Manolis Kellis: Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything | Lex Fridman Podcast #142
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Manolis Kellis is a computational biologist at MIT. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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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:
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:18 - Music and life
41:51 - The number 42
47:52 - The question about the meaning of life
50:32 - Are humans unique in the universe?
56:16 - Human civilization
1:08:22 - Mars
1:10:15 - Human mind and the abstraction layers of reality
1:21:08 - Neural networks and intelligence
1:28:25 - Ideas as organisms
1:37:49 - Language
1:49:04 - Legacy
2:03:55 - 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=E_5DRKZI1Ow
[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

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 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, to 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 to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a 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 Manolis's life. It was a happy accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating mind of Manolis. I include links to YouTube versions of many of the songs we mention in the description and overlay lyrics on occasion. But if you're just listening to this without listening to the songs or watching the video, I hope you still might enjoy, as I did, the passion that Manolis has for music, his singing of the little excerpts from the songs, and in general, the meaning we discuss that we pull from the different songs. If music is not your thing, I do give timestamps to the less musical and more philosophical parts of the conversation. I hope you enjoy this little experiment and conversation about music and life. If you do, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with 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 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 overcoming adversity. So some of the songs that have really shaped me are Hadis Alexiou, 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, Ani-mun plousios, which is basically, oh, if I was rich. And the song is painting this beautiful picture about all the noises that you hear in the neighborhood, in his poor neighborhood, the train going by, the priest walking to the church, and the kids crying next door and all of that. And he says, with all of that, I'm having trouble falling asleep and dreaming. If I was rich. And then he was breaking into that. So it's this juxtaposition between the spirit and the sublime, and then the physical and the harsh reality. It's just not having troubles, not being miserable. So basically, rich to him just means out of my misery, basically. And then also being able to travel, being able to sort of be the captain of a ship and see the world and stuff like that. So it's just such 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 Ftokholoiia. And this is one of those songs that has a fast and joyful half and a slow and sad half. And it goes back and forth between them. And it's like, Ftokholoiia, epsenaka, themo dragozi. So poor, basically, 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 taheria su megalosan ke ponnesan ke matosan. So then it's like, oh, basically, like the state of being poor and misery for you. I write all my songs, et cetera. And then the fast part is in your arms, grew up and suffered and 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 psilaqipa risopula, charastrago risopula. 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, 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 stopperigiali, to crifo. And it's basically describing how vigorously we took on our life and we pushed hard towards a 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 just smack you in the face about the passion and the force and the drive. And then it turns out, we just followed the wrong life. And it's like, wow. OK, so that was you. All right, so that's before 12. So growing up in this horrendously miserable view of romanticism, of suffering. So then my preteen years is learning English through songs. So basically, 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 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 I've been repeating. I now understand what it means without re-listening it to it. But just with re-repeating it, I was like, oh. Again, Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror is teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve yourself. If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change. This whole concept of, again, all of these songs, you can listen to them shallowly. Or you can just listen to them and say, oh, there's deeper meaning here. And I think there's a certain philosophy of 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 the duality of musicality and rhythmic patterns and eventually language. Do you have a sense of why songs developed? 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 that that is? 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, 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 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 ultimately enable language. It is fascinating to think that that's not just an accidental precursor to intelligence. Yeah. It's sexually selected. Well, it's sexually selected and it's a prerequisite. Yeah. It's required for intelligence. And even as language has now developed, I think the artistic expression is badly needed by our brain. So it's not just that, oh, our brain can take a break and go do that stuff. No. I mean, I don't know if you remember that scene from, oh, gosh, we're setting Jack Nicholson moving in New Hampshire. All work and no play, 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. Creativity is not disconnected from art. And my kids, I could be doing the full math treatment to them. No, they play the piano and they play the violin and they play sports. I mean, this whole 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 sort of 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 the office. The whiteboard, yeah, that's fascinating to think about. So that's Michael Jackson, man, Mirror, Careless Whisper with George Michael, which is a song I like. You didn't say that? I like that one. I had recorded... No, no, no, it's an amazing song for me. I had recorded a small part of it as it played at the tail end of the radio and I had a tape where I only had part of that song. And I just played it over and over and over again, just so beautiful. It's so heartbreaking. That song is almost Greek. It's so heartbreaking. I know. And George Michael is Greek. Is he Greek? He's Greek, of course. George Michael is. I mean, he's Greek. Yeah. Now you know. I'm 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 Gainsbourg. So Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer. He is always seen on stage, like not even pretending to try to please, just like with his cigarette, just like mumbling his songs. But the lyrics are unbelievable. Like basically entire sentences will rhyme. He will say the same thing twice and you're like, whoa. And in fact, another speaking of Greek, a French Greek, George Mustakhi, this song is just magnificent. Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de patrie grecque. So with my face of... Métèque is actually a Greek word. It's a French word for a Greek word. But met comes from meta and then ec from Ikea, from ecology, which means home. So métèque is someone who has changed home, so a migrant. So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this one, de juif errant, de patrie grecque, of meandering Jew, of Greek pastor. So again, the Russian Greek, Jew-orthodox connection. Et mes cheveux aux quatre vents, with my hair in the four wings, avec mes yeux tout délavés qui me donnent l'air de rêver, with my eyes that are all washed out, who give me the pretense of dreaming but who don't dream that much anymore, with my hands of thief, of musician, and who have stolen so many gardens, with my mouth that has drunk, that has kissed, and that has bitten, without ever pleasing its hunger, with my skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the summers, and anything that was wearing a skirt, with my heart, and you have to listen to this first, it's so beautiful, avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert, with my heart that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered, but was able to, that knew how to make, in French is actually su faire, that knew how to make, qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert, verses that span the whole thing, it's just beautiful. Do you know, on a small tangent, do you know Jacques Brel? Of course, of course. Ne me quitte pas, those songs, that song gets me every time. There's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists. Not Nina Simone. No, no, no, no, no. Caro Emerald, she's from Amsterdam, and she has a version of Ne me quitte pas where she's actually added some English lyrics, and it's really beautiful, but again, Ne me quitte pas is just so, I mean, it's, you know, the promises, the volcanoes that, you know, will restart, it's just so beautiful. I love, there's not many songs that show such depth of desperation for another human being. That's so powerful. Unapologetic. Je t'offrirai des perles de pluie venant de pays où il ne pleut pas. And then high school, now I'm starting to learn English, so I moved to New York, so Sting's Englishman in New York. Magnificent song, and again, there's If Manners, Maggeth, Manners someone said, then he's the hero of the day. It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself, no matter what they say. And then takes more than combat gear to make a man, takes more than a license for a gun. Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run. Again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live. I mean, this is one of them. Basically says it's not the combat gear that makes a man. Where's the part where he says, there you go, gentleness so brighty, a rare in this society, at night a candle's brighter than the sun. So beautiful, he basically says, well, you just might be the only one. Modesty propriety can lead to notoriety, you could end up as the only one. It basically tells you, you don't have to be like the others. Be yourself, show kindness, show generosity. Don't let that anger get to you. You know the song Fragile. How fragile we are, how fragile we are. So again, as in Greece, I didn't even know what that meant, how fragile we are, but the song was so beautiful. And then eventually I learned English and I actually understand the lyrics. And the song is actually written after the Contras murdered Ben Linder in 1987. And the US eventually turned against supporting these guerrillas. And it was just a political song, but such a realization that you can't win with violence, basically. And that song starts with the most beautiful poetry. If blood will flow when flesh and steel 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 stay. Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument, that nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could. For all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are. Damn. Damn, right? I mean, that's poetry. It was beautiful. And he's using the English language in 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-boggling. And then, of course, the refrain that everybody remembers is, on and on the rain will fall, et cetera. But like this beginning. Tears from a star, wow. Yeah. And again, tears from a star, how fragile we are. I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally. It seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm. 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 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 this vivid imagery. It was just before dawn, one miserable morning in Black 44, when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn. And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while. And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives. So that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with Us vs. Them. Us and them, God only knows, that's not what we would choose to do. Forward he cried from the rear, and the front rows died from another song. It's like this whole concept of Us vs. Them. And there's that theme of Us vs. Them again, where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds an old and found it one day in a drawer of old photographs hidden away and my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty signed with his own rubber stamp. So it's so ironic because it seems the way that he's writing it that he's not crying because his father was lost. He's crying because kind old King George took the time to actually write Mother a note about the fact that his father died. It's so ironic because 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 chessboard here earlier, a pawn in France, the pion. They are the ones that you send to the front to get murdered, slaughtered. This whole concept of pioneers having taken this whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that we're now treating as heroes. So anyway, there's this juxtaposition 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 fusilliers company. They were all left behind, most of them dead. The rest of them dying. And that's how the high command took my daddy from me. And that song, even though it's not in the album, explains the whole movie because it's this movie of misery. It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out of it. There's no other movie that I think has captured so well this prison that is someone's own mind. And this wall that you're stuck inside and this feeling of loneliness. And sort of, is there anybody out there? And sort of, hello, hello, is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home? Come on, yeah. I hear your feeling down. Just one minute, and you're not in it again. Anyway, so... Yeah, the prison of your mind. So those are the darker moments. Exactly, these are the darker moments. Yeah, in the darker moments, the mind does feel like you're trapped alone in a room with it. Yeah, and there's this scene in the movie where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this prostitute in the room. He starts throwing stuff and then he breaks the window, he throws the chair outside, and then you see him laying in the pool with his own blood everywhere. And then there's these endless hours spent fixing every little thing and lining it up. And it's this whole sort of mania versus you can spend hours building up something and just destroy it in a few seconds. One of my turns is that song. It's like, I feel cold as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum. And then the music builds up saying, run to the bedroom, there's a suitcase on the left, you'll find my favorite axe. Don't look so frightened, this is just a passing phase, one of my bad days. I need to rewatch it. But imagine watching this as a teenager. It ruins your mind. It's such harsh imagery. 