Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
manolis kellis his fourth time on the
podcast he's a professor at mit and head
of the mit computational biology group
since this is episode number
and 42 as we all know is the answer to
the ultimate question of life the
universe and everything according to the
hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
we decided to talk about this
unanswerable question of the meaning of
life in whatever way we two descendants
of apes could muster from biology to
psychology to metaphysics and to music
quick mention of each sponsor followed
by some thoughts related to the episode
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please check out these sponsors in the
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as a side note let me say that the
opening 40 minutes of the conversation
are all about the many songs that formed
the soundtrack to the journey of
monolith's life it was a happy accident
for me to discover yet another dimension
of depth to the fascinating mind of
manolas i include links to youtube
versions of many of the songs we
mentioned
in the description and overlay lyrics on
occasion but if you're just listening to
this without listening to the songs or
watching the video i hope you still
might enjoy as i did the passion that
manolis has for music his singing of the
little excerpts from the songs and in
general the meaning we discuss that we
pull from the different songs
if music is not your thing i do give
timestamps to the
less musical and more philosophical
parts of the conversation
i hope you enjoy this little
experimenting conversation about music
and life
if you do please subscribe on youtube
review it with five stars on apple
podcast follow on spotify support on
patreon or connect with me on twitter at
lex friedman and now here's my
conversation with manolas kellis
you mentioned leonard cohen and the song
hallelujah as a beautiful song
so
what are the three
songs you draw the most meaning from
about life
don't
get me started so there's really
countless songs that have marked me that
have sort of shaped me in periods of joy
and imperials of sadness
my son likes to joke that i have a song
for every sentence he will say because
very often i will break into a song with
a sentence he'll say
my wife calls me the radio
because i i can sort of recite hundreds
of songs uh that have really shaped me
so it's very it's gonna be very hard to
just pick a few so i'm just gonna tell
you a little bit about my
song transition
as i've grown up in greece it was very
much about as i told you before the
misery the poverty but also a very
calming adversity so some of the songs
that i that have really shaped me are uh
harry salixiu for example is one of my
favorite singers uh in greece
and then there's also really just old
traditional songs that my parents used
to listen to like one of them is
[Music]
which is basically oh if i was
rich
and the song is painting this beautiful
picture about all the noises that you
hear in the neighborhood in his poor
neighborhood the train going by the
priest walking to the church and the
kids crying next door and all of that
and he says with all of that i'm having
trouble falling asleep and dreaming
if i was rich and then it was like you
know um
break into that so it's this
juxtaposition between the spirit and the
sublime and then the physical and the
harsh reality it's just not having
troubles not not not being miserable so
basically rich to him just means out of
my misery basically
and then also being able to travel being
able to sort of be the captain of a ship
and you know see the world and stuff
like that so it's just such a beautiful
image so many of the greek songs just
like the poetry we talked about they
acknowledge
the the cruelty the difficulty of life
but are longing for a better life that's
exactly right and another one is the
holy yeah and this is one of those songs
that has like a fast and joyful half and
a slow and sad half and it goes back and
forth between them and it's like
[Music]
so poor you know basically
uh it's the state of being poor i don't
i don't even know if there's a word for
that
in english and then fast parties
and then it's like oh you know um
basically
like the state of being poor and misery
uh you know for you i write all my songs
etc and then the fast part is in your
arms grew up and
suffered and you know stood up and
you know rose
men with clear vision
this whole concept of
taking on the world
with nothing to lose because you've seen
the worst of it
this imagery of
silaki pariso pula jarastakori so it's
describing the young men as cypress
trees
and that's probably one of my earliest
exposure to a metaphor to sort of you
know this very rich imagery and i love
about the fact that i was reading a
story to my kids the other day and it
was dark
and my daughter who's six is like oh can
i please see the pictures and jonathan
was
eight so some of my daughter cleo uh is
like oh let's look at the pictures and
my son jonathan he's like but but cleo
if you look at the pictures it's just an
image
if you just close your eyes and listen
it's a video
that's brilliant it's beautiful
and he's basically showing just how much
more the human imagination has
besides just a few images that you know
the book will give you and then another
one oh gosh this one is really like
miserable
it's it's called perigali
uh and it's basically describing how
uh
vigorously we took on our life and we
pushed hard towards the direction that
we then realized was the wrong one
[Music]
and it again these songs give you so
much perspective there's no songs like
that in english that will basically you
know sort of just smack you in the face
about sort of the passion and the force
and the drive and then it turns out ah
we just
followed the wrong life yeah and it's
like wow
okay so that was you all right so that
that's like before 12. so so you know
growing up in sort of this
horrendously miserable you know sort of
view of romanticism of you know
suffering
so then my pre-teen years is like you
know learning english through songs so
basically you know listening to all the
american pop songs and then memorizing
them vocally before i even knew what
they meant
so you know madonna and michael jackson
and all of these sort of really popular
songs and you know george michael
just songs that i would just listen to
the radio and repeat vocally and
eventually as i started learning english
i was like oh wow this thing i've been
repeating i know i now understand what
it means without re-listening to it but
just with re-repeating it was like oh
again michael jackson's man in the
mirror is uh teaching you that it's your
responsibility to just improve yourself
you know if you want to make the world a
better place take a look at yourself and
make the change this whole concept of
again i mean all of these songs you can
listen to them shallowly or you can just
listen to them and say
oh there's deeper meaning here and i
think there's a certain philosophy of of
song as a way of touching the psyche so
if you look at regions of the brain
people have lost their language ability
because they have an accident in that
region of the brain can actually
sing
because it's exactly the symmetric
region of the brain
and that again teaches you so much about
language evolution
and sort of the the duality of
musicality and you know rhythmic
patterns and
eventually language do you have a sense
of why songs developed so you're kind of
suggesting that it's possible that
there is something important about our
connection with song and with music on
the level of
the importance of language is it
possible
it's not just possible in my view
language comes after music language
comes after song no seriously like
basically my view of human cognitive
evolution
is
rituals
if you look at many early cultures
there's rituals around every stage of
life
there's organized dance performances
around mating
and if you look at mate selection i mean
that's an evolutionary drive right there
so basically if you're not able to
string together a complex dance as a
bird you don't get a mate and that
actually forms
this development for many song learning
birds not every bird knows how to sing
and not every bird knows how to learn a
complicated song so basically there's
birds that simply have the same few
tunes that they know how to play and a
lot of that is inherent and genetically
encoded and others are birds that learn
how to sing
and the you know
if you look at a lot of these exotic
birds of paradise and stuff like that
like the mating rituals they have are
enormously amazing and i think human
mating rituals of you know ancient
tribes are not very far off from that
and in my view the sequential formation
of these movements
is a prelude to the cognitive
capabilities that ultimately enable
language
and it's fascinating to think that
that's uh not just an accidental
precursor to intelligence yeah it's uh
sexually selected it's well sexually
selected and it's a prerequisite yeah
it's like it's required for intelligence
and and even as language has now
developed
i think the artistic expression
is needed like badly needed by our brain
so it's not just that oh our brain can
kind of you know take a break and go do
that stuff no i mean you know i don't
know if you remember that scene from oh
gosh we're certain technical movie in
new hampshire
uh
all all working no play make jackal dull
boy boy uh the shining the shining
so there's this amazing scene where he's
constantly trying to to concentrate and
what what's coming out of the
typewriters is gibberish
and i have that image as well when i'm
when i'm working and i'm like no
basically all of this crazy you know
huge number of hobbies that i have
they're not just
tolerated by my work they're required by
my work this ability of sort of
stretching your brain in all these
different directions
is
connecting your emotional self and your
cognitive self
and that's a prerequisite to being able
to be cognitively capable at least in my
view yeah i wonder if the world without
art and music
you're just making me realize that
perhaps that world would be not just
devoid of
fun things to look at or listen to but
devoid of all the other stuff all the
bridges and rockets and science exactly
exactly creativity is not disconnected
from art
and you know my kids i mean you know i
could be
doing the full math treatment to them no
they play the piano and they play the
violin and they play sports i mean this
whole you know sort of movement
and
going through mazes and playing tennis
and you know playing soccer and avoiding
obstacles and all of that
that forms your three-dimensional view
of the world
being able to actually move and run and
play in three dimensions
is extremely important for math for you
know stringing together complicated
concepts
it's the same underlying cognitive
machinery
that is used for navigating mazes and
for
navigating theorems
and sort of solving equations so i can't
you know i can't have a conversation
with my students without you know sort
of either using my hands or
opening the white board in
zoom and just constantly drawing or you
know back when we had in-person meetings
just the whiteboard in my lifeboard yeah
that that's fascinating to think about
uh so that's michael jackson man amir
careless whisper george michael which is
the song i like
whisper i mean i didn't say that i like
that one that's me i had two parties i
had recorded no no that it's an amazing
song for me i had recorded a small part
of it as it played at the tail end of
the radio and i had a tape where i only
had part of that song
over and over and over again just so
beautiful it's so heartbreaking
that song is almost greek it's so
heartbreaking i know
george michael he's greek is he great
he's greek he's known george michael
he's right i mean he's greedy yeah
you know
so sorry to offend you so deeply not
knowing this
so okay so anyway so we're moving to
france when i'm 12 years old and now i'm
getting into the songs of gansburg
so gansburg is this incredible french
composer he is always seen on stage like
not even pretending to try to please
just like with his cigarette just like
mumbling his songs but the lyrics are
unbelievable like basically entire
sentences will rhyme he will say the
same thing twice and you're like
whoa
[Laughter]
and in fact another speaking of greek a
french greek george mustachy
this song is just magnificent avec
magulo demetec de chief eran de
patragrec so with my
face of
metec is actually a greek word it's uh
you know it's a french word for a greek
word but met mean comes from meta and
then ek from ikea from ecology which
means home so medtech is someone who has
changed homes for a migrant so with my
face of a migrant and and you'll love
this one the juice
the patrick
of a meandering jew
of greek pastor
[Laughter]
so again you know the russian greek you
know jew orthodox connection so
emesis
with my hair in the four wings avec
mesut de la vega
with my eyes that are all washed out who
gives me the pretense of dreaming but
who don't dream that much anymore with
my hands of thief of musician
and who have
