- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman is the Vice President of NextGen Systems at Cable Labs.

Prior to that, he was the Director of the Social Computing Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard. And he is, as his name suggests, my father. Today, we discuss various topics in science, including relativity theory, chaos theory, and quantum computing. But I'd like to assure you that even if you have zero background in physics, computer science, or mathematics, that entire discussion will be clear to you as to what those things are, and even some of how they work.

During today's discussion, we also talk about a life of science, that is, what it is to spend one's life in curiosity, in trying to understand the universe around us, and how to understand ourselves. Indeed, today, we also talk about neuroscience, how the brain works, and the different sorts of questions that I do believe everybody asks, whether you're a scientist or not.

Questions like, where do we come from? Is there a God? What is our use or purpose in the universe? And how is it that we can ponder these super high-level, abstract questions about how we got here, and what our purpose is, and how things work at the quantum level, tiny, tiny bits of things that we can't even see.

And at the same time, to lead an everyday life that is meaningful and joyful. We talk about this in the context of understanding oneself, in relation to others, family, community, including scientific community, and what it is like to come from a different country. My father immigrated from South America.

What it was like to do science in the United States then and now, cultural differences. And of course, we touch on some of our relationship as well. How could we not? I must say, for me, it was an immense pleasure and privilege to have this conversation, not just because Dr.

Huberman is my father, but because I believe the knowledge, and indeed some of the wisdom that he shares, will be useful to everybody. About what it is to carve one's own unique trajectory, in terms of career and life. And at the same time, how to savor the simple, everyday things that make life so worth living.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science, and science-related tools, to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. And now for my discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. Dr. Bernardo Huberman, welcome. - Thank you, Andrew. - And also great to see you, dad. - Same here. - I guess no premonition would have foreseen this one. - No, absolutely not. - And people might notice today I'm drinking out of a mate gourd, in part in honor of my father's father who drank out of his loose leaf mate every morning.

My first sip of mate was taken sitting in his lap when I was maybe four years old. - Yes, yes. - In my Spider-Man pajamas. In any event, let's talk about science. You're born in Argentina. - Mm-hmm. - As I recall, because once we had a conversation about it, you had a teacher, maybe it was in high school, who turned you on to physics, which became your field of choice.

- Yes, yes. - But prior to that, were you interested in different subjects? I don't recall if you had an avid interest in academics or you just did it because you were supposed to prior to that teacher. Then we'll talk about him. - Yes, yes. I was always very interested in ideas and so on.

Science at that time was a bit vague, but I'd read a lot of philosophy. I didn't understand much of what I read, but nevertheless, I kept reading it. I was interested in psychology. I was an avid reader. As a matter of fact, I embarrassed my father, or actually made him disappointed for a birthday.

I think I was 14 years old. I asked him to buy me the 12 volumes of Freud's writings. - Really? - Yeah, and he said, "What for?" But I was very impressed with it. Of course, I couldn't even understand half of what these books had in them. So I was very interested in many things.

And I must say to you that my interest in science, in particular physics, doesn't come from the standard thing that you see here in the United States mostly. Namely, I was not a whiz kid in math. I was not one of these people that can really do things very, very quickly and so on.

But I was interested because I thought that physics was gonna complement my attempt at understanding how the whole universe is put together. The philosophers were saying all sorts of things. I went to a very special school that I learned six years of Latin and so on. And I had to read things like Kant and Cosmogonies and so on that really didn't mean much to me.

But suddenly I started discovering that physics might be interesting. And I had a cousin, Hector, who was a physicist, a particle physicist already. I mean, he was living at that time in France. And so there was a little bit of that influence. But my interest was in things that had to do with fairly abstract ideas.

I cannot believe that at one point or the other I was very good in geometry class, being able to prove theorems. I mean, the teacher would just say, "Let's prove this." And I was somehow able to reason through and come to some proofs. So I think that I was very interested in ideas and not necessarily in the very concrete aspects of science at that time.

- Can I ask you a question about early schooling? So if I remember correctly, you were born naturally left-handed. - Yes. - They forced you to learn to write with your right hand. - Yes. - You went to a very strict schools. - Yes, yes. - Like military levels of strictness.

- Almost, yes, yes. This is a very interesting type of education. They have it in France. It's called the lycee in France. And this is a very special school in Argentina was actually founded in the 1500s by the Jesuits. And my father went to that school. And so he wanted me to go there.

And my brother went there too. And in six years of a very strict education, mostly humanistic, I learned Greek and learned Latin. I learned immense amounts of history, which I loved. And there were other courses, you know, French and so on. In French, we had to memorize incredibly long poems that we had to recite.

- Do you still remember some of them? Because sometimes early memories are embedded so deeply. - Yes, yes. And my brother and I sometimes tell each other some of the pieces of these poems. Yes, yes. And I'll say something right now to foreshadow what will likely happen several times throughout today's discussion, which is anytime that my father is in the presence of his brother, my uncle, Carlos, they start laughing about jokes that they've been telling over and over back and forth with one another since they were a young kid.

So just the mere mention of his brother will bring a bit of a smile and a chuckle to both of our faces. - Yes, yes. So I'd learned a lot of French. And also my parents decided, my mother mostly, that I had to learn French and English. And I went to Alliance Francaise, where for five years I went there.

I was essentially the only boy in the class, which was very nice in a way. And in order to graduate, I essentially, you know, to be fluent in French. But in the special school I went to, the discipline was very straight, very straight. You know, we were supposed to do things you don't do in the United States.

The moment the teacher walks in, everybody stands up. And if you're late and standing up, you're just kicked out of the classroom and things of that sort. But it was a lovely experience in many ways when I reflect on it, because it gave me a humanistic education that has been incredibly useful in my career.

Most people don't realize that. I mean, I tend to think of things in a very broad context, and it's because of the education I had. Okay, so, and I loved the history of Rome, and I'd learned to recite things in Latin. And so it was very, very, I enjoyed that very, very much.

My brother didn't, actually, and so. - Well, you two are very different. I have great, great adoration for Carlos, but you two are very different. And along those lines, I was just about to ask or mention, and some of our Argentine and South American listeners generally, and perhaps even European listeners, might be shocked and perhaps disappointed to learn that you're one of the few Argentines that I know who doesn't care much for the game of football, soccer.

It doesn't seem to concern you much at all. - No, no. The reasons for that are sort of interesting, I think. I've reflected on that, because my own wife likes to watch a soccer game. I mean, she's Danish. She likes the European tournaments. I never liked mob behavior. I never liked this whole passionate involvement in these things.

I don't know why. I was never able to understand it, to the point that I never went to a soccer game till the week before I left for the United States. My brother insisted that I had to go to a soccer game, and this is sort of embarrassing, but at one point or the other, it's someone, you know, there was a good goal, and so I stood up and said, "This is great," and I turned out I was on the wrong side of the audience, and people got very, almost violent with me, you know?

So, yeah, soccer to me is something that I watch, but I'm not passionate about. - Right. - Yeah, I never really felt that it was that interesting. Although, you know, I was in a rowing team. I learned boxing. I did a lot of sports, but I don't like that much of spectator sports, like tennis.

I played tennis since I was a teenager. - I'm not a spectator sport fan either. The other day, someone asked me what my favorite sports team is. You'll like this. And I said the Harlem Globetrotters because they're undefeated. They have the best record, and that was actually the one professional sports team game you took me to when I was a kid.

We'd always go see the Globetrotters. - Yes. - They're undefeated. - Yes, unbelievable, yes, yes. - And my father took me to see them too. They're fantastic, yeah, yeah, yeah. - I love it. So your father was not a scientist. - No. - Your brother's not a scientist, and you were fated, according to them, to join the family business.

But then you had a teacher who exposed you to physics. - To physics and to the notion of being authentic in what you want. There were two parts to it. He was a very interesting and tormented man, I felt, but it was very interesting. He would come into the class.

Most of the students, you know, really didn't care about what he was saying. And so I was fascinated, not only by what he was saying, but his whole personality. But I need to say something here that is important. I also was rather irresponsible. You see, I grew up in a family, a well-to-do family, that I never thought I was going to make a living.

So it was easy to be interested in science or anything because, you know, it's what you do. Yeah, it's, you know, you're interested in culture. You read books, you do things. But my father used to say, what are you going to do once you graduate? You don't want to start teaching in elementary schools or something of that sort.

My brother used to say, if he does physics, I'll have to support him because he still says that. - So scientists were considered poor. - Poor, yeah. Yeah, they couldn't get a job. I mean, science in Argentina. Argentina has a big tradition in medical sciences. I think two or three Nobel Prizes and so on.

But in physics, they produce some very good physicists. One of them lives in the United States. I mean, he's very, very famous, Maldacena. I haven't met him, but I know he's one of the top people in the field. But I just got into this because I was interested. It sounded, you know, fascinating and abstract and the ideas were so powerful.

And I think, and, you know, I reflected a lot on this. When you're psychologically in adolescence, because my parents made me jump two grades. So I was much younger than my classmates. And that created a lot of problems for me. I mean, at the time when, you know, you're developing and so on, all the boys were talking about girls and so on, I still was really interested, understanding why the excitement and so on, you know, I was very young.

But it gave me a sense of order. You know, reading a book about physics and understanding that there are laws that tell you how things work, gave me a tremendous sense of order and power. So, you know, everything else was a little bit in flow and the family and my own relationships with friends and girlfriends or whatever.

And going back to science, it was just a sense of, I don't know, I still remember those days. It was very, very soothing in a way. - So it's like a touchstone. - Yes, yes, yes. - And what grade were you, this teacher, was this like middle school, high school?

- Yeah, no, yeah, high school, yeah. I was 13 or 14 years old, yeah, yeah. When I finally, I started listening to this and I said, wow, this is impressive. You know, it's powerful. There are ways to know what's true and what's not true. You know, you just don't speculate on things.

So, but most of this stuff, I didn't really understand. Then I had this cousin of mine, Hector, who was already gone, but I would go to his parents' house and there, there were his books, all these incredible books on quantum mechanics, relativity, and I would just take them home.

And I didn't really comprehend a lot of the math, but somehow it seemed impressive. It was like looking into a mechanism or something. So, and I used to take them to school. And one of my teachers once said, you know, you seem to interested in this, but you don't understand it.

So, you need to, you need to learn it. And he was the one who started pushing me into this. On the other hand, my family was saying, you should become a lawyer. Just, you know, my brother and father. - And that never interested you? - No. I, it's interesting because now I'm very interested in aspects of constitutional law and so on.

When I hear about arguments against, you know, the Supreme Court and so on, I became very interested in law and economics later on. I mean, just to read about it. But what my father was talking about at the dining room table, it was all about strategies of, you know, getting something done half an hour before the opposition.

So you win a case. I mean, I was totally interested in that. - I'm sensing a bit of a theme, which is that social dynamics and what other people do, regardless of whether or not they like it, or it earns them a particular living, didn't capture you. Like the idea that people and their groups and their ways of thinking and behaving, while they may not bother you, it doesn't, it didn't captivate you.

The way that like, it sounds like physics, you know, made you think that there's something kind of bigger, that there's something more universal. - Right. - Which indeed physics is, right? It's not, it is, it explains most everything. - Yes, and I- - Most everything. - Yes, and I also think that I was a bit of a loner.

It was very hard to find people that, you know, I mean, children or young people that thought like me. So eventually I became part of a group. We were four or five guys that used to get together on Saturdays and, you know, go to the movies and so on.

And then afterwards discuss, you know, whatever we were interested in. And so I was, I was only 16 years old, you know, and deciding what to do with my life. Of all four of us, we committed. There were, some of them came from incredibly wealthy families, two of them.

We committed to really be true to ourselves and pursue what we liked. But I was the only one. The other two ended up running the business of their parents. And one of them essentially, I don't know what he did. I saw him years later. - Money becomes a pretty, a bright beacon for a lot of people.

- Yes, yes, yes. - Yeah, I'm grateful to you that you never pushed me to go in any particular direction. - Right. - You pushed me to not go in particular directions, but never with respect to academic choices. In fact, I don't recall you telling me or Laura, that by the way, folks, that's my sister's name, that we had to do anything except attend our classes and do our best.

But I never felt pushed to go into science. - No. - No. - Although you had a little bit of a curiosity about it. - Animals. - Animals, and I remember I was going through a period in which I started getting convinced that there was very little to do in physics and I wanted to change.

And one day on a bike ride, I think I was carrying in the back of my bike and bicycle, you were young. You asked me, "What is the unsolved problem?" And I said, "I don't think it's in physics, "but it's the brain." And you said, "Okay, I'll go into that." You said, "I'll never forget that." - Well, it's interesting.

I'm fascinated by human memory, as you know, I know you are as well. And I recall that story as well. I recall it slightly differently, but we're really closely aligned. Which is, I remember you used to walk me to school in the morning and you would drop me off at the cut through to the path behind Gunn High School.

Because that's, I would pick up Kristen Harnett across the street. And you told me it would be better if I picked her up by myself and walked her to the end of the street, which is where class was. You were teaching me chivalry. And I remember asking you what you do.

I was probably five or six years. Well, let's see, first grade. So it'd probably be somewhere around six or seven years old. I asked you what you do and you said, "Physics." And I said, "Well, what is that?" And you said, "Well, let me tell you "the feeling it gives me instead." You said, "You know, the night before your birthday?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "You know that feeling?" And I said, "Yeah." And you said, "Well, that's how I feel "every day when I go to work." And I remember, I'll never forget that.

And I said, "What do you do?" And you said, "I'm a physicist." And I said, "Well, then I'll be a physicist." And then I recall, so maybe we had the conversation twice, you saying, "Well, most of the big problems "in physics are solved. "So you should pick something perhaps "a little less untread like." And I said, "Like what?" And you said, "Well, the brain is pretty interesting." And then I said, "Okay, I'll work on that." - Yeah, no, that's true.

This issue of feeling like before your birthday is something I remember saying to you. I don't recall feeling that way every day. I do recall feeling like this when I had an idea and finally worked out and we wrote a paper and so on. You know, it was an incredibly exciting time.

It's, you know, well, you know about it. You've done it yourself now. And so I wanted to convey that to you. It was very, very interesting and important to me that you understood that. On the other hand, it made me feel very isolated as well, not only with you, with everybody.

I mean, it's a very esoteric field. You know, you used to walk into the study, look at me, you know, writing equations and so on. And what you say, what's that, you know? - I was thinking about your study, which was just a door down from my childhood bedroom.

I still remember the way that your study smelled. I can still smell it. I have an incredible sense of memory for certain things. I can still remember, but I remember how your books were aligned, where your stereo was placed, your photos, your photo of Einstein, your photos of me and Lara and mom.

I remember all of it. And the sofa that was just off behind it because you're a nap taker, like, which I inherited from you. But I remember that, yeah, you would spend a lot of time in that office and listening to classical music. Do you listen to music while you work or did you listen?

- All the time. All the time, yeah. Classical music for me is something I discovered very young, very young. My parents also loved classical music, my brother too. And it's something that I, to me, has a tremendous emotional resonance with the way I feel. Sometimes it's background music. Sometimes I'd really listen very carefully.

It's something that I, yes, I've always had in my life and still have it. I mean, it's very, very important to me. - But not many musicians in our family. - No, unfortunately, yeah. Although there is a very famous one. - We've all tried. We've all tried. - Yeah, yeah, you in particular, yeah, yeah.

- We all failed. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a very famous Huberman, the great violinist, Bronislav Huberman. I mean, there's a picture. I think I sent it to you. He and Einstein, he was one of the greatest violinists in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. An incredibly interesting man.

He's the founder of the Israel Philharmonic. And that's one of the reasons that the name Huberman is in some street in Israel, because of him. - Are we related to him? - Unfortunately not. (both laughing) - Which explains the lack of musical prowess in our family. We all love music, but none of us are good musicians.

- No, right, yes. - Except my cousin Diego. - Diego, he has a perfect ear, so he can really do interesting things, yes, yeah. - So going back to your childhood, this teacher. - Yes. - So, I mean, what was it? You already had a sort of seeded an interest in finding order, in things that made the world make sense.

What was the political situation in Argentina at that time? - Quite horrible parts of it. I mean, there was a dictatorship that lasted for a long time, this Perón thing, and so on. It was, I mean, he was really a follower of Mussolini and people of that sort in World War II.

- So what did that mean like out in the streets? Like you grew up in the heart of Buenos Aires, but like, what did that mean in terms of, I mean, was there poverty everywhere? Were people, I mean, was there violence? I mean, what does it spell out to you?

- Well, it was a very oppressive regime. I mean, you had to be careful what you talked about, you know, in my family, like most of that social class, we had maids and a cook, and so you had to be very careful what you said. - Because they would run that information back?

- Absolutely, and people, and your grandfather, my father, at one point or the other, was prevented from coming to visit me in the United States because he was classified as a communist because he did not join the Perónist party. - Okay, for the record, we are not communists. We are both big believers in capitalism sitting here at this table, right.

- So, no, and so it was terrible. It was a terrible time. It was a very oppressive time. - But he wasn't a communist, either. - No, of course not. Of course, no, no, he was on the other side. But the idea at that time, it was to be classified as such.

Eventually, that information leaked to the, obviously, to the American authorities, so when he asked for a visa, they denied him. It was a very complicated story. I don't think we should waste time to know how it got eventually resolved through a friend of mine who was a priest just here in the United States.

But the point being that, during that time, it was a very, you had to be very careful the way you spoke, the way you said things. There was a dictatorship that was very much like the fascist in Italy, you know, and actually, that dictatorship lasted until a few years ago, because as you know, or as you heard, the new president we have is one that actually ran against this whole ideology, Peronism, and so on.

- Millet. - Millet, yes. So, I was never, I was not political at all, but you have to be careful. But it was a funny time. And when he was overthrown through a military revolution, you know, my parents were delighted, and I remember the celebrations and so on. But that was considered the minority that was against him.

You know, it was a social class movement. The working class was behind Peron and what he promised and what he gave them. So, but that eventually died. So, the real problem was that there was no real commitment to science as an investment that a country should make. Yes, it was nice to have Nobel Prizes, and it's culturally good, but they didn't have the pragmatic notions that we have, see, in the United States, of doing science means solving concrete problems.

- And this was in the 1950s. - The '60s, too. - Right, so this was the, like, one of the biggest and fastest progressions of physics and its implementation in the US. - Yes. - So, were you hearing about that? - Of course, I was following it all, and I wanted to, you know, I wanted to buy books about it and so on.

I had some conflicts with my father about spending money on books that he thought that were not gonna take me anywhere and so on. I mean, he was a very pragmatic lawyer. He didn't understand why I was doing these things. So, yes, I was aware of everything. And actually, the university was very good.

I entered the university. You had to choose what you wanted to do, and after a tremendous crisis, personal crisis, I decided not to go into law or engineering, which was the alternative my father offered, and I decided to study physics. And I didn't regret it at all. It was a very impressive time.

You know, I got a good education in physics, a little bit too abstract. - So, this was experimental physics or theoretical physics? - Both, both, both. In the lab, I was okay. I mean, I was better in classes on advanced, I took a lot of courses in advanced mathematics and calculus and beyond that, and, you know, complex analysis and so on.

