Simone Cicero

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organisations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I am here solo today with a fantastic guest, someone I’ve been personally thinking about and following for well over a decade now. Welcome, Kevin Slavin.

 

Slavin 

Thanks very much, very happy to be here, thanks.

 

Simone Cicero

Thank you. I am super excited to have you. And your work is hard to define. You have been sitting at this, let’s say, really interesting intersection of design, systems, science, technology, culture for many years now. And your affiliations are countless and include NYU, MIT, Media Lab, multiple startups and scale apps. You even advised TV shows and novelists. 

 

Now you are a co-founder and president of Fairfield Bio, which is a global marketplace for the exchange of non-human genomic data, which we’re going to talk about during the episode. And I would say that as an entrepreneur and educator, you have been a pioneer constantly. 

 

I would say, especially in blurring the lines between the digital and the physical and I would say also investigating the implications of what happens at this interface between these two worlds. And so since the idea for this interview, for which I want to thank Amber Kelly as well, because she was making the connection, really started from your essay. 

 

An essay that is now 10 years old. It’s actually going to be 10 years old in two weeks on February 24 – which is called Design as Participation. That was a very seminal piece of work that mostly 10 years ago stuck with me for long and preparation for this call I mentioned that somehow helped me to recognise myself as a designer, right? So you said that you have been thinking about this essay a lot lately because of what you’re doing now. 

 

So I think it would be nice to start a little bit from the story of that piece of work and why are you thinking about it today?

 

Slavin 

I mean, I think, you know, from the moment that, that you reached out and referenced the essay, you know, it’s, to be honest, I hadn’t, I hadn’t thought that much about the essay itself. In many years, I wrote it, as you say, 10 years ago. It was interesting to me to go back and read it. 

 

Because what it felt like to read it, and I don’t think I’d read it in at least five years, maybe longer, is it felt like 10 years ago I wrote a letter to my future self. And I was only now just receiving it and acting on it. I think part of where the essay came from was 10 years ago I was still at the Media Lab at MIT. I somewhere in the middle of my time there. I was there from 2013 to 2017. When I got there in 2013, I would say that I was still generally focused on technology, in particular, locative technology. I had come out of working with a really brilliant group of colleagues and friends to build some of the earliest efforts in location-based technology. 

 

Then I got to the Media Lab in 2013 and found myself surrounded by and sort of fascinated by hardcore scientists for the first time. New York is really good at a lot of things, and it was just starting to get good at technology around that time. But it doesn’t have extreme gravity around science. There are extraordinary scientists who live and work in New York, but it’s not a center of gravity, per se. 

 

I found myself in Cambridge and exposed to folks who were doing the most extraordinary things in bio. And there were two things that were striking about that that sort of led to writing Design as Participation. One was that – The types of work and the ways and the forms of approach that the scientists that I was meeting, mostly biologists, made everything else that I had ever done or wanted to do or knew about look very small and very banal and a bit, just a bit dull. 

 

That the minute you start talking about interacting with living systems in the world. I found it much harder to get excited about digital interfaces and the like. And that really was like a real fork for me in terms of figuring out what felt both important and urgent to think about and find ways to engage with. So that was one thing about it. And the other thing about it was that the people who were working in biology, for the most part, were really different types of people than I had met in technology. They’re very different types of people than you would find out in Silicon Valley or whatnot. And they had a humility about them that I really responded to and really appreciated. And in a way, that’s a little bit what sort of inspired the essay about design and participation was realizing that the folks that I was beginning to spend my time with who were designing in interaction with living systems – they knew that this was not, this wasn’t like, they weren’t gonna like solve a problem and check off a box, you know, and make some number go up and to the right. Rather, they were really kind of motivated by not just the curiosity, but I think to some degree, and there’s a few folks that I have firmly in mind when I say this, in some ways they were sort of motivated by how small it made them feel to sort of like touch that live wire. And I really appreciated that, especially in the context of technology in that moment and technology now. The more people get excited about agentic AI and whatnot, like God bless.