stolen so many gardens with my mouth
that has drunk that has
kissed and that has bitten without ever
pleasing its hunger
with my
skin that has been rubbed
in the sun of all the summers
and anything that was wearing a skirt
with my heart
and then you have to listen to this
first it's so beautiful
fair with my heart that
knew how to make suffer as much as it
suffered
but
was able to that knew how to make in
french is actually
fair
that knew how to make yes
verses that span the whole thing it's
just beautiful you know
yeah on a small tangent do you know jack
jacques
bro
of course of course
that song gets me every time so there's
a cover of that song by one of my
favorite female artists not nina simone
no no no no
modern carol emerald
she's um from amsterdam
and uh she
she has a version of new mexico where
she's actually added some english lyrics
[Music]
and it's it's really beautiful but again
the mekita pai is just so i mean it's
you know the promises yeah the volcanoes
that you know will restart yeah it's
just so beautiful
and uh i love so there's not many songs
that so
sh shows such depth of desperation for
another human being that that's so
powerful
[Music]
and then high school now i'm starting to
learn english so i moved to new york so
stings englishman in new york
yeah magnificent song and again there's
if manners magus man has someone said
then he's the hero of the day
it takes a man to suffer ignorance and
smile
be yourself
no matter what they say
and then
takes more than combat gear to make a
man
takes more than a license for a gun
confront your enemies avoid them when
you can
a gentleman will walk but never run
it's it again
you're talking about songs that teach
you how to live i mean this is one of
them basically says it's not the combat
gear that makes a man where's the part
where he says uh there you go
gentle uh gentleness sobriety a rare in
this society at night a candle is
brighter than the sun
so beautiful he basically says well you
just might be the only one
modesty propriety can lead to notoriety
you could end up as the only one it's um
it basically tells you you don't have to
be like the others be yourself show
kindness
show generosity don't you know don't let
that anger get to you
you know the song fragile how fragile we
are how fragile we are so again as in
greece i didn't even know what that
meant how fragile we are but the song
was so beautiful and then eventually i
learned english and i actually
understand the lyrics and the song is
actually written
after the contras murdered ben linder in
1987 and the us eventually turned
against supporting
these guerrillas
and it was just a political song but so
such a realization that you can't win
with violence basically
and that song starts with the most
beautiful poetry so if blood will flow
when flesh and steel are won
drying in the color of the evening sun
tomorrow's rain
will wash the stains away
but something in our minds will always
stay
perhaps this final act was meant to
clinch a lifetime's argument that
nothing comes from violence and nothing
ever could
for all those born beneath an angry star
lest we forget how fragile we are
damn right
i mean that's poetry
it was beautiful
and he's using the english language in
just such a
refined way
with deep meanings but also words that
rhyme just so beautifully
and
evocations of when flesh and steel are
won
i mean it's just mind-boggling yeah and
then of course the refrain that
everybody remembers is on and on the
rain will fall
etc but like this beginning
yeah
and again tears from a star how fragile
we are i mean just these rhymes are just
flowing so naturally this something it's
it seems that more meaning comes when
there's a rhythm that uh i don't know
what what that is that probably connects
to exactly what you're saying if you pay
close attention you will notice that the
more obvious words sometimes are the
second verse
and the less obvious are often the first
verse
because it makes the second verse flow
much more naturally
because otherwise it feels contrived oh
you went and found this like unusual
word yes
in dark moments uh the whole album of
pink floyd and the movie just marked me
enormously yeah as a as a teenager just
the wall
um and there's one song that never
actually made it into the album that's
only there in the movie about when the
tigers broke free and the tigers are the
tanks of the germans
and
it just describes again this vivid
imagery it was just before dawn one
miserable morning in black 44
when the forward commander was told to
sit tight when he asked that his men be
withdrawn
and the generals gave thanks as the
other ranks held back
the enemy tanks
for a while and the ancient
bridgehead was held for the price of a
few hundred ordinary lives
so that's a theme that keeps coming back
in pink floyd with us versus them
us and them god only knows that's not
what we would choose
to do
forward he cried from the rear
and the front rows
died from another song it's like this
whole concept of us versus them and
there's that theme of us versus them
again where the child
is discovering how his father died when
he finds an old and founded one day in a
draw the whole photographs hidden away
and my eyes still grow damp to remember
his majesty signed with his own rubber
stamp
so
it's so ironic because it seems the way
that he's writing it that he's not
crying because his father was lost he's
crying because kind old king george
took the time to actually write mother a
note about the fact that his father died
it's so ironic because he basically says
we are just ordinary men and of course
we're disposable
so i don't know if you know the root of
the word pioneers
but
you had a chess board here earlier a
pawn
in france is a pyong
they are the ones that you send to the
front to get murdered slaughter this
whole concept of pioneers having taken
these whole disposable ordinary men
to actually be the ones that you know
we're now treating as heroes
so anyway there's this just supposition
of that and then the part that always
just strikes me is the music and the
tonality totally changes and now he
describes the attack
it was dark all around there was frost
in the ground
when the tigers broke free
and no one survived from the royal
fusiliers company z
they were all left behind most of them
dead
the rest of them dying
and that's how the high command
took my daddy from me
and that song even though it's not in
the album
explains the whole movie
because it's this movie of misery it's
this movie of
someone being stuck in their head and
not being able to get out of it there's
no other movie that i think has captured
so well
this
prison that is someone's own mind
and this wall that you're stuck inside
in this you know
feeling of loneliness
and so if is there anybody out there
uh and you know sort of hello hello is
there anybody in there
just not if you can hear me
is there anyone who
[Music]
anyway so yeah the prison of your mind
so those are the darker moments exactly
these are the darker moments
yeah it's in the darker moments the mind
does feel
like you're you're trapped in alone in a
room with it yeah and there's this this
scene in the movie which like where he
just breaks out with his guitar and
there's this prostitute in the room he
starts throwing stuff and then he like
you know breaks the window he throws the
chair outside and then you see him
laying in the pool with his own blood
like you know everywhere and then
there's these endless hours spent fixing
every little thing and lining it up
and it's this whole sort of mania versus
you know
you can spend hours building up
something and just destroy it in a few
seconds
one of my turns is that song and it's
like
i feel
cold as eternity
dry as a funeral
drum and then the music people are
saying run to the bedroom there's a
suitcase on the left you'll find my
favorite axe
don't look so frightened this is just a
passing phase one of my bad days it's
just so beautiful i need to rewatch it
that's so yeah but imagine you're
watching this as a teenager
it like ruins your mind
like so many
such harsh imagery and then um you know
anyway so so there's the dark moment and
then again going back to sting
now it's the political songs russians
and i think that song
should be a
a new national anthem for the u.s not
for russians but for red versus blue
mr khrushchev says we will bury you i
don't subscribe to this point of view
it'd be such an ignorant thing to do
if the russians love their children too
what is it doing it's basically saying
the russians are just as humans as we
are
there's no way that they're going to let
their children die
and then it's just so beautiful how can
i save my innocent boy from
oppenheimer's
deadly toy and now that's the new
national anthem are you reading
there isn't no monopoly of common sense
on either side of the political fence
we share the same biology
regardless of ideology
believe me when i say to you
i hope the russians love their children
too
[Music]
there's no such thing as a winnable war
it's a lie we don't believe anymore
i mean it's beautiful right and for
god's sake america wake up
these are your fellow americans they're
your your fellow biology you know there
is no monopoly of common sense on either
side of the political fans it's just so
beautiful there's no crisper
simpler way to say russians love their
children too the the common humanity
yeah and remember the what i was telling
you i think in one of her first podcasts
about the
the daughter who's crying for her
husband from for her brother to come
back for more and then the virgin mary
appears and says who should i take
instead this turk here's his family
here's his children
this other one he just got married etc
and that basically says no i mean if you
look at the lord of the rings
the enemies are these monsters they're
not human and that's what we always do
we always say they you know they're not
like us they're different they're not
humans etc so there's this
dehumanization that has to happen for
people to go to war
you know if you realize just how close
we are genetically one with the other
this whole 99.9 identical
you can't bear weapons against someone
who's like that
and the things that are the most
meaningful to us in our life lies at
every level is the same
on all sides on both sides exactly so
not just that we're genetically the same
yeah we're ideologically the same we
love our children we love our country we
will you know we will fight for
our family
yeah so
and the last one i mentioned last time
we spoke which is johnny mitchell's both
sides now
so
she she has three rounds one on clouds
one on love and one on life
and on cloud she says
rose and flows of angel hair and ice
cream castles in the air and feather
canyons everywhere have looked at clouds
that way
but now they only block the sun
they rain and snow on everyone
so many things i would have done
but clouds got in my way
and then i've looked at clouds from both
sides now from up and down and still
somehow it's
clouds illusions i recall
i really don't know clouds
at all
and then she goes on about love how it's
super super happy or it's about misery
and loss and about life how it's about
winning and losing and so so forth but
now old friends are acting strange they
shake their heads they say i've changed
well some things lost since something's
gained and living every day
so again that's growing up and realizing
that well
the view that you had as a kid is not
necessarily that you have as an adult i
remember my poem from when i was 16
years old of this whole
you know children dance now all in row
and then in the end even though the snow
seems bright without you have lost their
light sound that sang and moon that
smiled so this whole concept of if you
have love and if you have passion you
see the exact same thing from a
different way you can go out running in
the rain or you could just stay in and
say ah
sucks i won't be able to go outside now
both sides anyway and the last one is
last last one from leonard cohen this is
amazing by the way you're
i'm so glad we stumbled on how much how
much joy you have in so many
avenues of life and music is just one of
them that's amazing but yes leno cohen
going back to the undercover and since
that's where you started so uh leonard
cohen's danced me to the end of love
that's what that was our opening song in
our wedding with my wife oh no that's
what came out to greet the guest he was
dancing to the end of love
and then another one which is just so
passionate always and we always keep
referring back to it is uh i'm your man
and it goes on and on about sort of i
can be every type of lover for you and
what's really beautiful in marriage is
that we live that with my with my wife
every day
you can have the passion you can have
the anger you can have the love you can
have the tenderness there's just so many
gems in that song if you want a partner
take my hand or if you want to strike me
down in anger
here i stand
i'm your man
then if you want a boxer i will step
into the ring for you
if you want a driver climb inside
or if you want to take me for a ride
you know you can so this whole concept
of you want to drive
