SPENCER: Thomas, welcome.

THOMAS: Hi, Spencer. Thank you very much for having me on.

SPENCER: I learned about you in a very unusual way, which is, I asked ChatGPT who are the most unusual thinkers in the world, and your name, I think, was number three.

THOMAS: Oh, my goodness.

SPENCER: And I said, "Who is this person? I've never heard of this person before." So sorry to embarrass you a little.

THOMAS: [laughs] Yeah, when you emailed me with this, I was like, "Oh my goodness, I need to try and replicate this on ChatGPT on my end." I couldn't replicate it, Spencer, but my brother could, and he just took it as evidence of the first people against the wall when the AI takeover comes. That's what my brother's view was, yeah.

SPENCER: So the AI has it in for you, you think.

THOMAS: Well, who knows? It's a very weird AI world that we're approaching, I think. I really don't think ChatGPT would have scored highly on its response [laughs], putting me as one of the most original thinkers. But it's weird and scary, living now with this thing approaching us. Nobody really knows what it's going to be, right?

SPENCER: Absolutely, yeah, impending strangeness for sure. But I can see why it listed you. Why don't we start talking about one of your projects, The Toaster Project. Can you tell us where did that idea come from, and what really did you do for The Toaster Project?

THOMAS: I'm a designer — I teach design — and I'm in this field which is all about making products, making the things that we buy and surround us and all of that. I would make the argument that a chef should, at one time in their life, grow their own carrots or something like that. And so I suppose I was thinking, "Okay, as a designer, I should, at one time in my life, make something completely start to finish." So this idea buzzed around in my head: what have I ever actually made entirely myself? Of course, I've assembled things, made a chair or whatever, but I didn't make the plywood. I didn't make the screws. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to make one thing entirely myself, starting from the raw materials as they come out of the ground. And the thing I chose to try and make was a cheap electric toaster.

SPENCER: Now, I imagine you thought building a cheap electric toaster would be easier than (let's say) building an expensive toaster. What did you find when you actually started investigating that?

THOMAS: I went to the local shop and bought this toaster, the cheapest one I could find, the most basic, the least amount of bells and whistles. I thought maybe there might be a relationship between complexity and value or price. But I just thought, okay, the cheapest one I can find, took it home, took it apart and, lo and behold, inside this object that had just cost a few pounds, when you really take it apart down to the last screw and even unthread each copper strand from the course of the cable, there's over 400 different individual pieces that have been assembled into this thing that I just bought for five pounds. I had this idea that it would be complex, but I was unprepared for just how impossibly complex this task of remaking this from raw materials was going to be.

SPENCER: It's pretty insane to think about how many parts that has. And those parts probably come from different places all over the world, involving all sorts of different specialties and all sorts of different specialized machinery and so on, just to go into a simple toaster.

THOMAS: Yeah, and five pounds, Spencer. How could this possibly cost five pounds? [laughs]

SPENCER: Yeah, how did they assemble that so cheaply? It makes no sense.

THOMAS: That was the shock because I laid them all out in this beautiful, organized fashion. And when you're confronted with it and you know that this came from all over the world, and then you just know that that complexity is there, and then it's laid out in front of you. And then also, the retail — the shop presumably — made some profit. All the people involved, and it's for that very modest price. It was very startling. But yeah, I had to start somewhere. So I started by basically trying to strip out some of that complexity. Because even then, I knew that it was a thankless task to try and remake this in all its complexity, because those 400 plus different bits, I reckoned, were made of about 100 or so different discrete materials. And so I was like, "Well, I could spend the rest of my life trying to create all of these 100 materials myself," but I wasn't quite willing to put that much effort into this project. So I simplified it down into five key materials which I thought I could make this decent electric pop-up toaster from: steel, copper, nickel — which I could alloy with copper to make the resistance wire, the thing that was going to heat up — and then mica — this mineral which is non-conductive, which you have in toasters, and that holds the resistance wire in place — and then, of course, plastic for the beautiful, smooth exterior shell to hide all of this complexity inside.

SPENCER: So where did you get started?

THOMAS: Well, I started with steel because I thought, there's your bog-standard basic metal. It's everywhere. It's surrounding me now; I'm sure it's surrounding you. So surely, the recipe for steel must be pretty achievable and very well understood. So I went with steel. And it just so happened, down the road from where I was, was the Royal School of Mines. In that building is the expertise which I needed. And so I looked up this guy, Jan Cilliers — he's the Rio Tinto Chair of advanced mineral extraction — and sent him an email. "Hi, my name's Thomas. I'm trying to make a toaster. I need to make some steel. Can I come and ask you how to make steel?"

SPENCER: Now, did he think you were a crazy person when he first got the email? [laughs]

THOMAS: Well, I think he was actually quite taken with the idea of this project. So, yes, I think he thought it was rather absurd, but I think he could see the value in the attempt. I don't think he thought I was crazy; eccentric, perhaps, is the word. [laughs] So he invited me over and we had this conversation about how you make steel. This knowledge which I think most people have, sort of approximately: we know steel is sort of an alloy of iron with a bit of carbon in it, or something like that. He basically said, "Okay, step one, go and find yourself some iron ore. And then come back and we'll talk some more." So off I went, looked up the nearest iron mine I could find nearest to me in London — turns out it's just on the border with Wales — phoned them up. "Hi. My name's Thomas. I'm trying to make a toaster. Can I come and mine some iron ore?" [laughs] They were amazingly fine with it as well. They invited me up. Turns out, when I got there, the guy had misheard me on the phone and thought I was trying to make a poster, and was just expecting me to turn up with cameras and take a nice photo of this mine, or whatever. But nonetheless, he took me in and down into this mine to find some iron ore. The thing is, Spencer, I live in the UK and we don't really have any iron mines here anymore; we're well beyond the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire, the sort of industrial Britain. And so all of these mines I'm visiting are all disused, or they're tourist attractions now. And that's basically because of the scale of the operations. They're just tiny. This iron mine that I visited was tiny compared to the vast open-cast mines that exist in Chile or Australia. And so, we're going down in this tiny mine with a pickaxe sort of thing to get my... basically, I needed a suitcase full of iron ore.

SPENCER: Did you feel like you were playing Minecraft in some way, trying to figure out the hierarchy of how things are made from other things?

THOMAS: Very much so. Maybe not Minecraft, but this game, Civilization, was a big part of my youth, let's say. Yeah, this idea that you start out with nothing, and you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps or whatever, and gradually build up to more and more advanced sorts of metals and so on, that was definitely an undercurrent in this project.

SPENCER: Were you able to get the iron and bring it back in your suitcase?

