Welcome And Meet Amanda Parks

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Amanda Parks. Amanda calls herself a fashion scientist. She has a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, where her research bridged computer science and material science, and dual Stanford degrees in mechanical engineering and art history. She has spent 15 years trying to answer a deceptively simple question. What if we rebuild the material world around nature's logic instead of against it?

SPEAKER_03 0:46

That question has taken her from algae biofuels to 3D printed couture, from developing science exhibits at the exploratorium in San Francisco and the science museums here in London to running RD at Pangaya, the company she describes as a material science company masquerading as a fashion brand. There she turned wildflowers into jacket insulation, Himalayan nestle into denim, and carbon dioxide pulled from the air into sunglasses.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

She is now CTO at Mothership Materials, where she's gone even deeper. Extracting the building blocks of biology from food waste to feed the next generation of biomanufacturers. We talk about fashion as a material science. Designing clothing as part of a biological cycle.

SPEAKER_03 1:30

High-tech naturalism.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

How algae can transform into clothing dye.

SPEAKER_03 1:35

Biofabrication.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Humans are good at building but not at breaking down.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

Using carbon air pollution to make ink.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

How banana skin can become your next dress.

Becoming A Fashion Scientist

SPEAKER_03 1:46

Let's get dressed. Hi, this is Umida Stari.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

And Natasha McElhone.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

And with us today is Amanda Parks. Hey Amanda, thanks for taking the time.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Thanks so much for inviting me.

SPEAKER_03 2:02

So we have a lot of ground to cover today, but we thought that a good starting point would be talking about the fact that you call yourself a fashion scientist. You've also said that fashion people and scientists don't mix at all, just like water and oil. So tell us how you managed to overcome these incompatibilities as a person.

Why Fashion Needs Real R&D

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah, so I th I do call myself a fashion scientist. I'm not sure if I invented the term, but it's it's been working, at least gets people's attention. I think for me, it kind of went back to the fact that I was one of those kids that loved and was good at math and science, but also was totally glamorous little LA kid and would be obsessing about my outfits and colors and all that. And luckily I had a family and kind of a schooling situation, which no one told me that this was incompatible. So I was kind of able to do it. And it wasn't really until I got to kind of undergrad at Stanford that I sort of figured out like, oh, the engineering department's way across campus from the art department. Um, and this was in the 90s, and things have changed a bit now. But but I think this idea of merging the two, there's a lot of crossover in terms of creativity, kind of ways of thinking about the world, notions of curiosity and exploration that are kind of cross-functional between fashion and art and science. And it's just, it's been sort of more reason that they're being recognized. But the bigger problem with the fashion industry is just that it is very separate as a discipline. I like to talk about the fact that the Jackered Loom was the precursor of the first computer, right? Fashion is is inherently a technical domain the way that ever like the way that textiles are made, if you get into it, it's incredible. Fiber science, right? This whole back end. But I think because fashion is seen as so glamorous, it's it kind of in the media or with the public consciousness is seemingly superficial, right? And it's deceptively superficial. And so in that way, there is, I remember I did there was an article on me and like MIT alumni um publication, and it was about my work in fashion and how it was applying science into fashion. And I got a lot of hate for it on Twitter, like she wasted a spot at MIT, she's working in something so silly. It was quite interesting to see this kind of backlash on it. Um, so with my career, I've just been very interested in this crossover and everything from, you know, I've worked on re-architecting the inside of a high heel to be safer and more comfortable for women, with literally astronauts and SpaceX engineers, right? There's a really complicated problem involving body dynamics, materiality. It's actually really complicated to design for the body. And I think some of the best engineers I've ever met are pattern cutters, people who can drape and like they can see in two and three dimensions with a textile, which is a fluid. We don't have robots that can sew with the dexterity of human fingers yet. So there's a lot of pieces to it that are really, really complex. And because it's been underexamined by the kind of current state of engineering and science, there's so much ripe opportunity there. And that was, I think, one of the things that kept opening up to me for my career. The former head of talent at SpaceX came to me and saying, Oh, what's inside my shoes? Why are we not why can we not make something better? And just this kind of this entire notion of what's out there. And just because of my overlap of interests and potentially being a woman and just kind of being in the space and being very comfortable in fashion, it's sort of shown me a lot of different things. Um, also in wearable tech.

SPEAKER_03 5:38

Yeah, you're pointing out the the one side of it, which is saying the engineers are not so focused on fashion. But I would also argue that the fashion industry itself is not really focused on the RD as such. Like we see we see all the RD going into how do I make things cheaper and and more scalable in the non-scalable way for the planet rather than into RD.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

That's a huge point to make. And the fashion industry has been notoriously there have been restraint about allowing innovation in. And I think there's a some good reason about respecting craftsmanship and and these kinds of artistic practices and wanting to preserve them. And I'm I'm a huge fan of that. It's more about how we can sort of let the tech in. The other thing that was incredibly interesting to me, because I came from the engineering and science side and kind of took the back door into fashion, right? Through a lot of through through wearable tech and projects in that realm. And I was shocked to find out that the really big fashion conglomerates did not have their own internal RD. So the same way that, you know, Intel makes its own chips, Google builds its own software, right? They're not making their own textiles or doing their own research. And that was also what I saw as a huge opportunity to kind of step in. And how can fashion start to own the means of its own production and do that? I will say that I have been very impressed in the last kind of decade about how they are opening up to it. It's the models and mechanisms that are still a little bit behind and broken, and those things need to change. But the attitude and aptitude is there and changing. That's encouraging to me.

SPEAKER_03 7:09

I think that uh a lot of the things that you referred to and that we're gonna embark upon talking about are essentially saying there is a reality of evolution that has worked on building the most efficient manufacturing platform on planet Earth or in the known universe, maybe even, for 3.8 billion years. And now what we want to do is essentially use that rather than using processes that are not necessarily native to the planet, right? Is that a fair thing to say that that's what your career has been focused on to an extent?

