Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his second time on the podcast.
00:00:05 He’s a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.
00:00:09 He’s one of the most brilliant, productive, and kind people I’ve had the fortune of talking to.
00:00:15 A lot of my colleagues at MIT and former MIT faculty and students
00:00:19 wrote to me after our first conversation with some version of,
00:00:23 Manolis is awesome, isn’t he? I’m glad you guys are now friends. I am too. And I’m happy that
00:00:30 he makes time in his insanely busy schedule to sit down and have a chat with me.
00:00:35 Quick summary of the sponsors, Public Goods, Magic Spoon, and ExpressVPN.
00:00:40 Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
00:00:46 As a side note, let me say that I just got back from talking to Joe Rogan on his podcast,
00:00:51 my fifth time on there. I also got a chance to record a separate conversation with Joe
00:00:57 on this podcast. We talked on both quite a bit about his journey and his advice for mine.
00:01:04 One of the things that I think made his show special is that he just had fun and made choices
00:01:09 that didn’t get in the way of him having fun and loving life. I’m learning to do just that.
00:01:15 It’s tough since I’m naturally full of self doubt and anxiety,
00:01:19 but I’m learning to let go and have fun, even if my monotone robotic voice sometimes sounds otherwise.
00:01:28 For Joe, that involved talking to his friends, comedians, especially ones that brought out the
00:01:33 best in him. Duncan Trussell and the five hour first episode on Spotify comes to mind as an
00:01:39 example of that. Duncan has been a guest probably close to if not more than 50 times on Joe’s
00:01:45 podcast. My hope with amazing people like Manolis is to find my Duncan Trussell, my Joey Diaz,
00:01:52 and yes, even my Eddie Bravo. Obviously Joe and I are very different people but ultimately both
00:01:58 love life when we can interact often with people we love and who inspire us, make us smile,
00:02:05 make us think, and make us have fun when we get behind the mic of a podcast,
00:02:10 whether anyone is listening or not. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:02:15 review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect
00:02:20 with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. I also this time put a link in the description to a survey
00:02:26 for this podcast on how I can improve and also an option if you like, I don’t know why you would
00:02:32 like to, but if you like to join an inner circle of people that help guide the direction of this
00:02:37 podcast via email or occasional video chats. If you have a few minutes, please fill it out.
00:02:44 As usual, I’ll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these
00:02:48 interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip, but still please do check out the sponsors
00:02:54 by clicking the links in the description. It’s the best way honestly to support this podcast.
00:03:00 This show is sponsored by Public Goods, an online store for basic health and household stuff.
00:03:05 Their products have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just clean,
00:03:10 elegant, and beautiful. It goes nicely, at least I think so, with the design of Crew Dragon and
00:03:16 the recent SpaceX NASA mission that sent two humans into space. To me, very few things are
00:03:22 as inspiring as us humans reaching out into the unknown, the harsh challenges of space.
00:03:28 Colonizing Mars may not have obvious near term benefits, but I believe it will challenge our
00:03:33 scientists and our engineers to create technologies whose impact will be immeasurable for us humans
00:03:39 here on Earth, or those of us who choose to stay here on Earth. Personally, I’m kind of a long time
00:03:47 big fan of this planet. Anyway, visit publicgoods.com slash Lex and use code Lex at checkout to get 15
00:03:56 bucks off your first order. This episode is also supported by Magic Spoon, low carb,
00:04:03 keto friendly cereal. You might have heard on other videos that I eat keto mostly these days,
00:04:10 so Magic Spoon is a delicious healthy treat on a hard workout day that fits into that crazy diet.
00:04:17 Also, they’re a sponsor of episode 100 with my dad, and got my dad to buy this cereal and he now
00:04:24 loves it. Honestly, just loves it. It’s kind of funny actually. The deep heartfelt nature of that
00:04:30 conversation and the silliness of the cereal captures my dad perfectly. Much of the hardship
00:04:36 in his life he dealt with using wit and humor. His favorite flavor happens to be cocoa. Mine is too.
00:04:44 He hasn’t bought the eight sleep mattress yet, though my mom wants to, but he’s all about this
00:04:50 Magic Spoon cereal. I think it’s his actually favorite sponsor of this podcast. Probably
00:04:55 because they chose to sponsor the episode he’s on. Anyway, click the magicspoon.com slash Lex
00:05:01 link in the description and use code Lex at checkout for free shipping to let them know
00:05:06 I sent you and also indirectly to make my dad happy. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:05:14 Get it at expressvpn.com slash Lex pod. They gave me a suggested opening line of using the internet
00:05:21 without ExpressVPN is like going to the bathroom and not closing the door. This is like GPT3
00:05:27 suggesting to me how to be more human like, and I’ll honestly take all the help I can get.
00:05:33 By way of life advice, let me tell you that you need a VPN to protect you from Russians like me.
00:05:39 In fact, this podcast is a kind of hack of your biological network where I use my monotone,
00:05:45 low energy voice to convince you to buy kind of expensive cereal as a way to influence the
00:05:51 stability of the US economy. I use ExpressVPN on both Windows and Linux to protect myself
00:05:58 if I ever do shady things on the internet, which of course I never do and never will.
00:06:03 So secure your online activity by going to expressvpn.com slash Lex pod to get an extra
00:06:10 three months free and to support this podcast. And now here’s my conversation with Manolis Kallis.
00:06:18 What is beautiful about the human epigenome? Don’t get me started. So first of all,
00:06:25 as an engineering feat, the human epigenome manages the most compact, the most incredible
00:06:32 compaction you could imagine. So every single one of your cells contains two meters worth of DNA.
00:06:40 And this is compacted in a radius, which is one thousandth of a millimeter. That’s six orders of
00:06:47 magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, it’s as if a string as tall as the Burj Al Khalifa,
00:06:55 which is about a kilometer tall, was compacted into a tiny little ball the size of a millimeter.
00:07:00 And if you put it all together, if you stretch the trillions of cells that we have, we have about
00:07:10 30 trillion cells in your body. If you stretch the DNA, the two meters worth of DNA in every one of
00:07:15 your trillion cells, you would basically reach all the way to Jupiter a hundred times.
00:07:24 A hundred times. Yeah, it’s all curled up in there. It’s 30 trillion cells.
00:07:30 30 trillion cells, every one of them two meters worth of DNA. So all of that is compacted through
00:07:37 the epigenome. The epigenome basically has the ability to compact this massive amount of DNA
00:07:44 from here to Jupiter 10 times into one human body, into just the nuclei of one human body,
00:07:49 and the vast majority of the human body is not even these nuclei.
00:07:52 And that’s sort of the structural part. So that’s the boring part. That’s the structural part.
00:07:57 The functional part is way more interesting. So functionally, what the human epigenome allows
00:08:03 you to do is basically control the activity patterns of thousands of genes. So 20,000 genes
00:08:12 in your human body, every one of your cells only needs a few thousand of those, but a different
00:08:16 few thousand of those. And the way that your cells remember what their identity is, is basically
00:08:23 driven by the epigenome. So the epigenome is both structural in sort of making this dramatic
00:08:28 compaction, and it’s also functional in being able to actually control the activity patterns
00:08:35 of all your cells. Now, can we draw a definition distinction between the genome and the epigenome?
00:08:42 Again, being Greek, epi means on top of. So the genome is the DNA, and the epigenome is anything
00:08:52 on top of the DNA. And there’s three types of things on top of the DNA. The first is chemical
00:08:58 modifications on the DNA itself. So we like to think of four bases of the DNA, A, C, G, T. C
00:09:05 has a methyl form, which is sometimes referred to as the fifth base. So methyl C takes a different
00:09:11 meaning. So in the same way that you have annotations in a orchestra score that basically
00:09:18 say whether you should play something softly or loudly or space it out or interpret basically
00:09:25 the score, the human epigenome allows you to modify that primary score. So a modified C
00:09:32 basically says, play this one softly. It’s basically a sign of repression in a gene
00:09:38 regulatory region. I love how you’re talking about the function that emerges from the epigenome as a
00:09:46 musical score. It is in many ways. And every single cell plays a different part of that score.
00:09:53 It’s like having all of human knowledge in 23 volumes, like 23 giant books, which are your
00:09:58 chromosomes. And every single cell has a different profession, a different role. Some cells play the
00:10:04 piano and they’re looking at chapter seven from chromosome 23 and chapter four from chromosome
00:10:09 two and so on and so forth. And each of those pieces are all encoded in the same DNA. But
00:10:17 what the epigenome allows you to do is effectively conduct the orchestra and sort of coordinate the
00:10:24 pieces so that every instrument plays only the things that it needs to play. One thing that kind
00:10:29 of blows my mind, maybe you can tell me your thoughts about it, is the way evolution works
00:10:35 with natural selection is based on the final sort of the entirety of the orchestra musical
00:10:44 performance, right? But there’s these incredibly rich structural things, like each one of them
00:10:53 doing their own little job that somehow work together. The evolution selects based on the
00:10:58 final result and yet all the individual pieces are doing like infinitely minuscule specific things.
00:11:05 How the heck does that work? It’s a very good insight. And you can even go beyond that and
00:11:10 basically say evolution doesn’t select at the level of an organism. It actually selects at
00:11:15 the level of whole environments, whole ecosystems. So let me break this down. So you basically have
00:11:22 at the very bottom every single nucleotide being selected. But then that nucleotide function is
00:11:28 selected at the level of each gene and every, not even each gene, each gene regulatory control
00:11:37 element. And then those control elements are basically converging onto the function of the gene
00:11:42 and many genes are converging onto the function of one cell and many cells are converging into
00:11:47 the function of one tissue or organ. And all of these organs are converging onto the level of
00:11:54 an organism. But now that organism is not in isolation. So if you basically think about why
00:12:00 is altruism, for example, a thing, why are people being nice to each other? It was probably selected
00:12:06 and it was probably selected because those species that were just nasty to each other didn’t survive
00:12:13 as a species. And now if you think about symbiosis of, you know, there’s plants, for example, that
00:12:23 love CO2 and there’s humans that love O2 and we’re sort of, you know, trading different types of gases
00:12:32 to each other. If you look at ecosystems where one organism was just really nasty, that organism
00:12:42 actually died because everyone they were being nasty to was killed off. And then that kind of,
00:12:48 you know, universe of life is gone. So basically what emerges is selection at so many different
00:12:57 layers of benefit, including, you know, all of these nucleotides within a body interacting for
00:13:05 the emergent functions at the body level. Yeah. I wonder if it’s possible to break it down into
00:13:12 levels that’s selection even beyond humans. Like you said, environment, but there’s environments
00:13:18 at all different levels too, right? At the minuscule, at the organ level, at the tissue level,
00:13:23 like you said, maybe at the microscopic level. It would be fascinating if like there’s a kind of
00:13:28 selection going on, like both the quantum level and like the, the galaxy level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:36 So, so yeah, let’s again, sort of break down these different layers. So basically if you think about
00:13:41 the environment in which a gene operates, that gene, of course, the first definition of environment
00:13:47 that we think of is pollution or sunlight or heat or cold and so on and so forth. That’s the external
00:13:53 environment. But every gene also operates at the level of the internal cellular environment that
00:13:58 it’s in. If I take a gene from say an African individual and I put it in a European context,
00:14:05 will it perform the same way? Probably not because there’s a cellular context of thousands of other
00:14:12 genes that that gene has co evolved with, you know, in the out of Africa event and, you know,
00:14:18 all of this sort of human history of evolution. So basically if you look at Neanderthal genes,
00:14:25 for example, which again happened long after that out of Africa event, there’s incompatibilities
00:14:32 between Neanderthal genes and modern human genes that can lead to diseases. So in the context of
00:14:38 the Neanderthal genome, that gene version, that allele was fine, but in the context of the modern
00:14:43 human genome, that Neanderthal gene version is actually detrimental. So it’s, it’s, you know,
00:14:49 that cellular environment constitutes the genetics of that gene, but also of course,
00:14:54 all of the epigenomics of that gene. It’s fascinating that the gene has a history.
00:15:00 I mean, we talked about this a little bit last time, but just, and then some of your research
00:15:05 goes into that, but the genes as they are today have, have a story from the beginning of time.
00:15:14 And then some, sometimes their story was like their path was useful for survival for the
00:15:20 particular organisms and sometimes not. That’s fascinating. Let me ask as a tangent. We kind
00:15:27 of started talking offline about Neanderthals. Do you have something interesting genetically,
00:15:32 biologically in terms of difference between Neanderthal and like the different branches
00:15:38 of human evolution that you find fascinating? Neanderthals are only one of about five branches
00:15:46 that we are pretty confident about. Branches of? Of out of Africa events. So basically there’s
00:15:53 Neanderthals, there’s Denisovans. What is the evidence for Denisovans? One tiny little fragment
00:16:00 of one pinky from one cave in Siberia. Recent, relatively recently discovered, right? Less than
00:16:08 10 years ago. Yeah. And those are like little folks, right? No, no, no, no, no. That’s yet
00:16:12 another one though. Homo florensis. It had the little folks instead of Indonesia. But then the
00:16:18 Denisovans are basically another branch that we only know about genetically from that one bone.
00:16:24 And eventually we realized that it’s one of the three major branches along with Neanderthal,
00:16:28 modern human and Denisovan. And then that one branch has now resurfaced in many different areas.