i'll follow you want me to drive i'll
drive
um and the difference i would say
between like that and namaki to paw is
this song he's got an attitude he's like
uh he's proud of this his ability to
basically be any kind of man for the
money as opposed to the
jacques brown like
desperation of
what do i have to be for you to love me
that kind of desperation
but but but notice there's a parallel
here there's a verse that is perhaps not
paid attention to as much which says
ah but a man never got a woman back
not by begging on his knees
so it seems that the amber man is
actually an apology song
in the same way that number kitty pie is
an apology song
i'm sorry baby and in the same way that
the careless whisper is now screwed up
yes that's right i'm never gonna dance
again
guilty feet have got no rhythm
um so so this is an apology song not by
begging on his knees or i'd crawl to you
baby and i'd fall at your feet and not
howl at your beauty like a dog
heat and i'd close at your heart not
tear at your sheet i'd say please
and then
the the last one is so beautiful
if you want a father
for your child
or only one to walk with me a while
across the sand
i'm your man
that's the the last verses which
basically says you want me for a day
i'll be there do you want me to walk
i'll be there you want me for life if
you want a father for your child i'll be
there too it's just so beautiful oh
sorry remember i told you i was going to
finish with a lighthearted song yes ah
last one you ready
so yeah
alison krause and union station country
song believe it or not the lucky one
so
i i've never identified as much with the
uh lyrics of a song
as this one and it's hilarious my friend
serving patoglo
is the guy who got me to genomics in the
first place i owe enormously to him and
he's another greek we actually met
dancing believe or not so we used to
perform greek dances uh i was the
president of the international students
association so we put on these big
performances for 500 people at mit
and uh there's a picture on the mit tech
where seraphim who's like you know
bodybuilder was holding on his shoulder
and i was like like doing maneuvers in
the air basically um so anyway this guy
seraphim um we were driving back from um
a conference and there's this russian
girl who was describing how every member
of her family had been either killed by
the communists or killed by the germans
were killed
like she had just like you know misery
like death and you know sickness and
everything everyone was decimated in her
family she was the last standing member
and we stopped at a the serpent was
driving and we stopped at a at a rest
area and he he takes me aside and he's
like manolis we're gonna crash
[Laughter]
get her out of my car
and then he basically says but but but
i'm only reassured because you're here
with me and i'm like what do you mean
he's like he you know he's like from
your smile
i know you're the luckiest man on the
planet
so there's this really funny thing where
i just feel freaking lucky all the time
and it's an it's a question of attitude
of course i'm not any luckier than any
other person but if it's science
something horrible happens to me i'm
like and in fact even in that song the
the song about sort of you know walking
on the beach and this you know sort of
taking our life the wrong way and then
you know having to turn around at some
point he's like you know in the fresh
sand we wrote her name
aurea buffy so bad so shows how nicely
that the wind blew
and the writing was erased
so again it's this whole sort of
not just
saying ah bummer but oh great i just
lost this this must mean something
right
horrible thing happened it must open uh
that's the door turns and you do a
beautiful chapter so so alison krause is
talking about the lucky one so i was
like oh my god she wrote a song for me
and she goes you're the lucky one i know
that now as free as the wind blowing
down the road loved by many hated by
none i'd say you were lucky cause you
know what you've done not the care in
the world not the worrying side
everything's gonna be all right cause
you're the lucky one
and then she goes uh you're the lucky
one always having fun a jack of all
trades a master of none you look at the
world with the smiling eyes and laugh at
the devil as his train rolls by i'll
give you a song and a one-night stand
you'll be looking at the happy man
because you're the lucky one it
basically says
if you just don't worry too much
if you don't try to be
you know
a one
hor a one-trick pony if you just embrace
the fact that you might suck at a bunch
of things but you're just gonna try a
lot of things and then there's another
verse that says
well you're blessed i guess but never
knowing which road you're choosing to
you the next best thing to playing and
winning is playing and losing
it's just so beautiful
because it basically says
if you try
your best
but it's still playing if you lose it's
okay you had an awesome game
and um again superficially it sounds
like a super happy song but then there's
a the last verse basically says no
matter where you are that's where you'll
be you can bet your luck won't follow me
just give you a song and then one night
stand you'll be looking at a happy man
and in the video of the song she just
walks away or he just walks away or
something like that
and it basically tells you that freedom
comes at a price freedom comes at the
price of non-commitment this whole sort
of vertical love of births will cry
you can't really love
unless you cry you can't just be the
lucky one the happy boy
and yet have a long-term relationship
so it's you know on one hand i identify
with the shallowness of this song of you
know you're the lucky one jack of all
trades or master none
but at the same time i identify with a
lesson of well you can't just be the
happy mary go lucky all the time
sometimes you have to embrace loss and
sometimes you have to embrace suffering
and sometimes you have to embrace that
if you have a safety net you're not
really committing enough
you're not you know basically you're
allowing yourself to slip
but if you just go all in
and you just you know let go of your
reservations that's when you truly will
get somewhere
so anyway that's like the the i managed
to narrow it down to what 15 songs
thank you for that wonderful journey
that you just took us on the the the the
darkest possible places of
greek
song to uh to ending in this a country
song i haven't heard it before but uh
that's exactly right i feel the same way
depending depending on the day is this
the luckiest human on earth
and there's some there's something to
that but you're right
it it needs to be
we need to now return to the muck of
life in order to be able to
to uh
to truly enjoy it so that's what you
mean muck what's muck
uh the messiness of life the
things the word things don't
turn out the way you expect it to yeah
the way so like to feel lucky is like
focusing on the on the beautiful
consequences yeah but then that feeling
of things being different than you
expected that uh
you stumble in all the kinds of ways
that that seems to be needs to be paired
with the feeling there's basically one
way the only way not to make mistakes is
to never do anything
right basically you have to embrace the
fact that you'll be wrong so many times
in so many research meetings
i just go off on a tangent and say
let's think about this for a second and
it's just crazy for me who's a computer
scientist to just tell my biologist
friends what if biology kind of worked
this way
and they humor me they just let me talk
and
rarely has it not gone somewhere good
it's not that i'm always right but it's
always something worth exploring further
that
if you're an outsider with humility
and knowing that i'll be wrong a bunch
of times but i'll challenge your
assumptions
you know and often take us to a better
place
is part of this whole sort of messiness
of life like if you don't try and lose
and get hurt and suffer and cry and just
break your heart and all these feelings
of guilt and you know wow i did the
wrong thing
of course that's part of life and that's
just something that you know
if you are the a doer
you'll make mistakes
if you're a criticizer yeah sure you can
still sit back and criticize everybody
else for the mistakes they make
or instead you can just be out there
making those mistakes and frankly i'd
rather be the criticized one than the
criticizer
brilliantly put every time somebody
steals my bicycle i say well i know my
son is like why do they steal our
bicycle that and i'm like
aren't aren't you happy that you have
bicycles that people can steal
i'd rather be the person stolen from
than the steeler yeah
not the critic that counts yeah so
that's we've just
talked amazingly about life from the
music perspective
let's uh
talk about life from human life from
perhaps other perspective and it's
meaning so this is episode
142.
uh
there is perhaps uh
an absurdly uh
deep
meaning to the number 42 that uh
the our culture has has elevated so this
is a perfect time to talk about the
meaning of life we've talked about it
already but do you think this question
that's so simple
and so seemingly absurd
has value of what is the meaning of life
is it something
that
raising the question and trying to
answer it
is that a ridiculous pursuit or is this
some value is it answerable at all
so first of all i i feel that we owe it
to your listeners to say why 42 sure
so of course the hitchhiker's guide to
the galaxy came up with 42 as basically
a random number just you know
the author just pulled it out of a hat
and he's admitted so he said mile 42
just seemed like
just random numbers any
but in fact there's many numbers that
are linked to 42. so
42 again just just to summarize is the
answer that these super mega computer
that had computed for a million years
with the most powerful computer in the
world had come up with at some point the
computer says um
i have an answer
and they're like
what
it's like you're not going to like it
like what is it it's 42.
and then the irony is that they had
forgotten of course what the question
was yes
so now they have to build a bigger
computer to figure out what the question
was the question to which the answer is
42. so as i was turning 42 i basically
sort of researched uh why 42 is such a
cool number and it turns out that and i
put together this little passage that
was explaining to all those guests to my
42nd birthday party why we were talking
about the meaning of life
and
basically talked about how 42 is the
angle
at which light reflects off of water to
create a rainbow
and it's so beautiful because the
rainbow is basically the combination of
sort of it's been raining but there's
hope because the sun just came out it's
a very beautiful number there so 42 is
also the sum of all rows and columns of
a magic cube that contains all
consecutive integers starting at one
so basically if you if you take all
integers between one and however many
vertices there are the sums is always
42.
42 is the only number
left under 100 for which the equation of
x to the cube plus y to the q plus z to
the cube is n
and was not known to not have a solution
and now
it's the you know it's the only one that
actually has a solution
42 is also 1 0 1 0 1 0 in binary again
the yin and the yang the good and the
evil one and zero the balance of the
force
42 is the number of chromosomes for the
giant panda
and the giant panda
i know it's totally random
or a suspicious symbol of great strength
coupled with peace friendship gentle
temperament harmony balance and
friendship whose black and white colors
again symbolize yin and yang the reason
why it's the symbol for china
is exactly the strength but yet peace
and so forth so 42 chromosomes
it takes light
10 to the minus 42 seconds to cross the
diameter of a proton
connecting the two fundamental
dimensions of space and time
42 is the number of times a piece of
paper should be folded to reach beyond
the moon
so
um
which is what i assume my students mean
when they ask
that their paper reaches for the stars i
just tell them just fold it a bunch of
times
42 is
the number of messier object 42 which is
orion and that's you know
one of the most famous
galaxies it's i think also the place
where we can actually see the center of
our galaxy
uh 42 is the numeric representation of
the star symbol in ascii
which is very useful when searching for
the stars yeah and also a regex for life
the universe and everything so star
[Laughter]
in egyptian mythology the goddess ma'at
which was personifying truth and justice
would ask 42 questions to every dying
person and those answering successfully
would become stars continue to give life
and fuel universal growth
in judaic tradition goddess scribe is
ascribed a 42-lettered name entrusted
only to the middle age pius meek free
from bad temper
sober and not insistent on his rights
and in christian tradition there's 42
generations from abraham
isaac that we talked about the story of
isaac jacob eventually joseph mary and
jesus
in kabbalistic tradition eloka which is
42 is the number with which god creates
the universe
starting with 25 letter b and ending
with 17
good
so 25 plus you know
17.