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Yeah, I think I think what you're kind of intuitively saying is this nature of biofabrication, right? That we return to the processes of nature. And I think it's not just about the the manufacturing possibility, but I think it's sort of about how do we we have done amazing developments in all kinds of manufacturing, and it's about respecting how that works in balance with nature. Now, some of those things we can do actually using the mechanisms of nature, like using microbes to grow things. And other things do make sense. You know, if we're gonna cast metals, we have amazing injection molding technologies, right? So we can, you know, start to run those off of alternative forms of energy, right? It's mostly about keeping everything in balance. So we respect the kind of technological development that has fundamentally changed how we lived and made our, you know, made it more comfortable and allowed us to kind of move into the spheres of technology and innovation that we have. But looking back on that, like when I was in engineering school, we were absolutely not taught to consider any of those things about energy and sustainability. I mean, maybe a tiny bit, I'm being a little bit unfair, but in general, it was technology is about progress. And one of the questions that used to come up at MIT was like, just because we can, should we? Right. And that's been, I think, a little bit of a marked change in the last 20 years. We're starting to question um the ethics and and also just literally the sustainability, not just in terms of environmental sustainability, but but can we keep doing this? Right? Um, you know, is this is this a good idea, even if we can do it.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Also, I think the surprising union of engineering or technology and fashion that you're uh managing to bridge. I mean, fashion seems to be predicated on it's disposable, it's the newest, it's incredibly fast, you want to be ahead of the season, even fashion shows themselves are are all about that, predicting what's going to be the latest craze next year. And it's the spread of that that people get excited by. You know, there's a massive cultural shift that will need to happen for people to accept that. I remember thinking when when I was little that in a way, when I looked at sort of iconic figures, whether it was Jackie O or there was sort of uniforms that people had, right? Or even someone like Steve Jobs, even not a sort of screen goddess. There would just be these iconic outfits that they would wear, you know, whether it was someone only dressed in black and white, or Annie Libovich had a certain outfit, I think. These these designers as well, people in fashion. And I kind of thought, well, you know, that kind of makes sense. People tend to wear the same things, the things that suit them. So I was like, I wonder if we could create an outfit that just lasts for life. That you know, you know, and and it's a bit like do you know that guy Joakim Mitchell, the um the architect who makes edible housing, right? It's sort of like I was thinking when we get to the end of your story, it's just sort of almost like, oh, you could just eat your t-shirt just before you die.

Fast Fashion Meets Biology

SPEAKER_01 10:39

I have stories about that. So, first of all, I want to challenge you on that notion because it's it terrifies me to live in that world. So just personally, so because one of the reasons I love fashion is it's a means of personal expression, which could be that the unif it's about having a uniform and that you feel comfortable in that. But the other side of it is that the it's it's a a way that we actually speak to the world without speaking. And what I was a really shy kid. There's so many visual signaling and communication that happens with it. And I love the idea, especially for young people, to be able to experiment with that and to have it as a nonverbal form of communication uh in terms of development. And one of the reasons that I've become so interested in the this nature of creating fashion that has more of a biological basis is to challenge this notion of fast fashion, right? We have created something that is disposable, but is made of a material that lasts forever. So this is a design problem, right? This it's it's not the the medium is not meeting the task. But what if we had fast fashion that I used to say works like Snapchat or works like Instagram stories, where it's literally designed to be around for a season, a month, a week, whatever it is, and then it naturally disintegrates. There's this material chitosin comes from the waste of shrimp shells. It's a beautiful translucent material. There's so many things in the ocean that are underexplored. But it it actually is stable in like regular fresh water, but it disintegrates in salt water. So, what if the mechanism is that you wear the thing for as long as you want, and then the disposal is to throw it in the ocean and it disintegrates and that's its natural form, right? So there are these different biological paradigms. Nature has so many things that are disposable, leaves, right? And if we don't do anything to make them non-disposable, we can operate in that paradigm and have things that are disposable. I also think in this realm, and this is where digital technology and new platform where you can post your local closet, like down to like the street, you know, and I live in Brooklyn in a cool neighborhood, and it's like, oh, I would love to know that woman with that closet. You know, there's something that's that's a lot about identity, and I and I think we could actually uh build communities around it. Um maybe it's a little bit fashionisti, but you know, we all have it's like uh things that we identify with in our hobbies, and um, and I love the way that a means of sharing um is is something that can bring people together through these objects.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Totally agree. And and Tessa Clark of Olio, who we interviewed once, says this is her whole platform is around sharing these things and no no waste. And if we go back a hundred years, that's what our relatives used to do. They would share clothes. So that's all good, but I've totally taken us off piece, and I'm gonna allow it to be a little bit more than a little bit. Yeah, sorry, so okay, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_03 13:35

I I think this all fits together. So the the the thing that I wanted to actually ask was like, is this a culture problem or is this a science problem? And I think you well, you very well established that it's actually a science problem rather than a culture problem because ultimately this is a beautiful culture. It's a culture that inherently kind of connects people, it allows us to express ourselves. This is all what humanity is about, but it's a science problem that needs to adapt to the materials to the actual use of the use case.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

I think it's it's a science problem, but we do, we're starting to have more of the right materials. It's also it is it's a business culture problem in the sense that the invention of fast fashion was all about infinite growth. Like, you know, the models were like literally hockey stick Silicon Valley levels, and that is just unsustainable.

SPEAKER_03 14:24

Like, with the right materials, you'd say it still would work, right? So it's it's a business issue.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

Although I wouldn't say anything should have infinite growth. Like that doesn't even make sense, right? It's all about the planetary banners, as we said. But this very nature of you can't you can't even have just like a consistent sell-through uh for this stuff. It's what we call the race to the bottom. Yeah, exactly. Right? The more and more you're producing, that's the only way your company can can exist, then you're you're eventually gonna get to markets where there is no more, no longer any new markets.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

So tell us about your philosophy, high-tech naturalism. I think this is a good point to bring that in.

