The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fourth time on the podcast.
He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group.
Since this is episode number 142, and 42, as we all know, is the answer to the ultimate
question of life, the universe, and everything, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
We decided to talk about this unanswerable question of the meaning of life in whatever
way we two descendants of apes could muster, from biology, to psychology, to metaphysics,
and to music. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode,
thanks to Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence, structure,
and readability, Athletic Greens, the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all
my nutritional bases, and Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out
these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that the opening 40 minutes of the conversation are all about
the many songs that formed the soundtrack to the journey of Manolis's life. It was a happy
accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating mind of Manolis.
I include links to YouTube versions of many of the songs we mentioned in the description
and overlay lyrics on occasion. But if you're just listening to this without listening to the songs
or watching the video, I hope you still might enjoy as I did the passion that Manolis has for
music, his singing of the little excerpts from the songs, and in general, the meaning we discuss
that we pull from the different songs. If music is not your thing, I do give timestamps to the
less musical and more philosophical parts of the conversation. I hope you enjoy this little
experimenting conversation about music and life. If you do, please subscribe on YouTube,
review it with 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman. And now here's my conversation with Manolis Kallis.
You mentioned Leonard Cohen and the song Hallelujah as a beautiful song. So what are the
three songs you draw the most meaning from about life? Don't get me started. So there's really
countless songs that have marked me, that have sort of shaped me in periods of joy and in periods of
sadness. My son likes to joke that I have a song for every sentence he will say, because very often
I will break into a song with a sentence he'll say. My wife calls me the radio because I can sort
of recite hundreds of songs that have really shaped me. So it's going to be very hard to just
pick a few. So I'm just going to tell you a little bit about my song transition as I've grown up.
In Greece, it was very much about, as I told you before, the misery, the poverty, but also
overcoming adversity. So some of the songs that have really shaped me are Hadis Alexiu, for example,
is one of my favorite singers in Greece. And then there's also really just old traditional songs
that my parents used to listen to. Like one of them is Nemon Plousios, which is basically,
oh, if I was rich. And the song is painting this beautiful picture about all the noises that you
hear in the neighborhood, in his poor neighborhood, the train going by, the priest walking to the
church and the kids crying next door and all of that. And he says, with all of that, I'm having
trouble falling asleep and dreaming. If I was rich. And then he was like, you know, breaking to that.
So it's just that position between the spirit and the sublime and then the physical and the harsh
reality, it's just not having troubles, not being miserable. So basically, rich to him just means
out of my misery, basically. And then also being able to travel, being able to sort of be the captain
of a ship and see the world and stuff like that. So it's just such beautiful imagery.
So many of the Greek songs, just like the poetry we talked about, they acknowledge the cruelty,
the difficulty of life, but are longing for a better life. That's exactly right. And another one
is Ftohologia. And this is one of those songs that has like a fast and joyful half and a slow
and sad half. And it goes back and forth between them. And it's like, Ftohologia is a song for me.
So poor, you know, basically, it's the state of being poor. I don't even know if there's a word for
that in English. And then fast part is. So then it's like, oh, you know, basically,
like the state of being poor and misery, you know, for you, I write all my songs, et cetera.
And then the fast part is in your arms grew up and suffered and, you know, stood up and,
you know, rose. Men with clear vision, this whole concept of taking on the world
with nothing to lose because you've seen the worst of it. This imagery of
it's describing the young men as cypress trees. And that's probably one of my earliest exposure
to a metaphor to sort of, you know, this very rich imagery. And I love about the fact that
I was reading a story to my kids the other day and it was dark. And my daughter who's six is like,
oh, can I please see the pictures? And Jonathan, who's eight. So my daughter, Cleo,
is like, oh, let's look at the pictures. And my son, Jonathan, he's like, but Cleo,
if you look at the pictures, it's just an image. If you just close your eyes and listen, it's a video.
That's brilliant. It's beautiful. And he's basically showing just how much more the human
imagination has, besides just a few images that, you know, the book will give you. And then another
one, oh, gosh, this one is really like miserable. It's, it's called Stoperiali, and it's basically
describing how vigorously we took on our life and we pushed hard towards the direction that we then
realized was the wrong one. And it, again, these songs give you so much perspective. There's no
songs like that in English that will basically, you know, sort of just smack you in the face
about sort of the passion and the force and the drive. And then it turns out, we just followed
the wrong life. And it's like, wow. Okay, so that was, all right, so that, that's like before 12.
So, so, you know, growing up in sort of this horrendously miserable, you know, sort of
view of romanticism, of, you know, suffering. So then my preteen years is like, you know,
learning English through songs. So basically, you know, listening to all the American pop songs
and then memorizing them vocally, before I even knew what they meant. So, you know, Madonna and
Michael Jackson and all of these sort of really popular songs and, you know, George Michael and just
songs that I would just listen to the radio and repeat vocally. And eventually, as I started
learning English, I was like, Oh, wow, this thing has been repeating. I know I now understand what
it means without re listening to it. But just with re repeating it was like, Oh, again, Michael
Jackson's man in the mirror is teaching you that it's your responsibility to just improve yourself.
You know, if you want to make the world a better place, they could look at yourself and make the
change this whole concept of, again, I mean, all of these songs, you can listen to them
shallowly, or you can just listen to them and say, Oh, there's deeper meaning here.
And I think there's a certain philosophy of song as a way of touching the psyche. So,
if you look at regions of the brain, people who have lost their language ability because
they have an accident in that region of the brain can actually sing because it's exactly
it's exactly the symmetric region of the brain. And that again, teaches you so much about language
evolution and sort of the duality of musicality and, you know, rhythmic patterns and eventually
language. Do you have a sense of why songs developed? So you're kind of suggesting that
it's possible that there is something important about our connection with song and with music
on the level of the importance of language? Is it possible? It's not just possible. In my view,
language comes after music, language comes after song. No, seriously, like basically my view of
human cognitive evolution is rituals. If you look at many early cultures, there's rituals around
every stage of life. There's organized dance performances around mating. And if you look
at mate selection, I mean, that's an evolutionary drive right there. So basically, if you're not
able to string together a complex dance as a bird, you don't get a mate. And that actually forms
this development for many song learning birds. Not every bird knows how to sing. And not every bird
knows how to learn a complicated song. So basically, there's birds that simply have the same few
tunes that they know how to play. And a lot of that is inherent and genetically encoded.
And others are birds that learn how to sing. And if you look at a lot of these exotic birds
of paradise and stuff like that, the mating rituals they have are enormously amazing.
And I think human mating rituals of ancient tribes are not very far off from that. And in my
view, the sequential formation of these movements is a prelude to the cognitive capabilities
that ultimately enable language. And it's fascinating to think that that's not just an
accidental precursor to intelligence. It's actually selected. Well, it's actually selected and it's
prerequisite. It's required for intelligence. And even as language has now developed,
I think the artistic expression is needed, like badly needed by our brain. So it's not just that,
oh, our brain can kind of take a break and go do that stuff. No, I mean, I don't know if you
remember that scene from, oh gosh, was that Jack Nicholson movie in New Hampshire? All work and no
play make Jack a dull boy. The shining. So there's this amazing scene where he's constantly trying
to concentrate and what's coming out of the typewriter is just gibberish. And I have that image
as well when I'm when I'm working. And I'm like, no, basically all of these crazy, you know, huge
number of hobbies that I have, they're not just tolerated by my work, they're required by my work.
This ability of sort of stretching your brain in all these different directions
is connecting your emotional self and your cognitive self. And that's a prerequisite to
being able to be cognitively capable, at least in my view. Yeah, I wonder if the world without art and
music, you're just making me realize that perhaps that world would be not just devoid of fun things
to look at or listen to, but devoid of all the other stuff, all the bridges and rockets and science.
Exactly, exactly. Creativity is not disconnected from art. And you know, my kids, I mean, you know,
I could be doing the full math treatment to them. No, they play the piano and play the violin and
they play sports. I mean, this whole, you know, sort of movement and going through mazes and playing
tennis and, you know, playing soccer and avoiding obstacles and all of that, that forms your three
dimensional view of the world. Being able to actually move and run and play in three dimensions
is extremely important for math, for, you know, stringing together complicated concepts.
It's the same underlying cognitive machinery that is used for navigating mazes and for
navigating theorems and sort of solving equations. So I can't, you know, I can't have a conversation
with my students without, you know, sort of either using my hand or opening the whiteboard
in Zoom and just constantly drawing or, you know, back when we had in-person meetings,
just the whiteboard. Yeah, that's fascinating to think about. So that's Michael Jackson,
man, Mira, Carolus Whisper, George Michael, which is a song I like. You didn't say that?
I had recorded, I had recorded, no, no, no, it's an amazing song for me. I had recorded a small part
of it as it played at the tail end of the radio and I had a tape where I only had part of that
song. And I've just played it over and over and over again, just so beautiful. It's so hard
breaking. That song is almost Greek. It's so hard breaking. I know. And George Michael is Greek.
Is he Greek? He's Greek. Of course. George Michael is. I mean, he's Greek. Yeah.
Now you know. I'm so sorry to offend you so deeply, not knowing this. So, okay. So anyway,
so we're moving to France when I'm 12 years old and now I'm getting into the songs of Gainsbourg.
So Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer. He is always seen on stage,
like not even pretending to try to please, just like with his cigarette, just like
mumbling his songs. But the lyrics are unbelievable. Like basically, entire sentences will rhyme.
He will say the same thing twice and you're like, whoa. And in fact, another speaking of Greek,
a French Greek, George Moustachis, this song is just magnificent. With my
So with my face of Métèque is actually a Greek word. It's, you know, it's a French word for
a Greek word. But Mét comes from Meta and then from ecology, which means home. So Métèque is
someone who has changed homes for a migrant. So with my face of a migrant, and you'll love this one,
the Jewish heron, the Patrick Greg of meandering Jew of Greek pastor.
So again, you know, the Russian Greek, you know, Jew Orthodox connections.
