structured saying you do X, Y and Z and this is just what you need to do versus I have an idea, I'm gonna test this and go try it out and if that doesn't work I'm gonna try something else out. So I think it does hamper innovation definitely within the individual because you're not allowed at times to explore different things. Either via budget, either via time pressure either via your professor telling you what you can and can't do as projects. And yeah, so I think people once they get out of that environment too they face a lot of challenges thinking that academia and perpetuating this Ponzi scheme is the only way to continue but only 5% of PhDs end up with academic positions because we don't have that many new universities springing up everywhere. And so we have a glut of talent who are highly trained, highly driven but with nowhere to go. And that's kind of the heart of IndieBio too is we want to adopt all those 95% of the people and say hey, you can start your lab, you can do your science do the thing that you were passionate about but let's try to find a different model go for VC funding instead of academia funding go for customers and producing a product versus just writing a paper, yeah. So June, one thing that you said that was really interesting and strikes home is spending 95% of the time not thinking but doing things like putting pipette tips in racks and things like that and which brings us to the question of education versus training and Robin lives this every day like what is education versus training and I think the Minerva project spends a lot of time trying to educate and not train so do you have perspectives on this culture of austerity and how one might overcome it? Yeah, it's so interesting because I listen to June speak and I talk to a lot of students who get admitted to our undergraduate program and they're interested in science and they're really excited about it and the question they always ask is well, where are your labs? And then when we talk about what they wanna get out of the lab experience, it isn't that it isn't sitting and putting drops into test tubes and things like that and it's not conducting experiments where it's formulaic. I mean, the beauty of science is it's about discovery but we teach science so often as here's a formula and here's the reaction you should get and if you don't get that, you did it wrong. So the question then is how do you teach science in a completely different way? Well, it's actually the way you should educate everyone regardless of discipline and that is thinking about how do you critically look at the situation that you have? How do you break it down? We have some students here in the audience so they're just gonna say, this is what we do but how do you break it down? What is the right problem? What are you trying to solve for? How do you break it to component parts? How do you test? How do you develop hypotheses, test, challenge, repeat? It is so much more about the thinking than the actual doing and when we think about educating, we think about really educating people across all disciplines, meaning how do you think critically? How do you become a creative problem solver? How do you work effectively in teams because some of the best science and discoveries don't happen in isolation? How do you communicate well because you may have the best idea but if people don't understand it then it can't go anywhere. So we think about what are the skills you need as a scientist and how do we train for those and where we worry less about the formula for a certain experiment. So that's quite refreshing. Thank you. I think that that does lead to sort of the application side of things so I'm really curious Fatma about your perspective because you went through sort of the traditional PhD education and at some point you said, you said I want to take the risk of starting my own company and with all that entails which is all manner of difficulty, reputational, financial, so forth. How did the conditions of the academic world inform your decision to do that? I should start saying, I totally agree with June, the experience. I was fortunate in some ways. I had a really great PhD experience. My PhD advisor really cared about his students and I actually got the learning. I didn't actually have to do the pipetting. He didn't really have too much resources but I actually did experiment and I had really great mentors. I learned how to do science. I really liked it and I really enjoyed it and I thought, oh, I should definitely do a postdoc and move into a different field from molecular biology to chemistry. Now that was good and bad decision because different disciplines have different cultures and particularly in medical school. I'm not bad-mouthing but it was a new learning. There I actually experienced a Ponzi scheme because I think there were so many students, so many actually motivated students, I think more than they wanted. In College of Ag, they didn't really have that many students so whatever they had, they cherished them when you have abundance of it. Then one day I realized, like June said, the Ponzi scheme and there wasn't any future and I thought, I want to do this thing and I know it has a potential but I discovered, how can I do it? And I thought we are very resourceful. That is one of the things you learn when you are a PhD because you don't really have resources and I was very fortunate to be introduced in Dubai. And right at the same time, we got SBIR phase one funding thanks to my PhD advisor who taught me how to get funding and taught me how to write grants and how to organize. Then I started my company. One thing I should mention what Robin said, I had undergraduate students, I had this training grant and I actually trained my students and one of them got into a medical school. She said, hey Dr. Kaplan, I got into the school because of your teaching. During the interview, everything I learned in your lab, all of the experience I had in your lab, I told them that was the only thing. She comes back, she says she got in and she's in Louis Cotts, now I can't really, Temple Medical School. And she was very, very initially and I thought, you are very smart. Just be yourself. And that was the science experience. In many ways, moving into industry was the best thing I have ever done. I wish I had done it as soon as I graduated. That's a really very interesting perspective and I may have agreed with you on the industry thing myself. Now that isn't to say that academia is bad. It's just, it's not for everyone. And one thing, circling back to this idea of overcoming austerity in science and especially fluctuating austerity, Laura has worked in the biotech industry for longer than most of us, I think, and has seen it all. The triumphs and the layoffs and the rehirings and I was going to ask, what has your perspective been regarding cultures where you've worked, because the culture has varied all the time at Novartis and its predecessor companies over the years. What were successful scientific cultures and what were less successful ones? Really good question. It's interesting because when I started working, I basically have worked in the same place, ever since I was in school. I got the job and I always thought I would quit if I would look for another job if I didn't like it and I have never looked for another job and it's because it's never been boring. It changes basically every two years. The technology changes, everything changes. Culture changes, projects change. I've worked on infectious disease. I've worked on oncology and that's the nice thing about being a protein chemist. Everybody needs protein chemistry. And as far as culture goes, by far the best projects that I've worked on have been people who, groups where basically everybody's a leader. You could be a grad student that's in there or a post-doc in a meeting and you get listened to just as readily as anybody else. The groups that are collaborative are the best. I've been on really bad project groups where you get basically one leader who says my way or the highway and that's just not