The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fourth time on the podcast.

He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.

Since this is episode number 142, and 42, as we all know, is the answer to the ultimate question

of life, the universe, and everything, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

we decided to talk about this unanswerable question of the meaning of life in whatever way

we two descendants of apes could muster, from biology to psychology to metaphysics and to music.

Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode,

thanks to Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence, structure,

and readability, Athletic Greens, the all in one drink that I start every day with to cover all

my nutritional bases, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out

these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that the opening 40 minutes of the conversation are all about

the many songs that formed the soundtrack to the journey of Manolis's life. It was a happy

accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating mind of Manolis.

I include links to YouTube versions of many of the songs we 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 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now here's my conversation with Manolis Kallis.

You mentioned Leonard Cohen and the song Hallelujah as a beautiful song. So what are the

three songs you draw the most meaning from about life? Don't get me started. So there's really

countless songs that have marked me, that have sort of shaped me in periods of joy and in periods of

sadness. My son likes to joke that I have a song for every sentence he will say, because very often

I will break into a song with a sentence he'll say. My wife calls me the radio because I can sort

of recite hundreds of songs that have really shaped me. So it's going to be very hard to just

pick a few. So I'm just going to tell you a little bit about my song transition as I've grown up.

In Greece, it was very much about, as I told you before, the misery, the poverty, but also

overcoming adversity. So some of the songs that have really shaped me are Hadis Alexiu, for example,

is one of my favorite singers in Greece. And then there's also really just old traditional songs

that my parents used to listen to. Like one of them is Nemon Plousios, which is basically,

oh, if I was rich. And the song is painting this beautiful picture about all the noises that you

hear in the neighborhood, in his poor neighborhood, the train going by, the priest walking to the

church and the kids crying next door and all of that. And he says, with all of that, I'm having

trouble falling asleep and dreaming. If I was rich. And then he was like, you know, breaking to that.

So it's just a position between the spirit and the sublime and then the physical and the harsh

reality. It's just not having troubles, not being miserable. So basically, rich to him just means

out of my misery, basically. And then also being able to travel, being able to sort of be the captain

of a ship and, you know, see the world and stuff like that. So it's just such beautiful imagery.

So many of the Greek songs, just like the poetry we talked about, they acknowledge the cruelty,

the difficulty of life, but are longing for a better life. That's exactly right. And another one

is phtohologia. 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 phtohologia,

so poor, you know, basically. It's the state of being poor. I don't even know if there's a word for

that in English. And then fast part is. So then it's like, oh, you know, basically,

like the state of being poor and misery, you know, for you, I write all my songs, et cetera.

And then the fast part is in your arms grew up and suffered and, you know, stood up and, 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. 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, who's eight. So my daughter, Cleo, 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 stopper yali to cry for. And it's basically describing how

vigorously we took on our life and we pushed hard towards the direction that we then realized

was the wrong one. And 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, 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 preteen years is like, you know, learning English through songs.

So basically, you know, listening to all the American pop songs and then memorizing them

vocally before I even knew what they meant. So, you know, Madonna and Michael Jackson and all of

these sort of really popular songs and, you know, George Michael and just songs that I would just

listen to the radio and repeat vocally. And eventually as I started learning English, I was

like, oh, wow, this thing has been repeating. I know, I now understand what it means without

re listening to it. But just with re repeating it was like, oh, again, Michael Jackson's man in the

mirror is teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve yourself. You know, if you want

to make the world a better place, 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 song as a way of touching the psyche. So if you look at regions of the brain, people who have

lost their language ability, because they have an accident in that region of the brain, can actually

sing because it's exactly the symmetric region of the brain. And that again teaches you so much

about language evolution and sort of the duality of musicality and, 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. It's fascinating to think that that's not just

an accidental precursor to intelligence. It's actually selected. It's well, it's actually

selected and it's a prerequisite. It's like it's required for intelligence.

And even as language has now developed, I think the artistic expression is needed,

like badly needed by our brain. So it's not just that, oh, our brain can kind of, you know,

take a break and go do that stuff. No, I mean, you know, I don't know if you remember that scene

from, oh gosh, was that Jack Nicholson movie in New Hampshire? All work and no play, make Jack a

dull boy. The shining. The shining. So there's this amazing scene where he's constantly trying to

concentrate and what's coming out of the typewriter is just gibberish. And I have that image as well

when I'm working and I'm like, no, basically all of these 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

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 hand or opening the

whiteboard in Zoom and just constantly drawing or, you know, back when we had in person meetings,

just the whiteboard. Yeah, that's fascinating to think about. So that's Michael Jackson, man,

Mayor Carolus Whisper with George Michael, which is a song I like. You didn't say that? I like that

one. That's too popular for you. I had recorded, no, no, no, it's an amazing song for me. I had

recorded a small part of it as it played at the tail end of the radio and I had a tape where I

only had part of that song. And I've just played it over and over and over again. Just so beautiful.

It's so heartbreaking. That song is almost Greek. It's so heartbreaking.

You know, George Michael is Greek. Is he Greek? He's Greek. Of course. George Michael is. I mean,

he's Greek. Yeah. No, you know. I'm 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

Gainsbourg. So Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer. He is always seen on stage, like not

even pretending to try to please just like with your 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

Moustachy. This song is just magnificent. So with my face of Métèque is actually a Greek word.

It's, you know, it's a French word for a Greek word. But Mét comes from Metta and then Ek from

Ikea from Ecology, which means home. So Métèque is someone who has changed homes for a migrant.

So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this one, the Juif errant, the Patrick Greek of

meandering Jew of Greek pastor. So again, you know, the Russian Greek, you know,

Jew Orthodox connections. And mes cheveux aux quatre vents with my hair in the four wings,

avec mes yeux tout délavés, qui me donnent lèrent de rêver, avec with my eyes that are all washed

out, who give me the pretence of dreaming, but who don't dream that much anymore, with my hands of

thief of musician and who have stolen so many gardens, with my mouth that has drunk, that has

kissed and that has bitten without ever pleasing its hunger, with my skin that has been rubbed

in the sun of all the summers and anything that was wearing a skirt. With my heart, and then you

have to listen to this verse, it's so beautiful, avec mon coeur qui a su faire, souffrir autant

qu il a souffert, with my heart that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered, but was able to

that knew how to make in French is actually su faire, that knew how to make qui a su faire,

souffrir autant qu il a souffert. Verses that span the whole thing, it's just beautiful.

Do you know on a small tangent, do you know Jacques Braille?

Of course, of course.

Non, non, non, non ma quitte pas, those songs, that song gets me every time.

So there's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists.

Not Nina Simone.

No, no, no, no, no.

Modern?

Carol Emerald, she's from Amsterdam, and she has a version of non ma quitte pas where she's

actually added some English lyrics, and it's really beautiful. But again, non ma quitte pas is

just so, I mean, it's, you know, the promises, the volcanoes that will restart, it's just so beautiful.

And I love, there's not many songs that show such depth of desperation for another human

being. That's so powerful.

I'm sorry, Jeff.

And then high school, now I'm starting to learn English. So I moved to New York.

So Sting's Englishman in New York, magnificent song.

And again, there's, if manners, maggoth manners, someone said, then he's the hero of the day.

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself, no matter what they say.

And then takes more than combat gear to make a man, takes more than a license for a gun.

Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run.

It's, again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live. I mean, this is one of them.

Basically says, it's not the combat gear that makes a man.

