Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his second time on the podcast.

00:00:05.120 | He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.

00:00:09.920 | He's one of the most brilliant, productive, and kind people I've had the fortune of talking to.

00:00:14.720 | A lot of my colleagues at MIT and former MIT faculty and students

00:00:19.520 | wrote to me after our first conversation with some version of,

00:00:23.200 | "Manolis is awesome, isn't he? I'm glad you guys are now friends."

00:00:28.320 | I am too, and I'm happy that he makes time in his insanely busy schedule to sit down and have a chat with me.

00:00:35.120 | Quick summary of the sponsors.

00:00:37.840 | Public Goods, Magic Spoon, and ExpressVPN.

00:00:41.520 | Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

00:00:46.880 | As a side note, let me say that I just got back from talking to Joe Rogan on his podcast,

00:00:52.320 | my fifth time on there.

00:00:54.000 | I also got a chance to record a separate conversation with Joe on this podcast.

00:00:58.960 | We talked on both quite a bit about his journey and his advice for mine.

00:01:03.440 | One of the things that I think made his show special is that he just had fun

00:01:08.800 | and made choices that didn't get in the way of him having fun and loving life.

00:01:12.720 | I'm learning to do just that.

00:01:15.360 | It's tough since I'm naturally full of self-doubt and anxiety,

00:01:19.680 | but I'm learning to let go and have fun,

00:01:21.680 | even if my monotone robotic voice sometimes sounds otherwise.

00:01:28.000 | For Joe, that involved talking to his friends, comedians,

00:01:31.840 | especially ones that brought out the best in him.

00:01:33.840 | Duncan Trussell and the five-hour first episode on Spotify comes to mind as an example of that.

00:01:40.000 | Duncan has been a guest probably close to, if not more than 50 times on Joe's podcast.

00:01:45.600 | My hope with amazing people like Manolis is to find my Duncan Trussell,

00:01:50.880 | my Joey Diaz, and yes, even my Eddie Bravo.

00:01:55.440 | Obviously, Joe and I are very different people, but ultimately both love life,

00:02:00.080 | where we can interact often with people we love and who inspire us, make us smile, make us think,

00:02:06.800 | and make us have fun when we get behind the mic of a podcast, whether anyone is listening or not.

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00:04:26.560 | It's kind of funny, actually. The deep heartfelt nature of that conversation,

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00:06:11.200 | to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast.

00:06:14.800 | And now, here's my conversation with Manolis Kelis.

00:06:19.440 | What is beautiful about the human epigenome?

00:06:23.600 | Don't get me started. So first of all, as an engineering feat, the human epigenome

00:06:30.560 | manages the most compact, the most incredible compaction you could imagine.

00:06:36.080 | So every single one of your cells contains two meters worth of DNA,

00:06:41.680 | and this is compacted in a radius which is one thousandth of a millimeter.

00:06:47.200 | That's six orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale,

00:06:51.680 | it's as if a string as tall as the Burj al-Khalifa, which is about a kilometer tall,

00:06:59.600 | was compacted into a tiny little ball the size of a millimeter.

00:07:02.640 | And if you put it all together, if you stretch the trillions of cells that we have,

00:07:10.560 | we have about 30 trillion cells in your body. If you stretch the DNA, the two meters worth of DNA

00:07:15.840 | in every one of your trillion cells, you would basically reach all the way to Jupiter

00:07:21.680 | a hundred times.

00:07:26.480 | Yeah, it's all curled up in there. It's 30 trillion cells.

00:07:30.320 | 30 trillion cells.

00:07:31.760 | In the human body.

00:07:32.480 | Every one of them, two meters worth of DNA. So all of that is compacted through the epigenome.

00:07:38.400 | The epigenome basically has the ability to compact this massive amount of DNA

00:07:44.160 | from here to Jupiter 10 times into one human body, into just the nuclei of one human body,

00:07:49.520 | and the vast majority of the human body is not even these nuclei.

00:07:52.320 | And that's sort of the structural part.

00:07:55.440 | So that's the boring part. That's the structural part.

00:07:57.600 | The functional part is way more interesting.

00:08:00.240 | So functionally, what the human epigenome allows you to do

00:08:03.520 | is basically control the activity patterns of thousands of genes.

00:08:11.120 | So 20,000 genes in your human body, every one of your cells only needs a few thousand of those,

00:08:16.080 | but a different few thousand of those.

00:08:18.080 | And the way that your cells remember what their identity is,

00:08:22.400 | is basically driven by the epigenome.

00:08:25.040 | So the epigenome is both structural, in sort of making this dramatic compaction,

00:08:30.000 | and it's also functional in being able to actually control

00:08:33.760 | the activity patterns of all your cells.

00:08:35.920 | - Now, can we draw a definition,

00:08:40.240 | distinction between the genome and the epigenome?

00:08:42.960 | - Again, being Greek, epi means on top of.

00:08:46.960 | So the genome is the DNA, and the epigenome is anything on top of the DNA.

00:08:53.360 | And there's three types of things on top of the DNA.

00:08:57.440 | The first is chemical modifications on the DNA itself.

00:09:00.160 | So we like to think of four bases of the DNA, A, C, G, T.

00:09:03.920 | C has a methyl form, which is sometimes referred to as the fifth base.

00:09:09.280 | So methyl C takes a different meaning.

00:09:12.640 | So in the same way that you have annotations in a orchestra score,

00:09:18.160 | that basically say whether you should play something softly or loudly,

00:09:21.440 | or space it out, or, you know, interpret basically the score,

00:09:26.000 | the human epigenome allows you to modify that primary score.

00:09:30.960 | So a modified C basically says, play this one softly.

00:09:34.640 | It's basically a sign of repression in a gene regulatory region.

00:09:39.040 | - I love how you're talking about the function that emerges

00:09:44.640 | from the epigenome as a musical score.

00:09:47.520 | - It is in many ways.

00:09:49.680 | And every single cell plays a different part of that score.

00:09:53.440 | It's like having all of human knowledge in 23 volumes,

00:09:56.640 | like 23 giant books, which are your chromosomes.

00:09:59.360 | And every single cell has a different profession, a different role.

00:10:03.440 | Some cells play the piano, and they're looking at chapter seven

00:10:07.280 | from chromosome 23, and chapter four from chromosome two,

00:10:10.000 | and so on and so forth.

00:10:11.200 | And each of those pieces are all encoding in the same DNA.

00:10:17.120 | But what the epigenome allows you to do

00:10:18.960 | is effectively conduct the orchestra

00:10:23.440 | and sort of coordinate the pieces

00:10:25.360 | so that every instrument plays only the things

00:10:27.440 | that it needs to play.

00:10:28.240 | - One thing that kind of blows my mind,

00:10:30.720 | maybe you can tell me your thoughts about it,

00:10:33.360 | is the way evolution works with natural selection,

00:10:37.520 | is based on the final sort of,

00:10:40.640 | the entirety of the orchestra musical performance, right?

00:10:46.160 | And then, but there's these incredibly rich structural things,

00:10:52.160 | like each one of them doing their own little job

00:10:54.240 | that somehow work to get, like,

00:10:56.400 | the evolution selects based on the final result,

00:10:59.440 | and yet all the individual pieces are doing

00:11:02.000 | like infinitely minuscule specific things.

00:11:05.280 | How the heck does that work?

00:11:06.800 | - It's a very good insight.

00:11:08.640 | And you can even go beyond that

00:11:10.640 | and basically say evolution doesn't select

00:11:12.800 | at the level of an organism,

00:11:14.800 | it actually selects at the level of whole environments,

00:11:16.800 | whole ecosystems.

00:11:17.680 | So let me break this down.

00:11:20.320 | So you basically have at the very bottom

00:11:23.440 | every single nucleotide being selected.

00:11:26.640 | But then that nucleotide's function is selected

00:11:29.760 | at the level of, you know, each gene,

00:11:33.120 | and every, not even each gene,

00:11:35.680 | each gene regulatory control element.

00:11:38.320 | And then those control elements are basically converging

00:11:41.200 | onto the function of the gene.

00:11:42.800 | And many genes are converging onto the function of one cell,

00:11:45.840 | and many cells are converging

00:11:47.120 | onto the function of one tissue or organ.

00:11:49.600 | And all of these organs are converging

00:11:52.400 | onto the level of an organism.

00:11:55.120 | But now that organism is not in isolation.

00:11:57.360 | So if you basically think about why is altruism,

00:12:01.120 | for example, a thing?

00:12:02.800 | Why are people being nice to each other?

00:12:04.240 | It was probably selected.

00:12:06.720 | And it was probably selected because those species

00:12:10.960 | that were just nasty to each other

00:12:12.560 | didn't survive as a species.

00:12:14.720 | And now if you think about symbiosis of, you know,

00:12:22.080 | there's plants, for example, that love CO2,

00:12:25.120 | and there's humans that love O2.

00:12:27.120 | And we're sort of, you know,

00:12:28.880 | trading different types of gases to each other.

00:12:33.600 | If you look at ecosystems

00:12:38.560 | where one organism was just really nasty,

00:12:40.880 | that organism actually died

00:12:43.760 | because everyone they were being nasty to was killed off.

00:12:46.160 | And then that kind of, you know, universe of life is gone.

00:12:53.280 | So basically what emerges is selection

00:12:56.720 | at so many different layers of benefit,

00:13:00.400 | including, you know, all of these nucleotides

00:13:04.000 | within a body interacting for the emergent functions

00:13:08.000 | at the body level.

00:13:09.680 | - Yeah, I wonder if it's possible

00:13:11.840 | to break it down into levels.

00:13:13.280 | That's selection even beyond humans.

00:13:16.320 | Like you said environment,

00:13:17.680 | but there's environments

00:13:18.720 | that are all different levels too, right?

00:13:20.160 | At the minuscule, at the organ level,

00:13:22.960 | at the tissue level, like you said,

00:13:24.640 | maybe at the microscopic level.

00:13:26.080 | It'd be fascinating if like,

00:13:27.920 | there's a kind of selection going on

00:13:30.560 | at like both the quantum level

00:13:32.720 | and like the galaxy level.

00:13:35.440 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:36.480 | So, so, yeah, let's again,

00:13:38.880 | sort of break down these different layers.

00:13:40.320 | So basically if you think about the environment

00:13:42.400 | in which a gene operates,

00:13:44.240 | that gene, of course,

00:13:45.200 | the first definition of environment that we think of

00:13:47.920 | is pollution or sunlight or heat or cold

00:13:52.160 | and so on and so forth.

00:13:53.040 | That's the external environment.

00:13:54.880 | But every gene also operates

00:13:56.160 | at the level of the internal cellular environment

00:13:58.160 | that it's in.

00:13:58.660 | If I take a gene from say an African individual

00:14:02.240 | and I put it in a European context,

00:14:04.160 | will it perform the same way?

00:14:07.280 | Probably not because there's a cellular context

00:14:10.400 | of thousands of other genes

00:14:12.640 | that that gene has co-evolved with,

00:14:14.160 | you know, in the out of Africa event

00:14:17.360 | and you know, all of this sort of human history

00:14:21.280 | of evolution.

00:14:22.240 | So basically if you look at Neanderthal genes,

00:14:25.200 | for example,

00:14:26.320 | which again happened long after that out of Africa event,

00:14:29.760 | there's incompatibilities between Neanderthal genes

00:14:33.600 | and modern human genes that can lead to diseases.

00:14:37.840 | So in the context of the Neanderthal genome,

00:14:39.680 | that gene version, that allele was fine.

00:14:42.320 | But in the context of the modern human genome,

00:14:44.800 | that Neanderthal gene version is actually detrimental.

00:14:47.280 | So it's, you know, that cellular environment

00:14:51.440 | constitutes the genetics of that gene,

00:14:53.840 | but also of course, all of the epigenomics of that gene.

00:14:56.880 | - Yeah, it's fascinating that the gene has a history.

00:15:00.560 | I mean, we talked about this a little bit last time,

00:15:02.480 | and then some of your research goes into that,

00:15:06.240 | but the genes as they are today have a story

00:15:10.480 | from the beginning of time.

00:15:13.440 | And then sometimes their story was like,

00:15:17.600 | their path was useful for survival

00:15:20.080 | for the particular organisms and sometimes not.

00:15:22.320 | That's fascinating.

00:15:24.240 | Let me ask a tangent.

00:15:26.640 | We kind of started talking offline about Neanderthals.

00:15:29.200 | Do you have something interesting genetically, biologically,

00:15:33.600 | in terms of difference between Neanderthal

00:15:36.800 | and like the different branches of human evolution

00:15:39.120 | that you find fascinating?

00:15:42.480 | - Neanderthals are only one of about five branches

00:15:46.000 | that we are pretty confident about.

00:15:47.600 | - Branches of?

00:15:49.760 | - Of out of Africa events.

00:15:51.440 | So basically there's Neanderthals, there's Denisovans.

00:15:55.200 | What is the evidence for Denisovans?

00:15:57.200 | One tiny little fragment of one pinky

00:16:01.680 | from one cave in Siberia.

00:16:05.120 | - Relatively recently discovered, right?

00:16:07.920 | - Less than 10 years ago.

00:16:08.960 | - Yeah, and those are like little folks, right?

00:16:11.200 | - No, no, no, no, no, that's yet another one though.

00:16:13.520 | Homo florensis, it had the little folks in sort of Indonesia.

00:16:17.520 | But then Denisovans are basically another branch

00:16:21.120 | that we only know about genetically from that one bone.

00:16:24.240 | And eventually we realized that it's one of the three

00:16:26.880 | major branches along with Neanderthal,

00:16:28.640 | modern human and Denisovan.

00:16:30.400 | And then that one branch has now resurfaced

00:16:33.440 | in many different areas.

00:16:34.560 | And we kind of know about the gene flow

00:16:36.640 | that happened in between them.

00:16:38.400 | So when I was reading my Greek mythology,

00:16:40.960 | it was talking about the age of the heroes.

00:16:43.440 | These eras of human-like precursors

00:16:47.680 | that were wiped out by Zeus or by all kinds of wars

00:16:50.480 | and so on and so forth, like the Titans.

00:16:52.320 | It's ridiculous to sort of read these stories as a kid

00:16:57.520 | because you're like, oh yeah, whatever.

00:16:59.280 | And then you're growing up and you're like,

00:17:01.200 | whoa, layers and layers of human-like ancestors.

00:17:04.800 | And who knows if those stories were inspired by bones

00:17:07.920 | that they found that kind of looked human-like,

00:17:10.480 | but were not quite human-like.

00:17:12.240 | Who knows if stories of dragons were inspired

00:17:14.400 | by bones of dinosaurs.

00:17:16.000 | Basically this archeological evidence has been there

00:17:18.960 | and has probably entered the folk imagination,

00:17:22.880 | migrated into those stories.

00:17:25.360 | But it's not that far removed from what actually happened

00:17:28.640 | of massive wars of wiping out Neanderthals

00:17:32.480 | as modern humans are populating Europe.

00:17:36.720 | - Do you think what killed the Neanderthals

00:17:39.680 | and all those other branches is human conflict

00:17:42.640 | or is it genetic conflict?

00:17:44.080 | So is it us humans being the opposite of altruistic

00:17:49.360 | towards each other,

00:17:50.160 | or is it competition at some other level,

00:17:56.240 | like as we're discussing?

00:17:57.760 | - Yeah, so if you look at a lot of human traits today,

00:18:01.120 | they're probably not that far removed

00:18:02.720 | from the human traits that got us where we are now.

00:18:04.880 | So this whole tribalism,

00:18:08.880 | you're my sports team,

00:18:11.040 | or you're my political party,

00:18:13.600 | or you're my tiny little village.

00:18:16.320 | And therefore, if you're from that other village,

00:18:19.600 | I hate you.

00:18:20.320 | But as soon as we're both in the major city,

00:18:23.280 | I can't believe we're from the same region,

00:18:25.440 | my friend, come here, my family.

00:18:27.200 | And like two neighboring countries fighting.

00:18:29.600 | And as soon as they're off in another country,

00:18:30.880 | we're like, oh, I can't believe that.

00:18:32.480 | So it's kind of funny.

00:18:34.160 | Like this tribalism is nonsensical in many ways.

00:18:37.280 | It's like cognitive incongruent,

00:18:39.200 | that basically we like kin.

00:18:41.280 | And selection for sort of liking kin

00:18:46.480 | is hugely advantageous genetically.

00:18:48.640 | - Probably across all kinds of organs,

00:18:51.040 | across all kinds of life.

00:18:52.160 | - Of course, yeah.

00:18:52.660 | So basically, if you now transport that

00:18:55.760 | to the sort of humans arriving in Europe

00:19:00.480 | and Neanderthals are everywhere,

00:19:01.840 | what are you gonna do?

00:19:03.360 | You're gonna kill them off.

00:19:05.600 | There's this battle for territory

00:19:07.600 | and this battle for they're not like us,

00:19:09.520 | we have to get rid of them.

00:19:11.040 | So basically there's a very interesting mix there.

00:19:14.080 | But and yet, when you look at the genetics,

00:19:17.200 | there's tons of gene flow between them.

00:19:19.680 | So basically, love, romance between near species.

00:19:24.400 | - We have tribes, but love spans

00:19:27.840 | the gap between the different tribes.

00:19:30.080 | - It's Romeo and Juliet across species boundaries.

00:19:32.720 | - Sneaks away from the village to hang out.

00:19:35.280 | - Even before the out of Africa,

00:19:37.840 | there's within Africa selection,

00:19:41.040 | which was probably massive battles

00:19:43.520 | of larger and larger tribes

00:19:45.200 | selecting for our social networking and savviness

00:19:51.280 | and probably all our conspiracy theory genes

00:19:54.880 | are dating back from then.

00:19:56.560 | And so there's a lot of this mischievousness

00:20:01.280 | in the history of human evolution

00:20:04.160 | that unfortunately still present in many ugly forms today,

00:20:08.400 | but probably contributed to our success as a species

00:20:12.480 | in wiping out other species.

00:20:14.640 | - It just sucks that we don't have neighboring species

00:20:18.880 | that are intelligent like us,

00:20:21.600 | but yet very different than us.

00:20:26.320 | So we have like, dogs or wolves, I guess, co-evolved.

00:20:30.960 | They figured out how to neighbor up with humans

00:20:35.920 | in a friendly way and collaborate and develop in time.

00:20:40.000 | - You're describing this as if the wolves made a choice.

00:20:42.240 | It's possible that the wolves never had a say,

00:20:46.160 | that basically humans were just so overpowering

00:20:49.360 | that they had captive wolves

00:20:51.440 | and then at every generation killed off eight of the nine pups

00:20:54.960 | and only kept the one that was milder.

00:20:56.480 | - Ah, humans.

00:20:57.120 | - And it only takes a few generations

00:20:58.880 | to then sort of have pups that are really mild.

00:21:01.040 | - And so the Neanderthals weren't useful

00:21:04.960 | in the same way that wolves were.

00:21:07.520 | - I don't know if it's a question of useful.

00:21:09.360 | They were probably super useful.

00:21:10.720 | My thinking is that they were scary,

00:21:15.280 | that basically something that almost resembles you

00:21:17.600 | is something that you try to eliminate first.

00:21:20.800 | - It's too close.

00:21:21.680 | - Yeah, and speaking of species that are intelligent

00:21:26.800 | and sort of what's left of evolution,

00:21:28.800 | it is a shame, exactly like you say,

00:21:32.000 | that so many different amazing life forms were extinct

00:21:35.360 | and the kind of boring ones remained.