creative. One thing I've realized is, and I encourage people to do, students and something that I did, I actually don't have a PhD. I have a bachelor's in biochemistry and at one point I'm like, okay, should I quit and go get a PhD? And I looked around at the jobs that PhD people did and the jobs that quote unquote technicians do. And my personality fits so much better with the technician. And I like, if you look at my art, it's all very repetitive. It's mosaic. And so I paid attention to what makes me happy instead of trying to put myself in a whole and around a whole, but I'm actually square type of, so I really tried to find what made me happy. But as far as cultures go, yeah, I have seen a lot of things. My favorite culture are these just wonderful collaborations. I've been in some pretty bad cultures where one person came, a leader of the company came in. He was there for about five years and he would pit scientists against each other and they wouldn't know it. It was horrible. So they would get the same project to one group and another group and they would find out because they were both working with our group and there'd be tears. And it was just absolutely horrible. And that's not good industry. That's not good scientists. I think collaboration and working together, you're gonna be able to, this competition is ridiculous. Makes me angry. But yeah, I've seen all kinds of different styles in the last 30 years in the same company. Thanks, Laura. I was going to, Nick in his role interacts with the whole arc of science and engineering and design types from the lone genius to the people whose work is best understood as a group effort with equal contribution. And I would just ask broadly, what have you observed culturally in the scientists that you've collaborated with that Long Now has collaborated with and where would you like to see changes or improvements in general? That's a tough question because I don't know the full backgrounds of all the different individuals and groups that we work with, but I think the thing that draws a lot of people to the Long Now Foundation and the ideas that we're kind of cultivating is this sense that austerity doesn't grant you permission to explore the things that you wanna explore, makes you feel constrained. It's not exactly fun. It's not exactly the best educative experience and that in some sense, everyone that's kind of constellating around the foundation believes that having more time is good for a certain set of problems. And so there are problems in which austerity works, optimization works, you wanna get them done fast, get them out of the way, but then there's a whole other set of problems out there in the world that benefit from having additional resources, temporal, financial, whatever it is. And so adapting yourself optimally to one set of challenges leaves you vulnerable at this other level of abstraction, these other kinds of challenges. And so culturally in the broader sense, we're very well adapted to things like the business quarter and we're very poorly adapted to challenges that just don't exist on that time scale. So things like climate change or space exploration, these phenomena exist at another level of abstraction that we just haven't really adapted ourselves well to. And so kind of how do you diversify temporal preferences across all of these different time spans for us? It's as much as 10,000 years out in the future because it changes the way you think about things. If I said for your business challenges take world hunger for example, if somebody said, can you solve world hunger in five years? It would make a lot of sense to be completely paralyzed by that challenge and not necessarily know what to do or you think about the SDGs and even the time scales that they're on. This can be paralyzing for a lot of people. Whereas if I said, could you solve world hunger in 500 years? Well, your brain starts to operate, starts to war away and you start to think of maybe the first couple of meetings that you're gonna have, kind of what direction you're gonna take your year on. And so you start feeling a sense of agency restored as opposed to feeling like you can't be an agent, like you can't be in control, you don't have permission to try things, explore. And so we're trying to kind of push back against a certain kind of temporal austerity in the culture on a whole. Thanks, that's really an interesting way of looking at it. Resources, time is the resource that you really cannot buy and I think we often undervalue it and to our individual and collective peril. And so that's, thank you very much for bringing that perspective to the table. Now, we're talking about the culture of science and reimagining how, well, looking at what it looks like now and what it could look like. And I think that that can't be discussed without looking at stereotypes and thinking about how scientists portray themselves, I must say, and also how they're portrayed sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly in pop culture. You know, the cartoon strip scientist who has all these colored beakers, by the way, most things in lab are clear. My parents once asked me what I did for a living and I sarcastically told them I transfer small volumes of clear liquid into other small volumes of clear liquid and something invisible is happening that I indirectly detect. And they haven't really asked me since then, you know. But really, there's an important aspect I think in encouraging people to go into science who are more cognitively diverse than the person that finishes undergrad and says to themselves, I want to be a tenure track professor at a top 10 research school and I want to get there in 15 years and that's what I wanna do with my life. You know, a certain type of person does say that, but are those always the people that bring interesting discoveries to the table, especially people who might look at things differently than those very linearly minded individuals that know they want that. And so I'm going to ask the panel about how one might re-imagine the culture of science and maybe first, though, ask what do you think is wrong or less ideal about the portrayal of scientists and how does that interact with what you know about yourself or your circle of collaborators and friends in the field and just discuss that. And I think I might start with June just to sort of evenly spread the questions. So I actually think that scientists are actually really diverse because especially in the US, we have a lot of international students. So like, and also in biology, we're actually really fortunate to have almost a 50-50 split in women, which is really awesome. I actually would flip it on its head that we actually are so diverse that at times, we can't even find each other because we just, we look normal. Like all of you, presumably a lot of you are scientists, you look perfectly normal. Whereas like in the tech Silicon Valley sphere, there's like the tech bro stereotype. And that's cool for them because they get to like find their people. In some ways, I feel like scientists were like really spread out and were like actually in different pockets and doing our own thing. That was one of the ideas around my clothing brand actually, which I don't know why I'm not wearing today, is to try to especially get women to wear little things to show that they're scientists to just appear in public more. So that the general public who are not scientists don't see scientists as like the Einstein looking, crazy hair, old man in some lab doing crazy stuff, maniacally tweaking the world or something. But that to really get out there to say that, hey, scientists are around you all the time. We're very diverse from all kinds of cultures. There's so many women in science as well. And to kind of bring that conversation. Can I just, just a quick thing. One thing I've noticed in the friends that I've made and also looking at myself, pretty much every creative scientist that I work with is also some sort of artist, some kind of sort of creative person. Sometimes people are portrayed like Louis