Where's the part where he says, there you go, gentleness so bright, a rare in this society,

at night a candle's brighter than the sun. So beautiful. He basically says, well,

you just might be the only one, modesty propriety can lead to not to write, you could end up as the

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 contrasts 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 still are one, drying in the color of the evening sun,

tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away, but something in our minds will always stay.

Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes through

violence and nothing ever could. For all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how

fragile we are. Damn right. I mean, that's poetry. It was beautiful. And he's using the English

language is just such a refined way with deep meanings, but also words that rhyme just so

beautifully. And evocations of when flesh and still are one. I mean, it's just mind boggling.

And then of course, the refrain that everybody remembers is on and on, the rain will fall,

etc. But like this beginning star. Yeah. And again, tears from a star, how fragile we are.

I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally.

Something, it seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm that I don't know what that is.

That probably connects to exactly what you were 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, the whole album of Pink Floyd and the movie just marked me enormously

as a teenager, just the wall. And there's one song that never actually made it into the album

that's only there in the movie about when the tigers broke free and the tigers are the tanks

of the Germans. And it just describes again, this vivid imagery was just before dawn,

one miserable morning in black 44, when the forward commander was told to sit tight when

he asked that his men be withdrawn. And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back

the enemy tanks for a while. And the Anzio bridge, bridge head was held for the price

of a few hundred ordinary lives. So that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with

us versus them. Us and them God only knows that's not what we would choose to do for work. 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 a found it one day in a draw the whole photographs

hidden away. And my eyes still grow damp to remember his majesty sign with his own rubber stamp.

So it's so ironic because it seems the way that he's writing it that he's not crying because

his father was lost. He's crying because kind old King George took the time to actually write

mother a note about the fact that his father died. It's so ironic because it basically says

we are just ordinary men and of course we're disposable. So I don't know if you know what

the root of the word pioneers, but you had a chessboard here earlier upon in French the pion.

They are the ones that you send to the front to get murdered slaughter. This whole concept of

pioneers having taken this whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that,

you know, we're now treating as heroes. So anyway, there's this juxtaposition of that.

And then the part that always just strikes me is the music and the tonality totally changes.

And now he describes the attack. It was dark all around. There was frost in the ground when

the tigers broke free and no one survived from the royal fusiliers company. They were all left

behind. Most of them dead. The rest of them dying. And that's how the high command took my daddy from

me. And that song even though it's not in the album explains the whole movie because it's this

movie of misery. It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out

of it. There's no other movie that I think has captured so well this prison that is someone's

own mind and this wall that you're stuck inside and this, you know, feeling of loneliness. And

sort of, is there anybody out there? And, you know, sort of, hello, hello, is there anybody in there?

It's not if you can hear me. Is there anyone home? Come on. Yeah. I hear your feeling down.

Just one minute. 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 trapped alone in a room with it. Yeah. And there's this scene in the movie,

which is like where he just breaks out with his guitar and there's this prostitute in the room.

He starts throwing stuff and then he breaks the window. He throws the chair outside and then you

see him laying in the pool with his own blood, 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 a tourniquet, dry as a funeral

drum. And then the music bill says, run to the bedroom. There's a suitcase on the left that you find my favorite acts. Don't

look so frightened. This is just a passing phase. One of my bad days. It's just so beautiful. I need

to rewatch it. That's so great. But imagine watching this as a teenager. It like ruins your mind.

It's so many, it's such harsh imagery. And then, you know, anyway, so there's the dark moment.

And then again, going back to Sting, now it's the political songs, Russians. And I think that song

should be a new national anthem for the US, not for Russians, but for Red versus Blue.

What is it doing? It's basically saying the Russians are just as humans as we are.

There's no way that they're going to let their children die. And then it's just so beautiful.

How can I save my innocent boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy? And now that's the new national anthem.

Are you reading? There is a no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence.

We share the same biology, regardless of ideology. Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians

love their children too. There's no such thing as a winnable war. It's a lie we don't believe anymore.

I mean, it's beautiful, right? And for God's sake, America, wake up. These are your fellow

Americans. They're your fellow biology. There is no monopoly of common sense on either side

of the political fence. It's just so beautiful. There's no CRISPR simpler way to say Russians

love their children too, the common humanity. Yeah. And remember what I was telling you,

I think in one of our first podcasts about the daughter who's crying for her husband,

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, et cetera. And that basically says, no, I mean, if you look at the Lord of the

Rings, the enemies are these monsters. They're not human. And that's what we always do. We always say

they're not like us. They're different. They're not humans, et cetera. So there's this dehumanization

that has to happen for people to go to war. If you realize just how close we are genetically,

one with the other, this whole 99.9% identical, you can't bear weapons against someone who's like

that. And the things that are the most meaningful to us in our lives at every level is the same

on all sides, on all sides. Exactly. So not just that we're genetically the same.

Yeah. We're ideologically the same. We love our children. We love our country. We will,

you know, we will fight for our family. So, and the last one I mentioned last time we spoke,

which is Johnny Mitchell's both sides now. So she has three rounds, one on clouds,

one on love and one on life. And on clouds, she says, rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream

castles in the air and feather canyons everywhere. I've looked at clouds that way, but now they

only block the sun. They rain and snow on everyone. So many things I would have done,

but clouds got in my way. And then I've looked at clouds from both sides now from

up and down and still somehow it's cloud 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 forth. But now old friends are acting strange.

They shake their heads. They say I've changed. Well, some things lost and some things gained

in living every day. So again, that's growing up and realizing that, well,

the view that you had as a kid is not necessarily that you have an adult.

You remember my poem from when I was 16 years old of this whole children dance now all in row.

And then in the end, even though the snow seems bright without you have lost their light,

sun that sang and moon that smiled. So this whole concept of if you have love and if you have passion,

you see the exact same thing from a different way. You can go out running in the rain

or you could just stay in and say, ah, sucks. I won't be able to go outside now.

Those signs. Anyway, and the last one is the last last one, I promise, Leonard Cohen.

This is amazing, by the way. I'm so glad we stumbled on how much joy you have in so many

avenues of life and music is just one of them. That's amazing. But yes, Leonard Cohen.

Going back to Leonard Cohen since that's where you started. So Leonard Cohen's dance

me to the end of love. That's what that was our opening song in our wedding with my wife.

Oh no, that's good. As we came out to greet the guests, it was dance me to the end of love.

And then another one, which is just so passionate always. And we always keep

referring back to it is I'm your man. And it goes on and on about sort of,

I can be every type of lover for you. And what's really beautiful in marriage

is that we live that with my wife every day. You can have the passion. You can have the anger.

You can have the love. You can have the tenderness. There's just so many gems in that song.

If you want to partner, take my hand. Or if you want to strike me down in anger,

here I stand. I'm your man. And then if you want a boxer, I will step into the ring for you.

If you want a driver, climb inside. Or if you want to take me for a ride,

you know you can. So this whole concept of you want to drive, I'll follow. You want me to drive?

I'll drive. And the difference, I would say, between like that and Nemekite Paes,

this song, he's got an attitude. He's like, he's proud of this, his ability to basically be any

kind of man for the long and long as opposed to the Jacques Braille like desperation of,

what do I have to be for you to love me? That kind of desperation.

But notice there's a parallel here. There's a verse that is perhaps not paid attention to

as much, which says, ah, but a man never got a woman back, not by begging on his knees.

So it seems that the I'm your man is actually an apology song in the same way that Nemekite Paes

an apology song. Nemekite Pa basically says, I've screwed up. I'm sorry, baby.

And in the same way that the careless whisper is all screwed up. Yes, that's right.

I'm never going to dance again. Guilty feet have got no rhythm.

