Lex Fridman Podcast - #142 – Manolis Kellis: Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Manolis Kellis is a computational biologist at MIT. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil - Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10 EPISODE LINKS: Manolis Website: http://web.mit.edu/manoli/ Manolis Twitter: https://twitter.com/manoliskellis Manolis YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkKlJ5LHrE3C7fgbnPA5DGA PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (06:48) - Music and life (46:21) - The number 42 (52:22) - The question about the meaning of life (55:02) - Are humans unique in the universe? (1:00:46) - Human civilization (1:12:52) - Mars (1:14:45) - Human mind and the abstraction layers of reality (1:25:38) - Neural networks and intelligence (1:32:55) - Ideas as organisms (1:42:19) - Language (1:53:34) - Legacy (2:08:25) - Poems SONGS MENTIONED: [1] Dwros Gewrgiadis - An imoun plousios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7akZoEQv6jI [2] Grigoris Bithikotsis - Ftoxologia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGR24O0KQ8 [3] Sto perigiali to kryfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-GBPx_GXQw [4] Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqe5NP86OCc [5] George Michael - Careless Whisper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izGwDsrQ1eQ [6] Gainsbourg with Isabelle Adjani - Pull Marine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7MwHGHWgLk [7] Georges Moustaki - Le meteque https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV8fGf-N06A [8] Jacques Brel - Ne me quitte pas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_bq5mStroM [9] Sting - Englishman In New York https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d27gTrPPAyk [10] Sting - Fragile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB6a-iD6ZOY [11] Pink Floyd - The Wall (When the Tigers Broke Free) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9b9UhFe6Eg [12] Pink Floyd - The Wall (One Of My Turns) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOay-7aqLks [13] Sting - Russians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHylQRVN2Qs [14] Joni Mitchell - Both sides now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnf46boC3I [15] Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOnXe8ttmjY [16] Alison Krauss & Union Station - The Lucky One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcRZ_J_VgNc

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 142 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, psychology, to metaphysics, and to music. Quick mention of each sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode

thanks to Grammarly which is a service for checking, spelling, grammar, sentence, structure, and readability, athletic greens, the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases, and cash app. The app I use is a money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get discount and to support this podcast. 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 Manolus' life. It was a happy accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating

mind of Manolus. 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 Manolus has for music, his singing of the little excerpts from the songs, and in general, 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 experiment and conversation about music and life. If you do, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars and not a podcast, follow

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use code Lex podcast, you get 10 bucks and cash out will also donate 10 bucks to the first and organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Manolis Callis. 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 in periods 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 can sort of recite hundreds of songs 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 the overcoming adversity.

So some of the songs that have really shaped me are Hatticelexiu, for example, is one of my favorite singers in Greece. And then there's also really just old traditional songs that my parents used to listen to. Like one of them is Nimun Plucius, 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 the 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 he was like, you know, breaking into that, so he's

just, just a position between the spirit and the sublime and the physical and the harsh reality. It's just not having troubles, not not being miserable. So basically, rich to him just means out of my misery. 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 imagery. So many of the Greek songs just like the poetry we talked about, they acknowledge the cruelty, the difficulty of life, but are longing for a better life. That's exactly right. And another one is Ftokholoyah.

And this 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, it's the state of being poor. I don't even know if there's a word for that in English. And then fast part is the heria sum regalo san que plone san que mato san. So then it's like, oh, you know, basically, like the state of being poor and misery, you know, for you, I write all my songs, et cetera.

And then the fast part is in your arms, grew up and suffered and, you know, stood up and 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 silacris, pula, charas, pula, 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 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, who's eight. So my daughter, Cleo, is like, oh, let's look at the pictures. And my son, Jonathan, he's like, but Cleo is like, oh, let's look at the pictures and my son Jonathan.

He's like, 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 the book will give you. And then another one, oh gosh, this one is really miserable. It's called stoperegali to krifo, and it's basically describing how vigorously we took

on our life and we pushed hard towards the direction that we then realized was the wrong one. And 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.

And it's like, wow. Okay, so that was your, all right. So that's like, wow. Okay, that was you. Alright, so 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 preteen 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 Madonna and Michael Jackson and all of these sort of really popular songs and 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 has been repeating. I know I now understand What it means without re-listening it to it, but just with re-repeating it was like, oh Again, Michael Jackson's man in the mirror is Teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve yourself You know if you want to make the world a better place They could look at yourself and make the change this whole concept of, I mean, all of these songs you can listen to them shallowly, or you can just listen to them and say, oh, there's a deep remaining here. And I think there's a certain philosophy of song as a way of touching the psyche. So if you look at regions of the brain, people who 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 duality of musicality and 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, 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 if you look at a lot of these exotic birds of paradise and stuff like that, the mating rituals that they have are enormously amazing. And I think human mating rituals of 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 are ultimately enabled language. This fascinating to think that that's not just an accidental precursor to intelligence. It's sexually selected. Well, sex is selected and it's prerequisite. It's required intelligence. 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, some movie in New Hampshire. All work and no play, you make Jack a dull boy. A dull boy. The shining.

