Lee Cronin: Chemist trying to make life from chemistry discusses genius, being wrong & Twitter mobs

Lee Cronin [00:00:00] I mean, I taught myself a version of mathematics when I was four or five, which I didn't really understand was a fairly useful, but I couldn't explain it to anyone. So that's one of the reasons why I ended up in the, in the, in the, in the Learning Difficulties class, because people said, you can't count. I was like, well, no, I just invented a new system. It's much better than that. Why would I do that?

Vance Crowe [00:00:22] Hi, I'm Dan Crow, a small business owner living in Central Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Buckle up. We are in for a wild ride. I have Dr. Lee Cronin on the podcast, who is a chemist that is trying to actually hop the chasm between chemistry and biology. And we have a wild far ranging discussion about chemistry, about new ideas, about being the type of person that was put all the way in the learning disabled kids, and eventually becoming one of the most renowned scientists that talks to other scientists like Stephen Wolfram and many others on a regular basis. This conversation was a blast. We talk about things like dreams and aspirations and curiosity and novelty search. So while this is a little off of the beaten path from some of the other interviews we did, I wanna say a big thank you to Yoshi Bach for pointing me in the direction of Lee Cronin. Before we get to that, I want to talk a little bit about the Articulate Ventures network. Right now, I am able to use the network to beta test. Some of my classes, you guys that have been longtime listeners of the podcast, know that I teach things like negotiations and how to introduce yourself. Well, next month we are going to be doing a class where I'm working on helping people learn how to talk about your research so that people are interested and engaged and can figure out how your research applies to things that they care about.

Vance Crowe [00:02:04] What we do in the A VN is members get a chance to be a part of the group of five to 10 people that I have in the class that I test out my ideas with. And then before I publish these classes to the broader public, we also get another test run. So people get to see it, play with it, give me feedback. And if you wanna be the type of person that is involved in a network and gets that feedback and helps me produce these classes, give it a shot. And if not, then you can always wait for me to publish the classes publicly and then you can take them for yourselves. Because what we're trying to do is to help people become tangibly better communicators. So if you're interested in joining the Articulate Ventures Network, go to network dot Articulate Ventures to sign up and become a member that sometimes gets to sit in on classes and have me pressure test your ideas, give you feedback, help you make it better, and then use your work as an example. Or if not, sign up on our newsletter to be able to know when these classes are published for the public. I'm really looking forward to seeing you there. And if you'd like to find out more and sign up for the newsletter, you can go to Vance Crowe dot com slash podcast. Alright, without further ado, let's go to this wild and amazing interview with Dr. Lee Cronin. Lee Cronin, welcome to the podcast.

Lee Cronin [00:03:25] It's good to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Vance Crowe [00:03:27] So you're a curious character. The only thing I really knew about you before I started doing research for this podcast were two things. One, that you are a scientist that is trying to somehow create life from chemistry. And two, you got in a dustup on Twitter that required you to go out and make a public apology, which then brought you to my attention. So these two factors put together made you one of the most ideal candidates for a podcast. I could imagine.

Lee Cronin [00:03:57] Twitter's such a horrid platform, sometimes you can't have a conversation with anyone. It was very funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I can tell you about that.

Vance Crowe [00:04:05] Let's start with what your lab does. So you actually run a lab, and the way that I would distill it all the way down is you're trying to take chemistry, which is a non-living concept, and turn it somehow into biology. Is that a fair representation?

Lee Cronin [00:04:21] Yeah, so the lab, so I'm a, I'm a, I'm a chemist. I mean, I'm, well, I suppose I'm a card carrying chemist. I studied chemistry, but really, I've always been interested in how the universe works. And I always took a deep under, well, I wanted to, I want to think deeply about the universe. I'm not sure I do, but I, the way I do theory is by doing experiments, I'm really a theoretician, but I try and I try and come up with theory that are very close to experiments. So I like to play with reality. So the, the, the, the, one of the biggest questions I've always had is, what is the difference between dead? What is the difference between sand and life? Like, you know, how do I go from sand to cells or dead dirt to cells? So my lab is looking at that. In the process of kind of thinking about how that works, I had to invent some robotics. So I've got these drug making robots that I was gonna call Heisenberg for fun, but then my group got, you know, said they, you know, got Alexa and say, Alexa, please do this and have Heisenberg please make, but no, that's, that was a joke. But there is a serious side because if we can use robots to make drugs that humanity needs or you know, anything, pesticides on demand, antibacterial things, things like that could be really important. And so there is the, where does life come from? I needed a robotics for that. I built some robots, I realized can make drugs. Then when I realized I could use the robots to do chemistry, I thought, can chemistry be like a computer? So can I use a chemistry set to make a computational system to ask questions?

Lee Cronin [00:05:54] And then the other thing we're doing is asking what the hell it all means is, is there information language in the universe that kind of gets brought to life by chemistry in some way? And then biology.

Vance Crowe [00:06:07] So I think you have an idea really compressed in your mind that it doesn't quite compute for me when you say, I have robots making drugs. I'm just imagining you saying, you know, mix vial A with mile vial B, is that what you're saying?

Lee Cronin [00:06:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a little bit, it's, I'd like to dress it up and make it sound, you know, much more, I don't know, Tony starker, but it's not, it's really simple what we've worked, chemistry is a very practical subject. You wanna, and I realized this years ago when people were trying to make chemical robots and they were writing out all these equations and chemistry, but I'm like, you put some crap in that pot. Am I allowed to swear, put some other crap in the other pot? And then, you know, I mean, I did say I was gonna make crack, right, the crack pot, but that was my group. Again, don't like my humor. So you take some stuff in pot A, you mix it with stuff in pot B, you heat it, then you then purify it, and then you, you go through serious steps. Chemistry is really about cooking. It's like, so the code that we've got, the robotics literally does that, but at a higher level, it can take the reaction, say, oh, if I want to do that reaction, I translate that into a recipe that I can understand. And then I then, then bring it down to what do I do at the practical level? And that's the trick. That's the leap that we've made that no one thought we could do. The robot practically understands how to mix stuff together to get the reactions to work.

Vance Crowe [00:07:33] This is like at its very core. So I had Jim Rutt, we did a virtual reality podcast on just the other day, and he was talking about how most of the time when people are talking about artificial intelligence, they're really just talking about really quick information processing within a closed system. But not that the, that the machine itself discovers something new or comes to a form of consciousness where it can take apart something and recompile it in a different format. It sounds like that's what you're describing.

Lee Cronin [00:08:02] That's one element to it. We want to get to that. I mean, artificial intelligence is the worst term ever, basically, I would call it not intelligent at all. I would call it something else. I just call it basically inferred cur curve fitting. It's like basically, oh, I don't know, I, I, I, I like using the math. It's basically applied mathematics, that's all it is. It's applied mathematics, but we want to use that applied mathematics to set up the context for doing real, looking at what intelligence is. That's the exciting thing in the chemistry lab. I've always thought that there's something missing that people want to suddenly take a chemistry textbook, do machine learning, like, I don't know, natural language processing or read it or something, have, you know, Google chemistry, read it and then say, oh, I can make this drug. But the thing is that the information to make that drug, the data, the intelligence isn't encoded in that book. So all you learn is a little nonsense. And so what we had to do is say, hang on, let's make a robot that when you give it, say put viol and vi B and do these things, they understands that in a hard way. And once we've got, we can make a link between what the robot does and what the chemistry comes out at the other end, then we can start to infer and do discovery. And so what we are doing is, I, I think what we're doing is we're inventing the, like the, the, it is like the analog of making the first computer.