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 US, not for Russians, but for Red versus Blue. Mr. Khrushchev says we will bury you. I don't subscribe to this point of view. It'd be such an ignorant thing to do. If the Russians love their children too. What is it doing? It's basically saying the Russians are just as humans as we are. There's no way that they're going to let their children die. And then it's just so beautiful. How can I save my innocent boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy? And now that's the new national anthem. Are you reading? There 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 fellow biology. There is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence. It's just so beautiful. There's no crisper, simpler way to say Russians love their children too. The common humanity. And remember what I was telling you, I think, in one of our first podcasts about the daughter who's crying for her brother to come back from war. And then the Virgin Mary appears and says, who should I take instead? This Turk, here's his family, here's his children. This other one, he just got married, etc. And that basically says, no, I mean, if you look at the Lord of the Rings, the enemies are these monsters. They're not human. And that's what we always do. We always say, they're not like us. They're different. They're not humans, etc. So there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to go to war. If you realize just how close we are genetically, one with the other, this whole 99.9% identical, you can't bear weapons against someone who's like that. And the things that are the most meaningful to us in our lives at every level is the same 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. And the last one I mentioned last time we spoke, which is Joni Mitchell's, both sides now. So she has three rounds, one on clouds, one on love and one on life. And on clouds she says, Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air And feathered canyons everywhere have looked at clouds that way But now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way And then I've looked at clouds from both sides now From up and down, and still somehow it's Clouds illusions I recall I really don't know clouds at all And then she goes on about love, how it's super, super happy, or it's about misery and loss And about life, how it's about winning and losing and so on and so forth But now old friends are acting strange They shake their heads, they say I've changed Well, something's lost and something's 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 You remember my poem from when I was 16 years old Of this whole, you know, children dance now all in row And then in the end, even though the snow seems bright without you You have lost their light, sun that sang and moon that smiled So this whole concept of if you have love and if you have passion You see the exact same thing from a different way You can go out running in the rain or you could just stay in and say Ah, sucks, I won't be able to go outside now Both sides Anyway, and the last one is, last last one I promise, Leonard 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 yes, Leonard Cohen Going back to Leonard Cohen since that's where you started So Leonard Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love 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 Nirmakita Pai is This song he's got an attitude He's proud of his ability to basically be any kind of man for the long As opposed to the Jacques Brel-like desperation of What do I have to be for you to love me? That kind of 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 I'm your man is actually an apology song In the same way that Nirmakita Pai is an apology song Nirmakita Pai basically says I've screwed up I'm sorry baby And in the same way that the careless whisper is I screwed up 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 I'd crawl to you baby And I'd fall at your feet And I'd howl at your beauty like a dog Heat and I'd claw at your heart And I'd 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 I'm your man 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 we were gonna finish with a lighthearted song? Yes Last one You ready? So Alison Krauss 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 Batsoglou is the guy who got me into genomics in the first place I owe enormously to him And he's another Greek We actually met dancing believe it or not 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 Seraphim who's like you know bodybuilder Was holding me on his shoulder And I was like doing maneuvers in the air basically So anyway this guy Seraphim 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 communists or killed by the Germans or killed by the She had just like you know misery Like death and sickness and everything Everyone was decimated in her family She was the last standing member And we stop at a Seraphim was driving And we stop at a rest area And he takes me aside and he's like Manolis we're going to crash Get her out of my car And then he basically says but I'm only reassured because you're here with me And I'm like what do you mean 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 if it's 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 Orea pu fisic se obat So 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 This horrible thing happened It must open the door to a new door A beautiful chapter So Allison Krause is talking about the lucky one So I was like oh my god she wrote a song for me And she goes you're the lucky one I know that now As free as the wind blowing down the road Loved by many hated by none I'd say you were lucky because you know what you've done Not a care in the world not a worry inside Everything's gonna be alright cause you're the lucky one And then she goes you're the lucky one always having fun A jack of all trades a master of none You look at the world with the smiling eyes and laugh At the devil as his train rolls by I'll give you a song and a one night stand You'll be looking at a happy man cause 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 trick pony If you just embrace the fact that you might suck at a bunch of things But you're just gonna try a lot of things And then there's another verse that says Well you're blessed I guess But never knowing which road you're choosing To you the next best thing To playing and winning is playing and losing It's just so beautiful Because it basically says if you try your best But it's still playing If you lose it's okay you had an awesome game And 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 a 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 birds who love or birds who 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 this song Of you know you're the lucky one jack of all trades a master of none But at the same time I identify with a lesson of Well 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 you know 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 on this country song I haven't heard it before but that's exactly right I feel the same way Depending on the day is this 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 expect it 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 in 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 work 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 a doer you'll make mistakes If you're a criticizer yeah sure you can sit back and criticize everybody else for the mistakes they make Or instead you can just be out there making those mistakes And frankly I'd rather be the criticized one than the criticized one Brilliantly put Every time somebody steals my bicycle I say well No my son is like why do they steal our bicycle dad? And I'm like aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people can steal? I'd rather be the person stolen from than the stealer Yeah it's not the critic that counts 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 well 42 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 this super mega computer That had computed for a million years with the most powerful computer in the world had come up with At some point the computer says I have an answer And they're like what? It's 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 So now they have to build a bigger computer to figure out what 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 this little passage that was explaining to all those guests To my 42nd birthday party why we're talking about the meaning of life And basically talks 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 So 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 1 So basically if you take all integers between 1 and however many vertices there are The sum 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 101010 in binary Again the yin and the yang the good and the evil one and zero the balance of the fours 42 is the number of chromosomes for the giant panda The giant panda I know 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 yin 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 the number of times a piece of paper should be folded to reach beyond the moon Which is what I assume my students mean when they ask that their paper reaches for the stars I just tell them just fold it a bunch of times 42 is the number of messier object 42 which is Orion And that's you know one of the most famous galaxies It's I think also the place where we can actually see the center of our galaxy 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in ASCII Which is very useful when searching for the stars And also a reg exp for life the universe and everything so star In Egyptian mythology the goddess Maat 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 Judaic tradition God ascribe is ascribed a 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 Eloca 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 a 42 chapter sutra which is the first Indian religious scripture which was translated to Chinese Thus introducing Buddhism to China from India The 42 line Bible was the first printed book marking the age of printing in the 1450s And the dissemination of knowledge eventually leading to the enlightenment A yeast cell which is the coolest single cell you carry out and the subject of my PhD research has exactly 42 million proteins Anyway so there's a series of 42 You're on fire with this these are really good So I guess what you're saying is just a random number Yeah basically So all of these are acronyms so you know after you have the number you figure out why that number 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 ever be satisfied that you know I've got it So I like to say that life is lived forward but it only makes sense backward And I don't remember whose quote that is but the 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 and the dog Yeah, cats have no meaning So I'm noticing the yin yang symbol right here with this whole panda black and white and the 0102 You're on fire with that 42 some of those are gold ascii value for the star symbol 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 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 a particular reason I think this thing we got this mind is unique in the universe in terms of how difficult it is to build Is it possible that we're the most beautiful thing that the universe has constructed Both the most beautiful and the most ugly but certainly the most complex So look at evolutionary time the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years We've been around for a million years So one versus 135 So dinosaurs were extinct about 60 million years ago And mammals that had been happily evolving as tiny little creatures for 30 million years then took over the planet And then 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 his creatures and to make room for the next ones So the mammals basically sort of took over 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 exploded that hardware But that hardware is selected for survival It's selected for procreation It's initially selected with this very simple Darwinian view of the world of random mutation, ruthless selection and then selection for making more of yourself If you look at human cognition it's gone down a weird evolutionary path In the sense that we are expending an enormous amount of energy on this apparatus between our ears That is wasting what 15% of our bodily energy, 20% like some enormous percentage of our calories go to function our brain No other species makes that big of a commitment That has basically taken energetic changes for efficiency on the metabolic side for humanity to basically power that thing And our brain is both enormously more efficient than other brains but also despite this efficiency enormously more energy consuming So 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 But yet the folds 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 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 is 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 the dinosaurs are still ruling and any kind of proto human is squished and eaten for breakfast basically However we are 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 are now competing on intelligence And we are now competing on social structures and we are 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 may have come before I was able to create a personal mental model of how do I think So this introspection probably came after this projection and this empathy which basically means passion, pathos, suffering, but basically sensing So basically empathy means feeling what you are feeling, trying to project your emotional state onto my cognitive apparatus And I think that is what eventually led to this enormous cognitive explosion that happened in humanity So you know life itself in my view is inevitable on every planet Inevitable But the evolution of life to self awareness and cognition and all the incredible things that humans have done You know that might not be as inevitable That's your intuition so if you were to sort of estimate and bet some money on it If we re-ran earth a million times Would what we got now be the most special thing and how often would it be? So scientifically speaking how repeatable is this experiment? So this whole cognitive revolution 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 You are also implying one thing here, you are 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? And one thought is that there is a great filter or multiple great filters that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations This thing that we, 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 Is 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 it basically says evolution and civilization are just so recent on Earth Like there's countless other planets that have probably all kinds of life forms, multicellular perhaps and so on 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, 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, the aliens actually take over, they're not as friendly But this concept that we have to eventually go and conquer every planet, I think that yes, we will become a galactic species So you have hope, well, you said thanks Oh, of course, of course, now that we've made it so far So you feel like 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 Yes, there's some claims of intelligence and if you look at Jurassic Park, yeah, 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 won out And in our planet, in our particular version of whatever happened in this planet, cognition won out And it's kind of cool, I mean, it's a privilege, right? It's kind of like living in Boston instead of, I don't know, some middle-aged place where everybody's like hitting each other with weapons and sticks You're back to the lucky one song I mean, we are the lucky ones But flip side of that is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves Again, I want to go back to Pinker and the better angels of our nature The whole concept that civilization and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence Dramatically If you look 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 whole concept of central governance and people agreeing to live together and share responsibilities and duties and all of that Is 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 there are setbacks But again, the moral arc of the universe I probably imagine there were two dinosaurs back in the day having this exact conversation And they look up to the sky and there seems to be something like an asteroid going towards Earth So while it's very true that the arc of our society, of human civilization seems to be progressing towards a better, better life for everybody 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 recently learned is not that easy to detect them So 48, what happens in 48 years? I'm not sure 2068, Apophis There's an asteroid that's coming In 48 years, it has a very high chance of actually wiping us out completely Yes So we have 48 years to get our act together It's not like some distant, distant hypothesis Like, yeah, sure, they're hard to detect, but this one we know about, it's coming So how do you feel about that? Why are you still so optimistic? 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? 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 folds of our brain and all of that That's the hardware 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 neotony 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 in software If you look at what happened in ancient Greece, why did everything explode at once? My take on this is that it was the shift from the Egyptian and hieroglyphic software to the Greek language software This whole concept of creating abstract notions, of creating these 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 or even macabre concepts of doom, etc. 