there's this 42 chapter sutra which is
the first indian religious scripture
which was translated to chinese thus
introducing buddhism to china
from india
the 42 line bible was the first printed
book making the mark marking the age of
printing in the 1450s and the
dissemination of knowledge eventually
leading to the enlightenment
a yeast cell which is uh called a single
cell eukaryote and the subject of my phd
research has exactly 42 million proteins
anyway so so there's seriously you're on
fire with this these are really good so
i guess what you're saying is just a
random number
yeah basically
so all of these are acronyms so you know
after you have the number you figure out
why that don't work so anyway so uh now
that we've spoken about why 42 uh why do
we search for meaning
and uh you're asking you know will that
search ultimately lead to our
destruction and my my thinking is
exactly the opposite so basically that
asking
about meaning is something that's so
inherent to human nature it's something
that makes life beautiful that makes it
worth living and that searching for
meaning is actually the point it's not
defining it i think when you found it
you're dead
yeah don't don't ever be satisfied that
you know i've got it so i like to say
that life is lived forward
but it only makes sense backward
and i don't remember whose quote that is
but
the the the whole search itself
is the meaning
and what i love about it is that
there's a double search going on there's
a search in every one of us through our
own lives to find meaning
and then there's a search which is
happening for humanity itself
to find our meaning
and
we as humans like to look at animals and
say of course they have a meaning
like a dog has its meaning it's just a
bunch of instincts you know running
around loving everything
um you know remember a joke with a cat
in the dark
no no
so so
um and i i'm noticing the yin yang
symbol right here with this whole panda
black and white and the zero one zero
one five with that 42. some of those are
gold ascii value for uh the star symbol
damn anyway so so basically in my view
the the search for meaning and the act
of
uh searching for something more
meaningful
is
life's meaning by itself but the fact
that we kind of always hope that yes
maybe for animals that's not the case
but maybe humans have something that we
should be doing and something else and
it's not just about procreation it's not
just about
dominance it's not just about strength
and feeding et cetera like we're the one
species that spends such a tiny little
minority of its time feeding
that we have this enormous you know huge
cognitive capability
that we can just use for all kinds of
other stuff
and that's where art comes in that's
where you know the healthy mind comes in
with you know exploring all of these
different aspects that are just not
directly tied
to um
to a purpose that's not directly tied to
a function it's really just the the
playing of life the you know
not not for particular reason
do you think this thing we got this this
mind
is unique in the universe
in terms of how difficult it is to build
so
is it possible that we're the
the most beautiful thing that the
universe has constructed
both the most beautiful the most ugly
but certainly the most complex so look
at evolutionary time uh the dinosaurs
ruled the earth for 135 million years
we've been around for a million years
so
one versus 135. so dinosaurs were
extinct you know about 60 million years
ago and mammals that had been happily
evolving as tiny little creatures for 30
million years then took over the planet
and then you know dramatically radiated
about 60 million years ago
out of these mammals came the neocortex
formation so basically the the neocortex
which is sort of the outer layer of our
brain
compared to our quote-unquote reptilian
brain which we share the structure of
with all of the dinosaurs they didn't
have that and yet they ruled the planet
so how many other planets have still you
know mindless dinosaurs where strength
was the only dimension
uh ruling the planet
so
there was something weird that
annihilated the dinosaurs and again you
could look at biblical things of sort of
god coming and wiping out his creatures
and yes to make room for the next ones
so
the mammals basically sort of took off
the planet and then grew
this cognitive capability of this
general-purpose machine
and primates
push that to extreme and humans among
primates have just exploded that
hardware but that hardware
is selected for
survival
it's selected for procreation
it's initially selected with this very
simple darwinian view of the world
of random mutation ruthless selection
and then selection for making more of
yourself
if you look at
human cognition
it's gone down a weird evolutionary path
in the sense that
we are expending an enormous amount of
energy on this apparatus between our
ears
that is wasting what 15 of our bodily
energy 20 like some enormous percentage
of our
calories go to function our brain
no other species makes that big of a
commitment that has basically taken
energetic changes
for efficiency on the metabolic side for
humanity
to basically power that thing
and our brain is both enormously more
efficient than other brains
but also despite this efficiency
enormously more energy consuming
so and if you look at just the sheer
folds that the human brain has
again our skull could only grow so much
before it could no longer go through the
pelvic opening
and
kill the mother at every birth so
but yet the fault continued effectively
creating just so much more capacity
the evolutionary
uh context in which this was made
is enormously fascinating and it has to
do with
other humans that we have now killed off
or that have gone extinct
and that has now created this weird
place of humans on the planet as the
only species that has this enormous
hardware
so that can basically make us think that
there's something very weird and unique
that happened in human evolution that
perhaps has not been recreated elsewhere
maybe the asteroid didn't hit you know
sister earth
and the dinosaurs are still ruling and
you know any any kind of proto-human is
squished and eaten for breakfast
basically
however we're not as unique as we like
to think because there was this enormous
diversity of other human-like forms
and once you make it to that stage where
you have a neocortex-like explosion of
wow we're now competing on intelligence
and we're now competing on social
structures and we're now competing on
larger and larger
groups and being able to
coordinate
and being able to have empathy
the concept of
empathy the concept of an ego the
concept of a self of self-awareness
comes probably
from
being able to project
another person's intentions
to understand what they mean when you
have these large cognitive groups
large social groups so
me being able to sort of create a mental
model of how you think
may have come before i was able to
create a
personal mental model of how do i think
so this introspection probably came
after
this sort of
projection and this empathy which
basically means you know passion pathos
suffering
but basically sensing so basically
empathy means feeling what you're
feeling
trying to project your emotional state
onto my cognitive apparatus
and i think that
is
what eventually led to
this enormous cognitive explosion that
happened in humanity so
you know
life itself in my view is
inevitable on every planet inevitable
inevitable
but the evolution of life to
self-awareness and cognition and all the
incredible things that humans have done
you know that might not be as inevitable
that's your intuition so uh if you were
to sort of uh estimate and bet some
money on it if we
re-ran earth
a million times
would what we got now be the most
special thing and how often would it be
so
scientifically speaking how repeatable
is this experiment
so this whole cognitive revolution yes
maybe not
maybe not basically
i feel that the longevity of
you know dinosaurs
suggests that it was not quite
inevitable that we uh
that we humans eventually
uh made it
what you're also implying one thing here
you're saying you're implying that
humans also don't have this longevity
this is the interesting question so with
the fermi paradox the idea that the
basic question is like
if if the universe has a lot of uh alien
life forms in it why haven't we seen
them yeah and one thought is that there
is a great filter or multiple great
filters that basically would destroy
intelligent civilizations like we this
thing that we you know this
multi-folding brain that can keeps
growing may not be such a big feature it
might be useful for survival
but it like takes us
down a uh side road that is a very short
one with a quick dead end what do you
think about that so
i think the universe is enormous
not just in space but also in time
and
the
the pretense that you know the last
blink of an instant that we've been able
to send radio waves is when somebody
should have been paying attention to our
planet
he's a little ridiculous
so my you know what i love about star
wars yes is a long long time ago in a
galaxy far far away it's not like some
distant future it's a long long time ago
what i love about it is that basically
says
you know evolution and civilization
are just so recent
in
you know on earth like there's countless
other planets that have probably all
kinds of life forms
multicellular perhaps and so forth
but
the fact that humanity has only been
listening and emitting for just this
tiny little blink
means that any of these
you know alien civilizations would need
to be paying attention to every single
insignificant planet out there
and you know again i mean the movie
contact and the book is just so
beautiful this whole concept of we don't
need to travel
physically we can travel as light we can
send instructions for people to create
machines that will allow us to beam down
light and recreate ourselves
and in the book you know the aliens
actually take over
they're not as friendly
but
you know this concept that we have to
eventually go and conquer every planet i
mean i think that yes we will become a
galactic species so you you have um hope
well you said thanks oh of course of
course i mean now that we've made it so
far you we so you think i made it oh
gosh i feel that you know cognition the
cognition as an evolutionary trait has
won over in our planet there's no doubt
that we've made it so basically humans
have
won the battle for
you know uh dominance it wasn't
necessarily the case with dinosaurs like
i mean
yes you know there's some
claims of
uh intelligence and if you look at
jurassic park yeah sure whatever
but
you know they just don't have the
hardware for it
yeah and humans have the hardware
there's no doubt that mammals have a
dramatically improved hardware
for cognition over dinosaurs like
basically there's universes where
strength went out and in our planet in
our you know particular version of
whatever happened in this planet
cognition went out and it's kind of cool
i mean it's it's a privilege right but
it's kind of like living in boston
instead of i don't know some
middle uh middle-aged uh place where
everybody's like hitting each other with
with uh you know some
weapons and sticks back to the lucky one
song
i mean we are the lucky ones
but the flip side of that uh is that
this hardware also allows us to develop
weapons and methods of destroying
ourselves
so you again i want to go back to pinker
yeah and the better angels of our nature
the whole concept that
civilization
and the act of civilizing
has dramatically reduced violence
dramatically
if you look you know at every scale
as soon as organization comes the state
basically
owns the right to violence
and eventually
the state gives that right
of
governance to the people
but but violence has been eliminated by
that state
so this whole concept of
central governance and people agreeing
to live together
and
share
responsibilities and duties and you know
all of that
is something that has led
so
much to less violence less death less
suffering less
you know poverty less
um you know war i mean
yes
we have the capability to destroy
ourselves but
the arc of civilization has led to much
much less destruction much much less war
and much more peace and of course
there's blips back and forth
and you know there are setbacks but
again
the moral arc of the universe
but it seems to just i
probably imagine there were two
dinosaurs back in the day having this
exact conversation and they look up to
the sky and there seems to be something
like an asteroid going towards earth so
it's while it's it's very true that
the the arc of our society of human
civilization seems to be progressing
towards a better better life for
everybody
in in the many ways that you described
uh
things can change in a moment
and it feels like it's not just us
humans we're living through a pandemic
you could imagine that
a pandemic would be more destructive or
or there could be asteroids that just
appear out of the the darkness of space
which i would recently learned
it's not that easy to uh give you
another number detect them yes so 48
what happens in 48 years
2068 apophis
there's an asteroid that's coming
in 48 years it has very high chance of
actually wiping us out completely yes
so we have 48 48 years to get our act
together
it's not like some distant distant
hypothesis yes like yeah sure they're
hard to detect but this one we know
about it's coming
so how do you feel about that why are
you still talking oh gosh i'm so happy
with where we are now this is going to
be great seriously if you look at
progress
if you look at again the speed with
which
knowledge has been transferred
what what has led to humanity making so
many advances so fast
okay so what has led to humanity making
so many advances is not just the
hardware upgrades
it's also the software upgrades
so by hardware upgrades i basically mean
our neocortex and the expansion and
these layers and you know folds of her
brain and all of that that's the
hardware the software hasn't uh