00:21:38.640 | (laughs)

00:21:40.240 | So if you look at dinosaurs, I mean,

00:21:42.800 | the diversity that they had, if you look at sub,

00:21:45.360 | like there's just so many different lineages of life

00:21:51.280 | that were just abruptly killed

00:21:54.160 | and yet out of that death emerged

00:21:57.440 | many new kinds of really awesome lineages.

00:22:00.080 | - Do you think there was in the history of life on Earth,

00:22:03.680 | species that may be still alive today

00:22:06.480 | that are more intelligent than humans?

00:22:08.400 | And we just don't know, like dolphins?

00:22:09.360 | - So there's a reason we made for dolphins.

00:22:11.200 | Like if you look at their brains,

00:22:12.560 | if you look at the way that they play,

00:22:14.560 | if you look at the way that they learn,

00:22:15.920 | I mean, they don't have opposable thumbs and we do.

00:22:19.920 | So that probably made a big difference.

00:22:21.840 | - It's terrifying to think that like, not terrifying,

00:22:24.240 | I don't know how to feel about it,

00:22:25.840 | that they're more intelligent than us.

00:22:27.680 | It's like the hitchhiker's guide.

00:22:29.360 | - I know, but how do you define intelligence?

00:22:32.480 | Basically, like I was saying last time,

00:22:34.240 | stupid is as stupid does and smart is as smart does.

00:22:37.920 | So if the dolphins are basically super smart,

00:22:41.840 | figured out the meaning of life

00:22:43.040 | and just go around playing with water all day,

00:22:45.200 | which is probably the meaning of life,

00:22:46.400 | then we wouldn't know

00:22:50.160 | because all they're doing is kicking water,

00:22:51.680 | just like sharks are,

00:22:52.640 | and sharks are probably pretty stupid.

00:22:54.400 | So basically it's very difficult

00:22:57.120 | to sort of judge a species intelligence

00:22:59.280 | unless they kind of go out of their way to demonstrate it.

00:23:01.600 | - Yeah, and that's instructive for our understanding

00:23:06.240 | of any kind of life form.

00:23:07.760 | You know, I recently talked to Sarah Seager

00:23:10.960 | looking for life out there on other planets.

00:23:13.840 | It'd be fascinating to think

00:23:16.320 | if we discover a habitable planet outside of Earth

00:23:21.120 | in one day, maybe many centuries away,

00:23:23.200 | or be able to travel with like a robot there,

00:23:26.080 | how would we actually know that this species

00:23:30.560 | would probably be able to detect that it's a living being,

00:23:33.520 | but how would we know if it's an intelligent being?

00:23:37.120 | I mean, it's both exciting and terrifying

00:23:41.840 | to sort of come face to face with a life form

00:23:46.160 | that's of another world,

00:23:48.320 | like something that clearly is moving in a,

00:23:51.200 | how would you say, like a deliberate way,

00:23:54.960 | and to then like ask,

00:23:57.840 | "Well, how do I ask that thing whether it's intelligent?"

00:24:01.920 | - No, but the question that you're asking

00:24:03.840 | is applicable to every species on the Earth now.

00:24:07.600 | - On Earth now, yeah.

00:24:08.320 | - Yeah, so basically, you know, dolphins are a great example.

00:24:11.280 | We know that they're clearly capable hardware-wise

00:24:15.520 | and behavior-wise of intelligence.

00:24:17.840 | You know, how do we communicate?

00:24:20.000 | So basically, if your question is about

00:24:21.760 | crossing species boundaries of communication,

00:24:23.680 | the way that I wanna put it is that

00:24:28.240 | humans have achieved a level of sophistication

00:24:32.880 | in our behaviors, in our communication, in our language,

00:24:35.760 | in our ways of expressing ourselves,

00:24:38.240 | that I have no doubt that if we encountered

00:24:43.200 | a human-like form of intelligence,

00:24:45.360 | we'd figure out their language in a few weeks.

00:24:47.440 | Like, it'd be just fine, as long as, you know,

00:24:50.400 | of course, they're both trusting each other

00:24:52.720 | and not annihilating each other

00:24:53.920 | and not sort of fearing each other and attacking each other.

00:24:56.960 | - What about, let me ask, just out of curiosity

00:25:00.480 | into science fiction land a little bit,

00:25:02.000 | if, so clearly, you're one of the top scientists

00:25:05.920 | in the world, so if we were to discover an alien life form,

00:25:10.720 | you would be brought in to study his genetics,

00:25:15.600 | do you think the epigenome that we talked about,

00:25:18.160 | the genome, the code, the digital code that underlies

00:25:22.240 | that alien life form would be similar to ours?

00:25:24.480 | Like, in fundamental ways, maybe not exactly,

00:25:29.840 | but in fundamental ways of how it's structured?

00:25:32.320 | - Yeah, so you're getting to the very definition of life.

00:25:35.440 | You're getting to the very definition of

00:25:37.280 | what makes life life and how do we decode that life?

00:25:41.920 | And it's so easy to think that every life form

00:25:45.600 | would basically have to, you know, like oxygen,

00:25:48.080 | have to like heat from the sun and rely on sort of being

00:25:53.040 | in the habitable zone of, you know, its solar system

00:25:56.960 | and so on and so forth.

00:25:58.080 | But I think we have to sort of go beyond this sort of,

00:26:02.320 | oh, life on another planet must be exactly

00:26:05.200 | like life is on Earth, because of course, life on Earth

00:26:08.000 | happens to rely on the proximity to the sun

00:26:11.280 | and benefit from that amount of energy.

00:26:13.360 | But we're talking at timescales of human life

00:26:18.800 | where we kind of live, I don't know, between,

00:26:21.920 | and I'm gonna be super wide here,

00:26:23.760 | we're gonna live between six Earth months

00:26:26.720 | and, you know, 200 Earth months or 200 Earth years.

00:26:31.200 | So basically, if you look at the timescale

00:26:34.320 | that we inhabit on Earth, it is very much dictated

00:26:37.600 | by the amount of energy that we receive from the sun.

00:26:40.480 | If you look at, I don't know, Europa, you know,

00:26:43.600 | the smallest, the fourth smallest moon of Jupiter,

00:26:47.120 | the smallest of the Galilean moons,

00:26:48.720 | and also the smallest in its distance from Jupiter,

00:26:52.000 | it has an iron core, it has a rock exterior,

00:26:58.640 | it has ice all around it,

00:27:02.000 | and it has probably massive liquid oceans underneath.

00:27:07.200 | And the gravitational pull of Jupiter

00:27:10.960 | is probably creating all kinds of movement under that ice.

00:27:14.240 | How did life evolve on Earth?

00:27:17.600 | Yes, sure, life now, most of life that we,

00:27:22.080 | above the surface, look at has to do with

00:27:25.760 | exploiting the solar energy for, you know,

00:27:30.720 | our daily behavior.

00:27:32.000 | But that's not the case everywhere on the planet.

00:27:33.680 | If you look at the bottom of the ocean,

00:27:37.120 | there are hydrothermal vents.

00:27:38.960 | There's both black smokers and white smokers,

00:27:41.280 | and they are near these volcanic, you know,

00:27:45.680 | ducts that basically emanate a massive amount of energy

00:27:50.240 | from the core of our planet.

00:27:52.640 | What does life need?

00:27:53.600 | It needs energy.

00:27:54.480 | Does it need energy from the sun?

00:27:57.280 | It couldn't care less.

00:27:58.160 | Does it need energy from, you know, the Earth itself?

00:28:01.600 | Yeah, possibly, it could use that.

00:28:04.720 | And if you look at how did life evolve on,

00:28:07.840 | you know, on Earth, there are many theories.

00:28:10.560 | I mean, a kind of silly theory is that it came from outer space,

00:28:14.000 | that basically there's a meteorite out there

00:28:15.760 | that sort of landed on Earth and brought with it DNA material.

00:28:19.280 | I think it's a little silly

00:28:20.160 | because it kind of pushes the buck down the road.

00:28:22.160 | Basically, the next question is how did it evolve over there?

00:28:24.720 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:28:25.280 | - Whereas our planet has basically all of the right ingredients.

00:28:28.320 | Why wouldn't it evolve here?

00:28:29.440 | So basically, let's kind of ignore that one.

00:28:31.040 | And now the two other competing hypotheses

00:28:32.800 | are from the outside in or from the inside out.

00:28:35.760 | - What's that mean?

00:28:36.640 | - From the outside in means from the surface

00:28:38.640 | to the bottom of the ocean.

00:28:39.600 | - Ah.

00:28:40.400 | - From the inside out means

00:28:42.080 | from the bottom of the ocean to the surface.

00:28:43.840 | So life on the surface is pretty brutal.

00:28:49.360 | Life obviously evolved in the water

00:28:54.880 | and then there was an out of water event.

00:28:56.960 | But basically, before it exited,

00:29:01.280 | it was clearly in the water,

00:29:02.640 | which is a much nicer and shielded environment.

00:29:04.720 | - So just to be clear, on the surface,

00:29:07.200 | are you referring to the--

00:29:09.200 | - The surface of the sea or the bottom of the sea.

00:29:12.080 | - Versus the bottom of the sea.

00:29:15.440 | And you're saying life on the surface is harsh.

00:29:19.200 | - Life outside the water is horrible.

00:29:23.440 | It takes huge amounts of evolutionary innovations

00:29:27.600 | to sustain living outside the water.

00:29:29.440 | - That's so interesting.

00:29:32.240 | Why is that?

00:29:33.120 | So it's easier to, life is easier in the water.

00:29:36.480 | Maybe, see, I'm telling dolphins--

00:29:38.080 | - We are 70% water.

00:29:39.760 | No, dolphins went back into the water.

00:29:41.440 | - Really?

00:29:42.320 | - Of course.

00:29:42.560 | - 'Cause dolphins are mammals.

00:29:43.920 | - Of course, yeah.

00:29:44.960 | - Interesting.

00:29:45.760 | Well, again, they might be smarter.

00:29:47.280 | They went back.

00:29:47.920 | They're like, "Screw this."

00:29:49.200 | - So if you basically think about the fact

00:29:53.840 | that we are 70% water,

00:29:55.280 | we're basically transporting the sea with us

00:29:59.040 | outside the sea.

00:30:00.160 | (Lex laughs)

00:30:01.440 | You know, if we don't have water for about 24 hours,

00:30:05.680 | we're dry.

00:30:06.240 | - Yeah.

00:30:06.800 | - And if you look at life under the sea,

00:30:09.600 | I mean, I don't know if you're a diver,

00:30:10.880 | but when you go diving, your brain explodes.

00:30:13.920 | Again, when I say the boring life forms

00:30:17.120 | is what we see all the time, like tetrapods.

00:30:19.840 | I mean, what a stupid, boring body plan.

00:30:22.720 | Seriously.

00:30:23.360 | Like, just go diving and you'll see

00:30:26.160 | that a tiny little minority of the stuff under the sea,

00:30:29.360 | under the surface of the sea, is actually tetrapods.

00:30:31.600 | It's like snails with all kinds of crazy appendages

00:30:36.320 | and colors and round things and five-way symmetric things

00:30:40.320 | and eight-way symmetric things,

00:30:42.640 | all kinds of crazy body plans.

00:30:44.240 | And only the tetrapod fish managed to get out.

00:30:48.640 | And then they gave rise to all the boring plans

00:30:50.560 | we kind of see today of basically humans with four limbs,

00:30:56.160 | birds with four limbs, lizards with four limbs,

00:30:58.480 | and you know, right?

00:31:00.960 | It's kind of boring.

00:31:01.920 | If you look at, by comparison,

00:31:03.760 | life underwater is teeming with diversity.

00:31:06.160 | So now let's roll back the clock

00:31:08.560 | and basically say where did life in the ocean come from?

00:31:12.160 | - The three--

00:31:12.640 | - From the surface or from the bottom?

00:31:14.400 | - Exactly, those two options you were mentioning.

00:31:16.080 | - Exactly.

00:31:16.800 | So basically, life on the surface is one option.

00:31:20.320 | And then the idea there is that there's tides

00:31:23.440 | with the moon and the sun sort of causing

00:31:25.760 | all this movement and this movement is basically

00:31:28.240 | causing nutrients to sort of coalesce

00:31:31.120 | and bounce around, et cetera.

00:31:32.880 | That's one option.

00:31:33.840 | The second option, massive amount of energy

00:31:36.720 | under, from the core of our planet,

00:31:40.560 | basically exploited,

00:31:43.200 | leading to these basic ingredients of life forms.

00:31:47.920 | And what are these basic ingredients?

00:31:49.200 | Metabolism, being able to take energy

00:31:52.400 | from the environment and put it as part of yourself.

00:31:56.080 | Metabolism, it basically means transformation,

00:31:58.800 | again, in the Greek.

00:31:59.680 | (laughs)

00:32:01.480 | - It basically means taking stuff from,

00:32:05.200 | you know, like nutrients or energy source

00:32:08.000 | or anything and then making it your own.

00:32:09.920 | The second one is compartmentalization.

00:32:11.840 | If there's no notion of self, there can't be evolution.

00:32:16.320 | You have to know where your own boundaries end

00:32:18.480 | and where the non-self boundaries begin.

00:32:20.640 | And that's basically the lipid bilayer nowadays,

00:32:24.720 | which is extremely simple to form.

00:32:27.040 | It's basically just a bunch of lipids

00:32:28.560 | and then they eventually just self-organize

00:32:30.480 | into a membrane.

00:32:31.120 | So that's a very natural way of forming a self.

00:32:34.480 | And then the third component is replication.

00:32:39.040 | Replication doesn't need to be self-replication.

00:32:42.800 | It could be A helps make more of B,

00:32:45.760 | B helps make more of C,

00:32:47.440 | and C helps make more of A.

00:32:49.280 | Any kind of self-reinforcement

00:32:52.720 | is what you need to ignite the process of evolution.

00:32:55.360 | After you've ignited that process,

00:32:57.520 | you know, I don't wanna say all hell breaks loose,

00:33:00.560 | but all paradise breaks loose.

00:33:01.760 | (laughs)

00:33:02.320 | So basically you then, boom, you know, have life going.

00:33:06.880 | And the moment you have A, B, C,

00:33:08.720 | some kind of thing looping back onto A,

00:33:10.880 | you can make modifications and you can improve

00:33:14.800 | and then you let natural selection work.

00:33:16.480 | - Is there some element of that that's like,

00:33:21.200 | like some state representation that stores information?

00:33:24.880 | Like maybe I should say information.

00:33:26.640 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:33:27.280 | - Is that a fundamental part of life?

00:33:28.560 | - So we like to think of life

00:33:31.200 | as the information propagation, which is DNA,

00:33:34.800 | the messenger, which is RNA,

00:33:37.200 | and then the action, which is protein.

00:33:39.920 | So basically DNA, we think is an essential part of life.

00:33:45.040 | That's where the storage is.

00:33:48.240 | And therefore that early life forms

00:33:49.760 | must have had some kind of storage medium, DNA.

00:33:52.320 | If you look at how life actually evolved,

00:33:55.600 | DNA was invented much later.

00:33:58.080 | Proteins were invented later.

00:34:01.920 | And RNA was found by itself, thank you very much,

00:34:06.480 | in an RNA world.

00:34:08.080 | So the early version of life as we know it today

00:34:12.400 | was in fact RNA molecules performing all of the functions.

00:34:17.760 | The RNA molecule itself was the protein actuator

00:34:22.240 | by creating three-dimensional folds

00:34:25.600 | through self hybridization.

00:34:26.800 | - Self what?

00:34:28.160 | - Self hybridization.

00:34:29.360 | So basically the same way that DNA molecules

00:34:31.280 | can hybridize with themselves

00:34:32.400 | and basically form this double helix.

00:34:34.400 | The single-stranded RNA molecule

00:34:37.280 | can form partial double helices in various places,

00:34:41.760 | creating structure as if you had a long string

00:34:45.120 | with complementary parts

00:34:46.400 | and you could then sort of design

00:34:48.000 | kind of like origami-like structures

00:34:50.240 | that will fold onto themselves.

00:34:51.520 | And then you can make any shape from that.

00:34:53.920 | That early RNA world eventually got to replication

00:35:00.320 | where enzymes encoded in RNA would replicate RNA itself.

00:35:07.280 | And then that process basically kicked off evolution.

00:35:12.240 | And that process of evolution then

00:35:15.360 | led to major innovations.

00:35:16.880 | The first innovation was translation.

00:35:20.080 | So you start with an RNA molecule

00:35:23.120 | and you translate it into another kind of form.

00:35:25.680 | And that's the first kind of encoding.

00:35:27.040 | You're like, well, do you need some kind of code?

00:35:29.120 | Yeah, but the code was in fact one thing.

00:35:33.280 | It was conflated with the actuators.

00:35:35.920 | The actuators were separated from the code only later on.

00:35:39.760 | So you first had the self-replicating code

00:35:42.480 | which was also the actuator.

00:35:44.320 | And then you kind of have a functionalization,

00:35:46.960 | partitioning of the functionalization,

00:35:49.360 | a sub-functionalization of the proteins

00:35:52.160 | that are now gonna be the workhorse of life

00:35:54.160 | but they're not self-replicating.

00:35:56.400 | The code remains the RNA.

00:35:58.080 | So the most beautiful and most complex RNA machine

00:36:02.960 | known to man is the ribosome.

00:36:04.640 | And the ribosome is this massive factory

00:36:08.560 | that is able to translate RNA into protein.

00:36:13.200 | The ribosome, I mean, if you want, I don't know,

00:36:15.200 | divine intervention in the history of life,

00:36:17.360 | the ribosome is it.

00:36:18.320 | (laughs)

00:36:18.880 | - That's one of the great invention

00:36:20.400 | in the history of life.

00:36:21.280 | - It's, yeah.

00:36:22.640 | But again, you can't think of great inventions

00:36:24.480 | as one-time steps.

00:36:25.840 | They're basically the culmination

00:36:29.360 | of probably many competing software infrastructures

00:36:32.800 | for life preservation that won out.

00:36:36.240 | And then when the ribosome was so efficient

00:36:38.560 | at making proteins,

00:36:39.520 | all the other ones basically died out.

00:36:42.400 | And then the life forms that were using

00:36:44.800 | the modern ribosome

00:36:45.840 | were basically the more successful ones

00:36:48.640 | because it could make proteins.

00:36:49.760 | And now those proteins are much more versatile

00:36:54.400 | because RNA only has four bases.

00:36:56.000 | Proteins eventually have 20 amino acids,

00:36:59.840 | not initially, but eventually.

00:37:01.200 | And then they can form in much more complex shapes

00:37:05.120 | and they can create all kinds of additional machines,

00:37:06.960 | one of which is reverse transcriptase.

00:37:11.920 | So you basically now have RNA.

00:37:13.440 | Again, we like to think of transcription as the normal,

00:37:16.960 | reverse transcription as the oddball.

00:37:18.400 | Well, RNA preceded DNA.

00:37:21.440 | So reverse transcription actually was the first invention

00:37:24.320 | before transcription itself.

00:37:25.600 | So basically RNA invents proteins,

00:37:29.200 | RNA and proteins together invent DNA.

00:37:32.080 | So you now have a more stable medium,

00:37:35.600 | a more stable backbone

00:37:37.840 | with two helices instead of one.

00:37:41.600 | Two strands instead of one, the double helix.

00:37:43.920 | And RNA basically says, "Listen, I'm tired.