THOMAS: Yes, I got some very high-grade (apparently) iron ore and filled my suitcase up and, "Okay, thanks very much. Bye," dragged this extremely heavy suitcase. The wheel broke very early on in the journey home and so I'm just manhandling the suitcase on and off trains as I make my way back from Wales and took it back to Professor Cilliers, unzipped the suitcase in his office, and like, "There's the rock. How do you go from rock to metal? How do you go from iron ore to iron?" And it turns out it's, of course, way more complicated than you might think. And Professor Cilliers, maybe he was a bit busier, or maybe he was a bit unsure about getting his hands dirty — he's an academic — and so he says, "Look, just go to the library. The information's there." This is at Imperial College. And so I went to the undergraduate science library, and there's just shelves and shelves all about fundamentals of metallurgy and all of that stuff. And I'm looking in the undergraduate text like Metallurgy 101, break out box number 1.1, how to make iron from iron ore. And it's not there. There's all of this highly complex information about electron shells and reduction reactions and so on, but nothing that I could use. And so I ended up going to the History of Science Library around the corner and looking in books about experimental archeology and basically going further and further back in time until I came to this 14th century book about mining and metallurgy, written by Georg Agricola. And there, on one of the pages is this very basic woodcut diagram of some peasants smelting iron. And that's basically what I end up doing in a car park in London.

SPENCER: [laughs] Wow. This makes me think about some future civilization after our civilization is destroyed, and people trying to figure out how to rebuild civilization and finding these undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy and be like, "Why the hell can't I make metal from this? What are these books about?"

THOMAS: Yeah, totally. That came up in the project a bit and Professor Cilliers said something like, "You couldn't redo the Iron Age in the same way. You couldn't redo the Bronze Age because those systems relied on this near-to-the-surface, very high-grade ore, rock with a high amount of the metal element in it. And all of those ores have been mined out long ago. And so now, the mining operations are using this vast tonnage of material to produce relatively little metal. And so, in the Iron Age, humankind would not be able to manage that. And I asked Professor Cilliers, "So what do you do in your day job?" And it turns out his study was the mathematical modeling of bubbles. I'm like, "What have bubbles got to do with mining and metallurgy?" And it turns out, one of the many processes which this vast amount of material goes through, there's one called froth flotation where they bubble up this powdered mixture and the metallic particles stick to the surface of the bubbles. And his career had been optimizing the size of those bubbles to produce a fraction more of the metal powder that could then go into the next process and so on. So [laughs] bubbles and metal. It was just interesting.

SPENCER: The degree of specialization in modern society is truly incredible. You get down into the narrowest detail of obscure process that optimizes it by an extra three percent.

THOMAS: And for me, this is the joy of the project I do. It's a way into, at least dip your toe in the water of, these extremely specialized fields which happen to intersect with whatever project. It's really fun. I'm not saying I could ever become quite so specialized myself. I guess I'm more of a generalist perhaps.

[promo]

SPENCER: So tell us about actually doing the smelting in the (what was it?) parking lot, you said.

THOMAS: So 15 hours of shoveling in this iron ore and charcoal into this furnace that I'd made out of an old chimney pot. And instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower. It was all done in a metal dustbin with the lid on, and I also have a temperature probe in there, and the probe melts fairly early on. So I knew I was getting up to temperature, and then my furnace itself starts melting. But after 15 hours of this quite high-intensity process, I let it cool down and then, looking through the slightly melted remains, there at the bottom is this thing which is like a bloom of iron. And this rusty red rock that I'd been feeding into this furnace had now all coagulated into this metallic kind of cauliflower. And it's like, "Yes! This is what I've read about in these books. Yes, this is the bloom of iron!" And it's heavy, and I get a magnet, and it's magnetic, and it's like, "I've done it! I'm a genius! It took humankind so long to get to the Iron Age. But it turns out, I did it my first time, kind of thing." And I can even remember boasting in the pub, "Yeah, I've made some iron. That's quite cool, huh?" But then I finally get around to doing the next step in the processing, getting an anvil and heating this up, and starting to bash out some of the impurities. But each time I'd heat it up to cherry red and then hit it with a hammer, it would just shatter. And so my malleable ductile iron was really actually quite brittle. And this is quite a problem because I'd obviously melted my furnace and I'd also used up all of my iron ore. And then, doing the research that I should have done the first time round, I realized that, when you're smelting at the scale that I was, it's by no means a scientific process; it's much more of an art. And so, really, to be able to judge the temperature and the gas mixture inside the furnace, you have to judge the color of the flame and the smell of the gasses and all of that. To be able to make those judgments, I really would have needed to have done an apprenticeship with a medieval metallurgist. And so I'm like, "Agh, this is sad. This is the first thing I tried, and it's gone quite wrong." And, even if I go and get some iron ore, do the furnace again, spend another night feeding this furnace, it might not work again and again and again. So I start thinking I need to be able to experiment more quickly. I need to be able to find a more convenient way of heating this up and getting that mixture right. And so I said, "Well, ovens are more convenient fires, but an oven's not going to work; it can't get up to the 1200 or so degrees that I was looking for. But what's a more convenient oven? Maybe like a microwave." I didn't have a microwave, but my mum lives in London, so I went round to her house and borrowed her microwave. And it turns out, iron and oxide is a very good absorber of microwaves. And so if you really stuff the microwave oven full of insulation, and then have a small amount of this partially smelted iron that I had in a crucible in the microwave, and you just shut the door, and you stop it rotating — you take out the rotating plate or whatever — and you just pump in microwaves at full power for 30 minutes or so, then you can just about get up to the temperature needed to complete this iron smelting process. And yes, you may set your mother's microwave on fire, but that's okay because, after a few attempts, I was getting out small lumps of iron about the size of a coin that I could then reliably work into metal components for my toaster.

SPENCER: You've gone full mad scientist at this point, I think.

THOMAS: Slightly, slightly. There's something about mucking around with microwaves, which makes you feel quite a mad scientist, yes. But notice I've stopped talking about steel at this point, because getting to iron just required such a lot of research. And obviously, there's a lot of failure along the way, and other failed attempts at other things. I just realized that, to make steel — not just steel, but spring steel — the level of control you need is just like an order of magnitude beyond what I was seemingly capable of. So I'm already starting to slightly downgrade my final toaster; it's not going to have a spring to pop up the toast.

SPENCER: [laughs] So is it fair to say you had similarly difficult challenges with each of the different components?

THOMAS: Yes, basically. Copper was another trip to Wales, in fact, to this mine that was once the largest copper mine in the world. It provided the copper for the copper plating for the undersides of the British Navy ships. And from there, I got water from deep in the mine. They wouldn't let me actually mine any copper ore because this is now a scheduled monument. But I was going down with these spelunkers, cave and mine explorers. I was able to fill up these big water cooler bottles of water and take them up to the surface. And there was enough copper dissolved in this polluted mine water that I was able to — basically, using old phone chargers — electroplate out enough copper to make the pins of my electric plug. And I got this copper material out of this polluted mine water, and then cast the copper into cuttlefish shells — which is this ancient metal casting technique — because I needed to make the pins to plug this thing into the wall eventually, and then I had a little bit left over to make wire. And so I went to this jewelry place where I could roll out this very impure copper that I'd made, on their wire-making machines and so on, to make the wire that would carry the current to the heating element. Mica was a trip to the Highlands of Scotland to find this old quarry that had last been used during the Second World War, and basically getting lost in the highlands, but eventually finding this quarry and just peeling this amazing mineral from the side of this quarry face. I was determined that this toaster should have a plastic case, and plastic was a challenge, let's say.