And my cheveux au quatre vents with my hair in the four wings avec mes yeux tous délavés
qui me donnent l'air de rêver avec with my eyes that are all washed out who give me the
pretense of dreaming but who don't dream that much anymore with my hands of thief of musician
and who have stolen so many gardens with my mouth that has drunk that has kissed and that has
bitten without ever pleasing its hunger with my skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the
summers and anything that was wearing a skirt with my heart and then you have to listen to this
verse it's so beautiful avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert with my heart
that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered but was able to that knew how to make
in French is actually su faire that knew how to make qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert
versus that span the whole thing it's just beautiful. Do you know on a small tangent,
do you know Jacques Braille? Of course, of course.
That song gets me every time. So there's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists
not Nina Simone. No, no, no, no. Carol Emerald. She's from Amsterdam and she has a version of
Nume Kitapa where she's actually added some English lyrics and it's really beautiful but
again Nume Kitapa is just so I mean it's you know the promises, the volcanoes that you know will
restart it's just so beautiful and I love there's not many songs that so show such depth of
desperation for another human being that's so powerful. And then high school now I'm starting
to learn English so I moved to New York so Sting's Englishman in New York. Magnificent song and again
there's if manners mageth man as someone said then he's the hero of the day it takes a man to
suffer ignorance and smile be yourself no matter what they say and then takes more than combat gear
to make a man takes more than a license for a gun confront your enemies avoid them when you can
a gentleman will walk but never run it's it again you're talking about songs that teach you how to
live I mean this is one of them basically says it's not the combat gear that makes a man where's
the part where he says uh there you go gentleness so bright a rare in this society at night a candle
is brighter than the sun so beautiful he basically says well you just might be the only one uh
modesty propriety can lead to notoriety you could end up as the only one it's um it basically tells
you you don't have to be like the others be yourself show kindness show generosity don't
you know don't let that anger get to you you know the song fragile how fragile we are how fragile we
are so again as in Greece I didn't even know what that meant how fragile we are but the song was so
beautiful and then eventually I learned English and I actually understand the lyrics and the song
is actually written after the contrast murdered Ben Linder in 1987 and the US eventually turned
against supporting these gorillas and it was just a political song but so such a realization that
you can't win with violence basically and that song starts with the most beautiful poetry so
if blood will flow when flesh and steel are one drying in the color of the evening sun
tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away but something in our minds will always stay
perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes
through violence and nothing ever could for all those born beneath an angry star
lest we forget how fragile we are damn damn right I mean that's poetry yeah it was beautiful
and he's using the English language it's just such a refined way with deep meanings but also
words that rhyme just so beautifully and evocations of when flesh and steel are one
I mean it's just mind-vogling and then of course the refrain that everybody remembers is on and
on the rain will fall etc but like this beginning wow yeah and again tears from a star how fragile
we are I mean just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally this something it's it seems that
more meaning comes when there's a rhythm that I don't know what what that is that probably
connects to exactly what you were saying and if you pay close attention you will notice that
the more obvious words sometimes are the second verse and the less obvious are often the first
verse because it makes the second verse flow much more naturally because otherwise it feels contrived
oh you went and found this like unusual word yes in dark moments the whole album of Pink Floyd
and the movie just marked me enormously as a teenager just the wall and there's one song that
never actually made it into the album that's only there in the movie about when the tigers broke free
and the tigers are the tanks of the Germans and it just describes again this vivid imagery it was
just before dawn one miserable morning in black 44 when the forward commander was told to sit tight
when he asked that his men be withdrawn and the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back
the enemy tanks for a while and the ansio bridge head was held for the price of a few hundred
ordinary lives so that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with us versus them
us and them god only knows that's not what we would choose to do for work he cried from the rear
and the front rows died from another song it's like this whole concept of us versus them and
there's that theme of us versus them again where the child is discovering how his father died when
he finds an old and a found it one day in a drawer all photographs hidden away and my eyes
still grow damp to remember his majesty's sign with his own rubber stamp so it's so ironic
because it seems the way that he's writing it that he's not crying because his father was lost
he's crying because kind old king george took the time to actually write mother a note about
the fact that his father died it's so ironic because he basically says we are just ordinary men
and of course we're disposable so i don't know if you know what the root of the word pioneers
but you had a chessboard here earlier upon in french the pion they are the ones that you sent
to the front to get murdered slaughter this whole concept of pioneers having taken this
whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that you know we're now treating as heroes so
anyway there's this juxtaposition of that and then the part that always just strikes me is the music
and the tonality totally changes and now he describes the attack it was dark all around
there was frost in the ground when the tigers broke free and no one survived from the royal
fusiliers company they were all left behind most of them dead the rest of them dying
and that's how the high command took my daddy from me and that song even though it's not in the album
explains the whole movie because it's this movie of misery it's this movie of someone being stuck
in their head and not being able to get out of it there's no other movie that i think has captured
so well this prison that is someone's own mind and this wall that you're stuck inside and this
you know feeling of loneliness and sort of is there anybody out there and you know sort of hello
hello is there anybody in there it's not if you can hear me is there anyone home come on yeah
i hear your feeling down just one minute you're leaving again anyway so yeah the prison of your
mind so those are the darker moments exactly these are the darker moments yeah it's in the
darker moments the mind does feel like you're you're trapped in alone in a room with it yeah
and there's this this scene in the movie which like where he just breaks out with his guitar and
there's this prostitute in the room he starts throwing stuff and then he like you know breaks
the wind and he throws the chair outside and then you see him laying in the pool with his own blood
like you know everywhere and then there's these endless hours spent fixing every little thing
and lining it up and it's this whole sort of mania versus you know you can spend hours building up
something and just destroy it in a few seconds one of my turns is that song and it's like uh
i feel cold as a tourney kid right as dry as a funeral drama and then the music people are saying
run to the bedroom there's a suitcase on the left you find my favorite acts don't look so frightened
this is just a passing phase one of my bad days it's just so beautiful i need to rewatch it that's
so but imagine watching this as a teenager yeah it like ruins your mind it's like so many it's
just such harsh imagery and then um you know anyway so so there's the dark moment and then
again going back to sting now it's the political songs russians and i think that song should be
a new national anthem for the us not for russians but for red versus blue
mr khrushchev says we will bury you i don't subscribe to this point of view it'd be such
an ignorant thing to do if the russians love their children too what is it doing it's basically saying
the russians are just as humans as we are there's no way that they're gonna let their
children die and then it's just so beautiful how can i save my innocent boy from oppenheimer's
deadly toy and now that's the new national anthem are you reading there is a no monopoly of common
sense on either side of the political fence we share the same biology regardless of ideology
believe me when i say to you i hope the russians love their children too
there's no such thing as a winnable war it's a lie we don't believe anymore
i mean it's beautiful right and for god's sake america wake up these are your fellow americans
they're your your fellow biology that you know there is no monopoly of common sense on either
side of the political fence it's just so beautiful there's no crisper simpler way to say russians
love their children too the the common humanity yeah and remember the what i was telling you i
think in one of our first podcast about the the daughter who's crying for her husband for her
brother to come back for more and then the virgin mary appears and says who should i take instead
this turk here's his family here's his children this other one he just got married etc and that
basically says no i mean if you look at the lord of the ranks the enemies are these monsters they're
not human and that's what we always do we always say they you know they're not like us they're
different they're not humans etc so there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to
go to war you know if you realize this how close we are genetically one with the other this whole
99.9 identical you can't bear weapons against someone who's like that and the things that are
the most meaningful to us in our lives at every level is the same on all sides on both sides
exactly so not just that we're genetically the same yeah we're ideologically the same we love
our children we love our country we will you know we will fight for our family yeah so
so and the last one i mentioned last time we spoke which is johnny michels both sides now
so uh she she has three rounds one on clouds one on love and one on life and on cloud she says
rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air and feather canyons everywhere
i've looked at clouds that way but now they only block the sun they rain and snow on everyone
so many things i would have done but clouds got in my way and then i've looked at clouds from
both sides now from up and down and still somehow it's clouds illusions i recall i really don't know
clouds at all and then she goes on about love how it's super super happy or it's about misery
and loss and about life how it's about winning and losing and so so forth but now old friends
are acting strange they shake their heads they say i've changed well some things lost and
some things gained and living every day so again that's growing up and realizing that well the view
that you had as a kid is not necessarily that you have as an adult remember my poem from when I was
16 years old of this whole you know children dance now all in row and then in the end even though the
snow seems bright without you have lost their light sun that sang and moon that smiled so this
whole concept of if you have love and if you have passion you see the exact same thing from a different
way you can go out running in the rain or you could just stay in and say ah sucks i won't be able to go
outside now both sides anyway and the last one is last last one i promise leonard cohen this is
amazing by the way you're i'm so glad we stumbled on how much how much joy you have in so many
avenues of life and music is just one of them that's amazing but yes leonard cohen going back
to leonard cohen since that's where you started so leonard cohen's dance me to the end of love
that's what that was our opening song in our wedding with my wife oh no that's as we came out to
greet the guests it was dance me to the end of love and then another one which is just so passionate
always and we always keep referring back to it is i'm your man and it goes on and on about sort of
i can be every type of lover for you and what's really beautiful in marriage is that we live that
with my with my wife every day you can have the passion you can have the anger you can have the
love you can have the tenderness there's just so many gems in that song if you want to partner
take my hand or if you want to strike me down in anger here i stand i'm your man and then if you
want a boxer i will step into the ring for you if you want a driver climb inside or if you want to
take me for a ride you know you can so this whole concept of you want to drive i'll follow you want
me to drive i'll drive um and the difference i would say between like that and never keep the
pause this song he's got an attitude he's like um he's proud of this his ability to basically be any
kind of man for the money long as opposed to the Jacques Braille like desperation of what do i have