Lee Cronin [00:09:34] The first computer needed to be programmed. So people built computers that are transistors and, and, and those are the things they got to work. But what people are doing now, ai, particularly chemistry and materials and whatever, they're saying, oh, we don't think there's, we'll just pretend there's a robot and we'll just make stuff up and then we'll come up with a language and can you read the language? And that's just a, that's just a divide by zero. And I rem and I made that mistake myself many years ago where I made the language, I took it to my group, to my, the experts in my team said, use this language. And they said, and it was kind of the equivalent of me going, you saying, look, I've just learned cling on, I love Star Trek. You're gonna learn cling on 'cause it's gonna be more efficient. You'd be like, no, I don't want us featuring Cling on. I'm quite happy using this language. Go away and make cling on useful to me and then I will talk. And that's what my lab did. So I then went away and then invented the robot and said, oh, I've got this robot, would you like anyone? Oh, that's kind of cool. And I said, now will you learn cling on to program it? They went, oh, okay. As long as you can turn the cling on into English. So that's what we we're, we've kind of got right now.

Vance Crowe [00:10:39] And how far advanced is your language? Have other people been able to make commits to it? And you're, you've allowed it to be open so that it, they can change and evolve itself.

Lee Cronin [00:10:48] So that's a really good point. The language is just about to be made open in the next month or so. It's called K dl. It's a chemical programming language, but it's so simple and obvious that people will be able to use it. And we have got, we're working, we're maybe four teams around the world in the US and Canada, in Germany, in Poland. And they're making commits. And what the key thing is, our language isn't just easy to use, but it runs on their robots. It's a bit like I've made a language that will run on not just the Android, but on the Apple. And that's the killer app, literally, to make sure that the, the computer program runs on lots of different platforms. So it's not just my robot now, but any robot that has the right control system can do the chemistry.

Vance Crowe [00:11:37] And so when you are imagining all of the time you put this, you like, something had to drive you to put all this together, all of this time, what do you think is going to be discovered as a result of this energy you've put into creating a language and building robots? And

Lee Cronin [00:11:52] I want to discover the origin of life, right? I wanna make a new life form. That was my reason for doing it. But I realized, I mean, I get into trouble with chemists because the chemists say, you know, I'm being bad to them because I'm, I'm a chemist, I love chemistry. But I do think some chemists are a bit boring because they're just doing routine stuff. And also it's like anything, it's not just chemistry. It's physics does the same, biology does the same, what is it that happens? You get deep specialists who are really good at something and they protect their boundaries and say, oh, you can't do it like this. So when I started and said, I'm gonna make a robot that will do organic chemistry went, that's impossible. It's too hard. I'm like, okay, so is organic chemistry magic? They're like, no, no, you don't understand. You are not one of us. You don't really understand. You're not good enough. Like, okay, well that's good. I know I'm not good enough. I've not been good enough for a very long time. And then I just say, I say, when people say, tell me something is not possible, I say, why? If they can't gimme a reason why I just ignore them and do it. Because, so what I expect will be possible is that we will discover new drugs and we'll discover new ways of manufacturing chemicals that people need in a, like, like an Amazon if you like, right? Rather than having to, you know, get the stuff at a, you know, a chemical plant. Maybe you can make it locally, maybe you could do it in your own house. May, maybe you can make personal medicine. Maybe if you are, you know, you've got some kind of industry, maybe you want to make cer certain objects for antibacterial use, you'd be able to make them like that.

Vance Crowe [00:13:24] This sounds like the dream of 3D printing. And I was one of the people that became hyper convinced that 3D printing within five years was going to just, you know, you'd be able to be on a ship, a tool would break, you could just print it yourself and be just fine. And that future hasn't materialized. But I guess I'm patient enough to imagine a world in which material science becomes much better. And you can do that how long, how, how, how, I guess maybe how much excitement do you want people to have about this? Because if they don't have enough excitement, you won't be able to get them to, to learn cling on in order to build in it. But if they're too excited, then it blows up on the, on the launch pad.

Lee Cronin [00:14:03] Oh, it's, it's already been blowing up on the launch pad for the last eight years. Okay. I invented it in 2012, I think. And so, but now it works. No, no, no, we are, I mean, what I can say right now about fear of contradiction is if you wanted a chemical robot that you could put in a, in a shack somewhere and get it to make, so what I did for fun is I got, I, how am I gonna get people to turn around and like listen, right? So I said to my group, right, we need to make three drugs, one robot, three drugs, three different sets of code. And I said, right, we'll make NIT L, which is a sleeping drug, we'll make Finide, which is only seizure med and we'll make Viagra.

Vance Crowe [00:14:40] This is a harder problem I everybody attention

Lee Cronin [00:14:44] It actually is quite a difficult synthesis because it's kind of toxic and so on. So we made those three things. Sure, the, the robot fails, it's an academic robot, you know, it's like most academics, it kind of falls asleep now and then and doesn't understand deadlines and all that stuff. But we, but we've made it more and more modular. And so now the robot we've got in the lab, we've got 12 of them, we've started a company called Chey. So you can go there, C-H-E-M-I-F-Y, io, like Spotify. So the idea one day is that people will write code like MP three, MP fours post them, and then you can download the code and run it and make the molecule you want and it'll work every time. So no, it's not, will it happen in 5, 10, 20 years? Like some things like maybe people are still waiting for quantum computing, chemical computing or the MPU works. Now the only barrier is from me making it more reliable and convincing people to use it and making repertoire larger.

Vance Crowe [00:15:45] Man, when I first got involved in the synthetic biology world, and I met John Cumber who was talking all about like, look, we'll be able to make all of these chemicals from, you know, biology. We'll be able to synthesize it in a way, the very next thing that happened was he had to have the FBI stand up at the SIN bio conferences and be like, no, if you see something, say something. But on your level, what you are describing have, have the, has the A TF knocked on your door and said like, excuse me sir, we need to talk about what you're putting out into the world here.

Lee Cronin [00:16:16] Well, I mean there is a question about that. So we'll come to that. So first of all, synthetic biology, the synthetic biologists are kind of making stuff up. Synthetic biology is not programmable. I can tell you why that is, right? It just doesn't work. I know John, I've been pushed to name years, it doesn't work. What does work is I can synthesize some DNA and I can put it in a cell and I can do genetic engineering a bit, a bit, but it doesn't really work that we should kind of annoying. So if I said to you in general, I wanna put this gene in this plant, can I do it? And you're like, no, you might, if you gimme $10 million and a few labs, what I'm saying right now is the chemistry I can get off the shelf right now will work every single time. As long as I've done it once before. Now, should the FBI or the A TF or whoever come to me and say, well not really, because I'm a chemist and I know how to make molecules, I could go and make those molecules by hand tomorrow and I am making them. I suppose with synthetic biology, the fear is that someone makes a new virus, right? But look, oh no, I wouldn't make a joke about COVID. 'cause actually not very fair. And it, we are living through some really hard times. I would say that right now I'm not advocating for people making new dangerous molecules. I'm saying all the molecules we know that are out there, we can now make robotically. So if anything, it's more safe because would you want to go and make an explosive by hand? If you could make it far away with a robot, you know, kind of in another room, would you want to make a toxic material that is potential anti-cancer drug, but is also potentially toxic to you if you spill it on you?