SPENCER: Yeah, because plastic, obviously you have to make it from oil products, essentially, right?

THOMAS: Yeah, so plastic is obviously fossil fuel based, mostly derived from oil or natural gas. So my plan was to basically get a jug of crude, and then crack it into ethene and then polymerize it into polyethene or whatever. And so, task one was to get a jug of crude. So I phone up BP (British Petroleum) and get through the switchboard to the PR office, because I figure that's my way in. I'm trying to convince this guy that it would be fantastic PR if BP could fly me to an oil rig in the North Sea and let me get a jug of crude oil. And the guy says, "You know you'd have to do helicopter escape training." And I'm like, "Don't worry. I'm fine. I'm up for that." And he's umming and ahhing, but basically says, "Look, we'll phone you back." And then he phones back and says, "Look, how about we get a BP tanker to come to your house and you can take some photos or whatever." And he says, "It would be easier for us to do that than fly you to an oil rig in the North Sea." I'm like, "Would I be able to get some oil from the tank?" And it's sort of, "Well, that's not quite what I wanted." Anyway, he's like, "Okay, well, we'll see what we can do." And, of course, I never hear from him again. But while I'm waiting, I obviously start exploring bioplastics. You can make plastic from fossil feedstocks, but you can also make it from biologically derived feedstocks. And so you can make plastic from starch. So I go and get some potatoes and then extract the starch. And then basically, with the addition of some mild acid, you can polymerize the starch and get it to come together into a plastic material. So I'm mixing these batches of potato starch resin plastic. And I'd carved a mold for a toaster case out of a tree trunk, and then I tipped this potato starch resin into this mold that I'd made, and compress it — it was like a compression mold — and you have to let it cure or dry. And each time I'm trying to prise the case off the mold, it cracks or something. I leave it outside overnight and come back and it's surrounded by snails, and they're all eating my toaster casing. I was basically trying to find various ways of creating this plastic case from bioplastic, and none of it's working. So I start to think, "Okay, if it's going to have a plastic case, then I'm going to have to think laterally." So yeah, there's this idea of the Anthropocene, and it's basically geologists asking the question: are we now in a new geological age? And geologists were asking this question because they were theorizing that alien geologists come to earth, humans are long, long, long gone, but still, there would be some trace that we had left behind in the strata of rock that is being laid down now. So suddenly, there'd be this band of rock, which would suddenly become much more radioactive. Above this layer of rock, there'd be the sudden disappearance of all these fossils because we're in this sixth great extinction event. And also there'd be the sudden appearance of these long polymer molecules, these molecules of plastic. And so my idea was, well, I've been mining all of this ancient rock for metal. Can I allow myself to mine some neo-proto rock? Basically, can I mine some plastic from a rubbish tip or whatever? And I decided that, yes, I could. [laughs] So that's what I ended up doing. I went up to this plastics recycling factory where they are trying to work out a way of dealing with the ever-increasing waste mountain produced from these very cheap or expensive consumer electrical goods. Currently in Europe and the UK, these things just get put in a special bin and, basically, they get ground up into whatever mixed bag of metals and plastics, and then people suck out the metals — the valuable bits — and then leave these vast amounts of mixed plastics which people try and recycle. So to me, using old toasters and old vacuum cleaners to try and remake this case for my new toaster had a quite nice sort of circularity to it. I melted down this waste plastic, tipped it into my tree trunk compression mold, and then assembled my various bits into this thing which looked like a toaster. I don't know, maybe it looks like a toaster made by people in the far future who have really no idea what a toaster should be. Or indeed, maybe it's made by cave people. It's this weird, slightly strange-looking future-past object, I think.

SPENCER: And were you able to operate it?

THOMAS: It was quite scary because one of the materials that I had not been able to get was rubber. I thought I would insulate my copper wires with rubber insulation. But I'd phoned up the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to see if they would let me. They've got some early rubber trees which somebody brought back over and they've been growing in their greenhouse there. "Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster. I just need some rubber. Can I come and extract some rubber from your rubber trees?" And they said, "If you come and try to do that, you'll be leaving in a police car." So I'd never managed to. These are very prized, very special rubber trees. And so, these wires from the electrical outlet, they're very rough wire with splits and so on. I was a bit worried about plugging the thing in because I was worried about electrocuting myself, obviously, and the body — lots of iron — is quite dangerous. So I make sure I'm wearing you know, and not standing in a puddle of water or whatever. And I plug this thing in, and for a brief beautiful moment, there's a glow that comes from inside the toaster. And I've got bread in there. But basically, it doesn't quite burst into flames, but it definitely flames out because I realized that there must have been a tiny inconsistency in this heating element that I'd made in the jewelry department and a very small narrowing of the resistance wire would have led to a buildup of resistance at that point and a buildup of heat. So basically, it melted itself from the inside. However, upon extracting the bread, it was definitely slightly warm.

SPENCER: Success. [laughs]

THOMAS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]

SPENCER: What was that? A nine-month project?

THOMAS: Yes, about nine months of trying and failing.

SPENCER: And then it self-immolated upon first use? That must have been an intense, emotional experience.

THOMAS: Yeah, bittersweet, let's say. When I set out, I thought I would be able to do way better. But after nine months of real struggle, this was what I'd managed. But I think, as somebody said, if you'd really wanted to just make toast — if the goal was to make toast — you could have just built a little fire, got a stick, and put some bread on the end of it. The goal of the project was to use this process to understand what it would be possible to make. Would I be able to survive in the wilderness just with my wits or whatever? And the answer was a firm no. And I think learning that is quite a valuable lesson. And also, really engaging with this idea of the complexity of the world that we live in was not just understanding it intellectually. I was quite emotionally engaged, viscerally engaged in, "Oh, wow, this has been a long time coming, this toaster, this conversation." Just think of the billions of people that have contributed to this conversation or have contributed to the toaster on your kitchen counter. Understanding that was what the project was about, I think.

SPENCER: One thing I notice, there's certain rules you set for yourself that are, in a certain sense, arbitrary, but you also have some things you're not willing to do. You're not going to just put a piece of toast on a stick and cook it over a fire. So how did you think about what you're allowed to do in that project, and what's crossing a boundary?