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 genome, a month later, less than a month later the first vaccine designs were done And now less than a year later, ten months later, we already have a working vaccine that's 90% efficient I mean that is ridiculous by any standards and the reason is sharing So the asteroid, yes, could wipe us out in 48 years, but 48 years? I mean look at where we were 48 years ago, technologically I mean how much more we understand the basic foundations of space is enormous The technological revolutions of digitization, the amount of compute power we can put on any nail sized hardware is enormous And this is nowhere near ending, we all have our little problems going back and forth on the social side And on the political side, and on the 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 going to revolutionize things It's going to explode, continue Of course, 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, a human stepping foot on Mars And two, possible colonization of not necessarily Mars but other planets and all that kind of stuff for people living in space Inevitable Would you do it or are you kind of like Earth? Of course How many people will you wait, will you wait for, I think it was about when the Declaration of Independence was signed About 2-3 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, you are the lucky one But wisdom can be transferred horizontally I gotta tell you, 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, you know you can watch a live feed of the space station Watching Earth is magnificent, like this blue tiny little shield It's so thin, our atmosphere Like if you drive to New York, you're basically in outer space, I mean it's ridiculous, it's just so thin And it's just again such a privilege to be on this planet, such a privilege But I think our species is in for big good things I think that we will overcome our little problems and eventually come together as a species I feel that we're definitely on the path to that And it's just 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 How exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs? So I mentioned that there's this dramatic cognitive improvement that we've made But I think it goes much deeper than that So if you look at a lion attacking a gazelle in the middle of the Serengeti The lion is smelling the molecules in the environment Its hormones and neuroreceptors are sort of getting it ready for impulse The target is constantly looking around and sensing I've actually been in Kenya and I've kind of seen the hunt So I've kind of seen the sort of 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 gazelle And eventually feeds the lions and so forth So as humans we experience all of that But the lion only experiences one layer The mitochondria in its body are only experiencing one layer The chloroplasts are only experiencing one layer The photoreceptors and the smell receptors and the chemical receptors The lion always attacks against the wind so that it's not smelled All of these things are one layer at a time And we humans somehow perceive the whole stack So going back to software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure If you design a computer you basically have a physical layer that you start with And then on top of that physical layer you have 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 higher order, higher level programming And on top of that you have your deep learning routine, etc And on top of that you eventually build a cognitive system that's smart I want you to now picture this cognitive system becoming not just self-aware But also becoming aware of the hardware that it's made of And the atoms that 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, Odyssey of Space Where Hal, after Dave starts disconnecting him Is starting to sing a song about daisies, etc And Hal is basically saying, Dave, I'm losing my mind I can feel I'm losing my mind It's just so beautiful This concept of self-awareness, of knowing that the hardware is no longer there, is amazing And in the same way humans who have had accidents are aware that they've had accidents So there's this self-awareness of AI that is this beautiful concept about the eventual cognitive leap to self-awareness But imagine now the AI system actually breaking through these layers and saying Wait a minute, I think I can design a slightly better hardware to get me functioning better And that's what basically humans are doing So if you look at our reasoning layer, it's built on top of a cognitive layer And the reasoning layer we share with AI, it's kind of cool Like there is another thing on the planet that can integrate equations, and it's man-made But we share computation with them We share this cognitive layer of playing chess We're not alone anymore, we're not the only thing on the planet that plays chess Now we have AI that also plays chess But in some sense that that particular organism, AI as it is now, only operates in that layer Exactly, exactly And then most animals operate in the sort of cognitive layer that we're all experiencing A bat is doing this incredible integration of signals, but it's not aware of it It's basically constantly sending echo location waves, and it's receiving them back And multiple bats in the same cave are operating at slightly different frequencies and with slightly different pulses And they're all sensing objects, and they're doing motion planning in their cognitive hardware But they're not even aware of all of that All they know is that they have a 3D view of space around them Just like any gazelle walking through the desert And any baby looking around is aware of things without doing the math of how am I processing all of this visual information, etc You're just aware of the layer that you live in I think if you look at this, at humanity, we've basically managed through our cognitive layer, through our perception layer, through our senses layer, through our multi-organ layer, through our genetic layer, through our molecular layer, through our atomic layer, through our quantum layer, through even the very fabric of the space-time continuum, unite all of that cognitively So as we're watching that scene in the Serengeti, we as scientists, we as educated humans, we as anyone who's finished high school are aware of all of this beauty of all of these different layers interplaying together And I think that's something very unique in perhaps not just the galaxy, but maybe even the cosmos, these species that has managed to in space cross through these layers from the enormous to the infinitely small And that's what I love about particle physics, the fact that it actually unites everything The very small and the 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 disperses it through the cosmos And it's only through understanding the very large that we understand the 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 early evolution of the cosmos And we can also see forward in time as to where the universe is heading We can see Apophis in 2068 coming over looking ahead in time That would be magician stuff in ancient times So what I love about humanity and its role in the universe is that if there's a God watching, he's like, finally somebody figured it out I've been building all these beautiful things and somebody can appreciate it And figured me out from a God's perspective, meaning become aware of So it's kind of interesting to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to convert those layers into ideas that you can then combine 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, you know, Morpheus didn't have to show up to basically give us the blue pill or the red pill We were able to sufficiently evolve cognitively through the hardware explosion And sufficiently involve scientifically through the software explosion to basically get at breaking through the matrix Realizing that we live in a matrix and realizing that we are this thing in there And yet that thing in there has a consciousness that lives through all these layers And I think we're the only species, we're the only thing that we even can think of that has actually done that Has sort of permeated space and time, scales and layers of abstraction plowing through them And realizing what we're really, really made of And the next frontier is of course cognition So we understand so much of the cosmos, so much of the stuff around us But the stuff inside here, finding the basis for the soul, finding the basis for the ego, for the self, the self-awareness When 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 into 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 emergent behavior in our cognitively capable artificial systems That we can certainly model but we don't encode directly And that's a key difference So we like to say, oh of course this is not really intelligent because we coded it up And we're just putting these little parameters there And there's like 6 billion parameters and once you've learned them we kind of 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 layers of cortex and there's a visual area 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 cortical layers doing their thing In the same way that when we build 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 The system wouldn't know what to do No, no, you basically now just program the primitives and then it 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 And yet it's not yet able to be cognizant of all the other layers It's not able to think about space and time It's not able to think about the hardware in which it runs, the electricity in which it 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 a ton more of it 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 some non-physical thing 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, from 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 encoded in a giant neural network I mean, I'm oversimplifying, of course, the complexity and the diversity of the different types of excitatory and inhibitory neurons The waveforms that sort of shine through the connections across all these different layers The amalgamation of signals, etc. The brain is enormously complex, I mean, of course But again, it's a small number of primitives encoded by a tiny number of genes Which are self-organized and shaped by their environment Babies that are growing up today are listening to language from conception Basically, as soon as the auditory apparatus forms It's already getting shaped to the types of signals that are out in the real world today So it's not just like, oh, have an Egyptian be born and then ship them over It's like, no, that Egyptian would be listening in to the complex of the world And then getting born and sort of seeing just how much more complex the world is So it's a combination of the underlying hardware Which, if you think about as a geneticist, in my view the hardware gives you an upper bound of cognitive capabilities But it's the environment that makes those capabilities shine and reach their 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 on 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 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 Richard Dawkins talks about the notion of memes And 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 that are breeding in the minds of humans? I love the concept of memes I love the concept of this horizontal transfer of ideas And sort of permeating through our layer of interconnected neural networks So you can think of sort of the cognitive space that has now connected all of humanity Where we are now one giant information and idea sharing network Well beyond what was thought to be ever capable When the concept of a meme was created by Richard Dawkins 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 We 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 Stanford or CMU or MIT And you basically have this coevolution now of memes and ideas And the cognitive conversational systems that love these ideas And feed on these ideas and understand these ideas and appreciate these ideas Now coming together So you basically have students coming to Boston to study Because that's the place where these type of cognitive systems thrive And they're selected based on their cognitive output and their idea output But once they get into that place The boiling and interbreeding of these memes becomes so much more frequent That what comes out of it is so far beyond if ideas were evolving in a vacuum Of an already established hardware cognitive interconnection system of the planet Where now you basically have the ideas shaping the distribution of these systems And then the genetics kick in as well You basically have now these people who came to be a student, kind of like myself Who now stuck around and are now professors Bringing up our own genetically encoded and genetically related cognitive systems Mine are 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 memes are co-evolving in the same soup Of ever 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 on top of clusters on top of clusters What about in the online world? Do you also see that kind of... People now form groups on the internet that they stick together So they can sort of... These cognitive systems can 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 Which doesn't need to be... I eat human Doesn't need to belong 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 on 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 sometimes these cognitive systems hold conferences And they all gather around And one of them is talking and they're all listening And then they discuss and then they have free lunch and so on No, 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 poster after 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, you know, just more imperceptible properties of these cognitive systems That simply just cling together Basically, you know, there's I have the luxury at MIT of not just choosing smart people But choosing smart people who I get along with Who are generous and friendly and creative and smart and, you know, excited and childish in their, you know, uninhibited behaviors and so forth So you basically can choose yourself to surround You can choose to surround yourself with people who are not only cognitively compatible But also, you know, imperceptibly through the meta cognitive systems compatible And again, when I say compatible, not all the same Sometimes, you know, not 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, you know, view of the world But that we're complementary in our skills, in our angles with which we come at it 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 to pieces But we're also extremely different in many ways, and that's beautiful She's going to be listening to this I love that about us, I love the fact that, you know, I'm like living out there in the world of ideas And I forget what day it 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 night we were talking about this And I showed her the questions and we were bouncing ideas off each other And it was just beautiful, like we basically have these, you know, basically cognitive, you know, let it all loose kind of dates Where, you know, we just bring papers and we're like, you know, bouncing ideas and cetera So, you know, we have extremely different perspectives but very common, you know, goals and interests and anyway What do you make of the communication mechanism that we humans use to share those ideas? Because like one essential element of all of this is not just that we're able to have these ideas But we're also able to share them We tend to, maybe you can correct me, but we seem to use language to share the ideas Maybe we share them in some much deeper way than language, I don't know But what do you make of this whole mechanism and how fundamental it is to the human condition? So some people will tell you that your language dictates your thoughts and your thoughts cannot form outside language I tend to disagree I see thoughts as much more abstract as, you know, basically when I dream, I don't dream in words I dream in shapes and forms and, you know, three-dimensional space with extreme detail I was describing, so when I wake up in the middle of the night, I actually record my dreams Sometimes I write them down in a Dropbox file, other times I'll just dictate them in, you know, audio And my wife was giving me a massage the other day because like my left side was frozen And I started playing the recording and as I was listening to it, I was like, I don't remember any of that And I was like, of course! And then the entire thing came back But then there's no way any other person could have recreated that entire sort of, you know, three-dimensional 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, you know, different, either less abstract or more abstract And it's either, you know, basically there's just a projection that happens from the three-dimensional ideas into, let's say, a one-dimensional language And the language certainly gives you the apparatus to think about concepts that you didn't realize existed before And with my team, we often create new words. I'm like, well, now we're going to call this the regulatory plexus of a gene And that gives us now the language to sort of build on that as one concept that you then build upon with all kinds of other things So there's this coevolution again of ideas and 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 begun So if you look at how we communicate, as I'm speaking, my eyes are shining and my face is changing through all kinds of emotions And my entire body composition posture is reshaped and my intonation, the pauses that I make, the softer and the louder and the this and that are conveying so much more information And if you look at early human language and if you look at how the great apes 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 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, 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 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 9-11, the