Lee Cronin [00:17:48] No, do it in another room. Would you like to make a radioactive label for tracing, you know, for a biomark, a marker to trace what you know to image a tumor, which then you have a lot. So actually, yes, of course we need to be super careful about the societal implications, but my job is to make sure it works reliably, make sure that we can open it up so that more molecules are accessible. And of course I have ideas how to protect it and to stop people basically joking aside, making crystal meth on demand and things like that. And the question is, how do we enable more drug discovery and worry about, you know, the first world problem. We, there's, there's a, are we all drug abuser? Are we all on drugs? No. Do we all need drugs? Yes. And does the poorest part of the world, you know, like is like the bottom billion not got any access to drugs because of this? So we need to put, get our priorities straight, I think,

Vance Crowe [00:18:47] Yeah, I mean I think that if I have one fault, it is not clamping down enough. It's the opposite. Like I would rather just let a million flowers bloom and see what happens and then kind of deal with the consequences later. Yeah, I agree. I was just curious if anybody had been knocking on

Lee Cronin [00:19:01] I agree. I mean, I, I, I mean I think that, you know, if I get to the point where people would be willing to ingest material made in my robots, I would both be horrified and gratified horrified, because I don't want people to be making illegal drugs, but gratified because I think I might have convinced the FDA or the European meds or UK medical society that this might just save some lives and reduce the, the cost of drugs. So the, right now you make drugs in the plant, the plant works for the pan life one, the pattern is expired or repurpose the plant, that drug is no longer accessible anymore. My robot makes it like a Kindle ebook reader. No books go out of print. They're all you presented as you need on time, every time perfectly. That's the dream. Then obviously you need to do about copyright kindle. You want, if you worry about copyright my robot, you're gonna worry about people repurposing it and hacking it and making bad things or cool new drugs that we don't want population to be taking. And there are things we have to deal with and we're owning a better deal with them if we encourage the technology to be developed openly, transparently. And we're society saying, Hey, what are we doing? Are we, we still will drink alcohol, but we can't smoke cannabis or you know, you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't have any view. I'm a, I'm a professional chemist. I'm employed by Glasgow University. I, I abide the law of the country that I'm in, and I, and my aspirations are to make people better and, and kind of have fun and, you know, discover if, if aliens exist, the drug laws are beyond me.

Vance Crowe [00:20:45] So that's interesting. So you've just described it, I wanna discover if aliens are exist, and you mentioned before about creating life and that's your goal. Let's explore that a little bit because one of the challenges with saying I want to create life is the, the problem of definition, right? You as if you wanna say, I want to create life, then you have to define what life is. But as soon as you start defining it, then you start already building the thing that you're trying to define when you have something as complex as life. So how do you think about what is living and what is it that you're, when will you know it is that you've been successful?

Lee Cronin [00:21:20] Yeah, that's really the important question about def definition is a real problem. And so I will take a step back. In fact, I'm not gonna define it. And so, well, and the way I'm gonna do it is I'm, how do define, let's take a second. Let's define flight. Let's be before the Wright brothers or before the Mongol fear, were they brothers as well? There's all these brothers flying, right? All the, so there's so, so before people being up in balloons or airplanes, we saw birds and insects and maybe flying squirrels or gliding squirrels. So we had a concept that if you put some energy in, you could put, you could float. So that looked kind of okay, birds are kind of weird looking. They're, you know, so human beings are often fantasized about it. And then when people realize, okay, you can go light in there, you can fly. So, okay, that so is in a balloon flying like a bird. Well, it's the definition there is you'll beating in gravity and you're able to go up and you have a little bit of control. Now in the, we're the Wright brothers or whoever flew, they were like, they just went a few yards powered flight and then fast forward, you know, a hundred or so years for me, a flight, I define flight as, you know, a powered machine or can get on their wings, there's a control system and I can fly, you know, 30,000 feet above and land safely, right? So it's kind of new loose definition of flight. But for me, the it, I can kind of encapsulate it with some features.

Lee Cronin [00:22:52] Now, let's take a step back and say, well what does, how on earth do we define life? You fall into the same problem as flight. You know, if there's wings, it's not it, there's no wings that can't fly. Well, Elon Musk has manages to fly, right? There's no wings there, they're little bitty things. So what do you, so you then you get stuck. So what, what does flying, let's not define, let's not define flight or airplanes. What does flight do? Oh, it gets you in the air and you stay there for a bit and hopefully you come down in a nice controlled way. So what does life do? So can we define what life does and not get into all this shenanigans of, you know, cells doing this? And so I will put it really simply, and I think I have an answer that is not the answer, but yeah, the answer. So life is able to create objects, artifacts, songs, offensive content, whatever you want that can't form randomly in an environment. So that, so what that does is when you see ev in abundance, so that's life can do complex things in abundance. So that means not one off, right? So if I go, so life can make an iPhone, here's my iPhone, latest one. Okay? Some smart ask physicists would say, oh yeah, that could randomly form. Well, no, it can't. I mean there's the chances this randomly form is precisely zero, not very small, just zero. But let's say I go to Mars and I find an iPhone, my grumpy physicist friend say, oh, you just found one that could be a random event.

Lee Cronin [00:24:30] Even though I'm turning it on and I'm calling my mom or something. If I found a thousand identical iPhones with a com similarity, I know that they have been made by a life form. Okay? And the same goes for a protein or a, a complex enough piece of DNA. So life does complex things the background non-life cannot do. And that is my working, not definition, but thing that life does. And what I want to do is make something that can do complex stuff from scratch. And that's really the acid test as it were.

Vance Crowe [00:25:06] So, because this is the best thing that I can think of to open up your argument a little bit, how would you define that as different than say like a cloud that you know, the, the water forming together creates enough friction to make lightning and thunder and these other things,

Lee Cronin [00:25:22] Clouds, there's a phenomena of clouds. I can answer this, but they're not, they're not, the, the clouds don't exist. So when I'm talking about object iPhone identical, I'm not, if you find one, if you find me 10 identical clouds identical down to the, you know, the pattern in the sky and show me them, then I'll, yeah, okay, they're alive, but you won't, right? They are complex assemblies, but they are not living because there is no information that caused them. Same of hurricanes on Jupiter or on earth or a flame. There's lots of flames, but they don't have enough features. So, you know, if you see a cloud in the sky that looks like a Monet painting, I can tell you lots of Monet paintings, you'll only find a one-off. And it's association. So the, so when you see, so the thing is although the phone is not alive, the phone is not alive. The cor the causal structure or the sequence of events that produced the phone was alive. A protein is not alive, but the sequence of events that gave a protein is alive. COVID-19, when it is not in your cell, a virus is not alive, but it is produced by evolution. And when it goes into a cell, it is alive. And so what we start to do is this definition says, ah, viruses alive or dead. Wrong question. Were viruses produced by evolution? Yes. Was an iPhone produced by evolution? Sure. 'cause ge Steve Jobs annoying as he is to some hero to others.