So this is an apology song, not by begging on his knees or I'd crawl to you, baby, and I'd fall at

your feet and at howl at your beauty like a dog in heat and I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear

at your sheet and say, please. And then the last one is so beautiful. If you want a father for your

child or only want to walk with me a while across the sand, I'm your man. That's the last

verses, which basically says, you want me for a day? I'll be there. You want me to just walk?

I'll be there. You want me for life? Do you want a father for your child? I'll be there too.

It's just so beautiful. Oh, sorry. Remember how I told you I was going to finish with a

lighthearted song? Yes. Last one. You ready? So Allison Krause and Union Station,

country song, believe it or not, the lucky one. So I've never identified as much with the

lyrics of a song as this one. And it's hilarious. My friend Seraphim Batoglu is the guy who got me

to genomics in the first place. I owe enormously to him. And he's another Greek. We actually met

dancing, believe it or not. So we used to perform Greek dances. I was the president of the International

Students Association. So we put on these big performances for 500 people at MIT. And there's

a picture on the MIT Tech where Seraphim, who's like, you know, bodybuilder, was holding on

his shoulder. And I was like, like doing maneuvers in the air, basically. So anyway, these guys,

Seraphim, we were driving back from a conference. And there's this Russian girl who was describing

how every member of her family had been either killed by the communists or killed by the Germans

or killed by 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, Seraphim was driving. And we stopped at a rest area. And he takes me side.

And he's like, Manolis, we're going to crash. Get her out of my car. And then he basically says,

but I'm only reassured because you're here with me. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like,

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 every science must say something horrible happens to me. I'm like, and in fact, even in

that song, the, 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. So how nicely that the wind blew.

And the writing was erased. So again, it's this whole sort of, not just saying, bummer, but,

oh, great, I just lost this. This must mean something. Right.

As horrible thing happened, it must open the door to a new door, beautiful chapter.

So, so Alice on Kraus 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 it's free as the wind,

blowing down the road, loved by many, hated by none. I'd say you were lucky because you know

what you've done, not the care in the world, not the worry inside. Everything's going to be all

right because you're the lucky one. And then she goes, you're the lucky one, always having fun,

a jack of all trades, a master of none. You look at the world with the smiling eyes and laugh at

the devil as his train rolls by. I'll give you a song and a one night stand. You'll be looking at

a happy man 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, one trick pony, if you just embrace the fact that

you might suck at a bunch of things, but you're just going to try a lot of things.

And then there's another verse that says, well, you're blessed, I guess, but never knowing which

road you're choosing, to you the next best thing, to playing and winning is playing and losing.

It's just so beautiful because it basically says, if you try your best, but it's still playing,

if you lose, it's okay. You had an awesome game. And again, superficially, it sounds like a super

happy song. But then there's the last verse basically says, no matter where you are, that's

where you'll be, you can bet your luck won't follow me. Just give you a song and 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 birds who love or birds who cry,

you can't really love unless you cry. You can't just be the lucky one, the happy boy, la, la,

and yet have a long term relationship. So it's, you know, on one hand, I identify with the

shallowness of the song of, you know, you're the lucky one, jack of all trades, a master of none.

But at the same time, I identify with a lesson of, well, you can't just be the happy, merry,

merry, go lucky all the time. Sometimes you have to embrace loss and sometimes you have to embrace

suffering and sometimes you have to embrace that if you have a safety net, you're not really

committing enough. You're not, you know, basically you're allowing yourself to slip.

But if you just go all in and you just, you know, let go of your reservations,

that's when you truly will get somewhere. So anyway, that's like the, I managed to

narrow it down to what 15 songs? Thank you for that wonderful journey that you just took us on.

The darkest possible places of Greek song to ending on this country song. I haven't heard it before,

but that's exactly right. I feel the same way, depending on the day. Is this the luckiest human

on earth? And there's something to that, but you're right. It needs to be, we need to now return to

the muck of life in order to be able to truly enjoy it. What do you mean muck? What's muck?

The messiness of life, the things that where things don't turn out the way you expect it to.

The way, so like to feel lucky is like focusing on the beautiful consequences. But then that

feeling of things being different than you expected, that you stumble in all the kinds

of ways that seems to be, it needs to be paired with the feeling.

There's basically one way, the only way not to make mistakes is to never do anything.

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 I 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 and often take us to a better place

is part of this whole sort of messiness of life. 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, wow, I did the

wrong thing, of course, that's part of life. And that's just something that if you are a doer,

you'll make mistakes. If you're a criticizer, yeah, sure, you can sit back and criticize

everybody else for the mistakes they make. Or instead, you can just be out there making those

mistakes. And frankly, I'd rather be the criticized one than the criticized one.

Yeah, brilliantly, but...

Every time somebody steals my bicycle, I say, well, no, my son is like,

why do they steal our bicycle, Dad? And I'm like, aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people

can steal? I'd rather be the person stolen from than the stealer.

Yeah, it's not the critic that counts. So that's, we've just talked amazingly about life from the

music perspective. Let's talk about life from human life from perhaps other perspective and

its meaning. So this is episode 142. There is perhaps an absurdly deep meaning to the number

42 that our culture has elevated. So this is a perfect time to talk about the meaning of life.

We've talked about it already. But do you think this question that's so simple and so seemingly

absurd has value of what is the meaning of life? Is it something that raising the question and

trying to answer it, is that a ridiculous pursuit or is there some value? Is it answerable at all?

So first of all, I feel that we owe it to your listeners to say why 42.

Sure.

So of course, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came up with 42 as basically a random

number. Just, you know, the author just pulled it out of a hat and he's admitted so. He said,

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 to summarize, is the answer that these super mega computer that had

computed for a million years with the most powerful computing the world had come up with.

At some point, the computer says, I have an answer. And they're like, what? It's like,

you're not 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 bigger computers to

figure out what the question is, to which the answer is 42. So as I was turning 42, I basically

sort of researched why 42 is such a cool number. And it turns out that, and I put together this

little passage that was explaining to all those guests to my 42nd birthday party, why we were

talking about the meaning of life. And basically talks about how 42 is the angle at which light

reflects off of water to create a rainbow. And it's so beautiful because the rainbow is basically

the combination of sort of, it's been raining, but there's hope because the sun just came out.

So it's a very beautiful number there. So 42 is also the sum of all rows and columns

of a magic cube that contains all consecutive integers starting at one. So basically, if you

take all integers between one and however many vertices there are, the sums is always 42. 42

is the only number left under 100 for which the equation of x to the cube plus y to the cube plus

z to the cube is n and was not known to not have a solution. And now it's the, you know,

it's the only one that actually has a solution. 42 is also 101010 in binary. Again, the yin and

the yang, the good and the evil, one and zero, the balance of the fours. 42 is the number of

chromosomes for the giant panda. And the giant panda. I know it's totally random. It's 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 on 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, which is what I assume my students mean when they ask

that their paper reaches for the stars, I just tell them just folded a bunch of times.

42 is the number of messier object 42, which is Orion. And that's, you know,

one of the most famous galaxies. It's I think also the place where we can actually see the center

of our galaxy. 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in Ascii, which is very useful

when searching for the stars and also a reg X for life, the universe and everything. So star.

In Egyptian mythology, the goddess Maat, which was personifying truth and justice,

would ask 42 questions to every dying person. And those answering successfully would become stars,

continued to give life and fuel universal growth. In Judaic tradition, God ascribe is ascribed

the 42 lettered name and trusted only to the middle age pious meek free from bad temper,

sober and not insistent on his rights. And in Christian tradition, there's 42 generations from

Abraham, Isaac, that we talked about the story of Isaac, Jacob, eventually Joseph, Mary and Jesus.