The shining. So there's this amazing scene where he's constantly trying to concentrate and what's coming out of the typewriter is just gibberish. And I have that image as well when I'm working. And I'm like, no, basically all of this crazy, 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, they play the violin, and they play sports. I mean, this whole sort of movement and going through mazes and playing tennis and 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 stringing together complicated concepts. It's the same underlying cognitive machinery

that is used for navigating mazes and for navigating theorems and solving equations. So I can't have a conversation with my students without either using my hands or opening the whiteboard in Zoom and just constantly drawing or back when we had in-person meetings, just the whiteboard in my mouth. I know. Yeah, that's fascinating to think about.

So that's Michael Jackson, Mayor, careless whisper, George Michael, which is a song I like you to say, the careless whisper. I mean, you didn't say that. I like that one. That's me. I had recorded. small part of it as he's played at the tail end of the radio and I had a tape where I only had part of that song. And I just stayed over and over and over and over again. It's so beautiful. It's so hard breaking. That song is almost Greek. It's so hard break. That song is almost Greek. It's so hard break. And George Michael is Greek.

He's Greek. Of course. George Michael is Greek. Yeah. No, you know. So sorry to offend you so deeply not knowing this. So anyway, so we're moving to France when I'm 12 years old. And now I'm getting into the songs of Gensbourg.

So Gensbourg is this incredible French France when I'm 12 years old. And now I'm getting into the songs of Gensbourg. So Gensbourg is this incredible French composer. He is always seen on stage, like not even pretending to try to a please, just like with his cigarette, just like rrrr, 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, qui, c'est comme si l'entraînement entier va se rire. Il va se dire le même chose twice, et vous êtes comme, « Woh ! » Et en fait, d'ailleurs, speaking of Greek, un French-Greek, Georges Moustaki, des songs, c'est juste magnifique.

Avec ma gueule de Métèque de juif, et rend de Patregrèque. Donc, avec ma face de Métèque, c'est un French-Greek word, So with my face of Mettec, he's actually a Greek word. It's a French word for a Greek word. But Mette comes from Metta and then Ec from Ikea from Ecology, which means home. So Mettec is someone who has changed homes with a migrant.

So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this one. The Jouith Eran, the Patrick Rek of de Mianjuin, de Greek Pasteur. Donc, encore, le Russian Greek, du orthodoxe connection. Et mes cheveux au quatre vents, avec mes haires dans les four wings, avec mes yeux tout délavés qui me donnent l'air de rêver, avec mes yeux qui sont tous venu au revoir, qui with my eyes that are all washed out, who give me the pretence 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 you have to listen to this verse, it's so beautiful. With my heart that has suffered so much, et vous avez besoin de l'écran de cette verse, c'est tellement beau. Avec mon cœur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffr avec mon coeur que je mais c'est possible que je in French is actually su faire, that new had to make, su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffère,

versus that span the whole thing. It's just beautiful. So on a small tangent, you know Jacques-Bel? Of course, of course. And then, I'm a quittapa, you know, those songs. 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 from Amsterdam. And she has a version of Nume Kietopai where she's actually added some English lyrics. And it's really beautiful. But again, Nume Kietopai is so, I mean, it's, you know, the promises, the volcanoes that, you know, will restart. It's just so beautiful. And I love so, there's not many

songs that show such depth of desperation for another human being. That's so powerful. Unapologize. And then high school. Now I'm starting to learn English. So I moved to New York. So Sting Englishman in New York. Magnificent song. And again, there's if his magoth man is someone said, then he is the hero of the day. It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself, no matter what they say. And then it takes more than combat gear to make a man, it takes more than a license for a gun. Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run. Again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live.

I mean, this is one of them. Basically, it says, it's not the combat gear that makes a man. Where's the part where he says, there you go. Generalness, sobriety, a rare in this society, at night a candle those brighter than the sun So beautiful, basically I said, well, you just might be the only one A modesty propriety can lead to notoriety

You could end up as the only one It's, 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 with that man 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 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 still are one, drying in the color of the evening sun, tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away, but something in our minds will always stain. Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes through violence and nothing ever could. For all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile you are. Damn, right? I mean, that's poetry. It's beautiful.

And he's using the English language, it's just such a refined way with deep meanings, but also words that rhyme just so beautifully. And evocations of when flesh and steel are one, I mean, it's just mind-volving. And then, of course, the refrain that everybody remembers is on and on, the rain will fall, et cetera. But like this beginning. It's a very good star, wow. Yeah.

And again, tears from a star, how fragile we are. I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally. This is something, it seems that more meaning comes when there a rhythm that I don't know what that is. That probably connects to exactly what you were saying. And 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, the whole album of Pink Floyd and the movie just marked me enormously as a teenager, just the wall. 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 that the vivid imagery was just before dawn, one miserable morning in black 44. When a 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 Anziya bridge head 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 got only notes, that's not what we would choose to do.

