Radical Innovation: Unlocking the Future of Human Invention | Matthew Putman | Big Think Edge

Welcome everyone to Big Think Live. Uh, I'm Peter Hopkins, president and co-founder of Big Think. Today's webinar is Radical Innovation: Unlocking the Future of Human Invention. Uh, this webinar is brought to you by Financial, and our guest today is Matthew Putman. Matthew is the co-founder and CEO of Nanotronics, a science technology company that has redefined factory control through the invention of a platform that combines AI, automation, and sophisticated imaging to assist human ingenuity in detecting flaws and anomalies in the manufacturing process.

He and his team at Nanotronics are building New York's first high-tech manufacturing hub in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Matthew is also a considerable humanist. He sits on the board of directors of New York Live Arts and Pioneer Works. He's an accomplished jazz pianist, dancer, published poet, and has served as executive producer on several films and plays. He is also a good friend of mine and a friend of Big Thinks. Uh, and so Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, Peter, thank you so much. You make me sound so much better than I am, right? Oh, no, I love that introduction—thanks! Bragging about you the entire hour. I'm delighted, uh, that we get to bring, uh, you back and introduce more of our audience to you.

Um, a few more, uh, production notes before we get started. Uh, today's session will last roughly 55 minutes to an hour. I'll start the conversation with Matthew and then segue to audience questions after the halfway mark. Um, if you have questions for Matthew at any point in, uh, the hour from now till the end, please add them in the comments section of whatever platform you're joining us through. And, uh, Big Think colleagues will, uh, collect those questions and feed them to me, and I will ask them to Matthew.

Um, so without any further ado, uh, let's get started. Um, after you, I think as a sort of primer for people it would be great for you to sort of explain the work of Nanotronics and also the work that you do there yourself.

Yeah, Nanotronics wants to re-envision the way that things are made. Uh, you know, really I keep getting surprised in life, and we can talk a little bit about why this is and how I found this, but things are often made the same way that they have been made for the last 75 years. So what we do at Nanotronics is try to, you know, look at the things that we want in the world and how we can help bring those to life. We do this through imaging, we do this through the latest of artificial intelligence. We sort of looked everywhere for inspiration to do that.

And so it's both bringing new technologies to the world and making sure that companies that are doing things that make our life worthwhile are still continuing to prosper so that they can reinvent themselves. So we do this through imaging, we do it through robotics, we do it through people collaborating in different ways. So we are, you know, we're builders, and we are working with those who build, I think, some of the more interesting things in the world.

Now, to make this a little more concrete for our audience, I'm going to ask my colleague Greg to put on screen, uh, the device that you guys manufacture. Maybe explain to the audience what's involved here.

Essentially, it's a super sophisticated microscope of sorts, right? So if you were to go into a factory, normally you'd see many pieces of large mechanical equipment that do analysis of everything from semiconductors to advanced materials to biotech. This is the size of my desk, and on this you have something that loads wafers in and things that do scanning and analysis and really understand the making of an entire product, not just a part of the product.

And the size actually means something. It really, hardware-wise, is fairly simple, but advanced computation allows us to use that hardware for being able to do some of the more advanced analysis of materials. And that advanced analysis lets processes change, it lets companies increase yields, and it allows for new types of innovation. But it is a pretty simple thing—it's an advanced microscope.

These, uh, with some automation and Nanotronics—I mean, "nano" really means at the level of a billionth, correct? Right? So you're really sort of bringing, uh, the manufacturing floor—bringing clarity at that tiny microscopic level for all sorts of applications, that if you're not precise at that level, whether it's semiconductors or, uh, you know, you know, uh, development of biologics and other things, the products won't work.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's—we've been able to—not just Nanotronics, but the world has been able to see things and manipulate things at the nanoscale for many years, but it's been extremely expensive to do that. A semiconductor company, for instance, that works at that scale, it could cost up to 20 billion dollars to build a semiconductor fab. Um, our goal is to be able to not just deal with semiconductors at that level but allow for innovation to build things not in a 20 billion dollar fab only, but in very small rooms.

And I've always said that I would like the next great transformative thing to be built by an entrepreneur in a dorm room—not have, you know, the next great social network built in a dorm room. So it's not only about seeing things and manipulating things that are small, it's also about making the barriers to entry to invent much, much smaller as well.

Yeah, you're really democratizing access to a view on that scale of the world, that microscopic scale. Um, another theme that really comes out in your work, which I think is relevant to mention here, is that you really sit at the nexus of the physical and the digital world because you are using advanced artificial intelligence as a part of making sense of the world at such a tiny scale. Talk to us a little bit about that—how you are actually combining, uh, you know, and bridging those two domains of the physical and the virtual.