High-Tech Naturalism Explained

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Yeah, absolutely. So so when I was um, you know, working at Pangaia at the as a chief innovation officer, I had developed this philosophy around like, how are we gonna look at the world and what was gonna what was gonna be our brand idea? Think about sustainability, right? What does it mean to have a brand that is actually making and selling things? And how can we be, you know, respect both of those things, the science, purpose, and design angle, all at the same time. And so I I termed the phrase science high-tech naturalism. And what that means is that we look at the world from a place of abundance, right? So it could be things like, oh, there's fall, the leaves are falling, there's tons of this on the ground that we could use for something. So it could be those sort of positive things. It could also be look at how much carbon we've created as pollution. Hey, wait, let's twist it around and think of that as a resource which we can turn into things. And we are doing that now, right? How do we how do we it's about thinking about the world in balance and then using our highest levels of science and technology to augment those things that we have. So the very nature of doing actual carbon capture and turning it into proteins or turning it into plastics, the basis of bioplastics. Um, and so this was about literally technology working in support of sustainability. And that was that was kind of how we were balancing the nature of doing very high-tech things like biofabrication and like carbon capture, and then things that were considered very like low-tech or you know, in the what they would consider more of the hippie realm of you making things from agricultural waste. And I think those two things need to blend together, and that's where where I was seeing it happen. And um, a good example of one of the materials that we worked on was something called Flower Down. And this was made as an alternative to Goose Down, but also had no synthetics. And, you know, one of the biggest problems around language right now with fashion is when people talk about vegan leather, what it they're actually talking about is plastic. And we need to be very clear that all these brands have been like, oh no, we're making it, you know, we're going along with the vegan movement. No, you're just killing other kinds of things in different parts of the of the biosphere, right? So the point being that we were looking at something that was an alternative to animal down if you didn't want to have animals, but it also had no synthetics. So this was made from waste wildflowers mixed with biopolymer and cellulosic aerogel. This is a very high-tech material, aerogel, it's incredibly light, right? The whole development of it. Um, but it was made, all those components were um were compostable, and then when combined, they gave the kind of softness and internal structure and durability of a down. This this matching of taking something that is very techy in the lab uh with a material that was literally collected as a weed and putting those two things together.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

And the synthesis, uh, just out of interest, what what is the sort of energy consumption of one of these processes?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Um it's it's actually relatively low. And with energy, we do, we do obviously want to keep things at lower levels of energy, but really it's thinking about where can we get that energy from? And if it can be from a renewable form of energy, that is less of a concern than the actual material resourcing that we're using. So because we have so many methods of renewable energy, solar, wind power, and also very localized forms of energy, right? And how we think about that balance. Energy doesn't, we should be very aware of it, but we don't have to think of it as much of a limited resource as we do with something like rare earth metals or petroleum, right? Those are fixed numbers. Energy is literally about matter changing states.

SPEAKER_03 18:37

Nice. And there's infinite solar energy that we can tap into really.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 18:43

I think um maybe worthwhile just briefly talking about cotton and polyester, they scale, they seemingly work, right? What's wrong with those things? Uh, and what are some alternatives here? Yeah. Apart from lick flower down there. Right.

What’s Wrong With Polyester And Cotton

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Yeah. So the the issue with polyester, I think we all know the synthetic nature, but I think it is important to touch on like, why is it so bad to pull up oil from the ground? And the thing is that to pull up some of it is was actually okay. It's all about actually how much carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere. And it's about this rebalancing again, right? So we've just pulled up way too much of it, and we keep doing that as opposed to doing things that are actually kind of rebalancing. The other, the other thing is that we have actually created from that um materials that are non-biodegradable, that are non-destructible, and also are breaking down into components that are literally infecting our bodies. I think we all know about the microplastics problem that's compounding what we're already doing with that excess carbon. So the materials themselves leave traces of being like inherently dangerous to all human life, animal life, plants, et cetera. So, what is happening with contemporary cotton production is that we are we're we're growing too much of it in a conventional way that involves too many pesticides. And so the land is being stripped and then it's unable to be utilized long term. So, what we want is to use cotton for what cotton is is good for and to grow regeneratively. Um, this idea that we should just sort of have less cotton in the world. And the point is that we can balance that with the thousands of other fibers that are out there that have been not yet developed or discovered, right? So you go to Brazil, there's like a hundred different kinds of banana fibers that they're researching in labs. They're incredibly strong, they're beautiful, wherever they just, you know, there's different processes to get them into the kinds of textiles that we're accustomed to. And um, one of the things that we did at Pangaia, I was like, this is my was my favorite textile that we developed. It was called fruit fiber. We had a whole series called plant and fruit fiber, and it was to show that we could make something that was like a beautiful drapey jersey like cotton would would have, right, in a garment, but it made entirely from agricultural waste. So fruit fiber had the waste from banana plants, the waste from pineapple, and a seaweed blended together. Um, and we did, we got the kind of finish that we wanted. You know, these are all made in the form of Lyas cells, so like a man-made cellulosis where you take the cellulose from uh from this fiber and basically powderize it and then extrude it. The reason it's such an amazing plant is that you can just literally pull the fiber from the plant. I wouldn't say it's simple, but it's been around for thousands and thousands of years. And so this is a little bit more involved in the engineering, and we're getting better and better at utilizing these alternative forms of cellulose to make the kinds of textiles that are not just can be replicant of the functionality of cotton, but we can start to also work on the functionality of nylon and polyester is just through the finishes and through the way that we're making. So if you think about it, what we're going after is the performance of what we think of as a synthetic textile, but with the basis of a of a bioinput. And that's really the future of like how we can really start to shift away from our dependence on synthetics.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

