Meet Konstantin Batygin | Professor at Caltech | Co-Founder at Lucinetic, Inc | Vox & Guitar at The Seventh Season

We had the good fortune of connecting with Konstantin Batygin and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Konstantin, what habits do you feel play an important role in your life?
To a large extent, it’s just work ethic. This is something I acquired through martial arts practice. I am a naturally disorganized person but I got serious about training when I was a teenager, growing up in Tokyo. Learning Karate really helped me focus, and I have carried a sense of discipline with me throughout my career. Another critical insight you learn rather quickly when you are serious about training is that perfection is an asymptotic concept: there are always ways to improve and learn new things. This supposition has helped me to continue moving forward in virtually all of my pursuits.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
At present, my work is organized into three separate themes: (1) academia, (2) music, and (3) business.

(1) I’m a professor of planetary astrophysics at Caltech. My research focuses primarily on the formation and evolution of solar systems throughout their lifespans, as well as celestial mechanics, magnetohydrodynamics, and a bit of chaos theory. I run a wonderful research group at the Institute, full of amazing people, and we spend much of our time drinking coffee and doing math. Probably one of my most impactful pursuits to date has been the Planet Nine hypothesis (which I formulated together with my partner in crime, Mike Brown, also at Caltech) and more recently I have been working on a unified theory of planetary origins with Alessandro Morbidelli (a close friend and colleague from France).

(2) I play guitar and sing in a rock band called The Seventh Season. We put out some albums back in 2003 – 2007 and played live regularly before the pandemic hit. A bit of isolation gave us some time to return to the studio in a big way, and just last month, we finished the mixing and mastering of two new albums — “Remembrance” and “Starlight”. I’m extraordinarily excited about the upcoming releases — these are songs we have written and played live incessantly over the last decade and they came together beautifully in the studio.

(3) Last year, I co-founded a generative AI company called Lucinetic, Inc., together with my colleague from Yale, Greg Laughlin, and my wife Olga (who left her job at Caltech to step into the role of a badass CEO). Lucinetic’s technology is designed to help people become their most expressive selves with the aid of artificial intelligence. The company has grown quite a bit over the last 18 months, and we launched our first product earlier this year; our alpha users seem to absolutely love it and we are in the process of moving forward with our beta front-end right now. It’s a ton of work but none of it feels like work because we are all so passionate about what we are doing.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
The thing that always inspires me about LA is the staggering degree of contrast that you can experience in a short time. So here is a sample itinerary:

– start with an early-morning hike near JPL in La Canada, followed by breakfast in Old Towne Pasadena; alt: Griffith observatory
– hit up LACMA first, then MOCA; alt: Huntington gardens/Norton Simon Museum followed by the Museum of Jurassic Technology
– grab lunch and then surf at Hermosa beach; alt: Manhattan beach
– by now it’s getting later in the day, so head back to DTLA to catch a show (e.g., the Regent); alt: sunset strip
– last station: The Perch if we’re feeling rooftop; alt: The 82 if we’re gonna battle it out in Street Fighter II

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Easy!

1. Charlie Parish (charlieparish@gmail.com) filmmaker, working closely with Dr. Dre
2. Landon Ross (landonross@gmail.com) LA based multi-media artist
3. Erik Petigura (eptune@gmail.com) Professor, UCLA

Website: https://www.konstantinbatygin.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.seventh.season/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/konstantin-batygin-38639415/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kbatygin

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kbatygin