- So, it turns out you were good at math after all. - Good, yes, I understand math. I'm not a whiz. I mean, like many of my students have been. I had guys that can do incredible things, you know, that I can't do them, but slowly. I understand, yes, yes.

So, but yeah, physics is something that I knew how to be intuitive about it. I had already interesting ideas that perhaps didn't pan out, but yeah. - So, the teacher in high school, were they the one that told you that there was like a career in this thing? - Yes, he said, you know, you should devote yourself to this if you really care about it.

He was a man that obviously, he was sort of tormented on many levels and so on. - You say that because of the way he carried himself physically? - Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. He was troubled, but was interesting, intense man. I still remember his name. He was a philosopher, his name was Egesland, which is a German name.

And he started talking about, you know, discovering, you know, Christianity and what it meant to him and what it is to be authentic and so on. So, and then I had a very large exposure to the great thinkers of the antiquity, then, you know, Roman and Greek. So, it was all, to me, fascinating, interesting, you know, and it was good to have friends that I could discuss these things with.

- Do you think it's a disservice that nowadays in the United States, and even when I was growing up, but especially now that we don't force kids to be exposed to all these topics? Like, we try and track people into something early on. Actually, a recent guest told me that many schools are now just giving knowledge, but not expecting kids to do problem sets.

You know, teaching them about physical activity, but not expecting them to do physical activity, seriously. - Well, that sounds a little bit funny. - Well, no, but that's, I mean, that is the direction that education in this country is going. - I was a visiting professor in France. Actually, you live there because of that, in Paris.

And I discovered, you know, the French intellectual tradition is also very, very abstract compared to the American. I mean, the English and the Americans are the ones that took physics, and the Russians too, into a very, very practical realm and made progress that are very, very concrete, almost engineering-like.

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- Let's talk about that. So how did you end up getting into the United States as a graduate student? You applied. - Yeah, I was graduating, and the future looked rather gloomy. I had a girlfriend whose father was very wealthy, and she said, "No problem, you're gonna work for my dad," and she got a factory or whatever.

- Why do I feel like that is not the kind of offer that you'll go for? - No, no, not at all, not at all. - I've never known you to work for anyone, except you. - Yeah, in a way, you're right. - I'm a bit the same. - Yeah, yeah, so yes, yes.

Just the idea of running a business was not... I was truly idealistic and irresponsible too, but I had a cousin who was already got his PhD in theoretical physics at Columbia University, was a professor in France, then Sweden, and so on. So I felt that perhaps I should go to the United States, and so I started applying to this.

My father was saying, "I won't even help you with this." He didn't like, my parents didn't like it. I was very close to my family in many ways, and so I applied to many places. I remember being accepted at, I think it was Cornell, and I said, "Oh, New York, that's great." 'Til someone said to me, "You have to take a plane to go to real New York." - Yeah, he loves New York City.

We both love New York City. - If that guy's not for you. So in any event, I got this very, very nice fellowship to go to University of Pennsylvania, which is- - Who's the fellowship from? - The Navy, the United States Navy, yeah. I'm very grateful for that, and I actually wrote that in my PhD thesis.

I was very grateful, and I think it was incredible that they were supporting that kind of research. - They wanted to bring you to the US to build weapons? - No, no, no, not at all, not at all. I came to the United States working for Professor Burstein, who just died at the age of 101, and no, but I was supported by the United States Navy.

It was a fellowship by the University of Pennsylvania. But I remember in my first interview with some of the teachers, professors, that I am talking to them about the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the guy says to me, "Let me give you an interesting problem. "You have a ping-pong ball, "but instead of being a classical ping-pong ball, "it's a quantum one.

"Could you tell me at what heights will it bounce?" I had no idea what to do. I had no sense that you could turn all this knowledge into something implementable, practical, and so on. So it was quite a struggle the first year. - So you had theoretical understanding, not experimental understanding.

- Right, right, yes, or empirical, and so on. I didn't know how to calculate things very well, yeah. I didn't think it was-- - Despite being good at math. - I was good, yeah, math, understanding the math. There's a difference thing between understanding math, implemented, and creating things. Well, you learn that.

I had four years of graduate school, and got my PhD in physics, so obviously I learned how to do it. But what I'm saying is that I had this very, very vague theoretical understanding of what the world worked, but not really practical. I didn't have it at my fingertips.

That's what you learn when you go to graduate school, as you know yourself, okay? So that's-- - Yeah, it's one thing to learn about the brain as an undergraduate, but in graduate school is where I learned how to slice brains, stain brains, trace connections, record from neurons, and it's a whole other business to get your hands dirty in the thing.

- Absolutely, absolutely, and the same thing for me. Yeah, I'm taking courses and discovering what you like and dislike. I was a little bit bound to my professor because he was the one who gave me the fellowship, but I didn't like what he did, which was always very problematic.

- Did you have a good relationship? - It was funny. He sort of became, tried to become my surrogate father, but on the other hand, intellectually, I always felt that the guy was not quite there. I mean, he was very famous and so on, but-- - He's a member in the National Academy.

- He was not, but he was very famous, very famous, but I always felt that there was a lack of depth into what we were doing. It was not just him. It was just the solid state physics. There was a very famous, you know, Mary Gell-Mann, who had total contempt for solid state physics.

She used to call it squalid state physics. - For those that don't know Mary Gell-Mann, we'll get to Murray later because I had the interesting experience of meeting him as a child, but he discovered the quark. He won the Nobel Prize in many ways is considered at least as superb a physicist as Feynman, maybe better.

Yeah, lesser known, but among physicists, you know, would evoke great fear in everybody. We'll get to Murray in a little bit. So did you enjoy graduate school? - Yes, but it was incredibly hard. Very hard. The first year in Toba. And also personally, I was very lonely. You know, I say I was transplanted into a whole different world.

Philadelphia is not a city I would recommend too many people to live in. I escaped every weekend to New York and my professor was always upset about that. - And you went from being pretty well off financially to basically having no money. - I had no money. I lived on very little money as a matter of fact, yes.

My parents, my father felt that, okay, this is what you're gonna do. You're gonna survive on this. They paid for a ticket once a year to go back to visit. And it was incredibly nice and soothing to be back and to be taken care of and everything else, you know, the life and the family.

And then going back again to Philadelphia and the reality of just being a student. Unlike many people and foreign students that were with me in other places, I did not enjoy, I mean, it was quite a cultural adventure for me to meet people from all over the world, to learn what they, I became very close to a Japanese postdoc, a very interesting man.

But I was quite miserable. - So this was in the mid '60s? - Yes, yes, late '60s, yes, yeah. I did not like my life there at all. I mean, I lived for four years. I didn't have a single girlfriend or anything. I, you know, I dated and so on, but I just felt that I was transplanted into an environment that I didn't like.

Okay, and on top of that, my conflict with my advisor were not serious because they were not overt, but they were there all the time. - That can be tough. For those listening, the relationship to your graduate advisor is a potentially wonderful, a potentially hazardous one because they exert enormous control over your future, not just through letters of recommendation, but opportunities.

And I got lucky in that sense. - You were very lucky, yes. My advisor was the kind of person that if you went out to dinner with him, he ordered for you. - Are you kidding me? - I'm not kidding. He was that kind of guy. He would take the whole group to a Chinese restaurant.

And before you said, "I don't like this," he just ordered. Once he took me for a whole weekend to his summer house to finish a paper. The guy couldn't finish a paper. And it was, I was a mess. And he, and his daughter was there. She was 16 or 17.

And she said, "Are you two going to talk physics?" I was going to say, "No, let's go for a walk." He said, "That's all we're going to do." But the physics consisted in him regurgitating whatever we were doing. I mean, I remember I was so miserable looking at my watch, seeing how the heck do I get out of here?

I didn't have a car. So I was sort of his prisoner for, from Friday to Sunday night. So it was hard for me. I never really felt that happy. On the other hand, I had no other options at that time. Okay. So, but then as soon as I graduated, I got out.

So. - I was just thinking about how different your graduate school experience was from mine. I, you know, I delighted in my advisors, you know. She was amazing. - You had fantastic people. - Yeah, I got lucky. And I got a lot of that from you, which was to, for those who don't know, I left a program at Berkeley, which everyone thought I was insane.

Insane to leave Berkeley to go to Davis. That was by choice. But I remember what you said. You said, "How big is your incoming class at Davis?" Right? Because by all standard criteria, Berkeley is the better institution. Davis is great, but Berkeley's considered exceptionally strong. And I said, "There are three of us." And you said, "Well, either you're making the best decision of your life or the worst mistake of your life." And then I think you asked me what was driving the decision.

I said, "Well, there's this person there. Her name is Barbara Chapman. And she just seems to be working on things that if I don't work on these problems, I'm gonna regret it. And I can't imagine working on anything else." And you said, "Well, go for it." Which I really appreciate because any parent, if I were a parent and my kid said, "I'm gonna leave Berkeley and go to Davis halfway through a PhD and start again." I think I probably would have balked, so.

- Well, Barbara also played a very, very nice, supportive, emotional role in your life. I mean, it was obvious that she had tremendous preference for you. - Yeah. - You were like her son in many ways. - I smile and well up a little bit only because, well, she passed away young, but she's just an amazing person.

So I feel very blessed for that. That wasn't your experience with your advisor. So during that time, I did wanna ask about this. I asked about it being the mid to late '60s because it was the counterculture movement. - Yes, yeah, right. - And one thing that people should know about you, I'll just offer this up, is that in the entire time I've known you, which is a while now, you've been very clear.

Like you never had any interest in recreational drugs. - No. - Never did 'em. - No. - Even though that was super common then. - Yes. - I've never seen you have more than a glass of wine. - Yes. - You'd never been drunk in your life. - Never.

- And you don't like football, despite being from Argentina. It occurred to me on the drive over, like peer pressure is just not something that impacts you. You're not gonna do something because people around you are doing it. - Well, no, you're absolutely right. I always felt this sense of uniqueness or whatever, but I became very humble because of it.

I'm not arrogant. It's not that I feel that others are worse and so on. But yes, when I came to the United States, there was something, there was a decision I had to make, which is, I remember explicitly thinking about. It was the first time that I was beyond the control of my parents and family and the social environment in which I was in Argentina.

So you could do whatever you wanted. And I was not the only one who came. There were three or four brilliant mathematicians and physicists that came with me. And I saw them, within a year, just losing it all. They never, one of them never graduated. They got into drugs.

They got, they moved to the village in New York, and they decided that that was the life they wanted to have. Problem is that 10 years on, what are you doing, right? I mean, being, getting to be an old hippie is not that interesting. So I really had that notion at that time that I needed to be very disciplined.

And I had to internalize a set of values and to ask myself what I want and what I don't want. And so, yes, indeed, I used to go to parties. To me, it was quite a surprise. In New York, Philadelphia, people smoking pot and all sorts of other incredible things, getting drunk and so on.

It was something that I would say, "No, thank you." And that was it. And I felt quite okay with it. And I never felt the need to satisfy a group of people that were like this in order to be included. - You know, there's only one person that I've ever met in my entire life, now that I'm 49, I can say things like now that I'm 49, who has never been drunk, never done drugs, basically has never really had a sip of alcohol except for once, and that's Rick Rubin, my good friend who's- - I like the meaning.

- Yeah, by all standards is probably the greatest music producer of all time across a dozen different genres, right? Not just rock and roll, but classical, country, all this. And I once asked Rick, you worked in music where drugs and alcohol are everywhere, or at least used to be.

And he just said, "Yeah, it never really interested me. "I could be around it, but not participate in it." And so, the two of you are the only people I know that have ever had that kind of relationship to what's going on around you, where you don't feel pulled into it.

- I also didn't understand, I mean, for instance, the role of drugs and alcohol in young people, I was a graduate student, to a large extent, plays a role of relaxation and, you know, getting rid of stress and anxiety and so on. To me, it was very interesting that people would actually come sometimes to my place and ask, you know, do you have something to smoke or, why?

Because I'm nervous or whatever. Well, you know, deal with your state of anxiety, but you don't have to drink to do that. And I was always a little bit also concerned about my brain. I mean, I was afraid that these things would just take me over the edge, off the rails.

So, I just, but I think I was also, I need to say this, I was also rather judgmental of people who did it at that time. And it was a way, by being judgmental, by saying this is wrong, then I was able to stay on my track, okay? Today, I'm much more understanding.

I mean, I hear people and that's what, you know, it works for them. It's fine, although I still don't like it. And it was even worse when we came to California because that here, everything was going on, not just drugs and everything else. So- - Well, let's talk about that, but not that specifically right off the bat.

So, you finished your PhD. - Yeah. - You could have become, done a postdoc, become a professor. - I was playing with that. I was playing with that. I wanted to go to, my dream was to go to Cambridge University in England, not only because the Cavendish Laboratory was fantastic, there was the whole thing on DNA.

I mean, Crick was there and so on. So, I thought that perhaps I would just start, you know, inhaling some of those vapors. - You wanted to get into biology. - Well, I was interested. I mean, because I'd read the famous book by Watson, you know, "The Double Helix," and I couldn't sleep.

I mean, I read it one night and I said, "It's incredible what this guy did." - Amazing book. - Amazing book, yes. So, I said, oh, the whole thing is becoming like physics. It's no longer all these complicated names and so on. - Well, it's crystallography, which is, you know, I mean, the physics and chemistry are so-- - Crystallography is boring because you have, it's like botany.

You have to learn all these crystals. - I'm just chuckling because the spaghetti model folks, as we call them, the crystallographers, are probably covering their eyes right now, but that's all right. They love what they do and thank goodness for them. - No, no, of course. - 'Cause they design novel drug pockets and receptors.

I mean, they're doing some cool stuff. - So, I thought that being at Cambridge was okay. I mean, you would suffer from, you know, not even heating in the rooms and so on. But then what happens was, I mean, you know, I met your mother and then, you know, she brought a little bit of reality into my life and said, you know-- - How so?

- Well, she said, you know, it's time for you to graduate. Time, because I was just staying there as a, you know, a PhD student, you know, I was fine, you know. Okay, the money was a problem, but, you know, I got to live like this. - You met mom in New York.

- I met your mother in New York, yes. And she was, she had her, you know, feet on the ground and said, you know, it's time for you to graduate and so on. And then she actually was right. And so, I decided to look for a job, and my professor wasn't necessarily letting me go.

He wanted me to stay as a postdoc with him, which, you know. - This is something people don't often understand, is that if a student or postdoc is very good, the advisors are de-incentivized to move them along to their job. - Right. - But it's a tricky game because you want the support of your advisor, but oftentimes your advisor, if you're very good, they want to keep you.

- Yes. So, there was also another aspect at that time. By then, I started thinking that I wanted to live a much more comfortable life. I mean, I come from a family that lived a very comfortable life, and I wanted that very badly. And so, I started, you know, looking for jobs and so on.

My advisor was not too keen to, you know, tell me what to do. So, instead of going, I could have gone for a postdoc to a couple of places, but I wanted to be a little more independent. And I discovered that there were research institutions like IBM and Xerox in the West Coast and so on.

There were, you know, people could do science, you know, good science. And, you know, Bell Labs was the most famous one of all. - That was on the East Coast. - In the East Coast. I went to Bell Labs for an interview, and I felt that they were running that like a Russian internment camp almost.

I mean, it was unbelievable. You were, they were, we were 10 of us, and, you know, they took us around and people were taking notes of what you were saying and asking and so on, telling us that was an elite place. It was an elite place. - So, East Coast.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - East Coast institutions. I mean, it makes sense to me now why having been raised in the Bay Area that East Coast institutions and I are just never gonna mix because there's, they love tradition, they love hierarchy, and they love history. Whereas on the West Coast, well, it's all about the startup, the IPO, what is about what happened in the last three years and what's gonna happen in the next 10 years.

- Right, well, on the other hand, there is something nice to be said about the European model of universities in the sense that, the biggest contrast, you say this, I remember, I, you know, when you gave, when professors gave this colloquium and so on, they were wearing a suit and tie at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school and so on.

I came to Stanford. I went to the first colloquium and the students were coming in shorts with their dogs into the auditorium. I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was, it was such an incredible, you know, change, cultural change. - Yeah, but smart, but smart, I mean. - Oh, incredibly smart, incredibly smart.

They know that about that. So, in any event, I discovered something which historically became incredibly important, although I was marginally involved in it, which was Xerox Corporation had invented a copier, decided that they were gonna get into the information age, and they decided to establish a new research center in Palo Alto, next to Stanford, where they would recruit people that would work on this whole thing, computers and information and physics and so on.

And I came in and the guys, you know, whoever interviewed me, they said, "Oh, this is exactly the place for you." So, that's what I did. And the interesting thing was that while I was there doing what I thought was interesting things, there was a whole group of people, very small, that invented the personal computer.

Steve Jobs saw it and built the first Mac out of it. - This was, I had a classmate in high school, Becca Canara. - Yes. - I remember, 'cause she wrote a Vespa to school. - Yeah, her mother was involved in that. - And her mom was involved in creating the, it was Adele.

- Adele, yes. - Adele Goldberg. - Adele Goldberg in developing the ability to move what appear to be pages on the screen. - Object-oriented languages. I had no idea that was going on, I'll be honest with you. I mean, it was going on the second floor. They were all hippie-like.

I mean, it was a scandal of the life that they had there. It was the '70s and still the Bay Area was not what it's now. I mean, everybody went to risottis, you know, take long lunches and there was a lot of stuff on drugs and so on. - Yeah, can I ask a question about that?

So Xerox PARC was this incredible place. I remember going there when I was a kid to your lab. Actually, one of my earliest recollections was you took me into your and Jim Boyce's experimental lab. You told me to pick a piece of fruit. There was a bowl of fruit.

I picked a banana. You took the banana, you peeled it, and you dipped it into liquid nitrogen. And then you told me to throw it on the ground and we shattered the banana. And I thought that was like the coolest thing ever. I remember that. That was happening, but you mentioned the stuff that was happening about developing computer interfaces and that indeed Jobs borrowed or stole mostly because PARC didn't protect the intellectual property well.

I mean, he didn't do it illegally. I mean, he sought, they basically gave it away. - Right, right. - They basically gave it away, right? - Xerox was thinking that, you know, copiers were their future and that's it. - But I also recall, 'cause I overheard the conversations between you and mom when I was a kid, perhaps, that there were, it was pretty wild at PARC.

Like there was this whole, like the room with the beanbags, people were taking LSD and other drugs. That wasn't your scene though. - No, no, no, not at all. I was in the physics lab and we can talk later a little bit about it with Gene Boyce, who was a very, very interesting collaborator of mine and so on.

We had a lot of fun, but not on that level. As a matter of fact, we were considered very square people, you know, doing what we were doing. I mean, this is a group of people that were truly the, I mean, books have been written on this whole class of people that became really the embryo of what Silicon Valley became.

There were brilliant people trying to do new things, Adele, Alan Kay. There were many of them. - Did you ever want to get involved in that stuff? - I used to see them as so, yeah, I'll tell you how I got involved. The head of the group, Bob Taylor, a very charismatic man who was responsible for the development of the personal computing.