Well, I think that there—people think there's a type of magic that you can build complex things through brute force, and you really—you can build things. I mean, I like to build things in old school ways. You know, you can get inspired from using a machine shop and using additive manufacturing, but the way you make them better, the way that you make them in large quantities, and the way you innovate is to take the lessons that are learned—not just through, um, you know, things that have been built for the same way for many years—but you take, you know, you take lessons that they used at DeepMind for winning, um, the Go in the best way possible, use something called reinforcement learning agents to optimize for the building of something physical.

This is the way that we can get to something that I would consider a type of abundance that the world would like to see. It is this combination. We can't do it alone. Our artificial intelligence agents, working with us, can help create something physical. Now, behind Nanotronics is this deep mission to empower, uh, innovation—decentralize and democratize it.

Um, Nanotronics seems to practice what it preaches because you have just—are really in the midst of, uh, a phase of innovation that has taken Nanotronics outside of its initial work in microscopy and deploying some of its tools in the fight against COVID, right? And, and that actually all began with you getting COVID early on in the epidemic. Tell us that story—how you know when did you realize you had it, and when did the sort of, um, impulse to do something about it and using the resources of Nanotronics and the philosophy, you know, of sort of rapid innovation regress?

Yeah, it actually happened, I'd say a few days before I had COVID. So, um, a friend, um, called and gave us a call—Jack Gallagher gave me a call and said, you know, there's a huge need for people to be empowered to be able to breathe. Uh, the government was calling and everybody was calling for invasive ventilators that there were shortages of. Um, I knew from some previous experiences that invasive ventilators are extremely dangerous. Once you get admitted to an ICU and are intubated, you'll have an 80% chance of either being, uh, extremely damaged for life or not surviving.

Uh, so, you know, the idea of using a non-invasive, um, breathing device—something of eye-level respiratory device that's often used for sleep apnea—um, was something that, you know, I thought we could get out into the world much easier, save lives at the same time as deploying them around the world. So I surged—I called my father, who is this great, I think, inventor or tinkerer, you know, a big inspiration to me and, um, Gabe, just two things. Can you, you know, you're quarantined in, uh, Florida, can you go and invent a new type of a bi-level respiration device, um, with just these two parameters: of making it extremely easy to use and making it a tenth of the cost or less of anything else?

And there's very little that he says I can't be done. Um, so within three months, he went from building this thing—building a prototype—to us getting FDA approval, emergency use approval, and entering into agreements to, you know, we then thought, well, maybe other people can manufacture this. But it makes complete sense that if Nanotronics enables other people to manufacture things, why don't we set up a mechanism in order to manufacture them ourselves? So we have another group called Nanotronics Health now that builds these ourselves.

I can't trust that it'll get out into the world as quickly as needed and with that type of urgency that COVID brought. So, you know, now we're doing this and it is less than a tenth of the cost, very easy to use. We have partners all over the world.

Oh yeah, there it is! There it is, a pretty simple thing, but, um, that, you know, does a lot and can really give people comfort both in their homes, in clinics, um, you know, and, you know, both in a COVID era and then post-COVID—it’s hopefully part of people's lives to feel comfortable.

How much does that cost to manufacture?

Um, well it costs about $300 what we sell for, and not enormous profit margins, but strangely similar profit margins to if we—when we look at what others charge for much, much more expensive, you know, $4,000 is the common hospital, uh, price for an equivalent device.

Wow.

Wow, what you know, as you have entered this new market so suddenly, you know, in the face of such extraordinary need, um, what have you been—what have you witnessed? What have you seen? Um, you know, are you—have you been reassured by, uh, kind of the state of industrial readiness in this country or in the Western world generally? Or have you been concerned?

Um, I think it would be impossible to be completely hopeful during a lot of this time. I went through times—I mean, it's been a roller coaster—of extreme frustration early on. Uh, if I, who is not, you know, have not worked as a medical doctor in the field, could see abuses in the system or a system that didn't have a protocol for dealing with something like this and then had shortages of supply, I saw it just—it seems completely unnecessary and was incredibly frustrating.

Um, this type of institutional inertia exists in many areas. That said, you know, stories started to change and people started to realize that this was useful. And suddenly we do have a lot of partners and, you know, what was, you know, something I wanted to do in a month, um, while people were suffering in New York took a few more months. But in the course of how things happen, that's fairly quick. So, you know, I have our team to thank and some partners to thank, but it is really frustrating and kind of in India, you know, I think a lot of things like that, um, you know, with COVID have been noticed, the need for urgency and, you know, systems that don't move with urgency.

You've had some critique of the sort of outsourcing model that we've relied upon for so long, and what's your assessment? Are we—have we, you know, sent too much to be, you know, produced in mainland China? And if so, how do we bring it back and what should we be bringing back?

Yeah, so the first thing I would say about outsourcing—and I'll tie it back to this making of this device inhale—is that when you start building something, especially you want to make it as quickly as possible, you don't really think about—or I say we don't really think about, you know, trade agreements; you know, this is not something that we think about. What instead, what you do is you notice when you're trying to build it where there are bottlenecks.