Forward he cried from the rear and the front rose. It's from another song, it's like this whole concept of osferses them and there's that theme of osferses them again where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds an old and a founded one day in a draw the whole photograph hidden away and my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty sign 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 was lost, his crime 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 it 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 upon upon, in France de Pion, they are the ones that you sent to the front to get murdered, slaughter. This whole concept of pioneers, having taken this whole disposable ordinary man to actually be the ones that, you know, we're now treating us here as, so anyway, there's this just a position 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 fuzzle ears, companiesy.

They were all left behind, most them dead the rest of them died 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 and this feeling of loneliness. And so dof is there anybody out there? And you know, so hello, hello, is there anybody in there? Just not if you can hear me. Is there anyone home? Come on, yeah. I hear you're feeling down. Just one little thing. Anyway, so here now, in, in again. Anyway, so yeah, the prison of your mind. So those are the dark moments. Exactly. They're the darker moments. Yeah, it's in the dark moments, the mind does feel like you're

trapped in a loan in a room with it. Yeah, and there's this, this scene in the movie, which is like where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this scene in the movie, which is like where he just breaks out with his guitar, and there's this prostituting 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 this endless hour 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 destroyed in a few seconds. One of my turns is that song and it's like I feel cold as a tourney kid ride us a bit of a dry

as a funeral drum. And then the music people are saying, Run to the bedroom. There's a suitcase on the left. I'll find my favorite acts. 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, you're making your last... But imagine watching this as a teenager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It like ruins so beautiful. I need to rewatch it. That's so, you're a good girl. But imagine watching this as a teenager. It like ruins your mind. It's like so many such harsh imagery. And then, you know, anyway, 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 new national anthem for the U.S. not for Russians, but for Red versus Blue. Mr. Krushchev 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 is 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. 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 CRISPR, simpler way to say, Russians love their children too. The common humanity. Yeah. And remember what I was telling you, I think in one of her first podcasts about the daughter who's crying for her brother to come back from more, and then the Virgin Mary appears and says, who should I take instead?

This Turk hears his family, hears his children. This other one, he just got married, et cetera. 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, et cetera.

So there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to go to war. You know, if you realize this, 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 lives at every level is the same on all sides, on all 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 fight for our family. So and the last one I mentioned last time we spoke, which is Johnny Mitchell's both sides now. So 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 nice cream castles in the air, And feather canyons everywhere. I've 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 Cloud delusions 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 forth. But now old friends are acting strange. They shake their heads, they say, I've changed. Well, some things lost and some things gained in 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. Remember my poem from when I was 16 years old of this poem, 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 in the moon that smiled. So this whole concept of, if you have love, 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. Those sides.

Anyway, and the last one is, last last one I promise, Leonar Cohen. This is amazing, by the way. I'm so glad we stumbled on how much joy you have in so many avenues of life. And music is just one of them. That's amazing. But yeah, Slender Cohen. Going back to Leonar Cohen since that's where you started. So Leonar 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 good. As we came out to greet the guests, 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 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 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.

And 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. And the difference I would say between like that and then we keep to pause. This song has got an attitude. He's like, he's proud of this his ability to basically be any kind of man for the long long as opposed to the Jacques Brault like desperation of what do I have to be for you to love me?

Yeah, desperation. 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 Am your man is actually an apology song. In the same way that Nmokitapa is an apology song. Nmokitapa basically says, I've screwed up. I'm sorry, baby. Any the same way that the careless whisper is on screwed up. Yes, that's right. I'm never gonna dance again. Guilty feet have got no rhythm.

So, this is an apology song, not by begging on his knees or at crawl to you, baby, and at fall at your feet, and at howl at your beauty, like a dog, heat, and at clothe at your heart, and at tear at your sheet, I'd say, please. And then the last one is so beautiful. If you want a father for your child or only want to walk with me a while across the sand, that's the last verses which basically says, you want me for a day? I'll be there. You want me to just walk? I'll be there. You want me for life? You want a father for your child? I'll be there too. It's just so beautiful.

Oh, sorry. Remember how I told you I was going to finish with a light-hearted song? Yes. Last one. You ready? So, Alison Kraus and Union Station, country song believe it or not, the lucky one. So, I've never identified as much with the lyrics of a song as this one. And it's hilarious, my friend Seraphim Batoglu 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 in us, so we used to perform Greek dances. I was the president of the International Students Association, so we put on these big performances for 500 people

at MIT, and there's a picture on the MIT tech, where Syraphim, who's like, you know, bodybuilder, was holding his shoulder, and I was like doing maneuvers in the air, basically. So anyway, these guys had a theme. We were driving back from a conference. And there's this Russian girl who was describing how every member of her family had been either killed by the communist or killed by the Germans or killed. Like she had just like, you know, misery, like death and, you know know sickness and everything everyone was

decimated in her family she was the last standing member and we stop at a the center of him was driving and we stop at a at a rest area and he can he takes me side he's like man always we're gonna crash 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'm like, what do you mean? He's like, 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 a question of attitude, of course. I'm not any luckier than any other person,

but every time something horrible happens to me, I'm like, and in fact, even in that song, 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, orrea, pufisixio, how nicely that the wind blew and the writing was erased. So again, it's this whole sort of not just saying, bummer, but, oh, great, I just lost this. This must mean something. Right. As far as something happened, it must open the door turn beautiful chapter