00:37:47.120 | "I'm gonna delegate all information storage to DNA

00:37:50.720 | "and I'm gonna delegate most actuation to proteins."

00:37:55.280 | - Proteins.

00:37:55.920 | But that's, to you, is not like a,

00:37:58.160 | that's just an efficiency thing.

00:38:01.280 | It's not a fundamentally new invention.

00:38:04.320 | - Correct.

00:38:04.640 | That's why when you're asking,

00:38:05.680 | "Is a separate information storage medium

00:38:08.240 | "a definition of life?"

00:38:09.600 | I'm like, "No, any kind of self-preservation,

00:38:13.120 | "self-reinforcement."

00:38:15.040 | And it didn't need to be RNA-based initially.

00:38:18.400 | It didn't need to be self-replication initially.

00:38:21.200 | You just need to have enough RNA molecules

00:38:23.360 | randomly arising that reinforce each other

00:38:26.560 | that ultimately lead to the closing of that loop

00:38:32.480 | and the ignition of the evolutionary process.

00:38:34.080 | - Can we just rewind a little bit?

00:38:36.640 | Like if you were to bet all your money

00:38:38.320 | on the two options in terms of where life started--

00:38:41.120 | - Probably the bottom.

00:38:42.320 | - At the bottom, I don't know if this is answerable,

00:38:45.520 | but how hard is the first step?

00:38:49.360 | Or if there's something interesting you can say

00:38:52.080 | about that first leap--

00:38:53.360 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:54.320 | - About from not life to life.

00:38:56.880 | - Yeah, I think it's inevitable.

00:38:59.280 | - On Earth or just--

00:39:01.600 | - In the universe.

00:39:02.640 | (Lex laughing)

00:39:03.440 | I think it's inevitable.

00:39:04.400 | If you look at Europa, you know, going back--

00:39:08.080 | - The moon of Jupiter?

00:39:10.240 | - It's also a really nice song by Santana.

00:39:12.000 | (Lex laughing)

00:39:13.680 | - Europa basically has all the ingredients.

00:39:16.960 | It has, you know, the core that can emit energy.

00:39:20.800 | It has the shielding through the ice sheet,

00:39:24.400 | protecting it just like an atmosphere would.

00:39:27.920 | It even has a layer of oxygen,

00:39:29.280 | probably sufficiently dense to sustain life.

00:39:32.320 | So my guess is that there's probably

00:39:37.920 | a independently arisen life form already teeming in Europa

00:39:43.920 | because as soon as it--

00:39:44.960 | - Today?

00:39:45.460 | - Today.

00:39:45.960 | - Is that exciting or terrifying to you?

00:39:48.640 | (Lex laughing)

00:39:50.640 | - It's, I mean, as a scientist,

00:39:53.600 | I can't wait to see non-DNA-based life forms.

00:39:57.520 | I can't wait because we are so born,

00:40:01.040 | you know, sort of borné,

00:40:06.800 | as I would say in French,

00:40:07.920 | but basically we're sort of, you know,

00:40:10.000 | we are so narrow-minded in our thinking

00:40:13.440 | of what life should look like

00:40:15.840 | that I can't wait for all that to just be blown away

00:40:18.800 | by the discovery of life elsewhere.

00:40:21.040 | - Let me bring you into another science fiction scenario.

00:40:24.720 | So on that point, if we discover life on Europa

00:40:29.280 | and you were brought in,

00:40:31.680 | you seem very excited,

00:40:34.880 | but how would you start looking at that life

00:40:39.200 | in a way that's useful to you as a scientist,

00:40:44.000 | but also not going to kill all of us?

00:40:46.400 | (Lex laughing)

00:40:47.520 | So like, to me, it's a little bit scary

00:40:49.920 | because not because it's a malevolent life,

00:40:54.000 | like it's a dictator petting like a cat, it's evil,

00:40:58.240 | but just the way life is,

00:41:00.080 | it seems to be very good at conquering other life.

00:41:04.080 | - So there's a lot of science fiction movies

00:41:06.240 | based on that principle.

00:41:07.200 | - Yeah.

00:41:07.760 | - And that's sort of what causes the public to be so scared.

00:41:11.360 | But if you think about sort of,

00:41:12.560 | would Europa life be scared of humans

00:41:16.240 | coming over and taking over?

00:41:17.360 | Chances are no, not even like Earth bacteria,

00:41:20.480 | because Earth bacteria would be wiped out

00:41:22.480 | in an instant in this foreign world

00:41:24.720 | because they don't know how to metabolize energy

00:41:28.240 | that doesn't come from the types of energy sources

00:41:30.960 | that are here.

00:41:32.320 | The levels of acidity may just kill us all off.

00:41:35.680 | And at the same way, in the converse way,

00:41:38.800 | if you bring life from Europa on Earth,

00:41:40.640 | it'll die instantly because it's too hot.

00:41:42.480 | Or because it doesn't need to know how to cope with,

00:41:46.320 | I don't know, the sun's radiation

00:41:47.920 | so close to this completely inhabitable zone

00:41:50.960 | by their standards.

00:41:51.840 | (Lex laughing)

00:41:53.040 | - So--

00:41:53.360 | - So what we call the habitable zone

00:41:55.120 | might actually be the inhabitable zone.

00:41:56.400 | - Inhabitable for them.

00:41:57.360 | So the difference,

00:41:59.120 | if the environments are sufficiently different,

00:42:01.440 | you think we'll just not be able to even attack each other

00:42:05.200 | and the basic--

00:42:05.840 | - It'll take massive amounts of engineering

00:42:08.800 | to create machines that will go there

00:42:12.320 | and sample the oceans,

00:42:15.920 | basically drill through the layers of ice

00:42:19.360 | to basically sample and see what life is like there.

00:42:23.520 | And detecting it will probably be trivial.

00:42:27.120 | It definitely won't be DNA-based.

00:42:28.720 | It's not like we're gonna send a sequencer.

00:42:30.880 | But it'll be some other kind of combination of chemicals

00:42:34.960 | that will look non-random.

00:42:36.240 | - So if you had to bet,

00:42:37.120 | if I took that life form we find in Europa

00:42:41.200 | and put it on a sandwich that you're eating

00:42:43.840 | and eat that sandwich--

00:42:45.520 | - It'll taste just fine.

00:42:46.800 | - And you'll be, well, I know about that.

00:42:49.600 | (Lex laughing)

00:42:50.240 | I don't know, actually, will it taste fine?

00:42:52.000 | That's interesting.

00:42:52.720 | - So the other question is,

00:42:53.760 | do we have taste receptors for this?

00:42:56.400 | - Do you understand?

00:42:56.800 | - So where does our taste come from?

00:42:58.400 | - Oh, well, the chemistry.

00:42:58.880 | - Basically adaptations to chemical molecules

00:43:01.680 | that we are used to seeing.

00:43:03.040 | - So you think even the chemistry--

00:43:03.520 | - We don't have taste buds for things

00:43:04.880 | we don't even know about.

00:43:05.920 | - Wow.

00:43:06.240 | - So we won't, yeah, we won't be able to know

00:43:07.840 | that this chemical tastes funny.

00:43:09.200 | - But you think it won't be,

00:43:10.240 | it's likely not to be dangerous.

00:43:13.120 | Like it won't know how to even interact.

00:43:16.160 | Do you think our immune system will even detect

00:43:19.280 | that something weird is going on?

00:43:20.480 | - Probably.

00:43:21.120 | (Lex laughing)

00:43:22.080 | And it'll be very easy to detect

00:43:23.360 | because it'll be very different from us.

00:43:24.960 | - Very weird.

00:43:25.440 | - But it won't be able to sort of attack.

00:43:27.280 | I mean, the scene from, I don't know, Independence Day,

00:43:30.000 | where like they're communicating with the alien computer

00:43:32.080 | and they're like, "Ooh, I'm in."

00:43:32.880 | (Lex laughing)

00:43:34.080 | I mean, it's hilarious

00:43:34.960 | 'cause like Macs and PCs have trouble communicating.

00:43:37.520 | (both laughing)

00:43:39.840 | I mean, let alone an alien technology or even alien DNA.

00:43:43.120 | - So, okay, now I was talking about you

00:43:45.760 | being a scientist on Earth,

00:43:46.880 | but say you were a scientist

00:43:49.040 | that was shipped over to Europa

00:43:50.640 | to investigate if there's life,

00:43:52.960 | what would you look for in terms of signs of life?

00:43:55.760 | - Life is unmistakable, I would say.

00:44:00.720 | The way that life transforms a planet surrounding it

00:44:04.080 | is not the kind of thing that you would expect

00:44:07.200 | from the physical laws alone.

00:44:08.640 | So, I would say that as soon as life arises,

00:44:15.200 | it creates this compartmentalization,

00:44:18.080 | it starts pushing things away,

00:44:20.160 | it starts sort of keeping things inside that are self,

00:44:23.520 | and there's a whole signature that you can see from that.

00:44:27.760 | So, when I was organizing my Meaning of Life Symposium,

00:44:31.040 | my friend who's an astrophysicist,

00:44:33.520 | basically we were deciding on what would be the themes

00:44:37.840 | for the symposium.

00:44:39.280 | And then I said, "Well, we're gonna have biology,

00:44:41.760 | we're gonna have physics."

00:44:42.400 | And she's like, "Oh, come on,

00:44:44.080 | biology is just a small part of physics."

00:44:46.160 | (both laughing)

00:44:48.640 | - Everything's a small part of physics, right?

00:44:50.240 | - And I mean, in many ways it is,

00:44:53.280 | but my immediate answer was, "No, no, no, no, wait.

00:44:55.600 | Life challenges physics, it supersedes physics,

00:45:00.160 | it sort of fights against physics."

00:45:02.560 | And that's what I would look for in Europa,

00:45:05.040 | I would basically look for this fight against physics

00:45:08.400 | for anything that sort of signatures of,

00:45:11.040 | not just entropy at work, not just things diffusing away,

00:45:13.760 | not just gravitational pools, but clear signatures of...

00:45:18.560 | You remember when I was talking earlier

00:45:20.560 | about this whole selection for environments,

00:45:22.400 | selection for biospheres, for ecosystems,

00:45:25.120 | for these multi-organism form of life?

00:45:29.360 | And I think that's sort of the first thing

00:45:31.440 | that you can look for, chemical signatures

00:45:34.720 | that are not simply predicted

00:45:36.720 | from the reactions you would get randomly.

00:45:38.480 | - It's such a beautiful way to look at life.

00:45:40.880 | So you're basically leveraging some energy source

00:45:43.680 | to enable you to resist the physics of the universe.

00:45:47.840 | - Fighting against physics.

00:45:49.200 | (Lex laughing)

00:45:49.760 | But that's the first transformation.

00:45:51.440 | If you look at humans, we're way past that.

00:45:53.760 | - What do you mean by transformation?

00:45:55.200 | - So basically there's layers.

00:45:57.760 | I sort of see life, you know,

00:46:00.400 | when we talk about the meaning of life,

00:46:04.160 | life can be construed at many levels.

00:46:06.880 | We talked about life in the simplest form

00:46:09.040 | of sort of the ignition of evolution.

00:46:11.920 | And that's sort of the basic definition

00:46:13.520 | that you can check off, yes, it's alive.

00:46:15.360 | But when Alexander the Great was asked,

00:46:19.680 | "To whom do you owe your life?

00:46:23.440 | To your teachers or to your parents?"

00:46:27.200 | And Alexander the Great answered,

00:46:30.240 | "I owe to my parents the zine, the life itself.

00:46:35.120 | And I owe to my teachers the F-zine."

00:46:38.640 | Like euphony, F means good, the opposite of cacophony,

00:46:42.480 | which means, you know, bad.

00:46:44.160 | So F-zine in his words

00:46:49.040 | was basically living a human life, a proper life.

00:46:53.680 | So basically we can go from the zine to the F-zine.

00:46:56.880 | And that transformation has taken several additional leaps.

00:47:02.320 | So basically, you know, life on Europa,

00:47:05.360 | I'm pretty sure has gotten to the stage of

00:47:07.520 | A makes B makes C makes A again.

00:47:10.320 | But getting to the F-zine is a whole other level.

00:47:16.560 | And that level requires cooperation.

00:47:20.080 | That level requires altruism.

00:47:23.360 | That level requires specialization.

00:47:26.880 | Remember how we were talking about the RNA specializing

00:47:29.760 | into DNA for storage, proteins, and then compartmentalizations?

00:47:34.640 | And if you look at prokaryotic life, there's no nucleus.

00:47:38.080 | It's all one soup of things intermingling.

00:47:41.360 | If you look at eukaryotic life, again,

00:47:44.800 | "euk" for true, good, you know?

00:47:47.920 | So a eukaryote basically has a nucleus,

00:47:51.040 | and that's where you compartmentalize further

00:47:52.960 | the organization of the information storage

00:47:57.360 | from all of the daily activities.

00:47:59.440 | If you look at a human body plan or any animal,

00:48:02.560 | you have a compartmentalization of the germline.

00:48:04.560 | You basically have one lineage that will basically be saved

00:48:08.320 | for the future generations.

00:48:09.760 | And everything outside that lineage is almost superfluous.

00:48:14.160 | If you think about it, the rest of your body,

00:48:16.080 | all it does is ensure that that lineage

00:48:19.840 | will make it to the next generation,

00:48:21.360 | that these germlines will make it to the next generation.

00:48:23.840 | The rest is packaging.

00:48:24.720 | I'm sorry to be so blunt.

00:48:26.720 | And if you look at nutrition, we're deuterostomes.

00:48:30.880 | What does deuterostome mean?

00:48:32.240 | Deutero means second, where this is the second mouth.

00:48:36.480 | The first mouth is actually down here, it's the esophagus.

00:48:38.880 | So deuterostomes have evolved a second layer of eating,

00:48:42.800 | kind of like alien with the two mouths.

00:48:44.480 | (laughing)

00:48:46.320 | So you can think of us as alien,

00:48:47.440 | where the first mouth is up here,

00:48:49.120 | and then the second mouth is down there.

00:48:50.640 | - Is the first mouth just the physical manipulation

00:48:55.040 | of the food to make it more consumable?

00:48:56.720 | - Correct, correct.

00:48:57.360 | And basically, again, if you look at a worm,

00:49:01.040 | it's an extremely simple life form.

00:49:02.720 | It basically has a mouth, it has an anus,

00:49:05.040 | and it has just some organs in between

00:49:07.120 | that consume the food and just spit out poo.

00:49:10.720 | Humans are basically a fancy form of that.

00:49:13.440 | So you basically have the mouth,

00:49:15.680 | you have the digestive tract,

00:49:17.520 | and then you have limbs to get better at getting food.

00:49:19.760 | You have eyesight, hearing, et cetera,

00:49:22.960 | to get better at getting food.

00:49:24.400 | - Yeah.

00:49:24.880 | - And then you have, of course, the germline.

00:49:26.720 | And all of this food part,

00:49:28.400 | it's just auxiliary to the germline.

00:49:30.560 | So you basically have layers of addition,

00:49:32.960 | of compartmentalization, of specialization,

00:49:35.600 | on top of this zine to get all the way to the earth zine.

00:49:39.360 | - Yeah, so the worm is like Windows 95,

00:49:42.480 | very few features, very basic.

00:49:44.320 | And then us humans are like Windows Vista,

00:49:47.520 | Windows 10, whatever it is.

00:49:48.800 | - Well, a few innovations beyond that.

00:49:51.520 | - Beyond that, all right.

00:49:52.480 | - Where, I don't know, Linux.

00:49:53.840 | - We're Windows 2000, at least put it that way.

00:49:55.680 | (laughing)

00:49:56.160 | - So, okay, that's such a fascinating way

00:49:58.800 | to look at life as a set of transformations.

00:50:01.200 | - Exactly.

00:50:01.920 | - So is there some interesting transformations

00:50:04.800 | to our history here on earth that appeal to you?

00:50:08.240 | - Of course.

00:50:08.960 | - And what are the most brilliant innovations

00:50:11.360 | and transformations, you could say?

00:50:12.240 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:50:13.200 | I mean, this is such a fascinating question.

00:50:15.280 | Of course, like, you know,

00:50:16.320 | we're talking about basic, basic life forms,

00:50:18.160 | and we're talking about eukaryotic life forms.

00:50:20.480 | And then the next big transformation

00:50:22.320 | is multicellular life forms,

00:50:24.720 | where the specialization separates the germline

00:50:28.240 | from everything else that accompanies it

00:50:30.400 | and sort of carries it.

00:50:31.920 | And then that specialization then sort of has

00:50:34.640 | this massive new innovation, like above the second mouth,

00:50:38.720 | which is this massive brain.

00:50:40.640 | And this massive brain is basically something

00:50:43.760 | that arises much, much later on.

00:50:46.640 | Basically, you know, notochords,

00:50:48.160 | like having the first spinal cord,

00:50:50.000 | this whole concept that,

00:50:51.520 | along with these very simple layers,

00:50:54.240 | you basically now have a coordinating agent.

00:50:56.800 | And this coordinating agent is starting to make decisions.

00:51:00.160 | And remember when we were talking about free will?

00:51:03.600 | - Mm-hmm.

00:51:04.160 | - I mean, you know, as a worm is hunting for food,

00:51:07.360 | oh, it has plenty of free will.

00:51:09.280 | It can choose to, you know, follow chemotaxis to the left

00:51:12.000 | or chemotaxis to the right.

00:51:13.120 | - Yeah.

00:51:13.440 | - And maybe that's free will,

00:51:14.640 | because it's unpredictable beyond a certain level.

00:51:17.520 | So you basically now have more and more decision-making

00:51:23.600 | and coordination of all of these different body parts

00:51:27.120 | and organs by a central operating system,

00:51:29.760 | a central machine that basically will control

00:51:32.640 | the rest of the body.

00:51:34.000 | And the other thing that I love talking about

00:51:36.720 | is the different timescales at which things happen.

00:51:39.040 | You know, we were talking about the human epigenome before.

00:51:40.960 | The human epigenome is basically able to find

00:51:44.080 | what genes should be expressed

00:51:47.680 | in response to environmental stimuli

00:51:49.760 | in the order of minutes,

00:51:52.400 | and basically receive a stimulus,

00:51:54.560 | transfer all that data

00:51:55.920 | through this humongously long string of searching,

00:51:59.360 | and then sort of find what genes to turn on,

00:52:02.800 | and then create all that.

00:52:04.320 | All of that is happening in the timescale of minutes,

00:52:07.040 | basically, you know, three minutes to half an hour.

00:52:09.440 | That's the expression response.

00:52:12.320 | But our daily life doesn't happen

00:52:13.920 | on the order of three minutes to half an hour.

00:52:15.760 | It happens on the order of milliseconds.

00:52:17.680 | Like I throw a ball at you, you catch it right away.

00:52:19.600 | No gene expression changes there.

00:52:21.840 | You just don't have time to do that.

00:52:23.120 | So you basically have a layer of control

00:52:26.800 | built on a hardware that supports it,

00:52:30.800 | but that hardware itself lives in a different timescale

00:52:34.880 | than the controlling machine on top of that.

00:52:36.800 | - Is that an accident, by the way?

00:52:38.320 | Is that like a feature?

00:52:39.200 | Was it possible for life to have evolved

00:52:42.000 | where the daily life of the organism

00:52:46.000 | as it interacts with its environment

00:52:48.000 | was on a timescale similar to the way our internals work?

00:52:53.280 | - If you look at trees,

00:52:55.360 | they look kind of boring and stupid.

00:52:57.760 | You're like looking at a tree, like stupid.