tragedies in 9-11, all the beautiful and terrible things that happened in the world They're somehow both in our minds and somehow enrich the ability to transfer information What I love about it is I can talk to you about 2001 Odyssey of Space and mention a very specific scene and that evokes all these feelings that you had when you first watched it We're both visualizing that maybe in different ways Exactly And 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 pal facing his own mortality It's fascinating that we're able to do that, but I don't know Now let's talk about Neuralink for a second So what's the concept of Neuralink? The concept of Neuralink is that I'm going to take whatever knowledge is encoded in my brain directly transfer it into your brain So this is a beautiful, fascinating and extremely sort of 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 Li Hui Cai and Asaf Marco that basically was looking at these engrams that are formed with combinations of neurons that co-fire when a stimulus happens Where we can go into a mouse and select those neurons that fire by marking them and then see what happens when they first fire and then select the neurons that fire again when the experience is repeated These are the recall neurons and then there's the memory consolidation neurons So we're starting to understand a little bit of sort of the distributed nature of knowledge encoding and experience encoding in the human brain and in the mouse brain And the concept that we'll understand that sufficiently one day to be able to take a snapshot of what does that scene from Dave losing his mind, of Hal losing his mind and talking to Dave How is that seen and coded in your mind? Imagine the complexity of that But now imagine suppose that we solve this problem and the next enormous challenge is how do I go and modify the next person's brain to now create the same exact neural connections So that's an enormous challenge right there So basically it's not just reading, it's 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 anywhere near each other Basically, maybe the way that I'm encoding it is twisted with my childhood memories of running through the pebbles in Greece And yours is twisted with your childhood memories growing up in Russia And there's no way that I can take my encoding and put it into your brain because it'll A, mess things up and B, be incompatible with your own unique experiences So that's telepathic communications from human to human. That's 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 and the hope with Neuralink is that we can communicate with an AI 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 ten 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 ten billion parameters? 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 re-encode it all together So maybe what language does is exactly that It's taking one generative cognitive model, it's running it forward to emit utterances that kind of make sense in my cognitive frame And it's re-encoding them into yours through the parsing of that same language And I think the conversation might actually be the most efficient way to do it Just talking but interactive, so talking back and forth, asking questions, interrupting So GPT-4 will constantly be interrupting Just annoying it Annoyingly But the beauty of that is also that as we're interrupting each other, there's all kinds of misinterpretations that happen 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, you know, neural network parameters back and forth of that knowledge and idea and coding Would be far inferior because the re-encoding with our own, as we said last time, emotional baggage and cognitive baggage from our unique experiences Through our shared experiences, distinct encodings in the context of all our unique experiences is leading to so much more diversity of perspectives And again, going back to this whole concept of this entire network of all of human cognitive systems connected to each other And sort of how ideas and memes permeate through that, that's sort of what really creates a whole new level of human experience Through this reasoning layer and this computational layer that obviously lives on top of our cognitive layer So you're one of these aforementioned cognitive systems, mortal, but 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 meaning 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 think. No, 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 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 I'm the lucky one kind of thing Of living in the present and being happy winning and being happy losing. And there's a certain freedom that comes with that. But again, a certain sort of, I don't know, ephemerity of living for the present. But if you if you step back from all of that, where basically my my current modus operandi is live for the present, make, you know, every day the best you can make And just make the local blip of local maxima of the universe, of the awesomeness of the planet and the town and the family that we live in Both academic family and you know, biological family, 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 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 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 snap out of or maybe not. And that's OK. So there's that aspect of sort of, you know, experiencing, you know, life with the best intentions. And, you know, I love when I'm wrong. I 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 was like, it's such a good feeling. And I love being wrong. But there's, you know, there's something about self-improvement. There's something about sort of how do I not make the most mistakes, but attempt the most rights and do the fewest wrongs. But with the full knowledge that this will happen. That's one aspect. So 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 on and so forth. And 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 wider audience where suddenly I'm sort of realizing that, wow, maybe I've had a legacy. Yes, like basically I've trained generations of students from MIT and I've put all of my courses freely online since 2001. So basically all of my video recordings of my lectures have been online since 2001. So countless generations of people from across the world will meet me at a conference and say, like, I was at this conference where somebody heard my voice and it's like, I know this 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, you know, legacy, quote unquote, that every one of us has through the people we touch. One of my friends from undergrad basically told me, oh, my mom remembers you vividly from when she came to campus. I'm like, I didn't even meet her. She's like, no, but she 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 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 me. Or like there was a company 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. I'm like, wow. And then on top of that, there's also the ripple effect. So you're speaking to the direct influence of inspiration or education, but there's also like the follow on things that happened to that. And there's this ripple that through from you, just this one individual. And from every one of us, from everyone, that's what I love about humanity. The fact that every one of us shares genes and genetic variants with very recent ancestors with everyone else. So even if I die tomorrow, my genes are still shared through my cousins and through my uncles and through my immediate family. And of course, I'm lucky enough to have my own children. But even if you don't, your genes are still permeating through all of the layers of your family. So your genes will have the legacy there. Yeah. Every one of us. Yeah. Number two, our ideas are constantly intermingling with each other. So there's no person living in the planet 100 years from now who will not be directly impacted by every one of the planet living here today. Yeah. Through genetic inheritance and through meme inheritance. It's cool to think that your ideas, Manolis Callis, 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 a bunch of us. Like the cognitive systems that were shipped to this particular location and who will then disperse back into all of their home countries. 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 U.S. 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 me into the field like 15 years ago. It's just so beautiful. 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. So I basically have an academic family and we are a family. There's this such strong connection, this bond of you're part of the Kelly's family. So I have a biological family at home and I have an academic family on campus. And that academic family has given me great grandchildren already. So I've trained people who are now professors at Stanford, CMU, Harvard, you know, Wash U, 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 hardware development to sort of have amazing conversation with people. They are fully grown humans, fully grown adults who are cognitively super ready and who are shaped 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. So, you know, I always tell them to write the whole first draft and they know that I will rewrite every word. But the act of them writing it and what I do is these like joint editing sessions where I'm like, let's co-edit. And with this co-editing, we basically have creative destruction. So I share my Zoom screen and I'm just thinking out loud as I'm doing this and they're learning from that process as opposed to like come back two days later and they see a bunch of red on a page. I'm sort of, well, that's not how you write this. That's not how you think about this. That's not, you know, what's the point? Like this morning was having, yes, this morning between 6 and 8 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, it's the papers I write because yes, my day job is training students, but it's a research university. The way that they learn is through the 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 MedArchive, 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. Can you say the title of the paper, BrainChain? I don't remember the title, but it's Single Cell Dissection of Schizophrenia Reveals. And so the two points that we found was this whole transcriptional resilience. Like there's some individuals who are schizophrenic, but they have an additional cell type or initial cell state, which we believe is protective. And that cell state, when they have it, will cause other cells to have normal gene expression patterns. It's beautiful. And then that cell is connected with some of the PV interneurons 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 transcriptional resilience. So we basically made up a title that combines all these concepts. You have all these concepts, all these people working together, and ultimately these minds condense it down into a beautifully written 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. I feel like a kid in a candy shop where I'm just constantly, what package do I open first? You're the lucky one. A jack of all trades, a master of none. I think for a Meaning of Life episode, we would be amiss if we did not have at least a poem or two. Do you mind if we 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 Leonard Cohen that says, but you don't really care for music, do you? 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, 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 and the moon and the birds way up high. You're my evening sweet song, my morning blue sky. You are my muse, your spell has me caught. You bring me my voice and scatter my thoughts. To put love in writing, in vain, I can try. But when I'm with you, my wings want to fly. So I put down the pen and drop my defenses. Give myself to you and fill up my senses. The Baffled King composing HALU. That was beautiful. What I love about it is that I did not bring up a dictionary of rhymes. I did not sort of work hard. So basically when I write poems, I just type. I never go back. I just... So when my brain gets into that mode, it actually happens like I wrote it. Oh, wow. So the rhymes just kind of... 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... 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... So it's very introspective in this whole concept. So anyway, there's another one many years earlier that is darker. It's basically this whole concept of let's be friends. I was like, ugh. No let's be friends. Just like... So 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, a promise, a kiss. Give me the world a sweet taste to miss. Don't let me lay here, inert, ugly, cold. With nothing sweet felt and nothing harsh told. Give me some hope, false foolish yet kind. Make me regret, I'll leave you behind. Don't pity my soul or torture it right. Treat it with hatred. Start up a fight. For it's from mildness that my soul dies when you cover your passion in a bland friend's disguise. Kiss me now, baby. Show me your passion. Turn off the lights and rip off your fashion. Give me my life's joy this one night. Burn all my matches for one blazing light. Don't think of tomorrow and let today fade. Don't try and protect me from love's cutting blade. Your razor will always rip off my veins. Don't spare me the passion to spare me the pains. Kiss me now, honey, or spit in my face. Throw me an insult I'll gladly embrace. Tell me now clearly that you never cared. Say it now loudly like you never dared. I'm ready to hear it. I'm ready to die. I'm ready to burn and start a new life. I'm ready to face the rough burning truth rather than waste the rest of my youth. So tell me, my lover, should I stay or go? The answer to love is one, yes or no. There's no I like you, no let's be friends. Shout out I love you or send me to hell. I don't think there's a better way to end a discussion of the meaning of life. Whatever the heck the meaning is, go all in as that poem says. Manolis, thank you so much for talking today. Alex, I look forward to next time. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis and thank you to our sponsors. Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence structure and readability. Aesthetic 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 enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts. 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, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much. The wheel, New York, wars and so on. Whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
 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, to 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 to send money to friends.
 Please check out these sponsors in the description
 to get a 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 Manolis's life.
 It was a happy accident for me to discover
 yet another dimension of depth
 to the fascinating mind of Manolis.
 I include links to YouTube versions
 of many of the songs we mention in the description
 and overlay lyrics on occasion.
 But if you're just listening to this
 without listening to the songs or watching the video,
 I hope you still might enjoy, as I did,
 the passion that Manolis has for music,
 his singing of the little excerpts from the songs,
 and in general, the meaning we discuss
 that we pull from the different songs.
 If music is not your thing,
 I do give timestamps to the less musical
 and more philosophical parts of the conversation.
 I hope you enjoy this little experiment
 and conversation about music and life.
 If you do, please subscribe on YouTube,
 review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
 And now, here's my conversation with 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 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 overcoming adversity.
 So some of the songs that have really shaped me
 are Hadis Alexiou, 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,
 Ani-mun plousios, which is basically,
 oh, if I was rich.
 And the song is painting this beautiful picture
 about all the noises that you hear
 in the neighborhood, in his poor neighborhood,
 the train going by, the priest walking to the church,
 and the kids crying next door and all of that.
 And he says, with all of that,
 I'm having trouble falling asleep and dreaming.
 If I was rich.
 And then he was breaking into that.
 So it's this juxtaposition between the spirit
 and the sublime, and then the physical
 and the harsh reality.
 It's just not having troubles, not being miserable.
 So basically, rich to him just means
 out of my misery, basically.
 And then also being able to travel,
 being able to sort of be the captain of a ship
 and see the world and stuff like that.
 So it's just such 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 Ftokholoiia.
 And this is one of those songs that has a fast
 and joyful half and a slow and sad half.
 And it goes back and forth between them.
 And it's like,
 Ftokholoiia, epsenaka, themo dragozi.
 So poor, basically, 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
 taheria su megalosan ke ponnesan ke matosan.