So so so Alison Krause is talking about the lucky one. So it was like oh my god. She wrote a song for me And she goes you're the lucky one. I know that now. It's free as the wind blowing down the road Loved by many hated by none I'd say you were lucky because you know what you've done not the care in the world or not a worry inside Everything's gonna be all right because you're the lucky one. And then she goes, uh, you're the lucky one always having fun. A jack of old trades and master of none. You look at the world with the smiling eyes and laugh at the devil as he's trained rolls by. I'll give you a song and a one-night stand. You'll be looking at a 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, a one trick pony. If you just embrace the fact that you might

suck out a bunch of things, but you're just going to try a lot of things. And then there's another first that says, well, you're blessed, I guess, but never knowing which but you're just going to try a lot of things. And then there's another first 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 he basically says, if you try your best, but it's still playing. If you lose, it's okay, you had an awesome game. And again, superficially, it sounds like a super happy song, but then there's 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 or vertical cry.

You can't really love unless you cry. You can't just be the lucky one, the happy boy La La La, and yet have a long-term relationship. So it's, you know, on one hand, I identify with the shallowness of the song of, you know, you're the lucky one, Jack of Old Traits or Master None. But at the same time, I identify with a lesson of, well, you can just be the happy Mary Go Lucky all the time. Sometimes you have to embrace loss, and, you can't just be the happy, merry, 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 let go of your reservations, that's when you truly will get somewhere. So anyway, that's like the, I managed to narrow it down to what 15 songs. Thank you for that wonderful journey that you just took us on. The darkest possible places of Greek song to ending in this country song. I haven't heard it before, but that's exactly right. Greek song to ending a country song. I haven't heard it before, but that's exactly right. I feel the same way, depending on the day,

is the luckiest human on earth. And there's something to that, but you're right. It needs to be, we need to now return to the muck of life in order to be able to truly enjoy it. What do you mean muck? What's muck? The messiness of life. The things that were, things don't turn out the way you expected to. So like to feel lucky is like focusing on the beautiful consequences. But then that feeling of things being different than you expected

that you stumble on all the kinds of ways that seems to be, it 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 doer, you'll make mistakes. If you're a criticizer, yeah, sure, you can stitch it 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 criticized one. Brillianly put. Every time somebody steals my bicycle, I say, well, no, my son's like, why do they still are bicycle dead? And I'm like, aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people can steal? I'd rather be the person stolen from them than the stealer. Yeah. Not the critics that counts. Yeah. So that's we've just talked amazingly about life from the music perspective. Let's talk about life from human life from perhaps other

perspective and its meaning. So this is episode 142. There is perhaps an absurdly deep meaning to the number 42 that our culture 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 there some value? Is it answerable at all?

So first of all, 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, my off-foolitude just seemed like,

just random numbers, any. But in fact, there's many numbers that are linked to 42. So 42, again, just to summarize, is the answer that is super mega computer that had computed for a million years with the most powerful computing in the world had come up with.

At some point, the computer says, I have an answer and they're like, what? Like, you're not gonna 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 nothing have to build bigger computers figure out what the question was. Do which the irony is that they had forgotten, of course, what the question was. Yes. So they have to build bigger computers, figure out what the question was, the question is to which the answer is 42. So as I was turning 42, I basically sort of researched why 42 is such a cool number. And it turns out that, and I put together these little passages that was explaining to all those guests to my 42nd birthday party, why we were talking about the meaning of life. And I'm basically talking 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 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 cube plus z to the cube is n, and was not known to not have a solution. And now it's the only one that actually has a solution. 42 is also 1,0, 1,0, 1,0 in binary.

Again the y in the y, the good in the evil, 1,0, the balance of the force. 42 is the number of chromosomes for the giant panda. And the giant panda. No, it's totally random. It's a vicious symbol of great strength coupled with peace, friendship, gentle temperament, harmony balance, and friendship, whose black and white colors again symbolize Ying and Yang. The reason why it's the symbol for China is exactly the strength but yet peace and so on 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 a number of times a piece of paper should be folded to reach beyond the moon. So which is what I assume my students mean when they ask that their paper reaches for the stars. I just tell them just folded a bunch of times. 42 is the number of messier object

42 which is Orion. And that's one of the most famous galaxies. It's also the place where we can actually see the center for a galaxy. 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in ASCII, which is very useful when searching for the stars, and also a reg X for life, a universe, and everything. So star. In Egyptian mythology, the goddess Mahat, which was personifying truth and justice, would ask 42 questions to every dying person, and those answering successfully would become stars, continued to give life and fuel universal growth.

In today's tradition, goddesscribe is described the 42 lettered name and trusted only to the middle-aged pious, 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, Elocah, which is 42, is the number with which God creates the universe, starting with 25 letter B, and ending with 70 good, so 25 plus 17. There's the 42 chapters 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, marking the age of printing in the 1450s, and the dissemination of knowledge eventually leading to the Enlightenment. A Yissel, which is a call of single-cell Euchariot, and the subject of my PhD research has exactly 42 million proteins. Anyway, so there's a theory that you're on for the 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 backer names. So you know, after you have the number, you figure out why that don't. So anyway, so now that we've spoken about why 42, why do we search for meaning? And you're asking, you know, will that search ultimately lead to our destruction? And 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 the finding it. I think when you found it, you're dead. Don't never be satisfied that 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 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. You know, remember our joke with a cat in the dog? Yeah, yeah. No meaning. No, no. joke with a cat in the dog. Yeah, no, no. So, and I'm noticing the Yin Yang symbol right here with his call, Panda, Black and White and the 010. The 010 file with that 42. Some of those are cold, ASCII value for Star symbol. Damn.