And it's really surprising where those exist. You can, you know, the logic of trade still makes a lot of sense in some ways, but the reality of it is that we could not get things fast enough. Um, there were places where suddenly in the United States you couldn't build something like a fan—uh, a blower that lets you breathe for—the main component didn't exist that was made in the United States. That was shocking to me. There's nothing technologically difficult about it, but in the search for low-cost labor, we had low-cost products.

Over time, we'd miss the fact that we no longer know how to build things. It's the knowing how to build it that's important. And then once you know how to build the entirety of it—even if you're outsourcing it—then you can start to figure out what's inside and build those components. So, you know, it's something we've thought about a long time. And, you know, we do just distributed vertical manufacturing of our other products, and there seems to be no logical reason why we can't do this as well.

And this isn't a political thing. Um, this is a practical thing of, you know, building what you need where you need it. Uh, it's been a big problem that you hear about with everything. There's no reason why there wasn't PPE available at all times except for the complexity of a supply chain that made it very hard to get what you needed when you needed it.

Well, what's your sense of the, uh, redress for that? I mean, if you're—if the profit motive of, you know, minimizing cost, maximizing profit is driving the whole supply chain, presumably it will always net out to outsourcing and to finding the cheapest labor. So, you know, whose job is it to think of sort of the macro context and to take into account, we might have a pandemic, or, you know, we could have some other sudden crisis that turns this on its head? Um, is that should be that left up to industry, or is that something for government to be?

I mean, industry and government and individuals could all have a part to play in this, but I think that they're—I think you're right. You want to do things for as little amount of money as possible, but I think we're optimizing for the wrong things here. If you're optimizing for initial profit, um, then you—you could think that if I get this part for less doing things the way that we've done them for many, many years, that it'll be less expensive.

But if you look to automation, automation isn't something that is about the replacement of jobs for a job's sake. If you think about making something—whether it's this bypass device, whether it's a chair, whatever it is—and you start and you think that there is a human involved, and that human may be less expensive somewhere else, but if you automate that part, then that human starts doing something else, and the chair becomes cheaper.

And this works its whole way down to cutting down a tree, right? The farther you automate, the more you're freeing people, and then the less expensive the part is and the more abundant the society is. So what buying power does is something very different than just making parts cheaper immediately because there's low-cost human labor. Thinking about labor in that way and equating it with, you know, low-cost products is something I think we need to rethink.

Well, you've been a big proponent of, uh, getting away from the sort of Elon Musk notion of AI and technology as the inevitable downfall of mankind. You know that there's this existential clash—you really see a synergy between man and machine and the two kind of, uh, augmenting each other?

Oh, absolutely. Especially at this point in the game. At this point in the game, we're leaving a lot of things—and we're leaving a lot on the table—that should be done because of this new, incredibly powerful toolbox that we have that includes different types of artificial intelligence. If we go directly to, you know, to potential loss and something very big, we have to keep those things in mind. Certainly, you can't forget that technology can bring enormous amount of damage to the world.

That said, we're not—we're ignoring the potential to get to these ideas of abundance or just making things that are available. The way we talked about with COVID, COVID is just an example of where the pace at which the world needs to move, and artificial intelligence is an incredibly powerful tool for that.

Well, and, uh, the Inhale machine is not, uh, Nanotronics only, uh, innovation in the last couple of months as far as COVID is concerned. Um, talk to us a little bit about the work you've done in, you know, around UV light—thinking about, uh, the role, potential role of UV light in sanitation and decontamination. Um, and so what role you see that playing as part of opening up society, particularly because, you know, in New York, where you were—in Nanotronics is based—you know, you're getting ready to, to, uh, send kids back to school.

Uh, you know, yeah, scary!

Yeah, it's scary—but so there are solutions, right? There's solutions that seem to be ignored. Um, because they're slightly harder. Now, they're not slightly harder if you use things like, um, more intelligent factories that we've discussed, where you have closed loop AI systems. You're aligning the rewards of your AI agents with creating something that is better.

A perfect example of this is, um, LED lights. As you know, have been made for many years. We're using them everywhere right now. And even something called UV LEDs have been used—have been used as disinfectants. Um, UV lighting, in general, has been used as disinfectants in hospitals, but they disinfect the surface, so it's not when you're—if you're looking at them generally, since they called it 255 nanometer range—you can't look at them; they damage your eyes and damage your skin.

But you can build—and they have been built for a long time—UV lights that can be in the air, will be in an atmosphere so that my kids can go back to school and disinfect. And what we see with COVID is that it is passed through the air. It's not something that is mainly a surface concern. But the need to use artificial intelligence and different ways of manufacturing to bring down the cost is the only way that that will happen.

Well, but there is a huge part of the population that doesn't believe that this is possible, and they don't know about it. They haven't even heard about this. Or if they do, it's taken kind of in the wrong context, I think. Um, you know, the New York subway system put in UV lighting, but it's for service—for surfaces. And you're more likely to get this through the air filtration system or for breathing and speaking to each other.

