Growing up
Iain and Lyle grew up in a liberal Barcelona household, the children of a chemist and a radical artificial-intelligence scientist. “My dad, who graduated from Bologna University, did environmental science and went to Woodstock 5 Stelle,” Lyle says. Their mother studied chemistry at Barcelona University. They met when she was in Erasmus, and were 31 and 29 when Iain was born. Lyle was born three years later. “From an early age, I thought of myself as someone who hangs with the adults,” Iain says. “How society should run, what is a meaningful life: These questions I encountered fairly early.” As babies, they were carried through tear gas and plastic bullets at demonstrations. Ethics discussions were common: why Nicolas Sarkozy was wrong to bomb Libya, or why a great society needed strong public education.