to be for you to love me that kind of desperation but but but notice there's a parallel here there's
a verse that is perhaps not paid attention to as much which says ah but a man never got a woman
back not by begging on his knees so it seems that the i'm your man is actually an apology song
in the same way that numekita pa is an apology song numekita pa basically says i've
screwed up i'm sorry baby and in the same way that the careless whisper is our screwed up yes
that's right i'm never gonna dance again guilty feet have got no rhythm um so so this is an apology
song not by begging on his knees or at crawl to you baby and at fall at your feet and at howl at
your beauty like a dog in heat and a claw at your heart and i tear at your sheet i'd say please
and then um the the last one is so beautiful if you want a father for your child or only want to
walk with me a while across the sand i'm your man that's the the last verses which basically says
you want me for a day i'll be there you want me to just walk i'll be there you want me for life
if you want a father for your child i'll be there too it's just so beautiful oh sorry remember how
i told you i was going to finish with a light hearted song yes last one you're ready so um
alison kraus and union station country song believe it or not the lucky one so i i've never
identified as much with the lyrics of a song as this one and it's hilarious my friend seraphim
batoglu is the guy who got me to genomics in the first place i owe enormously to him and he's
another greek we actually met dancing believe it or not so we used to perform greek dances uh
was the president of the international students association so we put on these big performances
for 500 people at mit and there's a picture on the mit tech where seraphim who's like you know
bodybuilder was holding on his shoulder and i was like like doing maneuvers in the air basically
so anyway these guys had a theme um we were driving back from um a conference and there's
this russian girl who was describing how every member of her family had been either killed by
the communists or killed by the germans or killed like she had just like you know misery like death
and you know sickness and everything everyone was decimated in her family she was the last
standing member and we stopped at a seraphim was driving and we stopped at a at a rest area and he
he can he takes me side and he's like men always we're gonna crash get her out of my car and then
he basically says but but but i'm only reassured because you're here with me and i'm like what
do you mean he's like you know he's like from your smile i know you're the luckiest man on the planet
so there's this really funny thing where i just feel freaking lucky all the time and it's an it's
a question of attitude of course i'm not any luckier than any other person but every science
must be something horrible happens to me i'm like and in fact even in that song the the the song
about sort of you know walking on the beach and this you know sort of taking our life the wrong
way and then you know having to turn around at some point he's like you know in the fresh sand
we wrote her name so how nicely that the wind blew and the writing was erased so again it's
this whole sort of not just saying bummer but oh great i just lost this this must mean something
right as horrible thing happened it must open the door to a new door beautiful chapter so so
alison kraus is talking about the lucky one so it's like oh my god she wrote a song for me
and she goes you're the lucky one i know that now it's free as the wind blowing down the road
loved by many hated by none i'd say you are lucky because you know what you've done not the care in
the world not the worry inside everything's gonna be all right because you're the lucky one and then
she goes uh you're the lucky one always having fun a jack of all trades a master of none you look at
the world with the smiling eyes and laugh at the devil as his train rolls by i'll give you a song
and a one-night stand you'll be looking at a happy man because you're the lucky one it's basically
says if you just don't worry too much if you don't try to be you know a one-trick pony if you just
embrace the fact that you might suck at a bunch of things but you're just going to try a lot of
things and then there's another first that says well you're blessed i guess but never knowing
which road you're choosing to you the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing
it's just so beautiful because he basically says if you try
why you're best but it's still playing if you lose it's okay you had an awesome game
and um again superficially it sounds like a super happy song but then there's a the last
verse basically says no matter where you are that's where you'll be you can bet your luck won't
follow me just give you a song and then one night stand you'll be looking at a happy man
and in the video of the song she just walks away or he just walks away or something like that
and it basically tells you that freedom comes at a price freedom comes at the price of non-commitment
this whole sort of birds who love or birds who cry you can't really love unless you cry you can't
just be the lucky one the happy boy la la la and yet have a long-term relationship so it's you know
on one hand i identify with the shallowness of this song of you know you're the lucky one jack
of all trades a master of none but at the same time i identify with a lesson of well you can't
just be the happy merry go lucky all the time sometimes you have to embrace loss and sometimes
you have to embrace suffering and sometimes you have to embrace that if you have a safety net
you're not really committing enough you're not you know basically you're allowing yourself to slip
but if you just go all in and you just you know let go of your reservations that's when you
truly will get somewhere so anyway that's like the i managed to narrate down to what 15 songs
thank you for that wonderful journey that you just took us on the the the the darkest possible places
of greek song to uh to ending on this a country song i haven't heard it before but uh that's exactly
right i feel the same way depending depending on the day is this the luckiest human on earth
and there's some there's something to that but you're right it it needs to be we need to now return
to the muck of life in order to be able to to um to truly enjoy it so it's what do you mean muck
what's muck uh the messiness of life yeah the things that were things don't turn out the way you
expected to yeah the way so like to feel lucky is like focusing on the on the beautiful consequences
but then that feeling of things being different than you expected that uh you stumble in all
the kinds of ways that that seems to be it needs to be paired with the feeling there's basically
one way the only way not to make mistakes is to never do anything right but basically you have
to embrace the fact that you'll be wrong so many times in so many research meetings i just go off
on a tangent and say let's think about this for a second and it's just crazy for me who's a computer
scientist to just tell my biologist friends what if biology kind of worked this way yeah and they
humor me they just let me talk and rarely has it not gone somewhere good it's not that i'm always
right but it's always something worth exploring further that if you're an outsider with humility
and knowing that i'll be wrong a bunch of times but i'll challenge your assumptions
you know and often take us to a better place is part of this whole sort of messiness of life
like if you don't try and lose and get hurt and suffer and cry and just break your heart and
all these feelings of guilt and you know wow i did the wrong thing of course that's part of life
and that's just something that you know if you are the a doer you'll make mistakes if you're a
criticizer yeah sure you can sit sit back and criticize everybody else for the mistakes they
make or instead you can just be out there making those mistakes and frankly i'd rather be the
criticized one than the criticized uh brilliantly but every time somebody steals my bicycle i say
well i know my son's like why do they steal our bicycle dad and i'm like aren't aren't you happy
that you have bicycles that people can steal i'd rather be the person stolen from than the stealer
yeah it's not the critic that counts yeah so that's we've just talked amazingly about life
from the music perspective let's uh talk about life from human life from perhaps other perspective
and its meaning so this is episode 142 uh there is perhaps uh an absurdly uh deep meaning to the
number 42 that uh the our culture has has elevated so this is a perfect time to talk about the
meaning of life we've talked about it already but do you think this question that's so simple
and so seemingly absurd has value of what is the meaning of life is it something
that raising the question and trying to answer it is that a ridiculous pursuit or is there
some value is it answerable at all so first of all i i feel that we owe it to your listeners
to say why 42 sure so of course the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy came up with 42 as basically
a random number just you know uh the author just pulled it out of a hat and he's admitted so he
said mile 42 just seemed like just random numbers any um but in fact there's many numbers that are
linked to 42 so 42 again just just to um summarize is the answer that these super mega computer that
had computed for a million years with the most powerful computing the world had come up with
at some point the computer says um i have an answer and they're like what it's like you're
not gonna like it like what is it it's 42 and then the irony is that they had forgotten of
course what the question was yes so now they have to build bigger computers to figure out what the
question was the question is to which the answer 42 so as i was turning 42 i basically sort of
researched uh why 42 is such a cool number and it turns out that and i put together this little
passage that was explaining to all those uh guests to my uh 42nd birthday party why we were talking
about the meaning of life and um basically talked about how 42 is the angle at which light reflects
off of water to create a rainbow and it's so beautiful because the rainbow is basically the
combination of sort of it's been raining but there's hope because the sun just came out
so it's a very beautiful number there so 42 is also the sum of all rows and columns
of a magic cube that contains all consecutive integers starting at one so basically if you if
you take all integers between one and however many vertices there are the sums is always 42 42
is the only number left under 100 for which the equation of x to the cube plus y to the cube plus
z to the cube is n and was not known to not have a solution and now it's the you know it's the only
one that actually has a solution 42 is also 101010 in binary again the yin and the yang the good
and the evil one and zero the balance of the fours 42 is the number of chromosomes for the
giant panda and the giant panda i know it's totally random it's a suspicious symbol of great strength
coupled with peace friendship gentle temperament harmony balance and friendship whose black and
white colors again symbolize yin and yang the reason why it's the symbol for china is exactly
the strength but yet peace and so on so forth so 42 chromosomes it takes light 10 to the minus
42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton connecting the two fundamental dimensions of
space and time 42 is the number of times a piece of paper should be folded to reach beyond the moon
which is what i assume my students mean when they ask that their paper reaches for the stars i just
tell them just fold it a bunch of times 42 is the number of messier object 42 which is orion and
that's you know one of the most famous galaxies it's i think also the place where we can actually
see the center of our galaxy 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in aski
which is very useful when searching for the stars and also a reg exp for life the universe and
everything so star in egyptian mythology the goddess maat which was personifying truth and
justice would ask 42 questions to every dying person and those answering successfully would
become stars continued to give life and fuel universal growth in judaic tradition god ascribe
is ascribed the 42 lettered name and trusted only to the middle age pious meek free from bad temper
sober and not insistent on his rights uh and in christian tradition there's 42 generations from
abraham isek that we talked about the story of isek jacob eventually joseph mary and jesus
in kabbalistic tradition elokha which is 42 is the number with which god creates the universe
starting with 25 letter b and ending with 70 good uh so 25 plus you know uh 17 there's a 42
chapter sutra which is the first indian religious scripture which was translated to chinese thus
introducing buddhism to china from india the 42 line bible was the first printed book making the
mark marking the age of printing in the 1450s and the dissemination of knowledge eventually
leading to the enlightenment a yeast cell which is a coolest single cell you carry out and the
subject of my phd research has exactly 42 million proteins anyway so so there's a serious you're
on fire with this these are really good so i guess what you're saying is just a random number yeah
basically so all of these are background names so you know after you have the number you figure
out why that don't so anyway so uh now that we've spoken about why 42 uh why do we search for meaning
and uh you're asking you know will that search ultimately lead to our destruction and my my
thinking's exactly the opposite so basically that asking about meaning is something that's so
inherent to human nature it's something that makes life beautiful that makes it worth living
