 I took technologies that already exist and just combined them in a way that nobody had really thought of because we had this realization of what the ideal form of nanofabrication might be and we surveyed the landscape for what existed and what we could use and then put them together and as it turns out that involved taking elements from biological engineering, all the conjugation chemistries it involved taking this new form of microscopy that Ed had and his students had invented expansion microscopy as well as these new ways of doing lithography in three dimensions which came out of initially biological imaging but then started getting applied to nanofabrication as well so no one of those disciplines on its own could have done it it's really how things collide to create something entirely new Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation, I'm your host, Alan Sakein We are on site at MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts We are going to be talking about light, art, nanotech We have Daniel Oran joining us on the show, hello Hello, how are you? Thank you so much for coming on, really appreciate it I'm very grateful that Sir Anush Babukanova introduced us and we are going to be unpacking a lot of great technical nuance in your work and also the applications of it It was mind-blowing for me trying to understand it in the short time that we had before this For those that don't know Dan's background, he's a PhD student at MIT Media Lab in the Synthetic Neurobiology Group He's an artist, scientist and inventor who creates using light both aesthetically and technically You can find his website link below, iradiantart.com as well as his MIT Media Lab profile link Alright Dan, let's start things off with our question that we like asking that we find ourselves as stewards of Earth, what is your current take on the state of humanity? Well, I think I'm generally pretty optimistic about things The trend line for prosperity has just been going up steadily for a long time and that has not changed There's definitely a lot of reasons for concern about the future and even about the present but overall I think humanity will step up to the challenge and be able to address it So long as we're willing and able to really focus and answer and tackle hard issues that are in front of us Yes, yes, yeah Totes, there's a lot to tackle and we gotta come together, yeah, to tackle Well, the issue here is the coming together bit because somehow the technologies that connected us much more have somehow also fractured us much more in some ways You have the double edginess of it, yeah Now let's hit your journey So Indiana born and then Massachusetts raised That's right And then how did you pick up your interest in light and art? Well, it all started quite a long time ago In about middle school I started working in a dark room and I just had some amazing mentors all through middle school and then high school and I just fell in love with that process of taking imagery, capturing light and then placing a piece of paper in chemicals and just watching an image appear So that initially is what really made me fall in love with light, yeah And that process is so interestingly, 200 years ago photography came to life and then all the way up to actually leaving the photo in chemicals and having it appear slowly for you That was very profound for you and now all the way to us having the cameras in our pockets Yeah, it's been a huge transition Huge evolution One, we've both gotten to witness Yeah, so many digital photos now taken every single day Now, when that aha moment sparked for you, what was your feeling about light and art when you saw that image appear? I think it was just astonishment that you could take something, a moment from your everyday life and then just fix it and make it permanent, right? And what's I think powerful there is the recontextualizing of an experience, right? Being able to take something that you imagined and then saw and translate that through technology and with your mind's eye to create an aesthetic or idea and communicate that to others Yes All through light and chemistry in one way or another Now through also other forms of technology I love how you put it like a pressing a pause button on a frame of reality and then being able to kind of relive that if you want and in a 2D at least representation and eventually hopefully in a complete virtual immersion potentially That would be nuts Now, this kind of led you to iradiant art and you've been doing that for eight years Teach us about iradiant art Well, I would say when I started going into college I became, I wouldn't say bored with, but like disinterested in doing photography which is purely representational anymore and I really fell in love more purely with this idea of art and trying to create things using light and make artworks that are made of nothing other than light and that sort of led me on a path where I started studying all the old photographic processes and masters and how it was both an act of like science as well as an act of art and that they needed to know what they were doing they needed to manipulate things chemically as well as with light and with the technology of the cameras themselves I feel like the first medium where technology became intrinsic to the aesthetic There's something very profound about, like you said, capturing these These are called irradiance, you call them coherent light You're doing an aesthetic investigation into the wave nature of light These are gorgeous images of coherent light You actually have one right there on your laptop Right like