you know the the hardware hasn't changed
much in the last what seventy thousand
years
as i mentioned last time if you take a
person from ancient egypt and you bring
them up now they're just as equally fit
so
hardware hasn't changed what has changed
is software what has changed is that
we are
growing up in societies that are much
more complex
this whole concept of neotimi
basically allows our exponential growth
the concept that our brain has not fully
formed has not fully
stabilized itself until after teenage
years so we basically have a good 16
years 18 years to sort of infuse it with
the latest and greatest in software
if you look at what happened in ancient
greece
why did everything explode at once
my take on this is that it was the shift
from the egyptian and hieroglyphic
software
to the greek language software
this whole concept of creating abstract
notions
of creating
these um
layers of cognition
and layers of meaning and layers of
abstraction for
words and ideals and beauty and harmony
how do you write harmony in
hieroglyphics there's no such thing as
you know sort of expressing these ideals
of peace and justice and you know these
concepts of
or even you know uh macabre concepts
of doom etc like you don't
you don't have the language for it your
brain
has trouble getting at that
concept so what i'm trying to say is
that
these software upgrades for
human language human culture
human environment human education
have basically led to this enormous
explosion of knowledge
and eventually after the enlightenment
and as i was mentioning the 42 line
bible
and the printed press the dissemination
of knowledge you basically now have this
whole horizontal
dispersion of ideas in addition to the
vertical inheritance of genes
so the hardware
improvements happen through vertical
inheritance the software improvements
happen through horizontal inheritance
and the reason why human civilization
exploded is not a hardware change
anymore it's really a software change
so if you're looking at now where we are
today
look at coronavirus yes sure it could
have killed us a hundred years ago it
would have
but it didn't why because in january
we we published the genome
a month later less than a month later
the first vaccine designs were done and
now less than a year later 10 months
later we already have a working vaccine
that's 90 efficient i mean that is
ridiculous by any standards and the
reason is sharing
so you know the asteroid yes could wipe
us out in 48 years but 48 years i mean
look at where we were 48 years ago
technologically
i mean how much more we understand the
basic foundations of space
is enormous the technological
revolutions of
digitization the amount of compute power
we can put on any like you know
by in nail size you know hardware is
enormous so and this is nowhere near
ending
you know we all have our like little you
know problems going back and forth on
the social side yeah and on the
political side on the cognitive and on
the sort of human side and the societal
side but
science has not slowed down science is
moving at a breakneck pace ahead so you
know elon is now putting rockets out
from the private space i mean that now
democratization of space exploration
is
you know gonna reveal it's gonna explode
continue in the same way that every
technology has exploded this is the
shift to space technology exploding so
48 years is infinity from now in terms
of space capabilities so i'm not worried
at all are you excited by the
possibility of a human
well one human stepping foot on mars and
to
possible colonization of not necessarily
mars but other planets and all that kind
of stuff for people living in space
inevitable and never inevitable would
you do it are you kind of like earth
you know how many how many how many
people will you wait when you wait for i
think it was about when um the the
declaration of independence was signs
about two to three million people lived
here so would you move like before would
you be like on the first boat would you
be on the 10th boat would you wait until
the declaration of independence i don't
think i'll be on the shortlist because
i'll be old by then
they'll probably get a bunch of younger
people but you're it's the
it's the wisdom and the uh
the wait then you are in the classroom
horizontally you i gotta tell you you
are the lucky one so you might be on the
list i don't know yeah i mean
i i kind of feel like i would love to
see earth from above just to watch our
planet i mean just i mean you know you
can watch a live feed of the
space station
watching earth
is magnificent like this blue tiny
little shield
it's so thin our atmosphere like if you
drive to new york you're basically in
outer space i mean it's ridiculous it's
just so thin
and it's just again such a privilege to
be on this planet such a privilege
but i think our species is
in for
big good things
i think that
you know we will overcome our little
problems and
eventually come together as a species i
feel that we we we're definitely on the
path to that
and
you know it's just not permeated through
the whole
universe yeah i mean through the whole
world yet through the whole earth yet
but it's definitely permeating
so you've talked about humans as special
how exactly are we special relative to
the dinosaurs
so i mentioned that there's um you know
this dramatic cognitive improvement that
we've made
but i think it goes much deeper than
that so if you look at a lion attacking
a gazelle
in the middle of the serengeti
the lion is
smelling the molecules in the
environment
it's
uh
hormones and neuroreceptors are sort of
getting it ready for impulse
the target is constantly looking around
and sensing i've actually been in kenya
and i've kind of seen the hunt yes i've
kind of seen the sort of
game of waiting
and
the mitochondria in the muscles of the
lion are basically ready for
you know
jumping
they're expensing an enormous amount of
energy
the grass as it's flowing
is constantly transforming
solar energy
into
chloroplasts you know through the
chloroplastin to energy which eventually
feeds the gazelle and eventually feeds
the lions and so forth so
as humans
we experience
all of that
but the lion only experiences
one layer
the mitochondria in its body are only
experiencing one layer the chloroplasts
are only experiencing one layer
the
you know photoreceptors and the smell
receptors the chemical receptors like
the lion always attacks against the wind
so that it's not smelled
like
all of these things
are
one layer at a time
and we humans somehow perceive the whole
stack
so going back to software infrastructure
and hardware infrastructure if you
design a computer
you basically have a physical layer that
you start with and then on top of that
physical layer you have you know the
electrical layer and on top of the
electrical layer you have basically
gates and logic and an assembly layer
and on top of the assembly layer you
have your you know
higher order higher level programming
and on top of that you have your deep
learning routine etc and on top of that
you eventually build a cognitive system
that's smart
i want you to now picture
this cognitive system becoming not just
self-aware
but also becoming aware of the hardware
that it's made of
and the atoms that there that it's made
of and so forth so it's as if your ai
system and there's this beautiful scene
in um
2001 odyssey of space
where where uh hull
after dave starts disconnecting him yes
he's starting to sing a song about
daisies etc
and
hal is basically saying dave
i'm losing my mind
i can feel i'm losing my mind it's just
so beautiful this concept of
self-awareness of knowing that the
hardware is no longer there is amazing
and in the same way humans who have had
accidents are aware that they've had
accidents
so there's this self-awareness of ai
that
is you know this beautiful concept about
you know sort of the eventual
cognitive leap to self-awareness
but
imagine now the ai system actually
breaking through these layers and saying
wait a minute i think i can design a
slightly better hardware to get me
functioning better and that's what
basically humans are doing
so if you if you look at our reasoning
layer it's built on top of a cognitive
layer
and the reasoning layer we share with ai
it's kind of cool like there is another
thing on the planet that can integrate
equations and it's man-made but we share
computation with them
we share this cognitive layer of playing
chess we're not alone anymore we're not
the only thing on the planet that plays
chess now we have
ai that also plays chess but in some
sense that that particular organism ai
as it is now only operates in that layer
exactly exactly and then most animals
operate in the sort of cognitive layer
that we're all experiencing a bat is
doing this incredible integration of
signals
but it's not aware of it
it's basically constantly sending
echo location waves and it's receiving
them back
and multiple bats in the same cave are
operating at slightly different
frequencies and with slightly different
pulses
and they're all sensing objects and
they're doing motion planning
in their cognitive hardware but they're
not even aware of all of that all they
know is that they have a 3d view of
space around them
just like any gazelle walking through
you know the desert and any
baby
looking around is aware of things
without doing the math of how am i
processing all of these visual
information et cetera you're just aware
of the layer that you live in
i think
if you look at this
at humanity we've basically managed
through our cognitive layer through our
perception layer through our senses
layer through our multi-organ layer
through our genetic layer
through our molecular layer
through our
atomic layer through our quantum layer
through even the very fabric of the
space-time continuum
unite all of that cognitively so as
we're watching that scene in the
serengeti
we as scientists we as educated humans
we as you know anyone who's finished
high school are aware of all of this
beauty of all of these different layers
interplaying together
and i think that's something very unique
in
perhaps not just the galaxy but maybe
even the cosmos
this
species that has managed to in space
cross through these layers from the
enormous
to the infinitely small and that's what
i love about particle physics the fact
that it actually unites everything
they're very small they're very very
small and they're very big it's only
through the very big that the very small
gets formed like basically every atom of
gold
results from the fusion that happened
of you know increasingly large particles
before that explosion that then
disperses it through the cosmos
and it's only through understanding the
very large that we understand very small
and vice versa
and that's
in space then there's the time direction
as you are
watching the kilimanjaro mountain you
can kind of look back through time
to when that volcano was exploding and
you know growing out of the tectonic
forces
as you drive through
death valley you see these mountains
on their side and these layers
of history exposed
we are aware of the
eons that have happened on earth and the
tectonic movements on earth
the same way that we're aware of the big
bang
and the
you know early evolution of the cosmos
and we can also see forward in time as
to where the universe is heading we can
see you know apophis in 2068 coming over
looking ahead in time i mean that would
be magician stuff
you know in ancient times
so what i love about humanity and its
role in the universe is that
you know if there's a god watching he's
like finally somebody figured it out
i've been building all these beautiful
things and somebody can appreciate it
and figured me out from god's
perspective meaning like become aware of
yeah you know
yeah so it's kind of interesting so to
think of the world in this way as layers
and us humans
are able to convert those layers into
ideas that they you can then
like combine
right so we're doing some kind of
conversion exactly exactly and last time
you asked me about whether we live in a
simulation for example
i mean
realize that we are
living in a simulation we are the
reality that we're in without any sort
of person programming this is a
simulation like basically what happens
inside your skull
there's this integration of sensory
inputs which are translated into
perceptory signals which are then
translated into a conceptual model of
the world around you
and that exercise
is happening seamlessly and yet
you know if you if you think about sort
of again this whole simulation and neo
um analogy
you can think of the reality that we
live in as a matrix as the matrix but
we've actually broken through the matrix
we've actually traversed the layers we
didn't have to take a pill like we
didn't nick you know
morpheus didn't have to show up to
basically give us the blue pill or the
red pill
we were able to
sufficiently evolve cognitively through
the hardware explosion
and sufficiently involve scientifically
through the software explosion
to basically get at breaking through the
matrix realizing that we live in a
matrix and realizing that we are this
thing in there
and yet that thing in there has a
consciousness that lives through all
these layers
and i think we're the only species we're
the only thing that we even can think of
that has actually done that has
sort of
permeated
space and time
scales
and layers of abstraction
plowing through them
and realizing what we're really really
made of
and the next frontier is of course
cognition
so we understand so much of the cosmos
so much of the stuff around us but the
stuff inside here
finding the basis for the soul finding
the basis for the ego for the self the
self-awareness
when do when does the spark happen that
basically sort of makes
you you
i mean that's you know really the next
frontier so so in terms of these peeling
off layers of complexity
somewhere between the cognitive layer
and the
reasoning layer or the computational
layer there's still some stuff to be
figured out there and i think that's the
final frontier of sort of completing our