He was the head of the computer science lab. He once heard that I played ping pong. So he started challenging me to ping pong. So we used to play ping pong, you know, and the conversations were so odd because I would say, oh, you do computer science. I have some mathematical problems.

I would like some guys in your lab to help me. He said, we are not the kind of computer scientists you imagine, like at IBM with a white coat, fixing machines and solving math. We want to revolutionize the world. We want to change the way you think. He used to say that to me.

And I sort of understood a little bit of it, but quite frankly, it seemed totally out of whatever I was doing. - This is what when Mark Andreessen, founder of Netscape, et cetera, A16Z, now when he was sitting in the very seat you're sitting in, here he described this notion of wild ducks that at companies you have these people that are small groups of people that are really kind of wild and outrageous and really testing the outer limits of what's possible.

Do you think they serve an important role? - Tremendous, tremendous. And I was a little bit of that in my field at that time. I was the first one to realize that once I saw these machines, I could use them for doing things even in physics that no one could do.

And the kinds of fields that I chose to work on were totally out of what people were doing at Xerox or IBM and so on. I think that these people are essential. Now, the question is what does a company or a university, what do they do with those ideas and so on?

Xerox lost it completely. I mean, they showed them the stuff and there's a whole books that have been written about it. - Well, one thing that I think I'm realizing now I inherited from you consciously or unconsciously is that, well, I've been more of a risk taker with various aspects of my life than I probably should have been, but that I've always enjoyed being near people who are really pushing the boundary on something.

Like my love of like skateboarding, but not just skateboarding, but our friend Danny Wade jumping the Great Wall of China, building mega ramps in his yard. I knew I wasn't gonna do that, but there's something about being adjacent to people like that, that changes the way that I've approached things that were more pedestrian to make them less pedestrian.

And maybe we'll return to this because I think that being around people who are real mavericks and real iconoclasts can be very beneficial, but it doesn't mean that you have to jump in and do what they're doing. - Well, I decided at one point to take huge risks. And as a matter of fact, my first piece of work after I got my job at Xerox PARC, which was supposed to work on some solid state physics or whatever, was I had this notion, this fantasy of Einstein in the patent office.

So I would start working on things that were crazy. And there's a whole notion in physics, which is called tachyons, particles that are faster than the speed of light. - How do you say it? - Tachyons. - Tachyons. - It's from the word tachyons, which means fast, swift, means particles that are faster than the speed of light, which is impossible.

But some physicists were playing with that idea, okay? And I became very interested in that. As a matter of fact, my first paper out of graduate school was on tachyons, and I had the pride of getting the paper accepted in the top physics journal. - It's physics review letters?

- Physics letters, yes. Yeah, and I remember my cousin Hector sending me a note or something saying, "Well, now I see the road to perdition," he said. But I was so proud of it. I really thought that I was doing something incredible, and it had nothing to do with the work I was doing on a daily basis.

And I published several papers on things that were very important to me. - You have a lot of single author papers. - Yes, yes. - This is something that is especially rare in biology, but you have a lot of single author papers. - Yeah, yeah, I was very proud of that.

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Again, that's drinkelement spelled L-M-N-T. So it's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to us by ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is a virtual private network that keeps your data secure and private. It does that by routing your internet activity through their servers and encrypting it so that no one can see or sell your data.

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So many people hear Einstein's name, they think of the hair, they think of relativity. Is it possible to explain relativity in a way that the everyday person can get it a little bit better than they perhaps understand it now? - Yes, I think, as a matter of fact, I learned not long ago that Einstein himself wrote a popular book on relativity that seems to be very, very accessible.

Okay, now, there are two aspects to relativity. I mean, there are two things that our brains were not made by evolution to understand intuitively. One is relativity, and the other one is quantum physics. We know, we have intuitions, like, you know, an animal, for instance, if you see a lion running after a zebra and so on, the lion can actually calculate intuitively, you know, the speed at which it can move and so on.

We can do the same. But if you start thinking about what happens when you get too near the speed of light, we have no intuition whatsoever. Time almost stops. There are all sorts of complicated things. Lengths contract. I mean, it's a very complicated set of things, and that's why it's very hard to understand, although the math works.

Then there is general relativity that is even worse because there is some kind of a warping of space-time that is responsible for gravitation. But I'll go into that in a second. The other one is quantum physics. Our brains are not, not only are they not wired to understand that near the speed of light, because no one moves near the speed of light.

I mean, we move at speeds that are fairly small compared to the speed of light. And quantum mechanics is at such a microscopic level that is below, basically, the level of a molecule. It's molecules, atoms, and inside the atom. So, it's very, very hard to visualize or even understand some of the very counterintuitive ideas like entanglement and also, you know.

So, relativity can be understood in the sense that you can explain certain things, but people say, "Well, how can quantum work like that?" And then you have to get into the math. Okay. But I think that, I took a course a few years ago on generativity and I just-- - Is it profound?

- Yeah, yeah. I wanted to learn it finally. It's profound, deep. And it makes you feel that this man, Einstein, he had help from a lot of people, but still, it's an incredible thing. I mean, you know, it's on a level of Beethoven's symphonies and Mozart's piano concertos. I mean, it's something that comes into your head and you're able to do, you know, through a lot of struggle.

I mean, it took him years to do that. Okay, so, but it's profound. Now, when you say, "Can you explain?" I mean, the point is Einstein one day discovered that if the speed of light is the speed of light, no matter how fast you move with respect to a beam of light, it's still moving at the speed of light.

That means that the notion of simultaneity between two events is relative now. So, you and I might say, "Yes, now it's 110, "but if you're moving very fast with respect to me, "instead of 110, you'll say something else," okay? Just because time for you and I are not synchronized.

And that leads to all sorts of very interesting effects, and practical effects, too, because from there comes the idea that mass and energy are the same. From there, nuclear weapons came out of that. All sorts of very interesting things, you know, and today, you know, we can even detect gravitational waves that are coming from almost the beginning of the universe.

We can detect that because of those theories. They can calculate. So, it's profound, yes. I mean, Einstein, I think, stands on, I mean, Newton, too, by the way. I mean, you know, Newton, Einstein, I think they're top people, you know. But they talk to God, in a way, as they say.

(laughs) - We'll get back to God a little bit later. Yeah, it seems to me that even though it's very hard to grasp, it's worth asking for those of us that don't have an intuitive sense of relativity theory that is starting to, you know, peer into these things a little bit, trying to understand them.

Do you think that it gives one's mind an ability to, you know, to tap into forms of cognition that we don't normally think about when we're looking at macromechanics of the world around us, that objects fall down, not up, and, you know, a helium balloon goes up, okay, and you can learn something about helium.

But it's all pretty straightforward with just a few simple bullet points, whereas when you get into quantum mechanics, yeah, it challenges the mind in a way that it really feels like, for most people, there's a cliff, and we just kind of go, okay, you know. And obviously, there's trust there, but for people that are curious about understanding how the really tiny bits of the physical universe link up with the really big bits of the physical universe, where's the best place to start?

- Well, okay, you're asking a very, very interesting question which is, for most of us who are trained in physics, we learn how to calculate, we learn how to operate with these things. I, you know, I just got a patent on using quantum mechanics for communication and so on, but it's still the puzzle is, why does it work the way it works?

So what I'm saying is you learn an operational way of doing these things operationally. I don't know what happens in your brain because I have ideas that come out of intuitions, not just formulas and equations, and yet I don't necessarily think I understand deeply why these things are the way they are.

They are where they are, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be like that. Our brains, as I said before, you know, they are essentially conformed to understand the macroscopic world, not high speeds and so on. So physicists work in general activity. I don't. Can do incredible calculations. Can you tell you what a black hole collapsing to another black hole would do?

And, you know, they're using general activity things, and so they can do it. Now, what it does to your brain that allows you to operationally work with these equations and solve it and have new ideas, it's something I don't understand. Namely, for instance, the example that I gave about quantum mechanics, that's a very simple one because I talk to a lot of people nowadays that work on this, is I can give you two dice, okay?

You know, just dice. You can go to Mars and I stay here. The dice are, let's assume they're quantum mechanically entangled. I throw my dice. I see three. You got three. And we don't communicate. They're entangled. They go, this is faster than the speed of light. I throw again, five.

You get five. I do one. You get one. And it's an amazing thing. - What is the origin of the entanglement? - It's a property of quantum systems that they can get entangled. That's the word. And somehow what happens to your system affects mine, but doesn't affect it in the sense of signal.

No signal. They're entangled. Now, let me, let me, now, this becomes rather-- - They're not entangled through other bits of the universe. - No, no. - They're totally independent. - Totally independent, yes. They are entangled in the sense that quantum mechanically they started like this. Now, there are ways, I mean, they're trivial things.

There's a famous example of the socks. Okay, so you take a trip and you took a pair of socks. Let's assume they're blue socks and so on. And then you open your bag and you, oh, I forgot one sock. So this is my blue sock. So you know that there is a blue sock at home.

So knowing that is a correlation, but that's trivial, right? I mean, you can do that with anything. In quantum mechanics, imagine that you look at a sock, but the sock is changing colors all the time. So now you observe it is red. The other one is red. I observe it is green.

The other one is green. Okay, randomly. - So little bits of the universe are entangled. - Well, some people, and a friend of mine who's a Buddhist claims that there is a whole religious or Buddhist who are saying that everything was entangled. Yes, originally all atoms, all electrons, all elementary particles were entangled, yes.

Because the universe started very, very tiny and everything was entangled. Okay, so you could imagine that the universe is entangled. So what happens here affects the other. But it gets, the entanglement gets lost when perturbations and noise appears and so on. So we are not today entangled with, I don't know.

I mean, we don't think that we are. - Some people think that. - Yes, yes. - Some people are entangled. - Yes, yes, yes. - Well, that gets to it. - But that's a whole, yeah. - That's a whole thing. - Yeah, that's poetry. - That's poetry, exactly. There's another example that brings us to a very salient aspect of my childhood, which is chaos theory.

- Okay, yes. - Right, so I'll say it so you don't have to. You're one of the founders of chaos or certain aspects of chaos theory. We'll talk about that. But for those of us that grew up in the '80s and '90s, I was born in '75, who saw the movie "Jurassic Park." There's a moment in that movie where I think Jeff Goldblum is explaining, what is it, chaos theory.

And maybe it was the butterfly flapping its wings in one location and impacting something someplace else. For the poets in the world, right, that was a very captivating example because I think the human brain can naturally understand that things around us, we can have an impact on them and they can have an impact on us.

But that the notion that a small insect, thousands of kilometers away can impact something that's going on more adjacent to us, it seems outrageous, sci-fi. But the notion that one thing impacts another and impacts another, that's pretty straightforward, right? There's just a dominoing of the physical world. Chaos theory is different.

- Yes. - Okay, could you explain chaos? - Yes. - And I'll just add one more thing just for context for you to sort of the paints in the palette. Around the same time, I remember the book "Chaos" coming out and where there was a lot of excitement around chaos and this was coming up.

There was also a lot of discussion about fractals. The idea that when you zoom into things at a very, very small level, you start seeing some regularities. Now we know this about crystal structures, right? Like go drop a water under a high-powered microscope, you'll see structure there. It's not random.

The angles are very consistent, at least around certain nodes, et cetera. So I think people love this idea that we have repeating patterns and numbers in nature, that things at a distance can impact us more closely. Like this is the kind of stuff that the non-physics brain can understand.

- Yes. - And it does enchant, right? We sort of poked at poetry. I love poetry, you love poetry. But I think it enchants because I think humans are naturally interested in how the randomness of life might not be as random as it appears. So what is chaos? Where does it exist in our lives?

Not emotional chaos, but and what is the relationship between fractals and chaos, if any? - Okay, let me say, first of all, about why chaos is what it is. And it's not quantum. And there is quantum stories and there's a quantum chaotic field, but I won't go into that.

Chaos is a very interesting idea, which it flies against our intuitions. Since the times of Newton, we know that if you give me the position and the velocity of initial particle, I can use Newton's equations of motion to tell you where that particle is gonna be anywhere with an incredible precision.

When we launch a rocket, we wanna go to the moon, we can calculate and predict exactly where the rocket is gonna be after so many hours, after so many days and so on. Actually, we use the equations of motion to predict that trajectory. And it's a precise trajectory. - This is how Elon was able to capture the rocket with the chopsticks recently.

- Something of that sort. Yeah, that's, yeah. Okay, now, the idea of chaos is, so that's, okay, it works. There are some cases where, let's assume, now I'm gonna give you a simple example. So I take a ball, I put it on a billiard ball, on a billiard table.

I send it out. And at the moment I can know exactly the position of velocity, I can tell you exactly where it's gonna go. Chaos says that a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny difference in the initial position or velocity of that ball will take it very, very far from the other one, which is ridiculous.

I mean, if I tell you that, you know, two cars start at exactly the same speed in the same position and one of them has a little more, you know, they'll stay parallel to each other. In some systems, and I'll tell you in a second, that actually, those two trajectories diverge completely.

So it's what we call sensitivity to initial conditions. Okay, that's what chaos is all about in classical mechanics. What is really weird about it is that it happens in systems that also undergo friction. Because let me give you an example that I used to, you know, I used to teach chaos at Stanford for many years.

So imagine I give you a beaker full of molasses. And you take a very big ball, stainless steel ball, and you just throw it into the thing. Well, after a while, it will just drift with it and it goes so slow because, you know, friction slows it down and it just goes.

And now you throw another one from another altitude and all of them are gonna do exactly the same. Some systems that are chaotic do exactly the opposite. Even though there is friction, everything tends to just slow it down, they just keep going far apart from each other. Amazing. Amazing thing.

So that's chaos, okay? And I can tell you a little bit why I got so involved in this and the work we did. - Does chaos exist in every physical system? - Mostly, yes, yes. - Maybe even in neurons or the brain. - Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, this is why I don't wanna get into controversy here about issues of whether we live deterministic lives or not.

But, you know, if things are a little bit random and so on, or even just a tiny difference in initial conditions can take you to very different outcomes. But this, we're not talking about many particles, we are talking two. Okay, so that's one. Now, fractals is a different story that comes out of a guy who I knew very well, Benoit Mandelbrot, a very, very, very funny character.

Brilliant, too, but very strange. Who discovered that certain things are self-similar. That if you look at the coast of Britain, he used to say that. You look at the coast of Britain and you say, "Okay, tell me, how long is the coast of Britain?" You go with a meter and you measure it.

Now, suppose that the meter that you're using now can measure up to an inch. Well, you're gonna get a different distance, even though you are adding the same. Because there are all these little things in the coast of Britain that are essentially self-similar that add a tremendous amount of length.

That's what a fractal is all about. These are structures that are not just a simple line, but they have all these other things, okay? He thought that it was a whole new geometry. As a matter of fact, and I tell you this because I knew Benoit very well, I met him through a talk that I gave on chaos.

He used to hang out with chaos physicists. He was a mathematician, brilliant man in many ways. I was having dinner with him in Copenhagen in a restaurant. And then the very pretty waitress came to us and so on and served us, and we were talking, he's a Frenchman, he spoke with a very heavy French accent, and so she says something, "What are you doing here?" He says, "We're at a conference." "But I'm not just at a conference.

"I'm a very special man," he said to her. And she said, "How come?" And he says, "Do you know who Euclid was?" And she says, "Sort of." She said, "Well, he was a Greek man who invented geometry." And he said, "Oh, well, guess what? "I am better than Euclid.

"I invented a different geometry." - He said that? - Yeah, he said that. - Points to the waitress in Denmark that knew about Euclid. - That was very smart. - The Danes are smart. - Yeah, yeah, okay, that was very funny that he would talk about it. So he would give a talk, and he would say, "My equations can generate anything." Indeed, he could generate any patterns.

So he would say, "You want a mountain? "Here goes a mountain, blah, blah, blah, blah, "and you see a mountain, beautiful graphs," and so on. So self-similarity is a very powerful idea in physics because it allows you that if you know something at a certain scale, you can predict what it's gonna be at a different other scales, and I use that.

But chaos and fractals are not always the same. As he used to say, because he didn't like physicists, because we never liked his talks, we always said, "Okay, so you're telling us that, you know, things are..." He used to say, "I'm not interested in pulleys. "I'm not interested in things that move things up and down," he used to say.

- He was thinking about elementary physics class. - Something of that sort, yeah, yeah. But fractals are very interesting because these are self-similar structures. At all levels, they look the same. You look at it big, you look at small, they have the same type of geometric behavior. Chaos is all about dynamics, how things evolve in time, okay?

And chaotic systems, they tend to diverge from each other for a long, long time. The man who invented the idea of the butterfly effect was a man called Ed Lorenz, who was a very famous meteorologist at MIT, and he was solving the equations of the atmosphere, trying to predict the behavior of the weather.

And he noticed, in these very old computers and so on, that sometimes he would get different behaviors. He thought there was something wrong about the computer, and he discovered that the only thing that was wrong was that the initial conditions that he was giving them was very tinily different, and he would get different things.

From there, he went into that. And there's a very beautiful, I mean, there are ideas that are very beautiful, like strange attractors and so on. I mean, we don't have to go into that. So chaos is really a field that essentially explains why things that seem to be simply explained by classical physics tend to diverge from each other, and they give rise to random outcomes.

That's the important thing. You can use chaos in order to generate random numbers. You can use chaos to generate random patterns. I've done that. - And chaos exists at the quantum level and the macro level? - Okay, so I was working on something, and I don't think it's interesting how I got into this, because I was doing something else, and suddenly I decided I was gonna do this, and I really started going very fast at this.

But then I had a very bright student that you met, Ted Hoag, and we decided, let's see if we can see chaos in quantum mechanics. And we started doing it, and there were a couple of papers by the Russians actually showing that this was the case, and we discovered that it was not the case.

We actually proved that quantum systems are not chaotic. There's some kind of interference between them and so on that makes them recur back and forth periodically. - Why do I find that reassuring, that if you get down to a small enough level that you can really predict what's gonna happen as opposed to small perturbations leading to big differences in outcome?

- That was the whole point. We discovered that quantum mechanics, there are waves and interferences and so on that make the system recur, you know? As a matter of fact, I had quite an exchange with Dick Feynman about it, you know? When I met him, I went to give a talk at Caltech, and I was in his office, and he said, "So what are you gonna talk about?

"Because I don't wanna waste my time." And I said, "About chaos." He said, "Okay." I said, "You know, some things are very, "in particular, in quantum mechanics." So I'm smiling because he was so sharp and so on. So he said, "Okay, give me the problem." And he said, "What is it?" I said, "Well, okay, I give you an electron, "and you have it in a potential, and I give you a laser." And he says, "The laser inside or outside the apparatus?" Just like that.

(laughs) So I said, "Outside." So you turn on the laser, and I said, "So what happens to the electron?" And I knew he was gonna give me the answer that was already in the literature, but he appeared to be thinking that. He stood up and walked around, and was making all sorts of noises.

And then suddenly he says, "The energy grows linearly in time." I said, "No, it doesn't. "How do you know?" I said, "We measure it. "I can show you," and so on. And he was very impressed, because that means that there is no chaos, actually. Then he said, "Oh, you know why I got it wrong." I said, "No, because I wasn't thinking in colors, "only black and white." (laughs) - Was he trying to be funny?