Lee Cronin [00:26:57] He was evolved. Same Elon Musk in this Elon Musk as an alien. We we could talk about that as well. So, so what I'm saying is that really complex objects that conform in abundance, IE identical copies are the only way to do it is through evolution. And the only thing that we know that can do evolution in a, an autonomous way is life. Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:27:19] You landed the plane on that one. I, I find that to be a very, a fascinating concept. And I understand deeply when I heard you talking about it on a movie that you were in a documentary, the challenge of the definition because life is one of those things that philosophers can sit and, and talk abstractly about. And, and if they try and hang in the ordinary way that you define a term with a genus and a species, then, then by virtue of doing that, it puts you down a trajectory where you say the only way to succeed is to already know the answer before we've even started. Yeah.

Lee Cronin [00:27:55] And I had an argument with Steven Wolfram about this is a mathematician who's very smart, but the problem is he knows he is smart. I mean, I'm not smart, but I know I'm not smart. So this is my, this is my superpower. And and so he was saying, oh no, I know what life is, so I don't know that you'll ever define life because aliens will always look too complicated. I'm like, no, no, no. We will be able to tell aliens and living things in the universe by using this argument and uniquely this argument. And it's because Wolfram and most physicists don't really understand information. It's a really, I'm really saying outrageous things today. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:28:32] That is actually heretical. I read a new kind of science. This is, this is something that I would imagine he would come through the computer and attack you if you said that they don't understand information,

Lee Cronin [00:28:42] They understand how to manipulate information very well in the human context, but they don't understand how information is invented by the universe. I I think I have a notion of how to do it. And yeah, I think that the, the physicists are kind of in their own little bubble. And the same way the organic chemists think that they have control over how to make molecules. The physicists and the computer scientists think they understand information. No, they don't.

Vance Crowe [00:29:09] So the way that I got turned on to you was Yosha Bach was out there talking about you. And so before I did this interview, he's somebody that's known to my listeners, somebody I highly respect. I asked him, you know, Hey, tell me, you know, what should I expect in this interview with Lee Cronin? And I want to quote this precisely. He said he daress to be wrong, but he tends to be wrong in interesting and productive ways. And he always seems to ask himself what his theories allow him to build. You think that's a fair assessment?

Lee Cronin [00:29:37] Yeah, I would say so. That's really nice of him. Yeah. I mean, I don't mind being wrong, but the process of me telling you what I'm trying to do allows me to construct a validatory experiment or in the invalidator experiment and we learn more. It's one of the things I've always learned as a scientist that, you know, I grew up, when I was at school, I was in the kind of, in the, in the, in the learning difficulties class. And I couldn't ever understand while I was there. 'cause I, you know, I wanted to be smart and I was, it was a great source of, of disappointment when, when I kept learning, I wasn't, so I kept at the teacher and said, well, why am I dumb? And they were like, 'cause you're dumb, right? And I was like, but why? And and so, so I would say, and they say, well you can't do this. And well, I'll go away and do it and say, well, am I still dumb? And they say, well, yeah, yeah, you're still a bit dumb, but that's good. You know, and like, so what I would do is I would, you know, that's the way I do science now is universe tells me I'm dumb. So I do an experiment. Am I still dumb? And the universe might go, well that kind of worked. So I think that that, so I think that a lot of people, a lot of scientists say my secret weapon is I'm happy to be dumb as long as I'm able to come up with new ideas that make me less dumb. And I think that is what science is. That's why hopefully one day I might all be all right, you know, an average scientist or whatever that is. Whereas a lot of top scientists are terrified of being wrong. But if you're terrified of being wrong and you are paid because you have to be wrong, then all that happens is you do really boring conservative stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:31:11] Well, that's an interesting thing, particularly because you mentioned Stephen Wolfram earlier. One of my good friends picked up a Stephen Wolfram book from the library. It might have been a new kind of science or something else. And inside of it was a handwritten note by a mathematician that said, you should read this book with caution because he Wolfram is afraid to put this up to peer review. And because he's afraid of that, then we don't actually know whether or not this is true or not. Which, which actually brings up an interesting conundrum for you because you are willing to be wrong and you are, you're inside of the, the, the weird ivory tower that is academia. And yet you found a way to be wrong in interesting ways, discover new things and still fit in in the system. How is it that you're able to live and thrive in a, in the giant bureaucracies that our universities and still discover new things?

Lee Cronin [00:32:08] I can ask really profound, although I'm really rude, I ask really profound questions that people like, I guess I'm not bo I don't know, I I guess acade. It's not that academia's full of boring people. That's not fair academia. So let's go back to Steven Wolf from point. And then, so Steven's really interesting. Like I don't think Steven's Steven's clearly a very talented person, a genius on many levels. I don't think it's my job to call him a genius. Not, I love his work, I love his products, but he's one of those, it's like Craig Ventus, Steven Wolfram and Greg Venter occupy the same kind of niche. They're, they've made themselves money, they've made real products, they understand the real world, but they think they understand something about science and they're frustrated by the inside and the outside. And the problem is that there are a lot of smart people in the world, and Stephen Wolfram is not the only genius in the world. There are a few others. So what Stephen Wolfram needs to do is say, Hey, what do you think of my idea? And then other genius go, nah, I had that idea five years ago, don't work. What about that one? Oh yeah, that's better. And then you have a dialogue. And so if Steven Wolfram had submitted himself a bit to that process, not entirely because he's an outlier, he's a contrarian, we need him. But wouldn't it be great if the system would've been allowed to interact with him to some degree that he would get some feedback and work out when he is wrong and then improve and make it even better? Because Stephen Wolfram is onto something, he's just not, he's not right.

Lee Cronin [00:33:40] Everything. So what I've tried to do in my science and the way I do is I kind of want to, I want to be a contrarian, but I want academia to understand where I'm coming from. So I want to say outrageous things and then I want to prove why I'm right so out and then or why I'm wrong and then move up that scale because that's what excites me. There's plenty of room for more conventional approaches and there are many of them. There's room for more wild wilder ones, there's some of those as well. But I think that, I mean, I'm, and also the other reason I'm unconventional or able to get away being unconventional is I'm, I started off life being very conventional in chemistry. I did that on purpose to basically get some credibility. And then as soon as I, as soon as I got credibility, I went, you know, bat shit crazy and openly not because I've suddenly wanted to, you know, believe in astral projections and you know, I don't know faster than a like travel and that aliens living at the bottom of my garden because I want to understand the limits, our comprehension of reality and ask questions that people think are outrageous. And when they say that's outrageous, I say, well, why? And they go, oh, well, because I'm not allowed to ask that. Like, well that's not my problem. You are boring, I'm asking it. So I think what we have to do, and what I've tried to do is I use, I guess I'm lucky by, I mean, it sounds odd, right? 'cause everyone's saying, you know, I'm, I'm a minority. I've been affected in this way. I was in the worst school, in the worst class in the worst place. There was no way I was getting to university.

Lee Cronin [00:35:13] But I was lucky that I had enough awe of the world to say, well, I think I know how that works. Let me ask the question. And so, and my, you know, one or two teachers took pity on me and allowed me to keep asking the questions. I've been doing the same thing now since I have when I was five. And it seems to work. So that's probably, I mean, I don't know. There's plenty other people that are really talented people in academia. Of course, many smarter people than me. They may be not as as rude as I am.

