 All right, we have our first question. So one question that's come to my mind recently concerns plastic. China has stopped accepting our trash. And we have a great Pacific garbage patch and a great Atlantic garbage patch and a great Indian Ocean garbage patch. It doesn't get any press where Mauritius is. And I just wonder, seeing as plastic doesn't completely ever biodegrade, what does that look like going forward? I've been asking this question as a financial person. Where is the money in cleaning up the ocean? And how do we get to that part where we are actually incentivized to clean this shit up? Ocean's expert, do you get this one? So a couple of things. I think Lewis might have an interesting perspective on whether actually plastics are actually degrading or are there new forms of bacteria or microbes appearing in our oceans that never existed and are now feeding off the plastics, which I think is an interesting perspective. But I think your spot on one of the big challenges is how do we create the economic mechanisms and incentives where the plastic can be seen as either a resource that can either be recycled or put through? So I think the broader consensus on what's happening with plastics is that at some stage, 10,000 years from now, there will be a layer around our seabed and our surface where it's been an era of plastics. And it's clear that the global value systems are now shifted in a remarkably short period of time, which we went in the last two or three years, where we went to plastics being one of several issues. Do we, you know, plastic being a defining issue in many countries, where there's such strict policies that have been put in place, like in China and like in Rwanda and Kenya, where they've banned plastic bads here in California. So I'm confident that we'll move to an era, you know, a post-plastic era very quickly. And so there's two parts to answer your question. One is how do we incentivize the economics in that post-plastic era? So how do we make sure we're not developing materials that are more damaging because they may have a greater carbon footprint? So for example, a lot of people are developing straws made out of bamboo. But that bamboo actually has a higher water footprint or carbon footprint versus paper. But paper uses a form of glue and that glue is actually toxic, it's banned in Europe versus seaweed and algae and some of that small system. So number one is how do you move to that new economy? And I think that's an interesting model to actually create economic incentives through kind of value shifts to build alternatives. Number two is then what do you do with what exists right now with plastics in the oceans? To what extent is there kind of market mechanisms for that so that you can use a plastics and it can be recycled as bitumen or something in the streets? Or is there going to be, is that something where you just need a public intervention and a multilateral fund to actually go out and it becomes a public good to clean that up? So I think that's gonna be the challenge. I think in terms of post-plastic, I am now confident, I wasn't two or three years ago, but I am now confident that we will find new alternatives to plastics. I think there's a lot of innovation in the biotech world. I think the economic mechanisms and the cleanup still has to be worked out and I've not yet seen a comprehensive package. I've seen a lot of experiments, but nothing at scale that's going to scale up. So we'll have to talk to you offline if you've got ideas about that. Just real quickly, since Nishan sort of alluded to. So scientifically, what's going to happen, I'm not sure anyone knows. I had the good fortune to be at an event last week where I was able to see presentations by very different scientists than what I am, which is a biochemist. And in particular, what struck me were people showing off their sea floor mud samples. So these cores of mud that are used, they can be correlated to tree rings in some cases. They're a history of what's been deposited in the ocean. And I think that we're going to have the human plastic, the anthropocene plastic layer that if our species continues into deep time, we'll look back and say, oh yes, that's when our ancestors followed the oceans with plastics and there's a layer of particles. But what's interesting is that the concern about microplastics in seafood is actually driving a lot of innovation and incentivizing innovation in fish farming of one sort or another in artificial seafood replacement products, in fish grown in the laboratory from individual cells. And so in a way, the problem with microplastics is incentivizing, hopefully some technologies that will help us to restore fisheries maybe in a best case scenario. So I think we're stuck with a layer of plastic probably, but this has forced us to think of creative ways that we can protect ourselves from the plastic and in doing so we might help fix some of the problems we've created. I'll just one bead, which is, we say fight capitalism with a better capitalism and certainly with regulation two and incentives but we have a plastics company that is fully biodegradable, fully compostable, edible plastic, one before I came to Dubai I worked with Adidas a lot on these shoes which are from reclaimed ocean plastic. There are ways to fight this problem with better capitalism itself as well. I wanted to know what you think is a relationship between trauma that we have and the fact that we do eat animals who are suffering and we're talking about connection with nature and nature is speaking and so we have billions of animals that are killed, I'm not sure exactly the statistic but we have every day maybe just because we eat them. So it's really easy to stop eating animals and decrease a lot of pain in the world as well as climate