And what's the uptake from Clothing companies. So this goes back to cost.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

So first of all, really high-end cotton, we're gonna leave that alone and use it and we love it. Like let's just let's just be there. The more if we can grow regenerative cotton, we should and we will, and it'll be beautiful. The other thing is that we have these different Lyle cells. And so everything that is like polyester, especially like cheap polyester, should just be gone, anything PET based. And we can use these Lyo cells. Um, the problem is that right now a lot of them are uh they cost more than we just cannot compete with something, you know. We have to realize that synthetics are literally government subsidized because of the oil industry. It goes and back to every and so the every natural fiber we're up against, and and also alternative energy, like everything right in this space, we're up against this, not just the barrier to get the technology to what should be an equal pricing point. We have to go above that, right? So we also are looking at um, there's a little bit of infrastructure change around the production of bio cells, and and traditionally liocells have used a bit more toxic chemistry, which again makes it cheaper. So there's just a couple different steps there that that need um some back-end infrastructure, but we do have it, and this is not an unsolvable problem. And I think once the brands, and this is where we can I can talk about my new company, Mothership, um, when once we can get the feedstock costs down, the processing costs of getting them this high-quality cellulose to process with, I do believe that other things will fall into place. If there are like large mills and producers that can get the right inputs, they have the infrastructure there to do it. They can switch over. There's relatively easy ways, and this is a term in manufacturing where there's a there's a path forward to switch over those kinds of mills.

SPEAKER_03 23:49

Can we stay on this point? Because I think we had Janine Benius on the podcast uh talk to you about this. Like all this stuff makes so much sense, right? I mean, we can continue talking about this, and everybody's gonna buy into this who's gonna listen to this. Like, just I don't think there's anybody understands like I've got to put it.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

No, and also it's exciting. Our point is to try and educate. Until I met you, I didn't know half this stuff was going on. Yeah, exactly. So I I want people to know, and it's so exciting. Yeah. But it is the barriers. Yeah. And is legislation the answer? Should governments should we be asking all that?

Cost Barriers And Subsidized Synthetics

SPEAKER_03 24:19

I would say maybe a step before that. The reality for me is always when it makes so much sense. There's two things that could be the case. One, it doesn't make a business case yet, or it's, as you say, adverse kind of regulation because there are special interests involved. And I think we're we're basically talking about a situation where it seems like both are somewhat the case. So I want to maybe look at the economics a little bit more because with electrification and with solar, when this hits a certain price point, I mean everybody's gonna switch to it. So how can we get there and what are the challenges ahead for us to get to that inflection point?

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Right, yeah. And you you hit it right on like the reason that I want to be in industry and doing applied work is that I I saw so many amazing things in labs that were not being commercialized. And there's a lot of reasons behind that, not just cause. There's personality types and who wants to run businesses and all those things, right? Well, one of the reasons that I I now am working with Mothership as a CTO, and and we have a technology that's a sort of centrification technology that separates agricultural waste into different ingredient streams. So cellulose, glucose, lipids, proteins. And what the way that I ended up at this is because of the problem with making things like fruit fiber, where we could never get that fabric down to the price of a cotton, to organic cotton. And it and as you start investigating it, it's all about the upstream processing costs. So I used to call it the couture waste problem, where they were like literally like hand like like hand producing, hand processing waste. We cannot have that as the paradigm if we ever want this to scale.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

And so that's what Mothership is trying to do. And the other thing is that it's it's also this kind of when you start to like look at different organisms and materials that are all around us, like one of the first companies I started was um in algae biofuels, talk about government infrastructure problems. Um, but it was I started getting very close to looking at algae as an organism and what's inside it. This is microalgae, and it's this beautiful, perfect model organism that inside of a single cell, there's carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, like it's like this, its own little microfactory of making everything we need. And we were like piercing and pulling out the lipids to get oil, but I'm like, oh, we're throwing away cellulose and protein, like an alginate, like, you know, this is a so this idea of like sidestreaming or getting multiple ingredients from one organism is really where we should be. And that's what Mothership is actually working on because a lot of those what we call waste valorization techniques, which we were trying out in Pengaya, and I was on some research grants on, they it would be when you were trying to pull out one thing, trying to pull out the alginate, you destroy the other things with chemical processes. And so ours is actually a way to preserve all the things at once. And in the best way of like most of my favorite technologies, it comes from a different industry. It's about this transfer of ideas and applying something that was built for something and into something else, and then you have a whole new life in it. And this was made as a medtech um uh innovation that was to solve sickle cell anemia. So it's literally for the for the body where you pull the blood out from a person and it was sensitive enough, a density gradient separator that you could pull out just the sickle cells and then return the rest of the blood. So the plus the blood was kept clean. Um and so we're doing a much less uh high-tech version of this. I like to say that we're we're low resin it to work on agricultural waste, but we're making it more industrial and a lot and cost-effective and all those things, and obviously don't need clinical trials and da-da-da.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Um so so in that way is this just is this taking glucose from the waste? It is glucose process. Yeah, yeah. And explain to us what that's used for.