Um, so that's an example of if you—you can build something else. You have to build it and optimize the way you build it—which is the kind of thing that, you know, I want to do in life.

Talk to us also about the collaborations between Nanotronics and the gene sequencing companies. You have a number of partnerships, uh, that really were down to, uh, testing. Um, what is Nanotronics’ role in that, and sort of what's your sort of big picture around, you know, kind of the state of testing in the U.S. and abroad?

Yeah, this isn't something that is new. So we have—I think a lot of what you hear from me are goals that I've had for a long time. And so I saw COVID as a chance maybe to accelerate them—and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. Sometimes it's out of our control. But we work with the companies that do more genome sequencing than any other company when the goal from the very beginning of gene sequencing, in my mind, and in the mind of most of these companies is to make a full genome sequencing not a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, but a hundred dollars.

And when you get to a hundred dollars, then you can move on to the discovery of better therapeutics, vaccines, and things. Um, and eventually to personalize medicine, so you get—you’re able to deal with mutations of a pathogen and a lot of things through this methodology.

It is also, um, in the case of doing, uh, PCR testing, the most common way of testing for COVID, you know, a type of sequencing is needed. So we have a shortage of testing. We have long time wait times to get tests. So suddenly, you know, Nanotronics is helping to, um, bring machines that will increase yields and throughputs that handle both of these things. And it's the same ideas. Um, it's surprising that Nanotronics is doing this—it feels like something that many companies should be doing, but we’re happy to be involved obviously, uh, both from a business standpoint and because it's really needed in the world.

How would you describe for the audience your Nanotronics approach to innovation? Do you have a kind of codified way of going at a problem? You know, when you first started thinking, okay, we want to get involved, we see opportunities here, here and here in the COVID response—was there a framework or a, you know, a handbook that you, you deployed in order to sort of methodically look at the best way to tackle any one given dimension of the problem?

Okay, you know, that's embarrassing, but I wouldn't call it a handbook. What we find is that generally these things are a bit customer-driven. Um, and when I mean customer-driven, it's not always a customer coming to us and saying they need something. It's us looking out to the world and saying what is missing? Why are there issues and then engaging in it?

Oh, so it comes with a certain amount of confidence that if it's not defined—the laws of physics—there is a solution to it. So I'd say if there's anything, it starts out with this assumption that it can be done. If bits of it have been done before, let's unite that and start to build it, and let's not put that responsibility on others.

And every time I'm trying to do that, every time I've said I'm going to go to the government and they'll take care of it, or I'm going to go to somebody else—another company that should do it better—the more frustrated I have become. And that could be a communication problem on my side. It's nothing that I have or our company has that may be that special, but it is driven very much through relationships with customers but us looking at the places where there seem to be some type of bottleneck to getting things done.

Do you feel that innovation happens best and most, uh, effectively in the face of a concrete problem? Or, you know, is there a place for sort of blue sky, uh, just open imagination? Um, you know, what's needed for innovation to really take root?

So to that seems like those are opposites, right? That there are just this—you know, moments of creativity that you want to do things, and there's moments of urgency. God, I think the human existence is urgent, right? And like we're in—we're in urgent problems, um, whether it has a time scale of a day or a time scale of hundreds of years, or it's just our own necessity to invent, to innovate these—you know, it's existential and interesting.

So I go about everything as if it's incredibly urgent. Now, you have these opportunities where the rest of the world starts to see the things that you know may be, you know, inventive or interesting to explore as also being interesting. But experimentation can lead to so many different things, whether it's self-fulfillment, but eventually hopefully fulfill a, you know, a catalyst for others to have fulfillment as well.

So, yeah, it's all urgent. Playing the piano is urgent to me. You know, building something that gives people confidence that they can build something or, you know, and I hope that others around me are that way too, whether they're—they have, you know, podcasts or they're able to write and express things better than others—that's something that I, I think plays in a major role in us believing that things can be accomplished and that we can play a role in that accomplishment.

I heard you use the word experimentation just then, and I'm curious. Do you think that, um, you know, as much as people might embrace sort of in sort of blue sky creativity, uh, that there needs to be some rigor of process to innovation? That there needs to be a scientific experimentation? You need to be collecting data, yeah, assessing it objectively, you know, and then repeating? Or can it be more improvisational in the way that you might do in jazz or music or in more of an artistic sense?

I think that there is room for both. I think I really do stand by sort of popularity and falsification as—and trying to design at least the skeleton of experiments in a way you would with AI and say this is what I'd like to achieve. Now, that doesn't take away improvisation. You know, if I sit with, you know, a few musicians, we may have no idea what's going to come out of it. That's much less structured than an experiment to build a high-level respiratory device.