- Of course, he was always funny. - Let's talk about Feynman, and Gell-Mann, and Mandelbrot, and all the rest as a collection for a moment. One of the great gifts of my life has been that you would talk about scientists. It really enchants me. I'm like, I'm just so delighted when I hear it.

I grew up hearing the stories about these scientists, and not athletes, which is great, but scientists. And it seems to me that every time you talk about another scientist, you both revere the work they did. You see something unique about them. And something I learned very early on, and I've certainly internalized is, and forgive me because I'm assuming here, is that there's a certain aspect of their quirkiness or something about them, to take them seriously, but not too seriously.

I never learned to assume that because somebody was a Nobel Prize winner that they were perfect, for instance. Like you would tell me, like Einstein had, he was amazing, like he was relatively, the patent office, all this stuff, and he had all these problems with women. - Oh, yeah.

- Or, you know, and I read the books, right? Or this person, I won't name names 'cause these people are still alive, Silicon Valley. Actually, when you and I used to take walks when I was a postdoc, we used to see Jobs walking around, right? No feet, no shoes, he had feet, no shoes.

And you would say, you know, I mean, like, he's amazing. Like, this guy's brilliant. But then we would chuckle about some of the Jobisms, you know? - Yes. - And so one thing that I learned was that scientists are just people, that these founders, the creators, they're just people.

And they often have very challenging areas of their life as well. Like, they're not perfect, they're not gods. Some of them have almost godlike access to the universe and understanding it. But it seems to me that, like, you hold people up for their contributions, but you never actually, thank goodness, put people on a pedestal to the point where you're like, this person is spectacular in every way.

And I'm not saying you cut them down to size, but I learned very, and this has served me well in my life and now public facing or on Twitter. Like, if I make a mistake and someone comes at me, it's somebody that I respect, I go, ah. But then I remember, like, this person has a lot of issues in certain domains of their life.

So, to realize that, like, we're all human, like this notion of, like, none of us are gods. And yet there are people like Feynman, like Gell-Mann, like Einstein, who have almost supernatural levels of ability. Yeah, so what's that about? Like, how do you hold knowledge, insight, and stature in your mind alongside, like, the humanness, like, the inherent flawed nature of all of us, you know?

- Well, okay, it's complicated. There are many ways to think about it. In some of these names, you know, for instance, these people are built into giants by the media too. I mean, you know, Feynman, I mean, if you go to Quora and so on, everybody's asking, you know, what did Feynman do, what was he wearing, and so on, as if, you know, he was a god.

I mean, obviously what he did in physics. He, and I interrupt myself here because he really worked very hard, very hard, according to Gell-Mann in particular, to creating a myth about himself. He worked very hard. When I met him, I can't even tell you the anecdotes. I only met him for an hour, but he was obviously the kind of man that wanted to leave an impression with you.

- R-rated and X-rated anecdotes. - Exactly, and, you know, but I remember the good one was that, you know, I was gonna give a colloquium, and he said, "Should I come?" I say, "I think you should come." And then he said, "Well, then I'm gonna give you "a piece of advice.

"Do not look at me, because if you look at me "during your talk, you're gonna get confused," and so on, you know? And actually, that's exactly what happened. I started, you know, the colloquium at Caltech, you know, the marine boot camp of science, and there I am, starting to talk, and suddenly I said, instead of saying, "The next hour," I said something like, "In the next week," or something or so, because there he was, and then he started saying, you know, "Like, look elsewhere, elsewhere," you know?

That kind of guy, you know? - For anyone who hasn't lectured, there's a tendency sometimes when one is going fast to fill in without thinking. It's just something that one learns. I mean, I've had to learn it the hard way when we missed it in the recording and this kind of thing.

It's a humbling moment, but yeah, I think that, well, Feynman would have been canceled by the standards of the last few years. - I took even my father once to a lecture he was giving in San Francisco, and he was giving a beautiful lecture to, I don't know, get some award for teaching, and so on, and suddenly a bunch of women walked into the front of the big room, you know, and they started coming, because it turns out that in one of his lectures, he said something like, you know, "If you do it this way, you're as bad as a woman's driver," as, you know- - Feynman said.

- Feynman said that, and then all these women were saying things, and then he said, "I love women, they're all smart." He was very clever. - Yeah, so he would have lost his job by the standards of recent years. - Might be, yeah, yeah, okay, but regardless of that, 'cause I really want to go back to this issue, people like Merrick Gell-Mann, I mean, it was, to me, he was the most intimidating person I've ever met.

I mean, now, eventually I got to know him because he liked what I was doing, and as a matter of fact, he and I organized a workshop in an incredibly luxurious place in France, at the estate of Madame Schlumberger, one of the oiled people. Actually, it was an incredible meeting that he and I organized, so I got to know him a little bit personally, and all he was complaining at that time is he couldn't get a date.

He was a widow, and he wanted to, you know, women were intimidated by him, too. - Well, as I recall, 'cause I remember meeting him when I was a kid, and we both shared a love of birds, but he was perhaps one of the world's most obnoxious people. - Right, but you impressed him.

As a matter of fact, I still, you know, I don't know if you want me to remind you of this, because we had two stories there. Your mother and I were taking a hike in Aspen, and we saw a bird that looked incredibly complicated, and so on, so we looked at the bird.

The next day, we went to him, because he loved birds, as you know, and I said I saw a most unusual bird. He said, "Describe it," so I drew it up, and he gave me the name in Latin of the bird, and then he said, "That's the most common bird "in the Bay Area of California.

"As a matter of fact, you should see it "when you pick up the newspaper next time you're there," and indeed, two weeks later, I went to pick up the New York Times, and there was the bird, but at the same time, I said, "Andrew likes birds," and he asked you, "What is your favorite bird?" And you said, "The rainbow lowerkeit." - Still is.

- And he said, "This kid knows. "This kid knows," he said. - I know my birds. I know my birds. - No, no, that is amazing. I never heard, because if you could have said a parrot, he would have not been very interested, okay? But he was intimidating, very intimidating, and he was nasty, too, when he wanted to be, so he enjoyed the power he had.

I was a member of the board of the directors of the Aspen Center, so we had to decide what programs we had every summer, and he would come to me and say, "Whom do you want me to insult today?" He had all sorts of very funny names for all sorts of physicists and so on.

The downside of people like that in science, 'cause I've known some, too, there's a very famous neuroscientist now in his 70s who has a Nobel Prize, who also is known for generating anecdotes about himself. And in recent years, because of political correctness, wokeism, and so forth, tends to do that less, 'cause he was sort of a trucker's mouth.

Brilliant guy, but he's known for being outrageous and trying to create tales about themselves. This is something that scientists do. - Yeah, right, right. - Right, in order to maintain their legacy. - Yeah, also to feel good about themselves. I mean, by the way, I mean, Gell-Mann, I mean, I work with him, he was incredible.

I mean, you know, and the way he would interrupt people and so on, and there are two things I can tell you that are interesting. Once he was announcing some new results, he was working on this whole thing on quarks and other things, and actually it was string theory, and he announced a seminar, and everybody goes into the garden, you know, and the seminars are nice.

I need to remind the audience, perhaps here, that the Aspen Center for Music was right next door, in the tent, they were rehearsing. So the seminar was supposed to start at three, and there's, Gell-Mann comes with all his notes and then he's out. He always had notes, walking, pacing, and nothing happened.

And suddenly, they were rehearsing the Beethoven's fifth symphony, which starts, ta-ta-ta-tan, and then you heard the sound, and then he started. I will now tell you about a new theory of how the universe works. That's the way he spoke. - So what strikes me is that these people take themselves very seriously.

- Absolutely, absolutely. - Do you think that's important in life? - I don't, I like to, I mean, as you know, I like to have a good sense of humor about myself and be self-deprecating. I think some people, you know, have issues, and they do that. I mean, it all depends on how do you, you know, see things.

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Let me ask you about this. So, you know, further down my list of things I want to talk to you about is that, you know, you've always loved, it's clear from a young age, like high-level concepts, deep concepts, order in the universe, working on hard problems. You just filed another patent.

Like, I mean, as long as I've known you, you've been pursuing some new area of knowledge or implementation of knowledge. And yet, you, like your father, I know you delight in everyday things. I mean, since I was a kid, you've taken a walk after dinner. You've biked to work if you can, you know, that day because of the weather.

You love, like, a really good espresso, a really good meal. Like, the high and the low are checked-off boxes for you. - Yes. - Right? That's different, I think, than the way most people think about scientists, especially theoreticians, theorists, excuse me. Which one is it, theoreticians or theorists? - Theorists, they say, yeah.

- Theorists. - That, you know, we assume like the academics that are always somewhere else, like they're up here, they're not grounded, they're not feet on the ground. But you like everyday things. - Oh, absolutely. - Like, you very much like, like where we're gonna eat dinner tonight is every bit as important as this- - Absolutely.

- The conversation about relativity. - Absolutely. I think that there is a myth that sometimes gets perpetrated at universities. My first meeting with my advisor when I got to University of Pennsylvania, he said, "I want you to know one thing. "You're gonna live like a monk." I said, "What does that mean?" "No fun, nothing, you're gonna work.

"I want you to work. "You're getting paid to do something." I was so scared. And then I told him that on weekends I had to escape to New York City to take a walk on Central Park and look at nice things. And, you know, I always enjoyed the good things of life.

And, you know, at that time I couldn't afford them, but that doesn't mean that I didn't, you know, enjoy them. And I do believe that I inherit this from my father, a tremendous enjoyment of life in general. And yes, I am very physical and tactile about things. I like to surround myself with things that are beautiful.

I enjoy, as you said, good meals and the daily things about life. I'm not just living in some stratosphere and not being able to, you know, enjoy a meal I'm having and so on. No, the opposite. And yes, in that sense, I am very much like that. And, you know, Mary's the same way.

And so that's why I enjoy that. - Your wife. - Yeah, my wife, sorry. Yes, we really enjoy, you know, she in particular being Danish, you know, they have this idea of slow eating and enjoying the good things of life. And I'm very much like that. Yes, very much.

I don't feel guilty about it. You know, if I can afford it. - Nor should you. - Huh? - Nor should you. - Well, there is a certain aesthetic component to science and the idea that they sell you that, you know, Einstein didn't care about anything. Actually, if you look at the negotiations that Einstein had with Institute for Advanced Studies for salaries, you'll see that he really cared a lot about these things too.

- Oh, so our notion of him is just kind of like, it was just science and he had no interest in material things at all. - Right, right, yes. I had an uncle actually, Hector's father. You know, there was a branch of the family that was very much into culture.

They had beautiful collections of paintings and so on. And once, I was, what, 14 or so. And I remember at a party, we had big social parties in my parents' house. And he was lecturing me that I should never care about anything but truth and concepts and so on.

I was a little bit scared. I wanted to enjoy life as well. Okay, so it was a little bit complicated. No, no, I enjoy everything, of course. I think I got out of my father mostly, yes. My mother was a little more aesthetic in a way. But yes, the tiny little things of life are what makes one's life, you know.

- I'm slowly starting to get that. - Yes, yes. - I feel like I've been a little like rabid about my interests, almost to an obsessive level, to the point where I've sometimes overlooked like how many opportunities for just like lovely daily interactions I have. I try, but I feel like I've just been chasing the carrot of knowledge.

Like, I love doing what I do. I've always done that, you know, but. - Well, but you have to be careful indeed. I, you know, as you know, I meditate for many years and so on. And being in the present and being able to just, you know, be there and nothing else is a tremendous source of satisfaction and calms me down and so on.

- When did you start that? - Well, I started actually out of the discovery. I mean, a trivial thing that many people have. I discovered that every time my blood pressure was taken by the doctor, it was just going through the roof. You know, it's called a white coat phenomenon or something of that sort.

And I got very, very upset about it because I tried to control it. And it got worse and worse and worse. And they told me, you know, what to do. And so at one point or the other, I have a friend, a colleague, more than a friend, who's a Buddhist, who started telling me about, you know, have you tried, first of all, biofeedback?

That's the one I tried for a year. I did biofeedback. And then he started telling me about meditation. So one day, actually, he's a physicist as well. He was visiting me in my lab. And I said, he said, let me, let's do it. I did a session with him on meditation.

And I couldn't believe it. My hands suddenly were warm and, you know, felt incredibly nice. So I decided that I really wanted to learn how to do it. And I started doing it at a time when I truly needed it because I realized that without being aware, I was anxious.

Like, for instance, I would see myself walking down the street, holding my, you know, fists this way. That's not a very relaxed way of living, okay? So I really started doing this meditation on a fairly continuous basis, and I really enjoy it. And it's very important as, you know, as a father, I say this to anyone too, that you have to enjoy life.

I mean, pursuing these things, you know, eventually, what, you know, the value is in the pursuit, not in achieving them anyhow. So you might as well pursue many things at the same time. I mean, a good meal, eaten properly, can be very, very nice too. - I love that about you.

It's something I'm working on. I remember when I, along those lines, I remember when I was in graduate school, we published a paper, and then we published a second paper in science. And I remember thinking, like, this is like such a proud moment, a first author paper in the journal "Science." And I told you, and you said, "Well, enjoy it and just be aware that by tomorrow, you'll be worried that you'll never do it again." - Exactly, yeah.

- And fortunately, we published in "Nature" and a few other journals a bunch of times after that. But you also warned me about the postpartum of post excitement, like something great happens. You know, at that time, we, as a field of neuroscience, didn't really understand dopamine dynamics, but now we do.

What you were describing is this trough in dopamine that we get a day or two after some big event. - Yes. - Typically, postpartum is associated with the birth of a child, but it could be, you know, getting a degree or a great party or a paper in "Science" or "Nature," first author paper.

And you said, "A couple of days from now, you're gonna feel low and you just have to wait." And I'll never forget what you said. You said, "Just go back to what inspired the first project, pick a different problem, it'll happen again." And the second time it happened, I was like, "He was right, it happened again and again and again." I haven't had an infinite number of those papers in those journals, but I learned about the dopamine dynamics associated with pursuing a goal.

And then you get the thing and you're very excited and then you feel the drop. - Yes, yes. And that, I think, that is something that even ancient philosophers knew about it. The Buddha, many, you know, the Greeks and so on, this idea that the things we pursue, they are ephemeral in a way, in the way the feelings, they elicit in us, you know?

And I think that you're right. And there is also another tendency one has to try to avoid, which is you're successful in something and you continue doing exactly the same thing because, you know, by now you know how to do it with your hands tied here. And I always felt that I want to go elsewhere.

And, you know, I have sort of a reputation for changing fields and, you know, I don't do that in order for others to be puzzled by it. It's just that I'm curious and I want to have a feeling again, that like falling in love, you know, the new thing, you know, it's nice at the beginning, but eventually whatever you're doing, it becomes, you know, trite and so on.

- Yeah, let's talk about that because after chaos, which brought a lot of, you know, I remember we had reporters in our house and there was like a TV and the book by Jim Glick, and then you switched to something completely different. - Yes, yes. - And you got into computer science.

- Yeah, well, computer science is a-- - Computers. - Computers. What happened was that a lot of the success that we had was because I was at PARC. We had phenomenal computer facilities there, things that we could visualize at a time very few people could do. And so, and one of them actually, someone suggested I get a patent.

There is a patent for the chaos that sometimes people have in T-shirts that actually we discovered for the first time with guys from UC Santa Cruz, with Jim Crutchfield and so on. You know, he was actually very instrumental in getting me into chaos and so on. But that is, but when I, what happened was, okay, so we did this, we did quantum.

And then one day I said, okay, so what do I do now? Okay, well, you can go and publish one paper after that in chaos. I mean, you can produce 10 PhDs with this. But then I said, why don't I do the opposite? I'm using computers to help me in the physics.

Why don't I use the physics to study computers? Well, that's an interesting idea, but you know, I mean, so why don't you do that? So what happened to me, I was at a meeting on chaos in Copenhagen and I couldn't sleep one night and I had a book called "The Computer Red Brain" by John von Neumann, perhaps someone that was a true genius.

I don't know if you heard of him. He invented computers. He was a phenomenon at all levels. And he was part of the Manhattan Project. He was perhaps one of the most brilliant people that ever existed, at least that we are aware of. I mean, he was at the Institute for Advanced Studies for Neumann.

There are all sorts of anecdotes about him. He had a photographic memory. You could give him a page of a phone book. He would look at it, close it, and then he would recite the phone numbers from bottom to top. - Totally useless skill. - Yeah, but he was a genius, a genius, true genius.

He invented computers. He invented game theory in economics. I mean, it was- - Useful skill. - Yeah, exactly, okay. In any event, so he wrote a very little book called "The Computer and the Brain." No equations, nothing. And one night, four o'clock in the morning, I cannot sleep. I get down, you know, it was summer, so the sun was still setting in Copenhagen.

And I went there to read it. And I said, "This is what I'm going to do. I don't know anything about brains, but I can imagine, you know, if the brain is like a computer, I could do something like that. But I also want to apply some of what I know to these things." And the first thing that occurred to me was to start looking at the computer network we had at Park.

These computers were communicating with each other as we nowadays, we know, that's the internet and so on. So there were many, many aspects of this. And I decided that because I was very influenced by one or two students that were very much into economics and libertarian ideas and so on.

And one of them had taken two courses in econ at Caltech. So we decided to start looking at this as a market where computers essentially buy and sell programs to execute in their machines and so on. So we started really doing what we call the ecology of computation. It was a big effort, which married economics with artificial intelligence and computer.

But it became a big thing. And so I became, again, it's like falling in love again. It's a new field. I thought it was great. - Yeah, the discovery process of falling in love is half the fun. - Absolutely, yeah. And I also was able to, I mean, there is a lot of formalism in economics and some of it is really, I mean, sort of academic.

But there are some ideas that are very profound to the extent that some people consider me an economist sometimes, because I think in terms of utility rewards and risk and all this stuff. And as a matter of fact, a lot of the work I'm doing now on resource allocation in networks comes from ideas from economics.

- When you go into a new field, in order to learn about the field, is that mainly through talking to people in the field, reading books? - Both, both. - And it doesn't strike me that you have ever tried to ingratiate yourself into any field. It's not like you're trying to be a member of the field.

Like you go in as an observer and a learner. - Yes, I need to say this. I don't think that many people have said if I stayed in one field, I would have done much better in terms of reputation and so on. As a matter of fact, I can tell you an anecdote that is-- - You mean like awards and stuff?

- Yeah, like for instance, not long ago, I was already doing computers after chaos and so on. I won't name the person, but a very good physicist professor at Berkeley came into my office and says, Bernardo, we have an issue here. I said, what is it? That your name for a membership in the National Academy of Sciences is coming up.

I said, oh, that's nice. He said, well, it's a problem. You're not writing papers in physics. You're writing papers in computer science. And we need a physicist because otherwise, the chemists will get that job. The physicists don't-- - Like welcome to academia. - Yeah, so I said, well, you want me to do?

He said, well, can you perhaps write one or two more papers on this so we can show? I said, no, I cannot do that. I can't. - Well, isn't there a famous story about Feynman and being elected to the National Academy? - Yeah, he refused to, yes. - Right, I think they told him he was in the National Academy.