THOMAS: At the outset, I had these rules. Number one, it's got to be a toaster. What's a toaster? A toaster isn't a fire kind of thing. And number two was, it's all got to come from raw materials. And number three was, I'm only allowed to use processes and tools that have some kind of pre-industrial analog. So, yeah, the naive Thomas who thought he was some kind of genius, and who set out with these rules but then, fairly quickly, realized that it would be impossible to make a toaster sticking to those rules, really. It becomes, one, quite freeing to realize that, when you're making the rules of a project yourself, you can bend or break the rules. And two, what's going to be more interesting for me and for what I want to learn? Because there's definitely a version of the project where you're sticking religiously to those rules. Using a microwave oven, for example, was ridiculous. But then, maybe using any electricity at all is ridiculous. Okay, what about getting the train out to the mine or whatever? You can definitely boil it down to, okay, to really make a toaster from scratch, you need to start completely naked in the woods kind of thing, and then that's when you're really talking. I'm definitely attracted to that idea, at least before the first rainy night sort of thing. It sounds nice to just go to some woods and whatever, but that wasn't really what the project was about. There is this amazing YouTube account; I think it's called "Primitive Technology" where there is this guy who has been doing it for years; gradually, he's made himself a hut in the woods, and he's managed to make bread, and managed to make clay tiles, and managed to start to make metals and stuff like that. He's doing it. He's still a long way from an electric toaster. I didn't want to do that; I wanted to use it to understand this situation we find ourselves in. We're born into this already pre-existing, extremely complex civilization, and I just wanted to use this project to understand a little bit how all of this got here, and to connect with that history. But also, to connect with the current state of affairs which is, how is it possible to buy this toaster for five pounds when it's just got all of this material, all of this knowledge, all of this energy in it? And with the environmental crisis we're living in — some of us are living in it more than others, I think — maybe we're finding that it's not sustainable to have these objects. You certainly can't fix a five-pound toaster; when they break, you chuck them away and, obviously, that's not sustainable. I guess I was using the project to understand that and think about that. Am I wishing for things to be more expensive, which is the same as wishing for people to be poorer? I don't know. But it seems clear, at least from a materials and environment and design and energy perspective, in the current trajectory, we're clearly not going to be able to make objects in the same way, i.e., to be discarded once they're out of date or broken. That was also very clear from this project.

SPENCER: It reminds me of a story. I'm going to get the details slightly wrong but, basically, the story is about a tribe that has a very, very effective poison that they use on their arrows, and the process they use to make this poison is just absolutely insane. I'm going to butcher it, but it involves something like hunting a monkey, killing the monkey, throwing the monkey into a pit, pouring different things into the pit — different herbs and plants and stuff — letting it ferment there for a few weeks, digging it back up. It's just this incredibly elaborate process, but the net result is actually just this amazingly effective poison. But nobody who makes this poison knows how it works. This is a tribe that doesn't have the deep knowledge of chemistry or biology; they clearly don't have the scientific knowledge to understand how to make the poison, but the tribe has figured out how to do it through (one imagines) hundreds or thousands of years of trial and error. The process works, but nobody really understands how it works. And we think, well, we're beyond that; we got all the science and engineering. But maybe much more of our society is like that, where we figure out how to do things, but no actual individual person really understands it.

THOMAS: Yes, I think so. I think definitely no individual person understands how to make a toaster or whatever. It's that idea of institutional knowledge; there's certainly civilizational knowledge and, in the same way that an institution forgets, of course, we've forgotten how to make Kirkaldy's iron testing machine or whatever. Maybe somewhere, someone knows, or whatever. But it's like NASA and the space shuttle; all the people that knew the space shuttle back to front, they all retired or died or whatever. And so this concept of knowledge — and knowledge spread amongst a lot of people — it's definitely interesting to think about and to try and put yourself into. We often think, nowadays, we're much smarter than somebody living hundreds of years ago or whatever. But I now think that that is certainly not the case. I guess we've got more tools, let's say, but I think, individually, we're certainly not any smarter than somebody who figured out, through trial and error, how to make a slightly better iron, or how to make a better poison, or whatever. There's this strange essay called "I, Pencil," which also talks about this. It's written from the perspective of a pencil, just a normal writing pencil. And it's by this economist, Leonard Read; he wrote it in the 50s and talks about how no one person could ever make a simple HB pencil with a little rubber on it, held on with a little brass nodule. And that essay was written as a sort of libertarian 'free markets do these amazing things.' And I think, yes, definitely free markets do these amazing things, and they somehow capture this knowledge and let all these people with different knowledge operate and work together to create all of this wonderful stuff. However, I think we've definitely moved on from the 50s in terms of our economy and so on, and it brings up the role of government. Again, going back to this 'how can this toaster be so cheap.' You know that there's externalities which are not captured by the price of this object. For one, the carbon that was emitted in making this toaster which, if we were going to price that in, then maybe these objects wouldn't be made in such a way that they can just be discarded.

SPENCER: It is really fascinating that capitalism can optimize so much for something so complex, without anyone ever doing any kind of central planning around it. Like you could imagine a Manhattan Project to build a toaster that could get it down to such efficiency, but capitalism produces a toaster through the efforts of millions of people just trying to make money, and somehow we end up with this incredibly efficient system. But as you point out, it's optimal in one particular sense. It's optimal in the sense of being able to produce this thing at incredibly low cost with an extremely high level of convenience. But that's what it's optimizing for; it's not optimizing for other societal ends.

THOMAS: Yeah. That's then where the role of the government comes in, and the regulatory landscape which is created through laws which can suddenly create a market, if the political will was there, presumably. It's been tried; I don't think it's really worked, but we could create a market for carbon emissions or whatever, and capitalism would go to work in a slightly different regulatory landscape. These are big questions, big topics. We're looping back, looping AI into this. My favorite science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, has written a couple of essays about AI and, in one of them, he says we've already got artificial general intelligence. He characterizes corporations as slow AI. And his thinking is that we have these large, very complex entities which are very good at optimizing for a certain outcome or whatever, these large corporations. And yes, these large corporations — these slow AIs — they're made up of individuals but the corporation itself isn't acting in the best interests of the individuals that are in the corporation. The corporation itself has its own mind, its own institutional intelligence. And yes, the CEO is making the decisions, steering the ship or whatever, but even they are part of a larger grouping of shareholders or whatever. And so, in terms of looming AI and this idea of the alignment problem which, if somebody succeeds in creating this super intelligence or whatever — this artificial general intelligence — how will we make sure that this being is aligned to the best interests of us humans? The being is going to want to do its own thing and that may or may not involve humans. So it's this big concern in certain parts of the AI community and starting to think, well, the whole of the economy is basically an alignment problem. How do we get the economy and capitalism to align with the interests of humans as individuals or whatever? So I think you can say there's an emergent intelligence in how corporations act within this economy.

SPENCER: I think that's a great point, that there are intelligences already that are not just individual people. And some of them are great intelligences, and they're wickedly hard to align. And that's a fundamental challenge of society — getting these great intelligences aligned with societal benefit.

THOMAS: Personally, I think, as a designer and as an individual person, both my professional and private thoughts, I'm constantly flipping back and forth between this techno-optimist view of this great scientific progress and these big ideas, and artificial general intelligence coming along and how to align it with human interests, and so on. And then also flipping to this, 'well, it's just a story,' this idea of progress through complexity and ever-increasing complexity, and it's just a story that we tell ourselves. And just as lightly, or this idea of a return to a simpler time, like a crash or a drawdown or whatever. And so I'm always a bit aware of spinning off into this future sort of speculation and just swallowing this idea of the techno-optimist worldview. I just worry sometimes that these big questions of the future are maybe like distractions from the social, environmental problems that we face in the present.