But the process, we still have something we want to complete—the action of communicating with each other in a different way that creates a type of music it's either enjoyable to the audience or something that changes the way we feel. So it's still an experiment; the way you collect data, how it moves about, what—you know, what your expectations are, are different. But it's all an experimentation and in this experimentation, that has some structure around it, right?

It's interesting to sort of think about an audience reaction as a sort of data point.

Yeah, for it can be! It can't be—or just—yeah, I mean, what you— even a data point could be the pleasure you get out of something so that it can lead to the invention of something else. There are a lot of different things you can optimize for—there are the really big things. Right now, though, is that we can—that we should be rather rigorous in making sure that we don't get off track or it just won't get done.

Now you're in this unique position because your, you know, neurotransmission is to empower innovation in its clients is there to be a catalyst and a facilitator. So, you know, you're getting to see all sorts of different industries. Um, you also happen to be at the vanguard of two of the most, arguably, the most innovative domains out there, you know, uh, high-tech manufacturing, artificial intelligence.

Uh, I guess where I'm getting at this is, you know, how much of, of your approach, of Nanotronics approach is actually transferable outside of, you know, this really cutting-edge world in which you live? You know, can it be used outside of manufacturing? Can it be used in other industries? You know, when people come to you who are, you know, looking to you as an innovator, what advice can you give them that is, uh, that can be transferred regardless of the industry or the domain?

Yeah, I—I think it has, I've got, and I'll probably catch myself here, but I don't think it has to do with high-tech. Now, if there's high-tech tools that people should be using—now, I mean, I think that to ignore using artificial intelligence to avoid using the latest in computational tools and hardware is a way to can somehow limit some types of innovation. That said, I think that it's transferable to just about anything.

That if you take these ideas and say that we need physical things built and we need new virtual ways of interacting with each other, I think it's completely transferable and not high-tech at all necessarily. Um, you know, I do the lowest tech things in my life sometimes that give me enormous amount of pleasure and things that can bring about really great businesses. Um, so yes—completely transferable and should be! Don't get intimidated by the thinking that what you have to go to something that is so cutting edge that you need, you know, PhDs in mathematics in order to do it.

Do you see innovation? Um, there is there any difference between innovating in a virtual world versus innovating in the physical world?

That's interesting. I—I’m sure there are differences. I mean, to me, they feel different, but um, it's—it’s hard to—I wouldn’t want to say that humans aren't equally as good at creating in a virtual setting. I think that the virtual settings that we currently have available to us are not as good as a physical setting for interaction in order to build. That doesn't mean they won't ever be, and it also means we should be working on inventing ways that I can collaborate, um, at a distance with people, and that—that is virtual.

So it's certainly not limited. Um, you know, a lot of great things have happened in solitude. You know, great novels and great poems are written completely in solitude, so it’s—you know, virtual—it can be very similar to that. I think that we're lacking in the virtual world the ability to build the physical the way that we should be able to. That could change, and that sort of speaks to some of the work that Nanotronics has been doing around, you know, remote controls and being able to, uh, control machines remotely.

Talk to us a little bit about that because I think that really almost perhaps, of all the work that you that Nanotronics is doing, is really, uh, represents some of the quintessential demand, you know, uh, ambitions of the company.

Well, it's interesting because this is something that we started working on when gesture control was just becoming a thing—really at the beginning of the company. The company—um, you know, you had, you know, a Kinect, and then you had, you know, these hand gesture control devices, but they—they were being used for gaming. They were sometimes being used, uh, for other things that people were getting creative with. But what if they were—what if, you know, people could collaborate and move from one area to the other, collaborate with each other, collaborate with robotics, collaborate with machines, and it didn't matter where you were? You could be right next to us; you could be in different countries; you could be next door to each other.

It's not just a matter of social distancing as we're thinking about it during the COVID era; it's a matter of how do you collaborate with the best people all the time, and how do the passing off of control, um, in two robots—passing control to you—become the best partnership? There are great types of collaboration that can happen in this way that really still are not being done, and it's something that we've addressed through being able to have a conversation where I can hand control to you to do something, and we can't occupy the same place at the same time, but we can shake hands, and we can move, and we can move things to—and then we can pass control to a robot, and the robot can learn and can teach us, and we can teach it.

And, and that—I mean, that is really key to how you, you know, take what is humanity—what are our mechanics—and, you know, what does it look like to improve this greater collaboration between people?

Um, what do you say to people, um, who are afraid of technology and the sorts of technologies that you are working to advance? You know, who hold that dire view that sort of, um, Elon Musk view that eventually will be killed by the machines and—and even in the more near-term that, uh, most of these technologies are beyond their grasp and therefore they don't want to be bothered with them, and so the gap between them and the machines obviously grows wider. How do you, um, you know, what encouragement can you give people not to give up and not to reject, uh, developing relationships with these advanced technologies?

Well, part of that is to notice this isn't completely the case, that there are—in there's some rhetoric from somebody like Elon Musk about, um, you know, holding back on innovation, but he's a great innovator. He's great at inspiring, in building things and using things like gesture control and AI and starting things to do so.