SPEAKER_03 28:02

Can maybe take a step, so just to get everybody on the same page, so I understand what's going on. No, no, all good. Uh really great to understand this. So there's a bunch of biological waste in agriculture, and that's basically abundantly available, right? And we have this as a byproduct of society, really. And you're saying that currently the way we can use this stuff to make the things that are actually sustainable, we use something called, which I love, like couture waste management or whatever you called it. And this is obviously silly. So, what we actually want is we want to have a very efficient way of taking all this bio waste and turn that into various different streams where you can get the lipids and you can get the uh glucose and various different things out of all that waste. If we're able to pull this off in a very efficient way, then we can get to price points that make those materials really competitive with the cottons of today.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Exactly. If you think about it this way, nature has perfect cycles of building things up and breaking them down, right? And so we as a culture need to have similar cycles. We are really good at building things up, making things, we're not very good at breaking them down. And this is what true circularity is. So we need to work inside of that natural sphere to build up and break down. Um, and so this is this is using a very high-tech process to actually break things down. And yes, the point is that when we have alzagricultural waste, it comes from crops, and there's so much with crops, you grow all this biomass, we eat one piece of the fruit, the rest is actually a problem. Sometimes it goes back onto the ground as fertilizer, but a lot of times it's burned or there, it's just you know. And then we also have things like sargassum blooms, you know, this phenomenon, right, where like there's seaweed taking over like all the beaches in the Caribbean and South America, and this is gonna spread. This is a climate change issue, rising sea temperatures, things are out of balance. Hey, they're out of balance, that means we have a lot of seaweed. I spent a lot of time trying to get seaweed to grow, to get algae to grow. So I was like, this is like an ironic shift in the universe. Um, but what I do know is that that sargassum that's seen as waste and is a problem is being burned in resorts, et cetera, to clean up beaches and and ruining ecosystems. This is full of these nutrients, right? So we can so we can also take places like that, like polluted streams and process them. The other thing that's really important for the crop piece is that if you think about you have multiple value chains. We all know that farmers are suffering. As I get more and more into agri tech, I have no idea how farmers make any money. Like it's a miracle that you can sustain yourself as a farmer. Food should cost so much more than it does, right? And so what we can do is actually come in and we our system is that we will show up at a farm and we're just getting up and running. So um, we're doing our first actual installation this summer um at a bamboo farm in North Carolina. But we show up and we can process their their offcuts, right? And then we give a rev share back to them. And if we pull out, you know, cellulose, glucose, proteins, pectin, like orange peels are full of pectin, and we're having a pectin crisis right now. It's one of the only naturally occurring preservatives. So for jams, if you want to make there's lots of things that it goes into, it sells for like$4,000 a ton. Or these are like valuable things that are just laying on the ground. And and orange peels are particularly interesting one because the the peels are so acidic that they can't just be put directly in landfill, like farmers or whoever the processing people have to pay to have it taken away. So removing that cost, and then we're giving them money back. Yeah. And so if farmers can be like, on my land, I grew food, but I also grew the basis of bioplastics, the basis of clothing, right? They have like four different ingredients. That's really where this high-tech naturalism comes in. We're rebalancing, right? And saying, Oh, we've spent all of our society figuring out how to manufacture things. Now we have to figure out how to unmanufacture them.

SPEAKER_03 31:56

Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. And it's essentially a vibe shift, if I want to call it that, uh, to say, your waste is my resource.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Such a trite thing, like one man's trash and the man's treasure, but but and there is no waste in nature. Like I love and hate all those phrases. They're just totally true.

Turning Agricultural Waste Into Inputs

SPEAKER_03 32:14

Yeah, it makes sense. I I'd love to still maybe tell some people about because you've done some cool stuff at Pangai. I I love what you're doing, mothership, but like some of those examples of those things that you did would be fun for people to know what's even possible, right? Do you want to tell us about it?

SPEAKER_00 32:30

What do all of these raw materials go to make that we can use?

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Yeah. I think one of the things we haven't really touched on as another genre of new materials is biofabrication. So synthetic biology, which was basically we figured out the human genome back in relatively recently, like in 2000, it was fully decoded. And this allows us to basically understand how DNA works, and we're slow slowly sequencing like all the organisms on Earth. So we understand the mechanisms for growth, how biology literally works, like the building blocks and the code. Um, and so what this has allowed us to do is to take to find the gene sequence inside of an organism. So, say there's a a plant that grows a red flower, and some part of the coding, there is a thing that says, make something red. We can take that and put that into a microbe, so single-celled organism, and grow that in a lab. Let's not say a lab. This is like a fermentation factory. So it's like the way that you grow a beer. It lit it literally looks like you have these big silver vats and you're making beer. This is this is a biological process that nobody should be scared of. Um, and then the that microbe will grow red dye. And this is something that we worked on at Pengaya with a company called Colorifics, which is in the UK, they're out of um Cambridge. And this is this is really the next generation of how we start to have natural materials and things like natural dyes. So natural dyes are amazing. The problem with them is that if you're growing an entire, like say you're kind of getting it from a flower, the input, the the land, the the energy, the water, all of these things, there's a lot of inputs that go into just processing one field of flowers makes like three kilos of dye. Like the the the input-output ratio is really high. And that's why they're expensive and and that kind of thing. Um and that's why synthetics have sort of taken over in that space. So what we can do is make natural dyes, because it's literally the same genes and the same materials, right? It's a naturally occurring dye in an industrial paradigm that is at a efficiency level and a cost um that can can go parallel to synthetic. Now, that cost is not there yet. And this is one of the things with with biofabrication. So the promises are unbelievable. Like if we think about the the lower amounts of energy that they use, and if we have the infrastructure in place, this can really like challenge everything about synthetic production. One of the biggest bottlenecks is feedstocks, and that is literally glucose to feed the microbes because nothing comes from nothing. The microbes have to eat and digest something to make this color. This is like a kind of weird secret niche problem. That's what we got working on.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