and that searching for meaning is actually the point it's not the finding it i think when you
found it you're dead don't don't ever be satisfied that you know i've got it so i like to say that
life is lived forward but it only makes sense backward and i don't remember whose quote that is
but the the the whole search itself is the meaning and what i love about it is that
there's a double search going on there's a search in every one of us through our own lives
to find meaning and then there's a search which is happening for humanity itself to find our meaning
and we as humans like to look at animals and say of course they have a meaning
and like a dog has its meaning it's just a bunch of instincts you know running around loving everything
um you know remember our joke with a cat and the dog yeah that's no meaning
no no so so um and i'm noticing the yin yang symbol right here with this whole panda
black and white and the zero one zero you're one five with that 42 some of those are gold
eski value for a star symbol damn anyway so so basically in my view the the search for meaning
and the act of uh searching for something more meaningful is life's meaning by itself but the
fact that we kind of always hope that yes maybe for animals that's not the case but maybe humans
have something that we should be doing and something else and it's not just about procreation
it's not just about dominance it's not just about strength and feeding etc like we're the one
species that spends such a tiny little minority of its time feeding that we have this enormous
you know huge cognitive capability that we can just use for all kinds of other stuff and that's
where art comes in that's where you know the healthy mind comes in with you know exploring
all of these different aspects that are just not directly tied to um to a purpose that's not
directly tied to a function it's really just the the playing of life the you know not not for
particular reason do you think uh this thing we got this this mind is unique in the universe
in terms of how difficult it is to build so is it possible that we're the the most beautiful thing
that the universe has constructed both the most beautiful the most ugly but certainly the most
complex so look at evolutionary time uh the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years
we've been around for a million years so one versus 135 so dinosaurs were extinct you know
about 60 million years ago and mammals that had been happily evolving as tiny little creatures
for 30 million years then took over the planet and then you know dramatically radiated about 60
million years ago out of these mammals came the neocortex formation so basically the the neocortex
which is sort of the outer layer of our brain compared to our quote unquote reptilian brain
which we share the structure of with all of the dinosaurs they didn't have that and yet they ruled
the planet so how many other planets have still you know mindless dinosaurs where strength was
the only dimension uh ruling the planet so there was something weird that annihilated the dinosaurs
and again you could look at biblical things of sort of god coming and wiping out his creatures
and yes to make room for the next ones so the mammals basically sort of took over the planet
and then grew this cognitive capability of this general purpose machine and primates
push that to extreme and humans among primates have just exploded that hardware but that hardware
is selected for survival it's selected for procreation it's initially selected with
this very simple Darwinian view of the world of random mutation ruthless election and then
selection for making more of yourself if you look at human cognition it's gone down a weird
evolutionary path in the sense that we are expending an enormous amount of energy on this
apparatus between our ears that is wasting what 15 percent of our bodily energy 20 percent like
some enormous percentage of our calories go to function our brain no other species makes that
big of a commitment that has basically taken energetic changes for efficiency on the metabolic
side for humanity to basically power that thing and our brain is both enormously more efficient
than other brains but also despite this efficiency enormously more energy consuming so and if you
look at just the sheer folds that the human brain has again our skull could only grow so much
before it could no longer go through the pelvic opening and kill the mother at every birth so
so but yet the folds continued effectively creating just so much more capacity the evolutionary
context in which this was made is enormously fascinating and it has to do with other humans
that we have now killed off or that have gone extinct and that has now created this weird
place of humans on the planet as the only species that has this enormous hardware so that can
basically make us think that there's something very weird and unique that happened in human
evolution that perhaps has not been recreated elsewhere maybe the asteroid didn't hit you
know sister earth and dinosaurs are still ruling and you know any any kind of proto human is squished
and eaten for breakfast basically um however we're not as unique as we like to think because there
was this enormous diversity of other human-like forms and once you make it to that stage where
you have a neocortex-like explosion of wow we're now competing on intelligence and we're now competing
on social structures and we're now competing on larger and larger groups and being able to
coordinate and being able to have empathy the concept of empathy the concept of an ego the
concept of a self of self-awareness comes probably from being able to project
another person's intentions to understand what they mean when you have these large cognitive groups
large social groups so me being able to sort of create a mental model of how you think may have
come before I was able to create a personal mental model of how do I think so this introspection
probably came after this sort of projection and this empathy which basically means you know
passion pathos suffering but basically sensing so basically empathy means feeling what you're feeling
trying to project your emotional state onto my cognitive apparatus and I think that is
what eventually led to this enormous cognitive explosion that happened in humanity so
you know life itself in my view is inevitable on every planet inevitable inevitable but the
evolution of life to self-awareness and cognition and all the incredible things that humans have
done you know that might not be as inevitable that's your intuition so if you were to sort of
estimate and bet some money on it if we reran earth a million times would what we got now
be the most special thing and how often would it be so scientifically speaking how repeatable is
this experiment so this whole cognitive revolution yes maybe not maybe not basically I feel that the
longevity of you know dinosaurs suggest that it was not quite inevitable that we that we humans
eventually made it what you're also implying one thing here you're saying you're implying that humans
also don't have this longevity this is the interesting question so with the Fermi paradox
the idea that the basic question is like if if the universe has a lot of alien life forms in it
why haven't we seen them yeah and one thought is that there is a great filter or multiple
great filters that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations like we this thing
that we you know this multi-folding brain that keeps it keeps growing may not be such a big
feature it might be useful for survival but it like takes us down a side road that is a very
short one with a quick dead end what do you think about that so I think the universe is enormous
not just in space but also in time and the the pretense that you know the last blink of an instant
that we've been able to send radio waves is when somebody should have been paying attention to our
planet is a little ridiculous so my you know I what I love about star wars yes is a long long time
ago in a galaxy far far away it's not like some distant future it's a long long time ago what I
love about it is that basically says you know evolution and civilization are just so recent in
you know on earth like there's countless other planets that have probably all kinds of life forms
multicellular perhaps and so on so forth but the fact that humanity has only been
in listening and emitting for just this tiny little blink means that any of these you know alien
civilizations would need to be paying attention to every single insignificant planet out there
and you know again I mean the movie contact and the book is just so beautiful this whole concept
of we don't need to travel physically we can travel as light we can send instructions for
people to create machines that will allow us to beam down light and recreate ourselves and in the
book you know the aliens actually take over yes they're not as friendly but you know this concept
that we have to eventually go and conquer every planet I mean I think that yes we will become a
galactic species so you you hope well you said things oh of course of course I mean now that
we've made it so far you we so you've made it oh gosh I feel that you know cognition the cognition
as an evolutionary trait has won over in our planet there's no doubt that we've made it so
basically humans have won the battle for you know dominance it wasn't necessarily the case with
dinosaurs like I mean yes you know there's some claims of intelligence and if you look at Jurassic
Park yeah sure whatever but you know they just don't have the hardware for it yeah and humans have
the hardware there's no doubt that mammals have a dramatically improved hardware for cognition
over dinosaurs like basically there's universes where strength went out and in our planet in our
you know particular version of whatever happened in this planet cognition went out and it's kind
of cool I mean it's it's a privilege right but it's kind of like living in Boston instead of I don't
know some middle middle age place where everybody's like hitting each other with with you know weapons
and sticks you back to the lucky one song I mean we are the lucky ones but the flip side of that
is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves
so you yeah and I want to go back to Pinker yeah and the better angels of our nature
the whole concept that civilization and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence
dramatically if you look you know at every scale as soon as organization comes the state basically
owns the right to violence and eventually the state gives that right of governance to the people
but but violence has been eliminated by that state so this whole concept of
central governance and people agreeing to live together and share responsibilities and duties
and you know all of that is something that has led so much to less violence less death less
suffering less you know poverty less you know war I mean yes we have the capability to destroy
ourselves but the arc of civilization has led to much much less destruction much much less war
and much more peace and of course there's blips back and forth and you know they're setbacks
but again the moral arc of the universe but it seems to just I probably imagine there were two
dinosaurs back in the day having this exact conversation and they look up to the sky and
there seems to be something like an asteroid going towards earth so it's while it's it's very true that
that the the arc of our society of human civilization seems to be progressing towards a better better
life for everybody in the in the many ways that you described things can change in a moment and it
feels like it's not just us humans we're living through a pandemic you could imagine that a pandemic
would be more destructive or or there could be asteroids that just appear out of the the
darkness of space which I would recently learned it's not that easy to give you another number
detect them yes so 48 what happens in 48 years I'm not 2068 up office there's an asteroid that's
coming in 48 years it has a very high chance of actually wiping us out completely yes yes we have
48 years to get our act together it's not like some distant distant hypothesis yes like yeah sure
they're hard to detect but this one we know about it's coming how do you feel about that why are you
still talking oh gosh I'm so happy with where we are now this is going to be great seriously if you
look at progress yes if you look at again the speed with which knowledge has been transferred
what what has led to humanity making so many advances so fast okay so what has led to humanity
making so many advances is not just the hardware upgrades it's also the software upgrades so by
hardware upgrades I basically mean our neocortex and the expansion and these layers and you know
folds over brain and all of that that's the hardware the software hasn't uh you know the
hardware hasn't changed much in the last what 70 000 years as I mentioned last time if you
take a person from ancient Egypt and you bring them up now they're just as equally fit so hardware
hasn't changed what has changed is software what has changed is that we are growing up in societies
that are much more complex this whole concept of neoteny basically allows our exponential growth
the concept that our brain has not fully formed has not fully stabilized itself until after our
teenage years so we basically have a good 16 years 18 years to sort of infuse it with the
latest and greatest in software if you look at what happened in ancient Greece why did everything
explode at once my take on this is that it was the shift from the Egyptian and hieroglyphic software
to the Greek language software this whole concept of creating abstract notions of creating these
layers of cognition and layers of meaning and layers of abstraction for words and ideals