Vance Crowe [00:35:45] Yeah, you, you keep reminding me of a concept that I learned from Yoshi Bach about paper walls. So he gave this talk called Computational meps Psychology, which is a fantastic conversation. And one of the things he talks about, there are certain people out in the world, probably about 6% of the population, that if you were in a Japanese house and there are paper walls there, most everybody would recognize that the paper walls are there and I'm in the living room and you're in the kitchen and that's fine. But there's some people that they just don't see the paper walls. So they walk right through them and, and you know, they end up in somebody's kitchen and you're like, what in the hell are you doing here? But you need those people, and even though they're ordinarily rude to the point of being ostracized from society, oftentimes those people are pushed out because you're like, if you can't understand the social conventions, then you're not allowed here. So the ability to both walk through paper walls and yet still have people want you to come to their dinner parties, that's a very rare gift.

Lee Cronin [00:36:43] Yeah. Well if for still, still for me, I'm not sure I'm one of the dinner parties, but one of my good friends in Glasgow's, a physicist were I realized he wouldn't invite me anywhere to speak with his friends. And we were pretty good friends. I mean, and then, then he started inviting me and then he'd introduce me and say, here's Lee, ignore the first sentence and you'll be fine.

Vance Crowe [00:37:03] Because

Lee Cronin [00:37:04] In the first sentence, I would just walk through the paper wall, I'd, you know, meet as someone who's a, an expert in neutron scattering and say, neutrons are boring, scattering doesn't tell me anything. Why are you doing that? And, and then, and then, hi, how are you doing? And then, and the person would be so upset that I would, they wouldn't want to talk to me for the rest of the, of the discussion of the, you know, the dinner or whatever the conversation and Miles said, no, no, ignore the first sentence and they pretend you didn't hear it and carry on. And

Vance Crowe [00:37:33] So there's something really weird. No, I mean, clearly there's something very weird about you, but in a great way was what makes you a good guest. But there's something that I talk about a lot on this podcast, which is the inner voice of people to, to me, like even if you can get rid of this idea of consciousness by proving from an MRI that you've made the decision to move your finger before you ever knew that you made that decision and all you're doing is backwards recording, what was that you did to me though, that there is kind of this Jungian idea that curiosity is the spirit or it is the soul. It's the thing that says, oh, that's captured my attention. And I refer to this oftentimes as the Damon, you know, that, that people have this voice inside of their head that says, go this direction. And as much as you'd like to ignore it, you can't, it appears to me that you are driven deeply by your Damon. But as I describe this, does it become a repellent idea to you that there's some inner creature like a Damon?

Lee Cronin [00:38:38] No, I mean, I mean, I don't make any separation between me, you know, and me. So I have my conscious brain and my unconscious brain when I, I mean, I taught myself a version of mathematics when I was four or five, which I didn't really understand was a fairly useful, but I couldn't explain it to anyone. So that's one of the reasons why I ended up in the, in the, in the, in the learning difficulties class, because people said, you can't count. I was like, well, no, I just invented a new system. It's much better than that. Why would I do that? And, and the problem is that the way I taught myself to do that, I can solve mathematical problems in my subconscious brain fast in my conscious brain. So when the teachers were saying to me, please explain what you did, I'm like, I don't know. I mean, because like, I don't know, and it's not like I'm not a savant, right? I haven't got no skills really. And when it comes to like numbers or anything like that, I just know how to, I think in graphs, I guess I think in, I think in, I don't know, don't, I don't know what it is. I think in some kind of way that gives me insights that occasionally I can distill out to people. And I have no problem with my unconscious brain because unconscious brain, I mean, I think in some ways I really like talking to Yasha. I mean he's very, very precise and very, very, I like talking to him because he can, takes a lot of my unconscious thoughts the way I think about it, and actually puts them into the right order so I understand what I mean, right?

Lee Cronin [00:40:13] So whereas I just have this splurge of, I think like knit realities like this when I lack the formal, I don't know, education to actually place everything into the right words and the right layering so people understand what I mean. And that can be a big problem. I spend a lot of time drawing pictures. So I don't think we should worry about our unconscious and subconscious, our, our conscious brains. 'cause they interact with each other in real time and they're continuously updating each other. And so what we should see is our conscious brain is really a, it's actually an inhibitor. It is like, don't, your conscious brain is, I say is it's actually acting against your curiosity, right? So your unconscious brain go, go, go, go. But you're being taught social constructs, what you've been taught, what language can find you to do. And I am a rebel if people say, I mean I wear red trousers and pink shirts and when it wasn't allowed to, now it's boring. Paint my red, my office red or whatever I walk to, I walk to work backwards sometimes, right? I, you know, whatever. I like to kind of find novelty in the world because I think that demon, you talked about that curiosity, that is novelty. So what the human brain wants to try and do is minimize its surprise. I want to maximize my surprise but still not die. So, 'cause obviously by minimizing your surprise, you don't get eaten by a predator or run over by a train or whatever. But I still want to, so I try to find ways where I can maximize my surprise and that gives me enormous satisfaction when I find something new.

Lee Cronin [00:41:52] And I guess that's probably what you are thinking about, that, that that quality that you

Vance Crowe [00:41:56] A absolutely, that novelty search is, is precisely the description of what I think is going on there. And recently, I, I read a book or a, a paper on the cent, I can never pronounce the word, but it was essentially like the theory now that dreams are a way of preventing overfitting. And that when you go to sleep, it's, if you can, if you can get yourself into a place where you have lots of dreams, it's your brain running through all these different models that it has and making sure that you aren't saying, Hey, I just saw a hundred pictures of a brown dog and when I see a deer, I'm gonna confuse that with, with a dog. And by having these patterns and the fact that I now have started pursuing this, I can tell you that I can figure prob I have about two hours in the morning after I wake up where I can, I can write down things that I figured out at night that I just have to wait until they come to my conscious mind to be able to put them down. Do you have a similar experience? Is this odd to you?

Lee Cronin [00:42:57] I mean, I'm, I, no, I I kind of accept all of my unconsciousness and consciousness all at the same time, and I don't sleep that much sometimes. And so when I do get, when I, I I've been working on a new theory for time, which is a chemist, I'm like, who really wind up all the physicists and like, you don't understand time. And I'm like, but but you can't burn, you can't burn stuff reversibly. And they're like, oh, and I'm gonna get myself so ostracized from the, these things at this rate. But yeah, I'm in the moment, I'm trying to understand why the universe is deterministic, but undetermined and I, and I had a dream the other night when I was thinking about myself on a graph and I was that graph and I was bouncing and do do around like a tennis ball down in different branches of the graph. And what I've realized is that, what am I trying to say? Let's just say I'm in a box and all that box, I've got a couple of balls moving around and it's all deterministic, so I understand what's gonna happen. But let's just say it is kind of complicated. So I really need to calculate what's gonna happen next. It's like a, it's not obvious, but the problem is because people don't understand time and I, I, I think I have a different perspective when I build my computer to calculate what's going on in the box when I've just mastered the box. Because suddenly one unit of time goes by, boom, the box suddenly expands. Now suddenly that computer, that size is not big enough to do that one. And I think I've realized, and this was a dream I had and wrote down that the way I can understand how the universe is deterministic, but undeterminable is that the box is always getting bigger.