this? Yes, and this is super gorgeous and I want you to explain this to us and we'll have some of these embedded as you talk Yeah, so teach us about it So I was really inspired to do this project almost serendipitously actually I was learning a little bit about holography I had been working in some of these optical applications for holography and I just started noticing, you know, when you mess things up sometimes you get these really crazy forms of light just scattering out across the room So instead of trying to make holograms I instead started trying to capture those artifacts and the way I ended up making these is I actually would make optical elements I'd blow these small glass pieces that mangle and manipulate and refract the light quite a lot and then by passing a beam of coherent light through it I could then capture those images directly onto film But what's most interesting is that in using coherent light it actually exposes the wave nature of the light because you can actually see the interactions of the waves just like you might see ripples on a pond overlapping to create textures of like cross-hatching and things like that So you actually get to see that within the imagery itself And then how are you capturing this? Are these photons kind of just coming at each other? Yeah, these are photons coming at each other but they're being projected onto a plane and that plane is actually a very large piece of film So there's no camera but rather light just projected directly onto film That is kind of crashing into each other and then causing the waves So the waves are doing that throughout the whole space and I'm just taking like one slice out of that And how do you capture that again? I just use the same sort of film that's used in the old old view cameras the ones where you put like a hood over your head where there's like a slider that comes up So what all I do is I compose what I want onto a piece of paper and I replace that with the film holder and then open it up and make a brief exposure Brief exposure, interesting, interesting Okay, you're taking what I think so many of us forget about like the environments that we're in have light being exposed like in this room all the time and they're flying around enabling us to see A little bit more than that Also the Wi-Fi, that's also electromagnetic radiation and these sorts of forms of waves overlapping and interfering with one another are happening all around us even though we can't see it And would you say that then the waves of things like a Wi-Fi the photons are they kind of just like constantly going by all the time in the spaces So within the oxygen and nitrogen that's here there's also all the waves of photons and Wi-Fi and then we're just as animals just sitting in there Yeah, we're just being bombarded all the time So if you would capture a kind of like a still of what it looks like would it just look like noise kind of? Well, I mean most of the radiation we're exposed to is incoherent So those waves are there but there's so many of them and they're not lined up so it all just looks like blurs together but it's still happening whereas with a laser beam what you've done is you've lined all those waves up so that when they do interact you can actually see these sorts of interference patterns occurring Interesting, so you can almost think about it that like directly from the source of light it's the most coherent and then it becomes incoherent once it gets mixed up with all the other stuff A little bit, I mean most of these lights are incoherent to begin with It really takes a laser to be able to do that And then is that the difference then between a coherent is a constructive? Yeah, coherent means that all the waves are lined up and then that's a constructive interference versus destructive interference So let's say you have those waves and you overlap them sometimes those waves will add together and make a bigger peak or sometimes they'll cancel out and there will be nothing there Okay, so if the wave is propagated right on top of potentially another wave you could get the bigger peaks and then if they're a little bit offset then it could cancel out And oftentimes when you do this you see both, you see them both canceling out and creating brighter peaks which is why you see these big ripples especially when two waves come together in water They get bigger, they get taller but then in some areas you don't see anything, it's just sort of flat Yeah, interesting, so that may be like when in the ocean maybe two like you know ten foot waves kind of like come together and make a huge wave Exactly, that would be constructive interference constructive interference, interesting versus when they kind of cause each other to break apart destructive, interesting Okay, so taking us all the way to MIT Media Lab the last four years here you're pursuing your PhD in the synthetic neurobiology group and you're exploring nanotechnology you're blowing open the design constraints for nanofabrication with what's known as implosion fabrication So teach us about, you're blowing my mind with this like 2D nanofab predicated on the planar on a single plane versus 3D nanofab predicated on a volumetric deposition Yeah, that's right So this project started quite a long time ago and what actually happened is I had been in photography for doing that professionally just creating art and trying to show it and things like that and then I reconnected actually with my high school friend Samuel Rodriguez who I started this project with and he invited me to the lab and introduced me to Ed and Ed started letting me just start working