and beauty and harmony how do you write harmony in hieroglyphics there's no such thing as you
know sort of expressing these ideals of peace and justice and you know these concepts of
or even you know macabre concepts of doom etc like you don't you don't have the language for it
your brain has trouble getting at that concept so what i'm trying to say is that these software
upgrades for human language human culture human environment human education have basically led
to this enormous explosion of knowledge and eventually after the enlightenment and as i was
mentioning the 42 line bible and the printed press the dissemination of knowledge you basically
now have this whole horizontal dispersion of ideas in addition to the vertical inheritance of genes
so the hardware improvements happen through vertical inheritance the software improvements
happen through horizontal inheritance and the reason why human civilization exploded is not
a hardware change anymore it's really a software change so if you're looking at now where we are
today look at corona virus yes sir it could have killed us a hundred years ago it would have
but it didn't why because in january we we published the genome a month later less than a
month later the first vaccine designs were done and now less than a year later 10 months later
we already have a working vaccine that's 90 efficient i mean that is ridiculous by any
standards and the reason is sharing so you know the asteroid yes could wipe us out in 48 years
but 48 years i mean look at where we were 48 years ago technologically i mean how much more we
understand the basic foundations of space is enormous the technological revolutions of
digitization the amount of compute power we can put on any like you know
you know by in nail size you know hardware is enormous so and this is nowhere near ending
you know we all have our like little you know problems going back and forth on the social side
and on the political side on on the cognitive and on the sort of human side and the societal side
but science has not slowed down science is moving at a breakneck pace ahead so you know
elon is now putting rockets out from the private space i mean that now democratization of space
exploration is you know going to revolution is going to explode you continue in the same way
that every technology has exploded this is the shift to space technology exploding so 48 years
is infinity from now in terms of space capabilities so i'm not worried at all are you excited by the
possibility of a human well one the human stepping foot on mars and two possible colonization of not
necessarily mars but other planets and all that kind of stuff for people living in space inevitable
inevitable would you do it or do you kind of like earth of course you know how many how many
how many people will you wait when you wait for i think it was about when the the declaration
independence of science about two to three million people lived here so would you move like
before would you be like on the first boat would you be on the 10th boat would you wait until the
declaration of independence i don't think i'll be on the shortlist because i'll be old by then
they'll probably get a bunch of younger people but you're it's the it's the wisdom and the uh
the that you are in the transfer horizontally you i gotta tell you you are the lucky one so you
might be on the list i don't know i mean i i kind of feel like i would love to see earth from above
just to watch our planet i mean just i mean you know you can watch a live feed of the
space station watching earth is magnificent like this blue tiny little shield it's so thin our
atmosphere like if you drive to new york you're basically in outer space i mean it's ridiculous
it's just so thin and it's just again such a privilege to be on this planet such a privilege
but i think our species is in for big good things i think that uh you know we will overcome
our little problems and eventually come together as a species i feel that we we're definitely on
the path to that and you know it's just not permeated through the whole universe yet i mean
through the whole world yet through the whole earth yet but it's definitely permeating so you've
talked about humans as special how exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs so i mentioned
that there's um you know this dramatic cognitive improvement that we've made but i think it goes
much deeper than that so if you look at a lion attacking a gazelle in the middle of the serengeti
the lion is smelling the molecules in the environment it's uh hormones and neuro receptors
are sort of getting it ready for impulse the target is constantly looking around and sensing
i've actually been in kenya and i've kind of seen the hunt so i've kind of seen the sort of
game of waiting and the mitochondria in the muscles of the lion are basically ready for you
know jumping they're expensing an enormous amount of energy the grass as it's flowing
is constantly transforming solar energy into chloroplasts you know through the chloroplasts
into energy which eventually feeds the gazelle and eventually feeds the lions and so forth so
as humans we experience all of that but the lion only experiences one layer
the mitochondria in its body are only experiencing one layer the chloroplasts are only experiencing
one layer the you know photoreceptors and the smell receptors the chemical receptors like the lion
always attacks against the wind so that it's not smelled like all of these things are one layer at
the time and we humans somehow perceive the whole stack so going back to software infrastructure
and hardware infrastructure if you design a computer you basically have a physical layer
that you start with and then on top of that physical layer you have you know the electrical
layer and on top of the electrical layer you have basically gates and logic and an assembly layer
and on top of the assembly layer you have your you know higher order higher level programming
and on top of that you have your deep learning routine etc and on top of that you eventually
build a cognitive system that's smart I want you to now picture this cognitive system becoming
not just self-aware but also becoming aware of the hardware that it's made of and the atoms that
they're that it's made of and so on and so forth so it's as if your AI system and there's this
beautiful scene in 2001 Odyssey of Space where Hal after Dave starts disconnecting him he's
starting to sing a song about daisies etc and Hal is basically saying Dave I'm losing my mind
I can feel I'm losing my mind it's just so beautiful this concept of self-awareness
of knowing that the hardware is no longer there is amazing and in the same way humans
who have had accidents are aware that they've had accidents so there's this self-awareness of AI
that is you know this beautiful concept about you know sort of the eventual cognitive leap
to self-awareness but imagine now the AI system actually breaking through these layers and saying
wait a minute I think I can design a slightly better hardware to get me functioning better
and that's what basically humans are doing so if you if you look at our reasoning layer it's
built on top of a cognitive layer and the reasoning layer we share with AI it's kind of cool like
there is another thing on the planet that can integrate equations and it's man-made but we
share computation with them we share this cognitive layer of playing chess we're not alone anymore
we're not the only thing on the planet that plays chess now we have AI that also plays chess
but in some sense that that particular organism AI is it is now only operates in that layer
exactly exactly and then most animals operate in the sort of cognitive layer that we're all
experiencing a bat is doing this incredible integration of signals but it's not aware of it
it's basically constantly sending echo location waves and it's receiving them back and multiple
bats in the same cave are operating at slightly different frequencies and with slightly different
pulses and they're all sensing objects and they're doing motion planning in their cognitive
hardware but they're not even aware of all of that all they know is that they have a 3D view
of space around them just like any gazelle walking through you know the desert and any baby looking
around is aware of things without doing the math of how am I processing all of these visual
information etc we're just aware of the layer that you live in I think if you look at this
at humanity we've basically managed through our cognitive layer through our perception layer through
our senses layer through our multi organ layer through our genetic layer through our molecular
layer through our atomic layer through our quantum layer through even the very fabric of the spacetime
continuum unite all of that cognitively so as we're watching that scene in the serengeti we as
scientists we as educated humans we as you know anyone who's finished high school are aware of
all of this beauty of all of these different layers interplaying together and I think that's
something very unique in perhaps not just the galaxy but maybe even the cosmos these species
that has managed to in space cross through these layers from the enormous to the infinitely small
and that's what I love about particle physics the fact that it actually unites everything
the very small the very very small and the very big it's only through the very big that this
very small gets formed like basically every atom of gold results from the fusion that happened
of you know increasingly large particles before that explosion that then versus it through the
cosmos and it's only through understanding the very large that we understand very small and vice
versa and that's in space then there's the time direction as you are watching the Kilimanjaro
mountain you can kind of look back through time to when that volcano was exploding and you know
growing out of the tectonic forces as you drive through death valley you see these mountains
on their side and these layers of history exposed we are aware of the eons that have happened on
earth and the tectonic movements on earth the same way that we're aware of the big bang and the
you know early evolution of the cosmos and we can also see forward in time as to where the
universe is heading we can see you know apophis in 2068 coming over looking ahead in time I mean
that would be magician stuff you know in ancient times so what I love about humanity and its role
in the universe is that you know if there's a god watching he's like finally somebody
figured it out I've been building all these beautiful things and somebody can appreciate
and figured me out with God's perspective meaning like become aware of yeah you know yeah so it's
kind of interesting so to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to
what convert those layers into ideas that they you can then like combine right so we're doing
some kind of conversion exactly exactly and last time you asked me about whether we live in a
simulation for example I mean realize that we are living in a simulation we are the reality that
we're in without any sort of person programming this is a simulation like basically what happens
inside your skull there's this integration of sensory inputs which are translated into
perceptory signals which are then translated into a conceptual model of the world around you
and that exercise is happening seamlessly and yet you know if you think about sort of again
this whole simulation and neo analogy you can think of the reality that we live in as a matrix
as the matrix but we've actually broken through the matrix we've actually traversed the layers
we didn't have to take a pill like we didn't make you know more views didn't have to show up to
basically give us the blue pill or the red pill we were able to sufficiently evolve cognitively
through the hardware explosion and sufficiently involve scientifically through the software
explosion to basically get at breaking through the matrix realizing that we live in a matrix
and realizing that we are this thing in there and yet that thing in there has a consciousness that
lives through all these layers and I think we're the only species we're the only thing that we even
can think of that has actually done that has sort of permeated space and time scales and layers of
abstraction plowing through them and realizing what we're really really made of and the next
frontier is of course cognition so we understand so much of the cosmos so much of the stuff around us
but the stuff inside here finding the basis for the soul finding the basis for the ego
for the self the self-awareness when do when does the spark happen that basically sort of makes
you you I mean that's you know really the next frontier so so in terms of these peeling off layers
of complexity somewhere between the cognitive layer and the reasoning layer or the computational
layer there's still some stuff to be figured out there and I think that's the final frontier of
sort of completing our journey through that matrix and maybe duplicating it in the in other versions
of ourselves through AI which is another very exciting possibility what I love about AI and
the way that it operates right now is the fact that it is unpredictable there's emergent behavior
here in our cognitively capable artificial systems that we can certainly model but we don't
encode directly and that's a key difference so we like to say oh of course this is not really
intelligent because we coded it up and we're just putting these little parameters there and there's
like you know what's six billion parameters and once you've learned them you know we kind of
understand the layers but that's an oversimplification it's it's like saying oh of course humans we
understand humans they're just made out of neurons and you know layers of cortex and there's a visual