 

You know, it is interesting and it’s extraordinary, but, you know, it still feels that what it’s feeding is a sense of ego and you know, a power in a way. And there’s something interesting that happens when you touch biology, where you know that you don’t really have power in any conventional sense. 

There was a moment, I worked at Ginkgo Bioworks for about two years in a specific division of it. And there was one day where I was in a meeting with a guy who was a bioinformatician. And we were all sort of talking.

 

We had to introduce ourselves to somebody. And he introduced himself as a reverse engineer. And I said, what is a reverse engineer? And he said, oh, it’s like an engineer, but I’m not building a system. I’m actually trying to figure out somebody else’s system. But there’s no somebody. He’s like, actually, I’m not engineering anything. I’m reverse engineering what’s happening in nature.

 

If you start with that, you’re not the subject, right? Like that system is the subject and you’re sort of downstream of that. When I wrote Design as Participation, it was in a way kind of just grappling with what happens when that shift really takes place for people who are trying to make things in the world. What happens when you step outside of yourself and the idea of the user.

 

Simone Cicero

It’s fascinating how you kind of very, in a very early moment, identified this fork in the road for you from moving away from what was purely digital into this living system world.

 

And on the other hand, it seems like you are living in a continuum, right? So it’s more like your work as a designer, as an entrepreneur, is very much about connecting these two worlds, right? 

 

And on the other hand, I think another thing that resonates for me is this idea of designing without in a perspective which is not a subjectivity perspective, but it’s more like an embeddedness perspective. So you design even if you are part of the system. And with living systems, you cannot abstract, too much, a system from nature. Because imagine that you make a change in your DNA or something that’s going to be in nature. Then it can go very, very, very broad. 

 

And essentially, you don’t have these small words that typically we have in technology. And we can say, I’m designing something there, and then I’m doing something else. It’s more like an approach to design and entrepreneurship that recognises that there is no boundary. It’s much more everything is interrelated. 

 

So I think this is a good perspective that maybe we can bring into the second question that – it’s really about, is it really the moment that we embrace the idea that what we design is interconnected? And how does it change the posture to design this realisation?

 

Slavin 

Yeah. I’ll give an example. it’s funny because if I think about it, the story that I’m about to tell was contemporary to the moment which I was first writing Design as Participation. and it was a biologist. And I won’t name them because I’m probably going to screw up the quote. I don’t want to put words in their mouth, but generally the sense of what they said that I think about a lot. They had developed, there had been one of the people who had helped develop what’s called a gene drive. And a gene drive is a way, it’s a means by which you are altering not just a specific organism within a species, which is what we think of when we think of CRISPR, some sort of genetic model, you’re actually altering the evolution of the species. You’re producing a specific genetic trait that will have 100 % heritability from that moment on, which is, of course, bananas. You know, the idea that we can do that now. 

 

And so, you could imagine all the uses to which that could be put, could eliminate the capability of mosquitoes to carry malaria, things like that. And this person had worked on that and was pretty clear about how the operating principles and the mechanics and the dynamics of the intervention. This is all 10 years ago.

 

But he said something that I always remember. He said, ‘now we have to figure out who gets to make the decisions about it’. And I was like, what do you mean? And he said, ‘All I did was figure out how it’s done, because that doesn’t provide me with any implicit or explicit right to unleash it on the world.’ 

 

And I thought, man, is there one person in all of Silicon Valley, who ever said that? And the answer is no. There’s not even one. And that is so directly in contrast with the notion that software will eat the world, or move fast and break things. It’s the precise opposite of that. It is a deliberation and care and understanding that what it means to move science or design or technology forward is more than just invention. It’s more than just coming up with the idea and figuring out how to get it done. It’s embedded within social and cultural contexts that are very real. 

 

You know, a, in in a, probably in some other kinder timeline, uh, have factor far more greatly in how these capabilities are actually deployed. So I have to admit, I forgot exactly what your precise original question was here, but yeah.