And then he said, well, what do I do? And they said, well, you elect in other members. And he said, I quit. - Well, yeah, so in any event, I never became a member of the National Academy. - But you never sought prizes. - No, I mean, I would have liked to get them.

Why not? I mean, it's not that I said they are meaningless, but there was nothing that I could do about it. And since I was not, as you said, I was always a little bit of a, always moving on to the next thing, never staying long enough going to these meetings where by now you heard it all over and over and over again.

So, yeah. - Yeah, I mean, I have to say that, you know, like, I mean, as you know, I still have my position at Stanford and teach, I'm involved in a little bit of research. But, you know, one of the great advantages I had is that all my advisors died or killed themselves.

So I was orphaned in science. And so there was never an expectation from my advisors that I do the next thing 'cause they were dead. So I thought about that, but I remember when I launched the podcast or started going on podcasts, I remember you being a little bit concerned.

You're like, you know, what are your colleagues gonna think? And I think at that point, the way that science was going and the structure of academia relative to what my needs in life were and just a passion to wanting to do something new, I put a lot of thought to the fact that you've changed fields many times.

And I just felt absolutely compelled to get into science communication. And there was no stopping that. But I have to thank you a lot of the reason I was able to take the step to do the podcast in addition to being supported by Lex Friedman's suggestions and a lot of help from others, Joe Rogan and others.

But is that, I was like, well, that's what you're supposed to do. When you hit a point where what you're doing isn't as compelling, you wait for the thing that draws you forward. Seems like you were always drawn forward. I was thinking of carrot and stick. It's not like you disliked where you were.

It's that there was some carrot that you identified and you go towards the carrots. - And also something very, the other day, my wife was actually mentioning, I've been, in a sense, an orphan. I never had mentors. It's very interesting. - Except this, frankly, not terrific graduate advisor. - He was not my mentor, really.

I mean, you know, he didn't even want me to do the things that I wanted to do. So I never had someone who was whispering, Bernardo is the guy too, you should be considering for this or that. I mean, I had the fortune to really get to the top of many of these fields and I interacted with the top people.

I mean, we talk about Feynman and Gell-Mann. There are many very famous people that I respect immensely that I met when I was in France. You know, as you know, I was teaching there. I met people that are brilliant and so on. And I felt treated with tremendous amount of respect as a colleague and so on.

But I never had mentors in that sense. And also, as I said, I am a little bit restless. I am very curious about everything. And so, you know, sometimes I see something and I say, oh, there's an opportunity to do something interesting. I think that the issue of being curious is extremely important.

And it's interesting because I reflect a lot on, say, my father. My father was an immensely curious person, but all about details. He never liked abstractions of any kind. He was very proud that he went to the same school I went and the only course he flanked was philosophy because he said it doesn't make any sense.

Now, perhaps he was right about that. You know, sometimes you wonder about what these philosophers talk about. A couple of months ago in Denmark, we were invited, my wife and I, to a dinner with philosophers talking about artificial intelligence. I thought these people were, they didn't really know what was going on.

But nevertheless, yes, I am curious and sometimes I move on to things. And I feel that the reward, the internal reward you get from doing something new and interesting and exciting is much better than a recognition that someone will come and say, you know, whatever. I mean, don't misunderstand me.

I will not say no to a recognition. But it's not really that I'm, I do this in order to get that. That's not me at all. - Yeah, I mean, the whole thing, it sort of brings my thinking back to like the early discussions about, you know, other students are not interested in physics, you're interested in physics.

Other people are like smoking a lot of weed and partying, like, no, like, like you said, you've not had mentors. That's one area in which you and I have been very different. I've always attached myself to mentors, many of them. Many of them, I mean. - Well, there might be a psychological reason too.

Yeah, yeah. That you need this, you know, or needed that one point of that is parental type figures. Yeah, sorry, yeah, there might be. I wish I had them, don't misunderstand me. As a matter of fact, I mean, my influence on my students, I produce more than 15 PhDs.

It's also strange because none of them stayed in physics. Now, the department at Stanford was not too happy with that. It's not that I told them not to, but they all smelled that, you know, I was doing something else. I mean, you know, from computers, I became very aware of what was going on very early on with the internet.

As you know, I started doing all this stuff on social long before anyone was doing, and economics of attention and all that stuff. And many of the students, the other day, I found one of them, I met one, Lada Damich, who, you know, I think you- - She was early at Google.

- No, she went to Facebook. And the other day, she wrote me a note. I was so lucky that I met you. She was gonna do a thesis on, I don't know what, solar, collecting solar. - Yeah, you've collected some pretty interesting students. They're like a pretty, we won't name names other than Laza, but like some of them are very well-known people in the tech industry now.

- Oh, yeah, yeah. - And I think that, yeah, it seemed like the people that would gravitate towards you. It's interesting, your laboratory is off campus. So anyone that decides to be off campus is already making a choice toward, like they don't wanna be part of the standard culture.

- But they thought it was interesting. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me, I wanna get back to this issue of like internet and Silicon Valley. I recall it was the early '90s. So it'd be like '89, '90, '91. Remember I had this girlfriend, Gretchen, remember? And her dad was the editor of "Guitar Player" magazine.

And I'll never forget, he told me, he said, "It's gonna be all about multimedia." Remember that? No one talks about multimedia. He said, "Your television is gonna be, "your computer is gonna be, your stereo is gonna." I mean, he was right, right? He was basically, everything was gonna be synthesized into common devices.

And we now know that that were not to be true. But at what point did you decide that things like computers were mainly going to be a route to industry and not to academia? This is really important, I think, for people to understand because right now it's kind of happening in biomedical sciences.

But you see this at Stanford. People get degrees in computer science, but not to become computer science professors, sometimes, but really so that they can go into industry. So how do you see nowadays, like for people that are interested in science or technology, do they need to go to graduate school?

Like is a PhD useful anymore? - Peter Thiel says that you shouldn't even get a bachelor's. I think that's what he, you know. - I mean, I have great respect for Peter, great respect for Peter. There are a lot of things that are easier to say when you're already a billionaire.

- No, no, no, I know. Like Steve Jobs saying, you know, passion is everything. - Right, I mean, necessary, but not sufficient. - Right, right, right. - Necessary, but not sufficient. - So I think that what's happening today, I mean, technology, we are going through a technological revolution. There's no doubt about it.

We used to learn about the printing press and now it's the same thing with computers. I still remember, and I, you know, we, this is amazing because, you know, today is so, so obvious. I mean, people didn't know much what was going on. I park everything. One night we were having for dinner.

I remember, you know, Emmanuel Mignot, who was, you know. - He discovered the orexin-hypercretin relationship. That's the cause of narcolepsy is a mutation. - Yeah, he was a friend of ours and his wife. They were at home with our dinner and I was telling them, I was telling them that you could go to a computer and go through the Louvre Museum in Paris.

And they say, what are you talking about? So we finished dinner and we all drove to park at night. And I turn on my computer and there was a man. I still remember his name. Something Pioch was the last name. He had gone taking pictures of every painting at the Louvre and put them online so you could just navigate through the Louvre.

Today it's obvious, trivial. At that time, they couldn't believe it. There you are in Palo Alto on an evening going through all the rooms of the Louvre. They just couldn't understand what was going on. - What year was this? - I don't remember. But it was just-- - Must have been like '94?

- When the web started coming, that was right before-- - So we all had to get email in college in the final year of '97. So it must have been somewhere around like '94, '95. - Something of that sort, right before, right at the time Andreessen made the web available to everybody basically, Netscape.

So in any event, so it was an amazing thing. It was amazing. Now, all of these developments were really done in companies, not necessarily in academia. - Okay, that is an interesting point. And I think that today, an immense amount of the advances that we see in biotechnology, in computers, in everything are essentially done, I would say, for profit by companies.

Okay, I think social networks, they started, we started doing social networks at a time when no one even thought of doing it. I used to say I do social science with a capitalist because sociologists used to study the behavior of five widows in some Norwegian village and write a paper.

We could look at 150,000 people, how did they visit this side or that side and predict how, you know, we were able to predict behaviors, behaviors, you know? So I think that today, everybody knows that that's the case and it's, you know, the same thing with artificial intelligence. - But for a kid in high school or kids in college or kids, I mean, is it worth getting a graduate education?

- Well, it all depends on what you wanna do. - I mean, law, medicine, you need a, I mean, you need the professional degree. I mean, these are ultimately professional degrees, so you need the training. I don't want a surgeon that didn't go to medical school. - Okay, but the danger is, and I remember a very, very bright guy I had in my team, you don't wanna become a blue-collar worker.

See, what I'm saying is the following, being a hacker or being able to deal with software, it was an incredibly profitable profession. Now you have these large language models that can actually program for you. You need to write a program. You go to Chad GTP and he'll write it for you.

So suddenly, if you don't have a set of talents, a way of imagining things or doing something, you become basically just someone that just hacks for so many dollars an hour. Now, it's true that they can give you options. If the company does well, you get rich and so on.

But I still believe that you need some contextual cultural part to this. Okay, now I personally believe that humanities and all sorts of other things are very important. And to understand where is your cultural environment, where are you coming from and where is this society going is important. But on the other hand, as you said, you can just finish high school and start hacking and become very good at it and doesn't require much more than that.

- Do you think the examples of like Zuck, Elon, and others going from essentially departing standard education to start companies, do you think they've served? I mean, certainly not talking about the companies, but do you think those examples are good examples for people to internalize or are they unicorns?

- Well, I think that they're unicorns and you have to be very careful. We only talk about the success stories. We don't go and interview the guy that is loading a landscaping truck because his startup didn't go anywhere. Okay, so it is a very, our tendency to see these people as heroes and to try to imitate them is a very dangerous one, I think.

Now, that doesn't mean that you should not be working on the things you care and gamble, but these are the guys who played a lottery and won. Do you remember there were many other social websites before Facebook and they all died and Facebook could have died too. I mean, Zuckerberg might disagree with me, but he could have died, okay?

And all these things are like that. Apple, when almost under, they brought Steve Jobs again and the guy put them onto the stratosphere. And the same thing with Elon Musk, he's a high-risk taker. And so far, every time he flips the coin, he comes the right way. But to say, "I wanna be like him," you have to be very careful and to calculate the odds.

Okay, so when you say this, how many of these kids really make it? I mean, it's a very complicated thing. So I think that to have a strong background in something will help you when suddenly the field switches from being a programmer and making a lot of money to suddenly programming a dime a dozen or becoming a technician, basically, okay?

- I mean, I had a perfectly thriving career as a lab scientist with grants and private funding and a bunch of other things, publishing regularly. And when I decided to switch to this, were you worried? - No, because I saw it as a very slow departure from what you were doing.

And I saw the success very early on. I mean, I realized that you were essentially satisfying two things that are very important to you. You like to explain things. You're incredibly good at explaining things since you were a little kid. Okay, you were always explaining everything to people and you have a talent, let's face it.

I mean, you know, I'm not saying this because I wanna flatter you. I really believe that and everybody says that. The success of your podcast is a success at explaining things in ways that people understand. They don't have to go and buy a book on neuroanatomy to understand what you're saying.

So I knew that this was a path. Now, I didn't realize how incredible the path was. And there was a lot of randomness in it. For instance, you started podcasting at a time when very few people were podcasting. If you start today, the story would be a very different one.

- The timing was the pandemic, people were home, they were listening to podcasts. - And this brings to something to me that many times people have asked me about me. What makes me do what I do? I believe in the idea of walking on beaches with very few footprints.

When you go into a crowded field, it's a mess. So many of the times that I move into something else is when I realize that there's a mob scene of scientists working at this and the chances of doing something interesting are very, very small, okay? The internet has allowed information to go everywhere.

A guy in Zambia can actually read the same things that I read here. So it's very hard to compete against such a crowd. And many people are brilliant and many of them are smart. So you started something very early on and you were lucky that you chose a field that resonates with the needs of people, okay?

There are also other people who do a podcasting and goes nowhere. So I think that I never worried. I actually was elated to see the trajectory of your podcast. The only thing is you have a tenure position and that is a nice safety cushion if everything else were. Today you're beyond the reach of justice, as I say.

So no problem, you don't need it in a sense, unless you- - No one's beyond the reach of justice. But yeah, I still maintain my tenured position. I spoke to my chairman in ophthalmology this morning and I'll teach this spring or in the fall. - And it's good for you too, to really interact with young people and to hear what they care and so on.

But I never worried in the sense that I thought that you have enough talent to do well and you chose to do it. I mean, I remember during COVID at the beginning, we were at your sister's house and you were drawing all these little diagrams. - I used to put my drawings.

- Yeah, yeah. And then, so I think you put them on Twitter or something of that sort. And it was the beginning of something much more interesting and important. And so I never worried about it. I think that all of us, the whole family and those who know you are sort of impressed at the explosive success of the story here.

Your podcast is amazing. I mean, I don't have to tell you. - That's what reflects a kind of an early compulsion more than anything of learn and teach, learn and share. - Yeah, but there's also, I need to say something. The other day, actually, we were watching your interview with Esther Perel and regardless of the fact that I think it's a great interview, both my wife and I were reflecting on the fact that it's also an incredible tribute to the way you conduct an interview.

Okay, so there is a talent there. I mean, not many people can take someone and talk for, and make it interesting, let's put it that way. So you have that. - I inherited your curiosity. - No, but it's more than that. It's also a way of drawing people out and so on, which is also part of your practice.

So I never had any doubts. They are the opposite. I mean, the issue is, you know, obviously you're taking it to many, many places long beyond what you started, which was essentially explain to people how neuroscience works, right? - Yeah, we've gone into a lot of health domains and other things.

And I'm also been blessed with an amazing team. This is something that I think, while we share a lot of things in common, if I may, I mean, I've always been kind of a pack animal, you know, if it was skateboarding, like draw friends together, if it's birds, I have my bird club with Eddie Chang, who now, as you know, is the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF.

It's kind of wild to think about, but yeah, I've rarely gone alone. Like I'm just struck. I mean, we've had many conversations over the years, but I'm just struck at how you've been able to be, you've been a bit of a lone wolf with these different camps. You make friends, you have colleagues, you maintain long-term relationships.

- I have groups of people who collaborate with me. I don't do this alone, the opposite. - Right, right. But I haven't changed crowds very often, you know, and it seems like you've had to go into, you know, economics and theoretical physics and all these things. And yeah, that's an interesting difference.

And look- - And it's daunting and thrilling at the same time. Sometimes when you start giving talks in a field that you've never done much before and you see this audience, you know, can be intimidating too. You know, even when I started doing chaos, I thought I was doing very well till I gave a talk at Berkeley and there was a mathematician.

I regard mathematicians as the top, top people in the world. And I was saying something and the guy, he's a very famous mathematician. He said, "That's a lie." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Can you prove it?" "No, because you know, physicists don't prove theorems." He said, "Well, then it's a lie.

You cannot prove it's a lie." It was quite a, you know, a cold shower. - That happens to me on Twitter every now and again, where they'll find something where I misspoke and they do it and it's super embarrassing. You correct yourself, you move on. - No, no, and then you learn things too.

And you have a conversation with someone. - And you never forget those things. This is what I learned. Like you never forget the errors you made. Like on a qualifying exam, most people will never take a qualifying exam, but they basically ask you questions until you get something wrong.

The moment you say, "I don't know," or you get something wrong, that's an important moment because it's also the thing that you go look up and you never forget. - Yeah, right. And also the tiny humiliations can be very good too for you. I mean, this is very important.

- I've had plenty of those. - I've had plenty of those. - I do too. I mean, I think it's a very, very important part of growing up and discovering that you don't understand something. But I always, I need to say this. I mean, in spite of the fact that you paint me as a lone wolf, I'm not.

I'm very social and I love interacting with people. And I've always been very lucky that I surround myself with groups of people, including today, that are brilliant and resonate with the kinds of things I want to do. And so it's very stimulating. I'm not the kind of person that sits in a corner and does theories and publish it.

I publish papers on my own. That was my romantic period where I needed to be Einstein in the patent office. And not that I thought I was Einstein, but it was very important. I was the only author, okay? Today, I don't mind putting my name, whatever, and I don't need it.

I mean, I have hundreds of papers and lots, you know, more than enough patents and so on. So I like interacting with people. It's very, very important to me. When I have an idea, I need to tell people about an idea. So I can relate. - Yes, yes, yes.

So that's very good. And I still see some of my old students and collaborators, like, you know, Ted and so on. And we take walks every once in a while and discuss things, you know? And so I learned a lot from him too. - Right now you're working, as I understand, on quantum internet.

- Yes. - This is a mysterious term to most everybody. - Yes, yes. - You alluded to it earlier about quantum entanglement or about entanglement. - Yes. - But my understanding is that foreign governments, countries, and our government and country are very interested in quantum internet. - Yes. - That it might actually be at least as important as AI, maybe more important for security reasons, et cetera.

Can you explain quantum internet in a way that I can understand and the listeners can understand? - Yes, I can explain. I mean, I'll tell you the original thing. Quantum mechanics was essentially finished in 1925. So we're not reinventing new physics here, okay? There's the physics of the gravitation and quantum, but that's not really what we're talking about.

What happens is the following. The basis of all secure interactions in the internet on computers are based on the idea that there are certain mathematical equations or functions that are very hard to resolve. So when I send you something encoded, if someone is listening to that conversation that is encoded and tries to read it, it's very, very hard to do because in order to decode that code, it's some kind of symbols and so on, you need to, I don't know, months or years of a computer to do it, okay?

But it can be done. Computers get broke, computer codes get broken all the time because the basis of these codes are mathematical functions. You have a mathematical function, you can create a computer program that will try to unravel it and it can be unraveled. Okay, so that's one thing.

Now here comes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics provides security that is not given by mathematics, but by the laws of physics. So if you have a way of sending messages from one computer to the other, encrypted using quantum mechanisms, they cannot be broken. - Can you give me an example of a quantum mechanism for encoding information?

- Imagine that I'm sending you messages. Every message is encoded in binary, ones and zeros, okay? So I'm sending a message which is a string of ones and zeros. That string of ones and zeros could be hello, Andrew, or it could also be something, you know, that is secretly encoding to something.

If it's classical encryption, which is what we use today, a computer in principle can look at those symbols and unravel them. Now let me show you how it works in quantum. In quantum, when I send you a quantum message, the act of touching it, trying to look at it, destroys it.

That's what happens in quantum, not in classical thing. I can look at the strings of ones and zeros, and I look at them, and I can make a copy of it, and then I read them, I take them to my lab, and I decrypt them, okay? If I look at a string of qubits, quantum bits moving, that are not ones and zeros, they are different things.

- These are moving parts? - Yeah, moving parts, they are usually photons. They go on, you can use fiber optics, you can use-- - So these are photons, like, I know what photons are, so they're little bouncing energy of light? - Yeah, little bunches of light, because photons, if they're going around, they're also, you know, the photon could be polarized up or down or whatever, but if it's in a quantum state, which is in the intermediate between, the moment I look at it, the moment I capture it, I collapse it into one or the other, and I destroy it.