00:16:34 And we kind of know about the gene flow that happened in between them. So when I was reading
00:16:39 my Greek mythology, it was talking about the age of the heroes, these eras of human like,
00:16:46 you know, precursors that were wiped out by Zeus or by all kinds of wars and so on and so forth,
00:16:51 like the Titans and the, you know, it’s ridiculous to sort of read these stories as a kid because
00:16:57 you’re like, oh yeah, whatever. And then you’re growing up and you’re like, whoa, layers and
00:17:02 layers of human like ancestors. And who knows if those stories were inspired by bones that they
00:17:08 found that kind of looked human like, but were not quite human like. Who knows if stories of dragons
00:17:13 were inspired by bones of dinosaurs. And basically this archeological evidence has been there and has
00:17:20 probably entered the folk imagination, migrated into those stories, but it’s not that far removed
00:17:27 from what actually happened of massive wars of wiping out Neanderthals as humans are, modern
00:17:34 humans are populating, you know, Europe. Do you think, do you think what killed the Neanderthals
00:17:39 and all those other branches is human conflict or is it genetic conflict? So is it us humans being
00:17:48 the opposite of altruistic towards each other? Or is it some other competition at some other level,
00:17:56 like as we’re discussing? Yeah. So if you look at a lot of human traits today, they’re probably not
00:18:01 that far removed from the human traits that got us where we are now. So, you know, this whole
00:18:07 tribalism, you know, you’re my sports team or you’re my, you know, political party or you’re my,
00:18:14 you know, tiny little village. And therefore, you know, if you’re from that other village,
00:18:19 I hate you. But as soon as we’re both in the major city, I can’t believe we’re from the same region,
00:18:25 my friend, my family and like two neighboring countries fighting. And as soon as they’re off
00:18:30 in another country, you’re like, oh, I can’t believe that. So it’s, it’s kind of funny,
00:18:34 like this tribalism is nonsensical in many ways. It’s like cognitive incongruent that basically
00:18:40 we like kin and selection for, for sort of liking kin is hugely advantageous genetically.
00:18:49 Probably across all kinds of organisms, across all kinds of life. Yeah. So, so basically if you
00:18:54 now transport that to the sort of humans arriving in Europe and Neanderthals are everywhere,
00:19:02 what are you going to do? You’re going to kill them off. You know, there’s this battle for territory
00:19:07 and this battle for, they’re not like us. We have to get rid of them. So basically there’s a, you
00:19:12 know, very interesting mix there, but, and yet, and yet when you look at the genetics, there’s
00:19:18 tons of gene flow between them. So basically, you know, love romance between, you know, tribes,
00:19:25 but love spans the gap between the different tribes. It’s Romeo and Juliet across species
00:19:32 boundaries. Sneaks away from the village. Even before the out of Africa, there’s, you know,
00:19:39 within Africa selection, which was probably massive battles of larger and larger tribes
00:19:45 selecting for our social networking and savviness and, you know, probably all our conspiracy theory
00:19:53 genes are, you know, dating back from then. And, you know, so there’s a lot of this mischievousness
00:20:00 in the history of human evolution that unfortunately is still present in, you know, many ugly forms
00:20:07 today, but probably contributed to our success as a species in wiping out other species.
00:20:14 It just sucks that we don’t have neighboring species that are, you know, intelligent like us
00:20:23 that, but yet very different than us. So we have like, you know, dogs or wolves, I guess,
00:20:29 co evolved. They, they figured out how to neighbor up with humans in a friendly way and collaborate
00:20:37 and develop in time. You’re describing this as if the wolves made a choice.
00:20:42 It’s possible that the wolves never had a say, that basically humans were just so overpowering
00:20:47 that they had captive wolves. And then at every generation killed off eight of the nine pups and
00:20:53 only kept the one that was milder. And it only takes a few generations to then sort of have pups
00:20:58 that are really mild. And so the Neanderthals weren’t useful in the same way that wolves were.
00:21:05 I don’t know if it’s a question of useful. They were probably super useful. My thinking is that
00:21:11 they were scary, that basically something that almost resembles you is something that you try
00:21:18 to eliminate first. It’s too close. Yeah. And speaking of, you know, species that are intelligent
00:21:25 and sort of what’s left of evolution, it is a shame, exactly like you say, that so many different,
00:21:32 amazing life forms were extinct and the kind of boring ones remained. So if you look at the
00:21:40 dinosaurs, I mean, the diversity that they had, if you look at sub, you know, like there’s just so
00:21:46 many different lineages of life that were just abruptly killed. And yet out of that death emerged,
00:21:56 you know, many new kinds of really awesome lineages. Do you think there was in the history of
00:22:01 life on earth species that may be still alive today that are more intelligent than humans?
00:22:07 And we just don’t know. So there’s a case to be made for dolphins. Like if you look at their brains,
00:22:11 if you look at the way that they play, if you look at the way that they learn, you know, I mean,
00:22:16 they don’t have opposable thumbs and we do. So, you know, that probably made a big difference.
00:22:20 It’s terrifying to think that like, not terrifying, I don’t know how to feel about it,
00:22:24 that they’re more intelligent than us. It’s like the hitchhiker’s guide.
00:22:28 I know. But how do you define intelligence? Basically, like I was saying last time,
00:22:33 you know, stupid is a stupid does and smart is a smart does. So if the dolphins are basically
00:22:39 super smart, figured out the meaning of life and just go around playing with water all day,
00:22:43 which is probably the meaning of life, then we wouldn’t know because all they’re doing is kicking
00:22:49 water just like sharks are and sharks are probably pretty stupid. So basically it’s very difficult to
00:22:55 sort of judge a species intelligence unless they kind of go out of their way to demonstrate it.
00:23:00 Yeah, and that’s instructive for our understanding of any kind of life form.
00:23:06 You know, I recently talked to Sara Seager looking for life out there on other planets.
00:23:11 It’d be fascinating to think if we discover a habitable planet outside of Earth in one day,
00:23:19 maybe many centuries away, or be able to travel with like a robot there, how would we actually
00:23:24 know that this species would probably be able to detect that it’s a living being? But how would we
00:23:32 know if it’s an intelligent being? I mean, it’s both exciting and terrifying to sort of come face
00:23:40 to face with a life form that’s of another world. Like something that clearly is moving in a,
00:23:48 how would you say, like a deliberate way, and to then like ask, well, how do I ask that thing,
00:23:56 whether it’s intelligent?
00:23:58 No, but the question that you’re asking is applicable to every species on the Earth now.
00:24:03 On Earth now, yeah.
00:24:04 Yeah. So basically, you know, dolphins are a great example. We know that they’re,
00:24:08 you know, clearly capable hardware wise and behavior wise of intelligence.
00:24:14 You know, how do we communicate? So basically, if your question is about crossing species
00:24:18 boundaries of communication, the way that I want to put it is that humans have achieved
00:24:26 a level of sophistication in our behaviors, in our communication, in our language, in our ways
00:24:32 of expressing ourselves, that I have no doubt that if we encountered a human like form of
00:24:39 intelligence, we’d figure out their language in a few weeks. Like, it’d be just fine. As long as,
00:24:45 you know, of course, they’re both trusting each other, not annihilating each other, and not sort
00:24:50 of fearing each other and attacking each other.
00:24:52 What about, let me ask, just out of curiosity into science fiction land a little bit.
00:24:58 So clearly, you’re one of the top scientists in the world. So if we were to discover,
00:25:05 an alien life form, you would be brought in to study its genetics. Do you think the epigenome
00:25:12 that we talked about, the genome, the code, the digital code that underlies that alien life form
00:25:18 would be similar to ours? Like the, in fundamental ways, maybe not exactly, but in fundamental ways,
00:25:26 of how it’s structured?
00:25:28 Yeah. So you’re getting to the very definition of what we’re talking about.
00:25:31 Of how it’s structured. Yeah. So you’re getting to the very definition of life. You’re getting to
00:25:35 the very definition of what makes life, life, and how do we decode that life? And it’s so easy to
00:25:44 think that every life form would basically have to, you know, like oxygen, have to like heat from
00:25:50 the sun and rely on sort of being in the habitable zone of, you know, its solar system and so on and
00:25:57 so forth. But I think we have to sort of go beyond this sort of, oh, life on another planet must be
00:26:04 exactly like life is on earth. Because of course, life on earth happens to rely on the proximity to
00:26:10 the sun and benefit from that amount of energy. But we’re talking at timescales of human life,
00:26:19 where we kind of live, I don’t know, between, and I’m going to be super wide here. We’re going to
00:26:24 live between six earth months and, you know, 200 earth months or 200 earth years. So basically,
00:26:32 if you look at the timescale that we inhabit on earth, it is very much dictated by the amount of
00:26:38 energy that we receive from the sun. If you look at, I don’t know, Europa, you know, the smallest,
00:26:44 the fourth smallest moon of Jupiter, the smallest of the Galilean moons, and also the smallest
00:26:50 in its distance from Jupiter. It has an iron core, it has a rock exterior, it has ice all around it,
00:27:02 and it has probably massive liquid oceans underneath. And the gravitational pull of
00:27:10 Jupiter is probably creating all kinds of movement under that ice. How did life evolve on earth?
00:27:17 Yes, sure. Life now, most of life that we above the surface look at, has to do with exploiting
00:27:27 the solar energy for, you know, our daily behavior. But that’s not the case everywhere
00:27:33 on the planet. If you look at the bottom of the ocean, there are hydrothermal vents.
00:27:38 There’s both black smokers and white smokers, and they are near these volcanic, you know, ducts
00:27:46 that basically emanate a massive amount of energy from the core of our planet. What does life need?
00:27:53 It needs energy. Does it need energy from the sun? It couldn’t care less. Does it need energy from,
00:28:00 you know, the earth itself? Yeah, possibly. It could use that. And if you look at how did life
00:28:06 evolve on, you know, on earth, there are many theories. I mean, a kind of silly theory is that
00:28:12 it came from outer space, that basically there’s a meteorite out there that sort of landed on earth
00:28:16 and brought with it DNA material. I think it’s a little silly because it kind of pushes the buck
00:28:21 down the road. Basically the next question is how did it evolve over there? Whereas our planet has
00:28:26 basically all of the right ingredients, why wouldn’t evolve here? So basically let’s kind
00:28:30 of ignore that one. And now the two other competing hypotheses are from the outside in
00:28:34 or from the inside out. What’s that mean? From the outside in means from the surface to the
00:28:38 bottom of the ocean. From the inside out means from the bottom of the ocean to the surface.
00:28:46 So life on the surface is pretty brutal.
00:28:51 Life obviously evolved in the water and then there was an out of water event.
00:28:58 But basically before it exited, it was clearly in the water, which is a much nicer and shielded
00:29:04 environment. So just to be clear, on the surface, are you referring to the surface of the sea or
00:29:11 the bottom of the sea? Versus the bottom of the sea. And you’re saying life on the surface is
00:29:18 harsh. Life outside the water is horrible. It takes huge amounts of evolutionary innovations
00:29:27 to sustain living outside the water. That’s so interesting. Why is that? So it’s easier to,
00:29:34 life is easier in the water. Maybe, see, I’m telling dolphins are onto something.
00:29:38 We are 70% water. No, dolphins went back into the water.
00:29:42 Really? Oh, because dolphins are mammals.
00:29:43 Of course. Yeah.
00:29:45 Interesting. Well, again, they might be smarter. They went back. They’re like, screw this.
00:29:49 So if you basically think about the fact that we are 70% water,
00:29:55 we’re basically transporting the sea with us outside the sea. If we don’t have water for about
00:30:03 24 hours, we’re dry. And if you look at life under the sea, I mean, I don’t know if you’re a diver,
00:30:09 but when you go diving, your brain explodes. Again, when I say the boring life forms is what
00:30:16 we see all the time, like tetrapods. I mean, what a stupid boring body plan. Seriously. Just go dive
00:30:24 and you’ll see that a tiny little minority of the stuff under the sea, under the surface of the sea
00:30:29 is actually tetrapods. It’s like snails with all kinds of crazy appendages and colors and round
00:30:37 things and five way symmetric things and eight way symmetric things, all kinds of crazy body plans.
00:30:43 And only the tetrapod fish managed to get out. And then they gave rise to all the boring plans we
00:30:49 kind of see today of basically, you know, humans with four limbs, birds with four limbs, lizards
00:30:56 with four limbs, and you know, right? It’s kind of boring. If you look at, by comparison, life
00:31:02 underwater is teeming with diversity. So now let’s roll back the clock and basically say,
00:31:09 where did life in the ocean come from, from the surface or from the bottom?
00:31:13 Exactly. Those two options that you were mentioning.
00:31:15 Yeah, exactly. So basically life on the surface is one option. And then the idea there is that
00:31:21 there’s tides with the moon and the sun sort of causing all this movement. And this movement is
00:31:26 basically causing nutrients to sort of, you know, coalesce and, you know, bounce around,
00:31:31 et cetera. That’s one option. The second option, massive amount of energy from the core of our
00:31:39 the core of our planet basically exploited, leading to these basic ingredients of life forms.
00:31:47 And what are these basic ingredients? Metabolism, being able to take energy from the environment
00:31:53 and put it as part of yourself. Metabolism, it basically means transformation. Again, in the
00:31:59 Greek, it basically means taking stuff from, you know, like nutrients or energy source or anything,
00:32:08 and then making it your own. The second one is compartmentalization. If there’s no notion of self,
00:32:14 there can’t be evolution. You have to know where your own boundaries end and where the non self
00:32:19 boundaries begin. And that’s basically the lipid bilayer nowadays, which is extremely simple to
00:32:26 form. It’s basically just a bunch of lipids and then they eventually just self organize into a
00:32:30 membrane. So that’s a very natural way of forming a self. And then the third component is replication.