 

Simone Cicero 

It was more about, you know, now, then once you figure out and understand that the work you do, it’s connected, interconnected, and that can have consequences that you cannot really pre-identify, which is common between digital socio-technical systems and even more with living systems. 

 

How do you change your posture?

 

Slavin 

Yeah, that which is which is which is which is the great question. And I and I think I think, you know, it’s it starts with the acknowledgement, you know, of of of the the finite nature of the role of design slash invention slash engineering, etc, etc. And there are there are folks who are deeply concerned with how these how their work enters into culture and society. And then there are folks who are quite deliberate. They want to accelerate change and they believe that they understand how to do that, which is of course, insane. So, yeah.

 

Simone Cicero 

It’s really interesting because let’s imagine that now everybody, which is actually kind of real, right? Everybody has the potential to make big, a big deal, right? To create something it’s exponential, right? So this idea that the small, people, the single person even has the potential now with all this enabling technology that we have to create incredible impacts, right? You basically, how do you, so I guess that we live in this world now, OK? So how do we do? So what do we do? So there is the perception and the perspective of the designer and the entrepreneurs, right? And the question for the designer and entrepreneur should be, can we still design? Can we still explore? 

 

Or should we rather stop doing it, right? Or should we rather decide on our own that something – I’m thinking about somebody like Sam Altman or the guys that are doing the LLMs. So should we feel ourselves entitled with poking with reality in this way that can have these incredible consequences? Or there should be some sort of precautionary approach. And I think this is a very old question. 

 

It’s been investigated by so many people in time, starting from the philosophers, even Miyazaki in the movies. But the other question is, and what is the role of the society in the context where something like this happens? Because of course, what we are seeing is that in the world, there are some regional powers that are having a different approach to how they regulate technology.

 

And we have the Chinese and we have the US, and these are completely different postures, essentially putting technology in service of some sort of cosmological, political vision. So how do you grapple with all this when you are, so the question would be, why are you doing fair-field bio in the US then?

 

Slavin 

Yeah. I think one of the one of the complexities of trying to get anything new done, especially at scale, The problem is that for anyone who’s looking to do anything at scale and is getting things done at scale, there’s really only two tools by which to prevent a person from making decisions that affect millions or billions of people. 

 

And those, you know, and the two tools are basically regulation and policy, which are very related, not the same thing. Both of those are very clumsy tools. And when you get into regulation, then the question is like, well, then who’s doing the regulating? Are they better equipped to understand it? And in general, I would say not. Not just in the United States, but in general. Just the folks that are in regulatory roles are very rarely well equipped to fully understand what they’re regulating traditionally. And the other is policy and the idea that we can through alignment, somehow agree on some common values and best intentions. And, you know, if, if there’s nothing that’s been made clear by this chapter geopolitically, it’s the policy is not a very effective tool. 

 

For myself and my partner, Mitch Wolfe, was the chief medical officer for the CDC for years and helped global policy for health and human services and also led CDC efforts in Vietnam and Thailand. And he and I worked together for a while. And before we became partners and launched Fairfield Bio. And part of what even leads to Fairfield Bio is the the ineffectiveness of policy in particular around a very specific domain, the specific domain which is in one way a very narrow domain and on the other hand bigger than anything imaginable, which is basically the genomic sequencing of all life on Earth. 

 

Depending on how you count the number of species, depending on couple of different things. There’s somewhere in between 10 million species and a billion. And let’s say it’s somewhere in the middle, let’s say there’s 500 million species on Earth. And, you know, we as a species have full genomic sequences for again, depends on exactly how you count, but let’s say it’s 15,000. So, let’s just say it’s 15,000 sequences that we have out of half a billion, something like that. A little bit of hand waving, but the general orders of magnitude. The value of the information that’s in the genomic sequences of the remaining half billion species is broadly speaking incalculable. it’s, you know, it has all the knowledge of all life over all time embedded within it. You know, it is the history, not of our species, but of of the existence of our planet collaborative between this half billion species.