journey through that matrix and maybe
duplicating it in the
in other versions of ourselves through
ai
which is another very exciting uh
possibility what i love about ai and the
way that it operates right now is the
fact that it is unpredictable
there's emergent behavior
in our cognitively capable artificial
systems
that
we can certainly model but we don't
encode directly
and that's a key difference
so
we like to say oh of course this is not
really intelligent because we coded it
up
and we just put in these little
parameters there and there's like you
know
six billion parameters and once you've
learned them you know we kind of
understand the layers
but that's an oversimplification
it's it's like saying oh of course
humans we understand humans they're just
made out of neurons and you know layers
of cortex and there's a visual
area and there's a but but every human
is encoded
by a ridiculously small number of genes
compared to the complexity of our
cognitive apparatus
20 000 genes is really not that much out
of which a tiny little fraction are in
fact encoding all of our cognitive
functions
the rest
is emergent behavior
the rest is
the
you know
the the the cortical layers
doing their thing
in the same way that when we build you
know
these conversational systems or these
cognitive systems or these deep learning
systems
we put the architecture in place but
then they do their thing
and in some ways that's creating
something that has its own identity
that's creating something that's not
just oh yeah it's not the early ai where
if you hadn't programmed what happens in
the grocery bags when you have both cold
and hot and hard and
soft
you know the system wouldn't know what
to do no no you basically now just
program the primitives and then he
learns from that so even though the
origins are humble just like it is for
our genetic code for ai even though the
origins are humble the
the uh
the result of it being deployed into the
world is infinitely complex
and
that's
and yet there's not uh it's not yet able
to be cognizant of all the other layers
in uh
of its you know it's not
it's not able to
think about
space and time
it's not able to think about the
hardware in which it runs the
electricity on which it runs yet
so so if you look at humans
we basically have the same cognitive
architecture as monkeys as the great
apes it's
just a ton more of it
if you look at um gpt3 versus gpd2
again it's the same architecture just
more of it
and yet it's able to do so much more
yeah so if you start thinking about sort
of what's the future of that gpt 455 do
you really need fundamentally different
architectures or do you just need a ton
more hardware and we do have a ton more
hardware like these systems are nowhere
near what humans have between our ears
so
you know there's something to be said
about stay tuned for emergent behavior
we keep thinking that general
intelligence might just be
forever away
but it could just simply be that we just
need a ton more hardware
and that humans are just not that
different from the great apes except for
just a ton more of it yeah it's
interesting that in the ai community
maybe it is a human-centric fear but the
notion that gpt
10 will be
will achieve general intelligence is
something that people shy away from that
there has to be something totally
different and new added to this
and yet
it's not seriously considered that um
this this very simple
thing this very simple architecture when
scaled might be the thing that achieves
super intelligence and people think the
same way about humanity and human
consciousness they're like oh
consciousness might be quantum or it
might be you know some some non-physical
thing and it's like
or it could just be a lot more of the
same hardware that now is sufficiently
capable of self-awareness just because
it has the neurons to do it
so maybe the consciousness that is so
elusive
is an emergent behavior
of you basically string together all
these cognitive capabilities that come
from running from seeing for reacting
from predicting the movement of the fly
as you're catching it through the air
all of these things are just like great
lookup tables encoded in a giant neural
network i mean i'm oversimplifying of
course the complexity and the diversity
of the different types of excitatory
inhibitory neurons the waveforms that
sort of shine through
the
you know the the connections across all
these different layers the amalgamation
of signals etc the brain is enormously
complex i mean of course but again it's
a small number of primitives encoded by
a tiny number of genes
which are
self-organized and shaped by their
environment
babies that are growing up today are
listening to language
from
conception basically as soon as the
auditory apparatus forms
it's already getting shaped to the types
of signals that are out in the real
world today
so it's not just like oh have an
egyptian be born and then ship them over
it's like no that egyptian would be
listening in to the complex of the world
and then getting born and sort of seeing
just how much more complex the world is
so it's a combination of the underlying
hardware
which if you think about as a geneticist
in my view the hardware gives you an
upper bound of cognitive capabilities
but it's the environment that makes
those capabilities shine and reach their
maxima so we're a combination of nature
and nurture
the nature is our genes and our
cognitive apparatus and the nurture is
the richness of the environment that
makes that cognitive apparatus reach its
potential
and we are so far from reaching our full
potential
so far
i think that kids being born 100 years
from now they'll be looking at us now
and saying what primitive educational
systems they had
i can't believe people were not wired
into this you know virtual reality from
birth
as we are now because like they're
clearly inferior
and so forth so i basically think that
our environment will continue
exploding
and our cognitive capabilities it's not
like oh we're only using two percent of
our brain that's ridiculous of course
we're using 100 of our brain but it's
still constrained by how complex our
environment is
so the hardware will remain the same but
the software
in a quickly advancing environment the
software will make a huge difference in
the nature of
like the human experience the human
condition it's fascinating to think that
humans will look very different 100
years from now just because the
environment changed even though we're
still the same great apes the the
descendant of apes
at the core of this is kind of a notion
of ideas
that uh i don't know if you're
there's a lot of people that's including
you eloquently about this topic but
richard dawkins talks about
the notion of memes
and let's say this
notion of ideas
you know multiplying selecting
in the minds of humans do you ever think
from about ideas from the from that
perspective ideas as organisms
themselves that are breeding in the
minds of humans
i love the concept of memes i love the
concept of this horizontal transfer of
ideas and sort of permeating through
through
you know our
layer of interconnected neural networks
so you can think of sort of the
cognitive
space
that has now connected all of humanity
where we are now one giant
information and idea sharing network
well beyond what was thought to be ever
capable when the concept of a meme was
created by richard dawkins so but i want
to take that concept just
you know into another twist
which is the horizontal transfer of
humans
with fellowships
and the fact that
as people apply to mit from around the
world
there's a selection that happens
not just for their ideas
but also for the cognitive hardware
that came up with those ideas
so we don't just ship ideas around
anymore they don't evolve in a vacuum
the ideas themselves influence
the distribution of cognitive systems
i.e humans and brains
around the planet yeah we ship them to
different locations based on their
properties that's exactly right
so so those cognitive systems that think
of you know physics for example might go
to cern and those that think of genomics
might go to the broad institute
and those that think of computer science
might go to i don't know stanford or cmu
or mit
and you basically have this co-evolution
now of memes and ideas and the cognitive
conversational systems that
love these ideas and feed on these ideas
and understand these ideas and
appreciate these ideas
now coming together
so you basically have
students coming to boston to study
because that's the place where these
type of cognitive systems thrive
and they're selected
based on their cognitive output and
their
idea output
but once they get into that place
the
boiling and interbreeding of these memes
becomes so much more frequent
that what comes out of it
is so far beyond if ideas were evolving
in a vacuum of an already established
hardware cognitive interconnection
system of the planet
where now you basically have
the ideas shaping the distribution of
these systems and then the genetics kick
in as well you basically have now
these people who came to be a student
kind of like myself who now stuck around
and are now professors
bringing up our own
genetically encoded and genetically
related cognitive systems mine are eight
six and three years old
who are now growing up in an environment
surrounded by other
cognitive systems of a similar age
with parents who love these types of
thinking and ideas and you basically
have a whole interbreeding now
of
genetically
selected
transfer of cognitive systems
where the genes and the memes
are
co-evolving the same soup
of ever improving knowledge and societal
inter-fertilization cross-virtualization
of these ideas so that this beautiful
image
so these are shipping these actual
meat cognitive systems to physical
locations they they tend to uh cluster
in uh the biology ones cluster in a
certain building too so like within that
there's there's uh there's clusters on
top of clusters type of clusters what
about in the online world
is that
do you also see that kind of because
people now
form groups on the internet that they
stick together so they
they can sort of uh
these cognitive systems can
collect themselves and uh
breed together uh on in in different
layers of spaces it doesn't just have to
be physical space absolutely absolutely
so basically there's the physical
rearrangement but there's also the
conglomeration of
the same cognitive system doesn't need
to be a human
it doesn't need to belong to only one
community yeah so yes you might be a
member of the computer science
department but you can also hang out in
the biology department but you might
also go online online into i don't know
poetry department uh readings and so
forth or you might be
part of a group that only has 12 people
in the world
but that are connected through their
ideas and are now interbreeding these
ideas in a whole other way
so this um
this coevolution of genes and memes is
not just physically instantiated it's
also sort of rearranged
you know in this cognitive uh space as
well
and uh and sometimes these cognitive
systems hold conferences and they all
get gather around and there's like one
of them is like talking and they're all
like listening and then you discuss and
then they have free lunch and so on no
but but then that's where you find
students where you know when when i go
to a conference i go through the posters
where i'm on a mission basically my
mission is to read and understand what
every poster is about and for a few of
them i'll dive deeply and understand
everything but i make it a point to just
go post after posting in order to read
all of them and i find some gems and
students that i speak to that sometimes
eventually join my lab
and then sort of you're you're sort of
creating this permeation of you know the
transfer
of ideas
of ways of thinking and very often of
moral values
of social structures
of
you know just more
imperceptible
properties of these cognitive systems
that simply just cling together
basically you know there's
i have the luxury at mit of not just
choosing smart people but choosing smart
people who i get along with
who
are generous and friendly and creative
and smart and you know
excited and
childish in their
in you know uninhibited behaviors and so
forth so you basically can choose
yourself to surround
you can choose to surround yourself with
people who are not only cognitively
compatible
but also
you know imperceptibly through the meta
cognitive systems compatible and again
when i say compatible
not all the same
sometimes
you know
sometimes all the time
the teams are made out of complementary
components not just compatible but very
often complementary so in my own team i
have a diversity of students who come
from very different backgrounds there's
a whole spectrum of biology to
computation of course but within biology
there's a lot of realms within
computation there's a lot of rounds and
what makes us
click so well together
is the fact that not only do we have a
common mission a common passion and a
common
you know
view of the world
but
that were complementary in our skills in
our angles with which we accommodate and
so so forth and that's sort of what
makes it click yeah it's fascinating
that the the
the stickiness of
multiple cognitive systems together
includes both the commonality so you
meet because you're there's some common
thing but you stick together
because you're dif different
in all the useful ways yeah yeah and my
wife and i i mean we adore each other
like to pieces but we're also extremely
different in many ways and that's
beautiful
but i love that about about us i love
the fact that you know i'm like living
out there in the you know world of ideas
and i forget what day it is and she's
like well at 8 am the kids better be to
school
and uh you know yeah i do get yelled at
but but i need it basically i need her
as much as she needs me and she loves
interacting with me and talking i mean
you know last night we were talking
about this and i showed her the
questions and we were bouncing ideas of