in the wet lab rather so I sort of like made this transition from dark room to wet lab and in that process we ended up having this insight which is based off of another technology from the lab called expansion microscopy which was at the time a crazy idea that you can take a tissue and in order to see it with better resolution you actually just make it bigger as opposed to trying to build fancier and fancier microscopes to try to see below the diffraction limit of light and as it turns out this works great Ed demoed that on the TED stage with the diaper the materials with the diaper that would be below It's the same polymer as in diapers Expansion microscopy is when you blow something up that's smaller, blow it up to make it easier for you to analyze and do photograph it Yeah, image it And then this was initially just sort of a thought experiment about what if you did that in reverse what if instead of taking something you want to see and making it bigger why don't you take something and pattern it bigger and then make it smaller and more importantly what's that even good for This is a crazy idea of shrinking things down But what we realized is this actually has quite a lot of benefits even beyond the shrink itself because there's an analog here between what nanofabrication was and what it could be in the future and that once you have this scaffold like the one in expansion microscopy what you can do is you can create things in a volume as opposed to having to have it all connected or anything like that So whereas nanofabrication was predicated on a planar deposition where you create a mask and then you deposit material and then you do that over and over again to build something We're taking what was an imaging technology for imaging in three dimensions turning that on its head to do patterning which people have already done but more importantly doing it inside of one of these scaffolds that lets you shrink it down So it's a bit like the difference between like a paper cutout and a painting but in 3D whereas in 2D if you want to make a painting you have this canvas and this is a bit like a two-dimensional scaffold and you can apply different amounts of paint so you can create gradients the paint doesn't need to be connected to each other it can be separate from one another and you can put down different colors and that's almost like putting down different materials whereas with a paper cutout you sort of have to have everything connected together it's sort of hard to have multiple different materials you have to be like actually going in and grafting it together so it's supporting and connected So we wanted to do that for the third dimension and that brought us to this idea of volumetric deposition whereas when we make transistors we rely on something called the planar process which is planar deposition so in order to extend that into the third dimension we have this scaffold to be able to do volumetric deposition So teach us about the actual scaffold there's a hydrogel so teach us about that So a hydrogel you can sort of think of it as a bowl of spaghetti in water where all the spaghetti is sort of connected to each other in this big network and in the case of this hydrogel that spaghetti has a whole bunch of different chemical groups on it that are negatively charged so they repel each other so that's what causes it to expand and like holds that open and then you can infuse a small die actually and then wherever you zap that with light it'll stick to the spaghetti and that forms an anchor it actually is a bit like a latent image in photography where you create this initial image in three dimensions and then what you can do is go in afterwards and develop it into whatever material you want through volumetric deposition Okay and then when as I'm the anchor points are then you're attaching, you're shining light so it attaches and then afterwards we can deposit on those anchor points using nanoparticles or other water-based chemistry where you just sort of like watch something on and it either sticks or then grows at the point where you've put all these anchors and what would be an example of a material that you would want to anchor on to? So the ones we've demonstrated are silver for making conductors and semi-conducting nanocrystals as well so and then because we're again using this expansion microscopy hydrogel you can then actually add acid or salt and then it shrinks down by a factor of 10 or more actually linearly which is, you know, we can go as much as a million-fold volumetric and once you've finished with that process it's actually dehydrated so it's actually a resistor, it's like a dielectric material which you now have conductors and potentially also semi-conductors embedded inside of Holy cow Wow, okay so let me see if I can paraphrase again so you have like a bowl of interconnected spaghetti and water and then you have the hydrogel enables you to add the anchor points and shine the material Well, the die is when you pattern it it creates those anchor points The die creates the anchor points Yeah, it sticks to the spaghetti and that's like an intermediate that then lets you put other material there so it's like a meatball then can stick to it Sure, sure and then when you remove all the water all the meatballs come together And you used acid or salt Yes Okay, and then that can shrink it by ten or more fold down to potentially even a million Well actually anywhere from between two to now even like forty-fold So we're talking like taking a bowl like an actual bowl of spaghetti and turning that into less than a grain of sand Oh yeah, exactly