The way I got to know was that we need so, so one of the things that we can pull, we need waste sources of glucose that are not competitive to the food supply. It makes no sense to grow sugar cane, use all the resources to do that, and then feed that to a microorganism. We need it, we need to come from waste. So we can pull glucose um or even pull cellulose and convert it to glucose through process to feed microbes that at a much lower cost and also at in a way that makes sense with carbon balancing. Um, so that's a huge thing. We that could be our entire business. Like we have companies that are like, can you get us 100,000 tons of glucose next year? And I like the demand is is to a level where I start Googling like how much sugar is in the world. Like, like, where are these companies getting it now? What is encouraging is that there are these new processes, right, that are coming online. Building blocks for food, building blocks for other things, like this notion of like the when we think about standard chemistry, there's like tiers, there's like five levels of things that happen to make a chemical that you've heard of, right? There's four, there's all the inputs to the inputs to the inputs. And that's where we're getting into this base level with with like a kind of this bioprocessing. So biofabrication is um, I'm very excited for the future of it, but we need to fix the problems around the feedstocks and the infrastructure. Because again, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 36:26

So I wanted to get to that point because like there's there's two levels to this, right? Like the one, it's the inputs, and then two is where all these bioreactors, right? The where the precision fermentation happens. So I I guess the same problem with grown meat is a similar problem to an extent, right? It's exactly the same, actually.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

That this is it's literally the same process and it's just like a different, you've tweaked a different gene inside of the microbe, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:48

Exactly. So where where are we, say, on the infrastructure side of this? And is there an unlock that's missing there and building these precision bioreactors at scale? Um, is that a problem that needs to be solved?

Biofabrication And Fermentation Dyes

SPEAKER_01 37:00

For sure it is, but you you touched on something that's actually interesting and good, is that you're saying the same kinds of infrastructure that we need to grow new biomaterials is the same thing for to know to grow lab-grown meat. So it can be sort of industry in a way that a lot of things cannot. So, not that every bioreactor can grow everything. There are like differentiations, but you do have some companies that are emerging that are starting to work on the infrastructure of like, okay, here's an entire system of bioreactors and precision fermentation. How do we have shared space in all this? And especially for smaller companies, this is really important. Then this is the Valley of Death problem, right? Where you have a startup that has an incredible technology and they have gotten a level of funding, they're kind of into maybe a series A, they know they can produce at pilot scale, and then they have what, you know,$30 million or more to make a whole facility, and that is gonna take a couple of years to get up and running. And in that time, they're gonna have no revenue to and we all know investors are gonna lose faith. And so that's that's that problem where a lot of things are are falling out where the from the business case. So if you start having facilities where you're like, hey, we can get enough time in these machines without having to build them ourselves, then that is a way forward. We need we need what we call these transition strategies. And then when something is very successful, then they can't afford to build their own factory. And I do think it's important to point out that in every industry, there needs to be a whole lot of ideas that are tried out and then we'll funnel in to the best ones, right? It's not, it's it's it is okay that certain things are falling off, right?

SPEAKER_03 38:35

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

We need to try things like when you're a scientist, you're like, oh, if like 20% of the things I do are successful or work at all, you're like, this is amazing. I'm having amazing results, right? And in industry, it's harder to kind of come to terms with that, right?

SPEAKER_03 38:50

I would know it's you know, right now what it seems like we're spending all this money and investment in fabs now because this has become the thing. We want to build fabs that can build chips that can feed the AI growth, but that amount of money should go into this bioreactor platform technology as well, because it is really the future of manufacturing at scale and sustainable manufacture, right? I mean, and who is doing this? Like who's actually spending money on building this stuff right now?

SPEAKER_01 39:15

It is starting to happen. And I think what what you're talking about is yeah, there you're you have to get the right people on board, and you have to understand that a lot of this needs to be entirely global. And this is the thing about manufacturing. We can have America and Europe going, oh, we love this, we love this. But let's be clear, like a lot of the stuff is happening in Asia and in China. So we have to get that infrastructure change happening, and that's no single country can be in charge of it, right? There has to be a lot of agreement and and and um and just a kind of there obviously needs to be a huge business case, right? And so so both of those things happening, they they are there is lots of things moving forward. It's like I think it's two steps forward and one step back and not the other way around. If you think about it, it's about displacement. So if you're changing from one, you know, from one kind of production into another, something is gonna fall to the wayside. And and that's one of the problems with, I think, a lot of what's interesting to me about, say, for that, for example, synthetic production of fibers is if we can start, there's a lot of overlap in the kinds of actual infrastructure and literally the machines that do things like extrusion and different kinds of spinning, wet spinning, electro spinning, et cetera, that you can put in a different bioinput and still use the same infrastructure. So, so and to get out a bio-based lot, like something that is a install base of some of these things is still useful. Any company that is a drop-in solution, like there's a company that I advise called Material who's developed a um non-isocyanite polyurethane, which why should anybody care about that? Is right, I which I know. But the point is that polyurethane is basically a glue that is in everything. So every single bio leather, like there was a point when I was like, we need to stop working on bio leathers and we need to start working on polyurethane because every single one has this as a coating or as a kind of binder, right? And this was the problem. We get 90% of the way there, and then you throw the polyurethane in at the end, and then you make it non-biodegradable, right? And so this is why this is a breakthrough thing that is a non-obvious investment for fashion, right? This is the problem where you like the the information, the knowledge there to be like, why do we need this? We're starting to spread it, but I was like, we need to invest in this and this and this. It's an infrastructure piece. And so what they're doing is a drop-in, in which can go into all different kinds of manufacturing facilities. If they can drop in their appellate into an existing polyurethane machine and it comes in in the same cost, that's that's a no-brainer, right? Um, and so so those are the kind of solutions that I feel encouraged about, and there's um there's varieties of that happening. We do still need more bioreactors for this infrastructure change. That's a reality and and it's it's slow growth.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

Um two things that I'm getting from what you're saying about trends. One is sharing resources rather than exclusivity and that kind of fierce competitiveness and secrecy around a new technology. It's it's around sharing information as much as possible, which scientists seem to be better. My scientist friends say this isn't true, but they seem to be better at than, let's say, I I don't know, a fabulous people. Um yeah, there's no one worse than us. Yeah, that kind of secrecy. So that seems and you mentioned global as well. No country can do it on its own. So that has to be around shared facilities, shared information. What if we want these smaller companies to survive, they can't build this infrastructure themselves, so they're gonna have to rent or have it lent to them by. But the second thing was just to go back to Omid's point a few chapters ago, was tell us what products. I I loved what got me very excited looking at all of your work is that you know pollution or carbonyl soot could can make ink, for example, or or that CO2 can become sunglasses. So we Yeah, the sunglasses, the was it polycarbonate lenses or something. Just tell us about some physical products. Because we've heard about this amazing chemical process, but for Joe blogs, we don't know what that is. No, no, totally you're in our lives.