Anyway, so basically in my view, the search for meaning and the act of searching for something more meaningful is life's meaning by itself. 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, etc. We're the one species that spends such a tiny little minority of its time feeding that

we have this enormous, huge cognitive capability that we can just use for all kinds of other stuff. And that's where art comes in, That's where the healthy mind comes in with exploring all of these different aspects that are just not directly tied to a purpose. That's not directly tied to a function. It's really just the playing of life, not for particular reason. not for particular reason. Do you think this thing we got, this mind is unique in the universe in terms of how difficult it is to build?

It is possible that we are the most beautiful thing that the universe has constructed. Both are most beautiful and most ugly, but certainly the most complex. So look at evolutionary time. The din 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 to cover the planet. And then, you know, dramatically radiated about 60 million years ago.

Out of these mammals came the neocortex formation. So basically, 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 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 its creatures and to make room for the next ones. So the mammals basically took off the planet and then grew this cognitive capability of this general-purpose machine. And primates pushed that to extreme and humans among primates have just 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, rootless 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 expanding an enormous amount of energy on this apparatus between our ears, that is wasting about 15% of our bodily energy, 20% like some enormous percentage of our calories go to function or 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 and 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 fold continued effectively creating just so much more capacity. The evolutionary context in which this was made is enormously fascinating and it has to do with

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 sister Earth. And dinosaurs are still rolling. And any kind of proto-human is questioned, 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 create a mental model of how you think what they mean when you have these large cognitive groups, large social groups. So, me being able to create a mental model of how you think may have come before or I was

able to create a personal mental model of how do I think. So this introspection probably came after this 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, 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, that might not be as inevitable. That's your intuition. So if you were to estimate and bet some money on it, if we reran 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 dinosaurs suggests that it was not quite inevitable that we humans eventually 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 the universe has a lot of alien life forms in it, why haven't we seen them? Yeah.

And one thought is that there's a great filter or multiple great filters that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations. Like this thing that we, you know, this multi-folding brain that keeps growing may not be such a big feature. It might be useful for survival, but it takes us down a 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 pretense that 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, it's a little ridiculous. So what I love about Star Wars 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 on 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 alien civilizations would need to be paying attention to every single insignificant planet out there. And 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. Yes. 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 have hope? Well, you said thanks. Oh, of course, of course. I mean, now that we've made it so far. So you think we've made it?

Oh, gosh. I feel that 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 dominance. It wasn't necessarily the case with dinosaurs. Like, yes, there's some claims of intelligence. And if you look at Jurassic Park, yes, sure, whatever. But they just don't have the hardware for it.

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 one out, and it's kind of cool. I mean, it's a privilege, right? But it's kind of like living in Boston instead of, I don't know, some middle-age place where everybody's like hitting each other with, you know, weapons and sticks. In fact, the lucky ones song. weapons and sticks. You're back to the lucky ones song. I mean, we are the lucky ones.

But the flip side of that is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves. So you, yeah, and I want to go back to Pinker and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence. Dramatically, if you look 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 violence has been eliminated by that state. So this is called concept of central governance and people are green to live together and share responsibilities and duties and all of that.

It's something that has led so much to less violence, less death, less suffering, less poverty, less 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 they're 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 then 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 by everybody in In the many ways that you described Things can change in a moment. And it feels like it's not just us humans who are living through a pandemic. You could imagine that a pandemic would be more destructive or there could be asteroids that just appear out of the darkness of space, which I would recently learned It's not that easy to give you another number to detect them. Yes, so 48 what happens in 48 years

2068 a poffis There's an asteroid that's coming in 48 years. It has very high chance of actually wiping us out Yes We have 48 years to get our act together. It's not like some distant hypothesis. Yes. Yeah, sure, they're hard to detect, but this one we know about, it's coming. Sorry, you feel about that.

Why are you so sorry? 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 has led to humanity making so many advances so fast? Okay. So what has led 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 over brain and all of that. That's the hardware. The software hasn't, you know, the hardware hasn't changed much in the last what 70,000 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 neotany basically allows our exponential growth. The concept that our brain has not fully formed, has not fully stabilized itself until after our teenage years.

So, we basically have a good 16 years, 18 years, to sort of infuse it with the latest and greatest dust in software. If you look at what happened in ancient Greece, why did everything explode at ones? 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 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 expressing these ideals of peace and justice and these concepts

of, or even my Cabr concepts of doom, et cetera. 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, sir. It could have killed us a hundred years ago. It would have But it didn't why because in January we published the Gina a

Month later less than a month later the first vaccine designs were done and now 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 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 for 80 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 inale 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 and on the political side, on the cognitive, 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, Elon is now putting rockets out from the private space. I mean, that now democratization of space exploration is...