area and there's a but but every human is encoded by a ridiculously small number of
genes compared to the complexity of our cognitive apparatus 20 000 genes is really not that much
out of which a tiny little fraction are in fact encoding all of our cognitive functions the rest
is emergent behavior the rest is the you know the the the cortical layers doing their thing
in the same way that when we build you know these conversational systems or these cognitive
systems or these deep learning systems we put the architecture in place but then they do their thing
and in some ways that's creating something that has its own identity that's creating something
that's not just oh yeah it's not the the early AI where if you hadn't programmed what happens in the
grocery bags when you have both cold and hot and hard and soft you know the system wouldn't
know what to do no no you basically now just program the primitive and then it learns from that
so even though the origins are humble just like it is for our genetic code for AI even though the
origins are humble the the the result of it being deployed into the world is infinitely complex and
that's and yet there's not it's not yet able to be cognizant of all the other layers in
of its you know it's not it's not able to think about space and time it's not able to think about
the hardware in which it runs the electricity on which it runs yet so so if you look at humans
we basically have the same cognitive architecture as monkeys as the great apes it's just a ton more
of it if you look at gpt3 versus gpt2 again it's the same architecture just more of it
and yet it's able to do so much more so if you start thinking about sort of what's the future of that
gpt4 and gpt5 do you really need fundamentally different architectures or do you just need a
ton more hardware and we do have a ton more hardware like these systems are nowhere near
what humans have between our ears so you know there's something to be said about
stay tuned for emergent behavior we keep thinking that general intelligence might just be forever away
but it could just simply be that we just need a ton more hardware and that humans are just not
that different from the great apes except for just a ton more of it yeah it's interesting that in the
AI community maybe there's a human-centric fear but the notion that gpt10 will be will
achieve general intelligence is something that people shy away from that there has to be something
totally different and new added to this and yet it's not seriously considered that um this this
very simple thing this very simple architecture when scaled might be the thing that achieves super
intelligence and people think the same way about humanity and human consciousness they're like oh
consciousness might be quantum or it might be you know some some non-physical thing and it's like
or it could just be a lot more of the same hardware that now is sufficiently capable
of self-awareness just because it has the neurons to do it so maybe the consciousness that is so
elusive is an emergent behavior of you basically string together all these cognitive capabilities
that come from running from seeing for reacting from predicting the movement of the fly as you're
catching it through the air all of these things are just like great lookup tables encoded in a
giant neural network i mean i'm oversimplifying of course the complexity and the diversity of the
different types of excitatory inhibitory neurons the waveforms that sort of shine through the
you know the the connections across all these different layers the amalgamation of signals
etc the brain is enormously complex i mean of course but again it's a small number of
primitives encoded by a tiny number of genes which are self-organized and shaped by their
environment babies that are growing up today are listening to language from conception basically
as soon as the auditory apparatus forms it's already getting shaped to the types of signals
that are out in the real world today so it's not just like oh have an egyptian be born and then
ship them over it's like no that that egyptian would be listening in to the complex of the world
and then getting born and sort of seeing just how much more complex the world is so it's a combination
of the underlying hardware which if you think about as a geneticist in my view the hardware
gives you an upper bound of cognitive capabilities but it's the environment that makes those
capabilities shine and reach their maximum so we're a combination of nature and nurture
the nature is our genes and our cognitive apparatus and the nurture is the richness of
the environment that makes that cognitive apparatus reach its potential and we are so far from reaching
our full potential so far i think that kids being born a hundred years from now they'll be looking
at us now and saying what primitive educational systems they had i can't believe people were not
wired into this you know virtual reality from birth as we are now because like they're clearly
inferior and so on so forth so i basically i think that our environment will continue
exploding and our cognitive capabilities it's not like oh we're only using 10 percent of our
brain that's ridiculous of course we're using 100 percent of our brain but it's still constrained
by how complex our environment is so the hardware will remain the same but the software
in a quickly advancing environment the software will make a huge difference in
the nature of like the human experience the human condition it's fascinating to think that humans
will look very different a hundred years from now just because the environment changed even though
we're still the same great apes the the descendant of apes at the core of this is kind of a notion of
ideas that i don't know if you're there's a lot of people that's including you eloquently about
this topic but richard dockings talks about the notion of memes and they say this notion of ideas
you know multiplying selecting in the minds of humans do you ever think from about ideas from
from that perspective ideas as as organisms themselves they're breeding in the minds of humans
i love the concept of memes i love the concept of these horizontal transfer of ideas and sort of
permeating through through you know our layer of interconnected neural networks so you can think
of sort of the cognitive space that has now connected all of humanity where we are now one
giant information and idea sharing network well beyond what was thought to be ever capable
when the concept of a meme was created by richard dockings so but i want to take that concept just
it you know into another twist which is the horizontal transfer of humans with fellowships
and the fact that as people apply to MIT from around the world there's a selection that happens
not just for their ideas but also for the cognitive hardware that came up with those ideas
so we don't just ship ideas around anymore they don't evolve in a vacuum the ideas themselves
influence the distribution of cognitive systems i.e. humans and brains around the planet
yeah we ship them to different locations based on their properties that's exactly right so so those
cognitive systems that think of you know physics for example might go to CERN and those that think
of genomics might go to the Broad Institute and those that think of computer science might go to
I don't know Stanford or CMU or MIT and you basically have this co-evolution now of memes
and ideas and the cognitive conversational systems that love these ideas and feed on these
ideas and understand these ideas and appreciate these ideas now coming together so you basically
have students coming to Boston to study because that's the place where these type of cognitive
systems thrive and they're selected based on their cognitive output and their idea output
but once they get into that place the boiling and interbreeding of these memes becomes so much
more frequent that what comes out of it is so far beyond if ideas were evolving in a vacuum
of an already established hardware cognitive interconnection system of the planet where now
you basically have the ideas shaping the distribution of these systems and then the
genetics kick in as well you basically have now these people who came to be a student kind of
like myself who now stuck around and are now professors bringing up our own genetically
encoded and genetically related cognitive systems minor eight six and three years old
who are now growing up in an environment surrounded by other cognitive systems of a similar age
with parents who love these types of thinking and ideas and you basically have a whole interbreeding
now of genetically selected transfer of cognitive systems where the genes and the memes are
co-evolving the same soup of ever improving knowledge and societal inter fertilization
cross fertilization of these ideas so that this beautiful image so these are shipping these actual
meat cognitive systems to physical locations they they tend to cluster in the biology ones
cluster in a certain building to so like within that there's there's there's clusters on top of
clusters on top of clusters what about in the online world is that do you also see that kind of
because people now form groups on the internet that they stick together so they they can sort of
these cognitive systems can collect themselves and breed together in different layers of spaces
it doesn't just have to be physical space absolutely absolutely so basically there's the
physical rearrangement but there's also the conglomeration of the same cognitive system
doesn't need to be a human doesn't need to belong to only one community yeah so yes you might be a
member of the computer science department but you can also hang out in the biology department
but you might also go in line online into i don't know poetry department readings and so and so forth
or you might be part of a group that only has 12 people in the world but that are connected
through their ideas and are now interbreeding these ideas in a whole other way so this um
this co-evolution of genes and memes is not just physically instantiated it's also sort of rearranged
you know in this cognitive space as well and uh in the sometimes these cognitive systems hold
conferences and they all gather around and there's like one of them is like talking and they're all
like listening and then they discuss and then they have free lunch and so on no but but but then
that's where you find students where you know when when i go to a conference i go through the posters
where i'm on a mission basically my mission is to read and understand what every poster is about
and for a few of them i'll dive deeply and understand everything but i make it a point to just go
poster after poster in order to read all of them and i find some gems and students that i speak to
that sometimes eventually join my lab and then sort of you're you're sort of creating this permeation
of you know the transfer of ideas of ways of thinking and very often of moral values of social
structures of you know just more imperceptible properties of these cognitive systems that simply
just cling together basically you know there's i have the luxury at MIT of not just choosing
smart people but choosing smart people who i get along with who are generous and friendly
and creative and smart and you know excited and childish in their in you know uninhibited behaviors
and so forth so you basically can choose yourself to surround you can choose to surround yourself
with people who are not only cognitively compatible but also you know imperceptibly
through the meta cognitive systems compatible and again when i say compatible not all the same
sometimes you know not sometimes all the time the teams are made out of complementary components
not just compatible but very often complementary so in my own team i have a diversity of students
who come from very different backgrounds there's a whole spectrum of biology to computation of
course but within biology there's a lot of realms within computation there's a lot of realms
and what makes us click so well together is the fact that not only do we have a common mission a
common passion and a common you know view of the world but that we're complementary in our skills
in our angles with which we come at it and so so forth and that's sort of what makes it click
yeah it's fascinating that the the the stickiness of multiple cognitive systems together
includes both the commonality so you meet because you're there's some common thing
but you stick together because you're diff different in all the useful ways yeah yeah and
my wife and i i mean we adore each other like two pieces but we're also extremely different
in many ways and that's beautiful she's gonna be listening to this but i love that about about us
i love the fact that you know i'm like living out there in the you know world of ideas and
i forget what day it is and she's like well at eight a.m the kids better be to school and uh you
know i do get yelled at but but i need it basically i need her as much as she needs me and she loves
interacting with me and talking i mean we you know last last night we were talking about this and
i showed her the questions and we were bouncing ideas of each other and it was just beautiful
like we basically have these you know basically cognitive you know let it all lose kind of dates
where you know we just bring papers and we're like you know bouncing ideas etc so you know we
have extremely different perspectives but very common you know goals and interests and anyway
what do you make of the communication mechanism that we humans use to share those ideas because
like one essential element of all of this is not just that we're able to have these ideas but
we're also able to share them we tend to maybe you can correct me but we seem to use language
to share the ideas maybe we share them in some much deeper way than language i don't know but