00:32:40 Replication doesn’t need to be self replication. It could be A helps make more of B, B helps make
00:32:46 more of C and C helps make more of A. Any kind of self reinforcement is what you need to ignite
00:32:54 the process of evolution. After you’ve ignited that process, you know, I don’t want to say all
00:32:59 hell breaks loose, but all paradise breaks loose. So basically you then boom, you know, have life
00:33:06 going. And the moment you have A, B, C, some kind of thing looping back onto A, you can make
00:33:12 modifications and you can improve. And then you let natural selection work. Is there some element
00:33:18 of that that’s like some state representation that stores information? Like maybe I should say
00:33:26 information. Absolutely. We like to think of life as the information propagation, which is DNA,
00:33:35 the messenger, which is RNA, and then the action, which is protein. So basically DNA,
00:33:43 we think is an essential part of life. That’s where the storage is. And therefore that early
00:33:49 life forms must have had some kind of storage medium DNA. If you look at how life actually
00:33:55 evolved, DNA was invented much later. Proteins were invented later. And RNA was fine by itself,
00:34:05 thank you very much, in an RNA world. So the early version of life as we know it today was in fact
00:34:13 RNA molecules performing all of the functions. The RNA molecule itself was the protein actuator
00:34:22 here by creating three dimensional folds through self hybridization. Self what? Self hybridization.
00:34:29 So basically the same way that DNA molecules can hybridize with themselves and basically
00:34:33 form this double helix. The single stranded RNA molecule can form partial double helices
00:34:40 in various places, creating structure as if you had a long string with complimentary parts,
00:34:46 and you could then sort of design kind of like origami like structures that will fold onto
00:34:51 themselves. And then you can make any shape from that. That early RNA world eventually got to
00:34:59 replication, where enzymes encoded in RNA would replicate RNA itself. And then that process
00:35:10 basically kicked off evolution. And that process of evolution then led to major innovations.
00:35:16 The first innovation was translation. So you start with an RNA molecule and you translate it
00:35:23 into another kind of form. And that’s the first kind of encoding. You’re like, well,
00:35:27 do you need some kind of code? Yeah, but the code was in fact one thing. It was conflated
00:35:34 with the actuators. The actuators were separated from the code only later on. So you first had
00:35:40 the self replicating code, which was also the actuator. And then you kind of have a functionalization,
00:35:47 partitioning of the functionalization, a sub functionalization of the proteins that are now
00:35:52 going to be the workhorse of life, but they’re not self replicating. The code remains the RNA.
00:35:58 So the most beautiful and most complex RNA machine known to man is the ribosome.
00:36:04 The ribosome is this massive factory that is able to translate RNA into protein.
00:36:12 The ribosome, I mean, if you want, I don’t know, divine intervention in the history of life,
00:36:16 the ribosome is it. That’s one of the great invention in the history of life.
00:36:20 It’s yeah. But again, you can’t think of great inventions as one time steps. They’re basically,
00:36:25 you know, the culmination of probably many competing software infrastructures for life
00:36:32 preservation that won out. And then when the ribosome was so efficient at making proteins,
00:36:39 all the other ones basically died out. And then the life forms that were using the modern ribosome
00:36:45 were basically the more successful ones because it could make proteins. And now those proteins
00:36:50 are much more versatile because RNA only has four bases. Proteins eventually have 20 amino acids,
00:36:58 not initially, but eventually. And then they can form in much more complex shapes and they can
00:37:04 create all kinds of additional machines. One of which is reverse transcriptase. So you basically
00:37:11 now have RNA. Again, we like to think of transcription as the normal, reverse transcription
00:37:16 as the oddball. Well, RNA preceded DNA. So reverse transcription actually was the first invention
00:37:23 before transcription itself. So basically RNA invents proteins, RNA and proteins together
00:37:29 invent DNA. So you now have a more stable medium and more stable backbone with two helices instead
00:37:40 of one, two strands instead of one, the double helix. And RNA basically says, listen, I’m tired.
00:37:46 I’m going to delegate all information storage to DNA and I’m going to delegate most actuation
00:37:54 to proteins. But that’s to you is not like a, that’s just an efficiency thing. It’s not a
00:38:01 fundamentally new innovation. That’s why when you’re asking is a separate information storage
00:38:07 medium a definition of life? I’m like, no, any kind of self preservation, self reinforcement.
00:38:14 And it didn’t need to be RNA based initially. It didn’t need to be self replication initially.
00:38:21 You just need to have enough RNA molecules randomly arising that reinforce each other
00:38:26 that ultimately lead to the, you know, the closing of that loop and the ignition of the evolutionary
00:38:33 process. Can we just rewind a little bit? Like if you were to bet all your money on the two options
00:38:39 in terms of where life started at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t know if this is answerable, but
00:38:47 how hard is the first step or if there’s something interesting you can say about that first leap
00:38:54 about from not life to life. Yeah. I think it’s inevitable on earth or just in the universe.
00:39:02 I think it’s inevitable. If you look at Europa, you know, going back the moon of Jupiter. It’s
00:39:10 also a really nice song by Santana. Europa basically has all the ingredients. It has,
00:39:17 you know, the core that can emit energy. It has the shielding through the ice sheet,
00:39:25 protecting it just like an atmosphere would. It even has a layer of oxygen,
00:39:29 probably sufficiently dense to sustain life. So my guess is that there’s probably
00:39:38 independently a reason life form already teeming in Europa because as soon as it today.
00:39:46 Is that exciting or terrifying to you?
00:39:50 It’s, I mean, as a scientist, I can’t wait to see non DNA based life forms. I can’t wait
00:39:57 because we are so born in, you know, sort of, as I would say in French, but basically we’re sort of,
00:40:08 you know, we are so narrow minded in our thinking of what life should look like that I can’t wait
00:40:15 for all that to just be blown away by the discovery of life elsewhere.
00:40:20 Let me bring you into another science fiction scenario. So on that point, if we discovered
00:40:26 life on Europa and you were brought in, you seem very excited, but how would you start looking at
00:40:37 that life in a way that’s useful to you as a scientist, but also not going to kill all of us?
00:40:46 So like to me, it’s a little bit scary because not, not because it’s a malevolent life. Like
00:40:53 it’s a dictator petting like a cat, it’s evil, but just the way life is, it seems to be very good at
00:41:02 conquering other life. So there’s a lot of science fiction movies based on that principle.
00:41:06 Yeah. And that’s sort of what causes the public to be so scared. But if you think about sort of,
00:41:12 would Europa life be scared of humans coming over and taking over? Chances are no, not even like
00:41:18 earth bacteria because earth bacteria would be wiped out in an instant in this foreign world
00:41:24 because they don’t know how to metabolize energy that doesn’t come from the types of energy sources
00:41:30 that are here. The levels of acidity may just kill us all off. And at the same way, in the converse
00:41:37 way, if you bring life from Europa on earth, it’ll die instantly because it’s too hot or because it
00:41:43 doesn’t need to know how to cope with, I don’t know, the sun’s radiation so close to these
00:41:49 completely inhabitable zone by their standards. So what we call the habitable zone might actually be
00:41:55 the inhabitable zone. Inhabitable for them. So the difference, if the environments are sufficiently
00:42:00 different, you think we’ll just not be able to even attack each other and the basic. It’ll take
00:42:07 massive amounts of engineering to create machines that will go there and sample the oceans,
00:42:16 basically drill through the layers of ice to basically sample and see what life is like
00:42:22 there and detecting it will probably be trivial. It definitely won’t be DNA based. It’s not like
00:42:29 we’re going to send a sequencer, but it’ll be some other kind of combination of chemicals
00:42:34 that will look nonrandom. So if you had to bet, if I took that life form we find in Europa and
00:42:41 like put it on a sandwich that you’re eating and like eat that sandwich. It’ll taste just fine.
00:42:48 Well, I know about that. Will it taste fine? That’s interesting. So the other question is,
00:42:53 do we have taste receptors for this? So where does our taste come from? It’s basically
00:42:59 adaptations to chemical molecules that we are used to seeing. We don’t have taste buds for
00:43:04 things we don’t even know about. So we won’t be able to know that this chemical tastes funny.
00:43:09 But you think it won’t be, it’s likely not to be dangerous. Like it won’t know how to even
00:43:15 interact. Do you think our immune system will even detect that something weird is going on?
00:43:20 Probably. And it’ll be very easy to detect because it’ll be very different from us.
00:43:24 Very weird.
00:43:25 But it won’t be able to sort of attack. I mean, the scene from, I don’t know,
00:43:28 Independence Day where like they’re communicating with the alien computer and they’re like,
00:43:32 ooh, I’m in. I mean, it’s hilarious because like Macs and PCs have trouble communicating.
00:43:39 I mean, let alone an alien technology or even alien DNA.
00:43:43 So, okay. Now I was talking about you being a scientist on earth, but say you were a scientist
00:43:49 that was shipped over to Europa to investigate if there’s life,
00:43:52 what would you look for in terms of signs of life?
00:43:55 Life is unmistakable, I would say. The way that life transforms a planet surrounding it
00:44:02 is not the kind of thing that you would expect from the physical laws alone.
00:44:07 So it’s, I would say that as soon as life arises, it creates this compartmentalization.
00:44:16 It starts pushing things away. It starts sort of keeping things inside that are self.
00:44:21 And there’s a whole signature that you can see from that. So when I was organizing my meaning
00:44:27 of life symposium, my friend who’s an astrophysicist, basically we were deciding on what
00:44:34 would be the themes for the symposium. And then I said, well, we’re going to have biology,
00:44:39 we’re going to have physics. And she’s like, oh, come on. Biology is just a small part of physics.
00:44:46 Everything’s a small part of physics.
00:44:47 And I mean, in many ways it is, but my immediate answer was, no, no, no, no, wait.
00:44:53 Life challenges physics. It supersedes physics. It sort of fights against physics.
00:45:00 And that’s what I would look for in Europe. I would basically look for this fight against physics
00:45:05 for anything that sort of signatures of not just entropy at work, not just things diffusing away,
00:45:11 not just gravitational pools, but clear signatures of, you remember when I was talking earlier about
00:45:18 this whole selection for environments, selection for biospheres, for ecosystems, for these multi
00:45:23 organism form of life. And I think that’s sort of the first thing that you can look for, you know,
00:45:30 chemical signatures that are not simply predicted from the reactions you would get randomly.
00:45:35 Such a beautiful way to look at life. So you’re basically leveraging some energy source to enable
00:45:42 you to resist the physics of the universe.
00:45:45 Fighting against physics. But that’s the first transformation. If you look at humans,
00:45:49 we’re way past that.
00:45:51 What do you mean by transformation?
00:45:52 So basically there’s layers. I sort of see life, you know, when we talk about the meaning of life,
00:46:01 life can be construed at many levels. We talked about life in the simplest form of sort of the
00:46:06 ignition of evolution. And that’s sort of the basic definition that you can check off. Yes,
00:46:11 it’s alive. But when Alexander the Great was asked to whom do you owe your life to your teachers
00:46:22 or to your parents? And Alexander the Great answered, I owe to my parents the zin, the life
00:46:31 itself. And I owe to my teachers the f zin, like euphony. F means good, the opposite of cacophony,
00:46:38 which means, you know, bad. So f zin, in his words, was basically living a human life.
00:46:49 A proper life. So basically we can go from the zin to the f zin. And that transformation has taken
00:46:57 several additional leaps. So basically, you know, life on Europa, I’m pretty sure has gotten to the
00:47:03 stage of A makes B makes C makes A again. But getting to the f zin is a whole other level. And
00:47:13 that level requires cooperation. That level requires altruism. That level requires specialization.
00:47:23 Remember how we were talking about the RNA specializing into DNA for storage, proteins,
00:47:28 and then compartmentalizations. And if you look at prokaryotic life, there’s no nucleus. It’s all
00:47:35 one soup of things intermingling. If you look at eukaryotic life, there’s no nucleus. There’s no
00:47:43 eukaryotic life. Again, U for true, good, you know. So a eukaryote basically has a nucleus,
00:47:51 and that’s where you compartmentalize further the organization of the information storage
00:47:57 from all of the daily activities. If you look at a human body plan or any animal,
00:48:02 you have a compartmentalization of the germline. You basically have one lineage that will basically
00:48:07 be saved for the future generations. And everything outside that lineage is almost superfluous. If you
00:48:14 think about it, the rest of your body, all it does is ensure that that lineage will make it
00:48:20 to the next generation, that these germlines will make it to the next generation. The rest is
00:48:24 packaging. I’m starting to be so blunt. And if you look at nutrition, you know, we’re deuterostomes.
00:48:30 What does deuterostome mean? Deutero means second, where this is the second mouth. The first mouth
00:48:37 is actually down here, it’s the oesophagus. So deuterostomes have evolved a second layer of
00:48:42 eating, kind of like alien with the two mouths. So you can think of us as alien where the first
00:48:48 mouth is up here and then the second mouth is down there. Is the first mouth just the
00:48:53 physical manipulation of the food to make it more consumable? Correct. And basically, again,
00:48:58 you know, if you look at a worm, it’s an extremely simple life form. It basically has a mouth,
00:49:03 it has an anus and it has, you know, just some organs in between that consume the food and just
00:49:08 spit out poo. Humans are basically a fancy form of that. So you basically have the mouth,
00:49:15 you have the digestive tract, and then you have limbs to get better at getting food.
00:49:20 You have eyesight, hearing, et cetera, to get better at getting food. And then you have,
00:49:25 of course, the germline and all of this food part, it’s just auxiliary to the germline.
