I Attract Miracles

What if vivid colour could come from a material’s structure, without relying on coloured dyes?

Ivo Betke joins Silvia Vignolini to explore structural colour: the way tiny structures interact with light to create the colours we see. From the brilliant blue of Pollia berries to cellulose-based materials, the conversation follows an idea from curiosity about nature to practical applications.

We discuss alternatives to conventional glitter, the challenges of scaling up production, and what happens when research becomes a business. What makes a material more sustainable—and what trade-offs remain?

Then we look ahead to 2040: could colour become a signal, helping us detect stress in materials or changes in our environment? A conversation about optics, biology, and the possibilities—and limits—of learning from nature.

I Attract Miracles: Season 02, Episode 03
Grown, not Made.

Discover more: https://iattractmiracles.com/

What remains when you remove every cell from a piece of tissue—and could it help us grow something new?

Ivo Betke joins Ahed Almalla and Komali Valishetti of Renatrix to explore the extracellular matrix: the natural scaffold that surrounds and supports living cells. Starting with animal tissue already in the food supply chain, they turn this material into gels and bioinks for cell culture and bioprinting.

We explore the delicate balance between removing cells and preserving the structure they leave behind, why the origin of a biomaterial matters, and what it takes to make biology reproducible in the lab.

Then we look ahead to 2040: could giving cells a better home change how we test medicines and grow replacement tissue? A conversation about the science, the trade-offs, and the distance between today's research and tomorrow's possibilities.

I Attract Miracles: Season 02, Episode 02
Grown, not Made.

Discover more: https://iattractmiracles.com/

What if rare botanical ingredients could be grown without fields, seasons or harvests?

Ivo joins Alessandro De Simone of Molecular Garden to explore growing plant cells in steel tanks, the journey from laboratory research to production, and the challenges of making biology reliable at scale.

Then we look ahead to 2040: what changes when the factory becomes the garden—and what happens when that garden gets sick?

I Attract Miracles: Season 02, Episode 01
Grown, not Made.

Discover more: https://iattractmiracles.com/

CEO of Kipu Quantum. Algorithms compressed to run on noisy, error-prone quantum processors — making practical quantum computation available a decade before the hardware is ready. A 2040 where quantum advantage is already invisible infrastructure.

Enrique Solano grew up in Lima as the rebel child of engineers, the one who quit mechanical engineering in his final year. One of the most cited quantum theorists alive, he insists he is an artist first.

His company, named in Quechua, makes a heretical bet: stop waiting for the perfect qubits that may never come, and squeeze real value out of today's noisy, messy ones. He hates the word future. In quantum computing, he says, it is the excuse the field uses to avoid being useful now. So his miracle is set in the present tense.

Pressed on 2040, he relents only a little: AI and quantum quietly merged, as ordinary as riding a bicycle, something a teenager handles without once asking how it works. The hard physics does not vanish. It simply stops being anyone's problem.

Episode 4 of The Sovereign Stack.

Co-founder and CTO of SpaceComputer. A satellite in low Earth orbit is a computer no one can reach to tamper with. SpaceComputer relocates the hardware security root to orbit — where physical inaccessibility becomes the security model.

Filip Rezabek carried one question from Prague to Seoul to a Cisco internship to TU Munich: how do you trust a networked system you cannot physically inspect? Securing cars led to securing blockchains, which led to a strange conclusion. The safest place to run a computer is orbit, where no one can reach the hardware. SpaceComputer's satellites generate their own private keys in space, never on the ground.

Asked about 2040, Rezabek pictures Alice, who never thinks about any of it. The photo she takes carries a hash proving where and when it was real. Her weather report is signed by the satellites that watched the clouds. The checkmarks are simply there, seamless, and she may not even care. And when a service fails, the whole web no longer falls with it, the way everything breaks today when Cloudflare goes down. Authenticity stops being something you verify by hand.

Episode 3 of The Sovereign Stack.

CEO of EZKL. Zero-knowledge machine learning that lets any third party verify an AI model ran correctly on specific data — without seeing the model's weights or the inputs. A 2035 where "the algorithm said so" comes with a cryptographic receipt.

Jason Morton came to verifiable AI through algebraic geometry, modeling neural networks as polynomial equations for fifteen years before that meant anything, then through science fiction and a failed attempt to buy Bitcoin on Mt. Gox.

The problem that fused both halves of him: how do you prove an AI ran the way it claims without revealing its secrets? His tool, EZKL, compiles a trained model into a single zero-knowledge proof, a cryptographic receipt that the computation happened honestly.

Asked about 2040, he starts with the boring part: accounting and financial statements you can finally trust. Then it gets stranger. You lose your passport at Burning Man and still get home, because your data exhaust proves you are you. You die without a will, and a model trained to judge as you did releases the funds, no lawyer, no escrow. Stage one, you are the wallet. Stage two, the wallet is you.

Episode 2 of The Sovereign Stack.

Professor of Physical Chemistry, Humboldt University Berlin. Sodium-ion batteries with Prussian blue electrodes — built from abundant, cheap materials, without lithium or cobalt. The energy storage breakthrough that makes the transition democratically available.

Philipp Adelhelm stayed with batteries when they were a dead topic. A Stuttgart kid who read Al Gore and watched his father throw sodium into water, he chose chemistry that might help with climate change, back when everyone else was betting on hydrogen.

Decades later the bet is paying off. Sodium-ion swaps lithium for an element vastly more abundant: no cobalt, no copper, no supply chain a single country can choke. Think of a battery as a parking lot for ions, and we have learned to build the cheap, durable kind.

Asked to picture a Tuesday in 2040, Adelhelm keeps it grounded: batteries so long-lived they go invisible, cheap enough for everyone, streets gone quiet and clean as combustion engines disappear, the car downstairs quietly storing the day's sun. Pushed on whether solved energy means utopia, he refuses to pretend he knows.

Episode 1 of The Sovereign Stack.