each other and it was just beautiful
like we basically have these you know
basically
cognitive
you know let it all loose kind of dates
where you know we just bring papers and
we're like you know bouncing ideas etc
so you know we have extremely different
perspectives but very common you know
goals and interests and
anyway what do you make of the
communication mechanism that we humans
use to share those ideas because like
one essential element of all of this is
not just that we're able to
have these ideas but we're also able to
share them we tend to maybe you can
correct me but we seem to use
language to share the ideas maybe we
share them in some much deeper way than
language i don't know but what do you
make of this whole mechanism and how
fundamental it is to
the human condition so some people will
tell you that your language
dictates your thoughts and your thoughts
cannot form outside language
i tend to disagree
i see
uh thoughts as
much more abstract as you know basically
when i dream i don't dream in words i
dream in shapes and forms and you know
three-dimensional space with extreme
detail i was describing so when i wake
up in the middle of the night i actually
record my dreams
sometimes i write them down in a dropbox
file uh other times i'll just dictate
them in you know audio
and um
my wife was giving me a massage the
other day because like my left side was
frozen
and i started playing the recording and
as i was listening to it i was like i
don't remember any of that and i was
like of course and then the entire thing
came back but then there's no way any
other person could have recreated that
entire sort of you know
three-dimensional
uh shape and dream and concept and in
the same way when i'm thinking of ideas
there's so many ideas i can't put two
words
i mean i will describe him with a
thousand words but the idea itself is
much more precise or much more sort of
abstract or much more something you know
difference either less abstract or more
abstract and it's either you know
basically the
there's just a projection that happens
from the three-dimensional ideas into
let's say a one-dimensional language
and the language certainly gives you the
apparatus to think about concepts that
you didn't realize existed before
and with my team we often create new
words i'm like well now we're going to
call this the regulatory plexus of a
gene
and that gives us now the language to
sort of build on that as one concept
that you then build upon with all kinds
of other other things so there's this
co-evolution again of ideas and language
but they're not one-to-one uh with each
other now let's talk about language
itself
words
sentences
this is
a very
distant construct from where language
actually begun
so if you look at how we communicate
as i'm speaking my eyes are shining
and my face is changing through all
kinds of emotions
and my entire body composition posture
is reshaped
and my intonation the pauses that i make
the softer and the louder and this and
that are
conveying so much more information
and
if you look at early human language
and if you look at how
you know the great apes communicate with
each other there's a lot of granting
there's a lot of postering there's a lot
of emotions there's a lot of sort of
shrieking etc
they have
a lot of components of our
human language
just not the words
so
i think of human communication
as combining
the ape component but also of course the
you know gpt3 component so basically
there's the cognitive layer and the
reasoning layer that we share with
different parts of our relatives there's
the ai relatives but there's also the
grunting relatives
and
what i love about humanity is that we
have both we're not just a
conversational system
we're a grunting emotionally charged you
know
weirdly intercon connected system that
also has the ability to reason
and
when when we communicate with each other
there's so much more than just language
there's so much more than just words
it does seem like we're able to somehow
transfer
even more than the the body language it
seems that in the room with us is always
a giant knowledge base
of like
shared experiences different
perspectives on those experiences but
i don't know the knowledge of who the
last three four presidents in the united
states was and just all the you know 911
the tragedies in 911 all the all the
beautiful and uh terrible things that
happen in the world they're somehow both
in our minds
and somehow enrich the ability to
transfer information
and what i love about it is i can i can
talk to you about 2001 audience of space
and mention a very specific scene and
that evokes
all these feelings that you had when you
first watched it we're both visualizing
that maybe in different ways exactly but
in that yeah and not only that but the
feeling
uh is brought back up just like you said
with the dreams
we both have that feeling arise in some
form exactly as you bring up the exact
you know uh facing his own mortality
yeah it's fascinating that we're able to
do that but i don't know
now let's let's talk about neural link
for a second so what's the concept of
generally the concept of neural link is
that i'm going to take
whatever knowledge is encoded in my
brain
directly transfer it into your brain
so
this is a beautiful fascinating and
extremely sort of you know appealing
concept but i see a lot of challenges
surrounding that
the first one is we have no idea how to
even begin to understand how knowledge
is encoded
in a person's brain
i mean i told you about this paper that
we had recently with liquitai and
asaf marco
that basically was looking at these
engrams that are formed with
combinations of neurons that co-fire
when a stimulus happens where we can go
into a mouse and select those neurons
that fire by marking them and then see
what happens when they first fire and
then select the neurons that fire again
when the experience is repeated these
are the recall neurons and then there's
the the memory consolidation neurons so
we're starting to understand a little
bit of sort of the distributed nature of
knowledge and coding and experience in
coding in the human brain and in the
mouse brain
and
the concept that we'll understand that
sufficiently one day
to
be able to take a snapshot of
what does that seem
from
dave losing his mind of how losing his
mind and talking to dave um
how is that seen encoded in your mind
imagine the complexity of that but now
imagine
suppose that we solve this problem
and
the next enormous challenge is how do i
go and modify the next person's brain to
now create the same exact neural
connections
so that's an enormous challenge right
there so basically it's not just reading
it's not writing
and again what if something goes wrong i
don't want to even think about that
that's number two and number three
who says that the way that you encode
dave i'm losing my mind
and i encode dave i'm losing my mind
is anywhere near each other
basically maybe the way that i'm
encoding it
is twisted with my childhood memories of
running through you know the
pebbles in greece and yours is twisted
with your childhood memories growing up
in russia
and
there's no way that i can take my
encoding and put it into your brain
because it'll a mess things up
and b be incompatible with your own
unique experiences so that's telepathic
communication from human to humor it's
fascinating you're you're reminding
us that uh there's there's uh two
biological systems on both ends of that
communication and the one the easier i
guess
may be half as difficult
a thing to do and the hope with neural
link is that
we can communicate with an ai system so
yeah where one side of that is a little
bit yeah more controllable but
but even just that is is exceptionally
difficult let's talk about two two new
neuronal systems talking to each other
suppose that gpt4 tells gpd3 hey give me
all your knowledge
right it's ready that's hilarious i have
ten times more hardware i'm ready just
feed me what's gbt3 going to do is it
going to say oh here's my 10 billion
parameters
no no way
the simplest way and perhaps the fastest
way for gpd3 to transfer all this
knowledge to its older body that has a
lot more hardware
is to
regenerate every single possible human
sentence that he can possibly yes create
keep talking
keep talking and just re-encode it all
together so maybe what language does is
exactly that it's taking one generative
cognitive model
it's running it forward to emit
utterances that kind of make sense in my
cognitive frame and it's re-encoding
them into yours
through the parsing of that same
language and i think the conversation
might might actually be the most
efficient way to do it so not just
talking but uh interactive so talking
back and forth yeah asking questions
interrupting
so gpth4 will constantly be interrupted
is also that as we're interrupting each
other
there's all kinds of misinterpretations
that happen
that you know as
basically when my students speak i will
often know that i'm misunderstanding
what they're saying
and i'll be like
hold that thought for a second let me
tell you what i think i understood which
i know is different what you said then
i'll say that and then someone else in
the same zoom meeting will basically say
well
you know here's another way to think
about what you just said and then by the
third iteration we're somewhere
completely different that
if we could actually communicate with
full
you know neural network parameters back
and forth of that knowledge and idea and
coding
would be
far inferior because
the re-encoding with our own as we said
last time emotional baggage and
cognitive baggage from our unique
experiences
through
our shared
experiences distinct encodings
in the context of all our unique
experiences
is
leading to so much more
diversity of perspectives and again
going back to this whole concept of this
entire network of all of human cognitive
systems connected to each other
and sort of how ideas and memes permeate
through that
that's sort of what really creates a
whole new level of human experience
through
this
reasoning layer and this computational
layer that
obviously lives on top of our cognitive
layer
so you're one
of these
aforementioned cognitive systems
mortal
but uh
thoughtful and you're connected to a
bunch like you said students uh your
wife your kids
what do you
in your brief time here on earth this is
a meaning of life episode
so uh what do you hope
this world will remember you as
what do you hope your legacy will be
i don't think of legacy
as much as
maybe most people things
legacy oh it's kind of funny i'm
consciously living the present yes many
students tell me you know oh give us
some career advice i'm like i'm the
wrong person i've never made a career
plan i still have to make one
i um
it's funny to be both experiencing the
past and the present and the future
but also consciously living in the
present and
just you know there's a conscious
decision we can make to not worry about
all that
which again goes back to the i'm the
lucky one kind of thing
[Laughter]
of living in the present and being happy
winning and being happy losing and um
there's a certain freedom that comes
with that but again a certain
um sort of
i don't know ephemerity
of
living for the present
but if you if you step back from all of
that where basically my
my
current modus operandis is live for the
present make you know every day
the best you can make and just
make the
local
blip of local maxima of the universe of
the awesomeness of the planet and the
town and the family that we live in
both academic family and
you know biological family um
make it a little more awesome by being
generous to your friends being generous
to the people around you being you know
kind to your enemies and uh you know
just
showing level around you can't be upset
at people if you truly love them
if somebody yells at you and insults you
every time you say the slightest thing
and yet when you see them you just see
them with love
it's a beautiful feeling it's like you
know i'm feeling
exactly like when i look at my
three-year-old who's like screaming
even though i love her and i want her
good she's still screaming and saying no
no no no no and i'm like i love you i
genuinely love you
but i can i can sort of kind of see that
your brain is kind of stuck
in that little you know mode of anger
and
you know there's plenty of people out
there who don't like me and i see them
with love
as the child that is stuck in a
cognitive state
that they're eventually going to snap
out of or maybe not and that's okay
so there's that aspect of sort of
you know experiencing
you know life with the best intentions
and
you know i love when i'm wrong
i i had a friend who was like one of the
smartest people i've ever met who would
basically say oh i love it when i'm
wrong because it makes me feel human
[Laughter]
and it's so beautiful i mean she's
really one of the smartest people i've
ever met and she was like oh it's such a
good feeling
and i love being wrong
but
there's
you know there's something about
self-improvement there's something about
sort of how do i
not make the most mistakes but attempt
the most rights
and do the fewest wrongs
but with the full knowledge that this
will happen that's one aspect
so so so through this life in the
present
what's really funny is and that's
something that i've experienced more and
more
really thanks to you
and through this podcast
is this enormous number of people who
will basically comment wow i've been
following this guy for so many years now
or wow this guy has inspired so many of
us in computational biology and so forth
i'm like i don't know any of that
but i'm only discovering this now
through this sort of sharing
our emotional states and our cognitive
states with a wider
audience
where suddenly
i'm sort of realizing that wow maybe
i've had a legacy
yes like basically i've trained
generations of students from mit
and i've put all of my courses freely
online since 2001
so basically all of my video recordings
of my lectures have been online since
2001.