Lee Cronin [00:44:30] So when you've just understood what happened, you've only understood the past. And that's why there is a past going to the future. So that means your event horizon goes like this. So you've got all these ideas and the pyramid going out, but, and you think you can calculate them and you can capture them, but by the time you've calculate them, another unit of time has gone by and you've just done this. So what does that mean? That means determinism in the universe is fine, free will is also fine. Well it's no such thing as free will, but agency and consciousness and all that jazz, you can't just because the universe is predictable, sorry, determined doesn't mean that anything is predictable because the size of the computer that you need to do it is always bigger than the available universe. That was something I came to just two days ago.

Vance Crowe [00:45:17] Brilliant. And and when

Lee Cronin [00:45:18] You woke up, it's probably nonsense, but it's cool.

Vance Crowe [00:45:20] I mean it, the reason that I think it's brilliant is that it breaks away, I mean it fits my new hypothesis about over fitting, right? It's, it's, it's that there was a way that you were thinking about the world. And unless I put my brain to sleep where I'm calculating my grocery list and when I have to pick up my daughter and how the work I have to do and stuff for clients, then I'm never gonna figure those things out. And that ha my brain has to be all the way shut down. And for a long time I used to try and get there chemically, right? And now I've come to the realization that if you do it for me with THC or something like that, you give up night dreams for daydreams and those daydreams aren't nearly as powerful for over fitting. But to me, if I could have dreams like yours, I mean I would, I would, I would swap out mine for years. They sound fun.

Lee Cronin [00:46:06] I do feel, I mean I've never really taken any illegal, well not illegal. I've never really taken any, I mean whether it's legal or not, it doesn't matter. I've never taken substances that much. Some here and there. But, but, and I think that someone said to me, actually the weird thing about your brain is you don't seem to need to take drugs to halluc to basically be acting like you're on a trip. And I think that's maybe, and that's kind of a nice thing because I think I can do novelty search about the problem about you taking some chemicals is they, they dissolve yourself, right? So you get, you can see the objects, the barrier between you and the objects and the universe get lessened. And that's actually really important 'cause you are continuous objects. But they, but, but when, when that happens, you can then have a new perspective on how the universe is and your, your connection to it. Whereas I seem to be able to very, very much maintain my sense of self, but basically move myself around all the connections. And that integration of information is different to the other one. But you never, I did dream of once of having a thing called acid con and then invite some academics say, okay, you just gotta drop a tab and then give a lecture. But I think that's legal and that's not, that's just my personal opinion appears, you know, but it would be cool to, you know, when, when it's all been deregulated and we're all happy and we know that we're allowed to tr to have legal whatevers would be brilliant to have acid con.

Vance Crowe [00:47:34] So a couple of times in this conversation you have found ways to be like, I just wanna let you know this is my private opinion. This is not the office. But you got yourself in trouble by making some jokes. And now having spoken to you for a while, I could see how your jokes could get grabbed and thrown into the world in a way that you never meant for them to. So the way that we encountered each other is that you were apologizing for having turned your, well, having a fun turn of phrase with the way you were gonna name your lab. Can you describe that?

Lee Cronin [00:48:05] Yeah, it was actually a joke. So I, but my, I I've got, my lab is called Cronin lab or Cronin Group after me. And I thought maybe that's not the, you know, my ego obviously is very important to me and the universe and it, and I thought, well my group is doing digital chemistry. It's a big team of people. It's not just about me. I was going rename the group, right? Or have an additional name, digital chemistry. And then I spoke to my subgroups 'cause I've got loads of teams and we have all, all these different teams. And then one of the teams said, oh, we should name na. So we do a thing called poly metate or poms and poly metate are basically like rust. They're like, they're based on tung and tungsten rust. It's kind of boring, right? And so one of my group members made a figure, took the thing that is his website, I think it's Canadian website called PornHub, the legal site for pornography. And then, and I think it, it has a white and a and a orange thing. And they just gave, they gave the letters POM as in poly Metate hub. And I thought, that's brilliant. But all I did, all I did is I screenshotted it and I tweeted it and said, we're gonna rename the clusters group to pom hub. And I didn't think anything of it because it's like, and I wasn't even gonna, I wasn't even gonna tweet pornography porn or pos, it's poms every time, right? But I didn't, I just put it like that as a, like a, you know, a wink. So what happened, the, I mean I tweeted it nine o'clock in the morning, I was in a group meeting.

Lee Cronin [00:49:39] I thought it was hilarious. And then, and then, and then people started, then North America started to wake up and, and I think a particular side of North America that wanted, so I, you know, I have a large, well not large Twitter following a reasonable for a chemist, seven, 13,000 people or something. And then people started to get angry with me and, and said, you know, this is terrible. And it's like, it's a joke, dude, relax. And they were like, no, but what about the, you know, pornography is terrible and all the exploited people and all this stuff. And I was like, oh look, coal is, coal is legal, but look, think about all the people that have died because of coal mining. But I was like, I'm just not this, this not gonna work, is it? And so I just thought I'd because it was easier, but then when I apologized, then everyone,

Vance Crowe [00:50:29] Oh man, that's gonna make it a thousand times worse. Now you've just put blood in the water.

Lee Cronin [00:50:34] I just didn't, but I don't understand it. It's weird 'cause people said, so look, my view of tweeting my, I tweet like I am a human being. I wanna make you think and how can I make you think if I can offend you slightly to think so, oh, offend you intellectually, not offend you personally. Or, you know, I don't wanna offend you, make you feel bullied or you know, I don't wanna make you feel bad about yourself. I want you to feel like you are questioning yourself. That's my job, I think. And on Twitter, I amazed things like that, right? But some people obviously get offended with thinking. And so what the, the crew decided is they would take offense at this thing. So I just said, I apologized and then they kept going. And I said, right, actually the way we're gonna stop this now is I'm going to say that if you are really offended and you don't accept my apology, then there's something wrong with my apology. If you are just having a go at me, then you're just bullying me and I'm not gonna accept that. And then it stopped and I was like, okay. And, and then some people said, told me off for apologizing. I said, well look, just on the off chart, someone was genuinely offended. We, I don't wanna do that. But then I realized this, this some kind of game on Twitter that I don't understand, or maybe I should understand because I tweet like I'm speaking to people in a bar and they said, but you are not in a bar. You are on Twitter. I'm like, here's Twitter. People complained. My department had to talk and said, did you do this on university? You know? And I was like, no, I did it from my personal Twitter account.

Lee Cronin [00:52:06] They were like, okay, cool, cool, cool. It's like, did you say that Glasgow? It's like, no. He was like, I was gonna tweet homography, just the word. 'cause it sounds like pornography would be hilarious. Right. But I don't know if I should

Vance Crowe [00:52:22] The, I am so glad I asked you, man, because I saw this, I don't know, some to early in the morning. 'cause I saw Yosha tweeting about it and I thought, oh man, oh this is bad. Oh, oh man. He apologized. Oh, this is getting real bad. But the fact that you really didn't understand and stumbled

Lee Cronin [00:52:41] No, I had no idea.