 

You would think that we could just sequence it. It’s not that expensive these days to do that. And the problem is that like oil, like precious metals, these specific sequences are all on somebody else’s land. Certain ones only exist on Madagascar. Certain ones only exist in Indonesia or Brazil or the Republic of Georgia or Kenya – that information, which is essential to doing everything that we want to do, and sort of need to do everything from stopping cancer to making crops that are more climate resilient, things like that. We need all that. And, of course, we can’t get it unless the nations that that have sovereign rights to that data give it to whoever wants it. And they don’t. That’s a very rational act. I would take exactly the same position if I was them. They’ve been exploited and they use words like theft and robbery and colonialism to describe decades of theft of their IP.

 

So for us, what’s interesting is that there were attempts to address this through policy, something called the Nagoya Accord, which is 2010. And the Nagoya Accord was exquisitely well-conceived. It basically said, look, there are people who are going to use this type of data, this genomic data, and there are people who are going to provide this kind of genomic data.

 

And the people who use it need access to it. And the people who provide it need to share the benefits of when they help solve these ferocious problems. So that general field is called ABS, access and benefit sharing. And there was a summit in 2010 where this framework that says, if users get access, then the providers share the benefits. Pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against the, you know, the sort of like self-evident, you know, sense of that. And yet the United States didn’t sign it and neither did 62 other countries. And it was basically countries that are deeply embedded with commercial interests that didn’t want to pay for the data that they need. And so that policy, which was well thought through, it was a good idea, it was a very solid idea, it was the right idea. 

 

But the policy, first of all, it didn’t even pass in a way, like it wasn’t even agreed upon by the nations that really needed to agree to it. But more than that, even for the nations that did agree to it, it’s not enforceable. It’s not it’s just it’s sort of just an idea and there’s a lot of great ideas that people don’t agree to to stand by in the world and and this is another one of them. So for my partner Mitch and I the question was if you if you can’t address that through regulation and if you can’t address it through policy how can we unlock it? 

 

What is a system that we can design that will allow this to move forward? And so for us, it was about identifying what the incentives were on both sides and the incentives for the providers of data, which looked like Indonesia and Brazil or universities in Mexico.

 

Exactly. Yeah. And, know, and of note, you know, Indonesia and Brazil – Indonesia, Brazil, and I forget the third country account for one third of all the biodiversity on earth. So, you know, it’s like, you know, it’s really there are, and it’s all it’s all locked. Not again, not irrationally. You know, I don’t I don’t I don’t blame Indonesia. I don’t blame Brazil. But but they don’t they don’t share any of that data. And so the question is, what would it take? Like, like, how could how could we solve this? 

 

And so the answer is to take the general principles of Nagoya and rather than make them policy, turn them into commercial contracts, turn it into a marketplace rather than an idea. And, you know, it’s a, it’s a little bit like the movement from, you know, from Napster, you know, where there’s folks who have data and people who want to get at that data. And, you know, we just, we’ll just kind of like figure it out and maybe it’s illegal and maybe every once in a while somebody that’s arrested and has all their stuff seized and maybe somebody even goes to jail here and there. And to just basically take it out of that and take it out of the policy of don’t share music into a world where it’s like, okay, actually, you know, these people can buy it and these people can sell it. 

 

And, you know, it’s a very awkward moment to look at some ferocious problem, something wicked and realize that the thing that might actually be helpful here is capitalism. The thing that might actually be helpful here is the notion of the market because it evolved and emerged for reasons because you had two parties that don’t trust each other, that don’t necessarily want the same things. Basically markets emerge to figure out how to provide incentives on both sides to align them so that everybody gets what they want. So that’s what we’re building. it really comes back to, again, like going back and reading design as participation 10 years later. Yeah, this is basically what I was trying to tell myself in 10 years, which is, which is that if you can design a system for the systems and really like sort of stand back, you know, and do that with humility, then maybe things can happen. 