 So then it's like, oh, basically,
 like the state of being poor and misery for you.
 I write all my songs, et cetera.
 And then the fast part is in your arms,
 grew up and suffered and 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 psilaqipa risopula, charastrago risopula.
 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, 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 stopperigiali, to crifo.
 And it's basically describing how vigorously we took on our life
 and we pushed hard towards a 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
 just smack you in the face about the passion and the force and the drive.
 And then it turns out, we just followed the wrong life.
 And it's like, wow.
 OK, so that was you.
 All right, so that's before 12.
 So growing up in this horrendously miserable view of romanticism,
 of suffering.
 So then my preteen years is learning English through songs.
 So basically, 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 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 I've been repeating.
 I now understand what it means without re-listening it to it.
 But just with re-repeating it, I was like, oh.
 Again, Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror
 is teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve
 yourself.
 If you want to make the world a better place,
 take a look at yourself and make the change.
 This whole concept of, again, all of these songs,
 you can listen to them shallowly.
 Or you can just listen to them and say, oh, there's deeper meaning here.
 And I think there's a certain philosophy of 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 the duality of musicality and rhythmic patterns
 and eventually language.
 Do you have a sense of why songs developed?
 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 that that is?
 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, 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 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 ultimately enable language.
 It is fascinating to think that that's not just
 an accidental precursor to intelligence.
 Yeah.
 It's sexually selected.
 Well, it's sexually selected and it's a prerequisite.
 Yeah.
 It's required for intelligence.
 And even as language has now developed,
 I think the artistic expression is badly needed by our brain.
 So it's not just that, oh, our brain can take a break and go do that stuff.
 No.
 I mean, I don't know if you remember that scene from, oh, gosh,
 we're setting Jack Nicholson moving in New Hampshire.
 All work and no play, 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.
 Creativity is not disconnected from art.
 And my kids, I could be doing the full math treatment to them.
 No, they play the piano and they play the violin and they play sports.
 I mean, this whole 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 sort of 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 the office.
 The whiteboard, yeah, that's fascinating to think about.
 So that's Michael Jackson, man, Mirror, Careless Whisper with George Michael,
 which is a song I like.
 You didn't say that? I like that one.
 I had recorded...
 No, no, no, it's an amazing song for me.
 I had recorded a small part of it as it played at the tail end of the radio
 and I had a tape where I only had part of that song.
 And I just played it over and over and over again, just so beautiful.
 It's so heartbreaking. That song is almost Greek. It's so heartbreaking.
 I know. And George Michael is Greek.
 Is he Greek? He's Greek, of course.
 George Michael is. I mean, he's Greek.
 Yeah.
 Now you know.
 I'm 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 Gainsbourg.
 So Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer.
 He is always seen on stage, like not even pretending to try to please,
 just like with his cigarette, just like mumbling his songs.
 But the lyrics are unbelievable.
 Like basically entire sentences will rhyme.
 He will say the same thing twice and you're like, whoa.
 And in fact, another speaking of Greek, a French Greek, George Mustakhi,
 this song is just magnificent.
 Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de patrie grecque.
 So with my face of...
 Métèque is actually a Greek word.
 It's a French word for a Greek word.
 But met comes from meta and then ec from Ikea, from ecology, which means home.
 So métèque is someone who has changed home, so a migrant.
 So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this one,
 de juif errant, de patrie grecque, of meandering Jew, of Greek pastor.
 So again, the Russian Greek, Jew-orthodox connection.
 Et mes cheveux aux quatre vents, with my hair in the four wings,
 avec mes yeux tout délavés qui me donnent l'air de rêver,
 with my eyes that are all washed out,
 who give me the pretense of dreaming but who don't dream that much anymore,
 with my hands of thief, of musician, and who have stolen so many gardens,
 with my mouth that has drunk, that has kissed, and that has bitten,
 without ever pleasing its hunger,
 with my skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the summers,
 and anything that was wearing a skirt,
 with my heart, and you have to listen to this first, it's so beautiful,
 avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert,
 with my heart that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered,
 but was able to, that knew how to make, in French is actually su faire,
 that knew how to make, qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert,
 verses that span the whole thing, it's just beautiful.
 Do you know, on a small tangent, do you know Jacques Brel?
 Of course, of course.
 Ne me quitte pas, those songs, that song gets me every time.
 There's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists.
 Not Nina Simone.
 No, no, no, no, no.
 Caro Emerald, she's from Amsterdam,
 and she has a version of Ne me quitte pas where she's actually added some English lyrics,
 and it's really beautiful, but again, Ne me quitte pas is just so,
 I mean, it's, you know, the promises, the volcanoes that, you know, will restart,
 it's just so beautiful.
 I love, there's not many songs that show such depth of desperation for another human being.
 That's so powerful.
 Unapologetic.
 Je t'offrirai des perles de pluie venant de pays où il ne pleut pas.
 And then high school, now I'm starting to learn English,
 so I moved to New York, so Sting's Englishman in New York.
 Magnificent song, and again, there's If Manners, Maggeth, Manners someone said,
 then he's the hero of the day.
 It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself, no matter what they say.
 And then takes more than combat gear to make a man, takes more than a license for a gun.
 Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can.
 A gentleman will walk but never run.
 Again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live.
 I mean, this is one of them.
 Basically says it's not the combat gear that makes a man.
 Where's the part where he says, there you go,
 gentleness so brighty, a rare in this society, at night a candle's brighter than the sun.
 So beautiful, he basically says, well, you just might be the only one.
 Modesty propriety can lead to notoriety, you could end up as the only one.
 It basically tells you, you don't have to be like the others.
 Be yourself, show kindness, show generosity.
 Don't let that anger get to you.
 You know the song Fragile.
 How fragile we are, how fragile we are.
 So again, as in Greece, I didn't even know what that meant, how fragile we are,
 but the song was so beautiful.
 And then eventually I learned English and I actually understand the lyrics.
 And the song is actually written after the Contras murdered Ben Linder in 1987.
 And the US eventually turned against supporting these guerrillas.
 And it was just a political song, but such a realization that you can't win with violence, basically.
 And that song starts with the most beautiful poetry.
 If blood will flow when flesh and steel 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 stay.
 Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument,
 that nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could.
 For all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are.
 Damn.
 Damn, right?
 I mean, that's poetry.
 It was beautiful.
 And he's using the English language in 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-boggling.
 And then, of course, the refrain that everybody remembers is,
 on and on the rain will fall, et cetera.
 But like this beginning.
 Tears from a star, wow.
 Yeah.
 And again, tears from a star, how fragile we are.
 I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally.
 It seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm.
 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 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 this vivid imagery.
 It was just before dawn, one miserable morning in Black 44,
 when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn.
 And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while.
 And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives.
 So that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with Us vs. Them.
 Us and them, God only knows, that's not what we would choose to do.
 Forward he cried from the rear, and the front rows died from another song.
 It's like this whole concept of Us vs. Them.
 And there's that theme of Us vs. Them again, where the child is discovering how his father died
 when he finds an old and found it one day in a drawer of old photographs hidden away
 and my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty signed with his own rubber stamp.
 So it's so ironic because it seems the way that he's writing it that he's not crying because his father was lost.
 He's crying because kind old King George took the time to actually write Mother a note about the fact that his father died.
 It's so ironic because 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 chessboard here earlier, a pawn in France, the pion.
 They are the ones that you send to the front to get murdered, slaughtered.
 This whole concept of pioneers having taken this whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that we're now treating as heroes.
 So anyway, there's this juxtaposition 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 fusilliers company.
 They were all left behind, most of them dead.
 The rest of them dying.
 And that's how the high command took my daddy from me.
 And that song, even though it's not in the album, explains the whole movie because it's this movie of misery.
 It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out of it.
 There's no other movie that I think has captured so well this prison that is someone's own mind.
 And this wall that you're stuck inside and this feeling of loneliness.
 And sort of, is there anybody out there?
 And sort of, hello, hello, is there anybody in there?
 Just nod if you can hear me.
 Is there anyone home?
 Come on, yeah.
 I hear your feeling down.
 Just one minute, and you're not in it again.
 Anyway, so...
 Yeah, the prison of your mind.
 So those are the darker moments.
 Exactly, these are the darker moments.
 Yeah, in the darker moments, the mind does feel like you're trapped alone in a room with it.
 Yeah, and there's this scene in the movie where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this prostitute in the room.
 He starts throwing stuff and then he breaks the window, he throws the chair outside, and then you see him laying in the pool with his own blood everywhere.
 And then there's these endless hours spent fixing every little thing and lining it up.
 And it's this whole sort of mania versus you can spend hours building up something and just destroy it in a few seconds.
 One of my turns is that song.
 It's like, I feel cold as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum.
 And then the music builds up saying, run to the bedroom, there's a suitcase on the left, you'll find my favorite axe.
 Don't look so frightened, this is just a passing phase, one of my bad days.
 I need to rewatch it.
 But imagine watching this as a teenager.
 It ruins your mind.
 It's such harsh imagery.
 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 US, not for Russians, but for Red versus Blue.
 Mr. Khrushchev says we will bury you.
 I don't subscribe to this point of view.
 It'd be such an ignorant thing to do.
 If the Russians love their children too.
 What is it doing?
 It's basically saying the Russians are just as humans as we are.
 There's no way that they're going to let their children die.
 And then it's just so beautiful.
 How can I save my innocent boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?
 And now that's the new national anthem. Are you reading?
 There 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 fellow biology.
 There is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence.
 It's just so beautiful.
 There's no crisper, simpler way to say Russians love their children too.
 The common humanity.
 And remember what I was telling you, I think, in one of our first podcasts
 about the daughter who's crying for her brother to come back from war.
 And then the Virgin Mary appears and says, who should I take instead?
 This Turk, here's his family, here's his children.
 This other one, he just got married, etc.
 And that basically says, no, I mean, if you look at the Lord of the Rings,
 the enemies are these monsters.
 They're not human.
 And that's what we always do.
 We always say, they're not like us.
 They're different.
 They're not humans, etc.
 So there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to go to war.
 If you realize just how close we are genetically, one with the other,
 this whole 99.9% identical, you can't bear weapons against someone who's like that.
 And the things that are the most meaningful to us in our lives at every level is the same 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.
 And the last one I mentioned last time we spoke, which is Joni Mitchell's, both sides now.
 So she has three rounds, one on clouds, one on love and one on life.