Vance Crowe [00:52:42] Makes it all the funnier to me. And, but I think you said something really important there, that you use Twitter to offend people intellectually. The reason I find that to be fascinating is that article that I was mentioning, and I'll put this in the show notes about the sensorium, like why people dream. It made a distinction between entertainment and art. And that entertainment is one of those things that doesn't offend you. You already know it. It's you, it's fitting into a pattern when you're watching a comedy or something. But art actually should at times offend you or be difficult for you to understand or even grapple with. So you may encounter art that you love, that you simultaneously deeply dislike or disturb you. And that, that to me sounds like a fantastic aim for a Twitter feed, right? That actually will feed into people having better dreams as opposed to the entertainment that comes from, you know, cancel culture, you know, rage mobs.

Lee Cronin [00:53:42] Yeah. I, I find the whole council contra a bit curious because I, me, you know, I, I mean I like weirdos. I think the normies should probably ca how start uprising and say, how dare you like weirdos, what about the normies? So I'm just like, look, my pre I, we have to be open with our preferences and challenged on our biases and, and we have to ask society what do you want? Right? And then I think when it comes, so, so I see that people become memes of themselves, particularly on Twitter. So I did tweet a few months ago, like, you know, hi Twitter, how's all that? Excellent mediocrity out there. And I knew the people who didn't like that couldn't reply because there is more.

Vance Crowe [00:54:32] That is fantastic, you know, and there's nothing that like hurts you more than somebody saying something that proves that by the way, it makes you feel they are actually correct about what it was that they were saying. Like that is the, the ultimate catch 22 that you can capture somebody you

Lee Cronin [00:54:49] Don't wanna be correct or incorrect. I don't like, you know, I don't feel that I have some, some people say that, you know, I need to be more careful what I say because I have un well-known. I don't think that's the case. That's like saying, okay, people, if you're not well known, you can get away with being a bully and a racist. Right? That's fine young. You don't worry. No one knows you. I feel that I should be me and hopefully I'm not a bully or a racist. Right? You know, who hopefully, and if people don't like the way I am, they should challenge me. And I should either self-reflect and if I'm doing things unprofessional, I should be man that, you know, re re you know, punished, whatever. But the fact is I shouldn't change who I am because people, because I have some kind of status or standing, I should achieve that status or standing because of who I am. I think that's, I thought that's how it worked. But there are obviously a lot of pretend people out there who are basically, there's lots of people saying, well they want, so Twitter is now this dopamine hit. So that's why I wanna make a new Twitter so I can work out, I've got this idea of making time travel Twitter, where I can work out how to integrate all the information across Twitter, work out what the trend is gonna be three months from now, and hack that beforehand and then sell it to people and say, yeah, I know how get hacked if, because basically most of you are boring and I can know how to hack your dopamine and you're also boring that I can just basically bait you on Twitter and make money out of it.

Vance Crowe [00:56:15] Well, here herein lies. You know what, you could do it as NFTs and you could sell them in advance and let people buy low and sell high.

Lee Cronin [00:56:23] Yeah. Yeah. And then, then maybe by doing this, of course people aren't boring. I like being boring occasionally I, I wear the same pink trousers and the same pink shirt as I'm wearing my running gear just now actually every day because I want to be boring in some things. So I've got cognitive capacity to be novel and I think we're all like that and we choose where to be boring or novel. And so if we can convince people maybe not to be so boring, then the world may be more interesting and maybe we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously, but at the same time, correct. Where things are clearly bad. You know, I want to have a fairly open mind when I'm people in my research group. I don't want to be a racist, I don't want to be a bully. I don't want to be closed-minded. And I know I'm a racist, bully, closed-minded person to some degree. Like everyone is. Anyone who says I'm not a racist, I'm not a bully, I'm not closed-minded, doesn't know how, what these things are, but I'm aware that I have effects on people and I want to be positive with those people and I want people to do good jobs and feel good about themselves. So I need to challenge myself as much as, you know, I challenge other people and it's a two way. So I think by being honest and transparent and wrong, there's, there's hope, right? For humanity. That's what I need to do If people cancel me because of it, okay. I mean, you know, then all you're gonna do is you're gonna get into this future where everybody is like, pretending to be perfect is like, reminds me, I dunno if you know black, is it Black Mirror?

Lee Cronin [00:58:02] The episode in Black Mirror called Nose Dive? I love that episode where everyone's obviously really suppressed, but they're not allowed to be bad to each other or to outfall out 'cause they get marked down on their, and I can see that as a potential future. But anyway, we digressed a lot. But yeah, so I'm a, you

Vance Crowe [00:58:19] Know, you talk about not liking boring things or boring people. You've talked about like your friends warn other friends that you might say something, you know, the first few phrases outta your mouth are gonna be kind of offensive. What is your social life like? Are, do you have a rich ability to to have deep inner connections with lots of other people?

Lee Cronin [00:58:39] Yeah, I, I think so. I mean, I am, I, I'm interested, look, I'm interested in people who are interested in stuff and I'm interested in helping people who want help to do interesting stuff. And so what I've been able to do, I suppose in my life is make lots of connections around the world, you know, all around the world and who think about different things. And we're connected by the fact that we are maybe contrarians on our own disciplines. So I know lots of people from computer science, from molecular biology, from politics, although lots of artists and we tend to, and we like the fact that we confuse each other and provoke each other. And I have friends of course who, you know, who are, who like cycling and running and stuff. I mean, I'm not like, you know, saying, oh, that everyone is boring and I hate all normality. What I want to do is I find a pleasure in novelty and stimulation in asking questions that I dunno the answer to. And that's why I like being academic. And so, and, and that tends to be also something I do in my life. I, I, you know, in my, in my downtime, I'm asking questions about asking questions, you know, so it's, my hobbies are a bit like my day job. They kind of go together, but I'm not allowed to say that. Am I, I'm supposed to have a proper, you know, I'm supposed to have you, I only work 38 hours a week or whatever and not dream about science and not do it 24 7. But that would be a lie.

Lee Cronin [01:00:10] I do it 24 7, but I'd like to have fun doing it. And I, it's not just all the same thing. There's lots of different things I'm trying to do with lots of different people and some of that is really good fun. 'cause we do it socially. You know, we're doing some stuff on Clubhouse now with some friends to talk about the origin of life and the origin of evolution and why, why is the universe what it is? Because I want to have discussions with people that aren't just in academia who have interesting questions. And I think that that's something I, I'm finding more and more interesting and the disappointment with Twitter is that people just weaponize it to get, you know, up lists. Once I recognize that, then I could, you know, take my naivety. 'cause I'm quite naive in these things out of it, right. You know, I got told off for not worrying what woke is and I'm like, well, what do you mean? Oh, you mean, oh, okay, understanding that you're prejudice. Yeah, sure. I've understood that since I was like nine years old. Thanks. My, my fir my Christian name is Leroy and I grew up in the southeast of England when fame, the only other Leroy in the world was, you know, the guy wearing the leg warmers in fame. And it was, this

Vance Crowe [01:01:18] Is a cultural joke. I have no concept of what you're talking about.

Lee Cronin [01:01:23] The guy was a colored African American subject to racism and all sorts of things. And there were no other leros in my school

Vance Crowe [01:01:31] To me. And I got,

Lee Cronin [01:01:32] I got beaten up on, you know, I'm not saying that I understand racism, I just understand being bullied as a result of a, of a point of difference. But that was a long time ago.

Vance Crowe [01:01:43] So where do you think that your science will go 10, 15, 20 years from now in, in the space that most people are not willing or able to plan or predict? Where do you think you're going?