says, but most of us are either a musician or an artist or you know, and basically you have to be creative to be a good scientist. And I think people don't really realize that. And I'd like to honor that a little bit more and maybe get that message out there too. So I was going to ask maybe Robin. Sorry I didn't use my microphone. I was going to ask Robin, you see so many students and you helped to design curricula that tie together the sciences with philosophy and art and so much subject matter that brings something to the table in terms of providing context and in fact inspiration for the science. And what do you see the role of image and culture and science as affecting that work? Yeah, it's so interesting and I so appreciate the comments of the other panelists who are maybe more traditionally scientists. I'm probably one in the looser definition, but I think about it all the time because science in isolation is essentially a function but it's not gonna solve some of the greater challenges. And so when we think about curriculum, when I think about educating students, I think about much more interdisciplinary approach to any kind of challenges and science being that. So when we look at how we design curriculum, we make sure that students aren't looking at a problem in isolation. So we actually did something kind of unique. I'll give you a very specific sort of approach we have to our first year curriculum is instead of saying you're gonna learn chemistry, biology, economics, take a writing class, what we say is we're gonna talk about problems like how to feed the world. We're gonna talk about what do we do about the world's water supply? We're gonna ask why do people commit crimes? We're gonna talk about how do you stop war? We're gonna talk about really, really complex challenges because if you think about each of these, there's a science angle, there's a social science angle to it. There is an interpersonal connection to it. Everything in life is a complex system and there are second order and third order effects and how you think about that in a really broad context is gonna make people better scientists. So it really is how do we get out of that stereotype of a scientist is in their lab by themselves? They're actually out thinking about how to apply science in a really practical way. And along those lines, I was going to ask you Nick about in your line of work, you oversee collaborations of all different sizes and how does culture play a role in the cultures of the participants scientifically and intellectually and otherwise play a role in those collaborations? I think back to the earlier comment that we were discussing about these other cultures being mostly rooted in the idea of taking the right amount of time for things that things like creativity, original thinking, divergent thinking, take a bit of an abundance of resources that our culture doesn't necessarily support people using all the time. We don't always want to give people 500 years to solve world hunger and sometimes we expect people to launch and sell a company and then launch and sell another one immediately afterwards. So this culture of passing the baton as opposed to necessarily just kind of dunking the basketball, this idea that our culture is very good at lifting people up when they are basically starting an idea, taking it to fruition and then closing the whole thing up and then saying that was great, that's packaged, put that in the past, let's try something new and do that again. We're trying to see this idea that it can be all right to start projects without feeling obliged to necessarily finish them within your lifetime, that there are again, certain projects at certain time scales that just won't be finished within one lifetime or a couple of business quarters. So how do we make it cool to be the kind of person or the kind of member of an institution that's just passing the baton from one stage to the next? Whether that's the first stage, the last stage, the middle stages, how do we seed that as something that people aspire to? More of like the maintenance side of the world that we live in as opposed to just this innovative like flash of genius archetype of just like, oh I had a great new way of doing this. It's like, well no, I'm actually helping them do this awesome thing that they've been doing for a while. So I think that Fatma, in her role as founding a company and putting together a team, did you in doing this have to overcome this like, individual in a lab doing great science to shifting that frame of reference as Nick points out to a, this is a team-based product. This isn't the lone genius archetypical science model and could you speak to that? Like what worked and what didn't? Yes, that is actually one of our strength. We work as one as a team and that is one of the emphasis actually. Anybody came to our lab, we emphasize that. If somebody falls through the crack, we all fall. So one of the reason I do once a week lab meetings, we actually talk a lot more but once a week I'll make sure that everyone is same level, no one is falling through cracks and if someone is behind and we'll talk and help them out to be the same level. So that I do care and everyone, one other thing I taught everyone is time management. I don't manage anyone's time. Everyone manages their own time but I was the expert initially how the experiments were done and I taught them. And I did that actually even before I started my company when I was doing masters and I had group of undergraduates. The first two months I taught them how to manage their time and how to do this experiment. Then they recruited their own friends and next thing I know they're teaching each other and they were working so well then I moved on to another project and I asked them for help and I said, well here is one of the things I need help. They said, when can you do it? They said, well here is our schedule. We can give it to you two weeks later and I said, God, now I knew two weeks later I was gonna have what I needed. And same thing with my lab and when they needed to have time, they said, well here's the experiment. This is the time it's gonna be ending. We would like to have a break. And I said, sure, so what are the things you need help while you're on vacation? So your experiment would be going. And they said, well, we don't really need any help. We finish it on this day, we come back. When we come back our experiment is gonna be ready. I said, yes, I can't really ask anything more than we can do more creative stuff. So we work as a whole. If somebody needs, you know, there are sometimes maintenance, a couple of things here and there. They said, well, I talked to this person and who's gonna be helping me out when I'm gone and when I come back, I can pick up where I left. Thank you. I can put in a bit of perspective for my own experience. So, you know, in my graduate work and my postdoc, I worked in friendly collaborative labs, but labs where each trainee had their own project and there were sort of boxes drawn around those. So, you know, sometimes the project was lucky. If it was novel biology, sometimes you'd get lucky. Sometimes it would turn out to be much harder than it appeared at first glance. And this was good for enforcing self-reliance, but it was not an efficient way to discover new things. And maybe its purpose wasn't. But that model is the very large sort of big research academia driven vehicle for doing basic research in much of the world, including the US. And what was really refreshing about, and you may laugh at me about this, but what was really refreshing about joining Big Pharma is that everything was a team-based effort and for the most part teams were rewarded together and also called to accountability together. And this to me was very refreshing. It actually, it had an interesting effect on making the internal research more reproducible because if you're a single contributor and your output are scientific papers and the higher impact journal scientific papers, the better. You might oversell the value of what you discovered or maybe omit