00:52:59.840 | If you speed up the movie of a tree

00:53:02.000 | from spring until October,

00:53:04.080 | you'll be like, "Oh my God, it's intelligent."

00:53:05.600 | And the reason for that is that at that timescale,

00:53:09.840 | the tree is basically saying,

00:53:11.120 | "Oh, I'm looking for a thing to catch onto.

00:53:14.320 | "Ooh, I just caught onto that.

00:53:15.440 | "I'm gonna grow more here.

00:53:16.400 | "I'm gonna spawn there," et cetera.

00:53:18.080 | Like I can see the trees in my garden just growing

00:53:20.800 | and sort of looping around.

00:53:22.480 | It's all a matter of timescale.

00:53:26.400 | And if you look at the human timescale,

00:53:28.640 | remember we were talking about neoteny

00:53:30.960 | the last time around,

00:53:32.000 | the whole fact that our young are pretty useless

00:53:35.200 | until maybe a few months of age,

00:53:38.720 | if not a few years of age,

00:53:39.920 | if not, I don't know, getting out of college.

00:53:41.520 | And then we basically hold them,

00:53:45.840 | enabling their brain to continue being malleable

00:53:50.000 | and infusing it with knowledge and thoughts

00:53:53.760 | as that period of neoteny increases and expands.

00:53:57.360 | If you fast forward, I don't know,

00:54:00.480 | another million years.

00:54:01.440 | So humans have only been around,

00:54:04.720 | different from apes for about that long.

00:54:06.640 | Jump another unit of that,

00:54:10.240 | another human-gem divergence.

00:54:11.680 | What could happen?

00:54:13.360 | From an evolutionary timescale, a lot.

00:54:17.040 | One of the things that's happening already

00:54:19.920 | is expansion of human lifespan.

00:54:21.600 | We have longer and longer periods before we mature

00:54:25.520 | and we have longer and longer periods

00:54:27.920 | before we have babies.

00:54:29.440 | So intergenerational distance is grown from,

00:54:32.880 | I don't know, 16 years to 40 years.

00:54:35.200 | - You're saying that's in the genetics.

00:54:38.000 | - No, no, not necessarily.

00:54:40.400 | But it's sort of an environmental tendency that's happening.

00:54:43.600 | But as we medically expand human lifespan,

00:54:49.040 | the generations might actually be pushed

00:54:54.240 | instead of 40 years to 60 years, to 100 years.

00:54:56.880 | - Like if we look at the long arc of the evolutionary history.

00:55:00.160 | - Exactly.

00:55:00.880 | So as we start thinking about intergalactic travel now.

00:55:04.400 | (Lex laughing)

00:55:06.720 | - Sorry, that's a heck of a transition.

00:55:10.080 | Yeah, so let's talk about intergalactic travel.

00:55:12.240 | - No, no, no, no, no.

00:55:12.960 | As we as a species start thinking about,

00:55:15.760 | I'm talking about these transitions that are happening.

00:55:18.160 | - Oh, that's awesome.

00:55:19.760 | - Continuing along these transitions,

00:55:21.360 | what does the future hold in the next million years?

00:55:23.600 | So the concept of us going to another planet,

00:55:26.800 | and that taking three human lifetimes,

00:55:29.600 | might be a joke if the human lifetime

00:55:31.760 | starts being 400 years or 800 years.

00:55:35.440 | So imagine--

00:55:37.280 | - It's all timescale.

00:55:38.160 | - It's all timescale, just different timescales.

00:55:40.160 | You asked me offline whether I would like to live forever.

00:55:43.520 | I mean, my answer is absolutely.

00:55:46.800 | And there's many different types of forevers.

00:55:49.760 | One forever is, do I want to live today forever?

00:55:55.360 | Kind of like Groundhog Day.

00:55:56.800 | And the answer is absolutely.

00:55:58.800 | The stuff that I want to learn today

00:56:00.160 | will probably take a lifetime just to learn,

00:56:03.440 | you know, basically to clear my to-do list for the day.

00:56:05.600 | - You mean like relive the day?

00:56:07.040 | - Relive the day.

00:56:07.760 | - And then pick up different things

00:56:09.760 | from the richness of the experiences

00:56:11.440 | that are all in today.

00:56:12.320 | - Exactly.

00:56:12.720 | There's just so much happening in the world every single day.

00:56:15.360 | So much knowledge that has happened already,

00:56:17.360 | that just to catch up on that

00:56:18.800 | will probably take me around forever.

00:56:20.160 | - On that point, I would just love to see you

00:56:23.920 | in the Groundhog movie, just...

00:56:25.760 | Because you're so naturally as a scientist,

00:56:29.760 | but just the way your mind works beautifully,

00:56:32.480 | just all the richness of the experiences

00:56:34.400 | that you will pick up from that.

00:56:35.600 | It's a beautiful visual.

00:56:37.920 | - I try to live each day as if it was Groundhog Day.

00:56:41.040 | I'm basically every single day waking up and saying,

00:56:43.280 | all right, how would Bill Murray get out of that one?

00:56:45.600 | - Well, you know what?

00:56:46.400 | On a funny tangent, I got a chance to go to

00:56:53.760 | Neuralink demonstration event.

00:56:55.920 | I'm not sure if you're familiar with Neuralink.

00:56:57.600 | I talked to Elon for a while,

00:57:00.800 | and one of the funny things he said

00:57:03.920 | on this Groundhog Day thing is,

00:57:06.480 | it's a beautiful dream to eventually

00:57:10.000 | be able to replay our memories.

00:57:11.840 | So we're kind of these recording machines.

00:57:14.320 | Our brain is kind of maybe a noisy

00:57:17.520 | recording machine of memories.

00:57:18.960 | And it would be beautiful if we can,

00:57:22.800 | someday in the future, maybe far into the future,

00:57:26.080 | be able to, like in the Groundhog Day situation, replay that.

00:57:29.680 | And the funny comment that stuck with me

00:57:31.440 | is he said that maybe this, our conversation now,

00:57:36.240 | is a replay of a previous memory.

00:57:39.280 | And that stuck with me because

00:57:41.440 | it would probably be my replay.

00:57:43.840 | Who the hell am I?

00:57:45.280 | I'm just some idiot guy.

00:57:46.880 | But Elon Musk is, probably because of SpaceX and so on,

00:57:52.080 | is probably going to be remembered as a special person,

00:57:54.960 | one of our special apes in history.

00:57:58.000 | So if I wanted to replay a memory,

00:58:00.240 | probably be that one, talking to Elon for a while.

00:58:02.560 | - Yeah, that's awesome.

00:58:03.200 | - And that's an interesting possibility from,

00:58:06.960 | if we think about time scales,

00:58:09.920 | if we think about the richness of the experience

00:58:13.600 | through time that we humans take,

00:58:17.040 | and be able to replay some aspects of that,

00:58:20.560 | of that biology.

00:58:21.440 | That's super interesting.

00:58:22.880 | But anyway, sorry for the tangent.

00:58:25.200 | Let's, yeah, you were talking about time scales

00:58:27.520 | and the expansion of the human lifetime

00:58:32.240 | and the idea of intergalactic travel.

00:58:35.360 | - Yeah, no, but you're laughing about it.

00:58:37.600 | It's like, I can't believe you're laughing about it.

00:58:38.240 | - Yeah, no, for sure, that is the future.

00:58:39.040 | - You're talking about this.

00:58:40.000 | You're talking about exploring alien worlds

00:58:42.160 | and going to other planets.

00:58:43.280 | I mean, you know, when Sarah was here,

00:58:45.040 | she was talking about sort of going to other planets

00:58:47.040 | when we find these life.

00:58:48.640 | I mean, I'm just very naturally,

00:58:50.800 | given the topics that we've approached,

00:58:53.520 | talking about the time scale at which this will happen.

00:58:56.480 | - So you think eventually we will, human or life,

00:58:59.920 | life will expand out into the universe.

00:59:02.880 | - The point that I'm trying to make

00:59:04.960 | is that an intergalactic species

00:59:07.200 | will probably find ways to engineer its biology

00:59:10.960 | in order to expand the way that we experience time,

00:59:16.960 | expand the time scale that we experience.

00:59:19.280 | And going back to this whole concept of,

00:59:21.120 | would I like to live forever?

00:59:23.120 | Yes, I'd like to live forever,

00:59:25.200 | even if it was stuck on the same day,

00:59:27.600 | I'd love to live forever

00:59:28.880 | because I would finally have time to do all these things

00:59:30.800 | that I wanna do.

00:59:31.360 | But if living forever actually comes with a perk

00:59:35.680 | of watching the whole world evolve forever,

00:59:38.640 | I mean, that's a huge perk.

00:59:41.040 | And I would, you know, just, it'll never get boring,

00:59:43.440 | just an ever-changing world.

00:59:45.200 | And then the mind, you know,

00:59:47.600 | sort of experiment that I want you to do

00:59:50.720 | is to also ask, what if I wanted to live forever

00:59:53.600 | one day at a time every year,

00:59:57.360 | or one day at a time every decade?

00:59:58.960 | Would you choose that?

01:00:00.560 | Where you would wake up

01:00:02.400 | and the world would be 10 years later

01:00:04.240 | every single day you wake up.

01:00:05.680 | It's the opposite of Groundhog Day,

01:00:07.120 | where basically you always wake up

01:00:09.280 | and it's always 10 years later.

01:00:10.640 | - So you're saying that's such a powerful,

01:00:14.720 | interesting concept that life is more interesting

01:00:18.800 | if you're of all the life forms on earth,

01:00:22.480 | that you're the slowest one.

01:00:23.920 | - Exactly, exactly.

01:00:25.200 | - Like trees have it right.

01:00:26.640 | - Like trees have it right.

01:00:27.760 | All of trees, like, you know,

01:00:29.440 | they've been there since the Minoan civilization.

01:00:31.360 | - Yeah.

01:00:31.920 | - And, you know, that takes us back

01:00:33.200 | to the question you asked

01:00:34.480 | about sort of the transformations

01:00:36.080 | that have happened in humanity.

01:00:37.520 | The Minoan civilization is one of them.

01:00:39.440 | You know, there's this paper that was published

01:00:41.760 | just a couple of years ago by one of my friends

01:00:44.240 | that basically looked at the genetic makeup

01:00:49.600 | of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in ancient Greece

01:00:54.320 | and how they relate to modern Greeks.

01:00:56.800 | And they found that indeed

01:00:57.760 | there was very little gene flow from, you know, the outside.

01:01:02.320 | And, you know, it's fantastic to sort of think

01:01:06.960 | about these amazing civilizations

01:01:08.960 | that transform the way that human thought happens.

01:01:13.280 | That basically looked for rules in nature,

01:01:16.640 | that looked for principles,

01:01:18.320 | that looked for the standard of beauty,

01:01:21.440 | not human beauty, but beauty in the natural world.

01:01:24.800 | This whole concept that the world must be elegant

01:01:28.560 | and there must be deeper ways of understanding that world.

01:01:31.760 | To me, that's a massive transformation of our species,

01:01:35.520 | similar to, you know, the earlier transformation

01:01:38.880 | that we were talking about of even evolving a brain,

01:01:42.080 | of, you know, learning how to communicate language

01:01:46.080 | or the evolution of eyesight.

01:01:47.760 | If you look at sort of, you know,

01:01:50.480 | we're talking about these worms crawling around

01:01:52.480 | and then sensing which direction

01:01:54.080 | are the chemicals more abundant, you know, chemotaxis.

01:01:56.800 | So eventually they grow a nose,

01:02:00.240 | eventually they grow a, yeah, I mean, when I say nose,

01:02:02.560 | I mean ways of sensing chemicals.

01:02:04.400 | That's probably one of the earliest senses.

01:02:06.000 | You know, we always talk about how deep-rooted

01:02:08.320 | it is in your brain.

01:02:09.440 | That's one of the earliest senses.

01:02:10.880 | If you look at hearing, that's a much later sense.

01:02:13.120 | If you look at eyesight, that's an intermediate sense

01:02:15.680 | where you're basically sensing

01:02:17.040 | where the light direction comes from.

01:02:18.880 | That's probably something that life didn't need

01:02:20.640 | until he got, you know, into the surface

01:02:22.880 | and so on and so forth.

01:02:23.920 | So there's a lot of, you know, milestones.

01:02:28.240 | And I was talking about the latest milestone,

01:02:29.760 | which is LIGO last time,

01:02:31.680 | of being able to detect gravitational waves

01:02:34.320 | and sort of being able to sort of have a sense

01:02:37.280 | that humans haven't had before.

01:02:38.880 | - So you see that as a yet another transformation

01:02:41.760 | that gives us an extra little sense.

01:02:43.360 | - Of course.

01:02:44.000 | And now if you go back to this history of ancient Greece,

01:02:46.880 | I mean, this transformation that happened,

01:02:49.440 | I mean, of course, the Egyptians had this incredible,

01:02:52.640 | you know, civilization for thousands of years.

01:02:55.360 | But what happened in Greece was this whole concept of,

01:02:58.240 | let's break things down and understand the natural world.

01:03:01.200 | Let's break things down and understand physics.

01:03:03.200 | Let's basically build rules around architecture,

01:03:06.400 | around elegance, around, you know, statues and tragedy.

01:03:11.840 | I mean, another question that you asked me in passing

01:03:14.960 | was this whole concept of embracing the good and the bad,

01:03:18.400 | embracing the full range of human emotions.

01:03:20.720 | And if you look at Greek tragedy,

01:03:23.600 | it's the definition of that.

01:03:25.680 | It's, I mean, drama.

01:03:28.400 | I mean, again, it's a Greek word,

01:03:29.680 | but the whole concept of some problems

01:03:34.560 | that are just so vast and large

01:03:36.960 | that dying is the easy way out.

01:03:39.840 | (both laughing)

01:03:41.840 | That death, oh, that's the easy solution.

01:03:43.520 | You know, so I wanna touch a little bit on that point

01:03:47.280 | and sort of talk about this concept

01:03:52.000 | that life supersedes physics

01:03:55.600 | and that the brain supersedes life.

01:04:01.520 | That basically we have a brain that can decide

01:04:04.480 | to not follow evolution's path.

01:04:06.640 | We can decide to not have children.

01:04:08.960 | We can decide to not eat.

01:04:11.200 | We can decide to suicide.

01:04:13.360 | We can decide to sort of abolish communication

01:04:17.600 | with the outside world.

01:04:18.880 | I mean, all the things that make us human,

01:04:20.720 | we can basically decide not to do that.

01:04:23.920 | And that is basically when the brain itself

01:04:28.640 | is basically superseding what evolution problem is for.

01:04:32.640 | - Poof!

01:04:33.840 | So, okay, so one of the, it's, okay.

01:04:38.320 | My mind was already blown at the beautiful formulation

01:04:41.920 | of the idea that life is a system that resists physics.

01:04:49.280 | - Yeah.

01:04:50.000 | - And our brain, or perhaps the content of it,

01:04:53.200 | however it may be functionally,

01:04:56.000 | our brain is a thing that resists life.

01:04:59.520 | - Yes, yes.

01:05:00.800 | - You're so, you're so brilliant.

01:05:05.920 | (laughing)

01:05:06.960 | - But I want you to see all of that as continuum.

01:05:11.280 | Basically, you're sort of talking about

01:05:12.560 | the sort of individual transformations,

01:05:14.400 | but it's a path that humanity has been taking.

01:05:17.760 | - It's a transformation.

01:05:18.240 | - It's a path of transformation.

01:05:19.680 | And then I want us to think about

01:05:22.240 | what it truly means to become human.

01:05:24.880 | Like the F-zine.

01:05:26.240 | And you asked me about what motivated

01:05:28.640 | my Meaning of Life Symposium.

01:05:29.920 | What motivated it, in part,

01:05:32.240 | I mean, of course, it was an inside joke of turning 42,

01:05:35.520 | but what motivated it in part

01:05:38.960 | was actually a midlife crisis.

01:05:40.720 | So the joke that I always like to say

01:05:43.840 | is Christos Papadimitriou, a famous Greek professor

01:05:46.960 | who was previously at MIT, at Harvard,

01:05:48.560 | at Stanford, at Berkeley, everywhere.

01:05:49.760 | Brilliant, brilliant person, actually Costis' advisor.

01:05:53.680 | - Advisor, yeah.

01:05:54.640 | - So Christos Papadimitriou likes to say

01:05:57.040 | that when you're an undergrad,

01:05:59.040 | you work like a rat to get into grad school.

01:06:01.520 | And where you're grad student,

01:06:02.400 | you work like a rat to get your PhD.

01:06:04.640 | And where you're a postdoc, you work like a rat

01:06:06.880 | to get your assistant professor's degree.

01:06:08.880 | And where you're an assistant professor,

01:06:09.840 | you work like a rat to become a full professor.

01:06:12.000 | And then when you're a full professor,

01:06:14.320 | well, by then you're basically a rat.

01:06:16.880 | (both laughing)

01:06:19.120 | - Oh, that's brilliant.

01:06:19.920 | - So basically what happened to me

01:06:21.680 | is that I arrived at the end of the rat race.

01:06:24.720 | - Yeah.

01:06:25.360 | - You know, life is a rat race.

01:06:27.120 | You constantly have hurdles to jump over.

01:06:28.880 | You constantly have tunnels and secret pathways.

01:06:31.520 | And I figured it all out.

01:06:32.560 | And eventually, as I was turning 42,

01:06:35.200 | I looked back and I was like,

01:06:36.480 | "Wow, that was an awesome rat race,

01:06:39.040 | "but I'm not a rat."

01:06:42.240 | I basically got out of the labyrinth

01:06:44.400 | and I was like, "I'm not a rat," turns out.

01:06:46.800 | (laughs)

01:06:47.360 | - Is that the first moment where you saw

01:06:48.880 | that you were in a rat race?

01:06:52.320 | - No, no, no.

01:06:54.000 | I've known that I'm in a rat race for a long time.

01:06:55.680 | It's so easy to be in a rat race.

01:06:57.120 | It's so easy to be an undergraduate.

01:06:58.480 | You have problem sets.

01:06:59.440 | - You have problem sets.

01:07:00.960 | - We're all smart people.

01:07:02.320 | You know, problem set, it has a solution.

01:07:03.920 | Somebody made it for you.

01:07:04.960 | You can just solve it.

01:07:05.840 | - Yeah.

01:07:06.320 | - Everything was made as a test.

01:07:08.880 | And you keep passing those tests and tests and tests and tests.

01:07:11.600 | And you have tasks that are well-defined.

01:07:13.440 | The PhD is a little different

01:07:15.600 | because it's more open-ended.

01:07:17.760 | But yet you have an advisor who's guiding you.

01:07:19.520 | And then you become a professor

01:07:22.400 | and tenure is a well-set, defined set of tasks.

01:07:26.320 | And you do all that.

01:07:27.120 | And at 42, I basically had bought a house,

01:07:30.560 | three kids, beautiful wife, tenure,

01:07:34.480 | awesome students, tons of grants.

01:07:38.160 | Life was basically laid out for me.

01:07:40.480 | - Yeah.

01:07:41.040 | - And that's when I had my limited mean life crisis.

01:07:43.520 | That's when people usually buy a Harley Davidson.

01:07:45.600 | (laughs)

01:07:47.520 | And they basically say, "Oh, I need something new.

01:07:49.360 | "I need something different and to be young myself," et cetera.

01:07:51.760 | But basically that was my realization

01:07:53.360 | that it's not a rat race, that there's no rat race.