It's going to explode. 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, the human stepping foot on Mars and two possible colonization of not necessarily Mars, but other planets, all that kind of stuff for people living in space. Inevitable. Inevitable.

Would you do it? Or do you kind of like Earth? Of course. How many people will you wait? I think it was about when the declaration independence was 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 short list because I'll be old by then. They'll probably get a bunch of younger people. But you're, it's the wisdom and the, the, that case you are in the last four. But where's the chemistry? You, I gotta tell you tell you are the lucky one So you might be on the list. I don't know. I mean 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're driving in New York, you're basically in outer space. I mean, it's ridiculous, it's just so thin. And it's just against 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 we will overcome our little problems and eventually come together as a species. I feel that we're definitely on the path to that. It's not permeated through the whole universe yet, 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. 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, 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 Cerengeti, the lion is smelling the molecules in the environment. It's hormones and neuroreceptors are sort of getting it ready for impulse. and neuroreceptors are 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. I've kind of seen the game of waiting.

And the mitochondria in the muscles of the lion are basically ready for jumping. They're expensing an enormous amount of energy. The grass as it's flowing is constantly transforming solar energy into chloroplasts, through the chloroplasts into energy, which eventually feeds the gaz, and eventually feeds the lions and so on 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 chloroplast are only experiencing one layer. The conjure in its body are only experiencing one layer. The chloroplasts are only experiencing one layer. The photo receptors 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 human 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 know higher order, higher level programming, and on top of that you have your deep learning routine, et cetera, 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 it's made of and so on and so forth. So it's as if your AI system and there's this beautiful scene in 2001 on the Sea of Space where how

after Dave starts disconnecting him, he's starting to sing a song about daisies, etc. And Holly 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, well, 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 look at a 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 a computation with them. We share this cognitive layer 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 particular organism, AI is it is not 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 batch 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 my processing, all of these visual information, et cetera. 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 these 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.

These species that has managed to, in space, cross through these layers from the enormous to the infinitimally small. And that's what I love about particle physics, the fact that it actually unites everything. The very small, the very big. It's only through the and that's what I love about particle physics, the fact that it actually unites everything. Very small and 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 increasingly large particles before that explosion that then versus 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 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, a poffis 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, what God's perspective, meaning like become aware of, 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 what 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 think about sort of again, this whole simulation and Neo 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, more fused, 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 really only think 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 does the spark happen that basically sort of makes you you? I mean that's really the next frontier. 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 possibility. What I love about AI and the way that it operates right now is the fact that it is unpredictable. There's emerging behavior in our cognitively capable artificial systems that we can certainly model, but we don't encode directly. That's a key difference. We like to say, oh, of course,

this is not really intelligent because we coded it up. And we're just putting these little parameters there. And there's like, you know, it was six billion parameters. And once you've learned them, you know, we can understand the layers. But that's an oversimplification. 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 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 you eat learns from that. So even though the origins are humble, just like it is for genetic code, for AI, even though

the origins are humble, the result of it being deployed into the world is infinitely complex. into the world is infinitely complex. And yet, it's not yet able to be cognizant of all the other layers of it's not able to think about space and time. It's not able to think about the hard one which runs, the oxygen which runs yet. So if you look at humans, we basically have the same cognitive architecture as monkeys, as with the great apes. It's just a ton more of it.

If you look at GPT-3 versus GPT-2, again, it's the same architecture, just more of it. And yet, it's able to do so much more. So if you start thinking about sort of what's the future of that, GPT-4 and GPT-5, do you really need fundamental 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 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 the ton more of it.

Yeah, it's interesting that in the AI community, maybe there's a human-centric fear, but the notion that GPT 10 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 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 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 a fly as you're catching it through the air. All of these things are just like great lookup tables and coated in a giant neural network. I mean, I'm over simplifying, of course, the complexity and the diversity of the different types of excitatory inhibitor in neurons, the wave forms that sort of shine through the connections across all these different layers, the amalgamation of signals, et cetera. The brain is enormously complex. Oh, 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 auditorium 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 maximum. 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 a hundred 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 virtual reality from birth as we are now, because they're clearly inferior. And so 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

the percent of our brain. That's ridiculous. Of oh, we're only using 10% 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 the human experience, the human condition. It's fascinating to think that humans will look very different a hundred years from now, just because the environment changed. Even though we're still the same great apes, the descendant of apes, at the core of this is kind of a notion of ideas that I don't know if you're, there's a lot of people that's including you eloquently about this topic, but in 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 about ideas from that perspective, ideas as organisms themselves, they're breeding in the minds of humans. I love the concept of needs. I love the concept of these horizontal transfer of ideas and sort of permeating through 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 a concept of a meme was created by Richard Dawkins. So, but I want to take that concept just 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. It will ship them to different locations based on their properties. That's exactly right. So those cognitive systems that think of 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 could come 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, minor 8, 6, and 3 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 means are co-evolving the same soup of every improving knowledge and societal inter-fertilization cross-fertilization of these ideas. So, this beautiful image, so this is shipping these actual meat cognitive systems to physical locations,