Scaling Infrastructure And Drop-In Materials

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Yeah. Um one quick thing I do want to just backing up to the point more about sharing resources. There is an issue when you talk about scientists being open to share, there is a real issue around IP and production, and especially going into Asia, like stereotypically things can get taken and that kind of stuff. So that's that is a real concern, and uh innovators are kind of assessing it, and there is a lot more sort of movements to do actual factory production inside of Europe because they feel safer. And so so that's not a non issue, okay, just as a as a point. Like it's it I don't think it's necessarily stopping things, but it does it gives people pause, especially when they're in in phases. So having everything be more global in the sense that you can do it in different places and do it local is is a is a comfort. Um but you. Yes, so exact exactly the ex the example of different products. Um the yeah, the carbon capture thing is is is such a fun play because it's this idea of thinking about like it's air actually becomes matter. And this is like this transformation of energy and the whole piece about teaching science. It's so it's so lovely. But yeah, one of the projects we were done two projects with carbon capture of Pangaya. The first was um around air ink. And this was actually a friend of mine from MIT who had started working on this Anarud Sharma. I should look at his TED talk if you haven't, but he he literally was collecting, he's from he's from India, and he started collecting solution like soot from literally his tailpipe. He had this crazy device on his car that he would drive around. Um, and then it was also you could get it from factories, and then he had developed this technology that ran off solar, which would convert this into a very beautiful black ink. And what's interesting about it is people think soot, oh, dirty, polluted, whatever, but it's actually carbon. It's real carbon. So it was actually biological and base once you remove the toxicity. So that's what he had done. And this was in the middle of COVID, and we managed to get um this was a crazy thing about regulation, where we were trying to get his ink from um India into Portugal where we're manufacturing, and it looked like we were importing pollution from India into Europe. And it took like a whole like four scientists to figure out how to do this, where we had to write on the customs form like some sort of breakdown. We went down to like molecular structure to like show that it wasn't actually a pollutant. And there's all sorts of crazy stories around this new biology stuff where it's not the regulation and it even if it's not unintentional, is so behind, like they don't understand what the new material is. So it gets classed as something else, and then there's a massive tax or just all these things. But but yeah, so that was one example, and we use it to print black on all of our garments. They have a little text block that says what they're made of, where they're made, just a little we call it our you know, our transparency tech text block. And so so that was one project, and that's a that's a kind of an obvious one where you can go, okay, black suit to black ink. You know, but it when we worked with 12, which is a really innovative company in Silicon Valley, they were actually doing air capture carbon, right? And their technology pulls you know, CO2 from air, and they were looking at basically the exhaust from all different kinds of chemical factories. And this was a great story where they were they were fully intending to go into the existing chemical manufacturing infrastructure, right? So that's a good play. Like you're you know, you're remediating stuff on site. Um, any anytime you can tap into an existing giant industry that you know you just you you're set up for success. Um, but what they were doing was they were making the basis of a whole a lot of different kinds of chemistry from this air capture. And so uh for for the basis of plastics. So we used their material is the basis of polycarbonate, and we made sunglass lenses out of it. And but this is again, we're back to the couture waste problem. Now they were in pilot mode, and each uh when we were first manufacturing, each lens, I believe, cost six hundred dollars just to make. And right, which and and so so this kind of thing, everything was set for the cost to come down, but you know, we didn't we didn't make that many pairs, and we did we always try to explain to people we're not doing this as a capsule collection. Every product that we're making has a path towards like it the prices coming down. There's no there's an abundance of CO2. Their technology is not prohibitively expensive when it's at scale. So we wanted to kind of set that up, that there was a way, a way forward. But um yeah, so that those are the two um two fun things. And there's now there's even there's a lot of carbon capture that's going into protein because if you think about it, carbon is a molecule in everything, right? And it's not it's not appropriate to pull from air for everything, but um that is really about um an infrastructure scale-up. I'm not as aware of what's going on in that right now. It's not my kind of perfect area of expertise, but it's really exciting.

Carbon Capture Ink And CO2 Sunglasses

SPEAKER_03 48:02

So when I think about the things that you said, what I like is that one, you're saying there's a lot of waste material that needs to be classified as asset uh on the balance sheet rather than as waste. Which you also said, what I liked, which makes me more hopeful, is ingenious people are actually thinking about using the existing rails of the infrastructure that we've built in an industry to use that to do something that's more sustainable, actually. Yeah. Um and and that means that the install base of the new type of reactors maybe is not as as high as we think it is, and there's there's a way we can use our existing infrastructure, which is exciting. Obviously, the big topic right now is AI. Is AI having an angle here to help us overcome some of these problems? How would you think about its application to this problem?