And I think that humility is really important because marketplaces only work, marketplaces emerge in circumstances where people don’t trust one another. But they have to be able to trust the market. They have to be able to trust the market in the middle. You have to trust when you pay Spotify that you’re going to get the music that you paid for. And you have to trust when you upload music to Spotify that you’re going to get paid whatever you agreed to get paid. And so that requires, think, in particular in this, because this really touches sort of geopolitical third rails, it really requires it requires humility to be credible. And so that’s been a very important part of how we’re trying to build it and how we’re rolling it out.

 

Simone Cicero 

 

What we are describing here, right, it’s like a structural tragedy of the commons. Complex systems cannot be, I think we discovered in the last 10 years that the world is a complex system. There is no way that we can regulate it and govern it through policy. That’s a revelation of the last 10 years, I would say.

 

Just because it’s actually the nature of the word. Heidegger wrote this thing about Dasein and the fact that the word reveals itself as something to be used basically. So your DNA, the DNA in nature, it reveals itself as something useful. We want to have it because maybe we can use it for something. So there will always be an incentive for this to happen.

 

And I think somehow we made it through the thermonuclear bombs because of this architecture of people not being motivated to use it because the others, the mutual is self-assured destruction. And somehow I think this idea that it’s emerging in the world where these regions, these regional powers are somehow focusing on their own, Trump and the conflicts with the other regions. Maybe actually it’s a way to slow down this process of technological improvement and techno acceleration somehow. 

 

The question would be for you, for example. So let’s say that Fairfield Bio reveals all the DNA in the world and it makes it useful for people. So of course, people can use it to do, especially with AI, right? You can do, maybe one stupid guy can do something very bad with all this information that you are going to make available. So what do we do? So is it just something we are going to accept or is there any other reflection we can take?

 

Slavin 

Yeah, no, it’s a good question. It’s part of what I like about building a marketplace for this is that we can screen for bad actors. We don’t have to, you know, if you run a business, you don’t have to let everyone into your shop, you know, and if you can see if there’s if there are means by which you can tell that someone means to do you harm – You don’t have to let them in and in particular, know here we’re talking about you know sovereign genomic data that belongs to countries all over the world that have been broadly speaking victimized. You know part of our role as the marketplace is is a you know is a form of you know “KYC – Know your customer” where by which we can say, look, this is what it means to enter into the marketplace is to abide by these contractual obligations and so on and so forth. And first of all, you can tell who’s coming in on the way in and make your best possible decisions about who you’re letting in. And also you can see who’s doing what with what to some degree. 

 

You can see what people are accessing at least. And the incentive to be a good actor in a marketplace is access to the marketplace. A bad actor on the user side would lose access to the what will be the world’s largest and broadest set of repo of genomic data, to be a bad actor on the provider side would be to lose the opportunity to regain revenue against an invaluable natural resource. Basically using a marketplace to do things that you otherwise have to do with like law or again, back to regulation and so on and so forth. We’re not in the enforcement business. We are in the membership business.

 

Simone Cicero 

But doesn’t this sound, sorry for the interruption, but I want to drop some, doesn’t sound like, know, it’s funny because whenever I read your essay, like 10 years ago, it was the age of Airbnb and Uber and everybody, you know, we were talking about sharing economy and I was very active in the space. And I, with my friends at WeShare, we were doing these conferences where we were asking questions, whether the sharing economy would have had good or bad as societal outcomes. And this idea that you vet the people in the marketplace, know, the Uber driver will be vet and the Airbnb will be vetting the users. But still you have sometimes that it will be this guy that rents the Airbnb and runs this crazy thing and maybe somebody dies, right? So the question is with Fairfield bio – what happens if somebody makes a koala as a gene that is going to kill the generations because it screws up their DNA? And so what I’m asking here is – Can we do something about it? Or really, we can’t, right? It’s just, you know, it’s the same question I’m asking, was it better in the 90s or not, really, right? 