In Kabbalistic tradition, Eloca, which is 42, is the number with which God creates the universe,

starting with 25 letter B and ending with 70 good. So 25 plus, you know, 17. There's a 42

chapter sutra, which is the first Indian religious scripture, which was translated to Chinese,

thus introducing Buddhism to China from India. The 42 line Bible was the first printed book

marking the age of printing in the 1450s, and the dissemination of knowledge eventually leading

to the Enlightenment. A yeast cell, which is a coolest single cell you carry out, and the subject

of my PhD research has exactly 42 million proteins. Anyway, so there's a series of 40.

This is, 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 background names. So, you know, after you have

the number, you figure out why that number. So anyway, so now that we've spoken about why 42,

why do we search for meaning? And you're asking, you know, will that search ultimately lead to

our destruction? And my thinking is exactly the opposite. So basically, that asking about meaning

is something that's so inherent to human nature. It's something that makes life beautiful,

that makes it worth living. And that searching for meaning is actually the point. It's not

the finding it. I think when you found it, you're dead. Don't never be satisfied that,

you know, I've got it. So I like to say that life is lived forward, but it only makes sense

backward. And I don't remember whose quote that is, but the whole search itself is the meaning.

And what I love about it is that there's a double search going on. There's a search

in every one of us through our own lives to find meaning. And then there's a search which is happening

for humanity itself to find our meaning. And we as humans like to look at animals and say,

of course, they have a meaning. Like a dog has its meaning. It's just a bunch of instincts,

you know, running around, loving everything. You know, remember our joke with a cat and the dog?

Yeah, cat has no meaning. No, no. So, and I'm noticing the yin yang symbol right here with

this whole panda black and white and the zero one zero. You're on fire with that 42. Some of

those are gold, ascii value for star symbol. Damn. Anyway, so, so basically in my view that the

search for meaning and the act of 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, etc.

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

to a purpose that's not directly tied to a function. It's really just the playing of life,

the, you know, not for a particular reason. Do you think this thing we got, this mind is unique

in the universe in terms of how difficult it is to build? Is it possible that we're the

most beautiful thing that the universe has constructed?

Both the most beautiful and the most ugly, but certainly the most complex. So look at evolutionary

time. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years. We've been around for a million years.

So one versus 135. So dinosaurs were extinct, 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 neocortex, which is sort of the outer layer

of our brain compared to our quote unquote reptilian brain, which we share the structure of

with all of the dinosaurs, they didn't have that and yet they ruled the planet. So how many other

planets have still, you know, mindless dinosaurs where strength was the only dimension ruling the

planet? So there was something weird that annihilated the dinosaurs. And again, you could look at

biblical things of sort of God coming and wiping out his creatures and to make room for the next

ones. So the mammals basically sort of took over the planet and then grew this cognitive

capability of this general purpose machine. And primates 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 election, 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. 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. But yet, the folds continued,

effectively creating just so much more capacity. The evolutionary context in which this was made

is enormously fascinating. And it has to do with other humans that we have now killed off

or that have gone extinct. And that has now created this weird place of humans on the planet

as the only species that has this enormous hardware. So that can basically make us think

that there's something very weird and unique that happened in human evolution that perhaps has not

been recreated elsewhere. Maybe the asteroid didn't hit sister earth. And dinosaurs are still

rolling. And any kind of proto human is 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, 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 if you were to sort of estimate and bet some money

on it, if we re ran earth a million times, would what we got now be the most special thing? And

how often would it be? So scientifically speaking, how repeatable is this experiment?

So this whole cognitive revolution? Yes.

Maybe not. Maybe not. Basically, I feel that the longevity of, you know, dinosaurs

suggest that it was not quite inevitable that we humans eventually made it.

Well, you're also implying one thing here. You're saying you're implying that humans also don't

have this longevity. This is the interesting question. So with the Fermi paradox, the idea

that the basic question is like, if the universe has a lot of alien life forms in it, why haven't

we seen them? Yeah. And one thought is that there is a great filter or multiple great filters

that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations. This thing that we, you know,

this multi folding brain that keeps growing may not be such a big feature. It might be useful for

survival, but it like takes us down a side road that is a very short one with a quick dead end.

What do you think about that? So I think the universe is enormous, not just in space,

but also in time. And the pretence 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

is a little ridiculous. So my, you know, what I love about Star Wars is a long, long time ago

in a galaxy far, far away. It's not like some distant future. It's a long, long time ago.

What I love about it is that basically says, you know, evolution and civilization are just

so recent in, you know, on earth. Like there's countless other planets that have probably all

kinds of life forms, multi cellular, perhaps, and so on and so forth. But the fact that humanity

has only been listening and emitting for just this tiny little blink means that any of these,

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 have a hope. Well, you said

things. Oh, of course, of course. I mean, now that we've made it so far. So you feel like we've

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, dominance. It wasn't necessarily the case with dinosaurs. Like, I mean, yes,

you know, there's some claims of intelligence. And if you look at Jurassic Park, yes, or whatever.

But, you know, they just don't have the hardware for it. And humans have the hardware. There's

no doubt that mammals have a dramatically improved hardware for cognition over dinosaurs.

Like, basically, there's universes where strength won out. And in our planet, in our, you know,

particular version of whatever happened in this planet, cognition won out. And it's kind of cool.

I mean, it's a privilege, right? But it's kind of like living in Boston instead of, I don't know,

some middle, middle age place where everybody's like hitting each other with, you know, weapons

and sticks. You're back to the lucky one song. I mean, we are the lucky ones. But the flip side

of that is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves.

And I want to go back to Pinker and the better angels of our nature. The whole concept that

civilization and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence.

Dramatically. If you look, 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 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, 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 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 while it's very true that the arc of our society of human civilization seems to be

progressing towards a better, better life for everybody in the many ways that you described,

things can change in a moment. And it feels like it's not just us humans. 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 darkness of space, which I would

recently learned is not that easy to actually detect them. Yes. So 48. What happens in 48 years?

I'm not sure. 2068, up office. There's an asteroid that's coming. In 48 years,

it has a very high chance of actually wiping us out completely. Yes.

Yes. We have 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.

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 has led to humanity making so many advances

so fast? Okay. So what has led to humanity making something advances is not just the hardware

upgrades. It's also the software upgrades. So by hardware upgrades, I basically mean our neocortex

and the expansion and these layers and folds over brain and all of that. That's the hardware.

The hardware hasn't changed much in the last, what, 70,000 years.

As I mentioned last time, if you take a person from ancient Egypt and you bring them up now,

they're just as equally fit. So hardware hasn't changed. What has changed is software. What has

changed is that we are growing up in societies that are much more complex. This whole concept of

neotony basically allows our exponential growth. The concept that our brain has not fully formed,

has not fully stabilized itself until after our teenage years. So we basically have a good 16

years, 18 years to sort of infuse it with the latest and greatest in software. If you look

at what happened in ancient Greece, why did everything explode at once? My take on this

is that it was the shift from the Egyptian and hieroglyphic software to the Greek language

software. This whole concept of creating abstract notions, of creating these layers of cognition

and layers of meaning and layers of abstraction for words and ideals and beauty and harmony.

How do you write harmony in hieroglyphics? There's no such thing as expressing these ideals of

peace and justice or even macabre concepts of doom, etc. You don't have the language for it.