some key control experiments. And this can make it much more difficult for people to build on what you've published. But inside a company where other people are depending upon the work that you're doing right next to them to help build an edifice that needs to work in its entirety, there's an opposite selective pressure. If anything, people under-played their results because they wanted to be absolutely sure that those were reproducible. So I know that Big Pharma is not always held up as a place where everyone thinks great science is done, but really great science is done there often. And one of those reasons is because of this team environment. But the other perspective moving from the individual contributor to science as a team affair is what I found working for a small startup is there's only two of us in a company now that's like 13 or 14 people that had industry experience. And so it's been a fun and interesting cultural effort to change the culture of the company and say, okay, we need to actually coordinate our schedules and manage time and view our successes and failures as a team effort. And I really think that that's key. And I'll also mention that maybe the subject of a future panel or event we're going to do is think about instances where credit for science is not divided the way it may be ought to be. Rosalind Franklin, an x-ray crystallographer and one of the co-discoverers of the DNA structure is a prime example of maybe someone who didn't get credit for many reasons. Notably the Nobel Prize can't be split more than three ways. But if you look at the research underlying any given Nobel Prize, there's probably 20 or 50 or 100 or more people who've contributed to that. So something to think about. So I've only two more questions and then we'll mingle and do some somewhat directed small talk. And Yen, who's organized this event, will explain that. But each of you is a really complex individual, as we all are. And in looking at a group of scientists and science enabling and oriented people, I wanted to ask this question, which is if you're an iceberg, there's a tip of you sticking out of the ocean and then there's the larger volume that's underneath. And in these times, you might be mostly molten, but I'd like maybe each of you to say, what's the tip of your iceberg that people see you and if they were to draw a caricature, what would they seize upon? And then what's the part of you that's deep and large volume under the surface? Let's start from over there. I'll let whoever wants to. Let's see, the tip of the iceberg. That's interesting. I've changed so much in the last three years. I'm a lot different than the way I used to be. I used to be terribly shy. And now, basically I wear sparkly things, clothes, art that I have made and I'm a lot more visible. So I would say the most visible is the artist in me. Down deep is probably more the science actually. So, and Nick, I just wanted to, when you were talking about making it cool to be, to work on things that might take longer than a lifetime, I thought about Sagrada Familia. Are you familiar with that? Gorgeous, gorgeous, and Gaudi started it and it was finished, I think 125 years later. And it's just a beautiful example of that kind of cooperation. Still be your work on it. Still? I thought it was finished. Still under construction. I need your back. It's gorgeous. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site even before being completed. It is so beautiful. That's the one. So, and that's a really, I think this idea of projects that are greater than an individual person that you contribute to do your best but you might not see the end of. When I worked in Pharma, that's kind of my approach to all the projects I was on. And indeed, the division whose work I mostly supported infectious diseases was shut down for business reasons. But we're releasing the data to the public and the work will go on. So this idea, there is an element of scientific culture that is looking at these long timelines and saying, can I be, if I don't worry about my own ego, can I be part of something that's impactful and long term and a meta structure that many people have contributed to? So, that's a really cool point, Laura. Who else has an iceberg tip? All right, I'll go. I think if you look at the tip of the iceberg where most people have seen me the last seven years or so, it's out talking about education, innovation in education. And I'm very often out and about around the world and that's what people see. But I think what is below the surface is I am a mom. I care a lot about my family, my kids and that kind of grounds me. And the piece that a lot of people don't know is I am really a wanderer. So whereas I'm very, very directed in what I do and people always say type A, goal driven, but my background in the past had a lot of travel in it. And I really believe that life is not about just knowing where you wanna get to, but it's actually taking the journey and taking a lot of sidetracks and side paths and getting off the road that everybody else is on and trying different things. And if you look at my career, it isn't as direct as anybody would think. There's sort of every piece, there's lots of layers. Thank you. There's lots of layers to everything. And I think that's the piece that's below the surface that no one sees. So it seems like my turn. Well, on the surface, everybody knows here, I have a startup and I am an entrepreneur and scientist. So that would be the visible part. I think the invisible part, I'm a human. And I love my family and I like to spend time with them and I like the community and I believe the strong community creates a strong relationships and I care about people and I like to bond with people and I like socializing. I'm a social person. So I think I'm like everybody else and we all care about each other and making friends. That would be the bigger than me part. I think on the surface when people find out that I work for the Long Now Foundation and they have some familiarity with some of our projects that are kind of moonshot projects on large time scales for building a clock inside of a mountain that'll last for 10,000 years with no human intervention and working to de-extinct the woolly mammoth, genomic technology and landing a language archive on a comet, these are like really fun things to say here on Adeus because they sound really cool and really amazing and there's some really cool people involved in it. And so I think on the surface, a lot of times people think that's probably the coolest part of the job or something that I'm really paying attention to. But the truth is like I get so much more pleasure in having conversations with people who are inspired to work on really interesting things that just haven't taken off yet. You don't know their name yet. I don't know their name. I'm meeting them in the context of an event or a cocktail party or an event like this. And I think that's just fascinating to find what people are dedicating their lives to or leaving academia because they just feel so strongly that this project needs to be worked on and if it needs to be in the private space, let's take it to the private space or if we need to reinvent education models, like let's just do it, it's so important, we have to do it. So I'm constantly inspired by the people that are around me working on these really interesting things. Yeah, and that just gives me a lot of hope for the future. And yeah, that wouldn't necessarily be on the surface. People probably are like, oh yeah, how many times have you been at the clock this week? Zero. Thanks, Nick. June's the next, June didn't go yet. Finally, think about this. So on the tip of the iceberg, I'm a scientific director here at IndieBio helping companies, helping scientists become entrepreneurs and realizing their dream and build innovation in the world. Some of the personal reasons for that underneath, one is that because I was a scientist who became an entrepreneur and so I want to get more scientists to bring their science into the world. Secondly, that as a nerd girl growing