SPENCER: Thomas, let's talk about another project of yours that I think is quite intriguing. Tell us about your process of becoming a goat.

THOMAS: This was a project that came from, I guess, getting a bit depressed, getting the weight of the world on my shoulders, and just worrying about my own life, my own relationships, my own career, big argument with my girlfriend, and then also worrying about these questions of the future like climate change; are we just headed for centuries of increasing suffering, basically, and poverty and so on? And I happened to be looking after someone's dog at this time, and just having a coffee with the dog at my feet. And I just had that thought, "Ohhh, it would be so much simpler just to be this dog. Wouldn't it be nice to be you, dog? You're just there. You're just taking each day as it comes, just enjoying your environment. Of course, you get happy when you find something nice to smell or eat on the street. And yes, you get upset when you're left alone at home or whatever. But you're not constantly in the throes of this worry and churn about what you're doing with your life, and what's gonna happen." And, yeah, this little thought of, "Wouldn't it be nice to just have a holiday from being a human being?" developed into this project to try and become a goat.

SPENCER: So what does that mean, becoming a goat?

THOMAS: Good question. I went to try and find that question out myself. As is my process, I start to reach out to some experts working in different fields. One of them, an ethologist — basically a goat behavioral psychologist — is Dr. McElligott at Queen Mary University. I went to visit him and asked him what makes me different from a goat in terms of my mind. Of course, being an academic, he's quite guarded with the answers he gives. Well, fundamentally, he says that's like an impossible question, because there's this problem of other minds. How do you know what's going on in anyone else's mind, let alone a goat? But he says, from their behavior, our best guess is that we don't think goats have what's called episodic memory. Humans make our memories into stories, almost. We have our life story and we can remember a scenario and what happened, and then we can imagine that scenario happening differently. And then we do the same in the future; we're jumping ahead. What might happen if I ran down the road naked, waving my arms. [laughs] Yeah, I can imagine what might happen. And so, we're very good at imagining stories, imagining scenarios, like this mental time travel. And we don't think goats do that, at least not to the extent that humans do. And of course, once humans have made up all these stories in our minds, we just have this compulsion to tell other people about our stories using this amazing language we have. So that was his like, "That's what we think is the difference." And so off I go to visit a neuroscientist because I want to switch off these human abilities in my brain. I tracked down this neuroscientist who uses transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce virtual lesions in people's brains. And so I was thinking, "Okay, maybe he can induce a lesion in the part of my brain that is responsible for my ability to do mental time travel and another lesion in the part of my brain that is responsible for my ability to use language." Yeah, so I think when he gets my first approach, he definitely does think I'm a mad person. [Spencer laughs] However, I'm persistent, and eventually convince him to invite me to his lab. So I'm in the lab, and I'm explaining. "Could you do this? Could you do that?" And Dr Devlin is like, "Yes, well, I could do that, but that would be effectively inducing lesions in about two thirds of your brain, and that's known as killing you, so I can't do that. But what I can do is use this transcranial magnetic stimulation to interrupt your language pathway, your vocal pathway." And so I spent a very uncomfortable afternoon having this very powerful magnetic field positioned over this patch of my brain — patch of everyone's brain called Broca's area — which is implicated in our ability to speak. And it produced this effect of almost like stuttering, trying to get a word out, but when the magnets are firing, you'd just kind of lose that ability to speak. So it was very weird and quite uncomfortable. But he said, "For what you're really trying to do, which is use neuroscience to finally adjust your experience of the world to be closer to that of a different animal, we're so far away from that level of understanding of the brain. So come back in 50 years and maybe we'll have some wonderful technology that can selectively switch off and tweak your experience of the world." So yeah, and the next day, a filling fell out so I'm sure that some metal filling of mine was loosened by these magnetic fields. [laughs]

SPENCER: Am I correct to understand that you actually originally planned to be an elephant, not a goat?

THOMAS: Yes. When I began the project, I was like, "Yes, I'm gonna try and become an elephant." I hadn't really given it too much thought. I really had chosen an elephant for pragmatic purposes. My thought: maybe making a kind of exoskeleton that I could get inside and manipulate would be easier if it was bigger, like an elephant. And also, I just thought an elephant is so impervious to... It's not a prey animal, but it's not a predator animal. It's an elephant. It eats plants but it doesn't get hunted, and it's got a trunk, and you can spray things, spray people with your trunk. That'd be great fun and that'd be nice. And I was given some money by a funding agency to do this project, an art science sort of funding agency. So when I wrote to them — "Oh, I want to become an elephant" — and then they gave me the money, and then I started doing a bit more research into elephants and realized that elephants, humans, dolphins. There's a few animals that seem to have an understanding of their own mortality, and elephants are one of them. In fact, they'll exhibit this ritualistic mourning behavior, especially if they've witnessed the death of an elephant in their family that's been traumatic. And they live in these very large families — these complex social units — and the complexity of family was exactly the kind of thing I was trying to escape from. And so, I concluded that elephants have their own issues and so I decided I didn't want to be an elephant anymore. I was moaning to a friend in the pub, "I'm doing this project. I wanted to be an elephant, but I don't want to be an elephant anymore. What do I do?" And she made the excellent suggestion that I should go and consult an expert in human animal transformation, that I should consult a shaman. So she put me in touch with a friend of hers who is a shaman, and I went to visit this lady in Copenhagen and told her my problem. "I thought I wanted to be an elephant, but now I've realized I don't want to be an elephant anymore." And she immediately said, "Look, Thomas, you're an idiot for thinking you could be an elephant. Of course, you can't be an elephant. You could only hope to be an elephant if you'd grown up amongst elephants in the Kalahari Desert. But you didn't; you grew up in London. What animals do you have in London? You've got squirrels. You could maybe be a squirrel. But, ugh, who wants to be a squirrel?" And then she said, "Well, sheep, there's plenty of sheep in the UK. You could maybe be a sheep. But again, who wants to be a sheep?" But then she said, "Okay, well, perhaps you should consider becoming a goat." And as soon as she said goat, I was like, "Yes, of course, I should be a goat."

SPENCER: How did your funder feel about that?

THOMAS: Well, I didn't tell the funding agency [laughs] until the very end, and that led to this very strange meeting where I'm trying to convince people that actually, it's not much different. In fact, it's much better becoming a goat than it is becoming an elephant because of all of these reasons. It was one of the more surreal meetings I've had in my career. But Annette, this shaman, her reasoning was, basically, I had to choose an animal that was closer to me culturally and sort of spiritually and I had no real idea about what an elephant is, but I'd grown up in a culture where we have domesticated goats, that sort of thing.

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SPENCER: So how did you actually begin to become a goat? What was that process like of preparing yourself for the fields?