Your brain has trouble getting at that concept. So what I'm trying to say is that

these software upgrades for human language, human culture, human environment, human education

have basically led to this enormous explosion of knowledge. And eventually, after the Enlightenment,

and as I was mentioning the 42 line Bible and the printed press, the dissemination of knowledge,

you basically now have this whole horizontal dispersion of ideas in addition to the vertical

inheritance of genes. So the hardware improvements happen through vertical inheritance. The software

improvements happen through horizontal inheritance. And the reason why human civilization exploded

is not a hardware change anymore. It's really a software change. So if you're looking at now where

we are today, look at coronavirus. Yes, sir, it could have killed us a hundred years ago. It would

have. But it didn't. Why? Because in January, we published the genome. A month later, less than a

month later, the first vaccine designs were done. And now less than a year later, 10 months later,

we already have a working vaccine that 90% efficient. I mean, that is ridiculous by any

standards. And the reason is sharing. So, you know, the asteroid, yes, could wipe us out in 48 years,

but 48 years. I mean, look at where we were 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,

you know, by nail size, you know, hardware is enormous. So, and this is nowhere near ending.

You know, we all have our like little, you know, problems going back and forth on the social side

and on the political side on the cognitive 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 revolutionizing. It's gonna explode. It could 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, a human stepping foot on Mars

and two, possible colonization of not necessarily Mars, but other planets and all that kind of

stuff for people living in space. Inevitable. Inevitable. Would you do it? Or do you kind of like

Earth? Of course. Of course. You know, how many, how many, how many people will you wait? When

you wait for, I think it was about when the, the declaration independence was signed 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, then again, you are in the

lucky one. I gotta tell you, you are the lucky one. So, you might be on the list. I don't know.

I mean, I, I kind of feel like I would love to see Earth from above just to watch our planets.

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're definitely on the path to

that. And, you know, it's just not permeated through the whole universe yet. I mean, through the whole

world yet, through the whole Earth yet. But it's definitely permeating.

So you've talked about humans as special. How exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs?

So I mentioned that there's, 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

hormones and neuro receptors are sort of getting it ready for impulse. The target

is constantly looking around and sensing. I've actually been in Kenya and I've kind of seen

the hunt. So I've kind of seen the sort of game of waiting. And the mitochondria in the muscles

of the lion are basically ready for, 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 chloroplasts into energy, which eventually feeds

the gazelle and eventually feeds the lions and so forth. So as humans, we experience all of that.

But the lion only experiences one layer. The mitochondria in its body are only experiencing

one layer. The chloroplasts are only experiencing one layer. The, you know, photoreceptors and the

smell receptors and 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, et cetera. And on top of that, you

eventually build a cognitive system that's smart. I want you to now picture this cognitive system

becoming not just self aware, but also becoming aware of the hardware that it's made of.

And the atoms that they're, that it's made of and so on and so forth. So it's as if your AI system,

and there's this beautiful scene in 2001, Odyssey of Space, where Hal after Dave starts

disconnecting him, he's starting to sing a song about daisies, et cetera. 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, etc. We'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.

These species that has managed to, in space, cross through these layers from the enormous

to the infinitely small, and that's what I love about particle physics, the fact that it actually

unites everything. The very small, the very big. The very small and the very big. It's only through

the very big that the very small gets formed. Like basically every atom of gold results from the fusion

that happened of, you know, increasingly large particles before that explosion that then

versus it through the cosmos. And it's only through understanding the very large that we

understand the very small and vice versa. And that's in space. Then there's the time direction.

As you are watching the Kilimanjaro mountain, you can kind of look back through time

to when that volcano was exploding and, 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 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 and figured me out

with God's perspective, meaning like become aware of, you know, yeah. So it's kind of interesting. So

to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to what convert those layers

into ideas that 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 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 make, you know, morphios didn't have to show up

to basically give us the blue pill or the red pill. We were able to sufficiently evolve cognitively

through the hardware explosion, and sufficiently involve scientifically through the software

explosion, to basically get at breaking through the matrix realizing that we live in a matrix,

and realizing that we are this thing in there. And yet that thing in there has a consciousness

that lives through all these layers. And I think we're the only species, we're the only thing that

we even can think of that has actually done that has sort of permeated space and time,

scales and layers of abstraction, plowing through them, and realizing what we're really,

really made of. And the next frontier is, of course, cognition. So we understand so much

of the cosmos, so much of the stuff around us, but the stuff inside here, finding the basis for

the soul, finding the basis for the ego, for the self, the self awareness. When does the spark

happen that basically sort of makes you, you? I mean, that's, you know, really the next frontier.

So in terms of these peeling off layers of complexity, somewhere between the cognitive

layer and the reasoning layer or the computational layer, there's still some stuff to be figured

out there. And I think that's the final frontier of sort of completing our journey through that

matrix. And maybe duplicating it into in other versions of ourselves through AI,

which is another very exciting possibility. What I love about AI and the way that it operates

right now is the fact that it is unpredictable. There's emergent behavior in our cognitively

capable artificial systems that we can certainly model, but we don't encode directly. And that's a

key difference. So we like to say, Oh, of course, this is not really intelligent, because we coded

it up. And we just put in these little parameters there. And there's like, you know, what's 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 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 it 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 result of it being deployed into the world is infinitely complex. And yet, it's not yet able

to be cognizant of all the other layers of its, you know, 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 if you look at humans, we basically have the same cognitive architecture as monkeys.

That's the great apes. It's just a ton more of it. If you look at GPT3 versus GPT2, again,

it's the same architecture, just more of it. And yet it's able to do so much more. So if you start

thinking about sort of what's the future of that, GPT4 and GPT5, 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. It's interesting that in the AI community, maybe there's a human centric fear,

but the notion that GPT10 will achieve general intelligence is something that people shy away

from that there has to be something totally different and new added to this. And yet it's

not seriously considered that this very simple thing, this very simple architecture when scaled

might be the thing that achieves superintelligence. And people think the same way about humanity

and human consciousness, they're like, oh, consciousness might be quantum or it might be,

you know, some non physical thing. And it's like, or it could just be a lot more of the same hardware

that now is sufficiently capable of self awareness, just because it has the neurons to do it.

So maybe the consciousness that is so elusive is an emergent behavior of you basically string

together all these cognitive capabilities that come from running from seeing for reacting from

predicting the movement of 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 over simplifying,

of course, the complexity and the diversity of the different types of excitatory and inhibitory

neurons, the waveforms that sort of shine through the, you know, 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 complexity of the world and then getting born

and sort of seeing just how much more complex the world is. So it's a combination of the underlying

hardware, which if you think about as a geneticist, in my view, the hardware gives you an upper bound

of cognitive capabilities, but it's the environment that makes those capabilities shine and reach

their maximum. So we're a combination of nature and nurture. The nature is our genes and our cognitive

apparatus. And the nurture is the richness of the environment that makes that cognitive apparatus

reach its potential. And we are so far from reaching our full potential. So far. I think that kids

being born a hundred years from now, they'll be looking at us now and saying what primitive

educational systems they had. I can't believe people were not wired into this virtual reality

from birth as we are now because they're clearly inferior. And so on and so forth. So basically,

I think that our environment will continue exploding and our cognitive capabilities,

it's not like, oh, we're only using 10% of our brain. That's ridiculous. Of course,

we're using 100% of our brain, but it's still constrained by how complex our environment is.

So the hardware will remain the same, but the software, in a quickly advancing environment,

the software will make a huge difference in the nature of the human experience, the human condition.