change, environmental degradation in the oceans. So I'm just wondering how, I mean that's my opinion and so how much does trauma have to do with the fact that we just can't stop eating meat and this is causing so much trauma? We'll later find out what happens when we continuously eat animals that are traumatized themselves in tiny little cages. Yeah, and then it's slaughtered. Yeah. I don't have an answer to that but I get what you're feeling and there's, I think there's a great bit of Dr. Yoon's ideas on this that you can read about. I empathize very much with the point of view that we pick up this behavior pattern like a thought virus and we're not strong enough when young to fight it or our own need for personal care and self-care prioritizes over this concern that sits in the back of our mind forever, you know, and I've written about the times my kids when they were young were going through processing this. I think the one thing that is elsewhere out there is culture and people wanting to preserve culture and in their culture, they farmed this, ate that. My wife is Cajun, she grew up on three foods. Her family's been in the industries. She doesn't wanna lose her culture, lives here, you know, and wants to hang on to her culture so it's not that it's this or it's that, it's her culture, it's her style, it's her people and her identity and I do think the burden, like we have at IndieBio obviously many plant protein companies and alternative ways of dealing with this with cell-based meats and hybrid products but what we need, very important to do is, you know, I keep saying you can't feed the world one hipster at a time, we need to find a way to, so I wasn't trying to throw that one out and say like a joke but glad I got a laugh but it's very important that we enable cultural expression and not be sort of have an unparalleled approach to telling people what to do. We need to enable their way to stay in touch with their culture through these new foods that we're making, which is I think really, really, really important. Any other thoughts from the panel or next question? Okay, let's go to the next question. There was a comment about China moving very rapidly on environmental issues. Could you elaborate on that? Yeah, so on China, obviously there's a lot, China's a very complicated country, right? So in the sense that China effectively has, you know, eight big provinces and then plus Hong Kong, Macau, for China to make decisions, there's a group of seven, the State Council which is a cabinet, goes through down to provincial governments and so when a decision takes place at the top, it has to cascade through several layers. You've probably read a lot about the anti-corruption clampdown in China over the last kind of four, five years. A lot of the anti-corruption clampdown has mainly been around environmental standards. So what's been happening has been a lot of factories and others have been skirting environmental standards in terms of effluence and waste and so because of various things about corruption and pain inspectors. And so that has been where a lot of that clampdown has actually taken place. So number one, we're seeing signals from the very top that they're getting very serious on environmental crime and clamping down on that. Number two, indicators of the environment is now getting reported to the very highest level in a way that doesn't exist in the US or in Europe today. So under the Paris Agreement, we're now talking about these, what's called nationally defined contributions. There's all sorts of debate about how you're going to verify and validate what's being tracked, but in China there's a very complex set of metrics that's reported in. In the same way that today a central bank, the Federal Reserve in the US, tracks all financial transaction, they're trying to do that in China for the environment. And so that's kind of a second signal that that's being done. And yes, they're going to get it wrong to begin with different level of measurement, but at least directionally. And then number three, from the very top, Premier Ji, who's the president right now, he defined a, as you know, China has a five-year plans, but he defined a 25-year vision for China. And he called this the beautiful China vision. And so in Chinese, I know others probably speak better than I do, but he talked about the green mountains of gold and blue rivers of silver. And that concept of an ecological or beautiful China was meant to be a signal that China can only be successful financially if the mountains go back to being green and the rivers go back to being blue. And that's been an extremely powerful concept that's really galvanized all of China in a way that we're just not seeing in the US or in Europe. It's very fragmented here in terms of the debate, but from a top-down perspective, that's what we're seeing in China. Yes, there'll be things that will go wrong, things will not go in a straight line, but we've seen a lot of progress in the last five years. I've certainly have all those who traveled to China. And certainly from the very top, we're seeing that willingness. That's a story to galvanize. That's a story to galvanize people, yeah. Hi, thank you so much for being here. I know we were talking about the sense of digitality and our interstates, and I was trying to understand what your thoughts were on what it means to have a digital sense of well-being and what are some metrics or ways that we can actually measure that. And there's, I think, a lot of externalities when it comes to the way that we interact with our products or our cell phones, like the computer and the internet. And not a lot of, I think, clarity in how these things are affecting our lives and whether it's possible to have that embedded within new companies that are starting and new internet companies that are starting and being able to measure and track that, or if that's a solution that can only come top-down. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot in there. It's a hard, hard question that I just, I think for me, it goes back to what we're, I suppose, is what we're building collectively, and we've built these incredible prediction machines as what Marx or defines this digital empire we've created. It's the ability to ingest lots of data and then predict one step ahead. And for me, a metric of well-being is how we're using that to solve NP-hard problems. I think that that from a regulatory level, if there, it has many regulatory implications, for instance, and the other would be security. And I think there, again, I don't have any answers. This idea of technology versus the state and coming back to paternalism, how much right does the government or a tech company have to entering our bedrooms or entering our thought processes and who governs that? And with data, the good thing is, and with accounting and say, even blockchain, is that for the first time, we're looking at personalization at scale. So there might be opportunity for a decentralized regulation of these prediction machines. And so I think that there's scope there where we can transcend governments as well as corporates to monitor and to regulate these engines. I think from a scientific standpoint to, I see this all the time, a lot of these software packages and even apps have really transformed science in a good way, basic scientific research. And when thinking about that, I would, I suppose, apply some basic test. Does this platform technology and computational technology, does this allow people to do deeper thinking or devote more time to deeper thinking than they otherwise would? And some of the software that aggregates scientific manuscripts in digital form, for instance. And the legal industry has been transformed by this too. It's amazing not to have to go to a university library and photocopy journal articles. It's nice to be able to aggregate them on your computer. This saves time to do, you know, substantive thinking about things other than which stack is a particular journal located in the Medical Sciences Library. So I think that we do see these digital advances really improving things. And I think a friend of mine in the audience has thought a lot about machine learning, enabling, helping scientists to assimilate literature that's too vast for someone who didn't grow up in the field to understand. And I think there's really positive things in that space. So, I mean, if I was to apply a litmus test and I was looking at, say, digital companies to fund, if I was a VC, which I'm not, maybe I would apply this litmus test. Does this make people more capable of fulfilling their creative potential? Stricky, I look at it very much on the level of consumption versus production from the point of view of an author. And one of my books was called Nurture Shock, A New Thinking About Children. And one of the things that jumped out of that is the incredible power for children to do extended play, especially extended play when it was co-authored. I mean, you could share authorship of an imaginary scenario. It wasn't, you maybe were borrowing from some TV show you'd seen or a cartoon, but then you were making it your own. And the way I look at our digital life is very much through this lens of how much of it are we just taking in versus how much of it are we, and when I say interacting, I don't mean liking and reposting, right? So the big difference between listening to a podcast, entering almost a transcendent state, half of what you're thinking about is what you're hearing on the podcast and half is your own memory banks and processing happening simultaneously. It's a state of mind. It's a state of mind that again, it's very much one person could be scrolling through news and just being like an idiot, another person could be scrolling through news that looks the same, maybe even looks the same to your stupid crawling AI that says they know what people are doing and thinking, but it's not the same. And the other person is really heavily thinking and engaging with that material and bouncing around. And there's a meaningful difference between self-directed navigation through digital devices to learning because you're curious to be able to take in lots of information and it kind of coming at you. Fundamentally looking at the fact that when I wrote Nurture Shock or started that work in 2007, your average child in the United States was watching three hours and 40 minutes of linear television a day that was coming at them, totally in other people's control. We as big smarty pants, old people, moralize the fact that oh, they're on their phones all the time. And I'm like, what are you, 10 years ago, three hours and 40 minutes a day of sitting there sucking in serial commercials and whatever the Nickelodeon channel wanted to give you. And at least I'd rather have their thumb navigating it and taking control of it and being able to self-direct and learn a few things. So I think we have to be really careful about how we interpret this stuff. Even the overflow of our email box, like at least a lot of it you can actually act on. You can say, I disagree or I wanna schedule a meeting or yes, I will be there to pick up my kid, whatever it is. At least it may be nonsense, but it's active. And that's very different than just being a receiver, a consumer and not a producer, not co-creating with the world that's coming in. And do these tiny little tests for your digital well-being where you yourself decide for a day that you're just gonna turn your phone completely off and you're gonna go and read a book or you're gonna go into Mirror Woods or the