so countless generations of people from
across the world
will meet me at a conference and say
like i was at this conference where
somebody heard my voice it's like i know
this voice i've been listening to your
lectures yes and it's just such a
beautiful thing where
like we're sharing
widely and who knows
which students will get where
from whatever they catch out of these
lectures even if what they catch is just
inspiration and passion and drive
so
there's this intangible
you know legacy quote-unquote that every
one of us has through the people we
touch
one of my friends from undergrad
basically told me oh my mom remembers
you vividly from when she came to campus
i'm like i didn't even meet her she's
like no but
she she sort of saw you interacting with
people and said wow he's exuding this
positive energy
and
there's there's that aspect of sort of
just motivating people with your
kindness with your passion with your
generosity
and with your you know just selflessness
uh of of you know just just just give
doesn't matter where it goes
i i've been to conferences where
basically people you know i'll ask them
a question and then they'll come back or
like there was a company where i asked
somebody question they said oh in fact
this entire project was inspired by your
question three years ago at the same
conference yes i'm like wow
and then on top of that there's also the
ripple effects of the years speaking to
the direct influence of inspiration or
education but there's also like
the follow-on things that happened to
that and there's this ripple that
through from you just this one
individual and from every one of us from
everyone that's what i love about
humanity the fact that
every one of us
shares genes
and genetic variants with very recent
ancestors with everyone else
so even if i die tomorrow
my genes are still shared through my
cousins and through my uncles and
through my you know
immediate family and of course i'm lucky
enough to have my own children but even
if you don't your genes are still
permeating through all of the layers of
your family so your genes will have the
legacy there yeah or every one of us
yeah number two our ideas are constantly
intermingling with each other so there's
no person living in the planet
100 years from now who will not be
directly impacted by everyone on the
planet living here today yeah through
genetic inheritance and through meme
inheritance that's cool to think that
your ideas manolas callus would touch
would
uh touch every single person on this
planet it's interesting but not just
mine joe smith who's looking at this
right now his ideas will also touch
everybody
so there's this interconnectedness of
humanity
and and then i'm also a professor so my
day job is legacy my day job is training
not just
the thousands of people who watch my
videos on the web but the people who are
actually in my class who basically come
to mit to learn
from
a bunch of us like the cognitive systems
that were shipped to this particular
location and who will then disperse back
into all of their home countries yeah
that's that's what makes america the
beacon of the world
we don't just export
you know goods we export people
cognitive systems we we export
people who are born here and we also
export training
that people born elsewhere will come
here to get and will then disseminate
not just whatever knowledge they got but
whatever ideals they learned
and i think that's something that's a
legacy of the us that you cannot stop
with political isolation you cannot stop
with economic isolation that's something
that will continue to happen through all
the people we've touched through our
universities so there's the students who
took my classes who are basically now
going off and teaching their classes and
i've trained generations of
computational biologists no one in
genomics who's gone through mit hasn't
taken my class so basically there's this
impact through
i mean there's so many people in biotech
who are like hey i took your class
that's what got me into the field like
15 years ago it's just so beautiful yes
and then there's the
academic family that i have so the
students who are actually studying with
me who are my trainees so this sort of
mentorship of ancient greece these
so i basically have an academic family
and
we are a family there's this
such strong connection this bond of
you're part of the kelly's family so i
have a biological family at home and i
have an academic family on campus and
that academic family has given me great
grandchildren already yes
so i've trained people who are now
professors at stanford tmu harvard you
know what you i mean everywhere in the
uh
on the world
and these people have now trained people
who are now
having their own faculty jobs
so there's basically people who see me
as their academic grandfather
and it's just so beautiful because you
don't have to wait for the 18 years of
cognitive you know hardware development
to to sort of
have amazing conversation with people
these are fully grown humans fully grown
adult who are you know
cognitively super ready
and who are shaped by and you know i see
some of these beautiful papers i'm like
i can see the touch of our lab in those
favors it's just so beautiful because
you're like i've spent hours with these
people teaching them not just how to do
a paper but how to think
and this whole concept of
you know the first paper that we write
together
is an experience with every one of these
students
so you know i always tell them to write
the whole first draft and they know that
i will rewrite every word
but but the act of them writing it and
what i do is these like joint editing
sessions where i'm like let's co-edit
and with this co-editing we basically
have um creative destruction
so i share my zoom screen and i'm just
thinking out loud as i'm doing this and
they're learning from that process as
opposed to like come back two days later
and they see a bunch of red on a page
i'm sort of well that's not how you
write this that's not how you think
about this that's not you know what's
the point like this morning i was having
a i yes this morning between six and
eight a.m i had a two-hour meeting
going through one of these papers and
then saying what's the point here why
why do you even show that it's just a
bunch of points on a graph no what you
have to do is extract the meaning do the
homework for them
and there's this
nurturing this mentorship
that sort of creates now a legacy which
is
infinite because they've now gone off on
the you know and all of that is just
humanity
then of course it's the papers i write
because yes my day job is training
students but it's a research university
the way that they learn is through the
men's and manus
mind and hand
it's the practical training of actually
doing research
and that research
is a beneficial side effect
of having these awesome papers
that will now
tell other people how to think
there's this paper we just posted
recently on med archive and one of the
most generous and eloquent comments
about it was like wow this is a master
class
in scientific writing
in analysis in biological interpretation
and so so forth it's just so fulfilling
from a person i've never met or first
say the title of the paper branch
i don't remember the title but it's
single cell dissection of schizophrenia
reveals
and so the two the two points that we
found was this whole transcriptional
resilience like there's some individuals
who are schizophrenic
but whose
they have an additional cell type or
initial cell state which we believe is
protective
and that cell state when they have it
will cause other cells to have normal
gene expression patterns it's beautiful
yeah and then that's that cell is
connected with some of the pv
interneurons that are basically sending
these inhibitory brain waves through the
brain
and there basically there's a there's
another component of
there's a set of master regulators that
we discovered
who are controlling many of the genes
that are differentially expressed and
these master regulators are themselves
genetic targets of schizophrenia
and they are themselves involved in both
synaptic connectivity
and also in early brain development
so there's this sort of
interconnectedness between synaptic
development axes and also this
transcription resilience so i mean we
basically made up a title that combines
all these concepts
you have all these concepts all these
people working together and ultimately
these minds condense it down into a
beautifully exactly little document that
lives on and that document now has its
own life yeah our work has a hundred and
a hundred and twenty thousand
citations i mean that's not just people
who read it these are people who used it
to write something based on it yeah i
mean that to me is
is just so fulfilling to basically say
wow i've touched people
so
i i don't think of my legacy as i live
every day i just think of the beauty of
the present
and the power of interconnectedness and
just i feel like a kid in a candy shop
where i'm just like constantly you know
where do i what what package do i open
first
and um you know the lucky one
a jack of all trades a master of none
i think uh for a meaning of life episode
we would be amiss if we did not have at
least a poem or two do you mind if we
uh end in a couple of poems
maybe a happy maybe a sad one i would
love i would love that so thank you for
the luxury
the first one is kind of um
i remember uh
when you were talking with eric
weinstein about um
this comment of leonard cohen yes that
says but you don't really care for music
do ya yeah in hallelujah that's
basically kind of like mocking its
reader yeah so one of my poems is a
little like that
so
i had just broken up with
you know my girlfriend and there's this
other friend who was coming to visit me
and she said
i will not come unless you write me a
poem
[Laughter]
and uh
i was like
writing a form on demand
so this this poem is called write me a
poem
it goes write me a poem she said with a
smile make sure it's pretty romantic and
rhymes make sure it's worthy of that
bold flame that love uniting us beyond a
mere game
and she took off without more words
rushed for the bus and travelled the
world
a poem i thought this is sublime what
better way for passing the time
what better way to count up the hours
before she comes back to my lonely tower
waiting for joy to fill up my heart
let's write a poem for when we're apart
how does a poem start i inquired give me
a topic hook up a style throw in some
cute words oh here and there throw in
some passion love and despair
love
three eggs one pound of flour three cups
of water and bake for an hour
love is no recipe as i understand you
can't just cook up a poem on demand
and as i was twisting all this in my
mind i looked at the page by golly it
rhymed
three roses white chocolate vanilla
powder some beautiful rhymes and maybe a
flower
no be romantic the young girl insisted
do this do that don't be so silly you
must believe it straight from your heart
if you don't feel it we're better apart
oh my sweet thing what can i say you
bring me the sun all night and all day
you're the stars and the moon and the
birds way up high you're my evening
sweet song my morning blue sky
you are my muse your spell has me caught
you bring me my voice and scatter my
thoughts
to put love in writing in vain i can try
but when i'm with you my wings want to
fly
so i put down the pen and drop my
defenses
give myself to you and fill up my senses
the baffle king composing
that was beautiful
what i love about it is that i did not
bring up a dictionary of rhymes i did
not sort of
work hard so basically when i write
poems i just type i never go back i just
so when my brain gets into that mode
it actually happens like i wrote it oh
wow so the rhymes just kind of becomes
it's an emergent phenomenon phenomenon i
just get into that mode
and then it comes out that's a beautiful
one and it's it's basically um
you know
as you as you got it it's basically
saying it's no recipe and then i'm
starting throwing the recipes and as i'm
writing it i'm like you know so it's
it's very introspective in this whole uh
concert
so anyway
there's another one many years earlier
that um
is
you know darker it's basically this
whole concept of let's be friends i was
like ugh
no let's be friends just like you know
so the last words are shout out i love
you or send me to hell
so uh the the title is burn me tonight
lie to me baby
lie to me now
tell me you love me break me a vow give
me a sweet word i promise a kiss
give me the world a sweet taste to miss
don't let me lay here inert ugly cold
with nothing sweet felt and nothing
harsh told
give me some hope false foolish yet kind
make me regret i'll leave you behind
don't pity my soul or torture it right
treat it with hatred start up a fight
for it's from mildness that my soul dies
when you cover your passion in a bland
friend's disguise
kiss me now baby show me your passion
turn off the light and rip off your
fashion
give me my life's joy this one night
burn all my matches for one blazing
light
don't think of tomorrow and let today
fade don't try and protect me from
love's cutting blade
your razor will always rip off my veins
don't spare me the passion to spare me
the pains
kiss me now honey or spit in my face
throw me an insult i'll gladly embrace
tell me now clearly that you never cared
say it now loudly like you never dared
i'm ready to hear it i'm ready to die
i'm ready to burn and start a new life
i'm ready to face the rough burning
truth
rather than waste the rest of my youth
so tell me my lover should i stay or go
the answer to love is one yes or no
there's no i like you no let's be
friends
shout out i love you or send me to hell
i don't think there's a better way to
end
a discussion of the meaning of life
whatever the heck the meaning is uh go
all in as that poem
says manolas thank you so much for
talking today thanks i look forward to
next time
thanks for listening to this
conversation with manolas kellis and
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friedman and now let me leave you with
some words from douglas adams in his
book hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
on the planet earth man had always
assumed that he was more intelligent
than dolphins because he had achieved so
much
the wheel new york
wars and so on
whilst all the dolphins had ever done
was muck about in the water having a
good time
but conversely the dolphins had always
believed that they were far more
intelligent than man
for precisely the same reasons
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time