- The interaction with it changes it. - The measurement destroys it. This is the mystery of quantum mechanics, that the measurement collapses, we call it the word, collapses into one state or the other. Before that, it was anything. We could be anything. So when I use quantum signals, I'm sending qubits, quantum bits, they're called qubits.

The act of observing the qubit renders into a classical one or zero. So then there's no way you cannot break it. - So does that mean that the practical implementation of this equates to unbreakable code? - Exactly. - Which is why, of course, other governments, I mean, what I've been told is that in China, they're working very hard on this.

- Oh, absolutely. - And that here, we're working very hard on this. - We are working, I'm working too, yes. - Yeah, you're working very hard on this. - Yeah, yeah, no. But wait, wait. - Who's there? Has anyone gotten there yet? - Okay, the problem is the following.

In order to decrypt this, remember that I told you that you can use mathematics, okay? Some of these functions are incredibly complex. It might take the age of the universe, perhaps, to decode them mathematically. Let's not talk about quantum, but if you have a quantum computer, now we're talking about a quantum computer, it can do it in a couple of hours.

A quantum computer could decode any mathematical function of the ones used in encryption in hours, whereas it would take the age of the universe for a monster computer, standard computer you can buy, to do it. - So in theory, whoever gets this ability first can read essentially all the information that's being sent around the world.

- Not only that, and many people are doing, the Chinese, the Koreans, and we're doing, they are grabbing everything now that is encrypted. They cannot decrypt it, and they store it, because someday they'll be able to decrypt it. - But who knows if it will still be relevant? - Oh, but it may be.

- And we don't know what they have. - Imagine, imagine, imagine if you can get, remember when North Korea hacked, what was it, Disney? One of the, and then they discovered all these emails where people, like George Clooney, I don't know who, they was complaining about this or that.

So imagine-- - And worse. - And worse, and worse. - We just didn't hear about that. - Yeah, yeah, okay. So if you grab all this information, we cannot decrypt it today, but if quantum computers become available, and there are people working on quantum computing, they'll be able to decrypt it.

In the meantime, people are working on deploying these quantum networks. We're working on that too. Not to deploy them, but just to see whether or not it's feasible to do that, okay? The Chinese are ahead of almost everybody. They have two satellites already in orbit that are sending these qubits.

So these are impossible to decrypt, okay? - Wait, so they're sending the qubit, so you can already communicate in quantum. - Oh, yeah, yeah, we communicate all the time, yeah, yeah. I have a lab in Colorado that does that, yeah, absolutely, over 100 kilometers, yeah. - But that's not what standard internet is using.

- No, no, no, no, but eventually, we will have a quantum internet based on all this, because in order to talk to these quantum computers, you have to send qubits, not just normal bits. - So this is a race. - Yeah, a race. We are not really, I mean, since we are not a, yeah, yeah, and there are a lot of people.

I need to tell you that a lot of people, including this government, that claim that this is not really that relevant or important, but in Europe, for instance, that they're really putting a lot of money into that. - Why would our government not think it's important? - Because there is a sociological phenomenon here.

Cryptography has always been the promise of the mathematicians, because there are mathematical functions, you know, like discrete logarithms and so on. They believe, the moment they heard about quantum computers, they said, "Oh, we can solve the problem. "We can create algorithms, mathematical algorithms, "that are gonna be even harder to break." They call that post-quantum, but there is, they don't know it's true.

The United States government is following this post-quantum because they think it's easier and so on. Already, they published two of these very, very fancy, although two students with a laptop were able to decrypt it within a week. So obviously, you cannot prove that no one will ever decrypt these things, okay?

So there is, the cryptographers, they don't like physics. They don't, you know, they don't work as physicists. So they say quantum key distribution, that's the name of this thing. Esoteric, it's not important, and so on. And also, it won't work. Well, they say it's gonna work for short distances, about 10 to 20 kilometers.

We just published a paper that got tremendous publicity and an award and so on as best paper, that we were able to send this stuff over 100 kilometers. So I mean, and the Chinese are sending that from satellites, okay, so impossible to decrypt. Military communications, based on these kind of things, are impossible to decrypt.

So they are very important. But there is a whole group of people that are saying, no, post-quantum is what we want. And so NIST, the National Institute of, I think, Science and Technology, they are really pushing the post-quantum thing. In Europe, it's the opposite. They're really embracing quantum. I mean, I was, Denmark, for instance, is very far ahead into these things.

NATO just gave them a pile of money to work on quantum and so on. So it all depends, you know, it's a complicated thing because the crypto people are all mathematical people. So they don't care about quantum. - Is any of this going to be useful for trying to understand, I don't know, how the brain works?

- Well-- - Or is it, I mean, you know, there's still debate as to whether or not the way that we're thinking about brain function is even, like, the right way. We think about neurons, action potentials, and chemicals. But the physicists, whenever they kind of, like, poke their noses into this stuff, they tend to think about it a little bit differently or they start to think about, well, you know, state dependence, like, the brain that you have at 8 a.m.

is very different than the brain you have at 2 a.m. or 4 in the afternoon. Like, maybe everything's happening differently and maybe some of this actually gets down to the quantum level. Like, we can't say this neuron talks to this neuron and when they talk in the following way, you get a certain output.

Like, is there relevance here? - Okay, there are two things I want to say. Beware of physicists getting into brains, in brain work. I mean, they always end up-- - It's like the new thing now. - Yeah, I know, I know. - Neuroscience, you know, has swung the doors open.

- I was into neuroscience for a while. - Yeah, and I think recently, neuroscience has made a good move of including people from psychology, computation, even philosophy, economics, and biology, basically all levels of analysis. - But the other thing you asked about quantum and the brain, there is Roger Penrose, who just got the Nobel Prize in physics.

He's one of the few people who have very esoteric ideas about the brain being totally quantum. And he's an incredibly brilliant man. He was the advisor of Hawking. - Yeah, I heard him on Lex's podcast. - Yes, yeah. - And yeah, he does have interesting ideas about how neurons might be communicating, maybe as bound networks as opposed to independent entities.

- But no one really follows it, and I'm not an expert in that. So, Roger Penrose is the one that's pushing this. Many of the physicists go into brain science are not very clever at doing brain science, because, you know, I heard a story, I think it was Francis Crick or someone who told, I was at a conference and he was saying this, that a physicist came to him and said, "I decided to go into brain science." And so he said, "Okay, what have you done?" And the guy says, "I measure the specific heat of the brain.

"What do I do with it, basically?" - I think it's good that computationally minded people have joined neuroscience, because it was getting too modal, too descriptive. That said, I do think that, you know, math is so important, but it's often used to intimidate biologists into thinking that their ideas either might not be true or that there's better ideas out there.

I will say that when computational neuroscience first started it seemed like the attempts to model the brain were pretty feeble. And actually, I'll just say it, they were pretty lame. But now, I think with AI and LLMs, - Oh, that's a whole different story. - Like the biologists have had to step back and say, "Hey, you know, these math, physics, engineering AI types, "they have the potential to really evolve the field." - Right, right.

- At least that's my stance. - I was at conferences where people say things like, "The brain is a massively parallel machine." And I say, "Wait, wait, are you sure of that?" - Yeah, that's a meaningless accent. - Yeah, so I said, "If I show you a row of trees," and I said, "Tell me how many are they, "do you really take the whole thing?" And he said, "75, or you have to go sequentially." It's not parallel, it's sequential, you know?

- But LLMs are pretty interesting, right? I mean, you can take four or five large language models, essentially sort of pseudo brains, and have them work on the same problem. It's hard to work with five people in parallel in a way that's coherent, right? You can only talk so much over one another.

- It's very interesting. That's exactly what we're doing now. Years ago, with Jeff Frager, we wrote a paper on the idea of showing how programs collaborating with each other could solve problems very, very fast that humans and others cannot do. And it's a basis of a lot of the work we want to do now.

Yes, and there are people who are already thinking of putting many, many of these LLMs together, and then see whether or not they do better than a single one, or better than a human. - So you think AI is going to improve life for the typical citizen? - Yes, because you can use these things in order to do things that were very hard to do before.

I mean, I use them, and it's amazing. I mean, I just, we just published a paper on hallucinations in LLMs, and so, because they hallucinate every once in a while. They say anything. But yes, yeah, they are very useful, very useful. And I think that the companies that use them will make more money than the companies that produce them, like OpenAI, and so on.

Yes, yeah, it's a very, very important field. - But 10, 15 years ago, whenever I'd bring up AI, you would chuckle and say, "This stuff is life." - Well, the funny thing is that the other day, well, I don't want to name him, one of the managers at Xerox, but when I was at PARC, I started playing with the idea of using machine learning to see what they can do.

And the AI people at that time said, "That's nonsense. "We need to think about logic. "How does the brain think? "How do we do cognitive psychology, and so on?" We were just doing neural nets. That's exactly it. And the other day, I was meeting with some of these people, and they were saying to me, "We used to laugh at you, "you know, doing this stuff, "because we could do only very little." And today, it's the rage.

Now, the difference between what I was doing and what is being done today is the scale. I mean, you know, I don't know if you know that they are now using nuclear power reactors in order to power the data centers. - I didn't know that. - But it's an immense cost of computing.

You have no idea the amount of work it takes to one trillion tokens in order to get one of these things to work. - It strikes me you've always been very open-minded and very willing to adopt new technologies, but it hasn't changed your daily life very much. Like, not much at all.

I remember early on, you said, you showed me the internet, and you said, "Be very careful." And I said, "Why?" You said, "It's like mental chewing gum." - Absolutely. - You chew and chew. Those were your words. You said you chew and chew, and at first it tastes good, then it doesn't taste very good at all.

Then you don't taste it at all. And then you realize there's no nutrition. And I always think about that in terms of phone usage or web foraging behavior. - Yes. - And you still like to work. You take a walk in the afternoon or after eating. You've always been incredibly regular with your routine, despite the evolution of all these technologies.

Like, you're not the guy in Silicon Valley who's like tricked out with all the gear. - No, no, no. Well, there is another-- - Actually, I've never seen you at a cafe with a laptop. - Well, sometimes. But, well, there's another aspect to this. As you know, in the last, up to five years ago, I spent four years working on the economics of attention and why is it that people attend to things.

And I really believe, and I'm not an expert, that there is a tremendous resonance between these machines and our human brains, and they are addictive. The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, where I was direct in the labs, Meg Wickman, she used to say, you know, "I wake up in the middle of the night to look at my phone, "and I know people who do that.

"And there are members of my family who do that more often "than I would like to see them do that." - You don't do that? - No. I mean, I do it, but I don't have this compulsion to see what's going on. I had a student that he said, "I love spam "because at least something is happening." - Oh my goodness.

- He said that. - Spam? - Spam. He said, "I get spam and I look at it "because something's happening," he used to say. He's now a very successful financial guy. Stop doing that. Brilliant fellow, brilliant fellow. - But that's because maybe your internal world is rich enough that you don't, I mean- - No, but I look at news.

I like to look at things. I look at videos. Don't misunderstand me. It's not that I ignore it, but yeah, I'm not, I mean, I mean, I like the latest things and so on, especially if they are beautiful and so on. But yeah, I'm not into whatever the latest is and so on.

And I remember I got some Oculus things that I got for free- - VR. - I gave them to you and I never used them once or twice. - I'm not, I mean, I've used VR in my lab, but I don't want to spend time in VR. - And also as my conversation with one of your collaborators here revealed before this podcast, I love mechanical things and the details, the analog world, okay?

So yeah, digital is interesting and it's fascinating in some ways, but I like things like mechanical watches, cameras that click when you press them and so on, but not artificially, okay? So I really like that. I like things that are very classical and so on in many ways, and I enjoy that.

I like technology, don't misunderstand me, and I use it a lot. And I use it and I do new things with them and I get patents and so on. But yeah, I'm not a techie guy in the same sense. I enjoy, I like to have an analog life, not a digital life.

Riding a bicycle is analog, walking is analog, sitting and meditating is analog. Of course, you can also listen through the internet to a good thing that helps you meditate or go to sleep, don't misunderstand me. But I don't have this fascination with things and so on. I mean, some people do, but- - It seems like a lot of people have a fascination with the future.

You seem very grounded in the present. - I've never read a single book of science fiction. Most of the people I work with, and I admire them, they all come with ideas from books and science fiction. They always say, "Did you read this or that?" And I say, "I have no idea." I never liked it.

I like to read about real people with real blood and real feelings. Science fiction, to me, is devoid of that. It's imagining droids doing this or that. I couldn't care less. - 'Cause I always think that physicists must love science fiction because- - Never, never, never read a single book or looked at it in a movie or science fiction.

I couldn't care less. I don't relate to that. I don't think that these people display human-like behavior anyhow. So, I mean, I'm not saying that it's not interesting to others. - But you're not a futurist. - No, no, even though they call me a futurist because I always anticipate things.

- Right, but you're not somebody who thinks about what life is gonna be like 100 years from now. - No, no, I like to know life is now. Yes, yes. And I also, as Niels Bohr once said, "It is hard to predict anything, especially the future." Okay, we all predict the past very well.

I don't know what's gonna go. I mean, we've seen things happening, indeed, unbelievable things. I mean, the technology that allows you to become such a worldwide known phenomenon is because of the technology. Imagine if you were just declaiming the Roman Senate centuries ago. Very few people-- - I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now, but with no microphones or cameras.

- Right, okay. So, yeah, I'm not a futurist, and that's it. The people tell me I am because I anticipate things, but not because I imagine a world in which, you know, I couldn't care less about going to Mars, for instance, even though Elon Musk thinks this is very important.

- Do you think it's a cool project? - I don't know. I wanna ask him why, and then he tells me things, like he says things like, "Well, you know, "civilization is gonna die here. "We are gonna asphyxiate," and so I don't know. I mean, let it happen, I don't know.

Just enjoy now, you know? - You're not worried about the future? - In that sense, no, I'm an optimist. I believe that technology will solve the global warming problem, everything. It's obvious how to solve it. There's nothing very mysterious, you know? Nuclear power is gonna do it, you know?

Absolutely. - And once we get over our preconceived notions of nuclear power. - Right, but I mean, very few people have ever died of a nuclear accident, let's face it. - Yeah, they need to name it something else. - Might be, yeah, might be. - Like many things that at once were thought to be dangerous when renamed, you know, turn out to not be so dangerous when renamed, people are willing to adopt.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. - So, yeah, I don't really, you know, I don't worry too much about the future. I think that people are ingenious and wise enough to stare away from the brink, hopefully. - You don't seem to worry too much generally. You're not a big worrier.

- No, yeah. - You and I are different that way. - Huh? - You and I are different that way. - Yeah, you worry a lot, yes. - Not if I keep busy. - Oh, okay, yeah. - These days, a lot less. I think that, I think at the transition points between different circumstances and at the transition points between different career things, I think it makes sense to worry.

It sort of drives some of the urgency to make sure that, you know, you reach for the next rung and grab it, right? And not, you know, not miss. I mean, there's been, I think there's been elements of uncertainty in my life where I felt like, okay, I'm gonna ground the things I can control, but no, I don't stay up at night worrying about things.

- Yeah, also, I think meditation is profoundly effective at this. Suddenly, you're here, and that stays. The past is the past. You cannot do anything, and the future hasn't arrived, so what the heck, you know? I really believe that, and it has helped me immensely. I'm very, the few things I'm very proud, I went for my medical checkup a year ago, and the doctor says, "I'd love to hear you breathe." I said, "What's so wrong with my breathe?" He said, "It's so slow and calm." - So you got over the white coat syndrome?

- Yes. - Yeah. - Because of meditation. - Yeah, you sent me your lab results this morning, so everything looks great. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But you've always been regular about exercise. Not excessive. - No, no. - You're never one of the marathoners or the 5 a.m. in the pool people, but no.

- I tried runs to run a marathon, actually, so. - Yeah, I mean, it's very common in the area where, and around Stanford, to be pretty extreme about athletics. That was never your thing. - No, no. - Steady, long-distance running. - Yeah, I told you that once. I'm not a sprinter, yeah.

Some people are, and by the way, I admire them immensely. - You mean in life? We're speaking metaphorically. - Yeah, in general, yeah. There are some people who really can do things incredibly fast, and they move from one thing to the other, and so on. Yeah, I like people who reflect some wisdom.

For instance, I have a, it's very strange for someone like me, but I see a Buddhist monk, and I just suddenly, I feel calmer by just seeing that person. I don't know. There is something, it's not just the spirituality, the power they have to be here, totally and absolutely.

It's impressive to me. I mean, some of the people say, "Okay, he has funny robes," or something. I like that a lot. It's not necessarily a way, I mean, my therapist used to state to me that to use meditation to move away from trouble and troubling thoughts is not a good idea, so you have to embrace the world, too.

But I use it so as just to stay calm and to enjoy and to see things for what they are, and I think, yeah. Yeah, the future is the future, I don't know. - Well, you can only control what you can control. - Right, but there are some people that worry all the time about the future.

- Given your understanding of quantum mechanics, relativity, and the real world, and perhaps just generally knowing what you know and experiencing what you've experienced, do you believe in some sort of higher power organizing force or let's just be blunt, do you believe in God? - Well, okay, the word God has a lot of implications, right?

I mean, I don't necessarily, I don't believe in a God that keeps track of what you and I are doing at this point. There are too many people, and so on, so I don't believe in this notion of an agent there that is somehow knowing what everybody on this planet is doing, and so on.

I do feel sometimes, and especially because of the studies I have, and actually from reading people who have been very, very deep, you know, in particular the thoughts of people like Einstein, Heisenberg, and so on, that there seems to be at times a sense of an organizing principle in the universe, and to learn those rules, so there is this notion, I mean, philosophically, it's called pantheism, that God is in nature already.

Spinoza and all these people studied this. That is very appealing to me, the notion that there is something, that this thing is, if it's evolving, it's like an entity, but not an entity that says, oh, tomorrow, you know, you'll die, or so on. I mean, you'll die, you'll die, there are lots of events that lead to death or to happiness, and so on, but not because someone is out there checking.

I mean, I don't believe there is enough memory to store all this, although today I saw, you can buy a SanDisk memory terabyte study this big. So I don't believe in that, but it's a matter of belief, not anything else, and unfortunately, these beliefs are translated sometimes in complicated action.

I do believe that there is a sense of mystery. Sometimes, I once heard, I don't know who said it, but it's a very good sentence that if you listen to Beethoven say, I mean, the man struggled, but it's amazing he was able to create that music. On the other hand, Mozart seems to have been getting the messages from heavens, you know, on a daily basis, just wrote it down.

So some people are given this connection to something much bigger, and you have access to that through listening to that music, the experiences we have. - There is this idea out there that consciousness doesn't just exist within our brains, but as sort of like a collective network, and things come through us, not just as individuals, but as humans.

- Jungian thing is a lot of that. I'm very interested in the word spiritual and what it means, you know, to see that things transcend our particular needs at any point. But the idea of a God that tells you one thing or the other is funny, you know, if you look at any movie, you know, "Braveheart" or whatever, you see that one group of warriors has a priest saying, "God is with us," and the other one is about to engage and says the same thing to the other group.

That's a little bit funny, right? - Well, I think humans and human brains in particular are amazing, amazing what human brains can do. This computer in our heads is spectacular, and yet it also has limitations. And I think, well, put differently, does it make you nervous or worry you that I seem to have an increasing interest in God and religion?