THOMAS: Obviously, I needed to become a quadruped. I was thinking, "Okay, I need to de-evolve." And so I went to see an evolutionary anatomist at the Royal Veterinary College. Again, it took a little bit of persistence to get a meeting. [laughs] But yeah, he was intrigued by the idea and we ended up working together to dissect a goat which had died of natural causes. I had this idea that I was going to de-evolve myself; or somehow I had this idea that it should be easy to go backwards somehow. But, talking to this Professor Hutchinson at the Royal Veterinary College and dissecting this animal, and you just realize that, okay, goats have been evolving for just as long as humans, and they're just as specialized at being goats as humans are at being humans. And so this idea that it would be easier to downgrade myself to a goat was just complete nonsense. That was a nice lesson to learn for me, that we're not the top of the pyramid sort of thing. There is no pyramid. The goat anatomy is just as complex as human anatomy. But I realized the difficulty was going to be how to interface my existing body with this engineered exoskeleton that would let me gallop along like a goat. That meant prosthetics, so I contacted some clinical prosthetists and asked them if they would work with me to make me some goat legs. They found the idea professionally interesting, so they invited me up for a consultation and took casts of my limbs, and we worked out what to do. And then they said, "Okay, well, come back in a few weeks, and we'll have finished these prosthetics."

SPENCER: Okay, so you got the prosthetics from them. Did they function properly?

THOMAS: They did. It wasn't quite the beautiful galloping motion that I was hoping for, this idea of galloping away across the fields. And one of the things that they were really impressed that I could do was that I could trot. They thought I might be able to walk a few paces, but I was actually able to trot in the clinic. But they said, "Look, there's no way. You'll never gallop. You're never gonna gallop. And you're never gonna jump from rock to rock like a nimble goat. Because if you try that, there's bits of your anatomy which just prevent you from doing that. Like, goats don't have any collarbones, for example. If you try and jump down from a rock and land on your front legs, you're gonna, essentially, rip your collarbones away from your shoulders." And the other thing they said was, "You also don't have a nuchal ligament, this ligament that helps animals which have to carry their heads out in front of them, on their neck." It's like this rope that attaches from the back of their head down to their torso. And I was like, "Well, yeah, can't we just build in a rope from a helmet down to my torso?" And they're like, "We thought about that. We don't want you to do that because we're worried that you'll basically really damage your neck and your back, and we do not want you coming back here as a patient at some future date." So yeah, I had these prosthetics, these legs, but I was like, "Well, I'm not going to be very free if I have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. And so I need to find a way to basically survive on grass and foliage. I need to, not just be able to eat grass, but I need to be able to digest it. And so I need an artificial rumen." Ruminants — goats and other animals — have an extra digestive sack in their body, like an extra stomach. And inside a rumen, there's a whole different microbiome, a whole collection of bacteria and fungi that are all specialized in breaking down the cellulose in grass and other fibrous plants. Our bodies treat it as fiber, but the bodies of ruminants have this way of breaking it down and extracting energy from those fibers, sort of like an internal yogurt farm. They have these bacteria and fungi that grow on these fibers which we can't digest, and then this mixture from the rumen goes down into their true stomach, and they digest the fungi and the partially-digested fibers and so on. I needed an artificial rumen that had this specialized microbiome in it. So I created this bag out of food-safe silicone, which was in a U shape that I could strap to my torso to keep it all nice and warm, and then I just needed to get a sample of the rumen fluid from inside a healthy goat. I realized I would not be very free of human concerns and worries if I had to worry about where my next meal was coming from, and so I needed an artificial rumen. And so I contacted some ruminant biologists at the University of Aberystwyth and paid them a visit and convinced them. And I made this U-shaped silicone bag. My plan was that I would have this U-shaped bag that would strap to my torso, and I could keep it nice and warm, and then I'd bite some grass off with my teeth, chew, chew, chew, chew it up, and then spit it into one end of this U-shaped bag. And then this chewed up plant matter would go into the U-shaped bag and then it would be partially digested by this specialized microbiome that ruminants have, and then I could suck out this mixture of plant fiber, digested fungi bacteria from the other end of the bag, and then into my mouth again, and then down into my throat, swallow it into my true stomach, and then it would be like I would have made an artificial rumen. So I took this device to this lab and said, "Can I show you my artificial rumen?" And they were like, "Yeah, sure." So I explained what I wanted to do, and they were nodding along. And they were like, "Yeah, well, it's quite similar to our artificial rumens." And they showed me their artificial rumens. "Wow, yeah, that's really interesting. Now what I need is a sample of the rumen fluid from inside a healthy goat. Could you provide that?" And they were like, "Yes, well, in our research, we do take samples. So that shouldn't be a problem." So I was like, "Great, okay, I'll let you know when, when the time comes." And so I assembled my legs, and I made this suit that I could wear out of technical fabrics, and had this helmet, and I'd tried to adjust my vision and my hearing such that it would be more of a goat's eye view of the world. That was quite difficult. But then, okay, I've got it, I'm ready. And I'd arranged to go and live on a goat farm in Switzerland. So I wrote to the ruminant biologists and said, "Okay, can you send me the sample?" But, rather than sending me the sample, they sent me a letter from the university lawyers and, basically, they'd all got quite worried that I would give myself some serious long-term gut condition and then sue the university. I phoned up the scientists that I'd been talking to, and they said, "Yeah, we're really sorry but it wouldn't pass the ethics review board. We just don't really know what is our understanding of this organ and the complexity, the number of different viruses and bacteria and fungi in there; we don't really know what's going on. So we don't think it would be entirely safe for you to try and survive from this." So yeah, but I had to go anyway. So off I went to Switzerland to live on this goat farm. And I hadn't really told the goat farmer that I wasn't just interested in living on the farm. I didn't want to just live on the farm with the goats; I wanted to live on the farm as one of his goats and eat with his goats and sleep amongst his goats, and be herded along with his goats, and so on. So I turn up and say, "Yeah, what do you think?" He's this Swiss, doesn't-speak-much, slightly monosyllabic guy. Amazingly, to my relief, he just says, "Oh, yeah, sure, go ahead. The goat shed's over there." [Spencer laughs] And he just motions me to the barn, "Make yourself at home." Then he said, "But tomorrow, I'm moving the goats. You should know this. I'm moving the goats very early in the morning. It's getting cold up here. This is the Alps. (We're in the Alps.) It's getting cold up here. So I'm going to move them down to a lower pasture." And I'm like, "Okay. Don't worry about me. Just do what you need to do. You won't even notice me. I'll just be one of the herd." And so, at dawn the next morning — I slept the night in the barn amongst the goats — and all the goats started getting excited because they knew what's going to happen. I got my legs on and my artificial rumen and I'm there on four legs. Sep, the goatherd, starts herding us along and, for this wonderful moment or this wonderful period, I'm with the goats and it's beautiful. I'm right in the middle and we're all being herded along. But fairly soon into the journey, the terrain just becomes extremely steep, and they get herded down this, very, very steep mountain path. As it turns out, I find it much, much more difficult to go down, basically because, suddenly, more and more weight is on my front legs, and it just becomes extremely painful and also extremely worrying, because all the rocks are quite steep and I'm unsure of my footing. And I realized that, if I fall, I don't have my hands to stop myself so I just have to take it extremely slowly while the goats are just flowing down this hillside in their amazing goat way. And of course, my prosthetics start giving me blisters. This is the first real test; it basically takes me the rest of the day to cover this ground down to this slightly lower pasture. But finally, I arrive, and I'm there just trying to eat grass and forget that I'm a human.