You know, we have to be careful to see who are really the Luddites in a kind of old sense of, let's break down the technology and those that build them. Um, so you know, the fear, in the sense of how are we using these, is a real one. Um, I interviewed somebody recently—talked a lot about bias in the creation of artificial intelligence—seems like a very real thing. Um, you could speak about, you know, what are we using it for? Are we wasting a great opportunity?

Um, but I—I generally say we are early enough that we have a chance to invent something—not we just—we meaning Nanotronics, but we as humans—to use these tools, and we're just at the very beginning of it. And you know, I think that's really important to know, and, you know, there's nothing wrong, as long as it's interpreted correctly, with being concerned about how we can screw things up.

Um, but if we keep the real goals in mind, um, these things we spoke about earlier on creating abundance of not having, um, the types of bottlenecks that we have seen, um, during COVID or any other time actually, then AI becomes a great tool right now. So be more scared of not using it than being scared of abusing it.

Well, then, that also reasons the question, how do you look at failure and how do you treat failure at Nanotronics? Um, you know, obviously failure is so critical to experimentation, um, but you know, if left unchecked, it can, you know, doom entire organizations. How do you encourage people to try but also to sort of check yourself that, uh, you know, when things aren't going in the right direction, there is, you know, there is some redress, there is a way of rerouting things to a, you know, a better outcome?

Yeah, this is something that, you know, I'm not always good at, but I've started to think about failures as something macro and something micro. Um, the entire project—which means the things that we're talking about, you know, creating and what the world looks like—that's what we cannot fail at. Every many experiments should fail, you know? We should be risky enough to say that this work we did—and it can be a pretty severe failure—it could cost us a lot of money; it could risk, I mean, there's risk and huge, you know, there's human risk of how do you feel when you haven't accomplished something? How does the company survive any individual thing? But it's the grand project of surviving, um, that that I have to keep in mind—that's what we cannot fail.

Um, so fail on a bunch of micro levels in order to succeed on the big important things.

[Music]

I'm going to segue to some user questions, which are now beginning to, uh, pile up. One question is very simple: How would I know when my company might want to use or, uh, Nanotronics? You know, what frame for the audience—sort of what circumstances might they be in where a collaboration with Nanotronics, uh, you know, might add value?

I think that if they are trying to build something that either hasn't been built before, um, we—we are a way of quantifying things that are very hard to quantify through a lot of failed experiments. So if something is very difficult to make, you don't have a lot of runway for—for a lot of failure before there is a success in releasing those products. So Nanotronics is not—the most expensive way in order to try to get the most sophisticated results.

So if you're starting from scratch to try to build something that you want to build, we'll be good partners. I think if you're a large company that is, you know, counting on, um, things, you know, if it becomes a kind of pyramid scheme, um, where you, you know, it works for a while and it keeps seeming to work—it's a big company; it seems to work—we know we have to, you know, try things in new ways. You know, it's a great time to collaborate and think is it possible to make things much less expensive? Is it possible to use these new types of tools?

So whether it's a large company or you're intimidated to start trying to build something new, that thing can be next generation processors. It can be quantum computers. It can—it really doesn't matter what that thing is, but if you're making something physical, let's talk.

Uh, can you give us some examples of industries that you currently work with, uh, and maybe some examples of ones that you think there are opportunities but perhaps, you know, don't have much representation in Nanotronics customer roles yet?

Yeah, so I mean we—we work in areas that—from powering the cloud by looking at all of all of the, you know, analyzing all the hard drives in the world—that's a, you know, there's things that fall under, I would say, important emergency things. We do work on genomics, as we talked about. We work with most of the groups that are trying to create quantum computers. We work with companies that are creating lidar for self-driving cars, but we also work with, uh, tire companies to try to make them more sustainable to increase profit margins that can lead to research to making, you know, more sustainable technologies in in rubber and plastics.

Um, I think that, uh, where where we would like to go is those places where hope has been lost that any change can occur. So you look at very large companies that think that that inertia has gotten in the way of even thinking it's possible anymore. There have been great changes in aerospace in our life. You know, meaning in airplanes—it's basically the same as they've been my entire life.

Um, you know, so there are great advances there. I think that I think that battery technology is talked about all the time, and while there's been some innovation, I think that there is great opportunity for innovation in, in batteries and storage. Um, so I think that in nanoparticles and things such as graphene, which has been known for a long time but has extremely important properties, there's places to go. I think regenerative messes in this place is to go.

So, I mean, it's—it really, and I hope to be driven by people's desire to—that was just not my desire to think that this something is cool. I hope a lot of people think things are cool, and we can talk about how to make it happen. I don't even mean just anatomics; just the world in general—let's be able to take a positive outlook that we now have toolbox available to us to make things happen.