- No, I think that it's a beautiful journey in which you're in. And there are two pieces to this, provided you don't start using this to somehow spout arguments why people shouldn't do this or that. - No, no, it's only my own exploration of my own life. - I respect that.

I think it's a very important thing. You know, there is an issue here that I read, reading Wilson, actually, E.O. Wilson, which, you know, he wrote this beautiful book on human nature. And he claims that the religious instinct comes out of a submissive component in us that animals have.

Dogs are submissive. And we believe that we need to be submissive to a king and to something beyond a king, you know, some deity or something. That's his theory. - I certainly don't feel any compulsion to be submissive to other humans. I mean, I think in knowing the limitations of the human brain and cognition, I don't care how smart, I don't care how successful an individual or a group is, that it's very clear that the human brain is limited in parsing the universe that we're in.

Otherwise, we wouldn't continue to have the same issues over and over. Although I do like to think that we're falling forward, we're evolving forward, as opposed to devolving as a species. But we tend to repeat a lot of the same mistakes over and over again. - There's also a technical thing here.

We sometimes confuse randomness with premonition or God doing something. I mean, dodging a bullet by turning your head, as our next president did, is an incredible thing. The probability is so, so, so small. But that doesn't mean that there was someone who said, "Turn your head, do it," and so the bullet would pass.

I mean, we ascribe causality to something that was truly random. It could have also, in another scenario, the same turn of the head would have been to the other side and this person would be dead. So I, but sometimes we are confronted with these incredible coincidences that we cannot explain.

And we say, "Oh, it must be God that made sure that you and I met or that we thought the same thoughts," and so on. - Although as a biologist who started off as a neurodevelopmental biologist, I think I just had to see, there are two things that changed my understanding of what might be possible.

One was Barbara Chapman, my advisor, once treated me to an experiment. It was kind of a funny thing. Typical Barbara, you know how nerdy she was. She said, "Are you willing to stay up all night?" And I was like, "Okay, yeah." And she took zebrafish eggs and fertilized them.

And I sat for 11 hours with food. I got up to use the restroom and I watched a zebrafish egg duplicate and become a fish, like in real time with my eyes. Not some movie on YouTube, although that's impressive too. People can look these up. But to just actually see life emerge from a set of cells through its own organizing principles, all of which can be explained by genes, transcription factors, the physics of the mitotic spindle, all, I mean, math and biology and chemistry can explain all of it.

But there was something truly spectacular about it that seems so non-random because it's not random. And then the other one is that, I mean, I guess I've had enough experiences with prayer and the consequences of prayer in my real life that I just, I sort of can't get my head around the idea that there's not a God or some sort of organizing force.

I just, I can't accept it because there's, yes, there's causality, reverse causality, correlation and mistaking correlation and causality, but somehow, like, I mean, I like to think I'm grounded in science and reality, but I don't think science can explain it all. - Oh, no, and I think that this experience of this spirituality, for instance, I remember, it still happens, spending a night outdoors and looking at the sky.

I mean, it's an incredible thing, the stars and you feel so small, and yet there is order to all that. It's not just random stuff. I mean, they move according to laws that fortunately we humans were able to discover, which is an amazing thing when you think about it.

Dogs did not discover gravity. - No, certainly not Costello. - Okay. - Costello was gravity. - Yeah, so I really think that there is something to be said about these spiritual experiences, and I really believe that, very importantly, and I listen to people talk. I recently have been looking at some stuff that C.S.

Lewis, you know, he was a man who was studying the sagas and the mythology of the Vikings and so on, and eventually became a devout Christian, you know, thinking that this was the only answer to the, because all religions have the same element. So I understand that. I respect it.

I experienced that, you know, at times in my life. But when I think seriously about it, I think that the moment, you know, we have this computer and, you know, we can get glimpses of all this, but I don't believe that it's this notion. No one can prove to me that there is someone there organizing my life minute by minute or second by second.

I don't believe that. I do believe that there are fantastic chances in life and randomness, beautiful ones, okay? And, you know, having you and Lara as children is a fantastic randomness in my life. - Hopefully it wasn't too random. - No, no, in the sense that, you know, children, you know, children that come unhealthy, whatever.

I mean, you know, it's a very impressive thing. - Yeah, the number of things that have to organize to create a healthy child is, it's truly a miracle. - Yeah, true, true. Yeah, and I think, but a lot of it is random too, you know? I mean, the same set of parents can produce two different set of children too, okay?

I mean, that's a very, very important-- - Well, Lara and I are pretty different. - Oh, absolutely, but in very beautiful ways too. So, I mean, neither of you does behave or conducts a life that, you know, I would be unhappy, your mother would be unhappy with, so. But going back to this, I believe that, indeed, spirituality is important.

I have a lot of access to that through classical music. There are times that I really believe that is it. I mean, I can get very, very emotional listening to music, very emotional, you know? My wife always notices it when I do that. And I think that then you are having access to something very different.

Of course, it can be explained physiologically by all sorts of resonances and so on, but who cares? You know? - You mentioned that you can peer into the future with ideas that you're working on, and yet you don't get too far ahead. Like, you're not thinking like 100 years from now, what's it gonna look like?

Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the past? - Sometimes, sometimes. There is a, I've always, because I left my family when I was still very young, I always had a certain nostalgia for things, okay? I met a, I became friend with a very impressive guy in France, Claude Jopard.

I think he was the director of the Geophysics Institute, and both of us had very similar parents in different, you know, French and Argentina, but still, and similar educations. And we had, I have sometimes a certain nostalgia that is almost melancholy about the way we grew up and so on.

- Melancholy? - A little bit of that. I mean, I-- - I recall your stories about growing up in Argentina, like you would have 10, 15 cousins over for lunch every Sunday. - Yeah, yeah, it was very happy-- - That doesn't sound melancholy. - No, no, but there were moments, moments of loneliness, moments of times where I felt very misunderstood.

I had, unfortunately, a very punishing mother, so that, but I still remember her, and I think about her in ways that are not necessarily always very happy. I was looking at photos a while ago, and I, there are pictures of her that is, you know, she's smiling coming out of the Pacific Ocean in Carmel.

She took a walk and so on. But I reflect back in the past in that sense. I mean, and sometimes, you know, I'm asked, you know, how did you grow up? My wife being Danish, she grew up in a very different way from, you know, upper middle class Argentines.

So, you know, we reflect on that, you know, the kinds of childhoods we had and so on, but not in the sense that, you know, oh, I wish I had that now. - No regrets? - Well, not many, not many. - That's good. - I mean, there is one regret that is more theoretical than anything else, which is if I look at my family, my brother stayed, produced family, children, grandchildren, and so on.

I came here, and I produced children, grandchildren, and there are going to be two diverging branches of the family. - I wish that we still get together. We got together last year for your birthday. - Yeah, no, I know. That's what is so important to me, yes. But I think about it sometimes.

And when I go back and I see the lives very similar to what I had, or, you know, different perhaps, there is a certain, you know, sense of thinking about the past. But I also realize that if I didn't take the steps I took, I would be as miserable as some of my old friends that are really struggling even to find meaning in what they do, or even surviving economically.

So, I was really lucky. - Well, so was I, 'cause I wouldn't have existed, 'cause you wouldn't have met my aunt. - That's true too, yeah, yeah, exactly. - I mean, maybe you would have, but-- - No, no, no, no, no. - But I'm grateful I didn't grow up in Buenos Aires.

I love the city, I love the country, but-- - I don't feel that-- - I couldn't have done any of the things I've done in South America, given, maybe, but the landscape was just completely different. - Oh, I go there, and after a week, I want to come back.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. - So, you love this country? - I love this country. I feel very much part of this country. I'm very grateful to what this country has done for me, for my family, and that includes you and your sister, okay, and my wife. - When did you become a citizen?

- Oh, many, many years ago. And I really did it consciously, not because, I mean, there were practical things, but no, I really believe in it. I really believe it's an incredible country, and it gives incredible opportunities to people. As Elon says, Elon Musk, I'm also an immigrant, and very happy to be one.

- Yeah, you've always been a patriot. - Absolutely, and on the other hand, as I said, Argentina's complicated. I go there, and a lot of smells and things that, you know, bring memories that are amazing. - Food's not bad either. - I mean, huh? - The food's not bad.

- Yeah, yeah, but it's also the whole atmosphere. And the first two, three days are an incredible experience of meeting friends and talking with them and so on. But after a while, I also see a darker side to it. I must tell you that, on the other hand, my country-in-law, Denmark, is also a country that I like immensely.

There's nice people, and pleasant, and soft, very soft, especially in summer. (laughs) - But the Danes are also strong people. Like, the average Dane is so smart. I think the high school education there must be among the best in the world. - Yeah, there is a notion of proficiency.

I mean, people are proficient at what they do. Yeah, you go to a store, you go to, you have a problem, an airline or whatever, you'll get someone who really knows how to solve it. But there's also a very, it's a small society, very homogeneous, tremendous sense of humor, which I enjoy.

And it's very soft. People, you know, enjoy life. They have notions like slow food movements and things of that sort. So I like it. I could not live there because it's, you know, it's a very homogeneous way of behaving. You know, the Lutheran ethic is there. They're not religious, but they're Lutheran.

So I feel very comfortable in Europe and so on. But I like being here, yes. - Yeah, I feel like our family now includes so many different nationalities and religions and backgrounds and philosophies and political stances. - Well, it's good too, right? - Yeah, it's great. It's starting to look like the UN with some extra.

- Well, I grew up in a family that had an ideological diversity. It was incredible, incredible. - That's good. - Yeah, so that was also good to be, as a child, to hear these arguments about politics and so on, you know? - Yeah, I hear a few of those now.

- Yeah. - Arguments about politics. We won't get into politics. One thing that I did want to say, however, is that I remember a long time ago, and I'm certain 'cause I wrote it in my journal, you said, "Politically incorrect views are often right." Is that true still? - Yes, yes.

- Still true for you, I should say? - Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Because this has only to be judged in time, okay? I think that the issue of politically incorrectness is some kind of a mob behavior that says you should think like us, okay? We should be able to express our views.

We're respecting others and so on, and we should be respected for that. I think that this whole notion that others are telling you what to think or not to think is a little bit complicated. And I must say something, which I hope it doesn't get me in trouble with my Danish side of the family or friends.

Societies like the Scandinavian societies that are extremely uniform in thinking, the word "should" is used all the time. Yeah, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. Good that you did it, you know? It's a very, they enforce behavior in a very, very particular way. It's not a hurting instinct, but there is a very, very strict Lutheran tradition of telling you what you should and you shouldn't do.

So I know very few people, and I've been going to them for many, many years, that really have iconoclastic ideas that are away from the mean, and they're considered odd, okay? Very few, including the physicists. And they have fantastic school of physics there. Niels Bohr was there. So it's a society that conformity is the issue there, right?

So on the other hand, I think that it's good to think differently. And, you know, there's a man, perhaps you heard of him, I know, I mean, I admire him. He died, Freeman Dyson. He was on a level with Feynman and Engelman, by the way. He used to have very strange ideas too.

He used to say, "Global warming, what's wrong with it? "The Sahara is gonna be a garden." Yeah, you know, the Sahara Desert will become a garden. People will be able to eat all that food. - Well, I think people hear that, but then they counter it against these, you know, very heart-wrenching pictures of like polar bears on ice caps that are shrinking, this kind of thing.

- There are more polar bears today than when Mr. Al Gore said that we're gonna die. - Listen, I'm not gonna argue climate change with you because I have no knowledge there. - No, no, I'm just giving you a bit of- - Oh, no, no, no, no, I'm not countering.

I'm just saying, you know, like, I mean, this is getting very intense on the internet now because the arguments on both sides seem pretty strong, at least as they're presented. So who's right? - No, the question is, what can we do about it? That's the issue, and I think that technology and wisdom are gonna solve it.

I think so, I really believe that very strongly. I'm an optimist when it comes to that. But what I'm talking about being politically incorrect is this idea of saying things that a group of people say you shouldn't be saying or thinking those thoughts. And the question is, can we debate those things rationally or nicely, respecting people's beliefs, okay?

And I, yeah, I believe in that very strongly. And I think being politically incorrect is a way of saying you're sort of, you're smiling at them. But it's okay, why not? You know, it's a, you know, who said that we shouldn't be like that? I remember encountering the first libertarians when I was already, you know, working as a physicist, and they were saying to me, why should we, why are we, why are we afraid of the Russians?

I said, well, you know, well, you think they're gonna invade the United States? Can you imagine Russia invading? I mean, if they invade it, how are they gonna control us? You know, they had these arguments. They were very funny arguments, you know? Why do we need an army? Why do we need taxes?

And I really thought that was so provocative, it was so interesting. - Do you consider yourself a libertarian? - In many ways, I like the idea of liberty. I believe very strongly in it. I mean, this country was founded on that. I think that our founding fathers really believed in it, and I admire them for that.

I, you know, reading Jefferson and so on is really inspiring to me. I think that some of the political movement is a little bit odd. They always end up with political candidates that go nowhere and so on. - Why do you think that is? - Huh? - Why do you think that is?

- I think that they're-- - If they're so rational, they're often among the smartest people in the room. - But they are not the most, they are not strategically smart. I've met at times libertarians that think, you know, incredible thoughts, and you know, they work in, they live in Silicon Valley, and they're poor.

I mean, even though they are the ones who are supposed to know-- - Some are poor, some are-- - Some are not, but I'm saying, it's very interesting. They choose presidential candidates no one ever heard of. - I think many of them are, you know, they are on the spectrum in a way that doesn't allow them to get into the minds of other people in a way that would allow them to convince other people about their arguments.

I mean, a lot of politics, as we know, is show business. I mean, in this recent election, it was all posturing. It was all about grabbing emotion. It was not about logic, it was about emotion. - Yeah, I have several of my people that, you know, they put all their money to freeze themselves.

- You're gonna cry over yourself? - No. (laughs) - My dad and I have had this running joke for a lot of years because someone we know very well, and several people we know well, have set aside significant amounts of money to have their heads or entire bodies frozen on the idea that they're gonna be brought back later, Han Solo style.

You've always laughed at this idea. - No, but not only that, there's a colleague of mine at Stanford who accuses me of being friends with a guy that is like that. And I told this guy, I said, you know, he thinks that you're a bad influence on me. And the guy said, well, tell him that we are the ones who are gonna come back and do what we believe, but he's gonna be gone.

- You're not interested in living to be 200? - It's not the issue. These people are interested in living for another 1,000 years so when they wake up, they see how the world looks. They read science fiction. So they are very interested to know what the world looks like once they wake up.

So, okay. - Well, there are people in the health space that are trying to not die, you know, Brian Johnson and others. - That's a different story. - Yeah, I mean, what's your thought on trying to live to be 150 or something like that? - Well, if you can live, the issue is not the age, it's the conditions of your body and mind, okay?

That's the issue. I had the misfortune and unfortunate of having two parents that lived very long lives. One was incredibly, my father, was incredibly lucid until the end. My mother had everything, you know, all every dementia and complications that came from, you know, being an anorexic all her life and so on.

So my father enjoyed being lucid until the end. And so he, you know, he didn't take care of himself physically so well. So the idea is if you live up to 100 or 150 or 200 and you can still do the things you enjoy in life is one thing.

To be like my mother who couldn't even comprehend what was in front of her when you put a cup of tea, you know, then it's very sad, but it can happen at the age of 35, you know. So, yeah, I'm not into a race to live forever. I want to live healthily.

I want to enjoy life. Enjoyment is the most important piece. What's the point of being, you know, tethered to tubes all over the place? You know, flat on a bed, and you say, "Oh, I made another year of my life." I mean, that's not really a life, at least for me.

- Do you worry about or, and/or wish for anything for me, for Lara? - Yes. To be super happy people. No, I don't want to use the word happy. I want to see you joyful. Joy, joy is more important than happiness. Joy is a state of mind. Happiness is, okay, yeah, I set a list of things I want to have, and I have them, and I smile a lot.

Joyfulness is this sense of being in yourself, and I would like that. I mean, you two are very different. Lara lives much more in the moment than you do, for reasons, okay, it's her view of it. - It's her demeanor. - Huh? - It's her way. - It's her demeanor.

It's very good. - I'm focused on what she's going to do this weekend. - Yes. - I'm focused on what I'm going to do this weekend, next week, the next month, and for the next month. - I would personally like to see you enjoying today and this weekend, and that's it, and everything else is going to come to you.

I believe, and now I'm speaking in a way that is more paternal than anything else, I think you have a charmed life, and everything came to you since you were very little, and you exhibited behaviors and so on that everybody was even smilingly impressed with you from the very beginning.

I mean, it's not that you were a genius at chess or a Rubik's cube or anything. I know some kids that are like that, but there was something, something in there. And so I think that learning to just relax and rest, but it's part of your behavior. Since you were little, you had these problems, okay?

I used to put you on my lap and say, "It's going to be fine," and say, "Well, what if I cannot do my homework?" Okay, but you could. - Or even my stuffed animals. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, the same. That gave you tremendous-- - Needed to be organized. - Yeah, it was tremendous.

- Well, I probably have, remember I had the grunting tick? - Yes, yeah, oh, yeah. - That was, drove us nuts, yeah. - Well, I probably have a little bit of an OCD type thing. I mean, not diagnostically significant, but when I bite down into something that I'm pursuing, it's very hard for me to think about anything else.

- Well, we talked about it when you were at Berkeley, once you told me that you were starting to run, but you wanted to run like everybody else was running, I don't know, how many miles. - Yeah, no, I heard there was a guy who had been in the department, Randy Nelson.

He's now a professor in Ohio. Somebody just like off, you know, just in passing said, oh yeah, you know, Randy worked, you know, in like 80 hours a week or 90 hours a week. And I was like 95 hours. - Yeah, I'd remember that. - You know, but what's interesting is I'm not a naturally competitive person.

It was just this idea, like I've tended to want to know, and I've since stopped this, but there was a long time where I wanted to figure out what my body and mind were capable of. I just wanted to see like, how high is that ceiling? And it was only when I almost suffocated on a scuba dive or when I was working to the point of exhaustion or, you know, or, and then I also realized that, you know, I published a number of papers to get tenure.

Like I didn't need that many, but I enjoyed every one. It's not like I'm not having fun, I'm having fun. - Yeah, this idea of pushing oneself to limits, the question is why? I mean, I think there's so much to enjoy on a regular life and the things that we have already, we have to work to get them the way we want.

But I don't think that worrying for the sake of worrying or just worrying, I mean. - Yeah, I don't tend to worry. Well, you know what changed that for me in a major way? I mean, I've had moments, I've had moments. I think I can recall, like I have a favorite, best day of my life moment.

I won't share it here, it's not relevant right now, but Costello helped bring me into the moment. Like he would do these things that like, I would delight in that were just so simple. Like the way he would like fall over or something, or, you know, I think that like having another creature there that is very much in the moment brings you into the moment.

- Right, and you are very connected to it too. I mean, I think that if you were connected to someone that has that property of bringing you down and so on, you will start enjoying it. - Yeah, the people I've had amazing partners, as you know, some less than amazing, but many amazing partners, and they tended to be also kind of into the future, like focus on what's not quite there yet.