It's fascinating to think that humans will look very different a hundred years from now,

just because the environment changed, even though we're still the same great apes, the descendant

of apes. At the core of this is kind of a notion of ideas that I don't know if you're

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 say this notion of ideas,

you know, multiplying, selecting in the minds of humans. Do you ever think about ideas from

that perspective? Ideas as organisms themselves, they're breeding in the minds of humans.

I love the concept of memes. I love the concept of these horizontal transfer of ideas and sort

of permeating 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 it, 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.

We ship them to different locations based on their properties.

That's exactly right. 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, minor 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 coevolving

the same soup of ever improving knowledge and societal inter fertilization, cross fertilization

of these ideas. So this beautiful image, so this is shipping these actual meat cognitive

systems to physical locations. They tend to cluster in the biology ones, cluster in a certain

building too. So like within that, there's clusters on top of clusters on top of clusters.

What about in the online world? Do you also see that kind of, because people now form groups on

the internet that they stick together, so they can sort of, these cognitive systems can collect

themselves and breed together in different layers of spaces. It doesn't just have to be physical

space. Absolutely. Absolutely. So basically, there's the physical rearrangement, but there's

also the conglomeration of the same cognitive system, doesn't need to be a human, doesn't

need to belong to only one community. So yes, you might be a member of the computer science

department, but you can also hang out in the biology department. But you might also go online

into, I don't know, poetry department readings and so 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 coevolution of genes and memes is not just

physically instantiated, it's also sort of rearranged in this cognitive space as well.

And sometimes these cognitive systems hold conferences and they all gather around and

there's like, one of them is like talking and they're all like listening and then they discuss

and then they have free lunch and so on. No, but then that's where you find students where,

when I go to a conference, I go through the posters where I'm on a mission. Basically,

my mission is to read and understand what every poster is about. And for a few of them,

I'll dive deeply and understand everything, but I make it a point to just go poster after

poster in order to read all of them. And I find some gems and students that I speak to

that sometimes eventually join my lab. And then sort of you're sort of creating this permeation

of the transfer of ideas, of ways of thinking, and very often of moral values, of social structures,

of just more imperceptible properties of these cognitive systems that simply just cling together.

Basically, I have the luxury at MIT of not just choosing smart people, but choosing

smart people who I get along with who are generous and friendly and creative and smart and excited

and childish in their uninhibited behaviors and so forth. So you basically can choose

yourself to surround, you can choose to surround yourself with people who are not only cognitively

compatible, but also, you know, imperceptibly through the meta cognitive systems compatible.

And again, when I say compatible, not all the same. Sometimes, you know, not sometimes all

the time, the teams are made out of complementary components, not just compatible, but very often

complementary. So in my own team, I have a diversity of students who come from very different

backgrounds. There's a whole spectrum of biology to computation, of course. But within biology,

there's a lot of realms. Within computation, there's a lot of realms. And what makes us

click so well together is the fact that not only do we have a common mission, a common passion,

and a common, you know, view of the world, but that we're complementary in our skills,

in our angles with which we come at it and so forth. And that's sort of what makes it click.

Yeah, it's fascinating that the stickiness of multiple cognitive systems together includes

both the commonality. So you meet because there's some common thing, but you stick together

because you're different in all the useful ways.

Yeah. And my wife and I, I mean, we adore each other like two pieces, but we're also extremely

different in many ways. And that's beautiful. But I love that 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 8am, the kids better be to school. And, you know,

I do get yelled at. But I need it. Basically, I need her as much as she needs me. And she

loves interacting with me and talking. I mean, last night, we were talking about

this and I showed her the questions and we were bouncing ideas off each other. And it was just

beautiful. Like we basically have these, you know, basically cognitive, you know,

let it all loose kind of dates where, you know, we just bring papers and we're like,

you know, bouncing ideas and cetera. So, you know, we have extremely different perspectives,

but very common, you know, goals and interests and anyway.

What do you make of the communication mechanism that we humans use to share those ideas? Because

like one essential element of all of this is not just that we're able to have these ideas,

but we're also able to share them. We tend to, maybe you can correct me, but we seem to use

language to share the ideas. Maybe we share them in some much deeper way than language,

I don't know. But what do you make of this whole mechanism and how fundamental it is to

the human condition? So, some people will tell you that your language dictates your thoughts

and your thoughts cannot form outside language. I tend to disagree. I see thoughts as much more

abstract as, you know, basically when I dream, I don't dream in words. I dream in shapes and forms

and, you know, three dimensional space with extreme detail. I was describing, so when I wake up in

the middle of the night, I actually record my dreams. Sometimes I write them down in a Dropbox

file. Other times I'll just dictate them in, you know, audio. And my wife was giving me a massage

the other day because like my left side was frozen and I started playing the recording. And as I

was listening to it, I was like, I don't remember any of that. And I was like, of course. And then

the entire thing came back. But then there's no way any other person could have recreated that entire

sort of, you know, three dimensional shape and dream and concept. And in the same way, when I'm

thinking of ideas, there's so many ideas I can't put to words. I mean, I will describe them with

a thousand words, but the idea itself is much more precise or much more sort of abstract or much more

something, you know, difference, either less abstract or more abstract. And it's either, you

know, basically, there's just the projection that happens from the three dimensional ideas into,

let's say, a one dimensional language. And the language certainly gives you the apparatus to

think about concepts that you didn't realize existed before. And with my team, we often create new

words. I'm like, well, now we're going to call these the regulatory plexus of a gene. And that

gives us now the language to sort of build on that as one concept that you then build upon with all

kinds of other other things. So there's this co evolution again of ideas in language, but they're

not one to one with each other. Now let's talk about language itself, words, sentences. This is a

very distant construct from where language actually begun. So if you look at how we communicate,

as I'm speaking, my eyes are shining. And my face is changing through all kinds of emotions. And my

entire body composition posture is reshaped. And my intonation, the pauses that I make, the softer

and the louder and the this and that are conveying so much more information. And if you look at early

human language, and if you look at how, you know, the great Aves communicate with each other,

there's a lot of granting, there's a lot of posturing, there's a lot of emotions, there's a

lot of sort of shrieking, etc. They have a lot of components of our human language, just not the

words. So I think of human communication as combining the ape component, but also of course, the, you

know, GPT three components. 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

granting relatives. And what I love about humanity that we have both, we're not just a

conversational system, we're a granting, emotionally charged, you know, weirdly interconnected

system that also has the ability to reason. And when we communicate with each other,

there's so much more than just language, there's so much more than just words.

It does seem like we're able to somehow transfer even more than the body language. It seems that

in the room with us is always a giant knowledge base of like shared experiences, different

perspectives on those experiences. But I don't know, the knowledge of who the last three, four

presidents in the United States was and just all the, you know, 911, the tragedies in 911, all the

beautiful and terrible things that happen in the world, they're somehow both in our minds,

and somehow enrich the ability to transfer information. What I love about it is I can talk

to you about 2001 Odyssey of Space and mention a very specific scene and that evokes all these

feelings that you had when you first watched it. We're both visualizing that maybe in different

ways. Exactly. But in that, yeah. And not only that, but the feeling is brought back up just

like you said with the dreams, we both have that feeling arise in some form as you bring up the

hell, you know, facing his own mortality. It's fascinating that we're able to do that. I don't

know. Now let's talk about Neuralink for a second. So what's the concept of Neuralink? The concept

of Neuralink is that I'm going to take whatever knowledge is encoded in my brain directly transferred

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 Li Hui Tai and Asaf Marco that basically was looking

at these ngrams that are formed with combinations of neurons that cofire when a stimulus happens

where we can go into a mouse and select those neurons that fire by marking them and then see

what happens when they first fire and then select the neurons that fire again when the experience

is repeated. These are the recall neurons. And then there's the memory consolidation neurons.