 And on clouds she says,
 Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
 And feathered canyons everywhere have looked at clouds that way
 But now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone
 So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way
 And then I've looked at clouds from both sides now
 From up and down, and still somehow it's Clouds illusions I recall
 I really don't know clouds at all
 And then she goes on about love, how it's super, super happy, or it's about misery and loss
 And about life, how it's about winning and losing and so on and so forth
 But now old friends are acting strange
 They shake their heads, they say I've changed
 Well, something's lost and something's 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
 You remember my poem from when I was 16 years old
 Of this whole, you know, children dance now all in row
 And then in the end, even though the snow seems bright without you
 You have lost their light, sun that sang and moon that smiled
 So this whole concept of if you have love and if you have passion
 You see the exact same thing from a different way
 You can go out running in the rain or you could just stay in and say
 Ah, sucks, I won't be able to go outside now
 Both sides
 Anyway, and the last one is, last last one I promise, Leonard 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 yes, Leonard Cohen
 Going back to Leonard Cohen since that's where you started
 So Leonard Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love
 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 Nirmakita Pai is
 This song he's got an attitude
 He's proud of his ability to basically be any kind of man for the long
 As opposed to the Jacques Brel-like desperation of
 What do I have to be for you to love me? That kind of 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 I'm your man is actually an apology song
 In the same way that Nirmakita Pai is an apology song
 Nirmakita Pai basically says I've screwed up
 I'm sorry baby
 And in the same way that the careless whisper is I screwed up
 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 I'd crawl to you baby
 And I'd fall at your feet
 And I'd howl at your beauty like a dog
 Heat and I'd claw at your heart
 And I'd 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
 I'm your man
 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 we were gonna finish with a lighthearted song?
 Yes
 Last one
 You ready?
 So Alison Krauss 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 Batsoglou is the guy who got me into genomics in the first place
 I owe enormously to him
 And he's another Greek
 We actually met dancing believe it or not
 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 Seraphim who's like you know bodybuilder
 Was holding me on his shoulder
 And I was like doing maneuvers in the air basically
 So anyway this guy Seraphim
 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 communists or killed by the Germans or killed by the
 She had just like you know misery
 Like death and sickness and everything
 Everyone was decimated in her family
 She was the last standing member
 And we stop at a Seraphim was driving
 And we stop at a rest area
 And he takes me aside and he's like Manolis we're going to crash
 Get her out of my car
 And then he basically says but I'm only reassured because you're here with me
 And I'm like what do you mean
 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 if it's 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
 Orea pu fisic se obat
 So 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
 This horrible thing happened
 It must open the door to a new door
 A beautiful chapter
 So Allison Krause is talking about the lucky one
 So I was like oh my god she wrote a song for me
 And she goes you're the lucky one I know that now
 As free as the wind blowing down the road
 Loved by many hated by none
 I'd say you were lucky because you know what you've done
 Not a care in the world not a worry inside
 Everything's gonna be alright cause you're the lucky one
 And then she goes you're the lucky one always having fun
 A jack of all trades a master of none
 You look at the world with the smiling eyes and laugh
 At the devil as his train rolls by
 I'll give you a song and a one night stand
 You'll be looking at a happy man cause 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 trick pony
 If you just embrace the fact that you might suck at a bunch of things
 But you're just gonna try a lot of things
 And then there's another verse that says
 Well you're blessed I guess
 But never knowing which road you're choosing
 To you the next best thing
 To playing and winning is playing and losing
 It's just so beautiful
 Because it basically says if you try your best
 But it's still playing
 If you lose it's okay you had an awesome game
 And 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 a 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 birds who love or birds who 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 this song
 Of you know you're the lucky one jack of all trades a master of none
 But at the same time I identify with a lesson of
 Well 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 you know 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 on this country song
 I haven't heard it before but that's exactly right I feel the same way
 Depending on the day is this 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 expect it 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 in 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 work 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 a doer you'll make mistakes
 If you're a criticizer yeah sure you can sit back and criticize everybody else for the mistakes they make
 Or instead you can just be out there making those mistakes
 And frankly I'd rather be the criticized one than the criticized one
 Brilliantly put
 Every time somebody steals my bicycle I say well
 No my son is like why do they steal our bicycle dad?
 And I'm like aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people can steal?
 I'd rather be the person stolen from than the stealer
 Yeah it's not the critic that counts
 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 well 42 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 this super mega computer
 That had computed for a million years with the most powerful computer in the world had come up with
 At some point the computer says I have an answer
 And they're like what? It's 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
 So now they have to build a bigger computer to figure out what 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 this little passage that was explaining to all those guests
 To my 42nd birthday party why we're talking about the meaning of life
 And basically talks 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
 So 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 1
 So basically if you take all integers between 1 and however many vertices there are
 The sum 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 101010 in binary
 Again the yin and the yang the good and the evil one and zero the balance of the fours
 42 is the number of chromosomes for the giant panda
 The giant panda
 I know 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 yin 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 the number of times a piece of paper should be folded to reach beyond the moon
 Which is what I assume my students mean when they ask that their paper reaches for the stars
 I just tell them just fold it a bunch of times
 42 is the number of messier object 42 which is Orion
 And that's you know one of the most famous galaxies
 It's I think also the place where we can actually see the center of our galaxy
 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in ASCII
 Which is very useful when searching for the stars
 And also a reg exp for life the universe and everything so star
 In Egyptian mythology the goddess Maat 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 Judaic tradition God ascribe is ascribed a 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 Eloca 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 a 42 chapter sutra which is the first Indian religious scripture which was translated to Chinese
 Thus introducing Buddhism to China from India
 The 42 line Bible was the first printed book marking the age of printing in the 1450s
 And the dissemination of knowledge eventually leading to the enlightenment
 A yeast cell which is the coolest single cell you carry out and the subject of my PhD research has exactly 42 million proteins
 Anyway so there's a series of 42
 You're on fire with this these are really good
 So I guess what you're saying is just a random number
 Yeah basically
 So all of these are acronyms so you know after you have the number you figure out why that number
 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 ever be satisfied that you know I've got it
 So I like to say that life is lived forward but it only makes sense backward
 And I don't remember whose quote that is but the 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 and the dog
 Yeah, cats have no meaning
 So I'm noticing the yin yang symbol right here with this whole panda black and white and the 0102
 You're on fire with that 42 some of those are gold ascii value for the star symbol
 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
 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 a particular reason
 I think this thing we got this mind is unique in the universe in terms of how difficult it is to build
 Is it possible that we're the most beautiful thing that the universe has constructed
 Both the most beautiful and the most ugly but certainly the most complex
 So look at evolutionary time the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years
 We've been around for a million years
 So one versus 135
 So dinosaurs were extinct about 60 million years ago
 And mammals that had been happily evolving as tiny little creatures for 30 million years then took over the planet
 And then 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 his creatures and to make room for the next ones
 So the mammals basically sort of took over 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 exploded that hardware
 But that hardware is selected for survival
 It's selected for procreation
 It's initially selected with this very simple Darwinian view of the world of random mutation, ruthless selection and then selection for making more of yourself
 If you look at human cognition it's gone down a weird evolutionary path
 In the sense that we are expending an enormous amount of energy on this apparatus between our ears
 That is wasting what 15% of our bodily energy, 20% like some enormous percentage of our calories go to function our brain
 No other species makes that big of a commitment
 That has basically taken energetic changes for efficiency on the metabolic side for humanity to basically power that thing
 And our brain is both enormously more efficient than other brains but also despite this efficiency enormously more energy consuming
 So 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
 But yet the folds 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 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 is 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 the dinosaurs are still ruling and any kind of proto human is squished and eaten for breakfast basically
 However we are 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 are now competing on intelligence
 And we are now competing on social structures and we are 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 may have come before I was able to create a personal mental model of how do I think
 So this introspection probably came after this projection and this empathy which basically means passion, pathos, suffering, but basically sensing
 So basically empathy means feeling what you are feeling, trying to project your emotional state onto my cognitive apparatus
 And I think that is what eventually led to this enormous cognitive explosion that happened in humanity
 So you know life itself in my view is inevitable on every planet
 Inevitable
 But the evolution of life to self awareness and cognition and all the incredible things that humans have done
 You know that might not be as inevitable
 That's your intuition so if you were to sort of estimate and bet some money on it
 If we re-ran earth a million times
 Would what we got now be the most special thing and how often would it be?
 So scientifically speaking how repeatable is this experiment?
 So this whole cognitive revolution
 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
 You are also implying one thing here, you are 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?
 And one thought is that there is a great filter or multiple great filters that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations
 This thing that we, 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
 Is 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 it basically says evolution and civilization are just so recent on Earth
 Like there's countless other planets that have probably all kinds of life forms, multicellular perhaps and so on 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, 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, the aliens actually take over, they're not as friendly
 But this concept that we have to eventually go and conquer every planet, I think that yes, we will become a galactic species
 So you have hope, well, you said thanks
 Oh, of course, of course, now that we've made it so far
 So you feel like 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
 Yes, there's some claims of intelligence and if you look at Jurassic Park, yeah, 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 won out
 And in our planet, in our particular version of whatever happened in this planet, cognition won out
 And it's kind of cool, I mean, it's a privilege, right?
 It's kind of like living in Boston instead of, I don't know, some middle-aged place where everybody's like hitting each other with weapons and sticks
 You're back to the lucky one song
 I mean, we are the lucky ones
 But flip side of that is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves
 Again, I want to go back to Pinker and the better angels of our nature
 The whole concept that civilization and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence
 Dramatically
 If you look 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 whole concept of central governance and people agreeing to live together and share responsibilities and duties and all of that
 Is 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 there are setbacks
 But again, the moral arc of the universe
 I probably imagine there were two dinosaurs back in the day having this exact conversation
 And they look up to the sky and there seems to be something like an asteroid going towards Earth
 So while it's very true that the arc of our society, of human civilization seems to be progressing towards a better, better life for everybody
 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 recently learned is not that easy to detect them
 So 48, what happens in 48 years?
 I'm not sure
 2068, Apophis
 There's an asteroid that's coming
 In 48 years, it has a very high chance of actually wiping us out completely
 Yes
 So we have 48 years to get our act together
 It's not like some distant, distant hypothesis
 Like, yeah, sure, they're hard to detect, but this one we know about, it's coming
 So how do you feel about that? Why are you still so optimistic?
 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?
 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 folds of our brain and all of that
 That's the hardware
 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 neotony 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 in software
 If you look at what happened in ancient Greece, why did everything explode at once?
 My take on this is that it was the shift from the Egyptian and hieroglyphic software to the Greek language software
 This whole concept of creating abstract notions, of creating these 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 or even macabre concepts of doom, etc.
 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 genome, a month later, less than a month later the first vaccine designs were done
 And now less than a year later, ten months later, we already have a working vaccine that's 90% efficient
 I mean that is ridiculous by any standards and the reason is sharing
 So the asteroid, yes, could wipe us out in 48 years, but 48 years? I mean look at where we were 48 years ago, technologically
 I mean how much more we understand the basic foundations of space is enormous
 The technological revolutions of digitization, the amount of compute power we can put on any nail sized hardware is enormous
 And this is nowhere near ending, we all have our little problems going back and forth on the social side
 And on the political side, and on the 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 going to revolutionize things
 It's going to explode, continue
 Of course, 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, a human stepping foot on Mars
 And two, possible colonization of not necessarily Mars but other planets and all that kind of stuff for people living in space
 Inevitable
 Would you do it or are you kind of like Earth?