up, I was picked on as being like really into science and but now I'm like out there saying like, science is really cool. So like trying to bring that joy of science into the world and to get people to pay attention to it because as we know, science literacy is not so great in America and that has led to a lot of political issues and I want more people to embrace science to think about it as a valid obviously in the world and to think more logically and come to some of their own conclusions themselves. And then on the other side of just like seeing entrepreneurship and helping see entrepreneurship, I'm just so fascinated by human ingenuity. Like everything you see in this room was created by people. We started it as cavemen and now we have everything and we're curing diseases and hacking our own genetics. We are changing, using our technology to change the evolutionary processes in which we are genetics are now selected for and that has a lot of responsibility that could go very well or go very badly but we are shepherding that and we're building technologies for that and then on the very last personal level, I wanna be healthy and potentially live a long time and so trying to expand health span and longevity and then that also goes into climate change because if climate change doesn't revert in the next couple of decades, we're not gonna have a great home on this planet either so all these things are pressing issues that we are gonna be facing. And I'll put in on the surface. I'm really interested and people know my interest in finding new chemical matter encoded by the genome of nature and how do we do this more efficiently? How do we hunt amid the metagenome to find new enzymes that do new chemistry that's useful? Sometimes medicinally, sometimes for material science purposes and this CSO of bolt thread is joining us tonight and what bolt thread has done is exactly that. They prospected in metagenomic space, found a really useful type of protein and how to manipulate it and how to engineer it and they're making an entirely new material that humanity did not have access to before. So my day job and a lot of my extra time has spent thinking about these things but what most people don't know about me is for fun outside of science, I read quite a bit of fairly obscure history. Well, I started with the less obscure but I'm a student of history and with a particular interest in how society's collective worldviews about certain subjects shifts over time and sometimes it shifts really quickly and sometimes it's really slow and I wouldn't, there's heterogeneity in it and yet at the same time, there's themes in understanding human nature and how groups of humans make decisions that I think we learn from history but now we're at this interesting point where I don't think people have fundamentally changed yet the technology at our disposal has changed quite a bit. Some would say it's still changing exponentially and I spend a lot of time because of that thinking about how do we traverse this exciting but dangerous period where we can bend biology and science to the service of humanity, we can bend it to the service of maybe reversing some of the damage we've done to the earth but doing so will take away some people's jobs. If we do it well, it'll take away everyone's need to work to subsist but how do we transition through that middle period where some people are employed, some people aren't and robotics have taken their jobs or bioengineering has taken their jobs. So I think that that's the thing that people don't know about me is I spend a lot of time thinking about history, what we learn about people from things that have happened in history and how we can use those learnings as we go forward. And a question. Do you have time for questions? Yeah, so first I wanted to thank, we'll do the questions, I wanted to thank all the panelists who've come out on a weekday night and done us the honor of their presence and their perspective most of all. And I hope you all see from this panel that their science, scientific culture has heterogeneity and diversity and there's many determinants of culture and the lives of scientists that are important to consider. I'd also like to thank Yan Liu, who's in the back. He's the program director and essentially founder of BioCaptivate and we're doing this as an experiment. You all are a select set of invited guests who are part of our experiment but Yan put this together and we're really curious what you all think about it. And I'd like to thank IndieBio for hosting. I'd like to thank the other BioCaptivate co-conspirators who can't be with us tonight but helped Kira Havens, Chris Oaks and Ian Hayden. And so we're going to, this is going to evolve and we'll see where it goes. Some upcoming things that we don't have the schedules nailed down is we want to look at some narratives in science, some specific narratives and do maybe some deeper dives, for instance, into the life of Rosalind Franklin, the co-discoverer of DNA structure and maybe also do some discussions of specific tech meets society, societal problems. Like, what did we really learn from the Human Genome Project and how has that affected general culture? So stay tuned, those sorts of things are coming and sometimes we'll have panels, sometimes we'll have salons, sometimes we'll have happy hours, sometimes we'll have lectures. I gave a talk to us that we can make available online in the past about why DNA is not computer coding or computer codes, so things like that. So we want to stimulate you and actually have you help us come up with what is a playbook for communicating science in these times. So, without further ado, we have interesting panelists. We have someone who's waiting to ask a question, Mario. Let's get started. Questions? So something I was just thinking about listening to you guys speak. We want to get more people involved in science and how do we get more women involved in science? How do we get disenfranchised people involved in science? How do we get people from different backgrounds involved? How do we address the two different kinds of genius? Now we really have the flash genius in mind, but there's the slow genius and that's kind of what the Long Now Foundation kind of caters to. And I'm wondering if you guys think or an artistry too. So I'm wondering how do you guys think about it in the lens of inclusivity? Because when I think about it, it's like all of these things can be viewed through the lens of just opening up opportunities to more people to get involved and kind of shine in the lens of science. So it's not a word that's come up yet, but I'm wondering if that's something that you guys think about in terms of your mission? Well, I can speak for bio-captivate and say yes. And we really want to encourage people to think about science even if their day job is something else because we're all scientists. And we have to make policy decisions. At the very least, people should understand some science but it's also fun to participate in. And I know what you're doing with counterculture labs, Mario, is right in the midst of encouraging people who might not otherwise be involved with science to become citizen scientists. And so bio-captivate definitely encourages that. I'd say I'd like to ask the panelists if anyone has some perspectives on Mario's question and comment. I see join us startup because pretty much every bio startup is gonna have multiple functions, right? You need operations, you need business people, you might need marketing. And now it's also we're seeing that biotech is now a technology just like the tech sector. It's booming in all areas of different sectors. So there's transportation companies, there's food companies, there's neuro tech, there's all kinds of different things. So I think that's a great way for someone who might not be traditionally embedded in science to get in and learn science. And once they're there, they're gonna take that experience and go elsewhere with that. So in our case, science is not very easy to communicate, but we've finally got a project. We're