what what do you make of this whole mechanism and how fun the method is to the human condition
so some people will tell you that your language dictates your thoughts and your thoughts cannot
form outside language i tend to disagree i see uh thoughts as much more abstract as you know
basically when i dream i don't dream in words i dream in shapes and forms and you know three
dimensional space with extreme detail i was describing so when i wake up in the middle
of the night i actually record my dreams sometimes i write them down in a drawbox file
other times i'll just dictate them in you know audio and my wife was giving me a massage the other
day because like my left side was frozen and i started playing the recording and as i was
listening to it i was like i don't remember any of that and i was like of course and then the
entire thing came back but then there's no way any other person could have recreated that entire
sort of you know three dimensional shape and dream and concept and in the same way when i'm
thinking of ideas there's so many ideas i can't put two words i mean i will describe them with
a thousand words but the the idea itself is much more precise or much more sort of abstract or much
more something you know difference either less abstract or more abstract and it's either you
know basically the there's just the projection that happens from the three dimensional ideas
into let's say a one dimensional language and the language certainly gives you the apparatus to
think about concepts that you didn't realize existed before and with my team we often create
new words i'm like well now we're going to call these the regulatory plexus of a gene and that
gives us now the language to sort of build on that as one concept that you then build upon with all
kinds of other other things so there's this co-evolution again of ideas in language but they're
not one-to-one with each other now let's talk about language itself words sentences this is a very
distant construct from where language actually begun so if you look at how we communicate
as i'm speaking my eyes are shining and my face is changing through all kinds of emotions
and my entire body composition posture is reshaped and my intonation the pauses that i make the
softer and the louder and the this and that are conveying so much more information and if you look
at early human language and if you look at how you know the great apes communicate with each
other there's a lot of granting there's a lot of posturing there's a lot of emotions there's a lot
of sort of shrieking etc they have a lot of components of our human language just not the words
so i think of human communication as combining the ape component but also of course the you know
gpt3 component so basically there's the cognitive layer and the reasoning layer that we share
with different parts of our relatives there's the ai relatives but there's also the granting relatives
and what i love about humanity is that we have both we're not just a conversational system we're a
granting emotionally charged you know weirdly interconnected system that also has the ability
to reason and when we when we communicate with each other there's so much more than just language
there's so much more than just words it does seem like we're able to somehow transfer even
more than the the body language it seems that in the room with us is always a giant knowledge base
of like shared experiences different perspectives on those experiences but
i don't know the knowledge of who the last three four presidents in the united states was and just
all the you know 9-11 the tragedies and 9-11 all the all the beautiful and terrible things that
happen in the world they're somehow both in our minds and somehow enrich the ability to transfer
information what i love about it is i can i can talk to you about 2001 or is your space and mention
a very specific scene and that evokes all these feelings that you had when you first watched
we're both visualizing that it may be in different ways exactly but in the yeah and not only that
but the feeling is brought back up just like you said with the dreams we both have that feeling
arise in some form as you bring up the hell you know facing his own mortality yeah it's fascinating
that we're able to do that i don't know now let's let's talk about neural link for a second so what's
the concept of neural link the concept of neural link is that i'm going to take whatever knowledge
is encoded in my brain directly transferred into your brain so this is a beautiful fascinating
and extremely sort of you know appealing concept but i see a lot of challenges surrounding that
the first one is we have no idea how to even begin to understand how knowledge is encoded
in a person's brain i mean i told you about this paper that we had recently with li huay thai
and uh south marco that basically was looking at these n grams that are formed with combinations of
neurons that co fire when a stimulus happens where we can go into a mouse and select those
neurons that fire by marking them and then see what happens when they first fire and then select
the neurons that fire again when the experience is repeated these are the recall neurons and then
there's the the memory consolidation neurons so we're starting to understand a little bit of sort
of the distributed nature of knowledge encoding and experience encoding in the human brain and in
the mouse brain and the concept that will understand that sufficiently one day to be able to take a
snapshot of what does that scene from david losing his mind of how losing his mind and talking to
david um how is that scene encoded in your mind imagine the complexity of that but now imagine
suppose that we solve this problem and the next enormous challenge is how do i go and modify
the next person's brain to now create the same exact neural connections so that's an enormous
challenge right there so basically it's not just reading it's now writing and again what if something
goes wrong i don't want to even think about that that's number two and number three who says that
the way that you encode dav i'm losing my mind and i encode dav i'm losing my mind is anywhere
near each other basically maybe the way that i'm encoding it is twisted with my childhood memories
of running through you know the pebbles in greece and yours is twisted with your childhood memory
in russia growing up in russia and there's no way that i can take my encoding and put
it into your brain because it'll a mess things up and b be incompatible with your own unique
experiences so that's telepathic communications from human to humus fascinating you're you're
reminding us that uh there's there's uh two biological systems on both ends of that communication
the one the easier i guess maybe half as difficult a thing to do in the hope with neural link is that
we can communicate with an ai system so yeah where one side of that is a little bit yeah
more controllable but but even just that is is exceptionally difficult like let's talk about
two two neuronal systems talking to each other suppose that gpd4 tells gpd3 hey give me all your
knowledge right it's ready it's hilarious i have 10 times more hardware i'm ready just feed me what's
gpd3 gonna do is it gonna say oh here's my 10 billion parameters no no way the simplest way
and perhaps the fastest way for gpd3 to transfer all its knowledge to its older body that has a
lot more hardware is to regenerate every single possible human sentence that it can possibly
yes create just keep talking keep talking and just re-encode it all together so maybe what
language does is exactly that it's taking one generative cognitive model it's running it forward
to emit utterances that kind of makes sense in my cognitive frame and it's re-encoding i mean to
yours through the parsing of that same language and i think the conversation might might actually be
the most efficient way to do it so not just talking but uh interactive so talking back and forth
asking questions interrupting so gpd4 will constantly be interrupting just annoying
annoying yeah but but the beauty of that is also that as we're interrupting each other
there's all kinds of misinterpretations that happen that you know as basically when my students
speak i will often know that i'm misunderstanding what they're saying and i'll be like hold that
thought for a second let me tell you what i think i understood which i know is different
one what you said then i'll say that and then someone else in the same zoom meeting will
basically say well you know here's another way to think about what you just said and then by the
third iteration we're somewhere completely different that if we could actually communicate
with full you know neural network parameters back and forth of that knowledge and idea and coding
would be far inferior because the re-encoding with our own as we said last time emotional baggage
and cognitive baggage from our unique experiences through our shared experiences distinct encodings
in the context of all our unique experiences is leading to so much more diversity of perspectives
and again going back to this whole concept of these entire network of all of human cognitive
systems connected to each other and sort of how ideas and memes permeate through that that's sort
of what really creates a whole new level of human experience through this reasoning layer and this
computational layer that obviously lives on top of our cognitive layer so you're one of these
aforementioned cognitive systems mortal but thoughtful and you're connected to a bunch
like you said students your wife your kids what do you in your brief time here on earth this is
a meaning of life episode so what do you hope this world will remember you as what do you hope
your legacy will be I don't think of legacy as much as maybe most people think oh it's kind of funny
I'm consciously living the present many students tell me you know oh give us some career advice
I'm like I'm the wrong person I've never made a career plan I still have to make one I um
it's funny to be both experiencing the past and the present in the future but also consciously
living in the present and just you know there's a conscious decision we can make to not worry about
all that which again goes back to the I'm the lucky one kind of thing of living in the present and
being happy winning and being happy losing and there's a certain freedom that comes with that
but again a certain sort of I don't know ephemerity of living for the present
but if you if you step back from all of that where basically my my current modus operandis
is live for the present make you know every day the best you can make and just make the
local blip of local maxima of the universe of the awesomeness of the planet and the town
and the family that we live in both academic family and and you know biological family
make it a little more awesome by being generous to your friends being generous to the people around
you being you know kind to your enemies and you know just showing love all around you can't be
upset at people if you truly love them if somebody yells at you and insults you every time you say
this lightest thing and yet when you see them you just see them with love it's a beautiful feeling
it's like you know I'm feeling exactly like when I look at my three-year-old who's like screaming
even though I love her and I want her good she's still screaming and saying no no no no no
and I'm like I love you genuinely love you but I can I can sort of kind of see that your brain
is kind of stuck in that little you know motive anger and you know there's plenty of people out
there who don't like me and I see them with love as a child that is stuck in a cognitive state
that they're eventually gonna snap out of or maybe not and that's okay so there's that aspect of
sort of you know experiencing you know life with the best intentions and you know I love when I'm
wrong I had a friend who was like one of the smartest people I've ever met who would basically
say oh I love it when I'm wrong because it makes me feel human and it's so beautiful I mean she's
really one of the smartest people I've ever met and she's like it's such a good feeling and I love
being wrong but there's you know there's something about self-improvement there's something about sort
of how do I not make the most mistakes but attempt the most rights and do the fewest wrongs but with
the full knowledge that this will happen that's one aspect so so so through this life in the present
what's really funny is and that's something that I've experienced more and more
really thanks to you and through this podcast is this enormous number of people who will basically
comment wow I've been following this guy for so many years now or wow this guy has inspired so
many of us in computational biology and so and so forth I'm like I don't know any of that but I'm
only discovering this now through these sort of sharing our emotional states and our cognitive
states with a wider audience where suddenly I'm sort of realizing that wow maybe I've had a legacy
yes like basically I've trained generations of students from MIT and I've put all of my courses
freely online since 2001 so basically all of my video recordings of my lectures have been online
since 2001 so countless generations of people from across the world will meet me at a conference and say
I know this voice I've been listening to your lectures and it's just such a beautiful thing
where like we're sharing widely and who knows which students will get where from whatever
they catch out of these lectures even if what they catch is just inspiration and passion and drive so
there's this intangible you know legacy quote-unquote that every one of us has through the people we
touch one of my friends from undergrad basically told me oh my mom remembers you vividly from when