they tend to cluster in the biology ones, cluster in a certain building too, so like within that there's clusters and top of clusters and top 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 can sort of these cognitive systems collect themselves and breed together 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, I.e. human. Doesn't need to be long to only one community. 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 into, I don't know, poetry department readings and so 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 co-evolution of genes and memes is not just physically instantiated. It's also sort of rearranged in this cognitive space as well. And in the sometimes these cognitive systems hold conferences and they all gather around and there's like one of them is like talking and they're all like listening

and then they discuss and then they have relaunch and so on. But then that's where you find students, where you know, 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-rafted poster 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 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 social structures, of just more imperceptible properties of these cognitive systems that simply just cling together. Basically, 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 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 imperceptibly through the meta-cognitive systems compatible. And again, when I say compatible, not all the same. 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 realms. 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 view of the world, but that were complementary in our skills, in our angles with which we accommodate, and so on and so forth. And that's sort of what makes it click. Yeah, it's fascinating that the stickiness of multiple cognitive systems together includes both the commonality.

So you meet because there's some common thing, but you stick together because you're different in all the useful ways. Yeah, yeah. And my wife and I, I mean, we adore each other, like two pieces, but we're also extremely different in many ways. And that's beautiful.

Beautiful. Listen to this. 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 the eight is. And she's like, well, at 8 a.m., the kids better be to school. And, you know, I do get yelled at. 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 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 lose kind of date, where, you know, we just bring papers and we're like, you know, bouncing ideas and so on. 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 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 that how fundamental 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 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 drop-ox file. Other times, I'll just dictate them in, you know, audio. And my wife was giving me a massage the other day because 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 three-dimensional 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 to words. I mean, I will describe them with a thousand words, but the idea itself is much more precise or much more sort of abstract or much more something different, either less abstract or more abstract. And it's either, basically, the 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 these 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 in language, but they're not one to one with each other.

Now let's talk about language itself, words, sentences. This is a very distant construct from where language actually began. 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 the this and that are conveying so much more information. And if you look at early human language, if you look at how, you know,

the great Aves communicate with each other, there's a lot of grunting, there's a lot of posturing, 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, GPT-3 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 interconnected system that also has the ability to reason. And 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 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, 9, 11, the tragedies and 11, all the beautiful and terrible

things that happen in the world, they're somehow both in our minds and somehow enrich the ability to transfer information. What I love about it is that I can talk to you about 2001 or is your 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 in maybe in different ways. Exactly. But not only that, but the feeling is brought back up just like you said with the dreams,

we both have that feeling arise in some form. As you bring up the exact how facing his own mortality is fascinating that we're able to do that. I don't know. Now let's talk about neural link for a second. So what's the concept of neural link? The concept of neural link is that I'm going to take whatever knowledge is encoded in my brain directly transferred into your brain.

So this is a beautiful, fascinating and extremely sort of 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 Lee Huay Thai and Asaf Marco that basically was looking at these Ngrams 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 memory consolidation neurons. So we're starting to understand a little bit 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 will understand that sufficiently one day, to be able to take a snapshot of what does that scene from Dave losing his mind of how losing his mind and talking to Dave How is that seen and coded in your mind imagine the complex deal that but now imagine Suppose that we solve this problem and The next and normous challenges. How do I go and modify it the next person's brain to now create the same exact neural connections?

So that's and the normous challenge right there. So basically it's not just reading, it's now 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 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. And there's no way that I can take my encoding and put into your brain because it'll A, mess things up and be incompatible with your own unique experiences. So that's telepathic communications from human to humus fascinating. You're reminding us that there's two biological systems on both ends of that communication. The one, the easier, I guess, maybe half as difficult thing to do in the hope with neural link is that we can communicate with a NEI system. So where one side of that is a little bit more controllable, but even just that is exceptionally difficult. Let's talk about two neuronal systems talking to each other.

Suppose that GPT-4 tells GPT-3, hey, give me all your knowledge. It's ready. I have 10 times more hardware. I'm ready. Just feed me. What's GPT-3 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 GPT-3 to transfer all its knowledge to its older body that has a lot more hardware, is to regenerate every single possible human sentence that it can possibly create. Just keep talking. Keep talking and just reencode 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 actually be the most efficient way to do it. So not just talking, but interactive. So talking back and forth, asking questions, interrupting. So, GPs before will constantly be interrupting. Just annoying, annoying endlessly. But the meaning of that 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 from 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 neural network parameters back and forth of that knowledge and idea and coding, would be far inferior because they're reencoding 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 leading to so much more diversity of perspectives, and again going back to this whole concept of these 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 thoughtful, and you're connected to a bunch, like you said,

students, your wife, your kids. What do you, in your brief time here on earth, this is a meeting of life episode. So 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. Thanks for legacy. Oh, it's kind of funny. I'm consciously living the present. 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. 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 undelucky one kind of thing of living in the present and being happy, winning and being happy losing. There's a certain freedom that comes with that, but again, a certain sort of, I don't know, a familiarity of living for the present. But if you stay back from all of that where basically my current mode of superandis 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 biological family. 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, you know, just showing love all 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 I, 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, genuinely love you.