very excited about it is astronimitode. Some of you might have the mission patch. When I used to say nimitodes, people used to say, oh yeah, interesting. And then next thing, you know, the attention disappeared, but this one, you say, hey, you're sending nimitodes to space and they said, tell me more about it. Why are you sending them to space? So it is a great project and we made its own website and we are trying to include as many people as we can. And we already got invited to give a talk for, actually it is for the San Francisco High School. And I thought, this is a really great project. One of the reason is when you're a kid, you always think about something. When I was a kid, well, I was gonna go to Disneyland. I never even thought about sending nimitodes to space. Do you an experiment in space? Can I actually dream about it? Can I actually imagine? If you imagine and dream, you can do it. But how could you do something you couldn't even imagine? Well, even if you did imagine, it's so far away. Can you actually reach to it? So we thought with this project, we can actually include everyone. It's a project we share with everyone. So the project has its own website, its Twitter, so we will be updating everyone. If you want to be part of it, we have Indiegogo campaign too. We'll put your name there. As part of the mission partners. So we're very excited because it's the first science project I can share with everyone. I don't know if there's more questions. I mean, I'll answer really quick. And I'll just say that part of it is just exposure. I mean, that's the question like, how do you get people more excited about science? It's about giving people an opportunity in a safe space. And I think about most universities and if you go into some of the intro science classes, they're all considered like the filter classes, right? This is for the students who want to go to med school. And typically people hate those classes. They're just grind and how do you reimagine? I mean, it's something we did. How do you reimagine the sciences and have every single student get exposed to it? Doesn't mean they're all going to major in it. It doesn't mean they're all going to become scientists, but they certainly understand it. They understand what experiments are about. They understand how to think about data sets. They think about logic in terms of planning out how you're going to approach a challenge. So I think it's incumbent upon us to require it. And I think it starts early. We happen to do it at the college level. Start earlier. Get students excited about science early and make it approachable. Absolutely. And I'm really excited to start collaborating with a lot of people on the art level. My friend, Greg Bilpe, back there, is we're going to be collaborating basically using art to introduce science. I was talking to a friend. He's a grad student. And he says that when people find out, oh, you're a biochemist, it's like an intimidating word. Like, oh, you're some crazy person that I can't talk to because you speak a different language. And in some ways that's true, but in a lot of ways that's not. It took me five minutes to explain the concept of PCR to Greg, and he's a smart guy. And he completely understands it and sees the artistry of it and just the beauty of it. And bringing science to everyone through art, I'm really, really, really excited about it. And it's just a different way of communicating it. And I like what Robin said about exposure. We think that's so important. And at the Long Now Foundation, we have a speaking series here in San Francisco. We actually have two speaking series, one of them in SFJAS, one of them at our spot, The Interval, which is up on the North Waterfront. But we take both of them, we record them, and we send them out as podcasts. We're gonna be releasing a bunch of these talks as YouTube videos for everybody to access. They're currently up on our website. And we get about a million people tuning into those every single year. And I get some really interesting emails from people all over the country and all over the world who are not scientists. They have jobs as truck drivers or school teachers or any other job you can imagine. And they'll send things in and talk about, oh my God, this talk blew my mind and now I've been down a rabbit hole. And with the internet to kind of augment people's exposure to these ideas, people can really kind of ramp up their own education and things. And I think we had talked a little bit about how so many of the interesting things you find that inform your science are other things like art or other fields of study like history that kind of start to inform the way you're thinking about it. And so, yeah. So, you have a question? I do. Well, I have a comment first, which is thank you everyone for coming out here. This is excellent. I really appreciate the salon people thinking about things and I don't know, taking their precious time on a weeknight to do this. Now, I'm asking a question kind of on behalf of my younger self. Looking at the system, it seems like most people that you talk to, they'd be appalled to know how small the NSF budget is. It's like a fraction of a percent and it's ridiculous. If you were to really, and again, I say I ask this on the behalf of my younger self because I remember being kind of naive and not understanding how long things take and asking what would we really expect to come out of the system? If most of the money comes from creating clever financial products, that's where people are going to go. It seems pretty ridiculous to expect that anything different is going to happen. So, Nick, I really like what you said about having a different perspective and I'm wondering if, as kind of a challenge to you guys as leaders in this space, what would you recommend to all of the highly motivated and talented people out here? What would you actually do to change the second and third order terms in this function? If you really wanted this to change, if you wanted to put more money into science, you wanted to tell people that academia is not just a Ponzi scheme, that it is very creative and you could do things. How, what sort of instructions would you give to people to go into this and not make the rational decision, which is, yeah, go into management and take credit for other people's work, or I don't know, invest in things that are probably going to make money or start a startup and then sell it to Novartis? No offense, I think Novartis is a great company, but realistically, I'm wondering, as a challenge to you guys, what would you tell people to make real changes to the second and third order terms in this function? How do you make sure that we don't continue doing this thing at a really slow pace and see what we've been seeing for the last 100 years or so? I think that people should really pursue what they're passionate about and I think society has, and especially parents and culture, have really told us to go to school to get that good job. School is the means to that end. And same with your PhD, it's like, well, it doesn't exactly matter what I work on because I just want a PhD or like, oh, now I'm going to go into a postdoc doing something a little bit different versus just having more of a clear idea saying like, I want to solve this problem. I want to end cancer. I want to figure out how Alzheimer's works and then going and finding how to get there. So it's, yeah, it's definitely a balance and I think it's economically driven because we all have to eat and so sometimes an economic option and that safety net is more attractive than going after and taking those risks. But if you can find ways to creatively get to what you're actually passionate about as fast as possible, by taking as little risk as possible, then definitely try that math. So I would echo June, especially on the temporal advice, like try to succeed or fail at something or determine you like something or don't like it quickly and then get on with your life and continue doing these experiments. In terms of how we change, for instance, how scientists are