The Art of Poetry: A Conversation with Lex Friedman and Manolás Kellis

In this episode of The Lex Fridman Podcast, Lex sat down with poet and writer, Manolás Kellis, to discuss the intricacies of poetry and the creative process. As they delved into the world of words, it became clear that poetry is not just about rhyming couplets and verse, but an art form that requires vulnerability, introspection, and a willingness to take risks.

"I never go back to my notes," Manolás shared, "I just type. When my brain gets into that mode, it actually happens." This approach allowed him to tap into his creative subconscious, where ideas and emotions flow freely without the constraints of external expectations. It's this emergent phenomenon – the idea or emotion emerging organically from the writer's thoughts and feelings – that makes poetry so unique.

As they talked, Lex couldn't help but reflect on his own experience as a poet. He admitted to struggling with the notion of "no recipe" for writing poetry, wondering if there was a formula to be applied in order to produce something beautiful. Manolás offered a reassuring smile and countered, "It's not about that. It's about being honest with yourself." This sentiment echoed through many of their conversations, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and vulnerability in creative expression.

Their discussion also touched on the role of inspiration and influence in shaping one's work. Lex mentioned his favorite poet, saying, "The rhymes just kind of becomes it's an emergent phenomenon, a beautiful one." Manolás chuckled, acknowledging that sometimes the most effective way to tap into inspiration is simply to let go and allow oneself to be caught up by emotions. In this way, the creative process becomes almost intuitive.

Their conversation also delved into the realm of love and relationships, touching upon themes present in some of Manolás' work. He shared a poem that spoke to the concept of "let's be friends" – a poignant exploration of what it means to navigate complex emotions and desires with someone you care about. The final lines of the poem – "shout out I love you or send me to hell" – stood out as a powerful expression of vulnerability, revealing the raw emotion that lies at the heart of so many human connections.

As their conversation drew to a close, Lex turned to Manolás and asked for words of wisdom. The poet smiled, quoting Douglas Adams from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" – "man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time." This clever observation highlighted the importance of humility and openness in creative expression.

In the end, Manolás offered one final thought on the nature of poetry: "The answer to love is one yes or no. There's no i like you no let's be friends shout out I love you or send me to hell." This paradoxical statement echoed through their conversation, emphasizing the complexity and uncertainty that lies at the heart of both creativity and human connection.

As Lex wrapped up the episode, he expressed his gratitude for sharing this conversation with Manolás Kellis. He encouraged listeners to approach poetry – like life itself – with an open mind and a willingness to take risks. And as they said their goodbyes, it was clear that the true beauty of poetry lies not in its external form, but in the raw emotions, vulnerabilities, and connections it inspires us to make.

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