01:07:56.640 | It's over.

01:07:57.200 | That I have to basically think,

01:08:01.360 | how do I fully instantiate myself?

01:08:03.760 | How do I complete my transformation

01:08:06.000 | into an actual human being?

01:08:07.200 | Because it's very easy to sort of forget

01:08:10.640 | all the intangibles of life.

01:08:12.000 | It's very hard to just sort of think about the next task

01:08:15.440 | and the next task and it's all metrics.

01:08:16.880 | And what is the number of viewers I have?

01:08:18.480 | What is the number of publications I have?

01:08:20.240 | What is the number of citations,

01:08:21.440 | the number of talks, the number of grants?

01:08:23.120 | It's very easy to quantify everything.

01:08:24.560 | And then at some point you're like,

01:08:26.400 | "This is real life.

01:08:28.720 | "It's not a test anymore."

01:08:30.160 | And that's something that I told my wife early on.

01:08:32.320 | I was like, "No, no, no.

01:08:35.200 | "Our life is not gonna be,

01:08:36.160 | "'Let's put the kids through college.'"

01:08:37.440 | And maybe that's when I escaped the rat race.

01:08:40.480 | Maybe it continued being a rat race.

01:08:42.160 | Maybe the next step would have been,

01:08:43.520 | "All right, how do I make sure

01:08:44.560 | "that my kid is first in class?

01:08:45.920 | "How do I make sure that they're

01:08:47.360 | "into the greatest college?"

01:08:48.800 | And then they're into college

01:08:50.400 | and then you're like 60.

01:08:53.360 | (laughs)

01:08:54.720 | - So how do you escape?

01:08:57.120 | Is there a light at the end of the tunnel

01:09:01.920 | of a midlife crisis?

01:09:03.040 | - So you should watch that symposium

01:09:06.480 | because the videos were transformative to me

01:09:10.640 | and to many others.

01:09:11.520 | So basically the advice that I received

01:09:15.120 | from all of my friends was so meaningful.

01:09:17.760 | There's some advice that basically says

01:09:21.200 | you have to constantly maintain unachievable goals.

01:09:26.640 | Goals that you can make progress towards

01:09:30.160 | but you can never be fully done with.

01:09:31.840 | And I think that's almost playing

01:09:33.920 | into the sort of rat race thing.

01:09:35.520 | Like basically make sure that there's more obstacles

01:09:37.200 | for your little rat persona to jump through.

01:09:40.480 | So that's one possibility.

01:09:42.640 | - So first of all, watch.

01:09:45.040 | Is it available somewhere?

01:09:46.240 | - It's on YouTube.

01:09:46.800 | Just Google-- - What?

01:09:48.080 | - Google Meaning of Life Symposium.

01:09:49.360 | - I should have known this.

01:09:50.160 | I mean you should have told me this.

01:09:51.600 | This is awesome.

01:09:52.480 | Okay, this is great.

01:09:53.680 | And also like seeing rat race is,

01:09:58.080 | if we look at Ratatouille,

01:10:01.440 | I mean that's a beautiful thing

01:10:06.640 | of challenges and overcoming challenges.

01:10:09.360 | That could be fundamentally the meaning of life

01:10:13.440 | is to see life as a set of challenges

01:10:18.400 | and to fully engage in the overcoming of those challenges.

01:10:23.280 | - I would say that that's embracing the rat race view of life.

01:10:26.320 | So a joke that we like to have with my wife all the time

01:10:29.680 | is we basically say,

01:10:31.680 | we pretend that we're in this all-inclusive resort

01:10:34.960 | that we've basically hired all these people

01:10:37.600 | to go on the Esplanade and play games

01:10:39.520 | 'cause we enjoy watching people playing on the Esplanade

01:10:41.920 | and we enjoy sort of laying and looking at life

01:10:44.480 | and all the people biking and rollerblading and all of that.

01:10:46.640 | And then we've paid all these people

01:10:49.120 | in this all-inclusive resort that we live in.

01:10:51.760 | And then what are we gonna do today?

01:10:53.760 | I'm like, oh, I've signed up for professor activities.

01:10:56.320 | It's gonna be awesome.

01:10:57.520 | They lined up a bunch of super smart MIT students

01:10:59.920 | for me to meet with.

01:11:00.960 | I'm gonna have a grant writing meeting afterwards.

01:11:03.040 | It's gonna be awesome.

01:11:04.320 | And then she signed up for a bunch of consulting activities.

01:11:06.640 | It's gonna be great.

01:11:07.520 | And then in the evening, we just get back together and say,

01:11:09.360 | hey, how was your consulting today?

01:11:11.520 | So in a way, that's another view of life of basically,

01:11:16.080 | wait a minute, if I was a gazillionaire,

01:11:18.560 | what would I choose to do?

01:11:19.600 | I would probably pay an awesome university

01:11:22.640 | to give me an office there

01:11:23.920 | and just pay a bunch of super smart people to work with me

01:11:27.360 | even though they don't really want to, et cetera, et cetera.

01:11:31.840 | In fact, I would have exactly the life that I have now

01:11:34.560 | working my butt off every single day

01:11:36.960 | because it's so freaking fulfilling.

01:11:40.720 | - Well, that's, so let's clarify.

01:11:44.000 | It's just a beautiful way.

01:11:44.800 | It's almost like a video game view of life

01:11:46.960 | that is a set of, I mean, again,

01:11:49.440 | game is not perhaps a positive term,

01:11:51.520 | but it is a beautiful term.

01:11:53.600 | So do you or do you not like the rat race view of life?

01:11:59.840 | - No.

01:12:01.120 | - Because it is fulfilling in some--

01:12:03.360 | - The rat race is about the goal.

01:12:05.280 | My view of life is about the path.

01:12:07.520 | So again, quoting Greece.

01:12:10.320 | (laughing)

01:12:12.240 | - Those folks have come up with some good stuff.

01:12:14.000 | - So this Odysseus Elitis basically wrote this beautiful poem

01:12:19.440 | about sort of going through life saying,

01:12:23.040 | as you go through your journey,

01:12:25.440 | impersonating Ulysses of his voyage,

01:12:29.600 | he says, "Wish that the path is long and arduous."

01:12:33.440 | Because when you get to Ithaca,

01:12:37.280 | you might realize that it was all about the path,

01:12:42.080 | not the destination.

01:12:42.960 | So the rat race view of life

01:12:48.400 | makes it all about the destination.

01:12:49.680 | It's like, how do I get through the maze to get there?

01:12:52.240 | But the all-inclusive resort view of life

01:12:56.720 | is about the path.

01:12:59.120 | It's about, wow, today I couldn't wish

01:13:02.960 | for a better set of activities all programmed for me

01:13:05.760 | to enjoy having my brain, having my body,

01:13:09.600 | having my senses and the life that I have.

01:13:14.160 | So it's a very different kind of view.

01:13:15.600 | It's focused on the journey, not on the destination.

01:13:18.160 | - So you mentioned kind of the ups and downs of life

01:13:22.320 | and the midlife crisis.

01:13:24.480 | And right now you said focusing kind of on the journey.

01:13:29.440 | But what the journey involves is ups and downs.

01:13:32.800 | Is there advice or any kind of thoughts

01:13:39.280 | that you can elucidate about the downs in your life?

01:13:43.760 | The hard parts of your life and how you got out

01:13:48.560 | or maybe not, or is there,

01:13:51.120 | how do you see the dark parts of life?

01:13:54.720 | - Yeah, so I'm so glad you're asking this question

01:13:57.040 | because it's something that our society

01:13:59.520 | does a terrible job at preparing us for.

01:14:01.920 | Every Hollywood movie has to have a happy ending.

01:14:05.600 | It is ridiculous.

01:14:07.280 | You can count on your 10 fingers

01:14:09.040 | the number of bad ending movies that you've ever watched.

01:14:12.160 | And you probably wouldn't need all 10 fingers.

01:14:14.720 | We strive to tell everyone, yes, you can succeed.

01:14:20.640 | Yes, you're a millionaire, just temporarily disabled.

01:14:26.240 | And yes, the prince will eventually figure out his princess

01:14:32.720 | and they will have a happily ever after ending.

01:14:36.320 | And yes, the hero will be beaten and beaten and beaten.

01:14:39.280 | But you know that at the end of the movie,

01:14:40.960 | the good guys will win.

01:14:41.840 | We need more movies where the bad guys win.

01:14:44.560 | We need more movies where just everybody dies.

01:14:46.400 | (laughs)

01:14:47.920 | Where just, MacGyver doesn't figure out

01:14:50.240 | how to disable the bomb and just explodes.

01:14:52.080 | You just need more movies that are more realistic

01:14:55.920 | about the fact that life kind of sucks sometimes

01:14:58.480 | and it's okay.

01:14:59.120 | So again, growing up in Greece,

01:15:02.000 | I have been exposed to songs that are not just sad,

01:15:08.640 | but they're miserable.

01:15:10.480 | (laughs)

01:15:11.600 | Miserable.

01:15:12.320 | (laughs)

01:15:13.280 | So one of them comes to mind.

01:15:15.600 | (laughs)

01:15:17.280 | And it's basically talking about this woman

01:15:20.800 | who's lamenting in the early morning

01:15:24.800 | about losing the joyful kid, the joyful young man,

01:15:28.960 | who basically died in the civil war

01:15:32.560 | in the arms of our own fellow citizens.

01:15:37.360 | And she's like, if only he had died

01:15:41.760 | fighting the foreign forces,

01:15:43.520 | if only he had died at the sides of the general,

01:15:49.280 | if only he had died with honor,

01:15:52.480 | I would be proud to have lost the joyful kid.

01:15:56.400 | I mean, it's devastating, right?

01:15:58.480 | It's like, he didn't just die,

01:16:00.640 | he died without honor.

01:16:03.200 | And my friend who was with me was listening to the song

01:16:07.600 | and she's like, this is depressing.

01:16:08.880 | I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa,

01:16:09.760 | you have to listen to another one.

01:16:10.960 | It's not as sad.

01:16:12.080 | And she's like, what, this one died with honor?

01:16:13.920 | (laughs)

01:16:15.520 | So that's one example.

01:16:17.360 | - It's a kind of a celebration of misery.

01:16:20.560 | - No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:16:22.240 | So let me give you a couple more examples

01:16:23.840 | and then I'll answer that question.

01:16:25.200 | So another example is I picked up this book

01:16:28.240 | that I had from my childhood

01:16:29.520 | and I started reading stories to my kids.

01:16:32.000 | And the first story is about these two children.

01:16:35.200 | One is really poor living on the street

01:16:37.040 | and the other one is really rich,

01:16:38.560 | living in the house in the bright light above.

01:16:40.640 | And the poor one is wishing,

01:16:42.000 | looking at that window and wishing

01:16:43.520 | that he could have that house.

01:16:44.960 | And the other one is at the window,

01:16:47.280 | wishing that he was free,

01:16:48.240 | that he wasn't sick all the time,

01:16:49.360 | that he could escape outside.

01:16:51.520 | It's only four pages long.

01:16:52.800 | And at the end, both children die.

01:16:54.640 | One of them dies from cold,

01:16:57.040 | the other one dies from illness.

01:16:58.320 | And you're like, how is that even a children's story?

01:17:01.920 | The next story, I'm like, okay, that's fine.

01:17:04.560 | Let's skip this one.

01:17:05.760 | So I read this to my kids and then I read the next one.

01:17:08.240 | And the next one is about this woman

01:17:10.880 | whose brother is at war against the Turks

01:17:14.560 | and he is gonna die.

01:17:19.760 | And she prays to the Virgin,

01:17:21.760 | please don't let him die.

01:17:23.120 | And the Virgin appears and she's like,

01:17:24.320 | no problem, tell me who to kill instead.

01:17:27.280 | And she's like, anyone, anyone.

01:17:31.360 | No, no, no, no, choose one.

01:17:33.040 | How about this Turk?

01:17:33.920 | This one has two kids,

01:17:36.480 | a beautiful family waiting for him at home.

01:17:38.320 | She's like, no, not this one, choose another one.

01:17:40.560 | And then she goes through all the life stories of the others.

01:17:43.920 | And she's like, no, no, just don't take anyone.

01:17:46.480 | She's like, I can't do that.

01:17:47.920 | I can't, you can choose to bring your brother back

01:17:50.560 | and he will be depressed for the rest of his life

01:17:52.640 | because he didn't fight at war,

01:17:54.560 | because he didn't go to that battle

01:17:56.240 | and he will live without honor.

01:17:58.000 | She's like, and in the end,

01:17:59.520 | the woman decides to have her brother killed instead

01:18:02.480 | 'cause he dies without, I mean, this is insane.

01:18:05.760 | So why am I giving you these examples?

01:18:07.680 | It's not a glorification of misery.

01:18:09.360 | It's expanding your emotional range.

01:18:13.680 | It's teaching you that,

01:18:17.280 | and when I read these stories, I'm not a jerk.

01:18:20.160 | I'm crying out loud.

01:18:21.440 | I have tears and like my face becomes red

01:18:25.280 | from the pain that I'm experiencing through these stories.

01:18:30.480 | It's just so deeply touching to embrace the suffering

01:18:37.920 | not because of an accident, but because of a choice.

01:18:44.240 | The sacrifice to embrace the fact that

01:18:48.000 | not everything is cute and rosy and always ending well.

01:18:50.640 | And I think that we don't do a good enough job

01:18:53.760 | of teaching our kids that just life sucks

01:18:56.640 | and life is unfair sometimes and that's okay.

01:19:00.400 | And sometimes I read a story to my kids.

01:19:02.400 | I read a story every night

01:19:03.600 | and sometimes the story is horrible

01:19:06.960 | and sometimes the story is good

01:19:09.440 | and sort of friendly and happy.

01:19:11.280 | And my kids always ask, what's the moral of the story?

01:19:14.720 | And sometimes there's a moral and it's like,

01:19:16.480 | oh, you should be good or you should be nice.

01:19:18.240 | You should be helping each other, et cetera.

01:19:20.000 | And sometimes there's just no moral.

01:19:21.360 | And I tell my kids, you know what?

01:19:24.800 | Sometimes just life doesn't make sense and it's okay.

01:19:27.120 | And you can't comprehend everything.

01:19:29.120 | And I think this concept of how do you deal with bad days

01:19:33.600 | comes from the fact that we're taught,

01:19:35.440 | we're brainwashed into thinking

01:19:36.880 | that every day should be a happy day.

01:19:39.440 | And we're not ready to cope with misery.

01:19:42.160 | And the other thing that crying through these stories

01:19:46.960 | teaches you is that you don't have it

01:19:50.720 | nearly half as bad as you think.

01:19:52.240 | Do you see what I mean?

01:19:55.920 | Basically, it tells you that, I mean,

01:19:58.800 | my mom would always tell me about

01:20:00.640 | how she was transformed as a teenager

01:20:02.560 | when she volunteered in the hospital

01:20:05.200 | and she saw all these people at the brink of death

01:20:08.560 | clinging for life and helping them out to best she could

01:20:12.080 | and crying her heart out when they were dying.

01:20:16.320 | And just sort of how that taught her

01:20:19.200 | the appreciation for what we have every day.

01:20:21.840 | Waking up every morning and saying,

01:20:24.640 | my life doesn't suck.

01:20:27.280 | My life is not nearly half as bad as it could be.

01:20:32.480 | And sort of embracing the joy that we have

01:20:38.880 | of living where we live in the moment we live.

01:20:41.600 | And I'm going to go further.

01:20:42.640 | If you look at the arc of human life,

01:20:48.560 | you know, human existence through the centuries,

01:20:52.000 | there's no better way to be alive than now.

01:20:53.840 | I mean, we're complaining about every single little thing,

01:20:57.760 | but life expectancy is at an all-time high.

01:21:00.240 | Sickness, all-time low.

01:21:02.480 | Poorness, misery, all-time low.

01:21:06.640 | There's no better time to be alive globally

01:21:09.600 | across all of human existence, number one.

01:21:12.560 | Number two, here in Boston,

01:21:14.720 | there's no better place to be alive.

01:21:16.240 | If you think about the amalgamation of science,

01:21:21.280 | engineering, technology,

01:21:23.200 | the ridiculously awesome people you're bringing

01:21:25.280 | every week to your podcast,

01:21:26.800 | I mean, this is the ancient Greece of modern society.

01:21:30.400 | - But the weather still sucks.

01:21:32.240 | (Lex laughing)

01:21:32.800 | - No, let me put it this way.

01:21:35.360 | The weather gives us a range of emotion.

01:21:38.160 | (Lex laughing)

01:21:39.360 | The full range of human weather patterns.

01:21:42.000 | - The full scenic range.

01:21:42.160 | There's such a fascinating thing about human psychology.

01:21:44.720 | I often reread this book.

01:21:46.240 | I'm not sure if you're familiar with it.

01:21:47.760 | It's "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.

01:21:50.480 | And he talks about, you know,

01:21:56.240 | his living through the Holocaust

01:22:00.000 | and the concentration camps.

01:22:02.160 | And even there, where there's like human misery

01:22:05.920 | is at its highest,

01:22:08.160 | even there he discovers these moments

01:22:14.240 | by observing the suffering,

01:22:15.920 | by accepting the suffering.

01:22:17.600 | He observes moments of true joy

01:22:22.720 | of how great his life is

01:22:25.440 | relative to others at the camp who have it worse.

01:22:31.280 | - Yeah.

01:22:31.760 | - Yeah.

01:22:32.080 | So it's a dangerous slippery slope to think that way

01:22:35.760 | because it's basically being better than the Joneses.

01:22:38.400 | And if, you know, if the house next door has a giant car,

01:22:41.920 | then you want to get a bigger car or something like that.

01:22:44.000 | It's not comparative misery.

01:22:46.000 | I think the way that I see it is slightly different.

01:22:49.200 | It's, and it's not even thinking

01:22:53.200 | about all the worst possible outcomes

01:22:55.360 | that could have happened, but didn't.

01:22:57.040 | The example, as you were talking

01:23:00.480 | about the concentration camps, the most horrible,

01:23:02.880 | I mean, one of the most horrible moments of human existence,

01:23:04.880 | I was thinking about pictures that I was seeing

01:23:07.680 | of kids in Syria, in war-torn zones.

01:23:10.880 | And you're looking at these kids.

01:23:12.800 | And again, I cried out loud,

01:23:15.760 | imagining my own son in the van

01:23:20.320 | after a bomb explosion,

01:23:23.680 | watching his, you know, father die

01:23:26.320 | or his siblings die or losing his friends.

01:23:29.920 | It's something that we are not capable of fathoming.

01:23:33.600 | But if you actually put a seven-year-old

01:23:36.720 | in that situation, the look that I saw

01:23:39.600 | in these kids' eyes basically said, it is what it is.

01:23:43.360 | It was, and I've experienced that with my own kid.

01:23:48.320 | When he gets, like, my three-year-old last,

01:23:52.080 | like two years ago, who's now my five-year-old,

01:23:54.400 | she was burned really badly

01:23:57.360 | with like hot chocolate and coffee

01:23:59.120 | that just peeled off her skin.

01:24:01.120 | So you could actually see just her fragile skin

01:24:03.200 | had just peeled off.

01:24:04.160 | And she was the happiest little kid.

01:24:08.320 | She was just going along with the punches.

01:24:11.520 | - It is what it is.

01:24:12.240 | - It is what it is.

01:24:13.040 | - She accepted it.

01:24:13.920 | - So it's quite dramatic to sort of realize

01:24:18.480 | that children don't say, "Oh, I could have it better."