compensated or how science is incentivized, that's more complicated. Merely increasing the budget for science education probably won't help. Actually, the NIH budget around the turn of the millennium infamously doubled and a lot of that doubling went into more grant money which encouraged more junior faculty to positions to be created, but those junior faculty needed the pyramid of grad students and postdocs to assemble under them to produce data which produced papers which gets more grant money. So pretty soon the money was insufficient and there were just twice as many people running in that particular experiment. But so just increasing the funding maybe isn't enough. Restructuring it though could help and there's been a lot of discussion of this among people who talk about the postdoc ellipse, the postdoc cop apocalypse. There's somewhere on the order of 80 or 100,000 people with PhDs circulating around from postdoc appointment to postdoc appointment. We're just leaving the workforce because they don't see a way out or they don't have a way out into a job that they feel fits their education or a career that fits their education. So maybe incentivizing universities not to harvest grant money and perpetuate the pyramid scheme in the way that they do, but instead say let's have smaller laboratories where a professor has a high paid, maybe one highly paid postdoc, maybe one research assistant professor or senior technician associated with them and just change the structure of our science from mega labs to mom and pop labs. The Canadian research system largely looks like that with some exceptions. To give you sort of a personal idea, to give you an idea of how austere things can be. When I was a postdoc at UCSF, the standard salary was 42K a year. Try living on that. And I was like, oh man, what have I done wrong in life? I'm like almost 30 and I have to live with random roommates and can't afford to do anything. So that's a problem, but it also comes from the scientists narratives that they tell themselves and what they tell the public. If you're a research scientist and you're not producing fraudulent research and there's a fair bit of that, you're making something that is real. You are actually making something and it has value and other people can build upon it. And I think that there should be this, there should be a more vocal discussion among scientists that they deserve a middle class lifestyle in return for what they're giving to the society, what they're producing. And I think that often scientists tell each other, and I ran into this all the time even in Big Pharma, oh, how dare you suggest that our salaries aren't in line with the rest of industry in this field. You're just lucky to get to do science every day. And that's true, and very few people get to do what they want to as their career, but it doesn't mean it should be done in an exploitative way. So I think there is a need to discuss narrative and there's also a need to look at not funding only, but the structure of that funding. So sorry, that was long winded. Other thoughts? Another question. Can I add one different thing? I apologize for the rambling question. The thing I was going to add is I completely agree with what you're saying. I think that's totally true. I don't think adding more funding was necessarily help. I guess what I say is, as someone who decided not to pursue the PhD partly because it seemed glaringly obvious what was going to happen, I wonder, as leaders, as people that people look to and young people think, well, these guys must be doing something because they understand the scope of the problem. I challenge you to give people suggestions for things that they could actively do in order to change these things about. I say this because something like, for instance, the peer review system as it happens right now is very clearly broken. If you're going to select for studies that create outstanding publications in nature, you are incentivizing people to do certain things. If, as a reviewer of a study, I say, this thing is ridiculous. I am not going to let it through. There's no negative repercussion. The kinds of studies that we see, which are really interesting, like the 2006 induced pluripotent stem cell study, would not have happened if, like I'm sure you guys talk to people who write grants and they all say kind of the same thing, which is you write a grant for the thing you've already done so you can use the money to do the thing you really want to do. These things, to people who are in research, are very obvious and young people think that you guys are taking care of this. You're doing something about it. And as an older person who's an industry now and I look at it, I realize no one's doing anything about it. So again, the second, third order terms, I challenge you guys as leaders, and I know I'm like shifting a blame to you, but I challenge you to galvanize people and really tell them, what can we do to change this? Because we shouldn't be surprised by the results that we're seeing. Sorry for the rambling. Challenge accepted. And I think a lot of us are trying to do that. And I don't pass this along, but this is one of the reasons that I got involved in BioCaptivate because we want people to understand that maybe we could do things better for both humanity and for the scientists themselves. And in fairness, I always try to talk people out of going directly to graduate school from undergrad or directly from working for me to grad school. And I always say, if I write you this letter and you get in and you're unhappy four years from now, you can't say I didn't warn you. But no, part of it's providing good advice, but part of it I think, and I maybe haven't done this loudly enough, is to really demand and write about the change that we probably need systemically. I totally agree with you. There is one observation I had in the system is, for example, Laura wanted to be a technician. I don't think today any of the students have an option of being a technician because how many university profs have a technician? When I was in grad school, my advisor had a technician. Five years later, the technician position eliminated, it all became soft money. And many of the grad students, sadly, but used as a technician. Many of the things could have been done by the technician who would be very happy, but do they actually have an option? Maybe we should bring some of the good things in the past and put it in place, many other positions in between. And one other thing I used to do, I used to teach a thousand student class, biology class. I was an adjunct lecturer. So my appointment, who knows whether it was gonna happen again, but students would come to me because they would, I used to give a introduction what I did. They would all get excited about it, and I would get visit, hey, what should I do? And most of the time, I don't know what I would like to do. And I said, that's quite okay. When I was an undergrad, I didn't know what I wanted to do either. But this is the project I work. And if you work on it, if you like it, you know what you like. If you don't like it, that is perfectly fine because you eliminated one thing that this is something you don't wanna do. That is just as important as what you would like to do. And while the ones who work with me didn't go away, so they stay with me. But it is also the environment too. How much they like. One other thing I'll add to everything that's been shared up here is that, as important as it is to find what you love and to find a way to do it, sometimes that also involves getting very creative about doing things that you don't love to be able to continue to foster your predilections for obscure history. In my case, like philosophy or whatever it is that's kind of your side hustle thing that makes you come alive. Sometimes you have to get really creative and there is no easy way where someone's going to just hand you the check in a sufficient amount for you to do the thing that you wanna do in the way that you wanna do it. And you have to get kind of ruthless. And so just from