 

Before all this crazy technology acceleration we had.

 

Slavin

I think one of the main differences here is that -the goals of Fairfield Bio are not to provide endless growth to the number of participants in the system.

 

The goals are to provide endless growth in the value of the data in the system to a relatively finite number of participants. Like our goal is not to get more and more people and et cetera onto the platform, which if you are Uber or Airbnb, that’s your job, right? Your job is growth and growth is measured by the number of users.

 

For us, growth will be measured by the value that we can deliver to the users. And that value will scale as we get more and more diverse data into the system. So I think that’s a really, our objectives are not focused on monthly average users. They are focused on the value of the data that the users can gain. So I think that’s for us.

 

Simone Cicero 

That’s interesting because at the end of the day, the definition of value, it’s a very crucial thing. So it’s like a moral aspect that you have to play in the… So to judge what’s available, you will have to take a position.

 

Slavin

That’s right. That’s right. And we understand that to be our role is to take a position. And what are we optimizing for? The growth that we are optimizing for is in the number of sequences in the repo. And the rest is up to the world to to bring forth the folks who should be providing that data and the folks who should be using that data, which is not infinite. And we don’t want it to be infinite. So that’s part of it. And the other part of it is that I think there are a lot of concerns about the ways that the intersection of AI and biology produce novel threats in the world. 

 

I, you know, my partner and I worked, we met working in global biosecurity. It was definitely a theme, a topic in our work. Different people feel different ways about this. Mine is not an especially qualified take, but it’s informed. I would say it’s informed but not well qualified. 

 

And my position is this, that if we are going to be kept awake at night because of biological threats, which is not unreasonable, but if we’re going to be kept awake at night over the threat of biological threats, there have been plenty, and there are plenty, that are not very difficult to deploy that don’t need AI or anything really that fancy. And if I were a bad actor and I was setting out to do something with biology, I wouldn’t start with AI and synthetic biology. I would start with a bunch of things that I’m not going to talk about on a podcast.

 

Simone Cicero 

Okay. Yeah, that’s better, right?

 

Slavin 

But, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I just mean that like, I’m not worried about everybody’s ability to 3D print guns. I’m worried about the fact that guns are already just so easy to get, right? So, yeah.

 

Simone Cicero

Yeah. So maybe we can close it, right? And close the conversation around the idea that you have to ask questions. You have to optimize for something, right? You don’t just make these things happen. You don’t just move fast and break things, right? You have to think what you’re doing. You have to make a choice in terms of what you design, the approach you design it. And so I think it would be, it’s a nice way to close the conversation to get the listeners to these, to maybe read your essay and ask questions after reading it. I think it’s a powerful question generator, let’s say. 

 

There are some, characteristics on the world we’re living in. We cannot do much about, you know, it’s a continuous strategy of the common, it’s a complex system, game theory everywhere. So you have to deal with that. You have to make some choices and design optimize your entrepreneurial work and your design work in a way that it’s in line with what questions you want to ask.

 

Slavin 

Yeah, I agree. think understanding what outcomes you want will change the questions that you ask. If the outcome that you want is to eat the world, you build software to eat the world. If the outcome that you want is to feed the world, you do something else. And I think it really starts with identifying the outcome.

 

It starts with identifying who needs to be incentivized how, in order to produce that. Not what do I want them to want, but what do they actually want? And how do I build something that mediates between the outcome that I want for the world and the actual desires that people have. 

 

And I think it’s important to note that like there’s plenty of desires that people or nation states have that are not noble, that aren’t great, you know, and there are a million ways to prey upon the things that, in quotes, people want.

 

And that is part of how we got into the mess that we’re in. People really want to be independent and move fast. So everybody has cars. There’s all kinds of problems that emerge from that. But I think there are also – There are parts of what, there are different types of desires that people and entities and institutions have. And I think part of it maybe is figuring out which part of that are we going to speak to and how are we going to speak? 