Yeah, and then you can embed potentially computational capacity into that Absolutely Something that's less than a grain of sand Absolutely And then is that mostly like seeming to be used for computational purposes? Well, I think there's many, many different applications here You can take it in so many different directions since really what we've done is just expand the design space for what can be made to have nanoscale resolution and also useful materials, right? So as a result there's lots of things you can do You can make traditional computers potentially The things I'm most excited about are the light-based applications So 3D printing optics, lenses that are super super thin but very powerful or even it's been shown you can make these optical neural networks so we could pattern optical neural networks and then if you expand that even further you could imagine maybe even making minds that function based off of light Okay, before we get to all those things How do we actually make that both spaghetti into something that's like an optic? An optic Yeah, how would you... Well, in this case the thing you're causing to stick to the backbone of the hydrogel is something that causes light to bend So you just control either the geometry of where you put the material that causes light to bend or the concentration because you can also just change the laser intensity when you're trying to pattern it and you can control how much of it it is and that's called a gradient optic actually which traditionally have been very very hard to make and you never really had much geometric control but now we have essentially complete geometric control Okay, and then with this complete geometric control you're able to add whatever it may be for processing capacity or for optical capacity and then you're shrinking it and you're looking to add other materials to see if this can be used for you said crazy things like optics computation also you said... you said photonic computing optical neural networks minds made out of light Okay, let's unpack these one at a time So what would a... something that's at the nanoscale of an optic how would that be used? How would that be used? So one simple case is just making lenses that are much smaller and much better you know when you stick a lens on your camera it's you know sometimes this long you know sometimes even this long right but there's... the only reason it needs to be that long is you need to have like the curvature of the lens and it needs to be of a certain size to be able to collect that light but each one of those lenses induces certain kinds of aberrations so then you need more lenses to correct her those in order to shape and sculpt the light just right once it like hits your sensor or piece of film but when you have this sort of nanoscale control and these materials that can bend light quite a lot you can then architect all those functions from all those different lens elements all into one very very thin plane Okay, so the amount of space that we need in order to have the optic make the capturing of the image and then that we could embed the ability to be able to maybe send that constant stream of what you're capturing to our cloud Yeah, you could do that with electronics we're capturing it at the back you could also... one of the cooler papers that came out recently is they actually 3D printed these grids that diffract light in different ways and they have multiple layers of them and each layer is actually the layer in a neural network and each layer is doing computation on that light so you can cut sensors on this side and then an object on the other side and it'll do the machine vision to say is that a shoe? Wow, wow so within the actual optical imagery but that was done with microwaves so much longer wavelengths but I could do that with optical wavelengths the visible spectrum which is how we view the world so maybe also how we want these things to understand the world Whoa, okay, so we're talking things at the nanoscale almost... nanoscale is invisible to the human eye? Absolutely, yes, yeah So about the smallest thing a human eye can see is roughly I think 10 microns if you just hit catch the light just right and this is, let's see about 3 orders of magnitude less than that 3 orders of magnitude less than that Is it a billionth of a meter? It's 10 to the negative 9 Yeah, yeah, okay Yeah, yeah, yeah So then when you embed this thing that these nanotechs that are basically invisible they are invisible to the human eye then I'm so crazy to think for us animals that you can somehow put optical technology processing technology embedded in something that's that small when we've had these massive computers that yeah, I mean they've gotten a lot smaller It's crazy in some senses but you look at biology and it's already doing all that sort of stuff So this is not new it's just that we with our big hands fumbling around can't build it, right? So we're finally being able to understand how to manipulate matter to a greater and greater degree so we're starting to actually be able to do some of the same things that biology can I think that's actually one of the really exciting things about maybe now having a rapid prototyping approach to doing nanofabrication is you can maybe even have some sort of synthetic evolution where you can create tens of thousands or millions of variations on a structure very very quickly and like in evolution naturally or in this case unnaturally select for the ones that work the best and just keep doing that so you can instead of trying to understand everything and optimize it to be perfect in our heads