01:24:25.280 | They sort of embrace the moment, not embrace,

01:24:30.240 | but sort of accept the moment.

01:24:31.680 | And then they can have moments of pure joy

01:24:35.920 | in a horrendous war-torn country.

01:24:39.600 | And, you know, like so many people

01:24:42.240 | from these war-torn countries basically say,

01:24:45.680 | "Oh, you think you Americans are gonna just come

01:24:48.640 | and just send us a bunch of aid and food, et cetera?

01:24:51.440 | Yeah, sure, that's helpful.

01:24:54.400 | But what do we dream of?

01:24:56.000 | What do we struggle for?

01:24:57.280 | We struggle for love.

01:24:58.720 | We struggle for meaning.

01:25:00.320 | We struggle for, you know, emotions and friendships.

01:25:04.400 | We struggle for the same things you guys struggle for.

01:25:06.400 | We're not just like every day waking up and saying,

01:25:08.960 | "Oh, I wish I had more food."

01:25:10.320 | No, that's just the given.

01:25:11.840 | I just don't have enough food.

01:25:13.040 | But what we struggle with are basically everything else.

01:25:16.800 | And that sort of gives you some perspective on life.

01:25:20.160 | It basically says, you know,

01:25:21.920 | and another story that my mom told me when I was a kid

01:25:24.560 | is this story about sort of this man who's basically,

01:25:27.520 | you know, he sees the Christ appear in front of him.

01:25:31.360 | And he says, "Oh, Christ, I'm carrying all these problems.

01:25:35.600 | I'm carrying this big bag.

01:25:36.800 | Can you please take it from me?"

01:25:38.800 | And he's like, "Sure.

01:25:39.520 | Let me just give you any other bag."

01:25:41.600 | (Lex laughing)

01:25:43.680 | And basically, and of course the person in the end

01:25:47.760 | accepts his own bag.

01:25:48.640 | - So acceptance ultimately.

01:25:50.800 | - Basically every single-- - The path you recommend

01:25:52.720 | is acceptance.

01:25:53.440 | - Every single other bag is probably worse.

01:25:56.240 | It's the evil you don't know versus the evil you know.

01:25:59.120 | Like we all struggle with our own problems.

01:26:00.880 | But if you look at the bigger picture,

01:26:03.440 | it's just your path through life.

01:26:06.400 | And if you embrace it, the good and the bad,

01:26:09.040 | every single day, it's just joy, elation,

01:26:15.280 | sadness, misery.

01:26:19.920 | If you don't have both, you're not a complete human being.

01:26:23.120 | You know, you can't, I mean,

01:26:25.120 | the last example I'm gonna give is the movie

01:26:27.920 | "Inside Out" by Pixar.

01:26:30.560 | Beautiful movie.

01:26:32.400 | - Which one is that?

01:26:33.120 | - The one with the little characters controlling--

01:26:35.120 | - Oh, the emotions. - Highly framed.

01:26:36.320 | - Oh, it's a great movie. - Yeah.

01:26:37.360 | So you basically have joy and sadness and fear

01:26:40.320 | and disgust, et cetera.

01:26:42.080 | And the moral of the story, if you remember the movie,

01:26:45.280 | the moral of the story is that in the end,

01:26:48.400 | joy is basically trying to fix everything,

01:26:50.080 | to make everything happy.

01:26:51.440 | And she's failing miserably and everything else

01:26:53.760 | is like crumbling and falling apart.

01:26:55.840 | And the little girl basically becomes emotionless

01:26:58.240 | because all she knows how to do is fake happiness.

01:27:00.640 | And I think it's a very good analogy

01:27:02.960 | for our everyday society,

01:27:04.880 | where we're always saying, "Are you happy?

01:27:06.640 | "Are you happy?"

01:27:07.440 | My mama calls me and she's like,

01:27:08.800 | "Manolis, are you happy?"

01:27:09.600 | I'm like, "Mom, stop asking this stupid question.

01:27:12.480 | "No, I'm not happy.

01:27:14.000 | "What you should be asking is if I'm fulfilled."

01:27:15.920 | - Yeah.

01:27:16.560 | - And that's a very different thing.

01:27:17.840 | I don't go around being happy.

01:27:19.120 | - I would love it if your mom called and said,

01:27:23.600 | "Manolis, are you suffering beautifully?"

01:27:25.600 | or something like that.

01:27:26.160 | - That's exactly right.

01:27:27.120 | That's what she should be asking.

01:27:28.240 | (laughing)

01:27:29.840 | Are you struggling to achieve something great?

01:27:33.040 | - Yeah.

01:27:33.600 | - That's the question that mom should be asking.

01:27:35.120 | - Hear that mom?

01:27:36.160 | Call me about the suffering,

01:27:37.360 | not about how good are you doing?

01:27:39.920 | - So what I tell her is that life

01:27:41.920 | is not about maximizing happiness.

01:27:43.920 | Life is about accomplishing something meaningful

01:27:47.280 | and accomplishing that meaningful thing

01:27:48.880 | cannot come from a series of joyful moments.

01:27:52.000 | It comes from a series of struggles,

01:27:54.400 | of successes and failures,

01:27:58.240 | of people being nasty to you

01:28:00.160 | and people being nice to you

01:28:01.760 | and embracing the full thing.

01:28:03.440 | And if you supersede that constant need for gratification,

01:28:07.440 | if you supersede that constant need for kindness,

01:28:11.120 | you suddenly know who you are.

01:28:16.240 | And what I like to say to my kid,

01:28:17.520 | and my son the other day was telling me,

01:28:19.040 | "Oh, so-and-so called me such and such."

01:28:20.480 | And I'm like, "Are you such and such?"

01:28:22.240 | He's like, "No."

01:28:23.040 | I'm like, "Ha-ha, see, they were wrong."

01:28:24.800 | (laughing)

01:28:25.840 | And what I tell him is if you know who you are,

01:28:28.400 | what other people say about you

01:28:30.880 | only teaches you about them.

01:28:32.880 | - Yeah.

01:28:35.440 | - So it has no influence on your self-esteem.

01:28:40.240 | If you know where you stand,

01:28:42.480 | you embrace the good, but you also embrace the bad.

01:28:45.200 | I have plenty of bad and I'm embracing it.

01:28:47.920 | I'm a procrastinator.

01:28:49.600 | How do I deal with that?

01:28:52.160 | I trick myself into procrastinating

01:28:54.880 | about mindless, stupid little day-to-day things.

01:28:57.760 | And in that procrastination time,

01:29:00.000 | doing important things for the future.

01:29:01.280 | (laughing)

01:29:03.000 | - So accepting who you are.

01:29:04.400 | - Accepting your flaws.

01:29:05.600 | - Accepting the whole of it.

01:29:06.880 | - Accepting the struggle,

01:29:08.880 | accepting the sleeplessness,

01:29:10.720 | accepting the fact that the journey is what matters.

01:29:15.440 | Hoping that your path to Ithaca is full of troubles

01:29:19.280 | because those troubles are the life you will lead.

01:29:21.840 | Accepting that life will not start

01:29:25.440 | after the next milestone,

01:29:28.080 | that life has already started a long time ago.

01:29:30.160 | And what you're experiencing now is the life.

01:29:34.000 | This is it.

01:29:35.600 | It's not some kind of future thing

01:29:36.800 | that you work yourself hard to get to.

01:29:38.560 | And then after that, you live happily ever after.

01:29:41.920 | To me, the happily ever after,

01:29:44.160 | that's the end of the story.

01:29:45.120 | Nothing happens after that.

01:29:46.240 | The struggle and the struggle and the struggle

01:29:49.360 | is much more interesting story

01:29:50.880 | than the lived happily ever after.

01:29:54.080 | So I think we have to embrace that as a society

01:29:57.120 | that it's not just about the happy ending,

01:29:59.840 | that our kids are brainwashed into expecting

01:30:03.520 | that things will be happy and rosy

01:30:05.120 | and it's okay if they're not.

01:30:07.440 | And they should keep struggling

01:30:08.640 | because the struggle is the journey

01:30:11.040 | and the journey is the meaning of life.

01:30:14.160 | It's not the end, it's the journey.

01:30:15.920 | - What about accepting one of the harder things?

01:30:20.160 | We talked a little bit about immortality.

01:30:22.080 | What about accepting that life ends?

01:30:26.080 | So do you, Manolis, think about your own mortality?

01:30:31.200 | How, we talked about accepting

01:30:34.800 | that there's ups and downs to life.

01:30:37.120 | What about the ultimate down,

01:30:38.480 | which is the finality of it?

01:30:40.160 | Do you think about that?

01:30:41.440 | Do you fear it?

01:30:42.240 | - You also asked me if I'm afraid of getting older.

01:30:47.440 | - Yes.

01:30:48.400 | - And that's on the path to mortality.

01:30:51.040 | So let me talk about that first step

01:30:52.960 | and then the last step.

01:30:53.840 | - The last step.

01:30:55.200 | - Literally the last step.

01:30:56.320 | So getting older, what does that mean?

01:31:00.080 | When I was 18, when I was 20,

01:31:03.200 | my brain, I felt was at my maximum.

01:31:06.400 | I was like, nothing is impossible.

01:31:08.720 | I can solve anything.

01:31:10.640 | I could take any math puzzle, any logic puzzle,

01:31:13.440 | any programming puzzle and just solve it in milliseconds.

01:31:16.240 | I just saw the answer through problems.

01:31:18.160 | I was like feeling invincible.

01:31:19.920 | I would show up at lecture with my newspaper,

01:31:22.880 | lift up my head every now and then,

01:31:24.080 | point to errors, just brat, complete brat.

01:31:27.680 | I would raise my hand and correct my professors

01:31:29.360 | from the whole classroom, total brat.

01:31:31.520 | I have some of those in my class now and it's awesome.

01:31:33.440 | It's like very--

01:31:34.160 | - I used to be you.

01:31:35.440 | - It teaches you humility.

01:31:36.720 | - Yeah.

01:31:37.920 | - So I felt invincible and I was like, this is it.

01:31:42.880 | This is awesome.

01:31:43.520 | I'm living the life.

01:31:44.240 | 10 years later, my brain didn't work the same way.

01:31:48.240 | I wasn't as good at the tiny little puzzles

01:31:51.760 | but it worked in different ways.

01:31:54.800 | And right now, 20 years later,

01:31:57.280 | it works in yet different ways.

01:31:59.040 | And oh gosh, I love the journey.

01:32:02.640 | - Can you maybe give some hints

01:32:06.000 | of the interesting different ways

01:32:08.000 | that your brain works as it aged?

01:32:10.240 | - Yeah, I went from the phase of sheer speed

01:32:14.400 | and hardcore quantitative thinking

01:32:17.840 | to sort of stepping back,

01:32:20.400 | being able to sort of make more connections,

01:32:22.240 | being able to sort of say, yeah,

01:32:24.480 | but let's use that thing.

01:32:25.520 | Sort of a huge new creativity being unleashed.

01:32:29.600 | Basically when you're young,

01:32:30.560 | you're sort of thinking about that one problem.

01:32:32.640 | You can sort of reconfigure all the variables

01:32:34.320 | combinatorially in your head

01:32:35.600 | and just wipe it all out.

01:32:37.680 | When you're just a little older,

01:32:40.000 | you start getting more creative.

01:32:41.280 | You start bringing in things from different fields

01:32:43.680 | and different contexts

01:32:45.360 | and sort of stepping outside the box.

01:32:47.360 | Basically it's like being in the rat race

01:32:48.880 | and saying, there's a ceiling.

01:32:50.640 | Why are we trying to get through that?

01:32:52.320 | So it's sort of thinking outside the box.

01:32:54.800 | And then at 40, what I'm going through now

01:32:58.960 | is this whole sort of embracing the path of life.

01:33:01.680 | And when I say life has started already,

01:33:04.960 | it's not a test anymore,

01:33:06.160 | this is basically embracing the finality.

01:33:09.600 | Embracing that the journey is what it's at.

01:33:14.400 | So what I like to say is live every day

01:33:18.480 | as if it's your last one

01:33:20.160 | and make plans as if you'll never die.

01:33:23.200 | I always have the long-term

01:33:26.560 | that I'm sort of planning out for

01:33:29.920 | that will eventually become the short-term.

01:33:31.840 | And I always have the sort of short-term

01:33:34.880 | and I think this ability to sort of look at life

01:33:37.440 | in the past and look at life in the future jointly

01:33:41.600 | and sort of embrace the continuity

01:33:44.000 | both of life in the universe and on our planet

01:33:47.120 | as well as life as a human being

01:33:49.120 | from the beginning to the end,

01:33:50.400 | just as a path, as a journey

01:33:52.160 | and just embracing every aspect of that.

01:33:55.200 | I mean, I was talking about parenthood the other day

01:33:57.120 | and how amazingly fulfilling it is

01:33:59.440 | to sort of relive childhood through the eyes of my kids

01:34:04.480 | but with the perspective of a parent.

01:34:06.800 | So the sheer, you know,

01:34:12.000 | arrogance of youth.

01:34:16.000 | Watching this in my kid,

01:34:19.360 | I can see myself when I was 18 correcting my professor.

01:34:22.400 | I felt so proud.

01:34:23.120 | Little did I know that my professor was working

01:34:26.480 | on so much more interesting things

01:34:27.920 | than the three little things

01:34:28.960 | he was putting on the board that day.

01:34:30.640 | And I was like, "Ah, I'm invincible."

01:34:32.880 | But in fact, no, just a little brat.

01:34:34.480 | And basically right now,

01:34:36.720 | I sort of can see the sort of journey

01:34:41.920 | with a little more humility.

01:34:43.120 | I can sort of look at my own students

01:34:46.560 | with their unbelievable abilities,

01:34:48.960 | being able to do things that I'm no longer able to do,

01:34:51.840 | better than I probably was ever able to do,

01:34:54.560 | but yet being able to guide them

01:34:57.280 | and shape their thinking and blow their minds

01:35:00.240 | with new ideas and new directions.

01:35:02.880 | Through my perspective.

01:35:03.920 | And I know when something is solvable

01:35:07.040 | because I've been there,

01:35:08.320 | but I'm not gonna even bother.

01:35:09.920 | It's not that I can't do it.

01:35:11.280 | I'm sure I could if I tried,

01:35:12.800 | I just, I'm not interested in that anymore.

01:35:14.880 | So what I'm embracing this journey of aging

01:35:18.080 | is how my brain is changing

01:35:19.920 | and how I'm constantly trying to figure out the niches,

01:35:23.920 | the evolutionary niches that I'm best adapted for.

01:35:26.240 | - Yeah.

01:35:27.840 | - For the tasks that I'm best at,

01:35:30.880 | while hiring and recruiting

01:35:33.440 | both assistants and research scientists

01:35:36.880 | and students and postdocs,

01:35:38.640 | and that will be the best at those tasks.

01:35:41.920 | But someone still has to see the big picture.

01:35:44.880 | And I love being in that role.

01:35:46.960 | - So you're at the timescale of a human lifespan,

01:35:51.280 | you're doing the same thing that the worm

01:35:53.120 | did at the evolutionary timescale of growing arms,

01:35:57.280 | of the specialization,

01:35:58.640 | the compartmentalization he talks about.

01:36:02.400 | I mean, it's fascinating to think

01:36:03.600 | of what 80 year old Manolis would look back

01:36:07.280 | at the man that's sitting here today

01:36:10.240 | and laugh at the silliness, at the arrogance.

01:36:14.160 | - I think he finally figured out something.

01:36:15.520 | (laughing)

01:36:16.880 | I was like, no little thing,

01:36:18.480 | you didn't figure out anything.

01:36:20.720 | - I mean, ultimately it seems

01:36:22.400 | that if you're introspective about life,

01:36:24.480 | it all, it leads to a kind of acceptance

01:36:27.760 | a deeper and deeper acceptance of the whole of it.

01:36:33.120 | - Again, I wanna be cautious about acceptance

01:36:36.400 | because it almost says that you can't change it.

01:36:38.560 | - Ah, yeah.

01:36:39.440 | - It's sort of embracing the struggle

01:36:42.480 | and embracing the journey,

01:36:43.920 | is the way that I would put it.

01:36:45.040 | - So you ultimately feel the journey

01:36:46.960 | isn't just something that happens to you.

01:36:48.640 | - Of course, you shape it, you shape it.

01:36:51.520 | Remember how I was saying that Boston is the best place

01:36:53.680 | and the best time to live in right now,

01:36:55.280 | you know, in the history of humanity.

01:36:56.720 | (laughing)

01:36:57.200 | I'm exaggerating a little bit,

01:36:59.040 | but the way that I think about this is that,

01:37:01.760 | if you look at the whole of cosmos,

01:37:05.280 | where would you rather be?

01:37:07.200 | If you're just a bunch of molecules,

01:37:08.960 | roughly your, you know, biomass,

01:37:11.200 | where would you rather be?

01:37:12.000 | Would you rather be a rock on Mars?

01:37:13.600 | Eh, probably not.

01:37:14.800 | Would you rather be in a black hole?

01:37:16.480 | Probably not.

01:37:17.120 | Would you rather be in a exploding supernova?

01:37:19.440 | Maybe, that might be interesting.

01:37:20.640 | But being on earth is an awesome solar system,

01:37:25.520 | an awesome planetary system,

01:37:26.800 | an awesome, you know, place to be in.

01:37:29.680 | Across all of space time,

01:37:31.200 | it's a pretty good place to be in as a bunch of molecules.

01:37:34.080 | If you are a bunch of molecules on earth today,

01:37:36.800 | being an animal with, you know,

01:37:40.640 | some kind of awareness of the stuff around you is wonderful.

01:37:44.560 | Being a human among all animals is amazing

01:37:48.160 | because you have all this introspection.

01:37:49.680 | And being a human who's young, fit, athletic,

01:37:54.640 | smart, et cetera, I mean, you know,

01:37:56.960 | you have so much to be happy for.

01:37:58.800 | Beyond that, being surrounded by a bunch of awesome people

01:38:04.240 | that you interact with all the time.

01:38:05.920 | I mean, I feel blessed to interact with the people I know,

01:38:08.480 | with the friends I have, the dinners that I have,

01:38:10.400 | all of this, the students that I interact with.

01:38:12.640 | I'm so blessed.

01:38:13.440 | And the last little blip in this awesomeness of local maximum,

01:38:18.880 | the last little blip comes from being kind,

01:38:22.800 | being grateful and being kind.

01:38:24.800 | I don't know if you remember that little prayer

01:38:26.800 | that I described last time of,

01:38:29.200 | "Thank you for all the good you've given me

01:38:32.000 | and give me strength to give unto others

01:38:35.040 | with the same love that you've given to me."

01:38:37.920 | And the whole point of that is being grateful and being kind.

01:38:42.480 | What does that do?

01:38:43.200 | From a purely egoistic perspective,

01:38:46.720 | it makes the people around you happier

01:38:48.960 | and it takes that little maximum a little bit further.

01:38:53.440 | Because you'll be surrounded by happy people by being kind.

01:38:57.120 | That's the purely egoistic view.

01:38:58.720 | And the purely altruistic view,

01:39:00.960 | or maybe it's egoistic as well,

01:39:03.040 | is that it's just good to give.

01:39:05.440 | It feels good to give.

01:39:06.800 | Like basically watching somebody who's touched by what you said,

01:39:11.120 | watching somebody who's like appreciating a rapid response

01:39:15.360 | or a generous offer or just random acts of kindness

01:39:19.280 | is so fulfilling.