I love that! I mean, I love the idea of being able to confront seemingly, uh, insoluble problems with sort of fresh eyes and, you know, a can-do attitude. Um, next user question actually sort of hits on this. User sort of laments about the huge amount of waste—industrial waste, consumer waste—that's, you know, contributing pollution all over the, uh, globe.

Um, what role does Nanotronics play in addressing waste, and so what opportunities do you see? I mean, you know, the environmental crisis seems to be growing unchecked in many respects, yeah. You know, that's perhaps one of the quintessential seemingly insoluble problems. How do you think that Nanotronics fits into that and where do you see, um, you know, a positive outcome and for what needs?

Well, when I look at almost everything we do, it's all addressing the idea of waste. So if you make things that are of higher quality, a better precision—whether that goes down to atomic precision—but you are eliminating waste. You're not making things with—and the same thing comes with energy. So if I'm—if you're making things and you're making them correctly, you're not putting extra energy into the process of making them.

If you're making them in smaller locations and you're not dealing with complex supply chains, it's reducing waste. It's also making products that that are better energy storage. So things that we call, um, you know, uh, wide band gap materials—technical thing—is basically light LED lights consume less than on old incandescent lights. The same thing occurs with a lot of of different power devices and semiconductors. So it's both what we enable, the new materials that can do, but it's also the way of doing it—do it without any waste if possible.

Consider ourselves a failure unless our—if our customers are throwing anything away, consider it a failure. If they're not optimizing the amount of power or, you know, optimizing for good power consumption, uh, waste plays a huge deal in it. Also enabling the research into what things can help address climate change, uh, that go beyond recycling or driving less and say are there actual technological solutions? Um, you know, do we have to eventually look to geoengineering and how do we do it if we look at it? We have to use tools like AI to do it.

So, you know, a number—a number of ways that we say this is embedded in everything we do.

A question for you: You know, you mentioned the sort of two, uh, models of potential clients for, for Nanotronics—one being kind of startups who are really trying to do something really hard, the other being established entities that, you know, have some incumbency and maybe sort of recognize they can do things in different ways, better ways, more sustainable ways. Between those two models, you know, you know, do you think which do you think is likely to bring about more change?

It strikes me that a lot of these big companies, many of their business role models are so rooted in inefficiencies, you know, that doing something the way that you're describing—creating a kind of product that lasts forever or lasts far, far longer, you know—just may not be in their, you know, compatible with their DNA, right?

Hopefully, there is some kind of natural selection there where, um, you know, you'll see that more efficiency also leads to better yields, which leads to more successful companies. So it may be self-selecting in that way with large companies. Um, with, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit is incredibly important. But we—the thing we have to be careful about there, and we meaning Nanotronics and a lot of maybe hard tech companies or whatever you might call it, um, or, you know, businesses in general, is that even the way that we do fund—the way that companies are funded now is a big company way of funding.

Silicon Valley has its own optimization, which does not necessarily free innovators to invent like entrepreneurs in the way that you're thinking. Um, so, you know, it's big business too. Even when you're a small business.

So it's changing these ideas of how quickly you can make a change and that change being things that include environmental improvements.

This question next question, um, asks about universal basic income. The viewer wants to know generally what are your thoughts about it and, you know, particularly given that you're trying to, um, you know, that the automation that will come from the work that you're doing will displace people, um, to some degree, you know—is universal basic income have to factor into kind of the Nanotronics vision of the future?

I think it's a great step, um, and for maybe different reasons, um, then some think of it. I—I don't think of it as a necessity because of automation per se. I think that there are still plenty of room for people to do things. What I really love about it is if you—it aligns us with trying to create this abundant future and use automation to make things less expensive.

And then, you know, if you have user merciful basic income, have a chance for people to do things that are creative on their own. I don't think it's the end. I think that it's really exciting that people are talking about it as a—as a possibility. Um, you know, bringing this up a few years ago, people didn't even know what it was, so I think it is definitely a step. It's not the end—because you still have, you know, different financial incentives and concerns and maybe fear of AI for other reasons, but yes, I like the idea.

Uh, this next question, um, asks whether Nanotech can bridge the gap between serial silicon computation and wet parallel computing of a nerve cell. Is the work you're doing potentially going to help merge man and machine in a sort of more cyborg sense?

Well, you know, I—it certainly could! Um, you know, in the end, in the end, everything are just bits of physics, right? So you know, wet and hard are are a matter of substrate, um, that are made of atoms and molecules. So, you know, the cyborg concept we already do in some things, we're augmented in many ways.

Can we use that type of augmentation to either solve for disease, um, in the body to increase, you know, to deal with things like longevity and fear and a number of these aspects to strengthen ourselves or to use ourselves to strengthen machines? Absolutely! And we have to look at—we have to look holistically at this.

This next question, um, touches on the investments of some of the wealthiest people on Earth—Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk specifically—in space travel. The questioner wants to know, do you see these investments as a valuable use of resources? Um, or do you think investing in humanity in other ways, perhaps planet-based ways versus, uh, you know, sort of Martian ambitions, would that be a better use of those resources as far as overall welfare is concerned?