00:49:30 So you basically have layers of addition, of compartmentalization, of specialization
00:49:36 on top of this zine to get all the way to the Earth zine.
00:49:39 Yeah. So like the worm is like Windows 95, very few features, very basic. And then
00:49:45 us humans are like Windows Vista, Windows 10, whatever it is.
00:49:48 Well, a few innovations beyond that.
00:49:51 Beyond that, all right. I don’t know.
00:49:53 We’re Windows 2000, at least we’re that way.
00:49:56 So, okay. That’s such a fascinating way to look at life as a set of transformations.
00:50:01 Exactly.
00:50:01 So like, is there some interesting transformations to our
00:50:05 history here on Earth that like appeal to you?
00:50:08 Of course.
00:50:09 And what are the most brilliant innovations and transformations?
00:50:12 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is such a fascinating question. Of course, like,
00:50:16 you know, we’re talking about basic, basic life forms and we’re talking about eukaryotic life
00:50:19 forms. And then the next big transformation is multicellular life forms, where the specialization
00:50:26 separates the germ line from everything else that accompanies it and sort of carries it.
00:50:31 And then that specialization then sort of has this massive new innovation, like above the second
00:50:38 mouth, which is this massive brain. And this massive brain is basically something that arises
00:50:45 much, much later on. Basically, you know, notochords, like having the first spinal cord,
00:50:49 this whole concept that along with these very simple layers, you basically now have
00:50:55 a coordinating agent and this coordinating agent is starting to make decisions.
00:51:00 And remember when we were talking about free will, I mean, you know, as a worm is hunting for food,
00:51:07 oh, it has plenty of free will. It can choose to, you know, follow chemotaxis to the left or
00:51:12 chemotaxis to the right. And maybe that’s free will because it’s unpredictable beyond a certain level.
00:51:17 So you basically now have more and more decision making and coordination of all of these different
00:51:26 body parts and organs by a central operating system, a central machine that basically will
00:51:31 control the rest of the body. And the other thing that I love talking about is the different
00:51:37 timescales at which things happen. You know, we’re talking about the human epigenome before.
00:51:40 The human epigenome is basically able to find what genes should be expressed in response to
00:51:47 environmental stimuli in the order of minutes and basically receive a stimulus, transfer all that
00:51:54 data through these humongously long string of searching and then sort of find what genes to
00:52:00 turn on and then create all that. All of that is happening in the timescale of minutes. Basically,
00:52:06 you know, three minutes to half an hour. That’s the expression response. But our daily life
00:52:12 doesn’t happen on the order of three minutes to half an hour. It happens on the order of
00:52:15 milliseconds. Like I throw a ball at you, you catch it right away. No gene expression changes
00:52:20 there. You just don’t have time to do that. So you basically have a layer of control built on
00:52:26 a hardware that supports it, but that hardware itself lives in a different timescale than the
00:52:34 controlling machine on top of that. Is that an accident, by the way? Is that like a feature?
00:52:37 Is it, was it possible for life to have evolved where the hour, the daily life of the organism
00:52:44 as it interacts with its environment was on a timescale similar to the way our internals work?
00:52:52 If you look at trees, they look kind of boring and stupid. You’re like looking at the tree like
00:52:57 stupid. If you speed up the movie of a tree from spring until October, you’ll be like, oh my God,
00:53:03 it’s intelligent. And the reason for that is that at that timescale, the tree is basically saying,
00:53:09 Oh, I’m looking for a, you know, a thing to catch onto. Ooh, I just caught onto that. I’m going to
00:53:14 grow more here. I’m going to spoil out there, et cetera. Like I can see the trees in my garden,
00:53:18 just growing and sort of, you know, looping around. And it’s all a matter of timescale.
00:53:24 It’s all a matter of timescale. And if you look at the human timescale, remember we were talking
00:53:30 about neoteny the last time around. The whole fact that our young are pretty useless until,
00:53:36 you know, maybe, you know, a few months of age, if not a few years of age, if not, I don’t know,
00:53:40 getting out of college. And then we, we basically hold them enabling their brain to continue being
00:53:48 malleable and infusing it with knowledge and thoughts as, you know, that period of neoteny
00:53:56 increases and expands. If you fast forward, I don’t know, another million years.
00:54:02 So humans have only been around, you know, different from apes for about that long.
00:54:07 Jump another unit of that, another human chimp divergence. What could happen
00:54:13 from an evolutionary timescale? A lot. One of the things that’s happening already is expansion of
00:54:18 human lifespan. We have longer and longer periods before we mature. And we have longer and longer
00:54:25 periods before we have babies. So intergenerational distance is, you know, grown from, I don’t know,
00:54:31 16 years to 40 years. You’re saying that’s in the genetics. No, no, not necessarily. But it’s,
00:54:39 it’s sort of an environmental tendency that’s happening. But as we medically expand human
00:54:46 lifespan, the generations might actually be pushed instead of 40 years to 60 years, to 100 years.
00:54:55 Like if we look at the long arc of the evolutionary history. Exactly. So as we start thinking about
00:55:01 intergalactic travel now, sorry, that’s a heck of a transition. Yeah. So let’s talk about it.
00:55:10 No, no, no, no, no. As we, as a species start thinking about, I’m talking about these transitions
00:55:15 that are happening, right? And that’s, that’s awesome. Continue along these transitions.
00:55:19 What does the future hold in the next million years? So the concept of us going to another planet
00:55:24 and that taking three human lifetimes might be a joke if the human lifetime starts being 400 years
00:55:32 or 800 years. So imagine, it’s all time scale. It’s all time scale. It’s just different time scales.
00:55:39 You asked me offline whether I would like to live forever. I mean, my answer is absolutely.
00:55:45 And there’s many different types of forevers. One forever is, do I want to live today forever?
00:55:53 Kind of like Groundhog Day. And the answer is absolutely. The stuff that I want to learn today
00:56:00 will probably take a lifetime just to learn, you know, basically to clear my to do list for the day.
00:56:05 You mean like relive the day and then, and then pick up different things from the richness of
00:56:10 the experiences that are all in today. There’s just so much happening in the world every single
00:56:15 day. So much knowledge that has happened already that just to catch up on that will probably take
00:56:19 me around forever. On that, on that point, I just, I would just love to see you in the Groundhog movie
00:56:25 just because you’re so naturally as a scientist, but just the way your mind works beautifully,
00:56:32 just all the richness of the experiences that you will pick up from that.
00:56:36 That’s a beautiful visual. I try to live each day as if it was Groundhog. I’m basically every
00:56:41 single day waking up and saying, all right, how would Bill Murray get out of that one?
00:56:45 Well, you know what, on a funny tangent, I got a chance to go to a Neuralink demonstration event.
00:56:55 I’m not usually familiar with Neuralink. And I talked to Elon for a while. And one of the
00:57:02 funny things he said on his Groundhog Day thing is, you know, it’s a beautiful dream to eventually
00:57:10 be able to replay our memories. So we’re kind of these recording machines. Our brain is kind of,
00:57:16 maybe a noisy recording machine of memories. And it would be beautiful if we can someday in the
00:57:23 future, maybe far into the future, be able to, like in the Groundhog Day situation, replay that.
00:57:29 And the funny comment that stuck with me is he said that maybe this, our conversation now,
00:57:36 is a replay of a previous memory. And that stuck with me because it would probably be my replay.
00:57:43 You know, who the hell am I? I’m just an idiot guy. But like Elon Musk is, you know, probably
00:57:50 because of SpaceX and so on, is probably going to be remembered as a special person,
00:57:54 one of our special apes in history. So if I wanted to replay a memory, probably be that one. You know,
00:58:01 talking to Elon for a while. That’s an interesting possibility from, if we think about time scales,
00:58:09 if we think about the richness of the experience through time that we humans take and be able to
00:58:18 replay some aspects of that, of that biology, that’s super interesting. But anyway, sorry for
00:58:24 the tangents. Let’s, yeah, you were talking about time scales and the expansion of the human lifetime
00:58:32 and the idea of intergalactic travel. Yeah. No, but you’re laughing about this. I can’t believe
00:58:38 you’re laughing about this. You’re talking about this. You’re talking about exploring alien worlds
00:58:42 and going to other planets. I mean, you know, when Sarah was here, she was talking about sort of going
00:58:46 to other planets when we find these life. I mean, I’m just very naturally, given the topics that
00:58:52 we’ve approached, talking about the timescale at which this will happen. So you think eventually
00:58:57 we will human or life, life will expand out into the universe. The point that I’m trying to make
00:59:04 is that an intergalactic species will probably find ways to engineer its biology in order to
00:59:13 expand the way that we experience time, expand the timescale that we experience. And going back to
00:59:20 this whole concept of, you know, would I like to live forever? Yes, I’d like to live forever. Even
00:59:25 if it was, even if it was stuck on the same day, I’d love to live forever because I would finally
00:59:29 have time to do all these things that I want to do. But if living forever actually comes with a perk
00:59:35 of watching the whole world evolve forever, I mean, that’s a huge perk. And I would, you know, just,
00:59:42 it’ll never get boring, just a never changing world. And then the mind, you know, sort of
00:59:48 the experiment that I want you to do is to also ask, what if I wanted to live forever
00:59:54 one day at a time every year or one day at a time every decade, would you choose that?
01:00:01 Or you would wake up and the world would be 10 years later every single day you wake up.
01:00:05 It’s the opposite of Groundhog Day where basically you always wake up and it’s always 10 years later.
01:00:11 So you’re saying that’s such a powerful, interesting concept that life is more
01:00:18 interesting if you’re, of all the life forms on earth, that you’re the slowest one.
01:00:24 Exactly. Exactly.
01:00:25 Like trees have it right.
01:00:26 Like trees have it right. Olive trees. Like, you know, they’ve been there since the Minoan
01:00:30 civilization. And you know, that takes us back to the question you asked about sort of
01:00:35 the transformations that have happened in humanity. The Minoan civilization is one of them.
01:00:39 You know, there’s this paper that was published just a couple of years ago by one of my friends
01:00:43 that basically looked at the genetic makeup of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans in ancient
01:00:52 Greece and how they relate to modern Greeks. And they found that indeed there was very little gene
01:00:58 flow from, you know, the outside. And, you know, it’s fantastic to sort of think about these
01:01:06 amazing civilizations that transformed the way that human thought happens, that basically
01:01:13 looked for rules in nature, that looked for principles, that looked for the standard of beauty,
01:01:21 not human beauty, but beauty in the natural world. This whole concept that the world must
01:01:27 be elegant and there must be deeper ways of understanding that world. To me, that’s a massive
01:01:32 transformation of our species, similar to, you know, the earlier transformation that we’re talking
01:01:38 about of even involving a brain, of, you know, learning how to communicate language or the
01:01:45 evolution of eyesight. If you look at sort of, you know, we’re talking about these worms crawling
01:01:51 around and then sensing which direction are the chemicals more abundant, you know, chemotaxis. So
01:01:57 eventually they grow a nose. Eventually they grow, I mean, when I say nose, I mean, ways of sensing
01:02:02 chemicals. That’s probably one of the earliest senses. You know, we always talk about how deep
01:02:06 rooted it is in our brain. That’s one of the early senses. If you look at hearing, that’s a much later
01:02:11 sense. If you look at eyesight, that’s an intermediate sense where you’re basically sensing
01:02:15 where the light direction comes from. That’s probably something that life didn’t need until
01:02:19 it got, you know, into the surface and so on and so forth. So there’s a lot of, you know, milestones.
01:02:27 And I was talking about the latest milestone, which is LIGO, last time of being able to detect
01:02:31 gravitational waves and sort of being able to sort of have a sense that humans haven’t had before.
01:02:37 So you see that as a yet another transformation. It gives us an extra little sense.
01:02:42 Of course. And now if you go back to this history of ancient Greece, I mean, this transformation
01:02:47 that happened, I mean, of course, the Egyptians had this incredible, you know, civilization for
01:02:53 thousands of years. But what happened in Greece was this whole concept of let’s break things down
01:02:58 and understand the natural world. Let’s break things down and understand physics. Let’s basically
01:03:02 build rules around architecture, about around elegance, around, you know, statues and tragedy.
01:03:10 I mean, another question that you asked me in passing was this whole concept of embracing the
01:03:16 good and the bad, embracing the full range of human emotions. And if you look at Greek tragedy,
01:03:23 it’s the definition of that. It’s, I mean, drama. I mean, again, it’s a Greek word,
01:03:29 but the whole concept of some problems that are just so vast and large that dying is the easy way
01:03:38 out. That death, oh, that’s the easy solution. You know, so I want to touch a little bit on that
01:03:45 point and sort of talk about this concept that life supersedes physics and that the brain supersedes
01:03:59 life. That basically we have a brain that can decide to not follow evolution’s path. We can
01:04:06 decide to not have children. We can decide to not eat. We can decide to suicide. We can decide to
01:04:14 sort of abolish communication with the outside world. I mean, all the things that make us human,
01:04:20 we can basically decide not to do that. And that is basically when the brain itself is basically
01:04:28 is basically superseding what evolution program is for. Okay. So one of the, it’s okay. My mind
01:04:38 was already blown at the beautiful formulation of the idea that life is a system that resists
01:04:48 physics and our brain, or perhaps the content of it, or however it may be functionally, our brain
01:04:56 is a thing that resists life. Yes. Yes. You’re, you’re so, you’re so brilliant.