01:39:21.360 | So evolutionarily, we were selected for that.

01:39:24.960 | There's just such a good feeling that comes from that.

01:39:27.200 | - You know, it's fascinating to think

01:39:29.600 | you said Boston is the best place

01:39:31.440 | and talking about kindness,

01:39:33.760 | that the very thought that Boston is the best place

01:39:38.000 | in the universe is almost,

01:39:40.560 | it's a kind of a gravitational field.

01:39:44.320 | Your thought and your very life in itself

01:39:50.480 | is a kind of field that makes that real.

01:39:52.480 | - Yeah, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

01:39:55.280 | By claiming it's the best and thinking it's the best,

01:39:59.280 | it becomes the best.

01:40:00.160 | - And you make others,

01:40:01.200 | it's not a force that just applies to your own cognition.

01:40:06.480 | - Exactly.

01:40:07.040 | - It applies to the others around you.

01:40:09.120 | - And then suddenly you live in an even better place.

01:40:11.040 | - Yeah, and it creates the reality,

01:40:13.440 | the actual reality, the social reality.

01:40:16.640 | - Exactly.

01:40:16.960 | - Then it molds the environment.

01:40:18.800 | - Exactly.

01:40:20.000 | By the way, one of the coolest things about you,

01:40:22.000 | I think, is you represent the best of MIT,

01:40:30.960 | like the spirit of MIT.

01:40:32.400 | So I'm so glad that I'm fortunate enough

01:40:38.000 | to be able to talk to you

01:40:39.040 | because there's a kind of cynicism about academia in parts

01:40:48.160 | that I think is undeserved

01:40:50.480 | and that there's this, you know, MIT, of course,

01:40:54.160 | but academic institutions is a sacred place

01:40:59.440 | where ideas can flourish

01:41:01.440 | just in the same very way that you're talking about,

01:41:03.920 | is both kindness and curiosity

01:41:09.040 | and that weird thing that happens

01:41:11.440 | when a bunch of curious descendants of apes get together

01:41:15.360 | and just like get excited in this ripple effect that happens.

01:41:21.040 | I mean, that's the most beautiful aspect of MIT.

01:41:23.760 | People might think like competition and grants

01:41:27.680 | and like position, like you said, the rat race,

01:41:32.400 | but like underneath it all is these curious human beings,

01:41:36.960 | inspiring younger human beings,

01:41:39.280 | and there's this ripple effect that happens.

01:41:42.240 | I'm so glad that, I mean, I'm glad that I get a chance

01:41:47.280 | to record this because it inspires so many other students

01:41:50.960 | and so many other people to do the same,

01:41:53.920 | to embrace the inner curious creature

01:41:56.720 | that's not about the race.

01:41:58.080 | - So let's talk about the negative.

01:41:59.520 | Let's talk about, no, no, no, I'm serious, I'm serious.

01:42:01.600 | You know, you have to embrace the good and the bad.

01:42:03.760 | So let's talk about the negative.

01:42:04.880 | - As the Greek comes out.

01:42:05.840 | - Let's address it.

01:42:06.960 | So why do people want positions of power?

01:42:11.360 | Why do people want more money, more power,

01:42:14.720 | more this, more that?

01:42:15.440 | Remember the part where I was saying,

01:42:17.600 | if you know who you are, what other people think about you,

01:42:20.560 | it makes no difference to you.

01:42:22.800 | It only teaches you about them.

01:42:24.080 | Many people feel defined themselves.

01:42:31.280 | They feel instantiated through the eyes of others.

01:42:34.480 | So being in a position of power

01:42:38.400 | makes them feel better about themselves.

01:42:41.120 | Who knows what other kind of struggles they might have

01:42:43.520 | that creates that need to feel better about themselves.

01:42:47.520 | But they have a bunch of struggles

01:42:48.800 | and everybody has a bunch of struggles.

01:42:50.080 | And every time I see somebody behaving poorly,

01:42:53.360 | I'm basically thinking,

01:42:55.520 | well, they're in a tough spot right now and it's okay.

01:42:59.840 | I can kind of see how I would behave badly

01:43:03.440 | in other circumstances as well.

01:43:04.720 | So I think if you take away that sort of,

01:43:11.040 | having to prove yourself in the eyes of others,

01:43:13.920 | life becomes so much easier.

01:43:16.800 | So when I first became a professor at MIT,

01:43:19.760 | I started wearing adult clothes.

01:43:22.800 | (laughing)

01:43:23.360 | I had my like, I mean, before-

01:43:25.840 | - You became a serious person, Cor.

01:43:27.440 | - I basically had, I would always go around

01:43:30.400 | in my roller blades and my shorts and a t-shirt.

01:43:32.160 | And eventually I was a professional, like,

01:43:33.520 | oh, I bought all these khaki pants

01:43:36.400 | and these nice shirts with like,

01:43:40.480 | whatever they call it, the patterns.

01:43:42.720 | And I was like, dressing with my nice belt every day,

01:43:45.200 | showing up.

01:43:45.760 | And then a few months later, I was like,

01:43:48.880 | I can't stand it.

01:43:51.040 | And I just went back to my roller blades

01:43:52.880 | and my t-shirts and my shorts.

01:43:55.840 | And it was this struggle of sort of

01:43:58.640 | not feeling that I fit in.

01:44:00.240 | I was so intimidated by all of my colleagues,

01:44:03.280 | like just watching their incredible achievements,

01:44:05.520 | like persons next to me and the person,

01:44:07.680 | you know, the floor below me.

01:44:09.120 | I was like, oh my God, like,

01:44:10.960 | they clearly made a mistake.

01:44:13.600 | What the heck am I doing here?

01:44:15.200 | How will I ever live up to these people's standards?

01:44:19.760 | And eventually you grow up to realize that

01:44:26.080 | the way that, I grew up to realize that

01:44:29.600 | the way that other people perceived my work

01:44:31.600 | was very similar to the way that

01:44:33.520 | I perceived other people's work.

01:44:35.120 | As flawless.

01:44:35.840 | I knew all of the flaws in my work.

01:44:39.440 | I knew the limitations.

01:44:41.440 | I knew what I hadn't managed to achieve.

01:44:44.320 | And what I saw was maybe a third of the way

01:44:47.200 | of what I was trying to achieve.

01:44:48.640 | And I saw everything as flawed.

01:44:50.960 | What they saw, what I had achieved,

01:44:54.080 | they didn't see what I hadn't achieved.

01:44:55.600 | They only saw the one third down,

01:44:57.760 | which was pretty good in their eyes.

01:44:59.600 | So they all respected me.

01:45:00.800 | And I was feeling miserable about myself.

01:45:04.240 | I was like, I'm not worthy.

01:45:05.680 | And I think that this is a cognitive problem that we have.

01:45:11.520 | We kind of, it's kind of like when we're talking about

01:45:14.880 | artificial general intelligence, HEI,

01:45:17.120 | of sort of, we kind of have this definition

01:45:19.280 | that anything that machines can do is not intelligent

01:45:22.080 | and anything that they can't do is intelligent.

01:45:24.080 | Therefore, we narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow

01:45:26.160 | the field of what intelligence truly means.

01:45:27.920 | And as soon as machines achieve something,

01:45:29.520 | it's not intelligent anymore.

01:45:30.880 | I feel like I was doing the same thing with myself.

01:45:33.040 | As soon as I could solve something,

01:45:34.720 | it was the kind of thing that a kid like me could solve.

01:45:37.280 | And therefore it was kind of easy.

01:45:38.560 | But to the others, it seemed hard.

01:45:41.280 | - Yeah.

01:45:42.340 | - But to me, it seemed easy.

01:45:44.240 | So it was this kind of thing that everything

01:45:46.000 | that my colleagues were doing seemed impossible to me.

01:45:48.720 | But everything that I was doing seemed impossible to them.

01:45:51.600 | So it was that realization that sort of made me mature

01:45:55.360 | into sort of a, not more confident,

01:45:57.920 | but more comfortable human being.

01:45:59.840 | - Can you actually linger on that a little bit?

01:46:02.160 | I mean, you mentioned Minsky.

01:46:04.320 | I remember he said something in an interview

01:46:07.280 | where he said the secret to his,

01:46:10.320 | like the way he approached life

01:46:13.200 | was to never be happy with anything he did.

01:46:16.640 | So there's something powerful as a motivator

01:46:21.520 | to doing exactly what you're saying,

01:46:24.800 | which is everything you've achieved,

01:46:26.240 | to see that as easy and unimpressive.

01:46:28.240 | What do you do with that?

01:46:31.520 | Because clearly that's a useful thing.

01:46:34.480 | - I think I've kind of matured past that.

01:46:36.880 | And I think the maturity past that

01:46:38.640 | is to sort of accept what it is

01:46:41.520 | and accept that it has helped others build onto it

01:46:47.280 | and therefore advance human knowledge.

01:46:50.000 | So it's very easy to sort of fall into the trap of,

01:46:53.760 | oh, everything I've done is crap.

01:46:55.040 | What I told you last time is that I always tell my students

01:46:58.960 | that our best work is ahead of us.

01:47:01.520 | And I think that's more of my mindset.

01:47:04.480 | - That's a beautiful way to put it.

01:47:05.760 | - Exactly.

01:47:06.320 | - What we've done is strong.

01:47:08.480 | - It's great.

01:47:09.200 | It's great for the time

01:47:10.560 | and it'll become obsolete in 30 years.

01:47:12.320 | Not we can't, we are doing even better.

01:47:15.040 | - We're doing even better.

01:47:15.920 | - Exactly.

01:47:16.560 | So basically our next work, we'll just strive.

01:47:20.080 | And again, you can't let the perfect

01:47:22.640 | be the enemy of the good.

01:47:23.520 | At some point you have to wrap.

01:47:25.600 | I was having a meeting with my student yesterday

01:47:28.400 | and he was like, listen, we know this is not perfect

01:47:31.760 | but it's way better than anything

01:47:34.000 | that's ever been done before.

01:47:35.120 | You know how to improve it

01:47:37.360 | but if you try to, your paper is never gonna get published.

01:47:41.040 | So there's this balance of

01:47:45.840 | we're already at the top of the field, get it out.

01:47:50.080 | And then you work on the next improvement.

01:47:52.560 | And in my experience, this has never happened.

01:47:55.280 | We've never actually worked on the next improvement

01:47:57.120 | and that's okay.

01:47:57.760 | - Yeah, but it's a good way to think of it.

01:47:58.760 | - It didn't make a difference

01:48:00.240 | because you're basically putting a new stepping stone

01:48:03.120 | that others will be able to step on and surpass you.

01:48:06.160 | My advisor in grad school would basically tell me,

01:48:10.400 | Manolis, let others write the second paper in that field.

01:48:13.920 | Just write the first one, move on.

01:48:16.080 | Move on to the next field.

01:48:17.760 | You don't wanna be writing the second and the third

01:48:20.720 | and the fourth and the fifth paper in the same field.

01:48:22.720 | Just, and it's very shocking to a student to hear that

01:48:29.040 | 'cause I was like, I was at the top of my game.

01:48:31.440 | I was owning that field and I published the first paper.

01:48:34.080 | I'm like, I'm ready for two and three and four.

01:48:35.840 | He's like, move on, just let it be.

01:48:38.000 | And I was like, whoa.

01:48:40.640 | And it's so liberating to sort of not have to

01:48:43.280 | surpass everyone but just put your little stepping stone

01:48:48.240 | out there and others will step on it

01:48:50.560 | and put their own stones further

01:48:51.920 | and eventually cross a bigger river

01:48:53.520 | than if you tried to sort of make a giant leap all at once.

01:48:57.120 | So you need both.

01:48:58.960 | - Beautifully put.

01:49:00.720 | So the funny thing is, I've, I believe I closed

01:49:05.360 | the previous episode with a Darwin quote about

01:49:07.600 | the power of poetry and music in life.

01:49:11.920 | I think your quote, and again, I only heard once,

01:49:14.160 | was Darwin basically saying,

01:49:16.640 | if I were to live life again,

01:49:18.400 | next time I would read more poetry

01:49:21.600 | and something about art every week or something like that.

01:49:24.480 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:49:25.680 | It's so interesting for somebody who studied life

01:49:30.080 | at a very cold, I would say, genetic level to say that,

01:49:33.280 | yeah, the highest form of living is the art.

01:49:38.800 | But like on that, which made me realize

01:49:42.080 | that you write poetry and I forced you

01:49:46.480 | or maybe convinced you somehow to maybe share

01:49:50.720 | if it's possible, if it's okay,

01:49:52.560 | some of the poetry you've written yourself in your life.

01:49:57.360 | - So again, being Greek, a lot of my poems

01:50:00.400 | have been pretty miserable.

01:50:01.520 | (both laughing)

01:50:03.440 | And I always like to say that it's very hard for me

01:50:06.320 | to write a poem when I'm happy.

01:50:07.920 | And I just have to be in a state of deep despair

01:50:12.480 | in order to write poems.

01:50:13.440 | But the first poem I ever wrote was in English class.

01:50:19.040 | I'm Greek, I grew up in Greece,

01:50:20.880 | but I was in a French high school

01:50:22.080 | and I was taking English as a foreign language.

01:50:24.480 | So the English teacher basically asked us

01:50:27.040 | to write a poem in English.

01:50:29.280 | So this is basically what I'm gonna embarrass myself

01:50:33.120 | and read from my 16-year-old self many, many years ago.

01:50:36.720 | - Can you give a little bit more context

01:50:38.320 | about who you were in this moment?

01:50:39.840 | So like just--

01:50:40.960 | - So here's what's really interesting.

01:50:43.440 | In terms of growing up, how do we grow up?

01:50:48.480 | It's very difficult to grow up

01:50:49.840 | if you're in the same school

01:50:52.080 | going from one class to the other

01:50:53.600 | and all your friends know you inside out.

01:50:55.840 | It's very difficult to change.

01:50:57.120 | It's very difficult to grow up

01:50:58.480 | because they have a certain set of expectations

01:51:00.480 | for who you are and for how you're gonna behave.

01:51:03.360 | So in many ways, we kind of tend to get set in our ways

01:51:07.520 | and not change very much.

01:51:09.040 | I think something that helped me grow up

01:51:11.920 | is that when I was 11 years old,

01:51:14.240 | I was a kid in Greece in primary school.

01:51:18.000 | When I was 12 years old, I was a kid in Greece

01:51:20.640 | in first year of high school.

01:51:23.200 | When I was 13, I was in France.

01:51:28.000 | So basically moved countries and schools.

01:51:31.600 | The next year, I moved schools again

01:51:33.520 | because it was a transition

01:51:34.560 | in the French educational system

01:51:35.760 | from one school to the next.

01:51:36.720 | The next year after that, my family moved to New York

01:51:39.840 | in a French high school there.

01:51:41.200 | And the next year after that, I'm moving to MIT.

01:51:43.280 | So basically between 11 and 19,

01:51:46.800 | every single year, I actually had the opportunity to grow.

01:51:50.160 | I was not held by people who knew me

01:51:53.920 | and I could reinvent myself or reshape myself

01:51:58.160 | or reshape my sort of personality, my emotions,

01:52:01.600 | as I was growing up,

01:52:03.280 | especially in such a transformative time of a kid's life

01:52:06.560 | from 11 to 17.

01:52:08.960 | - Okay, first of all, it's so powerful

01:52:10.240 | that you think of it that way.

01:52:11.120 | Did you think of it that way at the moment?

01:52:12.960 | 'Cause it's kind of a source,

01:52:15.440 | you said an opportunity to grow,

01:52:17.440 | but it's kind of suffering.

01:52:18.480 | I mean, you're being torn away from the thing you know

01:52:21.280 | into a thing you don't know.

01:52:22.400 | - So when we moved from South France to New York,

01:52:26.480 | I was pissed.

01:52:27.280 | (Lex laughing)

01:52:28.240 | I was pissed.

01:52:29.040 | I was taking these long bike rides in the countryside,

01:52:33.600 | jumping in French swimming pools.

01:52:35.600 | And I had all these wonderful friendships

01:52:38.400 | going downtown and just staying by the fountains

01:52:41.600 | in the dim lit streets of Aix-en-Provence

01:52:44.640 | in the South of France.

01:52:45.440 | It was magical.

01:52:47.360 | And suddenly I moved to New York City,

01:52:49.360 | a city of cement, of ugliness,

01:52:53.440 | like trash in the streets at every corner.

01:52:55.760 | It's just horrible.

01:52:56.800 | Snow everywhere.

01:52:58.800 | Having never seen snow or like real snow in my life.

01:53:02.000 | I moved from Athens to South France to suddenly New York.

01:53:04.560 | So I was pissed.

01:53:05.840 | But whether I saw it as an opportunity for growth,

01:53:09.840 | I don't think so.

01:53:10.640 | I don't think that I was that self-reflective.

01:53:13.360 | It was just how it happened.

01:53:14.880 | - Only now do you see it this way.

01:53:15.680 | - I saw it like that probably pretty early on,

01:53:18.960 | but not during those transitions.

01:53:21.200 | So basically during those transitions,

01:53:22.640 | I was just a kid being a kid, you know?

01:53:25.280 | And maybe the time that I started seeing it that way

01:53:30.160 | was maybe when I decided to stay at MIT as a professor

01:53:35.120 | after having been there as a student.

01:53:37.120 | And I kind of saw the struggle of getting professors

01:53:42.320 | to not see you as a kid when they're your peers.

01:53:45.920 | And I was very flattered when one of my friends

01:53:50.080 | basically told me, "Oh, I remember you in recitation

01:53:52.560 | when you first asked me a question."

01:53:53.920 | I said, "Wow, this kid, I'll pay attention."

01:53:58.160 | (laughs)

01:53:59.200 | - One day you'll be a peer.

01:54:00.320 | - So it's, you know, certainly my perception

01:54:03.840 | was that many of them could not see me

01:54:05.440 | as anything but a kid,

01:54:06.480 | but it turns out that some of them saw me

01:54:09.200 | as something different than a kid even before

01:54:11.600 | I was actually their colleague.

01:54:13.280 | So it's kind of an interesting place

01:54:14.960 | because what I like to say about MIT

01:54:16.880 | is that people treat you as equal no matter what stage.

01:54:20.000 | And they respect you for what you say,

01:54:23.440 | not for who you are when you're saying it.

01:54:25.840 | And if I'm wrong, my students will tell me.

01:54:29.120 | They will have no reservation to just be bluntly,

01:54:32.960 | you know, sorry, I don't agree with that.

01:54:35.440 | - Yeah, I mean, the beautiful thing about you is,

01:54:40.080 | sorry to put it this way,

01:54:42.720 | is, you know, maybe people who weren't familiar

01:54:46.320 | with your work beforehand might think,

01:54:48.240 | like, might not realize that you're a world-class scientist

01:54:53.520 | who leads a large group and so on.

01:54:55.520 | 'Cause there's a youthful nature to you that it's,

01:54:58.560 | I mean, you talk like an undergrad,

01:55:02.080 | you know, with the excitement and the fresh eyes

01:55:05.280 | and the sort of excitement about the world.

01:55:07.520 | And that's, first of all, super contagious.

01:55:09.920 | And beautiful, you know, it's easy to sort of fall

01:55:13.040 | into behaving seriously because then people kind of

01:55:18.640 | start putting you on a pedestal more

01:55:22.560 | into a position of power.

01:55:24.560 | You wanna sort of act like you're in a position of power

01:55:28.320 | as opposed to allowing yourself to be lost

01:55:30.480 | in just the curiosity, the childish view of the world,

01:55:35.120 | which is just this open-eyed love of knowledge.