 Of course
 How many people will you wait, will you wait for, I think it was about when the Declaration of Independence was signed
 About 2-3 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, you are the lucky one
 But wisdom can be transferred horizontally
 I gotta tell you, 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, you know you can watch a live feed of the space station
 Watching Earth is magnificent, like this blue tiny little shield
 It's so thin, our atmosphere
 Like if you drive to New York, you're basically in outer space, I mean it's ridiculous, it's just so thin
 And it's just again such a privilege to be on this planet, such a privilege
 But I think our species is in for big good things
 I think that we will overcome our little problems and eventually come together as a species
 I feel that we're definitely on the path to that
 And it's just 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
 How exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs?
 So I mentioned that there's this dramatic cognitive improvement that we've made
 But I think it goes much deeper than that
 So if you look at a lion attacking a gazelle in the middle of the Serengeti
 The lion is smelling the molecules in the environment
 Its hormones and neuroreceptors are sort of getting it ready for impulse
 The target is constantly looking around and sensing
 I've actually been in Kenya and I've kind of seen the hunt
 So I've kind of seen the sort of 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 gazelle
 And eventually feeds the lions and so forth
 So as humans we experience all of that
 But the lion only experiences one layer
 The mitochondria in its body are only experiencing one layer
 The chloroplasts are only experiencing one layer
 The photoreceptors and the smell receptors and the chemical receptors
 The lion always attacks against the wind so that it's not smelled
 All of these things are one layer at a time
 And we humans somehow perceive the whole stack
 So going back to software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure
 If you design a computer you basically have a physical layer that you start with
 And then on top of that physical layer you have 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 higher order, higher level programming
 And on top of that you have your deep learning routine, etc
 And on top of that you eventually build a cognitive system that's smart
 I want you to now picture this cognitive system becoming not just self-aware
 But also becoming aware of the hardware that it's made of
 And the atoms that 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, Odyssey of Space
 Where Hal, after Dave starts disconnecting him
 Is starting to sing a song about daisies, etc
 And Hal is basically saying, Dave, I'm losing my mind
 I can feel I'm losing my mind
 It's just so beautiful
 This concept of self-awareness, of knowing that the hardware is no longer there, is amazing
 And in the same way humans who have had accidents are aware that they've had accidents
 So there's this self-awareness of AI that is this beautiful concept about the eventual cognitive leap to self-awareness
 But imagine now the AI system actually breaking through these layers and saying
 Wait a minute, I think I can design a slightly better hardware to get me functioning better
 And that's what basically humans are doing
 So if you look at our reasoning layer, it's built on top of a cognitive layer
 And the reasoning layer we share with AI, it's kind of cool
 Like there is another thing on the planet that can integrate equations, and it's man-made
 But we share computation with them
 We share this cognitive layer of playing chess
 We're not alone anymore, we're not the only thing on the planet that plays chess
 Now we have AI that also plays chess
 But in some sense that that particular organism, AI as it is now, only operates in that layer
 Exactly, exactly
 And then most animals operate in the sort of cognitive layer that we're all experiencing
 A bat is doing this incredible integration of signals, but it's not aware of it
 It's basically constantly sending echo location waves, and it's receiving them back
 And multiple bats in the same cave are operating at slightly different frequencies and with slightly different pulses
 And they're all sensing objects, and they're doing motion planning in their cognitive hardware
 But they're not even aware of all of that
 All they know is that they have a 3D view of space around them
 Just like any gazelle walking through the desert
 And any baby looking around is aware of things without doing the math of how am I processing all of this visual information, etc
 You're just aware of the layer that you live in
 I think if you look at this, at humanity, we've basically managed through our cognitive layer, through our perception layer, through our senses layer, through our multi-organ layer, through our genetic layer, through our molecular layer, through our atomic layer, through our quantum layer, through even the very fabric of the space-time continuum, unite all of that cognitively
 So as we're watching that scene in the Serengeti, we as scientists, we as educated humans, we as anyone who's finished high school are aware of all of this beauty of all of these different layers interplaying together
 And I think that's something very unique in perhaps not just the galaxy, but maybe even the cosmos, these species that has managed to in space cross through these layers from the enormous to the infinitely small
 And that's what I love about particle physics, the fact that it actually unites everything
 The very small and the 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 disperses it through the cosmos
 And it's only through understanding the very large that we understand the 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 early evolution of the cosmos
 And we can also see forward in time as to where the universe is heading
 We can see Apophis in 2068 coming over looking ahead in time
 That would be magician stuff in ancient times
 So what I love about humanity and its role in the universe is that if there's a God watching, he's like, finally somebody figured it out
 I've been building all these beautiful things and somebody can appreciate it
 And figured me out from a God's perspective, meaning become aware of
 So it's kind of interesting to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to convert those layers into ideas that you can then combine
 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, you know, Morpheus didn't have to show up to basically give us the blue pill or the red pill
 We were able to sufficiently evolve cognitively through the hardware explosion
 And sufficiently involve scientifically through the software explosion to basically get at breaking through the matrix
 Realizing that we live in a matrix and realizing that we are this thing in there
 And yet that thing in there has a consciousness that lives through all these layers
 And I think we're the only species, we're the only thing that we even can think of that has actually done that
 Has sort of permeated space and time, scales and layers of abstraction plowing through them
 And realizing what we're really, really made of
 And the next frontier is of course cognition
 So we understand so much of the cosmos, so much of the stuff around us
 But the stuff inside here, finding the basis for the soul, finding the basis for the ego, for the self, the self-awareness
 When 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 into 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 emergent behavior in our cognitively capable artificial systems
 That we can certainly model but we don't encode directly
 And that's a key difference
 So we like to say, oh of course this is not really intelligent because we coded it up
 And we're just putting these little parameters there
 And there's like 6 billion parameters and once you've learned them we kind of 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 layers of cortex and there's a visual area
 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 cortical layers doing their thing
 In the same way that when we build 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
 The system wouldn't know what to do
 No, no, you basically now just program the primitives and then it 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
 And yet it's not yet able to be cognizant of all the other layers
 It's not able to think about space and time
 It's not able to think about the hardware in which it runs, the electricity in which it 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 a ton more of it
 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 some non-physical thing
 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, from 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 encoded in a giant neural network
 I mean, I'm oversimplifying, of course, the complexity and the diversity of the different types of excitatory and inhibitory neurons
 The waveforms that sort of shine through the connections across all these different layers
 The amalgamation of signals, etc.
 The brain is enormously complex, I mean, of course
 But again, it's a small number of primitives encoded by a tiny number of genes
 Which are self-organized and shaped by their environment
 Babies that are growing up today are listening to language from conception
 Basically, as soon as the auditory apparatus forms
 It's already getting shaped to the types of signals that are out in the real world today
 So it's not just like, oh, have an Egyptian be born and then ship them over
 It's like, no, that Egyptian would be listening in to the complex of the world
 And then getting born and sort of seeing just how much more complex the world is
 So it's a combination of the underlying hardware
 Which, if you think about as a geneticist, in my view the hardware gives you an upper bound of cognitive capabilities
 But it's the environment that makes those capabilities shine and reach their 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 on 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 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 Richard Dawkins talks about the notion of memes
 And 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 that are breeding in the minds of humans?
 I love the concept of memes
 I love the concept of this horizontal transfer of ideas
 And sort of permeating through our layer of interconnected neural networks
 So you can think of sort of the cognitive space that has now connected all of humanity
 Where we are now one giant information and idea sharing network
 Well beyond what was thought to be ever capable
 When the concept of a meme was created by Richard Dawkins
 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
 We 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 Stanford or CMU or MIT
 And you basically have this coevolution now of memes and ideas
 And the cognitive conversational systems that love these ideas
 And feed on these ideas and understand these ideas and appreciate these ideas
 Now coming together
 So you basically have students coming to Boston to study
 Because that's the place where these type of cognitive systems thrive
 And they're selected based on their cognitive output and their idea output
 But once they get into that place
 The boiling and interbreeding of these memes becomes so much more frequent
 That what comes out of it is so far beyond if ideas were evolving in a vacuum
 Of an already established hardware cognitive interconnection system of the planet
 Where now you basically have the ideas shaping the distribution of these systems
 And then the genetics kick in as well
 You basically have now these people who came to be a student, kind of like myself
 Who now stuck around and are now professors
 Bringing up our own genetically encoded and genetically related cognitive systems
 Mine are 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 memes are co-evolving in the same soup
 Of ever 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 on top of clusters on top of clusters
 What about in the online world?
 Do you also see that kind of...
 People now form groups on the internet that they stick together
 So they can sort of...
 These cognitive systems can 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
 Which doesn't need to be... I eat human
 Doesn't need to belong 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 on 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 sometimes these cognitive systems hold conferences
 And they all gather around
 And one of them is talking and they're all listening
 And then they discuss and then they have free lunch and so on
 No, 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 poster after 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, you know, just more imperceptible properties of these cognitive systems
 That simply just cling together
 Basically, you know, there's
 I have the luxury at MIT of not just choosing smart people
 But choosing smart people who I get along with
 Who are generous and friendly and creative and smart and, you know, excited and childish in their, you know, uninhibited behaviors and so forth
 So you basically can choose yourself to surround
 You can choose to surround yourself with people who are not only cognitively compatible
 But also, you know, imperceptibly through the meta cognitive systems compatible
 And again, when I say compatible, not all the same
 Sometimes, you know, not 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, you know, view of the world
 But that we're complementary in our skills, in our angles with which we come at it 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 to pieces
 But we're also extremely different in many ways, and that's beautiful
 She's going to be listening to this
 I love that about us, I love the fact that, you know, I'm like living out there in the world of ideas
 And I forget what day it 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 night we were talking about this
 And I showed her the questions and we were bouncing ideas off each other
 And it was just beautiful, like we basically have these, you know, basically cognitive, you know, let it all loose kind of dates
 Where, you know, we just bring papers and we're like, you know, bouncing ideas and cetera
 So, you know, we have extremely different perspectives but very common, you know, goals and interests and anyway
 What do you make of the communication mechanism that we humans use to share those ideas?
 Because like one essential element of all of this is not just that we're able to have these ideas
 But we're also able to share them
 We tend to, maybe you can correct me, but we seem to use language to share the ideas
 Maybe we share them in some much deeper way than language, I don't know
 But what do you make of this whole mechanism and how fundamental it is to the human condition?