So we're starting to understand a little bit of sort of the distributed nature of knowledge 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

scene from Dave losing his mind of how losing his mind and talking to Dave.

How is that scene 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 now writing. And again,

what if something goes wrong? I don't want to even think about that. That's number two. And number

three, who says that the way that you encode Dave, I'm losing my mind. And I encode Dave,

I'm losing my mind is anywhere near each other. Basically, maybe the way that I'm encoding it

is twisted with my childhood memories of running through, you know, the pebbles in Greece,

and yours is twisted with your childhood memory and growing up in Russia. And there's no way

that I can take my encoding and put it into your brain, because it'll A, mess things up,

and B, be incompatible with your own unique experiences.

So that's telepathic communications from human to human. It's fascinating. You're

reminding us that there's two biological systems on both ends of that communication. The one,

the easier, I guess, maybe half as difficult thing to do in the hope with Neuralink is that

we can communicate with an AI system. So where one side of that is a little bit

more controllable. But even just that is exceptionally difficult.

Let's talk about two neuronal systems talking to each other. Suppose that GPT4 tells GPT3,

hey, give me all your knowledge. Right? It's ready. I have 10 times more hardware. I'm ready.

Just feed me. What's GPT3 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 GPT3 to transfer all its knowledge

to its older body that has a lot more hardware is to regenerate every single possible human

sentence that it can possibly create. Just keep talking. Keep talking and just reencode it all

together. So maybe what language does is exactly that. It's taking one generative cognitive model.

It's running it forward to emit utterances that kind of make sense in my cognitive frame.

And it's reencoding them into yours through the parsing of that same language.

And I think the conversation might actually be the most efficient way to do it. So not just

talking, but interactive. So talking back and forth, asking questions, interrupting.

So GPT4 will constantly be interrupting. Just annoying it.

But the beauty of that is also that as we're interrupting each other,

there's all kinds of misinterpretations that happen. That, you know, as basically when my

students speak, I will often know that I'm misunderstanding what they're saying. And I'll

be like, hold that thought for a second. Let me tell you what I think I understood, which I know

is different from what you said. Then I'll say that. And then someone else in the same Zoom

meeting will basically say, Well, you know, here's another way to think about what you just said.

And then by the third iteration, we're somewhere completely different that if we could actually

communicate with full, you know, neural network parameters back and forth of that knowledge

and idea and coding would be far inferior because the reencoding with our own, as we said last time,

emotional baggage and cognitive baggage from our unique experiences through our shared

experiences, distinct encodings in the context of all our unique experiences is leading to so much

more diversity of perspectives. And again, going back to this whole concept of these entire network

of all of human cognitive systems connected to each other and sort of how ideas and memes permeate

through that. That's sort of what really creates a whole new level of human experience through

this reasoning layer and this computational layer that obviously lives on top of our cognitive layer.

So you're one of these aforementioned cognitive systems, mortal, but thoughtful,

and you're connected to a bunch, like you said, students, your wife, your kids.

What do you, in your brief time here on earth, this is a meaning of life episode.

So what do you hope this world will remember you as? What do you hope your legacy will be?

I don't think of legacy as much as maybe most people think legacy.

No, it's kind of funny. I'm consciously living the present.

Many students tell me, oh, give us some career advice. I'm like, I'm the wrong person.

I've never made a career plan. I still have to make one.

It's funny to be both experiencing the past and the present and the future, but also consciously

living in the present. There's a conscious decision we can make to not worry about all that, which

again goes back to the I'm the lucky one kind of thing of living in the present and being happy

winning and being happy losing. And there's a certain freedom that comes with that. But again,

a certain sort of, I don't know, ephemerity of living for the present. But if you step back from

all of that, where basically my current modus operandis is live for the present, make every day

the best you can make, and just make the local blip of local maxima of the universe,

of the awesomeness of the planet and the town and the family that we live in,

both academic family and biological family. Make it a little more awesome by being generous

to your friends, being generous to the people around you, being kind to your enemies,

and just showing love all around. You can't be upset at people if you truly love them.

If somebody yells at you and insults you every time you say the slightest thing. And yet,

when you see them, you just see them with love. It's a beautiful feeling. It's like,

you know, I'm feeling exactly like when I look at my three year old who's like screaming,

even though I love her and I want her good, she's still screaming and saying, no, no, no, no, no.

And I'm like, I love you, genuinely love you. But I can, I can sort of kind of see that your

brain is kind of stuck in that little, you know, mode of anger. And, you know, there's

plenty of people out there who don't like me and I see them with love as a child that is stuck

in a cognitive state that they're eventually going to snap out of, or maybe not. And that's

okay. So there's that aspect of sort of, you know, experiencing, you know, life with the best

best intentions. And, you know, I love when I'm wrong. I had a friend who was like one of the

smartest people I've ever met, who would basically say, Oh, I love it when I'm wrong, because it

makes me feel human. And it's so beautiful. I mean, she's really one of the smartest people I've

ever met. And she's like, it's such a good feeling. And I love being wrong. But there's, you know,

there's something about self improvement. There's something about sort of, how do I not make the

most mistakes, but attempt the most rights and do the fewest wrongs. But with the full knowledge

that this will happen. That's one aspect. So, 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 and so forth. I'm like, I don't know any of that.

But I'm only discovering this now through these sort of sharing our emotional states and our

cognitive states with a 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, there was this conference where somebody heard my voice

and it's like, I know this voice, I've been listening to your lectures. And it's just such a

beautiful thing where like, we're sharing widely. And who knows, which students will get where

from whatever they catch out of these lectures, even if what they catch is just inspiration and

passion and drive. So there's this intangible, you know, legacy, quote unquote, that every one of

us has through the people we touch. One of my friends from undergrad basically told me, oh,

my mom remembers you vividly from when she came to campus, I'm like, I didn't even meet her.

She's like, no, but she 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 of, you know, just, just, just give doesn't matter where it goes.

I've been to conferences where basically people, you know, I'll ask them a question,

and then they'll come back to or like, there was a company where I asked somebody a question,

they said, oh, in fact, this entire project was inspired by your question three years ago at

the same conference. Wow. And then on top of that, there's also the ripple effect. So the year

speaking to the direct influence of inspiration or education, but there's also like, the follow

on things that happen to that. And there's this ripple that through from you, just this one individual

and from every one of us, from everyone, that's what I love about humanity. The fact that

every one of us shares genes and genetic variants with very recent ancestors with everyone else.

So even if I 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. Oh, every one of us. Yeah. Number two,

our ideas are constantly intermingling with each other. So there's no person living in the planet

100 years from now, who will not be directly impacted by every one of the planet living here

today through genetic inheritance and through meme inheritance. That's cool to think that your ideas,

Manolis Callis would touch every single person on this planet. It's interesting.

But not just mine. Joe Smith, who's looking at this right now, his ideas will also touch everybody.

So there's this interconnectedness of humanity. And then I'm also a professor. So my day job

is legacy. My day job is training, not just the thousands of people who watch my videos on the

web, but the people who are actually in my class, who basically come to MIT to learn from a bunch

of us like the cognitive systems that were shipped to this particular location and who will then

disperse back into all of their home countries. That's what makes America the beacon of the world.

We don't just export goods. We export people, cognitive systems. We export people who are born

here. And we also export training that people born elsewhere will come here to get and will then

disseminate not just whatever knowledge they got, but whatever ideals they learned. And I think

that's something that's a legacy of the 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 computation biologists.