or in our computers instead impose the design constraints for the function that we want and then just sort of like divide the formation of the structures that are best able to do that Yeah, that type of figuring out what letting this directed evolution find the best fit is, and like you said is already happening all the crazy processes that are happening within our bodies that we can't necessarily see I mean in some ways evolution already happens in our bodies there's something called somatic hypermutation which is how our active immune system works it's actually actively rejiggering genes to create antibodies that will recognize whatever foreign intruders are there and selecting for the ones that best bind and then producing more of those in order to then recognize let's say you know a bacteria or a virus Yeah, that's one of those for say it's like the constant computing of what's happening within us in regard to the environments that we're in and how to best survive in them and so then when you do a directed evolution with a synthetic neurobiology what would that look like? Well it really depends what you're trying to make right? In the case of optics for instance you're talking about creating structures smaller than the wavelength of light but which performs some operation on that light so what you could do is you could just pattern many many variations of this structure and see how that affects the light and then you can build like a catalog of all these things that do different operations on the light and then start combining those and seeing what sort of functions you can create from that and iterating on that and maybe all the while taking the measurements and seeing what these structures are and using that data to then do something like machine learning and figure out what is the topology of this space and maybe then more generatively inside of a computer just output the functional that you care about just by telling it what you want and then at the same time not understanding how any of it works. So does it seem like the nano fabrication is going to be that we're going to be doing this process more often with embedding what we want optics computing and then shrinking It's possible that's one approach to doing it to getting the resolution is through the shrink but it's unclear that the real demand here is in resolution rather just this new expansion of the design space to be able to create gradients to be able to pattern multiple materials and through dimensions and to be able to do it at really really high resolution is incredibly powerful and also in any geometry you can imagine because it's all embedded in a scaffold that doesn't need to be connected it doesn't need to be supported or anything like that so that really just like blows things open to some degree and even if you don't really shrink you could still use this for doing some very powerful fabrication and that adding that level of shrink just lets you get that resolution down which is good for some applications this seems to be one of the many exponential technologies what nanotech feels like is going to permeate everything as well kind of like artificial intelligence everything is in tons of ways just shrinking in terms of its size shrinking in terms of its capacity capabilities and hopefully it's going to make it easier for us to live in the world yeah I think there's a bit more than that I think you know when you can build things that are closer and closer to what we see in nature and in biology you can in turn start A doing the same sorts of amazing things that biology already does at the nanoscale but also in turn create things that are more integrated with biological systems as well one thing that's kind of funny about my process is that I had this huge issue of E. coli eating my nanostructures they were too delicious so it's very pile compatible I had to start adding antibiotics to prevent that from happening so one of the things that I think you just pointed out that's really interesting is there's all these complicated biological processes that have been evolving for billions of years and so now we're kind of looking at the catalog of biological processes identifying which ones we want to work with kind of like the electronics era that we're building and figuring out how to blend these and shrink and really get them down in size and scale but increase in capacity for applied to our everyday lives well I think we'll see a blurring of what we consider technology and what we consider biology there's no reason that those are distinct things it's just biology happened on its own but now we are starting to rest control over that but then also these more synthetic approaches like what I've done as well as what nanofabrication has done in order to create structures and understand what we're making and do it smaller and smaller and have more and more control and at some point these things might converge biology is this amazing way in which it can have a code like DNA and from that it is then able to generate the huge amounts of complexity of structure and function that it can and it builds itself using that information in turn when we get enough control over these synthetic systems you could also imagine building micro machines that can have some embedded code within them that then allows them to also reproduce themselves to create again another form of sort of synthetic evolution or self assembly more akin to biology and that's super intelligence I don't know maybe in many ways it feels like it's all pointing in the direction of super intelligence I like how you said that