ocean or whatever you're gonna do. And when you do that, just see how you feel and just tap into your own being and how you feel and just keep doing these tiny little behavior changes and seeing how you feel and just that quantified self-process of taking control of your well-being in the digital tech era. One of the most important things young people can learn how to do. Hi, so if you look into the history of education, you find that it's kind of originally started to make good soldiers and good factory workers and over time that has been even further optimized by the systems that we have. And Facebook isn't strictly intentionally optimized to make you feel bad about yourself and disempowered, but it does because people post their highlights and don't tell you so much about their struggles. What do you see as a way to kind of train people to realize that they are empowered and they can do things and that they have the ability to affect the world? Make education affordable. I mean, we as a society engineered a system where we knew that nothing was more important than people getting educated. And in that same period of time, we made education so expensive that people are saddled with that, that mission that enrollment rates are going down. It's to me like one of the most fundamental things. If you look at many, many societies that transform themselves, it was through using education in a time for a tough economic period. Argentina's done it, Ireland's done it. You can go country after country having done it and it's savage that what we've done to sort of make education inaccessible. And to me seems fundamentally designed to keep people from getting educated so that they don't vote with an educated mind. So also to follow on that, I would say that we need to maybe reconceive education as proper education. So I think that much of what is done is training and not that training is bad, but I think that a proper education, a useful education is one that teaches you to think critically and to bring together insights from disparate fields. And I think that having a well-prepared mind is more important for making innovations of any sort in any field than it is that you know specifically how to do a particular task in the laboratory. That can be learned, but being able to toggle between big picture and details that matter and being able to deconstruct problems and in fact identify perverse incentives is something that's sorely lacking or just not common enough in education. And if we had a movement more towards the basics of how to think elements of logic, maybe many things would be better. And mother nature is the best teacher. Yeah, a number of years ago I read an article that claimed that the British common law countries which is America, England and Australia had the extremely high level of climate deniers. And it sort of made sense to me and I think that we here in America today are so skeptical and we've created a system. It's good because questioning authority has its qualities about being an entrepreneur and it has its bright side, but we've become this society of not believing that vaccines are good, climate change is real. So this, we have this system that's capitalism and democracy rolled into one that has, and this common law that has created a lot of perverse incentives for us to just be skeptical, pathologically skeptical. So any comments on that? Just a quick one. I think that around that problem, we need to teach people that facts are not the result of an online poll. Like there are basic facts that can be proven to the level of theory or supported the level of theory by tested hypotheses and these are fairly immutable unless great evidence is the contrary is provided and people just don't get to decide that what they hope is right is the truth, is the truth. So I think that somehow this gets the educational problem teaching people basic things like cause and effect and coming up with testable hypotheses and testing them and empirically finding out what the closest that our measurements and abilities allow us to determine as truth is something important, especially when it comes to things like climate change. And so so many other key issues. I think the opinion in fact have been blurred in many areas where they shouldn't. And so. How do you get that scientific thought process or that scientific rigor into a non-scientific mind? Well, you know, that's a really good question. I don't have a good answer except to say that I think that inherently all people are scientists, whether they realize it or not. I mean, we do simple, we test simple hypotheses every day, mostly unaware that we're doing so and people who may have a non-quantitative mind, let's just say someone who's really creative in different ways, maybe socially or kinetically. They test hypotheses all the time. If you look at an athlete doing whatever athletic event they are, there's micro-hypotheses in every move they make. So I think that. Same with crossing the street. You know, crossing the street, do you need to pick up your speed a little bit in order to make the countdown clock on time? I see, well, in San Francisco, yes. But I do, so I think that to answer your question, if one could intervene, it would be to teach people with different types of intelligence or different distributions of different intelligence types that all of the different intelligence they use in some way queries hypotheses and that's sort of like baked into life. And that's an okay thing. And I think that if you did that, people who are not traditionally quantitative science, who we would think of as science oriented people would realize that this is sort of, this is fundamental to all thinking, no matter what type. I would actually not go so bottom up, which I think will play out in a very