01:05:06 But, but, but, but, but I want you to see all of that as continuum. Basically, you’re sort of
01:05:12 talking about the sort of individual transformations, but it’s a path that, that humanity has been
01:05:17 taking. It’s a transformation. It’s a path of transformation. And then I want us to think about
01:05:22 what it truly means to become human, like the F zine. And you asked me about what motivated
01:05:28 my meaning of life symposium. What motivated it in part, I mean, of course it was an inside joke
01:05:34 of turning 42, but what motivated it in part was actually a midlife crisis. So the joke that I
01:05:42 always like to say is Christos Papadimitriou, a famous Greek professor who was previously at
01:05:47 MIT, at Harvard, at Stanford, at Berkeley, everywhere. A brilliant, brilliant person. That’s
01:05:52 actually Costis’s advisor. So Christos Papadimitriou likes to say that when you’re an undergrad,
01:05:59 you work like a rat to get into grad school. And where you’re a grad student, you work like a rat
01:06:03 to get your PhD. And where you’re a postdoc, you work like a rat to get your assistant professor
01:06:08 position. And where you’re an assistant professor, you work like a rat to become a full professor.
01:06:12 And then when you’re a full professor, well, by then you’re basically a rat.
01:06:18 Oh, that’s brilliant.
01:06:19 So basically what happened to me is that I arrived at the end of the rat race.
01:06:25 You know, life is a rat race. You constantly have hurdles to jump over. You constantly have
01:06:29 tunnels and secret pathways. And I figured it all out. And eventually as I was turning 42,
01:06:35 I looked back and I was like, wow, that was an awesome rat race. But I’m not a rat.
01:06:42 I basically got out of the labyrinth and I was like, I’m not a rat, turns out.
01:06:47 Is that the first moment where you saw that you were in a rat race?
01:06:53 No, no, no. I’ve known that I’m in a rat race for a long time. It’s so easy to be in a rat race.
01:06:57 It’s so easy to be an undergrad. But you have problem sets. And you know, we’re all smart
01:07:01 people. You know, problem set, it has a solution. Somebody made it for you. You can just solve it.
01:07:06 Everything was made as a test. And you keep passing those tests and tests and tests and tests.
01:07:11 And you have tasks that are well defined. The PhD is a little different because it’s
01:07:16 more open ended, but yet you have an advisor who’s guiding you. And then you become a professor
01:07:22 and tenure is a well set defined set of tasks. And you do all that.
01:07:27 And at 42, I basically had bought a house, three kids, beautiful wife, tenure, awesome students,
01:07:36 tons of grants. Life was basically laid out for me. And that’s when I had my main life crisis.
01:07:42 That’s when people usually buy a Harley Davidson. And they basically say, I need something new. I
01:07:48 need something different and to be young myself, et cetera. But basically that was my realization
01:07:52 that it’s not a rat race, that there’s no rat race. It’s over. That I have to basically think,
01:08:00 how do I fully instantiate myself? How do I complete my transformation into an actual human
01:08:06 being? Because it’s very easy to sort of forget all the intangibles of life. It’s very hard to
01:08:12 just sort of think about the next task and the next task and it’s all metrics. And you know,
01:08:16 what is the number of viewers I have? What is the number of publications I have? What is the number
01:08:19 of citations, the number of talks, the number of grants? It’s very easy to quantify everything.
01:08:24 And then at some point you’re like, this is real life. It’s not a test anymore. And that’s something
01:08:29 that I told my wife early on. I was like, no, no, no, our life is not going to be let’s put the kids
01:08:35 through college. And that, you know, maybe that’s when I escaped the rat race. Maybe it continued
01:08:40 being a rat race. Maybe the next step would have been, all right, how do I make sure that my kid is
01:08:44 first in class? How do I make sure that they’re, you know, into the greatest college? And then,
01:08:48 you know, they’re into college. And then you’re like 60.
01:08:54 So how do you, how do you escape? What is the, is there a light at the end of the tunnel of a
01:09:00 midlife crisis? So, so you should watch that symposium because the videos were transformative
01:09:08 to me and to many others. So basically the advice that I received from all of my friends was so
01:09:15 meaningful. This, you know, there’s some, some advice that basically says you have to constantly
01:09:22 maintain unachievable goals. Goals that you can make progress towards, but you can never be fully
01:09:30 done with. And I think that’s almost playing into the sort of rat race thing. Like basically make
01:09:34 sure that there’s more obstacles for your little rat persona to jump through. So that’s one
01:09:40 possibility. So first of all, watch, is it available somewhere? It’s on YouTube, just Google,
01:09:46 Google meaning of life symposium. I should have known this. I mean, you should have told me this.
01:09:50 This is awesome. Okay. This is great. But, and also like, you know, saying rat race is, you know,
01:09:58 if we look at ratatouille, it’s not, I mean, that’s a beautiful, that’s a beautiful thing of,
01:10:06 of, of challenges and overcoming challenges. That could be fundamentally the meaning of life is,
01:10:15 to see life as a set of challenges and to fully engage in the overcoming of those challenges.
01:10:23 I would say that that’s embracing the rat race view of life. So, so a joke that we like to have
01:10:28 with my wife all the time is, we basically say, we, we, we pretend that we’re in this
01:10:33 all inclusive resort that we basically hired all these people to go on the Esplanade and play games
01:10:39 because we enjoy watching people playing on the Esplanade and we enjoy sort of laying and looking
01:10:44 at life and all the people biking and rollerblading and all of that. And then we’ve paid all these
01:10:48 people in this all inclusive resort that we live in. And then what are we going to do today? I’m
01:10:53 like, Oh, I’ve signed up for professor activities. It’s going to be awesome. They, they, they lined
01:10:58 up a bunch of super smart MIT students for me to meet with. I’m going to have a grant writing
01:11:02 meeting afterwards. It’s going to be awesome. And then she signed up for a bunch of consulting
01:11:06 activities. It’s going to be great. And then in the evening we just get back together and say,
01:11:09 Hey, how was your consulting today? So in a way, that’s another view of life of basically,
01:11:16 wait a minute. If I was a gazillionaire, what would I choose to do? I would probably pay an
01:11:21 awesome university to give me an office there and just pay a bunch of super smart people to work
01:11:27 with me, even though they don’t really want to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, I would
01:11:32 have exactly the life that I have now working my butt off every single day because it’s so freaking
01:11:40 fulfilling. So let’s clarify. It’s just a beautiful way. It’s almost like a video game view of life
01:11:46 that it’s a set of, I mean, again, game is not perhaps a positive term, but it’s a, it’s a,
01:11:52 it is a beautiful term. So do you, or do you not like the rat race view of life?
01:12:00 No.
01:12:01 Because it is fulfilling in some fundamental way.
01:12:03 The rat race is about the goal. My view of life is about the path. So again, quoting Greece.
01:12:12 Those folks have come up with some good stuff.
01:12:14 So this Odysseus Elites basically wrote this beautiful poem about sort of going through life
01:12:22 saying, as you go through your journey, impersonating Ulysses of his voyage,
01:12:29 he says, wish that the path is long and arduous because when you get to Ithaca,
01:12:37 Ithaca, you might realize that it was all about the path, not the destination.
01:12:46 So the rat race view of life makes it all about the destination. It’s like,
01:12:50 how do I get through the maze to get there? But the all inclusive resort view of life
01:12:57 is about the path. It’s about, wow, today I couldn’t wish for a better set of activities
01:13:04 all programmed for me to enjoy having my brain, having my body, having my senses and, you know,
01:13:12 the life that I have. So it’s a very different kind of view. It’s focused on the journey,
01:13:17 not on the destination.
01:13:18 So you mentioned kind of the ups and downs of life and the midlife crisis.
01:13:25 And right now you said focusing kind of on the journey,
01:13:28 but what the journey involves is ups and downs. Is there advice or any kind of thoughts
01:13:38 that you can elucidate about the downs in your life, the hard parts of your life and
01:13:46 how you got out or maybe not, or is there, how do you see the dark parts of life?
01:13:53 So I’m so glad you’re asking this question because it’s something that our society does
01:13:59 a terrible job at preparing us for. Every Hollywood movie has to have a happy ending.
01:14:06 It is ridiculous. You can count on your 10 fingers the number of bad ending movies that
01:14:11 you’ve ever watched. And you probably wouldn’t need all 10 fingers. We strive to tell everyone,
01:14:18 yes, you can succeed. Yes, you’re a millionaire, just temporarily disabled. And yes, you know,
01:14:29 the prince will eventually figure out his princess and they will have a happily ever after ending.
01:14:35 And yes, the hero will be beaten and beaten and beaten, but you know that at the end of the movie,
01:14:40 the good guys will win. We need more movies where the bad guys win. We need more movies
01:14:44 where just everybody dies. Where just, you know, MacGyver doesn’t figure out how to disable the
01:14:50 bomb and just explodes. You just need more movies that are more realistic about the fact that life
01:14:56 kind of sucks sometimes and it’s okay. So again, growing up in Greece, I have been exposed to songs
01:15:05 that are not just sad, but they’re miserable. So one of them comes to mind and it’s basically
01:15:18 talking about this woman who’s lamenting in the early morning about losing the joyful kid,
01:15:26 the joyful young man who basically died in the civil war in the arms of our own fellow citizens.
01:15:37 And she’s like, if only he had died fighting the foreign forces, if only he had died at the,
01:15:44 you know, sides of the, you know, general, if only he had died with honor, I would be proud to have
01:15:52 lost the joyful kid. I mean, it’s devastating, right? It’s like, he didn’t just die. He died
01:16:01 without honor. And my friend who was with me was listening to the song and she’s like, this is
01:16:07 depressing. I’m like, whoa, you have to listen to another one. It’s not as sad. And she’s like, what,
01:16:11 this one died with honor? So that’s one example. It’s a kind of a celebration of misery. No, no,
01:16:20 no, no, no, no, no. So let me give you a couple more examples and then I’ll answer that question.
01:16:25 So another example is I picked up this book that I had from my childhood and I started reading
01:16:30 stories to my kids. And the first story is about these two children. One is really poor living on
01:16:36 the street and the other one is really rich, really living in the house in the bright light
01:16:39 above. And the poor one is wishing, looking at that window and wishing that he could have that
01:16:44 house. And the other one is at the window wishing that he was free, that he wasn’t sick all the time,
01:16:49 that he could escape outside. It’s only four pages long. And at the end, both children die.
01:16:55 One of them dies from cold, the other one dies from illness. And you’re like, how is that even
01:17:00 a children’s story? The next story, I’m like, okay, that’s fine. Let’s skip this one. So I read
01:17:06 this to my kids and then I read the next one. And the next one is about this woman whose brother is
01:17:12 at war against the Turks and he is going to die. And she prays to the Virgin, please don’t let him
01:17:22 die. And the Virgin appears and she’s like, no problem. Tell me who to kill instead. And she’s
01:17:30 like, anyone, anyone. No, no, no, no. Choose one. How about this Turk? This one has two kids,
01:17:36 a beautiful family waiting for him at home. She’s like, no, not this one, choose another one.
01:17:40 And then she goes through all the life stories of the others. She’s like, no, no, just don’t take
01:17:44 anyone. She’s like, I can’t do that. You can choose to bring your brother back. And he will be
01:17:50 depressed for the rest of his life because he didn’t fight at war, because he didn’t go to that
01:17:54 battle. And he will live without honor. And in the end, the woman decides to have her brother killed
01:18:00 instead because he dies with her. I mean, this is insane. So why am I giving you these examples?
01:18:06 It’s not a glorification of misery. It’s expanding your emotional range. It’s teaching you that,
01:18:16 and when I read these stories, I’m not a jerk. I’m crying out loud. I have tears. And my face
01:18:23 becomes red from the pain that I’m experiencing through these stories. It’s just so deeply
01:18:32 touching to embrace the suffering, not because of an accident, but because of a choice, the sacrifice
01:18:45 to embrace the fact that not everything is cute and rosy and always ending well. And I think that
01:18:51 we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our kids that just life sucks and life is unfair sometimes.
01:18:57 And that’s okay. And sometimes I read a story to my kids. I read a story every night. And sometimes
01:19:03 the story is horrible. And sometimes the story is good and sort of friendly and happy. And my kids
01:19:10 always ask, what’s the moral of the story? And sometimes there’s a moral and it’s like, oh,
01:19:15 you should be good or you should be nice. You should be helping each other, et cetera. And
01:19:18 sometimes there’s just no moral. And I tell my kids, you know what? Sometimes just life doesn’t
01:19:24 make sense and it’s okay. And you can’t comprehend everything. And I think this concept of how do you
01:19:31 deal with the bad days comes from the fact that we’re taught, we’re brainwashed into thinking that
01:19:35 every day should be a happy day. And we’re not ready to cope with misery. And the other thing
01:19:42 that crying through these stories teaches you is that you don’t have it nearly half as bad as you
01:19:50 think. Do you see what I mean? Basically, it tells you that, I mean, my mom would always tell me about
01:19:59 how she was transformed as a teenager when she volunteered in the hospital. And she saw all these
01:20:05 people at the brink of death, clinging for life and helping them out to best she could and crying
01:20:12 her heart out when they were dying. And sort of how that taught her the appreciation for what we
01:20:19 have every day. Waking up every morning and saying, my life doesn’t suck. My life is not nearly half
01:20:29 as bad as it could be. And sort of embracing the joy that we have of living where we live in the
01:20:39 moment we live. And I’m going to go further. If you look at the arc of human life, human existence
01:20:49 through the centuries, there’s no better way to be alive than now. I mean, we’re complaining about
01:20:54 every single little thing. But life expectancy is at an all time high. Sickness, all time low.