 

And again, just to bring it back, and when we do speak to those desires that are meaningful and that could produce something meaningful to speak with humility and care.

 

Simone Cicero 

I think it’s nice that if you think about your article, right, in the article you speak about Cedric Price, and I think we cannot avoid quoting him when he said, you know, technology is the answer, but what was the question, right? And I think even thinking about finding solace in somewhere or somebody telling us, don’t worry, it’s going to be fine.

 

That’s not the case. It’s a lazy thing to do. So it’s really asking the question, the important part. And it’s not just the design thing. It’s asking the question, why we’re doing this? What are the outcomes we’re going to generate with this? So I think that’s a great place to end the conversation. 

 

So before letting you go, I think you have for sure some special gifts in terms of suggestions and breadcrumbs that you want to share with our listeners. So something that inspired you and I’m pretty sure it can inspire tons of people listening to this podcast.

 

Slavin

I recently reread A visit from the Goon Squad, which is fiction by Jennifer Egan. It’s from, I want to say like 10 or 15 years ago. I read it quite some time ago and I recently reread it and she’s not the only writer to ever do this, it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen in that it’s a… I wouldn’t call it a novel per se in that it’s non-linear. It takes place over broadly, maybe about an 80-year period among a set of characters who at times intersect.

 

Each chapter takes two or three of them maybe, and occasionally they intersect. And what she writes is basically a world. And it’s a world at roughly the scale of an entire human life. And first of all, she’s just such a fantastic writer, and the characters are so rich and and they’re beautiful but I think also as I was rereading it recently you know I thought like well this is part of what I love about it is is that it doesn’t doesn’t center around a protagonist you know with an antagonist and you know it doesn’t it doesn’t doesn’t fall into the the structures of how we are used to telling stories and instead it just sort of builds a world over over time and I I really I really appreciate that. I think there’s also, there’s very few reddits that could actually pull that off, but she does. So that’s fantastic.

 

Simone Cicero

And it really resonates with your work as well, right? This world building thing.

 

Slavin 

There’s one other, the book that I’m reading right now, I’m only, started it, but it’s fantastic, is by Richard Dawkins. It’s called The Genetic Book of the Dead. And it’s very, very closely related to the work that I’m doing in its own weird way. But it’s basically the idea that at some point in the future. hopefully I will be helping to make that future, like playing a role in that future. We will be able to read all life on Earth as if it’s a book. And that what we read Dawkins proposes, and this is a very beautiful idea, that what you see when you’re looking at a species is not just what the species is, but the history of the planet that produced it. You know, the, the lizard is this way because of the specific circumstances of geography and time and, and resource availability and so on and so forth. And that, and that what you’re doing when you’re reading that book of the dead, you know, which is all, you know, base pairs of DNA, what you’re doing is you’re reading the history of all life itself. 

 

And it’s a really, it’s such a beautiful idea. I’m only a little bit into it, so I can’t vouch that it’s fantastic all the way through, it’s a very, it’s a beautiful idea and so far it’s fantastic.

 

Simone Cicero 

Again, thank you so much for these two suggestions, which are also a bit off the typical suggestions list that our listeners get. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. It was somehow triggered some thoughts. I hope maybe we can have, we had an impact on what’s coming up at Fairfield Bio. That’s going to be great. And I encourage people to, of course, follow your work, even if you’re not so prolific in public, I must say. I would have loved to read more stuff from you in the last 10 years, but at least go and read Design as Participation because that’s going to change the way you look at your work. And again, thank you so much, Kevin. 

 

It’s been pleasure and I know you have so much to do and I appreciate it.

 

Slavin 

Thank you. Thanks very much. All right, take care.

 

Simone Cicero 

And to our listeners, of course, you need to head to boundarylees.io/resources/podcast, and you will find this episode with all the things that Kevin spoke about. And until we speak again, of course, remember to think Boundaryless.