long run. It's a top-down problem for me. It's its leadership. The political system has this perverse incentive to obfuscate this boundary between opinion and fact and especially in diverse countries. That's where the problem is stemming. And a joint coordinated international baseline, as I say, is what is needed to basically reinstill in our leadership that the sun does rise from the east and sets in the west. And that's where I would approach it from. Was, I haven't heard this, but Nisha, you know this as well, but why would climate denying be associated with countries that are historically white, male dominated, speaking English, a queen's English? How could that be? Well, the easiest answer is that they were in power, they were running the coal companies, 20 major energy companies in the world dominate the energy industry, and they have the 10 of the top 15, and therefore they're breeding denial. Like, there's an Occam's razor to that that I would suggest is at work. I'm tempted to say things like we kind of mistakenly made climate science like really sophisticated climate models need to be used, like no, CO2 traps heat, simple. Like, whether we wanted to characterize it as like really exotic science or not, or we actually needed to back in the 80s and the early 90s, when that was sort of all we had, we didn't have all the monitors that we do today, but in that period of time, portraying it as extremely complex that only a few people could understand, only experts can tell you this, that meta messaging was doomed if you try to convey the masses of anything where that's the first thing coming out of your mouth. And going back to your point about how do we all become scientists or can have more scientific thinking, but I'd say that scientific thinking may sound like a lofty goal, but maybe we can all do reasoning and reasoning sounds like a little easier and maybe when we explain reasoning to others that tells us something about our inner selves, which was an earlier topic. But let me ask a panel of question that's about your inner selves. And so this week, when you were faced with a perverse incentive, because we all do and we have choices, and I find it really interesting when we had to translate principles and the choices in our everyday lives, what was perverse incentive that you saw and what was your imperfect choice, probably, in that case, and why did you choose the way you chose? So I won't, yeah, so you're right that I think every day and every week there are kind of big choices and certainly this week is no shortage in terms of, I'm involved in, you heard in the introduction, a big treaty around kind of life on the oceans and there's a big perverse incentive and regulatory capture about those who want to do seabed mining, for example. So even though they proclaim to be doing a sustainable ocean economy, it's clear that it's not, it's just, and so when you're faced with those choices, I think one of the big questions at the core of what you're asking is where's your courage, right? Do you have the courage to stand up? Do you have the courage to let go of the institutions or the organizations or the labels that you have and to stand up for your values? And where does those values and what does that North Star come from? You know, so to the points about kind of education, I heard some themes and some questions on education and I had a lot about the kind of rational thinking. So this session that we were in in India, one of the big kind of revelations that the Dalai Lama has had, what was interesting, there's a small group around science and spirituality and he recognizes one of his big legacies is that the Tibetan people may be a people in exile for however many years, whether it's 10 years, decades, centuries, thousands of years. And so they're now reconciling the fact that they're no longer going to be in the homeland of Tibet, which have been ravaged by climate change in terms of the melting of the ice caps, that's changing the landscape as well as cultural and political factors. And so one of his big legacies is how does he then train the 10,000 Buddhist monks that are outside into the values of science, for example, because he sees that in Tibetan culture, I want the big assets, it's kind of that rational thinking but also scientific thinking, how do you find something which is compatible? But rather than just looking at the rational side, he's introduced this new education curriculum around the social, emotional and ethical side of thinking, which he think is undervalued in our modern education system. And so to the point that I don't know if you yourself or somebody else was making about, are we creating workers of the futures? Are we preparing kind of the adults of the future in terms of leadership? How can those sorts of tools that we're not comfortable with give us the courage to address those perverse incentives because even if you encounter perverse incentives, it's not your left brain logical thinking that will overcome that. It's gonna be something a bit more creative or even a little bit lower within you that may not be taught at school today that we'll need to develop. So, yeah, I can tell you one I face every day and one that became apparent to me last week when my mom was here and she asked me when I was moving back to India. And I think this perverse incentive of if I care so much about the global South, why am I sitting in San Francisco, right? And that is a very, very tough one. And I'm here because there aren't any dollars spent in India. Just there's no R&D spending where I am creatively inclined to be with the best scientists. But I also remind myself that I'm in this basement with the best scientists that are working on biotechnology for human and planetary health. And I think for me it comes with taking