01:55:38.880 | - And that was the transition that I was describing

01:55:40.720 | when I decided to go back to my rollerblades and T-shirt

01:55:43.120 | and baseball cap, basically.

01:55:45.840 | You know, when I met my first postdoc,

01:55:48.800 | it was basically, you know,

01:55:52.000 | he was interviewing for postdocs at MIT.

01:55:54.160 | He already had several first author papers to his name

01:55:56.560 | in top journals.

01:55:57.920 | And my friend, Yulia, basically introduced me to Alex Stark,

01:56:03.040 | who basically was interviewing at the time with Rick Young

01:56:05.440 | and with Eric Lander,

01:56:06.480 | just like these massive names in the field.

01:56:08.960 | And I was just a first year faculty person

01:56:11.200 | with, you know, zero credibility.

01:56:14.400 | And she basically says,

01:56:16.560 | "Oh, there's this friend of mine, Alex, who's visiting.

01:56:18.560 | "He's also German.

01:56:19.520 | "You know, he wanted to meet you."

01:56:20.480 | I'm like, "Oh, sounds great.

01:56:21.520 | "I'd love to talk science."

01:56:22.960 | I show up, we sit at the amphitheater in Stata.

01:56:25.600 | You know, I basically arrive in my rollerblades,

01:56:29.520 | you know, jump a few steps, sit down, wearing my blades.

01:56:33.680 | We're having this awesome conversation

01:56:35.840 | about science and about gene regulation

01:56:37.520 | and how the whole thing works and sort of,

01:56:39.360 | you know, my perspective and his perspective.

01:56:41.200 | And we're just bouncing ideas for 30 minutes.

01:56:42.960 | And then I just dash off to my next meeting.

01:56:45.840 | And he basically emails me afterwards.

01:56:48.000 | And I was giving him advice

01:56:49.440 | about how to interview with Eric Lander,

01:56:50.880 | how to interview with Rick Young,

01:56:51.920 | and how to sort of get a position with them.

01:56:54.160 | And then after a while, he emails me saying,

01:56:57.280 | "I would love to become a postdoc in your group."

01:56:59.360 | I'm like, "What? Are you kidding me?"

01:57:04.080 | So he basically didn't care

01:57:09.040 | that I wear rollerblades and T-shirt.

01:57:11.120 | All he cared about was my ideas

01:57:12.640 | and sort of embracing the me

01:57:15.200 | with the childhood excitement about science

01:57:19.520 | was basically what attracted him.

01:57:21.360 | It wasn't the, "Wow, this guy runs a big lab,"

01:57:23.840 | or this and that.

01:57:24.800 | It was just like, "I like his ideas.

01:57:26.880 | "I wanna work with him."

01:57:27.680 | (laughs)

01:57:28.240 | - That, by the way, folks, is the best of MIT.

01:57:31.120 | That's what MIT stands for.

01:57:32.320 | So that's a beautiful story.

01:57:34.000 | But take me back to the poem.

01:57:35.520 | (laughs)

01:57:36.400 | And where did this poem come from?

01:57:38.000 | - So now--

01:57:38.480 | - Where's your mindset?

01:57:39.920 | So who is the 17, 16-year-old kid, Manolis?

01:57:42.960 | - So again, I've just seen "Snow" for the first time.

01:57:47.520 | And I'm in New York. - Is this in New York?

01:57:49.280 | - This is in New York.

01:57:50.400 | So maybe that's where the sadness in the poem comes from.

01:57:54.400 | But anyway, we're asked in class to write an assignment.

01:57:56.880 | This is my third language.

01:57:58.080 | I'm not very good at it.

01:57:59.600 | So pardon me, but here's what I wrote.

01:58:02.160 | "Children dance now all in row,

01:58:05.760 | "Children laughing at the snow.

01:58:07.920 | "But in time's endless flow,

01:58:10.080 | "Children sooner or later grow.

01:58:12.240 | "Men are mortal, we go by.

01:58:15.440 | "If we know it, we may cry.

01:58:17.040 | "But I thought a love so sweet

01:58:19.360 | "Was immortal, was so deep.

01:58:21.120 | "There I told you, darling, sweet

01:58:23.680 | "That forever love would keep.

01:58:25.200 | "Blossomed spring and summer shined,

01:58:28.320 | "Then blue autumn, winter died.

01:58:31.760 | "One year passed, but the clouds

01:58:33.760 | "Still remember all our vows.

01:58:36.240 | "Never faked and never lied.

01:58:38.960 | "All we did was stare and smile.

01:58:41.200 | "All alone, sitting down

01:58:44.000 | "To the snow we made our vow.

01:58:45.760 | "But you told me you were right.

01:58:48.320 | "Birds who love are birds who cry.

01:58:51.280 | "Now with laughter children play,

01:58:55.280 | "Yet the sky is so gray.

01:58:58.080 | "Even if the snow seems bright,

01:59:01.200 | "Without you have lost their light.

01:59:03.040 | "Sun that sang and moon that smiled,

01:59:06.240 | "All the stars have ceased to shine.

01:59:08.240 | "All of nature drew its grace,

01:59:11.040 | "Found its light within your face.

01:59:12.800 | "Now you're gone and won't return.

01:59:15.440 | "Let the snow and my heart burn."

01:59:18.240 | (Lex laughing)

01:59:19.520 | - There's a Greek in there, that's beautiful.

01:59:21.200 | That's beautiful, by the way.

01:59:22.480 | And the rhyming, the musicality,

01:59:24.560 | there's both a simplicity--

01:59:27.120 | - I'm 16.

01:59:28.640 | - And a musicality to it.

01:59:29.440 | - I hate my third language.

01:59:31.120 | - No, no, no.

01:59:31.760 | But like, so I really enjoy like Robert Frost poems.

01:59:34.560 | I don't mean simplicity in a bad way,

01:59:36.320 | in a negative way at all.

01:59:37.440 | - Again, it's very weird to analyze your own poem,

01:59:39.360 | but I think it captures the simplicity of youth

01:59:42.240 | and the way that it kind of starts

01:59:43.680 | with "Children Dance La-On-La-Lo".

01:59:45.040 | It basically, and it kind of shows that

01:59:47.200 | snow can be interpreted first in the first verse

01:59:49.840 | as a happy thing, ta-da-da-da-da snow.

01:59:52.720 | And then in the end, you know,

01:59:54.480 | "Now with laughter children play."

01:59:57.280 | I'm like, now I've grown basically.

02:00:00.000 | It's this transformation that we're actually talking about.

02:00:02.240 | This whole men are mortal, we go by.

02:00:03.760 | I'm sort of, you know, you're saying,

02:00:05.680 | are you comfortable with growing old?

02:00:07.040 | I'm like, duh, I was since I was 16.

02:00:09.840 | - Yeah.

02:00:10.240 | - And what's really interesting is that, you know,

02:00:12.640 | again, when I was 12 years old

02:00:14.640 | in our summer house in Greece,

02:00:16.160 | I remember sort of telling my sister

02:00:18.320 | my outlook that I would have as a father

02:00:20.960 | for how to bring up my own kids.

02:00:22.800 | So it's very weird that I've always sort of seen

02:00:25.040 | the full path from, you know, a kid.

02:00:28.560 | - From when you were young.

02:00:30.240 | - Yeah, I don't know if you like this Jonny Mitchell song.

02:00:33.440 | "I've looked at clouds from both sides now,

02:00:35.520 | "from up and down and still somehow,

02:00:37.600 | "it's snow's illusions I recall."

02:00:39.920 | Or it's clouds illusions I recall,

02:00:42.400 | I really don't know clouds at all.

02:00:43.840 | So it's really beautiful.

02:00:45.760 | So I think the Jonny Mitchell song,

02:00:47.120 | which again, I heard for the first time

02:00:48.560 | much, much after this,

02:00:49.520 | and I wouldn't even compare this to that.

02:00:52.160 | But what Jonny Mitchell is saying that song

02:00:54.240 | is that you can see life from two perspectives.

02:00:58.320 | You can see the good or the bad

02:01:00.800 | in both, you know, in everything you see.

02:01:03.120 | And I think that's the allegory of snow right now.

02:01:05.360 | You can see snow as this bright, white, wonderful thing,

02:01:09.600 | or you can see snow as this miserable,

02:01:11.840 | you know, gray thing.

02:01:14.160 | So that's sort of,

02:01:15.200 | and what I like about the last verse now

02:01:16.960 | with Laughter Children Play

02:01:18.240 | is that it's a recall to the first one

02:01:20.160 | where I was the kid enjoying careless life

02:01:25.120 | and eventually was making promises

02:01:27.280 | that something would be forever.

02:01:28.800 | And I think part of that is also the loss

02:01:30.560 | of my friendships in France,

02:01:32.320 | of being in New York now and sort of everything's gray.

02:01:34.720 | And, you know, even though the snow seems bright

02:01:38.640 | without you have lost their light,

02:01:40.480 | sun that sang and moon that smiled.

02:01:41.840 | So it's this concept that if you lose your love,

02:01:46.800 | the same thing can be perceived in a very different way.

02:01:51.840 | - Let me ask you this,

02:01:53.920 | because somebody wrote me this long email,

02:01:55.760 | and I think you're the perfect person to ask this.

02:01:59.360 | - Uh-oh.

02:01:59.860 | - You mentioned love.

02:02:03.840 | From a genetic perspective,

02:02:08.240 | what is it?

02:02:11.700 | What do you make of love?

02:02:14.000 | Why do we humans fall in love?

02:02:16.880 | In your own life, why did you fall in love?

02:02:19.680 | You know, the email that was written to me

02:02:23.600 | was you always talk about mortality

02:02:27.040 | and fear of mortality,

02:02:28.400 | but you don't ask about love.

02:02:32.000 | So I don't know if there's some thoughts

02:02:35.760 | you could give about the role of love in your own life

02:02:40.000 | or the role of love in human life in general.

02:02:47.520 | - I think love in many ways defines my life.

02:02:51.120 | It's basically, I like to say that I'm a human first

02:02:54.640 | and a professor second.

02:02:56.560 | And I think this passion for life,

02:03:00.880 | this passion for everything around us,

02:03:03.920 | I mean, the only way to describe that is love.

02:03:06.160 | It's basically embracing your emotional self,

02:03:13.040 | embracing the non-brainiac in you,

02:03:22.560 | embracing the sort of intangible,

02:03:26.240 | not very well-defined.

02:03:30.480 | And even in my own research,

02:03:32.400 | I'm just very passionate about everything I do.

02:03:34.880 | There's a certain passion that comes through.

02:03:37.200 | And what, I'm sorry, again, being Greek,

02:03:40.080 | the etymology of the word passion.

02:03:41.920 | What was passion?

02:03:42.880 | Passion is suffering.

02:03:44.640 | The etymology, I mean,

02:03:47.600 | when we talk about the passion of the Christ,

02:03:48.960 | it's the suffering.

02:03:49.840 | And in the Greek version of that word, pathos,

02:03:53.200 | like pathology, pathos is deep suffering.

02:03:59.440 | It's the concept of someone who's sympathetic.

02:04:02.160 | Sympathetic means suffering together,

02:04:04.880 | experiencing emotions together.

02:04:07.840 | So it's funny that you're asking about love

02:04:09.600 | and I respond with passion,

02:04:11.120 | passion for life, passion for research,

02:04:13.200 | passion for my family, for my children, for, you know.

02:04:16.320 | So there's a certain passion that defines me

02:04:23.360 | and everything else follows

02:04:25.840 | rather than the other way around.

02:04:27.040 | I'm not first thinking with my brain,

02:04:29.360 | what is the most impactful paper we could write?

02:04:32.320 | And then going after that,

02:04:33.760 | I'm thinking with my heart, what am I passionate about?

02:04:35.520 | What drives me, what's just like, you know, makes me tick.

02:04:39.440 | - And that's a beautiful way to live,

02:04:41.040 | but I love it how the Greek part of you

02:04:43.440 | just kind of connects it to the suffering.

02:04:45.200 | So if you could remove the suffering.

02:04:47.440 | - No, no, no, no, no, no.

02:04:48.640 | When I say suffering,

02:04:50.080 | I don't mean suffering as in being miserable.

02:04:53.200 | I mean, suffering as in being emotionally invested

02:04:57.360 | in something.

02:04:58.320 | Remember, I mean, again, if you look at this poem,

02:05:00.880 | what is it saying?

02:05:01.680 | It's saying birds who love are birds who cry, right?

02:05:07.280 | - Yeah.

02:05:08.240 | - That's the very definition of love.

02:05:10.560 | Exposing your fragility.

02:05:12.960 | If you're not afraid of suffering,

02:05:15.600 | you don't fall in love.

02:05:17.200 | As soon as you hold back,

02:05:20.160 | you protect, you shield your heart,

02:05:21.680 | no love can enter.

02:05:24.080 | So there's this Simon and Garfunkel song.

02:05:27.680 | I am a rock.

02:05:29.120 | I am an island and a rock feels no pain

02:05:33.600 | and an island never cries.

02:05:37.520 | So again, there's some aspect of that into this poem.

02:05:40.480 | The fact that,

02:05:42.320 | but you told me,

02:05:46.400 | there I told you darling sweet

02:05:47.520 | that forever love would keep is this intermediate thing.

02:05:49.680 | And then there's a recall,

02:05:50.720 | but you told me you were right,

02:05:52.080 | birds who love are birds who cry.

02:05:53.440 | So it basically says that love is the fragility

02:05:57.680 | that you're willing to give to another person.

02:06:00.160 | It's opening up your vulnerable spots.

02:06:05.520 | It's sort of accepting that there's no safety net.

02:06:10.640 | You're just giving yourself fully

02:06:12.720 | and you're ready to be hurt.

02:06:14.400 | - So you've already been way too kind with your time,

02:06:18.320 | but I'm gonna force you to stay here

02:06:20.000 | just a few minutes longer.

02:06:21.280 | As we're talking about goodbyes,

02:06:24.160 | you have a really nice other poem here about goodbyes.

02:06:28.080 | Can I force you to read it as well?

02:06:30.320 | (laughing)

02:06:31.760 | - Oh, twist my arm, twist my arm.

02:06:34.080 | So the next poem was written

02:06:37.200 | specifically for our high school yearbook.

02:06:39.520 | So another poem written on demand.

02:06:42.480 | The rest of them are just so miserable

02:06:44.000 | written by pure sadness and melancholy.

02:06:48.640 | But this one was also written on demand.

02:06:50.720 | And it was basically saying goodbye,

02:06:54.320 | as is appropriate right now,

02:06:56.000 | to my friends and sort of, again,

02:06:58.720 | reflecting this whole journey

02:06:59.920 | and transformation through life.

02:07:01.520 | And also, I think showing a little bit of introspection

02:07:04.560 | about how we kind of had it easy in high school

02:07:07.840 | and we're about to go into rougher waters.

02:07:09.760 | So the title is actually "The Tidewaters"

02:07:12.320 | and it's an analogy on that.

02:07:14.960 | So here it goes.

02:07:16.400 | All this was another lake

02:07:20.320 | where some rest we sailors take.

02:07:23.040 | Water's calm and full of fish.

02:07:25.200 | We'll find there what we wish.

02:07:26.880 | Some seek fruit and others feast.

02:07:29.840 | Some of us just look for peace.

02:07:32.000 | Some find friendships, other love.

02:07:34.560 | Some seek both and neither have.

02:07:36.400 | We were different when we came.

02:07:38.800 | Each his own story and fame.

02:07:41.200 | Different people had we been.

02:07:43.360 | Different cultures had we seen.

02:07:44.720 | Different nature, different face.

02:07:47.120 | Each unlike all in this place.

02:07:49.760 | We had faced success, defeat,

02:07:52.400 | then in one lake came to meet.

02:07:54.880 | There, the orders that we followed

02:07:58.560 | and the pride that we swallowed

02:08:00.240 | made us one but not the same.

02:08:02.640 | Joined us strangers who there came.

02:08:05.920 | Sooner, later, groups were made.

02:08:09.040 | Tribes where differences will fade.

02:08:11.760 | Some attached, more or less.

02:08:14.560 | Others fought and made a mess.

02:08:16.160 | But again we have to go.

02:08:18.720 | What for? Where to? We don't know.

02:08:21.360 | Still we know it. We will try.

02:08:22.880 | There to rush, to flee, to fly.

02:08:25.600 | There'll be some who wish to stay

02:08:28.400 | but they'll carry on away.

02:08:29.680 | We will continue on our journey

02:08:32.080 | as we came here, strong yet lonely.

02:08:34.800 | From the lake a river flows,

02:08:37.360 | from the river many goals.

02:08:39.040 | On that river we will race.

02:08:40.560 | Each will try to find his pace.

02:08:42.800 | In that scene, the sailors face,

02:08:45.600 | their first fear, defeat, disgrace.

02:08:49.280 | Here and there comes out a face

02:08:51.760 | that the waters soon embrace.

02:08:54.480 | Some get lucky, find their way.

02:08:57.840 | Others sink beneath the waves.

02:09:00.000 | In this race we will part.

02:09:02.480 | Some will settle near the start.

02:09:05.360 | Some set goals beyond the stars

02:09:07.120 | 'cause the river carries far.

02:09:09.360 | You should know in what we've done,

02:09:12.000 | the hard part is still to come.

02:09:14.720 | So I'll have to say goodbye.

02:09:17.120 | Don't you worry, I won't cry.

02:09:19.680 | Neither will they those who try

02:09:22.240 | till the end to keep their pride.

02:09:26.240 | But please know, dearest friends,

02:09:28.560 | who are always there to mend,

02:09:30.160 | I will always need your hand.

02:09:32.800 | I will miss you till the end.

02:09:34.720 | - I don't think there's a better way to end it.

02:09:37.600 | Manolis, like I said last time,

02:09:41.040 | you're one of the most special people at MIT,

02:09:43.760 | one of the most special people in Boston

02:09:47.280 | and whatever mental force field

02:09:49.360 | that you're applying in saying

02:09:51.920 | that Boston is the best city in the world,

02:09:54.000 | MIT the best university in the world,

02:09:56.000 | you're actually making it happen.

02:09:57.440 | So thank you so much for talking to me.

02:09:58.800 | It's a huge honor.

02:09:59.520 | - Thank you so much.

02:10:00.480 | It's been a pleasure.

02:10:01.200 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:10:03.680 | with Manolis Kellis and thank you to our sponsors,

02:10:06.640 | Public Goods, Magic Spoon and ExpressVPN.

02:10:09.840 | Please check out these sponsors in the description

02:10:12.720 | to get a discount and to support this podcast.

02:10:15.440 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

02:10:18.480 | review the Five Stars on Apple Podcast,

02:10:20.640 | follow on Spotify, support on Patreon

02:10:22.960 | or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

02:10:26.560 | And now let me leave you with some words

02:10:29.040 | from another well-known Greek,

02:10:31.040 | Alexander III of Macedonia,

02:10:33.280 | commonly known as Alexander the Great.

02:10:35.120 | "There is nothing impossible to him who will try."

02:10:39.040 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:10:43.520 | (upbeat music)

02:10:45.060 | (upbeat music)

02:10:45.560 | (upbeat music)

02:10:46.060 | (upbeat music)

02:10:46.560 | (upbeat music)

02:10:47.060 | (upbeat music)

02:10:47.560 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Manolis Kellis: Origin of Life, Humans, Ideas, Suffering, and Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #123

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