technology is part of biology it's what biology created technology but it's all in the lines of blurring more and more teach us about digital transcendence and singularity oh you mean these art pieces that I made what it means for yeah well a long time ago right when the transition from like analog photography into digital photography was happening I thought a lot about mediums and how mediums have some intrinsic quality to them it's not that necessarily one is better all it is is that they're different you know back then people were like oh digital that's crap we're gonna stick with film and dark room prints are always better which we've seen is not really necessarily the case they're different and they have different qualities to them and I thought this was sort of similar to some of the same thoughts going on in Silicon Valley and how you know one could upload their mind to the cloud or perhaps you know technology becomes a singularity but that's also a transition into a digital medium from an analog medium right so I created these pieces a sort of question that I came up with a process by which you can create an image using light but that image falls apart into the digital medium it begins to break apart into these maze structures because the light itself is right on the edge of what the sensor can sense so it confuses the algorithms that create that image that take that information and compose it into an image and as a result you end up with this image that is both of the thing that existed in the analog world but is now also an image of the algorithm which then made that transition into the digital world and I imagine you know if we are uploading our minds for instance you're going to see that same sort of transition even if you can imagine understanding the brain perfectly up to like 99.999 percent and you imagine that every microsecond you're doing a computation if that last tiny bit if that over the entire brain just keeps happening over and over and over again in the simulation you could very very very quickly just diverge from being human for that tiny tiny difference because over time the way things function will just very very quickly change because the medium with which it's embedded is just also slightly different and that's only if it's also slightly different it probably would be very different Interesting, your thoughts on mediums I think and the way that there's a difference between the analog and the digital and to do something like being able to upload and what comes with that process what fidelity comes with that process it's such a complicated it's so hard to even wrap our minds around what that process like we don't know what's happening here how do we even upload that In thinking of mediums as having some intrinsic aesthetic and maybe meaning in their own one of the projects I started working on involves thinking about the ocean the communication that occurs there where in the ocean the two primarily modes of communication are sound and light you see a lot of bioluminescence and you see a lot of like auditory communication so I was thinking alright can we combine these two into a singular medium for expression and as it turns out there's these algae that when you perturb them mechanically they light up right you can go swimming in these bioluminescent bays it lights up around you so the thought here was you can actually use waves of sound to mechanically perturb these algae and cause them to light up and the cool thing about sound is it's a wave so you can actually do holography with it so you could potentially even control like how all the sound waves cancel each other out or constructively interfere like I was talking with light earlier to create an image in three dimensions which is then inducing the emission of light by these biological organisms and just trying to use this as a medium to communicate maybe some of the more profound struggles that the ocean is now facing with ocean acidification as well as all the plastic that's just completely demolishing ecosystems and that's not to say global warming heating things up is also taking a huge toll as well so maybe you can have a representation of that embedded in the mediums of communication that are intrinsic to the ocean to be able to kind of see the health bar of what's going on or at least communicate it and maybe move people move people into action so much of what we do is engaging in an inspiring side of things and the work that's happening right now is this place in MIT Media Lab is just popping this is just the stuff you see this is the tip of the iceberg then there's the rest of MIT which you don't see but a lot of that work is extremely foundational this is just the stuff that percolates up into the public eye the one that actually gets talked about through the media versus the stuff like you said it's bottom iceberg all of what is happening here as you walk down the halls is how much of these processes are happening in Tel Aviv or in Shenzhen or in London etc around the world how many of these groups are working on tackling some of the edge of knowledge innovations obviously there's people all over the world working on these problems and they're all doing fantastic jobs of it but I think there's something to be said for concentration when you take enough minds working on these sorts of problems and just stick them all in a very close space something very special happens right the serendipity of interaction takes over and you start seeing people you know taking disciplines that were separate and they're just collide to create something completely new and I think