01:21:01 Pornness, misery, all time low. There’s no better time to be alive globally across all of human
01:21:08 existence. Number one. Number two, here in Boston, there’s no better place to be alive.
01:21:16 If you think about the amalgamation of science, engineering, technology, the ridiculously awesome
01:21:22 people you’re bringing every week to your podcast. I mean, this is the ancient Greece of modern
01:21:28 society. But the weather still sucks. No, let me put it this way. The weather gives us a range
01:21:35 of emotion. The full range. The full scenic range. That’s such a fascinating thing about human
01:21:41 psychology. I often reread this book. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it. It’s Man’s Search
01:21:46 for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. And he talks about his living through the Holocaust and the
01:21:58 concentration camps. And even there where there’s human misery is at its highest, even there he
01:22:09 discovers these moments by observing the suffering, by accepting the suffering. He observes moments
01:22:19 of true joy of how great his life is relative to others at the camp who have it worse.
01:22:29 Yeah. So it’s a dangerous slippery slope to think that way because it’s basically being better than
01:22:35 Jones’s. And if, you know, if the house next door has a giant car, then you want to get a bigger
01:22:40 car or something like that. It’s not comparative misery. I think the way that I see it is slightly
01:22:46 different. It’s, and it’s not even thinking about all the worst possible outcomes that could have
01:22:53 happened, but didn’t. The example, as you were talking about the concentration camps, the most
01:23:00 horrible, I mean, one of the most horrible moments of human existence, is that the concentration
01:23:04 camps, I was thinking about pictures that I was seeing of kids in Syria in war torn zones. And
01:23:11 you’re looking at these kids. And again, I cried out loud, imagining my own son in the van after a
01:23:22 bomb explosion, watching his father die or his siblings die or losing his friends. It’s something
01:23:30 that we are not capable of fathoming. But if you actually put a seven year old in that situation,
01:23:38 the look that I saw in these kids eyes basically said, it is what it is. It was, and I’ve
01:23:46 experienced that with my own kid when he gets, like my three year old last, like two years ago,
01:23:53 who’s now my five year old, she was burned really badly with like hot chocolate and coffee that just
01:23:59 peeled off her skin. So you could actually see just her fragile skin had just peeled off.
01:24:04 And she was the happiest little kid. She was just going along with the punches.
01:24:11 It is what it is. She accepted it.
01:24:14 So it’s quite dramatic to sort of realize that children don’t say, oh, I could have it better.
01:24:24 They sort of embrace the moment, not embrace, but sort of accept the moment. And then
01:24:33 they can have moments of pure joy in a horrendous war torn country. And like so many people from
01:24:43 these war torn countries basically say, oh, you think you Americans are going to just come and
01:24:48 just send us a bunch of aid and food, et cetera? Yeah, sure. That’s helpful. But what do we dream
01:24:55 of? What do we struggle for? We struggle for love. We struggle for meaning. We struggle for,
01:25:01 you know, emotions and friendships. We struggle for the same things you guys struggle for.
01:25:07 We’re not just like every day waking up and saying, oh, I wish I had more food.
01:25:10 No, that’s just the given. I just don’t have enough food. But what we struggle with
01:25:14 are basically everything else. And that sort of gives you some perspective on life. It basically
01:25:20 says, you know, and another story that my mom told me when I was a kid is this story about sort of
01:25:25 this man who’s basically, you know, he sees the Christ appear in front of him and he says,
01:25:31 oh, Christ, I’m carrying all these problems. I’m carrying this big bag. Can you please take it from
01:25:37 me? And he’s like, sure. Let me just give you any other bag. And of course the person in Vienna
01:25:47 accepts his own bag. So acceptance, ultimately the path you recommend is acceptance. Every single
01:25:53 other bag is probably worse. It’s the evil you don’t know versus the evil you know. Like we all
01:25:59 struggle with our own problems. But if you look at the bigger picture, it’s just your path through
01:26:05 life. And if you embrace it, the good and the bad, every single day, it’s just joy, elation,
01:26:16 sadness, misery. If you don’t have both, you’re not a complete human being. You know, you can’t,
01:26:24 I mean, the last example I’m going to give is the movie Inside Out by Pixar. Beautiful movie.
01:26:31 Which one is that?
01:26:32 The one with the little characters controlling highly trained. So you basically have joy and
01:26:39 sadness and fear and disgust, et cetera. And the moral of the story, if you remember the movie,
01:26:45 the moral of the story is that in the end, joy is basically trying to fix everything,
01:26:50 to make everything happy. And she’s failing miserably and everything else is like crumbling
01:26:54 and falling apart. And the little girl basically becomes emotionless because all she knows how to
01:26:59 do is fake happiness. And I think it’s a very good analogy for our everyday society where we’re always
01:27:05 saying, are you happy? Are you happy? My mom calls me and she’s like, Manolis, are you happy? I’m
01:27:09 like, mom, stop asking this stupid question. No, I’m not happy. What you should be asking is if
01:27:15 I’m fulfilled. And that’s a very different thing. I don’t go around being happy.
01:27:19 I would love it if your mom called and said, Manolis, are you suffering beautifully or something
01:27:26 like that? That’s exactly right. That’s what she should be asking. Are you struggling to achieve
01:27:32 something great? That’s the question that mom should be asking. Hear that mom call me about
01:27:36 the suffering, not about how good are you doing? So what I tell her is that life is not about
01:27:42 maximizing happiness. Life is about accomplishing something meaningful. And accomplishing that
01:27:48 meaningful thing cannot come from a series of joyful moments. It comes from a series of struggles,
01:27:54 of successes and failures, of people being nasty to you and people being nice to you and embracing
01:28:01 the full thing. And if you supersede that constant need for gratification, if you supersede that
01:28:08 constant need for kindness, you suddenly know who you are. And what I like to say to my kid,
01:28:16 my son the other day was telling me, oh, so and so called me such and such. And I’m like,
01:28:20 are you such and such? He’s like, no. I’m like, ha ha, see, they were wrong. And what I tell him
01:28:25 is if you know who you are, what other people say about you only teaches you about them.
01:28:34 Yeah.
01:28:35 So it has no influence on your self esteem. If you know where you stand, you embrace the good,
01:28:42 but you also embrace the bad. I have plenty of bad and I’m embracing it. I’m a procrastinator.
01:28:48 I’m a procrastinator. How do I deal with that? I trick myself into procrastinating about mindless,
01:28:56 stupid little day to day things. And in that procrastination time doing important things
01:29:01 for the future. So accepting who you are, accepting your flaws, accepting the whole of it,
01:29:07 accepting the struggle, accepting the sleeplessness, accepting the fact that the journey
01:29:14 matters, hoping that your path to Ithaka is full of troubles because those troubles are the life
01:29:21 you will lead. Accepting that life will not start after the next milestone, that life has already
01:29:28 started a long time ago. And what you’re experiencing now is the life. This is it.
01:29:35 It’s not some kind of future thing that you work yourself hard to get to. And then after that,
01:29:40 you live happily ever after. To me, the happily ever after, that’s the end of the story. Nothing
01:29:45 happens after that. The struggle and the struggle and the struggle is much more interesting story
01:29:51 than they lived happily ever after. So I think we have to embrace that as a society that it’s
01:29:58 not just about the happy ending, that our kids are brainwashed into expecting that things will
01:30:04 be happy and rosy and it’s okay if they’re not. And they should keep struggling because the
01:30:09 struggle is the journey and the journey is the meaning of life. It’s not the end, it’s this
01:30:15 journey. What about accepting one of the harder things? We talked a little bit about immortality.
01:30:22 What about accepting that life ends? So do you, Manolis, think about your own mortality?
01:30:32 How, we talked about accepting that there’s ups and downs to life. What about the ultimate down,
01:30:38 which is the finality of it? Do you think about that? Do you fear it?
01:30:42 You also asked me if I’m afraid of getting older.
01:30:48 Yes.
01:30:48 And that’s on the path to mortality. So let me talk about that first step and then the last step.
01:30:54 The last step.
01:30:55 Literally the last step. So getting older, what does that mean? When I was 18, when I was 20,
01:31:03 my brain, I felt was at my maximum. I was like, nothing is impossible. I can solve anything.
01:31:10 I could take any math puzzle, any logic puzzle, any programming puzzle and just solve it in
01:31:15 milliseconds. I just saw the answer through problems. I was like feeling invincible.
01:31:19 I would show up at lecture with my newspaper, lift up my head every now and then, point to errors,
01:31:25 just brat, complete brat. I would raise my hand and correct my professor from the whole classroom.
01:31:30 Total brat. I have some of those in my class now and it’s awesome. It’s like very…
01:31:34 I used to be you.
01:31:35 It teaches you humility.
01:31:40 So I felt invincible and I was like, this is it. This is awesome. I’m living the life.
01:31:45 10 years later, my brain didn’t work the same way. I wasn’t as good at the tiny little puzzles,
01:31:53 but it worked in different ways. And right now, 20 years later, it works in yet different ways.
01:31:59 And oh gosh, I love the journey.
01:32:02 Can you maybe give some hints of the interesting different ways that your brain works as it aged?
01:32:09 Yeah. I went from the phase of sheer speed and hardcore quantitative thinking to sort of stepping
01:32:19 back, being able to sort of make more connections, being able to sort of say, yeah, but let’s use
01:32:24 that thing. Sort of a huge new creativity being unleashed. Basically, when you’re young, you’re
01:32:30 sort of thinking about that one problem. You can sort of reconfigure all the variables
01:32:33 combinatorially in your head and just wipe it all out. When you’re just a little older,
01:32:39 you start getting more creative. You start bringing in things from different fields and different
01:32:43 contexts and sort of stepping outside the box. Basically, it’s like being in the rat race and
01:32:48 saying, there’s a ceiling. Why are we trying to get through that? So it’s sort of thinking outside
01:32:53 the box. And then at 40, what I’m going through now is this whole sort of embracing the path of
01:33:00 life. And when I say life has started already, it’s not a test anymore. This is basically
01:33:07 embracing the finality. Embracing that the journey is what it’s at. So what I like to say is live
01:33:17 every day as if it’s your last one and make plans as if you’ll never die. I always have the long term
01:33:26 that I’m sort of planning out for that will eventually become the short term. And I always have
01:33:31 the sort of short term. And I think this ability to sort of look at life in the past and look at
01:33:38 life in the future jointly and sort of embrace the continuity both of life in the universe and
01:33:45 on our planet, as well as life as a human being from the beginning to the end, just as a path,
01:33:50 as a journey, and just embracing every aspect of that. I mean, I was talking about parenthood the
01:33:56 other day and how amazingly fulfilling it is to sort of relive childhood through the eyes of my
01:34:03 kid, but with the perspective of a parent. So the sheer arrogance of youth watching this in my kid,
01:34:18 I can see myself when I was 18 correcting my professor. I felt so proud. Little did I know that
01:34:25 my professor was working on so much more interesting things than the three little
01:34:28 things he was putting on the board that day. And I was like, I’m invincible. But in fact, no,
01:34:33 just a little brat. And basically right now, I sort of can see the sort of journey with a little
01:34:42 more humility. I can sort of look at my own students with their unbelievable abilities,
01:34:49 being able to do things that I’m no longer able to do better than I probably was ever able to do.
01:34:54 But yet being able to guide them and shape their thinking and blow their minds with new ideas and
01:35:00 new directions through my perspective. And I know when something is solvable because I’ve been there,
01:35:08 but I’m not going to even bother. It’s not that I can’t do it. I’m sure I could if I tried,
01:35:13 but just I’m not interested in that anymore. So what I’m embracing this journey of aging
01:35:18 is how my brain is changing and how I’m constantly trying to figure out the niches,
01:35:24 the evolutionary niches that I’m best adapted for, for the tasks that I’m best at,
01:35:32 while hiring and recruiting both assistants and research scientists and students and postdocs,
01:35:39 and that will be the best at those tasks. But someone still has to see the big picture.
01:35:45 And I love being in that role. So at the timescale of a human lifespan,
01:35:52 you’re doing the same thing that the worm did at the evolutionary timescale of Growing Arms,
01:35:58 the specialization, the carp compartmentalization. I mean, it’s fascinating to think of what
01:36:05 80 year old Manolis would look back at the man that’s sitting here today
01:36:11 and laugh at the silliness, at the arrogance.
01:36:15 He finally figured out something.
01:36:17 I was like, no little thing. You didn’t figure out anything.
01:36:21 I mean, ultimately, it seems that if you’re introspective about life, it leads to a kind
01:36:27 of acceptance, a deeper and deeper acceptance of the whole of it.
01:36:34 Again, I want to be cautious about acceptance because it almost says that you can’t change it.
01:36:38 Ah, yeah.
01:36:40 It’s sort of embracing the struggle and embracing the journey is the way that I would put it.
01:36:45 So you ultimately feel the journey isn’t just something that happens to you.
01:36:49 You shape it. You shape it. Remember how I was saying that Boston is the best place and the
01:36:53 best time to live in right now, in the history of humanity? I’m exaggerating a little bit.
01:36:59 But the way that I think about this is that if you look at the whole of cosmos,
01:37:05 where would you rather be if you’re just a bunch of molecules, roughly your biomass?
01:37:10 Where would you rather be? Would you rather be a rock on Mars?
01:37:12 Yeah, probably not. Would you rather be in a black hole? Probably not.
01:37:16 Would you rather be in an exploding supernova? Maybe that might be interesting.
01:37:20 But being on Earth is an awesome solar system, an awesome planetary system, an awesome,
01:37:26 you know, place to be in across all of space time.