SPEAKER_01 48:47

Yeah, so one of the biggest things for AI in the space of like material science is about like formulation development. So there's a lot of time that can be saved, and time is money in this case of innovation and startups, right? So if you have an inkling of we're how we're gonna tweak the formula to have better performance, there's particular like custom models that are being developed where you feed it, everything about chemistry, everything about biology, and everything we know about existing plastic formulation, and it'll spit out not necessarily the perfect thing, but here's a cluster of how we should do molecular structure. So that could be, you know, five years of work for a lab assistant, right? So it's this idea of where exactly are we gonna look and how are we gonna hone in on a formulation? Um, that's one of the most exciting um places around it. The other piece is there's also a big data piece. AI doesn't exist without data, so I think about them um in the same breath. And one of the things that we're doing, if you think about it, of so Mothership is we're going around the world and identifying waste streams, and then we're trying to figure out we're gonna, you know, we're doing local production there. Where's the closest place to sell that resource? So indirectly, we are making an entire data map of all the waste to ingredient input streams across the world. And that is a another piece of very valuable data for every AI model. Like, where where is everything in terms of resiliency? Like, we do not know exactly everything about our supply chains. And so the more the AI can kind of help us manage all of that, because you can imagine you just put in like everything that they need to build something, a particular product, and every waste stream of like where that is, and then cross-match, like no single human can do that effectively. So that's a massive AI play. Um, there's one other thing I need to bring up. This is maybe a little off-piece, but when we think about AI, there's no AI without data, there's no data without data centers. And this is a huge problem. Um when this it's one of the biggest kind of areas of conflict around AI. Well, there's many, but in my world. So here's something that is not being talked about that has to be known about. And this is DNA data storage. So when I talk about the all the promises of synthetic biology and unlocking the human genome, we now understand DNA. We know how to read it and write it, make it and synthesize it, right? So DNA is nature's natural storage mechanism. And we've now developed a technology where you can literally take digital data, so the ones and zeros of any piece of data, and convert that into the ACTG code of DNA, and then write it into.

SPEAKER_00 51:20

What's ACTG?

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Oh, sorry. So the so the the pro the bonded, the pair, you know, you know, in the helix, the double helix of DNA, like that, right? It's it's these two letters that go across. That just think of it as the code.

SPEAKER_03 51:31

The like so there's four letters that make of the DNA.

SPEAKER_01 51:35

The alphabet of DNA, right? And and so it's what I'm saying is that there's little translation, like a literal translation, it's like the rosetta stone between digital and biology. So we take the digital data and put it into DNA. It's stable at room temperature and it's like around one one thousandth the size. Right. So it just lives on solution. So the big the problems with data centers is that they take up massive amounts of energy and they're also huge and they have to be maintained. This is something that can just live at room temperature and a tiny, like I think like one cubic centimeter could have all the data of like like a hundred thousand phones or something. Like it would, you know, it's it's an order of magnitude that right. And this is happening, and it's like it is like right now, the reading and writing is slower than you would be able to access, like you're on off of Google Drive or something. But first of all, it's getting faster like day by day and cheaper. And um, and this is what we should be turning our attention toward. There's some sort of reckoning coming there. We need to have learned from what we did with the industrial revolution. Can we be aware of this now that this is going to be the piece of AI that destroys um the world? I'm not anti-AI. I'm just bringing up like I live in the world of physical things, and so this is where I think about this this idea of um of how that matters. Yeah, and then of course, I am a fan of robotics, you know, the Luddite fallacy, right? Which is where basically every, you know, every new technology is about a displacement, and it's it's not just we're not going to be taking people's jobs. We are displacing jobs and we're changing infrastructure, but we're making other jobs in other ways. Every AI and every robotic development should have a training program alongside it. That's where I think the government or or companies should should be. There should be some uh mitigation around that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_03 53:20

I think you've closed one of the talks that I saw with uh a quote that you like. They said that most of what is knowable is not yet known. That leaves me on a very hopeful note. And I hope we can also close this with a hopeful note. And I think what you're saying is that a lot of the things that need to be known for us to get our act together are already known in many ways. Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_01 53:43

Yeah. And so I it's not, I don't want to blame it on government or infrastructure or anything, right? It's it's a it's a complex thing about culture. And that's kind of one of the things I also have loved about working in fashion and tech is you have these strangely diametrically opposed cultures, both of whom I love, right? I love being with my nerds and very practical. And then you get into fashion and it is so um glamorous and idealistic and creative, and there's a kind of an essence to it that is sort of this unknowable thing and this thing about fantasy and and the traditions of the manufacturing. And bringing them together is I, you know, I I call a lot of my job like innovation diplomacy.

SPEAKER_02 54:24

Yeah.

AI, DNA Data Storage, And Hope

SPEAKER_01 54:24

Where you're kind of talking to someone, you're convincing them this is the right thing to do. You're it's not a hard, well, sometimes it's a hard sell, but like going into you know an Italian shoe factory, like that the we literally manufactured in the factory that made the first stilettos, like in the 1920s, and talking to the the it's the descendants of that original guy about how how we could put this new thing in his machine. And he did end up getting on board, you know, over a bottle of wine. And and um and that that kind of thing, you you can't, but you can't go in there and go, my thing is right, I'm a scientist, right? This is about there has to be a cultural communication. And that's why I think it is really important. The one thing that AI is not helping us with is connection, communication, reaching other people, or maybe there's a way it can be, but um, that's the part that humans need to be good at. Um, emotional intelligence, empathy, those are the things that people need in the jobs of the future.

unknown 55:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:20

But I I think that's something that you've done incredibly well. You feel as much like a philosopher as a scientist. There's this sort of material shift from making things to growing them, or there's something sort of metabolic. You know, you know, the materials that you're using aren't just being used, they are themselves alive or or sort of certainly reactive in the other kind of clothing that we didn't really drill into, but the the stuff that can make you bionic, um, which I'm really interested in. Um but yeah, growing and then decaying, us going back to mimicking nature's.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

I I like I like your point, and I think you're absolutely right. There's economic reality, there's scientific reality, but then there's just human reality. And as a matter of fact, a lot of this is getting people to come along on this ride, which is really exciting. And uh I appreciate that you took the time to take us on this ride to get everybody who's listening to this get excited about the future.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

Science is about the long term. It trend the world will trend towards the right kind of innovation. I love talking to you guys, and thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 56:25

Thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time.