No one in genomics who's gone through MIT hasn't taken my class. So basically there's this impact

through, I mean, there's so many people in biotechs who are like, Hey, I took your class. That's what

I've got into the field like 15 years ago. It's just so beautiful. And then there's the academic

family that I have. So the students who are actually studying with me, who are my trainees.

So this sort of mentorship of ancient Greece. So I basically have an academic family.

And we are a family. There's this such strong connection, this bond of you're part of the

Kelly's family. So I have a biological family at home. And I have an academic family on campus.

And that academic family has given me great grandchildren already. Yes. So I've trained

people who are now professors at Stanford team, you Harvard, you know, what you I mean, everywhere

in the world. And these people have now trained people who are now having their own faculty jobs.

So there's basically people who see me as their academic grandfather.

And it's just so beautiful because you don't have to wait for the 18 years of cognitive,

you know, hardware development to sort of have amazing conversation with people that

you're 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 and like, I can see the touch

of our lab in those papers. It's just so beautiful because you're like, I 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 creative

destruction. So I share my zoom screen. And I'm just thinking out loud, as I'm doing this,

and they're learning from that process, as opposed to like, come back two days later and

they see a bunch of red on a page. I'm sort of, well, that's not how you write this. That's not

how you think about this. That's not, you know, what's the point like this morning was having.

Yes, this morning between six and eight a.m. I had a two hour meeting going through one of these

papers. And then saying, what's the point here? Why do you even show that? It's just a bunch of

points on a graph. No, what you have to do is extract the meaning, do the homework for them.

And there's this nurturing this mentorship that sort of creates now a legacy, which is

infinite, because they've now gone off on the, you know, and and all of that is just humanity.

Then, of course, there's a paper that right. Because yes, my day job is training students,

but it's a research university. The way that they learn is through the men's and Manu's 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 Metarchive. And one of the most generous

and eloquent comments about it was like, wow, this is a masterclass in scientific writing,

in analysis, in biological interpretation and so forth. It's just so fulfilling from a person

I've never met or heard of. Can you say the title of the paper? I don't remember the title,

but it's single cell dissection of schizophrenia reveals. So the two, the two points that we found

was this whole transcriptional resilience, like there's some individuals who are schizophrenic,

but who have an additional cell type or initial cell state, which we believe is protective.

And that cell state, when they have it, will cause other cells to have normal gene expression

patterns. It's beautiful. And then that cell is connected with some of the PV interneurons that

are basically sending these inhibitory brain waves through the brain. And basically,

there's another component of, there's a set of master regulators that we discovered who are

controlling many of the genes that are differentially expressed. And these master regulators are

themselves genetic targets of schizophrenia. And they are themselves involved in both synaptic

connectivity and also in early brain development. So there's this sort of interconnectedness between

synaptic development axis and also this 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 connect down into a beautifully written little document that lives

on forever. And that document now has its own life. Our work has 120,000 citations. I mean,

that's not just people who read it. These are people who used it to write something based on it.

I mean, that to me is just so fulfilling to basically say, wow, I've touched people. So

I don't think of my legacy as I live every day. I just think of the beauty of the present

and the power of interconnectedness. And just, I feel like a kid in a candy shop where I'm just

like constantly, you know, where do I, what package do I open first? And you know,

the lucky one. A jack of all trades, a master of none.

I think for a meaning of life episode, we would be amiss if we did not have at least

a poem or two. Do you mind if we end in a couple of poems? Maybe a happy, maybe a sad one.

I would love that. So thank you for the luxury. The first one is kind of,

I remember when you were talking with Eric Weinstein about this comment

of Leonard Cohen that says, but you don't really care for music, do you? In hallelujah.

That's basically kind of like mocking its reader. So one of my poems is a little like that.

So I had just broken up with, 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 I was like, writing a poem on demand. So this poem is called, write me a poem.

It goes, write me a poem, she said with a smile. Make sure it's pretty, romantic and rimes.

Make sure it's worthy of that bold flame that love uniting us beyond a mere game.

And she took off without more words, rushed for the bus and traveled the world.

A poem, I thought, this is sublime. What better way for passing the time?

What better way to count up the hours before she comes back to my lonely tower?

Waiting for joy to fill up my heart? Let's write a poem for when we're apart.

How does a poem start? I inquired. Give me a topic, cook up a style.

Throw in some cute words, oh, here and there. Throw in some passion, love and despair.

Love, three eggs, one pound of flour, three cups of water and bake for an hour.

Love is no recipe, as I understand. You can't just cook up a poem on demand.

And as I was twisting all this in my mind, I looked at the page. By golly, it rhymed.

Three roses, white chocolate, vanilla powder, some beautiful rhymes and maybe a flower.

No, be romantic, the young girl insisted. Do this, do that, don't be so silly.

You must believe it straight from your heart. If you don't feel it, we're better apart.

Oh, my sweet thing, what can I say? You bring me the sun all night and all day.

You're the stars and the moon and the birds way up high. You're my evening sweet song,

my morning blue sky. You are my muse. Your spell has me caught. You bring me my voice

and scatter my thoughts. To put love in writing, in vain, I can try. But when I'm with you,

my wings want to fly. So I put down the pen and drop my defenses, give myself to you,

and fill up my senses.

The baffle king composing hallelujah. That was beautiful.

What I love about it is that I did not bring up a dictionary of rhymes. I did not sort of

work hard. So basically, when I write poems, I just type. I never go back. I just,

so when my brain gets into that mode, it actually happens like I wrote it.

Oh, wow. So the rhymes just kind of, it's an emergent phenomenon.

It's an emergent phenomenon. I just get into that mode and then it comes up.

That's a beautiful one.

And it's basically, you know, as you got it, it's basically saying it's no recipe and then

I'm throwing the recipes. And as I'm writing it, I'm like, you know, so it's very introspective

in this whole concept. So anyway, there's another one many years earlier that is,

you know, darker. It's basically this whole concept of let's be friends. I was like,

no, let's be friends. Just like, you know, so the last words are shout out, I love you or send

me to hell. So the title is burn me tonight. Lie to me, baby. Lie to me now. Tell me you love me.

Break me a vow. Give me a sweet word. 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, but torture it right. Treat it with hatred. Start up a fight.

For it's from mildness that my soul dies when you cover your passion in a bland friend's disguise.

Kiss me now, baby. Show me your passion. Turn off the lights and rip off your fashion.

Give me my life's joy this one night. Burn all my matches for one blazing light.

Don't think of tomorrow and let today fade. Don't try and protect me from love's cutting blade.

Your razor will always rip off my veins. Don't spare me the passion to spare me the pains.

Kiss me now, honey, or spit in my face. Throw me an insult I'll gladly embrace.

Tell me now clearly that you never cared. Say it now loudly like you never dared.

I'm ready to hear it. I'm ready to die. I'm ready to burn and start a new life.

I'm ready to face the rough burning truth rather than waste the rest of my youth.

So tell me, my lover, should I stay or go? The answer to love is one, yes or no.

There's no I like you, no let's be friends. Shout out I love you or send me to hell.

I don't think there's a better way to end a discussion of the meaning of life. Whatever

the heck the meaning is, go all in as that poem says Manolis. Thank you so much for talking to

me. Thanks. I look forward to next time. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis

Kellis and thank you to our sponsors. Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar,

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And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in his book Hitchhiker's Guide to

the Galaxy. On the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins

because he had achieved so much. The wheel, New York, wars, and so on. Whilst all the dolphins

had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always

believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.