01:37:31 It’s a pretty good place to be in as a bunch of molecules.
01:37:33 If you are a bunch of molecules on Earth today, being an animal with, you know, some kind of
01:37:39 awareness of the stuff around you is wonderful. Being a human among all animals is amazing
01:37:46 because you have all this introspection. And being a human who’s young, fit, athletic,
01:37:52 smart, et cetera, I mean, you know, you have so much to be happy for.
01:37:57 Beyond that, being surrounded by a bunch of awesome people that you interact with all the time.
01:38:02 I mean, I feel blessed to interact with the people I know, with the friends I have,
01:38:06 the dinners that I have, all of this. Students that I interact with, I’m so blessed.
01:38:10 And the last little blip in this awesomeness of local maximum, the last little blip comes from
01:38:17 being kind, being grateful, and being kind. I don’t know if you remember that little prayer
01:38:23 that I described last time of, thank you for all the good you’ve given me and give me strength
01:38:30 to give unto others with the same love that you’ve given to me. And the whole point of that is being
01:38:37 grateful and being kind. What does that do? From a purely egoistic perspective, it makes the people
01:38:44 around you happier. And it takes that little maximum a little bit further.
01:38:49 Because you’ll be surrounded by happy people, by being kind. That’s the purely egoistic view.
01:38:55 And the purely altruistic view, or maybe it’s egoistic as well, is that it’s just good to give.
01:39:01 It feels good to give. Like basically watching somebody who’s touched by what you said, watching
01:39:07 somebody who’s like appreciating a rapid response or a generous offer or just random acts of kindness.
01:39:14 It is so fulfilling. So evolutionarily, we were selected for that. There’s just such a good feeling
01:39:22 that comes from that. You know, it’s fascinating to think you said Boston is the best place,
01:39:28 and talking about kindness, that the very thought that Boston is the best place in the universe
01:39:34 is almost, it’s a kind of a gravitational field. Your thought and your very life in itself is a
01:39:45 kind of field that makes that real. Yeah, the self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. By claiming it’s the
01:39:52 best and thinking it’s the best, it becomes the best. And you make others, it’s not a force that
01:39:59 just applies to your own cognition. It applies to the others around you. And then suddenly you live
01:40:05 in an even better place. Yeah. And it creates the reality, the actual reality, the social reality,
01:40:12 then it molds the environment. Exactly. One of the coolest things about you, I think, is you represent
01:40:23 the best of MIT, the spirit of MIT. I’m so glad that I’m fortunate enough to be able to talk to
01:40:35 you, because there’s a kind of cynicism about academia in parts that I think is undeserved,
01:40:47 and that there’s this, MIT, of course, but academic institutions is a sacred place where
01:40:57 ideas can flourish. And just in the same very way that you’re talking about is both kindness
01:41:03 and curiosity and that weird thing that happens when a bunch of curious descendants of apes get
01:41:12 together and just get excited in this ripple effect that happens. I mean, that’s the most
01:41:19 beautiful aspect of MIT. People might think competition and grants and position, like you
01:41:28 said, the rat race, but underneath it all is these curious human beings inspiring younger human
01:41:35 beings. And there’s this ripple effect that happens. And I’m so glad that, I mean, I’m glad that I get
01:41:44 a chance to record this because it inspires so many other students and so many other people to
01:41:50 do the same, to embrace the inner curious creature that it’s not about the race. So let’s talk about
01:41:55 the negatives. Let’s talk about, no, no, no, I’m serious. I’m serious. You have to embrace the good
01:42:00 and the bad. So let’s talk about the negative. Let’s address it. So why do people want positions
01:42:07 of power? Why do people want more money, more power, more this, more that? Remember the part
01:42:13 where I was saying, if you know who you are, what other people think about you, it makes no
01:42:19 difference to you. It only teaches you about them. Many people feel defunct about what they’re doing
01:42:28 and define themselves. They feel instantiated through the eyes of others. So being in a position
01:42:37 of power makes them feel better about themselves. Who knows what other kind of struggles they might
01:42:42 have that creates that need to feel better about themselves. But they have a bunch of struggles and
01:42:48 everybody has a bunch of struggles. And every time I see somebody behaving poorly, I’m basically
01:42:54 thinking, well, they’re in a tough spot right now. And it’s okay. I can kind of see how I would
01:43:01 behave badly in other circumstances as well. So I think if you take away that sort of having to
01:43:10 prove yourself in the eyes of others, life becomes so much easier. So when I first became a professor
01:43:18 at MIT, I started wearing adult clothes. It became a serious person, quote, unquote.
01:43:26 I basically had, I would always go around in my rollerblades and my shorts and a t shirt,
01:43:31 and eventually I was a professional. I bought all these khaki pants and these nice
01:43:36 shirts with, what do they call it, the patterns. And I was dressing with my nice belt every day,
01:43:44 showing up. And then a few months later, I was like, I can’t stand it. And I just went back to
01:43:51 my rollerblades and my t shirts and my shorts. And it was this struggle of sort of not feeling that
01:43:58 I fit in. I was so intimidated by all of my colleagues, just watching their incredible
01:44:04 achievements. The person’s next to me and the person on the floor below me, I was like, oh my
01:44:09 God, they clearly made a mistake. What the heck am I doing here? How will I ever live up to these
01:44:17 people’s standards? And eventually you grow up to realize that the way that I grew up to realize
01:44:28 that the way that other people perceived my work was very similar to the way that I perceived
01:44:33 other people’s work as flawless. I knew all of the flaws in my work. I knew the limitations. I knew
01:44:41 what I hadn’t managed to achieve. And what I saw was maybe a third of the way of what I was trying
01:44:47 to achieve. And I saw everything as flawed. What they saw, what I had achieved, they didn’t see
01:44:53 what I hadn’t achieved. They only saw the one third down, which was pretty good in their eyes.
01:44:58 So they all respected me and I was feeling miserable about myself. I was like, I’m not worthy.
01:45:06 And I think that this is a cognitive problem that we have. We kind of, it’s kind of like when we’re
01:45:14 talking about artificial general intelligence, AGI, of sort of, we kind of have this definition
01:45:19 that anything that machines can do is not intelligent and anything that they can’t do
01:45:23 is intelligent. Therefore, we narrow, narrow, narrow, narrow the field of what intelligence
01:45:27 truly means. And as soon as machines achieve self, I mean, it’s not intelligent anymore.
01:45:30 I feel like I was doing the same thing with myself. As soon as I could solve something,
01:45:34 it was the kind of thing that a kid like me could solve. And therefore it was kind of easy.
01:45:39 But to the others, it seemed hard. But to me, it seemed easy. So it was this kind of thing that
01:45:45 everything that my colleagues were doing seemed impossible to me. But everything that I was doing
01:45:50 seemed impossible to them. So it was that realization that sort of made me mature into
01:45:55 sort of a, not more confident, but more comfortable human being.
01:46:00 Can you actually linger on that a little bit? I mean, you mentioned Minsky. I remember he said
01:46:05 something in an interview where he said the secret to his, like the way he approached life was
01:46:14 to never be happy with anything he did. So there’s something powerful as a motivator
01:46:21 to doing exactly what you’re saying, which is everything you’ve achieved to see that as easy
01:46:26 and unimpressive. What do you do with that? Because clearly that’s a useful thing.
01:46:33 I think I’ve kind of matured past that. And I think the maturity past that is to sort of accept
01:46:40 what it is and accept that it has helped others build onto it and therefore advance human knowledge.
01:46:49 So it’s very easy to sort of fall into the trap of, oh, everything I’ve done is crap.
01:46:54 What I told you last time is that I always tell my students that our best work is ahead of us.
01:47:00 And I think that’s more of my mindset. That’s a beautiful way to put it.
01:47:04 Exactly. What we’ve done is strong. It’s great. It’s great for the time. And it’ll become obsolete
01:47:10 in 30 years. Not we can, we are doing even better. Exactly. So basically our next work
01:47:16 will just strive. And again, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
01:47:21 At some point you have to wrap. I was having a meeting with my student yesterday and it was like,
01:47:27 listen, we know this is not perfect, but it’s way better than anything that’s ever been done before.
01:47:33 You know how to improve it. But if you try to, your paper is never going to get published.
01:47:38 So there’s this balance of we’re already at the top of the field, get it out. And then you work
01:47:48 on the next improvement. And in my experience, this has never happened. We’ve never actually
01:47:52 worked on the next improvement. And that’s okay. It didn’t make a difference because you’re
01:47:57 basically putting a new stepping stone that others will be able to step on and surpass you.
01:48:02 My advisor in grad school would basically tell me, Manolis, let others write the second paper
01:48:08 in that field. Just write the first one, move on, move on to the next field. You don’t want to be
01:48:14 writing the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth paper in the same field. Just,
01:48:20 it’s very shocking to a student to hear that. Cause I was like, I was at the top of my game.
01:48:26 I was owning that field. I was doing it. I was doing it. I was doing it. I was doing it.
01:48:31 Owning that field. And I published the first paper. I’m like, I’m ready for two and three
01:48:35 and four. He’s like, move on. Just let it be. And I was like, Whoa. And it’s so liberating
01:48:42 to sort of not have to surpass everyone, but just put your little stepping stone out there
01:48:49 and others will step on it and put their own stones further and eventually cross a bigger
01:48:53 river than if you try to sort of make a giant leap all at once. So you need both.
01:48:58 SL. Beautifully put. So the funny thing is I’ve, I believe I closed the previous episode
01:49:06 with a Darwin quote about the power of poetry and music and life.
01:49:11 SL. I think your quote, and again, I only heard it once, was Darwin basically saying,
01:49:16 if I were to live life again, next time I would read more poetry and something about art every
01:49:23 week or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so interesting for somebody who studied life
01:49:30 at a very cold, I would say, genetic level to say that, yeah, the highest form of living
01:49:37 is the art. But like on that, which made me realize that you write poetry and I
01:49:45 forced you or maybe convinced you somehow to maybe share if it’s possible, if it’s okay,
01:49:52 some of the poetry you’ve written yourself in your life.
01:49:56 SL. So again, being Greek, a lot of my poems have been pretty miserable.
01:50:03 And I always like to say that it’s very hard for me to write a poem when I’m happy.
01:50:08 And I just have to be in a state of deep despair in order to write poems. But the first poem I ever
01:50:15 wrote was in English class. I was, I’m Greek, I grew up in Greece, but I was in a French high
01:50:21 school and I was taking English as a foreign language. So the English teacher basically
01:50:26 asked us to write a poem in English. So this is basically what I’m going to embarrass myself and
01:50:33 read from my 16 year old self many, many years ago.
01:50:36 SL. Can you give a little bit more context about who you were in this moment? So like just…
01:50:40 SL. So here’s what’s really interesting. In terms of growing up, how do we grow up?
01:50:46 SL. It’s very difficult to grow up if you’re in the same school, going from one class to the other,
01:50:51 and all your friends know you inside out. It’s very difficult to change. It’s very difficult to
01:50:55 grow up because they have a certain set of expectations for who you are and for how you’re
01:51:00 going to behave. So in many ways we kind of tend to get set in our ways and not change very much.
01:51:07 I think something that helped me grow up is that when I was 11 years old, I was a
01:51:13 kid in Greece in primary school. When I was 12 years old, I was a kid in Greece in a first year
01:51:20 of high school. When I was 13, I was in France, so basically moved countries and schools. The next
01:51:30 year, I moved schools again because it was a transition in the French educational system
01:51:33 from one school to the next. The next year after that, my family moved to New York in a French high
01:51:38 school there, and the next year after that, I’m moving to MIT. So basically between 11 and 19,
01:51:44 every single year, I actually had the opportunity to grow. I was not held by people who knew me,
01:51:53 and I could reinvent myself or reshape myself or reshape my personality, my emotions, as I was
01:52:00 growing up, especially in such a transformative time of a kid’s life from 11 to 17. I was
01:52:07 11 to 17. Okay, first of all, it’s so powerful that you think of it that way. Did you think of
01:52:11 it that way at the moment? Because it’s kind of a source. You said an opportunity to grow,
01:52:17 but it’s kind of suffering. I mean, you’re being torn away from the thing you know into a thing
01:52:21 you don’t know. So when we moved from South France to New York, I was pissed. I was pissed. I was
01:52:30 taking these long bike rides in the countryside, jumping in French swimming pools, and I had all
01:52:36 these wonderful friendships, going downtown and just staying by the fountains in the dim lit
01:52:42 streets of Aix en Provence in the South of France. It was magical. And suddenly, I moved to New York
01:52:49 City, a city of cement, of ugliness, like trash in the streets at every corner. It’s horrible.
01:52:57 Snow everywhere. Having never seen snow or like real snow in my life, I moved from Athens to South
01:53:03 France to suddenly New York. So I was pissed. But whether I saw it as an opportunity for growth,
01:53:09 I don’t think so. I don’t think that I was that self reflective. It was just how it happened.
01:53:14 Only now do you see it this way.
01:53:15 I saw it like that probably pretty early on, but not during those transitions. So basically,
01:53:21 during those transitions, I was just a kid being a kid. And maybe the time that I started seeing it
01:53:29 that way was maybe when I decided to stay at MIT as a professor after having been there as a student.
01:53:37 And I kind of saw the struggle of getting professors to not see you as a kid when they’re
01:53:45 your peers. And I was very flattered when one of my friends basically told me, oh, I remember you
01:53:51 in recitation when you first asked me a question. I said, wow, this kid. I’ll pay attention.