Lee Cronin [01:01:57] It's hard to answer that question because, you know, I, I can remember, I remember being told off by a senior professor about a TED talk I gave, I was lucky enough to give a TED talk like, you know, Ted Global on the Red Slope.

Vance Crowe [01:02:09] Oh, the real Ted not, not like the, the TEDx

Lee Cronin [01:02:13] Ted Real Ted

Vance Crowe [01:02:14] I'm gonna have to go look that up. Okay, I'll link that in the show.

Lee Cronin [01:02:17] I think it was 2011 in Edinburgh.

Vance Crowe [01:02:18] What did you say

Lee Cronin [01:02:20] The first, I was the first speaker of the entire conference and you know, and, and I talk, gave it on inorganic life and I I wanted to make a, you know, biology and so on. And then Chris Anderson at the end said, it's so Lee, when do you think you're gonna do it? I said, oh, you know, it'll be about three years. He's like three years. I said, but after I've worked out how to do the experiment, it shouldn't take more than three years. But that's misquoted at me time and time again. So I got told off by some old senior professor a few weeks ago, you said on Ted you were do it in three years and that was in 2011. Look how rubbish you are. You spent all this money and all dah and you've done nothing interesting. I was like, thanks man, that's so nice. You know, training, like, you know, hundreds of people ha having 70 PhD students come through my team, my group, you know, that's nothing, right? They don't count. And it was really odd, but I'm sidestepping the question, no, look, in 10 years time there will be robots doing chemistry in pretty much every lab of the world. I'm gonna make it happen. And if I, if I have to go and, you know, beat down Elon Musk's door myself and say, look, I'm not, I mean I'm nothing compared to you, but I know how to do chemistry. Help me. You know, or the equivalent, I will make sure that happens. Why? Because I can make chemistry safe. I can make it reproducible. I can stop people having, you know, imagine doing a college degree and then doing a PhD and for the, and then doing a postdoc. And for the PhD that's three years and maybe the postdoc after your PhD for another two or three years, having to do manual labor in a laboratory.

Lee Cronin [01:03:53] That's just repetitive time and time again. You know, I can remove that in a stroke now, I think. So that's one of the missions I've got and that requires, I also need to change the way people taught chemistry. So I'm gonna make it, I'm gonna go on the record now. Where are we, you know, 2021 on and towards the end of March by 2032, there will be, the human beings will seldom be doing chemistry in the lab that's they could do with a robot. So, you know, reproducible chemistry, let's make it happen.

Vance Crowe [01:04:24] Lee Cronin, it may happen. I I I love this conversation. And so I have a question that I ask people, but I don't ask everybody because it puts 'em on the spot and it's kind of difficult. Okay? But you, I think are prepared for this. It's called my Peter Teel paradox. So the Peter Teel paradox is what is one thing that you believe is true that almost no one, you know, agrees with you on? I don't think this is gonna be hard for you, but for a lot of people it's difficult because if you say something that isn't, that no one agrees with you on, if you, if you say something people agree with, you've already failed. But then if you say something people don't agree with you on, now you've gotta talk your way out of it. What is something that you think from Yosha Bach all the way through all your artists friends you could say that they would not agree with you on?

Lee Cronin [01:05:08] Alright, yeah, there's one thing, and I think I'm right, is that time exists and it creates space. And that the reason why we don't understand these, the, the second law of thermodynamics and, and the order in the universe and, and why I think disorder works now and determinism is because time is more fundamental than space. And when you then put that in your head and you think about it, it changes the way the universe works in a remarkable way. It changes the way that we have to view physics. 'cause physics is not the physicist no longer the, the monarch in the universe. Time is the monarch. And so time is really weird from that point of view, but I think almost everybody would, you know, people would, 'cause they used to me coming up with, coming out with outrageous statements. Most people would pat me on their shoulder and say, yeah, yeah, yeah Lee, you'll break out a bit soon. But no, I'm pretty sure that everybody's understanding of time as currently conceived as wrong. But I'm not talking about some wacky thing. I'm just saying, hey, imagine that time I've got it written actually on my board in here. Let get it hidden. I've it down. Oh, here we go. Almost as if

Vance Crowe [01:06:36] Great. Yeah, so hold on, let me read it. Yeah, yeah. Read it For the people that are listening,

Lee Cronin [01:06:41] Physicists are wrong about time, time came first then there's a particle, a mass. Now, I'm not sure about the last two bits, but I I'm sure about the first two physicists are wrong about time. Time came first. I think it might be a particle of mass.

Vance Crowe [01:06:55] And why did you write that down and put it up on a, on a board?

Lee Cronin [01:07:00] Because, because I was asked to come up with a controversial statement a few weeks ago and I, and I and I, I came up with a boring one and I came up with this one and I was too scared to say this one. So I wrote it out and put it on for a day like this and it was like two weeks ago. So,

Vance Crowe [01:07:20] Oh, nothing could make me happier than that. I mean that's, I think the, the way that people get out of their gravity, well, you know, of the, of, of the same voices that they hear is to, is to always be asking yourself, do I have something that I believe is true that nobody else agrees with? Because that means you're at least getting novelty from somewhere that, that your entire gravity well isn't already getting. So I think it's awesome that you have one and that you'd, you had already written it down, Lee, I could talk with you for hours. I hope that you will come back on. This has been absolutely fantastic. If there were people out there that heard what you were saying and they said, that is a reality I would love to see happen and they wanna help your lab go further faster, what could people do to help you?

Lee Cronin [01:08:05] Contact me, give me advice, help me with technology, I suppose. I think that's the main thing I'm trying to do is to get as many like minds together to make this work. Getting people to do chemistry, robotics and artificial intelligence in the same lab is actually quite hard. Lots of people doing AI and they think they can read about chemistry, but practical chemistry, practical robotics and, and pr, practical ai, that intersection is really small. It's gonna expand and what I'm gonna need to do is get money and technology and vision, other people vision around that. So yeah, so I, so

Vance Crowe [01:08:44] If you have any of those, I, I have a thought on that and that is that the plant biology world exploded for a while, right? They were doing genetics, they had turned it all into robotics. You could do massive field trials and just a little tiny like microchip. And so much of the innovation has stopped in plant biology. The big ag companies went from six to four and now there's all these people that have brilliant minds, have worked on incredibly complex problems and there's no show in town that lets them really push the envelope. So if I were you, I'd go pick off the plant biologists and the geneticists, I

Lee Cronin [01:09:21] Should say that. Well the next add-on to the chemical robot is I think I know how to program biology using my chemical computing language to go up a level. And one of the things we're doing right now is I'm adding a bioreactor to do fermenting in the computer. So we can basically dial in a gene, make the molecule we want, take it out, put it in the chemical robot and go back. Wouldn't it be great to basically get a plant or a bacteria to make a molecule, take that molecule, put it in a chemical robot. Chemical robot does something to it and then you put that molecule in a plant, just go bacteria chemical, robot plant.

Vance Crowe [01:09:57] You should 100% look up the company that is in part run by my good friend Eric Ward called AgBiome. I think you'll find that is a very interesting place. So Lee, thank you so much for joining me and I will have you back on.

Lee Cronin [01:10:10] Okay. Very nice to have discussion. It's been a lot of fun.