Well, if you're looking at those two cases of two extremely, extremely wealthy people, um, there would—there's room for both. These guys can invest a lot of money in doing things on Earth and in space.

So, you know, I don't think it's an either or. If society were to spend all of our time figuring out how to get off the planet and all of our resources spent on how to get off the planet, I think that that is probably not the thing we should be most optimizing for. That said, the inspiration to go places and what you discover by doing that and what you realize about human potential for doing that I think is wonderful. It's exciting!

You know, I grew up, um, dreaming of space travel and watching Star Trek and believing in that. This is—that is just something as an exploration, just like we experiment in a lab, so it's important. If all of our money and every investment went towards it, it still wouldn't have the optimal outcome for humanity or for the planet.

[Music]

Where do you see opportunities? I mean, you know, you're a humanist, you have a lot of progressive views. Um, you're also a part now of a—an innovator, a really rarified innovator class. Um, you know, you're not yet Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk—you’re on your way! Um, and I guess the question is sort of how—from your vantage point, you know, you've brought so much into the world. Uh, you've been able to reap great rewards from that and potentially even greater in the future. How do you think about that responsibility—being at the sort of forefront, having such insight into so many different issues—um, you know, and potentially having resources to deploy, uh, outside of Nanotronics?

You know, what's your sense of your, your sort of obligations or responsibilities, if you think you have any?

Oh, I mean, you know, I—I think I have enormous responsibilities. I mean, I, you know, I have such gratitude that I get to do the things I get to do in my life. Um, and you know, you could—you can start with that. You can start a society working in a way, um, that gives others the opportunity to do the things that I do. That sounds super selfish. I mean, things I do—why should anybody want to do the things I do? They don't have to do the things I do, but they should have the freedom to build and create the way that I feel I have the freedom to do so.

And it's by the way, you know, I feel that I don't have the freedom part of the time too. I mean, it’s—it’s—you know, you're going up against a lot of different challenges in the world. But yes, it's a huge responsibility, and you know, and I also think that we're not generally realistic—people don't understand, um, what is possible with a lot less. You know, you don't have to be Jeff Bezos to make an enormous impact.

I mean, we talked about this—barriers to entry for starting a business that I think is less, but there's very—there's less various entries to be able to do rewarding things now. It's going to take a lot of people thinking that a lot of institutions to change, and you know, I could play little parts in it here and there. You know, I could—I can help, um, with an arts organization that also combines science.

Um, I—you know, we could—we can do different types of work in Nanotronics. It could be involved with a dance company that also then has lectures about the role of human humans versus machines and get people to think differently. Um, but yeah, I think it's it's freeing people to be people.

Now we are coming up on the hour. I've got two more questions for you from the audience, both of which I think are interesting—hit different, uh, topics. Um, one asked the question, does Nanotronics have any plans for integrating with blockchain technology, specifically automation via smart contracts?

No, we're not working on that. Um, it's not that it's a bad idea, but no, it's not—it's not part of Nanotronics work right now.

Got it. And the, uh, the last audience question—and this is one I had myself—um, you know, this person asks, how do you feel about copyrights and the funds needed, uh, copyrights, patents and the funds needed and time to, uh, to take to market in new innovation? Uh, especially in the context of COVID, you know, how do you think—do you think the patent system and, you know, intellectual property system, both in the U.S. and abroad, you know, is helping drive Nanotronics innovation or is it inhibiting you guys?

I think the patent system helps Nanotronics, not in any aggressive standpoint. You know, it doesn't help—we don't—we don’t—you know, it's not like we're out suing people for it. More than anything, it's—it's a way to organize our ideas and to find out what is innovative and not innovative or sometimes to go back and see what's already been patented so that we could, you know, then is expired and we can use it.

The system is broken; it takes too long sometimes for patents. There aren't enough patent examiners that in the world that necessarily have certain expertise. Um, it's being abused by some. But I like the organizational principle of how a patent is organized and has been for a couple hundred years.

So there's nothing changed about how you organize a pattern. If it slows things down because people are too afraid while they're waiting to get a patent, then it's a real problem. Don't allow something like that to slow you down from starting to build. Have you guys confronted any, uh, patent trolls, or have you run into any of the, uh, sort of roadblocks that, uh, you know, have been reported on as far as litigation is concerned?

We haven't. No, we've had a really great good experience.

Well, Matthew, um, we have run out of time. Uh, I cannot thank you enough!

So much fun, Peter.

Oh, I love having you! And, uh, our audience, uh, is so appreciative of your insights. I also want to thank Financial for, uh, generously supporting today's session, and I want to thank our audience, uh, for joining us—we really appreciate you tuning in, uh, and we look forward to seeing you on the next edition of Big Think Live. Have a great day! Stay safe!