01:53:58 One day I’ll be a peer.
01:54:00 So it’s, you know, certainly my perception was that many of them could not see me as anything
01:54:05 but a kid. But it turns out that some of them saw me as something different than a kid even
01:54:10 before I was actually their colleague. So it’s kind of an interesting place because
01:54:15 what I like to say about MIT is that people treat you as equal no matter what stage.
01:54:20 And they respect you for what you say, not for who you are when you’re saying it.
01:54:25 And if I’m wrong, my students will tell me. They will have no reservation to just be bluntly,
01:54:32 you know, sorry. I don’t agree with that.
01:54:35 Yeah. I mean, the beautiful thing about you, sorry to put it this way, is, you know,
01:54:44 maybe people who weren’t familiar with your work beforehand might think, like,
01:54:50 might not realize that you’re a world class scientist who leads a large group and so on.
01:54:54 Because there’s a youthful nature to you that it’s, I mean, you talk like a first,
01:55:00 like an undergrad, you know, with the excitement and the fresh eyes and the sort of excitement
01:55:06 about the world. And that’s, first of all, super contagious and beautiful. You know,
01:55:11 it’s easy to sort of fall into behaving seriously because then people kind of start putting
01:55:19 you on a pedestal more into a position of power. You want to sort of act like you’re
01:55:26 in a position of power as opposed to allowing yourself to be lost in the just the curiosity,
01:55:31 the childish view of the world, which is just this open eyed love of knowledge.
01:55:38 And that was the transition that I was describing when I decided to go back to my rollerblades
01:55:41 and t shirt and baseball cap. Basically, you know, when I met my first postdoc,
01:55:48 it was basically, you know, he was interviewing for postdocs at MIT. He already had several
01:55:53 first author papers to his name in top journals. And my friend Yulia basically introduced me to
01:56:00 Alex Stark, who basically was interviewing at the time with Rick Young and with Eric Lander,
01:56:04 just like these massive names in the field. And I was just a first year faculty person with,
01:56:09 you know, zero credibility. And she basically says, Oh, there’s this friend of mine, Alex,
01:56:16 who’s visiting. He’s also German. You know, he wanted to meet you. I’m like, Oh, sounds great.
01:56:19 I’d love to talk science. I show up. We sit at the amphitheater in Stata. You know, I basically
01:56:26 arrive in my rollerblades, you know, jump a few steps, sit down wearing my blades. We’re having
01:56:32 this awesome conversation about science and about gene regulation and how the whole thing works and
01:56:36 sort of, you know, my perspective and his perspective. We’re just bouncing ideas for 30
01:56:40 minutes. And then I just dash off to my next meeting. And he basically emails me afterwards.
01:56:46 And I was giving him advice about how to interview with Eric Lander, how to interview with Rick Young
01:56:50 and how to sort of get a position with them. And then after a while, he emails me saying,
01:56:55 I would love to become a postdoc in your group. I’m like, what are you kidding me?
01:56:59 Like, so, so he basically didn’t care that I wear rollerblades and T shirt. All he cared
01:57:11 about was my ideas and sort of embracing the me with the childhood excitement about science
01:57:19 was basically what attracted him. It wasn’t the, wow, this guy runs a big lab or this and that.
01:57:24 He was just like, I like his ideas. I want to work with him. That, by the way, folks is the best of
01:57:30 MIT. That’s what MIT stands for. So that’s a beautiful story. But take me back to the poem
01:57:36 and where did this poem come from? Where’s your mindset? So who is the 17, 16 year old kid Manolis?
01:57:43 So again, I’ve just seen snow for the first time and I’m in New York. So I’m, you know,
01:57:51 maybe that’s where the sadness in the poem comes from. But anyway, we’re asked in class to write
01:57:56 an assignment. This is my third language. I’m not very good at it. So pardon me, but here’s what I
01:58:01 wrote. Children dance now all in row, children laughing at the snow. But in time’s endless flow,
01:58:10 children sooner or later grow. Men are mortal. We go by. If we know it, we may cry. But I thought
01:58:18 a love so sweet was immortal, was so deep. There I told you, darling sweet, that forever love would
01:58:24 keep. Blossomed spring and summer shined. Then blue autumn, winter died. One year passed, but the
01:58:33 clouds still remember all our vows. Never faked and never lied. All we did was stare and smile.
01:58:41 All alone, sitting down, to the snow we made our vow. But you told me you were right. Birds who
01:58:48 love are birds who cry. Now with laughter children play, yet the sky is so gray. Even if the snow
01:58:59 seems bright, without you have lost their light. Sun that sang and moon that smiled, all the stars
01:59:06 have ceased to shine. All of nature drew its grace, found its light within your face. Now you’re gone
01:59:14 and won’t return. Let the snow in my heart burn. There’s a Greek in there. That’s beautiful. That’s
01:59:20 beautiful, by the way. And the rhyming, the musicality, there’s both a simplicity and a
01:59:28 musicality to it. I’m 16. It’s my third language. No, no, no. So I really enjoy like Robert Frost
01:59:33 poems. I don’t mean simplicity in a bad way, in a negative way at all. Again, it’s very weird to
01:59:38 analyze your own poem, but I think it captures the simplicity of youth and the way that it kind of
01:59:43 starts with Children Dance Like Only Low. It basically, and it kind of shows that snow can be
01:59:47 interpreted first in the first verse as a happy thing, ta da da da da snow. And then in the end,
01:59:54 you know, now with laughter children play, I’m like, now I’ve grown basically. It’s this
02:00:00 transformation that we’re actually talking about, this whole men are mortal, we go by.
02:00:04 I’m sort of, you know, you’re saying, are you comfortable with growing old? I’m like,
02:00:07 duh. I was, I was since I was 16. And what’s really interesting is that, you know, again,
02:00:12 when I was 12 years old in our summer house in Greece, I remember sort of telling my sister
02:00:18 my outlook that I would have as a father for how to bring up my own kids. So it’s very weird that
02:00:24 I’ve always sort of seen the full path from, you know, a kid. From when you were young. Yeah. I
02:00:31 don’t know if you like this Joni Mitchell song. I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,
02:00:35 from up and down and still somehow it snows illusions I recall. It’s clouds illusions I
02:00:42 recall. I really don’t know clouds at all. So it’s really beautiful. So I think the Joni Mitchell
02:00:46 song, which again, I heard for the first time much, much after this, and I wouldn’t even compare
02:00:51 this to that. But what Joni Mitchell is saying that song is that you can see life from two
02:00:56 perspectives. You can see the good or the bad in both, you know, in everything you see. And I think
02:01:03 that’s the allegory of snow right now. You can see snow as this bright, white, wonderful thing,
02:01:09 or you can see snow as this miserable, you know, gray thing. So that’s sort of, and what I like
02:01:16 about the last verse now with laughter children play is that it’s a recall to the first one
02:01:20 where I was the kid enjoying careless life, and eventually was making promises that something
02:01:27 would be forever. And I think part of that is also the loss of my friendships in France,
02:01:32 of being in New York now and sort of everything’s gray. And, you know, even though the snow seems
02:01:38 bright, without you have lost their light, sun that sang and moon that smiled. So it’s this
02:01:42 concept that if you lose your love, the same thing can be perceived in a very different way.
02:01:52 Let me ask you this, because somebody wrote me this long email,
02:01:57 and I think you’re the perfect person to ask this. You mentioned love.
02:02:03 From a genetic perspective, what is it? What do you make of love? Why do we humans fall in love?
02:02:17 In your own life, why did you fall in love? You know, the email that was written to me was,
02:02:24 you always talk about mortality and fear of mortality, but you don’t ask about love. So I
02:02:33 don’t know if there’s some thoughts you could give about the role of love in your own life,
02:02:41 or the role of love in human life in general. I think love in many ways defines my life.
02:02:50 It’s basically, I like to say that I’m a human first and a professor second. And I think this
02:02:58 passion for life, this passion for, you know, everything around us. I mean, the only way to
02:03:04 describe that is love. It’s basically, you know, embracing your, you know, emotional self,
02:03:12 embracing the, you know, the non brainiac in you, embracing the sort of intangible, the
02:03:28 not very well defined. And even in my own research, I’m just very passionate about
02:03:34 everything I do. You know, there’s a certain passion that comes through. And what, I’m sorry,
02:03:39 again, being Greek, the etymology of the word passion. What was passion? Passion is suffering.
02:03:46 The etymology, when we talk about the passion of the Christ, it’s a suffering.
02:03:50 And in the Greek version of that word, pathos, like pathology, pathos is deep suffering. It’s
02:03:59 the concept of someone who’s sympathetic. Sympathetic means suffering together,
02:04:04 experiencing emotions together. So it’s funny that you ask me about love and I respond with passion,
02:04:09 passion for life, passion for research, passion for my family, for my children, for, you know.
02:04:14 So there’s a certain passion that defines me and everything else follows rather than the other way
02:04:25 around. I’m not first thinking with my brain, what is the most impactful paper we could write? And
02:04:31 then going after that, I’m thinking with my heart, what am I passionate about? What drives me? What
02:04:35 just like, you know, makes me take. And that’s a beautiful way to live, but I love it how the Greek
02:04:41 part of you just kind of connects it to the suffering. So if you could remove the suffering.
02:04:46 No, no, no, no, no, no. When I say suffering, I don’t mean suffering as in being miserable. I mean
02:04:52 suffering as in being emotionally invested in something. Remember, I mean, again, if you look
02:04:58 at this poem, what is it saying? It’s saying birds who love are birds who cry. Right? That’s the very
02:05:08 definition of love. Exposing your fragility. If you’re not afraid of suffering, you don’t fall
02:05:15 in love. As soon as you hold back, you protect, you shield your heart, no love can enter. So there’s
02:05:24 this Simon and Garfunkel song. I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. And an island
02:05:34 never cries. So again, there’s some aspect of that into this poem. The fact that, you know,
02:05:44 but you told me, you know, there I told you, darling sweet, that forever love would keep,
02:05:47 is this intermediate thing. And then there’s a recall, but you told me you were right. Birds
02:05:51 who love are birds who cry. So it basically says that love is the fragility that you’re
02:05:57 willing to give to another person. It’s opening up your vulnerable spots. It’s sort of accepting
02:06:06 that there’s no safety net. You’re just giving yourself fully and you’re ready to be hurt.
02:06:14 So you’ve already been way too kind with your time, but I’m going to force you to stay here
02:06:18 just a few minutes longer as we’re talking about goodbyes. You have a really nice other poem here
02:06:25 about goodbyes. Can I force you to read it as well? Oh, twist my arm, twist my arm. So the next
02:06:33 poem was written specifically for our high school yearbook. So another poem written on demand,
02:06:40 the rest of them are just so miserable, written by pure, you know, sadness and melancholy.
02:06:46 But this one was also written on demand and it was basically saying goodbye, as is appropriate
02:06:53 right now, to my friends and sort of, again, reflecting this whole journey and transformation
02:06:58 through life. And also I think showing a little bit of introspection about how we kind of had it
02:07:04 easy in high school and we’re about to go into rougher waters. So the title is actually The Tide
02:07:10 Waters and it’s an analogy on that. So here it goes. All this was another lake, where some rest
02:07:19 we sailors take, waters calm and full of fish, we’ll find there what we wish, some seek fruit
02:07:26 and others feast, some of us just look for peace, some find fresh ships, other love, some seek both
02:07:33 and neither have. We were different when we came, each his own story and fame, different people had
02:07:40 we been, different cultures had we seen, different nature, different face, each unlike all in this
02:07:47 place. We had faced success, defeat, then in one lake came to meet. There, the orders that we
02:07:55 followed and the pride that we swallowed, made us one but not the same, joined us strangers who
02:08:03 there came. Sooner later, groups were made, tribes where differences will fade, some attached more
02:08:11 or less, others fought and made a mess. But again we have to go, what for, where to, we don’t know,
02:08:19 still we know it, we will try, there to rush, to flee, to fly. There’ll be some who wish to stay
02:08:26 but they’ll carry on away, we’ll continue on our journey as we came here, strong yet lonely.
02:08:33 From the lake a river flows, from the river many goals, on that river we will race, each will try
02:08:39 to find his pace, in that scene the sailors face, their first fear, defeat, disgrace,
02:08:47 defeat, disgrace, here and there comes out a face that the waters soon embrace. Some get lucky,
02:08:56 find their way, others sink beneath the waves, in this race we will part, some will settle near the
02:09:04 start, some set goals beyond the stars because the river carries far. You should know in what we’ve
02:09:11 done, the hard part is still to come. So I’ll have to say goodbye, don’t you worry, I won’t cry,
02:09:20 neither will they those who try, till the end, to keep their pride. But please know dearest friends
02:09:28 who are always there to mend, I will always need your hand, I will miss you till the end.
02:09:35 I don’t think there’s a better way to end it. Manolis, like I said last time, you’re one of
02:09:41 the most special people at MIT, one of the most special people in Boston, and whatever mental
02:09:48 force field that you’re applying in saying that Boston is the best city in the world,
02:09:54 MIT the best university in the world, you’re actually making it happen. So thank you so much
02:09:58 for talking to us, huge honor. Thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to
02:10:03 this conversation with Manolis Kellis, and thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, Magic Spoon,
02:10:08 and ExpressVPN. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to
02:10:14 support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars
02:10:19 on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter
02:10:24 at Lex Friedman. And now, let me leave you with some words from another well known Greek,
02:10:31 Alexander III of Macedonia, commonly known as Alexander the Great.
02:10:35 There is nothing impossible to him who will try. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.