she came to campus I'm like I didn't even meet her she's like no but she she sort of saw you
interacting with people and said wow he's exuding this positive energy and there's there's that
aspect of sort of just motivating people with your kindness with your passion with your generosity
and with your you know just selflessness of you know just just just give doesn't matter where it goes
I've been to conferences where basically people you know I'll ask them a question and then they'll
come back to or like there was a company where I asked somebody a question they said oh in fact
this entire project was inspired by your question three years ago at the same conference I'm like
wow and then on top of that there's also the ripple effect so the year's speaking to the direct
influence of inspiration or education but there's also like the follow-on things that happen to that
and there's this ripple that through from you just this one individual and from every one of us from
every one that's what I love about humanity the fact that every one of us shares genes
and genetic variants with very recent ancestors with everyone else so even if I die tomorrow
my genes are still shared through my cousins and through my uncles and through my you know
immediate family and of course I'm lucky enough to have my own children but even if you don't
your genes are still permeating through all of the layers of your family so your genes will have
the legacy there yeah oh every one of us yeah number two our ideas are constantly intermingling
with each other so there's no person living in the planet a hundred years from now who will not be
directly impacted by every one of the planet living here today yeah through genetic inheritance
and through meme and inheritance that's cool to think that your ideas Manolis Calis would touch
would uh touch every single person on this planet it's interesting but not just mine
Joe Smith who's looking at this right now his ideas will also touch everybody so there's this
interconnectedness of humanity and and then I'm also a professor so my day job is legacy
my day job is training not just the thousands of people who watch my videos on the web but the
people who are actually in my class who basically come to MIT to learn from a bunch of us like the
cognitive systems that were shipped to this particular location and who will then disperse
back into all of their home countries yeah that's that's what makes America the beacon of the world
we don't just export you know goods we export people cognitive systems we we export people
who are born here and we also export training that people born elsewhere will come here to get
and will then disseminate not just whatever knowledge they got but whatever ideals they learned
and I think that's something that's a legacy of the US that you cannot stop with political
isolation you cannot stop with economic isolation that's something that will continue to happen
through all the people we've touched through our universities so there's the students who took my
classes who are basically now going off and teaching their classes and I've trained generations
of computation biologists no one in genomics who's gone through MIT hasn't taken my class so basically
there's this impact through I mean there's so many people in biotechs who are like hey I took
your class that's what got me to the field like 15 years ago that's just so beautiful yes and then
there's the academic family that I have some the students who are actually studying with me who are
my trainees so this sort of mentorship of ancient Greece this yeah um so I basically have an academic
family and we are a family there's this such strong connection this bond of you're part of the Kelly's
family so I have a biological family at home and I have an academic family on campus and that academic
family has given me great grandchildren already yes so I've trained people who are now professors at
Stanford CMU Harvard you know what you I mean everywhere in the world and these people have
now trained people who are now having their own faculty jobs so there's basically people who see
me as their academic grandfather and it's just so beautiful because you don't have to wait for the
18 years of cognitive you know hardware development to to sort of have amazing conversation with people
that are fully grown humans fully grown adults who are you know cognitively super ready and who are
shaped by and you know I see some of these beautiful papers and like I can see the touch of our lab
in those favors it's just so beautiful because you're like I've spent hours with these people
teaching them not just how to do a paper but how to think and this whole concept of you know the
first paper that we write together is an experience with every one of these students so you know I
always tell them to write the whole first draft and they know that I will rewrite every word
but but the act of them writing it and what I do is these like joint editing sessions where I'm like
let's co-edit and with this co-editing we basically have creative destruction so I share my zoom screen
and I'm just thinking out loud as I'm doing this and they're learning from that process as opposed to
like come back two days later and they see a bunch of red on a page I'm sort of well that's not how
you write this that's not how you think about this that's not you know what's the point like this
morning was having I yes this morning between 6 and 8 a.m. I had a two-hour meeting going through
one of these papers and then saying what's the point here why why do you even show that it's
just a bunch of points on a graph no what you have to do is extract the meaning do the homework for
them and there's this nurturing this mentorship that sort of creates now a legacy which is
infinite because they've now gone off on the you know and and all of that is just humanity
then of course there's a paper that right because yes my day job is training students
but it's a research university the way that they learn is through the men's and manu's mind and hand
it's the practical training of actually doing research and that research is a beneficial side
effect of having these awesome papers that will now tell other people how to think there's this
paper we just posted recently on med archive and one of the most generous and eloquent comments
about it was like wow this is a master class in scientific writing in analysis in biological
interpretation and so forth it's just so fulfilling from a person I've never met or say the title of
the paper brain chef I don't remember the title but it's single cell dissection of schizophrenia
reveals and so the two the two points that we found was this whole transcriptional resilience
like there's some individuals who are schizophrenic but who's they have an additional cell type or
initial cell state which we believe is protective and that cell state when they have it will cause
other cells to have normal gene expression patterns it's beautiful and then that's that cell is connected
with some of the PV interneurons that are basically sending these inhibitory brain waves
through the brain and there basically there's another component of there's a set of master
regulators that we discovered who are controlling many of the genes that are differentially expressed
and these master regulators are themselves genetic targets of schizophrenia and they are
themselves involved in both synaptic connectivity and also in early brain development so there's
this sort of interconnectedness between synaptic development axes and also this transcription
resilience so I mean we basically made up a title that combines all these concepts
you have all these concepts all these people working together and ultimately these minds
connects it down into a beautifully written little document that lives on and that document
now has its own life yeah our work has a hundred and a hundred and twenty thousand citations
I mean that's not just people who read it these are people who used it to write something
based on it yeah I mean that to me is is just so fulfilling to basically say wow I've touched
people so I don't think of my legacy as I live every day I just think of the beauty of the present
and the power of interconnectedness and just I feel like a kid in a candy shop where I'm just
like constantly you know where do I what what package do I open first and you know the lucky one
a jack of all trades a master of none I think for a meaning of life episode we would be amiss
if we did not have at least a poem or do you mind if we end in a couple of poems maybe a happy
maybe a sad one I would love that so thank you for the luxury the first one is kind of
I remember when you were talking with Eric Weinstein about this comment of Leonard Cohen
that says but you don't really care for music do ya in hallelujah that's basically kind of
like mocking its reader yeah so one of my poems is a little like that so I had just broken up with
you know my girlfriend and there's this other friend who was coming to visit me and she said
I will not come unless you write me a poem and I was like writing a poem on demand so this this
poem is called write me a poem it goes write me a poem she said with a smile make sure it's pretty
romantic and rhymes make sure it's worthy of that bold flame that love uniting us beyond a mere game
and she took off without more words rushed for the bus and traveled the world a poem I thought
this is sublime what better way for passing the time what better way to count up the hours before
she comes back to my lonely tower waiting for joy to fill up my heart let's write a poem for when
we're apart how does a poem start I inquired give me a topic cook up a style throwing some cute words
oh here and there throwing some passion love and despair love three eggs one pound of flour three
cups of water and bake for an hour love is no recipe as I understand you can't just cook up a poem
on demand and as I was twisting all this in my mind I looked at the page by golly it rhymed
three roses white chocolate vanilla powder some beautiful rhymes and maybe a flower no be romantic
the young girl insisted do this do that don't be so silly you must believe it straight from your
heart if you don't feel it we're better apart oh my sweet thing what can I say you bring me the
sun all night and all day you're the stars and the moon and the birds way up high you're my evening
sweet song my morning blue sky you are my muse your spell has me caught you bring me my voice and
scatter my thoughts to put that love in writing in vain I can try but when I'm with you my wings
want to fly so I put down the pen and drop my defenses give myself to you and fill up my senses
the baffle king composing how beautiful what I love about it is that I did not bring up a
dictionary of rhymes I did not sort of work hard so basically when I write poems I just type I never
go back I just so when my brain gets into that mode it actually happens like I wrote it oh wow so
the rhymes just kind of it's an emergent phenomenon it's an emergent phenomenon I just get into that
mode and then it comes up that's a beautiful one and it's it's basically you know as you got it it's
basically saying it's no recipe and then I'm starting throwing the recipes and as I'm writing it I'm
like you know so it's it's very introspective in this whole concert so anyway there's another one
many years earlier that is you know darker it's basically this whole concept of let's be friends
I was like you know no let's be friends just like you know so the last words are shout out I love
you or send me to hell so the the title is burn me tonight lie to me baby lie to me now tell me
you love me break me a vow give me a sweet word a promise a kiss give me the world a sweet taste
to miss don't let me lay here inert ugly cold with nothing sweet felt and nothing harsh told
give me some hope false foolish yet kind make me regret I'll leave you behind don't pity my soul
but torture it right treat it with hatred start up a fight for it's from mildness that my soul dies
when you cover your passion in a bland friend's disguise kiss me now baby show me your passion
turn off the lights and rip off your fashion give me my life's joy this one night burn all my matches
for one blazing light don't think of tomorrow and let today fade don't try and protect me from
love's cutting blade your razor will always rip off my veins don't spare me the passion to spare me
the pains kiss me now honey are spit in my face throw me an insult I'll gladly embrace
tell me now clearly that you never cared say it now loudly like you never dared I'm ready to hear
it I'm ready to die I'm ready to burn and start a new life I'm ready to face the rough burning
truth rather than waste the rest of my youth so tell me my lover should I stay or go the answer
to love is one yes or no there's no I like you no let's be friends shout out I love you or send me
to hell I don't think there's a better way to end a discussion of the meaning of life whatever the
heck the meaning is go all in as that poem says Manolis thank you so much for talking to me
Lex I look forward to next time thanks for listening to this conversation with Manolis
Kellis and thank you to our sponsors Grammarly which is a service for checking spelling grammar
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support on patreon or connect with me on twitter and lex freedman and now let me leave you with
some words from Douglas Adams in his book hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy on the planet earth
man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much the
wheel new york wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water
having a good time but conversely the dolphins had always believed that they were far more
intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons thank you for listening and hope to see you next time