That's big, and you are still a professor.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a professor.

Um, I am on a permanent sabbatical, I guess, but I also still run a research team, and the way that works is the university and the company manage the conflicts of interest.

'Cause in a way, I'm the CSO.

Well, not in a way, I'm the CSO of the company, but I have no s- re- research team in the company.

It's very efficient to have the research team in my, in my, in the university, and then, uh, and vi- via various methods, um, we manage to kind of make it okay.

Mm-hmm

... and actually the...

So how does this work? Give us some tips

here.

I mean, I'm a full-time CEO, but I'm also on a sabbatical, but I'm running a research team.

And I mean, I think the simple answer to that is they're solving one big problem, right? Which is how to manipulate matter and encode it.

And I think that, you know, I've got an enormous amount of investment in Chemify.

So lots of jobs, lots of investor money, lots of expectation.

So I feel that my focus has to be on making sure this technology is not only works, but is useful and addresses the market.

I'm wondering, what do you take away from those clues about the origin of life? What do you think this story might have been?

Tour there gave a, a, a long definition of why he's very skeptical about your position, so here's your chance to respond.

Uh, thank you.

Yeah, so I think we have to, we have to understand we're doing science, right? And what, what James is saying, Professor Tour is saying, he's making s- arguments that don't make any scientific sense because he's saying 'cause it's hard it couldn't have happened, it broke a law.

Let me take an example of a mobile phone.

Mobile phone exists today, but explain to me how it all came together.

Explain where the parts came from, how they got refined, where the metals came from.

Just because a problem is hard, it doesn't mean it's, it's not gonna be f- solved.

Respond.

Élan vital

...

Experience and Truth.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, uh, and I real- and, you know, and H- Henri and Einstein were, uh, you know, famously, they had a debate, and everyone thought that Henri lost and Einstein lost, but actually it's the other way around, and it's because Einstein didn't really understand what life is.

And this is...

And so life is, because life is unfolding, and the way the future works and the way time is, in that H- uh, Henri had a understa- exactly.

So like when you think about the beginnings of something that wants to keep going, like the origins, the impetus of the conatus, from you, what is its seed? What would be the assembly theory take here to explain this crazy process?

Terms and conditions apply.

[dramatic music] [audience applauding] Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and get reverse engineering.

And as a chemist, one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? In essence, could we app chemistry? Now, what would this mean and how would we do it? Well, to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reaction ware.

And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry.

Now, what could this mean? Well, if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a, a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you wanna kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way.

So how are we doing this in the lab? Well, it requires software, it requires hardware, and it requires chemical inks.

And so the really cool bit is the idea is we wanna have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device.

[chuckles]

"But actually, uh, for fifty years, people have been working on complexity, and it took-- and there is no general theory.

I would encourage you to actually work on proper topics in science rather than tackle this." And I was like, "Whoa! Gosh." And what I was trying to say to him is like, "No, no, I actually think I have a solution to the tautological problem of élan vital tautology, complexity, and emergence," because I came up with a new problem that I think I was gonna try and solve.

And that's why kind of I started.

When I actually left, um, my PhD, I went and did a postdoc.

I went and did a postdoc in Germany with a professor who made the biggest inorganic molecules ever, and he literally l-- just took nothing more complicated than some salt, um, this is, this is a salt of a metal called molybdate, molybdenum, and you add a bit of acid to it, and they would form gigantic rings or balls with many hundreds of atoms in them, just magically.

I was like, "How did that happen?" And what happens is that it was, uh, the-- I went to work with him for a y- for just over a year as a Humboldt fellow to study that problem and say, "Well, where is the point of, for want of a better phrase, creation, or a better phrase, templation? How does a small thing become a big thing in chemistry and become-- exist for a long time?" So that's when I started to think about the problem of origin of life in terms of s-- a way that a thing can come into existence.

Yeah.

and doesn't have an external description and is causally deep um and it's really the causal depth that is leading to these weird phenomena in quantum mechanics and selection along causal depth you know eventually you know from molecules all the way up to us is what leads to to living structures so there's this interesting set of ideas emerging that are really exciting i think in that space go ahead lee

So I think we can be very precise about it.

And so I don't want to misspeak Jacob's work, but I think he's onto something extremely interesting.

And I think what was really interesting is that he was led there by some kind of interesting mathematical interpretation, which led me to see a causation in quantum mechanics.

And this was so interesting.

And he's already published some of this.

He's talked about some of this.

Can you spell out how assembly theory treats evolution biological evolution as a more general or maybe it's a more specific it's a special case of this more general causal principle

But what really distinguishes the two cases?

Yeah, I've, I used to worry about that.

Like, where's the creativity come from? Like is human, all human beings, creativity, just basically given at birth when that cell gets fertilized and that frozen accident, those initial conditions are responsible for way the human acts.

Um, I don't think it's quite that, but I think humans have a very interesting ability.

Um, number one, they can come up with things.

They can come up with creative acts.

that we could not in principle predict.

And I'm wondering why that would be or what the distinction would be since we created it, its intelligence would come from us.

So now tell me exactly what Chemify does.

Chemify was doing a number of different things, but what the market sees is, "Hey, Chemify, I want you to design me a really interesting molecule that will solve this particular problem." So it could be a drug, it could be like a dye, could be a fragrance even.

We will then basically turn that desire, that request and put it into our engine.

And then we basically calculate a load of various configurations which of virtual molecules in the memory of the computer.

The process we call computation turns those suggestions in the computer memory and literally, for want of a better phrase, prints them out in the laboratory for real.

And that's what we're going to market with.

And that's really exciting because we can make really complicated molecules that human beings cannot make by hand 'cause they would get too tired or they're too dangerous or literally we just don't n- have the knowledge encoded.

Mm-hmm.