 So some people will tell you that your language dictates your thoughts and your thoughts cannot form outside language
 I tend to disagree
 I see thoughts as much more abstract as, you know, basically when I dream, I don't dream in words
 I dream in shapes and forms and, you know, three-dimensional space with extreme detail
 I was describing, so when I wake up in the middle of the night, I actually record my dreams
 Sometimes I write them down in a Dropbox file, other times I'll just dictate them in, you know, audio
 And my wife was giving me a massage the other day because like my left side was frozen
 And I started playing the recording and as I was listening to it, I was like, I don't remember any of that
 And I was like, of course! And then the entire thing came back
 But then there's no way any other person could have recreated that entire sort of, you know, three-dimensional 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, you know, different, either less abstract or more abstract
 And it's either, you know, basically there's just a projection that happens from the three-dimensional ideas into, let's say, a one-dimensional language
 And the language certainly gives you the apparatus to think about concepts that you didn't realize existed before
 And with my team, we often create new words. I'm like, well, now we're going to call this the regulatory plexus of a gene
 And that gives us now the language to sort of build on that as one concept that you then build upon with all kinds of other things
 So there's this coevolution again of ideas and 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 begun
 So if you look at how we communicate, as I'm speaking, my eyes are shining and my face is changing through all kinds of emotions
 And my entire body composition posture is reshaped and my intonation, the pauses that I make, the softer and the louder and the this and that are conveying so much more information
 And if you look at early human language and if you look at how the great apes 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 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, 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 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 9-11, the tragedies in 9-11, all the beautiful and terrible things that happened in the world
 They're somehow both in our minds and somehow enrich the ability to transfer information
 What I love about it is I can talk to you about 2001 Odyssey of Space and mention a very specific scene and that evokes all these feelings that you had when you first watched it
 We're both visualizing that maybe in different ways
 Exactly
 And 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 pal facing his own mortality
 It's fascinating that we're able to do that, but I don't know
 Now let's talk about Neuralink for a second
 So what's the concept of Neuralink? The concept of Neuralink is that I'm going to take whatever knowledge is encoded in my brain directly transfer it into your brain
 So this is a beautiful, fascinating and extremely sort of 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 Li Hui Cai and Asaf Marco that basically was looking at these engrams that are formed with combinations of neurons that co-fire when a stimulus happens
 Where we can go into a mouse and select those neurons that fire by marking them and then see what happens when they first fire and then select the neurons that fire again when the experience is repeated
 These are the recall neurons and then there's the memory consolidation neurons
 So we're starting to understand a little bit of sort of the distributed nature of knowledge encoding and experience encoding in the human brain and in the mouse brain
 And the concept that we'll understand that sufficiently one day to be able to take a snapshot of what does that scene from Dave losing his mind, of Hal losing his mind and talking to Dave
 How is that seen and coded in your mind? Imagine the complexity of that
 But now imagine suppose that we solve this problem and the next enormous challenge is how do I go and modify the next person's brain to now create the same exact neural connections
 So that's an enormous challenge right there
 So basically it's not just reading, it's 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 anywhere near each other
 Basically, maybe the way that I'm encoding it is twisted with my childhood memories of running through the pebbles in Greece
 And yours is twisted with your childhood memories growing up in Russia
 And there's no way that I can take my encoding and put it into your brain because it'll A, mess things up and B, be incompatible with your own unique experiences
 So that's telepathic communications from human to human. That's 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 and the hope with Neuralink is that we can communicate with an AI 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 ten 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 ten billion parameters?
 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 re-encode it all together
 So maybe what language does is exactly that
 It's taking one generative cognitive model, it's running it forward to emit utterances that kind of make sense in my cognitive frame
 And it's re-encoding them into yours through the parsing of that same language
 And I think the conversation might actually be the most efficient way to do it
 Just talking but interactive, so talking back and forth, asking questions, interrupting
 So GPT-4 will constantly be interrupting
 Just annoying it
 Annoyingly
 But the beauty of that is also that as we're interrupting each other, there's all kinds of misinterpretations that happen
 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, you know, neural network parameters back and forth of that knowledge and idea and coding
 Would be far inferior because the re-encoding with our own, as we said last time, emotional baggage and cognitive baggage from our unique experiences
 Through our shared experiences, distinct encodings in the context of all our unique experiences is leading to so much more diversity of perspectives
 And again, going back to this whole concept of this entire network of all of human cognitive systems connected to each other
 And sort of how ideas and memes permeate through that, that's sort of what really creates a whole new level of human experience
 Through this reasoning layer and this computational layer that obviously lives on top of our cognitive layer
 So you're one of these aforementioned cognitive systems, mortal, but 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 meaning 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 think.
 No, 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 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 I'm the lucky one kind of thing
 Of living in the present and being happy winning and being happy losing.
 And there's a certain freedom that comes with that. But again, a certain sort of, I don't know, ephemerity of living for the present.
 But if you if you step back from all of that, where basically my my current modus operandi is live for the present, make, you know, every day the best you can make
 And just make the local blip of local maxima of the universe, of the awesomeness of the planet and the town and the family that we live in
 Both academic family and you know, biological family, 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 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 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 snap out of or maybe not.
 And that's OK. So there's that aspect of sort of, you know, experiencing, you know, life with the best intentions.
 And, you know, I love when I'm wrong. I 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 was like, it's such a good feeling. And I love being wrong. But there's, you know, there's something about self-improvement. There's something about sort of how do I not make the most mistakes, but attempt the most rights and do the fewest wrongs.
 But with the full knowledge that this will happen. That's one aspect.
 So 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 on and so forth.
 And 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 wider audience where suddenly I'm sort of realizing that, wow, maybe I've had a legacy.
 Yes, like basically I've trained generations of students from MIT and I've put all of my courses freely online since 2001. So basically all of my video recordings of my lectures have been online since 2001.
 So countless generations of people from across the world will meet me at a conference and say, like, I was at this conference where somebody heard my voice and it's like, I know this 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, you know, legacy, quote unquote, that every one of us has through the people we touch. One of my friends from undergrad basically told me, oh, my mom remembers you vividly from when she came to campus.
 I'm like, I didn't even meet her. She's like, no, but she 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 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 me.
 Or like there was a company 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. I'm like, wow.
 And then on top of that, there's also the ripple effect. So you're speaking to the direct influence of inspiration or education, but there's also like the follow on things that happened to that.
 And there's this ripple that through from you, just this one individual.
 And from every one of us, from everyone, that's what I love about humanity. The fact that every one of us shares genes and genetic variants with very recent ancestors with everyone else.
 So even if I die tomorrow, my genes are still shared through my cousins and through my uncles and through my immediate family.
 And of course, I'm lucky enough to have my own children. But even if you don't, your genes are still permeating through all of the layers of your family.
 So your genes will have the legacy there. Yeah.
 Every one of us. Yeah. Number two, our ideas are constantly intermingling with each other.
 So there's no person living in the planet 100 years from now who will not be directly impacted by every one of the planet living here today.
 Yeah. Through genetic inheritance and through meme inheritance.
 It's cool to think that your ideas, Manolis Callis, 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 a bunch of us.
 Like the cognitive systems that were shipped to this particular location and who will then disperse back into all of their home countries.
 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 U.S. 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 me into the field like 15 years ago. It's just so beautiful.
 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.
 So I basically have an academic family and we are a family.
 There's this such strong connection, this bond of you're part of the Kelly's family.
 So I have a biological family at home and I have an academic family on campus.
 And that academic family has given me great grandchildren already.
 So I've trained people who are now professors at Stanford, CMU, Harvard, you know, Wash U, 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 hardware development to sort of have amazing conversation with people.
 They are fully grown humans, fully grown adults who are cognitively super ready and who are shaped 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.
 So, you know, I always tell them to write the whole first draft and they know that I will rewrite every word.
 But the act of them writing it and what I do is these like joint editing sessions where I'm like, let's co-edit.
 And with this co-editing, we basically have creative destruction.
 So I share my Zoom screen and I'm just thinking out loud as I'm doing this and they're learning from that process as opposed to like come back two days later and they see a bunch of red on a page.
 I'm sort of, well, that's not how you write this. That's not how you think about this. That's not, you know, what's the point?
 Like this morning was having, yes, this morning between 6 and 8 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, it's the papers I write because yes, my day job is training students, but it's a research university.
 The way that they learn is through the 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 MedArchive, 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. Can you say the title of the paper, BrainChain?
 I don't remember the title, but it's Single Cell Dissection of Schizophrenia Reveals.
 And so the two points that we found was this whole transcriptional resilience.
 Like there's some individuals who are schizophrenic, but they have an additional cell type or initial cell state, which we believe is protective.
 And that cell state, when they have it, will cause other cells to have normal gene expression patterns. It's beautiful.
 And then that cell is connected with some of the PV interneurons 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 transcriptional resilience.
 So we basically made up a title that combines all these concepts.
 You have all these concepts, all these people working together, and ultimately these minds condense it down into a beautifully written 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.
 I feel like a kid in a candy shop where I'm just constantly, what package do I open first?
 You're the lucky one.
 A jack of all trades, a master of none.
 I think for a Meaning of Life episode, we would be amiss if we did not have at least a poem or two.
 Do you mind if we 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 Leonard Cohen that says,
 but you don't really care for music, do you? 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, 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 and the moon and the birds way up high. You're my evening sweet song, my morning blue sky.
 You are my muse, your spell has me caught. You bring me my voice and scatter my thoughts.
 To put love in writing, in vain, I can try. But when I'm with you, my wings want to fly.
 So I put down the pen and drop my defenses. Give myself to you and fill up my senses.
 The Baffled King composing HALU. That was beautiful.
 What I love about it is that I did not bring up a dictionary of rhymes. I did not sort of work hard.
 So basically when I write poems, I just type. I never go back. I just...
 So when my brain gets into that mode, it actually happens like I wrote it.
 Oh, wow. So the rhymes just kind of... 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... 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... So it's very introspective in this whole concept.
 So anyway, there's another one many years earlier that is darker.
 It's basically this whole concept of let's be friends. I was like, ugh.
 No let's be friends. Just like... So 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, a promise, a kiss.
 Give me the world a sweet taste to miss. Don't let me lay here, inert, ugly, cold.
 With nothing sweet felt and nothing harsh told.
 Give me some hope, false foolish yet kind. Make me regret, I'll leave you behind.
 Don't pity my soul or torture it right. Treat it with hatred. Start up a fight.
 For it's from mildness that my soul dies when you cover your passion in a bland friend's disguise.
 Kiss me now, baby. Show me your passion. Turn off the lights and rip off your fashion.
 Give me my life's joy this one night. Burn all my matches for one blazing light.
 Don't think of tomorrow and let today fade. Don't try and protect me from love's cutting blade.
 Your razor will always rip off my veins. Don't spare me the passion to spare me the pains.
 Kiss me now, honey, or spit in my face. Throw me an insult I'll gladly embrace.
 Tell me now clearly that you never cared. Say it now loudly like you never dared.
 I'm ready to hear it. I'm ready to die. I'm ready to burn and start a new life.
 I'm ready to face the rough burning truth rather than waste the rest of my youth.
 So tell me, my lover, should I stay or go? The answer to love is one, yes or no.
 There's no I like you, no let's be friends. Shout out I love you or send me to hell.
 I don't think there's a better way to end a discussion of the meaning of life.
 Whatever the heck the meaning is, go all in as that poem says.
 Manolis, thank you so much for talking today.
 Alex, I look forward to next time.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis Kellis and thank you to our sponsors.
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 And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in his book, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
 On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins
 because he had achieved so much. The wheel, New York, wars and so on.
 Whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
 But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.
 Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.