SPENCER: How long did you spend on the fields with the goats?

THOMAS: Three days and three nights and, to be honest, it was extremely uncomfortable really. [laughs] I'm just constantly tired and quite wet and obviously hungry. And in a way, it's beautiful; but in another way, it's just like, "Wow, I'm just really tired and hungry and cold." But there are these moments where I realized, I'm learning how to be a goat. Obviously, I can't do things with my hand so I have to manipulate things with my nose and my mouth, and I'm sniffing things and eating grass — and I realized, you just think, "Oh, eating grass, whatever. Grass is grass." But it's not, Spencer; there's some grass which is nice and some grass which is horrible — and just trying to forget I'm a human.

SPENCER: How did the goats react to you?

THOMAS: Obviously, at first, they were wary. But it didn't take long for a couple to get more curious and then, fairly soon, I am just amongst the herd, and everyone's just getting on with eating grass or doing what they're doing. So it went from being slightly wary to just not really, certainly not being worried about me.

SPENCER: But you don't think they ever accepted you in some way?

THOMAS: Well, after this period, the goatherd said that he thought that the goats had accepted me at this particular moment. I think maybe he'd been watching — keeping an eye on me in the field [laughs] — and, yeah, I knew the moment he was talking about because there was this moment when I was just eating some grass and just wandering around the field, but the field was on quite a steep slope. I find it much easier to go uphill, so I'm just tending to go up to the top of the hill. I find myself the highest of the goats on the hillside. And there's this moment which I noticed where, suddenly, a couple of the goats start tossing their horns at me, and behavior changes. I don't know, but it seems like the other goats are a bit more alert and start looking, and I'm like, "Okay, something's going on here." And I realized that this goat is preparing to butt me with its head. It wants to butt heads with me, and it's like, "Wow." Suddenly those horns take on the definite look of quite serious weapons. And I start to think, "Oh, yeah, my neck is really exposed and my fleshy stomach," and I just back away and try to remove myself from the situation, and just escape. And talking to the goatherd afterwards, he said, "Yes, that moment was possibly when the herd accepted you because a new goat that is introduced to the herd has to find its place in the social hierarchy, the pecking order. And by positioning yourself higher, physically, than the other goats, you were saying, 'I'm a dominant goat.'" And so I'd accidentally sent this signal that I was gonna come and be the dominant goat and then backed away from this match-up, this fight.

SPENCER: The goats put you in your place.

THOMAS: Exactly, yes. And in terms of how good I was at being a goat, I was definitely at the lowest rung of that ladder. I did also seem to make a goat friend. I realized that there was this particular goat that when I looked up, this goat would be there much more often than the other goats. And so we almost hung around together a bit. So maybe that goat was the second lowest goat or something like that, yeah.

SPENCER: Were you able to bond with that goat in some way, or is it just proximity?

THOMAS: Yeah, it's basically proximity, I think. The goat would sort of come up and smell my breath, and I would obviously smell its breath. I must say, trying to enjoy the smell of a goat's breath was something very difficult to come to, in terms of forgetting my human reaction to a goat's breath; just experiencing it as a goat was quite a difficult thing to manage. So I'm not sure; if I was able to physically do this for a year or something like that, then I feel like I would have understood the goats more. In fact, the goatherd himself who had lived with these goats, I think in terms of understanding their personality and their behavior from a human perspective, he was streets ahead of my understanding of the herd's behavior and the individual goat's behavior. And the shaman that I'd spoken to right at the beginning of the project, she'd said, "Thomas, the prosthetics that you're making and this suit that you want to make, it's just going to get in the way. If you really want to do this, you just need to go back to that thing of just de-complexifying and just going into the woods and just observing animals in the wild, that's how you can hope to gain an insight." But for me in this project, I didn't want to take that approach because there was something about technology that I wanted to bring into this project, these technical fabrics and these quite technical prosthetics, and the science of ruminant biology, and this idea of, could we use technology to become something different, or to understand the world from a different animal's perspective? But in the field, this technology did feel very clunky and quite painful. I guess it was the first prototype or Mark One.

SPENCER: I don't think I understood how you ate, actually. Because in the end, did you end up using this false stomach that you fermented the grass in?

THOMAS: Yeah, I did have the stomach on and I was chewing up a lot of grass, and swallowing a lot of grass. But I had looked at other ways of achieving this digestion, but again, they were considered too dangerous for whatever reasons. And the people who were funding the project just were not keen on some of the stuff that I was proposing. So in the end, I had a friend there as well, who came along to take some photos, and he would feed me Mars bars and pasta from his hand.

SPENCER: [laughs] But it sounds like you did eat quite a bit of grass. Did that make you ill?

THOMAS: Yeah, I did get a little case of worms but nothing too serious. Let's just say, the thing is, after I'd spent time amongst the goats on the farm, I really wanted to go into the wild and try and become like a wild goat in the Alps, like an ibex, so I set off into the Alps. But after another few days in the Alps and, let's say, returning to the human world, I had gained a new appreciation of human comforts that we take for granted.

SPENCER: Yeah, it sounds like you were just cold and wet much of the time. Is that a lot of what was most difficult about it?

THOMAS: Yes. [laughs] And I would love to be able to say that I forgot myself. And maybe I did momentarily, but there's nothing like being cold and wet to drag you back into reality sort of thing.

SPENCER: Right, because it sounds like you wanted to be like a goat in the sense of not living in the future, not living in the past, but really just being in that moment, experiencing what's in front of you, a kind of mindfulness, almost.

THOMAS: Yeah. And it was a surprise to me that a lot of things — like being present in the environment, and being present in your body, and being present in the moment — were things that you hear about from mindfulness or Buddhist practice, and to achieve that presence takes some mental training and mental practice. And I'm not sure putting prosthetics on and making yourself feel slightly ill was the best way to achieve that state of mindfulness. It took me a while to work out what the project meant to me. Yes, I definitely learned a lot about the difference between goats and humans. And I gained some insight into the life of the goat from the goat's perspective, what it is to live amongst a herd when you're on the same level as the other animals, and you're being jostled, and the horns of the goats that were interested in having a fight, they were real weapons; whereas, from a human perspective, you're looking down on these animals and I've really realized why it's important for a goat to be higher up in the social hierarchy. It's because they get to eat the nice grass; they get to sleep in the nice place in the barn. Obviously, I'd read that goats are social animals with a hierarchy in the herd and I understood this intellectually, but I was made to understand it physically and emotionally as well. But thinking about what the project was about a bit later, I think what I found actually the most difficult about doing this project was, somehow, it made me question this idea of progress and it made me realize that I had this innate idea of progress that humans, as a species, were on a journey from the cave to the stars kind of thing. Basically I had watched a lot of Star Trek when I was growing up and had this idea in the back of my mind, in my subconscious that, "Yes, there's going to be bumps along the road, but ultimately, humans are working towards some kind of future. There's a journey, and there's a destination and it's amongst the stars or something like that." Whereas, in wanting to become a goat, I was kind of rejecting that story of progress because, obviously, goats don't have that idea of themselves. And so it made me think, "Well, why am I thinking of myself as part of this idea of progress? Maybe it would be better to be a goat and essentially step away from this idea of a future kind of thing. Why not just live your life on a hillside and not try and contribute to something greater than yourself? Why not just think of yourself as part of something greater, this great human journey?" And it made me realize that this idea of progress is a story. It's not necessarily a true story either.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, I want to hear, do you have any new projects you're working on that you're excited about?