pride in being an immigrant and actually just embracing that label of being an immigrant. And in the hopes that the science we're creating downstairs will transcend these colonial national borders. So that's I guess my best answer I can give you. But yeah, that's one that hopefully over time I reconciled with, yeah. So one example that I faced this week and it always, I think it faces a lot of biotech startups is this question about how you scale in a humane way. Because if you have science that has a bottleneck in it of some sort or another and any scientific process always has a bottleneck, you can increase that aperture by just hiring people somewhat quickly and haphazardly maybe adequate people with adequate skills to force that bottleneck wider and get your work done. But then the question, the moral question that always faces the CEO of the company and I is how do we do this in a way that we don't have to lay people off if we buy a robot that greatly increases that slow step or it makes that slow step no longer the slowest in the pipeline. And so this necessitates a more difficult hiring process because instead of optimizing for someone who's CV, one can check each skill that they have, each particular skill, we optimize more for is this person, does this person show that they can learn new things quickly and has creativity and mental plasticity because if you hire people like that who are much harder to screen for in my opinion and require just a more difficult hiring process, you end up with something that's sustainable. And I can't say that in my career at this and other companies hiring people I've always done that perfectly but I think it's a moral issue that faces us and we have to take the more expensive route for a better long-term outcome. I think it comes down to alternatives, what are alternatives? So when I drive my car somewhere, there is, I feel bad about it but I think that's the best choice for me at the time. And so what we're really committed to downstairs here at IndieBio is creating better alternatives so that we don't have to make that choice in the future. And so I justify a lot of what I do, bad choices I make throughout the day by using plastic, if I drink out of a plastic bottle or it's a horrible, horrible feeling and I'm aware of it but I justify it by saying I'm creating more alternatives or part of a movement to create more alternatives to a better future. You guys are all much better than me because my compromises, which great question actually to bring it home because I mean, my compromises are very personal every single day. I don't care, my health, my creative work, my family, my work colleagues, my job, my extended family or let alone stuff outside the house, let alone the environment, like they are fighting a war every single day for my time and I'm compromising them and rationalizing every single day without a doubt and walk around half the time feeling like I can never make everybody happy and I'm only talking about myself and don't have a solution to that, especially during a period of time, Arvin and I are working on a book right now so especially during a time where I'm trying to find some time of the day to write 1,000 or 2,000 words in the middle of the night if I need to and I extremely selfish to sort of like to actually be sitting with dinner with people and not being present because I'm thinking half the time what am I gonna write tonight when I get up in the middle of the night? That is the nature of my life, I hope not to hurt too many people with it. And the most perverse thing that's happened to me is that I've had the truth obfuscated of who we are, where we come from, what our purpose is and how to connect back to that source and embody it moving forward and I'm grateful to Indigenous wisdom that I've been taught recently that has helped me better embody that on a moment to moment basis and that's the end of the Q&A so thank you to everyone for your questions thanks to our panelists another round of applause for everyone. All right, and now before we start the work groups, Greg Bilke, yes, come on up Greg, has some words to say about the remembering Rosalind Franklin project that is in partnership with BioCaptivate. Hi, I'm working right now with Jan Lewis and Laura Tendeski over there on the early development for a new project for BioCaptivate that is going to be launched in late 2019. As you can see there, it's called Remember Rosalind and that is the name of our website, rememberrosalind.org and I'll read the description here because it sums things up pretty well. Remember Rosalind is an interactive serialized presentation using augmented reality and online learning resources to explore the story, science, and controversy surrounding Rosalind Franklin's contributions during the race to discover the structure of DNA and how they can be relevant today and what we're looking at this project is being a collaboration between scientists, artists, and historians and it'll be presented over a three month period via updates to our website and also an augmented reality app and the audience will be able to interact with us via online forums, posting comments, we'll be able to ask questions. In just the early stages of developing this right now so I suggest if you'd like more information on it, go to the website, rememberrosalind.org and sign up for the mailing list and there'll be more information coming in the months ahead and also tonight we'll set up a little demo so you can see one of the augmented reality pieces actually up live and also you'll be able to sign up for the mailing list. We're really looking forward to developing and presenting this project. I think it's going to be an interesting, engaging project for all types of audiences and we hope you guys join us. Thanks.