- But I must say, I think women in general do it better than men, that they're better at like grounding to the present. - Well, it depends. I think that my wife tends to be more anxious than I am about the future. - So maybe it's not general. - Well, in trying to sort of, you know, tell her that she shouldn't worry so much, I think that I also suddenly reflect, what am I doing here?

And I try to also slow down myself. I think that, you know, yeah, I think you're someone who's running from one thing to the other, I mean, to say colloquially, but it would be nice if you said, okay, I'm fine. You know, you have a podcast that is doing well, you don't have to worry what the podcast is going to be doing in five years.

- No, I don't think out that far. I don't think about the career piece. I think that I, I mean, I often don't have a plan. I know what we're going to do this year. I don't know what we're going to do after that. But professionally, I think, look, I think part of it was science.

I mean, we're talking about a lot of things, but for many years, right, from the time I like squared my life away, and when I turned 19, it was like, okay, I'm going to get things right now. There's always been these milestones. You're going to finish your undergraduate degree.

I did a master's, then you do the PhD, then the postdoc, then you're going to need to get tenure. You know, I think the academic system was a system of two to five year bursts, like sprinting marathons in many ways to try and, you know, grab the next thing to get to the next level.

And there was a lot of uncertainty for a long time. You know, I think I'm finally now coming to a place of certainty, like feelings of like, oh, like things are good and they've gone great. But yeah, but it's hard. - Oh, of course it's hard, especially if you have that kind of temperament.

Yes, and I think you need to train yourself almost to, I just had a set of the words that are, it's a matter of bringing elegance into your life almost, to live it in a way that is elegant, is nice in itself, you know, that is important. One of the things I learned, I mean, you know, living with a Dane, Danes don't like you to eat standing.

They sit a table and they light a candle and, you know, it's very nice, it creates a pace. - Yeah, the ritual. - The rituals, rituals are very important. And also the other thing that is very important that I discovered is to have something to look forward to. You cannot just wake up one day and say, and now what?

There has to be something. Okay, that's important. I mean, you know, we all have that. - So Rogan talks about this thing about, you know, because he has a podcast, he does four episodes a week, plus he's an announcer of the UFC, has his comedy career, he has three kids, he's in a happy marriage and, you know, he's really into working out and all this.

And he, I heard something recently, it was actually the forward to Cameron Haynes' book. I was listening to it and he, it was amazing. He said, you know, you have to approach your life no matter how busy or how simple as a kind of work of art. Like you can't just think of it as daily life.

You have to have some macroscopic view of this so that you know where to put things. And it's a lot of what you're saying as well. - Elegance, yeah. Life has to have elegance. Otherwise it's just disjoint moments. And so sometimes they will be like that and it can be very creative too.

But most of the idea is to really get into something. I mean, I personally think that when you describe me as being very steady or whatever, sounds very boring too for that matter, right? I mean, yeah. I mean, there's a beauty in steadiness because from places of steadiness, you can take good risks.

- Well, right. I mean, and I think that my mind is not in a steady state, but I don't have this notion, I have to see things. Everybody's talking about something, I have to see it. I never felt like that. No, I mean, I'd like to see things, don't misunderstand me.

But it's very important for me to be in the moment and do things the way I like them to do. - Yeah, you don't seem to need to go on like jungle adventures or like ice skate across Antarctica. Like you've never been one for like the kind of wild outing.

- No, no, the wild outing is here. That's my wild outing. Yeah, I can have very wild thoughts about things that I would like. Sometimes they're totally wrong and so on. But yeah, in a funny way, I am a little bit of what the French call an armchair, a philosopher or whatever.

There are these people who write articles about France, if Africa would have never having left France or something of that sort. So I'm not like that. But I don't necessarily crave this physical adventure for the sake of adventure. I like beautiful things. And I don't mind repeating the same beautiful thing every year if necessary, going vacation to the same places and so on.

- Yeah, you'd like to go back to the same place. - Well, there is a difference between tourism where you see new things and so on. I like that. There's also the idea of vacation, where you just sit and enjoy what you have. - I confess I've not ever done it.

And you know this about me. I've never taken a vacation. - You should go to the summer house in Denmark. You can spend a week there just enjoying it. That's it. I don't know if I show you pictures from the window. They see the deer in the garden. They just sit there.

It's nice. So there's nothing, it's nice. It can be, you cannot spend a life doing that. I'm not a monk, okay? I'm not a meditator that will spend hours on this, but it's nice to rest. It's very important, I think. - And the rituals are important to you. - Very important, yes, yeah.

The rituals also are very reassuring because then you know it's predictable, right? You don't want a totally unpredictable life all the time. That's why people create rituals. - You early on taught me about etiquette. It's something that years later, I think it was probably in the mid nineties, for some reason, we were at the movies together and we saw some people at the movies and they were wearing their bathroom slippers and more or less their pajamas to the movies.

And I'll never forget, you grabbed my arm. Like you didn't grab it forcefully, but you grabbed me and said, "You see that?" I said, "Yeah." And you said, "People are coming to the movies in their pajamas." I said, "Yeah." And you said, "That's the beginning of the end to any society." And I thought you were joking, but it's something I thought about a lot.

You also said, and I'll never forget, "You're always better off being overdressed because then at least your class that you're speaking to or your hosts, et cetera, they know that you took them seriously." And I don't think we really appreciate etiquette. As Americans, especially, we've somehow confused freedom of choice with discarding etiquette.

Yeah, it's not something that you hear discussed very much, but what about etiquette? - Well, there are many components. I think the most important one is a societal one. I mean, one of the things that I like, for instance, if you go to England, how polite people are. Politeness is a virtue.

And politeness, they hire the social class, they hire the demand to be polite. It's behavior, it's being nice to people, it's understanding what they are. And associated with that, there are codes. Some of them are behavioral, some of them are dress codes. I had a brilliant economist, the Italian economist working with me, and now he's in the East Coast, who told me he went to a wedding in Italy after living in the United States, and he went to his cousin's wedding, and his uncle said, "You show no respect.

You're not wearing cufflinks." He said, "Well, but my shirt is all..." "No, no, no, go home and get cufflinks because you're showing lack of respect for not dressing the proper way to this wedding." So I think that there are expectations that people have about certain kinds of behavior. I mean, if you look at, say, the pictures of what's going on now in Washington and so on, you notice that Mr.

Elon Musk, who's always in a t-shirt that says, "Let's go to Mars," suddenly he's wearing a tuxedo because, at least now, he's part of a group of people that are behaving like government officials should behave. You don't go in sandals and shorts. - But Silicon Valley is famous for the flip-flops and the hoodie.

- Right, because the problem is that people confuse the style with the message. They think that because you wear a hoodie because Mark Zuckerberg was wearing hoodies makes you brilliant, okay? And I think that the issue of dress codes elicit a certain sense of behavior in people, as you said.

I mean, you know, how would you feel if you went on a first date with someone that comes in in her, you know, slippers and a bathrobe and say, "Let's go to the movies." - It's not happened yet. - Well, okay, but, okay, so what I'm saying is you don't have to overdo it.

You know, that's another issue. And you have to also conform to the rules of the society. I noticed, for instance, that in the East Coast, people dress much more properly than in the West Coast. You go to New York and you see men wearing suits and ties. You don't see that here, perhaps in LA, not in the Bay Area, ever.

- Yeah, one thing that you pointed out is that at any wedding in Argentina, men keep their jackets and ties on the whole night. I've always kept my jacket and tie on the entire night. In the United States, it's almost like moments after people arrive at any party in a suit, they start undressing.

- Yeah, right. Why did they dress up then? Okay, so that's my view. So I am not necessarily someone that advocates wearing a tie when I go to work and so on, but I really believe that there are codes of conduct that sort of reflect many things. And you're also, you're projecting a message, right?

I mean, the idea of a hoodie, at one point or the other, first of all, was hurting behavior. Everybody had to wear one because, you know, then you're cool or, you know, whatever. Okay, in adolescence, I understand it. I mean, that's what you do as an adolescent. You do what others do.

But as you grow up, you can also signal whom you are by the way you dress and you, you know, you behave. - Well, what do you think about the discourse on platforms like X, where you can see a mix, including a lot of academics and high-level thinkers, acting kind of like teenagers?

- Well, okay, that's, they want to be popular. That's all, they want to draw attention. - Yeah, this is kind of a new thing. I mean, I mean, they're, I mean, I won't name names, but, you know, some people who are considered some of the smartest people in the world, like what they, their discourse on social media is like, I mean, they wouldn't last two seconds on the schoolyard, they'd get hit in the face.

You know, it's like weird, like grown men acting kind of like teenagers. - Okay, well, that's, they have a problem because they want to be thought of as young. That's a whole different story, okay? That's a different story. Now, having said what I said, I respect that some people eventually reflect on whether or not the rules, the rules that, you know, that rule, you know, the rules that say how you should dress to do one thing or the other are not, do not, you know, operate for you, and then you decide to be very different.

You know, there are many people who are like that and like to be iconoclastic. I heard many stories about, we were talking about Richard Feynman, who actually made a case, I mean, Mary Gell-Mann used to say that about him, to be so different that people will talk about it because he was very interested in people telling stories about it.

- Yeah, bongo drumming naked on the roof, not rushing his teeth. - Exactly, all that, okay. So that, but he was very good at drawing attention. Okay, that's fine. You can also draw attention by dressing very nicely. You know, it's all a matter of, I mean, I was reflecting, you know, we go to the symphony in San Francisco regularly, and we are donors and so on.

Sometimes you go to a concert, it's an amazing thing what you see there. Some people nicely dressed, some people dressed as if they just woke up, they didn't have time to get dressed, and, you know, got there, you know, and they're whatever. - But do you think that, going back to the initial, you know, ping of the question, do you think that we have societally gone, that we're sort of drifting towards, like, for lack of a better word, chaos?

So our social interaction chaos. - Well, you know, I think the pendulum will swing again. The other day I was talking to someone, reading actually, that suddenly, not only in New York, but in the Midwest, men are starting to wear jacket and ties, not just for work, okay? They go on dates like that.

So, you know, it's a pendulum. It goes back and forth, back and forth. I don't think we're gonna end up in a time when, you know, you have to wear tails to have a breakfast or something. I think only the aristocrats used to do that. But I think that, you know, it's an issue of how, also, how we perceive the world through the eyes of television and movies, okay?

If movies start showing that everybody's dressed whatever, you know, people are gonna do the same thing. If movies start showing, you know, the trends that we see in movies are the trends that essentially society follows, okay? - Definitely. - So, I think that we, I don't think we're going to chaos.

It's gonna revert. California is a particular place because it has always been a place where people, in order to feel free, they had to dress differently and who cares and all that stuff. But it's not everywhere. - Yeah, it's kind of interesting that now counterculture is conservatism. - Right, right.

- We're back to that. The anti-war group is the more conservative. Anyway, it's-- - I mean, also, people like, you know, it's interesting how Americans are fascinated with English aristocracy and traditions. I've been to high table dinner at King's College in Cambridge twice. You know, everybody dresses properly. They wear gowns and the fellows are sitting at a top table and everybody else, and people love it.

And we like to see that in the movies. - Well, it's theater. - Yeah, right. - I mean, it's academic theater, a little bit of pomp and circumstance, but it's theater. - And it's nice. Everything on commencement, you know, traditions and so on. - Yeah, no parent wants to go to a graduation that's, you know, kind of a free-for-all.

They want to see some order. - Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that, you know, there is a place for that. And some people will, I mean, there are designers and sort of clothing and so on that exploit this nostalgia for that kind of elegant world. You know, Ralph Lauren and so it's always, you know, 1960s, fancy, you know, club type clothing and so on.

So do you plan to ever retire? - I don't know what it means. I mean, if retire, no, no, because I'm not a postal worker. I'm not a cook at a restaurant that eventually says, okay, I cooked it long enough that I collect my retirement and go home. I have a mind that it works and I need an environment where that mind can thrive.

And I need an environment where, you know, for one year, when I left Hewlett-Packard, I was basically, I took a course in general activity and so on, but I was really a bit idle. So suddenly, I mean, in a context where people have problems and so on that I really like to listen to, there's a social component to work, as you know.

So retirement means what, you know, you're a postal worker and one day you stop delivering mail and you stay home watching the paint dry, and that's not me, okay? So to me, I'm working and I enjoy it. And, you know, the day that will come that I cannot enjoy it, I'll stop.

And I think that, again, goes with this issue of getting bored with things that you don't like to do, you know, because you've done it for a long time. No, I enjoy my life, but I don't think in terms of, I'll say something, the CEO of my company, he's a great guy, Phil McKinney, said, "Bernardo, I don't work for the money here." I said, "I don't either.

"I mean, I like to get paid, but if I don't like it, "I'll walk," and I can do that. So it's not that I'm doing this for the income. That's what I'm trying to say. - Seems like you've never pursued money for its own sake. - No, but-- - Nor did you ever encourage me to pursue money for its own sake.

- But as my cousin, the physicist, used to say, "Money doesn't bring happiness, "but it points in the right direction." - I would say money doesn't bring happiness, but it can buffer stress. - Right, and it allows you to have the things you want to have and you don't have to, no.

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I think money's an important aspect of our lives, you know, having it and so on. I lived for many years as a graduate student with no money, and it was very painful, I'll tell you. Sometimes I didn't eat dinner because I didn't have any money. So I like having money to do the things that I like, but I don't work for money.

Many people say, "Well, you know, "I invented so many things. "I could have started in some companies "and make a lot of money." I don't really, I don't regret that at all. - The ultra-rich people that I know who are happy are still working every day. - Right, because beyond a certain amount of money, you still have to brush your teeth like everybody else.

Okay, you can dream of having 150 toothbrushes, but so what? - Right, and you can only eat so many steaks. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, that we all cover. The question is, what do you do with your life? Now, you want to travel? Well, you can travel. It's nice if you can travel, you know, in better ways than being, you know, an undergrad with the backpack, although it can be adventurous.

- I had fun backpacking. - Yeah, okay, yeah. - In a limited budget where, you know, part of the joy of traveling that way is you're thrown into kind of street-level interactions. - I took-- - Youth hostels and things like that. - Yeah, I went through Europe like this.

- I mean, I wouldn't change that for anything. - No, I went through Europe as a graduate student. I quit everything. I went to Europe in winter, and it was quite an adventure. - In the winter? - In the winter, it was horrendous. I had very little money. I stayed in places where, in Paris, where the lady in the little hotel would turn off the light if I turned it on in the middle of the night.

It was awful, and yet-- - To save energy. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and it was very funny, but I met people that were interesting, and I engaged, you know, it was, I still, every once in a while, I hear from one or two of those people I met years ago in trains.

I went by train everywhere. I ended up in Denmark in the middle of winter, you know. - Everything seems to lead back to Denmark. - Yeah, it's a nice country. - Well, now you have a Danish wife, so, and have for a long time. And have for a long time.

- Yeah, many times, yeah, yeah. No, I, yeah, I like, it's a very different contrast to Europe, the Central Europe, and so on, you know. Denmark, Northern Europe, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, is a very special kind of, you know, country and people. Yeah, I like them a lot. Life is very easy there.

- I like Scandinavia. - Yeah, yeah, it's very nice, yes. - Good, good, good-natured people. - Yes. - Good saunas. - Yeah, everything, yes. - And sunshine, at least in the summer. - In the summer only, yeah. - Any plans for the next couple of years? Anything that we should put on the calendar, make sure that we get in?

- No, because I cannot plan that well. I don't plan. - I just-- - Me either. Maybe I inherited it from you. - Well, I just move. I just move and intuitive. I'm very intuitive about these things. I suddenly see something, you know, this quantum stuff. I don't know, I started hearing about it.

I talked to a brilliant guy who was in my lab. I said, "Hey, Gene, what do you think about this?" He said, "Oh, sounds interesting, let's do it." And we're doing it. I am lucky that I get paid to do that. But no, I don't have plans like that.

I would like to, we would like, I mean, we would like to organize our life a little bit differently now that, you know, that we have a summer house in Denmark and so on. I still plan to travel there. I like Europe a lot, but I don't know if I can live there.

I like Switzerland a lot. I wanna go to Argentina every year and I feel very close to my family. That's very important. We are all going for an event there. I hope that you can join us if you can. So those things are very important to me. But I, no, I don't have plans for anything.

I don't know, I like to be surprised. - Well, dad, I wanna extend a real sense of gratitude from me, from everyone listening and watching. Although you may argue that they're not gonna be interested. This has been our back and forth over the last months as I've tried to convince you to do this podcast.

I can assure you that they were, they are very interested. Your story is a really unique one. And I can say that both as your son, but also as somebody who's sat across from scientists from all different domains and backgrounds, not just neuroscientists. I also really appreciate your ability to explain complicated things in ways that at least, you know, we can start to get an understanding 'cause these are hard concepts.

And, you know, I think what comes through so clearly is that somehow you've been able to grab these high level, really abstract concepts and work with them and try and understand them. But you've also been able to lead a life where you're really grounded in the day-to-day and in reality.

And I have to say your wish for me and for Laura, and I assume for everyone else to be joyful, I'll work on that. And also I must say, it just hit me like square in the face during this discussion that I get such peace and I can really focus on being joyful, knowing that you're joyful.

Like it's so clear, like you have a joyful life at so many levels and that you've pursued what you wanted to do over and over. And, you know, some people may have tuned into this podcast thinking that we were gonna get into our issues and things like that. I'll just briefly say that, yeah, we've had our ups, we've had our downs and we've certainly landed up and much, much higher than we ever would had we not had all of that.

And as I told you last year around this time on your birthday when we all got together to celebrate, like we're not just good, we're beyond good. So anything that comes up around that, I wanna just go on record saying that like, that's water under the bridge and I don't ever think about it.

All I think about are the incredible gifts that you've given me about curiosity and pursuing my curiosity about putting new footprints on untread beaches, the early discussions around the excitement that science can bring. I mean, I remember all of it. I really remember all of it and in immense detail.

And I love your stories about scientists, both how they soar and also how human they are and how they're fallible like the rest of us. So, you know, there's not a day that goes by where I don't thank God, because I do believe in God, that you're my father, that you and mom created me and Laura and that I've had the life that I have and that I continue to have the life that I have.

So I just wanna thank you for the example and the nurturing and for coming here. There aren't words. - Well, thank you. You know how much I love you. I think that these words are the biggest gift that I get. And I think any father listening to that, to his son or daughter saying that would also feel the same way or a mother for that matter.

It is a very fulfilling feeling, you know, to have that notion that you feel that you owe so much to what you got. And also the fact that you've done incredibly well and the kind of person you are, yeah. So I wish you all the wisdom that you need in order to just go through life the way you're going.

But I think that it's nice to also that we are sort of on the same wavelength and many things. In you, I see more of a reflection of what I always wanted to be as well. So that's easier in a way. Perhaps it's because fathers and sons have that.

- We certainly relate. - Yes. - Well, thank you. - Thank you. - I love you. - I love you too. You know that. - Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Bernardo Huberman. To learn more about his work, please see the links in the show note captions.

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