THOMAS: Well, yes. I'm trying to make a harmless car, which is, I guess, another one of these projects, which you quickly realize how impossible it is. But I feel like there's something interesting that I want to uncover with it, some question in my own mind. And I think, "How would you make anything harmless?" I guess with the toaster, it was like, "Wow, we're just connected in this vast interconnected society in space and also in time." And then the goat project was a bit like questioning this sort of story that there's some direction to this interconnected society that we've created. And so with this new harmless car project, I guess I wanted to think about, is it possible as a designer to ever design something which is harmless because, are we now in a world where it's almost like a zero-sum game? There's this idea that, at some stage in the past, it was like we were on this... Buckminster Fuller had this idea that we were on a cowboy Earth where the vast plains extended around us, and the effects that we could have were insignificant compared to the environment we were in. Now, are we on a spaceship Earth where the effects that we have are global and so we need to think about the planet as a spaceship: recycling, and it's an enclosed capsule, almost. And so, we need to recycle our waste in the way that you would on a long space voyage. And so, are we in this situation where we make something on one side of the world, and we know it's going to have benefits for some people, but it's going to be harmful for others — maybe people living today, or maybe it's just going to contribute to an unlivable future if climate change is not brought under control — or it's contributing to climate change or whatever? And so, yeah, can we make anything that's harmless? Nobody thought the internal combustion engine was going to end up being this major issue. Nobody thought the car was going to become the number one leading cause of violent death globally. So, could you design something that was guaranteed to be harmless for its entire life cycle? I think the answer is no; obviously, you can't do anything harmless. And by 'harmless,' I mean not just harmless to humans; I mean harmless to all forms of life. If you understand that you can't be harmless, well, then the next question is: well, who do you harm and why? For me, it brings into sharp relief the political nature of design, in that, we're constantly choosing who's going to get the benefit and who's going to get the harm? And that's political choices, but it also has an element of justice to it. If you could design an object and choose where to place the harm, where would you choose to place the harm? Where should you choose to place the harm? Last summer, I basically went to try and make a harmless car. And so far, that has involved weaving a space frame chassis from coppiced willow, which is the most harmless material I could think of. And the axles are made of bamboo, and the wheels are like huge balloon wheels, because the idea is that, should there be a small snail in the road or where I'm going — maybe not on a road — then the wheels, the tires will be of such low pressure that they'll just roll over the snail. The idea was that with these tires, the rubber was going to be made from dandelion rubber; that's still developing. But in the meantime, I've just got these large rubber inner tubes, and have created this slightly strange looking car to explore the idea of harm, and harm that we do with design, and trying to hazily imagine a world where the calculus of harm was different somehow.

SPENCER: Final question for you: one thing that your work sparks for me is the idea of agency, where you'll pick a project — it's just something you want to do — and you'll just set out on a quest. You give yourself a quest, and then, on that quest, you do all kinds of things that I think many people don't view as really possible. One of them will be just, "Oh, let me just ask people if they can help me who are people I don't know, people who have no particular reason to help me." And you find that all different sorts of people are willing to aid you in your quest. And you try to do things that you have no idea how to do, or you don't know the first thing about it, and you have to start by going and reading a book in a library. And so in a lot of ways, although people wouldn't necessarily want to do the things you're doing, I feel like you show them that it's possible to just choose something difficult that's completely outside of your comfort zone, and then just go after that thing.

THOMAS: I think the idea of agency is there, is definitely in my work, and I guess it's something in my process as well. I suppose it's very difficult to investigate the questions that I'm interested in investigating by yourself and, in fact, part of the joy of doing this project is asking these questions along with experts in their field. I think — I hope, anyway — and some of the conversations I've had have made me think that sometimes, it's quite fun and occasionally useful for people working in these fields to also have these projects which are looking at things in a different way or a more holistic way, or whatever. But in terms of agency, in terms of design, and in terms of how we talk about technology in the future, we often talk about, "Yeah, it's our world and it's technology we use, and yes, it's our future or whatever. And we're looping ourselves into this larger idea of human civilization, global civilization, and its technology." But I suppose, yes, asking about, "Who is this 'we'?" is something that I'm becoming more interested in. Who is this 'we' that is making decisions about technology? And, yes, I think there's potentially fewer and fewer people making decisions about technology, and I think that's maybe a bit of a problem. Maybe in the work that I do, I'm trying to access some of these spaces where technology happens and try and push myself into the conversation a bit more, and try and maybe slightly widen the conversation a bit more about what technology is for and how it interacts with the economy and our lives, and really find a way of questioning my role in technology, our role in technology (I don't know) in a way that's maybe not quite so combative. I guess I'm trying to feel my way in this complex world, just like anybody else.

SPENCER: Thomas, thanks so much for coming on.

THOMAS: Okay, a pleasure. Thank you very much, Spencer.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks: "Which abstractions — like, for example, probability or randomness — do you think are self-referential but which people confuse for externally referential physical laws?

SPENCER: Well, sometimes people think of math as referring to the world. And I'm a believer that it doesn't. People will think, "Oh, if you have one ball in a bag and then you put another ball in a bag, well, that's one plus one." And then you say, "Ah, now I know how many balls are in the bag. One plus one equals two!" And I think what they're doing there is they're confusing things a little bit. I think of math as a language of patterns. So it's incredibly precise language for describing patterns, ideally perfectly precise. And so you see this pattern in the world: oh, if I combine two things together, then I have two of them. Well, now what you're doing is you're saying, "Ah, that pattern in the world, we can map that to the mathematical abstraction of plus, right?" So once you map it to the mathematical abstraction of adding these together, the plus sign, now you can make predictions. So if I add another ball in the bag, I have three. If I add another, I have four. But let's say instead you're using soft objects that, when you put them in the bag, they tend to mold together, like (let's say) really soft mud. Well, now you put two things in the bag and you get one thing. Well, does that mean that one plus one doesn't equal two? No. It means that no longer is the plus sign the right operator to model that situation. You would need another mathematical abstraction to model that situation. So basically what you're doing is you're looking at the world, noticing patterns, then you're finding the right patterns in math that map onto those patterns. And then once you've done that, you can then draw conclusions about the world by analyzing the math.