A derelict grocery store in New York, half a block long, big green windows, a bank waiting to happen. The day before a trip, Lara Stein taped a cup of post-its to the glass and wrote on the first one: leave your idea here, dream up what you want this space to be. Within minutes people were stopping, reading, writing. She filmed them. She got on a plane. She asked a neighbour to walk by and take a picture.
Somebody had taken it down.
That is the whole conversation in one scene, so i will tell you the rest.
Lara invented TEDx. Not the talks, the licence: anyone, anywhere, under a few shared rules. Hence a TEDx under the Great Wall, a TEDx on a boat in the Amazon, and forty thousand talks in a hundred and thirty-three countries within five years. She then ran Singularity University’s global expansion, founded Boma, and has spent the years since in the places where the two tribes that do not talk to each other, the builders and the people who care about living things, are forced to share a room. She grew up in South Africa with a game park twice a year. Three kids, eighteen to twenty-four, all just left home. That is where the post-its came from.
This is the first of a series of conversations with her, and i wanted the foundation: what does she see when she looks at the world.
Her frame is simple: there are three operating systems running on this planet. Nature. Humans. Technology. Nature is the founding one, the technology that built everything including us. And a whole class of very capable people has decided that the third is the only one. They do not see the first one at all, because they sit in offices all day cracking whatever they committed to cracking, in some cases getting off the planet. Let’s hope we crack fusion soon, she said, and i let it pass, but: we cracked it, it is a hundred and fifty million kilometres away, and the whole economy called nature has been running on it for free. I wrote that up as heliogenesis years ago.
The pressure lands on land. Two point three billion people when she was born. Ten on the way. Regenerative agriculture has to scale, and so does the other kind, and so do critical minerals, data centres, solar fields. All of it is land. Meanwhile we reduced the planetary story to one molecule, CO2, because a complex, gnarly, systemic problem does not fit in a commercial. Biodiversity sits at the edge of Climate Week. She cites a figure: ninety-eight percent of the money goes to de-risked climate tech, two percent to nature. Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it.
Her response, for now, is to play. A red hat on an AI-rendered data centre: Make Data Centers Regenerative Again. Green roof, pool on top, a community centre and a daycare for the two-to-fives whose parents both work. I added heat and compute for the neighbourhood. Why is this not the default spec?
Geoffrey Hinton says analog compute is far cheaper in energy and far messier, and i asked whether we could use some of that mess. She went further. Real innovation only ever happens in the messy middle. The man who runs innovation for Toyota put himself in a fab lab for six months to think with his hands again. Companies are creative between two and forty people and then build systems that stick. And the thing we are all now doing to our own thinking: you have an idea, you put it into the model, and it kicks out a perfect paper and says well done. The twenty-four hours in which the idea would have become a different idea are gone. You can always tell it to ask back instead, i said. We are still in charge.
“For how much longer?”
If the first question people ask of any collective shift is what’s in it for me, i asked, what is behind the question? Her answer: unmet needs. Food that is not toxic. A roof that does not feel like a jail. A world-class education, deliverable with what we already have. Basic needs as a commons, in my words, and she agreed: start there, and the compulsion to win at everyone’s expense loses its grip. People will still compete. Fine. Let them compete on something else.
Our built world is designed for the opposite, she said. The European square connects, the strip mall separates. I wrote once that the sunset cannot be described, only had, and that a civilisation that cannot afford to watch one has lost the plot. Lara put it as a need: i am like a plant, i have to see the sunrise and the sunset. Science has caught up with the plant.
We talked about compassion as a muscle, Kailash Satyarthi’s version, which does not count unless it acts, and about whether a person who never trained it can learn later. She doubts it. I think the prefrontal cortex gives us more room than a rescued dog has. We left it there.
We will go down the rabbit holes next: nature, education, food and shelter as foundations, in ways that will look messy from inside the current paradigm and are worth living in. The post-its were not hurting anyone.
Somebody took them down.
Put them back.