personal story, because I don't know how to tell anyone how to do that. It's very individual. In my experience, I came out of college with an engineering degree in the Midwest and did not wanna work in engineering because it was very Dilbert-esque in that world. And I was working with an organization that sold proprietary fastening components to the domestic automotive industry. So like patented screws, nuts and bolts, this couldn't have been a more boring job, a more soul-crushing job. But it was a sales job and I figured that I could probably charm my way into working a decent sales pipeline and set aside all the extra time for doing what I love, which at the time was like being in a rock band and being a musician and then later on studying philosophy. And so getting really comfortable with doing something I absolutely loathed very creatively was what allowed other parts of myself to not just die and become these background things I used to do. But it kept them alive and eventually in a weird way on a longer arc, it landed me in a place where now I get to actually have those conversations that I've wanted to have my entire life. But man, that was a crazy weird 10, 15 year plan that absolutely wasn't guaranteed, shouldn't have worked out, got very lucky. So I guess my advice is be very flexible, super creative and get very lucky. All right, I have to just follow that with something because I talk to a lot of students all the time about how to think about internships, jobs, careers and all of that, because it's heavy on their mind. But I wanna go back, I agree with one thing June said and I'm gonna disagree with another, which kind of builds on yours. One is you gotta figure out what you care about and it needs to be a problem, a situation. You may love science and you care about science, but there may be some other challenge in the world. Find something that you can get excited about. But the one thing you said is don't take a risk. And this is something that I feel like you have to in life and I think about, I said I have a wandering path someday, we'll have a happy hour, I'll tell you my career if anybody cares. But if I hadn't taken a chance at the craziest times, I mean imagine seven years ago someone came to me and said let's go reinvent higher education. Are you crazy? We're gonna start a university from scratch. There are 4,000 American colleges and universities. Why in the world do we need another? But we did. And so sometimes you've gotta believe and take a leap and especially if you're younger in your career you got more flexibility before you have obligations, take chances because chances will open up opportunities. I would like to add one more thing. You don't have to be just young to take the risk. You can be older too. Just listen to your heart. If it is a job that you really didn't like it, it will really crush your soul slowly, slowly, slowly. And listen to yourself and am I really happy? Can I actually do something else or just feel it once in a while, evaluate how much you like it? Because I do it even though I like what I do, even every couple of months, I think about it, do I still like it? Do I still move forward? Or how can I make it? Because if you don't like it, when the tough times comes in, it's gonna be really hard. But if you're really passionate about it and if you like it, tough times will come and you'll think about it away. So how can I make it happen? Okay, I have this 10 months or five months. Can I make it? Or what can I do six months later? That's gonna get better. And you'll get to see the opportunities. Keep your eyes on the opportunities. Things doesn't come at the time you anticipate. It comes in, but you have multiple options. When you see it, grab it when it shows up. I just wanna add, I should explain what I was mentioning about risk. I think oftentimes when you are faced with a risk, if you actually think about all the underlying factors, it's not a risk at all. I've essentially switched four jobs in six years and each time there was like, am I leaving this entire field of study that I did my PhD in? And I was like, you know, that's actually not a big of a risk. Let's try it. So did that and then started a company. That was a huge risk. And then ended up here at IndieBio. So yes, absolutely take the risk. But I think from the mindset side, if you are scared about something and you're scared and you have all the fear, if you actually break it down, there's really nothing to fear. So I wanted to be cognizant of the time and give everyone time to mingle with our panelists. And I know other people might have questions. Please pose them individually. And because we want to give time for people to mingle and our organizer, Yen, is going to come up and just briefly explain how he wants us to make small talk and mingle, but not the normal small talk, not a small talk without a subject. He wants us to actually focus on meaningful small talk or subject directed. So Yen, did you want to explain that? Come up here. Well, a little personal story first. So it was in 2016 that I was volunteering for an organization and I invited Robin to speak. And at the time that I was broke, unemployed and virtually homeless, I mean couch surfing and also I graduated from SFSU with undergraduate degree so that's basically considered unimportant in the eyes of a lot of people in science. But the thing is at the time that I believe that it's my dream, it's something I'm willing to die for is to change the culture of science. And even for me that like someone who was so insignificant that can bring people together and have some kind of impact. So I think is anyone can have impact. So it's like it doesn't matter how small or insignificant you are if your desire, your belief is strong enough, then your impact will come out. And also like if Yen can cook some magic, you can cook magic. And so the following section will be the networking section so actually I would say no small talk. Talk about big things, what's your drive? What's your deepest desire? What's your deepest longing? Like what make you feel alive? And also like all gatherings are social contracts. So the thing is like what is bio captive way? We create those gatherings that trying to transform, trying to help people to embrace a deeper part of themself and trying to achieve something that they didn't think is possible. There are a lot of amazing people here. And so therefore I think that you should talk about not just your deepest longing, but also like what's lacking? Like what do you need? What type of talent or help or opportunity that you want or you need that like more than likely that you will meet someone even just tonight that can bridge that gap and bring you to your next chapter and I know that's from my own personal experience that there's only one thing in life that surely matters is how to go to the next chapter, how to change the rules, the ground rules and the ground rules are everything. And so I also have some print out. Those I call them mind muse. So it's just some my favorite quote. So you're welcome to take a peek and pick something to speak to your heart and discuss with whoever that you click. And so this is a very good way to do networking but also like you don't have to use them. You can just take them home and I think they're wonderful quotes and very transformational or transformative. And then the other thing is I will encourage you to talk about how we can transform the inter-organizational and intra-organizational relations because this world is made of relations. And also like how to transform your own relation with yourself like I earlier posed a question about what's your narrative and then what are your narratives? We all have many narratives and some are mutually incompatible and some fortify each other. So and it is our own job and also our duty towards others to kind of augment the narrative to help people to pick out the good narratives and get rid of the not so helpful ones. So that's about it. Thank you, everyone. All right, thank you. All right, let's have some wine and no small talk.