But 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 a child that is stuck in a cognitive state that they're eventually going to snuff out of or maybe intentions. And I love when I'm wrong. 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. And it's so beautiful. I mean, she's really one of the smartest people I've ever met. And she's like, it's such a good feeling. And I love being wrong. But there's something about self-improvement.

There's something about 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 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 computation biology and so and so forth. I'm like, I don't know any of that. But I'm only discovering this now through these sort of sharing our emotional states and our cognitive states with a water audience,

where suddenly I'm sort of realizing that, wow, maybe I've had a legacy. 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 and it's like, I know these voice, I've been listening to your lectures. 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 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 camp. So I'm like, I didn't even meet her. She's like, no, but she sort of saw you interacting with people and said, wow, he's exuding this positive energy. And 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 of, you know, just just, just give. It doesn't matter where it goes. I've been to conferences where basically people will, you know, I'll ask them a question and then they'll come back to, or like, there was a conference where I asked somebody a question, they said, oh, in fact, this entire project was inspired by your question three years ago at the same conference. And I'm like, wow. And then on top of that, there's also the ripple effect. So the years, speaking to the direct influence of inspiration or education, but there's also like the follow on things that happen 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 died tomorrow, my genes are still shared through my cousins and through my uncles and through my immediate family. 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.

Well, every one of us, number two are ideas are constantly intermingling with each other. So there's no person living in the planet, a hundred years from now, who will not be directly impacted by every one of the planet living here today, through genetic inheritance and through meme inheritance. That's cool to think that your ideas, Menola's Calis, would 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 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 bunch of us.

Like the cognitive systems that were short to this particular location. And who will then disperse back into all of their home countries. That's what makes America the beacon of the world. We don't just export goods. We export people. Cognitive systems. 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 biotechs who are like,

hey, I took your class, that's what got into the field, like 15 years ago. That'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, this. Yeah. So I basically have an academic family and we are a family.

There's this such strong connection, this bond of your 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, and you Harvard, you know, what you, I mean, everywhere in 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 sort of have amazing conversation with people. They're fully grown humans, fully grown adults who are, you know, cognitively super ready and who are shaped by, and I, by, and I see some of these beautiful papers and I'm like, I can see the touch of our lab in those papers. 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. I always tell them to write the whole first draft and they know that I will rewrite every word. The act of them writing it and what I do is these joint editing sessions where I'm like, let's co-edit and with this co-editing we basically have... 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 to these later in this year, 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 guy, 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 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 there's the paper that right. Because yes, my day job is training students, but it's a research university. The way that they learn is through the mens 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 Medarkiv 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 forth. It's just so fulfilling. From a person I've never met or heard of. Let's say the title of the paper branch. I don't remember the title, but it's single-cell dissection of schizophrenia. It reveals, so the two points that we found was this whole transcriptional resilience. Like there's some individuals who are schizophrenic, but who's, they have an additional cell type or an additional 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. And then that cell is connected with some of the PV internurons that are basically sending these inhibitory brain waves through the brain. And basically, 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 axis and also this transcription resilient. 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 connects it down into a beautifully, exactly, little document that lives on forever. And that document now has its own life. Our work has 120,000 citations. I mean, that's not just people who read it. These are people who used it to write something based on it. I mean, that to me is just so fulfilling to basically say, wow, I've touched people. So, 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 package do I open first? And you know, the lucky one. A jack of all trades trades a master of none. I think for meaning of life episode we would be a miss if we did not have at least a poem or two. Do you mind if we end in a couple of poems? Maybe a happy, maybe a sad one. I would love that. So thank you for the luxury. The first one is, kind of, I remember when you were talking with Eric Weinstein about this comment of Leonar Cohen that says, but you don't really care for music, do ya?

In hallelujah. That's basically kind of like mocking its reader. So one of my poems is a little like that. So I had just broken up with 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. And I was like, ah, writing a poem on demand. So 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 traveled 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, cook 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 in 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 Baffer King composing, this is how it's beautiful. What I love about it is that I did not bring up a dictionary of rhymes. I did not 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 rhyme just kind of, it's an emergent phenomenon.

It's an emergent phenomenon. I just get into that mode and then it comes out. That's a beautiful one. And it's basically, you know, as you got it, it's basically saying it's no recipe and then I'm throwing the recipes and as I'm writing it, I'm like, you know, so it's very introspective in this whole concept. So anyway,

there's another one many years earlier that is you know darker. It's basically this whole concept of Let's Be Friends. I was like, no let's be friends, just like you You know, the last words are shout out, I love you or send me to hell. So 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. I kiss. Give me the world. A sweet taste to miss. Don't let me lay here in an earth 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, but torture it right.

Treat it with hatred, start up a fight. For it's from my illness 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 passion. 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. 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, go all in as that poem says, Minola, thank you so much for talking today. Thanks, I look forward to next time. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Minola Skellis, and thank you to our sponsors. Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. I thought it greens the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases, cash app, the app I use to send money to friends.

Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in his book, Hit Chikers 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.