that's one of the things that the media lab has done a pretty good job of taking disciplines and just completely blurring the lines all together right yeah it's like when you look at the edge of knowledge and you find two fields and then where is that where do those edges come into another vertex and when you keep pushing when you blur those lines and keep pushing that edge then you have all the innovation that happens in that field new fields emerge new children get even in my case I took technologies that already exist and just combined them in a way that nobody had really thought of because we had this realization of what the ideal form of nanofabrication might be and we surveyed the landscape for what existed and what we could use and then put them together and as it turns out that involve taking elements from biological engineering engineering all the conjugation chemistry it involved taking this new form of microscopy that Ed had and his students had invented expansion microscopy as well as these new ways of doing lithography in three dimensions which came out of initially biological imaging but then started getting applied to nanofabrication as well so no one of those disciplines on its own could have done it it's really how things rely to create something entirely new you had yourself as an experience and you're right you're putting together the minds at a place like beelab it's inevitable that in such great concentration there's going to be more and more cool edges pushed and ideas created let's ask you a couple of the simulation questions on the way out the first question is are we in a simulation well honestly I don't really care whether I'm in a simulation or not is sort of my answer it's sort of irrelevant to me if you're living your life such that when you find out the simulation is real you're going to change then you're probably living your life wrong if you're content with what you're doing inside of a simulation then you'll be great right the whole point is like where you derive meaning I think one of the interesting things is today we have like this crisis of spirituality or meaning in our lives largely because a lot of people have broken away from our traditional religious institutions and things like that which initially had given us a lot of meaning so now we're in a place where you know it's very easy to feel like there is no meaning but once you take that and you accept that maybe there is no meaning the only meaning that matters is that what you create for yourself so if you were to live in a simulation how would you live your life creating maybe your own meaning yeah that's a good answer we ask the question a lot to probe about how people think in general and that's interesting that you tie meaning into the simulation question and we gain so much of our fulfillment in our lives by setting some sort of a massive goal that we want to achieve and taking a burden and going towards that goal and continuing to level up in the game and then also potentially making our own simulations and there's so much other cool stuff to do I'm sure Media Labs are already deep into simulation territory and there's going to be a lot more that is done definitely walk around here and it's a bit reminiscent of Black Mirror I can tell you that much sometimes there's some positive potentials as well well of course everybody likes to talk about there's an image right now on that screen of a matrix figure that was ridiculous we're talking about simulation questions so we're in the matrix that's the great answer and Dan last question is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world and my answer is light what I have found all the art I've ever created was for me to both communicate as well as experience the beauty of light and what can be made from and experienced through light that's the first time we've heard light as the answer to the most beautiful thing in the world yeah for someone that spent decade plus immersed in light well I think one of the ironic things is back in the days when we worked in the dark room in order to create things from light you had to deprive yourself from it yeah so I actually spent a lot of time in rooms that are completely pitch black in order to develop film and things like that and it gives you a very different appreciation I think for light and you begin to understand what it means to be blind also and to have to always have a map of your entire surroundings in your head a different kind of simulation literally a map yeah it's a simulation of what's around you in three-dimensional space without that visual input without the visual input yeah that was a really strong end this has been such a solid and enlightening conversation thank you so much for coming on to this show thank you for having me holy cow there's so much work that you guys are doing here that's fascinating and at the edge and I'm like a little child trying to understand it and hopefully help other people get inspired and engage with it thank you so much thanks to everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode and nanotechnology as well also find the links below to Dan's work go and support him, support the synthetic neurobiology group the MIT Media Lab follow them, follow their work as well and support the artists and entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in support simulation our links are below so you can do cool things like continue coming onsite and conducting awesome interviews like this and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much, thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon peace